Lessons of History and Trying To Avoid the Same Mistakes

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Jason T. Schofield, the elections commissioner for Rensselaer County in upstate New York, is set to plead guilty to federal criminal charges in the New Year after being accused of leading a plot to cast votes in at least eight other people’s names without their permission.
According to the Times Union, the notice of Schofield’s change-of-plea hearing was filed on December 13—just hours before the Republican-led Rensselaer County Legislature voted 16–2 to reappoint Schofield to a second term as election commissioner. This, after Schofield had already been facing federal criminal charges since September.

In September, the FBI arrested Schofield on accusations that the county elections commissioner was fraudulently applying for absentee ballots in the names of people who didn’t request ballots or Schofield’s assistance, or didn’t know that Schofield was using their personal information. The indictment alleged that Schofield brought ballots to voters, took possession of some ballots himself, and had voters sign ballot envelopes but not actually vote—enabling him to cast votes in the voters’ names.

Schofield’s plea agreement includes his pledge to cooperate in the federal investigation that is examining the use of county resources and employees to gather absentee ballots.

The election fraudster was appointed to the county elections commission back in April 2018, after resigning from the Troy City School District Board of Education, where the Times Union reports he spent 15 years as a board member and seven years as president.

Other officials are also being targeted by the investigation, including two Rensselaer County employees—one described by insiders as a GOP operative, another an assistant for county Executive Steve McLaughlin, who was indicted last year on campaign finance felony charges. The investigation has also led to the guilty plea of former Republican Troy City Councilwoman Kimberly Ashe-McPheron, for fraudulently submitting absentee ballots in last year’s primary and general elections.
The remarkably ever-widening scale of the upstate investigation follows a wider trend of Republican officials and voters being guilty of the phantasmal voter fraud they so often fearmonger about.

Yet Another Republican Commits Voter Fraud

An upstate New York elections official becomes the latest in a long line of conservatives to perpetrate the very crime they claim is being done against them.

newrepublic.com

 

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The ideological homogeneity of the Republican Party is not unique to the 118th Congress. It’s a 40-year-long trend that has seen elected Republicans moving further and further to the right while the ways in which they are described has continued to exist along the moderate-to-conservative continuum.

A quick look at some of the votes in the 117th Congress, in which the Democrats, under Speaker Nancy Pelosi, held a very slim majority of 222 over the Republicans’ 205-seat minority, illustrates the launching-off point for the new session:

• 208 Republicans, including Liz Cheney, voted against the Protecting Our Democracy Act.
• 203 Republicans voted against the Presidential Election Reform Act.
• 193 Republicans, including Liz Cheney, voted against the Affordable Insulin Now Act.
• 195 Republicans (that’s 95%) voted against The Right to Contraception Act (in the 21st century, no less).

I include Cheney here to illustrate the fact that, despite her being heroized for her role as Vice Chair on the January 6th Select Committee, she is less a proponent of democracy than she is an enemy of Donald Trump. It wasn’t her heresy against the party that lost her the 2022 Republican primary in Wyoming, it was her unwillingness to support, or at least stay silent about, Donald’s self-coup.

Speaking of the January 6th insurrection, once McCarthy’s heart rate returned to normal, he, like every member of the group opposing his bid for Speaker, voted against certifying Biden’s 2020 victory. For three weeks, though, he was willing to concede that Donald was directly responsible for the violent mob that swarmed the Capitol, endangering him and everybody else in Congress. Then, for reasons that aren’t yet clear, (though we can speculate) McCarthy realized that, although his life was no longer in danger, his political future might be if he continued to lay the blame for January 6th at the door of its architect.

So he flew to Florida to grovel at the feet of and swear renewed fealty to his overlord. When McCarthy returned to D.C., he was a man transformed. He finally realized that January 6th was, after all, the very best day of his life and the disruption of the election certification, ordered by said overlord for the express purpose of destroying American democracy thereby shredding the very document McCarthy had sworn “support and defend,” was of no consequence.

This invertebrate without an exoskeleton, whatever kind of creature that makes him, is now nominally in charge of the House of Representatives. But it’s McCarthy’s detractors as well as those who (like Marjorie Taylor Greene) made their own cynical bargain with him who have been empowered to wield a sledgehammer against good governance and democracy.

There are a handful of House Republicans who claim to be moderates. Nancy Mace (R-SC) has recently been the most vocal. This designation is very important to members like her who won their elections in swing districts. It is, of course, a sham. The fact that every single one of them voted for McCarthy—as much an election denier and enabler of Donald as any of the twenty original holdouts—15 times and all but one of the them voted for the quite frankly dangerous new rules package belies their identification as moderates while reminding us that just because a Republican wins in a swing district, does not mean he or she is moderate whatever the mainstream media would have us believe.

We now live in a democracy in which 11 of the 17 House committee chairs voted to overturn the results of a free and fair election. We are at the mercy of a Republican House that will willingly allow the United States to default on its debt, thereby triggering a global economic crisis of unimaginable proportions, in order to hold hostage programs like Social Security, Medicaid, and Medicare, that keep Americans out of poverty.

These Republicans conserve nothing. They are moderate about nothing. The water in which they swim is petty grievance and their only skills seem to be airing those grievances, projecting their failures onto their political opponents, and, yes, being cruel--always.

They redistribute the vast resources of the United States government to further enrich the already rich.

They reserve money for causes that do nothing to help improve the lives of the vast majority of the American people.

They care nothing for democracy. One-hundred and seventy-five democracy-related lawsuits were filed in 2022: 93 of them, were “anti-voting” and all were filed by Republicans. One of their goals is to restrict the right to vote to people who look like them, believe like them, and who will vote for them.

They favor hostage-taking over doing the hard work of governing.

They never deal in good faith.

They are seditionists.

They are domestic terrorists.

They are authoritarians.

They are autocrats.

They are fascists.

They are traitors.

A Brief Primer on How to Talk about This Shit

Words matter

marytrump.substack.com

 

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Paul Ryan calls for George Santos to step down: 'A fraudulent candidacy'

Republican former House speaker Paul Ryan called on GOP freshman lawmaker George Santos to quit Congress Thursday over revelations that he misrepresented parts of his background during his election campaign.

www.aol.com

 

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Alex Jones and Tucker Carlson Texted Each Other Conspiracy Theories Throughout the Pandemic

The most watched cable news network in America is taking at least some editorial direction from Infowars’ Alex Jones.

newrepublic.com

 

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The wife of a northwestern Iowa county supervisor has been charged with 52 counts of voter fraud after she allegedly filled out and cast absentee ballots in her husband’s unsuccessful race for a Republican nomination to run for Congress in 2020, federal prosecutors said.

Kim Phuong Taylor, 49, was arrested Thursday and pleaded not guilty to the charges before being released on a personal recognizance bond, the Sioux City Journal reported. Her trial is scheduled to begin March 20.

Prosecutors allege in an indictment unsealed Thursday that Phuong Taylor filled out voter registration forms or delivered absentee ballots for people in Sioux City’s Vietnamese community who had limited ability to read and understand English.

She filled out “dozens of voter registrations, absentee ballot request forms, and absentee ballots containing false information,” and delivered absentee ballots, sometimes without the knowledge of the people whose names were used, according to the indictment.

(full article online)

Iowa official's wife charged with 52 counts of voter fraud

SIOUX CITY, Iowa (AP) — The wife of a northwestern Iowa county supervisor has been charged with 52 counts of voter fraud after she allegedly filled out and cast absentee ballots in her husband’s unsuccessful race for a Republican nomination to run for Congress in 2020, federal prosecutors said.

apnews.com

 

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