Whether it's acceptable to mention it in polite discourse or not, the fascist GOP's plan to formalize national targeted voter suppression based on fascist conspiracy theories designed to explain why a bloviating reality TV show nazi lost the 2020 US presidential election, is a form of election rigging. We've already discussed Der Führer's recent (blatantly illegal) executive order to do just that, but the Republican plan to fuck elections and create their own permanent Pork Reich is a multi-pronged assault. One of the key spearheads in this quest to, again, rig elections by disenfranchising millions of voters who are statistically more likely to support the opposition party, is the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility Act, or Save Act, currently being cooked up in a GOP fascist-controlled Congress.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/mar/31/congress-republicans-save-act-voting-rights

Republicans are quietly trying to disenfranchise millions of voters

"According to research by the Brennan Center for Justice, more than 21 million US citizens of voting age don’t have easy access to proof of citizenship documents, and only about half of American adults have a passport, while millions do not have access to paper copies of their birth certificates. Married women whose legal names do not match their birth certificates could be disenfranchised by the Save Act, and folks looking to obtain lost or misplaced birth certificates would face financial and logistical hurdles.

The Save Act would restrict voters’ ability to register to vote online and through the mail while also severely limiting the ability of non-partisan civic organizations to conduct voter registration drives, which have been crucial to civic engagement for more than a century. That’s because, despite voters’ ability to register to vote at the DMV and registration efforts by political parties, data shows that voter registration drives from non-partisan organizations can account for about one-fifth of voter registration applicants – roughly equal to the political power of California, Florida and Texas combined. We simply cannot sit back and allow Congress or the White House to destroy the infrastructure of our elections by disenfranchising so many voters."

Look, I know Trump's unhinged fascist conspiracy theories about the 2020 election make most liberals very leery about uttering the words "rigging elections" but at some point you have to accept that you can't stop reality from being real, just because naming the beast makes you squeamish. Targeted voter suppression by the GOP has become so normalized that in a recent(ish) battle over election maps that clearly sought to minimize the political power of African American voters, GOP operatives defended themselves from charges of racial bias by saying they weren't restricting voters because they're Black, but rather because they vote Democrat. This is election rigging, by a fascist regime, headed up by a would-be King who keeps musing about violating the Constitution to seek a third term, and it's probably time to be honest with ourselves about what that actually means - an attempt to permanently install the US Republican brand of fascism in our society by preventing free and fair elections (such as those exist, in America.)

I mean let's cut the crap here for a second okay? The Save Act specifically targets voter registrations drives because the fascist GOP is openly arguing that registering people to vote, is somehow rigging elections. Let that sink in for a minute folks; a fascist regime is trying to rig elections through nationalized voter suppression because, and they essentially admit this, if everyone gets to vote they might lose power. The fact that this type of thinking and rhetoric is considered "normal" for the right wing party in America doesn't prove these guys aren't fascist, just that America has been embracing, normalizing, and ignoring fascism for a very long time before Donald Trump ran for office.

So what's a fascist party to do when they've already said the courts don't have authority over them, they intend to ignore court rulings, and they want to impeach federal judges who won't play fascist Calvinball for them, but the injunctions and restraining orders keep coming anyway? Apparently, if you're noted Christian Nationalist, GOP House Speaker Mike Johnson, the answer is to threaten to dissolve the courts entirely.

https://truthout.org/articles/mike-johnson-suggests-eliminating-federal-courts-after-trump-rulings-blocked/

"Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson (Louisiana) suggested on Tuesday that Congress might move to dismantle certain federal courts following at least 15 nationwide injunctions imposed by judges against executive orders issued by President Donald Trump.

“We do have the authority over the federal courts, as you know. We can eliminate an entire district court,” Johnson told reporters. “We have power of funding over the courts and all these other things. But desperate times call for desperate measures, and Congress is going to act.”

Look, by no means am I saying that I'm *against* taking the fascist Trump regime to court, to try and block as much of their techbro monarchist/fundie/nazi (depends on the moment with these guys) program as possible. What I'm saying however is that waiting around to see if you'll still have human, civil, and political rights after a long protracted legal battle, while the regime continues to install a fascist dicatorship in the meantime, is an incredibly shortsighted plan of action; and yet it seems to be the one much of the liberal establishment is adopting at the moment. This is particularly true when in so much as the regime is willing to acknowledge the authority of courts at all, it's so they can issue an emergency appeal to a 6-3 fascist high Supreme Court that already gave us nonsensical fascist Calvinball rulings like Dobbs, Chevron, and Trump v. United States.

"The Trump administration has attempted to bypass, circumvent, and even dismantle the judiciary in various ways since taking over the White House.

For instance, in response to federal judges restraining or enjoining many of Trump’s executive orders, the administration has increasingly turned to the Supreme Court with emergency appeals to overturn unfavorable rulings. Emergency applications typically request swift judicial intervention, claiming urgency to prevent significant harm or injustice.

“The Trump administration has now filed six emergency applications at #SCOTUS challenging rulings by six different federal district judges spread across five different federal district courts,” Steve Vladeck, author of The Shadow Docket: How the Supreme Court Uses Stealth Rulings to Amass Power and Undermine the Republic, said on Bluesky. “Maybe it’s not the judges who are ‘rogue’?”

Given all that, I think waiting on courts that literally cannot enforce their rulings without the backing of security forces wholly controlled by the Trump regime, and might get overruled anyway if guys like Sam Alito can find a amusing way to say Trump is God Emperor now, to start resisting fascism by any means necessary is a catastrophically bad plan; which stands to reason, because this is the same liberal establishment that by and large thought it would be a good idea to help Trump win the 2016 GOP primary contest because he'd be so "easy to beat."

We can have a debate till we're blue in the face about whether or not we're in a Constitutional Crisis yet; but nothing about that debate is going to change the fact that we're clearly in the middle of a fascist takeover by billionaire nazis, Christian Nationalists, and corrupt as fuck winger politicians, even SCOTUS judges, willing to pretend all of this is legal so long as the bribe monies are on time. The time to fight back, in government, in the media, and in the streets, is now. Waiting for the courts to solve the problem isn't a strategy, it's complicity.