Know the enemy. Including V.P. Vance.
The Second Insurrection is Coming – Are We Ready?
https://portside.org/2022-02-12/second-insurrection-coming-are-we-ready
Portside Date:
Author: Bill Mosley
Date of source:
Washington Socialist
By now it’s commonly accepted in even the most mainstream of media that the Republicans are planning a ruthless campaign to win back the House and Senate in 2022 and the White House in 2024. If they can win fairly, fine for them; if not, they plan to use manipulation, voter suppression, threats — and, if necessary, violence. Only GOP apologists deny this. This has implications not only for the Democratic Party, and not only for the survival of constitutional government, but for the broader left/progressive agenda as well.
The irony of the Trumpists’ slogan “Stop the Steal” was that in reality it was Trump and his cronies trying to steal the 2020 election, while Democrats — and a few Republicans — were trying to deliver an honest count of the results. Although Trump et al. ultimately failed in 2020, they began writing a playbook that they can repeat and expand on in the future.
While some see Biden’s eventual taking of office as evidence that the system worked despite the effort to undermine it, analysts not on the payroll of Fox News or the One America Network look at the machinations of Trump and his allies before and after the election and see how they might have worked — and might work next time to undercut and corrupt an election in his favor. One of the earlier and most comprehensive forecasts came in a December article by Barton Gellman for the Atlantic, who wrote: … The next attempt to overthrow a national election may not qualify as a coup. It will rely on subversion more than violence, although each will have its place. If the plot succeeds, the ballots cast by American voters will not decide the presidency in 2024. Thousands of votes will be thrown away, or millions, to produce the desired effect.
The prospect of this democratic collapse is not remote. People with the motive to make it happen are manufacturing the means. Given the opportunity, they will act. They are acting already. Manipulating the vote to partisan advantage is nothing new in the United States but rather goes back to the Constitutional Convention. The Electoral College and the Senate, two massively undemocratic institutions, were partly a response to demands from slaveholding states that gave them disproportionate power. In the Jim Crow era, the South’s advantage in those two institutions helped deny full citizenship to Blacks for a century after the Civil War. The Democratic Party was once the principal perpetrator and beneficiary of Jim Crow laws, but the party’s embrace of civil rights in the 1960s made it a champion (if an imperfect one) of voters of color. The Republicans, under Richard Nixon’s “Southern Strategy,” rushed in to appeal to racist Whites and have built on it ever since.
The Republican campaign to manipulate elections expands on the Jim Crow playbook and has been in operation for some time. The key elements have been voter suppression and gerrymandering. In GOP-controlled states the age-old practice of voter suppression has gone on steroids, with Republican-led legislatures in at least 19 states having passed laws making it harder to vote, surgically targeting communities that are heavily Democratic and/or populated by people of color. The restrictions include reducing the number of polling places, limiting early and mail voting, and cutting back in-person voting hours. The Biden Justice Department has sued Florida and Texas over their voting restrictions under the Voting Rights Act, but there are many more potential targets for litigation.
Both parties have long been guilty of gerrymandering, the practice of drawing state and congressional voting districts to their advantage — among blue states, Maryland is the champion — but Republicans have embraced the practice more aggressively and are pushing it further in advance of the 2022 vote. This is due partly to Republicans’ grip over more state governments, but also because several mostly blue states have turned over the drawing of boundaries to nonpartisan commissions. This unilateral disarmament by Democrats in the name of good government combined with unabashed Republican partisanship will strengthen GOP control in state legislatures and likely clinch their takeover of the House in the midterms.
By now we know of Trump’s efforts to overturn the verdict of the 2020 election: Trump’s bullying call to Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger; the move by Republicans on the Wayne County, MI, Board of Canvassers to block certification of the county’s vote until angry voters forced them to back down; the long-running Arizona vote “audit” in which the state GOP looked under every rock for fraud and found none; and, of course, Trump’s incendiary Ellipse speech unleashing his hordes on Congress while they were counting and certifying the electoral vote.
Trump failed to overturn the 2020 election for a number of reasons. One was the size of Biden’s win — 51.3 to 46.9 percent of the popular vote and a 74-vote margin in the Electoral College: not a landslide, but big enough that it would have required somehow flipping the vote in at least three states to change the outcome (not that Trump and his enablers didn’t try). Second, while many Republican officials were willing to abet Trump’s scheme, enough of them recognized reality and were committed enough to constitutional government to refuse to go down that path — and that includes the minority of GOP members of Congress who voted to certify the election results despite Trump’s bullying and threats; Vice President Pence, who chose to preside over the Senate count of the vote as directed by the Constitution and not arbitrarily throw out Democratic votes as Trump and his allies urged; Raffensperger and Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp, who had a stake in demonstrating their competency in administering the election in their state; and even Trump’s usually lickspittle Attorney General William Barr.
Third, Trump no doubt considered imposing martial law, using his lever as commander in chief of the armed forces — supporters and advisors such as his former national security advisor Michael Flynn urged it — but he did not. The military option was surely part of the reason he sacked Defense Secretary Mark Esper, who had refused Trump’s demand to invoke the Insurrection Act during the DC protests that followed the murder of George Floyd, and replaced him with the presumably more pliant Acting Secretary Christopher C. Miller.
A violent clash between his January 6 mob and counter-demonstrators would have been an excuse for Trump to call out troops under the pretense of restoring order. Still mobilized from counter demonstrations which occurred in November and December, DC's local anti-fascist networks were preparing to show up on January 6 but ultimately resolved to stand down. It was the right call: the threat of violence would have given Trump an excuse to involve the military. Another factor was the likelihood that the military brass would refuse to go along. As detailed in Bob Woodward’s book Peril, Gen. Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, felt burned by Trump’s manipulating him into joining his June 1, 2020, photo-op at St. John's Church just after protestors had been violently removed from Lafayette Square. After that, Milley became determined not to let the president use him to undermine a democratic transfer of power.
