The Big Lie, Local Edition

Here in Kentucky, Republican Secretary of State Michael Adams is under heavy fire for not being part of The Big Lie that Trump won the 2020 election.

 

Months ahead of the midterm election in Kentucky, Secretary of State Michael Adams continues to find himself combating election conspiracy fallout from the 2020 election and the primary in May.

That is some of what he shared with an audience Wednesday as guest speaker at Paducah Rotary Club's weekly meeting at the Carson Center.

Over recent weeks, Adams has been vocal on social media to shut down false claims of violations to voter integrity in Kentucky.

"I am really concerned about these conspiracy theorists making it harder for us to get poll workers. I don't want poll workers to feel like they're having to sit there, it's a long day as it is, and then have angry people come up and accuse them of fraud. It's ridiculous," Adams said.

Adams himself has been the target of baseless claims accusing him of overseeing voter fraud. Just last week he reported another death threat he had received to the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

Adams also voiced concern at an up-tick in demands for a recount following an election.

"What I don't want to have is abusive process for people who lost by a landslides demand recounts. Recounts are far more demanding on our county clerks and our election officials. They put a great strain on our process. They mean that we can't use the machines for voting because they're locked down. We've had five county clerks in the state resign in the last month alone, because, it's not just one thing, but in part it's the abuse they're getting from people and the absurd demands that they're getting from people," Adams said.

He said one of the ways he can thwart disinformation about alleged election irregularities is by traveling the state and talking with people one on one.

"All I can do is handle Kentucky. All I can do is talk to Kentuckians about what Kentucky does right. We've got a great record. We've made enormous strides improving our process that last few years making it more accessible, making it more secure, banning practices that have led to fraud in our state and other states, requiring an ID to vote, but also expanding access for our voters so they can go vote more easily. Not just having one arbitrary day but multiple days to pick to go vote," Adams said.

 

Which is true. 

Despite the famous quote attributed to Mark Twain about "When the end of the world comes, I'd rather be in Kentucky because it's 20 years behind" (which, by the way, Twain never actually said) it really does seem like the Commonwealth really is 20 years behind, back in the 2002 era of merely evil, greedy Republicans like McConnell instead of the full-on fascist election deniers like we're seeing in several other Secretary of State races in 2022.

To his credit, Adams is merely an evil, enabling Republican in a state where Republicans win by 15-20 points.

But I expect Adams is going to face a fierce primary challenge from a Trumpian election denier next year.

And as far as 2022 elections go, well, expect the goofballs in the state legislature to interfere with more "voter integrity" legislation should any Democrats actually win in November.

 

The Big Lie, Con't

I will say this until I'm blue in the face, but if Trump election deniers win these secretary of state, attorney general and gubernatorial races races in 2022, they will absolutely wholesale nullify Democratic wins in 2024, full stop.

The Republican nominee for secretary of state in Arizona is a self-proclaimed member of the far-right extremist group the Oath Keepers who repeatedly shared anti-government conspiracies and posts about stockpiling ammunition on social media. 

CNN's KFile team uncovered previously unreported posts from Mark Finchem, an Arizona state representative who won his party's nomination with the endorsement of former President Donald Trump, on several social media websites linked from his since-deleted former Twitter account. 

The posts included a Pinterest account with a "Treason Watch List," and pins of photos of Barack Obama alongside imagery of a man clad in Nazi attire making a Nazi salute; Finchem also shared photos of the Holocaust claiming it could happen in the United States. 

The Oath Keepers, of which Finchem self-identified as a member since 2014, is an anti-government, far-right militia composed of former and active military and law enforcement that purports to defend the US Constitution. The group is perhaps best known for providing security for the January 6, 2021, "Stop the Steal" rally preceding the Capitol riot. Eleven members, including its leader, were charged by the Justice Department with "seditious conspiracy" related to the Capitol attack. 

Finchem, who attended the January 6 rally before the attack on the US Capitol but has denied he participated in the riot and has not been charged with any crimes, campaigned extensively on the false claim the election was stolen from former President Donald Trump. If Finchem wins his race against Democrat Adrian Fontes, a former county clerk of Maricopa County, Arizona, Finchem would be tasked with running the state's elections in 2024. In Arizona, the secretary of state is second in line to the governorship. 

Finchem said CNN is not credible and declined to comment.

 

I still believe that in states where these jackasses already control the government, like Texas, there's a good chance that if a Democrat wins anything but the most gerrymandered races, they'll simply be annulled and awarded to the Republican. Beto O'Rourke, for example, will never be allowed to win, even if he does win. He'll be accused of massive voter fraud, the seat will be awarded to Ted Cruz, and Cruz will smile and nod and lie and gladly take it.

Watch.

The State Of The Buckeye State

Ohio's state Supreme Court has, for the fourth time now, knocked down the GOP's gerrymandered redistricting maps as unconstitutional. The 2022 maps have already been decreed by Trump federal judges and the state's 2022 elections for the US House at least will take place using unconstitutional maps. However, the fight will go on to 2024.

The Ohio Supreme Court struck down the state's Republican-drawn congressional map Tuesday, ruling that districts used in the May primary violate anti-gerrymandering rules in the state Constitution.

In a 4-3 decision, the Supreme Court rejected Ohio's 15-district congressional map and ordered Ohio lawmakers to redraw a new one for the 2024 elections within 30 days. If they can't, the Ohio Redistricting Commission will have 30 days to adopt a congressional map.

The map struck down by the Ohio Supreme Court will be used in the November elections, however, because candidates were selected in the May primary using these districts.

That map guarantees Democrats two victories – Columbus' 3rd Congressional District represented by Rep. Joyce Beatty and Cleveland's 11th Congressional District represented by Rep. Shontel Brown. But Republicans are either assured wins or have a shot in the remaining 13.

"Clearly, we agree with the Ohio Supreme Court that this second congressional map is gerrymandered beyond a reasonable doubt," said Jen Miller, executive director of the League of Women Voters of Ohio. "It’s our hope that the Ohio mapmakers will heed court orders and deliver congressional districts that truly serve voters."

The Ohio Supreme Court's majority ruled that the map was slightly more favorable to Democrats than one rejected earlier this year. Three Republican justices dissented, writing that both maps met Ohio's constitutional standards.

"The majority clearly has a number of Democrat congressional seats in mind, and any plan that does not result in that number will be deemed unconstitutional and therefore invalid," wrote Justices Sharon Kennedy and Pat DeWine, both Republicans. The former is running for chief justice against Democratic Justice Jennifer Brunner this November.
No end run around anti-gerrymandering language

Before approving this map, Senate President Matt Huffman, R-Lima, argued that the Ohio Redistricting Commission didn't need to abide by voter-approved rules that prevent maps from unduly favoring one party. The court, ultimately, disagreed.

"No constitutional language suggests that the voters who approved Article XIX intended to allow the prohibitions against partisan favoritism and unduly splitting governmental units to be avoided so easily," according to the majority's opinion, which did not list a specific author.

However, Kennedy and DeWine pointed out in their dissent that "there is nothing in the Constitution that precludes map makers from seeking to maximize competitive districts, and such a goal does not cause undue favoritism."

Ohio's unconstitutional congressional map creates a toss-up district for Democratic Rep. Marcy Kaptur, Congress' longest-serving female lawmaker. In November, Kaptur faces Republican newcomer J.R. Majewski, who won former President Donald Trump's endorsement after painting his lawn with a giant Trump banner.

 

So there's a very good chance that Republicans will take 12 of 15 House seats, if not 13, with barely 50% of the popular vote.  The state legislature will continue to be a supermajority with about the same 50% vote, garnering 65% of state House and 75% of state Senate seats.

And at least this year, they get away with it, as I've been telling you that they would ever since this whole redistricting scheme came up.

The Coming Supreme Storm

I have to admit, 2022 was the worst Supreme Court term of my lifetime, a historic destruction of rights in order to serve white supremacy and to put the nation's non-white folk at a lethal disadvantage in the years ahead.

And I am telling you now, 2023 may be worse.

The U.S. Supreme Court agreed Thursday to hear a North Carolina case with nationwide implications — on whether state legislatures should be immune from judicial oversight in state court when it comes to setting election rules. 

The arguments put forth by North Carolina’s Republican-led legislature concerned a controversial topic known as the “independent state legislature doctrine.” While the matter before the Supreme Court stems from a gerrymandering lawsuit in North Carolina, critics said the argument could be used in any state, for a variety of purposes — like overturning the results of future presidential elections. 

“This case is not only critical to election integrity in North Carolina, but has implications for the security of elections nationwide,” N.C. House Speaker Tim Moore said in a news release. He’s a main party in the case, called Moore v. Harper, which will likely be argued in late 2022 or early 2023. 

The basic premise is that there should be few checks and balances when it comes to election law. State legislatures should have near-total control over the rules, the theory says, without state courts being allowed to decide if a state’s elections laws are constitutional. 

The N.C. Supreme Court harshly shot down the argument earlier this year, in its ruling in the gerrymandering case. “It is also repugnant to the sovereignty of states, the authority of state constitutions, and the independence of state courts, and would produce absurd and dangerous consequences,” the state’s highest court wrote. 

The N.C Supreme Court has a Democratic majority. But the U.S. Supreme Court has a conservative majority which could see things differently, GOP leaders in North Carolina hoped — even though previous versions of the U.S. Supreme Court have also shot down the argument over the decades, and as recently as 2015. 

Republican lawmakers told the U.S. Supreme Court that they believe the Constitution intends for legislative leaders, not the courts, to have the final say over elections law — “and this Court should intervene to protect the Constitution’s allocation of power over this matter of fundamental importance to our democratic system of government.”

 

Understand that if there are five SCOTUS votes for this -- and there are already four -- we are looking at permanent control of the country by Republicans. State legislatures will simply declare Republicans winners with no recourse. Democratic wins will be simply annulled by a simple majority of Republicans in Republican-controlled legislatures.

The election laws in a couple dozen states will mean whatever the Republicans want it to mean. And in 2024, Republicans will simply give the state's electoral votes to the Republican. Vote totals won't matter. As bad as things are right now, if the Roberts Court decides that only state legislatures can ever run elections, then no Democrats will ever be elected from those states again.

At that point, history tells us massive violence follows.

This one's the end of democracy, folks.

Voting now may be the only way to stop it.

Last Call For Brazil Nuts, Con't

Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro is going down the Trump "stolen election"route as he faces a vote later this year, but unlike Trump, it looks like Bolsonaro may actually get his military coup plan should he lose.

President Jair Bolsonaro of Brazil has for months consistently trailed in the polls ahead of the country’s crucial presidential race. And for months, he has consistently questioned its voting systems, warning that if he loses October’s election, it will most likely be thanks to a stolen vote.

Those claims were largely regarded as talk. But now, Mr. Bolsonaro has enlisted a new ally in his fight against the electoral process: the nation’s military.

The leaders of Brazil’s armed forces have suddenly begun raising similar doubts about the integrity of the elections, despite little evidence of past fraud, ratcheting up already high tensions over the stability of Latin America’s largest democracy and rattling a nation that suffered under a military dictatorship from 1964 to 1985.

Military leaders have identified for election officials what they say are a number of vulnerabilities in the voting systems. They were given a spot on a transparency committee that election officials created to ease fears that Mr. Bolsonaro had stirred up about the vote. And Mr. Bolsonaro, a former army captain who filled his cabinet with generals, has suggested that on Election Day, the military should conduct its own parallel count.

Mr. Bolsonaro, who has spoken fondly about the dictatorship, has also sought to make clear that the military answers to him.

Election officials “invited the armed forces to participate in the electoral process,” Mr. Bolsonaro said recently, referring to the transparency committee. “Did they forget that the supreme chief of the armed forces is named Jair Messias Bolsonaro?”

Almir Garnier Santos, the commander of the Brazilian Navy, told reporters last month that he backed Mr. Bolsonaro’s view. “The president of the republic is my boss, he is my commander, he has the right to say whatever he wants,” Mr. Garnier Santos said.

With just over four months until one of the most consequential votes in Latin America in years, a high-stakes clash is forming. On one side, the president, some military leaders and many right-wing voters argue that the election is open to fraud. On the other, politicians, judges, foreign diplomats and journalists are ringing the alarm that Mr. Bolsonaro is setting the stage for an attempted coup.

Mr. Bolsonaro has added to the tension, saying that his concerns about the election’s integrity may lead him to dispute the outcome. “A new class of thieves has emerged who want to steal our freedom,” he said in a speech this month. “If necessary, we will go to war.”

 

Unlike America, Brazil has been under a military dictatorship before for a couple of decades, and seems to be heading right back for another round. 

Republicans are absolutely paying attention here.

Last Call For Election Insurrection, Con't

The Fulton County, GA case against Trump for attempted theft of the 2020 election in the state just became profoundly serious as the grand jury proceedings get underway next week.

As many as 50 witnesses are expected to be subpoenaed by a special grand jury that will begin hearing testimony next week in the criminal investigation into whether former President Donald J. Trump and his allies violated Georgia laws in their efforts to overturn his 2020 election loss in the state.

The process, which is set to begin on Wednesday, is likely to last weeks, bringing dozens of subpoenaed witnesses, both well-known and obscure, into a downtown Atlanta courthouse bustling with extra security because of threats directed at the staff of the Fulton County district attorney, Fani T. Willis.

Ms. Willis, a Democrat, has said in the past that Mr. Trump created a threatening atmosphere with his open criticism of the investigation. At a rally in January, he described the Georgia investigation and others focusing on him as “prosecutorial misconduct at the highest level” that was being conducted by “vicious, horrible people.” Ms. Willis has had staffers on the case outfitted with bulletproof vests.

But in an interview on Thursday, she insisted the investigation was not personal.

“I’m not taking on a former president,” Ms. Willis said. “We’re not adversaries. I don’t know him personally. He does not know me personally. We should have no personal feelings about him.”

She added that she was treating Mr. Trump as she would anyone else. “I have a duty to investigate,” she said. “And in my mind, it’s not of much consequence what title they wore.”

Ms. Willis emphasized the breadth of the case. As many as 50 witnesses have declined to talk to her voluntarily and are likely to be subpoenaed, she said. The potential crimes to be reviewed go well beyond the phone call that Mr. Trump made to Georgia’s secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, on Jan. 2, 2021, during which he asked him to find enough votes to reverse the election results.

Ms. Willis is weighing racketeering among other potential charges and said that such cases have the potential to sweep in people who have never set foot in Fulton or made a single phone call to the county.

Her investigators are also reviewing the slate of fake electors that Republicans created in a desperate attempt to circumvent the state’s voters. She said the scheme to submit fake Electoral College delegates could lead to fraud charges, among others — and cited her approach to a 2014 racketeering case she helped lead as an assistant district attorney, against a group of educators involved in a cheating scandal in the Atlanta public schools.

“There are so many issues that could have come about if somebody participates in submitting a document that they know is false,” she said. “You can’t do that. If you go back and look at Atlanta Public Schools, that’s one of the things that happened, is they certified these test results that they knew were false. You cannot do that.”

Mr. Raffensperger, a Republican, is likely to be one of the better-known figures to testify before the grand jury. His office confirmed on Friday that he and Gabriel Sterling, the chief operating officer for the secretary of state’s office, had received subpoenas and planned to appear soon before the panel.

In the Republican primary on Tuesday, Mr. Raffensperger defeated a Trump-endorsed candidate, Representative Jody Hice, who supported the former president’s false claims of election fraud.

Mr. Raffensperger will now vie for a second term in the general election in November, in which he is hoping to benefit from the national name recognition, and bipartisan kudos, he received after standing up to Mr. Trump.

This case could be a legitimate nightmare for the Georgia GOP, which means I fully expect this case to be tied up until Willis will be replaced, driven out of office by scandal, or something worse.

Understand that in all likelihood this case will not be allowed to go forward, and we all know why.

Erection, Flawed, Of Election Fraud

This is the biggest example of Republican 2022 dirty tricks yet: tens of thousands of fraudulent signatures were "collected" by several GOP candidates running in the Michigan Republican primaries in August, so many fraudulent signatures that several candidates running for Democratic Gov. Gretchen Whitmer's job will no longer qualify to be on the August primary ballot.

A signature forgery scandal has turned the race for the GOP nomination to be Michigan’s next governor on its head: Two leading Republican candidates did not collect enough signatures to qualify for the primary ballot after invalid signatures were excluded, according to a report from the state’s Bureau of Elections.

The Bureau of Elections reports will now go to the Board of State Canvassers, which will vote Thursday on which candidates qualify to appear on the ballot for the state’s Aug. 2 primaries.

Thirty-six petition circulators — campaign workers hired to collect signatures — “submitted fraudulent petition sheets consisting entirely of invalid signatures,” according to the Bureau. In all, according to the Bureau’s report Monday, these circulators submitted at least 68,000 invalid signatures across nominating petitions for 10 candidates.

Both leading Republican candidates submitted well above the 15,000 signatures necessary, but were subsequently hit with complaints that that counts contained fraudulent signatures.

James Craig , the former Detroit police chief, submitted more than 11,100 invalid signatures and just under 10,200 valid ones, according to the Bureau’s report. Bureau staff noted “consistent handwriting for the entirety of a petition sheet, including signatures” and evidence of “round-tabling,” or the practice of passing a petition sheet around in a group to make entries appear more authentic.

Another candidate, Perry Johnson, submitted nearly 14,000 valid signatures — not enough to make the ballot — and over 9,000 invalid signatures. The same group of petition circulators who submitted thousands of invalid signature pages for Craig’s campaign did so for Johnson’s, the Bureau reported. A report noted incorrect addresses and misspelled names.

Three additional Republican gubernatorial candidates also fell far short of the valid signatures needed to qualify, the Bureau said: Michael Brown, Michael Markey and Donna Brandenburg. Each submitted well more than 15,000 signatures, but in all three cases, more than 10,000 were deemed invalid.

Candidates need 15,000 valid signatures to qualify for the gubernatorial primary ballot, and were allowed to submit up to 30,000 for review. Gubernatorial candidates also need at least 100 signatures from at least half of the state’s congressional districts. Prices for signature-gatherers spiked this cycle, increasing pressure on campaigns as they raced to meet the qualifying figure.

The ultimate decision on the candidates’ qualifications for office is up to the Michigan Board of State Canvassers, which is made up of two Democrats and two Republicans and is set to meet Thursday.

If the Board of State Canvassers heeds the Bureau of Elections’ report and disqualifies 5 out of 10 Republican gubernatorial contenders, that could open the door for Tudor Dixon — who’s denied that Joe Biden won Michigan in the 2020 election and on Monday received the endorsement of the wealthy DeVos family, Michigan’s most influential political kingmakers. Dixon, notably, is also the only candidate to receive a shout-out at Donald Trump’s rally in Michigan last month: The former president called her “fantastic” and “brilliant.”

At least one campaign vowed to fight for their qualification Monday night.

“The staff of the Democrat Secretary of Staff does not have the right to unilaterally void every single signature obtained by the alleged forgers who victimized five campaigns,” John Yob, a consultant for Johnson, wrote on Twitter, adding: “We strongly believe they are refusing to count thousands of signatures from legitimate voters who signed the petitions and look forward to winning this fight before the Board, and if necessary, in the courts.”

 

John Yob is showing the obvious way forward for Michigan Republicans: those dirty Democrats made up the signature fraud, and if it really was fraud, it was the signature collectors' fault that we paid, not our fault!

Then again, this is a state where jurors bought the "FBI entrapment plot" defense to get the terrorists off who tried to kidnap and kill Gov. Whitmer.

Who knows how this will turn out?

Last Call For The Big Lie, Con't

Time and time again, in instance after instance, in state after state, the "widespread election fraud" of 2020 always turns out to be Republicans getting caught trying to rig the election for Donald Trump and the GOP.

A former elections supervisor in rural Coffee County, Ga., has told The Washington Post that she opened her offices to a businessman active in the election-denier movement to help investigate results she did not trust in the weeks after President Donald Trump’s 2020 defeat.

Trump had carried the conservative county by 40 points, but elections supervisor Misty Hampton said she remained suspicious of Joe Biden’s win in Georgia. Hampton made a video that went viral soon after the election, claiming to show that Dominion Voting System machines, the ones used in her county, could be manipulated. She said in interviews that she hoped the Georgia businessman who visited later, Scott Hall, and others who accompanied him could help identify vulnerabilities and prove “that this election was not done true and correct.”

Hampton said she could not remember when the visit occurred or what Hall and the others did when they were there. She said they did not enter a room that housed the county’s touch-screen voting machines, but she said she did not know whether they entered the room housing the election management system server, the central computer used to tally election results.

“I’m not a babysitter,” she told The Post.

Hall, who owns a bail bond business, did not respond to requests for comment.

Voting experts said that, whether they accessed sensitive areas or not, Hampton’s actions underscore a growing risk to election security.

In the year and a half since the 2020 election, there has been steady drumbeat of revelations about alleged security breaches in local elections offices — and a growing concern among experts that officials who are sympathetic to claims of vote-rigging might be persuaded to undermine election security in the name of protecting it.

“Insider threat, while always part of the threat matrix, is now a reality in elections,” said Matt Masterson, who previously served as a senior U.S. cybersecurity official tracking 2020 election integrity for the Department of Homeland Security.

Suspected or attempted breaches have spurred law enforcement investigations in Colorado, Michigan and Ohio. One such case has already led to criminal charges. Tina Peters, an elections official in Mesa County, Colo., was indicted in March on charges stemming from her alleged efforts to secretly copy a Dominion Voting Systems server last year.

Details continue to emerge from other places where outsiders may have sought access to voting machines. In Michigan, state police are investigating an alleged breach of voting equipment after the 2020 election in Roscommon County. A local NBC television affiliate in western Michigan reported last week that police had raided a township office in a different county as part of that investigation.

Meanwhile, some prominent election deniers have sought help from officials with access to protected voting systems, and others — including Peters in Colorado — are running to oversee elections as secretaries of state.

Voting systems are considered by the federal government to be “critical infrastructure,” vital to national security, and access to their software and other components is tightly regulated. In several instances since 2020, machines have been taken out of service after their chain of custody was interrupted.

Hampton told The Post she was unaware of guidance the Georgia secretary of state’s office had sent to county election administrators saying that voting equipment and software must not be released to the public absent a court order. And she questioned why access should be so restricted.

“I don’t see why anything that is dealing with elections is not open to the public,” Hampton said. “Why would you want to hide anything?"

 

Yes, because Republicans certainly would never use election data to defraud the public.

The same people screeching about "internet-connected voting machines" are the same people "opening their offices to random businessmen" and giving them direct voter data so it can be "used to investigate fraud". 

You know, committing election fraud so they can investigate election fraud.

They won't stop this year or especially in 2024.

Last Call For The Big Lie, Con't

Republicans don't want free and fair elections, they want elections where they control the election process and they always win, and anyone who doesn't go along with creating false election results is punished.

A local Republican Party leader in North Carolina threatened to get a county elections director fired or have her pay cut unless she helped him gain illegal access to voting equipment, the state elections board told Reuters.

The party official, William Keith Senter, sought evidence to support false conspiracy theories alleging the 2020 election was rigged against former U.S. President Donald Trump. The previously unreported incident is part of a national effort by Trump supporters to audit voting systems to bolster the baseless stolen-election claims.

Senter, chair of the Surry County Republican Party, told elections director Michella Huff that he would ensure she lost her job if she refused his demand to access the county's vote tabulators, the North Carolina State Board of Elections said in written responses to questions from Reuters. Senter was "aggressive, threatening, and hostile," in two meetings with Huff, the state elections board said, citing witness accounts.

Senter did not respond to requests for comment.

Huff, who refused Senter's demands, was disturbed by the incident of political intimidation. Such threats have become common nationwide since the 2020 election. Reuters has documented more than 900 threatening or hostile messages aimed at election officials in a series of investigative reports.

"It’s a shame, that it is being normalized," Huff told Reuters. "I didn’t expect to get it here in our county. We are just trying to do our job by the law."

Senter's demands are a potential violation of state law. In a legal memo responding to community calls for a "forensic audit" of voting machines, Mark Payne, an attorney retained by the Surry County Board of Elections, wrote this week that it was illegal to provide access to voting machines to unauthorized individuals. Anyone threatens or intimidates an election officer could also face felony charges, according to a state statute.

Senter and a prominent pro-Trump election conspiracist, Douglas Frank, met with Huff on March 28, claiming “there was a 'chip' in the voting machines that pinged a cellular phone tower on Nov. 3, 2020, and somehow influenced election results," the state election board said, calling the claim “fabricated disinformation.” Separately, in a public gathering that Huff did not attend, Senter threatened to have Huff's pay cut, according to Huff, who said a person at the meeting told her about the threat.

Two days before meeting with Huff, Frank gave a speech in Dobson, a town in the rural county of 72,000 people on the northern border with Virginia, where he spoke about "debunked conspiracy theories about the 2020 election," the board said. The day after the meeting, Frank, an Ohio math teacher, thanked his "patriot" hosts in a post to the messaging app Telegram about his trip to North Carolina and said he was "leaving behind a bonfire burning in good hands.”

Frank did not respond to requests for comment. 

 

Multiple state GOP parties are controlled by people who believe there was massive election fraud in their state, even in the states Trump won. The fact that red state Democrats exist is proof enough of widespread fraud, you see. And they'll do anything to "find" this fraud.

And if you think anyone in these state parties will be punished, you're fooling yourself. Meanwhile, ground beef is $5 a pound, so we're apparently going to hand the country right back to the people who believe democracies are a nuisance on the way to fascism.

As of this writing, redistricting remains incomplete in Florida, Missouri, and New Hampshire. However, for the sake of argument, let’s assume the following: 1. Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL) gets his way, and Republican state legislators approve his recently proposed map, where we’d rate 20 districts at least leaning Republican and 8 at least leaning Democratic; 2. Missouri eventually adopts a map that preserves 6 Republican-leaning seats and 2 Democratic-leaning ones; and 3. New Hampshire passes a map with 1 Democratic-leaning seat and 1 Toss-up.

If that happens, and no other state maps change due to legal action, here would be our topline ratings: 210 seats would be rated Safe, Likely, or Leans Republican, 198 would be rated Safe, Likely, or Leans Democratic, and 27 would be rated as Toss-ups.

Given the political environment, we’d expect Republicans to do quite well among the Toss-up races. Let’s say, for the sake of argument, they win 20 of the 27. That would result in a 230-205 Republican House, or a net gain of 17 from what Republicans won in 2020.

To be honest, that seems a little light in terms of Republican gains. If we had to guess, today, what Republicans would net in the House, we’d probably pick a number in the 20s. So that means our ratings are probably at least a little bit friendlier to Democrats than perhaps they should be. However, we do have several more seats rated Leans Democratic (15) compared to Leans Republican (8), which is one way of indicating how the playing field could grow. On the other hand, our ratings also reflect the possibility of a Democratic comeback in which they limit Republican advances.

Still, don’t be surprised to see more House updates from us later this year in which all or nearly all of the changes are in favor of Republicans. It’s just that kind of cycle, at least for the time being.

 

For the love of God, fight back or die.

A Strange Meadows Lark

Washington Post media reporter and fact check columnist Glenn Kessler lays out the case of voting fraud against former Trump WH Chief of Staff Mark Meadows.

After Donald Trump lost the presidential election, falsely claiming election fraud, Meadows became senior partner at the Conservative Partnership Institute (CPI), which promotes “election integrity” efforts. The organization’s “citizen’s guide” urges activists to determine that the registrations of their neighbors are legal by checking on “whether voters have moved, or if the registrations are PO Boxes, commercial addresses or vacant lots” and then “obtaining evidence: photos of commercial buildings? Vacant lots?” and “securing affidavits from current residents that a registered voter has moved.”

Voter-list maintenance is one of the dividing lines in American politics. Republicans argue that if voter-registration records are not regularly purged and updated, election fraud can take place. Democrats push back that too many voter-list purges are conducted haphazardly, removing eligible voters who don’t learn they are no longer listed until they show up to vote.

Now it turns out that until last week, Meadows was simultaneously registered to vote in three different states — North Carolina, Virginia and South Carolina — according to state records obtained by The Fact Checker.

The overlap lasted about three weeks, and it might have continued if revelations about Meadows’s voting record had not attracted scrutiny in North Carolina. Meadows is still registered in Virginia and South Carolina.

This is the latest in a series of revelations about election-related behavior by Meadows that appear to contradict his and his party’s rhetoric on election integrity.

Meadows, in fact, was the keynote speaker at a CPI Election Integrity Summit in Atlanta on Feb. 19. “What you’re doing is investing in the future of our country and making sure only legal votes count,” Meadows told attendees. He said he had just gotten off the phone with Trump, who he said had told him: “We cannot give up on election integrity.”

About three weeks after that speech, the New Yorker reported that Meadows had registered to vote at a home where he did not reside. Meadows and his wife, Debra, had submitted voter registration forms that listed as their residential address a 14-by-62-foot mobile home in Macon County, N.C., with a rusted metal roof that sold for $105,000 in 2021, even though they did not actually own it or live there. He then voted in the 2020 election via absentee ballot.

North Carolina officials announced last month that, as a result, Mark Meadows is under investigation for potential voter fraud. On April 11, his voter registration was removed by Macon County officials, the North Carolina State Board of Elections said last week.

The state cited the fact that Meadows had voted in Virginia during the 2021 gubernatorial election that elected a Republican, Glenn Youngkin. Meadows and his wife had registered to vote in the state in September, his and her voter registration applications show, even though they were still registered in North Carolina.

About two weeks after publication of the New Yorker article, Meadows registered to vote in South Carolina, state election records show. In July 2021, Meadows had purchased a three-story waterfront home of more than 6,000 square feet in South Carolina for nearly $1.6 million. But until this year, he also owned a townhouse in Alexandria that he had purchased in 2017.

It is not unusual for some overlap in voter rolls as people move across state lines, and many people do not bother to terminate their voting registration when they move. In contrast to Meadows, however, former secretary of state Mike Pompeo canceled his voter registration in Kansas just a few months after selling his home in Wichita and moving to McLean when he became CIA director.

South Carolina and Virginia are members of the Electronic Registration Information Center, a nonprofit that provides member states with reports on voters. If Meadows had listed his Virginia voter registration while registering in South Carolina, the state would have notified Virginia. Angie Maniglia Turner, Alexandria’s general registrar and director of elections, said Thursday that there has been no change in the voter registration status in Virginia of either Mark or Debra Meadows.

Ben Williamson, a spokesman for Mark Meadows, declined to comment.

 

Republicans cheered when Crystal Mason, a Black woman in Texas, was sentenced to five years in prison for unknowingly trying to vote while ineligible, but a white Republican Trumper registers to vote in three states knowingly in order to game the system on purpose will at most face a small fine if anything.

They can do whatever they want to. The rest of us are subject to actual laws that they impose upon us in the name of "integrity".

Last Call For It's About Suppression, Con't

As I said last month, the Supreme Court deciding that state legislatures, not courts, were the final word over elections would end our democracy overnight. For now at least, that fatal bullet has been dodged.

The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday allowed North Carolina and Pennsylvania to use electoral maps approved by state courts to replace ones deemed to have given Republicans unfair advantages, improving Democratic chances of retaining control of the U.S. House of Representatives in November.

The justices denied Republican requests to put on hold lower court rulings that adopted court-drawn boundaries for North Carolina's 14 House districts and Pennsylvania's 17 House districts to replace electoral maps devised by Republican-controlled legislatures in the two states.

Republicans are seeking to regain control of the House, which is narrowly controlled by President Joe Biden's fellow Democrats, in the Nov. 8 midterm elections. Party primaries in Pennsylvania and North Carolina are set for May 17.

The court has a 6-3 conservative majority. Conservative Justices Samuel Alito, Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch dissented from the action concerning North Carolina.

 

Justice Kegstand filed a concurring opinion agreeing with Justice Alito, his only quibble was with the NC GOP filing this as an emergency measure.

 

So at this point, there's four Supreme Court justices willing to eliminate Democracy by allowing state legislatures to conduct elections however they want to for both state and federal elections, with zero oversight by state or federal courts.

In other words, once Republicans get control of a state legislature, they could make whatever election redistricting and voting laws that they want.

All they need is one more Justice.

The Big Lie, Con't

Arizona Republicans failed to steal the 2020 election for Trump, so they're proposing giving themselves the right to do so legally in 2024.

An arch conservative member of Arizona’s state House of Representatives has proposed a mammoth overhaul of the state’s voting procedures that would allow legislators to overturn the results of a primary or general election after months of unfounded allegations and partisan audits.

The bill, introduced by state Rep. John Fillmore (R), would substantially change the way Arizonans vote by eliminating most early and absentee voting and requiring people to vote in their home precincts, rather than at vote centers set up around the state.

Most dramatically, Fillmore’s bill would require the legislature to hold a special session after an election to review election processes and results, and to “accept or reject the election results.”

The proposal comes after President Biden became the first Democrat since former President Clinton to win Arizona’s electoral votes. He defeated former President Trump there by just under 11,000 votes, or about three-tenths of a percentage point.

Ever since, Arizona Republicans have been riven between election denialists who have pushed to investigate or overturn those results and more mainstream legislators — and Gov. Doug Ducey (R) — who have tried to move on. An audit, conducted by an inexperienced firm called Cyber Ninjas, failed to uncover evidence of fraud or miscounting.

But Fillmore said at a committee hearing Wednesday he still does not believe the reports he has seen, though he maintained his skepticism has little to do with the ultimate winner.

“I don’t care what the press says. I don’t trust ABC, CBS, NBC or Fox or anybody out there. Everybody’s lying to me and I feel like I have a couple hundred ex-wives hanging around me,” Fillmore said. “This is not a President Biden thing. This is not a the other red-headed guy thing.”

“We should have voting in my opinion in person, one day, on paper, with no electronic means and hand counting that day. We need to get back to 1958-style voting,” he added.

 

And there it is. Vote on election day in person, one day, and that's it. Eliminate all mail voting, eliminate all early voting, and give the state legislature the final say on if the vote is legitimate. If this has been in place in 2020,  Trump would have been awarded the state and chaos would have followed for sure.

Remember, the whole point was to throw the election to the House because neither Trump nor Biden would have had the 270 electoral votes and Trump would have been declared the winner. The whole point was to obfuscate, smokescreen, and gaslight the process.

Arizona Republicans want to set up the ability to do so in 2024. More GOP state legislatures will follow.

Last Call For Orange Meltdown, Con't

Donald Trump's interview with NPR this week on The Big Lie went hilariously badly for both Trump and NPR.

Some Republican leaders are trying to move on from former President Donald Trump's failed attempt to overturn the 2020 election that he lost.

"While there were some irregularities, there were none of the irregularities which would have risen to the point where they would have changed the vote outcome in a single state," Sen. Mike Rounds, R-S.D., said Sunday on ABC's This Week. "The election was fair, as fair as we have seen. We simply did not win the election, as Republicans, for the presidency. And if we simply look back and tell our people don't vote because there's cheating going on, then we're going to put ourselves in a huge disadvantage."

But Trump — who has endorsed dozens of candidates for the 2022 midterm elections and still holds by far the widest influence within the GOP — is trying hard not to let them move on.

"No, I think it's an advantage, because otherwise they're going to do it again in '22 and '24, and Rounds is wrong on that. Totally wrong," Trump told NPR in an interview Tuesday, referring to his false and debunked claims that the 2020 election was stolen.

The interview was six years in the making. Trump and his team have repeatedly declined interviews with NPR until Tuesday, when he called in from his home in Florida. It was scheduled for 15 minutes, but lasted just over nine.

After being pressed about his repeated lies about the 2020 presidential election, Trump abruptly ended the interview.

 

Trump was always going to leave the interview and then attack NPR, certainly we'll see his cultists call again to defund and destroy the public radio news network. But the real problem is that NPR happily gave Trump yet another platform to spread his lies upon, even if the hosts rightfully attacked those lies. It won't matter one whit to the people who believe them, and now NPR has been drafted as yet another strawman enemy which Trump can attack at will.

Expect Trump to unload on NPR at his Saturday hate rally in Arizona this weekend, which was the entire point of the exercise.

 

Steve M. makes it clear that Steve Inskeep was in over his head, and that Trump basically won.

 

What did all this accomplish? Inskeep pushed back on a few points, but Trump threw out a Gish gallop's worth of allegations, all baseless but more than Inskeep was able to rebut. Wisconsin was corrupt! Arizona was corrupt! Detroit was corrupt! Philadelphia was corrupt! No Republican would regard Inskeep as the one who came away with a win, even if Trump did storm off. (Republicans like Trump's petulance.)

I wish Trump had been interviewed by someone ready to get in the weeds with him, someone with a deep knowledge of every conspiracy theory and of the facts that show they're all nonsense. No, there weren't more votes than people in Detroit -- here's the AP fact check. No, nothing fishy happened in Philadelphia -- even the Republican co-chair of the city's elections board acknowledged that. And so on. In the interview, Trump is essentially saying, "I won. Don't believe me? Do your own research." Imagine if Inskeep had geeked out and done his own research, in much greater depth, and brought the receipts.

Trump is used to rattling off the names of these allegedly suspicious locales and getting no pushback. Imagine if an anti-conspiracy election nerd had engaged him on his own terms. Then you really would have seen a walk-off -- and some serious public education.

 

But that won't happen. Trump is too crafty to go up against someone like that. Rolling Inskeep and the rest of our totally unprepared Village betters is exactly what Trump excels at.

All Inskeep accomplished was making NPR a target again.

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

If Republicans can't assure permanent election control by state legislature fiat, they can always fall back on good ol' voter suppression in counties with large percentages of Black and brown voters, like Georgia's Lincoln County, population 7,600 with more than a quarter being Black folk.

Lincoln County is trying to close all but one polling place for next year’s elections, a move opposed by voting and civil rights groups.

Relocating voters from the county’s seven precincts to a single location will make voting “easier and more accessible” and eliminate the need to transport voting equipment and staff the remaining sites, according to a news release. Community members disagreed.

“Lincoln County is a very rural county. Some people live as far as 23 miles from the city of Lincolnton,” said Denise Freeman, an activist and former Lincoln County school board member. “This is not about convenience for the citizens. This is about control. This is about the good old boys wanting to do what they’ve always done, which is power and control.”

The move was made possible after the Georgia General Assembly passed legislation earlier this year disbanding the Lincoln County Board of Elections. The chief sponsor of Senate bills 282 and 283 was Sen. Lee Anderson, R-Grovetown, whose district includes Lincoln County. The newly-appointed board agreed to move forward with the “consolidation” plan and was expected to vote on it last week, but appeared to lack a quorum, several said.

Multiple public interest groups including the Georgia Coalition for the People’s Agenda, Common Cause Georgia, the Southern Poverty Law Center and Augusta’s Interfaith Coalition are taking a stand against the effort.

Aunna Dennis, executive director for Common Cause Georgia, said the move is an extension of Senate Bill 202, which tightened restrictions on voting and gave the state the authority to take over elections boards.

“They’re trying to do this undercover precinct consolidation, so we’re going to go ahead with the canvassing drive,” Dennis said. Obtaining signatures from roughly 20% of the population of a single precinct would appear to have the effect of blocking the move, at least temporarily.

Dennis attributed the Lincoln County effort to a larger push across rural Georgia.

“I think there are bad actors who are wanting to pilot precinct consolidations and takeovers of elections boards in smaller counties,” she said.

With multiple voting changes from Senate Bill 202 already underway, adding the precinct closures in a county that lacks a public transportation budget – and attempting to pass them over the holiday season – is too much, Dennis said.

“There’s no real justification for something this drastic,” she said. “This is something that is trying to be steamrolled outside the public eye.”

 

This is exactly what I said would happen after Georgia's "election integrity" bills became law: entire county election boards purged of Black election workers, replaced with white Republican appointees, and voting precincts removed from Black neighborhoods entirely. 

This is also exactly the kind of racist voter suppression nonsense that the Voting Rights Act preclearance measures were supposed to stop, but that was gutted by the Roberts Court years ago and will never be fixed.

So now, Black voters will have to drive 20+ miles to vote, and it will be their fault if they don't "want to take responsibility to vote" when it will take them hours to do so.

It's the same tune across the country. Republicans gain and keep power with intensive gerrymandering, voter suppression, and spreading the Big Lie, and outright stealing elections.

The Big Lie, Con't

Yet more evidence of Trump regime officials directly pressuring state elections officials to commit election fraud and give the 2020 election to Trump that he didn't win, with all indications that Trump will be much more successful in these efforts in 2022 and 2024 unless he's stopped.

A member of Donald Trump’s 2020 presidential campaign arranged and participated in a meeting at which a Georgia election worker says she was pressed by a Chicago publicist to falsely admit voting fraud.

The revelation directly ties a senior figure in the former president’s political operation to an extraordinary late-night Jan. 4 meeting in which a $16-an-hour election worker faced pressure to implicate herself in a baseless conspiracy theory, stoked by Trump himself, as he sought to overturn his Georgia election loss.

Harrison Floyd - who was executive director of a national campaign coalition called Black Voices for Trump in 2020 - told Reuters on Monday that he asked Chicago publicist Trevian Kutti to visit the Atlanta area to speak with 62-year-old temporary election worker Ruby Freeman. Floyd said he then participated by phone in a meeting Kutti held with Freeman at a police station in Georgia’s Cobb County.

Kutti was accompanied at the meeting by another Trump campaign figure: Garrison Douglas, who was a Georgia leader in Black Voices for Trump during the campaign and now works as a Republican Party spokesperson in the state. Douglas confirmed to Reuters that he was present at the meeting. Floyd said he recruited Douglas and Kutti because he was unable to attend himself.

In a statement to Reuters on Monday, Douglas said: "On January 4th, I was unemployed and received a call to serve as a volunteer driver, as I had many times in the past. I had no involvement in the meeting beyond the task of driving."

In a phone interview Monday, Floyd said he was asked if he’d be willing to set up the meeting by a man he described as a chaplain with “connections” in federal law enforcement. He declined to name the clergyman or to detail what those connections involved. Floyd said the chaplain, who is white, wanted him to approach Freeman, who is Black, to discuss an immunity deal for her, out of a belief that she would not trust a white stranger. Floyd, Douglas and Kutti are Black.

Floyd said that he had left his role in the Trump campaign before the Jan. 4 meeting. Trump himself “never asked me to go” to Georgia, he said, and board members of the Black Voices for Trump group “had no involvement in this.”

Floyd said he arranged the meeting in an effort to help Freeman. He said he himself believed she was seeking assistance, including immunity from prosecution over claims from the Trump camp that she had committed voting fraud.

Freeman, through a spokesperson, said she never reached out to anyone to seek immunity. Her lawyer, Von DuBose, declined to comment further.

 

So once again we have a Black female election worker in Georgia who was facing direct pressure to lie  that election fraud existed, with threats of legal punishment if they didn't do so.  The timing once again was less than 48 hours before the Trump coup, and the plan was clearly to use these "accusations of election fraud" to justify Mike Pence blocking electors from enough states to send the election to the House delegations for a Trump theft of the presidency.

All this was planned from the top down, folks. It was 100% a coup, and in 20222 and 2024 the coup succeeds unless Trump's people and a lot of state GOP officials start going to prison and soon.

It's About Suppression, Con't

Florida GOP Gov. Ron DeSantis wants a brand new state election police force as part of a new raft of voter suppression measures, and this should be setting off klaxons all around the state.

Gov. Ron DeSantis vowed on Wednesday to create a fully-staffed statewide law enforcement office whose sole job would be to crack down on election crimes, despite previously praising Florida’s smooth 2020 elections and rebuffing calls by members of his own party for an audit.

DeSantis, who is running for reelection and is considered a potential 2024 presidential contender, is also pressing state lawmakers to increase the criminal penalty for violating new restrictions on collecting mail-in ballots. He also wants to enact a tight new 100-day deadline on when local election officials must scrub their voter rolls for those who died, moved or been convicted of a felony.

The new law enforcement office will cost nearly $6 million, according to a document obtained by POLITICO.

“I guarantee you this: The first person that gets caught, no one is going to want to do it again after that,” said DeSantis at a West Palm Beach event billed as a “press conference” but featured dozens of DeSantis supporters who loudly applauded the governor. At one point, the crowd cheered “Let’s go Brandon” — a conservative rallying cry against President Joe Biden.

The governor also said he wants the GOP-controlled Legislature to put additional restrictions on the use of drop boxes.

“I don’t even think we should have drop boxes,” said DeSantis even though he signed the bill two years ago that first authorized their use in the state.

The Republican governor’s push comes just months after he successfully got state legislators to enact a controversial new voting law that adds new restrictions on the collection of mail-in ballots including a clampdown on when and where drop boxes could be located. It also comes as some Republicans in the state, echoing former President Donald Trump’s baseless election fraud claims, are pushing for an audit of the 2020 election over DeSantis’ objections.

That new election law has drawn multiple federal lawsuits from civil rights and voting rights groups who contend those restrictions unfairly discriminate against elderly voters, voters with disabilities and minority voters. These additional proposals could throw another hot-button issue into an upcoming regular session where Florida legislators will be working on redistricting, abortion restrictions and another battle with tech companies over data privacy. The session starts in January.

Democrats — who have little power to stop the changes — quickly condemned the governor’s plans.

State Rep. Anna Eskamani, an Orlando Democrat, said on Twitter, “More attacks on voting coming to Florida. Just like in 2020 we had elections last night in our state w/no issues. Why does our Governor keep creating partisan chaos. Why can’t we just focus on problems like housing, hunger, taxes, our environment & public transportation?”

One of the biggest changes contained in the new law was a two-ballot limit on how many mail-in ballots someone could gather and turn in on behalf of the elderly or sick and disabled voters, though there is an exception for immediate family members. This ban on “ballot harvesting” is a misdemeanor that DeSantis wants increased to a felony.

DeSantis also said that many local election offices and local prosecutors either do not want to — or lack the expertise — to investigate election crimes. In late September, the governor asked Florida Secretary of State Laurel Lee to investigate whether Facebook interfered with the 2020 election even though her office does not have any investigators.

Under the governor’s proposal, Florida would create an “Office of Election Crimes and Security” that would have sworn law enforcement agents as well as other investigators to probe voter fraud and other election law violations. A three-page outline obtained by POLITICO says the governor’s election police force would cost $5.7 million in the first year and have 52 employees, including 20 sworn law enforcement agents who would be based in Tallahassee and in five field offices.

The breakdown of the governor’s proposal also calls for uniform reporting of felony convictions to election supervisors, banning cities from using ranked voting — which is already banned for the state — and a new deadline for determining voter eligibility. Local supervisors are already required to report to the state twice a year on how many voters they have removed in the previous six months.

 

So yeah, armed election police that would go after election officials with guns drawn, I guess. The second these clowns suspect "election fraud" they go in and what, arrest voters? Remove election machines in the middle of an election? How much power would these assholes have?

If you thought terrorism against state and county-level election officals was bad enough coming from Trump cultists, imagine what it will be like coming from gung-ho election cops.

This is literally DeSantis's special police, guys.

This road goes straight to fascism.

The Big Lie, Con't

It's only a matter of time before more Democratic election officials are hurt or killed by lunatic Trump cultists.

"I am a hunter -- and I think you should be hunted," a woman can be heard saying in a voicemail left for Arizona Secretary of State Katie Hobbs in September. "You will never be safe in Arizona again." 

Or there's the man who spit, "Die you bitch, die! Die you bitch, die!" repeatedly into the phone, in another of several dozen threatening and angry voicemails directed at the Democratic secretary of state and shared exclusively with CNN by her office. 

Officials and aides in secretary of state offices in Arizona and other states targeted by former President Donald Trump in his attack on last year's election results told CNN about living in constant terror -- nervously watching the people around them at events, checking in their rearview mirrors for cars following them home and sitting up at night wondering what might happen next. 

Law enforcement has never had to think much about protecting secretaries of state, let alone allocating hundreds of thousands of dollars in security, tracking and follow-up. Their jobs used to be mundane, unexciting, bureaucratic. These are small offices in a handful of states with enormous power in administering elections, from mailing ballots to overseeing voting machines to keeping track of counted votes. 

None were prepared to be publicly attacked. They don't have the budgets to monitor threats, and certainly not to suddenly protect officials who never had to be protected before. No systems were in place on the state or federal level to back them up, and the Department of Justice admits that the federal government doesn't yet have the infrastructure to handle the situation. 

Staff members in the offices say they're dealing with long-term emotional and psychological trauma after a year of constant threats -- in person and virtually -- to the secretaries and to themselves. 

"Bullet," read one tweet reply to Colorado Secretary of State Jena Griswold, a Democrat, in September. "That is a six letter word for you." 

An email sent to her office over the summer read: "I'm really jonzing to see your purple face after you've been hanged." 

Asked by CNN last week if she feels safe in her job and going about her days, Griswold paused for nearly 30 seconds before answering. 

"I take these threats very seriously," she finally said, choosing her words carefully. "It's absolutely getting worse," she added. 

The threats come in from their home states and across the country. Few appear to be coordinated or organized, and are instead often driven by momentary, angry reactions to a news story or social media post. But some get very specific, citing details and specifics that leave the secretaries and their staff rushing to report them to authorities. 

Most anticipate the threats will increase going into next year, with Republicans around the country making election doubt conspiracies a central plank of their campaigns, and with many of these secretaries of state up for reelection themselves in races that are already generating more attention than ever before, with expectations that they will be the frontlines of potentially trying to overturn the next presidential election. 

But Griswold's problem was, ironically, summed up in one of the tweets her office has tracked: "Your security detail is far too thin and incompetent to protect you. This world is unpredictable these days... anything can happen to anyone." It ended with a shrug emoji. Griswold's vulnerability is greater than that person imagined: for now, she's had to contract private security, and only for official events, squeezing the money out of her small office budget. With all that's been coming at her, that's what she has.

 

The point is to drive good people out of politics like Jena Griswold and Katie Hobbs and replace them with Trump Cultists. The point is to make sure Democrats can't find candidates to field because they fear for their lives. The point is to terrorize Democrats into not running, not voting, and not registering. The Trump Cultists win by default if there are no other candidates.

It's working, too.

The Manchin On The Hill, Con't

I've been telling everyone that President Manchin holds 100% of the cards in the Build Back Better/Good Package negotiations because he's stacked the deck, and now we finally get to see the last and most powerful card in his hand if David Corn's story is to be believed, and Manchin actually calls it "Bullshit".

In recent days, Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W. Va.) has told associates that he is considering leaving the Democratic Party if President Joe Biden and Democrats on Capitol Hill do not agree to his demand to cut the size of the social infrastructure bill from $3.5 trillion to $1.75 trillion, according to people who have heard Manchin discuss this. Manchin has said that if this were to happen, he would declare himself an “American Independent.” And he has devised a detailed exit strategy for his departure.

Manchin has been in the center of a wild rush of negotiations with his fellow Democrats and the White House over a possible compromise regarding Biden’s ambitious Build Back Better package, and Manchin’s opposition to key provisions—including Medicare and Medicaid expansion, an expanded child tax credit, and measures to address climate change—has been an obstacle that the Democrats have yet to overcome. As these talks have proceeded, Manchin has discussed bolting from the Democratic Party—perhaps to place pressure on Biden and Democrats in these negotiations.

He told associates that he has a two-step plan for exiting the party. First, he would send a letter to Sen. Chuck Schumer, the top Senate Democrat, removing himself from the Democratic leadership of the Senate. (He is vice chairman of the Senate Democrats’ policy and communications committee.) Manchin hopes that would send a signal. He would then wait and see if that move had any impact on the negotiations. After about a week, he said, he would change his voter registration from Democrat to independent.

It is unclear whether in this scenario Manchin would end up caucusing with the Democrats, which would allow them to continue to control the Senate, or side with the Republicans and place the Senate in GOP hands. In either event, he would hold great sway over this half of Congress.

Without Manchin’s vote, the Democrats cannot pass the package in the 50-50 Senate. And a vote on this measure is key to House passage of the $1 trillion bipartisan road-bridges-and-broadband infrastructure bill the Senate approved in August. (Sen. Kyrsten Sinema, an Arizona Democrat, has also been a problem for the party.) Manchin has met with Biden, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), the chair of the Senate Budget Committee, Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.), the chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, and a variety of his fellow Senate Democrats this week in an effort to strike a deal. Through it all, he has insisted that $1.75 trillion is his top and final offer, and he has constantly said no to proposed programs that almost every other congressional Democrat supports. He has told his fellow Democrats that if they don’t accept his position, they risk getting nothing.

Manchin told associates that he was prepared to initiate his exit plan earlier this week and had mentioned the possibility to Biden. But he was encouraged by the conversations with Sanders and top Democrats that occurred at the start of the week and did not yet see a reason to take this step. Still, he has informed associates that because he is so out of sync with the Democratic Party he believes it is likely he will leave the party by November 2022.

Manchin has repeatedly said that he has a significant philosophical difference with most of his fellow Democrats. He has told reporters that he believes major programs in the Build Back Better bill would move the United States toward an “entitlement mentality” and that he cannot accept that. In a recent meeting with Biden, Manchin told the president that he sees government as a partner with the public not the ultimate provider, according to people who heard the senator’s account of the conversation. He explained to the president that in his view Biden didn’t win the presidency last year by championing progressive proposals, and he pressed the president to recall his campaign promise to bring people together. He also reminded Biden that he has vowed not to support any package unless it contains the Hyde Amendment, which bans the use of federal funds to pay for abortions, except in cases of incest or when the life of the mother is at risk.

 

Now that if up there is a big one. David Corn isn't exactly the best person in the beltway Village. He's had #MeToo issues and credibility problems on the Steele Dossier in the past, and been publicly called out on both.

 

If Corn is right here, it means Democrats need to take President Manchin's deal, accept what he allows you to have, or get nothing and lose the Senate. Note that he's saying it's "likely" that he will leave the party by November 2022. Whether that means siding with the GOP and Biden losing everything, well, now that's up to Biden, isn't it, said the hostage taker.

Of course, Manchin doesn't want to be seen as the hostage taker so as I said up top he's denying all of this.

 

MANCHIN to @burgessev and me on the report he is threatening to leave the Democratic Party if his demands are not met on infrastructure: “I can’t control rumors and it’s bullshit, bullshit spelled with a B, U, L, L, capital ‘B’”: pic.twitter.com/ex8iHMIiSs

— Frank Thorp V (@frankthorp) October 20, 2021

So we're right back to "Will he, won't he" because frankly, feeding David Corn this rumor would be a GOP operative's dream story sowing Democratic disarray.  What would Manchin gain from going down as the most hated Democratic senator since Joe Lieberman and John Edwards? 

The answer is a shitload of money, frankly.

Besides, it's not like Manchin cares too much about making deals or getting things passed as voting rights went down in flames again in the Senate on Wednesday.

Democrats argued that the bill is a necessity after Republican state legislatures passed laws limiting access to the ballot box following former President Donald Trump's false claims that the 2020 election was stolen from him.

"Across the country, the Big Lie -- the Big Lie -- has spread like a cancer as many states across the nation have passed the most draconian restrictions against voting that we've seen in decades," Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer said. "If nothing is done, these laws will make it harder for millions of Americans to participate in their government." 

President Joe Biden issued a harsh statement during the vote, calling it "unconscionable" that Republicans would block the legislation from advancing. 

"The United States Senate needs to act to protect the sacred constitutional right to vote, which is under unrelenting assault by proponents of the Big Lie and Republican Governors, Secretaries of State, Attorneys-General, and state legislatures across the nation," Biden said. 

Amid the Republican blockade, Democrats on the left have increasingly called on their party's senators to gut the Senate's filibuster rule requiring 60 votes to advance most legislation. 

Pennsylvania Lt. Governor John Fetterman, a Senate Democratic candidate, said in a statement, "every Democratic Senator who votes in favor of this bill today, but won't support getting rid of the filibuster, is engaging in performative politics, and is content with the GOP's complete assault on our democracy." 

But at least two Democratic senators — Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona — have said they are unwilling to change the filibuster rule and are crucial votes for the Biden administration's economic agenda. 

 

On the other hand, Corn does have a lot of clicks and views and follow-ups to gain if he's the bad faith actor here and he's being rolled by his sources.

On the gripping hand, well, Manchin himself has been conducting this entire trashing of the Biden plan in bad faith.

Of course if the story is true, the best part is after Manchin gets done playing this game, then it will be Vice-President Sinema's turn to whittle the bill down even more to see what she can get out of the deal as well. Something will pass I expect, but what that something is will be 100% up to the two of them.

The real question is which of these known bad faith actors then is acting in bad faith. I don't know the answer to that, but I do know the answer to the general Manchin/Sinema problem.

 

Remember, the answer here is more and better Dems, not staying home in 2022. That would render Manchin's antics irrelevant. Sinema too. 53, 54 Democrats in the Senate, and somehow keeping the House, and we're in far better shape.

But if history's any indication, we'll only get five or six more Republicans in the Senate and fifty or sixty more in the House instead.

Retribution Execution, Con't

 I keep telling people that 2020 was a failed dry run for permanent authoritarian GOP government in America and basically all of Trump's orcs and goblins are ready to make sure we lose it all next time. When Steve Bannon speaks, every liberal, Democrat, progressive and human being better 100% pay attention, because like the megalomaniacal supervillain he is, he's giving his evil plan away ahead of time.

Scores of former Trump political appointees gathered at a GOP social club Wednesday night to hear Steve Bannon detail how they could help the next Republican president reconfigure government.

"If you’re going to take over the administrative state and deconstruct it, then you have to have shock troops prepared to take it over immediately," Bannon said in a telephone interview with NBC News. "I gave 'em fire and brimstone."

Bannon, who ran former President Donald Trump's first campaign and later worked as a top adviser in the White House, said that Trump's agenda was delayed by the challenges of quickly filling roughly 4,000 slots for presidential appointees at federal agencies and the steep learning curve for political officials who were new to Washington.

He is not alone in that view. His appearance at the Capitol Hill Club came at the invitation of a new organization called the Association of Republican Presidential Appointees, which was formed to create a resource for future GOP officials tapped to fill federal jobs.

"There are so many statutes and regulations as well as agency and departmental policies, it can be very overwhelming when you first come in," said Jeffrey Scott Shapiro, a former Broadcasting Board of Governors official who is one of the organizers of the group. "This is an organization that has a very narrow, clear and much-needed purpose, and, once it is operational, I think it could do a lot of good not just for the Republican Party but for the country."

Trump often railed publicly about career civil servants and Obama administration political appointee holdovers whom he saw as obstacles to his agenda, referring to them collectively as the "deep state."

Bannon said he wants to see pre-trained teams ready to jump into federal agencies when the next Republican president takes office. For the most part, that means the tiers of presidential appointees whose postings don't require Senate confirmation.

"We’re going to have a sweeping victory in 2022, and that’s just the preamble to a sweeping victory in 2024, and this time we’re going to be ready — and have a MAGA perspective, MAGA policies, not the standard Republican policies," he said, referring to Trump's "Make America Great Again" slogan and describing a 2024 electoral victory as a "second term."

 

Bannon's happy to tip his hand, because he knows he's going to win. He knows he's going to have his own Deep State ready to go in 2024, and that will be the end of democracy around here in your lifetime. He doesn't need Trump, he'll execute this plan with whoever gets he 2024 nod.

We got lucky once. We have to push these barbarians back again and again to survive.

We're just now finding out how close we were to an American authoritarian state.

However horrifying the Jan. 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol appeared in the moment, we know now that it was far worse.

The country was hours away from a full-blown constitutional crisis — not primarily because of the violence and mayhem inflicted by hundreds of President Donald Trump’s supporters but because of the actions of Mr. Trump himself.

In the days before the mob descended on the Capitol, a corollary attack — this one bloodless and legalistic — was playing out down the street in the White House, where Mr. Trump, Vice President Mike Pence and a lawyer named John Eastman huddled in the Oval Office, scheming to subvert the will of the American people by using legal sleight-of-hand.

Mr. Eastman’s unusual visit was reported at the time, but a new book by the Washington Post journalists Bob Woodward and Robert Costa provides the details of his proposed six-point plan. It involved Mr. Pence rejecting dozens of already certified electoral votes representing tens of millions of legally cast ballots, thus allowing Congress to install Mr. Trump in a second term.

Mr. Pence ultimately refused to sign on, earning him the rage of Mr. Trump and chants of “Hang Mike Pence!” by the rioters, who erected a makeshift gallows on the National Mall.

The fact that the scheme to overturn the election was highly unlikely to succeed is cold comfort. Mr. Trump remains the most popular Republican in the country; barring a serious health issue, the odds are good that he will be the party’s nominee for president in 2024. He also remains as incapable of accepting defeat as he has ever been, which means the country faces a renewed risk of electoral subversion by Mr. Trump and his supporters — only next time they will have learned from their mistakes.

That leaves all Americans who care about preserving this Republic with a clear task: Reform the federal election law at the heart of Mr. Eastman’s twisted ploy, and make it as hard as possible for anyone to pull a stunt like that again.

Democrats have to reform the Electoral Count Act, among other voting rights reforms, or it's over. The GOP is openly telling us they will use the full power of the US government as a weapon against dissent.  We have to make sure this happens or we're all going to burn.