That’s an evergreen quote in the Trump era, of course. But it’s particularly apt for this Supreme Court confirmation hearing. Any person with integrity would refuse to allow their confirmation to be rammed through under these circumstances. Coney Barrett does not have integrity. Obviously.
We know that Leonard Leo and the Federalist Society is behind this of course. Guess what else they are behind? Slate’s Rick Hasen and Dahlia Lithwick have this:
According to new reporting from the Guardian and OpenSecrets, Leo, Carrie Severino of the Judicial Crisis Network, and their dark-money backers are promoting the Orwellian-named “Honest Elections Project” to pressure elections administrators to limit access to the ballot and to undermine trust in elections. The messaging echoes Trump’s baseless claims that various states’ efforts to let people vote by mail are fraudulent—and turns these lies into policy. “The project announced it was spending $250,000 in advertisements in April, warning against voting by mail and accusing Democrats of cheating,” the Guardian explained. “It facilitated letters to election officials in Colorado, Florida, and Michigan, using misleading data to accuse jurisdictions of having bloated voter rolls and threatening legal action. Calling voter suppression a ‘myth,’ it has also been extremely active in the courts, filing briefs in favor of voting restrictions in Nevada, Virginia, Texas, Wisconsin, and Minnesota, among other places, at times represented by lawyers from the same firm that represents Trump.
Whitehouse told us, in an email, that “while Republican-appointed justices on the Supreme Court deliver decisions greenlighting GOP voter suppression, Leo and his network mobilize to tip elections by making it harder for people to vote. We’ve seen this mischief in the records of judges Leo and his dark money groups have packed onto the federal bench; now he’s mounting a direct dark-money assault on the American voter.”
It almost goes without saying at this juncture, but we will say it again: The idea that voter fraud in the United States is widespread has been debunked many times. There’s so little evidence to support the claims that the true aim of such chatter must be to use lies to make it harder for people likely to vote for Democrats to register and vote. The reality is that some Republicans have turned to suppressing the vote—by voter roll purges, voter disenfranchisement, voter intimidation, and the closing of polling places—when they fear they cannot win an election fairly. It is also not in dispute that vote by mail is not rife with fraud, that many states already allow for no-excuse vote by mail, and that attempts to stop the franchise by discouraging mail-in voting are simply the newest flavor of vote suppression for the pandemic era. That’s why the president is dementedly tweeting about it, even as he is being debunked in real time. And that’s why Leonard Leo and his confederates are directing untraceable dark money away from the judge-picking business and into the apparently booming vote-suppression business.
Of course they are doing this. The dynamic duo of McConnell and the orange clown who will sign anything they tell him to sign has been hugely successful to their project. They would love to have four more years to send the country back to some pre-civil war era of white, male supremacy and unfettered capitalism. And they could do it. In fact, they may already have if the Democrats don’t summon the will and the grit to rebalance our courts and return the nation to a democratic republic in which the people choose their leaders.