---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Heather Cox Richardson from Letters from an American
<heathercoxrichardson@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Sun, 6 Dec 2020 05:07:28 +0000
Subject: December 5, 2020
To: carjar82@xxxxxxxxx
View this post on the web at
https://email.mg2.substack.com/c/eJxtkM1uwyAMx5-m3BqBkzB64LDLXiMi4DZsCUTG2ZK3H2lPkybZsuWPv_Wzd4yPTIddc2GxFaQhBnsDbVRvRLBdUKYmsQx3QlxcnC3ThmLdxjl6xzGncwFk37Zisl6rm-rQdVrfRi1R-g58Cy6MWpm7k-I8M7gtREweLX4jHTmhmO3EvJZL-36Bj2oTOp6QfN4p-slRKDk1ZRsLO__V-LzUmbV6QI_LiHTtryBBimjPoEBq2cs3MI1qJtpJ7_3em3zp5PKAPzqCrHf06chA7T5OwGe58g01LluKfAyY3DhjeKHz61dPEj5WtAl_yozMSK_i-Q_ojIFWi3or5Kqa7H9Iv5wOgwU
Today’s news just amplifies yesterday’s, but the stories add up to an
interesting scenario.
Coronavirus continues to devastate the country, with official deaths
topping 281,000 today, but it turns out that the Trump administration
did not actually have a plan for distribution of vaccines. Federal
officials have drastically slashed the amount of vaccine they promised
to states before the election. Instead of the 300 million doses the
administration had promised before the end of 2020, the plan is
currently to distribute 35 to 40 million doses. Even those, though,
are plagued by bottlenecks in parts of the production process, as well
as manufacturing issues. This means a longer struggle with the disease
than many had come to expect.
Trump continues to refuse to acknowledge his loss in the November
election. This morning, before a scheduled rally in Georgia for two
Republican senators facing runoffs against their Democratic
challengers, Trump called Georgia Governor Brian Kemp to pressure him
to overturn Biden’s win in the state. Trump asked Kemp to convince the
state legislature to ignore Biden’s victory and appoint their own
slate of electors who would give the president the state’s votes in
the Electoral College. Biden won Georgia by about 12,000 votes, and
Georgia law does not permit the legislature to submit alternative
electors. When Kemp, who is a Republican, declined to do as Trump
asked, Trump took to Twitter to attack him.
Trump also asked Kemp to demand an audit of the signatures on mail-in
ballots, which Kemp does not have the power to do. Georgia’s governor
may not interfere in elections. Instead, the state secretary of state
has jurisdiction, and Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, a
Republican, has defended the existing signature match process and says
there is no evidence of fraud.
At tonight’s rally, Trump continued to insist he had won the election
and to assure attendees they are all victims of the Democrats’ plot to
steal the election. The rally was nominally about the senate
candidates, but Trump treated it pretty much as he treated his rallies
before the election. He is convincing his supporters that the election
was rigged, and that President-Elect Biden will be an illegitimate
president.
Trump loyalists at the Pentagon continue to refuse to let Pentagon
officials communicate with Biden’s transition team. According to an
official, the Pentagon chief of staff Kash Patel, a former staffer for
California Representative Devin Nunes appointed after the election,
has rewritten policy descriptions to reflect well on Trump before
letting Biden’s people see them. He has also stopped communications.
He “told everybody we're not going to cooperate with the transition
team,” an official said, and he has "put a lot of restrictions on it."
He is “controlling the information flow.” This will put the Biden camp
behind on getting up to speed on sensitive foreign policy issues with
Iran, Afghanistan, Russia, and North Korea, hurting national security.
Also today, the Washington Post printed the results of its query to
all 249 Republicans in the House and Senate, asking them who won the
202 presidential election. Only 27 of them are willing to acknowledge
that Biden won. Two Republicans insist that Trump won the election,
all evidence to the contrary. The rest of them—220 of them—refuse to
say who won.
This is a big deal. This was not a close election. Biden currently has
over 7 million more votes than Trump, and has won by 306 to 232 in the
Electoral College. And yet, Republican leadership is permitting Trump
to undermine our democracy. Try to imagine any past Republican
president doing what Trump is doing, and you can’t. But today’s
Republican lawmakers are standing to the side, permitting Trump to
poison our democracy.
To what end? Why are Republicans accepting this anti-American behavior
from Trump?
It seems to me they are unwilling to risk losing Trump’s voters in the
future because they are determined to regain power. They don’t much
care about our democracy, so long as they have a shot at keeping
Trump’s people on their side. But then, again, to what end? If
Republicans regain power in 2022 or 2024, what will that look like? Do
we have any reason to think they will then begin to defend our
democracy? Do we have any reason to think they are interested in
anything but even more legislation that moves wealth upward?
We have been in a spot much like this before. In 1884, Americans
turned against the Republican Party because it had abandoned its
support for ordinary Americans in favor of the industrial leaders who
put money into Republican lawmakers’ political war chests, as well as
into their pockets. Voters put Democrat Grover Cleveland into the
White House, the first Democrat to hold the presidency since James
Buchanan was elected in 1856.
Horrified, the Republicans flooded the country with stories of how
Democrats were socialists who would attack the rich by ending the
legislation that protected businesses. If Democrats continued to
control the government, Republicans said, they would destroy America.
In 1888, they suppressed Democratic votes and created modern political
financing as they hit up businessmen for major donations. Despite
their best efforts, voters reelected Cleveland by about 100,000 votes,
but Republicans managed to eke out a win for their candidate, Benjamin
Harrison, in the Electoral College. Harrison promised a “BUSINESSMAN’S
ADMINISTRATION,” and indeed, in office, he and his men did all they
could to cement the Republican Party into power so it could continue
to defend business (among other things, they added six new states to
the Union to pack the Electoral College).
But voters still didn’t like the Republicans’ platform, which seemed
more and more to funnel money from hardworking Americans upward into
the pockets of those men who were increasingly portrayed as robber
barons. In 1892, they voted for Cleveland in such numbers they
couldn’t be overridden in the Electoral College. Voters also put
Democrats in charge of Congress, both the House of Representatives and
the Senate.
And that is the moment I cannot help thinking about today. Faced with
a legitimately elected Democratic government, Republican leaders
deliberately sabotaged the country. They swamped the media with
warnings that Democrats would destroy the economy and that men should
pull their capital out of stocks and industries. Foreign capital
should, they said, go home or face disaster. Money began to flow out
of the country and stocks faltered. When financiers begged the
Harrison administration to shore up the markets in the face of the
growing panic, administration officials told them their job was only
to keep the country afloat until the day of Cleveland’s inauguration.
They didn’t quite make it. The economy collapsed about ten days before
Cleveland took the oath of office, saddling the new president with the
Panic of 1893 and very few ways to combat it. Republicans had
deliberately sabotaged the country in order to discredit Cleveland,
then demanded he honor the demands of financiers to stabilize the
economy. Caught between a rock and a hard place, Cleveland tried to
work with moneyed interests to combat the depression and promptly
split his own party. The country roiled as out-of-work Americans
despaired, some of them marching on Washington, D.C., to demand the
government do something to address their plight.
The Republicans went into the 1894 midterm elections blaming the
Democrats for the crisis in the country. They won the midterms in what
remains the largest seat swing in the history of the House of
Representatives. Then they claimed that, with Republicans back in
power, the economy was now safe. They papered the country with media
announcing that the panic was over and people should reinvest. The
panic was over, and a Republican president won in 1896, once again
insisting the Democrats were socialists, but this time adding that the
past four years had proved the Democrats could not run the economy.
There is no excuse for the silence of Republican lawmakers as their
president attacks our democracy. But there might be a precedent.
—-
Notes:
https://email.mg2.substack.com/c/eJwlkMuOqzAMhp-m2YFyKTRdZDGb8xooFwOZCQlKzKF9-zFTybIt__pt6_MWYSn1bfbSkB0N6hSDecpRi0GzYO5BaGpim-YKsNmYDNYD2H64FL3FWPJlkHxQiq3Gjf5uZVBPPWonZ_LOXHFaFuQ8O-XYdWayR4iQPRj4D_VdMrBkVsS93dTXTf6jOM-zP21bY16w5MvU-7KRsJcUMfpGLf2x7d0PUPI2pW6BUpdoSZFccipCUuIDpTnoMD4evlMPKTohwHU6KN2NFqywwSmtnlND4tCvuCUWzbVCSD7ygT-k7kW_1lcdX8Nr0OV259si-3a4htb_XJ-xaryt37ZqSepycfobE6aJ6nbkiO8JsnUJwocgfpD_AcH3DibD2RIgQv0ML6zyrrVUI6NbodDWbFawuEL15VWjX20NreRfb5aYSQ
[https://email.mg2.substack.com/c/eJwlkMuOqzAMhp-m2YFyKTRdZDGb8xooFwOZCQlKzKF9-zFTybIt__pt6_MWYSn1bfbSkB0N6hSDecpRi0GzYO5BaGpim-YKsNmYDNYD2H64FL3FWPJlkHxQiq3Gjf5uZVBPPWonZ_LOXHFaFuQ8O-XYdWayR4iQPRj4D_VdMrBkVsS93dTXTf6jOM-zP21bY16w5MvU-7KRsJcUMfpGLf2x7d0PUPI2pW6BUpdoSZFccipCUuIDpTnoMD4evlMPKTohwHU6KN2NFqywwSmtnlND4tCvuCUWzbVCSD7ygT-k7kW_1lcdX8Nr0OV259si-3a4htb_XJ-xaryt37ZqSepycfobE6aJ6nbkiO8JsnUJwocgfpD_AcH3DibD2RIgQv0ML6zyrrVUI6NbodDWbFawuEL15VWjX20NreRfb5aYSQ]
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This post by Heather Cox Richardson reminds me of how long the monied
ruling class has manipulated the Press and the People with twisted
lies. I remember when FDR ran for an unheard of fourth term, the
Republicans cried that this would be the end of the Party. Hard to
believe that the common folks would buy that big lie, considering that
they did not have the land, or the produce houses, nor the banks, or
factories. But they never did relinquish their power or control.
Carl Jarvis
