To Honor MLK, Focus on His Actual Work
Plus, why it's long past time to prosecute phony GOP electors.
Recently at The Bulwark:
CHARLIE SYKES: Trump Previews the GOP’s Future and Trump's Electoral Forgery/Fraud.
JVL: Ron DeSantis Is Going to Get Trump Trucked and Why We Must Act Now to Save Jeopardy!
You can support The Bulwark by subscribing to Bulwark+ or just by sharing this newsletter with someone you think would value it.
New from me: To Honor MLK, Focus on His Actual Work.
You’ll sometimes hear it claimed that, if Martin Luther King Jr. were alive today, he would be a Republican. In part, that claim is based on the notion that King would have opposed affirmative action, since he spoke so eloquently in his “I Have a Dream” speech of his hope that people would be judged by “the content of their character rather than the color of their skin.” But to claim on that basis that MLK would have been a Republican is a gross example of taking someone’s life and ideas out of context.
The notion of a GOP MLK can also be traced back to King’s niece, Alveda King, who has become a mainstay in the pro-life movement. After having had abortions of her own, Alveda King switched parties, was born again, and later denounced King’s widow, Coretta Scott King, for her stance on abortion. Alveda King has explicitly claimed that her uncle actually was a Republican during his lifetime, which has led other Republicans to repeat that falsehood.
The reality is that there is no evidence that King was a Republican. He found allies among the members of both major parties, but also found much to dislike in each party and was a thorn in the side of both Democratic and Republican leaders.
For the Democrats to win, they need to focus on what normal people think about — which is NOT Jan. 6 and the potential end of democracy. They want Covid shut down and the economy opened. Josh Barro joins Charlie Sykes on today's podcast.
INTRODUCING… Hellcat
Follow for a free weekly training diary as Hannah Yoest prepares to run The Speed Project relay race with the GRIT USA team. The race is 340 miles from the Santa Monica Pier to the Las Vegas Strip. The team is six runners, four men and two women, alternating 5k segments through the Mojave desert. The race has no rules.
PHILIP ROTNER argues: It’s Long Past Time to Prosecute Phony GOP Electors.
If federal prosecutors are already investigating these crimes, they have done a bang-up job of keeping it secret. It has been a year since the phony certificates came to light, and the criminal case to be made is not complicated.
While it may be understandable that the Department of Justice needs to conduct a sweeping, time-consuming investigation to fully comprehend the depth and breadth of the larger conspiracy to overturn the 2020 election, no complex investigation is needed to prosecute the specific, standalone crimes committed by those who signed and transmitted the fraudulent elector certificates. It’s not as if we don’t know the identity of the culprits—the signers of the fraudulent certificates are all identified on the face of the documents. The individuals who transmitted them to the federal government signed their names to the transmittal memoranda. It’s all right there, wrapped up in a nice, tidy package that can be cut and pasted straight into an indictment.
It’s as if the feds had perfect audio and video recordings of a heist, plus signed confessions.
So why the slow walk?
CHRIS TRUAX writes: The Electoral Count Act Is a Zero-Day Exploit Waiting to Happen.
Suppose that, instead of using Congress to count electoral votes, we had an Electoral Vote Tally Program, an app that simply added up a state’s electoral votes as they came in. Suppose that the app had a bug in it that allowed anyone watching the vote count to hack into the backend and change the vote totals. Once we’d discovered this flaw, would we ever use this app again without patching it?
Obviously, no. Except that the answer is also “yes.” Because while it was designed by nineteenth-century politicians and not Silicon Valley tech bros, this is an exact description of the system we use to count electoral votes today.
And nobody in either Congress or the White House seems all that concerned with fixing it.
To make matters worse, it’s not just that the Electoral Count Act can be hacked by bad actors attempting to overturn a presidential election’s results. The ECA is, as a legal matter, also full of buggy coding that will cause the entire electoral count system to crash—the constitutional equivalent of the blue screen of death—under certain conditions, even if no one is trying to break it.
What follows is the first in a three-part series on exactly what the ECA is, why it is vulnerable, and how it should be fixed.
🚨OVERTIME 🚨
Biden’s ignored achievement… His judicial nominees.
The Census interference by the Trump administration… Was way worse than we knew.
Union Pacific weighs skipping Los Angeles… The growth in train thefts there has the transit giant considering it.
5G cellular vs. The Airlines… We’re about to have a big lobbying battle over deployment of the newest cell phone technology and how close it can be deployed to airports.
McSweeney’s does it again… “I am a nineteenth-century iron worker and I await the day this factory is refurbished into an up-market food hall.”
The Trump 2024 soft launch. Elaine Godfrey from The Atlantic heads to Florence, Arizona for a repeat of the lies we’ve become accustomed to from our last president.
Is your N-95 or KN-95 mask real? Wirecutter has this helpful guide.
What it takes to keep COVID out of Hong Kong… “It felt like a different planet.”
The cult of Cage… Harper’s reviews The Age of Cage.
The Urkel Reboot… SNL has outdone itself. Enough with the reboots!
The Senate GOP’s lack of awareness on MLK day… Come on.
That’s it for me. Tech support questions? Email members@thebulwark.com. Questions for me? Respond to this message.
—30—
Editorial photos provided by Getty Images. For full credits, please consult the article.