The substitution of Rep. Elise Stefanik for Rep. Liz Cheney is an alarm, signaling that the Republican Party no longer will be bound by law or custom.

War is peace.

Freedom is slavery.

Ignorance is strength. — George Orwell, “1984”

Welcome to the funhouse world the Republican Party is building. Up is down. Black is white. Lies are truth.

The great cause that Republicans are uniting around is “election integrity.” That’s rich. The reality is that somebody did attempt to steal the 2020 election — Donald Trump. During the days and weeks following his loss, he brayed endlessly that the outcome was fraudulent, laying the groundwork for an attempt to overturn the voters’ will.

From the White House, he made multiple calls to local election officials demanding that they find votes for him. He dialed up members of local canvassing boards, encouraging them to decertify results.

At a time when Trump’s toadies were calling for legislatures to ignore the popular vote and submit alternate slates of electoral college votes, he engaged in flagrant election interference by inviting seven Michigan state legislators, including the leaders of the house and senate, to the White House on Nov. 20. What did they discuss? You can surmise from their statement issued after the meeting: “We have not yet been made aware of any information that would change the outcome of the election in Michigan and, as legislative leaders, we will follow the law and follow the normal process regarding Michigan’s electors…”

Trump phoned a Georgia elections investigator who was conducting a signature audit in Cobb County and asked her to find the “dishonesty.” If she did, he promised, “you’ll be praised. … You have the most important job in the country right now.”

The then-president phoned Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger 18 times. When he finally got through, he wove a tangled theory of voting irregularities that crescendoed to a naked plea to falsify Georgia’s vote: “So what are we going to do here, folks? I only need 11,000 votes. Fellas, I need 11,000 votes.”

Trump entertained ideas such as declaring martial law, seizing the nation’s voting machines and letting the military “rerun” the election. He turned loose his Kraken-conspiracy nuts and his pillow man to spread lies about Dominion Voting Systems, Black-run cities like Philadelphia and Chinese bamboo ballots.

The Trump campaign and its allies filed more than 60 lawsuits challenging election procedures and lost all but one. Pennsylvania was found to have erred in extending the period to fix errors on mail-in ballots. The case was a matter of three days and a small number of votes that would not have changed Pennsylvania’s outcome.

And then came the ultimate attack on election integrity — the violent attack on the Capitol and on members of Congress and the vice president as they were fulfilling their constitutional duties.

Leaving no doubt about his intentions for the riot, Trump told a crowd in February that the only thing that prevented the violent mob from successfully hijacking the official tally of the Electoral College votes was the “cowardice” of Mike Pence.

Today, we stand on the precipice of the House Republican conference ratifying this attempt to subvert American democracy. They are poised to punish Liz Cheney for saying this simple truth: “The 2020 presidential election was not stolen. Anyone who claims it was is spreading THE BIG LIE, turning their back on the rule of law, and poisoning our democratic system.” In her place, they will elevate Elise Stefanik, whose claim to leadership consists entirely of her operatic Trump followership.

Let’s be clear: The substitution of Stefanik for Cheney is a tocsin, signaling that the Republican Party will no longer be bound by law or custom. In 2020, many Republican officeholders, including the otherwise invertebrate Pence, held the line. They did not submit false slates of electors. They did not decertify votes. They did not “find” phantom fraud. But the party has been schooled since then. It has learned that the base — which is deluded by the likes of Tucker Carlson, Laura Ingraham and Mark Levin — believes the lies and demands that Republicans fight.

As my colleague Amanda Carpenter put it, the 2024 mantra is going to be “Steal It Back.”

If Cheney must be axed because she will not lie, then what will happen if Republicans take control of Congress in 2022 and are called upon to certify the Electoral College in 2024? How many Raffenspergers will there be? How many will insist, as Pence did, that they must do what the Constitution demands? How many will preserve any semblance of the rule of law and the primacy of truth?

With this sabotage of Cheney, House Republicans are figuratively joining the Jan. 6 mob.

Mona Charen is policy editor of The Bulwark and host of the “Beg to Differ” podcast. Her most recent book is “Sex Matters: How Modern Feminism Lost Touch with Science, Love, and Common Sense.”

Senate Majority Leader Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) offered fiery criticism of Republicans on Tuesday for efforts around the country to tighten voter laws amid unproven claims made by former President Trump that the 2020 election was stolen.

Schumer, speaking at a Senate Rules Committee meeting on a sweeping elections overhaul bill, accused Republicans of trying to act upon the “big lie that the election was stolen” to “placate” and “please” Trump.

“Unfortunately, the big lie is spreading like a cancer among Republicans. It’s enveloping and consuming the Republican Party, in both houses of Congress,” Schumer said.

Schumer pointed to the likely ousting of Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) as House Republican Conference chair. Frustration with Cheney has boiled over among House Republicans after she’s pushed back against Trump’s false claim that the election was stolen.

“Liz Cheney spoke truth to power, and for that, she’s being fired,” Schumer said.

Schumer also criticized Republicans for not pushing back against state laws that add restrictions on the ability to vote.

“Every Republican in this room knows Joe Biden won the election fair and square. Every Republican knows that Donald Trump perpetrated the big lie. But the price of admission in today’s Republican Party is silence in the face of provable lies,” Schumer said.

The Senate Rules Committee is set to vote on a sweeping bill to overhaul elections that has divided Congress along party lines.

Miles Taylor — who on Wednesday revealed himself to be the author of the infamous “anonymous” New York Times op-ed slamming the president — is a former Department of Homeland Security staffer campaigning against Trump’s re-election.

Between 2017 and his resignation in April 2019, Taylor, 33, worked in DHS, including as chief of staff for Kirstjen Nielsen, the former secretary of homeland security.

A lifelong Republican, Taylor went public with his criticism of Trump this summer, and in August released a video endorsing Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden in the 2020 election.

That month, he also penned a Washington Post op-ed, under his own name, claiming the US is less safe under Trump, who governs “based on “whim, political calculation and self-interest.”

In response, Trump called Taylor a “disgruntled employee” in a tweet.

According to NBC News reporting, election security experts were able to use a “Google for servers” application that allowed them to access thirty U.S. voting systems. This finding invalidates oft-repeated claims that U.S. voting systems were NOT connected to the internet and thus not vulnerable to tampering and fraud. The report also notes that if hackers gain access to these election systems they can also place code that can affect future elections.[…]

The post NBC News: Election Security Experts Say U.S. Voting Systems Do Connect To The Internet & Warn Serious Vulnerability That Can Affect Future Elections appeared first on .

Now that the mainstream media feels safe, whether true or not, that President Trump can’t possibly claim his presidential office this term, lo and behold, their security experts tell us they knew all along that voting machines were connected to the internet.

From NBC News Article,  – “‘Online and vulnerable’: Experts find nearly three dozen U.S. voting systems connected to internet”

“We kept hearing from election officials that voting machines were never on the internet,” he said. “And we knew that wasn’t true. And so we set out to try and find the voting machines to see if we could find them on the internet, and especially the back-end systems that voting machines in the precinct were connecting to to report their results. . .

. . .The three largest voting manufacturing companies — Election Systems &Software, Dominion Voting Systems and Hart InterCivic — have acknowledged they all put modems in some of their tabulators and scanners. The reason? So that unofficial election results can more quickly be relayed to the public. Those modems connect to cell phone networks, which, in turn, are connected to the internet.”

. . . The challenge with restoring voter confidence in our election process is complicated, but not impossible to solve. Engaging eligible voters and maintaining voter registration rolls in compliance with the National Voter Registration Act of 1993 (NVRA) is a good first step to flagging simple errors in voter registration.

This is an essential measure for lower-income voters who tend to move often and need to know where their new polling place is located. Standardizing processes and frequently checking registration records will ensure all voters have an opportunity to correct problems with their registrations in plenty of time before an election.

Improving transparency, moreover, can help reassure voters of their state’s election integrity. An overwhelming majority of Americans want to seelive-streaming technologyused on Election Day so everyone can watch ballot counting. This proposal is hardly a new idea as theU.S. House and Senate have been live-streamingtheir voting activities since 1979.

And the same standard of requiring proper identification for registering to vote and voting in person must be applied to absentee, mail-in voting. Absentee ballots should include simple identifying information to help prevent someone other than the registered voter from casting a mailed ballot. For those who cannot afford a government-issued ID, states can make them free and easily obtainable—just like Georgia has done. . .

President Trump has backed the UK government’s forthcoming Electoral Integrity Bill, which would mandate voter ID, saying the US should follow suit.

The Electoral Integrity Bill was confirmed as part of the UK government’s forthcoming agenda within Tuesday’s Queen’s Speech. The speech serves a similar purpose to the State of the Union, where the head of state addresses the government. The speech is written and prepared by the UK government, not the Queen, and sets out their legislative agenda for the next Parliamentary session.

The plans regarding what types of voter ID would be acceptable were set out in detail by Chloe Smith MP, a minister in the UK’s Cabinet Office, at the end of last month, confirming that it would not be limited to driver’s licenses or passports, but include a wide-range of identification. Any voter who did not have identification would be able to apply for a free “voter card” from their local authority. Under current legislation, British voters simply have to provide their name and address at the polling location, with no verification as to if they are that person in particular.

“This is exactly what we should do in the United States, unlike the Democrats who want to abolish Voter ID laws,” President Trump said in a statement. “All States should pass Voter ID laws along with many other fair and comprehensive election reforms, like eliminating mass mail-in voting and ballot harvesting, so we never again have an election rigged and stolen from us,” he continued, adding that “the people are demanding real reform!”