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xaviermcelderry

How Joe Biden was Donald Trump's kryptonite - CNNPolitics - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html

Biden Trump election

shared by xaviermcelderry on 16 Jan 21 - No Cached
  • President Donald Trump seemed to be a teflon president. It didn't matter how big things seem to get -- Trump's political career seemed to be impermeable. That was until Trump ran into President-elect Joe Biden.
  • Biden proved to be Trump's kryptonite and helped himself tremendously by doing something very simple: allowing Trump to be Trump. The President hogged the spotlight as he worried about Biden potentially defeating him.
  • First, there was the 2019 impeachment of Trump. It largely stemmed from him wanting Ukraine's president to investigate Biden ahead of the 2020 election.
  • ...12 more annotations...
  • Trump likely was looking at polling data that showed Biden, among the top contenders in the Democratic primary, was beating Trump in a general election matchup by the most and was better liked than Trump's 2016 opponent, Hillary Clinton.
  • What perhaps Trump didn't realize was that he was playing right into Biden's hands. His efforts seem to prove an important point for Biden: Biden was the Democrat Trump feared most at a time when Democrats were more likely than ever to prioritize electability over issue agreement.
  • Second, Biden defeated Trump in his re-election attempt. Biden did so by doing minimal campaigning, as Trump seemingly went everywhere during the coronavirus pandemic.
  • Biden seemed to learn the lesson of Clinton's campaign. Studies showed that Trump polled best when the media spotlight was not on him because he is not a popular politician. His best path to winning was by making the contest a lesser of two evils in the eyes of voters, which he failed to do in 2020.
  • Biden, it seems, not only won the election, but he won the transition period as well.
  • Trump it seems, couldn't stand not to be the center of attention, which is unusual for an outgoing president.
  • Meanwhile, Trump's overall approval rating has dropped below 40%, the worst for any president after one term and his approval rating among Republicans has dipped below the 80% mark for the first time in a long time.
  • Third, Trump was impeached a second time after an insurrection that he incited last week over outrage of the 2020 election results. Trump just couldn't seem to believe that he lost the election to Biden, which many of his supporters couldn't as well.
  • President Donald Trump seemed to be a teflon president. It didn't matter how big things seem to get -- Trump's political career seemed to be impermeable. That was until Trump ran into President-elect Joe Biden.
  • Biden didn't do anything directly to cause Trump to commit the actions that led to his impeachment.
  • Trump appeared in the top paragraph of stories nearly 80% of the time that had either Biden or Trump in them during the general election campaign, according to NewsLibrary.com. Inversely, Biden was in a little more than 20%. The same measurement found Trump was only in about 60% of them during the 2016 general election campaign in a similar reading of Clinton vs. Trump media mentions.
  • For example, so far since December 20, Trump got about 70% of the news mentions. To give you an idea of how unusual that is, every single outgoing president in the internet era (since Bill Clinton in 2001) had gotten fewer media mentions than the president-elect in the month leading up to inauguration
katherineharron

McConnell for the first time recognizes Biden as President-elect - CNNPolitics - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html

gop

shared by katherineharron on 15 Dec 20 - No Cached
  • Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell for the first time acknowledged Joe Biden's victory and referred to him as President-elect, six weeks after Election Day and amid President Donald Trump's continued refusal to accept defeat.
  • "The electoral college has spoken," McConnell said in remarks from the Senate floor in the US Capitol, adding, "Today I want to congratulate President-elect Joe Biden."
  • many Senate Republicans still wouldn't recognize Biden's victory on Monday evening even after the Electoral College made the win official.
  • ...12 more annotations...
  • it took more than 40 days since Americans went to the polls for many GOP members of Congress to speak up.
  • "The fact that it took six weeks for my colleagues to recognize reality and stop undermining our Democratic process is sad and disappointing," said Senate Democratic Whip Dick Durbin in a floor speech Tuesday following McConnell's remarks.
  • Trump needs to "take his cue from Leader McConnell, that it's time to end his term," in a floor speech
  • "Our Republican colleagues, for the sake of our democracy, for the sake of the peaceful transition of power, should stop the shenanigans," Schumer said "Stop the misrepresentations and acknowledge that Joe Biden will be our next president."
  • "It would take far more than one speech to catalog all the major wins the Trump administration has helped deliver for the American people," he said. "The outsider who swore he would shake up Washington and lead our country to new accomplishments, both at home and abroad proceeded to do exactly that. President Trump and Vice President Mike Pence deserve our thanks and our gratitude for their tireless work and their essential roles in all these victories and in many more."
  • McConnell said while millions wished the election would have yielded a different result, "our system of government has processes to determine who will be sworn in on January the 20th. The Electoral College has spoken."
  • Trump, even in defeat, holds enormous sway over his party, to the point where many refuse to publicly accept electoral reality or raise any concerns as the President continues to undermine the integrity of US democracy by lying that the election was rigged and stolen from him
  • "Montana cast three electoral votes for President Trump, and the Electoral College voted today," said Daines, who just won reelection in Montana. "And Congress will need to ratify in January."
  • some GOP members of Congress were signaling they were more willing to accept Biden's victory.
  • "We've now gone through the constitutional process and the electors have voted, so there's a President-elect," Blunt said. "With Vice President Biden as the President-elect, the President continues, obviously, to have all the options he has available to him, but the electoral vote today was significant."
  • Two other members of GOP leadership -- Senate Majority Whip John Thune of South Dakota and Sen. John Cornyn of Texas -- both said that any effort to overturn the election results on January 6, when a joint of session of Congress meets to count the electoral votes, would be fruitless.
  • "I think everybody realized it yesterday that counting the voting of the electors was a pivotal moment, and I agree," Cornyn told reporters Tuesday, when asked if he recognizes Biden as President-elect.
clairemann

Supreme Court: Why Brett Kavanaugh could pick the next president if the election comes ... - 0 views

www.vox.com/...in-pennsylvania-north-carolina

SCOTUS US gop politics election

shared by clairemann on 30 Oct 20 - No Cached
  • Here’s how grim the future of voting rights looks for both large-D Democrats and small-d democrats: the pivotal vote on the Supreme Court — the justice who is likely to decide all closely divided voting rights disputes in the near future — is Brett Kavanaugh.
  • credibly accused of attempting to sexually assault Christine Blasey Ford when they were in high school, denied the allegation then lashed out at Democrats who believed it disqualified him from serving on the nation’s highest court.
  • has staked out a position on voting rights that is less extreme than the views of many of his colleagues.
  • ...22 more annotations...
  • he intends to banish to the sunken place longstanding doctrines protecting the right to vote. But Kavanaugh, at the very least, rejects some parts of the nihilistic approach shared by Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, and Neil Gorsuch.
  • her approach to constitutional questions resembles that of Thomas and Gorsuch. Chief Justice John Roberts, who is himself frequently hostile to voting rights law, has written that he thinks his conservative colleagues are going too far i
  • was most visible in Andino v. Middleton, a recent decision that reinstated a South Carolina law requiring absentee voters to have another person sign their ballot as a witness.
  • he did not embrace the extreme position of Justices Thomas, Alito, and Gorsuch,
  • Kavanaugh handed down another opinion suggesting that, while he is not as hostile to voting rights as his most conservative colleagues, he still wants to make radical changes that would profoundly impact American democracy.
  • appears to be torn between a belief that well-established rules governing election disputes should be abandoned, and a competing understanding that it is unfair to disenfranchise voters who followed the rules that were in place at the time when those voters cast their ballots.
  • Purcell v. Gonzales (2006), a case which — at least according to Kavanaugh — established that “federal courts ordinarily should not alter state election rules in the period close to an election.”
  • “The Constitution ‘principally entrusts the safety and the health of the people to the politically accountable officials of the States,’” Kavanaugh wrote. Therefore, “it follows that a State legislature’s decision either to keep or to make changes to election rules to address COVID–19 ordinarily ‘should not be subject to second-guessing by an ‘unelected federal judiciary,’
  • Let state legislatures decide how elections will be conducted in each state, for better or for worse. And don’t intervene even if those decisions are likely to disenfranchise voters.
  • Thomas, Alito, and Gorsuch took the extraordinary position that voters who failed to anticipate that the Supreme Court would change the rules after their unwitnessed ballot was already cast should have their ballots tossed out.
  • that the Supreme Court should take unprecedented steps to overrule state judges and other state officials who try to make it easier to vote. But he also did not join a recent opinion by Alito that suggested that the Court may step in after the election to toss out ballots
  • Democratic National Committee v. Wisconsin State Legislature, a case that determined that ballots that arrive after Election Day in Wisconsin shall not be counted, Kavanaugh pointed to a provision of the Constitution that provides that “the rules for Presidential elections are established by the States ‘in such Manner as the Legislature thereof may direct.’”
  • “in accordance with the State’s prescriptions for lawmaking, which may include the referendum and the Governor’s veto.”
  • the Supreme Court of the United States has the final word on questions of federal law, but state supreme courts have the final say on questions of their own state’s law.
  • It could mean that a state governor cannot veto a state election law (because the governor is not the “legislature”). Or that a state constitution may not empower an independent commission to draw un-gerrymandered legislative maps (because the commission is not the “legislature”).
  • Kavanaugh appears to be largely indifferent to voting rights, and is willing to give state legislatures a great deal of leeway to disenfranchise voters.
  • On Wednesday night, the Supreme Court handed down orders in Republican Party of Pennsylvania v. Boockvar and Moore v. Circosta, which concern whether late-arriving ballots should be counted in Pennsylvania and North Carolina. In both cases, state officials — but not the state legislature — decided that ballots that are mailed before Election Day and that arrive during a brief window after the election should be counted.
  • but they didn’t exactly tell the GOP “no,” either. The Court denied the GOP’s request to order, in advance of the election, that late-arriving ballots will not be counted. But an ominous opinion by Alito suggests that the Court might revisit this question after the election.
  • Alito wrote in a concurring opinion in Republican Party, which was joined by Thomas and Gorsuch. Nevertheless, he added that the case “remains before us” and could be decided “under a shortened schedule” after the election takes place.
  • Voters, in other words, might mail their ballots close to Election Day, believing that they can rely on state officials and lower courts that have said that these ballots will be counted, only to have the Supreme Court change the rules after the election is over — and order these ballots tossed out.
  • But Kavanaugh hasn’t yet shown the same willingness to disenfranchise people who followed the rules — or, at least, who followed the rules that were in place when those voters cast their ballots.
  • It may be a Biden blowout, or a fair-and-square Trump win. But if it’s close, and if Pennsylvania or North Carolina is pivotal, these are the competing considerations that Kavanaugh, likely the swing vote, will be wrestling with.
Javier E

77 Days: Trump's Campaign to Subvert the Election - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...trump-election-lie.html

trump election 2020 coup Politics conspiracy history gop

shared by Javier E on 03 Feb 21 - No Cached
  • Thursday the 12th was the day Mr. Trump’s flimsy, long-shot legal effort to reverse his loss turned into something else entirely — an extralegal campaign to subvert the election, rooted in a lie so convincing to some of his most devoted followers that it made the deadly Jan. 6 assault on the Capitol almost inevitable.
  • with conspiratorial belief rife in a country ravaged by pandemic, a lie that Mr. Trump had been grooming for years finally overwhelmed the Republican Party and, as brake after brake fell away, was propelled forward by new and more radical lawyers, political organizers, financiers and the surround-sound right-wing media.
  • Across those 77 days, the forces of disorder were summoned and directed by the departing president, who wielded the power derived from his near-infallible status among the party faithful in one final norm-defying act of a reality-denying presidency.
  • ...24 more annotations...
  • Throughout, he was enabled by influential Republicans motivated by ambition, fear or a misplaced belief that he would not go too far.
  • For every lawyer on Mr. Trump’s team who quietly pulled back, there was one ready to push forward with propagandistic suits that skated the lines of legal ethics and reason
  • That included not only Mr. Giuliani and lawyers like Sidney Powell and Lin Wood, but also the vast majority of Republican attorneys general, whose dead-on-arrival Supreme Court lawsuit seeking to discount 20 million votes was secretly drafted by lawyers close to the White House, The Times found.
  • With each passing day the lie grew, finally managing to do what the political process and the courts would not: upend the peaceful transfer of power that for 224 years had been the bedrock of American democracy.
  • The vote-stealing theory got its first exposure beyond the web the day before the election on Mr. Bannon’s show. Because of the Hammer, Mr. McInerney said, “it’s going to look good for President Trump, but they’re going to change it.” The Democrats, he alleged, were seeking to use the system to install Mr. Biden and bring the country to “a totalitarian state.”
  • with the White House counsel, Pat A. Cipollone, backing him, Mr. Barr told the president that he could not manufacture evidence and that his department would have no role in challenging states’ results, said a former senior official with knowledge about the meeting, a version of which was first reported by Axios. The allegations about manipulated voting machines were ridiculously false, he added; the lawyers propagating them, led by Mr. Giuliani, were “clowns.”
  • Yet as the suits failed in court after court across the country, leaving Mr. Trump without credible options to reverse his loss before the Electoral College vote on Dec. 14, Mr. Giuliani and his allies were developing a new legal theory — that in crucial swing states, there was enough fraud, and there were enough inappropriate election-rule changes, to render their entire popular votes invalid.
  • As a result, the theory went, those states’ Republican-controlled legislatures would be within their constitutional rights to send slates of their choosing to the Electoral College.
  • Yet as the draft circulated among Republican attorneys general, several of their senior staff lawyers raised red flags. How could one state ask the Supreme Court to nullify another’s election results? Didn’t the Republican attorneys general consider themselves devoted federalists, champions of the way the Constitution delegates many powers — including crafting election laws — to each state, not the federal government?
  • In an interview, Mr. Kobach explained his group’s reasoning: The states that held illegitimate elections (which happened to be won by Mr. Biden) were violating the rights of voters in states that didn’t (which happened to be won by Mr. Trump).
  • The lawsuit was audacious in its scope. It claimed that, without their legislatures’ approval, Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin had made unconstitutional last-minute election-law changes, helping create the conditions for widespread fraud. Citing a litany of convoluted and speculative allegations — including one involving Dominion voting machines — it asked the court to shift the selection of their Electoral College delegates to their legislatures, effectively nullifying 20 million votes.
  • One lawyer knowledgeable about the planning, speaking on the condition of anonymity, said: “There was no plausible chance the court will take this up. It was really disgraceful to put this in front of justices of the Supreme Court.”
  • The next day, Dec. 9, Representative Mike Johnson of Louisiana sent an email to his colleagues with the subject line, “Time-sensitive request from President Trump.” The congressman was putting together an amicus brief in support of the Texas suit; Mr. Trump, he wrote, “specifically asked me to contact all Republican Members of the House and Senate today and request that all join.” The president, he noted, was keeping score: “He said he will be anxiously awaiting the final list to review.”
  • Some 126 Republican House members, including the caucus leader, Mr. McCarthy, signed on to the brief, which was followed by a separate brief from the president himself. “This is the big one. Our Country needs a victory!” Mr. Trump tweeted. Privately, he asked Senator Ted Cruz of Texas to argue the case.
  • By the time the bus pulled into West Monroe, La., for a New Year’s Day stop to urge Senator John Kennedy to object to certification, Mr. Trump was making it clear to his followers that a rally at the Ellipse in Washington on Jan. 6 was part of his plan. On Twitter, he promoted the event five times that day alone.
  • But talk at the rally was tilting toward what to do if they didn’t.“We need our president to be confirmed through the states on the 6th,” said Couy Griffin, the founder of Cowboys for Trump. “And right after that, we’re going to have to declare martial law.”
  • Though Ms. Kremer held the permit, the rally would now effectively become a White House production. After 12,000 miles of drumbeating through 44 stops in more than 20 states, they would be handing over their movement to the man whose grip on power it had been devised to maintain.
  • Mr. Barr had resigned in December. But behind the back of the acting attorney general, Jeffrey A. Rosen, the president was plotting with the Justice Department’s acting civil division chief, Jeffrey Clark, and a Pennsylvania congressman named Scott Perry to pressure Georgia to invalidate its results, investigate Dominion and bring a new Supreme Court case challenging the entire election. The scheming came to an abrupt halt when Mr. Rosen, who would have been fired under the plan, assured the president that top department officials would resign en masse.
  • But Mr. Cruz was working at cross-purposes, trying to conscript others to sign a letter laying out his circular logic: Because polling showed that Republicans’ “unprecedented allegations” of fraud had convinced two-thirds of their party that Mr. Biden had stolen the election, it was incumbent on Congress to at least delay certification and order a 10-day audit in the “disputed states.” Mr. Cruz, joined by 10 other objectors, released the letter on the Saturday after New Year’s.
  • The rally had taken on new branding, the March to Save America, and other groups were joining in, among them the Republican Attorneys General Association. Its policy wing, the Rule of Law Defense Fund, promoted the event in a robocall that said, “We will march to the Capitol building and call on Congress to stop the steal,” according to a recording obtained by the progressive investigative group Documented.
  • Mr. Stockton said he was surprised to learn on the day of the rally that it would now include a march from the Ellipse to the Capitol. Before the White House became involved, he said, the plan had been to stay at the Ellipse until the counting of state electoral slates was completed.
  • Defiantly, to a great roar from the plaza, Ms. Chafian cried, “I stand with the Proud Boys, because I’m tired of the lies,” and she praised other militant nationalist groups in the crowd, including the Oath Keepers and the Three Percenters.
  • Speakers including Mr. Byrne, Mr. Flynn, Mr. Jones, Mr. Stone and the Tennessee pastor Mr. Locke spoke of Dominion machines switching votes and Biden ballots “falling from the sky,” of “enemies at the gate” and Washington’s troops on the Delaware in 1776, of a fight between “good and evil.”“Take it back,” the crowd chanted. “Stop the steal.”
  • “What we do now is we take note of the people who betrayed President Trump in Congress and we get them out of Congress,” he said. “We’re going to make the Tea Party look tiny in comparison.”
dytonka

Trump tries to undermine democratic process at the end of the campaign - CNNPolitics - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html

Politics Trump 2020Election

shared by dytonka on 02 Nov 20 - No Cached
  • more than 91 million who already cast early ballots
  • Tuesday's moment of destiny -- and what could turn into a prolonged count owing to the crush of mail-in votes -- will decide whether Americans reject Trump after a single term or re-up for four more years of his brazen presidency.
  • The President on Sunday night hinted that he could seek to dismiss Dr. Anthony Fauci after the election after rejecting the admired infectious diseases specialist's science-based recommendations on the pandemic.
  • ...21 more annotations...
  • Biden argues that Trump's denial and neglect of a pandemic that has killed more than 230,000 Americans and is getting worse by the day should deny the President reelection.
  • Counting in midwestern battlegrounds like Michigan and Wisconsin, where he is expecting to do well, could take longer and lead to the kind of disputed outcome that the President is threatening. Trump has already tried to discredit mail-in ballots, which take longer to count, while Republicans in Texas -- so far without success -- have been trying to invalidate ballots cast at drive-thru sites in the Houston area.
  • "We feel very confident about our pathways to victory," Biden senior adviser Anita Dunn told Jake Tapper on CNN's "State of the Union" on Sunday.
  • Trump, while trailing Biden, also has a clear, if narrower, chance to get to 270 electoral votes that relies on him sweeping through a swath of battlegrounds he won four years ago with what his campaign promises will be a huge Election Day turnout.
  • At a rally in Florida on Sunday night, Trump's crowd started a chant of "Fire Fauci" when the President complained that everyone heard too much about the pandemic.
  • But an air of foreboding is hanging over one of the most surreal elections in modern US history. Reports of delays in the delivery of mail-in votes in several crucial battleground states deepened anxiety over the possibility of protracted legal duels between the campaigns in the event of a close election.
  • In Texas, the state Supreme Court denied a petition by a group of Republicans seeking to invalidate nearly 127,000 ballots cast at drive-thru facilities in Harris County, a heavily Democratic area that surrounds Houston. Republicans have also filed suit in federal court, which has an emergency hearing Monday morning in Houston.
  • "I think it's a terrible thing when ballots can be collected after an election," Trump said in the crucial state of North Carolina, which he is battling to keep in his column despite demographic changes that give Democrats hope.
  • "I think it's a terrible thing when people or states are allowed to tabulate ballots for a long period of time after the election is over because it can only lead to one thing, and that's very bad. You know what that thing is. I think it's a very dangerous, terrible thing," Trump told reporters.
  • But Michigan Democratic Gov. Gretchen Whitmer said on "State of the Union" that she was concerned that Trump could try to declare victory in her state if Election Day voting tallies showed him with a lead before early and mail-in votes were counted.
  • He took part in a "Souls to the Polls" get-out-the-vote event at a Baptist church in Philadelphia and then held a drive-in rally. He called out disparities in the impact of the virus on minorities and, in the cradle of the American experiment, he painted Trump as a threat to basic American freedoms.
  • "Let's not ever let anyone take our power from us. Let us not be sidelined, let us not be silent, there is too much at stake and the ancestors expect so much more from us than that," Harris said in North Carolina.
  • President Donald Trump is casting doubt on the integrity of vote counting and warning he will deploy squads of lawyers when polls close on Tuesday, as his latest attempts to tarnish the democratic process deepen a sense of national nervousness hours before Election Day.
  • The President's maneuvering, as he fights to the last moment to secure a second term, is taking place ahead of a court hearing in Texas Monday morning on a Republican request to throw out 127,000 drive-thru votes in a key county.
  • Fears are also growing that the President might try to declare victory before all the votes are counted as he and Democratic nominee Joe Biden launch a final-day swing through the battleground states that will decide one of the most crucial elections in modern US history.
  • Biden is leading in national polls and by a narrower margin in many key states and has multiple paths to victory.
  • Trump's route to the required 270 votes is thinner but still viable, meaning either candidate could win.
  • It is common for some states to take several days to finalize vote counts.
  • In an extraordinary departure from American political tradition, Trump has been arguing for months that the election is "rigged" against him, has made false claims that mail-in voting is corrupt and has refused to guarantee a peaceful transfer of power.
  • "I think it's a terrible thing when ballots can be collected after an election," Trump said in the crucial state of North Carolina, which he is battling to keep in his column despite demographic changes that give Democrats hope.
  • Some of the most crucial battlegrounds, like Pennsylvania and Michigan, have warned it could be several days before a final result can be declared.
anonymous

Pence Welcomes Futile Bid by G.O.P. Lawmakers to Overturn Election - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...tors-josh-hawley-election.html

Politics

shared by anonymous on 03 Jan 21 - No Cached
  • The announcement by the senators — and Mr. Pence’s move to endorse it — reflected a groundswell among Republicans to defy the unambiguous results of the election and indulge President Trump’s attempts to remain in power with false claims of voting fraud.
  • It will also pose a political dilemma for Republicans, forcing them to choose between accepting the results of a democratic election — even if it means angering supporters who dislike the outcome and could punish them at the polls — and joining their colleagues in displaying unflinching loyalty to Mr. Trump, who has demanded in increasingly angry fashion that they back his bid to cling to the presidency.
  • In their statement, the Republicans cited poll results showing most members of their party believe the election was “rigged,”
  • ...12 more annotations...
  • The group is led by Senator Ted Cruz of Texas and includes Senators Ron Johnson of Wisconsin, James Lankford of Oklahoma, Steve Daines of Montana, John Kennedy of Louisiana, Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee and Mike Braun of Indiana, and Senators-elect Cynthia Lummis of Wyoming, Roger Marshall of Kansas, Bill Hagerty of Tennessee and Tommy Tuberville of Alabama.
  • But as Mr. Trump continues to perpetuate the myth of widespread voter fraud, a growing number of Republicans in Congress have been eager to challenge the results, either out of devotion to the president or out of fear of enraging the base of their party that still reveres him even in defeat.
  • Senator Ben Sasse, Republican of Nebraska, on Thursday condemned the attempt, calling it a “dangerous ploy” intended to “disenfranchise millions of Americans.” He accused fellow Republicans of making a political calculation to try to further their careers at the expense of the truth by tapping into Mr. Trump’s “populist base.”
  • As Mr. Biden racked up victories in November, Mr. Trump indulged in increasingly outlandish fictions, spreading disinformation about the election’s results and encouraging his followers to challenge the vote at every step. In recent weeks, as his legal defeats have stacked up, the president has become more vitriolic in his condemnations of Republicans who fail to support his false claims of having been the true victor in the election, and has lavished praise on those who parrot his accusations.
  • Nevertheless, more than a month after Mr. Biden’s victory, with increasing numbers in their party marching in lock step with Mr. Trump, some Republicans felt the need on Saturday to explain why they planned to vote to uphold the results of a democratic election.
  • Senator Mitt Romney of Utah warned of the consequences of backing a bid to subvert the election’s outcome.“I could never have imagined seeing these things in the greatest democracy in the world,” he said in a statement. “Has ambition so eclipsed principle?”
  • The vice president, the statement continued, “welcomes the efforts of members of the House and Senate to use the authority they have under the law to raise objections and bring forward evidence before the Congress and the American people on Jan. 6th.”
  • Representative Mo Brooks, Republican of Alabama, has said he will object to certifying the results, and with Mr. Hawley’s support, that challenge would hold weight, prompting senators and representatives to retreat to their chambers on opposite sides of the Capitol for a two-hour debate and then a vote on whether to disqualify a state’s votes. Both the Democratic-controlled House and Republican-controlled Senate would have to agree to toss out a state’s electoral votes — something that has not happened since the 19th century and is not expected to this time.
  • “A fair and credible audit — conducted expeditiously and completed well before Jan. 20 — would dramatically improve Americans’ faith in our electoral process and would significantly enhance the legitimacy of whoever becomes our next president,” they wrote. “We are acting not to thwart the democratic process, but rather to protect it.”
  • Vice President Mike Pence signaled his support as 11 Republican senators and senators-elect said that they would vote to reject President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s victory.
  • The senators’ opposition to certifying Mr. Biden’s election will not change the outcome. But it guarantees that what would normally be a perfunctory session on Capitol Hill on Wednesday to ratify the results of the presidential election will instead become a partisan brawl, in which Republicans amplify specious claims of widespread election rigging that have been debunked and dismissed for weeks even as Mr. Trump has stoked them.
  • “We fully expect most if not all Democrats, and perhaps more than a few Republicans, to vote otherwise,” the senators wrote.
anonymous

Republicans Aim to Seize More Power Over How Elections Are Run - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...republicans-election-laws.html

shared by anonymous on 26 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • election officials in Georgia, from the secretary of state’s office down to county boards, found themselves in a wholly unexpected position: They had to act as one of the last lines of defense against an onslaught of efforts by a sitting president and his influential allies to overturn the will of the voters.
  • Buried in an avalanche of voting restrictions currently moving through the Georgia Statehouse are measures that would give G.O.P. lawmakers wide-ranging influence over the mechanics of voting and fundamentally alter the state’s governance of elections.
  • “It’s looking at total control of the election process by elected officials, which is not what it should be,” said Helen Butler, a Democratic county board of elections member. “It’s all about turnout and trying to retain power.”
  • ...10 more annotations...
  • Nationwide, Republican lawmakers in at least eight states controlled by the party are angling to pry power over elections from secretaries of state, governors and nonpartisan election boards.
  • The push is intertwined with Republicans’ extraordinary national drive to make it harder for millions of Americans to vote, with legislative and legal attacks on early voting, absentee balloting and automatic voter registration laws.
  • The new legislation across the country would systematically remove the checks that stood in Mr. Trump’s way, injecting new political influence over electors, county election boards and the certification process. In doing so, the Republican effort places a few elected officials who refused to buy into the lies and falsehoods about the election in its cross hairs.
  • If the bill becomes law, the State Election Board, under control of the Legislature, would have more authority over these county boards, including the ability to review and fire their members.“It will give the State Election Board the authority to replace a limited number, it appears, of county election superintendents, and that can be a very partisan tool in the wrong hands,” said David Worley
  • State Representative Barry Fleming, a Republican who has been a chief sponsor of the bills in Georgia, did not respond to requests for comment. In a hearing on the bill this month, he defended the provisions, saying, “We as legislators decide how we will actually be elected, because we decide our own boards of elections and those of the counties we are elected from.”
  • A new law in Iowa restricting access to voting also targeted county election officials. In addition to barring them from proactively sending out absentee ballot applications, the bill introduced criminal charges for officials who fail to follow the new voting rules.
  • “We can be fined heavily now, removed from office,” said one of those officials, Travis Weipert, the Johnson County auditor. “And instead of just saying, ‘Don’t do it again,’ they brought the hammer down on us.”
  • One bill gives the Legislature the authority to approve the state election manual, an essential planning document that is drawn up every two years by the secretary of state. It had previously been approved by the governor and the attorney general.The effort has been roundly criticized by election officials in the state.
  • Republicans are also introducing measures to give them more electoral oversight in some states, like Michigan and New Jersey, that have Democratic governors who would most likely veto such bills.
  • It is nearly assured that almost all of these bills will face legal challenges from Democrats, who have signaled that combating the efforts to restrict voting will be a top priority through both federal legislation and the courts.
ethanshilling

Republicans Push for Greater Power Over How Elections Are Run - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...republicans-election-laws.html

US Politics republicans

shared by ethanshilling on 24 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • In the turbulent aftermath of the 2020 presidential contest, election officials in Georgia, from the secretary of state’s office down to county boards, found themselves in a wholly unexpected position: They had to act as one of the last lines of defense against an onslaught of efforts by a sitting president and his influential allies to overturn the will of the voters.
  • Buried in an avalanche of voting restrictions currently moving through the Georgia Statehouse are measures that would give G.O.P. lawmakers wide-ranging influence over the mechanics of voting and fundamentally alter the state’s governance of elections.
  • “It’s looking at total control of the election process by elected officials, which is not what it should be,” said Helen Butler, a Democratic county board of elections member.
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  • State Representative Barry Fleming, a Republican who has been a chief sponsor of the bills in Georgia, did not respond to requests for comment.
  • Nationwide, Republican lawmakers in at least eight states controlled by the party are angling to pry power over elections from secretaries of state, governors and nonpartisan election boards.
  • In Georgia’s new voting bill, the State Legislature is looking to strip Mr. Raffensperger of his role as the chair of the State Election Board and make him an ex-officio member without a vote.
  • If the bill becomes law, the State Election Board, under control of the Legislature, would have more authority over these county boards, including the ability to review and fire their members.
  • Jon Greenbaum, the chief counsel for the nonpartisan Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, said Republicans were engaged in an “all-out effort to change the voting rules in lots of ways that would allow for greater opportunity for them to challenge the eligibility of electors,” and that the party would “add micromanagement by state legislatures to the process of running an election.”
  • It’s not just Georgia. In Arizona, Republicans are pushing for control over the rules of the state’s elections. In Iowa, the G.O.P. has installed harsh new criminal penalties for county election officials who enact emergency voting rules.
  • Gov. Brian Kemp of Georgia, a Republican, has not weighed in publicly on the changes to election administration and oversight.
  • The threat of increased punishment seemed to be directed at three county election officials in the state, who last year chose to mail absentee ballot applications to all registered voters in their counties, drawing the ire of state Republicans.
  • Bobby Kaufmann, the Republican state representative in Iowa who sponsored the voting bill, said the county auditors’ actions were “as much the inspiration for the bill as anything,” pointing to their decisions to mail out ballots with prepopulated information.
  • In Arizona, the Republican-controlled Legislature is pursuing multiple paths to tip the scales of election oversight.
  • Ms. Hobbs, who was the target of many Republican attacks after the 2020 election, said that purely partisan politics were at play in the bills.“The Legislature wasn’t interested in control over elections until I got here and happened to have a ‘D’ by my name,” she said.
  • Efforts in other states to muddle with the mechanics of elections have gone beyond state legislatures. In Michigan, the state Republican Party has indicated that it is unlikely to ask a G.O.P. member of the State Board of Canvassers who chose to certify last year’s election results to return to his post.
  • It is nearly assured that almost all of these bills will face legal challenges from Democrats, who have signaled that combating the efforts to restrict voting will be a top priority through both federal legislation and the courts.
katherineharron

Trump says for the first time Biden won the election but later insists he's not concedi... - 0 views

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trump

shared by katherineharron on 16 Nov 20 - No Cached
  • President Donald Trump acknowledged for the first time on Sunday that Joe Biden won the presidential election, but the President refused to concede and blamed his loss on a string of conspiracy theories.
  • Most news networks declared Biden the victor more than a week ago. Since the call was made, Biden has given a victory speech and gotten his transition team up and running.
  • "He won because the Election was Rigged," Trump said in one Sunday morning tweet.
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  • Trump, who had questioned the validity of the election before votes had even been cast, is continuing to dig in his heels on unsupported legal challenges lodged by his allies
  • "I concede NOTHING! We have a long way to go."
  • Trump also continued to blame his loss on debunked theories about the 2020 election
  • The tweets from Trump followed a Saturday spent golfing and tweeting similar false conspiracy theories, and driving by a crowd of his supporters who gathered in Washington, DC, to protest the election results on the basis of his lies and propaganda.
  • But on Twitter this weekend, the President launched baseless conspiracy theories and false statements to his nearly 90 million followers online.
  • Trump has repeatedly claimed without evidence that his chance at a second term in office was stolen from him with corrupt votes
  • Trump's former national security adviser, John Bolton, said Sunday that he thinks the President is "stunned" by his loss.
  • "I think he's stunned by it. I think that's why he's been silent really for so long. He's lived in his own dream world and been successful at it these last four years," Bolton told CNN's Fareed Zakaria.
  • Biden's incoming White House chief of staff, Ron Klain, said Sunday that Trump's tweet that the former vice president won is "further confirmation of the reality," but added that the President's Twitter feed doesn't determine an election.
  • "I accept it as a further confirmation of the reality that Joe Biden won the election -- and not through any of the rest of that tweet, not through fraud or anything else the President is baselessly alleging. He won because he got more votes, OK, that's why he won," Klain said
  • he won the same number of electoral votes that President Trump himself called a landslide four years ago.
  • Sanders told Tapper that it's "beyond belief" that the President "continues to deny reality."
  • "Trump will have the distinction of doing more than any person in the history of this country in undermining American democracy," Sanders added. "The idea that he continues to tell his supporters that the only reason he may have lost this election is because of fraud is an absolutely disgraceful, un-American thing to do."
  • "It's clear, that certainly based on what we know now, that Joe Biden is the President-elect and that transition, for the country's sake, it's important for a normal transition to start through,"
Javier E

Does Our Climate Crisis Make the 2020 Election Our Most Crucial One Ever? | History New... - 0 views

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climate crisis election trump

shared by Javier E on 05 Oct 19 - No Cached
  • Although historians differ on our most crucial presidential elections, four of them seem especially significant: those of 1800, 1860, 1932, and 1940. In 2007, Harvard historian Jill Lepore wrote that the 1800 election pitting John Adams against Thomas Jefferson “is the most important election in American history.” In 2012, another scholar, David Mayhew of Yale, considering various criteria, selected the election of 1860 as the most important one, followed by that of 1932. Finally, FDR scholar Paul Sparrow considers the 1940 election our most important: “If you step back and look at its impact on the world, no election was more important.”
  • But why these four? Regarding 1800, Lepore notes that the election “marked the first transition of power from one party to another. It led to the passage, in 1804, of the Twelfth Amendment, separating the election of Presidents and Vice-Presidents. . . . It might have—and should have—spelled the end of the Electoral College.” Mayhew concurs that 1800 “settled the point that the incumbent party would accept a loss and hand power over to the opposition--thus ensuring that we would continue to have elections
  • Lincoln’s 1860 election was followed by the Civil War and the end of slavery. If any of Lincoln’s three main opponentshad won, secession, the civil war, and the abolition of slavery would likely not have immediately followed
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  • Hence, my contention that the 2020 election is only “likely to be” our most crucial one ever.
  • Thus, it is largely due to the uncertainty of what would have happened if Jefferson, Lincoln, and FDR had not been elected that it is difficult to compare and contrast the elections of 1800, 1860, 1932, and 1940 to the upcoming one in 2020
  • In 1932, Franklin Roosevelt (FDR) was elected in the midst of the Great Depression and thereafter created New Deal Policies to counter its effects
  • And “likely” primarily because of our present climate condition. The environmental harm Trump has heretofore done is incalculable (valuable efforts to keep track of this appalling record can be found here and here), and a continuation of such policies in a second term would be highly likely
  • Of essence then is the vital importance of our climate crisis. To describe it adequately in a brief essay is almost impossible. But the opening words of David Wallace-Wells’ The Uninhabitable Earth (2019) are a start: “It is worse, much worse, than you think. The slowness of climate change is a fairy tale.
  • the recent words of writer Jonathan Franzenare alarmist, but not improbable: “If you’re younger than sixty, you have a good chance of witnessing the radical destabilization of life on earth—massive crop failures, apocalyptic fires, imploding economies, epic flooding, hundreds of millions of refugees fleeing regions made uninhabitable by extreme heat or permanent drought.”
  • Even the business-friendly Forbes Magazine opines thatTrump’s climate-change policies have been nightmarish—see its essay “Trump Ignores The Impacts of Climate Change at His Peril—And Ours.”
  • In April 2017, Bill McKibben--founder of 350.org, which has become a leading voice in the environmental movement--predicted that the effects of Trump’s policies “will be felt . . . over decades and centuries and millenniums. More ice will melt, and that will cut the planet’s reflectivity, amplifying the warming; more permafrost will thaw, and that will push more methane into the atmosphere, trapping yet more heat. The species that go extinct as a result of the warming won’t mostly die in the next four years, but they will die. The nations that will be submerged won’t sink beneath the waves on his watch, but they will sink.”
  • The next major battle, and perhaps the most important one of our lifetime, will be the 2020 presidential and congressional elections. Its results could mark a major turning point in our climate struggle.
katherineharron

Pence faces pressure from Trump to thwart Electoral College vote - CNNPolitics - 0 views

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election

shared by katherineharron on 05 Jan 21 - No Cached
  • Vice President Mike Pence's four years of faithful service to his boss, President Donald Trump, will culminate this week in a ceremonial act he's under increasing pressure to thwart.
  • "The Vice President has the power to reject fraudulently chosen electors," Trump declared falsely on Tuesday
  • "I hope Mike Pence comes through for us, I have to tell you," Trump said Monday night during a political rally in Georgia, where his public arm-twisting was met with cheers. "Of course, if he doesn't come through, I won't like him as much."
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  • It was a direct message to a vice president whose defining political characteristic remains his unyielding fealty to Trump. How Pence proceeds on Wednesday when he presides over the certification of the Electoral College tally could determine his future relationship with the man he has served loyally, even in moments of political peril.
  • Trump has become intensely interested in Pence's ceremonial role during the certification of the Electoral College.
  • There is little expectation among Trump or Pence's aides that he will divert from his constitutionally-prescribed role.
  • Pence and White House aides have tried to explain to him that Pence's role is more of a formality and he cannot unilaterally reject the Electoral College votes.
  • "Vice President Pence shares the concerns of millions of Americans about voter fraud and irregularities in the last election," Short wrote. "The Vice President welcomes the efforts of members of the House and Senate to use the authority they have under the law to raise objections and bring forward evidence before the Congress and the American people on January 6th."
  • Trump retweeted a call from one of his supporters for Pence to refuse to ratify the Electoral College results on January 6
  • "That decision has to get made by the President and vice president, and they are actually meeting today and going through all the research -- they probably aren't going to make that decision by sometime tomorrow," Giuliani said on a podcast hosted by Charlie Kirk, a conservative activist.
  • Giuliani ticked though several issues he characterized as constitutional matters that he said Pence and Trump would discuss. He framed the decision as one for both Trump and Pence -- even though the President has made clear he believes Pence should somehow act to prevent the certification
  • procedure and process can hardly inure Pence from the outrage of a President who still believes the election was stolen from him and has been fed conspiracies about the results from a band of fringe advisers.
  • Trump offered tacit approval for the lawsuit filed by his Republican ally Rep. Louie Gohmert pressuring Pence into overturning the election results and was later disappointed to learn his own Justice Department was asking a judge to reject the suit, according to a person familiar with the matter. Trump and Pence discussed the matter at the end of last week. 
  • Traditionally, the vice president presides over the electoral vote certification, though it's not a requirement. In 1969, then-Vice President Hubert Humphrey didn't preside over the process since he had just lost the presidential election to Richard Nixon. The president pro tempore of the Senate presided instead.
  • "I know we've all got our doubts about the last election," he said. "I want to assure you, I share the concerns of the millions of Americans about voting irregularity. I promise you, come this Wednesday, we'll have our day in Congress, we'll hear the objections, we'll hear the evidence."
  • Pence did not say what happens after.
katherineharron

More than 95 million Americans have voted with one day to go until Election Day - CNNPo... - 0 views

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election

shared by katherineharron on 02 Nov 20 - No Cached
  • More than 95 million Americans have voted nationwide with one day left until Election Day, according to a survey of election officials by CNN, Edison Research and Catalist.   
  • Eighteen states and Washington, DC, have seen more than half of their registered voters cast ballots already.
  • Nationwide, the 95.5 million ballots already cast represents 70% of the more than 136.5 million ballots cast in the 2016 presidential election.  
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  • Polling shows Republicans nationwide strongly prefer to vote in person on Election Day, which the Trump campaign thinks will be enough to recapture the state's 20 electoral votes.
  • President Donald Trump, former Vice President Joe Biden, Vice President Mike Pence, and Sen. Kamala Harris will all appear in Pennsylvania at some point today.
  • More than 14 million ballots have already been cast in these five states, which could be crucial in determining the next president.
  • It's no coincidence that all the candidates are stopping in Pennsylvania today. There are a lot of voters who still have not cast a ballot in the state that was the lynchpin to Trump's 2016 victory.
  • Democrats have dominated the pre-election vote in the Keystone State. They currently make up 66% of those ballots.
  • A significant majority of ballots cast so far in Pennsylvania -- 82% -- come from White voters. Black voters make up the second largest share of those early ballots at 11%, followed by Hispanic voters at 4% and Asian voters at 3%.
  • At 83% of early voters so far, White voters make up a smaller share of the early voting electorate compared to the 88% they were at this point in 2016
  • So far, 13% of Pennsylvania's early voters are under 30, and 38% are 65 or older. More younger voters have been casting ballots in Pennsylvania as the campaign comes to a close. Last week, 11% of the commonwealth's voters were under 30, and 42% were 65 or older.
  • Women in Pennsylvania account for nearly 57% of ballots already cast, and men account for about 43%.
  • Democrats hold a smaller lead over Republicans in pre-election ballots cast than they did on the day before the 2016 election. Back then, they had an eight-point lead. Currently, it's six points, with Democrats at 37% and Republicans at 31%.
  • Younger voters make up a larger share of North Carolina's early voters this year than at this point in 2016. Fifteen percent of the state's early voters so far are under 30, almost double the 8% at this time four years ago. That number continues to grow. One week ago, voters under 30 made up 12% of North Carolina's early voters.
  • Almost 56% of ballots already cast come from women in the Tar Heel State, and men comprise about 44%. This is roughly on par with the gender breakdown at this point in 2016.
  • Republicans want to hang onto Michigan's 16 electoral votes, while Democrats are working to bring the state back into the fold.
  • Black voters have expanded their share of pre-Election Day ballots cast from about 9% at this time in 2016 to 12% currently.
  • Texas and Hawaii have already surpassed their total turnout from the 2016 general election. In eight more states, the pre-election vote represents at least 90% of their 2016 total vote -- Montana, Washington, North Carolina, Georgia, Nevada, Florida, New Mexico and Tennessee.
  • Slightly more than 56% of ballots cast so far in the Wolverine State are from women and almost 44% are from men.
  • Wisconsin has seen a large decrease in the share of early votes from people 65 or older, but the state hasn't seen as much of an increase from voters under 30.
  • By race, Wisconsin's early voters are similar to that of four years ago, with White voters representing the vast majority -- about 88% -- of those who've cast their ballots so far. Black voters represent about 5% of those early voters, Hispanic voters 3% and Asian voters 2% -- all on par with this time in 2016.
  • The racial breakdown of Ohio's early voters is almost identical to this time in 2016. Eighty-six percent of ballots already cast have come from White voters. Black voters comprise about 11% of those early ballots, with Hispanic voters accounting for about 2% and Asian voters about 1%. Younger Ohioans have increased their share of the early vote from 7% at this point in 2016 to about 12% now. These voters below the age of 30 have also continued to turn out during the last week of the campaign -- one week ago, they made up 9% of early voters.
katherineharron

Explaining the Supreme Court lawsuit from Texas and Trump challenging Biden's win - CNN... - 0 views

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trump

shared by katherineharron on 10 Dec 20 - No Cached
  • Although all 50 states have certified their election results and the Supreme Court swiftly rejected an emergency request from Pennsylvania Republicans to block election results in the commonwealth, the justices are now grappling with a new controversial bid from Texas, supported by President Donald Trump and 17 other Republican-led states.
  • They are asking the Supreme Court for an emergency order to invalidate the ballots of millions of voters in four battleground states -- Georgia, Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania -- even though there is no evidence of widespread fraud.
  • They're asking for the court to block the electors from Georgia, Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania, pushing Biden back under the magic 270-vote total to win.
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  • Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton filed the lawsuit Tuesday. The President on Wednesday filed a motion to intervene -- basically a request to join the lawsuit
  • On Tuesday, it rejected the plea from Pennsylvania Republicans to invalidate the state's presidential tallies. It issued one sentence and noted zero dissents. (Justices don't always have to make their votes public.)
  • since Republican delegations outnumber Democratic delegations, Trump would win.
  • "In a nutshell the President is asking the Supreme Court to exercise its rarest form of jurisdiction to effectively overturn the entire presidential election," said Steve Vladeck, a CNN Supreme Court analyst and University of Texas Law School professor.
  • The court has thus far shown no desire to intervene in the presidential election.
  • Trump has suggested publicly that he hopes his nominees -- Amy Coney Barrett, Brett Kavanaugh and Neil Gorsuch -- will side with him on any election dispute.
  • "Our Country is deeply divided in ways that it arguably has not been seen since the election of 1860," Trump's motion to intervene states. "There is a high level of distrust between the opposing sides, compounded by the fact that, in the election just held, election officials in key swing states, for apparently partisan advantage, failed to conduct their state elections in compliance with state election law."
  • The court could act after those filings arrive or wait until Texas files a brief replying to the arguments made by the battleground states. The justices acted quickly in rejecting the Pennsylvania lawsuit on Tuesday, but they could bide their time as they have in other election-related cases.
  • If the court refuses to take up the lawsuit, it's another nail in the coffin for Trump's hopes to reverse his election loss.
  • If it acts in the other direction, it will be another dramatic and unprecedented turn in the 2020 election, guaranteeing the President will continue to challenge Biden's victory.
  • "There's nothing unique about Texas' claims here, most of which have already been brought in other suits against the same four states," said Vladeck, noting that if Trump and other states are joining in, it could weaken the suggestion the Texas case is unique.
  • The GOP "used to be a party for states' rights," Ginsberg said. "I can't imagine something that is less faithful to the principle of states' rights than a Texas attorney general trying to tell other states how to run their elections."
  • Sen. John Cornyn, the senior Texas Republican, told CNN that "I frankly struggle to understand the legal theory of it. Number one, why would a state, even such a great state as Texas, have a say-so on how other states administer their elections?
  • "Using the Covid-19 pandemic as a justification," Paxton wrote, officials in the battleground states "usurped their legislatures' authority and unconstitutionally revised their state's election statutes." He said they had done so through "executive fiat." He pointed specifically to mail-in ballots, which he said were placed "in drop boxes" with "little or no chain of custody," which weakened signature verification and witness requirements, which he called "the strongest security measures protecting the integrity of the vote."
  • First the court would have to allow Paxton to file the suit. Then the court would have to block certification of the Electoral College vote, determine that the four states had allowed massive amounts of "illegal" votes, have the states revisit their vote counts and then resubmit the numbers.
  • The President's campaign has been represented by former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani and attorney Jenna Ellis. In the current motion, however, Trump is being represented by John Eastman.
  • Trump has also asked GOP Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas -- the former solicitor general of the state -- to represent him at the Supreme Court in the unlikely event it hears oral arguments.
mimiterranova

Amy Coney Barrett Confirmed To Supreme Court : NPR - 0 views

www.npr.org/...y-barrett-to-the-supreme-court

shared by mimiterranova on 27 Oct 20 - No Cached
  • The Senate has voted to confirm Judge Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court, just about a week before Election Day and 30 days after she was nominated by President Trump to fill the seat of the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.
  • Democrats have railed against the advancement of Barrett's nomination so close to Election Day, after the Republican-led Senate refused to hold hearings for then-President Obama's nominee, Merrick Garland, nearly eight months before that year's election.
  • The 48-year-old judge's confirmation solidifies the court's conservative majority, potentially shaping the future of abortion rights and health care law for generations.
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  • "Nearly every Republican in this chamber led by the majority leader four years ago refused to even consider the Supreme Court nomination of a Democratic president on the grounds ... that we should wait until after the presidential election because the American people deserved a voice in the selection of their next justice," he said on Sunday.
  • President Trump is doubling down on claims that the results of the presidential election must be known on election night itself, falsely asserting "that's the way it's been and that's the way it should be."
  • The decision allows election officials in Pennsylvania to count absentee ballots received as late as Friday, as long as they are postmarked by Nov. 3. The president denied that he would try to declare victor
  • y prematurely.
  • "I think it's a terrible thing when people or states are allowed to tabulate ballots for a long period of time after the election is over," Trump said. "I think it's terrible when we can't know the results of an election the night of the election in a modern-day age of computers," he added.
  • "If people wanted to get their ballots in, they should have gotten their ballots in long before [Election Day]. They could have put their ballots in a month ago."
  • But that's not the way voting in America works.
  • For starters, no state ever reports its final results on election night.
  • Delaware, in fact, is the only state that will certify its results within the same week as Election Day. Most states will certify their results in the last two weeks of November, with some states even extending until the second week of December.
  • Americans are breaking early voting records, with more than 93 million votes already cast. Of that, 59 million mail-in ballots have been returned, with 32 million ballots still waiting to be mailed back, according to the U.S. Elections Project.
  • Election experts predicted that there would be a large increase in mail-in ballots this cycle because of concerns over the coronavirus pandemic.
  • "The counties are staffing up, have a ton of equipment, best practices in place, and are planning, for the most part, to count 24/7 until it's done."
  • FACT CHECK: Trump Falsely Claims That Votes Shouldn't Be Counted After Election Day
carolinehayter

How Police, National Guard And Military Are Preparing For Election Day Tensions : NPR - 0 views

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Politics us trump election police military

shared by carolinehayter on 27 Oct 20 - No Cached
  • Milley told NPR's Morning Edition. "And if there is, it'll be handled appropriately by the courts and by the U.S. Congress. There's no role for the U.S. military in determining the outcome of a U.S. election. Zero. There is no role there."
    • carolinehayter
      carolinehayter on 27 Oct 20
       
      And that's one of the (many) reasons Barrett's confirmation was so strongly opposed
  • Nov. 3 promises to be an Election Day unlike any other, and public safety entities say they're preparing for tensions and the possibility of violence.
  • Poll workers are usually the first line of defense in case of disputes between voters, though they may be backed up by private security guards. Some local election authorities say they'll be adding guards
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  • Most jurisdictions are not planning to post uniformed police at polling stations, because tradition and local laws keep officers at a distance to avoid an impression of voter intimidation.
  • Given this year's tensions, and the fact that the police themselves are a major issue in the election, the question of their presence at polling places has become a partisan flashpoint in some places.
  • Democrats in Miami complained about a uniformed police officer wearing a Trump face mask at an early-voting location, and he faces potential discipline by his department.
  • New Jersey is considering last-minute legislation to restrict the presence of officers at polling places, a debate that quickly acquired partisan overtones. A similar dispute broke out in North Carolina, where the Board of Elections issued a memo reminding uniformed police officers to stay away from polling places, and state Republicans objected.
  • "We want to respect the concern [about voter intimidation]," Newton says. But he says because voters have other ways to cast ballots, "it's not a valid issue, that someone has to face down a uniformed law enforcement officer to vote in North Carolina."
  • One unresolved question in Michigan is whether private citizens will be allowed to carry firearms openly around polling places. The state's open carry law is generally quite permissive, but Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson issued a directive saying visible guns would not be allowed at the polls or other election-related offices this year. But police chiefs have cast doubt on whether they have the legal grounds to enforce such an order, and it's also attracted a lawsuit.
  • Away from the polls, police departments are planning to have more officers on hand on Election Day, especially in cities that saw unrest over the summer.
  • Chicago endured extensive looting and property damage over the summer, something police superintendent David Brown believes was coordinated by what he calls "agitators" embedded in legitimate protests.
  • "From those lessons learned over the summer, we are planning for that to be a feature of peaceful protests," on Election Day, Brown said at a press conference last week.
  • National Guard soldiers around the nation will take part in security operations for the election — but only for cybersecurity, assisting state officials by trying to prevent foreign governments and others from interfering with the vote. The National Guard, like the active military, does not want to get involved in physical security at the polls, leaving that up to poll workers and if need be local police.
  • Military officials tell NPR they want to maintain their apolitical stance, and not get involved in partisan politics, saying uniformed soldiers at the polls would lead to charges the military favors one candidate over another.
  • Military officials don't anticipate any particular problems of violence at the polls themselves, but they do say that with the bitter campaign, street protests and the rise of armed groups, violence could occur after the election, regardless of who wins.
  • If violence erupts and local police are unable to handle it, a governor could activate Guard units
  • Governors are in charge of their state Guard forces, but a president can "federalize" the Guard and take control from a governor. That has happened in rare occasions in the 1950s and '60s during school integration.
  • And a president can invoke the Insurrection Act and send in active troops. That, too, is rare. In 1992, California Gov. Pete Wilson asked President George H.W. Bush to send in active troops to deal with protests after the Rodney King beating in Los Angeles.
  • Defense Secretary Mark Esper in June publicly opposed using the Insurrection Act, saying Guard troops would make more sense since they come from the local communities they would protect. That angered the president, who sources say threatened to fire Esper but was talked out of such a move so close to the election.
  • President Trump has added to the election tensions by suggesting on numerous occasions that he might not accept the results of the vote, unless it is "fair." And that has led to speculation the president might try to hold onto power, and the military might be called on to remove him. Such talk is strongly dismissed by the nation's top military officer, Gen. Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
Javier E

He Could Have Seen What Was Coming: Behind Trump's Failure on the Virus - The New York ... - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...oronavirus-trump-response.html

pandemic failure trump policy politics crisis

shared by Javier E on 12 Apr 20 - No Cached
  • “Any way you cut it, this is going to be bad,” a senior medical adviser at the Department of Veterans Affairs, Dr. Carter Mecher, wrote on the night of Jan. 28, in an email to a group of public health experts scattered around the government and universities. “The projected size of the outbreak already seems hard to believe.”
  • A week after the first coronavirus case had been identified in the United States, and six long weeks before President Trump finally took aggressive action to confront the danger the nation was facing — a pandemic that is now forecast to take tens of thousands of American lives — Dr. Mecher was urging the upper ranks of the nation’s public health bureaucracy to wake up and prepare for the possibility of far more drastic action.
  • Throughout January, as Mr. Trump repeatedly played down the seriousness of the virus and focused on other issues, an array of figures inside his government — from top White House advisers to experts deep in the cabinet departments and intelligence agencies — identified the threat, sounded alarms and made clear the need for aggressive action.
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  • The president, though, was slow to absorb the scale of the risk and to act accordingly, focusing instead on controlling the message, protecting gains in the economy and batting away warnings from senior officials.
  • Mr. Trump’s response was colored by his suspicion of and disdain for what he viewed as the “Deep State” — the very people in his government whose expertise and long experience might have guided him more quickly toward steps that would slow the virus, and likely save lives.
  • The slow start of that plan, on top of the well-documented failures to develop the nation’s testing capacity, left administration officials with almost no insight into how rapidly the virus was spreading. “We were flying the plane with no instruments,” one official said.
  • But dozens of interviews with current and former officials and a review of emails and other records revealed many previously unreported details and a fuller picture of the roots and extent of his halting response as the deadly virus spread:
  • The National Security Council office responsible for tracking pandemics received intelligence reports in early January predicting the spread of the virus to the United States, and within weeks was raising options like keeping Americans home from work and shutting down cities the size of Chicago. Mr. Trump would avoid such steps until March.
  • Despite Mr. Trump’s denial weeks later, he was told at the time about a Jan. 29 memo produced by his trade adviser, Peter Navarro, laying out in striking detail the potential risks of a coronavirus pandemic: as many as half a million deaths and trillions of dollars in economic losses.
  • The health and human services secretary, Alex M. Azar II, directly warned Mr. Trump of the possibility of a pandemic during a call on Jan. 30, the second warning he delivered to the president about the virus in two weeks. The president, who was on Air Force One while traveling for appearances in the Midwest, responded that Mr. Azar was being alarmist
  • Mr. Azar publicly announced in February that the government was establishing a “surveillance” system
  • the task force had gathered for a tabletop exercise — a real-time version of a full-scale war gaming of a flu pandemic the administration had run the previous year. That earlier exercise, also conducted by Mr. Kadlec and called “Crimson Contagion,” predicted 110 million infections, 7.7 million hospitalizations and 586,000 deaths following a hypothetical outbreak that started in China.
  • By the third week in February, the administration’s top public health experts concluded they should recommend to Mr. Trump a new approach that would include warning the American people of the risks and urging steps like social distancing and staying home from work.
  • But the White House focused instead on messaging and crucial additional weeks went by before their views were reluctantly accepted by the president — time when the virus spread largely unimpeded.
  • When Mr. Trump finally agreed in mid-March to recommend social distancing across the country, effectively bringing much of the economy to a halt, he seemed shellshocked and deflated to some of his closest associates. One described him as “subdued” and “baffled” by how the crisis had played out. An economy that he had wagered his re-election on was suddenly in shambles.
  • He only regained his swagger, the associate said, from conducting his daily White House briefings, at which he often seeks to rewrite the history of the past several months. He declared at one point that he “felt it was a pandemic long before it was called a pandemic,” and insisted at another that he had to be a “cheerleader for the country,” as if that explained why he failed to prepare the public for what was coming.
  • Mr. Trump’s allies and some administration officials say the criticism has been unfair.
  • The Chinese government misled other governments, they say. And they insist that the president was either not getting proper information, or the people around him weren’t conveying the urgency of the threat. In some cases, they argue, the specific officials he was hearing from had been discredited in his eyes, but once the right information got to him through other channels, he made the right calls.
  • “While the media and Democrats refused to seriously acknowledge this virus in January and February, President Trump took bold action to protect Americans and unleash the full power of the federal government to curb the spread of the virus, expand testing capacities and expedite vaccine development even when we had no true idea the level of transmission or asymptomatic spread,” said Judd Deere, a White House spokesman.
  • Decision-making was also complicated by a long-running dispute inside the administration over how to deal with China
  • The Containment IllusionBy the last week of February, it was clear to the administration’s public health team that schools and businesses in hot spots would have to close. But in the turbulence of the Trump White House, it took three more weeks to persuade the president that failure to act quickly to control the spread of the virus would have dire consequences.
  • There were key turning points along the way, opportunities for Mr. Trump to get ahead of the virus rather than just chase it. There were internal debates that presented him with stark choices, and moments when he could have chosen to ask deeper questions and learn more. How he handled them may shape his re-election campaign. They will certainly shape his legacy.
  • Facing the likelihood of a real pandemic, the group needed to decide when to abandon “containment” — the effort to keep the virus outside the U.S. and to isolate anyone who gets infected — and embrace “mitigation” to thwart the spread of the virus inside the country until a vaccine becomes available.
  • Among the questions on the agenda, which was reviewed by The New York Times, was when the department’s secretary, Mr. Azar, should recommend that Mr. Trump take textbook mitigation measures “such as school dismissals and cancellations of mass gatherings,” which had been identified as the next appropriate step in a Bush-era pandemic plan.
  • The group — including Dr. Anthony S. Fauci of the National Institutes of Health; Dr. Robert R. Redfield of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and Mr. Azar, who at that stage was leading the White House Task Force — concluded they would soon need to move toward aggressive social distancing
  • A 20-year-old Chinese woman had infected five relatives with the virus even though she never displayed any symptoms herself. The implication was grave — apparently healthy people could be unknowingly spreading the virus — and supported the need to move quickly to mitigation.
  • The following day, Dr. Kadlec and the others decided to present Mr. Trump with a plan titled “Four Steps to Mitigation,” telling the president that they needed to begin preparing Americans for a step rarely taken in United States history.
  • a presidential blowup and internal turf fights would sidetrack such a move. The focus would shift to messaging and confident predictions of success rather than publicly calling for a shift to mitigation.
  • These final days of February, perhaps more than any other moment during his tenure in the White House, illustrated Mr. Trump’s inability or unwillingness to absorb warnings coming at him.
  • He instead reverted to his traditional political playbook in the midst of a public health calamity, squandering vital time as the coronavirus spread silently across the country.
  • A memo dated Feb. 14, prepared in coordination with the National Security Council and titled “U.S. Government Response to the 2019 Novel Coronavirus,” documented what more drastic measures would look like, including: “significantly limiting public gatherings and cancellation of almost all sporting events, performances, and public and private meetings that cannot be convened by phone. Consider school closures. Widespread ‘stay at home’ directives from public and private organizations with nearly 100% telework for some.”
  • his friend had a blunt message: You need to be ready. The virus, he warned, which originated in the city of Wuhan, was being transmitted by people who were showing no symptoms — an insight that American health officials had not yet accepted.
  • On the 18-hour plane ride home, Mr. Trump fumed as he watched the stock market crash after Dr. Messonnier’s comments. Furious, he called Mr. Azar when he landed at around 6 a.m. on Feb. 26, raging that Dr. Messonnier had scared people unnecessarily.
  • The meeting that evening with Mr. Trump to advocate social distancing was canceled, replaced by a news conference in which the president announced that the White House response would be put under the command of Vice President Mike Pence.
  • The push to convince Mr. Trump of the need for more assertive action stalled. With Mr. Pence and his staff in charge, the focus was clear: no more alarmist messages. Statements and media appearances by health officials like Dr. Fauci and Dr. Redfield would be coordinated through Mr. Pence’s office
  • It would be more than three weeks before Mr. Trump would announce serious social distancing efforts, a lost period during which the spread of the virus accelerated rapidly.Over nearly three weeks from Feb. 26 to March 16, the number of confirmed coronavirus cases in the United States grew from 15 to 4,226
  • The China FactorThe earliest warnings about coronavirus got caught in the crosscurrents of the administration’s internal disputes over China. It was the China hawks who pushed earliest for a travel ban. But their animosity toward China also undercut hopes for a more cooperative approach by the world’s two leading powers to a global crisis.
  • It was early January, and the call with a Hong Kong epidemiologist left Matthew Pottinger rattled.
  • Mr. Trump was walking up the steps of Air Force One to head home from India on Feb. 25 when Dr. Nancy Messonnier, the director of the National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases, publicly issued the blunt warning they had all agreed was necessary.
  • It was one of the earliest warnings to the White House, and it echoed the intelligence reports making their way to the National Security Council
  • some of the more specialized corners of the intelligence world were producing sophisticated and chilling warnings.
  • In a report to the director of national intelligence, the State Department’s epidemiologist wrote in early January that the virus was likely to spread across the globe, and warned that the coronavirus could develop into a pandemic
  • Working independently, a small outpost of the Defense Intelligence Agency, the National Center for Medical Intelligence, came to the same conclusion.
  • By mid-January there was growing evidence of the virus spreading outside China. Mr. Pottinger began convening daily meetings about the coronavirus
  • The early alarms sounded by Mr. Pottinger and other China hawks were freighted with ideology — including a push to publicly blame China that critics in the administration say was a distraction
  • And they ran into opposition from Mr. Trump’s economic advisers, who worried a tough approach toward China could scuttle a trade deal that was a pillar of Mr. Trump’s re-election campaign.
  • Mr. Pottinger continued to believe the coronavirus problem was far worse than the Chinese were acknowledging. Inside the West Wing, the director of the Domestic Policy Council, Joe Grogan, also tried to sound alarms that the threat from China was growing.
  • The Consequences of ChaosThe chaotic culture of the Trump White House contributed to the crisis. A lack of planning and a failure to execute, combined with the president’s focus on the news cycle and his preference for following his gut rather than the data cost time, and perhaps lives.
  • the hawks kept pushing in February to take a critical stance toward China amid the growing crisis. Mr. Pottinger and others — including aides to Secretary of State Mike Pompeo — pressed for government statements to use the term “Wuhan Virus.”Mr. Pompeo tried to hammer the anti-China message at every turn, eventually even urging leaders of the Group of 7 industrialized countries to use “Wuhan virus” in a joint statement.
  • Others, including aides to Mr. Pence, resisted taking a hard public line, believing that angering Beijing might lead the Chinese government to withhold medical supplies, pharmaceuticals and any scientific research that might ultimately lead to a vaccine.
  • Mr. Trump took a conciliatory approach through the middle of March, praising the job Mr. Xi was doing.
  • That changed abruptly, when aides informed Mr. Trump that a Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman had publicly spun a new conspiracy about the origins of Covid-19: that it was brought to China by U.S. Army personnel who visited the country last October.
  • On March 16, he wrote on Twitter that “the United States will be powerfully supporting those industries, like Airlines and others, that are particularly affected by the Chinese Virus.”
  • Mr. Trump’s decision to escalate the war of words undercut any remaining possibility of broad cooperation between the governments to address a global threat
  • Mr. Pottinger, backed by Mr. O’Brien, became one of the driving forces of a campaign in the final weeks of January to convince Mr. Trump to impose limits on travel from China
  • he circulated a memo on Jan. 29 urging Mr. Trump to impose the travel limits, arguing that failing to confront the outbreak aggressively could be catastrophic, leading to hundreds of thousands of deaths and trillions of dollars in economic losses.
  • The uninvited message could not have conflicted more with the president’s approach at the time of playing down the severity of the threat. And when aides raised it with Mr. Trump, he responded that he was unhappy that Mr. Navarro had put his warning in writing.
  • From the time the virus was first identified as a concern, the administration’s response was plagued by the rivalries and factionalism that routinely swirl around Mr. Trump and, along with the president’s impulsiveness, undercut decision making and policy development.
  • Even after Mr. Azar first briefed him about the potential seriousness of the virus during a phone call on Jan. 18 while the president was at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida, Mr. Trump projected confidence that it would be a passing problem.
  • “We have it totally under control,” he told an interviewer a few days later while attending the World Economic Forum in Switzerland. “It’s going to be just fine.”
  • The efforts to sort out policy behind closed doors were contentious and sometimes only loosely organized.
  • That was the case when the National Security Council convened a meeting on short notice on the afternoon of Jan. 27. The Situation Room was standing room only, packed with top White House advisers, low-level staffers, Mr. Trump’s social media guru, and several cabinet secretaries. There was no checklist about the preparations for a possible pandemic,
  • Instead, after a 20-minute description by Mr. Azar of his department’s capabilities, the meeting was jolted when Stephen E. Biegun, the newly installed deputy secretary of state, announced plans to issue a “level four” travel warning, strongly discouraging Americans from traveling to China. The room erupted into bickering.
  • A few days later, on the evening of Jan. 30, Mick Mulvaney, the acting White House chief of staff at the time, and Mr. Azar called Air Force One as the president was making the final decision to go ahead with the restrictions on China travel. Mr. Azar was blunt, warning that the virus could develop into a pandemic and arguing that China should be criticized for failing to be transparent.
  • Stop panicking, Mr. Trump told him.That sentiment was present throughout February, as the president’s top aides reached for a consistent message but took few concrete steps to prepare for the possibility of a major public health crisis.
  • As February gave way to March, the president continued to be surrounded by divided factions even as it became clearer that avoiding more aggressive steps was not tenable.
  • the virus was already multiplying across the country — and hospitals were at risk of buckling under the looming wave of severely ill people, lacking masks and other protective equipment, ventilators and sufficient intensive care beds. The question loomed over the president and his aides after weeks of stalling and inaction: What were they going to do?
  • Even then, and even by Trump White House standards, the debate over whether to shut down much of the country to slow the spread was especially fierce.
  • In a tense Oval Office meeting, when Mr. Mnuchin again stressed that the economy would be ravaged, Mr. O’Brien, the national security adviser, who had been worried about the virus for weeks, sounded exasperated as he told Mr. Mnuchin that the economy would be destroyed regardless if officials did nothing.
  • in the end, aides said, it was Dr. Deborah L. Birx, the veteran AIDS researcher who had joined the task force, who helped to persuade Mr. Trump. Soft-spoken and fond of the kind of charts and graphs Mr. Trump prefers, Dr. Birx did not have the rough edges that could irritate the president. He often told people he thought she was elegant.
  • During the last week in March, Kellyanne Conway, a senior White House adviser involved in task force meetings, gave voice to concerns other aides had. She warned Mr. Trump that his wished-for date of Easter to reopen the country likely couldn’t be accomplished. Among other things, she told him, he would end up being blamed by critics for every subsequent death caused by the virus.
katherineharron

As Trump refuses to commit to a peaceful transition, Pentagon stresses it will play no ... - 0 views

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election

shared by katherineharron on 25 Sep 20 - No Cached
  • President Donald Trump this week refused to commit to a peaceful transition should he lose the November election, leading some to speculate that he might seek to use the tools of presidential power including his role as commander in chief of the armed forces to prolong his time in office.
  • "The Constitution and laws of the US and the states establish procedures for carrying out elections, and for resolving disputes over the outcome of elections ... I do not see the US military as part of this process," Milley said in the letter to two members of the House Armed Services Committee.
  • "The Department of Defense does not play a role in the transition of power after an election,"
  • ...12 more annotations...
  • Pentagon leaders have been concerned Trump may invoke the Insurrection Act to deploy active duty troops as well as civilian law enforcement to quell protests sparked by the killing of George Floyd in June.
  • "Those who suggest that the military would have any role in transition, they are being equally irresponsible," he added, saying "the military should have nothing to do with partisan politics and nothing to do even with any talk of a transition between administrations."
  • While Trump has not suggested he'd call on the military to decide the election, his opponent, former Vice President Joe Biden, has publicly floated the idea of top military leaders playing a role in ousting Trump should he refuse to leave office following an electoral defeat, a suggestion that drew pushback from Pentagon officials and experts on civilian military relations.
  • Defense Secretary Mark Esper made the Pentagon's position on the Insurrection Act clear in a June press conference. "The option to use active duty forces in a law enforcement role should only be used as a matter of last resort, and only in the most urgent and dire of situations. We are not in one of those situations now. I do not support invoking the Insurrection Act," he told reporters.
  • While the Insurrection Act does empower a president to deploy armed forces in certain situations to restore law and order, some experts believe doing so would be problematic in the event of an electoral dispute.
  • "While the President could invoke the Act on his own relating to an election dispute, that invocation would be immediately subject to legal challenge and, barring drastic and completely unforeseen circumstances, would be struck down in the courts," Elie Honig, a CNN legal analyst, said.
  • "All this bulls--- about how the president is going to stay in office and seize power? I've never heard of any of that crap. I mean, I'm the attorney general. I would think I would have heard about it," Barr told the Chicago Tribune earlier this month.
  • "Our laws and history make clear that the military has no formal role in resolving electoral disputes; that job falls in various manifestations to voters, the states, Congress, and the courts, and if there is any need for enforcement of electoral procedures or security, that is the job of civilian law enforcement in the first place, not the military," Honig said.
  • "It is not entirely certain that the president holds power to declare martial law -- particularly relating to his own election -- and any such attempt by a president almost certainly would be challenged in court and deemed illegal hence, not recognized by the military," Honing said.
  • "There is the mechanism of governing, I have spoken to our defense leaders about this issue," the Chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, Democrat Rep. Adam Smith, told CNN's Erin Burnett Thursday.
  • "No matter what, President Trump is going to be President until January 20.
  • In his closing remarks during a virtual town hall Thursday, Milley encouraged US troops to remain apolitical.
katherineharron

Election officials contradict Trump's voter-fraud conspiracy theories - CNNPolitics - 0 views

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shared by katherineharron on 13 Nov 20 - No Cached
  • A group of national, state and private election officials said in a joint statement Thursday that there is no evidence of any voting system being compromised in the 2020 election despite President Donald Trump's deluge of election fraud conspiracies.
  • "The November 3rd election was the most secure in American history. Right now, across the country, election officials are reviewing and double checking the entire election process prior to finalizing the result," the Election Infrastructure Government Coordinating Council and the Election Infrastructure Sector Coordinating Executive Committees said.
  • "There is no evidence that any voting system deleted or lost votes, changed votes, or was in any way compromised."
  • ...8 more annotations...
  • internal debate continues to rage over the wisdom of continuing with the legal challenges and requests for recounts in several states.
  • This includes falsely claiming during an election night address that he had already won reelection
  • Trump has refused to accept the results, instead pushing baseless conspiracies that his second term is being stolen.
  • Since last week, the President has been advised on numerous occasions that it's highly unlikely he will prevail in the courts, but he has plowed ahead anyway.
  • the President is sowing distrust in the electoral process by making claims that votes were changed and calling for hundreds of thousands of votes to be thrown out.
  • "CISA sees its first principle as protecting democratic processes, not protecting an individual," the official said.
  • "While we know there are many unfounded claims and opportunities for misinformation about the process of our elections, we can assure you we have the utmost confidence in the security and integrity of our elections, and you should too," the election officials said in concluding their statement.
  • "When you have questions, turn to elections officials as trusted voices as they administer elections."
katherineharron

Trump's push to overturn election result tears through GOP - CNNPolitics - 0 views

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election

shared by katherineharron on 03 Jan 21 - No Cached
  • President Donald Trump is tearing the Republican Party apart on his way out the door, forcing Republicans to choose sides as they wrestle with the future of the party in the wake of Trump's overt attempts to subvert the results of the election.
  • The President's fixation with overturning the results of a fair and free election is the latest crusade throwing the GOP into a full-blown crisis mode as members attack one another's motives
  • There's no evidence of widespread election fraud
  • ...15 more annotations...
  • But that hasn't stopped a dozen Republican senators -- including Sen. Josh Hawley of Missouri -- and more than 100 House Republicans from planning to join with Trump to reject the Electoral College votes in states that Biden won when Congress convenes a joint session on Wednesday.
  • The effort will only delay the inevitable, as the objections are sure to fail in both the House and the Senate,
  • For weeks, McConnell privately warned his party against making an unforced error by forcing votes on the Electoral College objections, fully aware that questioning the results of the election when Congress meets Wednesday would expose rifts in his ranks and force members up for reelection in 2022 into an unenviable political position.
  • "I'm concerned about the division in America, that's the biggest issue, but obviously this is not healthy for the Republican Party either," said Sasse
  • A group of nearly a dozen Republican senators announced Saturday that they would vote for Hawley's objection when it was brought forward, unless a commission was created to study voter fraud, something that is unlikely.
  • Trump's close ally, Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, tweeted on Sunday that proposing an election commission was "not effectively fighting for President Trump" and added "It appears to be more of a political dodge than an effective remedy."
  • But the long-term effects could stretch for years -- and into the 2022 Senate races, with Trump and his allies threatening primary challenges to those Republicans who cross him and vote against the objections. Aides to GOP members still trying to decide what to do next describe an anxious time for the party as members grapple with what choice to make.
  • Throughout Trump's four years in office, Republicans have often expressed frustration or looked the other way at some of Trump's efforts and rhetoric, though they rarely crossed him. But in the past month, many Republicans voted to override Trump's veto of a popular defense policy bill, the first override of Trump's presidency, and McConnell blocked his attempts to give people $2,000 stimulus checks instead of the $600 in the spending and Covid-19 bill that Trump reluctantly signed.
  • "There is substantial reason for concern about the precedent Congressional objections will set here. By objecting to electoral slates, members are unavoidably asserting that Congress has the authority to overturn elections and overrule state and federal courts," Cheney wrote. "Such objections set an exceptionally dangerous precedent, threatening to steal states' explicit constitutional responsibility for choosing the President and bestowing it instead on Congress. This is directly at odds with the Constitution's clear text and our core beliefs as Republicans," she added.
  • Former House Speaker Paul Ryan discouraged his former colleagues from objecting to the election results in a statement Sunday, saying it was "difficult to conceive of a more anti-democratic and anti-conservative act than a federal intervention to overturn the results of state-certified elections and disenfranchise millions of Americans."
  • "I think that if you have a plan, it should [be] a plan that has some chance of working. And neither of the two proposals that have been advanced will produce a result," said Sen. Roy Blunt, a Republican from Missouri, who added: "I don't believe it has much long-term impact on our conference."
  • On Thursday morning, McConnell repeatedly called on Hawley to make his case to members on why he was objecting to the results from at least one state. Hawley wasn't on the call, however, and later responded by email to the conference on his rationale. Then over the weekend, multiple senators including Romney, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska and Pat Toomey of Pennsylvania skewered any questions that the election had been compromised.
  • Romney specifically said the effort to overturn the election was an "egregious ploy" that "may enhance the political ambition of some, but dangerously threatens our Democratic Republic."
  • "I read Sen. Toomey's statement," Hawley said. "I recognize that our caucus will have varied opinions about this subject. That's not surprising. But I also believe we should avoid putting words into each other's mouths," Hawley wrote.
  • "The 2020 election is over. All challenges through recounts and appeals have been exhausted. At this point, further attempts to cast doubt on the legitimacy of the 2020 Presidential election are contrary to the clearly expressed will of the American people and only serve to undermine Americans' confidence in the already determined election results," the senators said.
katyshannon

Nepal just elected its first female president - Quartz - 0 views

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nepal female president politics history

shared by katyshannon on 29 Oct 15 - No Cached
  • A month after adopting a new national constitution, Nepal has elected Bidhya Devi Bhandari as its next president. She will be the country’s first female president and only the second president since Nepal became a democratic republic in 2008.
  • The new constitution required an almost entirely new government,
  • beginning with parliament’s election of prime minister Khadga Prasad Oli. He and Bhandari both represent Nepal’s Unified Marxist-Leninist Communist party.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • It also required that either the president or vice president be a woman, and that one-third of parliamentarians be women. Parliament’s first female speaker, Onsari Gharti Magar, was elected last week.
  • Bhandari became involved in politics as a teenager in Nepal the 1980s, but stepped away from the action after marrying communist leader Madan Bhandari and having two children with him. After becoming a widow in 1993, when her husband was killed in a mysterious car accident, she stepped back in and campaigned to take his place in parliament.
  • Nepal is still reeling from the violence and unrest sparked by the adoption of the new constitution. Minority groups complain that it marginalizes them, while others are dismayed at its secularism. India, Nepal’s neighbor, appears to have sided with the dissenters by instituting an unofficial blockade of fuel and other supplies across its border.
  • katyshannon on 29 Oct 15
     
    Nepal just a elected its first female president
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