In the past, the usual response to political criticism or opposition has been a substantive one.  Political positions were supported by expositions of circumstance and rationale. But the rise of conservative politicians has led to the ascendancy of the motivation behind the action argument. Because Trump’s behavior is often difficult to defend, conservatives have taken refuge in denigration of opponents, seldom even mentioning the original complaint. When any fact is revealed, Republicans are quick to say some variation on the theme they hate Trump, they’re a disgruntled former employee, they’re a socialist/radical Democrat etc, as if to label is to refute the point. It’s simple; requires no thought or additional investigation. And it works with the base. From these initial insults begins a campaign of innuendo which feeds into some conspiracy theory of complicated connections that uncovers the real motivation spread from Trump/FoxTV.  

This propensity to see malfeasance as the reason for every action is one of DJT’s personality quirks; for him, his lot in life is to be attacked and therefore, everything is personal. He likes to think it arises from envy. Projection bias, an implicit bias where one believes that everyone acts the same way that they do with similar intent, dominates his every thought. His paranomia that the world is out to get him frames his world view and enhances his susceptibility to conspiracy theory. He has difficulty envisioning those who oppose his views or his actions may have a valid perspective and since his motives are completely self interested, he’s thinking everyone else’s are too. 

The RealityTVPresident, having found his way into politics through this device, has elevated it to the primary modus operandi for his administration, the Republican Party and the conservative right although it has long been used in politics. Now, conservatives never make a judgment on the issue in the spotlight. The focus is always on who did/said it and what kind of person they are and why they would say such a thing. Not in reality, of course, because there’s never any documentation of any of these assertions. Some may hold a kernel of truth, but by in large, they boil down to character assassinations.

Marie Yovanovitch is an exemplary victim of the slur campaign. The former ambassador to the Ukraine was subjected to an attack on her reputation that began on Trump/FoxTV and then spread through Ukraine and the US State Department. If the president could have simply recalled her from the ambassadorship on a whim for no reason at all, why smear her reputation? Why not have some Pompeo deputy send her a cable terminating her post rather than “Take her out!” as Trump instructed Lev Parnas to do at a private fundraiser?  Apparently Yovanovitch, in carrying out the national diplomatic mandates for Ukraine, presented a stumbling block to the extortion of Ukraine’s president Slensky by the three amigos, Guiliani, Sondland and Volker. By some fantastical leap of the mind, she became part of the deep state and therefore had to be chewed up and spit out, rather than simply transferred to a different post. It is a measure of the meanness of spirit that motivates everything that Trump does.

Republican Senators can ignore John Bolton’s claim that the BullyPresident told him directly that he would withhold aid from the Ukraine until they agreed to an investigation into the Bidens because he’s a disgruntled former employee trying to sell a book. Colonel Vinman, the NSA analyst, born in Soviet era Ukraine is suspicious because he speaks Ukrainian, no doubt why he was on the fateful Selensky call, and may, according to Laura Ingraham, have “divided loyalties”. Lev Parnas, certainly a petty Ukrainian strongman of questionable integrity, is just making up his disclosures because of his indictment in New York even though he’s got notes and tapes of Trump speaking to him, despite Trump’s denials. Nothing new here Republicans say. Besides the Democrats should have gathered all this evidence in the House and since they didn’t, oh well. That’s the spirit, to hell with the pursuit of truth and justice. 

The only person whose motivations are never questioned are the president himself. There have been many instances of his subterranean dealings that have surfaced over the last three years. Actually, there are many from this Artful Dodger’s business career including unlawful tax manipulations with his father, but those are a question for legal prosecution in a different venue. Just this week, a NYT article reports that Bolton expressed concern to William Barr that Trump was intervening in an investigation into Halkbank, Turkey’s largest bank represented by Giuliani for violating Iranian sanctions. At first it was for a trader who turned state’s witness, but later, it was for actions against the bank itself. The lobbying included Erdogan and his son-in-law requests to Steve Mnuchin and asking Trump to speak to Barr about it. The case seemed to be in limbo until the Justice Department indicted the bank after Turkey invaded Syria. There was also some indication of irregular interference around sanctions against ZTE, the Chinese telecommunications giant, for work with Iran and North Korea. these sanctions were lifted which ultimately became were part of an exchange in the recently signed trade deal with China.   

Importantly, the manuscript of Bolton’s book was sent to the White House for security screening in November so somebody there knew this information then. PBS News Hour reported that the White House officially notified Bolton in a letter that his manuscript contained a significant amount of classified information and could not be published without deletions. Trump’s use of purported national security concerns to exclude information from the public eye has once again raised its ugly head. This is a sticky wicket that will no doubt end up at SCOTUS in the laps of a majority of justices predisposed to let the BullyPresident have his way. 

On the other hand, the national security claim must be greeted with a significant amount of cynicism. John Bolton has been in the national security business for decades and he knows his way around classified information. In the end, it’s all a wash. The book will be on the shelves in a couple of weeks even if the administration files an injunction. The Amazon lawyers must be pretty sure they’re on sure footing to proceed. Still, Trump forces have at least succeeded in keeping it out of impeachment, not that it would have made any difference anyway. I’m guessing that nobody on the White House staff had the integrity to inform the House impeachment investigation committee or maybe they passed it to Devin Nunes who immediately decided to keep it under wraps.

As the Greek tragedy entitled The Impeachment of Donald J Trump unfolds, the media keeps pitching it as a suspense thriller, each day hyping the possibility that there is some hope that Republicans will hear the evidence and vote to save the republic by removing him from office. The media has to pitch it in order to keep viewers watching, Twitter feeds scrolling, YouTube popping. There is a whole new cottage industry of podcasts around the impeachment alone. The Democrats try to pretend that their Republican colleagues are people who take their oath of office seriously, not wanting to offend in case there is some hope of future legislative deals. There isn’t a snowball’s chance in hell of feality to the oath. Their actions for three years have made it clear that the only oath they honor is the one to stay in power as long as they can.

Spoiler alert, as a friend of mine is always saying, “if you’re counting on white people to do the right thing, you’ll always be disappointed”. Any snippet of the repeated nonsense being rolled out in the president’s defense presages the forgone conclusion that Trump will remain in office. Will Moscow Mitch make it possible for his members in questionable districts to put on a smoke and mirrors display of apparent impartiality? Certainly because that will allow him to maintain the party’s power. There will be 4 or 5 Republicans who will vote for calling witnesses on the first vote. But they will vote no for each individual proposed after that. Or perhaps by voting for Hunter or Joe Biden, they will turn it into the perfect KGB propaganda vehicle for Biden bashing. McConell may have made it clear that is a road too far, lengthening the trial unnecessarily. But when members go home to their constituencies to say they are not simply glued to 45’s ass, they know that the public is apparently gullible enough to fall for it. And the dog and pony show will continue on.

On January 31, 1964 Louis Allen, who witnessed the murder of NAACP activist by a white state legislator, is killed in Mississippi.

EJI calendar

 During the impeachment debate, the GOP elevated the 63 million voters for their president to a graven image. Never mind that it was a minority of voters by over 3 million votes. And yet, those numbers represent little more than half of the country’s eligible voters. Voter turnout has always been a critical factor in all elections but it will be even more so in the 2020  presidential and congressional elections.

The US ranks 25th in voter turnout among the world’s democracies. Australia, Sweden, Belgium, Denmark and the Netherlands see over 80% of registrants vote with Israel and South Korea at more than 70%. Only 58% of registered voters in the United States turned out in 2016, which is about the average for presidential elections over decades. These numbers beg the question of why are states making it harder rather than easier to vote. It seems intuitive that a democracy would want to encourage every individual to have a voice in their government. Why it doesn’t; it’s politics, stupid.

The most recent wave of legislation to erect enfranchisement barriers was sparked by Republicans flashing the boogeyman, voter fraud which mingled well with attacks on immigration, later expanded into Trump’s Make America White movement. With the introduction of electronic voting under Bush 43, voter fraud became a lot more difficult, unlike in previous decades. Before the 1960s, all kinds of local political machines were infamous for packing voting booths with dead people, repeat voters and paid ballot checkers. All recent data verifies that in-person voter fraud is extremely rare. Government statistics estimate that between 2002-2005, only 26 voters were convicted of voter fraud out of 197 million ballots cast for a whopping 0.00000013%. Almost all 26 were simple mistakes without nefarious intent.

Republicans have long struggled with the reality that they are a minority party and long ago evolved a strategy to diminish voter turnout of non-Republicans. The fewer people who vote, the more likely a GOP candidate is to win, almost an exact quote. It Turns Out Voting is a Privilege Not a Right: Part I- A Retrospective

The gutting of the Voting Rights Act in 2013 launched GOP strategists into high gear in the states where they had legislative majorities to create the new poll tax, the government issued ID. In 2014, Republicans had 24 governors and controlled both houses of 26 state legislatures which increased to 32 in 2016. In contrast, Democrats controlled both houses in only 7 states. The majority of those GOP states were dominated by conservatives who had done an outstanding job of gerrymandering districts. It Turns Out Voting is a Privilege Not a Right Part II-Voter IDs, Gerrymandering and More .Their task was made easier by Bush’s electronic voting act, which required computerization of elections. Restructuring voting districts became a snap with precision computer drawn maps. Republicans circulated legislative templates for ID laws that could structure the appropriate circumstances to target the populations that had elected Barack Obama, the one intruder in the solid streak of Republican presidents after Bill Clinton. It stung even more that Obama had brown skin. 

Beyond voter IDs, there is the whack-a-mole closure and movement of DMV offices where IDs are obtained, usually away from areas with high minority populations and/or with few transportation options. What qualifies as a government ID has also been carefully crafted. For instance, in some places, public housing IDs don’t qualify even though they are government issued. In some cases, student IDs qualify, in others not. Young voters have been a particular conservative target; they were an important part of the Obama coalition and often represent a more liberal element in more conservative areas particularly in college towns. 

Republicans also instituted more frequent ongoing voter roll purges at varying intervals. The facile use of electronic voter roll purges to accidentally on purpose remove misidentified registrants through common names associated with likely Democratic voters made boosting the number of potential GOP voters easy as frying an egg. They have used failure to respond to mailings to verify addresses as the trigger or failure to vote for some period of years. In some states, registrants are not notified that they may be purged, a problem that is working its way through the courts. The removal of people from registration rolls who have died and those who have moved to other states or other counties is important. But much of these operations appear to have been done by stealth with partisan bias. 

During the last few weeks, over 300,000 voters in Georgia and over 200,000 in Wisconsin were purged from registration rolls after each purge was challenged in court. Mitch McConnell’s monthly stocking of the federal bench with conservative, less than qualified judges is not for nothing. It will increasingly pay off on the vast majority of federal court decisions done at the appeals level into the 2080s. The body of law feeds on itself. Once a decision has been made it becomes fertile grass for all other cases to graze on under the doctrine of precedents. Once a precedent exists, it takes a bold stroke, usually at the SCOTUS level, to overturn it. Republicans are so out in front of Democrats on this issue. Until it happened, Democrats naively believed in the goodness of their opposition and the sanctity of the courts. They are fools not to have seen conservatives for who they are and what they did until it is way too late.  

Theoretically, it is not clear why failure to vote should result in removal from the rolls. Intuitively, in a country that wants to encourage voter participation, one should have the option to vote without being penalized for not using the option. This is not the practice in other countries although there are a few countries where voting is mandatory and nonvoters are fined. An easy fix is universal same day registration which creates easy entry/reentry. Surely there is enough online information to make this a reality; Google or Facebook whose businesses are information about you, should be happy to assist.  

Poor people move a lot. They are frequent targets of eviction; they move in and out of low paying jobs. The last moving to-do is notifying the elections board of change of address if it ever comes up at all. Our election system puts a premium on addresses to assign districts which differ widely in candidates and issues. However, from an objective perspective, should the loss of a home be a reason not to cast a ballot for a candidate that could change the fate of the homeless? As the number of homeless people skyrockets across the country, a result of lack of new construction overall and particularly of affordable housing, rising rents, the preponderance of low paying jobs and the gig economy, the face of homelessness is increasingly families with children. The adults do not deserve to be disenfranchised and some would argue they are just the people whose voices should be heard. Similarly, not every chronically homeless man or woman is a substance abuser and/or mentally ill or PTSD sufferer. Some vets may have brain trauma or PTSD which makes it difficult to hold a job and therefore unable to afford housing. That does not render them less capable of voting than someone whose voting is based on partisan identification rather than consideration of the issues. At some point, the national discourse should take up these issues which must then be thrashed out in state legislatures.

So too should be re-enfranchisement of felons. Once a felon has served their sentence, there is no reason that they should not be able to vote. And since there is increasing evidence that a significant number of prisoners are innocent of the crimes for which they were sentenced, these men and women have been robbed of a lifetime of participation in government. The mechanism may have been false accusal or inappropriate actions by prosecutors or unlawful policing or plea bargains to crimes they didn’t commit. However, as the recent Florida referendum demonstrated, overwhelming majority support for suffrage for former felons can be derailed by hostile conservative state legislatures. Republican legislators felt they needed to “interpret” the will of the people according to their own Bible and enacted a law that requires that all outstanding fees and fines must be repaid before former prisoners can vote. As intended, this is a significant burden for a population that has difficulty finding employment and most often, what they can get is low wage. In some states, constitutional amendments may be a better target, since they are less likely to be overturned at the whim of punitive anti-crime (read racially biased) advocates.   

In 2018, one popular tool among conservatives for voter roll purges was an exact name match program created by the King of Voter Fraud Disinformation Chris Kobach. Typically, these programs mismatch common names like Williams, Johnson and Smith for African Americans, Lee and Kim for Asians, Garcia and Rodriguez for the Latinx with multiple individuals, all of whom are then purged. For instance, there may be a Willie Johnson who was a convicted felon, but he won’t be the only Willie Johnson purged because several others are also Black, one of the few other characteristics available in the database. 

Other problems with exact match come from typos and entry errors by registrars. Many registrars have difficulty with hyphenated Latinx names, transposing surnames. Voter registrants should not be penalized for election staff errors, particularly if they are not given notice of the purge in order to correct the error. Kobach’s program proved so fallible that many states have abandoned it. Kobach himself was so unpopular in his own state that he was trounced in his bid for a Kansas senate seat. 

 Polling places have also been consolidated to increase the distance voters must travel with the accompanying costs. Many closures have occurred in rural areas in states like Alabama and Georgia where there are large majority populations of African Americans and high levels of poverty. Conservative state budgets have cut funding to election boards leaving many strapped and unable to maintain facilities. For example in Georgia, two offices had no handicapped access which became the excuse to close them rather than renovate for economic reasons. Some offices have been closed because the population has become less dense. And yet, these changes most frequently shift open offices to areas where there are more whites and almost never in areas close to African Americans. Similar incidents have occurred with Native American voters. Statistically, these results can’t be by chance. Could officials be fearful that whites won’t want to go to Black areas to vote, thus lowering conservative turnout? Perhaps, but the general tenor of the changes has been to disenfranchise minorities and other likely Democratic voters, including the elderly, the poor and the handicapped. 

More refined tinkering revolves around wait times. For example, the number of voting machines can be inappropriately distributed. Officials often say they haven’t anticipated turnout at particular polling places or that mechanical dysfunction has lowered the number of machines. But machine allocation is one of the primary responsibilities of elections officials. Because elections are held during work hours, it is no accident that adding wait times to distance, means that some will not be able to wait before the start or during their work day or will wait until after work, when closing times can leave some voters in line after the deadlines. None of these circumstances encourage voting, particularly when it appears that a single vote doesn’t matter more than the hassle to cast it. One obvious solution to encourage most citizens to vote is to make voting day either a national holiday or to change it to a weekend. Mayor Pete has raised the national holiday idea during the campaign. 

Many states have adopted early voting to decrease the volume of voters on the designated Tuesday. For conservatives, early voting worked too well, so they have reduced the number of days allotted and/or omitted the weekend before the Tuesday and in some cases, eliminated the Sunday before election day used by get-out-the-vote organizers to ferry bus loads of church goers to the polls. Unfortunately, many minority and older voters seem wedded to the ritual of casting their vote on election day and are reluctant to take advantage of early voting. This makes it all the more important to oppose changes to schedules and polling places at the election board level.

Ibraham X Kendi has written an interesting analysis of the role of voter suppression in the Democratic hunt for the swing voter, reconfiguring the term to include voters who have voted in one election but elect to stay home when a candidate doesn’t speak to their concerns. Minorities are most often placed in this position with a string of what I have called Tweedledum Tweedledee candidates served up by the Democratic Party assuming that the GOP is a canker on minority interests. A vote for an array of third party candidates with a vampire’s chance in daylight of winning simply represents a vote for a winning candidate. It’s hardly worth navigating the jungle of interwoven vines strung to discourage your vote for the privilege of holding your nose and tapping the screen for someone who is likely to ignore your interests even as they are giving lip service to making your lives better.    

The Russians will not be the only definite meddlers in the 2020 elections. In light of recent events, the North Koreans and Iranians are prime candidate bad actors as well. In addition to their radio/TV advertising and targeted social media disinformation campaigns, partisan Republicans will remain very active at the state and local levels, crafting circumstances to disenfranchise groups that are likely to be anti-Trump voters, the young, the elderly and minorities. This is why Fair Fight 2020, launched by Stacey Abrams, will play a critical role in wrestling our elections from the tyranny of this conservative minority. Challenging improper voter roll maintenance and purges in the courts and ensuring equal access to polling places are all weapons in the battle for a fair election. Protecting voters from intimidation in or around polling places and mobilizing those who have difficulty getting to the polls by building organizations at the state level are other strategies. But beyond 2020, lies the state fights to ensure redistricting done based on the Census are not skewed to the advantage of partisan Republicans. In truth, neutral redistricting committees are the best solution for ensuring one man one vote, which in turn should represent the will of the majority of the people in a district as it was intended to be. Of course, the Electoral College is the constitutional undoer of that principle but that’s a whole different subject.

On January 10, 1966, Vernon Dahmer, Black businessman and voting rights activist, was killed in the firebombing of his Hattiesburg Mississippi home. From the Equal Justice Initiative calendar.