198 search results for ""election integrity""

How do democracies collapse? By inattention as much as anything else. And by tuning out, cautions elections expert Rick Hasen. He reviews the litany of Republican efforts to subvert democratic processes in the various states, and recommends actions, not words, that might arrest our democratic backsliding (New York Times):

Here are the three principles that should guide action supporting democratic institutions and the rule of law going forward. To begin with, Democrats should not try to go it alone in preserving free and fair elections. Some Democrats, like Marc Elias, one of the leading Democratic election lawyers, are willing to write off the possibility of finding Republican partners because most Republicans have failed to stand up to Mr. Trump, and even those few Republicans who have do not support Democrats’ broader voting rights agenda, such as passage of the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act. Flying solo is a big mistake. Democrats cannot stop the subversion of 2024 election results alone, particularly if Democrats do not control many statehouses and either house of Congress when Electoral College votes are counted on Jan. 6, 2025. Why believe that any legislation passed only by Democrats in 2022 would stop subversive Republican action in 2024? A coalition with the minority of Republicans willing to stand up for the rule of law is the best way to try to erect barriers to a stolen election in 2024, even if those Republicans do not stand with Democrats on voting rights or other issues. Remember it took Republican election officials, elected officials, and judges to stand up against an attempted coup in 2020. Other Republicans may find it in their self-interest to work with Democrats on anti-subversion legislation. Senator Minority Whip John Thune recently signaled that his party may support a revision of the Electoral Count Act, the old, arcane rules Congress uses to certify state Electoral College votes. While Mr. Trump unsuccessfully tried to get his Republican vice president, Mike Pence, to throw the election to him or at least into chaos, Republicans know it will be Democratic vice president Kamala Harris, not Mr. Pence, who will be presiding over the Congress’s certification of Electoral College votes in 2025. Perhaps there is room for bipartisan agreement to ensure both that vice presidents don’t go rogue and that state legislatures cannot simply submit alternative slates of electors if they are unsatisfied with the election results. Reaching bipartisan compromise against election subversion will not stop Democrats from fixing voting rights or partisan gerrymanders on their own — the fate of those bills depend not on Republicans but on Democrats convincing Senators Manchin and Sinema to modify the filibuster rules. Republicans should not try to hold anti-election subversion hostage to Democrats giving up their voting agenda.

But they will if they value their political careers above their country. (Did I just answer the question I didn’t ask?) As I wrote earlier this morning, it is a mistake to lay the fate of our democracy (or blame for its collapse) on Manchin and/or Sinema alone. Any of the 50 Republicans in the Senate could come to the aid of their country. History will remember with disgust those who fail to. Republicans both in and out of office share blame for what comes next if we fail, just as Confederates did for the Civil War. Hasen recognizes the rest of us have a duty to the country as well:

Second, because law alone won’t save American democracy, all sectors of society need to be mobilized in support of free and fair elections. It is not just political parties that matter for assuring free and fair elections. It’s all of civil society: business groups, civic and professional organizations, labor unions and religious organizations all can help protect fair elections and the rule of law. Think, for example, of Texas, which in 2021 passed a new restrictive voting law. It has been rightly attacked for making it harder for some people to vote. But business pressure most likely helped kill a provision in the original version of the bill that would have made it much easier for a state court judge to overturn the results of an election. Business groups also refused to contribute to those members of Congress who after the insurrection objected on spurious grounds to Pennsylvania’s Electoral College votes for Mr. Biden. According to reporting by Judd Legum, “since Jan. 6, corporate PAC contributions to Republican objectors have plummeted by nearly two-thirds.” But some businesses are giving again to the objectors. Customers need to continue to pressure business groups to hold the line. Civil society needs to oppose those who run for office or seek appointment to run elections while embracing Trump’s false claims of a stolen election. Loyalty to a person over election integrity should be disqualifying.

Hasen is more optimistic about rank-and-file Republicans snapping out of it than I.

Finally, mass, peaceful organizing and protests may be necessary in 2024 and 2025. What happens if a Democratic presidential candidate wins in, say, Wisconsin in 2024, according to a fair count of the vote, but the Wisconsin legislature stands ready to send in an alternative slate of electors for Mr. Trump or another Republican based on unsubstantiated claims of voter fraud or other irregularities? These gerrymandered legislators may not respond to entreaties from Democrats, but they are more likely to respond to widespread public protests made up of people of good faith from across the political spectrum. We need to start organizing for this possibility now. The same applies if Kevin McCarthy or another Republican speaker of the House appears willing to accept rogue slates of electors sent in by state legislators — or if Democrats try to pressure Kamala Harris into assuming unilateral power herself to resolve Electoral College disputes. The hope of collective action is that there remains enough sanity in the center and commitment to the rule of law to prevent actions that would lead to an actual usurpation of the will of the people. If the officially announced vote totals do not reflect the results of a fair election process, that should lead to nationwide peaceful protests and even general strikes. One could pessimistically say that the fact that we even need to have this conversation about fair elections and rule of law in the United States in the 21st century is depressing and shocking. One could simply retreat into complacency. Or one could see the threats this country faces as a reason to buck up and prepare for the battle for the soul of American democracy that may well lay ahead. If Republicans have embraced authoritarianism or have refused to confront it, and Democrats in Congress cannot or will not save us, we must save ourselves.

One could also pessimistically say that Hasen, an academic, is likely not pleased to be on call for interviews about imminent threats to fair elections and rule of law in this country. But here we are. I’m not sure anyone can plan a mass protest years ahead. Those events, like the Women’s March or even the Stop the Steal rallies, tend to be more organic. They rely on immediate passions more than advance strategy to fuel them and make them in any way impactful. Still, I’ve had a pot and wooden spoon in the back of my car for a couple of years against the need presenting itself.

The Republicans have been caterwauling about “voter fraud” for years. It’s what made Trump’s Big Lie so easily believed by the GOP base — they have been warned it was going to happen by top GOP politicians and pundits on a loop and they just figured the commie-libs finally pulled it off.

This TPM piece looks at one of the mainstream legal luminaries who are working this problem and how they plan to exploit Trump’s Big Lie to finally achieve the goal they’ve been working toward for years:

After listening to every single episode of conservative election lawyer Cleta Mitchell’s podcast, “Who’s Counting?” a simple truth emerges: This isn’t about Donald Trump. 

Yes, you may know Mitchell for advising Trump on his efforts to overturn the 2020 election results in Georgia. (She chimed in frequently on the call in which Trump pressured Georgia’s secretary of state to “find” the votes he needed to win.) Trump also blurbed Mitchell’s podcast last month, saying that the show “exposes our Corrupt and Rigged voting systems.”  

But Mitchell also has institutional cred among conservatives that goes back decades, the kind of swing that can land you a post-insurrection seat on a government elections advisory board without much public fuss, even during the Biden administration. When Mitchell’s current home, the Conservative Partnership Institute, brought her on to lead its “Election Integrity Coalition” in March, it called her, archly, the “consigliere to the vast right-wing conspiracy.” 

And they didn’t mean the QAnon kind. CPI, the post-White House home of former Trump Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, is part of a web of deep-pocketed right-wing influence operations seeking to steer the Republican Party during the Trump Age. And Mitchell is all business: Conservatives, she says, need to spend their time and energy taking back control of America’s elections from a runaway left wing. 

“We’re going to take those election offices back, and we need you to help us,” Mitchell told listeners at the end of her first episode.

In an echo of Steve Bannon’s effort to install right-wingers at low-level election posts around the country, one repeated theme of Mitchell’s show is that listeners should get involved in their local elections — and, more specifically, that they should try to get hired to count ballots, not simply as volunteer observers.

Unlike Bannon, however, Mitchell’s influence extends well beyond Trump die-hards, into the real institutional funders of the American right, like The Bradley Foundation. Several of her podcast guests have professional connections to Mitchell through groups like the Public Interest Legal Foundation. In other words, when Mitchell speaks, there’s a decent chance she’s broadcasting the priorities of the GOP’s money men. 

“Most of us should have figured out in about the third grade kickball that if you get to make the rules, you get to pick who wins the game,” Scott Walter, president of the Capital Research Center and a guest on the show’s sixth episode, said during his appearance — describing Democrats, of course. 

“That’s true!” Mitchell beamed. 

To understand Mitchell’s position on the 2020 election, you need to understand what claims she’s actually made about the election. She asserts that there were more illegal ballots cast than the Biden margin of victory in multiple states. “I don’t think I would use the word stolen and I don’t think I have — but I do know that the left manipulated the process to pre-determine the outcome,” she told TPM via email.

She was also a key figure in the assertion that Fulton County, Georgia election workers “made everybody leave” a counting room on election night, giving them the opportunity to count thousands of illegal ballots.

The state looked into this and found no evidence that any improper ballots were scanned. And two election workers are suing an online publication that boosted the conspiracy theory for defamation. Mitchell, however, is still pushing the story.

“There are some who have watched it who say they’re running the same ballots through multiple times,” she said of the incident in her first podcast episode, which was released in October 2021. 

With other theories, though, she seems to draw a line.

On the question of whether Chinese hackers messed with American voting machines for example — a favorite of MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell — Mitchell said, “you can make yourself crazy doing that.” 

“We don’t have any proof of it,” agreed her guest, Wall Street Journal editorial board member Kim Strassel. 

But the pair ultimately split the difference, pursuing a strategy that old guard Republicans around the country have for the past year, seeking both to satiate Trump fans and deflect criticism for their attacks on voting rights: The policies we want are necessary because people believe Trump — regardless of the reality, the argument goes, they have taken Trump at his word that elections are corrupt.

“It is a very serious cause for alarm if citizens decide not to vote because they think their vote will not be counted due to all the irregularities and manipulation that the left has come up with over the past decade,” Mitchell told TPM.

That line of thinking — and the need to take action to dispel Republicans’ fears — crops up throughout the podcast. The post-election voting restrictions passed by Georgia Republicans, Strassel said, were necessary to ensure “integrity” and “faith in the system.” That, in turn, can “squash down these theories of Chinese hacking, because it just discourages people to go out in the end.” 

Mitchell went further, seemingly making the case for publicly challenging election results as an electoral strategy in itself. She recalled the case she made to the Republican establishment ahead of the January 2021 Georgia U.S. Senate elections. 

“I said, ‘People, if the Trump voters don’t see you walking barefoot across broken glass about what happened last Tuesday, number one, the Democrats are going to do it again, and number two, they’re not going to want to vote again.’” 

If the right-wing outrage over Trump’s election loss is ammunition, Mitchell and others on the establishment right are training their fire on typical bugaboos — requiring photo IDs, restricting mail-in and early voting — as well as some newer fixations, such as the hundreds of millions of dollars from Mark Zuckerberg that funded election offices’ efforts amid the pandemic. 

They’re also on high alert over Democrats’ attempt to expand voting rights at the federal level, in bills like the “For The People Act,” which, like all voting rights legislation, has hit a brick wall in the Senate filibuster. 

The bill would set national standards for things like voting by mail, automatic voter registration and redistricting. But to hear Mitchell describe it, Democrats are after nothing less than an authoritarian power grab. 

Democrats, she worried at one point, are saying to themselves, “We’re going to fix the elections so we put ourselves beyond the reach of the people.” 

The definition of “the people,” as always, is a bit fluid. Rudy Giuliani infamously said a few days after Trump’s 2020 loss that the incumbent had essentially won re-election, “if you take out Wayne county,” home to Detroit, a majority-Black city. Mitchell has repeatedly denied any racist intent in her push for election integrity — though she told The New Yorker in August that Democrats were “using Black voters as a prop to accomplish their political objectives.”

“It’s the large urban counties that we need to be worried about,” she told The Federalist’s Mollie Hemingway in the third episode of “Who’s Counting?”

And what’s the best way to keep an eye on those counties? Count their ballots, of course. Mitchell spoke several times in multiple podcast episodes about the need for Republicans to get behind the scenes as election volunteers, or, better yet, paid staffers.

“So you’re inside counting the ballots rather than outside with your nose pressed to the glass,” Mitchell told J. Christian Adams, a fellow election lawyer and a long-time booster of the myth of widespread “voter fraud,” with whom Mitchell has deep ties. 

Mitchell recalled drawing a figure of a bullseye for a grassroots organization to illustrate the point. 

Mitchell has been working these issues for years. She kept a low profile during the post-election period even as she was advising Trump, I suspect in order to keep some shred of credibility. She was pushed out of her law firm once her fellow lawyers saw that she was on Trump’s bogus calls to election officials in Georgia.

This is a serious right wing strategy. It’s not just about the Big Lie. It’s using the Big Lie to do what they have been building toward for 60 years.

Perhaps the most famous Republican election lawyer in the country, Ben Ginsberg, has different ideas. He is working with Bob Bauer, former WH Counsel under Obama, on a new group dedicated to defending elections officials from the likes of Cleta Mitchell:

​​”Election officials face an increasing wave of state laws subjecting them to criminal penalties for performing their professional duties, while at the same time facing threats of violence to themselves and their families. This comes in the wake of the 2020 election and its aftermath, despite that election being the most secure and transparent election in American history, with record turnout, during a global pandemic. These attacks on election officials, the referees in democracy, must be fought and election officials need to know they are not alone. The Election Officials Legal Defense Network will provide these public servants with the advice and protection they need, at no cost.”

Sadly, there aren’t many Ginsbergs out there. Most of the GOP legal community seems to be falling in line behind the Big Lie. That’s where the money is.

The standard retort to boys’ locker-room brags of sexual conquest is that those that talk about it the most do it the least. The same applies to those who toss around freedom and liberty the mostest and the loudest. That their flags (or their trucks) are the biggest does not make their support for this nation the sincerest.

What they defend using those words is, in fact, a particular social hierarchy that favors them and theirs, be it racial, religious or economic.

Jamelle Bouie cites the late historian of France, Tyler Stovall, who believed “that to its defenders hierarchy is a matter of freedom and liberty.” Specifically:

… it means that we should think of freedom in at least two ways: a freedom from domination and a freedom to dominate. In “White Freedom: The Racial History of an Idea,” Stovall shows how both are tied up in the history of race and racial thinking. In societies like those of the United States and republican France, he writes, “belief in freedom, specifically one’s entitlement to freedom, was a key component of white supremacy.” The more white one was, he continues, “the more free one was.”

This “white freedom” is not named as such because it is somehow intrinsic to people of European descent, but because it took its shape under conditions of explicit racial hierarchy, where colonialism and chattel slavery made clear who was free and who was not. For the men who dominated, this informed their view of what freedom was. Or, as the historian Edmund Morgan famously observed nearly 50 years ago in “American Slavery, American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia,” “The presence of men and women who were, in law at least, almost totally subject to the will of other men gave to those in control of them an immediate experience of what it could mean to be at the mercy of a tyrant.”

As an ideology, Stovall writes, white freedom meant both “control of one’s destiny” and the freedom to dominate and exclude. And the two moved hand in hand through the modern era, he argues, both here and abroad. In the United States during the early 19th century, for example, the right to vote became even more entangled with race than it had been. “Not only was suffrage extended to virtually all white men by the eve of the Civil War, thus breaking down traditional restrictions based on property and class, it was also and at the same time increasingly denied to those who were not white men,” Stovall writes. “The early years of America as a free and independent nation were thus a period when voting was more and more defined in racial terms.”

Today, what freedom means for those who shout it the loudest is “to be free to dominate” on the basis of traditional hierarchies. For others, it means to be from domination and hierarchy.

“We all declare for liberty,” Lincoln said in April 1864, “but in using the same word we do not all mean the same thing.”

With some, he continued, “the word liberty may mean for each man to do as he pleases with himself, and the product of his labor, while with others the same word may mean for some men to do as they please with other men, and the product of other men’s labor.”

That business should be free to do as it pleases unbothered by the needs and desires of workers, or by concern for their health, safety, and financial stability (or for equitable wages), is the animating force behind conservatives’ efforts to sustain and enforce the traditional hierarchies Lincoln described in the latter half of that statement. Neither does election integrity mean the same thing to all of us.

From the same Lincoln speech Bouie quotes:

“The shepherd drives the wolf from the sheep’s throat, for which the sheep thanks the shepherd as a liberator, while the wolf denounces him for the same act as the destroyer of liberty,” he said. 

Bouie concludes, “We all want freedom. The question is what we each want to do, for ourselves or to others, with it.”

But turning freedom and liberty into shibboleths leaves some of our neighbors mindlessly pursuing more for more’s sake. Because as Americans, we assume more is always better. More freedom. More liberty. But to do what? Or do they even think ahead that far?

“Many people would rather die than think; in fact, most do."
– Bertrand Russell

— John Fugelsang (@JohnFugelsang) December 17, 2021

Sen. Raphael Warnock (D) of Georgia addressed this week on the floor of the Senate its failure to defend voting rights. He questioned elevating bipartisanship into the same political firmament as freedom and liberty.

“When colleagues in this chamber talk to me about bipartisanship, which I believe in, I just have to ask, at whose expense? Who is being asked to foot the bill for this bipartisanship? And is liberty itself the cost?

“We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender …” — Winston Churchill

One thing there is to say about the people attempting to end this almost 250-year experiment in democratic self-rule: They are tenacious. Koch Brothers tenacious. George W. Bush wanting to be a “war president” tenacious. Benghazi tenacious. Coup-plotter tenacious.

The New York Times front-pages a story of how Trump loyalists fought not just to spread Trump’s stolen-election lie, but to press at anywhere they thought a soft spot in government where they might gain some advantage in Trump retaining power beyond January 20, 2021. Or else to throw sand into the gears.

Just after Christmas last year an unidentified number on the phone of the Justice Department’s Richard P. Donoghue turned out to be Rep. Scott Perry, a Pennsylvania Republican. Perry had “compiled a dossier of voter fraud allegations that the department needed to vet.” He was yet another obscure but loyal foot soldier pressing the president’s case with anyone who might listen and among a half dozen doing so:

The lawmakers — all of them members of the ultraconservative House Freedom Caucus — worked closely with the White House chief of staff, Mark Meadows, whose central role in Mr. Trump’s efforts to overturn a democratic election is coming into focus as the congressional investigation into Jan. 6 gains traction.

The men were not alone in their efforts — most Republican lawmakers fell in line behind Mr. Trump’s false claims of fraud, at least rhetorically — but this circle moved well beyond words and into action. They bombarded the Justice Department with dubious claims of voting irregularities. They pressured members of state legislatures to conduct audits that would cast doubt on the election results. They plotted to disrupt the certification on Jan. 6 of Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s victory.

Other names are more familiar: Jordan, Biggs, Gosar, Goehmert, Brooks.

Congressional Republicans have fought the Jan. 6 committee’s investigation at every turn, but it is increasingly clear that Mr. Trump relied on the lawmakers to help his attempts to retain power. When Justice Department officials said they could not find evidence of widespread fraud, Mr. Trump was unconcerned: “Just say that the election was corrupt + leave the rest to me and the R. Congressmen,” he said, according to Mr. Donoghue’s notes of the call.

The rest of the article chronicles steps the group took along with Trump’s dye-drenched attorney, Rudy Giuliani, and Team Kraken, to prepare for the final Jan. 6 standoff that ended in riot, mayhem and death and injury at the U.S. Capitol.

Pain-in-the-ass caucus

But even with Watergate-level legal pressures mounting against them, and especially against Freedom Caucus founder and former Trump chief of staff Mark Meadows, the Freedom Caucus is not hunkering down. It is doubling down, looking to expand into the states, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reports:

Former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows is making headlines in Washington today, but he’s also looking to make a mark on state legislatures, including Georgia’s, with the launch of the State Freedom Caucus Network.

The network will be an extension of the House Freedom Caucus, the group of conservative House members that Meadows once chaired, which has successfully moved the House GOP agenda to the right since it was founded in 2015.

The network will be supported by the Conservative Partnership Institute, a Washington-based non-profit founded by former Sen. Jim DeMint, where Meadows has been a senior partner since leaving the White House earlier this year.

Also on the CPI staff with Meadows is Cleta Mitchell, a prominent Republican attorney who helped Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election results.

Meadows, we know, was on the infamous Jan. 2 Trump call to Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to pressure him to “find” enough votes to overturn Joe Biden’s win there from November. Trump (and perhaps Meadows as well) is under criminal investigation for election interference over that call to Georgia. Meadows is hardly backing off or avoiding Georgia. He spoke before about 200 at the State Freedom Caucus Network kickoff dinner in Atlanta on Tuesday.

Ed Kilgore adds New York Magazine:

DeMint, the former South Carolina senator and Heritage Foundation president, is probably best known in politics for his espousal of “constitutional conservatism,” that absolutist precursor to Trumpism which held that any means were justified to preserve the eternal policy preferences of the divinely inspired Founders.

The State Freedom Caucus Network will start initially with affiliates in 22 states from Connecticut to Alaska, with representatives attending a gala kickoff dinner in Atlanta. Its stated purpose is to organize “principled, America-First conservatives” to focus on “election integrity, critical race theory, school choice, vaccine mandates, and police reform,” issues where “our nation’s most important battles are taking place in state legislatures.” An unstated purpose is to encourage such pain-in-the-ass tactics as legislative hostage-taking, disruption of routine governing practices, and shakedowns of the “Republican establishment,” while serving as outposts for Trump’s efforts to get back to the White House by book or by crook.

This new organization, which will likely spread to other states soon, will help ensure that Republicans state elected officials can’t get away with simply tugging the forelock to Trump and then getting along with their regular business back home. MAGA agitation is a permanent revolution with foot soldiers wherever cultural resentment and political opportunism meet.

Look, normal is gone and any semblance of it is not coming back soon. Thinking back on the Churchill quote that came to mind this morning (at the top), it is not clear to me whether “We” is those who retain a commitment to democracy or those in Trump’s camp who seem bent on ending it. Perhaps both. Whether the coming political war is civil or Civil remains to be seen. But the “Russians” are clearly massing at the border and prepared for a long fight whether the rest of us want it or not. Ignoring it won’t make it go away. If Democrats and you cannot find the stomach to fight it, pack your bags.

“You can’t keep a good homicidal maniac down.” It was Roger Ebert, I think, who first said that of the unstoppable slashers in unstoppable slasher movie sequels. They just keep coming. Like “zombie lies,” that way. Paul Krugman first encountered that term in regard to lies circulating about Canadian heath care.

The voter fraud fraud is just as unstoppable. Republicans have worked assiduously for decades to ensure that. Facts don’t phase it. The most secure election in American history can’t stop it. Proving “dead voters” aren’t dead isn’t a kill shot. Republicans keep spinning. Real Election Integrity™ advocates keep trying:

An Associated Press review of every potential case of voter fraud in the six battleground states disputed by former President Donald Trump has found fewer than 475 — a number that would have made no difference in the 2020 presidential election.

Democrat Joe Biden won Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin and their 79 Electoral College votes by a combined 311,257 votes out of 25.5 million ballots cast for president. The disputed ballots represent just 0.15% of his victory margin in those states.

Please note the word potential. It appears over 15 times in the article and graphics. Potential voter fraud is not actual fraud or a provable crime. But it will be spun that way by voter fraud fraudsters.

AP’s review found the potential cases of fraud ran the gamut: Some were attributed to administrative error or voter confusion while others were being examined as intentional attempts to commit fraud.

The vast majority will be dismissed as unprovable as deliberate attempts to commit a crime. Others will prove to be the kinds of baseless allegations thrown around by Donald Trump, Rudy Giuliani and Team Kraken. Those, AP reports, are based “largely upon an incomplete assessment of voter registration records and lack of information concerning the processes by which these records are compiled and maintained.” Translation: Allegations made by people who know shit about election processes. Ask Rudy. He has a 3-ring binder full of those.

At The Atlantic, Vann R. Newkirk II interviews Crystal Mason. Convicted of voter fraud for improperly casting a provisional ballot that was never counted, Mason faces five years in prison. Texas made an example of her:

The story of Mason, a Black woman, illuminates the extraordinary efforts the Republican Party has made to demonstrate that fraud is being committed by minority voters on a massive scale. That false notion is now an article of faith among tens of millions of Americans. It has become an excuse to enact laws that make voting harder for everyone, but especially for voters of color, voters who are poor, voters who are old, and voters who were not born in the United States.

Mason was on supervised release from jail and thought she was eligible to vote again. She was not.

Most everyone knows what’s going on here. The way Fox News anchors knew privately the Jan. 6 insurrection was Trump supporters Trump himself could call off while in public keeping up the pretense the rioters were Black Lives Matter or antifa activists.

Fear of voter fraud, or at least the pretense of fear, has been a centerpiece of conservative objections to the expansion of voting rights going back, in the modern era, to the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Taking steps to curb alleged illegal voting tends to boost Republican electoral fortunes by disenfranchising people of color.

Newkirk adds:

It must be underscored: There is no evidence that illegal voting of any kind occurs at a level capable of influencing elections. Nor is there evidence that the scattered violations that do take place have been increasing in frequency or severity. Common kinds of election violations include local candidates fudging signatures to get on the ballot, partisans politicking too close to polling places, and people accidentally voting at the polls after forgetting that they had already mailed in a ballot—a glitch easily corrected by administrative procedures that already exist.

Indeed, procedures and laws are already in place to catch such actions and to punish them if necessary. Just as AP found.

Yes, Mason signed an affidavit affirming she was eligible to vote, but like most of us she simply read to make sure her name and address was correct. And remember, she was voting in a presidential election in Texas (emphasis mine):

“They said I tried to circumvent the system,” Mason said. “And for what? For a sticker?” Alison Grinter Allen, her attorney, echoed the point: “Why would you risk two to 20 years in the penitentiary in order to shout your opinion into the wind, basically?”

Just to add a single extra vote to her preferred candidate’s total in a state where it wouldn’t matter. Prosecutors did not even attempt to prove criminal motive. Mason got five years.

In 2018, Russ Casey, a Republican judge in Tarrant County, pleaded guilty to falsifying signatures in order to get his name on the ballot. Casey held a position of public trust, his actions were egregious, and he admitted that the accusations were true. In a plea deal, he received five years’ probation, with no prison time.

Guess his color.

It’s hard to keep a good zombie lie down. Making examples of the rare cases ensures a steady drip of examples people vaguely remember when it comes time to pass ever stricter procedures for voting. The ACLU observed of Mason’s case, “If you start to criminalize people who make mistakes, [who think] they’re eligible and then find out they’re not, then that guts the provisional-balloting system—turns it into a trap.”

It’s a vicious cycle—which is exactly the point. First gin up fear about fraud, then use that fear to aggressively prosecute voting infractions, then use those prosecutions to create stricter laws, then use the stricter laws to induce more examples of fraud, then use those examples to gin up even more fear. The potential impact on turnout is bad enough. But the cumulative effect of restrictive laws corrodes the democratic process itself.

Which is exactly the point of this decades-long, post-Voting Rights Act campaign against voting. Gin up fear. Demonize the Other:

Professional voter fraud frighteners like Hans von Spakovsky and James O’Keefe expect Real Americans™ to believe that while they’re having their Election Day coffee, “Others” are headed to the polls not to do their patriotic and civic duty, no, but to participate in a nationwide crime spree unparalleled in the annals of American criminology.

The Frighteners expect you to believe that thousands, tens of thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands of these Others – you know who they mean – go to the polls on Election Day determined instead to commit felonies punishable by up to 5 years in prison and a $10,000 fine for each offense by impersonating dead or fictitious voters. With nothing, nothing to stop them.

Take the case of 950 dead people voting in South Carolina in 2010. Um, no. Didn’t happen:

As was suspected from the beginning, the fevered stories of “zombie voters” turned out to be fantasy. This week, state elections officials reviewed 207 of the supposed 950 cases of dead people voting, and couldn’t confirm fraud in any of them. 106 stemmed from clerical errors at the polls, and another 56 involved bad data — the usual culprits when claims of dead voters have surfaced in the past.

The point of these stories is to get the front-page headline people will remember. By the time the story is debunked, it shows up on page five where no one sees it. The zombies keep shambling. Unfounded rumors keep circulating. Voter suppression legislation keeps passing.

What are Democrats going to do about it? Only they can.

Dan Pfeiffer’s newsletter today discusses the important topic of “messaging” for 2022 in light of all we know about the coup attempt, ongoing insurrection planning, right wing violence and the overall assault on democracy. You’d think that would be enough to get people off the couch but it seems to be hotly debated among the analysts, pundits and strategists, many of whom think “kitchen table issues” and bland moderations/bipartisanship are the the keys to winning.

Pfeiffer writes:

The recent uptick in insurrection-planning from the Republicans dovetails with an ongoing debate about Democratic messaging in the 2022 election. This convergence raises the question – can Democrats run on saving democracy? Or can they at least frame the Republicans as dangers to democracy?

The Need for One Consistent Story

The modern Republican Party has no policy, agenda, or ideological mooring other than loyalty to Donald Trump’s quackery. They oppose popular, important economic policies, block efforts to get the pandemic under control, and spread dangerous conspiracy theories about vaccines and the election. It is patently obvious to anyone not blinded by partisanship or performative neutrality that the GOP should not be within smelling distance of the higher levels of government for the foreseeable future. The only question is: what’s the best way to make that case to the voters? There is a Cheesecake Factory menu’s worth of Republican failings. Choosing one is hard, but it is essential.

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Whenever I appeared on a panel or spoke with a group of Democrats after the 2016 election, I would ask the attendees a couple of questions to make a larger point about why we lost. I would start by asking people to describe Donald Trump’s negative message about Hillary Clinton. The audience would respond – sometimes in unison – with some version of “Crooked Hillary.” This was Trump’s oft-repeated moniker for his opponent. The phrase encapsulated concerns about her email protocol, her paid speeches, and decades of residue from unfair Republican attacks on her and her husband. When I asked a similar question about Clinton’s argument against Trump, the audience would erupt with a multitude of answers – “racist,” “misogynist,” “liar,” “dumb,” “crook,” “Russian patsy,” and so forth.

Each of these was factual, but the audience’s response revealed that the Clinton campaign and the Democrats at large failed to settle on a single coherent narrative about why Trump shouldn’t be president. In politics and life, the worst choice is no choice. I worry the Democratic Party is headed down a similar path in 2022.

Can Running on Democracy Work?

There is a three-part test I like to use when thinking about messaging decisions:

First, Barack Obama would begin any conversation about the message or political strategy by declaring, “Let’s start with what’s true.” The former president didn’t just mean what could pass the factchecker’s muster – although he did care passionately about that; Obama was referring to the essential truth of the argument because he believed the only messages that resonated with voters are the ones that spoke to the world they clearly saw. Now you may be saying, ‘Republicans, run on fabricated bullshit all the time.’ And if you said that, you would be correct. However, Republicans and Democrats are trying to reach different voters through different means, and therefore, what works for them won’t necessarily work for us.

The idea that Republicans are a danger to democracy and election integrity is unquestionably true. It is also true that their anti-democratic authoritarianism is the greatest danger they pose in the short term. If Republicans were to take the House or the Senate, they could stop everything Biden wants to do, but they would fail to implement any of their retrograde policy agenda. Republican control of the House and/or Senate would put them in a position to potentially deny the presidency to the legitimate winner of the Electoral College.

Now we’re talking. Do people realize what lies in store in 2024 if the Republicans take over the congress, particularly with the radical wingnuts Donald Trump is enlisting in his cause? Can anyone feel confident that they won’t do it after all we’ve seen?

But the Democrats have to be willing to look “unreasonable” and have their hair on fire to explain this to the public with the required urgency. I haven’t seen mu evidence that they are willin to do that.

Pfeiffer points out that recent polling show that young people are especially concerned (and pessimistic) about democracy an d that emphasizing that battle could persuade them to come out and vote in the midterms, which I think is wishful thinking. But it’s worth a try.

Concerns about our democracy will only grow in intensity during the coming months as Republicans become more brazen and Donald Trump comes out of hiding to begin campaigning for his hand-picked, pro-insurrection slate of candidates. 

The final test of a message’s effectiveness is about the credibility of the messenger. This is where Democrats run into trouble. If democracy is really in grave danger why aren’t Democrats doing anything about it? Why aren’t more Democrats – including President Biden– more vocal about raising the alarm? Now, there may be nothing that can be done about Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema’s willingness to sacrifice your right to vote in order to protect Mitch McConnell’s power. No amount of arm-twisting or speech-making may be enough to change their recalcitrant minds. Efforts are still underway to pass Voting Rights and I expect President Biden to become more vocal about these issues once the endless effort to pass his economic plan is behind him. The failure to take action would be a huge problem on every dimension, but I think there are two things Democrats could do to make the message about democracy more credible even absent Senate action on voting rights legislation. 

First, they could get caught trying. That doesn’t mean one vote or a bunch of procedural BS. Democrats must engage in a party-wide effort, from the president on down, to make the case for democracy reform and raise alarms about Republican intentions to subvert democracy. It means real pressure on Manchin and Sinema and a very public push to eliminate the filibuster. Democrats cannot make the case that they will protect democracy if they haven’t clearly fought like hell to do so.

We must also clearly and specifically call out the Republicans. Because if Democrats don’t, we can be damn sure the media won’t do it for us. You lose 100 percent of the arguments you don’t make and not enough Democrats are making the argument that Republicans are a danger to democracy.

Second, we should spend more time talking about preventing election subversion and pushing efforts to reform the process at all levels to prevent politicians from stealing elections. This must include votes on specific pieces of legislation that make it more difficult for Congress to reject certified state election results. Let’s put the Republicans on record as being willing to overturn the will of the voters

It’s too early to know whether this is the right message. More research needs to be done, but the stakes could not be higher in 2022. In my experience, when the stakes are high, you want to make the election about big things. And what is bigger than the fate of democracy?

I know what the Republicans would do. They’d make Marjorie Taylor Green and Lauren Boebert the face of the Republican Party and run against them and Donald Trump asa threesome. And they wouldn’t be subtle about it either.

Negative partisanship is the zeitgeist of the moment, the two parties are completely polarized and there is really nobody in the middle. The way to win is to engage your voters against the other guys, get them mad/frightened enough to get out and vote. It isn’t pretty but it’s at least a realistic acceptance of the world as it is instead of this kumbaya belief that everyone will come out and vote in gratitude for the expanded child tax credit. (I know I don’t need to remind anyone that Obama and the democrats passed the biggest health care reform since the Great Society and got their asses handed to them in 2010.)

The Dems need to go nuclear about this. Will they?

Concerns about our democracy will only grow in intensity during the coming months as Republicans become more brazen and Donald Trump comes out of hiding to begin campaigning for his hand-picked, pro-insurrection slate of candidates. 

The final test of a message’s effectiveness is about the credibility of the messenger. This is where Democrats run into trouble. If democracy is really in grave danger why aren’t Democrats doing anything about it? Why aren’t more Democrats – including President Biden– more vocal about raising the alarm? Now, there may be nothing that can be done about Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema’s willingness to sacrifice your right to vote in order to protect Mitch McConnell’s power. No amount of arm-twisting or speech-making may be enough to change their recalcitrant minds. Efforts are still underway to pass Voting Rights and I expect President Biden to become more vocal about these issues once the endless effort to pass his economic plan is behind him. The failure to take action would be a huge problem on every dimension, but I think there are two things Democrats could do to make the message about democracy more credible even absent Senate action on voting rights legislation. 

First, they could get caught trying. That doesn’t mean one vote or a bunch of procedural BS. Democrats must engage in a party-wide effort, from the president on down, to make the case for democracy reform and raise alarms about Republican intentions to subvert democracy. It means real pressure on Manchin and Sinema and a very public push to eliminate the filibuster. Democrats cannot make the case that they will protect democracy if they haven’t clearly fought like hell to do so.

We must also clearly and specifically call out the Republicans. Because if Democrats don’t, we can be damn sure the media won’t do it for us. You lose 100 percent of the arguments you don’t make and not enough Democrats are making the argument that Republicans are a danger to democracy.

Second, we should spend more time talking about preventing election subversion and pushing efforts to reform the process at all levels to prevent politicians from stealing elections. This must include votes on specific pieces of legislation that make it more difficult for Congress to reject certified state election results. Let’s put the Republicans on record as being willing to overturn the will of the voters

It’s too early to know whether this is the right message. More research needs to be done, but the stakes could not be higher in 2022. In my experience, when the stakes are high, you want to make the election about big things. And what is bigger than the fate of democracy

Dan Pfeiffer shares my concern that Democrats — possessing neither message nor discipline — will not have what it takes to save our democracy. A “big tent” is fine. But sometimes you need a single, easily conveyed message that encapsulates what you stand for. Obama’s was one word: Hope.

Pfeiffer asks if Democrats can be successful running on saving democracy.

Yes, “Republicans are a danger to democracy and election integrity.” And yes, “their anti-democratic authoritarianism is the greatest danger they pose in the short term.” But will voters vote based on that? If Democrats can package it right?

A CNN poll suggests that 56 percent of Americans perceive democracy under attack. A critical Democratic voting bloc sees more threat:

A recent poll of 18 to 29-year-olds conducted by the Harvard University Institute of Politics suggests that a democracy-focused message might be effective. According to the poll, only seven percent of 18 to 29-year-olds describe the U.S. as a healthy democracy, while a majority describe it as either in trouble or failed. 35 percent of respondents believe there will be a civil war in their lifetime and 25 percent believe they will see a state secede from the union.

So, says Pfeiffer, there is a market for the message. But, says Pfeiffer, “This is where Democrats run into trouble.” A message, any message, unsupported by actions is likely to fail:

If democracy is really in grave danger why aren’t Democrats doing anything about it? Why aren’t more Democrats – including President Biden– more vocal about raising the alarm? Now, there may be nothing that can be done about Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema’s willingness to sacrifice your right to vote in order to protect Mitch McConnell’s power. No amount of arm-twisting or speech-making may be enough to change their recalcitrant minds. Efforts are still underway to pass Voting Rights and I expect President Biden to become more vocal about these issues once the endless effort to pass his economic plan is behind him. The failure to take action would be a huge problem on every dimension, but I think there are two things Democrats could do to make the message about democracy more credible even absent Senate action on voting rights legislation. 

First, they could get caught trying. That doesn’t mean one vote or a bunch of procedural BS. Democrats must engage in a party-wide effort, from the president on down, to make the case for democracy reform and raise alarms about Republican intentions to subvert democracy. It means real pressure on Manchin and Sinema and a very public push to eliminate the filibuster. Democrats cannot make the case that they will protect democracy if they haven’t clearly fought like hell to do so.

We must also clearly and specifically call out the Republicans. Because if Democrats don’t, we can be damn sure the media won’t do it for us. You lose 100 percent of the arguments you don’t make and not enough Democrats are making the argument that Republicans are a danger to democracy.

Second, we should spend more time talking about preventing election subversion and pushing efforts to reform the process at all levels to prevent politicians from stealing elections. This must include votes on specific pieces of legislation that make it more difficult for Congress to reject certified state election results. Let’s put the Republicans on record as being willing to overturn the will of the voters

Seriously, get caught trying. But can Democrats get caught trying and turn it into a message as easily grokked and as repeatable as “Crooked Hillary”? Without that, it will never catch fire. Democratic audiences were all over the place messaging against Trump in 2016, Pfeiffer notes, using words like “racist,” “misogynist,” “liar,” “dumb,” “crook,” “Russian patsy,” and so forth. Trump sucks at most everything except marketing and branding. Democrats couldn’t agree on calling a dog a dog.

A few days ago, I mentioned I was working through Exit Right: The People Who Left the Left and Reshaped the American Century by Daniel Oppenheimer. Among his tales of left-wing apostacy, Ronald Reagan’s conversion to conservatism is an outlier.

From the Washington Post’s 2016 review:

The mainstream liberalism of his younger days was a modest inheritance from his father, one he quickly spent. “Not for Reagan a descent into utopian delusion, followed by a long dark night of the soul, culminating in a baptismal emergence into the light of God, truth, and conservatism,” Oppenheimer admits. “In Reagan’s conversion story there was no conversion at all.” An outlier in this tale, Reagan gradually takes up conservatism and remakes his belief system, informed by Hollywood labor disputes and pro-market promotional work for General Electric during the 1950s and 1960s.

In Oppenheimer’s telling, Reagan’s path, easier and less self-aware, is mirrored by the country he would lead. “For Reagan, and for tens of millions of Americans who would travel with him to the Right, political transformation wasn’t marked by catharsis and epiphany,” he writes. “It rarely even revealed itself as a transformation. It was life, lived year to year, decade to decade,” with a deceptive sense of permanence “that gave more comfort and was less anxious to bear than a story of discontinuity and change would have been.”

What “The Great Communicator” offered voters was political conversion on the cheap, a way for southern Democrats, especially, to become Republicans without having to reject their former selves or basic values. Those were always sound, Reagan reassured. Reagan lived forever with one foot in reality and the other in fantasy, making it possible for him to imagine the Democratic Party had changed but he hadn’t. He sold that to the entire South.

Oppenheimer’s analysis is odd, given how many Reagan supporters were evangelicals for whom eternity in heaven or hell turns on lurid tales of dark nights of the soul where Jesus intervenes in the nick of time. They are “saved” in dramatic stories they love to retell again and again. That may be because while everyone imagines themselves as heroes in their own story, when it comes right down to it, they’d rather not have to exert themselves. How very American. Reagan played to that.

Reagan the story-teller grasped intuitively that people don’t make hard political choices if they aren’t given stories that locate those decisions in their own lives. He told Americans subtly that they were always Republicans, they just didn’t know it. (Of course, by the late 1960s, southern Democrats had other incentives to leave.)

But would that work in the other direction with democracy now on the line? Could Democrats (who don’t believe in marketing) drop their five-point plans and sing as a chorus a siren song of democracy that woos voters to them instead of condemning them?

The problem with many progressives is they want to see conservatives respond to an altar call, to fall to their knees and confess their political and personal sins, admit their error, their white privilege, what-have-you, and come to the light.

“We love being right” too much, says progressive messaging guru Anat Shenker-Osorio [timestamp 3:09]. “We definitely need everyone to understand that this is true. It’s true!” she mocks.

“I actually don’t care. If I can get you to do the thing I need you to do and you still think climate change is fake,” then that’s your personal problem. “We need to stop choosing to be right and start choosing to be happy. By which I mean win.”

We are in an age of competing stories, Shenker-Osorio says. And Democrats’ incoherent story is losing. Can we learn that lesson in time?

Remember, Reagan used to sell soap.

It seems like it was only a month or so ago that the political establishment had decided the Republicans had found the electoral holy grail in the campaign of Virginia governor-elect Glenn Youngkin. Out of 3.3 million votes cast, he had won with 63,000 votes and it was widely seen as a landslide victory that totally repudiated everything the Democratic Party stands for. The fact that Virginia has consistently elected a governor of the opposite party that holds the White House for more than 30 years (and usually by much wider margins than Youngkin’s) didn’t hinder the conventional wisdom in any way. The Youngkin campaign showed the way for the GOP to win again: All they had to do going forward was distance themselves from Donald Trump.

Fast forward just a few weeks later and it’s as if it all never even happened.

Donald Trump is firmly in the driver’s seat of the GOP and any thoughts of the party extricating itself from his grasp are but a faint memory. Of course, the notion was always ridiculous. Trump didn’t hold rallies for Youngkin but he made it clear to his base that he backed him. And Youngkin may not have gone down to Mar-a-Lago to kiss the ring but he did make “election integrity” a centerpiece of his campaign, which was exactly the dog whistle Trump and his followers needed to see to prove that he was on the team. If any of those Biden to Youngkin voters thought they were voting for a Republican Party that had left Trump behind they were sadly mistaken.

It’s been obvious that Trump’s Big Lie would be the organizing principle of the GOP ever since January 6th. It’s a nice delusion to think that the party would sober up but if it wasn’t clear before, it’s certainly clear now that they are going to stay on their Trump bender for the foreseeable future. And it’s highly unlikely that Trump and his people are going to allow any more candidates to hedge on the Big Lie or pretend to distance themselves from their leader.

Earlier this week, former Senator David Perdue of Georgia threw his hat into the ring to challenge incumbent governor Brian Kemp in the Republican primary. You may recall that he lost his Senate seat in a runoff last January to Jon Ossoff. Most political analysts attribute his loss and that of former Senator Kelly Loeffler to Raphael Warnock to the fact that Trump suppressed the Republican vote by insisting the election system in the state was corrupt. If that’s so one might expect Perdue to harbor some resentment but apparently not. The formerly mild-mannered businessman’s announcement was so Trumpian you’d almost expect him to launch into a rousing chorus of YMCA at the end:

I’m running for Governor to make sure Stacey Abrams is NEVER Governor of Georgia. We need bold conservatives who will stand up to the woke left, not cave to their radical demands. Join me in this fight to Stop Stacey and Save Georgia. pic.twitter.com/iQMMV97ynw

— David Perdue (@DavidPerdueGA) December 6, 2021

Perdue later said that he would not have certified the 2020 presidential election in Georgia which really means that if he wins the Governor’s seat in 2022, he will do everything in his power not to certify an election for anyone but Donald Trump. Not only is Trump running his enemies out of the party, he’s demanding that anyone who wants to run for office also sign on to his Big Lie.

Trump remains obsessed with the 2020 election.

Jonathan Swan of Axios reported on Thursday that people who see him at Mar-a-Lago say “it’s impossible to carry out an extended conversation with him that isn’t interrupted by his fixations on the 2020 election” and he continues to insist that there should be more “audits” that will somehow overturn the results. He is obviously very disturbed at this point if he actually believes that.

But it doesn’t matter. Whether his delusional obsession is born of his narcissistic personality disorder or it’s a canny form of salesmanship to inspire his supporters to take over the election systems in the states he must carry in 2024, he’s reorganized the Republican Party around the belief that the 2020 election was stolen and he must be restored to the White House. This goes way beyond Trump himself picking and choosing officials who will help overturn the 2024 election or unseat disloyal Republicans. Swan reports that Trump’s allies have been working just as feverishly putting together institutional support (and not coincidentally providing nice sinecures for his most loyal acolytes.)

Former Trump administration officials founded a think tank, America First Policy Institute. Former Trump adviser Stephen Miller runs America First Legal, challenging the Biden administration’s agenda in court.Former Office of Management and Budget Director Russell Vought is driving education battles, heading up the new Center for Renewing America, a think tank that’s focused on cultural issues including “critical race theory.” America First Policies, a high-dollar advocacy group run by allies when Trump was in office, was recently refashioned America First Works and primed to activate at the federal, state and local levels on issues including education policy and “election integrity.”

Barton Gellman wrote a major cover story in The Atlantic on this subject that seems to have finally captured the mainstream media’s attention. He makes a compelling case that Trump and his cronies are literally laying the groundwork for a coup in 2024 using all the tactics outlined above including the use of an obscure, untried legal theory called the “independent state legislature” doctrine which holds that statehouses have “plenary” control of the rules for choosing presidential electors. (I wrote about it here last June.)

These are the acts of GOP officials, not Trump.

Yet it’s garnered not a peep of protest from the Republican political establishment. Where Trump comes in is another aspect of this potential coup plot: He has created a mass movement (some might call it a cult.) Gellman writes that Trump’s followers, numbered in the tens of millions, are people who have been convinced that they lost the White House and ” are losing their country to alien forces with no legitimate claim to power” — and they are ready to fight by any means necessary, including bloodshed.

After January 6th, that threat of violence underlies everything else they are doing.

As The Hill reported, Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina addressed the GOP Senate caucus this week as they debated whether to allow the Democrats to raise the debt ceiling to prevent the US from defaulting on its debt. Trump was apoplectic that they would do this because he believed the Democrats would suffer politically if the country defaults and the markets crash, which is his fondest hope. Graham counseled his fellow Senators against saving the country saying, “It’s pretty obvious to me that this will not be received well by the Republican faithful, including Donald Trump.” He said that Majority Leader Mitch McConnell had led them up a hill and they were being shot in the back. 

What a metaphor. (It is a metaphor, right?) The Hill quoted another senator saying, “Graham was warning us about what Trump was going to do and ‘May God have mercy on your souls.” I couldn’t have said it better myself. 

“We have a system of governance that nobody in their right mind would design,” observes Catherine Rampell in trying to explain Senate rules. The filibuster, reconciliation, and the role of the parliamentarian are “challenging for even journalists to follow along, and we’re paid to understand this stuff,” she laments:

So imagine how difficult it is for regular voters to understand what’s going on. All they know is that Democrats have promised to do lots of big, ambitious things — and then, for opaque reasons, simply aren’t getting them done.

It is even harder to understand for non-news-geeks. They hire politicians every other year to understand it for them so they can go about their daily lives worrying about the myriad of things normal people do.

This week here in one of the country’s “Laboratories of Autocracy,” filing for 2022 races was scheduled to open at noon on Monday. That is, until a North Carolina state court responding to a lawsuit challenging Republican-drawn state legislative and congressional districts issued an injunction just before noon Monday (candidates for local races could still begin filing). Later in the day, a state appeals court overturned the lower court, allowing filing to resume for all races. Then on Wednesday, the state supreme court put a stop to the entire process and moved the planned March primary to May while we sort this out. This is how it started the last time Republicans redistricted the state.

Like Rampell said, it’s challenging for even a political blogger to follow along.

Democracy itself has gotten messy. All that one-person, one-vote, majority rules stuff is no longer intuitive. Marc Elias tries to explain. We’re defining democracy down:

In 1965, Congress enacted the Voting Rights Act, the most consequential piece of pro-democracy legislation in our country’s history. President Reagan called it the “crown jewel” of American democracy when it was reauthorized in 1982. In 2006, George W. Bush signed the reauthorization into law after it passed the U.S. Senate 98-0.

That was then. This is now.

By 2021, every Republican in the U.S. House and 49 of 50 Republicans in the U.S. Senate would vote against it. As a result, the Voting Rights Act is no longer a bipartisan litmus test for supporting democracy. It is now entirely possible and indeed expected that Republicans who claim to support democracy will also oppose the Voting Rights Act. By engaging in a mass partisan movement to oppose essential federal voting rights legislation, the Republican Party unilaterally redefined what it means, or does not mean, to be pro-democracy. In a sense, Republicans made opposing voting rights legislation the political equivalent of “too big to fail.” The media was simply unwilling to declare the entire GOP in opposition to democracy. Instead, the standard for democracy was lowered to no longer require support for — of all things — voting rights.

In its place, we have created a new test for being considered anti-democratic: support for the Jan. 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol. Only those politicians who directly support the attempted coup are now considered extreme enough to be considered anti-democratic. Republicans can spread the Big Lie, express sympathy for the goals of the insurrectionists, and support removing Rep. Liz  Cheney from leadership because she wants to investigate Jan. 6, but as long as they did not directly support the insurrection itself, they can pass the test.  In short, we are defining democracy down.

Inside the Beltway and in state capitols there are so many examples of Republicans normalizing anti-democratic behavior “that the sheer volume of examples makes the extraordinary seem ordinary.”

Quantum conservatism, I once called it, a dimension of belief, not fact, where up is down, black is white, in is out, and wrong is right. Where Ann Coulter’s cat can be both alive and dead. Where the Kentucky Fried Chicken company is a person … headquartered in Louisville … in a bucket.

We cannot expect better from Republicans, Elias writes,” but it is also time that we stop accepting less”:

Instead, those of us who care about democracy must focus on our own expectations and what we accept as normal or acceptable. We should not accept as normal a system that disenfranchises voters simply because it must do that in order to compete. We should not accept a system where simply opposing a coup is a free pass to support voter suppression. And, we should not accept a system when Republicans are expected to play by one set of rules and Democrats another. 

In short, we must demand that our leaders work to expand democracy rather than normalize its contraction. It may be uncomfortable at times to call out Republicans as anti-democratic, but that is what we must insist upon if we are not to allow our democracy to be defined down until it no longer exists.

Elias is being overly polite. The Republican Party is not simply anti-democratic, it is anti-American and pro-autocracy. Republicans are playing a white-nationalist version of Mad Magazine‘s “What They Say and  What it Really Means.” They have redefined liberty like they have redefined pro-democracy. What they say is not what they mean. When they promote election integrity they mean vote suppression, election-rigging, and invalidating majority rule where and when it suits them.

Nobody in their right mind would run a democracy like this. But then Republicans are not in their right minds and they do not want democracy.

This piece by Tim Alberta in the Atlantic about Peter Meijer, freshman Republican congressman from Michigan is nothing less that depressing. It tracks Meijers descent from romantic optimist to cynical survivor and it’s sad.

This is just an excerpt that picks up on the story after the insurrection on January 6th:

When the Capitol was finally secured and members returned to the House chamber, Meijer expected an outraged, defiant House of Representatives to vote in overwhelming numbers to certify the election results, sending a message to the mob that Congress would not be scared away from fulfilling its constitutional obligations. But as he began talking with his colleagues, he was shocked to realize that more of them—perhaps far more of them—were now preparing to object to the election results than before the riot.

On the House floor, moments before the vote, Meijer approached a member who appeared on the verge of a breakdown. He asked his new colleague if he was okay. The member responded that he was not; that no matter his belief in the legitimacy of the election, he could no longer vote to certify the results, because he feared for his family’s safety. “Remember, this wasn’t a hypothetical. You were casting that vote after seeing with your own two eyes what some of these people are capable of,” Meijer says. “If they’re willing to come after you inside the U.S. Capitol, what will they do when you’re at home with your kids?”

Meijer glanced down at his phone. It was crackling with messages from people in his district—some checking on his well-being; others warning him not to blow the insurrection out of proportion, arguing that it was little more than a spontaneous tour of the Capitol. He swiped past most of the missives. But one, from a longtime activist he’d gotten to know, caught his eye. “You better not buckle and wimp out to the liberals,” the man wrote. “Those who stormed the Capital today are True American Heroes. This election was a fraud and you know that’s true. Peter, don’t sell us out!!!”

“Those who stormed the Capitol attacked our republic today,” Meijer replied. “They trampled on the Constitution. We have a rule of law, courts, and peaceful means of resolving disputes.”

“No Sir. They are showing their God Given America Right,” the man texted back. “When the truth is being hidden, the Second Amendment gives every one of those people the right to do what they did today.”

Meijer silenced his phone and cast his vote to certify the election.

For all the negatives that defined Meijer’s first weeks on the job—the incompetence and the cravenness, the violence and the threats—he emerged from the gantlet relieved that at least now he was liberated to speak his mind about the GOP’s decay.

Meijer had never been a Trump guy. Like so many Republican candidates seeking to pass muster with the president’s base, he had been careful to say the right things. He’d touted Trump’s economic record. He’d ignored, or downplayed, much of his extreme rhetoric. But all the while, Meijer had studied Trump with trepidation. He viewed the 45th president as a manifestation of America’s psychological imbalance, someone who reflected our anger and insecurities instead of our confidence and aspirations. He feared Trump’s authoritarian instincts, but clung to a belief that the president’s grip on the American right would soon loosen.

After the impeachment vote, Meijer felt he was positioned to advocate for what he believed would be an imminent, sweeping overhaul of the party. He threw himself into the public debate surrounding January 6. He became a fixture on national news programs. He accepted every invitation—especially those that seemed hostile—to address local party chapters. At every stop, in every setting, Meijer forced the issue, believing that he was on the right side of history, and that an awakening was at hand.

“As of late January,” he says, “I thought there was the opportunity to have a harsh confrontation with reality. It was going to be a very unpleasant 18 months, 24 months, but maybe we would do the necessary soul-searching and reconstruction.”

His optimism didn’t last long. In February, two of the county-level Republican Parties in Meijer’s district—Calhoun and Barry—voted to formally censure him. (Calhoun’s leaders accused Meijer of having “betrayed the trust of so many who supported you and violate[d] our faith in our most basic constitutional values and protections.”) The next month, as other local parties across Michigan were debating similar reprimands of both Meijer and Fred Upton, the state GOP chair joked with party activists that “assassination” was one remedy for dealing with the two of them.

By April, Meijer had a primary challenger. The criticism back home was unceasing; the only praise he received was whispered. National polls showed that tens of millions of Republican voters still believed the election had been stolen. Looking around, Meijer saw that he was a leader without any following and realized how Pollyannaish he’d been. “It’s like, ‘All right, this is going to be a longer, deeper project than I thought,’ ” he says.

Meijer’s sense of urgency gradually gave way to self-doubt. He began to wonder whether his appeals to decency and democracy came across as “pearl clutching.” He could tell he was rubbing some of his constituents the wrong way—they could stomach a disagreement with their congressman; what they couldn’t tolerate was the lecturing and the finger-wagging. He sensed that he might be doing more harm than good with his high-minded rhetoric. “I’ve come to realize the limitations of performative outrage,” he says.

So he backed off. He took voters’ earfuls in stride. He says he decided that “by actively trying to correct them, I may have been inadvertently postponing the self-correction” that would come with some distance from Trump’s presidency.

Over time, the threats ebbed, the antagonistic encounters subsided, and Meijer got some semblance of his life back. He was able to spend more time on the policy issues he cared about. For most of his constituents, discussions of election integrity and January 6 and Meijer’s vote for impeachment had become redundant—and boring. “We had a moment in one of our town halls [when] there were all these people who said, ‘Can we talk about something else now?’ ” Meijer recalls.

In August, when I accompanied Meijer on a swing through his district during the congressional recess, something strange happened. A woman raised her hand, after Meijer’s luncheon talk at a Grand Rapids country club, and asked him about “the insurrection” on January 6. Everyone fell still; the room full of old friends who’d been buying raffle tickets and cracking jokes was suddenly on edge. Meijer had once offered lively commentary on the matter. But on this day, he was restrained, giving a brief synopsis of his whereabouts when the Capitol was overrun.

In the parking lot a few minutes later, Meijer turned to me. “I haven’t gotten that question in a long time,” he said. Sure enough, in more than a dozen stops across his district over the summer and fall, this was the only one where I saw anyone ask Meijer about the madness of January. Most of the questions he got were about the “socialist” Democratic agenda, the GOP’s prospects for taking back control of Congress in 2022, and President Joe Biden’s disastrous exit from Afghanistan. (This last topic allowed Meijer numerous victory laps for the unauthorized trip he took to Kabul during the U.S. evacuation. Having been in the crosshairs of his own party for so long, Meijer was delighted to be rebuked by the White House.)

Alberta says Meijer now believes the worst is over and the storm has passed. He is fooling himself. The article reveals that his own sister is a QAnon believer. Alberta writes:

In our many hours of conversation, Meijer had declined to call out any of his colleagues by name. (Watching him contort himself to avoid criticizing Kevin McCarthy was the closest I’ve come to seeing a man tortured.) This reticence, he explained, is his way of trying to bring down the temperature. Meijer is convinced that there are more Republicans like him—rational, pragmatic, disgusted by the turn the party has taken—than there are like Gosar. Because they have the numbers, he says, there’s no need to engage in guerrilla tactics. They can reason and debate like adults. They can take the high road. They can play the long game.

Maybe he’s right. Or maybe this will prove a ruinous miscalculation. Whatever the numbers, the reality is that Meijer’s side is getting quieter while the other side is getting louder. His side is letting go while the other side is digging in. His side is unilaterally disarming while the other side is escalating every day.

Counting on “lowering the temperature” by ignoring what’s going on is a ruinous miscalculation. He’s chosen the path of least resistance.

In the days after January 6, Meijer believed he was part of a mission to rescue the Republican Party from itself. Now he laughs at his own naïveté. Ten people isn’t a popular movement. And in truth, only two of them—Cheney and Kinzinger—have shown the stomach for the sort of sustained offensive that would be required to rehabilitate the GOP. The other eight, having glanced over their shoulders and seen no reinforcements on the way, chose varying degrees of retreat.

Read the whole thing when you get the chance. This man seems like a decent sort. But he’s slowly but surely being assimilated into the Borg. Power does that to people.