#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?' "
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