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Defend Our Country Digest

Defend Our Country Digest — February 9, 2023

By February 9, 2023No Comments

Driving the Day: 

Must Read Stories

Trump Charges In Georgia Could Lead To A Bigger Federal Case Over Efforts To Overturn The 2020 Election 

  • Bloomberg: Trump Charges in Georgia Over 2020 Could Lead to Bigger Fed Case: The first major criminal charges that Donald Trump could face for interfering in the 2020 election might come from Atlanta — and what happens in Georgia isn’t expected to stay in Georgia. Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis said her decision is “imminent” on whether to indict the former president, which would make him the first US president charged with a crime. That decision will have a ripple effect on the Justice Department’s special counsel probe and other investigations circling Trump. If Willis goes first, that case would road-test possible testimony, helping to determine what evidence holds up in court and providing a blueprint for prosecutions involving other battleground states where Trump and his supporters tried to undermine President Joe Biden’s win. Legal experts say nothing stops a US special counsel overseeing the federal Trump probe from pursuing similar charges at the federal level, regardless of what Willis ultimately does.

Republicans Continue Their Assault On Democracy In Black Cities 

  • New Republic: House Republicans Want to Take Away D.C.’s Right to Govern Itself:  Nearly 700,000 people live in Washington, D.C., which makes it more populous than at least two of the Union’s states. Unlike the people of Wyoming and Vermont, though, D.C. residents only have a partial form of self-government. But the return of a Republican majority in the House has brought with it the renewed threat that these rights may get chipped away—or one day, perhaps even abolished. House Republicans introduced measures this week in Congress to overturn two bills recently passed by the D.C. City Council. While D.C. has had an elected government and the authority to write its own laws since the 1970s, Congress retains the theoretical power to block specific legislative acts during a 30-day review period by passing “disapproval motions” in both chambers and getting the president’s signature on them.
  • Mississippi Today: ‘Only in Mississippi’: White representatives vote to create white-appointed court system for Blackest city in America: A white supermajority of the Mississippi House voted after an intense, four-plus hour debate to create a separate court system and an expanded police force within the city of Jackson — the Blackest city in America — that would be appointed completely by white state officials. If House Bill 1020 becomes law later this session, the white chief justice of the Mississippi Supreme Court would appoint two judges to oversee a new district within the city — one that includes all of the city’s majority-white neighborhoods, among other areas. The white state attorney general would appoint four prosecutors, a court clerk, and four public defenders for the new district. The white state public safety commissioner would oversee an expanded Capitol Police force, run currently by a white chief. The appointments by state officials would occur in lieu of judges and prosecutors being elected by the local residents of Jackson and Hinds County — as is the case in every other municipality and county in the state. Mississippi’s capital city is 80% Black and home to a higher percentage of Black residents than any major American city. Mississippi’s Legislature is thoroughly controlled by white Republicans, who have redrawn districts over the past 30 years to ensure they can pass any bill without a single Democratic vote. Every legislative Republican is white, and most Democrats are Black.

President Biden Stood Up For Democracy In His State Of The Union Address While Republicans Jeered 

  • CBS: Biden, In State Of The Union, Says “Democracy Remains Unbowed And Unbroken”:  In his State of the Union address, President Biden spoke about America’s “progress and resilience.” He said, “Two years ago, our democracy faced its greatest threat since the Civil War. Today, though bruised, our democracy remains unbowed and unbroken.”
  • New York Times: Heckling of Biden Reflects a New, Coarser Normal for House G.O.P.: The House floor has been no stranger to rowdy spectacle in 2023, but the eruptions of Republican vitriol against President Biden during his State of the Union address on Tuesday night underscored a new and notably coarse normal in Congress, where members of the G.O.P. majority tossed aside rules of decorum and turned the annual speech into a showcase for partisan hostility. The raucous peals of “liar,” “that’s not true” and at least one expletive lobbed at Mr. Biden during his 73-minute address dwarfed outbursts during previous such speeches, most of which have been interrupted by a single disturbance, if at all. The display — captured in images of Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, her mouth wide open as she booed and gave a thumbs down to the president — reflected the ethos that has come to define the Republican-led House, where an emboldened right wing that styles itself after former President Donald J. Trump is unapologetic about its antipathy for Mr. Biden and eager to show it in attention-grabbing ways.

In The States 

ARIZONA:  Republican Official Makes Cochise County A “Laboratory” For Denial 

  • Arizona Mirror: How An Arizona Official Is Making Cochise County A “Laboratory” For Election Skepticism: David Stevens had never supervised a ballot count. He didn’t know how he would count nearly 50,000 ballots by hand, who would help, or where he would find enough space to do it. But that didn’t dissuade him. Less than a month before the November election, Stevens, the Cochise County recorder, told the county supervisors he would be happy to try. Arizona GOP leaders had spent two years promoting unfounded claims about compromised vote-counting machines, and were scouring the state for a county that would willingly hand-count ballots. They found it in Cochise County, where Stevens grasped onto the idea, devised a plan, and stoked the sentiment starting to take hold locally. The Republican recorder propelled the proposal to illegally hand count all midterm election ballots, thrusting a rural Arizona county known for historic mining towns and natural beauty into months of chaos, court hearings, and national headlines. Cochise’s two Republican supervisors bore the brunt of the backlash — threatened with jail time and, even now, facing a citizen-led recall effort. But the initial effort would have hit an abrupt stop without Stevens, who mostly remained behind the scenes.

NEVADA:  Nevada Election Officials Still Face Harassment And Pressure 

  • Bolts: “They Don’t Trust Us”: Nevada Election Workers Still Face Pressure And Harassment: Election administration used to take up a fraction of Lacey Donaldson’s headspace. “An every-two-years kind of thing,” she said. But these days, Donaldson, the elected clerk and treasurer of Pershing County, Nevada, can hardly run an errand without being reminded of how much has changed since 2020 for elections professionals like her. “It’s not just people questioning you at work. It’s at the grocery store, or at your niece’s birthday party,” she said. Her county covers an area almost as big as New Jersey but has a population of just over 6,700 people. “I pretty much know everyone,” added Donaldson, a Democrat starting her fourth term in a county then-President Donald Trump won by 51 points in 2020. “They don’t trust us. We’re letting them watch the process, but you can’t really argue with those people that have believed misinformation. It doesn’t matter how long they’ve known you. They’ll say, we know you’re doing it the right way, but the county next door isn’t. Well, that doesn’t make you feel any better about your job.” This relatively new stressor is part of the long tail of election denialism that was kicked off by Trump during the 2020 presidential election. It remains as an animating belief among some on the right that entire electoral systems—and the people who run them—are irredeemably untrustworthy. 

TEXAS:  Without Evidence Of Fraud Or Disenfranchised Voters, Lt. Gov Dan Patrick Calls For New Elections In Harris County 

  • Houston Chronicle: Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, Without Evidence Of Disenfranchised Voters, Calls For New Harris County Election:  Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick this week joined other GOP state officials in calling for Harris County to redo its November 2022 election based on claims that voters were turned away due to alleged paper ballot shortages, though Patrick said he has no idea if any voters were actually disenfranchised. Patrick’s comments at a Magic Circle Republican Women’s Club event on Monday were first reported by the Texas Tribune. “How many people went to go vote that didn’t go back? We don’t know,” Patrick said at the event. “So we do need to have a new election.”

What Experts Are Saying

Marc Elias, founder of Democracy Docket: “Expanding access to registration, early voting and mail-in voting is the bare minimum. They are necessary but not nearly enough to address the threats we will face in 2024. To address those, Democratic legislatures need to be bolder and more aggressive to prevent a new wave of tactics aimed at suppressing the vote and subverting elections. Here are five new election laws every Democratic state should adopt this legislative session.” Five Voting Laws Needed To Protect Democracy

Ruth Ben-Ghiat, historian at New York University: “The history of Fascist violence speaks to what happens when generations have their sense of morality dimmed so that racist crimes can be perpetuated and tolerated. The children DeSantis uses as props exemplify the authoritarian’s greatest goal and pleasure: getting people to act against their own interests —preferably from an early age.” Lucid

Sean J. Westwood, a political scientist at Dartmouth: “In an August 2022 paper, “Does Affective Polarization Undermine Democratic Norms or Accountability? Maybe Not,” David E. Broockman, a political scientist at Berkeley, Joshua L. Kalla, a political scientist at Yale, and Sean J. Westwood, a political scientist at Dartmouth, pointedly reject the claim made by a number of scholars “that if citizens were less affectively polarized, they would be less likely to endorse norm violations, overlook copartisan politicians’ shortcomings, oppose compromise, adopt their party’s views, or misperceive economic conditions. A large, influential literature speculates as such.” Instead, Broockman, Kalla and Westwood contend, their own studies “find no evidence that these changes in affective polarization influence a broad range of political behaviors — only interpersonal attitudes. Our results suggest caution about the widespread assumption that reducing affective polarization would meaningfully bolster democratic norms or accountability.”…In an email, Westwood argued that the whole endeavor “to fix anti-democratic attitudes by changing levels of partisan animosity sounds promising, but it is like trying to heal a broken bone in a gangrenous leg when the real problem is the car accident that caused both injuries in the first place.”” NYT’s Thomas B. Edsall Column: Meet the People Working on Getting Us to Hate Each Other Less

Headlines

The MAGA Movement And The Ongoing Threat To Elections

New York Magazine: James O’Keefe Is on Paid Leave From Project Veritas

Washington Post (Analysis): The core weakness of the Republican Party, on raucous display

Trump 2024

Politico: The GOP Is Starting to Plot Against Donald Trump

January 6 And The 2020 Election

Politico: Scott Perry acknowledged a long-secret effort to prevent Justice Department investigators from accessing materials on his phone.

Other Trump Investigations.

Politico: Michael Cohen says Manhattan DA case against Trump is ‘ready to take off’

In The States

The Guardian: First case in DeSantis voter fraud crackdown ends with split verdict

Milwaukee Journal Sentinel: Republican measure would require felons to pay off all fines before voting rights are restored