#democracy docket

[rosielindy]

Follow and support Democracy Docket to counter these types of attacks on voting rights happening all across the country!

#virginia #voting rights #gop corruption #Marc Elias #democracy docket #wearethemajority #fight back #democracy dies in darkness #call them out

[yeahiwasintheshit]

this was a good interview with clinton today, about the dangers if trump wins

we were completely fucked over when she lost. what the world would look like now, with a liberal majority in the supreme court if more people in key states voted for her.

#democracy docket #marc elias #hillary clinton #Youtube

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

April 3, 2024

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

APR 04, 2024

The election of 2000 was back in the news this week, when Nate Cohn of the New York Times reminded readers of his newsletter, using a map by data strategist and consultant Matthew C. Isbell, that the unusual butterfly ballot design in Palm Beach County that year siphoned off at least 2,000 votes intended for Democratic candidate Al Gore to far-right candidate Pat Buchanan. 

Those 2,000 votes were enough to decide the election, “all things being equal,” Cohn wrote. But of course, they weren’t equal: in 1998 a purge of the Florida voter rolls had disproportionately disenfranchised Black voters, making them ten times more likely than white voters to have their ballots rejected.

That ballot and that purge gave Republican candidate George W. Bush the electoral votes from Florida, putting him into the White House although he had lost the popular vote by more than half a million votes.

Revisiting the 2000 election reminds us that manipulating the vote through voter suppression or the mechanics of an election in even small ways can undermine the will of the people.  

A poll out today from the Associated Press/NORC showed that the vast majority of Americans agree about the importance of the fundamental principles of our democracy. Ninety-eight percent of Americans think the right to vote is extremely important, very important, or somewhat important. Only 2% think it is “not too important.” The split was similar with regard to “the right of everyone to equal protection under the law”: 98% of those polled thought it was extremely, very, or somewhat important, while only 2% thought it was not too important. 

Recent election results suggest that voters don’t support the extremism of the current Republican Party. In local elections in the St. Louis, Missouri, area on Tuesday, voters rejected all 13 right-wing candidates for school boards, and in Enid, Oklahoma, voters recalled a city council member who participated in the 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, and had ties to white supremacist groups. 

Seemingly aware of the growing backlash to their policies, MAGA Republicans are backing away from them, at least in public. Earlier this year, Florida governor Ron DeSantis called for making it harder to ban books after a few activists systematically challenged dozens of books in districts where they had no children in the schools—although he blamed teachers, administrators, and “the news media” for creating a “hoax.” 

Today, lawyers for the state of Texas told a federal appeals court that state legislators might have gone “too far” with their immigration law that made it a state crime to enter Texas illegally and allowed state judges to order immigrants to be deported. (Mexico had flatly refused to accept deported immigrants from other countries under this new law.) Nonetheless, Arizona legislators have passed a similar bill—that Democratic governor Katie Hobbs refuses to sign into law—and are considering another measure that would allow landowners to threaten or shoot people who cross their property to get into the U.S.

Indeed, the extremists who have taken over the Republican Party seem less inclined to moderate their stances than either to pollute popular opinion or to prevent their opponents from voting. 

While Trump is hedging about his stance on abortion—after bragging repeatedly that he was the person responsible for overturning Roe v. Wade—MAGA Republicans have made their unpopular abortion stance even stronger. 

Emily Cochrane of the New York Times reported today that the hospital at the center of the decision by the Alabama state supreme court that embryos used for in vitro fertilization have the same rights and protections as children has ended its IVF services. And on Monday, Florida’s supreme court, which Florida governor Ron DeSantis packed with extremists, upheld a ban on abortion after 15 weeks and allowed a new six-week abortion ban—before most women know they’re pregnant—to go into effect in 30 days. 

In the past, people seeking abortions had gravitated to Florida because its constitution upheld the right to privacy, which protected abortion. But now the Florida Supreme Court has decided the constitution does not protect the right to abortion. Caroline Kitchener explained in the Washington Post that in the past, more than 80,000 women a year accessed abortion services in Florida. This ban will make it nearly impossible to get an abortion in the American South. 

Anya Cook, who in 2022 nearly died after she was denied an abortion under Florida’s 15-week ban, gave Kitchener a message for Florida women experiencing pregnancy complications: “Run,” she said. “Run, because you have no help here.”

Extremist Republicans have managed to put their policies into place not by winning a majority and passing laws through Congress, but by creating cases that they then take to sympathetic judges. This system, known as “judge shopping,” has so perverted lawmaking that on March 12 the Judicial Conference, the body that makes policy for federal courts, announced a new rule that any lawsuit seeking to overturn statewide or national policies would be randomly assigned among a larger pool of judges. 

On March 29, the chief judge of the Northern District of Texas, where many such cases are filed, told Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) that he would not adhere to the new rules. 

Rather than moderating their stances, extremist Republicans are doubling down on their attempt to create dirt on the president. With their impeachment effort against President Joe Biden in embarrassing ruins, House Republicans are casting around for another issue to hurt the Democrats before the 2024 election. 

Jennifer Haberkorn of Politico reported today that in the last month, House Republican Committee chairs have sent almost 50 oversight requests to a variety of departments and agencies. Haberkorn noted that there is “significant political pressure on the party to produce results after months of promising it would uncover evidence of high crimes and misdemeanors involving Biden.”

But it is Trump, not Biden, who is in the news for questionable behavior. In The Guardian today, Hugo Lowell reported that Trump’s social media company was kept afloat in 2022 “by emergency loans provided in part by a Russian-American businessman under scrutiny in a federal insider-trading and money-laundering investigation.”

There is more trouble for the social media company in the news today, as two of its investors pleaded guilty to being part of an insider-trading scheme involving the company’s stock. They admitted they had secret, inside information about the merger between Trump Media and Digital World Acquisition Corporation and had used that insider information to make profitable trades. 

Meanwhile, Trump is suing Truth Social’s founders to force them out of leadership and make them give up their shares in the company. His is a countersuit to their lawsuit accusing him of trying to dilute the company’s stock. 

Of more immediate concern for Trump, Judge Juan Merchan denied yet another attempt by Trump—his eighth, according to prosecutors—to delay his election interference trial. The trial is scheduled to begin April 15.

Finally, in an illustration of extremists aiming not to moderate their stances but to impose the will of the minority on the majority, Republicans are putting in place rules to make it easier for individuals to challenge voters, removing them from the voter rolls before the 2024 election.

Marc Elias of Democracy Docket noted today that states and local governments have regular programs to keep voter registration accurate, while right-wing activists are operating on a different agenda. In one 70,000-person town in Michigan, a single activist challenged more than a thousand voters, Elias reported, and in Allegheny County, Pennsylvania, right-wing activists have already challenged 16,000 voters and intend to challenge another 10,000.

One group boasted that their system “can and will change elections in America forever.” 

Rather like the election of 2000.

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

#Letters from An American #Heather Cox Richardson #political #history #Democracy Docket #voting #voter suppression #abortion ban #GOP extremism #election 2024 #purging voter rolls #Election 2000

[kp777]

GOP gets CRUSHED IN COURT by Top Election Lawyer and CAN’T HANDLE IT

PoliticsGirl (via MeidasTouch)

Oct. 17, 2023

Democracy’s white knight Marc Elias joins us to explain that we aren’t just fighting election suppression & subversion, we’re now fighting election vigilanteism and the new Republican strategy of standing in defiance of the law itself. The GOP seems to have decided it’s simply good politics to say you’re fighting a corrupt system when you, yourself, are the ones corrupting it. As Marc points out, one of the biggest ways to stop these extreme moves against our elections is to raise awareness of what’s going on. So today we talk what’s happening, what’s being done to counter it, and what we can all do to support democracy moving forward.

#marc elias #gerrymandering #voter suppression #republicans #gop #conspiracy theories #the big lie #democracy #democracy docket #Youtube

[swingleftnewsjunkie]

#on the docket #nashville #tennessee #political #politics #democracy #freedom

[phoenixyfriend]

I gain most of my politics/current events information right now from these shows:

ON SPOTIFY:

Up First - NPR: morning news broadcast, about 20 minutes. Moderately left.

NPR News Now: hourly updates, about 5 minutes each. Moderately left.

Al Jazeera News Updates: several minutes long, several times a day. Independent Qatari news organization.

Morning Brew Daily: morning news podcast, focused on business, comparatively lighthearted. Generically liberal.

The NPR Politics Podcast: weekdays, about 15-20 minutes. Moderately left.

Democracy Now!: Weekdays, far left.

BBC Global News Podcast: Daily, half hour. UK public news, centrist(?)

The Daily: Daily, New York Times. Moderately left.

ADDITIONALLY:

TLDR Daily, and associated channels: independent UK news org, vaguely moderate left(?). I watch them on Nebula, rather than YouTube.

GovTrack Daily Newsletter: a daily email letting me know about activity in Congress. Bills that were recently voted on AND the ones that are on the docket for this week.

I occasionally check other news sites, like Pink News or The Guardian, but the above are what I read and listen to on my commute.

#politics #Phoenix Politics #united states

[ridenwithbiden]

Last June, Supreme Court Justices John Roberts and Brett Kavanaugh shocked observers by joining the court’s three liberal justices to reject an Alabama congressional map aimed at diluting Black voters’ power. The ruling marked a (likely temporary) hiatus in the Roberts court’s systematic dismantling of the Voting Rights Act. It also invited a bevy of columnists to opine, See, this court isn’t so bad after all!

On the one hand, some fanfare was warranted. The Allen v. Milligan opinion was a genuine surprise, and as a recent lower court ruling in Georgia demonstrates, its effects will reverberate throughout the 2024 election cycle and beyond. A bad ruling would have been disastrous.

On the other hand, focusing on the decision obscures a disturbing reality: In the decade since it decimated the VRA with its notorious Shelby County v. Holder decision, the court’s right-wing majority has used its docket-setting power to tilt the playing field so sharply against democracy that even the rare “wins” simply preserve a degraded status quo.

A new study published on Thursday and led by my colleague Chelsey Davidson found that since the 2012–13 term, more than 80 percent of election-related cases on the Supreme Court’s hand-picked docket could move the law only in a direction that degraded fair elections.

In that time, the Supreme Court accepted 32 cases involving core democracy issues such as redistricting, ballot access, campaign finance, and VRA enforcement. In 26 of them, the lower court had issued a pro-democracy ruling. This means that the best-case scenario at the court was affirmation of the status quo, while a reversal of the lower court would restrict voter participation. By contrast, the justices picked just six cases where they might reverse anti-democracy rulings.

It’s not quite “Heads I win, tails democracy loses,” but it’s pretty damn close.

[futurebird]

Help me point nervous dems with money in better directions

A lightly left-leaning generally Democratic friend has just now noticed that freaking out about the election is reasonable... but they do take my opinion somewhat seriously (even after calling me "probably a communist" I have no idea)

I made such a horrible face (involentary) when they said something about giving money to Biden I had to make another suggestion ... uh..."Democracy Docket?"

Any democrats who might not get the help they need from the DNC but still might win I could also mention?

Do YOU have a creepy local school board candidate who you need defeated? Tell us!

It's a little creepy how many people I know who solve problems by throwing money around, so, post the links and name the people.

1. normie dem safe causes and candidates 2. probably should have a half decent shot 3. throw in your favorite mutual aid group as long as they don't set things on fire. (normie!)

#us politics #democrats #donations #aid

[posttexasstressdisorder]

Sign up and get the email newsletters...they're great daily summaries of the court and voting rights battles we're fighting.

A truly great effort! Here's what was in this afternoon's email:

Very clear, concise, and accurate.

@ms-cellanies (in case you haven't seen their work.)

[rosielindy]

This site is on my 2023 survival list, especially for exposing SCOTUS shenanigans trying to restrict our voting rights. Please check out Democracy Docket and Marc Elias on social media to stay up to date.

The Moore v Harper oral arguments were heard by SCOTUS on Dec 6. We need to engage in what happens next. Congress has the power to reign them in, which could happen if more Rs come to their senses and fight for voting rights. I’ve expressed this hope before, which is really more of an expectation now.

I know we are collectively better than this! I see trends bringing people together to solve problems that government never will, to form communities that don’t rely on the power structures we currently have in place. I’m ready to open my mind, ask questions, explore misconceptions, dispel mistruths, and become a living example of a better way.

#democracy docket #marc elias #voting rights #scotus #us supreme court #congressional oversight #judicial coup #engage #speak up #call out lies #fight for democracy #moore v harper #2023 survival guides #community #we can do hard things #talk to people #listen more #spread the message #grassroots #bethechange #equal rights #wearethemajority #exhaustedmajority #meidastouch #heather cox richardson

[ms-cellanies]

Instead of just posting ONE ARTICLE from Democracy Docket this link has written several important articles primarily about the states who are trying to get legitimate districts for voting.

LOTS OF ARTICLES TO READ. GO FOR IT FOLKS.

[worldofwardcraft]

How Republicans plan to win.

April 18, 2024

The Republican plot to steal the 2024 presidential election consists of a two-pronged attack. The first element is to engage in voter suppression. This is currently being pursued in a number of states in a number of ways: draconian voter ID laws, restricting the location and number of voting places, eliminating early voting, curbing mail-in voting, creating obstacles to voter registration, and any other nefarious method they can think up.

In 2013 the political hacks on our Supreme Court showed their eagerness to assist the cause by gutting the 1965 Voting Rights Act. Apparently, the freedom to vote is unconstitutional. Also fundamental to the GOP's voter muzzling efforts is nonstop scaremongering about voter fraud, even though it's extremely rare and usually committed by Republicans.

In fact, Republicans have been convicted of fraudulent voting in states around the country, from Wisconsin to Florida to Alabama. Here's MSNBC with a recent example:

Another person has been sentenced for committing voter fraud during the 2020 election — and once again it was on behalf of a Republican candidate. An Iowa woman named Kim Taylor was sentenced to four months in prison Monday after a federal jury convicted her last year on more than 50 counts of voter fraud as part of a scheme to help her husband in a congressional primary and a county supervisor race.

The second component in the right's election thievery scheme is simply out and out cheating. One way is by intimidating people at the polls. For example, Nevada Republicans are suing to block a state law that prohibits interfering with or harassing election officials. And Republicans in Texas and North Carolina have successfully pushed through changes making it easier for them to place partisan operatives inside polling areas.

Meanwhile, Texas has enacted two new election laws targeting Democratic stronghold Harris County — and only Harris County. One of the laws abolishes the office of county election administrator. The other allows the secretary of state to take over election administration, if the Republican governor doesn’t like how Harris County is running its elections.

Another way of cheating is through purging the voter rolls of people you don't want casting ballots. Already eight Republican-controlled states have left the Electronic Registration Information Center (ERIC) — the interstate compact that shares voter information. Which will make cheating easier and detecting fraud harder. Says Marc Elias of Democracy Docket, "What we're seeing is…a right-wing strategy to file lawsuits to remove voters from the rolls all around the country." In other words, a strategy to win dishonestly.

#election fraud #voter suppression #voter intimidation

[swingleftnewsjunkie]

#voting rights #on the docket #political #american politics #democracy #democratic party

[mightyflamethrower]

e should dispense with the tired narrative that four conscientious state and federal prosecutors—independently and without contact with the Biden White House or the radical Democrats in Congress—all came to the same disinterested conclusions that Donald Trump should be indicted for various crimes and put on trial during the campaign season of 2024.

The prosecutors began accelerating their indictments only once Trump started to lead incumbent Joe Biden by sizable margins in head-to-head polls. Moreover, had Trump not run for the presidency, or had he been of the same party as most of the four prosecutors, he would have never been indicted by any of them.

Yet now they are in a doom loop of discovering that the more they seek to rush to judgment before the election and gag Trump from speaking publicly about these star-chamber proceedings, the more he rises in the polls.

In truth, each succeeding cycle of corrupt leftwing lawfare that ends in failure—the Russian collusion hoax, the weaponized first impeachment, trying ex-president Trump in the Senate as a private citizen, the laptop disinformation set-up, the Alfa bank ping caper, the pathetic attempt to erase Trump from state ballots, and the unfolding Fani Willis moral debacle—does not return things to zero.

Rather, they serve as force multipliers for each other. Each overreach geometrically increases the dangers to democracy, ever more turns the public off, and ironically cascades sympathy and poll numbers for the very target of their paranoias.

Some of the prosecutors have colluded with White House lawyers and congressional liaisons. Some had run for office, offering campaign promises to get Trump convicted for something or other.

Now, after years of delays and deadends, all four are rushing to synchronize their trial dates to ensure that the front-running Trump is on the docket daily and not out on the 2024 campaign trail.

Do we recall when leftist legal eagles claimed that of all the iffy Trump indictments, Georgia prosecutor Fani Willis had the best case against Trump?

The phone call, we were told, was proof of “election interference.” It was Willis who got the first Trump “mug shot.” It was Willis, we were assured, who got Trump with the goods on tape, begging election officials to “find” the requisite missing votes that would prove his victory (note that he did not say “invent” the votes but to look for a supposedly existing trove of them).

And now Willis’s signature case is in shambles.

We learn, allegedly, that 1) Willis hired her stealth boyfriend Nathan Wade as a special counsel, the day before he filed for divorce (whose records were then mysteriously sealed by the court); 2) that Wade so far has received over $650,000 as special counsel, reportedly including a miraculous ability to charge for 24 hours of continuous legal service in a single day; 3) that Willis and Wade allegedly have used her greenlighted windfall to him to go on a number of pricey junkets and cruises; 4) that to try an ex-president and the leading candidate in the 2024 presidential election, Willis picked Wade who had never tried a single felony case and was previously a “personal injury/accident” lawyer; 5) that the supposedly apolitical Willis had consulted with the January 6 partisan congressional special committee, while Wade had met for marathon meetings with the Biden White House legal counsel (and apparently billed Georgia taxpayers for receiving such federal tutorials).

The legal community’s initial dismissal of this sordid prosecutor’s office is reminiscent of the immediate efforts to downplay Claudine Gay’s plagiarism. But the charade will eventually end the same way, in this case with the resignation and likely indictment of the prosecutor, along with her boyfriend, who concocted quite a scheme at the expense of the taxpayers. Both have made a mockery of their indictment of an ex-president and, if the allegations are true, will be disbarred and prosecuted.

The other three indictments are even weaker. Alvin Bragg claims that Donald Trump’s efforts a near decade ago to enact nondisclosure agreements and payments to remain silent about embarrassing behavior constituted “campaign finance violations.”

If so, what then defines campaign violations when Ms. Clinton brazenly destroyed nearly 30,000 subpoenaed campaign-era emails, ordered subpoenaed communication devices smashed, illegally hired a foreign national to find dirt on a campaign rival, and used three paywalls to hide her hush payments to British subject Steele to concoct a smear dossier—with help from Russian sources—to destroy her 2016 rival?

Letitia James, apparently for the first time in New York history, believes a bank was somehow wronged when its seasoned auditors viewed Trump’s assets, approved a loan to him, profited from his timely payments of interest and principles, and lodged no complaints against Trump or his company.

James apparently believes that Donald Trump is the first and most egregious real estate baron in New York history who inflated the value of his holdings. Her indictments thus supposedly have nothing to do with a left-wing political activist who ran for attorney general on promises to get Trump.

As far as Jack Smith, he supposedly was to be focused on Trump’s removal of classified presidential files to an insecure location at his Mar-a-Lago home and Trump’s “insurrectionary” actions on January 6. But he seems way beyond that now and is trying to put a gag order on the presidential frontrunner and to ensure Trump is in court during the 2024 campaign—challenging the very administration that appointed Smith in the first place.

In truth, Trump was the first ex-president in history to be indicted for a dispute with archivists over the status and security of removed classified files. Such disagreements were historically adjudicated bureaucratically rather than criminally, and certainly not with performance-art FBI swat raids into an ex-presidential residence.

Moreover, true insurrectionists do not instruct protestors to assemble peacefully and patriotically. Insurrectionists themselves do not try to overthrow governments while unarmed and accompanied by bare-chested buffoons with cow horns and slow-moving septuagenarians draped in American flags. And during an “insurrection,” unarmed “rebels” are usually not invited into the government quarters by supposed government doormen, among them perhaps 150-200 FBI informants. They are usually not shot and killed for the crime of entering a broken window while unarmed. And governments need not lie about the violence of insurrectionaries if they are truly insurrectionists.

Jack Smith’s problem—aside from his similar previous effort as special counsel to bankrupt and destroy the life and career of former Virginia governor Bob McDonald, a conviction overturned 9-0 by the Supreme Court—is that his indictments are so asymmetrical as to be surreal.

If the Department of Justice really wishes to prosecute insurrection, then it should concentrate on 120 days of arson, looting, killing, and violent protests that destroyed $2 billion in property, led to over 35 deaths, injured 1,500 law enforcement officers, and saw a federal courthouse, a police precinct, and a historic church torched by protestors, months of violent chaos planned and orchestrated by Antifa and Black Lives Matter, and enabled by leftwing inert mayors and governors.

The future Vice President of the United States, Kamala Harris, sought to organize bail for violent rioters. She boasted on television that the protests would not stop, should not stop, and would continue beyond the 2020 elections. Could she have at least suggested to the rioters to protest “peacefully and patriotically?” And just last week, President Biden praised that months-long violent summer of looting, violence, arson, and destruction, calling it “the historic movement for justice in the summer of 2020.”

Or Smith could investigate the well-orchestrated and increasingly violent pro-Hamas rallies. These are “insurrections” that have stormed the California legislature, occupied the Capitol rotunda, defaced and defiled iconic federal monuments and cemeteries, shut down key bridges and freeways, attacked law enforcement, and led to violence and assaults.

If Trump is guilty of removing files that he had the statutory right as president to formally declassify, then what was senator and subsequent Vice President Joe Biden guilty of when he stealthily and unlawfully removed hundreds of files, kept the removals secret (until his administration went after Trump for the same offense), and sloppily stored them in his insecure garage?

At each juncture of these extra-legal efforts, past precedents, former customs, and accepted traditions are being destroyed by the Left, whose endless miscarriages of justice are the real threats to constitutional government. And the more impotent these serial and unending gambits become, the more strident and desperate they appear.