Ill winds blow
Timothy Snyder reinforces what Hullabaloo readers already know: “the goal of these people is the end of law, the end of democracy, and the end of a recognizable republic.”
Snyder reacts to this Guardian story on a report released last week before the No Kings 2 protests:
The United States is “on a trajectory” toward authoritarian rule, according to a sobering new intelligence-style assessment by former US intelligence and national security officials, who warn that democratic backsliding is accelerating under the Trump administration – and may soon become entrenched without organized resistance.
The report, titled Accelerating Authoritarian Dynamics: Assessment of Democratic Decline, was released on Thursday by the Steady State, a network of more than 340 former officers of the CIA, the NSA, the state department and other national security agencies.
The intelligence experts employed the same tools from their former careers. They conclude “with moderate to high confidence” that the U.S. is “on a trajectory toward competitive authoritarianism: a system in which elections, courts, and other democratic institutions persist in form but are systematically manipulated to entrench executive control.”
“These are people who have seen these indicators develop in countries that shifted dramatically away from democracy towards authoritarianism,” Larry Pfeiffer, a former senior intelligence official who spent two decades at the NSA, told reporters on Thursday. “And we’re seeing those things happening in our country today.”
Among the key indicators of democratic decline identified in the report: the expansion of executive power through unilateral decrees and emergency authorities; the politicization of the civil service and federal law enforcement; attempts to erode judicial independence through strategic appointments and “noncompliance” with court rulings or investigations; a weakened and increasingly ineffective Congress; partisan manipulation of electoral systems and administration; and the deliberate undermining of civil society, the press and public trust.
The report itself is here.
The Guardian report continues:
“The speed with which we have devolved away from a fully functioning democracy is startling to me,” Gail Helt, a former CIA analyst and a member of the Steady State, said on a call with reporters after the assessment was published on Thursday. “In most cases, it takes longer than nine months to get where we are.”
Since returning to the White House, the president has pardoned January 6 rioters who assaulted police, fired independent watchdogs, purged career officials viewed as disloyal, publicly urged his attorney general to prosecute political opponents, deployed troops to US cities, attacked judges who ruled against him, threatened universities and restricted press freedom – all while testing the boundaries of executive power in ways federal courts have repeatedly deemed to be unlawful and unconstitutional.
Just last week, Trump’s justice department indicted Letitia James, the New York attorney general who successfully sued him for fraud, and separately charged the former FBI director James Comey, a longtime political adversary. He has also called for jailing the Illinois governor, JB Pritzker, and the Chicago mayor, Brandon Johnson, both Democrats who opposed his deployment of federal troops there.
Just yesterday, Trump AG Pam Bondi threatened to investigate Speaker Emerita Nancy Pelosi of California. Anticipating Trump surging federal immigration forces into San Francisco, Pelosi suggested that federal officers could be arrested for violating California law.
How dare she, Bondi roared:
“If you are telling people to arrest our ICE officers, our federal agents, you cannot do that, you are impeding an investigation, and we will charge them,” the Florida Republican told Fox News. Bondi added, “You’ve got Pelosi out there saying to obstruct their investigation. You can’t do it, and we’re going to investigate her now.”
Former Trump personal lawyer, Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche, chimed in with a letter posted to FKA Twitter:
“The Department of Justice will investigate and prosecute any state or local official who violates these federal statutes,” he wrote, “or directs or conspires with others to violate them.”
He concluded that “federal agents and officers will continue to enforce federal law and will not be deterred by the threat of arrest by California authorities.”
Not to be left out, Gruppenführer Stephen Miller went onto Fox News to assure ICE officers (no matter how unprofessional, capricious, brutal, or even murderous?) that they enjoy federal immunity for any of their actions.
If democracy is not on life support, it’s close
North Carolina Republicans this week passed yet another in along line of heavily gerrymandered congressional maps. Congressional (and state) representation is increasingly so skewed against Democrats in GOP-controlled states that they no longer look small-d democratic. The Republican Party has over the last decade-plus worked at denying the Constitution’s guarantee “to every State in this Union a Republican Form of Government” (that’s small-r) under Article IV, Section 4. The U.S. Supreme Court in 1849 ruled the Guarantee Clause nonjusticiable. The National Constitution Center adds, “Nearly one hundred years later, the Court sweepingly declared that the guarantee of a republican form of government cannot be challenged in court. Colegrove v. Green (1946). But is a guarantee a guarantee when Republican-controlled executive and legislative branches must enforce it?
Get busy defending it or get busy watching your republic die.
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Indivisible: A Guide to Democracy on the Brink
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Chop Wood, Carry Water
Thirty lonely but beautiful actions
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