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Erica Newland serves as counsel for Protect Democracy, a nonprofit organization founded in 2017 to fight democratic breakdown in America. Before Joe Bidens victory was officially confirmed in January, she researched some of the ways that Donald Trumps allies in Congress might sabotage the process. She came to a harrowing conclusion.

It occurred to me, she told her colleagues then, as I dug into the rules and watched what happened, that if the current Republican Party controls both Houses of Congress on Jan. 6, 2025, theres no way if a Democrat is legitimately elected they will get certified as the president-elect.

Liz Cheneys removal from Republican House leadership is the latest sign that Newland is probably right. Todays Republican Party has no political philosophy in the normal sense; it is, rather, organized around fealty to Trump and the stab-in-the-back myth that the election was stolen from him. Cheney had to go because she rejects that lie, recognizing it as inimical to democracy, which she continues to value. Her defenestration is one more indication that the party is preparing to do in the next election what it could not do in the last one.

Absent an overwhelming mobilization by Democrats, Republicans have a good chance of winning the House in 2022. Redistricting alone will probably give them several new seats. They could win the Senate as well. If Biden or another Democrat prevails in 2024, a House run by Kevin McCarthy, the craven minority leader who helped push Cheney out, seems likely to collaborate in right-wing schemes to change the result.

Trumps attempt to steal the 2020 election revealed how much our democracy depends on officials at all levels of government acting honorably. Republicans on state boards of election, like Aaron Van Langevelde in Michigan, had to certify the results correctly. Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger had to resist Trumps entreaties to find enough missing votes to put him over the top. Republican state legislatures had to refuse Trump campaign pressure to substitute their own slate of electors for those chosen by the people. Congress had to do its job in the face of mob violence and count the Electoral College votes. Trumps rolling coup attempt didnt succeed, but it did reveal multiple points at which our system can fail.

Since the election, Republicans, driven by the lie that is now their partys central ideology, have systematically attacked the safeguards that protected the last election. They have sent the message that vigorous defense of democracy is incompatible with a career in Republican politics. (Besides losing her leadership role, Cheney could easily lose her House seat.) Michigan Republicans declined to renominate Van Langevelde to the Board of State Canvassers. Raffensperger will most likely face a tough primary challenge in 2022. As Politico reported, in the next election, there will be secretary of state races in five of the 10 closest battleground states. Republican candidates for those offices will have an incentive to pretend to believe that a great injustice was done to Trump in 2020, and pledge to help rectify it.

Republicans in states like Arizona have proposed laws that would allow state legislatures to override the popular vote and choose their own electors. Right now, these bills have little chance of passing, but other measures to involve state legislatures in vote counting and election certification are being enacted. Georgias new voting law, for example, gives the legislature the power to choose the head of the State Election Board a position formerly held by the secretary of state. The board, in turn, will be invested with the power to investigate and replace local election officials.

Think about what 2020 would have been like if Trump loyalists had controlled the local and state level counting and certification process. Raffensperger did a tremendous job communicating throughout the vote-counting process his confidence in the processes, his confidence in the results, said Jess Marsden, another lawyer for Protect Democracy who researches state laws. You could imagine that a different person in that role could have very much clouded the public perception of the vote-counting process, in a way that would have validated later efforts by legislators to undo the certification to the extent that state law allows.

Some legislatures, she said, might even be prepared to go beyond state law in a way that invites litigation and uncertainty and delay that then invites Congress to step in. Weve already seen how the accretion of lies and confusion about the last election has justified political purges and restrictive new voting laws. Such lies could also give a Republican-controlled Congress a pretext to object to the counting of state electors.

Our current system, Newland told me, provides lots of opportunities for bad actors to claim there are ambiguities and to exploit those claims of ambiguities. They have to believe in the process in order for the process to actually work. Otherwise, they can purposely gum up the works so thoroughly that its impossible to declare a winner.

If that happens, the election would be tossed to the House, with each state delegation getting one vote. Even now, with the House as a whole controlled by Democrats, there are more states whose representatives are predominantly Republican. With enough procedural mischief, politicians representing a minority of the country could hand the presidency to a candidate who got a minority of both the popular and Electoral College votes. If this has never been an evident danger in the past, its because both parties were at least outwardly committed to liberal democracy, and probably thought their voters were, too.

That is no longer true. The Republican electorate, believing that Democratic victories are by their nature illegitimate, demands that everything possible be done to subvert them. For rejecting the anti-democratic turn in her party, Cheney a right-wing extremist in many other regards has been cast out. Republicans are showing us exactly what they expect of their officials. Theyve made it clear that while American democracy was given a reprieve in 2020, the work of repairing it has barely begun.

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Opinion | How Republicans Could Steal the 2024 Election - The New York Times

Republicans will say all kinds of nonsense but theres one phrase mysteriously absent from their vocabulary, comedian Roy Wood Jr. notes in his latest spoof segment for The Daily Show With Trevor Noah.

In the parody Unsolved Mysteries: MAGA edition bit, the correspondent examines why Republicans cant bring themselves to say that President Joe Biden won the 2020 election fair and square.

Republican mouths are unable to formulate these words, Wood says, airing a montage of conservatives swerving questions about the legitimacy of the vote.

Instead, they simply acknowledge Biden is the president in apparent deference to ex-President Donald Trumps election conspiracies.

Republicans seem to know that Joe Biden is the president but not how that happened, said Wood. Do they think a stork delivered Joe Biden to the White House? Do they think he tunneled into the White House, like some sort of reverse Shawshank? Do Republicans believe in an immaculate inauguration where Biden became president without achieving an election?

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Supercut Shows The Phrase Republicans Just Cant Bring Themselves To Say - HuffPost

The fossil fuel industry is effectively a public-private partnership. It depends on generous subsidies in the form of long-standing tax breaks and preferential leasing, but also on all manner of infrastructural support and diplomatic maneuvering to make the world friendly to U.S. fossil fuels. The concept of energy independence is itself the result of dedicated, state-led industrial policy first unveiled by the Nixon administration in the wake of the 1973 oil crisis, meant to boost domestic energy production. Even the ownership of the Colonial Pipeline itself shows just how much public capital makes oil flow. Shell and Koch Industries are both major owners, alongside private equity firms. Yet also behind the pipeline are companies that manage public pension funds in Australia and Quebec, as well as South Koreas state-run National Pension Service.

If energy independence were McCarthys real concern, it would make sense for him to favor temporarily halting fuel exports, which he instead wants to expand. It would make sense for him to urge refinery operators to invest more in being able to process the light, sweet crude flowing out of the Permian Basin. Needless to say, the Midwestern Keystone XL pipeline expansion McCarthy and other Republicans have used the cyberattack to pitch would not have either prevented a ransomware attack or alleviated fuel shortages among the East Coast gas stations the Colonial Pipeline supplies.

While the industry has cast just about any climate policy as a radical intervention into the economy, most of what Democrats have proposed so far amounts to either withdrawing some small portion of the mountains of state support oil companies currently enjoy or providing similar, much more modest benefits to the clean energy sector. The fossil fuel companies have trained plenty of attack dogs to make their case.

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The Republican Response to the Colonial Pipeline Hack Is Bananas - The New Republic

Update, May 10: Businessman Glenn Youngkin has won the Republican gubernatorial nomination.

GALAX, Virginia Republican gubernatorial candidate Kirk Cox was several minutes into a wonky election security answer at a diner when January 6 came up again.

Did President Joe Biden win the election? Cox avoided directly answering the question at this recent event, though he had previously acknowledged that reality, the one GOP frontrunner willing to do so.

Instead, he refocused on proposals like voter ID requirements, which are popular with lots of voters. But now Lin, a Trump supporter who had posed the Biden question, had another one. She wanted to know whether he agreed with the Virginia Senate censuring one of its members, Amanda Chase, after she called the people who stormed the US Capitol that day in January patriots.

Did Cox support the freedom of speech of Chase, now one of Coxs competitors for the Republican nomination?

Im very much for freedom of speech, Cox answered.

So you were against [the censure vote]? asked Lin, who supports Chase in the race. I dont want to put words in your mouth, but I need a yes or a no.

This narrow line on the 2020 election and cancel culture is one Republicans have had to dance along for months in courting voters before Saturdays Virginia GOP gubernatorial convention.

The GOP has had a tough go of it statewide in the past few years in Virginia, with demographic changes helping push the state to become reliably Democratic. The partys response running further and further to the right has only exacerbated the problem. But Virginia might not be lost to the right kind of Republican. At least not yet.

Republicans will choose their nominee in an unassembled convention; nearly 54,000 Republicans who successfully applied to be a delegate will be able to cast ranked-choice ballots at 39 drive-up locations around Virginia. Its a process that has had more than a few bumps along the way, including Chase alleging the party chose a convention over a primary to prevent her from becoming the nominee. It could also take several days to know the results candidates have already sown doubt about the race.

Its going to make the Iowa caucuses look like a well-oiled machine, a Democratic operative said, with a touch of hopeful glee.

Virginia last chose a Republican in a statewide election in 2009. Since then, the GOP has run candidates that its own insiders say dont appeal to the states growing suburban population. Theyre going to have to make inroads back into those communities to have a hope of winning, says Miles Coleman, associate editor of Sabatos Crystal Ball at the Center for Politics.

I always look at, in the 2016 primaries, places where candidates like John Kasich and Marco Rubio did well against Trump: Those are the areas that have moved more toward the Democrats since places like Loudoun County, Hanover County, Chesterfield County, Coleman said. Maybe those voters are still open to the right type of Republican after voting for Hillary [Clinton] and Biden.

But can they do that while turning out the 44 percent of the state that went for Trump?

The mix of contenders has been revealing.

But regardless of how candidates are positioning themselves, there are certain issues that keep coming up on the trail: support for law enforcement, the eradication of critical race theory from schools, and election integrity, to name a few.

And for some voters, like Heather, who attended Coxs event in Galax, the last on that list is most important or, more specifically, its the question of whether Joe Biden won the 2020 election that matters most.

Thats a huge one, she said. Thats first and foremost for this election or any election.

The future of the GOP after Trump is an open question. And barring disputes like the one playing out between US Rep. Liz Cheney and the bulk of the House GOP right now, Virginia might be the best glimpse we get before the 2022 midterms.

Heres what it looks like: There are seven candidates running for the Republican gubernatorial nomination, with four in real contention (Youngkin, Chase, Cox, and Snyder). All of them tout their traditional conservative bona fides being pro-Second Amendment, anti-abortion, pro-business, and the like. Many of them rail against Covid-related closures, praising Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis for keeping schools and businesses open throughout the pandemic.

All across Virginia on day one, we are going to get every single school open five days a week, every single week, with a real, live, breathing teacher in every classroom, Snyder told a crowd at a brewery in Wytheville last weekend. And folks, getting the schools open is only the beginning. We need to break the backs of this special interest monopoly of the teachers unions and bring real change to our schools.

Given the countrys rate of vaccination, decreased community spread, and reopening, those pandemic issues might not be as relevant come November or in 2022 and beyond. Trump, though, still will be.

At Snyders event, an emcee opened the afternoon by asking, How many of you wish Donald Trump was president right now? and a one-time Trump operator told the crowd they had to get to work to defeat the socialists, who might even be worse than socialists, theyre bordering on communists.

Youngkin, for his part, makes sure to note in his stump speech that hes won praise from Trump, but he was also willing to criticize the former presidents tone as a bit harsh at a campaign event in northern Virginia.

Loyalty to Trump isnt the key thing, argues Peter Doran, a former think tank CEO and one of the other three candidates recognized by the state party. (The others are former Roanoke Sheriff Octavia Johnson and retired Army Col. Sergio de la Pea.)

Most Virginia Republicans are painted as these big hard-right, hard-conservative voters who only care about Donald Trump. Thats not true, Doran said. They care about their job. They care about whats happening to their kids in this past year, and their education. And they care very deeply about the Republican Partys failure to win over the past decade.

Wilma, a mother of four and delegate in the convention, agreed, saying the GOPs future relies on getting young people to understand conservative values like small government, constitutional rights, and concern about the deficit.

My kids all look at the stimulus it might be nice to get that money, that cash, she said. But eventually they know in the long run, theyre the generation thats going to have to pay it back.

Still, its no longer enough to tick the fiscal conservative, Christian, gun owner, and anti-abortion boxes. There are new ones on the list keywords of the culture war issues the former president helped animate.

Take critical race theory, which Chase says is part of the reason she decided to homeschool her children.

As Voxs Fabiola Cineas explained, critical race theory is a framework for grappling with racial power and white supremacy in America. But its also become a catch-all term for what the Trump administration thought was an effort to indoctrinate American students and workers with divisive and harmful sex- and race-based ideologies:

Theyve lumped everything together: critical race theory, the 1619 project, whiteness studies, talking about white privilege, Kimberl Crenshaw, a founding critical race theorist and UCLA and Columbia University law professor, told Vox. What they have in common is they are discourses that refuse to participate in the lie that America has triumphantly overcome its racist history, that everything is behind us. None of these projects accept that its all behind us.

Its not just Chase using the term frequently: Almost all the candidates make sure to highlight their opposition to it; six have signed a pledge opposing critical race theory. As journalist Dave Weigel pointed out on Twitter, Youngkin went so far as to upload multiple video clips of him criticizing it.

Trumps impact, though, is perhaps most evident in the obsession with election security.

On one hand, Amanda Chases stance on the 2020 election sets her apart from the rest of the party so much so that she, her supporters, and some outsiders claim the state party chose a convention rather than a primary to mitigate the risk of her ending up at the top of their ticket.

Last month, in an interview with the AP, Chase even questioned whether Biden won Virginia. (He carried it by 10 percentage points, as official election results show.)

But none of the candidates can distance themselves too far from Trumps lies and doubt-sowing about the 2020 election. They need only look to the US House to see the consequences of doing so.

Neither Youngkin nor Snyder will say Bidens presidency is legitimate. Cox appears willing to do so (at least when hes not at a diner in southwest Virginia).

And everyone has plans to improve election integrity. Youngkin promotes his election security task force, one plank of which is updating voter rolls monthly. He and Cox talk about making the state election commission nonpartisan. Snyder wants to make Virginia No. 1 in ballot integrity.

Theyre all fairly anodyne-sounding proposals, but talking about things like that is a requirement for securing the nomination, says Stephen Farnsworth, a political scientist at the University of Mary Washington.

While they may not support what happened on January 6, they do want to offer a position that shows some sympathy to the position of Trump supporters, Farnsworth said.

That doesnt necessarily mean the rhetoric will dog them during the general election Youngkins spokesperson said they believe election security isnt a partisan issue, its a democracy issue.

And Kirk Cox is an example of a candidate who accepts Biden as a legitimate president but nevertheless speaks in ways that gives some solace to Trump supporters, Farnsworth pointed out, adding its likely that voters in November will not be dramatically impacted by whats said in May.

Still, the insistence on making Americas elections more secure helps perpetuate a world in which seven out of 10 Republican voters still say per a recent CNN poll that Biden didnt win enough votes to be president.

And the continued questioning of elections has applied even to their own partys choices. Some of those choices, admittedly, merit scrutiny from candidates extolling the importance of signatures on absentee ballots. But it also led Youngkin, Cox, and Chase to write to the party, demanding it not use untested and unproven software that creates uncertainty, lacks openness and transparency, and is inconsistent with our calls as a party for safe and secure elections.

Now, every ranked-choice ballot will be counted by hand, at a ballroom at the Richmond Marriott, race by race. Chair Rich Anderson detailed to the Virginia Scopes Brandon Jarvis the lengths the Republican Party of Virginia is going to try to instill confidence in the process:

Theyve also set aside money to livestream the counting process, because, Anderson said, I just dont want to repeat what was done in different places around the country where people were concerned about it being an opaque process.

Thats left no room for any conspiracy theories about the counting to crop up, says John March, the state party communications director. Even so, there are bound to be some dissidents, and if it takes days, Coleman says he can see the conspiracy theories now.

When you have a multi-candidate field in a multi-round election, Farnsworth said, the only sound bet is expecting that the party wont get together and sing kumbaya when this is all over.

Virginia, once home to the capital of the Confederacy, has moved left enough in presidential races that on election night in 2020, the forecast group Decision Desk called it for Joe Biden right as polls closed. Trump ended up with just 44 percent of the vote here, Biden with 54.

But the GOP argues the state is not lost to them just yet.

In recent decades, Virginia had a peevish streak, electing a governor from the opposite party that just won the White House. The candidate to break that trend was former Gov. Terry McAuliffe whos running again this year.

And March points to the unprecedented level of interest in the convention as a sign of whats to come: 54,000 people are getting involved on the grassroots level. ... You dont really see that, and that just shows how excited Virginia Republicans are.

Without Trump on the ballot this year, there might be an opening a slim one for the governorship, but a bigger one to flip competitive state House districts. The person Republicans choose on Saturday will matter a lot.

One thing I do think that could bode well for them is even though he lost, in 2017 Ed Gillespie got more votes than any previous Republican nominee for governor, Coleman pointed out. So maybe if Youngkin or whoever else can get that type of Gillespie turnout, which is definitely a question mark, and Democrats cant get that anti-Trump turnout, maybe its going to be closer.

Even so, its going to be an uphill battle for the GOP to narrow margins in some areas, let alone retake them. Take Chesterfield County, which Republicans easily won for decades. In 2020, it went for Biden by more than 6 percentage points.

Going forward, Coleman says, this may be the last potential cycle where the Republicans could win a county like Chesterfield, and that may not even be enough it may be necessary but not sufficient.

Democrats seem to think it wont be.

Were ready for a fight; we expect a fight. We expect a tough race, said David Turner, the communications director for the Democratic Governors Association. But what I would say is you cant report accurately on the state of Virginia without acknowledging theres pre-Trump and theres post-Trump, and were still post-Trump.

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Glenn Youngkin wins Republican nomination for Virginia governor: Inside the Trumpy governors race - Vox.com

WASHINGTON Minutes after a group of congressional Democrats unveiled a bill recently to add seats to the Supreme Court, the Iowa Republican Party slammed Representative Cindy Axne, a Democrat and potential Senate candidate, over the issue.

Will Axne Pack the Court? was the headline on a statement the party rushed out, saying the move to expand the court puts our democracy at risk.

The attack vividly illustrated the emerging Republican strategy for an intensive drive to try to take back the House and the Senate in the 2022 midterm elections. Republicans are mostly steering clear of Democrats economic initiatives that have proved popular, such as an infrastructure package and a stimulus law that coupled pandemic relief with major expansions of safety-net programs, and are focusing instead on polarizing issues that stoke conservative outrage.

In doing so, they are seizing on measures like the court-expansion bill and calls to defund the police which many Democrats oppose as well as efforts to provide legal status to undocumented immigrants and grant statehood to the District of Columbia to caricature the party as extreme and out of touch with mainstream America.

Republicans are also hammering at issues of race and sexual orientation, seeking to use Democrats push to confront systemic racism and safeguard transgender rights as attack lines.

The approach comes as President Biden and Democrats, eager to capitalize on their unified control of Congress and the White House, have become increasingly bold about speaking about such issues and promoting a wide array of party priorities that languished during years of Republican rule. It has given Republicans ample fodder for attacks that have proved potent in the past.

They are putting the ball on the tee, handing me the club and putting the wind at my back, said Jeff Kaufmann, the chairman of the Iowa Republican Party.

Democrats argue that Republicans are focusing on side issues and twisting their positions because the G.O.P. has nothing else to campaign on, as Democrats line up accomplishments to show to voters, including the pandemic aid bill that passed without a single Republican vote.

That was very popular, and I can understand why Republicans dont want to talk about it, said Senator Gary Peters of Michigan, the new chairman of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee. But were going to keep reminding folks who was there when they needed them.

The contrast is likely to define the 2022 races. Democrats will sell the ambitious agenda they are pursuing with Mr. Biden, take credit for what they hope will continue to be a surging economy and portray Republicans as an increasingly extreme party pushing Donald J. Trumps lies about a stolen election. Republicans, who have embraced the false claims of election fraud and plan to use them to energize their conservative base, will complain of radical Democratic overreach and try to amplify culture-war issues they think will propel more voters into their partys arms.

A release from the National Republican Senatorial Committee highlighted what it called the three pillars of the Democratic agenda: The Green New Deal, court packing and defund the police, even though the first two are far from the front-burner issues for Mr. Biden and Democratic leaders and the third is a nonstarter with the bulk of the partys rank and file.

Last week Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the minority leader, sought to thrust a new issue into the mix, leading Republicans in protest of a proposed Biden administration rule promoting education programs that address systemic racism and the nations legacy of slavery. He has taken particular aim at the 1619 Project, a journalism initiative by The New York Times that identifies the year when slaves were first brought to America as a key moment in history.

There are a lot of exotic notions about what are the most important points in American history, Mr. McConnell said on Monday during an appearance in Louisville. I simply disagree with the notion that The New York Times laid out there that year 1619 was one of those years.

Senator Rick Scott of Florida, the chairman of the Republicans Senate campaign arm, has been explicit about his strategy.

Now what I talk about every day is do we want open borders? No. Do we want to shut down our schools? No. Do we want men playing in womens sports? No, Mr. Scott said during a recent radio interview with the conservative commentator Hugh Hewitt.

Do we want to shut down the Keystone pipeline? No. Do we want voter ID? Yes, he continued. And the Democrats are on the opposite side of all those issues, and Im going to make sure every American knows about it.

Democrats who have fallen victim to the Republican cultural assault concede that it can take a toll and that their party needs to be ready.

It was all these different attacks that were spread all over mainstream media, Spanish-language media, Facebook, WhatsApp, said Debbie Mucarsel-Powell, a former Democratic House member from South Florida who was defeated last year after Republicans portrayed her as a socialist who was anti-police. A lot of it was misinformation, false attacks.

She said Democrats must begin taking steps now to combat Republican misdirection, warning that their legislative victories might not be enough to appeal to voters.

We can have a great policy record, she said, but we need to be present in our communities right now, reaching out to all of our constituencies to tell them we are working for them, that their health and their jobs are our priorities.

On the Supreme Court issue, progressive groups began pushing the idea of an expansion after Mr. Trump was able to appoint three justices, including one to a vacancy that Republicans blocked Barack Obama from filling in the last year of his presidency and another who was fast-tracked right before last years election.

Hoping to neutralize the issue, some Senate Democrats who will be on the ballot next year have made it clear that they would oppose expanding the court, and the bill seems to be going nowhere at the moment. Speaker Nancy Pelosi said she would not bring any court bill to the floor until at least after a commission named by Mr. Biden to study the matter issued its report, which is due in six months. The president has been cool to the expansion idea as well.

The office of Ms. Axne, the only Democrat in Congress from Iowa, did not respond to requests for reaction to the Republican attacks on her over the court plan. In an interview with MSNBC, Ms. Axne said that she, like Ms. Pelosi, would await the findings of the commission.

But Republicans are not waiting to try to score political points. They say more moderate Republican voters and independents who broke with the party during the Trump years have been alienated by the call to enlarge the court and other initiatives being pushed by progressives.

One key for Republicans next year will be winning back suburban voters while running campaigns that also energize the significant segment of their supporters who are fiercely loyal to Mr. Trump and want the party to represent his values. That may be a difficult balance to achieve, as evidenced this week when Republican leaders moved to strip Representative Liz Cheney of Wyoming of the partys No. 3 leadership post for calling out the former presidents false election claims.

Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, the majority leader, said it would matter less what Republicans said about Democrats than what his party was able to accomplish.

The one thing that will win people over, no matter what they do, is whether we can deliver, he said. They are doing what appeals to their base, but the voters in the middle, including a good chunk of Republican voters, actually care about getting things done.

Mr. Peters said Democrats would be better positioned to rebut attacks such as those that falsely portray them as pressing to defund the police after voters had experienced two years of the party holding power.

President Biden and the caucus have been very clear that we are not about defunding the police, we are about making sure police have the resources they need to do their jobs, he said. Ultimately, it is about how it is impacting peoples lives.

Mr. Kaufmann, the Republican leader in Iowa, begged to differ. He said he believed the hot-button issues Republicans were homing in on would drive voters more than the nuance of tax policy and who gets credit for the vaccine. He is eager to get started.

Some of this stuff is really controversial, he said. These are all very bold and clearly delineated issues. I can use this to expand the base and get crossover voters.

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Republicans Attack Democrats as Liberal Extremists to Regain Power - The New York Times