Last Call For The Recount Account

Donald Trump this morning declared war on Democrats winning elections.

 

This is authoritarianism 101, casting doubt on the legitimacy of elections, and with every other institutional norm Trump and the GOP have eroded in the last several years, once trust in our elections is gone and is replaced by trust in Dear Leader Trump, we don't get that norm back.

And while Donald Trump may not have any actual authority to interfere with the Florida recount, GOP Gov. Rick Scott actually can cause a lot of damage.

So many controversies have bedeviled Broward County Elections Supervisor Brenda Snipes — culminating in her office’s troubles in the aftermath of Florida’s chaotic 2018 elections — that her days in office are now numbered, insiders and lawmakers say.

She’s losing support from fellow Democrats and faces the increasing likelihood of an embarrassing suspension from office at the hands of either Gov. Rick Scott or his likely successor, Ron DeSantis.

Suspending Snipes from office would put a final exclamation point on one of the most contested midterms in recent Florida history, which has resulted in three statewide recounts — for U.S. Senate, governor and agriculture commissioner — as well as recounts in three local legislative races. Removal proceedings in the GOP-led Florida Senate could also cause a possible rift among Florida state Senate Democrats if the black caucus rallies around Snipes in the same way it did around her predecessor, who was also African-American, more than a decade ago.

“This is not just the most troubled elections office in the state, it’s the most troubled elections office in the nation,” said Sen. Marco Rubio, a Republican, who contends that Snipes needs to be removed from office once the recounts that began Sunday in the races for governor and U.S. Senate are over.

But Dear Leader Trump says the recounts need to already be over.  And Scott is looking for a direct link to Snipes's "mismanagement" and the recount.

Democrats say Snipes has privately confided that she plans to quit, but it’s unclear when. “I hope it’s soon,” said one state Senate Democrat who declined to be named. “Otherwise, she’s a goner.” Heading into the election, Democratic campaigns fretted about what her mismanagement would do in the second-largest Democratic county in the state.

Neither Scott's nor DeSantis’ teams will comment on the record about their plans for what many see as Snipes’ looming suspension, because both men are involved in races that are the subject of recounts and lawsuits. They don’t want their comments used against them in court, according to those close to both Republicans.

“I need to be careful with what I say about her,” Scott confided to a source who confidentially relayed the conversation to POLITICO, adding that the governor “is solely focused on winning. He’s senator-elect and he has blinders on to make sure it stays that way.”

Scott’s ire with Snipes is clear. He already linked the controversies of slow counting and what Republicans call “found” ballots in Broward to a liberal effort to “steal” this election; he asked the Florida Department of Law Enforcement to Investigate.

So far Scott hasn't been able to pin anything on Snipes for the recount, but if Scott loses, I fully expect that neither Rick Scott nor Donald Trump will accept those results, and then we have a nasty little fight almost certainly headed for the courts.  The larger problem is of course the untold damage to the country's election system.

In a month of harrowing news, this development is still almost incalculably bad for American democracy. I now assume that a substantial minority of Americans believe that the results of the elections in Florida, Georgia, Arizona, and California are democratically illegitimate unless the Republican candidate wins. Updating the lessons from the previous post,

1. When electoral procedures lose popular legitimacy, it is nearly impossible to get that legitimacy back. Elections are one great way of building popular legitimacy, and if by assumption they no longer do, what will?
2. Non-electoral sources of power are particularly dangerous when elections no longer legitimately empower politicians. It now falls to the very politicians who are involved in the recount to vouch for its legitimacy. The safest way to defend that legitimacy would be for the losing candidates to rebuke the President, directly and publicly. A public endorsement would be most meaningful if it were to come from, for example, DeSantis. Let us just ponder how likely that is.
3. The downstream consequences from the loss of electoral legitimacy are nearly impossible to predict. I suspect that one consequence will be an ever-greater tolerance for executive malfeasance, on the logic that Congressional representatives and state governments lack democratic legitimacy.

Meanwhile, "They stole the election in Florida" will be the GOP talking point for the next two years, which of course the only way to fix will be a national voter ID law.  And more importantly, does anyone still actually believe Trump will surrender power in case of impeachment or election loss in 2020?

Watch.

Bonfire Of The GOPs

As I mentioned last week, the "something special" I was working on is done, and it was a guest appearance on Bon Tindle's new podcast, Bonfire is Burning.



You can download it here. It was good to hang out with Bon for a while discussing the Democrats' blue wave on Thursday night.  I'm grateful for the opportunity.  Hopefully we'll have more to talk about for you guys soon, and listen to her podcast, she has some really good guests and it's a lot of fun.

The GOP's Race To The Bottom, Con't

We haven't talked that much about the final Senate race of 2018, the contest for retired Republican Sen. Thad Cochran's old seat in Mississippi.  Cochran retired on April 1 and GOP Gov. Phil Bryant appointed Cindy Hyde-Smith to the Senate, which set up a fight last week between Hyde-Smith and Tea Party darling Rep. Chris McDaniel.  

Smith won, but former Clinton Agriculture Secretary Mike Espy came in second, and McDaniel's presence forced a runoff between Smith and Espy as neither got more than 50% of the vote.  All that means a runoff two weeks from Tuesday where apparently Hyde-Smith is already letting everyone know just how politics are done in the Magnolia State.

Republican senator Cindy Hyde-Smith, who is facing a November 27 runoff election in Mississippi against Democrat Mike Espy, joked with supporters earlier this month about attending a “public hanging.” A video of the remark, which she made at a campaign stop in Tupelo on November 2, was shared on social media Sunday morning by Bayou Brief journalist Lamar White Jr. In the video, after hearing praise from a supporter, Hyde-Smith jokes that “if he invited me to a public hanging, I’d be in the first row.”

Hyde-Smith and Espy — who in 1987 became the first black Mississippian to be elected to Congress since Reconstruction, and later became the first black secretary of agriculture under President Clinton — were the two candidates who received the most votes in a four-person special election on Tuesday. Since no candidate received a majority of votes, the result triggered a runoff election between the top two. Hyde-Smith was appointed by Mississippi governor Phil Bryant to replace ailing senator Thad Cochrane back in April, but still had to win the special election to serve out the remaining two years of Cochrane’s term.

Mississippi, as the Jackson Free-Press explains in its report on Hyde-Smith’s comments, has a singularly terrible history when it comes to lynchings, racism, and the oppression of black Americans:

Between 1877 and 1950, Mississippi had the highest number of lynchings of African Americans of any state in the United States, just as the state had been the wealthiest from slavery before the Civil War, and then later passed the most onerous laws after Reconstruction to stop black people from voting and gain equal rights in the state.

Across Mississippi, 654 lynchings were reported in that period, including two in Lee County, where Hyde-Smith’s comments were made. Lynchings — extrajudicial mob justice used to intimidate African Americans — were usually done by hanging, often in front of crowds of joyous whites who even mailed postcards with lynching photographs to friends and family.

Sure is funny when white people in Mississippi joke about public lynchings when running against a black candidate, huh.

Mike Espy is not exactly favored to win, but after this, I'm betting a lot of people motivated to vote in that runoff might want to make their opinion of Cindy Hyde-Smith very clear at the runoff ballot box.

This is the who the GOP is, folks.

And this is who supports the GOP, the people who think her remark was "fine" and "no big deal".

Don't call the racists though, they don't like that.

StupidiNews!

• Palm Beach County, Florida's top election official says that the recounts for Governor, Senator, and Secretary of State will be "impossible" to complete by Thursday's deadline.
• The Trump regime wants to end all disaster aid to Puerto Rico after claiming that the US territory is using relief funds to pay down billions in debt.
• Worldwide, energy companies spent 1% of their 2018 budgets on green power, but nearly all of that was spent in EU countries alone.
• The death toll from this month's wildfires in California has reached 23 as the blazes are now the most destructive fires in state history, costing tens of millions in damage.
• A New Hampshire judge is ordering Amazon to hand over recordings made by an Echo device as possible evidence in a 2017 double murder.