America Is In a Downward Spiral. Worse is Still to Come

Like many so-called conservatives and Republicans, George Will - one of the deans of reasoned conservative thought - was an apologist for disastrous GOP policies and Republican shenanigans which harmed the country and laid the groundwork for the rise of Donald Trump.  Unlike those in the GOP who continue to prostitute themselves both to Trump and the white supremacist/religious extremists of the GOP base, Will finally opened his eyes and belatedly has come out strong in condemning the moral bankruptcy of Trump and today's Republican Party. In a column in the Washington Post he admits that America is in decline and lays much of the blame at the feet of Trump and the Republican political whores who have enabled him.   Further, he longs for a massive landslide victory by Joe Biden that will be so stark that even Trump's lies and his mindless, soulless followers will not be able to challenge the repudiation of Trump and all he and the GOP which is now a reflection of him stand for.  Here are column highlights:

Never has a U.S. election come at such a moment of national mortification. In April 1970, President Richard M. Nixon told a national television audience that futility in Vietnam would make the United States appear to the world as “a pitiful, helpless giant.” Half a century later, America, for the first time in its history, is pitied.

Not even during the Civil War, when the country was blood-soaked by a conflict involving enormous issues, was it viewed with disdainful condescension as it now is, and not without reason: Last Sunday, Germany (population 80.2 million) had 159 new cases of covid-19; Florida (population 21.5 million) had 15,300.

Under the most frivolous person ever to hold any great nation’s highest office, this nation is in a downward spiral. This spiral has not reached its nadir, but at least it has reached a point where worse is helpful, and worse can be confidently expected.

The nation’s floundering government is now administered by a gangster regime. It is helpful to have this made obvious as voters contemplate renewing the regime’s lease on the executive branch. Roger Stone adopted the argot of B-grade mobster movies when he said he would not “roll on” Donald Trump. By commuting Stone’s sentence, Stone’s beneficiary played his part in this down-market drama, showing gratitude for Stone’s version of omertà (the Mafia code of silence), which involved lots of speaking but much lying. Because the pandemic prevents both presidential candidates from bouncing around the continent like popcorn in a skillet, the electorate can concentrate on other things, including Trump’s selection of friends such as Stone and Paul Manafort, dregs from the bottom of the Republican barrel.

Today, there is a vast longing for respite from the 21st century, which — before the pandemic, two inconclusive wars and the Great Recession — began with a presidential election that turned on 537 Florida votes and was not decided until a Dec. 12, 2000, Supreme Court decision. Given Trump’s reckless lying and the supine nature of most Republican officeholders, it is imperative that the Nov. 3 result be obvious that evening.

[T]he pandemic will be an accelerant of preexisting trends: There will be a surge of early and mail voting. So, an unambiguous decision by midnight Eastern time Nov. 3 will require (in addition to state requirements that mailed ballots be postmarked, say, no later than Oct. 31) a popular-vote tsunami so large against [Trump] the president that there will be a continentwide guffaw when he makes charges, as surely he will, akin to those he made in 2016.

It is scandalous that in many places casting a ballot requires hours of standing in line. Larry Diamond of the conservative-leaning Hoover Institution at Stanford discerns another scandal: “The hard truth is that there has been a rising tide of voter suppression in recent U.S. elections. These actions — such as overeager purging of electoral registers and reducing early voting — have the appearance of enforcing abstract principles of electoral integrity but the clear effect (and apparent intent) of disproportionately disenfranchising racial minorities.

This nation built the Empire State Building, groundbreaking to official opening, in 410 days during the Depression, and the Pentagon in 16 months during wartime. Today’s less serious nation is unable to competently combat a pandemic, or even reliably conduct elections. This is what national decline looks like.

I hate to say it, but Will is 100% on the money.

Democratic Voter Motivation in Wisconsin: A Warning to the GOP

Somewhat lost among the daily coronavirus coverage is the story of the stunning defeat Republicans suffered in their effort to suppress voter turnout during the pandemic by limiting the number of polling locations and forcing voters to wait sometimes hours in line to cast their ballots. Democrats came out in force and defeating a right wing justice on the state supreme court in a landslide win for the liberal Democrat running for the seat.  If continued, this motivation on the part of Democrats and the shift it appears to show among suburban voters could make it difficult for Trump to carry that state in November.   Some Republicans cast cold water on that notion and claim that having Der Trumpenführer on the ballot will turn out more Republicans, while others admit that nothing turns out Democrat voters more than their loathing of Trump.  A piece in the Washington Post looks at what happened in Wisconsin.  Here are highlights:

John Carter, 71, stood in line for three hours last week to cast his ballot for Jill Karofsky, the liberal candidate for the Wisconsin Supreme Court.

Carter, a retired bus driver from Milwaukee and African American Democrat, said he wanted badly to oust conservative Justice Dan Kelly. And he wanted to send a message to President Trump and state Republicans, who pushed for in-person voting despite the threat of the novel coronavirus pandemic.

On Monday, Karofsky claimed a surprisingly decisive victory, defeating the Republican incumbent by 11 points. She was propelled by thousands of motivated Democrats, who were angered by GOP insistence on going forward with the election amid the pandemic— seen by many as a way to suppress turnout and boost the conservative candidate in an obscure state court race.

The mobilization of these voters could signal a warning to Republicans in a state that will be key for Trump in the fall.

“There’s no question in my mind that Democrats are more motivated to vote than Republicans,” said Mark Mellman, a D.C.-based pollster who has done work for Wisconsin Gov. Tony Evers (D).

number of Republicans said too many factors were at work last Tuesday to draw conclusions about November, . . . . But some Republicans said the results show a worrisome enthusiasm gap.

“I was surprised at the turnout in the Democratic primary. It was more than what I thought it would be,” said Brandon Scholz, the former chairman of the Wisconsin GOP. The results reminded him how much Democrats hate the president, he said, and what a motivating force that could be.

Democrats are also delighted — and Republicans worried — about the geographic sweep of Karofsky’s victory. She dominated not only in the states’ two liberal strongholds, Milwaukee and Madison, but also in its suburbs and even some of its rural areas.

Charles Franklin, who conducts the Marquette University Law School poll, said the results underscored how changing voting patterns have increasingly cut into Republican margins in suburban counties around Milwaukee.

Karofsky won small majorities in three counties in the Fox Valley that have long favored Republicans. Franklin attributed the changes there to ever-stronger support for Democrats in the cities of Green Bay, Appleton and Oshkosh, which are surrounded by strong Republican rural areas. Franklin, the pollster with Marquette University, offered an additional caveat that makes direct comparisons with November’s presidential election more difficult: Trump himself was not on the ballot, and his ability to draw his voters out is considered one of his strongest assets.

But the patterns that helped decide the Supreme Court race worry Republicans nonetheless. The shifts were evident in the presidential races of 2012 and 2016 as well as in the gubernatorial elections of 2014 and 2018. In all cases, the Republican suburban strongholds were beginning to erode.

Said Gilkes, the GOP strategist: “I don’t think this is going to be an easy win in any way shape or form.”

The Supreme Court Has Fueled Assaults on America's Democracy

There have been numerous contributors to the decline of America's democracy and the rise of plutocrat rule, but one institution bears a huge amount of responsibility: The U.S. Supreme Court.  More precisely, the conservative majority on the Court, including supposed swing vote, former Justice Anthony Kennedy. This clique of "conservatives" have put its collective religious and political views ahead of democracy and, in the process, has done severe harm to the constitutional system designed by the Founding Fathers and landmark civil rights legislation. One of the most damning  - and ridiculous - rulings  was Citizens United that held that corporations were "persons" under the law and, therefore entitled to assert "personal beliefs" and to give unlimited funds to political PACS and dark money groups. As a column in the Washington Post lays out, Chief Justice John Roberts is being forced to watch the fruits of the conservative justices toxic handiwork as he presides of Der Trumpenführer's impeachment trial - a trial Senate Republicans are turning into a farce and cover-ups.   Here are column excerpts:

There is justice in John Roberts being forced to preside silently over the impeachment trial of President Trump, hour after hour, day after tedious day.

Roberts’s captivity is entirely fitting: He is forced to witness, with his own eyes, the mess he and his colleagues on the Supreme Court have made of the U.S. political system. As representatives of all three branches of government attend this unhappy family reunion, the living consequences of the Roberts Court’s decisions, and their corrosive effect on democracy, are plain to see.

Ten years to the day before Trump’s impeachment trial began, the Supreme Court released its Citizens United decision, plunging the country into the era of super PACs and unlimited, unregulated, secret campaign money from billionaires and foreign interests. Citizens United, and the resulting rise of the super PAC, led directly to this impeachment. The two Rudy Giuliani associates engaged in key abuses — the ouster of the U.S. ambassador to Ukraine, the attempts to force Ukraine’s president to announce investigations into Trump’s political opponents — gained access to Trump by funneling money from a Ukrainian oligarch to the president’s super PAC.

The Roberts Court’s decisions led to this moment in indirect ways, as well. The court’s 2013 ruling in Shelby County v. Holder gutted the Voting Rights Act and spurred a new wave of voter suppression. The decision in 2014′s McCutcheon v. Federal Election Commission further surrendered campaign finance to the wealthiest. The 2018 Janus decision hobbled the ability of labor unions to counter wealthy donors, while the 2019 Rucho v. Common Cause ruling blessed partisan gerrymandering, expanding anti-democratic tendencies.

The Republican Party, weakened by the new dominance of outside money, couldn’t stop Trump’s hostile takeover of the party or the takeover of the congressional GOP ranks by far-right candidates. The new dominance of ideologically extreme outside groups and donors led lawmakers on both sides to give their patrons what they wanted: conflict over collaboration and purity at the cost of paralysis. The various decisions also suppress the influence of poorer and non-white Americans and extend the electoral power of Republicans in disproportion to the popular vote.

Certainly, the Supreme Court didn’t create all these problems, but its rulings have worsened the pathologies — uncompromising views, mindless partisanship and vitriol — visible in this impeachment trial. And Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), no doubt recognizing that the Supreme Court’s conservative majority is helping to preserve his party’s Senate majority, has devoted much of his career to extending conservatives’ advantage in the judiciary.

He effectively stole a Supreme Court seat by refusing for nearly a year to consider President Barack Obama’s eminently qualified nominee, Merrick Garland, to fill a vacancy.

It’s a symbiotic relationship. On the day the impeachment trial opened, the Roberts Court rejected a plea by Democrats to expedite its consideration of the latest legal attempt by Republicans to kill Obamacare. The court sided with Republicans who opposed an immediate Supreme Court review because the GOP feared the ruling could hurt it if the decision came before the 2020 election.

Roberts had been warned about this sort of thing. The late Justice John Paul Stevens, in his Citizens United dissent, wrote: “Americans may be forgiven if they do not feel the Court has advanced the cause of self-government today.”

Justice Stephen Breyer, in his McCutcheon dissent, warned that the campaign finance system post-Citizens United would be “incapable of dealing with the grave problems of democratic legitimacy.”

Now, we are in a crisis of democratic legitimacy: A president who has plainly abused his office and broken the law, a legislature too paralyzed to do anything about it — and a chief justice coming face to face with the system he broke.

Republicans Escalate Voter Suppression Efforts

What do you do when you belong to a political party that finds its message and policies rejected by the majority of voters?  You try to limit those who can vote to those who are buying your agenda of exclusion, racism, homophobia and economic war on the poor, the non-white and anyone your base deems "other."  This is precisely what the Republican party is seeking to do across the country, especially in states where Republicans still control state legislatures.  As a column in the Washington Post notes, Texas - where the growing urban areas are increasingly voting Democrat and are nearing a point of being able to out vote the backward rural regions of the state - is a prime example.  Rather than change their agenda, Republicans simply want fewer and fewer people to be able to vote if they might not be buying the GOP's toxic agenda.  To be totally candid, the GOP no longer believes in democracy. Here are column highlights on the GOP voter suppression effort:

MOBILE POLLING places that popped up on college campuses and other population-dense areas were “the most effective program we had,” Dana DeBeauvoir, the chief elections official in Travis County, Tex., told the New York Times. That would explain why Texas Republicans shut them down.

The Times reported last week that, as Texans head to the polls, it will be substantially harder for college students to vote. A new state law required all polling places to remain open for the state’s full 12-day early-voting period. Localities could not afford to keep the pop-up sites open that long, so colleges in Austin, Brownsville, Fort Worth and elsewhere have had to close them. That guarantees lower turnout among people whom Republicans do no want voting: Democratic-leaning students.

Early voting is meant to enable more people to vote: Shift workers, for example, who cannot wait in line at a polling place on a Tuesday can still have a voice. Texas’s law turns that vote-enabling system into a vote-suppressing weapon. Republicans throughout the country have embraced voter suppression as a strategy for party survival, and this is one more sad example.

In Florida, Republicans have tried repeatedly to end early voting on state campuses. They also tried to circumscribe the reach of a law that allows former felons to vote, even after voters overwhelmingly approved the law in a referendum. Republicans in New Hampshire, North Carolina, Tennessee and Wisconsin have made voting difficult for students in various ways; Republicans often use voter identification laws to exclude student voters, rejecting forms of ID that college students are likely to have. Typically, the pretext is the need to block in-person voter fraud — a practically nonexistent problem in the United States.

Citizens are citizens, whether they are 18 or 88. All should be encouraged to vote. But year in, year out, even jurisdictions not run by people seeking to discourage voting have trouble keeping lines reasonable, equipment functional and the experience less than excruciating. As 171 George Mason University students who recently had their registrations rejected can tell you, as The Post reported, registering from a campus address can be particularly difficult.

States should be trying to fix such problems, starting with competent staff and convenient polling locations and hours, rather than removing opportunities for eligible voters. Congress should require states to register people automatically when local government authorities have the information needed to do so — DMV records, for example. And the Republican Party should stake its future on offering policies and candidates that can attract voters — not on keeping potential voters away from the polls.

The GOP in its present incarnation needs to die - the sooner, the better.  This from a former Republican. 

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.”

Movement to End Electoral College Gains Momentum

The Founding Fathers designed the Electoral College as a backstop to prevent an unfit individual from becoming President of the United States.  For the system to work, of course, electors had to put the good of the nation first and be willing to take political heat if they acted to prevent the election of an unfit demagogue.  Sadly, it 2016 the Electors failed to do their constitutional duty and the consequence was that we now have the most unfit and foul individual in the history of the nation occupying the White House and doing incalculable damage to America both at home and abroad.  Making matters worse, congressional Republicans utterly failed to restrain the misconduct of the executive branch.  The result is now that there is a growing movement among states to amend their own laws so that their electoral votes will go to the winner of the popular vote nationally and not simply whichever candidate wins in their state.  If the movement grows, the consequences for the GOP could be catastrophic since its candidates have failed to win the popular vote in two out of the last five presidential elections.  Needless to say, Republicans who increasingly cannot win on their policies and who want to rid the votes of those who do not support their extreme agenda do not support the concept of one person, one vote.  A piece in NPR looks at this urgent need - a true national emergency - to avoid future presidents who failed to win the popular vote.  Here are highlights: 

An attempt at an Electoral College workaround is gaining momentum in the Mountain West.

Democrats in Colorado and New Mexico are pushing ahead with legislation to pledge their 14 collective electoral votes to the winner of the national popular vote — no matter who wins each state.

The plan only goes into effect if the law passes in states representing an electoral majority. That threshold is 270 votes, which is the same number needed to win the presidency.

Democrats have been stung by the fact that President Trump's victory marked the second time in five cycles that a Democrat lost the presidency while winning the popular vote. 2016 was the most egregious example, with Hillary Clinton winning 3 million more votes than Donald Trump, but losing the election. It was the largest margin ever for someone who won the popular vote, but lost the Electoral College.

Proponents of the national popular vote measures have argued that it's not political, but Republicans, who have benefited in recent elections from the Electoral College system, disagree.

And while a majority of the country has expressed support for giving the presidency to the person who wins the most votes — 55 percent in the latest Pew Research Center poll — there are sharp partisan divides.

So far, 11 states — including New York, California and New Jersey — have joined the effort along with the District of Columbia, putting the effort 98 votes short of its goal.

Colorado appears poised to join as the 12th state. The state legislature passed the bill Thursday, and Gov. Jared Polis is expected to sign it. In New Mexico, the legislation is awaiting consideration in the state Senate after the House approved it earlier this month.

[A] potential loophole in the Constitution — that while the Electoral College is in the Constitution, nothing says a candidate who wins a state has to get all of its electoral votes. . . . . In fact, Maine and Nebraska do not have "winner-take-all" systems. They allocate their electoral votes to presidential candidates by congressional district, with an additional two electoral votes going to the winner of the state.

Colorado state Sen. Mike Foote, who's sponsoring legislation, insisted that it's not a partisan response to Trump's 2016 win. Rather, he said, it's about upholding the democratic principle of one person, one vote.

"It's about time that every vote in the country counts equally," he said. "Right now, if you live in a state that is not a battleground state, then your vote doesn't count nearly as much."

Republican state Sen. Jerry Sonnenberg, who represents the plains east of Denver, worries about the impact of a popular vote on rural America. He said it would lead candidates to only campaign in the largest media markets, like New York and Los Angeles. Only Democratic-leaning states have joined so far. Swing states, like Ohio and Florida, have the least reason to sign on, which means it likely needs support from deep red states.

There's also a broader question as to whether it would be constitutional. The Electoral College is clearly written into the nation's founding document. Some insist that Congress would have to approve it since it would overhaul national election procedures. Other scholars have argued that states can't bind their electors to voters outside their boundaries.

Koza insists Article II gives states broad power to decide how they choose electoral delegates. Still, he expects a series of lawsuits if enough of the National Popular Vote efforts went into effect.

"It's about saying the status quo is unacceptable," he said. "This might not be the best way of changing it, but it's at least a way of forcing some change and forcing some discussion of it."

As for weakening the influence of rural voters, I am all for it.  Rural areas are the principal base for the racism and religious extremism that the GOP seeks to inflict on the majority of Americans.  Their ability to do so needs to end.  

The GOP's Effort to Disenfranchise Minority Voters Through Judicial Appointments

Trump's racist judicial nominee, Thomas Farr. Photo: Alex Brandon/AP/REX/Shutterstock

I have written for years now about Republican efforts to disenfranchise minority voters , first through gerrymandered districts and then through "voter ID laws" fighting non-existent voter fraud.  Now, it has moved to deleting voters from the voter rolls as we witnessed in Georgia.  But even more insidious is the Trump/Pence effort to put avowed racists and white supremacists on the benches of the federal courts where they will have lifetime appointments and can use judicial rulings to undermine minority voting rights. Thankfully, the nomination of one of the most foul individuals selected by Der Trumpenführer was blocked this week by two Republicans, but many other racists and homophobes have slipped through  A piece in New York Magazine looks at the scuttled nomination of Thomas Farr who illustrates the type of individuals Trump is seeking to pack the courts with.  This effort ought to frighten decent people everywhere.  Here are article highlights:

Senator Tim Scott announced on Thursday that he would oppose the judicial nomination of Thomas Farr, who President Donald Trump had tapped to become a United States District Judge for the Eastern District of North Carolina. The news ended a suspenseful four days of deliberation for Scott, whose decision cited Farr’s past efforts to undermine black suffrage. His opposition — paired with Arizona Senator Jeff Flake’s — effectively killed Farr’s bid, which would have secured the Raleigh-based lawyer a lifetime on the federal bench.

Farr’s abysmal record on black voting rights is well-documented. As a lawyer for United States Senator Jesse Helms — who, in 2001, Washington Post journalist David S. Broder described as “the last prominent unabashed white racist politician in this country” — Farr was the “coordinator” of a racist 1984 “ballot security” initiative spearhead by the North Carolina GOP. It included a “postcard mailing to voters in predominantly black precincts which was designed to serve as a basis to challenge [them] on election day,” according to a 1991 Justice Department memo.

His campaign sent 125,000 mailers to black voters falsely claiming they were barred from the ballot box unless they had lived in that precinct for at least 30 days, and would face jail time if they voted. The result was his successful reelection against then-Charlotte Mayor Harvey Gantt, a black man.

The DOJ recommended the North Carolina GOP be sued for its conduct that November. But Farr’s efforts to thwart black voters continued well into the 21st century. In 2013, he represented the Republican-controlled state legislature defending a voting law that a federal appeals court eventually overruled, saying it had “[targeted] African-Americans with almost surgical precision.” The law imposed stringent voter ID requirements, curtailed election day registration and early voting, and ended other procedures favored by black voters, . . . . Tellingly, legislators had enacted the law almost immediately after the U.S. Supreme Court gutted the Voting Rights Act that year, allowing several North Carolina counties to change their voting laws without federal “preclearance” for the first time since 1965. 

It should surprise no one that none of this was disqualifying for the Senate GOP. On the contrary, the vast majority still backed Farr’s nomination, with only a handful besides Scott and Flake signaling their reservations in light of his record. This is a feature of modern conservative politics, not a bug. The moral stench engulfing Republicans’ efforts to suppress nonwhite votes is detectable from Georgia to North Dakota. But black political participation has alarmed racist white North Carolinians for far longer.

Efforts to suppress black political power may have been bloodier before, but they are not new. The legacy Farr would have advanced on the bench — and the GOP support he amassed en route — is enough to sour any relief generated by his narrow failure.

That black North Carolinians have endured such a history only to have Republicans subject them to a man like Farr is remarkable, and even more so considering said history’s enduring relevance. Anti-black voter suppression may have narrowed its scope and obscured its intentions in light of strengthening civil rights legislation of late, but for decades, its most effective means — physical violence — was sanctioned gladly by a kleptocratic white elite.

North Carolina’s black population share has fallen dramatically since the era of the coup, from 49 percent in 1897, to 44 percent in 1900, to 26 percent in 2000, to just over 18 percent today. But the progressive resurgence and ballot access reforms that helped Barack Obama carry the state in 2008 and 2012 spurred Republicans to tighten their grip on power, using means both brazenly partisan, racist, and anti-democratic. The GOP’s redistricting efforts in 2010 paid special attention to North Carolina, gerrymandering the state so ruthlessly that, in the 2018 midterms, Democrats won just three seats in the U.S. House of Representatives to Republicans’ 10 — despite the parties garnering a comparable share of the statewide vote. . . .

This history should matter when considering a nomination like Farr’s. The racist and anti-democratic urge that propels efforts like those he spearheaded in 1984 and advised in 1990, on behalf of Helms, further delegitimizes the electoral process and should be disqualifying. In reality, it is often rewarded. Georgia’s gubernatorial race saw suppression architect Brian Kemp claim victory after seeking to disqualify black voters and refusing to recuse himself from oversight, as secretary of state, in an election where he was a candidate. That Farr came up short attests to Tim Scott’s brief flirtation with morals, as his party’s only black senator. But that may not matter in 2019, when Republicans control two more senate seats and Trump can re-nominate.

The Fruits of Trump’s Racist Policies

The Trump/Pence regime has been a nightmare for all minorities as it has openly embraced religious extremist, white nationalists and some of the ugliest white supremacists.  But Blacks - followed by Hispanics - have suffered the most as FBI and other statistics have demonstrated.  Hate crimes have soared with the targets being most often targeted due to their race.  Meanwhile, anti-Semitic hate crimes has soared by 60%.  At the same time the Trump/Pence regime has waged a war against the LGBT community and argued that firing LGBT employees is perfectly legal.  In short, hate, division and violence are the fruits of Trump's - and Pence's - racist policies.  A column in the Washington Post looks at this reality as well as the threat Trump's judicial nominees pose to civil rights.  Thankfully, one racist nominee, Thomas Farr, was rejected by the U.S. Senate thanks to the vote of the lone black Republican senator.  Here are column highlights:

Back in September 2016, eight weeks before Election Day, I wrote these words about Donald Trump:

“Repulsive though he is, nominee Trump’s character defects aren’t what make him a threat. What does sicken and alarm, and what ought to concentrate African American minds, is the thought of Trump with the powers of the presidency in his hands. Therein lies the danger.”

I admit that, at the time, I did not fully appreciate just how damaging and degrading a Trump presidency could become. Trump’s two years of shameless and cynical exploitation of fears and anxieties within the ranks of his white base of support, and his unprincipled governance, have left this country more fractured along racial lines than at any time since the civil rights revolution.

Shootings, bombings and other acts of violence motivated by right-wing political ideologies are nothing new, according to a Post analysis of global terrorism data. But it found that “violence by white supremacists and other far-right attackers has been on the rise since Barack Obama’s presidency — and has surged since President Trump took office.”

The FBI’s report released this month revealed that hate crimes had jumped an astonishing 17 percent from 2016 to 2017. And the targets? Sixty percent of the victims were selected because of their race, ethnicity or ancestry. More than 20 percent were targeted because of their religion.

The ADL reported an increase of nearly 60 percent in anti-Semitic incidents between 2016 and 2017. . . . . the Trump effect has taken on a life of its own, spreading a meanness and animosity once confined to the environs of the Ku Klux Klan and the White Citizens Councils that peppered the South.

The hard evidence of Trump’s hostility toward people of color abounds — his actions against south-of-the-border immigrants, his hostile treatment of black women and disparagement of black and brown men, references to Haiti and African nations as “shithole countries.”

And it’s being demonstrated through his federal judicial appointments. Trump’s racial animosity can’t get anymore obvious than his choice of Thomas Farr to be a district court judge in North Carolina.

Farr is well known for his work as a lawyer defending a 2013 North Carolina voter ID law ruled discriminatory against African Americans. The federal appeals court that struck down the law called it “the most restrictive voting law North Carolina has seen since the era of Jim Crow,” saying it targeted black voters “with almost surgical precision” because the forms of voter identification North Carolina deemed acceptable were ones disproportionately used by white people.

D.C. Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton (D) and two other members of the Congressional Black Caucus wrote in a letter last year to the Senate Judiciary Committee opposing Farr’s nomination that “it is no exaggeration to say that had the White House deliberately sought to identify an attorney in North Carolina with a more hostile record on African-American voting rights and workers’ rights than Thomas Farr, it could hardly have done so.”

There it is. Trump knew what he was doing, and what the nation would be getting, when he chose to put Thomas Farr on the federal bench — a voter suppression advocate after Trump’s own heart.

Trump’s selection of Farr was so odious that South Carolina’s Tim Scott, a lone black Republican senator with unquestioned loyalty to conservative dogma, finally had to break ranks and declare his opposition to Farr’s nomination. Scott’s courageous decision will almost certainly doom Farr’s chance for a federal judgeship.

But it’s not likely to quench Trump’s thirst for actions that fall within the purview of his discriminatory values. Watch out: He has yet to name a permanent replacement for fired attorney general Jeff Sessions.

That is the danger of Donald Trump with presidential power in his hands. A lesson now being learned the hard way.

Be very afraid. And do not fool yourself that Mike Pence would be any better should Trump be forced from office.  

Democratic House Majority’s First Order of Business: Restore Democracy

In the 2018 midterm elections Democrats won 8.8 million more votes than their Republican opponents and won as of this writing 39 seats in and control of the U.S. House of Representatives.  Yet due to gerrymandering, the structural failure of the U.S. Senate, Republicans continue to hold an outsize measure of control in Washington - a  control that benefits the wealthy, large corporations and corrupt politicians to the detriment of average Americans.  In a column in the Washington Post, Democrats lay out their plan to re-balance democracy in favor of the majority, not the select few and racist minorities. Among the reforms the House Democrats seek to enact - getting them through the Senate may be an obstacle - are: (i) ending dark money form politics and forcing donors to be identified. As of now, we still do not know who paid Acting Attorney General Whitaker $1.2 million through a shell "charity," (ii) closing down the revolving door between Congress and large corporations, and (iii) ending gerrymandering and Republican voter suppression efforts.  Unless one is part of the greed driven 1%, a racist, or a vulture capitalist, these goals should be attractive to decent moral citizens.  Here are column excerpts:

Americans went to the polls and sent a powerful message: The election not only was a resounding verdict against Republicans’ assault on Americans’ health care and wages, but also it was a vote to rescue our broken democracy.

In the face of a torrent of special-interest dark money, partisan gerrymandering and devious vote-suppression schemes, voters elected a House Democratic majority determined to bring real change to restore our democracy.

The new Democratic House is ready to deliver with H.R. 1: a bold reform package:

First, let’s end the dominance of money in politics. For far too long, big-money and corporate special interests have undermined the will of the people and subverted policymaking in Washington — enabling soaring health-care costs and prescription drug prices, undermining clean air and clean water for our children, and blocking long-overdue wage increases for hard-working Americans.

So let’s rein in the unaccountable “dark money” unleashed by the Supreme Court’s Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission decision by requiring all political organizations to disclose their donors, and by shutting down the shell game of big-money donations to super PACs.

Next, let’s make sure that when public servants get to Washington, they serve the public. Restoring the public’s trust means closing the revolving door between government and private industries, and imposing strong new ethics laws to stop officials from using their public office for personal gain. To do so, we will expand conflict-of-interest laws, ban members of Congress from serving on for-profit boards, revamp the oversight authority of the Office of Government Ethics, and prohibit public servants from receiving bonus payments from their former employers to enter government.

Finally, let’s make it easier, not harder, to vote. Since the Supreme Court took the teeth out of the Voting Rights Act, Republican political operatives have increasingly turned to blatant schemes to make it more difficult for the Americans left behind to participate in elections — a narrow agenda all too often targeted at communities of color.
We must renew the Voting Rights Act to protect every citizen’s access to the ballot box and restore the vital safeguard of pre-clearance requirements for areas with a history of voter suppression. We will promote national automatic voter registration, bolster our critical election infrastructure against foreign attackers, and put an end to partisan gerrymandering once and for all by establishing federal guidelines to outlaw the practice.

These are the reforms that will ultimately change the balance of power in Washington. When we get dark money out of politics, clean up corruption and ensure fair elections, we will dismantle the ability of special interests to stack the deck of our democracy and our economy against hard-working Americans.

[W]ith a system that works for the people, we will deliver policy outcomes that make life better for all Americans: We will lower health-care costs and out-of-control prices for prescription drugs. We will rebuild the United States’ infrastructure, raise the minimum wage and put leverage back in the hands of workers and consumers. We will finally advance common-sense, bipartisan solutions to prevent gun violence. We will confront discrimination with the Equality Act , pass the Dream Act to protect the patriotic young undocumented immigrants who came here as children, and take the first step toward comprehensive immigration reform.

We have a responsibility to honor the vision of our founders, the sacrifices made to expand the right to vote and our duty to the American people.

Here in Virginia, we can aid in the effort by electing Democrat majorities to both the Virginia Senate and the House of Delegates in November, 2017, and end Republican obstruction.  

Cindy Hyde-Smith's History of Embracing Racial Bigotry

The 2018 midterm elections in Virginia saw northern carpetbagger Corey Stewart run as a neo-Confederate candidate.  Thankfully, Tim Kaine crushed Stewart who lost by close to a 15% margin.  Virginia - at least in the urban areas - has moved beyond supporting Confederate values.  On Tuesday in Mississippi, a run off election for a Mississippi seat in the U.S. Senate will take place that pits a true believer in the Confederacy and Jim Crow laws against a black Democrat.  Despite a series of racist comments and actions, polls show GOP candidate Cindy Hyde-Smith leading her Democrat challenger by five points as of last Wednesday.  Mississippi is not Virginia - when I lived in Alabama years ago, we always were thankful for Mississippi because it was always worse than Alabama in pretty much every ranking - so the outcome of the election remains unclear.  What is clear is that Hyde-Smith (who has now been documented to have attended a segregationist "academy") embraces and represents the worst of Mississippi's past.  A piece in New York Magazine looks at the legacy that Hyde-Smith seemingly supports.  Here are excerpts:

Cindy Hyde-Smith took time during Tuesday night’s senatorial debate in Jackson, Mississippi, to read an apology from her notes. “For anyone that was offended by my comments, I certainly apologize,” she said. “There was no ill will, no intent whatsoever in my statements.” She was referring to video from November 2 showing her respond to praise from a Tupelo cattle rancher, Colin Hutchinson, by remarking, “If he invited me to a public hanging, I’d be on the front row.” Hyde-Smith rebuked the suggestion this was a reference to Mississippi’s history of lynchings and accused her critics of taking it out of context

Shortly after the “hanging” video surfaced on November 11, another video went public of her purportedly “making a joke” about suppressing unfavorable votes. “And then they remind me that there’s a lot of liberal folks in those other schools who maybe we don’t want to vote,” she said during a campaign stop in Columbus on November 3. “Maybe we want to make it just a little more difficult. And I think that’s a great idea.”

Either comment might be interpreted plausibly as a slip of the tongue, in isolation. Hyde-Smith is new to campaigns with national implications, having been previously appointed to the Senate, not elected. What might fly locally — as far as jokes and off-color remarks — invites more scrutiny with the country watching. But on Monday, Politico uncovered Facebook photos that Hyde-Smith posted in 2014, depicting the then-state commissioner of agriculture and commerce at the Jefferson Davis Home and Presidential Library, the former Biloxi residence of the Confederate leader and slavery proponent. She was wearing a Confederate soldier’s hat.

At this point, this is no accident. Mississippi history holds many lessons, good and bad. That its white governors and their foot soldiers among the citizenry fought a war to preserve the routine bondage, forced labor, and torture of black men, women, and children, is among the most damning, even without the century of segregation and terrorism that followed.

Public hangings are not neutral events anywhere, but in Mississippi, they and similar forms of extrajudicial torture and execution long served as tools of racist terrorism. The state led the nation in such violence over the course of nearly 75 years, with 654 incidents between 1877 and 1950, according to a database developed by the Equal Justice Initiative  . . . . “While one thousand white spectators watched, [Holbert and his wife’s] fingers and toes were cut off and large corkscrews were bored into their flesh,” Ifill wrote. “After a prolonged torture, the Holberts were burned alive. Three other black field workers who reportedly looked like Holbert were also killed that day by members of the posse organized to search for Holbert.”

Mississippi’s history of suppressing votes is equally brutal. Making voting “a little more difficult” for opposing constituencies often meant white citizens terrorizing black people into avoiding the ballot box altogether.

Activist Charles Cobb described in further detail the violence that often faced such efforts. “Right after the first attempt to register people to vote [in Indianola in 1962], nightriders came through the black community and shot up three houses, wounding the daughter of a neighbor of the person we were staying with.” Such stories are not rare. When journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones visited Greenwood in 2014, she met Silas McGhee, a local black man who had tried to register other black locals under Jim Crow. “At the height of the Mississippi civil rights struggle, a white man pulled up in a car and shot McGhee in his face when McGhee was sitting outside of a Greenwood restaurant,” she wrote. “The bullet barreled through his mouth, taking his front teeth with it.” And although suppressive efforts are more subtle today, they often achieve similar ends.

As for Hyde-Smith’s celebration of Confederate history, Mississippi’s own declaration of secession outlines the reasons for its rude departure in stark terms. “Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery — the greatest material interest of the world,” it reads. “Its labor supplies the product which constitutes by far the largest and most important portions of commerce of the earth … These products have become necessities of the world, and a blow at slavery is a blow at commerce and civilization.”

The  will be campaigning for Hyde-Smithis clear. That a candidate for U.S. senate has made such a persistent habit of winking at these gory strands of Mississippi history erases plausible deniability that she meant them innocently. Such gleeful treatment, further, leaves little doubt she finds them unimportant enough to be flippant about them at best, and worth celebrating at worst. There are likely those who appreciate this approach. Many likely sympathize. But nobody is required to give her the benefit of the doubt.

Polls currently have Hyde-Smith ahead by five points. Next Tuesday, Mississippi will have its answer.

Der Trumpenführer will be campaigning for Hyde-Smith in Mississippi.  One racist campaigning for another racist.

How Hurricane Michael May Impact the Midterm Elections

Hurricane Michael not only devastated a significant portion of the Florida panhandle, it also may have damaged current GOP governor Rick Scott's election chances in the U.S. Senate race.  The areas devastated are a part of the red, GOP voting area of the state and Scott could lose tens of thousands of potential votes on November 6, 2018, as a consequence. In Georgia, the rural areas most damaged, in contrast, include some of the poorest, highest minority voting part of that state and, combined with the GOP vote suppression campaign of the GOP gubernatorial candidate could harm the Democrat candidate.  If Scott - who has been terrible on environmental issues and somewhat of a climate change denier, should lose the election due to a climate change enhanced hurricane, there would certainly be some sweet irony at play.  A piece in New York Magazine looks at the situation.  Here are highlights:

The speed with which Hurricane Michael swept through Florida’s panhandle and then through Georgia and the Carolinas last week made it hard to grasp how much damage it had inflicted. The death toll is 29 and still rising as bodies are discovered in the wreckage. Bay County, Florida, where Michael made landfall, has been devastated, with many residents displaced. Power is still out in eleven Florida counties, and cell phone service could take a long time to resume thanks to damaged fiber networks. Countless roads and streets have been torn up.

The impact on elections is hardly the fifth or sixth thing on survivors’ minds, but it cannot help but concern the politicians making decisions in the wake of the disaster, such as Florida Governor Rick Scott, who is in a tight Senate race with Bill Nelson, or Tallahassee Mayor and gubernatorial candidate Andrew Gillum, whose city lost power for a while and had to deal with tree-blocked roads and also many thousands of refugees from the Gulf Coast. Campaigning and polling (including the internal polls that operate as a campaign’s critical intel system) have stopped indefinitely in the Sunshine State. And there are other more concentrated political implications, as Politico notes:

The state’s Senate and gubernatorial races are virtually tied at the moment — and 8 of the 11 counties without power, an area affecting 135,000 customers, are Republican-performing counties…. [O]ne Republican familiar with the affected counties said the party is bracing for a net loss of 20,000 votes that Scott or Republican Ron DeSantis in the race for governor would otherwise receive.

Scott has the power to delay state elections if he finds that emergency conditions prevent a full and fair vote. He cannot, however, delay federal elections like the one in which he is currently engaged. A decision on that front needs to come quickly, since absentee voting by mail has already begun (Florida’s in-person early voting doesn’t begin until October 27). This is a state where 68 percent of ballots were cast before election day in 2016. Republicans might have an advantage in a delayed election in which lower-income voters are less likely to participate, but it would be quite a crap-shoot by Scott, particularly if it resulted in different federal and state election calendars.

In Georgia, the other state Michael hit with hurricane force, in-person early voting began this week. A complication there is that the supervisor of election infrastructure, Secretary of State Brian Kemp, is the Republican nominee for governor, and is renowned for his voter suppression habits involving the low-income and minority citizens most likely to be affected by a natural disaster.

In both these states top elected officials are having to balance the need to appear compassionate and even-handed with their own narrow political interests. Challengers like Florida’s Democratic gubernatorial candidate Gillum and his Georgia counterpart Stacey Abrams can only watch carefully and hope their storm-afflicted supporters don’t take a second hit from the Republicans running the elections.

It goes without saying that I am hoping that Scott and Kemp both lose their races.

American Democracy Is in Crisis

Many will argue that Hillary Clinton was a flawed presidential candidate and that the Clintons have their own baggage.   Even if these complaints are true, in my view, Clinton's defects were never enough to justify voting for Donald Trump unless perhaps one is a white supremacist/racist or evangelical Christian who cared more for stripping others of their rights while more or less throwing the Bible into the sewer.  Now, we daily witness the unfolding scandals of the Trump/Pence, the growing number of convictions and plea deals that make the Trump regime as perhaps the most corrupt and scandal plagued in America's history.  Meanwhile, Trump and his Vichy Republican enablers are steadily and deliberately undermining the U.S. Constitution and the rule of law as self-style patriots worry more about whether or not black NFL players are kneeling for the national anthem than possible conspiracies between Trump and his minions and a hostile foreign power.  In a lengthy new piece in The Atlantic, Hillary Clinton vents and reminds all of us that her warnings about Trump/Pence were all too true.  How does this nightmare end?  The answer, vote for Democrats on November 6th at every level possible so as to cripple the GOP and most importantly, put control of Congress back in the hands of Democrats.  Here are article highlights:

It’s been nearly two years since Donald Trump won enough Electoral College votes to become president of the United States. On the day after, in my concession speech, I said, “We owe him an open mind and the chance to lead.” I hoped that my fears for our future were overblown. They were not.

In the roughly 21 months since he took the oath of office, Trump has sunk far below the already-low bar he set for himself in his ugly campaign. Exhibit A is the unspeakable cruelty that his administration has inflicted on undocumented families arriving at the border, including separating children, some as young as eight months, from their parents. According to The New York Times, the administration continues to detain 12,800 children right now, despite all the outcry and court orders.

Then there’s the president’s monstrous neglect of Puerto Rico: After Hurricane Maria ravaged the island, his administration barely responded. Some 3,000 Americans died. Now Trump flatly denies those deaths were caused by the storm.

And, of course, despite the recent indictments of several Russian military intelligence officers for hacking the Democratic National Committee in 2016, he continues to dismiss a serious attack on our country by a foreign power as a “hoax.”

Trump and his cronies do so many despicable things that it can be hard to keep track. I think that may be the point—to confound us, so it’s harder to keep our eye on the ball. The ball, of course, is protecting American democracy. As citizens, that’s our most important charge. And right now, our democracy is in crisis.

I don’t use the word crisis lightly. There are no tanks in the streets. The administration’s malevolence may be constrained on some fronts—for now—by its incompetence. But our democratic institutions and traditions are under siege. We need to do everything we can to fight back. There’s not a moment to lose.

As I see it, there are five main fronts of this assault on our democracy.

First, there is Donald Trump’s assault on the rule of law. . . . . That ideal is enshrined in two powerful principles: No one, not even the most powerful leader, is above the law, and all citizens are due equal protection under the law. Those are big ideas, radical when America was formed and still vital today. The Founders knew that a leader who refuses to be subject to the law or who politicizes or obstructs its enforcement is a tyrant, plain and simple. . . . That sounds a lot like Donald Trump. He told The New York Times, “I have an absolute right to do what I want to with the Justice Department.”

Second, the legitimacy of our elections is in doubt.

There’s Russia’s ongoing interference and Trump’s complete unwillingness to stop it or protect us. There’s voter suppression, as Republicans put onerous—and I believe illegal—requirements in place to stop people from voting. There’s gerrymandering, with partisans—these days, principally Republicans—drawing the lines for voting districts to ensure that their party nearly always wins. All of this carries us further away from the sacred principle of “one person, one vote.”

Third, the president is waging war on truth and reason.

Earlier this month, Trump made 125 false or misleading statements in 120 minutes, according to The Washington Post—a personal record for him (at least since becoming president). To date, according to the paper’s fact-checkers, Trump has made 5,000 false or misleading claims while in office and recently has averaged 32 a day.

Trump is also going after journalists with even greater fervor and intent than before. No one likes to be torn apart in the press—I certainly don’t—but when you’re a public official, it comes with the job. You get criticized a lot. You learn to take it. You push back and make your case, but you don’t fight back by abusing your power or denigrating the entire enterprise of a free press. Trump doesn’t hide his intent one bit. Lesley Stahl, the 60 Minutes reporter, asked Trump during his campaign why he’s always attacking the press. He said, “I do it to discredit you all and demean you all, so when you write negative stories about me, no one will believe you.”

Fourth, there’s Trump’s breathtaking corruption.

Considering that this administration promised to “drain the swamp,” it’s amazing how blithely the president and his Cabinet have piled up conflicts of interest, abuses of power, and blatant violations of ethics rules. Trump is the first president in 40 years to refuse to release his tax returns. He has refused to put his assets in a blind trust or divest himself of his properties and businesses, as previous presidents did. This has created unprecedented conflicts of interest, as industry lobbyists, foreign governments, and Republican organizations do business with Trump’s companies or hold lucrative events at his hotels, golf courses, and other properties. They are putting money directly into his pocket. He’s profiting off the business of the presidency.

Trump makes no pretense of prioritizing the public good above his own personal or political interests. He doesn’t seem to understand that public servants are supposed to serve the public, not the other way around.

Fifth, Trump undermines the national unity that makes democracy possible.

Democracies are rowdy by nature. We debate freely and disagree forcefully. It’s part of what distinguishes us from authoritarian societies, where dissent is forbidden. But we’re held together by deep “bonds of affection,” as Abraham Lincoln said, and by the shared belief that out of our fractious melting pot comes a unified whole that’s stronger than the sum of our parts.

At least, that’s how it’s supposed to work. Trump doesn’t even try to pretend he’s a president for all Americans. It’s hard to ignore the racial subtext of virtually everything Trump says. Often, it’s not even subtext. When he says that Haitian and African immigrants are from “shithole countries,” that’s impossible to misunderstand. Same when he says that an American judge can’t be trusted because of his Mexican heritage. None of this is a mark of authenticity or a refreshing break from political correctness. Hate speech isn’t “telling it like it is.” It’s just hate.

I don’t know whether Trump ignores the suffering of Puerto Ricans because he doesn’t know that they’re American citizens, because he assumes people with brown skin and Latino last names probably aren’t Trump fans, or because he just doesn’t have the capacity for empathy. And I don’t know whether he makes a similar judgment when he lashes out at NFL players protesting against systemic racism or when he fails to condemn hate crimes against Muslims. I do know he’s quick to defend or praise those whom he thinks are his people—like how he bent over backwards to defend the “very fine people” among the white nationalists in Charlottesville, Virginia. The message he sends by his lack of concern and respect for some Americans is unmistakable. He is saying that some of us don’t belong, that all people are not created equal, and that some are not endowed by their Creator with the same inalienable rights as others.

And it’s not just what he says. From day one, his administration has undermined civil rights that previous generations fought to secure and defend. . . . Nearly every federal agency has scaled back enforcement of civil-rights protections. All the while, Immigration and Customs Enforcement is running wild across the country. Federal agents are confronting citizens just for speaking Spanish, dragging parents away from children.

How did we get here?

Trump may be uniquely hostile to the rule of law, ethics in public service, and a free press. But the assault on our democracy didn’t start with his election. . . . . Over many years, our defenses were worn down by a small group of right-wing billionaires—people like the Mercer family and Charles and David Koch—who spent a lot of time and money building an alternative reality where science is denied, lies masquerade as truth, and paranoia flourishes. . . . . they opened the way for the infection of Russian propaganda and Trumpian lies to take hold. They've used their money and influence to capture our political system, impose a right-wing agenda, and disenfranchise millions of Americans.

I don’t agree with critics who say that capitalism is fundamentally incompatible with democracy—but unregulated, predatory capitalism certainly is.

There is a tendency, when talking about these things, to wring our hands about “both sides.” But the truth is that this is not a symmetrical problem. We should be clear about this: The increasing radicalism and irresponsibility of the Republican Party, including decades of demeaning government, demonizing Democrats, and debasing norms, is what gave us Donald Trump. Whether it was abusing the filibuster and stealing a Supreme Court seat, gerrymandering congressional districts to disenfranchise African Americans, or muzzling government climate scientists, Republicans were undermining American democracy long before Trump made it to the Oval Office.

Now we must do all we can to save our democracy and heal our body politic.

First, we’ve got to mobilize massive turnout in the 2018 midterms. There are fantastic candidates running all over the country, making their compelling cases every day about how they’ll raise wages, bring down health-care costs, and fight for justice. If they win, they’ll do great things for America. And we could finally see some congressional oversight of the White House.

When the dust settles, we have to do some serious housecleaning. After Watergate, Congress passed a whole slew of reforms in response to Richard Nixon’s abuses of power. After Trump, we’re going to need a similar process. For example, Trump’s corruption should teach us that all future candidates for president and presidents themselves should be required by law to release their tax returns. They also should not be exempt from ethics requirements and conflict-of-interest rules.

Congress should also repair the damage the Supreme Court did to the Voting Rights Act by restoring the full protections that voters need and deserve, as well as the voting rights of Americans who have served time in prison and paid their debt to society. We need early voting and voting by mail in every state in America, and automatic, universal voter registration so every citizen who is eligible to vote is able to vote. We need to overturn Citizens United and get secret money out of our politics. And you won’t be surprised to hear that I passionately believe it’s time to abolish the Electoral College.

When we think about politics and judge our leaders, we can’t just ask, “Am I better off than I was four years ago?” We have to ask, “Are we better off? Are we as a country better, stronger, and fairer?” Democracy works only when we accept that we’re all in this together.

In 1787, after the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia, Benjamin Franklin was asked by a woman on the street outside Independence Hall, “Well, Doctor, what have we got, a republic or a monarchy?” Franklin answered, “A republic, if you can keep it.” That response has been on my mind a lot lately. The contingency of it. How fragile our experiment in self-government is. And, when viewed against the sweep of human history, how fleeting. Democracy may be our birthright as Americans, but it’s not something we can ever take for granted. Every generation has to fight for it, has to push us closer to that more perfect union. That time has come again.