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Horns Of A Dilemma

About those Jack Smith reports

Attorney General Merrick Garland told Congress he plans to release Jack Smith’s special counsel’s report on the Jan. 6 investigation. The secret documents case is the second volume of the two-volume report (CNN):

Garland, in a letter sent Wednesday to House and Senate Judiciary Committee chairs and ranking members, outlines how he wants to confidentially provide to them Smith’s volume on the classified documents case and how he wants to release to Congress and to the public the volume on Trump’s 2020 election interference criminal charges.

Garland specifies he would do so “when permitted to do so by the court.”

Both cases have been dismissed before any findings of guilt or innocence, and the defendants are currently challenging the release of all parts of Smith’s report, signaling a major shift in the approach to transparency from the Justice Department that is expected in Trump’s administration.

“Consistent with local court rules and Department policy, and to avoid any risk of prejudice to defendants Waltine Nauta and Carlos De Oliveira, whose criminal cases remain pending, I have determined, at the recommendation of the Special Counsel, that Volume Two should not be made public so long as those defendants’ criminal proceedings are ongoing,” Garland wrote.

The “when permitted to do so by the court” language is a nod to Judge Eileen Cannon’s likely overstep when she issued an order to prevent their release:

After Cannon granted their request for an emergency order blocking the report’s release, Trump’s attorneys shifted gears and asked the Eleventh Circuit to remand the case back to Cannon.

But of course they (he) did. The matter may be decided by the Eleventh Circuit Court this morning.

Former U.S. Attorney Joyce Vance notes the problem Nauta and De Oliveira pose for Trump if he wants Smith’s report on the documents case kept from the public eye:

The Government told the court that its plan is to release the entire volume of the report that is related to the January 6 prosecution in Washington, D.C., but they do not plan to publicly release the volume about the classified documents because that case is still pending. They will, however, share a redacted version of that part of the report with House and Senate Judiciary Committee leaders, who must promise to keep it secret until the case concludes. That puts the new Trump administration on the horns of a dilemma: Let that case proceed, and the report stays behind the scenes (although the evidence would come out at trial or during guilty plea hearings). Or pardon the defendants or dismiss the prosecution, and Democrats in Congress no longer need to keep the report confidential.

Who knew being a criminal autocrat was so complicated? Not that the effort will make Trump’s bronzer run.

Only The Best People

Like properties, Trump knows how to pick ’em

Our president-elect has named former U.S. Rep. Billy Long of Missouri, a former auctioneer, to run the Internal Revenue Service. He boasts experience as a tax adviser. Trump in December praised Long for “32 years of experience running his own businesses in Real Estate and, as one of the premier Auctioneers in the Country.” Long, attended the University of Missouri, per Ballotpedia, but never graduated.

Rep. Don Beyer (D-Va.) serves on the House Ways and Means Tax subcommittee. He calls Long a “terrible mistake.”

ProPublica offers:

He advertises his credential as a certified tax and business advisor, and he adds CTBA to his name on his X profile. That profile encourages people to message him to “save 40% on your taxes.”

But tax experts told ProPublica that they have never heard of CTBA as a credential in the tax profession. The designation is offered by a small Florida firm, Excel Empire, which was established just two years ago and only requires attendance at a three-day seminar. That is in stark contrast to the 150 credit hours and the rigorous exams required to become a certified public accountant, a standard certification for tax accountants.

In most tax cases, only lawyers, CPAs and enrolled agents — federally authorized tax practitioners — can represent taxpayers at the IRS.

New Agers here in the 90s would print up business cards and hang out a shingle after receiving a laser-printed certificate from their $50 weekend workshop at the Airport Ramada. The incoming president thinks Long’s workshop qualifies him to run an agency with roughly 90,000 employees. (Long paid maybe $5,000 for his three-day training.) Students at Donald Trump’s one-time unlicensed “university” paid “between $1,495 and $35,000.

Rachel Maddow offered her observations on Long’s qualifications.

CBS reports that Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) has doubts about Long:

While serving as a representative, Long, a Republican from Missouri and a former auctioneer, co-sponsored legislation that aimed to wipe out much of the tax code. After leaving office, he served as a tax adviser to businesses seeking to employ a controversial tax credit, the Employee Retention Tax Credit, or ERTC.

In her Jan. 9 letter to Long, Warren raises questions about Long’s tax expertise as well as his promotion of the ERTC, which has been flagged by the IRS for its high rate of fraud. Unlike other recent IRS tax commissioners, Long doesn’t have a depth of experience in the tax industry, nor does he have a degree in accounting or tax law. 

“[Y]our lack of significant management or tax experience — and your promotion of credits that have been “magnet[s] for fraud” — raise serious questions about your qualifications to lead the IRS,” Warren wrote in the letter, noting that the Senate Finance Committee will hold his confirmation hearing early this year.

During his time in Congress, ProPublica adds, “Long pursued legislation to abolish the IRS and establish a national sales tax.” Thirty percent, Maddow notes, an idea promoted since the 1990s by the Church of Scientology.

Only the best for Trump.

No Sympathy For Anyone But Themselves

Trumpers whine incessantly about their victimhood. But in the face of actual tragedy that affects people they don’t see as Real Americans or even human. They are using the horror in LA as an excuse to treat the residents and its leaders like garbage:

(FYI, everything Watters says is a lie. Of course.)

More from the Asshole in Chief-elect, who has been tweeting garbage like this all day long:

The idea of secession is sounding better all the time.

The Deep State Is His Friend

Kash Patel and Pam Bondi are being nominated to purge the “Deep State” of all people who have not pledged fealty to Donald Trump. But there’s no reason to believe the DOJ or the FBI will be emptied. There are plenty of Trump loyalists in those agencies and have been from the very beginning.

Recall that James Comey revealed the “investigation” into the Anthony Weiner laptop just days before the 2016 election largely because he was aware that the NY FBI field office was full of Trumpers who were planning to leak the information. (He should have just let them and we could have called it the phony dirty trick it was. Instead it became front page news. two weeks before the election.)

Now we have more evidence of Trumpers in the woodpile. Philip Bump reports:

In early 2020, the coronavirus pandemic reached the United States, leaving state governments and the Trump administration scrambling to respond. Trump pushed for a quick return to normal, with his reelection bid looming. His subsequent disputes with medical experts and the increasing toll from the virus became central elements of the 2020 presidential campaign.

In late October, the New York Post reported that the Justice Department was seeking more information from several states with Democratic governors, suggesting that death tolls at nursing homes had been underreported. If true, this implied that perhaps the negative effects of the pandemic were a function of Democratic leaders instead of Trump — a potential asset to the president’s reelection bid.

On Tuesday, Reuters reported that this leak may have been specifically intended to have that effect. An assessment from Horowitz, obtained through the Freedom of Information Act, found that three senior officials in the Justice Department informed the New York Post about the letters. One sent a text message describing the move as being “our last play on them before the election but it’s a big one.”

Horowitz wrote that these senior officials’ conduct “raised serious questions about the partisan political motivation for their actions in proximity to the 2020 election,” according to the Reuters report.

Ya think?

If the intent was to aid Trump’s reelection, it was obviously insufficient. But it continues the pattern: pre-election information that aids, rather than hinders, Trump’s political prospects.

It’s a pattern that is worth remembering as Trump returns to the White House. For all of his insistences that federal law enforcement is eager to take him down — insistences that depend heavily on dismissing the Jan. 6 and classified documents cases as invalid — there are also examples that very much suggest the opposite.

The Bulwark’s Tim Miller interviewed Ryan Reilly who has been covering the January 6th investigation and trials for the Huffington Post since it happened. Reilly told him that there was a lot of resistance among FBI and DOJ employees to that investigation and in some cases it may have ended up hindering it and causing delay.

This seems obvious to me. Law enforcement generally is conservative and I would guess many of them think that Trump’s “support” for knocking heads and immunity for rogue cops, not to mention his racism and xenophobia, is a positive. They don’t care that he broke the law because he’s a rich white billionaire who hates who they hate. He’s a role model.

I assume that the “purge” is going to be aimed at the straight arrows who believe in the rule of law. And there are probably fewer of them than we might think.

Psychotic Nihilism

I can hardly believe that this is real:

There’s a nascent, concerted effort to make Oklahoma the first state to ban new renewable energy projects. And it’s picking up steam.

Across the U.S., activism against wind and solar energy has only grown in intensity, power, and scope in tandem with the recent renewables boom. This is in direct contrast to hopes many in the climate movement had that these technologies would become more popular as they entered communities historically hostile to the idea of switching away from fossil fuels. If anything, grassroots angst toward the energy transition has only surged in many pockets of the country since passage of the nation’s first climate law – Inflation Reduction Act – in 2022.

Nowhere is this more true than Oklahoma, which on paper resembles a breadbasket of possibilities for the “green” economy. Oklahoma is the nation’s third largest generator of wind energy, home to a burgeoning solar energy sector, a potential hydrogen hub, and maybe even the nation’s first refinery for cobalt, a rare metal used in electric vehicles. Yet yesterday, hundreds of people flocked to Oklahoma City, filled a giant hall in the state’s capitol building to the brim, and rallied for the state’s governor Kevin Stitt to issue an executive order to stop new wind and solar energy facilities from being built.

Donald Trump is leading this charge. He never fails to mention how terrible wind and solar power are. It doesn’t matter that these new technologies will create a boatload of jobs. They just don’t want it because Trump says it’s bad and it owns the libs. Nothing else matters.

Here’s Your Isolationist GOP, America

American Progress by John Gast

The Republicans are back, baby! They sound like the warmongering assholes we’ve always known and hated. I knew it was only a matter of time.

I haven’t thought about Manifest Destiny since about the 8th grade. It’s a ridiculous concept in the 21st century but then virtually everything Trump is doing and saying is about returning to the 18th and 19th centuries.

I have yet to read a good explanation of where Trump and his moronic followers are getting this stuff. We know Trump doesn’t read books. And while I certainly believe that he may have come up with the idea of taking over the world all by himself, the extolling of the gilded age and McKinley and all that has to have come from someone else. In the past I would have thought it was Steve Bannon but he doesn’t have trump’s ear anymore on this kind of thing. I wonder who does?

Update — It’s on!


I wonder why they bothered to delete it?

Firestorm. A Real One.


I don’t see the kind of wall to wall coverage I might expect from the national news media if this horrific disaster Los Angeles is experiencing was taking place in the east. But I’m sure you’ve seen something about it and it’s actually much worse than you know. Luckily there is robust local news covering this so people in the area are able to get real news. They certainly aren’t on Twitter which is a total shithole during times like these since Elon fired their disaster team and Facebook is equally unreliable. Bluesky is good but it doesn’t quite have the scale to do what Twitter used to do.

I was going to share some pictures here but I don’t have the heart to do it. It’s just devastating.

And keep a good thought for all the animals in the mountains that are on fire here in southern California. It breaks my heart.

By the way, if anyone tells you this has nothing to do with climate change and everyone should just rake the forest, they are wrong. This 2015 article in Rolling Stone by Tim Dickinson explains it well:

This is the present, and the future, of climate change. Our overheated world is amplifying drought and making megafire commonplace. This is happening even in the soggy Pacific Northwest, which has been hard-hit by what’s been dubbed a “wet drought.” Despite near-normal precipitation, warm winter temperatures brought rain instead of snow to the region’s mountains. What little snow did hit the ground then melted early, leaving the Northwest dry — and ready to burn in the heat of summer.

The national data is as clear as it is troubling: “Climate change has led to fire seasons that are now on average 78 days longer than in 1970,” according to a Forest Service report published in August. In the past three decades, the annual area claimed by fire has doubled, and the agency’s scientists predict that fires will likely “double again by midcentury.”

The human imprint on the bone-dry conditions that lead to fire is real — and now measurable. According to a major new study by scientists at Columbia and NASA, man-made warming is increasing atmospheric evaporation — drawing water out of Western soil, shrubs and trees. In California alone, the epic drought is up to 25 percent more severe than it would have been, absent climate change. And this impact doesn’t respect state borders. The study’s lead author, Columbia scientist Park Williams, tells Rolling Stone, “There’s the same effect in the Pacific Northwest.”

The fiery future is upon us…

With our nation’s firefighting resources tapped out by the fires of the present, America finds itself woefully unprepared for the blazes to come, much less the worst-case scenario: a Katrina by fire.

If you have a sub, read the whole thing. It may just be happening right now.

And yet:

America just put this fucking imbecile back in charge:

Predator Nation

Nobody voted for this

Many people don’t have the stomach to follow politics these days after the disappointment of the last election and the return of the Trump three ring circus to Washington. It’s depressing and nerve-wracking even if you just hear snippets in passing or read a few paragraphs of a news story about billionaires at Mar-a-Lago or strange D-list celebrity political figures being lifted into positions of great responsibility. There’s only so much you can take.

But I do wish that everyone could bring themselves to watch at least some of President-elect Trump’s press conference yesterday. Yes, much of it was the standard lunacy about shower heads and whales and windmills. He always plays his greatest hits. But he’s got some new material that I think people should be aware of.

I’ve been saying for years that his schtick about being some kind of peacenik was a crock. First of all, it was obvious that he adopted that pose in order to position himself as the opposite of both Bush and Obama who were criticized for their foreign policy. He has almost no understanding of international affairs, even now, so his shorthand decision making was to simply say that anything his predecessors did was stupid and made the world laugh at us and he promised to reverse their policies.

Sometimes he even did it, as with the Iran Nuclear Deal, the Paris Climate Agreement and the Trans Pacific Partnership. He simply tweaked Nafta and pretended that it was genius and left Afghanistan a terrible mess for his successor which allowed him to condemn it all over again. But generally, beyond kvetching endlessly about NATO not “paying its dues” and crowing about his love affairs with all the world’s worst despots, he really didn’t have a foreign policy.

But he did have a worldview. His central conceit all the way back to 2016 was that he’s a man of peace who wanted to put America first which people misinterpreted as a sort of pacifist isolationism. It was not. He wanted to spend massive sums to build up the US military to make allies pay up for protection and he believed that tariffs should be used as economic weapons to dominate other countries. In other words, he believes that US power should be used to bend the world to his will.

His recent comments about Mexico, Canada, Panama and Greenland show that this strategy has matured beyond just extorting money from other countries at the end of some very big guns, both military and economic, and has now become a full-fledged policy of territorial expansion.

In that typically crazy press conference on Monday, he made the startling announcement that he plans to rename the Gulf of Mexico the Gulf of America. His loyal hatchet woman, Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, promptly announced legislation to do just that so that the government could get to work changing all the maps. The fact that the Gulf of Mexico has been called that since before there was a United States of America makes no difference. Trump wants it and he’s going to make it so.

That wasn’t all, however. Earlier in the day we had all been treated to reports that Donald Trump Jr. and activist Charlie Kirk had been dispatched to Greenland to take the temperature of locals to see if they wanted to be annexed by Donald Trump. It was embarrassing, needless to say.

And when asked in the press conference if Trump actually planned to seize the island, and the Panama Canal as well, Trump said it was necessary for national security, the same rationale Vladimir Putin used to invade Ukraine which Trump called “savvy” and “genius” at the time. It is quite clear that Trump is serious about this. When asked directly, he would not rule out using the military to accomplish his goal.

He is also quite serious about using US troops to stage military operations in Mexico, ostensibly against the drug cartels. And for all of his “joking” about Canada being the 51st state as a way to emasculate Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, he conceded that he only planned to use economic force to bend Canada to his will, which was very restrained of him.

The Atlantic’s David Frum discussed what a change this was from the way the world has been organized since the end of WWII when the world was in rubble and the United States made the decision to help rebuild it:

Americans sought to achieve security and prosperity for themselves by sharing security and prosperity with like-minded others. The United States became the center of a network of international cooperation—not only on trade and defense, but on environmental concerns, law enforcement, financial regulation, food and drug safety, and countless other issues.

And yes, we also exploited other countries, chased phantom ideological goals and otherwise betrayed our ideals but this was central to how we organized our tremendous military and economic power in the world. After the searing experiences of two world wars, a global Great Depression and the long slog of the Cold War, the hard won lesson was that everyone was safer and more prosperous under mutual cooperation. The international institutions, alliances and treaties that sprang from that understanding were devised to at least make it difficult to completely abandon those ideals.

That concept is no longer operative. Here you have one of Trump’s glib minions wondering why America shouldn’t expand its territory. It’s as if the last century never happened.

With Trump saying that the US needs Greenland and the Panama Canal for national security reasons it’s pretty clear that they are laying the groundwork for military action. (Nobody is going to “sell” either of them.) I doubt that there will be any serious actions, economic or otherwise against Canada because America does lots of business with them. But Trump is stirring up a tremendous amount of resentment for no good reason. And we have every reason to believe that he’s serious about some kind of military action in Mexico. (And don’t be surprised if he proposes a Venezuelan invasion. He wanted to do it in his last term.)

Nobody voted for any of this. It wasn’t even a “vibe” in last November’s election.

Trump appears to have taken some inspiration from Vladimir Putin’s Ukraine invasion which he thought from the beginning made perfect sense. His Defense Secretary nominee put it in terms Trump probably liked very much. He called it “Putin’s give me my shit back war”:

I have always said that even if you believed that America’s role in the world was too broad and too expensive and perhaps outdated, just taking a wrecking ball to it without anything to replace it would be a horrible mistake. Well, Trump has something to replace it now. When he says “America First” he means “America Uber Alles .”

And guess what? Other countries aren’t eager to go along with that. So they’re arming up:

What could go wrong?

Salon

The Gulf Of Trump

“Gulf of America” is hardly his first choice

“Look at the size of this. It’s massive,” said Trump.

Donald Trump refuses to rule out taking military or economic actions against a NATO ally (Denmark) to take control of Greenland or to annex the Sudetenland Panama Canal.

Republican strategist Kristen Soltis Anderson argues this morning that Trump is misunderstood (Raw Story):

“What Donald Trump is trying to argue is that there are many other conflicts around the world where it’s not in our interest to be involved,” said Republican strategist Kristen Soltis Anderson. “We’ve gotten too overextended, [Trump says] but this is in our interest. This is in our hemisphere, this is something that is important for us to do, and in a way, I think the reason why you see Donald Trump so animated about all of this is I think he views it as a really big real estate transaction. What does Donald Trump do? Big real estate transactions, branding – the Gulf of America. I mean, this is this is just Donald Trump taking the same playbook he’s been running for decades and now trying to apply it to the U.S. government yet again.”

C’mon, Gulf of America is hardly the first choice for the guy who gets a fee for slapping his name on buildings he doesn’t own. But I digress.

CNN legal analyst Elliot Williams agreed that Trump wasn’t fully serious about his imperialist ambitions, but he cautioned against dismissing his comments altogether.

“We were here four years ago where the former president, president-elect will make these claims that in many ways are kind of preposterous, but there’s an element of truth to them,” Williams said. “Like, yes, we technically could under the laws of the military annex another nation if we so chose. But here we are once again, assessing the seriousness of these kind of harebrained, almost schemes being cooked up by the former president. That could be the future of America, but it’s hard to know where we go from here.”

Watch the clip here

As everyone knows, Trump is obsessed with size. He famously assured voters his hands were not really small and indicated nothing about the size of his tool. Trump admires Russian President Vladmir Putin who is richer, smarter, more ruthless, and controls a much larger swath of territory than the U.S. president-elect.

Seriously? Trump desperately wants an invitation to the International Autocrats Club (Putin, Kim Jong Un, Viktor Orbán, et al.), that would never have a flaccid imbecile like him as a member. He imagines that grabbing a big hunk of land like Greenland would be his ticket to admission (plus his throwing millions out of the country and building concentration camps to hold them until he can). It’s a Charlie the Tuna move. Sorry, Donny.

MSNBC’s Alex Wagner on Tuesday recounts that one of Trump’s billionaire friends first floated the idea to Trump of “acquiring” Greenland. He was so obsessed with the idea, reported Peter Baker that “Greenland was one issue that absorbed the National Security Council staff for months.”

“Part of Trump’s fixation with buying Greenland,” Wagner said, “may have stemmed from his failure to understand how maps work.” Wagner provided graphics to explain the Mercator projection to the size-obsessed, idiot president-elect who wasn’t watching.

The Mercator projection distorts the size of land masses near the poles and makes them unrealistically large.
Greenland is not nearly as large as it looks on a flat map.

Trump once said, “I love maps. And I always said: ‘Look at the size of this. It’s massive. That should be part of the United States.’”

Little Donny pictures TRUMP plastered across Greenland being visible from outer space.

Go to timestamp 6:05.

Election Stealing In Broad Daylight

The GOP is just getting warmed up

The North Carolina Supreme Court Building in Raleigh. Photo by Indy beetle (CC0 1.0)

When Republicans win elections, they celebrate and move on. When they lose, they scream foul and launch lawsuits. And insurrections. Americans marked the fourth anniversary of the Trump insurrection on Monday. Donald Trump was impeached and indicted for trying to steal the presidential election he lost in 2020.

North Carolina Republicans now mean to steal 60,000 votes and an entire statewide election. In broad daylight. In court. For a Republican state Supreme Court candidate, a judge yet. Two recounts confirm that Jefferson Griffin lost his election to incumbent Associate Justice Allison Riggs by 734 votes. Griffin’s attorneys hired Republican political consulting firm Coldspark to identify potential votes for challenge.

Four people I know, friends, including the former local president of the NAACP, are among the 60,000 Democrats, Republicans and independents whose votes Judge Griffin wants vacated so he can sit on the state’s highest court. Griffin means to steal the election ecumenically.

Robert Orr, former associate justice on the state Supreme Court (a former Republican), told MSNBC’s Chris Hayes Tuesday night that the NCGOP likely had this challenge teed up in advance “in case Trump lost North Carolina” by a narrow margin. They’re using that playbook to overturn Riggs’s election instead.

WUNC:

On Tuesday morning, the state board of elections appealed to the 4th Circuit, just a few hours after a federal district court judge granted Republican judicial candidate Jefferson Griffin’s motion to remand his election protest to the state Supreme Court.

The elections board’s federal appeal notwithstanding, the North Carolina Supreme Court’s conservative majority issued a temporary stay blocking the state elections board from certifying Griffin’s electoral loss to Democrat Allison Riggs, the incumbent justice he’s trying to unseat.

Lawyers for Griffin use language echoing Donald Trump’s complaints about his 2020 loss to Joe Biden, the very complaints he used to launch that the infamous insurrection. The GOP playbook is familiar, Rolling Stone noticed. Griffin held a sizable lead on Election Day but saw it evaporate after the counting of all absentee and provisional ballots. Fraud, clearly.

NC Newsline:

Most of the votes Griffin wants thrown out are those his campaign claims were cast by people who did not include a driver’s license or partial Social Security number on their voter registration applications.  People who did not include those numbers on their applications are not legally registered, Republican lawyers have argued. Many of those voters have been voting regularly for years. 

John Eastman-level skeevy

Griffin’s attorneys base their challenge on registration requirements added under the federal Help America Vote Act (HAVA) passed in 2002 (NC Newsline):

The state Board of Elections’ written order filed after it rejected Griffin’s protests says that just because driver’s license or partial Social Security numbers didn’t show up in the voter registration file doesn’t mean voters didn’t supply them.

A brief filed on behalf of the League of Women Voters of North Carolina and individual voters emphasizes that point. Griffin’s target list is inaccurate, the brief says, because it fails to account for voters who did not have to supply the information or for data entry errors or database mismatches that resulted when women married and changed their last names. 

Anne Tindall, one of the lawyers with the Protect Democracy Project representing the League and individual voters, said in an interview last week that the women and non-white voters were overrepresented on the list of 225,000 people Republicans originally wanted purged from the rolls.  Those are voters who are more likely to have hyphenated names or names people misspell, she said. 

Those aren’t the only votes at risk. Also under threat are nearly 300 ballots from voters living overseas, Rolling Stone reports, “including members of the military, a category of voter known as UOCAVA, short for the Uniformed and Overseas Citizens Absentee Voting Act, a federal law.” These include voting-age citizens born to Americans living overseas (to parents from N.C.) but who’ve never actually lived in the state. Federal and state law provide for these Americans to vote in the state of their parents’ last residency. Republicans are challenging their votes as illegitimate anyway. 

This is John Eastman-level, skeevy lawyering. The California State Bar Court recommended Eastman’s disbarrment (his license has been suspended). His license to practice law in the District of Columbia is suspended. He still faces criminal charges in Georgia and Arizona.

How this case impacts you

The (more) insane part of this affair is that Griffin’s election challenge is based on HAVA, a federal law. Throwing the case back to the state Supreme Court makes zero sense. Unless you’re a Trump judge like U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon, and U.S. District Judge Richard Myers II is. 

Secondly, if Republicans succeed in stealing Riggs’s seat based on HAVA, they will deploy the same tactic wherever and whenever they lose elections going forward. They may gut HAVA protections they dislike through congressional action, but will be sure to preserve provisions that allow them to steal elections (and your votes) the way Trump and Eastman attempted to with their fake electors scheme.

Griffin and his legal team are going to fight his election loss all the way to the Supreme Court, and they don’t care if it’s the state’s or SCOTUS. They’re both majority GOP.

The Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals may yet step in and wrest back jurisdiction in this case. The N.C. Supreme Court acknowledged that in its stay order. But unlike Trump whose go-to gambit is delay, delay, delay, “because it concerns certification of an election,” they’re in a hurry to wrap up the steal by the end of January.

Every time someone ineligible casts a fraudulent ballot, Republicans insist, it “steals your vote.” Your vote. They make it personal. Under cover of that faux outrage they’ve launched a thousand efforts at vote suppression. Like this one. They’re coming for your vote next.

UPDATE: Perhaps feeling the heat, Republican justices on the state Supreme Court revised their previous order to include justice statements. What was a 5-1 opinion now stands at 4-2 with Republican Justice Richard Dietz joining Democrat Anita Earls in dissent.

In my view, the challenges raised in this petition strike at the very heart of our state’s Purcell principle. The petition is, in effect, post-election litigation that seeks to remove the legal right to vote from people who lawfully voted under the laws and regulations that existed during the voting process. The harm this type of post-election legal challenge could inflict on the integrity of our elections is precisely what the Purcell principle is designed to avoid.

Any issue Dietz may have with State Board rules in place long before the election, he writes, should have been litigated long before the election, not now. Voters bear no responsibility for that.

Permitting post-election litigation that seeks to rewrite our state’s election rules—and, as a result, remove the right to vote in an election from people who already lawfully voted under the existing rules—invites incredible mischief. It will lead to doubts about the finality of vote counts following an election, encourage novel legal challenges that greatly delay certification of the results, and fuel an already troubling decline in public faith in our elections. I therefore believe our state version of the Purcell principle precludes the relief sought in the petition and respectfully dissent from the Court’s decision not to deny it outright.

Also note that this Supreme Court contest is just one of hundreds held acrsoss the state (already certified), some of which were lost by Republicans by a mere handful of votes. What remedy could this GOP court order at this point if it permits the cancelling of any portion of the contested 60,000 votes?