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How low has the Party of Lincoln fallen? In answering this question, it is instructive to look at the example of Kevin McCarthy, a seven-term California congressman who, since 2019, has served as the House Minority Leader. Until Donald Trump appeared on the scene, McCarthy wasnt regarded as particularly conservativeat least by the standards of todays Republican Party. When, in 2015, he abandoned a bid to become Speaker of the House, some Tea Party activists celebrated.

In the summer of 2016, McCarthy endorsed Trump for President, but only after the interloper from New York had sewn up the nomination. A year later, it emerged that, in June of 2016, McCarthy had told some of his fellow-members of the House Republican leadership that he believedswear to Godthat Trump was in the pay of the Russian President, Vladimir Putin. When the Washington Post eventually reported about these comments, McCarthy tried to laugh them off as a joke.

The nature of the accommodation that McCarthy made with his conscience, when he jumped onto the Trump train, can only be speculated upon. Its perhaps fair to assume that he didnt realize exactly where the tracks would lead, but, given his comments in 2016, its also clear that he didnt harbor any illusions about the man he was endorsing.

In any case, after McCarthy took over as House Minority Leader, he followed Trumps wishes so slavishly that the President started to refer to him as my Kevin. On Friday, McCarthy took the ultimate Trump-loyalist move and threw his backing behind the Presidents outlandish bid to overthrow the 2020 election result. Along with a hundred and twenty-five other Republican representatives, McCarthy added his name to an amicus brief supporting the lawsuit filed by Ken Paxton, the attorney general of Texas, and backed by seventeen other Republican state attorneys general, that requested the Supreme Court throw out the duly certified election results from Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin.

On Friday night, the Court dismissed this scurrilous lawsuit on the grounds that Texas had no standing to challenge election results in other states. (My colleague Amy Davidson Sorkin has more on the Supreme Court ruling.) And how did McCarthy respond to this rebuke from the Court? On Friday night, he said nothing. On Saturday morning, he maintained his silence, but tweeted out a video of himself talking to Senator Tim Scott, of South Carolina, the lone Black Republican senator. The Republican Party is the Party of Lincoln, grounded in the values of freedom and equality for all people, McCarthy said in the tweet.

The gall of McCarthy and his fellow Trump toadies in the Republican Party is only surpassed by their irresponsibility and fecklessness. In taking their oaths of office as members of Congress, they swore that they would support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic. And, yet, here they were, supporting a Trump venture that the attorney general of Pennsylvania, in a brief opposing the Texas lawsuit, described as a seditious abuse of the judicial process. The gambit amounted to a flagrant effort to overturn the most basic liberty enshrined in the Constitution: the right of the people to choose their leaders. In the unlikely event that the lawsuit had succeeded, the country would have been plunged into chaos, and Trump would have succeeded in his reckless effort to defy the rules of democracy.

The only conceivable defense for the actions of the Republican signatories is that they supported the Texas lawsuit in the sure knowledge that it would fail. Terrified of incurring the wrath of an enraged Bully-in-Chief, they postured for him, and for the MAGA mob. But what sort of defense is this for politicians elected to a body that likes to see itself as a model for the world? A pitiful one at best, and not one that would stand up in any court of law or any court of history. One lesson of failed democracies is that when officials or institutions genuflect before would-be authoritarians, in the hope that somebody else will head them off, or control them, the results can be disastrous.

After the events of the past few weeks, it is easy to sympathize with the editorial writers of the Orlando Sentinel, who published a column on Friday expressing regret to their readers for the support they afforded one of the Trump minions, Representative Michael Waltz, of Floridas Sixth District, going into November 3rd. We apologize to our readers for endorsing Michael Waltz in the 2020 general election for Congress, the editorial said. We had no idea, had no way of knowing at the time, that Waltz was not committed to democracy.

A fair reading of the G.O.P.s record of gerrymandering and voter suppression over the past couple of decades, and its abject servility toward Trump during the past four years, is that its commitment to democracy has long been subservient to its desire to retain power. But even for an organization as tarnished as this one, the decision by so many Republican congressmen, and so many state attorneys general, to support the Texas lawsuit marked a new low.

And its not over yetit never is when you put your lot in with a pathological narcissist who has no regard for you, your party, or democracy, beyond the services that they can render to him. On Saturday morning, Trump tweeted, WE HAVE JUST BEGUN TO FIGHT!!! Later in the day, en route to the Army-Navy football game, the Presidents Marine One helicopter flew over Freedom Plaza, at Pennsylvania Avenue and Fourteenth Street, where thousands of alt-right activists were holding a Stop the Steal rally, demanding that the results of the election be overturned.

On Monday, the Electoral College will meet and officially cast its votes to elect Joe Biden, who won by three hundred and six votes to two hundred and thirty-two. But Trump isnt quite done. His eyes are on January 6th, when Congress will hold a joint session to ratify the work of the Electoral College. In the coming days and weeks, he will, doubtless, demand that Republicans in Congress reject the vote counts from a number of states, which could cause bedlam. How will McCarthy and his colleagues react to Trumps next entreaties? Anyone hoping for a belated display of character and commitment to democracy is likely to be disappointed.

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The G.O.P. Can No Longer Be Relied On to Protect Democracy - The New Yorker

WILMINGTON, Del. President-elect Joe Biden pointedly criticized President Trump on Monday for threatening core principles of democracy even as he told Americans that their form of self-government ultimately prevailed.

Speaking from his longtime home of Wilmington, Delaware, on the day thatelectors nationwide castvotes affirming his victory, Biden was blunt in critiquing the damage done by Trumps baseless allegations that the contest was stolen. Such arguments have been roundly rejected by judges across the political spectrum, including the justices at the Supreme Court.

Democracy, Biden said, has been pushed, tested, threatened. But he said it proved to be resilient, true, and strong.

The flame of democracy was lit in this nation a long time ago, Biden said. And we now know that nothing, not even a pandemic or an abuse of power, can extinguish that flame.

Biden and his team hope that the formal victory in the Electoral College combined with his record-setting 81 million-vote count will help the country unify and accept his presidency. But the challenge facing Biden was evident as many congressional Republicans, including some of the partys top leaders, refused to officially accept Bidens win. Trump, meanwhile, shows no sign of conceding.

The president-elect acknowledged an irony in the circumstances, noting that he won with the same number of electoral votes 306 as Trump did four years ago. Trump hailed that win as a landslide.

By his own standards, these numbers represent a clear victory then, and I respectfully suggest they do so now, Biden said.

A candidate needs to win 270 electoral votes to clinch the presidency.

The fact that Biden had to even give such a speech shortly after electors voted to make him the president a usually routine and even mundane step shows how extraordinary the post-election period has been, with Trump trying to thwart Biden at every turn.

Despite that, Biden struck a familiar theme of his presidential campaign, pledging to be a president for all Americans who will work just as hard for those of you who didnt vote for me as I will for those who did.

Now it is time to turn the page as weve done throughout our history, he said. To unite. To heal.

He said that was the only way the country could overcome the worst health crisis in more than a century, saying that in the face of the pandemic, we need to work together, give each other a chance and lower the temperature.

Whether his message will have any effect remains to be seen. Top Republicans have mostly continued to back Trump and his unsubstantiated claims of a rigged election and, even once Biden takes power, are unlikely to give him any of the traditional honeymoon period.

Biden recalled that one of his jobs as vice president four years ago was to formally recognize Trumps electoral victory in the Senate after 2016, and he said he expected the same process to occur this time saluting the small number of GOP senators who have acknowledged his victory. But there are many other leading Republicans who have continued to side with Trump.

Andafter losing dozens of legal challengeson the state and federal level, Trump is expected to push forward with new litigation this week. Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani says he expects five more lawsuits at the state level.

Even after he takes the White House, Biden faces a narrowly divided Senate. Next months runoff elections in Georgia will decide which party controls the chamber. Theres also a thinned Democratic majority in the House as the GOP picked up seats even as Trump lost.

Meanwhile, Republican Sen. Ron Johnson of Wisconsin is set to hold a hearing Wednesday on election irregularities. Johnson has questioned why Congress wasnt informed that the taxes of Bidens son Hunter wereunder federal investigationduringTrumps impeachmenttrial last year.

The president wasacquitted in a Senate trialthat centered onTrumps dealings with Ukraines presidentand on whether he abused his office by seeking an investigation into the Bidens. Hunter Biden served on the board of directors ofa Ukrainian energy company.

The younger Biden said in a statement last week that he just recently learned that he was under investigation. He also said he committed no wrongdoing.

Bidens deputy chief of staff, Jen OMalley Dillon, downplayed the notion that the investigation could hamper Bidens ability to pursue his agenda.

The president-elect himself has said this is not about his family or Donald Trumps family, OMalley Dillon said. It is about the American peoples families. And I think were going to continue to stay focused on the issues that are impacting their daily lives.

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'Democracy prevailed,' Biden says as he aims to unify divided nation - pressherald.com

PublicAffairs

Is public education part of the foundation of democracy in this country? How long have the fights for and against it persisted? And where does that fight stand right now? Legal scholar Derek Blacks new book, Schoolhouse Burning, is a sharp, clear look at the long history of public education in this country, viewed through a legal lens.

Black asserts up front his conclusion that the ideological, legal, and constitutional roots of our public education system stretch to the very founding of our nation. Through thorough research and a close reading of critical court cases, Black traces how those roots have been fed, attacked, and refreshed over the last 250 years.

Education was viewed as critical from the very first, but in Blacks telling, it is in the aftermath of the Civil War that public education receives a real boost. For the freed slaves, education was a huge priority. It becomes a critical part of new southern state constitutions, and that view of public schools spread, so that every state in the Union has a clause requiring the state to provide public education. During Reconstruction, some states went so far as to impose a school tax. This furthered the old idea that education was part of a functioning democratic country. Black writes, Committing to and acquiring education was, in effect, to assume the role of citizen. He lays out how Reconstruction featured significant steps forward in guaranteeing an education to every American.

After Reconstruction, of course, assaults on that right accelerated. Public education moved forward as a conflicted institution beset by unreconcilable tensions, writes Black. An idea too strong to abandon but too dangerous to faithfully implement. States segregated students and segregated dollars in an attempt to avoid fully honoring the promise of public education, and as part of the program to keep Blacks out of the voting booth. But the author sees one silver liningthe actual right to an education was never stripped from the laws of the states.

Black writes about the Second Reconstruction and the series of legal challenges attempted to force states to honor the promise of public education for all students, and the defenses mounted by advocates of segregation, and this makes for particularly useful reading if your knowledge doesnt extend far beyond Brown v. Board of Education.

While many of the attacks on education for non-white citizens will seem familiar, Black observes that modern attacks on public education have shifted. While much of our history has involved attempts to avoid providing free public education for Black and brown Americans, he now sees a shift to attacks on the very idea of public education itself. Race still remains a powerful undercurrent fueling the notion that government spends too much on others kids education. But weve gone beyond that. He points at how state spending on public education did not bounce back after the Great Recession cuts of 2008. States did not have to stop funding education at adequate levels, he notes. They just stopped trying.

Many folks discuss education with semi-formed ideas about whether or not education really is a fundamental part of our democracy and whether or not it is something that is truly promised to our children. Schoolhouse Burning makes a strong case that yes, public education is and has always been a foundational element of our nation, not just a pretty ideal held by some, but a promise supported by the Founders and baked into our legal framework

Blacks book is packed with information and analysis, but remains exceptionally accessible, like getting a detailed explanation from a legal scholar who just happens to speak plain English. Beyond the well-researched history, Black also provides a convincing argument in favor of public education in this country, a defense of a foundational institution at a time it is once again under attack.

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Is Public Education Part Of The Foundation Of Democracy? A New Book By Legal Scholar Derek Black Says Yes. - Forbes

Donald Trump does not understand that, so elected Republicans must

Nov 21st 2020

ALMOST TWO weeks after the votes that made him a one-term president were counted, Donald Trump is still claiming that he won. In reality there is no room for doubt. Joe Biden beat him by almost 6m votes, amassing 306 electoral-college votes to Mr Trumps 232. Yet reality is a stranger to Mr Trump, who was crying fraud before the first vote had been cast. He has since fired an official who contradicted his view that the election was stolen and encouraged his supporters to protest against the result.

Most Republican leaders go along with the president. They include his attorney-general, Bill Barr, who told prosecutors to investigate substantial allegations of election fraud; Mitch McConnell, the Senate majority leader, who has championed the presidents right to go to court; and Lindsey Graham, one of Mr Trumps staunchest Senate defenders, who Georgias secretary of state says pressed him to exclude legitimate ballots.

As so often in the Trump presidency, it is hard to know how seriously to take all this. No coup is under way in America. Mr Trump does indeed have the right to mount legal challenges. The counting and certifying of election results has withstood pressure from above. Most of the Trump campaigns lawsuits have already been dropped or tossed out by the courts. Mr Barrs prosecutors explained that they could find no evidence of the kind of systematic fraud that the president insists took place. Despite violent threats, Georgias secretary of state refused to buckle (see article).

Whatever he says or does, Mr Trump will be out on January 20th and Mr Biden will be inaugurated. Might ignoring him thus be the best strategy? Some wonder if it might be best to let the courts explain to forlorn Trump voters that their man lost.

Yet Republican conduct is expedience dressed up as principle. Lawmakers are cowed by the threat that Mr Trump might back a primary challenge against anyone he judges disloyal. They think they need Mr Trumps support to win two run-off races in early January in which control of the Senate is at stake. Worse, their indulgence of Mr Trump imposes a cost on America. The effect of Republican leaders agreeing that perhaps Mr Trump really did win damages Americas ability to govern itself.

All Americans should wish the incoming administration to be competent. By delaying the transition, which in Americas spoils system entails the appointment of 4,000 new officialsall of whom must receive clearances before getting to grips with their new postsMr Trump is making that harder. When George W. Bush handed over to Barack Obama, they held a joint session of cabinet where outgoing officials sat with their replacements and ran through a series of hypothetical crises. The Biden officials will come into office with several existing crises to handle, including the logistics of a vaccination programme for covid-19 in which lives are at stake.

The president and his apologists are doing harm in another way, too. Voters have elected a divided government in Washington, with Democrats controlling the House and the presidency and Republicans favourites to keep the Senate. This requires both parties to work together, finding common interests where they can. If most Trump voters, encouraged by the likes of Mr McConnell, have come to believe that Mr Bidens win is illegitimate, why should they want their representatives to work with him?

America has had bitter elections before, yet the electoral system has almost always generated losers consent. In 2000 a minority of Gore supporters (36%) thought the result was illegitimate; in 2016, 23% of Clinton voters thought so. In 2020, 88% of Trump voters currently think the result was illegitimate. It is up to their elected officials to explain why it was not. This requires more than waiting for the courts, local election officialsor anyone elseto speak up. Failure to do so does not just make America harder to govern. It betrays a contempt for the spirit of democracy and thus a lack of patriotism.

Dig deeper:Read our latest coverage of the presidential transition, and then sign up for Checks and Balance, our weekly newsletter and podcast on American politics.

This article appeared in the Leaders section of the print edition under the headline "The art of losing"

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Accepting a disappointing election result is a key part of democracy - The Economist

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On 7 November the United States pulled back from the brink of re-electing a president who has repeatedly shown disdain for democratic norms and institutions. Donald Trump has fused his own business interests with the White House, dubbed the media enemies of the people, embraced foreign strongmen, sidelined science and politicized the justice department, falsely cast doubt on the electoral process and is currently distinguishing himself as the first sitting president since 1800 to frustrate a peaceful transition of power.

But as great escapes go, this one came bone-rattlingly close to collapsing. More people voted for Trump in the 2020 election some 71 million Americans than for any other presidential candidate in US history, other than Joe Biden himself. It took gargantuan determination to unseat him, with historically high turnout and black voters leading the way. And it happened in spite of, not because of, the unique features of US democracy.

The election exposed deep flaws in how Americans choose their leaders. Some of those flaws are as old as the nation itself, while others are more modern creations that have been weaponized by Trump and the Republicans. Combined, they present an existential threat to Americas reputation and survival as the oldest constitutional democracy on the planet.

As Ian Bassin, executive director of Protect Democracy, put it: The United States just allowed an autocratic person to ascend to the presidency, to serve in it for four years and to very nearly extend that term. The big question is: how did that happen, what went wrong there?

Sherrilyn Ifill, president of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, expressed a similar thought in Slate: Our voting system is fundamentally broken, she wrote. The future of our country unequivocally depends on our ability to reform it.

Here the Guardian looks at five of the most glaring flaws exposed during this election cycle, and asks: what hope now for setting them right?

The US is recovering from a severe bout of stress, caused by nerve-shattering waiting for the swing states to be called. The 2020 presidential election will go down in peoples memories as unbearably close.

It wasnt close at all.

Biden walloped Trump with a massive lead of more than 5 million Americans in the popular vote the simple national tally of votes cast for either candidate. As CNNs Harry Enten points out, the Democratic candidate will probably end up with 52% of the popular vote, the highest percentage of any challenger since Franklin Roosevelt in 1932.

The popular vote is how most democracies hold elections. Not the US. The outcome is decided here by the electoral college that arcane, twisty system by which the president is chosen not by we the people, but indirectly by 538 electors apportioned by state.

The electoral college is one of the democratic flaws that stretch back to the birth of the nation, when it was devised with less than pure motivations. As Sabeel Rahman, president of Demos Action, explained: It was intended to insulate the presidency from democratic popular control, and in particular to expand the power of the slaveholding states so it was inequitable from the beginning.

By Rahmans reckoning, the electoral college today gives Republican presidential candidates a 4% to 5% advantage over their Democratic rivals.

There is little chance of the electoral college being scrapped any time soon, as it would require a constitutional amendment which is all but impossible in these partisan times.

The main hope for change is the National Popular Vote compact whereby states collectively agree to pledge all their electoral votes to whichever candidate wins most votes nationwide. The movement gained a boost on election day when Colorado backed the idea, but it remains a distant prospect.

Huge turnout in the 2020 election was all the more impressive given barriers to voting. We have seen this cycle an effort by the Republican party to make it harder, wherever possible, to vote especially for black and minority populations, Bassin said.

He added: I dont know of another advanced democracy in the world where one of the two major political parties has invested in voter suppression as a core strategy.

Among the tactics on display were inaccurate purges of citizens from voter rolls, Trumps active undermining of the US Postal Service, and malicious robocalls in areas with large black populations such as Flint, Michigan.

One of the most egregious examples of voter suppression this cycle was in Florida. In 2018 Floridians handed back the right to vote to those with felony convictions, technically welcoming 1.4 million people back into democratic participation.

Floridas Republicans immediately set about undermining the will of the electorate, putting in place a bureaucratic maze that former felons had to negotiate before they could vote. It was so convoluted that almost 900,000 people were still disenfranchised on election day including about one in every six black Floridians of voting age.

Combatting voter suppression is central to HR1, the democracy reform bill championed by the Democrats in Congress. But for the past 245 days it has been stymied in the Senate by Mitch McConnell, the Republican majority leader, and pending two runoff elections in Georgia he is likely to continue to be a roadblock.

In that case focus is likely to shift over the next two years to the US justice department which has become virtually inactive in this area under Trump. Under Biden, the DoJ can be expected to re-engage, enforcing access to voting and prosecuting election-law violations.

That McConnell is likely to remain in control of the Senate is in itself a product of Americas flawed democracy. The composition of the chamber, with two senators assigned to each state no matter what its population, also has its roots in the countrys dark past.

The structure of the Senate is an outdated, racist, Jim Crow relic meant to enshrine white landowner power in our government, by prioritizing land over people, said Deirdre Schifeling, campaign director of the progressive coalition Democracy For All 2021. That disparity has only grown more magnified as our population has grown and its really unsustainable.

Assuming the Republicans hang on to the chamber by winning both runoffs for Georgias Senate seats in January, the Democratic group will represent 20 million more Americans in the incoming Senate than their peers across the aisle and yet still be in the minority. Vox has calculated that if both runoffs are won by Democrats that gulf in representation would shoot up to 40 million Americans, while the Senate would remain in a 50-50 split.

This distortion favors senators from low-population rural states with largely white electorates, such as Montana and the Dakotas, and helps explain the Republicans stranglehold on Congress. Its a catch-22: Democrats are unable to push through democracy reforms such as HR1 because they are blocked by unrepresentative Republican senators, yet without those reforms there is no hope of loosening the rightwing grip on power.

Plans had been laid to address this conundrum by granting statehood to Washington DC and to Puerto Rico, thus creating four new Senate seats. That scheme will be dead in the water with McConnell, the Grim Reaper, in charge and so the vicious cycle continues.

Brianna Brown knows what its like to be at the receiving end of Americas flawed democracy. As deputy director of the Texas Organizing Project, which seeks to build a political voice for black and Latino communities, she has been battling against a Republican state legislature that has made Texas ground zero for voter suppression for years.

Weve had polling place reductions, massive voter purges, a voter-ID law all attempts by the right wing to consolidate their power and shrink the electorate. If they can do that, they win, she said.

On top of all that, there is now the changing composition of federal courts to contend with. Over the past four years, Trump has placed more than 200 judges, conservatives to a fault, on district and circuit courts, in addition to the three rightwingers he nominated to the US supreme court.

Such judicial activism is likely to shift the balance of the federal judiciary for years to come, with consequences on the ground in places like Texas. The pattern was vividly illustrated during the election, when the Republican governor, Greg Abbott, limited the number of ballot drop-off locations to one per county.

The move meant that Harris county, home to the city of Houston, had to close 11 drop-off sites leaving only one to serve almost 5 million people.

The restriction was challenged, bouncing around the courts until it came before a three-judge panel of the fifth circuit court of appeals, which ruled in Abbotts favor. All three of the judges had been appointed by Trump.

This is going to be Trumps long-term legacy, Brown said. We are certainly going to feel it down the line as these rightwing judges, appointed to lifetime positions, obstruct us as we pull out all the stops to provide relief to our folks.

One of the most disappointing aspects of election night for the Democrats was the failure of the blue wave to materialize at state level. Republicans clung on to power in state legislatures in Florida, Iowa, Minnesota and North Carolina, and took control of New Hampshire.

Nowhere was that blow felt more keenly than Texas, where Democratic hopes of seizing the state house by storm rested on flipping nine seats. They didnt gain a single extra one.

The flop will, like Trumps judges, have long-term consequences. Failure to take control in Texas and elsewhere hands Republicans the gift of controlling the 10-year redistricting process in which electoral boundaries are drawn. As was seen in the last round in 2010, after the Tea Party upheaval swept Republicans to power in several states, they proved themselves to be devastatingly effective at drawing those lines in their own favor gerrymandering.

As Brown pointed out, this is another vicious cycle. Gerrymandering allows Republicans to consolidate their power, which in turn puts them in charge of the next redistricting round in which they will intensify gerrymandering.

Our goal is to transform democracy in Texas, and if we can do that we can transform the country, Brown said. But before we can even start that fight, the lines have already been drawn, limiting our ability to build a democracy that looks like us and shares our values.

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America's flawed democracy: the five key areas where it is failing - The Guardian