President Donald Trump is openly hinting at taking over the midterm elections by declaring a national emergency.
Newsmax’s Wayne Allen Root interviewed Trump just after midnight Tuesday morning, and said that Trump had the right to declare a national security emergency next month, forcing through photo identification, proof of citizenship, limits on mail-in ballots, and other heavy voting restrictions. Trump seemed to like that suggestion, but didn’t want to tip his hand.
“Let me just say stranger things have happened, okay? I’ll leave it at that,” Trump said.
Trump is afraid of massive Republican losses in November’s midterms, and has been unsuccessfully pushing his allies in Congress to pass the draconian SAVE Act. With that appearing more unlikely each day, Democrats and other Trump critics are raising concerns that he may take drastic action, such as declaring a national emergency and maybe deploying legions of Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents to the polls.
In fact, Democrats have been trying for close to a year to get documents from the Department of Homeland Security regarding its policies and memos on sending ICE agents to polls. Agents were seen at polling places in Texas during its May primaries and in California in June, but when Democrats used the Freedom of Information Act to investigate, they were sent useless press clippings.
If Trump tries to invoke national security to take over federal elections, it would shatter precedent and could set off lawsuits and protests across the country. His repeated, disproven claims about voter fraud and rigged elections suggest that he’ll make the same excuses in November. The question is how to ensure a fair and accurate result that can stand up to his attacks.
the problem isn’t that people won’t, it’s that people don’t want to be the crazed lone gun man.
one of the reasons i hate no kings, among a TON of issues. it’s their stance on armed protesting. they are organized around cooperating with police to ‘other’ anyone they find is armed, but armed protestors is not to stand there with a conceal carry you are not going to draw, it’s to stand there with your weapon out as an open threat to tyrants. you need solidarity.
i kinda believe that no kings is not there to do anything but provide a circus, so that people who would otherwise protest with leverage, gets corraled with the group that would stop protesting because the police tell them to go home.
if you protest with a gun by your self, you will be charged with branishing, if you are white… worse if you are not.
One might even suspect they are organized as a means of building solidarity with the police. That the police (and the national guard and the military at-large) are positioned as a neutral unbiased arbiter, and not a reactionary gang leveraged by private industry to intimidate and displace the working class.
Definitely felt like it was a manufactured outlet for dissent. Especially when you had those protests in Europe that had to be rebranded as "No Tyrants", for fear of offending actual kings.
I mean the 50501 OG leadership got ousted pretty early on in the movement, by what seemed to be DNC "centrist" types, which is why the 50501movement reddit got made by the OG leadership afterwards. So I do find it believable that No Kings was meant to waste our energy and frustrations so we didn't do anything truly effective with that energy.
the largest national protest in america, and it didn’t even make the news other then as a foot note punctuating trumps fucking birthday military parade.
and the goal? to show everyone how mad we were and to back the democratic centrist. it was a fucking joke and a waste of my fucking day. it angered me that such potential was wasted. no demands, no leverage, no threat, just everyone waving a flag. the police didn’t even bother to show up. a disgrace
It was fun to show up in keffiyehs and watch the old libs clutch their pearls, at least.
And to pass out anti-ICE info to middle-aged and older folks who may not have necessarily been aware of those resources.
But yeah fuck No Kings.
Yup, if your "protest" doesn't have the background of potential violence when your needs aren't met. That's a parade not a protest. Something that a lot of these "pacifist" types either don't understand, or choose to ignore. The whole point of a protest is to show you're a threat, that things will go poorly if we can't negotiate in good faith.