Lone Candle
Champion of Truth
Trump’s latest push to steal a Nebraska electoral vote appears to have flopped
https://www.vox.com/politics/2024/4/3/24119984/nebraska-electoral-college-vote-trump-biden-kirk
“It seems clear that neither Trump nor Vance is interested in a rational conversation. “With this rhetoric,” Bettina Makalintal noted on Eater last week, “the Republican party is picking from the most predictable xenophobic playbook and invoking time-worn fear mongering.” The idea that “immigrants ‘eat pets,'” she wrote, “is meant to signify their backwardness, danger, and inferiority, ” which “then justifies the Republican party’s efforts to curtail immigration.”
For politicians “perpetuating this false narrative,” Makalintal observed, “the truth has taken a back seat to the intended message: that immigrants are not ‘like us’ and therefore pose a threat to hard-won American lives.” Trump and Vance, she said, are implicitly drawing a contrast between “white ‘Americans’ with household pets like Fluffy and Fido as members of the family” and dark-skinned immigrants who are “trouncing on that which is held dear.”
Implicit racism aside, Vance is proving to be just as impervious to reality as the man he once condemned as a “total fraud” who was shockingly xenophobic, “reprehensible,” “a moral disaster,” and even possibly “America’s Hitler.””
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“All of this is reminiscent of Trump’s attitude toward claims of fraud during the 2020 presidential election, which he was eager to accept no matter how outlandish and unsubstantiated they were. During the notorious telephone conversation in which he pressured Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to “find” the votes necessary to reverse Joe Biden’s victory in that state, for example, Trump mentioned a rumor that election officials had “supposedly shredded…3,000 pounds of ballots.” That report, he conceded, “may or may not be true.” Yet within a few sentences, Trump had persuaded himself that the allegations were reliable enough to establish “a very sad situation” crying out for correction.
Where does Vance stand on Trump’s claim that the 2020 election was stolen through systematic fraud? He recently argued that Trump had raised concerns that were valid and troubling enough to justify “a big debate” about whether electoral votes for Biden from battleground states should have been officially recognized, although “that doesn’t necessarily mean the results would have been any different.” Alluding to “the problems that existed in 2020,” Vance said that if he had been vice president at the time, “I would’ve told the states like Pennsylvania, Georgia and so many others that we needed to have multiple slates of electors, and I think the U.S. Congress should’ve fought over it from there.”
Just as he refuses to definitively say whether he believes Hatians actually have been eating people’s cats and dogs in Springfield, Vance has declined to explicitly endorse or reject Trump’s stolen-election fantasy. In both cases, he seems to think the fact that someone made a wild allegation is enough to justify “a big debate” about whether it might be true, even when there is no evidence to support it.
You can either live in the real world or be Donald Trump’s running mate. Vance has made his choice.”
https://reason.com/2024/09/15/j-d-vance-says-it-does-not-matter-whether-rumors-of-pet-eating-migrants-are-true/
Trump tried to steal the last election, and may do so again, so former governors are trying to convince current state officials to not go along with such democracy-ending actions.
“A bipartisan group of former governors is launching a campaign to convince their successors to certify their states’ votes after the upcoming November election — and defy possible pressure from former President Donald Trump.
Nearly 20 ex-governors have signed onto the effort, which launches Tuesday on National Constitution Day, and more are expected in the weeks ahead. The push, organized by pro-democracy group Keep Our Republic, is sending a letter — shared first with POLITICO — to all 50 statehouses that urges sitting governors to certify election results by the December 11 deadline prescribed by federal law.
Four years ago, Trump failed in his push to have a pair of Republican chief executives in battleground states – Brian Kemp in Georgia and Doug Ducey in Arizona – overturn the voters’ will in their states. But the former executives fear he may do so again this winter and succeed this time, even though federal law has been strengthened to clarify that each governor’s role is simply to certify the winner of the popular vote.”
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“Trump’s plan four years ago centered on some battleground states submitting dueling sets of electors that would muddle the Electoral College certification process on Jan. 6 and have both sets voided. That would have allowed, according to the plan, then-Vice President Mike Pence to toss them out and give the election to Trump.
Former Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Corbett, a Republican, said he was “disappointed” that the nominee of his party refused to admit he lost in 2020 and appeared to be laying the groundwork for suggesting that this year’s election would be rigged.
“When you make allegations, you better have some evidence,” Corbett said. “And I have not seen any evidence.”
The group of former governors is hoping to provide political cover for those GOP executives who Trump may pressure.”
https://www.politico.com/news/2024/09/17/former-governors-urge-successors-certify-2024-election-results-00179445
“The “extra votes for parents” proposal came in a 2021 speech sponsored by the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, a conservative organization that encourages college students to engage with right-wing ideas. About halfway through the speech, Vance says that he wants to “take aim at the left, specifically the childless left.”
He knows these comments will be controversial: He says “I’m going to get in trouble for this,” and then asks the hosts if he’s being recorded. But he continues on by listing off leading Democratic politicians who didn’t have children at the time — Kamala Harris, Pete Buttigieg, Sen. Cory Booker, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez — and then asks, “Why have we let the Democrat Party become controlled by people who don’t have children?”
Of course, this is misleading: Harris is a stepmother and Buttigieg has become a father since Vance’s remarks. But the specific examples are less important than Vance’s general point, which is a moral one.
In his view, being a parent is the primary source of happiness and meaning in a person’s life, and people who don’t have kids can’t be trusted to make decisions in the interest of society writ large. Societies are good, per Vance, when they have babies; if they don’t have enough, they rot.
So what to do about it? Vance suggests borrowing ideas from Viktor Orbán, Hungary’s authoritarian prime minister who has made increasing Hungary’s birthrate a centerpiece of his policy agenda. But Vance also worries that a Hungarian model might not be possible because families suffer from a “structural democratic disadvantage”: children can’t vote. Hence, he concludes, we should let parents cast votes on their behalf.
“Let’s give votes to all the children in this country and let’s give control over votes to the parents in this country,” he says.
It’s an old idea called “Demeny voting,” named after 20th-century Hungarian demographer Paul Demeny (a vocal champion of the idea). Typically, the argument for Demeny voting is rooted in fairness. Children are people who, like anyone else, deserve political representation. Since they lack the maturity to make informed choices about their interests, parents should vote on their behalf — much in the same way they make decisions about children’s medical care or education. To get a sense of how this argument works, I’d recommend a recent paper by two law professors at Harvard and Northwestern making the case at length.
But for Vance, the policy isn’t just about ensuring fairness for families: it’s about punishing childless adults. Vance sees Demeny voting as a tool for creating two-tiered citizenship, one where parents have more and better political representation than other adults.
“When you go to the polls in this country, you should have more power — more of an ability to speak your voice in our democratic republic — than people who don’t have kids,” he says. “If you don’t have much of an investment in the future of this country, then maybe you shouldn’t get nearly the same voice.”
This is not the language of a liberal looking to expand the sphere of people whose interests are represented in the system to children. Vance’s defense of Demeny voting reveals a belief that people who aren’t like him, who don’t share his values about childrearing, are social unequals: non-participants in the political project of ensuring America survives across generations, and hence deserved targets of political discrimination.
In short, Vance wants to turn the law into a vehicle for legislating hard-right morality.”
https://www.vox.com/politics/363473/jd-vance-weird-voting-parents-demeny-postliberalism
“When the Supreme Court endorsed broad presidential immunity from criminal charges last month, it raised troubling questions about whether and how former occupants of the White House can be held accountable for abusing their powers. In an initial attempt to answer those questions, Special Counsel Jack Smith this week unveiled a superseding indictment in the federal election interference case against former President Donald Trump—the same case that prompted the Court’s ruling.
The viability of United States v. Trump is unclear at this point. The Supreme Court charged U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan with reviewing the charges against Trump in light of its ruling, and any decisions she makes will be subject to appeal. There is no chance that the case will go to trial before this year’s presidential election, and if Trump wins, we can be sure he will find a way to make it disappear. Smith’s revisions nevertheless suggest what it might take to successfully prosecute a former president despite the obstacles that the Supreme Court has erected.
The most notable change from the original indictment is the excision of any reference to Trump’s interactions with the Department of Justice (DOJ). The government initially portrayed those conversations, in which Trump pressured DOJ officials to investigate his baseless claims of systematic election fraud, as part of a criminal scheme to overturn President Joe Biden’s victory. But the Supreme Court explicitly ruled out criminal liability based on such contacts.
Trump was exercising his “conclusive and preclusive” authority as president when he urged the DOJ to validate his stolen-election fantasy, Chief Justice John Roberts wrote in the majority opinion. The executive branch has “‘exclusive authority and absolute discretion’ to decide which crimes to investigate and prosecute,” he wrote, “including with respect to allegations of election crime.”
As Justice Sonya Sotomayor noted in a dissent joined by Justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson, that holding seems to give presidents a lot of leeway to wield the federal government’s daunting prosecutorial powers against their political or personal enemies. Under the majority’s “view of core powers,” she said, “even fabricating evidence and insisting the [Justice] Department use it in a criminal case could be covered.”
Sotomayor also noted other possible implications of the majority’s position. When a president “uses his official powers in any way, under the majority’s reasoning, he now will be insulated from criminal prosecution,” she warned. “Orders the Navy’s Seal Team 6 to assassinate a political rival? Immune. Organizes a military coup to hold onto power? Immune. Takes a bribe in exchange for a pardon? Immune. Immune, immune, immune.”
Roberts faulted Sotomayor for “fear mongering on the basis of extreme hypotheticals.” But we do not need imaginary scenarios to understand the perils of assuring presidents that they need not worry about the threat of criminal prosecution as long as they are exercising their “core powers.”
The proposed articles of impeachment against Richard Nixon alleged, among other things, that he made “false or misleading statements to lawfully authorized investigative officers and employees of the United States” and that he interfered with “the conduct of investigations by the Department of Justice of the United States, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, [and] the office of Watergate Special Prosecution Force.” The issue of whether Nixon could have faced criminal charges based on those allegations was never litigated, because he resigned before he could be impeached, and his successor, Gerald Ford, granted him a pardon that covered any federal offenses he might have committed in office. But according to the Supreme Court’s reasoning in Trump v. United States, Nixon’s corrupt interactions with the DOJ would have been off limits for federal prosecutors.
Beyond that specific instruction, the Court was hazy about the extent of presidential immunity. “We conclude that under our constitutional structure of separated powers, the nature of Presidential power requires that a former President have some immunity from criminal prosecution for official acts during his tenure in office,” Roberts wrote. “At least with respect to the President’s exercise of his core constitutional powers, this immunity must be absolute. As for his remaining official actions, he is also entitled to immunity. At the current stage of proceedings in this case, however, we need not and do not decide whether that immunity must be absolute, or instead whether a presumptive immunity is sufficient.”
What about Trump’s interactions with Vice President Mike Pence? Trump persistently pressured Pence, in private and in public, to intervene on his behalf during the congressional ratification of the election results by rejecting electoral votes for Biden. Citing the “contingent” electors that his campaign had recruited in several battleground states, Trump urged Pence to send both sets of slates “back to the states” so that legislators could resolve a nonexistent controversy about the actual results. Pence repeatedly resisted, saying he had no authority to do what Trump asked.
The original indictment portrayed those interactions as a key part of a criminal conspiracy to change the outcome of the election. That aspect of the indictment presented “difficult questions,” according to the Supreme Court. “Whenever the President and Vice President discuss their official responsibilities, they engage in official conduct,” Roberts wrote. “Presiding over the January 6 certification proceeding at which Members of Congress count the electoral votes is a constitutional and statutory duty of the Vice President. The indictment’s allegations that Trump attempted to pressure the Vice President to take particular acts in connection with his role at the certification proceeding thus involve official conduct, and Trump is at least presumptively immune from prosecution for such conduct.”
The question, Roberts said, is “whether that presumption of immunity is rebutted under the circumstances.” He noted that the vice president is acting “in his capacity as President of the Senate,” part of the legislative branch, when he oversees the electoral vote count. The government therefore “may argue that consideration of the President’s communications with the Vice President concerning the certification proceeding does not pose ‘dangers of intrusion on the authority and functions of the Executive Branch.'”
Would that argument be correct? Maybe not, Roberts suggested: “The President may frequently rely on the Vice President in his capacity as President of the Senate to advance the President’s agenda in Congress. When the Senate is closely divided, for instance, the Vice President’s tiebreaking vote may be crucial for confirming the President’s nominees and passing laws that align with the President’s policies. Applying a criminal prohibition to the President’s conversations discussing such matters with the Vice President—even though they concern his role as President of the Senate—may well hinder the President’s ability to perform his constitutional functions. It is ultimately the Government’s burden to rebut the presumption of immunity.”
The new indictment tries to do that in several ways. It notes that Pence was Trump’s “own running mate,” meaning the intervention that Trump demanded would personally benefit both of them. It adds that “all of the conversations between [Trump] and [Pence] described below focused on [Trump] maintaining power.” The indictment points out that Trump “had no official responsibilities related to the certification proceeding, but he did have a personal interest as a candidate in being named the winner of the election.” It later reiterates that Trump “had no official role” in the certification process.
The indictment also emphasizes the private character of other conduct that might be construed as “official acts.” Regarding Trump’s pressure on state officials to reverse Biden’s victories, for example, the indictment notes that Trump “had no official responsibilities related to any state’s certification of the election results.” Discussing Trump’s “fake electors” scheme, the indictment likewise notes that he “had no official responsibilities related to the convening of legitimate electors or their signing and mailing of their certificates of vote.”
Like the original indictment, the revised version describes the notorious telephone conversation in which Trump leaned on Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to “find” the votes necessary to reverse the election outcome in that state. But the indictment makes a point of noting that the participants in that call included “private attorneys” and White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, who “sometimes handled private and Campaign-related logistics” for Trump.
The indictment still relies on Trump’s social media posts to make the case that he pushed a phony grievance aimed at preventing Biden from taking office. But it argues that such communications should not be viewed as “official acts.”
Although Trump “sometimes used his Twitter account to communicate with the public, as President, about official actions and policies,” the indictment says, “he also regularly used it for personal purposes—including to spread knowingly false claims of election fraud, exhort his supporters to travel to Washington, D.C. on January 6, pressure the Vice President to misuse his ceremonial role in the certification proceeding, and leverage the events at the Capitol on January 6 to unlawfully retain power.” And when Trump riled up his supporters that day, stoking their outrage at the prospect that Congress was about to recognize Biden’s supposedly fraudulent victory, he was speaking at “a privately-funded, privately-organized political rally.”
The indictment lists five alleged co-conspirators, “none of whom were government officials during the conspiracies and all of whom were acting in a private capacity.” It describes four as “private attorney[s]” and one as “a private political consultant.””
https://reason.com/2024/08/28/a-revised-trump-indictment-tries-to-overcome-the-presumption-of-presidential-immunity/
“The refugee crisis heightened the stakes for culturally conservative voters, forcing them to choose between centrist parties that were more welcoming to migrants and potentially antidemocratic extremists who opposed it. Many of them chose the latter, prioritizing preserving the traditional white-dominant society over protecting their democracy.
Across Europe, far-right parties started to reap electoral dividends. In Hungary in particular, the surge in power of anti-immigrant politics allowed a government that had already moved in an authoritarian direction to push a new and potent propaganda line, harnessing the reactionary spirit to consolidate its hold on power.
Similar events took place outside Europe. Post-Cold War Israel went through multidecade struggles over its ethnoreligious identity and occupation of Palestinian land, ultimately creating conditions for the reactionary spirit to spread from a small handful of extremists to a significant portion of the population. In India, the reactionary right’s rise began with a staged crisis designed to bring out the Hindu majority’s unease with India’s vision of equality.”
https://www.vox.com/politics/361136/far-right-authoritarianism-germany-reactionary-spirit
“Donald Trump’s allies have laid out sweeping plans to reshape the executive branch of the federal government if he is returned to power, plans that involve firing perhaps tens of thousands of career civil servants and replacing them with handpicked MAGA allies.
But how far, exactly, would Trump go in trying to tear down what he calls the “deep state?” The answer hasn’t been clear.
In picking J.D. Vance as his vice president, he’s picked someone who will egg him on to go very far indeed.
“If I was giving him one piece of advice” for a second term, Vance said on a 2021 podcast:
“Fire every single midlevel bureaucrat, every civil servant in the administrative state, replace them with our people.”
That was no idle talk. To an extent unusual for a politician — and perhaps because he hasn’t been in politics very long — Vance is interested in big ideas. He’s been deeply influenced by thinkers on the movement known as the New Right, who want to seize and transform societal institutions they believe are dominated by the left.
A big part of that would involve a restored President Trump purging any resistance to him, or checks on his power, from the executive branch.”
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“As Trump was about to leave office in 2020, he finally got around to trying to do something about the supposed “deep state”: He issued an executive order known as Schedule F.
This order laid the groundwork for reclassifying as many as 50,000 career civil servant jobs as political appointees who could then be fired and replaced by Trump. He was out of office before it could be implemented, however, and Biden quickly revoked it.
There’s been much fear about Trump restoring this policy in his second term, replacing a great many nonpartisan career experts with political hacks or ideologues willing to go along with his extreme or corrupt plans.
Such a move could be implemented in any number of ways, from the more limited and less disruptive to more sweeping and very disruptive. Considering Trump has only intermittent interest in the details of policy and implementation, I’ve thought that how this plays out would depend on who staffs his administration, since he could be pulled in various directions. Advisers worried about chaos and political blowback could counsel restraint.
Vance would not do that. He would be a key voice in Trump’s administration urging him to go very big indeed.
Elsewhere in the podcast, Vance said that the courts would inevitably “stop” Trump from trying to fire so many employees. When they do, Vance went on, Trump should “stand before the country like Andrew Jackson did, and say, ‘The chief justice has made his ruling. Now let him enforce it.’”
That is: Vance urged that Trump radically remake the executive branch even if the Supreme Court said doing so was illegal.”
https://www.vox.com/politics/361455/jd-vance-trump-vice-president-rnc-speech
13 Russians indicted on election meddling charges
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E-iptWSM_YI
“At the behest of Trump and his allies, the RNC approved a new GOP platform, one free of calls for federal abortion bans or any explicit opposition to same-sex marriage. The Republicans’ official agenda also forswears any cuts to Medicare and Social Security, including increases to the retirement age. All of these stances contradict longstanding conservative movement goals, and all three bring the Republican Party into closer alignment with public opinion.
Meanwhile, Trump used some of the RNC’s primetime speaking slots to signal sympathy for nonwhite voters, younger Americans, and union members. The biracial model and rapper Amber Rose gave a speech that invited young, historically liberal voters to rethink their skepticism of Trump and his party. “The truth is that the media has lied to us about Donald Trump. I know this because for a long time I believed those lies,” Rose declared, explaining that she eventually realized, “Donald Trump and his supporters don’t care if you’re Black, white, gay, or straight. It’s all love. And that’s when it hit me. These are my people.”
The RNC’s outreach to union voters was even more concerted. On the convention’s first night, Teamsters president Sean O’Brien enjoyed the most prominent speaking slot. The union leader did not actually endorse Trump and spent much of his address on diatribes against corporate greed that received tepid support in the convention hall.
To all but the most attentive viewers, however, O’Brien’s status as the keynote speaker overshadowed the absence of a formal endorsement: By all appearances, the head of one of America’s largest unions was vouching for Trump’s commitment to workers’ interests.
Taken together, the RNC’s four-day infomercial for Trump’s GOP was far more professionally orchestrated and broadly accessible than its 2020 and 2016 predecessors, which often seemed to be made by and for Fox News addicts.
Yet other aspects of the convention betrayed the strange, illiberal, and authoritarian character of Trump’s politics. As well-managed as the Trump campaign has been to this point, it cannot escape the inherent liabilities of the man it’s trying to sell.”
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“Vance is among the most openly authoritarian Republicans in Washington. He has said that he would have helped Trump overturn the 2020 election results, raised money for January 6 rioters, called on the DOJ to launch a criminal investigation against an anti-Trump Washington Post columnist, touted plans for consolidating the president’s authority over the federal bureaucracy, and argued that Trump should simply defy any court orders that obstruct such a power grab.
Traditionally, presidential candidates use their VP picks to assuage potential concerns that swing voters might have about them or balance out the ticket demographically. Vance’s selection, by contrast, exacerbates Trump’s biggest political liabilities: the perception that he is an authoritarian extremist whose election would threaten abortion rights.
Nevertheless, Trump picked him precisely because Vance’s current ideology closely mirrors his own. According to the Atlantic’s Tim Alberta, the Trump campaign had initially planned to pick a milquetoast, unthreatening running mate, such as North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum. But Trump was eventually persuaded that he needed a fellow true-believing populist to help him enact his most far-reaching ambitions.”
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“The Republican nominee’s acceptance speech was the longest ever given, meandering across 92 bizarre and tedious minutes. This excess was a direct reflection of the authoritarian nature of Trump’s candidacy. The nominee of a healthy democratic political party must balance their own narcissistic appetite for attention against the interests of the various constituencies they represent.
Having consolidated his personality cult’s control of the GOP, Trump faced no such constraint. His speech did not stretch to marathon length because of its abundance of substantive content. Rather, it consumed so much time because Trump allowed himself to supplement nearly every passage with pointless and tiresome ad-libbing, after detailing his own narrowly averted assassination in painstaking detail.
A less weird and authoritarian Republican nominee might have also drummed up panic about undocumented immigration. But they probably wouldn’t have paused in the middle of such demagogy to ask the crowd, “Has anyone seen The Silence of the Lambs?” and then say, incongruously, “The late, great Hannibal Lecter.”
Trump’s endless, self-indulgent rambling was alienating enough in and of itself. Even more unnerving was the spectacle of an increasingly bored crowd struggling to humor their dear leader with increasingly strained outbursts of enthusiasm.”
https://www.vox.com/politics/361751/rnc-trump-speech-vance-2024
“Hasina’s exit on an India-bound military helicopter came after crowds broke a curfew and stormed the prime minister’s residence in the capital Dhaka, following weeks of bloody protest.
The movement that ultimately toppled her started with students frustrated at their lack of job prospects and snowballed to include ordinary Bangladeshis facing increasingly tough economic conditions. But the jubilant scenes in the capital Dhaka come at great cost; around 300 people have been killed since the protests started in June, and the country’s future remains uncertain as a military-backed caretaker government steps in.
After a decade and a half in power, Hasina’s legacy is complicated. On the one hand, her government built modern infrastructure and improved development opportunities, especially for the poor. But she also increasingly cracked down on the press, as well as the opposition, and as time went on, many forms of dissent.
Army General Waker-uz-Zaman announced Monday that the military had taken control of the government; parliament is being dissolved, and the government is formulating a plan for fresh elections.
“The country is going through a revolutionary period,” Zaman said in a national television address. “We request you to have faith in the army of the country. Please don’t go back to the path of violence and please return to nonviolent and peaceful ways.”
Though a people-power movement has won a victory in driving Hasina out, the young democracy is entering a period of major uncertainty; indeed, what happens next for Bangladesh is anyone’s guess.”
https://www.vox.com/world-politics/365259/bangladesh-sheikh-hasina-awami-protests-bnp