by Cody Fenwick | May 29, 2020 - 7:11am | permalink
While President Donald Trump’s signing of an executive order on Thursday supposedly trying to rein in overly partisan social media companies is being covered by many outlets as a policy story, this framing is deeply misleading. Though the policy details are relevant, this isn’t about policy. This is about the president throwing a fit.
Twitter took the unprecedented move on Wednesday of appending a mild fact-check to Trump’s lies about California’s initiative to let people access vote-by-mail options.
Essentially, the idea behind the order was to reverse the section of federal law that allows social media platforms to avoid liability for the claims made by their users. Trump and other conservatives like to say that if a social media platform makes any content moderation decisions, it is, therefore, acting as a publisher rather than a platform, and so it should be held responsible for whatever it prints the way a news outlet is.
But this isn’t what the law actually says, so any effort to enforce the order will likely be challenged in court.
Mike Masnick of Techdirt explained:
To be clear: the executive order is nonsense. You can’t overrule the law by executive order, nor can you ignore the Constitution. This executive order attempts to do both. It’s also blatantly anti-free speech, anti-private property, pro-big government — which is only mildly amusing, given that Trump and his sycophantic followers like to insist they’re the opposite of all of those things. But also, because the executive order only has limited power, there’s a lot of huffing and puffing in there for very little actual things that the administration can do. It’s very much written in a way to make Trump’s fans think he’s done something to attack social media companies, but the deeper you dig, the more nothingness you find.
Most Americans were taught in school that our government is a carefully devised system of checks and balances. No president could ever get away with open corruption or abuse of power because he would be held accountable by Congress and the courts. We can now see that this is really just a myth held together by a set of rickety norms and practices that are only as good as the people who respect them. Republicans no longer respect them.
Democrats have seen this president get away with massive corruption, incompetence, nepotism and criminal behavior. A highly respected special counsel found ample evidence that Trump went to great lengths to obstruct justice and his attorney general exonerated him with novel theories about presidential power. And after all that was revealed, the president saw his supposed exoneration as a green light to further abuse his power, leaving the Congress no choice but to impeach him. He was spared conviction by the shell of an institution once known as the Republican Party.
At every step of the way, the Republicans in Congress have backed Trump, giving him permission to purge the government of anyone he believes is disloyal and reward his most sycophantic admirers. That has led to the greatest government failure in modern memory.
Faced with a global health crisis of unprecedented scope, America's hollowed-out federal government, led by this vain and shallow man, was unable to respond. The most technologically advanced nation on earth has the highest number of deaths in the world, and counting.
Faced with a global health crisis of unprecedented scope, America's hollowed-out federal government, led by this vain and shallow man, was unable to respond. The most technologically advanced nation on earth has the highest number of deaths in the world, and counting.
Yet Trump maintains the loyalty of his base and continues to have the full force of the Republican Party behind him. His cruel pettiness and narcissism only makes them cling to him all the more.Now Democrats are supposed to feel confident that Biden's six-point lead in the polls means that everything is going to be just fine? Nothing is going to be fine. The series of events I've just described — along with the hundreds of atrocities I don't have room to mention — aren't just about Trump. They are illustrations of a failing country that has been in a weakened state for a long time.
Let's hope that the system is still strong enough to produce a free fair election and that Trump is uncharacteristically willing to accept defeat in a somewhat dignified manner. Keep your fingers crossed that his supporters will follow that lead. But don't feel ashamed of losing sleep for fear that somehow he's going to win — or that we wind up with some disputed result in which he tries to cling to power.
If the last three years have taught us anything, it's that there is no "normal" anymore. Your worries are entirely rational. We're in uncharted territory.
With mail-in voting there is no long drive, bus ride, or wait in line, so Republicans can’t rig things to make it harder for people to vote. That particular voting suppression trick—which conservatives have been running for over a century, particularly in the South—just doesn’t work with mail-in voting.
Another trick the GOP likes is to merge the effects of voter registration purges with “provisional” ballots. First, Republican Secretaries of State throw hundreds of thousands of people off the voter rolls, disproportionately Hispanics and African Americans, by using “merge/purge” lists of felons or voters from other states with large black populations.
In 2018, investigative reporter Greg Palast sued a number of Republican secretaries of state and got his hands on purge lists that included more than 90,000 people in largely Democratic parts of Nevada, 769,436 voters purged in Colorado, 340,134 in Georgia, 550,000 in Illinois, a large but as-yet-uncounted list from Nebraska, and 469,000 purged in Indiana.
The Brennan Center for Justice found that just between 2014 and 2016, in the two years leading up to the presidential election, over 14 million people were purged from voter rolls, largely in Republican-controlled states. Kemp purged over a million in Georgia alone.
Calling the findings “disturbing,” the Brennan Center noted, “Almost 4 million more names were purged from the rolls between 2014 and 2016 than between 2006 and 2008. This growth in the number of removed voters represented an increase of 33 percent—far outstripping growth in both total registered voters (18 percent) and total population (6 percent).”
But people don’t know they’ve been removed, so they show up to vote anyway. And vote they can—the 2002 Help America Vote Act created an entirely new type ballot.
With mail-in voting, people know before they vote if they’ve been purged from the voter list, because they don’t get a ballot in the mail. Ballots are mailed out early enough that people who’ve been purged will have time to figure out there’s a problem and contact the Secretary of State’s office to get it fixed.
Like with closing polling places or putting in broken machines, this particular type of voter suppression, which was responsible for Trump winning the electoral college, doesn’t work.
Mail-in voting doesn’t cause working people to lose income by taking time off to vote; they can vote from their kitchen table over the weekend or on an unhurried evening.
Mail-in voting doesn’t force elderly people concerned about Social Security to have to undergo the pain and trauma of a road trip followed by standing for hours in line. Particularly with Covid-19 and the flu on the loose in November.
Mail-in voting doesn’t give Republican “ballot challengers” the ability to know a person’s race before they try to convince election officials to move a ballot into the provisional box because of “problems.”
The strongest tool Americans have to prevent Republican attempts at voter suppression is mail-in voting.
Living in Oregon, where the state has been exclusively mail-in for over 20 years, we have one of the highest rates of voter participation in the country and no evidence of so-called “voter fraud.” Louise and I sit down at the dining room table and look over the ballot, run a web search on various candidates and ballot initiatives we may not know, mark our ballots, and then drop the postage-paid envelopes in the mailbox out front.
President Trump is preparing to sign an executive order Thursday that could roll back the immunity that tech giants have for the content on their sites, according to two people familiar with the matter.
The law is controversial. It allows tech companies the freedom to police their platforms for abuse without fear of lawsuits. The wide-ranging order comes two days after Twitter took the rare step of labeling one of the president’s tweets and linking viewers to news articles that fact-checked his claims. The move infuriated Trump and his supporters, who quickly blasted Twitter and its peers in Silicon Valley for engaging in censorship and exhibiting political bias. The companies have long denied those charges.
The order will mark the White House’s most significant salvo against Silicon Valley after years of verbal broadsides and regulatory threats from Trump and his top deputies. It also may raise fresh, thorny questions about the First Amendment, the future of expression online and the extent to which the White House can properly — and legally — influence the decisions that private companies make about their apps, sites and services.
There are no universally accepted definitions of either a “failed state” or a “constitutional crisis.” Good arguments can be advanced, however, that we are suffering from both disorders at the state and national levels in the midst of the lethal COVID-19 pandemic.
In a May 19 article, Guardian columnist Nathan Robinson argues that Wisconsin is beginning to resemble a failed state, which he defines as “one that can no longer claim legitimacy or perform a government’s core function of protecting the people’s basic security.” The Wisconsin GOP, Robinson writes, is a minority party, but after years of extreme gerrymandering, it wields de facto dictatorial powers, enabling it to gut public-sector unions and advance the privileges of business interests and the wealthy.
Meanwhile, guided by his goal of winning another term at all costs, the president has pressed states to fully reopen despite the continued uptick in coronavirus cases in Georgia, Alabama, Arkansas, California, and elsewhere. Given the highly contagious nature of the virus and its propensity for exponential growth, it may only be a matter of time until a dreaded “second wave” of infection emerges and sweeps across the entire country.
Packer correctly blames Trump’s epic incompetence, dishonesty and corruption for the catastrophe that has already unfolded and the miseries yet to come. He accuses the president of immolating what was left of our national civic life prior to his election, and sharply dividing Americans along the lines of race, nationality, and religion.
Even if it may be premature to join Packer in labeling the U.S. a failed state, it’s not too early to cite Trump for igniting a constitutional crisis that could eventually lead to failed-state status. Legal scholars such as Princeton University professor of politics Keith Whittington tell us that constitutional crises fall into two general categories: “operational crises,” which occur when vital political disputes can’t be resolved within the existing constitutional framework; and “crises of fidelity,” which happen when a major political actor no longer feels bound by constitutional norms.
We’re beset by both kinds of crises today. As Harvard University Law School Professor Noah Feldman explained in an October 2019 New York Times op-ed, penned on the eve of Trump’s impeachment by the House of Representatives, Trump’s abiding lawlessness means that “we no longer have just a crisis of the presidency. We also have a breakdown in the fundamental structure of government under the Constitution. That counts as a constitutional crisis.”
Since his acquittal by the Senate, Trump has upped the constitutional ante, defying congressional subpoenas, firing inspectors general from several executive-branch departments, arguing before the Supreme Court that he enjoys “absolute immunity” from state criminal investigations, and stacking the federal judiciary with right-wing ideologues. Assisted by Attorney General William Barr, who has transformed the Justice Department into a partisan enterprise, Trump has taken his place in an exclusive rogues’ gallery of past commanders in chief who have wreaked havoc on the constitutional order.
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