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Amanda Carpenter, writer and editor at Protect Democracy, said part of the problem is that politicians are fearful because of heated rhetoric.
“If you are afraid to do your job out of fear, our institutions can no longer function,” she said.
Could the 2024 election be stolen?
If you listened to the On Point discussion on NPR this week with Jessica Marsden and Larry Lessig on Larry’s new book (with Matt Seligman), How to Steal a Presidential Election, you might have come away confused on this pressing question.
The Violence and Democracy Impact Tracker (VDIT)—compiled by Protect Democracy and Johns Hopkins University’s SNF Agora Institute—found that 100 global scholars it surveyed consistently ranked threats including intimidation, direct threats, and physical harm to American electoral processes among their top five areas of concern. Since August of 2022, the group has found that incidents of such threats and harassment are widespread, and the apprehensions they engender cut across party lines, particularly among women and people of color, who are often targeted.
Many legal scholars have warned that the executive authority to pardon people is uniquely broad and that it can apply to anyone who has committed an alleged crime or is anywhere in the legal process, whether they have been charged, convicted, or sentenced. However, Protect Democracy, a group founded by lawyers who worked in the Obama White House, has argued Trump’s vow to pardon Jan. 6 defendants could conflict with other parts of the Constitution and therefore be met with pushback from federal courts.
Don’t let tawdry elements of the first-ever criminal trial of a U.S. president distract from the most chilling, autocratic aspect of these legal proceedings: How Trump deliberately puts people who uphold the rule of law in danger.
Instead of focusing on presenting a sober, respectful defense, Trump is using this trial, as well the others he faces, as an opportunity to attack the judiciary, using his tremendous profile to weaken it as an institution of accountability.
On their website, the advocacy group Protect Democracy warns that democracy is in danger but tells readers that “Together, we can preserve democracy for future generations.” The group is nonpartisan and cross-ideological.
Kristy Parker is a Special Counsel with Protect Democracy. Previously, she served in trial attorney and leadership roles for 15 years in DOJ’s Civil Rights Division and for four years in the Torts Branch of DOJ’s Civil Division. After graduating from Harvard Law School, she clerked on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit.
But according to a new report from anti-authoritarianism group Protect Democracy, he may not actually have that power even if he is returned to the White House after this year’s election.
The report, titled Checking the Pardon Power: Constitutional Limitations & Options for Preventing Abuse, lays out a number of circumstances in which a presidential pardon would not be valid because it would not be a legitimate use of the president’s authority to grant reprieves for “offenses against the United States”.
There’s a weird tic that happens in most news stories on Trump’s trials. Usually it’s a single sentence — or really, a single clause — on how if he wins, he could “seek to pardon himself.”
And that’s it. The story moves along. As if that’s normal and would be the end of the saga.
In this opinion piece from Protect Democracy’s Ori Lev, he argues that the jawboning cases before the Supreme Court are “important in their own right, but they also come at a particularly pivotal time for American democracy. Public discourse and faith in democratic institutions are increasingly undermined by mis- and disinformation. And we are experiencing an era of extreme polarization punctuated by, among other things, a leading candidate for president openly running on a platform of retribution.”
“Speech codes have no place in American society, and elected officials have no business censoring the speech of business owners simply because they don’t agree with what’s being expressed,” Shalini Goel Agarwal, the Protect Democracy attorney who represented those challenging the law, said. “Barring employers from engaging in speech that powerful politicians don’t like is a move straight out of the authoritarian playbook.”
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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