Attacking elections and ignoring court orders
Authoritarianism demands that we all get tired. Here are some of the latest developments in the American right's efforts to beat the rest of us down.
For some reason it finally hit me last week and I’m feeling pretty burnt/bummed out about all this madness. But I’m just going to try to power through and do the work that’s in front of me — which remains a lot. I’m tracking ongoing DOGE dismantling of government agencies like the SSA as well as widespread efforts by Republicans to screw with free and fair elections. If you want to support my work, you can choose a paid subscription to American Doom for as little as $6 a month or drop a few dollars into our Coffee Fund.
Now, despite the fatigue, on to the news…
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Last week’s passage of the SAVE Act — a piece of legislation rooted in outright conspiracy theories about undocumented immigrants voting in U.S. elections — is just a part of the MAGA movement’s never-ending assault on free and fair elections. That assault has been going on for a while now, since as far back as 2017, when Donald Trump claimed that his election win over Hillary Clinton would have been even bigger if not for a bunch of fraudulent votes.
These attacks against voting rights will continue into the foreseeable future, now that Trump’s MAGA wing of the Republican party is effectively the entirety of the party, with election denialism and hatred of immigrants its two main areas of policy. The SAVE Act faces an uncertain future in the Senate, where it will have to pass before Trump signs the bill into law. If this happens, the SAVE Act will immediately threaten the voting eligibility of some 21 million Americans, according to the Brennan Center and other pro-democracy groups.
But even if the SAVE Act fails, the attacks on free and fair elections will go on. In statehouses across the country, Republican lawmakers are hard at work trying to restrict access to voting, make it harder to register to vote, purge voters from rolls under questionable claims of ineligibility, make it more difficult for voters to enact ballot measures to protect things like abortion rights, and generally open our elections up to even more fear, chaos and distrust than we’ve experienced these last five years.
You can read all about these efforts in a story I have out at Rolling Stone.
Long story short: it’s going to get worse. I wish this weren’t so because, frankly, I am pretty damn burnt out over the relentlessness of the American right’s assault on democracy — attacks that are made even more exhausting because they are using the very tools of democracy to undo it. This is of course made even worse by the fact that they’re doing it in service of a man who has, for his entire life, exhibited no desire to care about anyone other than himself. Yes, all that stuff about selling our country out for a cheap con man are true. That doesn’t make any of this easier to swallow.
Nearly every day of this second Trump presidency has been a bludgeoning for anyone who cares about the values and ideals this nation is supposed to uphold. Then, when you think they must be a bit tired out from all that authoritarian whipping, they continue to swing. Day after day, news event after constitution-defying news event, Republicans and the Trump administration continue on their project to remake America in a new, authoritarian image. Already on Monday, they’ve defied the constitutional order once again by refusing to retrieve a man the administration itself admits it wrongly sent to a Salvadorean prison. The Supreme Court determined last week — in a unanimous decision — that Kilmar Abrego Garcia must be brought back to the United States. But the court pussy-footed around this decision, sending the case back to a lower court even though the justices agreed that the Trump administration should bring Garcia back immediately.
Yesterday, during an Oval Office appearance with El Salvador’s president, Nayib Bukele, Trump’s immigration czar and future war criminal Stephen Miller seized on the Supreme Court’s milquetoast decision, gaslighting the entire world by proclaiming the justices had sided with the Trump administration. This is not true.
And that’s part of the reason all of this is so tiring. We are confronted every day by people who will do the wrong thing, get caught, and then just brazenly lie about it. How do you combat that? It’s difficult. But if sobriety has taught me anything it’s that I just have to put one foot in front of the other and get through the day, so that’s what I’m trying to do today.
More Doom on authoritarianism
We have now entered a very important stage of our ongoing constitutional crisis — the one where courts demand that the president do or not do something, and he decides whether or not he’s going to obey. If Trump continues to ignore court orders — as is the case with Garcia, and with a judge’s decision that the Associated Press be allowed back into the White House — democracy will have been dealt a very serious blow. How long this goes on, how many times Trump and his minions leading federal agencies ignore court orders, will determine whether we remain a democracy.
This is why it’s important to keep an eye on the prize. We still have elections — for now — that we can utilize to hold those in power to account. The SAVE Act and all the other machinations I describe in my story at Rolling Stone are just that: movements that can be stopped. But we all have to keep showing up to stop them. Authoritarianism relies on people getting tired, giving in, and giving up. It requires this exhaustion because on its own, it cannot stand.
Freedom’s future relies on people standing up when the moment requires, not just when it’s convenient. I am very tired right now — tired of tracking all this stuff, tired of having to know what insane thing Trump says or does every single day, tired of having to pay attention all the time just to know if things are going to be alright, or if it’s time to start thinking about getting out of here. But you know who is more tired? People like Garcia, who are stuck in a Salvadorean hellhole because the DOJ mistakenly deported him there, or Rumeysa Ozturk, who government lawyers say showed no signs of any of the bullshit crimes that the Trump administration used as pretext to send her to an ICE facility in Louisiana.
You see, all of this just starts with people like Garcia, Ozturk and Mahmoud Khalil, who it looks like will now be deported for exercising his right to free speech. It starts with these people because the authoritarians in the White House and in Congress view them as expendable. They want Democrats and the left to defend people like Garcia so they can say, “See, these liberals love criminal immigrants!” After the “criminal” immigrants, it’s regular criminals — U.S. citizens — who’ll get sent to a Salvadorean hellhole, as Trump again dreamed about yesterday during his meeting with Bukele.
Then it’s just a few more steps — a few more court orders ignored — before it’s everyday Americans being rounded up and sent somewhere else for little more than that we didn’t agree with what Trump and Republicans think this country should look like.
So, I’m tired, yes. But not nearly tired enough.
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