Republican Assault on Democracy and March Towards Fascism

[pnwguy]

Jul 18, 2021 18:20:17 GMT jackd said:

Trump knew who these people were and how they would react and enjoyed watching it unfold. Maybe not provable in a court of law but he's guilty as hell.

It's a sad reality of life, than Karma acts so slowly... 

[LFC]

I put this here rather than in the voting thread because it illustrates just how Georgia Republicans are goose stepping towards fascism as they run roughshod over the political process to rig the game for their continued power.

Georgia State Senator Sally Harrell (D) remembers arriving at the parking garage near the legislative office building early, before the sun rose. Sitting in meetings through dinner, her stomach rumbling. Feverishly texting the chair of the Senate Ethics Committee, begging him to get her a copy of an election-related bill early enough so she could read it before voting on it — sometimes, she said, he did, and sometimes he didn’t.

Frustrations like those peppered the few months when she and her Democratic colleagues watched as state Republicans raced to concoct restrictive voting legislation in response to the critical wins of President Joe Biden and Sens. Raphael Warnock (D-GA) and Jon Ossoff (D-GA) in the state.

They, like Republicans in state legislatures across the country, pushed the legislation under the guise of election security, despite the absence of widespread voting fraud. Georgia Republicans enjoy a trifecta: majorities in both statehouse chambers and the governor’s mansion.

“It was very frustrating to get up every morning and fight knowing that I couldn’t really affect the outcome,” Harrell told TPM. “We simply didn’t have enough votes.”

[LFC]

TPM basically says that Merrick Garland had better wake the f*** up and grasp the reality of the political situation in America today in a piece called Institutionalism Can’t Save Us Now.

We have no shortage of information about how historically bad an Attorney General William Barr was. His tenure was marked by attacks on LGBTQ rights, immigrants, and peaceful protestors. His overt politicization of the investigations into Russian interference in the election, the Mueller report, and Roger Stone’s sentencing are well-documented, and in a continuing headache for the Biden Administration’s DOJ, Barr’s Justice Department’s intervened to protect Trump against E. Jean Carroll’s defamation lawsuit against him just two months before the election. And yet, as we saw this week following revelations that his DOJ declined to prosecute Commerce Department officials for lying about the provenance of the Census citizenship question, what we know merely scratches the surface.

How is it that the Justice Department reached this decision? And why has it remained a secret for over a year? These are questions for which the public deserves answers. Attorney General Merrick Garland, however, has repeatedly emphasized his ambivalence towards the project of seeking them out. His refusal to look squarely at the damage of the past four years will make it hard not to speculate that his Department will repeat them.

In 2019, following a request from lawmakers, the Commerce Department’s Inspector General, Peggy Gustafson, opened an investigation to determine if Secretary Wilbur Ross and others had lied to Congress about the origin and intent of the proposed Census citizenship question. The evidence pointing to wrongdoing was public and overwhelming; in 2019, voting rights advocates publicized evidence that Wilbur Ross’ advisor Mark Neuman, former DOJ official John Gore, and Commerce Department General Counsel Peter Davidson repeatedly lied in their testimony regarding the census question.

This month, Gustafson disclosed that her office had determined that the officials had provided false testimony and referred the case to the Public Integrity Section of the DOJ’s Criminal Division. It declined to prosecute, despite the clear evidence of wrongdoing and persistent harm. In a letter to the House Committee on Oversight and Reform dated July 15, Gustafson noted that the inspector general investigation began in June of 2019 but it does not say when the investigation concluded, nor, for what it’s worth, when the Justice Department declined prosecution. Ross’ tenure at Commerce and political interference in the 2020 census had clear impacts. Biden’s census nominee Robert Santos acknowledged “a lot of morale issues” and a “harrowing” couple of years in his confirmation hearing earlier this month.

The incident also directly implicated several Justice Department attorneys in the plot to add a racist question, with illegal roots, to the 2020 Census. The Justice Department formally requested the addition of a citizenship question to the Census in 2017, at the request of Commerce Secretary Ross — a request he later lied about making. Trump’s DOJ also continued, in multiple court battles, to defend the question even as its illegality was made clear. The entire incident sheds light on a key problem with AG Garland’s tenure: by pretending wrongdoing didn’t occur in his own department, he is brushing illegal offenses under the rug and failing to hold those responsible accountable.

Although Garland’s actions are in line with some previous attorneys general — operating under the precedent to protect the DOJ as an institution, regardless of who is in power; a precedent at least initially established to keep the DOJ apolitical — the Trump administration changed things. And the behaviors of Barr’s DOJ should not be legitimized.

[jackd]

He's probably also reflecting Biden's desire to "move on". There is a tricky balance to be achieved between apparently harassing the prior administration and upholding the rule of law.

[goldenvalley]

Aug 9, 2021 21:56:17 GMT jackd said:

He's probably also reflecting Biden's desire to "move on". There is a tricky balance to be achieved between apparently harassing the prior administration and upholding the rule of law.

Moving on can mean: 1. ignoring the past in the name of not harassing the now vanquished Trump Administration or 2. ferreting out and exposing the excesses and/or criminality of the Trump administration so that we Americans can learn what to avoid in the future.  We don't know which definition hindsight will deem appropriate. 

[LFC]

I had high hopes for Merrick Garland but now I'm quickly getting a bad case of buyer's remorse. I think he's too firmly planted in how he wants things to be to handle how they really are. In this case it sounds like prosecution of the Jan. 6 insurrectionists is atypically light.

Federal Judge Beryl Howell on Monday challenged the feds on what she suggested to be their too-soft handling of some Jan. 6 insurrectionist cases.

During a hearing of one of the insurrectionists who was pleading guilty to a misdemeanor, Howell questioned why prosecutors were seeking only a total of $1.5 million in fines from the insurrectionists when Congress had shelled out $521 million in taxpayer funds to the National Guard in wake of the attack.

“I’m accustomed to the government being fairly aggressive in terms of fraud when there have been damages that accrue from a criminal act for the restitution amount,” Howell said, per the Washington Post.

“Where we have Congress acting, appropriating all this money due directly to the events of January 6th, I have found the damage amount of less than $1.5 million — when all of us American taxpayers are about to foot the bill for close to half a billion dollars — a little bit surprising,” the judge added.

Howell asked Clayton O’Connor, the prosecutor at the center of the hearing she was overseeing on Monday, for an explanation for those figures, according to Politico.

“I’m happy to get you that answer,” O’Connor told the judge.

Howell also expressed skepticism toward the distinction prosecutors have been making between insurrectionists who proudly broadcasted their involvement in the attack and those who didn’t, per Politico.

[goldenvalley]

Aug 10, 2021 21:35:43 GMT LFC said:

I had high hopes for Merrick Garland but now I'm quickly getting a bad case of buyer's remorse. I think he's too firmly planted in how he wants things to be to handle how they really are. In this case it sounds like prosecution of the Jan. 6 insurrectionists is atypically light.

Remember Garland is the guy that Obama Administration thought would be acceptable to McConnell and gang.   He was mild mannered and inoffensive, not likely to ruffle any Republican feathers.  

[LFC]

You may remember how the U.S. Attorney for Atlanta abruptly quit and a shady Trump flunky was immediately stuffed into his position. We're finding out more about this character, specifically that he is a traitor to American democracy who attempted to push the Georgia state gov't into a bogus hunt for The Big Lie.

Emails show a top Trump DOJ official advocating for federal law enforcement to throw its weight behind a demand that Georgia reject Biden’s win in the state in last year’s election, ABC reports.

Then-acting civil division chief Jeffrey Clark sent a draft letter on Dec. 28, 2020 that asked the governor and state legislature of Georgia to convene a special session that would examine mythical allegations of mass voter fraud perpetuated by President Trump, ABC reported.

The letter, the report said, also appeared to assert that the DOJ wanted the state to examine the supposed issues as they related to appointing of presidential electors.

“While the Department of Justice believe the Governor of Georgia should immediately call a special session to consider this important and urgent matter, if he declines to do so, we share with you our view that the Georgia General Assembly has implied authority under the Constitution of the United States to call itself into special session for [t]he limited purpose of considering issues pertaining to the appointment of Presidential Electors,” the memo reads, as reported by ABC.

Clark now works for the New Civil Liberties Alliance, TPM reported on Monday, a group that, among other things, fights vaccine mandates.

He first made headlines in the weeks after the Jan. 6 insurrection, when the New York Times reported that Trump had considered replacing then-acting Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen with Clark.

Per the NYT, Clark also reportedly told Rosen to declare that the election had been tainted with corruption, and that Trump would install him as AG.

He won't do it but Garland needs to fully investigate this. If inappropriate pressure was applied or false information provided (yes and yes) then he needs to prosecute this asshat with the full weight of the law.

[jackd]

What crimes do you think he could be prosecuted for? His legal argument that the state legislatures could take control of the state's electoral votes is "out there" but, based on some Federalist Society theories and some statements of Supreme Court Justices such as Scalia in Bush v. Gore as well as recent concurrences on cases from this election, would not be deemed totally frivolous by the current court even if the argument were rejected.

[LFC]

American's Brown Shirts, a.k.a. The Proud Boys, are headed back to their roots: street violence.

For more than six months after the Jan. 6 Capitol attack, the city of Portland, Oregon, enjoyed a summer largely free of far-right rallies. That changed this weekend when a coterie of fringe figures descended on the city, where they were filmed throwing punches at bystanders, clashing with the left, and in one case pointing a rifle at a journalist.

Among the group was one person charged with allegedly breaking into the Capitol (currently out of jail awaiting trial), as well as people wearing Proud Boys uniforms. The right-wing group’s return to the streets, after a brief lull in post-Jan. 6 scuffles, is a warning for the rest of the country, local activists say.

A famously left-leaning city, Portland has long been in the crosshairs of far-right groups, many of them based outside the city or across state lines.

“Portland itself is seen as this soft target, I think, by the far right, because there’s good activism going on here and a police force that doesn’t give two shits about policing the far right,” Juan Chavez, project director of the Oregon Justice Resource Center’s Civil Rights Project, told The Daily Beast.

At the heart of the weekend’s mayhem was a religious event by an anti-LGBT pastor, the Portland Mercury reported. The event attracted a “security” force of far-right figures, who engaged in an escalating series of fights throughout the weekend. On Saturday, for instance, a group on the right filmed itself shouting homophobic and misogynistic slurs at a man standing alone. The group, which included at least one man wearing Proud Boys colors, knocked the man’s coffee and phone to the ground before hitting him in the head and throwing him down, with one man appearing to hold a wooden bat in the man’s face.

It goes on, quite a bit.

[goldenvalley]

The level of anger and violence expressed astounds, angers, and saddens me. This is not the country I believed I lived in.   'We are in harm's way': Election officials fear for their personal safety... 

[LFC]

Aug 12, 2021 3:22:43 GMT goldenvalley said:

The level of anger and violence expressed astounds, angers, and saddens me. This is not the country I believed I lived in.   'We are in harm's way': Election officials fear for their personal safety...

A non-like like. Fascism courtesy of the Republican Plaid Shirts.

[LFC]

Fascism in Pennsylvania, only about an hour from home.

Steve Lynch, the Republican candidate for Northampton County executive in Pennsylvania, on Sunday claimed that he would aggressively confront pro-mask school board members with “20 strong men” to boot them from their positions.

Speaking to a crowd at a political rally in Harrisburg, Lynch is seen in a video ranting about his opposition against school mask mandates and issuing the rally cry of: “Make men men again!”

Lynch demanded that men join him in removing pro-mask school board members who refuse to resign.

“I’m going in with 20 strong men, and I’m going to speak to the school board, and I’m going to give them an option. They can leave or they can be removed,” Lynch said. “And then after that, we’re going to replace them with nine parents and we’re going to vote down the mask mandates that evening — that evening.”

Lynch insisted that his idea of confronting pro-mask school board members is “how you get stuff done.”

“Forget writing your legislator. Forget it! They’re not listening,” Lynch said, before saying people would have to end his life before he would permit “criminals” to enforce the mask mandate.

Apparently the way you "make men men again" is to have them act out like spoiled, rotten children who can't have their way. Republican men, backing away from adulting one MAGAt at a time.

[goldenvalley]

Aug 31, 2021 17:10:13 GMT LFC said:

Fascism in Pennsylvania, only about an hour from home.

Apparently the way you "make men men again" is to have them act out like spoiled, rotten children who can't have their way. Republican men, backing away from adulting one MAGAt at a time.

Such big talk with this group and with Congressmember McCawley too.  Apparently this is the essence of the new Republican Party, the thing that endeared Trump to so many people.  It used to be that warlike talk was reserved for going to war (actual shooting war), for threatening to go to shooting war, and for going after crime/criminals/drug use.  Now it's used for general political discourse.  Civil language is for wimps.

[LFC]

Aug 31, 2021 17:40:54 GMT goldenvalley said:

Such big talk with this group and with Congressmember McCawley too.  Apparently this is the essence of the new Republican Party, the thing that endeared Trump to so many people.  It used to be that warlike talk was reserved for going to war (actual shooting war), for threatening to go to shooting war, and for going after crime/criminals/drug use.  Now it's used for general political discourse.  Civil language is for wimps.

Who knows, maybe the Republicans will get what they want: an armed society. And an armed society is supposedly a polite society. I wonder how Bobby Brownshirt would act if he knew that any attempt to physically grab the school board members would erupt in a hail of gunfire as they stood their ground.

[goldenvalley]

Aug 31, 2021 18:15:02 GMT LFC said:

Aug 31, 2021 17:40:54 GMT goldenvalley said:

Such big talk with this group and with Congressmember McCawley too.  Apparently this is the essence of the new Republican Party, the thing that endeared Trump to so many people.  It used to be that warlike talk was reserved for going to war (actual shooting war), for threatening to go to shooting war, and for going after crime/criminals/drug use.  Now it's used for general political discourse.  Civil language is for wimps.

Who knows, maybe the Republicans will get what they want: an armed society. And an armed society is supposedly a polite society. I wonder how Bobby Brownshirt would act if he knew that any attempt to physically grab the school board members would erupt in a hail of gunfire as they stood their ground.

The problem with hails of gunfire is that you never know who will end up still alive at the end.  It might be the "wrong" people who survive.  

[indy]

I see a group of people managed to cancel a vaccination site in Georgia after harassing the health care workers there because, of course, these people are against 'cancel' culture.

[LFC]

Aug 31, 2021 18:30:08 GMT goldenvalley said:

The problem with hails of gunfire is that you never know who will end up still alive at the end.  It might be the "wrong" people who survive.  

[LFC]

Aug 31, 2021 18:30:09 GMT indy said:

I see a group of people managed to cancel a vaccination site in Georgia after harassing the health care workers there because, of course, these people are against 'cancel' culture.

Freedumb for me, not freedom for thee.

[LFC]

The right-wing fascists turn to violence so easily and naturally.

An anti-mask protester appeared to assault a doctor outside a school board meeting in Lee County, Florida on Monday night.

Then, as a reporter from NBC Channel 2 tried to interview the doctor about the alleged assault, a fistfight broke out.

The incident occurred outside district headquarters after Lee County imposed a 30-day mask mandate in schools, according to NBC Channel 2 reporter Dave Elias.

"What I'm seeing here is just unbelievable," Elias said during a live broadcast. "I can tell you that I just saw two doctors try to walk into this building, and they were shoved off of the sidewalk back into the street."

Elias then asked the doctor about the alleged assault.

"I was just trying to make my way to the door, so I could come in and fill (out) a comment card, and a woman stood in front of me and bumped me out of the way," the doctor said, adding that she was not surprised by the violence because, "I've been watching it on social media for weeks and months and months."

At that point, a fight broke out a few feet away.

"As you can see, fists are now flying, all of this on live television," Elias said. "Fists are flying! Unbelievable what we are seeing here today unfold live."

Another right-wing Christianist freak at the same meeting.

A woman unleashed a profane tirade about demons during a Florida school board meeting where a fistfight also broke out over masking rules for children.

The woman, who claimed to be a registered nurse and mother of two daughters, accused Lee County School Board members -- and others nationwide -- of being "demonic entities" because they were voting to require masks for 30 days as new cases of COVID-19 explode.

"These are demonic entities, and we need to stick together," said the woman, who identified herself as Melissa. "Remember, we have authority in Christ Jesus. These are demonic entities in all the school boards of all the United States of America, and all of us Christians are sticking together to take them all out."

Melissa, who was wearing a badge that read "mass non-compliance is the only way to end this nightmare," then appeared to issue a threat against police officers.

"All the police officers that kick us out for our First Amendment right will also be going down with them," she said. "Do you understand?"

She then appeared to argue that children should be allowed to catch the potentially deadly virus to confer natural immunity.

"I'm a nurse, infectious disease, 13 years -- masks don't work," Melissa said. "These doctors that were sneering at us like we're scumbags, they need to go back to f*cking medical school."

School board members issued a last warning to the woman for cursing and briefly cut off her microphone.

"They need to remember," Melissa said, once her microphone was restored, "natural immunity is best. You are all demonic entities, you are going to be taken down."

Her audio was shut off again and she continued shouting as a police officer escorted her away from the microphone.

[LFC]

The right-wing Republican fascist drumbeats for impeachment have started. To be fair they started before Biden won the election. That last sentence I quoted is a key goal for the GOP and they've been hammering on it for decades.

The wheels of the last U.S. military plane were barely off the ground in Afghanistan when Republicans trotted out their plot to impeach President Joe Biden over ending the war.

This article was originally published at Salon

Using Politico, ground zero for the media pressure campaign to bully Biden into occupying that nation forever, the GOP rushed to concept test the idea of impeaching Biden in 2023. "The I-word looms: McCarthy faces internal pressure to go harder at Biden on Afghanistan," reads Politico's headline the morning after the withdrawal. "Republicans [] want to make a high-stakes call for impeaching Biden over his handling of Afghanistan — a vow that would come due should the GOP take back the chamber next November."

Yep, they want to impeach Biden over Afghanistan. Or impeach him for something, anyway. Not because Biden committed any high crimes or misdemeanors, mind you. Nor even really because of "incompetence," which is a word that is thrown around mainly by people who haven't explained how one is supposed to make losing a 20-year war to the Taliban look prettier on the TV box.

No, it's all about pandering to Donald Trump's rabidly bitter, trollish base, the same people who are so furious about losing the 2020 election they're committing biowar on their own bodies just to hurt the rest of the country for not wanting Dr. Drink Bleach as their president. As Politico's Olivia Beavers writes of congressional Republicans, "their offices were being bombarded with calls from base voters for a future Biden impeachment" even before the full military withdrawal from Afghanistan this week.

What's going on here is not mysterious and, critically, is not about the lost war in Afghanistan, which was lost long before Biden set up camp in the Oval Office. Nope, this is about Trump. When it comes to Republicans, it's always about Trump.

"There's a school of thought in McCarthy's conference that Democrats opened the door to politically motivated impeachment efforts by going after Trump," Beavers writes, quoting an anonymous Republican congressional member claiming, "this is exactly what we said would happen when Democrats weaponized impeachment last time."

Of course, this excuse is just more rationalization and lies. Democrats did not, in any way, "weaponize" impeachment by impeaching Trump twice. On the contrary, Democrats didn't impeach Trump enough.

Trump was only impeached for two crimes: The first was for blackmailing a foreign leader into trying to help him cheat in the 2020 election. The second was for inciting an insurrection on January 6. But the actual number of impeachable offenses committed by Trump was a lot more than that, from his obstruction of justice in the Russia probe to his mainlining foreign bribes through his hotels to abuse of power against the press to tax fraud to campaign fraud, and probably a few more things I'm forgetting. Trump loves crime as much as he loves Diet Coke, and if he could have had a "commit a crime" button on his desk, he would have also been constantly punching it.

So no, the problem is not that Democrats politicized impeachment. It's the opposite: Democrats are so afraid of this "politicization" accusation that they haven't done nearly enough to hold Trump accountable for his criminal behavior. Trump is still walking around, free as a bird, even as the people he compelled to storm the U.S. Capitol are being sent to prison at a steady clip. Considering how much public evidence there is for Trump's criminality, it's hard not to conclude that the Department of Justice's failure to prosecute is less about the law and more about politics. Specifically, there's reason to fear that Attorney General Merrick Garland worries that Republicans will seize on any legitimate prosecution of Trump as an excuse to launch a thousand illegitimate prosecutions against Democrats the next time they control the DOJ.

But, as this talk of impeaching Biden demonstrates, Democratic reluctance to hold Trump accountable has not slowed down the vindictiveness and corruption of Republicans in the slightest.

Republicans claim the mantle of victimhood, no matter what, and if they don't have anything to point to as evidence, they'll just make stuff up. After all, the entire GOP caucus now tacitly endorses Trump's Big Lie that Biden stole the election, without a single shred of even decently faked evidence to support it. All that Democrats bought themselves by being under-zealous about going after Trump was that Trump is now free to run in 2024. Republicans don't really need excuses anymore. Hating Democrats is reason enough.

Beyond pleasing Trump and his base, there's an even deeper reason Republicans will want to impeach Biden the second they seize control of the House: to make a mockery of the very idea of accountability.

Boebert is going even further out on the loony limb.

Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-CO) on Tuesday called for the impeachment of Vice President Kamala Harris because she has not invoked the 25th Amendment to remove President Joe Biden from office over his handling of the Afghanistan war.

"The blame starts at the top," Boebert said during a Freedom Caucus press conference, "with Biden and his handpicked vice president who bragged that she was right there making the same bad decisions. And if not for her own dereliction of duty, she should be impeached for not demanding we invoke the 25th Amendment."

"Impeach Biden, impeach Kamala Harris and throw in the secretary of state," she said. "I came here to make sure my boys never lived in a socialist nation. And right now, today, I have to second guess who would actually lead them if they took a stand to serve and join our military."

Boebert added: "Woke doesn't work! Cutting and running doesn't work! Being asleep or senile or sucking on applesauce obviously doesn't work!"

What about being batshit nuts, a pathological liar, and stupid as a rock, Ms. Boebert? Does that work? I guess it does for grifting money from other just like you and for having your hubby cash in on your House committee seat.

[LFC]

It'll never happen. Garland is a product of a bygone era and he doesn't even realize it.

If Merrick Garland doesn't prosecute Trump, the rule of law is 'out the window': Laurence Tribe

If American democracy were a hospital patient, the diagnosis would be "critical". The Jim Crow Republican Party and larger neofascist movement are escalating their war on democracy by passing laws across the country designed to stop Black and brown people from voting. A new report from the Brennan Center details this:

After the 2010 elections, for the first time since the peak of the Jim Crow era, states across the country began to enact laws making it more difficult to vote. This wave of voter suppression was intertwined with race and the nation's changing racial demographics and was, at least in part, a backlash against rising turnout among communities of color contributing to the election of the nation's first Black president. Efforts to suppress the votes of communities of color accelerated in 2013, when the Supreme Court gutted a key part of the Voting Rights Act in Shelby County v. Holder. In the eight years since, and especially in 2020, these trends continued.

Fascist violence continues unabated. In Portland, Oregon, last weekend right-wing street thugs attacked people they believed to be anti-fascists. The violence included a gun battle in downtown Portland. Police did not intervene, which is not entirely surprising given that America's police have long supported fascists and other right-wing extremists.

And let's not forget — as so many in the mainstream American news media have already done — that less than two weeks ago a Trump supporter threatened to detonate a car bomb near the Capitol if his demands were not met. He was apprehended after an hours-long standoff. (He did not actually have a bomb, but no one could be sure of that at the time.)

America's political institutions have shown themselves to be greatly weakened in the battle against Trumpism and the larger neofascist movement. A series of recent Supreme Court decisions have been made by fiat through what is known as the "shadow docket" process. Instead of acting as a final check against fascism and authoritarianism and other abuses of power, the right-wing justices of the Supreme Court have proven willing to restrict Joe Biden's presidential powers in ways they refused to do under the Trump regime.

The Supreme Court is no longer calling "balls and strikes," as the cliché holds. It is putting a fist on the scales of justice in favor of the far right. This is by design: Donald Trump and the Jim Crow Republicans packed the court, essentially for that purpose.

At the Daily Beast, commentator and author David Rothkopf offers this warning about America's crisis of democracy:

Fox News has run an article about the "news" that last week I tweeted: "The Taliban, all of them together, plus every Al Qaeda fighter in the world, do not pose the threat to the United States that Trump or Trumpist extremists do."

That was not the first time I have said that nor will be it the last time. Because it is true. They did ask me if I wanted to comment on what I'd already said publicly, and I emailed the following:

The Taliban and Al Qaeda are among the most vile, dangerous violent extremist organizations in the world. They pose a threat that must be taken very seriously and actively combatted. They do not, however, pose an existential threat to the United States or our way of life. Trump and his supporters have, with support of one of America's most dangerous enemies, actively sought to undermine democracy in America. The coup attempt on January 6th and the propagation of the Big Lie are an example of this.

Their efforts to suppress the vote are an example of this. Trump's active obstruction of justice is an example of this. Should they succeed, democracy in America will be gutted, our way of life ended, our values undermined and our standing in the world destroyed. They may yet succeed. As a consequence, the threat they pose is far greater to the United States as a whole....

For these reasons, it is irrefutable that Trump and many of the people seeking to advance his agenda or claim it for themselves are poised to have a far greater negative impact on Americans and the country as a whole than foreign extremist groups.

In response to the dagger being pointed at the heart of American democracy by Donald Trump, his followers and the Jim Crow Republican Party, President Biden and Attorney General Merrick Garland are not acting with the necessary urgency. In a new op-ed for the Boston Globe, Laurence Tribe, the Carl M. Loeb University Professor Emeritus of Constitutional Law at Harvard, offers this warning:

We need to begin with the fundamental precept that not all crimes are created equal. Those crimes — regardless of who allegedly commits them — whose very aim is to overturn a fair election whereby our tradition of peaceful, lawful succession from one administration to the next takes place — a tradition begun by George Washington, continued by John Adams, and preserved by every president since except Donald Trump — are impossible to tolerate if we are to survive as a constitutional republic. …

Trump's relentlessness has laid bare the defects in many of those accountability mechanisms. Now Garland stands as the final line of defense for our constitutional democracy. No prior attorney general has confronted so daunting a challenge. For what might be the first time in his life and what will surely be the last, Garland could hold the future of the last best hope on earth in his hands.

I recently spoke to Tribe in search of more details on his deep concerns about the future of American democracy. In our conversation, he also reflected on how the current political crisis, in conjunction with the coronavirus pandemic and other problems, has caused many Americans to sink into a state of exhaustion, and an almost total withdrawal from politics. Tribe warned that such feelings represent a form of defeatism that will end in surrender to the neofascists.

Tribe also shared his thoughts on why Garland and the Department of Justice have (at least to this point) not attempted to prosecute Donald Trump and his confederates for their apparent crimes against democracy and the rule of law – and warned that not to do so would be a critical mistake, potentially fatal to the future of America's democratic project.

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity, as usual.

[LFC]

Joe McCarthy was never defeated — and Donald Trump now leads the movement he created

After a history of Joe McCarthy's horrible exploits and an explanation of McCarthyism the author finished up with this. Bold of a perfect explanation of the Republicans' use of critical race theory is mine.

This brings us to the Trump era. First of all, the accusations that Trump's campaign colluded with Russian agents in 2016 are not "McCarthyist," both because they were highly plausible (and at least partly true) and because they had nothing to do with left-wing or Communist ideology. For a better idea of what McCarthyism actually entails, consider this passage from a 2017 article about Cohn's influence on Trump. It practically lays out, step by step, the ways that Trump's narcissism would later fuel his attempts to overturn the 2020 election:

For author Sam Roberts, the essence of Cohn's influence on Trump was the triad: "Roy was a master of situational immorality . ... He worked with a three-dimensional strategy, which was: 1. Never settle, never surrender. 2. Counter-attack, counter-sue immediately. 3. No matter what happens, no matter how deeply into the muck you get, claim victory and never admit defeat." As columnist Liz Smith once observed, "Donald lost his moral compass when he made an alliance with Roy Cohn."

That attitude is a key element of McCarthyism. The only two ingredients missing from that description are the blatant pandering to bigotry and paranoia and the way supporters are seduced by a narcissist's charismatic allure into a sense of shared omnipotence with them. Without the former, the McCarthyist lacks the fuel necessary to whip up the mob against supposed enemies; without the latter, the demagogue can't convince the mob that his individual desires are also their own.

The bogus and evidence-free claim that Trump really won the 2020 election is quintessentially McCarthyist: Trump refused to settle or admit defeat, trying to proclaiming victory before all the votes had been counted and filing dozens of nonsensical lawsuits. Like McCarthy and Cohn, Trump gaslit America. As with McCarthy's claims that he had lists of Communist agents in the government, Trump's empty allegations force his supporters either to take him at his word or reveal their disloyalty — and nobody who wants a career in Republican politics can afford to be disloyal to Trump at the moment. In both cases, proof was no longer needed, and on some level was viewed with scorn. To doubt Joe McCarthy in the early '50s was to become an accomplice to the Communist conspiracy, just as anyone who rejects Trump's Big Lie today is clearly a socialist antifa liberal.

That is how a lie becomes political dogma, a phenomenon also visible in the current right-wing obsession with "critical race theory." Just as McCarthy defined "Communism" so broadly that it lost all meaning, opposition to "critical race theory" has very little to do with the academic approach that term actually describes — but a great deal to do with maintaining white supremacy. Salon's Chauncey DeVega has described it this way:

For today's Republicans, Trumpists and other members of the white right, "critical race theory" is a form of political ectoplasm: It's both a liquid and a solid, something slimy and sticky which can be shaped into whatever frightening or dangerous thing suits their mood and needs in a given moment.

In this political context, "critical race theory" means both everything and nothing; it is a fetish object used to summon up centuries-old racist nightmares and fears about "scary" Black and brown people who are plotting a rebellion or uprising to undermine the (white) family, indoctrinate (white) children and attack (white) America.

By implication, if "critical race theory" and other Black and brown bogeymen are threats to (white) America, then preemptive violence is both necessary and reasonable. Moreover, multiracial democracy is seen, by definition, as incompatible with white people's safety, security and material interests.

In channeling McCarthyism, whether consciously or otherwise, Trump has been successful to a degree McCarthy himself could only have dreamed about. But the connection is clear. While McCarthy was personally discredited, he made it difficult for any prominent American to express unpopular or radical views without being accused of disloyalty or possessing "Communist sympathies." The McCarthyist current has been with us ever since, and as Trump's career demonstrates, has not yet been defeated. If anything, it appears to be winning. Roger Stone is correct, in an upside-down fashion: There is a new McCarthyism in America today, and his pal Donald Trump and his supporters are the ones practicing it.

[pnwguy]

Q-Anon Ron is caught telling the truth. What amount of orifice-kissing will he have to do in Mar-A-Lago to redeem himself?

www.rawstory.com/ron-johnson-trump-lost-wisconsin/

[LFC]

House Republicans are trying to get Trump to vocally support impeachment of President Biden for ... well, anything. For some reason he's held his tongue for once.

As Republicans increasingly show willingness to call for President Joe Biden’s impeachment, there’s one GOP voice that’s notably absent: Donald Trump.

At least, he’s been absent publicly.

When he hasn’t been advocating for the re-invasion of Afghanistan or fundraising off Biden’s troop withdrawal, the ex-president has been fielding phone calls from members of Congress who are trying to gin up support in the U.S. House to remove his successor. In recent weeks, Trump has talked to multiple GOP lawmakers on Capitol Hill to discuss their progress—or lack thereof—on moving to impeach Biden over the tumultuous, violent withdrawal from the Afghanistan War, according to two Republican sources with knowledge of the situation.

One of the sources said most of the conversations have been initiated by lawmakers themselves, as they try to recruit Trump to publicly support various legislative attempts to embarrass Biden, either by impeachment of him or members of his administration—or by invoking the 25th Amendment.

And yet, Trump has been somewhat resistant to attach his name to these efforts.

The twice-impeached former president has been prolific in calling for Biden to “RESIGN,” and has repeatedly fundraised off those demands. For now, however, Trump has been less eager to publicly back an impeachment drive on the Hill, or to even acknowledge that his GOP allies in Congress have talked to him about it.