Preventing The GQP Seditious Insurrection Sequel On January 6, 2025

The MAGA/QAnon seditious insurrection on January 6, 2021, one of the darkest days in American history, is a date which will live in infamy.

But the MAGA/QAnon personality cult of Trump is already laying the groundwork in state legislatures, and blocking reforms at the federal level, plotting a sequel on January 6, 2025.

Forewarned is forearmed. Only you can prevent this plot against American democracy by the anti-democratic, anti-majoritarian MAGA/QAnon personality cult of Trump, the new American fascism. To save American democracy, the evil plot of these radical Republicans must be defeated at every level of government.

Matt Bennett and Jon Cowan from Third Way write at USA Today, January 6, 2025 could be the date American democracy dies. Mark it on your calendar.

You can write it down: Jan. 6, 2025, will be a hinge date in history. On that day, American democracy either will live or die. And if we do not take aggressive steps to ensure that Democrats control the House of Representatives when we get there, the prognosis for our republic is grim.

It is rare to have advance notice of a monumental moment. Before Pearl Harbor, no one suspected that Dec. 7 would “live in infamy.” We could not predict years beforehand that we would celebrate our nation’s birth on the Fourth of July or mark 9/11 as a monument to national tragedy and heroism [as was the tyranny of the MAGA/QAnon seditious insurrection on Jnauray 6, 2021].

Yet it is now clear that the Sixth of January 2025 will join those historic dates. A joint session of the new 120th Congress will meet that day to count the electoral votes from the 2024 election. The House of Representatives should perform its largely symbolic function and certify the will of the voters, naming the winner of 270 or more electoral votes as the president. That is how it should go. But there is a real chance that it will not.

GQP could install its own president

House Republicans are now firmly in the grip of a deeply anti-democratic right-wing populism. Almost all have now essentially pledged to “support and defend” Donald Trump and Trumpism rather than the Constitution of the United States. They no longer are constrained by once inviolate norms or even by observable facts. If these radicals control the House on 1/6/25, and if a Democrat has won the Electoral College vote, it now seems completely possible that Republicans will instead confirm their own choice as president of the United States. If that happens, the world’s greatest democracy will come to an end.

We came within just minutes of an unimaginable tragedy on January 6, 2021, with Vice President Mike Pence hanged from an impromptu gallows, and an untold number of members of the Congress and the Senate also executed by Trump’s fascist MAGA/QAnon red cap private militia (domestic terrorists). It was only fortuitous luck and the bravery of the Capitol Police and D.C. Metropolitan Police who thwarted Trump’s attempted coup d’etat that day. They would also have been killed in the line of duty.

Rather than hold Trump accountable for his actions, his MAGA/QAnon cult followers in the Congress ratified his seditious insurrection first by 147 Republican lawmakers who still objected to the election results even after the Capitol attack, and second by acquitting Trump in an impeachment trial for inciting an insurrection, and refusing to disqualify him from ever holding public office again under the 14th Amendment.

The radicalized Republican Party now endorses the use of domestic terrorism and seditious insurrection to achieve its ultimate goal of permanent minority power, a tyranny of the minority. As Michael Gerson writes, The threat of violence now infuses GOP politics. We should all be afraid.

The mechanism would be the same as the one they tried after the 2020 election: invalidating the Electoral College votes of certain states that went for the Democrat, thereby throwing the election to a vote of the House. This gambit failed because Speaker Nancy Pelosi and the majority Democrats blocked it. We will not have that protection in 2025 if the Speaker is Kevin McCarthy. He voted with the insurrectionists last January.

But wasn’t that just a protest vote? If they have power next time, would House Republicans actually do something so catastrophic?

Well, consider their recent behavior. Almost all have helped spread Trump’s Big Lie about the 2020 election being stolen. Two-thirds of them took that seditionist “protest” vote just hours after a violent mob stormed the Capitol, maimed police officers, erected a noose, and desecrated our democracy’s most sacred spaces. Only 10 of them voted to impeach Trump for inciting the insurrection.

They ejected from their leadership Rep. Liz Cheney for her failure to tell the Big Lie. They replaced her with a Trump toady who has supported the ludicrous Arizona recount that involves hunting for “Chinese bamboo” in the ballots. And they have even begun trying to erase from communal memory the horror, chaos, death and destruction of the insurrection, claiming it resembled “a normal tourist visit to the Capitol.”

So yes, it’s easy to predict that a House GOP caucus that remains deeply committed to Trump and his seditionist lies would steal the presidential election if they could. That means that the House elections in 2022 and 2024 are not just battles over normal political questions, like the future of the Biden agenda or the Trump tax cuts. Rather, our democracy itself will be on the ballot. But with gerrymandering and voter suppression laws sweeping the GOP-held states, winning these races will be tougher than ever.

Stopping the next attempted coup

Small-d democrats of all political stripes must be galvanized to much greater action than normal. We need nothing less than a Committee to Save the Republic: a coalition of Democrats and democracy-affirming Republicans. And the wealthy must dig deep, providing a huge well of resources to take on three essential tasks: First, we must protect at-risk House Democrats from the torrent of GOP lies that cut down so many of their colleagues in 2020.

Second, we must help Republicans of good will to weaken the GOP House candidates from behind their own lines, with ads aimed at their voters and third-party challengers to spoil the bids of insurrectionist Republicans.

Finally, we must install pro-democracy decisionmakers in the states, by electing secretaries of state and attorneys general to help ensure that Republicans cannot steal the presidential race before it reaches the House.

A pillar of the American experiment has been the rock-solid stability of our political system. Despite often deep and angry divisions, nothing has threatened to alter the very nature of our democracy since the Battle of Gettysburg. But the republic now faces an existential threat, and we know the date on which the plotters will attempt a coup. The only question is whether we will do enough to stop them.

Columnist Doyle McManus at the LA Times similarly sounds the alarm, Trump couldn’t steal the election in 2020. His allies are laying the groundwork to try again:

Donald Trump’s campaign to steal the 2020 election after clearly losing at the ballot box failed for a couple of reasons.

His baseless claims of fraud were thrown out by virtually every court that heard them. Perhaps most important, many GOP officials refused to play along — including Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, who declined to “find” the 11,780 more votes Trump needed, and then-Vice President Mike Pence, who turned down a demand from the president that he block Joe Biden’s victory from being certified by Congress.

But the former president and his allies aren’t done.

Pro-Trump forces in dozens of states are now working to change election laws to make it harder for Democrats to win — and easier for Republicans to challenge the results if their candidate loses. If they’re successful, the chaotic aftermath of the 2020 election may only have been a rehearsal for a second round in 2024.

“What was really scary about 2020 was how close we came to a meltdown,” Edward B. Foley, an election law expert at Ohio State University, told me. “It’s not too early to worry about Jan. 6, 2025.”

One part of the GOP election-law campaign has gotten plenty of publicity: new laws in Georgia and elsewhere to make voting more difficult, including a statute that makes it a criminal offense to give people water while they wait to vote.

But other, less visible actions may be even more important. In at least 36 states, Republican legislators have proposed laws to weaken the autonomy of local election officials and put more power over vote-counting in the hands of legislators.

That’s a recipe for political meddling in election results. “It’s the opposite of what good election administration should be,” Jocelyn Benson, Michigan’s Democratic secretary of state, said recently.

In Georgia, for example, the same law that criminalized giving water to thirsty voters also gave the Legislature the right to appoint the chair of the state election board — and gave the board the right to take over a county’s election management.

“The most destabilizing thing is the effort to change who’s in charge of the vote-counting process,” Foley said. “That’s really dangerous.”

And the most important battle over the ground rules for the 2024 presidential election will happen in plain sight with the 2022 elections of governors, secretaries of state and state legislators, plus members of the U.S. House of Representatives.

To understand why those jobs matter for the 2024 presidential election requires a brief refresher on the creaky machinery of the electoral college.

The Constitution gives every state legislature the power to regulate the elections that produce electoral votes. In advance of election day, the legislators write the rules. Then each state’s secretary of state administers the election and oversees the vote count.

Once the votes are tallied, it’s up to the governor to certify the electoral college result and send it Congress. Congress counts the electoral votes and confirms the result.

In most election years, that process is uncontroversial. But when a losing candidate contests the election, it can turn into a thicket of ill-defined powers.

Last year, for example, Trump asked several GOP governors to refuse to certify their states’ results — under the legal theory that if electoral votes for Biden weren’t certified, they couldn’t be counted.

When Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp refused, Trump called him “worse than a Democrat” and threatened him with a primary challenge. [Kemp, a former Secretary of State, is in the GQP Voter Suppression Hall of Fame no less].

Next step: If no candidate has a majority of certified electoral votes, the House of Representatives decides the winner — under a peculiar system in which each state’s delegation gets one vote.

If Trump had succeeded in throwing the 2020 election to the House, he could have won a second term, because 27 of the 50 House delegations have Republican majorities.

“To control the outcome [in a given state], one party has to be in control of both the legislature and the governorship,” Foley told me. “That makes the gubernatorial elections in 2022 critical in swing states like Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Michigan.”

The otherwise obscure races for secretary of state will matter as well. In Georgia, where Raffensperger refused Trump’s request to “find” extra votes, the former president has already endorsed a challenger, Rep. Jody Hice, who is casting himself as a Trump loyalist.

“They are trying to lay the groundwork [for 2024] to make sure local officials will jump if Trump tells them to jump,” Foley said. “They didn’t jump last time, but they might the next time.”

Do Republicans really want to win a presidential election this way? Probably not; any political party would rather have a clear and convincing majority, without any need to resort to chicanery.

I disagree. Republicans do not care about appearances. They will do whatever it takes to maintain their minority power, including overturning American democracy. They have already demonstrated their willingness to do so on January 6, 2021. It is all about controlling power.

But Trump clearly has no such scruples — and his supporters like House GOP leader Kevin McCarthy of Bakersfield, who hopes to be speaker of the House by 2024, have fallen in line. McCarthy signed on to a pro-Trump lawsuit that asked the Supreme Court to invalidate Biden’s electoral votes in four states, and was one of 126 GOP House members who voted against accepting the electoral votes from Arizona and Pennsylvania, which Biden won.

When voters choose governors, legislators and secretaries of state next year, they need to realize that there is far more at stake than what happens within the boundary of state lines. The outcome of the 2024 presidential election may be on the ballot, too.

Thus the very survival of American democracy is on the ballot in the 2022 midterm elections, ahead of the 2024 presidential election.

Democratic voters who tend not to turn out in midterm elections in the numbers they do for presidential election years, do so to the peril of American democracy. You must commit to turning out to vote in 2022.

To paraphrase President John F. Kennedy in his inaugural address, “we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe, in order to assure the survival and the success of liberty” and our American democracy.