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Political wrecking balls
Growing up in a small town in Indiana in the anti-communist McCarthy era of the 1950s, I was surrounded by the most conservative Republicans in existence. They were all fighting a cold war for American democracy against Russia’s totalitarian dictator Nikita Khrushchev who arrogantly boasted world communism would bury us.
It’s a good thing most of those ‘50s Republicans aren’t still around to see what’s become of their political party. Republicans are no longer fighting for American democracy.
Here’s the part that would blow the minds of hard-core Republican conservatives from the ‘50s. The Republican hostility toward American democracy turned toxic after the party elected a president with assistance from a massive internet propaganda campaign created by Vladimir Putin’s Russian intelligence agents pretending to be Americans.
It sounds incredible, but we all lived through it and it’s not over yet. Donald Trump publicly sided with Putin against U.S. intelligence agencies and his own Justice Department throughout his disastrous single presidential term before Americans cast the most votes in history to remove him from office.
Criminal Assault
We all watched Trump’s violent criminal assault on Congress to overthrow American democracy on January 6, 2021, attempting to unconstitutionally remain the president despite his enormous defeat. Special Prosecutor Jack Smith’s criminal indictment of Trump is restoring the principle no one is above the law.
Until that happens, Republican attacks on free and fair elections will continue. In 2024, Republicans will either nominate Trump for president again or someone just like him. That’s a terrible strategy to win a presidential election, but that’s not their primary motive. For Trump and his co-conspirators, it’s to try to stay out of prison.
If Trump wins the presidency again, democracy will be over. He’ll fire Smith, shut down all those federal indictments and hire a brand-new Justice Department to lock up political opponents just like Putin does. That makes it clear what American voters need to do again.
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Trump’s multiple criminal indictments haven’t convinced Republicans to become a legitimate American political party again. Conservatives who support democracy need to form a new American Conservative Party. Trump has turned Republicans into his own personal street gang like the Proud Boys.
Wisconsin’s Role
Wisconsin is one of seven “fake elector” states in which 83 prominent Republicans nationwide submitted fraudulent documents to Congress falsely claiming they were elected to cast electoral votes for Trump in states Biden won when they weren’t. Those Republicans were once respected political leaders in their communities. Now they’re unindicted co-conspirators who could become indicted ones at any time.
Wisconsin’s 10 fake electors always knew the plot cooked up by Trump’s lawyers was loony. “These guys are up to no good and it’s going to fail miserably,” Republican chairman Andrew Hitt texted executive director Mark Jefferson. Jefferson complained “freaking Trump idiots” wanted him to fly the counterfeit documents to Washington. Sen. Ron Johnson was the freaking Trump idiot assigned to personally hand Mike Pence lists of fake electors from Wisconsin and Michigan on January 6.
Trump was confident he could pound the usually compliant Pence into using the fake electors’ lies to throw out millions of legitimate American votes to overthrow the election. He couldn’t.
In Wisconsin that led to an even more brazen attempt by a group of lawless Republican partisans to try to overthrow Biden’s election. Those lawless partisans were the previous rightwing majority on the Wisconsin Supreme Court.
A more progressive court majority took over last month when Justice Janet Protasiewicz replaced retired Justice Pat Roggensack to end an unethical rightwing majority that had controlled the court for 15 years. Before Protasiewicz, the only person who prevented Wisconsin’s supreme court from becoming the only court in America lawless enough to embrace Trump’s 2020 election lies was conservative Justice Brian Hagedorn. The other three justices were eager to throw out the ballots of all 3.3 million presidential voters in Wisconsin and allow the gerrymandered Republican legislature to fraudulently declare Trump the winner.
Justices Rebecca Bradley, Annette Ziegler and Roggensack bitterly denounced Hagedorn for joining the progressive justices to throw out the evidence-free Trump lawsuits and support Biden’s election. Bradley wrote the nonsensical Trumpian dissent for the minority justices denouncing Hagedorn for dealing “a death blow to democracy. The majority’s failure to act leaves an indelible stain on our most recent election.”
Clearly, Republicans no longer even understand the definition of American democracy. In their party, it’s whatever violent retribution Trump woke up today and threatened to do in all capital letters with lots of exclamation points to destroy the lives of everyone who opposes him.
By now, those opponents should be every rational voter in America. If those commie-hating, rightwing, ‘50s Republicans in Indiana traveled here in a time machine, they wouldn’t be Republicans anymore either. They would recognize a deranged, wanna-be Russian dictator with a shovel threatening to bury American democracy when they heard him raving.
