Inside the far-right playbook to undermine elections.
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At the close of last week’s January 6 hearing, Rep. Liz Cheney (R-WY) called out the “50-, 60-, and 70-year-old men who hide themselves
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behind executive privilege.” She didn’t need to name them — we know who they are.
But they’re not hiding. Far from it. Steve Bannon, convicted last week of contempt of Congress, hosts a popular right-wing podcast. Former White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows is the senior partner of the Conservative Partnership Institute, a DC-based group formed to support far-right candidates.
Worse, both men are players in a nationwide effort to sow doubt and misinformation about upcoming elections. As my colleague Mekela Panditharatne writes
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in a new Brennan Center analysis, the Conservative Partnership Institute is working to plant election deniers — people who believe, contrary to all evidence, that the 2020 election was decided by voter fraud — at all levels of our electoral machinery. Staffers in elections offices, poll workers, poll monitors. If Meadows and Bannon succeed, these crucial positions in our democracy could soon become contaminated by people who live in a fantasy world where voter fraud is rampant. “We are arming the army of patriots, that’s our goal,” operative Cleta Mitchell told Bannon on his podcast.
The Conservative Partnership Institute has produced a written guide for those seeking to cast doubt on future elections. It urges followers to ensure that “ideological operatives cannot prey upon vulnerable voters” such as senior citizens. That’s rich. During the 2020 election, the Wisconsin Election Commission made the entirely necessary decision to slash the red tape required for nursing home residents to get mail-in ballots — the only way to uphold their right to vote during the height of the Covid-19 pandemic. Following Donald Trump’s defeat, the ideological allies of the Conservative Partnership Institute assailed that decision and sought to dissolve the commission in retribution. That’s enough to give hypocrisy a bad name.
The handbook makes phony claims of nonpartisanship while also urging followers to label staffers in state attorneys general’s offices as “friend or foe.” It equips readers with just enough information to be dangerous, but not nearly enough to be helpful. For example, it encourages people to try to identify “bad addresses” on voter rolls but doesn’t instruct them on how to differentiate an incorrect address from a student away at college. As a result, professional election officials — the people who actually know what they’re doing — will be inundated with baseless challenges to voter registrations.
It is a recipe for chaos. But that’s not a bug in the system — it’s the goal of the Conservative Partnership Institute. If it can sow enough doubt and confusion after an election defeat, it might be able to convince the legislature to overturn the clearly articulated will of the people. It didn’t work in 2020, but they’ll try again. Let’s not wait until the chaos machine clicks on to respond. Let’s insulate our system against these attacks right now.
Emergency Powers Aren’t the Path to Policy Goals
After this term’s outrageous Supreme Court rulings, some Democrats are pressuring President Biden to issue emergency declarations to strengthen abortion rights and our ability to fight climate change. Emergency powers, however, aren’t intended to address long-standing policy problems, and invoking them for this aim may do more harm than good. “Sacrificing constitutional principles is short-sighted, no matter how worthy the goal,” Elizabeth Goitein writes. “The real solution to Dobbs and climate change is to take every step within our power to ensure that we have a Congress that fairly represents the will of the American people.” Read more
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Sacrificing Public Safety for Profit
The persistent and self-reinforcing financial motivations embedded into the criminal justice system are a major obstacle to reducing the U.S. jail and prison population. Too often, revenue streams flow directly from the people who are ticketed, searched, arrested, jailed, tried, and incarcerated. “The justice system should be funded equitably by taxpayers, all of whom are served by it — not primarily by the community’s poorest, most marginalized members,” Ram Subramanian and Lauren-Brooke Eisen write. “It’s time for the government agencies involved in the criminal justice system at all levels to examine the revenue-generating parts of their work and its true costs.” USA TODAY
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Costly Electronic Monitoring Prolongs Punishment
Thousands of people entangled in the criminal justice system are allowed to choose community supervision over incarceration. However, 24/7 electronic monitoring saddles people with exorbitant monthly costs, as well as fees for damaging or losing their tracking device and additional fines for breaking the ambiguous rules that govern their supervision. More often than not, reincarceration is driven by technical rule violations and an inability to cover costs rather than new criminal offenses. “Eliminating these fees for people under supervision will help to reduce the likelihood of being trapped in cycles of debt and incarceration,” Hernandez Stroud and Taylor King write. “In our quest to reduce the sheer volume of people in prisons and jails . . . we must also ensure that alternatives to incarceration do not do harm as well.” Read more
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News
Elizabeth Goitein on declaring a climate emergency // THE HILL
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Daniel Weiner on reforming the Electoral Count Act // NATIONAL JOURNAL
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Thomas Wolf on the Trump-era push to add an illegal citizenship question to the census // WASHINGTON POST
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Thomas Wolf on the radical “independent state legislature theory” // THE ATLANTIC
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Katherine Yon Ebright on America’s “light footprint warfare” // FOREIGN POLICY
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