Trump's cancellation threat to the US elections is identical to the Hitler enabling act, in intent and people need to realize it. It's that dangerous
Three articles are here. The first states how what Trump tweeted is NOT legal. The second as to what is the threat this Trump tweet represents, and the third is to represent in gory detail the end goal Trump and Barr are driving toward, which is their version of an American version of the Germany based ENABLING act, A.K.A. the 2020 version of the abomination unleashed in Germany which killed German Democracy.
We have an identical threat today.
First see this
Trump proposes delay federal elections until it's 'safe'—something he doesn't have the power to do
Daily Kos Staff
Thursday July 30, 2020 · 9:38 AM EDT
When Joe Biden mentioned the possibility that Donald Trump would try to “kick back the election somehow” back in April, Washington Post pundit Henry Olsen was aghast. He called Biden’s statement an “unfounded accusation” and said this was “not only clearly over the line but also unmasks how low the supposedly moderate Biden will go to win.”
Olsen better be prepping that apology, because on Thursday morning Trump extended his rant about mail-in voting to the place where it was obviously going all along. After repeating his previous lies about mail-in voting being “inaccurate and fraudulent,” Trump delivered the punch line. Rather than allow mail-in voting, why not, Trump suggested: “Delay the Election until people can properly, securely and safely vote.” That safety would, presumably, be entirely up to Trump. Meaning that Election Day would be the second Tuesday after never.
As The Washington Post points out, Trump cannot actually change the date of the federal elections. Though Trump may believe that Article II provides godlike powers, picking the date for federal elections is actually the role of Congress. And that date is already set. Congress doesn’t have to vote to have the election on Nov. 3; it would have to vote to change it to any other date.
Still, this isn’t as comforting as it should be. Now that Trump has made an official salvo down the delay path, it’s certain not to be the last. And it’s easy to believe that Sen. Mitch McConnell and the other Senate Republicans who voted to give Trump a free pass on bribing foreign countries into lying about his opponent would happily go along with this scheme. After all, for McConnell, every day the election is delayed is another day in which a Supreme Court opening might occur.
Naturally, the Democratically-led House wouldn't go along with this, but that’s still no guarantee. Trump doesn’t have to actually delay the election so much as delegitimize it. That’s the purpose of all his rants against mail-in voting in the first place: To raise doubts about the outcome of the election and position Trump to deny the results, no matter how clear. It’s quite easy to imagine Donald Trump pounding the podium in November, claiming that only those votes cast in a voting booth on that date really count. Or even that the whole date is “not legitimate.” Because he says so. And it’s extremely easy to imagine Ted Cruz, and Lindsey Graham, and McConnell backing that play.
Of course, there is another obstacle. The date of the election may be subject to change by legislation, but the end of Trump’s term is set by Constitutional amendment. Vote or no vote, his term would come to an end on Jan. 20. Any attempt by Trump to continue occupying the White House at that point would be … put in front of the Supreme Court. Where such things always go so well.
Also
Quote
Trump’s threat to the election is a distraction — but it’s also deadly serious
President Donald J. Trump waves after disembarking Marine One on the South Lawn of the White Wednesday, July 29, 2020, following his visit to Texas. (Official White House Photo by Tia Dufour)
Written by Amanda Marcotte / Salon July 30, 2020
The first thing to understand about Donald Trump’s threat to delay the November election — should we call it a public fantasy? — is that it’s a distraction, like so many things our president says and does.
Around 8:30 Eastern time on Thursday morning, news came down that the U.S. economy saw its worst contraction since the advent of modern economic recordkeeping after World War II, with GDP falling at an annual rate of nearly 33% in the second quarter, 9.5% below where it was the previous quarter. This is a plunge exponentially larger than the fallout from the crash of 2008, and probably the largest since the Great Depression of the 1930s.
At 8:46 a.m., Trump let loose with this Twitter turd: “With Universal Mail-In Voting (not Absentee Voting, which is good), 2020 will be the most INACCURATE & FRAUDULENT Election in history. It will be a great embarrassment to the USA. Delay the Election until people can properly, securely and safely vote???”
As a distraction, the gambit worked. Immediately, the shift in headlines and cable news focus went from the country’s record-setting economic devastation toward this idiotic but deeply troubling question of whether Trump can really get away with delaying the election until such time as he thinks he can win it (which may be never).
The second thing to understand about Trump’s threat is that it’s nonetheless deadly serious. No matter how many reassuring articles come out about how there’s no mechanism available to Trump to delay the election, the public should not be complacent about this.
Rule of law, for the people who surround Donald Trump and prop him up, is something to be broken, not respected. Trump is a profoundly stupid man, but he does have a flight of much smarter people around him to do his bidding, especially when it comes to securing power for themselves and shutting down the ability of the American people to vote the bastards out.
We should not underestimate what people like Attorney General Bill Barr and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell could come up with, if they decide that Trump’s harebrained notion of using the pandemic as cover to “reschedule” (read: cancel) the election is the only path to keeping Republicans in power in 2021.
Barr, after all, has spent his time in charge of the Justice Department focused on remaking the institution as one focused on covering up Trump’s crimes, instead of dedicated to fighting crime. He started by using his powers to falsely frame the findings of Robert Mueller’s report on Russian election interference, claiming that Mueller found “no collusion.” That was an outright lie. Mueller found extensive collusion between the Trump campaign and the Russian conspiracy, much of it right out in public, even if it fell short of what Mueller felt could be charged as criminal conspiracy. But Barr successfully pushed out the “no collusion” narrative, and the impact of the entire Russia investigation dwindled to almost nothing, despite Trump’s demonstrable guilt in the cover-up.
Since then, Barr has been dedicated to the single-minded goal of making sure Trump’s power is secure and untouched by the meager concerns of people who believe in democracy, the rule of law or accountability. He’s pushed out U.S. attorneys for being insufficiently corrupt and compliant, backed Trump’s outrageous lies about voter fraud, helped spring Trump’s cronies from prison, and enthusiastically supported Trump’s expanding experiment in using federal police as a fascistic armed force to suppress dissent.
So, yes, Trump is both dumb and cowardly. But he has Barr at his side, an intelligent but dark-hearted man who has never hesitated to lie, cheat or swindle to secure Republican power. Above all other things, Barr is good at coming up with legal rationales to gut democracy and the rule of law. There’s good reason to suspect that he’d view the problem of concocting legal rationales for canceling or delaying the election not as a repulsive task but a fun and exciting challenge — exactly the sort of authoritarian overreach he came out of retirement to enact.
Trump also has McConnell by his side, a Machiavellian wizard of politics who has never met a line he won’t cross when it comes to securing power for himself and the Republican Party.
McConnell has already used a delaying tactic to steal one of the highest offices in the land from a Democratic president who had the legal and constitutional right to control it, and deliver it to a conservative who will hold that office until he dies or retires.
The mainstream media has basically forgotten about this, but we should not: Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch, Trump’s first nominee, holds a seat that should have belonged to Merrick Garland, Barack Obama’s nominee to replace Justice Antonin Scalia after the latter’s death in 2016. McConnell didn’t even bother to come with some elaborate legal justification for holding the seat open until (he hoped) a Republican president could fill it. He made some bad-faith argument about the looming election, but gleefully abandoned it once he no longer needed it. The whole maneuver was unconstitutional (or, in the most generous possible interpretation, extra-constitutional), but McConnell got away with it because, as it turned out, no one in Washington had the power to stop him.
That’s also the question we must consider when it comes to Trump attempts to hold power through some sort of coup, as he has increasingly indicated he’s willing to do. Even if he can’t delay the election — and there’s no obvious remotely legal way to do that — by making these demands, Trump is laying more groundwork for declaring the election fraudulent and rejecting the results if and when he loses in November. He’s surrounded by powerful people, such as McConnell and Barr, who are likely to back his play, especially if they see no other way to hang onto power.
Just because there’s no visible mechanism for how they might do that is no reason to relax. Barr and McConnell are pretty much kept alive, at this point, by coming up with innovative, bad-faith ways to “interpret” the law in order to undermine what remains of our democracy.
Sure, whatever Trump tries to do to hang onto power in the face of an actual or impending electoral defeat — delaying the election, rejecting the results — will technically be illegal.
But I often think of the scene in the first season of “Game of Thrones” when Ned Stark presents Cersei Lannister with a document that gives him, not her, the right to sit on the throne. She tears the paper up and throws it down, saying, “Is this meant to be your shield, Lord Stark? A piece of paper?” You know, before having him arrested and, eventually, beheaded in public.
The Constitution didn’t stop McConnell from stealing a Supreme Court seat. The rule of law hasn’t slowed Barr down one bit. We will need more than futile gestures toward the sanctity of the law to keep Trump and his minions from doing whatever they can to steal the election.
We can only hope that Democrats understand this and are working on a plan. For instance, they need a clear and secure way to swear Joe Biden into office on Jan. 20 — as the Constitution specifically mandates — out of the reach of Trump’s shadowy “federal police.” They need to know that the Secret Service and the leadership of the military will cooperate in an orderly transfer of power, and will accept or enforce the rule of law.
To drive Donald Trump from office, we can’t rely on a piece of paper. It simply isn’t enough.
end of quote
Now for the Hitler Enabling act
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enabling_Act_of_1933
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Enabling Act of 1933
Hitler's Reichstag speech promoting the bill was delivered at the Kroll Opera House, following the Reichstag fire.
The Enabling Act (German: Erm?chtigungsgesetz) of 1933, formally titled Gesetz zur Behebung der Not von Volk und Reich ("Law to Remedy the Distress of People and Reich"),[1] was a law that gave the German Cabinet—in effect, the Chancellor—the power to enact laws without the involvement of the Reichstag, and to override fundamental aspects of the Weimar Constitution.[2] The Enabling Act gave Hitler plenary powers and followed on the heels of the Reichstag Fire Decree, which had abolished most civil liberties and transferred state powers to the Reich government. The combined effect of the two laws was to transform Hitler's government into a legal dictatorship.
The act passed in both the Reichstag and Reichsrat on 23 March 1933,[3][2][4] and was signed by President Paul von Hindenburg later that day. The act stated that it was to last four years unless renewed by the Reichstag, which occurred twice.
The law was enacted by the Reichstag (meeting at the Kroll Opera House), where non-Nazi members were surrounded and threatened by members of the SA and the SS. The Communists had already been repressed and were not allowed to be present or to vote, and some Social Democrats were kept away as well. In the end most of those present voted for the act, except for the Social Democrats, who voted against it.[5]
Contents
- 1Background
- 1.1Preparations and negotiations
- 2Text
- 3Passage
- 4Consequences
- 4.1In the Federal Republic of Germany
- 5Portrayal in films
- 6See also
- 7References
Background[edit]
After being appointed Chancellor of Germany on 30 January 1933, Hitler asked President von Hindenburg to dissolve the Reichstag. A general election was scheduled for 5 March 1933. A secret meeting was held between Hitler and 20 to 25 industrialists at the official residence of Hermann G?ring in the Reichstag Presidential Palace, aimed at financing the election campaign of the Nazi Party.[6][7]
The burning of the Reichstag, depicted by the Nazis as the beginning of a communist revolution, resulted in the presidential Reichstag Fire Decree, which among other things suspended freedom of press and habeas corpus rights just five days before the election. Hitler used the decree to have the Communist Party's offices raided and its representatives arrested, effectively eliminating them as a political force.
Although they received five million more votes than in the previous election, the Nazis failed to gain an absolute majority in parliament, and depended on the 8% of seats won by their coalition partner, the German National People's Party, to reach 52% in total.
To free himself from this dependency, Hitler had the cabinet, in its first post-election meeting on 15 March, draw up plans for an Enabling Act which would give the cabinet legislative power for four years. The Nazis devised the Enabling Act to gain complete political power without the need of the support of a majority in the Reichstag and without the need to bargain with their coalition partners.
Preparations and negotiations[edit]
The Enabling Act allowed the cabinet to enact legislation, including laws deviating from or altering the constitution, without the consent of the Reichstag. Because this law allowed for departures from the constitution, it was itself considered a constitutional amendment. Thus, its passage required the support of two-thirds of those deputies who were present and voting. A quorum of two-thirds of the entire Reichstag was required to be present in order to call up the bill.
The Social Democrats (SPD) and the Communists (KPD) were expected to vote against the Act. The government had already arrested all Communist and some Social Democrat deputies under the Reichstag Fire Decree. The Nazis expected the parties representing the middle class, the Junkers and business interests to vote for the measure, as they had grown weary of the instability of the Weimar Republic and would not dare to resist.
Hitler believed that with the Centre Party members' votes, he would get the necessary two-thirds majority. Hitler negotiated with the Centre Party's chairman, Ludwig Kaas, a Catholic priest, finalising an agreement by 22 March. Kaas agreed to support the Act in exchange for assurances of the Centre Party's continued existence, the protection of Catholics' civil and religious liberties, religious schools and the retention of civil servants affiliated with the Centre Party. It has also been suggested that some members of the SPD were intimidated by the presence of the Nazi Sturmabteilung (SA) throughout the proceedings.[8]
Some historians, such as Klaus Scholder, have maintained that Hitler also promised to negotiate a Reichskonkordat with the Holy See, a treaty that formalised the position of the Catholic Church in Germany on a national level. Kaas was a close associate of Cardinal Pacelli, then Vatican Secretary of State (and later Pope Pius XII). Pacelli had been pursuing a German concordat as a key policy for some years, but the instability of Weimar governments as well as the enmity of some parties to such a treaty had blocked the project.[9] The day after the Enabling Act vote, Kaas went to Rome in order to, in his own words, "investigate the possibilities for a comprehensive understanding between church and state".[10] However, so far no evidence for a link between the Enabling Act and the Reichskonkordat signed on 20 July 1933 has surfaced.
End of quote
Summary:
What we are seeing is Trump fumbling in the direction in order to have Barr draft an American version of the Enabling act, as of Nazi Germany, and to apply it to the USA
The danger cannot be overestimated. And it comes with one caveat. YOU , reader can stop it, but it depends that YOU do not TOLERATE This emerging dictatorship
Andrew Beckwith, PhD