Comments by "freein2339" (@freein2339) on "Roland Clashes With Angela Stanton-King Over Trump's Misleading #SB2020 Ad, Criminal Justice Reform" video.
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@echo5226 Trump lied about covid.....When: Thursday, February 27
The claim: The outbreak would be temporary: “It’s going to disappear. One day, it’s like a miracle—it will disappear.”
The truth: Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, warned days later that he was concerned that “as the next week or two or three go by, we’re going to see a lot more community-related cases.” He was right—the virus has not disappeared.
When: Multiple times
The claim: “Coronavirus numbers are looking MUCH better, going down almost everywhere,” and cases are “coming way down.”
The truth: When Trump made these claims in May, coronavirus cases were either increasing or plateauing in the majority of American states. Over the summer, the country saw a second surge even greater than its first in the spring
When: Wednesday, June 17
The claim: The pandemic is “fading away. It’s going to fade away.”
The truth: Trump made this claim ahead of his rally in Tulsa, Oklahoma, when the country was still seeing at least 20,000 new daily cases and a second spike in infections was beginning.
When: Thursday, July 2
The claim: The pandemic is “getting under control.”
The truth: Trump’s claim came as the country’s daily cases doubled to about 50,000, a higher count than was seen at the beginning of the pandemic, and as the number continued to rise, fueled by infections in the South and the West.
When: Saturday, July 4
The claim: “99%” of COVID-19 cases are “totally harmless.”
The truth: The virus can still cause tremendous suffering if it doesn’t kill a patient, and the WHO has said that about 15 percent of COVID-19 cases can be severe, with 5 percent being critical. Fauci has rejected Trump’s claim, saying the evidence shows that the virus “can make you seriously ill” even if it doesn’t kill you.
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@echo5226 More lies from adolf trump concerning covid....When: Monday, July 6
The claim: “We now have the lowest Fatality (Mortality) Rate in the World.”
The truth: The U.S. had neither the lowest mortality rate nor the lowest case-fatality rate when Trump made this claim. As of July 13, the case-fatality rate—the ratio of deaths to confirmed COVID-19 cases—was 4.1 percent, which placed the U.S. solidly in the middle of global rankings. At the time, it had the world’s ninth-worst mortality rate, with 41.33 deaths per 100,000 people, according to Johns Hopkins University.
When: Multiple times
The claim: Mexico is partly to blame for COVID-19 surges in the Southwest.
The truth: Even before Latin America’s COVID-19 cases began to rise, the U.S. and Mexico had jointly agreed in March to restrict nonessential land travel between the two countries, and U.S. Customs and Border Protection says illegal border crossings are down compared with last year. Health experts say blaming Mexican immigrants for surges is misguided, especially when most of the individuals crossing the border are U.S. citizens who live nearby.
When: Multiple times
The claim: Children are “virtually immune” to COVID-19.
The truth: The science is not definitive, but that doesn’t mean children are immune. Studies in the U.S. and China have suggested that kids are less likely than adults to be infected, and more likely to have mild symptoms, but can still spread the virus to their family members and others. The CDC has said that about 7 percent of COVID-19 cases and less than 0.1 percent of COVID-19-related deaths have occurred in children.
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@echo5226 When: Thursday, August 27
The claim: Trump “launched the largest national mobilization since World War II” against COVID-19, and America “developed, from scratch, the largest and most advanced testing system in the world.”
The truth: These claims are incorrect and misleading. The federal government’s coronavirus response has been roundly criticized as a failure because of flawed and delayed testing, entrenched inequality that has amplified the virus’s effects, and chaotic federal leadership that’s left much of the country’s response up to the states to handle. Trump vacillated on fully invoking the Defense Production Act in March, set off international panic when he mistakenly said he was banning all travel from European nations, and was slow to support social-distancing measures nationwide. Widespread use of the DPA was still rare in July, despite continued shortages of medical supplies.
When: Multiple times
The claim: America is “rounding the corner” and “rounding the final turn” of the pandemic.
The truth: Trump made these claims before and after the country registered 200,000 coronavirus deaths. As the winter approaches, the number of coronavirus cases is increasing in almost every state; in the last week of October, cases rose faster than reported tests in 47 of the 50 states, according to the COVID Tracking Project.
When: Multiple times
The claim: The media is overblowing fears about the virus ahead of Election Day.
The truth: There is no media conspiracy to hype up the virus threat. Cases and hospitalizations are rising across the country, and America set and broke multiple daily case records during the last week of October, nearing 100,000 cases in a single day on Friday.
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@echo5226 adolf trump was a failure....In the absence of a vaccine, experts agree that widespread testing is a crucial means to control the spread of the coronavirus, but the Trump administration has undercut and politicized efforts to make enough tests available.
The president has repeatedly expressed a desire to suppress reported coronavirus infection numbers, even declaring at a Tulsa rally that testing should be slowed to stop new cases from being discovered. Although a White House adviser later claimed the president was joking, the administration has worked to block legislation that would fund testing and contact tracing. One of the president’s top advisers on the coronavirus, Dr. Scott Atlas, who lacks expertise in infection diseases or epidemiology—he is a radiologist by training—also advocated against widespread testing. Some government experts have accused him of peddling junk science. Dr. Atlas resigned as Trump’s pandemic adviser after feuding with health experts and repeatedly promoting various unproven theories related to the pandemic.
Additionally, in August 2020, Trump administration officials from the White House and the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) pressured the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to stop recommending coronavirus testing for people without symptoms, despite scientific research showing that asymptomatic people can infect others with the virus. The news broke later that HHS and White House staffers wrote the recommendation, rather than CDC scientists; it bypassed the CDC’s standard scientific review process and was published despite objections from CDC staff. Local health departments and experts condemned the change, and some CDC scientists told health officials to ignore the agency’s official guidance. The CDC ultimately reversed the guidance and again recommended that asymptomatic people who might have come into contact with the coronavirus should seek testing.
The administration has also failed to spend billions of dollars Congress allocated for expanded testing and contact tracing. Lawmakers have been unable to obtain a clear explanation from the administration as to why.
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@echo5226 The Trump administration has repeatedly censored and attacked preeminent government scientists, whose research and analysis would normally be leading the national response to a public health crisis like Covid-19.
The administration has implemented new policies to block government scientists from communicating with the public. For instance, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) stopped holding media briefings and instituted a restrictive media policy for agency scientists receiving inquiries for information about Covid-19 — even though these scientists have traditionally been allowed to speak to the press. The Trump administration also prevented National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Diseases Director Dr. Anthony Fauci and other senior health officials from communicating with the public, instead requiring that all communications be controlled by Vice President Mike Pence (who was accused of politicizing another public health crisis as governor of Indiana). A top political aide at the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) instructed Dr. Fauci’s press team that Fauci was to refrain from advising that children wear masks. The White House also prevented Fauci from testifying before the House of Representatives, because (in the president’s words) the chamber was full of “Trump haters.” He blocked other experts from testifying before Congress at all, including the CDC director, who was invited to testify about how to reopen schools safely. (Fauci and others eventually testified before a House committee.)
Officials who do speak out have faced retaliation. In February 2020, for instance, Dr. Nancy Messonnier, director of the National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases at the CDC, warned that the coronavirus would be severely disruptive to daily life. Her comments reportedly infuriated the president; she was sidelined from further coronavirus briefings and nearly fired. Dr. Rick Bright, a federal health official with many years of experience at HHS, was reassigned after suggesting that the Trump-touted drug hydroxychloroquine should be tested before being used to treat Covid-19 patients. He maintains that he continues to face retaliation in his new role.
In July 2020, the White House embarked on what appears to be a new and disturbing campaign to sideline Dr. Fauci. A White House official characterized as “concern[ing]” assessments and guidance that Dr. Fauci provided early in the pandemic that were later revised after experts developed a better understanding of Covid-19. In an unusual move, White House Trade Adviser Peter Navarro published an op-ed — which the White House denies clearing — claiming that Fauci had been “wrong about everything I have interacted with him on.” The president stated publicly that Fauci was an "alarmist” and had “made a lot of mistakes.” When Trump resumed public briefings on the coronavirus in late July, he did not include Dr. Fauci.
President Trump also attacked Dr. Deborah Birx, the government’s coronavirus response coordinator, as “pathetic” and made a baseless accusation that she changed her scientific assessment due to political pressure from House Speaker Nancy Pelosi when Dr. Birx accurately noted that the United States faced broad community spread of Covid-19 in August 2020.
President Trump claimed that the “deep state” at the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) was intentionally delaying research on Covid-19 treatments until after election day, and a politically-appointed HHS spokesperson accused career government scientists of “sedition” in their response to the Covid-19 pandemic, claiming without evidence that the CDC was operating a left-wing “resistance unit” dedicated to undermining President Trump. In September 2020, Trump directly contradicted the director of the C.D.C. by promising that a vaccine would be developed in a matter of weeks and “go to the public immediately” while also casting doubts on the value of wearing masks.
At the height of the presidential election campaign in October 2020, Trump attacked Dr. Fauci as a “disaster” and complained that “people are tired of hearing Fauci and these idiots.” He also suggested that he would have fired Dr. Fauci were it not for the negative press coverage that would result. (At the time, Trump lacked the power to fire Dr. Fauci, although he recently issued an executive order that may allow him to do so.) Even as Trump was attacking Dr. Fauci, however, his campaign used a misleading clip of Dr. Fauci — without his permission —in a campaign advertisement, falsely suggesting that Fauci had praised Trump’s response to the coronavirus.
These abuses are only the latest in a long history of Trump administration efforts to ignore, censor, and punish government scientists who contradict its political messaging. These attacks on science deprive lawmakers, healthcare workers, and the American public of critical information about Covid-19, undermine trust in government, and ultimately hamper the administration’s ability to effectively manage this public health crisis.
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@echo5226 Complete failure....Throughout the pandemic, President Trump has made repeated false and unsupported statements about Covid-19, contradicting scientific research and the advice of government experts. His statements have caused confusion, sown distrust of government, and politicized commonsense public health measures, making it difficult to control the spread of the coronavirus and stabilize the economy.
As the first coronavirus cases were reported in the United States and top government health officials expressed concern that the virus would spread throughout the country for months, President Trump claimed that the number of infections would soon "be down to close to zero" and that the virus would disappear "like a miracle." He has also falsely claimed that the mortality rate for Covid-19 is like that for the flu, that 99 percent of cases are “totally harmless,” and that the United States has “one of the lowest mortality rates [for the disease] in the world.” The Trump administration has encouraged state officials to disseminate false information. Vice President Mike Pence told governors to spread the president’s misleading claim that the uptick in coronavirus cases is due to an increase in testing.
Trump reportedly acknowledged that he had intentionally downplayed the threat of the virus during interviews with journalist Bob Woodward in February and March 2020, stating that although he recognized the deadly nature of the disease, “I wanted to always play it down . . . I still like playing it down, because I don’t want to create a panic.”
In late March 2020, with cases growing exponentially, and less than two weeks after many states and localities instituted lockdowns, Trump called for the reopening of the American economy by Easter based on the advice of business associates, and contrary to the counsel of health officials. Skeptical of models created by public health experts to predict the spread of the coronavirus, the president and his advisers instead relied on an econometric “cubic model” created by former Council of Economic Advisers Chair Kevin Hassett, who has no background in infectious diseases. Hassett’s model, which projected that Covid-19 deaths would stop completely by mid-May, was a preset Microsoft Excel curve-fitting function rather than a science-based analysis of coronavirus infection data.
The president has also misled the American public about preventative measures, cures, and treatments for the disease. He made the baseless projection that a vaccine would be available within three to four months after the outbreak began, which Dr. Fauci later explained was not possible. President Trump has pressured health officials to expedite the timeline for development and told reporters that a vaccine may become available before the November presidential election. The president has also repeatedly promoted the use of the antimalarial drugs chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine to treat Covid-19 — going so far as to announce that he was taking the latter as a preventative measure — despite a lack of scientific evidence of their effectiveness and against the advice of government experts. And most notoriously, President Trump suggested that Covid-19 could be cured by injecting disinfectants or by "hit[ting] the body with a tremendous" light, a patently unscientific — and dangerous — claim that led to an uptick in calls to poison control centers due to exposure to cleaning agents.
In September 2020, as the death toll from Covid-19 surpassed 200,000 in the United States, Trump again claimed that the coronavirus would “go away” and that the United States was “rounding the corner” — statements contradicted by Dr. Fauci. Trump also falsely claimed that Covid-19 affects “virtually nobody” younger than 18, despite reports from the CDC and the WHO that young people play a significant role in spreading the virus and reports of children being hospitalized in rising numbers. He later continued to mock others for wearing masks and, just hours before announcing his own diagnosis, claimed that "the end of the pandemic is in sight, and next year will be one of the greatest years in the history of our country." Trump later repeated at a rally, held at the White House, that the pandemic would “disappear.” In October 2020, the White House’s Office of Science and Technology Policy issued a press release that listed “ending the Covid-19 pandemic” as one of President Trump’s greatest accomplishments during his first term in office.
President Trump’s false and unsupported statements regarding the spread of and treatments for the disease have contributed to the United States’ failure to manage the crisis effectively. The president’s comments, as well of those of his allies in government and the media, have an impact on how seriously Americans view the threat of Covid-19 and the degree to which they adhere to guidance from public health experts. Opinion polls show a large and growing partisan gap in beliefs regarding the health threat of Covid-19. Consequently, public health measures like wearing masks and maintaining social distance have become divisive partisan issues, notwithstanding their grounding in scientific research. A Cornell University study of global English-language media found that President Trump was by far the most important single source of coronavirus misinformation — linked to almost 38 percent of misinformation.
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@echo5226 The cause of tens of thousands to die .....President Trump’s promotion of the antimalarial drugs chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine as Covid-19 treatments, despite scientific studies showing their ineffectiveness, has extended to federal agencies spending money on and officially recommending the drugs.
The president pressured government officials to push for use of the drugs as treatment. Dr. Rick Bright, an expert at the Department of Health and Human Services, was reassigned after he objected to the use of hydroxychloroquine to treat Covid-19 patients without first testing its effectiveness. The Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) purchased $208,000 worth of hydroxychloroquine to treat veterans, despite VA hospital data showing that veterans treated with the drug died at a 17 percent higher rate than others. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) issued guidance promoting the prescription of hydroxychloroquine, citing only anecdotal evidence. The CDC later removed the guidance, while the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) withdrew its emergency authorization for use of the drug to treat Covid-19, based on studies showing that hydroxychloroquine does not improve health outcomes. Political officials at the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) delayed the publication of a subsequent CDC report showing the ineffectiveness of hydroxychloroquine.
Additionally, in defiance of the emergency FDA authorization limiting the use of hydroxychloroquine to hospitals and clinical trials, the White House ordered the distribution of 23 million tablets of the drug from a federal stockpile, including to retail pharmacies. Although FDA guidance dictated that stockpile supplies should only have been released at the request of state governments, the Trump administration did not notify state officials about the large-scale distribution of hydroxychloroquine in their jurisdictions. The administration also provided a $765 million loan to Kodak to produce precursor ingredients for hydroxychloroquine, although it later put the deal on hold following criticism of Kodak’s suitability for a loan and allegations of associated insider trading.
In the meantime, however, the administration’s promotion of hydroxychloroquine and similar drugs as an appropriate Covid-19 treatment resulted in prescriptions increasing by a factor of 46, leaving patients who needed the drugs to treat other conditions unable to find supplies.
In a similar fashion, President Trump created confusion about another potential Covid-19 treatment, convalescent blood plasma, when he made misleading statements about its effectiveness and accused the FDA of delaying access to therapeutics shortly before the start of the Republican National Convention. Immediately thereafter, the FDA issued an emergency use authorization for plasma, even though senior government scientists had cautioned against doing so. As part of the rushed rollout, FDA Commissioner Dr. Stephen Hahn exaggerated the demonstrated benefits of blood plasma treatment, for which he later apologized. FDA spokeswoman Emily Miller, a conservative media personality filling a role that normally goes to a career agency staffer, also circulated the inaccurate information about blood plasma before Dr. Hahn fired her.
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@echo5226 Complete failure...adolf trump..
President Trump’s defenders are expressing anguish that his convulsive exit has tarnished his supposedly respectable record. Here is another oft-repeated deception demanding correction. Trumpism failed as much as Trump did. Not only was the now-former president a threat to the norms necessary for healthy democratic governance, his incompetent management of the federal government produced a remarkably thin legacy—and for that the country should be grateful.
Trump’s failures on policy are wide and varied. Much focus is, for understandable reasons, on the administration’s bungled response to the COVID-19 pandemic. But to appreciate the failure of Trumpism as a political program, the former president should be assessed on what he did to address the two issues central to his political ascent: immigration and trade.
His two immediate predecessors tried to fix the nation’s immigration laws, which have long needed reform. They failed to secure reform legislation largely because of the growing, and misguided, determination among some Republicans to embrace the most restrictive immigration stance possible, as evidenced in their refusal to support a humane and realistic resolution for persons already residing in the United States unlawfully. There are millions of people in this circumstance, and yet the implication of the hardline Republican position—which Trump amplified to great political effect in his 2015-2016 campaign—is that all of them should be deported.
That was never a realistic option, for good reason. The vast majority of people who would be affected by a mass deportation policy are law-abiding, have jobs and families, and pay taxes. Americans have no stomach for seeing millions of their neighbors deported to countries that the affected immigrants left long ago, or had never even seen before.
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And yet, even after embracing such an absolutist and unrealistic policy, Trump was still in a strong position to deliver a legislative resolution if he played his cards right. Both the House and Senate were under Republican control in 2017 and 2018. He campaigned on “fixing” immigration, and won. But getting a bill through Congress would have required compromising with congressional Democrats, and jettisoning “no amnesty” as a battle cry for political rallies and cable television. Cutting a deal, and embracing some version of a realistic resolution, would have enraged a small portion of the president’s political coalition, but it also would have produced a defining and lasting shift in immigration policy for which the president could have claimed credit.
So the opportunity was there for the taking—and Trump whiffed. He and his allies decided it was too politically risky—or substantively unattractive because at least some immigrants would receive legal status—to walk back his many ill-advised hardline statements committing themselves to no compromises. They preferred to implement what they could through administrative action.
And where did that get them? Nowhere. Led by his aides, Trump was able to implement harsh revisions to some policies, and in the process cause much harm to immigrant families and to desperate refugees. That should not be minimized or forgotten. He also modestly accelerated the replacement of a portion of the structure on the southern border—with construction of a grand total of 47 miles of entirely new barrier occurring since 2017—but he never built the entirety of his promised 2,000-mile “wall” and he certainly never got Mexico to pay for any of it, as he claimed he would.
Legal immigration has fallen during Trump’s term, but that is due mainly to the deep downturn in the U.S. economy that coincided with mismanagement of the COVID-19 pandemic. Despite all the talk, illegal immigration has not stopped or changed appreciably over the past four years. That Trump never implemented a “round them up” plan is a relief, but it also means the immigration revolution he promised his supporters never took place.
And because none of Trump’s immigration policies were passed as laws, most will be reversed by the Biden team, although some may take longer to unwind than others. In one prominent instance, the decision to overturn President Obama’s DACA program, the Trump administration’s actions have already been rejected by the Supreme Court.
The images associated with Trump’s immigration policies—especially the images of children separated from their parents and placed in cages—will remain in the public mind long beyond the policies themselves. By sometime in mid-2021, it will be hard to detect what effect Trump had on national immigration policy.
On trade, Trump was just as ineffectual. He misled his supporters by claiming, falsely, that his predecessors had purposefully agreed to unbalanced trade deals that favored foreign goods over American products. In particular, he railed against America’s trade deficit, and promised to eliminate it. He said the new deals he would negotiate would bring back millions of manufacturing jobs to America.
The trade deficit is not a meaningful metric of effective trade policy, but it is what Trump highlighted when inciting populist resentment toward previous agreements and thus is relevant for assessing his policies. Three years into Trump’s term, the trade deficit had barely changed, and it widened in 2020 as the economy fell into recession. The bilateral trade deficit with Mexico also widened under Trump’s watch, and, as of 2019, the trade deficit with China was essentially unchanged. At the end of 2020, the number of manufacturing jobs in the United States was level with where it was when President Obama left office.
President Trump’s defenders counter that he reset the conversation with China by imposing large tariffs—something his predecessors were too timid to do. That’s true. So give him credit for blowing past the ill-advised caution that led others to be overly soft with China.
Unfortunately, Trump reduced U.S. leverage by more than what was gained through the tariffs by unilaterally withdrawing from the Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP) at the beginning of his term. TPP would have further isolated China economically by bringing the United States and eleven trading partners closer together. Instead, Trump has tried to go it alone and take on China without any meaningful coordination with our traditional allies. The result is that China has been able to slow-walk its commitments, such as they were, in the bilateral deal struck with Trump, even as it has cut a more meaningful agreement with the European Union, and thus further undermined U.S. leverage.
On trade deals more generally, Trump and his team railed against the multilateral system that the United States built over seven decades, and yet they never articulated an alternative vision. Displacing current global rules with exclusively bilateral agreements is a nonstarter; there are no takers for such an approach, even among U.S. allies. Which is why the overall global trading system operates today much as it did before Trump took office..
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@echo5226 Trump’s failures on policy extend to many other spheres:
He never produced the oft-promised replacement plan for the Affordable Care Act.
He never implemented a sustainable policy for lowering the costs of prescription drugs (his last-minute gambit to tie some pricing to international benchmarks is highly likely to be blocked in court, and he abandoned the idea of $200 discount cards in his final days in office).
He never proposed, much less secured, an infrastructure plan.
And he ran up federal spending and left the country more vulnerable than ever to a debt crisis—this after promising in his 2016 campaign to pay off the entire national debt by 2024.
The president’s defenders contend his tax and regulatory policies jumpstarted economic growth. As with immigration, most of the cited regulatory changes are reversible, and thus fleeting, and will be changed quickly by the new administration. And the tax cuts were passed in 2017 despite the government’s growing fiscal problems and the GOP’s abandonment of spending restraint. Lower taxation is a fine idea if it can be implemented in the context of a sustainable fiscal plan. But Trump cut taxes in a way that has only strengthened the case for a countervailing tax hike to head off fiscal calamity. Significant parts of the 2017 law are set to expire automatically, and it would not be a surprise if its centerpiece, the reduction in the corporate tax, were partially reversed within the next two years.
And then, of course, there is the pandemic, and Trump’s catastrophic response to it. Trump’s positive policy legacy was nearly nonexistent even before the country was hit with the worst public health emergency in a century. It was a moment that called out for steady national leadership, and thus was an opportunity for the president to rise to the occasion and navigate an unforeseen and serious threat to human health and the nation’s economic well-being. He failed this test in every possible way. In a matter of months, he lost interest in trying to manage the immense fallout. The calamity he partially caused is still unfolding.
Trump’s apologists and defenders want the media and the public to focus on what they say were his policy achievements. There were some, of course. But they do not come close to outweighing the damage the president inflicted on the country. Trump was a failure in every way, substantively and morally.
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@echo5226 The evidence is clear: identification requirements for voting reduce turnout among low-income and minority voters. And the particular restrictions imposed by Republican lawmakers—limiting the acceptable forms of identification, ending opportunities for student voting, reducing hours for early voting—certainly do appear aimed at Democratic voters...Indeed, in a column for right-wing clearinghouse WorldNetDaily, longtime conservative activist Phyllis Schlafly acknowledged as much with a defense of North Carolina’s new voting law, which has been criticized for its restrictions on access, among other things. Here’s Schlafly:..“The reduction in the number of days allowed for early voting is particularly important because early voting plays a major role in Obama’s ground game. The Democrats carried most states that allow many days of early voting, and Obama’s national field director admitted, shortly before last year’s election, that ‘early voting is giving us a solid lead in the battleground states that will decide this election.’
“The Obama technocrats have developed an efficient system of identifying prospective Obama voters and then nagging them (some might say harassing them) until they actually vote. It may take several days to accomplish this, so early voting is an essential component of the Democrats’ get-out-the-vote campaign.”
She later adds that early voting “violates the spirit of the Constitution” and facilitates “illegal votes” that “cancel out the votes of honest Americans.” I’m not sure what she means by “illegal votes,” but it sounds an awful lot like voting by Democratic constituencies: students, low-income people, and minorities.
Schlafly, it should be noted, isn’t the first Republican to confess the true reason for voter-identification laws. Among friendly audiences, they can’t seem to help it.
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@echo5226 Pennsylvania House Majority Leader Mike Turzai told a gathering of Republicans that their voter identification law would “allow Governor Romney to win the state of Pennsylvania.” That summer, at an event hosted by the Heritage Foundation, former Wall Street Journal columnist John Fund conceded that Democrats had a point about the GOP’s focus on voter ID, as opposed to those measures—such as absentee balloting—that are vulnerable to tampering. “I think it is a fair argument of some liberals that there are some people who emphasize the voter ID part more than the absentee ballot part because supposedly Republicans like absentee ballots more and they don’t want to restrict that,” he said.
After the election, former Florida GOP chairman Jim Greer told The Palm Beach Post that the explicit goal of the state’s voter-ID law was Democratic suppression. “The Republican Party, the strategists, the consultants, they firmly believe that early voting is bad for Republican Party candidates,” Greer told the Post. “It’s done for one reason and one reason only ... ‘We’ve got to cut down on early voting because early voting is not good for us,’” he said. Indeed, the Florida Republican Party imposed a host of policies, from longer ballots to fewer precincts in minority areas, meant to discourage voting. And it worked. According to one study, as many as 49,000 people were discouraged from voting in November 2012 as a result of long lines and other obstacles.
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@echo5226 Republicans and the broader conservative movement have been trashing democracy and pushing voter suppression for decades — because they know that their oligarchic project is unpopular and they can’t win fair and square.....While it’s become commonplace since 2016 to cast Trump and his disregard for democracy as “unprecedented,” the conviction that the “wrong” people should not be allowed to vote — and, crucially, that Republicans cannot win if they do — has been central to the Republican Party and the broader conservative movement for decades.
As Bill Kristol, one of the many conservatives to attempt a late-in-life “never Trump” reinvention, admitted recently, “We [Republicans] lost faith in democracy. We lost faith that we could compete for votes and win elections. Therefore, you’ve got to start restricting the electorate, and that’s very bad for democratic principles and very bad for a political party.”
But, despite Kristol’s insistence otherwise, this “loss of faith” was no recent occurrence.
From civil rights opponents in the 1950s to the participants in the Miami-Dade protest to Trump Republicans sitting on the Supreme Court today, the GOP has been represented for decades by a parade of well-dressed, superficially respectable conservatives dismissing voter disenfranchisement with the absurd refrain of “We’re a republic, not a democracy.”
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