POLITICS
04/01/2021
04:21 GMT
Attorney On Trump's Georgia Call Works With Group
Aiming To Eliminate Senate Elections
Right-wing lawyer Cleta Mitchell began strategizing
with the American Legislative Exchange Council to challenge a Trump loss long
before the first vote was cast.
By Mary
Papenfuss, HuffPost US
One of the
attorneys on Donald Trump’s disturbing phone call Saturday demanding that
Georgia “find” votes for him is working with an organization fighting to
terminate democratic elections of U.S. senators.
Prominent
conservative Republican lawyer Cleta Mitchell — a partner in the politically
connected law firm Foley & Lardner — has been working with the American
Legislative Exchange Council to challenge the results of the presidential
election.
The
powerful, corporate-funded right-wing organization that includes state
legislators and lobbyists is also battling to change the Constitution to
eliminate Senate elections. Under the ALEC strategy, senators would instead be
named by their various state legislatures, where the Republican Party has
worked for decades to increase its power and influence.
ALEC
prepared a draft resolution in 2018 for state legislatures to call for the
repeal of the 17th Amendment that required senators be chosen by voters.
Just over a
year after Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) won his first election, he spoke out in
support of the strategy at an ALEC conference, saying in 2013 that he’d prefer
it if state legislators, not voters, picked senators. Cruz is now leading the
fight to challenge voters’ choice of President-elect Joe Biden.
ALEC has
consistently worked to “undermine democracy by the majority,” ALEC expert and
Columbia University assistant professor Alexander Hertel-Fernandez has told
HuffPost. The organization is continually “seeking ways to control by a
minority,” he said.
ALEC and
Mitchell began last year preparing to challenge mail-in ballots for the
presidential election only if Trump lost — long before the first vote was cast.
Mitchell
was the featured speaker at a FreedomWorks Election Protection Summit in early
October, where members strategized to challenge the validity of mail-in votes,
again, only if Biden won. She appeared maskless just days after attending the
Rose Garden COVID-19 super-spreader event honoring new Supreme Court Justice
Amy Coney Bryant.
“I thought
I was wearing a mask,” Mitchell told HuffPost, though photos and videos of the
conference revealed she wasn’t, nor did she maintain social distance.
In
November, Mitchell triggered a jaw-dropping reaction from a Fox News anchor
after the lawyer refused to accept that Trump had lost the election.
ALEC is
best known as a “bill mill,” writing corporate-friendly legislation that is
then handed off to its politician members to introduce in their state
legislatures. ALEC claims that nearly a quarter of state legislators and other
public policy “stakeholders” are members of the organization.
ALEC was
the source of “stand your ground” laws in several states, which legally protect
people who use force, including deadly force, when facing what they believe to
be a threat.
The law
influenced a jury’s decision to acquit George Zimmerman, a white neighborhood
vigilante, who fatally shot unarmed Black teenager Trayvon Martin in Florida in
2012 after confronting the teen he later said looked “suspicious.” The
17-year-old was walking back to a relative’s home from a convenience store.
ALEC keeps
its membership secret, but records obtained from 2017 by the watchdog group
Documented, which probes corporate influence on public policy, listed Koch
Industries, Honeywell, Exxon Mobil, UPS, Chevron and Southwest Airlines as
members or event sponsors, among several other corporate backers.
ALEC has
quietly increased their activity on voting and election issues, including
gerrymandering and election administration with “an eye to boosting the
political clout of conservatives,” Hertel-Fernandez told HuffPost. “They were
an early proponent of voter ID laws and restrictions on voter registrations
thought to disadvantage left-leaning constituencies,” he said.
Neither
ALEC nor Mitchell immediately responded to HuffPost’s requests to comment.
Mitchell
defended Trump’s strong-armed phone call Saturday to Georgia Secretary of State
Brad Raffensperger, a Republican, in a statement to The Washington Post
following its bombshell story on the conversation. Raffensperger’s office “has
made many statements over the past two months that are simply not correct and
everyone involved with the efforts on behalf of the President’s election
challenge has said the same thing: show us your records,” Mitchell’s statement
read.
Mitchell
asked for records on the call; Trump did not. He demanded that Raffensperger
“recalculate” the votes to make him a winner.
Sem comentários:
Enviar um comentário