Category: Republicans

As Trump’s staff works to sabotage a Biden presidency, Trump himself still wants to go farther

Posted on (Updated by Hunter

The Washington Post has yet another look at how Donald Trump and his loyalists are spending their last days at the levers of power. Not all of it, of course, because there's just too much, but the highlights.

To be honest, it's difficult to believe Donald set aside time for any of it. He has been singularly obsessed with delusional claims that the November elections were rigged against him, to the tune of millions and millions and millions of sneaky fake votes, because he is a malignant narcissist whose failure is causing him to decompensate into a sludgy puddle of make-believe. He and his top staff are engaged in a full-tilt campaign to overturn an election based on literally nothing but propagandistic falsehoods. He, and they, are spitting on their oaths of office as a full-time profession.

Rather than Mike Pence and the rest of Trump's top staff stuffing him into a sack while delivering formal notice that the "president" has, alas, become so unstable as to be incapable of fulfilling his duties, a collection of fascist-minded House Republicans is egging him on, America's violent underbelly of paramilitary frothers is taking Trump's delusions as signal that their own plans for genocide will soon come to fruition, and the press is still describing all the details with a detached, neutral air that both recognizes Trump's acts as unprecedented and attempts to play them down as (1) the impotent ravings of a man who is Too Sad Right Now or (2) not all that different from, say, the undignified spats between Thomas Jefferson and John Adams.

Here's the deal: The presidency of the United States is currently held by a leaking bag of garbage. Also, the bag is a psychopath with delusions of grandeur. The garbage bag is currently mulling, with his advisers, things like can the military enter the swing states Trump lost in November, seize the voting machines, and force the citizens to vote in a new election held according to whatever rules Trump's federal forces can enforce? This is not likely to happen, mostly because even the staff that eagerly assisted him in a prior extortion scheme aimed at forcing a foreign power to cooperate with a scheme to falsely incriminate his election opponent still has reservations about partaking in crimes technically punishable by firing squad. But Trump is, still, mulling ways to not just declare the United States elections illegitimate and invalid (he's already doing that, and daily), but enforce his claims using federal force.

On track two, and mind the gap, Trump's collection of archconservative party-line Republicans, anti-democratic activists who have for decades worked to portray all challenges to Republican rule as inherently illegitimate, is hurriedly sabotaging the nation's government by installing like-minded loyalists in positions where they cannot be easily dislodged, eagerly and gleefully using basement-tier conspiracy theories to amplify their own prior claims of non-Republican illegitimacy, and pushing forward last-minute actions intended to damage Biden's ability to govern at all.

Even if, as with the Republican efforts to block the Federal Reserve from providing emergency pandemic aid the moment Joe Biden has taken office, it results in deaths.

These are not policy spats. These are organized efforts to delegitimize democratic elections and to sabotage the economy so as to delegitimize non-Republican leaders. Trump's status as emotionally unstable buffoon is not a lucky coincidence making the rest of it slightly less dangerous, but an intentional choice made by a Republican electorate that demanded a cult-leader clown, the latest in a long-bubbling rebellion against government know-it-alls and book learners that has pushed an entire new crop of conspiracy clowns, con artists, and outright saboteurs into Congress.

The media, writ large, seems to find itself continually surprised when Trump and his top advisers take new steps even more contemptuous of laws and democracy than the last. It was evident when Republicans neutralized impeachment charges that the White House would take it as affirmation and redouble their efforts. It was evident when the White House purged increasing numbers of "disloyal" government watchdogs that the intent was to eliminate institutional resistance to doing once-shocking things. It was evident throughout the summer that the White House was more comfortable using propagandistic claims and bluster to downplay the severity of a nationwide pandemic than taking concrete steps to save lives. It was evident from Trump's preelection, pandemic-era rallies that he intended to challenge the election if he lost by only a little; it was evident within days of the election that he now intended to challenge the results even after losing by a lot.

He will propose even more shocking things, and the media will pretend to be surprised by them. His White House and Republican Party allies will embrace those things, or at least hold their tongues while waiting to see whether his newest contemptible acts will, by some chance, bear fruit.

Trump reworked Syrian policy as a favor to an oligarch he had long courted as a possible real estate partner. Trump tasked his "lawyer" with producing evidence incriminating his rival, who subcontracted the job to Russian-allied organized crime. Trump has used both the Department of Justice and his own pardon powers to immunize his allies from the consequences of crimes committed for his own benefit or that push his own agenda.

I'm not saying that we should hold off on the retrospectives of all the malignant ways Trump's White House and his Republican allies are attempting to sabotage government rather than hand it off to a rival intact. It's fine. But there's a month left, and Trump is continuing to re-tune his staff to include those willing to endorse even more radical schemes while jettisoning objectors. This is considerably more dangerous than it is being portrayed. Still.

It is well past time to confront the truth of the Republican Party’s threat to democracy

Posted on by RETIII

Watching the depressing and alarming spectacle of 17 Republican state attorneys general joining Texas’s bad faith, frivolous Supreme Court application to overturn the election in favor of Donald Trump, I am reminded that in September 2015, I wrote a post titled “The Dark Truth of John Boehner’s Resignation.”

What was that “dark truth”?

What is important here is not that Republicans object to the limits of their power, but that Republicans apparently cannot accept that such limits even exist. 

It sounds crazy, I know, but this represents the true "dark side" of Boehner's resignation: It is another significant step in the Republican Party's shocking withdrawal from our system of democratic governance.  

Five years ago, the notion that Republicans were abandoning democracy was considered to be a somewhat important observation, something to be widely shared and discussed. Today? Well, let’s consider a few of the developments since 2015.

Folks, this is insane. It’s an open, ongoing assault on the fundamental tenets of this country, unseen since the run up to the Civil War. 

Admittedly, defeating this Republican problem is hard and complex, and viable solutions will take discussions longer than this one post. But allow me to propose we rediscover an essential concept: scandal.

The first and necessary step back requires that our country, our politics, and our media rediscover how to label, report, and resist scandalous behavior. Remember Watergate? Whitewater? Benghazi? None of them compares to this threat to democracy (yes, not even Watergate).  

That means reporting this for what it is, and not inviting any co-conspirators on for polite interviews. It means having a panel of historians and civic leaders on, regularly, to discuss the scandal, not a D-list of political hacks. It means consistent front page reporting on this crisis. It means not reporting this as “horse race” politics. And it means that Democratic leadership has to be fighting against this, openly and all the time.

Shutting this down requires that, as a basic first step, we all begin to treat this as the five-alarm fire scandal that it is. 

I once called the Republicans’ hunger for power a “dark truth.” Five years later, sadly, it is an open, proud and largely unchallenged truth.

We can’t let this continue.

Trump’s demand that the election be overturned is farce—but Republican complicity is not

Posted on by Hunter

America's fascist moment has not passed, and will not pass while any of the current crop of Republican elected officials remain in office. The Republican Party continues to attempt to nullify the results of the presidential election—a longshot bid, to be sure—using conspiracy theories designed to do damage to democracy itself.

Surely it cannot be that bad, you may think to yourself. Surely Republicans are operating from a position of rank cowardice, and have only accidentally stumbled from that into strategies that accidentally undermine this nation's democratic ideals. It is that bad, and they are not cowards. They are attempting a power play—a new authority to nullify whatever elections their now thoroughly corrupt party cannot win. We are in a new era of voter manipulation and suppression characterized by party-sponsored lies intended to propagandize the public into believing not only that non-Republican governance is illegitimate, but that non-Republican election results are as well. The Republican Party is now fascist in both method and intent. Every senator and House member is, as we have seen, complicit.

It was an inevitable point, after the party witnessed impeachable crimes from the party's leader and instead voted to adopt those crimes as new valid policy. If crimes themselves are valid, if undertaken to boost Republican power, then lying to the public about the bones of democracy itself must be equally justifiable.

On the Sunday shows, multiple Republicans yet again pushed the false notion that Joe Biden may not have truly won the next presidency. To give audience to such malignant lies, whether in service to both sides-ing democracy or not, is contemptible, and the networks and hosts bear responsibility. It is not easy to simply end interviews with public figures when it is clear they are using the media to disseminate malevolent propaganda, but it is necessary. If the networks cannot do that much, their "news" programs are themselves public frauds.

Republican Sen. Mike Braun was one of those figures pushing forward false propaganda for the sake of misleading the public. Ostensibly booked to discuss COVID-19 stimulus options—itself a sham booking, since there has proven to be no possibility that Sen. Mike Braun will ever put forward a competent opinion on any subject, much less one so dire—Braun instead blustered to enabling ABC host George Stephanopoulos at length with conspiracy theories of voter fraud and other known-false, Trump-pushed claims.

On the ever-execrable Fox News, the ever-execrable Trump Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe called the election into question, saying "We'll see" if "there is a Biden administration." (Ratcliffe and the now thoroughly feral conspiracy wolverine Maria Bartiromo followed that up by puzzling over "Who got to Bill Barr?"—for the sin of not proving multiple conservative conspiracy theories that proved, even for Barr, too ephemeral to coax into faux-existence.)

It is important to note that John Ratcliffe is a frothing ex-House Republican seen as so conspiracy-minded and single-mindedly devoted to Republican power over the national good that even the Republican Senate balked, long and hard, before eventually confirming him to his current post. It is because of that past status as House propagandist and absurd Trump provocateur that he was elevated to the Republican administration to begin with. Ratcliffe is yet another fringe Republican figure elevated to higher power specifically due to his corruptions.

The Sunday show performances, of course, came on the heels of yet another week in which Donald Trump himself promoted crazed theories that the election that saw him get a shockingly high number of pro-incompetence, pro-white-nationalism votes but still millions less than challenger Biden must, by virtue of his loss, have been fraudulent. Trump is promoting those falsehoods obsessively, suspending nearly all presidential duties to instead weave nonsensical tales claiming the presidency was stolen from him. He did so at length this weekend in Georgia, during a campaign appearance ostensibly on behalf of scandal-wracked Republican senators Kelly Loeffler and David Purdue.

Both of those Republican Senators have called for the state's secretary of state, Republican Brad Raffensperger, to resign for his refusals to endorse the theory that massive voter fraud landed them in runoff elections. Though Raffensperger has been receiving plaudits for not furthering his party's conspiracy claims that the election was rigged against them, and for going farther still and condemning those claims, Raffensperger said on Sunday that he still supports both of their candidacies.

This, then, is an illuminating look at where even the most "heroic" and democracy-abiding Republicans now reside. He is not willing to himself endanger the republic merely to boost two Republicans seeking reelection. He is, however, still willing to endorse the candidates doing exactly that damage. Because, says Raffensperger, "I'm a Republican."

It is said as if it is obvious. It is natural to Raffensperger that he would still support the Republicans, even if they were engaged in corrosive, anti-democratic propagandizing that he himself could not stomach. However devoted to his nation Raffensperger may be, his devotion to even his party's worst actors remains higher.

Trump, in the meantime, has made the blunt request to the state's Republican governor that Georgia simply nullify the results of their presidential election. He asks that the vote counts be thrown out, and for the state's Republican-held legislature to appoint him the state's electoral winner.

It is (again) an explicitly corrupt request. Georgia's Gov. Brian Kemp has no authority to nullify the election. There is no scheme by which such an attempt would not be inherently un-democratic, whether successful or not. Trump is both ignorant enough and criminal enough to request it anyway.

Surrounded by less inept aides, there is no telling how much damage a similarly corruption-minded Republican president could do.

The attempts to dismantle democracy itself, rather than abide by election losses, are the newest arrived-at spot for the Republican Party after a litany of fascistic actions and proclamations. It is Jim Crow writ even larger, a new anti-democratic theory that not only ought the votes of non-white Americans be treated as illegitimate, but those of every voter who refuses to support the party.

After years of promoting the theory that Republican lawmakers were slavishly defending and promoting each of Trump's most corrupt actions due to a party-wide and all-encompassing cowardice, pundits are still attempting to pin current lawmaker silence, in the face of these Trump-led lies and blatantly fraudulent conspiracy claims, on the same. But this is wrong.

Or, as The Washington Post's Greg Sargent puts it, it "badly undersells the bottomless bad faith and dishonorable instrumentalism that Republicans are employing here."

The Republican Party is embracing claims of massive but invisible election conspiracies for the same reason they remained stubbornly, supremely silent on Trump's proven act of extorting election favors from a foreign nation: While the actions involved are absolutely corrosive to democracy, all of them of authoritarian vintage and used here for authoritarian ends, it is possible those actions could end up working. It is not so much that the McConnells of the party are remaining silent to avoid a lame duck's impotent wrath, and more that Republican lawmakers are almost to a person not willing to close the door on the very small but still real chance that Trump's obsessive attempts to overturn an American election could succeed.

They are playing a part considerably less nuanced than Brad Raffensperger's own decision to speak out against anti-democratic conspiracy propaganda while still endorsing the party leaders most directly responsible for promoting them. They are refusing to speak out against the claims so long as Trump's team of rancid legal pretenders, his administration propagandists, and the fringe elements of their conservative base still pursues them. If there is even a 10% chance of success, Republican lawmakers will not be speaking out to thwart it.

They defended Trump's impeachable act of election extortion with a similar silence. They pretended they could not see the evidence; they demanded they not be shown the evidence. If the Rudy Giuliani-led attempts to concoct Ukraine-based propaganda against Joe Biden had borne fruit, and at the time of impeachment there were still good reasons to believe the fabricated evidence could still be sold to the public, Republican lawmakers would benefit equally from the hoax discrediting their most visible opponent.

The decision to nullify impeachment proceedings, allowing Trump and an assortment of top officials to continue pursuing corrupt means to power, was an affirmative act by Republican senators. Their calculated silence here is for identical reasons. The acts may be criminal—but judgment on that will be withheld until the spoils can be divvied.

It is not likely that Trump will succeed in his own narcissism-fueled quest to claim that he could not have failed, in anything, unless subterfuge was involved. There are too many moving parts, the figures involved are still too ridiculous, and there are simply too many states involved this time around. But the eagerness of the party's base to adopt such rhetoric, the Republican Party leadership's embrace and furtherance of the moves, Republican lawmakers' calculated wait-and-see silence and, especially, their refusal to speak out to condemn election conspiracies all have firmly established Trump's propagandistic claims as acceptable tools for the party going forward.

Whether or not individual Republican actors like Raffensperger themselves act on such claims, there will be no penalties for simply declaring, upon losing an election, that the election was somehow Invalid, and therefore Illegitimate, and therefore the winner will be whoever a state's Republican officials choose to appoint. It is in the realm of the debatable, because Republicans on the Sunday shows are debating it. It is plausible that a future president may not be seated, if his predecessor has the backing of this crop of Republican elected figures and can put forward claims that are even fractionally less ridiculous.

The attempt to delegitimize American elections en masse rather than admit defeat is not a mere product of Trump's narcissistic delusions. It has the backing of top Republicans. It has the endorsement of an increasingly fascist-minded conservative media universe. It does not come from a vacuum; Trump is not the one filing the lawsuits to overturn results, and is only one of numerous Republican elites making the same outlandish assertions of "thousands" or "millions" of faked ballots, claims that near-unanimously target cities with large non-white populations.

It is a fascist movement, one based on the theory that party power must be preserved even if it requires the production of hoaxes and propaganda to accomplish. One that shows gaudy public contempt for expertise, and which invariably declares that any factual evidence that does not comport with the party's own oft-buffoonish claims must necessarily be a hoax perpetrated against Dear Leader, launched by remnant groups in government or outside it that seek to damage Dear Leader.

The party continually tests which democratic norms can be dispensed with, and have been successful at dismantling many or most. The push to overturn the results of a presidential election, and specifically to do so by nullifying the actual votes and tasking loyalist state elected officials create new ones, has very little chance of being successful this time, based on these states and these claims.

That does not mean that the party will not lend its weight to similar calls to overturn a future election. It does not mean that, in a Republican Party that continues to aggressively purge itself of the insufficiently sycophantic, it will with certainty run afoul of local officials unwilling to lend their own names to the effort. It does not mean that every collection of party lawyers and provocateurs will be as incompetent. There will be those that analyze these fraud claims not to discredit them, but to determine how they can best be made more compelling. And the movement of out-and-out imbeciles, Americans who pride themselves on believing hoaxes while condemning expertise, only continues to grow.

America remains at the same fascist moment, and Republican lawmakers and ex-lawmakers are going on the Sunday shows pushing false claims meant to suggest that our democracy itself is unreliable or compromised, having turned in results that the party's leader does not like. They are not turning the moment back, but pushing it forward. Again. Still.

Michigan County Board Throws Support Behind Impeaching Gretchen Whitmer

Posted on by LifeZette

Michigan’s Democratic Governor Gretchen Whitmer got some bad news this week when a county in the northern part of her state expressed support for a resolution to impeach her that was put forth by three Republican members of Michigan’s House of Representatives.

Michigan County Votes In Support Of Resolution To Impeach Whitmer

The Kalkaska County Board of Commissioners voted four to two in favor of supporting the impeachment effort, according to Michigan Live.

Whitmer has become known for imposing some of the strictest coronavirus lockdown measures in the country on her state. Commissioner David Comai stood by the board’s decision to support the impeachment effort, claiming that  Whitmer’s “unconstitutional executive orders” were to blame for Kalkaska County’s current economic crisis.

This comes days after Republican Representatives Beau LaFave, Matt Maddock and Daire Rendon issued the impeachment resolution, alleging that Whitmer was guilty of “corrupt conduct in office and crimes and misdemeanors” over her latest COVID-19 guidelines.

RELATED: Michigan Lawmakers Push For Impeachment Hearings Against Gretchen Whitmer

Michigan Speaker Of The House Defends Whitmer

Not all Michigan Republicans are behind this effort, however, as the state’s GOP Speaker of the House Rep. Lee Chatfield has spoken out against it. He described the resolution as a “distraction from the real things we have to get done in our state.”

“We’re not the party that impeaches someone because we’re upset with policies that they’ve enacted,” he said, according to Fox News.

“I thought it was shameful what the Democrats did to President Trump last year, and I would assume that any attempt by Republicans right now, with the current set of facts that we have to impeach the governor, would be on the same level,” Chatfield added. 

RELATED: Gretchen Whitmer Blames Her Strict Lockdown Orders On Trump

However, Maddock said last week that he has a “growing list of Michigan Legislators” who are planning to begin proceedings to impeach Whitmer, according to The Hill.

When asked why he feels she should be impeached, Maddock claimed that the Democrat has “ignored court orders. Violated our Constitutional rights. Completely ignored due process and the legislature. Weaponized contract tracing databases to aid democrat campaigns,”

This piece was written by James Samson on November 25, 2020. It originally appeared in LifeZette and is used by permission.

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The post Michigan County Board Throws Support Behind Impeaching Gretchen Whitmer appeared first on The Political Insider.

Michigan Lawmakers Push For Impeachment Hearings Against Gretchen Whitmer

Posted on by LifeZette

Michigan’s Democratic Governor Gretchen Whitmer got some bad news this week when state lawmakers called for impeachment hearings to be launched against her.

Republicans Move To Impeach Gretchen Whitmer

Republican state Rep. Matt Maddock took to Facebook on Sunday to say that he and several of his fellow colleagues in the GOP are seeking to hold “impeachment hearings for Governor Whitmer” in the state House of Representatives, according to WXYZ-TV. His posted listed out multiple reasons why Whitmer deserves to be impeached, claiming that she:

-Ignored court orders.
-Violated our Constitutional rights.
-Completely ignored due process and the legislature.
-Weaponized contract tracing databases to aid democrat campaigns.
-Using our kids as political pawns and denied special needs students who depend on the services that occur during in-person classes.
-Caused the unnecessary death of thousands of our vulnerable elderly who died alone and scared in nursing homes.

The Michigan Constitution allows the state House of Representatives to impeach “civil officers for corrupt conduct in office or for crimes or misdemeanors.”

RELATED: Grizzly New Details Emerge In Plot To Kidnap Gretchen Whitmer

Whitmer Fires Back

Whitmer’s office fired back in a statement saying that the Democratic governor “doesn’t have any time for partisan politics or people who don’t wear masks.”

“Governor Whitmer doesn’t have any time for partisan politics or people who don’t wear masks, don’t believe in science, and don’t have a plan to fight this virus,” said Whitmer press secretary Tiffany Brown. “Right now, she is focused on saving lives. The governor will continue to work hard for all 10 million Michiganders. This is about Michigan vs. COVID-19. Governor Whitmer doesn’t care if you’re a Trump Republican or a Biden Democrat. We are all in this together.”

Whitmer herself later addressed the impeachment efforts against her in a television interview.

“Part of the problem throughout this pandemic has been that there’s been so much partisanship around this public health crisis,” Whitmer said. “Unfortunately, while we’ve done a lot of outreach with the Michigan legislature, Republican leaders have shown very little seriousness around this issue.”

RELATED: Gretchen Whitmer Demands Michigan Pass Law Requiring People To Wear Masks

She went on to blast Republicans for refusing to wear masks, saying that “they don’t even know how to protect themselves.”

Over the past few months, Whitmer has become national infamous for enforcing some of the strictest COVID-19 regulations in all of America in her state. This has made her unpopular with quite a few conservatives in Michigan, so it remains to be seen just how far their impeachment effort against her will go.

This piece was written by James Samson on November 17, 2020. It originally appeared in LifeZette and is used by permission.

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The post Michigan Lawmakers Push For Impeachment Hearings Against Gretchen Whitmer appeared first on The Political Insider.

Pelosi Goes Off On Republicans As Trump Refuses To Concede – ‘Stop The Circus And Get To Work’

Posted on by LifeZette

Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) spoke out on Thursday to scold Republicans who have stood by President Donald Trump as he continues to not concede the election.

Pelosi Has The Nerve To Tell Republicans To ‘Stop The Circus’

“Stop the circus and get to work on what really matters to the American people,” Pelosi said in a press conference, according to Yahoo News. “It is most unfortunate that Republicans have decided that they will not respect the will of the people.”

Pelosi is perhaps the last person who should be telling anyone to “stop the circus,” given the fact that she was the one who led the impeachment charge against Trump in the House earlier this year, despite knowing that it would never pass through the Republican-led Senate.

Her impeachment push was an enormous waste of time that distracted the entire nation while COVID-19 was simultaneously making it’s way into the U.S. for the first time.

RELATED: Pelosi Speaks Out To Say Biden Has ‘Tremendous Mandate’ To Push Democratic Agenda

Schumer Chimes In

Pelosi was joined at her press conference today by Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, who begged Republicans to acknowledge Biden as the president-elect.

“The election is over,” Schumer said. “Senate Republicans, stop denying reality.”

Schumer went on to say that Biden’s election was a mandate for Democrats, calling on Republicans to accept this by caving to the left’s demands in coronavirus relief bill negotiations.

“This election was maybe more a referendum on who can handle COVID well than anything else,” Schumer said. “The Donald Trump approach was repudiated. The Joe Biden approach was embraced.”

“And that’s why we feel there’s a better chance to get a bill in the lame duck [period] if only the Republicans would stop embracing the ridiculous shenanigans that Trump is forcing them to in the election and focus on what people need,” he added. 

RELATED: Schumer Unloads On Feinstein For Acting Like An Adult In Amy Coney Barrett Hearings

Schumer might want to watch how much he throws around the word “referendum” when it comes to this election, given the fact that Democrats’ majority in the House shrunk considerably, and it looks like Republicans will be keeping the Senate. If the election was a referendum on anyone, it was most certainly on Democrats.

This piece was written by James Samson on November 12, 2020. It originally appeared in LifeZette and is used by permission.

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The post Pelosi Goes Off On Republicans As Trump Refuses To Concede – ‘Stop The Circus And Get To Work’ appeared first on The Political Insider.

The last chance for Republicans to denounce Trump has passed. Now it no longer matters

Posted on by Hunter

It's Election Day, and Republicans are still being spineless little weasels. Donald Trump has been repeatedly suggesting, in public, that he will not abide by the results of the election but will instead launch both polemics and legal maneuvers to sabotage the counting of votes. He's offered up the bizarre theory that states should declare a winner on election night—something that never happens, as many states need days or weeks to fully count all ballots received and the official certification of results typically happens on dates set by each state.

None of this is abnormal or even remotely conspiratorial; there is a reason the Constitution specifies an early November date as Election Day, but sets the inauguration of the winner to be late January. Nonetheless, the hopelessly incompetent, forever lying malignant narcissist who functions as Republicanism's rotting head is quite certain that it is all a conspiracy against him, personally, and is therefore willing to sabotage democracy itself to keep presidential immunities that will expire upon the next president's swearing-in.

When Politico's Ryan Lizza and Daniel Lippman went to query top Republican lawmakers about Trump's threats to block vote counting and plunge the country into still another constitutional crisis, however, they couldn't find anyone willing to condemn or even criticize Trump.

"Many Republicans insist they are disgusted by Trump’s threats, they just aren’t willing to say so publicly. Dozens of quietly anti-Trump members on Capitol Hill, or who left the Trump administration, usually in disgust, are willing to torch the president—but only under the cloak of anonymity," reports Politico.

There will be no other opportunities to put nation over party for these Republicans. Whether or not elections in the United States will still be considered legitimate, and whether or not votes that go against Dear Leader and his allies will be considered legitimate, it will be decided in the next several days. This is it. It is akin to Trump threatening to sell off a state to a foreign power, or to Trump declaring that he is dissolving the House of Representatives as retribution for impeachment. No matter what argument is offered up, what Trump is proposing is a sabotage of the Constitution.

So far, every public Republican reaction has been to back Trump's conspiratorial pronouncements. A sea of Republican functionaries have launched legal battle after legal battle, already, demanding that votes cast by mail (during a deadly pandemic) or votes at early polling centers (during a deadly pandemic) be nullified. Republican members of the House and Senate, however, have zipped their own mouths shut and have little to say on the schemes.

Instead, they would have us believe that they do indeed have principles, behind the scenes. Not ones they are willing to share out loud, or ones they will offer up with their own names attached. These are principles anonymously held—tossed into the ether as temporary placeholder, meant as ephemeral foothold for later declaring, to the same reporters, that they did indeed have principles all along.

It doesn't count. A principle you are unwilling to act on is not a principle. Whatever you later claimed you did when your nation's democracy was under attack doesn't matter.

When the Constitution conflicted with Dear Leader's visions of grandeur, Republican lawmakers offered no resistance. Not a scratch. If they distance himself from Trump only after voters did the hard work of ejecting him themselves, they are frauds, each and every one. They should be treated as such.

History will record that every Republican lawmaker assisted Trump despite him being openly corrupt, contemptuous of his oath of office, catastrophically incompetent, authoritarian-minded and authoritarian-fixated, racist, a steadfast promoter of white nationalism, and a propagandist not just willing, but obsessive in his efforts to disinform our citizens to acquire and preserve his power.

Trump is a fascist, and they backed his fascist tendencies and demands. Whether they privately were offended by them does not matter. The backers of fascism are called fascists, and there is no qualifying adjective that they can pin to their chests afterward, if their own Dear Leader figure is defeated, that will turn them into retroactive heroes.

Donald Trump is worried about going to jail if he loses. Yeah, ya think?

Posted on (Updated by Hunter

In a piece describing Donald Trump's incessant whining to his staff about election woes and his staff's continued efforts to gaslight him into thinking he's ahead in the polls rather than face another one of his screaming fits, the Trump whisperers at The New York Times bring us this tidbit from inside Trump's team: "In unguarded moments, Mr. Trump has for weeks told advisers that he expects to face intensifying scrutiny from prosecutors if he loses. He is concerned not only about existing investigations in New York, but the potential for new federal probes as well, according to people who have spoken with him."

Yeah. Ya think? Ya THINK?

There's all the investigations that Attorney General William Barr has personally squashed or slow-walked in an attempt to let Trump's various crime-doing loyalists off the hook. There's four years worth of press reporting on things in Trump's taxes that look, smell, and taste like fraud. There's the charges brought up in impeachment—which implicate a few of Trump's cabinet members in an international extortion scheme, and that’s not going to just go away if Trump slouches off toward Mar-a-Lago.

Unfortunately for Trump, even though he knows that keeping the presidency is the only way to hold back a tide of criminal investigations, he's still too scatterbrained and incompetent to mount a reelection bid not dependent on mass public delusion. Yeah, that stuff is going to come up just as soon as you lose presidential immunities. Golf clap for you, buddy, for figuring it out.

If Trump loses, and let us presume for a moment that he does, it seems almost certain that his close-of-office action will be blanket pardons to himself, his family, everyone he knows, and anyone who's ever cut him a check for eeeeeverything. That'll be what's on the pardon proclamation: "I pardon myself and these other people for absolutely all crimes, including all the stuff nobody found out about yet."

It might actually work, for federal crimes. The states? Not so much.

I still say there is a damn good chance Donald J. Trump becomes the first American president to flee prosecution and ask for foreign asylum. Air Force One could make it to Moscow without refueling, right? Honestly, we'd probably tell Putin to keep the plane while he's at it—we'd just be that thrilled to be rid of him.

Then again, there are other possibilities as well:

FWIW I’ve repeatedly heard a theory that Trump’s refusal to say he’d commit to a peaceful transfer of power if he lost is really a ploy to negotiate no future investigations/prosecutions of him and his businesses https://t.co/OX7NBLcxCZ

— Evan Siegfried (@evansiegfried) November 2, 2020

That seems literally too stupid a premise to believe, but this is Donald Trump we’re talking about. He is an accused rapist, tax cheat, pedophile, money launderer, and extortionist already; using the U.S. Army to hold the nation hostage for immunity negotiations isn’t quite out of the realm of possibilities for this fascist jackass.

Fascism: As polling turns against him, Trump lays groundwork for mass violence

Posted on (Updated by Hunter

Rattled by poor polling numbers in his reelection bid, the alleged president of the United States is encouraging domestic terrorism. That's where we're at, and everyone from top national security experts to local emergency officials are all crystal clear on that. The New York Times reports from a bunch of 'em in a piece that can both contain remarkable factual phrases like "Mr. Trump has descended into rants about perceived enemies" and still somehow soft sell the underlying message:

The nation is preparing for violence on and after Election Day because Donald J. Trump, a fascist, is goading his supporters into that violence with rally claims that any loss on his part will be proof that his enemies cheated.

There is no possible chance that Trump doesn't know what he's doing. His tweeted calls to "LIBERATE" states from governors who imposed widespread pandemic measures resulted in a Michigan militia attempting to do exactly that. Trump is back at it even today, claiming their primary target, Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, "wants to be a dictator." He is attaching the legitimacy of the state to calls for mob action—only to repeat those calls when it looks like the first versions are beginning to bear fruit.

The only reason he is not being treated as a radical, dangerous figure who has irreparably violated his own oath of office, necessitating removal, is because Republican Party leadership and lawmakers have themselves embraced and defended those violations. It is self-radicalizing; the farther Trump goes into overtly authoritarian behavior, the more pressure the party feels to defend and normalize their own support for him. The more Trump's circle has succeeded in isolating and excising state and local functionaries who express alarm at his grotesqueries, the more the party has become a homogenized group of anti-democracy, authoritarian-molded radicals themselves.

Trump has clearly been unfit for office in every respect; the impeachment investigation identified his corruption, the pandemic proved his apathetic incompetence, and his continued calls for mob justice against targeted enemies have proven (as have similar quotes repeated through the last five years) that he is not just indifferent to extralegal punishments of his enemies, but publicly fantasizes about them. If Vice President Mike Pence, Sen. Mitch McConnell, Attorney General William Barr, Treasury Sec. Steve Mnuchin, Sec. of State Mike Pompeo, Rep. Mark Meadows, Sen. Lindsey Graham, Sen. Ted Cruz, and the entire rest of the party had not all decided to ally with him for their own ideological and policy ends, he would have been removed in bipartisan fashion long ago, reduced to a historical footnote.

They didn't, and now local law enforcement officials around the country are preparing for radicals among what Trump has proudly designated his "Army" intent on disrupting Election Day, sabotaging ballot-counting measures, and committing acts of coordinated terrorism targeting his opponents. It's now expected.

Once again we're in a position where the fate of democracy rests on not just beating anti-democratic forces, but doing so in such a convincing fashion that sabotage can't alter the outcome. But now it comes with the near certainty of violence. This is Mitch McConnell's fault: Remember that. This is Lindsey Graham's fault. Mike Pence, Kellyanne Conway, William Barr. Trump's suggestions to "liberate" parts of America from small-d democratic governance would be intolerable if they believed them to be intolerable. Everything Trump does and will do has happened because they allowed it.

California Republican Party says it won’t take down illegal ‘ballot boxes’ despite state orders

Posted on by Hunter

On Monday, it came to light that the California Republican Party was placing what they called "official ballot drop off boxes" in locations deemed to be Republican-friendly (such as, no kidding, "gun stores") in apparent efforts to make it easier for Republican voters to vote than not-Republican voters.

There are two problems with this. First: It's not legal. California law allows voters to designate a person to drop their ballot off at an official location rather than going themselves; it does not allow the "designated person" to be an unattended cardboard box. (And yes, some of the "official ballot drop off boxes" are merely "simple cardboard boxes with no locking security mechanism.")

The second problem is, yes, ballot security. Voters may not be aware that these very much not official "drop off boxes" are managed by unknown Republican operatives, and there's no guarantee the ballots collected in such boxes won't "accidentally" be, to use a recent Trumpian example, dumped into a river. (I kid. Here in California we don't have rivers. They could be dumped into storm drains, though, which would be problematic because all the aspiring sewer actors do not need more lines to practice.) There's nothing to say the ballots the Republican Party claims to be collecting won't be sorted through, perhaps to weed out non-Republican looking names, or otherwise disposed of. That's why California ballot-harvesting laws require a designee.

California officials have now warned the state Republican Party that what they're doing is illegal and may even result in prison time. The Republican Party has responded in the expected way: They don't care, and won't be complying with state demands to remove the boxes.

More specifically, the California Republican Party intends to continue the operation while daring state officials to do anything about it. Party spokesperson Hector Barajas noted that a 2018 state law prohibits election officials from rejecting a ballot solely because it was returned without the required designee signature or relationship to the voter, signaling that the party intends to collect ballots however they want, handle and turn them in however they want, and dare election officials to throw those votes away. Election officials will almost certainly not do that, so here we are.

It's another case of the party's all-encompassing insistence that laws don't matter if bending the law would benefit the party. See also: Dinesh D'Whateverguy, and literally every member of Donald Trump's inner circles, past and present, indicted and not, and the Republican gutting of the Federal Election Commission, and the nullification of election-related impeachment charges against Dear Leader, and take your pick.

And yes, everyone involved is aware of the dichotomy of the Republican Party going to furious lengths to restrict voting access in Texas and other Republican-led states while bending restrictions that they believe are harmful to their own voters. It's not irony, it's fascism.

What California voters need to know right now, however: Do not use those boxes. Don't. California is mailing ballots to all voters; follow the instructions provided to the letter and mail them back. Do not put your ballot in a cardboard box, or a burlap sack, or into the mouth of a large wooden horse that has appeared, overnight, in the empty parking lot of an abandoned mall. Just mail them in, or turn them in where the state itself tells you to.

There's no guarantee that the local Chuckles' Gun Club and Shoebox Votin' Booth will be handling your vote, as America decides between authoritarian rule and democracy, with anything resembling care. The Republican Party is playing fast and loose with the votes of their own most loyal supporters, and that is not something you want to get involved in.