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      Supine Republicans don’t just dance to Trump’s tune – they amplify his racism

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      “I just love you!” Tim Scott bleated at Donald Trump.The South Carolina senator, who three months earlier had said Trump could not beat Joe Biden in the presidential election, was speaking on stage at a rally in New Hampshire.Criticism of Scott, who ended his own presidential campaign in November and later endorsed Trump, was swift.“Humiliating,” said Al Sharpton, the civil rights leader and news host. “A deeply, deeply pathetic moment,” said a fellow MSNBC host. “Cringe-y and painful,” was the opinion of The View.It was all of those things, but the self-abasement of Scott, who harbors ambitions of being Trump’s vice-president, was more importantly an illustration of how Trump remains the master puppeteer of the Republican party.The vice-presidential race – playing out in real time despite the presidential election being nine months away – is serving as a microcosm of what it means to be a success in the modern-day Republican party.In the current environment, anyone wishing to remain relevant in the GOP has to dance to Trump’s tune and kiss his big ring, surrendering any self-respect along the way.View image in fullscreenKristi Noem, the governor of South Dakota, and Elise Stefanik, a congresswoman from New York, are both seen as potential picks for vice-president. They have each campaigned with Trump and adopted Trump’s racially charged language, in Noem’s case, to the extent that she has been banned from tribal lands in her own state.Marjorie Taylor Greene, a longstanding Trump champion and bizarro star of the rightwing world, is a long-shot candidate, as the race to get Trump’s attention seems set to intensify.“Allies also say that while loyalty – and having a dependable attack dog who can effectively defend him – is paramount,” Associated Press reported, in a piece about the audition to become Trump’s vice-president.Beyond the vice-presidential race, it’s clear that Trump continues to embody the GOP. In the Senate and in the House, Republicans are forced to do his bidding or suffer the consequences.“I think the Republican party believes that he can deliver the voters and the party believes he is the best way to deliver the voters. He wields a tremendous amount of control over the party’s decision-making capacities,” said Shannon Bow O’Brien, a professor in the department of government at the University of Texas at Austin.“He does a lot of obedience through fear. He does have a very committed base who he says: ‘Jump’ and they say: ‘How high?’ He posts inflammatory things online and people respond and do what he asks essentially.”After Liz Cheney, a Republican congresswoman, voted to impeach Trump in the wake of the January 6 insurrection, Trump successfully backed a rival candidate against her in her state primary – a tactic he has deployed against other Republicans who aren’t sufficiently obsequious.“The people who vote in primaries are typically the most ardent and the most faithful,” O’Brien said.“And so if you have a candidate who Donald Trump has attacked, and has said: ‘This person needs to go,’ they run a serious risk, particularly in those primaries, of having that committed core coming out voting against them.”The bending of the knee to Trump is everywhere you look.During a bitter presidential primary campaign, Donald Trump dubbed Ron DeSantis “DeSanctimonious” and suggested he might be a pedophile, while a Trump campaign spokesperson said DeSantis walked “like a 10-year-old girl who had just raided her mom’s closet and discovered heels for the first time”.DeSantis set all that aside when he dropped out of the race and endorsed Trump in January.View image in fullscreenIf Trump’s influence only extended to demanding that people praise him, it would be easier to write off. But the former president has essentially forced people to amplify his inflammatory rhetoric about immigration and race, with increasingly overt racist language becoming the messaging of the Republican party.“I have been to the southern border many times. Some of you have, too. I have witnessed first-hand the invasion taking place. What shocks me is that every time I go, it is more of a war zone than the time before,” Noem said in an address in South Dakota at the end of January.“The sheer number of illegal migrants coming into the country has made it so that every state is now a border state.”Noem added: “This issue is about preserving this great nation for our kids and our grandkids.”The comments didn’t come out of nowhere. Despite his mother, like two of his wives, being an immigrant, Trump has long demonized and dehumanized people seeking refuge in the US. Notably, he did so in December when he claimed people entering the US across the southern border were “destroying the blood of our country”.And Noem’s invective seems to have worked. Four days after her speech, Trump praised Noem – along with Scott – in a Fox News interview, when asked about who he might choose as his running mate.“Kristi Noem has been incredible fighting for me. She said, ‘I’d never run against him because I can’t beat him.’ That was a very nice thing to say,” Trump said.Others are circling too. Stefanik was once seen as a sober Republican thinker, a moderate who was one of the most bipartisan members of the House. She isn’t seen as that any more.When Trump began calling the people jailed for their part in the January 6 insurrection “hostages” earlier this year, Stefanik immediately jumped on board.“I have concerns about the treatment of Jan 6 hostages,” Stefanik said in an NBC News interview, a day after Trump had started using the term. In the same interview, Stefanik also refused to commit to accepting the results of the 2024 election – something which no doubt would delight Trump, with whom she has appeared on his primary campaign trail.Stefanik stayed silent after Trump’s “poisoning the blood” claim, and in January seemed to adopt Trump’s dehumanizing tone when she claimed immigrants were set to “cross our borders and bleed into New York”.View image in fullscreen“When we look at Trump’s message around immigration, his message around the border, conversations around banning critical race theory, talking about crime in inner cities, he understands that America is at a very interesting point with respect to race relations. And so one way to keep the divisions alive is to talk about immigrants as if they are the problem,” said Emmitt Riley, a professor of politics and African and African American studies at Sewanee University and the chair of the National Conference of Black Political Scientists.“What we see happening with Republicans is that they now understand that Trump has spoken a message to the base of the Republican party and so if anyone disagrees with Trump, they’re vilified, they’re not likely to be successful when it comes to politics.”With the back and forth over how to address the number of people seeking to cross the US-Mexico border, Trump is unlikely to tone down his incendiary rhetoric on immigrants and foreigners – invective that Riley says “threatens the very fabric of American democracy”.And given Trump’s enduring influence and control, the chorus of similar Republican attacks is only likely to grow.“What’s different about Donald Trump is he’s emerged as a leader of the party, primarily because of voters seeing him as the face of the movement,” Riley said.“We haven’t really seen a candidate who has been able to exert such powerful influence over almost everything within the Republican party in this way.“And I think that that is also what makes him a little more dangerous.” More

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      Nikki Haley’s son calls Tim Scott ‘senator Judas’ over Trump support

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      The son of longshot Republican presidential candidate Nikki Haley referred US senator Tim Scott – their fellow South Carolinan – as “senator Judas” while criticizing Scott’s endorsement of Donald Trump.“Senator Judas – excuse me, senator Scott,” Nalin Haley said during a campaign rally in Gilbert, South Carolina.Haley herself reportedly joked later on stage at the event, “Nalin, I will deal with you later.”According to Washington Post reporter Dylan Wells, a spokesperson for Scott responded by issuing a statement which referred to the senator’s mother and said: “You’d never hear Ms Frances or anyone from the Scott family talk like that.”Haley when she was governor of South Carolina appointed Scott to the US Senate in 2012 to fill the seat of Jim DeMint, who retired.Scott dropped out of the Republican presidential primary in November and in January announced his official endorsement of Trump, who is seeking to defeat Democratic incumbent Joe Biden to return to the White House.Haley said in an interview with Fox News on the endorsement: “South Carolina is a bloodsport. Everyone has a decision to make, and they have to live with their decision. He’ll have to live with his.”She added in response to Scott being floated as a possible running mate for Trump: “He’s going to be disappointed when Trump doesn’t win.”South Carolina is set to hold its Republican presidential preference primary on 24 February, where Haley is currently trailing in polls by double digits behind Trump in her home state.She was behind by 37 points in a recent Morning Consult poll and 26 points in a Washington Post-Monmouth survey.During an interview on CBS News’s Face the Nation on Sunday, Haley sought to make up some of the ground between her and Trump by criticizing comments the former president made about her husband, who is serving overseas with South Carolina’s national guard.Trump, at his own campaign rally Saturday, asked where Michael Haley was. Trump – who has often been seen without wife Melania by his side as he grapples with a litany of legal problems – also said Michael Haley was “gone”.Haley on Sunday said: “We can’t have someone who sits there and mocks our men and women who are trying to protect America.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionShe also said Trump’s disparaging remarks of military members was “a pattern”, which was possibly a reference to a report that the former president once referred to Americans who died in war as “losers” and “suckers”.Haley served as governor for nearly two terms before resigning in 2017 to serve as the US ambassador to the United Nations for the Trump White House.She has affirmed plans to remain in the Republican presidential primary through Super Tuesday on 5 March – when 16 state primary races are run – regardless of the result Haley’s campaign receives in South Carolina.Trump is enjoying his status as the Republicans’ presumptive 2024 White House nominee despite facing more than 90 pending criminal charges.Those charges allege that he tried to illegally subvert the results of the 2020 election that he lost to Biden, improperly retained government secrets after his presidency and made illicit hush-money payments to an adult film actor who has alleged an extramarital sexual encounter with Trump. More

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      How to steal a US election: Harvard’s Lawrence Lessig on Trump’s new threat

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      Lawrence Lessig has a message for America: Donald Trump’s assault on democracy in 2020, with his stolen-election lie and refusal to concede the White House, may have been shocking, but wait till you see what’s coming next.“We are in a profoundly dangerous moment,” the Harvard law professor says. “This is a catastrophic year, and the odds are not in our favor.”Such a blunt warning carries the gravitas of its source. Lessig is a leading thinker on how public institutions can be corrupted, and has probed deeply into vulnerabilities that leave US democracy undefended against authoritarian attack.Lessig has teamed up with Matthew Seligman of the constitutional law center at Stanford. Their new book, How to Steal a Presidential Election, asks whether a second Trump attempt to subvert democracy could succeed. Their answer makes for uncomfortable reading.“We are convinced,” they write, “that an informed and intelligent effort to undermine the results of a close, free and fair election could work in America – if the rules governing our presidential elections are not changed.”It is a sign of troubled times that prominent scholars are wargaming the next election. A country that has long prided itself as an exemplar of constitutional democracy finds itself under surgical lights.Nor is this Lessig’s first such thought experiment. Four years ago, months before Trump launched his stolen-election conspiracy, Lessig and Seligman devised a class at Harvard law school: Wargaming 2020. They looked at whether it would be possible to hack the presidential election and send the losing candidate to the White House. Their conclusion was that American democracy had dodged a bullet.“We discovered that Trump didn’t really understand what he could have done,” Lessig says. “There were obvious moves he and his team could have made, but they didn’t take them.”The insurrection on 6 January 2021 was tragic in its loss of life, but as a method of overturning the election it was the “dumbest thing they could have possibly done. No court would ever allow the election to be decided by force of bayonets.”Having repeated the wargaming exercise for the new book, Lessig is far less confident that another assault on democracy would end so positively. With the former president almost certain to secure the Republican nomination, having won in Iowa and New Hampshire, Lessig has no doubt about how far Trump is prepared to go.“We’ve seen that he’s willing to do much, more more than we expected back in 2020,” he says.Another reason for people to be “very anxious” is that Trump and his inner circle have had four years to conduct their own wargames and are likely to be far more sophisticated: “Trump didn’t understand how to undo the structures of government. Now he’s well-trained, he knows exactly what he needs to do.”For their 2024 wargame, Lessig and Seligman assume the November election will be nail-bitingly close, both nationally and in at least one battleground state. That is not an outlandish precondition – you only have to think about the 537 votes that gifted Florida and the presidency to George W Bush in 2000.Given a close election, there are factors that could help stave off disaster. With the vice-presidency in the hands of Kamala Harris, there is no chance of Trump or his supporters unleashing the kind of pressure to which they subjected Mike Pence in 2020, trying to get him to block certification of Joe Biden’s victory.In the wake of January 6, Congress also moved to close several loopholes by clarifying some of the most ambiguous wording of the 1887 Electoral Count Act. The Electoral Count Reform and Presidential Transition Improvement Act makes it harder for Congress to object to the counting of votes under the electoral college, and gives the courts a greater role in adjudicating the proper slate of electors to be returned from individual states should disputes arise.But in the Lessig-Seligman analysis, inevitable congressional compromises have left some loopholes in place, opening up opportunities for an unscrupulous, now battle-hardened candidate.Three scenarios stand out. The first relates to so-called “faithless electors”: delegates chosen by parties to represent the winning candidate in each state under the arcane terms of the electoral college who decide to go against their pledge and back the loser.During Trump’s first presidential run in 2016, 10 electors switched their votes. The ruse was a creative, albeit vain attempt to stave off a Trump presidency.Lessig argued on behalf of the 2016 faithless electors before the US supreme court, in a case known as Chiafolo v Washington. The court ruled against the faithless electors, ordering that states have the right to compel them to back the winners of the popular vote.The authors’ concern is that the supreme court left it up to each state to decide whether or not to take up that power. Several states have yet to spell out in law that electors must abide by their pledge to vote for the victor. That leaves the door open to electors coming under massive, even violent pressure from Trump’s army of Make America Great Again warriors.“Imagine an elector had Maga Republicans surrounding their house carrying torches and demanding they vote for Donald Trump. Who knows what the electors would do in those circumstances,” Lessig says.The second scenario involves what Lessig and Seligman call a “rogue governor”: the governor of a state who decides to flip the results of the presidential election. This route poses the greatest long-term threat of US democracy imploding, Lessig believes.Paradoxically, post-January 6 reforms in the Electoral Count Reform and Presidential Transition Improvement Act heightened the danger by increasing the powers of governors to certify slates of electors sent to Congress. Both houses of Congress can vote to overrule a rogue governor, and count the correct slate representing the winner of the popular vote, but only if the House and Senate agree.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionGiven a divided Congress, a rogue governor and rogue House working together could steal the state’s electoral votes, and with it potentially the presidency.The risk of this scenario in this election cycle is minimal, Lessig concedes. Many of the highly sensitive battleground states – Arizona, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin – have Democratic governors.That leaves Georgia, which Biden won by just 11,779 votes. It has a Republican governor, Brian Kemp, but he resisted Trump’s efforts to overturn the result in 2020 and so is arguably less likely to go rogue this year.View image in fullscreenThe third wargaming scenario is the one that really keeps Lessig up at night: what if an entire state legislature decided to go rogue?Again, the idea is not fanciful. Several legislatures in the most hotly contested states have Republican majorities firmly under Trump’s sway – Arizona, Georgia and Wisconsin, to name just three – and conspiracy theories about rampant electoral fraud continue to circulate within them.Lessig worries that the supreme court ruling in Chiafolo, by giving state legislatures the power to tell electors how to cast their electoral votes, heightens the risk of a Maga-dominated legislature going rogue. He envisages state lawmakers claiming massive fraud in a close race and using that to justify switching its result to Trump.“That’s a kind of opened hole that is going to be very hard to close in time,” he says.The Harvard professor has emerged from this journey into the dark arts of election subversion in a bleak mood. The book finishes with a raft of proposed changes to federal and state laws that the authors argue would close the loopholes they uncovered in their travels. Will those changes happen in time to prevent a second Trump blitzkrieg?“I’m not optimistic,” Lessig says. “I’m not optimistic that Congress will be able to do anything in time, so the most we can hope for is that the infrastructure resists as it did last time.”When he was researching the book, Lessig says he had the voice of his 13-year-old daughter ringing in his head: “Just chill,” as she would say. But in the event of an extremely close result, he feels he can’t just chill.He stresses that none of this is partisan. He began life as a Republican and had the distinction in 1980, aged 19, of being the youngest delegate from Pennsylvania to Ronald Reagan’s nominating convention.“Neither of us have anything against the conservative movement in the United States, as expressed in the traditional Republican party,” he says.But he looks at how the party has become “disengaged from the basic premise of democratic politics – if you win, you win, if you lose, you go home”. And he sees that the number of Americans who still believe the 2020 election was stolen, against all evidence, remains steady. That scares him.“Many Trump supporters have the sense that anything is justified, and that’s terrifying,” he says. “Trump is denying every single core democratic norm, and yet his support continues to grow. That too is astonishing and terrifying.”
      How to Steal a Presidential Election is published in the US by Yale University Press More

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      Republican lawmaker who voted against impeaching Mayorkas to retire

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      A Republican congressman who broke with his party colleagues and refused to vote to impeach Democratic homeland security secretary Alejandro Mayorkas is retiring from his elected office, he announced Saturday.The announcement from Wisconsin representative Mike Gallagher that he won’t run for a fifth term means his time spearheading the US House’s pushback against the Chinese government will come to an end in early 2025.Gallagher’s refusal to impeach Mayorkas drew anger from his fellow Republicans, who have been looking to oust Joe Biden’s homeland security secretary as a way to punish the president over his administration’s handling of the US-Mexico border crisis.A House impeachment vote Tuesday fell just one vote short. Gallagher was one of three Republicans who opposed impeachment.His fellow Republicans surrounded him on the House floor in an attempt to change his mind, but he refused to switch his vote.Record numbers of people have been arriving at the southern border as they flee countries around the globe. Many claim asylum and end up in US cities that are ill-prepared to provide for them while they await court proceedings. The issue is a potent line of attack for Donald Trump as he works toward retaking the presidency from Biden in November’s elections.Gallagher wrote in a Wall Street Journal opinion column published after the vote that impeachment wouldn’t stop migrants from crossing the border and would set a precedent that could be used against future Republican administrations. But the impeachment vote’s failure was a major setback for Republicans.Party officials in Wisconsin in recent days mulled whether Gallagher should face a primary challenger.Gallagher did not mention the impeachment vote in a statement announcing his retirement, saying only that he doesn’t want to grow old in Washington.“Electoral politics was never supposed to be a career and, trust me, Congress is no place to grow old,” Gallagher said. “And so, with a heavy heart, I have decided not to run for re-election.”He told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel that the backlash over the impeachment vote did not play a role in his decision.“I feel, honestly, like people get it, and they can accept the fact that they don’t have to agree with you 100%,” he told the newspaper, adding later in the interview: “The news cycle is so short that I just don’t think that stuff lasts.”Gallagher, a former Marine who grew up in Green Bay, has represented north-eastern Wisconsin in Congress since 2017. He spent last year leading a new House committee dedicated to countering China.During the committee’s first hearing, he framed the competition between the US and China as “an existential struggle over what life will look like in the 21st century”.Tensions between the US and China have been high for years. Both sides enacted tariffs on imports during Trump’s presidency. Beijing’s opaque response to Covid-19, aggression toward Taiwan and the discovery of a possible spy balloon floating across the US only intensified lawmakers’ intent to do more to block China’s government.Gallagher was one of the highest-profile Republicans considering a run for the US Senate this year against incumbent Wisconsin Democrat Tammy Baldwin. But he abandoned the idea in June, saying he wanted to focus on China during his fourth term in Congress.
      The Associated Press contributed reporting More

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      Haley hopes to boost election bid with attacks on Trump’s and Biden’s ages

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      Nikki Haley’s Republican presidential nomination campaign in South Carolina is set to parade a mobile billboard drawing attention to rival Donald Trump’s age on Saturday, as ageing and mental acuity issues continue to dominate the United States’ political discourse.The stunt, which was scheduled to pass through Myrtle Beach, comes as Trump begins campaigning in Haley’s home state before the primary there on 24 February. It is scheduled to make stops outside a rally for the former president, according to the Hill, and show both Trump as well as Democratic incumbent Joe Biden appearing to fall into moments of confusion during public remarks.At 52, Haley is about three decades younger than the two leading candidates for November’s election. The video is part of a series her campaign calls Grumpy Old Men.While the 81-year-old Biden has received more attention for public mental blanks that have put Democrats on edge and prompted the president on Thursday to declare “my memory is fine”, Haley’s video highlights Trump’s mental miscues. Those include Trump’s confusing Haley with former House speaker Nancy Pelosi – a Democrat – and mixing up Sioux City, Iowa, with Sioux Falls, South Dakota.Kicking off her presidential campaign a year ago, Haley called for mandatory “mental competency tests” for politicians older than 75 and has since called for a “new generational leader” of her party.Last month, Trump, 77, boasted that he could beat Haley – whom he appointed to serve as his United Nations ambassador – in a cognitive test.“Well, I think I’m a lot sharper than her. I would do this: I would sit down right now and take an aptitude test and it would be my result against her result, and she’s not going to win, not gonna even come close to winning,” he said.On Friday, the former South Carolina governor, who trails Trump by double digits in her state, said both her ex-boss and Biden would use a second turn in the Oval Office as a “taxpayer-subsidized nursing home”.That came as an interview with the former secretary of state Hillary Clinton – recorded before Biden’s fiery remarks about his memory – drew further attention to the age issue.Clinton told MSNBC that while Biden’s age is a “legitimate issue”, she advised him to “lean in” to his years of experience.“I talk to people in the White House all the time, and you know, they know it’s an issue, but as I like to say, look, it’s a legitimate issue,” said Clinton, who lost to Trump in 2016. “It’s a legitimate issue for Trump who’s only three years younger. So, it’s an issue.”The focus on Biden and Trump’s mental acuity has prompted a debate on what makes a natural verbal stumble and what marks a sign of cognitive decline.“When I see somebody make a flub on TV, I’m really not all that concerned,” S Jay Olshansky, a researcher on ageing at the University of Illinois at Chicago, told the Associated Press on Saturday. “What science will tell you about flubs is that they’re perfectly normal, and they are exacerbated by stress.”Some studies suggest that “misnaming” may occur when the brain has names stored by category – including family – or may be phonetic, as when Biden confused France’s president, Emmanuel Macron, with the late French leader François Mitterrand.“To easily recall names, right in the moment, is the hardest thing for us to do accurately,” Eric Lenze of Washington University in St Louis, who focuses on geriatric psychiatry, told the AP.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionA poll by NBC News last month found that 76% of voters had major or moderate concerns when asked whether Biden has “the necessary mental and physical health to be president for a second term”. Posed the same question about Trump, 48% said they had major or moderate concerns.Biden’s personal lawyer, Richard Sauber, addressed the concerns in the classified documents report that triggered the current round of debate about mental competence, arguing: “We do not believe that the report’s treatment of President Biden’s memory is accurate or appropriate.”Sauber accused the special counsel, Robert Hur, of using “highly prejudicial language to describe a commonplace occurrence among witnesses: a lack of recall of years-old events”.Former attorney general Eric Holder, who served during the Obama administration, posted on X that the commentary in the special counsel’s report on Biden’s document retentions contained “way too many gratuitous remarks and is flatly inconsistent with long standing [justice department] traditions”.“Had this report been been [sic] subject to a normal [justice department] review these remarks would undoubtedly have been excised,” Holder added.While Trump may have an edge on Biden in terms of voter confidence in mental acuity, Biden retains a lead in other areas. According to NBC, close to half of voters – 51% – said they had major concerns, and 10% moderate concerns, about Trump’s legal issues.Topping Trump’s list of legal issues are more than 90 pending criminal charges, including for trying to subvert his 2020 electoral defeat.Recent Bloomberg polling found that a majority of voters in seven key swing states would be unwilling to vote for Trump if he is convicted of a crime (53%) or sentenced to prison (55%) in one of the four criminal cases against him. More

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      How to Steal a Presidential Election review: Trump and the peril to come

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      The Trump veepstakes is under way. Senator JD Vance and Representative Elise Stefanik prostrate themselves. Both signal they would do what Mike Pence refused: upend democracy for the sake of their Caesar. The senator is a Yale Law School alum and former US marine. Stefanik is the fourth-ranking House Republican. He was once critical of the former president. She was skeptical. Not anymore.“Do I think there were problems in 2020? Yes, I do,” Vance recently told ABC. “If I had been vice-president, I would have told the states, like Pennsylvania, Georgia and so many others, that we needed to have multiple slates of electors … I think the US Congress should have fought over it from there.”Last month, Stefanik said: “We will see if this is a legal and valid election. What we saw in 2020 was unconstitutional circumventing of the constitution, not going through state legislators when it comes to changing election law.”From the supreme court down, the judiciary has repeatedly rejected that contention.As the November election looms, Lawrence Lessig and Matthew Seligman offer How to Steal a Presidential Election, a granular and disturbing examination of the vulnerabilities and pressure points in the way the US selects its president. Short version: plenty can go wrong.Lessig is a chaired professor at Harvard Law School. He views a second Trump term as calamitous. “He is a pathological liar, with clear authoritarian instincts,” Lessig writes. “His re-election would be worse than any political event in the history of America  –  save the decision of South Carolina to launch the civil war.”Seligman is a fellow at the Constitutional Law Center at Stanford, focused on disputed presidential elections. He too views Trump uncharitably.“Former president Trump and his allies attempted a legal coup in 2020 – a brazen attempt to manipulate the legal system to reverse the results of a free and fair election,” Seligman has said. “Despite all the attention on 6 January 2021 [the attack on Congress], our legal and political systems remain dangerously unprotected against a smarter and more sophisticated attempt in 2024.”The open question is whether forewarned is forearmed. On the page, Lessig and Seligman spell out seven roads to ruin, the “inverting” of an election to force a result that thwarts voters’ expressed intentions. The authors discount the capacity of a vice-president to unilaterally overturn an election result. But they warn of the potential for havoc at state level.As they see it, the danger of pledged but not legally bound electors being coerced to vote for Trump when the electoral college convenes is “significant”. They also hypothesize a state governor “interven[ing] to certify a slate of electors contrary to the apparent popular vote”. Another path to perdition includes making state legislatures the final judges of election results. There is also the “nuclear option”, according to the authors, which is stripping the right to vote from the voters.“A state legislature cancels its election before election day and chooses the state’s electors directly,” as Lessig and Seligman put it, a potential outcome they call a “very significant” possibility under the US constitution.“State legislators are free to deny their people a meaningful role in selecting our president, directly or indirectly,” they write. “Is there any legal argument that might prevent a legislature from formally taking the vote away from its people? We are skeptical.”To say US democracy is at risk is not to indulge in hyperbole. Trump’s infamous January 2021 call to Brad Raffensperger, the Georgia secretary of state, is a vivid reminder. “What I want to do is this. I just want to find, uh, 11,780 votes, which is one more than … we have, because we won the state.” Such words continue to haunt.In an episode that casts a similar pall, Trump and Ronna McDaniel, the Republican National Committee (RNC) chair, urged election officials in Michigan’s Wayne county to block the release of final results.“Do not sign it … we will get you attorneys,” McDaniel told the officials, regarding certification.“We’ll take care of that,” Trump said.Now, as he has for so many former enablers, Trump has taken care of McDaniel. She will shortly be gone from the RNC.Among Trump’s supporters, discontent with democracy is no secret. During the 2016 campaign, Paul LePage, then governor of Maine, thought Trump needed to show some “authoritarian power”. In 2019, Mike Johnson, then a Louisiana congressman, declared: “By the way, the United States is not a democracy. Do you know what a democracy is? Two wolves and a sheep deciding what’s for dinner. You don’t want to be in a democracy. Majority rule: not always a good thing.”Johnson is now House speaker. For good measure, he claims God told him “very clearly” to prepare to become “Moses”.“The Lord said step forward,” Johnson says.On the right, many openly muse about a second civil war.“We’ve already had one, so we know it’s within the realm of possibility,” James Pinkerton, a veteran of the White Houses of Ronald Reagan and George HW Bush, recently wrote in the American Conservative.“In fact, by one reckoning, the English speakers have had two other civil wars in the last four centuries, spaced out every hundred or so years. Is there some sort of deep cycle at work here? With, er, implications for our own troubled times?”The election won’t be pleasant. In late December, 31% of Republicans believed Joe Biden’s win in 2020 was legitimate. That was eight points lower than two years before. Trump’s criminal trials loom. Through that prism, Lessig and Seligman’s work serves as dire warning and public service.
      How to Steal a Presidential Election is published in the US by Yale University Press More

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      Larry Hogan launches Republican Senate bid after saying he lacks ‘burning desire to be a senator’

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      Larry Hogan, the former Republican governor of Maryland who on Friday announced a surprise US Senate run, told an interviewer last year he did not “have a burning desire to be a senator”, would find sitting in the Senate “really frustrating”, thought being a senator was “not where my skill set lies”, and said that though he could win a seat, “the problem was I would win and I would have to go be a senator”.Hogan made the stark remarks, which may now come to haunt him, in an interview last May with Johanna Maska, host of the Press Advance podcast and a former White House aide to Barack Obama.Hogan left office in Maryland in January 2023 after two terms as governor. A popular moderate Republican in a deeply Democratic state, he was long linked to a presidential bid with No Labels, a centrist group considering a challenge to Joe Biden and Donald Trump, the likely GOP nominee.On Friday, however, Politico first reported that Hogan was jumping into the race to succeed Ben Cardin, a long-serving, retiring Democrat, in the US Senate.Releasing a video announcement, Hogan said: “I am running for the United States senate – not to serve one party – but to stand up to both parties, fight for Maryland, and fix our nation’s broken politics. It’s what I did as Maryland’s governor, and it’s exactly how I’ll serve Maryland in the Senate. Let’s get back to work.”He may have work to do to explain his comments to Maska.Asked about previous comments in which he said he wouldn’t run for the Senate, and if he could change his mind, Hogan said: “You know, I’ve said over and over again that number one, I just didn’t have a burning desire to be a senator.“You know, I love being governor. I’ve been running businesses my whole life. I’m more of an executive. I got to make decisions every day that [affected] people’s lives and you have a lot of ability to make a difference.“The Senate, not to say it’s not an important job, but you’re one of 100 and you’re, you know, arguing all day and making speeches in committees but very little ever seems to get done. And so I think just on a personal human level, I think it’d be really frustrating to be sitting in the Senate, I’m not sure it would motivate me, it’s not where my skill set lies, I don’t think.”Hogan’s decision to run for Senate came the same week Republicans in the chamber tanked their own border and immigration reform bill at the command of Trump.Hogan is a rare Republican critic of the former president. In his interview with Maska, he referred to widely reported attempts by the Senate GOP to recruit him as a prized moderate in a party which has seen a succession of extremists defeated in key states.“I get why they’re coming after me,” Hogan said. “We haven’t elected a Republican senator [in Maryland] since 1986 [when Charles Mathias retired] and in the last seat that opened up, two years ago [the Democrat] Chris Van Hollen, a Washington Post poll said I would have beaten him by 12 points.“You know … I left [the governor’s mansion] with the highest approval rating of any politician in state history and so I probably could win the seat. But … the problem was I would win and I would have to go be a senator.”The former governor did not immediately respond to a request for comment. The Maryland Republican party said it could not speak for Hogan. More

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      ‘Gratuitous, inaccurate’: White House disputes special counsel report on Biden

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      Democrats and the White House on Friday launched an aggressive push back against a special counsel report that pushed Joe Biden’s age and memory to the front and center of the presidential election campaign and spurred a series of Republican attacks on the US president.The special counsel Robert Hur’s report on Biden’s handling of confidential documents on Thursday said the US president would not face criminal charges in the case but in a series of remarks characterized Biden as elderly and with a failing memory – triggering a political bombshell on an issue seen as a core weakness of Biden’s re-election campaign.“He gets it. He gets how he’s viewed. He gets what people see and what’s written about him and what the American people also see. But there are other things to know,” the White House spokesperson Karine Jean-Pierre said, pointing to reports that the former Republican House speaker Kevin McCarthy considered the president a sharp negotiator.In an unusually lengthy question and answer session with the White House press corps other Biden administration officials also joined the chorus of voices defending the president, his lengthy legislative record in his first term as president and his handling of a multitude of crises – both domestic and foreign.The White House spokesperson Ian Sams said he fundamentally disagreed with the special counsel’s description’s of Joe Biden’s ability to recall details. “I dispute that the characterizations about his memory in the report are accurate, because they’re not,” he said as he and Jean-Pierre faced a barrage of questions on the issue.Sams also indicated that it was possible transcripts of Biden’s interviews with Hur’s team could be released. The transcripts could shine some light on some of the more jarring comments about the president’s memory Hur made in his report, such as that he could not recall the years he was vice-president, or when his son, Beau Biden, died.Democrats have also been quick to compare Biden’s issues with that of his almost certain rival in the 2024 race – the former US president Donald Trump. Trump also faces political problems due to his handling of confidential documents, but unlike Biden, he is being prosecuted for obstructing the recovery of papers held at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida.Trump also regularly makes gaffes on the campaign trail and faces a raft of other criminal charges in relation to his business dealings, allegedly paying off an adult film star, his role in the January 6 attack on the Capitol and trying to subvert the 2020 election in Georgia.But that did not stop the former US president and his many loyal allies in the Republican party from going on the offensive and seeking to portray Biden as mentally unfit for office.That barrage of attacks was met by a firm response from Democrats.The vice-president, Kamala Harris, condemned Hur’s comments about Biden’s age and memory as “gratuitous, inaccurate and inappropriate”, and noted that the president’s interview was conducted in the “intense” aftermath of the 7 October terrorist attack in Israel.“The way that the president’s demeanor in that report was characterized could not be more wrong on the facts, and clearly politically motivated, gratuitous,” she said.The Pennsylvania Democratic senator John Fetterman said he believes Biden is still up to the job as president, and criticized Hur as having concocted a “smear job”. The senator added: “The president was very clear in that he is absolutely in full control.”The Wisconsin Democratic senator Tammy Baldwin said: “I judge a president on what they’ve done and whose side they’re on,” Baldwin told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. She pointed to Biden’s “strong record of creating good-paying jobs, rebuilding our infrastructure, and lowering prescription drug prices”.Similarly, the Wisconsin Democratic congressman Mark Pocan stated that Biden “got things done for the American people”, while Trump “has used hate to try to divide this nation and in a way unseen before”.Not all Democrats were quite so unified, especially as polling has shown that many Americans – including Democrats – consider Biden’s age a source of deep concern. Paul Begala, a former top aide to Bill Clinton and now a CNN commentator said: “I’m a Biden supporter and I slept like a baby last night – I woke up every two hours crying and wet the bed. This is terrible for Democrats.”In a policy response to the issue the Biden administration plans to appoint a taskforce to review how classified documents are handled during often chaotic transitions between presidential administrations. Aside from Biden and Trump, Trump’s ex-vice president, Mike Pence, was also found to have some confidential documents inadvertently in his possession.“The president’s going to appoint a taskforce to review how transitions look at classified material to ensure that there are better processes in place,” Sams said. More