772 search results for ""voter fraud""

By this point it is clear that the top brass of the Republican Party is simply going through the motions of participatory democracy. Like a fraternity or sorority, they insist they will decide who gets to participate.

The narrative that Republicans are cowards in fear of Trump and his supporters is nonsense, says Greg Sargent, citing the endless recount in Maricopa County, Ariz. “It is a deliberate action plainly undertaken to manufacture fake evidence for the affirmative purpose of further undermining faith in our electoral system going forward.” Forward? This effort goes back as far as 1964’s Operation Eagle Eye. The voter fraud squad has worked for decades to convince Republicans election results cannot be trusted if Democrats win. The fraud is itself a fraud.

Sargent writes about the appearance on “Fox News Sunday” of Rep. Jim Banks (R-Ind.), the chair of the Republican Study Committee. Banks both admits Joe Biden won in 2020 fair and square and that he still had  “serious concerns” about the validity of the eletion.

Sargent writes:

This is not the act of a “coward” who “fears Trump,” and would vouch for the integrity of the election if only he could do so without consequences.

Rather, it is the act of someone who is fully devoted to the project of continuing to undermine confidence in our elections going forward.

This is for purely instrumental purposes. Republicans are employing their own invented doubts about 2020 to justify intensified voter suppression everywhere. Banks neatly crystallized the point on Fox, saying those doubts required more voting restrictions — after reinforcing them himself.

Indeed, with all this, Republicans may be in the process of creating a kind of permanent justification for maximal efforts to invalidate future election outcomes by whatever means are within reach.

As I said, a whole lotta pretext goin’ on.

Jonathan Bernstein at Bloomberg adds two other points. Republicans are not hostages to Trump and the threat of primaries: “What should really be scary for Republicans, however, is that Trump could turn against the party in general elections, where he wouldn’t need to convince very many voters to stay home to deal a devastating blow to the party.”

Then, Republicans are now a real threat to the republic’s continued existence. Many now refuse to support the rule of law:

What we know is that when Trump attempted to subvert the election, a number of Republicans in key positions refused to go along. We know that, for the most part, those individuals won’t be able to stop a similar effort in 2024, and that the party has sent clear signals that standing up for the constitution and the rule of law was unacceptable.

It matters to few how clownish this effort seems if it accomplishes the goal of leaving Republicans in control, even of something that was once a democratic republic and is no longer. Better to reign in Hell.

Last August, 53% of voters in Missouri voted to amend the state’s constitution to expand Medicaid in the state. They joined voters in other red-leaning states: Maine, Oklahoma, Idaho, and Utah. The U.S. Supreme Court in National Federation of Independent Business v. Sebelius in 2012 upheld the individual mandate in the Affordable Care Act, but allowed that states could choose for themselves whether to expand Medicaid. Many Republican-controlled states refused. Voters had to push their lawmakers.

Republicans in Missouri’s state senate voted “20 to 14 against funding the winning measure, effectively punting the issue to the courts to determine whether a cut-and-dry referendum ought to be acknowledged,” Natalie Shure writes at The New Republic. “You’d be hard-pressed to find a purer distillation of the Republican Party’s nihilistic political project anywhere in the country.”

You’d be hard-pressed to find a purer distillation of the Republican Party’s nihilistic political project anywhere in the country.

Unless you visited Florida.

Nearly two-thirds of Florida voters in November 2018 approved a state constitutional amendment restoring voting rights to felons who had completed their sentences, parole, and probation. The next spring, the Republican-controlled legislature passed (and Gov. Ron DeSantis signed) a law requiring former felons to pay all outstanding fines and “user fees” from their sentencing before their rights are restored. A federal appeals court upheld the law in September 2020, despite the “administrative nightmare” it created. With no central database tracking such fees, neither felons nor county clerks could easily determine what was owed by whom.

The two thirds of voters that explicitly chose to restore voting rights to over a million fellow Floridians with a constitutional amendment could take a flying leap at the moon as far as Republican legislators were concerned.

Missourians only passed a referendum. Shure lays out the costs for the state:

The federal government currently covers 90 percent of Medicaid expansion costs, which leaves Missouri on the hook for only $130 million per year, a number quite a bit lower than its $1 billion budget surplus. And that’s before you consider added incentives in the American Rescue Plan Act, which would make expansion an even more plum deal for the state—and which Republicans in other states have likewise signaled will not thwart their opposition to Medicaid. In short, adding a few hundred thousand people to Missouri’s Medicaid rolls is startlingly cheap for the state itself, and could be accomplished using money already left over in the state’s coffers. Even the federal portion of the expansion would run less than $2 billion annually—a crumb of the overall federal spending pie.

If Republicans’ objections to Medicaid are clearly not fiscal, they are ruthlessly ideological: If expanding Medicaid wouldn’t bankrupt Missouri, it does further entrench a critical public welfare benefit for residents who fall well beyond those the right-wing would define as the most pathetic and deserving, thereby broadening the constituency for the sort of robust public programming it vehemently opposes. This has a significant political impact: Poor and disabled Medicaid recipients eligible before the ACA—those earning less than 21 percent of the federal poverty line in Missouri—were among the least likely to vote at all, much less vote for Republicans.

The expansion of the overall population of Medicaid beneficiaries has lent the means-tested insurance program wider and deeper support than it’s enjoyed in the past, more akin to the affection showered on Medicare. This helps explain why protests born out of a fierce loyalty to Medicaid in particular played a major role in saving the ACA from near ruin in 2017. Nevertheless, the idea of whetting appetites for an expanded welfare state is anathema to Republican goals, which boil down to enriching their plutocratic donors as much as possible and maintaining a haggard surplus workforce who are desperate enough to work for scraps—designs that are undermined by collective security that expanded health care benefits bestow. As state senator Andrew Koenig put his objection to funding the measure, “I’m sorry, if you are a healthy adult, you need to get a job.”

There are a lot of jobs out there for those willing to work. I know people who have two or three. And still they are haggard.

Serving the interests of the ultrarich is inherently undemocratic—but when Republicans aren’t obfuscating their disdain for democracy with disingenuous bloviation about nonexistent voter fraud, they make their position gobsmackingly plain: “If voters had all the information we do, I think they would have made a different decision,” Missouri Republican Senator Dan Hegeman asserted as he voted against funding the winning ballot measure. Representative Justin Hill took an even more paternalistic approach: “Even though my constituents voted for this lie, I am going to protect them from this lie.” Direct ballot measures are far from problem-free, but for all their faults, no form of electoral decision-making isolates voters’ desires quite as vividly. Beyond that, “having information” is hardly a prerequisite for voting, even if you presume the voters aren’t as savvy as the lawmakers who govern their lives.

After last August’s vote, Republican lawmakers in Missouri moved to make it harder to amend the state’s constitution.

Even clutching their pocket constitutions, wrapped in the flag, and misty-eyed at singing Lee Greenwood’s anthem, democracy — popular sovereignty — is really not Republicans’ thing. They don’t want to govern. They want to rule.

“Not that long ago, the Supreme Court would have struck down laws that target trumped-up allegations of voter fraud,” reads a subhead in Ian Millhiser’s Vox column on how the Supreme Court enabled the undermining of voting rights:

Though the right to vote is the essential building block of any democracy, not all laws that make it more difficult to vote are unconstitutional. As the Supreme Court recognized in Storer v. Brown (1974), “as a practical matter, there must be a substantial regulation of elections if they are to be fair and honest and if some sort of order, rather than chaos, is to accompany the democratic processes.”

States may legitimately require voters to cast their ballots at a particular location, and it may require these voters to do so by a particular time and date. They may impose reasonable restrictions on who may qualify as a candidate whose name appears on the ballot. And states may require voters to use a standardized ballot rather than, say, simply writing a bunch of names on a blank sheet of paper and dropping it off at a polling place.

Yet while many election rules are permissible even if they prevent some small cohort of voters from casting a ballot, the Supreme Court as recently as 13 years ago forbade states from enacting laws that serve no purpose other than to restrict the franchise. As the Court held in Anderson v. Celebrezze (1983), when confronted with a law that makes it harder to vote, federal courts must weigh “the character and magnitude of the asserted injury” to the right to vote against “the precise interests put forward by the State as justifications for the burden imposed by its rule.”

Laws that imposed minimal burdens on the right to vote, while serving legitimate state interests, were typically upheld. But laws that burdened the right to vote without achieving any other real purpose would be struck down under the Anderson framework.

Anderson is technically still good law. But the Supreme Court watered down Anderson’s balancing test so severely in Crawford v. Marion County Election Board (2008) that it’s unclear whether Anderson still provides any meaningful safeguard against laws enacted primarily to disenfranchise voters.

Crawford was an early challenge to what was, at the time, a cutting-edge method of restricting the franchise: strict voter ID laws. Proponents of such laws, which require voters to show a photo ID before they can cast a ballot, typically claim that they are necessary to prevent anyone from impersonating a voter at the polls. But this kind of voter fraud is so rare that it barely exists.

A study by Loyola Law School professor Justin Levitt, who led much of the Justice Department’s voting rights work in the Obama administration, uncovered only 35 credible allegations of in-person voter fraud among the 834 million ballots cast in the 2000-2014 elections. A Wisconsin study found seven cases of any kind of fraud among the 3 million votes cast in the 2004 election — and none were the kind that could be prevented by voter ID. In 2014, Iowa Secretary of State Matt Schultz, a Republican, announced the results of a two-year investigation into election misconduct within his state. He found zero cases of voter impersonation at the polls.

The primary opinion in Crawford was only able to identify one case of in-person voter fraud at the polls in the preceding 140 years.

Perhaps some election lawyer can answer this question. In 2019, the U.S. Supreme Court blocked the Trump administration from including a citizenship question on the 2020 census. The court ruled against the administration because the question’s “‘sole’ voting-rights-related reason” for adding it was “pretextual.” Given that precedent and the evidence Millhiser presents (there is plenty more where that came from), why could that pretextual standard not apply to a raft of voting restriction bills now floating around Republican-controlled legislatures? And to others already in place?

There’s a whole lotta pretext goin’ on.

Caught lying again

Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) was not about to let an upstart like Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) outmaneuver him in pandering to President Donald Trump’s base of support. So when Hawley announced a few days before Congress met to affirm the 2020 electoral college votes that he would object to the vote totals from Pennsylvania, Cruz put together a contingent of senators to make the same promise.

The group, Cruz’s office explained in a statement, was “acting not to thwart the democratic process, but rather to protect it.” That assurance, buried at the bottom of the lengthy missive, was meant to address the obvious concern that blocking the counting of electoral votes ran the (infinitesimal) risk of derailing the inauguration of President-elect Joe Biden, who, by all objective accounts, had clearly won the race. But Cruz and the gang insisted that because the election “featured unprecedented allegations of voter fraud, violations and lax enforcement of election law, and other voting irregularities,” they had no choice but to throw up the stop sign.

It’s important now as it was then to point out that utterly unfounded allegations of fraud and irregularities — like those raised in the months after the 2020 election — are better addressed by confronting the false claims directly and confronting those spreading them. But when the person propagating the falsehoods has an energetic base of millions of supporters, it’s much easier politically to simply treat them as valid, to try to figure out a way to both treat those unserious claims as serious and also maintain a sober distance from the nonsense. Cruz’s “we must lamentably and futilely object” approach was the narrow path he chose to walk.

As protesters gathered outside the Capitol on Jan. 6 — motivated by Trump’s rhetoric and, perhaps in some cases, by Cruz’s and Hawley’s — Cruz stood on the Senate floor to make his case.

“Let me be clear,” Cruz said in his speech on that day: “I am not arguing for setting aside the result of this election.”

No, he was just arguing that it was “a profound threat to this country and to the legitimacy of any administrations that will come in the future” that so many people believed the election had been stolen, a claim elevated by Trump and coddled directly and through inaction by people like Cruz. He worried that not objecting to Biden’s win would send a message that “voter fraud doesn’t matter, isn’t real and shouldn’t be taken seriously.”

The reality, of course, is that there has been no demonstrated voter fraud sufficiently widespread to affect any major election and, in fact, fraud is extremely uncommon. Claims that it is real or a subject of concern for senators considering a presidential election should, in fact, not be taken seriously.

But you see what Cruz is doing. He’s trying to send a message to Trump’s base that he’s with them and that he agrees with their concerns while maintaining deniability with official Washington. Cruz knows that the fraud allegations are unfounded and he knows Biden won, but he also knows that Republican voters don’t believe either of those things. So he came up with a way of winking at the base while nodding at the establishment.

And he would have gotten away with it, too, if it weren’t for those meddling cameras.

On Thursday, Cruz joined Virginia gubernatorial hopeful Glenn Youngkin at a rally in Chesterfield, Va. At one point, Cruz joined members of the audience for photographs.

A woman wearing a camouflage hat approached Cruz and confronted him about the election results, as captured in video posted by activist Lauren Windsor. (Update: Windsor confirmed on Twitter that she was the woman in the video.)

https://twitter.com/lawindsor/status/1390693849924841477?s=20

He just can’t help it, can he? As Philip Bump pointed out in the article:

When the woman approached him on Thursday, Cruz could have objected to her false claim that Biden didn’t win. He could have clarified for her that his goal on Jan. 6 was simply to spend more time evaluating the sanctity of the vote, even though there was no reason to do so. But instead Cruz tried to leverage his actions that day in exactly the way that he’d always intended: they were his way to tell Trump voters that he’d fought on their behalf.

And so he did.

Yes, Ted is the most unctuous liar in the US Senate. But he’s not alone in this. They’re all doing the same thing in one way or another. Feeding their delusions, telling them what they want to hear, adopting Trumpish demagoguery all for their will to power.

The biggest news in Washington continues to be Liz Cheney’s ongoing refusal to bend the knee to the former president and formally repudiate her inexplicable fealty to the truth. It’s one thing to be investigated by the FBI for paying for sex with minors or to be a blatant white supremacist — these are human foibles that can be forgiven — but to unapologetically assert that Donald Trump’s insistence that the election was stolen is a Big Lie simply cannot be tolerated.

I’ve written before that I believe regardless of whether she is truly incapable of swallowing this election nonsense, Cheney also has a strategy. There is an open “lane” for a Republican woman, especially one with a pedigree like hers, to be the tough conservative who stood up to Trump in the event the magic veil ever falls from voters’ eyes. So far that lane looks like it gets narrower every day, but kicking her out of the leadership for telling the truth in the face of massive dishonesty can only add to her heroic luster in the long haul. The worst thing that happens is she is remembered as the Margaret Chase Smith of her day, after the brave senator from Maine who denounced the Wisconsin demagogue Joseph McCarthy long before anyone else had the nerve. There are worse fates for a politician than that.

Meanwhile, the rest of the Republican establishment continues to run around in circles clucking furiously like a brood of barnyard hens, trying to keep Trump and his cultlike following happy. They appear to have decided that their voters require human sacrifices for the cause so Cheney must be thrown over the cliff. (And to think “Democrats are in disarray” used to be a perennial trope. They’re amateurs compared to the GOP.)

But when I read Salon’s Sophia Tesfaye’s piece about former House speaker Paul Ryan, who reportedly really doesn’t care for Donald Trump and his shenanigans yet remains glued to his chair in the Fox boardroom, unwilling to utter a peep about what’s going on with his party, it occurred to me that it’s giving them far too much credit to simply call them cowards. They are much more craven than that. It’s not that they are afraid of their Trump-loving constituents who are metaphorically brandishing pitchforks and torches against anyone who dare call the Big Lie a big lie. It’s that they are seeing the upside for them personally.

While Washington officials clutch their pearls about Liz Cheney’s apostasy, consider all the anti-democratic activity that’s taking place around the country which these people are either explicitly or tacitly endorsing.

The Republican Attorney Generals Association has been in turmoil since January 6th when some members objected to the group’s sponsorship of the violent insurrection. The chairman resigned last month after being unable to handle the internal strife and is to be replaced this week by a hard-core Trump supporter who has promised to “take a blowtorch to Biden’s agenda.” In Florida, a state Trump won handily, they are nonetheless busily enacting voting restrictions which they belatedly realized might even suppress their own vote. They did it anyway. Ohio Republicans decided this week to censure Republican politicians who voted to impeach Donald Trump even though they are from other states. And the New York Times reports that the Texas GOP is now eating its own over “pandemic and voter-fraud conspiracy theories.”

But the big story is in Arizona, where the state Senate has hired an untried company led by a man with a history of floating vote fraud conspiracy theories to “audit” last November’s vote in Maricopa Country, which was won by Joe Biden. Despite the fact that the county was recounted twice by hand and found to match the machine count perfectly, Trump-supporting volunteers are laboriously examining the ballots without any proper monitoring, determined to prove that the election was stolen. The good news is that the Space Force is supposedly on alert to ensure that everything is done properly.

For his part, Trump is reportedly obsessed with this recount. He apparently believes it will prove the election there was stolen and that other states will follow. Here he is last week pontificating before his paying guests at Mar-a-lago:

https://twitter.com/Gekko_WynV/status/1388484633965309954?s=20

What all these supposed successful “audits” would add up to is not immediately clear, but on Tuesday Trump did say, “I think people are going to be very, very happy when I make a certain announcement,” so perhaps he believes having a bunch of his loyal fanatics falsely testify that they finally “found” the votes he wanted will somehow launch him back into the White House in 2024.

According to Tierney Sneed of Talking Points Memo, the Trump team expect these audits to take place elsewhere, starting next with Georgia:

Peter Navarro, a Trump White House advisor and the author of several reports asserting mass election fraud, told OAN last week that he believed the Arizona audit could precede a similar audit in Georgia, where the scale of voter fraud was, in his universe, “much larger.” Speaking to Steve Bannon Thursday, Trump supporter Boris Epshteyn said that if the audit shows “even a small fraction” of what the former president’s devotees expect, “the freight train of audit is coming down the way. It’s on the train to Georgia.”

All of this may very well be why even the Republicans who obviously know this is nuts are all climbing on board that crazy train. If they can stage one of these “audit” pageants in a place like Georgia they might just juice their turnout for 2022 and take out newly-elected Democratic Sen. Rafael Warnock. And there are dozens of House districts where that dynamic could play itself out as well.

It isn’t new for Republicans to say that Democrats are illegitimate. They used to say that President Clinton only won with a plurality in a three-way race, so his presidency wasn’t really valid. And we all know that Trump himself pushed the grotesque Birther lie which claimed that Barack Obama wasn’t born in the U.S. and was therefore not qualified to be president. But this is taking all that to a much higher level. Republicans no doubt realize that this flurry of anti-democratic activity in the states —ostensibly on behalf of Donald Trump and his Big Lie — is really going to pay off for them.

So the House GOP’s leadership apparent decision to purge Liz Cheney from their ranks is their way of telling all these rabid Trumpist activists in the states to have at it, the GOP establishment is with them all the way. They aren’t afraid of Trump voters. They’re grateful to them.

Salon

There are a lot of bad ones. But this one is just horrifying:

Former President Trump was an expert at sowing the doubt that’s now made it into proposals of at least 40 measures aimed at expanding the power of poll watchers — largely seen as an attempt to give legislative weight to former president’s false claims of widespread voter fraud and a stolen 2020 election.

“Watch all the thieving and stealing and robbing they do,” the increasingly desperate candidate Trump told a crowd of supporters during a campaign stop in North Carolina weeks before the Nov. 3 election. 

“I’m urging my supporters to go into the polls and watch very carefully because that’s what has to happen. I am urging them to do it,” Trump said during a presidential debate last fall against the then-Democratic nominee who would become his successor, Joe Biden.

The message was clear: Trump was calling on his supporters to monitor voting activity, but that call was cached in a broader effort to sow distrust in the 2020 elections.

Now months into Biden’s presidency, Republican state legislators in at least 20 states are responding.

Thirty-three of those measures would give poll watchers more authority to observe voters and election officials and would impose fewer limitations on the watchers’ actions at polling places and other locations, according to a tally published by the Brennan Center for Justice.

The report comes as bills expanding the powers of poll watchers were enacted into law in Georgia and Iowa last month.

A bulk of the measures detailed by the Brennan Center that are currently at play (12 have passed one or both chambers or have seen some sort of committee action, according to the report) were filed in Texas where they are working their way through the GOP-controlled legislature.

Voting rights experts have warned that expanding the powers of poll watchers could increase the possibility of voter intimidation and harassment. 

Ahead of the 2020 presidential election, Trump often urged supporters to appear at the polls and join an “army” of poll watchers, often tacking the call to guard the polls onto a broader effort to sow distrust in the elections process rather than reinforce confidence about safeguarding the vote.  

I think we know hat’s going to happen, don’t you? A bunch of Red Hat yahoos are going to flood voting places and try to harass and terrorize racial minorities, students and the elderly who they believe might be voting the wrong way. And it will be legal to do so.

CNN’s Gabby Orr did a deep dive into Trump’s life in Mar-a-lago as he plots his revenge and his comeback:

Most Mondays and Tuesdays, former President Donald Trump skips golf to confer with aides about the week ahead.Together they decide which Republican candidates he will meet with at his office — a converted bridal suite above Mar-a-Lago’s 20,000-square-foot ballroom — and whether they deserve his support. Often, he’ll ask for updates on his leadership PAC and political operation, or spend hours chatting by phone with a coterie of old friends.Far from a conventional post-White House retirement, Trump’s first 100 days out of office illustrate a man who has preferred plotting the next chapter of his political career to planning his presidential library, recruiting MAGA-aligned Republican primary challengers to writing a post-presidential memoir. Whereas his predecessors disengaged from politics for months after leaving office, Trump has turned the same political warfare that defined his presidency into a full-time retirement hobby as he weighs a full return to the spotlight with a potential comeback presidential bid in 2024.

“He didn’t play by the rules as President and he’s certainly not going to as an ex-President,” Newsmax CEO and longtime Trump pal Chris Ruddy said.

More than a dozen Trump aides, confidants and allies who spoke with CNN — many of whom were granted anonymity to candidly discuss his post-presidency — say the former President, who remains bitter about his defeat in the 2020 election, has nevertheless come to enjoy his status as a GOP kingmaker, relishing his ability to disrupt races or elevate pro-Trump figures against dissenters inside the party. Others noted that he is yearning to return to the White House and claimed that his efforts to build a post-presidential political machine are principally aimed at supporting that goal.

Most days of the week, Trump begins with 9 a.m. tee times at his namesake golf course 15 minutes from his home. He usually plays 18 holes, but he sometimes stays for the course’s full 27, followed by a leisurely lunch at its clubhouse with a rotating cast of friends. These days, friends say, he avoids the buffet.

Trump then conducts candidate interviews or meetings with his staff back at his oceanfront resort until 7:30 p.m. before joining his wife, Melania, for dinner on Mar-a-Lago’s bustling terrace. In recent weeks, the couple has dined with former House Speaker Newt Gingrich and his wife, Callista, who served as US ambassador to the Holy See during the Trump administration, and former White House counselor Kellyanne Conway, who remains a close friend.

“Right now, he’s doing a very good job sustaining his movement in case he does decide to run,” Gingrich said.It took Trump several weeks to get settled into his post-White House life.

Apparently, because he was pretending he actually won the election there weren’t many preparations done for his move to Florida. For a while he had some GSA aides, paid for by the taxpayers, to help him but they never provided them any phones or computers to do any work. Soon he was joined by a bunch of hacks to help him with his revenge planning. Names like Scavino, Lewandowski and Bossie showed up to do a little grifting. And Trump started making calls.

People familiar with these interactions said Trump has regularly called Conway, former Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi, former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows, Sens. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina and Rand Paul of Kentucky, and Rep. Jim Jordan of Ohio for messaging and political advice or to complain about Biden and Democratic leaders. And when outside advisers started warning him in March that his post-presidential operation — particularly his methods for vetting candidate endorsements — appeared disorganized, Trump hauled in another longtime ally, Florida-based GOP strategist Susie Wiles, to instill order.

A person close to Trump who fielded multiple disgruntled calls from the former President in his first few weeks out of office said it took him several weeks to overcome the isolation he felt after hundreds of his supporters stormed the US Capitol on January 6 and he was thrust into a political exile. After he arrived at Mar-a-Lago following a low-key sendoff at Joint Base Andrews the morning of Biden’s inauguration, this person said Trump would talk about forming a third party and complain that Republicans, like House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy of California, couldn’t wait to get rid of him — noting that his focus was on the past, not the future, which contributed to the early chaos in his post-presidential operation.

“Most people would leave the White House relieved to have the weight of the world lifted off their shoulders, but for him it was a reality that took some time to get used to. Those first few weeks, it was not an easy transition,” said the person close to Trump.

That’s because he’s out of his mind. Bu apparently his coterie of sycophants convinced him that he needed to concentrate on 2022 and he began to engage in retribution in earnest.

The former President already had a laundry list of prospective primary challengers lined up to take on his foes inside the party. But privately, he was working the phones to recruit more.

In Georgia, he encouraged GOP Rep. Jody Hice to launch a bid to unseat Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, who repeatedly rejected Trump’s baseless claims of rampant voter fraud in the state and is currently cooperating with state investigators as they investigate a January 2 phone call in which then-President Trump asked Raffensberger to find the votes needed to flip the state into his column. In Ohio, where Trump has yet to bestow his blessing on one of the several Republican candidates running to fill outgoing GOP Sen. Rob Portman’s seat, the former President reportedly grilled four of the contenders at his Palm Beach golf club before a fundraiser last month.Aides say Trump is still on the hunt for a primary recruit in Georgia’s 2022 gubernatorial race due to his dissatisfaction with Republican Gov. Brian Kemp’s handling of the 2020 results in his state.

They note he is also vetting challengers to Sen. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, the only Senate Republican facing reelection next fall who voted to convict him after his second impeachment trial earlier this year. He has plans to target the 10 House Republicans who voted to impeach him and are hoping to hang on to their seats in the upcoming midterm elections, as well.

And they all file down to Mar-a-lago for that bootlicking ritual they all seem to love. But Trump doesn’t like the summer heat in Florida and he’s decamping to New jersey, upsetting some of his aides:

Next month, these proverbial pilgrimages to Mar-a-Lago will end as Trump escapes the hot Florida summer to relocate to his golf club in Bedminster, New Jersey. The move has frustrated some allies who view his Florida resort as an ideal access point to wealthy Republican donors in the area — including former Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross, who former Trump aides starting their own political outfits have solicited for financial support — and who are wary of the old friends Trump will encounter during his stay up North.

“A lot of his aides and allies thought Florida was going to be the center of the Earth for the next two years, and now he’s up and out of there,” said a former senior administration official. “His Bedminster club is much more closely knit, and you really never know who’s going to show up.”

People familiar with his plans said Trump will continue to host meetings at Bedminster, where he conducted many of his interviews for Cabinet posts during the 2016 presidential transition and where the conference rooms and office space may create an environment that is more conducive to his post-presidential planning. The New Jersey venue will also serve as the backdrop for lengthy interviews of which Trump is the subject, as he continues meeting with journalists who are penning books about his presidency and already completed first-round interviews at Mar-a-Lago.

The big question hovering over everything is whether he plans to run again. Let’s just say I will be shocked, gobsmacked, beyond surprised if he doesn’t. The man lives for revenge. Taking out some congressman simply cannot match defeating Joe Biden in 2024. He won’t be any older than Biden is now and he thinks of himself as being 35.

But the cult is getting antsy. If Deal Leader doesn’t run again, there is a long line of wannabes who need to know:

Some Trump allies are hoping this summer will provide clarity about the former President’s 2024 ambitions and his plans to assist candidates he’s already endorsed, or who he plans to, ahead of the midterm elections in November 2022.

Trump has played coy about his desire to seek a second term — declining to either rule out a bid or commit to running — while promoting Republicans who are widely seen as strong contenders themselves for the party’s nomination. In a March 22 appearance on “The Truth with Lisa Boothe,” Trump said the GOP has “a pretty deep bench” of possible contenders and went so far as to name-check Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem and Sen. Josh Hawley of Missouri.

He’s testing them to see how loyal they are. They were all smart enough not to say anything that could make him turn on them. Just in case.

His noncommittal posturing has frustrated some allies, who worry he is blowing an opportunity to take control of the GOP early on and opening the door for other presidential hopefuls to forge relationships with his supporters.

“It’s important to have a field-clearing exercise sooner rather than later if he’s going to run, otherwise some of these other guys are going to start getting momentum,” said the former senior administration official.

Indeed, some rumored 2024 contenders have been laying the groundwork for their own potential campaigns with appearances in states that will play a critical role in the Republican presidential primary and general election: Former Vice President Mike Pence will deliver his first public address since leaving office in South Carolina this week. Former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, who visited Iowa in March, also appeared virtually at a fundraiser last month for New Hampshire Republicans. And both DeSantis and former US Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley are due for appearances in Pennsylvania and Iowa, respectively, in the next two months. Sens. Rick Scott of Florida, Tom Cotton of Arkansas and Tim Scott of South Carolina have also made recent stops in Iowa — or plan to in coming months — fueling speculation about their presidential ambitions.

They’d better bet careful…

Meanwhile, people are trying to make him do something other than wreak revenge. I don’t think it’s going to work:

Other Trump allies have urged him to fine-tune his post-presidential messaging, which has featured ruthless attacks against Republican Party leaders and incumbent GOP officeholders and only recently drifted into regular criticism of the Biden administration. They say the vengeance-driven strategy he has deployed so far is unlikely to be helpful in the long term and ignores what they view as layup opportunities to target Biden and Democratic leaders over issues like immigration, taxes and identity politics.

“I think the radicalism of the Democrats is going to rebound enormously to Trump’s benefit and he would be better off to focus on the Democrats. He has enough friends to go after disloyal Republicans,” said Gingrich.”He should take the higher position and focus on larger domestic issues and international crises,” added Newsmax CEO Ruddy.

Lol. Trump take the “higher position?” Please.

While aides say Trump has recently been paying more attention to Biden’s agenda and policy decisions — last week he issued a statement criticizing Biden’s timeline for withdrawing American troops from Afghanistan and told Fox News’ Sean Hannity that the surge of migrants crossing the US-Mexico border could “destroy our country” — the former President’s focus remains primarily on himself.

“He hates being off the A block,” said a person close to Trump, using a term that refers to the lead segment in a cable news program. “He’s really thinking of running again in 2024 just to get back to that.”

He’s apparently not watching as much TV as he did when he was president. Think about that. But he yearns to be back in the White House where he is on the TV 24-7.

The person close to Trump’s operation said that while his TV consumption has declined since he left office — a byproduct of him no longer being surrounded by televisions in the Oval Office or aboard Air Force One — he still reads The New York Times, the Wall Street Journal and the New York Post each morning and regularly marks up articles about his achievements or policies to send to aides and advisers.

And when an unflattering story pops up, he is quick to pick up the phone to complain to friends.

And yes. He’s getting ready to rally:

Recently, Trump has initiated discussions about resuming the signature MAGA rallies that fortified his nascent political movement in 2016 and continued throughout his presidency. While he has vowed to travel to Alaska to campaign against Murkowski and is said to be interested in hosting campaign events for some of the candidates he’s already endorsed, aides said the logistics are still being worked out but that he could resume rallies as early as May.

“It will definitely be different in terms of the setup, but we got really good at planning these events in 2020, so we will probably use a lot of those same vendors again,” said the person close to Trump’s post-White House operation.

Feel the magic.

The piece catches up with the kids. Javanka are laying low in their 30 million dollar estate in Florida. Jared phones in some of his stellar advice from time to time and Ivanka is being a “hands-on mom.” Melania is going to the spa all day and Junior and Kimberly are trusted advisers. No word on Eric and Lara.

Trump has to be the center of attention and now that he’s seen what it’s like to be the most famous man in the world he’s not going to give it up easily. Unless something external interferes I think he will run in 2024. It’s hard for me to imagine how he could rationalize not doing it.

Meanwhile, who’s running the Trump Organization? What’s happening with that?

“At stake is something I never expected to worry about in the United States: the integrity of the vote count,” Rick Hasen begins in his offering this morning at the New York Times. The professor of law and political science at the University of California, Irvine is not just talking about reciminations against Georgia’s secretary of state, Republican Brad Raffensperger, or Michigan’s state canvassing board member, Republican Aaron Van Langevelde, both of whom chose following the law over manipulating it for Donald Trump in 2020:

Republican state legislatures have also passed or are considering laws aimed at stripping Democratic counties of the power to run fair elections. The new Georgia law gives the legislature the power to handpick an election official who could vote on the state election board for a temporary takeover of up to four county election boards during the crucial period of administering an election and counting votes. That provision appears to be aimed at Democratic counties like Fulton County that have increased voter access. A new Iowa law threatens criminal penalties against local election officials who enact emergency election rules and bars them from sending voters unsolicited absentee ballot applications.

A Texas bill would similarly stymie future efforts like the one in Harris County to expand access to the ballot and give challengers at the polls the ability not only to observe but to interfere with polling place procedures meant to ensure election integrity. According to a new report by Protect Democracy, Republican legislators have proposed at least 148 bills in 36 states that could increase the chances of cooking the electoral books.

State legislatures and others also have been taking steps to amplify false claims that the 2020 election was stolen, solidifying the false belief among a majority of Republican voters that the November vote count was unfair. It’s not just the hearings featuring charlatans like Rudy Giuliani or Sidney Powell spewing the big lie. It’s also steps like the Arizona State Senate demanding the seizure of November ballots from Democratic-leaning Maricopa County, and ordering an audit of the votes to be conducted by a proponent of the bogus “Stop the Steal” movement who falsely contended that the election was rigged against Mr. Trump. Never mind that Arizona’s vote count has been repeatedly subject to examination by courts and election officials with no irregularities found.

Trump himself launched such a commission. Headed by Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach (R), the voting integrity commission “uncovered no evidence to support claims of widespread voter fraud” when it disbanded in 2018. Kobach’s Interstate Crosscheck program is itself all but disbanded. The thinly veiled effort to substantiate the myth of widespread voter fraud under the guise of voter list maintence is the subject of a class-action lawsuit by the American Civil Liberties Union of Kansas.

The vote-counting process is more arcane and harder to explain to the public than prohibiting giving water to voters in line at polling places, Hasen warns. He recommeds every jusistiction use tangible paper ballots rather than electronic records. H.R. 1 contains that requirement for federal elections.

Hasen also suggests several other ways attempts to subvert the process might be thwarted. But we might not know until January 2025 if enough has been done.

“It may begin with lawsuits against new voter-suppression laws and nascent efforts to enshrine the right to vote in the Constitution,” Hasen concludes. “But it is also going to require a cross-partisan alliance of those committed to the rule of law — in and out of government — to ensure that our elections continue to reflect the will of the people.”

Even tougher when one of the country’s major political parties is committed to neither the rule of law nor to rule by a majority of the American people.

The “don’t give a damn how it looks” radicalism in the GOP these days is overwhelming. Check out what they’re doing in Arizona:

When a Republican-led coalition gathers to “audit” Maricopa County, Arizona’s 2020 election results on Thursday, the motley crew will include a former lawmaker who previously lost a police job for lying about a stolen iPad and a technology firm helmed by a proponent of election conspiracy theories.

Joe Biden won the presidential election in Arizona, including in hotly contested Maricopa County, which includes Phoenix. Although multiple bipartisan reviews have upheld those results, and Donald Trump has long since exited the White House, a new effort to recount all of Maricopa County’s 2.1 million votes is kicking off this week. The scheme is led by actual elected officials with power, including the leaders of Arizona’s state Senate, which has tapped a Florida-based cybersecurity firm to oversee the audit.

But from kooky fundraisers to a conspiracy-minded tech CEO to an auditor who lost the very 2020 election he’s auditing, the recount has eyeballs rolling.

On Monday, former Arizona state representative Anthony Kern tweeted that he would be involved in the recount. “#Electionintegrity,” he wrote in his announcement. Arizona’s House Democrats had a less sunny response: quote-tweeting Kern with a picture of him standing in a crowd of Trump fans at a Jan. 6 rally that preceded the attack on the U.S. Capitol. “One of Arizona’s election auditors reporting for duty,” the House Democrats tweeted. “#ShamAudit.”

Kern, who did not return The Daily Beast’s request for comment, maintains that he did not enter the Capitol or participate in the riot, and has not been charged with a crime related to the day’s events. Still, the specifics of his actions are the subject of a legal spat in Arizona. On the day of the riot, he was serving his final days as a state representative, having lost re-election the same day as Trump. He and another Arizona representative who attended the pre-riot rally have declined public records requests for their messages related to the event, with their lawyer stating that “the threat of criminal prosecution gives rise to certain Constitutional rights that may overcome the duty to disclose otherwise public documents under Arizona’s public records law.”

The two Republicans have also filed a defamation lawsuit against an Arizona lawmaker who signed a letter asking the FBI to investigate their Jan. 6 activities.

This isn’t Kern’s first time facing legal scrutiny. Prior to becoming a lawmaker, he worked as a code enforcement officer for the El Mirage Police Department. In 2014, he was fired for misleading his supervisor about a computer tablet that went missing, the Phoenix New Times revealed in 2019. As part of his termination, he was placed on the state’s Brady list, a compendium of law enforcement officers with known credibility issues. (In fact, as the New Times noted, even Kerr’s claims to being law enforcement were dubious: He was a civilian officer throughout his employment, and though he represented himself as holding a “law enforcement” certification in financial disclosures in 2014, 2015, and 2016, he did not receive peace officer certification until 2017.)

In 2019, while serving in the Arizona House, Kern helped push a bill that would make it easier for people like himself to remove their names from the state Brady list. Colleagues told the New Times they had not been aware that Kern was on the list. The bill did not pass, but a similar one is currently being debated.

Arizona Democrats called Kerr’s participation in Thursday’s audit inappropriate. Rep. Athena Salman, a Democratic member of the state House’s Government and Elections Committee, noted that Kern was also in D.C. in January in his capacity as a Trump elector. (Kern promoted a bogus theory that “dual electors” could throw the election to Trump.)This is one of the guys that they bring in and say, “That’s who we need looking at these ballots and determining whether or not these are quality votes”?

[…]

But Kern is far from the only controversial figure involved in the audit. The recount is being led by a business called Cyber Ninjas, a Florida-based cybersecurity company led by Doug Logan.

Following Trump’s defeat in November, Logan became a prominent Twitter voice casting doubt on the election results via multiple debunked conspiracy theories. An Arizona Republic report found that Logan frequently retweeted Sidney Powell, the former Trump campaign lawyer whose theories about election fraud were so outlandish that, when Powell was sued for defamation, she argued in court that no reasonable person could have taken her seriously.

Logan’s Twitter involvement with pro-Trump fringes went even further. Archived tweets from Logan’s now-deleted account reveal that he frequently tweeted at Ron Watkins, the former administrator of the site 8kun. Watkins is a vocal proponent of election fraud claims and in a recent documentary appeared to accidentally admit that he was “Q,” the author of the lurid QAnon conspiracy theory. (Watkins now denies that he is Q.)

“I’d love to chat if you have a chance,” Logan tweeted at Watkins on Nov. 12. The following day, he tweeted at Watkins after tweeting about hacking voting machines. “If you have any ‘original source’ documents you’re basing your info off of, I’d love it if you shared the links ;-),” Logan tweeted. Later that day, he tweeted at Watkins with “source material” on voting machines.

In December, in a reply to a now-deleted thread from Powell and her colleague Lin Wood, Logan tagged Watkins again. “Haven’t you been working on this?” Logan asked him.

Elsewhere, Logan quote-tweeted Wood to promote a hoax about voting machines supposedly being seized in Germany, which would somehow prove Trump to have won the election.

[…]

Of course, the audit’s very existence is a victory for Arizona Senate Republicans, who spent months embroiled in court cases and logistical battles over how such a recount would take place.

Although the Republican-led Maricopa County Board of Supervisors did turn over voting data that upheld Biden’s victory in a previous review, the group argued against turning over the county’s 2.1 million physical ballots, citing rules on voter privacy. Then, in February, the Arizona Senate won a court ruling enabling them to examine the ballots by hand.

Their next challenge was figuring out how to conduct the audit. Initially, Senate President Karen Fann tapped the “Allied Security Operations Group” to head up the recount, but backtracked after critics noted that that group was pro-Trump and had made false claims about voter fraud in Michigan. After the partnership crumbled, a colorful assortment of Trump supporters, including MyPillow founder Mike Lindell and supposed Satanism expert Lyle Rapacki, stepped in to promote the audit, The Daily Beast previously reported.

Soon thereafter, a group called “Voices and Votes” took up the cause of fundraising for the audit. That group was led by One America News host Christina Bobb, who had promoted voter fraud conspiracy theories, TPM reported. Wood told the outlet that his foundation had chipped in $50,000 to the cause.

Ultimately the audit’s outcome is irrelevant. Multiple bipartisan reviews have upheld the state’s election results and Biden’s Arizona victory has already been certified in the state, in a process that involved the state’s governor, secretary of state, and state Supreme Court chief justice—all of them Republicans. Also: Biden is president and not going anywhere.

But what remains is a worrying precedent, Salman said.

“They can’t de-certify the election results for 2020,” she said. “I wholeheartedly believe that they’re testing the boundaries to see whatever they can get away with, so that they can do this whole performance again, and manufacture the results that they want coming into the 2022 election cycle.”

Of course. And they also want to fluff their Dear Leader Donald Trump by “validating” his Bie Lie. Maybe he’ll invited them to Mar-a-lago for selfie and a diet coke.

A proposition is a picture of reality, Ludwig Wittgenstein explained. Wittgenstein studied how language and logic interact. Our class on Wittgenstein used this as an example of a logical proposition: “There is a rose bush on the far side of the moon.” Was it? A valid proposition (IIRC; someone will correct me) was one that was provable. One that is unfalsifiable is not a valid proposition. Such a statement is doing something other than describing the world.

“I know Jesus is Lord because he has saved me,” is another we discussed. It may take the form of a proposition but is not. It is unprovable by comparison to observable reality.

With the help of Laura Field of the Niskanen Center, Greg Sargent examines the extreme right’s flight from reality into fantasy. Tucker Carlson and Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.), among others, utter things that sound like propositions but are hardly pictures of reality.

Carlson recently waved away assertions by a law enforcement official that Derek Chauvin’s use of force against George Floyd was excessive: “I’m kind of more worried about the rest of the country, which, thanks to police inaction, in case you hadn’t noticed, is, like, boarded up.”

“Of course, you probably haven’t noticed that the ‘rest of the country’ is ‘boarded up,’ because, well, it isn’t,” Sargent writes. All it would take to test Carlson’s proposition is a trip to the far side of the moon, so to speak.

Greene strikes a similar pose:

DC is completely dead tonight. People stayed in and were scared to go out because of fear of riots.

Police are everywhere and have riot gear.#BLM is the strongest terrorist threat in our county.

— Marjorie Taylor Greene 🇺🇸 (@mtgreenee) April 21, 2021

Was it “dead”? The police were there because of the right-wing riot on January 6.

Field distinguishes between conspiracy theories and conspiracism, “more a habit of mind, a tendency to unshackle oneself in a way that permits a kind of open-ended indulgence in fabulism,” Sargent continues:

The latter is common among QAnon sympathizers, but Field argues that a conspiracist tendency is becoming distressingly common even among some right-leaning intellectuals, particularly ones who saw President Donald Trump as a necessary disruption of our politics, and his defeat as a cause for political anguish. But their through line concerns their depiction of the left.

In too many cases, Field argues, empiricism is entirely absent. This tendency sometimes attacks the political legitimacy of the entire left by conflating liberals and Marxists into one monolithically tyrannical political force. Or it attacks the legitimacy of institutions which have fallen under the left’s cultural spell (such as the media or “woke” corporations, never mind the latter’s pursuit of a distributive agenda the left hates). Or it attacks the political system itself (which the left has manipulated, rendering elections illegitimate).

New Right intellectuals, Field writes, “share a fundamentally conspiratorial view of the left — a view that is often deeply cynical and/or detached from reality.” Indeed, “conspiracism is increasingly detaching itself from any obligation to justify its connection to reality in any way,” Sargent writes.

Straw man über alles

The conspiracy is all around you, Morpheus tells Neo in The Matrix. “Free your mind.” Carlson, Greene, et al. have freed theirs. Argument by assertion is the rule in their virtual world. Pictures they paint with words bear no relation to reality. Nor do they care if they don’t. (Emphasis mine.)

After all, if widespread voter fraud can simply be asserted, then overturning an election result can magically be made legitimate. If antifa’s role in storming the Capitol can simply be asserted, then the violent Trumpist mob can be transformed into virtuous exercisers of their First Amendment rights who were smeared by association with the Real Rioters, i.e., antifa.

Or, as John Ganz suggests, if the social degradations of cultural liberal hegemony can be exaggerated into something heinously irredeemable through conventional politics, then anything goes. The very “giving up” on our institutions itself becomes the justification for engaging in the prosecution of right-wing politics by any disruptive means necessary.

“In this imaginary world, sinister forces lurk behind every facet of liberal society: the most apparently milquetoast and moderate liberals are actually in the thrall of hardcore revolutionary Marxist ideology,” Ganz adds. That’s the picture painted by the Carlsons and Greenes. No correspondence to reality required.

Why, imaginary liberal depredations might just require virtuous conservatives take up fascism in response. Straw man über alles. “If the left forces the issue and things get bad enough,” the right’s violent response is on them.

Democracy? Disposable. The rule of law also.

Black Lives protests against police violence left cites across the country in flames last summer and boarded up now. Thus, right wing violence is justified. The election was stolen from Donald Trump. Thus, storming the Capitol was justified, too. The right’s believers are uninterested in having the Carlsons and Greenes show us their proofs.

Sargent concludes:

If these folks recognize no obligation of any kind to remain tethered to reality in depicting the leftist threat however they see fit, then it’s a short leap to justifying anything in response to it. Which is the whole point.

Liberals made them do it. Thus saith the personal responsibility people.