Engage with opinions that get to the heart of things . . .
The Deep, Tangled Roots of American Illiberalism
May 4, 2024
Steven Hahn
Dr. Hahn is a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian at New York University and the author, most recently, of “Illiberal America: a History.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/04/opinion/trump-second-term-illiberalism.htm
MAGA’s Violent Threats Are Warping Life in America
Opinion Columnist
[Excerpt:]
Amid the constant drumbeat of sensational news stories — the scandals, the legal rulings, the wild political gambits — it’s sometimes easy to overlook the deeper trends that are shaping American life. For example, are you aware how much the constant threat of violence, principally from MAGA sources, is now warping American politics? If you wonder why so few people in red America seem to stand up directly against the MAGA movement, are you aware of the price they might pay if they did?
Late last month, I listened to a fascinating NPR interview with the journalists Michael Isikoff and Daniel Klaidman regarding their new book, “Find Me the Votes,” about Donald Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election. They report that Georgia prosecutor Fani Willis had trouble finding lawyers willing to help prosecute her case against Trump. Even a former Georgia governor turned her down, saying, “Hypothetically speaking, do you want to have a bodyguard follow you around for the rest of your life?”
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/18/opinion/magas-violent-threats-are-warping-life-in-america.html
How Trump is already damaging U.S. national interests
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2024/02/05/trump-world-global-reaction-tariffs/
[Excerpt:]
The Eurasia Group, a risk consultancy, has warned that a Trump return would raise foundational questions about America’s trustworthiness as well as “the credibility of its commitments to foreign partners, and the durability of its role as the [linchpin] of the global security order.” We wish it were exaggerating.
Vote for destruction in November
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2024/01/25/republican-party-future-trump-save/
[Excerpt:]
If you want the GOP to be a serious conservative political party and not a MAGA cult, send Republicans into the wilderness. Vote for Biden. Take away Republicans’ control of the House. Give Democrats a bigger majority in the Senate. Vote Republican officials out of statehouses, city halls and school boards.
Make the metaphorical ashes from which a new GOP can rise.
“The 2024 Election Will Be Fair. People Still Won’t Believe It.”
I have written this piece for Politico. A snippet:
The current backdrop for the 2024 election may seem bleak: Many of those who helped to ensure a fair election and a peaceful transition of power in 2020 have been silenced, replaced or intimidated. Researchers who studied and reported on disinformation have been unfairly attacked as engaging in election interference in collusion with the government. Conservative states have passed new laws barring the use of private funds to help support election administration, derisively calling such money “Zuckerbucks” after Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan’s foundation provided hundreds of millions in crucial 2020 funding. Lawsuits and congressional hearings by the Orwellian-named House committee on the “weaponization of government” may be deterring some government agencies from reporting election disinformation and foreign interference to social media companies and others. The social media platforms that had deplatformed Trump after he encouraged the violence at the Capitol have restored his accounts.
Some Republican officials have been booted out of the party or out of power, including Aaron Van Langevelde, the Michigan state member of the board of canvassers who confirmed Biden’s 2020 victory in the state, and Republican members of the U.S. House, including Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger, who lost primaries or chose not to run for reelection. Attrition rates among election officials, who have faced relentless threats and intimidation while earning relatively low pay, are substantial.
And yet there is reason for hope.
Efforts have been made to ensure the 2024 election will be mostly fair. Congress amended the set of rules used for its counting of Electoral College votes to close off some of the shenanigans with alternative slates of electors that Trump and his allies tried in 2020. The Supreme Court last year in Moore v. Harper rejected an extreme theory that would have empowered legislatures to overcome even their own state constitutions and state courts in constricting voting rights. Election deniers who ran for chief election officer in swing states lost in 2022. People are now hypervigilant about attempts to subvert election results and are on guard against new forms of manipulation. Trump, no longer in government, has fewer tools to try to manipulate results. The 2022 elections, without Trump on the ballot, went off smoothly. (Of course, there is much more that can and should be done in law, politics, media and tech to assure a fair and safe election, as a group of us explained in a recently issued report, “24 for ’24.”)
But things look less promising when it comes to voter confidence in the fairness of election results — on both sides of the aisle.
Trump is already laying the seeds for claiming voter fraud in the 2024 elections should he lose, positing without evidence that Democrats are allowing illegal immigration into the United States so that these new arrivals can vote for Biden in the 2024 elections. (Noncitizens are ineligible to vote in U.S. presidential elections.) One of the mistakes I made in the run-up to the 2020 elections was believing that if the U.S. could pull off a free and fair election, it would take the oxygen out of false and outlandish claims of voter fraud. In fact, Trump has been able to manufacture doubt out of absolutely nothing; fraud claims untethered to reality still captivate millions of people looking for an excuse as to why their adored candidate may have lost. The upshot, of course, was an insurrection on Jan. 6. We should be deeply concerned about a sequel, even if Trump is not in the Oval Office this time…..
The U.S. Lacks What Every Democracy Needs
Mr. Hasen is the author of several books about elections and democracy, including “A Real Right to Vote: How a Constitutional Amendment Can Safeguard American Democracy.”
[Excerpt:]
The history of voting in the United States shows the high cost of living with an old Constitution, unevenly enforced by a reluctant Supreme Court.
Unlike the constitutions of many other advanced democracies, the U.S. Constitution contains no affirmative right to vote. We have nothing like Section 3 of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, providing that “every citizen of Canada has the right to vote in an election of members of the House of Commons or of a legislative assembly and to be qualified for membership therein,” or like Article 38 of the Basic Law of the Federal Republic of Germany, which provides that when it comes to election of the Bundestag, “any person who has attained the age of 18 shall be entitled to vote.”
As we enter yet another fraught election season, it’s easy to miss that many problems we have with voting and elections in the United States can be traced to this fundamental constitutional defect. Our problems are only going to get worse until we get constitutional change.
Can Trump Voters Be Persuaded to Reconsider?
Civil Discourse, by Joyce Vance
December 27, 2023
https://joycevance.substack.com/
[Excerpt:]I had not planned on writing today, but I want to make sure you don’t miss an excellent pieced published in The New York Times today. A Trump Conviction Could Cost Him Enough Voters to Tip the Election.
You’ve likely seen some of this information before. But the authors, Norm Eisen, former White House Ethics advisor and special counsel during Trump’s first House impeachment, Celinda Lake, well-regarded Democratic pollster, and Anat Shenker-Osorio, political researcher and campaign adviser, make a compelling case for the political impact jury verdicts in the criminal cases against Trump will have.
I think their argument suggests at more than that as well. The authors appropriately limit themselves to what they have statistical evidence to prove—that a conviction in a criminal case would swing enough Trump voters away to result in his loss at the polls in 2024. I think that data hints at a more compelling conclusion, that those who plan to vote for Trump can be swayed even without trials if they come to believe he committed criminal acts. A jury’s verdict isn’t the only kind of proof that can convince people to reject Trump’s candidacy. Now that indictments are public and much of the evidence is available it should be possible to persuade folks Trump committed a crime through means short of a jury verdict.
The West’s self-deception on Ukraine should not extend to Hungary’s Orban
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/12/26/orban-ukraine-europe-threat-west-hungary/
[Excerpts:]The risk of that particular self-deception has metastasized largely because of one man: Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban, who has made no secret of his intent to destroy Western unity on Ukraine.
It matters little that Orban has driven Hungary’s economy into a ditch, or that its economic output and population of 10 million are tiny fractions of the E.U.’s total. What counts is that Hungary, Putin’s Trojan horse in the heart of Europe, has weaponized the E.U.’s rules on Moscow’s behalf.
Orban, a darling of U.S. Republicans, has gutted Hungary’s democracy and made a sham of baseline E.U. expectations of its members: judicial independence, media freedom, minority rights, fair elections and tolerance.
That tragedy, for Hungarians and for Europe, will become farce next summer when Hungary takes over the rotating E.U. presidency, a role that grants Orban agenda-setting powers for a six-month term.
That bully pulpit will afford him the chance to embarrass the E.U. by showcasing his obstructionism, especially on Ukraine. But the broader threat he represents inside the alliance is real owing to the E.U.’s antiquated voting rules, including the requirement of unanimity of all member states on security and finance questions.
‘The Opposite of Politics’: A Conservative Legal Scholar Says Kicking Trump Off the Ballot Is ‘Unassailable’
J. Michael Luttig explains why he thinks the 14th Amendment should prevent Trump from running for president again.
https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2023/12/21/luttig-14th-amendment-trump-00132792
[Excerpt:]
Do you worry at all about the political blowback that a judicial decision removing Trump from ballots could spark?
I do, but what I would say, though, is this: The Constitution itself tells us that disqualification of the former president is not anti-democratic. Rather, the Constitution tells us that it is the conduct that can give rise to disqualification under the 14th Amendment that is anti-democratic.
I would add that we are a nation of laws, not of men, and it is the Constitution of the United States that is providing the avenue for the disqualification of the former president. This is not politics. This is the opposite of politics. This is constitutional law. And right now, the courts — the state courts and eventually the Supreme Court — will be interpreting the Constitution of the United States without regard to politics, let alone partisan politics.
A Trump dictatorship is increasingly inevitable. We should stop pretending.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/11/30/trump-dictator-2024-election-robert-kagan/
[Excerpt:]
But wait until Trump returns to power and the price of opposing him becomes persecution, the loss of property and possibly the loss of freedom. Will those who balked at resisting Trump when the risk was merely political oblivion suddenly discover their courage when the cost might be the ruin of oneself and one’s family?
We are closer to that point today than we have ever been, yet we continue to drift toward dictatorship, still hoping for some intervention that will allow us to escape the consequences of our collective cowardice, our complacent, willful ignorance and, above all, our lack of any deep commitment to liberal democracy. As the man said, we are going out not with a bang but a whimper.
Democracy faces two threats. Trump is only one of them.
Let’s start with the good news: It has become untenable to treat Trump as a normal presidential candidate, thanks to his own evermore radical rhetoric, starting with his pledges to use the Justice Department as a tool for revenge against political enemies. The result is a partial but welcome shift in journalistic coverage recognizing Trump’s journey into what the New York Times called “more fascist-sounding territory.” The Economist, no avatar of left-wing politics, received wide attention for declaring that Trump “poses the biggest danger to the world in 2024.”
It’s true that most Republican politicians shy away from calling out the former president’s planned assaults on our constitutional democracy, but at least the issue is being joined outside the GOP’s cocoon.
We are paying far less attention to the long-term deterioration of the right to vote, the essential building block of a democratic republic. It’s easier to overlook because chipping away at access to the ballot has been a subtle, decade-long process. It began with the Supreme Court’s 2013 Shelby County v. Holder decision that gutted Section 4 of the Voting Rights Act, thus sharply circumscribing the Justice Department’s power to enforce the law.
This led to an explosion of state abuses, including discriminatory voter-identification laws, targeted purges of electoral rolls, gerrymanders that undercut minority representation and changes in early-voting rules that often advantaged some groups over others.
Because such moves fall short of the wholesale disenfranchisement of Black voters during the Jim Crow era — it ended with the Voting Rights Act’s passage in 1965 — defenders of today’s restrictions insist they are not discriminating against anyone. But making it harder for some people to vote — often in the name of preventing the falsely imagined “voter fraud” that is at the heart of Trump’s election denial — is no less an attack on democracy.
And the attack continues.
In his decision in Shelby, Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. claimed that even without a strong Section 4, the Voting Rights Act bans discrimination under Section 2, which “is permanent, applies nationwide, and is not at issue in this case.”
Permanent? Not if the 2-1 decision last week from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 8th Circuit is allowed to stand.
The court’s majority arrogantly tossed aside what Congress explicitly said it was doing when it passed the law, claiming miraculous powers to read the “text and structure” of the act as preventing private parties, including civil rights groups, from bringing cases under Section 2. As the Atlantic’s Adam Serwer noted, the ruling’s claim that only the Justice Department had this authority ignored “Congress’s intentions, Supreme Court precedent and decades of practice.”
This is no minor bit of judicial activism. Rick Hasen, a law professor at UCLA, wrote in the Election Law Blog that the ruling would eliminate the bulk of the cases aimed at protecting voting rights because “the vast majority of claims to enforce section 2 of the Voting Rights Act are brought by private plaintiffs, not the Department of Justice with limited resources.” Bye bye, Voting Rights Act. Indeed, there were immediate signs (in a key Louisiana case, for example) that the 8th Circuit ruling would be used to overturn earlier voting rights actions.
Preventing Trump from overthrowing liberal democracy is certainly a necessary step, but it’s not sufficient. Renewing the fight for a new Voting Rights Act and the access-enhancing reforms in the Freedom to Vote Act is essential. But it’s also time to address one of the major flaws of our Constitution: It does not contain an explicit, affirmative guarantee of every citizen’s right to vote. Enacting a constitutional amendment that would do so, Hasen argues, would bring our voting wars to an inclusive conclusion.
“Why do we let the state put barriers in front of people when they exercise their right to vote?” Hasen asked in an interview. The director of UCLA’s Safeguarding Democracy Project, Hasen details his proposed amendment and the case for it in a forthcoming book, “A Real Right to Vote.” A carefully framed amendment, he argues, could simultaneously protect voter access and assure election integrity. He’d link automatic voter registration with a nationwide, universal, nondiscriminatory form of voter identification.
Polarization makes amending the Constitution nearly impossible these days, one reason Hasen addresses fears on both the left and the right. But whatever chances Hasen’s amendment has, it calls on Americans to address the most important question facing our democracy: Are we truly committed to being a democracy? We’ll decide that at the ballot box next November, but we’ll have a lot more work to do even if we get the initial answer right.
[Boldface added]
The Trump Threat Is Growing. Lawyers Must Rise to Meet This Moment.
George Conway, J. Michael Luttig and
The writers are lawyers. Mr. Conway was in private practice. Mr. Luttig was a judge on the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit from 1991 to 2006. Ms. Comstock represented Virginia’s 10th District in Congress from 2015 to 2019. They serve on the board of the newly formed Society for the Rule of Law Institute.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/21/opinion/trump-lawyers-constitution-democracy
What Ron DeSantis doesn’t seem to understand about Ronald Reagan
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/11/06/ron-desantis-choice-trump-republicans-2024/
Gerrymandered districts are not representative democracy
This is not representative democracy. Partisan gerrymandering is undemocratic and needs to be eliminated. This map dilutes the Black voting population, entrenches Republican supermajorities and renders voters’ input meaningless. It is outrageous and wrong that in a consistently purple state such as North Carolina, the legislature is a supermajority, districts are not competitive and election outcomes are predetermined regardless of turnout.
Perhaps if the North Carolina GOP adopted mainstream policies with strong public approval rather than its current radical, extremist agenda, it wouldn’t need to be afraid of the state’s voters.
Curtis Kelly, Hillsborough, N.C.
Ronna McDaniel Gets the Trump Treatment
Donald Trump claims to be the best, most or first in countless laughable ways, but there’s one endeavor at which he really is peerless: Nobody dishes out humiliation in such heaping, merciless measures.
Just ask Ronna McDaniel. She’s the one feasting miserably on it now.
The chair of the Republican National Committee, McDaniel is responsible for its presidential primary debates, including the one next week at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library in Simi Valley, Calif. Trump is skipping it. Dismissing her wishes, ignoring her entreaties, he has made other arrangements, just as he did in August, when he jilted McDaniel and pointedly took a pass on the first Republican primary debate, in Milwaukee.
But that’s just the half of it. When Trump snubs you, he snubs you in neon.
He’s actively competing with her debate by counterprogramming it — again, a repeat of his antics last month, when he did an interview with Tucker Carlson that was shown just as Ron DeSantis, Vivek Ramaswamy, Nikki Haley and the gang stood behind their lecterns, unfurling their talking points.
Only this time, he’s staging his rival event, a prime-time speech to striking United Auto Workers members that he could have scheduled for any other night, in McDaniel’s own backyard. She lives just outside Detroit, where Trump reportedly plans to make his remarks, and Michigan is where her grandfather George Romney was governor; where one of her uncles, Mitt Romney, grew up; and where the Romney clan has long been royalty. That’s why she went by Ronna Romney McDaniel until Trump came along and his contempt for Uncle Mitt complicated the luster of that middle name.
Michigan, in other words, is Romney territory. And Trump will be trampling all over it.
What a priceless turn of events. What a perfect spectacle — in the sense that it so vividly captures the mess of the Republican Party and the mortification of Republican “leaders” in the Trump era, when courtesy is obsolete, traditions are damned, loyalty flows to Mar-a-Lago but never from it, and all prosper or perish in accordance with their orange overlord’s whims.
Once upon a time, being the chair of the Republican Party was a prize and McDaniel’s duration in the job (she’s in her fourth term) would have been a triumphant validation of her political acumen and power. Now it just pegs her as a toady. It’s her ticket to disrepute.
She has richly earned that censure. Right after the 2020 presidential election, she was alternately squishy about and indulgent of Trump’s bogus claims that it had been stolen. As Tim Alberta recounted in a November 2020 article in Politico titled “The Inside Story of Michigan’s Fake Voter Fraud Scandal,” McDaniel “sanctioned her employees, beginning with top spokesperson Liz Harrington, to spread countless demonstrable falsehoods.” Alberta also noted that the R.N.C., “on McDaniel’s watch, tweeted out a video clip of disgraced lawyer Sidney Powell claiming Trump ‘won in a landslide’ (when he lost by more than six million votes nationally) and alleging a global conspiracy to rig the election against him.”
That was just a continuation of McDaniel’s fealty to Trump, who handpicked her to ascend to the chair of the R.N.C. after the 2016 election. She thanked him by dutifully playing the sycophant, as two headlines in Politico two years in a row neatly illustrated.
From January 2019: “R.N.C. Chair McDaniel Sides With Trump Over Uncle Mitt Romney.” That was when Romney, freshly elected to the Senate from Utah, wrote an opinion essay for The Washington Post that disparaged Trump’s performance as president. McDaniel in turn tweeted that Romney’s critique was “disappointing and unproductive.”
From February 2020: “Ronna McDaniel Stands With Trump After Uncle Mitt Says He’ll Vote to Convict.” That was when Romney, alone among Senate Republicans, deemed Trump culpable in the “perfect phone call” with President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine, which prompted the first of Trump’s two impeachments. McDaniel countered Romney’s vote by tweeting that “Trump did nothing wrong, and the Republican Party is more united than ever behind him.”
How faithful she has been. How little it has netted her. She is being reduced to a laughingstock and is learning what Rudy Giuliani did when he had to trek to Mar-a-Lago with a tin cup in his hand and beg for financial help with legal bills that he’d incurred by promoting Trump’s election lies: With Trump, there are no alms for the addled. He doesn’t spare his friends the kind of humiliation that he visits upon his foes. His favors are contingent not on your past servitude but on your present utility.
And when you sell your soul to him, you get no receipt.
Jack Smith and Fani Willis have a secret weapon: Donald Trump
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/09/21/trump-confessions-prosecutors/
[Excerpts:]The “advice of counsel” defense posits that if you received and accepted reasonable legal advice, you might not have had the requisite intent for certain crimes.
Trump’s statements and the testimony of his co-defendants point in one direction: He engaged in conduct outside presidential powers and disregarded or overrode advice of counsel. Meanwhile, his notes, statements affirming his willful retention of documents and the testimony of an aide shore up evidence of willful intent and obstruction of justice.
Bottom line: Trump and his cohorts’ arrogance have made prosecutors’ cases all the more compelling.
“Jan. 6 Rioters Have Been Held to Account. That Might Be the Easy Part.”
The Trump prosecutions are likely to be a stress test of the country’s commitment to the rule of law at a moment of intense polarization and with Mr. Trump solidifying his position as the Republican Party’s presumptive presidential nominee.
As if more tension were needed, Mr. Trump has already shown that he intends to make attacking the integrity of the proceedings a central part of his campaign, saying on Wednesday that he plans to take the stand in his own defense….
But Mr. Trump’s trials — especially the two he faces on charges of election interference, which were brought in Washington by the special counsel, Jack Smith, and in Georgia by the Fulton County district attorney, Fani T. Willis — will be of a different nature. They will be wrapped up in a tangled web of legal and political complexities that has never been seen before.
Samuel Buell, a former federal prosecutor and a law professor at Duke University, said that Mr. Trump’s election cases were legally challenging not only because they involved intersecting plots with numerous co-conspirators, but also because they were likely to hinge on thorny issues like proving intent and determining liability for crimes that different people may have committed together.
As if to prove his point, prosecutors in the Georgia case said on Wednesday that they expect to call at least 150 witnesses and that the trial there could last four months. (The judge said it might take eight.)
“These cases are much more nuanced and complicated than the riot cases,” Mr. Buell said.
Mark Meadows Is a Warning About a Second Trump Term
Mr. Whipple is the author of “The Gatekeepers: How the White House Chiefs of Staff Define Every Presidency.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/31/opinion/mark-meadows-georgia-trump
[Excerpts:]
Mr. Meadows failed as Mr. Trump’s chief because he was unable to check the president’s worst impulses. But the bigger problem for our country is that his failure is a template for the inevitable disasters in a potential second Trump administration.
Mr. Trump’s final days as president could be a preview. He ran the White House his way — right off the rails. He fired his defense secretary, Mark Esper, replacing him with his counterterrorism chief, Chris Miller, and tried but failed to install lackeys in other positions of power: an environmental lawyer, Jeffrey Clark, as attorney general and a partisan apparatchik, Kash Patel, as deputy C.I.A. director.
Mr. Trump has already signaled that in a second term, his department heads and cabinet officers would be expected to blindly obey orders. His director of national intelligence would tell him only what he wants to hear, and his attorney general would prosecute Mr. Trump’s political foes.
For Mr. Meadows, his place in history is secure as a primary enabler of a president who tried to overthrow democracy. But his example should serve as a warning of what will happen if Mr. Trump regains the White House. All guardrails will be gone.
[Boldface added]
Mark Meadows’s job wasn’t to help Trump steal the 2020 election
If Mr. Meadows were to succeed in changing venues, he would widen the pool of potential jurors, who could come from more conservative areas outside Atlanta, and he would avoid having his trial televised. He would also set a bad precedent, encouraging future presidents and their aides to interfere in the administration of local elections, with the expectation that they could later claim they were acting in their official capacities and secure more favorable circumstances at any trial.
The law requires defendants to establish three things to move a case to federal court: that they were an officer of the United States or acting under an officer; that they’re facing criminal charges “for or relating to any act under color of such office”; and that they have raised or will raise a “colorable federal defense.” Mr. Meadows has separately filed a motion in federal court to dismiss the charges against him under the Constitution’s supremacy clause, but this will be heard only if his arguments for removal prevail.
Trump yearns to govern a mafia state. Fitting that he faces racketeering charges
August 23, 2023
[Excerpts:]The Georgia indictment is particularly important: what many have long suspected – that Trump operates like a mafia boss – is confirmed by the ample evidence of Trump and his (increasingly bizarre and brutal) associates forming a criminal conspiracy to defraud the United States. Unlike mobsters, Trump used the power of the state itself to try to get his way, even if his making offers one couldn’t refuse ultimately failed. If Trump were brought back to power in 2024, there is every reason to believe that he would not only engage in all-out retribution for alleged wrongs against his political clan, but also erect what some observers describe as a mafia state.
It should have long been obvious that Trump operates with methods familiar from the mob: He tried to make James Comey kiss the ring. He demanded that Volodymyr Zelenskiy do him a favor. He threatens those who try to hold him to account for illegal behavior (“If you go after me, I will come after you”). This pattern is not unique to Trump; rather, it can be found among autocrats, or aspiring autocrats globally, who also happen to be kleptocrats.
The Hungarian sociologist Bálint Magyar has coined the term “mafia state” to describe the creation of “political families” (which can include a ruler’s actual family, as in the examples of Trump’s, Orbán’s, Bolsonaro’s and Erdoğan’s children, with especially nefarious roles reserved for sons-in-law); these families then use the state to enrich themselves.
. . . the methods to keep such a system going are recognizably mafia-style: absolute loyalty is given in exchange for material reward and, equally important, protection for an indefinite future through capturing the judiciary. Unlike with the ideologically driven authoritarian states of the 20th century, the main aim is not, as a Hungarian observer put it, “To persecute the innocent. It is the power to protect the guilty.”
[Boldface added]
The Constitution Prohibits Trump From Ever Being President Again
The only question is whether American citizens today can uphold that commitment.
The best argument for the Georgia indictment doesn’t involve Trump
The best argument for Ms. Willis’s indictment, in the end, has less to do with Mr. Trump than with these lesser-known leaders. They and others like them might confront a similar choice in 2024 and have now been put on notice that robbing voters of their say comes with consequences. Mr. Raffensperger put it aptly in a statement on Tuesday. “The most basic principles of a strong democracy are accountability and respect for the Constitution and rule of law,” he said. “You either have it, or you don’t.” In the 2020 election and its ugly aftermath, we learned how much those principles depend on the presumption that those who are charged with upholding them can be trusted to act with honor.
Rudy, Revealed
Mr. Kirtzman is the author of and Mr. Holley the researcher for “Giuliani: The Rise and Tragic Fall of America’s Mayor.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/16/opinion/rudy-giuliani-georgia-indictment-trump
It is easy to forget, and in some ways difficult to imagine, that Rudy Giuliani was once revered for his integrity. He was seen by many as a hero long before Sept. 11, a seemingly fearless U.S. attorney who broke the back of the mob, took on Wall Street titans and sent political power brokers to prison.
With each sensational indictment from his office in the 1980s, Mr. Giuliani spoke like the priest he almost became about good and evil and the seductions of power and money.
“It’s a rare individual in public office who does not eventually become personally corrupt,” he said in 1988.
The comment takes on new meaning when you read through the Georgia grand jury’s indictment, Mr. Giuliani’s first as a defendant. The details make it clear that the crusader of the 1980s and ’90s has completely lost his ability to distinguish right from wrong. He has gone from a moral compass in a city teeming with corruption to a long-ago leader who has descended into a moral void.
Enough With the False Narrative About Trump’s Rise
What exactly does David Brooks want “anti-Trumpers” to do?
Building a Legal Wall Around Donald Trump
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/20/opinion/jan-6-legal
[Excerpt:]
American legal institutions have passed the Jan. 6 test so far, but the tests aren’t over. Trump is already attempting to substantially delay the trial on his federal indictment in the Mar-a-Lago case, and if a second federal indictment arrives soon, he’ll almost certainly attempt to delay it as well. Trump does not want to face a jury, and if he delays his trials long enough, he can run for president free of any felony convictions. And what if he wins?
Simply put, the American people can override the rule of law. If they elect Trump in spite of his indictments, they will empower him to end his own federal criminal prosecutions and render state prosecutions a practical impossibility. They will empower him to pardon his allies. The American voters will break through the legal firewall that preserves our democracy from insurrection and rebellion.
We can’t ask for too much from any legal system. A code of laws is ultimately no substitute for moral norms. Our constitutional republic cannot last indefinitely in the face of misinformation, conspiracy and violence. It can remove the worst actors from positions of power and influence. But it cannot ultimately save us from ourselves. American legal institutions have responded to a historical crisis, but all its victories could still be temporary. Our nation can choose the law, or it can choose Trump. It cannot choose both.
Trump’s Conspirators Are Facing the Music, Finally
Norman Eisen and
Mr. Eisen is a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. Mr. Goodman is a law professor at New York University.
We’ve reached a turning point in the effort to ensure there are consequences for those who deliberately attempt to undermine our democracy: Michigan’s attorney general, Dana Nessel, charged 16 Republican leaders in her state on Tuesday for their role as fake electors working to overturn the results of the 2020 election. The charges, coming on the heels of news that the special counsel Jack Smith has informed Donald Trump that he’s a target of the Department of Justice’s investigation into the Capitol riot, mean we are witnessing a new and necessary phase in this quest for accountability, one in which the federal and state wheels of justice work to hold people accountable not only for the violence on Jan. 6, but also for what got us there: the alleged scheme to interfere with the transfer of power.
The charges in Michigan will surely meet criticism on all sides. Some will say the case is not broad or bold enough, that Mr. Trump and the other alleged national ringleaders should have been charged as well. Others will say Ms. Nessel cast too wide a net, pulling in low-level party functionaries who did not know better. We think those critiques are misconceived. Ms. Nessel got it just right, prosecuting crimes firmly within her jurisdiction, while opening the way for federal authorities to net even bigger fish.
Ms. Nessel brought the same eight counts against all 16 defendants. The offenses include conspiracy to commit forgery, since the defendants are accused of signing documents stating they were the qualified electors (they were not), and publishing forged documents by circulating these materials to federal and state authorities. On paper, the penalties for the offenses range from five to 14 years, but sentencing in this case would presumably be lower than that maximum.
Until now there have been no charges centered on the fake electors plot. For that reason alone, Michigan’s action brings a sense of needed accountability for those who fanned the rioters’ passions leading up to Jan. 6 by spinning a false narrative about a stolen election.
America Is Doing Just Fine
The United States deserves a robust defense.
July 10, 2023
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/07/uncle-sam-american-military-patriotism
It’s Not Too Late for the Republican Party
Judge Luttig was appointed by George H.W. Bush and served on the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit from 1991 to 2006.
When Republicans faced an 11th-hour reckoning with another of their presidents over far less serious offenses almost 50 years ago, the elder statesmen of the party marched into the Oval Office and told Richard Nixon the truth. He had lost his Republican support and he would be impeached if he did not resign. The beleaguered Nixon resigned the next day and left the White House the day following.
Such is what it means to put country over party. History tends to look favorably upon a party that writes its own history, as Winston Churchill might have said.
Republicans have waited in vain for political absolution. It’s finally time for them to put the country before their party and pull back from the brink — for the good of the party, as well as the nation.
If not now, then they must forever hold their peace.
Opinion: As a former AG, I know why Trump’s defenders are wrong
[Excerpt:]No one in the nation is above the law. That’s why we all have a stake in the outcome of Trump’s case. It is not just about one person; it is about our system of justice. We all lose — as a country and as a people — if at the end of the former president’s trial, regardless of the outcome, the Department of Justice and the rule of law emerge weaker.
Throughout our history, our democratic institutions have been tested, sometimes to the breaking point. Yet, in the end, those institutions proved capable because of strong, competent leaders who acted with faith and not fear. I encourage today’s leaders to set aside their personal views of the politics of one controversial figure and remain focused on preserving the rule of law.
Bill Barr: The Truth About the Trump Indictment
This time the president is not a victim of a witch hunt. The situation is entirely of his own making.
For the sake of the country, our party, and a basic respect for the truth, it is time that Republicans come to grips with the hard truths about President Trump’s conduct and its implications. Chief among them: Trump’s indictment is not the result of unfair government persecution. This is a situation entirely of his own making. The effort to present Trump as a victim in the Mar-a-Lago document affair is cynical political propaganda.
Here are the plain facts
On voting rights, the justices followed the law. Shouldn’t be news, but it is.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/06/09/supreme-court-voting-rights-ruth-marcus/
[Excerpt:]
It is imperative to call out the conservative majority’s radicalism for what it is. And let’s not get carried away. What passes for a win here is preserving the status quo. Still, when the conservative juggernaut falters, when the three remaining liberals are able to cobble together a victory, it is important to pause — to savor the moment, praise the restraint and ponder how it happened.
The Right Is All Wrong About Masculinity
“American men are in desperate need of virtuous purpose.”
Opinion Columnist
[Reprinted in full, gentlemen:]
There is a certain irony in discussions of masculinity. The group that is most convinced of a crisis of masculinity, the American right, is also busy emasculating itself before our eyes. It correctly perceives that young men are facing an identity crisis, yet it is modeling precisely the wrong response.
The release of the Missouri senator Josh Hawley’s new book on manhood is the latest peg for a national conversation about men, but the necessity of such a conversation has been apparent for some time. If there’s anything that’s well established in American social science, it’s that men are falling behind women in higher education, suffer disproportionately from drug overdoses and are far more likely to commit suicide.
Indeed, the very definition of “masculinity” is up for grabs. In 2019, the American Psychological Association published guidelines that took direct aim at what it called “traditional masculinity — marked by stoicism, competitiveness, dominance and aggression” — declaring it to be, “on the whole, harmful.”
I strongly disagreed. Aside from “dominance,” a concept with precious few virtuous uses, the other aspects of traditional masculinity the A.P.A. cited have important roles to play. Competitiveness, aggression and stoicism surely have their abuses, but they also can be indispensable in the right contexts. Thus, part of the challenge isn’t so much rejecting those characteristics as it is channeling and shaping them for virtuous purposes.
I should note here that traditionally “masculine” virtues are not exclusively male. Women who successfully model these attributes are all around us. On my recent visit to Kyiv, I was struck by the restraint and courage of the men and women I met. In the face of the greatest of challenges, they exhibited a degree of calm conviction that’s all too foreign to our domestic politics.
If you doubt the need for such stoicism in our own country, I’d point you, ironically enough, to the side of our political divide that is most critical of the A.P.A.’s conclusions: the American right. In its words, the right claims to uphold traditional masculinity; in its deeds, the story is very different.
Rudyard Kipling’s famous poem “If—” is one of the purest distillations of restraint as a traditional manly virtue. It begins with the words “If you can keep your head when all about you / Are losing theirs and blaming it on you.” The entire work speaks of the necessity of calmness and courage. Do not allow yourself to become too high or too low. (“If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster / And treat those two impostors just the same.”) Persevere.
It’s a compelling vision — although one that can become an emotional trap, to be sure. Stoicism carried to excess can become a dangerous form of emotional repression, a stifling of necessary feelings. But the fact that the patience and perseverance that mark stoicism can be taken too far is not to say that we should shun those values. In times of conflict and crisis, it is the calm man or woman who can see clearly.
Instead, the new right chooses to shriek about “groomers” on Twitter.
If you spend much time at all on right-wing social media — especially Twitter these days — or listening to right-wing news outlets, you’ll be struck by the sheer hysteria of the rhetoric, the hair-on-fire sense of emergency that seems to dominate all discourse.
In 2016, for example, the single most important intellectual work of the new right was an essay by Michael Anton entitled “The Flight 93 Election.” It began like this: “2016 is the Flight 93 election: Charge the cockpit or you die. You may die anyway. You — or the leader of your party — may make it into the cockpit and not know how to fly or land the plane. There are no guarantees. Except one: If you don’t try, death is certain.”
That’s right: The argument was that electing Hillary Clinton, a thoroughly establishment Democrat, would mean the end of America. It’s an argument that people never stopped making. In 2020, I debated the Christian author Eric Metaxas about whether Christians should support Donald Trump against Joe Biden. What did he argue? That Joe Biden could “genuinely destroy America forever.”
Catastrophic rhetoric is omnipresent on the right. Let’s go back to the “groomer” smear. It’s a hallmark of right-wing rhetoric that if you disagree with the new right on any matter relating to sex or sexuality, you’re not just wrong; you’re a “groomer” or “soft on pedos.” Did a senator vote to confirm Ketanji Brown Jackson for the Supreme Court? Then he’s “pro-pedophile.” Did you disagree with Florida’s H.B. 1557, which restricted instruction on sexuality and gender identity? Then “you are probably a groomer.”
But conservative catastrophism is only one part of the equation. The other is meanspirited pettiness. Traditional masculinity says that people should meet a challenge with a level head and firm convictions. Right-wing culture says that everything is an emergency, and is to be combated with relentless trolling and hyperbolic insults.
Twitter, even in its pre-Elon Musk state, seemed as if it had been constructed in a lab to contribute to a constant state of hysteria. Every single perceived left-wing outrage or excess is shared far and wide. “How can you be calm?” right-wing activists demand to know. “Didn’t you see that the North Face is using drag queens in its ads?”
Last month, my friend Jonah Goldberg wrote an important piece cataloging the sheer pettiness of the young online right. “Everywhere I look these days,” he wrote, “I see young conservatives believing they should behave like jerks.” As Jonah noted, there are those who now believe it shows “courage and strength to be coarse or bigoted.”
No one should think that this hysteria is confined to online spaces or that it ultimately remains merely petty or cruel. Hysteria plus cruelty is a recipe for violence. And that brings us back to Mr. Hawley. For all of its faults when taken to excess, the traditional masculinity of which he claims to be a champion would demand that he stand firm against a howling mob. Rather, he saluted it with a raised fist — and then ran from it when it got too close and too unruly.
If the right is going to claim it defends traditional masculinity — through its books, its viral Jordan Peterson videos and its Tucker Carlson documentaries — should it not at least attempt to exhibit the best virtues of traditional masculinity? Yet rather than model the traits of Kipling’s “If—,” the right mimics the attitudes of the countercultural 1968 film “If…,” which offered a sardonic inversion of Kipling’s virtues in its tale of a violent, schoolboy-led insurrection at a British boarding school.
I share many of the right’s concerns about young men. As I argued in one of my first pieces for The Times, American men are in desperate need of virtuous purpose. I reject the idea that traditional masculinity, properly understood, is, “on the whole, harmful.” I recognize that it can be abused, but it is good to confront life with a sense of proportion, with calm courage and conviction. [Boldface added]
One of the best pieces of advice I’ve ever received reflects that wisdom. Early in my legal career, a retired federal judge read a brief that I’d drafted and admonished me to “write with regret, not outrage.”
Outrage is cheap, he told me. And he doubted that I, as a young lawyer, had even begun to understand what true legal outrage looked like. Husband your anger, he told me. Have patience. Gain perspective. So then, when something truly is terrible, your outrage will mean something. It was the legal admonition against crying wolf.
I worry for the young right. As Jonah wrote, all too many of them “have no frame of reference, no meaningful political experience or memory of politics prior to this shabby era; they think being shabby is normal and smart.” But there is a better way. It includes paying close attention to the very masculine values they claim to uphold, and it can start with remembering a singular admonition: “Keep your head when all about you / Are losing theirs.” It’s a step toward reason, a step away from the emotional brink and a key to understanding what it truly takes to be a good man.
The GOP Is the Party of ‘Fuck You’.
It was once a political party, now it’s a nihilistic, corrupt, fake populist scam.
Updated May. 12, 2023 / Published May. 12, 2023
https://www.thedailybeast.com/the-gop-is-the-party-of-fk-you?
There is an apocryphal belief that among the Indigenous people of the north there are more than 30 words for snow. Well, I’m from New Jersey and I can tell you that in America’s great Garden State we don’t need so many words. In fact, along our stretch of the I-95 corridor there are probably 30 different ways we deploy just a single two-word phrase: “Fuck you.”
It can be a greeting, an expression of disbelief, a paroxysm of surprise or awe, an expression of affection, a reaction to a particularly delicious meal, and an expression of anger in its many different forms. You get the idea.
All of which is to say, I am an expert in the use of the term. And, because I also am a denizen of Washington, D.C., I have come to understand how it has become central to the politics of our moment.
The Republican Party has become the party of “Fuck you.” “Fuck you” is the motivation of its alienated voters. It is its legislative strategy. It is its views toward the laws and Constitution of the United States. It is its reaction to morality and values. It is its foreign policy mantra with our allies. “Fuck you” is even its message to the historians of the future.
Sadly, we live in an age in which the political discourse of the United States results in every idea floated by Democrats, independents, and even the elusive “reasonable Republicans,” in which every constructive thought floated about the direction our country should take, or how we should behave, or why the law matters is met by a chorus of Republican leaders with their signature “Fuck you.”
As a New Jerseyite, I worry they will discredit the term so much that we will have to find another way to express ourselves. My concern is due to the fact that the MAGA-ized GOP has only gotten more outrageous… which is to say more committed to the politics of outrage, to obliterating norms of decency, as the signature activities to which they devote themselves.
They do it because their base is angry. They do it because it drives social media wild. They do it because they have no ideas and their leaders are profoundly immoral, disgusting people.
We have seen multiple examples of the politics of “Fuck you” this week. We have seen Donald Trump, the leader of the party, the high priest of “Fuck you-ism,” the commander-in-chief of the “Fuck your feelings” army, in a video-taped deposition saying, essentially, “Fuck you” to E. Jean Carroll’s lawyer. We heard him say “Fuck you” to anyone who may have thought sexual abuse was wrong when he doubled down on his famous pussy-grabbing brag, arguing that “stars” like him have been “fortunate” to be able to grab pussies for the past “million years” or so.
Then, when an undoubtedly disgusted jury found Trump liable for sexual assault and defamation in record time, he immediately said “Fuck you” to the American system of justice and to his own hometown in a series of social media posts that soon may be fodder for the next set of defamation suits against him.
He followed that up with a televised Trump rally that was carried on CNN in which he repeated some of his greatest “Fuck yous” to America of the past seven years. He doubled down on the Big Lie. He called Vladimir Putin a smart guy. He refused to condemn Putin as a war criminal. He equated Russia and Ukraine’s role in the former’s invasion of the latter. He promised to pardon Jan. 6 insurrectionists. He said he had a right to the classified government documents he stole. He said the GOP was right to threaten debt default, which he said might have no effect at all. He gloated about his role in making the Dobbs decision happen. And he once again defamed E Jean Carroll. It was a tour de force of what might be called the art of “Fuck you,” complete with an audience of fawning MAGA zombies and a big old “Get fucked” to fact-checkers in the form of his usual tsunami of lies.
While some leaders in the GOP actually had the decency to condemn Trump’s vileness at the conclusion of the Carroll trial, they were very much in the minority. Most GOP lawmakers offered their party’s patented silent “Fuck you” by refusing to say a bad word about their party’s leader after a jury’s verdict that he was a sex abuser. But some went further. Some said “Fuck you” to New York and the nine average Americans who did their duty on the jury (and in so doing offered a “Fuck you” to the entire American system of justice).
Some members of the F.U. Party were not content to merely demonstrate their contempt for our system of law or any modicum of respect for women. Some, like Alabama Sen. Tommy Tuberville, actually said things like the Carroll verdict “makes me want to vote for him twice.”
Tuberville, now vying for Ted Cruz’s crown as the most despicable member of the Senate GOP contingent is emerging as a poster boy for the Fuck you-ist movement on the right. He was off to a good start, of course, when he ran for the Senate despite having zero political or public service background, coming to the post from his prior role as the coach of the Auburn University football team. But having arrived in the Senate unencumbered by any sense of shame due to his off-the-charts ignorance, he has zeroed-in on the most Fuck you-iest possible positions and statements. Most recently, this has involved telling U.S. national security and our military leaders to go take a flying fuck by blocking the promotion of over nearly 200 officers for over two months (so far) as a way of making a point regarding his troglodyte, profoundly anti-woman views on abortion. Then, with a flourish that will have Fuck you-ologists studying his work for years, when asked about efforts to keep white nationalists out of the military he responded, “Well, they call them that. I call them Americans.”
After Trump, the most senior member of the GOP, is of course, House Speaker Kevin McCarthy. He, too, has demonstrated where “Fuck your feelings, fuck your Constitution, fuck the world economy, fuck every American” gets you as a policy position by threatening to trigger a U.S. default on its debt for the first time in history.
He does this despite the GOP having held the view that paying the debt was sacrosanct under Trump (as it was for decades previous), and despite having voted for the big GOP measures that have contributed to America’s deficit. Oh, and the “plan” for cutting the deficit he proposes is not only completely unrealistic, it would be a big “Fuck you” to tens of thousands of Americans—like the 81,000 people at the Veterans Administration whose jobs he would put at risk or the hundreds of thousands of veterans they serve.
But what are tens or hundreds of thousands of jobs when the default you are flirting with would trigger a global recession, gut America’s standing on the world stage and possibly put as many as eight million Americans out of work?
“They do it because their base is angry. They do it because it drives social media wild. They do it because they have no ideas and their leaders are profoundly immoral, disgusting people.”
Doing his best Tony Soprano imitation—in response to criticisms of the risks he is undertaking or observations that the 14th Amendment to the Constitution prohibits such behavior—McCarthy’s response is, “Fuck me? No, fuck you!” (And he would add, to the voters of New York who were defrauded into voting for the pathological and now indicted fabulist Rep. George Santos, he adds a big “Fuck you, too, I’m going to keep him around as long as I need his vote!”)
When did all this Fuck-you-osity begin to happen? When did the last drops of decency or respect for our system or our people get sucked out of the leaders of the current GOP? It’s hard to say. Contempt for anyone but the donor class has been a clear theme among party leaders since the Reagan years. The message of contempt for our system and values was amplified further by the party’s decision to elevate a series of contemptible leaders in the Congress like convicted sex abuser and former Speaker Denny Hastert, ethically challenged former Speaker Newt Gingrich, or scandal-plagued GOP whip Tom Delay. Certainly, it was not helped by the George W. Bush administration’s chest-thumping about its embrace of torturing our enemies or slaughtering innocents in an illegal war.
But the real golden age of “Fuck you” politics was ushered in by the election of Donald Trump as president in 2016.
After all, by the time he was elected, the world had already seen and heard the Access Hollywood tape; they knew Trump had been accused of sex crimes by dozens of women; they knew of his shady business past; they knew he had reached out to our Russian enemies for help; they knew he was a racist; they knew he had no public service experience; they knew he was as despicable a human being as ever sought public office in the U.S.
They knew all that and their response was to elect him precisely because he sent a message of “Fuck you” to America.
Amazingly, of course, the reason so many Republicans wanted to tell the rest of the country to get fucked was because, of course, they had been fucked over by the system promoted, manned, defended, and advanced by the leaders of their own party and the donors that backed them. The fuckees elected the fuckers because they were tired of getting fucked by them.
What irony. What a scam. What a beauteous way for the GOP fat cats to cackle to each other over brandy and cigars about how well and truly they had fucked everyone but themselves.
The Briefing: The wrong way to protect election officials
Tucker Carlson’s Dark and Malign Influence Over the Christian Right
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/07/opinion/tucker-carlson-christian-right.html
[Excerpt:]
The great tragedy is that a moment of dangerous national polarization is exactly when a truly Christian message that combines the pursuit of justice with kindness and humility would be a balm to the national soul. A time of extraordinary social isolation, when people report less companionship, less time with friends and less time with family, is exactly the time when a healthy church community can be a beacon of inclusion and hope.
But not when the right-wing pursuit of its version of justice overwhelms its commitment to kindness, much less any shred of humility. This is how the religious right becomes post-Christian. Its “secular prophets” become even more influential than its Christian leaders, and it actively discards clear biblical commands for what it perceives to be the greater good.
That’s not Christianity. It’s a primitive form of consequentialism, the idea that the morality of an action is to be judged solely by its consequences. Many Christians fear that kindness doesn’t work, so they discard it. This is how even decency itself becomes a secondary value. Aggression, not virtue, becomes the touchstone of political engagement, and anything other than aggression is seen as a sign of weakness.
No Labels May Re-Elect Donald Trump
The centrist group’s candidate would take unenthusiastic voters away from Biden.
George Will is the latest commentator to view with equanimity the prospect of a No Labels-led bipartisan presidential campaign. “One or both of the major parties might, depending on their calculations of a third candidate’s appeal, accuse No Labels of being a spoiler,” he wrote in a Washington Post column last week. “Let those parties try to explain how today’s politics could be spoiled.”
I’m happy to accept Mr. Will’s challenge. In 2010 I helped start No Labels to foster bipartisan solutions to our country’s most important problems. Last month, after more than a decade, I felt compelled to resign in disagreement over its decision to launch a bipartisan presidential campaign.
Donald Trump May Have Begun Losing
Trump’s Prosecution Has Set a Dangerous Precedent
Mr. Khardori is a former federal prosecutor.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/01/opinion/trump-prosecution-precedent
I Worry About a Failed Prosecution of Trump, but I Worry More About No Prosecution
Liberal Professors Can Rescue the G.O.P.
Mr. Shields is a professor of government at Claremont McKenna College. He has written widely on the American right and the politics of higher education.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/23/opinion/conservative-college-students
[Excerpts:]Liberal professors have the power to help solve this problem. They can show their conservative students how to become thoughtful and knowledgeable partisans — by exposing them to a rich conservative intellectual tradition that stretches back to Enlightenment thinkers like Edmund Burke, David Hume and Adam Smith. They could mentor their conservative students, set up reading groups, help vet speakers and create courses on the conservative intellectual tradition.
This is easier said than done, of course. One challenge is that there are not many incentives to take undergraduate teaching and mentoring seriously, at least not at research universities, which instead dole out promotions based on research and publication. A bigger obstacle, though, is that very few professors know much at all about the conservative intellectual tradition. Many assume there is little of value in it.
The people now teaching them to think and act like conservatives mostly belong to Trumpist outfits like Turning Point USA, which recruits and trains young conservatives to be campus activists. (Turning Point has taken to hosting deliberate provocations like affirmative action bake sales, in which students are charged different prices, depending on their race.)
The point of these stunts isn’t just to provoke liberal outrage on campus; it’s to alienate conservative kids from their surroundings. Turning Point’s bombastic founder, Charlie Kirk, a college dropout, wants his young protégés to feel every bit as contemptuous of higher education as he does. As he told Fox News, “Anything but college.”
Of course, none of this would fully inoculate the next generation from embracing a reckless populism. Senator Josh Hawley of Missouri was close to his thesis adviser, David M. Kennedy. A prominent historian and visiting fellow at the center-right Hoover Institution, Dr. Kennedy even helped Mr. Hawley turn his thesis on Teddy Roosevelt into a book. That didn’t stop Mr. Hawley from going all in on Donald Trump’s claims of election fraud, infamously raising a clenched fist as he entered the Capitol on the morning of Jan. 6.
But this seems just as true: It’s hard to imagine how the next generation of Republican leaders will become thoughtful conservatives if all they’ve ever been tutored in is its Trump-style expressions. Professors have the power to make sure that doesn’t happen; it’s time they use it.
Why Xi and Putin pretend they run democracies
[Excerpts:]
Autocrats using fake elections to claim popular support while consolidating power isn’t new. Xi and Putin aren’t just hiding behind a fig leaf of legitimacy; they are attempting to redefine the world’s understanding of what “democracy” means. This is dangerous, and real democracies must push back.
To some, Putin and Xi’s democracy playacting might seem harmless.
But this week’s Putin-Xi summit showed that these two leaders are not simply trying to reframe democracy for domestic purposes. They are claiming ownership of the concept of democracy as a key plank of their proposed new world order — one where the actual struggle for democratic progress is demonized and negated. In 2021, China’s State Council Information Office even released a white paper entitled “China: Democracy That Works” and offered it as a model to the developing world.
More broadly, Putin and Xi are trying to hollow out the very notions of democracy, human rights and the rule of law in the international system.
“Once you get a taste of being autocratic in your own country, you want to be autocratic in the world,” Moisés Naím, author of the book “The Revenge of Power: How Autocrats Are Reinventing Politics for the 21st Century,” told me. “What happens in autocracies doesn’t stay in autocracies. It travels.”
Western democracies would be naive to think Beijing’s narrative isn’t spreading. A report last week by the U.S. Institute of Peace detailed the Chinese government’s extensive global campaign to influence media in the developing world through massive amounts of propaganda, corruption of local media, covert influence operations and co-opting of local officials.
Putin’s and Xi’s attacks on the Western concept of democracy are aided by the erosion of support for democracy promotion here at home. Some U.S. experts argue that the United States ought to ignore the ideological component of great-power competition because it shrinks the space for cooperation with dictatorships.
But the sheer amount of time, effort and resources that Putin and Xi devote to ideological projection shows its importance to them and therefore demands a response. The Biden administration next week is hosting the second iteration of its Summit for Democracy, which aims to bolster international support for these values. But one conference per year is just not enough.
Putin and Xi want to have it both ways; they want to run their systems as dictators while claiming the mantle of democracy in the 21st century. The fact they are pretending shows that they know their actual model is neither popular nor just. Leaders in open societies must ensure that democracy isn’t defined by those who oppose it.
DeSantis Has No Choice but to Fully Commit to the Trump Bit
The Florida governor’s Ukraine comments put an end to any hope that he’s a Reagan Republican. Now there’s nowhere to go but full MAGA throughout the GOP primary.
https://www.thedailybeast.com/desantis-has-no-choice-but-to-fully-commit-to-the-trump-bit
The Real Danger Isn’t Trump or DeSantis
It’s the illiberal desires of Republican voters.
I get the appeal of the question. It’s like wondering who would win in a fight—a gorilla, an alligator, or a shark.
But it’s the wrong question because the danger doesn’t emanate primarily from the politician.
The danger emanates from the will of the voters.
We have a number of potential Republican candidates who fit squarely in the middle of America’s political tradition:
Nikki Haley. Brian Kemp. Tim Scott. Mike Pompeo. Glenn Youngkin. Mike Pence.
You may have ideological or policy disagreements with all of them. You might vastly prefer a replacement-level Democrat to any of them. Fine. But none of those figures either has a record of, or is campaigning on a promise to, walk American back from the tradition of liberal democracy.
On the other hand, the field has just two candidates who are explicitly positioning
themselves as . . . I’m struggling to be charitable here . . . in tension with the underpinnings of liberal democracy.
Donald Trump is in tension with the idea that electoral outcomes must be honored.
Ron DeSantis is in tension with liberalism itself. Here I’m not talking about DeSantis policies that you might merely dislike or think are harmful. I’m talking about policies which seek to rewrite the relationship between government and the private sphere.
Here’s Chait on what DeSantis is doing to Disney:
On Monday . . . DeSantis appointed a board to oversee Disney. The Central Florida Tourism Oversight District is stacked with DeSantis cronies, including Bridget Ziegler, a proponent of his education policies; Ron Peri, who heads the Christian ministry the Gathering USA; and Michael Sasso, president of the Federalist Society’s Orlando chapter.
While the board handles infrastructure and maintenance, DeSantis boasted that it could use its leverage to force Disney to stop “trying to inject woke ideology” on children.
“When you lose your way, you’ve got to have people that are going to tell you the truth,” DeSantis proclaimed. “So we hope they can get back on. But I think all of these board members very much would like to see the type of entertainment that all families can appreciate.”
It is worth pausing a moment to grasp the full breadth of what is going on here. First, DeSantis established the principle that he can and will use the power of the state to punish private firms that exercise their First Amendment right to criticize his positions. Now he is promising to continue exerting state power to pressure the firm to produce content that comports with his own ideological agenda.
Pour encourager les autres.
There’s no way to understand this except as a move toward Orbánism. And when you package it with DeSantis’s attempts to use the power of the state to control what can and can’t be said in classrooms and on university campuses and his attempt to regulate the media, we are way, waaaaaay outside the American political tradition.
We’re in new territory.
So don’t ask, “Who is worse, Trump or DeSantis?”
Instead ask, “What do Republican voters want, liberalism or illiberalism?”
And this is the rough answer we have:
The two illiberal guys get 75 percent of the votes. That’s the problem.
Look: Is Trump more dangerous than DeSantis? If you gave me a button that would make one of them president and told me I had to pick, I’d take DeSantis, based purely on (1) cognitive functioning; (2) Trump’s history of actively attempting a coup; and (3) a thin hope that maybe DeSantis doesn’t mean the Orbán stuff and is just maneuvering opportunistically.
But I wouldn’t feel great about (3). Because when the Republican base is given a choice between the conservatism of the last 50 years and an illiberal attempt to renegotiate the foundations of our governing compact—they want the illiberalism. And it’s not even close.
So even if DeSantis is a pure opportunist, the opportunistic path might well be the illiberal path.
At this point, I want to make clear that I’m not wishing for some Never Trump fantasy version of a Republican. I’m not saying, Gee, if only St. Larry were the nominee, then we’d be fine.
Just give me Brian Kemp. Or Mike Pence. Or, God help me, Glenn Youngkin. Because as conservative as those guys are, and as much as you or I might not like their politics, none of them has betrayed an interest in renegotiating the liberal democratic order.
Only two of the potential candidates have. And those two guys are running away with it.
That’s the revealed preference of Republican voters. And that’s the real danger, irrespective of who wins the nomination.
Pat Buchanan’s GOP must tackle racism, not deny it
Mike Pence’s Dangerous Ploy
Mr. Luttig, a former judge on the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit, provided advice to then-Vice President Pence on the run-up to the Electoral College count on Jan. 6, 2021.
A New Manifesto for Texas Conservatives
As a lifelong Republican—and, more recently, dedicated Never Trumper—it’s clear to me that the state GOP desperately needs to enter the twenty-first century.
https://www.texasmonthly.com/news-politics/new-texas-conservative-manifesto/
Florida Could Start Looking a Lot Like Hungary
Opinion Columnist
In 2017, the government of Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orban passed a law intended to drive Central European University, a prestigious school founded by a Hungarian refugee, George Soros, out of the country. At the time, this was shocking; as many as 80,000 protesters rallied in Budapest and intellectuals worldwide rushed to declare their solidarity with the demonstrators. “The fate of the university was a test of whether liberalism had the tactical savvy and emotional fortitude to beat back its new ideological foe,” wrote Franklin Foer in The Atlantic.
Liberalism, sadly, did not: The university was forced to move to Vienna, part of Orban’s lamentably successful campaign to dismantle Hungary’s liberal democracy.
That campaign has included ever-greater ideological control over education, most intensely in grade school, but also in colleges and universities. Following a landslide 2018 re-election victory that Orban saw as a “mandate to build a new era,” his government banned public funding for gender studies courses. “The Hungarian government is of the clear view that people are born either men or women,” said his chief of staff. In 2021, Orban extended political command over Hungarian universities by putting some schools under the authority of “public trusts” full of regime allies.
Many on the American right admire the way Orban uses the power of the state against cultural liberalism, but few are imitating him as faithfully as the Florida governor and likely Republican presidential candidate Ron DeSantis. Last week, one of DeSantis’s legislative allies filed House Bill 999, which would, as The Tampa Bay Times reported, turn many of DeSantis’s “wide-ranging ideas on higher education into law.” Even by DeSantis’s standards, it is a shocking piece of legislation that takes a sledgehammer to academic freedom. Jeremy Young, senior manager of free expression and education at PEN America, described it as “almost an apocalyptic bill for higher education,” one that is “orders of magnitude worse than anything we’ve seen, either in the recent or the distant past.” [Boldface added]
Trump’s enablers must face consequences, too
Accessories to authoritarianism should not be able to launder their reputations.
Opinion by Jennifer Rubin
March 1, 2023
https://www.washingtonpost.
To fight defamation suit, Fox News cites election conspiracy theories
Legal experts say Fox News defense strategy in Dominion defamation case is risky but could help make case commentators truly saw false claims as plausible.
March 1, 2023
By Rachel Weiner
https://www.washingtonpost.com/media/2023/03/01/fox-news-defamation-lawsuit-defense-strategy/
Pence Is the Reagan Republican No One Wants Anymore
If you want to get a sense of how prolonged exposure to MAGA has shifted the Republican Party’s policy positions these last eight years, use Mike Pence as your control group.
This past week, we learned that, unlike Ron DeSantis, Pence doesn’t think we should use the coercive power of the government to punish private businesses like Disney.
We also learned that, contrary to Donald Trump, Pence thinks reining in our long-term debt crisis will require us to put entitlement reform on the table.
And lastly, we learned that, unlike Fox News’ primetime anchors, Pence thinks it’s vital that America support Ukraine against Russia’s invasion.
As a Reagan conservative, I’d say Pence is now batting 3-for-3. That means he’s probably going 0-for-3 in today’s GOP (though opinions about Ukraine remain mixed). Regardless, right and wrong aren’t determined by the opinion polls.
And the hits kept coming.
“I think it’s important that we hold the line here, support the Ukrainians as they make the fight just like [the] Reagan doctrine said,” Pence told Fox News’ Sean Hannity.
Pence’s positions strike me as correct, courageous, and (in today’s GOP) politically foolish. Then again, he is showing a clear contrast with the frontrunners (Trump and DeSantis) by staking out a clear niche.
That’s more than you can say for other Republicans, who seem to be all over the place on some of the most important issues of the day.
And did I mention that Reagan’s GOP, like Pence, used to believe “the orderly transfer of power” was a uniquely American blessing and a “miracle.”
These aren’t just fringe issues. These were defining tenets of what might be considered conservative (if not American) mainstream thought from 1980 to 2015.
Pence is one of the few remaining Republicans who still believes in the Reaganite policies that were once almost universally endorsed and praised on the right.
And for that reason, Mike Pence is a dead man walking in 2024.
What Fox News Says When You’re Not Listening
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/17/opinion/fox-news-dominion
[Excerpts:]
The brief, a motion for summary judgment in a case stemming from Fox’s egregiously false claims of Dominion-abetted election fraud, offers a portrait of extravagant cynicism. It reveals how obsessed Carlson and other leading Fox News figures were with audience share, and their fear of being outflanked by even further-right outlets like Newsmax.
“It’s remarkable how weak ratings make good journalists do bad things,” Bill Sammon, a Fox senior vice president until 2021, is quoted as saying. It’s a line that would fall flat on “Succession” because it’s too absurdly on the nose.
As the Dominion filing lays out, there was panic at Fox News over viewer backlash to the network correctly calling Arizona for Joe Biden on election night. Despite its accuracy, the call was viewed, internally, as a catastrophe.
“Do the executives understand how much credibility and trust we’ve lost with our audience?” Carlson texted his producer. He added, “An alternative like Newsmax could be devastating to us.” Sean Hannity, in an exchange with fellow hosts Carlson and Laura Ingraham, fretted about the “incalculable” damage the Arizona projection did to the Fox News brand and worried about a competitor emerging: “Serious $$ with serious distribution could be a real problem.”
Hyping false claims about election fraud was a way for Fox to win its audience back. While the Arizona call was “damaging,” Fox News C.E.O. Suzanne Scott wrote in a text to Fox executive Lachlan Murdoch, Rupert Murdoch’s son, “We will highlight our stars and plant flags letting the viewers know we hear them and respect them.”
When Fox News reporter Jacqui Heinrich fact-checked Trump’s wild claims about Dominion on Twitter, Carlson was enraged and tried to get her fired. “It needs to stop immediately, like tonight,” he texted Hannity. “It’s measurably hurting the company. The stock price is down. Not a joke.” (Heinrich kept her job but deleted the tweet.)
The network knew, of course, that Trump’s lawyer Sidney Powell, a chief promoter of Dominion conspiracy theories, was a delusional fantasist. The legal brief reveals that some of her claims about Dominion were based on an email Powell had received from someone who claimed to be capable of “time travel in a semiconscious state.” On Nov. 18, 2020, Carlson told Ingraham: “Sidney Powell is lying by the way. Caught her. It’s insane.” Ingraham wrote back that Powell was a “complete nut.”
But according to the Dominion brief, an analysis by Ron Mitchell, the senior vice president for prime-time programming and analytics, found that “Fox viewers were switching the channel specifically to watch Sidney Powell as a guest” on Newsmax. A few days after this analysis, Powell was a guest on Hannity’s show.
At one point, Carlson did express skepticism of Powell on-air, noting on Nov. 19 that she had never produced evidence for her claims. “Maybe Sidney Powell will come forward soon with details on exactly how this happened, and precisely who did it,” he said, adding, “We are certainly hopeful that she will.”
Even this gentle note of doubt produced viewer pushback, though most of a message about it from Fox executive Raj Shah is redacted. Afterward, Carlson seems to have given up trying to steer his audience away from total credulity about Trump’s stolen election claims, even though he privately called Trump a “demonic force.”
On Jan. 26, Carlson hosted MyPillow founder Mike Lindell on his show and let him sound off about Dominion without resistance. In fairness, Carlson may have had a motive for indulging Lindell besides grubbing for ratings. As Media Matters for America pointed out, MyPillow at the time was Carlson’s single biggest advertiser.
“Respecting this audience whether we agree or not is critical,” Hannity texted on Nov. 24. It’s a version of respect indistinguishable from contempt.
Can We Put Fox News on Trial With Trump?
Even if we can’t impeach media companies, we can do more to hold them accountable for sowing sedition.
Opinion Columnist
[Excerpts:]
As America debates whether to hold former President Donald Trump accountable for inciting insurrection, what about his co-conspirator Fox News?
Fox helped sell Trump’s lie about a stolen election, propelling true believers like Ashli Babbitt — a fan of Fox personalities like Tucker Carlson — to storm the Capitol. Babbitt died in the attack, while this week Fox Corporation merrily reported a 17 percent jump in quarterly earnings.
Fox News and Fox Business didn’t make an honest mistake about election outcomes but deliberately spun nonsense into ratings gold.
“During 2020, Fox News’s caldron of lies and extremism boiled over,” Carusone said. “They made us sicker and put up obstacles to the pandemic response by flooding the airwaves with over 13,150 instances of Covid misinformation. They fomented racial animus and promoted white supremacy as a response to the Black Lives Matter demonstrations. And, in the first two weeks after the election was called for Joe Biden, Fox News laid the groundwork for the attack on the Capitol by challenging the results on 774 individual instances with wild conspiracies and flat-out fabrications.”
In other words, the problem with Fox isn’t that it’s conservative but that it monetizes conspiracy theories and disinformation in ways that are sometimes lethal. Researchers have found, for example, that places where Fox News is randomly assigned a lower channel number (and thus gets more viewers) had riskier behavior during the pandemic, and that media markets where Hannity is particularly popular had higher Covid-19 death rates early in the pandemic.
We would agree that advertisers should not support their programs and that cable channels should not force Americans to subsidize them. In other words, we accept that there must be red lines even if we don’t always agree where to draw them — and I believe that Fox crossed those lines in 2020.
I hope Fox returns from the Land of Make Believe to its conservative roots, for America would benefit from a reliable right-wing TV news source. As Tucker Carlson said at CPAC in 2009: “The New York Times is a liberal paper, … but it’s also a paper that actually cares about accuracy. … Conservatives need to mimic that in their own news organizations.”
He was right … then.
The Constitution Has a 155-Year-Old Answer to the Debt Ceiling [& More!]
Mr. Foner is the author of “The Second Founding: How the Civil War and Reconstruction Remade the Constitution.”
The 14th Amendment, added to the Constitution in the wake of the Civil War, has been back in the news of late, mostly because the Supreme Court has taken aim at past decisions, notably Roe v. Wade, that employed it to protect Americans’ liberties. The amendment remains the most significant addition to the Constitution since the adoption of the Bill of Rights. Its magnificent first section established the principle of birthright citizenship and prohibited the states from denying to any person the equal protection of the laws, laying the foundation for many of the rights Americans prize.
Long-forgotten provisions of the 14th Amendment are suddenly crying out for enforcement. Section Two provides for a reduction in the number of representatives allocated to states that deny the right to vote to any “male citizens.” (Today this penalty would apply to the disenfranchisement of women as well.) Even at the height of the Jim Crow era, when millions of African Americans were prevented from voting, this penalty was never implemented. But with many states seriously limiting voting rights, its time may have come.
Section Three bars from public office anyone who took an oath to support the Constitution and subsequently participated in or encouraged “insurrection.” The events of Jan. 6, 2021, have focused new attention on this stipulation, which could be applied to participants in the uprising who previously held military, political, or judicial positions, including former President Donald Trump.
2023 could be the year that exposes populism for the sham that it is
[Excerpts:]
Why is this happening? Populism thrives as an opposition movement. It denounces the establishment, encourages fears and conspiracy theories about nefarious ruling elites, and promises emotional responses rather than actual programs (build a wall, ban immigration, stop trade). But once in government, the shallowness of its policy proposals is exposed, and its leaders can’t blame others as easily. Meanwhile, if non-populist forces are sensible and actually get things done, they defang some of the populist right.
Look at the United States, where President Biden’s moderate style, serious demeanor and practical policymaking have given him large legislative accomplishments without triggering a massive electoral backlash.
These trends are not permanent. The world’s complicated problems will always allow for someone who proposes answers that are simple, seductive and wrong. But let us hope that 2023 will see populism exposed for the sham that it is.
No resolutions for me, but here’s hoping there’s a reckoning for Trump
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/12/30/reckoning-trump-hope-new-year/
How the House of Trump Was Built
CARLOS LOZADA
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/28/opinion/trump-haberman-baker-glasser-draper.html
[Excerpt:]
One of the great questions of this time has always been whether Trump changed the country or revealed it more clearly. The answer is yes; it is both. He changed America by revealing it. On Jan. 6, Trump was the man who could win the country back for those who yearned for him long before they imagined him. If he can’t do it, someone like him will do. Or someone like him, perhaps, but more so.
I Was Caught in the Capitol Riot, and I Still Feel the Pain of That Day
Ms. Edwards, a Capitol Police officer, was injured in the line of duty on Jan. 6.
Marjorie Taylor Greene, Racists, and a Newsweek Editor Walk Into a Ballroom
There was violent rhetoric and disreputable company at a Young Republicans event in New York City. Sadly, this is the absolute state of the new right.
They aren’t putting their best face forward. After a disappointing 2022 midterm, Republicans have learned zero lessons, as Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene is poised to be the face of the GOP in the New Year—if she isn’t already.
The die was cast last month, when Greene broke with the right and endorsed Kevin McCarthy for Speaker of the House, and said that opposing him is a “bad strategy.” You don’t have to be Rasputin to see that Greene is trying to play kingmaker. If McCarthy becomes the Speaker (which seems more likely than not), she’ll be the one pulling the strings.
Meanwhile, Greene continues to provide an endless stream of controversy and demagoguery that is guaranteed to generate buzz and boost her stature. The most recent example came at the New York Young Republican gala on Saturday night, when she said: “If Steve Bannon and I had organized [the Jan. 6 riot], we would have won. Not to mention, it would’ve been armed.” (The insurrectionists should have been armed? )
It would be wrong to write off MTG’s violent rhetoric as an anomaly. In many ways, she has earned her status as queen bee of a Republican Party that reflects her values. Look no further than the aforementioned Young Republican event Greene addressed this weekend for proof.
According to a report from the Southern Poverty Law Center, the event also included a speech by the group’s president, Gavin Wax, who declared: “We want to cross the Rubicon. We want total war. We must be prepared to do battle in every arena. In the media. In the courtroom. At the ballot box. And in the streets.”
In the streets?
Call me crazy, but it sounds like he’s calling for actual war. The rhetoric isn’t cute or harmless: it is all very literal—especially when put in the context of Greene’s comments about Jan. 6 and armed insurrectionists.
What do people think the end game is going to be? Based on past performance, we shouldn’t dismiss this as mere hyperbole.
The SPLC’s report also highlighted some interesting event attendees, such as Peter Brimelow, Jack Posobiec, and Josh Hammer.
In case you’re not familiar, Brimelow runs the white nationalist site VDARE. Posobiec is best known for pushing the #Pizzagate conspiracy theory. Hammer is the opinion editor of Newsweek, once considered a premier news magazine, and an advocate of “national conservatism” (which raises the question of whether it’s going too far for me to connect the dots between national conservatism and white nationalism).
It’s hard to imagine the opinion editor of Newsweek, in say, 2015, cavorting with such extremists (according to the report, Hammer “shared jokes” with Posobiec and said he wanted to say “hi” to Brimelow). To be sure, spending time with all sorts of unseemly people is a job requirement (if not fringe benefit) for any curious opinion journalist. But in this situation, the line between observer and collaborator seems to have been crossed.
As I write this, I wonder if I am eliciting yawns from readers who have had their outrage receptors burned out since 2016 and may think this is all no big deal.
Let’s face the facts: We have lost the ability to be shocked anymore.
Once upon a time, talk of fighting in the streets was off limits. Once upon a time, a mainstream Republican event that prominently welcomed white nationalists who mingled with members of Congress and journalists would have been met with disbelief—and outrage.
Today, it’s all been normalized. The important thing to realize is that, by definition, this was not a fringe right-wing conclave, it was a mainstream Republican gala that took place in Manhattan—not the Michigan militia trading posts on 4chan. This was also the Young Republicans, once the anodyne home of Alex P. Keaton-esque conservatives (I know because I was a YR).
Along with Greene and the aforementioned names, former White House advisor Steve Bannon was at the gala. “America’s Mayor” Rudy Giuliani was at the gala. Son of the former POTUS, Donald Trump, Jr., was at the gala. We’re not talking about the fringe anymore. We’re talking about prominent names in the world of politics and journalism.
Aside from being dangerous, this also seems politically stupid.
A month after “candidate quality” issues doomed the Republican “red wave,” as candidates like Blake Masters, Kari Lake, and Herschel Walker all underperformed, Republicans seem destined to repeat history, while Democrats are committed to helping them do just that, partly by making sure Greene becomes the new face of the GOP.
By embracing Marjorie Taylor Greene and the cavalcade of weirdos, cranks, racists, and right-wing extremists she cavorts with, Republicans are preparing for another face-plant.
Abandoned: Trump’s election denialism meets 2022 electoral reality
Opinion: Election deniers aren’t the only threats to democracy this year
Editor’s Note: Joshua A. Douglas is a law professor at the University of Kentucky J. David Rosenberg College of Law. He is the author of “Vote for US: How to Take Back Our Elections and Change the Future of Voting.” Find him at www.joshuaadouglas.com and on Twitter @JoshuaADouglas. The views expressed in this commentary are his own. Read more opinion on CNN.
Democracy itself is on the ballot in 2022.
Not only do we have candidates who have questioned the 2020 election or refuse to say they will accept defeat this year, but numerous states and localities also will vote on measures to change how elections are run or who may vote in them. The outcomes of those ballot measures could have a significant impact on the health of American democracy moving forward.
A few states will determine whether to make voting easier. Connecticut will decide whether to amend its state constitution to allow for early voting, a needed improvement given that it is one of the few states without any no-excuse early voting opportunities.
Proposal 2 in Michigan would establish nine days of early voting and would improve the absentee balloting process, such as requiring the state to fund prepaid stamps, provide a ballot tracking system and offer ballot drop boxes. Enshrining these pro-voter policies in the state constitution would immunize them from repeal by the state legislature.
Arizona and Nebraska are on the other side of the ledger, asking voters to approve rules that could make it harder for some people to cast a ballot. Arizona has a proposed voter ID measure, which would require additional identifying information on voter affidavits that accompany mail-in ballots and would eliminate the ability of in-person voters to show two pieces of non-photo identification in lieu of a photo ID. Nebraska voters will similarly decide on a state constitutional amendment that would require a photo ID for voting.
Studies show that strict photo ID requirements can have a disenfranchising effect, especially on minority communities, while they do not improve election integrity given that in-person impersonation rarely occurs. At a time when democracy is under attack, we should focus on ways to improve voter turnout, not make it harder to participate.
There are also ballot initiatives in Ohio and Louisiana to amend the state constitutions to ensure that noncitizens cannot vote in local elections. These measures are likely a response to localities in some places, particularly in California and Maryland, that allow noncitizens to vote.
An appeals court recently put on hold a state trial judge’s decision that the San Francisco law is unconstitutional under the California constitution, meaning that noncitizens can vote in this year’s election.
Similar litigation is underway over New York City’s law; a trial court ruled the law to allow noncitizens to vote unconstitutional, but the case is on appeal. Meanwhile, Oakland, California, residents will vote on whether to allow resident noncitizens who are legally recognized caregivers of a child to vote in local school board elections.
Oakland will also decide whether to adopt a “democracy vouchers” program for public financing of local campaigns, similar to the system for funding campaigns in Seattle. Portland, Maine, has a Clean Election Fund measure on the ballot to create a public financing system for local elections.
Meanwhile, voters in Culver City, California, will decide whether to lower the voting age to 16 for school board and city elections. A handful of cities in California and Maryland have already adopted such a measure. Proponents note that, alongside improved civics education, lowering the voting age encourages young people to engage in democracy while they are in high school and can create lifelong voters. Along the same vein, Hawaii County will determine whether to create a Youth Commission to advise local politicians on youth engagement.
Nevada voters will decide whether to adopt ranked choice voting statewide, similar to how many elections in Alaska and Maine are conducted. The Nevada system would first use a primary to determine the top five candidates, with voters choosing one candidate regardless of party affiliation. Then, in the general election, voters would rank the remaining five in order of preference, though they could also rank fewer candidates if they wish.
If one hopeful receives a majority of first-place votes, then that candidate is the winner. If no one has a majority, however, then the candidate with the fewest first-choice votes is eliminated, and those ballots have their second-choice count instead. The process repeats until there is a candidate with a majority of votes when counting first-place votes along with ballots whose first choice is eliminated and which selected that candidate second (or third, if the voter’s first two candidates were eliminated).
Ranked choice voting leads to more positive campaigns and greater participation as voters recognize that they aren’t wasting a vote given that their preferences may come into play, proponents argue. Nevada voters will now decide whether to follow Maine, Alaska and numerous cities to embrace this pro-democracy measure.
Several localities are also considering ranked choice voting for their elections. Portland, Oregon, will decide whether to adopt “proportional ranked choice voting” for its City Council, which combines ranked choice voting with multimember districts.
The idea is to have voters select multiple City Council members for each district, using ranked choice voting to make their selections. Proponents say that this voting method gives voters even more choices and helps to elect someone that most people have ranked highly. The same idea is before voters in Portland, Maine.
Ranked choice voting is on the ballot in cities in California, Colorado, Illinois and Washington state as well. Seattle voters will choose between ranked choice voting and approval voting, where voters can select as many candidates as they wish, but not rank them, and the person with the most votes wins.
Come election night, most pundits will focus on whether Democrats have held the House of Representatives and Senate, or whether election deniers have won various offices – especially those who run elections and could be in positions to refuse to certify results in 2024.
But we shouldn’t ignore democracy measures on the ballot all over the country. The rules passed this year will affect the administration of the 2024 election and whether we will have a fair democratic process, where people have easy access to the ballot and voters, not restrictive election rules, determine the outcomes.
In Pennsylvania, the Big Lie Is Spreading Its Roots
As election-deniers become more involved in local politics, they are bringing with them the propaganda and conspiracies of national politics.
The 2022 midterms are the most important of my lifetime
The Republicans who pledge to ensure that nothing like the 2020 election ever happens again are serious. Their bloviation about ensuring “election integrity” in the future is a front for a more sinister agenda. The increasingly far-right Heritage Foundation has compiled a database going back to 1982, and in all the local, state and national elections over those 40 years can document only 1,384 “proven instances of voter fraud,” many of them individual acts. This supposed threat is the excuse for disenfranchising millions of Americans, whether by keeping them from the polls or delegitimizing the votes they do manage to cast.
The rhetoric of election denial is pure demagoguery, but with real-world menace. In at least two swing states — Arizona and Nevada — true-believer Republican candidates who deny Joe Biden’s victory over Donald Trump have a good chance of being elected secretary of state, putting them in charge of elections. If they win and the 2024 results are not to their liking, they may simply not accept them.
Trump’s acolytes do have a choice, if not courage or decency. Shame on them for undermining the nation’s faith in the democratic process for personal gain. Vital issues are at stake on Election Day. Abortion rights are gravely threatened after the Supreme Court’s decision overturning Roe v. Wade. Voting rights, especially for minorities, are imperiled. Efforts to fight climate change and make the transition to a clean-energy economy would at least be slowed if Republicans took either the House or the Senate.
But the overarching issue is what President Biden calls the fight for “the soul of this nation.” Do we continue our halting but undeniable progress toward making the Constitution’s guarantees of rights and freedoms apply to all Americans? Or do we reverse course?
I hope you care about the answer. And I hope you vote.
How to confront the rising power of the GOP’s election-denying wing
The Second Amendment Gives No Comfort to Insurrectionists
Mr. Raskin represents Maryland’s Eighth Congressional District in the House of Representatives.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/27/opinion/us-second-amendment.html
This Threat to Democracy Is Hiding in Plain Sight
[Excerpt:]
All those who value democracy have a role to play in strengthening and supporting the electoral system that powers it, whatever their party. This involves, first, taking the threat posed by election deniers seriously and talking to friends and neighbors about it. It means paying attention to local elections — not just national ones — and supporting candidates who reject conspiracy theories and unfounded claims of fraud. It means getting involved in elections as canvassers or poll watchers or precinct officers. (Mr. Bannon has the right idea about civic participation; he just employs toxic lies as motivation.)
And it means voting, in every race on the ballot and in every election. To this end, employers have a role to play as well, by giving workers time off to vote and encouraging them to do so.
The task of safeguarding democracy does not end with one election. Mr. Trump and others looking to pervert the electoral process are full of intensity and are playing a long game. Only an equally strong and committed countervailing force will meet that challenge.
Shocker: Most Republicans oppose plan to avert a 2024 Trump coup
The Georgia voting breach reminds us how dangerous the ‘big lie’ is
[Excerpt:]
The surest solution to the nation’s crisis of trust in our democracy is for the members of the Republican Party still claiming a stolen election to stop — or, more plausibly, for the country’s citizens to keep these reckless myth-makers out of office.
Trump should fill Christians with rage. How come he doesn’t?
“Do the dark pleasures of resentment and anger simply have a stronger emotional appeal than the virtues of compassion and self-sacrifice?”
Biden Calls on Americans to Resist Threats to Democracy
The president condemned Trump-led extremism and cast the midterm elections as a “battle for the soul of the nation.”
PHILADELPHIA — President Biden traveled to Independence Hall on Thursday to warn that America’s democratic values are under assault by forces of extremism loyal to former President Donald J. Trump, using a prime-time address to define the midterm elections as a “battle for the soul of this nation.”
The speech was intended to deliver a dark message about threats to the fabric of the country’s democracy. But aides said Mr. Biden sought to strike a balance just two months before elections that will determine control of Congress, seeking to offer a sense of optimism about the future and urging Americans to fight back against extremism.
“Donald Trump and the MAGA Republicans represent extremism that threatens the very foundations of our Republic,” Mr. Biden said, noting that not all Republicans follow Mr. Trump’s ideology. “But there’s no question that the Republican Party today is dominated, driven and intimidated by Donald Trump and the MAGA Republicans. And that is a threat to this country.”
Citing the “extraordinary experiment of self-government” represented by the American Constitution, Mr. Biden said that “history tells us a blind loyalty to a single leader and a willingness to engage in political violence is fatal to democracy.”
Read MoreThe stakes are high for the president and his political advisers, who believe they must cast the midterms as nothing less than an existential choice for voters between Mr. Biden’s agenda and a return to the extremism of “MAGA Republicans” who have enabled Mr. Trump’s ideology. Mr. Biden plunged into the cultural issues that his party believes could help galvanize Democratic voters, by bringing up reproductive rights and fears that Supreme Court could undo gay marriage.
“MAGA forces are determined to take this country backward,” Mr. Biden said. “Backward to an America where there is no right to choose, no right to privacy, no right to contraception, no right to marry who you love.”
The focus on threats to democracy is a return to an issue that Mr. Biden said drove him to run for the presidency, after watching white supremacists march through Charlottesville, Va., in 2017. Since taking office, he has often said that the United States and its allies are engaged in a long-running struggle between “autocracy and democracy” that will determine the fate of the rules-based order.
Mr. Biden spoke to several hundred spectators seated in front of Independence Hall in Philadelphia, where the country’s political institutions were born and just steps from the Liberty Bell. In his remarks, Mr. Biden made it clear that he believes the political violence and election denial espoused by the former president and his allies have damaged America’s reputation abroad.
The president had sought to avoid casting the conflict as a purely partisan one, according to White House officials familiar with the speech. But he called on Americans to go to the polls in November and reject Republican candidates who have signed on to the former president’s brand of politics.
He said Americans are not powerless to stop extremism and do not have to act like “bystanders in this ongoing attack on democracy” by failing to vote.
“For a long time, we’ve reassured ourselves that American democracy is guaranteed,” Mr. Biden said. “But it is not. We have to defend it. Protect it. Stand up for it. Each and every one of us.”
In particular, Mr. Biden condemned what he sees as an increase in politically violent rhetoric such as the threats against federal agents in the wake of the F.B.I.’s search for classified documents at Mr. Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate. Such threats, he said, threaten to undermine faith in the country’s law enforcement and have no place in normal political discourse.
In Thursday’s speech, Mr. Biden was specific about the threats inside America’s borders, saying that his political rivals have formed a party of extremism, threatening the democratic traditions debated and adopted at Independence Hall almost 250 years ago.
Mr. Biden has been planning the speech since early this summer, according to a Democratic official familiar with the president’s thinking. The official, who asked for anonymity to discuss private conversations with Mr. Biden, said the president has been concerned that the forces that animated the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol are not fading away.
Recently, however, the president has grown more motivated to deliver it because of persistent false claims of election fraud as voters prepare to go to the polls in the midterms, a White House official said.
In several recent speeches, Mr. Biden has replaced his usual calls for unity with sharp condemnations of “MAGA extremists,” saying Republicans have embraced “semi-fascism.”
Republicans have cited the president’s language as evidence that he has fallen short of his promise to bring the country together.
“Biden has pitted neighbors against each other, labeled half of Americans as fascist and tarnished any idea of his promise of ‘unity,’” Emma Vaughn, a spokeswoman for the Republican National Committee, said in a statement.
Karine Jean-Pierre, the White House press secretary, said the president’s aggressive tone has “hit a nerve.”
“We understand that they’re trying to hide, and we understand that ultra-MAGA officeholders want to play games here and dodge accountability for their extreme proposals and actions, but they’re just telling on themselves,” Ms. Jean-Pierre said.
Mr. Biden’s combative message coincides with new polling that suggests his party’s fortunes — and his own popularity — have improved after several legislative accomplishments, a decline in gas prices and strong job growth that has given Democrats hope that they may retain control of Congress.
A poll published by The Wall Street Journal on Thursday found Democrats with a small lead over Republicans when voters were asked which party they preferred in their own districts. Five months ago, Republicans held a larger lead over Democrats in the same survey.
The poll also found some improvement in Mr. Biden’s approval rating, which rose to 45 percent from 42 percent in March. That could mean Mr. Biden is less of a drag on his party’s candidates than some Democratic strategists had feared in the spring.
Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Republican leader, once vowed that “100 percent of my focus” would be on stopping Mr. Biden from making progress on his Democratic agenda. Recently, the Senate’s longtime tactician has found himself on the losing end of the legislative ledger.
Mr. McConnell has failed to block several of Mr. Biden’s high-profile bills, including a $1 trillion infrastructure package, a bill to improve competition with China, and a vast new investment in efforts to fight climate change and negotiate drug prices.
That has been in part because Mr. McConnell needs to protect incumbent Republican senators from a suburban backlash against the kinds of extreme positions in parts of the Republican Party that Mr. Biden has been raising more frequently in recent weeks.
The president and his allies still face a difficult task: retaining control of the House and the Senate at a time of high inflation and deep concerns among the majority of voters about the direction of the country under the leadership of Mr. Biden and Democrats in Congress. In The Journal’s survey, two-thirds of the registered voters who were polled said they believe the country’s economy is not good or poor.
But Mr. Biden’s political advisers believe the warnings about political extremism and Mr. Trump are an important part of motivating Democrats, independents and moderate Republicans to come to the polls.
The trip on Thursday will be Mr. Biden’s second to Pennsylvania this week, and he is expected to make a third on Labor Day. Pennsylvania, a swing state, will hold crucial races for the House and Senate as well as a closely watched governor’s race.
During his first year in office, Mr. Biden promised to bring a sense of normalcy to the White House and largely ignored Mr. Trump. But the former president is once again at the fore, with continuing investigations into the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol and an F.B.I. search last month of his residence in Florida for classified documents.
“I think finally the party and the people are waking up to see we have to hold these folks accountable,” said Quentin James, the president of Collective PAC, an organization dedicated to electing African-American officials.
“You may be paying a little more for your groceries, but the reality of what’s on the other side? It’s much more dire,” he said.
The speech comes at a moment of deep national divisions.
According to an NBC News poll released last month, nearly three-quarters of Americans believe the nation is heading in the wrong direction. The F.B.I. and the Department of Homeland Security have issued several warnings about how false claims regarding election fraud are motivating extremists attacks.
“We are in a crisis in this country. There’s no doubt about it. Not just in terms of the sanctity of the vote or trusting our votes will be counted,” said Allida Black, a historian at the University of Virginia who met privately with Mr. Biden last month to discuss the state of democracy. “We seem to attack rather than embrace responsibility and accountability.”
It is not the first time Mr. Biden has delivered a speech that is not about policies or campaigns but rather the morality of the country. He embarked on a “soul of the nation” bus tour during the presidential campaign and committed to unifying America during his inauguration.
Zolan Kanno-Youngs reported from Philadelphia, and Michael D. Shear from Washington.
Trump’s loony rants should remind the GOP his nomination would be disastrous
Trump’s posting of QAnon messages and implicit threats (in increasingly unintelligible syntax) suggests that he is losing the ability or desire to control his impulsive outbursts. This is the guy whom millions of Republicans want to nominate for president.
Since the redacted affidavit was released last week, the only two defenses from Republicans are no defenses at all. The first, courtesy of Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (S.C.), amounts to extortion: Prosecute Trump and there’ll be blood in the streets.
The second is the laughable inquiry: Is that all? It’s not “all,” because the affidavit was heavily redacted. Moreover, the notion that we are talking “just” about documents ignores that most espionage cases are about documents (or equivalent material). That’s where the secrets are.
Trump defenders ignore at their own risk ample indications in the affidavit and news reports that documents were withheld even after a Trump lawyer represented that all confidential material had been returned, that the documents were in an unlocked storage area and that documents were moved.
Any rational adult should be aware that evidence might show that Trump violated statutes the Justice Department cited in the affidavit (concerning obstruction and concealment/mutilation/removal). If so, aggravating crimes in addition to violation of the Espionage Act may be at issue.
Still, there is little to no sign that Republicans are ready to distance themselves from someone who risks an indictment in state and federal court and resorts regularly to incoherent rants that not even right-wing media dare repeat (lest they scare their viewers and listeners). Instead, they mutely march along, taking his advice on nominees and reiterating their support for another presidential run.
Their refusal to confront Trump’s current mental and legal status takes procrastination to a whole new level. Are they hoping that he’ll be indicted well in advance of 2024? Well, if past is prologue, then we shouldn’t discount the possibility that they would still nominate him. (Martyr! Deep state!). Hoping that another candidate comes along to point out that Trump is unelectable is peculiar given their own insistence, amplified by the right-wing media, that he’s the only one to lead the party.
If they are counting on the good sense of GOP primary voters to dump him, they might take a look at the MAGA loonies voters picked in primaries ahead of the midterms (e.g., Jan. 6 attendee and Pennsylvania gubernatorial candidate Doug Mastriano; MAGA provocateur and election-denier Kari Lake in Arizona).
Just how they expect to rid themselves of someone like Trump is unclear. They have delegitimized law enforcement, the media and the few sane Republicans (e.g., Rep. Liz Cheney). So, figuring out who exactly is supposed to now convince the base that Trump is, after all this, too toxic and deranged to be the nominee may be a challenge.
This dilemma is entirely of the GOP’s own making. Years of sycophancy or silence, years of building a right-wing media cocoon and years of selective listening may prevent the party from engaging in rudimentary self-preservation. Maybe party leaders simply intend for him to run, lose, take the party down and set off a more violent version of Jan. 6 — because that’s the direction we’re heading in.
[Boldface added]
Bill Barr Made the Decision to Clear Trump, and That Should Still Frighten Us
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/30/opinion/trump-barr-justice-department
Mr. Katyal is a professor at Georgetown University Law Center, was an acting solicitor general in the Obama administration and is a co-author of “Impeach: The Case Against Donald Trump.”
The Trump-era memo released last week by the Justice Department closing the book on the report of the special counsel Robert Mueller and his inquiry into Russian interference in the 2016 election is a frightening document. Critics have rightly focused on its substance, slipshod legal analysis and omission of damning facts.
But the process by which that memo, sent in March 2019, came to be is just as worrisome. Delivered to the attorney general at the time, Bill Barr, the memo was written by two political appointees in the Justice Department.
Mr. Barr used the memo to go around the special counsel regulations and to clear President Donald Trump of obstruction of justice. If left to fester, this decision will have pernicious consequences for investigations of future high-level wrongdoing.
Read MoreIt raises particular concerns because, as a young Justice Department staff member, I drafted the special counsel regulations in 1999 to prevent the exact problem of having partisan political appointees undermine an investigation. The regulations were put in place to ensure that the counsel would make any determination to charge or not and to force the attorney general to overrule those determinations specifically and before Congress.
The 2019 memo tendentiously argued that Mr. Trump committed no crimes — leaving the final decision on the matter to Republican-aligned appointees instead of to the independent special counsel.
The challenge in devising the regulations was to develop a framework for the prosecution of high-level executive branch officials — which is harder than it sounds, because the Constitution requires the executive branch to control prosecutions. So we are left with one of the oldest philosophical problems: Who will guard the guardians?
The solution we landed on was to have a special counsel take over the investigative and prosecutorial functions. That counsel was vested with day-to-day independence in an investigation, but the attorney general would still be able to overrule the special counsel — but, crucially, if the attorney general overruled, to report to Congress, to ensure accountability.
The regulations were written with an untrustworthy president in mind, more so than the problem that Mr. Barr presented, which is an untrustworthy attorney general. Unlike presidents, attorneys general were confirmed by the Senate, with a 60-vote threshold (though it is now a simple majority) — so we assumed they would be reasonably nonpartisan. And we also knew there was no way around the attorney general being the ultimate decider, because the Constitution requires the executive branch to control prosecutions.
We created the role of special counsel to fill a void — to concentrate in one person responsibility and ultimate blame so that investigations would not be covered up from the get-go and to give that person independence from political pressure.
>It is outrageous that Mr. Barr acted so brazenly in the face of this framework. The point of requiring a special counsel was to provide for an independent determination of any potential criminal wrongdoing by Mr. Trump. But the political appointees in his Justice Department took what was the most important part of that inquiry — the decision of whether he committed crimes — and grabbed it for themselves. This was a fundamental betrayal of the special counsel guidelines not for some principle but because it protected their boss, Mr. Trump. It is the precise problem that the regulations were designed to avoid and why the regulations give the counsel “the full power and independent authority to exercise all investigative and prosecutorial functions of any United States attorney.”
Mr. Mueller demurred in making that determination because of a longstanding policy against indicting sitting presidents, reasoning that if he could not formally indict, he then could not say whether Mr. Trump committed crimes. Reasonable minds can disagree with Mr. Mueller’s determination, but the key here is that Mr. Barr thought such a determination could be made.
But instead of doing what the regulations contemplated — namely, tell Mr. Mueller he disagreed and ask him to make that bottom-line determination — Mr. Barr left that intricate determination to two political appointees. He did this in the teeth of a set of regulations that required him to report to Congress if he disagreed with the counsel. Mr. Barr never made such a report and instead, until last week, the memo remained unavailable to the public; a Federal District Court judge recently called the Justice Department’s explanations to keep it secret “disingenuous,” as well as “misleading and incomplete.”
This is a key concern, because America desperately needs an effective system to investigate high-level executive branch wrongdoing. Whether it is a second Trump administration incident or a Biden administration scandal, somewhere, sometime, the executive branch is going to need to investigate itself.
Some people have suggested that we might revisit something like the Independent Counsel Act of 1978, which was structured to mix functions between an outsider and an inside attorney general. But in its actual execution — like the Starr investigation during the Bill Clinton years — it was even worse than the special counsel regulations. By fragmenting decision making, that act allowed the attorney general to blame Congress, for Congress to blame the attorney general, and for the independent counsel to blame both of them, for any controversial prosecutorial steps.
Some people have pointed out that, as Mr. Mueller clearly believed, current policy does not permit the indictment of a sitting president. But that is a flaw not of the special counsel regulations but rather of Department of Justice rules that go back to (not surprisingly) the Nixon administration. I think that those rules go too far and that indicting sitting presidents is permissible, even if they may not be tried until they leave office. Still, in a world where sitting presidents cannot be indicted (or tried) until they leave office, there is a need for a functioning apparatus to allow for the investigation and bottom-line criminality determinations to be made, both to tee up a possible criminal trial and for possible impeachment proceedings.
Just as one has to fear a rogue attorney general, we must fear a rogue special counsel. That is why the regulations required the special counsel to notify the attorney general of “significant events” and to permit the attorney general to overrule the special counsel. There is no purgatory option, in which the special counsel punts on a determination and lets the attorney general make the call; the point is to provide for an independent recommendation to the attorney general and for the call to be made against that backdrop.
What Mr. Barr did must be strongly and swiftly repudiated by Republicans and Democrats alike, because otherwise it will enable attorneys general to sidestep prosecution of not just the president who appointed them but also all those who serve that president.
The regulations can be improved: They should call for earlier congressional notification of significant developments. Instead of requiring attorneys general to report an overrule at the end of an investigation to Congress, a report to Congress (or perhaps a Gang of Eight) could be required very shortly after any important decision. That change would encourage attorneys general to avoid pernicious activity.
It’s no surprise that the Justice Department tried to keep this memo from the light of day. Years later, it packs none of the punch it would have had if it had been released at the time. Yet perhaps that distance provides us with an opportunity to think through the rules and procedures to get it right the next time.
Neal K. Katyal is a professor at Georgetown University Law Center and was an acting solicitor general in the Obama administration and wrote, with Sam Koppelman, “Impeach: The Case Against Donald Trump.”
The reckless rage of the lawless
Prominent Republicans reacted with predictable fury and heated threats of retaliation against the attorney general — unprecedented acts of vitriol based on the belief that the FBI’s conduct was politically motivated rather than legally necessary.
In doing so, they recklessly and knowingly undermined respect for a “law and order” institution and the men and women who risk their lives to protect us.
We are confident that Attorney General Merrick Garland and FBI Director Christopher A. Wray, both honest and honorable men, gave careful consideration before authorizing a search of Trump’s residence, knowing the historical significance and potential for political backlash.
Read MoreThe controversy, while significant in its legal implications, should not be allowed to overshadow the far larger issues surrounding the conduct of the former president.
The House Select Committee investigating Jan. 6, 2021, has produced compelling evidence that Trump and his supporters engaged in an orchestrated six-step plan to prevent the peaceful transfer of power, culminating with the assault on our Capitol.
We share disgust and deep disappointment that the Republican Party’s decency and respect for the rule of law has been defined down to a cultish devotion to a demonstrably unprincipled man of greed and blind ambition.
Sadly, the task of rescuing the banner of conservatism has been left to Republican Reps. Liz Cheney (Wyo.), Adam Kinzinger (Ill.), Peter Meijer (Mich.) and others who have been willing to fulfill their Pledge of Allegiance to our flag and Constitution. They have been noble exceptions to those who clutch their titles and sacrifice their honor; these heroes will likely be replaced with sycophants rather than serious legislators.
While the House committee’s focus is necessarily directed to recommending legislative measures to help preserve our democratic republic, we should not ignore what is at stake for America’s role in international affairs.
In November 2021, nearly 100 former national security officials, both civilians and military officers of both parties signed a letter decrying the threats that the Trump presidency created for the United States internationally. “The insurrection on January 6th,” the letter stated, “has left other countries to wonder if the American Experiment is failing and if American democracy is the best path forward.”
Our allies are rightly worried about the possibility of a resurgence of Trump and his hyper-nationalist methods of governance. Foreign adversaries who believe that we are in a state of moral and social decline see the deepening racial, ethnic and cultural divisions in our society as target-rich opportunities for exploitation in an age of cyber and social media propaganda. They recognize Abraham Lincoln’s insight that “a house divided against itself cannot stand” and are working to turn those sage words into our reality.
In her book, “How Civil Wars Start: And How to Stop Them,” political scientist Barbara F. Walter raises valid concerns about the United States slipping into a place where civil war is possible. She writes about a netherworld of anocracy — between democracy and autocracy — a breeding ground for political violence, where the grievances and resentments of a large White underclass have greatly increased the potential for civil war.
These predictions once sounded like the fever dreams of far-right lunatics who would welcome such a bloody conflict; today, such predictions are coming from responsible voices such as Walter and others who have carefully studied this phenomenon around the world.
Not long ago, we thought that with the collapse of the Soviet empire, the march of freedom and democracy was in unstoppable ascendancy. Today, the tide is moving in the opposite direction. Autocracies are surfacing even among members of NATO, such as Hungary and Turkey. Similar anti-democratic forces are gaining strength in France and Italy. Without America’s sustainable pro-democratic leadership, this trend is bound to accelerate.
Garland’s actions upholding the principle that no one is above the law reaches well beyond our borders. Surely, he is not eager to be the first person to initiate criminal proceedings against a former president. To do so will establish a woeful, even if justified precedent, and possibly will set off a level of civil strife we have not witnessed in more than 150 years.
But our nation’s senior law enforcer, a man who has an impeccable record of fairness and impartiality as a distinguished jurist, cannot tailor his judgment to accommodate the rage of the lawless.
There Is No Happy Ending to America’s Trump Problem
Mr. Linker, a former columnist at The Week, writes the newsletter “Eyes on the Right.”
[Excerpts: Read the entire opinion]
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/21/opinion/trump-fbi-republicans
Down one path is the prosecution of the former president.
That would set an incredibly dangerous precedent.
If the matter culminates in an indictment and trial of Mr. Trump, the Republican argument would be more of what we heard day in and day out through his administration. The spectacle would be corrosive, in effect convincing most Republican voters that appeals to the rule of law are invariably a sham.
But the nightmare wouldn’t stop there. What if Mr. Trump declares another run for the presidency just as he’s indicted and treats the trial as a circus illustrating the power of the Washington swamp and the need to put Republicans back in charge to drain it? It would be a risible claim, but potentially a politically effective one.
And he might well continue this campaign even if convicted, possibly running for president from a jail cell. It would be Mr. Trump versus the System. He would be reviving an old American archetype: the folk-hero outlaw who takes on and seeks to take down the powerful in the name of the people.
We wouldn’t even avoid potentially calamitous consequences if Mr. Trump somehow ended up barred from running or his party opted for another candidate to be its nominee in 2024 — say, Ron DeSantis, the governor of Florida. How long do you think it would take for a freshly inaugurated President DeSantis to pardon a convicted and jailed Donald Trump? Hours? Minutes? And that move would probably be combined with a promise to investigate and indict Joe Biden for the various “crimes” he allegedly committed in office.
As we’ve seen over and over again since Mr. Trump won the presidency, our system of governance presumes a certain base level of public spiritedness — at the level of the presidency, in Congress and in the electorate at large.
When that is lacking — when an aspersive figure is elected, when he maintains strong popular support within his party and when that party remains electorally viable — high-minded efforts to act as antibodies defending the body politic from the spread of infection can end up doing enduring harm to the patient.
That’s why it’s imperative we set aside the Plan A of prosecuting Mr. Trump. In its place, we should embrace a Plan B that defers the dream of a post-presidential perp walk in favor of allowing the political process to run its course. If Mr. Trump is the G.O.P. nominee again in 2024, Democrats will have no choice but to defeat him yet again, hopefully by an even larger margin than they did last time.
Mr. Trump himself and his most devoted supporters will be no more likely to accept that outcome than they were after the 2020 election. The bigger the margin of his loss, the harder it will be for Mr. Trump to avoid looking like a loser, which is the outcome he dreads more than anything — and one that would be most likely to loosen his grip on his party.
There is an obvious risk: If Mr. Trump runs again, he might win. But that’s a risk we can’t avoid — which is why we may well have found ourselves in a situation with no unambivalently good options.
Beto O’Rourke’s book spotlights Texans’ struggles for voting rights
O’Rourke has listed both “The Odyssey” and Joseph Campbell’s “The Hero’s Journey” as his favorite books. (He named his first son Ulysses.) This Ur-story of a long and winding journey infuses the book. Of course, in his picaresque travelogue of Texan political activism, O’Rourke is also telling his own story — as a careful listener and tireless avatar of all those who have fought against injustice, past and present.
But of all the injustices, the contemporary assault on the right to vote stands front and center. Like many Republican-controlled state legislatures, Texas passed laws in 2021 that curtailed access to voting methods favored by Democratic-aligned constituencies (especially voters of color) under the guise of “election integrity.” Since 2013 (following the Shelby County v. Holder decision, which substantially weakened the Voting Rights Act), Texas has closed 750 polling stations.
The Absurd Argument Against Making Trump Obey the Law
MICHELLE GOLDBERG
What has strengthened Trump has not been prosecution but impunity, an impunity that some of those who stormed the Capitol thought, erroneously, applied to them as well. Trump’s mystique is built on his defiance of rules that bind everyone else. He is reportedly motivated to run for president again in part because the office will protect him from prosecution. If we don’t want the presidency to license crime sprees, we should allow presidents to be indicted, not accept some dubious norm that ex-presidents shouldn’t be.
The question is how much deference the rest of us should give to this belief. No doubt, Trump’s most inflamed fans might act out in horrifying ways; many are heavily armed and speak lustily about civil war. To let this dictate the workings of justice is to accept an insurrectionists’ veto. The far right is constantly threatening violence if it doesn’t get its way. Does anyone truly believe that giving in to its blackmail will make it less aggressive?
I’m a Conservative, and I Don’t Know What the GOP Stands For
Free markets? Nope. Limited government. Uh-uh. Strong foreign policy? No, America first. Rule of law? LOL.
The mini-Trumps are as big a threat to democracy as Trump is
Most third parties have failed. Here’s why ours won’t.
The United States badly needs a new political party — one that reflects the moderate, common-sense majority. Today’s outdated parties have failed by catering to the fringes. As a result, most Americans feel they aren’t represented.
For the first time in modern history, roughly half of Americans consider themselves “independents,” and two-thirds say a new party is needed (and would vote for it). Surprisingly, a majority of Democrats and Republicans say they want another option, too.
As leaders and former elected officials, we’re tired of just talking about a third way. So this month, we’re merging our three national organizations — which represent the left, right, and center of the political spectrum — to build the launchpad for a new political party called Forward.
The two major parties have hollowed out the sensible center of our political system — even though that’s where most voters want to see them move. A new party must stake out the space in between. On every issue facing this nation — from the controversial to the mundane — we can find a reasonable approach most Americans agree on.
To succeed, a new party must break down the barriers that stand between voters and more political choices. Accordingly, we will passionately advocate electoral changes such as ranked-choice voting and open primaries; for the end of gerrymandering; and for the nationwide protection of voting rights and a push to make voting remarkably easy for anyone and incredibly secure for everyone.
Without such systemic changes, Americans will be left with a closed system and fewer options on the ballot. These reforms go hand in hand with a new party.
Some call third parties “spoilers,” but the system is already spoiled. There are more than 500,000 elected positions in the United States, but a recent study found more than 70 percent of races on ballots in 2020 were unopposed or uncontested. A tiny sliver of U.S. congressional seats will have close races this November. The two major parties have shut out competition, and America is suffering as a result.
That’s why we’re proposing the first “open” party. Americans of all stripes — Democrats, Republicans and independents — are invited to be a part of the process, without abandoning their existing political affiliations, by joining us to discuss building an optimistic and inclusive home for the politically homeless majority.
Our merged organizations are just the starting point, the launchpad for this movement. We are planning liftoff at a national convention next summer and will soon seek state-by-state ballot access to run candidates in 2024 and beyond. We are actively recruiting former U.S. representatives, governors, entrepreneurs, top political operatives and community leaders to make it happen.
America’s founders warned about the dangers of a two-party system. Today, we’re living with the dire consequences. Giving Americans more choices is important not just for restoring civility. Our lives, our livelihoods and our way of life depend on it.
Here’s a test to see whether Supreme Court justices are above the law
Now, the group is making its most ambitious move yet: It is filing a specific demand with the Supreme Court to kick Eastman, the chief architect of the coup plot, out of the elite Supreme Court Bar (lawyers eligible to argue in the highest court). And it has requested that Justice Clarence Thomas recuse himself from the disciplinary proceeding because of the role that Thomas’s wife, Ginni Thomas, played in the 2020 scheme.
Former Trump chief of staff: Republicans should pay attention to Jan. 6 hearings
BY MICK MULVANEY
Mick Mulvaney was former President Donald Trump’s Acting Chief of Staff in the final days of his term. Mulvaney resigned Jan. 6, 2021 following the attack on the Capitol. He is currently co-chair of Actum, LLC and lives in Indian Land, S.C.
Read more at: https://www.charlotteobserver.com/opinion/article263174168.html#storylink=cpy
UPDATED JULY 05, 2022
[Excerpt:]
The significance of last week’s Congressional Jan. 6 committee hearings cannot be overstated.
For the first time, evidence was presented that former President Trump knew some of the protesters were armed before encouraging them to go the Capitol, that right-wing extremist rioters communicated directly with the White House, that key Presidential advisers requested pardons, that the chief White House lawyer was concerned about getting “charged with every crime imaginable,” and that someone within Trump world may be trying to tamper with committee witnesses. Serious stuff. But roughly half the country — the Republican half — isn’t watching.
What the Nixon pardon tells us about the perils of letting Trump walk
A Man and a Mob
The Weekly Dish, Andrew Sullivan
https://andrewsullivan.substack.com/p/a-man-and-a-mob?
Of Course Trump Is Responsible for His Lies
[Excerpts:]
The unstated assumption here is that Trump did not sincerely believe the election was stolen. He was told over and over again that it wasn’t and yet persisted in propagating a dangerous lie to the world. And therefore he is responsible.
In the first place, the tangle of loose wires, celebrity gossip, Putin-worship, grade school taunts, and world-class vapidity that forms Trump’s mind is impossible to penetrate. We are, to our sorrow, quite familiar with his indifference to truth. When it comes to a person who has lied about American Muslims celebrating the fall of the Twin Towers; told the country that COVID was like the common cold and was “disappearing;” lied about why he fired James Comey; and lied even about the paths of hurricanes, we are dealing with someone whose lies are a constitutive part of his psychology. And everyone knows this.
Trump had so warped the people around him that there was no expectation of honesty or integrity. Did he know that the election was not stolen or did he sincerely believe that it was? What does it matter? What is sincerity in the mind of a man who lies with every exhale? Asking whether Trump knew the election was free and fair is like asking whether a komodo dragon prefers smooth jazz or hip hop. It’s a category error.
Part of Trump’s project was to obliterate the truth, to “flood the zone with s—” as Steve Bannon explained. Damon Linker summed it up:
There’s a reason the word ‘gaslighting’ entered the working vocabulary of reporters and citizens during the Trump years—because the president made a habit of telling lies that every American could see were lies, and that most people had reason to suspect Trump himself knew were untrue as well. It was a presidential-level display of indifference to the very distinction between truth and falsehood, a demonstration that he resided in and sought to drag the rest of us into a twilit world in which the very difference between fact and fiction ceased to hold up or even make sense.
This emphatically does not let Trump off the hook for his lies. On the contrary. His attempt to blur reality is all the more reason to substitute a different standard—and not just for Trump. In our era of curated news and information silos, we must ask not, “What did he know?” but “What was it that he knew or should have known?” This is the standard in tort law. If you are the owner of a dye factory and an employee sues when he’s blinded by a malfunctioning machine, you can’t escape responsibility by saying that you didn’t know the machinery was faulty. If the negligence is bad enough, it can be criminal.
Criminal negligence is a decent shorthand for the indifference to truth and/or eager embrace of lies that has come to characterize our historical moment. Are the people who get all of their news from Fox or The Federalist responsible for what they believe? They are. Every person in a democratic republic has a duty to ascertain the truth as best they can and that means questioning the pap that they are fed nightly. It means letting the light of skepticism peek under the blanket of certainty every now and then. A Fox viewer is lied to, yes, but he or she can ask: Why did Tucker Carlson do an entire show on the first night of televised hearings, Thursday, June 9, without commercial interruptions? What was he afraid viewers would learn if they switched channels to any other outlet even for a minute?
Yes, viewers are lied to and the liars deserve particular opprobrium, but at some point citizens have to use the sense God gave them. If the Dominion Voting machines were rigged, why did Republican House and Senate candidates do so much better than Trump? If there was a vast conspiracy to flip votes from Trump to Biden, why did Trump perform better with Hispanics in 2020 than he had in 2016? And if the problem was the “rigged” voting machines, why did two hand recounts in Georgia show no discrepancies?
If the riot at the capitol was the work of Antifa and the Deep State, why was Ashli Babbit a martyr? And for that matter, if it was Antifa, why were Republican members asking Trump for pardons in the final days of his presidency? Alternatively, if it was an “normal tourist visit,” why blame it on Antifa?
Finally, why would people like Brad Raffensperger, Chris Krebs, Bill Barr, Brian Kemp, Doug Ducey, and Liz Cheney, who had nothing to gain and a great deal to lose by telling the truth, be doing what they are doing? If any discordant reality can be dismissed with “explanations” like “RINO” or “woke,” we have left the realm of reality altogether.
So yes, Trump is responsible for his lies however fervently he may tell himself and others that he believes in them because what he believes is irrelevant. His mind is a black hole of truth. It’s not what he knows but what he has a responsibility to know. And the same goes for all of us.
The Future Criminal Case Against Donald Trump
Mr. Katyal is a professor at Georgetown University Law Center, was an acting solicitor general in the Obama administration and is a co-author of “Impeach: The Case Against Donald Trump.”
The January 6 committee is doing what the political media failed to do
[Excerpt:]
As the committee reveals its findings, reporters should absolutely consider whether the narrative, or new revelations, strengthen a potential criminal case.
And if and when the case becomes even more overwhelming, reporters should then be asking: What possible reason other than politics isn’t DOJ going ahead with indictments?
The court of public opinion matters, too. In certain cases, the appropriate verdict is public horror, not criminal guilt.
Another obvious success would be if the hearings lead to reforms. “In the end, what you had with Watergate was a real window for democracy reform: A moment to strengthen and improve democracy,” said Jon Steinman, communications director for Protect Democracy.
The Jan. 6 committee has a narrow but priceless opening
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/06/05/jan-6-committee-hearings-high-stakes/
[Excerpt:]
Lies about the 2020 election are an animating force for an entire faction of the GOP and have been mobilized as a pretext for corrupting the electoral system to smooth the way for a more successful assault on majority rule in the next presidential election. Even in the face of all our other challenges, protecting democracy is our nation’s most important task. The Jan. 6 committee has a narrow but priceless opening to sound the call to battle.
Gerrymandering, a legal form of vote stealing, more entrenched now than ever
Senate candidate Oz shows how Trump still threatens democracy
The Good News in Georgia That’s Bad News for Trump
ROSS DOUTHAT
How Elise Stefanik, ‘bright light’ of a generation, chose a dark path
The answer is simple: “Quest for power,” Bridgeland said. “But power without principle is a pretty dark place to go. She wanted to climb the Republican ranks and she has, but … she’s climbed the ladder on the back of lies about the election that are undermining trust in elections, putting people’s lives at risk.”
The Time to Prevent the Next Coup Attempt Is Now
MONA CHAREN
In 1980, because I was an idealistic conservative eager to do my bit for democracy, I volunteered for my local Republican party. Unfortunately, I lived in Manhattan, where Republicans were scarcer on the ground than armadillos. But maybe it wasn’t so unfortunate after all, because I learned a thing or two about the mechanics of elections. The party asked me to be a poll watcher on election day. Along with designees from the other parties (New York had four: Democrats, Republicans, Conservatives, and Liberals), we observed as people came to cast their votes. When polls closed, election officials asked us to gather around as they opened the backs of the machines one by one and tallied the votes. We could all see what was happening, and we all gave our assent that the totals were correct.
It was a glimpse into the ordinary yet extraordinary system we’ve devised over decades and centuries to ensure that elections are performed honestly and securely. Each state has developed its own procedures, but they’re all broadly similar. The results of each polling location are delivered to the precinct and then on to the canvassing board. Election administrators are observed by partisans of both parties. Often, the results are counted more than once. In 2020, more than 90 percent of ballots had paper trails. Perhaps part of the reason our elections were perceived as fair is that so many ordinary Americans, like me, had the experience of seeing the process for themselves.
Our voting systems in America have not always been perfect—the most glaring flaw being the disenfranchisement of many African Americans until the mid-20th century—but we corrected that and over time and in most places, we’ve conducted free and fair elections every two years. We’ve voted during wars and depressions and even in the midst of a civil war. With rare exceptions, we’ve accepted the outcomes as fair. Losers have conceded and phoned the winners to wish them well. Addressing their own crowds, defeated candidates hushed those of their supporters who booed the winner’s name and affirmed their obedience to the voters’ will. Most of us enjoyed the luxury of not even sparing a thought for who was counting the votes. We trusted that the system was reliable. Heck, we went abroad to teach others how to conduct free and fair elections.
Building a voting system that relies on community volunteers, nonpartisan administrators, and ingrained trust is an accomplishment. But what takes generations to build can be destroyed in short order. And what we’ve witnessed since the closing months of 2020, when Donald Trump first began to cast doubt on mail-in ballots, is the deliberate sabotage of trust in our elections. The spasm of violence on January 6th was the most visible evidence of the damage, but the undermining has accelerated.
Across the country, candidates who deny the legitimacy of the 2020 election are seeking office in order to prepare the ground for the next election contest. Pardoned Trump ally Steve Bannon is encouraging MAGAites to run for local posts with authority to count votes. Bannon uses his popular podcast to tout “taking over the Republican party through the precinct committee strategy.. . . It’s about winning elections with the right people—MAGA people. We will have our people in at every level.”
At least 23 candidates who deny the outcome of the 2020 election are running for secretary of state in 19 states. Among those are battleground states that Biden won narrowly: Michigan, Nevada, Georgia, and Arizona. Trump has endorsed candidates in Georgia, Arizona, and Michigan, the only time in history that a former president has bestirred himself over races so far down the ballot. “We’re seeing a dangerous trend of election deniers lining up to fill election administration positions across the country,” Joanna Lydgate, chief executive of the States United Democracy Center, told the Guardian. Lydgate’s group also tallies 53 election deniers seeking governorships in 25 states, and 13 election deniers running for attorney general in 13 states.
Additionally, death threats and intimidation from MAGA extremists have caused one in five election administrators to say they will leave their posts before 2024. The most common explanation is that too many politicians were attacking “a system that they know is fair and honest” and that the job was too stressful. A February survey of 596 local election officials found that they spanned the political spectrum pretty evenly—26 percent identified as Democrats, 30 percent as Republicans, and 44 percent as independents. A majority said they were worried about attempts to interfere with their work in future elections.
While MAGA types are beavering away, attempting to stack election boards and other posts with election-denying zealots, what are other Americans doing? The clock is ticking.
Democrats are likely to have a tough election in November—not that widespread Republican victories will cause election deniers to reconsider their belief that the 2020 race was stolen. But while Democrats are likely to lose seats in the House and Senate, local elections may not be so lopsided, particularly if the craziness of some of these candidates is highlighted. Kristina Karomo, for example, the Trump-endorsed secretary of state candidate in Michigan, claims that she personally witnessed fraudulent vote counting in 2020, that Trump won her state (Biden won it by 154,000 votes), and that left-wing anarchists attacked the Capitol on January 6.
Some Republicans, it should not be forgotten, continue to uphold the integrity of elections. Famed GOP election lawyer Ben Ginsberg, for example, has created a bipartisan group of lawyers who will defend election workers from harassment or fines in states that have criminalized honest mistakes. And a handful of honest Republicans saved the country from a potentially disastrous constitutional crisis in 2020. As Philip Rotner noted, “Substitute Rudy Giuliani—or Sidney Powell or Jim Jordan or any other Trump cultist—for just five people who held state or federal office at the time of the 2020 election and think about what might have happened.”
If past is prologue, Democrats will probably pour money into unwinnable races over the next few months. Remember Amy McGrath? She was supposed to dethrone Mitch McConnell in Kentucky. Democratic donors gave her $88 million. Remember Jamie Harrison? He was going to defeat Lindsey Graham in South Carolina. Donors shoveled $130 million his way. Harrison lost by a 10-point margin. McGrath lost by nearly 20 points. The list goes on. Beto O’Rourke anyone? (Republicans do this too. Just look at the money wasted in Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s district.)
This year, donors are spending millions in an attempt to unseat the execrable Marjorie Taylor Greene. Sigh. Trump won Greene’s district with 75 percent of the vote. This. Won’t. Work.
Democrats, independents, and sane Republicans should focus instead on the critical local contests that will determine who counts the votes in 2024. Those unsexy races for local positions and administrative posts like secretaries of state could make the difference in 2024 between an election and a coup.
GUEST ESSAY
Trump Has Uncorked a ‘Toxic Blend of Extremist Orientations’
Despite these high numbers, Baker argues, the percentage of Christian nationalists is declining as a proportion of the overall population, “along with white Protestantism more generally,” which may increase the likelihood of violent protests.
The decline, Baker wrote,
is helping to fuel the renewed fervor with which we are witnessing efforts to impose Christian nationalism. Because these views are necessarily rooted in perceptions of cultural threat, declining numbers further stoke the persecution complex that motivates Christian nationalism. So Christian nationalism’s numeric decline and cultural resurgence are, ironically, directly connected.
This “cultural resurgence” and the political clout that come with it will do nothing to diminish their ambition to restore an imagined past, by any means necessary.
MICHELLE COTTLE
The Don Jr. Road Show in Ohio Was No Joke
The crowd, a couple of hundred MAGA fans and local Republican players, laps up the wickedness. This is Don Jr.’s last public appearance of the day on behalf of J.D. Vance, whose Senate candidacy was recently endorsed by Trump Sr. As at earlier stops, the audience whoops and laughs and hollers “Amen!” as Trump the Younger slashes at a series of targets: Democrats, the media, RINOs (Senator Mitt Romney is taking a serious beating), Big Tech, America’s “stupid” military leaders and so on.
Don Jr. clearly inherited the family flair for showmanship. (Democrats would do well to keep an eye on his political development. In particular, the ladies here are gaga over him.) He deploys funny voices and goofy faces, his comic timing is spot on, and he has a vicious streak untempered by decency or accuracy. “The other side has literally taken the stance that it’s OK to be a groomer,” he charges, promoting the MAGAworld calumny that Democrats are pro-pedophile. Even on this dark topic he draws laughs by marveling that, in his younger days, “being antipedophile was something that we could all agree on!”
The Republican blueprint to steal the 2024 election
Trump should be charged. Don’t let the House pass the buck.
So now it is up the select committee and the Justice Department, which both seem to be caught in a cycle of hand-wringing. They worry about the “taint” of a referral and agonize over fears that Trump and the GOP will discredit any investigation as a partisan witch hunt.
But here’s a reality check: No matter what they do, no matter how cautiously they act, Trump will react with bad faith and demagoguery.
The Justice Department could hire an avatar of respectability and integrity to handle the prosecution (see: Robert Mueller) — and it wouldn’t matter. Whatever it does, Trump will let loose the dogs of disinformation, deceit and obstruction.
Knowing it can’t control the reaction, maybe the select committee should just do the right thing — and finally, finally end the cycle of timidity, self-deterrence and buck-passing.
How the GOP learned to stop worrying and love ‘stolen election’ claims
This line of argument suffers from the fatal flaw that there’s no allegation that any significant number of ballots cast were themselves illegal, as officials and even critics have acknowledged.
It’s primarily an argument that encouraging more people to vote without hindrance is unfair to Republicans — and, more ominously, something to be treated as dishonest or illegal. The Republican Party and the Trump campaign spent millions of dollars explicitly trying to get people to vote for Trump.
That nonprofits and state governments spent millions trying to get people to vote, though, is cast as proof that the system is rigged.
Opinion: GOP ‘built on fraud, fear and fascism’? If the jackboot fits …
April 8, 2022
Opinion: Is Trump crazy — or calculating? His opponents have to decide.
Leonard Pitts Jr. | Call it a stealth coup
https://www.tribdem.com/news/editorials/columns/leonard-pitts-jr-call-it-a-stealth-coup/
What if the coup already came and nobody noticed?
It sounds nonsensical, yes.
How does a coup go unnoticed? The conventional wisdom, as we learn more about the election of 2020 and the insurrection of 2021, is that by the machinations of Ginni Thomas, Rudy Giuliani, Donald Trump and others, America came this close to suffering an extralegal seizure of power, but escaped.
However, an argument can be made that another kind of coup – call it a stealth coup – has actually been under way for years.
What is a stealth coup? That would be a coup that sneaks up on you, that isn’t obvious at first, because it slowly destroys not form but function. This one has overthrown not the government but, rather, one of its core tenets: the idea that government is answerable to the will of the governed.
That’s something this one often is not.
Consider the ongoing push by Republican lawmakers to restrict abortion, LGBTQ rights and the teaching of African-American history, while making it harder to access the ballot and easier to access guns. And then consider this: None of that represents the will of the American people.
That’s something you won’t often hear from news media, with our reflexive curtsy at the altar of both-sideism, but it happens to be true.
The Enemies of Liberalism Are Showing Us What It Really Means
EZRA KLEIN
“There is much to learn from in that merger of self-criticism and deep solidarity.”
Opinion: The fool’s gold of Trump’s decertification plan
As Donald Trump flails about trying to “rescind” the 2020 presidential election and castigating Republicans who point out the Constitution doesn’t allow that, here is a heads-up for state legislators considering doing his bidding: You were elected to office by the same voters using the same ballots on the same day.
If somehow Joe Biden’s victory was fraudulent, so was yours.
It is worth asking all secretary of state candidates some questions: Would they have certified the 2020 election? And under what circumstances, with what hard evidence, would they refuse to certify future elections? Do they recognize that invalidating a vote for one office means invalidating the votes for all offices on a ballot? Their answers will be revealing, and Republican officials whose elections may be called into question should pay attention.
These issues spotlight the crucial role of election officials — the people charged in our democracy with calling balls and strikes. When umpires or referees call a game so that the team they favor wins, we recognize that as an “illegal fix.”
When they make claims that betray a basic lack of knowledge of how elections work, we should call them what they are: unqualified for the office.
The Hyperbole and Horror of Ginni Thomas
Frank Bruni
Opinion: Trump’s 7-hour phone gap should spur quicker action for Jan. 6 justice
Democrats are Fighting like Hell for Voting Rights
Republicans didn’t like the way the last election went, so they are trying to make it harder for folks to vote. The stakes couldn’t be higher.
Published Mar. 04, 2022
https://www.thedailybeast.com/democrats-are-fighting-like-hell-for-voting-rights
CHARLES M. BLOW
Open Letter to President Biden From a Dispirited Black Voter
March 2, 2022
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/02/opinion/biden-black-voter.html?referringSource=articleShare
[Excerpts:]In the State of the Union you didn’t once say the words “Black” or “African American,” “white” or “Hispanic.”
In the speech, you used just a few short sentences to call for the passage of the Freedom to Vote Act and the John Lewis Voting Rights Act.
When that voting legislation failed in the Senate in January, you said this in a statement:
“My administration will never stop fighting to ensure that the heart and soul of our democracy — the right to vote — is protected at all costs. We will continue to work with allies to advance necessary legislation to protect the right to vote. And to push for Senate procedural changes that will protect the fundamental right to vote.”
As far as I can tell, Tuesday’s brief comments were the first public statements you have made about passing voting rights legislation since January, and that’s from my search of the White House’s own collection of your comments published on the White House site.
Is that what “never stop fighting” looks like to you? Where did you learn to fight, in a pillow factory?
Symbols cannot be used as shields to deflect criticism of wrongheaded reversals on policies, reversals that could do generational harm to Black people.
MICHELLE COTTLE
CPAC: A Bacchanal of Right-Wing Pageantry, Passion and Grievance
Ms. Cottle is a member of the editorial board.
While U.S. leaders are dealing with war in Europe and disruption of the global order, the leading lights of MAGA America are in central Florida this week for that annual bacchanal of right-wing pageantry and passion known as the Conservative Political Action Conference.
With all the serious challenges the nation has faced of late, now seems like a perfect moment for serious conservative thinkers and activists to come together in pursuit of serious solutions. That, alas, is not what happens at CPAC.
Put on annually by the American Conservative Union, whose name pretty much explains its aim, the confab may once have been about ideology or actual policy. But for years, the gathering has been better known as a multiday fringe fest featuring some of the most outrageous players on the political right.
This time, it promises to be largely a celebration of former President Donald Trump and his angry MAGA vision for the nation — which makes it less distinct from the broader Republican Party than it once was. But such is the debased state of modern conservatism, and — for those who have the stomach for it — this circus can tell you a lot about the state of American politics.
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This year’s lineup provides the same caliber of thought-provoking offerings that the conference’s fans and foes alike have come to expect. Among the scheduled panel discussions are “The Moron in Chief” and the more baroquely titled “Put Him to Bed, Lock Her Up and Send Her to the Border.” The latter session will feature crack analysis by Jack Posobiec, the conspiracymonger known for scampering down the rabbit holes of crank theories such as Pizzagate.
Asinine titles aside, the presentations offer a glimpse into what is obsessing the G.O.P.’s activist base. Among this year’s hot topics is clearly the threat of wokeness, inspiring multiple offerings, including “Awake Not Woke,” “Woke Inc.” and “Fighting Woke Inc.” A legal chat about “defending the canceled” seems to fit the theme as well.
There are several presentations related to schools, including “School Boards for Dummies,” “Domestic Terrorists Unite: Lessons From Virginia Parents” and a town hall on the fittingly misspelled “Pupil Propoganda.”
Mock if you will, but Republicans will wrap these culture war issues around Democrats’ necks in the coming midterms. CPAC is a prime venue for test-driving their material.
Some offerings are more incendiary than others. Take “The Truth About Jan. 6: A Conversation With Julie Kelly,” who wrote the book “January 6: How Democrats Used the Capitol Protest to Launch a War on Terror Against the Political Right.”
Then there’s “Lock Her Up, for Real,” featuring the former representative and enduring Trumper Devin Nunes; Kash Patel, a Nunes aide turned controversial Pentagon staff member; and Lee Smith, the author of a book purporting to show how Mr. Nunes uncovered the secret deep state plot to bring down Mr. Trump. So. Much. Fun.
The conference set list includes some classics as well. “Obamacare Still Kills” should provide a warm dose of nostalgia. Ditto “I Escaped From Communist North Korea.” The enduring menace of Communism is always a crowd-pleaser at CPAC.
The gathering’s educational component should not be pooh-poohed. Attendees tired of all the pandemic hubbub will want to catch the Saturday morning breakout session “Lock Downs and Mandates: Now Do You Understand Why We Have a Second Amendment.” And aspiring public servants surely learned a lot from the session “Are You Ready to Be Called a Racist: The Courage to Run for Office.”
A couple of the presentation titles go so far as to name-check individuals who really rile up conservatives, so it is illuminating to see who rises to that level of distinction. This year’s honorees are the CNN host Don Lemon (“Don Lemon Is a Dinosaur: The New Way to Get Your News”) and Stacey Abrams, the Democratic candidate for governor of Georgia (“Sorry Stacey, You Are Not the Governor”).
The lineup of speakers is as telling as the panels and town halls. Who’s in? Who’s out? Who’s got the loser time slots? This year features appearances by conference old-timers like Wayne LaPierre, the National Rifle Association’s longtime frontman, as well as rising MAGA stars like Donald Trump Jr., who scored the closing speech, and his fiancée, Kimberly Guilfoyle, an infamously high-octane orator. (One word for her: decaf.)
An array of presumed presidential hopefuls/Trump lickspittles are having have their moments as well. Senators Ted Cruz and Josh Hawley and former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo are all on the program. Former Vice President Mike Pence is not, having declined his invitation.
Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida is generating the most buzz, mostly because the chattering class is giddy at the prospect of spotting even a hint of friction between Team DeSantis and Trumpworld. Mr. DeSantis is considered a top — maybe the top — 2024 presidential contender.
Unlike some 2024 hopefuls, he has not pledged to sit the race out if Mr. Trump runs. This has not gone over well in Trumpworld. It is perhaps unsurprising then that the governor was given a not-so-great speaking slot this week: early on the opening afternoon, wedged in between a presentation by Matt Schlapp, the chairman of the American Conservative Union, and a speech by Florida’s lieutenant governor.
Mr. Trump will speak at 7 on Saturday evening, serving as basically the keynote of the gathering.
As the convention unfolds, look for breathless updates on the dynamic between the governor and the former president — especially as the time draws nigh to announce the results of the annual straw poll on who should be the next president.
Last year, Mr. DeSantis was the solid winner when Mr. Trump was not among the options. This year’s results are likely to get more scrutiny than President Biden’s upcoming Supreme Court pick (OK, maybe not quite so much). That said, it’s worth remembering that, in the pre-Trump age, Senator Rand Paul won the poll three years running — 2013, 2014 and 2015 — with a Cruz win in 2016. So it’s best not to get too wrapped up in the predictive power of these things.
Until recently, it was best not to take CPAC in general that seriously as a political barometer. But with the G.O.P. eaten alive by Trumpism, there isn’t much left of the party beyond its raging MAGA base. Which makes this four-day spectacle as representative of Republican politics as any event.
Just one more thing to keep you up worrying at night.
Opinion: Republicans who voted to impeach Trump might be in less peril than people think
By Henry Olsen Columnist
February 18, 2022
The Conservative Case for Avoiding a Repeat of Jan. 6
Feb. 14, 2022
By J. Michael Luttig
Mr. Luttig, a former judge on the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit, has been advising a number of senior Republican senators on the Electoral Count Act.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/14/opinion/electoral-count-act.html?referringSource=articleShare
[Excerpts:]The clear and present danger to our democracy now is that former President Donald Trump and his political allies appear prepared to exploit the Electoral Count Act of 1887, the law governing the counting of votes for president and vice president, to seize the presidency in 2024 if Mr. Trump or his anointed candidate is not elected by the American people.
While the Republicans are transfixed by their own political predicaments, and the Democrats by theirs, the right course is for both parties to set aside their partisan interests and reform the Electoral Count Act, which ought not be a partisan undertaking.
Democrats, for their part, should regard reform of the Electoral Count Act as a victory — essential to shore up our faltering democracy and to prevent another attack like the one at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. These are actually the worthiest of objectives.
Republicans should want to reform the law for these same reasons, and more. Of course, some may never support reform of the Electoral Count Act simply because the former president has voiced his opposition to the efforts to revise it. But there are consequential reasons of constitutional and political principle for the large remainder of Republicans to favor reform in spite of the former president’s opposition.
Republicans are proponents of limited federal government. They oppose aggregation of power in Washington and want it dispersed to the states. It should be anathema to them that Congress has the power to overturn the will of the American people in an election that, by constitutional prescription, is administered by the states, not Washington. If the Democrats are willing to divest themselves of the power to decide the presidency that the 49th Congress wrongly assumed 135 years ago, then it would be the height of political hypocrisy for the Republicans to refuse to divest theirs.
Constitutional conservatives, especially, should want Electoral Count Act reform, because they should be the first to understand that the law is plainly unconstitutional. Nothing in the Constitution empowers Congress to decide the validity of the electoral slates submitted by the states. In fact, the Constitution gives Congress no role whatsoever in choosing the president, save in the circumstance where no presidential candidate receives a majority of the electoral votes cast.
Trump acolytes like Mr. Cruz and Mr. Hawley should appreciate the need to reform this unconstitutional law. They are also politically smart enough to understand that however likely it is that the Republican presidential candidate will lose in 2024, it is just as likely that he or she will win. Attempts to time reform based on handicapping the quadrennial presidential election are futile, and no Republican should want to be an accessory to any successful attempt to overturn the next election — including an effort by Democrats to exploit the law.
Come to think of it, the only members in Congress who might not want to reform this menacing law are those planning its imminent exploitation to overturn the next presidential election.
Marjorie Taylor Greene’s blunder sums it up
By Richard Galant / February 13, 2022
CNN Opinion <cnnopinionfeedback@newsletters.cnn.com>
“I know nothing.” That was the response members of the Order of the Star Spangled Banner were supposed to give when asked about their secret society, which was founded in 1849.
The fiercely anti-immigrant, anti-Catholic group evolved into the American Party, but it will be forever remembered by another name. The “Know Nothings” became a powerful political force, commanding the allegiance of more than 100 members of Congress in the 1850s, as Lorraine Boissoneault wrote in Smithsonian Magazine.
Last week, a Republican member of Congress, Marjorie Taylor Greene, lashed out at Speaker Nancy Pelosi, falsely accusing her of having “gazpacho police spying on members of Congress,” apparently mistaking a cold vegetable soup from Spain for the Gestapo, the Nazi regime’s secret police. The botched reference was widely mocked on social media, and Greene later made fun of herself, tweeting: “No soup for those who illegally spy on Members of Congress, but they will be thrown in the goulash.”
It wasn’t the first time Greene had reached for wildly inappropriate Nazi comparisons. Even if she had gotten the term Gestapo right, there would have been no excuse for comparing the Capitol Police with the murderous agents of Hitler’s Germany.
Greene’s blunder came at a head-spinning moment, when hyperpartisan politics and the long-running pandemic have combined to produce a cavalcade of misinformation, disinformation, ignorance, conspiracy theories and self-defeating protests — as if knowing nothing has become a feature, not a bug of 2022.
Don’t bet on the GOP coming to its senses just yet
Posted February 8, 2022
https://rollcall.com/2022/02/08/dont-bet-on-the-gop-coming-to-its-senses-just-yet/
[Excerpts:]
Yes, I understand that some people are angry with the establishment, believe Democrats are a threat to our economy and culture, and yearn for the 1950s. Some uneducated Americans even like Trump’s vulgarity and name-calling.
But Trump continues to get crucial support from people who are educated — the kind of people who, if they rejected Trump, would weaken him, encourage critics within the GOP, and turn the party back to a reasonable brand of conservatism.
Can those Trump supporters possibly believe that it is possible to insert ultraviolet light inside people to kill COVID-19? Do they really support seizing voting machines? And do they really regard the assault on the Capitol as “legitimate political discourse” after watching video of the attack and its ensuing destruction?
Now, the Republican National Committee has censured GOP Reps. Liz Cheney of Wyoming and Adam Kinzinger of Illinois, arguing that they are cooperating with a Democratic effort to discredit Trump. And former Vice President Mike Pence has said that Trump was “wrong” about his authority (or lack of authority) to stop the election of Joe Biden.
The question is whether these developments will have an impact on some people who have been Trump supporters, turning them against the GOP.
Will a growing percentage of Republican voters come to recognize Trump’s lies and reject his assertion that the election of 2020 was stolen? Will they be shocked and upset that he surrounded himself by so many advisers who said he could simply change the outcome of the 2020 election? And will more Republicans start to recognize Trump’s lies and see him as a bully who is intent on winning, even if that means undermining key democratic institutions?
I remain skeptical.
That may change, of course. But most Republicans who find Trump repugnant have already signaled their opposition to him, and the party apparently lacks a large contingent of people — in the grassroots, in elective office and in the national party’s leadership — for whom character, integrity and the truth are important.
Opinion:Why many immigrants believe the ‘big lie’ — and will again
yMinh-Thu Pham
February 2, 2022
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/02/02/why-many-immigrants-believe-trump-big-lie/
[Excerpts:]
Right-wing propaganda campaigns are already targeting immigrants for next time. Despite evidence that Latino and Asian immigrants are vulnerable to misinformation, too little attention has been paid to them.
This must change. These groups make up the fastest-growing part of the electorate, and they live in the suburbs of swing states. In razor-thin races, which the country is likely to see this year and in 2024, these communities’ votes are decisive.
Advocates should be mobilizing immigrant populations to be champions of democracy. Instead, antidemocratic forces have captured their attention.
It doesn’t have to be this way.
The good news: Immigrants’ commitment to democracy could also help save it.
In 2020, new Americans played a decisive role in preventing Trump — with his admiration of authoritarians such as Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping and Kim Jong Un — from winning a second term. This occurred partly because advocacy groups conducted outreach to first- and second-generation Asian Americans in their native languages in swing states.
Those efforts worked. Postmortems of the 2020 election showed that the 47 percent surge in Asian American and Pacific Islander turnout was influential in several races, including those in Arizona and Georgia. Across the country, almost two-thirds of Asian Americans voted to oust Trump.
But one-third did not. Entrepreneurial, religiously devout, anti-communist immigrants are a swing constituency. That’s why the antidemocracy right has ramped up efforts to persuade them.
Unfortunately, small-d democrats have done very little to stop this.
New Americans can help determine the fate of U.S. democracy. But that means reaching them where they are — via ethnic media, social and messaging apps, community and faith-based centers — and providing counternarratives in their primary languages.
Those on the side of democracy cannot take the United States’ increasing diversity for granted or assume that political outreach at the margins doesn’t matter. It does. We must appeal to immigrants if democracy is to win in 2024.
Democrats, Want to Defend Democracy? Embrace What Is Possible.
Mr. Diamond is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and a senior fellow in global democracy at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies at Stanford.
January 25, 2021
[Excerpt:]So far, the Republican leaders of the Senate and House, Mitch McConnell and Kevin McCarthy, have expressed openness to Electoral Count Act reform. Beyond such a bill, Republican senators such as Mitt Romney have also signaled an openness to considering some reforms on voting rights.
We can’t know what might be possible through bipartisan negotiations, but we do know that the Democrats’ two voting rights bills have not gotten passed this year.
Ann Coulter Is Rooting for a Trump-DeSantis Throw-Down. She’s Not Alone.
Jan. 23, 2022
Ms. Cottle is a member of the editorial board.
Ann Coulter has a gift for pushing just the right buttons to inflict maximum irritation. She has been a top-tier troll since Donald Trump was little more than a failed casino magnate.
Which makes Ms. Coulter’s recent attacks on the former president — her onetime political idol — at once delectable and illuminating. Take her contrarian assessment of Mr. Trump’s chokehold on the Republican Party.
“No one wants Trump,” she asserted in a column last week. “He’s fading faster than Sarah Palin did — and she was second place on a losing presidential ticket.”
Parsing recent polling data, Ms. Coulter made the case that high approval for Mr. Trump among Republicans is less about his enduring appeal than about the G.O.P. having been boiled down to a Trumpian rump. Increasingly, she contended, “the only people calling themselves ‘Republicans’ these days are the Trump die-hards.”
Why Millions Think It Is Trump Who Cannot Tell a Lie
Jan. 19, 2022
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/19/opinion/trump-big-lie.html?referringSource=articleShare
Why is Donald Trump’s big lie so hard to discredit?
This has been a live question for more than a year, but inside it lies another:
Do Republican officials and voters actually believe Trump’s claim that Joe Biden stole the 2020 election by corrupting ballots — the same ballots that put so many Republicans in office — and if they do believe it, what are their motives?
Opinion: Mike Pence worries about the wrong type of voter fraud
Craig M. Miller, Leland, N.C.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/01/19/voter-fraud-mr-pence-should-worry-about/
Opinion: Finally, some moral clarity in the voting rights debate
ByJennifer Rubin, Columnist
January 20, 2021
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/01/20/finally-some-moral-clarity-voting-rights-debate/
[Excerpt:]
Democrats cannot force Republicans to do the right thing. But Democrats did force Republicans and their two Democratic cohorts to reveal the paucity of their arguments and the puniness of their consciences.
Opinion: Tucker Carlson lectures on media weakness. That’s rich.
By Matt Bai Contributing columnist
January 14, 2022
[Excerpt:]More than anyone in prime-time cable, Carlson seems to have conceded that the venue is pure entertainment, fueled by a self-righteousness that is, in most cases, no realer than “WandaVision.”
I wish he’d decided to usehis considerable talent for less cynical ends, but you know, everybody’s got to look in their own mirror at the end of the day.
The point I really want to make, though, has to do with Carlson’s shot about weakness, which is a recurring theme these days.
There’s a narrative in the modern media and political world — not just on the right — that real courage can only be expressed through uncompromising partisanship.
If you’re always standing up for something like “America First” or the Green New Deal, then you’re speaking truth to power. But if you resist a tribal mentality and try to sift through the nuance of the issue, then you must be a quivering toady who just wants to please The Man, whether he’s a greedy CEO or a leftist revolutionary.
The truth, as anyone who actually works in the media and is honest about this will tell you, is that this narrative isentirely upside down.
In reality, the easiest thing to do right now is what Carlson does — to seek out the ardent applause of one side or the other, because the more strident and predictable you are, the more eyeballs you attract and the more appreciation you’ll garner.
This isn’t only on television. In too many opinion forums now, the only objective seems to be validating the preconceptions of the audience.
The more courageous thing, by far, is to tell people what they may not want to hear, to insist on independent thought even as the business model for it grows smaller by the day.
The harder thing is to stand against either onrushing current, pounded on all sides because you won’t just bend to the seductive idea that the answers to the country’s problems are obvious and comforting.
When strength becomes a synonym for extremism, bullies prevail. When moderation becomes a hallmark of cravenness, complex thought disappears.
“If you want to draw a salary from a big media company right now, you do what you’re told, you toe the line,” Carlson said in his monologue last week. “If it comes down to it, you lie.”
He’s right about that. But if Tucker wants to know what that kind of weakness really looks like, he should give that mirror a longer look.
Dems Can’t Afford to Form a Circular Firing Squad on Voting Rights
As the president puts himself behind a measure that is unlikely to pass, the choice is whether to credit him for trying or to accelerate the tragedy he’s trying to avert.
Opinion: Garland’s caution is an asset when it comes to holding Trump accountable
Columnist|
January 9, 2022
Opinion: The Cheneys can’t do it alone. We need Republican all-stars for democracy.
Columnist
January 9, 2022
Opinion: Trump’s PowerPoint coup plotters were crackpots. We may not be so lucky next time.
Opinion: Want to push back against Republican authoritarians? Expose their donors.
Where have you gone, Richard Nixon?
Democracy cannot survive without more Republicans sticking up for it
Posted December 15, 2021
Walter Shapiro has covered the last 11 presidential campaigns. He is also a fellow at the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU and a lecturer in political science at Yale.
https://www.rollcall.com/2021/12/15/where-have-you-gone-richard-nixon/
On Jan. 6, 1961, Nixon, as vice president, presided over the formal counting of the electoral votes that guaranteed his defeat. As he said on the Senate floor, “In our campaigns, no matter how hard they may be, no matter how close the election, those who lose accept the verdict and support those who win.”
The attacks on the 2024 election are already underway
[Click on link to read more]
The Republicans We’re Thankful For
MICHELLE COTTLE
Opinion: Our Foghorn Leghorn Republican senator little resembles his former Democratic self, but in Louisiana we know the type
Opinion: The Grand Old Party of disarray
Nov. 5, 2021
The Powerful G.O.P. Strategy Democrats Must Counter if They Want to Win
Tory Gavito and
Instead of ignoring race while Republicans beat us silly with it, Democrats must confront it and explain that powerful elites and special interests use race as a tool of division to distract hard-working people of all races while they get robbed blind. Then pivot back to shared interests.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/04/opinion/democrats-republicans-virginia-race
Opinion: The scandal involving Ron DeSantis and the silenced professors just got worse
Nov. 4, 2021
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/11/04/desantis-university-of-florida-professors/
CNN Opinion <cnnopinionfeedback@
Date: October 31, 2021
Beloved is banned.Please report infractions.Signed your future Guv.Ahead of Tuesday’s election for governor of Virginia, Republican candidate Glenn Youngkin released an ad starring an activist, “Laura Murphy, who campaigned against the teaching of (Toni) Morrison’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, ‘Beloved,’ on the grounds the story’s grueling depiction of racial violence gave her son — then a high school senior — nightmares,” wrote Peniel E. Joseph.
The Nobel laureate’s “work calls upon all Americans, but especially our young people, to interrogate the past to create a better democratic future,” Joseph observed. “Censoring the American past does not make White students less vulnerable to feelings of despair about the challenges of racial inequity, discrimination and violence we face as a nation.”
Wall Street Journal Defends Publishing Trump Letter Full of ‘Bananas’ Claims
The Wall Street Journal took to its own opinion pages Thursday to defend publishing a letter from Donald Trump full of lies about the 2020 presidential election. Blaming the “progressive parsons of the press” for becoming “aflutter” over the fact-light essay, the Journal’s editorial board wrote, “We trust our readers to make up their own minds about his statement. And we think it’s news when an ex-President who may run in 2024 wrote what he did, even if (or perhaps especially if) his claims are bananas.” In the letter, which ran in full without fact checks, Trump wailed about the familiar bogeyman of the “rigged” 2020 presidential election. He has made such “bananas” claims dozens, if not hundreds, of times before.
Opinions | The GOP’s attack on voting is shameless. The Democratic response is spineless.
A strategy of wishful thinking is no answer to an attack on the foundations of our democracy.
Opinion by Karen Attiah
Trump Tells GOP: Back My Big Lie or I’ll Burn the Party Down
After costing his party the Senate, along with the White House, he’s looking ahead: Nice elections you got there. Be a shame if something happened to them.
Updated Oct. 15, 2021
https://www.thedailybeast.com/trump-tells-gop-back-my-big-lie-or-ill-burn-the-party-down?ref=scroll
Donald Trump is the biggest loose cannon in the world.
If Joe Biden actually ends up spending trillions of dollars to radically transform America, it will be because Trump sabotaged not one, but two U.S. Senate seats in Georgia after refusing to accept his own defeat, giving Democrats a surprise majority in both houses of Congress to go along with the White House.
He could have an even bigger, and more damaging, impact on Republicans going forward. The only thing we know for sure is that he will not be ignored. Indeed, he is already meddling.
Let’s start in Virginia, where two replacement-level stooges are competing to become the state’s next governor. The race features former Gov. Terry McAuliffe, who is working hard to fend off Republican businessman Glenn Youngkin. In recent years, Virginia has become a Democratic state, but polling has this race very close. To prevail, Youngkin must (a) win back lots of “normal” suburban Northern Virginia voters who might once have voted for a Mitt Romney (and may be upset about Biden’s performance and/0r hot-button cultural issues like Critical Race Theory), and (b) avoid angering or alienating Trumpy voters.
For months, Youngkin has tried hard to thread this needle, but on Wednesday night, that was complicated by a rally in support of the state’s GOP ticket that was headlined by Steve Bannon and featured a phone call from Trump himself. Youngkin wisely skipped the event, which began with the pledge of allegiance being delivered to a flag that was present “at the peaceful rally with Donald J. Trump on Jan. 6.”
It was “an opening McAuliffe campaign was waiting for—in a campaign where he’s tried, sometimes in vain, to tie Youngkin to Trump,” observed ABC News’ Political Director Rick Klein. Seizing on the moment, McAuliffe tweeted, “Last night was the darkest moment of Glenn Youngkin’s campaign yet—a Donald Trump rally for Glenn where supporters celebrated the Jan. 6 insurrection. Glenn, for the sake of our democracy: denounce last night’s rally and Donald Trump’s dangerous lies. Enough is enough.”
Again, Youngkin’s only shot is to win back normal suburban voters, while also not alienating Trump’s fans in the Commonwealth. But Trump and his supporters won’t give him the space to do that. He can’t own what happened, but he also can’t disavow it. Trump would never allow that, nor would his supporters.
Read MoreThis is a glimpse of what Republicans running for Congress nationwide can expect next year. Indeed, mainstream Republicans are already being ritualistically forced to affirm Trump’s supposedly stolen re-election (and the nobility of the subsequent insurrection). They are not allowed to just pretend it didn’t happen and move on.
Along those same lines, just hours before the rally in Virginia, Trump released a statement saying, “If we don’t solve the Presidential Election Fraud of 2020 (which we have thoroughly and conclusively documented), Republicans will not be voting in ’22 or ’24. It is the single most important thing for Republicans to do.”
This should be interpreted as a serious threat because it speaks to the very efficacy of voting. Trump is not saying that he will tell his voters to stay home in 2022 to punish Republicans. He is making a much more furtive and veiled threat: He will tell the voters not to waste their time voting, unless, of course, other Republican politicians (a) buy into the bogus premise that the election was stolen from him, and (b) support whatever election “reforms” he says will prevent that from happening again.
This is a devious way of holding Republican politicians hostage to his demands while avoiding being labeled a spoiler.
Nice elections you got there. Be a shame if something happened to them.
The beauty is that Trump doesn’t even have to deliver on his mob-boss threat; he just has to issue it, and Republican politicians will bend to his will. That’s because the threat is believable, first because Trump doesn’t care about the party, and second because Trump has demonstrated that he is careless and erratic. In this regard, he is employing Nixon’s “madman theory”—against his own party.
Every compromise made to appease him or kick the can down the road (in hopes he will fade away) only empowers him more.
Trump isn’t just the biggest X factor in the 2024 presidential race, he may prove the greatest unknown in the 2021 and 2022 elections. He is the elephant in the room—the “known unknown.” His actions are unpredictable and chaotic, making it impossible for Republicans to plan for, much less manage, them.
Elections come and go. Trump is forever. And all he demands iseverything.
The Constitutionalist
October 13, 2021
GUEST ESSAY
We Are Republicans. There’s Only One Way to Save Our Party From Pro-Trump Extremists.
Oct. 11, 2021
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/11/opinion/2022-house-senate-trump.html?referringSource=articleShare
ByMiles Taylorand Christine Todd Whitman
Mr. Taylor served at the Department of Homeland Security from 2017 to 2019, including as chief of staff, and was the anonymous author of a 2018 guest essay for The Times criticizing President Donald Trump’s leadership. Ms. Whitman was the Republican governor of New Jersey from 1994 to 2001.
After Donald Trump’s defeat, there was a measure of hope among Republicans who opposed him that control of the party would be up for grabs, and that conservative pragmatists could take it back. But it’s become obvious that political extremists maintain a viselike grip on the national and state parties and the process for fielding and championing House and Senate candidates in next year’s elections.
Rational Republicans are losing the party civil war. And the only near-term way to battle pro-Trump extremists is for all of us to team up on key races and overarching political goals with our longtime political opponents: the Democrats.
Read MoreThis year we joined more than 150 conservatives — including former governors, senators, congressmen, cabinet secretaries, and party leaders — in calling for the Republican Party to divorce itself from Trumpism or else lose our support, perhaps with us forming a new political party. Rather than return to founding ideals, Republican leaders in the House and in many states have now turned belief in conspiracy theories and lies about stolen elections into a litmus test for membership and running for office.
Starting a new center-right party may prove to be the last resort if Trump-backed candidates continue to win Republican primaries. We and our allies have debated the option of starting a new party for months and will continue to explore its viability in the long run. Unfortunately, history is littered with examples of failed attempts at breaking the two-party system, and in most states today the laws do not lend themselves easily to the creation and success of third parties.
So for now, the best hope for the rational remnants of the Republican Party is for us to form an alliance with Democrats to defend American institutions, defeat far-right candidates, and elect honorable representatives next year — including a strong contingent of moderate Democrats.
It’s a strategy that has worked. Mr. Trump lost re-election in large part because Republicans nationwide defected, with 7 percent who voted for him in 2016 flipping to support Joe Biden, a margin big enough to have made some difference in key swing states.
Even still, we don’t take this position lightly. Many of us have spent years battling the left over government’s role in society, and we will continue to have disagreements on fundamental issues like infrastructure spending, taxes and national security. Similarly, some Democrats will be wary of any pact with the political right.
But we agree on something more foundational — democracy. We cannot tolerate the continued hijacking of a major U.S. political party by those who seek to tear down our Republic’s guardrails or who are willing to put one man’s interests ahead of the country. We cannot tolerate Republican leaders — in 2022 or in the presidential election in 2024 — refusing to accept the results of elections or undermining the certification of those results should they lose.
To that end, concerned conservatives must join forces with Democrats on the most essential near-term imperative: blocking Republican leaders from regaining control of the House of Representatives. Some of us have worked in the past with the House Republican leader, Kevin McCarthy, but as long as he embraces Mr. Trump’s lies, he cannot be trusted to lead the chamber, especially in the run-up to the next presidential election.
And while many of us support and respect the Senate Republican leader, Mitch McConnell, it is far from clear that he can keep Mr. Trump’s allies at bay, which is why the Senate may be safer remaining as a divided body rather than under Republican control.
For these reasons, we will endorse and support bipartisan-oriented moderate Democrats in difficult races, like Representatives Abigail Spanberger of Virginia and Elissa Slotkin of Michigan and Senator Mark Kelly of Arizona, where they will undoubtedly be challenged by Trump-backed candidates. And we will defend a small nucleus of courageous Republicans, such as Liz Cheney, Adam Kinzinger, Peter Meijer and others who are unafraid to speak the truth.
In addition to these leaders, this week we are coming together around a political idea — the Renew America Movement — and will release a slate of nearly two dozen Democratic, independent and Republican candidates we will support in 2022. [/expand]
‘Foul Five’ seeking to replace Sen. Portman will heap shame on Ohio: Brent Larkin
Published: Oct. 10, 2021
CLEVELAND — Ohioans should prepare for the possibility of another enormous blow to what’s left of the state’s reputation. Of the seven candidates with a plausible chance of succeeding outgoing Sen. Rob Portman, at least five would be a giant-sized downgrade.
This is not to excuse Portman’s silent sanctions of former President Donald Trump’s toxic behavior and lies. But as a person and legislator, Portman possesses qualities far superior to the “Foul Five” who have already shredded any sense of respectability in pursuit of a job for which they are uniquely unqualified.
The Foul Five are Josh Mandel, J.D. Vance, Jane Timken, Bernie Moreno and Mike Gibbons. Should any one of them win next year’s Senate election, those of us who regularly criticized Portman will be yearning for his return the day after he leaves office.
Of the seven candidates with a chance of replacing Portman, only longtime Rep. Tim Ryan, the presumptive Democratic nominee, and State Sen. Matt Dolan, the sole candidate representing the Republican Party that exists now in name only, have the potential to serve well.
Read MoreDolan alone among the GOP candidates refuses to surrender his personal dignity and reputation in service of the worst president in history.
But to win the primary, Dolan needs at least 30% of the vote, a tall order given that a CNN poll in September showed that 78% of the nation’s Republicans don’t believe Joe Biden won the presidency. More frightening, 54% believe there is evidence it was stolen – although no such evidence exists.
Attractive as Dolan may be to those who believe honesty is a virtue, it’s wise to remember that voter enthusiasm and turnout in Republican primaries tend to be highest among those whose views are far right of center. The same is true of Democratic primaries and far-left voters.
Members of the Foul Five have apparently concluded that embracing an anti-science, anti-fact agenda is the only path to victory in next spring’s Senate primary. The rallying cry of this sick and twisted appeal is “freedom” – freedom for Ohioans to live their lives as they see fit, even if it jeopardizes the lives of others, including children.
The worst of the Foul Five, for now, is Mandel, the former state treasurer whose long service in elected life is best remembered for a 2017 scheme using $1.84 million in tax dollars to promote himself. So egregious was Mandel’s waste of taxpayer funds that the Republican-run legislature amended state law to prevent some future officeholder from repeating it.
Mandel has no soul, no bottom. He uses social media to vaguely hint at the need for violence and often argues the 2020 election was stolen from Trump. On Sept. 23, Mandel took to Twitter with the preposterous claim there was widespread voter fraud in Ohio last year, offering no evidence, because none exists.
But the GOP’s race to the bottom is a competitive event. J.D. Vance, a Fox News favorite and author of the runaway best-selling book, “Hillbilly Elegy,” is working hard at proving more repugnant than Mandel. During the 2016 campaign, Vance positioned himself as a truth-teller with, “I can’t stomach Trump. I think that he’s noxious and is leading the white working class to a very dark place.”
Now, it’s Vance who wants to lead America to a very dark place, regularly serving the base helpings of bigotry and hatred. He revels in describing immigrants as “dirty” and regularly rails against “elitists,” then jets off to the Hamptons to fill his campaign coffers with their money.
On Sept. 5, Vance reached a point of no return, raging in a tweet that right-wing conspiracy crackpot Alex Jones “is a far more reputable source of information than Rachel Maddow.” Three weeks later, a federal judge in Texas ruled against Jones in a lawsuit brought by families of the children massacred at Sandy Hook Elementary School in 2012. Jones had cruelly claimed the Sandy Hook shooting never happened. He said the whole thing was a hoax.
If this is Vance’s idea of “reputable,” Ohio would be far better off without him. Not long ago a fresh face with a compelling life story, now it’s Vance who has been unmasked as a hoax. His journey from best-selling author to candidate for Ohio’s U.S. Senate seat was best described in a July profile in The Atlantic headlined, “The Moral Collapse of J.D. Vance.”
Timken, who resigned as Ohio Republican Party chair to run for the Senate, and successful Cleveland businessmen Mike Gibbons and Bernie Moreno, are a wee bit less contemptible than Mandel and Vance. But that requires clearing the lowest political bar imaginable.
Of these three, only Timken has a plausible path to victory. But her betrayal of U.S. Rep. Anthony Gonzalez for the Cleveland-area congressman’s vote to impeach Trump following the Jan. 6 insurrection evidenced a mind-numbing lack of character.
At the end of January, Timken told The Plain Dealer and cleveland.com that Gonzalez had a “rational reason” for his impeachment vote, describing him as “a very good person.”
He is. She isn’t. Barely a month later, the conscience-free Timken called on Gonzalez to resign.
His life threatened by the Trump mob for doing the right thing, Gonzalez chose family over politics, deciding not to seek a third term. If only every Trump voter possessed the self-awareness required to acknowledge the role they indirectly played in these attempts to ruin a man’s life for doing what was right.
It’s hard to imagine a worse look for Ohio than The Wall Street Journal’s front-page story of Oct. 7 detailing how Trump has actually “enhanced his influence” among Ohio Republicans since losing the 2020 election. About the 2022 election here, Trump said, “The biggest single issue is the election fraud of 2020.”
Trump’s “election fraud” claims are a nonissue to anyone who believes facts matter. But facts clearly matter not all to the Foul Five, because they all lack the constitution to demand Trump stop spreading these lies. Not one of them seems to care Trump’s obvious goal is to undermine voter confidence in democracy.
A far better option for the Foul Five would be for them to take their talents elsewhere.
I’ve found just the spot.
The village of Rendville is the tiniest town in Ohio. Tucked in the foothills of southeast Ohio, about 25 miles north of Athens, Rendville is home to 28 residents, down from 36 in 2010.
Funds are scarce in Rendville. If a road needs repair, residents do it themselves. For police and fire protection, they rely on the generosity of neighboring communities.
Bryan Bailey has been mayor of Rendville since 2000. “I’ve been at this a long time,” Bailey told me. “I’m pretty sure I won’t run again.”
Opinion:Our republic is gravely sick. A new poll confirms it.
Opinion by Henry Olsen, Columnist
October 1, 2021
[Excerpts:]
Many Americans are increasingly concerned that our national heritage, our democratic republic, is seriously in danger. A new poll from the University of Virginia’s Center for Politics confirms that we have reason to worry — and that the fault is in ourselves, not our political stars.
The most frightening findings show that supermajorities of voters in each camp believe the other side is bent on destroying the country. More than 80 percent of Biden and Trump voters agree that elected officials of the other party “present a clear and present danger to American democracy.” More than 70 percent of both sets of voters believe that some extreme media voices on the other side should be censored “despite the U.S. Constitution’s First Amendment.” More than 75 percent of Biden and Trump voters believe that Americans who strongly support the opposite party also threaten the American way of life. In short, politics has stopped being about how to govern a shared country and is more about a naked, “Lord of the Flies”-style struggle for power.
The cup of conflict will not pass from our lips no matter how much we pray. We will pass through this trial strong and intact only if we imitate Jefferson and are guided more by what we will build than by whom we will destroy. Our edifice must have as its cornerstone the fundamental American truth: “that all men are created equal … endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights.” Only dedication to that principle will enable us to transcend our present division into warring tribes and recover the shared sense of citizenship we so sorely want and need.
Opinion: Don’t be afraid of the election audits — they may be our only ticket out of this mess
Opinion by Benjamin L. Ginsberg
Benjamin L. Ginsberg practiced election law for 38 years. He co-chaired the bipartisan 2013 Presidential Commission on Election Administration and is a distinguished visiting fellow at Stanford’s Hoover Institution.
October 1, 2021
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/10/01/ben-ginsberg-election-audits-upside-big-lie/
Bring on the audits.
Really. As a Republican election lawyer who has participated in more than 30 post-election recounts, contests and audits, I am extremely confident: They won’t find anything. The massive fraud that former president Donald Trump claims tarnished the 2020 election has been and will remain illusory — because it didn’t exist.
But audits, I believe, can be the friend of sanity, helping everyone in the political process, especially the Republicans who understand that convincing their voters that elections are hopelessly rigged is no way to win elections.
Denying reality is not a successful electoral strategy. My argument to Republicans is simple: In the end, Trump’s elections-are-rigged message is going to hurt not only our democracy but also Republicans more than it hurts Democrats.
So to the extent that some of those who have bought into Trump’s delusional claims of a stolen election can be dislodged from this view by the repeated conclusions of the audits he himself has called for, my advice is: Bring it on. Welcome them with open arms. The furies have already been unleashed. And if there’s a better plan to dispel the “big lie” out there, no one’s described it.
The status quo is not sustainable, Trump is corroding American democracy with his unproven charges of fraudulent elections. Almost 30 percent of the electorate — and an astonishing 66 percent of Republicans — say they buy into Trump’s “big lie.” Constant fact-checking and reprobation by mainstream media outlets and good-government groups have not budged that number.
It’s time to call Trump’s bluff. Let’s stop decrying the wasteful idiocy of the Arizona audit (or quote-unquote “audit,” as it became universally known due to its sloppy procedures). That was conducted by Cyber Ninjas loyal to Trump yet unable to come up with anything more than 360 additional votes for Joe Biden and easily refutable charges about illegal voters. Let’s have more: Wisconsin, Pennsylvania — even states Trump won comfortably such as Ohio and Texas (especially puzzling since Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton already spent more than 22,000 staff hours fruitlessly searching for fraud).
The hope here isn’t to convince the entire 30 percent that they’re being bamboozled. As a realistic matter, that isn’t going to happen, but it’s a mistake to see them as a monolithic group.
Read MoreBelief in the myth of the rigged election has persisted for months — for years, actually. But every time Trump has had the opportunity to prove fraud, he’s failed.
Trump failed through his 2017 Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity, which could document no fraud and dissolved in early 2018 without even issuing a report. Through the more than 60 court cases that Trump supporters lost after the election. Through the Michigan Senate committee, led by Trump supporters, that comprehensively rejected Trump’s allegations of election fraud. Through the FBI and Justice Department post-election investigation.
If the audits that Trump himself has demanded keep coming up empty, maybe, just maybe, some true believers in Trump’s falsehood will recognize he’s been feeding them snake oil.
These proceedings run by Trump supporters at least present that opportunity. Reducing that 30 percent number will be good for everyone, Republicans included.
Challenging election outcomes when one party doesn’t like the results is a door Republicans need to realize swings both ways. Having two-thirds of your voters not trusting election results will over time injure Republicans more than Democrats. Why should Republican voters turn out? It’s a lethal path for a party that has already seen depressed turnout in some elections, such as the Georgia Senate runoffs and California governor’s recall.
Moreover, if a state’s elections are so flawed that Democratic victories should be reversed, that will also be fodder for Democrats to challenge the certifications of Republicans who ran on the same ballots.
Something has to change, and the key to that change is to convince some portion of the 30 percent that Trump has failed to deliver on his bombast. Trump is hoisting himself on his petard. Let him.
John Eastman tried to help Donald Trump subvert American democracy. He should be shunned
BY ERWIN CHEMERINSKY SPECIAL TO THE SACRAMENTO BEE
[Erwin Chemerinsky is dean and professor of law at the UC Berkeley School of Law.]
SEPTEMBER 30, 2021
Read more at: https://www.sacbee.com/opinion/op-ed/article254564607.html#storylink=cpy
Law professors across the country must emphatically and unequivocally condemn John Eastman’s role in attempting to overthrow our government. The former dean and professor at Chapman Law School in Orange County, now at the Claremont Institute, wrote a memo in advance of Jan. 6 detailing how former Vice President Mike Pence should throw the election to Donald Trump. Trump urged Pence to follow Eastman’s prescription.
On Jan. 6, Eastman exhorted the crowd at Trump’s rally to believe that the election had been stolen. He claimed fraud had occurred, saying “dead people voted” in the presidential election and voting machines contained a “secret folder” of ballots challenging the “very essence of our republican form of government.” All of that is nonsense, but nonsense that helped inflame the crowd that staged the insurrection.
Simply put, Eastman did everything he could to help stage a coup. He was not just expressing a controversial view; he was trying to nullify an election in a way that never had occurred in the United States. From 2000 until 2018, I did a weekly radio segment with Eastman on the syndicated Hugh Hewitt show. We also had countless in-person debates offering competing views on constitutional issues.
Read MoreI value such exchanges and the chance to model the ability to disagree in a civil way. But no longer will I accept any invitation where Eastman is also speaking. I urge my fellow professors to similarly boycott events where Eastman is provided a forum. I have never said this about anyone before, but never before have we had someone so actively try to overthrow our government. Eastman’s memo, which came to light in a new book by Bob Woodward and Robert Costa, said that Pence, in presiding over Congress on Jan. 6, should refuse to count the electoral votes from states where there were claims of fraud.
To be clear, judges in these states found no credible evidence of fraud. Recently, a Republican-led recount in Arizona found that Biden won by an even larger margin than originally thought. According to Eastman, excluding electoral votes from these states would leave 232 electoral votes for Trump and 222 for Biden. Eastman says Pence should then rule Trump reelected. “(T)here is very solid legal authority, and historical precedent, for the view that the president of the Senate does the counting, including the resolution of disputed electoral votes … and all the members of Congress can do is watch,” Eastman wrote.
There is absolutely no such legal authority or historical precedent. Eastman’s memo says Pence could then say the matter should go to the House of Representatives, where each state delegation would get one vote for president. Twenty-six state delegations in the House had a Republican majority. Thus, he expected they would select Trump. Eastman concludes his memo by saying “Pence should do this without asking for permission — either from a vote of a joint session or from the Court.” According to Woodward and Costa, Trump relied on the Eastman memo to urge Pence to overturn the decision of the Electoral College. Thankfully, Pence rightly concluded he had no such authority.
Had Pence followed the Eastman prescription, American democracy would have ended. Eastman was forced to resign from Chapman University but remains a featured speaker at academic conferences. I believe the California Bar, of which he is a member, should consider disciplinary actions, and I think it essential that other professors condemn Eastman’s actions. This is not an ideological disagreement. I differ with Eastman on virtually every issue but was always glad to debate him. This is about recognizing the grave seriousness of what happened on Jan. 6.
Here’s what Congress can do to keep the next Trump from stealing an election
Mandated audits, clarifying when states may send alternate sets of electors and stiffer penalties for interfering with elections could all make a difference in 2024
ByRichard L. Hasen
Richard L. Hasen is the chancellor’s professor of law and political science at the University of California at Irvine and the author of “Election Meltdown: Dirty Tricks, Distrust, and the Threat to American Democracy.”
September 29, 2021 at 10:33 a.m. EDT
https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2021/09/29/stolen-elections-legislation-prevention/
We know from the Bob Woodward and Robert Costa book “Peril” that the country came closer to a stolen presidential election than was previously reported. President Donald Trump’s lawyer John Eastman advised Vice President Mike Pence that he would be justified in single-handedly accepting some fake alternative slates of electors for states that Joe Biden won — on the grounds of supposed fraud in various states — and simply declare Trump the winner of the election. Pence would have done so on Jan. 6, when he sat in his ceremonial role as president of the Senate. Pence supposedly seriously considered the possibility, only to reject it upon getting sounder legal advice.
These machinations involving Pence came on top of at least 30 direct Trump contacts with election officials, elected officials and others to cajole Republican state legislatures to send in those alternative slates of electors. (None did, but Eastman’s plan pretended that they had.)
We dodged a bullet last time, and things are much worse now. Election officials have been leaving their jobs as they face threats of violence and harassment, and some of the people who will replace them have bought into the “big lie” that the 2020 election was stolen. Those are the people who will be in charge of counting the votes in some places next election. Simply put, we face a serious risk that election results will not reflect the will of the people in 2024 or some other future American presidential election.
Congress has the power to put up barriers to election theft, but the window is quickly closing. That’s because Democrats may soon lose control of one or both Houses of Congress, and Republicans, fearful of Trump or complicit in his plans, cannot be expected to take the lead on deterring election subversion.
Read MoreElection integrity should be a nonpartisan issue, but like everything else it’s been polarized, and reforms seem unlikely to pass the current Senate despite a razor-thin Democratic majority, given Republican intransigence — unless Democrats blow up the filibuster so a simple majority can decide the issue.
So what should Democrats do? Setting aside the filibuster for this one issue ultimately is the right way to go, because election subversion poses the gravest threat imaginable to American democracy. But we should recognize that there are dangers in this route. Voting reform passed with only Democratic support may persuade Republicans that efforts to avoid subverting election results are themselves meant to rig the outcome. So it’s important for Democrats to reach out to Republicans, and for responsible Republicans to join Democrats in this cause, which is sensible and nonpartisan.
Any bill aimed at election subversion should include a few crucial components. One would be the mandated use, in every state, of voting machines that produce paper ballots — ballots that can be examined by a court or other neutral body in the event of a dispute over the integrity of the vote count. (About 12 percent of Americans still voted on fully electronic machines in 2020, according to a Brennan Center analysis.)
Paper balloting requirements ought to be coupled with rules governing the chain of custody of ballots (and of voting machines), to insure they aren’t tampered with; meanwhile, mandatory post-election audits — conducted by independent officials — can help make sure no one inside or outside government messed with the voting technology used to cast or count ballots. (A National Conference of State Legislatures survey found that only a handful of states already incorporate into law requirements for state and local officials to do “risk-limiting” audits — the gold standard — to confirm official accounts, although more states have begun pilot programs.)
The Electoral Count Act, an arcane set of rules dating back to 1887 that governs how Congress counts electoral college votes, is in desperate need of a rewrite. New legislation aimed at preventing stolen elections could incorporate such a revision. Congress could clarify that only extreme circumstances impeding voting — such as a natural disaster — would justify a state legislature’s sending in a competing slate of electors. It should also be harder for members of Congress to raise frivolous objections to a state’s slate of electors; right now it takes only one senator and one House member, from any state, to bring the counting process to a halt for separate debates on the validity of that state’s counts.
We also learned in 2020 about potential choke points within some states in the process of certifying presidential election results. Procedures need to be streamlined so that political hacks charged with ceremonial roles in certifying results don’t insert themselves into the process, as almost happened in Michigan in 2020. (Republicans later replaced the courageous Republican canvassing board member in that state who voted to affirm Biden’s victory.) The rules that worked in the 1880s no longer make sense for our deeply divided modern democracy.
Congress could provide for meaningful federal court oversight when there is reason to believe election officials have tampered with vote counts. At present, federal courts play only a limited role in assuring fair vote counts, and state court processes might not be sufficient everywhere to assure such fairness.
And the new legislation should prevent state takeovers of local election bodies — the replacement of election officials with naked partisans. (Some think Georgia is poised for such a takeover in the Democratic bastion Fulton County, which contains Atlanta: The Georgia State Election Board has approved a majority-Republican panel to “review the performance” of the Fulton County Board of Elections. State oversight of local election bodies should truly be limited to assuring competence — and should not involve messing with the rules for conducting fair elections.)
Congress could also increase the criminal penalties that apply to election tampering, whether done by election officials or others. These activities are already illegal, but the threat of serious jail time should hang over those who would not report a fair vote count. In 2020, election officials like Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger stood up to Trump’s demand that he “find” over 11,000 votes to flip the state’s results from Biden. Someone with less integrity next time might still be deterred by a sufficiently severe criminal penalty.
Republicans have so far blocked all election reform that Democrats have proposed: Witness Senate Republicans’ filibustering a few months ago of the For the People Act, designed to counter a wave of ballot restrictions in Republican-led states. But much of Democrats’ efforts have been focused not on election subversion per se, but with issues related to voting rights or campaign financing. Legislation like the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, which would restore some aspects of the Voting Rights Act struck down by the conservative Supreme Court, raise important and serious issues and deserve to be passed. But considering voting rights issues separately from anti-subversion issues increases the chance for bipartisan compromise on the latter.
Some Republicans might well be enlisted in the cause — including the few Republican House members and Senators who voted either to impeach Trump or to convict him after the insurrection in Washington on Jan 6. The importance of election integrity knows no party, so a bipartisan bill would be the ideal.
But if Republicans won’t act, that shouldn’t stop Democrats from moving ahead on this issue. If protecting elections isn’t worth setting the filibuster aside for — if only temporarily — it’s hard to know what would be.
The survival of U.S. democracy may hinge on this decision by Pa.’s next governor | Will Bunch
Despite that embarrassing Arizona fake “audit,” the Trump war on election integrity is accelerating. Pa.’s gubernatorial race will play a key role for 2024.
by Will Bunch | Columnist
Published Sept. 26, 2021
To millions of Americans, what just happened in Arizona’s largest county was a laughingstock, a bad joke that blew up in the face of Donald Trump and his cultists like some exploding cigar from a 1940s cartoon. A GOP-approved hijacking of voting records and machines from the 2020 election — do not dare call it an “audit” — conducted by a scammy-is-too-good-a-word contractor called the Cyber Ninjas that dragged on through much of 2021 ultimately claimed that any miscounted votes actually expanded President Biden’s win in Maricopa County. The cackling on left-leaning Twitter and MSNBC Friday night could be heard from Key West to Kalamazoo.
But one man — a Michigan carpetbagger turned Arizona politico named Mark Finchem — had a very different interpretation of what the conspiracy-minded voting sleuths had uncovered with official Republican support. “I call for decertification of the Arizona election, arrest of those involved in tampering with election systems, and an audit of Pima County (in northern Arizona) as a next step,” Finchem tweeted Friday.
The crazy part is that Finchem’s minority viewpoints on Donald Trump and his invisible claims of election fraud may matter a heck of a lot more than yours or mine come the 2024 vote counting. Last week, the disgraced 45th president (and would-be 47th) officially endorsed Finchem, now a state lawmaker, in his 2022 GOP primary bid to become Arizona’s next secretary of state. Trump’s imprimatur makes Finchem the instant primary favorite, in a midterm election in which both history and newfangled voter suppression favors Republicans.
That means Finchem — not just a garden-variety Trumpist but a member of the extremist Oath Keepers who was on the Capitol grounds during the Jan. 6 insurrection — could be Arizona’s chief vote counter if and when the bleats of voter fraud and a stolen election again emerge from Mar-a-Lago in three years.
Be very afraid.
Read MoreFor the millions eager to preserve some semblance of democracy in the United States, the autumn of 2021 arrived with a best-of-times respite — the seeming implosion, at least to rational human beings, of the Arizona scam that many dubbed “the fraudit” — in what otherwise feels like a worst-of-times moment for the American Experiment. There have been shocking new revelations about both how close we came to the abyss in 2020-21, and apocalyptic scenarios for 2024 that are coming into sharper focus.
The sense of urgency and angst was nailed this weekend in a truly remarkable Washington Post essay by Robert Kagan — hardly a man of the left, but rather an infuriatingly wrongheaded neocon advocate for 2003′s Iraq War — that pulled no punches in portraying American democracy as possibly on the brink of a total meltdown. Writing that Trump — barring ill health — has already locked down the 2024 GOP nomination and that a scheme to empower Trump-besotted vote counters is well underway. Kagan wrote there’s “a reasonable chance over the next three to four years of incidents of mass violence, a breakdown of federal authority, and the division of the country into warring red and blue enclaves.”
“All right-wing authoritarian movements always do this — it’s how they come to power,” Steve Schmidt, the former Republican who advised John McCain’s 2008 presidential campaign, told MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow on Friday night. “They drive chaos through policies of cynicism [and] nihilism, and then they promise to restore order with easy scapegoats.”
Partially driving the new waves of concern have been a stream of major new revelations about how close the plotting around a Trump-led coup to keep him in office came to succeeding. Specifically, there was the discovery and leaking of the so-called Eastman memo — developed by conservative lawyer and Federalist Society member John Eastman — that spelled out a point-by-point plan for how Vice President Mike Pence could push to not certify valid Electoral College results at the Jan. 6 proceedings and either declare Trump the winner or throw the contest into the House, which would likely elect Trump with its arcane 18th-century rules.
Rioters climb the west wall of the the U.S. Capitol in Washington on Jan. 6. A House committee investigating the insurrection has requested that telecommunications and social media companies preserve the personal communications of hundreds of people who may have somehow been connected to the attack.
New reporting shows that Pence didn’t necessarily reject this ridiculous advice out of hand, but was talked down by Establishment Republicans including the most unlikeliest of heroes (or “heros”), Indiana’s former GOP veep Dan Quayle. We’re also learning a lot more about a supposed-to-be-secret Jan. 5 meeting of key Trump allies at the Willard Hotel, and about communications between pro-coup Trumpists and the then-president. The growing sense is that 2020 was less spontaneous chaos than a trial run for the next time. And what Trump’s neo-fascists learned is that an American election can be stolen — but only if wild-eyed loyalists can position themselves inside the sweet spots of the judiciary, state legislative leadership, and the key vote-counting roles, especially the all-important secretary of state position.
So the Trumpian strategy for 2024 seems to have two prongs. One is to createa continuous four-year cloud of uncertainty — at least for loyalists who only consume news on Fox or Facebook — about Biden’s 2020 victory. In other words, the outcome of these bogus investigations like Arizona’s not-really-an-audit isn’t what matters as much as keeping the plates of baseless accusation spinning. That’s why on Friday night, just moments after the Arizona alleged findings were released, the Republican secretary of state in Texas — which, you’ll recall, Trump actually won in 2020 — announced a new audit of four counties there. This series of “rolling ‘fraudits’” will keep the conversation on your uncle’s Facebook page for the next 26 months.
Equally significant in Texas is the presence of a Republican secretary of state. Key to Biden’s tenuous victory in the Electoral College in 2020, on the other hand, was the presence of pro-democracy officials in these key posts, from Democrats in Arizona and Pennsylvania to a pro-facts Republican in Georgia’s Brad Raffensperger. So the critical goal of Team Trump is to change all of that for 2024.
Supporters of Donald Trump gather outside the Pennsylvania State Capitol on Dec. 14, 2020, in Harrisburg.Michael M. Santiago / MCT
A stunning report last week by the Reuters news service found that 10 of the 15 top Republicans running for secretary of state in five key battleground states — where the post, unlike Pennsylvania, is an elected position — “have either declared that the 2020 election was stolen or called for their state’s results to be invalidated or further investigated.” Several of these candidates have already been Trump-endorsed, including Arizona’s Finchem but also Georgia Congressman Jody Hice, who is running to get rid of Raffensperger and called Jan. 6 “our 1776 moment.”
Pennsylvania — the closest battleground state with the most electoral votes, where the election was called for Biden last November — is a powerful example of exactly what the Trump scheme to unwind American democracy looks like. In Harrisburg, Republican legislative leaders — after weeks of lobbying and browbeating by Trump himself — are plowing ahead with their unpopular plan to yet again review (definitely NOT an audit) the 2020 outcome, which involves handing over my personal data and that of 9 million other voters to an unknown but probably dodgy vendor. Again, the medium — creating chaos — is the message.
The Democratic state attorney general, Josh Shapiro, has seized on this abuse of personal data in filing a lawsuit seeking to stop the GOP probe before it gets off the ground. That’s the right thing to do on Shapiro’s part, but it’s not the most important thing the Montgomery County politico can do to save democracy, in either America or its Keystone State. Shapiro is also the presumed front-runner to become his party’s nominee for governor. If he wins, he will pick the next secretary of state — and thwart a key element of Trump’s scheme.
If the GOP wins Pennsylvania’s open 2022 gubernatorial race to replace term-limited Democratic Gov. Tom Wolf — and the governor’s mansion has flipped parties without fail since the 1960s — then the secretary of state pick will be made by a Republican who will surely have to curry favor with Trump to get through a crowded primary. One of the front-runners is a mirror image of Arizona’s Finchem — State Sen. Doug Mastriano, who organized buses to Capitol Hill on Jan. 6 and was photographed near the insurrection. If Mastriano or one of several other Trump-crazed candidates wins the general election, it’s a lock that Pennsylvania’s 48th governor will name a secretary of state who will work feverishly to restrict voting rights in the run-up to the 2024 presidential election, and — if Trump gets fewer votes, again — cast doubt on the outcome, or work to simply ignore the results, as would be expected in a dictatorship.
So while, yes, Pennsylvania’s governor’s race will be important for the usual reasons like education funding or the fate of fracking, this time around voters are essentially tasked with preserving America’s 245-year experience with democracy … or not. We need to listen with great care to what former conservatives like Robert Kagan or Steve Schmidt are trying to tell us. The future of the United States, and its vital yet imperfect promises of liberty, are at the edge of a cliff, looking over the edge. We must seize this moment to pull it back.
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Opinion | Our constitutional crisis is already here
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/09/23/robert-kagan-constitutional-crisis/
Opinion by
Contributing columnist
September 23, 2021
“Is there no virtue among us? If there be not, we are in a wretched situation.”
— James Madison
The United States is heading into its greatest political and constitutional crisis since the Civil War, with a reasonable chance over the next three to four years of incidents of mass violence, a breakdown of federal authority, and the division of the country into warring red and blue enclaves. The warning signs may be obscured by the distractions of politics, the pandemic, the economy and global crises, and by wishful thinking and denial. But about these things there should be no doubt:
First, Donald Trump will be the Republican candidate for president in 2024. The hope and expectation that he would fade in visibility and influence have been delusional. He enjoys mammoth leads in the polls; he is building a massive campaign war chest; and at this moment the Democratic ticket looks vulnerable. Barring health problems, he is running.
Second, Trump and his Republican allies are actively preparing to ensure his victory by whatever means necessary. Trump’s charges of fraud in the 2020 election are now primarily aimed at establishing the predicate to challenge future election results that do not go his way. Some Republican candidates have already begun preparing to declare fraud in 2022, just as Larry Elder tried meekly to do in the California recall contest.
Meanwhile, the amateurish “stop the steal” efforts of 2020 have given way to an organized nationwide campaign to ensure that Trump and his supporters will have the control over state and local election officials that they lacked in 2020. Those recalcitrant Republican state officials who effectively saved the country from calamity by refusing to falsely declare fraud or to “find” more votes for Trump are being systematically removed or hounded from office. Republican legislatures are giving themselves greater control over the election certification process. As of this spring, Republicans have proposed or passed measures in at least 16 states that would shift certain election authorities from the purview of the governor, secretary of state or other executive-branch officers to the legislature. An Arizona bill flatly states that the legislature may “revoke the secretary of state’s issuance or certification of a presidential elector’s certificate of election” by a simple majority vote. Some state legislatures seek to impose criminal penalties on local election officials alleged to have committed “technical infractions,” including obstructing the view of poll watchers.
The stage is thus being set for chaos. Imagine weeks of competing mass protests across multiple states as lawmakers from both parties claim victory and charge the other with unconstitutional efforts to take power. Partisans on both sides are likely to be better armed and more willing to inflict harm than they were in 2020. Would governors call out the National Guard? Would President Biden nationalize the Guard and place it under his control, invoke the Insurrection Act, and send troops into Pennsylvania or Texas or Wisconsin to quell violent protests? Deploying federal power in the states would be decried as tyranny. Biden would find himself where other presidents have been — where Andrew Jackson was during the nullification crisis, or where Abraham Lincoln was after the South seceded — navigating without rules or precedents, making his own judgments about what constitutional powers he does and doesn’t have.
Read MoreToday’s arguments over the filibuster will seem quaint in three years if the American political system enters a crisis for which the Constitution offers no remedy.
Most Americans — and all but a handful of politicians — have refused to take this possibility seriously enough to try to prevent it. As has so often been the case in other countries where fascist leaders arise, their would-be opponents are paralyzed in confusion and amazement at this charismatic authoritarian. They have followed the standard model of appeasement, which always begins with underestimation. The political and intellectual establishments in both parties have been underestimating Trump since he emerged on the scene in 2015. They underestimated the extent of his popularity and the strength of his hold on his followers; they underestimated his ability to take control of the Republican Party; and then they underestimated how far he was willing to go to retain power. The fact that he failed to overturn the 2020 election has reassured many that the American system remains secure, though it easily could have gone the other way — if Biden had not been safely ahead in all four states where the vote was close; if Trump had been more competent and more in control of the decision-makers in his administration, Congress and the states. As it was, Trump came close to bringing off a coup earlier this year. All that prevented it was a handful of state officials with notable courage and integrity, and the reluctance of two attorneys general and a vice president to obey orders they deemed inappropriate.
These were not the checks and balances the Framers had in mind when they designed the Constitution, of course, but Trump has exposed the inadequacy of those protections. The Founders did not foresee the Trump phenomenon, in part because they did not foresee national parties. They anticipated the threat of a demagogue, but not of a national cult of personality. They assumed that the new republic’s vast expanse and the historic divisions among the 13 fiercely independent states would pose insuperable barriers to national movements based on party or personality. “Petty” demagogues might sway their own states, where they were known and had influence, but not the whole nation with its diverse populations and divergent interests.
Such checks and balances as the Framers put in place, therefore, depended on the separation of the three branches of government, each of which, they believed, would zealously guard its own power and prerogatives. The Framers did not establish safeguards against the possibility that national-party solidarity would transcend state boundaries because they did not imagine such a thing was possible. Nor did they foresee that members of Congress, and perhaps members of the judicial branch, too, would refuse to check the power of a president from their own party.
In recent decades, however, party loyalty has superseded branch loyalty, and never more so than in the Trump era. As the two Trump impeachments showed, if members of Congress are willing to defend or ignore the president’s actions simply because he is their party leader, then conviction and removal become all but impossible. In such circumstances, the Framers left no other check against usurpation by the executive — except (small-r) republican virtue.
Critics and supporters alike have consistently failed to recognize what a unique figure Trump is in American history. Because his followers share fundamentally conservative views, many see Trump as merely the continuation, and perhaps the logical culmination, of the Reagan Revolution. This is a mistake: Although most Trump supporters are or have become Republicans, they hold a set of beliefs that were not necessarily shared by all Republicans. Some Trump supporters are former Democrats and independents. In fact, the passions that animate the Trump movement are as old as the republic and have found a home in both parties at one time or another.
Suspicion of and hostility toward the federal government; racial hatred and fear; a concern that modern, secular society undermines religion and traditional morality; economic anxiety in an age of rapid technological change; class tensions, with subtle condescension on one side and resentment on the other; distrust of the broader world, especially Europe, and its insidious influence in subverting American freedom — such views and attitudes have been part of the fabric of U.S. politics since the anti-Federalists, the Whiskey Rebellion and Thomas Jefferson. The Democratic Party was the home of white supremacists until they jumped to George Wallace in 1968 and later to the Republicans. Liberals and Democrats in particular need to distinguish between their ongoing battle with Republican policies and the challenge posed by Trump and his followers. One can be fought through the processes of the constitutional system; the other is an assault on the Constitution itself.
What makes the Trump movement historically unique is not its passions and paranoias. It is the fact that for millions of Americans, Trump himself is the response to their fears and resentments. This is a stronger bond between leader and followers than anything seen before in U.S. political movements. Although the Founders feared the rise of a king or a Caesar, for two centuries Americans proved relatively immune to unwavering hero-worship of politicians. Their men on horseback — Theodore Roosevelt, Grant, even Washington — were not regarded as infallible. This was true of great populist leaders as well. William Jennings Bryan a century ago was venerated because he advanced certain ideas and policies, but he did not enjoy unquestioning loyalty from his followers. Even Reagan was criticized by conservatives for selling out conservative principles, for deficit spending, for his equivocal stance on abortion, for being “soft” on the Soviet Union.
Trump is different, which is one reason the political system has struggled to understand, much less contain, him. The American liberal worldview tends to search for material and economic explanations for everything, and no doubt a good number of Trump supporters have grounds to complain about their lot in life. But their bond with Trump has little to do with economics or other material concerns. They believe the U.S. government and society have been captured by socialists, minority groups and sexual deviants. They see the Republican Party establishment as corrupt and weak — “losers,” to use Trump’s word, unable to challenge the reigning liberal hegemony. They view Trump as strong and defiant, willing to take on the establishment, Democrats, RINOs, liberal media, antifa, the Squad, Big Tech and the “Mitch McConnell Republicans.” His charismatic leadership has given millions of Americans a feeling of purpose and empowerment, a new sense of identity. While Trump’s critics see him as too narcissistic to be any kind of leader, his supporters admire his unapologetic, militant selfishness. Unlike establishment Republicans, Trump speaks without embarrassment on behalf of an aggrieved segment of Americans, not exclusively White, who feel they have been taking it on the chin for too long. And that is all he needs to do.
There was a time when political analysts wondered what would happen when Trump failed to “deliver” for his constituents. But the most important thing Trump delivers is himself. His egomania is part of his appeal. In his professed victimization by the media and the “elites,” his followers see their own victimization. That is why attacks on Trump by the elites only strengthen his bond with his followers. That is why millions of Trump supporters have even been willing to risk death as part of their show of solidarity: When Trump’s enemies cited his mishandling of the pandemic to discredit him, their answer was to reject the pandemic. One Trump supporter didn’t go to the hospital after developing covid-19 symptoms because he didn’t want to contribute to the liberal case against Trump. “I’m not going to add to the numbers,” he told a reporter.
Because the Trump movement is less about policies than about Trump himself, it has undermined the normal role of American political parties, which is to absorb new political and ideological movements into the mainstream. Bryan never became president, but some of his populist policies were adopted by both political parties. Sen. Bernie Sanders’s supporters might not have wanted Biden for president, but having lost the nomination battle they could work on getting Biden to pursue their agenda. Liberal democracy requires acceptance of adverse electoral results, a willingness to countenance the temporary rule of those with whom we disagree. As historian Richard Hofstadter observed, it requires that people “endure error in the interest of social peace.” Part of that willingness stems from the belief that the democratic system makes it possible to work, even in opposition, to correct the ruling party’s errors and overreach. Movements based on ideas and policies can also quickly shift their allegiances. Today, the progressives’ flag-bearer might be Sanders, but tomorrow it could be Sen. Elizabeth Warren or Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez or someone else.
For a movement built around a cult of personality, these adjustments are not possible. For Trump supporters, the “error” is that Trump was cheated out of reelection by what he has told them is an oppressive, communist, Democrat regime. While the defeat of a sitting president normally leads to a struggle to claim the party’s mantle, so far no Republican has been able to challenge Trump’s grip on Republican voters: not Sen. Josh Hawley, not Sen. Tom Cotton, not Tucker Carlson, not Gov. Ron DeSantis. It is still all about Trump. The fact that he is not in office means that the United States is “a territory controlled by enemy tribes,” writes one conservative intellectual. The government, as one Trump supporter put it, “is monopolized by a Regime that believes [Trump voters] are beneath representation, and will observe no limits to keep them [from] getting it.” If so, the intellectual posits, what choice do they have but to view the government as the enemy and to become “united and armed to take care of themselves as they think best”?
The Trump movement might not have begun as an insurrection, but it became one after its leader claimed he had been cheated out of reelection. For Trump supporters, the events of Jan. 6 were not an embarrassing debacle but a patriotic effort to save the nation, by violent action if necessary. As one 56-year-old Michigan woman explained: “We weren’t there to steal things. We weren’t there to do damage. We were just there to overthrow the government.”
The banal normalcy of the great majority of Trump’s supporters, including those who went to the Capitol on Jan. 6, has befuddled many observers. Although private militia groups and white supremacists played a part in the attack, 90 percent of those arrested or charged had no ties to such groups. The majority were middle-class and middle-aged; 40 percent were business owners or white-collar workers. They came mostly from purple, not red, counties.
Most Trump supporters are good parents, good neighbors and solid members of their communities. Their bigotry, for the most part, is typical white American bigotry, perhaps with an added measure of resentment and a less filtered mode of expression since Trump arrived on the scene. But these are normal people in the sense that they think and act as people have for centuries. They put their trust in family, tribe, religion and race. Although zealous in defense of their own rights and freedoms, they are less concerned about the rights and freedoms of those who are not like them. That, too, is not unusual. What is unnatural is to value the rights of others who are unlike you as much as you value your own.
As it happens, however, that is what the American experiment in republican democracy requires. It is what the Framers meant by “republican virtue,” a love of freedom not only for oneself but also as an abstract, universal good; a love of self-government as an ideal; a commitment to abide by the laws passed by legitimate democratic processes; and a healthy fear of and vigilance against tyranny of any kind. Even James Madison, who framed the Constitution on the assumption that people would always pursue their selfish interests, nevertheless argued that it was “chimerical” to believe that any form of government could “secure liberty and happiness without any virtue in the people.” Al Gore and his supporters displayed republican virtue when they abided by the Supreme Court’s judgment in 2000 despite the partisan nature of the justices’ decision. (Whether the court itself displayed republican virtue is another question.)
The events of Jan. 6, on the other hand, proved that Trump and his most die-hard supporters are prepared to defy constitutional and democratic norms, just as revolutionary movements have in the past. While it might be shocking to learn that normal, decent Americans can support a violent assault on the Capitol, it shows that Americans as a people are not as exceptional as their founding principles and institutions. Europeans who joined fascist movements in the 1920s and 1930s were also from the middle classes. No doubt many of them were good parents and neighbors, too. People do things as part of a mass movement that they would not do as individuals, especially if they are convinced that others are out to destroy their way of life.
It would be foolish to imagine that the violence of Jan. 6 was an aberration that will not be repeated. Because Trump supporters see those events as a patriotic defense of the nation, there is every reason to expect more such episodes. Trump has returned to the explosive rhetoric of that day, insisting that he won in a “landslide,” that the “radical left Democrat communist party” stole the presidency in the “most corrupt, dishonest, and unfair election in the history of our country” and that they have to give it back. He has targeted for defeat those Republicans who voted for his impeachment — or criticized him for his role in the riot. Already, there have been threats to bomb polling sites, kidnap officials and attack state capitols. “You and your family will be killed very slowly,” the wife of Georgia’s top election official was texted earlier this year. Nor can one assume that the Three Percenters and Oath Keepers would again play a subordinate role when the next riot unfolds. Veterans who assaulted the Capitol told police officers that they had fought for their country before and were fighting for it again. Looking ahead to 2022 and 2024, Trump insists“there is no way they win elections without cheating. There’s no way.” So, if the results come in showing another Democratic victory, Trump’s supporters will know what to do. Just as “generations of patriots” gave “their sweat, their blood and even their very lives” to build America, Trump tells them, so today “we have no choice. We have to fight” to restore “our American birthright.”
Where does the Republican Party stand in all this? The party gave birth to and nurtured this movement; it bears full responsibility for establishing the conditions in which Trump could capture the loyalty of 90 percent of Republican voters. Republican leaders were more than happy to ride Trump’s coattails if it meant getting paid off with hundreds of conservative court appointments, including three Supreme Court justices; tax cuts; immigration restrictions; and deep reductions in regulations on business. Yet Trump’s triumph also had elements of a hostile takeover. The movement’s passion was for Trump, not the party. GOP primary voters chose Trump over the various flavors of establishment Republicanism (Jeb Bush, Marco Rubio), and after Trump’s election they continued to regard establishment Republicans as enemies. Longtime party heroes like Paul Ryan were cast into oblivion for disparaging Trump. Even staunch supporters such as Jeff Sessions eventually became villains when they would not do as Trump demanded. Those who survived had a difficult balancing act: to use Trump’s appeal to pass the Republican agenda while also controlling Trump’s excesses, which they worried could ultimately threaten the party’s interests.
That plan seemed plausible in 2017. Unlike other insurgent leaders, Trump had not spent time in the political wilderness building a party and surrounding himself with loyalists. He had to choose from an existing pool of Republican officials, who varied in their willingness to do his bidding. The GOP establishment hoped that the presence of “adults” would restrain him, protecting their traditional agenda and, in their view, the country’s interests, from his worst instincts.
This was a miscalculation. Trump’s grip on his supporters left no room for an alternative power center in the party. One by one, the “adults” resigned or were run off. The dissent and contrary opinions that exist in every party — the Northeast moderate Republicans in Reagan’s day; the progressives in today’s Democratic Party — disappeared from Trump’s Republican Party. The only real issue was Trump himself, and on that there could be no dissent. Those who disapproved of Trump could either keep silent or leave.
The takeover extended beyond the level of political leadership. Modern political parties are an ecosystem of interest groups, lobby organizations, job seekers, campaign donors and intellectuals. All have a stake in the party’s viability; all ultimately depend on being roughly aligned with wherever the party is at a given moment; and so all had to make their peace with Trump, too. Conservative publications that once opposed him as unfit for the presidency had to reverse course or lose readership and funding. Pundits had to adjust to the demands of their pro-Trump audiences — and were rewarded handsomely when they did. Donors who had opposed Trump during the primaries fell into line, if only to preserve some influence on the issues that mattered to them. Advocacy organizations that had previously seen their role as holding the Republican Party to certain principles, and thus often dissented from the party leadership, either became advocates for Trump or lost clout.
It was no surprise that elected officials feared taking on the Trump movement and that Republican job seekers either kept silent about their views or made show-trial-like apologies for past criticism. Ambition is a powerful antidote to moral qualms. More revealing was the behavior of Republican elder statesmen, former secretaries of state in their 80s or 90s who had no further ambitions for high office and seemingly nothing to lose by speaking out. Despite their known abhorrence of everything Trump stood for, these old lions refused to criticize him. They were unwilling to come out against a Republican Party to which they had devoted their professional lives, even when the party was led by someone they detested. Whatever they thought about Trump, moreover, Republican elders disliked Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama and the Democrats more. Again, this is not so unusual. German conservatives accommodated Adolf Hitler in large part because they opposed the socialists more than they opposed the Nazis, who, after all, shared many of their basic prejudices. As for conservative intellectuals, even those who had spent years arguing that Woodrow Wilson was a tyrant because he created the Federal Reserve and supported child labor laws seemed to have no concerns about whether Trump was a would-be despot. They not only came to Trump’s defense but fashioned political doctrines to justify his rule, filling in the wide gaps of his nonexistent ideology with an appeal to “conservative nationalism” and conservative populism.Perhaps American conservatism was never comfortable with the American experiment in liberal democracy, but certainly since Trump took over their party, many conservatives have revealed a hostility to core American beliefs.
All this has left few dissenting voices within the Republican ecosystem. The Republican Party today is a zombie party. Its leaders go through the motions of governing in pursuit of traditional Republican goals, wrestling over infrastructure spending and foreign policy, even as real power in the party has leached away to Trump. From the uneasy and sometimes contentious partnership during Trump’s four years in office, the party’s main if not sole purpose today is as the willing enabler of Trump’s efforts to game the electoral system to ensure his return to power.
With the party firmly under his thumb, Trump is now fighting the Biden administration on separate fronts. One is normal, legitimate political competition, where Republicans criticize Biden’s policies, feed and fight the culture wars, and in general behave like a typical hostile opposition.
The other front is outside the bounds of constitutional and democratic competition and into the realm of illegal or extralegal efforts to undermine the electoral process. The two are intimately related, because the Republican Party has used its institutional power in the political sphere to shield Trump and his followers from the consequences of their illegal and extralegal activities in the lead-up to Jan. 6. Thus, Reps. Kevin McCarthy and Elise Stefanik, in their roles as party leaders, run interference for the Trump movement in the sphere of legitimate politics, while Republicans in lesser positions cheer on the Jan. 6 perpetrators, turning them into martyrs and heroes, and encouraging illegal acts in the future.
This pincer assault has several advantages. Republican politicians and would-be policymakers can play the role of the legitimate opposition. They can rediscover their hawkish internationalist foreign policy (suspended during the Trump years) and their deficit-minded economics (also suspended during the Trump years). They can go on the mainstream Sunday shows and critique the Biden administration on issues such as Afghanistan. They can pretend that Trump is no longer part of the equation. Biden is the president, after all, and his administration is not exactly without faults.
Yet whatever the legitimacy of Republican critiques of Biden, there is a fundamental disingenuousness to it all. It is a dodge. Republicans focus on China and critical race theory and avoid any mention of Trump, even as the party works to fix the next election in his favor. The left hand professes to know nothing of what the right hand is doing.
Even Trump opponents play along. Republicans such as Sens. Mitt Romney and Ben Sasse have condemned the events of Jan. 6, criticized Trump and even voted for his impeachment, but in other respects they continue to act as good Republicans and conservatives. On issues such as the filibuster, Romney and others insist on preserving “regular order” and conducting political and legislative business as usual, even though they know that Trump’s lieutenants in their party are working to subvert the next presidential election.
The result is that even these anti-Trump Republicans are enabling the insurrection. Revolutionary movements usually operate outside a society’s power structures. But the Trump movement also enjoys unprecedented influence within those structures. It dominates the coverage on several cable news networks, numerous conservative magazines, hundreds of talk radio stations and all kinds of online platforms. It has access to financing from rich individuals and the Republican National Committee’s donor pool. And, not least, it controls one of the country’s two national parties. All that is reason enough to expect another challenge, for what movement would fail to take advantage of such favorable circumstances to make a play for power?
Today, we are in a time of hope and illusion. The same people who said that Trump wouldn’t try to overturn the last election now say we have nothing to worry about with the next one. Republicans have been playing this game for five years, first pooh-poohing concerns about Trump’s intentions, or about the likelihood of their being realized, and then going silent, or worse, when what they insisted was improbable came to pass. These days, even the anti-Trump media constantly looks for signs that Trump’s influence might be fading and that drastic measures might not be necessary.
The world will look very different in 14 months if, as seems likely, the Republican zombie party wins control of the House. At that point, with the political winds clearly blowing in his favor, Trump is all but certain to announce his candidacy, and social media constraints on his speech are likely to be lifted, since Facebook and Twitter would have a hard time justifying censoring his campaign. With his megaphone back, Trump would once again dominate news coverage, as outlets prove unable to resist covering him around the clock if only for financial reasons.
But this time, Trump would have advantages that he lacked in 2016 and 2020, including more loyal officials in state and local governments; the Republicans in Congress; and the backing of GOP donors, think tanks and journals of opinion. And he will have the Trump movement, including many who are armed and ready to be activated, again. Who is going to stop him then? On its current trajectory, the 2024 Republican Party will make the 2020 Republican Party seem positively defiant.
Those who criticize Biden and the Democrats for not doing enough to prevent this disaster are not being fair. There is not much they can do without Republican cooperation, especially if they lose control of either chamber in 2022. It has become fashionable to write off any possibility that a handful of Republicans might rise up to save the day. This preemptive capitulation has certainly served well those Republicans who might otherwise be held to account for their cowardice. How nice for them that everyone has decided to focus fire on Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin.
Yet it is largely upon these Republicans that the fate of the republic rests.
Notes of the vote count taken by the staff of the House impeachment mangers are seen after the Senate voted to acquit former president Donald Trump on Capitol Hill in Washington on Feb. 13. (Salwan Georges/The Washington Post)
Seven Republican senators voted to convict Trump for inciting an insurrection and attempting to overturn a free and fair election: Richard Burr, Bill Cassidy, Susan Collins, Lisa Murkowski, Romney, Sasse and Patrick J. Toomey. It was a brave vote, a display of republican virtue, especially for the five who are not retiring in 2022. All have faced angry backlashes — Romney was booed and called a traitor at the Utah Republican convention; Burr and Cassidy were unanimously censured by their state parties. Yet as much credit as they deserve for taking this stand, it was almost entirely symbolic. When it comes to concrete action that might prevent a debacle in 2024, they have balked.
Specifically, they have refused to work with Democrats to pass legislation limiting state legislatures’ ability to overturn the results of future elections, to ensure that the federal government continues to have some say when states try to limit voting rights, to provide federal protection to state and local election workers who face threats, and in general to make clear to the nation that a bipartisan majority in the Senate opposes the subversion of the popular will. Why?
It can’t be because they think they have a future in a Trump-dominated party. Even if they manage to get reelected, what kind of government would they be serving in? They can’t be under any illusion about what a second Trump term would mean. Trump’s disdain for the rule of law is clear. His exoneration from the charges leveled in his impeachment trials — the only official, legal response to his actions — practically ensures that he would wield power even more aggressively. His experience with unreliable subordinates in his first term is likely to guide personnel decisions in a second. Only total loyalists would serve at the head of the Justice Department, FBI, CIA, National Security Agency and the Pentagon. The chairman of the Joint Chiefs will not be someone likely to place his or her own judgment above that of their civilian commander in chief. Nor would a Republican Senate fail to confirm Trump loyalists. In such a world, with Trump and his lieutenants in charge of all the levers of state power, including its growing capacity for surveillance, opposing Trump would become increasingly risky for Republicans and Democrats alike. A Trump victory is likely to mean at least the temporary suspension of American democracy as we have known it.
We are already in a constitutional crisis. The destruction of democracy might not come until November 2024, but critical steps in that direction are happening now. In a little more than a year, it may become impossible to pass legislation to protect the electoral process in 2024. Now it is impossible only because anti-Trump Republicans, and even some Democrats, refuse to tinker with the filibuster. It is impossible because, despite all that has happened, some people still wish to be good Republicans even as they oppose Trump. These decisions will not wear well as the nation tumbles into full-blown crisis.
It is not impossible for politicians to make such a leap. The Republican Party itself was formed in the 1850s by politicians who abandoned their previous party — former Whigs, former Democrats and former members of the Liberty and Free Soil parties. While Whig and Democratic party stalwarts such as Henry Clay and Stephen Douglas juggled and compromised, doing their best to ensure that the issue of slavery did not destroy their great parties, others decided that the parties had become an obstacle to justice and a threat to the nation’s continued viability.
Romney & Co. don’t have to abandon their party. They can fashion themselves as Constitutional Republicans who, in the present emergency, are willing to form a national unity coalition in the Senate for the sole purpose of saving the republic. Their cooperation with Democrats could be strictly limited to matters relating to the Constitution and elections. Or they might strive for a temporary governing consensus on a host of critical issues: government spending, defense, immigration and even the persistent covid-19 pandemic, effectively setting aside the usual battles to focus on the more vital and immediate need to preserve the United States.
It takes two, of course, to form a national unity coalition, and Democrats can make it harder or easier for anti-Trump Republicans to join. Some profess to see no distinction between the threat posed by Trump and the threat posed by the GOP. They prefer to use Trump as a weapon in the ongoing political battle, and not only as a way of discrediting and defeating today’s Republican Party but to paint all GOP policies for the past 30 years as nothing more than precursors to Trumpism. Although today’s Trump-controlled Republican Party does need to be fought and defeated, this kind of opportunistic partisanship and conspiracy-mongering, in addition to being bad history, is no cure for what ails the nation.
Senate Democrats were wise to cut down their once-massive voting rights wish list and get behind the smaller compromise measure unveiled last week by Manchin and Sen. Amy Klobuchar. But they have yet to attract any votes from their Republican colleagues for the measure. Heading into the next election, it is vital to protect election workers, same-day registration and early voting. It will also still be necessary to pass the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, which directly addresses the state legislatures’ electoral power grab. Other battles — such as making Election Day a federal holiday and banning partisan gerrymandering — might better be postponed. Efforts to prevent a debacle in 2024 cannot. Democrats need to give anti-Trump Republicans a chance to do the right thing.
One wonders whether modern American politicians, in either party, have it in them to make such bold moves, whether they have the insight to see where events are going and the courage to do whatever is necessary to save the democratic system. If that means political suicide for this handful of Republicans, wouldn’t it be better to go out fighting for democracy than to slink off quietly into the night?
Opinion: The great Trump whitewash is underway. Kevin McCarthy’s big lie confirms it.
Opinion by Greg Sargent Columnist
May 13, 2021
This nonsense has been massacred by fact checks and widely mocked on Twitter. But it’s more than just a sad, sick joke: It shows that a careful and deliberate scheme is underway to erase very large truths about this moment, a project we cannot allow to succeed.
An important new piece in the New York Times helps demonstrate this. As it shows, many Republicans pushing voter suppression efforts across the country are not primarily justifying this with the full-blown lie that the election was stolen from Donald Trump.
Instead, they’re relying on a softer claim: These suppression measures are necessary because Republican voters lack “confidence” in the electoral system, because whatever the reality, they have reasonable grounds to believe the 2020 outcome might have been dubious.
Read MoreThe Times piece is the first major treatment of this ugly game by a news organization I’ve seen (though your humble blogger has been obsessing over it). Here’s a remarkable tidbit:
Lawmakers in at least 33 states have cited low public confidence in election integrity in their public comments as a justification for bills to restrict voting, according to a tally by The New York Times. In several states — including Arizona, Florida, Georgia and Iowa — the bills have already been signed into law, and legislation in Texas is very close to passage.
This absurdity — that suppression is needed in the name of “election integrity,” to restore “confidence” in our system — has been employed in nearly three dozen states. Of course, if anyone does “lack confidence” in our elections, that’s because Trump and Republicans made it so by deceiving their voters about the 2020 outcome for months on end.
What’s really happening here is that Republicans, having executed a monstrous crime against our democracy, are now spending the booty from the crime hand over fist while busily covering up their tracks to erase their culpability for all of it.
A crime against democracy
The crime was to go all in with Trump’s efforts to overturn the election, which included mass support for a lawsuit to invalidate millions of votes based on fictions and 147 House Republicans voting to invalidate President Biden’s electors. The relentless GOP feeding of Trump’s lies helped inspire the insurrectionist mob assault on the Capitol.
Meanwhile, other Republicans are claiming there’s no proof the rioters were Trump supporters. And as the Post fact-checking team documents in detail, Republicans are widely claiming leftist violence is the real problem (to muddy up culpability for the insurrection) and that Trump himself isn’t responsible for the attack.
Remarkably, this comes after numerous Republicans themselves admitted just after the assault (when they were still shellshocked into fleeting honesty) that he was indeed responsible for it. All this is now being erased entirely.
McCarthy’s claim might seem like disingenuous, mock-worthy clowning. But it’s symptomatic of a much broader, deeper and more comprehensive deception campaign. We can’t allow it to prevail.
‘He’s phoning it in’: why Biden is losing the voting rights fight
Activists say the president and Democrats have failed to stop Republican efforts to curtail the vote
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/jun/28/biden-democrats-voting-rights
[Excerpt]
“They’re checking the boxes,” said Cliff Albright, a co-founder of Black Voters Matter, an advocacy group that is focused on mobilizing Black voters. “They’re not acting like we are facing an existential crisis. That’s the problem. It’s from the top down,” added Albright, who is currently on a multi-state bus tour across the south to raise awareness about the need for voting protections.
If Biden and Democrats were ultimately unable to pass voting rights legislation, Brown said, it would be “devastating” to Black voters, who not only played a big role in getting Biden to the White House, but also helped Democrats flip two Georgia US senate seats in January.
“The message that it sends is that they’re not willing to go hard to deliver the things that we were expecting when we went out to vote for them and we risked our lives to do so,” Albright said. “The message that they’re sending is that they’re OK with a little bit of Jim Crow.”
Opinion: The House debates voting rights, and it’s Jim Crow all over again
Colbert I. King Columnist
August 27, 2021
This week’s House debate on the John R. Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, which passed on a 219-to-212 party-line vote, was a reprise of past legislative wars on voting rights. It was a disgusting sight to behold.
The Lewis Act itself is straightforward. It strengthens the Voting Rights Act of 1965 against the onslaught of voter suppression measures that many states passed following the 2020 elections. It also restores enforcement mechanisms that the Supreme Court gutted in 2013.
But when the Lewis Act reached the House floor Tuesday, a host of Republicans weighed in against the measure hurling objections that were as old and as specious as arguments made by Southern lawmakers against the original Voting Rights Act.
Fifty-six years ago, faced with compelling evidence of blatant discrimination against Black voters — as well as a nationally televised attack by Alabama state troopers on the peaceful participants in a march fromSelma to Montgomery that left civil rights leader John Lewis with a cracked skull — Republican Sen. Strom Thurmond of South Carolina argued that passing the Voting Rights Act would make Congress “the final resting place of the Constitution and the rule of law,” Thurmond said. “For it is here that they will have been buried with shovels of emotion under piles of expediency in the year of our Lord, 1965.”
Read MoreSen. Lister Hill (D-Ala.) denounced the act as a “head-on rush to the destruction of the basic rights of the individual states and the liberties of the American people to satisfy the demands, the clamor, and the expediency of the day.” He continued: “Never in my more than 40 years in Congress have I seen a measure come before this body that has had such built-in potential for the destruction of our constitutional system and the breakdown of law and order as the pending bill.”
The Voting Rights Act passed the Senate in May 1965, and the House followed suit on July 9, 1965. Ninety-sevenSouthern federal lawmakers voted no.
Fast-forward to 2021.
House Democrats had compiled compelling evidence that the Supreme Court’s 2013 decision eviscerating the Voting Rights Act prompted states with discriminatory records, that were previously covered by the law, to enact measures that restricted voting. Theyhad also collected data showing that Republican-led state legislatures have been passing restrictive election laws that disproportionately impacted Black and brown voters.
Confronted last Tuesday with the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, which would help correct those wrongs, House Republicans fell back on Thurmond and Hill’s line of attack.
“If you vote for this legislation, you are voting for a federal takeover of elections,” said Rep. Rodney Davis (R-Ill.). “You are removing the people elected at the state and local level to run elections from making decisions about how elections are run, including voter ID laws, and putting an unaccountable, unelected election czar at the DOJ, the attorney general, in charge of all election decisions in this country.”
Said Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio): “This bill is not about expanding voting rights; it is about Democrats consolidating their political power. That is why they are focused on this. They are focused on consolidating their power and, I think, taking it away from the states.”
“[The Lewis bill] is a radical, unprecedented federal power grab by unaccountable bureaucrats in Washington that every conscientious American ought to oppose,” said Mike Johnson (R-La.).
“This bill would comprehensively transfer the power to govern elections in this country from the sovereign states to the federal government permanently and everywhere,” said Dan Bishop (R-N.C.).
Hill, who never supported a civil rights bill during his 45 years in Congress, couldn’t have said it any better.
Still, for the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, worse days may be yet to come.
Recall what happened earlier this month, when Senate Majority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) sought last-minute unanimous consent to have the Senate debate — not pass, but just consider — the For the People Act. Texas Republican Sen. Ted Cruz took to the Senate floor to thwart it. “This bill would constitute a federal government takeover of elections,” Cruz said.
Other Republican senators haven’t had to say much about the act yet, because they don’t have to — they’ve got Mitch McConnell.The Senate Republican leader from Kentucky has already voiced his opposition to the John Lewis bill, calling it “unnecessary.” He echoes the cry of Thurmond, Hill and present-day House Republicans who charge that voting rights legislation gives Washington too much power when it comes to determining voting and election systems. And McConnell plans to use the filibuster, if necessary, to kill the Lewis bill in its tracks.
Who will be in the corner of the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act when the roll is called in the Senate?
President Lyndon B. Johnson, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., a phalanx of civil rights groups and Americans aroused by injustice were on hand in 1965.
Where stands America now?
Opinion: Glenn Youngkin is playing footsie with the ‘big lie.’ It undermines democracy.
Opinion by theEditorial Board
August 12, 2021
Joe Biden trounced Donald Trump in Virginia last year; his victory margin of 10 percentage points in the state was the biggest by any candidate in a presidential contest since 1988. Despite that, Glenn Youngkin, the Republican candidate for governor, continues to feed, wink at and indulge the fiction that somehow the election was crooked, the better to cultivate his Trump-idolizing base.
It’s a pernicious lie, as well as a direct threat to U.S. democracy, and Mr. Youngkin is complicit in sustaining it. Given repeated opportunities to state the truth by shutting down conspiracists, he fudges.
Last Saturday, he attended an “election integrity” rally at Liberty University in Lynchburg, an event whose lineup of speakers suggested it would be a festival of fabrications about the 2020 election. Mr. Youngkin showed up even after his running mates on the GOP ticket, for lieutenant governor and attorney general, pulled out. No journalists were allowed, which averted the risk of awkward questions about baseless assertions.
Read MoreRecently, he had been asked by a hopeful voter whether the courts might overturn the results of last year’s elections. There was a simple and truthful answer to that: No. Mr. Youngkin didn’t give it. Instead, he lamented that the “court system is moving slowly and it’s unclear,” adding a confection of words designed to give GOP partisans the impression that he also harbored such hopes.
Another voter asked the candidate about ballots cast by dead people, one of many such evidence-free conspiracy theories peddled by Mr. Trump and his acolytes. Again, Mr. Youngkin offered his sympathy and tacit agreement, suggesting that tighter rules were required to avoid a recurrence of such fraud. “When I’m governor,” he said, “we’ll be able to make some reforms.” He added: “We don’t trust our election process. We need to.”
It is precisely such weasel words, in deference to lies, that have sown the distrust in elections among Republican voters. Since becoming the gubernatorial nominee, Mr. Youngkin has acknowledged that Mr. Biden won the presidency legitimately. But he subverts that message by rolling with the fabrication of a rigged election, and proposing phony “election integrity” measures that masquerade as “reforms.”
It’s not worthwhile to speculate about whether Mr. Youngkin knows better. His background as a private equity executive contains nothing to suggest his analytical faculties were colored by a fondness for make-believe. But Mr. Youngkin, a first-time candidate, is crafting his public persona on the stump. By playing footsie with the “big lie,” he is helping to undermine faith in democracy.
Opinion: Virginians won’t buy what the ‘big lie’ advocates are selling
Ron Glaser, Haymarket
August 12, 2021
It was heartening to read how Virginians continue to demonstrate their intolerance for former president Donald Trump and his Republican sycophants in the Aug. 8 Local Opinions essay “Virginia is the proving ground for untenable platforms.”
Republicans who espouse the lies that vaccines and masks don’t work, the election was stolen and the Capitol riot was similar to a tour are running into a wall of rational-thinking Virginians. Perhaps it is time for the motto “Virginia is for lovers” to change to “Virginia is for truth seekers.”
Opinion: The most dangerous Trump official you’ve never heard of needs to be heard from
Opinion byRuth Marcus, Deputy editorial page editor
August 14, 2021
[Excerpt]https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/08/13/most-dangerous-trump-official-youve-never-heard-needs-be-heard/
“People tell me Jeff Clark is great, I should put him in. People want me to replace DOJ leadership,” President Donald Trump told acting attorney general Jeffrey Rosen on a Dec. 27, 2020, phone call — suggesting, with typical Trumpian subtlety, that Rosen might soon find himself out of a job if he didn’t comply with Trump’s demands to “tell people that this was an illegal, corrupt election.”
Opinion:Norman Lear: As I begin my 100th year, I’m baffled that voting rights are still under attack
July 27, 2021
[Excerpt:]
To legislators getting between people and the ballot box, and to senators who are standing in the dishonorable tradition of those who filibustered civil rights legislation, I say this: You may pass some unjust laws. You may win elections by preventing or discouraging people from voting.
But you will not in the end defeat the democratic spirit, the spirit that animated the Tuskegee airmen to whom I owe my life, the spirit that powers millions of Americans who give of themselves to defend voting rights, protect our environment, preserve peaceful pluralism, defeat discrimination, and expand educational and economic opportunity.
The right to vote is foundational to addressing all these issues. It is at the heart of everything I have fought for in war and in peacetime.
To senators who are willing to sacrifice the right to vote to some outdated notion of bipartisanship and Senate tradition, I almost do not know what to say. On the scale of justice, this is not even a close call. Do what’s right.
Protecting voting rights should not be today’s struggle. But it is. And that means it is our struggle, yours and mine, for as long as we have breath and strength.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/07/27/norman-lear-99th-birthday/
Republicans Aren’t Done Messing With Elections
Not content with limiting voting rights, they are threatening the integrity of vote counting itself.
ByRichard L. Hasen
Mr. Hasen is the author of several books about elections and democracy. Last year he proposed a 28th amendment to the Constitution to defend and expand voting rights.
April 23, 2021
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/23/opinion/republicans-voting-us-elections.html
Excerpt:
So what can be done? To begin with, every jurisdiction in the United States should be voting with systems that produce a paper ballot that can be recounted in the event of a disputed election. Having physical, tangible evidence of voters’ choices, rather than just records on electronic voting machines, is essential to both guard against actual manipulation and protect voter confidence in a fair vote count. Such a provision is already contained in H.R. 1, the mammoth Democrat-sponsored voting bill.
Next, businesses and civic leaders must speak out not just against voter suppression but also at efforts at election subversion. The message needs to be that fair elections require not just voter access to the polls but also procedures to ensure that the means of conducting the election are fair, auditable and verifiable by representatives of both political parties and nongovernmental organizations.
Congress must also fix the rules for counting Electoral College votes, so that spurious objections to the vote counts like the ones we saw on Jan. 6 from senators and representatives, including Senators Josh Hawley and Ted Cruz, are harder to make. It should take much more than a pairing of a single senator and a single representative to raise an objection, and there must be quick means to reject frivolous objections to votes fairly cast and counted in the states.
Congress can also require states to impose basic safeguards in the counting of votes in federal elections. This is not part of the H.R. 1 election reform bill, but it should be, and Article I, Section 4 of the Constitution gives Congress wide berth to override state laws in this area.
Finally, we need a national effort to support those who will count votes fairly. Already we are seeing a flood of competent election administrators retiring from their often-thankless jobs, some after facing threats of violence during the 2020 vote count. Local election administrators need political cover and the equivalent of combat pay, along with adequate budget resources to run fair elections. It took hundreds of millions of dollars in private philanthropy to hold a successful election in 2020; that need for charity should not be repeated.
Silverii: Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene as headliner? The El Paso County GOP clearly has zero standards
Greene’s invitation to headline the Republican Lincoln Dinner fundraiser is shocking
By Ian Silcerii, Columnist for The Denver Post
July 22, 2021
https://www.denverpost.com/author/ian-silverii-dp-columnist/
[Excerpts:]
Georgia Republican Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene will be the headline speaker at this year’s Lincoln Day Dinner fundraiser for the El Paso County Republican Party on August 6. If you’re not familiar with “MTG,” she’s the deplorable Holocaust trivializer, “big lie” enthusiast, anti-Muslim racist elected to Congress in 2020. And, thanks to Colorado’s Lauren Boebert, Greene is also known as the “other” QAnon conspiracy theory promoter in the House Republican caucus.
El Paso County Republicans likely thought that MTG would be a fundraising winner, but in an unusual turn of events, it seems that many Colorado Republicans don’t want anything to do with her. El Paso County Commissioner Holly Williams told Newsline’s Faith Miller that “she is not a speaker I am interested in hearing.” Even State GOP Chair Kristi Burton Brown who hails from El Paso County claimed in a recent interview that she was just too busy to make it to the event next week.
As more Colorado Republicans publicly distance themselves from Greene, we might also ask: How does Greene’s invitation even happen in the first place? Many Colorado Republican officials apparently don’t exactly approve of Greene’s pending appearance — at least not enough to be seen with her — but enough people in the El Paso GOP believe that this is what their party wants to see.
Turnout numbers for the Lincoln Dinner will give us some indication of which Republican faction guessed correctly on siding with MTG’s particular brand of horrible. That Colorado Republicans seem to be conflicted on this question is an ominous sign for their 2022 election hopes.
Texas Has Broken My Heart
Ms. Swartz is an executive editor of Texas Monthly.
July 14, 2021
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/14/opinion/texas-voting-law.html?referringSource=articleShare
[Excerpts]
It has long been possible to live in one of the state’s big cities with only occasional reminders of the stereotypes that have haunted this place for so long. Especially here in Houston, the acceptance of diversity of all kinds — political, sexual, economic, social and more — always makes me think of the best of Texas. The openness that has always been at the heart of our treasured exceptionalism doesn’t just apply to the vast, sometimes hostile landscape; it has allowed me and so many other people like and unlike me to build the kind of life we might never have had elsewhere.
But as I look across the leadership landscape today, that optimism has been eclipsed by cynicism. It would be a challenge to find a shred of conviction, much less hope, among the likes of Gov. Greg Abbott, Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick and Attorney General Ken Paxton — you could throw Senator Ted Cruz in there, too. They seem to be dreaming only of higher office.
If I know anything about Texas for certain, it is that people here do not like being told what to do. We choose freedom, sometimes bordering on chaos, because we can’t all agree on an exact definition. What is clear is that our leadership seems determined to take it away: the right to vote, to learn and to make decisions for ourselves, our families and our communities.
https://www.latimes.com/opinion/story/2021-07-04/july-4-voting-rights-american-democracy
To the editor: I’m old enough to remember conservatives moaning and gnashing their teeth about the Earl Warren court, saying it overstepped its bounds by legislating from the bench. But apparently it’s all right for the current ultraconservative Supreme Court to pretend that it is Congress.
The justices have once again gutted the Voting Rights Act, allowing Arizona to make it a crime for anyone to deliver mail ballots other than family members and postal workers.
Many tribal people have zero postal service and must drive an hour or more to the nearest post office. Many of these same people have limited access to transportation, and the only practical way for them to vote has been to rely on friends and neighbors to take their ballots to the post office.
The Supreme Court has now enshrined systemic racism against Native Americans.
Scott McKenzie, La Cañada Flintridge
Opinion: The great Trump whitewash is underway. Kevin McCarthy’s big lie confirms it.
Opinion by Greg Sargent Columnist
May 13, 2021
This nonsense has been massacred by fact checks and widely mocked on Twitter. But it’s more than just a sad, sick joke: It shows that a careful and deliberate scheme is underway to erase very large truths about this moment, a project we cannot allow to succeed.
An important new piece in the New York Times helps demonstrate this. As it shows, many Republicans pushing voter suppression efforts across the country are not primarily justifying this with the full-blown lie that the election was stolen from Donald Trump.
Instead, they’re relying on a softer claim: These suppression measures are necessary because Republican voters lack “confidence” in the electoral system, because whatever the reality, they have reasonable grounds to believe the 2020 outcome might have been dubious.
Read MoreThe Times piece is the first major treatment of this ugly game by a news organization I’ve seen (though your humble blogger has been obsessing over it). Here’s a remarkable tidbit:
Lawmakers in at least 33 states have cited low public confidence in election integrity in their public comments as a justification for bills to restrict voting, according to a tally by The New York Times. In several states — including Arizona, Florida, Georgia and Iowa — the bills have already been signed into law, and legislation in Texas is very close to passage.
This absurdity — that suppression is needed in the name of “election integrity,” to restore “confidence” in our system — has been employed in nearly three dozen states. Of course, if anyone does “lack confidence” in our elections, that’s because Trump and Republicans made it so by deceiving their voters about the 2020 outcome for months on end.
What’s really happening here is that Republicans, having executed a monstrous crime against our democracy, are now spending the booty from the crime hand over fist while busily covering up their tracks to erase their culpability for all of it.
A crime against democracy
The crime was to go all in with Trump’s efforts to overturn the election, which included mass support for a lawsuit to invalidate millions of votes based on fictions and 147 House Republicans voting to invalidate President Biden’s electors. The relentless GOP feeding of Trump’s lies helped inspire the insurrectionist mob assault on the Capitol.
Meanwhile, other Republicans are claiming there’s no proof the rioters were Trump supporters. And as the Post fact-checking team documents in detail, Republicans are widely claiming leftist violence is the real problem (to muddy up culpability for the insurrection) and that Trump himself isn’t responsible for the attack.
Remarkably, this comes after numerous Republicans themselves admitted just after the assault (when they were still shellshocked into fleeting honesty) that he was indeed responsible for it. All this is now being erased entirely.
McCarthy’s claim might seem like disingenuous, mock-worthy clowning. But it’s symptomatic of a much broader, deeper and more comprehensive deception campaign. We can’t allow it to prevail.
‘He’s phoning it in’: why Biden is losing the voting rights fight
Activists say the president and Democrats have failed to stop Republican efforts to curtail the vote
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/jun/28/biden-democrats-voting-rights
[Excerpt]
“They’re checking the boxes,” said Cliff Albright, a co-founder of Black Voters Matter, an advocacy group that is focused on mobilizing Black voters. “They’re not acting like we are facing an existential crisis. That’s the problem. It’s from the top down,” added Albright, who is currently on a multi-state bus tour across the south to raise awareness about the need for voting protections.
If Biden and Democrats were ultimately unable to pass voting rights legislation, Brown said, it would be “devastating” to Black voters, who not only played a big role in getting Biden to the White House, but also helped Democrats flip two Georgia US senate seats in January.
“The message that it sends is that they’re not willing to go hard to deliver the things that we were expecting when we went out to vote for them and we risked our lives to do so,” Albright said. “The message that they’re sending is that they’re OK with a little bit of Jim Crow.”
The G.O.P. Has Some Voters It Likes and Some It Doesn’t
This is what happens when a political party turns against democracy.
March 30, 2021
Jamelle Bouis
Opinion Columnist
[Excerpt:]This fact pattern underscores a larger truth: The Republican Party is driving the nation’s democratic decline. A recent paper by Jacob M. Grumbach, a political scientist at the University of Washington, makes this plain. Using a new measure of state-level democratic performance in the United States from 2000 to 2018, Grumbach finds that Republican control of state government “consistently and profoundly reduces state democratic performance during this time period.” The nationalization of American politics and the coordination of parties across states means that “state governments controlled by the same party behave similarly when they take power.” Republican-controlled governments in states as different as Alabama and Wisconsin have “taken similar actions with respect to democratic institutions.”
The Republican Party’s turn against democratic participation and political equality is evident in more than just these bills and proposals. You can see it in how Florida Republicans promptly instituted difficult-to-pay fines and fees akin to a poll tax after a supermajority of the state’s voters approved a constitutional amendment to end the disenfranchisement of most ex-felons. You can see it in how Missouri Republicans simply ignored the results of a ballot initiative on Medicaid expansion.
Where does this all lead? Perhaps it just ends with a few new restrictions and new limits, enough, in conjunction with redistricting, to tilt the field in favor of the Republican Party in the next election cycle but not enough to substantially undermine American democracy. Looking at the 2020 election, however — and in particular at the 147 congressional Republicans who voted not to certify the Electoral College vote — it’s not hard to imagine how this escalates, especially if Trump and his allies are still in control of the party.
If Republicans are building the infrastructure to subvert an election — to make it possible to overturn results or keep Democrats from claiming electoral votes — then we have to expect that given a chance, they’ll use it.
Opinion:How Montgomery County gets young people excited about voting
Lee Rucker Keiser, Bethesda
July 16, 2019
“Young people haven’t established a voting habit yet,” noted University of Wisconsin at Madison political scientist Barry Burden in the July 12 front-page article “Democrats wage legal fights to safeguard the youth vote.” Fortunately, the Montgomery County Board of Elections’ Future Vote program enables youths, starting in sixth grade, to assist as Election Day ambassadors and to assist in pre-Election Day duties, too. Later, on turning 16, youths can register to vote and serve as poll workers and election judges. Our daughter progressed through all Future Vote service phases, sealing her voting habit long before casting her first ballot. Now a summer-matriculated freshman at the University of Michigan, she will be joined there this fall by several other graduates from her high school who, knowing of her Future Vote training, have already asked her about registering to vote in Michigan.
Furthermore, although the article cited narrow election margins only in New Hampshire, Montgomery County’s current county executive won the Democratic primary in June 2018 by 77 votes , and a then-non-incumbent state delegate won a primary in Maryland’s 16th District by only 12 votes. With razor-thin margins in our own backyard, it’s never too early to nurture our children’s civic engagement: In preparation for the 2020 elections, Montgomery County’s next Future Vote recruitment period begins this October.