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Calling on election officials across the U.S. to recognize that the nation is at a critical crossroads, a non-profit legal advocacy group on June 30 cited the 14th Amendment as it demanded Republicans who aided the January 6 insurrectionincluding former President Donald Trumpbe barred from holding public office in the future.

The democracy watchdog Free Speech for People sent letters to the secretaries of state of all 50 states as part of its 14point3 campaign, calling attention to Section 3 of the 14th Amendment, which states:

No Person shall be a Senator or Representative in Congress, or elector of President and Vice-President, or hold any office, civil or military, under the United States, or under any State, who, having previously taken an oath, as a member of Congress, or as an officer of the United States, or as a member of any State legislature, or as an executive or judicial officer of any State, to support the Constitution of the United States, shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof.

If you want to be elected president, you have to be 35 years old, you have to be a natural-born citizen, and you cannot take an oath of office and then turn around and incite an insurrection, said Ben Clements, board chair and senior legal advisor for the organization. We are asking state election officials to do their job and follow the mandate of the Constitution.

The organization launched the campaign amid signs that Trump is preparing another presidential run in 2024, with rallies planned in key states this summer. At his first event over the weekend, Trump repeated the baseless lie that President Joe Biden was not the legitimate winner of the 2020 election, calling it the scam of the century and the crime of the century.

Should Trump attempt to seek another term, Free Speech for People said, state election officials are duty-bound to ensure his name is left off ballots because he incited hundreds of his supporters to wage a violent attack on the Capitol building on January 6 as lawmakers were preparing to certify Bidens victory.

Secretaries of state have a duty to ensure that candidates who seek to appear on their state ballots meet the constitutional qualifications for serving in public office, said Alexandra Flores-Quilty, the groups campaign director. We are urging them to make clear that insurrectionists such as President Trump are barred from ever again holding public office, as is required under the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

While the former president explicitly told his supporters on January 6 to stop the steal and to go to the Capitol and demonstrate against the certification of the election results, other Republicans including Sens. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) and Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) faced backlash for their roles as well.

Both senators amplified false claims that the election had been stolen and objected to the counting of votes in Arizona and Pennsylvania. They persisted in obstructing the democratic process even after the insurrection, in which five people were killed and more than 140 were injured.

Hawley also drew ire after a photograph of him raising his fist in support of the insurrection went viral. The two senators were joined by 145 other Republicans in the House and Senate who voted to overturn the election results hours after the chaos at the Capitol had been brought under control.

Formerly elected officials who engaged in the violent insurrection at the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, or who gave aid or comfort to the insurrectionists must be held accountable, said Free Speech for People president John Bonifaz, and if they seek to appear on the ballot again for any public office, secretaries of state and chief election officials must be clear: The Constitution bars it.

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Democracy watchdog cites 14th Amendment in effort to ban insurrectionist lawmakers from public office - Milwaukee Independent

American democracy is at a moment of profound risk. The failure to address the threats to our system could lead the country to a point of no return on the road to autocracy. Finding a solution, fighting fiercely to defend the right of all Americans to choose their form of government, is essential. But, what if the most commonly prescribed solutions are unrealistic or unachievable right now?

Outrage, no matter how justified, is not enough. The stakes are too high to keep raising alarms and wishing for outcomes that cannot happen in our current environment. Yes, the situation warrants outrage and a burning sense of urgency. But it also demands realism and a long-term strategy. The effort to degrade our democracy by giving fewer and fewer people more and more power over the fate of the country, to corrupt our system and to institutionalize the racism and inequality within it has been ongoing for decades. The solution to it will not come in one bold stroke.

We are in a war to define what America is. We must choose our battles carefully and seek victories that will methodically advance us to our ultimate goal. Some will equate such realism with defeatism. But there is nothing more defeatist than placing ones faith in calls for what cannot happen, in wishful thinking. That only plays into the hands of the enemies of democracy who have been working methodically to advance their goals for decades.

While those who value the aspirations and ideals that underpin our system are currently profoundly concerned about the hundreds of pieces of legislation being advanced by the Republican Party nationwide to restrict voting rights, they make a mistake if they see these moves as unprecedented. What is more, even if implemented, they would not represent the most damaging factors contributing to the degradation of democracy in America.

The Constitution itself is part of the problem. Its allocation of disproportionate power in our Senate and electoral college to less populous states is profoundly undemocratic and guarantees that proportionally fewer and fewer Americans will have more power over time. Today, the 50 Democrats in the Senate represent 43 million more people than the 50 Republican in the Senate. By 2030, roughly 70 percent of Americans will be represented by 30 percent of our senators. It is a grotesque imbalance that gives the minority effective veto power over efforts to curb their disproportionate power.

Our campaign finance laws are part of the problem. Since the Supreme Courts disastrous and ill-conceived Citizens United decision, which equated money with speech thus giving those with more money a louder voice in American politics, the power of check-writers to choose those who write our laws has only grown. Dark money and other techniques that eliminate transparency from the funding of political leaders has institutionalized corruption in our system. And there is little hope of getting incumbents in Congress to do anything meaningful about this right now because they see this broken system as serving their interests.

Another deeply flawed decision by the Roberts court, Shelby County, limited the ability of the federal government to defend the voting rights of minorities. Other court decisions have enabled states to gerrymander congressional districts thereby protecting incumbents and in many cases reducing the rights of voters whose party did not control the state legislature.

There is no doubt that the hundreds of voter suppression laws currently being considered nationwidevirtually all being promoted by a GOP terrified of demographic change in America and seeking to rig the system to enable whites and the rich to maintain control over a country that will in just two decades have a non-white majoritywill make a bad situation worse. They must be fought against by every means possible as should all factors that pervert and corrupt our system.

Currently, however, there is a widely held view that the way to fight those laws is to focus on having Democrats break the filibuster and then pass a set of laws that will help combat somebut far from allof the above problems. The filibuster is another extra-constitutional tool often used to preserve the rights of whites at the expense of people of color. As currently employed it also gives a Senate minority veto power over many vital issues in which their views run contrary to that of a large majority of Americans.

The filibuster should definitely go. Getting rid of it and passing the For the People Act and other legislation protecting voting rights would be a great step to take to help fix what is broken in our democracy. Ending it would also create an opportunity to fix other flaws in the system from campaign finance (with new laws) to the disproportionate power of less populous states (by admitting new states like the District of Columbia or Puerto Rico). It would also make the Senate more productive and more like the deliberative body it was originally envisioned to be.

But a number of Democratic senators oppose ending the filibuster. Their reasons are often specious (see Krysten Sinemas recent Washington Post oped for a great example of this). And the cold hard reality is that if all 50 Democrats are not willing to line up behind this reform, it will not happen, and that Sinema and Joe Manchin are not the only Democrats reluctant to make this change.

That said, we should push for it. We should do all in our power to change their minds. The president can and should play a more active role in seeking such reform. However, if we care about democracy, we also need to consider as the White House has reportedly done, the possibility that not enough Democrats will change their minds on the filibuster and that therefore, voter protection legislation like the For the People Act will not pass. What then?

The apparent conclusion of some within the White House, deeply frustrating to many progressives and others seeking to stave off this latest wave of voter suppression measures, is that if filibuster reform and voter protection laws cannot be passed, that they need to focus on doing what they can to pass other legislation that gives them a chance of bucking the long-term pattern with midterm elections and actually preserving or increasing their majorities in the House and Senate in 2022. They have come to the recognition that failing to do so, and allowing the GOP to retake the majority in the House, the Senate, or both will only accelerate that partys attacks on democracy and effectively make essential social and economic progress not to mention approval of new members of the judiciary impossible. It is a tough view for many to swallow. But the stakes are so high this calculus deserves serious consideration.

In other words, voter suppression is a grave threat. But if the cost of focusing on impossible solutions to it is increasing the odds of GOP wins in 2022, then a different approach is needed.

Opponents of voter suppression will rightfully argue that if these laws are put into place, it will make Democratic victories in 2022 that much less likely. The concern is real. That said, pushing for something that is basically just a wish dressed up as a political objective wont make it any more real, and that push takes time and energy away from other paths that might make a difference regarding next years elections.

Combatting naivete on this front cuts both ways, however. Those who want to defend democracy need to be realistic about whether the anti-filibuster cavalry is just over the horizon. But those who want to focus on winning in 2022 by virtue of the accomplishments of the president need to also invest in ways to combat those who will not be competing fairly next year.

This includes mobilizing a massive grass-roots effort to offset the effects of voter suppression laws. It includes funding the court challenges nationwide that will be required to roll back those laws that are unconstitutional or violations of existing legislation. It includes focusing resources on the communities that have been targeted by the suppression laws to ensure they are able to get to the polls and offset efforts to purge the rolls. It includes using technology to help make it easier for voters to know when polls are open or closed, where they are located, where problems may be emerging and so on. And, above all, it includes a massive effort to support candidates who will ensure Democratic majorities in the House and Senate and, not coincidentally, the preservation of our democracy.

It also includes doing what is possible to ensure the passage of more major legislation that has widespread benefits and is broadly popular as the American Rescue Plan has been and as the American Jobs Plan and the American Families Plan will be. We should not lose sight of the fact that a substantial majority of Americans support this president and that his initiatives are more popular than those of many presidents in recent memory. The few times the party of the incumbent president has done well in midterms have been when the country was at a moment of special need. We are in such a moment. But seizing it will require that the Democratic party remain unified around the president. Allowing factionalism or frustration with political reality to dilute our strength at this moment is the worst possible thing we can do if we wish to win this existential battle to preserve our democracy.

So, by all means, let us call for the sweeping reforms we need. Let us maintain our sense of urgency. Let us fight for filibuster reform if there is any way it is possible. Let us demand accountability for the wrong-doing of the prior administration. But above all, because the stakes are so high, let us be realistic about what is possible and formulate a strategy that enables us to win within the context of that reality.

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Outrage Won't Save Our Damaged Democracy. Here's What Will. - Daily Beast

Check out these state vaccination numbers. Here are the top 10, with the percentage of the adult population that has received both shots: Vermont, 64.6 percent; Maine, 60.5; Massachusetts, 60.4; Connecticut, 59.4; Rhode Island, 57.7; New Jersey, 55.3; New Hampshire, 54.9; Maryland, 54.4; Washington, 53.3; and New Mexico, 52.9. (New York, for those of you who insist that New York is the center of the known universe, is next, eleventh, at 52.7.)

And here are the bottom 10, from forty-second to fifty-first (because the District of Columbia is included), with the same percentages: West Virginia, 36.7; Utah, 36.7; Georgia, 35.4; Idaho, 35.4; Tennessee, 34.7; Louisiana, 34; Wyoming, 33.8; Arkansas, 33.6; Alabama, 32.1; and pulling up the bottom, it practically goes without saying, is dear old Mississippi, at 29.2 percent.

See a pattern here? Yes, its mostly geographic, with a few exceptions. But the starker snapshot here is blue versus red. The top 10 are a blue state sweep. With the exception of Georgia, which in 2020 barely voted blue for the first time in more than a quarter-century, the states gathering at the bottom are all scarlet-hued. This pattern extends: Of the bottom half of states, there are two blue ones, Georgia and that other newly minted and barely blue state, Arizona. Of the top 25, there are just three red states: #22, Iowa; #23, Nebraska; and #25, South Dakota (theyre all in the mid-40s, percentage-wise).

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Anti-Vaccine Fanaticism Will Prolong the Pandemic and Endanger Democracy - The New Republic

Health ministry workers check the temperature of mask-wearing fans before the start of a soccer match in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, on March 25, 2021. (Dieu Nalio Chery / AP file)

Research by Vanderbilts Latin American Public Opinion Lab found that in Haiti, the COVID-19 pandemic rallied support for the incumbent administration, even though the publics commitment to it and to democracy itself was weak before the pandemic. The paper, published in PLOS ONE, was co-authored by Noam Lupu, associate professor of political science and associate director of LAPOP, and Elizabeth J. Zechmeister, Cornelius Vanderbilt Professor of Political Science and director of LAPOP.

Other LAPOP surveys have found that commitment to the most fundamental tenet of democracyregular electionshas been wavering. The COVID-19 pandemic occurred during that shift, which could have created fertile conditions for decreased support for democracy in a country like Haiti, where there is high corruption and weak rule of law.

The majority of public opinion research related to the pandemic has focused on developed, wealthy democracies. So we wanted to knowhow might a monumental health crisis shape attitudes in less developed contexts, like Haiti? Lupu said. Our goal was to assess whether and how the introduction of a new crisisthe COVID-19 pandemicwould shift public opinion toward the president, elections and democracy. Does the public lash out against the incumbent government, does it rally around the executive as if the pandemic were an act of war, or does it shift in deference to authority and authoritarian principles?

To answer these research questions, the authors conducted a phone survey of a nationally representative sample of Haitians from April 23 to June 10, 2020, with 2,028 voting-age respondents. The questionnaire was structured such that half the respondents were asked 10 questions about views on the pandemic and then a set of questions on various topics that included the issues of interest: presidential approval, support for postponing elections, tolerance for coups and support for democracy. The other half of the respondents answered in the reverse order, being asked the second set of questions before being asked the 10 questions about the pandemic.

They found that considering the pandemic first modestly boosted responses that indicated presidential approval and intentions to vote for the incumbent president. This result shows that a rally effect can occur even in the most unlikely of placesan unstable context in which the president is struggling to maintain order and support. They did not find data supporting the notion that the onset of the pandemic eroded democratic attitudes, even in an unstable context like Haiti.

The authors also found evidence of increased deference toward the executives authority, which may be an under-explored outgrowth of rally dynamics. When asked if the president ought to be given leeway to postpone elections in the face of a major health crisis, like the COVID-19 pandemic, the vast majority of Haitians agreed, and they were even more likely to do so if they answered the set of pandemic questions first.

Then-Mayor of New York City, Rudy Giuliani, floated postponing his departure from office while riding a wave of approval following the 9/11 terrorist attacks, for example, Zechmeister said. However, we find no evidence of a broader shift in democratic attitudes. Our data show that support for a democratic form of government held steady, and that the onset of the pandemic does not appear to have bolstered a broader set of authoritarian attitudes in Haiti. Our results are reassuring for those who worry that the pandemic will inevitably undermine democratic values.

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Survey in Haiti shows democratic attitudes can persist in countries with weak governance, even during pandemic - Vanderbilt University News

Consider the following stark realizations about the condition of American democracy as evidence of the changing times:

The United States has been rated for a number of consecutive years by the Economist Intelligence Union as a flawed democracy.

Scores of highly respected mainstream scholars have analyzed massive amounts of data showing that public opinion counts very little in US policymaking (see, for example, Larry Bartels, Unequal Democracy: The Political Economy of the New Gilded Age; Princeton University Press, 2nd ed., 2016) to conclude that the American political system works essentially in a manner that actually subverts the will of the common people.

Others, like Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz, have argued that, because of rules set in the political system, the American economy is rigged to favor the rich, a view that is obviously wholeheartedly endorsed by Kishore Mahbubani, Distinguished Fellow from Asia Research Institute, at the National University of Singapore, when he declares that the US functions like a democracy but is actually a plutocracy.

And Timothy K. Kuhner, Professor of Law at the University of Auckland, has gone even further by arguing most convincingly in Kings Law Journal that the United States isnt only a plutocracy, but the only plutocracy in the world to be established by law.

To a large extent, of course, the structural flaws in the American political system have their origins in the many anti-democratic elements found in the Constitution. This is the view of eminent constitutional scholars such Erwin Chemerinsky, Dean and Distinguished Professor of Law at Berkeley Law School, and Sanford Levinson, W. St. John Garwood and W. St. John Garwood, Jr. Centennial Chair in Law at the University of Texas Law School, and author of Our Undemocratic Constitution (Oxford University Press, 2006).

Lets start with one of the basic principles of democracy which is one person, one vote. It is not applicable to the case of American democracy where US presidents are chosen by electors, not by popular vote. Hence the democratic anomaly of a candidate elected to become the 45th president of the United States after having lost the popular vote by a bigger margin than any other US president. Indeed, Donald Trump was elected president by trailing Hillary Clinton by nearly three million votes.The same thing happened in 2000, when Al Gore won nearly half a million more votes than George W. Bush, but it was Bush who won the presidency by being declared winner in the state of Florida by less than 540 votes.

In any other modern democratic system, such electoral outcomes would be imaginable only if democracy was crushed by some kind of a military coup with the aim of installing in power the preferred candidate of the ruling class.

To be sure, there is nothing in the Constitution that grants American voters the right to choose their president. When American voters go to the polls to vote for a presidential candidate, what they are essentially doing is casting a vote for their preferred partys nominated slate of electors.

The electoral college system is democracys ugliest anachronism. It was designed by the founding fathers in order to prevent the masses from choosing directly who will run the country, and its simply shocking that it still exists more than two hundred years later.

The existence of the electoral college system also helps to explain why voter turnout for the presidential elections in the worlds most outdated democratic model is consistently disturbingly low. More than 90 million eligible voters did not vote in the 2016 presidential election, in what was considered to be one of the most important elections in many generations because of the inflammatory and racist rhetoric of Donald Trump, and while there was a bigger turnout in 2020, the US is still incredibly low compared with other advanced democratic nations around the world when it comes to electoral participation, ranking 31st out of 35 developed countries in 2016, and 24th in 2020, respectively.

The existence of the two-party system (yet another democratic anomaly), and even the fact that elections are being held on a day when most people work, are also reasons for the low voter turnout in the US.

In addition, one could also argue that the reason why so many Americans are abstaining from voting, a cornerstone of democracy, is intrinsically related to the long-stemming pathologies of the American political culture, namely due to the manufacturing of a highly individualistic and consumer-driven society intended to promote conformism, ignorance and apathy about public affairs all while the rich and powerful control policymaking.

However, an even bigger democratic anomaly than the presence of the electoral college system revolves around US senate representation. A tiny state such as Wyoming, with barely 600,000 residents, has the same number of Senators on Capitol Hill as does California, with nearly 40 million residents. This translates, roughly, to Wyoming voters having 70 times more Senate representation than California voters. Moreover, since most of the smaller states have overwhelmingly white residents, it also means that whites have much larger representation in the Senate than Black and Hispanic Americans.

The undemocratic nature of Senate representation might not have been such a huge problem if its powers were similar to those of upper houses found in many other countries in the world, which tend to be overwhelmingly less than those of the lower houses. In the US, however, the Senate is far more powerful than the House of Representatives as it has virtually complete control over federal legislating and acts as the gatekeeper on treaties, cabinet approvals, and nominations to the Supreme Court.

Yet, perhaps an even bigger insult and injury to the body politic and the promotion of the common good in the U.S. is the privatization of democracy through the role of money in campaigns and elections. Campaign finance laws in the U.S. always posed at least an indirect threat to democracy by allowing private money to play a very prominent role in the financing of elections, but the 2010 Supreme Court ruling in Citizens United vs Federal Election Commission, which shifted even further the influence of dark money on politics by reversing whatever campaign finance restrictions were still in place and essentially declaring that corporations were effectively citizens and thus could spend unlimited funds on elections, robbed America of whatever hopes and aspirations it may have had of attaining a somewhat well-functioning democratic political system.

Taking everything into account, it is clear that, even though the United States remains a free and open society, conditions which have allowed greater exposure and by extension more public awareness of the structural flaws in the countrys political system, the progressive forces fighting for a democratic future have a truly herculean task ahead of them.

While changing the constitution, creating a multiparty system, and fighting the corrupting influence of money in politics are absolute necessities for democracy to functionjust as surely as a Green New Deal is an absolute must to protect the environment and save the planet the anti-democratic forces of this country are working even harder these days to destroy whatever is left of American democracy.

Republicans are bent on restricting voting rights as part of a concerted effort to change the rules in a way that they will impact on the demographic shifts favoring the Democrats. The campaign for restrictive voting legislation goes all the way back to the end of the 20th century, so what we are witnessing today is just a new wave of intensification to roll back decades of progress on voting rights.

The thoroughly anti-democratic and racist mindset of Republican Senators could not have been more glaringly revealed than with their recent use of a Jim Crow relicthe filibusterto block the most extensive voting rights bill in a generation. Now, activists are concentrating on eliminating the filibuster, which, naturally, should have no place in a normal democracy.

Yet, eliminating the filibuster while everything else stays the same in connection with the workings of the American political system and its institutions carries certain undeniable risks given that the most reactionary and outright proto-fascist forces in todays political universe are feverishly working on retaking powerfirst in the 2022 midterm elections, and then in 2024, in the presidential elections. As such, progressives should never lose sight of the importance of always maintaining a multi-level strategy for addressing and hopefully fixing the nations outdated political system and rigged economy.

Indeed, the American political system needs a dramatic overhaul due to its many structural flaws. Without one, American democracy will remain a mirage.

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American Democracy Will Remain a Mirage Without a Dramatic Overhaul of the Political and Economic System - CADTM.org