OUR PICKS: DEMOCRACY WATCHTrump’s New Threats to American Elections | The Real Reason ICE Agents Wear Masks | Ammon Bundy Is All Alone, and more

Trump Wants to “Nationalize the Voting,” Seeking to Grab States’ Power

Trump, who continues to falsely claim that he won the 2020 election, has baselessly alleged widespread fraud. The Senate’s Republican leader says he does not favor federalizing elections.

Trump’s New Threats to American Elections  (David A. Graham, The Atlantic)
The reasons to worry about election integrity are becoming more urgent.

Trump Had Unusual Call with F.B.I. Agents After Election Center Search  (William K. Rashbaum, Devlin Barrett, and Julian E. Barnes  (William K. Rashbaum, Devlin Barrett, and Julian E. Barnes, New York Times)
Tulsi Gabbard, the director of national intelligence, brokered the call and President Trump directly questioned frontline agents on the inquiry, The Times has learned.

The Real Reason ICE Agents Wear Masks  (Adam Serwer, The Atlantic)
Face coverings may work less to protect federal agents from danger than to make it easier for them to do unconstitutional things.

Ammon Bundy Is All Alone  (Jacob Stern, The Atlantic)
The anti-government militia leader can’t make sense of his allies’ support for ICE violence.
Not long ago, Ammon Bundy was the most famous right-wing militia leader in America. His two armed standoffs with federal agents had made him the face of the Patriot Movement: a loose assemblage of anti-government extremists, Second Amendment maximalists, and more than a few white nationalists. Even some mainstream elements of the Republican Party embraced him as a modern folk hero. But Bundy’s criticism of the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown now threatens to make him a pariah within his own community.
In November, Bundy self-published a long essay titled “The Stranger,” in which he labeled the Trump administration’s treatment of undocumented immigrants a “moral failure.” “To call such people criminals for lacking official permission” to be in the country, he wrote, “is to forget the moral law of God, the historical truth of our own founding, and the Constitutional ideals that continue to define justice.” On a recent livestream following the killing of Renee Good in Minnesota, Bundy told his audience that ICE’s conduct “clearly looks like tyranny.” If the government threatened his family, he said, he would fight back by whatever means necessary.
I spoke with Bundy a few hours after federal immigration agents shot and killed Alex Pretti. “It’s sickening to me,” he told me over the phone, “just to see the parallels of history repeating itself.” (In his November essay, he had compared the administration’s treatment of immigrants to the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II.) He added, “When it comes to the more humanitarian side of it, I think the left has it much more correct than the nationalist right.”

What It Took for George H.W. Bush to Invoke the Insurrection Act  (Julian E. Zelizer, Foreign Policy)
The president’s decision to send troops to Los Angeles received broad national, bipartisan support.
For decades, government reformers committed to the constitutional balance of power have urged Congress to revise the Insurrection Act to provide greater clarity about what constitutes an emergency and the conditions under which a president may invoke this authority. They have also called for clear timetables limiting how long troops could remain deployed without congressional approval, along with stronger oversight mechanisms.
But again and again, Congress has refused to act. The House and Senate have instead relied on presidents to follow a long-standing precedent of caution and restraint before federalizing law enforcement operations anywhere in America.
Now, that caution is gone. The power is in the hands of a president who disregards many of the traditional guardrails that have constrained the use of executive power, even in an era when executive power has been dominant.

We Have Questions About the FBI’s Fulton County Search  (Anna Bower, Eric Columbus, Troy Edwards, Michael Feinberg, Molly Roberts, and Benjamin Wittes, Lawfare)
The administration continues to litigate the 2020 election more than five years later.