This is where she loses me. We knew all of this behavior even before he won the GOP nomination. They don’t care - or worse, they like it. I’m not even sure if prison time would keep him from having GOP support. The only mechanism for making sure TFG doesn’t run as the GOP nominee in 2024 is the 14th Amendment. Can’t win if you’re not on the ballot.
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January 29, 2022 (Saturday)
I’ve thought a lot lately about Representative Lauren Boebert’s (R-CO) tweet on January 6, 2021, saying, “Today is 1776.”
It’s clear that those sympathetic to stealing the 2020 election for Donald Trump over the will of the majority of Americans thought they were bearing witness to a new moment in our history.
But what did they think they were seeing?
Of course, 1776 was the year the Founders signed the Declaration of Independence, a stunning rejection of the concept that some men are better than others and could claim the right to rule. The Founders declared it “self-evident, that all men are created equal” and that ordinary people have the right to consent to the government under which they live.
But that declaration was not a form of government. It was an explanation of why the colonies were justified in rebelling against the king. It was the brainchild of the Second Continental Congress, which had come together in Philadelphia in May 1775 after the Battles of Lexington and Concord sparked war with Great Britain.
At the same time they were declaring independence, the lawmakers of the Second Continental Congress created a committee to write the basis for a new government. The committee presented a final draft of the Articles of Confederation in November 1777. Written at a time when the colonists were rebelling against a king, the new government decentralized power and focused on the states, which were essentially independent republics. The national government had a single house of Congress, no judiciary, and no executive.
“Each state retains its sovereignty, freedom and independence, and every Power, Jurisdiction and right, which is not by this confederation expressly delegated to the United States,” it read. The organization of the new government was “a firm league of friendship” entered into by the states “for their common defence.”
With the weight of governance falling on the states, the confederation languished. It was not until 1781 that the last of the states got around to ratifying the articles, and in 1783, with the end of the Revolutionary War, the government began to unravel. The Congress could make recommendations to the states but had no power to enforce them. It could not force the states to raise tax money to redeem the nation’s debts, and few of them paid up. Lacking the power to enforce its agreements, the Congress could not negotiate effectively with foreign countries, either, and individual states began to jockey to get deals for themselves.
As early as 1786, it was clear that the government was too decentralized to create an enduring nation. Delegates from five states met in September of that year to revise the articles but decided the entire enterprise needed to be reorganized. So, in May 1787, delegates from the various states (except Rhode Island) met in Philadelphia to write the blueprint for a new government.
The Constitution established the modern United States of America. Rather than setting up a federation of states, it united the people directly, beginning: “We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.”
It corrected the weakness of the previous government by creating a president with explicit powers, giving the government the power to negotiate with foreign powers and to tax (although it placed the power of initiating tax bills in the House of Representatives alone), and creating a judiciary.
Those still afraid of the power of the government pushed the Framers of the Constitution to amend the document immediately, giving us the Bill of Rights that prohibits the government from infringing on individuals’ rights to freedom of speech and religion, freedom from unreasonable searches and seizures, and so on. The catch-all Tenth Amendment stated that “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.”
That reservation of powers to the states created a crisis by the 1830s, when state leaders declared they would not be bound by laws passed in Congress. Indeed, they said, if voters in the states wanted to take Indigenous lands or enslave their Black neighbors, those policies were a legitimate expression of democracy. To defend their right to enslave Black Americans, southern leaders took their states out of the Union after the election of 1860.
In the wake of the Civil War, Americans gave the federal government the power to enforce the principle that all people are created equal. In 1868, they added to the Constitution the Fourteenth Amendment, which declared that “No state shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any state deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.” It gave the federal government—Congress—the power to enforce that amendment.
It seemed that the Fourteenth Amendment would finally bring the Declaration of Independence to life. Quickly, though, state legislatures began to discriminate against the minority populations in their borders—they had always discriminated against women—and the American people lost the will to enforce equality. By the early twentieth century, in certain states white men could rape and murder Black and Brown Americans with impunity, knowing that juries of men like themselves would never hold them accountable.
Then, after World War II, the Supreme Court began to use the due process and the equal protection clauses of the Fourteenth Amendment to overrule discriminatory laws in the states. It ended racial segregation, permitted interracial marriage, gave people access to birth control, permitted reproductive choice, and so on, trying to enforce equality before the law.
But this federal protection of civil rights infuriated traditionalists and white supremacists. They threw in their lot with businessmen who hated federal government regulation and taxation. Together, they declared that the federal government was becoming tyrannical, just like the government from which the Founders declared independence. Since the 1980s, the Republican Party has focused on hamstringing the federal government and sending power back to the states, where lawmakers will have little power to regulate business but can roll back civil rights.
That effort includes rewriting the Constitution itself. In San Diego, California, last December, attendees at a meeting of the American Legislative Exchange Council’s policy conference announced they would push a convention to amend the U.S. Constitution to limit the power and jurisdiction of the federal government, returning power to the states.
ALEC formed in 1973 to bring businessmen, the religious right, and lawmakers together behind legislation. So far, 15 Republican-dominated states have passed legislation proposed by ALEC to call such a convention. In another nine similar states, at least one house has passed such bills, and lawmakers have introduced such bills in 17 other states.
The insurrectionists’ cries of 1776 remind me not of the Founding era, but of 1860. In that time, too, people believed they were creating a new country and recorded their participation. In that time, too, the rebels wanted a country with a weak federal government, so they could be sure people like them would rule forever.
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How often did someone think, say, or write this sentence?
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January 30, 2022 (Sunday)
This will just be a marker to keep the record complete—I need a night off.
Last night, at a rally in Conroe, Texas, former president Trump told supporters that if he runs for president and wins in 2024, he will pardon the January 6 insurrectionists. Observers note that this promise might encourage the bigger fish ensnared by the investigation to keep quiet; Will Bunch of the Philadelphia Inquirer noted that “Trump…is committing a form of obstruction of justice in full public view.” Others note that the promise of pardoning the insurrectionists might well become a litmus test for any Republican candidate in 2024.
That promise of pardons might also be for crimes not yet committed. Trump called for “the biggest protest we have ever had” in New York City, Washington, and Atlanta if the prosecutors “do anything wrong or illegal.” The specificity of the cities he mentioned suggests that the cases against him in New York City, Georgia, and Washington are weighing on his mind. “These prosecutors are vicious, horrible people. They’re racists and they’re very sick—they’re mentally sick,” he said. “They’re going after me without any protection of my rights from the Supreme Court or most other courts. In reality, they’re not after me, they’re after you.”
Observers saw his comments as a call for violence if the various legal cases against him lead to indictments. Crucially, these statements were clearly part of a plan: he did not say them off the cuff but appeared to read them from a teleprompter. It seems likely that as investigators get closer, he is turning to the threat of street violence to try to get them to back off.
It is not clear that will work, since more than 750 people who took to the streets for him in January 2021 are now facing criminal prosecution. Many have blamed him for where they are. It might be hard to rally more people with that history, and it seems that the promise of future pardons might be designed to address that wavering faith.
But Bunch noted that, overlooked by those not attuned to the siren songs of the right, Trump’s use of the word “racist” is a call to white supremacists. Three of the main prosecutors investigating the former president—Fulton County, Georgia, district attorney Fani Willis; New York State attorney general Letitia James; and Manhattan prosecutor Alvin Bragg (who recently took over from Cyrus Vance, Jr.)—are Black. So is Representative Bennie Thompson (D-MS), who chairs the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the U.S. Capitol.
“[I]t’s both alarming and yet utterly predictable that Trump would toss the gasoline of racial allegations onto his flaming pile of grievances, knowing how that will play with the Confederate flag aficionados within the ex-president’s cult,” Bunch wrote. Trump, he said, “is seeking to start a race war.”
But, as a sign of just how tied the Republican Party is to the former president now, on ABC News’s This Week, today, Senator Susan Collins (R-ME) refused to rule out supporting Trump in 2024 despite last night’s incendiary speech.
Collins’s reluctance to offend the former president didn’t do her much good: tonight, in an astounding statement, he referred to her as “Wacky Susan Collins.”
The statement was astounding not because he was insulting a Republican senator.
Referring to bipartisan congressional discussions about clarifying the law to guarantee that no one ever again will argue that the vice president can overturn the results of an election (this is where Collins came up), Trump claimed those discussions themselves proved the plan his team came up with was, in fact, legal. (It is not.) He went on to say: “Mike Pence did have the right to change the outcome and they now want to take that right away. Unfortunately, he didn’t exercise that power, he could have overturned the Election!”
After more than a year of insisting he just wanted to address the problem of voter fraud, which he falsely claimed had stolen the election from him, Trump just came right out and said he wanted to overturn the results of the 2020 election. Former U.S. attorney and legal commentator Joyce White Vance wrote: “This is what prosecutors call guilty knowledge. And also, intent.” CNN’s Jim Acosta was more succinct: he tweeted, “Coup coup for Cocoa Puffs.”
It is unlikely Trump’s admission was a slip. He tends to put out in public potential criminal activity, like the phone call to Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky, which he—not a whistleblower—first told reporters about. Apparently, declaring it openly makes it harder for people to see it as a crime. That he chose to put this out on a Sunday night suggests that he expects bad news this week.
At the very least, it is impossible to imagine that his promise to pardon the January 6 insurrectionists, his call for protests if he is indicted, and his admission that he wanted to overturn the results of the 2020 election will not stir up politics this week.
What will the Republican leaders who have tied themselves to Trump say now that he has openly admitted he was trying to destroy our democracy?
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January 31, 2022 (Monday)
CNN reported tonight that former president Trump had not one but two executive orders prepared to enable his loyalists to seize voting machines after the 2020 election. One authorizing the Pentagon to seize the machines was made public as part of the investigation by the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the U.S. Capitol. Another, authorizing the Department of Homeland Security, has been confirmed to CNN by a number of sources, but is not publicly available.
Shortly after this report, the New York Times reported a story with much more detail, claiming that Trump was directly involved in the plans to seize the machines. The authors talked to “people familiar with the matter [who] were briefed on the events by participants or had firsthand knowledge of them.” That latter description is interesting: someone in Trump’s inner circle is talking to reporters (and the shape of the different elements in the story suggests that person is not necessarily giving an accurate account).
CNN also reported that former vice president Mike Pence’s chief of staff, Marc Short, testified before the January 6 committee last week. Short had been cooperating with the committee, providing documents, and testified after a subpoena. He was with Pence for many of the key moments surrounding the events of January 6.
The committee has asked a judge to adjust document production from lawyer John Eastman’s former employer, Chapman University. Eastman sued to stop a subpoena for 94,000 pages of emails the university agreed to produce, saying that many of them were covered by attorney-client privilege. So a judge ordered him to review them, but he is moving so slowly the committee says he won’t get around to sending the ones between January 4, 2021, and January 7, 2021—the ones the members most want to see—until it’s too late for them to be of use. The judge ordered him to prioritize those days.
Also, campaign finance reports filed today show that former president George W. Bush donated the maximum allowable to Representative Liz Cheney (R-WY), who is vice chair of the January 6 committee, and to Senator Lisa Murkowski (R-AK), who also opposed former president Trump. The fight between establishment Republicans and Trump Republicans continues to simmer, but the muted response today to Trump’s statement last night about overturning the election suggests the establishment is not willing to make a stand in favor of our democratic system if it means losing their base.
In the wake of Trump’s weekend attack on the prosecutors investigating the varying valuations of his properties and his efforts to overturn the election, Fulton County, Georgia, district attorney Fani Willis today asked the FBI to address heightened security concerns.
Otherwise, today’s main news came from the meeting of the United Nations Security Council, where the U.S. ambassador, Linda Thomas-Greenfield, warned of an “urgent and dangerous” situation in Europe as Russian president Vladimir Putin has massed more than 100,000 Russian troops along the border with Ukraine. The Russian representative countered that Russia had indicated no intention of invading Ukraine and the U.S. is fearmongering.
At stake is the concept of sovereignty: will large states have the power to absorb their neighbors into spheres of influence in a system that mirrors that of the Cold War era, or will each state have the right to hold firm borders and determine its own alliances.
The U.S. and the U.K. have said they have prepared a list of “oligarchs close to the Kremlin” who will be hit with sanctions in the case that Russian troops invade Ukraine again. The list includes the family members of those profiting from Putin’s regime, cutting off their ability to funnel illicit money into western democracies.
This is a huge deal. Oligarchs consolidated power in the former Soviet satellite states in the 1990s and moved enormous amounts of illicit money into the U.S. and the U.K.—so much that London is sometimes called “Londongrad.” Recent studies suggest that the influx of that illicit money had undermined democracy, and cleaning it up would almost certainly help to stabilize the systems in the U.S. and the U.K. British foreign secretary Liz Truss said the measures “can target anyone providing strategic support close to Vladimir Putin.”
This threat appears to have worried the Kremlin, whose spokesperson Dmitry Peskov called the proposed measures an illegitimate “outright attack on business.” The head of Russia’s Senate committee for protection of national sovereignty, Andrey Klimov, said that any such sanctions would hurt Britain rather than Russia by hurting the image of the U.K. as a safe haven for investments. Capital would flow out of the U.K. to Hong Kong or Zurich, he warned.
Interviewed by Politico’s Ryan Heath, European Council on Foreign Relations senior fellow Kadri Liik noted that a massive military deployment would be “very badly received” in Russia. Asked if Putin sees Biden as weak, Liik said the opposite: that he has come off as smart. “He’s trying to limit his frontlines. He’s not fighting each and every battle. Plus, Biden is someone who can speak on behalf of the West. During the whole Trump period, there was no one like that.”
In Britain today, Prime Minister Boris Johnson of the country’s Conservative Party faced a serious challenge to his government when a report revealed “failures of leadership and judgment” by Johnson in attending 12 parties that ignored the country’s strict lockdown rules. Johnson had downplayed the events and now that they are confirmed, even much of his own party appears ready to abandon him, appalled that he apparently considered himself above the law. In a leader, one member of Parliament said, “honesty and decency matters.”
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February 1, 2022 (Tuesday)
There is nothing happening tonight that cannot wait until tomorrow. Let’s take the night off and regroup on Groundhog Day…
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Isn’t she aware of the plot of said movie?
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February 2, 2022 (Wednesday)
Today, retired Army Lieutenant Colonel Alexander Vindman sued Donald Trump, Jr.; Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani; as well as Fox News Channel personalities, including Laura Ingraham, for obstructing an official proceeding “by intimidating and retaliating against a key witness.” The lawsuit describes an “intentional, concerted campaign of unlawful intimidation and retaliation against a sitting Director of the National Security Council and decorated military officer…to prevent him from and then punish him for testifying truthfully before Congress during impeachment proceedings against President Trump.”
Their goal, the lawsuit says, was to portray him as disloyal to the United States, a spy, and “a politically motivated ‘leftist’ within the military who was insubordinate and even broke the law.” In addition to the effect on Vindman himself, it said, the attacks “left a stain on our democracy.”
And so, on Groundhog Day, we have come full circle.
Vindman was a key witness in the first House of Representatives impeachment hearing in 2019. A Ukraine expert on the National Security Council, he had been on the July 25, 2019 call between Trump and Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky. After hearing the call, Vindman had reported to John Eisenberg, the top lawyer for the National Security Council, that the call was troubling, with Trump pressing Zelensky to deliver an investigation into Hunter Biden, the son of potential rival Joe Biden, in exchange for promised military aid to Ukraine so it could resist Russian incursions. Eisenberg told Vindman not to tell anyone else about the conversation.
Vindman’s opening statement before Congress recalled the American dream. He explained that his father, who had brought Vindman from Ukraine when three, was afraid to have his son testify against the president. Vindman assured him it would be okay. “Do not worry, I will be fine for telling the truth,” Vindman said he told his father, “because this is America, this is the country I have served and defended, that all of my brothers have served, and here, right matters.”
After Vindman’s testimony, he was ousted from the National Security Council, and his twin brother Eugene, a senior lawyer and ethics official for the NSC who had not been involved in the impeachment hearings, was also fired, escorted off White House grounds “suddenly and without explanation,” according to Alexander’s lawyer David Pressman. The two men were fired on the same day Trump told reporters that he was “not happy” with Vindman’s testimony.
On July 8, 2020, Vindman resigned from the military after more than 21 years, citing the “campaign of bullying, intimidation, and retaliation” led by the president for his decision to leave public service.
And now he is suing the allies of the former president, demanding they repair the damage they did, both to Vindman and to democracy. “The threat to our democracy came from a conspiracy among people within the highest reaches of our government and their close allies. President Trump and his aides and other close associates, including Defendants, waged a targeted campaign against Lt. Col. Vindman for upholding his oath of office and telling the truth.”
“I filed this lawsuit,” he said, “because I believe in the active role all citizens must play in upholding our democracy.”
It’s an interesting moment.
The former president is still strong. His fundraising emails, full of fake promises of 700x matching and dinners with the president, might sound just like scams, but they work: he started the year with $122 million in cash. He seems to be stockpiling it for himself; the only significant expenditure he has made is $1 million to a nonprofit, the Conservative Partnership Institute.
But things are not all ducky for him, either.
That million-dollar payment to CPI is significantly higher than any other donation, and it went to CPI, where his former chief of staff Mark Meadows now works, weeks after the House created the January 6 committee, which has subpoenaed Meadows.
Trump’s social media platform, Truth Social, is supposed to go live this month, but when Business Insider reached out to Trump’s people—including to former representative Devin Nunes, who left Congress to become the CEO of Trump Media and Technology Group—to ask about it, no one responded. The investor presentation for the company was “so bad, it is laughable—literally says nothing,” one person to whom it was circulated wrote. The special purpose acquisition company (SPAC) behind Trump’s company is under investigation by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.
Yesterday, Trump tried to take back his statement of Sunday indicating he wanted then–vice president Pence to overturn the election. He released a statement saying he only wanted Pence to send the electoral votes back to the states “for reassessment.” This, too, would have been illegal, but it is significant because it shows he recognizes that his earlier statement adds to the case against him.
At his rally in Conroe, Texas, on Saturday, Trump promised to pardon the insurrectionists if he is reelected, and today Tara Palmeri of Politico reported that Trump had considered blanket pardons of the rioters, asking advisors if he had the power and if it was a good idea. Belying the idea floated by right-wing media that the rioters were “antifa,” he asked, “Is it everybody that had a Trump sign or everybody who walked into the Capitol,” who could be pardoned. Trump also wanted to announce that he was running in 2024 even before Biden’s inauguration, hoping to frame any future prosecutions as being politically motivated.
Representative Pete Aguilar (D-CA), a member of the committee investigating the insurrection, said on CNN that Trump’s promise is “absolutely” witness tampering. He wondered what it would take for Republicans to say enough is enough. “I don’t know where the floor is on that side of the aisle,” he said.
That seems a reasonable question, as right-wing personalities are upping the ante in their political rhetoric, echoing authoritarians in their suggestion that they will use the power of the government to go after those they consider political opponents. Charlie Kirk of Turning Point USA, for example, has expressed interest in arresting President Biden’s chief medical advisor Dr. Anthony Fauci, saying, “[w]e are going to create criminal referrals…. There needs to be an example made of him.”
As right-wing fury seems to mount, the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the U.S. Capitol is quietly gathering evidence, and those testifying seem to be getting closer to the heart of the attempt to overturn the results of the 2020 election.
Yesterday, yet another member of former vice president Mike Pence’s team, top aide Greg Jacob, met with the January 6 committee for more than eight and a half hours.
The leader of the Oath Keepers, Stewart Rhodes, has appeared before the committee this week and has answered “many questions,” according to his lawyer, although he has exercised his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination with regard to other questions.
Today, former Department of Justice lawyer Jeffrey Clark met with the January 6 committee for close to two hours. Clark backed Trump’s attempt to cast doubt on the election, and Trump entertained the idea of making him attorney general until Department of Justice leadership threatened to resign as a group if he did. Initially, Clark refused to answer a subpoena, and in December the committee voted to hold him in criminal contempt. The committee remained willing to talk, though, and apparently it now has.
We learned today that the committee has also subpoenaed from T-Mobile the phone records of Arizona Republican Party chair Kelli Ward and her husband, Michael Ward, both of whom signed a document falsely claiming that Trump had won Arizona’s electoral votes. The Wards filed suit in federal court today to block the subpoena, saying that because the Wards are osteopathic doctors who use their phones to talk to patients, the subpoenas violate patient-doctor privilege.
Meanwhile, the committee has put off Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani’s testimony while it discusses the scope of his subpoena with his lawyer.
Today, committee member Jamie Raskin (D-MD) said that the committee expects to hear from Ivanka Trump, the former president’s daughter and White House advisor, whom the committee expects to call this week.
Raskin also said public hearings will likely be held in April. This will make them uncomfortably close to the midterm elections, but they have had to be pushed back because of obstruction by Trump’s people.
And so we are back to where we were in 2019, when Vindman first reminded us that in America, right matters. At long last, will most of us decide that it does?
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see, the man does plan ahead. but only in the ways that a bully does.
though i don’t think anyone would have guessed fictitious bone spurs could be so perpetually useful.
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Any lawyer or doctor who claims privilege while blocking investigators from accessing their communications should be automatically investigated by their professional society for mixing crime with patient/client communications.
I mean, geez, how hard is it to protect confidentiality by having separate work and personal criminal phones?
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February 3, 2022 (Thursday)
Today, President Joe Biden announced that U.S. special operations launched a counterterrorism mission against the leader of the Islamic State militant group, ISIS. Abu Ibrahim al-Hashimi al-Qurayshi took control of ISIS after the death of previous leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, who killed himself in October 2019 during a raid by U.S. troops. Qurayshi was located in a safe house in northwestern Syria, and as U.S. forces approached, he detonated a bomb killing himself and the 13 women and children in the quarters with him.
Critics had charged that Biden’s withdrawal from Afghanistan, begun under former president Trump, would injure U.S. credibility in the fight against terrorism. Thanking U.S. armed forces for their skill and bravery, Biden indicated his critics’ assessment had been misguided. “Last night’s operation took a major terrorist leader off the battlefield, and it sent a strong message to terrorists around the world: We will come after you and find you,” Biden said.
Biden’s handling of tensions with Russia has also strengthened the nation’s international hand. Russian president Vladimir Putin has demanded extraordinary concessions, and rather than weakening the resolve of members of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, his aggression has united them. And, according to Edward Luce of the Financial Times, they are united behind U.S. leadership. “It has been years since that sentence could be written with a straight face,” Luce wrote. “Russia has brought about what it fears—a west that is displaying something approaching resolve.”
Today, U.S. officials claimed to have evidence that Russian intelligence intends to create a “very graphic” video, involving actors and corpses, that claims to show a Ukrainian attack on Russian speakers in order to justify a new Russian invasion of the neighboring country. Britain came to a similar conclusion.
British diplomat James Roscoe tweeted: “Russia says it will never invade Ukraine. Unless it is provoked. So just in case it is provoked, it has massed over 100,000 troops on Ukraine’s border. But how is it that they are able to anticipat[e] that provocation? Perhaps because they are planning to stage [it]?”
Representative Elissa Slotkin (D-MI), former CIA analyst and former acting assistant secretary of defense, tweeted that a classified briefing was “a powerful reminder of just how much warfare has changed.” The Russian plan to stage a false attack on Russian troops by Ukrainian soldiers is “insane behavior,” she said. “Disinformation & misinformation are real tools in the Russian toolkit, as are cyberattacks that could deliberately target American & NATO civilians.”
Disinformation remains a weapon at home, too.
Josh Dawsey, Rosalind S. Helderman, Emma Brown, Jon Swaine, and Jacqueline Alemany of the Washington Post this morning broke the story that on December 18, 2020, extremists proposed to former president Trump that he use the powers of the National Security Agency (NSA) and the Defense Department to try to prove that foreign countries had swung the 2020 election. It suggested he could direct the agencies to sift through the electronic data from phones, emails, social media, and so on, automatically collected by those agencies but against the law to use to target individuals without a court order.
After the election, on November 9, 2020, the White House pressured the Pentagon into naming a lightly qualified 36-year-old Trump loyalist, Michael Ellis, to become the top lawyer at the NSA. The appointment was problematic and thus Ellis did not take charge during Trump’s term, but the decision to appoint him over career civil servants perhaps bears more attention even than it got at the time.
While the proposal never went into effect, its backers did send it to Senators Kevin Cramer (R-ND) and Ron Johnson (R-WI). Senator Cynthia M. Lummis (R-WY) also attended a meeting on January 4 in which attendees alleged (falsely) that foreign governments had affected the vote. “[W]hy the heck did these R[epublican]s not alert the FBI, totally failure of conscience and their oaths,” wrote Jennifer Rubin of the Washington Post.
It’s a good point.
Meanwhile, reporters continue to dig into the history of the false electors who claimed Trump had won their states. Alan Feuer, Maggie Haberman, and Luke Broadwater of the New York Times today revealed two legal memos from a lawyer affiliated with the Trump campaign providing legal rationales for the fake electors. “[W]e are,” he wrote, “trying to have an alternate slate vote, in hopes that its legitimacy will be validated….” One memo, dated November 18, 2020, by Kenneth Chesebro, justified the casting of fake ballots; another, dated December 9, 2020, focused on overturning the certified ballots for Biden. It urged the fake electors to meet in secret, sign fake documents, and submit them as if they were real.
Chesebro worked to find loopholes in the mechanics of the process to enable the fake electors to seem legitimate. “Michigan is much more specific about the location in which the electors must meet,” he noted, “which could be a bit awkward.” “Nevada is an extremely problematic State, because it requires the meeting of the electors to be overseen by the Secretary of State, who is only supposed to permit electoral votes for the winner of the popular vote in Nevada,” he wrote. “In conclusion,” he wrote, “it appears that voting by an alternate slate of electors is unproblematic in Arizona and Wisconsin; slightly problematic in Michigan (requiring access to the senate chamber); somewhat dicey in Georgia and Pennsylvania…; and very problematic in Nevada.”
Chesebro’s cool analysis of how to overturn our democracy is chilling.
Representative Adam Schiff (D-CA), chair of the House Intelligence Committee and a member of the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the U.S. Capitol, notes that the committee members are paying attention to the churning news about the insurrection. Trump’s comments over the weekend about pardoning the January 6 rioters spoke of his intent: ““If this violence against the Capitol wasn’t part of the plan, or wasn’t something he condoned, then why would he consider pardoning them?”
And yet, the Republican National Committee is doubling down on its support for Trump, its resolution committee tonight voting unanimously to censure the two Republican representatives on the January 6 committee: Representatives Liz Cheney (R-WY) and Adam Kinzinger (R-IL).
Ahead of the party vote, Cheney said: “Leaders of the Republican Party have made themselves willing hostages to a man who admits he tried to overturn a presidential election and suggests he would pardon Jan. 6 defendants…some of whom have been charged with seditious conspiracy. I’m a constitutional conservative and I do not recognize those in my party who have abandoned the Constitution to embrace Donald Trump. History will be their judge.”
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No, Liz; judges should be their judge. Throw the traitors in prison!
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February 4, 2022 (Friday)
Today the January jobs report showed the U.S. added 467,000 jobs. With more than 6.6 million jobs since Biden took office, 2021 under Biden created more jobs than any other year in history. The jobs report also revised the numbers for November and December upward by more than 700,000. The first 12 months of Biden’s presidency mark the best job creation on record. The unemployment rate is at 4.0%.
The other big news today is that the Republican National Committee, meeting in Salt Lake City, Utah, censured Representatives Liz Cheney (R-WY) and Adam Kinzinger (R-IL) for joining the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the U.S. Capitol. Defending the events surrounding January 6, the RNC said that the investigation is “a Democrat-led persecution of ordinary citizens engaged in legitimate political discourse.”
That is, the Republican National Committee says that the January 6 attack on the Capitol—in which nine people died, more than 150 law enforcement officers were injured, offices were ransacked, and rioters spread feces on the walls—was “legitimate political discourse.”
These two wildly different headlines are the outcome of 40 years of U.S. politics.
For a long time, the idea that that economy thrives when the government supports ordinary Americans was not controversial. Democrats began to make it the centerpiece of our system in the 1930s when, after a decade in which the government worked only for the wealthy, they offered a “New Deal” for the American people. Over time, lawmakers from both major parties embraced it, believing they had finally figured out a truly American system that would serve everyone.
A member of Republican president Dwight Eisenhower’s administration explained that “Our underlying philosophy…is this: if a job has to be done to meet the needs of people, and no one else can do it, then it is a proper function of the federal government.” This, he said, was the “authentic American center in politics…a common meeting-ground of the great majority of our people on our own issues, against a backdrop of our own history, our own current setting and our own responsibilities for the future.”
But in the 1980s, Republicans argued that this system stifled economic development by hampering the ability of producers to put their money where they thought it would do the most good. Instead of supporting workers, they argued, government should cut taxes to enable those at the top of the economic ladder to accumulate capital and invest in the economy. Tax cuts became their go-to solution for any sort of economic crisis. The government should support the “supply side” of the economy. Any attempt to use the government to help the “demand side” was, they said, “socialism.”
Shortly after Biden took office, the Democrats returned to the old system. To address the economic wreckage left behind by the pandemic, Democrats in March 2021 passed the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan, without a single Republican vote. That measure is behind the extraordinary U.S. economic recovery, proving that, no matter what its supply-side opponents have alleged over the years, supporting the demand side of the economy works.
That the Republican Party has now retreated into the delusion that a deadly attack on our government was “legitimate political discourse” is also a product of 40 years of political rhetoric saying that those who oppose Republican policies are anti-American. The idea behind the insurrection, and behind the Big Lie that inspired it—the idea that Biden stole the presidential victory from former president Donald Trump—was that a Democratic victory could not be legitimate. Indeed, in the letter censuring Cheney and Kinzinger, the RNC charges that “[t]he Biden Administration and Democrats in Congress have embarked on a systematic effort to replace liberty with socialism.” In this framing, any attempt to overturn such an “illegitimate” election would be an act of patriotism.
It would be “legitimate political discourse.”
But overturning elections on the claim that the usurper must defend a nation’s legitimate government is so much a part of authoritarian coups that it is almost a cliché.
And so we stand, on this one day, seeing the reclaiming of an old bipartisan consensus, on the one hand, and the justification for an authoritarian coup on the other.
This extraordinary statement by the RNC has brought the fight for control of the party into the open. This morning, news broke that the January 6 committee has evidence that Representative Jim Jordan (R-OH), who has been evasive about his contact with Trump on January 6 and who has said he did not recall if he spoke with the president that morning, in fact did. The president called Jordan on the morning of January 6, and they spoke for ten minutes—hardly a call one would forget, it would seem.
Jordan rejected an invitation from the January 6 committee to testify, saying that its request “is far outside the bounds of any legitimate inquiry.”
But if most Republican leaders are lining up behind Trump and the insurrectionists to make up an authoritarian wing of the party, former vice president Mike Pence hinted today he was hoping to carve out some distance from them. Although Trump focused his fury on Pence on January 6 because he would not overturn the election, and although the rioters brought a gallows to hang Pence, the former vice president has largely kept quiet about the event until today.
Hours after the RNC’s statement, Pence told the Federalist Society that January 6 had been a “dark day.” Pence said, “President Trump is wrong. I had no right to overturn the election. The presidency belongs to the American people and the American people alone.” He added that “there’s nothing more un-American” than to have “any one person…choose the American president.”
Pence’s team, including his chief of staff, Marc Short, have been cooperating with the January 6 committee, and the committee will get a pile of records from Pence on March 3 unless a court stops Archivist of the United States David Ferriero from delivering them. It is likely Pence knows there is plenty that will come into the open to make siding with the Trump folks politically problematic. But there is more to his statement than that. While Pence stopped short of saying Biden won the election fairly, his rejection of the plot to overturn Biden’s victory and destroy our democracy suggests he is courting the old business wing of the party.
Pence has been closely allied with the billionaire libertarian Koch family throughout his political career and likely hopes to be a 2024 presidential candidate with their backing. Short, too, is allied with Koch family interests, and according to Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI), foundations and trusts associated with the Kochs are among the deep-pocketed funders of the Federalist Society, where Pence made his statement. The oligarchical wing of the party is, perhaps, making a bid to regain control over the party in the hopes that the insurrectionists will crash and burn.
Certainly, Trump loyalist Stephen Bannon recognized Pence’s words as a defection. On his podcast, Bannon addressed Pence, saying: “You are a stone cold coward…. My head’s blowing up… I can’t take Pence…and Marc Short and all these Koch guys up there ratting out Trump up on Capitol Hill right now.”
I’m not one to romanticize our history, but it does seem worth noting that it was on this day in 1789 that the Electoral College unanimously elected George Washington the first president of the new United States. It seems that we might be able to choose better leaders than ones who are leaving us at the end of this day in 2022 with the truly legitimate political question: “Ratting him out for what?”
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So. Do we need to polarise politics further?
I ask you to reach across the aisle and… hand over the toilet paper.
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February 5, 2022 (Saturday)
Just for fun, because today feels like a good day to talk about Grover Cleveland….
The economy has boomed under President Joe Biden, putting the lie to the old trope that Democrats don’t manage the economy as well as Republicans.
This should not come as a surprise to anyone. The economy has performed better under Democrats than Republicans since at least World War II. CNN Business reports that since 1945, the Standard & Poor’s 500—a market index of 500 leading U.S. publicly traded companies—has averaged an annual gain of 11.2% during years when Democrats controlled the White House, and a 6.9% average gain under Republicans. In the same time period, gross domestic product grew by an average of 4.1% under Democrats, 2.5% under Republicans. Job growth, too, is significantly stronger under Democrats than Republicans.
“[T]here has been a stark pattern in the United States for nearly a century,” wrote David Leonhardt of the New York Times last year, “The economy has grown significantly faster under Democratic presidents than Republican ones.”
The persistence of the myth that Democrats are bad for the economy is an interesting example of the endurance of political rhetoric over reality.
It began in the postwar years: the post–Civil War years, that is. Before the Civil War, moneyed men tended to support the Democrats, for the big money in the country was in the cotton enterprises of the leading enslavers in the American South, and they expressed their political power through the Democratic Party, which promised to protect and nurture the institution of human enslavement. Indeed, when soldiers of the Confederacy fired on Fort Sumter in the harbor of Charleston, South Carolina, in April 1861, it was not clear at all whether bankers in New York City would back the United States or the southern rebels. After all, the South was the wealthiest region of the country, and the North had just undergone the devastating Panic of 1857. Southern leaders laughed that without the South, northerners would starve.
The economic policies of the war years, including our first national money, national taxation, state universities, and deficit spending, created a newly booming industrial North, but many moneyed men resented the Republican policies they felt offered too much to poor Americans (the Homestead Act was a special thorn in their sides because it meant that western lands taken from Indigenous Americans would no longer be sold to bring money into the Treasury but would be given away to poor farmers). When the government established national banks, establishing regulations over the lucrative banking industry, state bankers were unhappy.
Whether moneyed men would stay loyal to Lincoln in 1864 was an open question. In the end, they did, but their loyalty after the war was up for grabs.
Democrats’ postwar financial policies drove moneyed men to give their allegiance to the Republican Party. Eager to make inroads on the Republicans’ popularity, northern Democrats pointed out that the economic gains of the war years had gone to those at the top of the economy, and they called for financial policies that would level the playing field. Notably, they wanted to pay the interest on the war debt with greenbacks rather than gold, which would make the bonds significantly less valuable. The alteration would also establish that political parties could take office and change government financial engagements after they were already in force.
Republicans recognized that if a change of this sort were legitimate, the government’s ability to borrow in the future—say, to put down another rebellion—would be hamstrung. They were so worried that in 1868, they protected the debt in the Fourteenth Amendment itself, saying: “The validity of the public debt of the United States, authorized by law, including debts incurred for payment of pensions and bounties for services in suppressing insurrection or rebellion, shall not be questioned.”
When it looked as if a coalition including the Democrats might win the presidency in 1872, leaders from Wall Street publicly threw their weight behind the Republicans, and in exchange, the Republicans backed away from supporting the workers who had made up their initial voting base.
Southern white supremacists had begun to charge that permitting poor men to vote would lead to a redistribution of wealth as they voted for roads and schools and hospitals that could only be paid for by tax levies on those with property. Such a system was, they charged, “socialism.”
While southern whites directed their animosity toward their formerly enslaved Black neighbors, northerners of means adopted their ideas and language but targeted immigrants and organized workers. If those people came to control government and thus the economy, wealthier Americans argued, they would bring socialism to America, and the nation would never recover.
Increasingly, power shifted to wealthy industrialists who, after 1872, were represented by the Republican Party. They demanded high tariffs that protected their industries by keeping out foreign competition and thus permitted them to collude to raise prices on consumers. By the 1880s, Republican senators were openly serving big business; even the staunchly Republican Chicago Tribune lamented in 1884 that “[b]ehind every one of half of the portly and well-dressed members of the Senate can be seen the outlines of some corporation interested in getting or preventing legislation.”
As money moved to the top of the economy, Democrats pushed back, calling for government to restore a level playing field between workers and their employers. As they did so, Republicans howled that Democrats advocated socialism.
Finally, after the spectacularly corrupt administration of Republican Benjamin Harrison, which businessmen had called “beyond question the best business administration the country has ever seen,” the unthinkable happened. In the election of 1892, for the first time since the Civil War, Democrats took control of the White House and Congress. They promised to rein in the power of big business by lowering the tariffs and loosening the money supply. This, Republicans insisted, meant financial ruin.
Republicans warned that capital would flee the markets and urged foreign investors—on whom the economy depended—to take their money home. They predicted a financial crash as the Democrats embraced socialism, anarchism, and labor organization. Money flowed out of the country as the outgoing Harrison administration poured gasoline on the fires of media fears and refused to act to try to turn the tide. Harrison’s secretary of the Treasury, Charles Foster, said his job was only to “avert a catastrophe” until March 4, when Democratic president Grover Cleveland would take office.
He didn’t quite manage it. The bottom fell out of the economy on February 17, when the Reading Railroad Company could not make its payroll, sparking a nationwide panic. The stock market collapsed. And yet the Harrison administration refused to do anything until the day Cleveland took office, when Foster helpfully announced the Treasury “was down to bedrock.”
To Cleveland fell the Panic of 1893, with its strikes, marchers, and despair, all of which opponents insisted was the Democrats’ fault. In the midterm election of 1894, Republicans showed the statistics of Cleveland’s first two years and told voters that Democrats destroyed the economy. Voters could restore the health of the nation’s economy by electing Republicans again. In 1894, voters returned Republicans to control of the government in the biggest midterm landslide in American history, and the image of Democrats as bad for the economy was cemented.
From then on, Republicans portrayed Democrats as weak on the economy. When the next Democratic president to take office, Woodrow Wilson, undermined the tariff as soon as he took office, replacing it with an income tax, opponents insisted the Revenue Act of 1913 was inaugurating the country’s socialistic downfall. When Democratic president Franklin Delano Roosevelt pioneered the New Deal, Republicans saw socialism. Over the past century, that rhetoric has only grown stronger.
And yet, of course, it has been Republican economic policies that opened up the possibility for Democrats to try new approaches to the economy, to make it serve all Americans, rather than a favored few. As FDR put it: “It is common sense to take a method and try it: If it fails, admit it frankly and try another. But above all, try something. The millions who are in want will not stand by silently forever while the things to satisfy their needs are within easy reach.”
In the end, that’s what the economists Leonhardt interviewed last year think is behind Democrats’ ability to manage the economy better than Republicans. Republicans tend to cling to abstract theories about how the economy works—theories about high tariffs or tax cuts, for example, which tend to concentrate wealth upward—while Democrats are more pragmatic, willing to pay attention to facts on the ground and to historical lessons about what works and what doesn’t.
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February 6, 2022 (Sunday)
There is, in fact, some news today, but nothing that can’t wait until tomorrow. Seems like this might well be a busy week, so let’s take the night off.
It’s been quite cold here, and the sea smoke, which rises when the air is colder than the water, has been spectacular.
Photographer Peter Ralston caught this image earlier this week.
[Photo, “Only One,” by Peter Ralston]
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February 7, 2022 (Monday)
It appears that the Republican National Committee’s censure of Representatives Liz Cheney (R-WY) and Adam Kinzinger (R-IL), along with its declaration that the riot at the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, was “legitimate political discourse,” has created a problem for Republican lawmakers as they try to position the party for the midterms and the 2024 election. Coming, as the statement did, just after former president Trump said that Pence had the power to “overturn the election” and that if reelected, Trump would pardon those who attacked the Capitol, it has put the Republican Party openly on the side of overturning our democracy.
Trump loyalists have been insisting that the rioters were “political prisoners,” and clearly the RNC was speaking for them. This wing of the party got a boost this evening when venture capitalist Peter Thiel, the libertarian whose wealth Forbes estimates to be about $2.6 billion, announced that he is stepping down from the board of Meta, the parent company of Facebook, to focus on electing Trump-aligned candidates in 2022. Thiel famously wrote in 2009 that he “no longer believe[s] that freedom and democracy are compatible,” and deplored “the vast increase in welfare beneficiaries and the extension of the franchise to women” after 1920.
It also got a boost today when the Supreme Court halted a lower court’s order saying that a redistricting map in Alabama violated the Voting Rights Act by getting rid of a Black majority district. Alabama’s population is 27% Black, which should translate to 2 congressional seats, but by the practice of “packing and cracking”—that is, packing large numbers of Black voters into one district and spreading them thinly across all the others—only one district will likely have a shot at electing a Black representative. The vote for letting the new maps stand was 5 to 4, with Chief Justice John Roberts siding with the liberals against the new right-wing majority, in control thanks to the three justices added by Trump.
But the backlash against the RNC’s statement suggests that most Americans see the deadly attack on our democracy for what it was, and Republican lawmakers are now trying to deflect from the RNC’s statement.
RNC chair Ronna McDaniel said that media quotes from the resolution are a “lie” and says the committee did not mean it to be taken as it has been. But other Republicans seemed to understand that the RNC has firmly dragged the Republican Party into Trump’s war on our democracy.
National Review called the statement “both morally repellent and politically self-destructive,” and worried that “it will be used against hundreds of elected Republicans who were not consulted in its drafting and do not endorse its sentiment.” If indeed the RNC simply misworded their statement, the editors said, “its wording is political malpractice of the highest order coming from people whose entire job is politics.”
Sunday, former New Jersey governor Chris Christie, who seems to entertain hopes for 2024, said on ABC’s This Week that “January 6 was a riot incited by Donald Trump in an effort to intimidate Mike Pence and Congress into doing exactly what he said in his own words—overturn the election.”
But others, like Senator Todd Young (R-IN), seem to be trying to split the baby. Young told Christiane Amanpour that those saying the attack was legitimate political discourse are “a fringe group,” although the RNC is quite literally the official machinery of the Republican Party. Young is up for reelection in 2022. He is also from Indiana, as is former vice president Mike Pence, who seems to be positioning himself to take over the party as Trump’s legal woes knock him out of the running for 2024.
On Friday, Pence told the Federalist Society that Trump was “wrong” to say that he, Pence, had the power to overturn the election. But he did not say that Biden won the election fairly. Then, on Sunday, Pence’s former chief of staff Marc Short seemed to try to let Trump off the hook for his pressure on Pence, telling Chuck Todd on Meet the Press that the former president “had many bad advisers who were basically snake oil salesmen giving him really random and novel ideas as to what the vice president could do.”
They seem to be trying to keep Trump’s voters while easing the former president himself offstage, hoping that voters will forget that the Republican leadership stood by Trump until he openly talked of overturning the election.
Representative Adam Schiff (D-CA), chair of the House Intelligence Committee and a member of the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the U.S. Capitol, seems unlikely to stand by as the country moves on, as the National Review editors indicated they were hoping. As he said in his closing at Trump’s first impeachment trial: “History will not be kind to Donald Trump. If you find that the House has proved its case, and still vote to acquit, your name will be tied to his with a cord of steel and for all of history.”
The other big news of the past day is that it turns out that Trump and his team mishandled presidential records, suggesting that we will never get the full story of what happened in that White House.
By law, presidential records and federal records belong to the U.S. government. An administration must preserve every piece of official business. Some of the documents that the Trump team delivered to the January 6 committee had been ripped up and taped back together, some were in pieces, and some, apparently, were shredded and destroyed. Legal commentator Asha Rangappa noted that Trump’s impeachments mean that such shredding could have amounted to an obstruction of justice.
Today we learned that the National Archives and Records Administration had to retrieve 15 boxes of material from Trump’s Florida residence Mar-a-Lago, including correspondence with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un and the letter that former president Barack Obama left for Trump (which would have brought a pretty penny if it were sold). Trump aides say they are trying to determine what other records need to be returned.
Former Republican Kurt Bardella noted, “If this had happened during a Democratic Administration while Republicans were in the majority, I guarantee you [the Oversight Committee] would be launching a massive investigation into this and writing subpoenas right now to any and every W[hite] H[ouse] official that was involved in this.”
Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton used the story to raise money for her progressive organization, Onward Together. She linked to the story as she urged people to “Take a sip from your new mug as you read the news.” With the tweet was the picture of a mug with her image and the caption “But Her Emails.”
House January 6 committee member Jamie Raskin (D-MD) says that the committee is planning to hold public hearings in April or May. They have been slowed down by the reluctance of the Trump team to cooperate.
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but her boxes and boxes of official documents stored at a third rate resort
wow. and here i thought he was a great business man, so smart. those guys must have twelfth-level intellects to pull the wool over his eyes.
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February 8, 2022 (Tuesday)
The fallout over the Republican National Committee’s statement censuring Representatives Liz Cheney (R-WY) and Adam Kinzinger (R-IL) for “participating in a Democrat-led persecution of ordinary citizens engaged in legitimate political discourse” continues to rain down on the Republican Party.
Today, more than 140 former Republican officials and leaders issued a statement saying that the RNC has “betrayed the GOP’s founding principles and ceded control of a once-great movement to grifters and extremists.” They condemned the description of “the January 6th insurrection” as legitimate political discourse,” calling that description “an affront to the rule of law, peaceful self-government, and the constitutional order.”
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) tried to distance himself from the party’s stance, saying the events of January 6 were “a violent insurrection for the purpose of trying to prevent the peaceful transfer of power after a legitimately certified election, from one administration to the next. That’s what it was.”
“First Pence, now McConnell,” NBC’s legal commenter Katie S. Phang noted. “A big hammer is about to drop and they don’t want to be in the path.”
Meanwhile, House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) strode speedily away from ABC News congressional correspondent Rachel Scott when she asked about the resolution describing the rioting on January 6 as “legitimate political discourse,” telling her it was “not good” to answer questions in hallways. (Comedian Noel Casler tweeted that McCarthy “ran down that hall like he was being chased by a bunch of white dudes looking for some ‘legitimate political discourse.’”)
Other representatives seemed eager to shore up their arguments that the election was fraudulent and that investigators are illegitimate. New York representative Elise Stefanik, a Trump loyalist who replaced Cheney as the number three Republican in House leadership when House Republicans removed Cheney by a secret vote in May, defended the RNC, saying it had “every right to take any action.” She suggested that voters would ultimately decide whether to justify Cheney’s position or that of the RNC.
Last night, Representative Jim Jordan (R-OH) was on the Fox News Channel sounding more frantic than usual, accusing the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the U.S. Capitol of attacking him and insisting that “this is ridiculous and the American people are so fed up with this….” Jordan, such a key Trump loyalist that the former president awarded him the Presidential Medal of Freedom in a private ceremony at the White House on January 11, 2021, five days after the insurrection, has been eager to deflect attention from what we now know was a ten-minute call between him and Trump on the morning of January 6.
Representative Paul Gosar (R-AZ) tweeted today that 740,000 Maricopa County ballots cannot be verified. (These were the ballots taken over by the Cyber Ninjas and have been examined and verified several times over.)
More odd, though, was Representative Troy Nehls’s (R-TX) claim on Twitter that the Capitol Police Intelligence Division on November 20, 2021, “investigated my office illegally” and that Capitol Police leadership was “maliciously investigating me in an attempt to destroy me and my character.” He claimed such an attack was due to his criticism of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), the January 6 Committee, the Capitol Police, and the shooting of Ashli Babbitt as she tried to break into the House chamber. The president of the right-wing organization Judicial Watch promptly accused Pelosi of targeting Nehls with “secret police.”
The Capitol Police responded that an officer found the office unlocked, entered it, and “saw a white board with text about body armor and an accompanying map of the Capitol campus.” In an article in the Federalist, Nehls said the map was intended to help an intern find an ice machine and the body armor part of a discussion of legislation to stop purchases of body armor from China. “If Capitol Police leadership had spent as much time preparing for January 6 as they spent investigating my white board, the January 6 riot never would have happened,” Nehls wrote.
It was a bizarre story that sounded like Nehls was trying to get out in front of something. Then Representative Louie Gohmert (R-TX) claimed that the Department of Justice is reading his mail. Taken with the spying on Nehls, Gohmert wrote, “the Democrat’s [sic] spying on political opponents appears to know no end.” And then he added a threat: “The people behind this should be hoping and praying that they will not be treated in the same manner in which they are running roughshod over Republicans when and if Republicans retake the majority.”
Jordan, Gosar, Nehls, and Gohmert all voted not to accept the certified ballots from certain states on January 6.
They might be reacting to the reality that the law is not as slapdash as they might have thought. Today, officers arrested the Mesa County, Colorado, clerk, Republican Tina Peters, after she resisted the seizure of an iPad on which she was illegally filming a court proceeding involving her deputy, Belinda Knisley, who is facing criminal charges of cybercrimes. Peters has been suspected of leaking data from county election machines to conspiracy theorists last year; it turned up in a presentation at MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell’s symposium about the election last August. Trump loyalist Steve Bannon showed the arrest on his webcast.
Also today, prosecutors revealed their evidence for the trial of a January 6 defendant, Guy Wesley Reffitt, allegedly a member of the Texas Three Percenter militia group, mobilized against the U.S. government. The trial is set to begin on February 28. Their list of evidence is 11 pages long and extraordinarily thorough. It includes videos, phone records, texts, hotel receipts, pictures, and interviews, including ones with the defendant’s children, who will testify that Reffitt threatened them to keep them quiet. His daughter will testify that “she heard her father tell them that if they turned him in to law enforcement, they would be traitors, and that traitors get shot.” Also testifying will be one of the defendant’s colleagues in the Texas Three Percenter militia who traveled with him to D.C.
The government has done its homework.
Today, Reuters reported that the Federal Bureau of Investigation is looking into a meeting between then-leaders of the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers alt-right extremist groups and other right-wing figures in a parking garage in Washington, D.C., on January 5, 2021. The attendees contacted by Reuters said “they did not discuss matters related to January 6.”
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February 9, 2022 (Wednesday)
This evening, the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the U.S. Capitol issued a subpoena for documents and testimony to former White House trade advisor Peter Navarro, who has made a number of public statements about his role in trying to overturn the results of the 2020 election. In its letter to Navarro, the committee noted his statements that former president Trump was “on board with the strategy” of trying to steal the election, as were “more than 100” members of Congress, including Representative Paul Gosar (R-AZ) and Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX).
This subpoena suggests that the committee is getting closer to lawmakers, and some of them are certainly acting as if they are uncomfortable these days.
Navarro responded to the subpoena with a fire-eating statement calling the members of the January 6 committee “domestic terrorists” engaged in a “partisan witch hunt,” and inaccurately claimed that former president Trump has invoked executive privilege that he cannot waive. (In fact, Trump invoked executive privilege only over documents in the possession of the National Archives and Records Administration, and the Supreme Court denied his claims.) He tried to blame House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) and the Capitol Police for the violence on January 6.
He added fuel to the ongoing fight within the Republican Party when he added: “Pence betrayed Trump. Marc Short is a Koch Network dog. Meadows is a fool and a coward. Cheney and Kinzinger are useful idiots for Nancy Pelosi and the woke Left.”
Navarro’s discomfort with the committee’s questions was not unlike that of Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA), who picked up today on Representative Troy Nehls’s (R-TX) odd accusations of yesterday that Pelosi and the Capitol Police were spying on him. Greene accused Pelosi of having Gestapo-like secret police “spying on members of Congress, spying on the legislative work we do, spying on our staff and spying on American citizens,” she said, although she called them “gazpacho,” apparently confusing the cold tomato soup with the Nazis.
Senator Marco Rubio (R-FL) is also flailing. Sunday, on Face the Nation, he said: “This commission is a partisan scam. They’re going after—they’re—the purpose of that commission is to try to embarrass and smear and harass as many Republicans as they can get their hands on.”
Yesterday, he released a video saying “Biden is sending free meth & crack pipes to minority communities in the name of ‘racial equity’… There is no end in sight for this lunacy.“
This is a wild lie made up and spread by right-wing publications, referring to a drug harm reduction program inviting applications for grants in a 75-page call for proposals. Part of that harm reduction includes infectious disease testing kits, medication lock boxes, safe sex kits, vaccinations, and so on, including safe smoking kits, which do not include free meth or crack pipes but do include rubber mouthpieces for pipes to prevent burns, and disinfectant wipes.
Drug harm reduction programs have been around in the U.S. since the 1980s, when the HIV epidemic made it clear that addressing drug addiction could stop that era’s epidemic.
Exaggeration and demonization of their opponents has been part of politics for years, as Republicans tried to fire up their base by describing their opponents as socialists, lazy “takers,” baby-killers, and so on. Now, though, these over-the-top attacks on the committee and on the Democratic administration seem to be part of a new political project.
The frantic edge to them suggests concern about what the January 6th committee might uncover.
But statements like those yesterday of Representative Louie Gohmert (R-TX), who claimed the Department of Justice was reading his mail; Nehls, who claimed that Pelosi was using the Capitol Police to spy on him; and Greene, who claims Pelosi has a “Gestapo,” normalize the practices of authoritarian government. The proposed banning of books by Republican school officials and lawmakers also echoes authoritarian tactics. Texas State Representative Matt Krause’s October list of 850 books he said “might make students feel discomfort, guilt, anguish, or any other form of psychological distress because of their race or sex” invited schools to self-censor. It also puts the idea of banning books–—banning one book normalizes the banning of 850—on the political table.
And, to enforce such bans, states like Virginia, West Virginia, and Florida are turning to laws that enlist ordinary people to turn each other in to authorities.
We learned yesterday more details of another undemocratic project thanks to Mark Mazzetti and Adam Goldman of the New York Times: in summer 2018, Republican operatives launched a spying operation in Wyoming to gather dirt on opponents of then-president Donald Trump, targeting progressives, Democrats, and Republicans who seemed insufficiently loyal. To help fund the project, they turned to Erik Prince, known as the founder of the military contractor Blackwater and brother of then–secretary of education Betsy DeVos.
The third piece of this new, frantic language ties into America’s long history of politicians deploying racism to break the coalitions that challenge their power.
When Rubio lies that Biden is sending crack pipes to minority communities, he is tying into other constructed panics around race. Fourteen state legislatures have passed laws restricting the teaching of anything that looks like Critical Race Theory, although the actual concept, an advanced legal theory that seeks to explain the persistence of racial inequality in the U.S., is almost never taught in public schools. Republican allegations of voter fraud focus on majority Black districts, and state laws are increasingly threatening minority voting. On Monday night, the Supreme Court okayed racial gerrymandering, making it harder for Black voters to elect representatives of their choice.
These new legal fences enclosing Black Americans echo times in our past when multiracial coalitions threatened an entrenched political party and those in power reacted by using the law to divide their opponents along racial lines. Last June, as Republican operatives whipped up fears of CRT, Republican political operative Stephen K. Bannon told Politico that enflaming racism was how Republicans would take back Congress. “I see 50 [House Republican] seats in 2022. Keep this up,” he said. “I think you’re going to see a lot more emphasis from Trump on [CRT] and DeSantis and others. People who are serious in 2024 and beyond are going to focus on it.”
Cracking the majority that elected a Democratic government in 2020 will enable the Republicans to take back Congress and, among other things, ease pressure over the January 6 insurrection.
But according to a Washington Post story today, some of the very “suburban moms” being pressed into this racial division are organizing to fight back. “[I]t’s time to get off defense,” organizer Katie Paris told reporter Annie Gowan. “Why should we be the ones explaining ourselves?” Paris’s organization, Red, Wine, and Blue, trains its more than 300,000 members to push back against book bans. Paris recognizes that the attacks on diversity in the schools are about political control of the nation. Attacks on the schools, she says, “certainly are part of what I would say is a pretty massive orchestrated effort to undermine public education and teachers in the country, impose a political agenda, and win back suburban voters.”
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