I am very worried about the “let’s not look in the rearview mirror” impulse in the Biden crowd. Obama and the Democrats famously refused to force accountability for the torture regime and other excesses of the War on Terror or pursue the bankers who caused the 2008 financial crisis, using the excuse that they need to looknforward, not backwards, to fix the problem.

That was a political decision and it was the wrong one. It furthered the culture of impunity that governs right-wing politics today. It simply cannot be allowed to continue or we are well and truly sunk. There must be a public accounting, one way or another.

This piece in The Independent argues for a Crime Commission:

As Donald Trump boards a “white top” Marine helicopter (sans the “Marine One” call sign) to begin his life as a former president, many of his countrymen will be asking themselves one question: Who will be held accountable for four years of scandals, dysfunction, and often flagrant violations of law?

America has found her way back from dark places before. .. But unlike the last Republican president, the list of those facing potential criminal charges includes Trump himself. Not only could a future attorney general conceivably charge an ex-President Donald Trump for any of the multiple instances of obstruction of justice found by former Special Counsel Robert Mueller, he could also find himself in the dock for financial crimes if New York County District Attorney Cyrus Vance finds anything untoward in the tax records he is seeking from Trump and the Trump family business empire.

Biden has already pledged to not follow in the footsteps of Gerald Ford by issuing his predecessor a blanket pardon, and has promised to do “whatever is determined by the attorney general” with respect to any investigation into Trump himself. He has also offered up “an ambitious proposal to ensure that our government works for the people” as evidence of his commitment to restoring trust in government and rebuilding guardrails that have all but eroded under Trump.

But good government advocates, legal experts, and some prominent Democrats say the broad range of alleged violations of law by Trump administration officials and allies, ranging from misuse of government resources for personal gain; to the abuse and mistreatment of persons — including minors — in immigration detention; to obstruction of justice and making false statements to Congress; means a Biden administration effort to simply “turn the page” on the Trump years would be a dangerous concession to lawlessness.

Remarkably, not a single Biden campaign official or adviser contacted by your intrepid correspondent would respond to questions about whether a Biden administration would undertake any effort to look back at the Trump years — either to merely document for posterity any violations of law, or to identify and prosecute administration officials and other government employees who committed illegal acts.

And while Biden’s forward-looking agenda of reforms has generally been well-received in Democratic circles, the lack of a similar plan to look back on the previous four years has set off alarm bells among those some Biden backers who are still smarting over Obama’s “let bygones be bygones” approach to Bush-era abuses.

“It took me a long time to stop being angry about people who committed torture in America’s name walking around free, but I understand why it was a tough call to make at the time,” said one prominent Democratic activist, who requested anonymity so they could speak candidly. “Not having a real, transparent investigation of the abuses that Trump and his cronies have committed would be even worse, because it would tell future presidents and their future appointees that it doesn’t matter how bad they let things get because the next president will just drop it.”

Another prominent Democrat, whose activism centers around immigration policy, suggested the only way for the country to truly put Trump’s “racist and inhumane” immigration enforcement actions behind it is to seek out each and every person involved — from Trump to rank-and-file ICE and Border Patrol agents — and bring them to justice.

“After World War Two, we made Germany go through de-Nazification. We need to put our entire government through ‘de-Trumpification’ and punish every single person who followed Stephen Miller’s illegal orders,” they said.

But Frederick Taylor, author of Exorcising Hitler: The Occupation and De-Nazification of Germany, cautioned that the effort to purge Germany of Nazi influences and bring human rights abusers to justice was one that was imposed on Germans from the outside by a military occupation. Even if a Biden-era Justice Department were to put some Trump administration officials on trial, he suggested that doing so with too heavy a hand could backfire by inspiring resentment among those asked to sit in judgment of their peers.

“That was really, really hard in postwar Germany because the Allies — even the Russians — wanted to involve some locals at some point to give it some legitimacy and give the Germans some sense of agency. But the trouble was, when you did that, a lot of them — even if they didn’t necessarily sympathize with the politics of the people they were asked to stand in judgment of — tended to resent Allied dictation,” he explained.

Any process used to shed light on Trump-era abuses or punish lawbreakers “should not feel imposed, even if it’s a convincing win for Biden and the Democrats control both houses of Congress,” he warned, especially given the potential for a Biden win to energize far-right extremist groups: “You’re going to have to be very careful with how you handle it. If the Democrats have a convincing win on all fronts in November, they will have the power to do these things. But the question is, how do you do it?”

“Even if you bring the evidence in, you do have to legitimize it,” he continued. “The general attitude among many Germans — not just fanatical Nazis, but many Germans — towards the international tribunal in Nuremberg was pretty cynical, ‘victors’ justice’ and all that.”

Taylor added that even in the event that there are no criminal prosecutions of those who may have committed abuses under Trump, there will still need to be a full airing of all the dirty laundry that America has accumulated during his presidency.

“You’ll have to talk about these things. Some people will not want to talk — they’ll just want to yell — but talking is essential, and not necessarily in an absolutely vengeful way,” he said, adding that if Democrats end up controlling Congress in 2021, they may need to enact special legislation to waive many of the provisions in the Presidential Records Act that would allow Trump to block access to his presidential papers.

Democrats, he added, would be “crazy” to not be preparing for the possibility that Trump will attempt to destroy records on his way out of office.

While Taylor cautioned against employing an accountability process that could foment resentment or resistance from Trump’s supporters, George Washington University lecturer and ex-federal prosecutor Glenn Kirschner is already trying to thread that needle.

For some time now, Kirschner has been speaking and writing of the need for a “Trump Crimes Commission” to fully examine the conduct of the previous administration.

Such a commission, Kirschner said, would be a mashup of sorts which combines aspects of the de-Nazification process, and of South Africa’s post-apartheid Truth and Reconciliation Commission.

“It would be a uniquely American response to our uniquely American atrocity,” said Kirshner, who spent three decades prosecuting homicides and racketeering trials in the office of the United States Attorney for the District of Columbia.

Unlike Taylor, Kirschner said worrying about complaints that any attempt to hold Trump administration figures accountable will be political retribution or victor’s justice is a waste of time.

“The criticism will come, and it will be argued that anything that’s done to address the crimes committed during the Trump years is somehow politically motivated revenge or retribution, and that’s absolute horses**t,” he said. “If crimes were going unaddressed because of political reasons, you can’t possibly argue that if you address them in the future, honestly, ethically, and in a nonpartisan way, that somehow you’re doing the wrong thing.”

Kirshner argued that the Biden administration and the next Congress should “stand up a truly independent, nonpartisan or bipartisan commission,” with members and staff drawn from across all three branches of government.

Such a commission, he said, should have broad investigatory powers along the lines of the old Office of Independent Counsel, which was established under the post-Watergate Ethics in Government Act but was allowed to expire after Congress failed to renew the provision in law authorizing it in the wake of Bill Clinton’s impeachment trial.

Former Michigan Representative Bob Carr, who was elected to Congress in 1974 as part of a post-Watergate landslide, agreed that there needs to be a full accounting of the Trump administration’s actions, if not for justice, then for the benefit of history.

“The new administration and the new Congress really should take it very seriously to do an audit of the last four years,” he said. “Of course, the Republicans will scream and holler that this is just political retribution and blah, blah, blah, but if it’s done by the right types of leaders in the Congress and the right kind of people inside the executive branch… in a methodical, professional, relatively low-key kind of way, it could provide … historians … with important facts.”

And while Kirshner would ideally have such an entity undertake a top-to-bottom review of agencies like Immigration and Customs enforcement to find out to what degree rank-and-file employees have been complicit in carrying out unlawful policies, he recognized that civil service laws and the limits of political capital could make that too heavy a lift.

“When it comes to civil servants, how do you go through the agencies that have potentially been complicit in Trump’s crimes… and try to figure out who actively did something that was criminal or that was that punishable by losing your job, versus who just kept their head down and just kept trying to do the honest work of government?” he asked. “I think in a perfect world, we tackle that, but in our world, I think we can probably only hope to hold the most obviously criminal government employees, cabinet members and administration officials accountable for the sort of big-ticket violations of law by investigating fully and figuring out if we have enough evidence to charge them.”

Kirshner agreed with Taylor’s assessment that the usual secrecy afforded to former presidents’ records should be off-limits to Trump and suggested that legislation is needed to open things up.

“I would argue that we need to pass legislation that amends whatever it is that has that has built secrecy into the system, because we used to build secrecy into the system for the right reasons, whether that’s grand jury secrecy or protecting Presidential Records, and now we see how that’s been taken advantage of, and we need to fix it,” he said. “I think where we are as a country, I don’t care about the chaos that might result by opening up the presidential archives on matters that will not impact national security so that the public can see what the heck is going on.”

I will be shocked if we actually do this. There is tremendous reluctance to “criminalizing politics” and since they managed to slither out of the Russia investigation charges, that impulse may perversely be even stronger. The fear of backlash is real. The Trump cult has a lot of guns…

So I don’t know if something this sweeping will happen. But there is some hope that the Congress can open a number of investigations looking back on various crimes and abuses, get relevant documents and at least hold a public accounting of what happened. The Republicans have lost any claim that it’s wrong to do such investigations of a previous administration with their ongoing “investigations of the investigation” that goes back to the Obama years. They cannot complain about the DOJ looking back either, if it comes to that.

I can understand why the Biden people aren’t talking about this in the campaign. But I sure do hope it’s not something they’ve already decided won’t be on the menu. It would be a catastrophic error.

Remember when the Republicans used to say they were the “grownups” and would restore honor and dignity to the White House. Yeah, those were good times.

Today?

The official portraits of former Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush were removed from the Grand Foyer of the White House within the last week, aides told CNN, and replaced by those of two Republican presidents who served more than a century ago.

White House tradition calls for portraits of the most recent American presidents to be given the most prominent placement, in the entrance of the executive mansion, visible to guests during official events. That was the case through at least July 8, when President Donald Trump welcomed Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador. The two stood in the Cross Hall of the White House and made remarks, with the portraits of Clinton and Bush essentially looking on as they had been throughout Trump’s first term.

But in the days after after that, the Clinton and Bush portraits were moved into the Old Family Dining Room, a small, rarely used room that is not seen by most visitors. That places the paintings well outside of Trump’s vantage point in the White House. In their previous location, the pictures would have been seen daily as Trump descends the staircase from his third floor private residence or when he hosts events on the state floor of the White House. Now, they hang in a space used mainly for storing unused tablecloths and furniture.

The portrait of former President Barack Obama is not expected to be unveiled for a formal ceremony during Trump’s first term, a sign of the bitter relationship between the 44th and 45th presidents. Trump has accused Obama of unsubstantiated and unspecified crimes, and has questioned whether Obama was born in the US for years… In his book, former Trump national security adviser John Bolton wrote Trump “despised” both Bush presidents, and people familiar with the conversations say Trump has lambasted George W. Bush as “stupid.”Trump has similarly castigated Clinton, the husband of his 2016 presidential rival, Hillary Clinton, and suggested he was a bad president…

The Bush portrait has been replaced by that of William McKinley, the nation’s 25th president, who was assassinated in 1901, and the Clinton portrait has been replaced by one of Theodore Roosevelt, who succeeded McKinley, three people who have seen the portraits this week tell CNN…

Photographs of the new portrait locations were reviewed by CNN, showing the Clinton and Bush portraits now hanging in the Old Family Dining Room, a small space off the grand State Dining Room. The Old Family Dining Room is barely used in the Trump administration, aides said, and was taken off the list of locations visited during White House tours before the pandemic closed the executive mansion to the public.

“President and Mrs. Trump did not want that room showcased on public tours,” a separate official said, adding that the room had essentially become a storage room during the last three years. The Old Family Dining Room had been renovated in 2015 by Michelle Obama, with donations from the private White House Historical Association, and for the first time was open to public for viewing. The room, which was established by President and Mrs. John Quincy Adams in 1825, was decorated with modern art, including “Resurrection” by Alma Thomas, the first Black female artist to be part of the permanent White House collection.

Of course…

Mary Trump is right. He is a frightened little boy.

Like this one:

The New York Times took a deep dive into the month of April, when the Trump team decided there was no political advantage for them in trying to deal with the virus:

Each morning at 8 as the coronavirus crisis was raging in April, Mark Meadows, the White House chief of staff, convened a small group of aides to steer the administration through what had become a public health, economic and political disaster.

Seated around Mr. Meadows’s conference table and on a couch in his office down the hall from the Oval Office, they saw their immediate role as practical problem solvers. Produce more ventilators. Find more personal protective equipment. Provide more testing.

But their ultimate goal was to shift responsibility for leading the fight against the pandemic from the White House to the states. They referred to this as “state authority handoff,” and it was at the heart of what would become at once a catastrophic policy blunder and an attempt to escape blame for a crisis that had engulfed the country — perhaps one of the greatest failures of presidential leadership in generations.

Over a critical period beginning in mid-April, President Trump and his team convinced themselves that the outbreak was fading, that they had given state governments all the resources they needed to contain its remaining “embers” and that it was time to ease up on the lockdown.

In doing so, he was ignoring warnings that the numbers would continue to drop only if social distancing was kept in place, rushing instead to restart the economy and tend to his battered re-election hopes.

Casting the decision in ideological terms, Mr. Meadows would tell people: “Only in Washington, D.C., do they think that they have the answer for all of America.”

For scientific affirmation, they turned to Dr. Deborah L. Birx, the sole public health professional in the Meadows group. A highly regarded infectious diseases expert, she was a constant source of upbeat news for the president and his aides, walking the halls with charts emphasizing that outbreaks were gradually easing. The country, she insisted, was likely to resemble Italy, where virus cases declined steadily from frightening heights.

On April 11, she told the coronavirus task force in the Situation Room that the nation was in good shape. Boston and Chicago are two weeks away from the peak, she cautioned, but the numbers in Detroit and other hard-hit cities are heading down.

A sharp pivot soon followed, with consequences that continue to plague the country today as the virus surges anew.

Even as a chorus of state officials and health experts warned that the pandemic was far from under control, Mr. Trump went, in a matter of days, from proclaiming that he alone had the authority to decide when the economy would reopen to pushing that responsibility onto the states. The government issued detailed reopening guidelines, but almost immediately, Mr. Trump began criticizing Democratic governors who did not “liberate” their states.

Mr. Trump’s bet that the crisis would fade away proved wrong. But an examination of the shift in April and its aftermath shows that the approach he embraced was not just a misjudgment. Instead, it was a deliberate strategy that he would stick doggedly to as evidence mounted that, in the absence of strong leadership from the White House, the virus would continue to infect and kill large numbers of Americans.

He and his top aides would openly disdain the scientific research into the disease and the advice of experts on how to contain it, seek to muzzle more authoritative voices like Dr. Anthony S. Fauci and continue to distort reality even as it became clear that his hopes for a rapid rebound in the economy and his electoral prospects were not materializing.

Mr. Trump had missed or dismissed mounting signals of the impending crisis in the early months of the year. Now, interviews with more than two dozen officials inside the administration and in the states, and a review of emails and documents, reveal previously unreported details about how the White House put the nation on its current course during a fateful period this spring.

• Key elements of the administration’s strategy were formulated out of sight in Mr. Meadows’s daily meetings, by aides who for the most part had no experience with public health emergencies and were taking their cues from the president. Officials in the West Wing saw the better-known White House coronavirus task force as dysfunctional, came to view Dr. Fauci as a purveyor of dire warnings but no solutions and blamed officials from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention for mishandling the early stages of the virus.
• Dr. Birx was more central than publicly known to the judgment inside the West Wing that the virus was on a downward path. Colleagues described her as dedicated to public health and working herself to exhaustion to get the data right, but her model-based assessment nonetheless failed to account for a vital variable: how Mr. Trump’s rush to urge a return to normal would help undercut the social distancing and other measures that were holding down the numbers.
• The president quickly came to feel trapped by his own reopening guidelines. States needed declining cases to reopen, or at least a declining rate of positive tests. But more testing meant overall cases were destined to go up, undercutting the president’s push to crank up the economy. The result was to intensify Mr. Trump’s remarkable public campaign against testing, a vivid example of how he often waged war with science and his own administration’s experts and stated policies.
• Mr. Trump’s bizarre public statements, his refusal to wear a mask and his pressure on states to get their economies going again left governors and other state officials scrambling to deal with a leadership vacuum. At one stage, Gov. Gavin Newsom of California was told that if he wanted the federal government to help obtain the swabs needed to test for the virus, he would have to ask Mr. Trump himself — and thank him.
• Not until early June did White House officials even begin to recognize that their assumptions about the course of the pandemic had proven wrong. Even now there are internal divisions over how far to go in having officials publicly acknowledge the reality of the situation.

Read on…

This action in Portland is a prelude to more. As tens of thousands of Americans are dying of a deadly virus, Trump has directed his militarized DHS brownshirts to take over the streets of America and roust peaceful protesters in order to protect … buildings and statues:

When asked about calls for an investigation into DHS police tactics in Portland, Oregon, Acting Deputy Secretary of Homeland Security Ken Cuccinelli tells NPR not only are they not going to stop but they want to take the tactics nationwide.

Well, we are – we welcome – the more investigations, the better. With as much lawbreaking is going on, we’re seeking to prosecute as many people as are breaking the law as it relates to federal jurisdiction. That’s not always happening with respect to local jurisdiction and local offenses. But, you know, this is a posture we intend to continue not just in Portland but in any of the facilities that we’re responsible for around the country.

You can’t be surprised. He’s been saying he was going to do this for months.

Remember his phone call to the governors on the Monday after he fouled his trousers and ran to the bunker?

You have to dominate. If you don’t dominate, you’re wasting your time. They’re going to run all over you, you’ll look like a bunch of jerks. You have to dominate, and you have to arrest people, and you have to try people and they have to go to jail for long periods of time. I saw what happened in Philadelphia. I saw what happened in Dallas where they kicked a guy to death. I don’t know if he died or not but if he didn’t, it’s a miracle, what they did to him, they were kicking him like I’ve never seen anything like it in my life.

They don’t talk about that, they talk about a lot of other things but they don’t talk about that but I saw what happened in Dallas and those kids, they’re all on camera, they’re wiseguys. And it’s coming from the radical left, you know it, everybody knows it, but it’s also looters, and it’s people that figure they can get free stuff by running into stores and running out with television sets. I saw it, a kid get a lot of stuff, he puts it in the back of a brand new car and drives off.

You have every one of these guys on tape, why aren’t you prosecuting them? Now the harder you are, the tougher you are, the less likely it is that you’re going to be hit. This is a movement. We found out they’re delivering supplies to various place in various states, your people know about it now. But we found out many things, it’s like a movement, and it’s a movement that if you don’t put it down, it’ll get worse and worse, this is like Occupy Wall Street. It was a disaster until one day, somebody said, that’s enough and they just went in and wiped them out and that’s the last time we ever heard the name Occupy Wall Street, until today when I heard about it, I heard Occupy Wall Street. I haven’t heard about it, I heard about it today for the first time in a long time. They were they forever it seemed on wall street. they closed up Wall Street, the financial district of the world, total domination, they were ordering pizzas, nobody did anything.

And then one day somebody said that’s enough, you’re getting out of here within two hours, and then after that everything was beautiful and that was the last time we heard about it. These are the same people. These are radicals and they’re anarchists. They’re anarchists, whether you like it or not, I know some of you guys are different persuasions and that’s OK. I fully understand that. I understand both. I’m for everybody. I’m representing everybody, I’m not representing — radical right radical left — I’m representing everybody but you have to know what you’re dealing with. But it’s happened before, it’s happened numerous times. And the only time it’s successful is when you’re weak. And most of you are weak.

And I will say this, what’s going on in Los Angeles — I have a friend who lives in Los Angeles. They say all the storefronts are gone. They’re all broken and gone. The merchandise is gone. It’s a shame. It didn’t look as bad as that to me, maybe it was the sunshine, I don’t know. But in Los Angeles, the storefronts are gone. Philadelphia’s a mess, Philadelphia, what happened there is horrible. And that was on television, they’re breaking into stores and nobody showed up to even stop them. There was no — nobody showed up to stop them. Washington, they had large groups, very large groups, they attacked the AFL-CIO building. So they attacked (INAUDIBLE) friends, which is very interesting. But Washington was under great control. But we’re going to have it under much more control. We’re pouring in — we’re going to pull in thousands of people (INAUDIBLE) of the DC police, the mayor, the mayor of Washington DC and Secret Service did a very good job around the White House but their sole, their primary function is around the White House.

But and we’re going to clamp down very, very strong. And you better arrest (INAUDIBLE) — and you’ll never see this stuff again and you’ll have to let them know that. They’re trying to get people out on bail in Minneapolis. I understand they’re out there trying to get all these guys out on bail. So you have them on tape. You have them on television. In history, there’s never been anybody taped so much committing a crime. You have these guys throwing rocks, they show them last night on one of the stations on one of the networks throwing a big brick, and they had him in slow motion replay. Like it’s like a fielder. Catching a ball or throwing a ball you have the slow motion replay, you see exactly who he is, everybody knows.

You have everybody on tape, you gotta arrest all those people, you gotta try them. And if they get five years or ten years, they have to get five years or ten years. There’s no retribution. So I say that and the word is dominate. If you don’t dominate your city and your state, they’re gonna walk away with you. And we’re doing it in Washington, in DC, we’re going to do something that people haven’t seen before. But we’re going to have total domination. 

If you read that whole transcript you’ll see that Bill Barr, Mark Esper and General Milley were there pimping for the DOJ and the Pentagon getting involved. Barr was laying the legal groundwork under the terrorist statutes,. But where was Chad Wolf the acting Secretary of Homeland Security? He wasn’t on that call.

There was a lot of blowback for that call and the actions they took shortly afterward in Lafayette Park. The military balked and even Bill Barr decided he didn’t want to be left holding this bag. So, it appears that DHS has stepped into the breach, gladly taking up the banner of domination and running with it.

I think we knew that when they named that new police agence “The Department of Homeland Security” that it would eventually come to this, didn’t we?

People use that word a lot. But John Lewis was the real thing, a legit American hero who changed the world and kept the faith through all the years that followed. Nothing made me more livid in this life than to see him disrespected, whether from the left or the right. (Yes, it happened from the left — and it was disgusting.) But he never lost his poise and his grace, no matter what. A lesson for us all.

It’s a gut punch to lose him, even though we knew it was coming and, as with all of us, was inevitable.

I don’t have the words today to do him justice so I’ll leave you with this lovely tribute from … Joe Biden.

We are made in the image of God, and then there is John Lewis.

How could someone in flesh and blood be so courageous, so full of hope and love in the face of so much hate, violence, and vengeance? Perhaps it was the Spirit that found John as a young boy in the Deep South dreaming of preaching the social gospel; the work ethic his sharecropper parents instilled in him and that stayed with him; the convictions of nonviolent civil disobedience he mastered from Dr. King and countless fearless leaders in the movement; or the abiding connection with the constituents of Georgia’s 5th District he loyally served for decades.

Or perhaps it was that he was truly a one-of-a-kind, a moral compass who always knew where to point us and which direction to march.

It is rare to meet and befriend our heroes. John was that hero for so many people of every race and station, including us. He absorbed the force of human nature’s cruelty during the course of his life, and the only thing that could finally stop him was cancer. But he was not bitter. We spoke to him a few days ago for the final time. His voice still commanded respect and his laugh was still full of joy. Instead of answering our concerns for him, he asked about us. He asked us to stay focused on the work left undone to heal this nation. He was himself — a man at peace, of dignity, grace and character.

John’s life reminds us that the most powerful symbol of what it means to be an American is what we do with the time we have to make real the promise of our nation — that we are all created equal and deserve to be treated equally. Through the beatings, the marches, the arrests, the debates on war, peace, and freedom, and the legislative fights for good jobs and health care and the fundamental right to vote, he taught us that while the journey toward equality is not easy, we must be unafraid and never cower and never, ever give up.

That is the charge a great American and humble man of God has left us. For parents trying to answer their children’s questions about what to make of the world we are in today, teach them about John Lewis. For the peaceful marchers for racial and economic justice around the world who are asking where we go from here, follow his lead. For his fellow legislators, govern by your conscience like he did, not for power or party. He was our bridge — to our history so we did not forget its pain and to our future so we never lose our hope.

To John’s son, John Miles, and to his family, friends, staff, and constituents, we send you our love and prayers. Thank you for sharing him with the nation and the world.

And to John, march on, dear friend. May God bless you. May you reunite with your

beloved Lillian. And may you continue to inspire righteous good trouble down from the Heavens.

There are so many pictures of John Lewis’ heroism during the civil rights movement. But these are my favorites:

Paranoia strikes deep
Into your life it will creep
It starts when you’re always afraid
You step out of line, the man come and take you away
“For What It’s Worth” by Stephen Stills (1966), inspired by the “Sunset Strip riots.”

MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow asked Mary Trump (“Too Much and Never Enough“) Thursday night what her uncle Donald might do if he loses the November election. She might have asked what the acting president might do to ensure he does not lose.

How might Trump cheat thee? Rolling Stone’s Andy Kroll counts the ways. Including Trump’s setting expectations for his base that, should he lose, it was Democrats and who-knows-who voting illegally by mail that stole his righteous victory.

Republicans plan massive investments this year in rooting out supposed “voter fraud,” including $20 million on lawsuits aimed at stopping Democratic efforts to make voting easier and safer during the coronavirus pandemic. Rick Hasen, a University of California, Irvine law professor and proprietor of Election Law Blog, says they have a simple goal: “Casting doubt on the legitimacy of the election. Raising spurious fraud claims.”

On cue, the Washington Post reports this:

A spokeswoman for the Republican National Committee said that attempts to “forcibly implement” policies that make it easier to vote absentee will “destroy public confidence in the integrity of our elections.”

Which is a strange complaint. Republicans have worked assiduously for decades to do just that.

Kroll notes that this is the first presidential election in 40 years that Republicans will not be restrained by the 1982 consent decree signed to resolve a case brought by Democrats over voter intimidation tactics the GOP deployed in the 1981 governor’s race in New Jersey:

On November 3rd, 1981, Lynette Monroe, who lived in northwest Trenton, headed out to her polling place. It was Election Day in New Jersey. When Monroe, a Democrat, arrived at the polling site, she was stopped outside by a member of a group called the National Ballot Security Task Force. Monroe was asked if she had her voter-registration card with her. She said she did not but that it didn’t matter — she was a registered voter. But the National Ballot Security Task Force members “turned her away, preventing her from casting her ballot,” according to a lawsuit later filed by the Democratic Party, Monroe, and several others.

When she was turned away, Monroe had no way of knowing that the National Ballot Security Task Force was a massive voter-suppression project funded and carried out by the Republican National Committee and the New Jersey Republican Party. Republicans hired county deputy sheriffs and local policemen with revolvers, two-way radios, and “National Ballot Security Task Force” armbands to patrol predominantly black and Hispanic precincts in New Jersey. They posted large warning signs outside polling places saying that it was “a crime to falsify a ballot or to violate election laws.” The signs omitted any mention of the GOP’s role in this egregious intimidation scheme, but the intent was obvious: “to harass and intimidate duly qualified black and Hispanic voters for the purpose and with the effect of discouraging these voters from casting their ballots,” the lawsuit stated.

Listen to more on this saga from WNYC.

I’ve written about the RNC’s voter fraud campaign and consent decree multiple times, and about the March 2012 opinion of the United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit. Judge Joseph Greenaway wrote in denying the RNC’s appeal, “If the RNC does not hope to engage in conduct that would violate the Decree, it is puzzling that the RNC is pursuing vacatur so vigorously …”

Now that the decree has expired, Justin Clark, a senior Trump 2020 campaign attorney told a group of Republicans at a private meeting in November that the consent decree’s demise was “a huge, huge, huge, huge deal.” He told them, Kroll writes, that “it frees the RNC to directly coordinate with campaigns and political committees on so-called Election Day operations.”

For massive voter-suppression this coming Election Day, the events this week in Portland make New Jersey cops in armbands look like pikers. Might Portland be a trial run?

USA Today’s headline Friday night: ‘Secret police force’: Feds reportedly pull Portland protesters into unmarked vehicles, stirring outrage

“It’s like stop and frisk meets Guantanamo Bay,” said civil rights attorney Juan Chavez. “You have laws regarding probable cause…. [This] sounds more like abduction. It sounds like they’re kidnapping people off the streets.”

Recall that Italy in 2009 convicted 23 CIA operatives (Americans) in absentia for involvement in abducting a Muslim cleric off the street in Milan in 2003. Several men dragged him into in an unmarked van. They “rendered” Abu Omar to Egypt where he claimed he was tortured.

Authoritarian governments, not democratic republics, send unmarked authorities after protesters. These Trump/Barr tactics designed to eliminate any accountability are absolutely unacceptable in America, and must end. pic.twitter.com/PE4YfZ9Vqd

— Senator Jeff Merkley (@SenJeffMerkley) July 16, 2020

If Trump gets away with this, Portland could end up a template for intimidating voters in blue cities in swing states, say, around Election Day. Before Trump, I might have considered that tinfoil hat territory.

But Election Day is just the denouement. For warm-ups, the president and his team are working to ensure the U.S. Postal Service’s ability to deliver those mailed ballots Trump distrusts is severely impaired (Paul Waldman):

For most of his time in office, President Trump has attacked and criticized the U.S. Postal Service, for reasons that range from the bizarre to the intensely personal. And lately, he has been waging a crusade against voting by mail, apparently out of the mistaken belief that it inherently benefits Democrats.

These two Trump wars — against the USPS and against mail voting — may be coming together to produce an election nightmare come November.

Have you noticed a slowdown in your mail delivery recently? Letters taking longer to reach you? Some days when you don’t get mail at all? If you have, you’re not alone. And that’s where our story starts.

Bottom line: If your state has a deadline for your vote-by-mail or absentee-by-mail ballot to arrive at the Board of Elections, DO NOT WAIT to mail it. Seriously, if you are reading this blog, are you really going to change your mind on candidates between the time your ballot arrives at your home and Election Day? Fill it out. Mail it back as soon as possible. Or don’t mail it at all. Place it in a nearby drop box. I plan on depositing mine in the drop box at the local Board office weeks ahead of Election Day.

To repeat:

We need to “flatten the curve” on how and when people vote this fall. Expand absentee voting as early as practicable to relieve pressure on in-person voting methods. COVID-19 means we expect to have trouble staffing polling places. Expanded use of absentee ballots means reducing lines and the risk of infection for early- and election-day voters. Think of it as a democratic strategic triad.

The Trump administration’s new postmaster general has eliminated overtime. If there aren’t enough hours in the day to handle today’s mail, it will sit until tomorrow. As ballots pile up … you get the idea.

Waldman again:

You may have heard that we need to be prepared for the vote count to take longer this year; because mail ballots take longer to process and there will be so many more of them, it could be a couple of days before we know who won the presidential election.

That’s bad enough, but we now face a situation in which hundreds of thousands of Americans could find their ballots tossed in the trash — which could not only interfere with the election, but also make people angry at the Postal Service itself. And that would make Trump very happy.

The Associated Press has more on Trump’s assault on the Postal Service.

● ● ● ● ● ● ● ●

For The Win, 3rd Edition is ready for download. Request a copy of my free countywide GOTV mechanics guide at ForTheWin.us. This is what winning looks like.
Note: The pandemic will upend standard field tactics in 2020. If enough promising “improvisations” come my way, perhaps I can issue a COVID-19 supplement.

Awwww:

I think I’ll have an ice cold shot of Vodka tonight. In her honor …

Update:

Trump has been saying over and over again since George Floyd was murdered, “if cities won’t deal with protesters, I will.” Bill Barr declared war on “Antifa” and blamed it for the violence and looting in the early days of the protests.

Guess what? They meant it.

“Pettibone declined and said he wanted a lawyer. The interview was terminated, and about 90 minutes later he was released. He said he did not receive any paperwork, citation or record of his arrest.”

When you’ve lost Ruth Marcus….

“Congress shall make no law … abridging the freedom of speech … or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”

Something terrible, something dangerous — and, yes, something unconstitutional — is happening in Portland, Ore. It must be stopped.

“Federal law enforcement officers have been using unmarked vehicles to drive around downtown Portland and detain protesters since at least July 14,” reports Oregon Public Broadcasting. “Personal accounts and multiple videos posted online show the officers driving up to people, detaining individuals with no explanation of why they are being arrested, and driving off.”

The report continues: “The tactic appears to be another escalation in federal force deployed on Portland city streets, as federal officials and President Donald Trump have said they plan to ‘quell’ nightly protests outside the federal courthouse and Multnomah County Justice Center that have lasted for more than six weeks.”AD

Of course, authorities — and we’ll get to the matter of what authorities in a bit — have the power to prevent violence. But that doesn’t seem to be what’s happening in Portland, where nightly protests have been taking place since early June. Law enforcement agents aren’t targeting protesters who engaged in violence; they appear to be sweeping up random people who have exercised their rights under the First Amendment. […]

This is not America.

As much as I revile what President Trump is doing to the country, I have not been among the alarmists who warn of incipient authoritarianism, of festering fascism. I believe — I have believed, anyway — in the rule of law; the steadfastness of the courts, even larded with Trump-appointed judges; the strong tradition of the U.S. military refraining from being used to serve partisan interests. But to have watched live as federal agents attacked peaceful protesters near Lafayette Square, and now to read the reports from Portland, is to worry: Perhaps that was over-optimistic.

This is not America because of the First Amendment, quoted above. It is not America because we are a federal system, something you would think Republicans, who supposedly believe in states’ rights, understand and respect. So we are a country in which governors can summon federal help, are authorized to call out the National Guard — not a country in which unbadged federal police are loosed upon innocent citizens of a state over the objections of its governor. In this case, Oregon Gov. Kate Brown, joined by Portland Mayor Ted Wheeler, who have beseeched the feds to leave.

Yes, President Dwight D. Eisenhower deployed federal troops to Arkansas. That was to protect black students attempting to integrate Central High School in Little Rock, and to enforce a federal court order. It was to protect the students’ constitutional rights, not undermine them.

“This political theater from President Trump has nothing to do with public safety,” Brown, a Democrat, said in a statement. “Deploying federal officers to patrol the streets of Portland” is “a blatant abuse of power by the federal government,” she said, adding that Chad Wolf, acting secretary of homeland security, who visited the city on Thursday, “is on a mission to provoke confrontation for political purposes. He is putting both Oregonians and local law enforcement officers in harm’s way.”

Wolf, for his part, said Portland “has been under siege for 47 straight days by a violent mob while local political leaders refuse to restore order to protect their city. Each night, lawless anarchists destroy and desecrate property, including the federal courthouse, and attack the brave law enforcement officers protecting it.”

But Wolf’s list of terrible depredations allegedly committed by the Portland protesters was less than convincing — and, in any event, in no way justified the kind of random, unprovoked arrests that have been described.

Supposedly, Antifa doxed members of law enforcement, they threw objects at the courthouse, spray painted it and lit some fireworks. They also destroyed a card reader at the Justice Center.

Now go back and watch those videos up above to see the insane overreaction.

Marcus continues:

There is a difference between solving a legitimate problem (the destruction of public property) and picking a political fight. Trump, understandably terrified of losing reelection, appears intent on doing the latter. “A federal courthouse is a symbol of justice — to attack it is to attack America,” Wolf thundered in his statement.

But there is a more important symbol of justice than a brick-and-mortar building.

It is called the Constitution. To ignore it is to attack America.

Those protesters should have sold out the country to the Russian government instead. We know that’s perfectly fine.

I haven’t weighed in on the latest conflagration over “cancel culture” because well, life is short and I don’t think it’s the most important issue facing us at the moment. I just don’t have the bandwidth at the moment.

However, others have and I think Michael Tomasky’s piece in the Daily Beast matches my basic feeling about this:

Liberals, conservatives love to say, live in a bubble. Every time something like this Bari Weiss thing happens, the cry goes up to the heavens: Look at these Stalinist liberals, enforcing their world view on poor conservatives, stifling voices, silencing opposing points of view even as they claim to believe in open dialogue, the hypocrites!

There is, obviously, some truth to the fact that both sides live in bubbles these days. But while we spend hours upon hours and tweets upon tweets investigating and dissecting the liberal bubble, it somehow almost never occurs to people to examine the conservative one.

So let’s examine it. And if we do, we see that it is far, far more insular and intolerant than the liberal bubble. And worse, we see that they get away with it simply because they never even try, never even feint toward balance. They’re con artists pure and simple.

Let’s look at some basic numbers. The New York Times (where, by the way, I am a contributing opinion writer, part of the larger stable of occasional, non-employee contributors) has three regular conservative oped columnists—David Brooks, Ross Douthat, and Bret Stephens. The Washington Post has five regularly appearing conservatives: George Will, Michael Gerson, Mark Thiessen, Kathleen Parker, and Megan McArdle. Pro-Trumpers will quibble that some of these no longer count as “conservative,” but come on: They were all hired as conservatives, and they sure aren’t liberals.

This point does illustrate the larger reality that these things can be complicated. Is Brooks still a conservative in the same sense Stephens is? Not really. And what about someone like Elizabeth Bruenig of the Times? She’s a socialist—but also pro-life. What’s she?

So these things can be complicated, but if we think about it in the most general terms, it’s more than fair to say that the Times has three conservatives, and the Post has five.

Meanwhile, let’s look at our country’s best-known conservative newspapers. There are three that have national audiences and are avowedly conservative in outlook: The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Times, and the New York Post.  

How many liberals do they have? Three each, like the Times? OK, two each, maybe?

No. One. Among them. Total. The Journal  has one, and the other two have zero.

The Journal’s house liberal is William Galston of the Brookings Institution. Bill is a friend of mine and an extremely smart man. He was a leading “New Democrat” thinker back in the Clinton days. Indeed he is rightly proud of the role he played in helping to provide the intellectual framework that succeeded in electing the first Democratic president in 12 years back in 1992 (that those ideas are out of favor now is a different point, and Bill himself is not in the same ideological place he was then).

So the Journal has one person representing non-Journal points of view on a consistent basis. That’s less than the Times or the Post, but hey, it is more than zero. 

And yet, I’m sure all of these outlets have teed off on the Times in self-righteous ways. Talk about glass houses—and hypocrisy! The imbalance here is insane. The liberal newspapers at least try. The right-wing papers don’t pretend to try. And then, when a liberal newspaper tries and slips up, the right-wing papers unfurl their mighty swords of justice and cry “Aha!”

Well, to paraphrase Randy Newman, I laugh at their mighty sword. These people are a joke. There was Hugh Hewitt in The Washington Post Thursday taking the Times to task. A… no, not merely a conservative; a pro-Trump right-winger, writing in a liberal newspaper! Gee, Hugh, how’d you ever get that platform? And what explains why I see you on MSNBC on a regular basis—left-wing intolerance? 

It’s nonsense. It’s the same thing with these campus controversies. Yes, sometimes a conservative is invited to speak at a liberal school, and he or she is attacked in some way or prevented from speaking, and I do not defend that. I have nothing but scorn for that.

But again—at least they are asked. Meanwhile, ponder this: When was the last time Liberty University invited, oh, Paul Krugman to lecture there, or Katha Pollitt, or Ta-Nehisi Coates, or Jennifer Finney Boylan? I haven’t studied this  lately, so my information could be old, but I did snoop around this question a couple years ago out of curiosity, and the answer then was what I’d reckon it probably still is now. Never. 

At least Berkeley asked Anne Coulter, and after one cancellation, she spoke. Lamentable unpleasantness ensued, which again, I do not defend in the slightest. But she did speak. And the Ivies, to say nothing of your basic land-grant universities, are constantly having conservative speakers. I was a fellow at the Kennedy School in 2003, and the list of speakers went out every day, and I can tell you, there were loads of conservatives, almost as many as liberals at times. There weren’t protests. But “Conservative Speaks on Liberal Campus Without Incident” isn’t news and doesn’t give Fox a cheap excuse to tee off on favorite targets. And yet it happened. All. The. Time.

But right-wing schools by and large don’t even ask people on the left to speak, and they get away with it because no one even expects them to operate according to the same standards. Yes, Liberty did have Bernie Sanders, and that’s to the school’s credit (and no doubt they’ll dine out on that one for years), but it was just once, and anyway, he was a candidate for president, a politician, which is a different thing from an intellectual. Politicians traffic in positions and slogans. Intellectuals traffic in ideas. Obviously, right-wing institutions don’t feel they even need to hear liberal ideas. And sorry, but the opposite is emphatically not true.

Now, I suppose conservatives would counter this—if indeed they would admit to the imbalance in the first place—by saying the thing they always say about well, you liberals, you own the mainstream media, we’re entitled to our own little patch of Earth. I could sympathize with that, a little, except that one of the arguments always lodged against the Times is that a newspaper has an obligation to serve the broad community and represent a diversity of views. Which The Washington Times and New York Post make zero effort to do, and The Wall Street Journal barely does. And it’s kind of hard to argue that there aren’t any Democrats in their cities.

As usual, it’s a racket, this right-wing attack on liberal intolerance. Bari Weiss is no martyr to anything. The Times and the Post try harder than the right-wing papers to publish diverse views. The whole line of argument is just an ideological working of the refs. Don’t fall for it. 

I gotcher cancel culture right here:

If you are looking for some other thoughtful commentary on this, I recommend this piece by Michelle Goldberg and this one by Jill Filipovic.

I don’t mean t dismiss this issue. It’s real and it’s complicated. But seeing Ivanka have a hissy fit that she’s a victim of “cancel culture” because she was criticized for breaking the law when she endorsed Goya products as a White House employee shows how the right is weaponizing the issue. And right now, they are the number one threat to justice, liberty and equality.

.

Cook Political Report: 20 Races Move Towards Democrats

President Trump’s abysmal polling since the pandemic began is seriously jeopardizing down-ballot GOP fortunes. We may be approaching the point at which dozens of House Republicans will need to decide whether to cut the president loose and run on a “check and balance” message, offering voters insurance against congressional Democrats moving too far left under a potential Biden administration.

Trump now trails Joe Biden by nine points in the FiveThirtyEight average, roughly matching Democrats’ average lead on the generic congressional ballot and seven points larger than his 2016 popular vote deficit. But because there are plenty of solidly blue urban districts where Trump didn’t have much room to fall in the first place, his decline is especially acute in swing suburban districts with lots of college graduates.

Republicans began the cycle hoping to pick up 18 seats to win the majority back. Now they’re just trying to avoid a repeat of 2008, when they not only lost the presidency but got swamped by Democrats’ money and lost even more House seats after losing 30 seats and control two years earlier. For the first time this cycle, Democrats have at least as good a chance at gaining House seats as Republicans on a net basis.

This week, we’re shifting our ratings in 20 races, all reflecting movement towards Democrats. View our full ratings here.

That’s assuming we all don’t die in the meantime. But still, hopeful news.