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ken paxton
Beware the Republican Plot to Steal the 2024 Election
From Georgia to Arizona, Nevada to Michigan, Republicans are mounting an all-out assault on the election process that journalist Ari Berman refers to as a “five-alarm fire for democracy.”
Aug 31, 2024
The “Party of Lincoln,” as Republicans call themselves, seems intent on undermining just about everything President Abraham Lincoln lived and died for. This includes Republican efforts to upend the way elections are run, by restricting who gets to vote, how voting is conducted, and how votes are counted and certified.
The outcome of the tight presidential race between former U.S. President Donald Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris will hinge on the votes in a handful of swing states. From Georgia to Arizona, Nevada to Michigan, Republicans are mounting an all-out assault on the election process that journalist Ari Berman refers to as a “five-alarm fire for democracy.”
“It appears that Georgia Republicans are laying the groundwork not to certify the presidential election if Kamala Harris wins,” Berman said on the Democracy Now! news hour. “They’re doing exactly what Trump wanted them to do in 2020. Trump made Georgia the epicenter of the attempt to try to overturn the election. He asked local and State Board of Elections and election officials not to certify the election. They refused to do so; they followed the law. It seems like in 2024 they’re going to extraordinary lengths to try to implement the measures that failed in 2020, to try to rig the election for Trump.”
The Republican Party of today, desperate to suppress the votes of people of color, could not be further from the Party of Lincoln.
Georgia Republicans altered how counties count and certify votes. The Democratic Party of Georgia, the Democratic National Committee, and 10 Democratic county election officials from across Georgia have sued, seeking to roll back the changes. Their lawsuit argues, “Georgia’s State Election Board has passed a host of last-minute rules that threaten to sow chaos and impede the vote-canvassing process.”
Berman warns: “These state and local election boards have been taken over, in some cases, by election deniers, by MAGA extremists…The administration of elections matters so much because you can cast a vote, you can have your vote counted, but it doesn’t actually matter until votes are certified.”
In Texas, the Republican-controlled state government has for years tried to restrict voting in districts where Democratic candidates do well. Donald Trump won Texas by over five percentage points in 2020, but President Joe Biden won the cities of Dallas, Fort Worth, Houston, Austin, and El Paso as well as the Rio Grande Valley.
Texas Gov. Greg Abbott announced this week that he has purged over 1 million voters from Texas voter rolls. This increasingly common tactic inevitably removes legally-registered voters, often through faulty data screens that target likely Democratic voters.
Meanwhile, Texas’ Republican Attorney General Ken Paxton, who’s currently agreed to do community service to avoid a felony criminal securities fraud trial, and survived an unrelated impeachment trial in the Republican-controlled state senate, has been raiding nonprofit organizations that provide services to immigrant and Latino communities.
Last week, under Paxton’s orders, the homes of a dozen members of LULAC, the League of United Latin American Citizens, were raided and searched by Texas authorities, including SWAT teams. One activist’s door was broken down. Texas House candidate Cecilia Castellano, running for an open seat to represent Uvalde, the town devastated by one of the worst school shootings in U.S. history, had her home raided. Government agents took her cell phone and, weeks ahead of election day, threw her campaign into chaos.
LULAC said in a statement, “Attorney General Paxton’s actions clearly aim to suppress the Latino vote through intimidation and any means necessary to tilt the electoral process in favor of his political allies.” LULAC has called on the Justice Department to investigate Paxton over the raids.
Juan Proaño, CEO of LULAC, said on Democracy Now!, “In the last U.S. Census, they reported 12.1 million Latinos in the state of Texas. For the first time, Latinos actually outnumber non-Hispanic whites, which is at 12 million. When you take into account not just the Latino population in the state of Texas, but the African American and Asian population… the minority community in Texas now stands at over 60%. Texas is and has been a majority-minority state. So, we see these, effectively, as tactics for the Republicans to actually stay in control of the government in Texas.”
If further evidence of Republican attempts to subvert the will of the voters were needed, Pluribus News, a nonprofit news organization, reports that Republican-controlled state governments are altering language on progressive state ballot initiatives to confuse or mislead voters. Arizona, for example, inserted “unborn human being” in place of fetus or embryo in the ballot initiative intended to guarantee the right to an abortion. Voters in Florida and Ohio will face similar confusing language in their ballot initiatives.
In President Lincoln’s final public address, three days before his assassination, Lincoln advocated that the right to vote be granted to formerly enslaved Black men (as only men could legally vote, until 1920). The Republican Party of today, desperate to suppress the votes of people of color, could not be further from the Party of Lincoln.
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The GOP’s Voter Intimidation Strategy Is Straight Out of the Confederate Playbook
Republicans have come to genuinely believe that they cannot retain political power without resorting to morally criminal, nakedly unethical voter suppression tactics.
Aug 28, 2024
The Republican attorney general of Texas sent armed police officers after Hispanic voters—some in their 80s—to intimidate, threaten, and destroy them financially by forcing them to hire lawyers to defend themselves, even though they are perfectly legal voters.
It’s a manifestation of the new unofficial Republican slogan:
If you can’t win on the issues, cheat. And if cheating doesn’t get you over the top, intimidate!
As is the case with so many bad Republican ideas (outlawing labor unions, ending welfare programs, banning abortion, gutting women’s voting and economic rights, etc.), this one started during the failure of Reconstruction in the 1870s. White supremacists had taken over the federal government and, in the states, Black voters were routinely threatened with violence and imprisonment when they tried to vote.
We thought those days were over. But in August of 2022, three months before he would face voters for reelection, Florida’s Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis reprised the neo-Confederate strategy of using the levers of official state power to intimidate Black voters.
DeSantis put together a special police force to go after “voter fraud,” and they executed a number of arrest warrants against Black voters who’d been told by various state officials that they could vote even though they had a felony conviction. They all believed they were eligible, and apparently most were. There was absolutely no effort to commit voter fraud involved, and there hasn’t been a single conviction.
The Texas attorney general bragged that Republicans only held power in Texas as a result of voter suppression, and added that if voter suppression were to end, Republicans would never again seize power in that state.
(With a 64% margin of victory, Florida’s voters had approved a ballot measure in the 2018 election giving voting rights back to the roughly 20% of Florida Black citizens—1.5 million potential voters—who’d had a felony conviction. The Republican-controlled state legislature then—quietly—essentially overturned the ballot measure in 2020, although many Black voters never got the memo.)
With cameras rolling, around 20 Black former-felon voters were arrested for “illegal voting” and paraded before the media in shackles.
As a result, many Black voters that November concluded showing up at the polls just wasn’t worth the risk. As the Palm Beach Daily Newsnoted shortly after the 2022 election:
In 2018, before the new voting laws were enacted, the state had a 63% turnout among registered voters in the midterms. This year, turnout dropped to 54%...
DeSantis’ brutal intimidation strategy was so effective at suppressing the Black vote in Florida that year that he even won Miami-Dade County, which had been a Democratic stronghold since 2002, and Palm Beach County, which had not voted Republican since 1986.
But what starts in Florida rarely stays in Florida, particularly if it helps a white Republican administration stay in power in a state with a large minority population.
Now the “notoriously corrupt” Republican attorney general of Texas, desperate to hang onto his party’s majority in this 2024 election, has picked up on DeSantis’ strategy of intimidating minority voters in August to keep them away from the November polls.
After putting 2 million people on the “suspense” list—forcing those mostly urban voters into provisional ballots which won’t be countered unless they take time off work to show up at a county office to confirm their identities in the week after the election—Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton is now sending police officers into Hispanic neighborhoods to kick in doors and arrest Latino voters.
In 2021, Paxton bragged to right-wing hate purveyor and now-imprisoned criminal Steve Bannon that he’d successfully prevented Harris County—home to Houston and its 2.4 million mostly-Democratic voters—from voting by mail in 2020, thus keeping Republicans in charge of the state.
That’s right. The Texas attorney general bragged that Republicans only held power in Texas as a result of voter suppression, and added that if voter suppression were to end, Republicans would never again seize power in that state.
His effort forced the few willing brave souls among Houston’s citizens—fully 14.5% of the entire state’s registered voters—to navigate crowded polling places in person during a deadly pandemic before vaccines were available.
“If we’d lost Harris County” by allowing people to vote by mail, Paxton crowed, “Harris County mail-in ballots that they wanted to send out were 2.5 million… and we were able to stop every one of them.
“Had we not done that, we… would've been one of those battleground states… and Donald Trump would’ve lost the election.”
After purging over a million Texas voters, most from big cities, off the voting rolls over the past few years, putting 2 million on the “suspense” list, and then preventing Houstonians from voting by mail in 2020, Paxton’s newest trick to keep the GOP in charge of Texas is a naked rip-off of DeSantis’ minority voter intimidation strategy.
One of the members of LULAC Texas (League of United Latin American Citizens, one of the oldest Latino voting and civil rights groups in the country), retired schoolteacher 87-year-old Lidia Martinez, had publicly spoken out against Paxton when he forbade Texans from getting mail-in ballots in 2020.
He got his revenge this past week.
At six in the morning, according to The New York Times, nine officers, some with guns, showed up at her home after having broken down a door to raid the home of Manuel Medina, the chair of the Tejano Democrats. Martinez asked who was at the door and, the Times noted, the officers “then pushed open the door” and invaded her home:
Ms. Martinez said that the officers told her they came because she had filled out a report saying that older residents were not getting mail ballots. “Yes, I did,”she told them. For 35 years, Ms. Martinez has been a member of LULAC, the civil rights group, helping Latino residents stay engaged in politics. Much of her work has included instructing older residents and veterans on how to fill out voter registration cards…
Two of the agents went to her bedroom and searched everywhere, “my underwear, my nightgown, everything, they went through everything,” Ms. Martinez recalled. They took her laptop, phone, planner and some documents.
All across the state, apparently, police were raiding the homes of Hispanic voters. The head of Texas LULAC Gabriel Rosales, who was on my radio/TV program Monday, told me and the Times, “It’s pure intimidation.”
When asked for an explanation, AG Paxton told the Times, without a trace of irony:
Secure elections are the cornerstone of our Republic.
Reporter Greg Palast, who’ll be premiering his new movie Vigilantes, Inc: America’s New Vote Suppression Hitmenon Sunday, September 8 in Los Angeles (I’ll be there, too), has pointed out that the former Confederate slave states of Texas, Georgia, and Florida would all be Blue were it not for voter suppression, voter purges, and the intimidation of Black and Hispanic voters.
“There is no doubt about it,” Palast told me recently on the air. “It’s just demographics.”
As I detail in my book The Hidden History of the War on Voting, this has been a fundamental, core strategy for Republican efforts to hold power once they take over a state since the 1960s. Heritage Foundation co-founder Paul Weyrich laid it out when he told a group of Texas Republicans in 1980, as they prepared to suppress votes during the Reagan campaign:
I don’t want everybody to vote. As a matter of fact, our leverage in the elections quite candidly goes up as the voting populace goes down.
The late Supreme Court Chief Justice William Rehnquist, for another example, started his rise in Republican politics in the Goldwater/Johnson election of 1964 standing outside Hispanic and Native American polling places to challenge and intimidate would-be voters. His program was called Operation Eagle Eye, and over the next decade it expanded to multiple Republican-run states.
Voter suppression is now a primary political tool for Republicans, which is why when Arizona’s Democratic Gov. Katie Hobbs signed an executive order last week expanding locations across the state where people can vote, the Arizona Republican Party sued to prevent them from opening to voters.
Republicans have come to genuinely believe that they cannot retain political power without resorting to morally criminal, nakedly unethical voter suppression tactics.
As former President Donald Trump toldFox “News” about unsuccessful Democratic efforts to offer mail-in ballots to registered voters nationwide during the 2020 pandemic:
They had things, levels of voting that if you’d ever agreed to it, you’d never have a Republican elected in this country again…
Because of a series of bizarre rulings by five Republicans on the U.S. Supreme Court over the past two-plus decades, America is the only country in the world where a state must go to court to take away your gun but doesn’t even need to inform you if it prevents you from voting or keeps your vote from being counted.
Vice President Kamala Harris has promised to make voting rights a top priority if she’s elected president and Democrats take both houses of Congress. This is part of what Democrats mean when they say that democracy itself is on the ballot this fall.
The John Lewis Voting Rights Enhancement Act, for example, will outlaw most of these types of voter suppression by making voting a right, rather than simply a privilege.
The stakes for this election couldn’t be higher. Tag, you’re it!
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Federal Judge Blocks 'Blatantly Unconstitutional' Texas Border Law
One ACLU attorney called the decision "an important win for Texas values, human rights, and the U.S. Constitution."
Feb 29, 2024
Migrant rights advocates on Thursday cheered a U.S. judge's decision to temporarily block a looming Texas law that critics argue is federally unconstitutional—even though the state's Republican attorney general has already filed an appeal.
U.S. District Judge David Ezra of the Western District of Texas granted a preliminary injunction to prevent the enforcement of Senate Bill 4, which would empower local and state authorities to arrest and deport undocumented immigrants. Republican Texas Gov. Greg Abbott signed the law in December, along with S.B. 3, which allocates over $1.5 billion for "border security" measures.
"This is a major step in showing the state of Texas and Gov. Abbott that they do not have the power to enforce unconstitutional, state-run immigration policies."
"The court's decision to block this anti-immigrant law from taking effect is an important win for Texas values, human rights, and the U.S. Constitution," said David Donatti, senior staff attorney at the ACLU of Texas, in a statement. "Cruelty to migrants is not a policy solution."
The U.S. Department of Justice challenged S.B. 4 on constitutional grounds—as did a lawsuit filed by the state and national ACLU along with the Texas Civil Rights Project (TCRP) on behalf of American Gateways, El Paso County, and Las Americas Immigrant Advocacy Center. The two cases were consolidated and led to Thursday's ruling.
As the judge wrote in his 114-page opinion:
Several factors warrant an injunction. First, the supremacy clause and Supreme Court precedent affirm that states may not exercise immigration enforcement power except as authorized by the federal government. Second, S.B. 4 conflicts with key provisions of federal immigration law, to the detriment of the United States' foreign relations and treaty obligations. Third, surges in immigration do not constitute an "invasion" within the meaning of the Constitution, nor is Texas engaging in war by enforcing S.B. 4. Finally, to allow Texas to permanently supersede federal directives on the basis of an invasion would amount to nullification of federal law and authority—a notion that is antithetical to the Constitution and has been unequivocally rejected by federal courts since the Civil War
"We celebrate today's win, blocking this extreme law from going into effect before it has the opportunity to harm Texas communities," said Aron Thorn, a senior attorney with TCRP's Beyond Borders Program. "This is a major step in showing the state of Texas and Gov. Abbott that they do not have the power to enforce unconstitutional, state-run immigration policies."
Jennifer Babaie, director of advocacy and legal services at Las Americas Immigrant Advocacy Center, declared that "with today's decision, the court sent a clear message to Texas: S.B. 4 is unconstitutional and criminalizing Black, brown, Indigenous, and immigrant communities will not be tolerated."
The El Paso County commissioner for Precinct 3, Iliana Holguin, stressed that "a piecemeal approach from individual states on federal matters such as immigration enforcement would put an undue burden on local taxpayers, while opening the door to potential civil rights violations for border residents and immigrants alike."
While welcoming their win in court on Thursday, those behind the legal challenge also recognized that the fight is far from over. Blasting S.B. 4 as "blatantly unconstitutional," Anand Balakrishnan, senior staff attorney at the ACLU's Immigrants' Rights Project, said that "we applaud the court's decision, but we must ensure this harmful law is struck down altogether."
Edna Yang, co-executive director of American Gateways, also noted the broader battle for immigration reform: "While we are thankful for this court decision, we know that too many people fleeing persecution are being denied their legal rights to make their case and seek political asylum. The only way to fix our broken immigration system is through federal congressional action, not individual state action."
Some federal lawmakers also praised the ruling. Democratic Texas Congressman Joaquin Castro said that "S.B. 4 has never been about the border. It's a dangerous, extreme law that gives local authorities the power to harass and detain anyone who looks or sounds like an immigrant. I'm glad to see this preliminary injunction, and I hope S.B. 4 will never go into effect."
The court ruling and Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton's subsequent pledge to "defend Texas' right to defend herself against the catastrophic illegal invasion" came as Democratic President Joe Biden—who is seeking reelection in November—and former President Donald Trump, the likely Republican nominee, visited different cities in the state.
Just before Biden's trip to Brownsville, Amnesty International USA pressured him to "abandon cruel anti-immigrant proposals" he has considered since the failure of a legislative package that outraged rights groups and progressive lawmakers. During his trip, the president announced resources to boost Customs and Border Patrol hiring; met with border local border officers, elected leaders, and law enforcement; and called on Congress to pass the immigration package.
"Each election year or legislative session, politicians make their way to Texas border cities to announce new policies or use the border in some other way to further their political agenda," said Denisse Molina, humanitarian outreach coordinator for TCRP's Beyond Borders Program. "Border communities are not political pawns that can be toyed with to earn points from voters."
"The timing of this announcement is in direct contrast with the spirit and community celebration of Charro Days, a celebration of friendship and culture amongst the cities of Brownsville, Texas, and Matamoros, Tamaulipas," Molina added. "This is a clear political stunt showing that while Brownsville may be the backdrop, President Biden does not know the history, welcoming arms, or respect locals have for their neighbors in Mexico. We deserve better."
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