Monthly Archives: December 2020

Blue State Blues

$2 billion unemployment fraud in California illustrates a downside of term limits

The State of California has many distinctions and ranks highly among the states in a number of categories. U.S. News’ Best States Rankings places California #19 overall. (Across the board: Health care #7; Education #21; Economy #4; Infrastructure #32; Opportunity #49; Fiscal Stability 42; Crime & Corrections 23; and Natural Environment #5.) The 24/7 Wall St. Best and Worst Run States list places California at #14 among its peers.

But numerous state agencies in California do not have reputations for efficient, error-free management or best customer service experience. Tales of long waits at the DMV are common and after passage of Motor Voter legislation, numerous reports surfaced of difficulties in registering voters.

Nonetheless, it was still shocking to read recent reports of up to $2 billion dollars of fraudulent unemployment claims (associated with 640,000 accounts) at the EDD (the state unemployment agency), including an estimated $400 million in “claims improperly filed in the names of inmates in state prisons,” as was this colorful story from the Los Angeles Times:

When Pasadena police pulled over Robert Sloan Mateer behind the wheel of a slick Maserati SUV, they found $197,711 in cash, methamphetamine and a loaded gun without a serial number. They also found 17 unemployment benefit debit cards loaded with tens of thousands of more dollars in various names.

The stack of cards carried more than $133,000 for unemployment benefits, issued by California’s Employment Development Department under the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security Act passed by Congress in March, according to a five-count federal indictment against Mateer unsealed last month. Many of those cards were in the names of victims of identity theft, according to federal prosecutors.

That Maserati was purchased with some of the unemployment insurance benefits the 30-year-old Pasadena man fraudulently obtained by using stolen identities, the indictment alleges.

A report this week suggested that “the state let its guard down well before the COVID-19 pandemic began in March, failing to keep up with what other states have done to flag bogus claims.”

It is hardly unprecedented for a government agency to be burdened with outmoded technology and processes, though some factors present in California make this situation more likely: The Democratic-dominated state government — responsive to the challenges posed by a highly diverse population, much of it in urban areas, wide disparities of income, expensive housing, unequal access to healthcare and education, and so on — will encounter many compelling demands competing for funding. Purchases of computers and software for the EDD or the DMV — or ensuring that vulnerabilities in the system are identified and remedied — may get short shrift.

But if government (and in particular, if the legislature with responsibility for making funding decisions) is working well, these problems won’t be slighted. Unfortunately, term limits hobble the ability of the legislature to work well.

When we limit the terms of legislators, we limit their opportunity to develop expertise in a policy area. By the time they’ve figured things out, they’re departing the legislature or running for their next office (where that expertise may or may not be relevant). And if they’ve figured things out, they hardly have time — or the clout as first- or second-term legislators to convince their colleagues — to resolve or remedy the problem.

For new legislators (with term limits in place) it’s easier to pick a high-profile area (rather than supportive administrative technology), perhaps a partisan hot topic with the interest of voters and activists, that may get more attention and a following to boost their campaign for their next elective office.

When someone can stay in place for a while, they can devote attention to the lower-profile, but still essential matters of making things work.

And worst of all from the standpoint of voters, when things go wrong, the legislatures, legislative leaders, and even the backbenchers responsible for letting things get out of hand are long gone. They’ve moved on before we can hold them accountable.

An anecdote will provide a contrast: Nicholas Petris served in the California State Senate from 1966 to 1996 (when he was termed out after passage of Proposition 28). He was my state senator for most of those years. Among his several areas of expertise was higher education. His district included Oakland (and the University of California Office of the President) and Berkeley (home of the UC flagship campus). Because of his expertise, he was an effective advocate for UC. As an old school liberal (responsive to competing needs in the state), he didn’t roll over for the University, but he knew what was critical. And — this is as important as advocacy — his expertise enabled him to be an effective and sophisticated critic. No one could pull the wool over his eyes.

Good governance in this area was possible. It’s a good bet that no one in the state senate since Petris departed Sacramento has had as good a handle on issues critical to the University of California. That depth of expertise is a thing of the past.

One of the L.A. Times‘ stories on the EDD scandal references “Assemblywoman Cottie Petrie-Norris (D-Laguna Beach), chairwoman of the Assembly Committee on Accountability and Administrative Review.” Her Assembly biography notes that she is a businesswoman and community leader, a graduate of Yale University, and is serving her first term.

It’s not impossible that through her leadership (with supportive allies) the problems at EDD (and the DMV) will be resolved before she leaves the Assembly. But Assemblywoman Petrie-Norris doesn’t have much time learn how to use the resources at her command as a new member of the Assembly, to figure things out at the troubled agencies, to interact productively with state leaders inside and outside of the Assembly, to make a public case for her diagnosis and proposed solution, and to ensure that a fix is implemented.

(Image of Maserati SUV from Maserati USA.)

Democracy, Donald Trump, Off the Rails

The nation is at the mercy of a raging Donald Trump — with a strong assist from the GOP

In the past week, Donald Trump, who has shrugged off most of his responsibilities as president (while he watches TV, talks to folks who encourage his crusade against the election results, and golfs — and, yesterday, decides to take off for Mar-a-Lago), has found ways — nearly every day since the election — to keep the attention of the media on himself, as well as to breach the guardrails of American democracy in unprecedented ways.

With cascades of lies and howls of grievance, Trump has fought against the fact of his defeat at the hands of Joe Biden. Last Friday, he hosted a White House meeting (described as “raucous” by the New York Times, which broke the initial story) featuring conspiracy theorist Sidney Powell (whom Trump considered naming special counsel to investigate voter fraud); retired Lt. General Michael Flynn (who recently suggested on Newsmax that Trump declare martial law, so battleground states he lost could have do-over elections); and, by phone, Rudy Giuliani (who has advocated that the Department of Homeland Security to seize voting machines as a step to overthrow the election). White House chief of staff Mark Meadows (former chair of the House Freedom Caucus and no slouch when it comes to disruptive far-right antics) pushed back with White House counsel Pat Cipollone (who appealed to the Constitution) against Flynn and others.

Trump has turned on his closest allies (Senators McConnell and Thune and Vice President Pence), after previously attacking Georgia’s governor and election officials, and even Fox News Channel; dismissed the significance of the recent sprawling cyberattack and endeavored to shift blame from Vladimir Putin’s Russia; and threatened to unravel legislation to provide overdue relief to Americans during an economic crisis brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic.

As the spotlight shifts inevitably toward Joe Biden, Trump satisfies his craving for attention, rewards those he deems loyal, and lashes out at those he faults for disloyalty. Trump is still president for four more weeks. He can wield power in ways unprecedented in American history. No one else has departed the presidency as he is doing. His avalanche of shady pardons and commutations is a case study in Trump’s governing style.

With few checks on the president’s pardon power, Trump can enjoy instant gratification with the stroke of a pen. He can pardon and commute sentences without the cooperation of Congress, the courts, or any executive branch department. This power is his alone to use as he sees fit.

Unique among American presidents, Trump has dished out pardons overwhelmingly to his friends, political allies, and family members. George H.W. Bush pardoned Casper Weinberger and other Reagan officials caught up in the Iran-Contra scandal, while Bill Clinton pardoned his half-brother and Marc Rich (the big money donor who had fled the country to escape prosecution). These, though, were exceptions, neither routine, nor representative of the pardons granted by either Bush or Clinton.

Among the crooks, grifters, scofflaws, and war criminals whom Trump has pardoned or whose sentences he has commuted, the vast majority have had a connection to Trump; or they have benefited from special pleading by friends, family, celebrities who have Trump’s attention, Republican members of Congress, and conservative media, led by Fox News Channel.

Last month, Jack Goldsmith, law professor at Harvard noted:

First, of the 41 people who received pardons or commutations (or both) from Mr. Trump, 36 (or 88 percent) have a personal or political connection to the president. They advanced an aspect of Mr. Trump’s political agenda, knew the president personally (or had a connection to someone close to him), were someone he learned about on television (usually on Fox) or a celebrity he admired. By contrast, only five of Mr. Trump’s pardons lacked a personal or political connection and appeared to be vetted through the traditional Justice Department clearing process. No president has come close to using the pardon power in such persistently self-serving ways.

That pattern, with Trump’s recent pardon spree, hasn’t changed. And yesterday’s White House announcement was especially noteworthy.

Paul Manafort—Today, President Trump has issued a full and complete pardon to Paul Manafort, stemming from convictions prosecuted in the course of Special Counsel Mueller’s investigation, which was premised on the Russian collusion hoax.  Mr. Manafort has already spent two years in prison, including a stretch of time in solitary confinement – treatment worse than what many of the most violent criminals receive.  As a result of blatant prosecutorial overreach, Mr. Manafort has endured years of unfair treatment and is one of the most prominent victims of what has been revealed to be perhaps the greatest witch hunt in American history.  As Mr. Manafort’s trial judge observed, prior to the Special Counsel investigation, Mr. Manafort had led an “otherwise blameless life.”  Since May, Mr. Manafort has been released to home confinement as a result of COVID-19 concerns.

Roger Stone— Today, President Trump granted a full and unconditional pardon to Roger Stone, Jr.  President Trump had previously commuted Mr. Stone’s sentence in July of this year.  Mr. Stone is a 68-year-old man with numerous medical conditions.  Due to prosecutorial misconduct by Special Counsel Mueller’s team, Mr. Stone was treated very unfairly.  He was subjected to a pre-dawn raid of his home, which the media conveniently captured on camera.  Mr. Stone also faced potential political bias at his jury trial.  Pardoning him will help to right the injustices he faced at the hands of the Mueller investigation.

With the stroke of a pen, Trump’s defiance of the Mueller investigation is complete. The many successful convictions expose the White House lies (attesting to a “hoax” and a “witch hunt”), but Trump has triumphed in the end. The cover-up — ensuring that neither Stone, nor Manafort turned on Trump, and in exchange are let off the hook — has to rank as one of the greatest successes of the Trump presidency.

It also represents a blow against democracy. The Constitution provides means to check a president. In the past four years, the Republican Party — with control of the U.S. Senate and the Supreme Court — has been intent on ensuring that Donald Trump would evade the most significant checks on his power. The Senate, especially, has enabled and emboldened him.

We’re living with the consequences of the Republican Party’s decision. Our country — with a rampaging president who won’t accept the results of a democratic election, and who brandishes his power to distort the rule of law to benefit himself — increasingly resembles a tin pot nation, not the world’s oldest democracy. The Republican Party has embraced this authoritarian model, which will have repercussions long past the next 30 days.

(Image: CNN on YouTube.)

2020 General Election, Donald Trump

Trump is obsessed (on Twitter) with losing the election, but can’t be bothered to do his job

“December is shaping up to be the U.S.’s worst month of the pandemic by a significant margin . . .”

“First-time claims for unemployment insurance totaled 853,000, an increase from the upwardly revised 716,000 total a week before, the Labor Department reported Thursday. Economists surveyed by Dow Jones had been expecting 730,000.”

“Days after several US agencies confirmed their networks were compromised in a massive data breach, federal officials are still struggling to understand the scope of the damage — highlighting the sophistication and breadth of an ongoing hacking campaign that has been tied to Russia.”

What’s Donald Trump thinking about? Let’s look at a sampling of the 34 tweets and retweets he has blasted out in the past 24 hours: The great majority related to his bogus claims that he won the election (“We won Wisconsin big. They rigged the vote,” “We won the Presidential Election by a lot,” and “Just released data shows many thousands of noncitizens voted in Nevada.“), including a Washington Examiner report of Peter Navarro’s 36-page report on “voting irregularities“; complaints about “so-called ‘Republicans,‘ ” in Georgia who won’t agree to “give us the State“; and no less than ten tweets and retweets commending Tommy Tuberman, who heaps praise on Trump and “may save the Republic” by disrupting the Electoral College count in January as a man of courage, in contrast to Republican senators who lack toughness.

Trump also offers swipes at the Supreme Court and the New York Times, insists that “I have NOTHING to do with the potential prosecution of Hunter Biden, or the Biden family. It is just more Fake News,” and offers more than one tweet each regarding Liz Cheney, Peter Strzok (adding a complaint about “the Russia hoax), and a Daily Caller report of a move to strip Lincoln’s name from a high school. Trump’s nod to legislation is a threat to veto the defense bill, which mentions Lindsey Graham’s attacks on social media companies.

Trump’s references to the pandemic (“the China virus”) include four tweets on the vaccine, including the approval of Moderna’s candidate and praise for the FedEx and UPS drivers delivering the doses across the country and three retweets of Buck Sexton, who couches his insistence that “Masks work” is no more than a mantra and his ridicule of California’s failures to stem the rate of infections as defenses of freedom of speech.

Trump references the economy — that is, the rising stock market, not unemployment or struggling businesses on Main Street — once (one of his four tweets referencing the vaccine): “All-time Stock Market high. The Vaccine and the Vaccine rollout are getting the best of reviews. Moving along really well. Get those “shots” everyone! Also, stimulus talks looking very good.”

He hasn’t tweeted (or spoken of) the Russian incursion into U.S. government and corporate databases, much less offered criticism of Putin’s mischief or assurances of taking any action to counter the threat.

Thirty-three days to go until January 20. Joe Biden will have his hands full.

(Image from “Donald Trump: A Study in Leadership.”)

Donald Trump, Republicans

Is it time for a Barr reappraisal? Not a chance.

A headline at TPM’s Editor’s Blog asks, “A Barr Reappraisal?” and suggests an affirmative response from a reader, based on the recent report that the investigation of Hunter Biden, begun in 2018, was kept secret (from the press and the President). Reader JG suggests, since the investigation (if made public) “would have been weaponized in the campaign,” we must give Barr credit for keeping it under wraps. JG offers the view that Barr has used “DoJ as a shield for Trump, not a sword to go after political enemies.”

Josh Marshall is skeptical, “I need to see a lot more to convince me we’re getting the full or true story here. As it is the facts just run too counter to Barr’s tenure and that of the DOJ for the last four years. Something does not add up.”

I agree and suggest an alternative to JG’s view: Just because something could be “weaponized,” it doesn’t follow that it would be effective politically to weaponize it (as the Trump campaign certainly would have done). Bill Barr has reason to regard himself as a savvier operator than most of the sycophants surrounding Trump. It is hardly a stretch to believe that in his judgment revealing the indictment would have generated as many votes for Biden as for Trump. (Furthermore, Barr stayed out of the line of fire — from Democrats, the press, Trump, and Trump’s accolytes — by keeping the report quiet. There is little reason to think that any flak from a leak would have “effected a different outcome in the election,” to borrow a phrase.) And so Barr didn’t leak the report before the election.

Whether this pragmatic judgment is right or wrong, it’s defensible; and furthermore, given the evidence of the past year and a half, it’s a more plausible account of Barr’s motivation than the idea that he kept the indictment secret because ethical or professional or reputational constraints held him back.

It is far more likely that he saw no point in releasing the information, no clear advantage to the Trump campaign. It’s laughable, after all we’ve seen since Barr came on board, to think that leaking an investigation of Joe Biden’s son was a bridge too far for the A.G.

Last week, Bill Barr said, “To date, we have not seen fraud on a scale that could have effected a different outcome in the election,” separating himself from Trump. While this is striking, in the sense that Barr has acted, at times, like another Trump sycophant. He is not and never was simply a Trump flunky.

Instead, he has been a devoted partisan of the Republican Party. That partisanship led to his defenses of the Republican president — when the the party’s and Trump’s interests coincided (fortifying a strong executive, undermining the Mueller investigation, pushing back against Nancy Pelosi’s House, and so on).

As I posted earlier, “Bill Barr is carrying water for the Republican Party ….” Trump’s interests (to salve his wounded ego and pump up his brand) and the GOP’s interests (winning two senate seats) diverged in a way that frightened the Republican Congressional leadership. So — placing party first, as he has always done — Barr separated himself from Trump.

There’s no paradox, no change of heart, no signs of “Barr’s limits” (in Marshall’s words). There’s an unflagging allegiance to the Grand Old Party. Same as it ever was for Bill Barr — going back decades.

(Image: Bill Barr and Donald Trump at the 38th Annual National Peace Officers’ Memorial Service via Wikimedia Commons.)

2020 General Election, Democracy, Donald Trump, Off the Rails, Republicans

The Republican Party has become an authoritarian threat to our nation’s democracy

Since Election Day, State and Federal courts throughout the country have been flooded with frivolous lawsuits aimed at disenfranchising large swaths of voters and undermining the legitimacy of the election. The State of Texas has now added its voice to the cacophony of bogus claims. Texas seeks to invalidate elections in four states for yielding results with which it disagrees. Its request for this Court to exercise its original jurisdiction and then anoint Texas’s preferred candidate for President is legally indefensible and is an afront to principles of constitutional democracy.

. . .

Texas’s effort to get this Court to pick the next President has no basis in law or fact. The Court should not abide this seditious abuse of the judicial process, and should send a clear and unmistakable signal that such abuse must never be replicated. — Attorney General Josh Shapiro, Commonwealth of Pennsylvania

The quotation (the first and last paragraphs of the preliminary statement) is from Pennsylvania’s response to the suit filed by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton that asks the Supreme Court to prohibit four battleground states where Biden beat Trump – Pennsylvania, Georgia, Michigan, and Wisconsin – from appointing electors to the Electoral College based on the results of the election. Instead, Texas proposes a do-over, asking the court to order each of the four states to call a special election, which would determine the selection of electors.

Seventeen Eighteen states have joined Texas’s appeal.

One hundred and six House Republicans (over half the caucus) filed an amicus brief in support of the lawsuit. [Update: the number has reached 126.]

Alabama Congressman Mo Brooks is seeking allies in the House (and Senate) to cast votes against official certification of the Electoral College results. 

“In my judgment, based on what I know to be true, Joe Biden was the largest beneficiary of illegally cast votes in the history of the United States,” Brooks said in a phone interview with AL.com today. “And I can either ratify that illegal vote system, or I can object to it, in hopes that our election system will become more secure in future elections.”

Seventy five members of the Pennsylvania state legislature (from both chambers) signed a letter asking their Members of Congress to reject certification of Pennsylvania’s Electoral College votes for Joe Biden.

Senators David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler of Georgia, each seeking reelection on January 5, have declared their support for the Texas lawsuit.

Almost all Republicans in both the Senate and the House, including leaders Mitch McConnell and Kevin McCarthy, continue to play along with Trump’s defiance of the election results, refusing to acknowledge Joe Biden as president-elect.

A whining, blustering Donald Trump is throwing a tantrum over his defeat at the hands of Joe Biden. The President of the United States is determined to overturn the results of the 2020 election. He is acting openly, persistently, in plain sight.

Governors, legislators, attorneys general, party leaders, and others have heard from a desperate Trump, who has sought to have Republican-controlled state legislatures nullify the decision their voters made.

Though his efforts, in the courts and among state officials, to throw out votes have met with consistent failure, Trump’s rampage represents a frightening erosion of democratic principles and practices. Yes, state election officials have stood firm. (This time.) But this threat to democratic governance is far more consequential for having found such broad support across the Republican Party at the national, state, and local level.

The voices we are hearing are not marginal figures in the Republican Party. Nor are the elected Republicans who have chosen to give tacit backing to Trump’s fever dreams. This is the primary message of the party right now — weeks after the results of the election have become clear. What we are witnessing is not a fringe movement within the party. This fierce fight against democracy — against the sanctity of elections and accepting the possibility of victory by ones opponents — has been embraced by the Republican Party.

The GOP’s party line is beyond the pale — beyond reason, facts and evidence, and democratic principles. The Arizona Republican Party asks whether its followers are ready to give their lives for the fight against the Trump loss in a democratic election.

https://twitter.com/AZGOP/status/1336186861891452929

Georgia Senators Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue are the last candidates standing in the way of Democratic control of the Senate. While Perdue is in hiding, Loeffler’s campaign consists of repeating, like incantations, scary names for her opponent and an insistence that the 2020 election was fraudulent.

https://twitter.com/martin_samoylov/status/1335824066666770433?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw

The campaign message in Georgia (an increasingly diverse state with enough Democratic constituencies to appear more like the nation, and less like the solid South that Republican pols have become used to) is the message of the national Republican Party.

And, unsurprisingly, the Republican majority of the Georgia state senate has responded to Trump’s loss with promises of investigations of “fraudulent activities,” “misconduct,” “criminals” (purported out-of- staters who may have infiltrated into the state to cast votes), and — of course — additional proposals to suppress the vote and reduce turnout in future elections:

As soon as we may constitutionally convene, we will reform our election laws to secure our electoral process by eliminating at-will absentee voting. We will require photo identification for absentee voting for cause, and we will crack down on ballot harvesting by outlawing drop boxes. 

The Republican Party, trafficking in “discredited allegations and conspiracy theories,” is furiously pushing back against the results of the 2020 presidential election.

That the grounds for overturning the election are flimsy, that the efforts are meeting with failure after failure, that it is tempting to regard the whole spectacle as pathetic and ridiculous — none of this diminishes the indecency of the GOP’s refusal to acknowledge the outcome of the election.

These are the actions of a political party that has become authoritarian. That transformation constitutes a grave threat to our democracy, to “government of the people, by the people, for the people.”

2020 General Election, Democracy, Donald Trump, Republicans

Grand old Party sees only traditional American politics as usual in Trump’s lies and rampages

President Trump called Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp (R) on Saturday morning to urge him to persuade the state legislature to overturn President-elect Joe Biden’s victory in the state and asked the governor to order an audit of absentee ballot signatures, the latest brazen effort by the president to interfere in the 2020 election.

Hours before he is scheduled to hold a rally in Georgia on behalf of the state’s two GOP senators, Trump pressed Kemp to call a special session of the state legislature to get lawmakers to override the results and appoint electors that would back him, according to a person familiar with the conversation. He also asked the governor to demand an audit of signatures on mail ballots, something Kemp has previously noted he has no power to do. — Amy Gardner and Colby Itkowitz, “Trump calls Georgia governor to pressure him for help overturning Biden’s win in the state”

More than 2,900 Americans died of COVID-19 on December 3, one month after the election. The death toll has topped 2,600 every day this month, while the United States leads the world in overall fatalities at more than 285,000. The President of the United States — who predicted that the virus would “disappear” and asserted that it would no longer be featured in the media after November 3 — has demonstrated complete indifference to the raging pandemic since his defeat in the election. Instead he throws holiday parties in the White House.

Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, in How Democracies Die (written during the first year of the Trump administration) suggest, “Perhaps President Trump’s most notorious norm-breaking behavior has been lying.” Certainly the man has proven to be a prodigious liar; as of October 22 — reflecting the most recent update — Trump had told more than 22,247 whoppers since the inaugural.

Note also Donald Trump’s disregard for the welfare of the American people and refusal to serve the public interest — as we can plainly observe — which constitute among the most egregious violations of the governing norms that other presidents have adhered to. We have, before Trump, taken for granted that our presidents were committed to acting in our best interests.

This president is hell-bent on evading the decision of the electorate to remove him from office and put Joe Biden in the White House. His torrent of lies, attacks, and conspiracy tales in recent weeks have focused on discrediting the electoral process, denying the outcome, and — as in his phone call to Governor Kemp — to overturning the decision of the people.

This behavior is straight out of the authoritarian handbook. Trump lost the election. His off the rails conduct to fend off this fact does grave damage to democratic institutions, Americans’ trust in the integrity of our elections, and the nation’s standing in the world.

This would all be bad enough. The damage is compounded by the complicity of the Republican Party, whose leadership (with few exceptions) has made the decision to go along to get along with the Republican in the White House. Consider the 249 elected Republicans in the House and the Senate:

Just 27 congressional Republicans acknowledge Joe Biden’s win over President Trump a month after the former vice president’s clear victory of more than 7 million votes nationally and a convincing electoral-vote margin that exactly matched Trump’s 2016 tally.

Two Republicans consider Trump the winner despite all evidence showing otherwise. And another 220 GOP members of the House and Senate — about 88 percent of all Republicans serving in Congress — will simply not say who won the election.

Those are the findings of a Washington Post survey of all 249 Republicans in the House and Senate that began the morning after Trump posted a 46-minute video Wednesday evening in which he wrongly claimed he had defeated Biden and leveled wild and unsubstantiated allegations of “corrupt forces” who stole the outcome from the sitting president. — Paul Kane and Scott Clement, “Just 27 congressional Republicans acknowledge Biden’s win, Washington Post survey finds”

The lies, the disregard of the public good, the defiance of a free and fair election — these are the acts of a would-be authoritarian strongman, not a leader committed to democracy — no matter the wishes of the Republican base.

 As Levitsky and Ziblatt observe, it is political parties that sustain governing norms threatened by authoritarian incursions. Responsibility for opposing extremists, and upholding democratic institutions, falls on our political parties.

Potential demagogues exist in all democracies, and occasionally, one or more of them strike a public chord. But in some democracies, political leaders heed the warning signs and take steps to ensure that authoritarians remain on the fringes, far from the centers of power. When faced with the rise of extremists or demagogues, they make a concerted effort to isolate and defeat them. Although mass responses to extremist appeals matter, what matters more is whether political elites, and especially parties, serve as filters. Put simply, political parties are democracy’s gatekeepers.

The Republican Party has absolutely failed to safeguard democracy. After limited efforts at constraining Trump fell short, the GOP has chosen to remain loyal to an erratic, reckless leader. To do otherwise, as Levitsky and Ziblatt observe, would damage careers. So:

. . . Trump’s deviance has been tolerated by the Republican Party, which has helped make it acceptable to much of the Republican electorate. . . . There is no “containment” strategy for an endless stream of offensive tweets. Unwilling to pay the political price of breaking with their own president, Republicans find themselves with little alternative but to constantly redefine what is and isn’t tolerable.

Recall that this was written during Trump’s first year in office. By the end of 2020 — in a process accelerated following a near party-line vote to acquit an impeached president — the ongoing redefining required thrashing core democratic institutions, such as fealty to the results of free and fair elections; graceful, timely embrace of the peaceful transition of power; and (as outlandish as it appears today) doing what one could to ensure the success, for the benefit of the American people, of the incoming president. Instead, Trump is deliberately sabotaging his successor — through vindictive purges, frantic rulemaking, capricious national security actions, and — by doing nothing, except boxing Biden in – ensuring that both the raging pandemic and the faltering economy are far less manageable on January 20, than they are today.

All this — with the GOP’s silent blessing — has been redefined as American politics as usual. Citing Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s concept of defining deviance down, Levitsky and Ziblatt observe, “in the face of widespread deviance, we become overwhelmed—and then desensitized. We grow accustomed to what we previously thought to be scandalous.”

The Republican Party, in the wake of Donald Trump, sees no scandals among its partisans (though mean tweets from Neera Tanden may threaten her cabinet appointment).

(Image: Trump in Georgia via NBC News.)

Donald Trump, Republicans

Bill Barr is an abject GOP partisan; hence, he is publicly contradicting Donald Trump

To date, we have not seen fraud on a scale that could have effected a different outcome in the election. . . .

There’s been one assertion that would be systemic fraud and that would be the claim that machines were programmed essentially to skew the election results. And the DHS and DOJ have looked into that, and so far, we haven’t seen anything to substantiate that. — Attorney General William Barr

Much is being made of Bill Barr’s public comments that reject Trump’s whining that Joe Biden won only because of election fraud. Which raises questions.

Has Barr had a change of heart? Is he trying to resuscitate his tattered reputation? Has he belatedly decided to act as a principled attorney general?

None of the above. Bill Barr is carrying water for the Republican Party, as he has consistently done throughout his tenure in the Trump administration (and in previous Republican administrations).

Donald Trump is traveling to Georgia this weekend to campaign for two Republican senators. If Democrats win both races, Mitch McConnell is no longer majority leader. The party desperately needs Donald Trump to gin up the base so Georgia Republicans turn out to vote. Too much bellyaching about a fraudulent election by the narcissist-in-chief could discourage Trump’s legions and keep them at home.

Republicans, who have played along for weeks with Trump’s refusal to concede his defeat and his complaints of being cheated (because of fear of what their mercurial leader may do or say), are concerned about how these bizarre hysterics will affect the Georgia election. Someone needs to nudge the President nearer the real world so he doesn’t sandbag the GOP this weekend.

Bill Barr is bold enough to deliver a reality check to the President when partisan duty summons. The message has four days to sink in (and perhaps other GOP partisans will join the chorus).

(Image: The AG at May 13, 2019 candlelight vigil via Wikimedia Commons.)