The indictment of the traitor and coward Donald J. Trump ends thus, on count four, Conspiracy Against Rights, namely the very right to vote:

“DONALD J. TRUMP did knowingly combine, conspire, confederate, and agree with co-conspirators, known and unknown to the Grand Jury, to injure, oppress, threaten, and intimidate one or more persons in the free exercise and enjoyment of a right and privilege secured to them by the Constitution and laws of the United States — that is, the right to vote, and to have one’s vote counted.”

... it’s perhaps amusing, and certainly intentional, that Smith chose to use the word “confederate.” As the New York Times notes, the law in question was intended to go after Klan members and other white southerners who tried to intimidate and terrorize now-free Black people away from voting. Interesting how history rhymes.

And also interesting, and horrifying, just how integral violence was to Trump’s conspiracies to steal the election and overturn the very Republic in order to seize power.

In 2016, almost 63 million Americans failed a basic test of civic responsibility and wisdom when, with the help of a broken and archaic Electoral College, they elevated Donald Trump, a reality TV show star, professional wrestling heel, confirmed sexual assaulter and failed casino owner to the White House over Hillary Clinton, one of the most accomplished, experienced, and distinguished public servants in recent American history.

In 2020, some 74 million Americans failed their second test of civic responsibility and wisdom when they voted for Trump again. This time they made the same decision with the experience and hindsight of Trump's two impeachments, demonstrated mental unwellness, democide via the COVID pandemic, white supremacy and betrayal of the nation's interests at home and abroad.

In 2024, the American people will be faced with a third test of their civil responsibility, wisdom and collective intelligence. The future of the country as a democracy governed by the rule of law and the Constitution is almost literally on the ballot.

The saga of North Carolina state Rep. Tricia Cotham (R) is a strange one: She was a vocally pro-choice Democrat who revealed in 2015 that she’d had a medically necessary abortion, then won her old seat in November 2022 only to defect to the Republican party in April and give the GOP a supermajority that they used to pass an abortion ban. Now, new reporting shows that local Republicans urged her to run as a Democrat—fooling voters in her very blue Charlotte-area district into thinking she strongly supported abortion rights—and were planting the seeds for her party switch for months.

On June 8, 2023, the United States Supreme Court issued its opinion holding that Alabama’s congressional redistricting scheme likely violated the Voting Rights Act. The state had cleverly (or so it thought) carved out a single Black-majority district, intentionally diluting Black representation in a state where 1 in 4 residents is Black.

Alabama had relied on this same map in the 2022 elections, and given the current makeup of the court, they expected it to be rubber-stamped. But in a surprise 5-4 ruling, the court agreed with a lower court decision finding that map to be discriminatory. They ordered Alabama to draw up a new map.

The last thing Alabama’s Republican-dominated legislature expected was to have their racist redistricting map repudiated by some of their own right-wing friends on the United States Supreme Court. The ruling was even more shocking as the court’s opinion was authored by Chief Justice John Roberts, who had previously gutted the most significant provisions of the Voting Rights Act in the case of Shelby County v. Holder. So Alabama Republicans huddled together and hours before the deadline produced another map, again containing a single Black majority district.

In other words, they completely ignored the Supreme Court’s ruling, much as they had ignored a much different Supreme Court’s ruling in the 1954 case of Brown v. Board of Education, which ordered that the state’s schools be integrated. As noted by Jane Timm, reporting for NBC news, Republican Gov. Kay Ivey heaped praise on the legislature, declaring it “knows our state, our people and our districts better than the federal courts or activist groups.”

From book bans to restrictions on access to the ballot, recent attacks on Americans’ freedoms illuminate a refrain those on the front lines of the fight for democracy have always known to be true:

All politics is local.

On the local level, school boards, judges, prosecutors, and thousands of other elected officials have been making decisions that affect all of our lives. When we consider the proliferation of white supremacy, misogyny, homophobia and transphobia in American culture, our country would be remiss to ignore just how much power each of these offices holds and the harm caused to Black, brown and other historically-marginalized communities.