Republicans Cripple the IRS to Serve the Rich, Starve Government

The Senate has produced a 2,700 page bill to provide roughly $1 trillion for infrastructure improvement across the next 10 years but with only the vaguest notions of how to pay for it, not least because Republicans disallowed inclusion of $80 billion across those years to beef up tax collection by the Internal Revenue Service. That is in keeping with budget cuts across the years despite the IRS being the one government agency that more than pays for itself. Sure enough, the Congressional Budget Office has since estimated that the repayment plan falls short by $250 billion.

After

an 11% hike in funding by the Obama administration, money dried up when Republicans won the House in 2010 and the IRS budget has been driven downward in real terms by nearly 15% over the last decade.

The consequences have been dramatic. Since peak in 2010, the agency has had to let 19,000 full-time employees go, with the number of auditors at a low not seen since the 1950s when the country’s population was half its current size. Audit rates have hit a 40-year low declining by 37% for corporations from 2010 to 2018 and by 46% for individuals. The decline was even more drastic for those with incomes over $1 million, their returns being more complex — a 74% drop. The 1 in 90 rate at which returns were scrutinized in 2011 was down to 1 in 161 by 2017 and by 2019 that had become only 1 in 222 returns.

money to be had

The White House estimates that its proposed $80 billion infusion to crack down on tax evasion would yield as much as $700 billion over the coming 10 years. A bipartisan group working on infrastructure was considering a smaller plan of $40 billion with a payoff of $140 billion. Lawrence Summers, economist and former Treasury secretary under Clinton, and associate Natasha Sarin, a University of Pennsylvania professor now hired by Sec. Janis Yellin at Treasury, foresee $1 trillion collected over a decade. These widely divergent estimates tell us that certainty is not available, but doing nothing to equip the IRS to go after taxes that are owed and not paid is a deliberate gift to the rich.

It would be a long process. Thousands of accountants sophisticated in the intricacies of global tax havens, interlocking partnerships and subchapter S corporations must be hired and others trained by the IRS to build back the shrunken agency.

Those on the right scoff. A Wall Street Journal editorial calls it “Mr. Biden’s phony $700 billion bogey” and fret that the “dedicated funding stream” that Biden wants — locked in annual funding across 10 years — would insulate the agency from accountability to Congress and its appropriation power. Given the history, they mean the ability of Republicans to resume IRS budget cutbacks when they regain control of the House. The editors fret that “it makes little sense that millions of Americans are willfully violating the tax code”, but the IRS’s random audit program shows that nearly 15% of taxes are outstanding, resulting in a tax gap of around $600 billion a year. The Journal says the congressional coalition’s claim of “fully paid for” is phony while a sentence away virtually congratulates Republicans for “deep-sixing” the IRS funding that could have filled the hole because that money, you see, was not to ferret out tax cheats but “to harass small businesses”.

There are literally millions of corporations that people have formed that “pass-through” engineered amounts of income to their personal returns. A National Bureau of Economic Research study estimates that 20% of pass-through business income is under-reported.

At the top, the 0.5% of the highest-earning Americans account for about a fifth of the tax gap, a University of Michigan study concluded. Income of ordinary workers is reported directly to the government, making compliance assured, whereas the wealthy are more likely to have types of income — capital gains on sale of property, rental income, etc. — that is more readily concealed. When they are challenged, the IRS is routinely confronted by accounting firms and lawyers who present sophisticated arguments why what appears to be income is instead something else. It can take years and hundreds of hours to litigate tax disputes. But it pays, and the alternative which the IRS, strapped for funds, cannot help but follow is to allow a certain class of people to cheat at will.

auditing the poor

The straitened budgets of the IRS explain why the service therefore audits little more of the wealthy than those with low incomes. More than 25 million Americans qualify for the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC). They are paid — using 2019’s figure —
Charts show the persistent decline in funding and therefore personnel over the recent decade.

an average of almost $2,500 each, so the IRS must pump out hundreds of thousands of letters asking for proof of eligibility if tax returns don’t make that clear. Pro Publica, which makes taxes a specialty of its reporting, said that in 2019 the “top 1% of taxpayers by income were audited at a rate of 1.56% while EITC recipients, who typically have annual income under $20,000, were audited at 1.41%”.

Funding that is inadequate to go after those hiding income leads to a regressive system in which low income earners are the ones heavily targeted. Nicolas Kristof of The New York Times tells us that, “The county in all America with the highest audit rate is Humphreys County, Miss., which is poor, rural, and three-quarters black”.

smokescreen

Nothing more clearly shows protection of its wealthy campaign donors than the Republican insistence that IRS funding be removed from the infrastructure bill. There may be debate about how much could be collected by going aggressively after tax cheats, difficult as it can be, but there is no denying that the amount of taxes legally owed but not paid is immense. Summers and Sarin think that over the next decade the IRS will fail to collect $7.5 trillion. Charles Rettig, the current IRS commissioner, a Trump holdover, estimates that the United States is losing about $1 trillion in unpaid taxes every year by crippling his agency. But with their perennial campaign to hobble the IRS, the Republican objective is to keep the audit rate of the wealthy as low as possible.

Excuses are feeble. Like clinging to its Benghazi obsession, the right-wing media still cites a 2013 contretemps with the IRS as justification for not giving the agency the money it needs. An office in Cincinnati that vets non-profits that apply for tax-exempt status was caught screening applications for terms such as “Tea Party” and “patriot” to identify organizations that may be overly political and taxable rather than their stated purpose of being engaged in social welfare. These non-profits were free to conduct their activities in any event; taxation was the only question, and we would argue that they all — left and right — were entirely political and trying to chisel the government with phony social pretexts. Oh, and by the way, the Treasury Department’s inspector general in 2017 found that the Cincinnati office was doing the same to spot left-wing non-profits, screening for words such as “progressive,” “occupy” and “green energy”.

Republicans made a villain out of Lois Lerner, whose position was IRS “director of exempt organizations”. Even though her Cincinnati outpost had nothing to do with the main business of the IRS, Republicans won’t let this go. It serves as their excuse for defunding the IRS which in turn truly punishes the government itself, as well as the rest of we taxpayers left holding the bill, by seriously reducing tax collection.

And now Republicans have acquired a new weapon: the Pro Publica exposé of tax returns of a number of the wealthiest Americans showing that they have been paying little or no taxes. “If the IRS can’t even meet its most fundamental responsibility of keeping its most sensitive information confidential, should the president and Congress even be talking about giving it more power?”, writes one pundit who goes on to mention — there she is again — Lois Lerner.

Fact is, there is no preventing the leak of sensitive information by someone in any agency who has access and is determined to do so. And maybe lack of “more power” is what makes possible the leaks, arising from millions of attempts to infiltrate the IRS’s antiquated computer systems by hackers on the prowl to steal taxpayer data. That correlation is, of course, never mentioned.

“More power” so it can “harass entrepreneurs and pass-through business owners who provide millions of jobs?” is what the IRS would do with funding, writes one columnist, showing how the right-wing wields a leak that exposed the monied-élite to plead for minimal auditing of all in the business class that Republicans bat for. Why? Because facilitating tax evasion results in millions of jobs.

“As we learned in 2013 [Lois again], Democrats have weaponized the IRS as a political tool, and now they want an even more powerful IRS to target their political enemies, just as they did under Obama”, said David McIntosh, president of the Club for Growth. “Their proposal is … just another example of the vicious tactics of the radical socialist left.” We should never be allowed to learn that the very rich pay next to no taxes, is the message. But did you know that in Sweden and Finland, people can find out about anyone else’s tax returns just by making a phone call, and in Norway one can simply look up anyone’s tax information on a government website?

overburdened

As it is, the IRS is asked to do far more than originally conceived. On top of handling tax returns from a steadily expanding population, it has been handed the job of administering a slew of government programs that have nothing to do with collecting taxes. It had to take on enforcement of the Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act and the Affordable Care Act when they became law. It has to manage the EITC as described above because deciding on amounts due and sending millions of checks are based on the income tax returns the IRS receives. It was the IRS that suddenly had to process all three stimulus checks because it has the data — people’s physical addresses, the bank transfer routing codes submitted by everyone who’d ever gotten an electronic refund. This demand landed in the agency’s lap without a thought to workload consequences. So at the end of the current tax season the IRS had a backlog of 35.3 million unprocessed tax returns. And now it falls to the IRS to issue the $250 to $300 payments to all taxpayers with children under 17 in age every month for a year — and possibly for good if the program is extended — because it knows who has child dependents.

All this is somehow managed with legacy information technology that is reportedly among the oldest in the entire federal government. Symptomatic is that, as in the rest of the federal government for the most part, the computer language used is Cobol. Cobol was created more than a half-century ago.

When you make one of the 95 million phone calls (the 2018 count) that Americans make to the IRS each year and are on hold for 41 minutes (2019 average) reserve your rage not for the IRS but for Republicans and their fiscal starvation diet.

Aug 29 2021 | Posted in Taxes | Read More »

Afghanistan Agonistes: Biden’s Self-Inflicted Debacle

Left-wing cable news and punditry cannot bring itself to admit the colossal failing of President Biden’s evacuation of Afghanistan, but its damage will endure throughout his term in the White House. He
postured to show resoluteness, setting deadlines where there should have been none, and turned to his priority, the two gigantic bills in Congress. He seemed oblivious to what was coming at him, as we wrote in June in a piece concerned for getting out of the country those who had helped the U.S. military, contractors, and diplomatic corps:

In his headlong rush to pull out the troops, pressing for mid-July rather than his original September 11 deadline, President Biden seems only at this last minute to have discovered that we are entirely unprepared to rescue the interpreters, drivers, cultural advisers, security guards, many of whom have been embedded with our troops, living with them at remote firebases, risking their lives on combat patrols, and now face inhuman retribution by the Taliban for their having rendered essential service to the U.S.

and we went on to say that Biden “perhaps should worry that he faces his own Saigon moment”. We now know that his inattention extended to Americans in country as well, with no advance planning in evidence for getting out an estimated 10,000 to 15,000 countrymen and women.

Even had the Taliban made nowhere near the gains of the last few weeks in which they were rolling up one after another provincial city, some without a shot fired, with Afghanistan security forces changing into civilian dress to melt into the marketplaces — even had the Taliban moved slowly, it was manifest that extraction needed to begin months ago. Had the administration forgotten Saigon?

Fingers pointed in every direction. Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Mark Milley pointed his at the intelligence agencies, saying, “There was nothing that I or anyone else saw that indicated a collapse of this army and this government in eleven days”, as if to exonerate the military and himself for taking no preparatory action in the months before those eleven days. There had been a July 13 State Department cable in the dissent channel (where opinions can be freely expressed supposedly without retribution) signed by 23 officials and sent to Secretary Antony Blinken that warned of the collapse of Afghan security forces and recommended ways to speed up evacuation, including beginning flights out no later than August 1. President Biden, at that same time in July, was saying collapse of the Afghan government and a Taliban takeover were “high unlikely”, citing the Afghan National Security Force, its training and American-supplied equipment.

Departure from Afghanistan was announced 18 months ago, yet everything was left to the last minute. When he said to George Stephanopoulos, “The idea that somehow there’s a way to have gotten out without chaos ensuing, I don’t know how that happens”, Biden was revealed as scattered, as someone who had not thought through the immensity of the job, on a par with Donald Trump’s famous lack of organization. Stephanopoulos pressed, asking, “So for you that was always priced into the decision?” “Yes!”, answered Biden emphatically, which had to be a lie. No one plans for chaos.

Faced with extracting troops, equipment, contractors, diplomatic corps, NGOs (non-government organizations), and the thousands who had assisted the U.S. as interpreters, etc., who would not have known to set in motion a quiet drawdown across months comprising removal from all quarters of the country of personnel and issuance of advisories to all Americans to follow suit. And in so doing, why announce the withdrawal at all? Instead of the before-the-fact political “buck stops with me” grandstanding, just get it done and only then tell America it’s over.

Would the Taliban have noticed a gradual evacuation? Of course. We had already announced our intention to withdraw over a year earlier. But Biden had months to accomplish much to most of it before the Taliban made its surge. He sleepwalked.

The year-earlier announcement brings Donald Trump into the picture. He had planned an even more precipitous withdrawal. The U.S. signed a peace agreement with the Taliban February 29th, 2020, in Doha, Qatar, which provided for the removal of all U.S. and other NATO troops in exchange for a pledge that the Taliban would keep al-Qaeda out of areas under Taliban control. There is a fundamental absurdity to a negotiated settlement that requires trusting the Taliban, trust being the absurdity. The Trump administration agreed to an initial drawdown from 13,000 to 8,600 troops by July 2020, followed by a full withdrawal by the 1st of this past May. This was in exchange for nothing whatsoever demonstrable, and all the while the barbarians went about their butchery.

Like Biden, Trump was equally inattentive, obsessed with trying to reverse the election and stay in power. His attitude was, “You’re not going to need an exit strategy. I don’t need exit strategies”, which he said about conflict with Iran. Can anyone remember any concern in his final days for the Afghanistan exit he had agreed would be completed by May 1?

Actually, yes. There was one gift he left for Biden. His administration having refused to coordinate with the Biden administration’s transition team, Trump left Joe only a token force by ordering last November a drawdown from 4,500 to 2,500 troops to be effected by January 15, just five days before Biden took office. Why was that not the signal to the Taliban that they could start their sweep with impunity?

Yet there was Trump, in Ohio at the end of June at his first rally since leaving office, trying to take credit for leaving Afghanistan:

“By the way, I started the process. All the troops are coming back now. They couldn’t stop the process. Twenty-one years is enough, don’t we think? Twenty-one years. They couldn’t stop the process. They wanted to, but it was very tough to stop the process”.

To start the process, Trump had concocted just before Labor Day, 2019, a secret plan to bring the Taliban to Camp David for peace talks. He was determined even over the horrified objections of his national security team. Even Vice President Pence went against him. But then a Taliban attack killed some 11 people, including one US soldier which might have made Camp David even unacceptable to his base. Trump had shown no knowledge of the nature of the primitive fundamentalists. He had said, “I’ll be meeting personally with Taliban leaders in the not too distant future.” He was all set to confer American recognition to those almost as savage as ISIS.

Not so? Trump negotiators had acceded to the release of 5,000 Taliban from prison in Pakistan, part of a “confidence building measure” in the February 2020 peace deal. One of them was Taliban co-founder Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar Akhund who just re-entered Afghanistan after 20-year absence and appears to be the movement’s prime leader. Also at the negotiating table in Doha were members of the Taliban Five, released by President Obama from Guantanamo in exchange for freeing deserter Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl in 2014.

Biden scrubbed the May 1 deadline. He set the deadline at September 11, which will be the be 20th anniversary of the al Qaeda attacks in the U.S. What did he have in mind choosing one of our country’s darkest days? Was this — the death of 3,000 that caused us to send troops to Afghanistan and our defeat two decades later — something to be commemorated, or even celebrated? He then backed that up to August 31st.

But the question is, why was there any deadline? The U.S. had no obligation to the Taliban, who had continued killing their own people while negotiations were going on. The criterion should always have been, we’re gone when we’ve finished getting everyone out, and a consideration at the outset of how many of the military we might need beyond just 2,500 to effect a retreat in force. Mr. Biden seemed only to have discovered the unsuitability of a deadline, that a deadline would leave Americans behind, when backed into a corner by Stephanopoulos:

Biden: The commitment holds to get everyone out that in fact we can get out and everyone who should come out, and that’s the objective. That’s what we’re doing now. That’s the path we’re on, and I think we’ll get there.

Stephanopoulos: So Americans should understand that troops might have to be there beyond August 31st.

Biden: No, Americans [should] understand that we’re going to try to get it done before August 31st.

Stephanopoulos: But if we don’t…

Biden: If we don’t, we’ll determine at the time who’s left.

Stephanopoulos: And?

Biden: And if there are American forces, if there’s American citizens left, we’re going to stay until we get them all out.

How, could have been the next question.

where was our military

What brainstorm caused the military to suddenly abandon Bagram Airfield in advance of whatever unknowns the evacuation might bring? They did so on the night of July 1 “without notifying the base’s new Afghan commander, who discovered the Americans’ departure more than two hours after they left,” the Associated Press reported. Gen. Milley’s reasoning was that, “If we were to keep both Bagram and the embassy going,” that would require “a significant number of military forces,” so “you had to collapse one or the other.” Thus we had Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin saying, “I don’t have the capability to go out and extend operations currently [from the airport] into Kabul.”

Was there any pushback from the military about Biden’s acceptance of Trump’s 2,500 troop level as being wholly inadequate to safeguard the evacuation? Surpise! Zero foresight has led to a build back to 6,200 at this writing.

“No one in their right mind would have closed Bagram Air Base while leaving behind thousands of civilians,” Arkansas GOP senator and Afghanistan war veteran Tom Cotton wrote on Twitter. In fact, Bagram would be a poor choice, situated 30 kilometers north of Kabul a run of gauntlet easily controlled by Taliban fighters, whereas Hamid Karzai Airport is only one kilometer from central city.

The importance is elsewhere. The inexplicably bad judgment of abandoning Bagram is that we forsook the biggest airfield in Central Asia perfectly centered strategically between Iran, China, the “stans” to the north and Pakistan to the south. The Taliban have no air force, the Chinese have already made gestures toward recognizing them as Afghanistan’s de facto government, and we shouldn’t be surprised to see China take over Bagram as part of an assistance deal in the not distant future as part of their setting up bases ever westward.

help yourselves

The collapse of Afghan Security Forces means vast stores of U.S. military equipment left behind for them are now in the hands of the Taliban.

The collapse of the Afghan military has meant that Taliban forces has taken over a war chest of military equipment that we left for the Afghan National Army. Reuters reports that 2,000 armored vehicles such as Humvees have fallen into their hands and as many as 40 aircraft, among them UH-60 Black Hawk helicopters, found by the Afghans to be as their most potent weapon. Videos show Taliban fighters inspecting lines of vehicles and opening crates of arms, communications gear, military drones, and night goggles.

That the Taliban lack the knowledge to operate much of this equipment — helos especially, which are complicated to fly and need frequent maintenance and replacement parts — it, too, might wind up with the Russians or Chinese. So the U.S. now needs to consider missions to destroy the more consequential equipment by air strikes, but from carriers in the Arabian Sea, a 300 mile sortie instead of short hops from Bagram which we gave up in an act of inconceivable stupidity.

Mr. Biden went home to Delaware on this weekend, perhaps to where he can get a good night’s sleep away from it all. He has to worry what will happen to his presidency should we come to learn that thousands of Americans are trapped, used as hostages, raped, killed.

A Bigger Coup Than Trump’s Is Afoot: Call It America 2.0

As if further confirmation was needed, the plan in December of a Justice Department official to press states to review the 2020 election, and Trump’s badgering Acting Attorney General Jeffery Rosen to publicly say the election was corrupt, finally made it unequivocal that Donald Trump was engineering a “coup” as if it weren’t apparent all along.

We began wondering about Mr. Trump’s intentions two weeks after the election in an article titled, “If All Else Fails, a Coup?”, the first of several pieces here that tracked Trump’s bid to overturn the election’s result, remain in office, and even be restored to the presidency.

His plot was stymied by Rosen, whose recent testimony to congressional investigators and the Justice Department watchdog opened a window on what was happening in the days after the election which we recount in our piece next door, “Yes, It Was an Attempted Coup”. But Trump’s attempt to enlist the Justice Department to aid in his takeover is just one plotline of several moving in parallel that presage the far larger coup the right-wing has in mind to reconfigure America and its institutions.

Trump was entirely out to regain the presidency, possessed of his delusions, but The Big Lie of a fraudulent and stolen election served the larger takeover plan by sowing doubt in the democratic electoral process. Phenomenally, it was a lie that was originated solely by him. No one else in the political sphere reacted on his or her own in the days after the election to claim Trump had actually won. Republicans who acquiesced belief in a stolen election were merely going along with what Trump was saying, mostly out of fear of being primaried in the 2022 campaign should they not echo their leader.

His attorney general, Bill Barr, had gone along before the election, imagining forged ballots coming in from other countries and mailed-in ballots being ripe for fraud, but Barr didn’t sign on after the election to the Big Lie. On December 1 he told the Associated Press that no significant fraud had been found, and three weeks later resigned to be quit of Trump’s chicanery after almost two years supporting all of it.

In his January 6 speech, Trump provides an overlooked state-by-state accounting, ascribing numbers to votes cast by people who died before the election, who lived in another state, registered after deadline, voted more than once, ballots that suddenly appeared, all for Biden, and so on. A tally of the numbers he cited in the speech comes to an astounding 2,104,400.

None of these very specific numbers has ever been run to ground. Trump had prefaced his scorecard with, “Over the past several weeks, we’ve amassed overwhelming evidence about a fake election”. What became of that “overwhelming evidence”? We hear of no attempts by the Trump camp to come up with proof of any of Trump’s allegations. He floated them into the winter air, proclaiming, “We won in a landslide… this, the most corrupt election in the history, maybe of the world”. The crowd chanted “Stop the Steal”, and went off to storm the Capitol.

democracy, so 1776

The vote by 147 Republicans in the January 6 joint session of Congress against certification of the electoral votes of the states in an attempt to block Biden as the election’s winner was a stunning break with the Constitution. It revealed that a majority of Republicans had chosen the autocratic path of simply choosing who they wanted to be president, undermining the voice of the people. That on its own should make clear that those on the right are part of a growing movement to jettison democracy.

That was confirmed when Republicans in Congress subsequently voted down a 9/11 style commission to learn the who, the why, the how of the insurrection. They hoped to bury whatever facts might be discovered about the roots of the white supremacist groups as well as their own suspected complicity. When House Speaker Nancy Pelosi set up a substitute investigative panel in Congress, we saw obstructionism again when House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy appointed members who had voted against certification — they would likely be witnesses and therefore investigating themselves — especially Ohio Republican Jim Jordan whose performance in previous hearings has not been to find any truth but to engage in disruptive, partisan challenges.

The coup goes on

Mid-August has come and gone and with it the QAnon belief promulgated by pillow salesman Mike Lindell that Trump would be reinstated as president. Silly, but what gives pause is that they were ready. The Hartmann Report has noted that there is a Trump shadow government seemingly poised to take over. Hartmann heard on talk radio Trump’s Chief of Staff, Mark Meadows, refer several times to Trump’s “cabinet”. “We met with several of our Cabinet members tonight,” Meadows said, still referring to Trump as “the president”. “We actually had a follow-up … meeting with some of our Cabinet members.”

squeeze plays

Investigative reporter Jane Mayer, author of the book “Dark Money”, in a 10,000 word New Yorker piece titled “The Big Money Behind the Big Lie “, has uncovered a congeries of rich conservative groups “determined to win at all costs” in a takeover starting in the 2022 election. With stunning percentages still believing The Big Lie — 53% of Republicans think Trump is the true president according to a May Reuters/Ipsos poll, and roughly half of Republicans think the Capitol attack was left-wing activists “trying to make Trump look bad” — these big money groups see this as the moment to trade on those beliefs full throttle.

A parallel plotline is the campaign in Republican-led state governments to enact hundreds of laws designed to make it more difficult for lower income groups to vote in person — those who cannot get off work or who sacrifice pay to do so, or are at college away from home districts — namely Blacks, Latinos, and students, groups that tend to vote Democratic. The pretext for the laws is to prevent the fraud that cost them the 2020 presidential election, fraud which in fact doesn’t exist to any degree, fraud that — recall what’s said above about Trump’s claims — no one has set out to prove for the good reason that it would expose the fraudulent claim that there is rampant fraud. Jane Mayer quotes Phil Keisling, the former Oregon secretary of state who pioneered universal voting by mail, who said, “Voters don’t cast fraudulent ballots for the same reason counterfeiters don’t manufacture pennies—it doesn’t pay.”

The Census is finally out, reporting a first ever reduction in white citizens. That will surely spur Republican-controlled states to employ software-optimized gerrymandering to pack as many as possible of those groups into the fewest possible districts to guarantee the rest of a state’s districts for Republican candidates.

Far more ominous are laws that would allow the legislature of a state to overturn the choice of the voters, substituting their own slate for the presidency to send to Congress for certification. There is now frequent reference by conservative elements to what is called the Independent Legislature Doctrine as justification for laws that weren’t even anticipated by the For the People Act and the John Lewis Voting Rights Act. They are focused on an anything-goes snippet in the Constitution that says states may choose electors for the presidency “in such Manner as the Legislature thereof may direct.” The laws often read the same, state after state, suggesting that they were prepared by ALEC (the American Legislative Exchange Council) whose mission is to draw up “model” conservative laws for ready adoption by state legislatures.

The conservative Heritage Foundation plans to spend $24 million over the next two years starting in eight battleground states to promote “election integrity” which they say is “The right to vote in a free and fair election”. By implication, this right is lacking. Why make a point of this item? The right-wing cannot win the popular vote, so it is uppermost to keep Trump’s claims of fraud alive. Indeed, immediately following that statement on Heritage’s site is a link to their “Election Fraud Database”.

The Big Lie in general is a concerted plot to delegitimize the election system. Creating an assumption of fraud in advance of our elections lays the groundwork for state legislatures to say “we told you so” when they don’t like the choice of their voters and send their own choice of electors to D.C. for certification in January 6’s to come.

The future’s electoral stage is being carefully set: Unlimited money, gerrymandered districts, restrictive voting laws, maximal gerrymandering.

operation downplay

January 6 is awkward for Republicans. Fox News, Newmax, and One America News have shown little of the vast trove of video of the attacks and the bludgeoning of the Capitol and D.C. Metropolitan Police over four hours that afternoon that will be inscribed in our nation’s history. Not for their viewers, though, shielded from reality. That void made it plausible for Republicans to hit upon a parallel to the Big Lie, that it was a riot, yes, but nothing unusual.

In a March Pew Research poll, 54% of Republicans said too much attention was being paid to January 6. A Monmouth poll survey had two in every five Republicans saying that violence that day was at least partly justified.

Those on the left, shown heavy doses of successive releases of riot footage for months, were dumbstruck that opinion writer Christopher Caldwell could say about a day when five died and protesters erected a gallows to hang Vice President Mike Pence, that the “day’s events are ambiguous…something familiar: a political protest that got out of control”. Georgia Congressman Andrew Clyde said “there was an undisciplined mob,” but argued that “to call it an insurrection in my opinion is a bold-faced lie.” He was the one who, isolating on the mob inside “staying between the stanchions and ropes” taking selfies against the backdrop of the building’s grandeur, said “you would actually think it was a normal tourist visit”. Video was later found showing the forgetful Clyde doing his utmost to barricade a door against the marauders.

Others showed the sociopathy that has overtaken the Republican Party when they mocked the police who had protected them, refused to shake their hand in appreciation, voted against giving them a medal, and called the testimony before the House January 6 investigation by four police officers brutalized that January day “theater” and a “performance”, mocking the tears of one who had experienced heavy wounds, been Tasered three times, and suffered a heart attack. In their campaign to now create a reverse image of the January insurrection, the law and order party that has always defended the police is now elevating to martyrdom not police who died protecting them or chose suicide, but Ashli Babbitt, who died from wounds when shot trying to force her way through a broken window into the chamber.

Trump 2.0

Mr. Trump sees this unfolding, hates being out of the limelight, shorn of power, and shows every sign that he will run again in 2024. Trump-watcher Michael Wolff, out with a third book from immersion in “his obsessions and fixations”, says so in a New York Times opinion piece titled “Why I’m Sure Trump Will Run for President in 2024”. Apart from returning to the top spot where he can wreak revenge on all who have challenged him — Pence, McConnell, Georgia Governor Kemp and, and now Florida’s DeSantis — he knows he’s set up a winning campaign battle-cry: revenge for “The Steal!”.

Mayer quotes Michael Podhorzer, an AFL-CIO adviser, who said to her,

“What animates [the Big Lie] is the belief that Biden won because votes were cast by some people in this country who others think are not ‘real’ Americans…Trump won white America by eight points. He won non-urban areas by over twenty points. He is the democratically elected President of white America. It’s almost like he represents a nation within a nation.”

Trump held back from going too far in several instances while in office because he knew it could hurt his chances for re-election in 2020. But if he wins in 2024, there will be no stopping his full authoritarian inclinations. He will issue illegal executive orders. In his disdain for the courts he will disobey their decisions. He will fire military leaders until he finds those who will obey his commands should he want troops in the streets. He will drill down at the Department of Justice to find those willing to investigate those on his enemy list and file suits to financially break opposition media.

our dream future

Tucker Carlson of Fox News has become the conservatives’ most influential media star with the largest audience in cable news. As if to tie together for us where all the plotlines lead that this article cites, Mr. Carlson this August went to Hungary for a week to show us the much better authoritarian system the right-wing has in mind for us. “If you care about western civilization and democracy, you should know what is happening here”, Carson advised. He interviewed Hungary’s President Victor Orban giving the near dictator a pulpit to tout his system to an American audience.

Orban has showed that a coup is unnecessary. Over ten years he, step by step, re-wrote the country’s constitution, changed its electoral laws to favor his political party, blocked refugees, packed the courts with loyalists, gerrymandered election districts, and achieved near complete control of the media to create what he calls an “illiberal democracy”.

But Carlson sees autocracy hidden behind a faux-democracy as the way to an ethnic homogeneous nationalism , and let’s not forget Christian nation, too. Castigated by the liberal media, he feels a freedom in the Orban dream future. “Who’s freer?” Carlson asks. “If you’re an American, the answer is painful to admit.”

David Frum of the Atlantic magazine, conservative enough to have been a George W. Bush speechwriter, would differ. He was alarmed by what he thought he would never see again in Europe when on a visit to Hungary in 2016 noticed that it had become habit for people to look side to side should anyone be listening and lean in close to speak.

Yes, It Was an Attempted Coup

Defenders of Donald Trump advance the belief that the president on January 6 did not have a coup in mind, notwithstanding his objective to have still Vice President Mike Pence overturn state elections in Congress that day, because hadn’t he told the crowd “to peacefully and patriotically make your voices heard”?

That became a harder case to make when the second in command at the Justice Department, Richard Donoghue, turned over to the House Oversight Committee hand-written notes of a phone call last December from President Trump to Acting Attorney General Jeffery Rosen. When Rosen told Trump it “can’t” and “won’t snap its fingers” to change the election result, Donoghue’s notes have Trump responding, “Don’t expect you to do that, just say that the election was corrupt + leave the rest to me and the R. Congressmen.” The notes elsewhere cite Representatives Jim Jordan of Ohio, Pennsylvania’s Scott Perry, and Senator Ron Johnson of Wisconsin as the likely “R. Congressmen”. In testimony, Rosen said Trump had been phoning him almost daily to get him to cooperate, to appoint special counsels to investigate fraud, to look into vote flipping by Dominion Voting Systems machines, etc.

A good deal more has come out. As far back as January it was known that Rosen’s refusal to do Trump’s bidding led Trump to collaborate with Jeffery Clark, head of the Justice Department’s civil division. Clark had come to believe the election had been stolen (he had spent a lot of time on the Internet, he said). He must have thought the time had come to stage his own coup within the Justice Department in the service of Trump’s.

Trump had badgered governors and secretaries of state and even individual state legislators to get them to overturn election results, even inviting the speaker of the Michigan House and majority leader of its Senate to the White House.

We now know that Clark put the Justice Department at Trump’s disposal. He had written a letter that he proposed to send to Georgia’s governor, house speaker, and senate president that went a good deal further than simply asking for another recount. It went on for seven pages, leading with a lie about his department conducting an investigation and even a promise to keep Georgia informed of its fictitious findings:

“The Department of Justice is investigating various irregularities in the 2020 election for the President of the United States…[W]e have identified significant concerns that may have impacted the outcome in multiple States, including the State of Georgia. No doubt many of Georgia’s state legislators are aware of irregularities, sworn to by a variety of witnesses, and we have taken notice of their complaints…In light of these developments, the Department recommends that the Georgia General Assembly should convene in special session so that its legislators are in a position to take additional testimony, receive new evidence, and deliberate on the matter consistent with its duties under the U.S. Constitution”.

The plan was to send the letter to all states narrowly lost by Trump. With the weight of the DOJ behind it, the letter would have probably seemed something of a threat to the states, more than just a suggestion that they should perhaps take action. That surely was the letter’s intention. Neither Rosen nor Donoghue would co-sign the letter, which squashed its sending, a firing offense for Trump, who decided to replace Rosen with Clark. He backed off when he heard that firing Rosen would cause others at Justice to resign en masse, immediately bringing comparisons to Nixon’s Saturday Night Massacre, when Attorney General Elliot Richardson and his deputy resigned rather than follow the president’s order to fire Special Prosecutor Archibald Cox, who was investigating Nixon. (Nixon found the willing in Robert Bork).