#Trump getting re-elected would if not lead to an outright civil war

[msvorderofoperations]

Also: project 2025 and Trump (in his own way) is explicitly banking on this kind of rhetoric. They want to install a tyrant (using the classical definition of the word) and they are coaching it in "hey if we get in you won't have to vote again". This is not just business as usual for modern politics. They have explicitly stated that they want completely upend the system and make it such that any dissent is fully illegal. It's in their manifesto that anyone that has had any sensitivity training at any level of the government would be blacklisted from ever being in government again. Which would hit their own team a bunch, but that's the lengths they're willing to go to. If it means destroying careers in order to have broad enough powers to make it such that the left literally cannot engage in governance, they will do it.

That the screenshotted tweet has Marxist in their handle makes me think this is either a full-on psyop, or just someone making a sockpuppet strawman. Marxism is kind of built on the idea of constant re-evaluation and analysis, and so the idea of a marxist being "I want one simple solution that I never have to think about ever" would be hilarious if things weren't so fucking dire.

i really think some of you are just lazy…like omg what do you mean I have to do the dishes again I just did them yesterday?!?

[andrewuttaro]

30 Years on: What is America?

I am not of the belief patriotism is a disappearing attribute in this country. I think those who say such a thing tend to struggle with the difference between patriotism and nationalism. I digress, I already wrote that article. I’ll let you do your own research on that. To the degree patriotism is in flux at the moment regardless of anyone’s relative love for America I think it’s because we are at something of a national crossroads.

We’re collectively looking critically at our own history again for the first time in a long time. In the aftermath of a global pandemic the craving for normalcy belies an unsettling question about what that normalcy actually is and if its worth going back to: What is America? No really, what is the lived vision of America in 2021 CE? To the extent you read overzealous nuts on social media drooling over the prospect of Civil War or national partition there is in fact some hard soul searching about the what of America that has potential to lead to real political sectarianism.

I’ll check my privilege at the door and say yes: I, as a straight, white male, has never had a lot to lose in any past incarnation of the American identity. Part of the struggle here is a truly inclusive answer to Who is America? I write this under the assumption literally anyone can be American, and we should build systems that reflect that. Nonetheless, we do have to look to the past for fear of repeating it.

What is America? Well it’s a country for one: more than two hundred years old with a congressional democratic republic form of government. It’s had 46 Presidents and counting. It is composed of 50 States for now. America was founded on a couple core principles it defined around “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness”. Anyone who seriously studies American History will tell you the promises of America’s founding documents were not all fulfilled in the beginning. America’s domestic history is defined by Civil Rights movements, reactions against said movements and a Civil War largely about who would receive the full promise of what America is. Indeed Abraham Lincoln, the 16th President who led America through that Civil conflict, spoke of this nation as the “American Experiment” that would not perish from the earth as long as the Union won. The Gettysburg Address Lincoln delivered about this vision of America was delivered on a battlefield where that nation was invaded by what can properly be called a different imagining of what the U.S. should be. Those invaders were former countryman, looking to make a different formulation of the experiment. America is an experiment, a work in progress, a project.

Nation-States as projects is not a new concept. Even before the United States of America’s War of Independence new nation-states were being founded across the world out of the milieu of Enlightenment Philosophy meeting political realities. In many places the nation-state was a more democratic, self-determining incarnation of what kingdoms and empires had been for millennia prior: the collective force of a like-minded ethnic, tribal, or familial group or otherwise aligned interested parties. The innovation of the American experiment, among other things, was perhaps that it was a nation-state for everyone seeking liberty and personal autonomy. Even though the founders envisioned the enfranchisement of a very specific kind of citizen, this American nation-state had potential from the beginning to be something that had never been attempted before.

Fast forward 128 years on from Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address. The U.S. has not only survived its Civil War, but it has also exploded onto the global stage after two world wars catapulted it to an international superpower. Still believing itself to be the project of liberty and self-determination America had stood opposed to a distinctly oppressive superpower in the Soviet Union and won. In the process the American experiment had been exported anywhere the Soviets couldn’t stop it and now the whole world was familiar with its tenets if not copying its institutions. A Cold War that held all of humanity in suspense at the precipice of nuclear annihilation has yielded to a new reality where America found itself the dominant political force in the world unopposed. 1991, thirty years ago now, was a rare inflection point in history where suddenly massive forces of power were upended at once and there was no clear guiding philosophy for the global political order going forward… except the United States of America. What would America be now? The Post-Cold War reality was ours to lose.

Canada, America’s most intimate international partner and closest neighbor, similarly finds itself at a philosophical turning point. The Canadian author and commentator Will Ferguson points to three core guiding themes, however misled they were, for the Canadian project upon its modern founding in 1867: 1. Keep the Americans out, 2. Keep the French in, 3. Somehow make the indigenous disappear. In Canada’s 150-year history these three ideas color its every decision and define its character. All of these founding directives are now either reversed because they were outright morally wrong (See number 3) or have been killed by a thousand cuts. The nation-state to America’s north is also set to reexamine what it’s all about. In that reexamination of national identity there is great opportunity and great danger. As if an international support group, Canada’s stereotypical niceness reaches out to tell us, we’re not alone in this self-discovery process.

The answer to the Post-Cold War world for the American Experiment in 1991 was doubling down on Americana and exporting our cultural and economic mores around the world. Though this process had already begun in earnest after World War Two, now the whole world was its oyster. From aggressive, no-prisoners capitalism to unapologetic, imperial democracy, you can now find few places on the planet that are not familiar with some facet of the United States’ self-perception. America globalized who it was and not everyone liked it. Indeed many Americans began to increasingly look in the mirror this cultural hegemony provided with a critical eye. Then September 11th happened.

After the terrorist attacks on 9/11 the United States cast its enemies in an axis of evil dualism in the War on Terror that provided an endless horizon of conflict for a military apparatus unseen in human history. The polar opposite, the truly evil enemy the Fall of the Soviet Union deprived America of, would now be replaced with a complex networks of dictators and non-state entities who recorded death threats in caves. While America doesn’t exist today like a traditional empire, its reach is unparalleled, and it can strike almost anywhere on earth in a matter of minutes. With no sufficient counterbalance it would seem its military industrial complex doesn’t know what to do with itself. That menacing, widespread inhuman enemy doesn’t actually exist much in the real world if it even did during the many proxy conflicts of the Cold War decades.

Domestically the thirty years of the Post-Cold War American Experiment has seen the two branches of our government that were supposed to be lesser to the legislative, balloon in importance. In a nation where every philosophical difference is magnified into a culture war the ultimate arbiter of those borderline violent disputes is a Court system that is supposed to be an afterthought and a Presidency that has become outright imperial in spite of the founders explicit anti-monarchical sentiments. When Supreme Court justices die or retire it really seems to be on par with a Pope’s death for political partisans stateside. All good and evil in the land of liberty seems to run through a council of black-robed appointees. All 5 Presidents of Post-Cold War America were cast as lightning rods for their bases and chastised by their opposition with every scandal that would stick (to varying degrees of success). The fourth of such Presidents, Donald Trump, openly rejected the idea of America as a pluralistic nation-state with any international responsibility at all to the contrary of the image that defines Post-Cold War America, in favor of a Pre-World War II image of an isolationist, explicitly white Christian nation. Yes, the current identity crisis played out in sharp contrast in the 2016 election cycle. Many Americans consider that election the perfect storm of two intractably terrible major party choices.

Perhaps we need to face the fact we did it to ourselves. We elect no-compromise fighters whenever we vote only to be shocked when Congress turns into a toxic mess that gets nothing done. It’s always easy to criticize a one-term President but the re-evaluation of what the American experiment will be is not limited to those of a more right-wing conservative bent. The left wing in this country increasingly discusses myriad reforms to everything from our election and representation systems to our healthcare and welfare systems. No matter what your future vision of America is you probably agree, perhaps for vastly different reasons than your neighbor, that America is not the somehow uniquely exceptional nation-state it’s insisted it is, not anymore at least. The Post-Cold War era saw the concept of “American Exceptionalism” become a punchline for Americans of both and every political affiliation. For numerous reasons America’s international and domestic vitality has diminished.

The current President, historically more of a traditionally moderate, establishment democrat, has even engaged in this revisionism aggressively seeking to revive Americans faith in their very form of government with stimulus, infrastructure and voting reform in the most evenly split congress in decades. More progressive types of the left-wing beckon in every election cycle now just as the former President refuses to go away, trying to weaponize the grievance of his increasingly right-wing base in the reimagining of the American experiment he set forth as a more authoritarian leader. We have to make an honest, good faith accounting of this effort toward a new definition of ourselves if any shared consensus as a nation will ever be possible again. There is of course great danger in redefining the purpose of a national project.

However America redefines herself going forward, finding these new definitions is not an optional project. With the U.S. shaken down from its international pedestal by trade war, an ascendant China, and a stubbornly plutocratic Russia, even America’s closest allies are reconsidering how they will persist with an unstable American self-image still able to exert its hard power anywhere on earth. As some Americans pursue a more equitable society at home for historical outgroups still struggling with society’s aged mores, those efforts have been met with open racism and a kind of selfish nationalism that has not been seen this ferociously in three generations. Unless a new lasting, inclusive, American self-image is agreed upon we may be at only the beginning of a long period of internal strife and discord. Increasing numbers of ideologs of both left wing and right-wing persuasions fantasize about cutting off whole sections of the nation whom they rarely agree with. American Statehouses are dominated by right-wing majorities more often than not who have actually initiated voter suppression efforts which positions America in a dangerous place for the next close enough national election. This is not to mention the way gerrymandering steals the power of congressional representation from the very people it was supposed to empower. This whole discussion doesn’t even touch on the increasing threat of environmental catastrophe rarely addressed in the halls of power.

The current American Identity Crisis leaves many issues unaddressed as a matter of fact. An opioid epidemic that is erasing broad swaths of the population, a wealth gap unseen since the gilded age, a skyrocketing suicide rate, a gun violence epidemic, natural resource exhaustion unrelated to climate change, police violence, the fourth rebirth of white supremacist organizations, DC and Puerto Rico Statehood, the Student Debt Crisis, an increasingly intractable housing market putting home ownership out of reach for many young Americans, and numerous other problems sit on the backburner without any signs of meaningful progress. On some level it seems we’ve all given up the project of governing for earning the most points in culture wars that now express themselves on as big a scale as a national election and all the way down to dinner tables and date nights.

What is American? How might we be optimistic about such a rapidly changing country on this Independence Day thirty years on from the end of the Cold War? Among people my age it would seem pessimism if not an outright nihilism about these sorts of things is the common response where activism seems to only make minor gains. Among the general population still rebounding from the COVID19 pandemic it would seem a certain empathy fatigue has set in. Where meaningful answers to these big, generational national identity questions are being formulated it is yet to be seen if a new American consensus can be found.

Perhaps our friend Canada would tell us: these days the most patriotic thing you can do is push for your country to do better. Reckoning with the past and present treatment of minorities and atrocities abroad is not optional if we are to have an honest, effective, united future. For now, if nothing else can move us to truly feel proud of our nation, then maybe this independence day we can recognize our internal interdependence on each other, however different we maybe. If anything the most patriotic way we can be this holiday and every day going forward as Americans is honest and patient about who we were, what we are and what we could possibly be if we commit ourselves to progress once again.

[orbemnews]

'An existential threat': The Republicans calling for their party to reject QAnon conspiracy theories “When we say QAnon, you have the sort of extreme forms, but you also just have this softer, gradual undermining of any shared, collective sense of truth,” Meijer said. The Michigan freshman believes conspiracy theories fuel “incredibly unrealistic and unachievable expectations” and “a cycle of disillusionment and alienation” that could lead conservative voters to sit out elections or, in a worst-case scenario, turn to political violence, like what happened on January 6. How deeply far-right conspiracy theories take hold within the Republican Party, and what the party does to either embrace or reject them, will have major consequences for the future of the GOP and American politics. Meijer is far from the only Republican in Congress disturbed by the rise of QAnon, but he is one of a rare few willing to publicly and repeatedly denounce it. Republicans who speak out risk a backlash, and many would rather dismiss, downplay or ignore the issue. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, a Republican from Georgia, famously signaled outright support for the conspiracy theory before she was elected to office, though she has recently attempted to distance herself from it. CNN reached out to the offices of more than a dozen GOP members of Congress to request interviews for this story, and only two agreed to participate. The lonely voices within the GOP who continue to take a stand must now grapple with what it would take for the party to turn away from conspiracy theories. Most recognize they face a difficult fight, but some hope they may be able to grow their ranks in Congress in the future, and one upcoming congressional election in Texas will serve as an early test of whether an anti-conspiracy theory message can resonate in a red district. ‘A long-term battle for the soul of the party’ Rep. Adam Kinzinger, who also voted to impeach Trump, may be the loudest voice within the Republican Party taking on QAnon. He recently launched a political action committee as part of an effort he’s calling “Country First” that seeks to counter the GOP’s embrace of conspiracy theories and the former President. The congressman has endorsed the nine other House Republicans who voted to impeach over the Capitol attack as they now face down the potential threat of primary challenges. He has also endorsed a Texas GOP congressional candidate, Michael Wood, who is running in a crowded field in the state’s sixth district on a platform calling for Republicans to turn away from Trump and reject conspiracy theories. Wood is running in a special election taking place on May 1 to fill the House seat previously held by the late Republican Rep. Ron Wright, who died in February after contracting Covid. “We are not the party of conspiracy theories and QAnon. We can be again the party of ideas,” Wood says in a video on his campaign website. Wood blames Trump for the spread of conspiracy theories within the party, and believes Republicans must repudiate Trump to defeat QAnon. Trump has long embraced conspiracy theories, including birtherism. He forcefully pushed the lie that the election was stolen from him and while he was in office, he praised QAnon followers for supporting him and refused to denounce the conspiracy theory. “I think he bears direct responsibility for the rise of conspiratorial thinking in the Republican Party and the conservative movement as a whole,” Wood said in an interview. “The big lie that he promulgated after Election Day did a whole lot of harm to our civic institutions.” Kinzinger hopes that whatever the outcome in the special election, his endorsement will show like-minded Republicans they’re not alone and encourage others to run for office on a similar platform. “I think what’s important is that people see there are people out there that support you, that will back you if you do the right thing,” he said. “It’s a long-term battle for the soul of the party.” The Illinois congressman describes the danger he believes QAnon poses in stark terms, saying he’s concerned its corrosive impact threatens to pull apart the very fabric of American democracy. “Do I think there’s going to be a civil war? No. Do I rule it out? No. Do I think it’s a concern, do I think it’s something we have to be worried about? Yeah,” he said. ‘We’re facts-based pariahs’ Former GOP Rep. Denver Riggleman of Virginia is outspoken in his opposition to QAnon, and he believes that is part of the reason he was voted out of office. While serving in Congress, Riggleman co-sponsored a bipartisan resolution condemning QAnon that passed in the House overwhelmingly, though seventeen Republicans voted in opposition and 34 didn’t vote at all. But he thinks most Republican lawmakers “want to have it both ways” when it comes to the issue of conspiracy theories. The former congressman said Republicans frequently try to make it look like they’re standing up for principle, while at the same time “winking and nodding” at conspiracy theories in an effort to get more votes. It’s difficult to pinpoint exactly how widespread belief in QAnon is in the Republican Party. According to the Pew Research Center, roughly a quarter of Republicans who know about QAnon view its supporters favorably, though nearly half of Republicans say they know nothing at all about the conspiracy theory. Riggleman believes a major problem right now is that there’s a strong “contingent of GOP voters who have completely lost themselves in the rabbit hole of conspiracies, disinformation and grievance politics,” and most Republican lawmakers “want to get re-elected so they would rather have people like me shut the hell up, even though they know I’m right.” “It’s almost like we’re facts-based pariahs that are trying to sort of rein in this insanity that’s gone on,” he said. “It does feel lonely sometimes in terms of being the outspoken voice,” Kinzinger said. “The reality is I think if you’re a sitting member of Congress it’s easy to say, I’m going to ignore this.” Wood, the Texas congressional candidate, is frustrated that, in his view, most GOP congressional leaders have not done enough to denounce QAnon conspiracy theories. “I’ve been incredibly disappointed by Republican leadership both in the House of Representatives and in the Senate,” he said, though he praised Rep. Liz Cheney, the No. 3 House Republican, who voted to impeach Trump over the attack on the Capitol and has said the GOP “cannot become the party of QAnon.” CNN reached out to House and Senate GOP leadership offices for comment. McConnell’s office pointed to the Senate Minority Leader’s past criticism of Greene where he said earlier this year that “looney lies and conspiracy theories are cancer for the Republican party and our country.” Wood specifically takes issue with House GOP leader Kevin McCarthy’s decision to meet with Trump to discuss efforts to take back the House majority after the riots, and believes the move demonstrated both a lack of courage and a losing strategy. “Kevin McCarthy has been a giant disappointment. He was elected leader for a reason and he hasn’t acted like a leader at all over the past few months,” he said. ‘An apocalyptic, messianic conspiracy theory’ As the GOP charts a path forward after Trump lost the White House, Kinzinger said he does not want to see Republicans push voting laws based on false claims of widespread election fraud. “The narrative is almost we have to tighten our election system so that the next election isn’t stolen again, and that is garbage,” he said. Republicans in Georgia recently sped a sweeping elections bill into law, making it the first presidential battleground to impose new voting restrictions following Biden’s victory in the state. Republicans cast the measure, which has sparked intense national controversy, as necessary to boost confidence in elections after the 2020 election saw Trump make repeated and unsubstantiated claims of fraud. The Illinois congressman said that he hasn’t followed the details of the Georgia law closely and thinks that some of the Democratic pushback has been “overblown,” but he also believes there is valid criticism that it was enacted in reaction to false claims of widespread voter fraud. Kinzinger hopes that the January 6 Capitol attack will ultimately prove to be a “turning point” for the Republican Party, but thinks it may take quite some time to undo the damage that was done. “I think it will be a turning point in the long run. I think in the short-term there were a number of people who have kind of woken up to it, but there’s a number who haven’t,” he said. Riggleman thinks QAnon has taken hold because it gives people something to believe in. “It’s an apocalyptic, messianic conspiracy theory that allows people to almost play act in this good versus evil battle against the global forces of evil,” he said, adding that people become “wrapped up in that” and it becomes “difficult to disentangle them from those theories.” Meijer is concerned that embracing conspiracy theories like QAnon could make it harder for the GOP to recalibrate and rebuild after losing the White House and being in the minority in both chambers. “I think it’s all part of this broader trend of blame casting,” the congressman said. “In the case of QAnon, it’s well, why am I in the position I’m in? Well, it’s because others are holding me down. Why did we lose this election? Well, it wasn’t because our candidate wasn’t the best or had made mistakes, it was because it was stolen. It’s these ways of distancing oneself from responsibility and accountability.” As one of the Republicans warning about the dangers of QAnon and conspiracy theory thinking, Meijer understands what he’s up against, but he says he’s determined to keep speaking out. “It’s important to not let the record go uncorrected and to continue to speak the truth,” Meijer said. “It’s something I definitely do at my peril, both politically and otherwise, but I didn’t run for office to seek the easy path and I’m certainly not going to cower away from what I think is an important responsibility.” CNN’s Kelly Mena contributed to this report. Source link Orbem News #'Anexistentialthreat':TheRepublicanscallingfortheirpartytorejectQAnonconspiracytheories-CNNPolitics #calling #conspiracy #Existential #party #Politics #QAnon #reject #Republicans #theories #threat

[dipulb3]

'An existential threat': The Republicans calling for their party to reject QAnon conspiracy theories

New Post has been published on https://appradab.com/an-existential-threat-the-republicans-calling-for-their-party-to-reject-qanon-conspiracy-theories/

'An existential threat': The Republicans calling for their party to reject QAnon conspiracy theories

“When we say QAnon, you have the sort of extreme forms, but you also just have this softer, gradual undermining of any shared, collective sense of truth,” Meijer said. The Michigan freshman believes conspiracy theories fuel “incredibly unrealistic and unachievable expectations” and “a cycle of disillusionment and alienation” that could lead conservative voters to sit out elections or, in a worst-case scenario, turn to political violence, like what happened on January 6.

How deeply far-right conspiracy theories take hold within the Republican Party, and what the party does to either embrace or reject them, will have major consequences for the future of the GOP and American politics.

Meijer is far from the only Republican in Congress disturbed by the rise of QAnon, but he is one of a rare few willing to publicly and repeatedly denounce it.

Republicans who speak out risk a backlash, and many would rather dismiss, downplay or ignore the issue. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, a Republican from Georgia, famously signaled outright support for the conspiracy theory before she was elected to office, though she has recently attempted to distance herself from it.

Appradab reached out to the offices of more than a dozen GOP members of Congress to request interviews for this story, and only two agreed to participate.

The lonely voices within the GOP who continue to take a stand must now grapple with what it would take for the party to turn away from conspiracy theories.

Most recognize they face a difficult fight, but some hope they may be able to grow their ranks in Congress in the future, and one upcoming congressional election in Texas will serve as an early test of whether an anti-conspiracy theory message can resonate in a red district.

‘A long-term battle for the soul of the party’

Rep. Adam Kinzinger, who also voted to impeach Trump, may be the loudest voice within the Republican Party taking on QAnon.

He recently launched a political action committee as part of an effort he’s calling “Country First” that seeks to counter the GOP’s embrace of conspiracy theories and the former President. The congressman has endorsed the nine other House Republicans who voted to impeach over the Capitol attack as they now face down the potential threat of primary challenges.

He has also endorsed a Texas GOP congressional candidate, Michael Wood, who is running in a crowded field in the state’s sixth district on a platform calling for Republicans to turn away from Trump and reject conspiracy theories. Wood is running in a special election taking place on May 1 to fill the House seat previously held by the late Republican Rep. Ron Wright, who died in February after contracting Covid.

“We are not the party of conspiracy theories and QAnon. We can be again the party of ideas,” Wood says in a video on his campaign website.

Wood blames Trump for the spread of conspiracy theories within the party, and believes Republicans must repudiate Trump to defeat QAnon. Trump has long embraced conspiracy theories, including birtherism. He forcefully pushed the lie that the election was stolen from him and while he was in office, he praised QAnon followers for supporting him and refused to denounce the conspiracy theory.

“I think he bears direct responsibility for the rise of conspiratorial thinking in the Republican Party and the conservative movement as a whole,” Wood said in an interview. “The big lie that he promulgated after Election Day did a whole lot of harm to our civic institutions.”

Kinzinger hopes that whatever the outcome in the special election, his endorsement will show like-minded Republicans they’re not alone and encourage others to run for office on a similar platform.

“I think what’s important is that people see there are people out there that support you, that will back you if you do the right thing,” he said. “It’s a long-term battle for the soul of the party.”

The Illinois congressman describes the danger he believes QAnon poses in stark terms, saying he’s concerned its corrosive impact threatens to pull apart the very fabric of American democracy.

“Do I think there’s going to be a civil war? No. Do I rule it out? No. Do I think it’s a concern, do I think it’s something we have to be worried about? Yeah,” he said.

‘We’re facts-based pariahs’

Former GOP Rep. Denver Riggleman of Virginia is outspoken in his opposition to QAnon, and he believes that is part of the reason he was voted out of office.

While serving in Congress, Riggleman co-sponsored a bipartisan resolution condemning QAnon that passed in the House overwhelmingly, though seventeen Republicans voted in opposition and 34 didn’t vote at all. But he thinks most Republican lawmakers “want to have it both ways” when it comes to the issue of conspiracy theories.

The former congressman said Republicans frequently try to make it look like they’re standing up for principle, while at the same time “winking and nodding” at conspiracy theories in an effort to get more votes.

It’s difficult to pinpoint exactly how widespread belief in QAnon is in the Republican Party. According to the Pew Research Center, roughly a quarter of Republicans who know about QAnon view its supporters favorably, though nearly half of Republicans say they know nothing at all about the conspiracy theory.

Riggleman believes a major problem right now is that there’s a strong “contingent of GOP voters who have completely lost themselves in the rabbit hole of conspiracies, disinformation and grievance politics,” and most Republican lawmakers “want to get re-elected so they would rather have people like me shut the hell up, even though they know I’m right.”

“It’s almost like we’re facts-based pariahs that are trying to sort of rein in this insanity that’s gone on,” he said.

“It does feel lonely sometimes in terms of being the outspoken voice,” Kinzinger said. “The reality is I think if you’re a sitting member of Congress it’s easy to say, I’m going to ignore this.”

Wood, the Texas congressional candidate, is frustrated that, in his view, most GOP congressional leaders have not done enough to denounce QAnon conspiracy theories.

“I’ve been incredibly disappointed by Republican leadership both in the House of Representatives and in the Senate,” he said, though he praised Rep. Liz Cheney, the No. 3 House Republican, who voted to impeach Trump over the attack on the Capitol and has said the GOP “cannot become the party of QAnon.”

Appradab reached out to House and Senate GOP leadership offices for comment. McConnell’s office pointed to the Senate Minority Leader’s past criticism of Greene where he said earlier this year that “looney lies and conspiracy theories are cancer for the Republican party and our country.”

Wood specifically takes issue with House GOP leader Kevin McCarthy’s decision to meet with Trump to discuss efforts to take back the House majority after the riots, and believes the move demonstrated both a lack of courage and a losing strategy.

“Kevin McCarthy has been a giant disappointment. He was elected leader for a reason and he hasn’t acted like a leader at all over the past few months,” he said.

‘An apocalyptic, messianic conspiracy theory’

As the GOP charts a path forward after Trump lost the White House, Kinzinger said he does not want to see Republicans push voting laws based on false claims of widespread election fraud.

“The narrative is almost we have to tighten our election system so that the next election isn’t stolen again, and that is garbage,” he said.

Republicans in Georgia recently sped a sweeping elections bill into law, making it the first presidential battleground to impose new voting restrictions following Biden’s victory in the state. Republicans cast the measure, which has sparked intense national controversy, as necessary to boost confidence in elections after the 2020 election saw Trump make repeated and unsubstantiated claims of fraud.

The Illinois congressman said that he hasn’t followed the details of the Georgia law closely and thinks that some of the Democratic pushback has been “overblown,” but he also believes there is valid criticism that it was enacted in reaction to false claims of widespread voter fraud.

Kinzinger hopes that the January 6 Capitol attack will ultimately prove to be a “turning point” for the Republican Party, but thinks it may take quite some time to undo the damage that was done.

“I think it will be a turning point in the long run. I think in the short-term there were a number of people who have kind of woken up to it, but there’s a number who haven’t,” he said.

Riggleman thinks QAnon has taken hold because it gives people something to believe in. “It’s an apocalyptic, messianic conspiracy theory that allows people to almost play act in this good versus evil battle against the global forces of evil,” he said, adding that people become “wrapped up in that” and it becomes “difficult to disentangle them from those theories.”

Meijer is concerned that embracing conspiracy theories like QAnon could make it harder for the GOP to recalibrate and rebuild after losing the White House and being in the minority in both chambers.

“I think it’s all part of this broader trend of blame casting,” the congressman said. “In the case of QAnon, it’s well, why am I in the position I’m in? Well, it’s because others are holding me down. Why did we lose this election? Well, it wasn’t because our candidate wasn’t the best or had made mistakes, it was because it was stolen. It’s these ways of distancing oneself from responsibility and accountability.”

As one of the Republicans warning about the dangers of QAnon and conspiracy theory thinking, Meijer understands what he’s up against, but he says he’s determined to keep speaking out.

“It’s important to not let the record go uncorrected and to continue to speak the truth,” Meijer said. “It’s something I definitely do at my peril, both politically and otherwise, but I didn’t run for office to seek the easy path and I’m certainly not going to cower away from what I think is an important responsibility.”

Appradab’s Kelly Mena contributed to this report.

[perfectirishgifts]

Trumpocalypse Now?

New Post has been published on https://perfectirishgifts.com/trumpocalypse-now/

Trumpocalypse Now?

President Trump addressing supporters during an October campaign appearance in Tampa. Will there be … [] another Florida Trump rally on Inauguration Day, kicking off a 2024 run? (Photo: Paul Hennessy/NurPhoto via Getty Images)

My New Year’s resolutions include this one: no longer greeting the day by seeing what’s making news on The Drudge Report – one of 2020’s more intriguing media stories being why that site went from Trump enabler to Trump disabler.

Today’s a good example of the need for a Drudge cleanse: a screaming headline about Rush Limbaugh suggesting a culture war that may lead to secession coupled with a story about America’s Republican Party “driving itself mad.”

I thought we were done with secession talk after some disgruntled Texans flirted with the idea following Barack Obama’s re-election and some spoiled-sport Californians threatened the same if Trump were to be granted a second term.

But it seems I was wrong.

A Texas state representative plans to introduce a bill that would start the ball rolling on a “Texit” voter referendum. Meanwhile, out west, a pro-independence group recently was granted permission to gather signatures to qualify a “Calexit” state ballot vote (better that than trying to sell the Golden State – in its tarnished state, fetching maybe pennies on the dollar).

File secession talk under “believe it when you see it.” Constitutional law prevents American states from leaving the union. Besides, Democratic-friendly California soon will have one of its own in the Oval Office. Then again, perhaps a Biden White House would like to bid adieu to the Lone Star State and hello to Lone Star Nation. Eliminate Texas’ estimated 41 electoral votes from the next two presidential elections and Republicans will have a hard time regaining the White House.

For now, the more salient matter is the future of the Republican Party. That consists of two questions: how do GOP hopefuls plan to campaign in 2024, and will Donald Trump be included in the mix?

Predicting the future is another item to add to the resolutions list: too many of us who traffic in politics and punditry too easily give in to the temptation to state with certainty what lies ahead when in fact we’re speculating based on trends, history, polling data and personal bias (here’s a good example from last year: a column assuring us that Joe Biden’s not electable, but Elizabeth Warren is).

Of the Republicans at this point seemingly angling for their party’s nomination, here are a few themes: Missouri Sen. Josh Hawley rails against Big Tech, “corporatists” and “war enthusiasts”; Arkansas Sen. Tom Cotton is no fan of China (he wants to revoke its MFN status); former UN Ambassador Nikki Haley (also a former governor of early-primary South Carolina) lashes out at AOC, the House “squad” and a lack of civility in public discourse.

That’s all fine and swell – three would-be candidates coopting different parts of Trump-brand populism. But what if Trump decides to “make America great again” . . . yet again?

If certain news report are to be believed, Trump is mulling an Inaugural Day spectacular of his own – a Florida political rally opposite Biden’s moment in the sun. Furthermore, the story goes, Trump will announce a 2024 re-election bid.

And where does that leave the GOP? Pretty much where it was in 2015, with a slew of Republicans all claiming to be the party’s and heart and soul – each deciding the right blend of embracing and distancing themselves from Trump.

Could Trump win the Republican nomination? Sure, as long as the primary rules don’t change. And maybe that’s something for the Republic National Committee to consider: if it doesn’t want a third Trump November run, alter how the party allots delegates.

Let’s go back and look at how Trump became the GOP nominee in 2016, which was a combination of persistence, moving to the front of the pack early, and benefitting from a delegate-reward system that makes it difficult for those in the back of the pack to catch up to and surpass the leader.

To recap: Trump finished second in 2016’s Iowa caucuses, then surged in front after wins in New Hampshire, South Carolina and Nevada, followed by victories in seven of the 11 “Super Tuesday” states on the first Tuesday in March. Trump’s next surge came two weeks later, on March 15, when he finished first in Florida, Illinois, Missouri and North Carolina while losing only one big prize (Ohio). The race was effectively by the end of April, after Trump wins in New York, Pennsylvania. He wouldn’t lose any of the remaining 10 primaries.

A look at the delegate math shows the problem in trying to stop Trump’s momentum. Thanks to Republican “binding” rules, Trump’s delegate haul exceeded his popular support.

In 2016 Trump received 45% of the overall GOP primary vote, while earning 59% of the 2,472 delegates. By contrast, runner-up Ted Cruz received 25% of the overall primary vote and 22% of all delegates. The two finishers after that had more disproportionate numbers – Marco Rubio received 11% of the popular vote and 7% of delegates; John Kasich received almost 14% of the popular vote and just 6.5% of delegates.

While Trump didn’t swamp his rivals in individual contests, rarely receiving an outright majority of states’ popular votes, he kept adding his delegate haul. Trump received 44% of the vote in Florida’s primary, but ended up with all 99 delegates; in Illinois, he received 39% of the vote and 54 of 69 delegates; in Arizona, Trump received 46% of the vote and all 58 delegates; in New York and Pennsylvania, 59% and 57% of the two states’ popular vote translated to 148 of 166 delegates; in California’s anti-climactic primary (the vote coming a week after he’d clinched the nomination), Trump’s 75% performance meant all 172 delegates.

There’s an easy fix here, if the goal is to somehow derail the Trump Train in 2024: make the delegation allocation more reflective of the actual popular vote, and expand the pool of unpledged delegates (only 5% of the delegate pool in 2016).

Of course, such a “reform” comes at a price: the risk of alienating Trump supporters who’d see the change as a shot across the MAGA bow. Besides, adding more unpledged “superdelegates” would play into Trump victim messaging as it would reek of elitism and stacking the decking again the red-hat crowd. 

And that’s the Republican conundrum for now – not so much a cause for convulsions as it is consternation. Unlike previous ousted incumbents, Trump is not a spent political force (this poll shows Trump as the frontrunner in a hypothetical 2024 primary field).

Past U.S. presidents, with the exception of Grover Cleveland, took their rejection in stride – exiting the political stage and staying in exile. There was no Hoover attempt at a comeback in 1936; no one sported “The Grin Will Win” buttons in 1984; George H.W. Bush, gracious man that he was, was done with partisan politics after his loss in 1992.

And therein lies the difference: Trump isn’t gracious, nor was he drubbed as were Hoover and Carter (neither incumbent clearing 41% of the popular vote; each carrying only six states).

A Trump second act? It sounds feasible.

Will anyone try to get in his way?

Follow me on Twitter: @billwhalenCA

From Policy in Perfectirishgifts

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The battle for voting rights in the age of mass incarceration

Norris Henderson, an activist for criminal justice reform including voting rights for former prisoners, in New Orleans, on November 7, 2019. | Akasha Rabut for Vox

Ex-prisoners are getting their voting rights back. But the backlash has already started.

Shauntelle Mitchell waited in her local polling station in Slidell, Louisiana, and contemplated leaving. The October primary election would be her first time voting in years — her criminal record had prevented her from casting a ballot since 2011. This year, re-registered and finally free to vote, she felt nervous.

“All eyes was on me,” Mitchell, 43, recalled. “I started to walk out, because I felt people was looking at me, and I was like, ‘Why go through the whole process to walk away? You came here to vote, to try to make a difference, even if the candidate you picked does not win.’” She stopped herself and turned around. “I stood my ground and voted.”

Mitchell’s vote came at a historic moment: the first state-wide election held after Louisiana restored voting rights to some 36,000 people convicted of felonies, as Mitchell had been. It was a significant win for criminal justice reform activists in a state that had the highest incarceration rate in the nation until last year.

Louisiana activist Norris Henderson has been in the fight for so long, he’s been dubbed “St. Norris” by other organizers. On a recent fall day, Henderson took the stage in a round room in Philadelphia’s Eastern State Penitentiary for the first presidential town hall hosted by formerly incarcerated people. Invitations had been extended to the entire field, and three Democratic candidates for president — Sen. Kamala Harris, Sen. Cory Booker, and businessman Tom Steyer — showed up.

Mark Makela/Getty Images

Sen. Cory Booker attended a presidential town hall to discuss voting in the age of mass incarceration at the Eastern State Penitentiary in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, on October 28, 2019.

Mark Makela/Getty Images

Billionaire Tom Steyer speaks during the town hall.

Mark Makela/Getty Images

Sen. Kamala Harris at the town hall.

“This has been a journey for us to get here,” he said. The room’s rough stone walls and Gothic, arching doorways surrounded him, leading to America’s original cellblocks. “Some people question why would we do something inside a prison, particularly this prison. This was where America first experienced mass incarceration. This was the first prison built in America.”

Today, some 200 years since Eastern State opened, an estimated 2.3 million people are held across the nation’s criminal justice system in prisons, juvenile facilities, jails, and immigrant detention centers. Nearly 60 percent of this population are people of color.

The town hall’s setting spoke directly to an inherent contradiction in the democratic ideal of “one person, one vote” presented by the age of mass incarceration: For people drawn into the system, one conviction often equals no vote — sometimes for life. Even when voting rights gains are made, they can be precarious.

Laws banning former prisoners from voting in America date back to the colonial era and remain the norm in much of the nation. Only 16 states and DC automatically re-enfranchise people convicted of felonies when they’re released, and two states — Maine and Vermont — allow people to vote from prisons. During the 2016 presidential elections, more than 6 million people were prevented from casting ballots through the criminal justice system, according to the Sentencing Project.

In tandem with the growing movement to end mass incarceration, there is a building consensus that these laws disenfranchise huge swaths of the population from participating in representative politics. Between 1996 and 2008, seven states repealed lifetime disenfranchisement laws for at least some ex-offenders.

Nevada, California, New York, and Arizona have all expanded voting rights for ex-felons this year. In Wisconsin, activists and politicians pushed a bill in October to immediately return the vote to those leaving prison. When Democrat Andy Beshear won Kentucky’s gubernatorial race in early November, it was viewed in part as a win for ex-felon re-enfranchisement — Beshear had campaigned on restoring voting rights to an estimated 100,000 people.

Nowhere has this fight been more consequential than in Louisiana and Florida, where activists scored two enormous victories. Last year, voting rights were restored to an estimated 36,000 people convicted of felonies in Louisiana through bipartisan legislation and 1.5 million in Florida during state elections through the Amendment 4 ballot initiative. That such expansions took place in these Southern states has both practical and symbolic significance: Florida’s high incarceration rate meant that extending the vote to former felons is considered the largest voting rights advancement since the 1970s.

John Raoux/AP

Desmond Meade, president of the Florida Rights Restoration Coalition (left) arrives with family members to register to vote in Orlando, Florida, on January 8, 2019. Meade has a felony on his record.

But the gains have not gone uncontested. Across the nation, voting rights wins have been undercut by laws requiring fines and fees in order to vote, relinquishing voting restoration for felons of certain crimes, and otherwise placing former prisoners in webs of bureaucracy with little clarity over how to regain their rights. It’s a lesson in the fragility of even momentous political gains, and the likelihood of setbacks.

“The right to vote is a marker of our citizenship, a marker of who counts, of who matters, a marker of who is part of our community and who is excluded,” said Micah Kubic, executive director of the ACLU of Florida. It is, he added, “essential to protecting all other rights and freedoms we care about.”

Norris Henderson sports a thin mustache, a smooth bald head and dark-rimmed glasses that he keeps in the pouch of his collared shirt. He has a calm presence and a subtly scrutinizing gaze. Henderson began organizing for prisoner’s rights while incarcerated himself 40 years ago. He’s considered a national authority in the movement — in addition to leading Voters Organized to Educate, a network of the nation’s leading formerly incarcerated activists from 35 states, which hosted the town hall, he’s also the head of Voice of the Experienced (dubbed VOTE), a similar group tackling mass incarceration and helping imprisoned people and their families in Louisiana.

A few weeks before the town hall, Henderson, 65, sat in his beige office in a converted school attached to an African American Catholic church in New Orleans, the city where Henderson was born and raised. It’s the city he returned to in 2003 when he was released from Louisiana State Penitentiary after serving nearly 28 years for a second-degree murder that he maintains he didn’t commit. Decades later, his organizing was instrumental in expanding voting rights in the state. “You almost don’t exist in this country if you don’t have your right to vote,” he said in an interview with the nonpartisan law and policy institute the Brennan Center for Justice.

Akasha Rabut for Vox

Norris Henderson in his office in New Orleans, Louisiana. Henderson is an activist focusing on criminal justice reform — the passage of voting rights restoration in Louisiana was a major win for him.

Laws banning felons from voting have colonial origins, but they became entrenched after the Civil War as a tool to protect white supremacy. As states expanded their criminal codes to make felonies of crimes associated with African Americans, they also stripped those convicted of felonies of the right to vote, creating what Voters Organized to Educate describes as a class of “political refugees” that spans generations.

Virginia lawmakers, for example, made petty theft a felony and Mississippi politicians singled out forgery, burglary, arson, and perjury — laws considered more likely for African Americans to commit or be convicted of. In her excoriation of mass incarceration, The New Jim Crow, Michelle Alexander began the book with the story of a man in 2010 who can’t vote because of a conviction, whose father couldn’t vote because of poll taxes, whose grandfather or great-grandfather couldn’t because of the Ku Klux Klan, nor his great-great-grandfather, who was enslaved.

For Henderson, voting rights are just one more path to undoing the racist origins of mass incarceration. That October morning, his office walls were, like his desk, covered with papers, and he’d been miserable. Louisiana’s Democratic governor, John Bel Edwards, had failed to win reelection outright, sparking a run-off with a construction mogul named Eddie Rispone who ran a campaign big on Trump and short on policy specifics. If Rispone wins on November 16, Henderson will lose an ally and gain an unknown quantity a mere nine months after a law passed restoring the vote to tens of thousands of Louisiana’s formerly incarcerated population.

Henderson pointed to a printed spreadsheet outlining voter turnout in the heavily Democratic Crescent City, which hadn’t broken 40 percent (it was 46 percent statewide). “Our people didn’t show up,” he said. He scoffed at the idea that President Donald Trump, Vice President Mike Pence, or Donald Trump Jr. had made the difference — all three of whom descended up in the state in a glitzy trifecta to galvanize Republicans ahead of the election. Instead, political analysts concluded Democratic and black voter turnout was down, despite statewide get-out-the-vote efforts.

Of the potential 36,000 re-enfranchised felons, only 581 had registered to vote by early September. “Voter apathy is so real in our state,” Ashley Shelton, the executive director of a network of progressive groups called the Power Coalition, told me on election night. “We don’t have a lot of voter suppression laws because they don’t have to.”

Henderson had expected Edwards’s win to “send a message” to the nation, which was beginning to view the race as a bellwether for 2020, about the kinds of progressive policies even Deep South voters want. Instead, Louisiana’s runoff election and the legal battle in Florida underline the potential fragility of voting rights gains.

Akasha Rabut for Vox

Posters in Henderson’s office. Henderson served nearly 28 years before his release. “You almost don’t exist in this country if you don’t have your right to vote,” he said in an interview with the nonpartisan law and policy institute the Brennan Center for Justice.

They’re not the only examples. In Massachusetts, people in prisons could cast ballots until 2000, when voters made it illegal. Both Tennessee and South Dakota have expanded felon disenfranchisement over the last 10 years. And in Tennessee, the requirement to repay fines and fees before being allowed to vote has reportedly placed some in an unnavigable maze of bureaucracy with no clear way to regain their rights. Today, 32 states require various levels of completion of parole, probation, and/or repaying fines, fees and restitution, if voting rights are returned at all, according to an analysis by the National Conference of State Legislatures.

One year after Florida voters passed Amendment 4, the state’s legislature is fighting a lawsuit attempting to curtail the amendment’s historic expansion of voting rights. Amendment 4 stated that those convicted of felonies, with the exception those convicted of murder or felony sex offenses, can vote after they’ve completed “all terms of sentence.” The amendment’s proponents, including its creator Desmond Meade, had argued it could take immediate effect without the need of any new legislation. The state’s Republican politicians disagreed.

This summer, Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis signed a law passed along party lines stating that former felons can only vote once they’ve paid back all fines and fees ordered by a court during sentencing or as a condition of probation, parole or community service, for any felony conviction in the country. In Florida, such fees begin the moment of an arrest and extend until freedom: There is a fee for requesting a public defender, and fees for ankle bracelets and other monitoring during probation or parole.

One analysis by Florida political scientist Dan Smith found an estimated 82 percent of the 1.5 million people re-enfranchised by Amendment 4 would be denied the right to vote under the new law because they owe the state money, including a rate twice as high for those who are black compared to those who are white.

Smith found even small fees within $500 could present an insurmountable barrier, and noted that anyone working with a newly freed voter to help them to determine whether they have paid back all fines or fees “will have great difficulty” figuring that out in Florida’s “highly decentralized” system, let alone making that determination for crimes sentenced by another state or federal court. The move has been slammed by some critics, including the ACLU of Florida, as a poll tax.

“I think what the legislature did and what Ron DeSantis did is require people to pay in order to vote,” said Kubic, the ACLU of Florida’s executive director, which sued the state over the law along with the Brennan Center for Justice and other groups.

In October, a federal judge partly blocked the law, rejecting the poll tax claim but concluding that the state could not “deny the right to vote to a felon who would be allowed to vote but for the failure to pay amounts the felon has been genuinely unable to pay.”

Josh Ritchie/Washington Post/Getty Images

Erica Racz at the bar where she bartends in Fort Myers, Florida, June 26, 2019. She has a felony on her record and is being asked to pay off court fees and fines before she can have her voting rights restored.

State Sen. Jeff Brandes, a Republican from Pinellas County who helped shape the new legislation, says he believes “being a felon shouldn’t be a scarlet letter that you carry around the rest of your life,” but that the new law follows “spirit and the letter” of Amendment 4. He added that it keeps with the testimony of John Mills, a lawyer who represented the proponents of Amendment 4 and told Florida’s Supreme Court that some fees were implied in the phrase “all terms of sentence.”

Meanwhile, Meade and his organization, Florida Rights Restoration Coalition, haven’t waited on the legal battle. This summer, they began fundraising hundreds of thousands of dollars to repay people’s fines and fees and launched an initiative to help them register to vote.

The group’s get-out-the-vote and Amendment 4 education bus tour was scheduled to hit more than a dozen cities in November, and FRRC says it identified 100,000 former felons still eligible to vote under the new law in Miami-Dade County alone. Numerous deadlines loomed: There were multiple November local elections, including Orlando’s mayoral election, where Meade himself had hoped to vote for the first time since the 1980s, when he was convicted on drug and firearms charges.

Amendment 4’s final interpretation — and its ability to expand voting rights — will likely lie with the Florida Supreme Court, which is expected to issue a non-binding opinion on whether fines and fees are rightly implied by the amendment’s language. In the meantime, Florida lawmakers face the challenge of creating an avenue for those who can’t afford to pay their fees to still vote, as ordered by the judge.

“It’s an open question what that looks like,” Kubic said, but he expects such a process to be in place before the 2020 presidential elections. If he’s right, the nation will be scrutinizing Florida’s election with more than the usual intensity, looking for signs that a new voting block could change the political fate of the state, and the White House.

Myrna Perez, who leads the Brennan Center for Justice’s voting rights and elections program, said this new phase of Florida’s Amendment 4 battle can’t undo what she’s called “the greatest civil rights advancement any of us will see in our lifetime.” But it is replete with lessons for activists. “We’re going to be doing calculations about how much you want to anticipate the backlash in the fight for these kinds of amendments,” she said.

The amendment proved that ballot initiatives can do in a single election what politicians can take decades to achieve. But she noted that ballot language itself is tricky. Floridian activists opted for the general phrase “all terms of sentence,” rather than using more specific, but perhaps also more complicated language, that could have avoided the entire debate on fines and fees.

“This is a data point about what can happen when you try for a policy that is easy for the average Floridian to understand,” Perez said. One needs to write a short statement that’s clear enough to be understood by average voters, but one that is also “detailed enough to forestall attempts to thwart it.”

Wilfredo Lee/AP

Supporters for Amendment 4 rallied for votes in Miami, Florida, on October 22, 2018.

It is also, despite ongoing litigation, another example of the bipartisan appeal of criminal justice reform among voters — the same appeal that has made the need to tackle mass incarceration an unlikely unifying issue of the Trump era. In order for Amendment 4 to have passed in the first place, a significant chunk of Florida’s Republican voters had to approve it, even if many of the state’s Republican politicians were less enthusiastic.

In Louisiana, seven of the original 10 criminal justice reform bills passed as a package in 2017 were carried by Republicans. Donald Trump recently received a controversial award for signing the bipartisan First Step Act, which allows thousands of federal prisoners to earn an early release, and Democratic presidential hopefuls have each tried to own an animating issue for the left with detailed and sometimes ambitious criminal justice policy proposals.

Even so, most of the 2020 Democratic field candidates who were absent from Henderson’s criminal justice forum won’t easily be able to shake such a slight to a group with little historical reason to trust either party. Henderson had warned a few weeks earlier: “If you don’t show up for us in October 2019, don’t look for us in November 2020.” He nevertheless characterized the event as a success as he took the stage again to wrap the event. “We’re not begging nobody for anything,” he said. “Today is the beginning of us making demands.”

Among the Louisiana reforms, restoring voting rights has been one of Henderson and his fellow activists’ greatest achievements — the other being ending Louisiana’s Jim Crow-era practice of allowing convictions even when juries were split 10-2, created expressly to “establish the supremacy of the white race” in 1898.

The law, which re-enfranchised those who’ve been out of prisons or jails for five years beginning March of this year, passed the Republican-dominated house by just two votes last year. Now, its future depends upon the ongoing support of enough of the state’s politicians, some of whom have already moved to reduce its impact. In the last session, one lawmaker attempted to block those convicted of sex crimes against minors from voting, a bill that failed.

Jason E. Miczek/AP Images for Voters Organized to Educate

Sen. Cory Booker, left, greets moderators Daryl Atkinson of Voters Organized to Educate, Rev. Vivian Nixon, second from left, and DeAnna Hoskins, during the presidential town hall at Eastern State Penitentiary in Philadelphia.

“It was little things like that, just the idea before these things even get implemented correctly,” Henderson said. “It was like, ‘It ain’t gonna work.’ Well, how do you know it ain’t gonna work? You gotta give it a chance to work.”

If Edwards loses, “it’s gonna be a whole bunch of ifa-woulda-shouldas,” Henderson said. “But that don’t get us nowhere, that just gets us into rolling back four years of progressive accomplishments. As opposed to fighting for new things, it’s kind of like trying to fight to hold onto things.”

What that means for elections in hotly contested states like Florida remains to be seen. Common speculation is that these newly enfranchised voters could have handed Hillary Clinton the Oval Office if they’d been able to vote in 2016, but that’s assuming a strong partisan lean among people convicted of crimes that some political scientists argue is likely false. One analysis of the impact of Florida’s Amendment 4 found that while black voters who’ve been imprisoned do tend to register as Democrats, their non-black counterparts —who are the majority — lean Republican. It could be that expanding voting rights to former felons won’t fit neatly into a partisan narrative — that it really will, simply put, expand democracy for democracy’s sake.

For millions of formerly incarcerated people, it’s a right that could matter immensely. Shauntelle Mitchell described it as a moment of power. “I’ve had a lot of people saying you know, you’ve been to jail before so your voting is not gonna count,” Mitchell said. “The thing I have to do is to not let no one put me down and tell me my voice doesn’t count. That’s what made me register and go vote. Even if the people I choose don’t win, I still made a difference.”

On November 16, when Louisianians decide whether they want four more years of John Bel Edwards — and criminal justice reforms — Mitchell will be one of them.

Rosemary Westwood is a writer in New Orleans and the publisher of the weekly newsletter on reproductive rights, the Roe Report. In past lives, she’s produced and reported radio news, created a podcast, and worked as a newspaper columnist.

Akasha Rabut is is a photographer and educator based in New Orleans. Her work explores multicultural phenomena and traditions rooted in the American South.

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