Has the Republican Party Rejected Democracy?

As the Democrat presidential veer to the left, the Republican Party has veered far right and, as a column in the New York Times, suggests looks to a form of authoritarian rule to maintain its power.  Indeed, in today's GOP, the goal is to thwart the will of the majority of voters and restrict the voting of anyone outside of its increasing racist and religiously extreme white base. The GOP tools to accomplish this?  Voter ID laws, gerrymandering, using legislative rules to block bills that otherwise have popular support - think Mitch McConnell - and outright intimidation. Frighteningly, while today's GOP bears no resemblance to the party I and my family once belonged to and actively supported, far too many Americans refuse to open their eyes to what the GOP has become.  Those who do, seemingly embrace minority rule and the shredding of American institutions.  Here are some column highlights:

A number of observers, myself included, have written pieces in recent years arguing that the Republican Party is no longer simply trying to compete with and defeat the Democratic Party on a level playing field. Today, rather than simply playing the game, the Republicans are simultaneously trying to rig the game’s rules so that they never lose.

The aggressive gerrymandering, which the Supreme Court just declared to be a matter beyond its purview; the voter suppression schemes; the dubious proposals that haven’t gone anywhere — yet — like trying to award presidential electoral votes by congressional district rather than by state, a scheme that Republicans in five states considered after the 2012 election and that is still discussed: These are not ideas aimed at invigorating democracy. They are hatched and executed for the express purpose of essentially fixing elections.

The idea that one party has become so radically different from the other, despite mountains of evidence, is a tough sell.  It’s a hard sell to make for one very simple reason: It doesn’t have a name, this thing the Republicans are trying to do. It’s not true democracy that they want. But it’s also a bit much to call them outright authoritarians. And there’s nothing in between.

Or is there?

A couple of weekends ago, I tripped across a 2010 book called “Competitive Authoritarianism: Hybrid Regimes After the Cold War,” by Steven Levitsky and Lucan A. Way. If you pay close attention to such things, you will recognize Mr. Levitsky’s name — he was a co-author, with Daniel Ziblatt, of last year’s book “How Democracies Die,” which sparked much discussion. “Competitive Authoritarianism” deserves to do the same.

What defines competitive authoritarian states? They are “civilian regimes in which formal democratic institutions exist and are widely viewed as the primary means of gaining power, but in which incumbents’ abuse of the state places them at a significant advantage vis-à-vis their opponents.” Sound like anyone you know?

But today, incredibly, the phrase has begun to bring to mind the United States of America. I literally gasped as I read certain passages, notably the part about the important role of a strong party in winning elections and in controlling legislatures. “Legislative control is critical in competitive authoritarian regimes,” the authors write. They list four reasons. You can bet Mitch McConnell knows every one of them, and probably a couple more. For one, there’s President Trump. Think of his efforts to do things like politicize the institutions of the executive branch, to try to turn the Department of Justice into his personal law firm. Think of his threat in 2016 that he would honor the results of the election “if I win,” and his recent musings about staying beyond two terms. Think of his commerce secretary’s attempt to add a citizenship question to the census, which would benefit the Republicans electorally. These are all manifestations of competitive authoritarianism. Second — and maybe even more so — there’s the Republican Party. The gerrymandering enabled them to maintain their House majority during the Obama years even as Democratic House candidates were winning more votes. But there’s much more. “Recent Republican behavior — from the 2016 stolen Supreme Court seat to the legislative shenanigans that followed gubernatorial defeats in North Carolina and Wisconsin to voter suppression efforts across numerous states — suggests a party whose commitment to democratic politics has weakened,” Mr. Levitsky said.
 “The fact that the Republican Party has grown increasingly authoritarian poses a greater threat to American democracy than Donald Trump.”

The Increasingly Grotesque Republican Agenda

As a former Republican who was raised in a predominantly Republican family I am increasingly shocked by the ugliness of the agenda of today's GOP which seemingly puts little effort into the pretense that it is a political party that gives a damn about average American much less their families.  My late parents and grandparents would be shocked  at the willingness of today's congressional Republicans - and they are no better at the state level - to throw millions of Americans into the gutter while lavishing huge tax breaks on the disgustingly wealthy (analysis of the House "tax reform" bill passed today on a party line vote estimates the Trump family will receive over a billion dollars in benefits).  As for the Gospel message, in today's GOP, that is something that receives lip service in order to prostitute party elected officials to Christofascists (who in truth only cling to certain Old Testament passages to justify their hatred of others) while the core of the Gospel message is tossed in the trash or utterly ignored.   A column in the Washington Post by a conservative columnist who I suspect, like me, has disavowed GOP membership enumerates some examples of the ugliness of today's Republican Party.  Here are excerpts.

It turns out that electing President Trump was not the apex of Republicans’ political insanity. Since last November, consider the Trump GOP’s track record:

The GOP’s idea of health-care reform was trying to remove millions of people from health-care coverage while giving tax cuts to the super rich. Having learned their lesson (not), Senate Republicans now support a tax bill that will remove millions of people from health-care coverage while giving tax cuts to the super rich — and to big corporations. Its tax plan contains permanent, huge tax breaks for corporations (e.g. reducing the corporate tax rate from 35 percent to 20 percent) and a new 25 percent rate for pass-throughs but temporary breaks for the middle class (e.g. the $300 “family flexibility” tax credit per filer).

The GOP’s environmental agenda includes climate-change denial (despite the government’s own confirmation that climate change is real and man-made), lifting the ban on importing elephant trophies (the first sons are avid big-game hunters and Christmas is around the corner) and trying in vain to save the coal industry. Trump’s GOP has made China look like a leader in global environmental issues.

The GOP president now embraces (literally, I think) autocrats like the Philippines’ Rodrigo Duterte, applauds autocratic Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan after a stolen election, barely if at all brings up human rights in China and Saudi Arabia, and has not a bad word to say about Russia’s President Vladimir Putin. The GOP now opposes multilateral trade deals (the North American Free Trade Agreement, the Trans-Pacific Partnership) while China makes trade deals and the TPP countries forge a deal among themselves without the United States.

The GOP’s constitutional conservatism amounts to giving a totally unqualified nominee who hid a conflict of interest a lifetime federal court appointment. . . . . “Brett J. Talley, the young lawyer nominated by President Trump for a lifetime federal judgeship in Alabama . . . did not, however, identify any family members — including his wife, who is one of President Trump’s attorneys. . . . He’s actually one of four nominees rated “unqualified” by the American Bar Association.

The GOP president believes 3 million to 5 million people voted illegally based on no evidence whatsoever but doesn’t think the Russians meddled in our election despite the unanimous findings of our intelligence services.

The GOP-led Congress is content to tolerate Trump’s nepotism, massive conflicts of interest and possible receipt of foreign emoluments. It looks the other way as a president monetizes the office, hawking his properties at every opportunity.

This is not a party that can be described as coherent, sensible, respectful of the rule of law, dedicated to equal protection or grounded in reality — let alone conservative. Today’s GOP stands for a set of crackpot ideas, unworkable and unpopular policies and a president not remotely fit to remain in office. Some sunny optimists think the GOP can be saved. From our perspective, it’s not worth trying.

I completely agree with the last sentence.  The GOP is not worth saving.  I made this decision numerous years ago at this point and believe that the best thing one can do is work diligently to see the GOP defeated in every possible election.  As for "friends" and neighbors who continue to live in a fantasy world and pretend that the GOP is still the party of their grandparents and parents, I have a few words of advice: get your heads out of your asses.  

GOP Voter Suppression Laws May Have Won Wisconsin for Trump

With their aging white, heterosexual, conservative Christian voter base literally dying off, Republican efforts around the country have shifted increasingly towards disenfranchising voters who they believe will vote against their agenda of tax cuts for the wealthy, special rights for Christofascists, emboldening white supremacists, and taking from the poor to give to the rich.  This effort takes many forms, but a favored method is to pass so-called voter ID laws under the guise of fighting non-existent voter fraud.  Other efforts include wrongfully purging voters from voter records and here in Virginia making it difficult for convicted felons who have served their time to regain their voting rights.  Hand in hand with this, of curse, is the disproportionate prosecution of minorities under Virginia's often very low threshold felony laws.  Now, a study suggests that these efforts bore fruit last year when Wisconsin's efforts to disenfranchise voters may have thrown Wisconsin to Trump.  A piece in New York Magazine looks at this disturbing situation which Republicans will no doubt seek to replicate in other states (Mother Jones also has coverage here).  Here are highlights: 

Close elections almost by definition conjure up countless explanations of what might have changed the result. As the fine voting-rights journalist Ari Berman notes, one of the more shocking and significant developments on November 8, 2016, was Donald Trump’s win in Wisconsin, a state that had not gone Republican in a presidential election since the 49-state Reagan landslide of 1984. Explanations were all over the place. . . .

Virtually no one, says Berman, talked about voter suppression, even though Scott Walker’s hyperpolarized state had enacted and fought successfully to preserve one of the nation’s strictest voter ID laws, expected and designed to reduce minority turnout.

Yet there is evidence, both anecdotal and academic, that voter suppression efforts had a lot to do with a sharp reduction in minority and student voting in Wisconsin.

After the election, registered voters in Milwaukee County and Madison’s Dane County were surveyed about why they didn’t cast a ballot. Eleven percent cited the voter ID law and said they didn’t have an acceptable ID; of those, more than half said the law was the “main reason” they didn’t vote. According to the study’s author, University of Wisconsin-Madison political scientist Kenneth Mayer, that finding implies that between 12,000 and 23,000 registered voters in Madison and Milwaukee—and as many as 45,000 statewide—were deterred from voting by the ID law. “We have hard evidence there were tens of thousands of people who were unable to vote because of the voter ID law,” he says.

Trump carried the state by less than 23,000 votes.

Wisconsin’s voter ID law was designed to create complex hoops prospective voters had to jump through to secure an ID, particularly for those without driver’s licenses, and also for college students attending schools that did not issue the kind of IDs the law demanded. Berman found abundant evidence that election personnel in the state went beyond the letter of the law to discourage compliance.

And voter ID was just part of the arsenal of voter suppression techniques at the GOP’s disposal:

The voter ID law was one of 33 election changes passed in Wisconsin after Walker took office [in 2011], and it dovetailed with his signature push to dismantle unions, taking away his opponents’ most effective organizing tool. Wisconsin’s Legislature cut early voting from 30 days to 12, reduced early voting hours on nights and weekends, and restricted early voting to one location per county, hampering voters in large urban areas and sprawling rural ones. It also added new residency requirements for voter registration, eliminated staffers who led statewide registration drives, and made it harder to count absentee ballots.

It all added up, and for Republicans, it paid off handsomely in 2016.

One lesson of the Wisconsin saga is that control of the federal courts matters a great deal in vindicating voting rights and political representation; this is, after all, the state where a GOP gerrymander of the legislature was so overtly partisan that the U.S. Supreme Court may find it unconstitutional.

Republican-controlled statehouses have already passed more voting restrictions in 2017 than they did in 2016 and 2015 combined. Taken together, “there’s no doubt that these election changes affected the turnout among young voters, first-time voters, voters of color, and other members of the Obama coalition that overwhelmingly supported Hillary Clinton,” . . .

If you think of voting rights as a wonky “process” issue that’s less important than health care or the environment or avoiding war with North Korea, think again. It’s entirely possible we wouldn’t be dealing with a President Trump at all if voting rights were regarded as a fundamental right of citizenship that should be strongly and universally encouraged.

I only meet one of the GOP's preferred voter base of white, heterosexual, conservative Christians - Like author Anne Rice, I don't call myself Christian anymore given the hideousness that Christianity has taken on under the Christofascists.  What will the GOP try to come up with to disenfranchise people like me?  If Republicans win the Virginia statewide elections next month, expect a new wave of voter disenfranchisement in Virginia. Be very afraid. Get out and vote while you still can. 

Do You Want Trump to Have Your Personal Data?

The other day I posted about Governor Terry McAuliffe's response to Der Trumpenführer's disturbing request for voting data from all 50 states that included social security numbers, home addresses, driver's license numbers, party affiliation and other non-public details.  The effort is part of Trump's effort to inflate the myth that voting fraud is rampant and a threat to our democracy.  Of course, meanwhile, Russian interference in our elections is "fake news" and a non-issue in Trump world.  And never mind that numerous studies have shown that cases of true voting fraud are almost nonexistent.  Many believe the real agenda behind the effort is to put forth more efforts to suppress voting by "those people" - blacks and minorities and other reliable Democrat voters - to aid Republicans facing demographic changes that could end their chances at continued electoral victories.  I for one no NOT want the malignant, bullying, vulgar, mentally disturbed individual in the White House to have personal data on me or my my loved ones. I have far more faith in the Commonwealth of Virginia (despite its faults) to look out for my welfare, especially when one looks at the voter suppressing histories of some of Der Trumpenführer's commission appointees.   Thankfully, at least 25 states have said they will not cooperate with the bogus commission.  Three stories in the Washington Post look at the situation.  Here are highlights from the first:

The chair of President Trump's Election Integrity Commission has penned a letter to all 50 states requesting their full voter-roll data, including the name, address, date of birth, party affiliation, last four Social Security number digits and voting history back to 2006 of potentially every voter in the state.

States began reacting to the letter on Thursday afternoon. "I have no intention of honoring this request," said Governor Terry McAuliffe of Virginia in a statement. "Virginia conducts fair, honest, and democratic elections, and there is no evidence of significant voter fraud in Virginia."

Connecticut's Secretary of State, Denise Merrill, said she would "share publicly-available information with the Kobach Commission while ensuring that the privacy of voters is honored by withholding protected data." She added, however, that Kobach "has a lengthy record of illegally disenfranchising eligible voters in Kansas" and that "given Secretary Kobach's history we find it very difficult to have confidence in the work of this Commission."

Under federal law, each state must maintain a central file of registered voters. States collect different amounts of information on voters.

In May, Trump created a commission to investigate alleged acts of voter fraud after he claimed, without evidence, that 3 million to 5 million undocumented immigrants voted illegally in the 2016 election. The commission is chaired by Kobach, who is the Kansas secretary of state and a voter-fraud hard-liner.

Advocates for voting rights and civil liberties are also sounding alarms over the letter. “The concern is that this is going to be used to justify regressive and disenfranchising federal law,” Myrna Pérez, deputy director of the democracy program at New York University Law School's Brennan Center for Justice, said in an interview.

Vanita Gupta, chief executive of the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights and former head of the Justice Department's civil rights division, said on Twitter that the letter is “laying the groundwork for voter suppression, plain & simple.”

Academics who have studied the issue for decades say that voter fraud — particularly of the type that strict voter-identification laws championed by Kobach and others are intended to combat — is vanishingly rare and that voter-ID requirements are a burdensome solution to a practically nonexistent problem. A federal judge ruled that some of Kobach's proposed ID requirements constituted a “mass denial of a fundamental constitutional right.”

 The second piece here looks at the growing reaction of various states:

While the Trump administration has said it is just requesting public information, the letters met with swift — and sometimes defiant — rejection. By Friday, 25 states were partially or entirely refusing to provide the requested information; some said state laws prohibit releasing certain details about voters, while others refused to provide any information because of the commission’s makeup and backstory. 

“This entire commission is based on the specious and false notion that there was widespread voter fraud last November,” Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe (D) said in a statement. “At best this commission was set up as a pretext to validate Donald Trump’s alternative election facts, and at worst is a tool to commit large-scale voter suppression.”

California, a state Trump singled out for “serious voter fraud,” also refused to participate. Alex Padilla, the California secretary of state, said providing data “would only serve to legitimize the false and already debunked claims of massive voter fraud.”

“It looks like they’re putting together a database of who people voted for,” said Jason Kander, a former Missouri secretary of state who runs the nonprofit group Let America Vote. “Democrat, Republican, independent, everybody should be outraged by that. This is from the same people, from Kris Kobach to Donald Trump, who’ve tried to make it harder for people to vote, and this seems like a step in the process. If the Obama administration had asked for this, Kris Kobach would be holding a press conference outside the Capitol to denounce it.” Experts described the request as unprecedented in scope, a recipe for potential voter suppression and troubling for the privacy issues it raises.

“This is an attempt on a grand scale to purport to match voter rolls with other information in an apparent effort to try and show that the voter rolls are inaccurate and use that as a pretext to pass legislation that will make it harder for people to register to vote,” said Rick Hasen, an election-law expert at the University of California at Irvine.

Hasen said he has “no confidence” in whatever results the committee produces. He said the commission and its request create a number of concerns, including that it is an election group created by one candidate for office — Trump, who already is campaigning for reelection — and headed by Pence, another political candidate.

“It’s just a recipe for a biased and unfair report,” Hasen said. . . . . . Experts also expressed concerns about Trump’s appointment of Hans von Spakovsky, a former Justice Department official and a longtime voter integrity advocate, to the commission. Gupta said that he, like Kobach, has “had a single-minded agenda to diminish voter participation and to fight voting rights, and to make voting harder.”

Other states have said that they do plan to hand over information, albeit less than the broad sweep outlined in the letters. Wisconsin’s elections commission administrator said that the state would give the public information for the standard $12,500 fee, but was not allowed to release other details such as dates of birth. Ohio Secretary of State Jon A. Husted, a Republican, said his state would be handing over most of the requested information — noting that it is publicly available — though he said they would not provide portions of Social Security numbers and driver’s license numbers because those are not.

The third piece here, underscores the why this effort is troubling, including the fact that the system the commission chair favors has come up with 200 false targeting of double voter registration for every one that is accurate.  Do the math and it becomes apparent that large numbers of people could find themselves wrongfully disqualified to vote.  Here are excerpts:

In Kansas, Kobach championed the use of Crosscheck, a multistate database of voter registration information that authorities use to check whether voters are registered in two states.

Researchers have found that Crosscheck's matching algorithms are highly inaccurate. A recent working paper by researchers at Stanford, the University of Pennsylvania, Harvard and Microsoft found that Crosscheck's algorithm returns about 200 false positives for every one legitimate instance of double registration it finds.

“We're concerned about unlawful voter purging, which has been something that Kris Kobach has been leading the charge,” said Vanita Gupta of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights and former head of the Justice Department's civil rights division.

An expansion of the Crosscheck system would be “a recipe for massive amounts of error,” according to elections expert Justin Levitt of Loyola Law School. “When you've got hundreds of millions of records, and thousands of John Smiths, trying to figure out which of them are your John Smith without making a mistake is well nigh impossible.” “This commission has been, from the beginning, an effort to sell Trump's lie that he won the popular vote,” Ho said. “Kobach's echoed that sentiment himself on camera. Now they've set up this commission that's going to create phony findings to support that lie.”

Some of Kobach's voter ID requirements have been struck down in federal court, with one federal judge ruling that they constituted “mass denial of a fundamental constitutional right.” And earlier this month, a federal judge fined Kobach $1,000 for “presenting misleading arguments in a voting-related lawsuit,” according to Politico.
 One final red flag in the commission's request, according to Levitt, is the inclusion of data on voters' party affiliation. While states are allowed to maintain this information, the federal Privacy Act of 1974 prohibits the federal government from keeping records of voters' party affiliation except in rare circumstances, Levitt said.

Levitt said the Privacy Act was enacted following the Watergate scandal and concerns about Richard Nixon collecting personal information on American voters.

Urge your state officials to tell Trump's commission that it can put its request for information where the sunshine doesn't shine. 

McAuliffe Politely Tells Trump Commission on Non-Existent Voter Fraud to Shove It

One of the perennial claims of Republicans is that voter fraud is rampant.  The goal, of course, is to fabricate a justification to implement voter ID laws and other impediments in order to disenfranchise those likely to vote against Republicans.  Meanwhile, numerous legitimate studies have found that voter fraud is very rare and, indeed, the chances of being struck by lightening far exceed the likelihood of voter fraud occurring (another good article is here). Der Trumpenführer, with absolutely no supporting evidence, has claimed that millions voted illegally in the 2016 presidential election - hence why Hillary Clinton won the popular vote.  To add legitimacy to this lie - and titillate his racist and white supremacist base - Der  Trumpenführer, established a "presidential election committee on election integrity" to investigate his imagined voter fraud.  Naturally, no such commission has been established to look into Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential elections.  Today, Virginia Governor Terry McAuliffe politely told Trump that Virginia would not participate in the charade or turn over personal information on Virginia voters as demanded by Der  Trumpenführer.  Here are highlights from a press release from McAuliffe's office:

“Today the Commonwealth and the other 49 states received a lengthy request from Kris Kobach, the Vice Chair of the Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity, requesting a list of all registered Virginia voters, the last four digits of their social security numbers, their addresses, date of birth, political affiliation, and their voting history. The Vice Chair’s letter also contained a list of vague inquiries about the election policies and laws of the Commonwealth.

“I have no intention of honoring this request. Virginia conducts fair, honest, and democratic elections, and there is no evidence of significant voter fraud in Virginia. This entire commission is based on the specious and false notion that there was widespread voter fraud last November. At best this commission was set up as a pretext to validate Donald Trump’s alternative election facts, and at worst is a tool to commit large-scale voter suppression.

“The only irregularity in the 2016 presidential election centered around Russian tampering, a finding that has been confirmed by 17 of our intelligence agencies and sworn testimony delivered to several congressional committees. In 131 days Virginia’s Department of Elections will again conduct a statewide election for the offices of Governor, Lieutenant Governor, and Attorney General, as well as 100 House of Delegates races and numerous other positions. I’m not going to divert resources that could potentially compromise that important work to enable this politically motivated and silly posturing.”

Kudos to Governor McAuliffe and shame on Trump and Republicans who continue to fabricate and disseminate the lies that voter fraud is a problem.  The biggest problem facing the nation at the moment is the Trump/Pence regime and the malignant narcissist in the White House. 

The Alabamafication of America

As long time readers know, early in my legal career I worked at a large corporate law firm in Mobile, Alabama.  When I first started work, George Wallace was still governor and the state, while reactionary in some ways, was more progressive that it is today and its government worked and constant scandal did not surround every branch of the state's government.  Now, Alabama is a basket case and lunacy prevails, thanks largely to the ascendancy of the Christofascist.  Simply put, logic, reason, and good government are mutually exclusive of Christofascists in control of public institutions and setting social and governmental policy.  As a piece in Harvard Political Review argues, the forces that have ravaged Alabama are now destroying the nation as a whole.  Here are article highlights:

The 2016 presidential election looked, more than anything else, like an Alabama election. Donald Trump’s relentless appeals to populist conservative ideas echo decades-long trends in the South. The current worries about Trump’s irresponsible governing style are similar to concerns Alabama commentators have been expressing about their often-demagogic leaders since before the 1940s. To understand the Trump administration, in which Alabama Senator Jeff Sessions will likely serve as attorney general, we should look to Alabama, and the reasons why the state government is teetering toward collapse.

Leaders in all three branches of Alabama’s government are either under investigation or have been recently removed from office. After using his position to obtain over $1.1 million in financial favors, Mike Hubbard, the former speaker of the Alabama House of Representatives, was convicted of 12 felony corruption charges in July 2016. He has been described by many as “the most powerful man in Alabama,” a state where the governor has relatively little authority and the legislature holds all the cards—a simple majority is all that is required to override most vetoes. The Hubbard trial was full of fireworks, including testimony from former Governor Bob Riley, but ended in a sentence of only four years in prison.

The drama of the Hubbard case stirred up another scandal which otherwise might have gone unnoticed. Governor Robert Bentley, a man who ran his 2010 campaign on family values, divorced his wife of 50 years after allegedly having an affair with his powerful chief advisor, Rebekah Caldwell Mason. Although neither admit to a “physical affair,” sexual voicemails the governor left for Mason say otherwise.

In 2016, Roy Moore, the former Chief Justice of the Alabama Supreme Court, was removed from the bench for ethics violations after he ordered the state’s probate judges to ignore the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling legalizing same-sex marriage. The result has been mass confusion in courthouses across the state, several of which stopped issuing marriage licenses altogether. Moore was previously removed from the same office in 2003, after erecting a stone monument of the Ten Commandments in the Alabama Judicial Building and ignoring a court order to have it removed.

Montgomery, the state capital, has become dominated by special interests, creating an environment where corruption is the norm. Far-right swings in the electorate have enabled extremists like Moore to come to power. But the forces destabilizing Alabama are not unique to the state. Donald Trump’s cabinet selections suggest that moneyed interests will be given influence in the federal government, and that far-right voices, like Steve Bannon, will be given a stage. Montgomery’s fate may be Washington’s future.

The lesson is simple: populism rises above all other concerns in Alabama. Demagoguery has a long track record of success in the South, and a politician who sufficiently channels that energy can say and do most anything—“grab them by the pussy,” for example—and still win by a landslide. George Wallace’s racism cost Alabama millions in economic development and outside investment, yet his populist appeal won elections. He served several nonconsecutive terms as governor, including one as late as the 1980s.

Why is Alabama, a place known for social conservatism, evangelical Christianity, and strong emphasis on family values, a hotbed for corruption and sex scandals, where removal from office serves to prove one’s conservative bona fides? To Fording, the answer lies in Alabama’s traditionalistic culture, a hierarchical system where citizens fall in line with authority and accept “an elite class entitled to power.” This results in low rates of citizen participation.

Religion is an important tenet of traditionalism. . . . “the Evangelical church is not concerned with social justice.” Personal ethics are also not important—“Southern Baptists have one of the highest divorce rates in the U.S. When it comes to premarital sex and children out of wedlock, Alabama doesn’t do well.” This leaves only theology, which Flynt sees as strict adherence to the text of the Bible.

Despite his public failures in social and personal ethics, Trump, like Moore, gives off strong traditionalist airs. He may not know the books of the bible, but his strong stance against Islam is a classic evangelical stance—traditionalist Christians stand up to those that do not accept the text of the bible, a pillar of traditionalist Christianity.

The root of Alabama’s unusually toxic political climate dates back to the anti-populist movement orchestrated by plantation owners and industrialists which culminated in the Constitution of 1901. While an anti-populist force and Donald Trump may seem antithetical, the political strategy used in 1901 remains relevant today.

Following the Civil War, Alabama industrialized rapidly. Wealthy “Bourbon” Democrats, worried about labor insurrections, called for a new constitutional convention to cement their interests and power. While the suppression of the black vote figured largest in convention (John B. Knox, president of the convention, opened by saying: “And what is it that we do want to do? Why, it is, within the limits imposed by the Federal Constitution, to establish white supremacy in this State”), the suppression of the white populist vote was important as well.

After the 2013 Supreme Court case Shelby County v. Holder, which gutted the Voting Rights Act, Southern states promptly started to pass voter ID laws. There is plenty of evidence that voting fraud is negligible, but politicians claimed that it was a pressing issue, and capitalized on those fears to pass legislation that previously would have been struck down as a civil rights abuse. Recently, Alabama has closed DMV offices in largely poor, black, Democratic counties, curbing access to driver’s licenses just as the strict new voter ID law came into practice. The move has been defended as necessary to balance the budget.

Trump’s recent claim that millions voted illegally fits soundly into this tradition. His statements are already changing perceptions of facts—about half of Americans believe that voter fraud is at least somewhat widespread. Trump’s prowess in media, coupled with a chance to fill vacant seats in the Supreme Court, leaves little to prevent Alabama-like changes in election law.

Alabama columnist Kyle Whitmire warned this past May that Donald Trump was part of what he called the “Alabamafication of America.” Like Alabama, America is full of promise, great ideas, and diverse people. But it is in danger of the same fate as the Yellowhammer state, hit with scandal after scandal until its citizens lose hope.

The Dangerous American Love of Conspiracy Theories

For a political party that once upon a time largely valued knowledge, science, education and purportedly personal responsibility, the GOP has morphed into something very ugly.  Now, ignorance, victim-hood, open bigotry are all the norm for the majority of the GOP base.  Worse yet, much of the base seems only to ready to embrace whatever conspiracy theory that fringe elements of the far right might float.  In response, some Democrats have shot back with their own conspiracy theories, although most have a least a shred of reality to support them.  A piece in Politico looks at the conspiracy theories plaguing the 2016 elections.  Here are highlights:

This weekend, former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani told Fox News Sunday viewers that Hillary Clinton was seriously ill. The media, he said, “fails to point out several signs of illness by her. … Go online. Search for ‘Hillary Clinton illness.’ Take a look at those videos for yourself.” The idea that Clinton is secretly wrestling with some unknown illness is just the latest conspiracy theory to go mainstream in an election season chock full of them. Conspiracy theories, which I’ve studied for the past seven years, have always been part of American politics, but they’ve tended to pop up in the dark corners of our political discourse, serving mainly as sideshows to more important political disputes. Not so this year; I’ve never seen a time when they so dominated the mainstream debate—and when they had the potential to do so much harm.

Whether it was witches colluding with Satan during colonial times, Freemasons nefariously controlling the government in the 1800s or communists coopting the State Department during the Red Scare, Americans have always been drawn to the idea that certain people or organizations are working in secret for their own benefit against the public good.

Despite this, the United States has not gone off the conspiracy theory cliff because our elite politicians and mainstream news sources generally eschew this type of heady theorizing. A few politicians or news sources might allege a plot from time to time (think Sarah Palin and her Obamacare death panels), but these are usually a result of overheated partisan rhetoric and they tend to receive intense backlash. That was, until now. Donald Trump, one of two people likely to be president next year, has been propagating, and now creating, conspiracy theories as a major theme of his campaign. There’s an obvious reason for this: Donald Trump has branded himself an “outsider.” In my research, I have found that conspiracy theories tend to work best when they are employed by outsiders, electoral losers and statistical minorities. These “losers” have to use conspiracy theories to justify their outsider status, explain away losses and call accepted practices into question.

There is nothing fundamentally wrong with conspiracy theories. They have their positive attributes: Sometimes they turn out to be true (think Watergate, for example), and sometimes they bring new information to light (such as securing the release of many documents pertaining to the Kennedy assassination). But too many can distort ourperception of reality, squander precious government time and resources and endanger lives—especially when they move out of the fringes of political life and become the currency of the truly powerful.

Here are the five most dangerous conspiracy theories of 2016 . . . . . 1. Mexicans and refugees are murderers, rapists and terrorists  Danger: Violence - Donald Trump has accused Mexican immigrants of being pawns in a Mexican conspiracy to send murderers and rapists to America. He also has accused refugees, fleeing their tattered homeland and shattered lives, of working against the government as ISIL agents.

In this case, however, the typical model is reversed: The strong (a man running for U.S. president with the backing of a major political party) is accusing the weak (refugees and minorities). This is a more dangerous type of conspiracy theory because those in power can actually act on their wild hunches, sometimes with deadly consequences.

2. “There’s something going on” Danger: Mass paranoia - A favorite go-to conspiracy theory of Trump’s, used in different circumstances at different points during the campaign, these four words suggest that our governmental institutions and our institutions for disseminating information are not only malevolent, but also engaged in a cover-up of epic proportions.

This conspiracy theory is useful for Trump because it lets him avoid specifics; it’s also dangerous because it’s open-ended, leaving Trump supporters plenty of room to connect their own dots. What is, in fact, “going on”? . . . these four words suggest that everyone is in on it, we need to watch our neighbors, keep an eye on the government and watch the president’s body language like a hawk.
This style of conspiracy theorizing—leaving the details for people to figure out on their own—is advantageous because it gives people less to disagree with.

3. Trump/Clinton is a Manchurian Candidate Danger: Institutional distrust, political polarization - Criticizing Clinton for her mishandling of classified emails, Trump suggested that the Democratic nominee is now beholden to the Obama administration, which decided not to prosecute her. Trump also suggested that other countries now have evidence to blackmail or control Clinton, given that they have been able to hack her private email server. Shooting back, the Clinton campaign put out an ad suggesting that Trump is an agent of powerful Russian interests. Americans of all political persuasions should be able to trust that the two candidates who could lead the national government aren’t pawns to other interests. When they start to doubt their leaders’ loyalty to the country, institutional distrust can skyrocket.

4. Vast right-wing conspiracy Danger: Lack of accountability - There are conspiracy theories; and then there are conspiracy theories about conspiracy theories. This particular one was born during the height of the investigations into then-President Bill Clinton’s business practices and personal life. During a Today Show interview, then-first lady Hillary Clinton dismissed the burgeoning Monica Lewinsky scandal: “The great story here for anybody willing to find it and write about it and explain it,” she said, “is this vast right-wing conspiracy that has been conspiring against my husband since the day he announced for president.” Conspiracy theories aren’t reserved for Republicans. Hillary Clinton has held on to her conspiracy theory that the right wing is in league against her and her family to this day; in fact, she claimed this election cycle that the conspiracy is “even better-funded” now.

5. Everything is “rigged” Danger: Disenfranchisement and alienation - The campaigns of Trump and Sanders repeatedly alleged during the primaries that the nomination process is rigged. Earlier this month, Trump claimed that in states without voter ID laws in place, fraud will be rampant and people will be voting “15 times.” And he asserted that the only way the Clinton campaign can win Pennsylvania is if “they cheat.”

We’ve seen what can happen when people seize on conspiracy theories about fraudulent and rigged elections—despite there being no evidence of mass voter fraud. Over the past few years, similar beliefs have led state legislatures across the country to enact restrictive voter ID laws. But rather than fix a system that wasn’t broken to begin with, these efforts have been shown to disenfranchise minority voters. This year, if Trump deploys supporters to polling stations across America to monitor for fraud and challenge voters’ legitimacy as he is promising to do, the results could be similar.

But such claims about election fraud pale in comparison to the larger allegations that the entire system is rigged.

Far from being helpful, this sort of rhetoric is dangerous. First, it allows for scapegoating (“my lot in life is the fault of the 1 percent”) and indictment (“the rich and powerful have gotten that way only through illicit means”). It also brings about hopelessness and alienation—the feeling that we have been locked into an unfair and degrading system by a few people who wish to abuse us. These sorts of conspiracy theories also serve to depress the vote, as those who believe that elections and governmental processes are rigged will most likely stay home; this weakens our democracy.

Trump and a Sore Loser Uprising

While thankfully the polls suggest that Donald Trump - and, if we are lucky, many others in the GOP - is headed toward electoral disaster in November (a poll has Hillary up 4 points in GEORGIA), Trump seemingly remains set on trying to destroy American democracy.  If he fails to win and cannot take the country down the road to fascism and open racism, then he appears to want to fan the flames of resentment or even violent confrontation among his increasingly ugly base which the New York Times effectively revealed with video clips from his rallies.  It is as if we are reliving a 2016 version of 1933 Germany.   A column in the New York Times looks at how Trump, but more importantly, his mindless, hate-filled followers pose a grave threat to America.  Here are excerpts:

After a week in which Donald Trump insulted babies and their mothers and war heroes and their families, and threw in fire marshals for good measure, the scariest thing to come out of his team of thugs and political mercenaries is this: the suggestion that civil unrest could follow if he’s denied the presidency.

When the Supreme Court handed George W. Bush the White House in 2000 even though he lost the popular vote, Al Gore graciously conceded and faded away. When Mitt Romney lost to Barack Obama four years ago although his internal polls showed a Republican triumph, he congratulated the winner and went off to rediscover his many grandchildren.

But this year, facing a likely trouncing in November, Trump has signaled that he will try to bring down our democracy with him. His overlooked comment — “I’m afraid the election is going to be rigged” — is the opening move in a scheme to delegitimize the outcome.

Because Trump is consistently barbaric and such a prolific liar, it’s hard to sustain outrage over any one of his serial scandals. But his pre-emptive attack on the electoral process is very troubling.

To understand what Trump is up to, listen to his doppelgänger, the veteran political operative Roger Stone. He will say things that even Trump will not say, usually as a way to allow Trump to later repeat some variant of them.

It was Stone who called a CNN commentator a “stupid Negro” and accused the Gold Star parents of Capt. Humayun Khan of being Muslim Brotherhood agents. And it was Stone who threatened to give out the hotel room numbers of unsupportive Republicans at the party convention, the better for the Trumpian mob to find them.

Picking up on Trump’s rigged-election meme, Stone told a right-wing news outlet that the electoral fix was already in: “The government will be shut down if they attempt to steal this and swear Hillary in.” The outcome is fair only if Trump wins.

“If there’s voter fraud, this election will be illegitimate, the election of the winner will be illegitimate, we will have a constitutional crisis, widespread civil disobedience,” he said.
It would be laughable if the campaign were simply laying down the grand excuse for the label that will follow the tyrant from Trump Tower after Nov. 8 — loser. But Trump has crossed all barriers of precedent and civility, from waging an openly racist campaign to loose talk about nuclear weapons. He has challenged the independence of the judiciary system, and called for a religious test for entry into this nation. With this latest tactic, he’s trying to destabilize the country itself after he’s crushed.

Let’s talk about the basis for his sore loser uprising — the gaming of the system. . . . there is virtually no evidence of modern American elections being fixed.  Studying national elections from 2000 to 2014, and looking at 834 million ballots cast, Justin Levitt of Loyola Law School found a total of 31 instances of credible voter fraud. Yes, 31.

Trump’s evidence? “I just hear things and I just feel it.” Yeah, he hears things. Like Russia not actually taking over Crimea. Like President Obama not being an American citizen. Like the N.F.L. writing him an imaginary letter. “The voter ID situation has turned out to be a very unfair development,” he said this week. “We may have people vote 10 times.”

Nationwide rigging, though difficult to do in a system with more than 9,000 voting jurisdictions, is more likely to come from Russian efforts at hacking voting machines, given Vladimir Putin’s apparent attempt to tip things in favor of his fellow authoritarian, the unstable Donald Trump.

With his inability to process basic information, Trump has gone down this road before. After the 2012 contest, which Romney lost by nearly five million votes, Trump said: “This election is a total sham and travesty. We are not a democracy.” The last statement, judging by the groundwork he’s doing for this November, looks more like a self-fulfilling prophecy.

 Be afraid - very afraid.  If you care about America, get out and vote AGAINST Trump come November.  The future depends on it. 

Democrats Target Virginia in Push to End Voter Disenfranchisement

I have long bemoaned the Virginia GOP's effort to disenfranchise voters that they fear will not vote for its Kool-Aid drinking candidates: voter ID to stop non-existent voter fraud and gerrymandered districts have been the Virginia GOP's primary tools to toward trying to rig elections.  Now, national Democrats as well see the obscenity of Virginia's efforts to maintain the voting strength of the dwindling angry white voters.  As a result, as a piece in the Washington Post describes, Virginia is to be targeted as part of a wider effort to roll back GOP voter disenfranchisement efforts.  Here are article excerpts:

After Tracey Bell tried to register to vote in Virginia last year, she got a letter in the mail saying her citizenship was in doubt and she would have to pay $10 to prove it. Confused and annoyed, Bell ranted on Facebook.

It was the rare Facebook rant that actually led to government action. A friend put her in touch with the Virginia Democratic Party, which connected her to a lawyer who explained that she had forgotten to check a box confirming her citizenship. She fixed it — and a year later, Gov. Terry McAuliffe (D) is pushing to have the box requirement eliminated.

Both the lawyer and the governor are participating in a national Democratic effort to expand turnout that could make or break presidential election results in highly competitive states — and Virginia is a key target.

According to voting rights activists, 15 states with 162 electoral votes face new voting restrictions in 2016. Because of a 2013 Supreme Court decision overturning part of the 50-year-old Voting Rights Act, next year’s presidential election will be the first in which Southern states, including Virginia, will not be required to have election-law changes approved by federal authorities.

Democrats are hoping to bring in new voters across the country by breaking down barriers to voting through legal challenges, regulatory changes and grass-roots organizing. In Virginia, the only battleground presidential state that also has elections this year, Democrats are working closely with their national counterparts to expand the electorate — testing ways, for instance, to work around voter-identification laws, narrower voting windows and other restrictions generally backed by Republicans.

McAuliffe’s proposal, however, is not certain to succeed. The state GOP has objected forcefully against the change in the voter-registration form. And on Tuesday, the head of the Virginia Board of Elections postponed action on the plan, saying it needs to be reworked.

The Virginia Republican Party says that voter-ID requirements are common-sense safeguards against fraud. 

State Democrats have formed a Voter Protection Council, working year-round with registrars, election officials and local parties to identify problems and publicize changes. They are identifying former felons and helping them get their rights restored, something McAuliffe has made easier.

The council is working on setting up a year-round hotline for voters to call in with questions. And Virginia Democrats plan to test a new model of the Democratic National Committee’s voter incident reporting system, a mobile application that logs problems at the polls. They want to improve volunteer coordination and sign up election officers earlier.

They are supporting lawsuits that would overturn the state’s voter-ID laws and redraw its congressional and legislative districts. At the same time, McAuliffe is leading a national effort to win governor’s seats in states that will draw new maps after 2020.

With a Republican-controlled legislature — and a Republican governor until 2014 — Virginia has voter-ID requirements that were made stricter in recent years. . . . In 2014, the then-Republican-controlled elections board ruled that the photo ID must be current or have expired within the past year. McAuliffe has since revamped the board with a Democratic majority.

“Virginia has been unique over the past few years because they have an election every year,” Pratt Wiley, national director of voter protection for the DNC. “There isn’t a state like Virginia . . . that is as appealing to be a testing ground and a proving ground.”

5th Circuit Strikes Down Texas Voter ID Law

The Voting Rights Act of 1965 turned 50 this week and as a gift to those who believe in the right to vote for voting age all citizens the United States Court of Appeals struck down Texas' anti-minority voter ID law, one of the most reactionary in the country.  The law had been pushed through the GOP controlled Texas legislature under the usual GOP pretense of preventing voter fraud - which had not been documented to be a problem - while aiming to restrict minority voting and voting by younger voters who tend to vote Democrat.  Rather than push policies and an agenda attractive to all, the GOP prefers to disenfranchise all those other than aging angry whites voters longing for the days of Jim Crow and a world of unchallenged white privilege.  The New York Times looks at the ruling.  Here are excerpts:

A federal appeals panel ruled Wednesday that a strict voter identification law in Texas discriminated against blacks and Hispanics and violated the Voting Rights Act of 1965 — a decision that election experts called an important step toward defining the reach of the landmark law.

The case is one of a few across the country that are being closely watched in legal circles after a 2013 Supreme Court decision that blocked the voting act’s most potent enforcement tool, federal oversight of election laws in numerous states, including Texas, with histories of racial discrimination.

While the federal act still bans laws that suppress minority voting, it has been uncertain exactly what kinds of measures cross the legal line since that Supreme Court ruling.

The Texas ID law is one of the strictest of its kind in the country. It requires voters to bring a government-issued photo ID to the polls. Accepted forms of identification include a driver’s license, a United States passport, a concealed-handgun license and an election identification certificate issued by the State Department of Public Safety.

The plaintiffs, including individual voters, civil rights groups and the Department of Justice, said it was discriminatory because a far greater share of poor people and minorities do not have these forms of identification and lack easy access to birth certificates or other documents needed to obtain them.

Student identifications, voter registration cards and utility bills are not considered acceptable proof of identity.

Although the appeals court upheld the finding of discriminatory effect, the three-judge panel said the lower court must re-examine its conclusion that Texas acted with discriminatory purpose.

Texas could appeal to the full Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals in New Orleans or the United States Supreme Court.

In a 147-page opinion issued in the fall of 2014 after a two-week trial, a district court judge, Nelva Gonzales Ramos, said the law “creates an unconstitutional burden on the right to vote” and blocked its enforcement.

She noted the lack of evidence that voter fraud was a threat and cited expert testimony that about 600,000 Texans, mainly poor, black and Hispanic, lacked the newly required IDs and often faced obstacles in obtaining them.

The evidence that the law violated Section 2 was relatively strong, said Justin Levitt, an elections expert at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles, because the racial difference in impact was striking.

Another case, in North Carolina, involves what some say are more subtle effects, and could provide a more telling test of the Voting Rights Act.

There, civil rights advocates and the Department of Justice are challenging cutbacks in a range of measures used disproportionately by minorities, including early voting and same-day registration and voting.

A second case in Texas, involving a challenge to the state’s redistricting, could also set an important legal precedent.

Voter disenfranchisement and gerrymandered districts are the GOP's favored tools to cling to power in the face of a changing America where the hate and bigotry and embrace of ignorance that the GOP are peddling is less and less popular.