Month: May 2021

People do not vote their interests, they vote their identities, cognitive scientist George Lakoff wrote in “Moral Politics.” Despite that, lefty friends insist on deriding conservative voters for “voting against their best interests.” As better-informed, savvy consumers of policy, we progressives know what their best interests are and, for our part, always vote what’s best for Number One (rather than what’s best for the country). Right?

Brendan Nyhan, a Dartmouth College political scientist, finds that the persistence of misinformation in our age stems from, among cognitive limitations and social factors, the need “to defend or support some group identity or existing belief.” Identity plays a role in what information people accept and retain.

Max Fisher reports on Nyhan’s findings at the New York Times:

Put more simply, people become more prone to misinformation when three things happen. First, and perhaps most important, is when conditions in society make people feel a greater need for what social scientists call ingrouping — a belief that their social identity is a source of strength and superiority, and that other groups can be blamed for their problems.

As much as we like to think of ourselves as rational beings who put truth-seeking above all else, we are social animals wired for survival. In times of perceived conflict or social change, we seek security in groups. And that makes us eager to consume information, true or not, that lets us see the world as a conflict putting our righteous ingroup against a nefarious outgroup.

This need can emerge especially out of a sense of social destabilization. As a result, misinformation is often prevalent among communities that feel destabilized by unwanted change or, in the case of some minorities, powerless in the face of dominant forces.

We may not be lab rats, but that does not mean as social animals we do not respond to social cues and positive reinforcement. In a time of high social tensions, we shift into “identity-based conflict” mode and seek out information that affirms our sense of us vs. them. The appearance of “high-profile political figures” who encourage followers to accept “identity-affirming misinformation” is another factor in misinformation’s persistence. Social media’s feedback system of likes and shares provides tasty pellets “for posting inflammatory or false statements.”

In the case of QAnon, the game that plays people, game designer Reed Berkowitz believes the online community provides “a hit of dopamine, the brain’s pleasure drug, as a reward” for “players” deciphering “Q drops” or for producing “research” that reinforce the group’s narrative. Truth and accuracy take a back seat to getting that hit.

Sociologist Zeynep Tufekci wrote that in a period of high social tension, fact-checking does not always correct misinformation. “Belonging is stronger than facts.” Identity again.

Nyhan finds, however, that the presence of the widely publicized “backfire effect” in fact-checking is overstated. Corrective information may not reinforce false beliefs in every case. Indeed, subsequent research finds backfire effects are rare. It depends on how accurate information is presented. Nevertheless, “accuracy-increasing effects of corrective information like fact checks … frequently seem to decay or be overwhelmed by cues from elites and the media promoting more congenial but less accurate claims.” Not to mention that the people who most need the corrective information are less prone to seeking it.

News coverage then should avoid partisan cues when addressing false claims. Fact checkers, journalists, and science communicators, Nyhan writes, should also take an intermediary approach that staunches the flow of misinformation from influencers who spread it. They should target political elites with heavier sanctions for spreading false information:

One field experiment found that state legislators who were sent reminders of the reputational threat posed by fact checkers in their state were less likely to make claims that were fact checked or whose accuracy was questioned publicly (87). There are many potential ways of accomplishing this goal. For example, providing fact-check statistics showing that a politician has repeatedly made false statements is more damaging to their standing with the public than a fact check of a single false claim (88).

Put their identities are on the line when they spread disinformation/misinformation. Thus:

Providing corrective information is generally worthwhile and can often improve belief accuracy on the margin, but durably reducing misperceptions will often require changing the cues that people receive from the sources that they most trust. Doing so will in turn require journalists and science communicators to focus less on communicating directly to the public and more on the intermediaries that are most credible to people who hold or are vulnerable to false beliefs.

FYI.

Today our family lost a true friend and loyal companion. For more than a decade, Bo was a constant, gentle presence in our lives—happy to see us on our good days, our bad days, and everyday in between.

He tolerated all the fuss that came with being in the White House, had a big bark but no bite, loved to jump in the pool in the summer, was unflappable with children, lived for scraps around the dinner table, and had great hair.

He was exactly what we needed and more than we ever expected. We will miss him dearly.

Originally tweeted by Barack Obama (@BarackObama) on May 8, 2021.

This report about how the Party is hiding negative information about Trump’s support even from their own members is fascinating. I have to imagine they are doing it because they know one of Dear Leader’s minions will run to tell him who mentioned it so they are simply putting their heads in the sand and pretending it isn’t true.

Rep. Liz Cheney had been arguing for months that Republicans had to face the truth about former president Donald Trump — that he had lied about the 2020 election result and bore responsibility for the insurrection at the U.S. Capitol — when the Wyoming Republican sat down at a party retreat in April to listen to a polling briefing.

The refusal to accept reality, she realized, went much deeper.

When staff from the National Republican Congressional Committee rose to explain the party’s latest polling in core battleground districts, they left out a key finding about Trump’s weakness, declining to divulge the information even when directly questioned about Trump’s support by a member of Congress, according to two people familiar with what transpired.

Trump’s unfavorable ratings were 15 points higher than his favorable ones in the core districts, according to the full polling results, which were later obtained by The Washington Post. Nearly twice as many voters had a strongly unfavorable view of the former president as had a strongly favorable one.

Cheney was alarmed, she later told others, in part because Republican campaign officials had also left out bad Trump polling news at a March retreat for ranking committee chairs. Both instances, she concluded, demonstrated that party leadership was willing to hide information from their own members to avoid the truth about Trump and the possible damage he could do to Republican House members, even though the NRCC denied any such agenda.

Those behind-the-scenes episodes were part of a months-long dispute over Republican principles that has raged among House leaders and across the broader GOP landscape. That dispute is expected to culminate next week with a vote to remove Cheney from her position as the third-ranking House Republican.

At issue: Should the Republican Party continue to defend Trump’s actions and parrot his falsehoods, given his overwhelming support among GOP voters? Or does the party and its leaders need to directly confront the damage he has done?

“She just believes he’s disqualified himself by his conduct, more than it’s any kind of political analysis,” said Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.). “If you look at a political analysis, there’s no way this party is going to stay together without President Trump and his supporters. There is no construct where the party can be successful without him.”

Cheney and House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) had come down on opposite sides of the divide, undermining the party’s efforts to put on a united front. Even before the riot, when McCarthy was calling on Republicans to “not back down” after the election, Cheney had quietly organized an essay by 10 former defense secretaries declaring the election results settled and warning the military not to be involved in Trump’s election protest.

She was shocked when McCarthy signed on to an amicus brief in a Texas case seeking to overturn the election, after he’d told her in a private conversation that he did not plan to, according to a person familiar with the conversation. More recently, she has sought to undermine McCarthy’s efforts to dilute the potency of a congressional inquiry into the Jan. 6 riot. McCarthy wants to broaden the inquiry’s scope to include antifa and Black Lives Matter violence, as well as the slaying of a Capitol Hill police officer in April.

McCarthy and many of his House colleagues, who don’t see a clear path to victory without Trump’s support in 2022, reached a breaking point in recent days.

Finally, someone acknowledges what I’ve been saying for weeks. This is Cheney’s political strategy. She’s playing a longer game than just being the number three leader in the House GOP minority. She sees this as a way to vault her into the national spotlight as the leader of the anti-Trump right. Is that a real constituency? Not by a long shot. But she’s betting that constituency will exist in the future and she will be there to reap the rewards:

At the root of the collapse in relations, according to interviews with more than a dozen people involved, most of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe private conversations, was a fundamental misunderstanding of Cheney’s position. Her determination to name, shame and banish Trump — and her refusal to follow McCarthy’s pleas to move on and display unity — had become fundamental to her political purpose, not just a position she could compartmentalize.

Even if she is cast out of power in the House, she has made clear that she will not stop, promising to take her argument against Trump to the campaign trail in Wyoming, where he garnered 70 percent of the vote in 2020. She has told others that blocking Trump from leading the party is a fight she sees as just beginning, no matter how Wednesday’s vote goes.

“The Republican Party is at a turning point,” Cheney wrote Wednesday in a Washington Post op-ed, “and Republicans must decide whether we are going to choose truth and fidelity to the Constitution.”

That is a remarkable statement from a Republican conference chairwoman, whose job description requires her to develop, coordinate and elevate the party’s communications strategy against Democrats, which she has continued to do at times with far less fanfare. Cheney and McCarthy declined to speak for this story.

Even before the Jan. 6 riot, she had been working to stem the threat she saw in Trump.

“She called me and said, ‘You know, I’m really worried about this. What should we do?’ ” said former U.S. Ambassador Eric Edelman, who worked with her to write the essay by the former defense secretaries. “Liz was a prime mover of the whole thing, really.”https://dc4c7e684077180486f863f17df95b25.safeframe.googlesyndication.com/safeframe/1-0-38/html/container.html

Working closely with her father, former vice president Richard B. Cheney, the congresswoman volunteered to recruit Jim Mattis, the former Marine general who had served as Trump’s first defense secretary; Leon Panetta, who served as defense secretary in the Obama administration; and Donald H. Rumsfeld, who was defense secretary while her father was vice president, Edelman said.

The opinion piece also warned the military that any involvement in election disputes was dangerous. Richard B. Cheney’s role in organizing the defense secretaries soon became public, but the congresswoman’s role was kept quiet at the time.

She also bet that Trump would lose, which was also risky. But you’ll note she waited very, very late in the game. She could have been Justin Amash and stood up much earlier. It’s not as if that Ukraine mess was anything but Trump and Rudy’s clumsy attempt to corruptly rig the 2020 election. She certainly knew that.

Meanwhile, it’s reported that McCarthy’s main goal is to keep Trump from forming a 3rd party? That’s news to me, but I suppose he might have started out that way. Now, it’s clear that he is totally on board the Trump train. And what’s curious about that is this other information about that polling info they are hiding even from themselves:

[…]

Weeks later, Cheney traveled to Orlando for an event designed to showcase the party’s strategy for taking out Democrats in 2022, but the story soon shifted to internal division. Before the conference even began, she announced to laughter from reporters that she had not invited the former president, even though she did not plan the speaker slates.

That really brings home to me that Liz wanted to be pushed out of the leadership. That was gratuitous, designed to get attention without any larger purpose.

This stuff about the polling is fascinating, though. If their internals are true, it would appear that the party establishment has now morphed entirely into vacant Trump clones even if it means their own demise:

The debate over Trump’s potentially negative impact on swing districts is likely to escalate in the coming months, as vulnerable Republicans try to position themselves for reelection.

The internal NRCC poll partially shared with lawmakers in April found that President Biden was perilously popular in core battleground districts, with 54 percent favorability. Vice President Harris was also more popular than Trump, the poll showed. Biden’s $1.9 trillion covid stimulus plan and his $2.3 trillion jobs and infrastructure package both polled higher than the former president’s favorability, which was at 41 percent, compared to 42 percent in February.

A person familiar with the polling presentation said many details from the battleground poll did not make it into the NRCC’s 30-minute address in Orlando.

Go for it, Republicans. Suck up to the MAGA cult and its Dear Leader. Those numbers are lying. He’s telling the truth. Maybe it will work out for you.

I think Emptywheel is very likely correct about the revelations that the Barr DOJ seized reporters’ phone records:

The WaPo has revealed that DOJ obtained toll records on three journalists, covering a 2.5 month period in 2017, in 2020.

The Trump Justice Department secretly obtained Washington Post journalists’ phone records and tried to obtain their email records over reporting they did in the early months of the Trump administration on Russia’s role in the 2016 election, according to government letters and officials.

In three separate letters dated May 3 and addressed to Post reporters Ellen Nakashima and Greg Miller, and former Post reporter Adam Entous, the Justice Department wrote they were “hereby notified that pursuant to legal process the United States Department of Justice received toll records associated with the following telephone numbers for the period from April 15, 2017 to July 31, 2017.” The letters listed work, home or cellphone numbers covering that three-and-a-half-month period.

[snip]

The letters do not say when Justice Department leadership approved the decision to seek the reporters’ records, but a department spokesman said it happened in 2020, during the Trump administration. William P. Barr, who served as Trump’s attorney general for nearly all of that year, before departing Dec. 23, declined to comment.

The WaPo cites two stories it think might be culprits:

Obama’s secret struggle to punish Russia for Putin’s election assault
Sessions discussed Trump campaign-related matters with Russian ambassador, U.S. intelligence intercepts show

But it misses a key story on which Ellen Nakashima — whose mobile phone and home numbers were seized — was the first byline.

Russian ambassador told Moscow that Kushner wanted secret communications channel with Kremlin

There’s also one on which Nakashima was not the first byline that might be relevant.

Comey prepared extensively for his conversations with Trump

Notably, the request goes through the time when Peter Strzok was on the Mueller team.

In August 2020, NYT reported that John Durham was investigating media leaks. As reported, that was focused on the original leak to David Ignatius that led Mike Flynn to respond. But it reported that it wasn’t clear whether the investigation included other leaks, such as the two stories based on leak intercepts from the period under subpoena.

This report looks like what you’d expect if Durham’s investigation was broader than that, covering the period through when Strzok was removed from Mueller’s team.

Update: Billy Barr told the AP that he had made Durham Special Counsel on December 1, just over 6 months before WaPo got notice that DOJ had seized their records. He did so, it’s now clear, so that whatever providers they were trying to obtain records for would know that he had the authority of Attorney General.

Update: What Durham is clearly pursuing is charging someone under 18 USC 798 for leaking signals intercepts that seeded three stories:

–The David Ignatius story revealing Mike Flynn’s calls with Sergei Kislyak had been discovered

–The WaPo story revealing that Jared Kushner’s effort to set up a back channel with Russia had been discovered

–The WaPo story revealing that Jeff Sessions had lied when he said he hadn’t spoken to any Russians in his confirmation hearing

Update: To be quite clear: I have no reason to believe Durham has any evidence about Strzok. What I have is a bunch of evidence that 1) Durham doesn’t understand what he’s looking at and 2) he was hired to take out a couple of FBI people, starting with Strzok.

More at the link…

This sounds right. Barr put all his Trump revenge eggs in Durham’s basket. And I think Durham was a great disappointment to both him and Trump for failing to get the case together before the election. But he did manage to get Durham protected so he could at least provide Dear Leader with the satisfaction he craves after he fact. Another human sacrifice.

I wonder where all the hand-wringing newly minted civil liberties fanatics who scream “FISA!!!” as a rallying cry and trot out Carter Page like he’s Daniel Ellsberg are on this? I have a sneaking suspicion they have no problem surveilling reporters — as long as they don’t work for FOX.

Trump henchman Jason Miller told Axios yesterday that Trump is planning to start up his rallies again late spring or early summer. But the faithful are just so bereft, they’re coming out to see a couple of his fringe supporters just to hear the tunes:

They’re keeping the crowd excited for the big return of Dear Leader:

“Tell me who’s your president?!” Greene called to the crowd upon taking the stage.

“Donald Trump!” they shouted back without hesitation.

Much like Trump had done, Greene and Gaetz cast themselves as Washington outsiders who could better relate to “proud American patriots” like the ones assembled in the audience. They accused the media of being “fake news” and mocked Democrats’ “wokeness” — but also blasted “Republicans in Name Only” who dared to go against Trump and his agenda.

“If Liz Cheney could even find Wyoming on a map and get there, she would find a lot of very angry cowboys,” Gaetz said, referring to the Wyoming congresswoman who voted to impeach Trump and is now at risk of being overthrown from her No. 3 leadership spot in the GOP.

“It’s the establishment against the rest of us,” Gaetz added.

Greene said she had never wanted to be a member of Congress — “a dirty rotten job, I’ll tell you that much” — until she saw Trump run for president “and I liked what he had to say.” She suggested she had the time to launch “America First” rallies because she had been stripped of her House committee assignments for her past extremist remarks and support of the QAnon ideology that has radicalized its followers.

“They decided they didn’t like me over a few things they didn’t like on Facebook some years back,” Greene said dismissively Friday, referring to past social media activity in which she had suggested some mass shootings were staged and supported assassinating some Democrats.

Greene boasted of tactics she had used to obstruct Democratic legislation and decried the fencing and other security measures surrounding the U.S. Capitol, falsely describing them as a sign Democrats didn’t want the public to access the building to observe the bills they were passing. She made no mention of the real reason for the extra security and fencing, which went up after a pro-Trump mob overran the Capitol on Jan. 6 in a violent short-lived insurrection that left five people dead.

Greene also called for President Biden to be impeached, but did not specify why beyond alluding to false claims about Biden’s son Hunter, and name-dropped other Democratic members of Congress with whom she has clashed, including House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (Calif.) and Reps. Cori Bush (Mo.), Marie Newman (Ill.) and Maxine Waters (Calif.).

At one point in the rally, Gaetz, who is under federal investigation for sex-trafficking and other allegations, tried to make light of the accusations by saying the media would probably bill the rally in Florida as: “Matt Gaetz has wild party surrounded by beautiful women in the Villages.” (Gaetz has not been charged with any crimes and has denied the accusations against him.)

Then Gaetz really went for it:

“We have a right to bear arms in this country and we will use it!” Gaetz declared. “The Second Amendment … is about maintaining within the citizenry the ability to maintain an armed rebellion against the tyrannical government. People may not like that. It might not be politically correct. But that is the truth.”

I don’t know about you, but to me that sounds vaguely … insurrectionist. They’re always babbled this drivel. But after January 6th, you’d think elected Republicans might ixnay the “armed rebellion” talk. Apparently not.

And this sounds like a direct threat against a Republican congresswoman from Greene:

Update: Here are some of the fans waiting outside. They seem nice.

(I won’t say what I’m thinking about all that sniffing …)

Caught lying again

Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) was not about to let an upstart like Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) outmaneuver him in pandering to President Donald Trump’s base of support. So when Hawley announced a few days before Congress met to affirm the 2020 electoral college votes that he would object to the vote totals from Pennsylvania, Cruz put together a contingent of senators to make the same promise.

The group, Cruz’s office explained in a statement, was “acting not to thwart the democratic process, but rather to protect it.” That assurance, buried at the bottom of the lengthy missive, was meant to address the obvious concern that blocking the counting of electoral votes ran the (infinitesimal) risk of derailing the inauguration of President-elect Joe Biden, who, by all objective accounts, had clearly won the race. But Cruz and the gang insisted that because the election “featured unprecedented allegations of voter fraud, violations and lax enforcement of election law, and other voting irregularities,” they had no choice but to throw up the stop sign.

It’s important now as it was then to point out that utterly unfounded allegations of fraud and irregularities — like those raised in the months after the 2020 election — are better addressed by confronting the false claims directly and confronting those spreading them. But when the person propagating the falsehoods has an energetic base of millions of supporters, it’s much easier politically to simply treat them as valid, to try to figure out a way to both treat those unserious claims as serious and also maintain a sober distance from the nonsense. Cruz’s “we must lamentably and futilely object” approach was the narrow path he chose to walk.

As protesters gathered outside the Capitol on Jan. 6 — motivated by Trump’s rhetoric and, perhaps in some cases, by Cruz’s and Hawley’s — Cruz stood on the Senate floor to make his case.

“Let me be clear,” Cruz said in his speech on that day: “I am not arguing for setting aside the result of this election.”

No, he was just arguing that it was “a profound threat to this country and to the legitimacy of any administrations that will come in the future” that so many people believed the election had been stolen, a claim elevated by Trump and coddled directly and through inaction by people like Cruz. He worried that not objecting to Biden’s win would send a message that “voter fraud doesn’t matter, isn’t real and shouldn’t be taken seriously.”

The reality, of course, is that there has been no demonstrated voter fraud sufficiently widespread to affect any major election and, in fact, fraud is extremely uncommon. Claims that it is real or a subject of concern for senators considering a presidential election should, in fact, not be taken seriously.

But you see what Cruz is doing. He’s trying to send a message to Trump’s base that he’s with them and that he agrees with their concerns while maintaining deniability with official Washington. Cruz knows that the fraud allegations are unfounded and he knows Biden won, but he also knows that Republican voters don’t believe either of those things. So he came up with a way of winking at the base while nodding at the establishment.

And he would have gotten away with it, too, if it weren’t for those meddling cameras.

On Thursday, Cruz joined Virginia gubernatorial hopeful Glenn Youngkin at a rally in Chesterfield, Va. At one point, Cruz joined members of the audience for photographs.

A woman wearing a camouflage hat approached Cruz and confronted him about the election results, as captured in video posted by activist Lauren Windsor. (Update: Windsor confirmed on Twitter that she was the woman in the video.)

He just can’t help it, can he? As Philip Bump pointed out in the article:

When the woman approached him on Thursday, Cruz could have objected to her false claim that Biden didn’t win. He could have clarified for her that his goal on Jan. 6 was simply to spend more time evaluating the sanctity of the vote, even though there was no reason to do so. But instead Cruz tried to leverage his actions that day in exactly the way that he’d always intended: they were his way to tell Trump voters that he’d fought on their behalf.

And so he did.

Yes, Ted is the most unctuous liar in the US Senate. But he’s not alone in this. They’re all doing the same thing in one way or another. Feeding their delusions, telling them what they want to hear, adopting Trumpish demagoguery all for their will to power.

Axios declares the sun came up this morning:

Republican officials are rendering an unequivocal verdict: They want to cement former President Trump’s politics and policies into the foundation of the GOP for many years to come.

The debate over Trump’s post-election hold on the GOP is over — it has gotten stronger since the Jan. 6 storming of the Capitol.

The evidence is overwhelming: House Republican Conference Chair Liz Cheney, a Trump critic, is expected to get booted from leadership next week for saying Trump’s claims of an illegitimate Biden victory are lies and destructive. 

Trumpian voting restrictions like Georgia’s are now being debated in Texas, Florida, Arizona, Iowa and other states.

The Trump positions on trade and immigration — both of which broke with Bush-era orthodoxy — are now the Republican positions.

The 10 House Republicans who voted to impeach Trump after the Jan. 6 violence have gone mostly silent, and in at least one case turned on Cheney. 

The entire House GOP leadership will soon be full-throated Trumpers. 

House Rs expect Trump-backed candidates to crush his critics in contested primaries. 

State-level Republican leaders are often as — or more — Trumpian than national leaders, and in many cases will control redistricting.

Trump senior adviser Jason Miller tells Axios Trump rallies are likely to “start as soon as late spring or early summer.”

Miller said Trump “has already begun to vet and endorse candidates for 2022, with an eye toward electing not just Republican candidates, but America First Republican candidates.”

“His endorsement lifts candidates above the pack and often clears the primary field,” Miller said. “The general election endorsement provides access to ‘Trump voters’ not normally accessible to Republicans.”

Actually that last thing isn’t true. But whatever. The point is that the Village media has figured out that the “good Republicans” are so few that they can’t save the party. It’s gone.

It won’t stop them from fatuous both sides reporting of course. But it does suggest a realization that “going back to normal” isn’t happening.

No, seriously. What a show.

“Yes he was — and remains — free from jail,” tweets Scott MacFarlane.

Now, put down your coffee before reading these two. The second one, really:

More resources need to be directed at state legislative races, says Raymond Paultre, the executive director of the Florida Alliance, a network of progressive donors. The New York Times spends many paragraphs arguing that Democrats are “struggling to build a surefire legal strategy to block new Republican-backed restrictions on voting rights,” but without providing much evidence for one. And before pointing out even winning legal strategies are inadequate.

North Carolina Democrats know too well that legal victories take time. Republicans have learned they can run out the clock in court on an entire decade before losing. Then, if they retain control of state redistricting, start the ten-year clock all over:

“Case-by-case litigation in the voting context is time-consuming, costly, and ultimately inadequate because even if you win a case, frequently these kinds of laws remain on the books for one or more election cycle before litigation can be complete, and there’s no way to compensate people after the fact,” said Dale Ho, the director of the Voting Rights Project at the American Civil Liberties Union, which litigated several major cases last year.

The same week Florida’s Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis appeared on Fox & Friends to sign a bill making it harder to vote in Florida, and the same week Texas House Republicans passed their own set of new restrictive voting rules, Paultre told the Times:

“We are living in and through sort of the remnants and results of a lack of investments in state infrastructure for the last 30 years,” Mr. Paultre said. “We don’t have a clear way of stopping these bills. Let’s use this as a wake-up call. Let’s get as upset with ourselves as we are with the Republicans.”

Still, Democrats are trying to stop the erosion of democracy through the courts, as they must:

Democrats’ legal case against the Florida law, filed by the party’s top election lawyer, Marc Elias, argues that the legislation violates the First Amendment’s protection of free speech, and the 14th Amendment on the grounds that it would adversely affect people of color. Another suit, filed on Thursday by the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, also argues that the law violates the First and 14th Amendments, as well as Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act and the Americans With Disabilities Act — because many drop boxes are likely to be moved to indoor locations that are inaccessible to people with disabilities.

Sam Spital, the director of litigation for the legal defense fund, said that while he believed the lawsuits would prevail, the only comprehensive solution to Republican efforts to restrict voting would come from the federal government — both Congress and the Justice Department.

And how does that happen without Democratic control of both Congress and the Justice Department? And without a Supreme Court averse to gutting the Voting Rights Act? And without control of state legislatures to keep Republicans from passing these antidemocratic measures in the first place?

Democrats in Congress are struggling to advance voting rights legislation that would put the brakes on Republican efforts to codify Republican minority rule. But they lack the votes in the Senate to pass the For the People Act and the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act. Building the capacity to beat back Republican efforts begins in state legislatures where in many places Democrats often lack a bench deep enough to build numbers at the federal level.

Republicans’ core ideological principle is contempt for democracy, “Late Night” host Seth Meyers told his audience this week. “Rather than appeal to a majority of voters, [Republicans] would rather just rig the game so they always win,” Meyers said, referencing the Fox News stunt by DeSantis.  

From The Guardian:

In a move Meyers called “bizarre and deeply unnerving”, DeSantis signed the bill, which imposes new limits on voting by mail and ballot drop boxes, live in an exclusive for Fox News. “I’m sure [the bill is] bipartisan if they’re signing it exclusively on Fox News,” Meyers deadpanned. “It’s like your spouse saying they have something to tell you, and they want to do it live on Maury.

“Signing the bill on Fox & Friends really gives the game away, doesn’t it?” Meyers continued. “It’s like when a loan shark knocks on your door with two goons on either side – you know what he’s there for.”

Taking them to court is not your best bet for solving the problem.