CVO TALK -- for a revolutionary workers movement!

[I haven't read the full article yet.]

Daniel Pinchbeck

The real threat to the midterms is likely to come after the votes are counted. Polls show Democrats on track to retake the House and probably the Senate. Voter purges and court fights may not be enough to stop that. A policy brief from the Center for Renewing America, the think tank founded by Russell Vought, the current OMB Director and "shadow President", outlines a backup plan. When the new Congress convenes on January 3, the House majority would refuse to swear in targeted Democrats, claiming their views or affiliations show “hostility” to the Constitution. Their seats would stay empty, and the House would stay in MAGA hands.

The Supreme Court ruled against this kind of exclusion in 1969. The plan depends on acting first and leaving the courts to catch up later, which could take months or years.

A fellow at the same think tank goes further. He calls for stripping citizenship from what he describes as a “red-green alliance” of Marxists and Muslims. Nazi Germany took the same steps in 1933 and 1935: it named a religious minority and the political left as enemies of the nation, then revoked their citizenship.

A plan like this works best when people don't know about it. Please share. The full essay, “How They Plan to Steal It,” is at danielpinchbeck.substack.com .
www.facebook.com/kent.jewell.5/posts/pf ... ETPQS9xj7l

I think this is the most likely scenario. The establishment Democrats are very hostile to left Democrats and DSA types. They will trade token concessions from Trump for complicity in getting rid of leftists and Moslems like el-Sayed. And the Supreme Court will go along with this and ignore precedent, the majority of the court has no qualms about throwing precedents it doesn't like aside.

Speculations about what major sellout deal the Democratic establishments might do after this or that possible result of the midterm elections, which haven’t taken place yet, are a dime a dozen. Careful discussion of the Democrats might be helpful, such as showing what the Democrats are actually doing now, what the splits among them mean, the ties of the Democratic party to the bourgeoisie, and why DSA seems even more complacent about a Trumpist coup than the DP as a whole. But mere speculation about future deals is here today and gone tomorrow.

There is the vital issue of the actual threats to the election, which are now openly talked about in some of the media. It can’t be predicted what Trump will finally do, but the existence of these threats is not speculation, but something that has to be taken seriously, as we and some others have been doing.

But especially, with regard to this election, we need to deal with how the radical left is dealing with the present election crisis, why much of the radial left is so complacent about the authoritarian threat, what longstanding weaknesses are being displayed, and what can be done to help revive a true radical left and develop a mass independent movement in the working class. The radical left is in crisis, and over the years it has basically failed in build an effective independent working class movement. As part of the radical left, it is our special responsibility to deal with this, and part of this is to encourage - and give our critical appraisal of its strengths and weaknesses - of the best writing on it from elsewhere in the radical left. There is a certain ferment in part of the radical left; we need to help encourage and develop it.

So we need to consider what our own role can be: what can we provide that is different or additional to what otherwise appears in the left discussion about the elections and the prospects that will follow from it? For DSA, the political talk ends up being - how to elect some candidates. If they elect a few more, they are ecstatic, even as the overall situation is darkening, and leading to a major storm. Other factors tend to get ignored by such discussion - from how to deal with the weaknesses of the left among the working class, to the lack of agreement over what socialism is, and on to the relation of the current growing world political crisis to the major changes in the world situation. There is the question of what the bourgeoisie is aiming at (or dividing over) with regard to the changes taking place in the world such as - major changes in economics in recent years, the escalating severity of climatic and other environmental disasters, the new methods of mass surveillance and repression, and the shifting world imperialist blocs. This is what ultimately underlies the sharpening political struggle. Major changes are approaching rapidly - indeed, they have already started and have been sending tremors around the world. This is the general context to the struggle against the growing threat of the far right, and it will continue after the elections.

As far as el-Sayed goes, I don't think the Democratic establishment will be in any hurry to throw him under the Trumpist bus, if Trump tries to purge him because of his religion or something. In fact, the Democrats will be glad to get another Democratic Senator. El-Sayed has been holding campaign rallies with well-established Democrats like Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders -- in fact, Sanders is one of el-Sayed's original backers. And Michigan's other Democratic Senator, Elissa Slotkin, is now running ads for el-Sayed. The idea that Trump, after the election, can get away with simply declaring el-Sayed's election invalid and these other Senators would not strenuously object, is fanciful. Is Trump prepared to completely purge the Senate and declare the entire electoral machinery invalid over and done with?

A note on Slotkin: she is a retired CIA operative with close ties to the military and intelligence networks. She is also among the most vocal and strenuous of Trump's critics and an early warner of Trump's plans to subvert the elections. She and Senator Mark Kelley, and a few other Senators, issued that warning to military officers a year ago, to not obey illegal orders. For that they were denounced by Trump as traitors, who said they should all be hanged. Slotkin followed that up this year by warning military officers to not interfere in the elections. So Slotkin, the establishment Democrat, is much less complacent about the elections than is DSA. If Trump tries to purge el-Sayed, he will no doubt have to purge Senators like Slotkin as well, and that would probably entail purging the Senate as a whole. Is that likely, or possible?

A more likely candidate for purging is Ilhan Omar, who has been a very consistent critic of Trump on all kinds of issues, and whose own background may have some openings for attack (that is what the raid on Omar's home is trying to discover).