The ability to tolerate the cognitive dissonance between what right wing media tells them to believe and their actual lived experience is truly mindboggling. But that’s the key to the success of the fascist wing. Facts and experience don’t matter, only feelings and opinions. And those can be dictated and manipulated, unlike the thrice-be-damned “reality-based community.” Onward the RBC!!
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December 14, 2023 (Thursday)
Today is one of those days when the main story is not what’s on the pages, but what the stories say when they are themselves seen as a pattern.
This morning the Associated Press ran a story by national political reporter Brian Slodysko titled “The Republican leading the probe of Hunter Biden has his own shell company and complicated friends.” It told the story of how Representative James Comer (R-KY), the chair of the House Oversight Committee, has a financial history that looks a great deal like that of which he accuses the Bidens, including a shell company that appears to ethics experts to have problematic connections to a campaign donor.
Comer is leading the House impeachment effort against President Joe Biden, an effort that Philip Bump of the Washington Post eviscerated today when he took apart Republicans’ accusations point by point. The Associated Press story is interesting not because it tells us something we don’t know—the story of Comer’s shell company is what led him to attack Representative Jared Moskowitz (D-FL) as a “Smurf” last month—but because of how far and wide it spread.
By this evening, Slodysko’s story had been reprinted by ABC News, the Los Angeles Times, and a number of smaller outlets.
The strength of that story, after years in which the Republican narrative was largely unchallenged in popular political culture, reminds me of the rise of the so-called muckrakers of the Progressive Era. That is, journalists from the 1870s onward wrote a lot about the shift in power during the Gilded Age toward the very wealthy and the politicians they bought. But it was only in the 1890s that journalists, writing for magazines like the landmark publication McClure’s Magazine, began to gain traction as cultural leaders.
Key to that shift was the sense that those who had been directing the country for decades were vulnerable, that they might lose their perch on top of the political, social, and economic ladder.
The vulnerability of the dominance of today’s MAGA Republicans has been exposed in part by the fecklessness of House Republicans, whose lack of interest in governing is evident from their focus on passing bills loaded with extremist demands that signal to their base but are nonstarters for actually passing the Senate and getting the president’s signature. Yesterday those same House Republicans voted unanimously to launch an impeachment inquiry into President Joe Biden although they are unable to identify any reason for that inquiry.
The Larry, Moe, and Curly aspect of their leadership seems to have made them appear to be low-hanging fruit for investigative journalists. When Hunter Biden yesterday stood in front of the U.S. Capitol and called House Republicans out for not daring to let him testify in public while they were using their privileged positions to show naked pictures of him in a hearing, he did the same thing McClure’s writers did: he personalized politicians’ abuse of their power.
That, in turn, makes it easier for people who might not otherwise note the large swings of politics to understand exactly what the Republicans are doing.
The vulnerability of the MAGA Republicans showed up in another way, today, too. Today is the eleventh anniversary of the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting in Newtown, Connecticut, in which a 20-year-old murdered 20 children between the ages of six and seven years old, and six adult staff members. In that wake of that mass shooting, Americans demanded background checks for gun purchases, a policy supported by 90% of Americans. But the measure was killed in the Senate by lawmakers who represented just 38% of the American people.
Since then, Republicans have blocked legislation to regulate guns and have instead offered thoughts and prayers after each mass shooting.
That dominant narrative was turned on its head today when Mothers for Democracy/Mothers Against Greg Abbott released a devastating ad in which a young girl falls into a swimming pool and, rather than jumping in to save her, her mother prays for God to save her while observers—including a man who looks like Texas governor Greg Abbott—offer thoughts and prayers as the child drowns. “Thoughts and prayers are meaningless when you can act,” the ad says. “Act Now. Demand gun reform.”
The vulnerability of MAGA Republicans was also underscored today at the trial of former Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani, who has already been found liable for defaming Georgia election workers Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss, to determine what damages he owes them.
Giuliani told reporters on Wednesday that he would testify in his own defense, but his lawyer stopped that plan after Giuliani continued to attack the women this week. In his closing statement at the trial, Giuliani’s lawyer could suggest only that the former New York City mayor is “a good man.” “He hasn’t exactly helped himself with some of the things that have happened in the last few days,” the lawyer said, adding, “My client, he’s almost 80 years old.”
Trump’s insistence that he actually won the 2020 election is part of the MAGA Republicans’ need to portray themselves as invulnerable. They must never be seen to lose. Indeed, on Tuesday, Trump once again went on at great length, claiming he won the 2020 election. He also doubled down on the idea that he will become a dictator, feeding the idea that he is invulnerable. But those who participated in his scheme to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election are admitting that Biden won the election or are cooperating with prosecutors, and his own legal cases are speeding up.
Meanwhile, MAGA Republicans are holding up a crucial aid package for Ukraine, insisting that immigration reform is such a grave national security issue it must take precedence over Ukraine aid. In their focus on immigration, they are following Trump’s lead: he is telling crowds that countries are dumping people from their “insane asylums” in the U.S., explicitly referring to the serial killer portrayed in the film The Silence of the Lambs.
And yet, despite that alleged national crisis, the House recessed today for three weeks without addressing it. Several Republicans indicated to Politico’s Playbook that they are not actually interested in a deal, since “polling consistently shows that immigration is the most toxic issue on the campaign trail for Biden. Why take that off the table as an attack on him in 2024?”
Meanwhile, Ukraine is running out of ammunition.
The White House is urging Congress to stay in session to deal with the supplemental funding bill and immigration reform, saying Republicans are “actively undermining our national security interests” to “go on vacation.” Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) has kept the Senate in session, saying it will stay and vote on a package next week. For his part, House speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) tweeted that “we must secure our own border before we secure another country’s,“ and that while work should continue on the package, “the House will not wait around to receive and debate a rushed product.”
The House’s holiday recess meant that former House speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) left Congress today, rather than waiting for the end of his term. MAGA Republicans led by Matt Gaetz (R-FL) made history in October by engineering his ouster from the speaker’s chair and grinding the work of the House to a halt. On his way out, McCarthy suggested that Gaetz has reason to be concerned about an investigation by the House Ethics Committee into his alleged sexual misconduct and misuse of funds.
In the 1890s, once the dominant narrative cracked, an entire industry rose as journalists investigated those whose access to power had for decades protected them from scrutiny.
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It is a powerful add and painful to watch as a parent of a young child.
I do love the title Wonkette gave to their write up on it.
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and he has been abusive to women. 
The coverage angered the former girlfriend who wrote a letter to the Louisville Courier-Journal in which she asserted that Comer had hit her and that their relationship had been “toxic.” She also told the newspaper that Comer became “enraged” in 1991 after he learned she had used his name on a form she submitted before receiving an abortion at a Louisville clinic
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That is so totally on par for these hypocritical asshats. I am so not shocked that I am shocked!
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December 15, 2023 (Friday)
CNN reporters today pulled together evidence from a number of sources to explain how “a binder containing highly classified information related to Russian election interference went missing at the end of Donald Trump’s presidency.” The missing collection of documents was ten inches thick and contained 2,700 pages of information from U.S. intelligence and that of North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) allies about Russian efforts to help Trump win the 2016 presidential election.
The binder went missing in the last days of the Trump presidency and has not been recovered. Its disappearance has raised “alarms among intelligence officials that some of the most closely guarded national security secrets from the US and its allies could be exposed.”
Reporters Jeremy Herb, Katie Bo Lillis, Natasha Bertrand, Evan Perez, and Zachary Cohen have pieced together the story of how in his last days in office, Trump tried to declassify most of the information in the binder in order to distribute copies to Republican members of Congress and right-wing media outlets. According to an affidavit by reporter John Solomon, who was shown a copy of the binder, the plan was to begin releasing information from it on the morning of January 20, 2021, so that it would hit the news after President Joe Biden had been sworn in.
But late on January 19, while Solomon was copying the documents, White House lawyers recalled the copies to black out, or redact, sensitive information, worrying that while most of the facts in the binder were apparently already public, the methods of collection and persons involved were not. At some point in that process, an unredacted copy of the binder disappeared.
A former aide to Trump chief of staff Mark Meadows, Cassidy Hutchinson, told the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the U.S. Capitol last year that she thought Meadows took the unredacted binder with him.
Today, in statements that seemed very carefully worded, Meadows’s lawyer, George Terwilliger, told CNN: “Mr. Meadows was keenly aware of and adhered to requirements for the proper handling of classified material, any such material that he handled or was in his possession has been treated accordingly and any suggestion that he is responsible for any missing binder or other classified information is flat wrong.” Terwilliger told the New York Times: “Mark never took any copy of that binder home at any time.”
The missing binder was not among the material the Federal Bureau of Investigation recovered from Mar-a-Lago last year, and intelligence officials briefed the Senate Intelligence Committee about the missing information (the CNN story does not say that the House Intelligence Committee has been briefed). In April 2021, Trump allegedly offered to let the author of a book about him see the binder, saying “I would let you look at them if you wanted…. It’s a treasure trove…it would be sort of a cool book for you to look at.”
The story of yet more missing classified information highlights that Judge Aileen Cannon, who was confirmed to her position after Trump lost the 2020 election, has permitted Trump to slow down United States of America v. Donald J. Trump, Waltine Nauta, and Carlos De Oliveira, the pending criminal case in which he and two aides are accused of mishandling classified documents under the Espionage Act as well as making false statements and engaging in a conspiracy to obstruct justice.
Perhaps even more strongly, at a time when House Republicans have declined to fund Ukraine’s war against Russia’s 2022 invasion, the story serves as a reminder of the role Russia played in Trump’s 2016 election and how, during Trump’s time in office, he continued to cultivate a relationship with Russia’s authoritarian president Vladimir Putin and to turn his back on America’s traditional democratic allies, including those in NATO. (At one point, he told National Security Advisor John Bolton, “I don’t give a sh*t about NATO.”)
Indeed, Trump has suggested he would take the U.S. out of NATO if he returns to office, breaking the coalition that held first the Soviet Union and then Russia at bay since World War II. Such a betrayal would weaken all of the security alliances of the United States, according to Eastern European specialist Anne Applebaum, exposing the U.S. as an unreliable ally. As democracies ceased to work together, they would have to work with authoritarian governments, and after American political influence declined, so would the economic influence that has protected our economy. Authoritarian leaders like Putin would be the winners.
News about the missing binder also highlights just how hard Trump worked to convince his loyalists that that connection was a hoax. Although all U.S. intelligence services and the Republican-dominated Senate Intelligence Committee assessed that, in fact, Russia did intervene in the election to get Trump into the White House, many Trump loyalists continue to believe Trump’s lie that such interference did not happen.
Trump’s determination to convince his followers that “Russia, Russia, Russia” was a hoax was in part an attempt to get out from under the legal implications of working with a foreign country to win an election but also, perhaps more profoundly, an attempt to make his followers believe his lies over reality. If he could make them believe him, rather than the conclusions of the U.S. intelligence community and the Senate, they would be his to command.
Russia, Russia, Russia was an important precursor to the Big Lie that Trump, rather than Joe Biden, won the 2020 presidential election. The Big Lie has failed at every test of evidence, and yet Trump loyalists still say they believe it.
Today, former Trump ally Rudy Giuliani continued to defend the idea that the 2020 election had been stolen, even after a jury of eight Americans said he must pay the eye-popping sum of $148,169,000 to Georgia election workers Shaye Moss and Ruby Freeman for defaming them by saying they had participated in election fraud—he made that up—and for emotional distress. Freeman and Moss had asked for $24 million each.
Of that verdict, $75,000,000 was for punitive damages, illustrating that spreading Trump’s lies so that they hurt individuals comes at a whopper of a cost. Giuliani had refused to cooperate in the case, although he admitted to the truth of the underlying facts, and he had continued to attack Moss and Freeman to reporters during the trial.
Trump’s election lies that hurt companies are also costly, as the Fox News Corporation found when it settled with Dominion Voting Systems for $787 million over the media company’s lies about the 2020 election.
Senators Tim Kaine (D-VA) and Marco Rubio (R-FL) tried to address Trump’s attack on our democracy when this week they inserted into the National Defense Authorization Act a provision saying that no president can withdraw from NATO without approval from the Senate or from Congress as a whole.
“NATO has held strong in response to Putin’s war in Ukraine and rising challenges around the world,” Kaine said. He added that the legislation “to prevent any U.S. President from unilaterally withdrawing from NATO reaffirms U.S. support for this crucial alliance that is foundational for our national security. It also sends a strong message to authoritarians around the world that the free world remains united.”
Rubio added, “The Senate should maintain oversight on whether or not our nation withdraws from NATO. We must ensure we are protecting our national interests and protecting the security of our democratic allies.”
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so he took it to mara largo? his private office? to a dead drop? oh i see, he took the original binder and not a copy of it home. the possibilities are really endless
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Reading that whole thing—that first they were going to release an unredacted copy, then officials took it back to redact sensitive information, and then it disappeared—tells me a story. Trump thought whatever was in there made him look great. Meadows, not being a delusional psychopath, realized it proved Trump’s guilt, took it back to redact the guilty parts, realized that was going to be insufficient, and then just had the thing destroyed. Then he gave a binder full of garbage to Trump, knowing Trump never actually reads anything, and told him it was the binder but he needed to hold on to it for reasons. That’s my guess.
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December 16, 2023 (Saturday)
Today is the 250th anniversary of the Boston Tea Party, when 30 or more men boarded three trading vessels in Boston Harbor. They broke open 342 chests of tea and dumped about 90,000 pounds of the valuable leaves overboard.
The pointed destruction of a cargo worth about $1.7 million in today’s dollars escalated the ongoing struggle between the British government and thirteen of its North American colonies.
Trouble had been growing since the end in 1763 of what the colonists knew as the French and Indian War. That conflict dramatically expanded British possessions in North America, but at the cost of badly stretching the Treasury. To raise revenue, the king’s ministers and Parliament placed a number of taxes on the colonists, including the 1765 Stamp Act. This law hit virtually everyone by taxing printed material from newspapers and legal documents to playing cards.
The Stamp Act shocked colonists. At issue was not just money, but a central political struggle that had been going on in England for more than a century: could the king be checked by the people or were his powers unlimited? Colonists were not directly represented in Parliament and believed they were losing their fundamental right as Englishmen to have a say in their government. They responded to the Stamp Act with widespread protests.
In 1766, Parliament repealed the Stamp Act but claimed for Parliament “full power and authority to make laws and statutes…to bind the colonies and people of America…in all cases whatsoever.” This act echoed the 1719 Irish Declaratory Act, which asserted that Ireland was subordinate to the British king and Parliament. It also imposed new taxes.
As soon as news of the Declaratory Act and the new taxes reached Boston in 1767, the Massachusetts legislature circulated a letter to the other colonies standing firm on the right to equality in the British empire. Local groups boycotted taxed goods and broke into warehouses whose owners they thought were breaking the boycott. In 1768, British officials sent troops to Boston to restore order.
Events began to move faster and faster. In March 1770, British soldiers in Boston shot into a crowd of men and boys who were harassing them, killing five and wounding six others. Engraver Paul Revere made an instantly-famous image showing soldiers in red coats smiling as they shot at colonists, including Black man Crispus Attucks. The altercation became known as the Boston Massacre.
Parliament removed all but one of the new taxes—the tax on tea—but trouble continued to simmer. In 1771 and 1772, an official in New Hampshire ordered a search of sawmills for white pine that bore the mark of the King’s Broad Arrow, three blazes on a tree— one straight up and two making an upside-down V— designating trunks thicker than 12 inches as the property of the king. New Englanders had never liked the law that claimed their valuable forests for Royal Navy masts, and had ignored it when they could.
But in April 1772, officials charged six sawmill owners with milling trunks that had been marked with the King’s Broad Arrow. One of the owners was arrested and then released with the promise that he would provide bail the next day. Instead, the following morning he and 30 to 40 men, their faces disguised with soot, assaulted the government officials and ran them out of town.
The so-called Pine Tree Riot suggested that British authority could be defied. Just two months later, a Royal Navy customs schooner, the HMS Gaspee, ran aground in Rhode Island while chasing a packet boat suspected of smuggling. As the captain waited for high tide to float the schooner free, Rhode Island men rowed to the ship, boarded it, and burned it to the waterline.
Eight of the men who participated in the Pine Tree Riot were later charged with assault, but the local judges who sentenced them let them off so lightly the verdict could easily be seen as support for their actions. The government had even less luck prosecuting the men who burned the Gaspee: it could not identify suspects. But its threat to extradite colonists to England for trial seemed to the colonists to prove the British government intended to strip them of their civil rights.
Then, in May 1773, Parliament tried to bail out the failing East India Company by giving it a monopoly on tea sales in the colonies. This would make tea cheaper in the colonies than it had been. It seemed to colonists the plan was to convince people to accept the cheaper tea…and thus establish Parliament’s right to govern without colonists’ input.
Ships carrying the East India tea sailed for the colonies in fall 1773, but mass protests convinced the captains of the ships headed to every city but Boston to return to England. In Boston the royal governor was determined to land the cargo. On December 16, 1773, after attendees at a meeting at Boston’s Old South Meeting House heard that the governor refused to let ships loaded with tea leave the harbor until the tax was paid, a group of colonists hid their faces, some with soot, other with overt symbols of their new identification with North America rather than England: as Indigenous Americans.
The men boarded three ships moored at a wharf in Boston Harbor, hauled the chests of tea out of the holds with the ships’ block and tackle, broke them open with axes and pry bars, and dumped the tea at an exceptionally low tide, turning the harbor into muck. They were careful to make sure that no other cargo was harmed and that none of the tea was stolen. They were making a political statement.
Parliament responded by closing the port of Boston, moving the seat of government to Salem, stripping the colony of its charter, requiring colonists to pay for the quartering of soldiers in the town, and demanding payment for the tea.
By fall 1774, concern about the government’s actions had grown deep enough that delegates from the colonies met for six weeks at Carpenters’ Hall in Philadelphia to figure out how to respond, and also how to work together to advance a constitutional opposition to tyranny, as Boston leader Samuel Adams put it.
Over the next two years, American politicians would find an answer to the question of whether the king could be checked by the people. They would get rid of monarchs altogether and declare that the people had the right to govern themselves.
[W. D. Cooper, “Boston Tea Party,” The History of North America (London: E. Newberry, 1789); Library of Congress, public domain. Accessed on Wikipedia Commons.]
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December 17, 2023 (Sunday)
It seems that former president Donald Trump is aligning his supporters with a global far-right movement to destroy democracy.
On Saturday, in Durham, New Hampshire, Trump echoed Nazi leader Adolf Hitler’s attacks on immigrants, saying they are “poisoning the blood of our country”—although two of his three wives were immigrants—and quoted Russian president Vladimir Putin’s attacks on American democracy. Trump went on to praise North Korean autocratic leader Kim Jong Un and align himself with Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán, the darling of the American right wing, who has destroyed Hungary’s democracy and replaced it with a dictatorship.
Trump called Orbán “the man who can save the Western world.”
Dr. Sarah Riccardi-Swartz, a professor of religion and anthropology at Northeastern University, explained in The Conversation what Trump is talking about. Autocrats like Orbán and Putin—and budding autocrats like Trump—are building a global movement by fighting back against the expansion of rights to women, minorities, and LGBTQ+ people.
Russian leaders have been cracking down on LGBTQ+ rights for a decade with the help of the Russian Orthodox Church, claiming that they are protecting “traditional values.” This vision of heteronormativity rewrites the real history of human sexuality, but it is powerful in this moment. Orbán insists that immigrants ruin the purity of a country, and has undermined women’s rights.
Riccardi-Swartz explains that this rhetoric appeals to those in far-right movements around the world. In the United States, “family values” became tied to patriotism after World War II, when Chinese and Soviet communists appeared to be erasing traditional gender roles. Those people defined as anti-family—LGBTQ+ people and women who challenged patriarchy—seemed to be undermining society. Now, as dictators like Putin and Orbán promise to take away LGBTQ+ rights, hurt immigrants, and return power to white men, they seem to many to be protecting traditional society.
In the United States, that undercurrent has created a movement of people who are willing to overthrow democracy if it means reinforcing their traditional vision. Christian nationalists believe that the secular values of democracy are destroying Christianity and traditional values. They want to get rid of LGBTQ+ rights, feminism, immigration, and the public schools they believe teach such values. And if that means handing power to a dictator who promises to restore their vision of a traditional society, they’re in.
It is an astonishing rejection of everything the United States has always stood for.
The White House today responded to Trump’s speech. White House deputy press secretary Andrew Bates said: “Echoing the grotesque rhetoric of fascists and violent white supremacists and threatening to oppress those who disagree with the government are dangerous attacks on the dignity and rights of all Americans, on our democracy, and on public safety…. It’s the opposite of everything we stand for as Americans.”
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December 18, 2023 (Monday)
Reporters at ProPublica have uncovered yet more news about the right-wing network of wealthy donors who have supported Supreme Court justice Clarence Thomas. According to Justin Elliott, Joshua Kaplan, Alex Mierjeski, and Brett Murphy, in January 2000, on a plane flight home from a conservative conference, Thomas complained to Representative Cliff Stearns (R-FL) about his salary. He warned that if lawmakers didn’t give Supreme Court justices a pay raise, “one or more justices will leave soon.”
After the trip, Stearns wrote to Thomas that he agreed “it is worth a lot to Americans to have the constitution properly interpreted.” Stearns immediately set out to pass legislation separating the salaries of Supreme Court justices from the rest of the judiciary, and then raising pay for the Supreme Court justices alone. But the top administrative official of the judiciary, L. Ralph Mecham, in June 2000 wrote to then–chief justice William Rehnquist to suggest that this was the wrong approach for this “delicate matter.”
“From a tactical point of view,” Mecham wrote, “it will not take the Democrats and liberals in Congress very long to figure out that the prime beneficiaries who might otherwise leave the court presumably are Justices Thomas and Scalia. The Democrats might be perfectly happy to have them leave and would see little incentive to act on separate legislation devoted solely to Supreme Court justices if the apparent purpose is to keep Justices Scalia and Thomas on the Court. Moreover, the fact that Representative Stearns is a conservative Republican may not help dissuade the Democrats and liberals from this view.”
Mecham distinguished between Republicans he thought of as “liberals,” and those, presumably like himself, Rehnquist, Thomas, and Scalia, who were pushing “to have the constitution properly interpreted.” By this, he meant those who wanted the concept of “originalism” to undermine the federal government’s regulation of business, provision of a basic social safety net, promotion of infrastructure, and protection of civil rights, principles on which “liberal” Republicans and Democrats agreed.
Although the extremist faction has now captured the Republican Party, as late as 2000 there were enough “liberals” in the Republican Party that members of the extremist faction worried they could not enact their chosen program. So they must have the Supreme Court. Stearns told the ProPublica reporters that Thomas’s “importance as a conservative [as they called themselves] was paramount…. We wanted to make sure he felt comfortable in his job and was being paid properly.”
About this time, wealthy Republican donors began to provide Thomas and his wife Ginni with expensive vacations and gifts. Ginni went to work for the Heritage Foundation, making a salary in the low six figures. Yale law school professor George Priest, who has joined Thomas and billionaire donor Harlan Crow on vacation, says that Crow “views Thomas as a Supreme Court justice as having a limited salary. So he provides benefits for him.”
That is, a Republican billionaire donor “provides benefits” for a Supreme Court justice who voted in favor of—among other things—the 2010 Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission decision that reversed campaign finance restrictions in place for over 100 years, permitting corporations and outside groups to spend unlimited funds on elections, and the 2013 Shelby County v. Holder decision that gutted the 1965 Voting Rights Act protecting minority voting rights in the United States.
The determination of wealthy Republicans to control our political system for their own economic benefit is now matched on the other side of the political equation by religious voters hellbent on overthrowing democracy to impose their religious will on the American majority.
After voters in Republican-dominated states have tried to protect the right to abortion in the wake of the Supreme Court’s 2022 Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision overturning the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision that recognized the constitutional right to abortion, antiabortion forces are trying to stop voters from having the right to decide the matter. They are trying to prevent voters from signing petitions to put such measures on ballots.
Steven Aden, the chief legal officer of the antiabortion group Americans United for Life, told Alice Miranda Ollstein and Megan Messerly of Politico: “Because we believe that abortion is truly about the right to life of human individuals in the womb, we don’t believe those rights should be subjected to majority vote.”
Breaking faith in democracy has led us to a place where the leading candidate for the Republican presidential nomination is openly praising dictators, trying to join the United States into a rising global authoritarian movement based in the idea that democracy, with its focus on equal rights, is destroying traditional society by getting rid of patriarchy, racial hierarchies, and heteronormative society. A Fox News poll released over the weekend showed that 3 in 10 Republicans agreed that “things in the U.S. are so far off track that we need a president willing to break some rules and laws to set things right.”
Today, Pope Francis undermined that argument when he said in a landmark ruling that Roman Catholic priests can bless same-sex couples. While this is not the same as the sacrament of heterosexual marriage, the Vatican’s doctrinal office said this is a sign that God welcomes everyone.
Pope Francis has tended to ignore the rise of right-wing extremism in the U.S. church but now appears to be defending his message that the church should be tolerant and welcoming in the face of the growing intersection of religion and authoritarianism. Last month, he relieved from duty Bishop Joseph H. Strickland of Tyler, Texas, who has vocally supported right-wing politics and openly revolted against the Pope’s positions.
There is a strong economic reason to reinforce the idea of democracy, as well. After forty years in which a minority worked to push tax cuts and deregulation with the argument that they would promote investment in the economy, the Biden administration quite deliberately has used the government not to prop up the “supply side,” but rather to bolster the “demand side.” Despite the history that showed such a system worked, economists and pundits warned that Biden’s policies would dump the U.S. into a terrible recession.
The 2023 numbers are in, and they show exactly what the U.S. Treasury under Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen predicted: inflation has dropped significantly, unemployment is at a low 3.7%, the economy grew at an astonishing 4.9% in the last quarter, and the stock and financial markets are at or near all-time highs.
The economic news is tangible proof that a government that serves the majority, rather than a wealthy few, works.
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December 19, 2023 (Tuesday)
This evening, by a vote of 4–3, the Colorado Supreme Court decided that former president Donald Trump is disqualified from holding office and should be removed from the 2024 ballot in the state, citing Section 3 of the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.
That section was written in the wake of the Civil War, after former Confederates had reelected to Congress men who had left in 1861 to try to destroy the United States government after voters elected Abraham Lincoln.
The section reads: “No person shall be a Senator or Representative in Congress, or elector of President and Vice-President, or hold any office, civil or military, under the United States, or under any State, who, having previously taken an oath, as a member of Congress, or as an officer of the United States, or as a member of any State legislature, or as an executive or judicial officer of any State, to support the Constitution of the United States, shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof.”
Six Colorado Republican and Independent voters challenged Trump’s inclusion on the state’s ballots because of his role in the January 6, 2021, attempt to stop the counting of the nation’s lawful electoral ballots that had elected Democrat Joe Biden president in 2020. Last month, Denver District Court Judge Sarah Wallace ruled that Trump had engaged in insurrection by inciting the riot that led to an attack on the U.S. Capitol but said that Section 3 did not apply to the president.
Today the Colorado Supreme Court agreed that the events at the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, constituted an “insurrection” and that Trump “engaged in” that insurrection through his personal actions, including his incitement of the crowd that breached the Capitol. But it disagreed that the 14th Amendment did not apply to the president.
“The sum of these parts is this,” the court wrote. “Trump is disqualified from holding the office of President under Section Three; because he is disqualified, it would be a wrongful act under the Election Code for the Secretary to list him as a candidate on the presidential primary ballot.”
“We do not reach these conclusions lightly,” the court said. “We are mindful of the magnitude and weight of the questions now before us. We are likewise mindful of our solemn duty to apply the law, without fear or favor, and without being swayed by public reaction to the decisions that the law mandates we reach.” Colorado voters preferred Democratic candidates to Trump in 2016 and 2020, so this case is less likely to reflect on Colorado in 2024 than it is to open the door to other challenges in swing states.
Recognizing that Trump would undoubtedly appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court—as his lawyers say he will—the court stayed its ruling until January 4, the day before the deadline for the Colorado secretary of state to certify the presidential primary ballot. Los Angeles Times legal analyst Harry Litman warns that “we are in for a wild and woolly constitutional ride over the next 16 days and perhaps beyond.”
It is not just this case, but also the question of whether Trump has presidential immunity for his behavior in office that will likely come before the U.S. Supreme Court in the next few weeks. In August a grand jury indicted Trump on four counts for engaging in a conspiracy to defraud the United States when he tried to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election.
Trump’s lawyers have argued that “he enjoys absolute immunity from criminal prosecution” for his behavior in office, and that in any case, he cannot now be tried for a crime after being impeached by the House of Representatives for high crimes and misdemeanors for the events of January 6 and then acquitted by the Senate.
(At the time, Republican leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) said that although he was voting to acquit, the proper place for Trump to face accountability was in the legal system. “President Trump is still liable for everything he did while he was in office as an ordinary citizen,” McConnell said. “He didn’t get away with anything. Yet.”)
As Special Counsel Jack Smith put it: “This case presents a fundamental question at the heart of our democracy: whether a former President is absolutely immune from federal prosecution for crimes committed while in office or is constitutionally protected from federal prosecution when he has been impeached but not convicted before the criminal proceedings begin.”
When a district court denied Trump’s immunity claim, Trump appealed, pretty clearly hoping to delay the case from its scheduled March 4 date until after the 2024 election by working it slowly through the courts until it got to the Supreme Court. Special Counsel Smith tried to avoid this delay by going straight to the Supreme Court to ask it to rule speedily on Trump’s argument that all of his behavior, including that which a grand jury said was criminal, was permitted while Trump was president. The court has not agreed to take the case, but it has agreed to consider taking it and has asked Trump’s lawyers to respond with their arguments by tomorrow.
Trump is trying very hard to appear the inevitable Republican nominee, but these cases pose real problems for him. Polls from last August show that Republicans are reluctant to vote for a convicted felon. Even if he is not convicted, the constant stories about his participation in the events of January 6 will not help him; the hearings of the January 6th committee weakened his support.
Trump’s determination to appear dominant despite his mounting troubles is helping to crumble the remnants of the Republican Party. Nicole Lafond of Talking Points Memo points out that this summer, Trump demanded that Iowa governor Kim Reynolds endorse him, although the governor of Iowa traditionally stays neutral before the nation’s first caucus unless there is a party incumbent. He was angry enough to pick a fight with her, and she ultimately did break precedent, backing Florida governor Ron DeSantis.
Now Trump is both attacking her and using old clips of her endorsing him in advertisements, prompting her to demonstrate Republican infighting by urging people to move on to a different candidate. “We need somebody that can win,” she said.
The Republicans in Congress aren’t helping the party’s image. Although the extremists in the House demanded more than 700 votes this year on things like reducing salaries of officials they dislike to $1, Annie Karni of the New York Times noted today that Congress passed just 27 bills in 2023, making it a historically unproductive Congress. In 2021, when Democrats held the House by the same slim majority the Republicans have now, Congress passed 85 bills that the president signed into law. In two years, the 80th Congress of 1947–1949, famously dubbed the “Do Nothing Congress,” passed 906.
And former House speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA), the first speaker ever thrown out by his own party, today officially resigned his seat.
Meanwhile, the Senate today confirmed by voice vote the 11 four-star generals that Senator Tommy Tuberville (R-AL) held up for most of the year. Tuberville is still placing a hold on the Pentagon’s civilian nominees.
And still, more news about January 6 continues to drop. The Inspector General for the Department of the Interior released a new report showing that one of the groups organizing the rally at the Ellipse that day, Women for America First, lied to federal officials in the National Park Service, denying that there were plans for a second rally in front of the Supreme Court. Such a rally would take the protesters right past the U.S. Capitol, and National Park Service officials asked repeatedly about such a plan because on two other occasions, Women for America First had led marches to the Supreme Court that had led to street violence and dozens of arrests.
Today’s revelation showed text messages between Women for America First official Kylie Kramer and MyPillow chief executive officer Mike Lindell in which Kramer told Lindell: “[W]e are having a second stage at the Supreme Court again after the ellipse. POTUS is going to have us march there/the Capitol. It cannot get out about the second stage because people will try and set another up and Sabotage it. It can also not get out about the march because I will be in trouble with the national park service and all the agencies but POTUS is going to just call for it ‘unexpectedly’… Only myself and [White House liaison] know full story of what is actually happening….”
Finally, today, a federal judge ruled that Representative Scott Perry (R-PA) must allow federal prosecutors access to his phone records, including more than 1,600 messages he exchanged with members of the Trump administration, Congress, and outside allies in their effort to overturn the results of the 2020 election.
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well that seems pretty significant! good evidence for the trials for sure
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December 20, 2023 (Wednesday)
(Hey, folks: we are still without power, making laptop time very limited. Please excuse errors and awkward phrasing that didn’t get combed out.)
On Monday, Republican governor Greg Abbott of Texas signed into law a measure that gives local law enforcement officers the power to arrest migrants, and local judges the power to send them to Mexico. Entering the state illegally would become a state crime, punishable by the state.
Aside from the deep concerns of Texas’s Hispanic population, which makes up about 40% of the state, about the measure, S.B. 4 attempts to take into state hands the power over immigration the Constitution gives to the federal government. It puts state laws in place of the laws Congress has written and which now govern immigration. Courts have repeatedly reinforced that immigration is the responsibility of federal, not state, government, including in 2012, when the Supreme Court largely struck down a 2010 Arizona law that required legal immigrants to carry their immigration papers at all times and required police to investigate the immigration status of every person they encountered.
Now, according to Uriel J. García of the Texas Tribune, “some Texas Republicans have said they hope the new law will push the issue back before a U.S. Supreme Court that is more conservative since three appointees of former President Donald Trump joined it.”
Texas Republicans are eager to exploit the issue of immigration, especially as voters are demonstrably angry over Texas’s extreme antiabortion law that has been in the news since 31-year-old Texas woman Kate Cox was forced to leave the state to obtain abortion care to protect her own health after she learned her fetus had a condition that was not compatible with life.
Republicans are trying to make immigration as powerful an issue as abortion, insisting, for example, that they will not approve emergency supplemental funding for Ukraine’s war against Russia’s invasion until President Joe Biden and the Democrats agree to their increasingly extremist demands on immigration. And yet, while Biden is so determined to get support for Ukraine that he has signaled he will risk infuriating Democratic progressives by making concessions, House Republicans have left town for the holidays, and Senate Republicans say there will not be a deal before the end of the year.
It is not at all clear that Republicans actually want to replace the outdated immigration laws that are currently in place, preferring to preserve the issue to hammer Biden in 2024.
At stake in Texas’s S.B. 4, though, is not just immigration, but also the larger question of the relationship between states and the federal government. Yesterday, civil rights and immigrant groups filed a lawsuit in Austin federal court noting that the law “violates the Supremacy Clause of the United States Constitution” and that “the federal government has exclusive power over immigration.”
Since the 1787 writing of the U.S. Constitution, which replaced the Articles of Confederation, the question of states’ rights and federal power has been central to the history of the United States. Written in the months after the thirteen colonies declared independence from a king they believed was a tyrant, the Articles of Confederation were simply a “firm league of friendship” among the 13 new states, with each retaining almost all of its rights.
But within a decade it seemed the new confederation of states would break apart. And so, in 1786, leaders called for a new government based not on states, but on the people of the nation represented by a national government. “We the People of the United States, in order to form a more perfect Union,” the Constitution began. It established a strong executive and gave to Congress power to write all “necessary and proper” laws.
The Constitution’s framers asserted that the federal government was supreme over the state governments. Article VI declared: “This Constitution, and the Laws of the United States which shall be made in Pursuance thereof…shall be the supreme Law of the Land…, any Thing in the Constitution or Laws of any State to the Contrary notwithstanding.”
Federal supremacy almost immediately ran into trouble as the country’s political leaders split into parties and each began to suspect the other of trying to destroy the country’s democratic government. When the Federalists in power in 1798 tried to criminalize false and malicious statements about the federal government in a series of four laws collectively known as the Alien and Sedition Acts, James Madison joined his friend Thomas Jefferson in worrying the government was on its way to becoming “an absolute, or at best a mixed monarchy.”
In what became known as the Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions, Madison and Jefferson suggested that states, acting together, had the ability to stand between the federal government and its citizens when the federal government was acting in a way that hurt those citizens.
No other states agreed at the time, but in 1832, South Carolina leaders inserted their economic interests into what for Madison and Jefferson had been a concern about the rights of citizens. After Congress in 1828 passed a federal tariff—essentially a tax on imported goods—southern leaders insisted that such a law unfairly hurt them because they had to import so much more than northerners did. The South Carolina legislature declared the federal law unconstitutional, and thus null and void within the state.
South Carolina’s leaders had discovered something crucial that would shape American history from then on: it was far easier to dominate a state legislature than the federal government. Rather than work within the federal system, they could simply insist that the states could overrule the federal government. In 1832, what was at stake was not simply the tariff, but also the South’s fundamental system: human enslavement. Recognizing they were becoming a smaller and smaller minority in the country, southern elite enslavers saw that to protect enslavement, they must carve out a power base for themselves that the nation’s majority could not touch: state governments.
To defuse the crisis, President Andrew Jackson signed into law a lower tariff in 1832, but angry South Carolinians adopted the Ordinance of Nullification, claiming that both the 1828 and the 1832 tariffs were null and void in South Carolina and threatening to leave the Union if the federal government tried to enforce them.
Jackson called the South Carolinians out for trying to work around the federal system. If states got to determine whether a law was constitutional, he wrote, “every law operating injuriously upon any local interest will be… represented as unconstitutional,” and because the state declared itself the final decider of that status, there could be no appeal. “If this doctrine had been established at an earlier day,” he wrote, “the Union would have been dissolved in its infancy.”
Such a doctrine was “incompatible with the existence of the Union, contradicted expressly by the letter of the Constitution, unauthorized by its spirit, inconsistent with every principle on which it was founded, and destructive of the great object for which it was formed.” He warned the South Carolinians that he would meet their plan to destroy the government with his own oath to execute its laws. Congress passed a law authorizing Jackson to use the military against South Carolina, but also passed a lower tariff, and South Carolinians backed down…for the moment.
But when voters elected Abraham Lincoln to the White House in 1860, his promise to stop the spread of human enslavement to the West sparked fear among white southerners that a free West would work with the free North to get rid of human enslavement in the South.
So South Carolina leaders asserted the right to dissolve the Union. Their Declaration of the Immediate Causes Which Induce and Justify the Secession of South Carolina from the Federal Union claimed that the federal government had violated the U.S. Constitution by attacking the institution of slavery. Once Lincoln stopped slavery from spreading, they wrote, “slaveholding States will no longer have the power of self-government, or self-protection, and the Federal Government will have become their enemy.”
After four years of war, Congress set out to end the ability of state leaders to undermine the federal government once and for all. In 1868, Americans added to the Constitution the Fourteenth Amendment. Southern state legislatures had tried to push Black Americans back into a form of quasi-enslavement; the amendment put a stop to that. “No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States,” it said, “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 also gave Congress the power to enforce the amendment.
But the struggle between federal and state power was not, in fact, resolved. Federal strength faded during Reconstruction as voters turned against the federal protection of Black Americans. States imposed Jim Crow and Juan Crow laws discriminating against minorities. After World War II, federal government power grew again, with the Supreme Court relying on the Fourteenth Amendment to protect civil rights. But that power, too, faded.
Businessmen who hated federal government regulation and taxes joined with racists and traditionalists who opposed equal rights for minorities and women to oppose federal power. Recognizing they were a political minority, they called for a return to what they called an “original” interpretation of the Constitution: one that focused power, once again, in the states.
It feels odd to write about S.B. 4 and the Nullification Crisis together in 2023. But it jumps out that while the attempt of the Republican-dominated Texas legislature to write its own immigration laws is in part a partisan attempt to whip up a political advantage in 2024, it is also a sign of a political minority that recognizes it cannot win control of the national government through democratic means.
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Chattel slavery, in every way except by name, continued to exist in the United States until early in WWII, in the form of debt peonage and convict leasing. I mentioned this in the thread about the Colorado Supreme Court’s decision to declare Trump ineligible to run for President under the 14th Amendment, but the 14th Amendment gave Congress the “power to enforce, by appropriate legislation, the provisions of this article.” The 13th Amendment had a similar provision. But Congress didn’t do it. For either amendment. As a result, when laws were passed in the late 1800s banning debt peonage, when the practitioners of that were arrested and charged, their defense was actually, “Oh no, this isn’t debt peonage. That would be illegal. These are my slaves.” And it worked, because while the 13th Amendment banned slavery, it didn’t criminalize it or prescribe penalties for engaging in it. There was no crime with which to charge them. It finally ended shortly after the US entered WWII, when the US attorney general ordered these cases to be aggressively prosecuted as debt peonage cases because they were, in spite of the denials of the those engaging in it.
The Constitution is supposed to be a basic framework, not a comprehensive book of laws. That’s why it gives Congress the power to pass all “necessary and proper” laws needed to make it work. Congress isn’t doing that right now, and it has a long history of not doing that.
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December 21, 2023 (Thursday)
The Washington Post editorial board today wrote that “the battle for democracy will be fought—and won” by “explaining to the world why freedom matters to everyone, every day.” So, on an evening when our power has finally been restored, but too late for me to do a deep dive on anything, let’s see what that might look like from today’s news:
For years now, the U.S. right wing has admired Hungary’s prime minister Viktor Orbán, who has overturned his nation’s democracy. Orbán claims that democracy weakens a nation because it allows immigration—which he calls “a poison” to a nation and says “poses a public security and terror risk”—and requires equal rights for women and LGBTQ+ individuals. The U.S. right wing claims to admire Orbán for what they see as a defense of traditional society.
But the logical evolution of Orbán’s “illiberal” society became clear last week, when the Hungarian parliament approved a new law designed to punish Hungarians who oppose the government. A new “sovereignty protection office” will intimidate and punish those who do not share the views of the ruling party, claiming that they are working for western governments and entities. The U.S. ambassador in Budapest, David Pressman, explained: “This new state body has unfettered powers to interrogate Hungarians, demand their private documents, and utilize the services of Hungary’s intelligence apparatus—all without any judicial oversight or judicial recourse for its targets.”
The U.S. State Department said yesterday: “This new law is inconsistent with our shared values of democracy, individual liberty, and the rule of law.”
Also today, House speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA), who has said that immigration is such a national crisis that House Republicans will not pass a bill providing supplemental funding for Ukraine to help it fight off Russia’s invasion without significant changes to the nation’s border policy, wrote a letter to President Joe Biden asking him to make those changes himself through executive action.
Biden has asked Congress for new legislation to address migration at the border since his first week in office, but Trump and his loyalists have demanded extreme measures that Democrats have, in the past, refused. With Republican refusal to fund Ukraine, Biden has said he is eager enough to get funding to Ukraine that he is willing to negotiate, but Johnson sent the House home until January 9 without a deal.
Now it seems Republicans don’t want their own names on any such deal, likely recognizing that such an outcome would take away an issue they hope to exploit in 2024. They want Biden’s name alone on any new policies or, failing that, to be able to blame him for not taking unilateral action.
White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre today reminded reporters that the White House has been negotiating with senators to come up with a bipartisan deal despite the absence of House members, and that Biden has been negotiating with the president of Mexico, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, to address the border situation.
In the next few days, Secretary of State Antony Blinken, Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas, and White House Homeland Security Advisor Liz Sherwood-Randall will all travel to Mexico to meet with President López Obrador to discuss border challenges, all in the spirit of the 2022 Los Angeles Declaration for Migration and Protection, an agreement between 21 Caribbean and Latin American nations, including the United States, to strengthen international frameworks to make migration safe, orderly, and humane.
Also today, Craig Mauger of The Detroit News reported that on November 17, 2020, on a phone call with Republican National Committee chair Ronna McDaniel, Trump personally pressured two Republican members of the Wayne County, Michigan, Board of Canvassers not to sign the papers certifying the 2020 presidential election in order to overturn the election’s lawful results.
Trump told Monica Palmer and William Hartmann that they would look “terrible” if they signed the documents. “We’ve got to fight for our country,” Trump said. “We can’t let these people take our country away from us.” McDaniel, too, urged the pair not to sign and promised, “We will get you attorneys.”
Palmer and Hartmann did not sign the papers, and the next day they tried to take back their votes in favor of certifying, filing legal affidavits saying “intense bullying and coercion” had led them to vote as they did.
Lawyer Chris Thomas, Michigan’s elections director for more than 30 years, told Mauger it was unfortunate that Republican leaders offered to give the two legal protection for not doing their jobs. “Offering something of value to a public official to not perform a required duty may raise legal issues for a person doing so,” Thomas noted. Legal analyst Joyce White Vance pointed out that “[o]ffering an official something of value (services of a lawyer) in exchange for withholding official action (certifying the Wayne County vote) sounds like a classic case of bribery under Michigan State law.”
Trump is currently facing four criminal counts for his attempt to overturn the lawful results of the 2020 presidential election. His attempts to stop Michigan from certifying Biden’s victory are part of those charges.
After the story dropped, Jocelyn Benson, Michigan’s secretary of state, wrote that for her, “the absolute lowest moment in the post election battle we endured to protect Michigan’s accurate and legitimate election results in 2020 was not when armed protestors stormed my home. It was the night of the Wayne County Board of Canvassers meeting.”
Benson said the board knew about the pressure not to certify and were prepared to fight in the courts, but also knew that such a delay would “create enough doubt and uncertainty to enable the Trump campaign to push Pennsylvania, which was certifying the next week, to delay as well. And we knew other dominos would fall after that. How could we overcome the pressure of the then–President of the United States on local and state officials? Were the facts and law not enough?”
“Well,” she wrote, “then something I’ll never forget happened.
“Hundreds—hundreds (!)—of citizens showed up to the meeting of the Wayne County Canvassing Board to remind them of their duty under the law to ensure their votes counted. Their voices mattered. Their votes mattered.
“In my view that turned the tide. Citizens and election officials in Wayne County and statewide didn’t flinch, stood firm, and demanded their votes be certified as required under the law.
“And in the end, the Wayne County Canvassing board fulfilled their legal duty, followed the law and certified the election.
“What started as the lowest moment of the post election melee became the most inspiring.
“The voters won. Facts and the rule of law carried the day.
“Democracy prevailed.”
Finally, tonight, former Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani has filed for bankruptcy less than a week after a jury awarded election workers Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss more than $145 million for defaming them by accusing them of election fraud as part of his attempt to overthrow the country’s democratic system.
The Washington Post’s editorial board wrote that “the world’s democracies should create a system to fight back that can speak plainly and consistently about the inherent advantages of democratic systems, while admitting the imperfections, and use creative ways to illuminate the flaws and depredations of authoritarian regimes.”
To be honest, it doesn’t seem that hard.
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The second Biden does that, the GOP will accuse him of executive overreach and abuse of power.
Or to blame for taking unilateral action. This is a no-win scenario for Biden. He needs to just not play, keep reiterating that it’s Congress’s responsibility to do something about immigration, and hang this on the GOP where it belongs.
We need to pin this and repost it every time somebody in the BBS starts claiming that democracy has one foot in the grave, and its death is just a matter of time.
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