340 search results for "certification"

I don’t think people understand what really happened in Georgia this week. The vote suppression law is terrible in so many ways. But there is one provision that makes it a democracy killer:

Much of the work administering elections in Georgia is handled by the state’s 159 counties. The law gives the State Election Board new powers to intervene in county election offices and to remove and replace local election officials. That has led to concerns that the Republican-controlled state board could exert more influence over the administration of elections, including the certification of county results.

One target for intervention could be Fulton County, a Democratic stronghold that contains most of Atlanta. The heavily populated county has been plagued by problems, including long lines, and it is often singled out by Republican officials. Under the law, the board could intervene in up to four counties at a time and install a temporary superintendent with the ability to hire and fire personnel including elections directors and poll officers.

This is ostensibly to give “the voters” faith that the elections are secure (since the Democrats stole it from Trump, dontcha know.) But I don’t think there’s even the slightest doubt that if there is a close election in 2022 for the Senate race or the presidential in 2024, they will simply refuse to certify a Democratic win. It is going to happen.

And by the way, they are also going to pass a laws in at least a few states that allows the state legislature to overturn elections at will. They have reason to believe there may be five Supreme Court justices who are willing to interpret Article II of the Constitution (which says, “The Times, Places and Manner of holding Elections for Senators and Representatives, shall be prescribed in each State by the Legislature thereof; but the Congress may at any time by Law make or alter such Regulations”) to mean that state legislatures have the power to decide the winner of the election if they want to. That is certainly what dear Leader Donald Trump wants his cult to believe. I have no reason to think the McConnell Court won’t go along with that.

The states are running with these sort of laws and I suspect they feel quite confident that they can get away with it. They know that Democrats won’t do the same thing and, more importantly, that they have nothing to fear from them if they did. The electoral college, Senate distortion and gerrymandering already gives them the leverage to hold minoritarian power as long as they can keep Republicans in the majority in the state legislatures in enough states.

The only legitimate election in the United State in the view of Republicans is one that they win. That is Donald Trump’s philosophy of life and now it is the philosophy of half the country as well.

Americans solemnly venerate their founding document (that was not their founding document) as if God dictated it Himself (naturally). Indeed, many American Christians (and painter Jon McNaughton) believe that just as they do of the Bible. But the U.S. Constitution has its merits, even if mathematician and philosopher Kurt Gödel thought it contained a fatal flaw.

As instructive as it is chilling at this moment in U.S. history, Jill Lepore walks readers of The New Yorker through Linda Colley’s upcoming “The Gun, the Ship, and the Pen: Warfare, Constitutions, and the Making of the Modern World.”

“Wars make states make constitutions,” Colley writes in a corollary on a thought by sociologist Charles Tilly. (Wars are also vectors for spreading religion, I would not be the first to observe.) The worldwide wars of the 18th century sparked an era of constitution-writing, Colley believes, not noble ideas about the rights of men. (Women nearly always fared less well under them.)

Lepore writes:

Before constitutions were written, women had informal rights in all sorts of places; constitutions explicitly excluded them, not least because a constitution, in Colley’s formulation, is a bargain struck between a state and its men, who made sacrifices to the state as taxpayers and soldiers, which were different from the sacrifices women made in wartime.

It was acknowledgment of the costs of rulers’ military adventurism that inspired rules for governance that both limited rulers’ itch to start wars and provided for ways to finance them with taxes. Promises of guaranteed rights — often unmet — prompted their acceptance by the populace.

Constitutions and constitution-like compacts, Colley argues, are one kind of paperwork that wars generate. In 1765, ten years after Paoli drafted Corsica’s costituzione, and at the close of the Seven Years’ War, Catherine the Great, the Empress of Russia, began drafting the Nakaz, or Grand Instruction. Having seized the throne in a coup d’état in 1762, and therefore insecure in her rule even as she worked to expand her realm through repeated military campaigns, she sought to provide a framework for government. She relied, in particular, on Montesquieu’s 1748 “Spirit of the Laws,” which also greatly influenced James Madison. (Catherine called it “the prayerbook of all monarchs with any common sense.”) Montesquieu had denounced the militarization of modern life, surveying kingdoms and empires from Spain and France to China, Japan, and India. “Each monarch keeps as many armies on foot as if his people were in danger of being exterminated,” Montesquieu wrote. “The consequence of such a situation is a perpetual augmentation of taxes.” He and his intellectual kin had a solution, which Colley describes as an irresistible lure to sovereigns: “that in an age of rampant, expensive and disruptive military violence on land and sea, innovatory and informed legislators might intervene so as to bind up society’s wounds, re-establish order, remodel their respective states, and in the process burnish their own reputations.”

That, as Colley makes clear, was Catherine’s plan. Faced with unceasing challenges to her authority—as a foreigner who had seized the throne and as a woman—she nevertheless intended to pursue wide-scale warfare against the Ottoman Empire and its allies in an effort to extend Russia’s borders. To that end, she insisted on her sovereignty while guaranteeing her subjects liberty and equality. “The equality of citizens consists in their being all subject to the same laws,” she wrote in the Nakaz. She called taxes “the tribute which each citizen pays for the preservation of his own well-being.”

“Taxes are what we pay for civilized society,” Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. would say much later. Americans being more provincial (and because Catherine was a woman) took little notice of the Russian monarch’s efforts in crafting their own constitution.

But what gave constitutions weight was ready availability of printed copies. People who knew what was in them could organize to hold leaders to them, or at least make the attempt.

Wars make states make constitutions; states print constitutions; constitutions guarantee freedom of the press. In the nearly six hundred constitutions written between 1776 and about 1850, the right most frequently asserted—more often than freedom of religion, freedom of speech, or freedom of assembly—was freedom of the press. Colley argues, “Print was deemed indispensable if this new technology was to function effectively and do its work, both at home and abroad.”

What made the U.S. Constitution more stable was Article V that allows for its amendment, the first such document to do so. Without that provision, the only other option for addressing deficiencies was overthrow of the government. Colley does not address this feature, Lepore writes, noting now that “ninety-six out of every hundred of the world’s codified constitutions contain an amendment provision.”

Even so, other states amend theirs far more frequently. U.S. amendments tend to come in bursts: “in 1791, with the ratification of the Bill of Rights, the first ten amendments; after the Civil War, with the ratification of the Reconstruction Amendments; and during the Progressive Era, with the ratification of the Sixteenth, Seventeenth, Eighteenth, and Nineteenth Amendments.”

It may be time for another round. Yet the obstacle to amending the Constitution is more cultural than structural. The veneration with which Americans view the document makes it difficult even though recent events have exposed some rotting roots. As with the practices of Christianity on this Palm Sunday, custom and usage over time freight the country as much if not more than the age of its core text.

Rather than being amended, the Constitution has been betrayed, circumvented, violated, and abandoned, by force of practice. Can a U.S. President compel a foreign leader to interfere in an American election? Apparently. Can a U.S. President refuse to accept the results of a free and fair election and incite a mob to attack Congress in order to prevent the certification of the vote? Apparently. The U.S. Constitution, no less than the U.K.’s unwritten constitution, is more than the sum of its words; it’s the accretion of practices and precedents.

Kurt Gödel might have been happy to hear that. Gödel’s Loophole really isn’t anything like Fermat’s Last Theorem, because constitutional scholars are pretty sure of what Gödel had in mind. It’s a constitutional version of the idea that, if a genie wafts out of an oil lamp and offers you three wishes, you should begin by wishing for more wishes. In what amounts to a genuine oversight, Article V, the amendment provision, does not prohibit amending Article V. It’s very hard to ratify a constitutional amendment, but if a President could amass enough power and accrue enough blindly loyal followers he could get an amendment ratified that revised the mechanism of amendment itself. If a revised Article V made it possible for a President to amend the Constitution by fiat (e.g., “The President, whenever he shall deem it necessary, shall make amendments to this Constitution, which shall be valid to all intents and purposes, as part of this Constitution”), he could turn a democracy into a dictatorship without ever having done anything unconstitutional. What Gödel did not realize is that it’s actually a lot easier than that.

One of the country’s major political parties can simply exploit “structural biases” in the Constitution to ensure minority rule in what is ostensibly a majority-rule system. Law professors Jonathan S. Gould and David E. Pozen spell out how, Greg Sargent wrote last week:

Their findings are stark. They find that the multiple veto points in the legislative process — the supermajority needed against the filibuster, congressional rules empowering committees to kill legislation, etc. — systematically work against Democrats, because they generally harbor more legislative ambition.

“Veto points that increase the difficulty of enacting legislation,” they note, “have come to impede the policy aspirations of Democrats more than those of Republicans.” The executive branch, they find, is riddled with procedural features that systematically hamper the ability of agencies to regulate.

They detect a similar electoral bias. Two senators representing each state regardless of population advantages the party that overperforms in small states, as does (to a lesser extent) the electoral college.

What’s more, the reliance on single-member congressional districts (created by federal law) benefits the party that overperforms in sparsely populated areas and works against the party that wastes more votes in concentrated ones.

In some cases, a shift in the party’s coalitions could undo those biases. But for now, the authors conclude, our “intersection of constitutional design and political geography” has produced systematic structural biases for the party that is “strongest in small states,” the GOP.

Good luck getting amendments past those states to undo, in the name of fairness, constitutional biases that tip the playing field in their favor. Especially now that minority rule is the only way they can.

The 2022 election in Georgia is going to be lit. This piece by Tim Miller on Trumper Herschel Walker and his nascent campaign says it all. Trump seems to think he would be best suited to beat Raphael Warnock, but who knows? Maybe he could take on Governor Brian Kemp in a primary:

Ask any football fan about the worst trades in NFL history and the one player they will all mention is Herschel Walker.

Back in 1989 the Dallas Cowboys traded their star running back to the Minnesota Vikings for five players and six draft picks, an unprecedented haul that Cowboys coach Jimmy Johnson later described as “the great train robbery.” The Cowboys used those picks to draft Hall of Famer Emmitt Smith and a bunch of other key cogs for the budding dynasty that would dominate the NFL for much of my childhood. For the Vikings on the other hand…well they haven’t been to the big game since 1977.

So you might say that being on the losing end of a swap is something Herschel knows a little bit about.

That’s going to be relevant experience for him, because 30 years after Jimmy J’s big heist, Herschel finds himself as a key player on the losing end of the political trade that turned Georgia—home to his alma mater and site of a potential run for either Senate or governor—into a blue state. In addition to being the answer to an NFL trivia question, Walker is now a card-carrying Trumper. And also a real-world celebrity. Or rather, as close to a “real-world celebrity” as exists in the jackleg MAGA world where Scott Baio and Kevin Sorbo are part of the A-list. Walker even has celebrity progeny: A son who is—I shit you not—a gay, anti-BLM, pro-Trump, TikTok sensation.

Walker currently lives in Texas, but is thought of as a Georgia candidate thanks to his heyday between the hedges. The Trump family wants revenge against Georgia’s Republican political establishment and see Walker as their prime recruit. And, God bless ‘em, the Republican consultant/media complex is getting on board, too.

Reading about Walker, you will see what the Trump family likes about him (spoiler: he’s a Trump suck up). What’s less clear is why Georgia Republicans would want to bring the Walker Texa(n)’s drama to the Peach State.

Miller describes Walker’s admission of having severe mental illness (“dissociative identity disorder” or D.I.D., which is colloquially known as “multiple personality disorder.”) which resulted in serious threats of violence to others and himself. He would play Russian Roulette in front of people.

After his book tour in 2008, Walker became a contestant on Donald Trump’s Celebrity Apprentice reality show where he “finished” a gentleman’s 7th place—behind Joan and Melissa Rivers, but ahead of Khloe Kardashian. The judges felt like his orange chicken with a yogurt dessert was not suitable for the frozen food category. It probably says something that Walker’s self-described competitive streak did not seem to engender any bitterness towards the man who fired him in week nine of the show.

Walker then tried his hand at MMA where he was more successful, finishing 2-0 before determining that he was aging out of a young man’s game.

A few years after that Walker reconnected with Trump and began to show a real interest in politics.

Lucky us.

Walker’s political ideology is somewhat muddled, but the through line that connects it all is his willingness to partake in any conspiracy theory that bubbles up from the MAGA internet.

Some examples.

In October of 2020, many months after Obama began campaigning for Biden, Walker suggested that Obama had delayed doing so because he might be privy to unspecified information about “O’Biden’s son” and “he may have known about it, knew it wasn’t right. And, uh, who knows?”

Who does know?! Not Herschel.

He also proposed a complex theory in which the Communist Party of China funded the Black Lives Matter movement, which in turn funded the Democratic party.

“Why does it seem like I’m the only one that’s coming up with this? Just think about it,” he said.

[Chin Scratch Emoji]

Walker was, of course, early to the #StopTheSteal conspiracy, proposing in the weeks before the election that Biden had already admitted to fraud and suggesting that maybe Obama had cheated in his victories, too.

We heard @JoeBiden say they put together voter fraud and Joe stated that’s also what they did for @BarackObama. Did they cheat to get Obama elected? @FoxNews @CNN @realDonaldTrump @espn @LouDobbs @DonaldJTrumpJr @kayleighmcenany

— Herschel Walker (@HerschelWalker) October 26, 2020

After the election, Walker, like many other consumers of MAGA media, became increasingly unhinged and radicalized—I understand this might not seem possible. But in this he was egged on by his increasingly visible son, Christian.

To fully understand the extent to which Herschel has internalized the messaging from the dregs of the Parlerified pro-Trump internet, you have to understand his gay, 21-year-old son, Christian, who—prior to becoming a content creator extraordinaire—was a competitive cheerleader.

(I want to break the fourth wall and offer, as a personal aside, that it’s pretty cool for a guy like Herschel to be so supportive of his cheer-squad son. I hope other MAGA dads get some cheerspiration from him on this count. . .)

Christian went on to become a star of the online right during the 2020 campaign, garnering over 400,000 followers on TikTok and 125,000 on Twitter with his sassy, contrarian rants.

Among his first viral hits was a harangue against Joe Biden over the “you ain’t black” gaffe, which Christian marked with the hashtag #JoeBidenIsARacist.

By September he had inhabited all of the trolly bad faith attacks that were popular in pro-Trump internet circles but which you likely would have had no familiarity with if you weren’t an extremely online MAGA.

For instance, Christian crams all of the following conspiracies into one 35 second clip: “Jim Crow” Joe Biden is a “drug addict” because he is “refusing a drug test,” he was demanding breaks every 30 minutes to get his diaper changed or sniff a child backstage, and that his press secretary was talking in his ear during debates. He goes on to call Biden a dementia patient, an elderly patient (?), and an unstable man. Which is a little weird since (a) Joe Biden has never copped to playing Russian Roulette or putting a gun to his wife’s head and (b) presumably the Walkers would tell you that being mentally unstable should not be disqualifying for high office.

As the campaign wore on Christian dedicated his feed to insane anti-Biden rants, condemning Black Lives Matter, and insisting that marginalized communities should stop complaining and be more positive about their opportunities. Like he was. During this time he honed his messaging, became ensconced in the MAGA web, and saw his online follower count skyrocket. As Christian’s commitment to the bit solidified, so did his dad’s ability to communicate in TheDonaldeeze.

Like many of their compatriots, the Walkers were undeterred by Trump’s loss.

On November 21, Herschel claimed that some of our elected officials knew about the fantastical “Dominion fraud” and that, as a result, they might end up in jail. The next day Herschel sent two tweets about his faith in Sidney Powell, saying that doubters “will be shocked” when Powell “lays the SMACKDOWN.”

Later that day he announced that he was moving over to the greener pastures of Parler, @HerschelWalker34.

Oops.

In December the Walkers visited with Maria Bartiromo about the state of affairs. Herschel lamented that his son’s first time voting had been tainted by (imaginary) voter fraud and demanded that people go to jail for . . . whatever. He went on to say that punishing the “bad players” who committed the fraud was the “only way you can make this country free.” He then ranted about how Trump needs to stay in power to punish the people who “have done the bad things.”

I think this president is going to bring law and order back to this country that’s the way we can get back to the country we used to be, the United States of America that believes in law and order and you got to send people to jail that have done the bad things. And I hate to say it, I don’t care where you’re from, whether you’re in Washington or whether you’re from the smallest town in the United States of America. If you’ve done something wrong, you need to go to jail and just know you’re going to get a knock at your door and I think that’s the only way you can solve this.

In the middle of Herschel demanding that the defeated president stay in power against the will of the people and jail his political enemies, Bartiromo interjected to compliment Christian on his Instagram posts raising awareness about the upcoming January 6 election certification. Christian and Bartiromo then agree that the election was “far from over.” (Reminder: At the time of this interview the election had been over for six weeks.)

Herschel and Christian continued to bang the drum about fraud all the way up through Insurrection Day. In one of the many…many…tweets Christian sent about election fraud in January, he declared that to get a fair vote in Georgia, someone should “throw Stacey Abrams a bucket of Popeyes fried chicken to distract her.”

On January 4, Herschel praised Lin Wood and said “America needs a total cleansing only Donald Trump can do with the help of TRUE PATRIOTS…Whatever it takes to get the job done.” Two days later when those true patriots went to the Capitol to get the job done, Herschel tweeted that they were “trojan horses.” Then he went dark on the platform for a month.

Sitting in sunny California, Christian was more clear-eyed about the patriots that he and his father had helped inspire.

https://twitter.com/ChristianWalk1r/status/1346894490536189959?s=20

Expect more of this?

Alrighty then.

There’s more at the link… oy vey.

Apparently, the Georgia MAGAs are over the moon at the prospect of Walker entering the race for either Senator or Governor and they seem to believe his winning the election is a slam dunk since he’s Black, a Trumper and a former football star which they think covers all the bases. And maybe it does. I honestly feel like I don’t know anything anymore.

He said it, I didn’t:

Lol. He’s lying, ofcourse. Many of the changes were approved by Republican state legislatures and he lost anyway.

But it’s clear they intend to push the idea that state legislatures should decide presidential elections.They are pretending that there was something unusual about State Supreme Courts, Secretaries of State or local elections officials handling the administration of the election and that the changes they made to accommodate the pandemic were illegal — and therefore he “won big.” It’s a fatuous excuse for his defeat but what would you expect.

But underlying all that folderol about election rules, which they certainly would like to invest in partisan politicians who could intervene at the last moment to tilt an election their way, there is a very basic attempt to destroy our democracy. Check out this little shot across the bow from Arizona:

Rep. Shawnna Bolick, R-Phoenix, has proposed letting the Legislature void the results of a presidential election if it chooses.

House Bill 2720 would allow the House, by a majority vote, to revoke the secretary of state’s certification of presidential electors chosen by Arizona voters to cast the state’s electoral college votes.

After the bill was proposed, Secretary of State Katie Hobbs questioned why the Legislature doesn’t get rid of the presidential election altogether, contending that’s essentially what Bolick’s bill would do.Your stories live here.Fuel your hometown passion and plug into the stories that define it.

Bolick, who chairs the House Ways and Means Committee, defended the bill on Friday as it attracted national attention.

“This bill would give the Arizona Legislature back the power it delegated to certify the electors. It is a good, democratic check and balance,” she said in a statement.

This is a live issue on the right. And they are working it.

Oh look. Just a couple of tourists armed with bear spray having a little recreation in the nation’s capitol. No big deal:

Federal authorities have arrested and charged two men with assaulting U.S. Capitol Police officer Brian D. Sicknick with bear spray during the Jan. 6 Capitol riot but have not determined whether the exposure caused his death.

Julian Elie Khater, 32, of Pennsylvania and George Pierre Tanios, 39 of Morgantown, W.Va., were arrested Sunday and are expected to appear in federal court Monday.

“Give me that bear s—,” Khater allegedly said to Tanios on video recorded at the Lower West Terrace of the Capitol at 2:14 p.m., where Sicknick and other officers were standing guard behind metal bicycle racks, arrest papers say.

About nine minutes later, after Khater said he had been hit with bear spray, Khater is seen on video discharging a canister into the face of Sicknick and two other officers, arrest papers allege.

Khater and Tanios are charged with nine counts including assaulting three officers with a deadly weapon — Sicknick, another U.S. Capitol Police officer identified as C. Edwards, and a D.C. police officer identified as B. Chapman. They are also charged with civil disorder and obstruction of a congressional proceeding. The charges are punishable by up to 20 years in prison.

Remember. These people were attempting to trespass into the US Capitol to disrupt the certification of the presidential election. They could have stood outside and screamed “lock them up!” and waved placards. But they charged the police, fought with them, broke windows and doors and sacked the building, hunting down the legislators.

If this was supposed to just be a peaceful protest that got out of hand, why in the world were they armed with bear spray?

This New York Times deep dive into the Proud Boys and the cops’ response to them is very enlightening. They’ve being taken seriously now, but the authorities knew all about them in the past and did nothing. Why? No surprise here — because they sympathized with them:

A protester was burning an American flag outside the 2016 Republican convention in Cleveland when Joseph Biggs rushed to attack. Jumping a police line, he ripped the man’s shirt off and “started pounding,” he boasted that night in an online video.

But the local police charged the flag burner with assaulting Mr. Biggs. The city later paid $225,000 to settle accusations that the police had falsified their reports out of sympathy with Mr. Biggs, who went on to become a leader of the far-right Proud Boys.

Two years later, in Portland, Ore., something similar occurred. A Proud Boy named Ethan Nordean was caught on video pushing his way through a crowd of counterprotesters, punching one of them, then slamming him to the ground, unconscious. Once again, the police charged only the other man in the skirmish, accusing him of swinging a baton at Mr. Nordean.

Now, Mr. Biggs, 37, and Mr. Nordean, 30, are major targets in a federal investigation that prosecutors on Thursday said could be “one of the largest in American history.” Theyface some of the most serious charges stemming from the attack on the U.S. Capitol in January: leading a mob of about 100 Proud Boys in a coordinated plan to disrupt the certification of President Donald J. Trump’s electoral defeat.

But an examination of the two men’s histories shows that local and federal law enforcement agencies passed up several opportunities to take actionagainst them and their fellow Proud Boys long before they breached the Capitol.

[…]

Local police officers have appeared at times to side with the Proud Boys, especially when they have squared off against leftists openly critical of law enforcement. Some local officials have complained that without guidance from federal agencies, their police departments were ill equipped to understand the dangers of a national movement like the group.

“It has largely been left to the locals to sort things out for themselves,” said Mitchell Silber, the former director of intelligence analysis at the New York Police Department.

To pre-empt violence by other far-right groups, federal authorities have often used a tactic known as the “knock and talk.” Agents call or confront group members to warn them away from demonstrations, sometimes reviving past criminal offenses as leverage.

Christopher Wray, the F.B.I. director, told a Senate committee this month that agents had done that in the run-up to a pro-Trump rally in Washington on Jan. 6 that preceded the Capitol assault. They contacted “a handful” of people already under criminal inquiry to discourage attendance, he said.

Enrique Tarrio, the chairman of the Proud Boys, said that federal agents had called or visited him on eight or so occasions before rallies in recent years. But it was never to pressure him to stay away.

Instead, he said in an interview, the agents asked for march routes and other plans in order to separate the Proud Boys from counterprotesters. Other times, he said, agents warned that they had picked up potential threats from the left against him or his associates.

But before the Jan. 6 event, no one contacted the leaders of the Proud Boys, Mr. Tarrio said, even though their gatherings at previous Trump rallies in Washington had been marred by serious violence.

“They did not reach out to us,” he said.

In summer 2017, neo-Nazis, Klansmen and other white supremacists gathered in Charlottesville, Va., to announce their resurgence at the “Unite the Right” rally. Its organizer, Jason Kessler, was a member of the Proud Boys.

The group had been founded a year earlier by Gavin McInnes, now 50, the co-creator of the media outlet Vice. (The company has long since severed all ties.) He was a Canadian turned New Yorker with a record of statements attacking feminists and Muslims, and he often expressed a half-ironic appetite for mayhem. “Can you call for violence generally?” he once asked in an online video. “’Cause I am.”

The Proud Boys had been volunteering as body guards for right-wing firebrands like Ann Coulter and Milo Yiannopoulos and frequently clashed with left-wing crowds, especially at college campuses. Proud Boys “free speech” rallies in bastions of the left like Seattle, Portland or Berkeley, Calif., routinely ended in street fights.

Yet Mr. McInnes shunned the Unite the Right gathering, saying in an online video: “Disavow, disavow, disavow.” By his account, the Proud Boys were not white supremacists but merely “Western chauvinists.” That stance helped the Proud Boys evade scrutiny from federal law enforcement.

The rally turned violent — a participant drove his car into a crowd of counterprotesters, killing one and injuring more than a dozen — setting off a broad repudiation of the groups that attended.

Despite Mr. McInnes’s cautions, several prominent Proud Boys attended, including Mr. Tarrio, the current chairman, who was photographed blowing kisses to a crowd of counterprotesters. But members cite his role to argue that the Proud Boys are not racially exclusive: Mr. Tarrio’s background is Afro-Cuban, making him one of the rare nonwhite faces in the group.

The group, whose total membership is unknown but believed to be in the thousands, has never articulated a specific ideology or dogma. Its rallies, though, feature hyper-nationalist chants about immigration, Islam and Mr. Trump. Its members have lionized Augusto Pinochet, the Chilean dictator, and their events often appear to be thinly disguised pretexts to bait opponents into confrontations.

Indeed, the Proud Boys have made little effort to hide violent intentions. In fall 2018, for example, members of a New England chapter posted notes on the online service Venmo as they paid their monthly dues and transportation costs to an October “Resist Marxism” rally in Providence, R.I.

The event would quickly degenerate into brawls, just what some of the Proud Boys had anticipated.

“October blood money and bus,” one wrote with his payment.

“Right wing atrocities,” wrote another.

“Helicopter fuel. Those filthy commies are not going to push themselves out of helicopters,” quipped a third, alluding to Pinochet’s practice of executing dissidents by dropping them from the air.

Your average street brawler is someone who evokes Pinochet’s tactics. Right.

While Bill Barr was wringing his hands over Antifa in Portland throwing paintballs at a courthouse, these guys were flying all over the country being helpfully guided by the local police and the FBI.

The Proud Boys have been closely affiliated for years with Roger Stone, Donald Trump’s confidant who he pardoned at the end of his term. Stone was hanging with the Proud Boys on the day of the Insurrection. There is one degree of separation between these terrorists and the former President of the United States. And I’m not convinced there’s any separation at all.

Emptywheel has been closely following this story for months now and is worth reading. Here’s her latest on this subject.

Ron Johnson is just letting it all out:

Blatant racism from @RonJohnsonWI here. He says he wasn’t worried on 1/6 because the majority-white insurrectionists who stormed the Capitol “love this country,” but says if they were Black Lives Matter protestors he would’ve been concerned for his safety. #WISen pic.twitter.com/V3gm4cLw8v

— American Bridge 21st Century (@American_Bridge) March 12, 2021

This is the previously unspoken subtext to law enforcement’s inexcusable lack of preparedness on 1/6. Maybe the media will finally address that now? I’m sick of screaming into the void. https://t.co/9uYuk1dspC https://t.co/y4bsnSXq4Q

— Dan Froomkin (PressWatchers.org) (@froomkin) March 13, 2021

Froomkin makes the point that the Capitol police were, in fact, warned explicitly days before. (This is not the Norfolk FBI warning of the 5th — this came in on the 3rd.) Here’s the memo:

Due to the tense political environment following the 2020 election, the threat of disruptive actions or violence cannot be ruled out. Supporters of the current president see January 6, 2021, as the last opportunity to overturn the results of the presidential election. This sense of desperation and disappointment may lead to more of an incentive to become violent. Unlike previous post-election protests, the targets of the pro-Trump supporters are not necessarily the counter-protesters as they were previously, but rather Congress itself is the target on the 6th.

As outlined above, there has been a worrisome call for protesters to come to these events armed and there is the possibility that protesters may be inclined to become violent. Further, unlike the events on November 14, 2020, and December 12, 2020, there are several more protests scheduled on January 6, 2021, and the majority of them will be on Capitol grounds.

The two protests expected to be the largest of the day – the Women for American First protest on the Ellipse and the Stop the Steal protest in Areas 8 and 9 —  may draw thousands of participants and both have been promoted by President Trump himself. The Stop the Steal protest in particular does not have a permit, but several high profile speakers, including Members of Congress are expected to speak at the event. This combined with Stop the Steal’s propensity to attract white supremacists, militia members, and others who actively promote violence, may lead to significantly dangerous situations for law enforcement and the general public alike.

Froomkin writes:

The point is that clearly something else was going on in [then chief of the Capitol Police] Sund’s head to reduce his sense of alarm. And if you think about it for just an instant, you know exactly what it was.

As Rep. Cori Bush – a veteran of many Black Lives Matter protests – put it on MSNBC the very evening of the insurrection: “Had it been people who look like me, had it been the same amount of people, but had they been Black and brown, we wouldn’t have made it up those steps… we would have been shot, we would have been tear gassed.”

The reporting on this element of the story – why Sund and the House and Senate sergeants-at-arms, also older white males, weren’t particularly alarmed by the MAGA horde – has been terrible. Nearly nonexistent.

The one exception has been an article by Joaquin Sapien and Joshua Kaplan for ProPublica, based on interviews with 19 current and former U.S. Capitol Police officers. They reported:

The interviews…  revealed officers’ concerns about disparities in the way the force prepared for Black Lives Matter demonstrations versus the pro-Trump protests on Jan. 6. Officers said the Capitol Police force usually plans intensively for protests, even if they are deemed unlikely to grow violent. Officers said they spent weeks working 12- or 16-hour days, poised to fight off a riot, after George Floyd was killed by Minneapolis police — even though intelligence suggested there was not much danger from protesters.

“We had intel that nothing was going to happen — literally nothing,” said one former official with direct knowledge of planning for the Black Lives Matter demonstrations. “The response was, ‘We don’t trust the intel.’”

By contrast, for much of the force, Jan. 6 began like any other day.

“We normally have pretty good information regarding where these people are and how far they are from the Capitol,” said Keith McFaden, a former Capitol Police officer and union leader who retired from the force following the riot. “We heard nothing that day.”

But nobody at the Senate hearing even mentioned the issue of race. Not once.

Nobody asked Sund to compare and contrast his preparedness for Jan. 6 with his preparedness for Black Lives Matter protests that weren’t even nearby. Nobody asked why Sund didn’t give front-line officers tear gas. Nobody asked Sund or the two sergeants-at-arms if the white privilege they shared with the mob had made it seem unthreatening to them, unlike the “other”.

Indeed, the only mention of possible complicity came when Trumpist Sen. Josh Hawley lashed out at House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s choice of retired Lt. General Russel Honoré to lead a review of Capitol security. A day after the ransacking of the Capitol, Honoré told a TV station what a lot of people were thinking: “We knew they were coming; everybody knew they were coming,” he said. “I’ve just never seen so much incompetence, so they’re either that stupid, or ignorant or complicit. I think they were complicit.”

BuzzFeed’s Sarah Mimms tweeted:

Hawley ended by asking each of them, “Were you complicit in the attacks on Jan. 6?” They, obviously, each say no. Sund is offended. Hawley: “Of course none of you were.” So that takes care of that.

Reporters from alternative media expressed some skepticism about the hearing and the senator’s questions. Daily Beast reporter Spencer Ackerman noted:

https://twitter.com/attackerman/status/1364253141328408578?s=20

HuffPost reporter Igor Bobcic tweeted:

It’s worth noting no senator has brought up yet in this hearing fact that some Capitol Police officers are under investigation for their roles aiding rioters on Jan 6

And veteran military reporter Sig Christensen complained:

The hearings are going just as I thought they would. Before long, the principal players in this saga will have disinfected the crime scene and declared themselves blameless, and the competing narratives out there will so muddy the waters that no one will know what to believe.

But the mainstream media coverage was awful.

The lack of intelligent, appropriately skeptical reporting on the Capitol Police’s failure of preparedness has been absolutely shocking from the beginning. It was shocking to me on Jan. 13. It’s still shocking six weeks later.

And now, reporters, like the senators, are focusing on that one, one-source FBI report — and on Sund’s excuse that he didn’t have specific intelligence of a coordinated attack. […]

The AP reported:

Faulty intelligence was to blame for the outmanned Capitol defenders’ failure to anticipate the violent mob that invaded the iconic building and halted certification of the presidential election on Jan. 6, the officials who were in charge of security declared Tuesday in their first public testimony on the insurrection.

The Washington Post reported:

An FBI warning of potential violence reached the U.S. Capitol Police on the eve of the Jan. 6 attack, but top leaders testified during a Senate hearing Tuesday that they did not see it.

But everyone paying attention at the time realized the Capitol was going to be the target on Jan. 6. And while in retrospect it all seems inevitable, this momentous event in our history could very likely have been nipped in the bud by better preparation.

Many members of the Capitol police, including the leadership, no doubt felt a sort of kinship with the Trump “protesters.” He certainly had the support of many police around the country. They thought these were their people. It turned out that they were violent, destructive, thugs. Imagine that.

How much of this sort of thing went on all over the government?

Two whistleblowers assert that a Justice Department official improperly injected politics into the hiring process during his waning days in the Trump administration, according to a new filing obtained by NPR.

The whistleblowers accuse Jeffrey Bossert Clark of conducting a “sham” process and elevating a person who volunteered to defend a controversial Trump policy on abortion access, even though the person had far less experience than other finalists for the job in the Civil Division, they said in a Wednesday letter to House and Senate lawmakers and the Justice Department’s inspector general. Clark was then the acting assistant attorney general in charge of the department’s Civil Division.

Clark drew nationwide attention this year after The New York Times reported he had discussed a way to unseat the acting attorney general, take the job for himself and advance then-President Donald Trump’s efforts to overturn Georgia’s election results before the congressional certification of electoral votes in January.

The scandal figured in Trump’s second impeachment trial — and it renewed concerns about partisan political influence on Justice Department operations.Article continues after sponsor message

The whistleblowers said that Clark’s participation in the hiring process for an assistant director of the Civil Division was unusual and that he engaged in “perfunctory” 15-minute interviews with two more highly qualified finalists for the post. Their letter said Clark had “used a timer” in the meetings and was not “particularly engaged.”

Clark announced his decision two days before he left the Justice Department in January. Two other officials in the Civil Division said they did not believe the hiring decision was motivated by politics, the letter said. But the whistleblowers disagreed.

“What set the successful appointee apart from the other candidates was that the appointee — unlike the others — had volunteered and was part of the DOJ litigation team defending a controversial Trump administration policy,” according to their letter. That policy barred pregnant, unaccompanied minors in federal immigration custody from obtaining abortions. A court later determined the policy was unconstitutional.

Of course.

It was clear that Clark is an extremist the minute it became known that he willingly intervenes on Trump’s behalf even beyond where Bill Barr was willing to go. It makes perfect sense that he would plant some right wing ideologues in the department before he left. And they probably aren’t the only ones.

This is a particularly acute problem for the DOJ but I suspect it happened at other agencies as well, like the Pentagon, HHS and Department of Energy. I think this sort of thing happened in the past but the Trump people are dangerous saboteurs. Each of the new cabinet members must do a full audit of these departments.

Susan Glasser spoke with Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, General Mark Milley:

Donald Trump’s image was flickering on the oversized TV screen in the private cabin of the Air Force jet that was flying General Mark Milley, Trump’s handpicked chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, back to Washington, after a round of meetings in Colorado. Just the day before, Trump had told Steve Hilton, of Fox News, that he had been so worried about the prospect of violence in Washington on January 6th that he had ordered the military to deploy ten thousand troops there, only to be rebuffed by “the people at the Capitol.”

Even as Trump said it, this new excuse from the former President who had incited a mob to march on the Capitol seemed flagrantly untrue. Not only were there no National Guard troops—none at all, never mind ten thousand—ordered to defend Congress but, once it was besieged by the pro-Trump crowd, Trump himself had done nothing to stop the rioters in their vain, and ultimately deadly, attempt to block the congressional certification of Joe Biden’s victory. Throughout his impeachment for his role in the insurrection, Trump and his lawyers had never mentioned this supposed order. Why would Trump and his former advisers—such as the ex-White House chief of staff Mark Meadows and the ex-White House press secretary Kayleigh McEneany—start bragging about it now, seven weeks later?

When I asked Milley about what Trump had said, his reply was clear. “As the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, if there was an order for ten thousand National Guardsmen, I would like to believe I would know that,” he said. “I know that was never transmitted to me by anyone—the President, the Secretary of Defense, or anyone else—for the 6th of January.”

[…]

Milley told me and two other reporters travelling with him this week that he was shocked at what the attack had revealed. “For me, January 6th clearly and unambiguously exposed a domestic extremist threat that I didn’t realize the size, scale, and scope of,” he said. “People are entitled to believe what they want,” he said, “but you can’t act out on it. And you can’t go smash windows at the Capitol. You can’t break into buildings. You can’t put bear spray into a police officer’s face. You can’t bash him with a stick. You can’t commit violence or other acts.” He warned that such crimes undermine “the very essence of what this Republic is all about.”

Milley’s comments were his first about the storming of the Capitol, and much was made this week of his statement that the National Guard had acted with “sprint speed” deploying troops to Capitol Hill once the order was given—a turnaround time of fewer than three hours, which, according to Milley, is as fast as the military’s most élite commandos. “For the Pentagon, that’s super fast,” he said. (The Pentagon’s time line of the day shows that Milley was present at the meeting in which the acting Defense Secretary, Christopher Miller, authorized the emergency deployment of the D.C. National Guard, at 3 p.m. Milley was not involved in a still-disputed back-and-forth that led General William Walker, the D.C. Guard’s commander, to testify this week that he was not given a final approval to deploy until after 5 p.m. on that awful day.)

The sad truth, though, as the conversation with Milley makes clear, is that, as we wait for investigators to definitively establish what the Pentagon did or did not do on the afternoon of January 6th, the troops controlled by America’s civilian leaders were not ready in advance—a state of affairs that could have allowed them to actually stop the storming of the Capitol.

And, for that, it’s hard not to blame Trump and his monthslong toxic attack on the institutions of democracy, including the sanctity of a principle that Milley holds dear: an independent, “apolitical military,” with officers who swear an oath to the Constitution, not to a man. The oath, not incidentally, also pledges officers to combat enemies “foreign and domestic,” and it’s the latter problem, I fear, that poses a challenge for which the U.S military—built to reckon with Vladimir Putin but not Donald Trump—is ill prepared.

We really don’t want them to be involved in any of that. The fact that we’re even talking about it is disturbing.

The real question, for Milley or any of the others at the Pentagon, is whether or not they were doing the bidding of the Commander in Chief during the insurrection. Dana Milbank’s column yesterday laid out the inquiry:

The man ultimately responsible for the delay, Christopher Miller, had been a White House aide before Donald Trump installed him as acting defense secretary in November, as the president began his attempt to overturn his election defeat. Miller did Trump’s political bidding at another point during his 10-week tenure, forcing the National Security Agency to install a Republican political operative as chief counsel.

Also involved in the Pentagon delay was Lt. Gen. Charles Flynn, brother of disgraced former Trump adviser Michael Flynn, convicted (and pardoned) for lying to the FBI. Michael Flynn had suggested Trump declare martial law, and he helped to rile Trump supporters in Washington the day before the Capitol attack. The Pentagon had falsely denied to Post journalists that Charles Flynn was involved in the pivotal call on Jan. 6.AD

Representing the Pentagon on Wednesday fell to Robert Salesses, who haplessly tried to explain the delay. An hour and six minutes of the holdup was because then-Army Secretary Ryan McCarthy “was asking a lot of questions” about the mission. Another piece of the delay: The 36 minutes between when the Pentagon claims Miller authorized the action and when the D.C. Guard was informed of the decision. “That’s an issue,” Salesses allowed.

Curiously, the Pentagon claims Miller’s authorization came at 4:32 — 15 minutes after Trump told his “very special” insurrectionists to “go home in peace.” Was Miller waiting for Trump’s blessing before defending the Capitol?

The Pentagon’s 199-minute delay looks worse in light of a Jan. 4 memo Miller issued saying that without his “personal authorization” the D.C. Guard couldn’t “be issued weapons, ammunition, bayonets, batons or ballistic protection equipment such as helmets and body armor.”

The Army secretary added more restrictions the next day, saying in a memo that he would “withhold authority” for the D.C. Guard to deploy a “quick reaction force” and that he would “require a concept of operation” before allowing a quick reaction force to react. McCarthy even blocked the D.C. Guard in advance from redeploying to the Capitol guardsmen assigned to help the D.C. police elsewhere in Washington.

Without such restrictions, Walker, the D.C. Guard commander, could have dispatched nearly 200 guardsmen soon after the Capitol Police mayday call. “That number could have made a difference,” Walker testified.

Sen. Rob Portman, an Ohio Republican, was incredulous. “There are three unarmed national guardsmen who are helping with traffic control … and they were not permitted to move a block away without getting permission from the secretary of the Army?”AD

“That’s correct,” Walker replied.

Miller “required the personal approval of the secretary of defense for the National Guard to be issued riot gear?” Portman asked.

“That’s correct,” Walker replied. “Normally for a safety and force-protection matter, a commander would be able to authorize his guardsmen to protect themselves.”

But this was not normal. The Pentagon claims the restrictions were in response to criticism of the heavy-handed deployment of the National Guard in Washington during racial justice protests last summer. Maybe so. But Walker testified that when the police chiefs “passionately pleaded” for the Guard’s help on Jan. 6, senior Army officials on the call said it wouldn’t be “a good optic.” They thought “it could incite the crowd” and advised against it.

During this moment of crisis — an attempted coup in the Capitol — the defense secretary and the Army secretary were “not available,” Walker testified.

The nation deserves to know why.

I don’t know the status of the Commission that Speaker Pelosi has in mind. The last I heard they were squabbling over how many Democrats and Republicans would be on it and it seemed obvious that since most Republicans are Trump acolytes there would be little point since they would sabotage the proceeding.

This report about the decline of democracy around the world is depressing. Something is definitely happening and it isn’t just here.

But what’s happening here is very bad.

The eclipse of US leadership:

The final weeks of the Trump presidency featured unprecedented attacks on one of the world’s most visible and influential democracies. After four years of condoning and indeed pardoning official malfeasance, ducking accountability for his own transgressions, and encouraging racist and right-wing extremists, the outgoing president openly strove to illegally overturn his loss at the polls, culminating in his incitement of an armed mob to disrupt Congress’s certification of the results. Trump’s actions went unchecked by most lawmakers from his own party, with a stunning silence that undermined basic democratic tenets. Only a serious and sustained reform effort can repair the damage done during the Trump era to the perception and reality of basic rights and freedoms in the United States.

The year leading up to the assault on the Capitol was fraught with other episodes that threw the country into the global spotlight in a new way. The politically distorted health recommendations, partisan infighting, shockingly high and racially disparate coronavirus death rates, and police violence against protesters advocating for racial justice over the summer all underscored the United States’ systemic dysfunctions and made American democracy appear fundamentally unstable. Even before 2020, Trump had presided over an accelerating decline in US freedom scores, driven in part by corruption and conflicts of interest in the administration, resistance to transparency efforts, and harsh and haphazard policies on immigration and asylum that made the country an outlier among its Group of Seven peers.

But President Trump’s attempt to overturn the will of the American voters was arguably the most destructive act of his time in office. His drumbeat of claims—without evidence—that the electoral system was ridden by fraud sowed doubt among a significant portion of the population, despite what election security officials eventually praised as the most secure vote in US history. Nationally elected officials from his party backed these claims, striking at the foundations of democracy and threatening the orderly transfer of power.

Though battered, many US institutions held strong during and after the election process. Lawsuits challenging the result in pivotal states were each thrown out in turn by independent courts. Judges appointed by presidents from both parties ruled impartially, including the three Supreme Court justices Trump himself had nominated, upholding the rule of law and confirming that there were no serious irregularities in the voting or counting processes. A diverse set of media outlets broadly confirmed the outcome of the election, and civil society groups investigated the fraud claims and provided evidence of a credible vote. Some Republicans spoke eloquently and forcefully in support of democratic principles, before and after the storming of the Capitol. Yet it may take years to appreciate and address the effects of the experience on Americans’ ability to come together and collectively uphold a common set of civic values.

The exposure of US democracy’s vulnerabilities has grave implications for the cause of global freedom. Rulers and propagandists in authoritarian states have always pointed to America’s domestic flaws to deflect attention from their own abuses, but the events of the past year will give them ample new fodder for this tactic, and the evidence they cite will remain in the world’s collective memory for a long time to come. After the Capitol riot, a spokesperson from the Russian foreign ministry stated, “The events in Washington show that the US electoral process is archaic, does not meet modern standards, and is prone to violations.” Zimbabwe’s president said the incident “showed that the US has no moral right to punish another nation under the guise of upholding democracy.”

For most of the past 75 years, despite many mistakes, the United States has aspired to a foreign policy based on democratic principles and support for human rights. When adhered to, these guiding lights have enabled the United States to act as a leader on the global stage, pressuring offenders to reform, encouraging activists to continue their fight, and rallying partners to act in concert. After four years of neglect, contradiction, or outright abandonment under Trump, President Biden has indicated that his administration will return to that tradition. But to rebuild credibility in such an endeavor and garner the domestic support necessary to sustain it, the United States needs to improve its own democracy. It must strengthen institutions enough to survive another assault, protect the electoral system from foreign and domestic interference, address the structural roots of extremism and polarization, and uphold the rights and freedoms of all people, not just a privileged few.

Everyone benefits when the United States serves as a positive model, and the country itself reaps ample returns from a more democratic world. Such a world generates more trade and fairer markets for US goods and services, as well as more reliable allies for collective defense. A global environment where freedom flourishes is more friendly, stable, and secure, with fewer military conflicts and less displacement of refugees and asylum seekers. It also serves as an effective check against authoritarian actors who are only too happy to fill the void.

I think American credibility has been permanently damaged. After all, if we could elect a monster like Trump once, why would anyone think we wouldn’t do it again? Particularly since the Republicans are still pushing the Big Lie and tens of millions of Americans believe it. We are simply not a stable country anymore. The rub, of course, is that the US is still immensely wealthy and armed to the teeth. The world can be forgiven for being leery of us at this point. I think a lot of Americans are leery of ourselves.