Booya.
Remember Kris Kobach (Kansas Secretary of State), t---- , and the 'Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity'?
Mr. Trump established the commission after his repeated insistence, without credible evidence, that widespread voter fraud explained how Hillary Clinton received about 2.9 million more votes while he won the presidency in the Electoral College.
It was dissolved 3 January 2018? At the time, Esquire wrote a headline, "I Guess They'll Have to Find Another Way to Suppress Votes" (1.4.18). They never find any evidence but they continue to insist for the need to make voting more difficult.
One of the committed Marxists who refused to cooperate with the commission
was Mississippi’s Republican Secretary of State Delbert Hoseman, who told Kobach and his panel to “go jump in the ocean.” Well said, comrade!
I think the 'Marxist' reference andthe 'comrade' comment are a tongue-in-cheek joke by the journalist which isn't really helpful, but nevermind.
Today, the Republicans continue the assault on voting, now at the state level. And, state-level republicans are getting support at the national level with the newly-established Committee on Election Integrity. We know these names are purely euphemisms, the real motivation being voter suppression. Fox news imbibers have been fed the big lie in a perfectly calculated onslaught such that:
Poll finds 65% of Republicans say they don't believe Biden's Election Was Legitimate (an AP article from Market Watch, 2.5.21)
And, of course, that lie was carefully incubated by Republican legislators, t---- himself, and what might be called the entire gop machine, to include the various fringe groups that assembled for the January 6 insurrection.
From the NY Times, 2.27.21
In Statehouses, Stolen-Election Myth Fuels a G.O.P. Drive to Rewrite Rules
The avalanche of legislation also raises fundamental questions about the ability of a minority of voters to exert majority control in American politics, with Republicans winning the popular vote in just one of the last eight presidential elections but filling six of the nine seats on the Supreme Court.
The party’s battle in the past decade to raise barriers to voting, principally among minorities, young people and other Democrat-leaning groups, has been waged under the banner of stopping voter fraud that multiple studies have shown barely exists.
“The typical response by a losing party in a functioning democracy is that they alter their platform to make it more appealing,” Kenneth Mayer, an expert on voting and elections at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said. “Here the response is to try to keep people from voting. It’s dangerously antidemocratic.”
and
The push also comes as Democrats in Congress are attempting to pass federal legislation that would tear down barriers to voting, automatically register new voters and outlaw gerrymanders, among many other measures. Some provisions, such as a prohibition on restricting a voter’s ability to cast a mail ballot, could undo some of the changes being proposed in state legislatures.
Such legislation, combined with the renewed enforcement of federal voting laws, could counter some Republican initiatives in the 23 states where the party controls the legislature and governor’s office. But neither that Democratic proposal nor a companion effort to enact a stronger version of the 1965
Voting Rights Act stands any chance of passing unless Democrats modify or abolish Senate rules allowing filibusters. It remains unclear whether the party has either the will or the votes to do that.
and
Those who back the Republican legislative efforts say they are needed to restore flagging public confidence in elections and democracy, even as some of them continue to attack the system as corrupt. In Arizona, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, for example, the chairs of House election committees refused for weeks or months to affirm that President Biden won the election. The chairs in
Pennsylvania and
Wisconsin urged U.S. House members or former Vice President Mike Pence to oppose the presidential electors certified after Mr. Biden won those states’ votes.
This is a very good NY Times article, which summarizes gop efforts in multiple states: Iowa, Arizona, Wisconsin, Georgia, New Hampshire, Nebraska, and Pennsylvania. You've probably heard this particularly outrageous example:
One Arizona Republican
has proposed legislation that would allow state lawmakers to ignore the results of presidential elections and decide themselves which candidate would receive the state’s electoral votes.
Meanwhile, a Washington Post opinion writer penned this article (3.1.21):
T----'s big CPAC lie unmasks a vile truth. Democrats ignore it at their peril.
Amid the stream of delusion, depravity, malevolence and megalomania that characterized Donald Trump’s speech to the Conservative Political Action Conference on Sunday, one message should be regarded as arguably more important than all the others combined.
It’s this: The former president told his audience that the Republican Party’s success in coming years depends, in no small part, on its commitment to being an anti-democracy party... Trump didn’t say this in precisely those words, of course.
and
By “election reforms,” Trump actually meant a redoubled commitment to making it harder to vote. We know this, because he said so: He went on to declare that Democrats had used the “China virus” as an “excuse” to make vote-by-mail easier.
“We can never let that happen again,” Trump said. “We need election integrity and election reform immediately. Republicans should be the party of honest elections.”
And, he perpetuated the big lie continuously throughout the speech. An article from Vox (2.28.21) points this out:
T---- will never stop lying about the 2020 election. His CPAC speech proved it.
“I may even decide to beat [Democrats] for a third time,” Trump said early on during his speech at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), implying his loss to Biden was illegitimate while teasing the possibility of running again in 2024.
That remark was met with a standing ovation.
and
“The election was rigged,” he said later, before attacking the Supreme Court for not overthrowing the results for him, with language eerily similar to the way he attacked then-Vice President Mike Pence during
his speech just before the January 6 insurrection.
“They didn’t have the guts or the courage to make the right decision,” Trump said.
Trump’s lie about the election being rigged was met with chants of “You won! You won!”
and, as Aaron Rupar, the author of the article, says, "The grift goes on":
In a nod to how
lucrative fundraising off his refusal to concede has been, Trump advised his fans that “there’s only one way to contribute to our efforts to elect America-first Republican conservatives and in turn to make America great again, and that’s through Save America PAC and donaldjtrump.com.”
oops. This is a bit long. Too long to expect anyone to read it! If you made it this far, I appreciate it, cuz it took a lot of effort and I spent so much time that I'm unwilling to cut it down right now.
Now's the time to play ball.
