Black Lives Still Matter, Con't

Nearly three-quarters of Black folk believe police killings of Black and brown youth have gotten worse in the last 12 months in a new Axios/Ipsos poll, while only one-third of white respondents do.

Nearly seven out of 10 Black Americans say police treatment has gotten worse in the past year, and about the same percentage believe police shootings of Black and brown youths have become worse in that time, according to an Axios-Ipsos poll.

The big picture: The poll, conducted a year after George Floyd's death, suggests that the relationship between Black Americans and the police not only hasn't improved, but is a profound and escalating crisis.  Far from seeing the police's role as one to protect and serve, a majority of Black Americans now say that calling the police or 911 often does more harm than good. And that distrust is backed by personal experience. Black and Hispanic Americans are significantly more likely than white or Asian Americans to encounter threatening situations at traffic stops, like guns drawn or extra officers called in. 

More results from the poll will be released later today in the latest of Axios' "Hard Truths" series of deep dives on systemic racism, this one focusing on the criminal justice system.

By the numbers: 68% of Black respondents said police treatment of Black Americans has gotten worse in the past year, with just 6% saying it has improved.
42% of Hispanic respondents and 37% of Asian respondents agreed that police treatment of Black Americans has become worse. By contrast, just 25% of white Americans agreed, with 61% saying police treatment of Black Americans had neither improved nor worsened in the last year.

Likewise, 72% of Black Americans said police shootings of Black or brown youths have gotten worse in the last year — a view that was shared by 49% of Hispanic Americans, and comes after the deaths of 16-year-old Ma'Khia Bryant and 13-year-old Adam Toledo in recent weeks. 32% of white respondents and 44% of Asian respondents agreed.

Most Americans still have a positive view of police and law enforcement. But that's not true of Black Americans. Just four out of 10 said they have favorable views of police and law enforcement, while 57% said they have unfavorable views.

 

I've had some iffy experiences with cops at best, but only had one truly bad interaction with police here in Kentucky, and I was almost accused of stealing my own car at the time because my plates had expired in NC, but apparently the officer either didn't want the hassle (it was late, dark, and snowy) or he just gave up on trying to bring me in. He did give me a $350 ticket though and 30 days to pay it, or I would go to jail he promised. I 100% believed he was going to make sure to follow up on that threat.

If I hadn't been able to come up with the money, yeah. Jail, no job, a record. Good luck getting hired again, as Kentucky makes sure that stays on your record for five years. He figured I didn't have the cash and that I'd be disappeared.

Black Lives still matter.

Sunday Long Read: One Versus A Country

Our Sunday Long Read this week comes from essayist Alexander Chee in GQ, writing about his experiences with his father's lessons on self-defense, self-reliance, and self-awareness being Korean in America, something very relevant given the massive rise in hate crimes here against AAPI folks.

Born in 1939 during what would be the last years of the Japanese colonial occupation of Korea, my father, Choung Tai Chee, also called Charles or Chuck or Charlie, came to the United States in 1960. He was flashy, cocky, unafraid, it seemed, of anything. Wherever we were in the world, he seemed at home, right up until near the end of his life, when he was hospitalized after a car accident that left him in a coma. Only in that hospital bed, his head shaved for surgery, did he look out of place to me.

A tae kwon do champion by the age of 18 in Korea, he had begun studying martial arts at age 8, eventually teaching them as a way to put himself through graduate school, first in engineering and then oceanography, in Texas, California, and Rhode Island. He loved the teaching. The rising popularity of martial arts in the 1960s in Hollywood meant he made celebrity friends like Frank Sinatra Jr., Paul Lynde, Sal Mineo, and Peter Fonda, who my father said had fixed him up on a date with his sister, Jane, in the days before Barbarella. A favorite photo from his time in Texas shows him flying through the air, a human horseshoe, each of his bare feet breaking a board held shoulder high on each side by his students.

When I complained about my wet boots during the winters growing up in Maine, he told me stories about running barefoot in the snow in Korea to harden his feet for tae kwon do. His answer to many of my childhood complaints was usually that I had to be tougher, stronger, prepared for any attack or disaster. The lesson his generation took from those they lost to the Korean War was that death was always close, and I know now that he was doing all he could to teach me to protect myself. When I cried at the beach at the water’s edge, afraid of the waves, he threw me in. “No son of mine is going to be afraid of the ocean,” he said. When I first started swimming lessons, he told me I had to be a strong swimmer, in case the boat I was on went down, so I could swim to shore. When he taught me to body-surf, he taught me about how to know the approach of an undertow, and how to survive a riptide. When I lacked a competitive streak, he took to racing me at something I loved—swimming underwater while holding my breath. I was an asthmatic child, but soon, intent on beating him, I could swim 50 yards this way at a time.

For all of that, he was an exceedingly gentle father. He took me snorkeling on his back, when I was five, telling me we were playing at being dolphins. There he taught me the names of the fish along the reef where we lived in Guam. He would praise the highlights in my hair, and laugh, calling me “Apollo.” And as for any pressure regarding my future career, he offered something very rare for a Korean man of his generation. “Be whatever you want to be,” he told me. “Just be the best at it that you can possibly be.”

Only when I was older did I understand the warning about being strong enough to swim to shore in another context, when I learned the boat he and his family had fled in from what was about to become North Korea nearly sank in a storm. In Seoul as a child, he scavenged food for his family with his older brother, coming home with bags of rice found on overturned military supply trucks, while his father went to the farms, collecting gleanings. His attempts to teach me to strip a chicken clean of its meat make a different sense now. I had thought of him as an immigrant without thinking about how the Korean War made him one of the dispossessed, almost a refugee, all before he left Korea.

When I began getting into fights as a child in the U.S., he put me into classes in karate and tae kwon do for these same reasons. He loved me and he wanted me to be strong. I just wasn’t sure how I was supposed to take on a whole country.

A country that would accept you, to a point, as long as you were one of the "good ones". Yeah, I can relate.

Farming Up Old History

Rural white farmers across America are growing increasingly hostile toward the idea of a Biden administration program that pays Black farmers a damn thing and that it's "reparations", and if they don't get money too, they'll make sure nobody gets a dime.

Shade Lewis had just come in from feeding his cows one sunny spring afternoon when he opened a letter that could change his life: The government was offering to pay off his $200,000 farm loan, part of a new debt relief program created by Democrats to help farmers who have endured generations of racial discrimination.

It was a windfall for a 29-year-old who has spent the past decade scratching out a living as the only Black farmer in his corner of northeastern Missouri, where signposts quoting Genesis line the soybean fields and traffic signals warn drivers to go slow because it is planting season.

But the $4 billion fund has angered conservative white farmers who say they are being unfairly excluded because of their race. And it has plunged Mr. Lewis and other farmers of color into a new culture war over race, money and power in American farming.

“You can feel the tension,” Mr. Lewis said. “We’ve caught a lot of heat from the conservative Caucasian farmers.”

The debt relief is redress set aside for what the government calls “socially disadvantaged farmers” — Black, Hispanic, Indigenous and other nonwhite workers who have endured a long history of discrimination, from violence and land theft in the Jim Crow South to banks and federal farm offices that refused them loans or government benefits that went to white farmers.

The program is part of a broader effort by the Biden administration and Democrats in Congress to confront how racial injustice has shaped American farming, which is overwhelmingly white. Black farm advocacy groups say that nearly all the land, profit and subsidies go to the biggest, most powerful farm operations, leaving Black farmers with little. But in large portions of rural America, the payments threaten to further anger white conservative farmers.

The plans have drawn thousands of enraged comments on farm forums and are being fought by banks worried about losing interest income. And some rural residents have rallied around a new slogan, cribbed from the conservative response to the Black Lives Matter movement: All Farmers Matter.

If you thought the politics of white resentment was going to cost Democrats any shot at rural states before, wait until Republicans are running ads with camera shots where money is given from white hands in suits to black hands in work shirts, and the white hand in the work shirt in the shot gets nothing. Run that for 2022 and even California will lose multiple House seats.

Support for Black Lives Matter among white voters has cratered in the last year (and it's fallen among Latino voters too.)

 

It's only going to get worse, too. This will absolutely be a rallying point in every rural community and things are going to go very, very badly for Black farmers. Granted, it just means Republicans will win rural House districts by 30 instead of just 20, but it could very well cost Dems seats in 2022 on top of everything else.

Really what I'm afraid of at this point is more violence. And Republicans are already suing in multiple states to block the program.

No, I quickly foresee Black farmers quietly telling the Biden administration that they don't want the money, because it comes guaranteed with the hatred of neighbors. And Black farmers in general are only going to suffer more in the months and years ahead.

Because we always do.

This is America.

The Big Lie, Con't

The Big Lie moves from Arizona to Georgia, from Phoenix to Atlanta, as a GOP judge has ruled that the state's new GOP voter suppression laws now allow for a "citizen recount" of November's mail ballots with the intent of overturning Biden's win there.

A Georgia state judge on Friday ordered Fulton County to allow a group of local voters to inspect all 147,000 mail-in ballots cast in the 2020 election in response to a lawsuit alleging that officials accepted thousands of counterfeit ballots.

The decision marks the latest instance of a local government being forced to undergo a third-party inspection of its election practices amid baseless accusations promoted by President Donald Trump that fraud flipped the 2020 contest for President Biden.

The inspection in Fulton County, home to Atlanta, is likely to proceed differently than an audit underway in Maricopa County, Ariz., where Republican state senators ordered county election officials to hand over equipment and ballots to a private company called Cyber Ninjas for examination. That process has come under widespread criticism for lacking security measures and failing to follow the rigorous practices of government recounts. On Thursday, Arizona Secretary of State Katie Hobbs (D) urged local officials to toss their machines after the audit is complete because their security is now in doubt.

In Georgia, Superior Court Judge Brian Amero ruled on Friday that the nine plaintiffs and their experts could examine copies of the ballots but never touch the originals, which will remain in the possession of Fulton election officials. Further details of how the inspection will proceed are expected next week, said one of the plaintiffs, Garland Favorito.

The order for the new ballot inspection comes after Georgia officials did three separate audits of the vote last year, including a hand recount, which produced no evidence of widespread fraud.

Fulton County Board of Commissioners Chairman Robb Pitts said it was “outrageous” that the county “continues to be a target of those who cannot accept the results from last year’s election.”

“The fact remains that Fulton County safely and securely carried out an election in the midst of a public health pandemic,” Pitts said in a statement. “It’s a shame to see that the ‘Big Lie’ lives on and could cost the hardworking taxpayers of this county.”

A spokesman for Pitts said he plans to meet with the Fulton County attorney to “review all legal options” to block “this waste of taxpayer resources.”

Fulton County is one of numerous communities where local residents have recently pushed to revisit the 2020 election results, echoing Trump’s false claims of fraud.

 

I'm sure another lawsuit will be filed to force the county to hand over the original votes, and will continue for months. Expect other blue urban areas in red states to be force-audited again and again as well, Houston, Dallas, Miami, Milwaukee, the list will go on and on.

 

The entire point of the Big Lie remains to justify the coming GOP nullification of Democratic party wins in 2022. Period. 

Count on it.

Things get very nasty from there.

The Big Lie, Con't

The consequences of the Big Lie continue in Arizona's largest county as AZ Secretary of State Katie Hobbs is warning that the entire county's election machines will need to be replaced because chain of custody practices were absolutely not followed to protect the machines from tampering.

Arizona Secretary of State Katie Hobbs said Thursday that the voting machines Republicans turned over to private companies as part of their audit of the 2020 election are no longer safe for use in future elections.

In a letter sent to Maricopa County officials and shared with NBC News, Hobbs, a Democrat, cited security concerns about losing the chain of custody over the equipment when it was handed over to the auditors and urged the county to get new machines. If it does not, her office would consider decertifying the equipment involved in the audit, she wrote. That would remove the machines from service.

State Senate Republicans subpoenaed nearly 400 of Maricopa County's election machines, along with ballots cast by voters in November's election, to facilitate an unusual audit of the election results. The GOP hired private firms, led by the Florida-based cybersecurity company Cyber Ninjas, to do the work.

"I have grave concerns regarding the security and integrity of these machines, given that the chain of custody, a critical security tenet, has been compromised and election officials do not know what was done to the machines while under Cyber Ninjas' control," Hobbs wrote in the letter to the county's mostly Republican Board of Supervisors, which oversees the county elections.

In Arizona, the secretary of state can decertify machinery in consultation with the state's Election Equipment Certification Committee, a three-person panel appointed by Hobbs.

The audit itself is an extraordinarily partisan effort after Arizona Republicans spent months questioning the accuracy of President Joe Biden's narrow win in the state while boosting former President Donald Trump's lie that the election was stolen from him.

The recount operation has been dogged by controversy and conspiracy theories since Day One, as state and federal experts and law enforcement officials have questioned the legality and prudence of the auditors and their efforts. The Justice Department and election experts have warned that some of their proposed processes could violate federal law, while auditors' searches for things like bamboo and secret watermarks have drawn scorn and mockery.

 

There's no doubt in my mind that the machines were fiddled with and that doing so was the entire point of the plan. If Hobbs had allowed the machines to be used again, the GOP would have pounced and said "Aha! The machines really were altered! " Hobbs would have been run out of the state if not arrested for fraud and it would have been the turning point in the "battle" to "prove" national election fraud in favor of the Democrats.

Luckily, Katie Hobbs is much smarter than that and has flipped the argument on its head, and she absolutely has the power to decertify the machines and toss them, forcing the county (and state) to pay for all new machines.

Still, expect the narrative to be "SHE'S DUMPING THE EVIDENCE OF FRAUD" and for the state GOP to try to stop the decertification somehow.

Me, I'd have the machines audited for tampering by Cyber Ninjas, but this works too.

A Lotto Solutions In Here

Maryland joins Ohio in taking the money that would have been used in ad campaigns to get vaccine resisters to get the jab and instead just using it for lottery prizes for the vaccinated. 

With vaccine demand dropping, Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan is launching a $2 million lottery that will hand out dozens of $40,000 cash prizes to state residents who have received coronavirus vaccinations — along with a grand prize of $400,000.

Hogan (R) said daily drawings for a $40,000 prize will be held from Tuesday to July 3. On July 4, the $400,000 grand prize will be awarded via a random drawing.

All state residents 18 and older who received coronavirus vaccinations in Maryland will be eligible — regardless of when the shots were administered. No registration or entry is necessary.

“That’s 40 drawings over 40 days for the chance to win $40,000 each day,” Hogan said. “Entry is very simple. . . . Get your shot for a shot to win.”

The VaxCash lottery is the latest effort by Maryland to boost vaccination as the state tries to return to pre-pandemic normalcy. It is one of the largest cash incentives a state government has offered. This month, Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine (R) announced that he would offer five $1 million prizes to vaccinated state residents, along with four-year college scholarships for five vaccinated Ohioans younger than 18.

“Those of you who are still on the fence, there is no better time than now,” Hogan said outside the governor’s mansion in Annapolis, standing next to state lottery and health officials and a man in a Maryland lottery ball costume.

Each vaccinated Maryland resident will be randomly assigned a number in a system that will be maintained by the state Department of Health, officials said. The state lottery agency will select a number each day during the promotion.

Winners will be contacted and have to provide written consent to accept the prize. They can remain anonymous but will be encouraged to share their stories.

Maryland Lottery and Gaming Director Gordon Medenica called the effort “one of the most creative lottery promotions” his agency has ever done. He said officials are scrambling “on relatively short notice” to pull it together.

“This promotion is going to be good for the lottery, but much more importantly it is going to be good for the state of Maryland, because everybody is a winner if you get vaccinated,” Medenica said.

The funds for the drawing are being provided by the state lottery’s marketing fund, Hogan said.

 

I'm actually okay with this. If we have to make it lowest common denominator to get people to get vaccinated, then fine. Do what it takes. Better than spending millions on ads that they'll ignore.

Last Call For The Big Lie Gets Franchised

The ludicrous Arizona "recount again again again again" performative farce has been 100% successful because the goal was never to find "stolen votes", the goal was to declare that Maricopa County Republicans were part of the massive conspiracy and then demand audits everywhere, forever, in an attempt to destroy trust in the system of American elections.

At a public meeting last week in Cheboygan County, Mich., a lawyer from Detroit told county commissioners that the voting machines they used in 2020 could “flip” votes and throw an election. She offered to send in a “forensic team,” at no charge to the county, to inspect ballots and scanners.

In Windham, N.H., supporters of former president Donald Trump showed up to a town meeting this month chanting “Stop the Steal!” and demanding that officials choose their preferred auditor to scrutinize a 400-vote discrepancy in a state representative race.

And at a board of supervisors meeting May 4 in San Luis Obispo County, on California’s Central Coast, scores of residents questioned whether election machines had properly counted their votes, with many demanding a “forensic audit.”

The ramifications of Trump’s ceaseless attacks on the 2020 election are increasingly visible throughout the country: In emails, phone calls and public meetings, his supporters are questioning how their elections are administered and pressing public officials to revisit the vote count — wrongly insisting that Trump won the presidential race.

The most prominent example is playing out in Arizona’s Maricopa County, where Republican state lawmakers have forced a widely pilloried audit of the 2020 vote. That recount is being touted as an inspiration by small but vocal cohorts of angry residents in communities in multiple states.

“I think there is clearly a justification to do that type of audit that they’re doing in Maricopa County. That’s what I wanted to see done here,” said Ken Eyring, a local activist in Windham who recently appeared at a rally with former Trump campaign manager Corey Lewandowski. Eyring said his only goal is to make sure Windham’s machines are accurate.

Behind the scenes, a loose network of lawyers, self-styled election experts and political groups is bolstering community efforts by demanding audits, filing lawsuits and pushing unsubstantiated claims that residents are echoing in public meetings. Much of it is playing out in largely Republican communities, where Trump supporters hope to find officials willing to support their inquiries.

The increasingly vocal protests seven months after Trump lost the White House show how deeply the former president has undermined confidence in the nation’s elections, an attack he began early in the 2020 campaign as state and local officials expanded mail voting in response to the coronavirus pandemic.

Even as national Republican leaders say they want to move on from the last election — a rationale they used to expel Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.), a Trump critic, from her leadership post last week — the widespread echoes of Trump’s lie that the election was stolen show how his supporters are keeping that narrative alive.

Cheering them on is Trump himself, who has been issuing near-daily statements from his private Mar-a-Lago Club in Florida, claiming that a cascade of findings that the election was rigged will appear any day.

“I wouldn’t be surprised if they found thousands and thousands and thousands of votes,” Trump recently told a crowd attending a party at Mar-a-Lago, according to a video posted online by an attendee. “So we’re going to watch that very closely. And after that, you’ll watch Pennsylvania and you’ll watch Georgia and you’re going to watch Michigan and Wisconsin. You’re watching New Hampshire. Because this was a rigged election. Everybody knows it.”

 

The whole point is to delegitimize elections nationally in order to justify nullification of Democratic party wins.

I guarantee you this is coming.

In half the country, it will be impossible for a Democrat to be declared the victor in 2022. History says it gets very dark from there.

Still No Good Republicans

Even the "moderate" and "reasonable" Republicans like Maine's Susan Collins are still Republicans, which means they are 100% corrupt grifters who eventually get caught.

The FBI is investigating what it describes as a massive scheme to illegally finance Sen. Susan Collins' 2020 re-election bid, Axios has learned.

What's happening: A recently unsealed search warrant application shows the FBI believes a Hawaii defense contractor illegally funneled $150,000 to a pro-Collins super PAC and reimbursed donations to Collins' campaign. There's no indication that Collins or her team were aware of any of it. 

Collins helped the contractor at issue, then called Navatek and since renamed the Martin Defense Group, secure an $8 million Navy contract before most of the donations took place. Former Navatek CEO Martin Kao was indicted last year for allegedly bilking the federal government of millions in coronavirus relief loans.

What they're saying: "The Collins for Senator Campaign had absolutely no knowledge of anything alleged in the warrant," Collins spokesperson Annie Clark told Axios in an emailed statement.

The big picture: Federal prosecutors say Kao used a shell company to funnel $150,000 in Navatek funds to a pro-Collins super PAC called 1820 PAC. According to the FBI, Kao and his wife set up a sham LLC called the Society for Young Women Scientists and Engineers. Navatek then wrote the LLC a $150,000 check, investigators say, which was passed on to the super PAC. Government contractors are barred from donating to federal political committees, and investigators suspect the donations were attempts to evade that prohibition.

Investigators say bank records also show that Kao illegally reimbursed family members who donated to Collins' campaign and that Navatek reimbursed some of Kao's colleagues for their contributions. That's known as a "straw" donation, and it's prohibited by law. The Collins campaign's fundraising solicitations also require donors to certify that they are in fact donating their own funds. 

The allegedly reimbursed donations came in clusters, according to federal contribution records, between June and September 2019, and amounted to less than 0.2% of the Collins campaign's total fundraising. The warrant application quotes an email exchange between Kao, who had just maxed out to Collins' campaign, and the senator's Maine finance director: "If you have friends or family members that would be willing to donate please don’t hesitate to send them my way," the Collins staffer wrote.

 

The straw donations are illegal, and the pay-for-play is worse. Collins took the money and got them a contract.  The difference is she doesn't have Trump's ability to cover up all the corruption and got caught.

The Great Decommissioning Of The January 6 Commission

Dear Leader Trump has ordered the GOP to scrap even any hints of bipartisan support for a January 6th commission to hold hearing on what happened during the most dangerous terrorist attack on the US government in years, and the GOP will follow.

Former President Trump called for an immediate end to the debate over a commission to investigate the Jan. 6 Capitol riot the night before the House is expected to approve the plan.

“Republicans in the House and Senate should not approve the Democrat trap of the January 6 Commission. It is just more partisan unfairness and unless the murders, riots, and fire bombings in Portland, Minneapolis, Seattle, Chicago, and New York are also going to be studied, this discussion should be ended immediately,” Trump said in a statement Tuesday night.

“Republicans must get much tougher and much smarter, and stop being used by the Radical Left. Hopefully, Mitch McConnell and Kevin McCarthy are listening!” he added.

Trump's statement came shortly after the bipartisan Problem Solvers Caucus endorsed the creation of a panel, despite opposition from House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) and House Minority Whip Steve Scalise (R-La.).

 

McCarthy and McConnell have their orders from high command, and they are now scrambling to kill any cooperation. In the House, McCarthy is now actively whipping against the commission vote.

Kevin McCarthy thought his House Republican conference would almost entirely stand behind him in efforts to derail an investigation into the events of Jan. 6.

Now, a last-minute surge of GOP interest is dashing hopes for near-perfect opposition to the independent commission and putting Republican divisions back on full display.

Dozens of Republicans are privately considering voting for the Jan. 6 commission — which McCarthy himself said he opposed earlier Tuesday, even after he deputized one of his allies, Rep. John Katko of New York, to strike a bipartisan agreement on the proposal. In a sign of momentum, the bipartisan House Problem Solvers Caucus, of which Katko is a member, formally voted to endorse the legislation Tuesday evening.

Just days after GOP leaders decided they wouldn’t force their members’ hands either way, McCarthy and his leadership team issued an informal “leadership recommendation” ahead of the Wednesday vote, urging a “no” vote to help contain defections in their party. Former President Donald Trump also sought to shut down the commission on the eve of the floor vote, calling it a "Democrat trap" and urging Republicans to get "much tougher and much smarter."

"This discussion should be ended immediately," he said in a statement, which could help push wavering GOP lawmakers into the "no" camp.

Regardless of how many Republicans buck Trump on this issue, though, the bill is expected to pass the House. It's fate in the 50-50 Senate is less clear.

 

That last part is a lie. The commission's fate in the Senate is 100% clear: it is DOA. In the Senate, Mitch is making sure the commission can't move forward at all without becoming a circus to blame Black Lives Matter and Antifa.

 

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) told his fellow Republicans during a closed-door caucus lunch Tuesday he can't support a Jan. 6 commission in its current form, two sources familiar with his remarks tell Axios.

Why it matters: Senate Republicans are bracing for a House vote Wednesday. Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) opposes the commission but several Republicans are expected to buck leadership — making it more difficult for Senate Republicans to dismiss it.

What we're hearing: McConnell made comments to his colleagues along the lines of, "There’s 41 of us who could change this, and I think we should,” according to one of the sources. A second source confirmed the nature of the comments. When McConnell finished, Sen. Roy Blunt (R-Mo.) — who's retiring in 2023 — also stood up and questioned aspects of the deal. 

The senators did not indicate the deal is DOA in the Senate, the sources said, but made clear they would want to see substantive changes. Such changes being discussed more broadly among some Republicans include ensuring the panel is truly bipartisan. Rep. John Katko (R-N.Y.), who struck the deal with Democrats in the House, voted to impeach Trump — raising concerns among his fellow Republicans.

McConnell spoke publicly following the lunch and said he is "pushing the pause button" on the legislation, adding the GOP conference is “undecided."

 

And of course, the "Republican concerns" will never be addressed to Mitch's liking, so the commission will never happen. Of course, there's a reason as to why it can't happen, a reason so obvious that even CNN's Chris Cillizza gets it on the first try.

McCarthy doesn't want to testify under oath about his phone conversation with former President Donald Trump on January 6. As CNN reported, Trump told McCarthy on that call that the rioters "are more upset about the election than you are" and the GOP leader responded by insisting that the people overrunning the Capitol were backers of the President and that he needed to tell them to stand down.

A week after the riot, here's what McCarthy said on the House floor about Trump and the riot: 

"The President bears responsibility for Wednesday's attack on Congress by mob rioters. He should have immediately denounced the mob when he saw what was unfolding. These facts require immediate action of President Trump." 

But, as it became increasingly clear that even Trump's role inciting these rioters would not turn the GOP base away from him, McCarthy changed his tune. In late April, in an interview on "Fox News Sunday," McCarthy said this about his January 6 call with Trump: 

"What I talked to President Trump about, I was the first person to contact him when the riots was going on. He didn't see it. What he ended the call was saying -- telling me, he'll put something out to make sure to stop this. And that's what he did, he put a video out later." 

That is, of course, fundamentally inaccurate. Trump waited hours before releasing any sort of statement about the riot. And, when he did call on the rioters to go home, he reiterated the Big Lie about the 2020 election. "We had an election that was stolen from us. It was a landslide election and everyone knows it," Trump said in a video released by the White House that day. "Especially the other side. But you have to go home now. We have to have peace." 

The broader point here is that McCarthy has been VERY cagey about that January 6 phone call -- and there continues to be questions about whether Trump and McCarthy have spoken about the call since January 6.

"Leader McCarthy has spoken to a number of people in -- in large groups and small groups since the sixth about his exchanges with the President," said Wyoming Rep. Liz Cheney (R) on "Fox News Sunday." "I think it's very important that, you know, he clearly has facts about that day, that an investigation into what happened, into the president's actions, ought to get to the bottom of. And I think that he has important information that needs to be part of any investigation, whether it's the FBI, the Department of Justice, or this commission that I -- I hope will be set up."

 

Neither McCarthy nor Trump can allow the commission to go forward, and once again it's Mitch's job to kill it. He will deliver. Anyone who thinks this is going to happen is making a sucker's bet, full stop. I am in total agreement with Steve M on this.

Republicans will block this. And if they can't block it, they'll sabotage it. They'll load up the committee with rhetorical bomb-throwers. They'll use the hearings primarily for anti-Democratic catchphrases and memes. Even if they don't succeed in broadening the scope of the investigation to include violence and property damage in anti-racism demonstrations, they'll find ways to hang all that around the necks of Democrats. They'll say any law enforcement failures were all Nancy Pelosi's fault. They'll never concede that this was a brutal threat to democracy by their party's voters on behalf of a president from their party. And whatever they say will be believed by nearly half the country.

After two Trump impeachments and the early stages of this process, I've had enough. I think Democrats should simply give up on the notion that "accountability" is possible for Republicans. It's not just that they resist it. They pay no price for resisting it. Resisting it endears them to their voters.

Nothing Democrats do and nothing they reveal will lead to second thoughts among Republican voters. We know this because nothing revealed in either of Trump's impeachments disillusioned them. Quite the opposite: It unified them in opposition to the accountability seekers.

When Democrats beg Republicans to put country over party, they reinforce the mistaken notion that the GOP might someday actually do that. That sends a signal that if Democrats can't come to terms with Republicans, then it must be the Democrats' fault -- after all, the Democrats say it's possible to reason with the GOP.

Enough. Better for Democrats to just accept that accountability is impossible, and to tell the public that a real reckoning can't happen because Republicans will always prevent it from happening. The only way to get to the truth is to vote Republicans out.

 

The Big Lie makes this clear. There is nothing that Democrats can do to "win" Republicans over anymore. Bipartisanship is dead as a whole. The GOP doesn't see Democratic politicians and voters as human, let alone Americans with rights in a competing marketplace of ideas. They're ready for authoritarian dictatorship now, if not full-on fascism, where they are the full "citizens" and the rest of us serve them.

They're close to getting it, too, closer than they've been in a century or two.

Last Call For Orange Meltdown, Con't

The NY Attorney General's investigation into the Trump Organization has officially become a criminal investigation, and things just got real interesting as this means both the federal and state probes are now criminal.

 

New York Attorney General Letitia James is joining the Manhattan district attorney's office in a criminal investigation of the Trump Organization, James' office said Tuesday. 

The attorney general office's investigation into the Trump Organization, which has been underway since 2019, will also continue as an ongoing civil probe, but the office recently informed Trump Organization officials of the criminal component. 

"We have informed the Trump Organization that our investigation into the organization is no longer purely civil in nature. We are now actively investigating the Trump Organization in a criminal capacity, along with the Manhattan DA," James' spokesman Fabien Levy told CNN. "We have no additional comment." 

A lawyer for the Trump Organization declined to comment when reached by CNN. 

James' office is working with Manhattan District Attorney Cy Vance's Office, whose wide-sweeping probe into the Trump Organization has looked into whether the company misled lenders and insurance companies about the value of properties and whether it paid the appropriate taxes. 

Vance's office is examining millions of pages of documents that include Trump's tax returns. 

A person familiar with the investigation said a couple of investigators with the New York attorney general's office, who are steeped in knowledge about the Trump Organization, have joined the district attorney's team. A different person familiar with the matter said the New York attorney general is still conducting a civil investigation.

 

I still don't think the probe will result in criminal charges however, or any charges against Trump. Doing so would almost certainly lead to a massive terrorist attack or series of attacks in New York City that would make January 6 and even 9/11 look like a picnic. 

Yes, the Biden administration would quickly restore order, but that would result in lots of other pop-up attacks all over the place, and governors in some states aren't going to cooperate even if charges are filed.

Still, it is one step closer to Trump getting what he deserves, and what America needs to happen.

A Supreme Ruling On Gunmerica

In a unanimous 9-0 opinion from Justice Thomas, the Supreme Court made it very clear that "community caretaking" exception to warrantless Fourth Amendment search and seizure procedures by police in a person's home has limits, and those limits include guns.

 

On Monday, the Supreme Court released its opinion in Caniglia v. Strom, which unanimously held that a lower court’s extension of Cady v. Dombrowski’s “community caretaking” exception into the home defied the logic and holding of Cady, as well as violated the Fourth Amendment’s warrant requirement. With the court’s unanimity in Caniglia, the home remains the most sacred space under the Fourth Amendment; its sanctity literally houses its privilege. Sans warrant, exigency or consent, governmental search and seizure within it is unconstitutional.

During an August 2015 argument with his wife, Edward Caniglia offered her one of his unloaded guns and requested that she put him out of his misery. Instead, she threatened to call 911. After the couple’s argument continued, she left the marital home to overnight at a hotel. When she returned the next day, she enlisted Cranston, Rhode Island’s police department to perform a wellness check on her husband. They did. They also arranged transportation for Edward to obtain a psychiatric evaluation at a local hospital. He agreed to go, but only after officers purportedly agreed not to confiscate his weapons. However, as soon as he left, officers — apparently by deceiving his wife — entered the Caniglia home and seized Caniglia’s handguns and ammunition. Caniglia sued, alleging that the officers violated his Fourth Amendment rights. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 1st Circuit sided with the officers by relying on Cady, a 1973 decision that upheld the warrantless “caretaking” search of a car that had been in an accident.

The court’s opinion, written by Justice Clarence Thomas, was devoid of the fearsome, compelling specter raised in the briefing and during argument regarding the potential for troubling eventualities — for instance, that Caniglia may have harmed himself or his wife (or, perhaps, other innocent/intervening victims). A pithy four pages “long,” the opinion was unanimous and unambiguous: If police do not have the homeowner’s consent, an “exigent” circumstance, or a judicial warrant authorizing a search, then no version of Cady’s car exception applies to police entry into the home under the Fourth Amendment. “What is reasonable for vehicles is different from what is reasonable for homes,” Thomas wrote.

As always with realty – and, per Caniglia, the court’s Fourth Amendment jurisprudence — location matters. Specifically, the location of Cady’s warrantless search and seizure – a post-accident, routine search of an intoxicated, off-duty officer’s damaged and impounded car — simply cannot compare to a search of and seizure within a home. Governmental searches of vehicles regularly occur via exceptions to the Fourth Amendment’s warrant requirement; a myriad of decisions have constitutionalized warrantless searches of vehicles, their compartments, their containers and even their occupants. Not one of these warrantless exceptions is available for the home.

Accordingly, caretaking under Cady is not carte blanche for police to search or seize within the home, nor do their “caretaking” duties create a “standalone doctrine that justifies warrantless searches and seizures in the home,” Thomas wrote. Cady, itself, he noted, drew an “unmistakable distinction between vehicles and homes,” constitutionally embedding the exception outside the home.

That police may engage in a myriad of “civic” community caretaking functions did not move the court off its jurisprudential bright line. Certainly, such functions give texture to the modern, sometimes complex, role of policing. They do not, however, supplant the constitutional sanctity of the home. Accordingly, the Caniglia court declined the opportunity to expand Cady’s “community caretaking” exception and permit warrantless entry into the home.

 

The overarching theme here is that short of an exigent emergency, cops can't search your home and take your things. None of those things applied in this case, and the court reaffirmed unanimously that this is the case.

It was a simple call, even for Clarence Thomas to make.

The House Republican Performative Caucus, Or Welcome To The Clown Show

Breaking news, the clown show that is the House Republican caucus is in fact full of clowns, and they're too busy being clowns to vote on legislation.

The top five freshman members of Congress who've missed the most votes this year are all House Republicans, according to data collected by Quorum.

By the numbers: Rep. Madison Cawthorn (R-N.C.) led the pack, missing 16.2% of votes. Cawthorn ranks sixth overall among all members — both House and Senate — in terms of missed votes. 

The House Democratic freshman who missed the most votes is Rep. Jamaal Bowman (D-N.Y.), No. 14 on the list, at 2.82%. 

Sen. Cynthia Lummis (R-Wyo.), No. 12, missed the most votes in the Senate as a freshman, at 3.14%.

What they're saying: “Rep. Cawthorn married the love of his life on April 3rd of 2021. Due to his honeymoon, he missed House votes occurring between April 13th and April 16th," his spokesman Micah Bock told Axios. 

Four of the votes that Sen. Lummis missed were due to a record-level blizzard that hit Wyoming this year, Lummis's office said.

 

Sure, that's an excuse, because all the House votes took place in four days in April, right? And it's weird, because Wyoming's other senator, John Barasso, made those votes.

Even more so than the House GOP entering freshmen of the last decade, this class seems to think that they'll get reelected by not doing anything in the House except being assholes.

And they will get reelected, because their Republican voters in red districts think the federal government is illegitimate and broken anyway, so why not have a Congressperson dedicated to making sure it stays that way?

They don't want representation. They want entertainment. They want to own the libs. Period.

Welcome to the clown show, rookies.