The Big Lie, Con't

Trump and his cronies continue to openly lie that the Arizona "audit" really proves that Trump "won" the state in a fantastic example of national gaslighting, with the point being to normalize the idea that elections can't possibly be truly fair and accurate in order to normalize overturning them in the years ahead.

The Cyber Ninjas failed to prove fraud in the Arizona 2020 election, but former President Donald Trump's election fraud crusade is now proceeding as if they'd won -- pushing for more "forensic audits" and restrictive voting in that state and elsewhere across the country.

Trump's allies are already demanding a new review of another Arizona county won by President Joe Biden. They are launching more partisan ballot reviews in other states following the Arizona playbook after passing laws making it harder to vote earlier this year. And they are calling for decertification of Arizona's 2020 election despite the lack of fraud, as part of a larger effort to validate Trump's "Big Lie" and undermine the 2020 election results.

The lesson they're taking from Arizona's Maricopa County ballot review is not that they failed and should stop, but rather that they should try to avoid the negative scrutiny that hounded the Cyber Ninjas' review and "do it better" in states like Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, even if there's no evidence of fraud, said Sarah Longwell, a conservative publisher and executive director of the conservative group Defending Democracy Together.

"It has nothing to do with auditing votes," Longwell told CNN. "It has to do with creating a cloud of suspicion around the elections and keeping their fraud narrative front and center."

The partisan ballot review in Maricopa County released last week reaffirmed Biden's victory. But Trump and the Arizona GOP officials who backed it ignored that conclusion and the highly problematic nature of the review itself, run by a company inexperienced in election audits and which failed to follow standard auditing procedures, and instead touted other issues raised in their report -- even though they were quickly rebutted by election experts and county officials.

Similar election "audits" already are moving forward in Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. And Texas' secretary of state's office announced a "full and comprehensive forensic audit" in four counties hours after Trump fired off a letter to Republican Gov. Greg Abbott demanding just such a review.
 

The partisan reviews of the 2020 election results have come after a host of Republican-led state legislatures enacted restrictive voting laws, frequently citing Trump's lies as reason to enact new measures in the name of "election integrity." Eighteen states, including Arizona, have enacted laws this year that make it harder to vote, according to a tally by the liberal-leaning Brennan Center for Justice at New York University's School of Law.

In one sign of how much the falsehoods about the 2020 election have become linked to the GOP's identity, a recent CNN poll found that nearly 6 in 10 Republicans and Republican-leaning independents said "believing that Donald Trump won the 2020 election" was "very" or "somewhat" important to their definition of what it now means to be a Republican.

 

The ground is being primed for a situation in the upcoming elections where a Democratic candidate in a red state wins a relatively close election, and that election is overturned on "fraud" and given to the Republican. It will probably happen in 2022, and it will definitely happen in 2024 when it comes to state electoral votes for President.

Republicans are now defined by the belief that the 2020 election was "stolen" and so they will not just accept but demand that the election be stolen right back in the years ahead, a hundredfold.

Democrats don't seem to be even considering that this is where we are going.

The Manchin On The Hill, Con't

The Democrats will get 50 Senate votes for their voting rights bill, finally getting Sen. Joe Manchin on board. But the bill isn't expected to get any Republican votes, and changing the filibuster still won't happens, so I'm not sure what the point is.

Senate Democrats are proposing new legislation to overhaul voting laws after months of discussions to get all 50 of their members behind a single bill, allowing their caucus to speak with one voice on the issue even though it stands virtually no chance of becoming law. 

The proposal -- announced in a statement by a group of Senate Democrats on Tuesday -- comes in the aftermath of their party's failed effort to open debate on the issue in June. Even though they unified behind the procedural vote at the time, Senate Democrats were not on the same page over the policy, kicking off months of talks to get the party's factions behind the bill that they will propose on Tuesday. 

Yet the new proposal will almost certainly fall well short of the 60 votes needed to break a GOP-led filibuster. Plus Democrats lack the votes to change the rules and weaken the filibuster as many in their party want them to do, meaning the plan is expected to stall when the Senate casts a procedural vote on the matter next week. 

The proposal, which will be introduced by Senate Rules Chair Amy Klobuchar, also has the endorsement of Sen. Joe Manchin, the West Virginia Democrat who had been the lone member of his caucus to oppose his party's more sweeping overhaul -- known as the For the People Act -- which passed the House earlier this year. 

The other Democratic senators who are co-sponsors include Sens. Jeff Merkley of Oregon, Tim Kaine of Virginia, Jon Tester of Montana, Alex Padilla of California and Raphael Warnock, the Georgia freshman who faces a potentially tough reelection fight next year. Maine Sen. Angus King, an independent who caucuses with Democrats, has also signed onto the bill known as the Freedom to Vote Act, according to the statement. 

The new bill would make it easier to register to vote, make Election Day a public holiday, ensure states have early voting for federal elections and allow all voters to request mail-in ballots. In addition, the measure would bolster security on voting systems, overhaul how House districts are redrawn and impose new disclosures on donations to outside groups active in political campaigns.

 

So I guess the point is to get all the Senate GOP on record against voting rights, even the "moderates" like Murkowski, Collins, Romney and yeah that's really it.

However, that doesn't actually save our voting rights.

The Big Lie, Golden State Edition

Of course California Republicans are going to drown the state in lawsuits and "citizen investigations" of the "corrupt" recall election as the polls show Democratic Gov. pulling away and keeping his job. The point was never actually getting rid of Newsom, it was justifying the violence coming after the recall and to lat the groundwork to terrorize Democrats in the biggest blue state of them all.

Looking to oust the governor? Ed Brown has just the right merch for you.

Camouflage Recall Newsom hats and Recall Newsom masks. He’s got Recall Newsom yard signs. A stack of Recall Newsom pamphlets.

But just days before California voters decide whether to push Democrat Gavin Newsom from office, the trailer off Golden Chain Highway was mostly a shrine to former President Trump.

“As far as I’m concerned, Trump is the president,” said Brown, 67.

And as for the recall election?

“They’ll probably do something to cheat,” he said of Newsom’s supporters, adding that he will vote for Larry Elder because “he’s more like Trump; he’s for the people.”

The Republican-backed recall election could not be more consequential for California. Set amid a deadly wave of the COVID-19 pandemic, with record-breaking wildfires and a relentless drought drying fields and faucets, it gives the GOP its best shot in over a decade at governing the nation’s most populous state.

And if there’s a symbolic heart of recall mania, it may be here in Amador County in the Sierra foothills, where about 1 in 5 registered voters signed petitions to give Newsom the boot. That’s the highest concentration in California.

The most fervent support for the recall has come from Northern California, where rural conservatives say that their voices are drowned out in Sacramento by urban Democrats and that they would be better off seceding to form their own state called Jefferson.

And yet, in many ways, this election is still about a man named Donald J. Trump.

Conservatives talk about the recall effort through the lens of Trump’s lies that he won the 2020 election. By and large, they refuse to cast their ballots by mail, believing his false claims that mail-in voting leads to rampant voter fraud. If Newsom prevails, many won’t trust the results — just as they didn’t after Trump lost.

In Newsom, they have found an avatar for the Democratic Party and everything they hate about it — a political entity in opposition to many of the things they hold dear, including (and sometimes especially) Trump.

“In many ways, the recall was never really about Gavin Newsom in particular,” said Kim Nalder, a political science professor at Cal State Sacramento.

Rather, she said, recall supporters are fueled by a “laundry list of complaints that Republicans had about liberals.”

“If you’re a Republican, especially a Trump-supporting Republican, in California, it’s a rough time in state politics,” Nalder said. “You feel really disenfranchised, and [if] you combine that with the high anxiety we all have about the fires and the pandemic and homelessness, you get a high level of motivation to do something about it.”

 

The "something" is violence, deadly, mass political terrorism. It's coming.  The recall is the excuse. "We tried the ballot box. Now we use the bullet box."

From the Bluest state to the reddest state, Republicans simply don't believe elections where Democrats win are legitimate, and this illegitimacy will absolutely be used to fuel violence against Democrats and their voters.

We've already seen it.

More is coming, and it will be a lot worse.

The Big Lie, Actual Truth Edition

So turns out we've actually found election fraud committed by corrupt state election officials, and of course they're Republicans failing to count votes in order to help GOP candidates.

 

Seated onstage at the most-hyped election conspiracy event of the year, the clerk of Mesa County, Colorado, Tina Peters, described herself as a crusader for election security.

“I’ve looked at it objectively,” Peters said of supposed issues in election data during her speech at MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell’s “Cyber Symposium” this month. “There’s some discrepancies there that I cannot deny, and I tell people, ‘I cannot unsee some of these things.’ If I’m going to be honest with the people of Mesa County and Colorado and all of you, I cannot unsee some of these things.”

But at home in Mesa County, some current and former officials have a different recollection of Peters’ tenure overseeing elections.

During Peters’ first year as clerk, in 2019, her office was blamed for leaving more than 570 uncounted ballots in a box, long past an election. Less than a year later, one of her office’s drop boxes leaked ballots, sending some floating in the summer breeze. Now Peters has gone underground, reportedly hiding in a safe house provided by Lindell, after she allegedly participated in a breach of Mesa County voting machine data this year. That data soon wound up on conspiracy websites, making Peters a folk hero among the MAGA set and the subject of an FBI investigation.

Peters (who did not return requests for comment) took office in 2019, after her predecessor, Sheila Reiner, reached her term limit. What followed was an unusually bombastic tenure in a typically low-drama role.

While overseeing the November 2019 general election, Peters’ office forgot to count 574 ballots, instead leaving them unattended in a drop box outside her office for months. That slip-up coincided with a rush of departures from Peters’ office. In December 2019, nearly 20 of Peters’ 32-person staff had departed, the Grand Junction Daily Sentinel reported at the time. More staff quit days after the missing ballots were discovered, in late February 2020, bringing the departure count over two dozen.

The Colorado Secretary of State’s Office told Peters to get her act together.

“The Secretary of State’s Office appointed someone to be in the [clerk’s] office to help with the election,” Amanda Polson, who served as elections director under Reiner, told The Daily Beast.

Patti Inscho, a Democrat and an experienced former Mesa County Clerk employee, was hired to help Peters with elections. But just two months into Inscho’s role, Peters fired her, accusing her of not doing assigned work—an allegation Inscho firmly denied. The rift turned ugly, with a Peters staffer filing a criminal complaint against Inscho for allegedly not working during a pandemic, the Colorado Sun previously reported. Police dismissed the report.

“Tina didn’t want to fight facts,” Inscho told The Daily Beast. “She wanted to damage people. She did and said a lot of things about me that are untrue. It hurt my reputation, and it’s hard to fight back against.”

Polson, who had been hopeful about Inscho’s hiring, saw her termination as a bad omen.

“Essentially, that person [Inscho] got shut out,” Polson said. “Nothing had improved in the office. She was still, we thought, not handling the ballot issue correctly. There are some lines you can’t cross in an election administration. That is one of them: not counting ballots that should be counted.”

In May 2020, Polson formally began an effort to recall Peters. The campaign took issue with Peters’ handling of the lost ballots, as well as her staff turnover, a series of controversial business expenses (including more than $3,000 in food), and her decision not to oversee a pair of town-level elections. (The towns were forced to oversee their own elections, costing them two to three times the typical cost of a county-run vote.)

Soon the recall campaign had another data point: a ballot drop-off box, installed by Peters’ office for the 2020 primary election, appeared defective, sending completed ballots blowing across a parking lot. Peters claimed the leak was staged and blamed a local couple who’d reported the issue. The couple denied the allegation in an interview with the Daily Sentinel, where a reporter also noted ongoing issues with ballots becoming lodged in the drop box.

Polson was joined in her signature-gathering campaign by Inscho and even, on occasion, Peters’ predecessor Sheila Reiner. “I agreed with the group that things weren’t being done properly,” Reiner told The Daily Beast. “I didn’t believe that Tina was doing a good job.”

She said she collected some signatures for the recall, but was not one of its organizers. Still, her involvement cost her. Reiner said she was antagonized by Peters loyalists who objected to the recall.

“I'm a Republican,” she said. “There are some other Republicans that felt like that I wasn't being loyal to the brand, let’s put it that way.”

 

Remember, this is someone who is a GOP hero because she actually committed election fraud, with the justification that it was "correcting" election fraud by the Democrats that didn't actually exist. 

I expect a lot more of this in 2022 and especially 2024, especially since it's clear that Democrats aren't going to kill the filibuster to pass federal voting rights legislation, and no Republican will ever vote for it.

They've been screaming about election fraud for over a year now -- before even the 2020 election - so they have cover to steal the next several ones.

Last Call For The Big Lie, Con't

We know Trump had the Rosen Justice Department interfere with Arizona's election certification process, now we find out he did the same in Georgia through former acting Civil Rights division head Jeffrey Clark.

 

Top members of the Department of Justice last year rebuffed another DOJ official who asked them to urge officials in Georgia to investigate and perhaps overturn President Joe Biden's victory in the state -- long a bitter point of contention for former President Donald Trump and his team -- before the results were certified by Congress, emails reviewed by ABC News show.

The emails, dated Dec. 28, 2020, show the former acting head of DOJ's civil division, Jeffrey Clark, circulating a draft letter -- which he wanted then-acting attorney general Jeffrey Rosen and acting deputy attorney general Richard Donoghue to sign off on -- urging Georgia's governor and other top officials to convene the state legislature into a special session so lawmakers could investigate claims of voter fraud.

"The Department of Justice is investigating various irregularities in the 2020 election for President of the United States," the draft letter said. "The Department will update you as we are able on investigatory progress, but at this time we have identified significant concerns that may have impacted the outcome of the election in multiple States, including the State of Georgia."

The draft letter states: "While the Department of Justice believe[s] the Governor of Georgia should immediately call a special session to consider this important and urgent matter, if he declines to do so, we share with you our view that the Georgia General Assembly has implied authority under the Constitution of the United States to call itself into special session for [t]he limited purpose of considering issues pertaining to the appointment of Presidential Electors."

The vote count in Georgia became a flashpoint for Trump and his allies and Trump at one point falsely claimed that it was "not possible" for him to have lost the state.
MORE: Statewide audit results reaffirm Biden winner in Georgia

But to date, the Justice Department has uncovered no evidence of widespread voter fraud that would tip the results of the presidential election. Attorney General William Barr also announced in December that the department had "not seen fraud on a scale that could have effected a different outcome of the election." A statewide audit in Georgia last year also affirmed that Biden was the winner.

The emails were provided by the DOJ to the House Oversight Committee, which is investigating efforts to overturn the election results. And they come as the DOJ investigator general looks at whether any officials in the department sought to overturn the outcome of the election.

Donoghue's notes about Trump telling Republican members of Congress to "leave it to him" when it came to the January 6th coup attempt was bad enough, but now we see that the efforts to manufacture a coup came about because Trump couldn't get acting AG Jeffrey Rosen to bite on saying the elections were fraudulent.

And yes, Trump absolutely had acting DOJ employees who wanted to publicly trash the 2020 elections as fraud, as we can see here.

We came this close to a coup, folks.

The Big Lie, Con't

The Trump Traveling Circus And Hate Show comes to Arizona today, and the topic is going to be wall-to-wall attacks on the 2020 elections with The Big Lie.

 

In this narrative, truth doesn't merely take a back seat. It gets tossed to the side of the road. 

Take last week's GOP briefing at Arizona's state capitol, where Doug Logan, lead contractor on the review of ballots in Maricopa County, said "we have 74,243 mail-in-ballots where there is no clear record of them being sent," and 11,326 people whom he said were not on the Nov. 7 voter rolls but showed up on the final roll of voters on Dec. 4. 

Election experts, analysts and reporters quickly debunked Logan's claims online and in news stories, noting they seemed to be based on Logan misunderstanding or misstating how the voting process worked. 

But that didn't matter. Within minutes, and in the week since, Donald Trump and a slew of GOP election conspiracists trumpeted these supposed findings across social media as "proof" the election was stolen. And candidates touting their fealty to Trump were quick to tweet, re-tweet or otherwise post Logan's debunked claims and call for more audits. 

From the start, with Arizona Senate President Karen Fann hiring the Cyber Ninjas firm, a little-known firm inexperienced in election audits, run by a man who'd repeated wild conspiratorial fraud claims; to the review being funded with great secrecy by private, likely partisan sources; through the company initially handing auditors blue pens until a reporter pointed out they could be used to change how ballots are read; to, more recently, contractors sending reams of vote data off to a mysterious cabin in Montana, in the latest portion of the audit, the Arizona vote review has been fraught. 

There could scarcely be a deeper canyon than the one between how election experts see the audit and how Trump-backing GOP candidates describe it. 

"Was this deliberate from day one for fundraising?" asked Harri Hursti, founder of Nordic Innovation Labs, and a data-security expert who recently completed a conventional election audit in New Hampshire, about the Arizona vote review. "This whole thing is theater ... it's all smoke and mirrors and theater." The New Hampshire audit, by contrast, found that a borrowed folding machine in the town of Windham caused 400 ballots to be improperly counted, but that there was "no basis to believe that the miscounts found in Windham indicate a pattern of partisan bias or a failed election." 

Trey Grayson, a Republican and former Kentucky Secretary of State, co-wrote a recent report on the Arizona audit for the States United Democracy Center, a nonprofit focused on fair and secure elections. It detailed huge flaws in the audit's processes, poor security, high levels of built-in error and other problems. 

"If you are a Republican who has concerns about this election, you shouldn't trust the outcome of this review in Arizona," Grayson told CNN. 

"Routine audits of vote counts are important," said Mark Lindeman, acting co-director of Verified Voting, a nonpartisan election-integrity nonprofit that earlier this year worked with Georgia on a full hand count of its vote and with Pennsylvania on a risk-limiting election audit. Both indicated that the original results were substantially accurate. 

But in Arizona, he said, "The problem seems to be that Trump lost, and that's what they're trying to fix; but that's not what audits do." He called the procedures Cyber Ninjas and the other subcontractors in Arizona are following bizarre, adding, "It's a process that can only raise more questions, muddy the waters ... None of it makes much sense, except as a way to increase doubt." 

Maricopa County's GOP-led Board of Supervisors also has termed the Arizona Senate's audit unnecessary, with board chairman Jack Sellers last week issuing a statement that, "It's clear the people hired by Arizona Senate leadership to supposedly bring integrity to our elections are instead just bringing incompetence." 

But many of the GOP candidates and lawmakers visiting Arizona, who have eagerly fomented lies about the 2020 vote, and embraced vicious and radical rhetoric about those who disagree with them, dismiss such criticisms. 

"I don't care what a GOP board says; you have a lot of RINOs occupying positions they should not be in," said Oklahoma's Lahmeyer, using the term for "Republicans in name only." Lahmeyer, who touts his endorsement from disgraced former Gen. Michael Flynn, and hopes to unseat GOP Sen. James Lankford in 2022, termed Lankford "a traitor," for voting on Jan. 6 to certify President Biden's victory. As of June 30, Lahmeyer reported raising just more than $250,000 to the Federal Election Commission. Lankford's FEC reports show he'd raised $2.3 million as of that date. 

"Absolutely," the election was stolen from Trump, said Gray, the Wyoming lawmaker challenging Cheney. Trump has regularly attacked Cheney for voting to impeach him and for rejecting his claims the election was stolen, scurrilous claims and nonsensical rhetoric Gray eagerly echoed. "We've ... got to expose the truth, got to stop the fake news media, Liz Cheney and the coalition of radical socialists," he said. 

Jones, the former Georgia lawmaker, has called Gov. Kemp "a traitor" for rejecting election fraud claims. Asked about his visit to the Arizona audit and his claims of fraud in Georgia, Jones said, "It has helped my campaign. From day one, I've talked about things I described as violation of the Constitution, the procedures followed in counting absentee ballots." His fundraising website specifically asks for contributions to "ensure that Georgia's elections are never stolen by Democrats again."

 

Understand that the audits will never, ever end. Never. They will keep going until "the truth is found".  They will keep going until they justify violence and election theft by Republican lawmakers "decertifying" 2022 elections. And at the center of it all is Ringmaster Trump and his Circus of the Damned.

The Big Lie forever!

Last Call For The Rights Thing To Try

Vice President Kamala Harris is making a final push to bring Republican senators on board with voting rights legislation, and while I understand the sentiment, I don't understand why anyone believes a single Republican in Congress will vote for anything involving voting rights that doesn't also include disenfranchising an equal amount of Black, brown, and Asian voters.

Vice President Kamala Harris says she is speaking with Republican senators on a key piece of voting legislation. During a phone interview with CBS News, the vice president said there is "no bright line" defining whom she speaks to about voting rights legislation. She said it's "a non-partisan issue" and "should be approached that way."

In response to a question about whether she had spoken with any GOP senators about S. 1, the sweeping voting rights bill that has been blocked in the Senate, she replied, "I have spoken to Republican senators — both elected Republicans and Republican leaders," Harris said, and she identified one GOP senator.

"I've talked with [Senator Lisa] Murkowski about this issue," Harris said.

Harris' office later clarified that the two had discussed infrastructure, not voting rights. A spokesperson for Murkowski did not respond to a request for comment.

S. 1 is not a bill that Murkowski favors — she has previously called the For the People Act a "partisan, federal takeover of the election system."

The Alaska senator is the co-sponsor of the John Lewis Voting Rights Act, which would essentially restore a portion of the act struck down by the Supreme Court. This bill also faces GOP opposition and has not yet been introduced, but the White House has expressed support for this legislation, too.

 

Oh, never mind, it's one GOP senator, Murkowski, and she won't vote for it. 

I guess we can keep wasting time with this, or go for reconciliation, which was always going to be the answer.

The Big Lie, Con't

Trump cultists are running on The Big Lie openly now in Georgia, and they will in contests across the country in 2021 and beyond. Every journalist needs to ask every Republican candidate or elected if they acknowledge Biden's win. Increasingly, the answer is "no."

The organizers at the door handed out soft-pink “Trump Won” signs to each attendee. An out-of-state radio host spouted far-right conspiracies. Speaker after speaker insisted that Joe Biden couldn’t have won the November election and that Georgia couldn’t be a blue state.

The gathering this week in Rome might seem like a pro-Donald Trump fantasy convention. But this was no fringe group. Some of the biggest stars in the Georgia GOP were in attendance.

State Sen. Burt Jones, a wealthy executive who is expected to run for lieutenant governor, was given a hero’s welcome. A fellow Republican, state Sen. Brandon Beach, regaled the group with stories about standing up to the party establishment. Two other congressional candidates worked the room.

And U.S. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene opened by telling the crowd, “I do not think Joe Biden won the election.”

Across the state, candidates for public office are repeating Trump’s false claims that the 2020 election was rigged and the contest was stolen from him. Many are running for local office and state legislative seats, while some are seeking the most powerful posts in the state.

The conspiracy theories are already complicating GOP primaries in Georgia, as Republicans try to fend off ascendant Democrats fresh off a string of victories in November’s presidential election and January’s U.S. Senate runoffs.

The leading candidates competing to challenge Democratic U.S. Sen. Raphael Warnock have raised questions about the election results and echoed the phony narrative of widespread voting fraud in Georgia.

And the early maneuvering in races for statewide posts, including governor and secretary of state, have focused on debunked claims that voter fraud was rampant in Georgia last year.

The evidence is clear. Three separate tallies of the roughly 5 million ballots upheld Biden’s narrow victory, court challenges by Trump allies were squashed, and state and federal election officials have vouched for the results.

An audit of absentee ballot signatures in Cobb County found no cases of fraud. While investigators are still probing more than 100 complaints from November, they would not change the election result even if every allegation is substantiated. Neither would a lawsuit pushing for a deeper review of Fulton County ballots.

But Trump’s unsubstantiated claims of a “rigged” election have seeped deeply into the Georgia GOP and left his critics marginalized.

An Atlanta Journal-Constitution poll showed a broad majority of conservatives support a Republican-backed election overhaul that includes new restrictions on voting. A spate of national polls, including from CNN, indicate most Republicans don’t believe Biden won.

The few Georgia Republicans who have spoken in defense of the results have faced ridicule from their own.

Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, who oversaw the election and rejected Trump’s demand that he overturn its results, is the underdog in his race against a formidable GOP challenger endorsed by Trump. Lt. Gov. Geoff Duncan opted against a reelection bid to focus on his vision for a post-Trump era.

In an interview, Duncan said every time Republicans falsely assert the election was stolen it “makes the pathway for Democrats even easier.”

“Our job, as Republicans, is to walk into every GOP meeting whether it’s comfortable or uncomfortable and convince them there’s no fraud,” he said.

 

The apostates like Raffensperger and Duncan will be purged from the ranks entirely in a few years. Understand that the purpose of The Big Lie is for it to be used as justification for everything the cult does for the rest of the decade, and longer.

Texas Two-Steppin' Out, Con't

My prediction yesterday that Texas Gov. Greg Abbott and the state GOP would move to arrest Texas Democratic lawmakers for leaving town was one of the easiest calls I think I've ever made, as Republicans in the state legislature voted swiftly to issue arrest warrants.

Texas Governor Greg Abbott has said that Democratic lawmakers who have left the state can and "will be arrested" upon their return as he pushes ahead with changes in voting laws.

Abbott, a Republican, gave an interview to KVUE on Monday about the Democrats' decision to leave the state and whether the special session of the Texas legislature the governor called can go ahead.

The Democratic legislators flew out of Texas to Washington, D.C. on Monday in order to deny the legislature the two-thirds quorum needed in order to conduct business and to pass legislation.

KVUE asked Abbott if the Democratic walkout meant the voting bills - Senate Bill 1 and House Bill 3 - could not be passed and if he could do anything as governor to compel the lawmakers to return to the state.

Abbott said there "still remains plenty of time to pass not just the bills you mentioned but there's a lot of other bills on there."

He highlighted some of the measures other than voting reforms. He then addressed the issue of the quorum.

"Answering your second question, yes, there is something the governor can do," Abbott said.

"First of all, I'll tell you what the House of Representatives can do. What the speaker can do is issue a call to have these members arrested.

"In addition to that, however, I can and I will continue to call a special session after special session after special session all the way up until election next year. And so if these people want to be hanging out wherever they're hanging out on this taxpayer-paid junket, they're going to have to be prepared to do it for well over a year," the governor said.

 

I fully expect this situation to get far worse. Don't be surprised if nutjobs decide to make citizens' arrests of these lawmakers, too. Abbott wants blood, he wants to see Democrats in chains, and thrown in jail. So do his voters, and my guess is they're going to get it.

It will be a bloody spectacle, and it won't be the last we see involving the arrest of Democratic party politicians, I think.

Texas Two-Steppin' Out

Texas state Democrats are heading for the hills to prevent a quorum in the state legislature for Texas Republicans to ram through the worst, most draconian voter suppression bills yet, but it's only delaying the inevitable.

With Republican-backed voting bills moving rapidly through a special session of the state Legislature, Texas Democrats bolted — again.

At least 51 Democratic members of the state House of Representatives fled the state Monday afternoon in two charter jets bound for Washington, D.C., in an effort to block the measures from advancing, a source familiar with the plans told NBC News. At least seven others are en route, as well.

The unusual move, akin to what Democrats did in 2003, will paralyze the chamber, stopping business until the lawmakers return to town or the session ends.

The lawmakers plan to spend more than three weeks in Washington, running out the clock on the session, which began Thursday, and advocating for federal voting legislation. The Democrats say the For the People Act, an amended version of which Republicans filibustered in the U.S. Senate last month, is the only way they can permanently fend off election limits Republicans are advancing at the state level.

"Our democracy is on the line," state Rep. Trey Martinez Fischer told NBC News. "It became very clear to us that this weekend that any attempts to negotiate some Democratic concessions were cut off, making it very clear that Republicans were hellbent on having it their way."

ON BOARD: Texas Democrats on their way to D.C., where they plan to stay for more than three weeks to deny the state House a quorum pic.twitter.com/hTE0mfxveZ— Jane C. Timm (@janestreet) July 12, 2021

The legislators risk arrest by taking flight. Under the Texas Constitution, the Legislature requires a quorum of two-thirds of lawmakers to be present to conduct state business in either chamber. Absent lawmakers can be legally compelled to return to the Capitol; the source said Democrats expect state Republicans to ask the Department of Public Safety to track them down.

Republican Gov. Greg Abbott, who has made tightening election rules a priority, slammed the move as a dereliction of duty.

"Texas Democrats’ decision to break a quorum of the Texas Legislature and abandon the Texas State Capitol inflicts harm on the very Texans who elected them to serve," Abbott said in statement. "As they fly across the country on cushy private planes, they leave undone issues that can help their districts and our state."

Republican House Speaker Dade Phelan vowed in a statement on Monday afternoon to "use every available resource under the Texas Constitution and the unanimously-passed House Rules to secure a quorum."

"The special session clock is ticking," Phelan said.

 

This didn't work for Oregon Republicans when they tried the same to stop climate change legislation in 2019 and again in 2020.

The difference of course is that Oregon Republicans aligned themselves with armed terrorists and dared Oregon Democrats to send cops after them. And in the end, Oregon Dems dropped the bill and gave in to the GOP terrorists.

 

In 2021, Oregon Republicans repeated the same nonsense several times over Gov. Kate Brown's COVID regulations.

Meanwhile, I fully expect Texas Republicans will do what Oregon Democrats didn't do: send armed law enforcement after the legislators and bring them back in cuffs.

Watch.

Last Call For The Big Lie, Con't

Next week, the Maricopa County, Arizona "audit" of the 2020 ballots will enter its fourth month, and there's no sign that the audit will ever end. As Amanda Carpenter reveals, that's the point. Audit uber alles!

If you’re waiting to read the Cyber Ninjas’ report about Maricopa County’s election counts to find out what happens next in Donald Trump’s rigged election narrative, don’t bother.

The sham audit itself is the endgame. The audit, which began on April 23, was supposed to end by May 14. Now, nearly two months after blowing past that deadline, a spokesman says people shouldn’t expect anything until August. But, really, who knows when, or if, it all will ever end.

It’s not like anyone in MAGA land is in any hurry to call curtains on the big show. That’s because the performance, as incompetent as it is, is the point. It’s what’s keeping Trump’s election delusions alive and well; not what will prove or disprove whether the fantasy has merit. The play’s the thing.

Besides, haven’t they already won, on some level? It’s not every day a couple of partisans are able to seize millions of ballots and a bunch of expensive election equipment to put on a big, months-long show at the Veterans Memorial Coliseum. Everybody came, too. Politicos, reporters, elected officials. MAGA propagandists are still capitalizing on all the free content. And donations keep pouring into the coffers of Trump-adjacent grifters all around. Why end it now?

The auditors haven’t even drafted a report and already, there’s lots of breathless talk from MAGA land about taking the show on the road to Pennsylvania. The dominos are falling, just as the prophecy foretold!

Arizona GOP Chairwoman Kelli “Stop the Counting” Ward couldn’t be happier. “It is good to know that the Arizona audit is already inspiring others to take important steps to ensure election integrity,” she said in a video on Friday. “Even before its completion, the Arizona audit, America’s audit, is bearing good fruit.”

Joy! The sequel is being planned before the first release even wraps its maiden run! Election Integrity Forever!

There are plenty of financial, legal, and political costs associated with the spectacle, none of which seem to worry the audit’s proponents much. They’re having too much fun.

They’re not concerned about sticking Arizona taxpayers with the bill for voting equipment that will need to be replaced at a yet-to-be-determined cost. They’re not thinking about the implications of using private funds to finance what was billed as a public, government-run enterprise before spiraling into bamboo-sniffing, Cheeto-dust-hunting ridiculousness. The Department of Justice has warned about possible legal exposure that Arizona Republicans have for violating federal laws requiring the preservation of election records. But that hasn’t slowed them down, either.

More than likely, the audit will damage the Republican brand even further in the critical swing state of Arizona, where it lost both its marquee races—the presidency and U.S. Senate—in 2020. A recent Bendixen & Amandi International poll found roughly half of Arizona voters oppose the recount effort and that the “intensity of opposition to the audit exceeded the intensity of support, with those strongly opposed to it outnumbering those strongly in favor by 5 percentage points.”

Considering that Maricopa County delivers about two-thirds of Arizona’s votes, someone ought to start writing a political thriller for 2022. Title it: “Backlash.”

 

Boy I'd like to think that this is how it plays out, but something tells me that it's not going to happen this way. "Remember Arizona!" is going to be a permanent battle cry through 2022 I suspect. In fact, the best thing for the GOP would be for Democrats to try to force an end to the report, and they'll hold out until someone makes them issue...some kind of statement.

 

Then they'll bitch about needing another audit.

 

It'll never end. That's the point.

The Big Lie, Con't

Pennsylvania Republicans, having learned nothing from the hubris of Arizona Republicans, now plan to conduct their own "forensic audit" of the 2020 election. To make things even worse (and to waste even more taxpayer dollars) the PA "audit" will include multiple counties, not just Arizona's one.

 

A Republican state senator close to former President Donald Trump has announced he will pursue a legislative audit of the 2020 election in Pennsylvania.

Sen. Doug Mastriano, R-Franklin, said Wednesday that he had sent letters to “several counties” asking for “information and materials” needed to conduct a “forensic investigation” of the 2020 general election and the 2021 primary.

“This investigation is not about overturning the results of either election,” he wrote in an opinion piece sent to Pennsylvania news outlets. “The goals are to restore faith in the integrity of our system, confirm the effectiveness of existing legislation on the governance of elections, and identify areas for legislative reform.”

Mastriano, who has promoted false claims of a stolen election, did not respond to a request for comment.

In the op-Ed, the central Pennsylvania lawmaker did not specify which counties he had requested information from. The counties also represent “different geographical regions” and “differing political makeups,” Mastriano said in the opinion piece. He added that it will be a “balanced investigation.”

*At least two counties have confirmed they received a letter from Mastriano: Philadelphia, Pennsylvania’s largest city and a Democratic stronghold, as well as York County, a large, reliably Republican county in south-central Pennsylvania.

The letter states that legislative changes to the election code, the COVID-19 pandemic, state Supreme Court rulings and actions by former Secretary of State Kathy Boockvar “presented unprecedented challenges” and “combined to cause a great burden on counties and county officials during the general election cycle.”

“The damage to the integrity and confidence in our election process will not be undone with the passing of time,” the letter continues. “I believe the only way to restore confidence in our Commonwealth‘s election process is to undertake a forensic investigation of the election results. By doing this, faith in our election system will be restored.”

The letter requests that York County turnover potentially hundreds of thousands of items, including all ballots cast in the 2020 election, voter rolls, ballot paper samples, cybersecurity protocols, software used through the election process, and the machines used to tabulate results, among others.

Mastriano set a July 31 deadline for the counties to respond with a plan to comply. A subpoena may be issued if a plan to comply with the documents request is not returned by the deadline, the letter says.

A spokesperson for York County declined further comment besides confirming they had received the letter.

 

No doubt that just like Arizona, Pennsylvania's "audit" will subcontract the job out to Trump-friendly Republicans, followed by comically bad faith efforts, a complete travesty of any chain of custody efforts of the ballots and the voting machines, and for a Democratic Secretary of State, in this case Kathy Boockvar, to find that the entire disaster will end up costing multiple counties millions to purchase new voting equipment.

This will go even worse than in the Grand Canyon State, I expect.

Watch.

Last Call For the Big Lie, Con't

The Big Lie is now costing Maricopa County, Arizona taxpayers millions to replace voting equipment tainted by the ridiculous "audit" farce that all but destroy the chain of custody for the machines themselves, and I swear that the county should sue the state GOP for every dollar.

Maricopa County will not reuse most of its voting equipment after it has been with Arizona Senate contractors for its audit of November election results, the county announced Monday.

The potential cost to taxpayers is so far unknown. The county is about half way through a $6.1 million lease with Dominion Voting Systems for the equipment, but it's unclear whether it will have to pay the rest of the money owed under that lease, and whether the county or Senate will be on the hook.

The county's Board of Supervisors wrote in a June 28 letter to Secretary of State Katie Hobbs that they share her concerns about whether the hundreds of vote-counting machines that they had to give the Senate's contractors are safe to use, in part considering the contractors are not certified to handle election equipment in the United States.

The Senate got the voting machines, as well as nearly 2.1 million ballots and voter information from the Nov. 3 election in April after issuing subpoenas and after a judge ruled the subpoenas were valid.

The Senate handed the machines over to contractors in an attempt to tell whether they had been hacked or manipulated during the election, even though a previous independent audit commissioned by the county found that was not the case and the machines counted votes properly.

Hobbs had written in a May 20 letter to the county's Board of Supervisors, recorder and Elections Department director that if the county tries to use the machines again, even if it performs a full analysis in an attempt to determine whether the machines were still safe to use, her office would "consider decertification proceedings." In Arizona, voting systems must be certified to be used in elections.

The county's three-year lease with Dominion for the equipment ends in December 2022. The Election Department still owed about $3.3 million as of May, since the lease is paid monthly.

The subpoenas covered all equipment used in the November election, which included most of the equipment under that lease.

It's unclear whether the county will be able to get out of that lease without paying for the remainder of the cost.

But it's also unclear whether the county would be on the hook for that cost. The Senate signed an agreement with the county that said the county is not liable for any damages to the equipment while in the Senate's custody.

The supervisors have not yet decided whether to ask the Senate to pay for any costs related to replacing the machines under that agreement, said county communications director Fields Moseley.

The county said in a statement Monday it is working with Dominion to replace the subpoenaed equipment so it will be able to serve voters for the November election. County officials are discussing with Dominion the terms for replacing the equipment, Moseley said.

The county broke the chain of custody, or the procedures for properly securing and tracking the machines, when it was required to give the machines to the state Senate under subpoenas, Hobbs wrote in her letter.

 

Any way you look at it, it's millions flushed down the toilet in order to serve the Big Lie. This is who the Republican party are: a bunch of delusional, dangerous imbeciles who destroy everything in their path on the way to power.

 

So stop voting for them, America.

The Big Lie, Con't

The Big Lie continues, and Lee Drutman of the Democracy Fund's Voter Study Group has an in-depth report on just how twisted Republican rank-and-file voters are, who continue to overwhelmingly believe the 2020 election was stolen from Donald Trump, and that increasingly dangerous measures need to be taken in order to correct that "fraud".

On January 6, 2021, a mob of pro-Trump supporters stormed the United States Capitol. The mob came directly from a Trump rally where the president had urged them to “show strength” and told them that “When you catch somebody in a fraud, you are allowed to go by very different rules.”(i)

In the months leading up to the election, Trump had repeatedly claimed that the only way Democrats could win would be through massive fraud. The pandemic shift to mailed ballots gave him and his allies a convenient target for their allegations. After the election, the president doubled down on his claims of fraud. A growing cadre of Republican elected officials and conservative media commentators followed along, pushing the Stop the Steal narrative: Democrats had somehow cheated, and Trump was the rightful winner.

In the months since, Republican politicians across the country have supported the narrative of a stolen election. The embrace has been especially strong in state Republican parties, and especially in states where the contest was relatively close. Republican Party officials who have argued that Biden won the 2020 election fair and square, like Georgia Republican Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger and Nevada Republican Secretary of State Barbara Cegavske, have been censured by state party committees.(ii) In Congress, House Republicans voted to remove Representative Liz Cheney from her leadership post for speaking out against the narrative of a stolen election.

The Stop the Steal movement is also driving a new wave of Republican-drafted state laws that restrict voting access — specifically targeting modes of voting favored by Democratic constituencies(iii) — and that change the ways in which elections are administered, empowering partisan state legislatures over professional election administrators and secretaries of state.(iv)

Meanwhile, Trump himself looms as a significant presence and the likely frontrunner in the 2024 Republican primary, should he decide to run. One sign of his sway over the party is the extent to which Republican elected officials at all levels, as well as conservative advocacy groups, devoted themselves to changing the rules of elections, in response to alleged, but unproven, fraud.(v) These developments raise an obvious question: Is this the future of the Republican Party? One way to answer this question is to ask another: What do Republican voters think about Trump and his claims of a stolen election? And more specifically, what other attitudes are most common among Republicans who most strongly believe the election was stolen and are most loyal in their support of Trump?

Republicans widely supported Trump both before and after the election,(vi) and Republicans also widely believe that the 2020 election was stolen.(vii) But we know less about which Republicans are most bought into the claim of a stolen election and which Republicans are most devoted to Trump.

A typical approach when answering questions such as these is to focus on specific and frequently binary polling questions, such as whether Republicans think of themselves as Trump Republicans or Party Republicans;(1) or whether Republicans believe Joe Biden fairly won the election or that Biden’s win was due to widespread fraud.(2) It’s important to keep in mind that any singular polling question misses the gradations of support or ambivalence.

In this analysis, I take a different approach. Using data from the Democracy Fund Voter Study Group VOTER Survey (Views of the Electorate Research Survey), I combine answers across numerous survey questions to generate various “scores” that reflect more complexity and diversity of attitudes among Republican voters. By averaging across multiple questions, we can see how deeply devoted some Republicans are to both the stolen election narrative and to Trump, as well as what other attitudes and outlooks are most prevalent among these devotees.

The results of this analysis confirm much of what many others have observed — Republican support for Trump and the stolen election narrative is broad but not universal. This variation among Republicans is important because it allows us to identify the characteristics of the most devout supporters and better understand the challenges the Republican Party faces in moving past the grievance politics of Trump and his acolytes.

This analysis shows Republicans most committed to both Trump and the narrative of election fraud also tend to have the highest levels of antipathy toward Democrats and toward immigrants, strongest belief that racism is not a problem, highest levels of nationalism, greatest support for traditional family values and gender roles, and strongest belief in a very limited role for government in the economy.

 

The ugliest part of the survey is that 46% of Republicans wanted GOP state legislatures to overturn election results in states Biden won, and another third of Republicans weren't happy about it but would have accepted it. There's a reason state legislative annulment is something both Georgia's and Florida's new election rigging laws allow, and something Texas's proposed law allows as a special legislative session in that state is expected soon. 

That's the plan in 2022 and 2024. Battleground states like Florida, Georgia, NC, Wisconsin, and Michigan are all vulnerable to this nonsense, and the problem of potential violence may be the worst in Michigan. 

As Michigan state Rep. Donna Lasinski got out of her car at the state Capitol in Lansing on a sunny morning last week, she was greeted by two people carrying what she described as assault rifles while protesters outside the building called for an audit of the 2020 election.

Such disconcerting encounters are not uncommon in Lansing — a reflection of persistent and growing tension gripping Michigan eight months after Joe Biden defeated President Donald Trump and more than a year after arrests were made in a plot to kidnap and kill Gov. Gretchen Whitmer.

Attacks on the integrity of the 2020 election have persisted in this state, where local county officials are contending with demands by some residents to review ballots for possible fraud. The mounting calls by Trump supporters to revisit the election results are creating a thorny dilemma for the state Republican Party, which has sought to fend off those efforts, even as GOP officials seek changes to election law.

On Wednesday, a Republican-controlled state Senate committee issued a report forcefully rejecting the claims of widespread fraud in the state, saying citizens should be confident in the results and skeptical of “those who have pushed demonstrably false theories for their own personal gain.”

The chairman of the Oversight Committee that produced the report, Sen. Ed McBroom, said in an accompanying letter that “at this point, I feel confident to assert the results of the Michigan election are accurately represented by the certified and audited results.”

But the report also recommended changes to the election system, providing fodder for Republican officials who — like their counterparts in other states — are seeking to pass strict new voting rules, hoping to use a quirk in state law to sidestep an expected veto from the Democratic governor.

Last week, a few hundred demonstrators carrying boxes of affidavits signed by thousands of people demanding a state ballot audit showed up at the Capitol. On Tuesday, a GOP legislator introduced a bill to start the audit process, although it so far does not have support among other lawmakers.

The drumbeat for audits has been accompanied by increasingly violent and vitriolic threats against state and local officials. The escalating rhetoric has left legislators from both parties lamenting what happened to the state that was home to moderate political consensus builders such as President Gerald Ford, governor George Romney and the late representative John Dingell.

As Lasinski, the House Democratic leader, walked to her office last week, speakers on the Capitol steps lambasted officials who have resisted requests to review last year’s ballots and asserted that the election was well-run and that Biden received more votes than Trump.

“They are lying,” said Matthew DePerno, a lawyer who is spearheading the petition drive. A small crowd cheered as he denounced Michigan’s secretary of state as a “tyrant” and the state’s Democratic governor as “the Fuhrer” and claimed that county clerks — many of them Republicans — had engaged in racketeering and conspiracy.

“These people have committed crimes,” he said.

“Put them in shackles,” shouted a man in the crowd, to whoops and applause.

Lasinski said the atmosphere has grown more fraught by the day.

“It seems we have become ground zero in this effort we see across the country to suppress democracy and deny the peaceful transfer of power,” she said.

DePerno did not respond to a request for comment.

 

Already this is a state where the feds had to break up a plot to kidnap Democratic Gov. Gretchen Whitmer by terrorists who wanted to force her to overturn the election, to kill her, or both.

The Big Lie, Con't

The Trump Insurrection Tour continues across the nation as The Former Guy™ can't stop fleecing his cultists, and the events are becoming a hotbed of possible violence drawing more and more fever-eyed fanatics out of the woodwork, as he continues to spread the Big Lie.

For a few hours last weekend, thousands of Donald Trump’s supporters came together in a field under the blazing Wisconsin sun to live in an alternate reality where the former president was still in office — or would soon return.

Clad in red MAGA hats and holding “Trump 2021” signs, they cheered in approval as Mike Lindell, the MyPillow creator-turned-conspiracy peddler, introduced “our real president.” Then Trump appeared via Jumbotron to repeat the lie that has become his central talking point since losing to Joe Biden by more than 7 million votes: “The election was rigged.”

Lindell later promised the audience that Trump would soon be reinstated into the presidency, a prospect for which there is no legal or constitutional method.

In the nearly five months since Trump’s presidency ended, similar scenes have unfolded in hotel ballrooms and other venues across the country. Attorney Lin Wood has told crowds that Trump is still president, while former national security adviser Michael Flynn went even further at a Dallas event by calling for a Myanmar-style military coup in the U.S. At the same conference, former Trump lawyer Sidney Powell suggested Trump could simply be reinstated and a new Inauguration Day set.

Taken together, the gatherings have gelled into a convention circuit of delusion centered on the false premise that the election was stolen. Lindell and others use the events to deepen their bond with legions of followers who eschew the mainstream press and live within a conservative echo chamber of talk radio and social media. In these forums, “evidence” of fraud is never fact-checked, leaving many followers genuinely convinced that Biden shouldn’t be president.

“We know that Biden’s a fraudulent president, and we want to be part of the movement to get him out,” said Donna Plechacek, 61, who traveled from Chippewa Falls, Wisconsin, with her sister for the event. “I know that they cheated the election. I have no doubt about that. The proof is there.”

State election officials, international observers, Trump’s own attorney general and dozens of judges — including many Trump appointed — have found no verifiable evidence of mass election fraud. Indeed, Trump’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency called the election “the most secure in American history” and concluded there was “no evidence that any voting system deleted or lost votes, changed votes, or was in any way compromised.”

But Plechacek is not alone. A recent Quinnipiac University poll found that two-thirds of Republicans, 66%, think Biden’s victory was not legitimate, while CNN found in April that 70% of Republicans do not think Biden won enough votes to be president. Half, 50%, said there is solid evidence to support that claim.

They are people like Deb Tulenchik and Galen Carlson from Pequot Lakes, Minnesota, who recalled the shock they felt after the election as Trump’s early election night lead faded as additional ballots were counted.

Thanks to the country’s polarization, many Trump supporters didn’t know anyone who voted for Biden and only saw Trump-Pence signs lining the roadways as they drove around their neighborhoods. Carlson, 61, said he went to bed believing Trump won. He didn’t heed warnings that mail-in votes take longer to count, so early returns would likely skew toward Trump, who urged his supporters to vote in person and not by mail.

“I was asleep early cause it looked like it was going to be a done deal. And then when we woke up I couldn’t believe it,” he said.

“Disbelief,” echoed Tulenchik, 63.

Trump spent months girding himself against possible defeat, insisting he could only lose if there was massive fraud. It’s a lie he’s sure to repeat as he steps up his public schedule in the coming weeks.

But the narrative was already resonating under the beating sun at the Wisconsin MAGA rally, where attendees came decked out in Trump gear, including plenty of shirts declaring, “Trump Won!”

 

The violence is coming. The only question is how widespread and how awful it will be, and how many people will be hurt or killed. No, I don't actually expect a full-fledged civil war at this point, but I do expect deadly political terrorism this summer that will quickly become a national nightmare.

 

The longer it takes for Trump to face indictments, the more he can foment insurrection and precipitate violence around the country. The plan is to make it impossible to indict him, because it will kick off a national terrorist movement, even if democracy, or what's left of it, is utterly destroyed in the process.

So far it's working.

The Manchin On The Hill, Con't

West Virginia Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin has finally come around to a compromise with his fellow Democrats on voting rights and election protection, in a package that he believes is fair, bipartisan, and historic.

The Senate GOP on Thursday took a big, huge steaming crap all over it and vowed to vote against it to a person.

 

Senate Republicans spent months praising Joe Manchin for his insistence on cross-party compromise. Next week they will almost surely end his hopes for a bipartisan deal on elections.

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell said he believed all 50 Republicans would oppose Sen. Manchin’s (D-W.Va.) slimmed-down elections compromise, which focuses on expanding early voting and ending partisan gerrymandering in federal elections. And it’s not clear there’s a single Republican vote to even begin debate on the matter, potentially dooming Manchin's proposals before they can even make it into the bill.

Both Sens. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) and Mitt Romney (R-Utah) said they would likely oppose a procedural vote next week that would bring Democrats’ massive elections reform bill to the Senate floor. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer said that the Senate could amend the bill to adopt Manchin’s changes. But Romney said supporting that strategy “doesn’t make a lot of sense to me" and Murkowski said “Joe hasn’t briefed me on any of this.”

“It needs to be blocked,” said Sen. Steve Daines (R-Mont.), who praised Manchin last week for “saving our country” in encouraging bipartisanship. “I’m not optimistic that they could make enough changes to that to make it a fair bill. It would usurp the rights of the states.”

The apparent blanket Republican opposition to bringing Democrats’ legislation to the floor and potentially amending it — as the Senate’s swingiest vote desires — moves the voting rights debate to a new phase. Schumer told Democrats at a Thursday caucus meeting that the vote on the elections bill will be Tuesday, June 22, according to a source familiar with the meeting. That bill will need 60 votes to proceed over a filibuster.

Manchin had long sought an approach that had input from Republicans and one that he could support, but it’s become apparent there is no road to a bipartisan compromise on election legislation. He said his opposition wasn’t just because there was no GOP support, but also because Democrats’ changes to help publicly finance elections, for example, went too far for him.

“They got confused thinking ‘the only reason you’re against it is because there’s no Republicans.’ That’s not it at all. I think it should be bipartisan. I think it’s a dangerous thing to do something that monumental” on party lines, Manchin said on Wednesday after he rolled out some of his changes. “The other thing is there were some things, being a former secretary of state and governor, that just didn’t make sense."

Murkowski has joined Manchin on a proposal to re-up the Voting Rights Act, but that legislation will wait until the fall. And that leaves Congress in a deadlock, infuriating progressives.

Manchin is also among a group of Democrats opposed to gutting the filibuster to install elections law changes, leaving no partisan road map either in a 50-50 Senate where Democrats would need every single vote to make changes on party lines. That group of filibuster-repeal skeptics may shrink after next week’s vote on the so-called For the People Act, with several Democrats saying the GOP’s rejection of that bill could change their minds.

Sen. Roy Blunt (R-Mo.), who has led the GOP opposition to the elections bill because of its federalized approach to state elections, said “every one of us works for opportunities to work with Sen. Manchin.” But he added that when “Stacey Abrams immediately endorsed Sen. Manchin’s proposal, it became the Stacey Abram’s substitute, not the Joe Manchin substitute.”

 

Understand that there is no package of federal election reforms that the GOP will vote for, because Republican will lose elections they cannot rig. Republicans don't want more people to vote. They want voting to be strictly limited to rich white folk who can afford to take the time off to go vote, and white senior citizens who have all the free time they need to vote Republican.

Everyone else can suffer in line for 10 hours.

To his credit, Manchin keeps proving time and time again that there is no compromise his Republican friends will accept. To his detriment, he seems to not have actually learned anything from wasting America's time proving something the rest of us already knew.

Where do we go from here? Well, like the January 6th commission, it'll get blocked next week, and we have nothing. Republicans won't be made to pay a price, because they can freely manipulate who can vote so that they don't have to.

I don't know what else Manchin wants, and since he'll never change his mind on the filibuster (and if he does miraculously, then all the power goes to Kyrsten Sinema who will play the same game) so at this point, I don't know what else we can do except watch our Republic get wiped out in 2022 and 2024 and permanent GOP control is phased in.

But hey, Manchin kept his morals, right?

Your Primary Consideration, Con't

The "first in the nation" primary war for 2024 has now been declared in earnest as Nevada enters the fray to take on Iowa and New Hampshire.

Democratic Gov. Steve Sisolak on Friday signed a law that would make Nevada the first state to vote in the 2024 presidential primary contests, bumping Iowa and New Hampshire from their leadoff spots.

Signing the law is a gamble.

It’s likely to set off maneuvering by other states, especially Iowa and New Hampshire, to move up their contests. The national political parties would need to agree to changes in the calendar, or state parties could risk losing their delegates at presidential nominating conventions.

The Democratic National Committee has not yet signaled whether it would support the calendar shakeup and isn’t expected to start writing rules for its nominating process until next year. Republicans in four early presidential nominating states this week all jointly opposed the move, saying they’re committed to preserving the historic schedule.

Democrats in Nevada, including former Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, launched the push this year to boost their state after the 2020 primary contest left members of the party questioning the process. They noted Iowa’s problem-plagued caucuses and the fact that the two traditional early states are overwhelmingly white, unlike Nevada.

Before he went on to win his party’s nomination, President Joe Biden performed poorly in Iowa’s caucuses and New Hampshire’s primary. In Nevada, with a much more racially diverse population that mirrors the U.S. as a whole, he finished second.

That gave Biden momentum heading into South Carolina’s primary, which then catapulted him to a string of Super Tuesday victories.

The new law changes Nevada’s contest from a party-run, in-person caucus meeting to a government-run primary election. Democrats nationally started shifting away from caucuses to primaries before 2020, citing the difficulty of attending an in-person meeting and the fiddly math involved to determine who wins the most delegates.

The law will require the presidential primary to be held on the first Tuesday in February in a presidential election year.

 

So now begins the behind-the-scenes maneuvering, where both the Dems and the GOP come to an agreement with the other early states: NH, IA, SC, and increasingly, Texas, Florida, and California, who all want to decide primary winners well before Valentine's Day. 

Of course, if the horse race for the conventions is decided six months before the actual convention, that doesn't leave much of a race to cover for the media. An agreement on a national primary day for all 50 states and all territories and ex-pats would be the actual solution people are looking for, but of course that will never happen.

Well, at least until the fighting gets so bad it does. Or, you know, we lose our democracy to fascism. Hey, at least we're finally getting rid of caucuses. That's actually progress.

It's About Suppression, Con't

Attorney General Merrick Garland on Friday announced a major new Justice Department initiative to take on GOP voter suppression efforts across the country as the Biden administration gears up to fight the Big Lie.

Attorney General Merrick Garland announced the Justice Department will aggressively fight efforts to restrict voting rights nationwide following a blitz of new voting restrictions in Republican-led states that stem from former President Donald Trump's lies that widespread fraud helped Joe Biden win the presidential election. 

In a speech Friday, Garland outlined a number of steps the Justice Department will take to protect every citizen's right to vote, and within the next 30 days said the department will double the number of employees in the Civil Rights Division's "enforcement staff for protecting the right to vote." 

"There are many things that are open to debate in America. But the right of all eligible citizens to vote is not one of them. The right to vote is the cornerstone of our democracy, the right from which all other rights ultimately flow," Garland said to a room of prosecutors inside the Justice Department's Great Hall. 

The Justice Department, he said, will examine new restrictive voting laws across the country and take action against any "violations." 

As Arizona's problem-ridden audit has inspired Republicans elsewhere to push for reviews in their own states, Garland said DOJ will analyze post-election audits, "to ensure they abide by federal statutory requirements to protect election records and avoid the intimidation of voters." 

Garland said that since 2013 when the Supreme Court decided that portions of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 were no longer valid, "there has been a dramatic rise in legislative efforts that will make it harder for millions of citizens to cast a ballot that counts." 

This year alone, 14 states have passed controversial voting right laws "and some jurisdictions, based on disinformation, have utilized abnormal post-election audit methodologies that may put the integrity of the voting process at risk and undermine public confidence in our democracy," Garland said. 

By increasing the Civil Rights Division's staff, Garland said "we will use all existing provisions of the Voting Rights Act, the National Voter Registration Act, the Help America Vote Act, and the Uniformed and Overseas Citizens Absentee Voting Act to ensure that we protect every qualified American seeking to participate in our democracy." 

Garland emphasized a commitment to protecting Black voters and other voters of color, and said the department will "scrutinize current laws and practices" to discern whether Black voters and other voters of color have been discriminated against, including when it comes to the amount of time Black voters and other voters of color wait in polling lines compared to white voters. 

The department will put out "guidance with respect to early voting and voting by mail," Garland said, and, "the voting protections that apply to all jurisdictions as they redraw their legislative maps," as states begin the redistricting process ahead of the 2022 midterm elections, Garland said. 

While he said the Justice Department is not waiting on legislation, Garland reaffirmed the Biden administration's vision for the passage of S1, called the For the People Act, as well as the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act. 

According to Garland, the "For the People Act," the Democratic-backed voting rights bill "would provide the Department with the tools it needs," to preserve voting rights.

 

Good. It's time to go on the offensive, staff up the Civil Rights Division, and start suing the hell out of Republican states for voter suppression.  We need to tie them up for months, if not years.

And yes, I know this means heading for a certain defeat in the Roberts court before 2024, which is the trap being laid. But it won't matter if the GOP wins back Congress in 2022, because the game will be up.

I like this fight. Let's have it.

Last Call For The Big Lie, Con't

Trump cultists are threatening to kill election officials nationwide over the Big Lie, and because their Orange God-Emperor will never be declared Maximum Leader, we are going to see a mass casualty terrorist event slash political assassination, and soon.

Late on the night of April 24, the wife of Georgia’s top election official got a chilling text message: “You and your family will be killed very slowly.”

A week earlier, Tricia Raffensperger, wife of Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, had received another anonymous text: “We plan for the death of you and your family every day.”

That followed an April 5 text warning. A family member, the texter told her, was “going to have a very unfortunate incident.”

Those messages, which have not been previously reported, illustrate the continuing barrage of threats and intimidation against election officials and their families months after former U.S. President Donald Trump’s November election defeat. While reports of threats against Georgia officials emerged in the heated weeks after the voting, Reuters interviews with more than a dozen election workers and top officials – and a review of disturbing texts, voicemails and emails that they and their families received – reveal the previously hidden breadth and severity of the menacing tactics.

Trump’s relentless false claims that the vote was “rigged” against him sparked a campaign to terrorize election officials nationwide – from senior officials such as Raffensperger to the lowest-level local election workers. The intimidation has been particularly severe in Georgia, where Raffensperger and other Republican election officials refuted Trump’s stolen-election claims. The ongoing harassment could have far-reaching implications for future elections by making the already difficult task of recruiting staff and poll workers much harder, election officials say.

In an exclusive interview, Tricia Raffensperger spoke publicly for the first time about the threats of violence to her family and shared the menacing text messages with Reuters.

The Raffenspergers – Tricia, 65, and Brad, 66 – began receiving death threats almost immediately after Trump’s surprise loss in Georgia, long a Republican bastion. Tricia Raffensperger started taking precautions. She canceled regular weekly visits in her home with two grandchildren, ages 3 and 5 – the children of her eldest son, Brenton, who died from a drug overdose in 2018.

“I couldn’t have them come to my house anymore,” she said. “You don’t know if these people are actually going to act on this stuff.”

In late November, the family went into hiding for nearly a week after intruders broke into the home of the Raffenspergers’ widowed daughter-in-law, an incident the family believed was intended to intimidate them. That evening, people who identified themselves to police as Oath Keepers – a far-right militia group that has supported Trump’s bid to overturn the election – were found outside the Raffenspergers’ home, according to Tricia Raffensperger and two sources with direct knowledge of the family’s ordeal. Neither incident has been previously reported.

“Brad and I didn’t feel like we could protect ourselves,” she said, explaining the decision to flee their home.

Brad Raffensperger told Reuters in a statement that “vitriol and threats are an unfortunate, but expected, part of public service. But my family should be left alone.”

Trump’s baseless voter-fraud accusations have had dark consequences for U.S. election leaders and workers, especially in contested states such as Georgia, Arizona and Michigan. Some have faced protests at their homes or been followed in their cars. Many have received death threats.

Some, like Raffensperger, are senior officials who publicly refused to bow to Trump’s demands to alter the election outcome. In Georgia, people went into hiding in at least three cases, including the Raffenspergers. Arizona Secretary of State Katie Hobbs, a Democrat, told Reuters she continues to receive death threats. Michigan’s Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson – a Democrat who faced armed protesters outside her home in December – is also still getting threats, her spokesperson said, declining to elaborate.

 

There's really no doubt that an attempt will be made (or several attempts) will be made on the lives of US election officials nationwide, but rather, when, and how successful they will be. I would hope that state and federal law enforcement are investigating right now to prevent a tragedy from happening. I expect that like the plot to kidnap and murder Michigan Democratic Gov. Gretchen Whitmer last year, we'll get wind of these plots being stopped soon.

It's better of course than the alternative, that the plots were carried out.

The bigger problem is that Trump's Big lie is going to get people hurt or even killed soon, and when it happens, Trump needs to be held responsible.