Will Trump’s GOP Finally Kill American Democracy?

-by Bob Fitrakis and Harvey Wasserman

For Donald Trump’s GOP followers, the real issue in the 2020 election is democracy itself.

They want it abolished.

Their primary allies are the Coronavirus, state legislatures like those in Ohio and Wisconsin, and the US Supreme Court.

The campaign just hit a new level in Wisconsin. Using the Pandemic, its gerrymandered GOP legislature made voting in the April 7 primary as dangerous as possible. The US Supreme Court, with its usual 5-4 death hammer, has backed them up.

That 5-4 margin selected George W. Bush (Bush v. Gore) in 2000, and cemented the corporate purchase of our elections with Citizens United (2010), Arizona Clean Elections (2011), Shelby County(2013) and McCutcheon (2014).

In recent years Republican governors and legislators have done all they can to limit the franchise. With discriminatory laws demanding voter ID, de facto poll taxes, abolition of early voting, elimination of neighborhood precincts, failure to deliver ballots and voting machines, bans on voting by alleged ex-felons and more, the GOP has assaulted the ability of citizens of poverty, youth and color to vote.

Now the 2020 Pandemic has made it all but impossible to run voting stations. With social distancing and other necessary precautions, operating 116,990 precincts for some 138,000,000 voters, as in 2018, would be impossible.

The Brennan Center for Justice now estimates it would take about $2 billion to federally fund absentee balloting for the whole nation. All registered voters would be mailed a ballot which they would send back to election boards or voting centers. Social distancing and other challenges raised by the pandemic would be eliminated.

An all paper vote-by-mail system may be the clearest route to a fair election. With ballots mailed to all registered voters, citizens would have the option of mailing or walking them back in to election boards. Centralized election centers would handle voting for those with special needs, and would provide for late registration and mass voting, as in the black community’s “souls to the polls” tradition.

Managing a paper-based universal system poses a wide range of serious challenges. But it can circumvent the main obstacles posed by a Pandemic, and offers a welcome alternative to the chaotic hodge-podge of hackable voting machines and rigged polling places that have cursed so many recent elections.

With a well-run universal paper-based mail-in system, we have every reason to believe that voter turnout would soar and reliable vote counts and recounts would be reasonably do-able.

Which is exactly what the Trump Cult most fears. For them, an easily accessible, reliably verifiable voting process is the ultimate enemy. If such a system were put in place, says Trump, “the Republicans would never win another election.”

In other words, for Trump and his ilk to stay in power, democracy must be crushed.

This week’s disaster in Wisconsin may be exactly what the Republicans have in mind. Trump’s ineptitude and greed have deepened and prolonged the Pandemic. Now he has used it in Wisconsin to crush democracy itself.

Thousands of Wisconsin citizens were denied their right to vote when ballots were not mailed out in time to be returned by a tight artificial deadline, which the Trump courts upheld. Voting stations throughout the state were closed or badly run. In Milwaukee, where 180 were planned, just five operated. Incredibly brave poll workers were scarce and terrified. Their jobs were hampered by the demand for social distancing, face masks (when they could get them) protective gear and more.

As usual in urban areas, incredibly brave, dedicated citizens waited hours to vote-- this time amidst a highly contagious Pandemic. At least some are likely to die from the experience.

In choking off the popular vote, Wisconsin Republicans entrenched a right-wing extremist on the state supreme court for ten more years.

In Ohio, the gerrymandered GOP legislature has blocked mailing ballots directly to registered voters, favored by the Republican Ohio Secretary of State and Ohio voting rights groups. Instead the legislature demands that voters must fill out an application to request an absentee ballot from their board of elections. The ballot is mailed to them, which must then be filled out, put inside an envelope, fill out personal information on the outside of that envelope, put that envelope inside another mailing envelope and either mail it or drop it off at the board of elections.

Strangely, the instructions are: “Important: Your voted ballot must be sealed in this envelope for your ballot to be counted.” The bold letters are theirs, implying that if your inner envelope was not properly sealed, your vote won’t be counted. Even stranger, the pre-paid postage stamp on the return mailing envelope appears on the back side of the envelope, not the side with the mailing address.

These mail-in ballots must be postmarked no later than April 27 to be counted.

Voter registration advocates have taken to dumping piles of absentee ballot applications in grocery stores like Kroger in hopes that people will pick them up and get their votes in on time.

Should enough Trump legislatures lock up their states like Ohio and Wisconsin, Trump’s “election” will be a foregone conclusion.

As back-up, he might use the Pandemic he has prolonged to cancel actual voting. The GOP legislatures, which are entrenched in states with an Electoral College majority, might then simply proclaim his “victory.” The Supreme Court, which has just adjourned until October, would rubber stamp the process, 5-4.

The American people now have just seven months to prevent this from happening. It won’t be easy. But our lives depend on it.

Midnight Meme Of The Day!

by Noah

In keeping with the president's intense psychopathology, the Trump owned and operated "Supreme" Court chose illness and death over the Constitutional right to vote for untold numbers of Wisconsin citizens earlier this week when they decreed from on high that there would be no extension of voting time, due to the pandemic, for citizens to get, fill out, and send in absentee ballots. Many voters who had asked for the absentee ballots literally didn't receive their ballots in time due to pandemic-caused postal delays. The result of all of this will be, of course, ballots being tossed in the garbage by state election officials and voters waiting in line as huddled masses, some infectious, some not, and all soon to be if they risked their health by voting. This is not unlike Trump urging Americans to pack their churches of Easter. The more sickness and death the merrier, no matter what your party affiliation. Make your judges and your president happy; get sick and die.

In short, Republicans, for whatever reasons, always seem to have an advantage that goes up as the number of actual voters goes down. It's the turnout wars and this decision to not extend the absentee ballot deadline will be a template for increased voter suppression across the country this year. It's a particularly brazen addition to the Republican Party's smorgasbord of voter suppression. It's taking advantage. It's evil. It's cynical. It's who they are. In this case, the scheming particularly affects urban African-Americans and Latinos who have suffered a deliberate decrease in polling locations in order to discourage voters with extra long lines at the locations which remain. The scheme also targets elderly voters in Wisconsin who, like African-Americans and Latinos, tend to vote for Democratic Party candidates. In addition, of course, the elderly are particularly more susceptible to the ravages of the coronavirus as are African-Americans and Latinos who live in densely packed urban neighborhoods. It's all part of the Republican Party grand strategy, and don't think for a second that dirtbags like "Justice" John Roberts (special thanks to Chucky Schumer) and Donald Trump haven't rubbed their hands in glee about it.

Trump vs Democracy

Our heroic jefe, Señor Trumpanzee, is not just a war-time president, he's fighting a war on two fronts-- one against the COVID-19 pandemic-- who could have known?-- and one against democracy. Yesterday, Alex Isenstadt reported from the front lines in Trumpanzee's war against democracy. As you can see on the chart above, 65% of registered voters support the idea of vote by mail-- including 93% of Democrats, 70% of independents and even 32% of Republicans.

It is notable that 68% of Republicans oppose vote by mail. Makes no sense. Actually it does. Historically, conservatives have always done everything they could to keep the franchise as small as possible. They year for their glory days when only older white males with property were allowed to vote. Progressives have slowly but surely chipped away at that. This week David Ralston, the Republican Speaker of the Georgia House explained it as well as any conservative: "The president said it best. This will be extremely devastating to Republicans and conservatives in Georgia." Yep, larger numbers of people voting usually is "extremely devastating" to conservatives.

Isenstadt wrote that "Trump's political operation is launching a multimillion-dollar legal campaign aimed at blocking Democrats from drastically changing voting rules in response to the coronavirus outbreak. In the past several weeks, the reelection campaign and the Republican National Committee have helped to oversee maneuvering in a handful of battleground states with an eye toward stopping some Democratic efforts to alter voting laws, and to bolster Trump. The mobilization is being closely coordinated with Republicans at the state and local levels.

The Trump campaign and RNC are actively engaged in litigation in Wisconsin, where the parties are at loggerheads over an array of issues including voter identification, and in New Mexico, where the battle involves vote-by-mail. The skirmishing has also spread across key states like Pennsylvania and Georgia, where the well-organized Trump apparatus has fought over changes that could sway the outcome of the election.

The enterprise-- which includes more than two dozen GOP officials, including lawyers dedicated entirely to litigation-- shows how completely the pandemic has upended the 2020 election. While litigation over voting issues is not uncommon, the coronavirus-- and the likely obstacles it will create for voting in November-- has brought the issue to the forefront of the campaign.

The public health crisis is already injecting a huge X-factor into the election, with impossible-to-predict effects on voter turnout, and officials in both parties acknowledge the fights over voting laws could affect the outcome of the election.

Democrats-- who typically benefit from high turnout elections because their voters cast ballots less reliably-- are plowing ahead with initiatives to make it easier to vote.

...Trump advisers say they are open to certain changes, such as automatically sending absentee ballot applications to voters over age 65. But they’re opposed to other moves Democrats are pushing, such as sending every voter a ballot regardless of whether they ask for one, which Republicans argue would open the door to fraud.

Trump has long been fixated on voter fraud. He has repeatedly claimed without evidence that he lost New Hampshire in 2016 because out-of-staters cast ballots, and after the election the president set up a since-disbanded voter fraud commission. Following the disastrous 2018 midterms, Trump said that after voting, some people “go to their car, put on a different hat, put on a different shirt, come in and vote again.”

During an appearance on Fox News this week, Trump pushed back against an effort by House Democrats to secure billions of dollars for election assistance in the coronavirus relief package. The bill Trump ultimately signed included $400 million, a fraction of what Democrats had been seeking.

“The things they had in there were crazy. They had things, levels of voting that if you’d ever agreed to it, you’d never have a Republican elected in this country again,” Trump said.

Federal funding to help states ease voting barriers in response to coronavirus is just one front in the battle. Trump's political apparatus is taking a state-by-state approach.

In Pennsylvania, where Democrats proposed an entirely vote-by-mail system, Trump advisers worked with the Republican-controlled Legislature to push through more circumscribed rules. They include a limited expansion of absentee voting and changes to the handling and counting of those ballots.

In Georgia, some officials are recommending sending everyone a ballot, also a no-go for Trump's team. The president’s advisers instead advocated mailing people applications they would need to fill out and return in order to receive a ballot. The idea was approved by Georgia’s Democratic Party and Republican secretary of state.

Republicans see an advantage in the change in Georgia. They say they will be able to use their financial advantage over Democrats to reach their Georgia supporters to ensure they're returning ballot request forms.

The Democratic offensive is being led by Marc Elias, a veteran election attorney who is currently involved in litigation in more than a dozen states. He has advocated a handful of changes in the wake of the outbreak, including providing pre-paid postage for mail-in ballots and extending the postmark deadline to Election Day.

"If states are not able or willing to rise to the occasion of the challenges that Covid-19 poses, we’re going to continue looking very seriously to the courts to protect the rights of voters and to ensure that ballots don’t go uncounted that should be counted,” Elias said.

Trump advisers say they are trying to prevent overreach on the part of Democrats, who have long sought to ease voting restrictions.

“It is beyond disgusting that the Democrats are using this crisis to try to dismantle the integrity of our voting system,” said Justin Clark, a senior Trump campaign counsel who is helping to spearhead the legal fight. “The American people won’t stand for this, and the campaign and the party intend to fight with them for a free, fair, and open vote in November."

Clark pointed to so-called community ballot collection-- an idea embraced by some Democrats that would allow local organizations and individuals to collect ballots from voters at their homes-- as something the Trump campaign would fight.

The pandemic is expected to increase the amount of funding the Republican Party devotes to lawsuits. The cash-flush Trump machine announced in February it was directing $10 million toward legal battles, but people involved in the effort say that figure is now likely to climb much higher.

You know how you always see photos of presidents and their wives early on election day voting at the polls? You won't see one of those this Friday for the Florida primary; Trump has requested absentee ballots for himself and the former Slovenian sex worker he married-- just as some 160,000 other Palm Beach County residents have. Yesterday at his daily shit show, he said "I think a lot of people cheat with mail-in voting. People should vote with ID, voter ID, I think voter ID is very important. The reason they don’t want voter ID is because they intend to cheat. It shouldn’t be mail-in voting. It should be you go to booth and you proudly display yourself, you send it in the mail… all sorts of bad things can happen… by the time it gets in and is tabulated."

Some think that the conservative plot to demolish the U.S. Post Office-- which happens to be constitutionally-mandated-- is now, because of the pandemic-- in high gear. No post office, no trustworthy mail-in-voting? Kara Eastman, in the progressive Democrat running to replace Trumpist toady Don Bacon in Omaha. "Republicans are afraid of high turnout so they are afraid of universal vote by mail," she told us. "We need to push to ensure that our democracy doesn’t fall victim to this virus like our economy has." Texas progressive Mike Siegel noted that "In one fell swoop, we see that the Republicans are both a death cult and fundamentally anti-democratic. They’d rather us risk infection than increase voter participation. I understand that creating national vote-by-mail is a monumental task, but with resources and commitment it is certainly achievable. It’s the right thing for public health and it’s the right thing for our democracy." Please consider supporting the campaigns being run by Kara, Mike Siegel, Mark Gamba and Liam O'Mara by clicking on the thermometer below and contributing what you can in these tough times.

Mark Gamba, the mayor of Mikwaukie, is running for Oregon's 5th congressional district against Blue Dog Kurt Schrader, who finds himself voting with Republicans far more than an actual Democrat. Gamba is a progressive with every instinct and every action. This morning he told us that "Oregon has been 100% vote by mail for over 20 years. It’s super convenient, we have two weeks with our ballots and can vote at our kitchen tables. We get some of the best turnouts in the country especially since we have one of the highest levels of voter registration in the country. What’s more, there’s a paper trail. It can’t be cheated. That last one in particular is what worries the Republicans. They know that in totally fair elections they lose. In this Pandemic moment, we are one of the few states that can safely vote. Our primary will continue as scheduled. I think the Republicans know that these last 3+ years have been some of the worst in American history for a significant part of the population. In a fair election, with a big turnout, they will lose the presidency, the Senate and the House will move further to the left. If we hope to stop climate change and create a universal health care system so that these pandemics don’t become a regular part of our lives then moving to a nationwide, Oregon style, vote by mail will be a powerful first step."

A Riverside County congressional candidate for a seat help by Trump-lockstepper Ken Calvert, progressive Liam O'Mara is also a history professor. "It is one of the most poorly-kept secrets in American politics that not everyone involved in it likes democracy," he said today. "There is a vocal subset of Republican officials who scream about Democrats wanting to take our freedoms, while they quietly do the job themselves-- authoring and passing surveillance legislation, expanding police powers, eroding civil rights legislation through the courts, and engaging in active voter-suppression. This has long since moved past hypocrisy and into farce, and if we cannot find a way to reach the voters who enable these figures, we will find ourselves living under permanent minority rule as the kind of "managed democracy" we see in places like Russia. If we're not willing to fight back for basic liberties like voting, then the act could lose meaning, becoming a rubber-stamp for a minority party, and our freedom be stamped out with it. We need to extend and secure voting rights, not let them be stripped from more each year. Enough is enough. Are we to be a republic or a party dictatorship? Talk to your Republican friends. Help them to understand that partisan divisions are being exploited to undermine what it means to be an American. If we can't talk to each other again, we may lose those values to which we pledged our allegiance."

Is America Really Up Against An Internal Fascist Threat?

That should be apparent to anyone who's been watching the metastization of the worst features of right-wing populism within the American conservative movement and within the Republican Party. If the non-progressive bulk of the Democratic Party establishment is moving more in the direction of an Eisenhower Republican posture, it's been pushed there by a drastic lurch to the right-- exacerbated by, but by no means begun by, Trump... more a headlong plunge than a mere lurch, by the GOP. And this isn't going to get any better, primarily because conservatives don't see a way forward for the Republican Party within the confines of democracy. The radical right-- and not just a morons like Trump-- is done playing by a set of rules that they feel are stacked against them. And that means anything goes.

Conservatives freaked out when people without property were allowed to vote, when ex-slaves and their descendants were allowed to vote, when women were allowed to vote, when young people were allowed to vote. They flip out when their schemes to prevent voting by groups unlikely to embrace conservatism are prohibited and when their endeavors to water down the vote of those people are declared unconstitutional. Ever since the Patriots beat the British and their conservative American allies in the late 1770s, conservatives have felt they've never gotten a break.

Trump's buffoon-like reflexive fascism was easier for conservatives to embrace than it would have been if they thought they could get anywhere without the populists, nationalists and, yes, fascists, who worship him. Over the weekend Jeremy Rosner from the quintessential Democratic establishment polling firm, Greenberg Quinlan Rosner, wrote an OpEd for The Hill, The Democratic and Anti-democratic parties, explaining a realignment of America’s two major parties that will not be mostly defined by demographics but by ideas about democracy and the rule of law. "To put it simply, we are headed for an era in which America may well have a Democratic Party and an Anti-democratic Party." Headed for? How many Republicans do you see standing up to Trump? Yes, a few... a very few.

"This realignment, in large part," he wrote cautiously, "was driven by a crucial strategic choice the Republican Party made over the past decade, as described in a recent piece for The Atlantic by Vann Newkirk II. Soon after the GOP’s 2012 presidential defeat, Reince Priebus... led a post-mortem analysis that was unusually blunt and prescient. It said the GOP must make big reforms in its outlook and agenda or risk electoral marginalization. In particular, it called for the GOP to support comprehensive immigration reform, liberalize its views on gay rights, demand reforms on corporate governance, and stop talking like a bunch of 'stuffy old men' who leave younger voters 'rolling their eyes at what the party represents.'" That was seen by the populist-right as a recipe for RINO-ism, so none of the recommendations were taken seriously, let alone adopted. "Instead," wrote Rosner, "it relied on tactics aimed at preserving power for a party that represented a steadily shrinking share of the population, mostly defined by non-urban, lower-educated whites. These tactics included gerrymandering, voter suppression, manipulation of the census process and efforts to stack the federal judiciary with like-minded jurists." Trump only made this tendency-- part of the nature of conservatism to begin with-- much, much worse-- and devoid of societal norms or even guard-rails.

If Republicans after 2012 decided to go outside democratic norms to preserve their power, rather than to reform and align with the values of a majority of the rising American electorate, Donald Trump in 2016 put that strategy on steroids. His presidential candidacy-- built on racially-charged language, offensive comments about women, nationalism and appeals to less-educated whites-- snugly fit the imperatives of a party that was drifting away from a majority of the public. So, too, the recent power-grabs by Republican legislatures in North Carolina, Wisconsin and Michigan, which have moved to strip incoming Democratic governors or attorneys general of traditional powers, simply to preserve Republican power, even in the face of a popular vote for change.

Trump didn't order, nor coordinate, those moves. They came pretty naturally to a Republican Party obsessed with power and financial greed over and above any "American ideals," which most conservative never truly embraced anyway. Rosner is looking for a happy ending and suggests that "the Trump-era moves to preserve Republicans’ power may have crossed an important line-- a legal line. Disclosures by special counsel Robert Mueller and the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York suggest that some on the GOP team lied, during and/or after the 2016 election, about their interactions with the Russians, and Trump’s former lawyer, Michael Cohen, has pleaded guilty to his part in a hush-money scheme during the campaign involving two women who say they had extramarital affairs with Trump. The march to apparent illegality was not confined to the 2016 presidential race. In the 2018 race for North Carolina’s 9th Congressional District, it now appears that the campaign of GOP candidate Mark Harris, the uncertified winner, may have run an illegal scheme to skew absentee ballots in his favor. The new legislative power-grab schemes in Wisconsin and Michigan almost certainly will face court challenges. Many Republicans who themselves are not breaking electoral laws or subverting democratic institutions are still condoning their party’s anti-democratic bent by refusing to condemn such actions. The slide toward extra-constitutional, illegal and anti-democratic tactics to preserve GOP power is becoming its new brand."

The Trump base is too thick to understand and conservatives who do understand seem to be increasingly opting for the Republican Party tribalism they're comfortable with.

Some analysts suggest issues of race, gender and education will be dominant drivers in upcoming elections, since those demographic fault lines were so visible in recent voting. But another dynamic may define 2020 even more strongly. Should the various Trump investigations produce more evidence of law-breaking, a defining dividing line between the parties could become the question of democracy-- which party is for it, and which is trying to subvert it.

Already, the incoming Democratic majority in the House has vowed that its first major bill will focus on democracy-- making it easier to vote, limiting big money in politics and ensuring presidential candidates are more transparent about their finances.

Will half-assed Democratic band-aid policies work while hypocrisy dominates the party establishment, essentially nothing more than another wing of deadly conservatism?

All this mirrors what happened after Watergate. A year before Nixon’s resignation, the dominant issues were the economy and the oil embargo. By the 1974 midterm, a focus on campaign finance reform helped to sweep in the 49-seat Democratic gain that became known as the “Watergate babies.” And two years later, the focus on ethics and reform was enough to sweep in a moral reformer and Washington outsider from Georgia.

It could be that Republicans in coming months will begin to change path on issues tied to democracy and the rule of law, as new revelations emerge about Trump and as they ponder the extent of their losses in the recent House elections. They might finally begin to act on Reince Priebus’s post-2012 urgings to adjust their policies and outlook. But if they continue to double down on preserving their power by any means, even as their voter base shrinks, their anti-democratic brand could become even more pronounced.

More likely, someone snuck into Rosner's room and shot him up with some pure diacetylmorphine. I'd count on Bernie winning before I'd count on the Republican or the conservative establishment changing stripes.

Lame Ducks Are Outdated And Should Be Abolsihed

American lame duck periods-- between early November's election and early Jannary's inauguration, are usually extremely dysfunctional-- but they were even worse before 1933 when they lasted until March. In 1933m the 29th Amendment to the Constitution moved the beginning of the new Congress to January 3 (and the inauguration of the president to January 20), shortening, but not eliminating the lame duck period. Now we need to amend the 20th amendment. Remember, a lame duck-- whether an executive or a legislature-- is free to make decisions that exercise power with little fear of consequence.

Yesterday Wisconsin's lame duck governor, Scott Walker, signed the lame duck legislature's lame duck anti-democracy bills that are examples of what lame ducks can do to fuck with the newly elected officials. What Republican legislatures and governors are doing in Wisconsin, North Carolina and Michigan make the case for stripping defeated politicians of their powers immediately after defeat.

Outgoing Gov. Scott Walker signed lame-duck legislation Friday that will scale back the authority of his Democratic successor-- approving the entire legislation after saying he was inclined to veto parts of it.

The move came a day after Walker announced a $28 million incentive package for Kimberly-Clark Corp. using powers the legislation strips from incoming Democratic Gov. Tony Evers. If Walker had signed the legislation earlier, he wouldn't have been able to cut the deal with Kimberly-Clark without permission from lawmakers.

The legislation also puts limits on the incoming attorney general and curb early voting-- provisions that will likely ignite legal fights.

...In a statement, Evers said Walker "chose to ignore and override the will of the people of Wisconsin."

"This will no doubt be his legacy," his statement said. "The people demanded a change on November 6th, and they asked us to solve problems, not pick petty, political fights. The people of Wisconsin expect more from our government than what has happened in our state over the past few weeks."

...[T]he measures mean Evers and incoming Democratic Attorney General-elect Josh Kaul would have fewer powers than all of their predecessors, Republican and Democrat alike.

The laws Walker signed-- passed by Republicans last week in an overnight session just four and a half days after the package was made public-- trim early voting; give Republican lawmakers control of the state's job-creation agency; and hem in Evers and Kaul.

The legislation also gives GOP lawmakers control of a litigation authorized by Walker to try to overturn the Affordable Care Act, or Obamacare. Evers and Kaul campaigned on getting the state out of that lawsuit.

...Republican lawmakers will gain the ability to more permanently block state rules written by the Evers administration. Such rules are more detailed than state statutes and carry the force of law.

Under the new law, Evers will need to get permission from lawmakers to make substantial changes to health care and public benefits programs. Republicans sought those measures to prevent Evers from shelving work requirements and drug screening requirements.

The system is particularly venal because Republican gerrymandering has given 64% of the seats in the Assembly over to Republicans, who only won 45% of the votes. 53% of Wisconsin voters cast ballots for Democrats, who wound up with just 36% of the seats.

Last week, Ian Millhiser, writing for ThinkProgress, summed up the reasons why lame duck sessions should be abolished-- on every level of government :Defeated lawmakers with nothing left to lose shouldn't be able to set the capitol on fire on their way out the door.. Other countries have already gotten rid of dysfunctional lame duck sessions which were established to take into account how long it would take a newly elected official to find out he had been elected in pre-telegraph days and then ride his horse all the way to the state capital to take a seat.

There are good reasons why a nation may need several days or even a few weeks between an election and the ascension of its new government. Counting all the ballots takes time. And, in parliamentary systems, it may take a while for the leader of the dominant party to pull together a large enough coalition to form a government.

But the United States has an unusually long lame duck period -- about two months at the federal level, and a similar amount of time in most states. And it still has this lengthy interregnum for no good reason. In the horse and buggy days, when it might have taken weeks for a new member of Congress to travel to the capitol, there was a logic to keeping outgoing lawmakers in place if an emergency should arise. Even state lawmakers might have needed time to get their affairs in order-- and to figure out who would manage their finances at home while they were largely out of contact at the state capitol.

...On May 7, 2017, Emmanuel Macron won France’s presidential election. He took office seven days later. Canada’s Liberal Party won a parliamentary majority on October 19, 2015. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau took office on November 4 of that year. The last time power switched partisan hands in Great Britain, former Prime Minister David Cameron took office just five days after the general election.

Republicans are using lame duck powers to purposefully subvert democracy. That's got to end.

When Republicans Don't Like What The Voters Decide...

I was shocked when the Florida Republican Party seemed so calm when Amendment 4 passed in November. It's going to probably mean a million new voters, many of then not especially GOP-friendly. Florida was one of only 4 states, the others being Kentucky, Iowa and Virginia, where convicted felons do not regain the right to vote after serving out their sentences. Amendment 4 was designed to automatically restore the right to vote for people with prior felony convictions-- other than convicted murderers or those who committed felony sexual offenses-- on completion of their sentences, including prison, parole, and probation. The victory for Amendment 4 was massive-- 64.55% to 35.45%. Compare that to Rick Scott's win in the Senate race (50.1-49.9%) or Ron DeSantis' win for governor (49.6-49.2%). 5,148,926 people voted to allow felons to regain their right to vote, over a million more people than those who voted for Scott and DeSantis (who both opposed the amendment). The potential to change politics in Florida is enormous. It seems like Republican politicians woke up to that after the vote sand are now moving against what they call "implementation," although the amendment seems clear enough that no actual implementation is needed.

Mitch Perry's essay for the Florida Phoenix, Key lawmakers now saying they may need to interpret what voters meant in approving Amendment 4 to restore felon voting rights is another demonstration of the Republican Party's assault on democracy. He wrote that there is growing growing concern that the Republican-dominated state legislature is finding ways to "slow-walk" the process, although I don't exactly understand why there even is "a process," since the amendment should just kick in automatically next month; end of story.

The central question is: Does Amendment 4 automatically kick-in next month, or will the Legislature need to get involved? The right wing nutcase Secretary of State, Ken Detzner, is questioning whether the state’s 67 county Supervisors of Election can go ahead and start registering felons to vote without an edict from the state legislature.

“It would be inappropriate for us to charge off without direction from them,” Detzner told reporters in Sarasota last week.

St. Petersburg Republican state Sen. and committee chair Jeff Brandes said he agreed that the law does begin on January 8, but added that there remain a number of questions that need to be resolved... Several elections supervisors complained last week that the Secretary of State’s office has given them no guidance at all on how to implement the initiative.

Yesterday, Florida Democratic Party Chair Terrie Rizzo told the media that "Floridians have spoken and overwhelmingly voted to restore voting rights for felons. Ron DeSantis and Republicans don’t get to decide whether to implement what is now law-- they must fulfill the will of the people. This is another act of voter suppression by Republicans who want to pick and choose who should have the right to vote."

The first I ever heard of this initiative was several years ago, when Alan Grayson told me it was one of the most important things he was working on. Today he told me that "Before this amendment passed, more than a quarter of all Florida African-American men couldn’t vote.  You can always count on Florida Republicans to do their best to keep African-Americans from voting. Fish gotta swim, birds gotta fly, Republicans gotta bigot." Earlier he had said that there may be litigation over what the phrase "all terms of their sentence including parole or probation" means "but that’s for the courts to decide, not the legislature. There is nothing for the Legislature to do; the amendment is self-executing."

Bipartisanship-- The Real Kind, Not The Kevin McCarthy Cynical Bullshit Kind

In a wave election-- with a DCCC recruiting some real garbage, dumb-as-a-brick candidates to run-- you get some really ignorant freshmen in Congress. And we do. So some of them might not know who Kevin McCarthy is... let alone what his role has been and what his likely intentions are. On Thursday he penned a letter: Dear Members of the Democratic Class of 2019, not, you'll notice, Dear Members of the Class of 2019.

McCarthy's something of a dolt, but a dolt with an extremely inflated self-image. And being a dolt doesn't mean he isn't crafty... like his pal, Trumpanzee. Democratic freshmen need to hear from Democratic sophomores, juniors and seniors, about Republican bipartisanship while they controlled the levers of power in the House. This gives little more than a hint:

"When the new Congress is sworn in," he reminded the freshmen eager to break through, "we will all bear the 'solemn responsibility' of acting on behalf of our fellow citizens, as you wrote in a letter to your party's leadership earlier this month. " And he's happy to help him undermine their leaders. "In the spirit of that responsibility," he continued in the spirit of well-known Republican comity and generosity, "I am writing to express my willingness to work with you for the good of the country-- and to extend an open invitation to meet with you int the new year."

So the idiot who led the partisan food fight of the last several years is now trolling for Democrats of the Josh Gottheimer mold who are willing to work with him against Democratic values. No more partisan food fights! Not when there are more Democrats with arms than Republicans!

There are several different ways to work across the aisle. McCarthy is hoping some of the Democratic freshmen will take guidance from Wall Street Democrats like the aforementioned Mr. Gottheimer (Blue Dog-NJ) and come to think, reflexively, that compromise and bipartisanship is selling out-- and there are rewards for that-- their own constituents "for the greater good," "greater" as in corporate good. Some of the most accomplished-- and respected and admired-- Democrats in Congress know how to successfully work across the aisle without selling out their constituents and without selling out their values.

McCarthy worked tirelessly this week to make sure that what Bernie accomplished yesterday with Mike Lee (R-UT) and Rand Paul (R-KY)-- a bipartisan resolution to end American participation in the Yemen genocide-- would not even get a vote in the House. That's how Kevin McCarthy, when he still has any power to do anything other than lure greedy and mentally impaired freshmen across the aisle, expresses his devotion to ending the food fights!

One skilled legislator who learned how to compromise and work for her constituents' best interests with good faith efforts with her colleagues in the state legislature is Pramila Jayapal (D-WA). She passed legislation in Olympia, working with Republicans eager to also benefit their own constituents-- not shallow hypocrites like Kevin McCarthy-- that benefited both Democratic and Republican Washingtonians... and without selling out the progressive values that have propelled and energized her stellar career as an organizer, activist and political leader. This morning we asked Pramila to help us understand the art of successful, forward-looking bipartisanship, something the freshmen Democrats should pay attention to instead of McCarthy's hollow, staff-generated empty words.

Pramila is a skilled close-quarters negotiator who helped create Seattle's Office of Immigrant and Refugee Affairs. Even before going to Congress, she worked with Republican Senators Lindsey Graham and John McCain on an immigration reform bill that passed the U.S. Senate in 2013. She worked with them to get that bill passed.

When we first met her in January of 2016 she was helping Republicans in the state Senate to see common ground on bills she was trying to pass-- to lift the statute of limitations on rape and sexual assaults and for free community college education.

Just before we talked she has testified at a hearing in the Senate Governmental Operations committee on her bill to expand democracy through automatic voter registration (SB 6379). She worked on the bill with Washington's Republican Secretary of State, Kim Wyman.

"The right to vote is the cornerstone of our democracy," she explained when she introduced it. "Yet while our state is a leader in so many things, we are struggling to get Washingtonians to cast ballots and have their voices heard. It is the duty of elected officials, regardless of party, to ensure everyone has the opportunity to be heard. That is the goal of this bill. There should be no barriers between the people and voting, and with this bill one more barrier has been removed. We have worked very hard over the past several months to develop a bipartisan piece of legislation that fits Washington’s particular needs."

Secretary Wyman concurred: "I am pleased to join Senator Jayapal and a bipartisan group of legislators in proposing this welcome expansion of access to the voter rolls. We have a sizable group of people who have not chosen to register through the normal routes of online, motor-voter, mail or in-person registration. We know that some of these potential voters have already given proof of citizenship to the DOL or to health exchange, and so automatic registration should be allowed for them. Our goal in the election community is to register every eligible voter, to remove any barriers to voting, and to promote robust turnout."

Analysis shows that automatic voter registration boosts numbers of registered voters as well as turnout at elections. In addition to increasing voter rolls, SB 6379 reduces paperwork and streamlines the registration process, allowing agencies to integrate voter registration services into existing forms and online prompts. "Passing a bill like this with support from both sides of the aisle helps rebuild trust that we can break political gridlock," said Jayapal. "While voting issues can be divisive at times, we have a bipartisan mandate with this bill. Let’s get it passed through the Legislature and onto the governor’s desk for signature."

If you want to know what GOP intentions are, forget McCarthy's sirens song. Go no further than George Packer's essay early this morning for The Atlantic, The Corruption of the Republican Party. He explained that the corruption he was addressing "has less to do with individual perfidy than institutional depravity. It isn’t an occasional failure to uphold norms, but a consistent repudiation of them. It isn’t about dirty money so much as the pursuit and abuse of power-- power as an end in itself, justifying almost any means. Political corruption usually trails financial scandals in its wake-- the foam is scummy with self-dealing-- but it’s far more dangerous than graft. There are legal remedies for Duncan Hunter, the defeated representative from California, who will stand trial next year for using campaign funds to pay for family luxuries. But there’s no obvious remedy for what the state legislatures of Wisconsin and Michigan, following the example of North Carolina in 2016, are now doing."

Republican majorities are rushing to pass laws that strip away the legitimate powers of newly elected Democratic governors while defeated or outgoing Republican incumbents are still around to sign the bills. Even if the courts overturn some of these power grabs, as they have in North Carolina, Republicans will remain securely entrenched in the legislative majority through their own hyper-gerrymandering-- in Wisconsin last month, 54 percent of the total votes cast for major-party candidates gave Democrats just 36 of 99 assembly seats-- so they will go on passing laws to thwart election results. Nothing can stop these abuses short of an electoral landslide. In Wisconsin, a purple state, that means close to 60 percent of the total vote.

The fact that no plausible election outcome can check the abuse of power is what makes political corruption so dangerous. It strikes at the heart of democracy. It destroys the compact between the people and the government. In rendering voters voiceless, it pushes everyone closer to the use of undemocratic means.

Today’s Republican Party has cornered itself with a base of ever older, whiter, more male, more rural, more conservative voters. Demography can take a long time to change-- longer than in progressives’ dreams-- but it isn’t on the Republicans’ side. They could have tried to expand; instead, they’ve hardened and walled themselves off. This is why, while voter fraud knows no party, only the Republican Party wildly overstates the risk so that it can pass laws (including right now in Wisconsin, with a bill that reduces early voting) to limit the franchise in ways that have a disparate partisan impact. This is why, when some Democrats in the New Jersey legislature proposed to enshrine gerrymandering in the state constitution, other Democrats, in New Jersey and around the country, objected.

Taking away democratic rights-- extreme gerrymandering; blocking an elected president from nominating a Supreme Court justice; selectively paring voting rolls and polling places; creating spurious anti-fraud commissions; misusing the census to undercount the opposition; calling lame-duck legislative sessions to pass laws against the will of the voters-- is the Republican Party’s main political strategy, and will be for years to come.

Republicans have chosen contraction and authoritarianism because, unlike the Democrats, their party isn’t a coalition of interests in search of a majority. Its character is ideological. The Republican Party we know is a product of the modern conservative movement, and that movement is a series of insurgencies against the established order. Several of its intellectual founders-- Whittaker Chambers and James Burnham, among others-- were shaped early on by Communist ideology and practice, and their Manichean thinking, their conviction that the salvation of Western civilization depended on the devoted work of a small group of illuminati, marked the movement at its birth.

...Even after Gingrich was driven from power, the victim of his own guillotine, he regularly churned out books that warned of imminent doom-- unless America turned to a leader like him (he once called himself “teacher of the rules of civilization,” among other exalted epithets). Unlike Goldwater and Reagan, Gingrich never had any deeply felt ideology. It was hard to say exactly what “American civilization” meant to him. What he wanted was power, and what he most obviously enjoyed was smashing things to pieces in its pursuit. His insurgency started the conservative movement on the path to nihilism.

The party purged itself of most remaining moderates, growing ever-more shallow as it grew ever-more conservative-- from Goldwater (who, in 1996, joked that he had become a Republican liberal) to Ted Cruz, from Buckley to Dinesh D’Souza. Jeff Flake, the outgoing senator from Arizona (whose conservative views come with a democratic temperament), describes this deterioration as “a race to the bottom to see who can be meaner and madder and crazier. It is not enough to be conservative anymore. You have to be vicious.” The viciousness doesn’t necessarily reside in the individual souls of Republican leaders. It flows from the party’s politics, which seeks to delegitimize opponents and institutions, purify the ranks through purges and coups, and agitate followers with visions of apocalypse-- all in the name of an ideological cause that every year loses integrity as it becomes indistinguishable from power itself.

...The corruption of the Republican Party in the Trump era seemed to set in with breathtaking speed. In fact, it took more than a half century to reach the point where faced with a choice between democracy and power, the party chose the latter. Its leaders don’t see a dilemma-- democratic principles turn out to be disposable tools, sometimes useful, sometimes inconvenient. The higher cause is conservatism, but the highest is power. After Wisconsin Democrats swept statewide offices last month, Robin Vos, speaker of the assembly, explained why Republicans would have to get rid of the old rules: “We are going to have a very liberal governor who is going to enact policies that are in direct contrast to what many of us believe in.”

As Bertolt Brecht wrote of East Germany’s ruling party:

Would it not be easier
In that case for the government
To dissolve the people
And elect another?

GOP Lame Duck Legislative Moves In Wisconsin And Michigan Will Cost Trump Both States-- And More House Seats

The outgoing Michigan congressional delegation has 9 Republicans and 5 Democrats. Starting in January it will be 7 Democrats and 7 Republicans-- and that despite gerrymandering. Starting in January every constitutional officer will be a Democrat as the state GOP enters the wilderness-- except for the shockingly gerrymandered state legislature where a 52-47% popular vote advantage for Democrats only gave them 47% of the seats. But even there Democrats managed to pick up 6 seats in the House and break the GOP supermajority in both chambers. Next cycle looks even more deadly for the Republicans, especially in terms of Congress. At least 3 more Republicans are on shaky ground for reelection. Fred Upton, for example, only drew 50.2% of the vote last month, despite outspending his opponent nearly 3 to 1 and despite the DCCC virtually ignoring the race (with a pitiful expenditure of just $241,270-- compared to, for example, the $2,033,044 they spent to replace Mike Bishop with New Dem Elissa Slotkin). This session is likely to be Upton's last in Congress.

Paul Clements, a Climate Change and Democratic Party activist who ran against Upton in 2016 told us today that "The games Republicans are playing in the Michigan legislature are so openly contemptuous of the will of the people-- and the media are paying attention-- it will only help to build Democratic momentum towards 2020. Democrats in Michigan are pumped. And many independents and people who stayed home in 2016 are ruing the day Trump became president. After the Democratic sweep of our state's highest offices, the energy is only intensifying to turf Trump and his enablers out of office in 2020."

There's been a steady drumbeat in southwest Michigan for state Rep Jon Hoadley to take on Upton next cycle. Hoadley, a member of the LGBT community, was first elected in 2014 and he represents the entire city of Kalamazoo with some of the suburbs. He's won reelection with huge majorities.

Asked about his priorities in the legislature this cycle, this is how he responded:

Invest in education for today and tomorrow: Let's invest more in our students, give teachers the freedom to teach to the individual students-- not the test, reduce class size, lower or eliminate student debt, and help us compete globally with the best trained talent and skilled labor.

Build an economy that works for everyone: Let's make sure more people are benefiting when productivity and the economy improve. It's time to stop giving away our tax dollars to the most profitable companies through tax breaks that aren't creating new jobs. Let's strengthen unions, raise the minimum wage, and help rebuild the middle class.

Champion social justice and protecting the environment: Let's prohibit discrimination in Michigan based on sexual orientation and gender identity by expanding the Elliott-Larsen Civil Rights Act, protect a women's right to choose, end mass incarceration and reform the criminal justice system, promote a caring economy to deal with issues related to long-term care, earn paid sick and family leave time, and make our hospitals safer by improving our laws related to nursing and healthcare. Let's work together to protect our drinking water from lead, PFAS, and other contaminants, while tackling global warming.

Unrig our Democracy: Let's end gerrymandering, improve access to the ballot, end the legislator-to-lobbyist pipeline caused by term-limits, and reduce the role of money in politics.

...I am running for office because I believe in a Michigan that invest in people. I fundamentally believe that government has the power to do good in the world when good people power the government. Coming from a family of teachers, I have work to continue fighting for education for today and tomorrow, lowering class size, and reducing student debt.

As a small business owner, I know we need to do more to raise wages, make sure economic improvements reach the pockets of working people, and end giveaways to the most profitable companies. Finally, we need to protect the environment, promote social justice, and unrig our democracy. There's a lot of work to do, but together we can get it done.

This morning, Daniel Strauss, reporting for Politico wrote that Republican legislators in Wisconsin and Michigan have reignited Democratic energy since the midterms in two narrow Trump states, their power grab pouring gas on the resistance. "Republican efforts to weaken incoming Democratic governors in Michigan and Wisconsin," he asserted, "have reignited the grass-roots fervor that flipped both states in November, turning the typically sleepy post-election period into a key organizing moment ahead of the 2020 presidential election."

Liberal groups in both states are organizing demonstrations filling the capitols in both states to oppose GOP legislators stripping power from the governor’s offices before new Democratic governors take their posts. Local chapters of Indivisible, the national “resistance” group founded after President Donald Trump’s 2016 win, reactivated their members weeks after the election to protest the legislation, while MoveOn.org has texted members in key Wisconsin state Senate districts urging them to contact Republican politicians to complain. And Wisconsin Gov.-elect Tony Evers and the Wisconsin Democratic Party have raked in money with online fundraising appeals highlighting the fight over the past two weeks.

...The furor is a “great bridge for the energy from the midterm into Trump reelect,” said Tom Russell, a veteran Democratic strategist in Wisconsin. “I think it’s going to be a very good tool for Democrats to keep the energy up, keep people focused, keep people engaged.”

In Wisconsin, the controversy stems from legislation in the final days of Republican Gov. Scott Walker’s term to limit the window for early voting and weaken Gov.-elect Tony Evers, the Democrat who bested Walker in November. In Michigan, Republican lawmakers are trying to reduce the power of the governor, the attorney general and the secretary of state. The GOP had controlled the latter two for over a decade and the governorship for eight years, but Democrats won all three offices in this year’s midterms.

Democrats also won the majority of votes cast for state legislature in both states. But they will still be in the minority next year in both legislative chambers in Michigan and Wisconsin, where Republicans drew the political maps at the beginning of the decade. That means Democrats won’t have the numbers in 2019 to reverse legislation passed in the waning days of this year.

...The GOP’s legislative actions could stay in the news for a while; the National Democratic Redistricting Committee is monitoring both states and considering whether it could take legal action if Walker and Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder sign the measures into law. Protracted court battles could spur the activists for months, up to or potentially through a state Supreme Court race early next year-- the type of off-year race at which the Republican Party excelled during the Walker years.

“Progressives have to defend a Supreme Court seat in April of 2019-- this will help them do that,” said Scot Ross, the executive director of One Wisconsin Now, a liberal outside group.

Liberals will then have the chance to take the majority on Wisconsin’s Supreme Court in 2020, as Trump tries to keep the state in his column in the fall’s presidential race.

In Michigan, there’s also more than executive power at stake for the new governor. State legislative Republicans have also taken steps to undo initiatives to raise the state minimum wage and paid sick leave in the state.

Both initiatives were set to be on the ballot this November before Republican lawmakers short-circuited the process by passing the language-- before altering it during the lame-duck legislative session.

“Democrats and progressives both in and out of the party are really concerned about this and they’re really energized by it,” said Liano Sharon, a Democratic organizer in Michigan.

Democratic Gov.-elect Gretchen Whitmer has condemned the lawmakers, while promoting hopes of bipartisanship.

“This legislation needlessly divides and won’t deliver results. It won’t clean up our water. It won’t improve literacy or fix the roads. Instead of working to undermine the very leaders Michigan residents have chosen to get this job done, let's instead respect the voices of voters who have spoken clearly and decisively, and get back to building bridges.”

Whitmer’s power may be limited during her first years in office thanks to Republicans’ enduring legislative majorities. But in the meantime, activists could push to put new liberal initiatives on the ballot, including a more aggressive minimum wage hike. It could even push them toward contention to flip a state legislative chamber or more in 2020.

“I think the Democrats were energized in November, and now they’re going crazy,” said Barry Goodman, a Democratic National Committeeman from Michigan.

Republican Criminal Behavior-- From North Carolina To Kansas

Have you been wondering how much Mark Harris paid professional Republican Party vote thief Leslie McCrae Dowless to steal the 2018 election for him? It was over half a million dollars, probably a lot over half a million dollars. How slimy is Harris? Watch the sickening video above that he released yesterday through Twitter.

He refers to his scheme to steal the Republican primary from Mark Pittenger and then the general from Blue Dog Dan McCready as "alleged irregularities." He wants to let everyone know that he and his campaign "are cooperating fully with the state Board of Elections investigation." Is he really? What's the alternative? Seeking asylum in Paraguay, which still has a sentimental soft-spot for fascists? And it got sleazier: "I trust the process that's underway, just as I've always trusted the decisions of the voters." That's why he paid Dowless to collect absentee ballots and destroy them?

Here are my favorite lines, which I hope are played for a jury one day very soon:

I trust that this investigation will be full and complete, examining any alleged irregularities that could have benefited either party in this election or in past election cycles. The integrity of our electoral process is the heart of our democracy. And we must protect it.

Though I was absolutely unaware of any wrong-doing that will not prevent me from cooperating with this investigation. I'm hopeful that this process will ultimately result in the certification of my election to Congress before the next House session begins. However, if this investigation finds proof of illegal activity on either side, to such a level that it could have changed the outcome of the election then I would wholeheartedly support a new election to insure all voters have confidence in the results.

Two things I want to say about this. First is that he used "either side" twice when no one is accusing McCready or Pittenger of anything other than being victims of Harris' criminal conspiracy. And, second that it doesn't matter if Harris' crooked employees told ten votes ten thousand votes, he should be banned from participating in any elections and should be tried for a n extremely serious crime and, hopefully, spend the rest of his life in prison.

This is all part of what we've been talking about-- the undermining of democracy by the Republican Party, whether that means state legislators in Wisconsin, Michigan and North Carolina trying to invalidate their losses in lame duck sessions, Trump and his repulsive family working with the Russians to steal the 2016 presidential election, or characters like Harris hiring a known felon-- Dowless-- to steal ballots from minority voters.

Funny, just as I was finishing up on this post, a McClatchy report popped up on my screen about more GOP criminal behavior, this time by Kanas Congresswoman Lynn Jenkins. She's retiring but hasn’t left Congress yet, and has "already launched a new lobbying firm," which is absolutely illegal.

Jenkins’ term in the U.S. House doesn’t officially end until the first week of January and she still faces major votes on the farm bill, homeland security budget and other legislation. But her new business, LJ Strategies, LLC, has already registered with the state of Kansas.

Ethics watchdogs say the situation makes a mockery of the rules restricting lawmakers from working as lobbyists until they’ve been out of office for at least one year.


“This is an egregious abuse of the revolving door,” said Craig Holman, the lobbyist for Public Citizen, a group which advocates for stricter ethics rules.


“I suspect she’s being coached as to how to dance around the law, but it certainly violates the spirit of the revolving door law itself,” he said.

And, Holman warned, “She’s opened herself up to being bought.”

Jenkins and her firm should be banned from lobbying Congress in perpetuity and she should be banned from entering the Capitol from the moment next month that her term expires. Conservative lawmakers seem to believe that laws are written for "the little people," not for them.

You know what that Harris video reminded me of? That great clip 60 Minutes clip that shows John Boehner's reaction when he was caught red-handed giving out tobacco industry checks on the floor of the House. Like Harris Boehner seemed offended by his own behavior. "it's a practice," he told 60 Minutes, "that's gone on here for a long time that we're trying to stop... It's a bad practice," he said indignantly [about his own behavior]. "We ought to stop this. This is just not something that ought to happen." Watch: