Tag: GOP now the fascist party

Trump Aides Prepared Insurrection Act Order During Debate Over Protests

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President Donald Trump never invoked the act, but fresh details underscore the intensity of his interest last June in using active-duty military to curb unrest.

Responding to interest from President Donald J. Trump, White House aides drafted a proclamation last year to invoke the Insurrection Act in case Mr. Trump moved to take the extraordinary step of deploying active-duty troops in Washington to quell the protests that followed the killing of George Floyd, two senior Trump administration officials said.

The aides drafted the proclamation on June 1, 2020, during a heated debate inside the administration over how to respond to the protests. Mr. Trump, enraged by the demonstrations, had told the attorney general, William P. Barr, the defense secretary, Mark T. Esper, and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of staff, Gen. Mark A. Milley, that he wanted thousands of active-duty troops on the streets of the nation’s capital, one of the officials said.

Mr. Trump was talked out of the plan by the three officials. But a separate group of White House staff members wanted to leave open the option for Mr. Trump to invoke the Insurrection Act to call in the military. Continue reading.

Majority of Americans believe GOP ‘election audits’ are a sham designed to undermine election processes

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As Republican lawmakers continue their efforts to conduct audits of the 2020 presidential election, the majority of Americans are raising questions about the integrity of their efforts. 

The results of a new Monmouth University poll offer insight into how Americans view the so-called election audits, like the one underway in Maricopa County, Ariz. According to Truthout, poll respondents were asked if they believed election audits were “legitimate efforts to identify potential voting irregularities” or “partisan efforts to undermine valid election results.”

Based on the poll results, many Americans see the audits as nothing more than a partisan effort to undermine the outcome of the presidential election. Continue reading.

Senate voting and ethics overhaul stalls, but Democrats united in vote

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Klobuchar: ‘This is the beginning and not the end’

West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin III voted with his party Tuesday in favor of debating Democrats’ signature overhaul of elections, campaign finance and ethics laws, but the measure’s path to enactment still remains improbable.  

Republicans, as expected, opposed a procedural vote that would have let the Senate begin debate and given Manchin a chance to change a sweeping bill he had said earlier this month he would vote against. Senators voted 50-50 along party lines, leaving the motion short of the needed 60 votes for adoption. 

GOP senators called the bill a power grab by the other side of the aisle and argued it would give too much control to the federal government over elections. Democrats said they planned to press ahead, as  allied outside interest groups mounted a fresh round of pressure campaigns, including to end the legislative filibuster.  Continue reading.

Greene claims Capitol riot ‘ruined’ all the work she did to throw out Biden votes

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Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene complained that the Jan. 6 riot undid her work to overturn millions of votes cast for Joe Biden.

Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) complained on Tuesday that the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol “ruined” her attempt to throw out millions of votes in the presidential election that were cast for Joe Biden.

Appearing on “War Room: Pandemic,” a program on the right-wing Real America’s Voice network hosted by disgraced former Donald Trump campaign manager Steve Bannon, Greene said she was “very upset” by the events of the day.

“I worked hard. I led an effort and worked very hard to object to Joe Biden’s Electoral College votes for six states. I worked my tail off and the riot at the Capitol – or, you know, whatever you want to call it – guess what? It ruined it. So it ruined my job, it ruined all of us, there was many of us involved in this, and it ruined our ability to object,” she said. Continue reading.

McConnell shoots down Manchin’s voting compromise

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Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) said on Thursday that Republicans will oppose a compromise election reform proposal put forward by Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.).

“I would make this observation about the revised version … all Republicans I think will oppose that as well if that were to be what surfaced on the floor,” McConnell told reporters, referring to Manchin’s proposal.

McConnell’s comments, which came during a press conference with GOP senators railing against the For the People Act, are the latest signal that the election bill will fail during a procedural vote next week due to a GOP filibuster. Continue reading.

Republican governors’ misleading spin on new voting restrictions

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Courts across the country rejected President Donald Trump’s claims of massive election fraud in 2020, but his falsehoods have taken on a life of their own, as new voting restrictions pile up in Republican-controlled states.

At least 14 states have enacted laws this year that tighten the rules around casting ballots. Hundreds of bills pending in statehouses would institute new voting restrictions, as this Washington Post tracker shows, and many of the Republican lawmakers sponsoring those proposals are echoing Trump’s false claims that loose election laws allowed the 2020 White House race to be tainted by fraud.

The Fact Checker dug into statements from three of the Republican governors who have signed voting restrictions into law this year: Ron DeSantis of Florida, Brian Kemp of Georgia and Doug Ducey of Arizona. Continue reading.

Opinion: A trove of preposterous emails raises the question: How can Republicans still be loyal to this man?

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MANY REPUBLICANS want the nation to ignore and forget President Donald Trump’s poisonous final months in office — the most dangerous moment in modern presidential history, orchestrated by the man to whom the GOP still swears allegiance. Yet the country must not forget how close it came to a full-blown constitutional crisis, or worse. Tuesday brought another reminder that, but for the principled resistance of some key officials, the consequences could have been disastrous.

The House Committee on Oversight and Reform on Tuesday released emails showing that the White House waged a behind-the-scenes effort to enlist the Justice Department in its crusade to advance Mr. Trump’s baseless allegations of fraud in the 2020 election. On Dec. 14, 10 days before Jeffrey Rosen took over as acting attorney general, Mr. Trump’s assistant emailed Mr. Rosen, asserting that Dominion Voting Systems machines in Michigan were intentionally fixed and pointing to a debunked analysis showing what “the machines can and did do to move votes.” The email declared, “We believe it has happened everywhere.”

Later that month, Mr. Trump’s assistant sent Mr. Rosen a brief that the president apparently wanted the Justice Department to submit to the Supreme Court. The draft mirrored the empty arguments that the state of Texas made to the court before the justices dismissed the state’s lawsuit. Piling on the pressure, then-White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows also dispatched an email asking Mr. Rosen to examine allegations of voter fraud in Georgia. A day later, Mr. Meadows apparently forwarded Mr. Rosen a video alleging that Italians used satellites to manipulate voting equipment. These were just some of the preposterous White House emails claiming fraud in arguably the most secure presidential election ever. Continue reading.

In Congress, Republicans Shrug at Warnings of Democracy in Peril

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As G.O.P. legislatures move to curtail voting rules, congressional Democrats say authoritarianism looms, but Republicans dismiss the concerns as politics as usual.

WASHINGTON — Senator Christopher S. Murphy concedes that political rhetoric in the nation’s capital can sometimes stray into hysteria, but when it comes to the precarious state of American democracy, he insisted he was not exaggerating the nation’s tilt toward authoritarianism.

“Democrats are always at risk of being hyperbolic,” said Mr. Murphy, Democrat of Connecticut. “I don’t think there’s a risk when it comes to the current state of democratic norms.”

After the norm-shattering presidency of Donald J. Trump, the violence-inducing bombast over a stolen election, the pressuring of state vote counters, the Capitol riot and the flood of voter curtailment laws rapidly being enacted in Republican-run states, Washington has found itself in an anguished state. Continue reading.

Mike Lindell invites Chinese Communist Party to ‘cyber symposium’ for ‘gladiator fight’ on election

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MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell on Monday said that he would invite the Chinese Communist Party to a cyber symposium to prove that it had attacked the United States by stealing the 2020 election for President Joe Biden.

“We’re in a race against time here,” Lindell told host Steve Bannon on Real America’s Voice. “One of the things that we’re going [to do] is a cyber forensic election symposium. We’re bringing all of our evidence to a big venue I haven’t announced yet.”

Lindell said that “any cyber guy that’s got credentials in the country, we’re going to bring them there.” Continue reading.

‘There will be no loyalty — except loyalty to the Party’: Historian suggests the GOP has reached Peak Orwell

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The phrase “the loyal opposition” was coined by John Hobhouse in a debate in the English Parliament in 1826. Less than a hundred years later, A. Lawrence Lowell, a political scientist (and later president of Harvard University) proclaimed the loyal opposition “the greatest contribution of the nineteenth century to the art of government.”

Designed to make space for the political party out of power to dissent and hold the majority party accountable without facing accusations of treason, the concept of a loyal opposition depends on the deference of non-governing parties to the authority of democratic institutions and the normative framework in which they operate.

The saving assumption of the loyal opposition, Michael Ignatieff, former leader of the Liberal Party in Canada and President of the Central European University, has written, is that “in the house of democracy, there are no enemies.” When politicians treat each other as enemies, “legislatures replace relevance with pure partisanship. Party discipline reigns supreme… negotiation and compromise are rarely practiced, and debate within the chamber becomes as venomously personal as it is politically meaningless.” Continue reading.