“Trump at NRA convention floats 3-term presidency”

election subversion risk

Politico:

Former President Donald Trump on Saturday floated the idea of a third term if he wins in November.

“You know, FDR 16 years — almost 16 years — he was four terms. I don’t know, are we going to be considered three-term? Or two-term?” Trump quipped at the National Rifle Association annual meeting, speaking before a crowd of gun rights supporters.

Some in the crowd shouted in response: “Three.”

It’s not the first time Trump has mentioned extending his stay in the White House, an idea he suggested while on the campaign trail in 2020. His latest remarks provide more fodder for the Biden campaign, which seized on the comments as it tries to paint Trump as a threat to democracy and institutional norms.

But Trump has more recently shut down the proposition of seeking a third term, which is barred by the Constitution. And he told Time magazine in an April interview that he wouldn’t be in favor of challenging the 22nd Amendment, enacted after FDR’s presidency:

“I wouldn’t be in favor of it at all. I intend to serve four years and do a great job. And I want to bring our country back. I want to put it back on the right track. Our country is going down. We’re a failing nation right now. We’re a nation in turmoil,” he said.

Playbook:

The riff does exactly what Trump wants: riles up his base with excitement and freaks out people worried about his autocratic leanings.

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“‘We’ll See You at Your House:’ How Fear and Menace Are Transforming Politics”

Uncategorized

NY Times. From Jamie Raskin to Chief Justice Roberts to a variety of election officials you have never heard of, these few quotes say it all.

“Public officials from Congress to City Hall are now regularly subjected to threats of violence. It’s changing how they do their jobs.”

“By almost all measures, the evidence of the trend is striking. Last year, more than 450 federal judges were targeted with threats, a roughly 150 percent increase from 2019, according to the United States Marshals Service. The U.S. Capitol Police investigated more than 8,000 threats to members of Congress last year, up more than 50 percent from 2018. The agency recently added three full-time prosecutors to handle the volume.”

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“Arizona Republicans Set Up a Ballot Measure to Squash Future Ballot Measures”

direct democracy

Bolts Magazine: One more Republican legislative attack on ballot measures. The Arizona legislature seeks to make the process more difficult through a constitutional amendment imposing strict geographic requirements. These measures are highly problematic because ballot initiatives are one of the few options that voters have to circumvent gridlock, polarization, and political entrenchment.

What triggered this one? An initiative to protect abortion access in Arizona that has gathered more signatures than it needs to make the November ballot.

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“Historians and the Strange, Fluid World of Nineteenth-Century Politics”

third parties,

ERIK B. ALEXANDER AND RACHEL A. SHELDEN have published a blog post reflecting on the significance of their recent article, which I mentioned a few weeks back in a post on the history of third parties in the United States.

For more than half a century, historians have relied (often implicitly) on a model of organizing U.S. political history around distinct and separate “party systems,” pitting two competitive, stable, national parties against one another for long stretches of time between short bursts of realignment. In the context of the shifting political landscape of 1868, however, explaining the partisan politics of the Johnson impeachment through the party system model is the equivalent of forcing a square peg into a round hole.

They then apply this to Andrew Johnson’s impeachment vote.

How, then, are we to understand the partisan breakdown of the 1868 vote to impeach? If we conflate the Union Party with the Republican Party, was Johnson a Republican? He may have flirted with the Democrats in pursuing a revived Union Party, but he was not a Democrat. And while Democrats certainly supported Johnson’s vision for Reconstruction over that of the Republicans, they did not view him as a member of their party either. In other words, including Johnson in any kind of accounting of the partisan politics of impeachments is confusing at best.

. . . .

We argue that it is high time to shed the confines of that model. Nineteenth-century politics are better described as fluid, unstable, and federal, operating through a series of mechanisms—networks, newspapers, customs, and laws—unique to that era. Political actors used these mechanisms to address the most pressing ideological and constitutional conflicts of their era, often in concert with broader political activism. They could quickly organize new parties to address problems as they arose, and just as quickly discard parties when the issues were resolved (or when absorbed by another party). In this way, parties were deeply integrated into the broader fabric of American political life, rather than serving as its organizing structures.

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“RFK Jr. uses major cash infusion from his running mate to fund ballot access efforts”

campaign finance, third parties

Politico. RFK, Jr.’s campaign currently depends on money from his VP, Nicole Shanahan. In April, she contributed $ 8 million. Independent presidential candidate + wealthy donor as VP is a well-established pattern to avoid campaign contribution limits. In 1980, David Koch ran as the VP for the Libertarian Party for the same purpose. More interestingly, the article notes:

“Kennedy’s campaign received $843,000 from unitemized donors — those giving less than $200 — in April, down from $1.3 million from such donors in March. It was the lowest unitemized donor total for him for any month this calendar year.

Small donor money may not be necessary to fund Kennedy’s campaign if Shanahan keeps cutting big checks. But funds from donors giving only a little are also one gauge of grassroots support.”

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