What the end of democracy looks like

"During the more than seven years that I have been warning about the inevitable end of constitutional democracy in the United States, I have almost exclusively focused on the legal mechanics of how this process will play out. Being a law professor, I am inexorably drawn to "on paper" explanations, that is, laying out the procedural mechanisms that Republicans are using to turn the US into a one-party state.

Thus, I have pointed out the various ways in which future presidential elections can be hijacked via strategies that tax lawyers would sardonically describe (in a different context) as "perfectly legal" -- that is, gambits that are apparently within the letter of the law but are still terrible outcomes. The Electoral College exists; the Constitution gives state governments the power to choose electors in utterly non-democratic ways; the Supreme Court has made it clear that Republicans can suppress votes and gerrymander at will; the Court might go even further and endorse the so-called Independent State Legislature theory to cut Democratic governors out of the process; and so on.

Earlier this summer, I pointed out that those mechanisms are ultimately put into operation by people, and we need to understand why so many people have become willing to subvert our republican form of government to maintain power at all costs. These non-mechanical considerations are important in understanding the on-the-ground reality in which all of this will play out. After all, even if Republicans could pull off their autocratic coup bloodlessly (based on the "on paper" possibilities that I have described), they are now encouraging a burn-it-all-down attitude. Will they bother to keep it tidy? Even if they wanted to, could they at this point stop it from becoming utter bloody chaos?

These questions are motivated, of course, by the right-wing freakout regarding the search by federal agents of Donald Trump's house to look for documents that he had illegally taken with him from the White House. (Those documents were apparently not difficult to find upon serving the warrant and searching the grounds.) The response from Trump, Republicans, and the wingnut-overse has been stunning to the point that it actually surprised people (like me) who thought that we had seen the worst.

But even short of the most extreme worst-case scenarios -- an outbreak of terrorist acts against Democrats, bombings of government buildings, and so on -- the terribly fascinating aspect of the Republicans' words this week is that they show the ground-level reality of what a country looks like when one major party simply abandons its commitment to the rule of law. Although I can point out that Republicans have identified the mechanical processes that they will surely use to install themselves in power in perpetuity, a big part of the lived reality is that they have stopped accepting anything like legal restraints on anything that they want to do.

Trump's supporters believe the lies about the 2020 election because they cannot and will not believe that they should ever be disappointed. That attack on the notion of objective reality is now trickling down into every aspect of accountability in government. Once people have accepted such a non-reality, everything else follows. "We didn't lose, because we can't lose," is not the attitude of the citizens of a democratic republic. It is, based on recent evidence, the attitude of nearly the entire Republican Party today."
http://www.dorfonlaw.org/2022/08/what-end-of-democracy-looks-like-in.html#more

Fascist fools..

 

they are not asking "did trump do something wrong?" they are asking "who snitched?"

that attitude is more appropriate for a street gang or la cosa nostra than a political party.

q. what is the difference between donald trump and john gotti?

a. not much. rudy made sure both went to lail.

 

What the OP misses, is the inevitable reaction of the Democratic Party to the tactics described in the OP. They will not just stand around and watch as election loss after election loss after election loss pile up in red and purple states. They will wonder which elections they lost to gerrymandering, which elections they lost to voter suppression tactics, which elections they lost because Trumpists were now 'counting' the ballots, which elections they lost because Trumpist red state legislatures had redirected certification authority away from previously independent county and state commissions and secretarys of state toward 'safer' authority.

Any remotely close result that ends in bitter disappointment will attract a lot of suspicion, and rage as Dems lose ground, despite anticipated demographic or turnout advantages. And that will of course mean that Dems will have to duplicate the dirty tactics in order to compete. The cycle will end up with increasing partisan distrust, and increasing sporatic violence which will spiral.

 

no. i am not at all happy to contemplate where this MUST end.

we have already begun to see the process in some of the repub primaries

 

Bahahahah the Dems LITERALLY raided the former presidents home over documents WHICH HE CREATED that they agreed with him to put under lock and key in an effort to keep him out of the White House.

And y’all have the audacity to sit here and talk about fascist republicans? Lols what a joke

 

Nothing I stated was a lie. I’ll be happy to source them for you so you can apologize if you’d like.

 

Hmm.. The sad part is this is what democrats will do. Talk about themselves, and their gambits, and attribute it to their political opposition. And believe that folks will just believe them. This is going to be a hard sell. What with liberal assassins attacking the justices of the USSC, The weaponization of the FBI by democrats, the weaponization of the IRS, etc. It's hard to imagine a more authoritarian non democratic model, and democrats are just trying to brush that away and call out their opposition and denigrate them in this manner.

Sorry. Your little BS screed is just that. Fascim? How about just naked authoritarianism of democrats.. We'll go with that and call democrats the horror they are these days.

 

The talking points are still coming by they still suck!

 

Indeed.

 

And yet we aren't the party of:

• heavily armed raids over paper work disputes,
• burning down our cities,
• catch and release for dangerous felons
• doubling the number of IRS agents.

When Republicans screw up, that's the story.
When Dems screw up the GOP's response is the story:

REPUBLICAN POUNCES! Trump seizes on FBI search to fuel backlash. “A day after the FBI search of his Florida resort, it was as if Trump had never been away, as he reapplied his grip on the national psyche by orchestrating a fierce backlash against the bureau, the Justice Department and the Biden White House, which has said it had no advance warning of the FBI activity.”

Clearly the raid failed if the WH, DOJ, and AG are all distancing themselves from it.

​

 

To the OP, the move on stonewalling Republican Representatives is being overshadowed by the reaction to the Mar-A-Lago search, for example Scott Perry’s phone was seized as well as warrants served on PA state Representatives.

DOJ is farther along in it’s investigation(s) than many anticipated and the Republican Party’s actions are being scrutinized.

I too have been taken aback by the gaslighting around the Mar-A-Lago search. It’s a step beyond albeit I shouldn’t have been so naive about the recklessness. Deny, attack, and reverse is the playbook I just didn’t expect it to come at all levels.

I suspect that means the DOJ is getting closer to blowing all that lead up to 1/6 open.

 

The End of US Constitutional Liberal Democracy? Oh I don't think so, rather the end of a bunch of left wing wanna-be totalitarian fools.

Beto at rally: Stop laughing at me, "motherf****r"

We'll just keep laughing, we find your rage hilarious.

​

Now this pretentious clown thinks he's a real tough guy.

"O’Rourke took aim (SWIDT?) at the progressive bete noire AR-15 rifle, used by the shooter in Uvalde, and insisted that this had to be banned. O’Rourke argued that the AR-15 was designed for combat — falsely — and that it had been designed for use in Vietnam — again, falsely. When O’Rourke tried mimicking a combat stance to underscore both of those false points, someone in the audience understandably laughed out loud."

"The rifle we know now as the AR-15 was not designed for combat — not in Vietnam, nor anywhere else. The semi-automatic AR-15 entirely services domestic sales, including significant use by law enforcement agencies."

"Beto’s history is entirely laughable, but so are his political instincts here. He’s clearly talking to a small group of supporters in this incident. What politician calls his own supporters “motherf*****s”? Rather than ask what the criticism might be, O’Rourke’s first instinct is to attack and posture himself as supremely virtuous rather than defend his argument. That’s a bad look for any politician, but especially risible for a gun-control radical stumping for office in Texas, of all places."

Just another in the group of blundering fools that includes the heavily armed blundering thugs that just raid Melania's panty drawer because she is the wife of their boss' chief political rival. These fools are done, they are desperate and they are making fools of themselves. The voters will straighten them out, in just 89 days.

​

 

This country has never been closer to collapse into a banana Republic than the moment nancy kicked Jordan et al off the committee. I had been marching inexorably coser ever since.

 

Democracy ends when the left stages a military coup.

 

I am enormously sympathetic to your concerns. In the span of 40 years we have all witnessed a relatively moderate GOP morph in to the radicalized POT. But not radicalized with respect to issues the party was traditionally at odds with the Dems over. Rather, radicalized in unforeseen ways. Most succinctly put, radicalized in their rejection of objective truth.

I agree they are working very hard to compromise democracy as we have known it. Both procedurally, and by the insidious ways they erode how we perceive the ways democracy should work. More specifically, they have managed to call in to question the efficacy, even the possibility, of majority rule by abusing the institutional power given to the minority by the Founders.

However, as frightfully apathetic as those on our side of the aisle are (Repubs work harder at their chosen nefarious goals), and how bleak things appear at this moment in time, I have faith their efforts will ultimately be frustrated. If for no other reason than I have faith the will of the majority will prevail. I include self identified moderates in the majority. People who may have been duped by a professional conman for a while but possess the wisdom not to allow a true force of evil to put an end in this experiment in democracy.

 

It didn't end when Trump attempted a bloodless coup. But then theirs is a work in progress.

 

President of El Salvador bashes US government over FBI raid on Mar-a-Lago. “The leader of El Salvador chided the FBI’s raid on Mar-a-Lago, rhetorically asking what the United States would say if he did something similar” to his chief political opponent and sent heavily armed thugs to rummaged through his wife's closets.

​

""What would the US Government say, if OUR police raided the house of one of the main possible contenders of OUR 2024 presidential election?" Bukele, el Presidente de El Salvador, asked.

 

I'm not sure which is more off-putting about the OP screed, the lack of faith in American democracy or the whining about the political success of those with whom the author disagrees.

 

Who installed the director of the FBI?
Who installed the judge that signed the warrant?
Who is refusing to release the details of the warrant?

It’s all the same person — it isn’t a democrat
Three guesses?

 

Wrong; here's what the end of Democracy looks like:

 

The democrat aligned deep state is a fascist joke

 

Well you got one out of three right.

He did install Wray.

The judge however is not installed by trump.

And Trump just demanded the release of the warrant

Y’all better pray there’s more than just some random documents that needed to be returned on that warrant lol

 

trump cannot “demand” anything — he can release it himself however
Think he will?

Did he or did he not increase the severity of theft of confidential records? Should he be held to the standard of the law?

 

Oops wrong link

https://www.foxnews.com/politics/do...nd-fbis-mar-a-lago-raid-release-documents-now

There we go

 

What he publicly says is irrelevant, there is a process where he will have to certify that to the judge.

Let’s see if he follows through