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minority rule

PRIMARY 7 25 TEXAS MIDTERM REDISTR GERRY

hmmn see lie power any means

filibuster

gerry

dirty tricks

see fascism authoritarian, eventally violence needed to beat down resistance to vast inequality

see electoral college

see senate

see mcconn court judge stack pack aileen cannon kaczmarik pill

see voter suppression election integrity BS illegal alien

see propositions

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AN 1 26

NO LNX

Inside the GOP plot to end America as we know it

Thom Hartmann January 05, 2026

It’s not just a brand new year; it’s a midterm election year. And the stakes this coming November are mind-boggling, so, of course, Republicans are starting to do everything they can to rig the election.

Just a week ago, for example, Trump’s Postal Service changed the rules about getting your mail-in ballot postmarked so it’ll be counted. Instead of postmarking letters when they’re received, Post Offices will now postmark them when they get “processed,” which may happen days later.

In the 2024 presidential election, the feds estimated that around 104,000 mail-in ballots nationwide weren’t counted because they were postmarked late; with this change, the number this fall and for 2028 could be in the millions.

Meanwhile, Republican secretaries of state are enthusiastically purging voters from the rolls as they get ready for this fall. Remember, reporter and economist Greg Palast found, using official federal and state numbers, that in 2024:

Kamala Harris“Trump lost. That is, if all legal voters were allowed to vote, if all legal ballots were counted, Trump would have lost the states of Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Georgia. Vice-President would have won the Presidency with 286 electoral votes.“And, if not for the mass purge of voters of color, if not for the mass disqualification of provisional and mail-in ballots, if not for the new mass “vigilante” challenges in swing states, Harris would have gained at least another 3,565,000 votes, topping Trump’s official popular vote tally by 1.2 million.”

You’d think we each have a right to vote, rather than voting being just a privilege that Republican-controlled states could take away in dozens of different ways.

Supreme Court Republicans on the ruled, for example, that we have a right to own a gun. As a result, before a state or local government can take away your gun, they must first go before a judge to prove the necessity of doing so.

But, Republicans on the Court tell us, Republican secretaries of state can eliminate your right to vote without even telling you; how does that make sense?

14th Amendment After all, the to the Constitution references “the right to vote at any election” and even says that any state that violates that right shall lose members of its congressional delegation as punishment.

The 19th Amendment references “The right of citizens of the United States to vote…”

The 24th Amendment starts, “The right of citizens of the United States to vote…”

The 26th Amendment is all about, “The right of citizens of the United States, who are eighteen years of age or older, to vote…”

ConstitutionAdditionally, the , in Article I, Section 4, says that Congress can make federal laws that overrule state laws restricting or regulating voting:

“The Times, Places and Manner of holding Elections for Senators and Representatives, shall be prescribed in each State by the Legislature thereof; but the Congress may at any time by Law make or alter such Regulations…”

And, sure enough, Congress did just that in 1993 when it passed the National Voter Registration Act (NVRA), sometimes referred to as the Motor Voter Act because, among other things, it provided for the option of instant voter registration when a person gets a driver’s license in every state in the union.

Now known as 52 U.S. Code § 20501, this law of the land opens with:

The Congress finds that -(1) the right of citizens of the United States to vote is a fundamental right

(2) it is the duty of the Federal, State, and local governments to promote the exercise of that right and

(3) discriminatory and unfair registration laws and procedures can have a direct and damaging effect on voter participation in elections for Federal office and disproportionately harm voter participation by various groups, including racial minorities.

And it wasn’t a particularly contentious law when it was passed: every Democrat present in the Senate voted for it (Rockefeller missed the vote) as did all but two Republicans.

So how did we get from the Constitution repeatedly asserting a “right to vote” and Congress passing a law that unambiguously proclaims that right, to the current state of affairs where states regularly and methodically deprive citizens of their “right” to vote and instead claim that it’s merely a privilege?

As I lay out in The Hidden History of the War On Voting, much of the blame rests with the most conservative and regressive of our federal institutions, the Supreme Court.

The first real test of the NVRA came in 2018, when Ohio’s Republican Secretary of State, John Husted, went on a voter-purge binge (that hit Black, student, and elderly neighborhoods particularly hard) and was sued by the A. Phillip Randolph Institute for violating Ohio citizens’ constitutional right to vote.

In a bitter 5-4 decision, the Republican majority ruled in Husted v Randolph that purging voters because they failed to return a junk-mail-like postcard was entirely legal.

It’s a practice that was called “caging” back when Karl Rove’s guy was allegedly doing it and it was illegal then but has, since that Court ruling, spread to pretty much every Republican-controlled state in the nation.

They’ll identify a part of the state that they consider particularly “prone to fraud“ — in other words, filled with a lot of Black and brown people — and mail postcards that look like junk mail into those precincts. When people failed to return them, they are automatically removed from the voting rolls. In most cases they don’t even know they’ve been purged until they show up to vote and are turned away.

Justice Samuel Alito’s decision was particularly biting, claiming that the arguments made by the citizens who’d lost their right to vote were “worse than superfluous” and their argument that they shouldn’t have to regularly check in with the Secretary of State’s office to stay on the voter rolls represented logic “no sensible person” could agree with.

Sensible or not, in his dissent, liberal Justice Stephen Breyer pointed out that around 4 percent of Americans move every year. Yet, he wrote:

“The record shows that in 2012 Ohio identified about 1.5 million registered voters — nearly 20 percent of its 8 million registered voters — as likely ineligible to remain on the federal voter roll....”

Justice Sonia Sotomayor’s dissent was even more scathing.

“Congress enacted the NVRA against the backdrop of substantial efforts by States to disenfranchise low-income and minority voters,” she wrote, “including programs that purged eligible voters from registration lists because they failed to vote in prior elections.“The Court errs in ignoring this history and distorting the statutory text to arrive at a conclusion that not only is contrary to the plain language of the NVRA but also contradicts the essential purposes of the statute, ultimately sanctioning the very purging that Congress expressly sought to protect against.”

She then quoted the “right to vote” NVRA preamble noted above, and, essentially, accused the conservatives on the Court of helping Republicans in the states they controlled engage in massive racial and economic discrimination in the voting process.

“[This decision] entirely ignores the history of voter suppression against which the NVRA was enacted and upholds a program that appears to further the very disenfranchisement of minority and low-income voters that Congress set out to eradicate. … Our democracy rests on the ability of all individuals, regardless of race, income, or status, to exercise their right to vote.”

The “right to vote” took another hit when the State of Florida’s Supreme Court ordered a recount of the 2000 presidential election but five Republicans on the US Supreme Court ignored the 10th Amendment (“states’ rights”) and stopped the recount.

That was a good thing for George W. Bush because when the Florida vote was later recounted by a consortium of newspapers including the New York Times and the Washington Post, they found, as the Times noted on Nov. 12, 2001:

“If all the ballots had been reviewed under any of seven single standards and combined with the results of an examination of overvotes, Mr. Gore would have won...”

Nonetheless, Chief Justice William Rehnquist dismissed all the nation’s concerns about the Court flipping the 2000 presidential election in that totally partisan 5-4 decision, writing in his opinion:

“[T]he individual citizen has no federal constitutional right to vote for electors for the President of the United States.”

Which casts us in a pretty terrible light. As Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-MD) points out:

“The constitutions of at least 135 nations — including our fellow North American countries, Canada and Mexico — explicitly guarantee citizens the right to vote…”

Instead, Raskin notes, because of five corrupt Republicans on the US Supreme Court we’re in the company of countries like Azerbaijan, Chechnya, Indonesia, Iran, Libya, and Pakistan.

Republicans are pushing a full-blown authoritarian agenda and they know it’s so unpopular that the only way they can get it through is to suppress the vote and thus rig the system.

That’s why they’ve already successfully passed previously-unthinkable major voter suppression laws in 18 states and have them pending in many more. They’ve changed the law in Georgia and several other states so that they can now throw out the votes from entire neighborhoods or cities where they don’t like the outcome; all they have to do is vaguely assert a “suspicion of fraud.”

Between the massive gerrymandering effort the GOP has launched nationwide and the Post Office’s changes that’ll hit Blue states with high levels of mail-in voting (some only have mail-in voting), the next few elections are going to be a real challenge for Democrats.

Additionally, as you’re reading these words, millions of voters are being purged from the rolls in Red states, particularly in Blue cities with significant minority populations.

As a result, this fall we’re going to have to show up in absolutely overwhelming numbers just to get squeaker victories in these now-heavily-rigged Republican-controlled states.

Unless enough of us stand up, speak up, and get active to regain control of Congress this fall and push legislation protecting American voters, Republicans will continue to eviscerate the voting right they’ve now turned into a privilege until it becomes completely meaningless.

And that will signal the end of America as we know it.

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REF PPL WORLD

NEW YORK—The Trump administration and its radical right foot-soldiers in the federal government and in the states are undertaking a comprehensive scheme to undermine future state and federal elections, in effect rigging the rolls to keep themselves in power no matter what the voters decide.

So far, other than the report itself, by the Brennan Center for Law and Justice at New York University, there’s been little—or little-noticed—response.

The comprehensive scheme is detailed in a combination of a Trump executive order on March 25 and the notorious SAVE Act, a GOP voter repression law that would disenfranchise at least 21 million people, most of them women—the voters most likely to oppose the Trump-right-wing-corporate agenda.

Detailed and footnoted protests were aired by the Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) to the GOP-run House Administration Committee and by the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights—whose members include the AFL-CIO—to the GOP-run Senate Rules and Administration Committee.

And states have gone to court to try to block Trump, the Brennan Center adds.

“A president has no right to rewrite the country’s election rules or regulate federal elections on his own,” the center’s report says.

“As a federal court recently put it, ‘The Constitution vests none of these powers in the president.’ In issuing the order, the president claimed extraordinary unilateral authority to regulate federal elections and usurp the powers of Congress, the states, and the (U.S.) Elections Administration Commission, an independent, bipartisan federal agency.”

Protecting U.S. elections, at all levels, from partisan manipulation, is now and has been for more than a century, important to workers, union, and non-union.

One, as AFL-CIO President Liz Shuler often points out, is that the GOP Trump regime views organized labor as a key roadblock to its partisan and repressive agenda. And the best way to crush labor is to crush workers’ right to vote.

And, second, and just as important, restricting who can vote, and who cannot, centralizes power in the hands not just of Trump but of the corporate interests that back him and who turn a blind eye—or worse–to repression both at the workplace and at the ballot box.

After all, paraphrasing the late UAW President Walter Reuther, what is won at the bargaining table can be taken away by the stroke of a pen.

The elements in the right wing’s coordinated attempt to entrench itself in power go far beyond what Trump tried in the aftermath of the 2020 presidential election. Trump lost it to Democratic nominee Joe Biden, and knew it. But he tried to overturn the results in lawsuits and other intimidation in selected swing states—and went 0-for-62 in court cases.

When that failed, he turned to aiding and abetting the Jan. 6, 2021, Trumpite invasion, insurrection, and attempted coup d’etat at the U.S. Capitol.

But now the Trump right-wing playbook to undermine and rig coming elections is much more extensive and much more under the radar, the Brennan Center reports. It includes:

Leaves out one key tactic

The Brennan report leaves out one tactic of Trump, the MAGAites and the right-wing: Stacking state and local elections boards. An attempt occurred in Nevada, a swing state in 2020 and 2024. And after the four-member, evenly split Wayne County, Mich. (Detroit) elections board voted 3-1 to certify Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden’s margin there in 2020, Michigan MAGAites forced the Republican commissioner who voted for certification out of office.

“Why do we conclude this represents a concerted strategy? Among other things, President Trump tried to do this before,” the Brennan Center points out. “He was the first president to try to overturn the results of a presidential election and used federal power to do so.

“Institutions and key officials blocked him. These internal checks, however, are now gone, and many public officials will likely carry out the president’s will.

“This campaign to undermine elections runs afoul of the U.S. Constitution. Only Congress and the states can set election rules. The executive branch, especially the Department of Justice (DOJ), is charged with enforcing federal laws. But neither the president nor the DOJ has the authority to set rules governing elections or to supervise” state elections procedures.

Yet Trump is trying just that. And, as CREW and the Brennan Center point out, the misnamed SAVE Act, a key goal of the House’s ruling right-wing Republicans, would aid and abet that campaign. Other specifics include:

Trump, in a March 25 executive order, and the GOP congressional majority, in the SAVE Act, say doing so would prevent “voter fraud,” which even Trump’s last Attorney General in his first term, Bill Barr, called non-existent. But “show your papers” mandates, using a citizenship document to even register to vote, “would undermine voting and disrupt election administration in multiple respects.”

Estimates are that the mandate, the SAVE Act, or both, would disenfranchise at least 21 million voters nationwide. Most of them would be women, whose names on their initial voter registrations are different from the name they now use.

There are also bans on unauthorized access to voting machines and equipment. The result of violating them is to toss the machines—and the votes they count—out. Tina Peters, former county clerk in rural “red” Mesa County, Colo., is now serving a 9-year term in prison for allowing Trumpite election deniers access to her county’s machines after the 2020 balloting. She was convicted last year.

That kind of retaliation could target both unions and their get-out-the-vote drives and groups such as the Poor People’s Campaign, which registers and mobilizes poor and low-wealth people—the very voters least likely to participate, but also the most likely to oppose the Trumpite, right-wing and corporate hegemony.

Reports likely targets

The Brennan Center reports likely targets for “law enforcement” type retaliation would include individual voters, election officials, “perceived political adversaries, and journalists.” The last two groups of targets have been GOP targets before: On Richard Nixon’s enemies list. Labor leaders—AFSCME President Jerry Wurf and UAW President Leonard Woodcock—were on it, too.

Trump’s FBI Director Kash Patel “stated ‘We’re going to come after the people in the media who lied about American citizens, who helped Joe Biden rig presidential elections–we’re going to come after you,’” the Brennan Center adds.

The Brennan Center reports three active task forces leading that retaliation: The Justice Department’s “Weaponization Working Group, the New Jersey U.S. Attorney’s Office Election Integrity Task Force, and the Washington, D.C., Attorney’s Office Special Unit.

“The administration could abuse voter file access to claim fraud and erode public trust in elections,” the Brennan Center warns. “It could also pressure state officials to target groups of voters and carry out unwarranted voter purges. Any disclosure of sensitive personal information puts individuals and groups at risk of being intimidated or doxed. And mishandling voter file data could expose U.S. elections to political and foreign interference.”

“Criminal investigations and prosecutions would impose a severe personal and financial toll on election officials or nonprofit employees for simply doing their jobs to help keep elections free and fair. But beyond that, the harms that stem from targeting the officials and civil society groups that make our elections work are manifold,” the Brennan Center report says.

“Even if the administration never charges any officials, the threat alone of criminal investigation or prosecution will likely exacerbate the exodus of election officials. In 2024 33% of local election officials knew at least one colleague who resigned at least in part due to fear for their safety, of increased threats, or of intimidation; 21% stated they were unlikely to continue serving in their role for the 2026 midterms. In 2025, 59% of officials reported fear of political interference in their ability to do their jobs. And 46% were very or somewhat concerned about potential politically motivated investigations of themselves and their families.”

One solution: Sue for damages. The Brennan Center reports “federal and state law prohibit anyone, including federal officials, from intimidating voters and those, like election officials or civic engagement organizations, who assist or encourage them to vote. And though voters rarely do so, they are able to sue DOJ officials under anti-intimidation law in federal court.”

“The Constitution establishes a system of checks and balances to ensure free and fair elections. The power to regulate elections lies in the hands of states and Congress. Courts and advocates complement this system to uphold the Constitution and federal law,” the Brennan Center declares.

“U.S. election infrastructure leaves no room for the president to insert himself. Yet that is exactly what he purports to do.”

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AN 7 25

Six years after Trump demanded Geogia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger “find” him enough votes to win in 2020, Republicans are still trying to find him votes.

“Now, he’s calling on Texas Republicans to find five congressional seats — before a single vote is cast in the 2026 midterms. And the GOP is answering that call,” said MSNBC co-host Symone Sanders Townsend.

Townsend referenced Texas Republicans proposing a heavily gerrymandered congressional map this week that gives Republicans control of 30 out of 38 House seats, despite 42 percent of the state voting for Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris in 2024.

READ MORE: 'Buyouts': Trump’s mass layoffs are costing taxpayers a fortune — here’s why

If enacted, Townsend said the Republican map would “erase Democratic power in one of the most diverse states in the nation.”

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“We’ve seen this kind of maneuver before,” said Townsend. “After the 2010 tea party wave election, Republicans launched a nationwide campaign called the Redistricting Majority Project (REDMAP) to win control of state legislatures ahead of the 2011 redistricting cycle. That effort paid off. Republicans gerrymandered themselves into durable congressional majorities in states like North Carolina, Ohio and Wisconsin. A decade later, we’re still living with the consequences.”

The map, she said, “slices up Black and Latino communities,” particularly in urban centers like Dallas and Houston and gives an advantage to a white population that only comprises about 40 percent of the state’s population. The Texas Tribune reportsat least 54 percent of lawmakers were white in 2023, and half are white men.

“Now, Trump is attempting a mid-decade REDMAP 2.0 in Texas, a state that already had one of the most gerrymandered congressional maps in the country and has a long history of using racial gerrymandering to suppress voters of color,” Townsend said.

READ MORE: 'You guys made this happen': Dems find a way to stick it to a furious GOP

This is part of a broader Republican Party strategy, said Townsend, which targets not only congressional maps but also state legislative lines.

“And that matters, because America’s policy doesn’t begin in Washington,” she said. “It starts in state capitols. Bathroom bills. Book bans. Voter roll purgers. Attacks on trans children. These policies are born in Republican-controlled legislatures and then bubble up to the national level.”

She added that Republicans know this, and "have been playing the long game," unlike Democrats

The public is already fighting back with hundreds of protestors showing up at redistricting hearings in Texas this week, but Townsend said Democrats need to get serious about investing in and flipping state seats or they could “lose a fair shot at the House not just in 2026, but until 2032. A full decade of minority rule.”

READ MORE: Behind the real reason Americans voted for Trump

Read the full MSNBC report at this link.

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slate

no lnx

On Wednesday, Sen. Mitch McConnell announced that he will not seek another term as leader of the Senate Republicans, stepping down from the post (though not his seat) in January 2025. McConnell will leave a legacy of extreme obstruction, having pioneered new ways to paralyze the upper chamber in an effort to stymie Democratic legislation. He also regularly kowtowed to Donald Trump, even voting to acquit the former president following his impeachment trial over the Jan. 6 insurrection. But McConnell’s most indelible mark on history is likely to be his fixation on stacking the courts with far-right ideologues, thus fundamentally refashioning the federal judiciary in the image of the modern Republican Party.

On a new episode of Amicus, Dahlia Lithwick and Mark Joseph Stern discussed the wrecking ball that McConnell took to the independent federal judiciary and its enduring impact on American democracy and civil rights. Their conversation has been condensed and edited for clarity.

Dahlia Lithwick: Can we talk about Mitch McConnell for a minute? He announced that he’s stepping down as the leader of Senate Republicans in the near future.

Mark Joseph Stern: What was your first reaction when you heard the news?

My first reaction was that I hate this timeline so much. It’s the timeline where we have to miss Rep. Kevin McCarthy because the person who followed him was, as sure as night follows day, vastly crazier. That’s how I feel about McConnell. This is the person who singlehandedly did more to destroy Senate norms of comity and respect, to help Donald Trump evade accountability, and to steal and pack the Supreme Court with people who should not be sitting on the court. And still, in this moment, we’re going to have to thank him for respecting the vestigial norms that he did and not being an utter sociopath each and every day. Because the person who follows him will be worse.

I’ll add that, in my view, no one has done more to destroy the federal judiciary than Mitch McConnell. This is the guy who, under Obama, decided to block as many judicial nominations as possible, for no reason other than to leave the seats open so Trump could come in and fill them. This is the guy who violated every known norm to hold open Justice Antonin Scalia’s seat, ostensibly because it came open in an election year, only to fill Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s seat when people were already voting in the 2020 election. I think he made a lot of Americans wake up and realize that this was all Calvinball, that he had no principles to begin with.

But even more than that, Mitch McConnell was the guy who realized you don’t need to win elections to enact Republican policy. You don’t need to change hearts and minds. You don’t need to push ballot initiatives or win over the views of the people. All you have to do is stack the courts. You only need 51 votes in the Senate to stack the courts with far-right partisan activists like Aileen Cannon and Matthew Kacsmaryk. And they will enact Republican policies under the guise of judicial review, policies that could never pass through the democratic process. And those policies will be bulletproof, because they will be called “law,” and Democrats will need at least a century to win back the courts.

Anyone who believes in an independent judiciary with any integrity should loathe McConnell to their bones.

I want to add that McConnell, for so many reasons, stands out as somebody who knew exactly who Donald Trump was, exactly what happened on Jan. 6, exactly what his responsibility was in that moment. And he didn’t do it. He normalized the idea that you can mumble stuff and do nothing. Then we all live with the consequences. He made it easier for whoever follows him to do even less. And now he’s being praised as some elder statesman? Really? He’s totally morally bankrupt. The only silver lining, Mark, is that whoever follows him will not be as good as him at this crap.

Related From Slate

Jim Newell

Why Mitch McConnell Is Really Stepping Down in November

Read More

I agree. Under Trump, McConnell built the most impressive and efficient judicial confirmation machine ever seen. He really helped to keep the broader Republican Party and conservative movement behind Trump by saying, “don’t worry, we’re still getting all the right judges!” He pushed them through at a record clip. Aileen Cannon, the judge thwarting Trump’s trial over the Mar-a-Lago documents, was confirmed after the 2020 election, when Trump had already lost! This went on right up until the end. And I don’t think his successor will match those heights, even if he or she isn’t quite as loony as we’re speculating. Think about how much Joe Biden and his team have struggled to match the number of confirmations that Trump and McConnell achieved. They can’t do it. We may have passed peak efficiency for judicial confirmations under any president.

But is that anything to celebrate? McConnell’s successor will still scrape and strive to get crazy people on the bench. And sure, they might get 20 percent fewer judges through, because they won’t have the same ruthless efficiency. But Republicans will take that deal, because it only takes one insane district court judge to thwart an entire presidency.

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AN 3 125

As Americans face the reality of President Donald Trump's second term and the mass firings, takeover of federal agencies by billionaire mogul Elon Musk, and looming trade war that have come with it, the direct democracy advocacy group Fairness Project warned of a "major attack" on voters' rights taking place at the state level across the country.

While many in the U.S. have been focused on the actions of the Trump administration, said the group in a Thursday statement, legislators in over 15 states have introduced more than 100 bills to stop citizen-led initiatives from being placed on ballots in upcoming elections—and to stop them from becoming law even if a majority of voters support the measures.

"We're sounding the alarm: Direct democracy is being threatened right under our noses," said Kelly Hall, executive director of the Fairness Project. "Ballot measures have been a lifeline to working people in red and purple states, allowing them to make change even when politicians fail to represent their interests. Legislators are trying to systematically take that power away."

The Fairness Project has supported dozens of successful ballot measure campaigns to expand healthcare access, raise minimum wages, and win paid time off policies for roughly 18 million people across the country.

The group was the biggest funder of abortion rights ballot measures in the last election cycle, working to ensure campaigners in Missouri and Arizona collected enough signatures to get questions about expanding abortion rights on ballots. Both ballot initiatives were approved by voters in November.

The Fairness Project was also involved in a 2023 campaign to stop a Republican-backed measure in Ohio that would have required a 60% supermajority to pass any future constitutional amendments.

In six of the states currently pushing attacks on ballot measures—Oklahoma, Arizona, Missouri, North Dakota, South Dakota, and Idaho—Republicans are making similar attempts to raise the threshold for passing ballot measures from a simple majority to 60%.

If they succeed in passing the proposals, said the Fairness Project, the GOP will be "effectively enacting minority rule."

Lawmakers are also advancing bills that would apply onerous signature requirements to the ballot measure process.

In Florida, Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis' proposed changes to ballot initiative laws include requiring individual voters to complete a petition in person at an election office or by mail in order to express support for a measure, instead of allowing sponsors to pay workers to collect signatures in public.

"They want to kill the process," Angelo Paparella, president of a group that has run several petition drives in the state, toldAxioslast month.

The Arkansas state Senate this month passed several bills regulating how citizen-led initiatives make it onto ballots, including one requiring canvassers to request a photo ID from signers; one requiring potential signers to read the ballot title of a petition or have it read aloud to them; and one requiring canvassers to file an affidavit certifying they complied with state law when collecting signatures.

"This is their playbook: When cowardly politicians know they can't win with voters on the issues, they try to change the rules of the game," Hall said Thursday.

Earlier this week, Mississippi voters once again lost out on the chance to place measures on statewide ballots, which was permitted in the state until the state Supreme Court struck down the ballot initiative process in 2021.

Lawmakers allowed a proposal to partially restore the process to die ahead of a legislative deadline.

"This means voters still have no direct way to propose new state laws, to change state laws, or to change the Constitution," reported Taylor Vance of Mississippi Today.

Hall said the Fairness Project will continue fighting attacks on representative direct democracy nationwide.

"Voters are paying attention to this widespread attack on their constitutional rights, and they're fighting back," said Hall. "Americans deserve leaders who respect our democracy."

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MASTER PLAN Bonus: The Other Memo

in this exclusive MASTER PLANbonus episode, Lever Timeproducer Arjun Singh and investigative journalist David Daley discuss the rise of the conservative legal movement, including anotherlittle-known memo responsible for the emergence of right-wing groups like the Federalist Society.

Nearly a decade after the Powell memo was published, conservative legal activist Michael Horowitz was commissioned by the right-leaning Scaife Foundation to develop a ground-up strategy for enshrining conservative ideology into law. In his 1980 report, Horowitz recommended recruiting and empowering young conservative minds on law school campuses. By “captur[ing] youthful loyalties,” he argued, conservatives could “redefine what is moral in law.”

Horowitz also pressed for a rebranding of the ideological right, noting “the very decline in power of the American business community over the last decade… is perhaps the best evidence that the skills in the business community are not well correlated with the skills involved in generating idealism and enlisting the intellectual loyalties of bright young men and women.”

These writings would become the foundation of the Federalist Society, which used the strategy laid out in Horowitz’s memo to recruit and advance the next generation of conservative legal minds — including six of nine justices who currently sit on the U.S. Supreme Court.

This episode and transcript are available for paid subscribers only.**Click here to upgrade now**.

If you’re already a paid subscriber, you can access the materials below. If you don’t see the content, please click here to log in and reload this page.

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Bonus Episode Transcript

DAVID SIROTA:Hey MASTER PLAN listeners — first off, thanks for being a paid subscriber. Your support makes this project possible, and funds all of our investigative work at The Lever. Please enjoy this exclusive bonus episode for paying subscribers.

In MASTER PLANEpisode 7, you may remember hearing about the rise of the Federalist Society as the group worked in the early 2000s to expand its network of lawyers and launch a conservative takeover of the federal courts.

As part of our research for MASTER PLAN,we spoke with an expert on the right-wing legal movement’s expansion — David Daley, author of *Antidemocratic: Inside the Far Right's Fifty-Year Plot to Control American Elections.

You’ve learned about the Powell Memo — but what you haven’t heard about is the other secret memo directly responsible for the rise of conservative legal groups like the Federalist Society, the Heritage Foundation, and more. This memo, written by right-wing scholar Michael Horowitz, called for a guerilla-style ideological takeover of law schools across the country and a ‘ground-up’ approach to building support for Big Business.

For the Lever Time podcast last week, Senior podcast producer Arjun Singh sat down with David Daley to discuss the contents of that other memo, the Horowitz memo — here’s the extended version just for MASTER PLAN Premium subscribers

ARJUN SINGH:Awesome. David Daley, it's great to have you here on Lever Time. It's a topic that I'm obsessed about. We at The Lever are always obsessed about it too. But you had written a book previously called Ratfuck. You had written about gerrymandering in the time that you had started writing about gerrymandering, the Shelby court case, which I want to ask you about later.

In writing your new book, which is really about the right-wing efforts to take over the court. How have your perspectives on how American democracy functions changed? Like when you were writing about gerrymandering, did it seem like this effort by the right to really control our elections was something you saw very prevalently, or was that something that changed over time?

DAVID DALEY:I think that it's something that has changed over time. I think that this is, in many ways, the product of the last 15 years, and it's really the product of the combination of the strategy that Chris Jankowski had with red map to gerrymander American state legislatures and congressional delegations, and the strategy that Leonard Leo had to take over the courts, along with the anti-democratic nature of Chief Justice John Roberts’ thoughts on voting rights, and when you mix the three of those together, what you have is a recipe for entrenched, enduring right-wing minority rule.

The gerrymanders have put really staunch conservative election deniers in control of caucuses in crucial swing states that are more than willing to pass election laws that benefit their side and suppress minority voters, the court has liberated them to do all of this with a series of cases from Shelby County on, that has taken on and effectively eviscerated the protection mechanisms in the Voting Rights Act. And when you put the two of those together, it really draws a tight knot around American democracy, and I fear we're headed towards learning just how tight that knot is.

ARJUN SINGH:This fall, you write in the book about something called the Horowitz memo, and we at The Lever, just released a new podcast series called MASTER PLAN, where we focus on the Powell memo, which was written by Lewis Powell, and it was sort of this memo to almost instruct the business community about how to better control and operate in politics. But you talked about also in a great piece in The Atlantic about another memo, the Horowitz memo. Tell me about the Horowitz memo and the role that it plays in the story that you are telling about this effort by the far right to take over our political system.

DAVID DALEY:MASTER PLAN is absolutely brilliant, by the way, so let me start there. Congratulations on it. Thank you. Fantastic piece of work. We completely agree on the importance of the Powell memo. Lewis Powell wrote what was effectively a roadmap for big business to get involved in politics, to counter what the future chief to counter what a future Justice, Lewis Powell, believed to be the insidious nature of left-wing control of American society and campus in the mass media. Sounds a lot like Leonard Leo today — doesn't he? — and he was deeply influential on the Koch brothers, on Richard Mellen scaife, on all of the conservative founders who built so much of the scaffolding of the conservative right.

One of the things that they didn't do, particularly effectively, though, was build legal institutions. What the right did… they built the American Enterprise Institute and the Heritage Foundation and the Koch brothers got underway, but they also built this entire series of conservative public interest law foundations around the country that didn't have the influence that Powell suggested that they would, and donors got a little frustrated with it for about a decade, they spent tens of millions of dollars on this regional system that effectively generated a pile of amicus briefs, but didn't actually gain significant policy victories.

So there was a man named Michael Horowitz who was a real student of what the left had done with regards to public interest law, what the Nader organizations had done, for example, on really building power in Washington and working with the government and the regulatory agencies in order to bring about the environmental gains, and, you know, safer cars. And Horowitz took a look at what the left was doing and said, guys, we're doing this all wrong. On the right, we are invested in this big, sprawling regional network, and the power is in Washington, D.C., and you're trying to do this big, top down thing, when really what you've got to do is go ground up our legal power.

He said, our brain power is appallingly mediocre, and what we have to do is go into law schools. We have to win hearts and minds and convince people that they are doing something important. They're not defending DDT, they're not defending General Motors. They are part of a conservative movement that can actually affect hearts and minds.

And so when the donors are asked around the same time to give money to this new entity called the Federalist Society, all of these big organizations had read and digested the conclusions of the Horowitz report, and when he brought around these young conservatives like Lee Lieberman, Otis and Gene Meyer to the foundations for the grants that would launch the Federalist Society, which is probably the greatest return on investment of any nonprofit in American history, they were primed and ready because of what Michael Horowitz had done. He set out a different direction for the conservative legal movement, a course correction.

ARJUN SINGH:So what was the ideology that they were trying to push? What did they want law students to take away from this, and how did that differ from, I guess, the conventional wisdom of what was being taught in law school at the time?

DAVID DALEY:I think the conventional wisdom of what was being taught in law school at the time, I mean, law school at the time may well have been the kind of more liberal hegemony that some conservatives would like to say is right. When you talk to these conservatives who are at the elite law schools, they felt radically outnumbered. You know, they talk about on the day after election day of 1980 Ronald Reagan is elected, and their law professors asked for a show of hands for who had voted for Ronald Reagan, and maybe two or three hands would go up in a room of 150 people. So they felt beleaguered and outnumbered.

Now, the right often feels beleaguered and outnumbered, even in institutions that they actually really control. So I think it's, you know, I don't think that these Ivy League law schools, by any stretch of the imagination, were turning out young radicals, but they were feeding into sort of the cool culture. And the cool culture was the public interest law firms that groups like Nader and Charlie Halpern were running that were having a real impact in Washington and elsewhere, and yet the country was changing, right?

I mean, Ronald Reagan had been elected president, and when they wanted to try to staff conservative administrations, when they wanted to appoint conservative judges, they didn't have any infrastructure to go to for reliable people. So what they wanted to do really was build that bench. What they intended to do with the Federalist Society is exactly what it has become. They wanted to build a careerist organization that they would get to know young people. They would be able to advance those people into positions of power, and they would be able to trust on their ideologies as they move them along the path.

ARJUN SINGH:And I imagine part of this too, is that if you educate a generation, starting with lawyers, and you know, people within academia, you're also going to eventually spread not just to the court system, but eventually into general politics, Republican politics as well.

But this idea of like a conservative judge, I think, if you think about it now, there is an image I certainly have, which is, you know, a conservative judge is like a Scalia, Amy Coney Barrett, but you know, they would overturn Roe v. Wade. Increasingly, it seems to be they have no limits on presidential authority and power. But when the Reagan era. That early Federalist Society era. What did they mean by a conservative judge? Was it that, like judges were too hard on business? Was it culture kind of stuff? What was kind of the ideal conservative judge to them?

DAVID DALEY:I think much of this was a backlash against the Warren Court and what followed. So the idea that they were opposing was this idea that judges were making up the law and legislating from the bench.

ARJUN SINGH:And this was Chief Justice Earl Warren from California, right?

DAVID DALEY:That's right. So, Chief Justice Warren from the late 1950s into, boy, the late 1960s or so, and this is the great era of rights expansion on the U.S. Supreme Court. You are, you are talking about the apportionment revolution, that the great one person, one vote revolution, but also the expansion of the right to privacy of birth control later that would blossom, not under Warren, but under many of those judges into Roe v Wade.

And this court really was what conservatives and the fledgling Federalist Society grew in order to oppose and they used the birth of originalism. Here you can track originalism's birth all the way back to the days after Brown v. Board of Education and those who were opposed to that decision.

ARJUN SINGH:What is originalism? Again? It's like a strict reading of the Constitution?

DAVID DALEY: The idea that judges are only going to use the original intent of the founders in order to make decisions, which sounds pretty good, right? Oh, we don't want judges who are making up the law. We want judges who are going to support a reading of what's actually in the Constitution.

Except that when you go back and find their memos, as I have and other reporters have, they understood full well that originalism was a fig leaf for getting to conservative results through the judicial process while pretending that you were still sort of wearing the robes of the founders, right?

ARJUN SINGH:I mean, it was, yeah, “this is what the founders wanted you to do.”

DAVID DALEY:Originalism is like founders cosplay and that's what they were up to creating. Because when judges went before Congress, like Robert Bork and others and said, “well, we're going to overturn Roe v. Wade, or we don't believe in the Griswolddecision. They were not confirmed.

So they needed a way to talk about all of this that would get their judges and justices confirmed without scaring America. And so this idea of originalism comes forth as such common sense that Rush Limbaugh could talk about it on the radio, and Americans could say, Yes, I believe that this ought to be the way that we interpret the Constitution. In reality, it was a Trojan horse.

ARJUN SINGH:I feel like, you know, there has been so much attention rightfully put on what happened when Donald Trump tried to overturn the election, but in the years preceding that, there felt like there was quite a bit of anti-democratic effort. You talked about it in one of your books, Ratfucked, which is about gerrymandering –– we were talking about that at the top.

Before we get to the kind of 2016, 2020 Trump era, when you have after, say, the 2000s after Bush v. Gore. What are some of the ways that anti-democratic attempts take place via the court system? And I guess one that I'm thinking about a lot is a Supreme Court case, Shelby v. Holder. I think that John Roberts is, by this point, Supreme Court Chief Justice — he's been appointed by George W. Bush, and that was a big one about voting rights, and it felt like in addition to gerrymandering, there was a big effort to really dismantle voting rights. But can you talk a little bit about that? And were there other kinds of efforts, not necessarily even on Supreme Court level, but on lower court levels, to start to dismantle the voting rights system that we have?

DAVID DALEY:Yeah, dismantling voting rights has really been John Roberts’ life's work. You can go back to his days in the Reagan administration as a young person in Washington in the early 1980s but certainly by the time he is Chief Justice in Shelby County v. Holder, he eviscerates what had been known as preclearance, which was the crucial enforcement mechanism that prevented the states with the worst histories of racial prejudice and voting from enacting any changes to their laws without preapproval of them, and that had worked for 50 years to hold back the worst instincts of these states to keep them in check.

And John Roberts in 2013 insisted that things had changed in the South. Congress thought otherwise, right when Congress reauthorized the Voting Rights Act in 2006 — a Republican Senate, unanimously, 98 to nothing. A Republican House, 390 to 33. A Republican President, George W. Bush, signing it into law, along with a 16,000 page report documenting exactly why preclearance was still necessary in all of these states.

Example after example, canceled elections and moved precincts and just all the same old poison in new bottles. And Roberts, the humble caller of balls and strikes, ignores all of this, just thrusts it aside and says, Well, I think things have changed. He does this in the most dishonest way you can possibly imagine, first, by misreading census data on race that actually says the opposite of what he proclaims it does in his decision. And second, by just making up the law he makes up. Right, again this school of thought that says judges are going to simply interpret the law, not make up the law.

Roberts makes up the idea of equal sovereignty among states, which he takes from the equal footing doctrine, which has nothing to do with voting rights or any other rights, but has to do with the admission of new states. And he takes a couple of sentences from a previous court case on voting rights that mention the idea of equal sovereignty and how it doesn't apply here, and slices the crucial part out with an ellipsis, deletes it as if it was never there, and says, voila, look at my standard of equal sovereignty. And he even calls it a traditional theory. And then says, I'm going to put an end to this. You can't treat Alabama and Texas any differently than you would treat Iowa and Montana and Connecticut.

The trouble with this, and the trouble with the new day of racial kumbaya that Roberts tried to declare in June of 2013, is that if things had actually changed in the South, that very day was the day that Texas enacts its draconian voter ID bill that preclearance had stopped and that 700,000 Latinos — this isn't me saying this, this is the state of Texas admitting that it knew — that 700,000 Latinos citizens lacked the act the specific papers that the law now required to vote. One group that didn't lack those actual papers, gun owners, because they were allowed to use their gun license, but if you had a student ID or a public housing ID, not so much.

And so Shelby County kickstarts — it liberates all of these legislatures across the South to suddenly do their worst. The prison guard has been removed, and all of those evil, dark forces in American politics are free to burst forth again. And so they do. So when Roberts gets rid of Section 5, effectively, of the Voting Rights Act by freezing the formula that was in Section 4, he says, well, we don't really need this, because we still have Section 2 as a protection. And then the court has gone to work over the last decade in scaling back Section 2, and they've since torn that in half and in half and in half again.

And I think the other crucial case here is the partisan gerrymandering case,Common Cause v. Rucho, back in 2019, in which a number of states had gone to the court over time and said, we've been gerrymandered into oblivion. We need help from the neutral federal courts. And the neutral federal courts had devised several nonpartisan standards that all pointed to when the gerrymander had gone too far.

And John Roberts calls all of this sociological gobbledygook. Says, “Gosh, I can't possibly understand this.” Him with his elite private school degree and Harvard Law degree and Harvard degree, and he closes the federal courts to partisan gerrymandering claims and effectively green lights not only the gerrymanders that had been in place, but the maximal ones that we saw in the 2021 cycle.

And of course, those gerrymanders help create more conservative MAGA caucuses that then pass more insane election laws that the court then blesses as perfectly fine under its interpretation of the Voting Rights Act, and how lawmakers ought to be perfectly free to do whatever they want if they think they're fighting voter fraud — voter fraud that they can't actually identify, but as long as they say it's voter fraud, then they're perfectly fine with this court. And all of it works together. So you know, it's all of these decisions at once that have created such an anti democratic cocktail of minority rule.

ARJUN SINGH:I feel like the way that John Roberts calls himself an umpire, which is clearly not true — maybe to be fair, referees in the NBA and in baseball should just start calling themselves John Roberts when it's very obvious they've made horribly bad calls. How does this kind of culminate in, you know, in 2020 we saw Donald Trump's effort to overturn the election, one of his leading supporters — one of his lawyers, John Eastman was a Federalist Society member, ran a federal society study or debate group at one point in time — the Federalist Society is all over this effort.

And I feel that if you tried to make an argument, which I'm sure John Roberts will, which is, you know, look, I've created a very fancy doctrine and document, and I've cited whatever, you know, I made some effort to make it look like this is this makes sense based on my role as the Chief Justice. This effort by Donald Trump totally blew open, you know, any of that, any semblance of that, and yet, you did have these lawyers all over the place supporting it, supporting different candidates for office who were in favor of it. What did, what did you make of the 2020 effort. And I guess I will just leave it at that. What did you make of that entire effort? Having been reporting on this stuff for such a long time?

DAVID DALEY:I thought it was really predictable, right? I mean, there were a lot of us, I think you all as well, who started reporting in March of 2020 This is how they're going to do it. The plan is going to involve gerrymandered state legislature and tweaking the rules and slowing down the process of certification and trying to send alternate slates of electors and creating a constitutional crisis. I mean it these guys. These guys are smart, but they're not so smart that we can't look ahead and see what they're up to. They're up to the same thing right now. We all see it coming. It's the slow motion car crash.

They were not able to get away with it in 2020 for a handful of reasons, the general election, popular vote was too big in too many places. But also the legal work was really shoddy. It's Rudy Giuliani, you know, half in the bag at the, at the Four Seasons landscaping. You know, it's, you know, it's a clown car. And they filed all these cases too late, right? They brought them all after the election. And if you look at what most of these courts said, they said, Why are you bringing us this now?

And so what I think happened in 2020 is not so much that the courts stepped up and saved American democracy, but that conservatives learned, oh, if we want to do this, we have to do this a little bit differently. We have to bring the cases earlier, and we have to have control of these other boards that handle certification in advance. And so this time around, you've got the white shoe, DC, Constable McCarthy firms and others handling these cases. The adults in the room have got it. They will dress them up with the appropriate Federalist Society hothouse theories.

And the cases have been brought. There's already more than 75 cases in 16 states that the RNC is as either broader as an amicus party too, and you have events unfolding like we see in Georgia right now, right where the state election board, filled with MAGA enthusiasts is trying to slow down the process of certification. And those five weeks between Election Day and the Safe Harbor Day effectively — when you know are crucial — and if you can slow those that process down, if you can kick it into the courts, you can create all kinds of constitutional mischief. I mean, there's any number of scenarios you could see in which the U.S. Supreme Court is, is, is brought into play. And I mean, I, and one could say that it's almost as if they wanted it this way, because this election board in Georgia that is causing this whole mess wouldn't be able to do this if preclearance was still in place.

So, you know, obviously things have not changed in the South, but if we still had preclearance, this board would have to send its changes to the Department of Justice, which would say, “yeah, no.” So this entire threat is not something any of us would have to lose any sleep over. It would just, it would just be wiped away instead, because of John Roberts, it exists, and it's a way of getting the election back to the Supreme Court and John Roberts.

And so 180 million of us are going to vote on November 5, and yet, is it still possible that nine of us end up deciding — the six conservative supermajority on the court, five appointed by presidents that lost the popular vote. I mean, it's not crazy to look at this. It's not crazy to look at everything that they've done over the past couple of decades and say, this is where it's pointing to, and we better be careful before it all slides off the rails.

ARJUN SINGH:Yeah. I mean, that's exactly what I have been thinking about. And then you look at some of the previous things that have come up, the elimination of the Chevron doctrine, which you know required them to defer to federal agencies, and you especially the overturning of Roe v. Wade. I mean, just overturning precedent. And now you have the six people who have a total lock on the Supreme Court.

And so, you know what I mean, what is the safeguard against that? Then, because you do have Democrats, some of them trying. But Joe Biden in particular was, you know, really saying, “well, if I get elected, it will be the safeguard of democracy. It will be this.”

But in a lot of ways, it feels like the master plan. The plot worked. They got the 6-3 on the court. They've given presidents full immunity. That was very clearly directed at Donald Trump, and I'm not, you know, a legal scholar. I didn't go to law school, so I guess I'm wondering, how does this story end? Does it just end with the essentially, six people for until they die, telling us how we're going to be able to do and, you know, invalidating our Congress and our political will? Or is there some mechanism that it doesn't rectify it, but it at least pushes back against that?

DAVID DALEY:No matter where your politics lie, I would think that all Americans would be deeply uncomfortable that any nine Americans should hold this much power in a representative democracy. And indeed, I think the polls show that people are… if you look at the polls, on term limits, on a real ethics clause for these justices, it's upwards of 70 to 75 percent of Americans backing this, including upwards of 70 percent of Republicans.

So this is popular, and we are going to have to reform this court or accept that it intends to rule over our lives. I mean, if Vice President Harris is elected, she's going to have to decide between having an agenda that she can enact through Congress or having an agenda that is blocked by this court every step of the way. She's going to have to step up and fight this court that has become a real renegade, runaway, anti-democratic menace to American democracy, and that, if left unchecked, will continue this way for some time.

So this is a moment for us to be thinking about dramatic Supreme Court reform. We have to be thinking about how we strip a jurisdiction on some cases from these judges. We have to be thinking about how we expand and right size this court, we need to be thinking about real ethics responsibilities that stop these justices from being corrupted and paid by those who have interests before them. It is time to think big and immediately and urgently about all of this.

I mean, Lincoln, in his first inaugural, says the candid citizen must confess that if the policy of the government upon the vital questions affecting the whole people is to be irrevocably fixed by the decisions of the Supreme Court. The people will have ceased to be their own rulers, and we're dangerously close to that moment right now.

DAVID SIROTA:That was author and investigative journalist David Daley. If you’re not already following our weekly news podcast,Lever Time, you should. It’s already part of your paid subscription to the Lever! Just email us at support@levernews.com and we’ll get you set up.

There will be plenty more MASTER PLANbonus content throughout the season for premium paying subscribers like you. This episode was produced by Ronnie Riccobene with help from Jared Jacang Maher. Thank you so much for supporting MASTER PLAN. Rock the boat.

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an 10 24 truthdig

Donald Trump owes the Founding Fathers a deep debt of gratitude for making his past and present election-subversion plots possible. In particular, he should thank them for creating the Electoral College.

*:{This article originally appeared on Truthdig.

Most of the 55 white men of property who convened in Philadelphia in 1787 to revise the Articles of Confederation held a deep distrust of the masses. No less than 25 of them were slave owners. They considered but quickly rejected the possibility of electing the president by direct popular vote as excessively democratic. Instead, the national charter they produced embodied a host of compromises that were at their core profoundly racist and anti-democratic. These “Faustian bargains,” as many legal commentators have called them, included the structural design of the Senate, which accords each state two members regardless of population; the protection of slavery and states’ rights with the notorious “three-fifths” compromise, which allowed three-fifths of the enslaved populations of the Southern states to be counted for purposes of determining representation in the House of Representatives; and above all, the Electoral College.

As set forth in Article II of the Constitution, the Electoral College allocates “electors” to each state based on the size of each state’s House delegation, plus two senators. The three-fifths clause was necessary to secure support for the system from slave states, as it increased their number of electors. The candidate who wins a majority of the college becomes the president.

In the event that no candidate secures a majority, Article II as modified by the 12^th Amendment (ratified in 1804) requires the House to conduct a “contingent election,” in which each state delegation, rather than each individual representative, gets one vote to determine the presidency. And under both the 12th Amendment and the 20^th (ratified in 1933, and which moved the inauguration from March to January), it is the newly elected Congress, not the outgoing one, that makes the determination.

As Berkeley law school dean Erwin Chemerinsky explains in his latest book, “No Democracy Lasts Forever,” no other putative democracy in the world selects its chief executive in such a blatantly undemocratic manner. Because of the Electoral College, the United States has elected a president who lost the national popular vote five times — in 1824, 1876, 1888, 2000, and most egregiously, in 2016, when Trump claimed the Oval Office despite losing the popular vote to Hillary Clinton by nearly 3 million ballots. The country has conducted contingent elections for the president twice — in 1800, when the House handed the presidency to Thomas Jefferson, and in 1824, when the House selected John Quincy Adams.

Without the Electoral College and its rejection of popular democracy, Trump’s 2020 election-subversion plot, as well as the efforts currently underway, would have been unthinkable. The 2020 plan was built on a series of memos drafted by attorney Kenneth Chesebro and law professor John Eastman that called for the creation of “alternate” slates of Republican electors in swing states where Joe Biden won the popular vote. Under the plan, Vice President Mike Pence as president of the Senate would either accept the alternate slates as genuine during the joint session of Congress convened on Jan. 6, 2021, to confirm the winner; send the election back to state legislatures to reexamine their electoral certifications; or send the election to the House for a contingent ballot that would end in Trump’s favor.

The plan also called for invalidating the Election Count Act of 1887, which Congress adopted in the aftermath of the disputed 1876 contest between Republican Rutherford B. Hayes and Democrat Samuel Tilden. Like 2020, the 1876 election was plagued by allegations of fraud, and dual sets of electors from four states were submitted to Congress. Rather than forward the vote to the House, however, a special commission was appointed to determine the winner. In return for agreeing to end Reconstruction, Hayes was chosen.

The ECA spelled out in greater detail than the Constitution the procedure for tallying electoral votes. Although intended to minimize confusion and subversion, it was poorly drafted and provided inadequate safeguards. It permitted a state’s electoral votes to be challenged at the joint session if just two members of Congress, one from the House and one from the Senate, filed written objections. Once such objections were lodged, the ECA required the session to be suspended while the two chambers separated and debated the merits of the objections. If both chambers sustained the objections to a state’s votes, those votes were to be thrown out and not considered in the final electoral count. If the revised count still showed no candidate winning a majority, a contingent election in the House would ensue.

The plot failed and the ECA survived, but not before the country was nearly brought to its knees with the Jan. 6 insurrection that disrupted the joint session and the peaceful transfer of power. Pence held firm to his position that the vice president had a ministerial role limited to opening and counting electoral votes, and that he lacked the unilateral power to invalidate votes. Although objections were made to Arizona’s electoral certification, the Senate rebuffed the challenge by a vote of 93-6, and the House by a margin of 303-121.

Hoping to avoid another insurrection, Congress passed the Electoral Count Reform Act in 2022, correcting some of the ECA’s massive deficiencies. Among other provisions, the reform act clarifies the vice president’s role as strictly ministerial and provides that states may only submit a single, conclusive slate of electors certified by the governor or other designated executive official. The new act also raises the objection threshold from one representative of each chamber to one-fifth of the members of each body and it offers expedited review in federal court of election lawsuits.

The reform act will make it harder, but by no means impossible, for Trump’s current subversion scheme to work. The new plan is unfolding before our eyes, paralleling the 2020 plot with a flood of litigation contesting voting procedures in swing states, with the ultimate aim of getting at least one case before the Supreme Court, which has moved ever more sharply to the right and become little more than a tool of the MAGA movement.

Compounding the danger of renewed subversion, there is nothing in the Reform Act to prevent a far-right governor from colluding with similarly extreme state legislators to overturn the will of state voters and send a single fake slate of electors to the next joint session in 2025. Nor will the GOP be hard-pressed to meet the new 20% objection threshold if it controls both chambers of Congress come January. Most foreboding, the reform act also does nothing to alter the rules governing contingent elections in the House.

With the polls showing the race between Trump and Kamala Harris coming down to the wire, no amount of subversion from Trump and his party can be ruled out. The plot this time is far more sophisticated and informed than its 2020 predecessor. If it succeeds, we can blame the Founding Fathers for creating a system that contained the seeds of its own destruction with the deeply anti-democratic Electoral College.

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an 9 24

McConnell warns GOP 'it’s over' for Republicans if Harris wins and kills Senate filibuster

standup guy

an 9 24

Nebraska is among the few states in the U.S. that splits its electoral votes, and the area around Omaha — which has one electoral vote — has been leaning Democrat in recent years.

Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-South Carolina) has been urging Nebraska to abandon that system and switch to a winner-take-all format.

But Nebraska State Sen. Mike McDonnell, a former Democrat turned Republican, is, according to the New York Times, pushing back against the proposal.

READ MORE:[Trump is 'losing women voters' badly — here's why it may get even worse

In an official statement on Monday, September 23, McDonnell said, "In recent weeks, a conversation around whether to change how we allocate our Electoral College votes has returned to the forefront. I respect the desire of some of my colleagues to have this discussion, and I have taken time to listen carefully to Nebraskans and national leaders on both sides of the issue. After deep consideration, it is clear to me that right now, 43 days from Election Day, is not the moment to make this change."

McDonnell, according to the Times, said he told Nebraska Gov. Jim Pillen, "I will not change my long-held position and will oppose any attempted changes to our Electoral College system before the 2024 election."

The Nebraska Examiner's Aaron Sanderford notes that "McDonnell's no on winner-take-all leaves Republicans in Nebraska's officially nonpartisan legislature with no path to overcoming a promised filibuster unless a Democrat or nonpartisan senator defects."

"Part of the GOP urgency is wrapped in national polling that shows a close race between Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democratic nominee," Sanderford reports. "Some political observers have argued the 2nd District could break a 269-269 Electoral College tie. Few Democrats were surprised that the fate of winner-take-all largely swung on McDonnell, a former Omaha fire union president who switched to the GOP this spring after facing political pushback from Democrats for backing abortion restrictions."

READ MORE:**A grim question that must be asked**

Sanderford adds, "Several said the abortion debate should have shown Republicans that McDonnell is largely immovable once he has made a controversial position clear. McDonnell said when he switched parties that he would not support winner-take-all. Others said he did what helped him most politically.

READ MORE:[Harris sees 'largest favorability increase for any politician' since Bush post-9/11: report

an 9 24 pro p

According to Shackelford, First Liberty conducted polling, ran advertisements, worked with social media influencers and urged Congress to oppose these changes. In particular, Shackelford said, his group focused its activities on convincing Democratic Sens. Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema to oppose filibuster reform.

In the end, both senators did just that. “We stopped this from happening,” Shackelford said. (Spokespeople for Manchin and Sinema did not respond to requests for comment.)

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see story 1 crt rufo

an 12 23 no lnx

What Nikki Haley’s gaffe reveals about the GOP

John Stoehr

December 28, 2023

The new Nikki Haley news is that she refused to say that slavery was the cause of the Civil War. During an event in New Hampshire, she said that the bloodiest conflict on US soil was about, well, anything but slavery: “how government was going to run, the freedoms and what people could and couldn’t do,” she said, among other ridiculous things.

Magdi Jacobs, an Editorial Board contributor, said that “the fascinating thing about Haley's response was her discomfort. You could feel her flailing as she reached for the perfect combo of a pre-Donald Trump conservative ‘states’ rights’ answer to appeal to centrist voters, all while knowing that the insurrectionists want more racist red meat.”

“This is a balance no one can strike,” Magdi concluded. “It shows how fundamentally weak the current GOP is, even if our political media doesn't want to admit it. You can't win without Trump. I firmly believe – and I think Haley does, too – that you can't win with him either.”

More precisely (and I think Magdi would agree) is that this balance is impossible to strike because there’s nowhere to put it. There’s no such thing as a moderate position inside today’s Republican Party. There’s no foundation on which to build the broad coalition of voters that’s necessary to winning (ie, candidates need more than a base.) If such a position existed, Haley would have found it. It doesn’t, so all she can do is reach for a reason, any reason, as the true cause of the Civil War.

To her credit, Haley quickly walked back her remarks. Perhaps she sensed something was at risk in sounding so unreasonable. “Of course, the Civil War was about slavery,” she said. “We know that. That’s the easy part of it.” Then she went on to say that it was about “more than that,” citing, among other ridiculous things, “the role of government.”

That she walked back her initial remarks may seem “reasonable,” but it won’t matter. Remember, even if she wanted to strike a balance between “conservative states’ rights” and “racist red meat” – and that’s apparently what she wanted to do – there is no foundation inside the Republican Party on which to put it. There is no moderate position.

To be a moderate, you have to sound reasonable, but according to David Atkins, a frequent contributor to the Washington Monthly, the GOP base “doesn’t want even the perception of a more reasonable candidate. They want a dictator to punish their enemies.”

“Haley has zero chance of winning” the presidential election, David told me. “Even if she did win New Hampshire, it wouldn’t help her any more than it did Bernie Sanders in 2016 and Pete Buttigieg in 2020.”

There’s always makebelieve, though. Fortunately, Haley has a lot of help in that regard. The billionaire Koch brothers gave her their blessing. So did the popular governor of New Hampshire, Chris Sununu. They portray Haley as the champion of “conservative values,” as if “conservative values” was still shorthand for “moderate,” and as if Donald Trump’s gravity has not pulled the entire party to the far right.

While makebelieve is a powerful force in politics, it’s probably not going to be enough for Haley or any of the other GOP candidates. Oh, sure, they did OK while the neutral press was casting them as “legitimate alternatives” to Trump. But once the neutral press gets bored – and the neutral press always gets bored – whatever promise these “legitimate alternatives” once had melts into the air. It happened to Ron DeSantis. It happened to Vivek Ramaswamy. It will probably happen to Haley. Everything begins and ends with Trump. As Magdi said, the GOP can’t win with him and it can’t win without him.

In the following interview with me, David Atkins explains not only why he thinks Haley is doomed, but why, in 2024, the Republicans are, too.

JS: New Hampshire Governor Chris Sununu endorsed Republican candidate Nikki Haley after the Koch network did. Could that be enough for her to win New Hampshire? And will that matter in the long run?

DA: GOP megadonors need to come to terms with the reality that their base cannot be controlled. They let the MAGA flames burn out of control and now they get to reap the whirlwind. Haley has zero chance of winning absent some issue impacting Trump’s health, because the GOP base doesn’t want even the perception of a more reasonable candidate. They want a dictator to punish their enemies.

And let’s be clear: Haley is also a radical rightwing extremist, as her embrace of a six-week abortion ban makes clear. She just doesn’t seem like she wants to destroy the entire federal bureaucracy, send Democrats to gulags, weaponize the Justice Department and the IRS against all their domestic opponents, and institute mass deportation camps of immigrants. So she’s not the candidate of the GOP base, which does want those things and wants Trump to deliver them.

The Republican Party’s base isn’t in the thrall of Trumpism; Trump is the avatar of their desires, which is why he will be the nominee. Also, even if Haley did win New Hampshire, it wouldn’t help her any more than it did Bernie Sanders in 2016 and Pete Buttigieg in 2020.

JS: You said the culture war is over. Taylor Swift won, Elon Musk lost. I have written that obituary, too, only to see myself proven wrong.

DA: The culture war is over in the sense that people under the age of 50 in the areas of the country that make up more than 80 percent of the national GDP despise the theocratic conservatism that animates Republican activists. That isn’t going to change.

This doesn’t mean that Republicans can’t win elections, and institute rearguard policy actions, like restricting abortion and LGBT rights. They can. The threat of hard-right fascist dictatorship is very real.

But most of the culture wars can be explained by the fact that the marketplace responds primarily to 18- to 45-year-old consumers in cities, while the electoral system responds primarily to 65-plus-year-olds in exurbia. The electoral system can produce a fascist takeover, but it will do so by oppressing a majority that wants nothing to do with it. Such tyrannies rarely last for long.

In the meantime, the weight of popular culture is increasingly shifting to treat cultural progressivism as normative, if for no other reason than that’s the population advertisers want to appeal to. The engines of capitalism are working against social conservatives now, which is why you see such a growing rift between the evangelical base and the urbanite business Republican crowd.

JS: You said the GOP will lose 2024. You cited the fact that they have lost every special election. Special elections attract partisans. Presidential election attracts everyone. Am I wrong in noting the difference?

DA: It’s no secret that Trump and Biden at the top of the ticket will make for an interesting dynamic in 2024, since neither are popular, at least at the moment. But in this environment, a generic Democrat is consistently beating a generic Republican. If the public’s concerns about both Trump and Biden as individuals were sidelined, and the voters were to choose a party and its policies, Democrats would be marching into a confident victory in 2024.

The key will be to remind voters of the tremendous legislative accomplishments of the Biden administration, emphasize Trump’s rampant criminality and danger to democracy, and remind people that no matter what they think of the candidates, the policy choices are very real. Republican rule would be a cruel disaster.

JS: I think the GOP is going to impeach Biden. How does that factor into your thinking, if it does, that the Republicans are going to lose 2024?

DA: Republicans want to play tit-for-tat by impeaching Biden to take some of the sting out of Trump’s double impeachments. More generally, if they can make impeachment into a routine partisan clown show, then it minimizes and defangs the one tool in the Constitution that’s designed to stop an authoritarian, criminal unitary executive.

The flip side of doing this is that any impeachment of Biden by Republicans on flimsy pretexts is likely to have as minimal an impact on voters as Trump’s impeachments apparently have.

JS: What if there's a major polling error and Trump isn't really a mile ahead of every other Republican candidate? Most of us just assume he's going to be the nominee. Iowa and New Hampshire might be stunners?

DA: What’s particularly interesting about Trump seizing the GOP nomination is the low-key panic among many Republican activists. While Trump’s indictments have so far not impacted his popularity, we are in uncharted territory. It’s impossible to predict what impact multiple public trials and possible felony convictions of the sitting GOP nominee might have on public polling and electoral outcomes.

One could speculate that the polling might be wrong, and GOP voters in Iowa and New Hampshire might choose a different nominee out of self-preservation. But Trump has developed a cult-like following, and one thing that we know about cults is that they are largely impervious to even their leaders going to jail. If anything, it makes them feel like martyrs. So I find it extremely unlikely that Iowa and New Hampshire will surprise us by selecting a Haley or Ron DeSantis.

[[===

evil crypto

https://www.alternet.org/gop-megadonor-citizen-ballot-initiatives/

https://yyy.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/jun/23/foundation-government-accountability-democracy

an 6 23

no lnx

This GOP megadonor is funding efforts to 'derail citizen-led ballot initiatives': report

Alex HendersonJune 23, 2023

Over the years, Illinois-based shipping magnates Richard and Elizabeth Uihlein have been major donors to the Republican Party. And these days, they have a preference for far-right MAGA candidates, including 2022 Pennsylvania gubernatorial nominee Doug Mastriano (who lost by double digits to Democratic now-Gov. Josh Shapiro).

In 2023, The Guardian reports, Richard Uihlein has been a major funder of a Florida-based group known as theFoundation for Government Accountability (FGA) — who are trying to make it more difficult to get initiatives on ballots.

The Guardian's Brendan Fischer, in an article published June 23, reports, "These efforts are designed to derail citizen-led ballot initiatives to protect abortion rights, raise the minimum wage or expand Medicaid. In effect, FGA and its allies seek to give 41 percent of the voting population an effective veto over the wishes of the other 59 percent."

READ MORE: 'A stark illustration of our broken campaign finance system': Here's how rich mega-doners hacked US politics

Fischer notes that in "at least four states," FGA has "lobbied or testified in favor of changing ballot initiative rules to enshrine minority rule."

He then explains, "The latest fight is in Ohio, where Republican lawmakers last month passed a measure requiring future constitutional amendments to receive at least 60 percent support from voters — rather than a simple majority — and that would make it harder for proposed amendments to make it on to the ballot. Ohioans will now vote in August on whether to approve the higher thresholds…. FGA's tactics in Ohio echo those used previously — and unsuccessfully — in Arkansas and South Dakota."

In 2021, Fischer reports, FGA "issued a legal memo arguing for the constitutionality of a 60 percent requirement for enacting ballot initiatives, and a report decrying how voters in red states like Missouri, Oklahoma and Nebraska had approved Medicaid expansion through the ballot initiative process."

READ MORE: Appeals court dismisses GOP megadonor’s lawsuit against Beto O’Rourke: report

The Guardian's full report is available at this link.

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ref

no lnx

Florida group primarily funded by an Illinois billionaire is driving the recent attacks on direct democracy in states such as Ohio, Missouri, South Dakota and Arkansas.

The Foundation for Government Accountability, a Florida-based group affiliated with the alliance of conservative thinktanks called the State Policy Network, has played a key role in recent efforts to raise the threshold for passing citizen ballot initiatives from a simple majority to a supermajority, and to make it harder to place measures on the ballot in the first place.

These efforts are designed to derail citizen-led ballot initiatives to protect abortion rights, raise the minimum wage or expand Medicaid. In effect, FGA and its allies seek to give 41% of the voting population an effective veto over the wishes of the other 59%.

In at least four states, FGA and its lobbying arm, the Opportunity Solutions Project, have lobbied or testified in favor of changing ballot initiative rules to enshrine minority rule, and in some cases have financed ballot committees advocating for those changes. FGA has also issued reports, legal memos, op-eds and polling that advocate for gutting direct democracy.

The latest fight is in Ohio, where Republican lawmakers last month passed a measure requiring future constitutional amendments to receive at least 60% support from voters – rather than a simple majority – and that would make it harder for proposed amendments to make it on to the ballot. Ohioans will now vote in August on whether to approve the higher thresholds.

The controversial plan is designed to derail an abortion rights initiative expected to be on the ballot in November.

Deuel Ross, center, plaintiff’s counsel in Allen v Milligan, speaks with members of the press after oral arguments outside the supreme court on 4 October 2022.]

‘Historic and significant’: key lawyer’s verdict on Alabama supreme court ruling

Read more

When Ohio Republicans first proposed the supermajority requirement last year, a representative of FGA’s lobbying arm was the only person who testified in favor. FGA’s lobbying arm again testified in support of the proposal earlier this year, in hearings before the House and Senate. FGA argued that the proposal was necessary to“make it more difficult for out of state billionaires and dark money groups” to change Ohio law.

As the measure moved through Ohio’s Republican-controlled legislature, the Illinois billionaire Dick Uihlein gave $1.1m to the newly created “Save Our Constitution PAC”, which ran ads pressuring state lawmakers to support the measure; Uihlein is expected to contribute more as the August vote approaches.

A foundation controlled by Uihlein is also the largest known source of FGA’s funding, giving $17.6m since 2014. Uihlein has also been one of the key funders of election denial. Among other things, Uihlein has poured tens of millions into his “Restoration of America” network that promotes ludicrous election conspiracy theories and which created a controversial database that published voters’ personal information online in the name of uncovering election fraud. In the 2022 cycle, Dick Uihlein and his wife, Liz, were also top donors to election-denying candidates like the Pennsylvania gubernatorial hopeful Doug Mastriano and Nevada secretary of state candidate Jim Marchant.

FGA itself began to focus on “election integrity” in 2021, and boasted that it “achieved more than 70 election integrity policy wins across 19 states” last year.

FGA has also been promoting a supermajority requirement in Ohio and other states since at least 2021.

That year, FGA issued a legal memo arguing for the constitutionality of a 60% requirement for enacting ballot initiatives, and a report decrying how voters in red states like Missouri, Oklahoma and Nebraska had approved Medicaid expansion through the ballot initiative process. FGA and its lobbying arm also began testifying in support of state efforts to make it harder to enact ballot measures, andits in-house polling firm released Ohio polling showing voter support for a 60% threshold and for placing other restrictions on the initiative process.

FGA’s tactics in Ohio echo those used previously – and unsuccessfully – in Arkansas and South Dakota.

In Arkansas last year, FGA’s lobbying arm produced a fact sheet, an op-ed and social media posts advocating for Issue 2, which would have raised the ballot initiative threshold to 60%. As the billionaire-backed dark money group warned of “shady groups funded by billionaires you’ve never heard of” pushing ballot measures in Arkansas, it also gave $65,000 to the ballot committee advocating for the supermajority requirement. Arkansas voters defeated the measure by 19 percentage points.

In South Dakota, a representative of FGA’s lobbying arm testified in February 2021 in support of HJR 5003, which would require 60% approval for constitutional amendments. The legislation passed and was placed on the June 2022 ballot, with a goal of thwarting a Medicaid expansion initiative slated for the November 2022 ballot. FGA’s lobbying arm then gave $50,000 to the ballot committee advocating for the supermajority requirement – but voters rejected the measure by 35 points. Later that year, South Dakota voters approved Medicaid expansion.

FGA has also pressed Missouri lawmakers to create new hurdles for the initiative process.In 2021, FGA’s lobbying arm released polling claiming to show public support for “initiative integrity”, then sent a letter to Missouri legislative leadership arguing for a supermajority requirement and other changes to the initiative process. “Without reform,” the letter warned, “[o]ut-of-state billionaires will continue to pump millions of dollars to [promote] destructive, leftist policies like Medicaid expansion.” The group testified in support of Missouri HJR 22 that year, which would have created new requirements for putting measures on the ballot.

FGA’s lobbying arm would go on to testify in support offour different Missouri proposals to erect barriers to the ballot initiative process in 2022, and four more similar proposals this year. The Missouri house passed a measure to raise the initiative threshold, but it unexpectedly failed in the state senate.

This article was produced in partnership with Documented, an investigative watchdog and journalism project. Brendan Fischer is deputy executive director with Documented

LNX

boast voter suppress

https://www.alternet.org/2021/05/**john-cornyn**

lil bit fashy? an raw 3 23

Texas-based gathering of the right-wing legal group the Federalist Society saw members pushing "radical new theories" about election laws — and possibly secession from the United States, reported POLITICO on Friday.

The Federalist Society -- which is best known for training an army of conservative lawyers for jobs on the federal bench, where they have undermined everything from abortion rights to labor laws to the basic ability of the civil service to pass rules -- was long a champion of "judicial restraint," as it was founded in an era when the judiciary was far more liberal than it is today.

Now, wrote, Ian Ward, their gathering for the National Student Symposium in Austin — an event that brought out Texas Gov. Greg Abbott to give a speech, the tables have turned — and it's "alarmingly clear" that attendees are more interested in using judicial power to overrule liberal democracy itself.

"'Democracy is what philosophers call an ‘essentially contested concept,’' said Daniel Lowenstein, a professor of law emeritus at UCLA and an expert in election law, during a panel on Friday evening. 'Differences that seem on their surface to concern the meaning of the word ‘democracy’,' he added, are actually struggles to advance particular and controversial political ideas,'" said the report. "What democracy does not mean, Lowenstein argued, was 'plebiscitary democracy,' or simple rule by democratic majorities. Citing the Federalist Papers — the namesake of the Federalist Society — Lowenstein suggested that governance based on simple mathematical majorities would enable 'tyrannical domination of the minority by the majority.'"

This rhetoric, explicitly rejecting the idea of the U.S. as a democracy, has grown more common in GOP circles, even being pushed by some Republican senators — and it obscures the fact that the U.S. electoral system is in fact the reverse, with the Senate's structure in particular letting a small minority dominate the majority.

Some attendees didn't stop at rejecting democracy, but rejected the idea of the United States as a country.

"Later on in the same panel, Joel Alicea, a law professor at the Catholic University of America, diagnosed the apparent threats facing American democracy today — political violence, abuses of governmental power, and attempted election subversion, to name a few — as symptoms of a deeper malaise," and threw in a jab at transgender rights, saying, “At this point in our society, we can’t even agree whether somebody is a man or a woman.” "Alicea advised the attendees to embrace conversion rather than coercion, but in the question-and-answer session after the panel, an audience member proposed a third option: a full-scale national divorce, of the sort recently proposed by Republican Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia."

In recent years, President Joe Biden has responded to the new flood of Federalist Society affiliated judges former President Donald Trump installed — who recently defeated a proposed ethics rule limiting their affiliation with the group while on the bench — by appointing another wave of more civil-rights oriented jurists in record numbers at a record pace.

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rural trumpistas?

USA Today runs a daily poll on its frontpage. On Friday, the public survey results were on gun laws. “If it were harder to obtain guns legally, Americans think there would be __ mass shootings.”

Sixty-six percent said there would be far fewer or somewhat fewer mass shootings. Nearly 30 percent said no difference. (A smattering of cranks, 5 percent, said there would be more or somewhat more.)

I bring this to your attention not so much to bolster the prospect of tighter gun laws (though it does), but to point out a pretty common demographic pattern – that a radical third stands against the majority with respect to issues concerning us all. Whether gun control, abortion or “indoctrination” in public school, there’s always about a third of the country representing the country’s shame.

READ MORE: Dark money groups have pumped $1 billion into GOP effort to retake the Senate

This alone isn’t noteworthy. After all, every country has its yokels and yahoos. But not every country has a political setup that gives yokels and yahoos more practical power than the majority. Very few countries, if any, give voters in sparsely populated farming areas an effective veto over densely populated areas with large urban centers.

That setup – or the political advantages of it – are apparent when the Republicans slander cities, and in the slandering, they protect those same advantages. Ohio Congressman Jim Jordan said last week: “Do you feel safe in cities controlled by the Left? Cities that defunded the police? Cities that ignore police staffing issues. No. No. No.”

The dynamic of political power between urban and rural is obviously asymmetrical. That’s by design. It’s to prevent liberal democracy from flourishing fully. The thinking at the time of the founding was that a fully flourishing liberal democracy would inflict tyranny on the minority. In the case of the founders, rich white men like them.

But the problem is and has been the opposite.

READ MORE: 'Just out here watching boxes': Armed Arizona 'poll watchers' raise fears of right-wing voter intimidation

A radical minority dictates the terms of American democracy.

I suspect that even people with something better to do than pay attention to politics get this. The Electoral College stands against democracy. So does the US Senate. The courts, especially the Supreme Court, do, too. We liberals say “it’s a republic, not a democracy” is wrong, but we don’t consider whether right-wingers have a point. Saying they’re wrong is more theoretical than empirical.

We should consider something else that’s more theoretical than empirical – the idea that political violence is an exception to the rule. Precisely, that political violence is random, irrational, senseless: something that deviates from the norm. It’s nothing of the sort.

Its origins have always been here.

It’s that place, demographically speaking, where the minority believes, say, that tighter gun laws will make no difference to shooting massacres, even amid mass death, even amid murder rates in Republican-controlled state outstripping those of all other states.

What respect is the truth (or anything) owed when a third controls contramajoritarian institutions built into the system by design? What respect is the political majority owed by a political minority? Why would the politically strong give respect to the politically weak?

But sometimes those contramajoritarian institutions fail (or appear to). If and when they do, this radical third of America is entitled, on account of having political advantages, to resort to violence in order to maintain those same political advantages. While democracy is the point for the political majority, with violence the exception, violence is the point for the political minority, with democracy the exception.

So when a school kid is sent a letter like the one above (regarding the child’s mother, a Loudoun County, Virginia, school board member), it should not be seen as extraordinary, because it’s actually ordinary. After all, what’s more common? People discussing hard topics like “critical race theory” in public school? Or people losing their minds over things they don’t understand and don’t want to understand?

The radical third has been living among us since the founding. They had kids. Their kids had kids had kids. This is how they think. This is what they do. The difference is of degree, not kind. As long as the contramajoritarian institutions hold, all’s well. If they don’t, well …

According to USA Today, “bomb threats at [historically Black colleges and universities] had swelled to at least 57” since February, “leaving administrators and students on edge and rekindling a history of violence aimed at Black students seeking educational advancement.”

The FBI said that it had focused on six subjects in 2021, but arrested no one, according to USA Today. In the meantime, however, “the menacing behavior continued into the next school year.”

“If we allow people to feel like they can continue to do this without being held accountable, they will always be able to be disruptive,” Walter Kimbrough told the newspaper. “We’re the only group where there have been threats, and nobody has been caught” (my italics).

If it isn’t apparent, the source of these threats is the radical third of America, where democracy is undeserving of respect and where the rule of law applies only if it maintains baked-in political advantages.

A radical third dictates the terms of American democracy.

It’s empirical, not theoretical.

READ MORE: Are SCOTUS Republicans in on a plot to end Democratic presidencies forever?

https://www.alternet.org/2022/07/supreme-court/

Some will rob you with a six-gun

And some with a fountain pen

— Woody Guthrie, "Ballad of Pretty Boy Floyd"

As Woody Guthrie indicated in his 1939 song quoted above, crimes need not be carried out through violence. That applies even to the grandest larceny: stealing the most precious possession of a people, self-government.

In February 1964, John Frankenheimer's "Seven Days in May" premiered. The film depicts a conspiracy headed by a right-wing extremist general to stage a coup d'état aimed at ousting the president and installing a military junta to rule the nation.

As we learn ever more details of Donald Trump's attempted coup to overthrow the American Republic — what might be titled "Six Days in January" — we realize just how close it came to succeeding. The evidence indicates that the then-president's approach to staying in the presidency was similar to the "bold, persistent experimentation" to deal with the Great Depression that Franklin D. Roosevelt advocated when running for the office in 1932: "Take a method and try it. If it fails, admit it frankly and try another. But above all, try something." Apart, of course, from the "admit it frankly" part, that appears to be exactly how the Trump plan to steal the election worked. If one method failed, the conspirators would move on to the next, with a violent insurrection being the final option if all else failed.

It is now clear that there was another alternative, in the event that the attempt to end democracy through a violent attack on the Capitol failed: In Guthrie's terminology, to rob Americans of democracy with a fountain pen instead of a six-gun.

Two days after Cassidy Hutchinson provided a riveting account of how the then-president was determined to overthrow the government by force, the three people he appointed to the Supreme Court showed how to overthrow the government by decree.

The period from June 24 through June 30 constituted the results of a coup much longer in the planning than that of the former president and his accomplices. As Jane Mayer, Nancy MacLean and Kurt Andersen have detailed in their respective books, "Dark Money" (2016), "Democracy in Chains" (2017) and "Evil Geniuses" (2020), a stealth plan, overseen by radical right-wing billionaires determined to "liberate" themselves from all effective government limitations on their actions and accumulation of wealth, has been ongoing for nearly seven decades and in earnest for more than four decades.

Like the enslavers of old and their chief theoretician, John C. Calhoun of South Carolina, they believe that property rights are superior to people's rights and that the sort of policies they favor can most readily be obtained and preserved by concentrating power at the state level.

Achieving their objectives, which are in the interests of only a tiny minority of the population, would be a challenge in a democracy, as was evident in 1964 when the radical right gained the Republican presidential nomination for Barry Goldwater but saw him crushed by Lyndon Johnson, the architect of the sort of for-the-people government that was anathema to them.

The actual agenda of the radical rich had to be kept under wraps as they attracted needed allies by stoking racism, fear, hate and division. Though it is unlikely that many of them gave a hoot about abortion and most of the other "social issues" that animated the base of the movement the billionaires would steer toward their interests, they could use them to gain support for their hidden program.

Full democracy — which was first achieved in the United States in 1964-65 — is incompatible with promoting the interests of a small minority over those of a vast majority. The objectives of the greedy few might stand a better chance in the least democratic branch of the American Republic. In 1982, the Federalist Society was created to develop an alternative legal outlook to the then-dominant social and economic views in the profession. This long game has worked magnificently. All six of the Supreme Court justices who voted to overturn Roe v. Wade and to severely limit regulation of business in West Virginia v. EPA came out of the Federalist Society.

Those two bookends on the court's final week nicely show that a price the forces of greed were willing to pay to assure America would have a new Gilded Age was to give us a Gilead Age.

The Supreme Court of the United States now in effect holds that corporations and zygotes are persons, but women are not.

But the court's counterrevolution during June's last week didn't end with the EPA decision that could, in the words of historian Heather Cox Richardson, "signal the end of the federal government as we know it." For bad measure, the court announced that it is taking up the case of Moore v. Harper, which is based on afringe legal theory called the "independent state legislatures doctrine." It will give the right-wing majority of the court the opportunity in its 2022-23 session to empower state legislatures to do legally exactly what Trump was trying to coerce them to do illegally: replace electors for the candidate who won the state with others who will vote for the loser. Such a ruling would write "The End" to the story of American democracy.

The "pens" of the right-wing extremists — please stop calling them "conservatives" — on the Supreme Court have nearly accomplished what the "swords" of the Jan. 6 insurrectionists failed to do.

The subtitle of Kurt Andersen's book, "The Unmaking of America," decades in the planning, was largely accomplished in a week.Call it "Seven Days in June."

...

The negative effects that these new amicus campaigns have on our democ-

racy are twofold. The wealthy few fund the campaigns, excluding the majority

of Americans from the process and exacerbating preexisting countermajoritarian

and inequality concerns. And without a mechanism for disclosure, the general

public currently does not, and cannot, know how judicial reasoning is influenced

by masked private actors.

...

Donors have reaped enormous returns on their investments. As I have doc-

umented, the Roberts Court has handed down over eighty partisan Republican

5-4 decisions87 that benefit an easily identifiable Republican Party-donor inter-

est.88

These include decisions that remove constraints on anonymous giving

(e.g., Citizens United v. FEC,89 Americans for Prosperity Foundation v. Bonta90), as

well as decisions that weaken the power of countervailing institutions like labor

unions (e.g., Janus v. American Federation of State, City & Municipal Employees,

158

Council 3191), regulatory agencies (e.g., Seila Law v. Consumer Financial Protection

Bureau92), and the civil jury (e.g., Epic Systems Corp. v. Lewis93).

The effects of this litigation strategy on our democracy are frightening: the

courts are becoming an arena for enacting policies by judicial decree that are too

unpopular to pass through democratically elected legislatures. These coordi-

nated efforts warp the judiciary toward anonymous, ultrawealthy donor inter-

ests, all without the public ever learning about the role of dark-money interests

in shaping the law. The Supreme Court was already, by its nature, an avenue for

countermajoritarian ideas and policies to prosper.

But as Barry Friedman ex-

plains, especially when the Court is acting during a period of judicial suprem-

acy—as it arguably is now—the countermajoritarian aspect of the institution will

flourish.94 Alongside those concerns, the emergence of the dark-money amicus

machine increases the probability that the Court’s rulings will run counter to the

will of the American people (i.e., counter to democracy), and instead for the

benefit of the hidden interests that had a secret hand in putting Justices on the

Court and then filed masked amicus briefs...

..https://www.yalelawjournal.org/pdf/F7.WhitehouseFinalDraftWeb_v4zwakx5.pdf

an 7 22

wake of the U.S. Supreme Court's flurry of controversial rulings, a new analysis is highlighting some of the deeply flawed aspects of the U.S. Constitution. The piece, published by The Root, also raises the question of why a document co-written by oppressors is still considered a framework for a country deemed to be the "land of the free."

In her op-ed, The Root's Candace McDuffie began with a brief overview of the Supreme Court justices' erosion of multiple legal landmarks over the last several days.

"Last week, the Supreme Court eviscerated a woman’s right to abortion, undermined Miranda rights, expanded gun rights and allowed border patrol agents to operate with even further impunity," McDuffie wrote. "Today, it ruled that a former Washington state high school football coach can pray on the field immediately after games—regardless of the religious backgrounds of the students."

Offering historical highlights about the U.S. Constitution, McDuffie noted that the 235-year-old document was also co-authored by two oppressors who owned slaves as she emphasized that the document was not written for the purpose of inclusion for all people. "The primary authors consisted of: John Adams, Thomas Paine, Thomas Jefferson, and James Madison. The last two men on that list owned slaves," she wrote. How can this set of laws still guide a nation when it was concocted by white men who looked at Black people as property and not as human?"

McDuffie also pointed out a number of flaws and contradictions in the Constitution as it relates to modern-day issues currently plaguing American citizens."The Fifteenth Amendment gave Black people the right to vote," she noted. "However, last year nineteen states passed laws that restricted access to voting. The Thirteenth Amendment outlawed slavery and involuntary servitude, but America’s mass incarceration problem proves this as untrue."

She also noted the basis of the Constitution and the irony in Justice Clarence Thomas' stance as he has been a vocal advocate of the latest, controversial rulings.

"The fact that a Black man—Justice Clarence Thomas—is working to erode the rights of millions of people is more than ironic: it’s downright pathetic. In a concurring opinion Thomas wrote Friday, he claimed that the Supreme Court’s controversial June decisions aimed to weaken substantive due process which protects certain rights even if they’re not listed in the Constitution."

“As I have previously explained, ‘substantive due process’ is an oxymoron that ‘lack[s] any basis in the Constitution,’” Thomas wrote in his concurring opinion on Roe v. Wade.

According to McDuffie, Thomas also claimed that it’s “'legal fiction' that is 'particularly dangerous.' Even more ironically, how is it up to the states to decide a woman’s right to abortion yet not interfere with a person’s right to carry a concealed firearm?"

The writer also noted the deeply flawed issue with the justices' appointments. The majority of them on the bench was actually nominated by Republican presidents who only won elections by way of the Electoral College. In short, the majority of American voters did not vote for them so the Supreme Court's rulings are based predominantly on the beliefs of a smaller minority as opposed to being a reflection of the country, collectively.

She went on to raise a question that many have posed: whether or not the basis of the Electoral College needs to be revisited.

"Seven of the nine Supreme Court justices were put there by presidents from a party who haven’t won a popular vote more than once in three decades," she wrote. "Shouldn’t the Twelfth Amendment, which established the electoral college, be revisited?"

She concluded, "It’s clear that the right will continue to twist and contort anything they can to carry out their agenda—an agenda that has and will always harm this country’s most marginalized and vulnerable populations. And honestly, the Constitution will always be a hell of an excuse to oppress Black folks on behalf of white supremacy."

from chis adams pilf:

Two other Public Interest Legal Foundation lawyers—its president, J. Christian Adams,and another board member, Hans von Spakovsky—served in George W. Bush’s Justice Department, where they began efforts to use the Voting Rights Act, which was designed to protect Black voters, to prosecute purported fraud by Black voters and election officials. Both men have argued strenuously that American elections are rife withserious fraud, and in 2017 they got a rare opportunity to make their case, when Trump appointed them to a Presidential commission on election integrity. Within months, after the commission was unable to find significant evidenceof election fraud, it acrimoniously disbanded. Adams and von Spakovsky, who are members of what Roll Call has termed the Voter Fraud Brain Trust, have nevertheless continued their crusade, sustained partly by Bradley funds. Von Spakovsky now heads the Heritage Foundation’s Election Law Reform Initiative, which has received grants from the Bradley Foundation.

At Heritage, von Spakovsky has overseen a national tracking system monitoring election-fraud cases. But its data on Arizona, the putative center of the storm, is not exactly alarming: of the millions of votes cast in the state from 2016 to 2020, only nine individuals were convicted of fraud. Each instance involved someone casting a duplicate ballot in another state. There were no recorded cases of identity fraud, ballot stuffing, voting by non-citizens, or other nefarious schemes. The numbers confirm that there is some voter fraud, or at least confusion, but not remotely enough to affect election outcomes.

Even Benjamin Ginsberg, a Republican lawyer who for years led the Party’s election-law fights, recently conceded to the Times that “a party that’s increasingly old and white whose base is a diminishing share of the population is conjuring up charges of fraud to erect barriers to voting for people it fears won’t support its candidates.”

The Voter Fraud Brain Trust lent support to Trump’s lies from the time he took office. In 2016, when he lost the popular vote by nearly three million ballots, he insisted that he had actually won it, spuriously blaming rampant fraud in California. Soon afterward, von Spakovsky gave Trump’s false claim credence by publishing an essay at Heritage arguing that there was no way to disprove the allegation, because “we have an election system that’s based on the honor system.”

More than a year before the 2020 election, Cleta Mitchell and her allies sensed political peril for Trump and began reviewing strategies to help keep him in office. According to a leaked video of an address that she gave in May, 2019, to the Council for National Policy, a secretive conservative society, she warned that Democrats were successfully registering what she sarcastically referred to as “the disenfranchised.” She continued, “They know that if they target certain communities and they can get them registered and get them to the polls, then those groups . . . will vote ninety per cent, ninety-five per cent for Democrats.”

One possible countermove was for conservative state legislators to reëngineer the way the Electoral College has worked for more than a hundred years, in essence by invoking the Independent Legislature Doctrine. The Constitution gives states the authority to choose their Presidential electors “in such Manner as the Legislature thereof may direct.” Since the late nineteenth century, states have delegated that authority to the popular vote. But, arguably, the Constitution permits state legislatures to take this authority back. Legislators could argue that an election had been compromised by irregularities or fraud, forcing them to intervene.

In August, 2019, e-mails show, Mitchell co-chaired a high-level working group with Shawnna Bolick, a Republican state representative from Phoenix. Among the topics slated for discussion was the Electoral College. The working group was convened by alec, the corporate-backed nonprofit that transmits conservative policy ideas and legislation to state lawmakers. The Bradley Foundation has long supported alec, and Mitchell has worked closely with it, serving as its outside counsel until recently.

Mitchell and Bolick declined to answer questions about the working group’s focus, but it appears that Bolick’s participation was productive. After the election, she signed a resolution demanding that Congress block the certification of Biden’s victory and award Arizona’s electors to Trump. Then, early this year, Bolick introduced a bill proposing a radical reading of Article II of the Constitution, along the lines of theIndependent Legislature Doctrine. It would enable a majority of the Arizona legislature to override the popular vote if it found fault with the outcome, and dictate the state’s Electoral College votes itself—anytime up until Inauguration Day. Bolick has described her bill as just “a good, democratic check and balance,” but her measure was considered so extreme that it died in committee, despite Republican majorities in both houses of the legislature. Yet, simply by putting forth the idea as legislation, she helped lend legitimacy to the audacious scheme that the Trump campaign desperately pursued in the final days before Biden’s Inauguration: to rely on Republican-led state legislatures to overturn Electoral College votes. Ian Bassin, the executive director of Protect Democracy, who served as an associate White House counsel under Obama, told me, “Institutions like the Heritage Foundation and alec are providing the grease to turn these attacks on democracy into law.”

Bolick has since announced her candidacy for secretary of state in Arizona. Her husband, Clint Bolick, is an Arizona Supreme Court justice and a leader in right-wing legal circles. Clarence Thomas, one of the three U.S. Supreme Court Justices who signed on to the concurring opinion in Bush v. Gore laying out the Independent Legislature Doctrine, is the godfather of one of Clint Bolick’s sons. If Shawnna Bolick wins her race, she will oversee future elections in the state. And, if the Supreme Court faces another case in which arguments about the Independent Legislature Doctrine come into play, there may now be enough conservative Justices to agree with Thomas that there are circumstances under which legislatures, not voters, could have the final word in American elections.

Months before the 2020 vote, Lisa Nelson, the C.E.O. of alec, also anticipated contesting the election results. That February, she told a private gathering of the Council for National Policy about a high-level review that her group had undertaken of ways to challenge “the validity” of the Presidential returns. A video of the proceedings was obtained by the investigative group Documented, and first reported by the Washington Spectator. In her speech, Nelson noted that she was working with Mitchell and von Spakovsky.

Although the law bars charitable organizations such as theCouncil for National Policyfrom engaging in electoral politics, Nelson unabashedly acknowledged, “Obviously, we all want President Trump to win, and win the national vote.” She went on, “But it’s very clear that, really, what it comes down to is the states, and the state legislators.” One plan, she said, was to urge conservative legislators to voice doubt to their respective secretaries of state, questioning the election’s outcome and asking, “What did happen that night?”

By August, 2020, when the Council for National Policy held another meeting, the pandemic had hurt Trump’s prospects, and talk within the membership about potential Democratic election fraud had reached a frenzy. At the meeting, Adams, the Public Interest Legal Foundation’s president,echoed Trump’s raging about mail-in ballots, describing them as “the No. 1 left-wing agenda.” He urged conservatives not to be deterred by criticism: “Be not afraid of the accusations that you’re a voter suppressor, you’re a racist, and so forth.”

A younger member of the organization, Charlie Kirk—a founder of Turning Point USA, which promotes right-wing ideas on school campuses—injected a note of optimism. He suggested that the pandemic, by closing campuses, would likely suppress voting among college students, a left-leaning bloc. “Please keep the campuses closed,” he said, to cheers. “Like, it’s a great thing!”

Five months later, Turning Point Action, a “social welfare organization” run by Kirk’s group, was one of nearly a dozen groups behind Trump’s “March to Save America,” on January 6th. Shortly before the rally, Kirk tweeted that the groups he leads would send “80+ buses full of patriots to DC to fight for this president.” His tweet was deleted after the crowds assaulted the Capitol.

Turning Point, which has received small grants from the Bradley Foundation, is headquartered in Arizona, and it has played a significant role in the radicalization of the state, in part by amplifying fear and anger about voter fraud. Turning Point’s chief operating officer, Tyler Bowyer, is a member of the Republican National Committeeand a former chair of the Maricopa County Republican Party. Bowyer’s friend Jake Hoffman runs an Arizona-based digital-marketing company, Rally Forge, that has been Turning Point’s highest-compensated contractor.In the summer of 2020, Rally Forge helped Turning Point use social media to spread incendiary misinformationabout the coming elections.

In September, the Washington Post reported that Rally Forge, on behalf of Turning Point Action, had paid teen-agers to deceptively post thousands of copycat propaganda messages, much as Russia had done during the 2016 campaign. Adult leaders had instructed the teens to tweak the wording of their posts, to evade detection by technology companies. Some messages were posted under the teens’ accounts, but others were sent under assumed personae. Many posts claimed that mail-in ballots would “lead to fraud,” and that Democrats planned to steal the Presidency.

Turning Point Action denied that it ran a troll farm, arguing that the teen-age employees were genuine, but a study by the Internet Observatory at Stanford’s Cyber Policy Center documented the scheme, along with other dubious practices by Rally Forge. In 2016, the company fabricated a politician—complete with a doctored photograph—to run as an Independent write-in candidate against Andy Biggs, a far-right Republican seeking an open congressional seat in Arizona. The ploy, evidently intended to siphon votes from Biggs’s Democratic opponent, didn’t go far, but it was hardly the company’s only scam. The Guardian has shown how Rally Forge also created a phony left-wing front group, America Progress Now, which promoted Green Party candidates online in 2018, apparently to hurt Democrats in several races.

In October, 2020, Rally Forge was banned from Facebook, and its president, Hoffman, was permanently suspended by Twitter. Undeterred, he ran as a pro-Trump Republican for the Arizona House—and won. Remarkably, the chamber’s Republican leadership then appointed him the vice-chair of the Committee on Government and Elections. Since getting elected, Hoffman has challenged the legitimacy of Biden’s victory, called for election audits, and, in coördination with the Heritage Foundation, used his position to propose numerous bills making it more difficult to vote.

This past spring, at a private gathering outside Tucson, Jessica Anderson, the executive director of Heritage Action—the politically active arm of the Heritage Foundation—singled out Hoffman for praise. As a leaked video of her remarks revealed, she told supporters that, with the help of Hoffman and other state legislators, the nonprofit group was rewriting America’s election laws. “In some cases, we actually draft them for them, or we have a sentinel on our behalf give them the model legislation so it has that grassroots, from-the-bottom-up type of vibe,” Anderson explained. “We’ve got three bills done in Arizona!” She continued, “We’re moving four more through the state of Arizona right now . . . simple bills, all straight from the Heritage recommendations.” One of the bills, she noted, was “written and carried by Jake Hoffman,” whom she described as “a longtime friend of the Heritage Foundation.”

Hoffman’s bills have made the Heritage Foundation’s wish list a reality.Voting by mail has long been popular in Arizona, with as many as ninety per cent of voters doing so in 2020, but one of Hoffman’s bills made it a felony to send a mail-in ballot to residents who hadn’t requested one, unless they were on an official list of early voters. Another bill, which Hoffman supported, will, according to one estimate, push as many as two hundred thousand people off the state’s list of early voters. Opponents say that this legislation will disproportionately purge Latinos, who constitute twenty-four per cent of the state’s eligible voters. Another bill by Hoffman banned state election officials from accepting outside donations to help pay for any aspect of election administration, including voter registration. (One of the bill’s targets was Mark Zuckerberg, whose foundation helped county election officials in Arizona handle the pandemic.) In February, at a hearing of the Committee on Government and Elections, a witness from the Washington-based Capital Research Center—also funded by the Bradley Foundation—testified in support of Hoffman’s legislation. Athena Salman, the ranking Democrat, told me she was incensed that Hoffman—“a guy who paid teen-agers to lie”—was put on the election committee. “It’s the fox guarding the henhouse!” she said.

Anderson, of Heritage, declined to respond to questions about the group’s collaborations with Hoffman, instead sending a prepared statement: “After a year when voters’ trust in our elections plummeted, restoring that trust should be the top priority of legislators and governors nationwide. That’s why Heritage Action is deploying our established grassroots network for state advocacy for the first time ever. There is nothing more important than ensuring every American is confident their vote counts—and we will do whatever it takes to get there.”

Hoffman, who formerly served as a town-council member in Queen Creek, a deeply conservative part of Maricopa County, did not respond to requests for comment. Kristin Clark, a Democrat who mounted a write-in campaign against him after the news of his troll farm broke, called Hoffman an “unintelligent man who wants to be a big guy.” She told me, “The Republicans here have changed. They were conservative, but now they’ve sold out. It’s money that’s changed it. All these giant, corporate groups that are faceless—it’s outside money.” In her view, “Jake Hoffman is but a cog.”

The spark that ignited the Arizona audit was an amateur video, taken on Election Night, of an unidentified female voter outside a polling place in what Kristin Clark recognized as Hoffman’s district.The voter claimed that election workers had tried to sabotage her ballot by deliberately giving her a Sharpie that the electronic scanners couldn’t read. Her claim was false: the scanners could read Sharpie ink, and the ballots had been designed so that the flip side wouldn’t be affected if the ink bled through. Nevertheless, the video went viral.

Among the first to spread the Sharpiegate conspiracywas another one ofCharlie Kirk’s youth groups, Students for Trump. The next day, as Trump furiously insisted he had won an election that he ended up losing by roughly seven million votes, protesters staged angry rallies in Maricopa County, where ballots were still being counted. Adding an aura of legal credibility to the conspiracy theory, Adams, the Public Interest Legal Foundation president, immediately filed suit against Maricopa County, alleging that a Sharpie-using voter he represented had been disenfranchised. The case was soon dismissed, but not before Adams tweeted, “just filed to have our client’s right to #vote upheld. Her #Sharpie ballot was cancelled without cure.” Arizona’s attorney general, Mark Brnovich, a Republican, investigated, and his office took only a day to conclude that the Sharpie story was nonsense. But, by then, many Trump supporters no longer trusted Arizona’s election results. Clark, the former Democratic challenger to Hoffman, told me that she watched in horror as “they took B.S. and made it real!”

A day after the election, the office of Katie Hobbs, Arizona’s secretary of state, reported that, based on a routine, bipartisan hand recount of a sample of ballots, “no discrepancies were found” in Maricopa County. Within days, the mainstream media had called the election for Biden, based on late returns from Nevada, Pennsylvania, and Georgia. But Cleta Mitchell, who had been dispatched by Trump’s chief of staff, Mark Meadows, to help the Trump campaign in Georgia, told Fox News, “We’re already double-checking and finding dead people having voted.” As Georgia was ratifying its results with a recount, she tweeted that the tally was “fake!!!”

Meanwhile, on the conservative Web site Townhall, Hoffman demanded “a full audit of the vote count in swing states,” adding that the election was “far from over.” He claimed that there had been “countless violations of state election law, statistical anomalies and election irregularities in more than a half dozen states,” and argued that state legislatures should therefore have the final say. By December, he had joined his friend Bowyer and other members of the state’s Republican Party in filing suit against Arizona’s governor, calling for the state to set aside Arizona’s eleven electoral votes and allow the legislature to intervene.

At the same time, another version of the Independent Legislature Doctrine argument was being mounted in Pennsylvania, by the Honest Elections Project, the group tied to Leonard Leo, of the Federalist Society. Local Republicans had challenged a state-court ruling that adjusted voting procedures during the pandemic. The Honest Elections Project filed a brief with the U.S. Supreme Court arguing that the Pennsylvania court had usurped the legislature’s authority to oversee elections. The effort didn’t succeed, but Richard Hasen, the election-law professor, regards such arguments as “powder kegs” that threaten American democracy. Leo didn’t respond to requests for comment, but Hasen believes that Leo is trying to preserve “minority rule” in elections in order to advance his agenda. Hasen told me, “Making it harder to vote helps them get more Republican victories, which helps them get more conservative judges and courts.”

In the case of Arizona, it took only a week for a federal district court to dismiss Hoffman and Bowyer’s suit, citing an absence of “relevant or reliable evidence.” The court admonished the plaintiffs that “gossip and innuendo” cannot “be the basis for upending Arizona’s 2020 General Election.” Hoffman and the other plaintiffs appealed the case to the U.S. Supreme Court, which declined to hear the matter, but it waited to do so until March. In the meantime, election-fraud conspiracy theories in Arizona were growing out of control.

On November 12th, Biden was declared the winner in Maricopa County. Soon after, a Republican member of the county’s Board of Supervisors, Bill Gates, was picking up takeout food for his family when the board’s chairman—one of four Republicans on the five-person board—called to warn him to be careful going home. Ninety angry people had gathered outside the chairman’s house, and Gates’s place could be next. “We’d all been doxed,” Gates told me. He and his wife are the legal guardians of a teen-ager whose father, a Ugandan, was nearly killed by henchmen for Idi Amin. “It’s chilling to see the parallels,” Gates told me. “You’d never think there were any parallels to a strongman autocracy in Africa.” Gates considers himself a political-science nerd, but, he said, “I had no concept that we were heading where we were heading.”

Gates, who moved to Arizona as a teen-ager, was a latchkey kid whose idea of entertainment was watching C-span. He is forty-nine and describes himself as a “child of the Reagan Revolution” who started a Republican club in high school. He attended Drake University, in Iowa, partly so that he could witness the state’s Presidential caucuses. Winning a Truman Scholarship opened his way to Harvard Law School, where he joined theFederalist Society,the Harvard Law School Republican Club, and the Journal of Law and Public Policy. At Harvard, membership in all three was called the “conservative trifecta.” Gates can scarcely believe how the Republican Party and the conservative movement have changed in the years since.