US Politics

Republicans are plotting to destroy democracy from withinLawrence DouglasOpportunism and cowardice has more than sufficed to make Republicans espouse a noxious falsehood as an axiomatic truth At hand is a plot to destroy American democracy from within. Its organizers have infiltrated the highest echelons of state and federal government, and have instigated and condoned acts of violence directed against our elected officials. This might sound far-fetched. But the threat is real and the seditious group is none other than the Republican party. Its target is the 2024 presidential election.Less than a year ago, Donald Trump limped from the White House a badly discredited figure, roundly condemned for having instigated a shocking attack against a coordinate branch of government. The 6 January insurrection seemed like a wake-up call to Republican lawmakers. No longer could they indulge the self-serving story that Trump was simply an uncouth, untraditional president. The reality was stark and undeniable. The president was at heart a petty autocrat, willing to torch democracy to cling to power.The wake-up call went unheeded. The critical inflection point came during the second impeachment trial, when Republican senators had the opportunity to join Democrats in condemning Trump. And while seven Republican senators voted along with all 50 Democrats to convict, this still left the Senate 10 votes short of the 67 needed to hold Trump to account.Emblematic of the Republican refusal to reckon was the stance adopted by Mitch McConnell, who only weeks before had lost his position as Senate majority leader. On the floor of the Senate, McConnell delivered a powerful condemnation of Trump – only then to vote to acquit. Insisting that an ex-president was “constitutionally not eligible for conviction”, McConnell cynically overlooked the fact that the purpose of the trial was not to remove Trump from office but to bar him from ever running again. And while McConnell presumably was hoping to mollify the Republican base while keeping Trump himself sidelined, that strategy backfired grandly.The acquittal served as the first step to Trump’s rapid rehabilitation and the further radicalization of the Republican party. Ten months ago, McConnell castigated Trump for spinning “increasingly wild myths about a reverse landslide election that was being stolen in some secret coup”. Now these same myths have been elevated to first principles of the Republican party, as the party has come to effectively close its doors to those unwilling to lie about the 2020 election. In George Orwell’s 1984, Winston Smith had to be tortured into declaring that 2+2=5. In the case of today’s Republicans, no torture has been necessary. Opportunism and cowardice has more than sufficed to make Republicans across the land espouse a noxious falsehood as an axiomatic truth.No less ominous has been the whitewashing of the insurrection itself. Ten months ago, McConnell declared the “mob … assault[ed] the Capitol in [Trump’s] name. These criminals were carrying his banners, hanging his flags, and screaming their loyalty to him.” Hardly a day passes without fresh revelations from the House select committee, documenting the shocking steps Trump contemplated in his effort to remain in the White House. Yet despite the intrepid work of Liz Cheney, the larger Republican response has been to distort and suppress the committee’s findings. Paul Gosar, the Arizona congressman who recently posted an animated video that depicted him slashing to death his House colleague Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, has recast the insurrectionists as patriots. Others, including Wisconsin Senator Ron Johnson, have insisted the attack was a false-flag operation, a conspiracy theory given traction by Tucker Carlson’s three-party series.Republican state lawmakers have in turn weaponized the lies about the 2020 election and the 6 January insurrection to gain control over the local administration of elections. Bad enough are the 33 laws that have been passed in 19 states designed to make it harder for persons of color to vote. But more disturbing still are the Republican party’s radical efforts to purge officials who resisted Trump’s attempt to subvert the 2020 results and replace them with loyalists who have bought into the big lie. Republican lawmakers in Wisconsin are seeking to eliminate the state’s bipartisan elections commission altogether and to install themselves as the sole arbiter of state election results. And more than a dozen other red states have similarly enacted laws to transform the counting and review of ballots cast into a carefully monitored partisan exercise.By the time insurrectionists stormed the Capitol on 6 January, the 2020 election was a fait accompli. True, Trump tried desperately to forestall Congress from counting and accepting the duly certified state electoral certificates attesting to Biden’s victory. What ultimately frustrated Trump’s putsch attempt was the fact that election officials in Arizona, Georgia, Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania had already accurately and honestly reported the results. Many of these officials were Republicans. They acted in simple defense of democracy and were rewarded with death threats, ostracism and now ouster.Come 2024 these quiet custodians of democracy will have been replaced with loyalists and hacks ready to muddy the waters or supply the votes to secure a Trump win. The 2024 election will not witness a repeat of the events of 6 January. By the time Congress tallies the electoral votes on 6 January 2025, the putsch could be complete. And if it is, it will have been staged in the small offices of the election officials in the key swing states. And it’s all being scripted now.
Lawrence Douglas is the author, most recently, of Will He Go? Trump and the Looming Election Meltdown in 2020. He is a contributing opinion writer for the Guardian US and teaches at Amherst College
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‘It’s an American issue’: can Georgia’s candidate for secretary of state save democracy? Bee Nguyen, who has led her party’s fight against Republican-backed voting restrictions, may prove vital to building election integrity and restoring voter confidence in GeorgiaGeorgia state representative Bee Nguyen has seemed destined to wage epic battles in her fast-changing state ever since replacing Stacey Abrams in its legislature four years ago when the now-nationally-recognized Democrat announced her first bid for governor.Or maybe it’s since former president and Georgia native Jimmy Carter decided, more than 40 years ago, to double the number of refugees admitted to the US from Vietnam – including her parents. Nguyen was born in Iowa, but has lived in Georgia since her parents moved here when she was seven.Now, events of recent months have made it clearer than ever what’s at stake for Nguyen in her next bid: becoming Georgia’s secretary of state, responsible for overseeing elections and other duties in a state that seems set to be at the center of 2022’s midterm elections and also a key battleground in the 2024 presidential race.Since becoming the first Asian American woman in Georgia’s legislature, she has led her party’s fight against Republican-backed restrictions on voting. Now, if she becomes her party’s nominee for secretary of state, her ideas may prove vital to building election integrity and restoring voter confidence in Georgia, and by example, elsewhere in America at a moment when US democracy itself seems in peril.She may have just received a boost last week when Abrams announced her intentions to run for governor again. If successful, Abrams would become the nation’s first Black woman governor. Having Abrams on the ballot should “mobilize resources and get people aware of the seriousness” of the midterm elections next year, said Adrienne Jones, political science professor at Morehouse College. Having Abrams in office may provide a backstop to protecting elections in Georgia as well, Nguyen said. “We need Stacey Abrams to veto further erosion of voting rights,” she said – especially if federal voting rights legislation isn’t passed.Still, the challenges Nguyen faces include Georgia being one of three states where Donald Trump has endorsed Republican candidates for secretary of state who believe the 2020 election was “stolen”, along with Arizona and Michigan. The plan is to help elect election administrators who will make it difficult for Trump to lose in 2024. The former president has already visited Georgia to stump for current member of Congress Jody Hice, who is hoping to oust incumbent Brad Raffensperger – the same official who taped Trump’s 2 January phone call, in which the former president asked the current secretary of state to find “11,780 votes”. Fulton county district Attorney Fani Willis is leading an investigation to determine if Trump committed a crime in that call and other efforts to change last year’s election results.These events, along with continuing threats against Georgia election officials and poll workers, have made Georgia emblematic of the chaos surrounding voting and elections in the US. The resulting situation has given the once-overlooked office of secretary of state new importance, Nguyen said.In that context, “We’re no longer looking at this as a Georgia issue,” she said. “It’s an American issue.”At the same time, the challenges for Georgia’s next secretary of state aren’t limited to overseeing elections in a state where millions of voters still believe the 2020 election was stolen. Or even sorting out the impacts of the state’s new election law, which allows the Republican-controlled legislature to take over local election boards, and is the subject of a handful of lawsuits alleging that the law makes it harder for thousands to vote.If elected, Nguyen will also have to face the fact that Georgia had already been struggling with election cybersecurity issues before 2020, resulting in a federal judge ordering former secretary of state and now governor Brian Kemp to scrap the entire state’s system – a historical first. Then the legislature ignored top cybersecurity experts and bought another vulnerable system – first used statewide in last year’s election. There’s also a 2018 US Commission on Civil Rights report that rated Georgia among the nation’s worst for violating the rights of voters.Against this backdrop, Nguyen has adopted a clear-eyed, practical approach to her campaign. Reached by phone after returning to Atlanta from meetings with community groups in coastal Georgia, she mentions a query she got about the Republican-controlled state legislature certifying elections under the new law. “I said, there’s nothing we can do about that. The secretary of state’s office is a safeguard to democracy – but it’s not a silver bullet.”Communicating transparently with the public, combating disinformation, and evaluating past elections for successes and failures are all key to protecting elections, said John S Cusick, counsel at the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund who is representing plaintiffs in one of the suits against Georgia’s new law. “While there are limitations, there are also opportunities,” he said.Nguyen has a host of ideas to “help offset” the new law, as well as restore voter confidence.They include building cybersecurity expertise into the secretary of state’s office, she said. “What I envision is hiring top-notch security experts,” she said. Their duties would include monitoring threats to the election system, as well as disinformation and conspiracies online, and communicating with the state’s 159 counties and their election officials in real time.As a legislator, Nguyen voted against the current $100-plus million computerized elections system, chosen despite top cybersecurity experts recommending that the state use hand-marked paper ballots, as in many other states.This decision is what Richard DeMillo, chairman of Georgia Tech’s School of Cybersecurity and Privacy, calls the “original sin” underlying Georgia’s current situation. “They denied the ground truth … that these are opaque systems with vulnerabilities,” he said. “This is independent of whether the [2020] election was hacked, of which there is no widespread evidence.”Still, scrapping the entire system now would mean that Republican legislators “would have to admit they made an error”, said Nguyen. Her plan would at least make cybersecurity part of the central function of the secretary of state’s office, a first. She hopes to pay for it with federal funds.Other ideas include communicating by mail, text and email with registered voters when trying to maintain rolls current, instead of using only mail and then “purging” voters from the rolls when they don’t respond.“The state should be doing everything they can to notify voters,” she said – including about changes such as new deadlines for requesting absentee ballots or new polling locations. Also, she would make more information on voting available in languages other than English – a practice still controversial in Georgia. And, she would like to install computerized kiosks in grocery stores located in areas with spotty Internet access, to enable voters to do everything from updating registrations to sending in absentee ballots.As for election workers – the historically anonymous and now increasingly threatened key to running elections – “what I have witnessed as a member of the Government Affairs Committee [of the legislature] is that the secretary of state isn’t acting as a collaborative partner” with local election boards, Nguyen said. She wants to change that, improving training, and, she hopes, using federal funds to help counties obtain the equipment they need to avoid such issues as long lines due to a lack of voting machines.Although Nguyen allows that some of these ideas may seem “unsexy”, she says they are “necessary pieces to safeguard democracy. It’s like, ‘Here’s what we can do.’”One thing that Nguyen recognizes as necessary to run for secretary of state in the post-Trump era is a personal security plan.As an Asian-American woman in the public eye, she has become accustomed to bigotry; she noted that someone had posted on Twitter several days before we spoke, “Go back to your shit-hole country.” But “before last year, there was general harassment,” she said. “Now it’s more death threats.” Late last year, Nguyen personally contacted voters from a list Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani’s team had compiled, after the Big Lie promoter alleged they had voted fraudulently. Nguyen proved the accusation to be wrong. Video of her testimony was widely seen. The death threats increased. She contacted law enforcement officials; they advised that she remove personal information from the Internet as much as possible. “I asked family members to lock down their social media accounts,” she added. Police drove by her house.The situation is not without irony for Nguyen. “I have a frame of reference from my parents,” she said. “They saw a loss of civil liberties. My Dad was imprisoned by the government for three years. They have said to me that they never believed they would lose their country. I’m very concerned – we’re facing threats, disinformation, people actively trying to dismantle democracy. I believe we have a limited time to redirect ourselves.”TopicsGeorgiaStacey AbramsUS politicsnewsReuse this content More

Jonathan Freedland and Joan Greve look back on a chaotic year in US politics and attempt to offer some predictions of might be coming down the tracks in 2022

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‘Unlike anything we’ve seen’: the unprecedented risks facing US democracyFrom attacks on election officials to politicizing election boards, threats to the voting system are deeply worrying Get the latest updates on voting rights in the Guardian’s Fight to vote newsletterHello, and Happy Thursday,For some year-end reporting, I’ve been talking with folks about how 2021 exploded as the year American democracy came under siege. “It’s unlike anything we’ve ever seen,” David Becker, an election administration expert and the executive director of the Center for Election Innovation and Research, told me.For our last Fight to Vote newsletter of the year (don’t worry – we’ll be back in January), I wanted to highlight the most dangerous threats to America’s electoral system.Efforts to inject partisanship into under-the-radar election jobsEach state in the US oversees its own elections. And within each state different counties, and in some places even smaller townships and municipalities, are responsible for running those elections. At each level, there are under-the-radar officials, appointed in some cases and elected in others, who are responsible for enforcing the rules.These are positions that many people have never heard of – their job isn’t to be political, but rather to ensure that the person with the most votes is seated as the winner of the election. Over the last year, however, there’s been an effort to weaponize these offices.One of the first signs came a few months ago in Michigan. The Detroit News reported Republican officials there were nominating people who embraced the idea that the 2020 election was stolen to positions on local boards of canvassers, which play a central role in certifying election results.In Georgia, Republicans have quietly exerted more influence over local election boards across the state, removing Black Democrats from their roles. In addition to certifying election results, those local boards approve polling place locations and consider challenges to voter eligibility.And in Pennsylvania, there’s concern that election deniers are seeking positions as judges of elections. These officials are essentially in charge of the polling place in their precinct.Attacks on election officialsOver the last year, there’s been a surge in harassment against election officials, and many of them have left their jobs. Perhaps the most alarming example of this is happening in Wisconsin, where Republicans are launching an aggressive effort to oust Meagan Wolfe, the non-partisan administrator of the bipartisan body that oversees election in the state, from her role.Observers are deeply concerned. Running an election is an enormously complicated enterprise. Having deeply experienced people leave the field creates an opening for inexperienced, and potentially more partisan people, to fill that void.“Intimidating the professionals who run elections, saying elections are rigged orfraudulent, altering state laws to allow partisans, as opposed to professionals, the final say in who wins elections, will be a self-fulfilling prophecy,” Ben Ginsberg, a longtime prominent GOP elections lawyer, said this week. “No one will have faith in elections.”Campaigns for secretary of stateAt the top of the election bureaucracy in most states is a secretary of state, the chief election official. These secretaries can act alone to automatically mail out absentee ballot applications, for instance, or implement rules around ballot drop boxes. Overlooked for years, these officials wield an enormous amount of unilateral power.“There is no one person who has as much authority [in] protecting the will of the people as the secretary of state,” Jocelyn Benson, Michigan’s secretary of state, told me in an interview. “They can do enormous damage but they can also do enormous good.”Trump has endorsed candidates running for secretary of state in almost every swing state, including Michigan, Georgia, Arizona and Nevada. All the candidates he has endorsed have supported the idea that the election was stolen.Last year, secretaries of state stood as bulwarks against Trump’s efforts to undermine the election. Officials like Benson debunked some of Trump’s wildest claims. Brad Raffensperger, Georgia’s Republican secretary of state, refused to go along with Trump’s request to “find” more than 11,000 votes in Georgia and overturn the results.Lingering distrust in electionsThere is still a staggering number of people who remain unconvinced of the 2020 election results. A September CNN poll found 78% of Republicans do not believe Biden won.Trump’s baseless claims about the election have had an impact. And that’s deeply alarming – a functioning democracy depends on all voters, regardless of whether their candidate won or lost, accepting the results.Also worth watching …
The Atlantic profiled Crystal Mason, the Texas woman sentenced to five years in prison for using a provisional ballot in 2016. Mason’s case, the profile points out, shows the devastating consequences of unfounded claims about fraud.
BuzzFeed News has a great look at how election deniers are going door to door in some places across the country.
Texas restarted an effort to remove non-citizens from its voting rolls, sparking concerns officials may be targeting eligible voters.
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America’s death penalty divide: why capital punishment is getting better, and worseThis year the US saw the fewest executions since 1988, but those states sticking with judicial killings are displaying grotesque aberrations More than half of the states in the US have either abolished the death penalty or have formal suspensions in place, as the country’s use of the brutal punishment continues to wither on the vine.When Virginia became the first southern state to scrap capital punishment in March, it raised to 23 the number of states that have abolished the practice outright. In a further three states, governors have imposed a moratorium on executions.Virginia’s seismic shift away from judicial killings has created a death penalty-free zone on the north-east seaboard of the US that runs from Maine’s border with Canada down to the edge of the Carolinas. A similar zone now runs all the way down the west coast of the US.The growing block of states where capital punishment is no longer welcome is one of the headline findings of the annual review of the Death Penalty Information Center (DPIC). The report contains nuggets that will make an abolitionist’s heart soar, including a record low number of new death sentences in 2021 (18) and the fewest executions carried out since 1988 (11).Virginia becomes the first southern state to end the death penalty Read moreBut there is a powerful sting in the tail. As the fondness for judicial killings generally recedes, those states that are sticking with capital punishment are displaying grotesque aberrations in its application.“The handful of states that continue to push for capital punishment are outliers that often disregard due process, botch executions, and dwell in the shadows of long histories of racism and a biased criminal legal system,” said DPIC’s executive director Robert Dunham.Five states, together with the US government, judicially killed prisoners this year. Seven imposed new death sentences.Three states have the dubious distinction of standing out in this year’s review – Alabama, Oklahoma and Texas. Between them they accounted for a half of all death sentences and most of the 11 executions.Oklahoma botched its first execution in six years, that of John Grant who was observed convulsing and vomiting on the gurney. The Guardian revealed that another death penalty state, Arizona, spent thousands of dollars obtaining hydrogen cyanide for its gas chamber, the same lethal chemical used by the Nazis in Auschwitz.Racism continues to leap out of the statistics, as it has since the early days of US capital punishment with its roots in slavery and racial terror lynchings. Ten of the 18 (56%) new death sentences were meted out to prisoners of colour, while the same percentage of death row inmates who were executed (six out of 11) were African American.Arizona ‘refurbishes’ its gas chamber to prepare for executions, documents revealRead moreReflecting a centuries-old distortion, more than three out of every four of the victims of this year’s murders ending in new death sentences were white. No non-white victim was involved in any case leading to a white person being condemned to death.Horrors abound in other aspects of the behaviour of the rump of death penalty states. This was a year in which the callous disregard for the mental impairments of those prisoners put to death was on visceral display.As Ngozi Ndulue, DPIC’s deputy director, pointed out, all but one prisoner executed this year had serious impairments including brain injury or damage, mental illness and intellectual disabilities, or had histories of gruesome childhood neglect and abuse.“We are seeing fewer and fewer executions, but those that do occur demonstrate that the death penalty is not reserved for the worst of the worst, but the most vulnerable of the vulnerable,” she said.Perhaps the most powerful argument of all against the death penalty is that it runs the risk of killing innocent people, and there was plenty of food for thought in that regard in 2021. Two death-row inmates were exonerated during the year, taking the total number of prisoners in the modern era who had been awaiting execution only to be found innocent to a staggering 186.DPIC points out that the figure is equivalent for one exoneration for every eight executions that have been carried out in the past 50 years. Both this year’s exonerees, Eddie Lee Howard and Sherwood Brown, were from Mississippiand were cleared with the help of DNA testing after both had been on death row for 26 years.The annual record for 2021 contains a hangover from an earlier era, in the form of the federal government’s flurry of executions in the dying days of the Trump administration. Three people on federal death row were killed in less than 10 days before Joe Biden’s inauguration, as part of Donald Trump’s rush to carry out 13 executions in six months.Those who died in 2021 at the hands of the Trump administration were Lisa Montgomery, a profoundly mentally-ill woman who had suffered a lifetime of abuse tantamount to torture; Corey Johnson who was severely intellectually disabled; and Dustin Higgs who indisputably did not kill anybody.Since Biden took office in January there have been no further federal executions and in June the US attorney general Merrick Garland announced a formal pause to give the Department of Justice time to review its policies.Anti-death penalty campaigners have been hoping the Biden administration would end the federal death penalty and commute sentences of the remaining 45 federal death row inmates to life imprisonment. So far, there has been no sign of that happening.TopicsCapital punishmentLaw (US)US politicsnewsReuse this content More

Biden nominates Caroline Kennedy to be ambassador to AustraliaDaughter of John F Kennedy was long seen as top candidate for a prominent diplomatic role Joe Biden has nominated Caroline Kennedy, daughter of John F Kennedy, to be the US ambassador to Australia.Kennedy, 63, a member of one of America’s most famous political families, has long been considered a leading candidate for a high-profile envoy position after she threw her support behind Biden’s presidential campaign.More details soon …TopicsBiden administrationUS politicsnews More