Democrats in a Panic about Election Control

AG M. Garland gave a speech yesterday about how he is preserving democracy by locking up political protesters. The public is not buying it. The Jan. 6 protesters were making a legitimate political statement.

The Democrats are increasingly panicking that they might not get away with another election steal.

The lead new year NY Times editorial:

In short, the Republic faces an existential threat from a movement that is openly contemptuous of democracy and has shown that it is willing to use violence to achieve its ends. No self-governing society can survive such a threat by denying that it exists. Rather, survival depends on looking back and forward at the same time. ... Thus the Capitol riot continues in statehouses across the country, in a bloodless, legalized form that no police officer can arrest and that no prosecutor can try in court.

An opinion column adds:

The outcome will clearly come down to those three key states — all with Republican legislative majorities that put in place laws making them the final arbiters of electoral disputes. As the counting in the three proceeds, Democratic Party representatives raise a hue and cry that it is proceeding unfairly, with significant numbers of valid ballots being rejected without proper cause. State election officials (mostly pro-Trump Republicans) declare that there is no substance to these objections. All three conclude that Mr. Trump won their states’ electors, and with them the presidency. ... The scenario I described above is precisely what multiple observers have been warning about in the year since the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol. Republican legislatures in several states have revised their election statutes to give themselves more authority over the conduct of elections in their states, reducing the authorities of state secretaries of state, governors and county election officials in the process. From the perspective of anyone who isn’t a Republican, those moves look like preparation to commit fraud and to do so with legal impunity.

Another essay:

These next three years will test our democracy in ways it hasn’t been tested since the 1860s, or maybe ever. The scenario is pretty straightforward. The Republicans retake the House in the midterms. Immediately, any chance of Biden passing meaningful legislation is dead, but that’s the least of it. The GOP will launch hearing after hearing, issue subpoena after subpoena; they will find some flimsy rationale on which to impeach Biden, and they will stretch it out as long as possible. Trump will run—as Raskin put it, “for psychological, political, and financial reasons”—and he will be the GOP nominee, Raskin has little doubt. Assuming Biden seeks reelection, the election will probably be close, because elections just are these days. If Biden wins by a matter of several thousand votes in a few states, as he did in 2020, the Trump machinery will kick into gear to steal the election. Republican election commissioners and state legislators and even some governors will put forward pro-Trump electors. The House of Representatives will not vote to certify Biden’s win in January 2025, which will toss the election to the House, which will make Trump president. (When a presidential election gets thrown to the House, under the Twelfth Amendment, the vote is by state delegation, so North Dakota has the same voting power as California; Republicans now control, and will likely in 2025 still control, a majority of state delegations, and Liz Cheney will probably be gone, meaning that Wyoming will go pro-Trump.) For the second time in the history of the United States, the other time being 1824, Congress will have installed as the president a candidate who did not win a plurality of votes in either the Electoral College or the popular vote. “Donald Trump has now converted every formerly ministerial step of the process into a moment for partisan rumble and contest,” Raskin told me.

Larry Tribe wrote an article with a lot of scare-talk about a "coup", but his main fear is not a coup at all, or anything illegal. He warns that the states might use their constitutional powers to determine a method for choosing electors that might be unfavorable to the Democrat Party.

It is scary to think that Garland and Tribe almost got appointed to the Supreme Court. They are partisan anti-American ideologues.