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Defend Our Country Digest

Defend Our Country Digest — April 29, 2022

By April 29, 2022No Comments

Driving the Day:   

Must Read Stories

January 6 Committee Will Hold Eight Hearings Beginning June 9 

  • CNN: January 6 Committee To Hold 8 Hearings In June, Chairman Says: Democratic Rep. Bennie Thompson, who chairs the House select committee investigating the January 6 Capitol Hill insurrection, told reporters Thursday that the committee will hold eight hearings spread out through the month of June. Thompson said the hearings will be a “mixture of some prime time and some regular” and they “will tell the story about what happened.” Thompson also said he expects “at this point the first hearing is June 9th,” though that date did not appear to be finalized. When and how many public hearings the committee would have has been an open question as the panel has ramped up its investigation over the past year. Thompson also said the committee will be reaching out to more members of Congress as soon as this week that they want to speak to — including Republicans in both the House and the Senate.

GOP Invents A New Voting Threat: Undoumented Immigrants 

  • New York Times: G.O.P. Concocts New Fake Threat: Voter Fraud by Undocumented Immigrants: Six years after former President Donald J. Trump paved his way to the White House on nativist and xenophobic appeals to white voters, the 2,000-mile dividing line between Mexico and the United States has once again become a fixation of the Republican Party. But the resurgence of the issue on the right has come with a new twist: Republican leaders and candidates are increasingly claiming without basis that unauthorized immigrants are gaining access to the ballot box. Voter fraud is exceptionally rare, and allegations that widespread numbers of undocumented immigrants are voting have been repeatedly discredited. Yet that fabricated message — capitalizing on a concocted threat to advance Mr. Trump’s broader lie of stolen elections — is now finding receptive audiences in more than a dozen states across the country, including several far from the U.S.-Mexico border. In Macomb County, Mich., where Republicans are fiercely split between those who want to investigate the 2020 election and those who want to move on, many voters at the county G.O.P. convention this month said they feared that immigrants were entering the country illegally, not just to steal jobs but also to steal votes by casting fraudulent ballots for Democrats. “I don’t want them coming into red states and turning them blue,” said Mark Checkeroski, a former chief engineer of a hospital — though data from the 2020 election showed that many places with larger immigrant populations instead took a turn to the right.

What Experts Are Saying 

  • Norm Eisen And Dennis Aftergut: “The Trumpian Right Keeps Pushing Rule Of Law To The Brink. But the Law Is Winning.”  “From ancient Greek democracy to the Roman republic to the French Revolution, history tells us again and again that gravitating to autocracy comes back to haunt a nation. As John Adams, signer of the declaration of independence and second president of the United States, wrote in 1775 to his wife, Abigail, ‘[A] Constitution of Government once changed from Freedom, can never be restored. Liberty once lost is lost forever.’ This week, we were reminded again how close we came to a coup here in the US. Fortunately, a New York judge also showed us that the institutions of law remain strong and the impulse to autocracy is being held at bay.” – The Guardian, 4/28/22

Headlines

In The States 

Atlanta Journal Constitution: ‘Blah, Blah, Blah’ Second Georgia Gov Debate Focuses Again On 2020 Election

New York Times: Revolt Brews in Michigan G.O.P. After Elevation of Trump Allies