Archives for category: Trump
« Older Entries
Newer Entries »

The Trump Insurrection of 2021

By dianeravitch
January 7, 2021 //
96

Like everyone else, I was stunned by the insurrection at the Capitol on January 6. I followed the proceedings from the start to see what stunt Trump might pull. I watched as the mob approached and stormed the Capitol, where Electoral votes were being counted. What happened was a violent desecration of the Constitutionally prescribed process for transferring power from one president to the next. It was an attack on our government and our Constitution. The ceremony is typically dry as dust, and no one watches it.

This time there was an air of anticipation because some 140 Republican members of the House and at least 13 Senators had announced that they would oppose certification of Biden’s victory unless there was an “audit” of the states that Trump thinks he should have won, despite multiple recounts and 60 failures in state and federal courts and two rejections by the United States Supreme Court. Not a single court agreed with Trump’s claims of election fraud. (Remember that Trump said on the famous phone call with Georgia election officials that he couldn’t possibly have lost Georgia; not only did he lose it on November 3, he lost it again in the Senatorial elections of January 5.)

I have visited the Capitol many times for meetings with members of Congress. I always thought security was tight, but then I was always in a single-file orderly line, not part of an angry mob. Trump invited his base to come to D.C. on January 6 to take part in his effort to overturn the election. He predicted on Twitter that January 6 would be “wild.” On December 26, Washington Post columnist David Ignatius wrote a widely read article warning that there might be disorder in the streets of D.C. on January 6. Former Defense Secretaries worried that Trump might try to stage a military coup. Yet no extraordinary security precautions were taken.

Trump held a rally in the morning to stir up his loyalists. He urged his angry partisans to march to the Capitol. They did, and they broke through its feeble defenses, meeting little resistance. For hours, the mob had the run of the Capitol, sitting at the dais of the Senate chamber in the Vice-President’s chair, rummaging through private offices, looting, smashing windows, and showing their contempt for our government. Several boldly marched around with huge Confederate flags. They were domestic terrorists.

As the rampage continued, Trump was silent. After a few hours of lawlessness, he released a video telling them to go home. He reiterated his lie that the election had been stolen. In the video, he also praised the crowd, who broke into the Capitol using force, stole items from its rooms and posed for photographs in the legislative chambers. “We love you,” Trump said. “You’re very special.”

Yeah, very special thugs, looters, and terrorists.

It was frightening and sickening. I expected the National Guard, the city police, some authority to drive them out, handcuff them, arrest them, and put them in jail. That never happened, unlike the Black Lives Matter protests where armed guards are always a large presence. The Mayor’s curfew of 6 pm came and went, hundreds of terrorists milled about, and no one was arrested. Why are the police hyper-vigilant when African Americans protest, but gentle and patient when faced with a siege of the nation’s Capitol by thugs?

It was a humiliating day for our democracy. The realization dawned on those too blind to see: The United States of America is under attack by the president of the United States. Even some of his loyalists in Congress lost the faith. Six of the 13 Senators backed away from their commitment to abet his last desperate effort to overturn the election. (The Senators who refused to certify Biden’s victory in Pennsylvania: Ted Cruz of Texas; Josh Hawley of Missouri; Cynthia Lummis of Wyoming; Roger Marshall of Kansas; Rick Scott of Florida; Cindy Hyde-Smith of Mississippi, and Tommy Tuberville of Alabama.)

If ever there was a time to force this vile man out of office, it is now. His Cabinet could activate the 25th Amendment and force him out; he is unfit to lead, even for two weeks. The leaders of the Republican Party could call on him and demand that he resign at once or face bipartisan censure and other sanctions. He put their lives and our nation at risk. He is our leading national security risk, and it’s terrifying to know that he holds the nuclear codes for two more weeks.

Dana Milbank of the Washington Post summed up what many felt: an angry, vengeful Trump committed treason. He incited an insurrection against the seat of his own government, so desperate to cling to power that he would unleash violence on the members of Congress who had convened to confirm his loss.

Milbank wrote:

President Trump broke any number of laws and norms during his ruinous four-year reign. He just added one more on the way out: treason.


He lost the House in 2018. He lost the presidency in November. He lost the Senate on Tuesday. And on Wednesday, with nothing left to lose, he rallied a violent mob to attack the U.S. Capitol in hopes of pressuring lawmakers to toss out the election results, ignore the will of the people, and install him as president for another term.


Trump fomented a deadly insurrection against the U.S. Congress to prevent a duly-elected president from taking office. Treason is not a word to be used lightly, but that is its textbook definition.
“We will not take it anymore, and that’s what this is all about,” he told a sea of MAGA fans and Proud Boys on the Ellipse outside the White House at noon. From behind bulletproof glass, he told them: “If you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore.”


Earlier, Trump ally Rudy Giuliani had proposed, to the same crowd, a “trial by combat” to resolve Trump’s election complaints. And Donald Trump Jr. delivered a political threat to lawmakers who don’t vote to reject the election results: “We’re coming for you.”

The elder Trump worked the crowd into a frenzy with his claim that victory had been stolen from him by “explosions of bullshit.”
“Bullshit! Bullshit!” the mob chanted.


Trump instructed his supporters to march to the Capitol — “and I’ll be there with you” — to “demand that Congress do the right thing” and not count the electoral votes of swing states he lost. “You’ll never take back our country with weakness, you have to show strength and you have to be strong,” he admonished them, with CYA instructions to make themselves heard “peacefully and patriotically.”


Wink, wink.
“We’re going to the Capitol,” he told the mob.


With that, Trump snuck back into the safety of the White House fortress. But his supporters, thus riled, marched to the Capitol and breached the barricades. They overpowered Capitol Police, climbed scaffolding, scaled walls, shattered glass, busted into the Senate chamber and stood at the presiding officer’s desk, and broke into Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s hastily abandoned office. They marauded about the Rotunda and Statuary Hall wearing MAGA hats, carrying Confederate flags, posing for souvenir photos and scribbling graffiti (“Murder the Media”).


Police rushed legislative leaders to safety. They barricaded doors to the House chamber and drew guns to protect lawmakers sheltering inside. They fired tear gas at the attackers. Shots were fired inside the Capitol; a bloodied woman who was wheeled out later died. The District of Columbia declared a curfew. And even then it took Trump nearly three hours before he released a video telling those ransacking the Capitol to “go home” — even as he glorified the violence by saying “these are the things and events that happen when a sacred landslide election victory is so unceremoniously & viciously stripped away from great patriots.”


Before he lost the election, Trump refused to commit to the peaceful transfer of power. During the campaign, he defended militia violence and told his violent white nationalist supporters to “stand by” — part of a well-documented pattern of encouraging violence since he launched his first campaign in 2015.


Yet, somehow, the men in the Capitol who enabled Trump for all those years were shocked that he would unleash a mob against Congress.
“What is unfolding is unacceptable and un-American,” declared House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, who just hours earlier had announced he would support Trump’s effort to annul the electoral college count.


“Violence is always unacceptable,” tut-tutted Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas, who along with Josh Hawley of Missouri was leading the effort in the Senate to nullify the election results. Just moments before the MAGA mob burst into the chamber, Cruz gave a speech saying “democracy is in crisis” because many Americans think the election was “rigged” — in large part because Cruz et al. kept telling them so.


As Trump’s goons began taking over the Capitol, Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah), who had called the attempt to set aside the electoral college tally an “egregious ploy,” yelled at Cruz and his co-conspirators: “This is what you’ve gotten, guys.” Romney later issued a statement saying: “What happened here today was an insurrection, incited by the president of the United States.” Rep. Liz Cheney of Wyoming, the No. 3 House GOP leader, told Fox News: “The president formed the mob. The president incited the mob. The president addressed the mob. He lit the flame.”


Trump’s inept legal challenges amounted to a clownish coup attempt. The Cruz-Hawley scheme amounted to a bloodless coup attempt. And now, Trump has induced his MAGA mob to a violent coup attempt.


As it happens, moments before the barbarians busted into the Senate chamber, Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, long among the most faithful Trump enablers, had denounced the effort to overturn the election.
“The voters, the courts and the states have all spoken,” an emotional McConnell said, in perhaps the finest speech of his long career. “If this election were overturned by mere allegations from the losing side, our democracy would enter a death spiral.”


Or maybe the spiral has already begun.


Most Americans never imagined they would see such banana-republic images of violence from the seat of American democracy. But Wednesday’s mayhem and violence form a predictable coda to a presidency that has brought us far too much of both.


Republicans must now decide whether they are going to return to being the party of small government, individual liberties and national strength, or to continue being the Trump and Cruz party of violence, racism and authoritarianism.


Are they small-d democrats or are they fascists? After Wednesday’s terrible scene, they must choose.

Categories Elections, Trump

Twitter Temporarily Suspends Trump’s Account

By dianeravitch
January 6, 2021 //
51

At the end of a shameful day, in which Trump claimed falsely (again) that he had won in a landslide, Twitter announced that it was suspending him—but for only 12 hours. Twitter warned Trump that his account might be permanently blocked.

Twitter locks Trump’s account for 12 hours and warns he could get kicked off permanently

President Trump took to Twitter on Wednesday to call for calm mere hours after he sought to rally his supporters outside the U.S. Capitol, sending mixed messages that incited real-world violence and forced congressional lawmakers into a lockdown.

Since he can’t tweet without lying, his account should be permanently suspended.

Categories Lies, Media, Trump

Terrorism at the U.S. Capitol, Inspired by Trump

By dianeravitch
January 6, 2021 //
305

Trump’s violent cultists invaded the United States Capitol today. The president watched on television. He did nothing as his base broke windows, stormed into the Rotunda and entered members’ offices while our elected officials cowered in hiding.

This was an attempted coup, a deliberate effort to disrupt the functioning of government.

Hours went by without decisive action. I am not alone in observing that if the terrorists were black, the police/military response would have been fast and furious.

This is the culmination of Trumpism. Today is a shameful day in American history.

Categories Trump

John Thompson: Who is Cleta Mitchell, Trump’s Latest Election Lawyer?

By dianeravitch
January 6, 2021 //
26

John Thompson, retired teacher in Oklahoma, knows who Cleta Mitchell is. Her career began in Oklahoma.

Cleta Mitchell sat alongside Trump and Mark Meadows as they made the now famous phone call to Georgia election officials to try to persuade or bully them into “finding” enough votes to reverse the election results in that state. Georgia law enforcement officials are now considering filing criminal charges against Trump for his encouragement of election fraud in that call.

Cleta Mitchell’s law firm, Foley & Lardner, questioned her role in prodding Georgia election officials to “find” enough votes to overturn the result of the state’s election. She “resigned” from the firm. She embarrassed the firm by encouraging Trump’s efforts to undermine the rule of law and the Constitution. I am happy to report that I was one of what must have been many who expressed those views on the firm’s website.

John Thompson writes:

Who is Cleta Mitchell, “a prominent GOP attorney,” who participated in the already infamous telephone call where President Donald Trump pressured Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger “to ‘find’ enough votes to overturn his defeat” in the November presidential election? The Washington Post reports that this “extraordinary one-hour phone call” is described by legal scholars “as a flagrant abuse of power and a potential criminal act.”

Mitchell, the former Oklahoma liberal, subsequently justified the call saying Raffensperger’s office:

Has made many statements over the past two months that are simply not correct and everyone involved with the efforts on behalf of the President’s election challenge has said the same thing: show us your records on which you rely to make these statements that our numbers are wrong.

How is it that the previously respected Cleta Deatherage came to participate in the effort to use “debunked conspiracy theories” to overthrow the results of a clearly legal election? What did Cleta Mitchell think when Trump demanded, “I just want to find 11,780 votes?”

Mitchell had been a well-liked, respected state representative, who became the “first woman in the U.S. to chair a state appropriations and budget committee.” But she said that she realized that professional politicians are “like noncustodial parents in a divorce” who “don’t really know” regular citizens who shop at grocery stores.

I wonder what Mitchell would say about how well this week’s fiasco, merely the latest in the Trump experiment where amateurs and zealots replace professionals, is turning out?   

The Atlantic’s Jonathan Krohn suggested an alternative explanation of how an advocate for the Equal Rights Amendment joined with conservative organizations to advance a rightwing agenda. Her allies include, Americans Back in Charge, the Bradley Foundation, the National Rifle Association, the American Conservative Union, the Republican National Lawyers Association, as well as Stephen Bannon’s Citizens of the American Republic, Krohn recalls Mitchell’s effort to expel GOProud, a gay rights group, from the Conservative Political Action Conference. He said her efforts “led GOProud’s Chris Barron to once call her “a nasty bigot,” and [Executive Director Jimmy] LaSalvia to accuse her of “personal animosity towards gay people.”

Krohn explains that Mitchell’s actions are “ironic” because her first husband was gay. They divorced in 1982. Her former husband, Duane Draper, later directed the Massachusetts AIDS policy office, and died of AIDS.

Krohn also recalls Deatherage’s 1984 marriage to Oklahoma City banker Dale Mitchell.  He then reports:

In late 1992, he (Mitchell) was convicted of five felony counts of conspiracy to defraud, misapplying bank funds and making false statements to banks and ordered to pay $3 million in restitution–something that his wife says convinced her that government had grown too big.The New Yorker’s Jane Mayer also wrote about Cleta Mitchell’s transformation. She quoted Mitchell’s claim that her husband “is the most honest person I’ve ever known.” His conviction convinced her that “overreaching government regulation is one of the great scandals of our time.”

Near the beginning of Mitchell’s post-Oklahoma career, she campaigned for term limits for legislators. She eventually developed a “stepmother theory of government.  “Citizen Legislators” would replace politicians; her vision would be “Why not take turns in office like jury duty.” 

If that sounds weird, however, wait until Mitchell’s allies more publicly reveal the next step toward undermining representative government.

Mitchell explained that she changed after her pastor warned of the “perils of struggling all one’s life to succeed at what in the end could turn out to be an unworthy pursuit.”

But, Mayer ended her article on how Mitchell became an “outsider” with the lesson, “appealing to the discontent of those outside the system may be the surest path to becoming an important player inside it.”

Since Mayer’s 1996 article, Mitchell’s allies at the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) have devised a plan that is the antithesis of her previous “Citizen Legislators” approach, and is even more disconnected from reality. Documented’s Jamie Corey reveals that nearly a year ago, Mitchell was one of three attorneys working with ALEC on a path that “legislators can take to question the validity of an election.”  It seems impossible to reconcile that tactic with Mitchell’s faith in the people, as opposed to their representatives. And the next ALEC move is even more incomprehensible, unless the goal is to attack American democracy on all fronts.

The Huffington Post’s Mary Papenfuss, in an article about Mitchell entitled Attorney on Trump’s Georgia Call Works with Group Aiming to Eliminate Senate Elections, reports that ALEC is trying to persuade legislatures to the repeal of the 17th Amendment. U.S. Senators would then be chosen by legislators not the voters! 

Getting back to The Atlantic piece on Mitchell, Krohn concludes, “Mitchell herself, ironically, offers a clear model of how people can change.” And while on the subject of changing a person’s mind, Law and Crime now cites the McClatchy report that Mitchell (who had worked for the NRA) “‘had concerns about [the NRA’s] ties to Russia’” and the NRA’s ‘”possible involvement in channeling Russian funds into the 2016 elections to help Donald Trump.’” But, I wonder what Mitchell was thinking when she  dismissed the report as a “complete fabrication.” 

Similarly, as reported by Slate, Mitchell was caught on tape telling a closed door ALEC panel on gerrymandering, “My advice to you is: If you don’t want it [notes from the panel] turned over in discovery, you probably ought to get rid of it before you go home.” Don’t such words raise questions about how she could respect voters over her allies who disenfranchise them?

Above all, I wonder what Mitchell thought when, as Law and Crime explains, the January 2 Trump phone call was “completely undermining Mitchell’s attempts to discuss the matters he raised.” And now, her law firm, Foley & Lardner is distancing itself from Mitchell,So, is it possible that the Cleta Mitchell – who is helping Trump undermine our constitutional democracy – might remember the words of her pastor and distance herself from ALEC’s next unworthy pursuit?

Categories Accountability, Elections, Oklahoma, Trump

Bob Shepherd: The Devil Went Down to Georgia

By dianeravitch
January 5, 2021 //
24

Bob Shepherd, our resident polymath, essayist, humorist, and lexicographer, wrote the following rumination on Trump’s visit to Georgia last night. He was supposed to “get out the vote” for the two billionaire Republican Senators, but spent most of his talk complaining about how the Georgia state officials had cheated him, how the election was rigged against him, and airing his usual woe-is-me victim grievances:

Bob Shepherd wrote:

So, this is what I heard listening to Trump’s Toddler Rant last night in Georgia:

The Devil Went Down to Georgia, aka Bad Angels in America, a Screenplay

[“Bohemian Rhapsody,” by Queen, crescendos, then fades over voice of Announcer.]

ANNOUNCER: Ladies and Gentlemen, the President of the United States.

JABBA THE TRUMP: Good evening, GEEOR-JUH! So here we are. What’s this place? Dalton? Dalton, Geeorjuh. You gotta be kidding, right? What the heck am I doing here? They said to me, ‘Sir. You have to go to Dalton, Geeorjuh.”

“No way, I said.”

“But, Sir,” they said, “if you don’t go, the Republicans down there, they lose.” Pitiful, am I right? But it’s true. It’s true. Carpets, right? You make carpets here in Dalton, Geeorjuh. So, here I am. And I’m not even on the ticket. Not something I want to do, believe me. But they need me. Republicans, without me, they never win another election.

So, we love the great state of Geeorjuh. I had this guy, Jeff Sessions. Wanted to be Attorney General. He was from Geeorgia or someplace in the South. I know. Hayseeds, right? A long way from New York, I’m telling you. Terrible. Worst Attorney General ever. Worse than Barr, even. Barr couldn’t do the most simple thing I asked him. Send in the military around the country–the Army, the Air Force, the Marines. Trump’s military. Get the Communist Democrats, Antifa, the News Media. Look at them back there. The Media. What a joke, right? Just wait. Tomorrow, they’ll say, he threatened the media. Sessions. Wouldn’t fire Mueller during the fake Russia investigation. So, I said, Jeff, you’re fired. And then he tried to run for office. And he lost. Lost terribly. That’s what happens. Trump’s not behind you, you lose.

Because I’m a winner. Won this election you wouldn’t believe how much—millions and millions of votes. But they got dead people voting. Illegals. Democrats. Can you believe that? They’re allowing Democrats to vote. Crazy, believe me. 11,000 votes. That’s all I need. It’s Tuesday night. I’m well ahead. Ahead everywhere. And then at the last minute they bring in all these boxes and boxes of votes—millions of them—all Biden. By dead people and Democrats. Biden. I know. The worst. He’ll take your jobs. Your cows. He wants the country to be Venezuela. Terrible. But that’s the radical Democrat Communist agenda, folks. I was saying to Ivanka—where is Ivanka? Ivanka, come up here and say something.

IVANKA: Hello, Georgia. I’m not going to say much because Daddy would get mad and I don’t have a brain anyway, but thank you. Thank you for coming out tonight and showing that you want to draw the line in the sand. That you are going to support David Doodoo and Kelly Loofa because the president has their backs. The greatest president in the history of our country, my father, Guardian of the Galaxy, Donald J. Trump.

JABBA THE TRUMP: Thank you, Ivanka. Nice legs on her, huh? I always say, if she weren’t my daughter, I’d be dating her. So, they’re trying to steal the election. Rename your military bases where so many heroes fought and died, named after great hero slave owners and rebels against your country. Nobody knows the military like Trump. You got, what? What’s that? Fort Benning? I don’t know. Maybe they could call it Fort Trump. I’d be OK with that.

But we won. We won by a lot. They call me up and they say, Sir, I can’t believe how they’re trying to steal it from you. It’s a statistical impossibility. Biden got more votes than there were people in the whole history of the country. Cause they got these machines. Need votes? Just print them up. Millions and millions of votes. Oh, this is a vote for TRUMP? Throw that one out.

The two worst events in the history of our country. First the fake Russia investigation. Then they try to steal the election. I don’t know. Not since the Continental Army had to fight off the Communist invasion from CHAIY-nuh was it so bad. Touch and go. Touch and go. That’s how it will be for Republicans if the Supremes—I’m not very happy with them right now—don’t step up and fix this thing. You know, I flew down here on a great helicopter—Marine One—great helicopter. Not as good as the Trump helicopter. Not by a long shot. But good. Like those stealth planes. Since I rebuilt the military. Terrible. It was in terrible shape, and I rebuilt it. They got these stealth planes, they’re actually invisible. You could be standing right next to it, and they would say, what do you think of the plane? And you would say, What plane? Because you couldn’t see it. Incredible. Incredible. So, I flew down on Marine One. And it’s like touch and go. Touch and go. Like my connection to reality.

But you’ll see. We won the election. We’re still going to win. Just wait. You’ll see. Big things happening. And any Senator goes against me, like your Governor here in Georgia, I’ll be campaigning against them. I can promise you that. You’re done. Finished.

OK. Well, that’s about it. Just wait and see the next couple days. You’ll see. Going to be wild out there. Good night, Geeorgia. Now, get me the hell out of here.

[JABBA exits to music of “YMCA” by The Village People. Satan and the ghost of Roy Cohn dance onstage to the music. Crowd in MAGA hats–Moscow’s Asset Governing America–mills around aimlessly, like zombies in The Walking Dead, trying to remember what day it is, their own names, and where the exits are located.]

Categories Elections, Georgia, Lies, Trump

Denis Smith: “The American Taliban”

By dianeravitch
January 5, 2021 //
12

When Congress meets to accept the results of the vote of the Electoral College, a large number of Republicans say they will object. They will object not because of facts or evidence or court decisions, but because they want to prove their devotion to Trump, the most incompetent and unhinged man ever to hold the presidency. The Republican members of Congress who deny the election of Joe Biden are, in the contested states, denying their own election. The Republican members of Congress from Georgia, Arizona, Nevada, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, andMichigan who support Trump’s challenge—even though the courts in their states threw out his claims—are saying that their own election was invalid. They should resign at once and wait for a new election.

Denis Smith, retired from the Ohio Department of Education, wrote the following:

“At least 12 Republican senators and potentially upwards of 140 House Republicans will formally object in writing to the electoral results submitted…”  says one report about tomorrow’s vote to accept the Electoral College results.  That number represents about 2/3 of all Republican members of the House, a startling figure when you consider that all of these people were democratically elected, that every state had their votes audited and certified, and that 60 court cases have been dismissed due to the sheer lack of evidence.

This would be laughable except for the fact that this whole spectacle is a challenge to democracy, an affront on majority rule – even though the Electoral College itself is a contradiction and a relic from the slavery era . In fact, Joe Biden won by more than 7,000,000 votes, yet we have at least 152 Members of Congress that are challenging that simple fact.


In light of all of this outrageous conduct and seditious behavior by Republicans, here are two quotes which I hope will be shared far and wide in the days ahead. I pulled them from my collection of favorite quotes assembled over the years, and do believe they are perfect for Americans to read before the debate in Congress tomorrow:
“It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.” (Attributed to several humorists, including Mark Twain, Josh Billings, Artemus Ward and Will Rogers)

“The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction (i.e., the reality of experience) and the distinction between true and false (i.e., the standards of thought) no longer exist.” — Hannah Arendt, “The Origins of Totalitarianism” (1951)

This quote from the iconic HBO series, The Newsroom, which aired from 2012-2014, has turned out to be particularly prophetic. Think about this observation spoken by Anchorman Will McAvoy, played by Jeff Daniels:

image.png

“We have one party that has these characteristics:

“Ideological purity. Compromise as weakness. A fundamentalist belief in scriptural literalism. Denying science. Unmoved by facts. Undeterred by new information. A hostile fear of progress. A demonization of education. A need to control women’s bodies. Severe xenophobia. Tribal mentality. Intolerance of dissent. Pathological hatred of the U.S. government. They can call themselves the Tea Party. They can call themselves conservatives. And they can even call themselves Republicans, though Republicans certainly shouldn’t. But we should call them what they are – The American Taliban.”

Who would have ever thought that this nation would come so close to becoming an authoritarian state? The distance on the road from authoritarianism to totalitarianism is not that far. In the meantime, get out the popcorn for tomorrow’s authoritarian spectacle. What you see and hear should be much more frightening than entertaining.

Categories Democracy, Elections, Republicans, Trump

Georgia: Federal Judge Tosses Another Trump Lawsuit

By dianeravitch
January 5, 2021 //
27

The Trump campaign filed yet another lawsuit in Georgia to overturn the state’s vote, and once again Trump lost.

Remember that the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting to get different results?

The Trump team, by that definition, is insane.

At what point will these fake lawyers be disciplined for clogging the calendars of state and federal courts with lawsuits that have no merit?

Categories Elections, Georgia, Trump

Steve Schmidt: January 6 is “the Beginning of the End” for the GOP

By dianeravitch
January 5, 2021 //
47

Steve Schmidt used to be a Republican insider. He ran Republican campaigns. He drew a line at Trump. He saw Trump for the phony and self-obsessed con man that he is. He joined the Lincoln Project. He changed his party registration. He is no longer a Republican.

He says that January 6 marks the beginning of the end for the GOP. Here is an excerpt from his remarks.

The die is cast for the Republican Party. It will be destroyed on January 6th in much the same way the Whig party was destroyed by the passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act in 1854. The act unraveled the Missouri compromise and allowed for the westward expansion of slavery.

The party could not survive its factionalism. There could be no more accommodation, compromise, and partnership between pro-slavery and anti-slavery Whigs. A new political party was born, the Republican Party. Now, that party will divide into irreconcilable factions on January 6th.

The 6th will commence a political civil war inside the GOP. The autocratic side will roll over the pro-democracy remnant of the GOP like the Wehrmacht did the Belgian Army in 1940. The ‘22 GOP primary season will be a blood letting. The 6th will be a loyalty test. The purge will follow.

Does anybody doubt the outcome of the @IvankaTrump vs. @marcorubio primary in Florida? Anyone willing to make a bet on @robportman?

It turns out JFK was right. The problem of trying to ride the tiger is the likelihood of winding up inside the tiger.

The poisonous fruit from four years of collaboration and complicity with Trump’s insanity, illiberalism, and incompetence are ready for harvest. It will kill the GOP because its Pro-Democracy faction and Autocratic factions can no more exist together then could the Whig Party hold together the Abolitionist with the Slave master. It won’t happen over night, but the destination is clear.

The Conservative party in America is dead. It may continue to bear the name “Republican” but it will be no such thing. Fascism has indeed come to America, and as was once predicted it is wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross.

Categories Elections, Fascism, Republicans, Trump

Trump’s Wild-Eyed Conspiracy Theories Run Out of Time

By dianeravitch
January 5, 2021 //
17

As we learned in the recording of his outrageous conversation with the Georgia Secretary of State, Trump will stop at nothing in his crazed efforts to cling to his office. He has lost interest in governing, but not in ruling. His base believes whatever claptrap he spews. Some theorize that it was Trump who released the recording of the conversation where he bullied Brad Raffensperger and tried to persuade him to “find” enough votes to reverse the results in Georgia. The recording allowed him to get all his nutty conspiracy theories into the public space, magnified by massive coverage. Since Georgia’s electoral votes would not be enough to change the outcome of the election, we can safely assume that Trump had similar conversations with state election officials in other states. He doesn’t seem to understand that the election is over. The votes were counted and recounted. The Electoral College met, and Biden won. The process on January 6 is supposed to be ceremonial not consequential. Trump’s surrogates sued to try to give the Vice-President the power to overturn the duly certified slates of electors and recognize alternate pro-Trump slates instead, but that lawsuit was dismissed in Texas by a federal judge appointed by Trump; when it was appealed to the Federal Appeals Court, a three-judge panel (all appointed by Republican presidents) affirmed the lower court decision to toss out the lawsuit.

However, Politico says that the call was recorded and released by the Georgia Secretary of State, for his own protection. He was burned once before by Lindsay Graham. Let’s give credit where credit is due: Secretary of State Raffensperger, a lifetime Republican, refused to be cowed by Graham; he refused to be cowed by Trump. He stood strong for election integrity, despite the pressure. He is an American hero.

Here is the full recording and transcript.

Politico wrote:

The story of the extraordinary call of a president pushing a top election official to rig the Georgia results was broken by the superb reporting of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution’s Greg Bluestein and the Washington Post’s Amy Gardner, but the backstory is almost as interesting.

It started on Saturday when Trump and his team reached out to talk to Raffensperger, who, according to an adviser, felt he would be unethically pressured by the president. Raffensperger had been here before: In November he accused Trump ally and South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham of improperly exhorting him to meddle in the election to help Trump win Georgia. Graham later denied it.

So why not record the call with the president, Raffensperger’s advisers thought, if nothing else for fact-checking purposes. “This is a man who has a history of reinventing history as it occurs,” one of them told Playbook. “So if he’s going to try to dispute anything on the call, it’s nice to have something like this, hard evidence, to dispute whatever he’s claiming about the secretary. Lindsey Graham asked us to throw out legally cast ballots. So yeah, after that call, we decided maybe we should do this.”

The call took place Saturday afternoon. “Mr. President,” announced Mark Meadows, the White House chief of staff, at the top of the call, “everyone is on the line.” Little did he know. Trump made his ask and did most of the talking for the next hour, trafficking in the same conspiracy theories about election fraud that no court or criminal investigator has found credible. At the end of the call, Trump complains, “What a schmuck I was.”

Raffensperger’s team kept quiet about the call and the recording and waited. The president made the next move, claiming on Sunday morning via Twitter that Raffensperger was “unwilling, or unable, to answer” questions about his baseless claims of widespread voter fraud. “Respectfully, President Trump: What you’re saying is not true,” Raffensperger replied at 10:27 a.m. “The truth will come out.” It wasn’t an empty promise.

Now the best that Trump can hope for is to draw thousands of his rabid, armed supporters to the Capitol to threaten others and to create chaos. This won’t change the outcome of the election, unless Trump invokes the nineteenth-century Insurrection Act and declares martial law.

The Boston Globe published this editorial:

For worried residents of the District of Columbia, President Trump’s flailing efforts to overturn the results of a free and fair election that he lost no longer seem quite so funny. With the prospect of unrest in the nation’s capital when Trump’s loss is formalized on Wednesday, Republicans have run out of excuses for continuing to indulge Trump’s anti-democratic rants.

Not a single state or federal court has accepted the preposterous conspiracy theories floated by Trump and his supporters to explain his loss, ranging from zany stories of North Koreans smuggling ballots into Maine to supposed Sharpie malfunctions in Arizona. No election has been as thoroughly scrutinized as the 2020 vote, and even Trump’s own Justice Department acknowledges it couldn’t find any serious fraud, much less the vast plots of Trump’s imagination.

To their credit, state Republican officials in Georgia, Arizona, Michigan, and other states rejected those fictions. National Republicans, from Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell on down, have (belatedly) also acknowledged Joe Biden as the victor. In fact, the election wasn’t especially close: Democratic candidate Joe Biden won by more than 7 million votes, and with an Electoral College margin identical to Trump’s 2016 victory.Get Today in Opinion in your inboxGlobe Opinion’s must-reads, delivered to you every Sunday-Friday. Enter EmailSign Up

But the president remains immersed in his conspiratorial fantasyland, careening from one delusional idea to another, apparently in hopes that one fringe theory will finally pay off, a deus ex whackina that changes the ending of the 2020 election.

And on Wednesday, when Congress meets to formally certify Biden’s victory, Trump has called for his supporters to descend on Washington for a protest he said would be “wild.”

Of course, protesting is any American’s right. But especially considering the way the last gathering of Trump supporters in Washington descended into violence, lawmakers need to stop giving oxygen to his efforts and firmly reject expected challenges to the vote-certifying on Wednesday. Trump’s fellow Republicans have mostly indulged him by treating his complaints as plausibly legitimate. But that’s only emboldened what would otherwise be a crackpot fringe. By doing so, they’re risking a greater likelihood of trouble on the streets of Washington in the short term, and more lasting damage to trust in democracy in the long term.

Certifying an election is a ministerial job, not a policy decision; it’s not Congress’s job on Wednesday to say whether they like the results of an election or the way that states conducted their votes. Still, if even a single House member and a single senator object to a state’s electoral votes, it triggers a mandatory two-hour debate in Congress and then a vote on whether to accept the state’s votes. As of Saturday, eleven GOP senators and senators-elect had pledged to join House members in objecting to some states’ electoral votes. Trump and his supporters had been pushing members of Congress to object to states Biden won, and demanding that Vice President Mike Pence — who will preside over the count in a ceremonial capacity — switch Biden states to Trump, which he does not have the power to do. (In another dead-end lawsuit, some GOP lawmakers tried to change the law dating back to the 19th century to give Pence the authority to override voters.)

Seeking to avoid a debacle, McConnell lobbied Republican senators not to raise objections to Biden’s victories, apparently unsuccessfully. Meanwhile, according to a top aide, Pence supports the GOP lawmakers’ egregious plan to legitimize the president’s conspiracy theories on the floor of Congress.

Ever since election day, Republicans have generally defended Trump’s challenges to the outcome as within his legal rights. Likewise, insisting on a floor debate on individual states’ presidential votes is perfectly legal. But what is legally permissible and what is right for a polarized and frazzled country aren’t the same.

The country needs to turn the page not just on Trump, but also the toxic brand of conspiracism that he’s mainstreamed into American politics. That won’t be easy. But members of Congress ought to do their part by publicly rejecting Trump’s conspiracy-laced demands to subvert the electoral count, and recognizing Biden’s clear victory. Those who do not don’t deserve to be in public office in a democracy.

Categories Accountability, Elections, Ethics, Georgia, Trump

Trump Loses Another Frivolous Lawsuit

By dianeravitch
January 4, 2021 //
23

This just appeared in the Washington Post. The Trump campaign continues filing lawsuits. His lawyers should be disbarred for filing multiple frivolous lawsuits.

Federal judge rejects latest effort by Trump allies to overturn election results, saying lawsuit ‘would be risible were its target not so grave’


A federal judge rejected yet another attempt by allies of President Trump to overturn the November election results on Monday, saying the lawsuit “would be risible were its target not so grave” and suggesting he will consider asking for disciplinary action for the lawyers involved.


More than 90 judges have rejected efforts by Trump or his allies to overturn the November vote. In Michigan, the city of Detroit has asked another judge to consider disciplinary action against Sidney Powell, a lawyer who has represented plaintiffs in a number of suits.


The latest suit was filed Dec. 22 by the Amistad Project, a conservative group that had already filed and lost a number of lawsuits targeting the vote in various states. This last-ditch effort was filed against Vice President Pence, both houses of Congress, the leaders of five states and the electoral college — a body that does not exist as a permanent entity — and argued that the Constitution requires that state legislatures alone certify presidential electors. It asked a federal judge in D.C. to stop Congress from certifying President-elect Joe Biden’s victory when it meets to read the electoral college votes on Wednesday.


In a seven-page opinion, District Court Judge James Boasberg rejected the effort, citing a series of fatal flaws with the suit. The plaintiffs, he wrote, had filed in the wrong court, did not have standing to sue and had made no effort to serve their opponents with the suit, a legal requirement to move the process forward.


More importantly, he wrote, “the suit rests on a fundamental and obvious misreading of the Constitution.”


“It would be risible were its target not so grave: the undermining of a democratic election for President of the United States,” he wrote.


He wrote that their central contention — that only state legislatures can certify presidential electors — was “flat out wrong” and would require him to ignore decades of precedent and Supreme Court decisions to overturn a number of state laws.


“Plaintiffs’ theory that all of these laws are unconstitutional and that the Court should instead require state legislatures themselves to certify every Presidential election lies somewhere between a willful misreading of the Constitution and fantasy,” he wrote.


He added, however, that the plaintiffs’ failure to even try to serve the many parties they had sued made it difficult of him to believe the lawsuit was intended to be taken seriously.


“Courts are not instruments through which parties engage in such gamesmanship or symbolic political gestures,” he wrote, adding that he was contemplating referring the case to the court’s Committee on Grievances “for potential discipline of Plaintiffs’ counsel.”


Erick G. Kaardal, the Minneapolis-based lawyer who filed the suit on behalf of the group, did not respond to a request for comment.

Categories Elections, Failure, Trump
« Older Entries
Newer Entries »