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MAGA was always supposed to be about taking our country back. But do Donald Trumps most ardent soldiers even want to be part of the United States of America?

Texas Republicans not only want to secede but also imagine that after backing out of our country, they would live in an Eden of their own creation where there are no state or federal income taxes. How this penniless republic would then fund even basic services, much less build infrastructure and raise an army, not even God knows. But the states record of running its own power grid isnt a hopeful indicator.

Were this fantasy ever realized, of course, Republicans would elect no more American presidents. This year, such a withdrawal would mean that Democrats would hold both the House and Senate.

Im not sure if the sort of person whod consider NRA favorite Sen. John Cornyn a sellout for trying to do even a little something about mass shootings knows that none of this is going to happen.

But the law-and-order party is definitely pushing Texans to ignore any federal law that it decides should be ignored, opposed, refused, and nullified. On Juneteenth, the party declared that it wanted to start by repealing the Voting Rights Act.

Texas schools should, according to the GOP platform, be required to teach the evils of socialism, while climate science and even evolution would be presented as challengeable.

Already, among Republicans not just in Texas but across the country, elections are legitimate only if the right candidate wins. Which is how the Texas GOP knows that Joe Biden is not our legitimate president, though somehow, all of the other candidates elected in 2020, when the GOP overall did very well, are perfectly legitimate officeholders.

This is not just moving to the right but moving to the alt-universe in which Republicans who have not lost their way are considered the enemy, too. And not just the enemy, but the rightful prey of the righteous.

I refer, of course, to the loathsome new commercial from Missouri Senate candidate Eric Greitens, the disgraced former governor, who has declared open season on RINOs, or Republicans in name only. The GOP leader of the Missouri Senate called the police after seeing the ad.

It shows the candidate, along with his pump-action shotgun and a bunch of other guys in tactical gear, storming a house in search of those Republicans who dont agree with him that reality is whatever dark MAGA men say it is.

As Tuesdays Jan. 6 committee hearing again made clear, it was brave Republicans RINOs, as MAGA would have it who did save our country after Biden was elected.

Arizona House Speaker Russell Bowers described being pressured by Trump and his lawyer Rudy Giuliani to convene a committee to replace the states electors with a slate willing to vote for Trump instead. I will not break my oath to the state and U.S. Constitution, Bowers told them.

Bowers kept asking them for evidence that the massive fraud they were describing had actually occurred. And they kept putting him off, telling him that they did have proof without ever producing any. At one point, Bowers said, Giuliani came out and said, Weve got lots of theories; we just dont have the evidence.

The loopy lawyer formerly seen as Americas mayor tried to convince him to overlook that technicality and put his party first, asking, Arent we all Republicans here?

Yes, of the sort that some Democrats dont believe exist, and that Trump and his allies dont want to survive unscathed.

Asked to read from the journal Bowers kept at the time when Trump was leaning on him, he did: I do not want to be a winner by cheating, he wrote. I will not play with laws I swore allegiance to with any contrived desire towards deflection of my deep foundational desire to follow Gods will, as I believe he led my conscience to embrace. How else will I ever approach Him in the wilderness of life, knowing that I ask for this guidance only to show myself a coward in defending the course he led me to take?

Bowers also talked about the threats he and his family had received, and about how upset his gravely ill grown daughter had been about protesters in his neighborhood blaring lies calling him a pedophile. She isnt upset anymore because she died in late January, but does that make MAGA world ashamed? You know the answer.

Republican election officials from Georgia also testified about being pressured to pretend that there had been widespread fraud that they tried to find but couldnt. While Trumps legal team claimed that 10,315 dead voters had cast ballots in the state, for instance, Republican officials found only four. They found 0 underage voters.

Fulton County election worker Shaye Moss testified that she and her mother, also an election worker, had been forced into hiding after Giuliani claimed that they had changed the outcome in Georgia by bringing in suitcases of fake Biden ballots and scanning them multiple times.

GOP officials said that all the video Giuliani had claimed proved fraud actually showed was the normal process playing out. The suitcase was the usual carrying receptacle for votes. And that memory stick that Moss mother had supposedly handed her, and that Giuliani had told the world proved she was as guilty as a drug dealer passing off a vial of cocaine?

It was a ginger mint, said Moss, who like every other election worker in that video has since left her job.

Since then, Trump supporters have succeeded in replacing many of the Republicans who did put country above party who still recognize laws they might not like and winners for whom they did not vote with those who do not.

Theyve been replaced by those whose view of American democracy is so far from anything the founders they claim to love ever believed that its no wonder some want to exit this country and start a new one.

The Jan. 6 committee is right to make Republicans who did the right thing under extreme pressure the heroes of these hearings. Because if the American experiment is going to continue, were going to need many more like them.

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Column: MAGA secessionists versus the Republicans who really did save our country after 2020 - Yakima Herald-Republic

Rusty Bowers, the speaker of the Arizona house of representatives, wanted Donald Trump to win the 2020 election. He worked hard to elect him and, when the time came, cast his ballot for the president.

What he wasnt willing to do was cheat for him.

In searing and at turns emotional testimony, Bowers, a rock-ribbed conservative from battleground Arizona, recounted for the House select committee investigating the January 6 assault how he resisted a relentless campaign by the then president of the United States and his allies to do just that.

You are asking me to do something against my oath and I will not break my oath, Bowers said he responded, when pressured repeatedly by Trump and his allies to overturn Joe Bidens victory in the state.

Bowers comments helped reveal how much of a threat to American democracy Trumps attempt to block Joe Bidens win was and how it was defeated by the actions of officials like Bowers. But, amid a continuing attempt by Trump and his Republican allies to peddle lies and control election races in 2024 battleground states, it also revealed the threat to the US is not over.

The presidents lie was and is a dangerous cancer on the body politic, said the California congressman Adam Schiff, who led the hearing. If you can convince Americans that they cannot trust their own elections, that anytime they lose, it is somehow illegitimate, then what is left but violence to determine who should govern.

Trump lost the state of Arizona by less than 11,000 votes votes that were legally cast and fairly counted, Bowers said. But Trump refused to accept his loss and in his denial concocted a plot to try to stop the state from certifying the election results based on groundless conspiracies that Bowers likened to a tragic parody.

In perhaps his most damning disclosure, Bowers recalled a conversation in which Trumps personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani told him: Weve got lots of theories. We just dont have the evidence.

Bowers said the comment was so absurd that he and his staff wondered if it was a gaffe and laughed about it. But he found little reason for levity during Tuesdays hearing.

Bowers was joined in the cavernous Cannon Caucus Room by the Georgia secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, a Republican, and his deputy, Gabe Sterling, also a Republican, who testified about the pressure Trump and his legal team put on elections officials in their state.

In a phone call after the November election, Trump asked Raffensperger to find 11,780 votes just enough to flip Bidens election victory in the state.

Their refusal to obey Trumps demands was met with a barrage of online harassment and intimidation. Raffensperger said all of his personal information was made public. His wife began receiving sexually explicit threats and someone broke into the home of his daughter-in-law, a widow with two children. Bowers at the time was caring for his dying daughter who he said was troubled by the menacing crowd that gathered outside his home, pelting taunts and threats. During the hearing, Bowers read a passage from his journal.

It is painful to have friends who have been such a help to me turn on me with such rancor, he wrote in December. I do not want to be a winner by cheating. I will not play with laws I swore allegiance to.

Sterling became a standout figure when he called on Trump to stop riling up his supporters during a televised press conference held in the tumultuous post-election period while Georgia carried out a series of recounts. Death threats, physical threats, intimidation its too much, its not right, Sterling said in his remarks, parts of which the committee showed during the hearing. He told his committee he lost it that day after being told that a young election contractor with Dominion Systems was receiving death threats from purveyors of the QAnon conspiracy theory.

I tend to turn red from here up when that happens. And that happened at that time, he said.

Lives and livelihoods were disrupted and destroyed as a result of Trumps lies, the committee heard. Wandrea Shaye Moss, a former Georgia election worker, testified on Tuesday that she no longer felt safe, secure or confident since becoming the subject of one of Trumps most pernicious fraud claims one involving suitcases that both federal and state officials said was baseless.

Tuesdays witnesses were all that stood between what the chairman of the committee, Congressman Bennie Thompson of Mississippi, described as a close call and a catastrophe for American democracy, during its fourth public hearing. It also revealed new details in the brazen, if ill-conceived, scheme to put forward fake slates of electors in seven states as part of a last-gasp attempt to keep Trump in power.

Again and again the committee has sought to show that the violent insurrection on 6 January, horrible as it was, isnt the whole story. Nor is it the end of the story. Its part of a coordinated and continuing plot by the former president and his allies to remain in power by any means possible.

Focus on the evidence the committee will present. Dont be distracted by politics, the committees vice-chair, the Republican congresswoman Liz Cheney of Wyoming, urged viewers. This is serious. We cannot let America become a nation of conspiracy theories and thug violence.

Trumps big lie, the committee said, was a dangerous precursor to the deadly insurrection on 6 January. But it remains an urgent threat to democracy.

Trump continues to claim that he won the 2020 election and polls suggest millions of Republicans believe him. Indeed, before the hearing he claimed Bowers had said the Arizona election was rigged and he actually won the state. Under oath, Bowers said Trumps recollection of their conversation was categorically false.

Nevertheless, embracing the lie has become a requisite for his endorsement, which has delivered mixed results in Republican primaries. In Georgia, Raffensperger overcame a Trump-backed challenger to win re-election as the states attorney general.

But elsewhere, election deniers are winning primaries in an attempt to seize control of elections administration in key states across the country. In Pennsylvania, where the governor appoints the secretary of state, Republicans chose a nominee who helped organize the rally that preceded the attack on 6 January and has openly mused about fraud in future elections.

And across the country, election workers like Moss are being driven out by threats of violence and intimidation. In some instances, election watchdogs have warned, they are being replaced by partisans and conspiracy theorists.

Look no further than New Mexico, Thompson said on Tuesday, where a Republican commission refused to certify the results of the states primary election, citing unfounded claims about the security of the voting machines. The commission ultimately bowed to an order by the states supreme court and certified the election but the committee said it was a blinking red warning sign ahead of the 2022 and 2024 elections.

The system held, but barely, Schiff said. And the question remains, will it hold again.

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A few good Republicans stopped Trump but his threat to democracy isnt over - The Guardian US

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Letter to the Editor: Tennessee Republicans could act to lower gas prices - Dickson Post

And while Republicans and anti-abortion forces were increasingly working in concert to turn the states to their advantage, abortion rights supporters accused Democrats of all but giving up on local elections.

On the far right, they realized that the most lasting impact of 2010 would be in the states, said Daniel Squadron, a former New York state senator and the executive director of the States Project, which was founded by Democrats in 2017 to try to win back control of legislatures. On our side, state power was a footnote. The lesson we took was Focus more on midterms; the lesson they took was Wield power in states. And today, both sides are reaping what we sowed.

Abortion rights groups lacked the infrastructure their opponents had in the states. NARAL had cut its number of state affiliates nearly in half between 1991 and 2011. And with Democrats in the glow of winning Congress in 2006 and electing the nations first Black president two years later, abortion rights groups were having trouble convincing big donors and grass-roots supporters alike that Roe was in trouble.

Donors liked to support congressional and presidential elections, and tended to go away when they perceived that the threat had disappeared. When you were trying to convince them they had to put money into Kansas or Nebraska, they were like, Thats futile, said Nancy Keenan, the president of NARAL at the time.

Opponents of abortion rights had always proved easier to mobilize than supporters. In polls and focus groups, NARAL asked women who were sympathetic to its cause what it would take to get them to be more active in protecting Roe v. Wade. Consistently, Ms. Keenan said, We received answers saying, If they overturn it.

Some younger activists were pushing abortion rights groups to stop apologizing for or seeking compromise on abortion. To the new generation, abortion was health care, and bodily autonomy was not something to be compromised. The Democratic Party platform in 2012 left in safe and legal but took out rare.

When you were trying to convince them they had to put money into Kansas or Nebraska, they were like, Thats futile.

Anti-abortion groups exploited this, portraying the Democrats position on abortion as anytime, anywhere, under any circumstance, and paid for with government funds. By contrast, said Marjorie Dannenfelser, the president of Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America, a 20-week ban looked reasonable, in keeping with what polls showed Americans wanted.

Two thousand ten was the year that the light came on about the reality of abortion law in the nation, she said. It was the year that the polarization between the extreme abortion absolutism and the Republican Party position was a winning contrast. Its the first year that sitting officeholders could see that this issue really helps us. And it just got stronger every election cycle because we would not relent with that contrast.

Republicans running in right-leaning districts backed increasingly strict laws to appeal to reliable anti-abortion voters and avoid primary challenges. By 2016, one analysis found not a single Republican state legislator willing to identify as pro-choice.

In the nearly 50 years between the Roe decision and its reversal on Friday, states enacted 1,380 restrictions on abortion. Almost half 46 percent were enacted since 2011.

Professor Devins, of William and Mary, revisited the question of abortion politics in 2016, this time in a paper for The Vanderbilt Law Review. He stuck by his 2009 assessment, but the middle ground he had written of approvingly then had disappeared. Today, red state political actors are not interested in compromise, Professor Devins wrote in 2016. With the rightward shift in the Republican Party, abortion rights had become about partisan advantage, along with voter identification laws, tax reform and elimination of public-sector unions.

In 2015, the Florida Senate had taken just one hour to approve a 24-hour waiting period on abortion, with Republicans rejecting all eight amendments offered by Democrats. Wisconsin had passed its ban on abortion after 20 weeks without a single Democrat. And a bill in Texas to prohibit abortions based on fetal abnormality was brought up for a committee vote after the House had recessed and Democrats were absent.

Its conventional wisdom to say that the courts decision in Roe caused the polarization over abortion, said Reva Siegel, a law professor at Yale. But the court did not cause that polarization. It was the Republican Partys quest for voters political party competition that savaged Roe. Once the attack on Roe was underway, the defense needed to be full tilt in politics as well as in the courts and in all political arenas, state, local and federal. Because over time the attack on Roe has become more than an attack on abortion; it has become an attack on democracy.

By 2019, proponents of the incremental strategy for undoing Roe were losing to those who wanted the frontal attack. With two new conservative justices, the Supreme Court was tilted toward the latter. Momentum was on their side, and states began passing legislation designed to force the court to act. Twenty-week bans had led to 18-week bans, eight-week bans, and now six-week bans.

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How Did Roe Fall? Before a Decisive Ruling, a Powerful Red Wave. - The New York Times

The first fetal heartbeat law banning abortion at what was at the time a flagrantly, almost laughably unconstitutional six weeks was proposed 26 times before it found a state legislature willing to advance it. Signed into law in North Dakota in 2013, the ban was quickly struck down by the Supreme Court. But in the years that followed, more states began to warm to the idea of outlawing abortion much earlier than was previously imaginable. Many more.

When the Supreme Court overturned Roe v Wade on Friday, 12 states had passed laws banning abortion at 6 weeks. Five states had passed near-total bans on abortion at any point in pregnancy. Thirteen had trigger bans on the books that would automatically snap into effect banning abortion if and when the Supreme Court overturned Roe. Several states had all three. Many, if not most, of those laws were written by organizations like Americans United for Life.

For decades, Americans United for Life had worked quietly, diligently, incrementally: drafting model legislation (including those six-week heartbeat bills), coaching Republican lawmakers on how to advance it in their home states, and helping defend the legislation when it is inevitably challenged in court. A 2019 investigation found AUL was responsible for the vast majority of some 400 anti-abortion bills introduced in 41 states.

Their project was wildly successful: On Friday, some states had so many layers of conflicting previously-unenforceable laws on the books that some abortion clinics suspended operations the moment news broke, turning patients away out of fear of ending up on the wrong side of one of those laws.

If there is a moral to this story, it might be to take the anti-choice groups who worked for decades to help overturn Roe v. Wade at their word. And in the words, on Friday, of AULs president, Catherine Glenn Foster, their work has truly just begun.

At a Heritage Foundation panel on Life After Roe last week, Clarke Forsythe, senior counsel for Americans United for Life, discussed the possibility of a constitutional amendment banning the procedure nationwide. For that, Forsythe said thoughtfully, Were going to have to secure 38 states. (Vice President Mike Pence and Marjorie Dannenfelser, president of Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America, with whom Pence reportedly has close ties, both called for a similar nationwide ban Friday.)

Forsythe was bullish too about the idea of further restricting medication abortions either at the state or federal level. The states have been working over the past decade to limit chemical abortions in a number of ways, said Forsythe. But its also within Congress power, expressly in the Constitution, to pass a federal law on that. And at the earliest possible opportunity, Congress should pass a federal law.

One day before the Heritage Foundation event, the National Right to Life Committee, the oldest and largest anti-abortion group in the country, released its own roadmap for the right-to-life movement post-Roe to protect mothers and their children from the tragedy of abortion.

The 29-page model law represents a dramatic escalation of many of the tactics already mainstreamed by anti-abortion groups. It proposes a total nationwide ban on abortion with no exceptions other than to prevent the death the mother. It would prohibit the prescription and distribution of mifepristone and misoprostol the two-step abortion pill protocol (trafficking in abortifacients), and it would treat as a criminal anyone who might give instructions over the telephone, the internet, or any other medium of communication regarding self-administered abortions or means to obtain an illegal abortion.

Many of the provisions seem ridiculously, patently unconstitutional Oh, theyre just going to criminalize free speech? like those fetal heartbeat laws did ten years ago.

Lawyers who work in the reproductive rights realm are taking them seriously. I cant overstate how extreme this bill is, Jessica Arons, ACLU senior policy counsel, tells Rolling Stone. Its a complete ban on abortion with no regard for the health of the patient. Theres only an extremely limited life exception a patient would basically have to be dying on the table for doctors to be able to intervene, and by then it could very well be too late.

Like Texas abortion bounty law, SB 8, the National Right to Life Coalitions law promotes the use of civil lawsuits to discourage abortions. There is a more narrow range of individuals who would be eligible to file suits under the bill, but includes friends and family as well as the fetus biological father, Arons says, without any exception for if there was rape or other sexual violence or intimate partner violence so its something that can easily be used as a tool to further abuse in an abusive relationship. Thats just a starting point The chilling effect of this kind of ban would be extensive.

Under the law, organizations like Planned Parenthood might be treated as criminal syndicates. (The whole criminal enterprise needs to be dealt with to effectively prevent criminal activity, so RICO-style laws were adopted to provide effective remedies against the whole criminal enterprise, an introduction to the model law explains. This illegal abortion industry will be well-funded and well-organized, operating as an illegal abortion enterprise that will need to be stopped to prevent illegal abortions from occurring.)

Already, some states like Missouri, have considered making it a crime to help someone travel out-of-state to obtain an abortion. The National Right to Life Coalitions proposed law would extend that logic a step further, threatening providers, Arons says, who are acting lawfully under their own state laws.

On Friday, Julie Rikelman, Senior Director of U.S. Litigation at the Center for Reproductive Rights and the lawyer who argued Dobbs v. Jackson Womens Health Organization before the Supreme Court, told Rolling Stone, The reality is that we are going to see some of those laws enacted, and they will be challenged, but the ultimate constitutionality of those laws will end up being decided through litigation by the Court.

Put another way: the laws can only be as extreme as the Supreme Court is. And with this Supreme Court, thats not a very comforting thought.

Both the National Rights to Life Committee and Americans United for Life organizations that have routinely put out model legislation where they continue to float up these test balloons to see how far what they can get away with, Arons says. Over time, they normalize their extreme ideas. And they do have a captive audience of lawmakers who are willing to run these tests for them, and to push the envelope and to try to pass legislation, and see what the courts will uphold.

This is their roadmap, Arons says. They are emboldened, they are not trying to hide it.

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Ban Abortion Pills, Prosecute Planned Parenthood: This Is The Future Republicans Want - Rolling Stone