Bracing for a Biden Presidency

Here are some various thoughts on the Presidential election, as Trump is Sieg Heil-ing himself as the winner. Although at this moment on Thursday, it looks like Biden will be the winner.



The class-vs-other-identities debate will go on. But the Democrats need to build the party infrastructure - and by that I mean get people involved at the grassroots level - and Biden as President needs to support that effort. Repeating the 2009-2017 approach is not acceptable: Mara Liasson, The Democratic Party Got Crushed During The Obama Presidency. Here's Why NPR 03/04/2016; Stanley Greenberg and Anna Greenberg, Was Barack Obama Bad for Democrats? New York Times 12/23/2016.

The Democrats need leaders who will fight Republicans. Nancy Pelosi is no longer one of them: Alexander Sammon writes (It’s Time for an Overhaul of House Democratic Leadership The American Prospect 11/05/2020):

Votes are still being tallied, but we already know for certain that election night was a disaster for House Democrats. As it stands, on a night where Democrats were forecast to pick up as many as 20 seats in the chamber, not a single GOP incumbent has been defeated. The only two Democratic pickups thus far can be chalked up to court-mandated changes to congressional district maps in North Carolina. While Democrats will likely keep the House majority, it’s possible they will lose between 7 and 12 seats in total, underperforming optimistic projections by 30 seats or more. The final count, whenever it comes in, will merely tell us how bad the bleeding is.

That result is stunning, after House leadership spent the summer all but assuring an expansion of the considerable mandate they won in 2018, when they flipped 40 seats in the House. Many of those freshmen who flipped those seats two years ago now find themselves on the ropes, struggling to hold on for the possibility of a second term. The vaunted rise of the suburbs, touted by moderate pundits as the surest path to Democratic victory, ran aground... [my emphasis]

The post-election moment is weird enough that the man Digby Parton refers to as Little Tommy Friedman, Age 6, manages to make sense. An additional case of the Rick Perry Principle: Even a stopped clock is right once a day.

I mean, it's Friedman, so he can't resist tossing in a dig at those scary leftist colleges and their Political Correctness. But this part isn't bad (There Was a Loser Last Night. It Was America. New York Times 11/04/2020)

... Democrats have a lot to rethink, said Michael Sandel, a professor at Harvard and author of “The Tyranny of Merit: What’s Become of the Common Good.”

“Even though Joe Biden emphasized his working-class roots and sympathies,” Sandel told me, “the Democratic Party continues to be more identified with professional elites and college-educated voters than with the blue-collar voters who once constituted its base. Even so epochal an event a sa pandemic, bungled by Trump, did not change this.

“Democrats need to ask themselves: Why do many working people embrace a plutocrat-populist whose policies do little to help them? Democrats need to address the sense of humiliation felt by working people who feel the economy has left them behind and that credentialed elites look down on them.”

Again, while Biden made small inroads with working-class voters, there seems to be no huge shift.

The invisible elves and sprites known to establishment Democrats as "moderate Republicsns" still stubbornly fail to reveal their presence. Charlie Pierce goes to town on their most prominent advocates (The Lincoln Project Didn't Move 10 Votes in This Election Esquire Politics Blog 11/04/2020):

Can we talk about Never Trump for a minute?

Its various iterations — The Lincoln Project, Republicans Against Trump — made some fine commercials and a lot of noise. They raised a lot of money, especially TLP, which is now going to morph into a multi-platform media network that likely will become a permanent (and very conservative) factor in elections going forward. Starting from scratch, TLP raised $60 million. Republicans Against Trump got started late, but they hoovered up $10 million. This is nice work if you can get it.

The problem is that, despite their fat bank accounts and some terrific publicity, these people didn't materially affect the presidential race at all. Their entertaining commercials got great run, but they didn't move 10 votes. They certainly didn't materially affect the Republican side. What data we have at the moment indicates that the president* got more of the Republican vote this time than he did in 2016. He certainly got more votes generally than he did four years ago. Take them all in all, and Never Trump is about as relevant to the actual election results this year as are the Whigs or the Free Soil Party. The problem for all the rest of us is that they should be.

Never Trump should have been a haven for Republicans and conservatives revolted by the notion that their party and the government had been appropriated by a vulgar talking yam. As should be obvious, there just aren't that many people like that. Most of the Never Trump movement is on salary to the Never Trump movement. Everybody else is completely With The Program. The president* has utterly subsumed American conservatism in general and the Republican Party in particular and, win or lose, he's not going to go anywhere. [my emphasis in bold]

On that last thought, I also assume that Trump will style himself as the American Juan Guaidó, President-in-exile who doesn't actually have to go into exile. Although if justice is allowed to run its course, Trump make seek asylum in a country with no extradition treaty with the US.

Trump and the Republicans want to stop counting the votes

Anita Kumar summarizes the current unfolding of Trump's political-judicial coup process in Trump's Supreme Court vow was what he planned all along Politico 11/04/2020. At this point, we do not have a complete vote count. Trump in his usual bombastic, reality-TV style attempted to paint a deliberately false picture of massive fraud by the Democrats, a position he's ben prepping for weeks. And his legal team is trying to prevent the counting of ballots, on the theory that a full count would be more like to benefit Biden.

Kumar writes:

[Trump's] decision to discredit the election results before the ballots are fully counted in several battleground states shattered yet another norm in American politics as he closes out his first — and perhaps only — term in office. But given the months Trump spent demeaning the electoral system, it was an unsurprising move.

“He’s not going to go gently into the night,” said presidential historian Douglas Brinkley. “Trump will look for ways to contest it because for him everything is at stake in this election. He goes from being the most powerful person in the world to being an outlaw figure.”

On Tuesday night, Trump did win important states like Florida, Iowa and Ohio. But Biden won Arizona, while the race was too close to call in key states the president flipped in 2016, including Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin.

Officials in Detroit, Philadelphia and Milwaukee said they would continue to count votes Wednesday as they work through a backlog of paper ballots. Trump’s team is bracing for a delay in results until the end of the week.

In a statement, Biden campaign manager Jen O’Malley Dillon described Trump’s Supreme Court vow [aiming to block counting votes] as “outrageous, unprecedented and incorrect.”

“Nearly 100 million people cast their ballot before Election Day in the belief — and with the assurances from their state election officials — that their ballot would be counted,” she wrote. “Now Donald Trump is trying to invalidate the ballot of every voter who relied on these assurances.” [my emphasis]

The election results, once they are fully known - barring the courts blocking significant numbers of legal votes being counted - will be endlessly parsed, of course. But it does seem on Wednesday morning that Trump votes were underestimated in the polls.

The critical thing for the Democrats is to stick to their insistence on counting the votes and call out a judicial coup attempt for what it is. Trump's judicial ploy will likely succeed if Biden and the Democratic establishment pursue the passive approach that failed with the Florida vote count in 2000. A Republican-packed Supreme Court cannot be allowed to decide the election.

The Democrats also have to respond effectively to the mobilization of the Republican base - including violent white-supremacist groups - that Trump and the Republicans are undertaking.

The coup plans seem to be already going into action

It looks like the Trump coup plan is already being put into motion:

Kate McGee et al, Biden camp cancels multiple Texas events after a "Trump Train" surrounded a campaign bus Texas Tribune 10/31/2020

Lois Beckett and Alexandra Villarreal, Biden campaign says Trump supporters tried to force bus off highway 11/01/2020

Matt Mathers, Biden event in Texas cancelled as 'armed' Trump supporters threaten campaign bus Independent 10/31/2020

Apparently, this action was popular in some quarters:

From the Texas Tribune coverage:

The Federal Bureau of Investigation is looking into a Friday incident in which a group of Trump supporters, driving trucks and waving Trump flags, surrounded and followed a Biden campaign bus as it drove up I-35 in Hays County, a law enforcement official confirmed to The Texas Tribune Saturday.

The confrontation, captured on video, featured at least one minor collision and led to Texas Democrats canceling three scheduled campaign events on Friday. The campaign officials cited “safety concerns” for the cancellations.

There's also this:

Texas Republicans have asked a federal judge to throw out 100,000 ballots in Harris County cast through curbside voting. They drew Judge Andrew Hanen, one of the most notoriously partisan Republican judges in the entire federal judiciary. This is alarming. https://t.co/VODOZrCoUF

— Mark Joseph Stern (@mjs_DC) October 31, 2020

Wow: One of the Republicans asking a federal judge to throw out more than 117,000 valid ballots in Harris County is a COVID and QAnon conspiracy theorist. Great reporting from @ehananoki. https://t.co/roTEm4vMIM pic.twitter.com/8KGNQvGAow

— Mark Joseph Stern (@mjs_DC) October 31, 2020

Stern in his Slate article linked in his tweet (Texas Republicans Ask Federal Judge to Throw Out 117,000 Legally Cast Ballots 10/31/2020) explains in more detail what a crassly partisan-political move it is and how flimsy the legal claims behind it are.

The Confederate symbolism would have been more completed if the Klan-style attempted vehicular homicide and the frivolous lawsuit relying on a corrupted judiciary had taken place in South Carolina rather than Texas.

But one of the Carolinas also got into the act, as Julia Craven describes (North Carolina’s Police Attack on Election Marchers Had a Long History Behind It Slate 10/31/2020):

On Saturday, Alamance County sheriff’s deputies and city police pepper sprayed a crowd of about 200 people who were peacefully marching to the polls in Graham, North Carolina without warning and on slim reasoning. Graham police claimed that protesters didn’t have the adequate permits to close off the road, while the Alamance County sheriff’s office said that the march was shut down out of “concerns for the safety of all.”

If it is at all difficult to understand how a police department could act so heinously—particularly when children and elderly community members are present within the crowd— then it’s important for one to grasp the context that the law enforcement operates within. ...

Voter intimidation is an omnipresent concern in North Carolina, a state that has tried to prevent Black and brown voters from casting ballots with “surgical precision” since Reconstruction. During the late 1800s, a high-level white supremacist campaign in North Carolina went to extreme acts of violence - including massacring Black residents in Wilmington - in order to regain political power within the state. Less outwardly violent voter suppression tactics have cropped up in the state following the Supreme Court’s weakening of the Voting Rights Act in Shelby v. Holder, such as North Carolina’s infamous voter I.D. law and gerrymandering so precise that every district in the state had to be redrawn. [my emphasis]

The chances of a Republican coup to keep Trump in office even if he loses the votes depends in significant part on how big the margin for Biden is. It should not be that way. But that's how badly wounded American democracy already is.

US Election Day and a post-election fight over voting coming up

Karen Greenberg of Fordham Law's Center on National Security, who has among other things has been closely following the ongoing trials in Guantanamo Bay, in the alternative-law enclave that the Cheney-Bush Administration created and the Obama-Biden Administration very shamefully refused to close, as of course did the Trump-Pence Administration, writes about the ways that the American state is failing on both the COVID-19 pandemic and on basic democratic processes. (Donald Trump’s Failed State: America’s Daunting New World and the Coming Election TomDispatch 10/29/2020).

She concludes with this concerned, defiant, and hopeful conclusion:

While some may view the coming election as a precipitous cliff, with dangers lurking everywhere, I also see it as an opportunity, which is why the tsunami of early voting, often involving hours of waiting, is an encouraging sign. Despite the abyss that we face after four years of chaos and cruelty, this country still has a chance to prove that we are not a failing state and to reclaim our trust in our government, our protections, and one another. Only then will we be able to begin to repair the economic damage, the rank divisiveness, and the unequal allocation of resources that has fueled our disastrous pandemic response and, with it, a further erosion of trust in government.

Maybe we need to accept the challenge of proving in this election that one of the world’s longest-standing democracies can rise to the occasion and vote to uphold the foundation of its system, elections themselves. Maybe, using this very election, we can harness the civic pride that could lead to a successful restoration of our basic beliefs in constitutional principles and the rule of law. The chance to vote, no matter how long the lines and the wait, might be just the opportunity we need. [my emphasis]

She is describing the stakes in this election accurately.

If Biden wins the Presidency, as she rightly says, the US will still be staring into an "abyss that we face after four years of chaos and cruelty."

In other words, we will have won a reprieve of the democratic system from Trumpism. But the longterm problems that have accumulated over three decades of dominant neoliberal economic policy and the specific problems created and exacerbated by the Trump-Pence government will remain. And the American oligarchy's grip on the government will still be very strong.

That's why at least progressives can't afford to let up the pressure for substantive popular reforms that secure the vote, combating the depression that has set in, adequate responses to the corona virus, limiting the role of money in politics, and much more.

Trump may be leaving the White House, but Trumpism is now the Republican Party. It's not going away. And the Republicans have seen in the past 12 years that by a combination of aggressive obstruction of Democratic initiatives and full-blown program of implementing an oligarchical restriction of democracy under the massively corrupt Trump Administration. Ending that will require the Democrats to reframe politics around a pro-democracy narrative and concrete programs to improve the lives of ordinary people and restricting the power of the oligarchy.

But this will definitely require civil society institutions, as they are generically called - progressive grassroots pressure in more specific terms - to push the Biden Administration starting on Election Day and continuing for four years. The Republicans will not stop fighting to reimpose Trumpism. If too much of the Democratic base metaphorically breathes a sigh of relief and goes to brunch, we will have a restoration of Trumpism sooner rather than later.

One group that has been generating ideas and strategies that the people can use to block Trump's planned attempt to nullify the election next week is Choose Democracy, headed by Joshua Kahn Russell. You can check out online their Ten Things You Need to Know to Stop a Coup.

They also feature on their website What’s the game plan if Trump really does try to steal the election? 7 tactics to stop a coup 10/21/2020 by Daniel Hunter from Waging Nonviolence.

Choose Democracy's 10 major points are the following:

1. Don’t expect results Election night.
2. Do call it a coup.
3. Know that coups have been stopped by regular folks.
4. Be ready to act quickly — and not alone.
5. Focus on widely shared democratic values, not on individuals.
6. Convince people not to freeze or just go along.
7. Commit to actions that represent rule of law, stability, and nonviolence.
8. Yes, a coup can happen in the United States.
9. Center in calm, not fear.
10. Prepare to deter a coup before the election.

Joshua Kahn Russell was a guest on Sam Seder's Majority Report 10/29/2020, starting around 18:00:

Slate's Dahlia Lithwick and Mark Joseph Stern are covering the Supreme Court actions related to the election both individually and together, as in their joint article The Supreme Court Wants to Determine Who Votes and Who Wins 10/27/2020. They will be good sources to follow over the next week, and probably longer, for election-relation SCOIUS actions.

Quincy Institute panel what the military's role might be in a post-Presidential-election transition crisis

Andrew Bacevich's Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft held a panel discussion yesterday on the current but eerie topic of The US military’s role in a contested election 10/28/2020. The full video is available at the link, and also on Facebook. The three panelists were Bacevich, Amber Smith, and Mark Hertling. The link has brief bios on them. 

There also a Facebook link: https://fb.watch/1pwVmwn9wk/

On the sensational-sounding possibility of some kind of military coup happening in the wake of a contested election, they all agreed that the possibility was highly unlikely. They all agreed that an August Open Letter by John Nagl and Paul Yingling on the topic (“. . . All Enemies, Foreign and Domestic”: An Open Letter to Gen. Milley Defense One 08/11/2020) that attracted quite a bit of attention was "irresponsible" on the part of Nagl and Yingling. Or, as Bacevich put it, "utterly irresponsible and stupid." But they did discuss the hypothetical of Trump losing the election and just refusing to leave office.

Bacevich put it this way, saying that if Biden wins the election he becomes President on January 20. "If Donald Trump decides he wants to continue to reside in the White House, who cares?" Biden would be President and that would be a minor problem to deal with. Smith said that in that case, which all three agreed was unlikely, it would be the responsibility of law enforcement and not the military to deal with it. Hertling suggested that if Trump refuses to leave the Oval Office, they should just turn out the lights, don't bring in any food, and wait for him to get tired and leave.

They also discussed that in case there was actual serious civil violence in some places after the election that neither local police or the state National Guard could adequately handle, the President does have the authority to declare martial law in an area or to invoke the Insurrection Act. Hertling commented that both laws are "squishy," meaning unclear in some ways. But all three panelists agreed on the obvious that neither should be used to suppress protests. Hertling said it would be justified only in cases of "extreme violence". That means, something a lot more serious than someone smashing store windows or setting a fire in a trash can.

Hertling also commented more generally that he is "absolutely opposed" to the increased militarization of the police.

And he stressed that state National Guards are normally trained in handling civil disturbances, crowd control, and so forth. But the military is trained to handle such matters primarily in a hostile foreign environment. And he noted specifically that it means that soldiers sent into American cities to handle such situations are more likely to start shooting earlier.

Bacevich expressed his opinion that it is a bad development for retired senior military officers - I assume he has mainly generals in mind though he didn't specify - to make partisan political endorsements, although as he noted, there is no law against it nor should there be. But his worry is that such endorsements contribute to normalizing the notion that it is legitimate for the military to be a partisan political body. Hertling explained why he disagreed, while Smith just complained about former military officers criticizing Trump.

I recall that Biden at one point responded to a question about Trump refusing to leave office in a somewhat offhand way by saying if that were to happen the military would just come take him out of there. In the moment, it conveyed the point that if he were elected President, he wouldn't stand for such a ploy by Trump. I was relieved to hear that at the time, because it showed more of a willingness to fight against Republican misconduct that Democrats are often willing to.

But technically speaking, that was a Biden "gaffe". Because it would be a law-enforcement responsibility, presumably the Secret Service, to take appropriate action to remove Trump if he decides to illegally trespass in the White House after a new President is inaugurated.