340 search results for "certification"

Wow:

In today’s Republican Party, the path to power is to build up a lie in order to overturn democracy. At least that is what Senator Josh Hawley was telling us when he offered a clenched-fist salute to the pro-Trump mob before it ransacked the Capitol, and it is the same message he delivered on the floor of the Senate in the aftermath of the attack, when he doubled down on the lies about electoral fraud that incited the insurrection in the first place…

In multiple speeches, an interview and a widely shared article for Christianity Today, Mr. Hawley has explained that the blame for society’s ills traces all the way back to Pelagius — a British-born monk who lived 17 centuries ago. In a 2019 commencement address at The King’s College, a small conservative Christian college devoted to “a biblical worldview,” Mr. Hawley denounced Pelagius for teaching that human beings have the freedom to choose how they live their lives and that grace comes to those who do good things, as opposed to those who believe the right doctrines.

The only thing worse than a right winger who’s anti-intellectual is a right winger who pretends to be an intellectual. He doesn’t know what the fuck he’s talking about.

The most eloquent summary of the Pelagian vision, Mr. Hawley went on to say, can be found in the Supreme Court’s 1992 opinion in Planned Parenthood v. Casey. Mr. Hawley specifically cited Justice Anthony Kennedy’s words reprovingly: “At the heart of liberty,” Kennedy wrote, “is the right to define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life.” The fifth century church fathers were right to condemn this terrifying variety of heresy, Mr. Hawley argued: “Replacing it and repairing the harm it has caused is one of the challenges of our day.”

…In other words, Mr. Hawley’s idea of freedom is the freedom to conform to what he and his preferred religious authorities know to be right. Mr. Hawley is not shy about making the point explicit. In a 2017 speech to the American Renewal Project, he declared — paraphrasing the Dutch Reformed theologian and onetime prime minister Abraham Kuyper — “There is not one square inch of all creation over which Jesus Christ is not Lord.” Mr. Kuyper is perhaps best known for his claim that Christianity has sole legitimate authority over all aspects of human life.

“We are called to take that message into every sphere of life that we touch, including the political realm,” Mr. Hawley said. “That is our charge. To take the Lordship of Christ, that message, into the public realm, and to seek the obedience of the nations. Of our nation!”…

The line of thought here is starkly binary and nihilistic. It says that human existence in an inevitably pluralistic, modern society committed to equality is inherently worthless. It comes with the idea that a right-minded elite of religiously pure individuals should aim to capture the levers of government, then use that power to rescue society from eternal darkness and reshape it in accord with a divinely-approved view of righteousness.

…When he was still attorney general, William Barr articulated this conclusion in a speech at the University of Notre Dame Law School, where he blamed “the growing ascendancy of secularism” for amplifying “virtually every measure of social pathology,” and maintained that “free government was only suitable and sustainable for a religious people.”

In any other administration, that outrageously un-American speech would have led to scandal and Barr’s resignation.

Christian nationalists’ acceptance of President Trump’s spectacular turpitude these past four years was a good measure of just how dire they think our situation is. Even a corrupt sociopath was better, in their eyes, than the horrifying freedom that religious moderates and liberals, along with the many Americans who don’t happen to be religious, offer the world.

…At a rally in Washington on Jan. 5, on the eve of Electoral College certification, the right-wing pastor Greg Locke said that God is raising up “an army of patriots.” Another pastor, Brian Gibson, put it this way: “The church of the Lord Jesus Christ started America,” and added, “We’re going to take our nation back!”

In the aftermath of the Jan. 6 insurrection, a number of Christian nationalist leaders issued statements condemning violence — on both sides. How very kind of them.

…The brash young senator styles himself not just a deep thinker who ruminates about late-Roman era heretics, but a man of the people, a champion of “the great American middle,” as he wrote in an article for The American Conservative, and a foe of the “ruling elite.” Mr. Hawley has even managed to turn a few progressive heads with his economic populism, including his attacks on tech monopolies.

Yet Mr. Hawley isn’t against elites per se. He is all for an elite, provided that it is a religiously righteous elite. 

Indeed. Hawley’s a Stanford and Yale alum. Which brings into question what the hell is wrong with their admissions departments.

Make no mistake: Mr. Hawley is a symptom, not a cause. He is a product of the same underlying forces that brought us President Trump and the present crisis of American democracy. Unless we find a way to address these forces and the fundamental pathologies that drive them, then next month or next year we will be forced to contend with a new and perhaps more successful version of Mr. Hawley.

Exactly. This is not over. Democracy has not triumphed.

When they said they were “crossing the Rubicon” they may not have known what they were saying and the president certainly didn’t but it was strangely apt anyway. As this NYT op-ed points out, Trump’s cri de guerre, while a clear call to overturn an election and install the loser, also an effort to annul the power of the Congress:

It is tempting to try to run out the clock on the Trump presidency. President Trump has already been impeached once and congressional leaders may assume they still lack the necessary Republican votes to convict and remove him in the Senate. Lawmakers concerned about the possibility for new abuses of power before Jan. 20 have been tempted to settle for urging the president to resign. But more is at stake than what the president might do in the next few days. If Congress declines to impeach and convict the president for his actions on Wednesday, its failure to act will weaken the basic structure of the Constitution.

The key issue is this: One of the three branches of the federal government has just incited an armed attack against another branch. Beyond the threat to a peaceful transition, the incident was a fundamental violation of the separation of powers. Prompted by the chief executive, supporters laid siege to, invaded, and occupied the Capitol building, deploying weapons and subjecting members of both chambers of Congress to intimidation and violence in an effort to produce a particular decision by force.

We have all been taught about “checks and balances” in school. The Constitutional strategy for limiting power requires that officeholders defend the institutions they occupy against what the framers called “encroachments” by the other branches. Usually encroachments are understood metaphorically, and there is time to allow the branches to work out their differences in the back and forth of political negotiation and occasional court battles. The president’s attempted encroachment on the constitutional rights of Congress this past Wednesday was anything but metaphorical.

The president aimed to reverse the decision that Congress was making on a question that the Constitution expressly reserved for the legislature. The specifically anti-congressional animus is most obvious in the fact that the only other elected member of the executive branch, the vice president, was specifically targeted in his role as president of the Senate.

At Wednesday’s rally, Mr. Trump gave some prepared remarks on the so-called evidence of election fraud, but he worried aloud that the crowd would be bored by those details. The more powerful thread running through his speech was an argument that constitutional constraints were forms of weakness, that Vice President Mike Pence and Congress should not be allowed to certify the election, and that it was time to take the gloves off and fight.

After Rudolph Giuliani, the president’s personal lawyer, exclaimed, “Let’s have trial by combat,” and Donald Trump Jr. said of Republican members of Congress who did not support Mr. Trump, “We’re coming for you,” the president took the stage. He praised his son and Mr. Giuliani, and then delivered a speech full of inflammatory implications. He stated: “We will never concede. We will not take it anymore.” He condemned the Republican Party for fighting like “a boxer with his hands behind his back,” urged Mr. Pence in his capacity as presiding officer in Congress, to “come through for us,” said it was up to Congress to refuse to certify the election, and then announced that he would lead the crowd down Pennsylvania Avenue to the Capitol just after the speech. About the possibility that Mr. Pence and Congress would fail to block certification of the election on Wednesday, he said, “We’re just not going to let that happen” and then remarked on the size and devotion of the crowd.

In a way, it was also an attempt to anul the power of the Judicial branch as well since it had ruled against Trump’s election fraud cases 60 times and he refused to accept their decisions.

The separation of powers is one of the foundations of the system. What Trump has done, first with refusing to accept the results of the election then attempting to usurp the power of the Judiciary and the congress, is taking first steps to dictatorship. Unless we find out that Trump has been pretending to be the uneducated dipshit we’ve seen all these years, it’s highly unlikely he has thought this through in any conscious way. But what’s the difference? His actions have led to the same place.

And while it was all just an academic argument until now, his setting loose that mob of thousands of rioters to storm the Capitol while it was in joint session to threaten the congress with physical harm to stop the vote takes it beyond academic. It didn’t work. But it was, without a doubt, an attempted putsch which, if successful, would have ended with Trump as a de facto dictator. After all, it is highly doubtful he would ever agree that had lost an election in the future any more that he admitted it this time.

While life in America has gone on over the past five days — football games are still being played, people are having cookouts, kids are going sledding — much of the country is still in a state of shock over what happened on January 6th in Washington D.C. As more and more of the video footage from that day becomes available, it’s clear that what happened was far more violent and dangerous than we knew. The pictures we saw on television and social media as it was unfolding looked bad, but what has emerged since then shows that something feral, ugly and deadly was afoot in that crowd that day:

I knew this would end badly. I did not think it would end with Trump supporters beating a cop with poles adorned with American flags as they try to enter the U.S. Capitol to execute Mike Pence. https://t.co/GSPAvMqH0S

— Radley Balko (@radleybalko) January 10, 2021

The police officer beaten in that video by a Trump-motivated mob was not Capitol Police Officer Brian Sicknick, who died of wounds from a different incident. It was another officer from the Metropolitan Police Department. That comment by Radley Balko may sound arch, but it isn’t. That is exactly what happened and it’s clear that there were many in the crowd also prepared to commit violence against elected leaders, presumably in order to force the illegal installation of Donald Trump as president on Jan. 20. That is what they came for. It’s what Donald Trump sent them there to do.

Some people on the right have tried to rationalize this by saying that violence that ensued after the George Floyd murder this summer sent the message that the best way to resolve political differences is through violence. This is beyond sophistry. Violent protests have been part of American history since the beginning, starting with the revolution itself. Violent civil unrest has happened in every decade since. The idea that liberals invented it last summer is completely absurd.

But that’s not the point. There is a difference between protests, peaceful and otherwise, which people do all over the world, and an attempt to violently overturn an election. To do that by storming a joint session of Congress, with all the representatives present, as it ceremonially certified an election is beyond anything we’ve ever seen before in this country. In all the protests, riots and uprisings, no one ever took over the U.S. Capitol and marauded through it looking for leaders chanting “we’re coming for you” and threatening to hang them. It was no protest, it was an attempted putsch, a violent overthrow of a democratic government on the basis of a Big Lie that the election was fraudulent.

Plenty of people saw it coming. Many of the ringleaders had planned the violence in plain sight and they were incited by the President of the United States and several of his henchmen. People had been pouring into DC for days, ready to rumble. The day before the riot, they held a rally in which The Big Lie was broadcast over and over:

Listen to this – he's giving away their plans for the next 4 years. https://t.co/ngI3ruYXMw

— Cathy McG (@CathyMcG2) January 6, 2021

And they thought this was gonna end peacefully??? https://t.co/NbEyA2if4h

— Ali 💪🇺🇦❤️ (@BellaCoutureAli) January 7, 2021

Everyone knew the city was filling up with far right extremists yet for reasons that are still unexplained, the authorities were unprepared at best, complicit at worst. Perhaps they believed that this group of Real Americans from around the nation (and in the Congress) were just blowing smoke when they shared their little #1776 hashtags and plotted their “Stop the Steal” insurrection. But anyone who was paying attention knew that they were focused on the Capitol where the certification ceremony would take place. Why it was left so thinly guarded is still a mystery.

We still haven’t had an official briefing from any law enforcement agency on the status of the investigations or analysis of what happened, which is unprecedented. We’ve had nothing from the Capitol Police, the city police, the FBI, the Department of Justice, no one. The worst violent attack on U.S. government property since the plane hit the Pentagon on 9/11 and there has been no communication from the federal government.

What we are left with are accounts from those who were reporting on the event both inside and outside the Capitol and from those who were inside, terrified that they were about to be taken hostage or worse. Perhaps the most heart-rending is this Buzzfeed account from some Black Capitol policemen who had to deal with the grotesque racism of these insurrectionists, (many of them flying “blue lives matter” flags) including being repeatedly called the n-word:

At the end of the night, after the crowds had been dispersed and Congress got back to the business of certifying president-elect Joe Biden’s victory, the veteran officer was overwhelmed with emotion, and broke down in the Rotunda.”I sat down with one of my buddies, another Black guy, and tears just started streaming down my face,” he said. “I said, ‘What the fuck, man? Is this America? What the fuck just happened? I’m so sick and tired of this shit.'”

Soon he was screaming, so that everyone in the Rotunda, including his white colleagues, could hear what he had just gone through.”These are racist-ass terrorists,” he yelled out.

One of the heroes to have emerged from this riot is this man:

This moment in ⁦@igorbobic⁩ stunning footage. In front of the officer, coming up the stairs, is a mass of rioters. The USCP officer glances to his left. Between those two chairs is the entrance to the senate floor. He lured them to his right, away from their targets. pic.twitter.com/knjQQ4GZ0d

— Kristin Wilson (@kristin__wilson) January 10, 2021

Reading these stories from the Black officers and seeing the footage of that lone cop facing the angry mob and luring them away from the Senators who were still being evacuated made me think about the other story of last week, the one that would have been an earthquake of its own, in a good way, if this hideous violence hadn’t happened. I’m speaking, of course, of the wonderful outcome in the two Senate races in Georgia. For the first time in American history, this Southern state voted for a Black man and a Jew for the U.S. Senate.

Considering its fraught racial history — including being the home of the Moore’s Ford lynchings, which the New York Times noted “is considered by many to be the last mass lynching in American history,” and the earlier lynching of Leo Frank, a famous case of anti-semitic violence — this was a singular moment that we didn’t have time to savor and analyze. For all of its politically reactionary, racist violence and conspiracy-mongering, the country is progressing anyway. It usually does, much too slowly and backsliding often, but inexorably nonetheless. In the midst of all this horror, we shouldn’t forget that.

I’m sure there will be hours of commentary and analysis of the Capitol Insurrection and rightly so. This Trump cult has gone further than any group of Americans since the civil war to assault our government institutions and the democratic process. The big question now is if anyone in power will face consequences for what they did, starting with Trump and going all the way down the line. If there is no price to be paid for this you can bet that there will be more political violence from this faction down the road. If there is one thing in the footage that is crystal clear it’s that they’ve tasted blood — and they liked it.

Salon

I think the weekend we’ve all realized that the assault on the capitol was much worse than we originally thought. The footage we saw in real time was scary but it was easy to believe that these people were yahoos and miscreants. It was shocking but we didn’t know just how seriously dangerous it was and how terrified the people inside the building were.

https://youtu.be/PfiS8MsfSF4?t=1140

We’re coming for that bitch. Tell fuckin’ Pelosi we’re coming for her, fuckin traitorous cunt … we’re comin’ for all of you!

BREAKING: Feds arrest Cleveland Meredith for his role in the US Capitol chaos. Investigators allege Meredith texted others that he would be "putting a bullet" in Speaker Nancy Pelosi's head pic.twitter.com/QcaNuIb9Ov

— Scott MacFarlane (@MacFarlaneNews) January 10, 2021

Yikes. As that was happening:

A top adviser to Majority Leader Mitch McConnell stepped out of the ornate chamber for a short break.

Alone in the Capitol’s marble halls, just outside the chamber’s bronze doors, it was suddenly apparent that the citadel of U.S. democracy was falling to the mob incited by President Trump.

A cacophony of screaming, shouting and banging echoed from the floor below. McConnell’s security detail rushed past and into the chamber. The adviser began walking toward the Rotunda and came face to face with a U.S. Capitol Police officer sprinting in the opposite direction. The two made eye contact and the officer forced out a single word: “Run!”

The aide to McConnell (R-Ky.) darted down a side hallway lined with offices. He jiggled one locked doorknob, then another. A co-worker poked his head out of the office of McConnell’s speechwriter. The adviser lunged, pushing him and a colleague back inside.

The screaming and shouting soon seemed right outside. Only then, a text alert from Capitol police blared on every phone in the room: “Due to security threat inside: immediately, move inside your office, take emergency equipment, lock the doors, take shelter.”

Three senior GOP aides piled furniture against the door and tried to move stealthily, worried that the intruders would discover them inside. In waves, the door to the hall heaved as rioters punched and kicked it. The crowd yelled “Stop the steal!” Some chanted menacingly, referring to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi: “Where’s Nancy? Where’s Nancy?”

That article goes on to describe a truly terrifying situation. The incoherent, deluded mob was very worked up and there were some who obviously had plans to do real harm to people in the building, particularly, it appears, Nancy Pelosi and Mike Pence.

https://twitter.com/59dallas/status/1346963199778828290?s=20

Meanwhile, as the insane mob was threatening the lawmakers, the president and his lawyer were pushing from the other side, trying to get the congress to delay the counting:

President Donald Trump and his attorney Rudy Giuliani both mistakenly made calls to Republican Sen. Mike Lee as deadly riots were unfolding at the US Capitol earlier this week, a spokesman for the senator confirmed to CNN — calls that were intended for another GOP senator the White House was frantically trying to convince to delay the counting of Electoral College votes.

Lee’s spokesman said the calls from Trump and his attorney were intended for Sen. Tommy Tuberville, a newly elected Republican from Alabama.

The effort by the White House to get Tuberville to delay certification of the votes provides insight into the President’s thinking and priorities as a mob of his supporters lay siege to the iconic building. As the President worked to convince Tuberville to delay the process, he and other top White House officials did little to check in on Vice President Mike Pence while he and members of his family were inside the breached Capitol, a source close to the vice president told CNN.

Trump first called the personal cell phone of Lee, a Utah Republican, shortly after 2 p.m. ET. At that time the senators had been evacuated from the Senate floor and were in a temporary holding room, as a pro-Trump mob began breaching the Capitol.Lee picked up the phone and Trump identified himself, and it became clear he was looking for Tuberville and had been given the wrong number. Lee, keeping the President on hold, went to find his colleague and handed Tuberville his phone, telling him the President was on the line and had been trying to reach him.

Tuberville spoke with Trump for less than 10 minutes, with the President trying to convince him to make additional objections to the Electoral College vote in a futile effort to block Congress’ certification of President-elect Joe Biden’s win, according to a source familiar with the call.

The call was cut off because senators were asked to move to a secure location.

Evidently, Mitch McConnell, Pelosi and Pence were determined to finish the vote count, thank goodness. They simply could not let this mob and its leader have their way. But they came very close to not having the chance. Those people were so out of control I hesitate to even think what would have happened if they had gotten to the lawmakers. They were out for blood.

They may be wrong about this, but you can’t blame them for thinking it’s possible. What would we think if we saw this in another country?

The supporters of President Donald Trump who stormed the Capitol on Wednesday to stop the ratification of President-elect Joe Biden’s election victory were attempting a violent coup that multiple European security officials said appeared to have at least tacit support from aspects of the US federal agencies responsible for securing the Capitol complex.

Insider spoke with three officials on Thursday morning: a French police official responsible for public security in a key section of central Paris, and two intelligence officials from NATO countries who directly work in counterterrorism and counterintelligence operations involving the US, terrorism, and Russia.

They said the circumstantial evidence available pointed to what would be openly called a coup attempt in any other nation. None were willing to speak on the record because of the dire nature of the subject.

While they did not furnish evidence that federal agency officials facilitated the chaos, Insider is reporting this information because it illustrates the scale and seriousness of Wednesday’s events: America’s international military and security allies are now willing to give serious credence to the idea that Trump deliberately tried to violently overturn an election and that some federal law-enforcement agents — by omission or otherwise — facilitated the attempt.

One NATO source set the stage, using terms more commonly used to describe unrest in developing countries.

“The defeated president gives a speech to a group of supporters where he tells them he was robbed of the election, denounces his own administration’s members and party as traitors, and tells his supporters to storm the building where the voting is being held,” the NATO intelligence official said.

“The supporters, many dressed in military attire and waving revolutionary-style flags, then storm the building where the federal law-enforcement agencies controlled by the current president do not establish a security cordon, and the protesters quickly overwhelm the last line of police.

“The president then makes a public statement to the supporters attacking the Capitol that he loves them but doesn’t really tell them to stop,” the official said. “Today I am briefing my government that we believe with a reasonable level of certainty that Donald Trump attempted a coup that failed when the system did not buckle.

“I can’t believe this happened.”

The French police official said they believed that an investigation would find that someone interfered with the deployment of additional federal law-enforcement officials on the perimeter of the Capitol complex; the official has direct knowledge of the proper procedures for security of the facility.

[…]

The third official, who works in counterintelligence for a NATO member, agreed that the situation could only be seen as a coup attempt, no matter how poorly considered and likely to fail, and said its implications might be too huge to immediately fathom.

“Thank God it didn’t work, because I can’t imagine how hard it would be to sanction the US financial system,” the official said. By sanctions, he means the imposition of the diplomatic, military, and trade blockages that democratic nations usually reserve for dictatorships.

“The broader damage around the world will be extensive in terms of reputation, and that’s why Putin doesn’t mind at all that Trump lost. He’s got to be happy to take his chips and count his winnings, which from the Trump era will be a shockingly quick decline in American prestige and moral high ground.

“Every moment the Americans spend on their own self-inflicted chaos helps China, it helps Putin, and, to a lesser extent, it helps the mini-dictators like [Turkish President Recep Tayyip] Erdogan and [Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor] Orban, who breathe cynicism about politics, human rights, and democracy as their air,” the official said. “They won’t miss Trump; they’ll be glad to see his drama leave so they can enjoy the poisoned political climate.”

That political climate is very, very poisoned. I don’t know how this ends.

Some people did. This twitter thread was from December 20th:

On January 6, armed Trumpist militias will be rallying in DC, at Trump’s orders. It’s highly likely that they’ll try to storm the Capitol after it certifies Joe Biden’s win. I don’t think this has sunk in yet.

These people are angry at the Democrats. They’re angry at the GOP for not suspending democracy. They hate the media, and many consider police to be the enemy even as they fly the “blue lives” flag instead of the Stars and Stripes.

They are convinced that Congress will, somehow, declare Trump the winner on Jan 6. Maybe Pence will just refuse to count the Electoral Votes from states Biden won? Or the Senate will throw those votes out? Or Justice Thomas? Alternatively…

…some think Trump will win because *they* will ensure it. Maybe by forcing Congress to certify him as the winner at gunpoint. Maybe as backup forces to Trump’s supposed military coup.

Pro-Trump forums are very excited about Trump's call for a mass DC protest on the day Congress counts the Electoral College votes. Many see it as the mobilisation call they've been waiting for. pic.twitter.com/KQhK57eoSx

— Arieh Kovler (@ariehkovler) December 19, 2020

When Congress certifies Biden, these people will be shocked. Their worlds will collapse. And it’ll happen while they’re (illegally) armed and gathered in DC. It’s the nitroglycerine of explosive mixtures.

How will January 6 be policed? We’ve already seen that the White House can effectively commandeer the DC police, and construct ad-hoc paramilitary forces out of prison officers and CBP. Will Congress get the protection it needs?

• 

• 

The Capitol Police has 2200 officers, but I’m guessing they mostly aren’t riot trained or SWAT types. The question here is if federal forces will be *allowed* to help them.

To be clear here, I don’t think the 3%ers, Proud Boys, Oathkeepers or boogaloo types are going to seize the Capitol. But some of them are going try. And people will die.

How will US Conservatives react? Well, they made Kyle Rittenhouse into a hero. They ignored the Whitmer kidnap plot, except as a way of calling for more violence against her.

I note that @Robertwaldeck reckons I’m completely wrong here and that DC forces including the Capitol Police, DC police and Nat Guard, which he knows well, will be able to keep things completely under control.

More than a year back, I wondered if Trump would be the first President to be impeached twice. Tonight, members of Congress are seriously considering it.

Will Trump be the first president to be impeached TWICE? Thread: 1/

— Arieh Kovler (@ariehkovler) October 24, 2019

Originally tweeted by Arieh Kovler (@ariehkovler) on December 21, 2020.

Amazingly prescient. Maybe the police agencies thought they were dealing with the kind of “resistance” that happened when Clinton lost. Millions of people wore pink hats and marched peacefully on the capitol. Trump voters are different.

This is the reason twitter and the others suspended Trump’s account. They were seeing more of this focusing on the inauguration. Now everyone’s paying attention.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rep. Adam Schiff (D-N.Y.) warned us a year ago in prosecuting the impeachment of President Donald J. Trump before the U.S. Senate:

No constitution can protect us if right doesn’t matter anymore. And you know you can’t trust this president to do what’s right for this country. You can trust he will do what’s right for Donald Trump. He’ll do it now. He’s done it before. He’ll do it for the next several months. He’ll do it in the election if he’s allowed to.

And Trump did. He continues to. His enablers in Congress, those who voted to allow him to remain in office, enable Trump even now, with few exceptions. Even after a recording from last weekend showed Trump attempting to coerce the chief elections official in Georgia to falsify election results counted thrice and certified.

Although Trump deserves it, with his term expiring on Jan. 20, Democrats have little time or appetitie for attempting to impeach Trump again, even to make a moral statement. But justice demands judgment against Trump and the criminal actions he has taken in violation of his oath of office. If he walks away unpunished except by loss of his office, others will emulate him. Count on it.

“If Trump’s Republican Party isn’t checked,” writes Michele Goldberg, “we could easily devolve into what political scientists call competitive authoritarianism, in which elections still take place but the system is skewed to entrench autocrats.” The U.S. is already well down that road.

The problem with holding Trump to account, Goldberg observes, is “the psychopath’s advantage.” Mens rea makes it tough to prosecute someone insane enough to believe the law does not apoply to him and dumb enough to believe misinformation circulated by “QAnon followers, 8kun posters, and a random Twitter guy.” Practical politics, Goldberg continues, make it doubly difficult to prosecute a president voters have already thrown out of office:

Yet if there is no penalty for Republican cheating, there will be more of it. The structure of our politics — the huge advantages wielded by small states and rural voters — means that Democrats need substantial majorities to wield national power, so they can’t simply ignore the wishes of the electorate. Not so for Republicans, which is why they feel free to openly scheme against the majority.

During impeachment, Republicans who were unwilling to defend the president’s conduct, but also unwilling to penalize him, insisted that if Americans didn’t like his behavior they could vote him out. Americans did, and now Trump’s party is refusing to accept it. It’s evidence that you can’t rely on elections to punish attempts to subvert elections. Only the law can do that, even if it’s inconvenient.

In a 2004 interview with “The Daily Show” host Jon Stewart, former President Bill Clinton explained why Republicans keep deploying the politics of personal destruction:

Clinton: They had a calling operation in South Carolina in the primary in 2010 about how John McCain had a black baby, and they didn’t want the white voters to forget it.

[banter]

Stewart: Do you believe that politics has gotten so dirty … that these kinds of tactics become so prevalent that this is the reason half the country doesn’t vote? Or this is the reason that we don’t get, maybe, the officials that we deserve?
Clinton: No, I think people do it because they think it works.
Stewart: That’s it? Simply a strategy?
Clinton: Absolutely. And as soon as it doesn’t work, they’ll stop doing it.

Except no one has stopped them. Neither Democrats nor a once-watchdog press. Federal prosecution of white-collar criminals is the lowest level on record. Meaning actual criminal behavior by elites in and out of public office goes unpunished as well.

It did not stop with Pres. Richard Nixon; Pres. Gerald Ford pardoned him for Watergate. It did not stop after Iran-Contra; Pres. George H.W. Bush pardoned the high-level players and Pres. Ronald Reagan never faced serious sanction. It did not stop after officials in the George W. Bush administration sanctioned the torture of prisoners, or after Wall Street moguls brought the world economy to its knees peddling fraudulent financial products; Pres. Barack Obama’s administration preferred to “look forward, not back” and neither group faced prosecution.

David Atkins wrote here in 2013, “Unfortunately, that also makes us easy targets to relive the horrors of the past again and again while learning almost nothing from them.”

Trump must face punishment. Or at least a public accounting. In some fashion. In some way that matters. Even if it’s inconvenient. We’ve seen this movie too many times in half a century.

Singed by Donald Trump’s and Republicans’ efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election, the Washington Post Editorial Board this morning urges the nascent Biden administration to assign a high-level commission the task of developing recommendations for overhauling our democracy:

The nation needs a top-to-bottom review of how it conducts elections, counts votes and assures the public of the democracy’s health, so that it resists those who want to restrict voting, trash legitimate ballots and leverage positions of trust to upend valid results. 

The Post already has a short list for the commission to consider: abolish the electoral college (or assign electoral votes proportionally), institute universal voter registration, make Election Day a holiday, expand mail-in voting, improve ballot security, make voting mandatory, etc.

Changes like these, the Post believes, are necessary to prevent a more competent autocrat than Trump from stealing a future election. The commission’s guiding star would be “to prevent fraud and promote voter confidence,” including reforms to prevent partisan officials from rejecting election results.

Perhaps they are naive. They are missing the forest and most assuredly missing the point.

Not that their suggestions are bad ones. But improving democracy will not change the attitudes of those who have demonstrated they no use for it. Have we not seen enough bad-faith arguments in the last couple of decades to recognize them by now?

“If conservatives become convinced that they cannot win democratically, they will not abandon conservatism. They will reject democracy,” former George W. Bush speechwriter David Frum wrote in January 2018.

“A realignment of America’s two major parties is under way,” Jeremy D. Rosner, former Special Adviser to President Clinton and senior staff member National Security Council, wrote in December that year. “To put it simply, we are headed for an era in which America may well have a Democratic Party and an Anti-democratic Party.”

Both predictions have come to pass.

As others observed before me, Republicans do not want to govern, they want to rule. The first rule once was, heads they win, tails you lose. Now it is heads they win, tails “Nice constitutional republic ya got there….”

“So what’s a plutocrat to do?” asked Paul Krugman at a time before openly rejecting democracy was de rigueur for Republicans. Since they could not come straight out and say only the wealthy should have the franchise, they resort to propaganda about voter fraud, etc. More democracy, better democracy is the last thing they want.

The latest wrinkle in our Trumpist saga is the effort among elected Republicans to raise objections to the decision of voters on January 6 when the U.S House and Senate meet to accept electoral vote certifications from the states. Republican Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas proposes a special commission charged with yet another examination of electoral college votes from “disputed states.”

Edward B. Foley has a clearer-eyed view of what is afoot than his Washington Post colleagues:

… the fact that a dozen senators and senators-elect, along with apparently more than 100 House members, want to disrupt congressional ratification of the electoral college result is one more horrendous sign of the severity of the disease afflicting the United States’ democratic system.

Anti-democrats do not want a more perfect democratic republic. They want the answer they want. They want to rule or else. Like a former client, like Donald Trump, he of the bottomless cup of lawsuits, they will keep raising objections to the will of the people, they will wear down opponents until they get the answer they want. If they lose, they try to will get even, Donald Trump-style. No presidential commission will remediate that.

As you contemplate the fact that possible 140 House members and at least a dozen Senators are going to “object” to the certification of the election on Wednesday and demand a ten day audit of the election (taking the certification up to the 16th at the earliest) I’m sure you recall this:

Trump impeachment: ‘Let the people decide for themselves’ says president’s lawyer

Donald Trump’s legal team has closed their first day of defence arguments by criticising the impeachment prosecutors’ calls to remove President Trump from office.

White House Counsel Patrick Cipollone said voters should make the decision: “That’s what the founders wanted. That’s what we should all want.”

Sure. And all the Republicans except Romney voted to acquit Trump of his crimes based on that logic. Now they want to reject the will of the voters:

And Josh Hawley, the man who is leading the charge to overturn the election had a lot to say on that subject:

Senator Hawley, Listen to Senator Hawley. @HawleyMO pic.twitter.com/ciQg26R1XA

— Republicans for the Rule of Law (@ForTheRuleOfLaw) January 2, 2021

Apparently, impeaching a president under the rules laid out in the Constitution is usurping the will of the voters while pulling an unprecedented, partisan, sideshow even after the judiciary has already determined the election was fair is perfectly fine.

This is really beginning to worry me. I don’t think they can prevent Biden from being sworn in. But the fact that all these congressional representatives and Senators are willing to go this far is extremely unnerving. I’m no longer sure this is just an appeasement of Trump and his cult followers or even a way to rationalize further vote suppression. It’s starting to look as though they’re buying into the notion that this gambit is legit.