Welcome To Gunmerica, Ten Years Later

One of the biggest advocates for gun safety legislation in the wake of Sandy Hook has been Shannon Watts, who founded the advocacy group Moms Demand ten years ago. But facing two years, minimum, of a hostile Supreme Court and a House GOP who will never pass anything to stop kids from being butchered by guns, Watts is hanging up her spurs, and I don't blame her one bit.

 

Shannon Watts, one of the country’s most influential gun-safety activists, says she will retire later this year from Moms Demand Action, the grass-roots advocacy group she began in her kitchen a decade ago and grew into a political juggernaut.

“I have asked myself, honestly, every year since I started this organization: Is it time for me to step back and let other people step forward?” Watts, 52, said in an exclusive interview with The Washington Post to announce her decision. “And I think this is the right time.”

The 2012 massacre of 20 first-graders and six staff members at Sandy Hook Elementary in Connecticut inspired Watts, then a stay-at-home mom, to act. When she searched online for a gun-safety group to join and found that all of them were led by men, she decided to start her own. From her home in Indiana, Watts recruited like-minded women through a Facebook group.

Now, in much of the country, Moms Demand’s influence has eclipsed that of its longtime adversary, the National Rifle Association. Under Watts’s leadership, the organization has established chapters in all 50 states and enlisted tens of thousands of volunteers — almost always dressed in branded red shirts — to organize rallies, campaign for “gun sense” candidates and pack meeting rooms where firearms laws are being debated.

Watts’s success stems from an uncommon blend of qualities and experience that made her ideally suited for the job’s challenges. Her previous work as a communications executive gave her a deep understanding of how to attract media attention and market ideas. She turned a severe case of attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder into what she called a “superpower” that allowed her to hyperfocus for many hours straight, a skill she’s harnessed hundreds of times to live-tweet details and context after shootings.

Watts, who says she has never taken a salary from Moms Demand, also possesses a fortitude that has sustained her despite years of death threats from gun-rights extremists, inaction by federal lawmakers and near-constant immersion in one of America’s darkest crises.

Although she denies opposing the Second Amendment, gun-rights groups have long portrayed her as an enemy of the Constitution who wants legal weapons confiscated. In its many denunciations, the NRA has called her a “#2A-hating lobbyist,” accused her of promoting “nearly every gun control measure” and described her Twitter feed as a “fevered anti-gun stream-of-consciousness.”

Through it all, Watts has maintained a sense of optimism — as well as a biting wit she often deploys against her many conservative critics (Watts’s “location,” according to her Twitter profile: “NRA’s head, rent free”).

“This woman has nerves of steel,” said Katie Couric, among the first journalists to introduce Watts to a national audience. “I just admire her on so many levels for her organizational acumen, for her fearlessness in the face of just horrible harassment, and for her determination to stop at nothing.”

Watts says she won’t stop after resigning either, and though some around her have suggested she run for public office, the mother of five has yet to decide what will come next.

She started the organization assuming she would run it for only a few months, but in the spring of 2013, the U.S. Senate rejected President Barack Obama’s effort to overhaul the nation’s gun laws. Watts was in the Capitol, watching from the gallery, when one of those bills failed to pass by six votes.

Among the senators to reject the legislation was Heidi Heitkamp, a Democrat from North Dakota, who told reporters that calls to her office the day before the vote were “at least 7 to 1 against that bill.”

Watts never forgot that comment. Nine years later, when the chance for reform finally returned to Capitol Hill this summer after another deadly school shooting at Robb Elementary in Uvalde, Tex., she helped organize a massive lobbying effort that directed more than a million calls and messages to the Senate.

The Bipartisan Safer Communities Act passed Congress with relative ease, despite NRA opposition. The bill didn’t include many of the sweeping changes activists had long fought for, but it represented the first significant gun legislation to become federal law in three decades.

 

A victory in the BSCA, but the war has effectively been lost. We live in Gunmerica now, where firearms outnumber people by tens of millions. There's no reason to believe any further legislation will pass, or even be considered Constitutional, in the years ahead.

 

Like I said, I see why Watts is retiring.  Maybe she can make a difference in Congress.

Chasing Those Trump Voters Again

Democratic strategists are once again back to "Only more rural white men can save the party from doom".

Former Democratic Sens. Heidi Heitkamp and Joe Donnelly, who both lost their 2018 re-election races in North Dakota and Indiana, respectively, are launching the One Country Project to help their party win back rural voters ahead of the 2020 cycle. Their team looked at rural votes by county and state from 2000 to 2018 and found that if Democrats don't break their performance with rural voters, they're projected to once again win the popular vote but lose the electoral college in 2020.  

Details: Their focus is primarily on Democratic Senate races and the presidential election, but they eventually want to work with races up and down the ballot in these rural areas.

Heitkamp and Donnelly will work with campaigns before the election, giving them messaging, data, polling, and a strategy to break through with these voters who "didn’t feel that we shared their beliefs" in past elections, Donnelly told Axios in an interview.

"Culturally, they’re focused on faith and family and country, and Donald Trump tells them all the time that we’re not, even though we are."

What they're saying: "What we heard on the ground is that the Democratic Party no longer speaks for the entire country," Heitkamp said. "They’ve forgotten the middle of the country and forgot to even show up. Even past Democratic voters didn’t recognize the Democratic Party of 2018."

By the numbers: Their data, shared exclusively with Axios, projects that Democrats' popular vote would increase from +2.1% in 2016 to +3.6% in 2020.

But, using a similar margin that Obama won by in 2012, One Country Project estimates Democrats would end up with just 232 electoral college votes in the upcoming presidential cycle. (Hillary Clinton won 227 in 2016.)

They also project Democrats would be poised to have a better performance in states like Arizona, Florida, Nevada, North Carolina, Texas and Georgia.

Assuming these trends among rural voters continue, the team predicts Minnesota, Maine and New Hampshire will become even more competitive in 2020.

The reason why Republicans are doing better in those states is massive voter suppression efforts of black and Hispanic voters, not because of "rural white voter trends".

We can do both, but getting rid of the voter suppression is far more important than making Trump voters comfortable enough to maybe not vote for Trump.

It's About Suppression, Con't

Heidi Heitkamp is finished.

Not because of her courageous vote against Brett Kavanaugh, but because thousands of Native American voters in North Dakota just became ineligible to vote thanks to...the Supreme Court.

The Supreme Court on Tuesday upheld a lower-court order requiring voters in North Dakota to present certain forms of identification and proof of their residential address in order to cast a ballot in next month’s elections. A case challenging this requirement on behalf of the state’s sizable Native American populations alleged that the requirement would disenfranchise tribal residents, many of whom lack the proper identification and do not have residential addresses on their identification cards.

The Supreme Court’s order will likely make it harder for Sen. Heidi Heitkamp, considered the most vulnerable Democrat in the Senate, to retain her seat in November. Heitkamp won her seat by less than 3,000 votes in 2012 with strong backing from Native Americans, and she is the only statewide elected Democrat. North Dakota Republicans began changing voting rules to make it harder to cast a ballot months after Heitkamp’s victory six years ago. Republicans have claimed the changes to voter ID requirements are intended to stop voter fraud, even though in-person fraud is exceedingly rare.

Justice Brett Kavanaugh, who was sworn in on Monday, did not partake in the decision, and Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Elena Kagan dissented.

North Dakota’s 2017 voter law ID was challenged by Native residents who alleged that the law disproportionately blocked Native Americans from voting. In April, a federal district court judge blocked large portions of the law as discriminatory against Native voters. “The State has acknowledged that Native American communities often lack residential street addresses,” Judge Daniel Hovland wrote. “Nevertheless, under current State law an individual who does not have a ‘current residential street address’ will never be qualified to vote.” According to the website of the Native American Rights Fund, which represents the plaintiffs, many native residents lack residential street addresses because “the U.S. postal service does not provide residential delivery in these rural Indian communities.”As a result, tribal IDs use P.O. boxes, which are not sufficient under North Dakota’s new law—a specification that seems designed to disenfranchise native voters. Hovland’s ruling was in place during the primaries this spring.

But in September, the 8th Circuit Court of Appeals allowed the law to go into effect. The Supreme Court upheld that ruling Tuesday. In her dissent, Ginsburg argued that the Supreme Court’s order was at odds with one of the top court’s most frequently invoked doctrines on election law: not to change the rules right before an election. By allowing a different set of ID rules in the general election from in the primary, Ginsburg warned, the court was risking widespread confusion and disenfranchisement.

“The risk of voter confusion appears severe here because the injunction against requiring residential-address identification was in force during the primary election and because the Secretary of State’s website announced for months the ID requirements as they existed under that injunction,” Ginsburg wrote. “Reasonable voters may well assume that the IDs allowing them to vote in the primary election would remain valid in the general election. If the Eighth Circuit’s stay is not vacated, the risk of disfranchisement is large.”

Ginsburg noted that according to the factual record of the case, about 20 percent of voters likely to try to cast a ballot in the midterms will lack the required identification. Another “approximately18,000 North Dakota residents also lack supplemental documentation sufficient to permit them to vote without a qualifying ID,” she noted.

A great many of those voters who will lose their right to vote, one month before the election, will be Native Americans who backed Heitkamp.  She's done.  She will lose by double digits now, because tens of thousands lost their vote in North Dakota.

Meanwhile in Georgia, GOP Secretary of State Brian Kemp, running for Governor against Democrat Stacey Abrams, is in the middle of stealing that election by also disenfranchising tens of thousands of Democratic voters.

Georgia Secretary of State Brian Kemp’s (R) office is blocking 53,000 people from registering to vote, according to records obtained by the Associated Press, a huge number that could sway his gubernatorial race against Democrat Stacey Abrams.

As TPM laid out this morning, Kemp has used a controversial “exact match” program to approve or block voter registrations that disproportionately impacts minority voters.

Now we know exactly how many people that might affect this election. According to the AP, fully 70 percent of the voter applications that are being held up by Kemp’s office are from black people.

It’s unclear how many of these voters will be able to get on the rolls by Election Day, though if past is prologue Kemp will manage to keep many if not most of them from voting.

The secretary of state has waged a years-long battle against voting rights groups in the state, regularly going after minority voter registration efforts, while purging voting rolls and making it harder for many people to vote.

This figure shows how much impact that could have. Georgia Gov. Nathan Deal’s (R) 8-point reelection margin in 2014 was just 200,000 votes total. Abrams and Kemp have been statistically tied in most public and private polls. Whether or not these voters get on the rolls could determine who wins the election.

Republicans will keep making it harder and harder to vote until only rich, old, retired white people can.  Do we not get this?

The Blue Wave Rises, Con't

Dave Wasserman of Cook Political Report talks to the NY Times about the massive difference between the Democratic party's prospects this year in the House, and the dismal defense they have to play in the Senate.

This fall, Democrats are defending 26 Senate seats, with Bernie Sanders and Angus King (more than half of their caucus), including five seats that voted for President Trump by 19 points or more. Republicans are defending only nine seats (fewer than a fifth of their caucus); all but one are states Mr. Trump carried.

But in the House, where all 435 seats are up for election, Republicans are much more exposed: They must defend 25 districts Hillary Clinton carried, whereas Democrats must defend only 13 seats Mr. Trump won.

In my time covering races professionally, I’ve never observed this little overlap between the battlegrounds of high-stakes Senate and House races. Of the 64 most competitive House races, only 15 are in states with highly competitive Senate races.

These are two truly different universes: The median competitive Senate seat gave Mr. Trump 56 percent in 2016, has a population density of 88 people per square mile and falls below the national average in educational attainment and income. But the median competitive House district gave Mr. Trump 49 percent of the vote, has a population density of 375 people per square mile and ranks above the national average in college graduates and income.

Even if Democrats have a stellar year nationally, Democratic Senators Joe Manchin of West Virginia, Heidi Heitkamp of North Dakota, Claire McCaskill of Missouri and Joe Donnelly of Indiana could still fall short of re-election in states where the president is still popular.

But the Republicans’ tenuous grip on the House is exposing the limits of gerrymandering. Several seats Republican mapmakers drew to be “safe” at the beginning of the decade, including districts outside Atlanta, Detroit, Dallas, Houston, Kansas City and Washington, are suddenly under stress from the combination of college-educated whites fleeing the new, Trump-led G.O.P. and the potential for a Democratic wave.

Much as 2016 produced an anomalous split between the popular vote and the Electoral College, 2018 could produce a split decision between the House and Senate. That would allow both parties to claim a midterm mandate — and reinforce their stubbornness.

The good news: if the Dems can hold on this year, it's the GOP who has to play defense in 2020.  With Trump on the ticket, the Dems could take the Senate and White House in two years, and the country would go through a stunning turn-around.  After yesterday, this calculus could definitely change in the Democrats' favor.

The Republican plan is a full court press to ignore the Cohen and Manafort stories though and attack the Democrats as corrupt.

It’s Tuesday afternoon. Imagine, for a moment, that President Trump logs on to Twitter. News is breaking that could prove existential for his presidency. But his social media feed hardly records the magnitude of the developments.

Instead, a link from Sean Hannity of Fox News appears, announcing the intention of Michael Cohen, Trump’s former lawyer, to enter a guilty plea but omitting the fact that Cohen’s admission implicates the president. A minute later, another link from Hannity comes through, this one about a former congressional IT staffer targeted by conspiracy theories cooked up by right-wing media and advanced by the president.

Trump’s carefully curated feed is a reflection of the ideological chasm that’s dividing the media and splintering society. Tuesday offered vivid evidence of the way in which right-wing media insulates Trump, and his most devoted supporters, from blunt assessments of his administration.

What did you expect from the world of alternative facts?

Also on offer to the president was an announcement from his own White House about business confidence and a supportive message from Donald Trump Jr. If he went online shortly before 4 p.m., the only “BREAKING NEWS” alert he would have seen was the one from Fox about the 24-year-old undocumented immigrant from Mexico who law enforcement officials say killed Mollie Tibbetts, the 20-year-old college student who disappeared last month in Iowa. The story led Fox’s homepage much of the day.

Alarm over the student’s death dominated the president’s feed, which has been replicated by the account @trumps_feed, created by The Washington Post’s Philip Bump. “OUTRAGE!” steamed Laura Ingraham. The only message the Fox News host posted about Tuesday’s legal outcomes was an opinion column criticizing CNN for seeking the names of the jurors in the Manafort trial.

The Mollie Tibbets story is definitely the rage on the right this morning.  It's a tragic murder, and she of course didn't deserve to be brutally murdered by anyone, but it has all the ingredients they need for OUTRAGE™ and her death is being exploited as such to help Donald Trump.

Authorities in Iowa have filed charges against an undocumented immigrant on Tuesday in connection to a recovered body believed to be that of 20-year-old University of Iowa student Mollie Tibbetts, who disappeared from her home a month ago.

The details: The suspect, identified as Cristhian Bahena Rivera, 24, is facing a first degree murder charge and life without parole, Rick Rahn, special agent at the Iowa Division of Criminal Investigation, explained in a briefing Tuesday. He's believed to have been living in Poweshiek County area for four to seven years.

A pretty young white co-ed apparently killed by an undocumented immigrant who had been in the US for several years?  Newt Gingrich wants to make her a household name.

Only one problem with that.

Update: Farm owned by family of Craig Lang, prominent Iowa farmer and GOP official, confirms that it has employed suspect in Mollie Tibbetts' death for the last four years

— Ryan J. Foley (@rjfoley) August 22, 2018

This is how Republicans are going to protect Trump? It won't work if we vote.

Pompeo And Circumstances

Kansas GOP Rep. Mike Pompeo was easily confirmed on Monday as the Trump regime's new CIA Director, including by more than a dozen Senate Democrats.

The Senate confirmed Mike Pompeo, President Donald Trump's pick for CIA director, on Monday night. 

The vote was 66-32 in favor of confirmation, with Pompeo picking up some Democratic backing. The only Republican in opposition was Sen. Rand Paul. 

The vote was held open longer than normal in an effort to let Senators delayed by the storm in the Northeast reach Washington, but it was gaveled closed before Sens. Chris Murphy and Richard Blumenthal could arrive.

Vice President Mike Pence swore in Pompeo, a Kansas congressman, after the vote at the White House.

"I just want to remind our colleagues that our country continues to face incredible threats, and they are not hitting the pause button," Senate Majority Whip John Cornyn, a Texas Republican, said in a statement issued before he voted in support of Pompeo. "The President needs his national security Cabinet, and particularly his CIA Director at his side, a Cabinet position integral to keeping our country safe." 

Pompeo's view on electronic surveillance and torture drew the ire of some Democrats.
But Sen. Bernie Sanders, a Democratic Socialist from Vermont, cited Pompeo's support for the broad collection of metadata in his vote against the CIA nominee. 

"What we are talking about is the United States government having in many ways more information about us than we may even understand about our own life," Sanders said. "In many ways, it sounds to me like we are moving toward an Orwellian society."

Who voted for Pompeo?  Our old red state Dem friends Joe Manchin, Claire McCaskill, Joe Donnelly and Heidi Heitkamp of course, but also blue state Dems like Chuck Schumer, Sheldon Whitehouse, Amy Klobuchar and Brian Schatz.

Who voted against?  Bernie and Rand Paul.  Go figure.  If you were expecting the CIA to start poking around in Trump's Russia connections, well with pro-torture Pompeo now in charge, the agency's rank and file just got bought off by Trump this week.

The Trump administration is preparing a sweeping executive order that would clear the way for the Central Intelligence Agency to reopen overseas “black site” prisons, like those where it detained and tortured terrorism suspects before former President Obama shut them down. 

President Trump’s three-page draft order, titled “Detention and Interrogation of Enemy Combatants,” and obtained by The New York Times would also undo many of the other restrictions on handling detainees that Mr. Obama put in place in response to policies of the Bush administration. 

If Mr. Trump signs the draft order, he would also revoke Mr. Obama’s directive to give the International Committee of the Red Cross access to all wartime detainees in American custody – another step toward reopening secret prisons outside of the normal wartime rules established by the Geneva Conventions. 

And while Mr. Obama tried to close the Guantánamo prison and refused to bring new detainees there, the draft order directs the Pentagon to continue using the facility “for the detention and trial of newly captured” detainees – including not just more suspected members of Al Qaeda or the Taliban, like the 41 remaining detainees, but also Islamic State detainees. It does not address legal problems that might raise.

So the Trump regime's back in the torture game, guys.  And Dems did nothing to stop it.  We could have closed Gitmo under Obama years ago, but Dems screwed Obama over on that too.  Now Trump will make sure America tortures suspects for no actual law enforcement, legal, or moral reason.

Oh well.  At least we didn't elect that awful Hillary, right?

New tag: Mike Pompeo.  I figure we're going to need it.

Last Call For A "New Direction"

I really don't have too much hope for Democrats in the Senate to beat back what's coming.

It was a blunt, plain-spoken set of senators who gathered last Monday at the Washington home of Senator Heidi Heitkamp, Democrat of North Dakota, dining on Chinese food as they vented frustration about the missteps of the Democratic Party.

To this decidedly centrist group, the 2016 election was nothing short of a fiasco: final proof that its national party had grown indifferent to the rural, more conservative areas represented by Democrats like Joe Manchin of West Virginia, Claire McCaskill of Missouri, Joe Donnelly of Indiana and Jon Tester of Montana, who attended the dinner. All face difficult re-election races in 2018.

The party, these senators said, had grown overly fixated on cultural issues with limited appeal to the heartland. They criticized Hillary Clinton’s campaign slogan, “Stronger Together,” as flat and opaque, according to multiple people present at the dinner, some of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity.

Most of all, they lamented, Democrats had simply failed to offer a clarion message about the economy with appeal to all 50 states.

“Why did the working people, who have always been our base, turn away?” Mr. Manchin said in an interview, recounting the tenor of the dinner conversation.

Moderate Democrats are not alone in their sense of urgency about honing a new economic message. After a stinging loss to Donald J. Trump, liberals in the party are also trying to figure out how to tap into the populist unrest that convulsed both parties in 2016. Only by making pocketbook issues the central focus, they say, can Democrats recover in the 2018 midterm elections and unseat Mr. Trump in 2020.

“We need to double down and double down again on the importance of building an economy not just for those at the top, but for everyone,” said Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, a high-profile progressive who is seen as a leading potential opponent for Mr. Trump.

This pocketbook-centered approach offers an added benefit in the minds of Democratic strategists: It papers over the party’s differences on how much to focus on cultural issues.

There is little appetite among most Democrats to substantively revise their stances on issues like abortion, gay rights, gun control and immigration, where trends on the national level continue to favor the party. By constructing a platform focused on an overarching theme of economic fairness, Democrats are hoping to avoid yoking their candidates to a more divisive agenda that could sink them in states like North Dakota and West Virginia, which are crucial to control of the Senate.
This is markedly different from the approach that party leaders have taken over the last eight years, when President Obama defined the party from top to bottom with his personality and policies. Instead, Democrats intend to focus on a sparer agenda of bread-and-butter priorities that can win support from both liberal and moderate officeholders — and appeal to voters just as much in red states as along the two coasts.

It's abortion, gay rights, gun control and immigration that Democrats will now be running away from. Most importantly it's issues of race that will be ignored.  Democrats will simply pretend Obama never happened.

Voters of color will not.  If we're going to go with a combination of Bernie "It's always about class" whitewashing and Centrist Dem triangulation, the Obama coalition will disintegrate for good and the GOP will rule this nation for a generation.  If we even last that long.

Good luck, Dems.  Good luck chasing the white vote and taking the black, Hispanic, and Asian vote for granted.

2020's going to get ugly soon if this prevails.