We know what the majority supports; will it vote?

Poll after poll after poll.

Name your indicator and know the Republican Party is completely out of touch with the majority of thought in America. Completely on the wrong side of history. Completely wrong. Period.

Abortion rights. Sane gun laws. LBGTQ rights and social advancement. Voting rights. The Affordable Care Act and other steps to insure more Americans.

Not to mention the desire never to see Donald Trump in a position of power again.

It's a rout. So how is it possible that the Party of Trump could reclaim control of Congress in the fall?

We all know how – the same way Trump became president in the first place: voter apathy -- miserable, unforgivable non-turnout by people who support all the above.

Republicans knew where the prize was when they looked at the bankruptcy king and said, "What the hell?" in 2016.

The prize was the Supreme Court. Trump got fewer votes, but thanks to the Electoral College, he got the prize.

Now Republicans hope – assume – that by way of voter apathy and gerrymandering they can have control of Congress with the new year.

For those very reasons, prospects are not good in the House.

A principal reason is a Supreme Court sculpted by the forces of backsliding and racism. Fair districts and much of what came from the Voting Rights Act of 1965 have been flushed down the toilet.

Things are looking less bleak in the Senate, thanks to – drum roll – Donald Trump.

Trump's hand-picked celebrity candidates (Dr. Oz? Herschel Walker? Don't make us laugh.) and made-to-order election deniers aren't doing too well. Meanwhile, the abortion issue is proving to be exactly the kind of voter motivator Republican strategists feared.

Let's face it: The GOP's driving cause is to keep people away from the polls. When turnout goes up, Republican candidates go down.

Off-year elections are notoriously low turn-out. The party in power almost always gets punished by the "anti" vote – voters motivated by grudges and momentary concerns.

Inflation is the biggest concern of the moment, and Republicans hope to hang it around Democrats' necks.

Too much of the reporting on inflation has been a disservice ("What's the stock market saying?") Too few Americans understand that this is a global problem driven by two factors: supply-chain problems worldwide related to the pandemic and stunningly sweeping sanctions against Russia for the horrors it has wrought in Ukraine.

It's going to hurt the Democrats, without question.

Other issues are going to motivate people, however, headed by Republican policies to empower states to order every pregnant woman to gestate to term.

It's been stunning and revealing how quickly red-state legislatures have taken this step. Republicans will not profit from this politically.

Poll after poll after poll shows this to be true.

The horrifying carnage in Uvalde, Texas, once again has drawn a focus on the fact that the GOP is motivated not by public safety but the needs of commerce when it comes to gun-happy constituents -- and the gun lobby.

The organic grassroots protest in Uvalde demanding that Texas lawmakers convene in special session to age-restrict the purchase of assault weapons shows the desire among the masses to shed nutty Old West inclinations about killing machines.

The U.S. House was representing the majority of Americans when it voted to ban assault weapons last week. Of course, the gun lobby will ride the filibuster in the Senate, and dependable Republican lap dog obedience, to have the final say.

This is a scary time. Suddenly lawmakers must protect such things taken for granted, such as contraception and the right of privacy. The highest court has become an adversary of basic and long-held rights.

The majority must stand up. It must assert itself by voting. It must put the minority in its place this November, not in control of Congress.

Longtime newspaperman John Young lives in Colorado. Email: jyoungcolumn@gmail.com.

Party of Trump is certifiably off its rocker

Donald Trump and shoeshine boy Rudy Giuliani like to throw around claims of dead people voting in massive numbers.

Eight thousand dead voters in Philly! Make that 30,000!

Uh, yeah. As he admitted to Arizona's House speaker, Giuliani had no evidence for any of his claims, only theories.

Ah, but I'm here to report that Colorado has confirmed an instance. Sorry, Rudy, but the dead person's vote went to your client.

It's quite a story, actually, because the man who cast his presumed-dead wife's vote was (is?) being investigated for her murder.

Barry Morphew is the name, a resident of Chaffee County in Southern Colorado. His wife Suzanne disappeared two years ago. He was held for months as the prime suspect, then released in April when the case grew cold. Whoever killed Suzanne did a really good job of concealing the deed.

Morphew didn't try to conceal his illegal vote, however. He told the FBI, "I just thought I'd give (Trump) another vote. I figured all these other guys are cheating."

Who are "these other guys," Barry? Maybe Rudy can tell us. The only other cheaters we can lock-cinch confirm from 2020 were those conspiring to re-install Trump president after getting shellacked at the polls.

"All these other guys." That line is one of the fruits of the Big Lie.

Trump has built an industry of out of bogus claims, brick by brick. In the process, he's raked in millions of dollars from followers who believe he needs their money to investigate the "steal."

In the Jan. 6 rally that sent rioters on their merry way up the Capitol steps, Trump juiced the crowd with specious voter claims:

"Dead people. Lots of dead people. Thousands."

In Pennsylvania, he crowed, "you had 205,000 more votes than you had voters" and "10,000 votes illegally counted."

All were among the claims Trump's own attorney general, Bill Barr, pronounced to be "bullshit."

Of course, Trump knew it was all a lie. Steve Bannon assured as much in a broadcast before the 2020 election: When Trump lost, he was going to say he won – bigly. Then he would surf the wave of chaos as far as he could.

As grievous as was Trump's comportment, lounging before the big screen while big-bellied rioters assaulted the Capitol and threatened his vice president's life – more egregious is what the Big Lie has done to our elections system.

Draconian moves have been made nationwide to make voting more difficult and purge voters, all based on unconscionably bogus claims pertaining to "ballot security" and more.

Last week the Republican-majority Wisconsin legislature passed a bill to ban voting drop boxes except at county election headquarters.

As one who uses them, let me say, "You've got to be kidding."

Ballot drop boxes are absolutely secure and are the essence of voter convenience. No evidence exists – none – that they can or ever have been used fraudulently. They are more secure, for example, than the mailbox outside your pharmacy.

The only reason for this move is the Republican power structure's pledging allegiance to Trump's Big Lie.

It was a disgusting spectacle -- an insult to Americans far and wide -- that at its state convention, the Texas Republican Party voted to pronounce Joe Biden's win null and void.

Based on what? Rudy's "theories"? No -- based on the calculated fiction of one serial liar on the cusp of indictment for defrauding the U.S. government and fomenting an insurrection.

Texas Republicans also called for a vote on secession from the United States. Let me be the first to say:

Good luck, compadres. After our troops at Fort Hood, Fort Bliss, Fort Sam Houston and elsewhere occupy all major citadels, gulf ports, petrochemical facilities, oil fields and pro football palaces, and control the entire I-35 corridor, they will have reduced New Texas to a place where only the deer and antelope play – and a functioning electric grid won't matter at all.

The Republican Party, running on a lie and supporting a lawbreaker, isn't fit to hang a shingle in a constitutional republic.

Longtime newspaperman John Young lives in Colorado. Email: jyoungcolumn@gmail.com.

 

Agents of chaos and criminality

Where did they find these people? Roger Stone. Paul Manafort. Sidney Powell. John Eastman.

How is it that any of these people could ever be at the elbow of the most powerful man on the planet?

We know where they found Rudy Giuliani: begging for pizza crust and publicity on the sidewalks of New York.

And someone made a deep dive into the sewer where Steve Bannon dwells.

How did any in this police lineup gain entrance to the White House?

They were there at the behest of the former president who, if "justice" is more than a seven-letter world, will wear numbers on his chest for his next portrait.

So much to digest from Republicans inside the administration who appeared live and videotaped in the public hearings of the Jan. 6 Committee:

Team Crazy knew Donald Trump lost bigly, knew the courts wouldn't help him, ran into "deep state" resistance on seizing voting machines and appointing a special counsel (Powell) to declare the election stolen.

What was the final option for a pack of political thieves?

Chaos. That's what.

This is what Bannon was referring to in a podcast a few days before the 2020 election.

"What Trump's gonna do is just declare victory, right? He's gonna declare victory. But that doesn't mean he's a winner. He's just gonna say he's a winner."

This, he said, would create a "firestorm."

Bannon knew of what he was speaking. Chaos is what the man is all about, and why Trump so values his opinion.

Chaos – to disrupt the electoral count and cause discord in the streets with the hope of sending all of it back to pliant Republican-controlled legislatures.

"This is about Trump pushing for uncertainty in our country." That's not some liberal MSNBC talker venting. It's former campaign manager Brad Parscale in a text exchange expressing deep regret for having served "a sitting president asking for civil war."

Mike Pence's former chief counsel Greg Jacob testified to the committee that the whole idea – fake electors and all -- was to create a violence-inducing "constitutional jump ball" to create rage and confusion, with a void to be filled by the loser who wouldn't leave.

This is a criminal conspiracy to defraud the U.S. government, plain and simple. People died, and democracy was gravely wounded.

Speaking of fraud, that's what the Department of Justice said Bannon did, claiming in 2020 that he siphoned from a fund ostensibly to raise private dollars to build a border wall. He got a Trump pardon, and returned to being one of America's loudest voices for political chaos.

If one wants a "smoking gun" on Donald Trump's intentions for Jan. 6, it comes from the caldron of chaos that is Bannon's own mouth.

After two phone calls Jan. 5 with the president, Bannon broadcast, "All hell is going to break loose tomorrow. It's all converging and now we're on the point of attack."

Attack? The attack on democracy.

Again, where did they find these goons? Before he became editor of Breitbart, the online MAGA mouthpiece, Bannon was involved in a deep-data exploitation operation called Cambridge Analytica.

The now-defunct company, a client of the Trump campaign (after having helped Ted Cruz in his losing bid for the GOP nomination) dug into online activities of millions of average Americans on Facebook and then used targeted fake social media posts, pure disinformation, to influence them in advance of the 2016 election.

Read about it in the book "Mindf*ck" by former Cambridge Analytica insider Christopher Wylie.

          In particular, posts were meant to discourage Black Americans from voting at all. It was cunningly evil. No bloc was more crucial to Donald Trump's victory than those who didn't vote.

      So, how in the world did Trump and Bannon end up in a position to blow up the democracy that's the envy of the world? Apathy and disinformation, that's how.

        Longtime newspaperman John Young lives in Colorado. Email: jyoungcolumn@gmail.com.