By Joe Miller
This Week: MAGA House Takeover Emboldens State-Level Election Deniers
Last week, Kevin McCarthy became Speaker of the House of Representatives after 15 rounds of voting that saw some of the most extreme lawmakers from the far-right Freedom Caucus extract a hefty set of concessions giving them greater influence over House rules and legislative priorities.
Their success has emboldened radicals across the country to forge a similar path in state legislatures. Election deniers in key states have been emboldened by MAGA Republicans taking full control of the House, and many are re-organizing. In Michigan, a newly formed state-level Freedom Caucus in the Michigan House is already targeting chamber rules that empower the Democratic House Speaker to make logistical decisions about staffing and office space. In Arizona, the local Freedom Caucus is planning to sue newly elected Gov. Katie Hobbs over her first four executive orders, which merely outline plans for her first 100 days in office.
Even as extremist lawmakers mobilize, investigations into Trump’s criminal conspiracy to overturn the 2020 election results continue. All eyes are on Georgia, where a state court overseeing the Fulton County grand jury investigation has scheduled a hearing for Jan. 24 to consider the release of the grand jury’s report documenting Trump and his MAGA allies’ 2020 election interference in the state. Legal experts expect the first criminal charges for Trump to come out of Georgia, and some suggest that more states may follow suit.
This week, Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel announced that her office will be reopening a criminal probe into the GOP’s slate of fake electors who posed as Electoral College delegates as part of an attempt to overturn the election results for former President Trump after he lost the presidential election there in 2020. In contrast, the Nevada Attorney General is refusing to say whether or not the state is investigating the state GOP’s six fake electors for now, though new evidence shows that the electors sent messages bashing Nevada’s former Secretary of State, as well as the state’s lone Republican in Congress, Mark Amodei, for not helping them overturn the election results.
Elsewhere, election deniers are still working to subvert the will of voters:
In Pennsylvania, Republican lawmakers are reportedly looking to restrict mail-in voting and give state officials more power to prosecute so-called election discrepancies, many motivated by false allegations of election fraud. A powerful State Senate committee has even advanced anti-voter legislation that would instate Voter ID, unnecessary and duplicative audits, and shift regulatory authority over elections.
MAGA lawmakers in Georgia are asking a judge to uphold the state’s voting system in an election security case, facing allegations that the system is inherently insecure after Trump attorney Sidney Powell hired a MAGA cybersecurity firm to breach rural Coffee County’s voting infrastructure after the 2020 election.
And finally, in Florida, authoritarian right-wing Governor Ron DeSantis is embroiled in a lawsuit over his firing of a democratically elected state prosecutor, Andrew Warren. The trial judge assigned to the case could issue a ruling at any moment, given that court proceedings concluded more than five weeks ago.
