An Amalgam

An Upset

When the big horse gets his ass handed to him, we call it an upset - cuz once upon a time there was a dinky little racehorse named Upset who is the only horse ever to beat the big-n-bad Man O' War.

While the winner in the campaign for Mayor is a registered Independent, there's plenty to say about voters not wanting to go with some generic Democrat, but way more definitely wanting to vote against another fuckwit Republican.

Mr Mobolade beat the Republican by 15 points.

Political newcomer Yemi Mobolade wins Colorado Springs mayor’s race

In what can only be described as a stunning turn of events, political veteran and former Secretary of State Wayne Williams conceded the Colorado Springs mayoral runoff to political newcomer and businessman Yemi Mobolade not long after the polls closed Tuesday night.

The concession came shortly after the first results were posted. That stood in stark contrast to the spring general election, where it took days to discern the top two vote-getters.

“Wow,” said Mobolade as he took the stage with his family at the COS City Hub community center where his watch party was held. “This is our win. We are Colorado Springs. It’s a new day in our beloved city.”

As of 9:40 p.m., when the final vote count of the evening was released, unofficial results showed Mobolade leading in the race for Colorado Springs mayor with 57.5 percent of the vote to Williams' 42.5 percent. Counting is expected to resume Wednesday morning.

"I think folks were, as indicated by their vote, were looking for something new as opposed to the tried and proven track record and that's certainly their right to make that decision," Williams told KRCC at The Pinery event venue where his watch party was held. "Being the top two out of 12 sounds better than being second."

The Williams campaign noted that while 2022 Republican gubernatorial candidate Heidi Ganahl won El Paso County, she lost Colorado Springs.

"It's clear Colorado Springs is less conservative than it used to be. When I was chairman here (of the El Paso County GOP) we had no Democratic state reps. Now we have three," Williams said. "So there are significant changes that have taken place and I congratulate Yemi on an excellent campaign."

When asked if Tuesday night's results signal a larger change in the political alignment in Colorado Springs, Mobolade said, “I don't know, I can't speak to that. But what I can speak to is the hunger in our city at this moment in time. The hunger is not one that is partisan, as clearly evident in this room. We have Democrats, Republicans and Independents all gathered. The hunger is for vision that transcends political party lines and the tiredness and the frustration in our city and in our nation is around (the) partisan divide and the fighting that happens and people are just ready for a new type of leadership that puts our quality of life ahead of party politics.”

He also noted the city charter calls for the mayor to be non-partisan, “I'm glad that I could restore the spirit of the law that we should be abiding by.”

Mobolade, who is a naturalized citizen and identifies as a political independent, is the co-founder of two local coffee shops and has also founded a church.

In the public sector, Mobolade has been an advocate for small businesses with the city. He has worked with the Colorado Springs Chamber and Economic Development Corp. Mobolade said he sees his new role as an opportunity to "restore public trust in local government."

Mobolade called his preparation for the runoff his “longest job interview” to prove to the community that he is the leader for the job.

In a survey sent out by KRCC, Mobolade said he would prioritize safety, growth, and the economy.

While Williams gained the endorsement of John Suthers, the outgoing mayor, as well as more than half the current council, Mobolade was able to secure the endorsement of third-place finisher Sallie Clark.

In the general election last month, Mobolade garnered the most votes among the dozen candidates, separating himself from Williams by more than 11,000 votes.

Williams' campaign said he started the runoff down 25 points.

Williams said all of the GOP attacks and infighting also didn't help.

"So you had a number of Republican candidates beating up on each other in the initial round," Williams noted. "I think that carried through."

Though some Republicans disagreed with Williams in the past, the GOP did coalesce around him during the runoff. State Party Chair Dave Williams showed his support as well as El Paso County GOP Chair Vickie Tonkins.

Williams is a familiar name in El Paso County’s Republican circles and Colorado politics. He was elected Secretary of State in 2014, after serving as a county commissioner and then the county clerk. He’s currently an at-large city councilman for Colorado Springs.

Republican and former state Rep. Lois Landgraf, a Williams ally, was not thrilled with the result.

"I just hope people don't fall for the running the city on love," Landgraf said. "Because it takes a lot more than that to be able to negotiate with two sides, both sides of issues."

Don Kidd, a businessman and long-time resident who spent 27 years in the Air Force, is worried to see the less conservative candidate win.

"I see nice commercials, but I don't see a whole lot more," Kidd said. "I'm concerned about progressive policies if (Mobolade) brings those to the city. I'm concerned what they might do to Colorado Springs. We've got a large, large military presence. And I think we are right now very favored and have been for many, many years in the defense department. I'm afraid that that might turn just like the rest of Colorado."

At his Tuesday night watch party, Williams said his early concession was not what he'd hoped for, but that it was necessary for the city to move forward.

"I believe that the future of Colorado Springs is still strong, and I've been honored to serve this city and state for the last 28 years," Williams told the crowd. "I appreciate all the opportunities I've had to make this city and state and county a better place."

Colorado Springs 2023 election results for the mayoral runoff
Voters dropping off their ballots earlier in the day said population growth and higher property taxes were issues of concern for them.

Gary Turner, who voted for Williams, said he hopes the new mayor will address growth in the city.

“It’s ridiculous,” Turner said. “It’s gone way too far out of sight. My property taxes went up 60 percent. Yeah and I’m a senior citizen living on social security. How in the hell do they expect me to… what am I supposed to do without? Heat or food?”

Mike Clouse didn’t participate in the April municipal election but cast his ballot for Mobolade on Tuesday.

“It’s just kinda making up for not voting last time,” Clouse said. “I would’ve voted for Yemi before and I want to do it now to do my part too. Hopefully he’ll get in.”

Back at his watch party Tuesday night, Mobolade had a message for the skeptics: “To anyone who doubts that politics can be disrupted… tonight is for you.”

We Have To Stop This Shit

More election tampering.

I admit that I went immediately to the part of the story where they identified the culprit's party affiliation.

And now I can use this example to assert my that my reaction would be the same in any case - anyone caught fucking with an election deserves to burn.

Democrat, Republican, Bull Moose, Whig, Sandanista, Likud - doesn't matter. Shit's gotta stop.

Michigan official gets house arrest for 2020 ballot sabotage yesterday

FLINT TOWNSHIP, Mich. (AP) — A local official in Michigan accused of breaking a seal on a ballot box in her own election to ensure that votes couldn’t be recounted was sentenced Monday to six months of house arrest.

Kathy Funk, a Democrat, must wear an electronic monitor and also write a public apology for her actions in 2020 as the Flint Township clerk.

In January, Funk pleaded no contest to misconduct in office. A no-contest plea is not an admission of guilt but is used as such at sentencing.

Funk had won the Democratic nomination by just 79 votes out of about 5,300. A recount was not conducted, and she subsequently won the general election that fall. Investigators say she sabotaged the ballot box after the primary election, an act that would make those ballots ineligible for a recount.

Funk, 59, initially told state police she thought someone had broken into the township hall and damaged the seal on the ballot container.

At her sentencing, Judge Mark Latchana admonished Funk for her break-in theory.

“I’m sure there’s a segment of the population that thinks you should be locked up for calling into question the integrity of an election,” Latchana said Monday. “And if we had unlimited jail space, perhaps that’s true. But we don’t.”

Funk quit her township position in 2021 for a bigger job as elections supervisor for Genesee County, 60 miles (100 kilometers) north of Detroit, but she was dismissed last year while her criminal case was pending.

Less Than Nothing

Ex-Fox Producer: There Are Secret Rudy Giuliani Recordings About Dominion

In an amended legal complaint, Abby Grossberg said that Fox News failed to provide Dominion with several audio recordings she made featuring Giuliani and other Trump allies.

Abby Grossberg, the former Tucker Carlson producer accusing Fox News of pressuring her to give false testimony in the Dominion Voting Systems lawsuit, filed amended legal complaints on Tuesday claiming there are secret Fox audio recordings of Rudy Giuliani and other Trump allies.

Grossberg, who is suing the conservative network for harassment and a toxic work environment, claims that the behind-the-scenes conversations with Giuliani, former Trump lawyer Sidney Powell and Trump campaign officials featured them admitting they had no evidence to support their Dominion election fraud lies.

Additionally, she says an adviser of former President Donald Trump pointed out the importance of January 6 weeks before the Capitol attacks, noting that the adviser said there were “no issues” with voting machines and January 6 was now the “backstop” for determining the election.

Once a senior booking producer for pro-Trump Fox News host Maria Bartiromo before moving to Carlson’s show, Grossberg filed two lawsuits against Fox News last month alleging that the network’s lawyers tried to coerce her into falsely testifying in Dominion’s defamation case. She claims that the network sought to make her and Bartiromo scapegoats in the bombshell lawsuit, all while deflecting blame from Fox executives.

Dominion has accused Fox News of knowingly airing lies about widespread election fraud in an attempt to boost sagging ratings after MAGA viewers bolted following the 2020 election, allegations the network vehemently denies. The case is scheduled to go to trial next week, and Grossberg has suggested she would testify on the voting software firm’s behalf. She was recently subpoenaed in Smartmatic’s defamation lawsuit against Fox.

After Smartmatic subpoenaed Grossberg earlier this month, her lawyers claimed that Grossberg had previously surrendered access to certain evidence to Fox News. However, according to the attorneys, it didn’t appear that the evidence was ever provided to the Delaware court overseeing the Dominion case.

In her motions to amend her complaints against Fox News on Tuesday, Grossberg claimed that in preparation for their appearances on Bartiromo’s weekend Fox News show, she had recorded multiple conversations with Giuliani and Powell following the 2020 election. Those discussions, which were heard by the network’s control room, were recorded by Grossberg using Otter—a transcription device popular with journalists.

During a recording in mid-November 2020, according to Grossberg, Giuliani admitted to Bartiromo that the Trump campaign couldn’t prove some of its Dominion allegations. Asked by Bartiromo what evidence he had implicating Dominion in rigging the election, Giuliani allegedly said “that’s a little harder.” He also conceded that he had no evidence to back up the conspiracy theory that then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi had an interest in Dominion. “I’ve read that. I can’t prove that,” he said.

On that same recording, Grossberg says that Powell claimed that a “registered agent for Smartmatic” was on President Joe Biden’s “transition team.” However, when pressed by Bartiromo on her most compelling evidence that voting software flipped votes for Biden, Powell merely said the Trump campaign had “a witness who’s given a foreign declaration about how [the voting software] was created, why it was created, and watched it work.”

Perhaps most damning, however, is a December recording between Grossberg, Bartiromo, and someone described as a “high-ranking advisor to and spokesperson for President Trump and the Trump 2020 presidential campaign.” The campaign official, according to the amended complaint, admitted “there were in fact no issues” with any purportedly fraudulent voting machines in Georgia.

“More broadly, however, the Trump advisor stated that the purpose of the call was to highlight the importance of the impending January 6th date as the true ‘backstop’ for determining the validity of the election, as this was ultimately the date when the House and Senate would count the electoral votes,” Grossberg’s complaint reads. “The Trump advisor voiced their concern to Ms. Bartiromo that there had been ‘virtually no pick up of the January 6th date’ in the media.”

Grossberg’s legal team claims that despite having access to her devices multiple times, Fox News “deliberately or recklessly failed to produce highly relevant recordings of behind-the-scenes conversations” to Dominion in the course of its lawsuit.

“We hope that by laying bare the egregiously unlawful conduct of Fox News with respect to its treatment of Ms. Grossberg as a fact witness in the Dominion case (including coercing incomplete and shaded testimony from her and covering up key documents that both inculpate Fox News as a malicious actor and exculpate Ms. Grossberg from unjust allegations of journalistic malfeasance) in our proposed Second Amended Complaint, all of the facts and issues necessary for justice to be served will be timely put before the Delaware Superior Court,” said Grossberg’s attorney Tanvir Rahman.

In a pre-trial hearing on Tuesday, Superior Court Judge Eric Davis ruled that Dominion could not mention the Jan. 6 Capitol attack during this month’s trial. “We’re not putting the January 6th attack on [trial]. That may be for another court at another time. It’s not for this one,” Davis said.

“Fox has complied with its discovery obligations in the Dominion case,” a Fox News spokesperson told The Daily Beast in a statement.

Another One On Wisconsin

Why do these jokers seem to think they can convince me they're standing up for, and defending the institution by delivering remarks that defame and undermine the institution? It is a wonderment.

Loser Daniel Kelly makes his non-conceding concession (?)

Opinion

It seems pretty important that at least some of the Press Poodles are behaving more like the Newsy Bulldogs we need them to be by speaking very openly and explicitly about the prospects of MAGA fucking things up on purpose, and with malice of forethought.

MAGA partisans grasp these stakes with perfect clarity. One well-known Trumpist operative has been frantically warning that a liberal majority on the Wisconsin state Supreme Court would spell doom for “election integrity.” That’s MAGA code for saying it would complicate efforts to illicitly subvert a MAGA loss in 2024. And it’s true: If liberals control the court, that will be largely out of reach.

Greg Sargent isn't exactly the epitome of a leftie looney, although he fits the wingnuts' description pretty well.

What catches my eye is not so much his willingness to call the MAGA shit for what it is - and not equivocate on it - but the fact that something this straightforward made it past the editors at a news outlet that has a 40-year tradition of being a very Both-Sides-y kinda joint.

Maybe I'm overstating it, but this is not normal, and it carries a measure of hope that doesn't come along all that often in USAmerica's Commercial Establishment Press.

Opinion
This sleeper race could wreck MAGA’s 2024 dreams

Wisconsin looms large in the MAGA transformation of American politics. Of the three “blue wall” states that Donald Trump flipped in 2016, Wisconsin was the toughest for Democrats to take back in 2020. Winning there — more than Michigan or Pennsylvania — is the most likely starting point for Trump or another MAGA presidential candidate to assemble an electoral majority in 2024.

That’s why a race for Wisconsin state Supreme Court — Election Day is April 4 — has extraordinarily high stakes. A Democratic win would deal a big blow to the MAGA movement’s 2024 hopes, underscoring its dramatically weakened hold on must-win territory once dominated by Trump. That outcome would give liberals a 4-3 majority on a court that could thwart any rerun of Trump’s 2020 effort to overturn his loss by legal chicanery.

The conservative candidate for the court seat — Republican lawyer Daniel Kelly — has sterling MAGA credentials. He was reportedly involved in discussions about a “fake electors” scheme to overturn Trump’s loss in the state. Last year, he helped lead “election integrity” events that suggested the state’s 2020 voting was suspect.

In private polls, Kelly is trailing the liberal candidate, Milwaukee County Judge Janet Protasiewicz, and Democrats are outspending Republicans in the race. A liberal court could overturn a state abortion ban, so Democratic ads are highlighting Kelly’s support from anti-choice groups, hoping abortion can deliver another win after driving many 2022 victories.

But this race is also about the future prospects of MAGA — on multiple levels.

A loss for Kelly would effectively constitute a third strike for MAGA in the geographic heart of the movement’s effort to transform U.S. politics. Trump’s 2016 Rust Belt victories were driven by supercharged margins among non-college-educated White voters disproportionately concentrated in that region, which hinted at a long-term MAGA-driven realignment of the electoral map.

But since then, not only did Joe Biden win back Wisconsin (and the other “blue wall” states) in 2020, but in 2022 Democratic Gov. Tony Evers triumphed over a Trump-backed GOP candidate. While GOP Sen. Ron Johnson was reelected there in 2022, Evers’s clear majority win provided vivid evidence of MAGA’s waning influence.

A third Democratic triumph in Wisconsin would suggest the MAGA transformation is proving far less durable than its proponents hoped. Wisconsin has a slightly higher percentage of blue-collar White people than either Pennsylvania or Michigan, so another win would be a big morale booster for Democrats heading into 2024.

“The whole Trump-MAGA strategy is to run up the score with rural voters and White voters without college degrees,” Wisconsin Democratic Party Chair Ben Wikler told me. “That describes most voters in Wisconsin.” What’s more, Wikler added, “MAGA can’t win in 2024 without the Badger State.”

MAGA partisans grasp these stakes with perfect clarity. One well-known Trumpist operative has been frantically warning that a liberal majority on the Wisconsin state Supreme Court would spell doom for “election integrity.” That’s MAGA code for saying it would complicate efforts to illicitly subvert a MAGA loss in 2024. And it’s true: If liberals control the court, that will be largely out of reach.

To be fair, one of the court’s current conservative justices did not side with Trump’s efforts to overturn results in 2020, notes election law expert Richard L. Hasen. So even a one-seat conservative majority might not do its worst. But if 2024 comes down to Wisconsin, the pressure would be intense to greenlight dubious efforts to overturn a loss, and a conservative majority joined by Kelly would be “much more risky,” Hasen said.

“A liberal court would make it much less likely that lawsuits meant to disenfranchise voters or subvert election results would get a serious hearing,” Hasen told me.

To the surprise of many observers, Democrats won in 2022 by running as defenders of both abortion rights and democracy, enabling them to defeat election-denying candidates across the country. That combination proved to be Kryptonite to MAGA among swing voters, including in Pennsylvania and Michigan.

In addition to running ads on abortion, Democrats in Wisconsin are also putting big money behind a spot that is entirely about the threat to democracy posed by conservative domination of the state Supreme Court. A win there would once again show the potency of that joint message — against MAGA candidates in particular.

Yet even if Democrats prevail, it would be folly to be overly confident that MAGA’s efforts to realign the region are fully extinguished. As Ronald Brownstein notes for the Atlantic, Democratic performance among non-college White people in 2020 and 2022 improved only marginally relative to 2016, so relying on educated voters alone won’t keep the “blue wall” states in the Democratic column.

But when it comes to MAGA’s dreams of retaking the Rust Belt in 2024 — or even of stealing the election in Wisconsin if the GOP candidate can’t win fairly — a Democratic victory in April would make those hopes a whole lot dimmer.

Bamboozlement

Arizona’s top prosecutor concealed records debunking election fraud claims

Newly released documents show how Republican Mark Brnovich publicized an incomplete account of his office’s probe of the 2020 election in Maricopa County

PHOENIX — Nearly a year after the 2020 election, Arizona’s then-attorney general Mark Brnovich launched an investigation into voting in the state’s largest county that quickly consumed more than 10,000 hours of his staff’s time.

Investigators prepared a report in March 2022 stating that virtually all claims of error and malfeasance were unfounded, according to internal documents reviewed by The Washington Post. Brnovich, a Republican, kept it private.

In April, the attorney general — who was running in the GOP primary for a U.S. Senate seat — released an “Interim Report” claiming that his office had discovered “serious vulnerabilities.” He left out edits from his own investigators refuting his assertions.

His office then compiled an “Election Review Summary” in September that systematically refuted accusations of widespread fraud and made clear that none of the complaining parties — from state lawmakers to self-styled “election integrity” groups — had presented any evidence to support their claims. Brnovich left office last month without releasing the summary.

That timeline emerges from documents released to The Post this week by Brnovich’s successor, Kris Mayes, a Democrat. She said she considered the taxpayer-funded investigation closed and, earlier this month, notified leaders on Maricopa County’s governing board that they were no longer in the state’s crosshairs.

The records show how Brnovich used his office to further claims about voting in Maricopa County that his own staff considered inaccurate. They suggest that his administration privately disregarded fact-checks provided by state investigators while publicly promoting incomplete accounts of the office’s work. The innuendo and inaccuracies, circulated not just in the far reaches of the internet but with the imprimatur of the state’s attorney general, helped make Arizona an epicenter of distrust in the democratic process, eroding confidence not just in the 2020 vote but in subsequent elections.

Brnovich did not respond to questions about his conduct of the probe, his decision not to release additional documents or differences between his public statements and his office’s private findings.

The documents — two investigative summaries and a draft letter with edits, totaling 41 pages — are far from an exhaustive record of Brnovich’s investigation. But they fill in details about the sometimes-enigmatic actions of the state’s former top law enforcement officer.

Brnovich quickly affirmed then-President Trump’s loss in Arizona in November 2020, angering fellow Republicans. And he went on to resist Trump’s efforts to overturn the vote. Yet he flirted with claims of fraud as he courted GOP support over the subsequent two years, trumpeting his interim report on a far-right radio show and saying, “It’s frustrating for all of us, because I think we all know what happened in 2020.” It was only in the final days before the November 2022 midterm election, several months after Brnovich had lost his Senate primary, that he began to denounce politicians who denied Trump’s defeat, calling them “clowns” engaged in a “giant grift.”

In releasing materials that Brnovich’s administration had kept from public view, Mayes said she was reorienting the work of the attorney general’s office — away from pursuing conspiratorial claims of fraud and toward protecting the right to vote, investigating the few cases of wrongdoing that typically occur every election and preventing threats against election workers.

“The people of Arizona had a right to know this information before the 2022 election,” Mayes said in an interview. “Maricopa County election officials had a right to know that they were cleared of wrongdoing. And every American had a right to know that the 2020 election in Arizona, which in part decided the presidency, was conducted accurately and fairly.”

The records released this week represent a fraction of the thousands of pages produced by investigators and attorneys during the investigation, including additional material from drafts of reports and interviews and correspondence with witnesses and election officials. Mayes’s staff is reviewing those documents and is redacting sensitive information before making them public in the coming months, said Richie Taylor, her spokesperson.

Brnovich’s administration did not release the investigative summaries, which The Post requested under Arizona’s public records law before he left office in January. Brnovich and his staff said repeatedly throughout the investigation that they were limited in what they could disclose since the probe was ongoing.

But his office did on occasion make public some aspects of its findings. On Aug. 1, the day before the state’s primary election, Brnovich said his office had finished its probe of allegations that hundreds of votes had been cast in the name of deceased people. His office found one instance. In December 2022, as Brnovich was preparing to leave office, an executive assistant wrote in an email to The Post that “regardless of transition, we will continue processing and will release when completed.”

The 2020 election in Maricopa County drew intense scrutiny because it’s the state’s largest voting jurisdiction, home to more than half of voters, and helped swing Arizona to Joe Biden and deliver him the presidency. Brnovich launched the investigation shortly after Cyber Ninjas, a Florida-based firm hired by the GOP-led state senate, ended its own review of the election in September 2021. The months-long legislative review, which was roundly criticized by election experts, affirmed Trump’s loss in the state. Brnovich was competing at the time in a Senate primary contest against Trump-aligned candidates who said they would have taken steps following the 2020 election to thwart certification of Biden’s victory.

The attorney general’s probe stretched through 2022, as Brnovich’s office spent more than 10,000 hours examining claims of irregularities, malfeasance and fraud, records show. At one point, the office set up a command center, and “the review of the audit was made a singular, high-level priority; all hands were assigned to work exclusively on reviewing the audit with other matters being placed on hold unless a matter required immediate action on our part,” a report said. Mayes said the office has about 60 investigators, all of whom participated in the probe at some point, along with lawyers and support staff.

By September 2022, a year into the inquiry, the special investigations section had received 638 election-related complaints and deemed 430 of them worthy of investigation. Of those, just 22 cases were submitted for prosecutorial review; two cases involving felons who illegally sought to vote were prosecuted, leading to convictions.

note: in case you're wondering, those 430 instances deemed worthy of investigation means the election was 99.99% clean. These pricks aren't seriously asserting "the election was rigged". They're attacking our trust in democratic processes.

eg: raise the question of shenanigans, intimating there are massive problems, then move to solve those make-believe problems by proposing drastic measures that you say are meant to protect the system, while actually intending them to dismantle democracy altogether. Exactly the way they taught it at School Of The Americas, when we were training assholes like Pinochet and Noriega to seize power.

Brnovich never broadcast the full findings, declining to close the books on suspicions raised by an interim report with characterizations directly rebutted by his own office.

The interim report, delivered in the form of a letter to Karen Fann, then the Republican president of the state senate, was met by Trump allies as confirmation that voting in Maricopa County was corrupted. The letter, sent on April 6, highlighted management of early voting, saying, “We can report that there are problematic systemwide issues that relate to early ballot handling and verification.”

But Brnovich’s staff took issue with his criticism of the handling and verification of ballots, writing in a draft of the letter, “we did not uncover any criminality or fraud having been committed in this area during the 2020 general election.”

State investigators took issue with certain language included in an April 2022 draft of then-Arizona Attorney General Mark Brnovoch's interim report on his office's investigation of the 2020 election in Maricopa County, highlighting problematic text in yellow and offering corrections in blue.
State investigators took issue with certain language included in an April 2022 draft of then-Arizona Attorney General Mark Brnovoch's interim report on his office's investigation of the 2020 election in Maricopa County, highlighting problematic text in yellow and offering corrections in blue. (Arizona Attorney General)
The staff comments were made in blue type, below disputed statements highlighted in yellow, and included in a document sent by a chief special agent in the criminal division to several others in the office on April 1. That document was forwarded to Brnovich’s top aide. The subject line was, “Additional Considerations for Draft Interim Report.” It’s not clear who else reviewed the document.

The considerations were largely not reflected in Brnovich’s final version.

Brnovich speculated that a large number of early ballots in the 2020 contest may have prevented county officials from properly verifying signatures on the ballots, even though his staff advised him that the county had rigorous training and processes, as well as additional staff, to ensure proper verification.

Brnovich went ahead with his claim that “Maricopa County had not always timely and fully responded to our requests for records,” even though staff advised in the draft document that it was the “collective opinion of … investigators” that the county “was cooperative and responsive to our requests.”

State investigators took issue with certain language included in an April 2022 draft of then-Arizona Attorney General Mark Brnovoch's interim report on his office's investigation of the 2020 election in Maricopa County, highlighting problematic text in yellow and offering corrections in blue.

When Brnovich released his interim report, it was not accompanied by a fuller “Investigation Summary,” prepared by the assistant chief special agent and dated March 8. The 24-page summary described a range of allegations probed by the attorney general’s office, including improper signature verification, misuse of drop boxes and incomplete access to records for the state senate’s audit. That report was also shared with Brnovich’s top aide, Taylor said.

Virtually all allegations had been deemed unfounded, according to the summary. Several issues were listed as undetermined, including a claim by Cyber Ninjas that certain files had been deleted by the county; investigators had yet to review all archived data.

The summary revealed that there had been procedural violations in one instance — involving the retrieval of ballots from drop boxes. The state did not find that the county had mishandled ballots, according to the summary, but that it had not always properly recorded certain details, such as the time of retrieval.

Regarding signature verification, the issue highlighted in Brnovich’s interim report, the prepared summary found, “No improper Election Procedures were discovered during the Signature Verification review.”

Later the same year, Brnovich’s office came to further conclusions about the absence of any basis for claims of systematic fraud, but kept those findings private as well.

On Sept. 19, about a month after Brnovich had lost the GOP nomination for Senate to a MAGA-aligned candidate who insisted that “Trump won in 2020,” a memo summarized the work of investigators. The memo, drawn up by a chief special agent in anticipation of a final report, was not shared with office leadership since no such final report was ever drafted or requested, Taylor said.

The memo, titled “Election Review Summary,” emphasized that, “no evidence of election fraud, manipulation of the election process, or any instances of organized/coordinated fraud was provided by any of the complaining parties.”

A September 2022 memo summarizing the state probe of the 2020 election in Maricopa County went unreleased by the outgoing attorney general, Mark Brnovich

Of the more conspicuous claims examined by investigators — including those circulated by Cyber Ninjas, Texas-based True the Vote and others — the groups “did not provide any evidence to support their allegations,” the memo concluded. The information they did provide “was speculative in many instances and when investigated by our agents and support staff, was found to be inaccurate.”

The memo also reported that some high-profile Republican officials — who had publicly made fantastical claims of fraud — did not reiterate those assertions under questioning by agents, when they were subject to a state law prohibiting false reporting to law enforcement.

Mark Finchem, then a state representative who later ran unsuccessfully for secretary of state, had repeatedly claimed that a “source” told him that more than 30,000 fictitious votes had appeared during the general election in a county south of Phoenix. But when questioned by agents, he did not repeat the claim, “specifically stating he did not have any evidence of fraud and that he did not wish to take up our time.” Finchem provided four ballots that he said reflected a flawed voting process, but those ballots had not been counted and were unopened.

Sonny Borrelli, a GOP state senator who had alleged a coverup of election irregularities, did not repeat those claims during an interview but did provide what he said was the name of a deceased voter, the memo stated. Investigators learned that the alleged deceased voter was alive, had not voted and was not a resident of Arizona.

Investigators sought a meeting with Wendy Rogers, a Republican state senator and vocal election denier who now chairs the chamber’s elections committee. But Rogers refused to meet, the report said, “saying she was waiting to see the ‘perp walk’ of those who committed fraud during the election.”

No perp walk resulted from allegations presented to the unit, including that aerial objects flipped votes; that election workers scrubbed hard drives; and that satellites under the control of the Italian military penetrated vote-counting machines.

Drifting Towards Justice

Michigan Sec'y of State Jocelyn Benson has been making a solid point about the need to fight misinformation, saying (I'm paraphrasing here):

It's illegal to lie about a product you're trying to sell. When your candidate loses, but you yell "fraud" and "stolen election", it's really no different than some Bait-n-Switch asshole rolling back the odometers on the used cars he has for sale.

Alex Wagner - and we should be talking about coming down hard on the tiny-dick terrorists who swallow all the bullshit being peddled on wingnut media, and then threaten public officials.

Ari Melber - DumFux News may finally take it in the shorts:

But we have to keep in mind that "the liberal press", even as they start to come around a bit, will continue to pimp the Middle Ground Fallacy.

Here's NYT with what ought to be something like a bomb going off in their neighbor's basement, more or less burying the story below the fold, "headlining" it in standard 20-point font.

Fox Stars Privately Expressed Disbelief About Election Fraud Claims. ‘Crazy Stuff.’

The comments, by Tucker Carlson, Sean Hannity and others, were released as part of a defamation suit against Fox News by Dominion Voter Systems.

Newly disclosed messages and testimony from some of the biggest stars and most senior executives at Fox News revealed that they privately expressed disbelief about President Donald J. Trump’s false claims that the 2020 election was stolen from him, even though the network continued to promote many of those lies on the air.

The hosts Tucker Carlson, Sean Hannity and Laura Ingraham, as well as others at the company, repeatedly insulted and mocked Trump advisers, including Sidney Powell and Rudolph W. Giuliani, in text messages with each other in the weeks after the election, according to a legal filing on Thursday by Dominion Voting Systems. Dominion is suing Fox for defamation in a case that poses considerable financial and reputational risk for the country’s most-watched cable news network.

“Sidney Powell is lying by the way. I caught her. It’s insane,” Mr. Carlson wrote to Ms. Ingraham on Nov. 18, 2020.

Ms. Ingraham responded: “Sidney is a complete nut. No one will work with her. Ditto with Rudy.”

Mr. Carlson continued, “Our viewers are good people and they believe it,” he added, making clear that he did not.

The messages also show that such doubts extended to the highest levels of the Fox Corporation, with Rupert Murdoch, its chairman, calling Mr. Trump’s voter fraud claims “really crazy stuff.”

On one occasion, as Mr. Murdoch watched Mr. Giuliani and Ms. Powell on television, he told Suzanne Scott, chief executive of Fox News Media, “Terrible stuff damaging everybody, I fear.”

Dominion’s brief depicts Ms. Scott, whom colleagues have described as sharply attuned to the sensibilities of the Fox audience, as being well aware that Mr. Trump’s claims were baseless. And when another Murdoch-owned property, The New York Post, published an editorial urging Mr. Trump to stop complaining that he had been cheated, Ms. Scott distributed it widely among her staff. Mr. Murdoch then thanked her for doing so, the brief says.

The filing, in state court in Delaware, contains the most vivid and detailed picture yet of what went on behind the scenes at Fox News and its corporate parent in the days and weeks after the 2020 election, when the conservative cable network’s coverage took an abrupt turn.

Fox News stunned the Trump campaign on election night by becoming the first news outlet to declare Joseph R. Biden Jr. the winner of Arizona — effectively projecting that he would become the next president. Then, as Fox’s ratings fell sharply after the election and the president refused to concede, many of the network’s most popular hosts and shows began promoting outlandish claims of a far-reaching voter fraud conspiracy involving Dominion machines to deny Mr. Trump a second term.

- more -

The Grand Jury's Report

Full report at WaPo

Ongoing GOP Fuckery

Republicans filed record number of anti-voting lawsuits in 2022 – report

Efforts challenging election results and attacking voting rights peaked last year, but courts ruled against the majority of them

The Republican party filed a record number of anti-voting lawsuits in 2022, a sign it is shifting the battle over voting access and election administration to courtrooms as well as state legislatures.

Last year, Republican party groups filed 23 democracy-related lawsuits, according to a new report by Democracy Docket, a progressive media platform that tracks voting litigation. The lawsuits included efforts to challenge election results, attacks on mail-in voting and attempts to undermine the administration of elections. The Democratic party, the report found, filed only six voting lawsuits in 2022 and all sought to protect or expand the right to vote.

The almost two dozen lawsuits filed by the GOP is an increase from 20 in 2020, the year of the presidential election in which Donald Trump’s loss was contested in courts for months. There were no new lawsuits by the Republican party in 2021, when there was no major election.

“Evidently, the GOP establishment is becoming more litigious than ever and is turning to courts to achieve its anti-voting and anti-democracy ends,” the report says.

A total of 175 voting lawsuits were filed in 2022, according to the report, up from 150 in 2020. Of the 175 lawsuits, 93 were characterized as anti-voting, and the Republican party (which the report said it defined as the Republican National Committee, the National Republican Senatorial Committee, the National Republican Congressional Committee, or state or county Republican parties) was responsible for nearly 25% of them.

In addition to the lawsuits filed by the party itself, 25 lawsuits were filed by GOP candidates without the official backing of their party. Many of these candidates were election deniers, like Mark Finchem in Arizona who challenged the results of the secretary of state race he lost in November.

A judge threw out Finchem’s lawsuit in December, finding he didn’t present evidence of election misconduct.

Many of the anti-voting lawsuits were based on what Democracy Docket called “fringe” theories. The parties that filed them often promoted the ”big lie” or relied on conspiracy theories to challenge election results or limit voting opportunities. Several lawsuits continued to challenge the results of the 2020 election two years later, including one lawsuit filed in Michigan in September by a group of Republicans seeking to decertify the election 648 days after it was certified.

Though the lawsuits were spread across the US, three battleground states with prominent election deniers on the ballot – Arizona, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin – saw the most new lawsuits filed last year.

The report also tracked consequential orders in each of the voting-related lawsuits in 2022 and found that a majority of them were wins for voting rights. Of 175 consequential orders, 116 were victories for voters, 35 were losses for voters and 27 were neutral decisions.

“In 2022, democracy won in the courtroom,” the report concluded.

Nonetheless, the litigation is unlikely to slow down in the next two years. The Republican party appealed nearly a third of the final orders that benefited voters last year, and an upcoming presidential election means there will no doubt be a new round of litigation ahead of 2024.

Election Fantasies

These guys always say there's massive fraud, and then set out to prove it by actually committing election fraud, and then pretending that being caught is proof of concept.

And getting caught doing it doesn't even matter - mostly because they usually turn themselves in. But instead of thinking how a national election could be swung "the wrong way" by a few knuckleheads fucking with the mail-in system, they just stop right there and yell about phantoms running around stealing elections.

Here's the thing:

• Yes there's voter fraud. And yes, there's voter fraud exactly like what this Harry Wait idiot pulled.
• But no - in order to swing a national election, someone would have to put in about a dozen fraudulent ballots in each of the 176,933 voting precincts

That's a conspiracy that simply can't hold together. If you could find 2,500 people willing to risk 12 or 15 years in federal lockup, you could put 50 people in every state, and they'd each have to cover 70 precincts. And then you'd have to worry about 2,500 people being able to keep quiet about it.

Like Grandpa said: 3 people can keep a secret - as long as 2 of 'em are dead.

I think that's probably why somebody came up with the stories about Hugo Chavez, and Italian internet satellites intercepting the voting machine signals, and whatever other weird shit they put out there.

Anyway, WaPo observes a change in how Republicans are trying to deal with their crazies, and how the crazies aren't going anywhere anytime soon.

As Republicans inch away from election denialism, one activist digs in

Harry Wait ordered ballots in the names of others to show voter fraud is possible. Now facing up to 13 years in prison, he is undaunted in his crusade to change Wisconsin’s voting laws.

RACINE, Wis. — Harry Wait marched into the courthouse, walked through a metal detector and planted himself on a bench in the ornate lobby. His supporters, some wearing bright yellow “Free Harry” T-shirts, chatted amiably as they followed him inside.

Emboldened by former president Donald Trump’s false election claims, Wait in July had ordered absentee ballots in the names of others for the purpose, he said, of exposing what he considers flaws in Wisconsin’s voting systems. Now, on a warm September afternoon, he was using the resulting voter-fraud charges against him — which could land him in prison for up to 13 years — to amplify his argument that absentee balloting should be severely restricted.

“I’d do it again in a heartbeat because to save the republic, soldiers have to draw blood and blood be drawn,” Wait said as he sat on the courthouse bench.

For two years, a large segment of Trump supporters has embraced discredited claims that the 2020 election was stolen. The strategy of cultivating anger over supposed voter fraud proved politically disastrous this fall, when election deniers lost high-profile races from Arizona to Pennsylvania.

Now some Republican leaders are urging their party to downplay election denialism and shift its focus to other issues to improve its chances of winning the presidency in 2024.

But activists such as Wait are making that difficult, showing how hard it will be to extinguish the grievance and distrust whipped up by Trump and his allies. Undeterred by the November results, Wait in recent weeks has rallied for overhauling election rules, planned a January protest at the state Capitol and pledged to use the charges against him to trumpet his call for new voting laws. For him, the fight over elections continues.

A Harry Wait supporter wears a pin to show support at the Racine County Courthouse in Racine, Wis., on Oct. 7. (Alex Wroblewski/for The Washington Post)

There are others like him. Three months after Wait made headlines, an election official in Milwaukee engaged in similar behavior to bring attention to what she sees as voting vulnerabilities. Election deniers who lost their bids for statewide office in Michigan this fall are running to lead the state’s Republican Party. Former professor David Clements, who spent the summer visiting small towns around the country to spread false claims about the 2020 election, reappeared after the midterms to urge officials in Arizona to defy state law and refuse to certify the state’s results.

Former Trump adviser Stephen K. Bannon continues to dwell on election issues on his podcast. MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell, now making a long-shot bid for chairman of the Republican National Committee, remains committed to funding efforts to ban the use of voting machines. Trump himself, running for president once again, has shown no signs of letting up on his false claims about a stolen 2020 election.

Some Republicans worry that the emphasis on electoral fraud will prove self-defeating for the party.

When voters are told “that their vote doesn’t count, they stop voting,” said former congressman Reid J. Ribble (R-Wis.). He encouraged Republicans to push back on the claims of activists including Wait by assuring voters that elections are secure and the results accurate. If they don’t, he said, they risk losing more elections.

“The House wave didn’t happen, because there were too many election deniers,” he said.

But Wait, an ardent Trump supporter who does not consider himself a Republican, isn’t inclined to heed Ribble’s plea to move on.

Wait, 68, is a veteran of fights against officialdom in Racine, a blue-collar city on Lake Michigan 25 miles south of Milwaukee. After receiving a disorderly conduct ticket in 2011, Wait launched a blog to chronicle what he considered the failures of local government. The retired business consultant kept going after he beat his citation and several years later formed a group with others to marshal their energy. They called themselves HOT Government to highlight their support for a form of politics that they describe as honest, open and transparent.

When a school referendum passed by five votes in the spring of 2020, Wait helped organize a lawsuit over the recount — only to lose 7-0 before the state Supreme Court. The experience led Wait to dive into how elections are conducted in Wisconsin, just as Trump was ramping up his complaints about supposedly fraudulent voting.

This summer, Wait discovered that a state website would allow him to request someone else’s absentee ballot and have it sent to any address. Election officials, who designed the site to make it easy for out-of-town voters to obtain ballots, have maintained that the site does nothing to diminish election integrity, saying anyone who attempted voter fraud would be quickly caught.

But Wait saw the potential for something nefarious and set out to prove a point.

He ordered ballots under the names of two officials with whom he has long clashed — one Republican, one Democrat — and asked that the ballots be delivered to his address. Wait checked a box saying he was confined to his home because of age or disability, which allowed him to get around a state law that requires most voters to provide a copy of a photo ID the first time they request an absentee ballot. He also checked a box acknowledging that he understood he could face charges if he impersonated someone else.

The ballots he requested were in the names of Racine Mayor Cory Mason, a former Democratic state representative, and Assembly Speaker Robin Vos, the most powerful Republican in state government. Wait received Mason’s ballot a few days later and quickly turned it over, unopened, to a sheriff’s deputy; the election clerk in Vos’s hometown never mailed Vos’s ballot to Wait.

Shortly after Wait made the requests, he sent an email to Mason and Vos, as well as to Racine County’s top prosecutor and sheriff. “I stand ready to be charged for exposing these voting vulnerabilities,” he told them.

Election officials in Wisconsin and around the country have spent the past two years battling far-fetched conspiracy theories, including debunked ones alleging that voting machine totals were altered by Italian satellites or thermostats connected to the internet. Wait’s tactic raised a new type of challenge — actual fraud that arguably could go undetected if carried out on a small scale.

Jay Stone, a retired hypnotherapist who has filed more than a dozen challenges to Wisconsin’s voting policies, talked to Wait the night he requested the ballots under others’ names. He said he opposed the idea but added, “You can’t talk Harry out of anything.”

“Look up the cingulate gyrus of the brain. It’s the brain’s gear shifter,” Stone said. “If a car goes — an automatic car — goes zero to 50, it shifts from first gear to second and third gear, decelerates, downshifts. Some people have a gear shifter that gets stuck. That’s Harry.”

In September, the judge hearing Wait’s case imposed a gag order that prevents him from talking about his case. But, in interviews, at rallies and at HOT Government meetings, Wait eagerly shares his views on election policies and the officials who oversee them.

He argues that the Republican and Democratic parties have conspired to establish election laws that protect the powerful. He says the 2020 election was stolen through voting machine algorithms and other means, despite a string of reviews and court rulings that found no significant fraud. Wait, whose legal bills are being covered by the conservative Thomas More Society, wants to get rid of voting machines, limit absentee voting and require all residents to re-register to vote.

“I know both sides cheat. The problem is catching them,” he said.

Mason learned of what had happened from Wait’s email but didn’t know at first whether to believe him. “It was disbelief followed by disgust,” Mason said of finding out what Wait had done.

While frustrated, Mason said he thought the ordeal over his ballot showed that Wisconsin’s systems work. Mason was able to cast a ballot and Wait within a month was charged with two felonies over unauthorized use of personally identifiable information and two misdemeanors relating to election fraud.

“It’s not really about my vote or Speaker Vos’s vote specifically,” Mason said. “It’s about whether or not this stunt is going to intimidate people, policymakers specifically, into making changes that will make it harder for people to vote.”

In response to Wait’s actions, the state elections commission mailed postcards to every voter who had an absentee ballot sent somewhere other than their home — nearly 13,000 in all. The commission has received no reports that other ballots were sent somewhere they should not have been.

Ann Jacobs, a Democrat who sits on the bipartisan commission, said few people do what Wait did because they know they are likely to be caught if they try it. If someone casts a ballot in someone else’s name, the victim will discover it when he or she goes to the polls, she noted.

“In all areas, we balance access with security,” she said. “In a situation like this, where it is such a rare occurrence [and] the penalties are severe, the real question has to be whether we need to make it harder to vote to thwart would-be criminals from doing something like this. And my view of it is, I don’t think we should.”

Some Republicans have called for a tightening of the state’s absentee-voting policies, but there is little chance of that happening. Republicans control the state legislature and have, over the past two years, approved election bills only to see them vetoed by Gov. Tony Evers (D), who won a second term in November.

Three months after Wait ordered the ballots, Milwaukee’s deputy elections director used the same website to create three false identities and ask that military ballots be sent in those names to a state lawmaker. The elections official, Kimberly Zapata, later told prosecutors she did so to alert the public to what she considers a flaw in the state’s voting laws. Unlike most states, Wisconsin allows members of the military to get absentee ballots without registering to vote, and the state site makes it easy to request such absentee ballots.

Zapata was fired from her position and charged with a felony and three misdemeanors. She faces up to five years in prison. Wait and his allies held a rally outside a court hearing for Zapata this month, some of them wearing military-style dog tags that say they marks them as members of “Harry’s Army.”

In the coming months, Wait’s legal team will file briefs contending that Wait’s actions amounted to a form of political speech that is protected by the First Amendment. The judge will consider those arguments at a hearing in April.

At a HOT Government gathering in November, in the back of a Racine bar where the group meets, Wait expressed confidence about ultimately winning his case and pledged to take it to an appeals court, if necessary.

“All I can say is, my case is an attorney’s dream,” he told the group, “because they love to bill.”

Today In Both Sides Don't

Most people (ie: normal decent people), when they see a hole in the law or the constitution, they try to fix it.

Amy Klobuchar is one of those normal decent people.

Others - manipulative, self-dealing assholes like John Eastman and Marjorie Trailer Park Greene - see those glitches in the law as opportunities to dive into SmarmSpace and exploit the loopholes in furtherance of their own narrow interests.

IMHO, the glitches are there, and haven't been addressed, because the whole thing has worked pretty well on the honor system. ie: People of honor see and recognize that doing some shitty thing may be technically "legal", but it's not an honorable thing to do.

And yes, the SmarmSpace rangers know they're doing shitty things.

Honorable people don't do shitty things.

It's not honorable to make a move to monopolize power under a constitution so obviously constructed to prevent someone monopolizing power.

The GOP seems to have flopped all the way over to "If it's not specifically prohibited, then it's both peachy and dandy - let's knock this shit out."

Opinion

The plan to stop a future Trumpist coup moves closer to reality

It turns out our political system might prove capable of defending itself against future subversion after all.

In a big step forward for protecting democracy, Senate Majority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) announced Tuesday that he expects action in the lame-duck session on reform of the arcane law that Donald Trump exploited during his attempted 2021 coup.

“I expect an omnibus will contain priorities both sides want to see passed into law, including more funding for Ukraine and the Electoral Count Act,” Schumer said, in a reference to an end-of-year spending bill the two parties are negotiating.

Speaking about reform of the ECA, the 1887 law that governs how presidential electors are counted in Congress, Schumer added: “It will be great to get that done.”

This is welcome news. The Senate version of ECA reform would clarify the vice president’s role in counting electors as purely ceremonial, make it harder for Congress to invalidate legitimate electors and make corruption of the appointment of electors at the state level much harder.

All these points would make a rerun of Trump’s 2020 effort less likely, in part because they would patch up ECA vulnerabilities that invited him to attempt it. He pressured his vice president to halt the electoral count, got Republican members of Congress to vote to cast out Joe Biden’s electors and pressed state legislatures to appoint sham electors for him instead.

Because of this, ECA reform has long risked being seen as “anti-Trump.” That might have rendered it unlikely that 10 GOP senators would support it and make it possible to circumvent a filibuster.

But Schumer’s announcement is cause for real optimism. That’s because it’s unlikely Schumer would have made it if Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) hadn’t quietly indicated support for attaching reform to the omnibus.

Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.), a longtime proponent of ECA reform, says she’s optimistic that Republicans will remain behind this endgame. Klobuchar notes that McConnell voted for ECA reform in the Rules Committee, and it’s supported by well over a dozen other GOP senators.

“It’s clearly a top priority,” Klobuchar told me, speaking of how ECA reform is seen by McConnell and its Republican supporters. Klobuchar noted that negotiations over it have been a “strong bipartisan effort” and reform boasts some “very conservative members supporting it.”

“This law is just crying out for updating,” Klobuchar said. While some House lawmakers want new tweaks to the Senate bill, a person familiar with the situation says the Senate version is the one that will move forward.

In a twist, the prospects for passage might be improved by attaching it to the omnibus. As this column recently noted, holding a stand-alone Senate vote on ECA reform might subject it to more attacks from MAGA-loyal forces in Congress and in right wing media, making it harder for GOP senators to support it. Schumer’s plan allows McConnell to move it forward a bit more quietly.

New developments this week forcefully underscored the need for reform. In a widely noted speech, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) openly declared that had she been in charge of Trump’s insurrection on Jan. 6, 2021, it would have been “armed.”

And text messages from House Republicans to Trump’s chief of staff, Mark Meadows, unearthed by Talking Points Memo, show members of Congress scheming in the run-up to Jan. 6 to overturn Trump’s loss in all kinds of ways, with one even calling for Trump to declare martial law.

What all this means is that the insurrectionist spirit will run strong in next year’s GOP-controlled House, which would be likely to try to help with any effort by Trump — or an imitator — to subvert the 2024 presidential election. Under current law, if a GOP-controlled state legislature appointed electors for the Republican nominee in defiance of the state’s popular vote, the GOP House could count those electors, leading to a stolen election or constitutional crisis.

Reform of the ECA would make that much harder to pull off. It would require governors to certify lawful electors, create new pathways for legal challenges to corruptly appointed electors and require Congress to count the electors validated by the courts.

“The clock is ticking towards midnight,” Matthew Seligman, a legal scholar and ECA expert, told me. “Congress seems poised to pull us back from the brink, at a moment when the extreme wing of the GOP House seems more eager than ever to trigger a crisis.”

Passage of these fixes, especially along with this cycle’s defeat of numerous gubernatorial candidates who were essentially running on a vow to subvert future elections, would amount to major action in defense of democracy and self-rule. As the unabashed and continuing insurrectionism of Greene and other House Republicans demonstrates, it’s poised to come not a moment too soon.