An Unconventional Proposal, Con't

January in state legislature land always means the crazy stuff happens, this time it's Nebraska Republicans wanting to join the more than a dozen Republican legislatures who want to completely rewrite the US Constitution.

Late in the 2021 legislative session, a resolution adding Nebraska to the list of states calling for a convention to propose amendments to the U.S. Constitution appeared dead in the water.

The proposal (LR14) from Sen. Steve Halloran of Hastings had failed to advance from committee, and a motion to pull it onto the floor fell two votes short of reaching a simple majority of 25 senators.

But a motion to suspend the Legislature’s rules late in the 90-day session allowed the resolution to be considered in committee once more, and negotiations between Halloran and Omaha Sen. John McCollister produced the fifth vote needed to put LR14 on the floor.

The Legislature advanced LR14 to second-round consideration on a 32-10 vote after a first-round filibuster attempt was scrapped Monday afternoon, the first day of floor debate in the 2022 session.

Four senators were present but not voting.

“Honestly, I think most people were expecting the full eight-hour filibuster, and that didn’t happen,” Halloran said after the vote. “I was surprised.”

The resolution, and others like it introduced by Halloran and others in recent years, have failed to gain traction in the Legislature, despite many conservative senators supporting it.

LR14, like resolutions adopted in 15 other states, would call for a convention of states as outlined in Article V of the U.S. Constitution.

Under the resolution, convention delegates would be responsible for drafting proposed constitutional amendments imposing fiscal restraints on the federal government, limiting the power and jurisdiction of the federal government and setting term limits for officeholders and Congress.

Supporters said constitutional amendments are necessary to rein in out-of-control spending that has grown the country’s debt as well as the deficit. Halloran, a Republican, laid blame at the feet of presidents dating back to George W. Bush.

“The debt clock is ticking,” he said, referring to the U.S. Debt Clock, which puts the national debt at nearly $30 trillion, equal to about $89,000 for every person in the country.

While a constitutional amendment could erect guardrails for federal spending and limit the government’s authority to spend, opponents said Halloran’s resolution left room for delegates to interpret intent.

 

It's madness, for sure. Eliminating the federal government's spending power would drive tens of millions of American families into deep poverty with no way to help them, because of course this wouldn't affect a single dime of Pentagon spending. Executive agency regulations and programs would vanish overnight.

 

Of course, there's a good chance that will happen anyway if the Roberts Court decides to dismantle the Executive branch. 

Republican corporations need a stead stream of miserable peons to work until they die, you know. They're going to get it eventually.

Last Call For Cawthorne Called Out

A group of petitioners in North Carolina are filing papers claiming that GOP Rep. Madison Cawthorn is ineligible for office under the state Constitution because of his participation in the January 6th insurrection.

A Bernie Sanders-backed group has launched a long-shot bid to keep North Carolina Representative Madison Cawthorn off the ballot in this year’s midterms by claiming his alleged support for the 6 January insurrection renders him ineligible to serve in Congress.

A petition by a group of Tarheel State voters who are making the challenge to Mr Cawthorn’s eligibility was filed with the North Carolina state board of elections last week as part of a campaign progressive groups Free Speech for People and Our Revolution are staging in hopes of using an obscure section of the 14th Amendment to keep a number of GOP figures from seeking reelection.

Enacted in 1868 as part of the Reconstruction process after the US Civil War, the 14th Amendment is now mainly known for guaranteeing birthright citizenship to anyone born on American soil, and for its guarantees of “due process” and “equal protection” to all citizens.

But the challengers opposing Mr Cawthorn’s candidacy hope the board will apply a North Carolina law allowing them to challenge a candidate’s eligibility by filing an affidavit articulating their “reasonable suspicion” that he is barred from holding officer under the third section of the amendment, which states that “no person shall be a … representative in Congress … or hold any office … under the United States … who, having previously taken an oath, as a member of Congress … to support the Constitution of the United States, shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof”.

The amendment does not lay out how such ineligibility would be determined, but in practice the House and Senate have invoked it by a simple majority vote against prospective members. Congress has done so only once since the end of the 19th century when it blocked a Socialist Party of America member named Victor Berger from taking office as a representative from Wisconsin.

Berger, who had been convicted of violating the Espionage Act by opposing the US entry into the First World War, later successfully sued to have his conviction overturned, removing his ineligibility and allowing him to serve three terms in Congress.

The petition against Mr Cawthorn does not accuse him of violating any laws that would bar his eligibility, but alleges that his support for the protests organised on 6 January — including his appearance at the rally on the Ellipse which later featured then-president Donald Trump — combined with his vote against certifying the election amount to involvement “with, at minimum, the planning of events that led to the insurrection”.

 

Yes, it's a long shot.But it might actually work because in NC, a candidate whose eligibility is challenged has the burden of proof placed upon them to then prove they are indeed eligible. We'll see what happens, most likely the challenge will be dismissed by a Trumpist-friendly judge, but hey.

On the other hand, depending how he reacts to this, Cawthorn will probably commit another insurrection in his defense.

Our Little White Supremacist Domestic Terrorism Problem, Con't

US Attorney General Merrick Garland is taking the threat of Trumpist white supremacist domestic terrorism seriously, enough so to form a special Justice Department unit dedicated to rooting it out.

The Justice Department is establishing a specialized unit focused on domestic terrorism, the department's top national security official told lawmakers Tuesday as he described an “elevated” threat from violent extremists in the United States.

Assistant Attorney General Matthew Olsen, testifying just days after the nation observed the one-year anniversary of the violent insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, said the number of FBI investigations into suspected domestic violent extremists has more than doubled since the spring of 2020.

“We have seen a growing threat from those who are motivated by racial animus, as well as those who ascribe to extremist anti-government and anti-authority ideologies,” Olsen said.

Olsen's assessment tracked with a warning last March from FBI Director Christopher Wray, who testified that the threat was “metastasizing.” Jill Sanborn, the executive assistant director in charge of the FBI's national security branch who testified alongside Olsen, said Tuesday the greatest threat comes from lone extremists who radicalize online and look to carry out violence at so-called “soft targets.”

The department's National Security Division, which Olsen leads, has a counterterrorism section. But Olsen told the Senate Judiciary Committee that he has decided to create a specialized domestic terrorism unit “to augment our existing approach" and to “ensure that these cases are properly handled and effectively coordinated” across the country.

The formulation of a new unit underscores the extent to which domestic violence extremism, which for years after the Sept. 11 attacks was overshadowed by the threat of international terrorism, has attracted urgent attention inside the federal government.

 

Senate Republicans are already Big Mad about it, as are the usual House GOP trogldytes, but the fact is that's where the terrorism is happening right now, folks.

Remember, under Trump, these attacks were dismissed if not actively covered for.

 

Ridin' Over Biden

President Biden will be in Georgia today to announce he's backing Chuck Schumer's plan to eliminate the filibuster for voting rights legislation, but the reality is that voting rights activists in the state simply don't give a single damn about what Biden has to say on the subject anymore.

SO MUCH FOR UNITY — Democratic leaders hoped to spend the week before Martin Luther King Jr. Day presenting a united front for voting rights legislation and blasting Republicans as undemocratic.

So much for that.

Multiple high-profile voting rights leaders are planning to skip President JOE BIDEN’s speech on the matter in Atlanta today, dismissing the address as too little too late. “We’re beyond speeches. We’re beyond events,” said LATOSHA BROWN, the leader of Black Voters Matter. (h/t Sam Gringlas from NPR’s Atlanta bureau)

“We do not need any more speeches, we don’t need any more platitudes,” former NAACP of Georgia President JAMES WOODALL told NYT’s Nick Corasaniti and Reid Epstein. “We don’t need any more photo ops. We need action, and that actually is in the form of the John Lewis Voting Rights Act, as well as the Freedom to Vote Act — and we need that immediately.”

STACEY ABRAMS won’t be there either, citing a scheduling conflict.

At the same time, Democrats are facing growing doubts within their own ranks about nixing the filibuster to pass the voting bills. Burgess Everett reports that Sen. MARK KELLY (D-Ariz.) is undecided on what to do while Sen. JON TESTER (D-Mont.) admits he’s not crazy about a filibuster “carveout.” That’s aside from Sens. JOE MANCHIN (D-W.Va.) and KYRSTEN SINEMA’s (D-Ariz.) long-stated opposition.

WHAT BIDEN WILL SAY TODAY — Look for him to crank up the heat on the party’s voting push, calling the next few days “a turning point in this nation,” and posing a question: “Will we choose democracy over autocracy, light over shadow, justice over injustice?”

“I know where I stand,” Biden will say, according to a preview shared with Playbook. “I will not yield. I will not flinch. I will defend your right to vote and our democracy against all enemies foreign and domestic. And so the question is where will the institution of [the] United States Senate stand?”

Biden, whose support for the filibuster has softened since taking office, is also expected to reiterate that he backs “changing the Senate rules to ensure it can work again … Because abuse of what was once a rarely used mechanism that is not in the Constitution has injured the body enormously, and its use to protect extreme attacks on the most basic constitutional right is abhorrent.”

A White House aide says Biden will again invoke Jan. 6 and will “describe this as one of the rare moments in a country’s history when time stops and the essential is immediately ripped away from the trivial, and that we have to ensure Jan. 6 doesn’t mark the end of democracy but the beginning of a renaissance for our democracy.”

I don't see how treating Biden like garbage helps advance voting rights. I seriously thought Stacey Abrams had better judgment than to dismiss Biden with a "scheduling conflict" when she's sure as hell going to need him later this year for her campaign rallies for Governor. 

But apparently we're right back to 2010 when "Obama failed us" after passing historic legislation.

I absolutely understand the frustration and anger. But as Jonathan Capehart points out, the actual villain remains Mitch McConnell and the other 49 GOP senators blocking any and all voting rights legislation.

The reality though is that for all the righteous anger in the country, Schumer doesn't have the votes to change the rules. There are still Democrats who refuse to play ball, and it's not just Manchin and Sinema, but Kelly and Tester and even Jeanne Shaheen.

That's not Biden's failure, but it is a failure of the Democrats.

It might be the bridge too far this time. Capehart reminds us that we still have the vote in 2022 to punish Republicans across the country, but most Americans don't care to do so, or they outright support the GOP.

As I keep telling people, the Civil Rights era was an aberration of American history, and that era is now almost certainly over.

Last Call For Big Time Budgets

It's January, which means state governors are introducing their budgets for the year, and nobody's going bigger than Gavin Newsom in California.

Backed by soaring revenues amid the pandemic, California Gov. Gavin Newsom on Monday proposed a budget that would pay for the health care of all the state’s low-income residents living in the country illegally, while cutting taxes for businesses and halting a scheduled increase in the gas tax later this summer.

California taxpayers already pay for the health care of young adults and people 50 and over living in the country illegally, provided they meet certain income requirements. Now, Newsom wants California to become the first state to cover all adults who are living in the country illegally, a move that would eventually cost $2.2 billion per year.

“We’re doing something that no other state has done,” Newsom said.

Newsom said his $286.4 billion budget proposal tackles five of the state’s biggest problems — what his administration called “existential threats” — including the surging coronavirus pandemic; wildfires and drought worsened by global warming; homelessness; income inequality including the lack of health insurance for some immigrants; and public safety, including combatting a recent flurry of coordinated smash-and-grab robberies.

The “existential” label is usually applied to climate change and the pandemic, Newsom acknowledged, but he said homelessness, the rising cost of living and public safety are “understandably top of mind in terms of people’s concerns.”

The governor said his budget includes a $45.7 billion surplus, which is larger than previous estimates because his administration uses a different definition of what counts as surplus.

The proposed $2.2 billion program to aid immigrants in the country illegally would not take effect until January 2024 to include “all low-income Californians, regardless of immigration status,” Newsom said.

The state has made great strides in reducing its uninsured population in recent years, but the largest single group left behind under the state’s Medicaid program are low-income residents in the country illegally.

The state began covering immigrants 26 and under in 2019, and those 50 and older last year.

 

But I was told that California was a failed Socialist state that was doomed to collapse 15 years ago and everyone moved out to Texas.

 

Here's there thing though: Newsom's budget, a whole hell of a lot of it, will become law because Democrats actually do things like cut taxes AND increase services.

 

Here in Kentucky, Gov. Andy Beshear's budget proposal, which will 100% be ignored by the nearly three-quarters Republican supermajority in the state legislature, is a lot more modest.

Gov. Andy Beshear on Monday unveiled “record funding” of an additional $2 billion in pre-K to 12th grade education as part of his upcoming budget proposal.

Beshear’s proposed budget would fully fund universal pre-K for all 4-year-olds with $172 million in each year of the biennium and fund full day kindergarten.

“It is more than affordable... a something we must do,” Beshear said of the pre-school proposal.

Republican lawmakers did not immediately comment Monday afternoon.

Beshear is also proposing a 16.9 percent increase in SEEK funding, the dollars provided to K-12 schools for everything from transportation to support for special needs students.

There is a 12. 5 percent increase in the SEEK based per pupil funding formula for elementary and secondary schools.

The budget proposal fully funds school district costs for student transportation. That is $175 million annually, an 81 percent increase over the last budget.

“We are not burdening our schools with an unfunded mandate,” Beshear said.

Kentucky needs to make sure it is paying the people educating children what they are worth, Beshear said.

The proposal includes a minimum 5 percent salary increase for all school personnel, in additional to salary schedule increases for certified educators. He said its the first identified pay increase in a budget since 2006 to 2008 and there will be no health insurance premium increases for school employees, Beshear said. He said Kentucky ranks 42nd nationally in starting salaries for teachers.

He is providing $26. 3 million each year for a student loan forgiveness program that provides a maximum of $3,000 a year annually to help a teacher pay off student loans. Educators can stay in the program for five years if they are teaching in Kentucky. His proposal fully funds teacher’s pensions and medical benefits, all measures to keep them in the classrooms.

Beshear’s proposal provides $22.9 million each year to restore professional development as well as provide funding for textbooks and instructional resources.

With the proposed funding, Kentucky teachers would not have to dip into their own pocket to provide resources for their classrooms, he said.

Beshear provided an additional $6 million each year in funding for the state’s 874 family resource and youth service centers for 1,200 schools, which Beshear said provides items such as coats for students. He said their funding has not been increased for years.

 

California's surplus is only a couple billion short of Kentucky's entire biennial budget, but it doesn't matter, as state House Republicans filed their entire budget last week.

Kentucky House Republicans filed their first draft of the state's two-year budget plan Friday, ahead of Gov. Andy Beshear's budget address next week.

It's been a common practice in Kentucky: the governor unveils his budget plan and the legislature then follows. But on Friday, the Republican majority unveiled theirs early, with no warning.

"I don't know if it's petty or excitement or what, but I'll leave that up to Kentuckians to decide," said House Floor Minority Leader Joni Jenkins.

She says just like her Democratic colleagues, she was taken aback.

"I've been in Frankfort, this is the beginning of my 28th year of service and throughout Democratic and Republican governors, I have never seen the legislature put forth their budget before the governor gave their budget address," Jenkins said.

 

The message from House Speaker David Osborne is clear: Beshear is irrelevant.

 

He's not wrong.

 

The problem is 4.5 million Kentuckians remain irrelevant to Osborne and the KY GOP, but people here will vote for themselves to be miserable anyway...as long as they remain better off than *those people*.

Another Year In Gunmerica, Con't

Turns out that the real reason for the massive homicide spike in the last two years is even more guns here in Gunmerica.

After murders in the United States soared to more than 21,000 in 2020, researchers began searching for a definitive explanation why. Many factors may have contributed, such as a pandemic-driven loss of social programs and societal and policing changes after George Floyd’s murder. But one hypothesis is simpler, and perhaps has significant explanatory power: A massive increase in gun sales in early 2020 led to additional murders.

New data from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) suggest that that indeed may have been the case. According to the data, newly purchased weapons found their way into crimes much more quickly and often last year than in prior years. That seems to point to a definitive conclusion—that new guns led to more murders—but the data set cannot prove that just yet.

The ATF data are the result of tracing nearly 400,000 firearms in 2020. According to the bureau, firearms are traced only “at the request of a law enforcement agency engaged in a bona fide criminal investigation where a firearm has been used or is suspected to have been used in a crime.” Not all guns recovered by law enforcement are traced, and many guns that are used in crimes are never recovered by law enforcement to begin with. But the ATF’s data are the most robust source available for evaluating the increased use of firearms in the United States in 2020.

What’s most startling in these new data is the degree to which firearms purchased in 2020 featured in crimes committed in 2020. The ATF’s data set includes a measure known as the “time to crime” of each gun traced—the time from when a firearm was legally purchased to when it was recovered after a crime. On this metric, an enormous shift is apparent: The number of traced guns whose time to crime was a year or more increased by less than 1 percent in 2020 compared with 2019, but the number of guns whose time to crime was six months or less increased by 90 percent.

Prior years looked quite different. Only about 13 percent of guns traced from 2015 to 2019 were recovered within six months of purchase. In 2020, 23 percent were. In total, the average time to crime fell from 8.3 years in 2019 to seven years in 2020, and just about half of the guns traced in 2020 crimes were purchased three or more years prior to recovery, compared with more than 70 percent a decade ago. Moreover, states with greater upticks in gun background checks—meaning more purchases of new guns—also saw greater increases in new guns recovered in and traced to crimes. All told, what this reveals is that guns used in crimes in 2020 were newer than in the past. Additionally, more guns were recovered in 2020 than in 2019 across a host of crimes. “You do see these guns ending up in risky situations more quickly than in the past,” says Aaron Chalfin, a criminology professor at the University of Pennsylvania.

 

Everything is an excuse to buy MOAR GUNZ and MOAR AMMOZ you see, and with more firearms in the hands of the American public than we have people in the country almost, it's no wonder that things designed to do lethal damage to living beings are working as the manufacturer intended.

 

Just another year in Gunmerica.

I Don't Buy Mike Rounding On Trump

Not sure why South Dakota GOP Sen. Mike Rounds would be on This Week with George Stephanopoulos, as he's a back-bencher in the minority party with no leadership roles, but that's how the media treats Republicans (when's the last time, say, Catherine Cortez Masto or Tom Carper were on a Sunday show?) over Democrats. Rounds did make some news I guess with a...less...than enthusiastic endorsement of Trump in 2024.

 

Sen. Mike Rounds (R-S.D.) said on Sunday that while he previously stated he would support the next Republican presidential nominee, he would take a "hard look" at supporting former President Trump if he ran again in 2024.

ABC "This Week" host George Stephanopoulos asked Rounds, who has shot back at GOP assertions that the 2020 presidential election was fraudulent, if he could support Trump if he ran for office again.

"I will take a hard look at it," said Rounds.

"Personally, what I have told people is, is I'm going to support the Republican nominee to be president. I'm not sure that the eventual nominee has even shown up yet," he said. "There's still — we're two years to go, where we're going to focus on the next election cycle. It's critical that we take back the House. It's critical that we take back the United States Senate."

Rounds said that he would leave it to the courts to decide whether Trump can run for office again. Democrats have been quietly exploring ways to prevent Trump from running for president again, including using the 14th Amendment.

"I think this is an issue which the courts can decide. And, most certainly, if there's evidence there, this is going to be up to the Justice Department to bring it forward and to move with it. But, once again, every single person has protections under that system. The former president has protections under that system as well," Rounds told Stephanopoulos.

"But this is something that should be decided in the courts. And I don't think it's something that we should be legislating on right now," he added.

 

Now, "I'll support the eventual nominee" is boilerplate dodge, but "If the Justice Department has evidence it's up to them to bring it forward" may be the first time I've heard any congressional Republican admit that Merrick Garland is anything other than a fiendish legal hitman working for Biden to take our freedoms and crap. 

Not only that, but it's an admission that hey, Garland may indeed have the goods, which is weird because Rounds doesn't serve on Judiciary or Intelligence. The Democrats aren't going to try to pass any legislation based on the 14th Amendment to ban Trump from running for office again, that's just not going to happen.

But...maybe Merrick Garland really does have something.

 

On the other hand, Trump is pissed. 

 

Trump issues a statement attacking GOP Sen. Mike Rounds, who said over the weekend that Biden won 2020 election fair and square.

"Even though his election will not be coming up for 5 years, I will never endorse this jerk again."

— Igor Bobic (@igorbobic) January 10, 2022

 

And yet, nobody doubts Trump will still be the GOP kingmaker in 2026.

StupidiNews!

• NYC fire officials say a space heater was most likely responsible for a Sunday Bronx apartment fire that left 19 dead, including 9 children, and injured 63 more.
• NASA has completed deployment of the James Webb Space Telescope over the weekend, with the orbital platform traveling to Earth's second Lagrange point over the next five and a half months.
• Australia has surpassed 1 million COVID infections as the Omicron variant continues to spread across the island nation.
• House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is open to the idea of another round of federal relief aid for COVID ahead of a February deadline for keeping the government open.
• Game developer Sega says it will reconsider plans to explore gaming NFTs after a major customer backlash, saying the company will now "carefully assess" what is acceptable to users.
  

Last Call For The Manchin On The Hill, Con't

New year, same old Joe Manchin games, same old Biden administration getting the football yanked away.

The week before Christmas, Sen. Joe Manchin III sent the White House a $1.8 trillion counteroffer to President Biden’s Build Back Better agenda that included substantial funds for climate, health-care and education initiatives.

About four weeks later, the West Virginia Democrat has made clear that he does not currently support advancing even that offer following a breakdown in negotiations between Manchin and the White House right before Christmas, three people with knowledge of the matter said.

Manchin said publicly this week that he was no longer involved in talks with the White House over the economic package. Privately, he has also made clear that he is not interested in approving legislation resembling Biden’s Build Back Better package and that Democrats should fundamentally rethink their approach. Senior Democrats say they do not believe Manchin would support his offer even if the White House tried adopting it in full — at least not at the moment — following the fallout in mid-December. The people spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss private conversations.

Negotiations deteriorated quickly in December after a White House news release named Manchin as the obstacle to passing the legislation. Manchin then surprised the administration by criticizing the bill on Fox News, after which the White House released a blistering statement calling his credibility into question. Manchin, who has drawn protesters’ ire because of his opposition to the legislation, later said the decision to name him in the news release imperiled the safety of his family.

The White House has continued to project optimism that it will eventually secure Manchin’s vote and approval of a major economic plan by Congress. And Manchin’s $1.8 trillion counteroffer suggested that much common ground between the two sides remained on the policy substance. He said in recent days that he supports much of the administration’s climate agenda, for example.

But Democratic leaders in Congress have abruptly pivoted from trying to complete the economic package to addressing voting rights legislation, leaving unclear the fate of the White House’s chance to remake big parts of the U.S. economy and provide the biggest-ever investment in fighting climate change.

Manchin has talked with a range of public officials trying to sway him on Build Back Better, such as senior White House aide Steve Ricchetti; Larry Kudlow, who was an adviser to President Donald Trump; and Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah), among others.

White House allies, including several officials in the White House itself, have in recent days expressed confusion as to how the administration could pass up on the potential for $1.8 trillion deal that would amount to one of the most significant pieces of domestic policy in decades.

Manchin’s offer included permanent funding for universal prekindergarten, an expansion of the Affordable Care Act and hundreds of billions of dollars in climate-related spending — measures staunchly opposed by congressional Republicans. His plan also included support for a tax on billionaires, which would amount to the most aggressive plans to reduce wealth inequality in modern American history. And Democrats may not see another majority in Congress for many years.

“A $1.8 trillion package along the lines of what Manchin offered last month would be one of the most transformative, progressive pieces of legislation in modern history,” said Ben Ritz, a budget expert at the Progressive Policy Institute, a D.C. think tank. “The White House should absolutely take it if they can.”

 

Last month, Manchin was the villain, and what he needed most was a way to kill Build Back Better without being the obvious bad guy. Now he's won on that, and the BBB plan is 100% dead.

It'll be blamed on "Biden and the progressives" for not taking his offer, which was never really an offer anyway. He would have objected to his own offer on the table in order to reset the news cycle, but now he doesn't have to lift a finger.

He's most going to get away with it.

On A Need To Don't Know Basis

Expect a lot more of this going forward in one-party, permanent GOP rule states.

When Iowa’s 2022 legislative session commences Monday, there will be a notable absence on the floor of the state Senate: reporters.

Republican leaders in the state Senate told journalists last week they will no longer be allowed to work on the chamber floor, a change that breaks with a more than 140-year tradition in the Iowa Capitol. The move raised concerns among free press and freedom of information advocates who said it is a blow to transparency and open government that makes it harder for the public to understand, let alone scrutinize, elected officials.

The new rule denies reporters access to the press benches near senators’ desks, a proximity current and former statehouse reporters told The Washington Post is crucial for the most accurate and nuanced coverage. The position allows reporters to see and hear everything clearly on the Senate floor and to get real-time answers and clarifications during debates.

Beginning this session, reporters will be seated in a public upper-level gallery.

“When you take journalists and restrict their access and then you couple that with changes that have occurred in the past couple of years with procedures in Iowa, it makes it that much harder for the public to know what’s going on,” said Randy Evans, executive director of the Iowa Freedom of Information Council, a government transparency watchdog.

In an email to statehouse reporters obtained by The Washington Post, Senate Republican spokesperson Caleb Hunter said the new rule arose from the “evolving nature and definition of ‘media.' ”

“As nontraditional media outlets proliferate, it creates an increasingly difficult scenario for the Senate, as a governmental entity, to define the criteria of a media outlet,” the email said. Hunter did not immediately respond to a request for comment Saturday.

To critics of the new rule, including members of the Iowa Capitol Press Association and Democrats in the state Senate, the change is little more than a thinly veiled retaliation against news outlets for unflattering coverage of the Republican-controlled legislature. Longtime statehouse reporters also called the justification specious and said there are no instances of nontraditional media causing disruptions.

“Keeping reporters out doesn’t make reporters more accurate or fair. [Senators] would be better off letting those folks in and getting to know them,” said Kathie Obradovich, editor in chief of the Iowa Capital Dispatch, who also serves as vice president of the Iowa Capitol Press Association (ICPA). She called the move “discouraging” and unprovoked.

Obradovich noted that the Iowa House, the judiciary and the governor’s office have all managed to define criteria for media outlets and said the Iowa Senate will have to eventually, whenever it next holds news conferences that require credentialing.

Unlike the Washington press corps covering Congress and the White House, the media space at the Iowa Capitol is allocated by the party that has control of the Iowa House and Iowa Senate; both chambers of the statehouse and the governor’s office are currently controlled by Republicans.

The change in access comes as government accountability and media watchdogs raise the alarm about the effects of dwindling statehouse coverage across the United States as larger swaths of the country become local news deserts.

 

Understand that authoritarians only want you to know about laws after they are passed, and that Republican state legislatures are hurtling towards regime status at these statehouse levels. 

 

When I say "please, please get involved in local politics like county commissions, city councils and school boards where you live" I mean it, because literal white supremacist domestic terrorists are more than happy to do so.

On the morning she met her opponent for coffee, Sarah Cole walked in with a front-runner’s confidence.

To Cole, the school board seat in this rural red district about an hour outside Seattle was all but hers. Educators and community leaders had endorsed her. She had name recognition from years in the Parent Teacher Association. And, besides, she was running against Ashley Sova, a home-schooling, anti-masking member of the far-right Three Percent movement.

“I kind of thought I had it in the bag,” Cole recalled.

Their coffee date that October day, as recounted by both women, was an exercise in gritted-teeth civility. Cole asked about the Three Percent logo tattooed on Sova’s neck in red, white and blue bullets. Sova tried to corner Cole on critical race theory. At the end, they took a photo and promised to work together no matter who was elected, each privately expecting Cole to win.

In December, however, it was Sova who was sworn in, the second Three Percenter on the five-person Eatonville School Board. Three Percenter ideology, part of the self-styled militia movement, promotes conspiratorial views about government overreach and imagines “patriotic” Americans revolting against perceived violations of the Constitution.

Presented as “defending liberty,” extremism analysts say, those far-right views are spreading in conservative places like Eatonville, where the school board race spiraled into a fight over mask mandates and how race is taught in school. Cole lost by more than 200 votes.

“The race was basically sabotaged by the national narrative,” Cole said. She sounded incredulous that parents felt best represented by a Three Percenter whose kids aren’t even in public school: “I don’t even know how to explain it except to say, in the face of the facts, they still chose to run with fears.”

What happened in Eatonville, according to extremism trackers, is bigger than a small-town upset. In recent years, far-right groups have been moving away from national organizing to focus on building grass-roots support, harnessing conservative outrage to influence school boards and other local offices. That effort was stepped up after the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol left much of the militant right under federal scrutiny and in operational disarray.

Eatonville is among several rural, conservative parts of the West where members of self-styled militias are making inroads through what researchers call a mix of opportunism and intimidation. Once-fringe views about government “tyranny” now match the mainstream conservative discourse on vaccine and mask mandates, softening the public image of movements linked to political violence.

“If you’re going to make a change, you don’t do it by storming the Capitol. You make change by using the process that you’ve been given and starting at the bottom,” said Matt Marshall, founder of the Washington Three Percent and a member of the Eatonville School Board.

Two years ago, watchdog groups warned that Marshall’s election represented the dangerous creep of anti-government extremism. Today, the Washington Three Percent claims members in dozens of official posts throughout the state, including a mayor, a county commissioner and at least five school board seats. Sova, an officer with the group, was among four female members who ran in local races this cycle. Three won.

 

The fascists like Steve Bannon are organizing and are winning at the local level as Ezra Klein points out.

The difference between those organizing at the local level to shape democracy and those raging ineffectually about democratic backsliding — myself included — remind me of the old line about war: Amateurs talk strategy; professionals talk logistics. Right now, Trumpists are talking logistics.

“We do not have one federal election,” said Amanda Litman, a co-founder of Run for Something, which helps first-time candidates learn about the offices they can contest and helps them mount their campaigns. “We have 50 state elections and then thousands of county elections. And each of those ladder up to give us results. While Congress can write, in some ways, rules or boundaries for how elections are administered, state legislatures are making decisions about who can and can’t vote. Counties and towns are making decisions about how much money they’re spending, what technology they’re using, the rules around which candidates can participate.”

An NPR analysis found 15 Republicans running for secretary of state in 2022 who doubt the legitimacy of Biden’s win. In Georgia, Brad Raffensperger, the incumbent Republican secretary of state who stood fast against Trump’s pressure, faces two primary challengers who hold that Trump was 2020’s rightful winner. Trump has endorsed one of them, Representative Jody Hice. He’s also endorsed candidates for secretary of state in Arizona and Michigan who backed him in 2020 and stand ready to do so in 2024. As NPR dryly noted, “The duties of a state secretary of state vary, but in most cases, they are the state’s top voting official and have a role in carrying out election laws.”

Nor is it just secretaries of state. “Voter suppression is happening at every level of government here in Georgia,” Representative Nikema Williams, who chairs the Georgia Democratic Party, told me. “We have 159 counties, and so 159 different ways boards of elections are elected and elections are carried out. So we have 159 different leaders who control election administration in the state. We’ve seen those boards restrict access by changing the number of ballot boxes. Often, our Black members on these boards are being pushed out.”

America’s confounding political structure creates two mismatches that bedevil democracy’ would-be defenders. The first mismatch is geographic. Your country turns on elections held in Georgia and Wisconsin, and if you live in California or New York, you’re left feeling powerless.

But that’s somewhere between an illusion and a cop-out. A constant complaint among those working to win these offices is that progressives donate hundreds of millions to presidential campaigns and long-shot bids against top Republicans, even as local candidates across the country are starved for funds.

“Democratic major donors like to fund the flashy things,” Litman told me. “Presidential races, Senate races, super PACs, TV ads. Amy McGrath can raise $90 million to run against Mitch McConnell in a doomed race, but the number of City Council and school board candidates in Kentucky who can raise what they need is …” She trailed off in frustration.

 

If we give up these local offices to the terrorists and anti-democracy authoritarians, they will be taken and used against everyone who isn't them.

 

And this is why GOP authoritarians don't want local and state legislation covered until it's far too late.

Sunday Long Read: Post-Trump Stress Disorder

"Hillbilly Elegy" author J.D. Vance is running for Rob Portman's US Senate seat in Ohio against perennial GOP loser Josh Mandel, and while Mandel is leading the primary race, Vance is the threat in the long term because of his Trumpian radicalization, as our Sunday Long Read from WaPo's magazine's Simon van Zuylen-Wood documents.

Let’s start with the beard. J.D. Vance didn’t used to have one. The Vance who in 2016 achieved incandescent literary fame with his memoir “Hillbilly Elegy” was all baby fat and rounded edges. The Vance I’m watching now, from the back of a coffee shop in the depressed steel town of Steubenville, Ohio, has covered up his softer side. In small-format events like this one, addressing a couple dozen primary voters, he spends about 15 minutes attacking corporate and governmental elites for failing the country, then answers questions and mingles for maybe another 45 minutes. Vance, 37, is comfortable in the folksy idiom of GOP campaigning (e.g., “she loved the Lord, she loved the f-word — that’s what Mamaw was”) but he tends to gloss over his famously traumatic childhood, immortalized on screen in Ron Howard’s 2020 film adaptation of his book. In Steubenville, he paces the room with a Big Gulp-sized foam cup in his hand, an Everyman touch that accentuates his new aesthetic.

I’m not the only one thinking about J.D. Vance’s beard. Recently, I asked one of his law school friends to tell me about his personality. “He’s lovely,” the friend said, describing Vance’s smile and laugh. Then he paused. He wanted to talk about Vance’s facial hair. Even as a slightly older law student — Vance had served four years in the Marines before enrolling at Ohio State as an undergraduate — he came across as guileless, boyish. No longer. “He looks different,” the friend said. “He’s going for a kind of severe masculinism thing. He looks like Donald Trump Jr.” Toward the end of our conversation, which was mostly about the way the culture shock of Yale Law School informed Vance’s politics, I asked the friend if he wanted to discuss anything else. He returned to the beard. “That’s honestly occupied an outsized amount of my attention,” he said.

The beard isn’t a bad symbol for Vance’s U.S. Senate campaign — or at least for how that campaign is being received. Discourse around the race centers mostly on the idea that Vance is a changed or fraudulent person. Five years ago, Vance was eloquently decoding Donald Trump supporters for liberal elites, while lamenting the rise of Trump himself. Vance, whose mother is a recovering heroin user, compared Trump to an opioid, calling him an “easy escape from the pain.” Now, since announcing his run, he’s reversed himself on Trump and adopted a bellicose persona at odds with the sensitive, bookish J.D. of his memoir. On Veterans Day, 48 hours after the Steubenville event, Vance tweeted that LeBron James — of Akron, Ohio — is “one of the most vile public figures in our country.” (James had joked that Kenosha, Wis., shooter Kyle Rittenhouse “ate some lemon heads” before crying on the stand during his trial.) Watching Vance campaign, I felt him straining to deliver his talking points in an angry register. It wasn’t just that steel jobs had been offshored; they were outsourced by “idiots” in Washington, to countries that “hate us.”

Commentary about Vance from Never-Trumpers and liberals tends to strike a note of personal chagrin about his evolving image. Pundit Mona Charen, writing about Vance as if he had died, called him an “extremely bright and insightful man who could have been a fresh voice for a fundamentally conservative view of the world.” Frank Bruni of the New York Times predicted that a Vance tweet about Alec Baldwin’s recent accidental shooting incident would “endure as one of the boldest markers of his descent.” In Ohio, meanwhile, the pressure on Vance runs entirely in the opposite direction. Every campaign stop he makes, he patiently tries to explain away his past Never-Trumpism, which has been exhumed in the form of deleted tweets and “Charlie Rose” clips. An attack ad playing his anti-Trump sound bites ends with a woman saying, “That’s the real J.D. Vance.”

Vance’s friends split the difference: They say he’s the same guy but he’s been radicalized. “I think he’s gotten a lot more bitter and cynical — appropriately,” conservative blogger Rod Dreher told me. To Dreher, the change in tone is justified by the course of American politics over the past five years. “Trump remained Trump — but the Left went berserk,” he wrote in a post defending Vance. Still, Dreher — who attended Vance’s 2019 baptism into the Catholic Church — worries about the toll campaigning is taking on his friend. “S--t-posting has become the signature style of young radicals on the right, and this is particularly a hazard I think for Christians,” he told me.

The surface-level changes are indeed striking. Yet the more I watched him, the more it seemed to me that the emerging canon of “what happened to J.D. Vance” commentary was missing the point. Vance’s new political identity isn’t so much a façade or a reversal as an expression of an alienated worldview that is, in fact, consistent with his life story. And now there’s an ideological home for that worldview: Vance has become one of the leading political avatars of an emergent populist-intellectual persuasion that tacks right on culture and left on economics. Known as national conservatism or sometimes “post-liberalism,” it is — in broad strokes — heavily Catholic, definitely anti-woke, skeptical of big business, nationalist about trade and borders, and flirty with Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orban. In Congress, its presence is minuscule — represented chiefly by Sens. Josh Hawley and Marco Rubio — but on Fox News, it has a champion in Tucker Carlson, on whose show Vance is a regular guest. And while the movement’s philosopher-kings spend a lot of time litigating internal schisms online, the project is animated by a real-life political gambit: that as progressives weaken the Democratic Party with unpopular cultural attitudes, the right can swoop in and pick off multiracial working-class voters.

Vance’s Senate race is an almost perfect test of these ideas because the front-runner in the Republican primary, former state treasurer and tea party product Josh Mandel — who, according to recent polling, leads Vance by 6 points — is the candidate of traditional conservative tax-cutters. To those watching the Vance-Mandel slugfest from afar, it may just look like two candidates trying to out-flank each other on the right; but the fissures between them run deep. The Club for Growth, known for its free-market zealotry, is supporting Mandel and has spent roughly $1.5 million on anti-Vance attack ads. One TV spot highlights a tweet in which Vance says he “loved @MittRomney’s anti-Trump screed.” The narrator does not linger on the rest of the message, which reads: “too bad party will do everything except admit that supply-side tax cuts do nothing for its voters.” Before Vance deleted his old anti-Trump tweets, he tended to attack Trump for abandoning his stated commitment to economic populism. In a 2020 interview with anti-establishment pundits Krystal Ball and Saagar Enjeti, Vance contended that Trump’s great political failure wasn’t his handling of the pandemic, but his signature corporate tax cut and his attempts to undo Obamacare.

A couple of weeks after I saw him in Steubenville, Vance called me from the road, on his way to an event in Toledo. I asked about his sudden estrangement from polite society. “The price of being beloved by the establishment is you don’t say anything interesting,” he told me. “And if you don’t say anything interesting, you’re not going to be a useful part of solving any of the problems we have in this country.” What Vance is saying now may or may not prove appealing to voters, but it certainly meets the test of being interesting. “Dominant elite society is boring, it is completely unreflective, and it is increasingly wrong,” he told me. In other words: “I kind of had to make a choice.”

 

The term "radicalization" is true, but it also partially absolves Vance of his screaming, hateful racist rhetoric. As he says in the last paragraph above, he made a choice.

That choice was deciding, as so many white Americans have done over the years, that blaming, attacking and destroying the rights, lives, and humanity of those who are not white is the best way for a white Americans to stay in power at our direct expense.

 

There's a significant chance he ends up as Ohio's next senator, where he will seek to codify that racism into permanent law.

Vance isn't anything new, but something as old as America itself.

From Frankfort To Hickman

Kentucky Republicans are redistricting the state's six congressional districts this week as the 2022 General Assembly gets underway in Frankfort, and the first order of business is to make sure GOP Rep. Andy Barr never has a Democratic challenge again.

The Kentucky General Assembly approved new redistricting maps Saturday, mere days after its Republican leaders introduced their plans to redraw the boundaries for the state's legislative and congressional seats.

Redistricting happens every 10 years to reflect shifts in population, and this is the first time the GOP has fully controlled that process in Kentucky.

The Kentucky House of Representatives and Senate usually don't meet on weekends, but they did Saturday to pass this set of maps. Leading House Republicans unveiled their proposal just before the new year, while the Senate's GOP leadership waited to release their redistricting plans until the state's annual lawmaking session began this week.

The bills lawmakers approved Saturday and sent to Gov. Andy Beshear's desk included new maps for the state House and Senate as well as for the commonwealth's six congressional seats. The General Assembly also passed legislation that changes the Kentucky Supreme Court's districts for the first time in decades.

Leading Republican lawmakers have said they made sure these new maps meet all legal and constitutional requirements for redistricting.

It's possible, however, that someone could try to challenge the new redistricting plans in court.

The first redistricting plan that got final passage Saturday was the Senate GOP's redrawn map for Kentucky's congressional districts.

The House gave that proposal the last approval it needed in a 65-25 vote Saturday morning.

The new congressional map doesn't chop up Kentucky's 3rd Congressional District, represented by Democratic Rep. John Yarmuth, as some people feared it might. That district still will include most of Jefferson County, except for an eastern and southeastern swath that now will be represented by Rep. Brett Guthrie's 2nd Congressional District.

The particularly controversial part of the new map is Rep. James Comer's reshaped 1st Congressional District, which will stretch further northeast and take Franklin County — the home of the Democrat-friendly state capital of Frankfort — out of Rep. Andy Barr's 6th Congressional District. That's expected to make Barr's seat safer.

Rep. Derrick Graham, D-Frankfort, criticized that shift in Franklin County's representation to Comer's district, which is primarily based in Western Kentucky.

"What it does to Franklin County is wrong," Graham said Saturday. "Franklin County was and is and always will be a part of Central Kentucky, both geographically and in spirit. ... Franklin County shares a lot of bonds with Western Kentucky, but we should not share a congressman."

So yeah, expect 5-1 US House delegations in favor of the GOP here long into the future. 

 

At the state level, the KY GOP is making sure that it can keep their three-quarters super majority in both chambers in perpetuity, too. They only need 50% + 1 to override a Beshear veto, but...why not grab all the power you can? Worked for Ohio's GOP, after all.

 

The Senate signed off on the House's redistricting plan Saturday in a 23-10 vote, with a few Republicans joining the chamber's Democrats in opposition.

The House already had approved that bill earlier in the week on a mostly party-line vote, as Democrats repeated their objections that the maps were unfairly drawn to split urban areas and further help Republican candidates.

Democrats and the League of Women Voters of Kentucky have heavily criticized the House map. Common complaints have been that it unnecessarily splits some of Kentucky's biggest counties into different districts and targets women by pitting two sets of incumbent women against each other in Jefferson County.

Top Republicans have defended their plan, with House Speaker David Osborne recently saying he believes they achieved their goal of drawing "a thoughtful map that complied with every legal and constitutional requirement."

The House gave the Kentucky Senate's redrawn districts the final approval they needed in a 67-23 vote.

When the Senate passed the new map for its chamber earlier in the week, the Republican plan actually got the support of most Senate Democrats, none of whom will have to run against each other in the same district.

One criticism some people have raised is the way this map splits a few of the state's biggest counties into different districts.

Rep. Patti Minter, D-Bowling Green, said Saturday her home county of Warren had to be divvied up because it has gained so many residents in recent years, but she argued it should only have been cracked into two districts, not the three that make up its territory in this map.

 

Right now the KY GOP has 75 of 100 state House seats, and 30 or 38 Senate seats.  The news plan will probably make it closer to 80-20 in the House and 32-6 in the Senate, meaning that there's absolutely no chance Democrats will ever be in power again in my lifetime, and that the GOP can pass whatever laws they want and override any possible veto from any future Democratic governor easily, and never have to pay a political price for it.

One party rule for good here, folks. Not a fun place to be in the years ahead.

Last Call For Meanwhile In Kazakhstan, Con't

 Me, on Kazhakstan's unrest on Thursday:

 

We'll see where this lands, but behind all of this is a Russian president who wants a new Soviet Union. Don't be surprised if Moscow steps in to "bring order" back to the country as they did in Ukraine.  

 

And 48 hours later, I hate to once again be right about something.

Russia's President Vladimir Putin and his Kazakh counterpart Kassym-Jomart Tokayev on Saturday discussed restoring "order" in Kazakhstan following days of violence and unrest, as several high-profile officials were detained on suspicion of treason. 

Tokayev told Putin the situation in his country was "progressing on the way to stabilization" and expressed his "appreciation" for the deployment of a Russia-led military bloc to Kazakhstan to try and control violence on the streets, the Kremlin said in a statement on Saturday. 

Meanwhile, former head of Kazakhstan's National Security Committee Karim Massimov and some other unnamed officials have been detained on suspicion of treason, the country's National Security Committee announced, according to state media Khabar 24 on Saturday.

 

And just like that, President Tokayev is literally inviting Russian troops onto his soil to "restore order".

 

Thing is, these Russian troops aren't leaving for a long, long time. 

As for the "traitors" being rounded up, well it's not like Kazakhstan is going to need a national security  anything for much longer anyway, since that job will got to Moscow very soon.

Looks like Vlad is getting his old neighborhood watch together. Kyiv's sweating, that's for sure. If Putin wanted to make it clear what's in store for Ukraine in the days ahead, he just made a hell of a test case.

Insurrection Investigation, Con't

The Guardian's Hugo Lowell continues his reporting on the January 6th Committee with information that the investigation is now focusing on Donald Trump and his lackeys being part of a criminal conspiracy as well as obstruction of justice.

 

The House select committee investigating the Capitol attack is examining whether Donald Trump oversaw a criminal conspiracy on 6 January that connected the White House’s scheme to stop Joe Biden’s certification with the insurrection, say two senior sources familiar with the matter.

The committee’s new focus on the potential for a conspiracy marks an aggressive escalation in its inquiry as it confronts evidence that suggests the former president potentially engaged in criminal conduct egregious enough to warrant a referral to the justice department.

House investigators are interested in whether Trump oversaw a criminal conspiracy after communications turned over by Trump’s former chief of staff Mark Meadows and others suggested the White House coordinated efforts to stop Biden’s certification, the sources said.

The select committee has several thousand messages, among which include some that suggest the Trump White House briefed a number of House Republicans on its plan for then-vice president Mike Pence to abuse his ceremonial role and not certify Biden’s win, the sources said.

The fact that the select committee has messages suggesting the Trump White House directed Republican members of Congress to execute a scheme to stop Biden’s certification is significant as it could give rise to the panel considering referrals for potential crimes, the sources said.

Members and counsel on the select committee are examining in the first instance whether in seeking to stop the certification, Trump and his aides violated the federal law that prohibits obstruction of a congressional proceeding – the joint session on 6 January – the sources said.

The select committee believes, the sources said, that Trump may be culpable for an obstruction charge given he failed for hours to intervene to stop the violence at the Capitol perpetrated by his supporters in his name.

But the select committee is also looking at whether Trump oversaw an unlawful conspiracy that involved coordination between the “political elements” of the White House plan communicated to Republican lawmakers and extremist groups that stormed the Capitol, the sources said. 

 

We also learned this week that the Committee wants to talk to two people specifically as part of that raft of messages pointing to a criminal conspiracy: FOX News host Sean Hannity, whose cooperation is being requested after messages between him and Mark Meadows advising Trump how to act on January 6th were made public, and former VP Mike Pence himself, who is at the center of the conspiracy to try to steal Biden's win through decertification of electors and throwing it to the House delegations to decide in Trump favor.

As far as Hannity goes, the fact that he hasn't immediately been fired or even suspended, or that he hasn't announced a "previously planned vacation"is proof enough that FOX News is the propaganda arm of the Trumpists (if not the Trumpists being the long-term political arm of the far right media monsters.)  Hannity is even more awful than Tucker Carlson is, while Carlson is still an unrepentant racist authoritarian who cozies up to dictators like Putin and Viktor Orban in Hungary, Hannity is the thin patina of respectability in the FOX stable of hosts, and with the direct ear of basically all the major Trump players, including Trump himself.

As for Mike Pence? I honestly think he's running scenarios through his head where he emerges as the "reformed" face of Trumpism and is a "hero" respected by voters of all camps and creeds who will consider his "service" to the country by refusing Trump's orders to make him history's good guy, the way Gerald Ford was portrayed. And remember, for all Ford's "heroism" and pardoning of Nixon, his reward was a loss to Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan.

We do seem to be getting closer to the point where Donald Trump is going to be referred for criminal prosecution, and then it's all Merrick Garland from there.

The Vax Of Life, Con't

Again, predicting the Supreme Court is a mug's game, but if the questions are any indication from Friday, well, as Vox's Ian Millihiser points out, the Biden administration vaccine mandate is pretty much toast.

Benjamin Flowers is Ohio’s solicitor general, and he was supposed to be at the Supreme Court on Friday to ask the justices to nullify a Biden administration rule requiring most workers to either be vaccinated against Covid-19 or to be regularly tested for the disease.

But Flowers had to argue his case over the phone. The reason why? He himself has Covid, and therefore could not enter the justices’ workplace and risk endangering them and their staff.

It’s an elegant metaphor for the kind of see-no-evil approach to Covid-19 that Flowers, and several other lawyers arguing against policies from President Joe Biden’s administration, would impose on the nation. Flowers would have the justices block one of Biden’s most significant efforts to halt a potentially deadly disease that, as Justice Stephen Breyer noted multiple times during Friday’s arguments, is infecting about three-quarters of a million Americans every day this week.

And yet, if Friday’s argument in National Federation of Independent Business v. Department of Labor is any sign, there will almost certainly be at least five votes on the Supreme Court to block the workplace Covid rule, which applies to employers with 100 or more employees.

Meanwhile, in separate case Biden v. Missouri, the Court considered a rule requiring health providers that accept Medicare and Medicaid funds to be vaccinated. This oral argument was less of a bloodbath for the government, and it seems possible that this more limited rule for health providers will be upheld.

But the oral argument in the first case, NFIB, suggests that the Court’s 6-3 conservative majority is inclined to hand down a very broad decision — one that won’t simply hobble many of the Biden administration’s efforts to quell a pandemic that has killed nearly 830,000 Americans, but that could also fundamentally rework the balance of power between elected federal officials and an unelected judiciary.

Both the NFIB case and the Missouri case involve very broadly worded laws, enacted by Congress, which give federal agencies sweeping authority to protect the health and safety of workers or Medicare patients. But all six of the Court’s Republican appointees appeared uncomfortable with letting these agencies — and especially the federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) — fully exercise the power Congress has given them.

Multiple justices appeared eager to impose new restrictions on Congress’s ability to delegate authority to federal agencies. Indeed, the Court could easily give itself a sweeping new power to veto agency regulations that a majority of the justices disapprove of.

A majority of the Court, in other words, appeared much more bothered by the implications of letting the Biden administration fight the pandemic than they are bothered by the many deaths caused by the pandemic itself.

If the Court does wind up drastically shrinking the federal government’s authority, that won’t exactly be a surprise. The Court’s been signaling that it is eager to transfer power from federal agencies to the judiciary since shortly after then-President Donald Trump replaced the relatively moderate Justice Anthony Kennedy with hardline conservative Justice Brett Kavanaugh.

But, while the Court has foreshadowed the most likely result in the NFIB case for quite a while, that does not mean that a decision striking down OSHA’s vaccinate-or-test rule would be any less profound. NFIB is likely to be a turning point in the right-wing Roberts Court’s relationship with the elected branches — and it could permanently disable the federal government’s ability to address crises like the Covid-19 pandemic in the future.

 

Again, I've been warning about this for a while now. What the Roberts Court appears ready to do is to absolutely hamstring federal agencies and give nearly all of the regulatory and rule-making power to Congress, where Senate Republicans can simply block regulations from ever being made, and the rest can be delegated to the states.

Outside of State, Justice, and the Pentagon, the rest of the Executive branch is about to get torn to shreds, with entire agencies possibly rendered powerless. Mostly though, it's about making sure government can't work for the American people, and that the GOP's long-term authoritarianism is codified.

But Zandar, you say, if the GOP wants an authoritarian government, why cripple the executive? The answer, as I said, is the Senate. Democrats aren't going to get rid of the filibuster, and the Senate will always have at least 41 Republicans in any possible future scenario. A broad ruling that destroys regulatory authority in the executive means that the Senate can block any attempts to legislate that regulatory power, too.

As I've been saying, by July 4th, it's going to be painfully clear how bad things are going to be in the years ahead.