Pledge of allegiance #2

August 19, 2018

Each day’s fresh revelations seem to hasten Trump’s descent into full on King Lear- dinner theater edition. There are unhinged Twitter rants directed equally at disloyal confidants and highly esteemed career government lawyers; the capricious revocation of security clearance (or the threat of it) as retaliation against former high-ranking officials with the temerity to criticize the thin-skinned autocrat.

The strongest evidence we have that Trump is unraveling is the escalating number of former sycophants eagerly turning on him to save their own skins. First we had Cohen intimating the existence of damaging tapes, then we had Omarosa one-up Cohen by actually releasing damaging tapes. The most sophisticated gambit, though, came from White House Counsel, Don McGahn, who is skillfully plotting his exculpation through the media. Yesterday’s New York Times featured a detailed story of McGahn’s extensive cooperation with the Special Counsel’s inquiry. McGahn’s actions seem motivated by his fear that Trump is setting him up to take the fall for obstruction of justice, rather than from a patriotic sense of duty to help Robert Mueller get at the truth (Source: “McGahn, White House Counsel, Has Cooperated Extensively in Mueller Inquiry,” by Michael S. Schmidt and Maggie Haberman, The New York Times, 8/18/18).

The article clearly struck a nerve, because Trump promptly took to Twitter to declare that “the failing New York Times wrote a story that made it seem like the White House Councel [sic] had TURNED on me,” (@RealDonaldTrump, Twitter, 8/19/18). By now the pattern is mind-numbingly predictable — damaging new information comes out; Trump rages on Twitter; and we breathlessly binge on the media’s dissection of each twist and turn like it’s a new Netflix series and not our republic crumbling in real time.

The fact is that while this melodrama consumes the news cycle, the dogged effort to destroy our democracy continues apace. Republicans are engaged in a multipronged campaign to suppress the votes of Black Americans and other Democratic constituencies. First, they are aggressively purging the voter rolls. The Brennan Center has found that since Shelby County v. Holder eliminated the pre-clearance requirement of the Voting Rights Act, several states formerly subject to pre-clearance have dramatically ramped up their voter purges. The Brennan Center study found a 33% increase in purges between 2014-2016 from the 2012-2014 cycle. Georgia, for example, purged 1.5 million voters, double the amount purged in the previous cycle (Source: “Purges: A Growing Threat to the Right To Vote,” by Jonathan Brater, Kevin Morris, Myrna Perez, Christopher Deluzio, Brennancenter.org 7/20/18).

Secondly, Secretaries of State are attacking efforts to register black voters and other voters of color. Gubernatorial candidate, Georgia Secretary of State Brian Kemp, has a long track record in this regard. In 2014-2015, Kemp investigated both The Asian American Legal Advocacy Center and Stacey Abrams’ New Georgia Project, claiming voter fraud. Both organizations were exonerated, but this was clearly an attempt to retaliate against them for their effort to ensure that underrepresented minorities exercised their right to vote (Source: “Register Minority Voters in Georgia, Go to Jail,” by Spencer Woodman, The New Republic, 5/15/15).

Thirdly, where Republicans control the election apparatus, they are drastically restricting access to the polls by shuttering polling places. Last week, in Randolph County, Georgia, a rural county that is more than 60% black and impoverished, the county proposed closing seven of the nine polling places in advance of the November midterms. Although Kemp condemned the plan, it was recommended by Mike Malone, a consultant that he put in place (Source: “Brian Kemp’s Bid for Governor Depends on Erasing the Black Vote in Georgia,” by Mark Joseph Stern, Slate.com, 8/17/18).

In case we had any doubt as to the motivation behind these moves, we should take Brian Kemp at his word when he told a group of Republican donors in a private fundraiser, “all these stories about them, you know, registering all these minority voters that are out there… If they do that, they can win these elections in November,” (Source: ibid). This is why they refused to appropriate more money for election security, despite knowing that Russians are actively targeting our election apparatus. This is the reason that Republicans aren’t regulating Russian social media interference, since those social media efforts actually targeted black and other non-white voters to discourage them from voting. In short, Republicans are not merely idle in the face of continued Russian interference, they are counting on it. Like Trump, the Republicans have shown who they owe their allegiance to. It sure as hell isn’t us.

#VOTE

#Paperballots

#NAACPLDF

#ACLU