198 search results for ""election integrity""

Q: When is an abortion ban not a ban?

A: When it’s dressed up as a 12-week limit.

“They’ve dressed this up as a 12-week ban, but it’s really not,” North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper (D) told CBS’ “Face the Nation” on Sunday. The GOP-controlled legislature, suddenly with supermajorities in both houses can, with no defections, pass SB 20 over Cooper’s expected veto.

“It will effectively ban many abortions altogether because of the obstacles they have created for women, for clinics, and for doctors,” Cooper told host Margaret Brennan. “This bill has nothing to do with making women safer.”

No more than Republican-sponsored “election integrity” measures are about safeguarding elections.

Democratic @NC_Governor Cooper explains why he believes the new abortion limits passed by the state's GOP-led legislature are too restrictive.

"It will effectively ban many abortions altogether because of the obstacles they have created for women, for clinics, and for doctors. pic.twitter.com/MbilpMytNA

— Face The Nation (@FaceTheNation) May 7, 2023

Politico:

“North Carolina has become an access point in the Southeast,” he told Brennan. “And what this legislation is going to do is going to prevent many women from getting abortions at any time during their pregnancy, because of the obstructions that they had put here. Many of these clinics are working very hard to treat women, and now they’re going to have many new medically unnecessary requirements that I think many of them are going to have to close.”

The devil is in the details. Under SB20, “patients who discover at 25 weeks that their fetus is developing without lungs or a brain, for example, would be forced to carry a non-viable fetus to term – an utterly barbaric barrier,” warns the nonpartisan advocacy group Carolina Forward:

Moreover, for women who do encounter abnormalities before 25 weeks, SB 20 dictates a long series of condescending and moralistic requirements euphemistically termed “informed consent.” Section 90-21.81D of SB 20 stipulates that doctors must tell women about the “unpredictable and variable lengths of life” with the abnormalities at stake, even if this is not medical fact. The doctor must offer referrals to multiple forms of (expensive) care to encourage her to continue with the pregnancy. The doctor must make a full report to the state Department of Health and Human Services.

Carolina Forward counts off the bureaucratic hurdles Cooper referenced:

• Requiring a consultation with a physician 72 hours before an abortion to be in person, not over the phone or remote.
• Requiring 3 separate visits to a doctor’s office for obtaining a medication abortion. Only 1 of these actually involves giving the medication.
• Requiring any abortion after the 12th week of pregnancy to take place in a hospital, instead of any outpatient facility. (This involves much higher costs and additional staffing and scheduling issues.)
• Inventing brand new licensure requirements for abortion facilities, with a long list of onerous fees, and a requirement that they be annually renewed. Those requirements will likely match those for ambulatory care centers, like emergency rooms, and would effectively close every abortion clinic in North Carolina.

We’ve seen this “find the ban” shell game before in other states. It’s not in the 12 weeks. It’s elsewhere in the bill. Originally the “Safe Surrender Infants/Safe Sleep Prog. Funds” bill, SB 20 became the “Safe Surrender Infants” bill, then the “Care for Women, Children, and Families Act,” then finally just “Abortion Laws” as it grew from 11 to 47 pages.

Here we go again. It seems as if every other election cycle or so for the past few decades has produced dreams of a centrist third party “unity” ticket that would appeal to all the Americans who say they want the partisan bickering in Washington to stop. The Beltway media gets excited at the idea of “the grown-ups” being in charge and the Big Money Boys lick their chops at the prospect of a party based entirely on their needs and their needs alone. This year it looks like the perennial group that calls itself No Labels has decided to throw a monkey wrench into our closely divided electoral college map and possibly send Donald Trump back to the White House in 2024 — in the name of unity, of course.

No Labels is already gathering signatures to get on the ballot and is trying to recruit a Democrat and a Republican to run as a bipartisan ticket. Joe Manchin D-W.V., Kirsten Sinema, D-Az., Susan Collins, R-Me., and former Maryland Governor Larry Hogan are the names mentioned most often. (At least they aren’t pulling former Democrat turned Independent pain in the neck Joe Lieberman out of mothballs for another run.)

The New Republic obtained a video the organization is showing to donors to illustrate why this ticket is needed.

“With the extremes on both sides dominating the primaries,” the video warns, “the two parties are on a path to nominating candidates most eligible voters will find unacceptable.” Above these words, the video shows photos of four political figures—in order of appearance, Donald Trump, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Bernie Sanders, and Elizabeth Warren.

The ad is bizarre, to say the least. No Labels may think Biden is too liberal but you simply can’t say he isn’t bipartisan. He managed to get through more major bipartisan legislation on infrastructure, climate change, domestic manufacturing, election integrity, gun safety than any president in recent memory. Is bipartisanship what they really want or are they more interested in preening about “unity” while lobbying under the table for corporate interests? It’s so off base that even the usually compatible centrist think tank Third Way has denounced this effort.

There have been these “centrist” movements for quite a while. I recall back in 2008 a big gathering at the University of Oklahoma led by Michael Bloomberg, then considering a third party run, who shared this stirring message:

“People have stopped working together, government is dysfunctional, there’s no collaborating and congeniality,” Bloomberg said to applause from the crowd.

Same old same old. In 2012, they really revved up with “Americans Elect” yet another dark money big donor group with the same agenda:

By its own account, the group is driven by civic-minded citizens who feel that moderates and independents have been disenfranchised by the tendency of the two parties play to their bases, especially in primaries, when independents cannot vote in many states.

No Labels was launched in 2010 when centrists like Joe Lieberman decided that President Barack Obama was failing to reach out to the Republicans and work toward common solutions to America’s problems. The fact that this was complete and utter nonsense (remember the Grand Bargain?) didn’t matter — there was money to be made and this group was going to get a place at the trough. The group was launched by a former Democratic fundraiser named Nancy Jacobson a noted “radical centrist” who got billionaire funders Michael Bloomberg and Andrew Tisch to sign big checks right away. They were the first of many although we don’t know exactly who they all are because it’s a dark money group that is not obliged to name its donors. But there have been reports of fundraising appeals made to everyone from David Koch to PayPal founder Peter Thiel to associates of George Soros. Considering the mission, I wouldn’t expect many liberal-minded billionaires to join up but I suppose you never know.

This year they are reported to have already gathered 70 million for a spoiler third-party presidential campaign. In our very closely contested, antiquated, and undemocratic electoral college this is just what the doctor ordered to give the Republicans another go at it.

It’s hard not to assume that’s the plan. Jacobson is married to shady pollster Mark Penn who was affiliated with the Clintons back in the day but has steadily become hostile to the Democratic Party over the years. Penn has been intimately involved with No Labels. One of his most famous contributions to their attempts at sabotage was back in 2017 during the Obamacare repeal attempt. As the Daily Beast reported at the time, Penn tweeted this inane bit of political advice:

The Democrats missed their chance to shape healthcare and let the Freedom Caucus be the key swing actor. Time to get off the sidelines.

I don’t know what he was smoking or drinking but the idea that the Freedom Caucus has ever been or ever will be a “key swing actor” is delusional. They would rather cripple their own agenda rather than ever compromise on anything. (And they have.) The notion that the Democrats should help them destroy the party’s signature health care plan has always been ridiculous, although many centrist types like Penn have argued for it from the beginning.

There are always third party gadflies in presidential races and they can have an effect. Ross Perot in 1992 arguably shifted the race to Bill Clinton and Green Party candidate Ralph Nader’s 94,000+ votes in Florida certainly cost Al Gore the White House in 2000. There’s an argument to be made that Green Party candidate Jill Stein’s run in 2016 made the difference in the electoral swing states that Donald Trump won narrowly. The stakes were high then but we can attribute that to the fact that like most of us, it was inconceivable to those voters that so many people would vote for the bizarre Donald Trump for president. I think most Americans have been properly schooled about that by now.

Well, except for these centrists who seem to be living in some kind of insular dream world where the electoral college isn’t closely divided and the stakes aren’t monumental. To compare Trump and Biden when Trump is currently under indictment and likely to be indicted in several more cases, after having incited an insurrection is daft. What’s Biden’s crime? Passing too much bipartisan legislation and not paying off porn stars?

This is nothing more than sabotage and it couldn’t come at a worse time. Let’s hope it fizzles like these centrist third party bids have done in the past. Let them meddle somewhere else. We don’t have the luxury of indulging another high-dollar, dark money vanity project right now.  

Reactionaries are playing for keeps in the provinces

Under the guise of “election integrity,” Republican secretaries of state held a two-day conference in Washington in February to discuss efforts to restrict voter access to the ballot box. The watchdog group Documented shared documents from the Heritage Foundation-sponsored event with the Guardian.

“A list of attendees namechecks the chief election officials of Indiana, Florida, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, Tennessee, Virginia and West Virginia,” write Ed Pilkington and Jamie Corey:

The keynote speech was given by Ken Blackwell, former secretary of state in Ohio. He was an early adopter of Trump’s lie about rigged elections, championing the idea in the 2016 presidential race which Trump won.

Blackwell now chairs the Center for Election Integrity at the America First Policy Institute, a rightwing thinktank led by former Trump officials. The center has been touting election-related model legislation.

Heritage was careful to organize the conference amid tight secrecy. Among the records obtained by Documented is an email from Hans von Spakovsky, a lawyer at the foundation who leads their election work.

Responding to a query about the event from a Texas official, Von Spakovsky said: “There is no livestream. This is not a public event. It is a private, confidential meeting of the secretaries. I would rather you not send out a press release about it.”

Yeah, that Hans von Spakovsky.

The Public Interest Legal Foundation (Pilf) and the Honest Elections Project (HEP) joined Heritage in sponsoring the event.

Pilf “sues election officials to force them to purge voter rolls,” Pilkington and Corey write, while HEP “is a conservative dark-money group closely tied to the Republican operative Leonard Leo who was instrumental in engineering the current conservative supermajority on the US supreme court.”

Speakers were a who’s-who of GOP “election denial and voter suppression” promoters.

Heritage has updated the “election fraud database” it once called a voter fraud database. When last I looked, it padded out its list of 1,088 citations with cases dating back to 1948. As I wrote in 2018, any and all varieties of election rigging, registration fraud, vote-buying, even ballot petition fraud are lumped together under the rubric of voter fraud (which they use interchangeably with election fraud). Perhaps embarrassed by that 1948 citation, their update contains 1,422 stretching back only to 1982, a period in which billions of votes have been cast.

Listen, the left in this country needs to get serious about taking on these people. They mean to reduce the Constitution to a series of conservative preferences and to gut the rest. There is a war on, and not the civil war armed MAGA lunatics thirst for. This one is led by people in ties. It is happening quietly in the states and behind closed doors by Americans in birth certificate only.

Heather Cox Richardson hits some of the lowlights:

Since the 2020 election, Republican-dominated states have passed “election reform” measures that restrict the vote; those efforts are ongoing. On Thursday alone, the Texas Senate advanced a number of new restrictions. In the wake of high turnout among Generation Z Americans, who were born after 1996 and are more racially and ethnically diverse than their elders, care deeply about reproductive and LGBTQ rights, and want the government to do more to address society’s ills, Republican legislatures are singling out the youth vote to hamstring.

That determination to silence younger Americans is playing out today in Tennessee, where a school shooting on March 28 in Nashville killed six people, including three 9-year-olds. The shooting has prompted protesters to demand that the legislature honor the will of the people by addressing gun safety, but instead, Republicans in the legislature have moved to expel three Democratic lawmakers who approached the podium without being recognized to speak—a breach of House rules—and led protesters in chants calling for gun reform. As Republicans decried the breach by Representatives Gloria Johnson, Justin Jones, and Justin Pearson, protestors in the galleries called out, “Fascists!”

Richardson hears echoes of the backlash to Reconstruction. Today’s MAGA Republicans “reject the principles that underpin democracy, including the ideas of equality before the law and separation of church and state, and instead want to impose Christian rule on the American majority.” And while progressives fuss about Donald Trump, Jim Jordan and Marjorie Taylor Greene, conservative extremists with lower profiles are busily at work on Jim Crow 2.0 and worse.

Their conviction that American “tradition” focuses on patriarchy rather than equality is a dramatic rewriting of our history, and it has led to recent attacks on LGBTQ Americans. In Kansas today, the legislature overrode Democratic governor Laura Kelly’s veto of a bill banning transgender athletes who were assigned male at birth from participating in women’s sports. Kansas is the twentieth state to enact such a policy, and when it goes into effect, it will affect just one youth in the state.

Yesterday, Idaho governor Brad Little signed a law banning gender-affirming care for people under 18, and today Indiana governor Eric Holcomb did the same.

Meanwhile, Republican-dominated states are so determined to ignore the majority they are also trying to make it harder for voters to challenge state laws through ballot initiatives. Alice MIranda Ollstein and Megan Messerly of Politico recently wrote about how, after voters in a number of states overrode abortion bans through ballot initiatives, legislatures in Arkansas, Florida, Idaho, Missouri, North Dakota, Ohio, and Oklahoma are now debating ways to make it harder for voters to get measures on the ballot, sometimes even specifying that abortion-related measures are not eligible for ballot challenges.

They are serious. They take a long view. They are committed. Are we?

More self-serving outrage from the GOP

Without getting overly wonky here, I’ve studied the Electronic Registration Information Centers (ERIC) efforts at voter roll maintenance for several years.

Multiple red states in recent weeks have exited the ERIC network. The consortium of over two dozen states (it was over 30) share voter registration data in a coordinated effort to eliminate multi-state registrants, to identify registrants who have moved within and between states, to identify those who have died, and to identify people who vote in more than one state in an election.

There seem to be quite a few of the last group in Florida, one of several red states that exited ERIC last week.

Readers who remember Kansas’ Kris Kobach’s defunct Interstate Crosscheck system and its history of bad data matching, take note. Originally a project of The Pew Charitable Trusts, ERIC is what Interstate Crosscheck purported to be and was not. Kobach’s real project was not election integrity but promoting the notion that voter fraud was widespread and photo IDs necessary to combating the phantom menace. Republicans loved it.

The Washington Post Editorial Board this morning reflects on the red states now exiting ERIC in the wake of last year’s “expose” by The Gateway Pundit. The three-part posting alleged that George Soros was behind ERIC’s “left-wing plot to add more racial minorities to the voter rolls,” the Board reports.

“If Republicans are serious about protecting election integrity and the rule of law, they’d celebrate ERIC,” the Board writes without irony:

The nonprofit association, which is led by its own members, formed in 2012 after a report showed that one in eight voter registrations across the country were no longer valid. Four of the seven charter members were Republican-led states. By last year, 34 states plus D.C. had joined — including the six tightest presidential battlegrounds. The system compiles voter participation records from member states along with change-of-address records from the U.S. Postal Service and death records from the Social Security Administration. The pooling of information has identified more than 11.5 million people who have moved across state lines and over 60 million potential voters who are unregistered.

It’s that last ERIC function, identifying potentially eligible but unregistered voters (EBUs), that now gives Republicans heartburn. It’s barely a footnote in ERIC’s contract with member states that every two years they agree to send postcards (not voter registration forms or ballots, as righties will allege) to EBUs with information on how to register to vote if they are eligible. ERIC provides the EBU targeting lists; the states do the rest. (While Democrats are still sending people with clipboards to streetcorners and farmers’ markets.)

Not one politician I’ve talked to about ERIC had any idea about the voter registation component if they were even aware of ERIC.

When Florida joined the system in 2019, Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) touted ERIC’s ability to keep the state’s voter rolls up to date and boasted that “it will increase voter participation.” Last summer, Mr. DeSantis touted the system by name as a critical tool in his efforts to prosecute anyone who illegally voted. The Office of Election Crimes and Security, which Mr. DeSantis created, said in a January report that ERIC had identified more than 1,000 voters who might have cast ballots in Florida and another member state.

As I’ve noted, Florida mailed 2.2 million ERIC postcards in 2020. A couple of studies (2013 and 2020) have shown the mailings result in a roughly 1% rise in voter registration and a 0.9% increase in voter turnout. (Sound small?) That is what Republicans really object to.

With MAGA dominating the GOP and with 2024 elections already percolating, Republicans wanting to position themselves as MAGA darlings contend that there is something deeply nefarious about the very voter list efforts they celebrated until recently.

The Post concludes:

The attacks on the database aren’t really about ERIC. They’re part of a broader, multiyear campaign to bully elections officials. Demagogues have planted seeds of doubt in the minds of Americans that their votes don’t count. Now many of these same people are trying to destroy one of the country’s best tools for fighting the rare cases of voter fraud that do occur.

Conservatives don’t want the wrong people to vote. Never have.

Update: Noted the contrast between how ERIC works and how Democrats register voters.

Like so many others, he couldn’t completely do the right thing.

The Washington Post reports:

Nearly a year after the 2020 election, Arizona’s then-attorney general Mark Brnovich launched an investigation into voting in the state’s largest county that quickly consumed more than 10,000 hours of his staff’s time.

Investigators prepared a report in March 2022 stating that virtually all claims of error and malfeasance were unfounded, according to internal documents reviewed by The Washington Post. Brnovich, a Republican, kept it private.

In April, the attorney general — who was running in the GOP primary for a U.S. Senate seat —released an “Interim Report” claiming that his office had discovered “serious vulnerabilities.” He left out edits from his own investigators refuting his assertions.

His office then compiled an “Election Review Summary” in September that systematically refuted accusations of widespread fraud and made clear that none of the complaining parties — from state lawmakers to self-styled “election integrity” groups — had presented any evidence to support their claims. Brnovich left office last month without releasing the summary.

That timeline emerges from documents released to The Post this week by Brnovich’s successor, Kris Mayes, a Democrat. She said she considered the taxpayer-funded investigation closed and, earlier this month, notified leaders on Maricopa County’s governing board that they were no longer in the state’s crosshairs.

The records show how Brnovich used his office to further claims about voting in Maricopa County that his own staff considered inaccurate. They suggest that his administration privately disregarded fact-checks provided by state investigators while publicly promoting incomplete accounts of the office’s work. The innuendo and inaccuracies, circulated not just in the far reaches of the internet but with the imprimatur of the state’s attorney general, helped make Arizona an epicenter of distrust in the democratic process, eroding confidence not just in the 2020 vote but in subsequent elections.

The documents — two investigative summaries and a draft letter with edits, totaling 41 pages — are far from an exhaustive record of Brnovich’s investigation. But they fill in details about the sometimes-enigmatic actions of the state’s former top law enforcement officer.

Brnovich did not respond to questions about his conduct of the probe, his decision not to release additional documents or differences between his public statements and his office’s private findings.

Brnovich quickly affirmed then-President Trump’s loss in Arizona in November 2020, angering fellow Republicans. And he went on to resist Trump’s efforts to overturn the vote. Yet he flirted with claims of fraud as he courted GOP support over the subsequent two years, trumpeting his interim report on a far-right radio show and saying, “It’s frustrating for all of us, because I think we all know what happened in 2020.” It was only in the final days before the November 2022 midterm election, several months after Brnovich had lost his Senate primary, that he began to denounce politicians who denied Trump’s defeat, calling them “clowns” engaged in a “giant grift.”

This is what passes for integrity in the GOP these days — only lying a little bit, maybe leaving some stuff out, not completely joining in the fantasies and conspiracies. That makes him a hero? It’s nice that in the final few days before the election he said some things condemning the massive pile of wingnut horseshit in Arizona. But I’m sorry — he gets no medals. He’s still a coward.

Will DeSantis hold a press conference surrounded by his election police force?

Nope, sorry:

All four residents of The Villages charged with voting twice in the 2020 election have now admitted to the crime, court records show.

John Rider, 62, recently entered into a pre-trial intervention program that will allow him to avoid potential prison time if he successfully completes court-ordered requirements and refrains from violating the law.

Rider acknowledged his guilt as part of the agreement with prosecutors.

“The Parties agree that the first step in rehabilitation is to the admission of his wrongdoing,” the contract states.

Rider indicated in court papers that he plans to “buy out” his requirement of completing 50 hours of community service at a cost of $10 per hour.

Three other residents of The Villages accused of voting twice signed similar pretrial intervention contracts last year.

All four were facing a maximum of five years in prison if a jury convicted them of a third-degree felony.

As part of their agreements with the state, Joan Halstead, Charles Barnes and Jay Ketcik were required to complete a 12-week adult civics class based on the textbook “We the People; the Citizen and the Constitution.”

Under the pretrial intervention contracts, prosecution of the defendants will be deferred for a period of 18 months, with the possibility that it will be permanently deferred if they successfully complete the court-ordered requirements.

Florida’s secretary of state first learned about three of the alleged double voting cases after receiving anonymous emails from a self-described “citizen election integrity analyst.”

Wait. You can “buy out” your community service in Florida? How convenient for people with money.

These people all voted for Trump twice, by the way. But it’s fine. They only arrest and try Black people for this kind of crime in Florida. White Republicans just take a class and “buy out” their sentence.

Next Florida will mandate yellow WOKE badges

Woke is a four-letter word, a conservative all-purpose epithet as meaningless as the f-word.

“You woking wokers get that woking thing out of my woking sight!”

Meaningless or not, it serves Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’s purposes: to divide and inflame. Republican politicians, conservative pundits, and Fox News anchors attach their slur to anyone to the left of submitting to them on their knees.

Writing in Roll Call, Mary C. Curtis  believes the term’s vagueness in Florida’s “Stop Woke Act” is deliberate.  DeSantis means to erase Black history without expressly erasing Black history.

A federal judge ruling on the act in November stated that Florida’s actions strike “at the heart of ‘open-mindedness and critical inquiry.’” By so doing, “the State of Florida has taken over the ‘marketplace of ideas’ to suppress disfavored viewpoints.”

If you have to ask, “disfavored by whom?” you might be part of the problem.

The Florida Department of Education rejected the College Board’s AP African American studies course as “inexplicably contrary to Florida law and significantly lacks educational value.” Its use of “inexplicably” is telling. Florida has no idea what’s objectionable about it. Vagueness in the “Stop Woke Act” is a feature, not a bug. DeSantis “has mastered this dark art.”

The vagueness of rules enforced by his “election integrity” task force in the wake of an amendment voters passed to restore voting rights to ex-felons is also deliberate. Even law enforcement officers are “puzzled about the details of the law the terrified, targeted citizens were supposed to have broken,” Curtis explains:

Charges may have been dropped in most cases, but do you think minority folks with a former brush with the law would risk another by voting?

Call it a pattern of intimidation by obfuscation.

First it was non-white voters. Now it is teachers. DeSantis is banning books in schools; teachers are covering up or removing classroom libraries. Which books will earn teachers death threats? Or “up to five years in prison and a $5,000 fine“? Who can say?

Now, many school librarians who stuck it out are confused about which books and magazines they are allowed to order, especially when lawmakers, citizen panels, school board members, loud parents and occasionally people without a child in the school or community have the final say.

So, they’ve stopped. No new books for school libraries that need them, for students who present lists of titles they are eager to read. Will discouraged young people give up on reading altogether when they can’t see themselves in literature, when they are denied anything that might excite them or introduce them to something surprising?

Janai Nelson, president and director-counsel of the Legal Defense Fund (LDF), writes in the New York Times:

Mr. DeSantis’s “Stop WOKE” law relegates the study of the experiences of Black people to a prohibited category. The canceling of any students’ access to accurate, truthful education that reflects their diverse identities and that of their country should chill every American. Not only do these laws offend First Amendment freedoms of speech and expression; to the extent they harm certain groups on the basis of race, gender or other protected status, they also violate principles of equal protection. And they are a chilling precursor to state-sponsored dehumanization of an entire race of people.

That is just what DeSantis is selling, and white supporters love him for it. He’s running for president on it.

The commissars are in charge now in Florida, writes Tom Nichols in The Atlantic:

Florida’s governor, Ron DeSantis, has set out to ruin one of Florida’s public colleges. He’s appointed several board members to the ideologically progressive New College of Florida with, apparently, a mandate to somehow rebuild it and thus save it from its dreaded wokeification. Helpfully for the cause of screwing up a college, most of the new overseers aren’t from Florida and don’t live there; one of them, in fact, is Christopher Rufo, a young man from the Manhattan Institute who has no actual experience in higher education but does have a genuine talent for rhetoric that he seems to have gained at the Soviet Higher Institute of Pedagogy somewhere in Moscow or Leningrad circa 1970.

Bristling at criticism from the Harvard professor Steven Pinker, Rufo fired back on social media. “We’re in charge now,” he tweeted, adding that his goal was “constitutionally-mandated democratic governance, to correct the ideological corruption of *public universities.*”

As they would have said during those old Party meetings: The comrade’s remarks about implementing the just and constitutional demands of the People to improve ideological work in our educational collectives and remove corruption from the ranks of our teaching cadres were met with prolonged, stormy applause.

Education itself is now in the right’s crosshairs. Florida could pass a constitutional amendment tomorrow to abolish state universities. “There’s no national right to a college education, and if Florida wants to unleash a battalion of Guy Montags on its own state colleges and their libraries—well, that’s up to the voters.” But the “Sovietization of the New College” is about more:

Something has changed on the American right, which is now seized with a hostility toward higher education that is driven by cultural resentment, and not by “critical race theory” or any of the other terms that most Americans don’t even understand. College among conservatives has become a kind of shorthand for identifying with all kinds of populist grievances, a ploy used even by Republicans with Ivy League educations as a means of cozying up to its non-college-educated and resentful base.

GOP attitudes about education have changed fast. As recently as 2015, most Republicans, by a wide margin, thought of universities as a positive influence on the United States. Four years later, those numbers flipped, and nearly 60 percent of Republicans saw universities as having a negative impact on the country.

The world is complex. Its problems complex. Its history more nuanced than Bible stories and fables. Right-wing distrust of “experts” and elites stems from an inability to cope with that complexity. A bonfire is simpler. Burn it all down and start over.

First books. Then democracy.

UPDATE: It’s not just Florida.

The UNC Board of Trustees passed a resolution on Thursday to “accelerate” the creation of the School for Civic Life and Leadership.

Faculty Chairperson Mimi Chapman said the faculty had no involvement in the creation of the resolution.https://t.co/ncJsvUzxuZ

— The Daily Tar Heel (@dailytarheel) January 31, 2023

The Daily Tar Heel:

“The board doesn’t have any ability to propose a class, to propose a degree, or — for God’s sake — to propose a school,” Holden Thorp, who served as UNC’s chancellor from 2008 to 2013, said.

He said the BOT’s resolution is an example of the “worst governance” he thinks he’s ever seen.

Mimi Chapman, chairperson of faculty, said she was “flabbergasted” in response to the exclusion of faculty input in the decision, which she said she considers to be an attack on shared University governance. 

[…]

Chapman said she thinks the School is opportunity for donors to fund programs against what they perceive is the indoctrination of liberal ideology at the University — a phenomenon that Chapman said she doesn’t believe exists.

The “dogma” that higher education is submitting to progressive politics is unfounded, Chapman said.  

“I absolutely disagree with that,” Chapman said. “I do not think that is true in any way, shape or form.”

This would be the same outfit that denied tenure to UNC alum Nikole Hannah-Jones who won a Pulitzer for the “1619 Project,” now a docuseries on Hulu:

In April 2021, Ms. Hannah-Jones was announced as the Knight Chair in Race and Investigative Journalism at the university’s Hussman School of Journalism and Media. She was offered a five-year contract as a professor instead of the usual tenured position, and her appointment drew criticism from conservatives who took issue with her involvement in The Times’s 1619 Project, which re-examined slavery in the United States.

The university’s failure to approve Ms. Hannah-Jones’s tenure drew intense backlash from faculty and students, as well as academics and journalists outside the school. Ms. Hannah-Jones said she was considering legal action on claims of discrimination. Under pressure, the board of trustees backtracked and granted her tenure a month later.

Ms. Hannah-Jones, who received a master’s degree at U.N.C. in 2003, then announced that she would no longer be joining the university and would instead join the faculty of Howard University.

2024 is on the ballot in 2022

Posts in my space will be brief the next couple of days.

If you have not, please, please, get your butts (and/or your ballots) to the polls tomorrow. There is much to do and a better tomorrow to secure locally and nationally. One with a fairer economy, a stronger social safety net, better health care, and a healthier environment.

People worried about the prospects for violence during early voting, but there is nothing to report from my county. The usual hiccups, but nothing much more than last-minute lines on Saturday. Good to see, better late, etc.

“This is not a normal election,” The Washington Post’s lead editorial declares.

No kidding? Early vote totals already exceed the 2018 midterms. Things could go either way for Democrats.

Do you think Democrats will hold the state Supreme Court, a local judge asked me on Saturday. It depends not only on how many vote, but on how. If voters come out of the polling place after five minutes, they didn’t vote all the down-ballot races. If they come out after 15, they likely did.

The Washington Post Editorial Board reports in a new poll that people are worried about the prospects of more political violence in our future. “Nearly 9 in 10 reported they are somewhat or very concerned. Federal authorities warned last week that a broad range of potential targets, such as ideological opponents and election workers, might be at risk following the vote, particularly if losing candidates claim election fraud.”

Republicans are sure to do so. Their asymmetric war on the foundations of the republic proceeds apace.

Democrats warn that a raft of governmental features that make America America are on the 2022 ballot tomorrow. In fact, the 2024 election is on the ballot tomorrow:

There is no need to overstate the threat; widespread early voting has so far proceeded mostly without incident, and it is imperative that Americans are not scared away from the polls. That requires leaders at all levels of government to assure that voting and vote-counting proceed smoothly — and for voters themselves to recognize that this election matters, more than many others in the past, and to be sure to show up.

In deciding whether and how to vote, Americans should keep the fundamentals in mind, supporting candidates committed to the democratic system and the peaceful transfer of power, and opposing those who have tried to profit from toxic lies about election integrity. Otherwise, those who stoke unfounded suspicions and widen divisions might prevail. This would encourage others to mimic them. It would also hand over critical elements of the machinery of democracy to election deniers in advance of the 2024 presidential race.

It’s important to understand that this election, in these times, is not normal.

The stakes are higher than where the top marginal tax rate might end up, what kinds of judges get confirmed or even the size of government. The past two elections have not been normal, and this one is not, either.

https://twitter.com/AnandWrites/status/1589599709563613185?s=20&t=hGcODFIvll3krHJMroI7zA

The Post found nearly 300 election deniers on the ballot in 48 of 50 states. That is, Republicans who once pitched hissy fits about flag pins and salutes now are simply going through the motions of elections to offices they plan to declare theirs, whatever voters decide, as if by divine right. They pledge their allegiance to a republic for which their party cult no longer stands. They will get their way, or else.

Nice republic ya got there. A shame if you couldn’t keep it.

Don’t forget to vote your entire ballot!

● ● ● ● ● ● ● ●

Please go vote and take family and friends.

It’s red for a reason

Hey fellow Virginia friends – especially you suckers who voted for him. God. How embarrassing. https://t.co/B5qoS04Qej

— JoPete 🟧🌻 (@jpc0621) October 24, 2022

So-called Virginia moderate Glenn Youngkin betrayed his true nasty MAGA self yesterday and otherwise during this campaign. He’s fully bought in on Trumpism. Karen Tumulty who has previously held out hope that he could be a harbinger of slightly less awful post-Trump Republican politics has had enough. After yesterday, she realizes there is no hope:

I’d like to take this opportunity to retract the nice things I said about Glenn Youngkin a few months ago.

In July, I wrote a column when reports began to surface that Virginia’s Republican governor, a fresh and sunny political newcomer with proven bipartisan appeal, was already thinking about running for president.

At the time, I expressed hope that Youngkin — or someone like him — would seek the GOP nomination in 2024. His stunning 2021 victory in blue-ish Virginia showed that there might still be room in the Republican Party for a different model of politician, one who could run as a unifying alternative to Donald Trump’s venomous brand.

Optimist that I am, I still hope that a tribune of sanity will emerge in the Republican Party. But the everydad in the fleece vest probably isn’t that guy. When a situation this week called for expressing a modicum of human decency, Youngkin — who frequently talks about his religious values — showed he could rival the former president at diving for the gutter.

As news was breaking Friday about the horrific attack on House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s husband, Paul, by an intruder in their San Francisco home, Youngkin happened to be campaigning in Stafford, Va., for Yesli Vega, the Republican running in a very tight race against Democratic Rep. Abigail Spanberger.

“Speaker Pelosi’s husband, they had a break-in last night in their house, and he was assaulted. There’s no room for violence anywhere,” Youngkin said.

Alas, he didn’t stop there.

“But we’re going to send her back to be with him in California,” the governor said. As the crowd cheered, Youngkin doubled down: “That’s what we’re going to go do. That’s what we’re going to go do.”

Set aside the fact that his joke, if that’s what you can call it, showed a lack of understanding of basic civics and geography. Pelosi is in Washington because she has been elected for the past 35 years by the voters of California. This has nothing to do with anybody in Virginia.

What made Youngkin’s riff not only tasteless but also dangerous is that he was not referring to some random act of “violence anywhere.” The attack on Paul Pelosi was a direct product of the toxic political culture — a culture that the governor was helping to cultivate for what he apparently sees as a political opportunity.

Evidence now indicates that the assailant who beat Pelosi with a hammer, sending the 82-year-old to the hospital with a skull fracture and serious injuries to his arm and hands, had broken into the Pelosi home because he was looking for the speaker herself. Nancy Pelosi has been demonized for years by Republicans, including in countless GOP campaign ads. The attacker’s reported shouts of “Where is Nancy?” were a chilling echo of the Jan. 6, 2021, rioters’ cries as they tried to hunt her down in the corridors of the Capitol.

Being a jerk about Pelosi is not the only Youngkin action of late that betrays who he really is and what he is willing to do in service of his ambition. During his campaign for governor, he managed a tricky balancing act on the election denialism that has gripped his party. He promised to put “election integrity” at the top of his priorities in office — indulging the lie that fraud is rampant — but also acknowledged Joe Biden’s 2020 victory and called the Jan. 6 insurrection “a real blight on our democracy.” And, notably, he kept Trump at a distance.

But more recently, Youngkin is being seen with the worst people in his party. A little over a week ago, he stumped in Arizona for GOP gubernatorial nominee Kari Lake, one of the loudest of those 2020 deniers and someone who has refused to say whether she will accept the results of this year’s election. He called her “awesome,” and she declared him a “total rock star.”

Asked on CNN about his plans to campaign with Lake, Youngkin replied: “I think that the Republican Party has to be a party where we are not shunning people and excluding them, because we don’t agree on everything.” In other words, Youngkin thinks it’s fine to undermine democracy in the cause of lower taxes and school choice.

The governor remains popular in Virginia, with a recent poll showing his approval at 55 percent and most of his constituents saying the state is moving in the right direction. But the commonwealth limits its governors to one consecutive term, which means, come 2024, he will be looking for a new job.

No apologies will be forthcoming:

asked by Greta Van Susteren if he wants a "do over" for his comments callously attacking Nancy Pelosi today, Glenn Youngkin refuses to apologize pic.twitter.com/Fvm6Yz4Ips

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) October 28, 2022

Old Glenn of the red fleece vest (which he never seems to take off) can run for president all he wants. He won’t win, no matter how much he kisses up to Trump and his flock. He’s really running for VP but I can’t see how he brings anything to the table. Trump has a whole slew of courtiers seeking his favor and he can’t compete with the likes of Kristi Noem and Kari Lake.

Is “status anxiety” supposed to excuse their anti-social behavior?

Let’s offer up a nice rationalization for why people are behaving like animals, shall we? They can’t help it. They’re just upset that they have to share the world with people who don’t look and think like them. Poor guys.

When Representative Troy Nehls of Texas voted last year to reject Donald J. Trump’s electoral defeat, many of his constituents back home in Fort Bend County were thrilled.

Like the former president, they have been unhappy with the changes unfolding around them. Crime and sprawl from Houston, the big city next door, have been spilling over into their once bucolic towns. (“Build a wall,” Mr. Nehls likes to say, and make Houston pay.) The county in recent years has become one of the nation’s most diverse, where the former white majority has fallen to just 30 percent of the population.

Don Demel, a 61-year-old salesman who turned out last month to pick up a signed copy of a book by Mr. Nehls about the supposedly stolen election, said his parents had raised him “colorblind.” But the reason for the discontent was clear: Other white people in Fort Bend “did not like certain people coming here,” he said. “It’s race. They are old-school.”

A shrinking white share of the population is a hallmark of the congressional districts held by the House Republicans who voted to challenge Mr. Trump’s defeat, a New York Times analysis found — a pattern political scientists say shows how white fear of losing status shaped the movement to keep him in power.

The portion of white residents dropped about 35 percent more over the last three decades in those districts than in territory represented by other Republicans, the analysis found, and constituents also lagged behind in income and education. Rates of so-called deaths of despair, such as suicide, drug overdose and alcohol-related liver failure, were notably higher as well.

Although overshadowed by the assault on the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, the House vote that day was the most consequential of Mr. Trump’s ploys to overturn the election. It cast doubt on the central ritual of American democracy, galvanized the party’s grass roots around the myth of a stolen victory and set a precedent that legal experts — and some Republican lawmakers — warn could perpetually embroil Congress in choosing a president.

To understand the social forces converging in that historic vote — objecting to the Electoral College count — The Times examined the constituencies of the lawmakers who joined the effort, analyzing census and other data from congressional districts and interviewing scores of residents and local officials. The Times previously revealed the back-room maneuvers inside the House, including convincing lawmakers that they could reject the results without explicitly endorsing Mr. Trump’s outlandish fraud claims.

Many of the 139 objectors, including Mr. Nehls, said they were driven in part by the demands of their voters. “You sent me to Congress to fight for President Trump and election integrity,” Mr. Nehls wrote in a tweet on Jan. 5, 2021, “and that’s exactly what I am doing.” At a Republican caucus meeting a few days later, Representative Bill Johnson, from an Ohio district stretching into Appalachia, told colleagues that his constituents would “go ballistic” with “raging fire” if he broke with Mr. Trump, according to a recording.

Certain districts primarily reflect either the racial or socioeconomic characteristics. But the typical objector district shows both — a fact demographers said was striking.

Because they are more vulnerable, disadvantaged or less educated white voters can feel especially endangered by the trend toward a minority majority, said Ashley Jardina, a political scientist at George Mason University who studies the attitudes of those voters.

“A lot of white Americans who are really threatened are willing to reject democratic norms,” she said, “because they see it as a way to protect their status.”

I’m sorry, but what exactly are the Democrats supposed to do about this? They are already the party that passes policies to help people and offer opportunity in their economic circumstances. They are the party of the working man and woman and they protect the social safety net, lower prescription drugs prices, offer affordable health care. etc. So it’s not that. It’s the other thing.

Are Democrats supposed to adopt their racist attitudes? Excuse them? Take punitive actions against immigrants and people of color. Withdraw their support for women’s rights? Guess what? They already tried that. It didn’t work.

Lincoln understood this:

The question recurs, what will satisfy them? Simply this: We must not only let them alone, but we must somehow, convince them that we do let them alone. This, we know by experience, is no easy task. We have been so trying to convince them from the very beginning of our organization, but with no success. In all our platforms and speeches we have constantly protested our purpose to let them alone; but this has had no tendency to convince them. Alike unavailing to convince them, is the fact that they have never detected a man of us in any attempt to disturb them.

These natural, and apparently adequate means all failing, what will convince them? This, and this only: cease to call slavery wrong, and join them in calling it right. And this must be done thoroughly – done in acts as well as in words. Silence will not be tolerated – we must place ourselves avowedly with them. Senator Douglas’ new sedition law must be enacted and enforced, suppressing all declarations that slavery is wrong, whether made in politics, in presses, in pulpits, or in private. We must arrest and return their fugitive slaves with greedy pleasure. We must pull down our Free State constitutions. The whole atmosphere must be disinfected from all taint of opposition to slavery, before they will cease to believe that all their troubles proceed from us.

There is no appeasing them because they insist on dominating others — and forcing them to agree with them. If they don’t they are the enemy.