Let's Be Clear About What the Republicans Are Doing to Our Elections and Vote

I hadn't heard of this man or his quote but it certainly seems to describe the Republicans' efforts, individually as well as by the political party, across the nation, to disenfranchise likely millions of fellow, taxpaying citizens.

Stop vote suppression.

Americans Need to Know and Understand and Fight What the Republicans Are Doing

From Heather Cox Richardson, once more. No one evaluates what's going on politically in America currently any better and informs, instructs us all.

Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo articulated today what many have been reluctant to say: What is at stake in the Big Lie and all the Republican efforts to keep it in play—the shenanigans in the secret Maricopa County, Arizona, recount; the censuring of Republicans who voted to impeach the former president; the expected removal of Wyoming Representative Liz Cheney from a leadership role in the party; and so on—is not the past election of 2020, but the upcoming election of 2024.

The Republican Party has demonstrated that it intends to control the government in the future, no matter what most Americans want. Iowa, Georgia, Montana, and Florida have already passed voter suppression laws, while other states are considering them. (Governor Ron DeSantis signed Florida’s bill yesterday live on the Fox News Channel.)

As Marshall points out, though, making sure that states return only Republicans to Congress is also about controlling the White House. Republican lawmakers are purging from state election machinery members of their own party who refused to change the outcome of the 2020 election and give a victory to Trump. The former president has fed speculation that he still hopes to overturn the 2020 election, but Marshall looks forward: Is it really possible to think that in 2024, members of the new Trump party will protect the sanctity of any election that gives a victory to a Democratic candidate? If Republicans capture the House in 2022, will they agree to certify electoral votes for a Democrat? In 2020, even before the current remaking of the party in Trump’s image, 139 House Republicans contested them.

Trump is systematically going after leading members of the Republican Party, determined to remake it into his own organization. Several former senior White House officials told Ashley Parker and Josh Dawsey of the Washington Post that “[t]he defeated ex-president is propelled primarily by a thirst for retribution, an insatiable quest for the spotlight and a desire to establish and maintain total dominance and control over the Republican base.” Republican strategist Brendan Buck noted that Trump seems to relish fighting, rather than victory to achieve an end. “Usually,” Buck said, “a fight is the means to an end, but in this case fighting is the end.”

The Republicans are consolidating their control over the machinery of government in a way that indicates they intend to control the country regardless of what Americans actually want, putting Trump and his organization back in charge. Democrats have proposed the For the People Act (H.R. 1 and S. 1), which would start to restore a level playing field between the parties. The For the People Act would sideline the new voter suppression bills and make it easier to vote. It would end partisan gerrymandering and stop the flow of big money into elections permitted after the 2010 Citizens United decision.

But Republicans are determined to stop this measure. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) is especially engaged in its obstruction. He has called it a “partisan takeover” that would “give Washington Democrats unprecedented control over 50 states’ election laws.” He recognizes that restoring a level electoral playing field would hamstring the Republicans’ ability to win elections. Defeating the act is McConnell’s top priority.

The story of how Republican leaders embraced voter suppression and gerrymandering starts back in the 1980s, though the mechanics of overturning a presidential election are new to 2020. Still, their undermining of our democratic system begs the question: Why are leading Republicans surrendering their party, and our nation, to a budding autocrat?

Two days ago, when asked if he is concerned about the direction of his party, McConnell told reporters that he is not paying attention to it because the Democrats are trying “to turn American into a socialist country,” and that “[o]ne-hundred percent of our focus is on stopping this new administration.”

America, Your Vote and Voting Rights Are Being Devoured

Yes, Mr. and Mrs. America, the Republicans and their Republican Party know they're so deeply umpopular with Americans across the nation, they have to make it tougher to the point of impossible for us, fellow taxpaying American citizens to vote.

This cannot stand. We cannot allow this. It's un-American and un-democratic. We must stop it, all of it, state to state across the nation. Vote them all out. Push to have Congress end the filibuster and pass the For the People Act so NO POLITICAL PARtY can gerrymander voting districts any longer. Please contact your Senators.Let's do this.

The Republican Party/USA/Democracy Dilemma

People are fleeing the Republican Party. Democrats are as popular as they've been in a decade.

The Very Real Dangers of the Republicans' Vote Suppression

I don't think enough Americans realize what Republicans are doing and trying to do to our vote and votes, to our elections. That they even tried in Georgia to disenfranchise fellow citizens is horrible enough. That it has now expanded to 46 more states threatens our Democracy, no overstatement. Fortunately, people like Stacey Abrams, from Georgia are doing their best to get the word out across the nation. So what can we do? Glad you asked. Please support the For the People Act Contact your/our Senators today. Tell them to vote for and support it. Thanks in advance.Let's do this. We must.

Quote of the Day -- On GOP Vote Suppression

"Expand the Supreme Court. Abolish the Electoral College. End the filibuster. The GOP calls these moves radical because they know once we make democracy work, they won't stand a chance." --Robert Reich @RBReich

Republicans Threatening Our Democracy, State by State

Americans the nation over need to understand just what Republicans are doing or are trying to do, state by state, statehouse to statehouse, including Missouri and Kansas. Stop vote suppression, folks. We're under attack here and it's coming from fellow citizens, from Republicans and their Republican Party. They're attacking our votes, our elections, the election process and Democracy itself, all for their own political party. Their ideas and goals and candidates are so patently, reliably bad they have to do this, disenfranchise fellow Ameericans in order to get and stay in office. It is an assault on Democracy and certainly un-American. Contact your representatives and tell them this will not, this cannot stand. Stop vote suppression. Also, pass the For the People Act. It truly is for the people.

Kansas Republicans Now Trying to Kill Democracy, Too

I just learned there is a new bill just presented in Kansas, in Topeka SB307...

"..that would disenfranchise tens of thousands of Kansas voters (it would have thrown out 32,367 votes in 2020). --Davis Hammet, Loud Light

Democracy Died Yesterday in Georgia

From Heather Cox Richardson last evening: "...Tonight, Governor Brian Kemp of Georgia signed a 95-page law designed to suppress the vote in the state where voters chose two Democratic senators in 2020, making it possible for Democrats to enact their agenda. Among other things, the new law strips power from the Republican secretary of state who stood up to Trump’s demand that he change the 2020 voting results. The law also makes it a crime to give water or food to people waiting in line to vote. The Georgia law is eye-popping, but it is only one of more than 250 measures in 43 states designed to keep Republicans in power no matter what voters want....

The story today is not about coronavirus vaccines, or border solutions, or economic recovery, because all of those things depended on the election of Joe Biden. If the Republicans get their way, no matter how popular Democrats are, they will never again get to direct the government." This bill in Georgia does the following things: 1) severely limits ballot dropboxes, 2) curtails early voting in all-important run-off elections, 3) allows for unlimited ballot challenges by right-wing activists, 4) gives the gerrymandered GOP legislature the ability to take over local county election boards, and 5) makes giving food and/or water to people in lines, waiting to vote, a crime, among other things.

Yet Another High Placed Defection From the Republican Party, Thanks to Mr. Trump

Yes, here's yet one more. One more Republican very publicly leaving that political party. 

Former NH GOP chair announces she's leaving the GOP

A bit of her story and the article:

Jennifer Horn, the former chairwoman of the New Hampshire Republican Party and a co-founder of the anti-Trump GOP group The Lincoln Project, announced Thursday in a new op-ed that she is leaving the Republican Party as President Trump and his allies continue their efforts to challenge the results of the 2020 presidential election.

Horn said she "became a Republican" because she viewed the party's values as "a voice for equality, freedom and constitutional conservatism, with a rich history of fighting for what was right because it was right."

"For the past five years, however, I have found myself fighting for what I thought were the principles of my party in the face of the ever-deteriorating character and integrity of party representatives," Horn wrote in the op-ed published Thursday by USA Today. "They have revealed their impotence and decrepitude as they have fallen, one by one, at the feet of the most corrupt, destructive and unstable president in the history of our country."

"It seems there is no assault on human dignity too great, no attack on democracy too extreme, to inspire the Republican weaklings in Congress to speak up or stand up to President Donald Trump," she continued.

And who but the most rabid Trump supporter can argue with that? With any of that?

Meanwhile, this report came out this morning.

Trump Tells Advisers 'He Won't Leave The White House' 

January 20th will go down in history, but perhaps for all the wrong reasons.

Sources say President Donald Trump has told advisers that he will refuse to leave the White House on Inauguration Day. According to a CNN report, several sources have confirmed that Trump will refuse to leave the White House on January 20.

Insane. Insanity.

Thanks, Republicans.

Ever so.

Quote of the Day -- Important Presidential Edition

 

During World War II, there was a very real and rational fear that American democracy would not survive. The danger was obvious, visceral, and violent. It was promulgated by tanks, bombs, and battleships. It was measured on maps that traced the march of armies, the swarming of navies, and the decimation of cities by aerial assault. America sat within her borders and could feel a world of madness and hatred closing in.

Since the attack came from the outside, the human inclination was to rally within one's own community for safety. That community was riven with its own violent injustices of segregation and the ugliness manifested against its citizens of Japanese ancestry. But the threat from outside was so great and would be likely so unsparing that America hardened its resolve with nearly miraculous levels of selflessness and sacrifice to the cause of survival. The cost was great in blood, particularly of the young overseas, and in treasure.

It is likely that many of you have a sense of where this is going, the comparison I seek to make.

American democracy is once again under a dire threat. Once again there is death at a scale that is incomprehensible. But the threat is of such a different nature that it may be too convenient to deny the full level of danger. This threat comes from within, a civil cleaving that instead of uniting the nation is dividing it. Perilously so.

This is not a violent threat, at least not yet despite some low-level skirmishes. That could change, but there is nothing approaching the reckoning of Nazi forces sweeping into Paris or a Japanese strike on Pearl Harbor. Meanwhile, the mass death we face doesn't lend itself to the visceral images of war. Our killer doesn't have a face or a flag. It is invisible. Instead of sending our young off to battle overseas, we have medical professionals, grocery store clerks, farmhands, and many others commuting daily into danger. We are mostly aware of what takes place within our four walls of isolation and the looming specter of hunger and homelessness for many of our fellow citizens.

But there is of course another deep worry pervasive in this country. It is about America's heretofore unbroken peaceful transfer of power between presidents. It is the notion that all of us, regardless of party, play by and revere the same democratic ideal that we the people have the power to fire our leaders in free and fair elections. This election has revealed a president who doesn't believe any of that, and a party and base that is eager to go along with him. This is not fringe; it is a movement that encompassess tens of millions of Americans. And to defeat it and preserve American democracy will require resolve, patience, ingenuity, and grit.

I believe that the nature of this threat to American democracy is not being taken nearly seriously enough. And in an odd way I find some comfort in that. I still do not believe most Americans want our ideal of representative government by majority rule to end, not by a long shot. It is tempting to laugh off the outrageousness of the court challenges and see a pathetic man desperate to hold on to fleeting power. There is truth in all of this, and I suspect Donald Trump will struggle to own the national conversation as much as he hopes once he loses his perch behind the presidential podium.

Yet the fissures laid bare by this election, and its shameful aftermath, are not going away. And every Republican official who signed their name, or even spoke by their silence, bears responsibility for what has been the most serious attempt to wreck our union internally since the Civil War. I hope, and pray, we as a nation can walk back from the ledge, that the passions can cool, and a new administration can steer our American ship of state back into the safer harbors of our democratic traditions. The struggle will not be easy, but if victory for American democracy does emerge, and I believe it will, we can resolve to make it much more secure so that this doesn't happen again.

In the dark days of World War II, it was almost impossible to imagine a bright and happy future. But that did happen. Today, we have a vaccine coming and a new government. There is danger still ahead, but hope is possible. It is a hope that must be built on hard work and action. But I would go so far as to say a realization of hope is the likely outcome. I have seen America tested many times, and usually we end up in a better place than where we started.

Steady.

--Dan Rather

Highly Placed Defections From the Republican Party

 Yes sir and ma'am, there were two rather highly placed defections from the Republican Party in the last few days. First, a member of the House of Representatives.

Congressman Paul Mitchell Resigns from Republican Party

A bit of the story:

Disgust with Donald Trump’s attempts to overturn the election and GOP leadership’s acquiescence in damaging American democracy has led to one member saying, “Enough”. Paul Mitchell of Michigan, a retiring member of the US House, has resigned from the Republican Party.

So yes, he was retiring but hey, we'll take it. He bailed on the party after being and working in it most if not all of his entire adult life, given its direction under this lunatic of a President.

Then, the second defection.

Steve Schmidt Officially Registers As A Democrat

And who is Steve Schmidt, you might ask? From Wikipedia:

Stephen Edward Schmidt[2] (born September 28, 1970)[3] is an American communications and public affairs strategist who has worked on Republican political campaigns, including those of President George W. Bush, California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, and Arizona Senator John McCain.

Schmidt was the senior campaign strategist and advisor to the 2008 presidential campaign of Senator John McCain.[4] He pushed McCain to select Sarah Palin as his running mate, a choice which McCain came to regret.[5] He was a Vice Chair at the public relations firm Edelman[6] until he stepped down in July 2018.[7]

He's a long time, very entrenched Republican and member of that party. Or at least he was.

The smart people and the people of integrity and thought and backbone are getting out. 

The Frightening, Threatening Neanderthal That Is This President Trump

"In my life, I have watched John Kennedy talk on television about missiles in Cuba. I saw Lyndon Johnson look Richard Russell squarely in the eye and and say, "And we shall overcome." I saw Richard Nixon resign and Gerald Ford tell the Congress that our long national nightmare was over. I saw Jimmy Carter talk about malaise and Ronald Reagan talk about a shining city on a hill. I saw George H.W. Bush deliver the eulogy for the Soviet bloc, and Bill Clinton comfort the survivors of Timothy McVeigh's madness in Oklahoma City. I saw George W. Bush struggle to make sense of it all on September 11, 2001, and I saw Barack Obama sing 'Amazing Grace' in the wounded sanctuary of Mother Emanuel Church in Charleston, South Carolina. 

"These were the presidents of my lifetime. These were not perfect men. They were not perfect presidents, god knows. Not one of them was that. But they approached the job, and they took to the podium, with all the gravitas they could muster as appropriate to the job. They tried, at least, to reach for something in the presidency that was beyond their grasp as ordinary human beings. They were not all ennobled by the attempt, but they tried nonetheless.

"And comes now this hopeless, vicious buffoon, and the audience of equally hopeless and vicious buffoons who laughed and cheered when he made sport of a woman whose lasting memory of the trauma she suffered is the laughter of the perpetrators. Now he comes, a man swathed in scandal, with no interest beyond what he can put in his pocket and what he can put over on a universe of suckers, and he does something like this while occupying an office that we gave him, and while endowed with a public trust that he dishonors every day he wakes up in the White House.

"The scion of a multigenerational criminal enterprise, the parameters of which we are only now beginning to comprehend. A vessel for all the worst elements of the American condition. And a cheap, soulless bully besides. We never have had such a cheap counterfeit of a president* as currently occupies the office. We never have had a president* so completely deserving of scorn and yet so small in the office that it almost seems a waste of time and energy to summon up the requisite contempt.
"Watch how a republic dies in the empty eyes of an empty man who feels nothing but his own imaginary greatness, and who cannot find in himself the decency simply to shut up even when it is in his best interest to do so. Presidents don't have to be heroes to be good presidents. They just have to realize that their humanity is our common humanity, and that their political commonwealth is our political commonwealth, too.

Watch him behind the seal of the President of the United States. Isn't he a funny man? Isn't what happened to that lady hilarious? Watch the assembled morons cheer. This is the only story now."

- Charles Pierce

Link:

Charles P. Pierce on Politics

It's a BEE--YOO--TEE-FULL DAY!!

Great news!!  Fantastic news Friday!! Say it loud!!

Supreme Court rules against Trump and the FDA authorizes the first coronavirus vaccine in America, both on the same day.

It's like conservative columnist and writer Bill Kristol wrote on Twitter yesterday:

"December 11,2020--a date which will live in Democracy."

Good on you, America. Let's do this.

Whither the Republican Party?

Bill Moyers makes a great statement today and then asks an also excellent, fair, even important question today.

There is no real Republican Party anymore, it has morphed into the Party of Trump. Will democracy survive if people continue to believe whatever they want to believe, if truths, facts, and respect for the rule of law are eliminated?

Bill Moyers talks with noted lawyer Steven Harper and distinguished historian Heather Cox Richardson about threats to democracy and the future of democracy after Trump.

Link:

PODCAST: Democracy on the Edge

Happy Safe Harbor Day, America!

 Yes indeed, Mr. and Mrs. America! Happy Safe Harbor Day!

Safe harbor law locks Congress into accepting electoral votes cast for President-elect Joe Biden

What is Safe Harbor Day, you might ask? Well here you are:

Other than Wisconsin, every state appears to have met a deadline in federal law that essentially means Congress has to accept the electoral votes that will be cast next week and sent to the Capitol for counting on Jan. 6. Those votes will elect Joe Biden as the country’s next president.

So here we are and thank goodness! We've never needed to really acknowledge this day up to now since no sitting President ever denied, ignored, disavowed our vote, our votes, our election and our Democracy. But then, we've never had this much a narcissistic, self-dealing, self-centered, greedy, thoughtless, corrupt President before now, either.

So, go! Enjoy this great and beautiful day!

Now only 6 more days until the Electoral College turns in its formal finding on the election and FORTY-TWO days until inauguration!

Glory, hallelujah!

Meanwhile, he can't leave soon enough. This came out yesterday.

Trump administration officials passed when Pfizer offered months ago to sell the U.S. more vaccine doses.

This came out today, this morning.

Trump’s Attacks on Local Officials Are Spreading Hatred and Inciting Violence

This, though---good news---also came out this morning.

Lawyers Across the Country Urge Bar Associations to Investigate Trump Legal Team

Heavens help us.

The Insanity, Inanity and Obscenity That is Donald Trump Just Now

 This is basically, in fact, what is going on just now with this so-sorry excuse for a Republican Party President Donald J Trump in his/our White House and Oval Office.

As usual, click on picture for large viewing, easier reading.

Thanks, Republicans.

Very Welcome Contrast in Presidents

 

Yeah. That. All that. And thought and thoughtfulness and intelligence and compassion.

And more.

#Throwthebumout 

Fantastic Presidential News Today!

Check this out, folks! Even the ultra-conservative "National Review" is putting this mess of a Republican Party President in his place concerning his reactions to our vote and election! Yahoo!!

National Review editors bash Trump's 'disgraceful conduct since losing' reelection

I love it! Fantastic! A bit from the article about it from The Hill:

The National Review editorial board is drawing attention online for its sharp rebuke of President Trump’s actions challenging the results of the presidential election, which he lost to President-elect Joe Biden.

In a Monday editorial titled “Trump’s Disgraceful Endgame,” the conservative publication’s senior editorial staff referred to the president’s continued efforts to undermine the results as “disgraceful” and said “almost nothing that the Trump team has alleged has withstood the slightest scrutiny.”

And now, some of the original article at National Review:

Almost nothing that the Trump team has alleged has withstood the slightest scrutiny. In particular, it’s hard to find much that is remotely true in the president’s Twitter feed these days. It is full of already-debunked claims and crackpot conspiracy theories about Dominion voting systems. Over the weekend, he repeated the charge that 1.8 million mail-in ballots in Pennsylvania were mailed out, yet 2.6 million were ultimately tallied. In a rather elementary error, this compares the number of mail-ballots requested in the primary to the number of ballots counted in the general. A straight apples-to-apples comparison finds that 1.8 million mail-in ballots were requested in the primary and 1.5 million returned, while 3.1 million ballots were requested in the general and 2.6 million returned.

Flawed and dishonest assertions like this pollute the public discourse and mislead good people who make the mistake of believing things said by the president of the United States.

Enough to give a person hope!

Concede! or we #Throwthebumout

Link:

Trump Election Fraud Allegations Disgraceful Endgame

Trump's NATO ambassador pledges 'seamless' transition to Biden administration

GOP Gov On Why He’s Working With Biden: ‘The Words Of President Trump Are Not Quite As Significant’

Missouri's Senator Blunt Takes a Deserved, Fair, Earned Beating at Daily Kos Today

Yes, it's a brutal write up on Missouri's Senator Roy Blunt today over at the Daily Kos but really, with him making excuses for this Republican Party President Trump of theirs and his denying our vote, our votes, our election and Democracy.....  Well... What can I say but he earned it all? And it's fair. Very fair. And yes, deserved.

Sen. Roy Blunt goes on Sunday shows to explain Republican Party's cowardly stance on Democracy

Just a bit from the article today but I really recommend all voting Missourians read the entire piece at Kos.

Republican Sen. Roy Blunt of Missouri is a coward. Sen. Blunt has a storied career of being absent from the job he reportedly has as a senator in the United States Congress. In a Senate run by arguably the least legislative senator ever, Mitch McConnell, Blunt stands out in his sheer cowardly laziness. This has made it considerably less surprising to watch Sen. Blunt, over the past couple of weeks, do the Republican anti-Democracy dance of first vaguely insinuating that there is voter fraud that rigged the national election, and then outright pushing the theory that the outcome of the election was in doubt. The best that can be said about Blunt is that he’s a good bellwether for telling you what talking points the Republican leadership has passed down to its underlings—or hasn’t. He’s a coward.

On Sunday, as the worm has turned and the almost forty cases Trump and his band of Keystone fascists have lost or had thrown out in court settles in, Blunt and friends went on the Sunday shows to tell America that they were still technically acting like democratically elected representatives. They also wanted to remind their base that our election system might need to be rigged more for the minority of Americans in the Republican Party. Especially if all of these Black and Asian and Latino people are going to come out and vote!

Host Dana Bash began by trying to see if Sen. Blunt might join the meager trickle of GOP officials recognizing that President-elect Joe Biden won the Nov. 3 election against one term white supremacist executive Donald Trump. Blunt began by not acknowledging that, but reporting that “well, we are certainly moving forward as if that what is going to happen on January the 20th.” He then attempted to soften the Trump administration’s withholding of the transition funds by remarking that it “is a relatively new thing in American government that the elected president would have to have government money to make their transition is available.”

Sen. Roy Blunt basically reported what has only recently begun to happen. Sen. Roy Blunt said nothing. He then went on to argue that the semantics of calling Biden the victor or the “President-elect” are all just words...

As I said, it's brutal...but it's fair. And I say again, it's earned. And deserved.

Thanks, Senator Blunt! Thanks for standing up for us! And our vote! And votes! And election! And Democracy! Heck, for that matter, for decency and truth.

Not.