“People need to know what they’re up against”
Slate’s Dahlia Lithwick spoke with Ari Berman of Mother Jones, author of “Minority Rule: The Right-Wing Attack on the Will of the People―and the Fight to Resist It.” He warns that anti-democracy forces inside this country are doing what the far right always does: doubling down.
Republicans love few things more than a twofer. They have one in spreading a new conspiracy theory that noncitizens are voting in numbers and tipping elections away from decent, All-American white people.
Berman says, “[I]t’s the newest version of the Big Lie, and it’s really a twofer for them because they are fusing voter fraud paranoia with anti-immigrant hysteria. And in doing so, they’re building support both for new restrictions on voting, but also for new restrictions on immigration. So it’s basically taking two of the most important planks of the MAGA agenda and putting them together.”
But that’s just filigree. The real meat of Stop The Steal 2.0 is far more sophisticated than Rudy Giuliani’s Four-Seasons-Total-Landscaping presser and dripping hair dye:
This is a much more organized effort, because they have changed the laws in a number of places to make it easier to effectuate these outcomes. They don’t need to bang on the doors outside the polling place in Michigan anymore, because they’re inside the polling places in a lot of these places now. They are the election officials who will be counting the ballots, or election observers who will be much closer to counting the ballots.
They’re inside the courts too.
Berman continues:
That’s why they changed the rules in Georgia well ahead of time. To get ahead of the thing so they don’t need to challenge it after the election. They’re already laying the groundwork not to certify the election in Georgia. We don’t know if they’ll be successful—it’s very likely their efforts to try to not certify elections will be blocked by the courts ahead of time or blocked by the courts after the fact; I think most people are confident of that.
What I worry about most is that they’re also trying to send a signal to other states and other Trump people to do this ahead of time. I worry that the votes were counted in 2020 and then lawsuits were filed to overturn the votes, but the votes had already been counted. What if the votes aren’t counted? What’s a court going to do then? That changes the whole process. Then you might have disputes that look much more like Bush v. Gore as opposed to what we saw in 2020 and just outright trying to steal an election.
Very clever, these criminal minds. And like Ford’s pardon of Nixon, the legal system going easy on the people behind the insurrection means they’ve just learned from their 2020 mistakes. They’re thinking ahead:
Not only did the “Stop the Steal” people seemingly face no accountability other than maybe being slapped on the wrist here or there, maybe disbarred or losing their license, but basically they have been resurrected to lead “Stop The Steal” 2.0, which is a lot more sophisticated than it was the last time. All of these Trump-aligned think tanks are laying the groundwork for these policy changes this time around. You have the Conservative Partnership Institute raising millions and millions of dollars to work with state officials and to put election deniers in positions of authority.
Berman believes Democrats are fighting asymmetric warfare where it comes to election protection and court battles. The real fight is happening now under their noses.
[Republicans are] not fighting on policy. They don’t care about policy. They’re laser-focused on changing the rules to make sure they can succeed where they failed in 2020. That is the overriding goal of the MAGA movement right now.
And they’ve got a large swath of MAGA voters convinced they are in an apocalyptic fight for “their” country. They’ve built a well-funded network of operatives planning to “win” elections no matter how the votes totals go. Democrats are bringing a butter knife to a gunfight, if I read Berman right.
I’m inquiring into what contingency plans are being made for direct, nonviolent actions if needed in the post-election period to protect the vote count and elector process from physical disruption. Taking nothing away from Marc Elias and his network of election protection lawyers, I worry that we’re going into democratic battle armed with little more than harsh language.
Update: Will Bunch just weighed in on this topic.
“Americans are being impacted by the authoritarian threat right now,” Amanda Carpenter, the disaffected former aide to Texas GOP Sen. Ted Cruz, posted on X/Twitter, referring to assaults on voting rights in Texas and Florida. “Believe it. This is what authoritarians want to put on steroids and enact on a federal level.”