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      Josh Hawley dodges question during Fox News grilling on election challenge

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      A prominent Republican senator has declined to clearly answer a question about whether he is involved in a bid to reverse the result of the 2020 presidential election that Democrat Joe Biden won convincingly in November.Asked if he was trying to “overturn the election” and keep Donald Trump in power, Missouri senator Josh Hawley told Fox News: “That depends what happens on Wednesday.”That is when Congress will meet to count Joe Biden’s 306-232 electoral college victory, which has been certified by all 50 states. Formal objections due to be raised by Hawley, around a dozen other senators and more than 100 Republicans in the House will not overturn the result – as Trump and his supporters hope they will.Democrats hold the House, guaranteeing defeat there, and Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell and other senior Republicans in that chamber also oppose the objections.Speaking on Monday night, Hawley at first avoided questions about whether he was trying to overturn an election and thereby disenfranchise millions of Americans, insisting he was objecting to the handling of the presidential election in states including Pennsylvania.“I just want to pin you down,” anchor Bret Baier said, eventually, “on on what you’re trying to do. Are you trying to say that as of 20 January [inauguration day] that President Trump will be president?”“Well,” said Hawley, “that depends on what happens on Wednesday. I mean, this is why we have to debate.”Baier answered: “No it doesn’t. The states, by the constitution, they certify the election, they did certify it by the constitution. Congress doesn’t have the right to overturn the certification, at least as most experts read it.”“Well,” Hawley said, “Congress is directed under the 12th amendment to count the electoral votes, there’s a statute that dates back to the 1800s, 19th century, that says there is a right to object, there’s a right to be heard, and there’s also [the] certification right.”Baier countered: “It’s from 1876, senator, and it’s the Tilden-Hayes race, in which there were three states that did not certify their electors. So Congress was left to come up with this system this commission that eventually got to negotiate a grand bargain.”That bargain left a Republican president, Rutherford Hayes, in power in return for an end to Reconstruction after the civil war. In August, the historian Eric Foner told the Guardian: “Part of the deal was the surrender of the rights of African Americans. I’m not sure that’s a precedent we want to reinvigorate, you know?”Baeir continued: “But now all of the states have certified their elections. As of 14 December. So it doesn’t by constitutional ways, open a door to Congress to overturn that, does it?”“My point,” Hawley said, “is this is my only opportunity during this process to raise an objection and to be heard. I don’t have standing to file lawsuits.”Trump’s campaign has filed more than 50 lawsuits challenging electoral results, losing the vast majority and being dismissed by the supreme court.Hawley dodged a subsequent question about whether his own White House ambitions are the real motivation for his objection – as they seem to be for other senators looking to appease the Trumpist base of the party.Also on Monday night, activists from the group ShutDownDC held what they called an “hour-long vigil” at Hawley’s Washington home. Demanding he drop his objection, they said they sang, lit candles and delivered a copy of the US constitution.Hawley, in Missouri at the time, complained that “Antifa scumbags” had “threatened my wife and newborn daughter, who can’t travel. They screamed threats, vandalized, and tried to pound open our door.” More

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      Trump is trying to thwart democracy itself. But the problem is deeper than one man | David Daley

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      Democracy rots slowly. Sometimes its decay is perfectly legal, helped along by legislatures and embraced by the courts. It happens when elected officials deliberately tilt the game to their own advantage.On Sunday, the Washington Post published smoking-gun audio of Donald Trump pressuring Georgia’s secretary of state to “find” enough votes to reverse the election outcome and declare Trump the winner, or face potential legal consequences. Even some Republicans have recognized that the bright line between democracy and authoritarianism had been breached.That line, however, has been melting for quite some time. It did not begin with Trump’s presidency. And it will not end when he leaves the White House. The rot runs deep inside a Republican party that has not only lost faith in democracy but bet its future on rule-rigging and minority rule. The party has subverted free and fair elections for years, in ways so ordinary that they’ve been accepted as politics as usual for far too long.Republican gerrymandering – the manipulation of electoral constituencies in favor of one party – in Pennsylvania, Michigan, North Carolina and Wisconsin has locked in Republican control of state legislatures even when their candidates win hundreds of thousands fewer votes statewide. When Democratic governors won in Wisconsin and North Carolina, Republican-led legislatures stripped power from them in extraordinary lame-duck sessions.Republicans drew themselves similarly friendly maps for Congress and state legislatures in Texas, Ohio and Florida. Then these gerrymandered legislatures – with the blessing of a US supreme court that has gutted the 1965 Voting Rights Act – have tried to make it harder for Democrats and minorities to cast their ballots, by using surgically targeted voter ID bills, shuttering voting precincts, or eliminating days of early voting.Then, when large majorities of citizens, from both parties, come together to make voting fairer for everyone, these legislatures often run right over them.When Floridians, for example, overwhelmingly voted to restore voting rights to former felons in a 2018 constitutional amendment backed by almost two-thirds of voters, it was hailed as the largest expansion of the franchise since the passage of the voting rights act. An estimated 1.4 million citizens who served their time won back their voice in civic affairs.In any functioning representative democracy, that resounding vote should have been the last word. However, this is Florida where, in 2011, Republicans ignored a state constitutional amendment that banned partisan gerrymandering and locked themselves into such advantageous districts that the will of the people hardly matters at all.And so the Florida legislature not only replaced the voters’ judgement with its own, but turned the amendment on its head. If voters sought to end restrictions designed after the civil war to limit black voting power, the legislature substituted another reminder of those days: a poll tax. Republican legislators insisted that formerly incarcerated people pay all fines and fees related to their sentence – often amounting to hundreds of thousands of dollars – before reinfranchisement.This is the time bomb that threatens American democracy. The threat only grows more urgent.As suppressors of the vote well know, poll taxes are extraordinarily effective. Last fall, ProPublica, the Miami Herald and the Tampa Bay Times cross-referenced the voting rolls with a list of those released from prison over the past 23 years, and found just over 31,000 of those 1.4 million former inmates had been able to register to vote. Trump carried this perennial swing state by just 370,000 votes.This is the time bomb that threatens American democracy. The threat only grows more urgent. Republicans’ gerrymandering strategy, known as Redmap, was executed in 2010. The supreme court undid the voting rights act in the Shelby county case in 2013. These efforts came long before Trump descended a Trump Tower escalator and announced his campaign. They may even grow more virulent after Trump leaves, as 2024 presidential hopefuls such as Josh Hawley, the senator from Missouri, decide that doubling down on “fraud” claims is the best path to claiming the Trump vote, and as red state legislatures use those false fraud assertions to justify new voting restrictions.These efforts are already underway. In Pennsylvania, the new legislature hasn’t even been sworn in yet – but lawmakers are already seeking co-sponsors for a restrictive new voter ID bill, as well as a repeal of no-excuse absentee voting that was expanded due to Covid-19.And that’s not the only chicanery. In 2018, the Pennsylvania state supreme court struck down a congressional map so gerrymandered that Republicans consistently won 13 of the state’s 18 US House seats even when they won fewer statewide votes. Now, on the verge of the next redistricting cycle, Republicans’ gerrymandered state legislative majorities are looking to take revenge – by gerrymandering the courts, essentially creating judicial districts that can then be gerrymandered by the already gerrymandered legislature. Minority rule begets more minority rule.Texas, already one of the most restrictive states in the nation for voting, is readying a raft of new measures. In Georgia, Republican senators have indicated their support for an end to drop boxes as well as no-excuse absentee voting. A movement is also underway to require voter ID for mail-in voting. Many Republicans, meanwhile, frustrated that Georgia’s Republican secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, has stood up for the integrity of Biden’s win of the state, have sought to make his position one appointed by the legislature rather than elected by the people.The practice of state legislatures ignoring the will of their own voters is not limited to Florida. Several states worked to make it harder for voters to reform their government via direct democracy. Others brazenly undid the citizens’ efforts and ignored their will. In Missouri, where more than 60% of voters voted for an independent redistricting amendment, Republican lawmakers pushed, and won, a 2020 amendment that masqueraded as campaign finance reform but actually unwound the redistricting effort. Utah’s Republican legislature also worked to undermine an advisory commission that voters enacted in that conservative state in 2018. The conservative political establishments in Arkansas and North Dakota used the courts to knock qualified initiatives off the 2020 ballot that would have opened up the closed primaries that make it easier for them to maintain power.Arizona’s independent redistricting commission remains, but Republicans there stacked the appellate court personnel commission, which vets applications and selects the five finalists for its nonpartisan chair. Their selections include a lobbyist and a gun store owner whose shop hosted a Trump rally and a shooting event for the president last fall.So, yes, Trump will leave the White House in less than three weeks. Democracy teetered but held. Some Republicans played important roles in making that happen, and their bravery should be noted. But Trump did not unleash this anti-democratic fever inside the Republican party. It’s worth noting that two of the other people on that brazen audio obtained by the Post were veteran Republican election lawyer Cleta Mitchell – heard teaching Republican state legislators how to gerrymander and duck legal discovery in leaked audio from a 2019 Alec conference – and Mark Meadows, the Trump chief of staff who first won office – running as a birther who would send Obama “back to Kenya” – from one of those gerrymandered congressional districts in 2012.Trump was created, in part, by the preceding years of gerrymandering and voter suppression that put the most extreme voices in control. They’re not going anywhere. They remain in power. They have not been chastened. There will be a next time. Our democracy may not be so lucky. More

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      in US Politics

      Trump call to Georgia secretary of state electrifies voters in Senate runoffs

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      Some voters not surprised by president’s call but expressed uncertainty over how it would impact the raceAn explosive recording of Donald Trump pressuring Georgia election officials to overturn the election results is further electrifying voters in Georgia’s elections for two US Senate seats, in Tuesday’s runoff that will determine which party controls Congress’ upper chamber.In the call, made public by the Washington Post on Sunday, Trump pressured Georgia’s Republican secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, to “find 11,780 votes”, to overturn Trump’s loss there. When Raffensperger refused, Trump suggested he and his aides may be committing a criminal offense. Continue reading… More

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      in US Politics

      Georgia Senate elections: why are they a big deal and when will we have results?

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      Control of the US Senate – and the fate of the Biden presidency – is on the line in a pair of runoff racesMore than 81 million Americans voted last November to install Joe Biden as president. But the fate of the Biden presidency could come down to a pair of runoff US Senate elections happening in the state of Georgia this Tuesday.Control of the US Senate is on the line. If the Democrats win both races, the president-elect will gain a big opportunity to build a progressive legacy. If Democrats lose one or both races, the country will enter at least a two-year period of divided government, with the Republican Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell, retaining power and likely frustrating Biden’s agenda. Continue reading… More

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      in US Politics

      'Fight like hell': grievance and denialism rule at Trump Georgia rally

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      Unrepentant president urges voters to support Republicans in the Senate runoffs on Tuesday and veers off script with bogus claims of a stolen electionAn unrepentant Donald Trump has urged voters in Georgia to back Republicans in Tuesday’s Senate runoffs and vowed revenge against Republican state officials who refuse to overturn his own defeat.On a chilly night at a remote airport in Dalton, the US president mercilessly aggravated divisions within his own party, embracing loyalists and castigating perceived traitors. While it was ostensibly a campaign rally on behalf of Senate candidates Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue, he could not resist veering off script to push bogus claims of a stolen election. Continue reading… More

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      in US Politics

      Republicans divided: Trump creates new splits as party frets about Georgia

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      Donald Trump has been marking the final days of his presidency by creating new fissures within the Republican party, at a time when the GOP needs to unify if it is to win two races in Georgia, which will decide control of the Senate.To the dismay of some senior Republicans, Trump has continued to make baseless claims of having won the 2020 election – which he lost to Joe Biden – and to stoke conspiracy theories among his enthusiastic supporters.But Trump’s move has won the approval of a significant chunk of his party’s elected officials, leading to the kind of open split which never meaningfully materialized during his four years in office.“This is a time when the party should be unifying around opposition to Biden’s agenda,” said Republican strategist Alex Conant. “Instead, Trump is continuing to divide Republicans in a way that really weakens their political hand. Biden’s the real winner in all of this because his opposition is more divided than ever.”Republicans have wanted Trump to zero in on a message that will boost Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue, running for re-election to their Georgia Senate seats. Instead, Trump’s interactions with Georgia Republicans and voters have focused on his grievances and unfounded claims of fraud.The president ramped that up on Saturday in an hour-long call with Georgia secretary of state Brad Raffensperger, the top elections official in the state and a Republican himself. The president implored Raffensperger to find more votes for him, even though though the election is over and recounts and investigations found Biden won.“So look. All I want to do is this. I just want to find 11,780 votes, which is one more than we have. Because we won the state,” Trump said.The call was recorded by officials in Raffensperger’s office and first reported by the Washington Post.Raffensperger resisted, fueling the president’s frustration and widening the gap between top members of the party who are going to whatever lengths possible to try and keep the president in the White House, and those who think such efforts do more harm than good.As the president has fumed, other Republicans have been fretting about the party’s prospects in Georgia. Turnout is already high and Republican and Democratic operatives in the state expect a razor-thin margin of victory.Biden won the state in November, ending years of Republican dominance in major elections. That victory has fueled hopes among Democrats that they can win both Senate races and thus control the Senate. Pessimism is high among Republicans, who fear party disunity will only help Democrats.Whatever the outcome in Georgia, Trump’s desperate efforts have divided Republicans in Congress.About a dozen senators and a significant number of House Republicans are planning to fight certification of Biden’s victory this week in Congress. That effort is expected to fail. Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Senate majority leader, Liz Cheney of Wyoming, the chair of the House Republican Conference, Senator John Thune of South Dakota and others have argued that that push is doomed and will cause lasting damage.“This is directly at odds with the constitution’s clear text and our core beliefs as Republicans,” Cheney wrote in a 20-page memo laying out her opposition to the anti-certification move.Trump has lashed out at such Republicans speaking out against the effort to save him. He has gone so far as to call for Governor Kristi Noem of South Dakota to run a primary campaign against Thune, the second-highest-ranking Senate Republican, in 2022.Notably, two of the senators leading the charge are prospective 2024 presidential candidates: Ted Cruz of Texas and Josh Hawley of Missouri.Cruz is known for bucking Republican leadership. The advantage for these two senators in fighting the certification is that it could engineer goodwill among the pro-Trump base of the party. That could be highly valuable as they try to move the party on from Trump without appearing to oppose him or the possibility that he might run again himself.“These senators that have joined this Cruz effort are clearly motivated by a mix of 2024 ambitions and 2022 primary concerns, neither of which is going to slow down the Democrats’ agenda for a second,” Conant said.Matt Gorman, another Republican strategist, stressed that Trump and the GOP would be better served by focusing only on winning the Senate races in Georgia.“What is crucial to Georgia is Republican turnout in the ruby red parts of the state,” Gorman said. “Therefore you need President Trump to be invested in this. That’s where he’s going. He needs to convince that base that regardless of how you feel about his election, this election is important and you need to go vote. That is bar none crucial.”Trump was due to address a rally in Dalton, Georgia on Monday night. More

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      in Elections

      Revealed: David Perdue bought bank stocks after meeting financial officials

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      David Perdue, the Georgia Republican facing a Senate runoff election on Tuesday, has twice bought a significant number of shares in a US bank shortly after meeting with financial policy makers, raising more questions about his prolific stock trading while in office.In one case, in May 2015, Perdue bought between $15,000 and $50,000 worth of shares in Regions Financial Corporation two days after a 10-minute phone call with then treasury secretary Jack Lew.Perdue bought additional shares in the bank two years later, on 18 May 2017, two days after a half-hour meeting with then Federal Reserve chair Janet Yellen.It is not clear in either case if Perdue discussed relevant financial regulation or other market-sensitive issues with Lew or Yellen or whether the discussions influenced his decision to buy the stock.At the time of the call with Lew, members of the Senate banking committee, on which Perdue sits, were engaged in close talks over a potential trade deal.But the purchase of more Regions stock in the wake of Perdue’s meeting with Yellen – who will be nominated to serve as treasury secretary by Joe Biden once the president-elect takes office – is possibly significant, because it came about two months before Yellen publicly discussed her support for raising the $50bn asset threshold for systemically important institutions, a change that meant Regions bank could see an easing of important financial regulations.As Yellen’s views on the topic publicly evolved in her role as chair of the Fed, so did Perdue’s buildup of stock in Regions. Perdue separately sought to advance deregulatory legislation that would be favorable for banks like Regions, which Regions and more than a dozen other banks publicly endorsed.Public records show that Perdue sold his full stake in Regions on 11 October 2019 and on 23 October 2019, suggesting that Perdue may have made a 21% return on his earlier investment. He then bought more shares of the stock in November 2019 and January 2020.John Burke, Perdue’s communications director, has said that Perdue does not handle day-to-day decisions about his portfolio, which Perdue claimed is managed by outside financial advisers.It is not uncommon for policy makers like Yellen to have meetings with senators. On the day of her meeting with Perdue in 2017, Yellen also met with Lord Mervyn King, the former governor of the Bank of England, had lunch with Treasury secretary Steve Mnuchin, and then met with another senator, Ohio Democrat Sherrod Brown.Former government insiders say policy makers try to be cautious in such meetings, and try to avoid sharing information that could move markets. At the same time, it can be difficult to avoid the sharing of potentially valuable information if senators and policy makers are discussing any issue in depth, and a senator might be able to gauge an evolving policy position that could be market-sensitive.The new revelations come as Perdue’s frequent stock trading while in office has come under increased scrutiny in the press ahead of his runoff Senate election on Tuesday. If Democrats win two runoff elections, it will transfer control of the Senate from Republicans to Democrats.Previous media reports have focused on how Perdue has faced federal scrutiny for his frequent stock trading while in office, and whether his position as a senator with access to market-sensitive information, especially during the pandemic, may have influenced some trades. The New York Times, citing multiple anonymous sources, said Perdue’s sale of $1m in stock in a financial company called Cardlytics, where he served on the board, drew the attention of investigators at the Department of Justice last spring, who were undertaking “a broad review of the senator’s prolific trading around the outset of the coronavirus pandemic for possible evidence of insider trading”.The investigators ultimately concluded that a personal message that had been sent to Perdue from the company’s chief executive, alluding to “upcoming changes”, was not “nonpublic information”, and declined to pursue charges. Perdue sold his stock two days after he received the personal message from the CEO. About six weeks later, the chief executive resigned and the company revealed that results were below expectations, causing the stock to tumble.The New York Times separately reported that, as a member of the Senate’s cybersecurity committee, Perdue and others sought out the protection of the National Guard against data breaches. The newspaper said that beginning in 2016, Perdue bought and sold shares in a cybersecurity firm called FireEye on 61 occasions. Nearly half of those trades, the New York Times reported, occurred while Perdue sat on the cybersecurity committee, which could have given him access to sensitive information.Perdue’s senate campaign did not respond to the Guardian’s request for comment. He has formerly denied having any conflict of interest.But Perdue’s challenger in this week’s senator runoff, Democrat Jon Ossoff, has repeatedly raised the issue, and accused Perdue of using his office to enrich himself.Perdue’s spokesman has called the criticism “baseless” and he has emphasized being “totally exonerated” by federal investigators. More

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      Trump's Republicans have dumped Lincoln – they're the Confederacy now | Lloyd Green

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      On Wednesday, the Republicans’ transition to the party of the Confederacy will be complete. A day after Georgia’s runoff elections, at least a dozen lawmakers in the Senate and more than half of the party’s House membership will seek to overturn the results of the 2020 election and disenfranchise the majority of US voters. A coup attempt in all but name, this is how democracy dies.Sadly, a statement issued on Saturday by seven sitting senators and four senators-elect dispelled any doubts about the nexus between the end of the US civil war, more than 150 years ago, and Donald Trump’s desperate attempt to cling to power. Predictably, America’s racial divide again stands front and center.After regurgitating for the umpteenth time unproven and unsubstantiated charges of electoral fraud, the senators invoked the election of 1876. Back then, the Democrats contested the outcome, conceding after the Republicans agreed to halt Reconstruction.As framed by Ted Cruz and his posse, “the most direct precedent” for their actions “arose in 1877, following serious allegations of fraud and illegal conduct in the Hayes-Tilden presidential race”. In their telling, “elections in three states” were “alleged to have been conducted illegally”. Left unsaid is that after the end of Reconstruction, Jim Crow and the toxic legacy of “separate but equal” followed.To these Republicans the right to vote is only for some of the people, some of the timeTo quote Mississippi’s William Faulkner, “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” Senators from states that were part of the Confederacy, or territory where slaveholding was legal, provide the ballast for Cruz’s demands. At least one senator each from Alabama, Louisiana, Oklahoma, Tennessee and Texas is on board.Apparently, Trump’s defeat at the hands of Joe Biden, formerly vice-president to the first black man in the White House, and Kamala Harris, a black woman, is too much for too many to bear. Said differently, to these Republicans the right to vote is only for some of the people, some of the time – those people being this president’s supporters.Trump’s equivocation over Charlottesville, his debate shoutout to the Proud Boys and his worship of dead Confederate generals are of the same piece. The vestiges of an older and crueler social order are to be maintained, at all costs.Likewise, the reluctance of Trump appointees to the federal judiciary to affirm the validity of Brown v Board of Education, the supreme court ruling that said school segregation was unconstitutional, is a feature not a bug.As for the Declaration of Independence’s pronouncement that “All men are created equal”, and the constitution’s guaranty of equal protection under law, they are inconveniences to be discarded when confronted by dislocating demographics.“Stand back and stand by,” indeed.Since the civil war, there has always been a southern party, frequently echoing strains of the old, slave-owning south. Practically, that has meant hostility towards civil rights coupled with wariness towards modernity.To be sure, southern did not automatically equal neo-Confederate, but the distinction could easily get lost. And to be sure, the Democrats were initially the party of the south. During debate over the 1964 Civil Rights Act, Republicans gave Lyndon Johnson the votes he needed. Not anymore.Cruz and Josh Hawley, the Missouri senator who kicked off the attempt to deny the electoral college result, are the products of places like Harvard, Stanford and Yale. John C Calhoun, the seventh vice-president, argued in favor of slavery and the right of states to secede. He went to Yale too. Joseph Goebbels had a doctorate from Heidelberg. An elite degree does not confer wisdom automatically.For the record, Cruz also clerked for a supreme court chief justice, William Rehnquist. Hawley did so for John Roberts.On Sunday, as the new Congress was being sworn in, a recording emerged of Trump unsuccessfully browbeating Georgia’s secretary of state into finding “11,780 votes, which is one more than we have”. From the sound of things, Trump’s fear of prosecutors and creditors, waiting for him to leave the White House, takes precedence over electoral integrity.Back in May, after Deborah Birx, the White House coronavirus response coordinator, predicted 240,000 deaths from Covid, and as armed protests to public health measures grew, an administration insider conveyed that Trump’s America was becoming a “bit” like the “late” Weimar Republic. Eight months later, the death toll is past 350,000 and climbing unabated.Come nightfall on 6 January, the party of Abraham Lincoln will be no more. Instead, the specters of Jim Crow and autocracy will flicker. Messrs Trump, Cruz and Hawley can take a collective bow. More