Politics & Stuff

[cosmicway 1,326]

1 minute ago, Vesper said:

No, not if Trump wins the other swing states (WI, AZ, GA, and NC) and retains all he won in 2020 (NC being the main one at risk)

I even gave Harris NE-2

She will lose if that above happens

 

 

Apart from NE, PA I don't see much swinging.
And as for the national vote yesterday's poll says Trump 49%, Harris 48%.
He seems to be winning it.
So far what saves the world from racism is the moderate attitude of the various conservatives.
If those are commandeered, hijacked by Trump and similar entities it looks pretty awful.
Even the Japanese will remember their empire and they will go for Australia, Corrigedor.

[Vesper 28,879]

An actual tweet from the US House Judiciary Committee Republicans

wtf

 

[IMissEden 20]

Well 20 mins ago I saw a video of responding officers in Ohio seeing to a Haitian incomer who’d stamped someone’s cat to death to eat it. The video of the man carrying about the duck he killed is verified. What’s the issue. That’s the issue. Not an AI pic pushing the point, against the wave of propaganda trying to hide these policy failings. 
edit to add you can see the cat, the location confirmed, it’s not fake. That’s the issue. Not reacting to everything trump. Christ 

Edited September 9 by IMissEden

[IMissEden 20]

an actual Ohio situation to have comments for. The concern never seems there, from most who dogmatically push their ideals surrounding the current political climate. The “bad guys“, are distraught with what’s going on. Goody two shoes section of one side just seem oblivious to so much and teeth so sank into things they won’t remove them even if it becomes apparent that it’s not healthy to do that, for self or supposed goals. 

Edited September 9 by IMissEden

[Vesper 28,879]

14 minutes ago, cosmicway said:

Apart from NE, PA I don't see much swinging.
And as for the national vote yesterday's poll says Trump 49%, Harris 48%.
He seems to be winning it.
So far what saves the world from racism is the moderate attitude of the various conservatives.
If those are commandeered, hijacked by Trump and similar entities it looks pretty awful.
Even the Japanese will remember their empire and they will go for Australia, Corrigedor.

all 7 swing states are basically a dead heat atm

it is absolutely impossible to call the race atm

atm, over the past week or so, Trump has, insanely so, a wee, wee bit of momentum as the Dem post-convention buzz wears off

a shedload is riding on the debate tomorrow night

[Fulham Broadway 16,868]

27 minutes ago, Vesper said:

a shedload is riding on the debate tomorrow night

Looking forward to that. Microphones will be muted. Think @robsblubot is right, it will reveal who is the real senile git

[Vesper 28,879]

34 minutes ago, IMissEden said:

an actual Ohio situation to have comments for. The concern never seems there, from most who dogmatically push their ideals surrounding the current political climate. The “bad guys“, are distraught with what’s going on. Goody two shoes section of one side just seem oblivious to so much and teeth so sank into things they won’t remove them even if it becomes apparent that it’s not healthy to do that, for self or supposed goals. 

laughable RW racist CT (and anything that uses Fox News as evidence and/our rationale is automatically null and void)

look at that fucking lunatic fringe RW crackpot X account you are pushing

Kash Patel???? LOLOLOL

GTFO

 

The Man Who Will Do Anything for Trump

Why Kash Patel is exactly the kind of person who would serve in a second Trump administration

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2024/10/kash-patel-trump-national-security-council/679566/

Kash Patel was dangerous. On this both Trump appointees and career officials could agree.

A 40-year-old lawyer with little government experience, he joined the administration in 2019 and rose rapidly. Each new title set off new alarms.

When Patel was installed as chief of staff to the acting secretary of defense just after the 2020 election, Mark Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, advised him not to break the law in order to keep President Donald Trump in power. “Life looks really shitty from behind bars,” Milley reportedly told Patel. (Patel denies this.)

When Trump entertained naming Patel deputy director of the FBI, Attorney General Bill Barr confronted the White House chief of staff and said, “Over my dead body.”

When, in the final weeks of the administration, Trump planned to name Patel deputy director of the CIA, Gina Haspel, the agency’s head, threatened to resign. Trump relented only after an intervention by Vice President Mike Pence and others.

Who was this man, and why did so many top officials fear him?

 

It wasn’t a question of ideology. He wasn’t a zealot like Stephen Miller, trying to make the bureaucracy yield to his agenda. Rather, Patel appeared singularly focused on pleasing Trump. Even in an administration full of loyalists, Patel was exceptional in his devotion.

 

This was what seemed to disturb many of his colleagues the most: Patel was dangerous, several of them told me, not because of a certain plan he would be poised to carry out if given control of the CIA or FBI, but because he appeared to have no plan at all—his priorities today always subject to a mercurial president’s wishes tomorrow. (Patel disputes this characterization.)

 

What wouldn’t a person like that do, if asked?

 

Most Americans had no idea Patel existed, yet rarely a day passed when administration leaders weren’t reminded that he did. In a year and eight months, they had watched Patel leapfrog from the National Security Council, where he became senior counterterrorism director; to the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, where he was principal deputy to the acting director; to the Department of Defense, where his influence rivaled that of the acting secretary himself.

 

But in the officials’ warnings about the various catastrophic ways the rise of an inexperienced lackey to the highest levels of government might end, all Patel seemed to detect was the panic of a “deep state” about to be exposed. Such officials understood, as Patel later wrote, that he “wouldn’t sit quietly and accept their actions to stonewall direct orders from the president.”

 

Patel was ultimately denied a role at the pinnacle of the national-security establishment, but Trump has promised to learn from his mistakes. Should he return to the White House, there will be no Milleys, Haspels, or even Barrs to restrain him as he seeks revenge against his political enemies. Instead, there will be Patels—those whose true faith and allegiance belong not to a nation, but to one man.

 

“Get ready, Kash,” Trump said before a gala of young Republicans this past December. “Get ready.”

 

 

A cursory appraisal of Patel’s activities since the Trump administration might suggest that his days as a senior official in the United States government are behind him—that Patel, like countless others on the right, has learned the art of commodifying his association with the former president.

 

There is, for example, merch: “the official K$h wine!” ($233.99 for six bottles) and the Fight With Kash Punisher Intarsia Reversible Scarf ($25), which Patel wore for his remarks at this year’s Conservative Political Action Conference. There are TAKE A LAP RHINO tank tops ($35), JUSTICE FOR ALL #J6PC tees (also $35), and Kash Krew Golf Polos ($50–$53).

 

There are the books. Government Gangsters: The Deep State, the Truth, and the Battle for Our Democracy is Patel’s account of his years fighting the “corrupt cabal” of federal officials trying to take down Trump. And in The Plot Against the King, a children’s book, Patel tells the story of a wizard named Kash who sets out to save King Donald from the sinister machinations of Hillary Queenton and a “shifty knight.”

 

Head over to fightwithkash.com, and for a “special low offer” of $19.99, one can purchase playing cards (“the collector’s item of the century”) featuring the story’s characters; the king card belongs to “Kash, the distinguished wizard and corruption combatant.”

 

There is at least one song: Patel produced “Justice for All,” a version of the national anthem sung by jailed January 6 defendants and played by Trump at his first 2024 campaign rally. Patel professes to make no money from the song or the merch—he says proceeds go to January 6 defendants and their families, or to the Kash Foundation.

 

Few details are available about the charity, but according to Patel, it has funded meals for needy families and defamation lawsuits on behalf of Ric Grenell, Patel’s friend and former boss at the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, and Daniel Bostic, a “Stop the Steal” activist. (Just as this article was going to press, most of the merch was removed from Patel’s online shop.)

 

All the while, Patel churns out promotional content on Truth Social—for a conservative cellphone carrier (“Freedom in cell phones, switch today”) and a Christian payment processor (“Why not just give your money to the enemy, or switch now”)—and hawks pills that he says “reverse” the effects of COVID vaccines (“Mrna detox, reverse the vaxx n get healthy”).

 

He has also worked as a national security adviser to Trump (bringing in more than $300,000 over the past two years from the former president’s Save America PAC, according to campaign-finance records) and as a consultant for Trump Media & Technology Group, the owner of Truth Social ($130,000 last year, according to a Securities and Exchange Commission filing).

 

In addition, Patel has spoken of work abroad, though public paper trails are hard to come by—he has claimed, for example, that he worked as a security consultant for Qatar during the 2022 FIFA World Cup, in Doha.

 

Nevertheless, Patel has at times vented that he deserves more, according to two people I spoke with. “He complains about money all the time—like, he doesn’t have any money, can’t make any money, nobody will hire him,” a longtime Trump adviser told me. “Anybody who was as big of a deal as he was in the past administration would come out and they’d be on the board of Raytheon and Boeing.” (This person, like many of the nearly 40 Patel associates I spoke with for this story, requested anonymity for fear of retribution. Patel, who declined to be interviewed, denied this through a spokesperson.)

 

From the time Patel left the administration, he appeared committed to finding opportunities to reinforce his loyalty to Trump. In spring 2022, after the FBI opened a criminal investigation into Trump’s handling of federal records at Mar-a-Lago, Patel insinuated himself into the story, telling Breitbart News that he witnessed Trump verbally declassify “whole sets of materials” before leaving the presidency.

 

The claim ensured a starring role for Patel throughout the probe—ending with Patel testifying before a federal grand jury in exchange for a grant of limited immunity. More crucially, Patel’s assertion to Breitbart seemed to preview Trump’s own approach to the case: In August, shortly after federal investigators executed a search on Mar-a-Lago, Trump’s office claimed that, as president, he had a standing order that any materials moved from the Oval Office to Mar-a-Lago were considered declassified.

 

It did not appear to bother Patel that numerous Trump officials flatly denied the existence of such an order.

That October, the far-right personality Benny Johnson asked Patel on his podcast how he would respond if Trump offered him the job of FBI director in a second term.

 

Patel leaned back, laughed, and waved off the question, but a minute later he decided to chime in after all. “Yes, to answer your question, of course,” he said. “Who would turn that down?” Some in Trump’s orbit acknowledge that Senate confirmation is unlikely for Patel—that if he were to lead an agency, it would probably be in an acting capacity.

 

On a podcast in November 2023, Donald Trump Jr. floated the idea of installing Patel as an “interim” attorney general at the outset “just to send that shot across the bow of the swamp.”

 

“A lot of people say he’s crazy,” Trump once said of Patel, according to a longtime Trump adviser. “But sometimes you need a little crazy.”

Such is the present dynamic of Kash Patel’s life: marketing “Orange Man Bad” Punisher-skull license plates and dubious supplements while fielding questions about which major national-security or law-enforcement agency he might soon like to run.

 

“Kash, I know you’re probably going to be head of the CIA,” Steve Bannon said on his podcast, War Room, this past December. “But do you believe that you can deliver the goods on this in pretty short order, the first couple of months, so we can get rolling on prosecutions?”

 

Bannon was talking here about “receipts,” the supposedly incriminating documents and emails that a second Trump administration would use to bring cases against deep-state dwellers and members of the press.

 

Patel expressed no doubt about his capacity to deliver the goods. “We will go out and find the conspirators, not just in government but in the media,” he said. “Yes, we’re going to come after the people in the media who lied about American citizens, who helped Joe Biden rig presidential elections—we’re going to come after you.”

 

“A lot of people say he’s crazy,” Trump once said of Patel, according to the longtime adviser. “I think he’s kind of crazy. But sometimes you need a little crazy.”

 

It was only a matter of time before they found each other, is how Patel seemed to see it. Just a “couple of guys from Queens,” he has said, trying to synonymize his brand with Trump’s home borough, and the scrappy knuckle-crack caricature that comes with it. In Government Gangsters, Patel reminds readers of this piece of shared heritage four times.

 

Perhaps it makes sense, then, to go back to the beginning, to the affluent Nassau County village of Garden City, New York, where Kashyap Patel was actually born and raised. Just north of the Garden City Golf Club, one finds the charming corner-lot home to which he returned after school and football practice and hockey games and occasionally, yes, a father-son jaunt for butter chicken about an hour away in Queens. Just a guy from Garden City—it’s true; it doesn’t quite sing.

 

Patel, who is of Gujarati ancestry, has said that his parents both grew up in East Africa; in the 1970s, his father, Pramod, fled the despotic regime of Idi Amin in Uganda. The young couple immigrated to the United States and settled on Long Island. Children soon followed. Their first chapter in America began in close quarters, according to Patel, with his family and Pramod’s eight siblings all sharing the same home.

 

Before long, Patel writes in his book, his family gained access to the thrills of “milquetoast Americana”—New York Islanders hockey games, annual sojourns to Disney World. It was the Reagan era, and in 1988, Patel’s parents registered to vote for the first time in the U.S., as Republicans.

 

But their conservatism, according to Patel, was “dispositional”—they valued hard work, fairness, personal responsibility. American opportunity, meanwhile, arrived just as advertised: Pramod ultimately became CFO at a global distributor of aircraft bearings.

 

Patel was raised Hindu, the family going to temple together and praying in their shrine room at home. It’s difficult to envision many neighbors joining them.

 

Of the roughly 22,000 residents recorded in Garden City in the 1990 census, 96 percent were white. Four years later, when Patel began his freshman year at Garden City High School, he was one of only a handful of people of color in his class.

 

His senior-yearbook quote came from the Jewish theologian Abraham Joshua Heschel: “Racism is man’s gravest threat—the maximum of hatred for a minimum reason.”

 

In Garden City, Patel caddied for “very wealthy” and “important” New Yorkers at the local country club, some of them defense attorneys, he writes in Government Gangsters; as they played, he listened to their stories about the drama of court. “I could be a first-generation immigrant lawyer at a white shoe firm making a ton of money,” Patel thought.

 

After he graduated from the University of Richmond and then Pace University’s law school, however, his dreams of Big Law and high retainers were complicated when, by his account, no firm would hire him.

 

On the advice of a friend, he sent an application to the Miami-Dade County public defender’s office in Florida, considered one of the best state defender’s offices in the country. Many of the people I spoke with for this story were quick to highlight his time as a public defender—how incongruous it seems in the context of the revenge-driven exploits that now appear to consume him.

 

Public records show that Patel moved into a condo in a new building in Coral Gables, which his parents bought in the summer of 2005. “He just was a normal, good lawyer; did a good job, never stood out,” recalled Bennett Brummer, who was the Miami-Dade elected public defender for 32 years.

 

Patel writes that, by this time, he was shifting “more and more to the right.” But even if he struck his colleagues as a little more conservative than the norm, as Todd Michaels, who was an attorney in the Miami-Dade office, put it to me, he was not overtly partisan.

 

State court was well suited to Patel’s strengths as an attorney, his former colleagues told me. He was personable and quick on his feet, and adept at “marketing” and “presenting” himself. After a few years, however, Patel moved to the federal public defender’s office in Miami.

 

There, the work was more complex, more writing- and research-intensive. Despite some successes, he developed a reputation for “style over substance,” a former colleague said—one he seemed aware of but not terribly motivated to change. “He always was like, ‘Look, I’m really good at trial skill.

 

But all of this reading and writing and arguing about, like, the intricacies of the law—I’m not really interested,’ ” a second former colleague recalled. (Patel disputed this characterization, referring to a complex drug-trafficking case he’d handled.)

 

“I’m not saying he wasn’t capable of it,” this person added. “But I think he always liked being the face.”

 

Patel seemed caught between a brewing resentment of elites and an abiding desire to be seen as one.

 

Transcripts from Patel’s cases reveal a lawyer comfortable before the bench, many of his presentations sharp and clever and peppered with flatteries for Your Honor. (“Judge, I think you hit it on the head last week.”) They were also embroidered with performative modesties: “On my best day, I’m an average defense attorney”; “I’m not a mathematician, but …”; “I’m not saying I’m a Spanish expert, Judge, but …”; “I know I’ve been doing this by far the shortest time of any lawyer sitting here.”

 

Many times, this worked. “There were certain judges that he kind of had magic in front of,” the second former colleague said.

This former colleague began to notice flashes of grievance in the young attorney, but they didn’t seem grounded in politics so much as insecurity.

 

This person recalled that when Patel would ask for help on legal research, he would occasionally offer some version of Well, thank God I talked to someone who is book smart and went to all the right schools and checked all the right boxes. “He would always phrase it like a compliment, but there was an edge to it.”

 

It became clear that Patel “did kind of have a chip on his shoulder,” this former colleague said—that he seemed caught between a brewing resentment of elites and an abiding desire to be seen as one.

 

By early 2014, Patel had left Miami to become a federal prosecutor in Washington, D.C. He’d landed a job in the counterterrorism section of the Justice Department’s National Security Division. Yet in Patel’s telling, what should have been a dream chapter in the career of a young lawyer fast became a study in the rot of bureaucracy—and the malicious repercussions for those who dared to challenge it.

 

This education began with Benghazi.

 

Patel was one of the attorneys from the main Justice Department office who assisted the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Washington in pursuing foreign militants for the September 11, 2012, attacks that killed four Americans.

 

In his book, Patel writes that as the Justice Department moved to bring the Benghazi terrorists to court, “I was leading the prosecution’s efforts at Main Justice.” He claims that he proceeded to watch firsthand as senior DOJ leadership and other Obama officials—“political gangsters, frauds, and hypocrites” such as Attorney General Eric Holder and his successor, Loretta Lynch—chose to “go soft” on the terrorists by prosecuting only one perpetrator.

 

It was for this reason, Patel writes—a lack of trust in the prosecution’s decisions—that when his supervisors asked him to join the trial team itself, he declined.

 

When I put this version of events to three people familiar with the prosecution, I was met with astonishment. One of these people said simply: “Good God.”

 

Although Patel was Main Justice’s representative on the case for a period, the U.S. Attorney’s Office led the prosecution, they said. The department prosecuted a single suspect, they added, because he was the only one the government had been able to capture. (DOJ later prosecuted a second suspect, and reportedly brought charges against multiple others.)

 

Patel was tasked with coordinating approvals for warrants and indictments, among other responsibilities. Moreover, he did not decline an invitation to join the team working on the actual trial; according to two of his former DOJ colleagues, he was never asked. After clashing with the U.S. Attorney’s Office, he was removed from the case altogether. (Patel denied this, saying he was simply reassigned to a different position.)

 

What all parties seem to agree on is that the young attorney had grown bitter toward the system that had employed him for the better part of his career. And an unexpected confrontation in Texas transformed the building friction into a personal declaration of war.

 

In January 2016, Patel traveled to Tajikistan to interview witnesses for an Islamic State–related case. While he was there, a federal judge in Houston scheduled a surprise hearing in another terrorism case Patel was involved in. He had less than 24 hours to make it to Texas, and having brought only slacks and a blazer on his trip, he contacted the local U.S. Attorney’s Office asking for a tie.

 

But when Patel finally arrived at the courthouse, for reasons that remain in dispute, there was no tie.

Judge Lynn Nettleton Hughes lost it. “If you want to be a lawyer, dress like a lawyer,” Hughes snapped in chambers. “Act like a lawyer.” Hughes proceeded to berate Patel as “just one more nonessential employee from Washington.” “What is the utility to me and to the people of America to have you fly down here at their expense?” he said. “You don’t add a bit of value, do you?” The judge dismissed Patel from chambers.

 

Patel’s bosses were furious on his behalf. Hughes, then 74, had a history of eruptions in court, including disturbing remarks about race.

 

Three years earlier, an Indian American plaintiff had tried but failed to have the judge removed from his discrimination case after Hughes held forth in a pretrial conference on “Adolf Hitler’s use of swastikas, the origin of Caucasians and the futility of diversity programs at universities,” the Texas Observer reported. DOJ officials’ attempts to get a transcript of the Patel exchange only enraged Hughes further; the judge issued an “Order on Ineptitude” castigating the “pretentious lawyers” at Main Justice.

 

The Washington Post included all of this in a report on the incident. In the article, Patel comes across as a sympathetic figure. But the Justice Department chose not to comment, and for Patel, this was what counted. He writes in his book that, although his superiors privately praised him for keeping a level head, they “refused to say any of that publicly,” standing by as the media “dragged my name through the mud.”

 

Patel brought complaints again and again to the leadership of the department’s National Security Division—adamant that something be done to hold the Texas prosecutors to account for not standing up for him in front of the judge, one of his former DOJ colleagues recalled.

 

It wasn’t that his superiors had failed to understand his frustration; yes, they agreed, the judge was a “wack job,” in the words of the second former DOJ colleague, and they had called the U.S. Attorney’s Office to express their disappointment. “I finally said, ‘I don’t really know what else you want,’ ” the first former colleague recalled. “ ‘The U.S. attorney is presidentially appointed, like, I—what do you want us to do?’ ”

 

“He just felt so aggrieved,” this person added, “and this continued throughout the rest of his tenure. And I actually think it was part of why he left.”

 

The lesson of the bench slap and its aftermath, as Patel explains in Government Gangsters, was this: Although he had tried “to do my best to serve my country,” senior government officials had “refused to step up to the plate” for him in return. Patel decided to stop working for “cowards.”

 

The next year, he met Devin Nunes.

 

In Patel’s children’s book The Plot Against the King, Duke Devin bursts into the home of Kash, the wizard. The duke is distressed because ever since Choosing Day, a “shifty knight” (otherwise known as Democratic Representative Adam Schiff) has been proclaiming that King Donald cheated his way past Hillary Queenton to the throne.

 

He begs Kash, known throughout the Land of the Free as the “Distinguished Discoverer,” to enlist in “the Quest for the Truth about the Plot against the King,” and after some consideration, Kash agrees.

 

Patel tends to emphasize his reluctance when he recounts going to work for the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence in April 2017, whether he is a teal-caped wizard in the telling or just another 30-something civil servant looking for the next thing.

 

He has said that when he first met with Nunes, the committee’s Republican chair, about a staff opening on the committee’s investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election, he thought the job sounded boring; what Patel had really wanted, since Trump’s election, was to work in the White House.

 

But Nunes won him over, Patel writes in Government Gangsters, by promising to recommend him for a spot on Trump’s National Security Council once the probe concluded.

 

Patel would devote the next several months to examining the FBI’s rationale for wiretapping the former Trump-campaign adviser Carter Page, and to uncovering the origins of the infamous Steele dossier.

 

In interviews, staffers and committee members recalled Patel as personable, hardworking, and not noticeably partisan. “He was instrumental in helping us understand what the FBI would have had in their possession,” Mike Conaway, a Republican member of the committee at the time, said.

 

A former Democratic committee staffer told me that Patel at first impressed even some in the minority as “exceedingly nice.”

Some of the Republicans on the committee grew frustrated, however, by Patel’s emerging tendency to go rogue.

 

One of the more surprising examples of this came just a few months into his tenure, when Patel and a colleague turned up unannounced at the London office of Christopher Steele’s lawyer, where Patel left his business card. (“We did everything by the book,” Patel later wrote of the incident.) One Republican staffer, initially taken by Patel’s charisma, came to view him as a “spotlight ranger.”

 

In January 2018, as the committee’s majority neared the completion of a report on its findings, Nunes and his staff, including Patel, met with then–Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein at the Justice Department. By all accounts, the conversation grew contentious as Nunes pressed Rosenstein to furnish more documents to the committee.

 

According to a statement later issued by the Justice Department, Nunes warned that he would act to hold Rosenstein in contempt of Congress, and Rosenstein issued a warning of his own: Should Nunes pursue that route, Rosenstein was prepared to subpoena the committee’s communications to defend himself.

 

Patel interpreted Rosenstein’s warning as a “direct and personal threat against” him—one of the nation’s top officials retaliating against a House staffer out of fear of the “corruption I was about to expose.” As Patel tells it in his book, he immediately contacted senior staff to House Speaker Paul Ryan to share news of the attack on one of their own employees, and Ryan’s office “flatly refused to have my back.”

 

A former Ryan aide described the exchange to me this way: “Kash seemed to think there was some magic wand the speaker had to stop people from saying things Kash didn’t like.”

 

Suddenly everything seemed to make sense to Patel. Different setting, different time, but same deep state, same story: Here, in new form, was the Justice Department refusing to defend him against “the unstable judge in Houston,” he writes; here was Washington’s dogmatic lack of interest in “defending what’s right” made coldly manifest.

 

The majority’s four-page report, of which Patel was a primary author, was ultimately found to have credibly identified errors and omissions in the FBI and DOJ’s applications to surveil Carter Page, though an inspector general did not corroborate the memo’s suggestion that the surveillance was politically motivated.

 

When it was released, the so-called Nunes memo was framed by much of the media as politically charged fiction, and Patel was identified for his role in writing it. On February 2, 2018, The New York Times published an article headlined “Kashyap Patel, Main Author of Secret Memo, Is No Stranger to Quarrels.”

 

The article cited Patel’s run-in with the Houston judge as a key example of his history of “quarrels,” offering a pared-down version of events that seemed to render Patel the irresponsible offender of a sober-minded judge. The incident, in other words, had been elevated to a defining place in the public narrative of Patel’s career—just as he’d always seemed to fear. “He felt extraordinarily mistreated,” another former Republican member of the House Intelligence Committee told me.

 

 

Somewhere along the way, the plot against the king had turned into a plot against the wizard himself.

 

As Patel came to feature in more and more stories about the Russia investigation, he seemed to embrace the view that any criticism of him or his work—valid or not—was evidence of a coordinated smear campaign. “All their attacks only convinced me that we were on to something big,” Patel writes in his book.

 

A few months later, by his own admission, he decided to leak intelligence-committee emails regarding Rosenstein’s “chilling” and “sustained personal attack” against him to Fox News. Shortly after an article ran, according to Patel, Ryan approached him on the House floor and asked him to stop shopping stories to the press.

 

“Absolutely,” Patel claims to have replied. “I would have no problem doing that the moment he, as the Speaker of the House, started having the backs of people falsely attacked for their work on behalf of the House.” (A spokesperson for Ryan told me that neither Ryan nor his staff has “any recollection of this occurring.”)

 

They’d given him no choice, Patel reasoned. Somewhere along the way, the plot against the king had turned into a plot against the wizard himself.

 

By the winter of 2018, Republicans had lost the House, and Schiff was set to take over the intelligence committee. Patel later wrote that Nunes, as promised, urged Trump to hire his protégé onto the National Security Council. According to Patel, when Trump realized just whom Nunes was referring to—the man who “had saved his presidency by revealing the unprecedented political hit job designed to take him down”—he ordered his chief of staff to onboard Patel at once.

 

Former administration officials told me that, from his first days as a staffer on the National Security Council, in February 2019, Patel was fixated on trying to get face time with Trump. He had a script, and it wasn’t long before many of his colleagues could recite it themselves: “Mr. President, the deep state is out to get you,” as the longtime Trump adviser paraphrased it, “and I’m going to save you from it.” Five months into his tenure, Patel was made the senior director of the NSC’s counterterrorism directorate.

 

Much has been written about Patel’s year on the National Security Council, including the early suspicions among his colleagues that he was funneling information about Ukraine directly to Trump, outside official channels.

 

In the former president’s first impeachment inquiry, the NSC official Fiona Hill testified about learning from another colleague that Trump apparently viewed Patel as the council’s director on Ukraine policy, though his portfolio had nothing to do with Ukraine.

 

Hill said she had been sufficiently alarmed to report the conversation to her superior and then warn her colleagues to be “very careful” in their communications with Patel. “Let’s just say it’s a red flag,” she testified, “when somebody who you barely know is involved on one of your policy issues” and “clearly providing materials outside of the line”—particularly when she didn’t know what those materials were.

 

Patel has repeatedly denied ever discussing Ukraine with Trump. In his rendering, his colleagues were jealous of his close relationship with the president and still hated him for the Russia investigation. Not only was the deep state’s plot against him still in motion, Patel seemed to decide, but it had expanded.

 

For the most part, this is how he explains the rest of his time in the Trump administration, why it is that at virtually every turn—from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence to the Department of Defense to very nearly the FBI and CIA—there emerges yet another crop of officials who object to his accrual of power.

 

It could not possibly be the case, for example, that Bill Barr harbored genuine concerns about Patel’s qualifications to serve as deputy FBI director: In Patel’s version of events, Barr was simply one more top bureaucrat bent on foiling Patel’s success as payback for the “mess” he’d exposed in their agency.

 

And if this narrative begins to feel less and less plausible, if Patel’s latest detractors have to date seemed as reliably pro-Trump as Patel himself—well, that just goes to show their cunning.

 

Patel has a talent for casting himself as the ultimate hero or the unjustly persecuted. I have wondered if this is why he chose not to include in his book the events of October 30, 2020—if, in the end, not even he could figure out a way to make himself the martyr of the story.

 

On that Friday, according to multiple reported accounts, SEAL Team 6 was awaiting the Pentagon’s green light on a rescue mission in West Africa.

 

The day before, the administration had learned where gunmen were holding Philip Walton, a 27-year-old American who had been kidnapped that week from his farm near Niger’s border with Nigeria.

 

As multiple agencies now coordinated on final details for the evening operation, the State Department worked to resolve the last outstanding task—securing airspace permission from Nigerian officials. Around noon, Patel called the Pentagon with an update: Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, he said, had gotten the approval. The mission was a go.

 

The SEALs were close to landing in Nigeria when Defense Secretary Mark Esper discovered that the State Department had not, in fact, secured the overflight clearance, as Patel had claimed. The aircraft were quickly diverted, flying in circles for the next hour as officials scrambled to alert the Nigerian government to their position.

 

With the operation window narrowing, Esper and Pompeo called the Situation Room to put the decision to the president: Either they abort the mission and risk their hostage being killed, or they proceed into foreign airspace and risk their soldiers being shot down.

 

But then, suddenly, the deputy secretary of state was on the line, Esper later wrote in his memoir: They’d been cleared.

Soon Walton was reunited with his family.

 

What had happened?

 

Celebratory feelings gave way to anger as officials tried to make sense of Patel’s bad report. According to Esper, Pompeo claimed that at no point had he even spoken with Patel about the mission, much less told him he’d received the airspace rights.

 

Esper wrote that his team suspected that Patel had simply “made the approval story up.”

 

Anthony Tata, the Pentagon official and retired Army general to whom Patel had originally given the green light, confronted Patel in a rage. “You could’ve gotten these guys killed!” Tata shouted, according to two people familiar with the exchange. “What the fuck were you thinking?”

 

Patel’s response was: “If nobody got hurt, who the fuck cares?”

 

Patel denies saying this, or making up the approval story. He “would never jeopardize an operation, American hostages or our soldiers,” he said through his spokesperson. “In every situation, including this one, I followed the chain of command.”

But three former senior administration officials independently cited the near catastrophe in West Africa as one of their foremost recollections from Patel’s tenure.

 

They remain unsettled by Patel’s actions in large part because they still have no clue what motivated them. If Patel had in fact just invented the story, as Esper’s team concluded, then why? Was it because the election was in four days, and Patel was simply that impatient to set in motion a final potential victory for Trump, whatever the risk—was it as darkly cynical as that? Did his lack of experience mean he just had no grasp of the consequences?

 

Some people close to the former president privately vent about Patel and whatever they last heard him say on a far-right podcast or at a fundraiser, particularly if it involves some overstatement of his administration activities.

 

The longtime Trump adviser said he had been in Patel’s presence, more than once, when he’d claimed he was the person who “gave the order” for U.S. forces to move in and kill the ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi in 2019—an operation for which Patel, by his own admission, wasn’t even in the Situation Room. (Asked about this, Patel said through his spokesperson: “Trump made that brave and courageous call.”)

 

One of the former senior administration officials, meanwhile, sent me a photo of what he said was Patel’s challenge coin, a small, customizable medallion for service members and government officials. In addition to a curious image of a drone illuminating (targeting?) a dollar sign in front of the White House, the coin features an assortment of national-security-adjacent terms, including DIRECT ACTION, SANCTIONS, HEZ/IRAN, and CYBER.

 

“It’s just random shit,” the former official said. “Half of this stuff, he wasn’t even involved in.” (Through the spokesperson, Patel neither confirmed nor denied having such a coin.)

 

Yet the prevailing sentiment in Trump’s inner circle, according to the longtime adviser, is that there is no upside to calling out Patel’s exaggerations or lies. By now, this person explained, Trump is entrenched in his view of Patel as a “useful tool.” The former president, the adviser said, understands that “Kash is the one you say to, ‘Hey, I’m not telling you to go break into the DNC. But …’ ”

 

What Trump might also understand is this: For Patel, the urgency of victory in November is personal. He recently described Trump as the candidate “fighting for everybody else’s right to have fame, to have money”—the central prongs of a prosperity that Patel, after nearly a decade in Washington, appears convinced is his due, and of which the leaders of a corrupt system have conspired to deprive him.

 

Little wonder, then, that Steve Bannon mused on his podcast that Patel, far from simply being the person most likely to oversee Trump’s retributive plans in a second term, could have helped inspire them in the first place. “I think President Trump might’ve read Government Gangsters,” Bannon said. “Yeah, look, he probably did,” Patel responded, fetching a copy to display on camera. “That’s probably why it’s a best seller, and he keeps talking about it.”

 

To the extent that Americans might struggle to grasp what any of this has to do with their own life—how a federal agenda of score-settling corresponds to their ability to be famous and make money—Patel has yet to offer a theory.

 

He tends to frame political vengeance as an end in itself. In a second term, Trump’s top law-enforcement and national-security officials would immediately focus on exposing and prosecuting those who “did Russiagate” and are already planning their next “election-rigging scam,” he told Bannon—paying special attention, perhaps, to the 60 names in Patel’s compendium of “Members of the Executive Branch Deep State,” found in Appendix B of Government Gangsters.

 

And then—well, it’s not altogether clear what then. But Patel’s value to Trump has never revolved around precise plans. As Richard Nixon’s plumbers understood, the hallmark of loyalty is a flexible constitution.

Edited September 9 by Vesper

[cosmicway 1,326]

38 minutes ago, Vesper said:

all 7 swing states are basically a dead heat atm

it is absolutely impossible to call the race atm

atm, over the past week or so, Trump has, insanely so, a wee, wee bit of momentum as the Dem post-convention buzz wears off

a shedload is riding on the debate tomorrow night

The bookies are not my source of info when it comes to politics.
It's the events themselves that inform me and it's not as if I ever make political bets - I mention them only to show to you what is going on with a bird's eye view.
But from the table of state by state bets I 've seen and from my experience, in bookmaking I don't see how we have seven swing states. It's only PA and NE I 'm afraid.

Edited September 9 by cosmicway

[Vesper 28,879]

Just now, cosmicway said:

But from the table of state by state bets I 've seen and from my experience, in bookmaking I don't see how we have seven swing states. It's only PA and NE I 'm afraid.

Absolutely not true and it is only NE-2, not the entire state (as NE and ME are the only 2 states to split their EVs), as the rest of the state is massively and deeply Red.

All 7 swing states (plus NE-2) are completely up for grabs atm.

I have only missed 2 states in each of the last 2 elections, but I have never seen anything like this election. The variables are just off the charts.

In 2016 I had MN going Red (it came close, but now is back to solid Blue) as part of the Clinton Midwest Blue Wall collapse, and FL staying Blue (will not make that mistake again).

And in 2020 I had NC going Blue and GA staying Red, both of which were extremely close (especially GA) to going the way I said they would go.

I correctly had AZ going Blue (which it barely did), as I postulated that the lunatic RW nutter Kari Lake (running for AZ Governor in 2020 and now running for US Senator in 2024 against Ruben Gallego, the Dem nominee, who I think wins) would drive out normally non voters who would vote Dem (which is exactly what happened, and hopefully happens again).

[Fulham Broadway 16,868]

Brad Raffensburger removed from Georgia as Election Official.

Remember him ? He was the one Trump was begging and threatening to get 11 000 votes overturned.

He is replaced with 3 Election Officials who have the discretion to overturn the Georgia result in favour of Trump.

Georgia the cradle of Civil Rights knows all about Voter Suppression....

[Vesper 28,879]

10 minutes ago, Fulham Broadway said:

Brad Raffensburger removed from Georgia as Election Official.

Remember him ? He was the one Trump was begging and threatening to get 11 000 votes overturned.

He is replaced with 3 Election Officials who have the discretion to overturn the Georgia result in favour of Trump.

Georgia the cradle of Civil Rights knows all about Voter Suppression....

Lone Democrat on Georgia Election Board Issues 'Chaos' Warning

https://www.newsweek.com/republican-majority-eleciton-board-democrat-chaos-warning-georgia-1950822

Less than two months before the 2024 election, the Georgia State Election Board is pushing through rules which, according to reports, could jeopardize election certification in the crucial battleground state.

Sarah Tindall Ghazal, the board's only Democrat warned that the rules could cause "chaos." Speaking to CNN, she said, "We can't be doing this at the last minute because it creates chaos. And chaos undermines confidence in our elections, full stop."

Ghazal also said that her Republican colleagues on the board are "not taking the advice of attorneys, they're not taking the advice of election administrators – who are really critical in this whole calculus – and they're certainly not listening to anybody who doesn't think that the elections are rigged."

Concerns regarding rigged elections in the U.S. stem from a number of factors, including claims of voter fraud, foreign interference and voting system security.

No credible evidence of widespread voter fraud in Georgia or any other state during the 2020 election has been found. Numerous investigations, audits, and court cases across multiple states, including Georgia, confirmed that the election results were accurate and secure.

What Is the Georgia State Election Board?

The five-person election board is comprised of four members and a chairman and has a Republican majority.

The board was once led by Georgia's Secretary of State, Republican Brad Raffensperger. He was removed from the board following legislative changes made by the Georgia General Assembly in response to his actions during the 2020 election. After Raffensperger refused former President Donald Trump's request to "find" enough votes to overturn the election results in Georgia, the Republican-controlled state legislature passed laws altering the structure of the State Election Board.

One of the key changes removed the Georgia Secretary of State as a voting member and chair of the board, transferring control to members appointed by the state legislature.

Raffensperger, who had been a defender of the integrity of Georgia's 2020 election, has been critical of these changes, arguing that they undermine election efficiency and security in the state.

Today, the board is comprised of Rick Jeffares, a former Republican state senator, Janice Johnston, a retired obstetrician, Janelle King, a right-wing media personality, Sarah Tindall Ghazal an attorney, and chairman John Fervier, an army veteran and former Waffle House executive.

Fervier, an independent, has also voiced opposition to some of the Republican board members' proposals, according to CNN.

While the state election board in Georgia does not certify election results, it does make rules that guide election administrations and local boards that certify results before they are sent to the secretary of state, and then the governor. The board also investigates election irregularities.

What Are the New Rules?

The rules affect how counties can certify election results. A ruling passed on August 6 will require county election boards to conduct a "reasonable inquiry" prior to certifying the results of an election. The word, "reasonable" was not defined.

Another ruling, passed on August 19, will allow local election officials to request and review an expanded number of documents before certifying an election. An additional ruling, passed in the same meeting, will require counties to verify vote counts prior to the deadline for overseas absentee ballots.

Next month, the board will take up another rule. This would require counties to perform hand recounts of ballots at the local precinct level, on the night of the election.

What Is the Controversy Surrounding the Rules?

Raffensperger described the board as a "mess," in an email shared with Newsweek.

A spokesperson for the Georgia secretary of state said in the email that, "The State Legislature removed the Secretary from any role with the State Elections Board earlier this year, and we have neither input nor insight into their decision-making process."

In a press release shared on his website, Raffensperger said that "Activists seeking to impose last-minute changes in election procedures outside of the legislative process undermine voter confidence and burden election workers."

"The General Assembly knew that quick reporting of results and certification is paramount to voter confidence," the statement read. "Misguided attempted by the State Election Board will delay election results and undermine chain of custody safeguards."

The statement continued that, "These misguided, last-minute changes from unelected bureaucrats who have never run an election and seem to reject the advice of anyone who ever has could cause serious problems in an election that otherwise will be secure and accurate."

Newsweek spoke with Deidre B. Holden, the Director of Elections and Voter Registration of Paulding County, Georgia, who expressed her support for Ghazal's comments.

"Voters already do not trust the election process," she said in an email. "Now you have a board that is making decisions that will fuel this distrust. The [state election board] needs to realize that they are not law makers. They are rule makers."

"They should not be passing rules that go against the laws that have already been set forth. They should also respect the federal law that states that no changes are to be made 90 days prior to an election."

GOP board member Janelle King has argued that the recent rule changes are necessary to ensure vote counts are accurate, and that local election board members have the information they need in order to certify the vote.

Speaking to CNN, she said "I don't care because I know we haven't done anything wrong."

"This is a method of trying to weaken the Republican side by making it seem like we're out here trying to steal elections. There's no win for me to steal the election for anybody."

She added, "The concerns around these rules creating chaos, I do not see that happening at all."

Newsweek has reached out to all members of the Georgia State Election Board via email for comment.

Edited September 9 by Vesper

[Fulham Broadway 16,868]

Georgia set to be a mahoosive clusterfuck

[Vesper 28,879]

Trump threatens to jail adversaries in escalating rhetoric ahead of pivotal debate

https://apnews.com/article/trump-harris-wisconsin-election-economy-a6923d6c5758dabb6d959417ea9d7d12

MOSINEE, Wis. (AP) — With just days to go before his first and likely only debate against Vice President Kamala Harris, former President Donald Trump posted a warning on his social media site threatening to jail those “involved in unscrupulous behavior” this election, which he said would be under intense scrutiny.

“WHEN I WIN, those people that CHEATED will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the Law, which will include long term prison sentences so that this Depravity of Justice does not happen again,” Trump wrote late Saturday, sowing doubt once more about the integrity of the election, even though cheating is incredibly rare.

“Please beware,” he went on, “that this legal exposure extends to Lawyers, Political Operatives, Donors, Illegal Voters, & Corrupt Election Officials. Those involved in unscrupulous behavior will be sought out, caught, and prosecuted at levels, unfortunately, never seen before in our Country.”

Trump’s message represents his latest threat to use the office of the presidency to exact retribution if he wins a second term. There is no evidence of the kind of fraud he continues to insist marred the 2020 election; in fact, dozens of courts, Republican state officials and his own administration have said he lost fairly.

Just days ago, Trump himself acknowledged in a podcast interview that he had indeed “lost by a whisker.”

While Trump’s campaign aides and allies have urged him to keep his focus on Harris and make the election a referendum on issues like inflation and border security, Trump in recent days has veered far off course.

On Friday, he delivered a stunning statement to news cameras in which he brought up a string of past allegations of sexual misconduct, describing several in graphic detail, even as he denied his accusers’ allegations. Earlier, he had voluntarily appeared in court for a hearing on the appeal of a decision that found him liable for sexual abuse, turning focus to his legal woes in the campaign’s final stretch.

Earlier Saturday, Trump had leaned into familiar grievances about everything from his indictments to Russia’s meddling in the 2016 election as he campaigned in one of the most deeply Republican swaths of battleground Wisconsin.

“The Harris-Biden DOJ is trying to throw me in jail — they want me in jail — for the crime of exposing their corruption,” Trump claimed at an outdoor rally at Central Wisconsin Airport, where he spoke behind a wall of bulletproof glass due to new security protocols following his July assassination attempt.

There’s no evidence that President Joe Biden or Harris have had any influence over decisions by the Justice Department or state prosecutors to indict the former president.

Trump has eschewed traditional debate preparation, choosing to hold rallies and events while Harris has been cloistered in a historic hotel in downtown Pittsburgh, working with aides since Thursday.

Harris has agreed so far to a single debate, which will be hosted by ABC.

At the rally, Trump outlined his plans to “Drain the swamp” — a throwback to his winning 2016 campaign message as he ran as an outsider challenging the status quo. Though Trump spent four years in the Oval Office, he vowed anew to “cast out the corrupt political class” if he wins again and to “cut the fat out of our government for the first time, meaningfully, in 60 years.”

As part of that effort, he repeated his plan, announced Thursday, to create a new “Government Efficiency Commission” headed by Elon Musk that will be charged with conducting “a complete financial and performance audit of the entire federal government” to root out waste.

After again maligning the Congressional committee that investigated the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the nation’s capitol by his supporters after his election loss in 2020, Trump told the crowd of thousands that he would “rapidly review the cases of every political prisoner unjustly victimized by the Harris regime” and sign their pardons on his first day back in office.

Trump has repeatedly defended those who have been jailed for crimes including violent attacks on law enforcement.

And he said he would “completely overhaul” what he labeled “Kamala’s corrupt Department of Injustice.”

“Instead of persecuting Republicans, they will focus on taking down bloodthirsty cartels, transnational gangs, and radical Islamic terrorists,” he said.

Harris campaign spokesperson Sarafina Chitika responded to his comments with a statement warning that, if Trump is reelected, he will “use his unchecked power to prosecute his enemies and pardon insurrectionists who violently attacked our Capitol on January 6.”

Both Harris and Trump have been frequent visitors to Wisconsin this year, a state where four of the past six presidential elections have been decided by less than a percentage point. Several polls of Wisconsin voters conducted after Biden withdrew showed Harris and Trump in a close race.

Democrats consider Wisconsin to be one of the must-win “blue wall” states. Biden, who was in Wisconsin on Thursday, won the state in 2020 by just under 21,000 votes. Trump carried it by a slightly larger margin, nearly 23,000 votes, in 2016.

As Trump was campaigning, Harris took a short break from debate prep to visit Penzeys Spices in Pittsburgh’s Strip District, where she bought several seasoning mixes. One customer saw the Democratic nominee and began openly weeping as Harris hugged her and said, “We’re going to be fine. We’re all in this together.”

Harris said she was honored to have endorsements from two major Republicans: former Vice President Dick Cheney and his daughter, Liz Cheney, the former Wyoming congresswoman.

“People are exhausted, about the division and the attempts to kind of divide us as Americans,” she said, adding that her main message at the debate would be that the country wants to be united.

“It’s time to turn the page on the divisiveness,” she said. “It’s time to bring our country together, to chart a new way forward.”

Trump held his rally in the central Wisconsin city of Mosinee, with a population of about 4,500 people. It is within Wisconsin’s mostly rural 7th Congressional District, a reliably Republican area in a purple state.

During his speech, he railed against Harris in dark and ominous language, claiming that if the woman he calls “Comrade Kamala Harris gets four more years, you will be living (in) a full-blown Banana Republic” ruled by “anarchy” and “tyranny.”

Trump also railed against the administration’s border policies, calling the Democrats’ approach “suicidal” and accusing them of having “imported murderers, child predators and serial rapists from all over the planet.”

Many studies have found immigrants, including those in the country illegally, commit fewer violent crimes than native-born citizens. Violent crime in the U.S. dropped again last year, continuing a downward trend after a pandemic-era spike.

He dismissed warnings from U.S. officials about ongoing Russian attempts to spread disinformation ahead of November’s election, including an indictment this past week that alleged a media company linked to six conservative influencers was secretly funded by Russian state media employees.

“The Justice Department said Russia may be involved in our elections again,” Trump told the crowd. “And, you know, the whole world laughed at it this time.”

Among those in the crowd was Dale Osuldsen, who was celebrating his 68th birthday Saturday at his first ever Trump rally. He hopes a second Trump administration will take on “cancel culture” and bring the country back to its “foundational past.

“We’ve had past administrations say they want to fundamentally change America,” Osulden said. “Fundamentally changing America is a bad thing.”

Many supporters embarked on hours-long drives from across Wisconsin to see Trump speak. Some came from even further.

Sean Moon, a Tennessee musician who releases MAGA-themed rap music under the stage name, “King Bullethead,” blasted his songs from a truck in the event parking lot. As a musician, he said Trump rallies approximate the experience of a raucous concert.

“Trump is a rockstar,” Moon said. “He’s incredible. People see he represents them and the deep state trying to kill him and take him out. But he’s standing strong, and he stands for the normal person.”

Democrats have relied on massive turnout in the state’s two largest cities, Milwaukee and Madison, to counter Republican strength in rural areas like Mosinee and the Milwaukee suburbs. Trump must win the votes in places like Mosinee to have any chance of cutting into the Democrats’ advantage in urban areas.

Republicans held their national convention in Milwaukee in July and Trump has made four previous stops to the state, most recently just last week in the western Wisconsin city of La Crosse.

Harris and her running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, last month filled the same Milwaukee arena where Republicans held their national convention for a rally that coincided with the Democratic National Convention just 90 miles away in Chicago. Walz returned Monday to Milwaukee, where he spoke at a Labor Day rally organized by unions.

[ZAPHOD2319 4,489]

3 hours ago, Vesper said:

It's original purpose was systemic slavery/racism. Same as the Three-Fifths Compromise. (The Three-Fifths Compromise was reached among state delegates during the 1787 Constitutional Convention. It determined that three out of every five slaves were counted when determining a state's total population for legislative representation and taxation.)

The Electoral College’s Racist Origins

More than two centuries after it was designed to empower southern white voters, the system continues to do just that.

https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/analysis-opinion/electoral-colleges-racist-origins

Is a color-blind political system possible under our Constitution? If it is, the Supreme Court’s evisceration of the Voting Rights Act in 2013 did little to help matters. While black people in America today are not experiencing 1950s levels of voter suppression, efforts to keep them and other citizens from participating in elections began within 24 hours of the Shelby County v. Holder ruling and have only increased since then.

In Shelby County’s oral argument, Justice Antonin Scalia cautioned, “Whenever a society adopts racial entitlements, it is very difficult to get them out through the normal political processes.” Ironically enough, there is some truth to an otherwise frighteningly numb claim. American elections have an acute history of racial entitlements—only they don’t privilege black Americans.

For centuries, white votes have gotten undue weight, as a result of innovations such as poll taxes and voter-ID laws and outright violence to discourage racial minorities from voting. (The point was obvious to anyone paying attention: As William F. Buckley argued in his essay “Why the South Must Prevail,” white Americans are “entitled to take such measures as are necessary to prevail, politically and culturally,” anywhere they are outnumbered because they are part of “the advanced race.”) But America’s institutions boosted white political power in less obvious ways, too, and the nation’s oldest structural racial entitlement program is one of its most consequential: the Electoral College.

Commentators today tend to downplay the extent to which race and slavery contributed to the Framers’ creation of the Electoral College, in effect whitewashing history: Of the considerations that factored into the Framers’ calculus, race and slavery were perhaps the foremost.

Of course, the Framers had a number of other reasons to engineer the Electoral College. Fearful that the president might fall victim to a host of civic vices—that he could become susceptible to corruption or cronyism, sow disunity, or exercise overreach—the men sought to constrain executive power consistent with constitutional principles such as federalism and checks and balances. The delegates to the Philadelphia convention had scant conception of the American presidency—the duties, powers, and limits of the office. But they did have a handful of ideas about the method for selecting the chief executive. When the idea of a popular vote was raised, they griped openly that it could result in too much democracy. With few objections, they quickly dispensed with the notion that the people might choose their leader.

But delegates from the slaveholding South had another rationale for opposing the direct election method, and they had no qualms about articulating it: Doing so would be to their disadvantage. Even James Madison, who professed a theoretical commitment to popular democracy, succumbed to the realities of the situation. The future president acknowledged that “the people at large was in his opinion the fittest” to select the chief executive. And yet, in the same breath, he captured the sentiment of the South in the most “diplomatic” terms:

“There was one difficulty however of a serious nature attending an immediate choice by the people. The right of suffrage was much more diffusive in the Northern than the Southern States; and the latter could have no influence in the election on the score of the Negroes. The substitution of electors obviated this difficulty and seemed on the whole to be liable to fewest objections.”

Behind Madison’s statement were the stark facts: The populations in the North and South were approximately equal, but roughly one-third of those living in the South were held in bondage. Because of its considerable, nonvoting slave population, that region would have less clout under a popular-vote system. The ultimate solution was an indirect method of choosing the president, one that could leverage the three-fifths compromise, the Faustian bargain they’d already made to determine how congressional seats would be apportioned. With about 93 percent of the country’s slaves toiling in just five southern states, that region was the undoubted beneficiary of the compromise, increasing the size of the South’s congressional delegation by 42 percent. When the time came to agree on a system for choosing the president, it was all too easy for the delegates to resort to the three-fifths compromise as the foundation. The peculiar system that emerged was the Electoral College.

Right from the get-go, the Electoral College has produced no shortage of lessons about the impact of racial entitlement in selecting the president. History buffs and Hamilton fans are aware that in its first major failure, the Electoral College produced a tie between Thomas Jefferson and his putative running mate, Aaron Burr. What’s less known about the election of 1800 is the way the Electoral College succeeded, which is to say that it operated as one might have expected, based on its embrace of the three-fifths compromise. The South’s baked-in advantages—the bonus electoral votes it received for maintaining slaves, all while not allowing those slaves to vote—made the difference in the election outcome. It gave the slaveholder Jefferson an edge over his opponent, the incumbent president and abolitionist John Adams. To quote Yale Law’s Akhil Reed Amar, the third president “metaphorically rode into the executive mansion on the backs of slaves.” That election continued an almost uninterrupted trend of southern slaveholders and their doughfaced sympathizers winning the White House that lasted until Abraham Lincoln’s victory in 1860.

In 1803, the Twelfth Amendment modified the Electoral College to prevent another Jefferson-Burr–type debacle. Six decades later, the Thirteenth Amendment outlawed slavery, thus ridding the South of its windfall electors. Nevertheless, the shoddy system continued to cleave the American democratic ideal along racial lines. In the 1876 presidential election, the Democrat Samuel Tilden won the popular vote, but some electoral votes were in dispute, including those in—wait for it—Florida. An ad hoc commission of lawmakers and Supreme Court justices was empaneled to resolve the matter. Ultimately, they awarded the contested electoral votes to Republican Rutherford B. Hayes, who had lost the popular vote. As a part of the agreement, known as the Compromise of 1877, the federal government removed the troops that were stationed in the South after the Civil War to maintain order and protect black voters.

The deal at once marked the end of the brief Reconstruction era, the redemption of the old South, and the birth of the Jim Crow regime. The decision to remove soldiers from the South led to the restoration of white supremacy in voting through the systematic disenfranchisement of black people, virtually accomplishing over the next eight decades what slavery had accomplished in the country’s first eight decades. And so the Electoral College’s misfire in 1876 helped ensure that Reconstruction would not remove the original stain of slavery so much as smear it onto the other parts of the Constitution’s fabric, and countenance the racialized patchwork democracy that endured until the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

What’s clear is that, more than two centuries after it was designed to empower southern whites, the Electoral College continues to do just that. The current system has a distinct, adverse impact on black voters, diluting their political power. Because the concentration of black people is highest in the South, their preferred presidential candidate is virtually assured to lose their home states’ electoral votes. Despite black voting patterns to the contrary, five of the six states whose populations are 25 percent or more black have been reliably red in recent presidential elections. Three of those states have not voted for a Democrat in more than four decades. Under the Electoral College, black votes are submerged. It’s the precise reason for the success of the southern strategy. It’s precisely how, as Buckley might say, the South has prevailed.

Among the Electoral College’s supporters, the favorite rationalization is that without the advantage, politicians might disregard a large swath of the country’s voters, particularly those in small or geographically inconvenient states. Even if the claim were true, it’s hardly conceivable that switching to a popular-vote system would lead candidates to ignore more voters than they do under the current one. Three-quarters of Americans live in states where most of the major parties’ presidential candidates do not campaign.

More important, this “voters will be ignored” rationale is morally indefensible. Awarding a numerical few voting “enhancements” to decide for the many amounts to a tyranny of the minority. Under any other circumstances, we would call an electoral system that weights some votes more than others a farce—which the Supreme Court, more or less, did in a series of landmark cases. Can you imagine a world in which the votes of black people were weighted more heavily because presidential candidates would otherwise ignore them, or, for that matter, any other reason? No. That would be a racial entitlement. What’s easier to imagine is the racial burdens the Electoral College continues to wreak on them.

Critics of the Electoral College are right to denounce it for handing victory to the loser of the popular vote twice in the past two decades. They are also correct to point out that it distorts our politics, including by encouraging presidential campaigns to concentrate their efforts in a few states that are not representative of the country at large. But the disempowerment of black voters needs to be added to that list of concerns, because it is core to what the Electoral College is and what it always has been.

The race-consciousness establishment—and retention—of the Electoral College has supported an entitlement program that our 21st-century democracy cannot justify. If people truly want ours to be a race-blind politics, they can start by plucking that strange, low-hanging fruit from the Constitution.

That is a bit of revisionist history. The three fifths compromise was proposed by two northern delegates. That were in free states.

Quote

The Three-Fifths Compromise was proposed by James Wilson, a delegate from Pennsylvania, during the Constitutional Convention of 1787; he introduced the idea alongside Roger Sherman of Connecticut.

 

[IMissEden 20]

27 minutes ago, ZAPHOD2319 said:

That is a bit of revisionist history. The three fifths compromise was proposed by two northern delegates. That were in free states.

 

Same day she said someone else can’t get basic facts correct lol. Pushing an agenda instead of evaluating info properly. 

[Vesper 28,879]

1 hour ago, ZAPHOD2319 said:

That is a bit of revisionist history. The three fifths compromise was proposed by two northern delegates. That were in free states.

 

It is not revisionist, it existed because of slavery. No slavery, no Three-Fifths compromise.

[Vesper 28,879]

1 hour ago, IMissEden said:

Same day she said someone else can’t get basic facts correct lol. Pushing an agenda instead of evaluating info properly. 

Except they were wrong. I made no revisionist claims. No slavery, no Three-Fifths Compromise. Slavery was literally written into the US Constitution.

In the U.S. Constitution, the Three-fifths Compromise is part of Article 1, Section 2, Clause 3:

Representatives and direct Taxes shall be apportioned among the several States which may be included within this Union, according to their respective Numbers, which shall be determined by adding to the whole Number of free Persons, including those bound to Service for a Term of Years, and excluding Indians not taxed, three fifths of all other Persons.

[Fulham Broadway 16,868]

Classic doc right now on Trump on UK TV

John Bolton - says Trump never read any briefing notes, has the attention span of a fruit fly, and before meeting Putin, Trump asked his advisor ''is Finland in Russia ?''