Last Call For A Supremely Bad Decision, Con't

None other than Chief Justice John Roberts himself led the way to rewrite decades of labor history, with a 6-3 decision by the court's conservatives using the Fifth Amendment's "takings clause" to deny unions the right to speak to workers on company property...but only unions.  You know, not health inspectors or other government officials.

Before Wednesday, the Court distinguished between two different types of violations of the takings clause. “Per se” takings involved unusually severe intrusions on private property — such as if the government strips a plot of land of all of its economic value — and were treated with particular skepticism by courts. Less severe intrusions, meanwhile, were classified as “regulatory” takings.

Property owners subject to a per se taking nearly always prevail in court, while property owners alleging a regulatory taking are much less likely to succeed — even when the government imposes fairly strict limitations on how they can use their property. In one famous regulatory takings case, the Court upheld a New York City law preventing the owners of Grand Central Terminal from constructing a high-rise office building on top of the station.

Because the Court views per se takings with such extraordinary skepticism, past decisions held that very few intrusions on private property qualify as such. A per se taking did not occur unless the government deprived a property owner of “all economically beneficial or productive use” of their property, or subjected the property owner to a “permanent physical occupation” of their land.

Thus, California’s regulation did not qualify as a per se taking prior to Cedar Point, as the presence of union organizers does not strip a worksite of all of its economic value, and the regulation did not allow those organizers to permanently occupy a worksite. It only allowed them to enter the property for three hours a day, and for only about a third of the year.

Roberts’s opinion didn’t eliminate this distinction between regulatory and per se takings altogether, but it significantly blurred the line. Under the new rule announced in Cedar Point, any law or regulation that “appropriates a right to invade” private property amounts to a per se taking. If California allowed union organizers to enter an employer’s land for a single minute, then California committed a per se taking.

“The right to exclude is ‘one of the most treasured’ rights of property ownership,” Roberts writes. And much of his opinion suggests that any intrusion on this right to exclude amounts to a taking.

But then Roberts’s opinion takes an unusual turn, in an apparent effort to ward off some of the radical implications of its expansive vision of per se takings.
Roberts isn’t willing to live with the implications of his opinion for cases that don’t involve unions

One problem with Roberts’s expansive view of the takings clause is that it could prevent the government from performing very basic functions, such as health and safety inspections.

Suppose, for example, that a restaurant has a disgusting, rat-infested kitchen that violates numerous local health ordinances. The restaurant’s owners obviously do not want these violations to be discovered, so they refuse to admit any government health inspectors. Under Roberts’s reading of the takings clause, it’s not clear why the restaurant owner should not be allowed to do so — or why it shouldn’t be able to, at the very least, demand compensation from the government before health inspectors can be allowed on their property.

After all, if “the right to exclude is ‘one of the most treasured’ rights of property ownership,” why should an employer be allowed to exclude union organizers but not health inspectors?

Indeed, as California warned in its brief, the expansive vision of the takings clause laid out in much of Roberts’s opinion “would also imperil a wide variety of health- and safety-inspection regimes” (including “food and drug inspections, occupational safety and health inspections, and home visits by social workers”) as well as a federal law providing that “underground mines must be inspected ‘at least four times a year.’”

Roberts’s opinion recognizes that it would be untenable to hold that health and safety inspections violate the Constitution, so he carves out a special rule allowing such inspections to stand. “The government may require property owners to cede a right of access as a condition of receiving certain benefits,” such as a license to operate a business, Roberts writes, so long as that condition “bears an ‘essential nexus’ and ‘rough proportionality’ to the impact of the proposed use of the property.”

Those are some very large and very vague words, and it’s not entirely clear what it means for an inspection requirement to be roughly proportional to “the impact of the proposed use of the property.” Nor is it clear why, if the government can require restaurants to admit health inspectors as a condition of doing business, it can’t also require that restaurant to admit union organizers as a condition of employing workers.

 

It's a brutally clunky decision, and it only serves the purpose of busting unions.  As with the Hobby Lobby decision, it'll be up to the courts to determine who and what qualifies for exemptions and who does not in the future and that of course will be determined by Trump-appointed judges and the 6-3 Roberts Court.

The Road To Gilead, Con't

The Road To Gilead series of posts documents red state America's journey into the fictional Christian theocracy of Gilead, the setting of The Handmaid's Tale books and Hulu series. I've been told by more than a few Village Betters™ types that it's overreaction, that the GOP wouldn't dare press women too hard or end up losing them altogether and becoming a rump reactionary mess with no power.

And yet it seems as they have for several years now, Republicans keep proving that theory wrong.

Missouri is at risk of losing $4.5 billion in tax revenue and federal funding for Medicaid because of a fight between lawmakers over contraceptives.

At issue is a state tax on hospitals, doctors and other health care providers that is used to draw down billions of dollars in federal funding for the government health insurance program, which covers children, low-income adults and people with disabilities.

The Republican-led Legislature adjourned last month without reauthorizing the tax after fighting over whether to include a ban on Medicaid coverage for “any drug or device approved by the federal Food and Drug Administration that may cause the destruction of or prevent the implantation of, an unborn child.”

Federal law requires Medicaid programs cover family planning.

The tax expires Sept. 30.

Republican Gov. Mike Parson has said he’ll start cutting the state budget if lawmakers don’t reup the tax by the start of the next fiscal year, July 1.

Now, three states, NC, AK, and TX, have already made cuts to contraception coverage in Medicaid. NC and AK allow insurers to provide plans without coverage of family planning, and Texas doesn't mandate coverage of emergency contraception at all.

But the Missouri GOP bill would in fact ban Medicaid from covering any birth control, IUDs, or any female contraception options.  It's monstrous.

This is the future the GOP has in store for women, robbing them of their bodily autonomy the second their wombs become involved, and a government that can successfully revoke Medicaid coverage for birth control can revoke all insurance coverage for birth control.

Or for, you know, anything else.

School Of Hard Right Knocks, Con't

Ron DeSantis continues his "The Former Guy™ But Smarter" routine with GOP state lawmakers forcing new legislation that requires surveys of the "beliefs" of all Florida college and university students, with the heavy implication that he will find "indoctrination" no matter what the actual results are, and use it as justification to make massive cuts to the state's education system.

In his continued push against the “indoctrination” of students, Gov. Ron DeSantis on Tuesday signed legislation that will require public universities and colleges to survey students, faculty and staff about their beliefs and viewpoints to support “intellectual diversity.”

The survey will discern “the extent to which competing ideas and perspectives are presented” in public universities and colleges, and seeks to find whether students, faculty and staff “feel free to express beliefs and viewpoints on campus and in the classroom,” according to the bill.

The measure, which goes into effect July 1, does not specify what will be done with the survey results. But DeSantis and Sen. Ray Rodrigues, the sponsor of the bill, suggested on Tuesday that budget cuts could be looming if universities and colleges are found to be “indoctrinating” students.

“That’s not worth tax dollars and that’s not something that we’re going to be supporting moving forward,” DeSantis said at a press conference at a middle school in Fort Myers.

University faculty members have worried the new measure could create a chilling effect on their freedom of speech. Democratic lawmakers also have argued the bill might allow politicians to meddle in, monitor and regulate speech on campus in the future.

DeSantis, however, said the intent of the measure is to prevent public universities and colleges from becoming “hotbeds for stale ideology.”

“It used to be thought that a university campus was a place where you’d be exposed to a lot of different ideas,” DeSantis said. “Unfortunately, now the norm is, these are more intellectually repressive environments. You have orthodoxies that are promoted, and other viewpoints are shunned or even suppressed.”

The governor did not name specific state universities or colleges with this problem. He was broad in his accusations about the higher education system and used vague anecdotes to justify the need for such a survey.

For instance, the governor said he “knows a lot of parents” who are worried that their children will be “indoctrinated” when they go off to college, and that universities are promoting “orthodoxies.” But he did not offer specifics on those claims.

Officials at some of the state’s major universities, including Florida State University and Florida International University, did not immediately respond to requests for comment on the governor’s claims.

The University of Florida issued a statement that upheld the Gainesville-based school as a “marketplace of ideas where a wide variety of opinions are expressed and independent inquiry and vigorous academic deliberation are valued.”

“We believe the survey will reflect that, and we look forward to widespread participation across campus,” the statement said.

 

As I said though, the results of the "survey" are already in.

But in what appeared to be a coordinated effort, Senate President Wilton Simpson, R-Trilby, and House Speaker Chris Sprowls, R-Palm Harbor, slammed universities for lacking a “diversity of thought.”

Simpson, speaking at a state university system’s Board of Governors meeting on Tuesday in St. Petersburg, said there appear to be “socialism factories” in the state’s public university system.

“We always hear about the liberal parts of the university system, and we don’t hear so much of that from the college system,” Simpson said.

Sprowls echoed some of that sentiment at the governor’s press conference.

“As the governor said, we are at great risk, as a nation and as a state, on the lack of intellectual diversity that is on our university campuses,” Sprowls said. “We have decided that one ideological standard will win the day, but the thing is we’re losing because we’re not having real conversations.”

 

Here's where the real pogrom begins however:

 

In addition to the survey, the measure DeSantis signed into law will bar university and college officials from limiting speech that “may be uncomfortable, disagreeable or offensive,” and will allow students to record lectures without consent for educational purposes or to support a civil or criminal case against a higher education institution.

When debating the bill on the Senate floor, Rodrigues said students should be able to “shed a light” on wrongdoing in a classroom. Professors, however, would have civil cause of action against any student — whether they are an adult or a minor — if they publish the recording for any other purpose.

DeSantis did not go into all the details of the bill, but lauded it in broad terms, saying it will allow “robust First Amendment speech on our college and university campuses.” 

 

Sure.

 

The point of the bill is to give the right-wing the tools it needs to sue professors, instructors, and entire departments out of existence, if not to drown universities in civil lawsuits to the point where they are shut down. It's a fascist attack on getting rid of all public education in the US, leaving it only for the super-elite to be able to afford.

 

Fascism 101, folks. Get rid of the smart people.

 

And should DeSantis run for the White House and win in 2024 or 2028, this will be taken nationwide by his education Secretary.  He's as dangerous as they come, folks.

Last Call For Executing A Training Exercise

Turns out the Obama State Department was responsible for the training contract of four members of the Saudi hit squad that butchered US journalist and Saudi dissident Jamal Khashoggi, trained through a private military contractor.

Four Saudis who participated in the 2018 killing of the Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi received paramilitary training in the United States the previous year under a contract approved by the State Department, according to documents and people familiar with the arrangement.

The instruction occurred as the secret unit responsible for Mr. Khashoggi’s killing was beginning an extensive campaign of kidnapping, detention and torture of Saudi citizens ordered by Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, Saudi Arabia’s de facto ruler, to crush dissent inside the kingdom.

The training was provided by the Arkansas-based security company Tier 1 Group, which is owned by the private equity firm Cerberus Capital Management. The company says the training — including “safe marksmanship” and “countering an attack” — was defensive in nature and devised to better protect Saudi leaders. One person familiar with the training said it also included work in surveillance and close-quarters battle.

There is no evidence that the American officials who approved the training or Tier 1 Group executives knew that the Saudis were involved in the crackdown inside Saudi Arabia. But the fact that the government approved high-level military training for operatives who went on to carry out the grisly killing of a journalist shows how intensely intertwined the United States has become with an autocratic nation even as its agents committed horrific human rights abuses.

It also underscores the perils of military partnerships with repressive governments and demonstrates how little oversight exists for those forces after they return home.

Such issues are likely to continue as American private military contractors increasingly look to foreign clients to shore up their business as the United States scales back overseas deployments after two decades of war.

The State Department initially granted a license for the paramilitary training of the Saudi Royal Guard to Tier 1 Group starting in 2014, during the Obama administration. The training continued during at least the first year of former President Donald J. Trump’s term.

Louis Bremer, a senior executive of Cerberus, Tier 1 Group’s parent company, confirmed his company’s role in the training last year in written answers to questions from lawmakers as part of his nomination for a top Pentagon job during the Trump administration.

The administration does not appear to have sent the document to Congress before withdrawing Mr. Bremer’s nomination; lawmakers never received answers to their questions.

In the document, which Mr. Bremer provided to The New York Times, he said that four members of the Khashoggi kill team had received Tier 1 Group training in 2017, and two of them had participated in a previous iteration of the training, which went from October 2014 until January 2015.

“The training provided was unrelated to their subsequent heinous acts,” Mr. Bremer said in his responses.

He said that a March 2019 review by Tier 1 Group “uncovered no wrongdoing by the company and confirmed that the established curriculum training was unrelated to the murder of Jamal Khashoggi.”

 

It's all related. The number of horrific things that happened during the Trump years that start with "following Obama administration policy" is disturbingly high, but there you are. For all his loud screaming about how awful Obama was, Trump was sure good at taking a bad Obama idea that he liked and making it into a hideous one.

Why we continue to be friends with the Saudi regime, well, we all know the answer to that.

Our Little White Supremacist Domestic Terrorism Problem, Con't

After Senate Republicans killed any idea of a bipartisan January 6th Commission to investigate the Trump insurrection to kill lawmakers in the US Capitol, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is going ahead with a select committee anyway, and Republicans will of course do everything they can to stall, attack, and discredit it.

 

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi plans to appoint a select committee to investigate the deadly January 6 attack on the US Capitol after Senate Republicans blocked the creation of an independent commission to probe the insurrection, according to two sources familiar with the matter.

Pelosi announced Tuesday evening to the House's Steering and Policy Committee that she will create a select committee, the sources said. She told Democrats the January 6 inquiry will be a "pursuit of truth" investigation, according to one source who heard her remarks.

One of the sources said Pelosi indicated she believes a regular standing committee of several dozen members just would not work, and notes the House has already given the Senate several weeks to get a bill on an independent commission passed and that has not happened.

Pelosi later denied that she had made a decision. "No, I did not make that announcement. Somebody put out a false report," she told reporters.

After CNN and numerous news outlets reported on her decision, her spokesman, Drew Hammill, later tweeted, "Clarification on tonight's meeting of the Steering and Policy Committee. Speaker Pelosi told Members she plans to announce WHETHER she will create a select committee THIS WEEK. Her preference continues to be a bipartisan commission which Senate Republicans are blocking."

However, CNN stands by its reporting and the sources who confirmed her initial remarks.

The decision to appoint a select committee to investigate the attack means that House Democrats will channel their various efforts examining the events surrounding January 6 into one place. It was one of several options Pelosi had been considering after Senate Republicans filibustered legislation creating an independent commission that had passed in the House.

The commission is likely to fuel the political brawl that's played out in the House the aftermath of January 6, in which Democrats have charged that Republicans are trying to whitewash the insurrection carried out by supporters of former President Donald Trump. Republicans, meanwhile, have accused Democrats of trying to use the commission and their committee investigations for political gain.

Trump's role in the lead-up to the January 6 attack is sure to be a focus of the select panel, and the committee could look into actions of some House members, too.

 

I don't expect much of anything from the committee anyway. I'm not even sure the Biden White House or Justice Department will even cooperate very much, given both of those entities looking to protect Trump and the executive branch more than reach the truth. Certainly Republicans will ignore any subpoenas, and they won't be enforced.

Hell, I don't even expect public hearings. I expect all of this to be done behind closed doors, and for us to get a quickly-forgetten Committee report late next year.  Hell, if the GOP wins the House back, we may not even get the report at all if Trump and friends can drag it out long enough. And even if the report does come out, it'll be heavily redacted.

No, absolutely nothing will come of this, let alone any real consequences for the Republicans who voted to overturn the election. Nearly all of them will be re-elected in 2022.

There Is No Plan B For Plan V

Well, we've apparently gotten the desired outcome of the death of the For The People Act: all Republicans voted against it, all Democrats voted for it, but the Republicans still win because the Democrats let them keep the filibuster. Precisely none of this makes voting any more fair or more safe, but it's the thought that counts as Republicans at the state level lock in permanent GOP majorities for decades to come.

After months of build-up, Democrats are boxed in on their party’s signature election reform plan. And there’s no apparent escape route.

Senate Republicans blocked Democrats’ sweeping ethics and elections legislation on Tuesday, a filibuster that many in President Joe Biden’s party hoped would turbocharge the demise of the chamber’s 60-vote threshold for most bills. But Democratic moderates’ support of the filibuster has only hardened in recent days, culminating in an emphatic defense of the supermajority requirement by Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (D-Ariz.) on the eve of Tuesday’s vote.

Liberals eager to change the minds of Sinema, Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) and nearly a dozen other senators reluctant to eliminate or reform the filibuster had staked their success on a series of Republican blockades on former President Donald Trump’s impeachment, a Jan. 6 commission, equal pay standards and most notably, the elections bill dubbed “S1.”

In today’s 50-50 Senate, Democrats would need every single one of their members to vote in favor of any changes to the rules, and there is no sign that’s close to happening.

It gets worse for Biden’s party: Now that the GOP has rejected debating the legislation that would overhaul federal elections, Democrats are without a new strategy to show party activists some momentum before the 2022 midterms. At the moment, the party doesn't have a backup plan on elections and Democratic senators acknowledged their internal maneuvering over the filibuster has only begun after months of dominating their time in control of Washington.

“There doesn’t seem to be much of a path to getting any Republican votes on voting reforms. So what does that leave?” said Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.). “It leaves a conversation in the caucus about whether you want to give Republicans the authority to continue to strip away from people the right to vote.”

Democratic leaders have told members that Tuesday’s vote is only the beginning of the discussion, not the end. And some Senate Democrats took it as a positive sign that all 50 members of the caucus — including Manchin — were united in Tuesday’s vote.

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer did not detail next steps during Tuesday’s private caucus meeting, according to an attendee. But later on the floor, he said that Democrats will “have several, serious options for how to reconsider this issue" and "are going to explore every last one.”

Many in his caucus are desperate to find a path forward. “A body that won’t defend itself from an internal attack hardly deserves the name of a U.S. Senate,” said Sen. Tim Kaine (D-Va.). “No consequences for Trump, no impeachment, no censure, no January 6 commission ... no agreement on voting rights.”

Potential backup plans after the filibuster include breaking up the elections bill into pieces to force more votes on the GOP or waiting until the fall to push a voting-rights-specific bill. Democrats could also put elections spending in a party-line budget reconciliation bill.

But on Tuesday evening success looked far off, even as Democrats vowed not to give up after Schumer promised that “failure is not an option.” Vice President Kamala Harris told reporters that “the fight is not over.”

In the meantime, the Senate is left with a handful of bipartisan gangs negotiating critical legislation on infrastructure and policing — and a lot of angry progressives who want to exercise their party’s power while they still have full control of Congress.

 

I understand the actual problem is Republicans voting to make sure that Republican states can caontinue to disenfranchise millions, but we've wasted five months to get to a guaranteed failure point, and everyone is asking "So now what?"

 That question should have been answered months ago.

Last Call For The...Sinema...On The Hill

Apparently seeing WV Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin getting all the attention over the filibuster made Arizona Democratic Sen. Kyrsten Sinema angry, so now she demands the sacrifice of American democracy at the altar of bipartisanship, and she wants her pony too dammit!

To those who want to eliminate the legislative filibuster to pass the For the People Act (voting-rights legislation I support and have co-sponsored), I would ask: Would it be good for our country if we did, only to see that legislation rescinded a few years from now and replaced by a nationwide voter-ID law or restrictions on voting by mail in federal elections, over the objections of the minority?

To those who want to eliminate the legislative filibuster to expand health-care access or retirement benefits: Would it be good for our country if we did, only to later see that legislation replaced by legislation dividing Medicaid into block grants, slashing earned Social Security and Medicare benefits, or defunding women’s reproductive health services?

To those who want to eliminate the legislative filibuster to empower federal agencies to better protect the environment or strengthen education: Would it be good for our country if we did, only to see federal agencies and programs shrunk, starved of resources, or abolished a few years from now?

This question is less about the immediate results from any of these Democratic or Republican goals — it is the likelihood of repeated radical reversals in federal policy, cementing uncertainty, deepening divisions and further eroding Americans’ confidence in our government.

And to those who fear that Senate rules will change anyway as soon as the Senate majority changes: I will not support an action that damages our democracy because someone else did so previously or might do so in the future. I do not accept a new standard by which important legislation can only pass on party-line votes — and when my party is again in the Senate minority, I will work just as hard to preserve the right to shape legislation.

Good-faith arguments have been made both criticizing and defending the Senate’s 60-vote threshold. I share the belief expressed in 2017 by 31 Senate Democrats opposing elimination of the filibuster — a belief shared by President Biden. While I am confident that several senators in my party still share that belief, the Senate has not held a debate on the matter.

It is time for the Senate to debate the legislative filibuster, so senators and our constituents can hear and fully consider the concerns and consequences. Hopefully, senators can then focus on crafting policies through open legislative processes and amendments, finding compromises that earn broad support.

A group of 10 Democrats and 11 Republicans that I am helping lead has reached an agreement on an infrastructure investment framework. We are now negotiating with the administration. Bipartisan working groups to which I belong are negotiating how to address our broken immigration system and raise the federal minimum wage. I strongly support bipartisan discussions underway on police reform. The Senate recently passed a critical water infrastructure bill, as well as crucial research, development and manufacturing legislation.

It’s possible that not all of these efforts will succeed — and those that do may not go as far as some of us wish.

But bipartisan policies that stand the test of time could help heal our country’s divisions and strengthen Americans’ confidence that our government is working for all of us and is worthy of all of us.

And as several people, myself included, several of you in the comments, pundits and columnists ranging from Never Trumpers to progressives and everyone in between have all exhaustively noted over the last several months, Sinema's argument about the filibuster as a tool of moderation would be correct if it wasn't for the fact that Republicans are currently using it to block everything the Democrats are trying to do, just as they did during the Obama years.

The second strike against this curious naiveté is the fact that the GOP also refuses to operate in good faith on nearly anything. Mitch McConnell is on record as opposing the entire Biden administration, Sen. John Barasso has openly said that he wants to make Biden a half-term President, burying his agenda. This isn't two opposing sides of democracy, folks, this is one side wants democracy and the other side wants authoritarian dictatorship.

Thirdly, Sinema's "Group of 21" is also a trap, one designed to give both Democrats and Republicans cover to not do anything about the filibuster and keep it as is as a tool of obstruction. The For The People Act is about to be blocked by every single Republican senator. The infrastructure bill isn't being made better by Republican filibuster threats, every time the bill gets smaller and smaller. Sinema is just as guilty as using this bipartisanship as an excuse to pass no legislation, so she doesn't have to answer for failure. Senators rarely do.

And I'm tired of it.

Europe's Little Trumps Get Thumped

Europe's "Little Trumps", Hungarian PM Viktor Orban, Polish right-wing ruling party leader Jaroslaw Kaczynski and Slovenian PM Janez Jansa, are all facing revolts at home as hopefully they are headed towards suffering the same political fate as The Former Guy™ and Israel's Benjamin Netanyahu.

 

A right-wing populist wave in Eastern Europe, lifted by Donald J. Trump’s surprise victory in 2016, has not crashed as a result of his defeat last November. But it has collided with a serious obstacle: Its leaders are not very popular.

After winning elections by railing against widely disliked elites, right-wing populists on Europe’s formerly communist eastern flank, it turns out, are themselves not much liked. That is due in large part to unpopular coronavirus lockdowns, and, like other leaders no matter their political complexion, their stumbling responses to the health crisis. But they are also under pressure from growing fatigue with their divisive tactics.

In Hungary, Prime Minister Viktor Orban is being countered by an uncharacteristically united opposition. In Poland, the deeply conservative government has made an abrupt shift to the left in economic policy to win back support. And in Slovenia, the hard-right governing party of the Trump-loving prime minister is slumping disastrously in the polls.

Slovenia’s leader, Janez Jansa, who made international headlines by congratulating Mr. Trump on his “victory” in November and is a self-declared scourge of liberal, or what he calls communist, elites, is perhaps the most at risk of the region’s unpopular populists.

Propelled by nationalist promises to bar asylum seekers from the Middle East and “ensure the survival of the Slovenian nation,” Mr. Jansa’s Slovenian Democratic Party won the most votes in a 2018 election. Last year, a new coalition government led by the party had an approval rating of 65 percent.

This has since plunged to 26 percent and Mr. Jansa is so unpopular that allies are jumping ship. Street protests against him have attracted as many as tens of thousands of people, huge turnouts in a normally placid Alpine nation with a population of just two million.

Mr. Jansa has staggered on, narrowly surviving a no-confidence vote in Parliament and a recent impeachment attempt by opposition legislators and defectors from his coalition.

But he has been so weakened “he does not have the power to do anything” other than curse foes on Twitter, said Ziga Turk, a university professor and cabinet minister in an earlier government headed by Mr. Jansa, who quit the governing party in 2019.


An admirer of Hungary’s Mr. Orban, Mr. Jansa has sought to bring the news media to heel, as nationalist governments in Hungary and Poland have largely succeeded in doing, at least with television.

But the only television station that consistently supports him, a bombastic and partly Hungarian-funded outfit called Nova24TV, has so few viewers — less than one percent of the television audience on most days — that it does not even figure in ratings charts.

Slavoj Zizek, a celebrity philosopher and self-declared “moderately conservative Marxist” — one of the few Slovenians well-known outside the country, along with Melania Trump — said it was too early to write off leaders like Mr. Jansa, Mr. Orban and Jaroslaw Kaczynski of Poland, whose three countries he described as a “new axis of evil.”

Nationalist populists, he said, have rarely won popularity contests. Their most important asset, he said, has been the disarray of their opponents, many of whom the philosopher sees as too focused on “excessive moralism” and issues that do not interest most voters instead of addressing economic concerns.

“The impotence of the left is terrifying,” Mr. Zizek said.

 

The same problem as always: the fractured left can't get it together against the unified right, but the right has become fractured again, and that is giving the left hope.

 

We'll see if it's enough.

Anatomy Of An Illness

America barely escaped COVID-19 being an order of magnitude worse as The Former Guy was so worried about the disease becoming his bete noir that he nearly scrapped the federal response entirely and left 100% of the work to dealing with infected Americans to the states. WaPo's new book on the early days of COVID-19 reveals Trump's response was just as horrible as I imagined.

“Testing is killing me!” Trump reportedly exclaimed in a phone call to then-Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar on March 18, yelling so loudly that Azar’s aides overheard every word. “I’m going to lose the election because of testing! What idiot had the federal government do testing?”

“Uh, do you mean Jared?” Azar responded, citing the president’s senior adviser and son-in-law, Jared Kushner. Just five days earlier, Kushner had vowed to take charge of a national testing strategy with the help of the private sector, Abutaleb and Paletta write.

Trump countered that the U.S. government never should have become involved in testing, arguing with his health secretary over why the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention was seeking to track infections at all. “This was gross incompetence to let CDC develop a test,” Trump reportedly said as he berated Azar.

Public health experts contend it was inadequate testing that allowed the novel coronavirus to spread largely undetected across the United States in early 2020, making contact tracing and isolation all but impossible in the early days of the outbreak and fueling the first staggering wave of infections, hospitalizations and deaths.

Trump’s rages frequently distracted senior officials and slowed the national response, the authors found, with the president touting his hunches and eventually turning to handpicked advisers including the radiologist Scott Atlas, who had no infectious-disease or public health experience. But the book also depicts the president as ineffectual and out of touch while his health and national security officials tried to manage the worsening outbreak.

Despite his famous reality TV catchphrase “You’re fired,” Trump proved markedly ineffective at removing staffers during the pandemic, Abutaleb and Paletta write, boxed in by deputies who worried about political fallout and the implications of undermining public health.

For instance, Trump repeatedly told his aides in February to fire a senior State Department official who allowed 14 coronavirus-infected Americans on the Diamond Princess cruise ship to return home. The decision “doubles my numbers overnight,” the president complained to Azar, as the number of official U.S. coronavirus cases rose to 28.

But senior officials balked at firing the diplomat, and Trump and then-acting White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney eventually “gave up,” Abutaleb and Paletta write, adding that the official’s decision to bring the sick Americans back to the United States may have saved their lives, given there were no later flights they could take.

Trump also would call for firing Robert Kadlec, the HHS emergency preparedness chief who signed off on the Diamond Princess evacuation. Later, he would push to replace Food and Drug Administration Commissioner Stephen Hahn when the agency chief refused to expedite vaccine approvals before the election and deferred to career FDA officials instead.

Both men would stay on for the duration of Trump’s presidency, along with Anthony S. Fauci — the longtime infectious-disease expert who became a top target of Trump and his allies but whose public popularity helped insulate him. Rather than fire Fauci, White House officials increasingly tuned out the advice from him and other top health officials, the book says, with Trump instead leaning on Kushner, an array of economic advisers and other trusted allies who lacked infectious-disease expertise.

Trump’s top deputies adopted a similar strategy of issuing threats or isolating their rivals, undermining efforts to manage the outbreak, Abutaleb and Paletta write.

Kadlec, who had overseen the purchase of 600 million masks, took the plan in late March to Kushner — who exploded in anger, throwing his pen against the wall in frustration when he learned the masks would not arrive until June.

“You f---ing moron,” Kushner reportedly said. “We’ll all be dead by June.”

Mark Meadows, whom Trump abruptly installed as White House chief of staff with little warning to Mulvaney, also berated Kadlec as the federal government struggled to distribute a new antiviral treatment called remdesivir, whose use the FDA had just authorized.

“I’m going to fire your a-- if you can’t fix this!” Meadows reportedly yelled at Kadlec in a surprise phone call as the remdesivir rollout sputtered when scarce supplies were wrongly delivered to hospitals without eligible patients or appropriate refrigeration and the White House’s hopes for positive headlines slipped away.

“That was what the response had turned into: a toxic environment in which no matter where you turned, someone was ready to rip your head off or threatening to fire you,” Abutaleb and Paletta write.

 

I know the term "kakistocracy" gets tossed around a lot when referring to the Trump regime, government by the least suitable individuals, and yet here we are with reams and mountains and terabytes of evidence affirming that for four years we trudged through that flaming manure pile and we barely made it out as a democratic nation.

And notice that all the major Trump villains were present: Jared Kushner, Mark Meadows, Mick Mulvaney. The worst possible chief executive hired the worst possible people to run the show.

Last Call For Sleeping With The Enemy

Time to remind everyone of the Oliver Willis Unified Punditry Kayfabe Theory: it's all pro-wrestling, the heels and the faces are all buddies, and the corporations write the scripts months in advance for consumption, as NY Times reporter Ben Smith talks to his "white supremacist but only on TV and radio" buddy Tucker Carlson.

Last month, I texted Tucker Carlson to ask him a question that was on my mind: “Did you get vaccinated?”

“When was the last time you had sex with your wife and in what position?” he replied. “We can trade intimate details.”

Then we argued back and forth about vaccines, and he ended the conversation with a friendly invitation to return to his show. “Always a good time.”

One question you may be asking, if you are a New York Times reader, is: Why are you exchanging texts with Tucker Carlson, the Fox News host who recently described the media at large as “cringing animals who are not worthy of respect”?

And if you are a Tucker Carlson viewer, you may also be asking: How can the guy who tells you every night that the media is lying be texting with the enemy?

The answer is one of Washington’s open secrets. Mr. Carlson, a proud traitor to the elite political class, spends his time when he’s not denouncing the liberal media trading gossip with them. He’s the go-to guy for sometimes-unflattering stories about Donald J. Trump and for coverage of the internal politics of Fox News (not to mention stories about Mr. Carlson himself). I won’t talk here about any off-the-record conversations I may have had with him. But 16 other journalists (none from The Times; it would put my colleagues in a weird position if I asked them) told me on background that he has been, as three of them put it, “a great source.”

“In Trump’s Washington, Tucker Carlson is a primary supersecret source,” the media writer and Trump chronicler Michael Wolff writes in his forthcoming collection of essays, “Too Famous.” Mr. Wolff, who thanked Mr. Carlson in the acknowledgments of his 2018 book, “Fire and Fury,” explained, “I know this because I know what he has told me, and I can track his exquisite, too-good-not-to-be-true gossip through unsourced reports and as it often emerges into accepted wisdom.”

Mr. Carlson was particularly well positioned to be a source about the Trump administration. His Fox platform, where in May he had a nightly average of three million viewers, made him someone who mattered to Mr. Trump, a close follower of television ratings. He has a former reporter’s eye for detail and anecdote, and his observations can be detected in the lurid tales of Mr. Trump’s chaotic court and Fox’s own tumultuous internal politics.

A coming book by the Wall Street Journal reporter Michael Bender, “Frankly, We Did Win This Election: The Inside Story of How Trump Lost,” includes a moment in which Mr. Carlson sends Mr. Trump’s calls to voice mail after the first presidential debate last fall, when he was criticized for repeatedly interrupting Joe Biden. When Mr. Trump finally reaches the Fox host, the book describes, verbatim, an exchange between the two men that casts Mr. Carlson in a flattering light. (“Everyone says I did a good job,” Mr. Trump tells Mr. Carlson. “I don’t know who told you that was good,” Mr. Carlson says. “It was not good.”) Mr. Bender declined to comment on the sourcing that allowed him to so precisely reconstruct a conversation between the two men.

And Brian Stelter, the host of the CNN program “Reliable Sources,” told me that “you can see Tucker’s fingerprints all over the hardcover” edition of his 2020 book “Hoax,” which excoriates Fox News for amplifying Mr. Trump’s falsehoods. He said that he “couldn’t stomach” talking to Mr. Carlson, who has grown ever more hard-line, for the updated paperback version that was just released.

Mr. Carlson was born to a world of insiders and story shapers, and makes no secret of it. His father was a reporter in Los Angeles and San Diego before Ronald Reagan appointed him director of the Voice of America, and the son grew up with a generation of elite Washington journalists. “I’ve always lived around people who are wielding authority, around the ruling class,” he said in a 2018 interview. A former New York Observer media writer, Sridhar Pappu, recalled to me that when he first traveled to Washington to cover the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner in the early 2000s, it was Mr. Carlson who asked him, “Do you have an invitation to Tammy’s?” referring to the annual brunch for media insiders co-hosted by Tammy Haddad, the well-connected former MSNBC producer.

Mr. Carlson has said he turned against his fellow elites after the 2008 financial crisis. His political shift also transformed his long journeyman’s career as a magazine writer and MSNBC conservative, and made him Fox’s leading tribune of the pro-Trump masses.

But his decades of Washington relationships have produced a tiresome conversation among Mr. Carlson’s old friends about what he really stands for, whether he’s really a racist or whether he cynically plays one on TV. Who knows, and what does it matter anyway? Mr. Carlson’s recent fixations include suggesting that the Jan. 6 Capitol insurrection was, in fact, a provocation staged by the F.B.I. and that making children wear masks is abuse. The Anti-Defamation League recently called for him to be fired from Fox News for warning that Democrats are plotting to “replace” the current electorate with “more obedient voters, from the third world.” The Pentagon rebuked him for a sexist riff on women in the military.

And then there are his stated views on the media. “I just can’t overstate how disgusted I am,” he told the Fox-owned sports media site Outkick in April. “The media is basically Praetorian Guard for the ruling class, the bodyguards for Jeff Bezos. That’s the opposite of what we should have. I really hate them for it, I’ll be honest.”

 

The answer of course is "since nobody really knows what Carlson is thinking, and that he's just a media cypher, does it matter when he's here to play a role, and that he plays it better than anyone else?"

 

That's letting him off too easily, but the media ecosystem isn't meant to punish obvious assholes like Carlson. He's played the game expertly and he continues being handsomely rewarded for doing so. The point is to hate the guy, but to recognize that he runs his little sick high school clique.

 

America is full of assholes like that.

 

Most of the time, they win and keep on winning.

 

That's the problem, of course.

The Separation Of Church And Hate

US Catholic Bishops, ignoring Pope Francis's warnings, are considering denying Pro-choice politicians in the US the rite of communion, up to and including President Joe Biden and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.

The Roman Catholic bishops of the United States, flouting a warning from the Vatican, have overwhelmingly voted to draft guidance on the sacrament of the Eucharist, advancing a political push by conservative bishops to deny President Biden communion because of his support of abortion rights.

The decision, made public on Friday afternoon, is aimed at the nation’s second Catholic president, perhaps the most religiously observant commander in chief since Jimmy Carter, and exposes bitter divisions in American Catholicism. It capped three days of contentious debate at a virtual June meeting of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops. The measure was approved by a vote of 73 percent in favor and 24 percent opposed.

The Eucharist, or holy communion, is one of the most sacred rituals in Christianity, and bishops have grown worried in recent years about declining Mass attendance and misunderstanding of the importance of the sacrament to Catholic life.

But the move to target a president, who regularly attends Mass and has spent a lifetime steeped in Christian rituals and practices, is striking coming from leaders of the president’s own faith, particularly after many conservative Catholics turned a blind eye to the sexual improprieties of former President Donald J. Trump because they supported his political agenda. It reveals a uniquely American Catholicism increasingly at odds with Rome.

The action is the latest sign of how the nation’s bitter political divisions are shaping religious life. Christians across denominations are facing similar divides. Earlier this week at the Southern Baptist Convention meeting in Nashville, a more moderate majority narrowly headed off a takeover attempt by a hard-right movement.

The text of the proposal itself has not been written and would ultimately require approval by a two-thirds majority vote. The proposed outline, earlier reported by America Magazine, said it would “include the theological foundation for the Church’s discipline concerning the reception of Holy Communion and a special call for those Catholics who are cultural, political, or parochial leaders to witness the faith.”

Some conservatives want to use such a statement as theological justification to deny communion to Mr. Biden and Catholic politicians like him who support abortion rights.

The decision immediately drew criticism from 60 Catholic Democrats in Congress, who urged the bishops “to not move forward and deny this most holy of all sacraments” and who challenged the bishops by outlining their own commitment to “making real the basic principles that are at the heart of Catholic social teaching.”

Asked about the bishops’ decision at a vaccination event on Friday, Mr. Biden said it was “a private matter and I don’t think that’s going to happen.”

 

Joe Biden has more faith than I do in the Church and in the church, that is 100% true and i freely admit it. But there are a good five dozen Democratic Catholics in Congress, and for the Church to basically target them for political views, well, that seems...

...actually that's completely in character for the history of the Roman Catholic church over the centuries, now isn't it?

The Big Lie, Con't

The Trump Insurrection Tour continues across the nation as The Former Guy™ can't stop fleecing his cultists, and the events are becoming a hotbed of possible violence drawing more and more fever-eyed fanatics out of the woodwork, as he continues to spread the Big Lie.

For a few hours last weekend, thousands of Donald Trump’s supporters came together in a field under the blazing Wisconsin sun to live in an alternate reality where the former president was still in office — or would soon return.

Clad in red MAGA hats and holding “Trump 2021” signs, they cheered in approval as Mike Lindell, the MyPillow creator-turned-conspiracy peddler, introduced “our real president.” Then Trump appeared via Jumbotron to repeat the lie that has become his central talking point since losing to Joe Biden by more than 7 million votes: “The election was rigged.”

Lindell later promised the audience that Trump would soon be reinstated into the presidency, a prospect for which there is no legal or constitutional method.

In the nearly five months since Trump’s presidency ended, similar scenes have unfolded in hotel ballrooms and other venues across the country. Attorney Lin Wood has told crowds that Trump is still president, while former national security adviser Michael Flynn went even further at a Dallas event by calling for a Myanmar-style military coup in the U.S. At the same conference, former Trump lawyer Sidney Powell suggested Trump could simply be reinstated and a new Inauguration Day set.

Taken together, the gatherings have gelled into a convention circuit of delusion centered on the false premise that the election was stolen. Lindell and others use the events to deepen their bond with legions of followers who eschew the mainstream press and live within a conservative echo chamber of talk radio and social media. In these forums, “evidence” of fraud is never fact-checked, leaving many followers genuinely convinced that Biden shouldn’t be president.

“We know that Biden’s a fraudulent president, and we want to be part of the movement to get him out,” said Donna Plechacek, 61, who traveled from Chippewa Falls, Wisconsin, with her sister for the event. “I know that they cheated the election. I have no doubt about that. The proof is there.”

State election officials, international observers, Trump’s own attorney general and dozens of judges — including many Trump appointed — have found no verifiable evidence of mass election fraud. Indeed, Trump’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency called the election “the most secure in American history” and concluded there was “no evidence that any voting system deleted or lost votes, changed votes, or was in any way compromised.”

But Plechacek is not alone. A recent Quinnipiac University poll found that two-thirds of Republicans, 66%, think Biden’s victory was not legitimate, while CNN found in April that 70% of Republicans do not think Biden won enough votes to be president. Half, 50%, said there is solid evidence to support that claim.

They are people like Deb Tulenchik and Galen Carlson from Pequot Lakes, Minnesota, who recalled the shock they felt after the election as Trump’s early election night lead faded as additional ballots were counted.

Thanks to the country’s polarization, many Trump supporters didn’t know anyone who voted for Biden and only saw Trump-Pence signs lining the roadways as they drove around their neighborhoods. Carlson, 61, said he went to bed believing Trump won. He didn’t heed warnings that mail-in votes take longer to count, so early returns would likely skew toward Trump, who urged his supporters to vote in person and not by mail.

“I was asleep early cause it looked like it was going to be a done deal. And then when we woke up I couldn’t believe it,” he said.

“Disbelief,” echoed Tulenchik, 63.

Trump spent months girding himself against possible defeat, insisting he could only lose if there was massive fraud. It’s a lie he’s sure to repeat as he steps up his public schedule in the coming weeks.

But the narrative was already resonating under the beating sun at the Wisconsin MAGA rally, where attendees came decked out in Trump gear, including plenty of shirts declaring, “Trump Won!”

 

The violence is coming. The only question is how widespread and how awful it will be, and how many people will be hurt or killed. No, I don't actually expect a full-fledged civil war at this point, but I do expect deadly political terrorism this summer that will quickly become a national nightmare.

 

The longer it takes for Trump to face indictments, the more he can foment insurrection and precipitate violence around the country. The plan is to make it impossible to indict him, because it will kick off a national terrorist movement, even if democracy, or what's left of it, is utterly destroyed in the process.

So far it's working.

Last Call For Meathead Matt's #MeToo Moment, Con't

Florida GOP Rep. Matt Gaetz is almost certainly going to be indicted soon on sexual assault charges for his escapades involving underage girls, and a wingman, Joel Greenberg, already flipping on him to avoid the worst federal tax fraud charges, but now the question is rapidly evolving into just how many other Florida Republicans Gaetz and Greenberg take down with them.

 

Since federal prosecutors obtained the cooperation of GOP Rep. Matt Gaetz's once close-ally in May, sources tell ABC News the ongoing investigation, which includes sex trafficking allegations involving Gaetz, has engulfed the tight-knit Central Florida political scene as prosecutors continue their investigation of the Florida congressman.

Former Seminole County tax collector Joel Greenberg, who reached a plea deal last month, has been assisting federal agents in the sprawling probe that has recently revved up its focus on alleged corruption and fraud stemming from Greenberg's time in office and beyond, multiple sources familiar with the matter told ABC News.

The former tax collector pleaded guilty in May to a host of crimes including charges of stalking, identity theft, wire fraud and conspiracy to bribe a public official, as well as a sex trafficking charge. Greenberg is prepared to hand over evidence and testimony that could implicate Gaetz and others, sources told ABC News.

Sources told ABC News that prosecutors believe a decision about whether or not to bring charges against Gaetz could come as early as July.

Sources said the probe into the congressman has ramped up in recent weeks. Investigators have started interviewing more women who were allegedly introduced to Gaetz through Greenberg, who last month pleaded guilty to sex trafficking a 17-year-old girl -- who later went on to work in pornography -- and introducing her to other "adult men." Since May, a new round of target letters and subpoenas in the wide-ranging investigation have been sent out, ABC News has learned.

Another avenue investigators have been focusing on recently, according to sources, are contracts that Greenberg handed out through the tax office totaling more than $1.5 million, which an independent audit late last year described as "unnecessary" and "considered to be a waste of taxpayer dollars," according to documents in the forensic audit of the tax office obtained by ABC News through a public records request.

Sources told ABC News that investigators have reached out to Keith Ingersoll, whose firm KI Consulting had a $48,000 contract with the tax office that ran between January 2017 and September 2020. The audit found that there was "no evidence of work product" by Ingersoll's group despite the multi-year contract and staff at the tax office being "unaware what this group did."

Ingersoll's attorney did not respond to multiple requests for comment from ABC News.

 

So the feds appear to suspect that Greenberg's massive multi million-dollar tax fraud scheme -- which he's already plead guilty to, mind you --was in fact used to pay underage girls for sex for multiple Republicans in Central Florida, not just Matt Gaetz. And let's not forget, this girls were 100% victimized by adults here. They are not the villains. They deserve justice. They were used and abused, and Gaetz and his asshole bros need to pay for a good, long time.

I suspect things are going to get very bad, very quickly for Gaetz and a lot of the GOP when the indictments start raining down like a Florida thunderstorm. I should only be so lucky if this all ends up pointing to Gov. Ron DeSantis, too.

Stay tuned, folks.

The COVID Catastrophe Continues

With news that COVID-19 appeared in the US as early as December 2019, Beijing is now all but accusing the Biden administration of covering up America being part of the international "multiple origins" of the virus, and is demanding that the global medical community focus on America's part in spreading the virus globally.

 

A senior Chinese epidemiologist said the United States should be the priority in the next phase of investigations into the origin of COVID-19 after a study showed the disease could have been circulating there as early as December 2019, state media said on Thursday.

The study, published this week by the U.S. National Institutes for Health (NIH), showed that at least seven people in five U.S. states were infected with SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, weeks before the United States reported its first official cases.

A China-World Health Organization (WHO) joint study published in March said COVID-19 most likely originated in the country's wildlife trade, with the virus passing into humans from bats via an intermediary species.

But Beijing has promoted the theory that COVID-19 entered China from overseas via contaminated frozen food, while a number of foreign politicians are also calling for more investigations into the possibility it leaked from a laboratory.

Zeng Guang, chief epidemiologist with the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention, told state-owned tabloid the Global Times that attention should shift to the United States, which was slow to test people in the early stages of the outbreak, and is also the home of many biological laboratories.

"All bio-weapons related subjects that the country has should be subject to scrutiny," he was quoted as saying.

Commenting on the U.S. study on Wednesday, foreign ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian said it was now "obvious" the COVID-19 outbreak had "multiple origins" and that other countries should co-operate with the WHO.

 

It's nonsense of course, it just means that the virus got across from China weeks earlier than originally caught, which we knew last year. On the other hand, Trump's response to the virus was so incompetent that the US can't really say that it wasn't part of the problem of global spread of the virus...and let's remember that so far it's killed over 600,000 Americans.

 

On top of all that, tens of millions of American refused to get vaccinated. China doesn't really have to do much of anything if this is a bio-weapon that got loose, because our own ignorance will kill millions over the next few years as the virus continues to mutate into more lethal strains. 

China has all the reason it needs to blame the US. We elected Trump, after all. Why wouldn't some believe them?

The Manchin On The Hill, Con't

West Virginia Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin has finally come around to a compromise with his fellow Democrats on voting rights and election protection, in a package that he believes is fair, bipartisan, and historic.

The Senate GOP on Thursday took a big, huge steaming crap all over it and vowed to vote against it to a person.

 

Senate Republicans spent months praising Joe Manchin for his insistence on cross-party compromise. Next week they will almost surely end his hopes for a bipartisan deal on elections.

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell said he believed all 50 Republicans would oppose Sen. Manchin’s (D-W.Va.) slimmed-down elections compromise, which focuses on expanding early voting and ending partisan gerrymandering in federal elections. And it’s not clear there’s a single Republican vote to even begin debate on the matter, potentially dooming Manchin's proposals before they can even make it into the bill.

Both Sens. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) and Mitt Romney (R-Utah) said they would likely oppose a procedural vote next week that would bring Democrats’ massive elections reform bill to the Senate floor. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer said that the Senate could amend the bill to adopt Manchin’s changes. But Romney said supporting that strategy “doesn’t make a lot of sense to me" and Murkowski said “Joe hasn’t briefed me on any of this.”

“It needs to be blocked,” said Sen. Steve Daines (R-Mont.), who praised Manchin last week for “saving our country” in encouraging bipartisanship. “I’m not optimistic that they could make enough changes to that to make it a fair bill. It would usurp the rights of the states.”

The apparent blanket Republican opposition to bringing Democrats’ legislation to the floor and potentially amending it — as the Senate’s swingiest vote desires — moves the voting rights debate to a new phase. Schumer told Democrats at a Thursday caucus meeting that the vote on the elections bill will be Tuesday, June 22, according to a source familiar with the meeting. That bill will need 60 votes to proceed over a filibuster.

Manchin had long sought an approach that had input from Republicans and one that he could support, but it’s become apparent there is no road to a bipartisan compromise on election legislation. He said his opposition wasn’t just because there was no GOP support, but also because Democrats’ changes to help publicly finance elections, for example, went too far for him.

“They got confused thinking ‘the only reason you’re against it is because there’s no Republicans.’ That’s not it at all. I think it should be bipartisan. I think it’s a dangerous thing to do something that monumental” on party lines, Manchin said on Wednesday after he rolled out some of his changes. “The other thing is there were some things, being a former secretary of state and governor, that just didn’t make sense."

Murkowski has joined Manchin on a proposal to re-up the Voting Rights Act, but that legislation will wait until the fall. And that leaves Congress in a deadlock, infuriating progressives.

Manchin is also among a group of Democrats opposed to gutting the filibuster to install elections law changes, leaving no partisan road map either in a 50-50 Senate where Democrats would need every single vote to make changes on party lines. That group of filibuster-repeal skeptics may shrink after next week’s vote on the so-called For the People Act, with several Democrats saying the GOP’s rejection of that bill could change their minds.

Sen. Roy Blunt (R-Mo.), who has led the GOP opposition to the elections bill because of its federalized approach to state elections, said “every one of us works for opportunities to work with Sen. Manchin.” But he added that when “Stacey Abrams immediately endorsed Sen. Manchin’s proposal, it became the Stacey Abram’s substitute, not the Joe Manchin substitute.”

 

Understand that there is no package of federal election reforms that the GOP will vote for, because Republican will lose elections they cannot rig. Republicans don't want more people to vote. They want voting to be strictly limited to rich white folk who can afford to take the time off to go vote, and white senior citizens who have all the free time they need to vote Republican.

Everyone else can suffer in line for 10 hours.

To his credit, Manchin keeps proving time and time again that there is no compromise his Republican friends will accept. To his detriment, he seems to not have actually learned anything from wasting America's time proving something the rest of us already knew.

Where do we go from here? Well, like the January 6th commission, it'll get blocked next week, and we have nothing. Republicans won't be made to pay a price, because they can freely manipulate who can vote so that they don't have to.

I don't know what else Manchin wants, and since he'll never change his mind on the filibuster (and if he does miraculously, then all the power goes to Kyrsten Sinema who will play the same game) so at this point, I don't know what else we can do except watch our Republic get wiped out in 2022 and 2024 and permanent GOP control is phased in.

But hey, Manchin kept his morals, right?

StupidiNews!

• After passing both the House and Senate this week, President Biden has signed into law legislation declaring Juneteenth as a national federal holiday, meaning federal employees will have today off.
• An hour-long blackout suffered by global web services provider Akamai interrupted business for multiple US airlines and Australian banks, among other corporations early Thursday.
  
• Peru's judicial electoral board says that full results of this month's presidential elections could take weeks as Pedro Castillo claimed victory, while opponent Keiko Fujimori refuses concession.
• Northern Ireland's Democratic Unionist Party leader Edwin Poots is facing a possible collapse of government as a power sharing agreement with Sinn Fein has come unraveled.
• Ohio Republicans are close to eliminating municipal broadband in the state with a budget amendment that would make public broadband illegal for 98% of residents.
  

Last Call For A Supremely Historic Day

First, the good news: in a 7-2 ruling, the US Supreme Court upheld the Affordable Care Act by dismissing Texas's challenge to the healthcare law.

 

The Supreme Court saved the Affordable Care Act yet again on Thursday, tossing out a Republican lawsuit that sought to overturn former president Barack Obama’s signature legislation.

The 7–2 decision brought together the court’s liberal wing and several of its more conservative members, including the two newest justices confirmed under former president Donald Trump, Justices Amy Coney Barrett and Brett Kavanaugh.

The majority concluded that Texas and the other Republican state attorneys general who sued lacked standing to bring the case at all, a ruling that brought the yearslong fight to an end without delving into the substance of the latest challenge to the healthcare law. Justice Stephen Breyer wrote the opinion, which was also joined by Chief Justice John Roberts Jr. and Justices Clarence Thomas, Sonia Sotomayor, and Elena Kagan.

The ACA’s many provisions that transformed the US healthcare system will remain intact — including insurers being blocked from denying coverage to people with preexisting conditions, regulated individual insurance markets, and an expansion of Medicaid plans to millions of people with low incomes.

To establish standing, a party has to show that they suffer an injury traceable to the issue at hand. The Texas lawsuit centered on the individual mandate portion of Obamacare, a tax on people who decline to purchase health insurance, which did not directly affect state governments at all. The Republican states tried to get around this by arguing that encouraging people to sign up for health insurance causes extra paperwork costs for states as an employer. “Those forms don’t produce themselves,” then–Texas solicitor general Kyle Hawkins argued before the Supreme Court in November.

The court wasn’t having it. During last year’s hearing, Justice Elena Kagan said the Texas argument would “explode” standing doctrine

The Republican states tried to argue that the individual mandate penalty — despite being $0 — increased their financial burden by driving more people to join state medical insurance programs. But the court forcefully rejected that argument.

“Neither logic nor evidence suggests that an unenforceable mandate will cause state residents to enroll in valuable benefits programs that they would otherwise forgo,” says the decision.

The justices ruled that granting standing in a case like this would essentially give the courts a blank check to overturn legislation. “It would threaten to grant unelected judges a general authority to conduct oversight of decisions of the elected branches of Government,” says the ruling.

 

Texas's argument was simply that the federal government trying to get states to do things was inherently harmful to the states, which is the equivalent of a ten-year-old saying sending them to bedtime causes them irreparable harm and that kids should be allowed to sue to stay up as long as they want. It would have been the end of These United States™ effectively.

Two justices, Alito and Gorsuch, ignored the standing question and agreed with the Texas argument that the entire ACA was rendered unconstitutional in 2017 over the SCOTUS ruling that ended the individual mandate four years ago.  But not even Clarence Thomas bought that argument, neither did Kavanaugh, Barrett, or Roberts.

But in the other major ruling handed down Thursday, the court found unanimously, 9-0, that the city of Philadelphia could not force a Catholic adoption agency to screen same-sex couples as foster care providers.

The Supreme Court on Thursday unanimously ruled that Philadelphia may not bar a Catholic agency that refused to work with same-sex couples from screening potential foster parents.

Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., writing for six members of the court, said that since the city allowed exceptions to its policies for some other agencies it must also do so in this instance. The Catholic agency, he wrote, “seeks only an accommodation that will allow it to continue serving the children of Philadelphia in a manner consistent with its religious beliefs; it does not seek to impose those beliefs on anyone else.”

The decision, in the latest clash between anti-discrimination principles and claims of conscience, was a setback for gay rights and further evidence that religious groups almost always prevail in the current court.

Philadelphia stopped placements with the agency, Catholic Social Services, after a 2018 article in The Philadelphia Inquirer described its policy against placing children with same-sex couples. The agency and several foster parents sued the city, saying the decision violated their First Amendment rights to religious freedom and free speech.

Lawyers for the city said the case, Fulton v. City of Philadelphia, No. 19-123, was an easy one. When the government hires independent contractors like the Catholic agency, they said, it acts on its own behalf and can include provisions barring discrimination in its contracts.

Lawyers for the agency responded that it merely wanted to continue work that it had been doing for centuries, adding that no gay couple had ever applied to it. If one had, they said, the couple would have been referred to another agency.

A unanimous three-judge panel of the United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit, in Philadelphia, ruled against the agency. The city was entitled to require compliance with its nondiscrimination policies, the count said.

The case was broadly similar to that of a Colorado baker who refused to create a wedding cake for a same-sex couple.

In 2018, the Supreme Court refused to decide the central issue in that case, Masterpiece Cakeshop v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission: whether businesses may claim exemptions from anti-discrimination laws on religious grounds. It ruled instead that the baker had been mistreated by members of the state’s civil rights commission who had expressed hostility toward religion.

The foster care agency relied on the Colorado decision, arguing that it too had been subjected to hostility based on anti-religious prejudice. The city responded that the agency was not entitled to rewrite government contracts to eliminate anti-discrimination clauses.

 

The Roberts Court has made it very clear over the last several years that religious freedom trumps legal equality, and that government entities must always accommodate an organization's religious beliefs to deny services, employment, or recognition on the basis of sexual orientation. It is still a very loud reminder that both federal law and legal precedent still finds LGBTQ people to be permanently second-class citizens if their existence serves to harm the religious beliefs of others.

It's repugnant, but it will not change in my lifetime. It is the "separate, but equal" doctrine for the 21st century.

 

But Democrats didn't excite people, so we ended up with Trump packing the courts.

No Longer A Householder Name

Indicted former Ohio GOP House Speaker Larry Householder, charged on several federal counts related to bribery involving billions in grift to an energy company SuperPAC slush fund, has finally been expelled from the Ohio state House by a 75-21 vote. All but one Democrat voted to expel him, along with a majority of Republicans.

Lawmakers in the GOP-controlled Ohio House removed Rep. Larry Householder from the chamber, ousting the former leader in a 75-21 vote Wednesday.

After a brilliant political comeback to lead the Ohio House of Representatives, Householder leaves his beloved chamber under the cloud of a federal indictment for the second time.

Householder maintains his innocence: "They say the truth will set you free. I look forward to it."

Householder's now-former colleagues utilized a little-used provision in the Ohio Constitution that allows lawmakers to police their own for disorderly conduct. The last legislator removed in this way was Hamilton County Rep. John P. Slough in 1857 for punching another representative.

Even getting the resolution to the floor for a vote was a monumental effort that eked by with one vote. Ultimately, he was removed by 42 fellow Republicans and 33 Democrats. One Democrat, Rep. Joe Miller of Amherst, and 20 Republicans opposed the resolution.

The expulsion came after months of inaction and Householder steadfastly refusing to resign despite the pleas of top Republicans and Democrats.

"This has been going on long enough," said Rep. Mark Fraizer, R-Newark. "It is time for this to come to a conclusion."

Timeline:The rise and fall of Ohio Rep. Larry Householder

Householder, 62, of Glenford, was arrested last July in connection with the state's largest bribery scheme. Householder is accused of orchestrating a nearly $61 million operation to win control of the Ohio House, pass a $1 billion bailout for two nuclear plants in northern Ohio and defend that law against a ballot initiative to block it.

Householder has pleaded not guilty to the offense. If convicted, he faces up to 20 years in prison.

 

I expect the federal case against Householder will result in conviction, if it's bad enough to be brought during the Trump era, it must have been egregious.  Having said that, let's remember that every single Ohio state House Republican who voted along with Householder to run this billion-dollar bailout scheme was re-elected in 2020. Every single one of them. The voters don't care, and I expect if Householder isn't convicted and jailed before the 2022 primary, he'll be on the ballot and will win.

We'll see how the trial plays out, but I fully expect that Householder will be back in the Ohio state House, and sooner than people think.

Black Lives Still Matter, Con't

In something of a major miracle, the US Senate just passed Democratic Sen. Ed Markey's resolution on making Juneteenth a federal public holiday, with avowed racist GOP Sen. Ron Johnson of Wisconsin finally dropping his opposition to the bill.

The Senate unanimously passed a resolution on Tuesday establishing June 19 as Juneteenth National Independence Day, a US holiday commemorating the end of slavery in the United States. 

The legislation has gained momentum since the massive Black Lives Matter protests sparked by the police killing of George Floyd last year and the Democrats' takeover of the White House and Congress. 

But Wisconsin Republican Sen. Ron Johnson blocked the bill in 2020, saying that the day off for federal employees would cost US taxpayers hundreds of millions of dollars. Johnson dropped his objection this week despite his concerns, paving the way for the bill's passage in the Senate. 

"Although I strongly support celebrating Emancipation, I objected to the cost and lack of debate," said Johnson in a statement. "While it still seems strange that having taxpayers provide federal employees paid time off is now required to celebrate the end of slavery, it is clear that there is no appetite in Congress to further discuss the matter." 

The measure needs to pass the House and be signed by President Joe Biden to become law.
On June 19, 1865, Major General Gordon Granger announced in Galveston, Texas, the end of slavery in accordance with President Abraham Lincoln's 1863 Emancipation Proclamation. 

In 1980, Juneteenth became a Texas state holiday. In the decades since, every state but South Dakota came to officially commemorate Juneteenth, but only a handful of states observe it as a paid holiday.

 

I suspect many businesses will treat it much like Dr. King's birthday or the day after Thanksgiving: nice if your employer can give it to you off, but for the most part, it'll be ignored and most of us will be at work that particular day in favor of a "real" holiday like July 4th, or worse, given a choice of one of the two (I totally expect some tech company to announce that you can have your choice of one of the two holidays off in the very near future).

The measure should pass the House, although it won't be unanimous. You can bet the usual suspects will not vote yes, although I do expect the wiser ones will merely abstain.

Last Call For Putin On The Ritz, Con't

As President Biden meets with Russian President Vladimir Putin this week, you may still be wondering what the Former Guy ™ said to Putin in Helsinki in 2019, and how House Democrats were very eager to get to the bottom of Trump and Putin's conversations without any witnesses (well, a translator who House Democrats definitely wanted to talk to).

But that was then and this is now, and now we're getting well and solidly into the "We're looking forward, not backward" phase of a Democratic administration that completely refuses to hold its predecessor to account, guaranteeing an even worse administration later this decade.

Ahead of President Joe Biden’s meeting Wednesday with Russian President Vladimir Putin, congressional Democrats said they are no longer seeking records of former President Donald Trump’s private meetings with the Russian leader, despite previous concerns Trump tried to conceal details of their conversations.

"The Biden administration is looking forward, not back," said House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Gregory Meeks, D-N.Y., whose panel once considered subpoenaing Trump’s interpreter to testify about his July 2018 meeting with Putin in Helsinki, Finland, where only an American interpreter was also present.

From 2017 to 2019, amid former special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russian efforts to influence the 2016 presidential election, Democrats raised questions about Trump’s conversations with Putin, especially after Trump said in Helsinki, standing next to Putin, that he believed his 2017 denial of election interference, over the findings of U.S. intelligence.

Similar questions were raised after the disclosure of an unplanned conversation with Putin during a G-20 dinner in Osaka, Japan, in June 2019 during which Trump was not accompanied by an interpreter.

He had told reporters beforehand that his private discussions with Putin were "none of your business."

In 2019, the Washington Post reported that the former president went to "extraordinary lengths" to conceal details of his conversations with Putin, leaving some subordinates without a clear record of the world leaders’ interactions.

Rep. Tom Malinowksi, D-N.J., a member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee who served as an assistant secretary of state in the Obama administration, said details about Trump and Putin’s conversations are "historically very interesting," but less relevant given that Trump "is not shaping US policy towards Russia or anything else."

"At the time, my concern was not so much that the former president and Putin had agreed ... to do something not in our interest, because President Trump would have to tell somebody that," Malinowski said. "It was more the signal that it sent to Putin that Trump wanted to confide in him above his own team."

Foreign policy analysts ABC News spoke with ahead of Biden’s meeting with Putin in Geneva largely downplayed concerns about Trump and Putin’s conversations, and their impact on Wednesday's summit.

"You’d like to have it, but I don’t think it matters much," Ian Bremmer, a political scientist and president of the Eurasia Group, who first reported Trump and Putin’s second meeting at the G-20 in 2017, told ABC News.

 

And there we are. "Don't think it matters much."

 

We made this mistake with Obama and Dubya and got Trump. We barely escaped Trump with Biden, and noe Biden is making the same "forward, not backward" mistake.

 

 Our next GOP tyrant will be far, far worse than Trump.