Minor schedule change: I’ll be publishing mailbag responses on Friday instead of today (which means there’s still time to get questions in). I hope everyone has a restful and reflective Juneteenth.
I had the opportunity on Wednesday to chat live with Andrew Weissmann, the former federal prosecutor and legal-affairs commentator, whose new book Liar’s Kingdom proposes ideas, inspired by foreign democracies, for amending our own laws to impose civil or criminal consequences on political candidates who tell Trump-like lies about elections.
Andrew crafted his proposals carefully to pass muster under our Constitution. They are thus meant to serve both as actionable responses to Donald Trump’s ongoing campaign of post-2020 lies, and as realistic prescriptions for discouraging copycats in the future. But the book hit the shelves just a couple weeks before Republicans in California and across the country asserted new false claims of fraud, in the vain hope of overturning the results of the Los Angeles mayoral primary, and installing a defeated GOP candidate on the general election ballot.
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I was reading Liar’s Kingdom as that happened, and borrowed from it heavily in writing this piece, which argues California Democrats should pass a law that would effectively disqualify these election liars from seeking office in the state on future ballots.
