Tag: Trump fake voter fraud crisis

Challenges persist for Biden after delayed transition start

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Former Obama administration officials and outside groups say a growing list of challenges in the transition process are likely to impede President-elect Joe Biden‘s entry into office.

The transition itself started later than usual after the General Services Administration waited for weeks to authorize it. Since then, there have been reports of political appointees sitting in on Biden transition meetings with career staff, blocking of information and reports to Biden’s team, and other unusual involvement by political officials.

Biden’s transition officials haven’t been vocal about the issues, and some say his team doesn’t want to exacerbate matters by publicizing them. Continue reading.

Republicans faced a simple choice: For or against democracy.

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HOUSE REPUBLICANS have faced what amounts to a choice between standing for or against democracy: whether to sign on to Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton’s delusional lawsuit to overturn the presidential election. A large majority of them failed the test. More House Republicans, including Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.), on Friday signed an amicus brief supporting Mr. Paxton, just hours before the Supreme Court unceremoniously rejected the suit. This is a disheartening signal about what these members of Congress might do on Jan. 6, when at least some Republicans probably will object to the counting of President-elect Joe Biden’s electoral votes.

Mr. McCarthy and the other extremists and toadies who have signed their names to President Trump’s antidemocratic plot may think their complicity is costless, because the Supreme Court was bound to reject the Paxton lawsuit, as it did on Friday, and there are enough Democrats on Capitol Hill to foil any GOP mischief during the electoral vote counting. They are wrong. Their recklessness raises the once-unthinkable possibility that a Congress controlled by one party might one day flip a presidential election to its candidate in defiance of the voters’ will, citing claims of mass fraud just as bogus as the ones Republicans have hyped up this year.

Some Republicans described the Paxton lawsuit honestly, including two senior Texas lawmakers. “I frankly struggle to understand the legal theory of it,” said Sen. John Cornyn. “I’m not convinced.” “I’m not supporting it,” said Rep. Kay Granger. “It’s a distraction.” Continue reading.

‘Irrelevant to the course of justice’: CNN reports Bill Barr dismissed Trump’s tweets as ‘the deposed king ranting’

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Attorney General Bill Barr is dismissing President Donald Trump’s tweets, according to a new report by CNN.

Barr reportedly said, according to CNN’s Jaimie Gangel, “none of this matters— it’s the deposed King ranting. Irrelevant to the course of justice and to Trump’s election loss.”

The report came after Trump had repeatedly lashed out at Barr on Twitter on Saturday. Continue reading.

‘The last wall’: How dozens of judges across the political spectrum rejected Trump’s efforts to overturn the election

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They are both elected and appointed, selected by Democrats and Republicans alike.

Some have served for decades — while others took the bench only months ago.

One is a former high school teacher, another the first Native American woman appointed to a federal judgeship. A third worked for years for a Republican governor who has been a vocal supporter of President Trump. Continue reading.

Ron Johnson to bring Ken Starr to testify at controversial hearing on 2020 elections

Sen. Ron Johnson, the chairman of the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, has invited former independent counsel Ken Starr and attorneys in key battleground states to testify at a controversial hearing next week where he plans to probe the 2020 election that President-elect Joe Biden won.

The hearing, which has prompted sharp criticism from senators in both parties over concerns that Johnson is peddling in debunked conspiracy theories, is moving ahead despite calls from Democrats that he scrap it.

But Johnson, a Wisconsin Republican who has not yet said if he’ll run for reelection in 2022, says his hearing is geared at “trying to restore confidence in the system” and says it is he who is “trying to debunk” questions about “suspicious activities” that occurred in the elections. He also says the hearings will help him decide whether to join House Republicans to challenge the electoral results on the floor in January, as he’s met with one of those conservatives — Ohio Rep. Jim Jordan — to help prepare for next week’s hearing. Continue reading.

House Democrat Calls To Exclude 126 Republicans From Next Congress For Supporting Texas Lawsuit

TOPLINE Rep. Bill Pascrell (D-N.J.) on Friday urged House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to refuse to seat any of the 126 Republican House members who signed an amicus brief supporting a lawsuit aimed at overturning the results of the presidential election.

KEY FACTS

  • Pascrell, who has been among the most vocal proponents in Congress of investigations into President Trump, called on Pelosi in a letter to “exclude” any members who signed the brief, claiming they want to “tear the United States government apart.”
  • Pascrell cites Section 3 of the 14th amendment – which states that anyone who “engaged in insurrection or rebellion” cannot serve in federal office – claiming the lawsuit seeks to “obliterate public confidence in our democratic system” and that those who signed it committed “unbecoming acts that reflect poorly on our chamber.” Continue reading.

Texas GOP actually suggests secession after Trump’s Supreme Court election challenge fails

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After the Supreme Court decisively shut down a lawsuit attempting to overturn the 2020 election, Texas GOP Chair Allen West issued a disturbing statement floating the idea of possible secession over the result.

The case was brought by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, though it was widely panned by legal experts. Some believed that Paxton, currently under investigation by the FBI, was using the lawsuit as a vehicle to win President Donald Trump’s favor and obtain a presidential pardon. Despite the lack of merits, the president and his allies rallied behind the lawsuit, with Trump himself calling it “the big one” — apparently trying to distinguish it from the more than 50 additional failed election lawsuits filed on his behalf.

From the start, the lawsuit never had the chance. Paxton tried to exploit a feature of the constitutional system that allows states to sue each other before the Supreme Court. But Paxton’s arguments that four key swing states had violated the Constitution in conducting their elections were specious, and there was no reason to take them seriously. The court concluded, unsurprisingly, that Texas didn’t even have the standing to bring a challenge to other states on this ground and rejected the argument without it even being officially filed. Continue reading.

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.

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.

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.