We begin today’s roundup with Joel Mathis at The Week who urges Democrats to not let Donald Trump and the GOP get away with trying to overturn the results of the 2020 election:
Trump is plainly, openly weaponizing his baseas a threat against any official who might try to hold him accountable for his (alleged) financial and constitutional misdeeds — he even dangled future presidential pardonsas a reward for the Jan. 6 defendants, offering an incentive to followers who might be inclined to commit mayhem in the service of his ambitions. He's not much hiding his real aims anymore: On Sunday, Trump put out a statement that (among other things) grumbled that then-Vice President Mike Pence should have "changed the outcome" of the 2020 election. It's not hard to see where all of this is going.
So what are Democrats going to do about it?
It's not clear.
[...] The only real choice is for Democrats to walk and chew gum at the same time. They have to do kitchen table issues and keep Jan. 6 at the forefront of the conversation.
Matt Lewis at The Daily Beast explores Trump’s claim that he would pardon the insurrectionists:
Donald Trump will never stop reminding us of how dangerous a prospect another four years of him in the White House would be. (If only he had been impeached, convicted, and barred from office over inciting a riot!... Oh, wait.)
"If I run and if I win, we will treat [the Capitol rioters] from January 6 fairly. We will treat them fairly," Trump declared at a rally in Texas on Saturday night. "And if it requires pardons, we will give them pardons. Because they are being treated so unfairly." [...] Watergate, in hindsight, was a botched “third-rate burglary,” that turned into an attempted White House coverup. Trump’s presidency, in contrast, involved numerous impeachable offenses, two actual impeachments, several serious attempts to strong-arm officials into “overturning” the 2020 election, and (lest we forget) the denouement: the incitement of an attempted insurrection.
At Business Insider, Grace Panetta explores how a governor could help Trump steal an election in the future:
A bipartisan group of lawmakers is trying to reform a 135-year-old law to save future elections from being stolen by their own colleagues. But if their well-intentioned attempts prove successful, they may inadvertently create a pathway for a less discussed but more urgent threat: a rogue governor in a swing state like Georgia single-handedly undermining the democratic process. [...]
The proposed reforms to the ECA are designed to prevent the executive branch and Congress from undermining elections, as Trump and dozens of Republican members of Congress tried to do by raising objections to results at the state level in Arizona and Pennsylvania, and pressuring former Vice President Mike Pence to overturn the ratification of then-candidate Joe Biden's Electoral College victory, leading to the January 6 insurrection.
However, the suggested changes to the law would do little to constrain the power of state and local governments. By overseeing vote counting and certifying election results before they are sent to Congress for ratification, these levels of government arguably have as much power, if not more, than Congress and a sitting president to steal an election.
The New York Times reports on just how brazen Trump was in trying to overturn the election:
Six weeks after Election Day, with his hold on power slipping, President Donald J. Trump directed his lawyer, Rudolph W. Giuliani, to make a remarkable call. Mr. Trump wanted him to ask the Department of Homeland Security if it could legally take control of voting machines in key swing states, three people familiar with the matter said.
And on a final note, there’s this:
When the National Archives and Records Administration handed over a trove of documents to the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6 insurrection, some of the Trump White House records had been ripped up and then taped back together, according to three people familiar with the records.
Former president Donald Trump was known inside the White House for his unusual and potentially unlawful habit of tearing presidential records into shreds and tossing them on the floor — creating a headache for records management analysts who meticulously used Scotch tape to piece together fragments of paper that were sometimes as small as confetti, as Politico reported in 2018.