It's growing more likely that a GOP-controlled legislature will subvert a 2024 election result. Republicans are laying the groundwork to do just that, right now. Trump's backing of a radical GOP candidate for Georgia Sec State makes it explicit. My latest: washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/…
The war over voting is often covered as a “partisan” struggle, as if each side is trying to manipulate election rules to its advantage in a vaguely equivalent way.
That erases the profound moral differences between being anti-democracy and pro-democracy:
“Republicans are using the former president’s failed attempt to overturn the election as a guide to how you would change the system to make it possible."
As @jbouie notes, this is spreading to many states, and critically, it's a *forward-looking* effort:
Biden's new plan makes a very big bet: That huge public expenditures are the kryptonite to defeat Trumpism. While Trumpists remain lost in deranged anti-leftism, in reality center and left are rolling out the most ambitious policies in 50 years. My latest: washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/…
Biden's plan is both nostalgic and forward-looking. It looks back to the big public expenditures and public works of the prosperous 1960s, while addressing climate, racial inequities, and the needs of the multi-racial health-care-oriented working class:
This is a strikingly idealized vision of what a Dem center-left alliance can accomplish.
As Tucker Carlson fantasizes about leftist extremism provoking the right into full fascism, a broad liberal-left coalition is working to solve vast public problems:
It's true that there are tensions and ambiguities in the Dem position. So what? These tensions and ambiguities flow from the moral and policy complexities of the challenges themselves.
Dems are trying to figure these things out right now. But that's good, not bad.
Also, this idea that the GOP message is "effective" is sort of nonsense. Rs lost the last two national elections. We have to get our heads out of 2016. Trump *lost in 2020.* Rs *lost the House in 2018.* Immigration was central both times. Stop pretending this never happened.
Time to dispense with the silly myth that the GOP is "moving left" on economics in any meaningful sense. They're dismissing tax hikes on the rich with rhetoric that hasn't changed in 30 years. And they can't even support a family-friendly child allowance: washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/…
A new "populist" GOP? Republicans are dismissing tax hikes on the rich with rhetoric that hasn't changed in 30 years. Meanwhile, they're calling the child allowance "welfare," using language that echoes Paul Ryan's attack on the welfare state "hammock":
When Republicans pretend their concerns about voter fraud are rooted in a desire to restore "confidence" among Trump voters who supposedly "believe" the election was stolen from him, we are not obliged to pretend it's a real argument. It isn't.
Everybody should watch @ossoff debunking this dumb lie.
"Public concern regarding the integrity of the recent election," Ossoff said, is due only to a "sustained misinformation campaign led by a vain former president unwilling to accept his own defeat.”
@ossoff The insulting lie that Republican voters lack confidence in the 2020 election, and that this justifies various anti-democratic moves, is everywhere.
It's been pushed by the head of the RNC's Orwellian "election integrity" group and many others:
The GOP has now adopted an institutional policy of mass voter suppression, justified as "election integrity." But Trump himself is revealing what this phrase really means: Make it harder to vote wherever possible, expressly to help Rs win future elections: washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/…
Amazingly, the RNC has tapped a leading proponent of Trump's "stop the steal" campaign to head its "election integrity" project.
But we're not obliged to pretend GOP officials "really believe" the election was stolen from Trump.
Trump, who regularly touted his corruption and contempt for democracy as positive attributes, openly and explicitly told us exactly what the GOP quest for "election integrity" really means.
The key point is Republicans are widely acting on his directive:
Here's my response to @JDVance1's awful take on the migrant influx. This has created very hard moral and policy dilemmas. But Vance doesn't seriously engage them at all. Instead he hides behind phony anti-woke posturing to elide them. You deserve better: washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/…
@JDVance1 I say children and teens should not be turned back into Mexico. Does JD Vance think they *should* be?
He doesn't say. Instead he anticipates that critics of his position will only say he's "racist." That relieves him of engaging with such complexities:
@JDVance1 I say it's unacceptable to threaten desperate people with cruel, degrading and dangerous outcomes to deter them from exercising their legal right to apply for asylum.
Trump's policies did those things. Does Vance think that's acceptable? He doesn't say: