Former U.S. District Judge for the Southern District of New York Shira Scheindlin (an appointee of former President Bill Clinton) offered hard reasons behind Republicans’ massive effort to undermine the credibility of national elections this year. The judge also presented reasons for why President Donald Trump's administration is pressing to put armed ICE agents at polling places.
“It's about deterring and depressing the vote,” Scheindlin told MS NOW anchor Katy Tur. “If you instill fear in the voters, if they think they're going to go to the polls and find armed masked agents, they just might not go to the polls.”
“This is a campaign to deter and depress the vote, because otherwise they don't think they're going to win the next two elections,” Scheindlin said. “And this is a reaction to the fear of not winning.”
Tur played footage of House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) attempting to tear down the legitimacy of elections that Republicans happen to lose.
“We had three House Republican candidates who were ahead on Election Day in the last election cycle, and every time a new tranche of ballots came in, they just magically whittled away until their leads were lost and no series of ballots that were counted after Election Day were our candidates ahead on any of those counts,” Johnson said of recent elections in the blue state of California.
Johnson was quick to add, however, that he had no proof of his suspicion: “It just it looks on its face to be fraudulent. Can I prove that? No, because it happened so far upstream.”
“Welcome to the Bigfoot Era of American politics, the era where conspiracies are true just because some people might want to believe them to be true, and even apparently when those conspiracies are proven wrong,” said Tur. “So, congratulations to all you flat-earthers, moonwalk denialists, and 9/11-was-an-inside-job people, because the very fact that you believe it now makes it true, according to reasoning by Speaker Mike Johnson and other Republicans who refused to believe that Republicans could possibly lose an election.”
“At one time, this would be laughable or ignorable,” Tur lamented. “But it's not any longer because of these people, at the prompting of the president who can't accept a reality where he is not the best.”
But things got worse for Republicans today, said Scheindlin, and now they’re even more afraid and desperate because of a Supreme Court decision allowing the state of California to gerrymander away five Republican seats in response to Trump’s gerrymander maneuver in Texas last year.
“It’s now worse in the sense that Republicans are even more worried now that they won't win the midterms or the upcoming presidential,” said Scheindlin, who added that the party will ramp up calls to undermine elections now.