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The estimated cost of the recall election, according to state finance officials, is $215 million statewide, including an estimated $20 million for San Diego County

SAN DIEGO COUNTY, Calif. On the eve of California's highly-anticipated reopening, Republicans who have been critical of Governor Gavin Newsom's handling of the pandemic say it is time for new leadership. Already, more than six dozen candidates have filed paperwork to run in the upcoming recall election.

Monday night, five of those hopefuls, including former Olympian and trans-rights advocate Caitlyn Jenner, spoke in front of hundreds of local Republicans.

Two of the most high-profile candidates vying to take Governor Gavin Newsom's place, former San Diego Mayor Kevin Faulconer and businessman John Cox, did not appear at the event, organized by the Republican Party of San Diego County.

But those who did take the stage had a unified message: in their view, it is time for new leadership in California.

"Why are we all here?" asked Jenner. "We are running against the corruption and the mismanagement, and it has only been accelerated under Gavin Newsom's rule."

Candidate after candidate took the stage and made their case.

"Gavin Newsom has got to go, and we need real leadership in his place," said candidate Joseph Luciano.

"What we have experienced in California this last year is nothing less than a socialist-communist takeover by the leadership of this state," said candidate Sarah Stephens

Candidate Anthony Trimino talked about his grandfather fleeing Communist Cuba for a better life in the United States.

"My grandfather would be rolling over in his grave right now if he realized this country he was running to is starting to look more and more like the country he was fleeing from," Trimino said.

"We are hearing from the farmers in Fresno, the entrepreneurs in the Bay Area, the moms in Hollywood," said candidate Jenny Rae Le Roux. "There are an unreal number of people who are excited about this election."

A recent poll by the Public Policy Institute of California finds 40% of likely voters say they would vote to remove Newsom from office.

"California lays claim to the lowest [COVID-19] positivity rate in America," Newsom said recently. "Now is not the time to waste hundreds of millions of dollars on a recall effort that is nothing more than a partisan power grab."

The estimated cost of the recall election, according to state finance officials, is $215 million statewide, which includes an estimated $20 million for San Diego County.

The election will be held most likely sometime between September and November, with some Democrats pushing to hold it before the end of summer.

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Republican candidates vying to unseat Gov. Newsom in recall election take the stage - CBS News 8

A few hours after Michael Flynn, the retired three-star general and former national-security adviser and convicted felon, told a group of QAnon conspiracists who met in Dallas over Memorial Day weekend that the Biden Administration should be overthrown by force, Democratic legislators in the Texas statehouse, two hundred miles away in Austin, did something remarkable: they stopped their Republican colleagues from passing one of the most restrictive voting bills in the country. Flynns pronouncement and the Republicans efforts rely on repeating the same untruth: that the Presidency was stolen from Donald Trump by a cabal of Democrats, election officials, and poll workers who perpetrated election fraud. No matter that this claim has been litigated, relitigated, and debunked. Based on data collected by the conservative Heritage Foundation, the incidence of voter fraud in the two decades before last years election was about 0.00006 per cent of total ballots cast. It was negligible in 2020, too, as Trumps Attorney General, William Barr, acknowledged at the time.

Senate Bill 7 was stymied at the last minute, when Democrats in the Texas House walked out, depriving Republicans of a quorum. The legislation is full of what are becoming standard suppression tacticsmost of which burden people of color, who in 2020 overwhelmingly voted Democraticand includes measures that would, for example, allow a judge to overturn an election result simply if a challenger claimed, without any proof, that fraudulent votes changed the outcome. Sarah Labowitz, of the A.C.L.U. of Texas, called the bill ruthless. Texas was already the most difficult state in which to cast a ballot, according to a recent study by Northern Illinois University. In 2020, voter turnout there was among the lowest in the nation. Even so, with nonwhites making up more than sixty per cent of the population under twenty, Texas is on its way to becoming a swing state. S.B. 7 is intended to insure that it doesnt. Governor Greg Abbott has promised to call a special session of the legislature to reintroduce it.

Since January, Republican lawmakers in forty-eight states have introduced nearly four hundred restrictive voting bills. What distinguishes these efforts is that they target not only voters but also poll workers and election officials. The Texas bill makes it a criminal offense for an election official to obstruct the view of poll watchers, who are typically partisan volunteers, and grants those observers the right to record videos of voters at polling places. In Iowa, officials could be fined ten thousand dollars for technical infractions, such as failing to sufficiently purge voters from the rolls. In Florida, workers who leave drop boxes unattended, however briefly, can be fined twenty-five thousand dollars. In Georgia, poll watchers can challenge the eligibility of an unlimited number of voters.

Even before the pandemic, sixty-five per cent of jurisdictions in the country were having trouble attracting poll workers. The threat of sizable fines and criminal prosecution will only make that task harder, and thats clearly the point. Polls cant operate without poll workers. Voters cant vote if there are no polling places, or if they cant stand in hours-long lines at the sites that are opennot to mention if other means of casting a ballot, such as by mail, have been outlawed.

What began as thinly veiled attempts to keep Democrats from voting has become a movement to undermine confidence in our democracy itself. How else to understand the recount under way in Maricopa County, Arizona (which gave Joe Biden the state), six months after the election was certified? Despite an audit in February that showed no malfeasance, Republicans in the Arizona Senate took possession of the countys more than two million ballots and turned them over to a private Florida-based company, Cyber Ninjas, which has no election-audit experience. The firms C.E.O. had reportedly tweeted that he was tired of hearing people say there was no fraud. Its unclear who is paying for the recount, which was supposed to have concluded last month. According to the Arizona Republic, recruiters for the project were reaching out to traditionally conservative groups. At least one of the recounters was at the January 6th Stop the Steal rally outside the U.S. Capitol. Some have been examining ballots for bamboo fibres, which would purportedly prove that counterfeit ballots for Biden were sent from South Korea. The official chain of custody has been broken for the voting machines, too, which could enable actual fraud, and may force the county to replace them.

Its easy to joke about conspiracy hunters searching for bits of bamboo. But the fact is that more than half of Republicans still believe that Trump won, and a quarter of all Americans think that the election was rigged. Republicans in at least four other statesNew Hampshire, Michigan, Georgia, and Pennsylvaniaare now considering recounts. Soon, Trump will begin to hold rallies again and will use them to amplify his Big Lie lie; he has reportedly suggested that he could be back in the White House in August, after the recounts are completed. The real, and imminent, danger is that all the noise will make it easier for a cohort of Americans to welcome the dissolution of the political system, which appears to be the ultimate goal of the current Republican efforts.

Last Tuesday, in a speech commemorating the hundredth anniversary of the Tulsa massacre, Biden vowed to fight like heck to preserve voting rights, and he deputized Vice-President Kamala Harris to lead the charge. Chuck Schumer, the Senate Majority Leader, said that he would bring the For the People Act to a vote this month. Among other provisions, the act mandates automatic voter registration, prohibits voter intimidation, and reduces the influence of dark money in elections. If it became law, and survived the inevitable legal challenges, it could stop much of the Republican pillage, and perhaps prove the most pivotal piece of legislation in a generation.

Nearly seventy per cent of Americans favor measures in the bill, but its unlikely to gain the support of Senator Joe Manchin, the conservative West Virginia Democrat, let alone of enough Republicans to clear the sixty-vote hurdle imposed by the filibuster. So far, to Bidens evident annoyance, Manchin and another Democratic senator, Kyrsten Sinema, of Arizona, oppose eliminating the filibuster. Its up to Democratic leaders to impress upon their colleagues that their legacies, and that of their party, are now entwined with the survival of American democracy.

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The Republicans Wild Assault on Voting Rights in Texas and Arizona - The New Yorker

Early on in the COVID-19 pandemic, the GOP collectively decided to make Anthony Fauci, M.D., public enemy number one, having found in the veteran immunologist the perfect target through which to whip up their base and take the spotlight off the fact that the then president had let the virus gain a foothold in the country while actively lying about it at every turn. Fauci, of course, is everything conservatives hate: An educated man of science with not one but two degrees, he committed what Republicans believe was a capital offense when he failed to back up everything Donald Trump said about the disease, including the part about treating it by freebasing bleach. While tiresome and dangerousFauci and his family required a security detail at one pointthe ridiculous attacks and conspiracies, like that Fauci invented the coronavirus and is part of a secret cabal with Bill Gates and George Soros to profit from vaccines have had little impact. Fauci remains employed by the government, and by all accounts Joe Biden is happy with his work.The president and the administration feel that Dr. Fauci has played an incredible role in getting the pandemic under control and being a voice to the public throughout the course of this pandemic, White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki said this week.

But like the living embodiment of a QAnon forum, Republicans, Trump, and Fox News now appear to believe theyve found some kind of smoking gun showing Fauci is somehow responsible for the virus, based on the fresh interest in the lab-leak theory (which the doctor himself is supportive of investigating, which you wouldnt think he would be if he was implicated in the whole thing, a slight wrinkle conservatives will probably explain at a time and place TBD). So naturally, theyre amping up their attacks like hes the second coming of Benghazi/Hillary Clinton/Pol Pot.

Per Axios:

President Trump plansto make Anthony Fauci a top target at upcoming rallies, using increased attention to the Wuhan lab-leak theory as a weapon against an official long viewed as more trustworthy. Why it matters: Trump and conservative media have made Fauci an improbable face of the opposition, trying to give him the cartoon-villain status once accorded to former Sen. Harry Reid, Speaker Nancy Pelosi, orin Trumps caseHillary Clinton. Trump amped uphis longtime Fauci rants yesterday in a statement calling for COVID reparations from China: The correspondencebetween Dr. Fauci and China speaks too loudly for anyone to ignore. China should pay Ten Trillion Dollars to America, and the World, for the death and destruction they have caused!

Fox News prime-time stars are [also] amping up their Fauci rants based on new questions about COVIDs origins. [A]ll the smirking moronsin the American news media changed their view completely overnight, Tucker Carlson said last night, 24 hours after saying Fauci should be criminally investigated. LORD FAUCI EXPOSED,said one Tucker graphic. Another dubbed him Lord Fauci, Patron Saint Of Wuhan. Sean Hannityjumped the gun last night with a graphic calling new revelations the FALL of FAUCI.

Reality check: The theory most experts still believe to be most likely is that the virus was transmitted from a bat to some other species of animal, then to humans.Thats what happened with plenty of other viruses.

Incidentally, none of the people calling for the director of theNational Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases to basically be tried for war crimes have expressed the slightest interest in any investigation whatsoever into the events of January 6 and in fact have lost their collective shit over the prospect of anyone digging into the that day, and the lead-up, too closely.

Meanwhile, in an interview with the Financial Times, Fauci himself said China should release medical records for nine people whose sicknesses could shed some vital light onto the question of COVID-19s origins. I have always feltthat the overwhelming likelihoodgiven the experience we have had with SARS, MERS, Ebola, HIV, bird flu, the swine flu pandemic of 2009was that the virus jumped species, Fauci said. But we need to keep on investigating until a possibility is proven. As for the possibility he or his organization might actually be responsible for the virus because they provided a small amount of funding to the Wuhan lab, Fauci, like most sane people, believes the idea is absurd. Are you really saying that we are implicated because we gave a multibillion-dollar institution $120,000 a year for bat surveillance? he asked.

Mike Pence continues to be weirdly understanding about that time Donald Trump nearly had him killed

Was the former V.P. thrilled about the insurrection that took place as he was attempting to certify Joe Bidens win, which involved Trump supporters chanting Hang Mike Pence? No, but hes not going to let it come between him and the 45th president, whom he continues to hold in high regard. Per The Washington Post:

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Republicans Are One Week Away From Starting a Lock Her Up Chant for Anthony Fauci - Vanity Fair

But almost all of those up-and-comers have one common trait: they have embraced Trump. And for others in the party, that fealty is a sign of a party contracting, not expanding. The fear is that, as Trump lingers on the scene, aggressively intervening in internal party disputes and openly flirting with running again in 2024, it will only get more pronounced.

There is a lost generation of conservatives and I think its because theyre forced to tie themselves to Trump, one Republican operative said. There was an anti-Romney backlash, anti-Bush backlash When you lose the presidency whether an incumbent or challenger the party distances themselves and that is absolutely not the case here."

Political parties have gone through concerns about talent drains before. At the end of Barack Obamas presidency, Democrats warned that the bench of up-and-coming lawmakers he left behind was painfully thin as the party suffered tremendous setbacks in Congress and the statehouses. Trump, too, oversaw the loss of seats down-ballot. But unlike Obama, he has not receded from public view after leaving office. And his continued presence has sparked fears mainly, but not exclusively, from the GOP diaspora about the narrowing of the party.

"If the conservative cause depends on the populist appeal of one personality, or on second-rate imitations, then we're not going anywhere, former House Speaker Paul Ryan, who left Washington for Wisconsin two years ago, said last week on the first night of the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library & Museums "Time for Choosing" series. Voters looking for Republican leaders want to see independence and mettle. They will not be impressed by the sight of yes-men and flatterers flocking to Mar-a-Lago."

In a clear sign Trump was listening, the ex-president responded with a four-paragraph critique the next day. Paul Ryan has been a curse to the Republican Party, Trump said. Ryan didnt respond back.

Ryans fear about Trumps grip on the party is shared by top operatives who believe that few aspiring presidential candidates will choose to run if Trump ultimately does make a bid. So far, former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie is the only potential 2024 contender who said he wouldnt wait around for the ex-president to make a decision first. Former U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley has flatly said shed defer to her former boss before deciding on making a run.

As one close adviser coolly remarked: Theyre all so afraid [of] going first maybe? Or saying something that sounds like theyre moving on from the Trump years.

On the congressional level, Trumps impact on the composition of the party has been visible in obvious and subtle ways. He helped orchestrate the ouster of Wyoming Rep. Liz Cheney from leadership ranks, and either directly or indirectly drove numerous lawmakers to retirement. As FiveThiryEight noted, of the 293 Republicans who were serving in the Senate or House on Jan. 20, 2017 the day of Trumps inauguration a full 132 (45 percent) are no longer in Congress or have announced their retirement or resignation.

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Republicans fear Trump will lead to a lost generation of talent - POLITICO

As a boy growing up in the 1950s in Massachusetts, my father and I used to go into Boston to Red Sox games and to attend political meetings and state Democratic conventions. We would often go through Belmont, down Concord Ave., past the high school, a bit of a short cut. We would pass a small non-descript brick building that my father told me was the home of the John Birch Society.

During the period of the 50s and 60s, the John Birch Society was also the home of those who wanted the United States out of the United Nations; they wanted to impeach Earl Warren, the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court; their leader, Robert Welsh, accused Dwight Eisenhower of deliberate treason; they even urged their members to infiltrate the local P.T.A. and take over school boards (where, by the way, my father served).

They were full of conspiracy theories, centered around anti-Communism, and were convinced that nefarious power brokers were on the verge of creating a one-world government. They were denounced by conservatives like William F. Buckley and even Ayn Rand. Buckleys biographer, John Judis, wrote that Buckley was beginning to worry that the country would take an ugly, even Fascist turn should the Birchers take hold.

I remember my father describing them as the two-percenters that is, only about 2 percent of Americans bought what they were selling. True conservatives rejected them, and Republicans like Barry Goldwater kept their distance. No one really took them that seriously.

As Republicans became more conservative, they argued more and more strongly for less government, greater defense spending and embraced cultural conservatism. They lost northern Republican moderates while gaining seats held by conservative Democratic southerners, but they didnt embrace the complete crazies. They may have tolerated them, but Republicans were still a party that elected presidents and members of Congress who supported free and fair elections, an independent judiciary, a free press, bipartisan cooperation and who rejected violence, overturning elections, undermining democracy. From Eisenhower to Bush, the Republican Party may have left a lot for us Democrats to disagree with, but we would have been hard pressed to describe them as the party with fascist, anti-democratic views and values.

That has changed.

Actions show it: Republican-controlled legislatures passing bills in state after state gaming the system to stop people from voting on the front end and letting them change the election results on the back end; Congressional Republicans allowing an armed insurrection on Jan. 6 to be swept under the rug by rejecting a bipartisan commission; Arizona Republicans continuing the lie about the election results and engaging a phony and fraudulent audit;and too many rank-and-file Republicans falling for and Republican leaders supporting the likes of QAnon, which spreads falsehoods deliberately.

Polls show the destruction of the Republican Party: 70 percent of Republicans dont believe Biden is the legitimate winner of the Presidential election; 23 percent of Republicans believe that government, media and the financial world in the U.S. are controlled by a group of Satan worshiping pedophiles who run a global child sex trafficking operation; 28 percent of Republicans believe things have gotten so far off track, true Patriots may have to resort to violence in order to save the country.

Here is the even bigger problem: When you examine Republicans who get their news from far- right sources and who are strong Trump supporters, 40 percent buy into those QAnon conspiracy theories and support violence. Their numbers are growing.

Former national security adviser Michael Flynn, speaking recently at a QAnon rally in Dallas, said that we should have an armed coup by the military like what happened in Myanmar.

Where are the Republicans of yesteryear? Where are those who rejected the John Birch Society, who stood up to Joe McCarthy in the 50s, who worked across the aisle to pass landmark Civil Rights legislation? Where are the Republicans of old who knew how to speak truth to power and who convinced Richard Nixon he had to resign for the good of the country? Where are the courageous Republicans who believed in conservatism, like Liz CheneyElizabeth (Liz) Lynn CheneyStefanik pregnant with her first child Bye-bye Miss American Pie whatever happened to the Republican Party and conservatism? The Memo: Trump seizes spotlight to distract from defeat MORE, who would say simply and truthfully, Joe BidenJoe BidenTrump touts record, blasts Dems in return to stage Trump demands China pay 'reparations' for role in coronavirus pandemic Lincoln Project co-founder: Trump's words 'will surely kill again' MORE is President, Trump is not a patriot and does not represent our Party?

And, finally, where are the Republicans who can see that the rise of wild and crazy conspiracy theories they know are false, coupled with blind loyalty to a former president who has more in common with fascist authoritarian dictators than past American presidents, are all leading us rapidly down the road to the destruction of our democracy?

By failing to speak out, failing to acknowledge that this is way beyond who wins and who loses the next elections, you put the nation at real risk.

There is a lot more at stake when you let demagogues run wild and when more and more people buy into the conspiracy theories, a lot more than the two-percenters.

This is scary on the national level when we watch those Republicans in the House and Senate who kowtow to Trump and QAnon; but watch out, as this plays out in those state legislatures, county commissions and school boards. Watch out when statewide offices and elections are run by those who dont believe in democracy and the rule of law as extremism takes hold. It started way before Trump, like the frog put in tepid water and the fire slowly turned up and the frog doesnt jump out.

This has been with us since the John Birch Society, but our problem now is that the Republican Party leaders of conscience are too few and far between to sound the alarm. If there ever was a time to show courage and common sense, it is now.

Peter Fenn is a long-time Democratic political strategist who served on the Senate Intelligence Committee, was a top aide to Sen. Frank Church and was the first director of Democrats for the 80s, founded by Pamela Harriman. He also co-founded the Center for Responsive Politics/Open Secrets. Follow him on Twitter@peterhfenn.

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Bye-bye Miss American Pie whatever happened to the Republican Party and conservatism? | TheHill - The Hill