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The title of the interim report issued today from the Senate Judiciary Committee majority contains a spoiler. Well, not really. Subverting Justice: How the Former President and His Allies Pressured DOJ to Overturn the 2020 Election. Republicans on the panel think not. No spoiler there either.

The Washington Post summarizes the findings:

On Jan. 3, then-acting attorney general Jeffrey Rosen, his deputy Richard Donoghue, and a handful of other administration officials met in the Oval Office for what all expected to be a final confrontation on Trump’s plan to replace Rosen with Jeffrey Clark, a little-known Justice Department official who had indicated he would publicly pursue Trump’s false claims of mass voter fraud.

According to testimony Rosen gave to the committee, Trump opened the meeting by saying, “One thing we know is you, Rosen, aren’t going to do anything to overturn the election.” For three hours, the officials then debated Trump’s plan, and the insistence by Rosen and others that they would resign rather than go along with it.

In fact, all Justice Department’s assistant attorneys general would resign en masse if Trump went through with the scheme.

Katie Benner at the New York Times first reported:

• • The report fleshes out the role of Jeffrey Clark, a little-known Justice Department official who participated in multiple conversations with Mr. Trump about how to upend the election and who pushed his superiors to send Georgia officials a letter that falsely claimed the Justice Department had identified “significant concerns that may have impacted the outcome of the election.” Mr. Trump was weighing whether to replace Mr. Rosen with Mr. Clark. Of particular note was a Jan. 2 confrontation during which Mr. Clark seemed to both threaten and coerce Mr. Rosen to send the letter. He first raised the prospect that Mr. Trump could fire Mr. Rosen, and then said that he would decline any offer to replace Mr. Rosen as acting attorney general if Mr. Rosen sent the letter. Mr. Clark also revealed during that meeting that he had secretly conducted a witness interview with someone in Georgia in connection with election fraud allegations that had already been disproved.

  • The report raised fresh questions about what role Representative Scott Perry, Republican of Pennsylvania, played in the White House effort to pressure the Justice Department to help upend the election. Mr. Perry called Mr. Donoghue to pressure him into investigating debunked election fraud allegations that had been made in Pennsylvania, the report said, and he complained to Mr. Donoghue that the Justice Department was not doing enough to look into such claims. Mr. Clark, the report said, also told officials that he had participated in the White House’s efforts at Mr. Perry’s request, and that the lawmaker took him to a meeting at the Oval Office to discuss voter fraud. That meeting occurred at around the same time that Mr. Perry and members of the conservative House Freedom Caucus met at the White House to discuss the Jan. 6 certification of the election results.

  • The report confirmed that Mr. Trump was the reason that Mr. Pak hastily left his role as U.S. attorney in Atlanta, an area that Mr. Trump wrongly told people he had won. Mr. Trump told top Justice Department officials that Mr. Pak was a never-Trumper, and he blamed Mr. Pak for the F.B.I.’s failure to find evidence of mass election fraud there. During the Jan. 3 fight in the Oval Office, Mr. Donoghue and others tried to convince Mr. Trump not to fire Mr. Pak, as he planned to resign in just a few days. But Mr. Trump made it clear to the officials that Mr. Pak was to leave the following day, leading Mr. Donoghue to phone him that evening and tell him he should pre-emptively resign. Mr. Trump also went outside the normal line of succession to push for a perceived loyalist, Bobby L. Christine, to run the Atlanta office. Mr. Christine had been the U.S. attorney in Savannah, and had donated to Mr. Trump’s campaign.

The panel hopes Clark will sit for an interview. In the meantime, it has asked the District of Columbia Bar to begin a disciplinary investigation into Clark’s actions.

The report recommended that the Justice Department tighten procedures concerning when it can take certain overt steps in election-related fraud investigations. As attorney general, the report said, Mr. Barr weakened the department’s decades-long strict policy of not taking investigative steps in fraud cases until after an election is certified, a measure that is meant to keep the fact of a federal investigation from impacting the election outcome.

The Senate panel found that Mr. Barr personally demanded that the department investigate voter fraud allegations, even if other authorities had looked into them and not found evidence of wrongdoing. These allegations included a claim by Rudolph W. Giuliani, the president’s personal lawyer and a prime force behind the unfounded election fraud allegations, that he had a tape that showed Democratic poll workers kicking their Republican counterparts from a polling station and fraudulently adding votes for Joseph R. Biden Jr. into the count.

In July, Giuliani has had his law license suspended in New York and D.C. over “false and misleading statements” about election fraud.

Is anyone suprised by any of this except for the fact that no one has yet been indicted for plotting a coup?

As a space pirate once said, we’re not out of this yet (New York Times):

MADISON, Wis. — In three critical battleground states, Democratic governors have blocked efforts by Republican-controlled legislatures to restrict voting rights and undermine the 2020 election.

Now, the 2022 races for governor in Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania — states that have long been vital to Democratic presidential victories, including Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s — are taking on major new significance.

Republicans will be back, leaving Govs. Tony Evers of Wisconsin, Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan and Tom Wolf of Pennsylvania facing “a rising Republican tide of voting restrictions and far-reaching election laws.”

Reid J. Epstein and Nick Corasaniti write:

Republicans have aggressively pursued partisan reviews of the 2020 election in each state. In Pennsylvania, G.O.P. lawmakers sought the personal information of every voter in the state last month. In Wisconsin, a conservative former State Supreme Court justice, who is investigating the 2020 election results on behalf of the State Assembly, issued subpoenas on Friday for voting-related documents from election officials. And in Michigan on Sunday night, Ms. Whitmer vetoed four election bills that she said “would have perpetuated the ‘big lie’ or made it harder for Michiganders to vote.”

Republican candidates for governor in the three states have proposed additional cutbacks to voting access and measures that would give G.O.P. officials more power over how elections are run. And the party is pushing such efforts wherever it has the power to do so. This year, 19 Republican-controlled states have passed 33 laws restricting voting, one of the greatest contractions of access to the ballot since the Voting Rights Act was passed in 1965. Democrats in Congress have tried without success to pass federal voting laws to counteract the Republican push.

“I would’ve never guessed that my job as governor when I ran a couple years ago was going to be mainly about making sure that our democracy is still intact in this state,” said Evers, once Wisconsin’s superintendent of schools.

Now Evers worries that if his reelection campaign fails next year, Wisconsin Republican legislators would have a clear path to overturning the state’s 2024 presidential election results. “Governors are required to submit to Congress a certificate of ascertainment of presidential electors,” Epstein and Corasaniti write. What would happen if a Republican governor refused?

“It’s full of hyperbole and exaggeration, which is what the Democrats do best on this election stuff,” Robin Vos, the speaker of the Wisconsin State Assembly, said in an interview last week at the State Capitol. “All we’re trying to do is make sure that people who were elected were elected legitimately.”

See, Republicans are all about restoring faith in election systems they have worked decades to undermine with relentless, unsubtantiated allegations of widespread voter fraud. Tear down the building and you can rebuild from the ground up. Your way.

In Pennsylvania and Michigan as well, Republican candidates for governor are running on “election integrity,” essentially, on erecting new barriers to voting or else prohibiting making voting easier.

Michigan was also home to one of the most forceful and arcane attempts at reversing the outcome in 2020, when Republican election officials, at Mr. Trump’s behest, tried to refuse to certify the results in Wayne County and stall the certification of the state’s overall results. That memory, combined with new voting bills and Republican attempts to review the state’s election results, makes Michigan’s election next year all the more important, Ms. Whitmer said.

“If they make it harder or impossible for droves of people not to be able to participate in the election,” she said, “that doesn’t just impact Michigan elections, but elections for federal offices as well, like the U.S. Senate and certainly the White House.”

Democracy-optional Republicans have dropped all pretense of allowing voters to decide who represents them.

It’s not as if Republicans have not telegraphed the move. Under Michigan’s Public Act 436, then-Gov. Rick Snyder appointed emergency managers empowered to take control of city governments and school boards, particularly minority-majority cities, elected by voters. Chris Savage (Eclectablog) noted in 2013 that half of Michigan’s black residents were living “in cities where their elected officials have been replaced by a single, state-appointed ruler.”

Chris Lewis wrote in The Atlantic in 2013:

“It totally decimates democracy,” Detroit resident Catherine Phillips says of state takeover. “We have the right by federal law to allow us to go and choose by way of voting who we want to represent us in municipalities and school districts. By implementation of this dictator law, they have taken that right away.”

A study published Sept. 14 in the journal State and Local Government Review finds that the law affected more than drinking water in Michigan:

“Our findings provide evidence that decisions about state takeovers in Michigan are not entirely, or perhaps primarily, driven by objective measures of financial distress. Cities with larger Black populations and a higher reliance on state funding are more likely to be taken over,” said study lead author Sara Hughes, an environmental policy analyst and assistant professor at the U-M School for Environment and Sustainability.

“We also find that cities that have had takeovers are more likely to see changes to their drinking water systems, such as rate increases and privatization. Whether these patterns are the product of racial bias, flawed policy and implementation, or broader political motivations is a question that could be taken up in future research.”

The most notorious recent example of water-system changes during a Michigan municipal takeover occurred in Flint, which was under emergency management when critical decisions about the city’s water supply and water treatment protocols were made, and where emergency managers were resistant to public concerns about the safety of the city’s drinking water. For nearly 18 months, from April 2014 to October 2015, the city of Flint delivered inadequately treated Flint River water to residents, exposing thousands to elevated lead levels and other contaminants.

The 10 other Michigan cities that came under emergency management between 1990 and 2017, and which were analyzed in the study, are Highland Park, Hamtramck, Three Oaks Village, Pontiac, Ecorse, Benton Harbor, Allen Park, Detroit, River Rouge and Lincoln Park.

See link to Savage’s post above about the demography of those towns.

Hughes and her co-authors expected that at least one of the financial indicators used by the state, or a composite financial health score based on all the indicators, would be able to identify all 11 Michigan cities that have experienced takeover.

Surprisingly, that was not the case. The composite financial stress score captured just 45% of those cities. But a city’s level of reliance on state revenue sharing captured 82% of the takeovers, while the percentage of Black residents and median household income correctly predicted 64% and 55% of the takeovers, respectively.

“These findings support previous work challenging the technocratic and rational basis of state municipal takeover laws and pointing to the inherent politics in municipal takeovers, specifically the bias and structural challenges facing Black and poor communities,” the authors wrote.

You have been warned. This erosion predates Donald Trump. Under Republican rule democracy is now optional.

One of the more memorable quotes from the 2020 post-election period was the one in which a Republican insider blithely told a reporter for the Washington Post that there was no harm in letting Trump cry himself out:

“What is the downside for humoring him for this little bit of time? No one seriously thinks the results will change,” the official said. “He went golfing this weekend. It’s not like he’s plotting how to prevent Joe Biden from taking power on Jan. 20. He’s tweeting about filing some lawsuits, those lawsuits will fail, then he’ll tweet some more about how the election was stolen, and then he’ll leave.”

We all know how that turned out, don’t we?

Today, the congressional Jan. 6 commission continues to subpoena witnesses and demand documents from various players in the post-election saga, and the press keeps reporting new information on exactly what went down during that bizarre period weekly. Last month, the new book from Bob Woodward and Robert Costa, “Peril,” revealed the existence of a full-blown coup plot based upon a legal theory advanced by conservative constitutional lawyer John Eastman, formerly of Chapman College and a founder of the Claremont Institute, a right-wing think tank. They actually memorialized what they planned to do in writing.

The idea was to have Mike Pence refuse to acknowledge the electoral votes of certain states whose legislatures might be persuaded to send an alternate slate of electors and then declare Trump the winner based upon the remaining electoral votes. It was a cockamamie scheme, but the concept of Republican state legislatures declaring that the vote was rigged and sending an alternate slate to declare Trump the winner did not come from nowhere. I wrote this in November 2020, just a couple of weeks after the election:

Having lost over and over again in court, Trump and his team have switched to their Plan B, which, as longtime Democratic strategist Chris Marshall spelled out in detail in Salon on Thursday, is to delay the certification of the vote in certain states and try to get Republican legislatures to assign electors to vote for Donald Trump instead of the actual winner, Joe Biden. This is based on the theory that if they can create enough chaos around the election results, Republican loyalists will rise to the occasion and “save democracy” from the Democrats, who are allegedly stealing the election.

Trump’s behavior with all these phony “audits,” even in places like Texas where he won, is explained as an extension of that plan. They are attempting to create so much distrust in the electoral process that in the case of a semi-close election, the default “solution” will be for the (Republican) state legislatures to take over the process and decide the winner. Lest you think the courts would automatically reject such a clearly unconstitutional move, don’t count on it. As the New Yorker’s Jane Mayer noted:

Few people noticed at the time, but in … Bush v. Gore, Chief Justice William Rehnquist, along with Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas, hinted at a radical reading of the Constitution that, two decades later, undergirds many of the court challenges on behalf of Trump. In a concurring opinion, the Justices argued that state legislatures have the plenary power to run elections and can even pass laws giving themselves the right to appoint electors.

Today, the so-called Independent Legislature Doctrine has informed Trump and the right’s attempts to use Republican-dominated state legislatures to overrule the popular will. Nathaniel Persily, an election-law expert at Stanford, told me, “It’s giving intellectual respectability to an otherwise insane, anti-democratic argument.”

That’s the legal argument. The implementation will require provocateurs to help foment the chaos and distrust on the ground. Enter Trump’s former campaign chairman (and pardoned accused felon) Steve Bannon. You may recall that Bannon was heavily involved in the Jan. 6 planning, urging Trump to “kill the Biden presidency in its crib” and promising listeners of his wildly popular podcast the night before that “all hell will break loose tomorrow. It’s them against us. Who can impose their will on the other side?”

ProPublica did extensive reporting last month showing that since then Bannon has been pushing a “precinct strategy,” whereby MAGA followers take over the Republican apparatus at the precinct level, which in many states means they have influence over how elections are run, including the choice of poll workers and members of election boards. When Bannon announced this strategy, it “rocketed across far-right media” and suddenly people who had never before been involved in politics were volunteering all over the country, in blue states as well as red states, cities and suburbs and rural areas alike.

This strategy is the brainchild of Arizona activist Daniel J. Schultz, who has been pushing it for several years:

In December, Schultz appeared on Bannon’s podcast to argue that Republican-controlled state legislatures should nullify the election results and throw their state’s Electoral College votes to Trump. If lawmakers failed to do that, Bannon asked, would it be the end of the Republican Party? Not if Trump supporters took over the party by seizing precinct posts, Schultz answered.

Schultz is now a huge right-wing celebrity, has been on Bannon’s show at least eight times and holds weekly Zoom calls with activists around the country. Last July he told his audience, “Make sure everybody’s got a baseball bat. I’m serious about this. Make sure you’ve got people who are armed.”

Bannon isn’t confining himself to trying to destroy the democratic electoral system. NBC News’ Jonathan Allen reported that he’s also planning an assault on the government once he gets Trump back in the White House, as a continuation of his “deconstruction of the administrative state.” To that end, Bannon held a meeting last week with “scores of former Trump political appointees” at the Capitol Hill Club and gave them their marching orders for the hypothetical day when Trump returns to power.

He was invited by a new group called the Association of Republican Presidential Appointees, which has the goal of having non-confirmable executive branch appointees ready on Day 1 to go in and take over. In practice, that means they would immediately set about systematically dismantling everything put in place under a Democratic president and deregulating everything in sight. Bannon aptly calls them his “shock troops.”

Now maybe all this is just the lunatic fringe acting out and nothing will come of it. Bannon has been flogging this kind of anti-democratic strategy for a long time. But considering how radical the GOP establishment itself has become, it seems foolhardy to make that assumption. Inviting Bannon to address this ambitious new Republican group sends a clear signal that his previously outlandish ideas and strategies have become mainstream conservative thinking.

Salon

The New York Times has its problems but today the Editorial Board tells it like it is:

However horrifying the Jan. 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol appeared in the moment, we know now that it was far worse.

The country was hours away from a full-blown constitutional crisis — not primarily because of the violence and mayhem inflicted by hundreds of President Donald Trump’s supporters but because of the actions of Mr. Trump himself.

In the days before the mob descended on the Capitol, a corollary attack — this one bloodless and legalistic — was playing out down the street in the White House, where Mr. Trump, Vice President Mike Pence and a lawyer named John Eastman huddled in the Oval Office, scheming to subvert the will of the American people by using legal sleight-of-hand.

Mr. Eastman’s unusual visit was reported at the time, but a new book by the Washington Post journalists Bob Woodward and Robert Costa provides the details of his proposed six-point plan. It involved Mr. Pence rejecting dozens of already certified electoral votes representing tens of millions of legally cast ballots, thus allowing Congress to install Mr. Trump in a second term.

Mr. Pence ultimately refused to sign on, earning him the rage of Mr. Trump and chants of “Hang Mike Pence!” by the rioters, who erected a makeshift gallows on the National Mall.

The fact that the scheme to overturn the election was highly unlikely to succeed is cold comfort. Mr. Trump remains the most popular Republican in the country; barring a serious health issue, the odds are good that he will be the party’s nominee for president in 2024. He also remains as incapable of accepting defeat as he has ever been, which means the country faces a renewed risk of electoral subversion by Mr. Trump and his supporters — only next time they will have learned from their mistakes.

That leaves all Americans who care about preserving this Republic with a clear task: Reform the federal election law at the heart of Mr. Eastman’s twisted ploy, and make it as hard as possible for anyone to pull a stunt like that again.

The Electoral Count Act, which passed more than 130 years ago, was Congress’s response to another dramatic presidential dispute — the election of 1876, in which the Republican Rutherford Hayes won the White House despite losing the popular vote to his Democratic opponent, Samuel Tilden.

After Election Day, Tilden led in the popular vote and in the Electoral College. But the vote in three Southern states — South Carolina, Florida and Louisiana — was marred by accusations of fraud and intimidation by both parties. Various officials in each state certified competing slates of electors, one for Hayes and one for Tilden. The Constitution said nothing about what to do in such a situation, so Congress established a 15-member commission to decide which electors to accept as valid.

The commission consisted of 10 members of Congress, evenly divided between the parties, and five Supreme Court justices, two appointed by Democrats and three by Republicans. Hayes, the Republican candidate, won all the disputed electors (including one from Oregon) by an 8-to-7 vote — giving him victory in the Electoral College by a single vote.

Democrats were furious and began to filibuster the counting process, but they eventually accepted Hayes’s presidency in exchange for the withdrawal of the last remaining federal troops from the South, ending Reconstruction and beginning the era of Jim Crow, which would last until the middle of the 20th century.

It was obvious that Congress needed clearer guidelines for deciding disputed electoral votes. In 1887, the Electoral Count Act became law, setting out procedures for the counting and certifying of electoral votes in the states and in Congress.

But the law contains numerous ambiguities and poorly drafted provisions. For instance, it permits a state legislature to appoint electors on its own, regardless of how the state’s own citizens voted, if the state “failed to make a choice” on Election Day. What does that mean? The law doesn’t say. It also allows any objection to a state’s electoral votes to be filed as long as one senator and one member of the House put their names to it, triggering hours of debate — which is how senators like Ted Cruz and Josh Hawley were able to gum up the works on Jan. 6.

A small minority of legal scholars have argued that key parts of the Electoral Count Act are unconstitutional, which was the basis of Mr. Eastman’s claim that Mr. Pence could simply disregard the law and summarily reject electors of certain key battleground states.

Nothing in the Constitution or federal law gives the vice president this authority. The job of the vice president is to open the envelopes and read out the results, nothing more. Any reform to the Electoral Count Act should start there, by making it explicit that the vice president’s role on Jan. 6 is purely ministerial and doesn’t include the power to rule on disputes over electors.

The law should also be amended to allow states more time to arrive at a final count, so that any legal disputes can be resolved before the electors cast their ballots.

The “failed” election provision should be restricted to natural disasters or terrorist attacks — and even then, it should be available only if there is no realistic way of conducting the election. Remember that the 2012 election was held just days after Hurricane Sandy lashed the East Coast, and yet all states were able to conduct their elections in full. (This is another good argument for universal mail-in voting, which doesn’t put voters at the mercy of the weather.) The key point is that a close election, even a disputed one, is not a failed election.

Finally, any objection to a state’s electoral votes should have to clear a high bar. Rather than just one member of each chamber of Congress, it should require the assent of one-quarter or more of each body. The grounds for an objection should be strictly limited to cases involving clear evidence of fraud or widespread voting irregularities.

The threats to a free and fair presidential election don’t come from Congress alone. Since Jan. 6, Republican-led state legislatures have been clambering over one another to pass new laws making it easier to reject their own voters’ will, and removing or neutralizing those officials who could stand in the way of a naked power grab — like Georgia’s secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, did when he resisted Mr. Trump’s personal plea to “find” just enough extra votes to flip the outcome there.

How to ensure that frivolous objections are rejected while legitimate ones get a hearing? One approach would be to establish a panel of federal judges in each state to hear any challenges to the validity or accuracy of that state’s election results. If the judges determine that the results are invalid, they would lay out their findings in writing and prevent the state from certifying its results.

There is plenty more to be done to protect American elections from being stolen through subversion, like mandating the use of paper ballots that can be checked against reported results. Ideally, fixes like these would be adopted promptly by bipartisan majorities in Congress, to convey to all Americans that both parties are committed to a fair, transparent and smooth vote-counting process. But for that to happen, the Republican Party would need to do an about-face. Right now, some Republican leaders in Congress and the states have shown less interest in preventing election sabotage than in protecting and, in some cases, even venerating the saboteurs.

Democrats should push through these reforms now, and eliminate the filibuster if that’s the only way to do so. If they hesitate, they should recall that a majority of the Republican caucus in the House — 139 members — along with eight senators, continued to object to the certification of electoral votes even after the mob stormed the Capitol.

Time and distance from those events could have led to reflection and contrition on the part of those involved, but that’s not so. Remember how, in the frantic days before Jan. 6, Mr. Trump insisted over and over that Georgia’s election was rife with “large-scale voter fraud”? Remember how he called on Mr. Raffensperger to “start the process of decertifying the election” and “announce the true winner”? Only those words aren’t from last year. They appear in a letter Mr. Trump sent to Mr. Raffensperger two weeks ago.

Mr. Trump may never stop trying to undermine American democracy. Those who value that democracy should never stop using every measure at their disposal to protect it.

Here’s what Trump was talking about just yesterday:

The following piece by Robert Kagan has been the most read article on the Washington Post web site since it was published last week. The piece, in my opinion, is absolutely correct but doesn’t raise a lot of points that we haven’t already heard from others. What makes it significant is that it is written by a grand poobah of the political establishment.

Obviously, some of us have been screeching about this since the morning after election day in 2016. And we were waving our hands frantically for a couple of decades before that. But better late than never …

“Is there no virtue among us? If there be not, we are in a wretched situation.”

— James Madison

The United States is heading into its greatest political and constitutional crisis since the Civil War, with a reasonable chance over the next three to four years of incidents of mass violence, a breakdown of federal authority, and the division of the country into warring red and blue enclaves. The warning signs may be obscured by the distractions of politics, the pandemic, the economy and global crises, and by wishful thinking and denial. But about these things there should be no doubt:

First, Donald Trump will be the Republican candidate for president in 2024. The hope and expectation that he would fade in visibility and influence have been delusional. He enjoys mammoth leads in the polls; he is building a massive campaign war chest; and at this moment the Democratic ticket looks vulnerable. Barring health problems, he is running.

Second, Trump and his Republican allies are actively preparing to ensure his victory by whatever means necessary. Trump’s charges of fraud in the 2020 election are now primarily aimed at establishing the predicate to challenge future election results that do not go his way. Some Republican candidates have already begun preparing to declare fraud in 2022, just as Larry Elder tried meekly to do in the California recall contest.

Meanwhile, the amateurish “stop the steal” efforts of 2020 have given way to an organized nationwide campaign to ensure that Trump and his supporters will have the control over state and local election officials that they lacked in 2020. Those recalcitrant Republican state officials who effectively saved the country from calamity by refusing to falsely declare fraud or to “find” more votes for Trump are being systematically removed or hounded from office. Republican legislatures are giving themselves greater control over the election certification process. As of this spring, Republicans have proposed or passed measures in at least 16 states that would shift certain election authorities from the purview of the governor, secretary of state or other executive-branch officers to the legislature. An Arizona bill flatly states that the legislature may “revoke the secretary of state’s issuance or certification of a presidential elector’s certificate of election” by a simple majority vote. Some state legislatures seek to impose criminal penalties on local election officials alleged to have committed “technical infractions,” including obstructing the view of poll watchers.

The stage is thus being set for chaos. Imagine weeks of competing mass protests across multiple states as lawmakers from both parties claim victory and charge the other with unconstitutional efforts to take power. Partisans on both sides are likely to be better armed and more willing to inflict harm than they were in 2020. Would governors call out the National Guard? Would President Biden nationalize the Guard and place it under his control, invoke the Insurrection Act, and send troops into Pennsylvania or Texas or Wisconsin to quell violent protests? Deploying federal power in the states would be decried as tyranny. Biden would find himself where other presidents have been — where Andrew Jackson was during the nullification crisis, or where Abraham Lincoln was after the South seceded — navigating without rules or precedents, making his own judgments about what constitutional powers he does and doesn’t have.

Today’s arguments over the filibuster will seem quaint in three years if the American political system enters a crisis for which the Constitution offers no remedy.

Most Americans — and all but a handful of politicians — have refused to take this possibility seriously enough to try to prevent it. As has so often been the case in other countries where fascist leaders arise, their would-be opponents are paralyzed in confusion and amazement at this charismatic authoritarian. They have followed the standard model of appeasement, which always begins with underestimation. The political and intellectual establishments in both parties have been underestimating Trump since he emerged on the scene in 2015. They underestimated the extent of his popularity and the strength of his hold on his followers; they underestimated his ability to take control of the Republican Party; and then they underestimated how far he was willing to go to retain power. The fact that he failed to overturn the 2020 election has reassured many that the American system remains secure, though it easily could have gone the other way — if Biden had not been safely ahead in all four states where the vote was close; if Trump had been more competent and more in control of the decision-makers in his administration, Congress and the states. As it was, Trump came close to bringing off a coup earlier this year. All that prevented it was a handful of state officials with notable courage and integrity, and the reluctance of two attorneys general and a vice president to obey orders they deemed inappropriate.

These were not the checks and balances the Framers had in mind when they designed the Constitution, of course, but Trump has exposed the inadequacy of those protections. The Founders did not foresee the Trump phenomenon, in part because they did not foresee national parties. They anticipated the threat of a demagogue, but not of a national cult of personality. They assumed that the new republic’s vast expanse and the historic divisions among the 13 fiercely independent states would pose insuperable barriers to national movements based on party or personality. “Petty” demagogues might sway their own states, where they were known and had influence, but not the whole nation with its diverse populations and divergent interests.

Please go to page 2 to read more…

He wanted so badly to help Dear Leader pull off his coup. He just didn’t have the guts to totally usurp the constitution and become a full blown traitor to his country. Sad!

Eight months after the events of Jan. 6, former Vice President Mike Pence is generally seen as one of the key figures who did the right thing when it mattered. Despite intense political pressure, from Donald Trump and others, the Republican fulfilled his legal obligations and helped certify the results of the 2020 presidential election after the insurrectionist riot that put him in serious danger.

What we didn’t know is that Pence really didn’t want to fulfill his legal obligations.

A new book from The Washington Post’s Bob Woodward and Robert Costa includes details that haven’t previously been reported about just how eager the then-vice president was to do the wrong thing. As the Post reported yesterday:

So intent was Pence on being Trump’s loyal second-in-command — and potential successor — that he asked confidants if there were ways he could accede to Trump’s demands and avoid certifying the results of the election on Jan. 6. In late December, the authors reveal, Pence called Dan Quayle, a former vice president and fellow Indiana Republican, for advice.

Quayle, fortunately, made clear to his ally that he had no choice in how to approach his responsibilities. “Mike, you have no flexibility on this,” Quayle told Pence. “None. Zero. Forget it. Put it away,” he said.

Pence, unsatisfied and reluctant to honor his commitments, kept pushing, exploring ways to help Trump remain in power, despite having lost the election. Quayle found the ideas “preposterous and dangerous,” according to the Woodward/Costa book. Pence nevertheless inquired about whether he could perhaps delay the election certification.

“Forget it,” Quayle told him, adding, “Mike, don’t even talk about it.”

Pence reportedly replied, “You don’t know the position I’m in.”

As the world saw in January, the then-vice president ultimately played by the rules, a day after telling Trump in the Oval Office that his role was to simply “open the envelopes” as the Senate certified the results of the election.

“I don’t want to be your friend anymore if you don’t do this,” Trump reportedly replied, apparently referring to his coup scheme. He later told Pence, “You’ve betrayed us. I made you. You were nothing.”

And while reports of Trump’s child-like tantrum are hardly surprising, it’s the larger takeaway that matters: Pence has been heralded in recent months for prioritizing the rule of law, overcoming presidential pressure, and ignoring those who urged him to be corrupt. The Woodward/Costa book casts the Hoosier in a new light: Pence didn’t want to prioritize the rule of law; he was prepared to succumb to presidential pressure; and he actively explored ways to corrupt the process.

Or put another way, Pence was prepared to do the wrong thing; he just couldn’t find a credible way to pull it off. Far from the image of a heroic figure who valiantly put the integrity of our political system above all, Pence grudgingly did his duty after concluding he didn’t have a choice.

I honestly don’t know if there’s ever been a more pathetic figure in American politics. (Well — there is Lindsey Graham…) The man has no pride, no self-respect.

I had wondered about his allegedly heroic actions on January 6. He was apparently afraid that the Secret Service was going to abduct him so that the counting couldn’t continue that night. If that’s the case, he knew a coup was being attempted and he realized that he was on the wrong side of it. I guess it’s to his credit that he came back and did what he had to do that night but that’s literally the least he could do.

And after the MAGA insurrectionists, inspired by their Dear Leader, chanted “hang Mike Pence” he’s now out there trying to curry their favor. But what else is new? Trump has a way of making all these Republican officials ostentatiously lick his boots after he insulted them in the most egregious ways possible. Getting grown adults who know better to bow down to him truly is his greatest talent.

In case you haven’t seen this Australian TV interview of the nutball Sidney Powell, here it is:

Ed Kilgore at NY Magazine has done an invaluable service by putting together the timeline of Trump’s Big Lie. I’m posting it here for the record. It’s my hope that we’re going to need it when the January 6th Committee gets rolling:

The House select committee’s investigation into the Capitol Riot and the various media ticktocks explaining what Donald Trump and his allies were doing in the days immediately leading up to it are casting new light on an important threat to American democracy. But the intense focus on a few wild days in Washington can be misleading as well. Trump’s campaign to steal the 2020 presidential election began shortly after the 2016 election, and arguably the moment of peak peril for Joe Biden’s inauguration had already passed by the time Trump addressed the Stop the Steal rally on January 6.

A full timeline of the attempted insurrection is helpful in putting Trump’s frantic, last-minute schemes into the proper context and countering the false impression that January 6 was an improvised, impossible-to-replicate event, rather than one part of an ongoing campaign. If Congress fails to seize its brief opportunity to reform our electoral system, the danger could recur in future elections — perhaps with a different, catastrophic outcome.

Laying the Groundwork: Trump claims “millions” voted illegally in 2016

Epitomizing the rare phenomenon of the sore winner, Trump insisted in late November 2016 that he would have won the popular vote as well as the Electoral College “if you deduct the millions of people who voted illegally.” He repeated the lie for years and even claimed falsely in a June 2019 interview with Meet the Press that California “admitted” it had counted “a million” illegal votes.

This wasn’t just a tossed-off random Trumpian fabrication. His insistence that Democrats had deployed ineligible (and probably noncitizen) voters led to his appointment of a Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity in May 2017. The commission was ostensibly led by Vice-President Mike Pence but was more closely identified with its co-chairman Kris Kobach, the immigrant-bashing, vote-suppressing secretary of State of Kansas. As David Daley explains, it was a wide-ranging fishing expedition that caught exactly zero fish:

Kobach’s plan was easy to discern: The commission was to be the front through which a cabal of shadowy Republican activists and oft-debunked academics, backed by misleading studies, laundered their phony voting-fraud theories into a justification for real-world suppression tactics such as national voter ID and massive coast-to-coast electoral-roll purges.

The commission was soon disbanded empty-handed, with Kobach & Co. blaming its failure on noncooperation from states that refused to turn over voters’ personal information. But in MAGA Land, wild voter-fraud claims become more credible each time they are repeated, so the commission was a sound investment in future lies.

Republicans raise bogus concerns about ballot counting in the 2018 midterms

In an effort to spin Republican losses in the 2018 midterm elections, House GOP leaders Paul Ryan and Kevin McCarthy seized on four contests in California in which Republicans led in early vote counting but lost when late mail ballots came in. Without alleging (much less proving) anything in particular, congressional Republicans suggested skullduggery in what was a normal trend in the counting of entirely legal ballots signed and mailed before Election Day but received afterward. I dismissed this GOP spin, which McCarthy was still pushing a year later, but warned that “all this ex post facto delegitimization of elections that [Republicans] lost sounds like a dress rehearsal for how they’ll behave if they do poorly again next year.”

The president himself made similar allegations after the 2018 midterms, though he focused on two races the GOP eventually won. On Veterans Day, Trump declared that Florida’s Senate and governor’s race should be called in favor of the Republicans who were ahead on Election Night, though legally cast overseas military and civilian mail ballots had yet to be counted. He tweeted, falsely, that these “massively infected” ballots had shown up “out of nowhere” and thus must be ignored:

The Florida Election should be called in favor of Rick Scott and Ron DeSantis in that large numbers of new ballots showed up out of nowhere, and many ballots are missing or forged. An honest vote count is no longer possible-ballots massively infected. Must go with Election Night!

This did, indeed, turn out to be a dress rehearsal. Trump went on to make almost identical charges about late-arriving (or just late-counted) mail ballots on Election Night 2020.

Trump suggests that voting by mail is inherently fraudulent

As the COVID-19 pandemic spread in 2020, states holding primaries and special elections naturally began liberalizing opportunities to vote by mail. Trump went bananas on Twitter in May, threatening to withhold federal funding from Michigan because its secretary of State had sent absentee-ballot applications to all registered voters.

Twitter, in what was then an unprecedented action, took down two Trump tweets in which he mendaciously attacked California for “sending Ballots to millions of people, anyone … no matter who they are or how they got there.” Actually, of course, the ballots went only to registered voters.

Trump’s goal seemed clear: By asserting that voting by mail is tantamount to voter fraud, he was setting up a bogus justification for contesting election results in any state he lost.

Trump prepares to exploit the “Red Mirage”

Team Trump’s parallel strategy was to get Republicans to eschew voting by mail to ensure that the votes most often counted first (in-person Election Day ballots) would skew red as forcefully as possible (which is why one analyst dubbed the scheme the “Red Mirage”). As Election Day approached, there were many signs that, simply by attacking voting by mail as illegitimate, Trump was succeeding in discouraging his supporters from voting that way, thus producing the desired Election Night “skew” in his favor.

In September, Trump’s hostility to mail ballots and threats to just claim victory became more intense and regular. In his first debate with Biden, on September 30, the plan to contest any election loss was made plain. Following an incoherent diatribe recapping his unfounded claims of rampant voter fraud, Trump was pressed on whether he would urge his supporters to “stay calm” and “not engage in any civil unrest” during the ballot-counting process, which would likely be drawn out due to unprecedented levels of voting by mail. “Will you pledge tonight that you will not declare victory until the election has been independently certified?” moderator Chris Wallace asked.

“I’m urging my supporters to go into the polls and watch very carefully,” Trump replied. “If it’s a fair election, I am 100 percent onboard. But if I see tens of thousands of ballots being manipulated, I can’t go along with that.”

November 4, 2020 – January 5, 2021

The Post election scramble: Trump declares victory on Election Night

With Trump ahead but giving up ground in a number of states he would ultimately lose, he made his long-awaited play. At around 3 a.m. on November 4, he concluded his remarks to his supporters by saying:

This is a fraud on the American public. This is an embarrassment to our country. We were getting ready to win this election. Frankly, we did win this election. We did win this election. So our goal now is to ensure the integrity for the good of this nation. This is a very big moment. This is a major fraud in our nation. We want the law to be used in a proper manner. So we’ll be going to the U.S. Supreme Court. We want all voting to stop. We don’t want them to find any ballots at four o’clock in the morning and add them to the list. Okay? It’s a very sad moment. To me, this is a very sad moment, and we will win this. And as far as I’m concerned, we already have won it.

It seems plausible that Trump delayed his premature victory claim by a few hours because it initially appeared that he might win legitimately. An “insider” account of Trump’s Election Night activities recently published in the Washington Post aired the theory that his declaration might have been spurred by a spontaneous suggestion from an inebriated Rudy Giuliani. But the many times Trump himself predicted he would do exactly this would indicate otherwise.

Trump’s “clown show” legal team challenges the election in court

A steadily changing cast of Trump campaign lawyers, eventually featuring histrionic extremists Giuliani and Sidney Powell, fired off 62 federal and state lawsuits challenging many aspects of the election results. Most were laughably frivolous, and 61 were rejected on widely varying grounds. The one that succeeded, in Pennsylvania, involved a small number of ballots with technical errors that a local judge had allowed voters to “cure” after a statutory deadline.

There were two big opportunities for a Hail Mary from the Supreme Court, but Trump lost both times. On December 8, the Court refused without comment to hear a claim by Republican congressman Mike Kelly that Pennsylvania’s expansion of voting by mail was invalid because it was not enacted by a constitutional amendment. And on December 11, another shot at the claim that state legislatures cannot delegate their election powers was rejected by the Court on grounds that the state bringing the suit had no standing to challenge procedures in the targeted states (Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin).

By then, the Trump campaign’s legal effort had descended into full farce, as became obvious on November 19 when Giuliani and Powell held a wild press conference featuring outlandish conspiracy theories, including communist manipulation of voting machines. Both Attorney General William Barr and White House adviser Jared Kushner reportedly dismissed the Trump legal team’s efforts as a “clown show.”

Trump tries to enlist Republican state legislators

Arguably the most serious Trump attempt to steal the election involved pleas to Republican legislators in key states won by Biden to dispute the results before they could be certified (the step before the formal award of electoral votes). As of November 21, Trump was publicly making arguments for this extreme remedy, but as Politico observed, it was a long shot from the get-go: “Republican-led legislatures in states Biden won would need to move to overturn their state’s popular vote and appoint a slate of Trump electors when the Electoral College meets on Dec. 14.” The opposition of Democratic governors in Michigan and Pennsylvania would have stopped such maneuvers absent an unlikely court finding that legislatures have sole power to appoint electors. And legislators in those two states didn’t respond to Trump’s requests for assistance.

All 50 states and the District of Columbia certified their election returns by December 9, and on December 14, presidential electors cast their ballots to make Biden the president-elect.

Trump pressures Georgia officials to “find” 11,000 votes

Trump continued his attempt to find state politicians willing to help him reverse the election results even after passing every deadline established by Congress over more than a century to cut off presidential-election disputes.

On December 5, he called Georgia governor Brian Kemp, who had backed the certification of Biden’s win, to ask him to convene the state legislature to overturn the results and appoint pro-Trump electors (Kemp declined to do so). On December 23, Trump called Bonnie Watson, a lowly election investigator for Georgia secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, urging her to find fault with mail ballots since “I won [Georgia] by hundreds of thousands of votes. It wasn’t close.”

On January 2, 2021, he concluded this particular line of election tampering by appealing directly to Raffensperger to find him some more votes. “So look. All I want to do is this,” the president said in a recorded conversation. “I just want to find 11,780 votes, which is one more than we have. Because we won the state.”

Trump urges Justice Department to declare the election “corrupt”

Trump was also working the state angle from the other direction, conspiring in particular with Acting Assistant Attorney General Jeffrey Clark to push Republican legislatures to investigate and possibly overturn Biden’s victory.

Clark drafted a letter to Republican officials in Georgia, claiming falsely that the DOJ was “investigating various irregularities” in the 2020 election. The letter urged them to convene a special legislative session to investigate these voter-fraud claims and consider “issues pertaining to the appointment of Presidential Electors.” Clark reportedly prepared similar letters addressed to GOP legislators in Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin.

None of these letters was ever sent out because Acting Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen and Acting Deputy Attorney General Richard Donoghue refused to go along. “There is no chance that I would sign this letter or anything remotely like this,” Donoghue told Clark in an email obtained by ABC News.

The @JudiciaryDems investigation into former President Trump’s attempt to enlist the DOJ in his efforts to overturn the 2020 election has already revealed some frightening truths. Just yesterday, we heard seven hours of testimony from Jeffrey Rosen alone. Much more is to come. 

In recent closed-door testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee, Rosen said his monthlong tenure as acting attorney general was marked by Trump’s “persistent” efforts to have the Justice Department discredit the election results. For instance, during a December 27 phone call, Rosen told Trump that he needed to “understand that the DOJ can’t + won’t snap its fingers + change the outcome of the election, doesn’t work that way,” according to Donoghue’s notes on the call.

“[I] don’t expect you to do that,” Trump reportedly answered, “just say that the election was corrupt + leave the rest to me and the R. Congressmen.”

Only a wholesale revolt by senior DOJ staff prevented Trump from carrying out the plan. On January 3, the president met with top Justice Department officials to discuss his desire to oust Rosen in favor of Clark, who could then advance bogus voter-fraud claims and pressure state officials as acting attorney general. Trump was informed that DOJ leaders had agreed to resign en masse if he fired Rosen, and the president eventually accepted that the move “would trigger not only chaos at the Justice Department but also congressional investigations and possibly recriminations from other Republicans and distract attention from his efforts to overturn the election results,” according to the New York Times.

Trump attempts to bully Pence into rejecting Biden’s electoral votes

“It is my considered judgment that my oath to support and defend the Constitution constrains me from claiming unilateral authority to determine which electoral votes should be counted and which should not.” pic.twitter.com/cIZvfCMfnt

Trump calls on congressional allies to block confirmation of Biden’s win

The fallback strategy for interfering with Biden’s accession to the presidency was to utilize the procedures in the Electoral Count Act enabling challenges in Congress to individual state certifications. Alabama congressman Mo Brooks announced in early December that he would challenge selected Biden electors.

Trump promptly thanked Brooks publicly and encouraged others to join him, particularly in the Senate since every challenge requires the support of at least one member from each chamber. Mitch McConnell discouraged his troops from joining the rebellion, but soon enough, hard-core Trump supporters like Tommy Tuberville, Josh Hawley, Ted Cruz, and others climbed aboard the Insurrection Express.

This set the stage for the Capitol Riot.

January 6, 2021 – Present

The Insurrection Goes Live

For weeks, Trump called on his supporters to descend on Washington on January 6 to protest Biden’s election (and back whatever play he could manage in Congress). On December 20, he tweeted, “Statistically impossible to have lost the 2020 Election…. Big protest in DC on January 6th. Be there, will be wild!”

By December 30, multiple groups, some of them known for armed extremism, were planning to converge on D.C. in response to Trump’s summons. “Stop the Steal,” a rubric invented by Roger Stone in 2016 in anticipation of a Hillary Clinton victory, became the protesters’ organizing slogan.

As a joint session of Congress was convening to confirm the Biden victory, Trump addressed the faithful gathered on the National Mall. Much of the debate over his subsequent impeachment and Senate trial revolved around exactly what he said to the demonstrators who subsequently broke into the Capitol and temporarily shut down the confirmation of Biden’s victory. Was this the smoking gun from his address?

All of us here today do not want to see our election victory stolen by emboldened radical-left Democrats, which is what they’re doing. And stolen by the fake news media. That’s what they’ve done and what they’re doing. We will never give up, we will never concede. It doesn’t happen. You don’t concede when there’s theft involved.

Or maybe this?

We’re going to walk down to the Capitol, and we’re going to cheer on our brave senators and congressmen and women, and we’re probably not going to be cheering so much for some of them. Because you’ll never take back our country with weakness. You have to show strength, and you have to be strong.

Equally significant from a broader perspective was Trump’s language echoing the lies he told about Democrats “finding” votes during the wee hours on Election Night, which he would continue to use as a rallying cry long afterward:

Our election was over at ten o’clock in the evening. We’re leading Pennsylvania, Michigan, Georgia, by hundreds of thousands of votes.

And then late in the evening, or early in the morning — boom — these explosions of bullshit. And all of a sudden. All of a sudden it started to happen.

Arizona conducts an endless election “audit”

Even after the failure of the January 6 insurrection, and then Biden’s inauguration, cut off even the most remote possibility of an election coup, Trump claimed vindication when Republican senators saved him from being convicted and banned from holding office again after his second impeachment. Then he and his supporters devised another way to keep pointlessly challenging the 2020 results. In Arizona (with sporadic efforts to repeat the tactic in other states, so far unsuccessfully), hard-core Trump activists in the state senate ordered an election “audit” (a legally meaningless term) of votes in Maricopa County, which went solidly for Biden after Trump carried it in 2016.

This strange exercise, conducted by an unqualified consulting firm led by a pro-Trump conspiracy theorist, was supposed to last 60 days but has now gone on for more than five months without producing any evidence of the kind of irregularities that might call Biden’s Arizona win into question. The idea seems to be to muddy the waters just enough that those who already believe in a Biden “steal” can nourish their grievances right up until the next presidential cycle.

Trump keeps the Big Lie alive

There’s been a lot of media derision about Trump’s postpresidential efforts to wave the bloody shirt of the stolen election. It’s easy to assume the 45th president is just trying to stay in the news or stay relevant or give vent to his natural mood of narcissistic grievance and vengeance. However, the damage he is doing to the credibility of democratic institutions among Republican rank-and-file voters and conservative activists is not fading but is being compounded daily.

It’s entirely plausible that Trump or some authorized successor will build on the lies he deployed so regularly during the 2020 election cycle and plan a heads-I-win, tails-you-lose response to whatever happens on November 5, 2024, as I argued in April 2021:

If you begin not with the assumption that Trump’s entire effort to steal the election was absurd but regard it as an audacious plan that wasn’t executed with the necessary precision, then reverse engineering it to fix the broken parts makes sense …

And the really heady thing for Trump is knowing how easy it was to convince the GOP rank-and-file base that his lies were the gospel truth.

Put together shrewd vote suppressors, audacious state legislators, emboldened conservative media, a better slate of lawyers, a new generation of compliant judges, and quite possibly a Republican-controlled Congress, and the insurrection plot could finally succeed.

In the wee hours of November 9th, 2016, I sat slumped in front of my computer trying to gather my thoughts to write my piece for Salon that was scheduled for later in the morning. The feeling I had, as did millions of others, was one of utter shock and despair that my country had somehow elected an ignorant brand name in a suit named Donald Trump to lead it. Having observed him closely during the campaign, writing about him nearly every day, I knew his presidency was going to be a trainwreck of epic proportions. This was depressing on every level but the prospect of a GOP-led Supreme Court majority, with special thanks to the Machiavellian machinations of Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., was downright terrifying.

Within just a few weeks that terror was made manifest as millions of women and their allies took to the streets for the first Women’s March on January 21, 2017. The massive gatherings were a protest against everything Donald Trump and the Republicans stood for but the main issue that brought all those people together was the knowledge that the Supreme Court was now very likely going to end abortion rights in America. Donald Trump had made an explicit promise to appoint only anti-abortion judges who were committed to overturning Roe vs. Wade and there was little doubt the GOP base would hold him to it.

When Justice Anthony Kennedy cynically retired the next year so that the Republicans could solidify their hard core majority by installing a political hack by the name of Brett Kavanaugh, it was all over but the shouting. The 5-4 majority to overturn Roe vs Wade was on the court.

This week we saw the beginning of the end. Texas passed a draconian anti-abortion law that banned the procedure after 6 weeks. Since most people don’t know they are pregnant that early in pregnancy, it effectively bans the procedure for all but a very few. This wasn’t the first of what they call “fetal heartbeat” laws that states have tried to pass, but it is the first to go into effect despite Roe v. Wade still standing. This is because the Texas legislature came up with a devious way to circumvent federal jurisdiction, by taking enforcement out of the hands of the state altogether and putting it into the hands of private citizens, also known as vigilantes.

Abortion rights advocates had petitioned the Supreme Court to block the implementation of the law but they allowed it to go forward, the Trump majority writing that the laws novel scheme was just too complicated for them to contemplate so they just had to let it stand. It’s absurd, of course. The court exists to untangle complicated legal questions.

But everyone knows that this was not the real reason the five ultra-conservatives let this law stand. The justices are fully aware that the scheme was devised to circumvent their authority and they are happy to let it. This gives them a chance to let the air out of the balloon a little bit in anticipation of the full overturn of Roe vs Wade in the next session when they hear Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the Mississippi case that has been chosen as the vehicle to deliver the coup de grâce. As my Salon colleague Amanda Marcotte expressed with visceral emotion, no matter that we knew it was coming, it’s still devastating to finally see it happening.

It’s worth taking a closer look at the law Texas passed and how it came about just to see where else we may be headed in the era of the Trump Court.

This law’s novel approach to enforcement, essentially removing the state and using what amounts to vigilantes and bounty hunters (under the promise of $10,000 for every abortion aider and abettor they bag) is essentially a form of legal secession from the U.S. Constitution. By removing the state and putting this into the realm of civil law, they can circumvent Americans’ constitutional rights by making them impossible to exercise. Chief Justice John Roberts, who dissented from the majority opinion, concedes that the vigilante scheme is a problem writing:

“I would grant preliminary relief to preserve the status quo ante — before the law went into effect — so that the courts may consider whether a state can avoid responsibility for its laws in such a manner.”

The mind boggles at the possibilities for this idea to be used in other realms. Imagine if California were to ban guns but only allow private citizens to sue people who knowingly or unknowingly helped them obtain them? Or how about outlawing MAGA hats with the same scheme? But let’s be serious. The Trump Court will only allow these means to be used for ends with which they agree. And they can do that. There is no appeal after all.

This court majority is signaling loud and clear that they have abandoned all pretense of impartial justice. They have joined the rest of the far-right in their quest to retain power and achieve their ends by any means necessary. All they need for “legitimacy” is the power they have — and it is immense.

The fact that hardcore, anti-democratic, right-wingers like the Trump Court have apparently decided that state-sanctioned vigilantism is a valid law enforcement mechanism should not surprise us. As the New York Times’ Michelle Goldberg pointed out, this is now mainstream thinking on the right:

Today’s G.O.P. made a hero out of Kyle Rittenhouse, the young man charged with killing two people during protests against police violence in Kenosha, Wis. Leading Republicans speak of the Jan. 6 insurgents, who tried to stop the certification of an election, as martyrs and political prisoners.

Last year, Senator Marco Rubio praised Texas Trump supporters who swarmed a Biden campaign bus, allegedly trying to run it off the road: “We love what they did,” he said. This weekend in Pennsylvania, Steve Lynch, the Republican nominee in a county executive race, said of school boards that impose mask mandates, “I’m going in with 20 strong men” to tell them “they can leave or they can be removed.”

Their leader Donald Trump himself has encouraged vigilante violence, praising insurrectionist Ashli Babbit as a martyr, issuing statements like “when the looting starts the shooting starts”, “Liberate Michigan” and famously telling his ecstatic fans that he will pay their legal fees if they beat up protesters, among a hundred other provocative comments.

Goldberg points out that in Texas, the “pro-life” crowd is ready to start hunting down their enemies quoting one of their leaders, John Seago, saying “One of the great benefits, and one of the things that’s most exciting for the pro-life movement, is that they have a role in enforcing this law.” That’s certainly very exciting for all of the MAGA fans out there. 12 other states have passed laws similar to Texas’. A little tweaking to take state enforcement out of it and put anti-abortion bounty hunters in and they’re good to go. No doubt there will be a lot of pain and suffering but that’s pretty much all there is to the GOP agenda these days. 

Salon

Just Security this morning posted “Rep. Jim Jordan, a Systematic Disinformation Campaign, and January 6.” The Ohio Republican has “has engaged in a systematic effort to cast doubt on the integrity of the 2020 U.S. presidential election.” Jordan is more Trump troll than a lawmaker:

Jordan’s impact on broadcast and social media is extraordinary. He is a frequent guest on Fox News, as well as Newsmax and OAN, and advanced false claims about the election on all three networks. Of the 147 Republican members of Congress who opposed the certification of the election, Jordan was “the most prolific Fox guest,” according to an analysis by Media Matters, a non-profit organization that monitors conservative misinformation. He  fielded close to 10% of all appearances by those GOP members since January 6. And while Jordan lost nearly 150,000 Twitter followers in a post-January 6 purge of accounts associated with the QAnon conspiracy, the most of any Republican lawmaker, he retains more than 2 million followers. Many of his tweets have been shared more than 10,000 times and liked over 50,000 times. 

Twitter flagged many of Jordan’s election fraud claims as disputed. (Read: Outright BS) Nonetheless, Jordan helped whip January 6 as the “ultimate date of significance” for Trump supporters in spite ofTrump’s legal team losing over 60 court cases filed to try and overturn the 2020 election.

Jordan called repeatedly for investigations into the conduct of the election. So many times, in fact, that it might be hard for him to oppose them on principle if he had any principles. Now that the House is conducting them into the Jan. 6 insurrection to determine (among other things) if it was part of an attempted coup, Jordan could have a front-row seat.

Watch this space:

July 27, 2021: Rep. Jordan appears to confirm he spoke with President Trump by phone on January 6.

In a Fox News interview, Jordan appears to avoid saying whether he spoke to Trump that day. When asked directly, he responds, “Yes. I mean I’ve talked to the President so many – I can’t remember all the days I’ve talked to him. But I’ve certainly talked to the President.”

Additional context: A Republican member of the House Select Committee, Rep. Liz Cheney, D-MO, says Jordan should be called before the committee as a “material witness”. 

No doubt Rep. Madison Cawthorn (R-NC) sees a role model in Jordan’s trolling.

This piece by Damon Linker in The Week is really interesting. I don’t think it says anything my readers don’t already know but it goes into a certain corner of the right wing universe to illuminate just how far they’ve gone.

How does ideological change happen? Why do certain political ideas and possibilities that appear outrageous and even unthinkable at one moment in history come to be considered options worth taking seriously? What causes the Overton window to shift dramatically in one direction or another?

The answer has something to do with the dynamics of partisan coalitions. To cite a fairly anodyne example, Ronald Reagan took over the Republican Party in 1980 by expanding the GOP’s appeal to the right as well as to the center-left. Those who supported Gerald Ford in 1976 were joined by conservative activists who had passionately favored Barry Goldwater in 1964, right-wing populists in the South and Midwest who had cast ballots for George Wallace in 1968, and the more moderate voters across the country who came to be called “Reagan Democrats.” The result was broad-based support for deep tax cuts, sharply increased defense spending, and amped up confrontation with the Soviet Union — a synthesis of positions that seemed to be a non-starter just a few years earlier but which, thanks to Reagan’s political skills and their intersection with contingent changes in political culture, became a stable ideological and electoral configuration of the GOP for the next 36 years.

The GOP has shed a lot of voters (as a share of the electorate) since its high-water mark in 1984. But with the rise of Donald Trump, the shape of the party’s coalition also began to change. Some of the shift has been class-based, with white and Latino voters lacking a college degree flocking to the Republican Party and highly educated urban and suburban voters fleeing it.

But Trump also actively courted the right-wing fringe — the militia movement, quasi-paramilitary groups like the Proud Boys, neo-Nazis, overt racists, and outright xenophobes. These voters are a tiny portion of the party, but they punch above their weight, as we learned on Jan. 6, when a small handful of these extremists took the lead in initiating the mayhem and violence on Capitol Hill that afternoon while most of the intruders simply followed along rather cluelessly. (This point, along with much else in this column, is elaborated with depth and insight in the “Aftermath of January 6th” episode of the consistently excellent Know Your Enemy podcast.)

With most Republican officeholders and media personalities refusing to condemn the actions of the insurrectionary mob that invaded the Capitol to stop congressional certification of the 2020 election results — or Trump’s decisive role in inciting that mob — and some of them instead endorsing an evidence-free conspiracy involving the “deep state” and the FBI, the GOP has verified that the Overton window has shifted sharply to the right. What would have until quite recently been considered unacceptable forms of political dissent have been legitimized. That’s how the once unthinkable becomes a new normal.

And the “intellectuals” of the conservative movement? Well, as my readers know, I’ve been examining the rot inside that movement for a long time. It’s finally rotted through.

He discusses Michael Anton, the fatuous crank who wrote that stupid screed in 2016 which suggested that Trump was a hero for saving the world from the terroristic Clinton:

A parallel process of line-shifting has been unfolding among conservative intellectuals, most of whom responded to the launch of Trump’s presidential campaign six years ago with a mixture of disgust and incredulity. The dismissal didn’t last. While many shifted to the center and refused to endorse Trump’s hostile takeover of the party, plenty of others went along with it, adjusting their prior positions to bring them into alignment with the nominee on policy and attitude. No commentator did so with more enthusiasm or popular impact than Michael Anton.

A former director of communications for New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani (where he was briefly my boss) and former speechwriter for Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, Anton penned the most notorious and rhetorically scalding case for supporting Trump. Published in early September 2016 in the Claremont Review of Books online, “The Flight 93 Election” portrayed Trump as a final, last-ditch opportunity for conservatives to wrest control of the country back from those (like Hillary Clinton) who aimed at nothing less than its thoroughgoing destruction. Rush Limbaugh paid tribute to the power of the argument (and amplified it for a vastly larger audience) by reading the essay aloud, paragraph by paragraph, on his radio show. In doing so, Anton, with Limbaugh’s help, gave legions of Trump-skeptical conservatives permission to vote, even to express outright enthusiasm, for the untested right-wing populist.

After Trump’s victory, Anton went on to serve the new president on the National Security Council. That lasted a little more than a year. Once he had left the White House, Anton returned to writing and speaking publicly in defense of Trump and in favor of his re-election. Two months before the 2020 vote, he predicted an attempted “coup” from the left if Democrat Joe Biden didn’t prevail. When events unfolded in precisely the opposite way — with Trump losing the vote, refusing to accept the result, and attempting a hapless coup of his own to stay in power — Anton said nothing to acknowledge either the irony or the error. Quite the opposite, in fact. In the months since Trump left office, Anton has been doing his best to throw open the doors of the conservative intellectual world to ideas once considered far too extreme for American politics.

How extreme? So extreme that in late May, Anton set aside nearly two hours on his Claremont Institute podcast (“The Stakes”) for an erudite, wide-ranging discussion with self-described monarchist Curtis Yarvin about why the United States needs an “American Caesar” to seize control of the federal government, and precisely how such a would-be dictator could accomplish the task.

With this conversation, Anton seems eager to shift the Overton window far beyond anything resembling liberal democracy. In its place, he would substitute an elaborate, historically and philosophically sophisticated justification for tyranny.

It’s important right at the outset to make a few things clear about the Anton-Yarvin conversation. First, Anton doesn’t explicitly endorse Yarvin’s most outlandish ideas, which blend a far-right love of unlimited executive power with the techno-utopianism of Silicon Valley. (Yarvin created the Urbit digital platform and co-founded the tech company Tion, while also gaining considerable notoriety with the alt-right blog “Unqualified Reservations,” written under the pen name Mencius Moldbug.) In fact, at several points Anton goes out of his way to declare in a tone of mock seriousness that as someone affiliated with the Claremont Institute, which has long advocated for a return to the principles of the American founding (including the Declaration of Independence’s denunciations of monarchical tyranny), he can’t stand behind Yarvin’s sympathy for dictatorship. Yet it’s also true that at no point does Anton offer a substantive critique of Yarvin’s arguments and assertions. He merely expresses pragmatic or tactical objections, as if the primary fault in Yarvin’s ideas is that they are unrealistic.

Then there’s the matter of terminology. I have described Anton’s conversation with Yarvin as helping to shift the Overton window away from liberal democracy and toward a defense of tyranny. Yet this isn’t how either man understands the American present. Rather, they agree early on in the podcast (around minute 24) that the current American “regime” is most accurately described as a “theocratic oligarchy” in which an elite class of progressive “priests” ensconced in the bureaucracies of the administrative state, and at Harvard, The New York Times, and other leading institutions of civil society, promulgate and enforce their own version of “reality.” Anton and Yarvin treat this assertion as given and then proceed to talk through how this theocratic oligarchy might be overturned. (One of their substantive disagreements concerns how long this regime might last if it’s not directly challenged. Anton is hopeful it will collapse of its own incompetence and corruption, while Yarvin thinks the current “clown world” could continue onward for decades or even a century, with the United States slowly decaying into something resembling a Third World country.)

Once the conversation really gets going (around minute 45), Yarvin makes clear that he has a highly idiosyncratic take on American history. In his view, roughly every 75 years, a “Caesar” seizes dictatorial powers and institutes “substantive regime changes.” George Washington did this in 1789. Abraham Lincoln did it again in 1861. And FDR did it last in 1933, speaking in the closing passages of his First Inaugural Address about the national emergency of the Great Depression and the need to wield unprecedented government power to combat it, which he did with the New Deal. The U.S. today is overdue for its next political transformation — one that would settle the country’s “cold civil war” from above.

Yarvin’s top choice to become the next American Caesar is Elon Musk, though both men acknowledge that he’s constitutionally ineligible for the role because he was born in South Africa. This provides an occasion for them both to joke about how great it would be for him to run, win, and demand to be made president anyway, in defiance of the Constitution. (Anton makes sure to clarify that their jovial chit-chat about flagrantly disregarding the letter of the Constitution is “not an endorsement” of actually doing so. Later on, they likewise joke about how great it would have been for Trump to declare himself the personal embodiment of the “living Constitution.”)

But what exactly is Yarvin proposing and Anton entertaining here? Is it nothing more ominous than a New Deal from the right? As the conversation unfolds further, beginning around an hour and twenty minutes into the podcast, it becomes clear that Yarvin has something much more radical in mind (even if his peculiar constellation of assumptions prevent him from recognizing just how extreme it is).

The trick, for Yarvin, is for the would-be American Caesar to exercise emergency powers from day one. How? Caesar should run for president promising to do precisely this, and then announce the national emergency in his inaugural address, encouraging every state government to do the same. Taking advantages of “ambiguities” in the Constitution, he will immediately act to federalize the national guard around the country and welcome backup from sympathetic members of the police (who will wear armbands to signal their support for Caesar).

When federal agencies refuse to go along, Yarvin suggests, Caesar (whom he now begins referring to as “Trump”) will use a “Trump app” to communicate directly with his 80 million supporters on their smart phones, using notifications to tell them that “this agency isn’t following my instructions,” which will prompt them to rally at the proper building, with the crowd “steered around by a joystick by Trump himself,” forming a “human barricade around every federal building, supporting Trump’s lawful authority.” Where maybe 20,000 people stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6, millions responding to the Trump app would be much more effective — a modern-day version of the paramilitary groups that ensured Lincoln’s safety during the hard-fought, dangerous 1860 campaign for president that preceded the Civil War (and the president’s subsequent suspension of habeas corpus and shuttering of hundreds of newspapers).

When Anton asks how Trump-Caesar should respond to Harvard, The New York Times, and the rest of the theocratic oligarchy blaring air-raid sirens about the imposition of dictatorship, Yarvin indicates that it would be essential to “smash it” with one blow. To suggest that Caesar should be required to deal with “someone else’s department of reality is manifestly absurd.” Going on, Yarvin explains that “when Caesar crosses the Rubicon, he doesn’t sit around getting his feet wet, fishing. He marches straight across the Rubicon” and uses “all force available.” Once that happens, the whole world can be “remade.”

The podcast concludes with Anton quoting another Claremont writer (Anthony Codevilla) on how Trump dropped “the leadership of the deplorables,” which is waiting to be picked up by someone “who will make Trump seem moderate.” Yarvin responds approvingly with a quote by Serbian dictator and indicted genocidal war criminal Slobodan Milošević, who said the goal should be that “no one will dare to beat you anymore.”

Defenders of Anton, Yarvin, and the Claremont Institute will say that this thoroughly appalling discussion was just that — some casual talk, idle musings, a fantasy disconnected from reality. Yet fantasies are outgrowths of our imaginations and hopes, and they help set our expectations, including our conception of what is possible and desirable in politics.

The indisputable fact is that a leading and longstanding conservative institute in the United States hosts a podcast by someone who served as a senior official in the presidential administration of a man who may run again for the nation’s highest office in a few years. And on an episode of that podcast, this former official and his invited guest genially rehearsed arguments about why a future president would be justified in turning himself into a tyrant, and how he could set about accomplishing this task.

Which means that on the starboard side of American politics, the Overton window has now shifted far beyond the boundaries of democratic self-government to a place broadly coterminous with fascism.

It is fascism. The right’s party, the GOP, is out there defending and/or covering up the attempted coup last January. I don’t know what else we need to know.