Monday, July 17, 2023

Two bits: Election subversion in Florida; Republican plans for American dictatorship

From the Radical Republicans Sabotaging Elections Files: A Florida NBC affiliate reports that masses of voters by mail have been quietly purged from voter rolls without any notice whatsoever:
NBC2 has learned hundreds of thousands of vote-by-mail requests have been wiped out of the system in every county in the state.

This means most of us right now will not receive a ballot in the upcoming March primary.

Lee County would like to have about 250,000 vote-by-mail requests in its system, but currently only has 23,000.

It’s up to voters to reach out to the county they live in to request a ballot be mailed to them.

However, a new law signed by Governor Ron DeSantis requires counties to purge requests before every general election. They claim it will cut down on election fraud, although no significant fraud has been discovered in Florida.

What if more voters don’t sign up to vote by mail? [Lee County Election Supervisor Tommy Doyle] said it could mean trouble for many counties.

“It would overwhelm Election Day polls and we want to avoid that at all cost,” Doyle explained.
One wild card in the 2024 elections is how well radical right Republican voter suppression and election subversion laws will work. It is critically important to understand that the laws do not need to work very well to throw the election to Trump. It was very close in 2020 in three critical states. If those election subversion laws are worth just ~100,000 votes spread across a few states, that could give DJT the presidency. 
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The Radical Republican Party plans to impose dictatorship on America in 2025: The NYT writes:
Donald J. Trump and his allies are planning a sweeping expansion of presidential power over the machinery of government if voters return him to the White House in 2025, reshaping the structure of the executive branch to concentrate far greater authority directly in his hands.

Mr. Trump and his associates have a broader goal: to alter the balance of power by increasing the president’s authority over every part of the federal government that now operates, by either law or tradition, with any measure of independence from political interference by the White House, according to a review of his campaign policy proposals and interviews with people close to him.

Mr. Trump intends to bring independent agencies — like the Federal Communications Commission, which makes and enforces rules for television and internet companies, and the Federal Trade Commission, which enforces various antitrust and other consumer protection rules against businesses — under direct presidential control.

He wants to revive the practice of “impounding” funds, refusing to spend money Congress has appropriated for programs a president doesn’t like — a tactic that lawmakers banned under President Richard Nixon.

He intends to strip employment protections from tens of thousands of career civil servants, making it easier to replace them if they are deemed obstacles to his agenda. And he plans to scour the intelligence agencies, the State Department and the defense bureaucracies to remove officials he has vilified as “the sick political class that hates our country.”  
“The president’s plan should be to fundamentally reorient the federal government in a way that hasn’t been done since F.D.R.’s New Deal,” said John McEntee, a former White House personnel chief who began Mr. Trump’s systematic attempt to sweep out officials deemed to be disloyal in 2020 and who is now involved in mapping out the new approach.

“Our current executive branch,” Mr. McEntee added, “was conceived of by liberals for the purpose of promulgating liberal policies. There is no way to make the existing structure function in a conservative manner. It’s not enough to get the personnel right. What’s necessary is a complete system overhaul.”

Mr. Trump and his advisers are making no secret of their intentions — proclaiming them in rallies and on his campaign website, describing them in white papers and openly discussing them.  
“What we’re trying to do is identify the pockets of independence and seize them,” said Russell T. Vought, who ran the Office of Management and Budget in the Trump White House and now runs a policy organization, the Center for Renewing America.  
Mr. Trump and his allies also want to transform the civil service — government employees who are supposed to be nonpartisan professionals and experts with protections against being fired for political reasons.

The former president views the civil service as a den of “deep staters” who were trying to thwart him at every turn, including by raising legal or pragmatic objections to his immigration policies, among many other examples. Toward the end of his term, his aides drafted an executive order, “Creating Schedule F in the Excepted Service,” that removed employment protections from career officials whose jobs were deemed linked to policymaking.

Mr. Trump signed the order, which became known as Schedule F, near the end of his presidency, but President Biden rescinded it. Mr. Trump has vowed to immediately reinstitute it in a second term.  
“We will demolish the deep state,” Mr. Trump said at the rally in Michigan. “We will expel the warmongers from our government. We will drive out the globalists. We will cast out the communists, Marxists and fascists. And we will throw off the sick political class that hates our country.”
I've been warning that the radicalized, demagogic, morally rotted GOP is deeply anti-democratic, deeply anti-rule of law and deeply authoritarian. Radical Republican elites are are corrupt, liars, demagogues and dictator thugs. Those elites are not "conservatives", "patriots", "truth tellers", or "victims" of people who hate America. They are the ones who hate America, democracy and inconvenient truth. They are the oppressors and brutal, corrupt thugs.

Now it's time to scream the warning.

WARNING!! Wake up!!
DICTATOR ALERT!! 


One can only wonder how much more evidence will it take before reasonable people come to see the urgency and depth of the radicalized, pro-tyranny GOP threat? Most MAGA people (~98% ?) are not going to see anything worrying here. Since they are in a brainwashed cult, they cannot see the threat. It is up to pro-democracy people of good will to oppose this rising tyranny horror.

Q: Is this warning just a deranged, alarmist QAnon-level crackpot conspiracy, or (ii) are there compelling reasons to greatly fear the rise of radical right American authoritarianism, or (iii) is the situation something else, e.g., this:


or this



or this

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