TRUMP'S COUP WON'T HAPPEN IN 2024. IT IS ALREADY HERE!

We cannot look away

I am an avid reader, and though I have lost count, I surmise that in excess of 20 periodicals come into my home. Among them, The Atlantic has moved to the top of my list.

This month's issue features an article that is a must read for anyone concerned about the future of American democracy. Titled “January 6 Was Practice,” it is authored by staff writer Barton Gellman. The article is long and very dark.

Gellman's central premise is that Trump, his operatives and his followers, are assiduously and methodically working now to subvert the 2024 election to ensure Trump's victory, even if we the people vote otherwise. In short, the coup is not in the future; it is taking place now as we go about our lives. What's being engineered may in a twisted way be technically legal, but it will be the death knell of democracy.

We are living in unique times and our response needs to address the urgency of the moment. But people, including Democratic leadership, are idle and looking away. This is not a time for business as usual.

I think it best to let Gellman to speak for himself. He opens his article as follows:

“Technically, the next attempt to overthrow a national election may not qualify as a coup. It will rely on subversion more than violence, although each will have its place. If the plot succeeds, the ballots cast by American voters will not decide the presidency in 2024. Thousands of votes will be thrown away, or millions, to produce the required effect. The winner will be declared the loser. The loser will be certified president-elect.

The prospect of this democratic collapse is not remote. People with the motive to make it happen are manufacturing the means. Given the opportunity, they will act. They are acting already.

Who or what will safeguard our constitutional order is not apparent today. It is not even apparent who will try. Democrats, big and small D, are not behaving as if they believe the threat is real. Some of them, including President Joe Biden, have taken passing rhetorical notice, but their attention wanders. They are making a grievous mistake.

'The democratic emergency is already here,' Richard L. Hasen, a professor of law and political science at UC Irvine, told me in late October. Hasen prides himself on a judicious temperament. Only a year ago he was cautioning me against hyperbole. Now he speaks matter-of-factly about the death of our body politic. 'We face a serious risk that American democracy as we know it will come to an end in 2024,' he said, 'but urgent action is not happening.'”

The most vulnerable point in our electoral system, which Trump feverishly attempted to manipulate in order to overturn Biden's victory, is vested in the authority of state legislatures to select electors whose votes determine which candidate wins that state. His cascade of baseless lawsuits were rebuffed by the courts, as were his efforts to intimidate election officials who stuck to their principles.

But Trump's operatives have learned from their mistakes. Moreover, these failed efforts succeeded in expanding and emboldening his base, wedded to the “The Big Lie” that the election was stolen.

Article II of the Constitution provides for each state to choose its electors “in such Manner as the Legislature thereof may direct.” This general provision allows in principle for a huge range of discretion. Since the 19th century, precedent has assured that electors cede their choice to the voters. However, as Gellman notes, “'... in Bush v. Gore the Supreme Court affirmed that a state can take back the power to appoint electors'. No court has even said that a state could do that after its citizens have already voted, but that was at the heart of Trump's plan.”

It is, again, at the level of state legislatures that Trump is taking aim. Trump's richest trove are those states in which Republicans control both houses of the legislature and the governorships. Among the states of greatest concern are therefore Arizona, Texas, Georgia, Pennsylvania, and Michigan. The midterm elections may fatefully add to that list.

These legislatures are hard at work ensuring the gaming of the system. According to a September 30th article in The New York Times, “Between January and June, Republican-controlled legislatures passed 24 laws across 14 states to increase their control over how elections are run, stripping secretaries of state of their power and making it easier to overturn results.”

As this quote makes clear, it is not merely legislation, but those administrators who oversee the complex matrix of election procedures who are being replaced by Trump loyalists. I invoke Gellman's piece again, that captures the aggression of Trump's maneuvers. And we should be ever mindful of the looming violence that underlies Trump's base.

“Since the 2020 election, Trump’s acolytes have set about methodically identifying patches of resistance and pulling them out by the roots. Brad Raffensperger in Georgia, who refused to “find” extra votes for Trump? Formally censured by his state party, primaried, and stripped of his power as chief election officer. Aaron Van Langevelde in Michigan, who certified Biden’s victory? Hounded off the Board of State Canvassers. Governor Doug Ducey in Arizona, who signed his state’s “certificate of ascertainment” for Biden? Trump has endorsed a former Fox 10 news anchor named Kari Lake to succeed him, predicting that she “will fight to restore Election Integrity (both past and future!).” Future, here, is the operative word. Lake says she would not have certified Biden’s victory in Arizona, and even promises to revoke it (somehow) if she wins. None of this is normal.

Arizona’s legislature, meanwhile, has passed a law forbidding Katie Hobbs, the Democratic secretary of state, to take part in election lawsuits, as she did at crucial junctures last year. The legislature is also debating an extraordinary bill asserting its own prerogative, “by majority vote at any time before the presidential inauguration,” to “revoke the secretary of state’s issuance or certification of a presidential elector’s certificate of election.” There was no such thing under law as a method to “decertify” electors when Trump demanded it in 2020, but state Republicans think they have invented one for 2024.

In at least 15 more states, Republicans have advanced new laws to shift authority over elections from governors and career officials in the executive branch to the legislature. Under the Orwellian banner of “election integrity,” even more have rewritten laws to make it harder for Democrats to vote. Death threats and harassment from Trump supporters have meanwhile driven nonpartisan voting administrators to contemplate retirement.

Vernetta Keith Nuriddin, 52, who left the Fulton County, Georgia, election board in June, told me she had been bombarded with menacing emails from Trump supporters. One email, she recalled, said, “You guys need to be publicly executed … on pay per view.” Another, a copy of which she provided me, said, “Tick, Tick, Tick” in the subject line and “Not long now” as the message. Nuriddin said she knows colleagues on at least four county election boards who resigned in 2021 or chose not to renew their positions.

Georgia Governor Brian Kemp, excommunicated and primaried at Trump’s behest for certifying Biden’s victory, nonetheless signed a new law in March that undercuts the power of the county authorities who normally manage elections. Now a GOP-dominated state board, beholden to the legislature, may overrule and take control of voting tallies in any jurisdiction—for example, a heavily Black and Democratic one like Fulton County. The State Election Board can suspend a county board if it deems the board to be “underperforming” and replace it with a handpicked administrator. The administrator, in turn, will have final say on disqualifying voters and declaring ballots null and void. Instead of complaining about balls and strikes, Team Trump will now own the referee.”

We are witnessing an assault on our electoral system employing thuggery backed up by potential violence.

In the current issue of Foreign Affairs in an article by political theorists Alexander Cooley and Daniel Nexon on the rising tide of liberalism, the authors confirm that “...the Republican Party is purging officials who stood in the way of efforts at overturning the 2020 presidential election. Republican voter-suppression efforts are accelerating. Extreme gerrymandering has already made some states – such as Maryland, North Carolina and Wisconsin – de facto legislative autocracies, or systems of governance that mix democratic and autocratic features.”

Gellman also reports that Trump's legal team is fine tuning arguments to be brought to the Supreme Court asserting an “independent state legislature” doctrine which holds that statehouses have “plenary,” or executive control of the rules for choosing presidential electors. He concludes that taken to its logical conclusion, it could provide a legal basis for a state legislature to throw out an election result it did not favor and appoint its preferred electors instead. Ominously standing in the background are justices Alito, Gorsuch, Kavanaugh and Thomas, who have signaled their interest in a doctrine that would disallow election administrators to deviate from election rules passed by a state legislature. It would absolutize the legislature's control over the appointment of electors.

There is much more, none of it good. This is going on before our eyes, yet we are suffering from a political blindness as our democracy is being subverted. What is to be done? Since the starkest vulnerability is at the state level, particularly in states in which Republicans control both the legislature and governor's seat, the empowerment for those outside those states is relatively limited. Yet, at least the following needs to happen.

Americans need to be alerted to the danger and what is at stake. Public knowledge is essential. The neutrality of the media is not useful in this regard. We can no longer afford media neutrality of providing equal time to Democrats and then Republicans. The United States functionally has one party. The other is the vanguard of a mass movement, bewitched by a demagogic cult leader and sustained by lies, conspiracy theories and the threat of violence. This reality needs to be called out by the responsible press. We, who are not in states totally controlled by Republicans, need to urge our Congressional leaders to militantly speak out against this coup in the making. To repeat, it is not business as usual. As never before we need courageous voices, not evasion.

National organizations with a presence in the most vulnerable states need to mobilize their constituents. Professional associations, legal organizations, rights-based non-profits, citizen action groups, business associations and churches must organize to expose and rally against the subversion underway.

On the federal level we need a voting rights act that will stem the tide of new restrictive voting rights laws emerging from Republican state legislatures. Senator Amy Klobuchar has introduced a bill that will expand protection for election administrators. Other salutary measures have been proposed, all of which will require changing the Senate filibuster, which arguably is in the Democrat's power to do.

I end by reiterating the importance of Barton Gellman's article in The Atlantic. As we all know, we are challenged by a converging storm of major issues from the recrudescence of the Covid-19 to the omnipresent menace of climate destruction. Yet, arguably, our capacity to successfully combat these challenges rests in a system of government that is responsive to them. We must do what we can to prevent America's slide in autocracy. We may have lived with the assumption that American constitutional democracy is solid and will endure into the future as it has for the past 245 years. We can no longer do so.

I strongly recommend that we can begin by reading the article that inspired this essay. You can find it at:

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2022/01/january-6-insurrection-trump-coup-2024-election/620843/