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Kristy Parker, counsel at Protect Democracy and a former federal prosecutor herself, agrees that the GOP report is exceedingly weak. “The FBI has very strict guidelines for when they can open investigations,” Parker said. “The GOP report does not provide any information that would credibly justify a criminal inquiry.”
“Spending as much money as the Escambia County School Board has so far to defend the indefensible — removing school library books about LGBTQ and Black characters — is unfortunate, especially since those resources could instead be spent on reviewing these books, many of which have been off school library shelves for over two years now,” said Shalini Goel Agarwal, special counsel for Protect Democracy, in a statement. Her group is representing the plaintiffs.
This project imagines a different future, said Drew Penrose, a policy strategist at Protect Democracy. Without taking a position on whether the House should expand (Penrose said Protect Democracy supports it, but Swift and POPVOX abstain), it probes the logistics of adding an extra 150 representatives.
“Few people talking about that issue had really addressed head-on the question of, what’s it going to take?” Penrose said. “One of the first questions we would get when talking to people on the Hill was, ‘Where are they going to sit?’”
The answer to that hypothetical question, according to the report authors, could be a brand-new House office building located south of Cannon.
William Ford, a policy advocate at the advocacy group Protect Democracy, said that presidents have routinely complied with the Impoundment Control Act since its passage, and Presidents Gerald R. Ford and Ronald Reagan released funds in the face of actual or threatened suits from the Government Accountability Office.
“And so what Trump and his team are now contemplating doing is completely out of step with what every other president has done since 1974. It’s out of step with what they did during their first term. Their extreme arguments, in our view, don’t hold water,” Ford said.
But the Supreme Court has also said pardons shouldn’t infringe on other parts of the Constitution. “Nowhere in the Constitution does it state that the pardon power is some magical exception to any other enumerated powers,” said Grant Tudor, with the anti-authoritarian group Protect Democracy.
“Media capture” is a subset of what Protect Democracy executive director Ian Bassin calls “autocratic capture,” where “the government uses its power to enforce loyalty from the private sector.” On a recent episode of Vanity Fair’s “Inside the Hive,” Bassin said “I think we are in danger of seeing that happen across the American marketplace in all sorts of sectors.”
Grant Tudor, a policy advocate at Protect Democracy, pointed to multimember districts as a way to ensure the political minority in a district still feels represented in Congress.
“If you have 60% of voters voting red in a district or voting blue in a district, that’s still at 60-40, which seems like it ought to be competitive. But if there’s only a single winner in that district, every single election is more or less going to be guaranteed,” Tudor said.
“Now, if you were to have two or three or four members elected from that district, that issue more or less dissipates,” he said.
Even a homecoming for the so-called normal GOP lawyers wouldn’t inspire confidence in Kristy Parker, a former DOJ civil rights supervisor and counsel at Protect Democracy.
“What does it mean to be an institutionalist if someone accepts a DOJ position knowing that Trump has promised to use its law enforcement powers as a tool for retaliation and retribution?” Parker said before the announcement.
The high stakes U.S. election this week is on track to match the record 66% turnout set four years ago, and surpass the routinely lower midterm election turnout that peaked at 49% in 2018. But as records go, these look sad when you consider that many democracies get closer to 80% of their voters to head to the polls.
Election officials, law enforcement and civil society have been preparing for months — some for years — to ensure that the full election process plays out safely, securely and in accordance with the law. And for the most part, it seems that Election Day was indeed generally orderly. While the election process continues with final counting and certification, the projected result of the presidential election came more quickly and clearly than many of us anticipated.
Defeating authoritarianism is going to take all of us. Everyone and every institution has a role to play. Together, we can protect democracy.
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