Eliminate the pesky will of the American voter

I wrote to Biden and Congress again. The text follows. Feel free to adapt it to send to your own representatives. Pelosi has responded, the text the same as what she sent last time ( though I didn’t check if it was identical). So, yeah, form letter. Florida, Iowa, Georgia, and Montana have passed massive voter suppression laws. More states, including Michigan have suppression laws on the way. What have Democrats done? As far as I can tell, nothing. Republicans in Arizona are putting on a huge display of pretending to "audit" the Maricopa County vote. They are committing several election crimes along the way. And Democrats are doing nothing. Liz Cheney is about to be ousted from Republican leadership so that the party can present a united message that the 2020 election was stolen, giving them the reason to pass laws to declare results in the 2022 and 2024 election as invalid if it doesn't produce the results they want. And Democrats are doing nothing. Our democracy is in grave peril and Democrats are acting like it is business as usual. I wrote to you about this before. Some of you responded, saying that you are in favor of, even a sponsor of, the For the People Act and the John Lewis Voting Rights Act. Great! I'm glad to hear it. But because the Republicans are so vocal about their voting "fraud" message, Democrats need to be equally vocal. And they're not. I hear very little. Democrats need to find a way to get the For the People act through the Senate. Not sometime. Now. Voting rights are much more important than infrastructure and helping families. If we lose voting rights nothing else matters. If it isn't passed by July the Republican messaging will have gotten too far ahead for the law to do much good. Democrats need to introduce and act on the John Lewis Voting Rights Act now, not in September, which will be too late. Both of these laws must be firmly established before redistricting begins this fall. Then Democrats need to reform the court system so that by the time these laws get before the Supreme Court (and they will be challenged and will get there) a 6-3 conservative court won't rule against them. Some justices have already said voting is not a right. Democrats need to be vocal, as loud as Republicans, in condemning the voter suppression laws and explaining why they are bad and standing up for democracy. Messaging is just as important as acting. Seize the stage! The silence and inaction of Democrats implies that you want the one-party state the Republicans are creating. As a gay man, I would be a target in that state, as would my transgender, black, Asian, Latinx, and poor brothers and sisters be. When I wrote about this last time suggested I contact my personal representative. I had. I am sending this message to Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, Sen. Gary Peters, Sen. Debbie Stabenow, Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Rep. Rashida Tlaib, and President Joe Biden. As for why I felt the letter was necessary... Marc Elias tweeted:

Today Florida joined Iowa, Georgia and Montana in enacting a massive voter suppression law. Businesses are still mostly offering thoughts and prayers. The media is still mostly offering both-side analysis. Our democracy is in trouble.

Hunter of Daily Kos wrote six days ago about the audit of the vote in Maricopa County, Arizona. Some more of the problems (I had written about some before): * Ballots and computers have been left unattended. * There are no fixed procedures so workers are left to their own judgments. Though they seem to have procedures if Antifa ever attacked. * There could be a mingling of counted and uncounted ballots. * The recount company, Cyber Ninjas, has declared their method of counting ballots to be a trade secret. A judge has declared that BS and ordered them to produce it. * Holding ballots up to UV light and sticking the folds under a microscope to somehow detect if a human voted the ballot or a robot did. * Check for signs of bamboo fibers to tell if it was one of 40,000 that really came from Asia, where bamboo free paper is apparently unknown. The Department of Justice has warned the AZ Senate that the audit appears to breaking laws, such as not keeping “control” of ballots. Hunter wrote:

It will never end. Conspiracy theories by design never have an end date to them; if the conspiracy cannot be proven to exist, say its promoters, that only proves that the conspiracy is even more wide-ranging and nefarious than anyone had anticipated. They will demand another recount, and a recount to be done by some other group, and a recount of that other group's recount, and it will not end because the Republican Party has declared that the election was "fraudulent" not based on any evidence at all, but simply because they did not win. It is a fascist propaganda campaign, and one that Donald Trump and his team of deplorables openly stated they would be promoting if Trump lost the election. He did. They did. It resulted in insurrection inside the U.S. Capitol, a barrage of new voting restrictions premised on ex-presidential delusions, and an Arizona Republican move to throw the counting of ballots to the very people promoting the hoaxes. ... The propaganda is the strategy; the goal is to stoke the notion that elections not won by the Republican Party are illegitimate, and that new means must exist for throwing out those election results when Republican lawmakers don't like them. It is a fascist movement; the insurrection is still going on.

Yesterday Laura Clawson of Kos provided an update.

“It makes us look like idiots,” one Republican state senator who supported the effort was quoted in The New York Times. “Looking back, I didn’t think it would be this ridiculous. It’s embarrassing to be a state senator at this point.” That well, huh? Republicans are trying to have 2.1 million ballots from Maricopa County—where the majority of the state’s voters live—“audited.” So far, the conspiracy theorists in charge of the effort have gotten through 250,000 ballots, which puts them on track to finish in August.

But that comments about being idiots wasn’t enough to convince them to stop. The Justice Department was annoyed with the plan to verify voter registrations and check whether voters actually voted by talking to voters sounds too much like illegal voter intimidation. That idea was thrown out. Clawson wrote:

Arizona Secretary of State Katie Hobbs, a Democrat who has criticized the partisan and slipshod manner of the proceedings, now requires a 24/7 security detail after death threats. ... “They lost, and they can’t get over it,” as Grant Woods, a former Republican Arizona attorney general who became a Democrat during the Trump years, told the Associated Press. “And they don’t want to get over it because they want to continue to sow doubt about the election.”

Brahm Resnik tweeted:

Folks, if you're following Arizona audit coverage, keep in mind: The AZ fight against the 11/3 results has been on blast for six months. Six months. And it is far from over.

Kyle Griffin of MSNBC tweeted:

The private company conducting the GOP recount in Arizona is now demanding access to government internet routers and passwords, which the Maricopa County sheriff blasted as "mind-numbingly reckless and irresponsible" and a threat to law enforcement.

Brooke Binkowski, who describes herself as “Your friendly neighborhood debunker,” responded:

What the f--- did everyone expect? You treat cranks like these as legitimate, they'll keep pushing. That's how they managed to get as far as they have.

Binkowski quoted Jeff Sharlet:

The GOP goal is not to make it harder to vote. It's to delegitimize the concept of voting all together.

Then Binkowski added:

This is a disinformation campaign that calls itself an audit, it's part of an ongoing far right power grab, and we cannot sleep on it.

Dartagnan of the Kos community discussed what is going on behind the ouster of Liz Cheney from the 3rd position in the GOP House leadership. That’s likely to happen tomorrow. As I’ve written before it is because Cheney has consistently pushed back against the Big Lie. As part of his discussion Dartagnan quoted Greg Sargent of The Washington Post. Sargent noted some Republicans are saying they are willing to overturn future elections. Others are keeping the Big Lie alive. Dartagnan noted the party is giving its full approval to both efforts. Dartagnan wrote:

It’s far more than testing boundaries, it’s a barely veiled effort to eliminate the pesky will of the American voter entirely from the equation.

And Sargent wrote:

Republicans are untethering themselves from any obligation to recognize future legitimate election outcomes, which will provide the rationale to overturn them, a freedom they are also effectively in process of appropriating. Cheney is insisting on a GOP future premised on a full repudiation of these tendencies, and getting punished for it.

Dartagnan considers a scenario: one of 2020’s six close states again votes slightly Democratic in 2024. The state legislature declares fraud and sends an alternate slate of electors to Congress, overturning the will of the state’s voters. It will go to the Supremes. There will likely be violence. Sargent wrote:

“The core component of the democratic process is that we count the votes as cast,” [Constitutional law scholar Edward] Foley told me. The punishing of Cheney, Foley concluded, suggests that the Republican Party might be institutionally “abandoning the very essence of democracy.”

Dartagnan wrote the bigger crime on January 6 wasn’t the attack on the Capitol, but the 147 House members who voted not to certify the election. They have become more radical since then. They’ve already shown us democracy means nothing to them. John Stoehr tweeted an introduction to one of his Editorial Board articles:

How do we know Trump's insurrection hasn't stopped? Because the GOP can't stop lying. ... I wish more people understood the authoritarian nature of lies. They are things you, me and everyone we know cannot engage. Not unless we are part of the elite group that owns them, that exercises exclusive control over them. Lies are like an imperial power refusing to recognize the sovereignty of the public good. While facts are happy to be what they are, lies are never content. They are greedy. They must acquire. They must grow and expand and spread. ... By liberal standards, [Liz Cheney is] bad. By democratic standards, she’s good. She voted to impeach the former president on a charge of inciting insurrection. She has never wavered from that. As a conservative, she’s been terrible. As a democratic patriot, though, she’s been terrific. ... But what’s increasingly clear is by replacing a moral leader (Cheney) with an immoral leader (Stefanik), the Republicans are laying the groundwork for a future in which they can replace the truth (the results of a free and fair election) with a lie (Dems rig election etc.). In other words, they are preparing for the day they can replace democracy with autocracy—a republic with an apartheid state. Lies are greedy. They must dominate. They must conquer. ... Lying is not an effect. It’s a cause. Lying is not a means or an end. It’s a means *as well as* an end. The Republican inhabit a world in which they need not engage facts democratically. They need not engage the out-group as if its interests were legitimate.

This morning Ian Millhiser of Vox tweeted:

Ted Cruz is giving a speech right now claiming that Democrats are the real racists because they want to pass voting rights legislation. He called the voting rights legislation "Jim Crow 2.0."

Kelly Hayes responded:

It's actually pretty important that Ted Cruz is trying to co-opt and nullify the phrase "Jim Crow 2.0." That phrase comes from grassroots voting rights activists, and the GOP knows those people are a threat to their agenda.

ContextFall added:

I've noticed that they're doing this more and more intentionally. Similarly, Trump has been reframing "The Big Lie" to mean the fact that he lost is the lie. This attack on language is the central way they maintain control of the media landscape.

Jonathan Metzl tweeted:

Take home point: Northern strategies potentially ineffective against what is becoming a nationalized Southern strategy. Start talking and listening to ppl who have lived through this in purple-turned-red states.

Nixon used the Southern Strategy to win. Jennifer Cohn, election security advocate, quoted audiomagnate:

Why haven't the Democrats been able to use Trump's false election claims as the foundation for changing to a system that simply can't be hacked?

Cohn replied:

Yes. It is tragic that the Democrats haven’t even attempted to use this lemon as leverage for passing legislation that wld require robust manual audits for all federal races in 2022 & a ban on internet connectivity - the reforms that Rs blocked in 2020. What a missed opportunity.

Rev Magdalen tweeted:

No matter what crimes the Trumpist Party did, for two years, the oblivious normalizers with oversight power instead obsessed over their hundreds of bills. "Someday when we get the Senate back, we'll get all this stuff! So Trump's crime victims have to take one for the team now." He risked the lives of up to 4 million of us, and succeeded in killing over half a million of us. And he should not have even BEEN there to throw away the scientific response plan, because he had already been caught in 10 counts of obstruction of justice years before. He was credibly accused of rape. And Nancy said that she just didn't know what role there would be for her in that. So, his victim had to watch her attacker on TV every day and Nancy's "cutesy" little comments trying to goad him into signing her aspirational infrastructure plan. That was really, *really* wrong, and it is going to take this nation a long time to unpack everything that happened. All we can say for sure is that the oversight body did not do its duty once the people gave it that power in a massive wave election. They ignored the emergency. ... We *did* what they asked and made another unprecedented election, more voters than ever before. And even when the fascist cult of personality responded by sacking the capitol, we're still told everything's normal, it's fine that two Ds are R in practice and we get nothing. Vote!