One last fact and a call for noise

Pat Ryan Leave a comment

The sands of time slip away.  The days dwindle down to a precious few.  Whatever your favorite allusion to the inexorable march of time (that’s a good one, too), realize this good news: after tomorrow, our TVs will finally be freed from the scourge of political advertising insulting our intelligence with lie upon lie for another year.  Or so.  The other good news is this: tomorrow is the day things can start to change, if we choose to take action to make it happen.  Tens of millions of American have already done so, and I’m looking forward to joining them tomorrow.

The latest polls, fallible though they are, carry strong hope that the wave of anti-Trump sentiment is still strong on the day before election day.  Democrats across the country are expected to do well tomorrow, even in places (like my state of Texas) where they haven’t done well since even before we knew there was a thing called MAGA America.

If we’ve learned nothing else in the last ten years, we know that Donald Trump is a man who is used to getting his way and generally doesn’t let facts or history or even good sense get in the way of whatever it takes to scratch that itch.  That includes going to court with the flimsiest of arguments demanding that “his judges” find a way around the plain meaning or intent of the law to clear a path for his self-aggrandizing plans.  But remember, he’s losing in the courts (with only a few exceptions) and that losing streak is going strong.  Our country’s judges – even many judges that Trump himself nominated to the bench – are doing their jobs and shooting down the shoddy motions from the government lawyers.  For example, yesterday a federal judge threw out the Administration’s effort to block certification of the vote for U.S. senator in Alaska – but only if the incumbent Republican were to lose!  It’s gotten so ridiculous that last week a federal judge ordered a “formal inquiry into potential misconduct by Trump Administration officials in the lawsuit over East Potomac Park” after Department of Justice lawyers urged the judge to ignore the president’s own statements about plans for the golf course there, statements that directly contradicted those that the DOJ lawyers made in court.  (Yes, your honor, please ignore that man behind the curtain; who you gonna believe, me or the president of the United States?)

There seems to be a reasonable chance that tomorrow’s election could swing control of both houses of Congress to the Democrats.  If so, we can expect that next year we will see the end of the “yessir, anything you want” Congress that Republicans have given us the past two years, a barely-there branch of government that has utterly and deplorably given up its Constitutional responsibility of checks and balances.  With a Democrat-controlled House and/or Senate, it’s likely that the worst intentions of TFG will finally run into some Congressional resistance to back up that already coming from the Judicial Branch.  I like the sound of that.

Speaking of sound, I saw a great thing on television last week.  It was a very brief message in the credits of a broadcast network comedy show where the executive producer likes to sound off; it struck me as a smart call to arms before this critical election, so I took a picture of the screen.

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Fact is, this tortured abuse of the legal process is likely only the beginning

Pat Ryan Leave a comment

OK then, I guess up is down, right is left, the sun sets in the north and I was People Magazine’s Sexiest Man of the Year in 1984 (a test of concept, before rolling out Mel Gibson the next year).  That we now live in Bizarro World is the only reasonable explanation for how Donald Trump’s Justice Department today could – with a straight face – ask a federal court “to block certification of the Senate election in Alaska if the Republican incumbent loses.” [emphasis added]

The Justice Department, in a court filing, argued that confusion over another candidate on the ballot with a name very similar to the incumbent, Senator Dan S. Sullivan, could taint the election result. Mr. Sullivan is in what polls suggest is a close race against Mary Peltola, a Democrat, but the ballot also features Daniel J. Sullivan Jr.

A number of tight races across the country, including Alaska, could tip the balance of power in the Senate. The legal gambit also comes shortly after the administration sued the state of California over what it claims are 20,000 “likely noncitizens” on the state’s voter roll.

David Becker of the Center for Election Innovation and Research, a nonpartisan group that advises election officials, said he could not recall a similar instance in which the federal government sought to block certification of an election, “and certainly not 11 days before an election.” The issue of another candidate with a similar name has already been addressed by state officials, he said.

“D.O.J. making this claim this late smells of political interference and is against D.O.J. policy,” Mr. Becker said. “The feds have absolutely no authority to tell Alaska when and how to certify. The state officials are following Alaska state law, as the Constitution requires.” He said he expected the courts to reject the administration’s lawsuit.

Did DOJ argue that confusion might also work the other way, that voters who would have otherwise elected the other Dan Sullivan might be confused into voting for the incumbent senator?  That that might be another reason to stall certification until the confusion could be sorted out?  No, no it did not.  The new politically-supercharged Department of Justice (We Punish Trump’s Enemies; Just You Try Us!) has bravely stepped up to try to protect a poor, defenseless Republican senator from suffering at the hands of the stupid voters of his own state.  And it did so because, apparently, Trump himself told them to do it.  This would be the most pathetic example of the tortured relationship with the concept of truth by people living in Trumpworld that I found in the news today were it not for the sad claim that Melania Trump brokered a ceasefire in Ukraine.  Yes, that  Melania Trump.

Remember, Donald Trump has the emotional maturity of a two year old and cannot admit to losing, or even to making a mistake.  That he is trying to corrupt the conduct of this election in the hope he can steal enough races to maintain his control of the Congress is a given.  That he is doing so while simultaneously sowing the seeds for the excuses he’ll rely on later to blame others for the loss…well, that dexterity may be his only remarkable talent.

The facts: Trump’s not-so-secret plan “for the most corrupt political party ever” in America to capture the next Congress

Pat Ryan Leave a comment

Welcome back to the blogosphere’s recently-dedicated home of facts about our president.  In today’s installment we focus on the fact that any time he is confronted with true facts that do not suit him, TFG acts like a four year old who’s been told he can’t have any more ice cream.  Plus, we look at the associated counterfactual statements (the lies) he produces in these instances to salve his ego and (he thinks) to convince us all that he really is our favorite president ever.  That will include, currently most crucially, his lies about the integrity of next month’s elections.

There are very many sources that are independent of this Administration where you and I can check for verification of the truth or falsity of things Donald Trump says.  CNN has a dedicated area, as does the Washington Post, and there are websites that do nothing but fact-check politicians (not just Trump), and I have links to some of them in the far left column of this page under Reference.   (I wish there were a Meghan Trainor song-inspired https://iknowyoulieyourlipsaremovin.com/.)  You can check stupid things, like him ham-handedly altering a National Hurricane Center map to add Alabama to the predicted track of a hurricane, or repeatedly insisting in the face of compelling visual evidence to the contrary that the crowd at his first inauguration was the largest ever.  In these cases he’s much like the brat who stomps his feet and cover his ears screaming “I can’t hear you” when told it’s time to come inside for dinner.

TFG has proven over and over that unlike most mature human beings, he insists that all “truth” not only does not put him in a negative  light, it must be nothing less than the most complimentary light.  Ever since he left military school he has existed in a world where his family’s wealth has allowed him to do pretty much whatever he wants and to ignore any negative consequences.  For example, The University of Pennsylvania couldn’t be forced to give him the good grades he’d need to graduate first in his class, but it couldn’t stop him from lying about it afterward.  If ever there is offered any “truth” which claims Trump is anything less than the sterling and respected character he pretended to be on a television show, then that “truth” is a vicious lie being spread by his enemies.  (Who all “hate Trump,” apparently.)  No matter what he’s talking about, he always sounds like a real estate huckster incessantly selling the biggest and best deal, making you an offer you’d be a fool to refuse.  If he had stayed in that private business world his lies wouldn’t matter to the rest of us, so long as we had the good sense not to do business with him.

But he didn’t.  Now, his lies are about things that really matter.  Every single, solitary accusation of “fake news” directed at a reporter or newspaper or network that doesn’t praise the president for every single, solitary move he makes, facts notwithstanding, does two things. It proves that he does not know how journalism is supposed to work: reporters are not there to promote the president (any president), they are there to report what really happened, as truthfully and as fairly as they can, for the benefit of the American citizens for whom every president works.  No president likes negative coverage and some publicly object to the emphasis reporters put on “bad news” stories, but no other president has so blatantly, transparently and falsely accused the journalists of just making shit up to hurt him.  And, his use of repeated false claims are a political propaganda technique to make people believe outrageous things that are not true.  It was called “the big lie” by that noted political philosopher Adolf Hitler, who wrote that the general population could be manipulated with the use of this tool since they wouldn’t believe that anyone “could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously.”  Well folks, someone does.

The most dangerous example of Trump’s use of the big lie is his refusal to accept that he lost the 2020 election, to continue to deny it to this very day despite the complete lack of evidence of any fraud significant enough to have changed the outcome, and his continued insistence that all American elections are “rigged.”  Always against him, apparently, even in the two cases where he won.

That claim, which is false – unsupported by any facts – has a very specific goal in mind:

  • to give Americans a reason to believe him when he claims the expected Republican losses in this year’s midterm election are the result of voter fraud,
  • and to get them to agree with his efforts to overturn the results of that election
  • so Republicans maintain control of the House and the Senate
  • where the party will continue to roll over and play dead for Trump’s destructive agenda.

Republicans will smugly respond (as they often do) that it’s not hard to find liberal or even moderate commentators who will shill for this anti-MAGA conspiracy.  They have a harder time arguing the facts when they’re offered by a real Republican, a certified conservative – not a Trump butt boy but a true conservative, like former federal appeals court judge J. Michael Luttig.  He argues in The New Republic that the Trumpist assault on the November midterms is an important next step in their effort to overturn American democracy: fight the results of the expected Democratic victories in House and Senate races, which lays the groundwork for Congress to refuse to seat the Democratic winners  next January and seize control of the government.  Read it yourself and see if you think he’s overstating the case.

…Donald Trump and his Republican congressional allies are even more determined to prosecute the president’s war against American democracy to its catastrophic end than they were on January 6, 2021.

That catastrophic end could well come on January 3, 2027, when Trump and his Republican congressional allies wage the final battle in Trump’s determined war to corrupt America’s democracy and deliver a lasting political victory over the Democrats for his MAGA Republican Party.

Trump and his Republican allies have been preparing for this final battle since January 6, 2021. For the past six years, they have embarrassed themselves and the U.S. with their preposterous, win-at-any-cost denial that Trump lost the 2020 presidential election and their deceitful slander of America’s democracy. Since his return to the White House, Trump’s every unconstitutional act in his effort to seize control over the midterm elections—each hailed by his prostrate Republican Congress—has been toward the end of ensuring that Republicans retain a majority in the 120th Congress.

(snip)

So unalterably subjugated to Trump is today’s Republican House that even a decisive victory for Democrats and a resounding repudiation of Trump and the MAGA Republicans at the polls in November will not guarantee that a Democratic majority-elect will be seated in the 120th Congress on January 3 [emphasis added].

All year long, Trump has been dragooning House Speaker Mike Johnson and the congressional Republicans into prejudging as fraudulent the upcoming November elections of the presumed Democratic majority, as he himself has already prejudged those elections. His dragooning appears to have worked. House Republicans are now poised to claim that the midterm elections were stolen from them when they meet on January 3 to decide which members-elect will be seated in the 120th Congress.

Over the past year and a half since his return to the White House, Trump has exploited every conceivable unlawful means possible to rig the midterm elections in favor of the Republicans, and the federal courts have struck down as unconstitutional every one of these unlawful attempts. He will try every unlawful means over the remaining weeks to ensure that Republicans handily win the midterm elections in November. Those of us who oppose his illegality will look to the courts, but the federal courts will be institutionally incapable of checking his final unlawful rampage.

Trump punctuated his expressed intent to interfere in the midterm elections eight weeks ago in a national prime-time address on “election integrity,” accusing the Democrats and the Chinese in particular of threatening the free and fair elections in November. In that address, he claimed without evidence or support (as usual) that the 2026 midterm elections were being threatened by noncitizen voting, weaknesses in voter registration systems, foreign interference, and vulnerabilities in electronic voting systems.

(snip)

Everyone knows that the greatest threat to the upcoming midterm elections is not the Democrats or the Chinese, noncitizen voting, or electronic voting machines, but the president of the United States and his servile Republican Congress.

(snip)

There was a time not long ago when virtually every member of Congress could be expected to commit to the peaceful transfer of congressional power in advance of an election, just as every president could be expected to commit to the peaceful transfer of presidential power. But those times came to an abrupt end upon Donald Trump’s arrival in January 2017. In a damning indictment of the president and today’s congressional Republicans, it would be hard to find even one congressional Republican with the integrity, sense of duty to country, honor, and courage to put America above the Republican Party, let alone above Donald Trump.

Yet America’s only hope for saving its democracy and avoiding another crippling constitutional crisis on January 3 is for the House Republicans to decide that they are not going to betray their oaths and their country one last time for Donald Trump, and telegraph to Trump and Mike Johnson that any unconstitutional plan they might be contriving to deny Democratic members-elect their rightful seats in the 120th Congress would be dead on arrival January 3.

If there are any such Republicans in the Congress today, they should announce well before November 3 that they will not be party to Trump’s and Johnson’s attempt to steal the midterm elections from the American people.

In fact, Luttig encourages all House members, both parties, to campaign on that point: make sure to loudly highlight any candidate who refuses “to affirm that they will not be complicit in any attempt to steal the midterm elections.”  It will be effective, assuming the issue becomes important to voters to care about and if we can trust the candidates who promise not to steal the election.

He also he lays out – in enough frightening detail to make you realize that some people have actually given this “plan” a lot of thought – the steps the Republicans may take to refuse to allow some or all of the Democrats who win in November to take their seats in the new House in January.  It begins with Speaker Mike Johnson unilaterally, and quite legally, removing current House Clerk Kevin McCumber, “a Republican appointed by former Speaker Kevin McCarthy. He is widely respected for his integrity and faithful adherence to the Constitution and is reputed to be unwilling to carry out orders he considers to be unconstitutional.”  Then Johnson appoints someone more loyal to TFG, who “refuses to list Democrat representatives-elect on the clerk’s roll of representatives-elect that determines who may participate in organizing the new Congress.”  When those who are excluded from that roll object, this whole circus expands into the courts.  And that will take time.  Time during which the country would be in a full-blown constitutional crisis with Congress unable to do any business, including responding to international threats.

It is not difficult to imagine the many possibilities, some of the most critical being entirely realistic. It would be the ideal moment for China to move against Taiwan, by way of military blockade, attack, or even invasion. It would be the perfect moment for Vladimir Putin to complete his conquest of Ukraine, and perhaps even to move militarily against Estonia. Every passing day could bring a deepening economic crisis, worsened by our angry allies around the world who would welcome the opportunity to requite Donald Trump for his belittling mockery of their countries and presidents. Without the Congress, the United States would be powerless to respond to any of these crises.

But we can always count on the Supreme Court to be the voice of reason, to restore a little sanity to the whole process…right?

I don’t intend to be overly sanguine about this Supreme Court. This is the court that shattered the one constitutional truth in the U.S. since 1789 that “no man is above the law” and placed Donald Trump of all presidents above the law in Trump v. United States. This is the court that betrayed the Constitution by refusing even to decide whether Trump was disqualified from the presidency under the Fourteenth Amendment because of his insurrection against the Constitution, which he clearly was. This is also the court that has cynically authorized Trump’s lawlessness for the past two years through its aptly named “shadow docket,” without so much as briefing, argument, or written opinion.

But surely by now this court must understand what it has wrought for the U.S. and the Constitution, and is aghast as we all are, even if it is not penitent. Surely, surely, it will understand the signal moment in American constitutional history that would be presented, and this time understand its supreme obligation to the nation.

Surely indeed.

I hope relying on the Supremes to save America’s bacon is not our only chance to kick Trump in the teeth and defeat his election-stealing plans.  (Note to the people who indicted James Comey in North Carolina: this is not a threat of actual unlawful violence against the person of the president, it is the use of a common metaphor indicating I would like to beat him in this contest.  Er, change that “beat” to “triumph over.”)  I like to think that enough people across this country have sufficient distaste for this Administration and its extralegal antics to turn out in numbers large enough to flip enough House and Senate seats into a Democratic majority that would resuscitate the Congressional checks-and-balances impulse that has gone dormant during Trump II.  And I trust that those same people – and maybe a good portion of the inhabitants of MAGA world, too – won’t stand for a blatant attempt to commit such a fraud.  Luttig hopes the same:

Between now and November 3, congressional Republicans would do well to ponder one last time the fate of their Republican Party were the Supreme Court of the United States to reverse a fraudulent determination by the 120th Republican Congress not to seat Democratic members-elect who would give the Democrats majority control of the House.

Two hundred and fifty years into the greatest experiment in self-government in the history of the world, the Republican Party would finally meet the fate to which it has been destined since January 6, 2021, and cement its place in history as the most corrupt political party ever to emerge in the United States of America for its second attempt in six years to defy the will of the American people on Election Day.

If we Americans are to save our democracy from the forty-seventh president and his MAGA Republican Party, we must disenthrall ourselves from our political bondage to Donald Trump and MAGA, as Abraham Lincoln urged the nation in 1863 to disenthrall itself from its bondage to the ruinous political dogmas of its time. “We must disenthrall ourselves, and then we shall save our country,” the sixteenth president admonished. The Republican Party in particular must finally loose the chains of its political and moral enslavement to Donald Trump and separate itself from the MAGA political party cult.

The writing is already on the wall, Republicans.

Just the facts, ma’am – election rigging edition

Pat Ryan Leave a comment

For a guy who promised to keep “piling up the facts” about our president to illuminate the truth about his ongoing assault on our country and our way of life, it may seem out of character to offer a prediction.  But this prediction is grounded in facts and a clear-eyed review of past actions, which all point to one incontrovertible fact: Donald Trump is trying to rig the November elections to keep MAGA world in charge in Washington.  He’s been doing it right out in the open, in front of our eyes, stacking lie upon lie about a false “crisis of election security” so he can undo enough MAGA losses in November to maintain Republican control of the House and Senate for the last two years of his term of office.  So he can get away with God knows what.

We all witnessed him try to unlawfully snatch victory from the jaws of his defeat in 2020 and fail, thanks to the dozens of lawyers and judges who argued against and struck down his nonsensical pleadings in court cases across the country, and to the members of Congress and Vice President Pence who refused his treasonous efforts on January 6, 2021.  But his basic approach – to election stealing, to everything – is to never admit defeat (even when defeat is obvious) and always fight back with greater force.  Getting his ducks lined up before this November’s election is critical: he knows that if Democrats take control of either house of Congress he won’t be able to get the Compliant Congress® to pass anything to smooth the MAGA path for 2028.

The “facts” he is abusing to make his argument concern voting by mail and voting by non-citizens.  Voting by mail is a simple, reasonable, pretty uncontroversial method of voting, which Trump himself has reportedly taken advantage of for years (apparently without any fraud, eh?).  Yet Trump has been lying about problems with voting by mail for years, despite research by conservative and GOP organizations finding no significant issues: as reported recently by the New York Times,

An election fraud database maintained by the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, includes just under 300 cases of proven “fraudulent use of absentee ballots” over a 43-year period, from 1982 to 2025. And in 2025, the Brookings Institution found that fraud accounted for only four out of 10 million mailed ballots.

Only 300 cases of fraud in 43 years !?  Only four cases (one two three FOUR) out of 10,000,000 ballots!?!   (BTW,  Brookings headline is that there was “very low fraud and significant benefits to voters” [emphasis added])  Hardly an issue of fraud, or of election results being compromised.  Might Trump have something else in mind?

Mr. Trump has admitted that combating fraud is not the only reason to target the practice. In March, he told Republican lawmakers that passing a strict voter identification law cracking down on mail ballots, which Democrats now use more than Republicans, would “guarantee the midterms” for his party.

I.  Am.  Shocked.  So shocked.

I’m all for keeping non-citizens from voting in our elections.  As it so happens, it is already illegal for non-citizens of the U.S. to vote in U.S. federal elections.  Also illegal for non-citizens to vote in state elections in all 50 states; municipalities in three states and the District of Columbia do allow them to vote in some municipal elections.  The documented instances of non-citizens becoming registered to vote is exceedingly small; the number of those illegally registered to vote who then actually voted  is even smaller than that.  In summary, there is no evidence that non-citizens have ever voted in large enough numbers to have changed the outcome of any election, despite the hair-on-fire claims of TFG.

There has been a lot of activity in the past week over voting by mail, starting with a Supreme Court ruling that “allowed the Trump administration to move forward with plans to restrict mail-in voting before the midterm elections.”

…the justices said President Trump could proceed with implementing an executive order he had signed, which directed the U.S. Postal Service to help decide which voters should receive mail-in ballots. Under the executive order, the Department of Homeland Security will also create lists of U.S. citizens that the administration believes could be used to monitor voter rolls for noncitizens.

The decision means the administration can move ahead with planning for restricting the use of mail ballots even as a lower court continues to weigh the legality of Mr. Trump’s executive order.

It’s important to remember that the Constitution gives the states — the states — the authority conduct elections for Congress (both houses), subject to Congressional approval or revision of those plans by virtue of laws passed by the Congress.  Laws passed by Congress, not executive orders from the president –- Constitutionally speaking, the president has ZERO authority over conducting elections, including through the use of executive orders.  (It is believed that the Supreme Court justices are aware of this.)  Yes, Congress has passed laws concerning federal elections: for example, to establish a uniform election date across the country, to require states with more than one representative in the House to draw districts rather than elect all representatives statewide, and to limit campaign contributions.

But this Congress has refused to pass the SAVE Act that the president wants enacted to “ensure election integrity and prevent non-citizens from voting.”  If passed into law, this proposal would “add a new layer of documentation requirements on top of a verification system that is already in place and working.”  In practice,

Every American, including people who have been registered for decades, would need to appear in person at an election office with qualifying documents. Online voter registration, which 42 states currently rely on, would be upended or eliminated. Mail registration would end entirely. Voter registration drives would become functionally ineffective, since they depend on reaching people at events and public spaces where no one carries a passport or birth certificate.

A standard driver’s license alone does not qualify in most states. A REAL ID alone does not qualify. A military ID alone does not qualify. A tribal ID alone does not qualify. Only five states currently issue enhanced driver’s licenses that meet the bill’s requirements on their own.

(snip)

For most Americans, qualifying requires one of the following: a valid U.S. passport or passport card, a certified birth certificate paired with a photo ID, a naturalization certificate, or a Consular Report of Birth Abroad. If your name does not match across those documents, additional paperwork such as a marriage certificate would also be required.

(snip)

The requirement applies any time a voter updates their registration, including after moving, changing their name, or switching political parties. Millions of already-registered Americans would need to comply, not just people registering for the first time.

Meanwhile, back in court last week: opponents of Trump’s plan refiled their objections in light of the Supreme Court ruling, leading to a federal judge halting Administration efforts to restrict voting by mail, and to the Justice Department appealing that ruling.  And since the election is only two months away and the first mail-in ballots are about to be sent out, “The whipsawing legal battle could have major ramifications for the midterms. Nearly one-third of Americans vote by mail and election officials contend there isn’t enough time to revise their systems to comply with the new Postal Service directives.”  The Postal Service, officially, insists it has to obey the executive order, and “won’t deliver mail ballots unless states provide a list of voters who should receive them and format the envelopes in a certain way.”

But, a Postal Service official has filed a federal whistle-blower report that claims “the agency is moving forward with a ‘secretive, rushed’ effort to carry out President Trump’s order exerting federal control over mail voting, despite a court order blocking those plans.”

The official filed a whistle-blower report, published on Tuesday morning by the office of Senator Richard Blumenthal, Democrat of Connecticut, asserting that the “risky and haphazard” implementation of Mr. Trump’s order could lead to a “catastrophic failure” in the mail ballot system ahead of this year’s midterm elections.

(snip)

The official at the Postal Service, describing their work on the portal in the whistle-blower report, raised “grave concerns” that the portal’s verification process could reject tens of thousands of ballots in a bulk-mailing batch if “even one bar code on one single ballot” failed to properly scan, and that the rushed, “slapdash” development of the portal would significantly increase the chance of errors and other failures in the verification process.

“Potentially millions of American voters may not receive their mail-in ballot this election cycle in a timely manner, or at all,” the official said in the report, which was prepared with the assistance of Whistleblower Aid, a nonprofit group that represents people seeking to expose potential lawbreaking.

(snip)

The Postal Service confirmed in a statement that it had continued work on the portal amid the legal battle, but asserted that it was in compliance with the courts because it was not currently using parts of the new system that could invalidate people’s votes.

Meanwhile, the New York Times reports today that hundreds of Department of Homeland Security agents have been pulled off of their regular duties of “investigating such serious crimes as human trafficking and terrorism” to scour state voter rolls using the personally identifiable information of individual voters looking for non-citizens who are registered to vote.

Given the decades of evidence showing how rare noncitizen voting is, it’s unclear what the administration will discover, how verifiable any findings will be and what President Trump or Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin plans to do with those findings.

(snip)

Mr. Trump’s unrelenting focus on noncitizen voting has concerned election officials from both parties. So far, the administration has been unable to verify his claims, and has effectively admitted at times that its numbers have been overstated. Yet the public repetition of falsehoods about election fraud has continued to sow doubt and distrust in the electoral process ahead of a charged midterm election that will determine control of Congress [emphasis added].

All of it has left voting-rights groups and Democrats increasingly concerned that the president will try to interfere with the election. And it has alarmed former officials with the Department of Homeland Security that the agency is being weaponized as part of the effort.

Jamelle Bouie summarizes that “the president’s plot to subvert the integrity of the midterm elections looks like this.”

Issue a rule requiring states to give lists of mail-in voters to the Postal Service if their citizens hope to receive mail-in ballots. Knowing that this is a blatantly unconstitutional seizure of the states’ prerogative to run their own elections, count on a federal court to block the rule. Then challenge the injunction, arguing — under the Supreme Court’s “Purcell principle” — that it is too late to make any adjustments to voting procedures, and that the new rules should be treated as the status quo. Then hope that the Supreme Court accepts the argument that the new rules are the status quo and therefore can’t be blocked.

This would leave states that rely on mail-in voting scrambling to accommodate the new rules, leading to the kind of chaos that might keep voters from casting a ballot in the first place. And in states that reject the rules, the administration can tar the results as fraudulent. None of this would stop the public from electing a Democratic majority, but it could give that majority the taint of illegitimacy — and even tee up a situation where new members are challenged in the next session.

It is important to say that there is no way to know, at this point, if any of this will actually work in the end. But it clearly is the plan.

Is it a plan to rig the election?  To rig the counting of the votes in this election?  If it looks like a duck and walks like a duck and sounds like a duck, do you have any doubt it’s a duck?

No facts are a match for the denier in chief

Pat Ryan Leave a comment

On this day in history it is noted that the first enslaved Africans arrived in Virginia and were purchased by English colonists (1619), to begin legal slavery in North America; Lewis and Clark’s Corps of Discovery suffered the only death of one of its members (1804) from what is now believed to be peritonitis after a burst appendix; Leon Trotsky was assassinated (1920), the Soviets invaded Czechoslovakia (1968), President Ford picked Nelson Rockefeller as his vice president (1974) and the Menendez brothers murdered their parents (1989).  I am daydreaming that if someone casually mentioned this list of carnage to President Trump today, his likely response would be to quickly declare that none of it was his fault.  Nothing ever is, you see.

Concerns about a weak economy and still-high inflation? His predecessor, Joe Biden, saddled him with that, he says, even though the Democrat has been out of office for 18-plus months and despite Trump once promising an immediate turnaround.

The problem-plagued revamp of the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool? That was marred by vandalism, the Republican president insists, even though the office of a prosecutor he put in the job has said the damage was due to shoddy workmanship.

The increasingly unpopular war in Iran that has kept oil prices high, Trump’s approval rating low and sent shock waves through the global economy? Actually, this was Trump making up for timid earlier presidents who, he argues, squandered nearly 50 years of opportunities to curb Tehran’s nuclear ambitions.

Pithy slogans aside, all modern presidents shift responsibility onto others to some degree, frequently blaming the commander-in-chief who preceded them, Congress — or both. But Trump has taken it to a new level, effectively embracing a de facto political strategy of being in charge of everything but responsible for nothing when things go badly.

(snip)

Accepting the 2016 presidential nomination, Trump said, “Nobody knows the system better than me, which is why I alone can fix it.” But as president, he has often suggested that the solution and blame rest elsewhere.

For all of his praise of his own father – whose emotionally cold parenting bears much of the blame for Trump being the way Trump is – TFG’s personality was molded critically by legendary lawyer Roy Cohn.  You know: prosecuting the Rosenbergs, assisting Joe McCarthy, defending the Trumps from charges of racial discrimination in their housing developments…that Roy Cohn.  It was Cohn who taught Donald Trump that the way to respond in any dispute is never apologize, always fight back with greater force, and never admit you were wrong.  Especially if you were wrong.  Explains a lot.

In the interest of providing more facts about “your favorite president,” I wonder if you can pick your favorite Trump Truth (a truth that is not): the lie about the stolen 2020 election has to be the biggest, but there’s also the “longest” lie, the one about issues with election security that he has been reinforcing (with more lies) for years and years to set the stage for the real election interference to come.

That [federal] interference [in state elections] could take many forms: demands for access to voter rolls, pressuring state officials, attempts to station federal monitors at voting locations or even efforts to seize ballot boxes, voting equipment or election records.

States need to stiffen their spines now. It doesn’t require much imagination to see that Trump may be setting the stage to keep his options open to subvert state elections.

Governors, attorneys general and secretaries of state should review their legal authority, secure voter data, clarify chains of custody, establish procedures for resisting unlawful federal demands and prepare emergency litigation in advance. They should not wait until federal agents arrive, ballots are threatened or the president manufactures a crisis.

Republican officials especially must understand that federalism is not a slogan to be used only against Democratic presidents. If a Democratic administration attempted to seize ballots in Texas, Republicans would be outraged. It doesn’t become just constitutional because Trump orders it in Pennsylvania.

The Constitution gives states control over their own elections. Executive branch interference in state elections is a violation of separation of powers. If Washington attempts to influence or take control of state elections, the states should resist, for the sake of the Republic.

Not counting all the documented untruths of his pre-presidential business career, CNN and the Washington Post recorded more than 30,000 lies during his first term – nearly two dozen every single day!  That is, I think, partly due to the need to battle back with new lies to appear to bolster the veracity of the original lie, and his inherent nature as a salesman to need to promote every single thing as the best, the greatest, the tallest, the richest, the most beautiful.  “Like no one’s every seen before!”  Even when it is not any of those.  Maybe especially when it is not any of those.

Yesterday we marked 19 months of the second Trump Administration…just 29 more to go!