Cleta Mitchell has long been the right-wing go-to for creation, staffing and maintenance of their dark money network, but she may be best remembered as the lawyer who was part of the call where Trump hounded Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to "find" 11,780 votes.
Monday, Mitchell announced that she was heading up a "new" right-wing project to protect "election integrity." The announcement seen in the video above was an exclusive to Newsmax and made in conjunction with Freedomworks, the same hard-right organization who organized against the Affordable Care Act with the assistance of many, many Billionaire Bucks™.
In a statement to Newsmax, Freedomworks stressed, “Election integrity is the most important issue to the conservative movement.”
“The outcome of the 2020 presidential election and its associated legal battles underscore the need for conservatives to engage at all levels in fighting for secure elections that generate confidence,” they wrote.
As if this hasn't been their project for years and years. Let me re-introduce the "Hydra" plan of attack embedded below, brought forward by True The Vote's director Catherine Engelbrecht to the Groundswell gaggle of conservatives headed up by Ginni Thomas, spouse of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas.
There's more about that here, but this is a taste:
On May 8, 2013, True the Vote is a facilitator and presenter at a meeting where Ginni Thomas and others are key players. TTV presents their plan to attack "the left" for daring to register voters. They're committed to stopping them from challenging any and all efforts to disenfranchise voters. Or as they describe it, securing the vote. Others might call it democracy corrupted.
Take a look at that document, which was from a 2013 presentation. It's obviously racist. When they single out organizations like Color of Change as some radical lefty vote-stealing organization, that speaks volumes. I especially like the part where they complain that voting-rights organizations win 90 percent of the time, or the framing of voting-rights advocates as "anti-integrity" organizations.
There is nothing new about what Cleta Mitchell is talking about here. It's a constant drumbeat, which is pretty easy to decode if you listen to her: Black and Brown people shouldn't be allowed to vote, and by god, they're going to stop them any way they can. This drumbeat reaches all the way back to Jim Crow. It's not new; it's just packaged in 21st Century public relations argle-bargle.
Mitchell's effort will be backed with lots of Billionaire Bucks™ and it will be implemented in time to make sure 2022 is bought and paid for in advance if they have their druthers. Already, states are pushing through ALEC-approved voter suppression bills, ranging from cutting off early voting to ending vote-by-mail schemes that states have maintained for years -- when Republicans used them more than Democrats.
Without question, the most important pieces of legislation in front of Congress right now are the John Lewis Voting Rights Act and the For the People Act (HR1). Neither can pass the Senate with the current version of the filibuster, and they must pass. Nothing is more important than protecting people's right to vote.
Greg Sargent interviewed Mike Konczal about the prospect that Joe Biden is a transformative president and what could possibly stop momentum in that direction. Konczal was blunt:
We need to weaken the filibuster in the Senate. Really essential reforms to our democracy and voting rights, investments in climate, taking care of our elderly and vulnerable — a lot of our important priorities are going to run up against this totally arbitrary wall.
There is nothing more important than voting rights. If Mitch McConnell can blow out the filibuster for judges, there should be no reason why Dems can't do it to preserve guaranteed constitutional rights. Whatever has to be done to preserve voting rights must be done.
Conservatives like Cleta Mitchell cannot win this battle.
