Former President Barack Obama issued a warning to America years ago. He said democracy is in danger and that we should NOT take for granted that it will always be around. Interestingly, his words couldn’t be more true today.
Politics
For weeks, political pundits have suggested that Donald Trump will not run for president in 2024 simply because his ego won’t allow him to face the possibility of losing again. However, those political opinions have failed to consider that Trump might rig the results in advance and in his own favor.
It’s no secret that Donald Trump loves power. He also loves the image of dictators and autocrats who completely control their non-democratic nations with an iron fist based on their own personal whims. So, for him to steal back the presidency and hold the power to thwart his enemies and excuse/pardon his family, friends, and those who agree to do his bidding would not only be a coup, but the crime of the century.
According to separate reports from The Atlantic, Axios, and Vanity Fair, Donald Trump and his Republican sycophants are actively laying the groundwork to steal the 2024 presidential election and destroy democracy in America for good. Or, in other words, Trump wants an America where whatever HE says is the law — and it appears there are just enough Republicans who are so fearful of him that they’re willing to go along with it.
Per Axios:
Trump and his associates are systematically reshaping the Republican Party, working to install handpicked loyalists across federal and state governments and destroy those he feels have been disloyal, sources close to the former president tell Axios. Why it matters: If most or all of Trump’s candidates win, he will go into the 2024 election cycle with far more people willing to do his bidding who run the elections in key states. He will also have a well-funded policy and political infrastructure and his own social media ecosystem.
His apparatus touches everything from unseating governors, members of Congress, state legislators, and secretaries of state, to formulating policy and influencing local school boards.
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Per The Atlantic:
For more than a year now, with tacit and explicit support from their party’s national leaders, state Republican operatives have been building an apparatus of election theft. Elected officials in Arizona, Texas, Georgia, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Michigan, and other states have studied Donald Trump’s crusade to overturn the 2020 election. They have noted the points of failure and have taken concrete steps to avoid failure next time. Some of them have rewritten statutes to seize partisan control of decisions about which ballots to count and which to discard, which results to certify and which to reject. They are driving out or stripping power from election officials who refused to go along with the plot last November, aiming to replace them with exponents of the Big Lie. They are fine-tuning a legal argument that purports to allow state legislators to override the choice of the voters.
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Yes, folks, democracy is in danger!!
Trump and his MAGA Republicans across state legislatures have enacted dozens of voting laws just this year designed to help Trump and the GOP dismantle democracy. In fact, at least 10 bills introduced at the state level would, if enacted, allow partisan politicians to overturn legitimate election results in multiple states. This would make voting obsolete and mirror the democratic facade in Russia where Vladimir Putin always wins no matter what the voters do.
Concerned scholars of democracy are understandably sounding the alarm.
“The democratic emergency is already here,” said Richard L. Hasen, a professor of law and political science at UC Irvine. “We face a serious risk that American democracy as we know it will come to an end in 2024. But, urgent action is not happening.”
His words were beyond jarring.
Proof that democracy is in danger is evident in the fact that Trump and his flunkies are calling on an obscure 1887 law called the Electoral Count Act — that is desperately in need of a rewrite.
The Electoral Count Act, which grew out of the disputed election of 1876, says that a legislature can appoint its own electors at odds with the winner of a state’s popular vote if it concludes that voters “failed to make a choice” on Election Day. Now, the act doesn’t specify what “failed” means, making it just ambiguous enough to provide an opening for Republicans to claim (like they did in 2020) that unproven accusations of voter fraud could result in a “failed election,” giving the legislatures the power to overthrow the preferences of a state’s voters.
Fortunately, Democratic and Republican members of the House committee investigating the January 6th insurrection are planning to recommend that Congress revise the Electoral Count Act and prevent an attempt at stealing the 2024 election. However, will this be enough to halt Trump and his plot to kill America’s democratic traditions?
Democracy may not be dead (yet), but it could very well be as early as 2022 or ’24 if Donald Trump and his minions have their way.
Or, to put it more bluntly, we defeated Adolf Hitler in 1945 and we may very well need to defeat ‘Adolf’ Trump in 2024.
MSNBC: “Donald Trump came closer than anyone thought he could to toppling a free election a year ago,” or so Barton Gellman writes last week in The Atlantic in a piece perfectly pitched to the growing belief among Democrats that the former president, in 2024, will succeed in doing what he failed to do last year. This is not a new argument. Indeed, two months before the 2020 election, Gellman laid out a similar doomsday scenario. Republican state legislatures, in states won by Joe Biden, would be pressured by Trump to appoint a rival set of electors loyal to him. Then-Vice President Mike Pence, presiding over a joint session of Congress, would refuse to recognize any electors from those states, thus provoking a constitutional crisis and, potentially, a continuation of the Trump presidency. These efforts would also, it was said, receive the support of the Supreme Court and the Trump-controlled… Read more »