Afghanistan Failed Us! And Other Lies.

 There is a mythology being developed by the Biden Administration and media outlets such as MSNBC in which the US has withdrawn from Afghanistan because it has been failed by the Afghani people, rather than it having failed them.  Here's what President Biden said in his speech about the end of the war, prefaced by his comment that he'd always promised the American people he'd be straight with them:

The truth is, this did unfold more quickly than we had anticipated. So what’s happened? Afghanistan political leaders gave up and fled the country. The Afghan military collapsed, sometimes without trying to fight. If anything, the developments of the past week reinforced that ending U.S. military involvement in Afghanistan now was the right decision.

American troops cannot and should not be fighting in a war and dying in a war that Afghan forces are not willing to fight for themselves. We spent over a trillion dollars. We trained and equipped an Afghan military force of some 300,000 strong. Incredibly well equipped. A force larger in size than the militaries of many of our NATO allies. We gave them every tool they could need. We paid their salaries, provided for the maintenance of their air force, something the Taliban doesn’t have. Taliban does not have an air force. We provided close air support. We gave them every chance to determine their own future. What we could not provide them was the will to fight for that future.

 These comments are reprehensible lies.  While Biden's remarks refer specifically to the faster than anticipated march of the Taliban, he has clearly insinuated that the Afghans, and particularly the military and security forces ( ANDSF ) had failed to adequately use the materiel the US, at great expense, provided them.  It must be so, else the logic of quitting because Afghans quit before us wouldn't hold.  And yet it was the ANDSF which suffered and died in defense of the American cause, and between 2014, when NATO combat support ended and Ashraf Ghani became President, and 2018 some 45,000 ANDSF died fighting the Taliban.  The Americans have lost some 4,000 soldiers and contractors between 2001 and 2018.

While it is true the US sought ANDSF force size of 300,000 or more and that this size is indeed larger than some NATO allies, it is also a force far larger than a nation the size of Afghanistan should be expected to maintain.  It is more than 3x the number of active military per 1,000 citizens of Iraq, for example.  And this might well have been a big part of the problem.  Even Biden recognized the Afghani special forces were highly capable, suggesting a different emphasis might've been more effective.  And the size of the ANDSF made it a major source of corruption, particularly with free-flowing dollars from the US.  While the determination to spend whatever it takes is admirable, the "what it takes" portion apparently also includes necessary limits to and oversight of such spending.

While Biden claims the ANDSF was "incredibly well equipped", that can only be true on paper.  In actual fact much of the advanced equipment provided by the US was only operable with maintenance performed and parts supplied by the US.  Here's how Afghan General Sadat described the situation at the New York Times:

The Afghan forces were trained by the Americans using the U.S. military model based on highly technical special reconnaissance units, helicopters and airstrikes. We lost our superiority to the Taliban when our air support dried up and our ammunition ran out.

Contractors maintained our bombers and our attack and transport aircraft throughout the war. By July, most of the 17,000 support contractors had left. A technical issue now meant that aircraft — a Black Hawk helicopter, a C-130 transport, a surveillance drone — would be grounded.

The contractors also took proprietary software and weapons systems with them. They physically removed our helicopter missile-defense system. Access to the software that we relied on to track our vehicles, weapons and personnel also disappeared. Real-time intelligence on targets went out the window, too.

While I'm sure President Biden is being reasonably honest about the cost of the war, he is not at all honest about the support we gave to the Afghan government.  All these systems, from small arms to C-130s to intelligence gathering, were dependent on US support.  That doesn't sound like a particularly good strategy for exiting the war while leaving behind a capable and reliable ally.  It sounds like the US made itself an indispensable partner, and thus ensured the necessity of its own presence even as it sought to exit.  That policy worked well for American contractors and defense companies, as well as the elite in the Afghan military and government, but not so well for the average Afghan, or American for that matter.

It's worth asking why Biden would bother with any of these lies. There is a central oddity in his response to the withdrawal.  He has suggested that his hands were tied by the previous administration, blaming the timeline for the pullout on Trump, even while he tries to take credit for the withdrawal itself.  The media has abetted this political posturing, largely crediting Biden with ending the war when in fact it was Trump, on Biden's own logic, who did it.  This is surely a response to Trump's having out-maneuvered Democrats on ending the war, and an attempt to maintain anti-war credibility on the left.  But to do so, he is forced to retreat on another issue the Republicans long ago took from them:

We went to Afghanistan almost 20 years ago with clear goals: get those who attacked us on Sept. 11, 2001, and make sure Al Qaeda could not use Afghanistan as a base from which to attack us again...Our mission in Afghanistan was never supposed to have been nation-building. It was never supposed to be creating a unified, centralized democracy. Our only vital national interest in Afghanistan remains today what it has always been: preventing a terrorist attack on American homeland...I’ve argued for many years that our mission should be narrowly focused on counterterrorism, not counterinsurgency or nation-building.

You might recall that during his campaign for the 2000 election, George W. Bush declaimed any interest in or responsibility for "nation-building".  Some of his closest advisors after 9/11 represented the traditional view that the military exists to break things and blow sh*t up, particularly Dick Cheney, widely considered the most influential and powerful vice president in history, as well as Donald Rumsfeld.  The W. administration maintained this view, with its consequent light "footprint" in terms of the American presence, in Afghanistan until at least as late as 2003.  In February of that same year, then Senator Biden testified before congress:

“In some parts of this administration, ‘nation-building’ is a dirty phrase. But the alternative to nation-building is chaos — a chaos that churns out bloodthirsty warlords, drug-traffickers and terrorists. We’ve seen it happen in Afghanistan before — and we’re watching it happen in Afghanistan today.”

Then again in October:

“The fact of the matter is, we’ve missed an opportunity to do what many of us on this committee, including the senator about to sit down, have been pleading be done from the beginning. But because there has been this overwhelming reluctance on the part of some in the administration to get involved in genuine, quote, ‘nation-building,’ we essentially elected a mayor of Kabul and turned the rest over to the warlords, and we’re paying a price for it now.”

So clearly President Biden was for nation-building before he was against it, and indeed his language in October clearly contradicts his language in August 2021, in criticizing the failure of the US to create "a unified, centralized democracy".  It has long been the tradition for hawkish liberals, or dovish conservatives if one prefers, to promote the concepts behind "nation-building" if not the term itself.  It was this aspect of the W. administration which pushed for it, particularly Paul Wolfowitz and the neocons.  Democrats took the lead, at least with regard to Afghanistan, on promoting democratization as a major part of the counter-terrorism effort.  And they were right to do so.

Now, however, the failure of the war in Afghanistan on particularly that aspect is being used by Democrats, and particularly by "progressives", to attack the very concept.  And Biden has joined his voice with theirs:

So I’m left again to ask of those who argue that we should stay: How many more generations of America’s daughters and sons would you have me send to fight Afghanistan’s civil war when Afghan troops will not? How many more lives, American lives, is it worth, how many endless rows of headstones at Arlington National Cemetery? I’m clear on my answer: I will not repeat the mistakes we’ve made in the past. The mistake of staying and fighting indefinitely in a conflict that is not in the national interest of the United States, of doubling down on a civil war in a foreign country, of attempting to remake a country through the endless military deployments of U.S. forces. Those are the mistakes we cannot continue to repeat because we have significant vital interest in the world that we cannot afford to ignore.

Note that this is a civil war the US largely engineered, and is now fleeing the consequences of its actions, leaving particularly the girls and women of Afghanistan to pay the price.  Now Biden thinks nation-building is a mistake of the past, and that the US has no vital interest in Afghanistan, from whence al Qaeda, protected and aided by the Taliban, launched its attack on 9/11.  It is true that al Qaeda as such no longer exists, having been fractured into dozens of lesser organizations, each without the resources and capabilities the original had.  But lest we allow ourselves to think the present unpopularity there of organizations like ISIS-K prevents any cooperation between them and the Taliban, remember that al Qaeda was unpopular with much of the Taliban as well, and it was through them that Mullah Omar eventually won control of the Taliban itself.

It might well be true that Afghanistan is no longer a significant vital interest to the US.  But democracy is, particularly in the Middle East, wbere the US has for generations supported various undemocratic regimes.  Today it remains one of the least democratic regions in the world, and one of the most autocratic.  Biden has this month signed off on that deal, without mentioning the betrayal of our allies the Kurds, or the relative success in Iraq.  But what should we expect from a president who refuses to take the minimal necessary steps to protect the US itself?

Afghanistan: A cornucopia of lies, deceit and partisan recrimination and misdirection

We all expected it. We are going to get it. The lies are gushing from all over the place. Our former ex-president, Lyin Donnie, hacked up a hairball yesterday that immediately got a three Pinocchio rating from professional fact checkers, but rave reviews from fascist radical right media. The Washington Post fact checker writes: 

“ALL EQUIPMENT should be demanded to be immediately returned to the United States, and that includes every penny of the $85 billion dollars in cost.” 

This is a new claim. A version of this claim also circulates widely on right-leaning social media — that somehow the Taliban has ended up with $83 billion in U.S. weaponry. (Trump, as usual, rounds the number up.)

.... the equipment provided to Afghan forces amounted to $24 billion over 20 years. The GAO said approximately 70 percent of the equipment went to the Afghan military and the rest went to the national police (part of the Interior Ministry).

Of course, some of this equipment may be obsolete or destroyed — or soon may not be usable.

Even more problematic, there were not enough maintenance crews to maintain the aircraft. “Without continued contractor support, none of the AAF’s airframes can be sustained as combat effective for more than a few months, depending on the stock of equipment parts in-country, the maintenance capability on each airframe, and the timing of contractor support withdrawal,” the [GAO] report said.

“No one has any accounting of exactly what survived the last weeks of the collapse and fell into Taliban hands, and even before the collapse, SIGAR had publicly reported no accounting was possible in many districts,” said Anthony H. Cordesman of the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “In rough terms, however, if the ANDSF could not sustain it without foreign contractors, the Taliban will have very serious problems in operating it. That covers most aircraft and many electronics and heavier weapons.”

The Pinocchio Test

U.S. military equipment was given to Afghan security forces over two decades. Tanks, vehicles, helicopters and other gear fell into the hands of the Taliban when the U.S.-trained force quickly collapsed. The value of these assets is unclear, but if the Taliban is unable to obtain spare parts, it may not be able to maintain them.

But the value of the equipment is not more than $80 billion. That’s the figure for all of the money spent on training and sustaining the Afghan military over 20 years. The equipment portion of that total is about $24 billion — certainly not small change — but the actual value of the equipment in the Taliban’s hands is probably much less than even that amount.

Significant factual error and/or obvious contradictions. This gets into the realm of "mostly false." But it could include statements which are technically correct (such as based on official government data) but are so taken out of context as to be very misleading. The line between Two and Three can be bit fuzzy and we do not award half-Pinocchios. So we strive to explain the factors that tipped us toward a Three. 

The WaPo fact checkers describe four Pinocchio statements like this: Whoppers.

Questions: 

1. Are the WaPo fact checkers biased in favor of Lyin Donnie because they should have rated his lying blither a four Pinocchio statement since the liar’s assertion of $85 billion was literally 100% false? In other words, the fact checkers let that literal lie slide.

2. Is this just the beginning of what is going to turn out to be a hell of a lot of lying, finger pointing, deceit, sleight of hand and so forth from all over the place, left, right, center, alt-universe, pragmatic rationalists, Christian nationalist, fascist, etc., or just from some of those places?

An abortion update

As expected, the Supreme Court is set to hear an abortion case from Mississippi that could wind up overturning the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision. Anti-abortion states have been passing laws for years that cut back on abortion rights, but are intended to kill of Roe once and for all. Those laws are constantly being challenged in the courts, which is what the people who wrote the laws want. They all want to be the authors of the case that finally kills off Roe. The current case presents the court with an intermediate scenario that would require the court to (1) reverse its rule that abortions before fetus viability outside the womb are constitutional, (2) completely overturn Roe, or (3) reject the state law and leave things as they are for now. 

Option 1 would greatly limit abortions. Option two would either leave abortion law to the states, or outlaw most or all abortions in all states. The former is probably more likely than the latter.

Given that there now are six radical Christian nationalist judges on the court, all of whom were put there specifically to overturn Roe as their highest priority, this feels like the case that will probably see the demise of Roe, but opinions on that differ (see below). The New York Times writes: 

A major confrontation on the abortion battlefield looms this fall, when the Supreme Court is expected to hear arguments on whether Mississippi can ban abortion after 15 weeks. That’s roughly nine weeks before viability, the point at which states are now allowed to forbid abortion. To uphold Mississippi’s law, the court would have to eliminate its own viability rule or reverse Roe v. Wade altogether.

Given the composition of the court, there is a real chance the justices may overthrow Roe. But there is also the possibility that the court, for institutional or political reasons, may not yet want to upend that 1973 decision, which found the Constitution protects a woman’s right to have an abortion without undue government interference.

What then? A recent ruling by the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit seems tailor made for a Supreme Court that wants to look as if it cares about precedent while shooting a hole through that right. The appellate court relied on a past Supreme Court ruling to give leeway to the Texas Legislature to restrict a certain abortion procedure even though there was uncertainty about the medical consequences of the stricture.  

Texas is one of several states that functionally ban dilation and evacuation, the safest and most common abortion procedure used in the second trimester. In performing the procedure, a doctor dilates the cervix and then removes a fetus using forceps and possibly suction.

The NYT goes on to point out that the abortion-restricting law in Texas could be a pathway for states to get rid of Roe without overturning it.[1] That would leave a fig leaf of plausible deniability for the Christian nationalists on the court to falsely claim they are not political partisans. That Texas law is bubbling up and it might be the one the Supreme Court eventually chooses to uphold. By doing so, there would be a path to eliminate legal abortions without overturning Roe. The states could regulate legal abortions into non-existence but point to a meaningless Roe decision as being still valid law. That is a cynical political argument. However, the anti-abortion crowd does not care about cynical tactics. They care only about getting rid of abortions.

If the court chooses option 2 and leave abortion law to the states, women with the means to travel out of state to get an abortion will routinely do so. If the court decided to make abortion illegal everywhere, then women with the means to travel out of the country to get an abortion will routinely do so. If states makes it illegal travel to get an abortion, then depending on the penalty states decide to impose, life for those women could get complicated and/or dangerous. 

Questions: Should the Supreme Court overturn Roe and make abortions illegal in all states, or leave it to the states to make what laws they want? Is the Supreme Court mostly politically partisan or not, at least on politicized issues such as abortion, gun control, civil liberties and voting rights?

Footnote: 

1. The NYT writes on the implications of the Texas law: 

The Fifth Circuit decision, should it end up before the Supreme Court, offers an escape hatch for justices who might think it is prudent to take their time dismantling abortion rights.

The court’s institutionalists, led by Chief Justice John Roberts, do not want to crush respect for the federal judiciary. Honoring precedent makes the justices look more like jurists than partisans. And politically, overruling Roe also presents unique challenges.

Most Americans pay no attention to much of what the Supreme Court does, but abortion is different. A decision reversing Roe could energize abortion rights supporters to vote in 2022 and 2024 and also advance the cause of court reform. All of that means that the court’s conservative majority might hesitate to get rid of Roe quickly, especially without paying lip service to precedent.

That is the genius of the Texas strategy. There seems to be no trade-off between relying on precedent and gradually eliminating abortion rights. The message of the Fifth Circuit decision was clear: The court’s conservatives can have it all.

The court can pretend as hard as it can that it is not partisan political. That is just not true. 

Is there a rule on this forum about not promoting a product?

 BECAUSE:

Found this awesome site that sells awesome stuff.

DIG IT:

https://www.trumpstore.com/

Some samples:

Products ONLY for the most discriminating minds.

Chapter review: Levers of Influence: (Power) Tools of the Trade

“. . . . the typical citizen drops down to a lower level of mental performance as soon as he enters the political field. He argues and analyzes in a way which he would readily recognize as infantile within the sphere of his real interests. . . . cherished ideas and judgments we bring to politics are stereotypes and simplifications with little room for adjustment as the facts change. . . . . the real environment is altogether too big, too complex, and too fleeting for direct acquaintance. We are not equipped to deal with so much subtlety, so much variety, so many permutations and combinations. Although we have to act in that environment, we have to reconstruct it on a simpler model before we can manage it.” -- Christopher Achen and Larry Bartels, Democracy for Realists: Why Elections Fail to Produce Responsive Governments, 2016

(Note: the argument in Democracy for Realists about the "average citizen" being too confused by the complexity and intricacy of the world to have a reasonable grasp of it, basically recaps Walter Lippman's classic argument to the same effect in Public Opinion (1922). In the end he concludes we need experts in communications-- propagandists he depicts as benign-- to interpret the world and spoon feed the masses the limited knowledge they can handle. Dewey and Lippman argued about this. Lippman said democracy is impossible, Dewey denied such a conclusion while recognizing that for it to succeed the mindset prevalent in our society would need to change. Hence his educational theories.) -- PD, comment here, Aug. 27, 2021 

If some form of pragmatic rationalism is to ever have a chance of making a significant difference regarding the human condition, public education will need to be significantly reoriented to focus on how the human mind works and fails to work and how it can be and often is deceived and manipulated. -- Germaine, Aug. 29, 2021

Chapter review

Levers of Influence: (Power) Tools of the Trade is chapter 1 of Robert Cialdini’s 2021 book, Influence, New and Expanded: The Psychology of Persuasion. Cialdini is a leading expert on persuasion science. Some of his research was discussed here before. The book (446 pages, 41 pages of notes) is written for a general audience and is easy to read.

Cialdini starts out by noting that evidence from social science is settled that both humans and other higher animals often, maybe usually, respond to input information in what he refers to as an automatic “click-run” mode. This kind of behavior is formally called fixed-action patterns. These behavior patterns range from simple to very complex. A key trait of click-run mode behavior is that the behaviors in the pattern almost always play out is exactly the same pattern or sequence of behaviors. As Cialdini puts it: 

“It is almost as if the patterns were installed as programs within the animals. .... Click, and the appropriate program is activated; run and out rolls the standard sequence of behaviors.”

What is really interesting about click-run is what triggers the initial click. It often isn’t much at all, e.g., a patch of the right color instead of the same color as a whole animal threatening the turf of another animal. With humans Cialdini points out that the word “because” in a request for a favor is the trigger, not the reason for the favor that follows the trigger. Thus ‘can I cut in line at the copy machine because I'm running late and need copies right away’ is ~94% effective, ‘can I cut in line at the copy machine because I need to make some copies’ is ~93% effective, while ‘can I cut in line at the copy machine’ is only ~60% effective. The trigger is the word because, not the reason given.

Cialdini argues that humans have no choice but to rely on click-run, mental shortcuts and other tactics that reduce the cognitive load needed to navigate a world that is too complex for anything more than a superficial understanding or even a false impression of some understanding:

“Such automatic, stereotyped behavior is prevalent in much of human action because in many cases, it is the most efficient form of behaving, and in other cases it is simply necessary. You and I exist in an extraordinarily complicated environment, easily the most rapidly moving and complex ever on this planet. To deal with it, we need simplifying shortcuts. .... Without the simplifying features, we would stand frozen--cataloging, appraising and calibrating-- as time for action sped by and away.”

In addition to click-run mode, humans can respond to information by a process called controlled responding. This mode is slow and requires conscious effort. This requires both a desire to be more thoughtful and an ability to think the information through. There is a strong human tendency to operate in click-run mode when the effects of something are relatively modest or impactful on other people, but not themselves. Thus controlled responding tends to kick in and act as a safety net in situations where personal stakes are significant. 

We all know where this is going - the profiteers

Cialdini notes that complexity and time are not on the side of mindsets oriented to controlled responding: “I have become impressed by evidence indicating that the form and pace of modern life is not allowing us to make fully thoughtful decisions, even on many personally relevant topics.” Too often, issues are too complex, time too limited, distractions too intrusive and fomented emotional responses too strong for people operate in controlled processing mode, so we default to click-run mode. 

Professional influencers are aware of all of this. Propagandists have been aware of most of these things at least since the early 1900s. Some or most of these aspects of the human condition were intuited by careful observations of people ranging from Plato in ~400 BC to master propagandist Edward Bernays in the early 1900s to Walter Lipmann in the 1920s to modern corporate marketing and the Republican Party today.

Cialdini comments that most people know little or nothing about click-run mode and how it can be triggered to coax people to believe and/or do things they might otherwise not. He sounds a warning: “it is vital that we clearly recognize one of their [click-run] properties. They make us terribly vulnerable to anyone does know how they work.” He points out that humans share with other animals this aspect of behavior and the vulnerability it imparts on people and other animals.  

Businesses are acutely aware of this aspect of human behavior and they know how to hit triggers that lead to more sales and higher profits. We are rarely aware that we have been manipulated. For example, salespeople in clothing stores are instructed to always guide customers first to the most expensive item and then to a less expensive item. That is because once we have accepted a more expensive item, a lower cost item seems less expensive that it would if that had been the first thing the customer decided to buy. Some (most?) real estate salespeople show new home shopper a couple of undesirable but over priced properties and then show a couple of nicer properties. This contrast makes people more open to higher prices for a nicer home. 

Car dealers and salespeople use the same low-high contrast tactic, called perceptual contrast, to coax people into buying expensive options after a price on the car has been agreed to. By contrast with the cost of the car, the cost of various options or upgrades look cheap and are offered inly one at a time. They can easily add a lot to the final price the customer winds up paying. Cialdini sums this sales tactic up nicely: “While customers stand, signed contract in hand, wondering what happened and finding no one to blame but themselves, the car dealer stands smiling the knowing smile of the jujitsu master.” 

Questions: 

1. It is mostly legal, but is it immoral to trigger click-run behavior patterns or use tactics like perceptual contrast to coax people to buy and/or pay more than they otherwise would have? If one business doesn’t adopt such tactics, a competitor could or would, putting the less manipulative business at a disadvantage. 

2. Roughly, what amount of commerce in the US is driven by manipulation that increases buying and selling over mostly unmanipulated commerce, e.g., ~45%? Of that, how much is waste in the sense that added purchases turned out to be not needed, e.g., ~85%? 

3. Is the moral situation any different for politics compared to commerce, at least when they are mostly independent? What about when business buys legal favors from governments to more aggressively exploit consumers, at least in situations (i) without discernable beneficial impacts on society, or (ii) with discernable harmful impacts on society, e.g., freedom from pollution regulations?

Where the fascist Republican Party stands on voting rights: In staunch opposition

What the aftermath of the 2020 elections in

Georgia led to in 2021: voter suppression laws, election rigging laws

and protests against those laws 

The Washington Post reports in an opinion piece on how the debate went in the House of Representatives on the John R. Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act. As one might expect, it was ugly. WaPo writes:

This week’s House debate on the John R. Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, which passed on a 219-to-212 party-line vote, was a reprise of past legislative wars on voting rights. It was a disgusting sight to behold.

The Lewis Act itself is straightforward. It strengthens the Voting Rights Act of 1965 against the onslaught of voter suppression measures that many states passed following the 2020 elections. It also restores enforcement mechanisms that the Supreme Court gutted in 2013.

But when the Lewis Act reached the House floor Tuesday, a host of Republicans weighed in against the measure hurling objections that were as old and as specious as arguments made by Southern lawmakers against the original Voting Rights Act.

Fifty-six years ago, faced with compelling evidence of blatant discrimination against Black voters — as well as a nationally televised attack by Alabama state troopers on the peaceful participants in a march from Selma to Montgomery that left civil rights leader John Lewis with a cracked skull — Republican Sen. Strom Thurmond of South Carolina argued that passing the Voting Rights Act would make Congress “the final resting place of the Constitution and the rule of law," Thurmond said. “For it is here that they will have been buried with shovels of emotion under piles of expediency in the year of our Lord, 1965.”

Sen. Lister Hill (D-Ala.) denounced the act as a “head-on rush to the destruction of the basic rights of the individual states and the liberties of the American people to satisfy the demands, the clamor, and the expediency of the day.” He continued: “Never in my more than 40 years in Congress have I seen a measure come before this body that has had such built-in potential for the destruction of our constitutional system and the breakdown of law and order as the pending bill.”

Fast-forward to 2021.

House Democrats had compiled compelling evidence that the Supreme Court’s 2013 decision eviscerating the Voting Rights Act prompted states with discriminatory records, that were previously covered by the law, to enact measures that restricted voting. They had also collected data showing that Republican-led state legislatures have been passing restrictive election laws that disproportionately impacted Black and brown voters.

Confronted last Tuesday with the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, which would help correct those wrongs, House Republicans fell back on Thurmond and Hill’s line of attack.

“If you vote for this legislation, you are voting for a federal takeover of elections,” said Rep. Rodney Davis (R-Ill.). “You are removing the people elected at the state and local level to run elections from making decisions about how elections are run, including voter ID laws, and putting an unaccountable, unelected election czar at the DOJ, the attorney general, in charge of all election decisions in this country.”

Said Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio): “This bill is not about expanding voting rights; it is about Democrats consolidating their political power. That is why they are focused on this. They are focused on consolidating their power and, I think, taking it away from the states.”

“[The Lewis bill] is a radical, unprecedented federal power grab by unaccountable bureaucrats in Washington that every conscientious American ought to oppose,” said Mike Johnson (R-La.).

“This bill would comprehensively transfer the power to govern elections in this country from the sovereign states to the federal government permanently and everywhere,” said Dan Bishop (R-N.C.).

Once again, the fascist Republican Party (FRP) relies on lies, hyperbole, irrational emotional manipulation and crackpot motivated reasoning to attack free and fair elections. As argued here before, the party has no choice but to suppress votes and rig elections. The FRP is out of step with the American public. Demographic changes have been against it for decades and the party has been acutely aware of that fact for decades. RINO hunts have left the party ideologically cleansed, intolerant and a shrinking small tent. Increasingly, it cannot win free and fair elections. It has to subvert democracy to stay in power.

In their arguments against free and fair elections, FRP House members have no choice but to (i) ignore what has happened since 2013 when the FRP Supreme Court gutted enforcement of the 1965 Voting Rights Act[1] (or argue that never happened in effect), or (ii) claim as some do now that states have the power to run elections as they see fit and there is no actionable racial or political discrimination going on.  

FRP Senators have been mostly quite because they have political cover to say nothing. Mitch McConnell has made it clear that the John Lewis bill, is “unnecessary.” He promises it will be filibustered into oblivion in the US Senate. Saying it is unnecessary to protect free and fair elections might be about as close as FRP leadership will ever come to saying (1) there is no racial discrimination going on, and (2) there is no partisan discrimination going on against Democratic voters or candidates. All the party is trying to do is get rid of all that voter fraud that made Biden's election invalid.

Free election: roughly, easy voter access to voting with minimal reasonable voting requirements

Fair election: roughly, an election not subject to laws that allow the FRP to overturn the vote for partisan advantage without a valid reason(s), i.e., a rigged election 

Questions: 

1. Is the FRP merely trying to get rid of all that voter fraud that made Biden's election invalid? Or was Biden's election valid and something else is going on here, i.e., is the FRP in congress racist and/or fascist (single-party rule oriented, autocratic, etc.)? If not either, what is it? 

2. What about rank and file voters who vote for those people? 

3. How serious a threat to two-party rule and free elections does FRP opposition to free and fair elections pose, lethally serious, serious, moderate, low or trivial to nonexistent?

4. If there is no racial discrimination or opposition to free and fair elections as the congressional FRP leadership at least implies, why oppose federal laws that reinforce free and fair elections, while state FRP legislatures are passing dozens of state laws that directly attack free and fair elections?

Footnote: 

1. For context, Wikipedia says this about the 1965 Voting Rights Act: 

The Voting Rights Act of 1965 is a landmark piece of federal legislation in the United States that prohibits racial discrimination in voting. It was signed into law by President Lyndon B. Johnson during the height of the civil rights movement on August 6, 1965, and Congress later amended the Act five times to expand its protections Designed to enforce the voting rights guaranteed by the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments to the United States Constitution, the Act sought to secure the right to vote for racial minorities throughout the country, especially in the South. According to the U.S. Department of Justice, the Act is considered to be the most effective piece of federal civil rights legislation ever enacted in the country. It is also "one of the most far-reaching pieces of civil rights legislation in U.S. history.

As initially ratified, the United States Constitution granted each state complete discretion to determine voter qualifications for its residents. After the Civil War, the three Reconstruction Amendments were ratified and limited this discretion. The Thirteenth Amendment (1865) prohibits slavery "except as a punishment for crime"; the Fourteenth Amendment (1868) grants citizenship to anyone "born or naturalized in the United States" and guarantees every person due process and equal protection rights; and the Fifteenth Amendment (1870) provides that "[t]he right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude." These Amendments also empower Congress to enforce their provisions through "appropriate legislation".

To enforce the Reconstruction Amendments, Congress passed the Enforcement Acts in the 1870s. The acts criminalized the obstruction of a citizen's voting rights and provided for federal supervision of the electoral process, including voter registration. However, in 1875 the Supreme Court struck down parts of the legislation as unconstitutional in United States v. Cruikshank and United States v. Reese. After the Reconstruction Era ended in 1877, enforcement of these laws became erratic, and in 1894, Congress repealed most of their provisions.

Southern states generally sought to disenfranchise racial minorities during and after Reconstruction. From 1868 to 1888, electoral fraud and violence throughout the South suppressed the African-American vote. From 1888 to 1908, Southern states legalized disenfranchisement by enacting Jim Crow laws; they amended their constitutions and passed legislation to impose various voting restrictions, including literacy tests, poll taxes, property-ownership requirements, moral character tests, requirements that voter registration applicants interpret particular documents, and grandfather clauses that allowed otherwise-ineligible persons to vote if their grandfathers voted (which excluded many African Americans whose grandfathers had been slaves or otherwise ineligible). During this period, the Supreme Court generally upheld efforts to discriminate against racial minorities. In Giles v. Harris (1903), the court held that regardless of the Fifteenth Amendment, the judiciary did not have the remedial power to force states to register racial minorities to vote.  

In South Carolina v. Katzenbach (1966) the Supreme Court also held that Congress had the power the pass the Voting Rights Act of 1965 under its Enforcement Powers stemming from the Fifteenth Amendment.

From that bit of history, one can clearly see that conflicts over race and the scope of government have plagued American governance and society for a long time. Those same conflicts are still with us today.

In the pre-Jim Crow era, lynchings were more likely in the lead up to an election. This relationship disappeared once Jim Crow laws were in place. Southern politicians replaced violence to suppress black voters with laws that had the same effect. While these laws fell away following the Civil Rights Era, with the recent rolling back of much of the Voting Rights Act, there is a return to legal means for voter suppression.