Voting on My Mind - 2, and Varied Short Subjects

 #Voting Fraud - Attorney General William Barr told the Associated Press that: "To date, we have not seen fraud on a scale that could have affected a different outcome in the election." Barr had broken with the tradition of the Department of Justice to hold off on pursuing such cases until after the election results are certified to avoid the perception that it is  trying to put a thumb on the scales. State and local prosecutors are capable of investigating and charging crime.

My Comment: Because of Barr's history as an aggressive defender of President Trump, and his echoing of Trump's baseless attacks on mail-in ballots, many were disturbed by Barr's divergence from typical practice, and the insertion of Barr into farfetched conspiracy theories about the election, positing the mail-in voting was vulnerable to mass manipulation by foreign actors. Trump repeatedly spread and elevated a wide range of absurd and outlandish claims alleging that he actually won in a landslide.

#Kali Holloway, "The Failed Coup," The Nation, December 14-21, 2020. - "Instead, his [Trump's] failed coup will have led, undoubtedly, to a scorched-earth, lame-duck session. Never interested in governing anyway, Trump will run down the clock between golf games, giving pardons to his allies, stoking red-meat conspiracy  theories for his losses, and issuing unconstitutional executive orders from the desk of Stephen Miller." "Trump is still tweeting that mail-in voting is a 'sick joke,' and falsely       claiming,  'I WON THE ELECTION!' "

"From the sidelines, he is cheering on street violence by MAGA thugs, and framing political opponents as unAmerican." 

"After this year's presidential election, 70 percent of Republican voters said it was not free and fair, up from 35 percent before the election, and 82 percent said Biden did not legitimately win." "Now, Republicans are casting Black and Brown citizens illegitimate voters to invalidate the Biden presidency." "Trump will keep denigrating democracy to elevate himself. Yet again, this president's selfish gains will be America's loss."

#Noah Lenard, "Miami Noise Machine," Mother Jones, January + February 2021. - "In August 2016, Cubans who arrived in the United States since 1995 favored Hillary Clinton by more than a 2-to-1 margin, according to Florida International University's long-running and respected Cuba Poll. Two years later, that had flipped. More recent arrivals voted for Republicans by roughly a 2-to-1 margin in  the 2018 midterms." "In October, the Cuba Poll found that among Cubans who came to the United States between 2010 and 2015, 76 percent were Republicans, and only 5 percent were Democrats."

#Calling Out the Repubs - Gabriel Sterling, Georgia's voting system implementation manager, pulled out all stops in calling for his fellow Republicans to condemn the language and actions of those trying to overthrow the 2020 election results: "Mr. President, you have not condemned these actions or this language. Senators, you have not condemned this language or these actions. This has to  stop. We need you to step up, and if you're going to take a position of leadership, show some."

Sterling said elections are "the backbone of democracy, and all of you have not said a damn word are complicit in this!"

#Donald Trump's 2016 campaign chief, Steve Bannon, has urged Americans to be prepared to die to overturn the election. Michael Flynn and his allies are imploring the President to declare "limited martial law." Their scheme is to suspend  civil liberties and normal legal processes; in order to conduct a new election under military control. 

#The Washington 'Post' contacted all 249 Republicans in the House and Senate, and found that only 27 would simply say that Joe Biden won the election. This count was taken in the first week of December. Trump had designated a specific House member to get the names of all those who have acknowledged that Joe Biden won the election.

#Trump called Georgia Governor Brian Kemp on the morning of December 5 to demand that he overturn Biden's victory in that state. And then at a rally in support of Kelly Loeffler and David Purdue in their run-off elections to return to the U.S. Senate, he slammed Kemp for refusing to support his authoritarian scheme to retain power. Specifically, he wanted Kemp to call a special session of the Georgia state legislature to elect a slate of electors who would back Trump, and he also wanted an audit of signatures on mail-in ballots. 

#Eric Alterman, "The End of the Jewish Vote," The Nation, December 14-21, 2020. - "First things first: Jews remain very liberal. J Street, a nonprofit advocacy group that describes itself as 'pro-peace,' commissioned exit polling of Jewish votes, and found a 77-21 percent preference for Biden over Trump. Florida and the odd US urban districts aside, Jewish votes rarely matter much. Jews constitute about 2 percent of the US population -- not much more than Muslims. Also, just 5 percent of Jews chose 'Israel' as their first or second most important issue -- and, being Jews, they disagree on that topic, too."

"Trump has delivered on the move of the US Embassy to Jerusalem, the recognition of Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights, the unashamed encouragement of Israel's massive settlement         expansion into the occupied West Bank, and a cutoff of US aid  to the Palestinians."

#Polling Evangelicals - The Public Religion Research Institute's American Values Survey found that 59% of white evangelicals agree that immigrants are "invading our country and replacing our cultural and ethnic background," about double all other religious Americans -- 30% -- and 31% of the country. 7 in 10 white evangelicals continue to see the killing of Black people by law enforcement  officers, isolated incidents. Among  all other religious Americans, and the country as a whole, only 43% agree. 25% of white evangelicals agree that Trump has encouraged white supremacist groups, versus 60% of all other Americans.

#Religious Presidential Voting - According to APVoteCast, about 8 in 10  white evangelicals voted for Trump; 50% of Catholics voted for Trump, versus 49% for Biden; white Catholics voted 57% for Trump, versus 42% for Biden. Biden took 72% of the vote from those with no religious affiliation.

ADDENDUMS:

*Trump, on Thanksgiving Day, labeled Georgia's Secretary of State, Brad Raffensperger, an "enemy of the people."

*Although Georgia's Secretary of State, Brad Raffensperger, has been praised for his refusal to somehow overturn Biden's victory in the state, he has opened an investigation into the progressive voter registration organizations, including the New Georgia Project.

*16 U.S. attorneys, who were tapped specifically to monitor the 2020 election for malfeasance, have written to Attorney General Barr, asking him to rescind his memo authorizing them to conduct probes.

*Joe diGenova, who once was a lawyer for President Trump, has said that Chris Krebs, who was a cybersecurity expert in the Trump administration, but was fired because he said there was no fraud in the 2020 general election, should be taken out, drawn and quartered, and then shot. diGenova has said he was just kidding.

Voting on My Mind

#U.S. District Judge Linda V. Parker ruled that a suit brought by Sidney Powell, an attorney disavowed by the Trump campaign, saying: "In fact, this lawsuit seems to be less about achieving the relief Plaintiff's seek -- as much of that relief is beyond the power of the Court -- and more about the impact of their allegations on People's faith in the Democratic process and their trust in our government." "Plaintiffs ask this Court to ignore the orderly statutory scheme established t challenge elections and to ignore the will of millions of voters. This the court cannot, and will not do. The people have spoken."

#Vera Bergengruen, "False alarm," TIME, November 2-9, 2020. - "From formal announcements by the Justice Department and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to the state-level 'election integrity' task forces, the President's allies are mixing politics and law enforcement to amplify [Trump's] baseless claim that the [November 3] election is plagued by rampant voter fraud." "Using data going back to 1982 on everything from presidential elections to state and local votes -- potentially hundreds of millions of ballots cast -- the conservative Heritage Foundation found a grand total of 1,298 instances  of voter fraud."

My comment: After examining millions of ballots from an array of  voting levels, the Brennan Center for Justice found the incidence of voter fraud was a period, followed by four zeros, before a digit above zero  appeared.

#Elie Mystal, Supreme Injustice," The Nation, October 19-26, 2020. - "But if such a thing as legal objectivity ever existed, it was obliterated 20 years ago with 'Bush v. Gore'. It was then that the Supreme Court proved, by a 5-4 vote, that it was a purely political branch." "We're debating religious freedoms for Christians who want to be bigoted, not Muslims who want to worship unimpeded -- Democracy v. Voter Suppression." "The stakes are too high, and Trump has been too effective at undermining  faith in the American electoral process." 

[Chief Justice John Roberts] "has attacked voting rights over the entire course of his career. In fact, he authored the biggest setback to voting rights of our generation: His 2013 decision in 'Shelby County v. Holder', which eviscerated the Voting Rights Act." 

Roberts also struck a blow against the Affordable Care Act (ACA), when in 'California v. Texas', "the initial conservative challenge claimed that the ACA's individual mandate, which required uninsured people to pay a penalty for failing to get health insurance, was an unconstitutional use of federal power under the Constitutional commerce clause. Instead, Roberts 'famously' converted the individual mandate from a normal government regulation authorized by the commerce clause to a tax authorized under the federal government's broad taxation power."

#Tim Murphy, "Win. Lose, Redraw," Mother Jones, January+February 2021. - "But Democrats        failed to flip a single legislative chamber, and even lost both houses in blue New Hampshire." "The results, gloated one Republican operative, were 'absolutely embarrassing.' " "Those maps, and the legislative majorities they protected, cemented minority rule, and turned competitive states into conservative policy labs where progressive ideas -- Medicaid expansion, climate action, voting rights -- went to die."

"In 2012, Obama won Michigan, Wisconsin, Ohio, and Pennsylvania, while Democrats  won only 17 out of a possible 50 congressional seats in those states." Michael Li, a senior counsel at the Brennan Center for Justice, points out that this will be the first 10-year cycle in which Republican mapmakers won't be bound by Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act.

#David Corn, "Back From the Brink," Mother Jones, January+February 2021. - "He [Trump] had questioned the legitimacy of elections, attacked the free press, called for the arrest of his political opponents, encouraged   white supremacists, violated anti-corruption safeguards, implemented nepotism,  advocated measures that limit voting, sought more control of the civil service, claimed      unbridled executive power, treated the federal government (even the White House grounds) as his own private  duchy, and embraced despotic leaders around the world."

"He [Trump] gained support among Americans. He bagged 10 million more votes than he did in 2016. Nearly half of the electorate and an entire political party accepted it, if not fully applauded, his war on democratic norms." "And after the election,70 percent of Republicans, following Trump's lead, said they did not believe the election was free and fair."

"The election demonstrated that this violent current existed beyond Trump's narcissism. And this movement raises a pressing question for the nation: Can a slide toward authoritarianism be reversed, or is one 51-47 election enough?" Two academics found in 14 episodes of democratic decline in 14 episodes of decline in 10 Asian democracies since the early 2000s that "democratic forces managed to contain the process before democracy broke, disunited."

David Corn writes that today the "current strain of authoritarianism in the United States relies in part on the tools of white supremacy, particularly voter suppression and racist demagogic rhetoric." " 'This is what is troubling to me,' notes Larry Diamond, a Stanford professor who co-edits the 'Journal of Democracy.' 'It's not just Trump. You look at the widespread efforts at voter suppression, the cynical efforts [of Republicans] to create one set of rules for themselves and another for the opposition... and you see much broader abandonment of democratic norms than we saw during Watergate, when it was mainly confined to Nixon and his clique...'  Diamond adds: 'Our democratic system is much more badly damaged and outmoded than it was after Watergate.' 'The agenda of fixing our democracy is going to be much longer and more arduous. What do you do when half of the United States does not want to repair its democracy?' "

Police Unions Offer Extraordinary Protection

 #Samantha Michaels, "The Shield," Mother Jones, September/October 2020.

"Law enforcement kills more than a thousand Americans a year. Many are unarmed, and the disproportionate number are African American. Very few of the officials involved face serious, if any, consequences, and much of that impunity is owed to the power of police unions." "In their territorial 'safe zones,' police unions can offer their members extraordinary protections."

"In the city's large, and largely segregated, Black communities, police brutality has been a first-order for decades." "By the end of the sixties, a racialized law-and-order ideology has emerged as a sort of unexamined consensus, and it has basically prevailed since then, providing the political context in which police unions thrive." "White cops, Black and brown suspects: that remains the dominant paradigm."

"But, statistically, law enforcement does not make the list of the ten most dangerous jobs in America. Studies of patrol officers' service calls have shown that less than five percent are related to violent crimes." "Pro-police analysts always talk about 'bad apples'; it's only a few cops who misbehave -- ten per cent, tops. But the problem is that the other ninety per cent inevitably know about the misconduct and thus are made compliant." Ben Breecoto, a sociologist at Rhode Island College, says: 'These organizations function as lobbies to both resist accountability legislation, and shield implicated officers,'  he writes. It is "a relic of mid-century policing, when cops were always right and usually white, and could take a free hand in Black and brown neighborhoods."

#Bill Fletcher Jr., "No!" The Nation, November 2-9, 2020.

"Much of white organized labor took pride in building this exclusionary state, and therefore now finds it difficult, if not impossible, to come to terms with its role in racist oppression and imperil expansion." "Also, unions are understandably afraid that the expulsion of police from organized labor could expose themselves to a right-wing assault on public-sector collective bargaining."

"But racial injustice is not just the extinguishing of Black lives; it is also about segregated housing, poor health care, exclusion from skilled employment, and an education that prepares particular racial minorities only for prisons and menial work."

#Kim Kelly, "Yes!" The Nation, November 2-9, 2020.

"You'll never see cops join a picket line; instead, they're the force that the bosses call to break the strike." "Report after report reveals the proliferation of white supremacists and far-right rhetoric within the ranks of law enforcement." "We cannot stand by and watch as our so-called union of brothers, continues to brutalize and extinguish working-class lives with impunity." "It is imperative that labor unions address and eradicate the poison from rank-and-file members up to the highest levels of leadership." 

"In 2016, nearly 40 percent of union members voted for Donald Trump, including over 50 percent of white male members, but the problem is not a new one."

Fletcher and Kelly were debating the issue of police unions remaining as part of the overall organized labor movement.