This guy was a Texas Supreme Court Justice before he became a US Senator. As Trump used to say: sad!
"what digby sez..."
Month: April 2021
Lol!
As Donald Trump settles into his role as a semi-retired, failed former president, he and his team continue to construct a growing political machine. For example, Trump already has a leadership PAC, ironically called “Save America,” which is raising a ton of largely regulated money for the Republican. He also has Mar-a-Lago, which for many in the party, has become the center of the GOP’s world.
Stephen Miller, meanwhile, has apparently created a new legal operation called “America First Legal,” and Axios reported yesterday that several veterans of Team Trump are moving forward with plans to create something resembling a D.C. think tank.
A constellation of Trump administration stars today will launch the America First Policy Institute, a 35-person nonprofit group with a first-year budget of $20 million and the mission of perpetuating former President Trump’s populist policies…. Two top Trump alumni tell me AFPI is by far the largest pro-Trump outside group, besides Trump’s own Florida-based machine. In the coming months, the group plans to take a large office space near the U.S. Capitol as a symbol that it’ll fight to be a muscular, well-heeled center of the future of conservatism.
The operation will reportedly be led by Brooke Rollins, who led the Domestic Policy Council in Trump’s White House, though the former president is also directly involved: Axios’ report added that Rollins met with Trump at Mar-a-Lago last week to discuss the group’s future.
The America First Policy Institute’s roster is filled with all sorts of familiar names: Linda McMahon, who led Trump’s Small Business Administration, will serve as chair, working alongside Larry Kudlow, who’ll serve the vice chair.
Meanwhile, John Ratcliffe, the troubled former DNI, will help steer the organization’s focus on national security; Pam Bondi, the controversial former Florida attorney general, will focus on legal and justice issues; and Paula White-Cain, a controversial televangelist, will reportedly head the institute’s Center for American Values.
Part of the problem with this is the question of whether any of these Republican voices are qualified to help guide “the future of conservatism,” but I’m also stuck on a more foundational question:
Why in the world would veterans of Team Trump need a “policy institute”? The group’s mission is to perpetuate the former president “policies,” which sounds vaguely interesting until one realizes that the former president doesn’t really have any policies.
Whenever Trump would try to come up with something resembling a governing agenda, it quickly became obvious that he had poorly thought-out whims, which contradicted the agenda of those around him, which were impractical and borderline illegal and which he’d routinely abandon based on random segments he saw on Fox News.
With this in mind, the America First Policy Institute may soon have tens of millions of dollars, but I haven’t the foggiest idea what its staffers will do all day.
No doubt they’ll be looking for ways to maximize their incomes and please Dear Leader. That’s about it.
The following tweet thread discusses a very depressing study that found any talk of the racial disparities in COVID made racists more determined to resist mitigation strategies and believe they were being trod upon by the Big Gummint, presumably because those strategies would help Blacks.
It’s the same as it ever was. These racists have always denied themselves benefits if they think they might also benefit “those people.” And it appears they are even be prepared to die rather than do anything that helps them.
Disseminating info about racial disparities in #COVID deaths polarized risk perceptions and policy preferences. This potentially tragic conclusion from experimental study (w @allisonharell) just out in @socscimed https://doi.org/10.1016/j.socscimed.2021.113884. @CIFAR_News @EGAPTweets @dsallentess
Most troubling, among Whites with neg views of Af Americans, info about higher black death rates caused them to perceive lower risk, to oppose strong govt responses, and to perceive their liberties were being trampled. @LACPOP @maqartan @alondra @michele_norris
On the flip side, the same info caused Af Americans to perceive greater risks of infection (if they weren’t already aware); and caused Whites with positive views of Af Americans to become more supportive of COVID policies. @JosephHarrisBU @MITPoliSci
Our study says nothing about the potentially critical value of collecting race-related health data for planning and targeting campaigns.
But it does highlight that in our racially-divided society, putting a focus on racial disparities leads to a mix of empathy and polarization. Simply documenting and publicizing inequalities is not sufficient to generate needed solidarity.
Racism continues to be a serious threat to American public health. Thanks @lab_diversity @alex_scacco @chagaiweiss, others in IGR group for feedback.
Originally tweeted by Evan Lieberman (@evlieb) on April 14, 2021.
There’s some good news in that the information about the disparities did make non-racist white people more inclined to follow the strategies, which is a relief. I know that it made me even more vigilant. But damn, that shouldn’t even be a question.
But I think the big unanswered question is how many of those white racists who decided that their “liberty” was infringed because they didn’t believe they should have to wear a mask because the virus was hitting black people harder actually reveled in the idea that they might spread the disease to them. Honestly, I think it’s possible that there were quite a few.
“It’s a f—ing nightmare.”
That was the lament of a staffer working for one of the members of the so-called G-10, the group of 10 Republican senators who insist they’re itching to negotiate deals with the White House.
In the span of a few months, the G-10 has gone from the center of politics in DONALD TRUMP’S Washington to the policy sidelines in President JOE BIDEN’S.
While these senators mostly despised Trump, they were the engine of policymaking for his final Covid relief bill. While they mostly respect Biden, they have so far been irrelevant to his legislative push despite his inaugural promise of “unity.”
It’s been a bewildering change for them. And if you want to understand both why Biden is winning and why his so-far successful formula could be in jeopardy, it’s worth listening closely to the voices within this frustrated and marginalized group of self-proclaimed dealmakers.
Back to the nightmare. It starts with what they see as some hardwired media narratives they can’t shake: that Biden is a reasonable, deal-making moderate and that Republicans talk about compromise but really just want to obstruct. It’s a perception that has given the White House all the leverage.
“Biden is a horrible villain for us,” said the G-10 staffer, meaning not that he was an actual villain but that he was difficult to villainize. “There are deeply entrenched narratives that have some truth but are no longer totally true. Reporters believe them despite all evidence to the contrary.”
They see a White House “constantly rubbing dirt in the face of Republicans” over the party’s lack of interest in bipartisanship while “passing as many partisan bills as they possibly can through reconciliation before they lose the House in 2022.”
Two episodes stand out to them. The first was when they were invited to the White House to discuss the Covid relief bill in February. It was intoxicating. They finally had both a normal president, one who understood the Senate better than any president since LBJ, and one who recognized the G-10 as the center of power in Congress. The staffer joked that they were so giddy about the meeting that they had to be told to “calm down” and “play it cool.”
But the next day, Senate Majority Leader CHUCK SCHUMER announced the outlines of a plan to pass the bill with just 50 votes. “You do one meeting and 24 hours later they prepare the reconciliation process,” another G-10 staffer complained.
The second episode came last week, when Biden said the 10 senators “didn’t move an inch” off of their initial proposal during the Covid talks. On the eve of fresh negotiations over infrastructure, the president, in their view, was attacking them disingenuously. In a flurry of phone calls among the senators, they vented their outrage and plotted a response.
It can take days for a group of senators to agree on anything, but the 10 of them put out a statement a few hours later respectfully but firmly correcting Biden. “The Administration roundly dismissed our effort as wholly inadequate in order to justify its go-it-alone strategy,” it said in part. It didn’t receive much coverage.
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THE NEXT DILEMMA — They are now debating internally how to approach the Biden jobs bill. Their big fear is being used as “props” or “window dressing” at the next White House meeting.
“If you get an invitation to the White House, you go to the White House. But regardless, you’re damned if you do and damned if you don’t,” said another G-10 staffer. “When you go to the White House meeting you risk being used in a feigned attempt at bipartisanship. If you don’t go then it’s, ‘Oh, Republicans won’t even meet with me.’ It all pivots on whether it’s a genuine offer from the White House or just part of their messaging strategy.”
Another staffer for one of the group of 10 senators was resigned to a replay of the Covid bill: “You would be hard pressed to find anyone on our side of the aisle that thinks this will end up any differently than last time.”
The staffer who lamented the nightmare of it all had a grudging respect for how effectively Biden had played things so far.
“Everything they support is defined as either Covid relief or infrastructure, and everything they oppose is like … Jim Crow voter suppression and evil,” this G-10 aide said. “And you constantly just feel like you’re in this gaslighting chamber of insanity. But it’s working.”
The “G-10” senators are: SHELLEY MOORE CAPITO of West Virginia, BILL CASSIDY of Louisiana, SUSAN COLLINS of Maine, JERRY MORAN of Kansas, LISA MURKOWSKI of Alaska, ROB PORTMAN of Ohio, MITT ROMNEY of Utah, MIKE ROUNDS of South Dakota, THOM TILLIS of North Carolina and TODD YOUNG of Indiana.
WHY IT’S WORKING — Our latest POLITICO/Morning Consult poll suggests that Biden continues to hit the sweet spot in terms of highlighting popular measures, even on fraught issues like gun control. No wonder Republicans are frustrated. Some toplines:
Sixty-four percent of voters support stricter gun control laws in the United States.
Sixty-three percent of voters support Biden’s executive order to limit the spread of “ghost guns.”
A plurality of American voters somewhat or strongly support (46%; 28% oppose) Biden’s executive order to increase regulation of stabilizing braces, which can turn a pistol into a kind of rifle that ordinarily would require stricter government controls.
Seventy-three percent of voters support employees’ right to bargain collectively for workplace conditions.
Those moderates enabled Trump at every turn so they could get their judges and their tax cuts. Now they don’t like the fact that they lost their majority because of the same orange monster they refused to condemn and they have to live with their opposition in power. So sad.
Recall that when they win they always say “elections have consequences.”
Yep.
There were many bizarre moments during the Trump administration but one of the oddest has to be that time he spontaneously invited the Taliban to Camp David on the anniversary of 9/11 in 2019. The story went that the peace talks preceding withdrawal were on the verge of bearing fruit and President Trump wanted to have a big ceremony like Jimmy Carter did with the Camp David Accords — only much bigger and better. The New York Times reported that during a meeting with various advisers the idea was floated to invite the Taliban to the U.S. and Trump, of course, was thrilled. He could smell that Nobel Peace Prize finally coming home to papa.
There were quite a few people who were just a tad appalled by this idea, needless to say. There may be no choice but to leave Afghanistan in the hands of the Taliban but considering the history of the past 20 years, the idea of inviting them to the U.S. for a big party wasn’t a welcome one. Doing it on the anniversary of the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, attacks which were enabled in part by these same people, sent shudders through those who knew how that would be received by the 9/11 families and the military. And while a majority of Americans are in favor of a U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, rewarding the repressive, violent, fundamentalist authoritarian Taliban, who the U.S. government officially designates a terrorist organization, with a dazzling ceremony a la Kim Jong Un is not something anyone wants to see. The plan fell apart when the Taliban insisted that the deal be announced before they came to the U.S. while Trump insisted that it be announced after so that he could take the credit for negotiating the deal personally at Camp David. And that was that.
Nobody would have even known the plan existed except that Trump inexplicably decided to tweet about it on a Saturday night and let the cat out of the bag. He soon lost interest in Afghanistan when it became clear that he wouldn’t have his big celebration, but withdrawal negotiations continued with a final agreement to an American withdrawal in May 2021. Trump sporadically made promises on the issue that he didn’t keep, the last one being an announcement that all troops would be home by last Christmas. Obviously, that didn’t happen and there’s no way of knowing if he would ever have followed through.
Perhaps the only thing Trump has in common with the current president is that Biden’s also been an Afghanistan skeptic for years and was known as a voice pushing for ending American involvement within the Obama administration. He said very clearly that he intended to end that war if he won the election. Upon taking office the administration set up a policy review on the subject and for good reason. Who knows what kind of diplomatic landmines the Trump administration had left lying all over the place? That review is still ongoing but on Tuesday, the Washington Post reported that Biden had made a decision to extend the May 1st deadline to leave until September 11th, but leave he will do regardless of whether the Taliban and the Afghan government come to an agreement.
He is scheduled to make the announcement today. According to Spencer Ackerman at the Daily Beast, the Biden administration hopes that a hastily drawn-up summit in Istanbul can bring the two parties together to agree on a power sharing deal before the May 1st deadline and help soothe any ruffled feathers from the Taliban over the short delay. (The Taliban leaders said late Tuesday that they would boycott any such summit until the U.S. completely withdraws, so it remains to be seen whether this will mark a collapse in the ongoing talks or not.)
The New York Times’ David Sanger reported that Biden and his staff had to work hard to get the Pentagon on board with this plan but that he was unwilling to bend in his desire to make a date certain announcement despite their insistence that it should be conditional. It’s not hard to see why. American withdrawal has been contingent on various “conditions” being met for nearly two decades and somehow it just never seems to happen. The US must make the decision and follow through unless it intends to be a permanent occupying force, something for which the American people have no appetite.
Trump’s desire to withdraw from Afghanistan was always one of his few positive foreign policy objectives although I don’t think anyone expected that he would succeed. He had no understanding of the complexities and only saw it as a way to burnish his reputation as a “winner” and a “deal maker.” But in a way, his ignorance helped drive the decision beyond the typical hawkish national security dogma to put in place a serious negotiation to finally end America’s presence there. He got Fox News people to start talking about the need to end the “forever wars” and soured most of the GOP base on the relics of the post-9/11 War on Terror.
And his vendettas against his enemies have led to a fracturing of the Republican foreign policy establishment. Trump’s enemy number one, super-hawk Liz Cheney is predictably leading the charge to oppose Biden’s decision to withdraw at all, while Trump acolytes are struck silent, unable to do the same since his only criticism of the deal must be that it’s delayed. The usual screeching about “cutting and running” is muted, giving Biden much more room to make this move than any Democrat normally would have. It may be the one good thing Trump ever did.
As Sanger put it in the Times:
Mr. Biden is declaring that war is over — no matter what, and even though the United States is leaving with most of its goals unmet, and Afghanistan’s stability deeply in jeopardy. If there is no terrorist attack launched from Afghan territory again, no echo of Sep. 11, 2001, Mr. Biden may well have been judged to have made the right bet.
Let’s hope so. But it’s a risk that he must take if we want to turn the page and face the challenges of the future. The War on Terror was a mistake from the beginning. It’s long past time to admit that and move on.
J.V. Last at the Bulwark observes that although the Republicans didn’t do the traditional autopsy after their loss this time (because they cannot acknowledge that it happened) but it does not mean there isn’t one. The report is a doozy:
The Autopsy Is Happening Right Now
In the days after Democrats unseated an incumbent president and won unified control of Congress, the victorious party went though a round of self-analysis and recriminations.
The Republicans, who managed a trifecta of losing that hadn’t been accomplished since Herbert Hoover, doubled down. Then they backed up their bets, split 4s, and doubled down again.
People were confused as to why the losing party didn’t conduct an autopsy to try to figure out what went wrong.
Except that they did. It wasn’t a traditional autopsy in the sense that there was no formal committee and the project wasn’t centered around getting more votes in future elections. But it’s clear that Republicans are in the midst of a crowd-sourced attempt to figure out how to win the presidency in 2024.
There are three ways to capture the presidency:
(1) Win a lot more votes than the opposing candidate.
(2) Get fewer votes, but win pluralities in enough states to get 270 certified and counted Electoral Votes.
(3) Get fewer votes and fewer Electoral Votes, but prevent the official counting and certification of the Electoral Votes—and then win a majority of state delegations when the contest is shifted to Congress.
You can win the presidency even while getting blown out in both the popular vote and the Electoral College, provided your party:
1)Controls the House and Senate.
2)Constitutes a congressional majority in 26 states.
3)Has sufficient raw political will.
Five years ago this scenario would have sounded like a nightmare designed to scare children; democracy’s version of the Baba Yaga.
Today it’s just an alternative path to power.
After all, it’s right there in the rules. How could anyone possibly object?
And if you ask Conservatism Inc. they’ll tell you how beside-the-point “democracy” is, anyhow.
The Republican Game Plan
When Republicans conducted their autopsy, they skipped “How to Win Option 1” and went straight to Options 2 and 3—leapfrogging the question of how to get more votes and focusing on how to use institutional leverage to take power even while losing popular majorities.
Option 2—the path of least resistance—is for Republicans to change voting rules at the state level in the hopes that they can drive down the number of Democratic votes cast and win the Electoral College despite being a persistent minority. A lot has been written about these various initiatives, some of which are more grotesque than others.
But the real cutting edge work being done as a result of the GOP autopsy concerns Option 3: Figuring out how a Republican can win the presidency even while losing the popular vote and the Electoral College.
Just go by the numbers: It is likely Republicans will have majorities in the congressional delegations of at least 26 states for the foreseeable future. They have a >50 percent chance of winning the House in 2022 and a pretty good shot at flipping the Senate.
So the first two preconditions for winning the presidency while losing the election are very much on the table.
Which leaves just one project: Mustering the political will to move past both the popular vote and the Electoral College.
In 2020, many elected Republicans lacked the will to use the means that would have been necessary to stop the certification and counting of Electoral Votes:
— In Michigan, the election results were certified only because a single Republican member of the state canvassing board, Aaron Van Langevelde, broke party ranks and voted to certify them.
— In Georgia, Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger refused direct requests from the president of the United States to change the official tally of the state’s votes.
— In Pennsylvania, enough Republicans in the state legislature declined the president’s entreaty to create an alternate slate of electors.
— Once the Electoral Votes were sent to Washington, more than half of the Republican members of Congress objected to the counting of the Electoral Votes—but it wasn’t enough to stop the process.
So the key parts of the Republican autopsy have been (1) building the political will to use raw power next time and (2) removing the Republican officials who were not willing to comply last time.
That’s why Republican state parties have censured nearly every Republican who did not participate in Trump’s attempted coup.
That’s why Brad Raffensperger is the target of a primary challenge in Georgia.
That’s why Michigan Republicans replaced Aaron Van Langevelde with a more reliable partisan on the state canvassing board.
That’s why Nevada Republicans are attacking Secretary of State Barbara Cegavske, the only Republican to have won state-wide office in 2018. (Even though she is a Republican, Cegavske refused to go along with the attempt to overturn Nevada’s result.)
That’s why Republicans in Arizona have introduced HB 2720. Here’s the relevant section of the bill:
The Legislature retains its legislative authority regarding the office of presidential elector and by majority vote at any time before the presidential inauguration may revoke the Secretary of State’s issuance or certification of a presidential elector’s certificate of election.
Ladies and gentlemen: Behold the fruit of the Republican autopsy.
Meanwhile, Conservatism Inc. is doing its part to devalue and delegitimize democracy, seeding the ground for moving past both the popular vote and the Electoral College.
The Big Lie is actually the biggest insight to come from the Republican autopsy. Republicans and their enablers discovered that if they make false, evidence-free claims often and loudly enough, then the vast majority of their voters will believe them.
And then, once Republican voters were onboard, they found that the rest of the party elites would either join them or stay silent. Only a handful of Republicans dared to object. And those figures are in the process of being either defeated or coopted.
By insisting that Trump was the real winner of 2020, Republicans have created a trifecta of preconditions within their base going into 2024:
— There is a pent-up demand for retribution.
— These voters will not believe that election results unfavorable to them are legitimate.
— These voters will be primed ahead of time to demand that elected Republicans satisfy their desired outcome, by any means necessary.
Which is to say: Republicans are already well on their way to marshaling the political will to do whatever the law even theoretically might allow in pursuit of power.
And even though the success of such a gambit is a longshot given all of the various failure points, since political power is derived from their voters, many Republicans politicians will be incentivized to embrace the challenge anyway, since they will gain power within the party from the voters who have been primed to demand such a fight
The difference between the 2020 and the 2024 elections will be the difference between a reactive Republican party focused on trying to flip the Electoral College and a proactive Republican party prepared to move past the Electoral College to the next pathway to victory.
Those are the lessons of the 2020 Republican autopsy. Ignore them at your peril.
This is how authoritarianism starts. A society goes from the rule of law, to rule by law—where the minority gets just enough power to change the laws so that they can amass more power.
And here is a serious question: If Republicans managed enough votes to sustain an objection to counting Electoral Votes, what would our recourse be? Crossing our fingers and hoping that the Supreme Court steps in?
What we are seeing—in broad daylight—is another proof of the idea that democracy runs on the honor system. If you have two parties and one of them is openly attempting to subvert democracy . . . well, good luck.
The time to fight against authoritarianism isn’t December 2024. It’s now.
He is 100% right about this plan. It’s exactly what they are trying to do and I think they are radicalized enough to go through with it.
You might have said before January 6th that it was absurd to think Trump would have had the nerve to contest the election as far as he did or that his rabid followers would storm the Capitol and stage an insurrection, with him egging them on. But it happened. And over the next four years we are going to see a concerted effort to mainstream the ideas that Last lays out. If necessary they will execute that plan, have no doubt. They are not a normal party anymore.
Media Matters last night tweeted this compilation of “replacement theory” rhetoric spread by Fox News. It has been spreading for years and has accelerated since Donald Trump’s reelection loss in 2020.
In “‘Replacement Theory,’ a Racist, Sexist Doctrine, Spreads in Far-Right Circles,” Nellie Bowles wrote in 2019 (New York Times):
Before the massacre of 50 people in New Zealand mosques last week, the suspect released a document called “The Great Replacement.” The first sentence was: “It’s the birthrates.” He repeated it three times.
If the phrase about replacement sounded familiar, perhaps that was because it echoed what white supremacists bearing tiki torches shouted in Charlottesville, Va., in 2017: “You will not replace us.” It is also the slogan of the neo-Nazi group Identity Evropa.
Behind the idea is a racist conspiracy theory known as “the replacement theory,” which was popularized by a right-wing French philosopher. An extension of colonialist theory, it is predicated on the notion that white women are not having enough children and that falling birthrates will lead to white people around the world being replaced by nonwhite people.
And like so many fundamentalist ideologies, the foundation of this one requires the subjugation of women.
The French philosopher was Renaud Camus. His “Great Replacement” theory has been percolating on the right since about 1996 and went to print in two books he published in 2010 and 2011 (per Wikipedia).
My first exposure was a 2006 Wall Street Journal editoral by Mark Steyn, “It’s the Demography, Stupid.” It had all the “Wake up, Amurca!” subtlety of the parody right-wing radio commentator, Earl Pitts – American. The secular west needs to face its slow suicide by contraception, Steyn warned, long before Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale became a TV series.
I wrote at the time:
Steyn argues that just ground-pounding the Muslims wouldn’t prevent the fall of the Christian west. We suffer from an alarming birthrate gap vis-à-vis the Muslim world, Steyn warns, and the Christian world risks being eventually overrun because of “our lack of civilizational confidence.” (The cure for which is, no doubt, civilizational Viagra.) Americans are not afraid enough of the urgent threat posed by Muslim children and must retaliate by stockpiling more of our own.
To plagiarize a quote from a review of one of nuclear-alarmist Jonathan Schell’s old books, “I shudder to think how I’ve failed. I shudder for Mark Steyn, for all the time he’s spent banging away at his typewriter instead of banging away elsewhere.”
Steyn’s target was Muslims. Donald Trump expanded the target list to Latinos and Asians. Basically, to anyone on our soil who is non-white and not of the Republican persuasion. And citizen or not, as recent street violence against Asians demonstrates. Immigrants must be stopped, Fox News warns, from diluting the voting pools of Real Americans™, white-Christian-Republican Americans.
I remember just where I was when news got out of the Rwandan genocide.
The GOP ignored the post-2012 autopsy it commissioned. And the party may not have performed a formal, post-election autopsy on its failed 2020 presidential efforts. But the executive editor of The Bulwark thinks an informal one has emerged nonetheless. Jonathan V. Last writes that Republicans now see three ways forward:
(1) Win a lot more votes than the opposing candidate.
(2) Get fewer votes, but win pluralities in enough states to get 270 certified and counted Electoral Votes.
(3) Get fewer votes and fewer Electoral Votes, but prevent the official counting and certification of the Electoral Votes—and then win a majority of state delegations when the contest is shifted to Congress.
Republicans have decided winning democratically is either too hard, too wussy, or involves the risk of losing. And they cannot have that.
Instead, the GOP figures if it controls the House and Senate, controls a majority of state legislatures, and has enough raw political will, it can “win the presidency even while getting blown out in both the popular vote and the Electoral College.” It’s all there buried in the rules. What’s consent of the governed got to do with it? asks Conservatism Inc.
The real cutting edge of Republicanism is Option 3, Last explains. The GOP has a good shot at winning back the House in 2022 and maintaining control of 26 state legislatures. What they need (and what Trump’s state-level allies lacked in 2020) is the raw political will to circumvent the will of voters regardless of how the “world’s oldest democracy” looks to the rest of the world.
First they came for the truth….
The GOP has already targeted for elimination state Republicans who defied Trump’s effort to steal the 2020 election for himself. The Big Lie can take care of the rest:
The Big Lie is actually the biggest insight to come from the Republican autopsy. Republicans and their enablers discovered that if they make false, evidence-free claims often and loudly enough, then the vast majority of their voters will believe them.
And then, once Republican voters were onboard, they found that the rest of the party elites would either join them or stay silent. Only a handful of Republicans dared to object. And those figures are in the process of being either defeated or coopted.
By insisting that Trump was the real winner of 2020, Republicans have created a trifecta of preconditions within their base going into 2024:
- There is a pent-up demand for retribution.
- These voters will not believe that election results unfavorable to them are legitimate.
- These voters will be primed ahead of time to demand that elected Republicans satisfy their desired outcome, by any means necessary.
Which is to say: Republicans are already well on their way to marshaling the political will to do whatever the law even theoretically might allow in pursuit of power.
The Republican Party for years has been on a trajectory toward rejecting democracy and whatever the law theoretically might allow. REDMAP might have been cunning but was not illegal. Rigging the census as the Trump administration attempted was ruled illegal (or at least out of order). Conservatives’s extralegal means of securing a presidential win were on public display during the Jan. 6 insurrection. Republican officials even now are trying to disappear that down the memory hole. The assault on the U.S Capitol resulted in multiple deaths. Can you say slippery slope?
Analyst Zerlina Maxwell noted in late January that Republicans are “not engaged in this project of democracy that the rest of us are participating in, because they don’t actually want voters to make decisions and elect people.”
Jonathan Last concurs:
This is how authoritarianism starts. A society goes from the rule of law, to rule by law—where the minority gets just enough power to change the laws so that they can amass more power.
************************
While the Roberts Court will never explicitly endorse a white man’s government in the way the Redemption Court did, in pursuit of other cherished ideological goals it will be asked to pave the road for a white man’s government by another name. – Adam Serwer, The Atlantic, September 4, 2018
A little gallows humor to end the day …
The top 20 are all pretty close, actually.
There are endless rankings of the US states: whether they are the best places to live, the best places to do business, how much fun they are. Such judgements are made by economists, companies, and journalists – but what do Americans themselves think?
We asked people to choose the better of two states in a series of head-to-head matchups. States are rated based on their “win percentage”, that is: how often that state won the head-to-head matchup when it was one of the two states shown.
All 50 states were shown, in addition to Washington, D.C., but territories were not included.
Hawaii, which is well-known for its beautiful beaches and warm weather, took the top spot by winning 69% of its matchups. With its scenic mountains, hiking paths, and recreational marijuana industry, Colorado took second place with 65% of matches won.
I don’t think this means anything at all, of course. There are great aspects of every state and Washington DC comes last not because it’s a hellhole, which it is not, but because is the seat of the federal government. It’s actually quite a beautiful city.
And I’m sure that a lot of people were inflicting their political agendas on states they know nothing about.
I do think we can all agree that Hawaii is paradise, though. Who could say otherwise?