Election Integrity!!

 With all the concerns about election integrity in the U.S., what needs to happen to make sure voting IS done fairly?

Some ideas:

Do away with ALL mail-in voting
Do away with ALL early voting, only same day voting allowed
Have armed guards at all voting stations to ensure no undesirables are voting
Restrict voting rights for Blacks
Hire Cyber Ninjas to audit every district that does not go to Republicans
Pass laws forbidding media from posting polling data, Fox exempted

If anyone else can suggest ways to secure election integrity, suggestions are welcome.

MAGA!

Blame Snowy for this presentation!

Social violence is near as Republican elites attack law enforcement and the FBI

Freeze Peach mentioned this little news item from yesterday. Mediaite writes:

Breitbart Publishes Names of FBI Agents Involved in Mar-a-Lago Raid 

That DOJ Sought to Keep Hidden

A handful of media outlets reported on Friday the contents of the search warrant executed at former President Donald Trump’s Florida estate, but Breitbart also published information about the FBI agents involved that the Department of Justice had sought to protect.

Fox News, the Wall Street Journal, Politico, and Breitbart all reported on the contents of the warrant, which indicate the DOJ is investigating the former president for a possible violation of the Espionage Act, as well as obstruction of justice.

Breitbart, the far-right publication once helmed by former Trump White House adviser Steve Bannon, published the names of FBI employees involved in Monday’s search. Breitbart reported the FBI gave two receipts listing the seized items to Trump’s attorney.

“The longer receipt was signed by FBI Special Agent [REDACTED] and the shorter receipt was signed by the name: [REDACTED] and includes [REDACTED],” Breitbart’s article stated, while not redacting the names as Mediaite has done here. “It is unclear who that person is, and the handwriting is not the clearest.”

My initial reaction to the reaction of the Republican Party leadership and its propaganda Leviathan was that the GOP was now openly attacking the rule of law. It is the case that the GOP has been undermining the rule of law for years. However, the GOP reaction to the search warrant of the traitor's Mar-a-Lago residence felt different. It felt a lot more direct and more immediately deadly. But that was just an initial personal reaction. I've been accused of over-reacting and being wildly alarmist multiple times.

Events in recent days have reinforced my initial reaction that we're approaching violence. In my opinion, American conservative politics and the Republican Party, including its rank and file, have passed a point of not only reason and reality. It is now in the process of passing a point of restraint against violence. Is that an over-reaction? Maybe. I hope so. But I now doubt it.

In my opinion, Republican Party fascism is starting to make its final move to normalize and foment violence. Its got God on its side, so the ends justify all means, including civil war based on lies.

Sad history

Sadly, Americans wars are usually based on lies to a non-trivial extent. Some historians see the Declaration of Independence as a gigantic propaganda piece that seriously distorted reality to whip up pro-war sentiment among Americans. That historical argument seems reasonable. There was a major propaganda by land owning elites in the South before and during the Civil War to con poor White people into supporting the mass slaughter. The government's gigantic propaganda effort, the Committee on Public Information, to con Americans into a pro-war sentiment before entry into World War 1 is well known. We all know about Vietnam, as moral philosopher Sissela Bok wrote:

“[Johnson repeatedly told the American people] ‘the first responsibility, the only real issue in this campaign, the only thing you ought to be concerned about at all, is: Who can best keep the peace?’ The stratagem succeeded; the election was won; the war escalated. .... President Johnson thus denied the electorate of any chance to give or refuse consent to the escalation of the war in Vietnam. Believing they had voted for the candidate of peace, American citizens were, within months, deeply embroiled in one of the cruelest wars in their history. Deception of this kind strikes at the very essence of democratic government.”

And now, we have an openly fascist, radical right Republican Party riding on the vicious, cruel winged dragon called Demagoguery. The dragon has been flying and sowing its poison for decades, e.g., Faux News, Rush Limbaugh, Alex Jones, Steve Bannon, etc. 

In accord with solidly established American tradition, Demagoguery is lying, deceiving, slandering, emotionally manipulating, and normalizing and fomenting pro-war sentiment among as many American minds as the beast can deceive and poison. 

No one can say that what is happening now has not happened here before. Looks like it is going to happen again, if the poll data below is a reasonable indicator of where American sentiment is going.

Qs: Is it reasonable or unreasonable to see the doxxing of the FBI agents as Breitbart has done as a Republican Party attack on law enforcement? Does it matter that there has already been an attack on the FBI in recent days**? Can bad words lead to bad behavior**?

** NPR: An attack on an FBI office raises concerns about violent far-right rhetoric

MAGA reaction to FBI raid on Mar-a-Lago. pic.twitter.com/6DO9BF05pi

— Ron Filipkowski 🇺🇦 (@RonFilipkowski) August 8, 2022

The crumbling rule of law

Fascist Republican Joe Cuffari, 

happily squelching investigations and

stonewalling for the Republican Party 

Personally, both Biden and Garland have been failures so far in terms of vindicating the rule of law. They do not take the rule of law seriously when it comes to rich or powerful people. The latest inaction outrage comes from a T**** appointee, Joe Cuffari, who is stonewalling an investigation into what happened to Secret Service texts related to the Republican's 1/6 coup attempt. Biden says he won't get involved. Not surprisingly, some congressional Republicans oppose any investigations into the Republican Party's 1/6 coup attempt, in part because they supported the coup attempt, making them complicit. 

As usual, the rule of law is a farce when it comes to political elites and partisans. 

The Washington Post writes:

The White House has faced mounting questions about a decision by the Department of Homeland Security inspector general’s office to abandon attempts to recover missing Secret Service texts from Jan. 6, 2021. President Biden, in response, has signaled his intention to stay out of the process as an independent watchdog investigates the inspector general.

But Joseph V. Cuffari and his staff have refused to release certain documents and tried to block interviews, effectively delaying that probe, which has now stretched for more than 15 months and evolved into a wide-ranging inquiry into more than a dozen allegations of misconduct raised by whistleblowers and other sources, according to three people familiar with the case who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss an open investigation.

Some Republican senators have also raised stiff resistance to the investigation — which is being overseen by a panel of federal watchdogs from the Council of the Inspectors General on Integrity and Efficiency (CIGIE) — questioning the need for a full probe into the Trump administration appointee.

Led by Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) the senators have demanded that investigators scale back records requests from Cuffari’s office and pressed them on their motives, according to congressional aides and documents.

Cuffari and his staff have complained to the senators of a politically motivated fishing expedition designed to undermine him, according to sources familiar with the investigation and congressional aides. In a written response to questions from House lawmakers last summer, Cuffari said the probe “will destroy” his office. He accused investigators of “undermining my attempts to clean up DHS OIG.”

There is no doubt that what Cuffari means by saying he is trying to “clean up DHS OIG” is that he is actively trying to poison and subvert it. Cuffari is a T**** appointee. He previously stifled an investigation embarrassing to T**** and Republican elites. Cuffari rejected his staff's recommendation to investigate what role the United States Secret Service played in the forcible clearing of protesters from Lafayette Square during T****'s photo shoot at St. John's Church in 2020.

People like Cuffari, i.e., essentially all Republicans, want no investigations into any crimes that any Republicans commit. They are enthusiastic about endless investigations going after Hunter Biden and his laptop or Hillary and her emails. But by God, there will be no investigations of crimes of Republicans, especially Republican elites. That is American fascism in action. 

And that Republican fascism is aided and abetted by clueless Biden and his worse than worthless AG, Merrick Garland. The FBI does not look very good here either. The FBI was fine with starting an investigation of Hillary a week or two before the 2016 election, causing her campaign grievous damage, but they walk on eggshells when it comes to Republicans. 

Now THIS is disturbing!

Sorry for the language but this is about as nasty as it gets, and demonstrates just how completely OFF the rails some Trumpers have gone.

Deconstructing church-state separation and reconstructing Christian theocracy

“If you think they’re going to give you your country back without a fight, you are sadly mistaken. Every day, it is going to be a fight. And that is what I’m proudest about Donald Trump. All the opportunities he had to waver off this, all the people who have come to him and said, ‘Oh, you’ve got to moderate’ — every day in the Oval Office, he tells Reince and I, ‘I committed this to the American people, I promised this when I ran, and I’m going to deliver on this.’ .... [The Trump administration is in an unending battle for] ‘deconstruction of the administrative state.’” -- Steve Bannon in 2017 referring to the mainstream media, political opposition, and the radical right populist intention to completely restructure the federal government and society

In addition to attacking and eliminating civil liberties such as abortion and same-sex marriage, the Christian nationalist (CN) wing of the fascist Republican Party wants to completely obliterate all separation between church and state. In the minds of the elites who control the CN political movement, establishing a Christian theocracy with society controlled by Christian sharia law, is the ultimate power and wealth grab. Radical Christian fundamentalists would control both political power and tax revenues for its own ends. Those ends include making fascist Republican elites richer and more powerful than they already are. 

An opinion piece by MSN comments on the prospects for destroying church-state separation:

Many legal scholars in the wake of the U.S. Supreme Court’s radical decision to reverse Roe v. Wade have focused on the dangerous implications of the court’s centuries-old worldview on protections for things such as same-sex marriage and contraception. This concern is real, but there is another issue with equally grave constitutional consequences, one that portends the emergence of a foundational alteration of American government itself.

Considered alongside two First Amendment rulings last term, the Dobbs decision marks a serious step in an emerging legal campaign by religious conservatives on the Supreme Court to undermine the bedrock concept of separation of church and state and to promote Christianity as an intrinsic component of democratic government.

The energy behind this idea was apparent in Justice Samuel Alito’s speech last month for Notre Dame Law School’s Religious Liberty Initiative in Rome. Calling it an “honor” to have penned the 6-3 majority opinion in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, and mocking international leaders for “lambast[ing]” the ruling, Alito spent the bulk of his remarks lamenting “the turn away from religion” in Western society. In his mind, the “significant increase in the percentage of the population that rejects religion” warrants a full-on “fight against secularism” — which Alito likened to staving off totalitarianism itself. Ignoring the vast historical record of human rights abuses in the name of religion (such as the Taliban in Afghanistan and even his own Catholic church’s role in perpetuating slavery in America), Alito identified the communist regimes of China and the Soviet Union as examples of what happens when freedom to worship publicly is curtailed. Protection for private worship, he argued, is not enough. Because “any judge who wants to shrink religious liberty” can just do it by interpreting the law, Alito insisted that there “must be limits” on that power.

Dobbs is significant not just because it reversed 50 years of precedent under the “due process clause” of the Fourteenth Amendment (under which the Court has recognized certain rights, even if unenumerated in the Constitution, as so bound up with the concept of liberty that the government cannot arbitrarily interfere with them). In Dobbs, Alito subverted that notion and fashioned a brand-new, two-part test for assessing the viability of individual rights: (1) whether the right is expressed in the Constitution’s text, and if not, (2) whether it existed as a matter of “the Nation’s history and tradition.” This second part of the test is the crucial one when it comes to religion — and in particular, its installation in government.

Under Dobbs’ step two, Alito time-traveled back to the Fourteenth Amendment’s ratification in 1868, when women could not even vote and, in his words, “three quarters of the States made abortion a crime at all stages of pregnancy.” Alito then regressed even earlier, to 13th century England (before America’s birth), to shore up his dubious quest to excavate historical authority rejecting abortion rights. Alito gave no guidelines for identifying which chapter of history counts in this calculus. Nor did he grapple with ancient law that actually went the other way. All we know going forward is that, for this majority, text is paramount and, barring that, very old history is determinative.

This article makes it clear, once again, that the Republican CN judges on the Supreme Court are opaque and unprincipled in their decision-making. They know the decisions they want to make before a case is heard, and they then dream up a reason that their decision is legal and constitutional. When there is no sound legal reason for what they want, they just make one up. The power that gives the Supreme Court is enormous.

On the one hand Alito complains that protection for private religious practice is insufficient because a judge can shrink religious liberty just by interpreting a law. On the other hand, Alito and four other theocrat CN judges decide to take power from judges to interpret law and instead tells them to look to cherry-picked ancient texts that he claims support the decision he wanted to arrive at the day he and the other Republican CN judges were sworn in as federal judges. 

There is no legal precedent for determining if a personal civil liberty is constitutional based on whether it existed as a matter of “the Nation’s history and tradition.” Alito just made that up. The whole point of judges being there is and has been since 1803 to interpret law. Now Alito and his Christofascist friends are turning to selected ancient texts to tell Americans in 2022 what their Nation’s history and traditions are and therefore what rights they can have and not have. This is pure Christian bullshit masquerading as sound legal reasoning in a secular country with a secular Constitution, secular traditions and a living Constitution that adapts to secular social change over time. 

The Christian fundamentalist intent here is crystal clear. The CN movement needs an excuse (they call it a rationale) to obliterate church-state separation. Looking at convenient cherry-picked ancient texts eviscerates what the Founders and drafters of the Civil War Amendments tried to do. Ignoring inconvenient ancient texts makes the bad situation much worse. The Founders tried to keep Christianity and religion generally out of government as best they could in their times. They tried to protect personal rights and civil liberties as best they could. 

Now, the Christofascist Republican Party has taken control of the Supreme Court. That court intends to generally get rid of secular law, in particular, laws related to civil liberties. They intend to replace that with Christian sharia law. 

That is core CN dogma. It is not a secret. It is a true conspiracy, but one so big that it cannot possibly be fully hidden from the public. What CN movement elites and their propagandists (Faux News, etc.) try very hard to do is to hide their real intent. That is where the conspiracy is. In that, the CN movement is quite effective. Millions of Christian fundamentalists have bought into core CN lies and propaganda. For example, most believe that America was founded as a White Christian nation, which is a lie. Most also believes that God Almighty demands that White heterosexual men should rule over all others with an iron fist, which is propaganda.

Our secular democracy and civil liberties face at least two major, urgent threats from the fascist Republican Party. One is the fall of secularism and pluralism to intolerant White Christian bigotry. The second is the fall of professional bureaucracies to lawless authoritarian radical right ideologues and regulation, taxes and government hating capitalists. Both are lethal separately. Together they are more than lethal.

A part of Sotomayor's dissent in a recent case that 

punched a huge hole in the wall separating church and state

Acknowledgement: Thanks to FriendlyGoat for bringing the MSN article to my attention.

CPAC and modern authoritarian anti-democracy tactics

This 19 minute video discusses how authoritarians rise to power in democracies and then they subvert and kill democracy. The process is well underway in America right now. Most of the interview is with Kim Lane Scheppele, a professor at Princeton. She is an expert on how Hungarian democracy was destroyed after Viktor Orban was elected in 2010. Orban has since been re-elected three times in rigged elections, making him the Hungarian dictator for life. Central points are:

• Modern authoritarians in democracies have learned how to gain power and then use it to establish tyranny. After being elected, they destroy free and fair elections and by subverting government. Government subversion involves firing career professional employees and replacing them with people chosen for their loyalty to the tyrant. That includes government employees who oversee elections. Loyalty to the Constitution and the rule of law, concern for the public interest, professional competence and other concerns are not the most important qualifier. Loyalty is all-important.

• CPAC (Conservative Political Action Conference), which consists mostly of Republican Party elites, elected politicians and radical right propagandists (Faux News, etc.), is openly adopting these same tactics. Once back in power, Republicans plan to give themselves the power to fire tens of thousands of federal employees. Fired employees will be replaced by people loyal to the Republican Party leader and its elites. 

• Most average people in democracies are very slow to understand what is happening to their form of government. It takes years before most people come to realize that they have lost their democracy. Holding rigged elections distract from the fact that elections have been turned into a farce. Despite being a farce, holding rigged elections provides extremely effective propaganda and cover for tyrants. Tyrants boldly but falsely claim they are democratic and adhering to the rule of law by holding elections they falsely say are free and fair. The tyrant's supporters do not complain because they believe they are rightfully winning, and defending their racial purity, their nation and literally Western civilization.

• Institutions and norms that impose checks and balances on concentration of power, like those in place in the US, fall apart when the people in power are loyal to a party or a tyrant In a functioning American democracy, loyal of powerful people in government would be to federalism, the institutions they are in, and the Constitutional. That is the legal basis for separation of power sufficient to prevent the rise of a tyrant. If Republicans once again get control of institutions, including federal agencies, federal courts, congress and the presidency, their loyalty to their party will be the pathway for a tyrant to rise to power for life. So far, the Republican Party has disabled all of the checks and balances that it could. That makes the rise of a tyrant for life in the US much more likely. The GOP already controls the US Supreme Court, making it a major ally in the Republican Party's run at tyranny.

Acknowledgement: Thanks to PD for bringing this interview to my attention.