Voter Suppression/Election Integrity

[GreyhoundFan]

Marjorie is such a piece of work.

[WiseGirl]

He said it in front of SCOTUS. 

Maybe Republicans can win legitimately if they start representing more than just the racists and bigots and actually maybe represent their constituents instead of lining their pockets. Nah not gonna happen any time soon.

[fraurosena]

22 hours ago, GreyhoundFan said:

 

Wow, a repug lawyer saying the quiet part out loud.

I'm surprised that Barrett asked that question.

[GreyhoundFan]

[47of74]

#CovidKim signed the voter suppression bill into law. 

Quote

Changes to Iowa’s election laws will become law after Gov. Kim Reynolds signed the bill on Monday.

Reynolds signed Senate File 413, according to a statement released by her office, which made changes to the absentee voting process, voter list maintenance activities, and limited the length of election day voting, among other changes. Some of the changes the bill brings include cutting down the early voting period by 9 days, requiring most mail-in ballots to be received by the time polls close on election day, as well as requiring polls in all elections to be closed by 8:00 p.m. instead of 9:00 p.m.

Democrats opposed the bill, saying it makes it harder for Iowans to vote. Meanwhile, republicans believe the bill is necessary for people to feel confident that elections are secure.

And they’re spewing the bullshit about electoral integrity. Spare me. This was about making it harder for people to vote against the GOP. Nothing more than that. 

[Alisamer]

Democrats: Um... this is blatant voter suppression.

Republicans: Nuh uh! We gotta make voting more secure! By making it as difficult and uncomfortable a process as possible for as many people as possible!

They know they can't just make the rule they want, which is that only rural or wealthy white people can vote - so they're nipping away at it. Reduce voting on weekends = make it impossible for people who can't take time off to vote on a Tuesday. Reduce voting hours and locations, limit mail-in voting, and make it illegal to offer food and water to people waiting in line = make it difficult to impossible for people living in high density areas to vote, while not affecting those in sparsely populated areas at all. 

They know full well that nobody wants to stand in line for 5 hours with a toddler they couldn't find childcare for with no access to food and water and that in more rural areas voting is far more likely to be a quick in-and-out process with few to no lines. They know most Americans can't take a vacation day to vote and don't get random Tuesdays off, especially younger voters. Retired people and business owners, of course, can go vote whenever. 

They are literally doing everything they can think of to make the lines as long as possible and as uncomfortable as possible for the voters they think will not vote Republican.

I'm amazed they haven't made a regulation disallowing voting locations from having bathrooms on the property and banning umbrellas in outdoor voting lines, honestly. 

[47of74]

A group in Iowa is already fighting back. 

Quote

An organization representing Iowa’s Hispanic population filed a lawsuit Tuesday challenging new restrictions on voting in the state, a day after Gov. Kim Reynolds signed the measure into law.

The League of United Latin American Citizens, represented by Washington-based voting rights lawyer Marc Elias, filed the lawsuit in state court in Des Moines.

The lawsuit claims none of the provisions of the new law will make elections more secure or increase public confidence in the electoral process. It said the law instead imposes undue and unjustified burdens on minority, elderly and disabled voters and those with chronic health conditions, who work multiple jobs, and who lack access to reliable transportation or consistent mail service. It claims the bill will suppress votes among those people.

“This is because the bill is an exercise in voter suppression, one disguised as a solution for a problem that exists only in the fertile imaginations of its creators,” the lawsuit states. “It is not a response to voter fraud; its sponsors have said as much, and at any rate, there is no evidence of widespread fraud in Iowa’s elections that requires a response (much less as draconian a response as this).”

 

[GreyhoundFan]

Of course the repugs think that expanding voting access is something only the devil would do:

[47of74]

Another Republican saying the quiet parts out loud.  This time Rep. John Kavanagh, a Fountain Hills, Arizona House Republican.

Quote

"There's a fundamental difference between Democrats and Republicans," Kavanagh said. "Democrats value as many people as possible voting, and they're willing to risk fraud. Republicans are more concerned about fraud, so we don't mind putting security measures in that won't let everybody vote -- but everybody shouldn't be voting."

He pointed to Democrats' emphasis on registering voters and pursuing those who have not returned ballots -- tactics that Republicans have successfully implemented in other swing states -- and said doing so means that "you can greatly influence the outcome of the election if one side pays people to actively and aggressively go out and retrieve those ballots."

"Not everybody wants to vote, and if somebody is uninterested in voting, that probably means that they're totally uninformed on the issues," Kavanagh said. "Quantity is important, but we have to look at the quality of votes, as well."

I wish these Republican sticks of fuck would just be honest and say they're against anyone other than white, wealthy business owners having the right to vote. 

[fraurosena]

Consumer power at work.

The fourth tweet in the thread under the spoiler has a list of big companies donating to supporters of the voter suppression bill.

Quote

 

 

[GreyhoundFan]

Gee, a repug committing election fraud, tell me it isn't so. /s

 

[GreyhoundFan]

Here in Virginia, we have our election for governor, lieutenant governor, and attorney general this year. The repugs have already started playing games: "'Fraud' accusations roil Virginia GOP governor race"

Quote

The gubernatorial campaign of self-funding Republican Glenn Youngkin is coming under fire in Virginia for allegedly deceiving voters in an effort to register them to vote in the upcoming nominating convention and obtain their personal information.

On Thursday afternoon, a local GOP official, Stephen Kurtz, sent a letter to state party chair Rich Anderson asking for an investigation into reports that the Youngkin campaign had dispatched canvassers who misrepresented themselves as working for the Republican Party of Virginia.

On Wednesday, a video was released that captured a door-knocker approaching the home of a voter and identifying herself as working on behalf of the state party. But when pressed further, the canvasser says she works for Vanguard Field Strategies, an affiliate of Axiom Strategies, a prominent political consulting firm that is working for Youngkin.

“I’m calling for a full and thorough investigation by the Republican Party of Virginia to determine the extent of the fraud that was perpetuated by the Youngkin campaign contractors at Vanguard Field Strategies and Axiom Strategies.

“Unfortunately, we do not know the extent of the fraud exposed this week,” adds Kurtz, who sits on the party’s central committee and is supportive of another Republican candidate, Pete Snyder. He added that the Youngkin campaign has “failed to address the fraud, the lies, and the fact that we don’t know the extent of this abuse of trust.”

Youngkin, a wealthy investment executive, is one of a number of Republicans seeking the nomination in this year’s gubernatorial race. The field also includes state Sen. Amanda Chase, former state House speaker Kirk Cox, and Snyder, a venture capitalist.

The nomination will be decided at a May 8 party-run convention, with 37 voting locations across the state. But because Virginia does not have party registration, voters wishing to take part in the race must be pre-registered as delegates to the convention.

Each of the campaigns are aggressively trying to sign up delegates, which allows them to capture personal information and reach out to them ahead of the convention to ensure they attend. Campaigns are also looking to pre-register a large number of supporters with an eye toward claiming momentum before party activists pick a favorite.

In the video, the Vanguard canvasser asks the voter to provide personal information by filling out a form that requests their email address, phone number and voter number.

But Anderson, the state party chair, said the state GOP “doesn’t use Vanguard and we have not deployed door-knockers.”

The Virginia Scope, an online news source, was the first to report on the allegations.

Matt Wolking, a Youngkin spokesperson, said in a statement that the candidate had reached out to Anderson on Wednesday evening "to reiterate how unacceptable this was."

Wolking added that "Vanguard’s employees are representing the Youngkin campaign and have been re-instructed by Vanguard’s leadership to identify themselves that way to eliminate any confusion.”

Youngkin is a former executive with The Carlyle Group, an investment firm headquartered in Washington. While the candidates have yet to disclose their financial activities for this year, most Republicans expect Youngkin to self-fund; according to The Washington Post, his net worth exceeds $250 million.

The Virginia GOP sent a letter to Vanguard on Thursday insisting "that you immediately direct anyone working on behalf of your company to properly identify themselves and make no representation or suggestion, direct or indirect, that they represent" the state party.

The letter was signed by Chris Marston, the state GOP's general counsel who also oversees compliance for the Snyder campaign. Anderson, the party chair, was copied.

Vanguard, a Texas-based firm that provides campaigns with field deployment services, responded with a letter saying that it had removed the canvasser shown in the video and was pulling all of its staff from the field “to engage in an intensive re-training to ensure nothing like this happens again.”

Other voters have complained about similar interactions with other door-knockers. One Republican living in northern Virginia said a male canvasser approached his home over this past weekend and asked him to sign a similar form. The canvasser initially said he was employed by the state party, but later said that he actually worked for Youngkin’s campaign.

Another voter who lives in Clifton, Va., reached out to the campaign of one of Youngkin’s opponents to claim that a man who identified himself as being from Houston knocked on her door “with what looked like a registration form for the RPV convention" and told her “he was working for a company that was contracted to go door-to-door.”

And yet another Virginia Republican took to Facebook to complain that a canvasser “came to my friend’s house and when she pressed them they said they were from the Youngkin campaign after first insisting they were from the Republican Party.”

 

[fraurosena]

America’s image of itself as the best proponent for freedom in the world turns out to be rather hypocritical.

US sinks below Mongolia and Argentina in global ranking for freedom

Quote

The United States has dropped 11 points in 10 years in the global ranking for freedom.

A new report from democracy watchdog Freedom House charting the political and civil rights of different nations has the US down significantly because of racial inequality, the negative impact of money in politics, and the rise in polarisation between Americans. 

Coming in at 83 out of 100 possible points, the US is now tied with countries such as Panama, Romania, and Croatia, and behind Argentina and Mongolia. America is outstripped by the United Kingdom and Chile which both got 93 points, Costa Rica at 91 and Slovakia at 90. 

The nordic trio of Finland, Sweden, and Norway were the only countries getting full marks at 100 points. America's neighbour to the north, Canada, came in at 98 points. 

The United States went from 94 points in 2010 to 83 points in 2020. The drop, analysed by Freedom House's vice president of research and analysis, Sarah Repucci, comes after events taking place during the last several months that "amounted to an acute crisis for democracy in the United States", she writes.

She told The Guardian: “Dropping 11 points is unusual, especially for an established democracy, because they tend to be more stable in our scores."

 

[Becky]

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/politics-news/georgia-legislator-arrested-pulled-out-state-capitol-governor-signs-new-n1262120

 This is so incredibly disturbing, I just want to cry.  There needs to be some sort of boycott, similar to the one against states with "bathroom bills."  

[smittykins]

The MLB Players’ Association is open to discussion about pulling this summer’s All-Star Game out of Atlanta due to the new voting law.

https://sports.yahoo.com/mlbpa-open-to-discuss-pulling-all-star-game-out-of-georgia-after-voting-restrictions-passed-chief-says-162446933.html

[fraurosena]

Georgia’s New Voter Suppression Law Is Hit With Its First Lawsuit

Quote

Shortly after Georgia enacted a sweeping voter suppression bill that could make it easier for Republicans to overturn election results, three groups on Thursday announced a lawsuit intended to block the measure. Calling the legislation an effort to impose “unconstitutional burdens on the right to vote”—particularly for Black voters—the plaintiffs accused Georgia Republicans of acting in direct response to former President Donald Trump’s stunning campaign to undo Joe Biden’s 2020 victory in the state.

The voting law has attracted national attention, as well as fierce condemnation from Democrats. Georgia Republicans—much like Republicans in other states where brazen voting restrictions have been introduced—have characterized the law as an attempt to prevent illegal voting, despite longstanding evidence that voter fraud is a largely nonexistent problem.

“None of the bill’s burdensome and discriminatory changes to Georgia’s election code will increase the public’s confidence in the state’s election administration or ensure election integrity,” the lawsuit, announced by Marc Elias, the prominent election lawyer, argues. “Rather, the grab bag of voting restrictions that populate SB 202 make clear that the Bill was animated by an impermissible goal of restricting voting.”

The three groups—the New Georgia Project, which was founded by Stacey Abrams, the Black Voters Matter Fund, and Rise—objected to a wide range of provisions in the bill, including a ban on non-poll workers distributing water to voters waiting in line and restrictions on the use of absentee drop boxes. And as my colleague Ari Berman writes, the “major power grab” would give the state board of elections sweeping powers “to take over county election boards it views as underperforming, raising the possibility that elections officials appointed by and beholden to the heavily gerrymandered Republican legislature could take over election operations in Democratic strongholds like Atlanta’s Fulton County, where Trump and his allies spread conspiracy theories about ‘suitcases’ of ballots being counted by election officials in November after GOP poll monitors had left.”

Biden, in his first White House news conference on Thursday, slammed Republican voter suppression efforts as “sick.” 

 

[Ozlsn]

I honestly don't know what shocks me more - that they enacted this legislation, or that it's so blatantly racist. It's not covert, it's openly, proudly, in your face racist. 

And they think that it will make them more popular with their base (probably true) and entrench their power (less certain).

Honestly if anywhere needed an independent body to run elections and draw up districts, and probably mandatory voting to boot it's Georgia. 

What I really don't fully understand is why they think that entrenching power and disenfranchising large groups of people is going to be accepted quietly - and why they think leaving fewer options open to seek equity of outcomes isn't going to lead to desperation and more violence.

 

[fraurosena]

18 minutes ago, Ozlsn said:

What I really don't fully understand is why they think that entrenching power and disenfranchising large groups of people is going to be accepted quietly - and why they think leaving fewer options open to seek equity of outcomes isn't going to lead to desperation and more violence.

In their arrogance they believe that they can do anything they please because they are in power and there is nobody who can stop them. They don’t care if people are quiet or loud in their protestations, they don’t care about desperation (they probably gloat about it) or violence (it won’t touch them personally) and they don’t care if their racism is overt and blatant.
They believe that they can get away with it. And up til now, infuriating as it may be, they have. 

[WiseGirl]

What the ever loving fuck. I despise him more every time he opens his mouth.

And I shall not  be flying Delta any time soon. If ever. If you don't want to read it all they credit for helping to craft the voter suppression bill.

 

Edited March 28, 2021 by WiseGirl
Add text

[WiseGirl]

Fucker. Did I mention boycott Delta and boycott Coke yet?

 

[fraurosena]

The Kochs are rightly afraid of the bill, because it is not only popular with Democrats, but with a majority of conservative voters too.

Here's a link to the article. It's a long interesting read, which gives insight into the panic that is spreading among dark money donors -- and Mitch McConnell too, which pleases me no end. 

Inside the Koch-Backed Effort to Block the Largest Election-Reform Bill in Half a Century

Quote

In public, Republicans have denounced Democrats’ ambitious electoral-reform bill, the For the People Act, as an unpopular partisan ploy. In a contentious Senate committee hearing last week, Senator Ted Cruz, of Texas, slammed the proposal, which aims to expand voting rights and curb the influence of money in politics, as “a brazen and shameless power grab by Democrats.” But behind closed doors Republicans speak differently about the legislation, which is also known as House Resolution 1 and Senate Bill 1. They admit the lesser-known provisions in the bill that limit secret campaign spending are overwhelmingly popular across the political spectrum. In private, they concede their own polling shows that no message they can devise effectively counters the argument that billionaires should be prevented from buying elections.

A recording obtained by The New Yorker of a private conference call on January 8th, between a policy adviser to Senator Mitch McConnell and the leaders of several prominent conservative groups—including one run by the Koch brothers’ network—reveals the participants’ worry that the proposed election reforms garner wide support not just from liberals but from conservative voters, too. The speakers on the call expressed alarm at the broad popularity of the bill’s provision calling for more public disclosure about secret political donors. The participants conceded that the bill, which would stem the flow of dark money from such political donors as the billionaire oil magnate Charles Koch, was so popular that it wasn’t worth trying to mount a public-advocacy campaign to shift opinion. Instead, a senior Koch operative said that opponents would be better off ignoring the will of American voters and trying to kill the bill in Congress.

Kyle McKenzie, the research director for the Koch-run advocacy group Stand Together, told fellow-conservatives and Republican congressional staffers on the call that he had a “spoiler.” “When presented with a very neutral description” of the bill, “people were generally supportive,” McKenzie said, adding that “the most worrisome part . . . is that conservatives were actually as supportive as the general public was when they read the neutral description.” In fact, he warned, “there’s a large, very large, chunk of conservatives who are supportive of these types of efforts.”

As a result, McKenzie conceded, the legislation’s opponents would likely have to rely on Republicans in the Senate, where the bill is now under debate, to use “under-the-dome-type strategies”—meaning legislative maneuvers beneath Congress’s roof, such as the filibuster—to stop the bill, because turning public opinion against it would be “incredibly difficult.” He warned that the worst thing conservatives could do would be to try to “engage with the other side” on the argument that the legislation “stops billionaires from buying elections.” McKenzie admitted, “Unfortunately, we’ve found that that is a winning message, for both the general public and also conservatives.” He said that when his group tested “tons of other” arguments in support of the bill, the one condemning billionaires buying elections was the most persuasive—people “found that to be most convincing, and it riled them up the most.”

McKenzie explained that the Koch-founded group had invested substantial resources “to see if we could find any message that would activate and persuade conservatives on this issue.” He related that “an A.O.C. message we tested”—one claiming that the bill might help Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez achieve her goal of holding “people in the Trump Administration accountable” by identifying big donors—helped somewhat with conservatives. But McKenzie admitted that the link was tenuous, since “what she means by this is unclear.” “Sadly,” he added, not even attaching the phrase “cancel culture” to the bill, by portraying it as silencing conservative voices, had worked. “It really ranked at the bottom,” McKenzie said to the group. “That was definitely a little concerning for us.”  [ me: ]

Gretchen Reiter, the senior vice-president of communications for Stand Together, declined to respond to questions about the conference call or the Koch group’s research showing the robust popularity of the proposed election reforms. In an e-mailed statement, she said, “Defending civil liberties requires more than a sound bite,” and added that the group opposes the bill because “a third of it restricts First Amendment rights.” She included a link to an op-ed written by a member of Americans for Prosperity, another Koch-affiliated advocacy group, which argues that the legislation violates donors’ freedom of expression by requiring the disclosure of the names of those who contribute ten thousand dollars or more to nonprofit groups involved in election spending. Such transparency, the op-ed suggests, could subject donors who prefer to remain anonymous to retaliation or harassment. [ me: ]

The State Policy Network, a confederation of right-wing think tanks with affiliates in every state, convened the conference call days after the Democrats’ twin victories in the Senate runoffs in Georgia, which meant that the Party had won the White House and majorities in both houses of Congress, making it likely that the For the People Act would move forward. Participants included Heather Lauer, the executive director of People United for Privacy, a conservative group fighting to keep nonprofit donors’ identities secret, and Grover Norquist, the founder and president of Americans for Tax Reform, who expressed alarm at the damage that the disclosure provisions could do. “The left is not stupid, they’re evil,” he warned. “They know what they’re doing. They have correctly decided that this is the way to disable the freedom movement.” [me:  ]

Coördinating directly with the right-wing policy groups, which define themselves as nonpartisan for tax purposes, were two top Republican congressional staffers: Caleb Hays, the general counsel to the Republicans on the House Administration Committee, and Steve Donaldson, a policy adviser to McConnell. “When it comes to donor privacy, I can’t stress enough how quickly things could get out of hand,” Donaldson said, indicating McConnell’s concern about the effects that disclosure requirements would have on fund-raising. Donaldson added, “We have to hold our people together,” and predicted that the fight is “going to be a long one. It’s going to be a messy one.” But he insisted that McConnell was “not going to back down.” Neither Donaldson nor Hays responded to requests for comment. David Popp, a spokesperson for McConnell, said, “We don’t comment on private meetings.”

Nick Surgey, the executive director of Documented, a progressive watchdog group that investigates corporate money in politics, told me it made sense that McConnell’s staffer was on the call, because the proposed legislation “poses a very real threat to McConnell’s source of power within the Republican Party, which has always been fund-raising.”   [me: ]    Nonetheless, he said that the close coördination on messaging and tactics between the Republican leadership and technically nonpartisan outside-advocacy groups was “surprising to see.”

The proposed legislation, which the House of Representatives passed on March 3rd, largely along party lines, has been described by the Times as “the most substantial expansion of voting rights in a half-century.” It would transform the way that Americans vote by mandating automatic national voter registration, expanding voting by mail, and transferring the decennial project of redrawing—and often gerrymandering—congressional districts from the control of political parties to nonpartisan experts. Given the extraordinary attempts by Donald Trump and his supporters to undermine the 2020 election, and Republicans’ ongoing efforts to deter Democratic constituencies from voting, it is the bill’s sweeping voting-rights provisions that have drawn the most media attention. During his first press conference, last week, President Joe Biden backed the bill, calling Republican efforts to undermine voting rights “sick” and “un-American.” He declared, “We’ve got to prove democracy works.”

But as the State Policy Network’s conference call demonstrated, some of the less noticed provisions in the eight-hundred-plus-page bill are particularly worrisome to conservative operatives. Both parties have relied on wealthy anonymous donors, but the vast majority of dark money from undisclosed sources over the past decade has supported conservative causes and candidates. Democrats, however, are catching up. In 2020, for the first time in any Presidential election, liberal dark-money groups far outspent their conservative counterparts, according to the nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics, which tracks campaign spending. Nonetheless, Democrats, unlike Republicans, have pushed for reforms that would shut off the dark-money spigot.

The Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision, from 2010, opened up scores of loopholes that have enabled wealthy donors and businesses to covertly buy political influence. Money is often donated through nonprofit corporations, described as “social welfare” organizations, which don’t publicly disclose their donors. These dark-money groups can spend a limited percentage of their funds directly on electoral politics. They also can contribute funds to political-action committees, creating a daisy chain of groups giving to one another. This makes it virtually impossible to identify the original source of funding. The result has been a cascade of anonymous cash flooding into American elections.

The nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics reports that in the 2020 federal election cycle more than a billion dollars was spent by dark-money groups that masked the identity of their donors. Of that total, more than six hundred and fifty-four million dollars came from just fifteen groups. The top spender was One Nation, a dark-money social-welfare group tied to McConnell. The For the People Act requires greater disclosure of the identities of donors who pay for election ads—including those released on digital platforms, which currently fall outside of such legal scrutiny. It also requires that donors who give ten thousand dollars or more to social-welfare groups be identified, if that donation is spent to sway elections. Donors who fund non-election-oriented activities by such groups can remain anonymous. And, notably, the legislation calls for the disclosure, for the first time, of large donors trying to exert control over the selection of judicial nominees.  [ me: ]   This provision appears to target groups such as the Judicial Crisis Network, on the right, and Demand Justice, on the left, which have mounted multimillion-dollar public-advocacy campaigns to influence the confirmation of Supreme Court nominees.

Brendan Fischer, a campaign-finance-reform advocate in favor of the legislation, said that the conference call showed that “wealthy special interests are working hard to protect a broken status quo, where billionaires and corporations are free to secretly buy influence.” After listening to the recording, Fischer, who directs the Campaign Legal Center’s Federal Reform Program, added that it exposed “the reality that cracking down on political corruption and ending dark money is popular with voters across the political spectrum.”

On the call, McKenzie, the Koch operative, cited one “ray of hope” in the fight against the reforms, noting that his research found that the most effective message was arguing that a politically “diverse coalition of groups opposed” the bill, including the American Civil Liberties Union. “In our message example that we used, we used the example of A.C.L.U., Planned Parenthood, and conservative organizations backed by Charles Koch as an example of groups that oppose H.R. 1,” he said. “I think, you know, when you put that in front of people . . . they’re, like, ‘Oh, conservatives and some liberal groups all oppose this, like, I should maybe think about this more. You know, there must be bigger implications to this if these groups are all coming together on it.’ ”

However, that test message was inaccurate. Planned Parenthood does not oppose the For the People Act. It is, in fact, on a list of organizations giving the legislation their full backing. And the A.C.L.U. supports almost all of the expansions of voting rights contained in the bill, although it has sided with the Koch groups and other conservative organizations in arguing that donors to nonprofit groups could be harassed if their names are disclosed. Advocates for greater transparency in political spending argue that there is no serious evidence of any such harassment. Asked if she could cite any examples, Kate Ruane, a senior legislative counsel at the A.C.L.U., said that the only one she knew about was atypical—the online backlash experienced by the actor Mila Kunis, after she had made a donation to a pro-abortion group in the name of Mike Pence, a staunch opponent of abortion rights.

With so little public support, the bill’s opponents have already begun pressuring individual senators. On March 20th, several major conservative groups, including Heritage Action, Tea Party Patriots Action, Freedom Works, and the local and national branches of the Family Research Council, organized a rally in West Virginia to get Senator Joe Manchin, the conservative Democrat, to come out against the legislation. They also pushed Manchin to oppose any efforts by Democrats to abolish the Senate’s filibuster rule, a tactical step that the Party would probably need to take in order to pass the bill. “The filibuster is really the only thing standing in the way of progressive far-left policies like H.R. 1, which is Pelosi’s campaign to take over America’s elections,” Noah Weinrich, the press secretary at Heritage Action, declared during a West Virginia radio interview. On Thursday, Manchin issued a statement warning Democrats that forcing the measure through the Senate would “only exacerbate the distrust that millions of Americans harbor against the U.S. government.”

Pressure tactics from dark-money groups may work on individual lawmakers. The legislation faces an uphill fight in the Senate. But, as the January 8th conference call shows, opponents of the legislation have resorted to “under-the-dome-type strategies” because the broad public is against them when it comes to billionaires buying elections.

 

[fraurosena]

How is this type of political retaliation against a private company even legal?

 

[Smash!]

On 3/27/2021 at 9:47 AM, Ozlsn said:

What I really don't fully understand is why they think that entrenching power and disenfranchising large groups of people is going to be accepted quietly - and why they think leaving fewer options open to seek equity of outcomes isn't going to lead to desperation and more violence.

 

In my opinion this is straight out of a dictators playbook. We had four years of anxiety what OFM would do next. Now he‘s out of office and it seems the GOP is using the same tactics. They do these things to show us they can and we can‘t do anything about it. They want us to feel hope- and helpless.

It‘s about time to get rid of the filibuster.

[WiseGirl]

MLB takes a stand.

And Delta, take note.

 

[Ozlsn]

On 4/2/2021 at 6:53 AM, Smash! said:

It‘s about time to get rid of the filibuster.

It's also past time to revisit the electoral college, how federal elections are run and the voting legislation.