Report For Legal Blindness Ny State: Fill & Download for Free

Hello!Great question!We don’t know, do we? Mike Pompeo did his PR tour on the Sunday shows and it didn’t come as a surprise Pompeo blindly defended Trump’s every move, but to do so as the situation in Iran continues to rapidly deteriorate, is definitive proof that there’s no adult in the room with Donald Trump.Pompeo’s appearance on the shows comes only days after the Soleimani’s drone strike. Just think about the number of strategic and legal issues pertaining the deadly attack.First, the legality of the strike itself is in question. Considering launching the strike without Congressional approval requires the presence of an imminent threat, which the White House has refused thus far to identify. And in fact, a correspondent for the NY Times who spoke with intelligence officials claim of evidence suggesting an imminent attack on American targets by Iran to be “razor thin.”1. I’ve had a chance to check in with sources, including two US officials who had intelligence briefings after the strike on Suleimani. Here is what I’ve learned. According to them, the evidence suggesting there was to be an imminent attack on American targets is “razor thin”.— Rukmini Callimachi (@rcallimachi) January 4, 2020But beyond that, team treasonweasel aka the administration, claims that this was done as the means of de-escalation, only to witness the following events take place as a direct result: The U.S.-led coalition has suspended operations against ISIS as resources are reassigned to protect U.S. facilities and personnel. In other words; we can’t fight terrorists because now we have to defend our own interests from retaliation. Cool! Except it’s not, far from it…The Iraqi Parliament has voted to expel U.S. forces from Iraq given that even they weren’t notified that we’d be using their country as a theater to assassinate another country's number two government official. And so we’ve now lost one of our most vital strategic footholds in the Middle East. Moderates have now united with hardliners in Iran, in mourning the death of Soleimani, all but ensuring hardline rule in Iran for the foreseeable future.Footage of Soleimani’s funeral clearly indicated, he was far from unpopular. Missiles have now been fired at U.S. bases near our embassy in Baghdad, Iraq, again putting Americans in immediate danger.A purported cyber attack has been launched on a U.S. Federal depository library website, setting the stage for what may amount to massive, ongoing large scale cyber warfare, that 2016 has already shown us to be vulnerable to. And finally, Iran announced they will no longer be adhering to the 2015 nuclear deal or JCPOA (Joint Comprehensive Plan Of Action) that the European Union was still holding the Iranians to.That means no restrictions on uranium enrichment, no restrictions on the number of centrifuges and no restrictions on R&D, meaning Iran will possibly become a nuclear power. And all of this happened while Trump was on his golf course.To make matters worse, the administration isn’t even trying to contain the fallout from this disastrous decision. For example, Pompeo knows how much controversy surrounding the strike there is. He knows the American public does not think it was justified, especially since it’s looking more and more like we’ll get embroiled in a war with Iran because of it.And if Pompeo really had the proof of an imminent attack that this administration says it has, why wouldn’t he share it? If not with the American people then at least with Democrats and REPUBLICANS in Congress, those who represent the majority of Americans. Why wouldn’t he simply give a justification to prove, since the proof is reportedly there, that the killing of Soleimani was warranted.It is the government’s job to keep us safe and right now the only source that we have is an administration led by a guy who cannot tell the truth if his life depended on it. A guy who wants us to take at face value that there was some imminent attack that they refuse to expand upon while the only effects we’re witnessing is Iran’s vow of retaliation against the United States and rockets being launched at our embassies and soldiers.We are less safe because of what this administration did. Meaning that a government whose job it is to keep us safe and secure, is failing bigly. The fact is while the Republican Party gets off on its insatiable appetite for war, while the Republican Party thinks this will distract from impeachment and they think this will unify the American people against Iran and help Trump going into the next election, none of these things are true.All they show is just how utterly incompetent and unfit for office they are and how much damage they’ve done to this country and the world in just the short time they’ve been in power…Fun fact: Isn’t it grand how Pompeo praises our intelligence agencies now? Particularly since those same agencies for the past three years I might add, have been excoriated, vilified as the Deep State for stating that Russia’s been behind meddling and interfering with our elections?

Let’s see! Ok, those that were caught there will get 20 years prison sentences, and that is just for sedition, trump signed that executive order to cater to his racists that give a 10 year sentence for even graffitiing a state property, remember? That will be used also, so most people will be looking at 30 to 40 years, plea down a bit and get 20! And for those that wore masks:“hey champ, did you commit treason on wednesday?” ☠️ pic.twitter.com/YuOhBxV5cy— shauna (@goldengateblond) January 11, 2021So, what about presidential pardons? Right? Well the only thing that the constitution say about presidential pardons is: “The president can pardon anyone for crimes against the USA, unless he is impeached!”Spoiler, he have now being impeached twice, so Clinton could have his pardons over turned if any politician or judge insisted on it, because he was impeached! It didn’t happen because Clinton wasn’t a drug addict afraid of prison that tried to overthrow the government like Mr Trump did! Right? So, even if trump attempted to pardon these guys, which he won’t! His supporters will now find out what a narcissistic self centered traitor he is! He have done it to everyone else, with the exception of those that could testify against him, but now Flynn and Oliver Stone have to start seriously worrying about their pardons, because they are now invalid, and believe me the DC an NY ciricuit courts are going after them! But here is another thing about pardons, they are for federal crimes only, local charges (which some will be) can not be pardon by the president! And here is another issue, this guy:I have enormous respect for @ltgrusselhonore.This is who you hire when you're not _______ around.Pelosi taps retired military commander, who oversaw the US response to Hurricane Katrina, to oversee probe into security failures during Capitol siege https://t.co/dZjKBA874E— Don Winslow (@donwinslow) January 16, 2021He was sent to Nola during Katrina after black water and local police had been abusing the local black population, he kicked the black water agents out and made the local cops stay either in the precinct on in their patrol cars! He doesn’t mess around! He is in charge of the 25k guardsmen in DC, not pence, not trump, and Nancy Pelosi is in charge of him, not pence, not trump. And here is the “WORSE PART”, he is also in charge of investigating who is complicit in the organizing, financing, logistic and enticing the attack, and he is also investigating politicians, in the White House, senate, house, and local governments. So, right now the leader, the big man that those guys support seem to be nothing, but a lame duck president and Nancy Pelosi is really in charge! He already threw all his supporters under the bus saying that they were either antifa, or criminals! He said his supporters aren’t violent people, they would never use violence, vandalism nor hurt or kill a police officer! And why did he say that? Because his attorney told him to disassociate himself from them to escape prosecution! Your chosen one right? You would die for him, right? How about spending 20 years in prison for him? It’s better than dying, isn’t it?Now, let’s move to 2024, as the OP questioned, according to the facts above most of those charged will probably be in prison still, you make a deal, get 15 to 20 and after good behavior you get out, let’s say in 7 years, most will still have another few years to go in their sentences! But, what about the all powerful, the Stable Genius, the evangelical’s “Chosen One”, the “Leader”, the “Strong Man, the “Best Deal Maker Ever”, the Best “Negotiator”, blah, blah, blah…It seems that as soon as the senate comeback the democrats will have the tie braking vote, and although it takes 2/3 to remove him(there will be no need for that, his term will be over) it only take a one vote majority to strip him of his rights to ever hold office again! And I’m pretty sure that after January 6th the democrats and the biden administration, and even the republicans will make sure to prosecute him for every single crime they can find, and there are a lot, he have 3.700 conflicts of interest while in office, him and his family robbed this country blind, as did the republicans and those in his administration! But for the sake of arguments let’s say that even after they threatened to hang pence, shoot biden, kill pelosi, Schumer, AOC, and others they may decide to say, ok we will not prosecute them for the theft, the sedition, the treason, try to steal an election, the lies, threaten there lives, etc… for the sake of argument ok!Well, here is trump and his family’s real problem, the reason why he was willing to betray his country, lie about the elections, the democrats and at the end even his own party, the reason how come they were willing to send their own supporters to kill, or die or go to prison for life, here it is:Here's why the #MelaniaTapes are out:The Trump inauguration is under federal investigation for making massive payments to the Trumps and possible money laundering. They raised $107 million that just disappeared. https://t.co/Ahy45KiG6O— Swing Left (@swingleft) October 2, 2020Melania is about to be indicted for embezzling 107 million dollars from the inauguration in 2016! They tried to blame pascale, his former campaign manager, that’s what they do, when there is a problem they throw those who work for them under the bus, but promise to pardon them or pay their legal fees! Ny is also indicting pascale, ivanka, melania and Kushner for embezzling another 170 million from the inauguration:https://t.co/TiiGRk3stj— DarthSpader (@DarthSpader747) September 8, 2020And a judge ordered trump, his three children to also go to trial on the internet scam they were running from the White House in 2017:A federal judge allowed a federal lawsuit accusing @realDonaldTrump, his three eldest children and his company of collaborating with a fraudulent marketing scheme to prey on investors to proceed.#TrumpCrimeFamilyhttps://t.co/7Lu4u0PtGs— Democratic Coalition (@TheDemCoalition) May 20, 2020Then there is the pyramid scheme case, going to trial also:A lawsuit alleging President Trump carried out fraud by promoting a pyramid scheme will go ahead after a federal judge dismissed his legal counsel’s request for a stay. https://t.co/Fy4KXYRefB— Citizens for Ethics (@CREWcrew) May 20, 2020Then there is this case in dc:Trump Campaign Is Secretly Funneling $360K A Year Eric Trump’s wife via a private company run by the president’s campaign manager.Gawd! The corruption is never ending! I wonder how many hours a day tRUMP spends thinking of ways to cheat or steal! https://t.co/9Pvwz4Bt9R— ✨Resister Chic🧚🏼 (@ResisterChic) April 18, 2020Then there is this investigation:The payments went to a company called Pursuit Venture LLC. Corporate records in Delaware, where it was formed in late 2018, list Trump Jr as its principal. The company also received $11k from Matt Gaetz's campaign in October for "supporter gifts" https://t.co/BlUoL380dP— Lachlan Markay (@lachlan) December 4, 2020have a nice day pic.twitter.com/SbDh6EyEaJ— REESUS PATRIOT™💙 (@ReesusP) December 4, 2020This are all of the ags investigating them, and ny state alone in getting ready to indict them on 67 charges jan 21st:Let me just put this tweet out...🚨🚨🚨🚨🚨🚨🚨🚨🚨🚨🚨🤣😂🤣😂🤣😂😂😂🤣🤣😂New York Attorney General, Letitia James has 67 Trump indictments ready to be unsealed on January 21, 2021. pic.twitter.com/agElLEpMfp— Belkiss Obadia💎 (@BelkissObadia) December 10, 2020And here is the ny Ag herself explaining it:#TrumpCrimeFamilyForPrison2021You will not escape Justice! pic.twitter.com/UJBGNPgQEG— Katie Johnson2020 (@KatieJohnson214) December 19, 2020And these are some of the charges:And there are more like two rape/defamation cases, and this one is going to court as soon as he is out of the White House:#BARR GETS BLOCKED re RAPE CASE#DOJ Blocked in BID TO SHIELD #TRUMP From RAPE Defamation SuitThe DOJ tried to intervene to represent President Trump against the lawsuit by the writer E. Jean Carroll, who claims he lied when he denied raping her#MOG https://t.co/KmyHnh8JlW— Michael O'Grady (@mog7546) October 27, 2020And she saved the dress with his dna, so he just have to provide his dna and prove his innocence! Right? He tied the case in court for 4 years on our dime, and now the judge say he have to pay for his own attorney and provide his dna!Scotland is about to charge him and his resort with money laundering:Scotland’s First Minister Nicola Sturgeon says Trump will face “due accountability” in Scotland if evidence emerges that his Scottish golf courses have been used for money laundering and fraud.https://t.co/SeI2u9B8pz— 💃PissOffTrump💃 (@PissOffTrumpkin) November 22, 2020And here is the kicker, 90% of these are state charges, but some are federal charges and NY just signed a bill into law that make his presidential pardon useless there:BREAKING ⚖️⚖️⚖️New York Governor Andrew Cuomo signed a bill today that would allow the state to pursue charges against people who have received a presidential pardon — a law seen as a direct shot at Donald Trump. https://t.co/xOYr7dar3y— 𝙰𝚗𝚊𝚋𝚎𝚕𝚕𝚎 (@DemocracyJourno) October 16, 2019Worse yet, is the fact that SDNY attorney’s office just brought in the Deutsch bank General manager involved with several cases involving the trumps with tax evasion, money laundering and others and hired expansive forensic accountants, also brought in his former attorney that he also threw under the bus, and several other people to testify, and the cases in ny could involve both Flynn and roger stone, also rendering their pardons useless!Looking forward to a very happy 2021 for the American people when justice will be servedManhattan DA intensifies Trump financial fraud probe, Deutsche Bank and Aon employees summoned for questioning | Boing Boinghttps://t.co/uUStAsiGtI— Lillith Alexander (@lillithmind) December 23, 2020And there are several other money laundering cases involving his children, all three of them, and kushner! Both jr and Eric have pleaded the fifth in cases involving 6 properties, there are also 30 cities suing him for not paying them up to 1/2 million dollars for each of his rallies! There are dozens, and all of these cases with the exception of the cities these crimes were committed prior to him becoming president, and he kept them tied up in court then became president and immune from prosecution! But while at the White House he committed many more crimes, robbed the country, sold state secrets to several dictators, even Iran and russia(that we know of so far) some how got in our cyber space fairly easily! So, as to 2024 he won’t be able to run, and he will probably be in prison for the crimes above! He is also 1 billion dollars in debt and all banks just dropped him and all loans are due, his assets aren’t worth 1/3 of what he owes on financing! The man is a con artists that have been living off of robbing us, and his supporters(that was why he kept taking donations from 2015 until now), he is now asking for 2 billion dollars to build his library, that is what he does, he and his family are all grifters! Look at this:EXCLUSIVE: Jared Kushner helped create a Trump campaign shell company that secretly paid the president's family members and spent $617 million in reelection cash, a source tells Insider https://t.co/WE8YlMp6iY— Politics Insider (@Politicsinsider) December 18, 2020They stopped paying for the MAGA2020 campaign in June, and kushner created a shell company where by the Election Day, 617 million dollars were diverted to that account(their private account), and the 205 million dollars they got since the election for the “stop the steal!” That’s 822 million stollen from his campaign and supporters, and now he is asking for another 2 billion for the library! These people are vile, he lied to his supporters because even though he destroyed the USPS, the gop used gerrymandering, voter suppression(where in Harris county in Houston, there was only one site for 4 million mostly minorities to vote, and it was 37 miles out of town in the football stadium, for low income people that over 2 million don’t own cars and no buses go there), let covid run amok in the hopes that people wouldn’t show up, simple genocide and there are now 400k dead because he thought it would help him win an election! And when he lost, he sent his supporters based on lies to attack the capitol while the coward went back to the White House with his family and then sold them out, knowing that they would get arrested, hurt, killed or kill someone! A pathetic, cowardly, dumb, vile human being afraid to face his crimes and willing to destroy the country for his cowardice! Many of those that went there were getting paid through his gang stalking program, but many were just people that really believed all his lies, no matter how utterly ridiculous they maybe, either way he doesn’t care, the only thing that matters to him is him!Don’t know who this dude is but he broke that shit DOWN!! Listen especially the ones that need to hear it!! pic.twitter.com/gSZno2yaRh— Leslie Jones 🦋 (@Lesdoggg) January 17, 2021This a good message from an American to these people, me… I have been a target of his trailer park, low class, racist, border line idiots for the past 4 years so I really have no sympathy for any of them, I’m from the believe that if you support a vile idiot like this either for money, or ignorance, that’s your problem, you must agree with their corruption, racism, dishonesty, habitual lying, brutality and apathy, so I have none! We get what we get for our choices! Hopefully, i’m wrong and all of these judges were wrong also, and trump will be your president in 2024, and all his racist idiots will do like the kkk and go back under the rocks they came from and come out in all his glory in 2024, but if the information above is correct(I know it is), trump will be in prison or fighting litigation, broke and most of his supporters that committed treason and sedition, will still be in prison! Ignorance is truly bliss, but only to the ignorant, and by next year we will have the prove of whom they are! Karma man! You must be really dumb to come out and threaten the life of the president, the Vice President and some of the most powerful people in this country, for God’s sake agree with them or not they are the Elected leaders, elected democratically! The 2016 election was the most fraudulent one, reality winner is still in prison for producing the proof that russia and Israel attempted to get in the voting machines of, 24 states and actually were successful in 7, and 5 of them were swing states! Here is what the judge that read the unreducted Muller report said about Bill Barr:Judge Gleason Told Bill Barr He's a Hopeless Hack Serving a Hopeless Crook https://t.co/BeX6EBsSIQ— The Ghost of Lindsey Graham's Past (@PogoChrestman) June 11, 2020He said Barr have no candor (called him a liar), that lied about the report to protect trump! And even though democrats went out on the streets and got beaten down by police, non tried to attack the capitol building, hang politicians, kill police officers, and then waited 4 years and voted, many being targeted by the most corrupt and racist police we have seeing for a long time!‘You’re not going to silence our voice’ — Filmmaker @thematthewcooke offered this comprehensive and passionate takedown of Republican hypocrisy pic.twitter.com/X4pNLLy9It— NowThis (@nowthisnews) January 10, 2020Evangelicals, specially the white ones that sold out to this false profit to rob us will have some dues to pay also!

This is not a short story, so this will not be a short answer. That’s just a fair warning. This is going to be long. I hope, however, that if you have any genuine interest in this question, you’ll take the time to read it.Seriously, this is long. You have been warned.The first important thing to be aware of is that both political parties have gone through substantial changes both in their ideologies and in the coalitions of voters who support them. Political scientists call these changes realignments; since the Civil War, there have been at least three major realignments which have, collectively, dramatically transformed both the Democratic and Republican parties. The particular change addressed in this question has to do with BOTH the changes to the Democratic Party AND corresponding changes to the Republican Party over the last 150 years.Most people have trouble with the idea that political parties can change so much. They think the party they are a member of now has always been EXACTLY the same and always stood for the same issues that it does today. This is simply untrue. While the labels “liberal” and “conservative” were not used in the 19th century the way they are used today (the modern meanings of those terms in American politics developed during the 20th century), if we were to retroactively apply those labels to the political parties of the 1860s, then the Republicans would easily be the more “liberal” party and the Democrats the more “conservative” party.The Democratic Party was the older of the two political parties; it was established in the 1820s by Andrew Jackson (really through the organizational genius of Martin Van Buren, who ran Jackson’s 1828 election campaign and served as his second-term Vice President and eventual successor.) It had been assembled from fragments of the old Democratic-Republican, or Jeffersonian Republican, party, which had finally collapsed during the election of 1824. Its original opponents were the Whig Party. There were both Northern and Southern Whigs, but the party was never very well organized and fell apart between 1850 and 1854. The Democratic Party, meanwhile, was very well organized, and developed a large national constituency in every region of the country.In 1854, the Republican Party was established as an anti-slavery party. Because it was not socially acceptable to be openly anti-slavery in the South at this time, the Republican Party did not exist in Southern states at all for many years.But… and here’s the first real key point in understanding the answer to this question: there was always a divide between Northern and Southern Democrats. This split came out into the open in 1860, when the party could not agree on a single presidential candidate; Northern Democrats nominated Stephen Douglas, who was sort of vaguely anti-slavery in the most moderate sense of the term but who had a record working with the South on a number of issues related to slavery in the past, while Southern Democrats nominated the much more openly pro-slavery John C. Breckinridge. The split in the Democratic Party (along with an attempt by some former Whigs to create a third party around the moderately pro-slavery John Bell) is what made Republican candidate Abraham Lincoln’s victory possible in the election of 1860.Map Source: United States presidential election of 1860 | United States governmentIt was Southern Democrats who pushed for secession and led the Confederacy during the Civil War. Some Northern Democrats opposed secession in principle, but many others pushed for peace by granting the Confederacy its independence (these were commonly known as “Copperheads.”)When the Civil War was over, the Democratic Party had to reunify itself to compete with the Republicans. The Republican Party tried to build a Southern constituency around transplanted Northerners (“carpetbaggers,” as they were known) and black voters. For a variety of reasons outside the scope of this already-too-long answer, this was only successful for a time. By the late 1870s, most Southern states were back under the control of Southern Democrats, who used violence and intimidation as well as measures like literacy tests and poll taxes to block blacks from voting. The “Solid South” arose in the aftermath of Reconstruction, with Democrats controlling all aspects of Southern politics for the next 90 to 100 years.But to maintain national influence, the Democratic Party had to reunify its Northern and Southern wings. The Southern wing was controlled by rural Southern whites who were overwhelmingly Protestant and whose main concern was limiting federal interference in Southern affairs so that the system of segregation they had begun to establish would remain secure. They adopted a “states rights” and “small government” philosophy because if the federal government’s powers were limited and the rights of the states “protected” from federal interference, then Southern states would be free to maintain the Jim Crow system with no interference. But the Northern Democratic party was increasingly becoming an urban party dominated by immigrants and poor workers, many of whom were Roman Catholic, Jewish or Eastern Orthodox Christian. This seemed to be a poor fit for a coalition with rural Protestant whites in the South.But the Northern Democratic Party was made up of a lot of Irish and German immigrants, for whom alcohol played a significant cultural role. The Republican Party had embraced the idea of Prohibition in the late 19th century. This was the bridge between Northern and Southern Democrats; Northern Democrats wanted a smaller, weaker federal government so it would not attempt to restrict or prohibit the sale of alcohol, while Southern Democrats wanted a smaller, weaker federal government so it would not infringe on segregation in the South. Northern Democrats were basically saying, “The federal government needs to stay out of our lives and let us drink if we want,” and Southern Democrats were basically saying, “The federal government needs to stay out of our lives and let us enforce segregation if we want.” This was an alliance that held for a while. Northern Democrats didn’t really care very much about segregation because it did not exist in the North, and up through 1910 about 90% of the black population lived in the South so it was seen as a Southern problem. So Northern Democrats were willing to turn a blind eye to segregation in the South — actually that gives them too much credit, as they didn’t really have a problem with segregation at all and were willing to support Southern positions on racial issues in the interests of maintaining their coalition.But then something changed. Blacks started moving North.From World War I through the late 1960s, the “Great Migration” occurred. During this time period about half of the black population moved out of the South and settled in the North.The Great Migration (1915-1960)And they settled mainly in big cities — where the Democratic Party was already dominant. In the absence of formal voting restrictions in Northern states, and without the total control of state governments that they enjoyed in the South which had enabled them to pass such restrictions, Northern Democrats had to make room for black voters or risk losing power.So they did. And the relationship between the two factions of the Democratic Party began to fray again. In the 1930s, during the Great Depression, President Franklin Roosevelt did nothing to interfere with segregation in the South because he could not afford to alienate Southern Democrats who remained an important part of his coalition. However, when he created New Deal relief and work programs to aid the legions of unemployed during the Depression, he required that benefits and pay be equal for black and white workers. This helped ease the economic hardship of the growing Northern black population and hastened their movement toward the Northern wing of the Democratic Party.At the same time, within the Republican Party, there was a new conservative movement brewing in response to the New Deal. This new conservatism was a minority within the Republican Party at first, as the party had been pushed toward the political center by its crushing electoral defeats in 1932, 1936 and 1940. But it was focused on a critique of the New Deal that focused on a kind of small-government ideology that had been reminiscent of some ideas percolating in the Democratic Party for decades. The Republican Party had in the past been internally divided on the role of government in American society; Theodore Roosevelt, a Progressive Republican, pushed to expand government regulatory power in the early 1900s, while Calvin Coolidge, a conservative Republican, had urged a rollback of that regulatory power in the 1920s. In the 1940s and 1950s, moderate Republicans (sometimes called “Rockefeller Republicans” after moderate NY governor Nelson Rockefeller) dominated the Republican Party, and looked to make peace with the New Deal. But a conservative rebellion was growing under their noses.Meanwhile, back in the Democratic Party, in 1946, Harry Truman, who had become President when FDR died in 1945, created a special presidential commission to investigate Civil Rights abuses throughout the country.To Secure These RightsIn doing so, Truman was acknowledging what would become a growing political problem for Democrats: their Northern wing increasingly received support from black voters, which pushed Northern Democrats toward federal intervention on civil rights. Northern Democrats were also more willing to embrace the activist government approach of the New Deal. This put pressure on Truman to take action. When his commission returned its report in 1947, detailing the violence and legalized discrimination that Southern blacks, in particular, had to live with on a day-to-day basis, Truman decided to take action. When he ran for re-election in 1948, he pushed for the Democratic Party to include a plank on its national platform calling for an end to segregation.This drove the Southern wing of the party insane. The Southern wing remained more conservative, and still embraced small-government, states’ rights ideology as a means of protecting segregation. When Truman called for an end to segregation, 8 southern delegations walked out of the Democratic National Convention. They announced the creation of a third party, the States’ Rights Democratic Party, better known as the Dixiecrats, and nominated South Carolina governor Strom Thurmond as their candidate.Map Source: United States presidential election of 1948 | United States governmentThis was a return to the open split between the Northern and Southern wings of the Democratic Party that we had last seen in 1860.When Truman won re-election in 1948 he took few concrete actions on civil rights in his second term (his most famous act on civil rights, desegregating the armed forces, was done before the 1948 election) and the Dixiecrats largely returned to the Democratic Party, but the fissure between the two wings was clearly there now, and would only get larger.In the 1950s, the conservative movement in the Republican Party grew in strength as conservatives like William F. Buckley, Jr. became frustrated at Eisenhower’s moderate policies and the continued control of the Rockefeller Republicans over the direction of the party. Buckley founded the National Review to provide a forum for conservative ideas to gain influence within the Republican Party. In 1957, Buckley authored an editorial in the National Review about the Civil Rights movement, titled “Why the South Must Prevail.”In it, Buckley says, “The central question that emerges — and it is not a parliamentary question or a question that is answered merely by consulting a catalogue of the rights of American citizens, born equal — is whether the White community in the South is entitled to take such measures as are necessary to prevail, politically and culturally, in areas where it does not predominate numerically? The sobering answer is Yes — the White community is so entitled because, for the time being, it is the more advanced race.”Now, in fairness to Mr. Buckley, later in life he would recant these views. But this is not about his personal views; what was happening here was a coherent strategy on the part of conservative intellectual leaders in the Republican Party to find common cause with conservative Democrats in the South. Conservatives like Buckley wanted “small government” in part because they believed in a kind of economic freedom based on individualism and they thought the New Deal and the expansion of government power that came with it had undercut that ideal. Southern Democrats wanted “small government” because they did not want interference by the federal government on issues of racial equality. What mattered is that they both wanted “small government.” The basis of an alliance —basically the same alliance that had kept the Northern and Southern wings of the Democratic Party together for decades after the Civil War — had been found, although it would be a while before it was fully realized. In the meantime, conservatives like Buckley started speaking out in defense of “states’ rights,” a term which had been largely the exclusive province of Southern Democrats up to that time, and the defense of states’ rights became part of conservative Republican ideology.This by itself was remarkable considering that the term “states’ rights” originated in the 19th century as Southern Democrats’ way of defending against interference in their “domestic institutions” by a Republican-led federal government. Yet now it was becoming part of the conservative Republican lexicon.In 1960, John F. Kennedy, a Northern Democrat, was elected President, and he ran on a platform that promised to do more to address civil rights. He was slow to engage on this issue once he took office, because he had narrowly won in 1960 and was fearful of alienating Southern Democrats in advance of his re-election campaign. But matters would force his hand; as civil rights protests drew violent reactions from white Southerners and from law enforcement in the South, Kennedy was forced to weigh in. When peaceful protesters in Birmingham, Alabama were set upon by police with high-pressure fire hoses and attack dogs, and the results were captured on TV and broadcast around the world, in April of 1963, John F. Kennedy promised to submit a new Civil Rights bill to Congress that would overturn segregation once and for all.In a roundabout way, this promise got Kennedy killed.Kennedy’s administration was working on a Civil Rights bill in 1963. This alienated Southern Democrats whose support he badly needed to get re-elected. So in November of 1963, one year before the election, Kennedy launched his re-election campaign with a series of campaign events in the South, to shore up his political support there. The first trip was to Texas, and included a stop in Dallas on November 22, 1963. Kennedy was not killed because of civil rights, but he WAS in Texas that day because of concerns over how support for Civil Rights reform would affect his support in the South.After Kennedy’s death, Lyndon Johnson became president. Johnson was a Southern Democrat, but he broke with the Southern wing of the Democratic Party, calling Civil Rights reform “an idea whose time had come,” and he championed the bill Kennedy had promised to pass before his death. It passed as the Civil Rights Act of 1964. It passed with a coalition of Northern Democrats and moderate Republicans from the “Rockefeller” wing of the GOP. Southern Democrats mostly voted against it.The night after Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act, he is alleged (though this has never been confirmed) to have said words to the effect that he had just delivered the South to the Republican Party for a long time to come.Also voting against the Civil Rights Act was one prominent Republican Senator, Barry Goldwater of Arizona. Goldwater argued that while he found segregation morally reprehensible, he did not believe the proposed bill was Constitutional because he did not think the federal government could prohibit discrimination in public accommodations or employment. He had supported previous Civil Rights legislation in 1957, but that had been a much more limited bill that had not directly addressed segregation. Goldwater presented his opposition as being based solely around Constitutional principles, but it’s worth noting that the one of the main objectives of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was to end racial discrimination in public accommodations — segregation — and employment, so he opposed the core of the legislation itself.Regardless, a few months after casting his vote, Goldwater, who was from the conservative faction of the Republican Party, defeated, among other candidates, New York governor Nelson Rockefeller, the poster child for the moderate faction of the party, for the Republican Presidential nomination in 1964.Goldwater lost in a landslide, with Lyndon Johnson winning 61% of the popular vote and 489 electoral votes. BUT… since the Civil War, Democratic candidates had pretty much always won every Southern state in presidential elections. (The one previous exception was in 1928, when some of the “upper South” plus Florida went for Herbert Hoover against Democrat Al Smith, but this was mainly because Smith was a Catholic and the Southern wing of the Democratic Party was strongly anti-Catholic.) But here was Goldwater, winning only 6 states, but five of them were in the Deep South — all five were states that had not voted Republican since the end of Reconstruction.Map source: How has your state voted in the past 15 elections?So the “Solid South” was showing cracks, and a candidate who had voted against the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and which came from the same wing of the party as conservatives like Buckley who had been looking to adopt the states’ rights language of Southern Democrats as part of their new conservative ideology, was the one able to exploit those cracks.This was not lost on Republicans.In 1968, Richard Nixon was the Republican nominee. And Nixon noticed the split in the Democratic Party seemed to be widening. Some Democratic members of Congress, notably Strom Thurmond, the Senator from South Carolina who had been a Democrat and had been the “Dixiecrat” candidate against Truman in 1948, switched to the Republican Party. Alabama governor George Wallace left the Democratic Party to create the pro-segregation American Independent Party, and won 5 Southern states and 46 electoral votes in 1968. Nixon, meanwhile, won the upper South, including Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina and Tennessee. The South was now up for grabs:Map source: United States presidential election of 1968 | United States governmentAnd so was born Nixon’s “Southern Strategy”: a coherent and deliberate plan to permanently realign the South into the Republican Party. One of its architects was Nixon’s political strategist Kevin Phillips, who published a book in 1969 titled “The Emerging Republican Majority.” In it, he argued that the Republican Party could appeal to Southern whites who were angry over desegregation and working-class Northern whites who believed, or could be led to believe, that the social welfare programs Johnson had championed as part of his “Great Society” had basically rewarded lazy black people at the expense of hardworking whites who earned too much to benefit from these programs. These groups were angry at what they saw as liberal government overreach and were also angry at the public unrest and protests against the Vietnam War. Nixon called these voters the “Silent Majority.” And by appealing to them, often in racially coded terms, the Republican Party could build a permanent majority. The Republican Party, the party of Lincoln and emancipation, would deliberately abandon black voters to pursue this path.As Phillips wrote in his book, “Substantial Negro support is not necessary to National Republican victory in light of the 1968 election returns. Indeed, Negro-Democratic mutual identification was a major source of Democratic loss — and Republican or American Independent Party profit — in many sections of the nation.”So over time, the split between the Northern and Southern wings of the Democratic Party, first exposed back in 1860, became too wide to bridge. Southern conservatives stopped thinking of themselves as Democrats and started thinking of themselves as Republicans, as Republican conservatives shaped their ideology to appeal to them and embraced “states rights” as part of small-government conservatism. The segregationists and yes, KKK members who had once been part of the core constituency of the Democratic Party abandoned that party in the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s, as the Northern wing pushed Civil Rights reform and as Republicans looked to capitalize on Democratic alienation of the South over Civil Rights. And today, the South is solidly Republican, as it was once solidly Democratic.And if you read all the way to the end of this, I thank you.