18 December 21
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A rally and march to insist that President Trump rightfully won a second term went by several names, including the Million MAGA March, the March for Trump and Stop the Steal DC. (photo: Eman Mohammed/NPR)
The Right has always used a mix of legislation, violence, and the courts to keep the wrong people from voting. Now it seems prepared to go a step further: legislating and organizing on the assumption that elections the GOP loses are inherently illegitimate.
In the twentieth century, numerous popular struggles faced years of resistance to expand democratic rights, eventually bringing about the direct election of senators and then the right to vote for women, black people, and adults under twenty-one. But while the Right generally no longer opposes democratic rights in principle — at least in public — over the past few years it has significantly accelerated its project of undermining fair elections. Simply put, the situation is dire.
Republicans are very unlikely to do anything as ham-fisted as suspending elections, freedom of speech, or the right to assembly entirely. But everywhere Republicans have power, they have increasingly stacked the deck in order to advance the Right and suppress or disadvantage racial minorities and the Left.
Both parties have tried to game the electoral system to their own advantage for centuries, and in modern times, the Republicans have long been more blatant about it. But since the Supreme Court gutted the Voting Rights Act in 2013, and especially since Donald Trump’s presidency, Republicans have moved with increased unity, speed, and aggression to undermine fair voting. And of course, all of this is happening in a country where less than a year ago, a right-wing mob stormed Congress while it was certifying the results of the presidential election, a riot almost certainly coordinated with high-ranking Republican operatives and politicians.
While Republicans have not given up on trying to win elections, they have decided that they aren’t going to let anything as trifling as losing keep them out of power. The new energy is motivated in large part by Trump’s loss to Joe Biden, but their work has actually picked up speed since he left office. In a concerning development, a significant and growing faction of the party is now legislating and organizing based on the assumption that elections in which Republicans lose are inherently illegitimate. In this belief they mirror their party’s voters, at least two-thirds of whom believe that Joe Biden’s victory over Donald Trump was fraudulent.
Strategies of Suppression
Of all the Right’s attempts to undermine democracy, three are the most blatant: making it harder for likely Democrats to vote; gerrymandering; and stuffing formerly dull, bureaucratic election boards with Trump cronies willing to bend the results.
Voter suppression has been a key tactic of the American right for a long time. But as Josh Mound wrote in Jacobin, these efforts grew even more intense in 2020:
Already aided by the anti-democratic structures of the Senate and the Electoral College, gerrymandering, and the Supreme Court’s gutting of the Voting Rights Act in 2013’s Shelby County v. Holder, Republicans have waged a concerted effort in states across the country to suppress the vote by closing polling places, limiting drop boxes, stunting the postal service, throwing out ballots for dubious reasons, and disenfranchising ex-felons, among other tactics.
With the Supreme Court shifted even further to the right than in 2013, there is little hope of recuperating the Voting Rights Act. In all likelihood, it will be gutted even further. Any hope of at least slowing the damage via new legislation has been dashed, as Senate Democrats have allowed Republicans to filibuster voting rights bills three times since the start of the year.
Among other things, the failure to pass voting legislation means that with the results of the 2020 census, Republican-controlled state legislatures can gerrymander districts more aggressively than ever before. Gerrymandering — the process of drawing political maps to advantage one party — has gone on for centuries, but the maps Republicans have drawn in the last few months are staggering, and they will define the boundaries of election districts across the country for at least a decade. Ari Berman, who has covered the issue extensively, lays out some stark numbers:
In Georgia, Republicans passed a new congressional map on Monday giving their party 64 percent of US House seats in a state Joe Biden won with 49.5 percent of the vote.
In Ohio, Republicans passed a new congressional map on November 18 giving their party at least 80 percent of seats in a state Donald Trump won with 53 percent of the vote.
In North Carolina, Republicans passed a new congressional map on November 4 giving their party between 71 to 78 percent of seats in a state Trump won with 49.9 percent of the vote.
In Texas, Republicans passed a new congressional map on October 18 giving their party 65 percent of seats in a state Trump won with 52 percent of the vote.
The gerrymandering of state legislative districts has been even more extreme than of federal districts. Because of the way the new maps are drawn, in any state Republicans currently control, it is about to become virtually impossible for Democrats to win legislative majorities, even if a majority of voters cast votes for them. Democrats’ federal delegations from these states are also all but guaranteed to grow smaller, again regardless of the number of total votes they receive.
In case rigging the districts in their favor fails, Republicans, egged on by Trump, have also filled state and local election boards with activists convinced that Biden won the election only through fraud. Many of these activists are willing to do almost anything to stop that perceived fraud from happening again. Since no actual election fraud occurred, what this means in practice is simply ensuring that the right candidate wins regardless of the vote count.
Following recent legislation, the Republican government in Georgia flagrantly removed black Democrats from electoral boards and placed them with white Republicans who parrot Trump’s lies about voter fraud costing him the election, a move the usually dry Reuters wire service described as a “purge.”
Even longtime Republicans aren’t safe unless they toe the new party line. In Wisconsin, Republican law enforcement officials have publicly mused about charging electoral board members with felonies. Referring to the activists who replaced her, one Republican who served on a county electoral board in Michigan for thirteen years recently told Slate, “Every last one of them believes all this fraud happened and that I participated in it. . . . It’s sad. People I’ve known for thirty years are literally attacking my integrity.”
Beyond putting hardcore Trump activists into the boards, Republicans in a number of state legislatures have also introduced bills to give themselves greater influence over the process of counting votes, which has long been considered a technocratic process with little need for partisan intervention.
As the New York Times reported in June, “Republicans have introduced at least 216 bills in 41 states to give legislatures more power over elections officials, according to the States United Democracy Center, a new bipartisan organization that aims to protect democratic norms. Of those, 24 have been enacted into law across 14 states.” While no laws have yet been passed to this effect, an increasing number of Republicans have gone so far as to assert that state legislatures can simply hand the state’s electoral votes to whichever presidential candidate they choose, regardless of the vote in their state.
Crisis Incoming
Given that voter suppression and gerrymandering are already very effective in producing the desired outcomes, it remains to be seen how often these corrupt electoral boards or state legislatures will actually need to intervene. Though Republicans would certainly prefer to win without blatantly overturning electoral results, the events of January 6 show that even mainstream Republicans like Ted Cruz are not above doing so. Indeed, the playbook goes all the way back to 2000.
With the Supreme Court and the federal judiciary in general largely captured by right-wing ideologues, the facts hardly matter. They don’t have to be correct, they just have to manufacture controversy and confusion about the results until a friendly court has time to rule in their favor.
Tactics like storming the Capitol and trying to physically stop the vote count in Democratic strongholds might look silly considered in isolation (though physically stopping the count until they could arrange more favorable circumstances was an important part of Republicans’ successful strategy to hand the presidency to George W. Bush in 2000). However, in reality, these tactics aren’t deployed in isolation but rather as the most visible and dramatic part of a multifaceted strategy.
And as Barton Gellman has extensively reported, the Republicans have learned quickly from Trump’s chaotic attempt to overturn the 2020 election. In fact, the entire wave of new state legislation and electoral board upheaval is meant to knock down the very barriers that stopped the first attempt.
With Republicans set to win more legislative power in 2022 and officials still near-unanimous in their desire to nominate Trump for a rematch against Biden, all of this adds up to an acute crisis of democracy coming in 2024, if not sooner. The question is, who is left to stop it?
A Starbucks barista. (photo: USA TODAY)
The union won a landmark vote at a Starbucks in Buffalo, New York in the United States last week. Now, it’s urging the National Labor Relations Board to reject results of another location’s failed union vote.
The labor group, Workers United, urged the National Labor Relations Board in a filing late Thursday to reject the results of the failed union vote, saying that Starbucks waged a “shock and awe” campaign to intimidate workers. It filed an identical complaint for a store where the election results are still in question.
“The psychological harm on the employees cannot be overstated, since they had to contend with dozens of managers in a frenzy of anti-union propaganda,” the union wrote in the complaints.
When reached for comment, a Starbucks spokesman referred to a Dec. 9 statement in which the company said the results were preliminary “with no immediate changes to our partner relationship as the NLRB process continues.”
The complaints came the same day the labor board certified a victory for the union at a third Buffalo-area store, requiring Starbucks to begin bargaining with the workers.
Mail-in ballots from the Buffalo-area store where the union lost had gone 12-8 against unionization, but the union’s attorney said last week that some votes had gone uncounted. Results at the other store where the union filed a complaint are pending the outcome of voter-eligibility challenges, but the votes counted there trended in favor of the union.
Workers United, an affiliate of the Service Employees International Union, is trying to expand its foothold among the thousands of corporate-run Starbucks restaurants in the U.S. after last week’s win. The union petitioned in August for store-by-store union votes at three restaurants in the Buffalo region.
The labor board has the authority to invalidate election results in response to conduct that could have changed the outcome and prevented workers from making a free choice about whether to unionize. Challenges to election results are considered by regional labor board officials, whose rulings can then be appealed to board members in Washington.
If the labor board certifies the union as the winner in one or more of the elections, Starbucks will be legally required to collectively bargain with workers at any store where the union prevailed. However, employers in that situation have sometimes refused to negotiate until they first have the chance to challenge the agency in federal court.
Mary Hunt, poses for a portrait outside her home in Swartz Creek, Michigan, on August 4. Hunt makes $10 an hour driving people to doctors appointments. She has faced eviction from her manufactured home park. (photo: Elaine Cromie/NPR)
She owns her home outright. But she needs to pay monthly "lot rent" to the park for the little patch of land that it sits on. And the managers of the park, a couple named Stan and Nancy, used to live right here.
"I would call up and say, 'Hey, look, I've got half the rent,' " Hunt says, "I'll bring the rest, you know, next week or whatever." Stan and Nancy would say OK. So she could make it work, even earning just $10 an hour at her job driving elderly patients to doctor's appointments.
But a few years ago, Stan and Nancy retired, a local landowner sold the park, and Hunt, 50, learned that her new landlord was an out-of-state company in the business of buying mobile home parks.
These days, that's not unusual. A generation of mom-and-pop owners of mobile home parks are retiring and looking to sell. And investors and companies are swooping in to buy up these parks. They raise fees and rents for the land under the homes, and evict people who can't pay. Housing advocates say it's a disturbing trend that's happening across the country.
What's more, these companies are getting help doing that from billions of dollars worth of low-interest-rate loans backed by the federal government. And the volume of that financing has risen sharply in recent years.
This trend is hurting the homeowners who can least afford it. For millions of Americans, owning a home in a mobile home park has been an affordable way to keep a roof over their heads. Families living in them make around $32,000 a year.
Members of the Texas National Guard during a news conference with Gov. Greg Abbott, not pictured, in Mission, Texas, Oct. 6, 2021. (photo: Sergio Flores/Bloomberg/Getty Images)
Soldiers patrolling border communities with assault rifles is the latest escalation in Gov. Greg Abbott’s Operation Lone Star.
“They have this aggressive posture with the rifles across their chests,” Treviño Wright said. “We cruise the river four or five times a week on our boat and have not seen anything that would indicate an increase in [migrant] traffic or any sort of increased threat. … So the question is, What are they doing here?”
On Monday, a wildlife camera recorded three armed soldiers on a private road inside the butterfly center, which alarmed Treviño Wright and other employees. The privately owned nonprofit nature preserve hosts several thousand schoolchildren and visitors every year to experience the flora and fauna, which includes several hundred species of butterflies.
“I worry that these young, deployed soldiers, who find themselves in a situation that is not their home and their heads filled with Lord only knows what, could act impulsively or recklessly or even accidentally with tragic consequences,” she said.
Allowing soldiers to patrol with assault rifles is the latest escalation in an ongoing border campaign by Texas Gov. Greg Abbott called Operation Lone Star. Since March, Abbott has deployed more than 10,000 state police officers and soldiers to the Texas border. He has also welcomed soldiers and police from at least 10 other Republican-led states. One billionaire Republican donor in Tennessee, Willis Johnson, funded the deployment of South Dakota’s National Guard to Texas. And last week, Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee announced he’d send 50 more National Guard members in early 2022.
Rick Perry, who was Texas governor from 2000 to 2015, also deployed the state National Guard to the border to assist Border Patrol in surveillance and other support functions. But Abbott is the first Texas governor to send armed soldiers to arrest migrants as quasi-immigration officers.
National Guard members deployed by U.S. presidents are barred from participating in civilian law enforcement duties under the Posse Comitatus Act. But guard members deployed by state leaders have more latitude.
Over the summer, soldiers and state police from the Texas Department of Public Safety, or DPS, began arresting migrants for criminal trespassing in Val Verde County and neighboring Kinney County. Instead of being turned over to Border Patrol, some are being charged with state misdemeanors and prosecuted by Texas counties.
Since much of the Texas border is privately owned, DPS has sent teams to ask landowners to sign agreements allowing them access to their land. The landowner is then listed as the “complainant” on the trespassing charges against migrants. DPS said it plans to extend these arrests to other counties but has yet to expand the initiative.
Treviño Wright said the butterfly center, which is in Hidalgo County, has not signed an agreement allowing soldiers or DPS officers to patrol the center’s land. After discovering that someone had cut through the center’s barbed wire fence, Treviño Wright placed wildlife cameras at the location. Soon after, the center recorded footage of a soldier with a rifle appearing to examine the spot where Treviño Wright said the fence had been cut. Since then, she’s recorded footage of soldiers at the center several times, despite the “No Trespassing” signs posted.
At press events, Abbott has said the flooding of border communities with police and military is necessary due to “the Biden administration’s open-border policies.” But Biden continues to enforce Title 42, an obscure public health regulation the Trump administration invoked to bar asylum-seekers from crossing during the pandemic. And this month, the Trump era’s “Remain in Mexico” program, which forces asylum-seekers to wait in Mexico for their U.S. immigration court dates, was reinstated due to a federal court order.
In September, thousands of Haitian asylum-seekers arrived at the port of entry in Del Rio, Texas; two months later, Abbott announced further militarization of the border. The state launched Operation Steel Curtain to “surge personnel, equipment, and capabilities to anywhere in the state of Texas … so we can repel and block any large caravans and illegal activity coming across,” according to Maj. Mike Perry, the National Guard’s border public affairs officer. Perry said in a November press briefing that DPS and the National Guard were training at the port of entry in Eagle Pass, bringing in Black Hawk and Chinook helicopters and military police with “a contingency reaction force that have non-lethal force and riot gear.”
The Intercept and Type Investigations asked Abbott’s office whether a new threat had been determined that required soldiers to patrol with assault rifles in border communities. A spokesperson for the governor directed questions to the Texas Military Department, which oversees the National Guard. “There’s no new threat on the OLS mission,” a spokesperson for the military department wrote in an email. “Abbott has the authority to arm us at any time should the situation arise.”
When asked about the protocol that soldiers follow for use of lethal force, the spokesperson wrote, “Rules for self-defense are in place … all service members receive training on these rules prior to their deployment on the mission.” The spokesperson said that they could not release detailed information about the rules, however, because “it could endanger our service members and law enforcement officials on the border.”
Treviño Wright is not the only Texan noticing the change. Last Sunday, Elsa Hull, who lives near the Rio Grande in Zapata County, was startled by two armed men in uniform who she says followed her as she walked home from the river. In the encounter, which she filmed on her phone, the two men said they were just checking on her after reports that an individual had come up from the river.
“It just totally freaked me out,” Hull said. “I mean, who are these guys? And what are they doing at my gate? They didn’t have any patches or anything identifying them. One of them was wearing a helmet. Is he expecting bombs to drop from the sky?”
The Intercept and Type Investigations sent Hull’s video and footage from the butterfly center to the Texas Military Department, asking why armed soldiers were on private property and what precautions they’d take in a public setting with schoolchildren and visitors present. We also asked them to confirm that the two men who approached Hull were National Guard members.
The spokesperson responded, “The Texas Military Department has used federal property co-located near the National Butterfly Center while working in support of missions along the Texas-Mexico border. Our service members are under strict guidance to remain on federal property while working in this area.” The spokesperson did not confirm whether the men in Hull’s video were part of the National Guard or explain the presence of soldiers at the privately owned nature preserve.
Treviño Wright and Hull are especially concerned about the lack of information around the protocol governing soldiers patrolling communities and their reasons for being armed. There has been little detail from state officials outside of information they provided to the Center for Immigration Studies — designated an anti-immigrant hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center — for an article the group published in late October.
DPS Director Steve McCraw explained to CIS that soldiers would receive 40 hours of police training in Fourth Amendment rights and use of deadly force. The training was being given by DPS officers at military bases and in the field along the border, officials said. “Under the new initiative,” according to CIS, “soldiers who have undergone the deadly force training will be fully armed and, while trained to understand restrictions on use of force, will be authorized to use it if directly threatened.” The soldiers will not be allowed to pursue fleeing suspects in vehicles, according to the article.
Some Texas Democrats, including Rep. Joaquin Castro, have asked Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas and Attorney General Merrick Garland to investigate Operation Lone Star. “Abbott’s continued misuse of the Texas National Guard has led to an excessive militarization of our border communities,” Castro told The Intercept and Type in an email. “It’s unwarranted, can lead to real consequences and trauma, and is a dangerous way for the governor to try and score political points.”
In a letter sent to Mayorkas and Garland, Castro and several other Democratic members of Congress said Operation Lone Star establishes “a separate state immigration policy … which is wreaking havoc on Texas’s judicial system.” Flooding the border with military and state police has “continued to militarize Texas’s border communities and interfered with the federal immigration system,” the letter went on. “Even more egregiously, these programs have directly led to a violation of state laws and constitutional due process rights.”
Border Patrol Chief Raul Ortiz also voiced concerns about the state’s operation in an interview with Texas Monthly. “I really would prefer to see border security left to the border-security experts,” he said. “I want other agencies’ help; I certainly need it at this time, but coordination has to happen.”
Treviño Wright said she’s more concerned about the conduct of armed soldiers and police in her community than she is about any migrant caravans. “We were just voted one of the best botanical gardens in the state and now we’re crawling with National Guard soldiers,” she said. “Give me a break. This is all fabricated by Abbott for personal and political gain.”
Hull said she’s afraid for her family after coming across the armed soldiers near her home. “I’ve lived here for 20 years,” she said. “And I’ve never had any problems with people crossing, breaking in, or vandalizing anything. This is a peaceful area. But now I’m worried. I don’t want to get shot. I don’t want my kids to get shot. This is just a tragedy waiting to happen.”
Associated Press photographer Mahmoud Illean reacts after being attacked by Israeli police while covering a demonstration in the east Jerusalem neighborhood of Sheikh Jarrah, Friday, Dec. 17, 2021. (photo: Ahmad Gharabli/AFP/AP)
The AP said it was outraged by the violence against staffer Mahmoud Illean, while a prominent journalists’ advocacy group called for disciplinary action against the officers involved.
Illean had been covering a weekly demonstration in the east Jerusalem neighborhood of Sheikh Jarrah, where longtime Palestinian residents are battling efforts by Jewish settlers to evict them from their homes. The case, which has drawn global attention and fueled Israeli-Palestinian tensions, has been before Israel’s Supreme Court for months.
According to Illean, Friday’s demonstration was relatively quiet, with only minor scuffles between Israel’s paramilitary border police and protesters.
He said that about 15 minutes after the demonstration wrapped up, he was approached by a group of border police officers who threw stun grenades toward him.
Video from the scene shows Illean standing in front of a white car when one of the officers approaches him, pushes him backward onto the ground and then proceeds to punch him several times. A second video showed Illean photographing police attacking several other journalists before the officer turned on him.
Illean’s face was bleeding and he was taken to Jerusalem’s Hadassah Hospital for X-rays. He did not suffer any fractures and returned home several hours later with a bruised face and head and back pain.
Israel’s border police is a paramilitary force that often is sent to quell riots, and its officers have been targets of Palestinian attackers. At the same time, its officers have frequently been accused of using excessive force against unarmed protesters and journalists.
“We are outraged by this senseless and unprovoked attack by Israeli police on an AP photographer, who was simply doing his job,” said AP spokeswoman Lauren Easton. “Such violence against journalists is abhorrent and unacceptable.”
The Foreign Press Association, which represents some 400 journalists working for international media in Israel and the Palestinian territories, said Friday’s incident was the latest in a string of attacks on journalists by the border police.
“The Foreign Press Association strongly condemns this behavior, which raises serious questions about the discipline and professionalism of the officers,” the group said. It called for a “serious investigation” and “appropriate disciplinary action against the officer involved.”
Responding to the FPA, police sent a statement saying that officers were clearing out the area after a violent demonstration in which one officer was hit in the head and slightly hurt by a chair thrown by a protester. It gave no explanation as to why Illean was targeted, saying only that relevant authorities would investigate.
Illean has worked for the AP for five years. His image of clashes between Palestinian protesters and Israeli police at Jerusalem’s Al-Aqsa Mosque last May was named one of Time magazine’s top 100 photos of 2021.
The Nathaniel B. Palmer, an ice-faring research ship, glides through the waters of Barilari Bay in western Antarctica, near the Thwaites Glacier. (photo: Adam Jenkins/International Thwaites Glacier Collaboration)
Thwaites, the widest glacier in the world, has doubled its rate of melt in the last 30 years, a researcher said.
A dramatic chain reaction in the ice could occur by 2031, starting with the Thwaites Glacier, said Erin Pettit, a professor at Oregon State University who studies glacier and ice sheet dynamics.
The glacier, a river of flowing ice, is blocked from falling into the sea by the eastern ice shelf, which sits atop an underwater mountain and is disintegrating.
New research Pettit presented to a meeting of the American Geophysical Union in New Orleans suggests the final collapse of the ice shelf may occur "within as little as 5 years" and mark the beginning of the end of the Thwaites Glacier.
The ice at the top of the shelf is newly crisscrossed with cracks that are expanding toward the center of the shelf as quickly as 2 kilometers (1.24 miles) a year, the research found.
Scientists pointed to a zigzag path they say is the likely site for the ice shelf to crack and disintegrate.
Pettit's research is under review for publication in The Cryosphere, a scientific journal.
Thwaites is the “widest glacier in the world” and has “doubled its outflow speed within the last 30 years,” said Ted Scambos, a senior research scientist at the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences and a contributor to the research.
“If Thwaites were to collapse, it would drag most of west Antarctica’s ice with it,” Scambos said in a news release. “So it's critical to get a clearer picture of how the glacier will behave over the next 100 years.”
Thwaites contributes 4 percent of annual global sea level rise, according to the British Antarctic Survey. But if the shelf collapses, that amount could rise to 25 percent, the scientists said.
All the water in the Thwaites Glacier would raise sea levels by 2 feet — but if its collapse triggers nearby glaciers to fall, the global sea level could rise by up to 10 feet, Scambos said.
A series of scientific studies of Thwaites in recent years has shown the enormous glacier is melting more quickly and in ways scientists never expected.
In 2019, scientists discovered a 6-mile-long, 1,000-foot-deep cavity under the glacier that means it lost 14 billion tons of ice, NBC News reported.
Later that year, researchers compared aerial films of Antarctica taken in the 1970s to current radar data, which showed Thwaites was melting much faster than researchers thought.
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