We all know the story of Donald Trump’s endless fury for Georgia Republican Gov. Brian Kemp, who refused to allow the former president to use his state to further MAGA efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 election.
It seems like Kemp now has the opportunity to serve as a roadblock for another Trumpian election subversion scheme. It remains to be seen if he will.
Continue reading “Brian Kemp Is In An Interesting Place. Again.”Special Counsel Jack Smith on Tuesday obtained a superseding indictment charging Donald Trump with the same four counts relating to his 2020 coup attempt that a grand jury leveled at Trump in 2023. The new indictment marks an attempt by Smith’s office to move forward with the bulk of its case intact after the Supreme Court declared that the vast majority of presidential actions are immune from prosecution.
Continue reading “Jack Smith Obtains New, SCOTUS-Adjusted Jan. 6 Indictment Against Trump”Republican Gov. Jeff Landry signed an executive order on Monday requiring all Louisiana government agencies that hand out voter registration forms to include a written declaration that non-citizens are prohibited from registering to vote or voting in elections.
“The right to vote in United States elections is a privilege that’s reserved for American citizens,” Landry said during the Monday press conference. “In Louisiana, election integrity is a top priority.”
Louisiana is just the most recent state to implement measures to ensure that individuals who are not American citizens are not voting in U.S. elections, even though there is simply no evidence to suggest that non-citizen voting is a real problem.
Continue reading “Louisiana Becomes Latest Red State To Solve Non-Existent Problem That Trump Claims Exists”Democrats are suing to block a series of new rules recently enacted by the Trump-endorsed Georgia State Election Board.
Continue reading “Dems Mount Legal Challenge Against Trump-Backed Georgia Election Board’s New Rules”This article is part of TPM Cafe, TPM’s home for opinion and news analysis. It was originally published at The Conversation.
Over the past four years, Congress and state governments have worked hard to prevent the aftermath of the 2024 election from descending into the chaos and threats to democracy that occurred around the 2020 U.S. presidential election.
A new federal law cleaned up ambiguities that could allow for election subversion. New state laws have been enacted across the country to protect election workers from threats and harassment. Technology experts are working to confront misinformation campaigns and vulnerabilities in election systems.
But untouched in all of these improvements is the underlying structure of presidential elections — the Electoral College.
Here is a quick refresher about how the system works today:
After citizens vote in the presidential election in November, the Constitution assigns the task of choosing the president and vice president to electors. Electors are allocated based on the number of congressional representatives and senators from each state. The electors meet in their separate state capitals in December to cast their votes. The ballots are then counted by the vice president in front of members of Congress on Jan. 6 to determine which ticket has won a majority.
The widely varied pros and cons of the Electoral College have already been aired and debated extensively. But there is another problem that few have recognized: The Electoral College makes American democracy more vulnerable to people with malicious intent.
The original brilliance of the Electoral College has become one of its prime weaknesses. The unusual system was devised at the Constitutional Convention in 1787 as a compromise that prioritized the representation of state interests. This focus helped win over reluctant delegates who feared that the most populous states would disregard small states’ concerns.
Nowadays nearly every state has chosen to award all of its electoral votes to whichever ticket wins more votes in the state. Even if a candidate gets 51% of the popular vote, use of the winner-take-all rule in these states means they will be awarded 100% of the electoral votes.
This is what leads to the “battleground state” phenomenon: Presidential candidates focus their rallies, advertisements and outreach efforts on the few states where campaigns could actually tip the balance. In 2020, 77% of all campaign ads ran in just six states that were home to only 21% of the nation’s population.
In this way, the Electoral College system naturally draws campaign attention to issues that might tip the balance in these hotbeds of competitiveness.
By doing so, the system essentially identifies the states where malicious people who want to alter or undermine the election results should focus their energies. The handful of battleground states are efficient targets for harmful efforts that would otherwise not have much success meddling in elections.
Someone who wants to infiltrate the election system would have difficulty causing problems in a national popular vote because it is decided by thousands of disconnected local jurisdictions. In contrast, the Electoral College makes it convenient to sow mischief by only meddling in a few states widely seen as decisive.
In 2020, the lawsuits, hacking, alternative electors, recount efforts and other challenges did not target states perceived by some to have weaker security because they had less strict voter ID laws or voter signature requirements. Opponents of the results also did not go after states such as California and Texas that account for a large share of the country’s voters.
Rather, all of the firepower was trained on about a half-dozen swing states. By one account, there were 82 lawsuits filed in the days after the 2020 presidential election, 77 of which targeted six swing states. The “fake elector” schemes in which supporters of Donald Trump put forward unofficial lists of electors occurred in only seven battleground states.
A majority of Americans say in surveys they prefer to scrap the Electoral College system and simply award the presidency to the person who gets the most votes nationwide.
Dumping the Electoral College would have a variety of consequences, but it would immediately remove opportunities for disrupting elections via battleground states. A close election in Arizona or Pennsylvania would no longer provide leverage for upending the national result.
Any election system that does not rely on states as the puzzle pieces for deciding elections would remove opportunities like these. It could also seriously reduce disputes over recounts and suspicion about late-night ballot counts, long lines and malfunctioning voting machines because those local concerns would be swamped by the national vote totals.
Although not without its own concerns, an agreement among the states to award their electoral votes to the winner of the popular vote is probably the most viable method for shifting to the popular vote, in part because it does not require passing an amendment to the Constitution.
There is no ideal way to run a presidential election. The Electoral College has survived in its current form for almost two centuries, a remarkable run for democracy. But in an era where intense scrutiny of just a few states is the norm, the system also lights the way for those who would harm democracy.
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
A lot of things happened. Here are some of the things. This is TPM’s Morning Memo. Sign up for the email version.
The timing was breathtaking.
U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon’s wholesale dismissal in July of the indictment of Donald Trump for hoarding national security information at Mar-a-Lago and obstructing efforts to retrieve the materials came on the Monday following the Saturday assassination attempt against the former president.
That Monday was also the first day of the GOP convention and the day that Trump announced JD Vance as his running mate.
You could be excused if you missed the Mar-a-Lago news that day.
Yesterday, Special Counsel Jack Smith filed his appeal brief with 11th Circuit Court of Appeals to have Cannon’s dismissal reversed. It is an airtight case for why his own appointment as special counsel by Attorney General Merrick Garland and the funding for his work were both lawful. It is also an understated but withering deconstruction of Cannon’s deeply flawed decision. The only real bit of news was what the brief didn’t contain: an explicit request that the appeals court remove Cannon from the case.
It is highly likely that Smith prevails at the appeals court, but that victory will not mask the fundamental systemic and institutional failures to hold Trump to account under the rule of law for his crimes in a timely way that halts Trump’s ongoing threat to national security, gives voters a clear picture of who they’re voting for in November, and bolsters public confidence in the ability of the judicial branch to properly function in a crisis.
It’s easy to blame Judge Cannon for this debacle, and she deserves all the scorn heaped on her, but no one judge should be able to wreak this much havoc in such an important case without recourse or accountability. While we properly vest considerable power in individual federal judges, the system has shown its limitations, weaknesses, and ineptitude when confronted with a case of this magnitude.
Looming over these failures is the prospect of Trump winning back the White House then ordering the Justice Department to dismisses the case against him, and as I’ve suggested before, abusing the powers of the presidency to hamstring the judicial branch in various other ways that will sideline it to his autocratic impulses, especially now that the Supreme Court has sanctified him with presidential immunity. To put it more simply, Trump represents an existential threat to the judiciary, too, though it collectively doesn’t seem to grasp the risk.
Former CIA lawyer Brian Greer took a back-of-the-napkin stab at when the Mar-a-Lago case is likely to go to trial. By his estimate, even assuming Trump loses in November, we’re not looking at a trial beginning until sometime in 2026 or even 2027, some five to six years after Trump’s alleged criminal conduct. You can quibble with the specific math, but no math realistically gets you to a timely trial.
I don’t begin to have all the answers for the reforms needed to hasten the administration of justice in cases with structural constitutional issues at stake while preserving individual rights and due process. But I do know that blaming one corrupt judge for our national plight lets the system off the hook.
TPM’s Josh Kovensky: How MAGA Is Already Justifying The Use Of Military Force At Home If Trump Wins
A stellar profile of Kash Patel, one of the worst of the worst Trump flunkies, in the new issue of The Atlantic.
The writer, Elaina Plott Calabro, posted a thread about the most eye-popping incident she uncovered in her reporting on Patel.
Give them both a look.
The NYT takes note of the 5th Circuit’s status as the Trumpiest court in the land. It actually calls it the most conservative, which everyone agrees on, but that descriptor is seeming ever more antiquated and imprecise in the face of an radical right-wing judiciary that is anything but conservative in the classical or legal sense.
As expected, the complaint filed late last week by a coalition of red states seeking to block the Biden program creating a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants who are married to U.S. citizens won an early victory when a federal judge in Texas ordered a temporary stay of the program.
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As we’ve discussed countless times, in Trump’s world there are dominators and the dominated. There’s no in between. And Trump has spent a month in the bad category.
Continue reading “Different Language, Same Story”Your column on Trump today made me think of the “baby in diapers” parlance he uses as a go-to insult. To him, nothing is worse than being a helpless baby. He called Rudy a helpless baby for not forcefully defending him in the press and told him they “took your diaper off right there.”
I googled the WaPo column below for more examples and there are plenty of YouTube clips along the same lines.
Many MAGA influencers have an apocalyptic story to tell about the country, the political divide, and where we’re all headed, and they’re already using it to lay the groundwork for crossing what has long been a red line: deploying the military for domestic law enforcement purposes.
In this MAGA fever dream, everyone has their part to play. They believe that they’ll be caught up in it; you might be, too. It goes something like this: If Donald Trump wins in November, people will protest. Riots will break out. The left, they theorize, will go all-out to stoke organized violence around the country, clearing the way for a newly inaugurated Trump administration to step in and make unprecedented, widespread use of the U.S. military to restore law and order.
Continue reading “How MAGA Is Already Justifying The Use Of Military Force At Home If Trump Wins”At the Democratic National Convention last week, Harris supporters and the presidential candidate herself leaned in to what is proving to be a successful attack on the former president: ridiculing him.
Continue reading “The Harris Camp Master Class In Trump Baiting Continues”Former President Donald Trump and his running mate Sen. JD Vance (R-OH) attempted to downplay the Trump campaign and the far-right’s extreme positioning on abortion over the weekend, after Democrats spent the past week of the Democratic National Convention highlighting the GOP’s attacks on reproductive freedoms.
In an interview that aired on Sunday, Vance said Trump would veto a federal abortion ban as president should a bill like that make it to the Oval Office, something Trump himself has said in recent months in an attempt to moderate his party’s extreme rhetoric on the issue and appeal to voters outside his base of anti-abortion Christian voters.
Continue reading “Trump And Vance Pretend To Moderate On Abortion After DNC Highlighted Horrors Of Their Agenda”
