Tag: 2020 election

How The Party Of Lincoln Became A Danger To The Republic

Off and on for 25 years, I participated in National Review cruises as a speaker. I met lots of wonderful people who were intelligent, curious, and great company — but there were always cranks and conspiracy theorists, too. Once, during the Clinton administration, people at my dinner table were repeating the story that Hillary Clinton had killed Vince Foster. I choked down my bite of chicken Kiev and responded, as equably as possible, “Well, for that to be true, she would also have had to transport his body to Fort Marcy Park without the Secret Service or anyone else noticing.” Several people at the table blinked back at me. Yeah? So?

In later years, I noticed that cruisers weren’t citing mainstream publications for their information. They were getting their news from email lists and subscription newsletters.

There’s a theory that people have rallied around President Donald Trump and alternative news sources because they feel disrespected by the mainstream, liberal-leaning press. There is some truth in this, but my experience with conservatives makes me skeptical of that as a complete explanation. Sure, the urban/rural divide is real — and not limited to the United States — but resentment of elites has always been with us. From suspicion of the First Bank of the United States among the Jeffersonians to the populist movement of the 1890s, “coastal elites” have always been despised by some. But it didn’t drive people into abject lunacy in the past, or at least not on the scale we see today. Continue reading.

Cruz Threatens To Hold Up Biden Nominees Until Trump Concedes

Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) plans to obstruct every one of President-elect Joe Biden’s Cabinet confirmations unless Donald Trump concedes.

Trump, of course, has vowed never to do so.

“As long as there’s litigation ongoing, and the election result is disputed, I do not think you will see the Senate act to confirm any nominee,” Cruz said in an Axios interview on Wednesday. Continue reading.

The appalling reason why Republican lawmakers may have joined the Texas lawsuit

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More than 100 Republican lawmakers and nearly half of state attorneys general have signed on to a Texas lawsuit challenging President Donald Trump’s election loss, and a top political analyst revealed an alarming reason why they’re willing to upend democracy.

Texas attorney general Ken Paxton asked the U.S. Supreme Court to invalidate votes from Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, and 106 GOP House members and 17 other state attorneys general signed on to the challenge.

“I get a question all the time from my friends, people in Washington, outside of Washington — why are Republicans doing this?” Washington Post reporter Robert Costa told MSNBC’s “Morning Joe.” “Why are they behaving this way? Isn’t President Trump going out the door?”

“That’s not what they think,” Costa added. “He’s not going away. There’s a growing acceptance, while he may be at Mar-A-Lago in 2021, he will not run from the scene. He may prepare to run in 2024. Even if he doesn’t, he’s going to be meddling in primary races in 2022, so many of these Republicans are operating sometimes out of loyalty, sometimes to be sharing in the theatrics of the moment and sometimes out of fear.” Continue reading.

Here’s what happened when a Georgia lawmaker scrutinized the Trump campaign’s list of allegedly illegal votes

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When Georgia state Rep. Bee Nguyen (D) reviewed a list of voters who President Trump’s campaign claimed cast illegal ballots in the state, three names caught her eye: two friends and a constituent.

For days, Nguyen pored over public records, spoke with voters by phone and even knocked on doors in person to vet the Trump list. She found that it included dozens of voters who were eligible to vote in Georgia — along with their full names and home addresses.

On Thursday, when a data analyst who compiled the list told a panel of state lawmakers that it proved thousands of voters cast ballots in Georgia who should not have, Nguyen was ready. Continue reading.

‘An Indelible Stain’: How the G.O.P. Tried to Topple a Pillar of Democracy

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The Supreme Court repudiation of President Trump was also a blunt rebuke to Republican leaders who had put their interests ahead of the country’s.

The Supreme Court repudiation of President Trump’s desperate bid for a second term not only shredded his effort to overturn the will of voters: It also was a blunt rebuke to Republican leaders in Congress and the states who were willing to damage American democracy by embracing a partisan power grab over a free and fair election.

The court’s decision on Friday night, an inflection point after weeks of legal flailing by Mr. Trump and ahead of the Electoral College vote for President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr. on Monday, leaves the president’s party in an extraordinary position. Through their explicit endorsements or complicity of silence, much of the G.O.P. leadership now shares responsibility for the quixotic attempt to ignore the nation’s founding principles and engineer a different verdict from the one voters cast in November.

Many regular Republicans supported this effort, too — a sign that Mr. Trump has not just bent the party to his will, but pressed a mainstay of American politics for nearly two centuries into the service of overturning an election outcome and assaulting public faith in the electoral system. The G.O.P. sought to undo the vote by such spurious means that the Supreme Court quickly rejected the argument. Continue reading.

Trump and his GOP enablers are slandering American democracy

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UNDETERRED BY one defeat in court after another, President Trump is ratcheting up his effort to overturn last month’s election results. He is promoting a ludicrous lawsuit filed by Republican state attorneys general. He and his allies are pressing members of Congress to reject electoral votes from swing states he lost, using a rare parliamentary maneuver that should be reserved for serious allegations of electoral malfeasance. These efforts will fail as his lawsuits have failed, but not before further entrenching Mr. Trump’s election lies and doing more damage to Americans’ faith in their democracy.

Mr. Trump’s legal crusade was never credible, raising the question of whether he really thought he could win or whether he was challenging the results simply to delegitimize President-elect Joe Biden and keep his grip on Republicans. Latching on to Texas v. Pennsylvania, the last-ditch lawsuit from Republican state attorneys general, the Trump team admitted that it cannot show fraud but argued that the Supreme Court should block the electoral college from finalizing its votes anyway. Judges will reject this wild argument, too.

But instead of deescalating, as many of his enablers in Congress predicted he would have by now, Mr. Trump is abusing yet another legitimate channel to achieve the illegitimate goal of upending the election. The president cannot halt the formal casting of electoral college votes on Dec. 14. So, The Post reportedThursday, he and his allies are increasingly focused on persuading Republicans to object to the results when Congress meets to count the electoral college votes on Jan. 6. Continue reading.

In Blistering Retort, 4 Battleground States Tell Texas to Butt Out of Election

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The attorneys general of Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin and Georgia asked the Supreme Court to reject a lawsuit from Texas seeking to overturn President-elect Joe Biden’s victories.

WASHINGTON — In blistering language denouncing Republican efforts to subvert the election, the attorneys general for Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin and Georgia asked the Supreme Court on Thursday to reject a lawsuit that seeks to overturn the victories in those states by President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr., calling the audacious effort an affront to democracy and the rule of law.

The lawsuit, filed by the Republican attorney general of Texas and backed by his G.O.P. colleagues in 17 other states and 106 Republican members of Congress, represents the most coordinated, politicized attempt to overturn the will of the voters in recent American history. President Trump has asked to intervene in the lawsuit as well in hopes that the Supreme Court will hand him a second term he decisively lost.

The suit is the latest in a spectacularly unsuccessful legal effort by Mr. Trump and his allies to overturn the results, with cases so lacking in evidence that judges at all levels have mocked or condemned them as without merit. Legal experts have derided this latest suit as well, which makes the audacious claim, at odds with ordinary principles of federalism, that the Supreme Court should investigate and override the election systems of four states at the behest of a fifth. Continue reading.

With Texas AG facing federal probe, lawsuit to help Trump comes amid whispers of pardons

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton is reportedly the subject of an FBI probe.

The Texas politician who filed the Supreme Court election challenge that President Donald Trump touted as “the big one” may have good reason to curry favor with the White House at this moment.

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton took the lead in the long-shot legal bidto overturn Trump’s 2020 election defeat just two weeks after reports surfaced that he is the subject of an FBI investigation into allegations he abused his office to benefit a wealthy donor — a thorny problem Trump could eliminate with a presidential pardon.

Paxton and a group of Republican state attorneys general met with the president at the White House on Thursday, days after filing the case that now shoulders Trump’s hopes of holding onto his job for another term. Paxton’s attorney, Philip H. Hilder, declined to comment on the nature of Paxton’s discussions with the president. Continue reading.

Living people fire back at Republican fraud claims in error-ridden list of ‘dead voters’

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Conservative advocate Meshawn Maddock found herself at the center of controversy after highlighting a bogus voter fraud claim alleging that deceased voters had cast ballots in the 2020 presidential election. Like an overwhelming number of other Trump supporters, instead of verifying the validity of her claims, she aired her grievances on social media and left the public to do their own research. 

According to the local news outlet Bridge Michigan, Maddock released a list of more than 150 names of voters. It also publicized the addresses of the voters Maddock claimed were dead. According to Maddock, her list derived from a larger file that contained more than 2,000 names of people she claimed “voted in Wayne County by absentee ballot that are CONFIRMED deceased,”

It did not take long for social media users to fire back at Maddock. The outcome is no different than the frivolous post-election lawsuits being filed in courts across the country. Social media users quickly realized the problem with the list of names she released: many of the voters were, in fact, alive. Viewers also noted that some of the residential locations Maddock claimed were in Wayne County were actually in Oakland County. Continue reading.

More than 100 House Republicans sign brief backing Texas lawsuit challenging election results

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More than 100 House Republicans on Thursday signed an amicus brief in support of the Texas lawsuit aimed at overturning the election results in four swing states — Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin — that handed Democrat Joe Biden the White House.

“This brief presents [our] concern as Members of Congress, shared by untold millions of their constituents, that the unconstitutional irregularities involved in the 2020 presidential election cast doubt upon its outcome and the integrity of the American system of elections,” states the brief signed by 106 GOP lawmakers.

Outgoing Republican Study Committee Chairman Mike Johnson (La.) — one of President Trump’s closest allies in the House, having served on his impeachment defense team — helped lead the effort to garner support from his GOP colleagues for the brief. Johnson is joining the GOP leadership team in the new Congress. Continue reading.