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Two men recognized and exploited the anti-democratic loopholes within America’s rickety democracy
-- in order to deliver Republicans victories that they could never win at the ballot box.
Now their willfully minoritarian creations threaten the very essence of a representative democracy:
if Donald #Trump, rightwing courts, #gerrymandered state legislatures and an extreme Republican #caucus in the US House of Representatives create constitutional #chaos over the certification of this presidential election, 
two men cleared the path.
The single-minded determination of #Leonard #Leo built a conservative supermajority on the US #supreme #court and 
stacked lower and state courts with Republican #ideologues that have pushed the nation to the right via the least accountable branch of government.
#Chris #Jankowski masterminded the partisan #gerrymanders that tilted state legislatures and congressional delegations across the south and the purple midwest toward extreme Republicans, ended Barack Obama’s second term before it started, and rendered elections in Wisconsinand North Carolina all but meaningless over the last decade and a half.
Leo and Jankowski understood, separately, that the courts and state legislatures were undervalued and often undefended targets for a deliberate strategy aimed at capturing important levers of power that sometimes float under the radar.
They could be Moneyball-ed, to borrow the term Michael Lewis used in his book about how the Oakland A’s made an end-run around large-market teams by understanding value that their opponents overlooked.
What Leo and Jankowski built separately would soon reinforce the other’s creation (with, of course, crucial assists from chief justice #John #Roberts), tightening the knots around meaningful elections, pushing policy to the extreme right and 
making it nearly impossible for voters to do anything about it