,
22 tweets,
4 min read
Read on Twitter
More than a month ago, Nancy Pelosi was quoted in the New York Times saying that she thought Trump might not step down if he lost the election. It was a one-day story, and she hasn't made any public statement on the topic since.
The Democrats should be making public preparations for the possibility of a stolen election next year, and mobilizing the public against that possibility. So far they're doing neither.
Who the Democrats nominate as president will matter a lot as to how effective an attempt to steal the 2020 election would be. On its own, it may well not matter enough to stop a serious attempt.
The refusal to begin impeachment proceedings is a capitulation. Entertaining the possibility of a stolen election is a capitulation. And capitulation in 2019 will have serious consequences in 2020.
And as @chrislhayes suggests, we're not just facing the prospect of a single overt act. We're looking at a hundred different efforts to shrink and shape and disenfranchise the electorate.
That said, Pelosi's capitulation is tremendously dangerous, but it's not the final word. The impeachment process may yet go forward this year in spite of her attempts to obstruct it—and whether it does has a lot to do with how much public pressure is put on Dems in the House.
And there's a lot that we as ordinary people can do to prepare for, and protect against, antidemocratic tactics in the election and in its aftermath.
We're not impotent here. And some Democratic party folks—more than are immediately obvious—are preparing for a fight, too. But the time for them to come forward is now, and the time to push them is now.
And let's be clear, what we're facing unlikely to be something so clean as Trump refusing to accept the vote of the Electoral College. Think Florida 2000. Think Georgia 2018.
What happens if an election in a state with a GOP legislature and governor is disrupted? What happens if there's an attack on election infrastructure, or violence at the polls, or mass removal of voters from the rolls?
How does the president respond to that? How does the Senate? How does the Supreme Court?
I don't think it's over. I think we can win. But if you think we're past that, if you think it's not possible, the question is: What comes next? Either way, we need to be working.
Someone just asked me why impeach—what's the point, if the Senate will never vote to convict? Here's why:
Impeachment hearings, and an impeachment vote, are a matter of making a public case for the lawlessness of this president, forcing confrontations in the courts, and building a constituency among elected officials for holding him accountable for his violations of the constitution.
Impeachment is a tool of mobilization. Impeachment is a tool for rousing the public. Impeachment is a tool for shifting the boundaries of the politically possible.
Pelosi is right that the bigger the margin, the harder a race is to steal. But that's not because you CAN'T steal a lopsided race, it's because you have to resort to more obvious, more aggressive tactics to do it.
And the downside to those aggressive tactics is essentially political—it exists in the response of the people, and of political elites. Which is precisely why normalizing misconduct—normalizing the possibility of a stolen election!—is so dangerous.
We need to be mobilizing. The good news is, we are mobilizing. We're not starting from zero. We're angry. We're connected. We're engaged. Far more than we were five years ago. We need to build on that. We need to build.
All right. I gotta get back to work. Go build.
Oh, just one more thing: When I criticize "the Democrats" in this thread, I'm talking primarily about Pelosi, Schumer, and those who are taking their cues from those two. There's a fair amount of opposition within the party to the stuff I'm criticizing here.
And on the subject of potential disruption of the elections: There's a big article in the NYT today about how the US and Russia have inserted malware into each others' power grids. nytimes.com/2019/06/15/us/…
Imagine it's a close election in Florida next November. Imagine there's a power outage on election day in Broward County, which went for Clinton by nearly 300K votes in 2016. What happens next?
