In a speech last week against a stark backdrop of red light at Philadelphia’s Independence Hall, President Biden warned of anti-democratic forces seeking to undermine American Democracy, saying that supporters of President Donald Trump saw the failed attempt to overturn the 2020 election as “preparation” for years to come.
Sadly, with a fair amount of law enforcement contaminated with Trumpers, I don’t know that there’s much of anything anyone can do. It’s lovely to suggest that threatened election officials go to law enforcement, but what if the threats are coming from local LE members?
I appreciate that:
“A threat that says something like ‘I think you’re an awful person and I hope you die,’ it’s probably not actionable,” he said. However, “a threat that says ‘I know where your children go to school and this is what the Second Amendment is for’ is probably not protected.”
And that 1A is deeply involved here, but at what point, just like screaming ‘fire’ in a theatre, does free speech become a danger to the community as a whole?
Sadly, the rational folks have sat back for too long. This cancer has metastasized, and it will be damned difficult to get rid of it.
All we can do at this point is shine the bright light of publicity on what these threats are doing. Not much else.
Having been through a verbal threat at the end of my first marriage and told by a judge that I couldn’t do anything about it until my ex actually DID something (like kill me or my kids or set my parents’ home on fire, all of which he threatened verbally to do), I understand the hopelessness of this situation.
I have to say, Karine Jean-Pierre was on NPR last weekend and she was pretty bad on this question – when asked what Biden was actually proposing she first said she doesn’t get into politics (if I heard her correctly) and then when pressed said that Biden was just asking people to be involved, meaning to vote for Dems. She basically said that the Biden administration had no actual plans to help protect the vote. If you’re going to give a speech about an existential threat facing the country you need some sort of tangible plan to fight it. She could even just have iterated the specific ways this threat is manifesting itself like pending Supreme Court cases, but she didn’t, and to me sounded unprepared. Very disappointing.
Edit: Here’s the relevant part from the transcript. She was being interviewed specifically on the question of elections and his speech.
RASCOE: In his speech, the president also expressed concerns about the outcomes of elections being honored. What exactly is the Biden administration doing to ensure that the outcomes of the November elections are not undermined by false claims of voter fraud?
JEAN-PIERRE: Well, you know, I can’t get into politics from here from this particular position that I am as a government official. But what we believe is that if he used that moment to call that out - right? - he used that moment - the importance of free and fair elections…
…
RASCOE: I mean, but if this is an inflection point, if democracy is on the line, what is the actual plan to protect it?JEAN-PIERRE: Well, the actual plan to protect it is to make sure that our voices are loud and clear. It was a - the way to see that speech was it was a powerful call to action, a powerful call to make sure that people understand what is at stake, a powerful call to protect our democracy, to protect our freedoms, to protect equality. And who else can have a bigger megaphone, a bigger, powerful place to do that than the president? And as we have seen, it was well-received. Americans watched. They listened. And majority of Americans understand that. So we have to use this moment. We have - and he believes he has to use this moment to make that clear. And I think asking people to use their voice is a powerful action. We think that.
I don’t know that there’s anything that can be done. Every election we have in the next ten years is going to be legally contested. We can count on that. 60 cases for the 2020 election will look like nothing compared to what’s coming.
I just edited to add the transcript. It seems like something could be done beyond putting it all on the American people. She should have come armed with ideas about new offices for election security or new legislation protecting elections at the federal level or a constitutional amendment defining state courts as arbiters of election disputes or whatever. Anything tangible beyond saying that the way to protect the vote is… vote. I think it really undercuts his speech to send her out with no real message.
That plan may still be under development. But I do believe we have some responsibilities to protect our elections by not letting positions on the ballot go unchallenged with only Trumpers running for the position. Happens a lot here in Wisconsin. It’s how we’ve ended up with gerrymandering that will probably never be undone without a court order and, even then, we’ve seen the Legislature successfully overrule any attempts to re-district the State.
You can understand the difficulty of this process, given the make-up of SCOTUS (which will overrule ANY attempt to take their party out of power - and yes, I’m accusing them of partisanship). Even if the Dems take back the House and the Senate in 2022, they will still have to get whatever election-based legislation past the court. The GQP supporters already have that litigation in plan - it won’t take long for appeals through the judicial system to migrate upward.
We’ve seen how awful the GQP appointments to the courts have been with this recent decision in FL. A TFG appointment days before the end of his term, the entire judiciary is populated with idiots like her, whose only job is to make decisions based on Heritage and Federalist policies, even if they flagrantly violate the law. There’s a lot more of that to come.
To your point about putting it all on the American people, if we don’t care to fix it, why should anyone else?
Why did the networks pass on Biden’s speech, who is the President but hang on to every utterance by the other guy?
Well, right, but it can’t all be on them.
That’s part of the difficulty here – this needs to be a nonpartisan effort because the mechanism of elections themselves are under attack, but that attack is being done by one party. It’s not great to say “We all need to come together to fight this assault on our nation, by voting Democratic to stop Republicans.” If that’s the message it needs to be paired with expressly non-partisan efforts that the Biden admin is undertaking or urging the states to undertake. Otherwise this ends up seeming to validate GOP whines that this was just a campaign speech.
Reading her words again, it makes me think of the events of January 6th, and ask: how specifically can people prevent a repeat by “using their voice”? It feels like a cop-out.
The corporate media has determined that conflict sells so much better than unity. The fascists offer conflict so they hog the coverage. The corporate media is all about profits but not public welfare.
OT
Please remember 9/11
“The road to fascism is lined with people telling you to stop overreacting.”
You do realize that TPM has covered Trump extensively from June of 2015 until now, (over 7 years)
Every day, Trump dominates TPM’s coverage. At least 75% of TPM is Trump or Trump related. It’s part of the reason I mostly stay away. I’m starting to think people here have a Trump addiction. After two years, all the insults are mostly recycled and repeated over and over.
Such as the Constitutional Sheriff in Johnson County, Kansas? JC,K is 60% of Kansas City, Kansas. The Sheriff is elected. I doubt he’ll be re-elected, unless he is the source of significant disruption to fair and legal voting.
GOP hopefuls for election posts see enemies within own party - ABC News
Four Republicans who have promoted false claims about the 2020 presidential election and are seeking to overhaul how elections are run by becoming their state’s chief election official say they are fighting against a corrupt system
The current surveys indicate that local law enforcement all the way up to DOJ and the FBI have been infiltrated by Trumpers and more than one or two have participated in disruptions of elections and even in the J6 insurrection.
There hasn’t been a sweep yet to identify these people and relieve them of their duties. Don’t know if it’s fear or apathy, but they’re still there and standing in the way of the majority opinion. The courts have also been infiltrated, as we saw with the Florida decision earlier this week. This isn’t going away quietly and it won’t go away with doing nothing. We can vote some of these out (or not vote them in in the first place), but police and judges aren’t really up to us, are they?
Trump wasn’t mentioned in this article.
Feel free to “mostly” stay gone.
Elections are run at the local level. Beyond normalizing the requirements to register to vote for every citizen, then there isn’t much that the feds can do other than give grants of money to update equipment or for training of poll workers.
The questions you are raising should be directed at your local election board, and the person in your state that oversees that state’s election process.
