Episode 1: Power Without Accountability

Everybody believes in accountability until it applies to their own side.

In this episode of Renewing Democracy, Jeff Sites looks at three stories connected by the same troubling pattern: leaders creating a crisis, ignoring the warning signs, and demanding more power. We examine the Trump administration’s failed attempts to obtain sensitive voter data, the record deployment of the USS Abraham Lincoln, and Ohio Issue 3’s push to place an existing photo ID requirement into the state constitution.

Different stories. Same question. Who pays the price when those in power get it wrong?

Transcript

Copy Transcript Copied

SPEAKER_00 0:02

Democracy doesn't disappear overnight. It erodes one broken promise, one abuse of power, and one unanswered lie at a time. I'm Jeff Saites, an Army veteran, former congressional candidate, and your host, This is Renewing Democracy, a podcast about political accountability, the people affected by government decisions, and what it will take to put country before party. Let's get started. Right up until accountability applies to their side. This week, three stories show us what happens when power stops listening. The courts say no. The administration keeps pushing for voter data. Military families say sailors are breaking down. The president says their deployment was not long enough. Nine months. And here in Ohio, politicians want to amend our constitution to require something state law already requires. Different stories, same political instinct, create a crisis, ignore the warning signs, and demand more power. So topic one, 21 losses, and they are still coming. When a president loses the same argument in court 21 times, the real story is no longer the legal case. The story is why is he refusing to stop? Reuters reports that the Trump administration has lost 21 straight court fights this year in an effort to obtain state voter rolls. Why? These were not 21 rulings from one partisan judge. The losses came from judges appointed by presidents of both parties. The Justice Department has sued more than two dozen states seeking voter files that can include birth dates and partial social security numbers. So what's their argument? The administration says it needs the information to identify non-citizens on voter rolls and enforce election laws. Eight, accurate voter rolls matter. Only eligible citizens should vote. That part is not controversial. But evidence matters too. Reuters found only one hundred and twenty-nine federal prosecutions for non-citizen voting since the federal law was enacted in nineteen ninety-six across the entire country across three decades. Many of these cases involve confusion or mistakes, not an organized conspiracy. You QAnon people. The Constitution gives states the primary role for administration administrating elections. Sorry, administering elections. Federal judges have repeatedly said existing law does not require states to surrender the records being demanded by Trump. That should settle the question unless Congress changes the law. Instead, the administration has appealed many losses, threatening some disaster funding and pursuing new restrictions on mail ballots. Anything to cheat to win. That's the Republican playbook. Think about that leverage. Disaster relief is supposed to help communities recover from floods and storms and fires. It should not become a bargaining chip in a dispute over election records. One federal appeals court involved in the Cincinnati base sixth circuit, which is about two hours from my house, which upheld dismissal of the administration's case against Michigan. This fight is not remote from Ohio. It is moving through the federal courts that serve our region. So that is the contradiction. The party that spent decades preaching states' rights now wants Washington to assemble sensitive voter information from the states. Imagine that. And I guess law and order went out the window too with states' rights. And it is happening less than three months, I think it's 84 days now, as I record this, before the midterm elections. I cannot tell you what is in Donald Trump's mind because his mind is gone, but I can tell you the political consequences. If Republicans win, he can claim the pressure protected the election. If Republicans lose, he can claim that the states hid something from him. Either way, suspicion becomes the product. A democracy cannot survive if elections integrity, if election integrity means one side gets to declare every law suspicious before the votes are even cast. Demand clean voter rolls. Demand proof. Demand legal authority. We can all we can do all of those things at the same time. I have to show an ID to vote in Ohio. I have done this for years. And nobody before Trump has ever questioned it. Nobody. Plain and simple. So on to the next topic. Um I kind of said this as not nearly long enough. The president calls himself a champion of the military, and so does the Republican Party. Then military families raise the alarm about the USS Abraham Lincoln, and he tells the sailors they haven't sacrificed enough, Mr. Bone Spurs. The man has no bounds. He gets out of the Vietnam War, I think it's five times, and then he has the audacity to tell these sailors on the USS Abraham Lincoln, who I think has been deployed for nine months, the longest in in history, that they haven't sacrificed enough. So it's the care Abraham Lincoln spent has spent about um two hundred and forty consecutive days at sea during operations connected to the Iran war. A modern day record, right? The carrier has roughly 5,000 sailors on board. Family and lawmakers have raised concerns about mental strain, sanitation, supplies, food, and a lack of port calls. I think they went into Oman once, but nobody was allowed to get off the ship. There have been reports of sailors going overboard or attempting to do so. The Navy says it has not identified an increase in pseudocidal ideation, and we should state that clearly. Those two things can both be true. The Navy disputes the scale of the crisis, and families are still telling us something is wrong. When President Trump was asked about the deployment, he called 250 days, not nearly long enough. Yeah, he can't get away from Mar-Lago for a week. And you expect these sailors and families to be apart for more than 240 days. The answer is not toughness, it is distance from human cost of command. It's sailors yearning to go home to their families that they haven't seen in 240 days. But I still got to go back to the states for 30 days on leave. But nobody joins the military expecting um comfort or a predictable schedule. You know, even though I was on two days on post patrolling as an MP and then or sorry, two weeks on post patrolling as an MP, and then two weeks out in the field. But leadership has responsibilities too. Define the mission, supply the force, protect readiness, listen to the families, because families and and the soldiers are one unit. You know, if you make the soldiers and the families happy, readiness goes up. And then bring people home when the mission allows. This should have been planned out months in advance, but we all know good old Pete, he can't find his way around anywhere, let alone plan out troop rotations and things like that. United States has now been fighting Iran for five months. Congress has passed resolutions directing the president to halt unauthorized hostilities, yet the fighting continues. Why? Because Trump got into a war that he has no way of getting out of. He has no clue. The House vote on June in July was 214 to 208. Four Republicans joined Democrats. It was a rare bipartisan warning that Congress cannot surrender its constitutional war powers simply because challenging a president is politically uncomfortable. I don't know what everybody's afraid of of this president. Congress, you need to do something. And I'm talking to the Republicans because they can control it. They control it. The resolution has not ended the war, and Trump has only escalated it. But it exposes the central failure. Americans are being asked to accept an expanding military commitment without a clear public definition of victory or a credible path home. Jim Jordan told A Lima Station, my hometown, hometown stations, this week that America needs to finish the mission. No kidding, Jim. He actually said something worth saying. Did you find your jacket yet? Fine. What is the mission? What's the mission? What does finished look like? What is the cost? Because our deficit is ballooning out of control. And who authorized an open-ended war? Not Congress, who has the responsibility of declaring war. Not the president. The president has to ask Congress. Congress says okay. Those are not anti-military questions. They are questions elected leaders owe the people wearing the uniforms. Supporting the troops is easy when it means standing for the anthem or posting a flag. Real support means telling the truth about operational strain, mental health, family separation, and political decisions that keep deployments going. And remember, he said when he was running for president, I want to end all these wars. And yet he's gone into Venezuela and Iran. A commander-in-chief does not prove strength by demanding endless endurance from the troops who cannot publicly argue back. Because he is the commander-in-chief. So the bottom line is strength is accepting responsibility for the mission and the people ordered to carry it out. So topic three, Ohio issue three solves a problem already solved. Ohio Republicans want to change the Ohio state constitution to require photo ID for voting. Here's the catch. Ohio already requires photo ID for voting, you idiots. I show it every fricking time I go to the polls. Every time. So why? Because you can placate the president and all the MAGA crowd. Oh my god, all these other people are voting. What are we gonna do? Idiots. Issue three will appear on Ohio's November ballot. But you know something? Even if the people say no, we don't want it because we already have it, they'll probably do the same thing they did with marijuana when Ohioans said, yeah, we want to smoke marijuana. And now they're trying to uh limit that uh vote and make it illegal again. I don't know how they're doing it. I guess they're just like Trump, they don't want to abide by the law. And that is uh Speaker of the House, Huffman, who is from Lima, my hometown. That is the guy that started all the gerrymandering. So, anyways, issue three will appear on Ohio's November ballot. It would place the state's existing in-person voter ID rules into the Ohio Constitution. Okay. Ohio has required photo ID in person since 2023, but I can always remember going to the polls and showing my ID. So I don't know why it says 2023, but it does. Accepted identifications include an unexpired Ohio driver's license or state ID, a U.S. passport, and certain military or veteran identifications. Mail voters can currently verify their identity with the Ohio driver's license or ID number, the last four digits of your social security number, and a copy of an acceptable, acceptable photo identification. According to reporting by Signal Ohio, issue three would create no immediate change in how Ohioans vote. Why do I not believe that? So if it doesn't change things, why amend the Constitution? If we're still required to have voter ID. Riddle me that. I totally get it. Most people show an ID in everyday life, and asking election officials to confirm identity sounds reasonable. You know, we have to keep our elections safe. But the honest ballot debate is not ID or no ID. Ohio already chooses ID. The honest question is whether a rule that already exists belongs in the Constitution. We're changing even the technical detail that could require another statewide vote. Constitutions say established rights, powers, and guardrails. They should not become storage space for whatever the majority party wants to champion on this year. There's also a practical reason for this caution. Election systems change, technology changes, identification documents change. A statute can be debated and updated by elected lawmakers. That's how it works. Constitutional language is deliberately harder to repair. I get that. Locking today's details, detailed rules into the Constitution can turn tomorrow's routine administration fix into a statewide political campaign. And every new hurdle lands hardest on people with the fewest resources. Older voters, low-income voters, people without transportation, voters with disabilities like my brother, and people whose documents do not neatly match. Ohio offers free state IDs, which helps, but free does not erase the time, transportation, paperwork, and the follow-up required to get one. If issue three changes nothing today, then voters deserve a clear explanation of the future problem it is supposed to solve. Do not amend the Constitution because politicians say election integrity and expect the phrase to end the controversy. Ask what changes, who benefits, who bears the burden, and why ordinary legislation is not enough. So the bottom line: a redundant law does not become more necessary just because politicians put it into the Constitution. So three stories, three versions of the same problem. The courts say the federal government has not proved its authority to seize state voter data. So the administration keeps pushing. Military families warn the sailors are under extraordinary strain. So the president tells them, ah, 250 days was not long enough, you idiot. Ohio already acquires voter identification, so politicians ask us to put the same rule in the Constitution. Democracy does not usually disappear in one dramatic moment. It weakens when citizens stop asking for evidence. When Congress stops guarding its power, when courts are treated as obstacles, when the service becomes something politicians praise, but service members are expected to endure in silence. Renewing democracy begins with a simple habit. Make people in power answer the next question. What is your evidence? What is your authority? What is the consequence? And who pays the price if you're wrong? So I'm Jeff Seitz. This is Renewing Democracy, country over party, and accountability for everyone. Thanks for listening to Renewing Democracy. Democracy isn't something we inherit and simply get to keep. It survives only when ordinary people remain informed, involved, and willing to hold power accountable. If this conversation matters to you, share it with someone else. Until next time, stay engaged and keep renewing democracy.