More than a year after the deadly Capitol insurrection, former U.S. Court of Appeals Judge J. Michael Luttig opined on Wednesday that former President Trump and his allies’ bogus claims of widespread election fraud was just a “dry run” for the 2024 presidential election.
Well, it’s clear that the Republican right wing hopes to carry on challenging any election result that is not in their favor. It is still up to Congress to come up with a renewed or expanded Voting Rights Act, since according to the Constitution, Congress has the ultimate authority: not the state legislatures, and not the Supreme Court. It is up to Democrats and all who want fair elections to press Congress for a solution that forestalls the type of right wing maneuvering described in this article.
This is not some obscure individual …
Interesting to know what’s in front of you.
THis did not start in 2020, it started in 2016 with trump screaming about a fixed election. Then after the Electoral College appointed him he was screaming about 3 million fake votes.
The GOP never has stopped calling Bill Clinton’s presidency illegitimate. I’d say this started long before 2016…
Beware of the Right Wing.
Even if the Right succeeds in its desires, the Planet will not reward its actions by easing the payback it surely will unleash once the fruits of the Right policies (and the lack of others) become more and more apparent.
Judge Luttig’s description of the “independent state legislatures” plans, both pre- and post-election, are correct, but he doesn’t note how incredibly unlikely they were to succeed. The pre-election lawsuits would have had little impact on vote totals, and getting any actual state legislatures to replace Biden electors with Trump electors never even came close to happening (and would almost without doubt be held unconstitutional anyway because states can’t change the rules after the election has been held).
If this were seriously about taking away the results of a popular vote for president in 2024, we would see a bunch of state-level legislation giving the legislature the authority to judge and reject the results of the election in favor of direct appointment of electors. That’s an idea so fringe that I think it’s only been proposed by one looney tunes legislator in Arizona (I think the same one who’s running for SOS this year).
Not to say that we shouldn’t revise the Electoral Count Act to prevent this crap from being attempted again.
I fear our biggest failing is the ability to imagine how far our countrymen are willing to go.
That’s what mind-numbing propaganda, messaging and misinformation (constant) does…
I think this ruthless drive for Republican power at all costs started around Watergate, back when Dick Cheney first got a gleam in his eye while working for Donald Rumsfeld in Nixon’s “Office of Economic Opportunity.” Then fast-forward past Lee Atwater to Bush v. Gore.
There’s an even deeper disease here, imo. It went by the name Manifest Destiny at one time. The occult belief that God’s will is for a white, protestant nation to take dominion here (by force as needed) goes all the way back to the days of the English colonies.
When these people claim that “American was founded as a Christian nation,” it’s not that they’re ignorant of the actual history – I mean they might be but that’s not their point. Their point is that from the get-go it was and continues to be God’s plan for white christians to rule. The exact meanings of “white” and of “christian” are malleable, but they’ve always meant “us guys and not you folks”.
Nice to hear the quiet part out loud, but I don’t think anyone is surprised by this.
And GOP ears everywhere are deaf to this message. 
Thanks - that is exactly the impression I have of the entire scheme and the likelihood of its success. There are a hell of a lot of moving parts, in the first place - all the state legislators. I don’t care if they are Repugs, not every state level Repug is down with this shit as we’ve seen.
Okay, so we have a blueprint for murder right in front of us. Best to wait and see what happens.
What would you suggest as an alternative?
Okay, TPM. What happened here. Was the dem-drawn map really that bad?
I’m not so sure that’ll happen any time soon. There’s no reward and a hell of a lot of risk that the GQP isn’t going to be willing to absorb to allow this to happen. They will go whole hog on the Democrats trying to steal elections by making ANY changes of this nature, so it’ll never go through.
Every alarmed German in 1939.
What’s the saying? “First time as tragedy, second time as farce” ?