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2020 General Election, Democracy, Donald Trump, Republicans

There is much reason to doubt that the November election will be free and fair – At least we’re forewarned

Democrats desperately need a Plan B.

Plan A is encouraging voters to send in ballots by mail. That seems foolhardy, since Republican lawyers will be in place in key states across the country to challenge votes, delay the process, and hope for another result like Bush v. Gore delivered in 2000 to stop counting votes — or to muddy the process so much that one or more Republican controlled state legislatures throw all their electoral votes to Trump (as the majority in Bush v. Gore asserted that the Constitution sanctioned)*.

The headline in the photo above is from the Washington Post. NPR beat the newspaper to the punch, with a similar headline (and story) yesterday: “More Than 550,000 Primary Absentee Ballots Rejected In 2020, Far Outpacing 2016.”

Two days ago an op-ed in the Post (“I mailed my ballot in on time. Florida tossed it. 2020 will be much worse.”) included this chronology:

In 2018, I mailed my ballot on Oct. 29, eight days before Election Day. Yet every time I checked the website of the Miami-Dade County Elections Department in the following week, I got bad news: “Ballot not tabulated.” Maybe the system was backed up, I thought. I called the office on Nov. 7, the day after the vote, but the woman on the other end of the line said my ballot still hadn’t arrived. No way would it be counted. 

Ten days later, I received scanned copies of each side of my ballot envelope. On one side, there was a Nov. 9 postmark. On the other, the Nov. 14 arrival date. My ballot had spent half a month traveling 10 miles across town. And I was in good company: 3,429 other people in Miami-Dade had sent ballots that were deemed late and thus not tallied, according to the late-ballot log I obtained from the Elections Department. Of those, 2,105 had postmarks on or before Election Day. One was postmarked Oct. 17. Statewide, county supervisors discarded more than 15,000 ballots for lateness, as required by Florida law.

Trump can’t win the election unless something unforeseen and dramatic happens between now and November 3 that somehow turns things in his favor. (Not likely.) But his chances of stealing the election — in plain sight as we all watch — are better than we might have anticipated a relatively short time ago.

Republicans can’t be counted on to side with democracy if a victory in the presidential election hangs in the balance (or if a Republican majority in the Senate is in play). Yes, Republicans in Congress pushed back on Trump’s suggestion that we postpone the fall election. But — stop and consider for just a moment all that we’ve witnessed over the past three and a half years — are there any grounds to believe that, say, Mitch McConnell would object to a transparent theft of the election if he thought that he could get away with it?

Consider all of Trump’s enablers. Isn’t the same cynical calculation in play for each of them? If Fox News Channel and the rest of the conservative media universe were on board, nearly half the country would be convinced, if Trump claimed a victory, that Trump had won (or that McConnell had held his majority).

Democrats had better come up with an alternative to Plan A, because that’s a slender reed to hang our fortunes on. We need more than that to protect majority rule. We can’t count on democratic norms; or the rule of law; or legitimate, non-partisan rulings from the courts. Bipartisan consensus on all that stuff is long past.

We can’t count on the timely, reliable delivery of mail; or competent, conscientious county officials tallying votes; or innumerable workaday procedures not to glitch out and effect the outcome. Most of the 550,000 uncounted primary votes — and the delayed and uncounted ballot mailed in by the op-ed writer — are just kinks in the system, not likely the result of bad faith. But in anything resembling a close election, glitches and kinks could determine the outcome. Let’s add Republican bad faith to the mix, because we have that aplenty.

If Republicans decide that half the country (or close enough) is with them, they will not hesitate to muck things up so badly that an outright theft becomes possible. Tweets. On-air rants. Legal challenges. Organized outrage. Manufactured chaos. All in the service of stealing an election (as they hurl that accusation at Democrats).

Republicans with reservations will stay silent. The shouters will have the floor — until it’s time to claim the victory. Then they’ll all accept whatever they’ve managed to pull off.

It would be much uglier than 2000, but that won’t stop them. Ugly works for them.

* “In its infamous 2000 decision in Bush vs. Gore, the U.S. Supreme Court remarked that although every state legislature had given voters the power to vote directly for the president and to allocate the state’s electoral college votes, state legislators could take back that power at any time.“

Democracy, Republicans

Release of v. 5 of the report by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence is a man bites dog story

The Republican-led Senate Select Committee on Intelligence has released what is probably its final report on Russian interference in the 2016 election, which goes beyond what we learned from the Mueller report. The 966-page fifth volume provides more details and establishes more conclusively that Trump’s claim — “It’s all a hoax” — is a lie.

▪ “The Committee found that the Russian government engaged in an aggressive, multifaceted effort to influence, or attempt to influence, the outcome of the 2016 presidential election.” (p. 5)

▪ “Manafort hired and worked increasingly closely with a Russian national, Konstantin Kilimnik. Kilimnik is a Russian intelligence officer. . . . Kilimnik and Manafort formed a close and lasting relationship that endured to the 2016 U.S. elections and beyond.

Prior to joining the Trump Campaign in March 2016 and continuing throughout his time on the Campaign, Manafort directly and indirectly communicated with Kilimnik, Derispaska, and the pro-Russian oligarchs in Urkraine. On numerous occasions, Manafort sought to secretly share internal Campaign information with Kilimnik.” (p. 6)

▪ “The Committee found that Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered the Russian effort to hack computer networks and accounts affiliated with the Democratic Party and leak information damaging to Hillary Clinton and her campaign for president. Moscow’s intent was to harm the Clinton Campaign, tarnish an expected Clinton administration, help the Trump Campaign after Trump because the presumptive Republican nominee, and undermine the U.S. democratic process.

[Redacted] WikiLeaks actively sought, and played, a key role in the Russian influence campaign and very likely knew it was assisting a Russian intelligence effort. The Committee found significant indications that [redacted] …

While the GRU and WikiLeaks were releasing hacked documents, the Trump Campaign sought to maximize the impact of those leaks to aid Trump’s electoral prospects. Staff on the Trump Campaign sought advance notice about WikiLeaks releases, created messaging strategies to promote and share the materials in anticipation of and following their release, and encouraged further leaks. The Trump Campaign publicly undermined the attribution of the hack-and-leak campaign to Russia and was indifferent to whether it and WikiLeaks were furthering a russion election interference effort” (p. 7)

SSCI report on Russian interference in 2016 election, v. 5, p. vii.

Writing at Lawfare, Benjamin Wittes suggests that, in their statement asserting that “the Committee found no evidence that then-candidate Donald Trump or his campaign colluded with the Russian government in its efforts to meddle in the election,” Senate Republicans on the committee have misrepresented the report they signed off on.

Wittes draws three conclusions from the report: First, the report’s findings validate and go further than the Mueller report. Second, the findings undercut Bill Barr’s efforts to portray the Russian investigation as illegitimate “spying” on the Trump campaign. And, finally [emphasis added]:

Third, while I have contempt for the rhetoric of these Republican senators and I find it almost mind-boggling to try to reconcile the text of this report with their votes in the impeachment only a few short months ago, I would be remiss if I did not acknowledge the public service they have done here. Yes, they are lying about having done it—pretending they found things other than what they found and did not find the things they actually found. And yes, they are almost religiously evading the moral, legal, and democratic consequences of what they found.

But unlike their counterparts in the House of Representatives, they allowed this investigation to take place. They ran a bipartisan, serious investigation. They worked with their Democratic colleagues to insulate it from an environment rife with pressures. And they produced a report that is a worthy contribution to our understanding of what happened four years ago.

This report may represent the most significant example of bipartisanship in American politics in 2020. It is an extraordinarily rare instance of senators working across the aisle on a fiercely partisan issue that has become nearly extinct.

In their 2012 book, It’s Even Worse Than It Looks, Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein write: “The Republican Party has become an insurgent outlier — ideologically extreme; contemptuous of the inherited social and economic regime; scornful of compromise; unpersuaded by conventional understanding of facts, evidence and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition.”

Documenting and illustrating the truth of that conclusion has been the most consistent theme of this blog. As someone who has followed politics since my teenage years in the mid-1960s, it has been fascinating and horrifying to see the Republican Party run itself off the rails. Bipartisanship, a collegial Senate, and even placing U.S. security interests above the Republican party line, are in the last stages of extinction.

Let’s acknowledge that we’re not quite there yet — not 100%.

(Although Marco Rubio now heads the panel, I suspect that we can attribute this milestone to the relationship between Senators Richard Burr and Mark Warner, and their respective authority as leaders to direct the work of the committee and to make decisions for their side of the party divide, for this success. Just like in the good ole days.)

Note however that this exception reveals the Republican Party’s comprehensive success in evading accountability and truth: Republican voters don’t trust the mainstream media, and will hear (if they hear anything at all of this report) only mischaracterizations on Fox New Channel and in other conservative media. So, the Republican senators who allowed the release of this report could rest assured that their false statement — which relies on “lying,” “pretending,” and “almost religiously evading the moral, legal, and democratic consequences of what they found” — will be taken at face value by Donald Trump and his base.

Republicans, in other words, will accept the fraudulent cover story as true. Should the actual substance of the report come to their attention, that will be rejected as “fake news.” In 2020, a singular gesture of bipartisanship doesn’t leave us much to celebrate.

(Image: screengrab of Reuters video.)

2020 General Election, Democrats, Donald Trump

Day one of DNC: Sound the alarm and urge Americans to “Vote for joe Biden like our lives depend on it.”

Kristin Urquiza, Bernie Sanders, and Michelle Obama were among the speakers at the first night of the Democratic National Convention.

Kristin Urquiza, who lost her father to COVID-19, addressed Donald Trump’s most deadly failure (tragically ongoing) last night.

Her remarks in full [emphasis added]:

I’m Kristin Urquiza. I’m one of the many who have lost a loved one to COVID. My dad, Mark Anthony Urquiza, should be here today, but he isn’t. He had faith in Donald Trump. He voted for him, listened to him, believed him and his mouthpieces when they said that coronavirus was under control and going to disappear, that it was OK to end social distancing rules before it was safe, and that if you had no underlying health conditions you’d probably be fine.

So in late May, after the stay-at-home order was lifted in Arizona, my dad went to a karaoke bar with his friends. A few weeks later he was put on a ventilator, and after five agonizing days he died alone, in the I.C.U., with a nurse holding his hand. My dad was a healthy 65-year-old. His only pre-existing condition was trusting Donald Trump — and for that he paid with his life.

I am not alone. Once I told my story, a lot of people reached out to me to share theirs. They asked me to help keep the communities safe, especially communities of color, which have been disproportionately affected. They asked me, a normal person, to help, because Donald Trump won’t. The coronavirus has made it clear that there are two Americas: The America that Donald Trump lives in and the America that my father died in. Enough is enough. Donald Trump may not have caused the coronavirus, but his dishonesty and his irresponsible actions made it so much worse.

We need a leader who has a national, coordinated, data-driven response to stop this pandemic from claiming more lives and to safely reopen the country. We need a leader who will step in on day one and do his job: to care.

One of the last things that my father said to me was that he felt betrayed by the likes of Donald Trump. And so when I cast my vote for Joe Biden, I will do it for my dad.

Video NBC News; transcript: NPR.

Bernie Sanders also took Trump to task for his failures to crush the coronavirus (“Nero fiddled while Rome burned; Trump golfs.”) and the economic crisis these failures have brought our country. The Senator focused as well on the unprecedented threat of authoritarianism Trump has brought to our country:

“At its most basic, this election is about preserving our democracy. During this president’s term, the unthinkable has become normal. He has tried to prevent people from voting, undermined the U.S. Postal Service, deployed the military and federal agents against peaceful protesters, threatened to delay the election and suggested that he will not leave office if he loses. This is not normal, and we must never treat it like it is. Under this administration, authoritarianism has taken root in our country. I and my family, and many of yours, know the insidious way authoritarianism destroys democracy, decency and humanity. As long as I am here, I will work with progressives, with moderates, and, yes, with conservatives to preserve this nation from a threat that so many of our heroes fought and died to defeat.”

Video NBC News; transcript CNN.

Michelle Obama offered a strategy for change [emphasis added to excerpted remarks]:

So what do we do now? What’s our strategy? Over the past four years, a lot of people have asked me, “When others are going so low, does going high still really work?” My answer: going high is the only thing that works, because when we go low, when we use those same tactics of degrading and dehumanizing others, we just become part of the ugly noise that’s drowning out everything else. We degrade ourselves. We degrade the very causes for which we fight.

But let’s be clear: going high does not mean putting on a smile and saying nice things when confronted by viciousness and cruelty. Going high means taking the harder path. It means scraping and clawing our way to that mountain top. Going high means standing fierce against hatred while remembering that we are one nation under God, and if we want to survive, we’ve got to find a way to live together and work together across our differences.

And going high means unlocking the shackles of lies and mistrust with the only thing that can truly set us free: the cold hard truth.

So let me be as honest and clear as I possibly can. Donald Trump is the wrong president for our country. He has had more than enough time to prove that he can do the job, but he is clearly in over his head. He cannot meet this moment. He simply cannot be who we need him to be for us. It is what it is.

Now, I understand that my message won’t be heard by some people. We live in a nation that is deeply divided, and I am a Black woman speaking at the Democratic Convention. But enough of you know me by now. You know that I tell you exactly what I’m feeling. You know I hate politics. But you also know that I care about this nation. You know how much I care about all of our children.

So if you take one thing from my words tonight, it is this: if you think things cannot possibly get worse, trust me, they can; and they will if we don’t make a change in this election. If we have any hope of ending this chaos, we have got to vote for Joe Biden like our lives depend on it.

…

Joe Biden wants all of our kids to go to a good school, see a doctor when they’re sick, live on a healthy planet. And he’s got plans to make all of that happen. Joe Biden wants all of our kids, no matter what they look like, to be able to walk out the door without worrying about being harassed or arrested or killed. He wants all of our kids to be able to go to a movie or a math class without being afraid of getting shot. He wants all our kids to grow up with leaders who won’t just serve themselves and their wealthy peers but will provide a safety net for people facing hard times.

And if we want a chance to pursue any of these goals, any of these most basic requirements for a functioning society,These tactics are not new.

But this is not the time to withhold our votes in protest or play games with candidates who have no chance of winning. We have got to vote like we did in 2008 and 2012. We’ve got to show up with the same level of passion and hope for Joe Biden. We’ve got to vote early, in person if we can. We’ve got to request our mail-in ballots right now, tonight, and send them back immediately and follow-up to make sure they’re received. And then, make sure our friends and families do the same.

We have got to grab our comfortable shoes, put on our masks, pack a brown bag dinner and maybe breakfast too, because we’ve got to be willing to stand in line all night if we have to.

Look, we have already sacrificed so much this year. So many of you are already going that extra mile. Even when you’re exhausted, you’re mustering up unimaginable courage to put on those scrubs and give our loved ones a fighting chance. Even when you’re anxious, you’re delivering those packages, stocking those shelves, and doing all that essential work so that all of us can keep moving forward.

Even when it all feels so overwhelming, working parents are somehow piecing it all together without child care. Teachers are getting creative so that our kids can still learn and grow. Our young people are desperately fighting to pursue their dreams.

And when the horrors of systemic racism shook our country and our consciences, millions of Americans of every age, every background rose up to march for each other, crying out for justice and progress.

This is who we still are: compassionate, resilient, decent people whose fortunes are bound up with one another. And it is well past time for our leaders to once again reflect our truth.

So, it is up to us to add our voices and our votes to the course of history, echoing heroes like John Lewis who said, “When you see something that is not right, you must say something. You must do something.” That is the truest form of empathy: not just feeling, but doing; not just for ourselves or our kids, but for everyone, for all our kids.

And if we want to keep the possibility of progress alive in our time, if we want to be able to look our children in the eye after this election, we have got to reassert our place in American history. And we have got to do everything we can to elect my friend, Joe Biden, as the next president of the United States.

Thank you all. God bless.

(Image of host Eva Longoria from the Democratic Party.)

Donald Trump

A “Manipulated Media” tweet exposes FNC’s disinformation in service of the Republican Party

[Editor’s note: original headline revised to avoid confusion.]

Sean Hannity, one of Fox News Channel’s most popular personalities and a presidential advisor (“I never claimed to be a journalist,” he says), found himself the subject of mockery in a Meidas Touch video. The video splices the FNC star’s words with clips of the President of the United States, to create a more accurate commentary than anything we can expect to hear on Fox.

Hannity complained to Twitter (since his words were directed at Trump’s enemies, not at the man himself), which responded by posting a Manipulated Media warning. Meidas Touch was undaunted.

Although FNC has a history of employing manipulated media in its broadcasts, something more significant is going on with the outlet: Fox News Channel manipulates news and information, facts and context, to distract and deceive its conservative audience (which has been trained not to trust what are clearly more trustworthy sources of news, information, facts, and context). That manipulation is the raison dêtre of FNC.

Journalists (like doctors and scientists) make mistakes, but they strive to get things right. “Conservative media do not embrace this journalistic mission (or the ethos of science) to inform accurately. Their job, in the conservative media ecosystem, is to bolster faith in their leader, to cast doubt on facts that might undermine that faith, and to attack and disparage anyone who contradicts the message of the day.”

(Image: Sean Hannity with his conspiracy chart via Vox.com.)

2020 General Election, Democracy, Democrats, Donald Trump, Republicans

Trump’s war on the Post Office is key to the Republican party’s voter suppression strategy

https://twitter.com/therecount/status/1293896544668782592

They want three and a half trill — billion dollars for the mail-in votes. Okay, universal mail-in ballots. Three and a half trill — They want 25 billion dollars — billion — for the Post Office.

Now they need that money in order to have the Post Office work, so it can take all these millions and millions of ballots.

Now, in the meantime, they aren’t getting there. By the way, those are just two items. But if they don’t get those two items, that means you can’t have universal mail-in voting. — Donald Trump on the phone with Fox Business Network.

It couldn’t be clearer.

“They” are the Democrats and “they need  that money in order to have the Post Office work” — and Donald Trump doesn’t want the Post Office to work because it would permit “universal mail-in voting.”

Donald Trump — adopting a decades old Republican strategy — is focused on depressing voter turnout in the upcoming election. He realizes that — based on the best evidence we have right now — in a high turnout election he will be turned out of the White House.

Gutting the U.S. Postal Service — never mind the effects on the American public and our economy, both of which rely on prompt, reliable mail delivery — is an attempt to avoid being held accountable on November 3. This strategy has played out over the past three months:

In May, Louis DeJoy – a multi-million dollar contributor to the Republican Party – was appointed Postmaster General. Since that time he has imposed changes that have eliminated overtime for hundreds of thousands of postal workers; prohibited late trips to deliver mail; and ruled that, if a distribution center is running late, “they will keep the mail for the next day.”

He reassigned 23 top executives at the Postal Service, imposed a hiring freeze, and implemented “early retirement authority” for nonunion employees.

On Tuesday, Noel King at NPR interviewed Kimberly Karol, president of the Iowa Postal Workers Union. Among the things we learn from Ms. Karol is that the Postal Service has been removing mail sorting machines at facilities across the country. Another key fact: many of the changes circumvent rules that require public comment when closing offices or degrading delivery standards – but which have the same result.

Here is a brief exchange:

KAROL: Yes, we are beginning to see those changes and how it is impacting the mail. Mail is beginning to pile up in our offices, and we’re seeing equipment being removed. So we are beginning to see the impact of those changes.
KING: Curious – I hadn’t heard about this one – equipment being removed. What equipment?
KAROL: The sorting equipment that we use to process mail for delivery. In Iowa, we are losing machines. And they already in Waterloo were losing one of those machines. So that also hinders our ability to process mail in the way that we had in the past.
KING: Sure. Sounds like it would. You’ve been a postal worker for 30 years? How do you feel about Louis DeJoy?
KAROL: I am not a fan. I grew up in a culture of service, where every piece was to be delivered every day. And his policies, although they’ve only been in place for a few weeks, are now affecting the way that we do business and not allowing us to deliver every piece every day, as we’ve done in the past.
KING: Do you get the impression that your feelings about him are shared broadly among postal workers? Do people agree with you?
KAROL: Yes, all across the country. We are trying to activate people all across the country and notify the public because we will – my opinion is that the PMG is trying to circumvent the rules that have been set in place to safeguard the public by making changes that don’t require public comment but have the same impact as closing offices and/or changing delivery standards. And so this is a way to avoid that kind of public comment. And we’re trying to make sure that the public understands that they need to make comment.

It is remarkable that this attempt to sabotage democracy by crippling the Post Office is happening in plain sight.

In recent years the Republican Party has increasingly relied on sowing social division, on racial, ethnic, and religious cleavages, to win elections. And, as that ugly Us-vs.-Them narrative has proved unreliable — the GOP has won the popular vote in only one presidential election since 2000 — the fallback position, now in the foreground, is to attack democratic institutions that ensure majority rule.

And that’s not the half of it. It’s not just democratic practices and institutions that are threatened. Much more is at stake. The Republican Party is prepared to accept a stomach-turning level of collateral damage to stay in power. Early on, as Trump jumped to do Vladimir Putin’s bidding, Republicans accepted the damage to our national security and the destruction of alliances that have kept the peace. As the coronavirus has swept the country, Republicans have chosen to accept an enormous and still rising death toll, rather than break with Trump. Let’s grant, inflicting severe damage on the Post Office is small potatoes for these guys. They appear ready to do pretty much anything they can get away with to stay in power.

The decision Americans make on November 3 could hardly be more consequential.

2020 General Election, Democrats, Donald Trump, Republicans

Joe Biden offers a sharp contrast to Donald Trump with his embrace of Kamala Harris,Hagar the Horrible, and Søren Kierkegaard

In selecting California Senator Kamala Harris as his running mate, Joe Biden has embraced the diversity of the Democratic coalition. An eminently well-qualified woman of color of a different generation than the former vice president rounds out a well balanced ticket to take on Donald Trump and Mike Pence, who lead the monochromatic Republican Party.

In a photograph of Biden and Harris chatting by video, a Danish philosopher and the author of Nihilism (The MIT Press Essential Knowledge series) spotted a Hagar the Horrible cartoon behind the former VP’s laptop.

That cartoon suggests that a higher being (whether the God of Biden’s Catholicism or an ancient Norse deity) directing the storms and tribulations bedeviling Hagar doesn’t answer to any man. Whether or not an individual suffers misfortune is often the furthest thing from a personal choice.

No one needs that comic reminder less than Joe Biden, who lost his first wife and their one-year-old daughter in 1972 and his oldest son, Beau, in 2015, and has credited his faith with helping sustain him. In an interview with Stephen Colbert, four months after Beau’s death, Biden spoke about putting one foot in front of the other when experiencing great suffering — and of other people who keep going when confronted with tragedy in their lives.

. . . Think of all the people you know who are going through horrible things and they get up every morning, And they put one foot in front of the other. And they don’t have, like I said, anything like the support I have.

I marvel, I marvel at … at the ability of people to absorb hurt and just get back up. And most of them do it with an incredible sense of empathy to other people. . . .

Joe Biden talks about putting one foot in front of the other with Stephen Colbert.

Biden tells Colbert that his wife Jill tapes quotes to his bathroom mirror, which he sees in the morning when he shaves. Biden has mentioned one quote, from Kierkegaard — “Faith sees best in the dark” — on several occasions. It illustrates that when tragedy strikes, when our suffering is most intense, reason (human understanding) has nothing to offer — that’s when believers must rely on faith.

One need not share Biden’s faith (as Colbert does) to appreciate the man’s compassion and empathy for other human beings. The Colbert interview offers a sense of the man whom Democrats have chosen as their candidate for president. His empathy distinguishes him in a fundamental way from the current occupant of the White House. Indeed, the contrast could hardly be greater.

It is extraordinary and calamitous to have Donald Trump as president in the time of a global pandemic. The man hears of the deaths of Americans — more than 165,000 and counting — and thinks only of the misfortune to himself.

Trump often launches into a monologue placing himself at the center of the nation’s turmoil. The president has cast himself in the starring role of the blameless victim — of a deadly pandemic, of a stalled economy, of deep-seated racial unrest, all of which happened to him rather than the country. (“Trump the victim: President complains in private about the pandemic hurting him,” by Ashley Parker, Philip Rucker, and Josh Dawsey)

And while Trump is psychologically deviant — an outlier unrepresentative of his party, the GOP still embraces him and accepts the harm he brings. Moreover, one of the fundamental differences between Democrats and Republicans is the empathy that Democrats feel for others — including folks not in our tribe — who suffer.

We might draw the contrast this way: The circle of moral concern — the width and breadth and diversity of the group of human beings whom Democrats regard empathetically — is clearly greater by far than the batch of folks whom Republicans view as worthy of moral consideration.

Think of those kids separated at the border to illustrate this point. Or of our Kurdish allies, whom Trump sold out to Erdogan. Or of tens of millions of Americans — our neighbors — without adequate health care coverage.

Americans will have a stark choice — Trump-Pence or Biden-Harris — on the ballot this fall.

2020 General Election, Democracy, Donald Trump

Why we can’t count on the Voting Rights Act of 1965 to avert an electoral disaster in November 2020

The withdrawal of federal troops from the South in 1877 ushered in the Jim Crow era. Put into place state by state over several decades, Jim Crow imposed legally sanctioned segregation made possible by the disenfranchisement of Black Americans. C. Vann Woodward writes in The Strange Career of Jim Crow:

The effectiveness of disfranchisement is suggested by a comparison of the number of registered Negro voters in Louisiana in 1896, when there were 130,334 and in 1904, when there were 1,342. Between the two dates the literacy, property, and poll-tax qualifications were adopted. In 1896 Negro registrants were in a majority in twenty-six parishes—by 1900 in none.

In spite of the ultimate success of disfranchisement, the movement met with stout resistance and succeeded in some states by narrow margins or the use of fraud. In order to overcome the opposition and divert the suspicions of the poor and illiterate whites that they as well as the Negro were in danger of losing the franchise—a suspicion that often proved justified—the leaders of the movement resorted to an intensive propaganda of white supremacy, Negrophobia, and race chauvinism. Such a campaign preceded and accompanied disfranchisement in each state.

Jim Crow was not merely a Southern institution. It was an integral element in FDR’s Democratic coalition and served as scaffolding for Democratic majorities in Congress well into the 1960s, when Lyndon Johnson made the commitment to enact historical civil rights legislation (knowing full well that the Solid South would shift from Democratic to Republican).

Fifty-five years ago today, President Johnson signed the 1965 Voting Rights Act. John Lewis, whose recent passing has focused attention on voting rights, was present at the signing.

LBJ’s signature brought an abrupt end to a vile era in American history. In the view of the Department of Justice (circa June 2009), the law proved to be extraordinarily effective.

Soon after passage of the Voting Rights Act, federal examiners were conducting voter registration, and black voter registration began a sharp increase. The cumulative effect of the Supreme Court’s decisions, Congress’ enactment of voting rights legislation, and the ongoing efforts of concerned private citizens and the Department of Justice, has been to restore the right to vote guaranteed by the 14th and 15th Amendments. The Voting Rights Act itself has been called the single most effective piece of civil rights legislation ever passed by Congress.

That 2009 assessment (near the beginning of the Obama administration) looks somewhat dated now, in the second decade of the 21st century, as the United States Supreme Court – led by Chief Justice John Roberts, who has made a career out of battling the Voting Rights Act – has persistently chipped away at the right to vote in subsequent years.

In 2013 in Shelby County v. Holder, Roberts, writing for a 5-4 Republican majority of the Supreme Court, struck down the Justice Department’s authority to subject states and local governments with a history of discrimination in voting to “pre-clearance” requirements when changing voting laws and procedures. While the law still stands, the ruling stripped away the most effective means of enforcing it.

In his opinion, Roberts wrote that in the jurisdictions subject to pre-clearance since 1965, Black registration has increased substantially. “Racial disparity in those numbers was compelling evidence justifying the preclearance remedy and the coverage formula. There is no longer such a disparity.”

Ruth Bader Ginsberg, in her dissent, replied: “Throwing out preclearance when it has worked and is continuing to work to stop discriminatory changes is like throwing away your umbrella in a rainstorm because you are not getting wet.”

Richard Hasen notes in Election Meltdown: Dirty Tricks, Distrust, and the Threat to American Democracy:

Justice Ginsburg was right that the law served as a deterrent and that bad behavior would quickly return upon its removal. Within hours of the Shelby County decision, Texas announced it would immediately enforce its law requiring those wanting to vote to provide one of a limited number of types of photographic identification. Student IDs were unacceptable, but concealed handgun permits were allowed.

Other states soon followed with a range of suppression measures targeting Democratic constituencies:

Closing polling places to create voting deserts. By election day in November 2018, the Leadership Conference Education Fund found that 1,688 polling places had been closed.

Cutting back on early voting. Although more than two-thirds of the states permit early voting, a number have implemented cutbacks. Governors, secretaries of state, and state legislatures are generally discreet about announcing their intent, but not always. North Carolina (in a court filing) acknowledged restricting Sunday voting because “[c]ounties with Sunday voting in 2014 were disproportionately black” and “disproportionately Democratic.”

Fewer voting places and fewer days to vote results in longer lines in selected neighborhoods.

Wholesale purges of voting rolls. Between 2016 and 2018 more than 17 million names were removed from voting rolls nationwide. The Supreme Court has ensured that states have wide latitude to conduct such purges – even when there is evidence that lists of voters to be purged are riddled with errors.

Ari Berman comments (“Republicans Are Trying to Kick Thousands of Voters Off the Rolls During a Pandemic”):

There’s nothing inherently wrong with updating registration lists to remove the names of people who have become ineligible to vote. “We want election administrators to have the tools they need to make sure that the records are clean,” says the Brennan Center’s Pérez. But recent examples show that some purges mislabel thousands of eligible voters, disproportionately Democrats and people of color. 

The Chief Justice is often the swing vote on the Roberts Court, forming a majority with liberals on one case, then with conservatives on another. But on issues of voting rights, gerrymandering, and campaign finance – all central to the Republican Party’s electoral strategy as its voting base shrinks – Roberts almost invariably sides with the GOP.

Earlier in 2020, conservative majorities led by the Chief Justice have weighed in numerous times on voting rights:

In April the Court ruled 5-4 in favor of the Republican National Committee in blocking a lower court ruling that gave Wisconsin voters an extra six days to return ballots.

In July the Court reprised the Wisconsin decision with rulings in Alabama and Texas cases. The Alabama ruling carried with the same 5-4 majority, though there were no dissents to the Texas ruling.

Later in July the 5-4 conservative majority sided with Republican officials in Florida in upholding an appellate court ruling that blocked felons from voting if they could not afford to reimburse the state for court costs, just a poll taxes barred voters in the Jim Crow era.

LBJ’s signature on the Voting Rights Act transformed both of the country’s political parties. As white Southerners abandoned it, the Democratic Party became a highly diverse coalition, while the GOP, a half century later, is mostly white and led by a man who sees “very fine people” among white supremacists and neo-Nazis.

On Tuesday, Donald Trump celebrated the vote by mail system in Florida (where Trump casts his mail-in ballots). The day before he blasted vote by mail in Nevada, complaining that it would make it “impossible for Republicans to win the state,” and promising litigation.

We can count on litigation aplenty. President Trump is hellbent on casting doubt on the integrity of the November election. Through tweets, interviews, and musings to the press, he throws up nonsense, conspiracy theories, and whiny accusations — all instances of Steven Bannon’s tactic for muddying the waters (“flooding the zone with shit,” in his words). All of this advances the politics of grievance and provides fodder for (heretofore) spurious legal claims.

It’s possible that the Supreme Court will decide the November election — as the it did in 2000 in Bush v. Gore — but if the decision turns on issues related to the Voting Rights Act, there is little doubt that John Roberts will be among the five conservative Republican men in the majority.

The surest way to prevent that: clear, decisive victories for Joe Biden at the ballot box in enough states to make the outcome indisputable.

(Image of President Johnson, at the signing ceremony of the Voting Rights Act, with Martin Luther King Jr.: LBJ Presidential Library.)

Donald Trump, Off the Rails

“Here’s one. Well, right here, United States is lowest in numerous categories. We’re lower than the world.”

In the photo above, the President of the United States reviews a page displaying a bar chart with four long, wide colored bars that his staff has armed him with for his interview with Jonathan Swan of Axios.

As Donald Trump is wont to do, he spouts nonsense during several exchanges with Swan. He fails to acknowledge, or apparently even comprehend, the points Swan makes. I know Trump is a showman. I grant that he has no qualms about lying. But my take is: his confusion is genuine, not a charade adapted for television.

Unable to apprehend conclusive evidence of his own failure, he grasps at charts and notes on paper that — as is evident to anyone not constrained by blinders imposed by narcissism — can’t possibly relieve him of responsibility for a terrible, tragic death toll that continues to mount month after month in our country. (The current count: 156,426 Americans have lost their lives. It will be tens of thousands more by election day.)

And if I’m wrong, if Donald Trump is actually just putting on a show — playing dumb — that’s even more damning.

President Donald J. Trump: Take a look at some of these charts.

Jonathan Swan: I’d love to.

President: We’re gonna look.

Swan: Let’s look.

President: And, if you look at death —

Swan: Yeah. Started to go up again.

President: Here’s one. Well, right here, United States is lowest in numerous categories. We’re lower than the world.

Swan: Lower than the world? …

President: Lower than Europe.

Swan: In what? In what?

President: Take a look. Right there. Here’s case deaths.

Swan: Oh, you’re doing death as a proportion of cases. I’m talking about death as a proportion of population. That’s where the U.S. is really bad, much worse than South Korea, Germany, et cetera.

President: You can’t, you can’t do that.

Swan: Why can’t I do that?

President: You have to go by, you have to go by where — Look. Here is the United States. You have to go by the cases. The cases are there.

Swan: Why not as a proportion of population?

President: When you have somebody — What it says is, when you have somebody that has it, where there’s a case —

Swan: Oh, okay.

President: The people that live from those cases.

Swan: Oh. It’s surely a relevant statistic to say, if the U.S. has X population and X percentage of death of that population versus South Korea —

President: No. Because you have to go by the cases.

Swan: Well, look at South Korea, for example. 51 million population, 300 deaths. It’s like, it’s crazy compared to —

President: You don’t know that.

Swan: I do.

President: You don’t know that.

Swan: You think they’re faking their statistics, South Korea? An advanced country?

President: I won’t get into that because I have a very good relationship with the country.

Swan: Yeah.

President: But you don’t know that. And they have spikes. Look, here’s one of —

Swan: Germany, low, 9,000.

President: Here’s one. Here’s one right here, United States.

Swan: Let me look.

President: You take the number of cases.

Swan: Okay.

President: Now look, we’re last, meaning we’re first.

Swan: Last? I don’t know what we’re first in.

President: We have the best.

Swan: As a what?

President: Take a look again. It’s cases.

Swan: Okay. I’ll just … okay.

President: And we have cases because of the testing.

Swan: I mean, a thousand Americans die a day. But I understand. I understand on the cases, it’s different.

President: No, but you’re not reporting it correctly, Jonathan.

Swan: I think I am, but —

President: If you take a look at this other chart … look, this is our testing. I believe this is the testing. Yeah.

Swan: Yeah. We do more tests.

President: No, wait a minute. Well, don’t we get credit for that? And, because we do more tests, we have more cases. In other words, we test more. We have — Now, take a look. The top one, that’s a good thing not a bad thing. But the top … Jonathan — …

Swan: If hospitals rates were going down and deaths were going down, I’d say, ‘Terrific.’ You would deserve to be praised for testing.

President: Well, they don’t even —

Swan: But they are all going up.

President: Well, they very rarely talk —

Swan: Plus, 60,000 Americans are in hospital, A thousand dying a day.

President: If you watch the news or read the papers, they usually talk about new cases, new cases, new cases.

Swan: I’m talking about death.

President: Well, you look at death.

Swan: It’s going up.

President: Death is way down from where it was.

Swan: It’s a thousand a day.

President: Death —

Swan: It was two and a half thousand. It went down to 500. Now, it’s going up again.

President: Death — Excuse me. Where it was is much higher than where it is right now.

Swan: It went down and then it went up again.

President: It spiked, but now it’s going down again.

Swan: It’s going up.

President: It’s gone down in Arizona. It’s going down in Florida.

Swan: Nationally it’s going up.

President: It’s going down in Texas. Take a look at this. These are the tests.

Swan: It’s going down in Florida?

President: Yeah. It leveled out and it’s going down. That’s my report as of yesterday.

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

Donald Trump speculates: “Delay the Election until people can properly, securely, and safely vote?”

“He gets new information. He likes to talk that through out loud. And really have that dialogue. And so that’s what dialogue he was having.“ — Dr. Deborah Birx on Donald Trump’s suggestion at a public health briefing that injecting bleach could be a cure for COVID-19.

Yesterday:

▪ Donald Trump boohooed that he had lower approval ratings among Americans than Dr. Anthony Fauci:

He’s working with our administration. And for the most part we’ve done pretty much what he and others — Dr. Birx and others, who are terrific — recommended. And he’s got this high approval rating. So, why don’t I have a high approval rating with respect — and the administration — with respect to the virus?

▪ He downplayed the coronavirus and touted hydroxychloroquine as remedy, though the FDA revoked authorization for use of the drug for COVID-19 treatment “reports of serious heart rhythm problems and other safety issues, including blood and lymph system disorders, kidney injuries, and liver problems and failure.”

▪ And the President retweeted a video (since removed by Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube, but not before 14 million viewings) with discredited claims from a Houston doctor/religious minister that she has successfully treated hundreds of coronavirus patients with hydroxychloroquine and that face masks are not necessary to stop the spread of the virus. Stella Immanuel has also claimed that gynecological problems are caused by having sex in ones dreams with demons and witches; that DNA from alien beings is being used in medicine today; and that “reptilions” and other aliens are embedded in our government.

▪ Donald Trump is still a fan: “There was a woman who was spectacular in her statements about it: that she’s had tremendous success with it.”

Just another day in the Trump presidency. So, when he tweets about delaying the election, is Trump simply riffing? Merely talking out loud about something he’s seen online or on cable TV? Is this nothing more than more idle talk from an uninformed, credulous individual?

Neither the Constitution, nor federal law grant this man, even though he sits in the Oval Office, the authority to change the date of the 2020 election. But it is well within his power to signal his view that something isn’t on the up and up. Something about the November 3 election is rotten. The Democrats are trying to cheat.

The President of the United States has sought for many months to delegitimize the 2020 election, much as he did in the run-up to the 2016 election, before winning it — and even afterwards.

Donald Trump has presided over a disastrous 2020. His failures — resulting in an unfolding tragedy that grows greater by the day — are unmistakable. Surveys of public opinion suggest a steeply uphill climb to reelection for the President.

As the prospect of losing has become more likely, Trump has waged a campaign against mail-in voting, insisting that “it doesn’t work out well for Republicans,” and even more dire that it will “lead to the end of our great Republican Party.”

He has continued to strike this theme throughout the year:

He has endorsed the unsubstantiated claim of Bill Barr that foreign governments might corrupt the election by printing and mailing counterfeit ballots

Election officials have discounted the President’s claims (“Trump claims without evidence that mail voting leads to cheating: A guide to facts on absentee ballots.”):

“We are not aware of any evidence supporting the claims made by President Trump,” the National Assn. of Secretaries of State said in a statement. “As always, we are open to learning more about the Administration’s concerns.”

So what’s Trump up to? Well, he’s revving up his base. For another thing, if Republican state legislatures and secretaries of state follow his lead, they will curtail, or refuse to expand, vote by mail options. That serves the venerable Republican strategy of voter suppression. Georgia Governor Brian Kemp and former Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach are past all-stars in this game.

Even if vote by mail options exist, Trump’s campaign may serve to suppress the Democratic vote. An NBC report (“A Trump trap? He’s the one who could get a boost from mail voting glitches”) explains why:

The real danger is a perfect catastrophe of administrative overload, postal delays and voter error that could lead to millions of absentee ballots not counting. And this year, unlike the past, those ballots are likely to be overwhelmingly Democratic.

Mail-in ballots are much more likely to be rejected than ballots cast in person. If Trump’s base votes in person on election day, those votes are more likely to be counted than Democratic votes cast by mail-in ballots. Some estimates suggest that up to 4-percent of mail ballots were rejected in 2016 with no opportunity to remedy any problems (as one might do at a polling place). Furthermore, studies suggest that younger voters and people of color — predominantly Democratic — are more likely to have their ballots disqualified.

If a higher proportion of Democrats than Republicans vote by mail, Democrats will be disadvantaged because of procedural glitches that are apt to multiply this year as the number of mail-in ballots increase — overwhelming some jurisdictions. Add to this a multi-million dollar GOP donor just appointed as Postmaster General, who is imposing changes on the Postal Service that have created backlogs and late deliveries. As a result, there will likely be delays in sending ballots to voters and in receiving voters’ completed ballots in a timely way that ensures that votes are cast and counted.

But there’s more to it than that. Republicans probably can’t suppress enough votes to win in 2020. These tactics, even with an assist from the U.S. Supreme Court, failed in Wisconsin. These cries of fraud and rigged elections serve another purpose, as Richard Hasen has explained:

If most Republicans vote in person and most Democrats vote by mail, Hasen said, that could create a scenario well suited to Trump’s tendency to make unfounded accusations of wrongdoing.  

“As Trump drives more and more of his supporters to vote in person and away from vote-by-mail, it’s quite likely that we’ll see Trump getting many more votes on election night, the votes that are counted on Election Day,” Hasen said in an interview on “The Long Game,” a Yahoo News podcast.

“Then, four or five days later, [if] Biden becomes the winner as the absentee ballots are counted in Philadelphia or Detroit, that’s a recipe, if it’s close, for a really ugly election scenario,” he said.

Election results for Philadelphia’s June 2 primary were not certified for nearly three weeks. The outcome of the June 23 primary in New York’s 6th CD, a victory by challenger Jamaal Bowman over Congressman Eliot Engel, was not clear for more than four weeks. It takes a long time to verify and count ballots received by mail. There will be tens of millions more votes cast in November than have been cast in primaries earlier this year.

The Brooks Brothers riot — in 2000 when Republican operatives from across the country created a mob scene in Miami-Dade County to stop officials from counting votes (after George W. Bush had established a small lead in the state) — is the template for creating chaos in November 2020 in any state where Trump has a slim lead and there are still thousands of ballots to be counted. Only this time the rioters (most of whom were not actually dressed in expensive suits) might be replaced by armed militias in camo. And multiply the rioting across a number of states.

Even if Trump trails in same day voting, if there are tens of thousands of uncounted votes in key states, he could still cry fraud.

Trump’s eruptions about voting by mail all serve as a setup for challenging his defeat in November. Whatever happens on November 3 and after, things have already become ugly.

This scenario is beyond abnormal. But rest assured this will not be Trump’s last off the rails maneuver between now and November 3.

There are 97 days to go.

(Image: from Five Thirty Eight’s average presidential approval July 30.

2020 General Election, Democrats, Republicans

Should Joe Biden and the Democrats welcome help from GOP Never Trumpers to defeat the President?

“It is possible for Biden to beat Trump without attracting many conservative votes. But it is not possible for him to win in a giant landslide without winning moderate conservative votes.” — Quinta Jurecic and Benjamin Wittes in “The Revenge of the Never Trumpers.”

That’s a Yes.

Moreover, a landslide will help deliver the Senate to Democrats — and the more victories in 2020, the more secure the Democratic majority will be after inevitable defeats in less favorable election cycles in the future.

A number of folks on the left side of the political spectrum have criticized the Lincoln Project and John Kasich’s prime time role at the Democratic convention. The most substantive objection is that, somehow, Republican Never Trumpers might gain undue influence over Joe Biden’s agenda, moving him toward a hawkish foreign policy, and away from health care expansion and increases in the corporate tax rate.

I don’t buy it. If a Biden win brings a new Democratic majority to the Senate, it will be the influence of conservative Democratic senators — not Republicans and former-Republicans who joined Democrats in opposing Trump — that shape the breadth and reach of his policy successes in 2021.

Besides — Biden hasn’t won the election. There are 98 days to go until November 3. A lot can happen — and will. Rejecting disaffected conservatives from a broad Biden coalition is foolish.

(Photograph: Voters in line to cast ballots in California’s March 2020 primary.)