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Here's how we stop the GOP from criminalizing abortion and stealing elections [1]

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Date: 2022-09-07

If it feels like the stakes keep getting higher, that’s because every batch of Republican nominees grows sicker, more violent, more unhinged, more fascist, and more dangerous each passing year. But it’s simpler to show rather than tell.

Here’s a stunning recent tweet from Matthew DePerno, the Republican running against Nessel in Michigan, in which he manages to make up completely false allegations of corruption, slur the incumbent as a “groomer,” call for her to be “locked up,” and shoehorn in two pieces of far-right iconography: the white supremacist mascot Pepe the Frog and a “red pill”—a totem of the women-hating “men’s rights movement.”

Unsurprisingly, DePerno is deeply involved in efforts to overturn the 2020 election still to this day. He spearheaded the infamous Antrim County "election fraud" report that Donald Trump thought would secure him a second term but was utterly debunked by every expert—and now has him under criminal investigation for possible tampering with voting machines.

Of course, DePerno is bitterly hostile to abortion rights, too, and has promised he would enforce the state’s 1931 abortion ban that’s still on the books. And he was fired by a previous law firm for falsifying his bills and was even accused of assault by one client. Yet this is the man Michigan Republicans think should be attorney general in a state that’s home to 10 million people and could decide our next presidential election.

The GOP’s other candidates are no better. In Colorado, Republican John Kellner has said he wouldn’t have filed any legal challenges against Trump—something Weiser did frequently during the Trump years. In Georgia, incumbent Chris Carr used his office to file an amicus brief asking the Supreme Court to overturn Roe v. Wade in the Dobbs case. In Nevada, Sigal Chattah said Ford, the state’s first Black attorney general, “should be hanging from a fucking crane.” And in Wisconsin, local prosecutor Eric Toney fanned the flames of the Big Lie by charging five people with voter fraud—for listing a UPS store on their voter registration forms.

None of these people should be in charge of powerful public positions allowing them to implement the GOP’s far-right vision for America. Today, that means turning a safe, normal health care procedure into a criminal act and jeopardizing the health of countless Americans. Come 2024, it will mean overturning the results of the next election for president should Democrats win. After what we saw two years ago, there can be no doubt that this is their plan.

Our plan, therefore, must be to elect Democrats who will uphold the rule of law and do everything in their power to safeguard our rights and thwart another Republican coup attempt. Attorneys general in the states were crucial to holding the tide against Trump’s extremism, and we’ll need them even more in the years to come.

Of course, Republicans know that principled attorneys general stand in the way of their authoritarian fever dreams, which is why they want to defeat every Democrat on our slate so badly. The good news, though, is that grassroots power is greatly magnified in races like these, which have budgets just a fraction of those for Senate campaigns. Your donation of any size will go a long way toward protecting our democracy.

Stop the GOP’s plan to criminalize abortion and steal elections by giving $10, $100, or whatever you’re able to Daily Kos’ slate of Democrats running for attorney general!

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[1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2022/9/7/2120988/-Here-s-how-we-stop-the-GOP-from-criminalizing-abortion-and-stealing-elections

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