Attention to the Unseen

Politico reports: A Democratic senator from Arizona is still not sold on changes to the filibuster. And it’s not Kyrsten Sinema. Mark Kelly is not yet committed to a change in the Senate rules that would allow elections reform legislation to pass by a simple majority. A centrist who is up for reelection in November, Kelly said Monday he is still undecided just days before he may have to vote on proposals to weaken the filibuster. “I’ve never been part…

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David Remnick writes: The edifice of American exceptionalism has always wobbled on a shoddy foundation of self-delusion, and yet most Americans have readily accepted the commonplace that the United States is the world’s oldest continuous democracy. That serene assertion has now collapsed. On January 6, 2021, when white supremacists, militia members, and MAGA faithful took inspiration from the President and stormed the Capitol in order to overturn the results of the 2020 Presidential election, leaving legislators and the Vice-President essentially…

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Henry Olsen writes: Former president Donald Trump, like a tone-deaf musician, used the anniversary of the Jan. 6 Capitol riot last week to once again allege, without evidence, that the 2020 election was rigged. “Look at the numbers,” he told his followers, “they speak for themselves.” He’s right, they do: They conclusively show his fraud allegations are bogus. For proof, let’s take a deep dive into Pennsylvania’s results. Trump won the Keystone State in 2016 by less than a point…

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The Associated Press reports: More than 800,000 noncitizens and “Dreamers” in New York City will have access to the ballot box — and could vote in municipal elections as early as next year — after Mayor Eric Adams allowed legislation to automatically become law Sunday. Opponents have vowed to challenge the new law, which the City Council approved a month ago. Unless a judge halts its implementation, New York City is the first major U.S. city to grant widespread municipal…

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Sam Levine reports: The Mississippi officials met in the heat of summer with a singular goal in mind: stopping Black people from voting. “We came here to exclude the Negro,” said the convention’s president. “Nothing short of this will answer.” This conclave took place in 1890. But remarkably, approximately 130 years later, the laws they came up with are still blocking nearly 16% of Mississippi’s Black voting-age population from casting a ballot. The US stands alone as one of the…

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Adam Serwer writes: As 2022 begins, the risk American democracy faces is not just that Donald Trump supporters will repeat the events of January 6, 2021—attempting to overturn a free and fair election to illegitimately install Trump as president. It is that Trump will win outright, and use his second term in office to further erode popular sovereignty. During the four years of the Trump presidency, his opponents could draw comfort from the fact that a majority of Americans had…

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Rioters are tear-gassed as they storm the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. Lev Radin/Pacific Press/LightRocket via Getty Images By Amanda J. Crawford, University of Connecticut Americans had to confront a new reality when an angry mob attacked the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021: Some of their fellow citizens were in the grips of a false reality and had resorted to violence to support it. Conspiracy theories about the 2020 presidential election and the strange alternate universe of QAnon…

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Lane Cuthbert and Alexander Theodoridis write: All credible evidence tells us that the 2020 election was very secure. Experts on both sides of the political aisle, and even President Donald Trump’s own Justice Department, have confirmed that 2020 was a free and fair election. Even a Republican-sponsored audit of Arizona’s results found no evidence of fraud or malfeasance. Nevertheless, the vast majority of Republican voters say they agree with Trump’s unsubstantiated claims that the election was stolen. In our most…

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The New York Times reports: The embattled president of Kazakhstan has the pedigree of an international technocrat. The son of prominent intellectuals, he studied in Moscow at a premier academy for diplomats, and later worked in the Soviet Embassy in Beijing. He served as a key adviser to the strongman who ruled the oil-rich Central Asian country as a fief for nearly three decades — and then, in 2019, became his heir. The rise of Kassym-Jomart Tokayev to the presidency…

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