There are already federal laws that ban soldiers or armed federal agents at polling stations. But since Trump owns federal law enforcement, that doesn’t really matter. What this model does is recommend states pass their own state laws which follow the language of those federal laws as closely as possible. That accomplishes two critical purposes. The big threat to these kinds of defensive state laws is federal supremacy. When state and federal power or law come into conflict, federal law is supreme. But only when the federal government or federal authorities are acting in a constitutional and lawful capacity. Since these new state laws would only be outlawing what is already against federal law they are only outlawing actions which by definition cannot be lawful. Approaching the problem in this way, by mimicking these seldom-discussed or used federal laws, disposes of the supremacy clause issue categorically and elegantly. State officials are now on solid enforcement grounds. Additionally, individual federal officials only have criminal immunity if they are acting lawfully. The model law also creates a civil cause of action which citizens can use to sue federal officials from violating their rights.

…

One other point I want to make. Don’t be over literal about what the law accomplishes. It empowers state executive officials to block criminal executive branch interference. It gives state legal officials the power to indict federal officers for that criminal interference. But it also begins the critical process of taking power over the whole question back into the hands of the states which lawfully run elections. The passage of such laws would become news stories in every state they were passed in. It would put state Republican lawmakers on the spot to explain why they won’t support such unobjectionable legal language. Again, this is all already illegal at the federal level. It begins to shift the entire debate. It’s the democratic forces in the Free States taking the matter to the criminal executive rather than waiting passively on the latter to decide when and on what terms to act. It energizes the opposition and begins fleshing out how a criminal executive could try to reach his hand into the states, how the states can resist those efforts and the legal and operational specifics of how it would play out.

“…the lack of any Dem/progressive leaning “sustainable media advocacy outlets” severely hampered my runs (and runs of all other Dems). As I related to the chair of the DCCC at one point (using a mountain climbing analogy - hey, I live in… the mountains), “After my first campaign I felt like I reached the Hillary Step of Mount Everest, mere meters from the summit. Yet, one year later when I decided to run again, I felt like I was starting all over back at base camp”. Simply put, there was minimal outside support - media wise and even initially, financially - to bolster my candidacy/policies in any meaningful way. There had been no sustainable advocacy in the interim between races. While we absolutely adapted our media strategy to include social media, live online forums, etc., it was never going to be enough.”

An old friend dropped me a note this week with a complaint that, once you hear it, you can’t stop noticing everywhere you look in our nation’s media. He’d been watching one of the three major network TV evening newscasts and noticed that Trump and other Republicans are on every single night, almost always without serious pushback or fact-checking, while Democrats are rarely featured at all…

When a Democrat does show up, it’s usually to react to something Trump just did or said, a process that reinforces the Republican frame of the news even when it pushes back against it (see: George Lakoff)…

I’ve been in the media much of my life; was a radio news reporter for a top station in the 1970s and have been writing books and articles about democracy and politics regularly for the past three decades. What my friend is describing is neither an accident nor a coincidence…

It’s the fully ripened fruit of a successful strategy Republicans have been running to get the media to spin stories for them since the early 1980s. And it’s long past time for Democrats to stand up and fight back hard with exactly the same playbook.

Back during the 1992 Clinton/Bush Sr. presidential race, Rich Bond, then chairman of the GOP, explained his party’s media strategy with unusual candor:

Lee Atwater had been running a version of this strategy for years before Bond said the quiet part out loud. The genius of it was that they never needed to prove that the media was actually infected with “liberal bias.”

Which was good for them, because the mainstream media’s never really had any sort of political bias other than status quo; it’s just that the GOP has relied on so many lies over the years like “trickle down,” “murderous immigrant invasion,” “evil union bosses,” “non-citizens voting,” “queer predators,” etc., etc., that when they get confronted with reality it seems to them like bias.

All they needed was for the accusation to be repeated often enough that journalists and producers would end up sufficiently intimidated to lean over backward to prove they weren’t pushing a liberal line. And it worked.

Media scholar Eric Alterman (fyi, from my high school😇) documented the phenomenon in detail at the Center for American Progress: conservative columnists like George Will, Charles Krauthammer, and Bob Novak had prominent perches all over the allegedly “liberal” media showing up on major TV programs weekly, while genuinely progressive voices like Paul Krugman and E.J. Dionne almost never got television slots.

A study comparing Sunday morning talk shows during Obama’s first two years versus Trump’s first two years (first time around) found that by the Trump era, every single major Sunday show, including NBC’s Meet the Press and CBS’s Face the Nation, was featuring more Republicans than Democrats. And a FAIR analysis found Republicans outnumbering Democrats 56% to 40% in Sunday show appearances during Trump’s first post-election transition period.

Here’s how effectively this strategy worked: When Bush was president, the networks said they “needed more Republicans” on television because “Republicans are in power.” When Obama was president, they said they “needed more Republicans” on TV “because Democrats were in charge,” and “it’s important to hear from the opposition.”

Heads Republicans win, tails Democrats lose, every single time, under almost every conceivable circumstance and on pretty much every topic. That’s not journalism. That’s genuine media bias. In favor of the GOP.

And while that particular scheme was playing out, the billionaires on the hard right were simultaneously building media empires of their own that now include roughly 1,500 rightwing radio stations, Fox “News,” Newsmax, One America News, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Post, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, more than half of America’s local newspapers, and now, CBS itself.

Now, consider what would have happened if Barack Obama or Bill Clinton had done any of this? What if Clinton’s son-in-law had taken $2 billion from a foreign government and then whispered in Clinton’s ear to start a war that benefited that same foreign government? What if Obama had accepted a $400 million jet from Qatar? What if a Democratic administration had been killing people on boats in international waters without congressional authorization?

Republicans would have been incandescent, holding news conferences and hearing after hearing after hearing. Fox “News” would have run wall-to-wall of outraged coverage for months. The Sunday shows would have featured nothing but Republicans demanding impeachment or worse.

And the mainstream media would have covered those hearings seriously and continuously, because they’d have been terrified of being called “liberal” if they didn’t.

That’s the mechanism. That’s how it works. Republicans institutionalized the accusation of “liberal media bias” so thoroughly that the media now polices itself on their behalf, even when the corruption on the other side is jaw-dropping.

The solution to this media crisis that’s so damaging to our democracy is straightforward, and Democrats need to do it now.

Every senator, every congressperson, every governor, every mayor, every Democratic surrogate who goes on television needs to be trained to say the words “rightwing media bias” early and often, not occasionally, but constantly, institutionally, the same way Republicans “worked the refs” for thirty years.

It means pressuring the networks directly. It means holding hearings — even if they have to be unofficial “shadow” hearings — right now about media consolidation and the capture of the press corps by rightwing interests. It means pointing out, loudly and specifically, every single time a network gives a Republican five minutes of uncontested airtime and then gives a Democrat thirty seconds to “respond.”

Republicans didn’t spend forty years bleating about the “liberal media” because the liberal media actually existed. They knew it didn’t but were relentless about the accusation nonetheless, and they had the infrastructure to amplify it everywhere, all the time.

Democrats can do the same thing today, and unlike the GOP, they have the truth on their side.

This starts with you. Call your Democratic senators and representatives today and demand they raise this issue publicly and loudly, in press conferences, in hearings, in every television interview. Share this article. Talk with your neighbors about it.

The refs change their calls when the voices get loud enough. It’s time to start speaking out loudly.