Rolling back your voting rights
Michael Podhorzer finds, as Digby posted on Saturday:
the defining feature of American politics this century is that neither party can “win” elections anymore; they can only be the “not-loser.”
Donald Trump was the not-loser in November. (It’s just what he wanted for Christmas.) Trump “won the same share of the eligible population” in 2024 as he did in 2020 while the Democrats’ share dropped 3.5% from 2020.
Hurrah!The country did not turn more MAGA. That’s little consolation for the left and doesn’t change the facts on the ground. In an age where facts don’t seem to matter, those facts nevertheless could get suckier under Trump 2.0, writes Sam Levin for The Guardian:
Donald Trump could use a second term atop the justice department to gut enforcement of US federal voting laws and deploy an agency that is supposed to protect the right to vote to undermine it, experts have warned.
Trump has made no secret of his intention to punish his political enemies and subvert the American voting system. His control of the justice department could allow him to amplify misleading claims of voter fraud by non-citizens and others, as well as investigate local election officials.
It could also cause the department’s voting section to largely scale back its enforcement of the Voting Rights Act, returning it to the approach that it took under Trump’s first term.
Enter Pam Bondi of Florida fundraising infamy and Trump’s current nominee to lead the Department of Injustice. (Or has he now dropped that moniker?)
Trump harbors a gnawing need to prove somehow that he won the 2020 election and will task Bondi with delivering a verdict that contradicts all previous findings. He will endeavor to his dying day to bend objective reality to his will, no matter what he told “Meet the Press.”
Much of the discussion about Trump’s justice department has focused on the fate of its voting section, which is charged with enforcing the nation’s federal voting rights laws. Cleta Mitchell, a Trump ally who sought to overturn the 2020 election and has become a key figure in the election denial movement, has called for all of the lawyers in the voting section to be fired.
“They are all leftist activists and use taxpayer dollars and the power of the federal government to advance their leftwing legal theories,” she said in an email. “Their loyalty is not to the constitution and the rule of law. They should go back to the leftist advocacy groups they came from.”
Again, objective reality be damned. Levin continues, “Career attorneys in the justice department have apolitical jobs in which they are charged with representing the position of the United States, regardless of the administration.”
In the AfterBiden, you’re on your own
Trump has nominated “a sycophant loyalist to head the Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division,” warns Democratic voting rights attorney, Marc Elias.
Buckle up. Losing the election sucked for Democrats. Things are about to get suckier still. Trump will likely see to it that Bondi et al. launch investigations “to help build the narrative that voter fraud is a problem in the US” despite failing in his first administration.
Among voter fraud theorists, absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.