The Election War of 2024 Is Being Fought Now

This is not a fight over something like the minimum wage. This is a battle for the survival of the American republic and in a larger sense, it’s about the survival of democracy across the world.

Photo by Frida Bredesen on Unsplash

Republicans and their authoritarian supporters are working right now to steal the 2024 election and drop their 2020 treason into the memory hole. We can’t let them get away with it.

At the same time Democrats are trying to negotiate in “good faith” with Republicans about creating a “bipartisan commission” to investigate what happened on January 6th, Republicans are rigging elections in state after state and preparing for a total takeover of the American government. They’re even rehearsing ways to rewrite the Constitution.

This is war, but apparently only one side realizes it.

Democrats should forget about “bipartisanship” and either create a real investigative commission that has subpoena and other real powers or start talking about a Special Prosecutor or Independent Counsel with a grand jury that can do the job.

As former Cruz and DeMint communications director and speechwriter Amanda Carpenter writes over at The Bulwark in favor of a real investigative commission:

No one should be surprised that elected Republicans are not, as a class, eager to support the commission. For some, such as House Minority Leader McCarthy and the people who spoke at the January 6 rally, a vote for the commission is a vote to investigate themselves. If anything, their opposition is further evidence of the need for an independent investigation.

Republicans, of course, will block and filibuster any such thing — so many of them supported or engaged in treason on that day, they can’t afford it coming to the light of day with the 2022 election coming up — so breaking or changing the filibuster is step one.

Chuck Schumer needs to take control of his caucus and immediately either end the filibuster or replace it with a “Jimmy Stewart filibuster” (requiring 40 people on the floor and continuous talking followed by an unavoidable vote so actual and necessary legislation can be passed now).

If Schumer can’t do that, President Biden needs to intervene and help Democrats in the Senate replace him with somebody who can and will.

Once the filibuster is gone, the first order of business has to be taking apart, discrediting, and utterly shattering the democracy-destroying lies promulgated on a daily basis now by Trump and most of the rest of the Republican Party about our electoral process.  

It’s absolutely necessary to reveal the Trump-following Republicans as the traitors and wannabe fascists they’ve become, and to stop their agenda of destroying democracy in this country.

That means forgetting about some namby-pamby January 6th Commission with a bunch of obstructionist Republicans on it — the very people who are trying to destroy our democracy — and immediately passing legislation to put into place a real investigative body, or a Special Prosecutor or Independent Counsel, to look into participation by Republican members of both Congress and the Trump administration in an attempted coup d’état takeover of our country.

Republicans will do everything they can to block any sort of real and actual investigation into the crimes they’ve been committing for the last few decades and, in particular, over the past five years. It’s guaranteed.

Chuck Schumer can’t let that happen: if he does, history will judge him as the Neville Chamberlain of our era.

We don’t need another whitewash like the Warren Commission or the 9/11 Commission: we need a Leon Jaworski, Archibald Cox, Ken Starr or Lawrence Walsh.  

We need a Robert Mueller unencumbered by the restraints that Bill Barr put on him that prevented him from investigating Trump’s association with international and domestic organized crime and foreign governments. 

There’s a reason why the 9/11 Commission never pointed out that Bush and Cheney were warned, in January 2001 during the presidential transition, by Clinton and Gore about Bin Laden but chose to do nothing with that information.

There’s a reason why the 9/11 Commission avoided seriously investigating and discussing Saudi Arabia‘s complicity, along with that of other wealthy and influential Saudi families associated with the Bush and other wealthy American families.

There’s a reason why the 9/11 Commission never investigated statements made by George W. Bush in 1999 that his father had “wasted” his own political capital by only having a three-day war in Iraq and that if W became president he’d attack Iraq again, only this time he’d make it a long enough war that he could use it to get himself reelected in 2004. 

There’s a reason the 9/11 Commission never looked into how Cheney plundered the Defense Department on behalf of Halliburton, a company he’d run into near-bankruptcy when he was its CEO, with billions in no-bid contracts.

There’s a reason they didn’t even bother to look into Cheney’s ongoing stock holdings in the company, or investigate the many scandals surrounding Halliburton‘s shoddy workmanship that led to multiple American deaths.

And there’s a reason the 9/11 Commission completely ignored all the lies Cheney told about Saddam Hussein, and the pressure he put on our intelligence agencies to go along with his lies to get his war that would make him fabulously rich while leading to a million unnecessary human deaths.  

The reason is that the Commission was put together with Republicans; it was a 50-50 effort. And they put a fence around that kind of information, forbidding investigations or testimony about events preceeding the attack.

This is not a debate over the minimum wage. This is about the survival of the American republic. In the larger sense, it’s about the survival of democracy across the world, the lives of billions of humans, and the survival of our biosphere.

Schumer needs to stop behaving like he’s negotiating a healthcare plan. This is war. And the only way to win a war is to fight it.

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If you’d like to do a deeper dive on these topics, I’ve written a series of small, quickly-read books breaking them down. 

The Hidden History of Guns and the Second Amendment describes that Amendment’s roots in the Southern Slave Patrols and how American policing grew out of that and is used today as a violent system of control against marginalized people.

The Hidden History of the Supreme Court and the Betrayal of America lays out how a corruptly-stacked Supreme Court is the principal instrument that brought us here. 

The Hidden History of the War on Voting describes the processes through which oligarchs corrupted the Republican Party and the American political system. 

The Hidden History of Monopolies describes how the oligarchic class, exploiting weaknesses within our political system, managed to seize control of virtually our entire economy, giving them massive political power. 

The Hidden History of American Oligarchy reveals the two previous times in this country when we almost tipped over into oligarchy [the Civil War era and the attempts to overthrow Franklin Roosevelt] and exposes oligarch efforts to pull it off again today and how we can stop them. 

And The Hidden History of American Healthcare shows how the most important and central function of government — maintaining the health and well-being of its people — has been co-opted and seized by a small group of “healthcare oligarchs” and how a Medicare For All system can overthrow much of their power and end their plunder of the American middle class.

All are available through your favorite bookseller.