198 search results for ""election integrity""

“The law, in its majestic equality, forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal their bread.” ― Anatole France

“You just can’t be racist the way you used to,” begins Charles M. Blow .

No. Not most places. Using the N-word with abandon meant freedom to some people. During EMT training in the emergency room decades ago, one of my patients wore a black tee shirt with white block letters reading “I HATE (N-words).” There was a large-caliber, blue-black hole in his foot where he’d shot himself with a percussion-cap revolver as antique as the racial attitudes broadcast across his chest.

That was then. Nowadays they wear their tee shirts under oxford shirts and ties while writing legislation to suppress the votes of poor people. “Poor” now being a proxy for Black.

“There are two ways to win an election: convince enough voters that you are best suited for the job, or rid the electorate of as many people who would vote against you as possible,” Blow writes. Republicans have chosen the latter:

It can sound reasonable enough to demand that people have a state-issued ID to vote. After all, proponents ask, don’t you need an ID to drive, fly or open a bank account? But that argument ignores the fact that there are millions of Americans who don’t drive, have never flown and have no bank or credit union account.

So long as the burden is everyone’s, Republicans can hide behind their lawmaking’s majestic equality.

But the burden of voter ID laws falls heaviest on poorer voters who tend to be Black and tend to vote for Democrats. Racial discrimination under the cover of “election integrity” or “ballot security” is by design.

When state legislatures make it less convenient to register or to vote, it also greatly affects the poor. Poverty is the ultimate inconvenience. It is incredibly time consuming to be poor. The things that people with money take for granted — like shopping for groceries or making a doctor’s appointment — require considerably more time and energy when you lack money. If you make tasks like voting harder, it means that poor people will do them less often.

Prohibiting Sunday voting, “souls to the polls” communal voting favored in Black communities is another legislated inconvenience with a target demographic. Plus limiting poll hours and early voting sites as well as siting early voting sites more remote to minority communities than white ones.

Blow adds:

What we are seeing across the country are effectively Republican attempts to resurrect a poll tax — to use poverty and income inequality (which white supremacy helps to create) to further racial oppression.

We are witnessing attempts to use poverty and disadvantage as tools to silence voices. It is a further dehumanizing and delegitimizing of the poor.

In the early days of the Republic, only rich landowning white men were routinely allowed to vote. The ability to participate in how the country was governed was inherited or acquired in life — and many were excluded.

I have always believed that conservatives in this country have bemoaned the expansion of the franchise and have continuously fought to make it more narrow again.

"They are the ones making the lines longer through these draconian actions. Then they want to make it a crime to bring grandma some water while she's waiting in a line that they're making longer. Make no mistake, this is democracy in reverse." — Warnock pic.twitter.com/Alz9WtVqSN

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) March 17, 2021

Across the country conservative legislators have set about making barriers to voting even higher for Black voters by targeting the poor. Even now, for all the heat Georgia Republican legislators feel for their efforts to head off losses in 2022, they are preparing yet another assault (CNN):

Word of a new 93-page bill came about an hour before a scheduled hearing of a special election integrity committee in the Georgia House, and it set off outrage from voting rights activists who called it a “disgraceful” bait-and-switch tactic.

“They are attacking voting rights from every single angle,” Hillary Holley of Fair Fight Action, a voting rights group, said in a hastily arranged news conference.

Earlier in the day, the committee’s public agenda had described the hearing as centered on a two-page bill, dealing narrowly with absentee voting provisions — only to substitute it with the sweeping bill.

In his first Senate floor speech, Georgia Democrat Raphael Warnock addressed the widespread effort by Republicans to choose their voters rather than allow an open democratic process to choose them.

The full speech is below.

By now, Dear Readers, you may have heard of the effort by Georgia Republican electeds not only to eliminate Sunday “Souls to the Polls” voting promoted in Black communities, but to prohibit volunteer efforts to help people stay in line to vote when wait-times run long:

Limiting Sunday voting would affect Black voters beyond losing the assistance of the church. It would inevitably lead to longer lines during the week, especially in the Black community, which has historically been underserved on Election Day.

The bill would also ban what is known as “line warming,” the practice of having volunteers provide water, snacks, chairs and other assistance to voters in line.

That particular food-and-drink provision (based on my quick scans) seems to have been dropped in the legislative sausage-making (maybe shame still holds somepower). Still, it was there in the original Republican bill. Anything to make voting more of a burden for voters who tend to vote Democrat. Or even for Republican voters, for that matter. The GOP treats its own as acceptable casualties when laying land mines and erecting barbed wire to hamper its opponents. They play the percentages. So long as barriers to ballot access hurt their opponents more than their own, it’s all good.

Especially if their own are women, as I noted before, in the case of photo IDs:

The Republicans’ argument is since voting restrictions in their majestic equality prevent rich and poor, Republican and Democrat alike from participating as full citizens without presenting IDs, nothing is amiss in passing and enforcing them.

But in professing concern for “election integrity,” fearful, white Republican politicians are playing percentages, displaying scorn not just for their opponents but their own supporters. They are willing to sacrifice the franchise of thousands, potentially, as acceptable casualties in elections, if that is what it takes to win, including their own sisters, wives, and daughters.

It’s simply a matter of fine-tuning people’s ability to exercise their rights.

Kentucky Republicans are preparing for Sen. Mitch McConnell’s eventual retirement (or death) if he does not serve out his full term (he was reelected last November). McConnell, 79, has prepared a short list of “heirs.”

But there is a snag. Under Kentucky law, naming a replacement under the circumstances above would fall to Democratic Gov. Andy Beshear. Republicans can’t have that. So it’s time for the GOP-controlled legislature to rewrite the law, the Intercept reports:

The new legislation, Senate Bill 228 — dubbed by some inside the state Legislature as the Daniel Cameron Election Bill — was filed on February 10, 2021, during the Kentucky General Assembly’s 30-day “short” session. The bill alters current state statute that allows the governor to appoint a replacement in the event of a vacancy to the U.S. Senate. If the bill becomes law, the appointment to fill a vacancy will be selected from a list of three names submitted by the state executive committee of the same political party as the senator who held the vacant seat. According to the bill, the appointee from that list will then serve until a successor has been elected by voters. The legislation goes on to list instructions on when elections take place in the event of a vacancy.

Republicans in North Carolina leading the charge on this kind of thing, that is how it works in my state now. The GOP-controlled legislature in charge here since 2011 made those changes in steps between 2013 and 2018, with the “list of three names” provision passed into law in 2018 without Gov. Roy Cooper’s (D) signature.

It’s how they roll.

Trump wasn’t the only one inciting the Insurrection:

Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-CA) on Thursday night released an absolutely massive report compiling the social media posts of every Republican who voted to object to the counting of certain states’ Electoral College votes on Jan. 6.

Then-President Donald Trump had hyped that Jan. 6 congressional objection effort as his last real hope of stealing a second term, and on the morning of Jan. 6, he urged the thousands of supporters that he’d summoned to Washington, D.C. to march on the Capitol and provide some “courage” to the members of Congress voting inside.

Many of those members spent weeks spreading what Democrats have begun calling the “big lie” — the false claim that the 2020 election was fraudulent, and that Joe Biden was not the rightfully elected president. Lofgren’s report, documenting over 1,900 pages of tweets, creates a detailed record of the effort to justify overturning an election. Here are some takeaways:

The Lofgren review of social media posts — it’s more like a PDF database, organized alphabetically by member — makes one thing clear: A small handful of congressmen and women made much of the social media noise from November through January.

Rep. Paul Gosar (R-AZ) appears to have been the most prolific. The Trump die-hard, who recently spoke at a political conference organized by the white nationalist Nicholas Fuentes, takes up a full 176 pages of the 1,900 page report. Reps. Mo Brooks (R-AL), Matt Gaetz (R-FL) and Billy Long (R-LA) aren’t far behind, taking up around 120 pages each. Rep. Majorie Taylor Greene’s (R-GA) tweets take up 94 pages.

The posts from these loyalists offer a real-time view of the Trumpian strategy. Brooks, for example, shifts over time from complaints about “en masse” mail-in voting, to his own dubious claims about voting machines, to assertions about votes from an “illegal alien block” and people other than “eligible American citizens.” On the morning of Jan. 6, Brooks said from the rally stage in front of the White House that patriots ought to start “taking down names and kicking ass.” But in the middle of the attack, he’d already begun shifting blame for the riot: “Rumor: ANTIFA fascists in backwards MAGA hats” he tweeted at 2:20 p.m., the start of a lie that persists today.

All but one member of GOP House leadership (Republican Conference Chair Liz Cheney from Wyoming) voted to overturn the election: House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA), House Minority Whip Steve Scalise (R-LA) and Republican Policy Committee Chair Gary Palmer (R-AL)

Lofgren’s compilation included a McCarthy tweet that promoted a clip of his Fox Business interview on November 4, when Joe Biden was beginning to emerge as the winner. McCarthy declares in the clip: “We’re going to have to fight because we want to make sure every legal vote is counted.”

That soundbite — ”every legal vote needs to be counted” — and demands for “transparency” became the codewords employed by the House minority leader and Scalise in their attempts to legitimize Trump’s lies about election fraud. Their language indicates how they were careful not to lean too much into Trump’s more outlandish claims; they never explicitly accuse Democrats of stealing the presidential election (though McCarthy did accuse them of trying to steal the razor-thin race in Iowa’s 2nd Congressional District). Rather, their tweets show them trying to chip away at the legitimacy of the election in more subtle ways, by raising supposedly “serious” questions “about election integrity” and baseless claims that “millions” of ballots are “ripe for voter fraud.”

(Lofgren’s compilation did not include posts from Palmer. The methodology notes that a lawmaker may not be listed if they didn’t post relevant content in the study’s set time frame.)

For weeks after Election Day, Republicans following Donald Trump’s lead amped up the rhetoric as his options for a legal victory dwindled. As the vote-counting continued and the reality of Biden’s lead became clear, the violent rhetoric only grew.

On Nov. 6, for example, Gaetz tweeted “I’ll fight on the floor of the House of Representatives to stop the Electoral College from being certified.”

Gosar quote-tweeted him and commented, “Where do I sign up?”

Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene frequently tweeted about the need to “fight” the election results. On Dec. 19, when Trump first announced a “wild” protest in Washington, D.C. for Jan. 6, Greene tweeted “I’m planning a little something on January 6th as well, @realDonaldTrump.” She tweeted the #FightForTrump hashtag the following day, before boosting details of the Jan. 6 protest as it came together. “I need a massive grassroots army behind me to STOP THE STEAL,” she wrote a week before the rally. The day prior to the rally, she referred to “OUR 1776 MOMENT” in an interview with Newsmax.

Even on clean-up duty after weeks of false and inflammatory claims, some Republicans used the prospect of violence as a lever: Brooks, on Jan. 7, wrote that when citizens lose faith in the system, they have “three bad options”: Emigrating, submitting, or fighting back with violence. “We don’t ever want citizens in America feeling they have been forced into the aforesaid box, with 3 bad options,” he wrote.

The conservative media’s role in amplifying Trump’s bogus claims about the election has already been well-established.

However, this study highlighted the extent to which the ex-president’s foot soldiers in the House used pro-Trump outlets like Fox and Newsmax as a bullhorn in their crusade to overturn the election and then to do damage control as they tried to shift blame away from themselves and Trump for the insurrection. When they weren’t posting clips of themselves ranting to Lou Dobbs and other sympathetic pro-Trump media cranks, they were sharing bogus articles from fringe websites like the Epoch Times or Town Hall to boost their false claims.

One example of this was when Gaetz and Greene shared a Washington Times article that falsely claimed that facial recognition technology found that members of antifa were part of the mob that stormed the Capitol. The Times was forced to issue a correction after the tech company stated that their article was “outright false” and that their software had actually caught two neo-Nazis, with no evidence of antifa being present.

The existence of the mammoth document is notable in the first place, and marks a major step from Lofgren in creating a social media record for any investigations that may be coming down the pike. On her website, the congresswoman noted that she participated, either as a staffer or as a member of Congress, in all four modern presidential impeachment hearings, in addition to congressional removal proceedings for other government officials including former federal Judge G. Thomas Porteous, Jr. and former Rep. James Traficant. Lofgren is today the chair of the Committee on House Administration.

In light of that experience, Lofgren wrote, colleagues have asked her for guidance on what can be done about other members’ of Congress “involvement in the January 6th attempt to overthrow the lawful government of the United States.” Lofgren cited some potential avenues of accountability, including expulsion from Congress for violating the 14th Amendment’s provisions related to insurrection, congressional punishment for disorderly behavior and even potential criminal investigation.

Disciplinary action, the congresswoman wrote, “is a matter not only of the Constitution and law, but also of fact.” To establish those facts, Lofgren said, she asked her staff to take a “quick look” at social media posts from members who voted to overturn the 2020 presidential election. The 1,900-page document is an attempt to compile statements that may be part of Congress’ future responsibilities.

I’m still hopeful there will be a commission that will investigate everything that happened but I’m afraid there will be no accountability for Republican members of congress for what they did. They are backed by their voters and that is not likely to change, unfortunately. But time will pass and there needs to be a record. This is a good start.

He didn’t have the power to defy the constitution as his Dear Leader required so the cult went after him with a hangman’s noose as they sacked the Capitol on January 6th. Now he’s come out of his hole to pretend that he cares about “election integrity” and he’s proposing a whole panoply of vote suppression laws to permanently enshrine undemocratic, authoritarian rule.

And it will do him absolutely no good:

Donald Trump is telling allies he’s strongly considering another run for president in 2024 — and close advisers want him to choose someone other than former Vice President Mike Pence for his ticket, according to people familiar with the discussions.

Trump publicly teased at the Conservative Political Action Conference on Sunday that he’s mulling another bid for president. Privately, he’s discussed alternatives to Pence as he takes stock of who he believes stood with him at the end of his term and who didn’t, according to two of the people.

They requested anonymity because the conversations have been private.

Trump’s advisers have discussed identifying a Black or female running mate for his next run, and three of the people familiar with the matter said Pence likely won’t be on the ticket.

Two advisers have suggested Trump consider South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem, the people said. Donald Trump Jr. and his girlfriend, Kimberly Guilfoyle, are hosting a fundraiser for Noem on Friday at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort and home in Palm Beach. The former president is planning to make an appearance, people familiar with the matter said.

And on Tuesday, Trump issued a public endorsement for South Carolina Senator Tim Scott’s re-election. Scott is the only Black Republican in the U.S. Senate

Trump is constitutionally unable to forgive Pence’s refusal to overthrow the government. Revenge is at the center of his worldview. He believes you have to show the world that you will destroy anyone who crosses you or no one will respect you. If Trump wins again I think it is highly unlikely that Pence will be with him. In fact, I’ll be surprised if Pence has any future in politics at all.

The Party of Trump is split on whether to drop all pretense and just admit it does not believe in democracy and wants to go full-on authoritarian on the European model, as Digby notes today at Salon.

As we saw Tuesday at the Supreme Court in reference to an Arizona law that disqualifies ballots cast out of precinct, Justice Amy Coney Barrett asked the Arizona GOP’s lawyer, “What’s the interest of the Arizona RNC here in keeping, say, the out-of-precinct ballot disqualification rules on the books?”

“Because it puts us at a competitive disadvantage relative to Democrats,” Carvin replied. “Politics is a zero-sum game.”

You have to commend him for joining Paul Weyrich and other Republicans in telling the truth about GOP vote suppression.

In key voting rights case, Justice Amy Coney Barrett asks GOP lawyer Michael Carvin “what’s the interest” to Republicans in keeping voting restrictions in Arizona.

Carvin: “Because it puts us at a competitive disadvantage relative to Democrats. Politics is a zero-sum game.” pic.twitter.com/In7GULkSUb

— The Recount (@therecount) March 2, 2021

Many others in the party will out of habit still solemnly insist their primary concern is for election integrity or ballot security or restoring voters’ confidence in elections, confidence the GOP has spent decades systematically undermining with groundless charges of widespread, undetected voter fraud.

I still recall when remember when their comlaint was “uh, forced busing, states’ rights, and all that stuff.“

"Election integrity" is the GOP's new code word for massive voter suppression

— Ari Berman (@AriBerman) March 3, 2021

While a few will drop the integrity act, the rest will continue to play along. But we know how this game is played.

In this game, absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. If we haven’t uncovered aliens disguised as humans voting in our elections, that’s not proof it isn’t happening. What (they claim) it proves is we have failed in our duty to enact the kind of common-sense election security measures Real Americans™ demand to prevent aliens disguised as humans from voting in our elections.

And they’re just the guys to do it.

Even after a violent insurrection, after endless debates over stolen elections, and after disingenuous Republican “election integrity” measures designed to suppress the vote, one may still hear some tone-deaf Democrat joke about voting early and often. Loose talk on the left about letting red states secede is similarly counterproductive. Both should stop. The right should curb its own thirst for a separate white republic.

Casey Michel, author of “American Kleptocracy,” examines secessionist sentiment growing across the country among the disaffected:

And it’s not just a tiny fringe that’s thinking about these concepts anymore. As the Bright Line Watch, a group of researchers from places like Dartmouth University, the University of Rochester, and University of Chicago, noted in a study released earlier in February, one-third of Republicans said they support secession. Disturbingly, half of Republicans across the former Confederacy (plus Kentucky and Oklahoma) are now willing to break off to form a newly independent country.

There are murmurrings of secession from the Pacific Northwest among both ehe left and right, but none more serious as on the right elsewhere.

NEW: The events in Texas this month should highlight just how idiotic state-level secession is—but pro-Trump secessionist rhetoric is only going to grow and grow. https://t.co/qma5suHXlZ

— Casey Michel (@cjcmichel) February 28, 2021

The Texas Republican Party recently supported a referrendum on withdrawing Texas from the union — nicknamed “Texit” after the British vote to leave the European Union. Reportedly, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott dodged questions on whether he supported the effort.

While much of the secessionist rhetoric remains couched in claims about things like fiscal responsibility and burdensome federal regulations, it doesn’t take much to discern the ethno-nationalism driving the push. Just like so much of Trumpian America, secession in places like Texas is rooted in a combination of nativism, xenophobia and white racial grievance. Texas secession Facebook pages are saturated with fantasies of forcing Democrats to leave the state, seizing their property and forcing them to “convert” (to what is unclear). Just like the Confederates before them, this modern secessionist ethos is rooted at least in large part in maintaining white supremacy and authoritarian governance, regardless of the costs.

On their own, the increasing marriage of secessionist chatter and GOP ideology would be cause enough for concern. But this month’s disastrous winter storm in Texas also points to how idiotic such secessionist dreams truly are. Thanks to an electric grid carved out separately from the rest of the country, Texas remained effectively stranded while storms wrought rolling blackouts, boil-water advisories and dozens of deaths thus far. Scenes reminiscent of catastrophes like Hurricane Katrina illustrated what state-level collapse looks like in modern America.

Bright Line Watch finds, “The unwillingness of respondents to reject secession outright is widespread and context-dependent. Republicans express greater support for secession overall than Democrats, but Democrats are more amenable to secession than are Republicans in regions they dominate.”

Yes, but.

“Unless you want violence on the scale of the Partition of India—primarily targeting non-white and immigrant populations—liberals should really, really stop encouraging secession of so-called ‘Red States,'” Michel wrote in a tweet.

One other thing: Unless you want violence on the scale of the Partition of India—primarily targeting non-white and immigrant populations—liberals should really, really stop encouraging secession of so-called "Red States." https://t.co/3S1SBeHEwP pic.twitter.com/w13uIcEZHH

— Casey Michel (@cjcmichel) February 28, 2021

The joke is that it is hard to look away from a slow-motion train wreck. Even harder when you yourself are riding on the train. Harder still when these people are riding in the seat beside you.

The Republicans may not be good at governing but when they get a chance to help themselves manipulate elections, they are ON IT:

GOP state lawmakers across the country have proposed a flurry of voting restrictions that they say are needed to restore confidence in U.S. elections, an effort intended to placate supporters of former president Donald Trump who believe his false claims that the 2020 outcome was rigged.

But the effort is dividing Republicans, some of whom are warning that it will tar the GOP as the party of voter suppression and give Democrats ammunition to mobilize their supporters ahead of the 2022 midterms.

The proposals include measures that would curtail eligibility to vote by mail and prohibit the use of ballot drop boxes. One bill in Georgia would block early voting on Sundays, which critics quickly labeled a flagrant attempt to thwart Souls to the Polls, the Democratic turnout effort that targets Black churchgoers on the final Sunday before an election.

States where such legislation is under consideration also include Arizona, Florida, Texas, Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin.

Proponents say the actions are necessary because large numbers of voters believe Trump’s false assertions that President Biden won the 2020 election through widespread fraud.

“The goal of our process here should be an attempt to restore the confidence of our public in our elections system,” said Barry Fleming, a state lawmaker from Evans, Ga., and the chairman of the newly formed House Special Committee on Election Integrity.

And then he burst out laughing, saying, “sorry, it’s just SUCH a good scam!”

They are seriously trying to snow people into accepting their ridiculous explanation that they are doing this to “restore faith in the electoral system” because so many of their voters believed that the election was stolen. It’s enough to make your head explode.

First of all, they have been trying to suppress the vote for decades and nobody is fooled that they aren’t using this as an excuse to do what they always do. Second, it’s obvious that if their voters don’t trust the system it’s because their Dear Leader lied to their faces. An easy way to deal with that is to tell them the truth. He lied. He lost. And he lost because he was the worst president in US history.

But no, they are going to keep up this ridiculous charade as long as it works for them. But as the article makes clear, there is a down side to this. This crap mobilizes Democrats who, by the way, tend to be younger and able to stand in line for all those hours than the elderly GOP voters who have been voting absentee for years. They may very well be making it more difficult for their own voters than the people they are targeting.

But they seem to realize that their message of hate and racism isn’t really resonating with the majority of the country so they have no choice but to manipulate the voting system to have a prayer of holding power. And they are doing it right out in the open now, reduced to making up the flimsiest excuses ever.

This guy…

Stephanopoulos immediately kicked off Sunday’s This Week interview with Paul by asking him a “threshold” question about the results of the election, wondering aloud if he accepted that President Joe Biden’s victory was legitimate and “not stolen,” something former President Donald Trump and his allies have baselessly insisted and which eventually resulted in an insurrectionist riot.

“Well, what I would say is that the debate over whether or not there was fraud should occur, we never had any presentation in court,” the Kentucky lawmaker deflected. “Most of the cases were thrown out for lack of standing, a procedural way of not hearing it.”

As Paul said there was “still a chance” that some cases challenging states’ voting laws or alleging irregularities could make their way to the Supreme Court, the ABC moderator pushed back to point out that Republicans’ election challenges have been laughed out of court.

“I have to stop you there,” Stephanoulous noted. “No election is perfect. But there were 86 challenges filed by President Trump and his allies in court, all were dismissed. Every state certified the results.”

The Republican senator contended that the majority of Republican voters believe that “we do need to look at election integrity,” prompting Stephanopoulos to claim that those voters agree with Paul “because they were fed a ‘big lie’ by President Trump and his supporters.”

Cornered on the issue, and still refusing to admit that the election was not “stolen,” Paul then framed the argument as a partisan and ideological issue, complaining that “people coming from the liberal side” immediately “say everything’s a lie instead of saying there’s two sides to everything.”

Stephanopoulos, meanwhile, again explained that Trump falsely claimed the “election was stolen” when, in fact, it wasn’t. Furthermore, as the ABC host stated, Trump’s own attorney general and Department of Justice found no evidence of widespread voter fraud that would impact the election’s results.

“I won’t be cowed by liberals in the media who say ‘there’s no evidence here and you’re a liar if you talk about election fraud.’ Let’s have an open debate this is a free country,” Paul grumbled in response.

The Trump-boosting senator went on to dismiss former Attorney General William Barr’s declaration about the lack of evidence of voter fraud, claiming it was just a “pronouncement.” From there, he complained that the media is unfair to Republicans and says they are “all liars.”

“There are two sides to every story,” he blared.

“Sir, there are not two sides to this story. This has been looked in every single state,” Stephanopoulos shot back.

“There are two sides to every story,” Paul wailed. “George, you’re forgetting who you are as a journalist if you think there’s only one side. You’re inserting yourself into the story to say I’m a liar!”

“There are not two sides to facts,” the ABC anchor retorted.

Stephanopoulos would then circle back to the original question about whether Paul felt the election was stolen or not, something Paul still refused to answer.

“I think there was great deal of evidence of fraud and changing of the election laws illegally,” he asserted. “A thorough investigation is warranted.”

He’s a liar. Even Chris Christie agrees:

“This election was not stolen … there were no type of irregularities that would have changed the result in one state,” Chris Christie says, adding that Republicans making the claim are trying to score "political points” with people Trump “lied to.” https://t.co/w9SFw2wgzB pic.twitter.com/mrxpbIcoxY

— This Week (@ThisWeekABC) January 24, 2021

Republicans have not only decided Democratic victories are illegitimate, they have assembled a playbook for prosecuting their case.

Jamelle Bouie reminds NYT readers this morning how this playbook has developed over the last 30 years:

It’s a story of escalation, from the relentless obstruction of the Gingrich era to the effort to impeach Bill Clinton to the attempt to nullify the presidency of Barack Obama and on to the struggle, however doomed, to keep Joe Biden from ever sitting in the White House as president. It also goes beyond national politics. In 2016, after a Democrat, Roy Cooper, defeated the Republican incumbent Pat McCrory for the governorship of North Carolina, the state’s Republican legislature promptly stripped the office of power and authority. Wisconsin Republicans did the same in 2018 after Tony Evers unseated Scott Walker in his bid for a third term. And Michigan Republicans took similar steps against another Democrat, Gretchen Whitmer, after her successful race for the governor’s mansion.

Considered in the context of a 30-year assault on the legitimacy of Democratic leaders and Democratic constituencies (of which Republican-led voter suppression is an important part), the present attempt to disrupt and derail the certification of electoral votes is but the next step, in which Republicans say, outright, that a Democrat has no right to hold power and try to make that reality. The next Democrat to win the White House — whether it’s Biden getting re-elected or someone else winning for the first time — will almost certainly face the same flood of accusations, challenges and lawsuits, on the same false grounds of “fraud.”

The “bad faith and dishonesty on display” is stunning. “The issue for Republicans,” Bouie continues, “is not election integrity, it’s the fact that Democratic votes count at all.”

Except 30 years is perhaps too narrow a time frame for charting the Republican erosion of faith in the flag in which they wrap themselves.

So long as women remained barefoot, pregnant, and in their kitchens, all was right with their world.

So long as their god was God and everybody knew it, they felt secure of their place in the next.

So long as Black poeple knew their places, and homosexuals and others remained closeted, society was ordered as it should be with white conservatives at its apex.

So long as America was the preeminent power in the world and the U.S.S R. was its principle adversay in a Cold War played by an unwritten but established set of rules, they knew where they stood.

But the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts helped change that and turned Jim Crow Democrats into Reagan Republicans. For the last half century, America pursued and Republicans supported economic opportunities and new technologies that simultaneously enriched them and eroded the status quo that existed when the world was a smaller, more parochial place more to their liking. The ground shifted, revealing just how empty was the American faith they proclaimed so loudly and proudly, just as Jesus cautioned them not to.

“Even as they criticize an attempted power grab, they echo the idea that one side has legitimate voters and the other does not,” Bouie writes.

Patriotism, values, and principles have all turned to ashes in their mouths. Still, they will condemn one-party states even while trying to establish one for Real Americans™, proving themselves anything but.

Bill Bishop (“The Big Sort“) passed on a pre-SCOTUS-decision link from a conservative site arguing that the outgoing president should invoke the Insurrection Act to force the U.S. Supreme Court to restore “election integrity” or else “the greatest democracy the world has ever known would come to an immediate end.”

It is a lengthy litany of rumors, supposition, and talking points presented as “proof” of massive election fraud. As with any good conspiracy theory, what believers lack in quality they make up for in quantity.

https://twitter.com/niubi/status/1337715334820876291?s=20

See, we face a black-and-white choice, the lawyer writes. If Trump prevails in court, “Democrats, including radical groups such as Antifa, could, and likely would, revolt openly and violently.” On the other hand, if Joe Biden’s election subterfuge is allowed to stand, “Trump supporters could take the streets, and violence doubtless would erupt.” One guess as to which he prefers.

Then came last night’s Supreme Court decision to reject the lawsuit from Texas and 17 other state attorneys general, supported by almost two-thirds of the Republican House caucus, to throw out the presidential votes in four states. But not any down-ballot votes from those states in elections Republicans won, mind you.

“There is no place left on earth for liberty. Come Lord Jesus,” wrote one respondent on Mark Levin’s Twitter feed. Keep an eye on the streets outside your windows.

Meantime, Rep. Bill Pascrell, Jr. (D-N.J.) called for House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to sanction, if not refuse to seat, the 126 House Republicans who sought to overturn the 2020 presidential election, including the minority leader, Rep. Kevin McCarthy. Pascrell cites Section 3 of the Fourteenth Amendment:

No person shall be a Senator or Representative in Congress, or elector of President and Vice President, or hold any office, civil or military, under the United States, or under any State, who, having previously taken an oath, as a member of Congress, or as an officer of the United States, or as a member of any State legislature, or as an executive or judicial officer of any State, to support the Constitution of the United States, shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof. But Congress may by a vote of two-thirds of each House, remove such disability.

Pascrell’s letter gets right to it:

Stated simply, men and women who would act to tear the United States government apart cannot serve as Members of the Congress. These lawsuits seeking to obliterate public confidence in our democratic system by invalidating the clear results of the 2020 presidential election attack the text and spirit of the Constitution, which each Member swears to support and defend, as well as violate the Rules of our House of Representatives, which explicitly forbid Members from committing unbecoming acts that reflect poorly on our chamber.

Consequently, I call on you to exercise the power of your offices to evaluate steps you can take to address these constitutional violations this Congress and, if possible, refuse to seat in the 117th Congress any Members-elect seeking to make Donald Trump an unelected dictator.

Per House rules and Article I, Section 5 of the U.S. Constitution, Pelosi could do it. She has that authority. It is tempting. These Republican members have effectively renounced the U.S. Constitution and their oaths anyway — on top of demonstrating lack of seriousness required for their jobs. And it would be fun to reply to their objections with the parental trope, “you should have thought of that before ….”