Arizona Republic provides a comprehensive analysis of the indictment:

“A grand jury has charged 11 Arizona Republicans and seven others in a scheme to keep Donald Trump in the White House by falsely certifying he won the state in 2020, though voters in the Grand Canyon State narrowly favored Joe Biden. …

“The names of seven other individuals are redacted from the grand jury indictment, suggesting a broader scope of Mayes’ case. …

“The grand jury’s decision could levy criminal consequences for an unprecedented plot to subvert the will of Arizona voters, one that has ruptured faith in elections and fueled election conspiracies that have taken root in GOP politics in the state. …

Arizona actually had two different groups of illegitimate GOP electors. The indictment made public on Wednesday names the slate that included more prominent Republican figures, and some of whose involvement has already been well established by the Congressional committee investigating the violent break-in at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.”

The video is now posted of Rick’s important lecture on Combatting Political Extremism. I encourage everyone who did not have a chance to see it live to watch the video. It’s an excellent summary of the institutional reforms that would ameliorate the problems afflicting American politics and governance currently.

In the Washington Post, adapted from his forthcoming book. His essay is eloquent. Here’s some excerpts:

A healthy republic would not be debating whether Trump and his followers seek the overthrow of the Founders’ system of liberal democracy. … As one 56-year-old Michigan woman present at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021 explained: “We weren’t there to steal things. We weren’t there to do damage. We were just there to overthrow the government.” …

Trump … has explicitly promised to violate the Constitution when he deems it necessary. That by itself makes him a unique candidate in American history and should be disqualifying.

This kind of open challenge to our democracy was never meant to be addressed by the courts. As the Founders well understood, you don’t serve a subpoena to a would-be tyrant and tell him to lawyer up. Nor was it meant to be addressed by the normal processes of democratic elections. They knew, and feared, that a demagogue could capture the allegiance of enough voters to overthrow the system. That was why they gave Congress, and particularly the Senate, supposedly more immune from popular pressures, the power to impeach and remove presidents and to deny them the opportunity to run again — and not simply because they violated some law but because they posed a clear and present danger to the republic. After Trump’s attempt to overthrow the government in 2020, Congress had a chance to use the method prescribed by the Founders in precisely the circumstances they envisioned. But Senate Republicans, out of a combination of ambition and cowardice, refused to play the vital role the Founders envisioned for them. The result is that the nightmare feared by the Founders is one election away from becoming reality.…

Americans … know he would not respect the results of fair elections if he loses, which is the very definition of a tyrant.

So, why will so many vote for him anyway? For a significant segment of the Republican electorate, the white-hot core of the Trump movement, it is because they want to see the system overthrown. …

Many of Trump’s core supporters insist they are patriots, but whether they realize it or not, their allegiance is not to the Founders’ America but to an ethnoreligious definition of the nation that the Founders explicitly rejected. …

If the American system of government fails this year, it will not be because the institutions established by the Founders failed. It will not be because of new technologies or flaws in the Constitution. No system of government can protect against a determined tyrant. Only the people can. This year we will learn if they will.

While I share much of Kagan’s diagnosis of the danger that Trump and his followers present to our nation’s system of “liberal democracy,” I think Kagan goes too far in depicting the Founders and the Constitution they created as an ideal from which we have fallen and to which we must return. Conversely, one need not go as far as Kermit Roosevelt does in arguing that we must repudiate the Founders in favor of resting our collective national creed solely on the beliefs of Lincoln and the Republican Reconstruction that followed the Civil War. Instead, my view is that if we are going to see a way out of our predicament, it will because we recognize that the Founding and its Constitution, reflecting important Enlightenment values that are worth sustaining and nurturing as we continue to seek human progress, were important respects deeply flawed, including in the institutional structures of democracy that they established. Unlike Kagan, I don’t think we can rely on a hope that the public will be sufficiently virtuous to reject would-be tyrants. Instead, like Madison himself, I think we need to be the architects of institutional arrangements that provide for the ongoing operation of collective self-government given the limited amount of civic virtue that necessarily will exist in society. The problem in my view is that our existing institutions are no longer adequate for the level of civic virtue we currently have, and thus we need institutional reforms (along with efforts to re-cultivate more civic virtue) to bring our system into Madisonian equilibrium. In this sense, Madison had the right idea, but he did not implement it correctly. As good Madisonians, we need to repair the serious flaws in the system he and the other Founders created. I think Kagan regrettably misses this key point.

This Washington Post summary of yesterday’s testimony highlights how the prosecution is attempting to turn a potential federal campaign finance violation into a state-law criminal offense. The “secret pact” to influence the election through a “catch-and-kill” scheme to suppress stories unfavorable to Trump would not be illegal, given the First Amendment, unless it amounted to some sort of unlawful financial contribution to Trump’s campaign. And even if it were, there are all the legal issues associated with tying it to state-law crimes. So what The Washington Post describes as potentially “significant damage” to Trump from David Pecker’s testimony may ultimate depend on legal rulings down the road on the implications of that testimony under the applicable federal and state laws.

Bloomberg covers a new report released by Center for American Progress, which advocates more aggressive use of shareholder suits to curb the kind of campaign spending permitted after Citizens United (and especially the D.C. Circuit’s decision in SpeechNow on superPACs):

“That threat of legal action could make executives of publicly traded companies less likely to donate to political causes and groups, said Tom Moore, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress and a co-author of the analysis.”

But:

“Not all campaign finance lawyers are convinced the idea can work. Jason Torchinsky, an attorney with Holtzman Vogel who was general counsel to former President George W. Bush’s 2004 reelection campaign, said he couldn’t see what harm a shareholder could show. Companies that earn billions in profit spend a relatively small amount on politics, he said, and in a manner that aligns with their business interests.”

Time will tell whether this proposed strategy lives up to the expectation that it “could play a major role in the 2024 elections with corporations more cautious to donate.”

There is much that’s accurate in this explainer in The Washington Post. But there is one sentence that jumped out to me as highly inaccurate and misleading: “For much of U.S. history, there were more than two major political parties, and that could emerge again.” That’s just not true. To be sure, third (and fourth, etc.) parties have attempted to compete against the two dominant parties since fairly early in the nineteenth century, and the upstart Republican Party was able to replace the Whigs as the second dominant party before the Civil War. But never has there been a period when three or more “major political parties” have been competitive amongst each other at the same time. The closest the nation came to that was 1912, when Teddy Roosevelt’s Progressive (Bull Moose) party eclipsed the GOP to come in second for the presidency (in both the Electoral College and the national popular vote). But the Progressive Party was not able to sustain itself as a “major” third party. The role of minor parties in the nineteenth century, like the Greenbacks, was much the same as the role of minor parties, like the Greens, today.

The Post’s explainer correctly observes that the “plurality” winner rule that states to award their electoral votes prevents third parties from effectively competing. But the piece fails to discuss the kind of electoral reforms that would enable third parties to compete without simply serving as spoilers for one of the two major parties. Instead, the explainer concludes by saying: “So until there is a popular rejection of the two major parties, or an official divide in one of them, the two-party system dominates.” Instead, a better conclusion would have been something like this: “So unless election laws are changed to adopt procedures that would enable third parties to compete effectively, like various forms of ranked choice voting, the two-party system dominates.”

UPDATE: Although this blog post focused on presidential elections, a full assessment of the extent to which a third political party has ever been able to sustain successful electoral competition in the United States for any significant period of time would encompasses an analysis of third parties in congressional as well as presidential elections. One reader of this post correctly observes that in the Thirty-Fourth Congress, elected in 1854, the American (Know Nothing) Party won 51 seats in the House of Representatives, while Democrats won 82 seats, and the “Opposition Party” of former Whigs and future Republicans won 100 seats. This aberrational high-water mark of third-party representation in Congress, I would argue, was a temporary consequence of the transition from the old two-party electoral competition between Democrats and Whigs to the new two-party electoral competition between Democrats and Republicans. Indeed, as a result of the next election in 1856, the American Party’s representation in the House dropped to 14 members (with 132 Democrats and 90 Republicans, plus 1 “Independent Democrat”). I do not think the performance of the Know-Nothings in the 1850s reflects the capacity of a third party to sustain effective electoral competition in the plurality-winner system that became dominant in the Jacksonian era.