Tag Archives: authoritarianism

“American Bar task force calls on lawyers to defend against threats to democracy”

The Hill:

When the American Bar Association’s Task Force for American Democracy officially launches Thursday, it will call on America’s lawyers to take up the “clarion call” to defend the U.S. constitutional democracy against the “serious threat” of “rising authoritarianism.”

“Our country and democracy face a wide variety of serious threats, including that of rising authoritarianism,” the bipartisan task force wrote in its opening report. “For the first time in our history, we did not have a peaceful transition of power in our last presidential election.”  

Here’s The ABA Task Force’s Opening Statement.

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Trump’s Attacks on Judges Fan the Flames

A Reuters Special Report analyzes posts on Truth Social since March 1, 2024, showing that Trump’s attacks on the integrity of the judges presiding over his cases are fanning the flames. Presumably, the tweets of his Republican colleagues who have been joining him in court this week will do the same. The images of the posts are worth a look.

“The rhetoric is inspiring widespread calls for violence. In a review of commenters’ posts on three pro-Trump websites, including the former president’s own Truth Social platform, Reuters documented more than 150 posts since March 1 that called for physical violence against the judges handling three of his highest-profile cases – two state judges in Manhattan and one in Georgia overseeing a criminal case in which Trump is accused of illegally seeking to overturn the state’s 2020 election results.

Those posts were part of a larger pool of hundreds identified by Reuters that used hostile, menacing and, in some cases, racist or sexualized language to attack the judges, but stopped short of explicitly calling for violence against them.”

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Poland’s Partisans Choose Country over Party

Ian Bassin and Ben Raderstorf (Protect Democracy) offer an interesting analysis of Poland’s recent election in which the pro-democracy forces pulled off a surprise victory. How? They abided by the “important pro-democracy maxim: don’t let the coalition fracture.”

The authors urge House Republicans to do the same:

“any remaining pro-democracy Republicans in the House of Representatives — those who oppose having a speaker who worked to overturn the last presidential election — should put country over party and join Democrats in electing a moderate, consensus speaker.”

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