Plans underway to stop Trump from making the midterms a 2nd Jan. 6

Now that the Supreme Court is temporarily allowing President Donald Trump to continue his USPS war on mail-in voting, anti-Trump Americans are increasingly concerned that he will effectively negate the will of the voters should they choose to install a Democratic Congress to oppose him in the 2026 midterm elections.

Yet according to a recent report by NPR, the Democrats have a plan to combat that if necessary.

"Eric, Republicans are in control of both chambers of Congress, and they control what comes up for a vote," NPR host Juana Summers asked congressional reporter Eric McDaniel on Sunday. "So what does that leave Democrats actually able to do other than sounding the alarm, speaking out?"

McDaniel replied, "I mean, they're planning, right? They've held tabletop games so they're not caught off guard by the same failure of imagination - what they describe to me as a failure of imagination - that caught them off guard five or six years ago, around January 6. Allied groups are also directly involved in litigation to stop the Department of Justice from obtaining state voter rolls, which they describe both as federal overreach and a pretext to encumber eligible voters."

The conversation also included an observation by Vanita Gupta, a task force advisor who was the No. 3 in Biden's Department of Justice. She's now at New York University Law School.

"Maybe the process of getting from here to a new Congress may be messier than any of us would like, but we are going to have free and fair elections so long as people don't take for granted their right to vote," Gupta told NPR.

Speaking about Trump's July speech falsely claiming that China had stolen the 2020 election from him, former principal deputy Director of National Intelligence Sue Gordon outlined the dangerous nature of the "questionable" remedies that Trump proposed to address his inaccurate claims of election theft.

"I think this was a dangerous speech about an incredibly important topic, with some really questionable remedies in mind," Gordon said at the time. "So let me go through that. Number one: since 2016, the intelligence community has been saying that foreign actors intended to influence our election for the purpose of undermining democracy — not undermining a president, undermining democracy. If you recall, the whole 2016-to-2021 first Trump term turned on us trying to say that, and him interpreting it as us spreading misinformation when we tried to share that information. So this is not new — that foreign actors try to influence our election. They do."

She added, "And with the advent of the digital era, there are lots of tools available to them. So this is not a new threat. It is one he certainly knew of. He had an entire term to deal with it."

Overall, Trump's war against voting is widely perceived to be a genuine threat to the continuation of American democracy. Perhaps the most ominous detail is Trump compelling states to turn over their voter rolls, which could be used to stop legitimate voters from being able to cast their ballots.

“The other thing is that, as you well know, the administration has been trying to compel states to turn their voter rolls over to the federal government and to consolidate all of that in a mega database,” Susannah Goodman, Common Cause’s Policy Director in the Voting and Fair Representation Program, told AlterNet in June. “A number of states have refused to turn over their unredacted voter rolls with personal identifying information — Social Security numbers, driver's licenses, et cetera. Common Cause and our partners have intervened in, I think, 17 of those cases on behalf of voters.”

She continued, “I don't believe there has been a single case... where, when the state has resisted and claimed they are not going to turn these voter rolls over, the court has dismissed the case or compelled the states to turn them over. The government has not had a compelling reason, and the states have won. So when states fight back, they win. We have been involved in that litigation. That is another huge power grab by the administration. It is also an illegal power grab, and when we have pushed back, we have won.”