“Dead Skunk in The Middle of The Road” – Page 66

Republicans are using baffling legalese and underhanded tactics to quietly push through their deeply unpopular policies. Don’t fall for their shady tricks.

Business Insider

Republicans are using baffling legalese and underhanded tactics to quietly push through their deeply unpopular policies. Don’t fall for their shady tricks.

Eoin Higgins June 18, 2021

Texas governor Greg Abbott with a feather quill drawing question marks on pieces of old parchment paper on a red background — Montinique Monroe/Getty Image; Samantha Lee/Insider

The GOP’s agenda isn’t popular, so right-wing lawmakers around the country are using technical workarounds.
Right-wing policies like abortion restrictions don’t necessarily need to go into effect to be effective.
Relying on confusion and stalling tactics is the right-wing approach.
Eoin Higgins is a journalist in New England.
This is an opinion column. The thoughts expressed are those of the author.

The GOP is winning more battles than a minority party with an unpopular platform should. But they aren’t paying as high of a political price because Republican lawmakers around the country are hiding their unpopular agenda behind confusing technicalities and baffling legalese.

Republicans are using obfuscation tactics to lead Americans to believe that laws are in place when they actually aren’t, that gridlock in Washington is an unshakable truth rather than a parliamentary strategy, and that voting in the country is far harder than it is.

The GOP passes laws they know will never stand up in court, because the message of its passage is likely to change behavior even if the law ultimately falls. These officials pontificate self-importantly about the necessity of keeping parliamentary tradition and rules in place, and then turn around and break them whenever it’s convenient. The GOP deploys whatever means are necessary to bend and even outright break the political rules of engagement.

The right has been pursuing this strategy of confusion for decades. It’s a tried and true tactic to force the window of what is considered “acceptable” policy further and further to the right in hopes that enough challenges slip through and establish a precedent. Winning individual battles in the traditional sense is secondary to this broader war.

Faced with an electorate that’s broadly opposed to the details of their policies, the GOP has relied on passage, not enforcement, to get the results that they’re after. It’s a savvy approach to lawmaking for a party with a broadly disliked policy vision, allowing for various workarounds at the federal and state level to remain in power.

Most people don’t really know

In May, I talked to women in Texas who have had to fight against the state’s existing abortion restrictions. Briana McClellan, a social worker with reproductive rights group the Texas Equal Access Fund, got an abortion in Texas in 2009. The process was arduous, she told me, due mostly to cost and geography.

Today, things are even worse. Republican Governor Greg Abbott signed a bill last month that would restrict abortions to only six weeks after conception, a ban that would effectively end Roe v Wade, which established a Constitutional right to abortion up to 24 weeks. Therein lies the trick. The law, whether or not it goes into effect, is going to make access even more difficult. Even if it is struck down in the courts, the ban’s passage through the state legislature means that there will be more confusion surrounding the issue. McClellan told me that she already frequently needs to remind clients that abortion is still legal.

“I did have to explain to them that what they were doing was legal, because a lot of the time most people don’t really know,” McClellan said.

Access is even more restricted in Mississippi, where there’s only one clinic statewide and social conservatism adds to the stigma. Serita Wheeler, a sociologist in the state, told me that she believes that is by design. Right-wing economic goals are being realized by the use of religious morality to restrict reproductive healthcare access.

“The major industries in this state are food, hospitality, tourism, and retirement; all powered by feminized poverty,” Wheeler said.

Industry and religion work together with the state’s Republican lawmakers to ensure the right to abortion is always up in the air, even while the right to reproductive access is technically in place, leaving people around Mississippi in a constant state of confusion. Just the way the GOP likes it.

Stalling tactics

Abortion laws aren’t the only deliberately confusing ones: Republicans are doing the same with voting rights. Members of the public often do not understand the laws around voting, which can change state by state and year by year. The confusion over which rights are in place and which are not can be a powerful motivator to those going to the polls.

Laws passed in GOP state legislatures, like Georgia’s ban on giving water to people waiting in line to vote, are aimed at restricting rights and making voting seem like a confusing, intractable burden. Republican-sponsored bills in state legislatures around the country are designed to reduce participation and make exercising the franchise difficult – if not impossible.

Federal attempts to solve the problem have stalled out against GOP manipulation of the Senate. Even before nominal Democrat Joe Manchin announced on Sunday that he was voting against the For the People Act, the House Democrats’ omnibus voting rights act, Republicans were blocking the bill’s passage into law in the Senate by holding up the process via the filibuster.

“Democrats’ poster child for why the Senate should change its rules is a bill that would forcibly change the rules for elections in every state in America,” Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell said Monday.

By using this age-old parliamentary tactic to stop any legislation from moving forward unless Democrats use reconciliation – a tactical move that the majority party has, for some reason, left to the unelected Senate Parliamentarian to decide when it can and can’t be used – the GOP are ruling from the minority and stopping the ruling party’s agenda in its tracks.

This has created an inertia similar to that seen during the Obama years. GOP Senators, faced with legislation they don’t want to pass, hold it up with a 60-vote majority needed to pass it and enforce the filibuster without having to get on the floor and actually speak.

Not only does this tactic stop the legislation, it allows the GOP to distance themselves from the actual work of opposing whatever bill is in front of the Senate. Not allowing the bills to come to the floor in the first place – by using a largely anonymized system that lets senators stop the legislative process without actually having to actually do the work of stopping it – is perfect for Republicans.

Needed change

One of the primary reasons the right relies on such convoluted, legalese tactics to get their policies into legislatures around the country is that the right-wing agenda just isn’t that popular. Poll after poll shows that the GOP’s policy prescriptions for what ails the US to be massively unpopular on a policy by policy issue (with the possible exception of tax cuts as long as they don’t go to the rich).

Democrats at both the federal and state level are complicit in this approach to governing. Bad messaging, a disinterest in holding the GOP accountable, and multiple tactical errors have left the Democrats wanting when it comes to even playing the game in the same universe as their opponents.

Progressives and rights advocates are thus constantly on the defensive. The use of disinformation and confusion to push forward an agenda as unpopular as the one Republicans have is the only tool the GOP has that can work – but it’s still working due to inertia from the other side.

If American voters don’t know whether they can go to the ballot box, think Washington is hopelessly gridlocked for no reason other than its natural state, and believe basic civil rights like the right to an abortion are up in the air – irrespective of reality – then the battle’s halfway won for the GOP already. It’s up to liberals and the left to fight back.

The lakes in California that have been swallowed up by the ‘megadrought’

Business Insider

Take a look at some of the lakes in California that have been swallowed up by the ‘megadrought’

Grace Kay June 19, 2021

California has been hit by a “megadrought” that has dried up key reservoirs in the state.
Entire lakes have shrunk exponentially, leaving yachts and docks beached on dry land.
Nearly 95% of the state is experiencing “severe drought” and is susceptible to wild fires.

California is facing its worst drought in over four years.

Over 37 million people have already been impacted by the “megadrought” and nearly 95% of the state has been classified as experiencing “Severe Drought,” which puts the land in significant danger of wildfires, according to the National Integrated Drought Information System (NIDIS).

Last year, California land was consumed by over 8,200 wildfires – a number double the state’s previous record. This year, scorching weather has dried out reservoirs and made the state even more susceptible to breakout wildfires than the record 2020 season. NIDIS analysts call the outlook for the land “grim.”

california wildfire — October 15, 2017. Jim Urquhart/Reuters

Water levels of California’s over 1,500 reservoirs are 50% lower than they should be at this time of year, Jay Lund, co-director of the Center for Watershed Sciences at UC-Davis told the Associated Press.

In April, scorching weather turned the San Gabriel reservoir lake bed to dust. The reservoir is not expected to see rain fall until the end of the year.

The drought turned the San Gabriel reservoir lake bed to dust Getty

On Wednesday, the drought dried up a lake so much that it potentially exposed a decades old mystery, allowing officials to find a plane that had crashed in 1965.

A composite image showing Folsom Lake, California, at drought levels in 2017, and a sonar image of a plane underwater there. — Folsom Lake, California, under drought conditions in 2017 (L), and the sonar image of a plane there taken by Seafloor Systems (R) Robert Galbraith/Reuters/CBS13

The California drought has been caused by climate change which has pushed temperatures an average of about 2 degrees hotter, drying out soil and melting Sierra snow rivers, which causes less water to soak into the ground, as well as flow through rivers and reservoirs. The state also endured two unusually dry winters that didn’t bring needed storms to the area.

Officials are predicting the water level of Lake Oroville – a primary body of water that helps the state generate energy through hydroelectric power plants – will hit a record low in August. If that happens, they would need to shut down a major hydroelectric power plant, putting extra strain on the electrical grid during the hottest part of the summer.

Earlier this month, about 130 houseboats had to be hauled out of the lake as its water levels hit 38% capacity. The water levels are only at about 45% of average June levels, according to California Department of Water Resources.

House boats pulled out of Lake Orovill — Getty

It’s going to be a rough summer for boat owners in the state.

Pictures from the Associated Press show massive lakes have run dry, leaving boats and docks completely beached

Experts say the drought could devastate local wildlife populations, as well as California’s tourism industry.

In April, Governor Gavin Newsom held a press conference in the dried up waterbed of Lake Mendocino. Where he stood there should have been about 40 feet of water.

“This is without precedent,” Newsom said. “Oftentimes we overstate the word historic, but this is indeed an historic moment.”

The month before, the California Department of Water Resources reduced farmers and growers to 5% of their expected water allocation in March. A move that has farmers leaving large portions of their land unseeded, while other have been forced to purchase supplemental water, which comes at a hefty cost. Supplemental water was priced at $1,500 to $2,000 per acre-foot in mid-May, according to a report from California Farm Bureau.

It has also made it difficult for ranchers to feed and water their livestock

As California temperatures continue to rise while water reservoirs fall, the state could be in for a devastating summer. From increased fears for wildfires to the impact on state agriculture and tourism, California residents are bracing for the worst drought season since 2014.

My front row seat to the radicalization of the Republican Party

Los Angeles Times

Op-Ed: My front row seat to the radicalization of the Republican Party

Jackie Calmes June 13, 2021

Future House Speaker Newt Gingrich of Georgia looks over his shoulder as he arrives for a Capitol Hill news conference, Monday, Dec. 5, 1994 in Washington, after his fellow Republicans voted him as speaker. To serve alongside Gingrich, the Republicans voted Rep. Dick Armey, R-Texas, as House Majority Leader and Rep. Tom DeLay, R-Texas, as House Majority Whip. (AP Photo/John Duricka) — Newt Gingrich at a Capitol Hill news conference on Dec. 5, 1994, after his fellow Republicans voted him in as speaker of the House. (John Duricka / Associated Press)

Since before he became president, Joe Biden has told crowds, “Folks, this is not your father’s Republican Party.” As a political reporter, I’d been hearing that lament since the late 1990’s, from far better sources — those Republican fathers’ sons and daughters.

The radicalization of the Republican Party has been the biggest story of my career. I’ve been watching it from the start, from the time I arrived in then-Democratic Texas just out of college in 1978 to my years as a reporter in Washington through four revolutions — Ronald Reagan’s, Newt Gingrich’s, the tea party’s and Donald Trump’s — each of which took the party farther right.

From this perspective, it seems clear that the antidemocratic drift of the GOP will continue, regardless of Trump’s role. He didn’t cause its crackup, he accelerated it. He took ownership of the party’s base, and gave license to its racists, conspiracists, zealots and even self-styled paramilitaries, but that base had been calling the shots in the Republican Party for some years, spurred by conservative media. Now, emboldened, its activists will carry on with or without him.

The first elections I covered in 1978, at the midterm of Jimmy Carter’s presidency, marked the beginning of the Republican Party’s reemergence from its Watergate ruins and the shift of its base from the north to the south. In a poll a year earlier, fewer than 1 in 5 Americans had identified as Republicans. Texas was a Democratic bastion. But many Democrats I met there were more conservative than Republicans I knew up north; they often bucked the national party, yet remained “yellow dog Democrats” in state and local elections — so loyal, the saying went, that they’d vote for a yellow dog over a Republican, just like voters elsewhere in the South.

Republicans revived nationally in the late ’70s largely because of the governing Democrats’ misfortunes — a global energy crisis, double-digit inflation, a stagnant economy, party infighting.

Evangelicals threw off their longtime aversion to earthly politics and took over local party organizations, becoming culture warriors. By mid-1978, the property tax revolt in California kindled an anti-tax movement nationwide. With both moderate establishment Republicans and insurgent conservatives seeing the possibility of retaking the White House in 1980, the two camps intensified their decades-long war to define the party.

It’s clear now that the norms-abiding moderates never had a chance. As right-wing activist Paul Weyrich warned, “We are different from previous generations of conservatives. We are no longer working to preserve the status quo. We are radicals, working to overturn the present power structure in the country.” That could stand as conservatives’ mission statement today.

That November, my election-night story for the Abilene Reporter-News included mention of the defeat of a young George W. Bush for a House seat representing Midland and Odessa.

Yet he and other Republicans across the South did better than expected. Some actually won, including third-time candidate Newt Gingrich in suburban Atlanta. Texans elected the first Republican governor since Reconstruction. It all signaled the wave Reagan would ride two years later, carrying other Republicans in his wake. The Democrats who won congressional races across the south, replacing some New Deal liberals who retired, were more conservative and allies-in-waiting for Reagan, many of them future defectors to his party.

By 1984, I’d moved to Washington to cover Congress and got to know Gingrich. While he was a backbencher in House Republicans’ seemingly permanent minority, he led a maverick faction calling itself the Conservative Opportunity Society (Gingrich himself was more opportunist than truly conservative, his lieutenants grumbled to me).

After he read stories I’d written about the ethics scrapes of some Democrats in Congress, Gingrich would have an aide in his congressional office contact me with dirt on others, often just allegations culled from the lawmakers’ local newspapers.

That was just one sign that he was a new breed of Republican, more interested in ruthless partisanship than in passing laws and representing constituents. His goal was nothing short of ending Democrats’ decades-long lock on the House majority and leading the next Republican revolution.

In 1990, Gingrich — by then the second-highest ranking House Republican leader — made a prediction that I found unbelievable: Republicans would win a House majority in the 1994 midterm elections. He explained to me that if George H.W. Bush lost reelection in 1992, with a Democrat in the White House the Republicans could benefit from the midterm jinx for a president’s party, and win enough seats to take control.

Gingrich did his part to weaken Bush. Most famously, he led a conservative mutiny against a bipartisan deficit-reduction deal the president had negotiated, assailing him for violating his “no new taxes” campaign promise.

With Bush’s loss to Bill Clinton, Gingrich immediately looked toward 1994. Since the late 1980s, he had mobilized a nationwide network of right-wing talk-radio hosts emerging in local markets. They echoed his talking points daily.

On election day 1994, Gingrich was confident of big gains — if not a House majority — and certain that conservative media had helped. “I think one of the great changes in the last couple of years was the rise of talk radio, which gives you an alternative validating mechanism,” separate from the mainstream media, he told me. In fact, he was about to be interviewed by a new local host — a young guy named Sean Hannity.

The Republicans triumphed beyond even Gingrich’s messianic dreams, winning House and Senate majorities for the first time since 1952. As the new speaker who’d taken the party to the promised land, Gingrich led a cult of personality presaging Trump’s.

“Be nasty,” he’d tell followers, and he kept conservatives perpetually angry at Democrats and at government generally, with the aid of his right-wing media megaphone.

On the first day of the new Republican-controlled Congress in January 1995, Gingrich had set up “Radio Row” in a Capitol corridor — table after table of talk-show hosts interviewing Republicans for conservative audiences back home. Rush Limbaugh, the king of them all, was declared an honorary House Republican. Collectively, these local celebrities became a power center within the party.

Gingrich would find governing harder and less popular than campaigning, however. He overreached to please the base, shutting down the government in a doomed bid to force deep cuts in domestic programs, and then impeaching Clinton. Within four years, after election losses and scandals, he resigned.

Back in Texas, then-Gov. George W. Bush positioned himself as the un-Gingrich for mainstream voters — a “compassionate conservative” — while telling those on the right he was different from his father: that Jesus Christ was his personal savior, he’d slash taxes, and his foreign policy would eschew interventionist nation-building. (He’d break that last promise big time in Iraq.)

But even as Bush sought to soften his party’s hard lines to win election, the GOP’s nationalistic, protectionist and even nativist populism ran deep. As president, Bush had hoped to build a broader party — for example, by giving millions of undocumented, longtime residents a path to citizenship. But the growing xenophobia among the party’s increasingly white, older and rural base foiled him.

Trump didn’t unleash those forces 16 years later. He simply harnessed and amplified them.

By the end of Bush’s presidency, conservatives were rebellious against both Bush, for his immigration proposals, Mideast wars and rising debt, and the Republican majority in Congress for its overspending and corruption.

After the near-collapse of the financial system and its bailout by the Bush administration, in 2008, Barack Obama became the first Black American elected president. Almost immediately, the third Republican revolution took shape, this one a headless movement from the bottom up: the tea party.

Republican Party leaders sought to unite with tea party activists against their common enemy — Obama. In the midterm elections of Obama’s two terms, Republicans regained control of the House in 2010 and then the Senate in 2014.

Yet just as Gingrich found with Clinton, sharing responsibility for governing requires occasional compromise with the Democratic president on must-pass bills. And compromise infuriated the Republican base and conservative media. “They don’t give a damn about governing,” former Rep. Tom Latham, an Iowa Republican, told me in 2015. Latham, who was first elected in the 1994 Gingrich revolution, had just left Congress in frustration after 20 years.

A year later, against a field of establishment Republicans vying for the presidential nomination, Trump quickly rose to the top, speaking a language of aggrievement that resonated with the mostly white, less educated voters living in rural America and long-struggling industrial areas like my Ohio hometown.

They jumped on the Trump train and stayed on even after he’d lost reelection and the GOP’s control of Congress. As Donald Trump Jr. said of other Republican officials on Jan. 6, just before the attack on the Capitol, “This isn’t their Republican Party anymore. This is Donald Trump’s Republican Party.”

It was a straight line from Gingrich’s uncompromising, smash-mouth politics to the tea party and then to Trump.

Should Trump remain exiled at Mar-a-Lago, his MAGA army will soldier on, forcing party officials and 2024 presidential aspirants to fall in line. And if Republicans lose in 2022 or 2024, many seem poised to reject the result, turn to force or countenance those who do — Trump or no Trump.

Jackie Calmes is the White House editor for the Los Angeles Times. This article is adapted from her book “Dissent: The Radicalization of the Republican Party and Its Capture of the Court,” which will be published June 15.

In Congress, Republicans Shrug at Warnings of Democracy in Peril

The New York Times

In Congress, Republicans Shrug at Warnings of Democracy in Peril

Jonathan Weisman June 14, 2021

“Democrats are always at risk of being hyperbolic,” said Murphy, D-Conn. “I don’t think there’s a risk when it comes to the current state of democratic norms.”

After the norm-shattering presidency of Donald Trump, the violence-inducing bombast over a stolen election, the pressuring of state vote counters, the Capitol riot and the flood of voter curtailment laws rapidly being enacted in Republican-run states, Washington has found itself in an anguished state.

Almost daily, Democrats warn that Republicans are pursuing racist, Jim Crow-inspired voter suppression efforts to disenfranchise tens of millions of citizens, mainly people of color, in a cynical effort to grab power. Metal detectors sit outside the House chamber to prevent lawmakers — particularly Republicans who have boasted of their intention to carry guns everywhere — from bringing weaponry to the floor. Democrats regard their Republican colleagues with suspicion, believing that some of them collaborated with the rioters on Jan. 6.

Republican lawmakers have systematically downplayed or dismissed the dangers, with some breezing over the attack on the Capitol as a largely peaceful protest, and many saying the state voting law changes are to restore “integrity” to the process, even as they give credence to Trump’s false claims of rampant fraud in the 2020 election.

They shrug off Democrats’ warnings of grave danger as the overheated language of politics as usual.

“I haven’t understood for four or five years why we are so quick to spin into a place where part of the country is sure that we no longer have the strength to move forward, as we always have in the past,” said Sen. Roy Blunt of Missouri, a member of Republican leadership, noting that the passions of Republican voters today match those of Democratic voters after Trump’s triumph. “Four years ago, there were people in the so-called resistance showing up in all of my offices every week, some of whom were chaining themselves to the door.”

For Democrats, the evidence of looming catastrophe mounts daily. Fourteen states, including politically competitive ones like Florida and Georgia, have enacted 22 laws to curtail early and mail-in ballots, limit polling places and empower partisans to police polling, then oversee the vote tally. Others are likely to follow, including Texas, with its huge share of House seats and electoral votes.

Because Republicans control the legislatures of many states where the 2020 census will force redistricting, the party is already in a strong position to erase the Democrats’ razor-thin majority in the House. Even moderate voting-law changes could bolster Republicans’ chances for the net gain of one vote they need to take back the Senate.

And in the nightmare outcome promulgated by some academics, Republicans have put themselves in a position to dictate the outcome of the 2024 presidential election if the voting is close in swing states.

“Statutory changes in large key electoral battleground states are dangerously politicizing the process of electoral administration, with Republican-controlled legislatures giving themselves the power to override electoral outcomes on unproven allegations,” 188 scholars said in a statement expressing concern about the erosion of democracy.

Sen. Angus King, an independent from Maine who lectured on American politics at Bowdoin College before going to the Senate, put the moment in historical context. He called American democracy “a 240-year experiment that runs against the tide of human history,” and that tide usually leads from and back to authoritarianism.

He said he feared the empowerment of state legislatures to decide election results more than the troubling curtailments of the franchise.

“This is an incredibly dangerous moment, and I don’t think it’s being sufficiently realized as such,” he said.

Republicans contend that much of this is overblown, though some concede the charges sting. Sen. Patrick Toomey, R-Pa., said Democrats were playing a hateful race card to promote voting-rights legislation that is so extreme it would cement Democratic control of Congress for decades.

“I hope that damage isn’t being done,” he added, “but it is always very dangerous to falsely play the race card and let’s face it, that’s what’s being done here.”

Toomey, who voted to convict Trump at his second impeachment trial, said he understood why, in the middle of a deadly pandemic, states sharply liberalized voting rules in 2020, extending mail-in voting, allowing mailed ballots to be counted days after Election Day and setting up ballot drop boxes, curbside polls and weeks of early voting.

But he added that Democrats should understand why state election officials wanted to course correct now that the coronavirus was ebbing.

“Every state needs to strike a balance between two competing values: making it as easy as possible to cast legitimate votes, but also the other, which is equally important: having everybody confident about the authenticity of the votes,” Toomey said.

Trump’s lies about a stolen election, he added, “were more likely to resonate because you had this system that went so far the other way.”

Some other Republicans embrace the notion that they are trying to use their prerogatives as a minority party to safeguard their own power. Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky said the endeavor was the essence of America’s system of representative democracy, distinguishing it from direct democracy, where the majority rules and is free to trample the rights of the minority unimpeded.

“The idea of democracy and majority rule really is what goes against our history and what the country stands for,” Paul said. “The Jim Crow laws came out of democracy. That’s what you get when a majority ignores the rights of others.”

Democrats and their allies push back hard on those arguments. King said the only reason voters lacked confidence in the voting system was that Republicans — especially Trump — told them for months that it was rigged, despite all evidence to the contrary, and now continued to insist that there were abuses in the process that must be fixed.

“That’s like pleading for mercy as an orphan after you killed both your parents,” he said.

Sen. Tim Kaine, D-Va., said in no way could some of the new state voting laws be seen as a necessary course correction. “Not being able to serve somebody water who’s waiting in line? I mean, come on,” he said. “There are elements that are in most of these proposals where you look at it and you say, ‘That violates the common-sense test.’”

Missteps by Democrats have fortified Republicans’ attempts to downplay the dangers. Some of them, including President Joe Biden, have mischaracterized Georgia’s voting law, handing Republicans ammunition to say that Democrats were willfully distorting what was happening at the state level.

The state’s 98-page voting law, passed after the narrow victories for Biden and two Democratic candidates for Senate, would make absentee voting harder and create restrictions and complications for millions of voters, many of them people of color.

But Biden falsely claimed that the law — which he labeled “un-American” and “sick” — had slapped new restrictions on early voting to bar people from voting after 5 p.m. Sen. Chuck Schumer of New York, the majority leader, said the Georgia law had ended early voting on Sunday. It didn’t.

And the sweep — critics say overreach — of the Democrats’ answer to Republican voter laws, the For the People Act, has undermined Democratic claims that the fate of the republic relies on its passage. Even some Democrats are uncomfortable with the act’s breadth, including an advancement of statehood for the District of Columbia with its assurance of two more senators, almost certainly Democratic; its public financing of elections; its nullification of most voter identification laws; and its mandatory prescriptions for early and mail-in voting.

“They want to put a thumb on the scale of future elections,” Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, said Wednesday. “They want to take power away from the voters and the states, and give themselves every partisan advantage that they can.”

Sen. Mitt Romney, R-Utah, who could conceivably be a partner in Democratic efforts to expand voting rights, called the legislation a “fundamentally unserious” bill.

Republican leaders have sought to take the current argument from the lofty heights of history to the nitty-gritty of legislation. Sen. Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the minority leader, pointed to the success of bipartisan efforts such as passage of a bill to combat hate crimes against Asian Americans, approval of a broad China competition measure and current talks to forge compromises on infrastructure and criminal justice as proof that Democratic catastrophizing over the state of American governance was overblown.

But Democrats are not assuaged.

“Not to diminish the importance of the work we’ve done here, but democracy itself is what we’re talking about,” said Sen. Brian Schatz of Hawaii. “And to point at other bills that don’t have to do with the fair administration of elections is just an attempt to distract while all these state legislatures move systematically toward disenfranchising voters who have historically leaned Democrat.”

King said he had had serious conversations with Republican colleagues about the precarious state of American democracy. Authoritarian leaders like Vladimir Putin, Viktor Orban and Adolf Hitler have come to power by election, and stayed in power by warping or obliterating democratic norms.

But, he acknowledged, he has yet to get serious engagement, largely because his colleagues fear the wrath of Trump and his supporters.

“I get the feeling they hope this whole thing will go away,” he said. “They make arguments, but you have the feeling their hearts aren’t in it.”

OPINION: Like Donald Trump, Tennessee GOP voters are delusional

Tribune Publishing

OPINION: Like Donald Trump, Tennessee GOP voters are delusional

Pam Sohn, Chattanooga Times Free Press, Tenn. June 12, 2021

Jun. 12—Tennessee used to be a state with a centrist temperament, a state where in election after election voters cast ballots for moderate politicians of both political stripes — Howard Baker, Fred Thompson, Zach Wamp, Ned McWherter, Bill Frist, Al Gore, Phil Bredesen, Lamar Alexander and Bill Haslam to name a few.

But that’s over. Tennessee Republicans are no longer centrists and moderates. They are now leaning hard, hard right — and straight over the edge of a flat earth.

Judging from a recent Vanderbilt University survey of 1,000 registered voters, it isn’t just former president Donald Trump who is delusional in insisting the election was stolen from him.

It’s also 71% of Tennessee’s Republican voters who last month told Vandy pollsters they agreed with the statement: “Joe Biden stole the 2020 presidential election.”

And why not? As disheartening as it is, it shouldn’t be completely surprising. Tennessee’s new hard-right politicians bang the drum daily on social media and Fox News, peppering Tennesseans with continued references to Trump and his ever-increasing false claims.

Never mind that the “big lie” of a rigged or stolen election was soundly rejected by state officials, the courts, the Electoral College, Trump’s own administration and eventually Congress — which acted to certify the results amid a Capitol breach by a violent mob of Trump supporters.

You already know how Republicans answered that question posed in the statewide survey by Vanderbilt’s Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions in Nashville. But among all of those 1,000 voters, only 40% agreed with the big lie; among independents, 30% agreed and among Democrats, only 5% agreed.

“This is a remarkable number — that the vast majority of a political party feels the other party is illegitimate, despite the lack of any evidence,” said Dr. Josh Clinton, a Vanderbilt political science professor and co-director of Vanderbilt’s Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions.

The partisan disconnect doesn’t stop there:

— 37% of Republicans and 30% of Independents said they do not plan to get the COVID-19 vaccine (60% of Republicans and 94% of Democrats said they already are or plan to be vaccinated).

— 90% of Democrats but only 29% of Republicans said they agree that the legacy of slavery affects the position of Black people in today’s America a great deal or a fair amount.

— 57% of Republicans and 8% of Democrats approve of making it legal for those 21 and over to carry a handgun without a permit. (Overall, only 39% of Tennesseans approve.)

Testing the partisan divide, the pollsters ran a small experiment, asking about voters’ support for infrastructure upgrades two different ways.

When respondents were asked if they approved of Biden’s American Jobs Plan that would use $2.3 trillion to upgrade the country’s infrastructure over the next 10 years, including improving roads and bridges, electric grids, drinking water and access to broadband internet, only 29% of Republicans approved while 96% of Democrats approved. But when the question was posed without naming the plan or President Biden, Republican approval for infrastructure doubled — to 59%, while the same 96% of Democrats approved.

It seems those anti-Biden, anti-Democrats Fox News talking points are getting through.

Professor Clinton was more tactful: “The fact that there is broad support for these economic issues when partisan indicators are omitted shows that political context can really affect people’s reactions to important policy issues, depending on how the issues are framed.”

Of course, the Vandy survey isn’t alone in noticing the hard right-wing slide in Tennessee. History is telling, too. Trump won the state in 2020 by 23 percentage points, and the Republican margin of victory has consistently widened in every presidential election since 1996 — the last time the state went to a Democrat.

Former Tennessee Gov. Haslam talked about that slide in a Q & A published last week in The Atlantic about his new book, “Faithful Presence.”

Haslam, a moderate and an evangelical Christian who says he loved being a mayor and loved being governor, faces a dilemma with Tennessee’s new right-wing lean. It’s a place where he’s having a hard time identifying with his own evangelical faith and with his party’s recent direction.

“One of the reasons I wrote the book is this conflation of folks’ personal views of Christianity with the personal political views. This to me is a sign of how far off track the Church has gone. There’s been damage to the Church by the identification with this political cause [Trumpism].”

Haslam told The Atlantic he hasn’t figured out whether he’s going to run for office again, and the magazine noted it’s also not clear that he could win in today’s political environment.

Talking of Tennessee voters, Haslam noted that unlike in Georgia where newcomers helped flip the Peach State blue in 2020, “the folks who are moving here are actually more conservative than the people who were here to begin with.”

Haslam added that Republicans did a good job in the last election of reaching out to more rural voters, even attracting a lot of people who haven’t been heavy voters in the past. But at the same time, the GOP lost a lot of the suburban voters — particularly women.

“As a party, we’re trading high-propensity voters for low-propensity voters,” he said. “That’s a concern for the Republican Party in Tennessee, and everywhere else for that matter.”

Perhaps therein lies another hint as to why 71% of Tennessee’s Republican voters believe the “big lie.”

Turkey hoovers up vast blooms of sea snot in biggest ever maritime cleanup

The Telegraph

Turkey hoovers up vast blooms of sea snot in biggest ever maritime cleanup

Campbell MacDiarmid June 12, 2021

eams continue cleaning process of mucilage

Turkey launched the biggest maritime cleanup operation in its history this week to tackle an unprecedented bloom of marine mucilage in the Sea of Marmara that experts say is an unsightly symptom of a much larger environmental problem.

In recent weeks “sea snot” has blanketed much of the shoreline around Istanbul in the waterway between the Aegean and the Black Sea. Underneath the waves curtains of the sludge hang in sheets, with the blooms depleting oxygen levels in the ocean, choking aquatic life and threatening Turkey’s fishing industry.

Turkey's president has promised to rescue the Marmara Sea from an outbreak of "sea snot" that is alarming marine biologists and environmentalists

President Recep Tayyip Erdogan promised to designate the Sea of Marmara a conservation area this week, vowing to save Istanbul’s shorelines from “the mucilage calamity.”

“We must act without delay,” he said, as officials dispatched a fleet of surface cleaning boats and an army of workers equipped with trucks with vacuum hoses to suck up the worst of the scum along the shoreline.

The algal bloom first appeared in Turkish waters in 2007 but this year’s outbreak is the worst on record, experts say.

The floating organic matter is secreted by a booming phytoplankton population, whose out-of-control growth has been fuelled by a nutrient-rich cocktail of raw sewage, agricultural runoff and other pollution, according to an academic committee formed by Turkey’s Higher Education Council.

Children swim in the Marmara sea covered by sea snot

While overfishing, ocean acidification and the impact of invasive species are other interrelated factors, the experts believe that warmer waters associated with climate change are turbocharging the bloom.

“The impact of rising sea temperatures due to climate change also plays an important role,” said President Erdogan.

According to researchers at the Institute of Marine Sciences at Turkey’s Middle East Technical University, the temperature of the Sea of Marmara has increased by an average of 2-2.5 degrees over the past two decades.

Between the immediate cleanup efforts and the long-term effects of climate change, Turkey is looking at solutions to improve water water treatment and reduce pollution.

A view of the sea, on the Caddebostan shore, on the Asian side of Istanbul

Environmental protection has failed to keep pace as the population of Istanbul and its surroundings has increased massively in recent decades, with around 20 million people now living around the Sea of Marmara.

That is about to change, with Environment Minister Murat Kurum pledging to reduce nitrogen levels in the sea by 40 percent .

“We will take all the necessary steps within three years and realize the projects that will save not only the present but also the future together,” he said, speaking aboard a marine research vessel.

Meanwhile the mucilage has began to infiltrate portions of the adjoining Aegean and Black seas.

Here’s Why Schumer’s Mostly OK With Manchin Blocking His Agenda

Daily Beast

Here’s Why Schumer’s Mostly OK With Manchin Blocking His Agenda

Margaret Carlson June 11, 2021

Washington’s most popular parlor game, after a round of Kamala Harris is wrong no matter what she does, is guessing What in the world is Joe Manchin up to?

Manchin is now the man of the moment, with the fate of the Democratic agenda in his hands in a 50-50 Senate. He’s going about it in his wide-eyed, can’t-we-all-get-along way that his colleagues might find grating if it weren’t so sincere. Senators in his party who agree with him from afar on delicate issues like the For the People Act and maintaining the filibuster call him a heat shield. He told a confidant that after the shock of the Jan. 6 insurrection, he feared a civil war could break out between and within the parties. He wanted to create a safe space for warring sides and factions to talk it out.

Call him what you want—and many use unprintable epithets—he looks like the Pied Piper as reporters and other senators follow in his wake as he goes to cast another vote that will enrage someone. Eight Democrats voted against raising the minimum wage but Manchin and Arizona’s Kyrsten Sinema, a Green Party activist who’s tilted right since she ran for her seat in 2018, is generally inscrutable but something snapped in her that day. She flounced to the well in an exaggerated schoolgirl get up and what looked like a wig, gave a theatrical thumbs down, and flounced out seeming as happy to own the libs in that moment as Marjorie Taylor Greene is to taunt them every day.

The Democratic Senators Hiding Behind Joe Manchin

It’s messy up there. Manchin is generally at the center trying to calm things down but often stirs them up. He said it was the GOP’s duty to vote for a commission to find out what happened on Jan. 6, insisting “You have to have faith there’s ten good people.”

No, you don’t when those ten good people in the Republican Party don’t show up even though the commission in question had already been watered down to a thin gruel with equal power between the parties and a hard stop on Dec. 31, no matter what. Republicans who believe subpoenas are mere invitations to show up would only have to stonewall for a few months before claiming to have exonerated the ex-president who demands it. Delay is their friend. Former White House Don McGahn finally came to Congress last week to give limited testimony on his own terms behind closed doors, four years after being ordered to do so and long after Ship Mueller set sail.

After bipartisanship failed in such an easy instance, surely Manchin would have realized he’s naive to believe anyone’s going to buy his belief in bipartisanship. Not at all. Afterward, he said he’s not “willing to destroy our government” by ending the filibuster over it.

No one benefits from Manchin’s belief that there’s a pony in the manure McConnell is shoveling more than Majority Leader Chuck Schumer. As long as Manchin is so publicly standing in the way of so much, Schumer can go home, have AOC stand on the podium next to him, and not get hit too hard by progressives for what he’s not getting done. Schumer’s up in 2022. AOC hasn’t said she’s going to primary him but she also hasn’t said she won’t, so keeping her close is in order. Manchin taking the hits also protects Schumer’s other members running in 2022, like Arizona’s Mark Kelly, New Hampshire’s Maggie Hassan, New Hampshire’s Jeanne Shaheen.

Joe Manchin: Deeply Disappointed in GOP and Prepared to Do Absolutely Nothing

It’s unlikely any Democrat other than Manchin could win statewide in an increasingly Trumpian state. Trump won West Virginia by 39 points last year; as the Times noted; no other member of the House or Senate represents voters who favored the other party’s presidential candidate by more than 16 points. In 2018, two years after Trump won the state by 32 points, Manchin won a second term by just three points.

And for all his faith in Republicans now, it’s not true that the Democrat from West Virginia might as well be a Republican, as Joe Biden said this month when he said the reason he couldn’t get Democrats’ voting rights bill through was “two members of the Senate”—meaning Manchin and Sinema, “who vote more with my Republican friends.”

In fact, Manchin voted consistently against repeal of Obamacare and for Medicare for All, to preserve funding for Planned Parenthood, against Trump’s tax cuts (and for his impeachment), and periodically reintroduces a gun control bill he co-sponsored with Sen. Pat Toomey. He’s no longer high on S.1, the bloated For the People Act, but he wants to fatten and pass the John Lewis Voting Rights Act.

Still, I threw up my hands and said that’s it when Manchin stuck with the filibuster after losing the Jan. 6 commission vote. Didn’t he hear Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell say he is “100 percent focused “on stopping President Joe Biden’s socialist administration? Imagine what he’d say about a Democratic president he hasn’t been friends with for decades. Then I read something Manchin wrote when he took a hard vote last year against the confirmation of Amy Coney Barrett.

He warned that Republicans had chosen “a dangerous, partisan path” to cram Barrett onto the court an unprecedented eight days before an election. “The Senate is supposed to be the greatest deliberative body in the world… But each time a Senate majority–regardless of party–changes the rules, we reduce the incentive to work together across party lines” and “fan the flames of division.”

He’s applying that to his party now. And on Thursday it worked. The infrastructure bill that had appeared to be dead on Wednesday came back to life after hours and hours of Manchin talking it out in his safe place along with—you guessed it—a bipartisan group of 10 senators.

I still fear the country is paralyzed until the filibuster ends or McConnell’s obstruction does. Otherwise, an election has no consequences. But I no longer feel Manchin is wrong to play by the rules as they exist. He’s put his own seat on the line as collateral and so that others might survive. I’m sure he’s hoping for a pony to come out of it. I’m hoping too.

Either you believe in our right to vote, or you don’t, Sen. Manchin. Something tells me you don’t.

Miami Herald

Either you believe in our right to vote, or you don’t, Sen. Manchin. Something tells me you don’t | Opinion

Leonard Pitts Jr. June 8, 2021

Dear Sen. Joe Manchin: It has only been 56 years.

As Americans, we are pleased to call ourselves one of the world’s oldest democracies. We are actually one of the world’s newest. Democracy, after all, is government shaped by the will of the people. But until 1920, roughly half the people were not allowed to vote, disqualified by dint of gender. And until 1965 — 56 years ago — roughly 10 percent were restricted by color of skin.

So American democracy is not even as old as you are. Its newness — its recentness — is invoked here to help you understand the trepidation with which some of us regard the dozens of bills being pondered and passed in Republican-led statehouses across the country with the intention and certain effect of keeping us from voting. As part of a demographic whose access to that right has never been impeded, perhaps you find it difficult to appreciate the profound distress and sense of historical déjà vu some of us are now processing.

To say nothing of our equally profound disappointment in those who could defend us choosing instead to let us down, failing to meet the moment with the urgency it requires. Sadly, that’s a category into which you fall.

“The right to vote is fundamental to our American democracy,” you wrote in a Sunday op-ed in the Charleston Gazette-Mail of West Virginia. You then spent a thousand words explaining why you will not protect this right by supporting the For The People Act, which would end partisan gerrymandering, punish those who try to intimidate voters and streamline voter registration, among other urgently needed reforms. Your argument boils down to: I won’t vote for the bill because it doesn’t have bipartisan support. You lodge no other complaint against it.

But your reasoning is nonsensical. Would you decline to support a For The Chickens Act solely because the foxes refused to sign on?

Yes, you did signal a willingness to vote for a companion bill, the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, which would repair the Voting Rights Act that was gutted by the Supreme Court in 2013. But even here, your support is conditioned upon Republican buy-in; you have flatly ruled out ending — or even carving out a one-time exemption from — the filibuster, a parliamentary procedure that allows a minority party to block legislation the majority approves.

There has been much speculation on why you’re doing this. Some say you enjoy the attention. Some say you’re not very smart. But the scariest idea is that you are sincere, that you truly believe this radical (and unrequited) commitment to bipartisanship is what’s best. It’s entirely possible, however, to be sincere and yet, sincerely wrong.

And you are. In effect, you ask those of us who face the loss of our voting rights to trust you as you wager those rights on Republican integrity and good faith. But as recent years have proven ad nauseam, those are qualities your colleagues have in vanishingly short supply.

Moreover, if America is what America says, then my ballot is not yours to gamble with. Bipartisanship is very important, yes, but the right to vote is sacred — “fundamental,” to use your word. When you prioritize the former above the latter, you echo all the other times this country has made us the fulcrum of its moral compromises, deemed something else to be of more importance than our rights as human beings.

Sir, the error you are making is seismic and potentially tragic. Reconsider, please.

The fatal flaw(s) in Manchin’s case against the For the People Act

MSNBC – MaddowBlog

The fatal flaw(s) in Manchin’s case against the For the People Act

By Steve Benen June 7, 2021

Joe Manchin is prepared to be remembered by history as the senator who did little more than hope as his country’s democracy unraveled.

About a week ago, more than 100 American scholars who specialize in democracy studies unveiled a joint public statement warning that the United States’ system of government is “now at risk.” As part of their efforts, the scholars, many of whom have devoted much of their lives to studying the breakdowns in democracies abroad, pleaded with lawmakers to act.

“We urge members of Congress to do whatever is necessary — including suspending the filibuster — in order to pass national voting and election administration standards,” the experts wrote, apparently referring to the standards Democrats hope to establish in the pending For the People Act legislation.

One of the signatories was Harvard’s Daniel Ziblatt, co-author of How Democracies Die, who told The New Yorker‘s Susan Glasser that threats against the U.S. democracy “are much worse than we expected” when he and Steven Levitsky first wrote the book in 2018. Ziblatt added that current conditions are “much more worrisome.”

It was against this backdrop that President Biden delivered Memorial Day remarks last week describing democracy as the “soul of America” that all of us must fight to protect. The president soon after called for June to be “a month of action on Capitol Hill,” specifically on the issue of voting rights. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) told members that they should prepared to vote this month on the For the People Act, which he said is “essential to defending our democracy.”

Yesterday, Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) announced that his party’s top legislative priority would die by his hand.

Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., said Sunday that he will not vote for S.1, known as the For The People Act, the massive elections and ethics reform package Democrats have proposed. The announcement immediately imperils the bill, which is universally opposed by Republicans and would require elimination of the Senate filibuster to be passed. The legislation was passed in the House this year.

In an op-ed in the Charleston Gazette-Mail, the conservative Democrat didn’t identify any substantive problems with the legislation, other than to denounce the bill as “partisan.”

The superficiality of the indictment was jarring: Manchin would have the public believe that any important proposal that Republicans don’t like is by definition “partisan,” which in turn renders the bill unacceptable, regardless of merit. It’s a governing model that says the majority party must give the minority party veto power over efforts to shield our system of government, even as that party takes a sledgehammer to democracy in states nationwide.

The West Virginian appeared on Fox News yesterday morning and added, in reference to his Senate Republican colleagues, “I’m just hoping they are able to rise to the occasion to defend our country and support our country and make sure that we have a democracy for this republic of all the people.” In the same interview, the conservative Democrat went on to say, “I’m going to continue to keep working with my bipartisan friends and hopefully we can get more of them.”

Note the repetitious use of the word “hope.” Manchin, after already having seen GOP senators discredit his preferred approach to legislating, is “just hoping” that the party actively opposed to voting rights changes its mind.

The plan is not to have the majority party govern to preserve democracy; rather, the plan is to hope that Republican opponents of democracy see the light before it’s too late. What could possibly go wrong?

In a word, everything.

The disconnect between the seriousness of the threat and Manchin’s aspirational longing is jarring because the scope and scale of the Republican Party’s campaign is so severe. As part of the most aggressive attacks against our democracy in generations, GOP officials are placing indefensible hurdles between Americans and ballot boxes through voter-suppression measures. At the same time, the party is hijacking election administration systems. And actively undermining public confidence in election results. And positioning far-right, anti-election ideologues to serve as Secretaries of State, whose offices oversee elections. And targeting poll workers. And exploring ways to make it more difficult for Americans to turn to the courts in the hopes of protecting voting rights. And intensifying voter-roll purges. And empowering heavy-handed poll watchers. And preparing to exploit gerrymandering to create voter-proof majorities.

And laying the groundwork to allow officials to overturn election results Republicans don’t like.

Is America heading to a place where it can no longer call itself a democracy?

The Guardian

Is America heading to a place where it can no longer call itself a democracy?

David Smith in Washington June 5, 2021

<span>Photograph: Brendan Smialowski/AFP/Getty Images</span>

If Donald Trump’s inaugural address can be summed up in two words – “American carnage” – Joe Biden’s might be remembered for three: “Democracy has prevailed.”

The new president, speaking from the spot where just two weeks earlier a pro-Trump mob had stormed the US Capitol, promised that the worst was over in a battered, bruised yet resilient Washington.

But now, four and a half months later the alarm bells are sounding on American democracy again. Even as the coronavirus retreats, the pandemic of Trump’s “big lie” about a stolen election spreads, manifest in Republicans’ blocking of a commission to investigate the insurrection. And state after state is imposing new voting restrictions and Trump allies are now vying to run future election themselves.

With Republicans still in thrall to Trump and odds-on to win control of the House of Representatives next year, there are growing fears that his presidency was less a historical blip than a harbinger of systemic decline.

“There was a momentary sigh of relief but the level of anxiety is actually strangely higher now than in 2016 in the sense that it’s not just about one person but there are broader structural issues,” said Daniel Ziblatt, co-author of How Democracies Die. “The weird emails that I get are more ominous now than they were in 2016: there seems to be a much deeper level of misinformation and conspiracy theories.”

There seems to be a much deeper level of misinformation and conspiracy theories

Daniel Ziblatt

Just hours after the terror of 6 January, 147 Republicans in Congress voted to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election despite no evidence of irregularities. Trump was impeached for inciting the violence but Senate Republicans ensured his acquittal – a fork in the road where the party could have chosen another destiny.

As Trump continued to push his false claims of election fraud, rightwing media and Republican state parties fell into line. A farcical “audit” of votes is under way in Arizona with more states threatening to follow suit. Trump is reportedly so fixated on the audits that he has even suggested – wrongly – he could be reinstated as president later this year.

Perhaps more insidiously, Trump supporters who tried to overturn the 2020 election are maneuvering to serve as election officials in swing states such as Arizona, Georgia, Michigan and Nevada. If they succeed in becoming secretaries of state, they would exercise huge influence over the conduct of future elections and certifying their results. Some moderate Republican secretaries of state were crucial bulwarks against Trump’s toxic conspiracy theories last year.

The offensive is coupled with a dramatic and sweeping assault on voting rights. Republican-controlled state legislatures have rammed through bills that make it harder to vote in states such as Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Iowa and Montana. Their all-out effort in Texas was temporarily derailed when Democrats walked out of the chamber, denying them a quorum.

A person holds a sign reading ‘Secure our democracy’ in San Diego, California, in April. Photograph: Mike Blake/Reuters

Ziblatt, a political scientist at Harvard University, commented: “The most worrying threat is at the state level, the effort to change voting rules, which I think is prompted by the failed effort to alter the election outcome of 2020.

“The lesson Republicans have learnt from that is they don’t really suffer any electoral consequences from their base pursuing this kind of thing. In fact, they’re rewarded for it. That’s very ominous because that suggests they’ll continue to try to do this until they pay an electoral price for it, and so far they don’t sense they’re paying an electoral price for it.”

Where is this authoritarian ecosystem heading? For many, the nightmare scenario is that Trump will run again in 2024 and, with the benefit of voter suppression, sneak a win in the electoral college as he did in 2016. If that fails, plan B would be for a Republican-controlled House to refuse to certify a Democratic winner and overturn the result in Trump’s favor.

Disputed presidential elections have been thrown to the House before, Ziblatt noted. “It’s not unprecedented but in those earlier periods you had two parties that were constitutional, fully democratic parties. The thought of having a dispute like that when one of the parties is only questionably committed to democratic rules and norms is very frightening.”

People use elections to get into power and then, once in power, assault democratic institutions

Daniel Ziblatt

In How Democracies Die, Ziblatt and Steven Levitsky argue that democracies often come under threat not from invading armies or violent revolutions but at the ballot box: death by a thousand cuts. “People use elections to get into power and then, once in power, assault democratic institutions,” Ziblatt said.

“That’s Viktor Orbán [in Hungary], that’s Recep Tayyip Erdoğan [in Turkey], that’s Hugo Chávez [in Venezuela] and what’s distinctive about that is that it often begins incrementally. So people continue to go about their lives, continue to vote, parliament continues to meet and so you think, ‘Is there really a threat?’ But the power concentrates so it becomes harder and harder to unseat an incumbent.”

He added: “We shouldn’t overlook that fact that we had a change in government in January. What that suggests is our electoral institutions do work better than they do in Hungary. The opposition in the United States is more well-organized and financed than the Hungarian opposition or the Turkish opposition, so we shouldn’t overstate that. But on the other hand, the tendencies are very similar.”

Republicans are also playing a very long game, rewiring democracy’s hard drive in an attempt to consolidate power. Trump is arguably both cause and effect of the lurch right, which takes place in the wider context of white Christians losing majority status in America’s changing demographics.

His grip on the party appears only to have tightened since his defeat, as evidenced by the ousting of Trump critic Liz Cheney from House leadership and their use of a procedural move known as the filibuster to block the 6 January commission. Critics say that, in an atmosphere of partisan tribalism, the party is now driven by a conviction that Democratic victories are by definition illegitimate.

Kurt Bardella, a former Republican congressional aide who is now a Democrat, said: “It’s very clear that the next time there is a violent effort to overthrow our government, Republicans in Congress will be knowing accomplices in that effort. They are the getaway driver for the democratic arsonists.”

Bardella, a political commentator, added: “It has become painfully transparent that the Republican party platform is 100% anti-democratic and it is their ambition to impose minority rule on the majority going forward, because they know that when the playing field is level, they can’t win and so they have instead decided to double down on supporting a wannabe autocrat, and are doing everything they can to destabilize the democratic safeguards that we’ve had in place since the founding of our country.

“We cannot underestimate the gravity of this moment in time because what happens over the next month or year could be the turning point in this battle to preserve our democracy.”

The threat poses a dilemma for Biden, who was elected on a promise of building bridges and seeking bipartisanship. He continues to do so while issuing increasingly stark calls to arms. Speaking in Tulsa, Oklahoma, this week, he repeated his “democracy prevailed” mantra but then warned of a “truly unprecedented assault on our democracy” and announced that the vice-president, Kamala Harris, would lead an effort to strengthen voting rights.

Joe Biden speaks in Tulsa, Oklahoma, on 1 June. Photograph: Brandon Bell/Getty Images

Proposed national legislation to address the issue, however, depends on a Senate currently split 50-50 between Democrats and Republicans (Harris has the tie-breaking vote). In order to pass it with a simple majority, Democrats would first have to abolish the filibuster but at least two senators, Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona, have ruled out such a step.

Facing this stalemate, activists and civil society are trying to create a sense of urgency. More than a hundred scholars this week released a joint statement, posted by the New America think-tank, expressing “deep concern” at “radical changes to core electoral procedures” that jeopardize free and fair elections. “Our entire democracy is now at risk,” the scholars wrote.

Last year’s poll was dubbed “the election that could break America” and the nation was widely considered to have dodged a bullet; it may not be so fortunate in 2024. Yvette Simpson, chief executive of the progressive group Democracy for Action, added: “We’re getting to the place where we might not be able to call ourselves a democracy any more. That’s how dire it is.

“It is not just the fact that there is an orchestrated, concerted effort across our country to interfere with the most fundamental right of any democracy but that they’re doing it so blatantly, so out in the open and so unapologetically, and that there have been many attempts and there’s no easy way to stop it.”

Simpson compared Democrats’ victory over Trump to the film Avengers: Endgame and warned against complacency. “We just defeated Thanos and everybody was like, ‘OK, let’s take a break,’ and I’m like, ‘No, we cannot take a break because the GOP never take a break’. They know that we’re taking a break and that’s why they’re doing it now and so aggressively: ‘You think you won because Trump is out? Oh, we got you.’”

Ibram X Kendi, a historian and author of How to Be an Antiracist, added: “At the end of the day, there is an all out war on American voters, particularly younger voters, particularly younger voters of color, and it’s happening from Texas to Florida and it’s really causing the American people to decide whether we want our democracy or not.”