Melissa Block: ‘The clear and present danger of Trump’s enduring “Big Lie”’

From NPR: 

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.

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Amanda Marcotte: ‘What Republicans know that Democrats don’t: Power matters more than policy’

From Salon:

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.



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P.B.S. Newshour: ‘How Fox News personalities amplified divisions, disinformation around January 6’

Zack Beauchamp: ‘American democracy is tottering. It’s not clear Americans care.’

From Vox:

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 Republican partisans, 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.

 

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Mike Nesmith (1942-2021)