It’s been nearly a year since the United States suffered an unprecedented attack on constitutional democracy.
When a violent mob stormed the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, the goal
was to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election and
install Donald Trump to a second term.
Call it an insurrection or a coup attempt, it was fueled by what’s known as the “Big Lie”: the verifiably false assertion that Trump won. Joe Biden won 306 votes in the Electoral College, while Trump received 232. In the popular vote, Biden won by more than 7 million votes.
Many are warning that over the past year, that “big lie” of a stolen election has grown more entrenched and more dangerous.
After days of rumors swirling among reporters on Capitol Hill, President Joe Biden confirmed it late Thursday evening: The Build Back Better plan is not going to pass this year. Which almost certainly means that the timeline for passing it is never.
Biden, of course, denied that “never” is in the cards. Instead, he released a statement to reporters, claiming, “My team and I are having ongoing discussions” with Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.), the primary holdout stopping Democrats from passing the bill through the Senate. “Leader Schumer and I are determined to see the bill successfully on the floor as early as possible,” Biden insisted.
Still, there’s good reason for skepticism.
As I note in Friday’s Standing Room Only newsletter, the past 11 months have made it impossible to believe that Manchin is negotiating in good faith. Instead, every move Manchin makes suggests that his plan is what skeptics thought it was all along: pull out the few items that he and his rich benefactors approve of to pass through a slim bipartisan bill, and then doom the larger Build Back Better plan by wasting time with fake objections until Republicans retake Congress and permanently destroy it. Manchin explodes with hair-trigger defensiveness at even the mildest question that reminds him his “support” for the policies in Build Back Better is a big, fat lie. This is not the behavior of a man who actually intends to vote for a bill he keeps swearing he’s one more tweak away from supporting.
There is no doubt that democracy in the United States is at serious risk.
The year began with an attack on the Capitol designed to thwart the
transition of power; instead of repudiating this violence, Republicans
doubled down on the lie that Trump won the election and are working,
right now, to rig the system in their favor. Neither Democrats nor the general public are doing much of anything to stop them.
Several pieces of legislation on voting rights have been
stopped cold by the filibuster, as neither Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (D-AZ)
nor Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV) seems willing to make an exception to the archaic Senate rule in order to protect democracy. Meanwhile, the voters who care are mostly Republicanpartisans, believers in Trump’s lies about 2020. An October poll found that 71 percent of Republicans believe democracy is facing a “major threat,” as compared to just 35 percent of Democrats.
Experts on democracy warn that America is sleepwalking toward a
disaster, a situation where the electoral playing field is so tilted in
the GOP’s favor that America’s people no longer have a meaningful voice
in who [governs] them.
One of the nation’s foremost experts
on the laws that hold together democracy in America, Hasen used to be
concerned about highly speculativeelection “nightmare
scenarios”: the electrical grid being hacked on Election Day, or the
pandemic warping turnout, or absentee ballots totally overwhelming the
postal service. But now, what keeps him up at night aren’t fanciful
“what if” exercises: It’s what has actually happened over that past nine
months, and how it could truly blow up in the next presidential
election.
For
the first time in American history, the losing candidate refused to
concede the election — and rather than dismissing him as a sore loser, a
startling number of Americans have followed Donald Trump down his
conspiratorial rabbit hole. The safeguards that ensured he left office
last January after losing the presidential election may be crumbling:
The election officials who certified the counts may no longer be in
place next time he falsely claims victory; if Republicans take Congress,
a compliant Speaker could easily decide it’s simply not in his interest
to let the party’s leader lose.
“You
could look at 2020 as the nadir of American democratic processes, or
you could look at it as a dress rehearsal,” says Hasen, a professor of
law at UC Irvine.
To millions of Americans, what just happened in Arizona’s largest county was a laughingstock, a bad joke that blew up in the face of Donald Trump and his cultists like some exploding cigar from a 1940s cartoon. A GOP-approved hijacking of voting records and machines from the 2020 election — do not dare call it an “audit” — conducted by a scammy-is-too-good-a-word contractor called the Cyber Ninjas that dragged on through much of 2021 ultimately claimed that any miscounted votes actually expanded President Biden’s win in Maricopa County. The cackling on left-leaning Twitter and MSNBC Friday night could be heard from Key West to Kalamazoo.
But one man — a Michigan carpetbagger turned Arizona politico named Mark Finchem — had a very different interpretation of what the conspiracy-minded voting sleuths had uncovered with official Republican support. “I call for decertification of the Arizona election, arrest of those involved in tampering with election systems, and an audit of Pima County [in northern Arizona] as a next step,” Finchem tweeted Friday.
The crazy part is that Finchem’s minority viewpoints on Donald Trump and his invisible claims of election fraud may matter a heck of a lot more than yours or mine come the 2024 vote counting. Last week, the disgraced 45th president (and would-be 47th) officially endorsed Finchem, now a state lawmaker, in his 2022 GOP primary bid to become Arizona’s next secretary of state. Trump’s imprimatur makes Finchem the instant primary favorite, in a midterm election in which both history and newfangled voter suppression favors Republicans.
That means Finchem — not just a garden-variety Trumpist but a member of the extremist Oath Keepers who was on the Capitol grounds during the Jan. 6 insurrection — could be Arizona’s chief vote counter if and when the bleats of voter fraud and a stolen election again emerge from Mar-a-Lago in three years.
At midnight on Wednesday, the Supreme Court allowed a Texas law that effectively bans all abortions after six weeks of pregnancy to take effect.
Twenty-four hours later, the Court released a brief, one-paragraph order
explaining why it did so — though it is a stretch to describe the
Court’s short and thinly reasoned order as an “explanation.” The vote in
Whole Woman’s Health v. Jackson was 5-4, with conservative Chief Justice John Roberts crossing over to vote with the three liberal justices.
The implications of this order are breathtaking. The Texas law violates the precedent established in Planned Parenthood v. Casey
(1992), which protects “the right of the woman to choose to have an
abortion before viability and to obtain it without undue interference
from the state.” The sixth week of gestation is so early in a pregnancy
that many people aren’t even aware they are pregnant....
[The Texas law] relies on a highly unusual enforcement mechanism.
No state officer is permitted to enforce the statute. Instead, the law
permits “any person, other than an officer or employee of a state or
local governmental entity in this state” to file a lawsuit against an
abortion provider or anyone who “aids or abets the performance or
inducement of an abortion.” A plaintiff who prevails in such a lawsuit
is entitled to bounty of at least $10,000, paid by the person they sued.
As Justice Sonia Sotomayor explains in one of four
opinions filed by the dissenting justices, Texas lawmakers “fashioned
this scheme because federal constitutional challenges to state laws
ordinarily are brought against state officers who are in charge of
enforcing the law.” So if no state officer can enforce the law, it is
unclear whether anyone can be sued to block it.
The Supreme Court’s order, joined by the five most
conservative justices, effectively blesses this method of evading
judicial review.
The images coming out of Afghanistan have been disturbing. But let’s be clear: The Trump Administration led us straight into this mess. And President Biden is doing everything he can to get us out of it.
In Afghanistan, President Biden got dealt yet another losing hand from the Trump Administration. Their Doha Agreement with the Taliban violated the most basic principles of self-government for the Afghan people. There was no way to enforce it or make sure the Taliban kept its word. There was no denunciation of al-Qaeda terrorists. Worst of all, the deal didn’t mandate the Taliban stop attacks against Afghan security forces.
All of this set the stage for the chaotic scenes we’re seeing on TV today.
Trump’s deal with the Taliban was flawed from the start, which is why Trump’s own officials are now scrambling to distance themselves from it. “To have our Generals say that they are depending on diplomacy with the Taliban is an unbelievable scenario. Negotiating with the Taliban is like dealing with the devil,” tweeted Trump’s ambassador to the United Nations, Nikki Haley, who certainly voiced no such objections while working for Trump. She was not alone. “Our secretary of state signed a surrender agreement with the Taliban,” Trump’s former national security adviser, H.R. McMaster, told journalist Bari Weiss. “This collapse goes back to the capitulation agreement of 2020. The Taliban didn't defeat us. We defeated ourselves.”
As
I watch some Democrats handle the voting rights issue, I’m seeing a
replay of a 19th-century political horror story. It ended with Black
voters losing faith in the leaders who were supposed to protect them.
President
Biden has called voting rights “the single most important” issue and
described a wave of voter restriction bills recently passed by
Republican legislatures across the US as “Jim Crow on steroids.”
Yet he has refused to throw the full weight of the Oval Office behind passing two pending voting rights bills in Congress. He has stopped short of embracing
calls to jettison the filibuster — the parliamentary tactic
Republicans can use to halt a voting-rights bill — because he says it
would “throw the entire Congress into chaos.”
He’s focused instead on passing a bipartisan infrastructure bill that could rejuvenate the economy and appeal to a broad swath of voters.
But
for anyone who knows this country’s shameful voting-rights history,
Biden is following a script that once doomed Black voters and made the
rise of Jim Crow possible.
Americans sure are angry these days. Everyone says so, so it must be true.
But who or what are we angry at? Pandemic stresses aside, I’d bet you’re not especially angry at your family. Or your friends. Or your priest or your plumber or your postal carrier. Or even your boss.
Unless, of course, the conversation turns to politics. That’s when we start shouting at each other. We are way, way angrier about politics than we used to be, something confirmed by both common experience and formal research.
When did this all start? Here are a few data points to consider. From 1994 to 2000, according to the Pew Research Center, only 16 percent of Democrats held a “very unfavorable” view of Republicans, but then these feelings started to climb. Between 2000 and 2014 it rose to 38 percent and by 2021 it was about 52 percent. And the same is true in reverse for Republicans: The share who intensely dislike Democrats went from 17 percent to 43 percent to about 52 percent….
What’s the reason for this? There’s no shortage of speculation. Political scientists talk about the fragility of presidential systems. Sociologists explicate the culture wars. Historians note the widening divide between the parties after white Southerners abandoned the Democratic Party following the civil rights era. Reporters will regale you with stories about the impact of Rush Limbaugh and Newt Gingrich.
There’s truth in all of these, but even taken together they are unlikely to explain the underlying problem.
Joe Biden is not known as a fiery orator, but the president was riled up yesterday [Tuesday, July 13, 2021].
Biden spoke in Philadelphia about voting rights, calling a current round of state laws and bills, plus rhetoric emanating from Donald Trump and others, “the most significant test of our democracy since the Civil War.” The president defended the 2020 election, celebrating the record voter turnout, praising election officials who made sure voting was smooth, and rebutting attacks lodged by Trump and his aides, who have baselessly claimed that the election was stolen or marred by fraud. “No other election has ever been held under such scrutiny, such high standards,” Biden said. “The big lie is just that: a big lie.”
But the president’s main focus was the next election, which he warned was gravely threatened. “I’m not saying this to alarm you,” he said. “I’m saying this because you should be alarmed.” He added, “We have to prepare now.”
The question is, who is we?
Biden’s speech assumes a unified American people who support democratic norms, and it assumes that once they understand the threat posed to those norms, they’ll be willing and able to fend it off. That nation is a chimera. Many Americans support these attacks on democracy, and those who don’t, face a system stacked against them.
The 1965 Voting Rights Act has long stood as a symbol of the progress America has made in the struggle for civil rights and as a guardian of the right of all citizens to vote. Today, with two main provisions stripped of their power by the Supreme Court, the law has become a symbol of the weakening of resistance to the states’ efforts to restrict rather than expand and protect those rights.
In two decisions over eight years, the high court has taken away much of the law’s power, first in 2013 by gutting Section 5, which required states with a history of discrimination to seek clearance from the Justice Department before making any changes in election procedures, and on Thursday [July 1, 2021] by limiting the potential for successfully challenging voting changes after they have been enacted under Section 2.
The decision on Thursday involved two provisions in an Arizona law, one that called for discarding ballots cast at the wrong precinct, the other prohibiting what is known as “ballot harvesting,” a controversial practice in which partisans or activists collect absentee or mail ballots and deliver them to polling places. In allowing those provisions to stand, the court did nothing surprising. Many court watchers expected that to happen.
Happy LGBT+Pride Month to everyone who is observing! The LGBT+ community has spent so much time forced into the shadows — I’m talking about decades and centuries — that I think it’s marvelous its members can now live openly and honestly without the awful stigma and disparagement once attached, at least in most of the Western world. And I hope that all hate crimes against them will soon be completely and utterly relegated to the past.
As anyone who knows me can attest, I’ve spent a lot of time advocating for the greater inclusion of people of color (POC) in the media, and I’m a big fan of anything that can help raise their profile and those of other marginalized communities. However, I’ve never grown to like adding colors to the now-familiar rainbow Pride Flag, with the six alternating primary and secondary colors. While I think it’s important to recognize the contributions of further marginalized groups within the already marginalized LGBT+ community, I don’t think that adding extra colors to the Pride Flag is the way to go. Why? Because, very simply, it would mean — or be interpreted to mean — that LGBT+ people of color, and the others represented by the additional colors, were never a part of the original rainbow flag to begin with, that the rainbow flag never represented them. Additional colors would mark the six-hued rainbow Pride Flag as exclusionary.
Still, I’ve kept my opinion on this matter to myself largely because (1) I’m not a part of the LGBT+ community and (2) an “official” Pride Flag has never been declared (and I understand that no one is in authority within the community to make any such declaration, which is as it should be). I always figured that the LGBT+ community would resolved this issue on their own.
So, I was pleased to come across the above video by the YouTube user Shaaba, a member of the LGBT+ community and POC who also doesn’t believe that any additional colors should be attached to the six-striped rainbow flag. She also discusses issues within the LGBT+ community which I, as an outsider, wouldn’t be able to articulate. I’m glad that she agrees with me. I hope that the other Ls, Gs, Bs, Ts, and the additional letters that make up the community will listen to what she says.
With yet another GOP effort to restrict voting underway in Texas, President Biden is now calling on Congress to act in the face of the Republican “assault on democracy.” Importantly, Biden cast that attack as aimed at “Black and Brown Americans,” meriting federal legislation in response.
That is a welcome escalation. But it remains unclear whether 50 Senate Democrats will ever prove willing to reform or end the filibuster, and more to the point, whether Biden will put real muscle behind that cause. If not, such protections will never, ever pass.
Now, in a striking intervention, more than 100 scholars of democracy have signed a new public statement of principles that seeks to make the stakes unambiguously, jarringly clear: On the line is nothing less than the future of our democracy itself.
“Our entire democracy is now at risk,” the scholars write in the statement, which I obtained before its release. “History will judge what we do at this moment.”
And these scholars underscore the crucial point: Our democracy’s long-term viability might depend on whether Democrats reform or kill the filibuster to pass sweeping voting rights protections.
Days after the chaotic storming of the Capitol on January 6, some Republican members of Congress had an idea.
What the country needed, Reps. John Katko (R-NY), Rodney Davis (R-IL), and others decided, was a bipartisan commission, akin to the one established after 9/11, to sort through the facts and determine just how such a terrible breach of government security happened.
Now, though, the chances for such a commission are
imperiled. A bill to establish it passed the House last Wednesday [May 19, 2021] with
support from every Democrat and 35 Republicans. But most others in the
GOP, including party leaders, have come out strongly against the bill,
with the party’s senators planning a filibuster.
Republicans have evidently calculated that such a
commission’s findings would likely hurt their party’s electoral
prospects. Some even admit this: “Anything that gets us rehashing the
2020 election, I think, is a day lost on being able to draw contrast
between us and the Democrats’ very radical left-wing agenda,” Senate
Minority Whip John Thune told reporters last week.
But even if a deal does somehow come together, there are
real reasons to doubt whether such a commission would achieve anything
substantial.
Last week, the Supreme Court finally took up the case of Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, raising the specter of a clock turned back to 1973, before Roe v. Wade created a constitutional right to abortion.
For those who favor greater reproductive rights, the Supreme
Court’s decision to reconsider long-established precedent is deeply
ominous. There won’t be a ruling until spring or summer of 2022, and
it’s impossible to guess exactly what the new conservative majority
might support. The Court could surprise us, as it did with the 1992
decision Planned Parenthood v. Casey; rather than making
it illegal to terminate a pregnancy, the Court reaffirmed its
prohibition on banning abortions that occur prior to fetal viability
(around 24 weeks), while opening the door to limited state restrictions.
Or the Court could return the country to the pre-Roe status-quo ante, in which states could effectively set whatever policies they wanted.
What might the latter scenario look like? Below is a preview of the
savage landscape of inequality and culture war that could be unleashed
by the Dobbs decision.
Most Republican critics of Donald Trump’s attempt to overturn the 2020 election result have gone quiet.
Sure, Liz Cheney spoke out — and ended up being booted from House Republican leadership earlier this month in spectacular fashion. But she’s the exception. The rest of the party has united around a strategy of moving on, as seen in Mitch McConnell’s newly announced opposition to a bipartisan commission investigating the storming of the Capitol in January.
For the segment of the party composed of die-hard Trump
supporters, that approach makes sense. But even Republicans with deep
misgivings about Trump’s post-election behavior have managed to
rationalize avoiding the topic.
There are likely three reasons for this. First, there’s
the cynical calculation that the GOP can best win future elections by
seeming united, rather than spotlighting party divisions. Second,
there’s the fear of openly defying Trump and earning the enmity of his
supporters, since those deemed insufficiently loyal to the former
president tend to see their jobs put at risk. And third, there’s the
fatalistic view that this criticism simply won’t achieve anything,
because the GOP base will trust the propaganda pipeline of conservative
media and social media over their own leaders.
What will the institutions of liberal democracy do when Republican
officials simply refuse to concede Democratic victories? The question
isn’t as far-fetched as it may seem, and the reckoning may be coming far
sooner than most expect.
The entire left-leaning political world has spent the months after
the 2020 election obsessed over the fairness of elections, and
conservative attempts to rig the vote through gerrymandering and voter
suppression. This is for good reason, of course: Republicans know they
lack the support to win majority support in a fair contest, but believe
they have the right to rule nonetheless for reasons that ultimately boil
down to white supremacy, religious dominionism and antiquated
patriarchal beliefs. So Republicans have been busy passing bills to restrict voting among young people and non-whites,
while doing their best to ensure that exurban conservative whites
continue to be dramatically and unfairly overrepresented in the House,
Senate and Electoral College.
But there’s another even more sinister trend among conservative politicians that deserves greater attention: an unwillingness to concede any electoral victory by a Democrat as legitimate, and an eagerness to punish any Republican elected official who concedes the will of the voters. The Big Lie that Trump really won the election is now canon among a majority of Republican voters.
Any Republicans who refuses to toe the line is branded a heretic, and
elections officials who dared to certify Biden’s win are being censured
or stripped of their power. Arizona Republicans have sponsored a bogus “audit” of the election
full of crackpot conspiracy theories, and Republican legislatures have
been busy taking control of both running and certifying elections out of
the hands of county official in Democratic-run cities and counties. The
context of the January 6th insurrection at the Capitol was the attempt
by Congressional Republicans to refuse to certify the Electoral College
tally, in the hopes of sending the election back to gerrymandered
Republican state legislatures, thus handing Trump a win as part of a
anti-democratic coup. It was a physical coup attempt designed to
intimidate Congress into enforcing a legislative coup. Republicans who
refused to back the latter are facing steep primary challenges.
On June 15, 2012, the American Enterprise Institute hosted a speech portentously titled “Growing Threats to Our First Amendment Rights: An Address by Mitch McConnell.” (“Address” is the term politicians use for speeches they wish to be taken seriously.) The Senate Minority Leader used the hour-long remarks to warn that restrictions on political donations by corporations and wealthy people, or even mere disclosure requirements, were “an alarming willingness itself to use the powers of government to silence” dissent. Since “the form of speech most needful of absolute protection is political speech,” McConnell argued that President Obama’s efforts to require public disclosure of donations by figures like the Koch brothers amounted to the government “using its own powers to harass or intimidate those who participate in the political process.”
Whatever might be said about McConnell, here was an issue where not even his bitterest critics doubted his sincerity. Opposing campaign-finance reform as a dangerous restriction on political speech by businesses was the cause of his life. Obama’s memoir casually describes McConnell as lacking “any strong convictions beyond an almost religious opposition to any version of campaign-finance reform.”
And yet, last Monday, here was McConnell treating the spectacle of business leaders engaging in political debate as a stark threat to be extinguished. The provocation was a series of corporate statements denouncing Republican-sponsored voting restrictions, which McConnell described as “a coordinated campaign by powerful and wealthy people to mislead and bully the American people.” McConnell, invoking a spate of Republican proposals to punish firms that speak out against their vote-suppression laws, warned, “Corporations will invite serious consequences if they become a vehicle for far-left mobs to hijack our country.”
The Republican Party is the biggest threat to American
democracy today. It is a radical, obstructionist faction that has become
hostile to the most basic democratic norm: that the other side should
get to wield power when it wins elections.
A few years ago, these statements may have sounded like
partisan Democratic hyperbole. But in the wake of the January 6 attack
on the Capitol and Trump’s acquittal in the Senate on the charge of
inciting it, they seem more a plain description of where we’re at as a
country.
But how deep does the GOP’s problem with democracy run, really? How did things get so bad? And is it likely to get worse?
The first American social media presidency came to
something of an end last month [November 2020], not when the votes rolled in but when
Twitter flagged six of President Trump’s tweets in less than 24 hours.
To view Trump’s pronouncements — most of them vociferous claims that he’d won the election he has since certifiably lost — users had to click past a warning that each tweet’s content “might be misleading about an election or other civic process.”
It was a dramatic departure for the 45th president’s
favorite platform, where for almost a decade he’s honed his persona as a
trash-talking businessman, spewed racist conspiracies, and incited violence largely without interference. But this year, amid rampant coronavirus misinformation
and baseless charges of election fraud, Twitter finally cracked down on
one of its biggest accounts, with 88 million followers. The warnings,
however, haven’t really stopped @RealDonaldTrump’s lies from circulating.
Over four tumultuous years, Trump hasn’t just broken
every rule of online engagement — he’s rewritten the playbook. Now every
politician is forced to engage on social media, thoughfewuse
their preferred platforms more skillfully. Barack Obama was the first
sitting president on Twitter (and continues to have more followers on
the platform), but Trump was the one to weaponize it....
Trump will soon be leaving Washington, but his tactics will influence GOP politicking in particular for years to come.
The
conservative movement has been xenophobic, intellectually bankrupt, and
proto-authoritarian since well before the phrase “President Donald
Trump” ceased to be a Simpsons reference.
Mitt Romney’s “compassionate conservative” pedigree did not stop him from demanding the self-deportation of “illegals” in 2012 (nor, for that matter, did not prevent him from kissing the birther king’s ring).
The GOP’s disregard for deficits under Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush
did not stop it from fomenting anti-debt hysteria under Bill Clinton
and Barack Obama; nor did the repeated failure of supply-side tax cuts
to pay for themselves stop Republicans from insisting that the next
round would. Meanwhile, through aggressive gerrymandering, the Roberts Court’s gutting of the Voting Rights Act, and
various voting restrictions aimed at combating nonexistent mass voter
fraud, Republicans have been chipping away at the foundations of our
liberal democracy for more than a decade.
But they used to have some
sense of decorum: Conservatives insisted that their opposition to
“amnesty” was rooted in a commitment to the rule of law and concern for
native-born workers, not racial animus against nonwhite immigrants; that
their support for regressive taxation derived from macroeconomic models
and not plutocratic avarice; and that their apparent attempts to
suppress the votes of Democratic-leaning constituencies reflected
earnest concern about safeguarding the integrity of election results,
not a conviction that their opposition had no legitimate right to
govern.
Donald
Trump had no patience for such politesse. For five years now, the mogul
has been waging total war on the American right’s (im)plausible
deniability about its own true nature. There were plenty of immigration
restrictionists in the 2016 GOP primary, but the Republican base opted
for the one who’d declared that Mexicans were rapists and that no Muslims should be allowed to enter the United States. By manically oscillating between contradictory economic proposals — calling for universal health care and higher taxes on the wealthy one
day, work requirements for Medicaid and supply-side tax cuts the next —
Trump revealed the policy nihilism of the self-styled “party of ideas.”
The high priests of supply-side voodoo may have disdained empirical
rigor, but only Trump broadcasted contempt for the very concepts of
ideological coherence or reasoned argument.
Now,
in his presidency’s final chapter, Trump has torn away the conservative
movement’s most precious fig leaf — the one concealing its naked
contempt for democracy.
