Election Insurrection, Con't

The evidence revealed by the January 6th Committee hearings, continuing today, has now coincided with the Justice Department issuing multiple subpoenas in multiple states for election officials involved in Trump's fraudulent elector slate scam.

 

Federal agents investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol on Wednesday dropped subpoenas on people in multiple locations, widening the probe of how political activists supporting President Donald Trump tried to use invalid electors to thwart Joe Biden’s 2020 electoral victory.

Agents conducted court-authorized law enforcement activity Wednesday morning at different locations, FBI officials confirmed to The Washington Post. One was the home of Brad Carver, a Georgia lawyer who allegedly signed a document claiming to be a Trump elector. The other was the Virginia home of Thomas Lane, who worked on the Trump campaign’s efforts in Arizona and New Mexico. The FBI officials did not identify the people associated with those addresses, but public records list each of the locations as the home addresses of the men.

Among those who received a subpoena Wednesday was David Shafer, the chairman of the Georgia Republican Party, who served as a Trump elector in that state, people familiar with the investigation said. Shafer’s lawyer declined to comment.

Separately, at least some of the would-be Trump electors in Michigan received subpoenas, according to a person who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss an ongoing investigation. But it was not immediately clear whether that activity was related to a federal probe or a state-level criminal inquiry.

The precise nature of the information being sought by the Justice Department at the homes of Carver and Lane was not immediately clear.

Officials have previously said that the Justice Department and the FBI were examining the issue of false electors, whom Trump and others hoped might be approved by state legislators in a last-ditch bid to keep Trump in the White House. Until now, however, those investigative efforts seemed to primarily involve talking to people in Republican circles who knew of the scheme and objected; the subpoenas issued Wednesday suggest the Justice Department is now moving to question at least some of those who allegedly agreed to pursue the effort.

FBI agents delivered a subpoena to Lane on Wednesday morning at his home in Virginia, according to the person who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss an ongoing investigation. After leaving the Trump campaign, Lane has worked for the Republican National Committee’s election efforts in Virginia, this person said.

A video posted online in 2020 appears to show Lane handing out paperwork for electors at the Arizona Republican Party’s Dec. 14 alternate elector signing ceremony in Phoenix.

Phone messages left for Lane were not immediately returned. Carver, the Georgia lawyer, also did not immediately respond to messages seeking comment. Public records list an address for Lane in south Arlington, and an FBI spokeswoman confirmed agents conducted “court-authorized law enforcement activity” at that address on Wednesday morning.

The new investigative moves by the Justice Department come amid a series of high-profile congressional hearings examining not just the riot at the Capitol, but also Trump’s efforts to undo Biden’s electoral victory through fake electors, lobbying the Justice Department and false claims of massive voter fraud.

 

Repeat after me: Conspiracy to defraud the United States of America.

 

Merrick Garland and the DoJ are moving deliberately now towards prosecution and have been for months. We've known about the fake elector scam for 18 months almost. The only question is if they will go all the way up the ladder and charge Trump. The DoJ has been on this investigation since January of this year.

 

Granted, that's the biggest decision of them all, but I guarantee you federal charges are coming for a hell of a lot of Trump's inner circle on this.

 

 

Last Call For Gillium Gets Gotten

As if somehow things couldn't possibly get worse for the semi-torpid corpse of the Florida Democratic Party, the last guy they tried to run against Ron DeSantis is now facing 21 counts of federal fraud charges.

Andrew Gillum, the once-rising Florida Democratic star who narrowly lost the 2018 governor’s race to Ron DeSantis, was hit with a 21-count federal indictment Wednesday for wire fraud, related conspiracy charges and making false statements.

Gillum, the former Tallahassee mayor, was charged along with his mentor, Sharon Lettman-Hicks, for fraudulently fundraising from "various entities" between 2016 to 2019, according to a Department of Justice press release. The Justice Department said the two allegedly diverted some of the money to a company controlled by Lettman-Hicks, who fraudulently disguised the funds as payroll payments to Gillum.

In a written statement, Gillum and his lawyers proclaimed his innocence. Lettman-Hicks — a candidate for a state House seat — has not returned texts or calls from NBC News requesting comment.

“I have spent the last 20 years of my life in public service and continue to fight for the people,” Gillum said. “Every campaign I’ve run has been done with integrity. Make no mistake that this case is not legal, it is political. Throughout my career I have always stood up for the people of Florida and have spoken truth to power. There’s been a target on my back ever since I was the mayor of Tallahassee. They found nothing then, and I have full confidence that my legal team will prove my innocence now.”

Marc Elias, a leading Democratic lawyer, and top criminal defense attorney David Oscar Markus also issued a joint statement said they’ll fight to clear his name.

“The government got it wrong today. The evidence in this case is clear and will show that Mr. Gillum is innocent of all charges. We look forward to putting this case to rest and giving Andrew and his family peace of mind once and for all,” the lawyers said.

The indictment marks a new low for Gillum, a married father of three who withdrew from public life as a political leader and a paid CNN commentator after a March 2020 sex scandal involving a suspected male overdose victim in a South Beach hotel.

At the time, Gillum said he was abusing alcohol as he coped with his loss to DeSantis, but campaign finance records and a leaked criminal subpoena in 2019 showed that Gillum also faced the pressure of an FBI investigation.

 

Now that investigation has resulted in a boatload of indictments, which if Gillum was governor, would be grounds for impeachment, removal, and, well, someone like DeSantis being elected governor, so. 

Yaaaaaay Florida Dems.

 

We Don't Need No Education, Con't

The Roberts Court issued a ruling on funding religious schools with taxpayer dollars that could most generaously be described as creating a path for forcing states and the federal government to fully fund private relgious schools with taxpayer money, and more accurately as Slate's Mark Joseph Stern writes, a path to ending public education in America period. 

The Supreme Court’s conservative supermajority effectively declared on Tuesday that the separation of church and state—a principle enshrined in the Constitution—is, itself, unconstitutional. Its 6–3 decision in Carson v. Makin requires Maine to give public money to private religious schools, steamrolling decades of precedent in a race to compel state funding of religion. Carson is radical enough on its own, but the implications of the ruling are even more frightening: As Justice Stephen Breyer noted in dissent, it has the potential to dismantle secular public education in the United States.

Carson challenges Maine’s effort to provide quality civic education to every child in the state. The government created a tuition assistance program to help families who live in remote, sparsely populated regions without any public schools. Under the program, parents can send their kids to certain private schools, and the state covers the cost of tuition. To qualify, these schools must give students a secular education. They may be affiliated with, or even run by, a religious organization. But their actual curricula must align with secular state standards.

Two families challenged this limitation, arguing that it violated the First Amendment’s free exercise clause. Just two decades ago, this claim would’ve been laughed out of court: SCOTUS only permitted states to subsidize religious schools in 2002; at the time, it would’ve been absurd to say that states have a constitutional obligation to subsidize them. Beginning in 2017, the court began to assert that states may not exclude religious schools from public benefits that are available to their secular counterparts. And in 2020, the conservative justices forced states to subsidize religious schools once they began subsidizing secular private education.

Tuesday’s decision in Carson takes this radical theory to a new extreme, ordering Maine to extend public education funds to religious indoctrination.

The upshot of Chief Justice John Roberts’ opinion for the court is that states have no compelling interest in providing public, secular education to children. Indeed, Roberts suggests that the very concept of secular schooling is a smokescreen for “discrimination against religion”—a pretext for unconstitutional animus toward pious Americans. His opinion reaches far beyond Maine. About 37 states have amendments to their constitutions that bar government funding of religious institutions, including schools. Carson essentially invalidates those laws while undermining the broader constitutional basis for the nation’s public school system.

Roberts reached this astonishing result by overruling broad swaths of precedent respecting states’ authority to separate church and state more strictly than the U.S. Constitution requires. The court previously upheld states’ interest in avoiding the “establishment” of religion by refusing to underwrite the indoctrination of students into a particular faith. No longer. Roberts condemned Maine’s efforts to guard against religious establishment as nothing more than “discrimination against religion”—an effort to “exclude some members of the community” from public benefits “because of their religious exercise.” He also overruled a line of cases that let the government withhold funding on the basis of religious use (like indoctrination) but not religious status (like affiliation with a church). That distinction, he wrote, “lacks a meaningful application not only in theory, but in practice as well,” tossing it in the precedential dumpster.

The chief justice maintained that Carson’s rule only kicks in once a state starts sending taxpayer dollars to private schools through vouchers, tax credits, or scholarships. So, in theory, a state can send all its money to public schools and avoid constitutional concerns. Even if that’s true, the consequences are sweeping: Most states offer at least one of these programs, so Carson gives millions of families an opportunity to bail out of the public school system and demand public money for parochial education.

But can this distinction hold? Roberts’ bright line dims under scrutiny: Maine, after all, wanted private schools to replace public education for some students, not supplement it. And yet the court found no good reason for the state to insist that these substitute schools adhere to secular standards. Indeed, the chief justice’s rhetoric depicts education not as a state-sponsored benefit for all, but rather as a personal matter best left up to parents. There is, he claimed, no “historic and substantial state interest” in preserving secular education. If that’s true, how can any state refuse to fund religious schooling?

Breyer raised these questions in dissent. Does Carson, he asked, “mean that a school district that pays for public schools must pay equivalent funds to parents who wish to send their children to religious schools?” In other words, must every state begin cutting checks to parents who want to give their kids a Christian education? Does Carson mean “school districts that give vouchers for use at charter schools must pay equivalent funds to parents who wish to give their children a religious education?” Can states even mandate secular curricula at charter schools any more? Who knows? In the end, the only limit on Carson is whatever five justices want it to be.

 

The issues Justice Breyer raises are the ones that will be determined in future cases, because I guarantee you those lawsuits are being readied in light of Chief Justice Roberts's bonkers interpretation of Carson. The next step is almost certainly demanding that anything less than equal funding for religious schools as public secular ones is religious discrimination, and that the standards that secular schools are held to when getting that state and federal money will be changed to meet religious school dogma.

In other words, the end of secular schooling, period.

This is as dangerous a ruling as it gets to the future of America.

Another Day In Gunmerica, Con't

The Senate "Bipartisan Deal" on gun safety in the wake of lethal mass shootings in Buffalo NY and Uvalde, Texas has resulted in a toothless federal bill that shifts the burdens of adopting red flag and background check laws to states, and rewards state that refuse to implement either with more federal money for "crisis prevention". 

 

A bipartisan group of senators overcame some last-minute hurdles and released legislative text Tuesday on a narrow set of provisions to combat gun violence, including state funding to implement “red flag” laws and enhanced background checks.

“Today, we finalized bipartisan, commonsense legislation to protect America’s children, keep our schools safe, and reduce the threat of violence across our country," Sens. Chris Murphy, D-Conn., and John Cornyn, R-Texas, said in a joint statement along with Sens. Kyrsten Sinema, D-Ariz., and Thom Tillis, R-N.C.

"Our legislation will save lives and will not infringe on any law-abiding American’s Second Amendment rights. We look forward to earning broad, bipartisan support and passing our commonsense legislation into law,” they added.

Cornyn said earlier Tuesday that the senators agreed to address the so-called boyfriend loophole by limiting gun rights for non-spouse dating partners who are convicted of domestic abuse.

“Unless someone is convicted of domestic abuse under their state laws, their gun rights will not be impacted," he said on the Senate floor. "Those who are convicted of non-spousal misdemeanor domestic abuse—not felony, but misdemeanor domestic violence—will have an opportunity after five years to have their Second Amendment rights restored. But they have to have a clean record."

The legislation will offer red flag grants to every state, including those that do not adopt red flag laws, which can be used on other crisis prevention programs designed to prevent individuals in crisis from resorting to violence, said Cornyn, the chief GOP negotiator.

The boyfriend loophole and red flag provisions were the last two major sticking points between the core senators: Murphy, Cornyn, Sinema and Tillis.

"We are closing the boyfriend loophole," Murphy said. "This provision alone is going to save the lives of so many women who unfortunately die at the hands of a boyfriend or an ex-boyfriend who hunts them down with a firearm."

Murphy said the bill enhances background checks for people between the ages of 18 and 21, allowing up to three days to conduct checks, and an extra 10 days if there are signs of concern. He said it will contain tougher penalties for gun trafficking and "clarify" which sellers must register as a federal firearm licensee, which would force them to conduct background checks. And he said the bill expands money for mental health and school-based health.

The National Rifle Association quickly announced its opposition to the bill, arguing in a statement that the legislation “does little to truly address violent crime while opening the door to unnecessary burdens on the exercise of Second Amendment freedom by law-abiding gun owners.”

The evenly split Senate is expected to hold a procedural vote on the legislation as early as Tuesday night, with Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., saying he hopes to pass the bill this week. The initial vote would only require a simple majority to begin processing the legislation.

It remains to be seen whether there will be 60 votes to ultimately break a filibuster and end debate on the bill later in the voting process.

 

We'll see if the bill survives or not, but even if it does, in the era of the Roberts Court, states have to opt in individually and still get the money if they don't. 

Quite literally this is the best we're going to get on federal firearms legislation, and even then, it's an entirely optional law.

If it even becomes law, which is still very much in doubt.

 

Last Call For The Ravnsborg And The Tower

After his impeachment in April by South Dakota's state House, SD Attorney General Jason Ravnsborg faced a state Senate trial and possible removal from office on Tuesday over his conduct in a fatal hit and run crash that left a man dead in 2020, and when Ravnsborg faced the music he had no chair to sit in when it stopped playing.

South Dakota Attorney General Jason Ravnsborg was removed from office on Tuesday after an historic impeachment trial in the state Senate, nearly two years after he fatally struck a man with his vehicle.

Ravnsborg was facing two articles of impeachment stemming from his role in the 2020 car crash: one for crimes that resulted in death, and the other for malfeasance related to his conduct after the collision.

The senators voted 24-9 in favor of the first article — the exact number of votes to meet the two-thirds threshold necessary for conviction and removal — and 31-3 for the second. Those outcomes triggered a third vote on whether Ravnsborg should be barred from holding future office, with all 33 senators present voting in favor of that.

Ravnsborg, a Republican who was elected state attorney general in 2018, now becomes the first South Dakota official to be removed from office –– more than two months after he became the first to ever be impeached following a vote in the state House of Representatives.

For almost two years, the ordeal surrounding Ravnsborg has gripped South Dakota locals and brought national attention to the sparsely populated state.

It also became a dominant focus for the state’s governor, Kristi Noem, who repeatedly called on Ravnsborg to resign. After Ravnsborg pleaded no contest to a pair of misdemeanors over the crash, Noem immediately called on the legislature to move forward with impeachment.

Following the vote in the state Senate on Tuesday, Noem celebrated the outcome.

“After nearly 2 years the dark cloud over the Attorney General’s office has been lifted,” the governor said on Twitter. “It is now time to move on and begin to restore confidence in the office.”

Ravnsborg was driving back to the capital city of Pierre on September 12, 2020 when he veered off the road and struck a man named Joseph Boever. The subsequent chain of events is what elevated the crash to a scandal. Ravnsborg claims he did not realize he hit a man that night, and after calling 911, the responding county sheriff loaned the attorney general his personal vehicle to complete his trip back to the capital city of Pierre that night.

When he drove back to return the sheriff’s vehicle the following morning, Ravnsborg and his chief of staff stopped by the scene and found Boever’s lifeless body. Ravnsborg claims that was the first moment he knew he had hit a man.

There has been pervasive skepticism surrounding that account, which was a central topic at Tuesday’s trial.

“He absolutely saw the man,” said Alexis Tracy, one of two attorneys leading the prosecution.

Tracy said Ravnsborg had “countless” opportunities “to do the right thing.”

In his closing arguments, Mark Vargo, the other prosecutor, probed some of Ravnsborg’s comments made to investigators, at one point playing a clip of the attorney general clumsily saying he never saw the man.

“You’ve heard better lies from five-year-olds,” Vargo said.

 

Ravnsborg really believed he would never be removed in this way and that he would simply be able to run in November for a second term. That will not happen now. Justice was not served here, but accountability was to be had for once in the GOP.

It's the exception that proves the rule of a party of corruption.

The Road To Gilead, Con't

Democratic party strategists are gearing up for the death of Roe v Wade in the next week or two, in an attempt to massively rally voters to show up at the polls once abortion becomes de facto illegal in half the US.

In every poll running in every targeted House district around the country, House Democrats’ campaign arm is testing how voters feel about the Supreme Court likely overturning Roe v. Wade.

The group’s strategists have drafted fundraising emails that will blast out to millions of supporters in the hours after the decision comes out. They’ve cut video clips of what GOP candidates say about abortion. They’re developing analytics models to find and target voters who back abortion rights.

The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee’s preparations, previewed by a committee official, are a window into the Democratic Party’s broader efforts to capitalize — in the middle of a brutal-looking midterm election climate — on the Supreme Court’s likely reversal of Roe v. Wade, which would change a half-century of precedent and let states decide the legality of abortion.

Support for Roe is at an all-time high with voters, and the Democrats’ strategy is aimed at firing up a flagging Democratic base, while also trying to compete for some of the college-educated, female, suburban swing voters who backed them during the Trump era. The question, though, is how to make abortion a top issue for voters in November while facing a range of challenges, especially gas prices averaging $5 a gallon and inflation ticking up.

“We’re not going to be able to keep it in the national news, but we’re going to put a lot of money on paid advertising — on TV, on digital ads, on mail, on radio — and in key places across the country, and that’s how this issue will matter,” said Stephanie Schriock, former president of EMILY’s List, a Democratic pro-abortion-rights group. “And in some states, it will be in the news every day, because state legislatures are going to push this issue further and further to the right with outright bans.”

The DCCC is one of many entities on the left meticulously planning how to jump on the post-Roe moment, starting in the minutes after it happens.

The Democratic National Committee put together briefings and message trainings with state parties, surrogates and campaign staff on Roe, while the Democratic Governors’ Association will be launching the “Protect Reproductive Rights Fund,” which will direct cash and volunteers through the fund to states where abortion is poised to be banned altogether.

The DGA — charged with electing Democratic governors, who will be on the front lines on this issue — is already drafting language for fundraising emails, social media posts and texts and direct mail to voters.

American Bridge, a Democratic super PAC, had its full roster of paid influencers pivot all their conversations to Roe after POLITICO published a draft majority opinion overturning the precedent in May. And in the Senate, Democrats are drilling into candidates’ statements on abortion, particularly those who support banning it even in cases of rape and incest, a stance that former President Donald Trump hasn’t gone so far as to agree to.

As for spending, EMILY’s List, Planned Parenthood and NARAL, a trio of abortion rights groups, announced $150 million in spending on the 2022 midterms.

“We will be using every tool in the toolbox to tell this story,” said Heather Williams, executive director at the Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee. “We know that Roe is not the only issue [in the midterms], but Roe is a motivator … and we definitely see that voters who may be only presidential-year voters — that Roe falling certainly gives them additional motivation and urgency.”

Democrats’ efforts come as support for abortion rights hits an all-time high. Gallup, which has tracked views on abortion for decades, found that voters self-identifying as “pro-choice” jumped to 55 percent in recent weeks. The Pew Research Center found that six in 10 Americans believe that abortion should be legal in all or most cases. After the draft opinion reversing Roe was published, the Kaiser Foundation found that two-thirds of Americans said they do not want the 1973 decision to be overturned.

But even though a majority of Americans don’t want Roe overturned, that doesn’t mean they will automatically vote along those lines in November.

“I don’t think it wins us the persuasion fight, given everything else the public is facing, from inflation to rising costs to supply chain problems,” said Josh Ulibarri, a Democratic pollster.

“The decision will help motivate our base,” Ulibarri continued. “I see no data, no focus group, no survey where Republicans win on the abortion fight. We win it handily. But is that more powerful than when a voter looks at their receipt when they check out at Target?”

 

The problem is the DCCC and the DGA are still clown shows. Current DCCC leader Rep. Sean Patrick Maloney might very well get redistricted out of the House altogether by Democrats in his own state of New York because he's such an asshole, and Gov. Roy Cooper in NC has his hands full with the NC GOP overriding nearly all of his vetoes, including anti- abortion laws.

The cold hard reality though is that the economy is the number one issue with voters. We'll see what voters think, but this was a battle we lost in 2016 and now millions of women will pay the price.

Orange Meltdown, Con't

Tang The Conqueror has apparently realized just how bad the January 6th hearings have been and will continue to be, so much so that Trump is going to play the Roger Stone game with former White House legal adviser John Eastman, offering Eastman up to the Committee (and AG Merrick Garland) in order to try to save his own ass.

With the Justice Department and Jan. 6 committee taking a close look at Donald Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election, he and his cronies could certainly use a fall guy, and it looks like they’ve found their patsy: right-wing lawyer John Eastman.

Eastman worked for Trump as the attorney devised legal strategies to overturn the election to keep the outgoing president in power. But, in recent weeks, Trump has confided to those close to him that he sees no reason to publicly defend Eastman, two people familiar with the matter tell Rolling Stone. The ex-president is also deeply annoyed with Eastman and all the negative “attention” and media coverage that the lawyer’s work has brought Trump and his inner sanctum, including during the ongoing Jan. 6 hearings on Capitol Hill.

Furthermore, to those who’ve spoken Trump about Eastman in recent months, the ex-president has repeated an excuse he often uses when backed into a corner, as investigators confront him with an associates’ misdeeds: He has privately insisted he “hardly” or “barely” knows Eastman, despite the fact that he counseled Trump on taking a string of extra-legal measures in a bid to stay in power and wrote the so-called “coup memo,” which laid out the facsimile of a legal argument for reversing Trump’s election defeat.

Behind closed doors, Trump will occasionally ask questions about Eastman’s fortunes, including bluntly inquiring: “Is [John] going to jail?” according to a source who has heard the former president say this. But publicly, Trump has stayed silent. Over the past several months, Trump has been strongly advised by lawyers and several associates not to openly discuss Eastman or his work — and to personally avoid the man altogether, according to three sources familiar with the matter. At this time, Trump, his legal advisers, and various political counselors would prefer to cut ties with Eastman and keep their distance, in a perhaps vain attempt to build a firewall between the lawyer who enthusiastically pitched strategies for delegitimizing the 2020 election outcome and the ex-president who repeatedly sought his help.

“It has been repeatedly communicated to the [former] president that he should not even bring up Johnny Eastman’s name because he is maybe the most radioactive person [involved in this] when it comes to…any so-called criminal exposure,” a source with direct knowledge of the matter says. “Johnny does not have many friends in [the upper crust of] Trumpworld left, and most people loyal to the [former] president are fine with him being left out on his own, to deal with whatever consequences he may or may not face.”

Indeed, the infamously garrulous Trump has publicly kept his mouth shut about Eastman, a lawyer whose work became integral to the scandalous efforts to nullify President Biden’s 2020 victory. (Trump even considered Eastman as counsel for his post-insurrection impeachment.)

Nowadays, in the top ranks of MAGAland, there’s a clear attitude towards Eastman (“Johnny,” as some Trump advisers derisively call him): He might be going down. So be it, as long as he doesn’t take anyone else down with him.

Eastman and a Trump spokesperson did not respond to requests for comment from Rolling Stone.

 

Now, the long game as with Stone, is that Trump expects to be back in power, and he'll pardon everyone involved on his Team Stupid Conpiracy checklist.

 

But anyone even slightly self-aware on this knows Eastman was a key player, and giving him up could have him turn on Trump to save himself.

 

The bigger issue is that Trump now knows he's in real trouble over this coup thing. The walls are getting a bit closer this week.

Last Call For Black Lives Still Matter, Con't

VP Kamala Harris visited the African American History Museum in Washington DC today, surprising a class of students as America observed our first federal holiday for Juneteenth.

Children and their families greeted Harris, the first Black woman to serve as the nation's second-highest executive, with cheers as she entered the room.

"Happy Juneteenth, young leaders," a smiling Harris told the children.

Juneteenth commemorates June 19, 1865, when enslaved African Americans in Galveston, Texas, were the last to learn President Abraham Lincoln had signed the Emancipation Proclamation two years earlier, freeing them from slavery. The date achieved federal holiday status last June, when President Joe Biden signed into law the Juneteenth National Independence Day Act.

"Today is a day to celebrate the principle of freedom," Harris told the children ages 4 to 10, "and think about it in terms of the context of history, knowing that Black people in America were not free for 400 years of slavery, but then at the end of slavery -- right? ... when the Emancipation Proclamation happened, that America had to really think about defining freedom ..."

"I would argue, it is our God-given right to have freedom," she added. "It is your birthright to have freedom, and then during slavery freedom was taken. And so we're not going to celebrate being given back what God gave us anyway" as the group voiced agreement, one person saying, "Amen."

She continued, "let this be a day that is a day to celebrate the principle of freedom, but to speak about it honestly and accurately, both in the context of history, and current application. That's what I'm thinking about today."

 

Republicans in several states of course have made laws where students and teachers actually did "speak about it honestly and accurately" about Juneteenth and its accompanying history "both in the context of history, and current application" the teacher would immediately be fired or worse.

 

It's no coincidence that she said this.

 

Black Lives Still Matter.

 

 

The French Disconnection, Con't

French President Emmanuel Macron's party will remain in power in the legislature after National Assembly elections on Sunday, but it will need a coalition government with second-place leftist coalition party NUPES to do so, and rival Marine Le Pen's authoritarian National Rally party had its best showing ever winning nearly 90 seats.

Voters in France’s legislative elections dealt President Emmanuel Macron a serious blow on Sunday as his centrist coalition lost its absolute majority in the lower house of Parliament to a resurgent far-right and a defiant alliance of left-wing parties, complicating his domestic agenda for his second term.

With all votes counted, Mr. Macron’s centrist coalition won 245 seats in the 577-seat National Assembly, the lower and more powerful house of Parliament. That was more than any other political group, but less than half of all the seats, and far less than the 350 seats Mr. Macron’s party and its allies won when he was first elected in 2017.

For the first time in 20 years, a newly elected president failed to muster an absolute majority in the National Assembly. It will not grind Mr. Macron’s domestic agenda to a complete halt, but will likely throw a large wrench into his ability to get bills passed — shifting power back to Parliament after a first term in which his top-down style of governing had mostly marginalized lawmakers.

Mr. Macron’s government will likely have to seek a coalition or build short-term alliances on bills, but it was unclear Sunday night how it might go about doing so.

The results were a sharp warning from French voters to Mr. Macron, who just months ago convincingly won re-election against Marine Le Pen, the far-right leader. “The Slap” was Monday’s headline on the front page of the left-leaning daily Libération.

Élisabeth Borne, Mr. Macron’s prime minister — who won her own race in Normandy — said on Sunday that the results were “unprecedented” and that “this situation constitutes a risk for our country, given the challenges we must face.”

“Starting tomorrow we will work on building a majority of action,” she said, suggesting, without giving details, that the government would work with other political parties to “build good compromises.”

Mr. Macron appeared disengaged from the parliamentary elections and did little campaigning himself, seeming more preoccupied by France’s diplomatic efforts to support Ukraine in its war against Russia — which Sunday’s results should not impact, as French presidents can conduct foreign policy mostly as they please.

Speaking on an airport tarmac before a trip to Eastern Europe that took him to Kyiv, the Ukrainian capital, this past week, he had urged voters to give him a “solid majority” in the “superior interest of the nation.”

But many French voters chose instead to either stay home — only about 46 percent of the French electorate went to the ballot box, according to projections, the second-lowest participation level since 1958 — or to vote for Mr. Macron’s most radical opponents.

Several of Mr. Macron’s close allies or cabinet members who were running in the election lost their races, a stinging rebuke for the president, who had vowed that ministers who failed to win a seat would have to resign. Richard Ferrand, the president of the National Assembly, and Amélie de Montchalin, his minister for green transition, were both defeated.

“We disappointed a certain number of French people, the message is clear,” Olivia Grégoire, a spokeswoman for Mr. Macron’s government, told France 2 television on Sunday.

“It’s a disappointing first place, but it’s a first place nonetheless,” she said, adding that Mr. Macron’s coalition would work in Parliament with “all those who want to move the country forward.”

Final results gave the alliance of left-wing parties — which includes the hard-left France Unbowed party, the Socialists, Greens and Communists, and is led by the leftist veteran Jean-Luc Mélenchon — 131 seats, making it the biggest opposition force in the National Assembly. The National Rally, Ms. Le Pen’s far-right party, secured 89 seats, a historic record.

 

Ironically 46% turnout for a midterm election here in the states would be pretty good.

Macron will now have to make major concessions to the left, and considering both NUPES and National Rally want France to wash its hands of Ukraine and hand it off to Putin, things could get very interesting in the days ahead in Paris.

We'll see.

Last Call For Hearing Aides For America, Con't

As I have said multiple times, the primary goal of the January 6th Committee's publicly televised hearings is simple: to make the case to America for charging Donald Trump with criminal acts in connection with the effort to annul Joe Biden's win and to defraud America with a slate of illegitimate electors.

The latest ABC News poll finds that the hearings are working even better than I expected.

With the first full week of hearings for the House select committee's investigation into the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol now complete, nearly 6 in 10 Americans believe former President Donald Trump should be charged with a crime for his role in the incident, a new ABC News/Ipsos poll finds.

Six in 10 Americans also believe the committee is conducting a fair and impartial investigation, according to the poll.

In the poll, which was conducted by Ipsos in partnership with ABC News using Ipsos' KnowledgePanel, 58% of Americans think Trump should be charged with a crime for his role in the riot. That's up slightly from late April, before the hearings began, when an ABC News/Washington Post poll found that 52% of Americans thought the former president should be charged.

An ABC News/Washington Post poll that asked a similar question days after the attack in January 2021 found that 54% of Americans thought Trump should be charged with the crime of inciting a riot.

Attitudes on whether Americans think Trump is responsible for the attack on the U.S. Capitol remain relatively stable. In the new ABC News/Ipsos poll, 58% of Americans think Trump bears a "great deal" or a "good amount" of responsibility for the attack on the Capitol. This is unchanged from an ABC News/Ipsos poll in December 2021 and similar to the findings of an ABC News/Washington Post poll conducted just after the attack in January 2021.

The poll divides along party lines, with 91% of Democrats thinking Trump should be charged with a crime compared to 19% of Republicans. On whether Trump bears a "great deal" or a "good amount" of responsibility for the attack, 91% of Democrats and 21% of Republicans say he does.

Among self-described independents, 62% think Trump should be charged and 61% think he bears a "great deal" or a "good amount" of responsibility.

 

Again, a majority of Americans believe Trump should be charged. The country is not "tuning out boring hearings" like Republicans want you to believe...and even one in five Republicans think Trump should be indicted. That's about twice as much as I was expecting, meaning the hearings are changing some Republican minds as well.

More hearings are scheduled for Tuesday. More people are watching and paying attention.

That's a good thing, because even Republicans believe more violence is coming.

The GOP Mess In Texas

Texas Republicans held their annual state party convention last week, in which thousands of delegates from all over the state voted on the party's official platform. This being 2022 and Republicans being Republicans, the official Texas GOP platform is straight-up codified racism, fascism, and secession.

Meeting at their first in-person convention since 2018, Texas Republicans on Saturday acted on a raft of resolutions and proposed platform changes to move their party even further to the right. They approved measures declaring that President Joe Biden “was not legitimately elected” and rebuking Sen. John Cornyn for taking part in bipartisan gun talks. They also voted on a platform that declares homosexuality “an abnormal lifestyle choice” and calls for Texas schoolchildren should be taught “to learn about the Humanity of the Preborn Child.”

The actions capped a convention that highlighted how adamantly opposed the party’s most active and vocal members are to compromising with Democrats or moderating on social positions, even as the state has grown more diverse and Republicans’ margins in statewide elections have shrunk slightly in recent years.

Votes on the platform were collected at the end of the party's three-day convention in which party activists moved to add multiple items to their official platform. As the convention closed, two separate sets of ballots — one allowing delegates to choose eight of 15 legislative priorities and another allowing delegates to vote on the 275 platform planks — were gathered. Those will now need to be tallied and certified in Austin, but it is rare for a plank to be rejected, according to party spokesman James Wesolek.

The convention reinforced the extent to which former President Donald J. Trump’s unfounded claims of a stolen election continue to resound among the party faithful — even though his claims have repeatedly been debunked, including by many of his own former aides, and after a week of televised hearings about the Trump supporters who stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.

The denunciation of Cornyn represented a remarkable rebuke to a Republican who has served in the Senate since 2002. The hall at the George R. Brown Convention Center in Houston filled with boos on Friday as he tried to explain the legislation, which would allow juvenile records to be incorporated into background checks for gun buyers younger than 21 and encourage “red flag” laws that would make it easier to remove guns from potentially dangerous people, along with more funding for school safety and mental health.

Meanwhile, the party platform vote on Saturday by roughly 5,100 convention delegates would argue that those under 21 are “most likely to need to defend themselves” and may need to quickly buy guns “in emergencies such as riots.” It also would say that red flag laws violate the due process rights of people who haven’t been convicted of a crime.

Around 9,600 delegates and alternates were eligible to attend; organizers said the turnout was healthy.

The new platform would call for: 

• Requiring Texas students “to learn about the Humanity of the Preborn Child,” including teaching that life begins at fertilization and requiring students to listen to live ultrasounds of gestating fetuses.
• Amending the Texas Constitution to remove the Legislature’s power “to regulate the wearing of arms, with a view to prevent crime.”
• Treating homosexuality as “an abnormal lifestyle choice,” language that was not included in the 2018 or 2020 party platforms.
• Deeming gender identity disorder “a genuine and extremely rare metal health condition,” requiring official documents to adhere to “biological gender,” and allowing civil penalties and monetary compensation to “de-transitioners” who have received gender-affirming surgery, which the platform calls a form of medical malpractice.
• Changing the U.S. Constitution to fix the number of Supreme Court justices at nine and to repeal the 16th Amendment of 1913, which created the federal income tax.
• Ensuring “freedom to travel,” by opposing Biden’s Clean Energy Plan and “California-style, anti-driver policies,” including efforts to turn traffic lanes over for use by pedestrians, cyclists and mass transit.
• Declaring “all businesses and jobs as essential and a fundamental right,” a response to COVID-19 mandates by Texas cities requiring customers to wear masks and limiting business hours.
• Abolishing the Federal Reserve, the nation’s central bank, and guaranteeing the right to use alternatives to cash, including cryptocurrencies.

Not every far-right proposal was advanced. The party chair, Matt Rinaldi, ruled that a motion to defend the due process rights of those who rioted at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, and to “reject the narrative” that the riot was an insurrection was out of order, and could not be voted on.

Taken together, the new provisions would represent a shift even further rightward for the Republican Party of Texas, once known as the party of Presidents George Bush and his son George W. Bush. Land Commissioner George P. Bush, a grandson and nephew of the two presidents, was defeated handily last month in his race against Attorney General Ken Paxton, an arch-conservative who sued to challenge the 2020 election outcome and convinced voters that he was the truer Trump loyalist.

 

 

Sure, there's been whackoid platform planks in the past, the "reserve the right to secede" thing ends up in there every year it seems, but the  "Gay folks are deviants and trans folks are mentally ill" stuff is relatively new, and of course "Biden isn't president" is a huge red flag. And specifically, the platform is calling for a statewide referendum for secession to be put on the ballot in 2023.

This is once again a case of Republicans telling exactly how they will rule if given power, and telling us exactly who they will use that power against.

Pay attention.

Sunday Long Read: Teaching Those People A Lesson

Our Sunday Long Read this week of Juneteenth comes from ProPublica, the painful story of Cecelia Lewis, an award-winning Black middle school principal hired as the first diversity administrator in Cherokee County, Georgia's school district.

And then the county's wealthy white parents got a hold of Lewis and destroyed her life, her job, and her home in the name of "ending Critical Race Theory".

In April of 2021, Cecelia Lewis had just returned to Maryland from a house-hunting trip in Georgia when she received the first red flag about her new job.

The trip itself had gone well. Lewis and her husband had settled on a rental home in Woodstock, a small city with a charming downtown and a regular presence on best places to live lists. It was a short drive to her soon-to-be office at the Cherokee County School District and less than a half hour to her husband’s new corporate assignment. While the north Georgia county was new to the couple, the Atlanta area was not. They’d visited several times in recent years to see their son, who attended Georgia Tech.

Lewis, a middle school principal, initially applied for a position that would bring her closer to the classroom as a coach for teachers. But district leaders were so impressed by her interview that they encouraged her to apply instead for a new opening they’d created: their first administrator focused on diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives.

DEI-focused positions were becoming more common in districts across the country, following the 2020 protests over the killings of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor and Ahmaud Arbery. The purpose of such jobs typically is to provide a more direct path for addressing disparities stemming from race, economics, disabilities and other factors.

At first, the scope of the role gave Lewis pause. In her current district, these responsibilities were split among several people, and she’d never held a position dedicated to anything as specific as that before. But she had served on the District Equity Leadership Team in her Maryland county and felt prepared for this new challenge. She believed the job would allow her, as she put it, to analyze the district’s “systemic and instructional practices” in order to better support “the whole child.”

“We’re so excited to add Cecelia to the CCSD family,” Superintendent Brian Hightower said in the district’s March 2021 announcement about all of its new hires. (The announcement noted that the creation of the DEI administrator role “stems from input from parents, employees and students of color who are serving on Dr. Hightower’s ad hoc committees formed this school year to focus on the topic.”) Hightower acknowledged “both her impressive credentials and enthusiasm for the role” and pointed out that, “In four days, she had a DEI action plan for us.”

During her early visits, Lewis found Cherokee County to be a welcoming place. It reminded her of her community in southern Maryland, where everyone knew one another. But leaving the place where she’d been raised — and where, aside from her undergrad years at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, she’d spent most of her adult life — wasn’t going to be easy. Before her last day as principal of her middle school, her staff created a legacy wall in her honor, plastering a phrase above student lockers that Lewis would say to end the morning messages each day: “If no one’s told you they care about you today, know that I do ... and there is absolutely nothing you can do about it!”

Lewis was beginning to prepare for her move South, spending as much time with friends and family as possible, when she got a strange call from an official in her new school district. The person on the line — Lewis won’t say who — asked if she had ever heard of CRT.

Lewis responded, “Yes — culturally responsive teaching.” She was thinking of the philosophy that connects a child’s cultural background to what they learn in school. For Lewis, who’d studied Japanese and Russian in college and more recently traveled to Ghana with the Fulbright-Hays Seminars Abroad program for teachers, language and culture were essential to understanding anyone’s experience.

At that point, she wasn’t even familiar with the other CRT, critical race theory, which maintains that racial bias is embedded in America’s laws and institutions and has caused disproportionate harm to people of color. In a speech the previous fall, then-President Donald Trump condemned CRT as “toxic propaganda” and “ideological poison.”

The caller then told Lewis that a group of people in a wealthy neighborhood in the northern part of the county were upset about what they believed were her intentions to bring CRT to Cherokee County. But don’t worry, the district official said; we just want to keep you updated.

 

What happened next made national news, or at least, FOX News. Angry white racists mobilized thanks to astroturf groups specifically designed to "warn parents about the horrors of CRT" and they didn't just chase Lewis and her family out of Cherokee County, when she decided to quit and then get a job in Cobb County and Atlanta, the same parents hunted her down and told Cobb County schools that they would end up on FOX News next if they didn't fire her immediately. 

And they did fire her.  They chased Lewis out of the state entirely.

The same story is being repeated all over the country.  Every school teacher, administrator, and employee is suspect of belonging to the "cult of CRT" until proven innocent by a jury of enraged white parents.

Increasingly, public education is now the enemy of MAGAs

An enemy that needs to be destroyed by any way possible.

Vote Like Your Country Depends On It, Con't

I know Biden v. Trump polls are worthless 29 months out from a 2024 matchup, but as far as being a current snapshot of the electorate, the electorate apparently wants to give the country back to the seditious fascist because gas is $5 a gallon.

As inflation keeps rising and recession fears loom, a new Yahoo News/YouGov poll shows that Joe Biden is currently in the worst shape of his presidency.

The survey of 1,541 U.S. adults, which was conducted from June 10-13, found that if another presidential election were held today, more registered voters say they would cast ballots for Donald Trump (44%) than for Biden (42%) — even though the House Jan. 6 committee has spent the last week linking Trump to what it called a “seditious conspiracy” to overturn the 2020 election and laying the groundwork for possible criminal prosecution.

Since Biden took office, no previous Yahoo News/YouGov poll has shown him trailing Trump (though Biden’s most recent leads have been within the margin of error, like this one is for Trump). One year ago, Biden led Trump by 9 percentage points. In 2020, Biden won the White House by more than 7 million votes.

Yet Biden’s job approval rating has been atrophying for much of the last year, and the new survey shows that it has never been weaker. A full 56% of Americans now disapprove of the president’s performance — the highest share to date — while just 39% approve. Three weeks ago, those numbers were 53% and 42%, respectively.

On average, Biden’s job approval scores are now a few points worse than Trump’s were at the parallel stage of his presidency.

Among all Americans, Trump (43%) now has a higher personal favorability rating than Biden (40%) as well. Meanwhile, nearly two-thirds of independents (64%) have an unfavorable opinion of Biden, and just 28% say they would vote for him over Trump.

The bad news for Biden comes as prices continue to increase at the fastest pace in 40 years, upending expectations and overshadowing other concerns. According to the poll, 40% of registered voters (up from 33% last month) now say inflation is “the most important issue to you when thinking about this year’s election” — more than four times the number for any other issue.

So inflation really is driving voters, especially white voters and more than a few Latino voters, right into the arms of the party who has made it very clear that the rights of anyone who isn't a white straight Christian male will be taken from them over the months and years ahead.

And that's 100% okay with a lot of people who aren't white straight Christian males because they think Daddy Trump will fix everything he helped cause and that Biden hasn't fixed it yet in 17 months.

A whole lot of people seem very eager  to vote for the guy currently under investigation for, you know, sedition, conspiracy, and fraud against the country itself, but fuck Joe Biden, right?

And yes, as I keep saying, white people and white-adjacent people voting for the party of white supremacy absolutely are voting for their self-interests, and at the direct expense of the rest of us.

As long as it gets gas back under $3, the rest of us can be hunted down and dealt with.

Jesus wept.

Hearing Aides For America, Con't

Just Security's Ryan Goodman asked multiple former Justice Department legal experts about the need to indict Trump given the revelations this week in the January 6th Committee hearings that 1) Trump was told his plan with Pence and alternate electors was illegal by several of his legal staff, that 2) former VP Mike Pence was indeed targeted by Trump for not following through on that plan, and 3) they knew that SCOTUS would still vote against them even if they pulled it off.

The results are pretty unanimous that Trump should face charges, and that Merrick Garland would have a winnable case.

 

The following questions relate to the potential criminal liability of President Trump.

As a former federal prosecutor or senior Justice Department official, what legal significance do you give to the above testimony and document in terms of determining an individual’s mental state?

In particular, what significance may that information hold for President Trump’s potential criminal liability under Obstruction of an Official Proceeding, 18 U.S.C. §1512(c)(2) (a charge brought against at least 275 January 6 defendants) or Conspiracy to Prevent an Officer from Discharging Any Duties,18 U.S.C. § 372 (one of the charges brought against Oath Keeper defendants), other federal offenses (e.g., 18 U.S.C. § 371)? Note, in a public court hearing of a January 6 defendant, a lead DOJ prosecutor told a federal court that someone could be guilty of obstruction in pressing Mike Pence to adjudge the certification in a particular way “if that person does that knowing it is not an available argument [and is] asking the vice president to do something the individual knows is wrongful … one of the definitions of ‘corruptly’ is trying to get someone to violate a legal duty.” Not necessary, but you may already be aware or want to consider how DC courts have addressed whether inducing another person to violate a legal duty in relation to an official proceeding meets the definition of acting with an unlawful purpose.

What are your views of these potential sources of criminal liability for President Trump’s course of conduct toward Mike Pence in light of the evidence presented by the Committee?

Please feel free to answer any or all of these questions or related issues that you consider relevant and important.

 

Goodman got several responses including:

Liam Brennan, a former federal prosecutor and head of Connecticut’s Public Corruption Task Force, currently serves as Inspector General in Hartford:

The testimony from the January 6th committee this week was explosive for multiple reasons. First, it made clear that Trump was advised that his actions to stop the certification of President Biden’s election were unlawful. While there has always been circumstantial evidence to this effect, this direct evidence is more persuasive. Second, John Eastman’s involvement in the scheme has always dangled the possibility that Trump could raise an advice of counsel defense to any prosecution, theoretically negating the corrupt mental state needed for conviction. With email evidence showing that Eastman admitting that he advised Trump that Vice President Pence could not unilaterally reject the electoral college results, any possible advice of counsel defense crumbles. Testimony to this effect is powerful enough, but the emails and Gregory Jacob’s memorandum to Mike Pence detailing these conversations provides a contemporaneous recording of the events that are always weighty pieces of evidence for any jury. The Department of Justice has indicted many defendants with much less evidence than this. These revelations put great pressure on the DOJ and raise the question of whether our criminal law system holds any authority over the actions of a president.

Stuart Gerson, former Acting Attorney General of the United States, Assistant Attorney General, and an Assistant United States Attorney:

The signal value of the Select Committee so far at least is its disclosure of evidence that utterly negates any defense that Donald Trump or his closest advisers somehow lacked intent with respect to their actions as to the January 6 insurrection. It is clear that weeks before January 6 the White House staff under Trump’s direction engaged in a pattern of firings, transfers and otherwise diminishing agencies that could have prevented the events of the day. In addition it is clear that Trump and others close to him were advised, and were aware, that their conduct would violate the Electoral Count Act and perhaps other statutes. It is clear also that Trump was advised and knew even through communications from his daughter and the former Attorney General that he had lost the election and that there was no cognizable evidence of fraud. Put all these things together and it is clear that Merrick Garland would have grounds to seek indictments and would be able to deflect any argument that the participants in the seditious conspiracy lacked criminal intent.

Mary McCord, former Acting Assistant Attorney General for National Security at the U.S. Department of Justice, an Assistant U.S. Attorney, and is now Executive Director of the Institute for Constitutional Advocacy and Protection (ICAP) and a Visiting Professor of Law at Georgetown University Law Center:

Section 1512(c)(2) requires that there be a nexus between the wrongful conduct and an official proceeding and that the obstructive conduct be done “corruptly.” The evidence produced at the June 16 hearing of the House Select Committee established both John Eastman’s proposal–for the Vice President to either reject the electoral votes from the states that submitted alternate uncertified slates of electors or to suspend the joint session and send the dueling slates back to the states in the hope that the state legislatures would change the outcome–had a direct nexus to the counting of the Electoral College votes required by the 12th Amendment. And the evidence that Eastman himself knew and told President Trump that his proposal would violate the Electoral Count Act, along with other evidence that the President was aware that there was no authority for the Vice President to overturn the election, establish that his efforts to pressure Vice President Pence to act unlawfully were done with corrupt intent. In other words, he knew he was pressuring the vice president to violate a legal duty. So did Eastman and Rudy Giuliani, who–based on the evidence produced at the hearing–joined in the apparent conspiracy to “obstruct[], influence[], or impede[]” the counting of the Electoral College votes.

Chris Mattei, former Chief of the Financial Fraud & Public Corruption Unit, U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Connecticut:

It is important to remember that the entire predicate for the pressure campaign against Vice President Pence was the lie that electors from certain states were illegitimate and, therefore, could be rejected. The Committee has already presented direct evidence that the former President knew he lost fair-and-square and that there was no meaningful fraud in the so-called “contested” states. So, putting aside whether the former President actually believed that the Vice President could reject electors, he knew that there was no factual basis for doing so. That knowledge is compelling evidence that the former President acted corruptly when he and others acting at his direction repeatedly urged Vice President Pence to reject electors.

Prosecutors will want to pair that evidence with evidence that the former President also knew that the act of rejecting electors was itself unlawful. Here, the most damning evidence presented by the Committee is Eastman’s email admission that, after all the back and forth, he ultimately told the former President that the Vice President lacked the authority to reject electors. Yet, the former President continued to insist. To present that evidence, prosecutors will likely seek the testimony of others who similarly advised the former President (or Eastman’s testimony pursuant to a cooperation agreement and guilty plea). On this issue, it is not enough to prove that Eastman knew his plan was unlawful, which he clearly did. The key, of course, is to prove that the former President knew that as well.

If they can develop that evidence, DOJ can make a compelling case that the former President conspired with Eastman and others to corruptly obstruct, influence, or impede Congress’ counting of electoral votes, under 18 U.S.C. § 1512(c)(2). Based on the evidence I’ve seen so far, I think this would be a more straightforward case than a prosecution under § 372. 

 

The responses continue down this vein. Nobody here says that Trump shouldn't be charged, and nobody says that Justice can't win such a case against Trump.

I've said all along that the entire point of the committee's public hearings was to lay out the legal case against Trump, and we're seeing just how effective that case is going to be.

Another Day In Gunmerica, Con't

Sen. Mitch Mconnell set up Senate GOP negotiations on new gun legislation in the wake of Uvalde to fail miserably, knowing he'd need all ten Republicans to overcome a filibuster. But putting Texas Sen. John Cornyn in charge, the GOP's Number Two in the Senate, was a brilliant move, because now Mitch looks reasonable, and Cornyn, arguably the only person who could reasonably run against Mitch for leadership next year, looks like an incompetent negotiator compared to McConnell.

Frustration inside the Senate GOP conference is boiling among conservatives at the way Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas) is handling the bipartisan gun reform negotiations — putting the man who aspires to succeed Mitch McConnell as Republican leader in a political jam.

Why it matters: Some senators are viewing these negotiations as a test case for how Cornyn would fare as lead negotiator for the party should he replace McConnell one day.

Driving the news: Multiple sources with direct knowledge say the GOP senators who are uneasy about the negotiations include Mike Lee (R-Utah), Rick Scott (R-Fla.), Ted Cruz (R-Texas), Josh Hawley (R-Mo.), Tom Cotton (R-Ark.), Rand Paul (R-Ky.), and Mike Crapo (R-Idaho), among others.McConnell has thus far supported Cornyn's efforts, saying he's "comfortable" with the bipartisan gun deal and will support the bill if it "ends up reflecting what the framework indicated."

Behind the scenes: At Tuesday's private Senate GOP lunch, several senators questioned Cornyn about the proposal and pushed for specific details about what the legislation would entail.Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah) "very vocally" requested more information from Cornyn on the substance of the framework. Those requests were rebuffed, three sources familiar with the lunch told Axios. 

The proposal to incentivize state red flag laws has been especially unpopular among conservatives. Sens. Crapo, Cruz and others have voiced their concerns to leadership about it potentially becoming too easy to strip Americans of their right to bear arms. 

And Scott, the chairman of the Senate Republicans' campaign arm, feels snubbed by the bipartisan group after holding early talks with Cornyn and Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.).
"No one's telling me anything. I've just asked for the text, and I haven’t gotten anything," Scott told Axios. "My whole goal is that we shouldn't be rushing something like this through; we should take our time."

Hawley told Axios he's "not a big fan of the framework as it's been announced ... I'm tracking what's been reported in the press. I understand the framework is shifting. But you know, I'm not a huge fan of it.""I'm at a disadvantage because I'm not part of the negotiations," Hawley added. "I don't know where they are. All I know is what I read secondhand from you all."

Between the lines: Several senators feel they've been shut out of the negotiating process and kept in the dark about crucial details, and will be asked to take a politically tough vote without enough time to digest the bill.One GOP senator, speaking to Axios on the condition of anonymity to be candid about his concerns, branded Cornyn's approach: "Shut up, and vote." 

"There's considerable unhappiness in the conference that we seem to be approaching a bill that will unite all the Democrats and divide the Republicans," said another senior Republican with direct knowledge of the internal talks. 

The senior Republican mentioned that Sen. John Kennedy (R-La.) asked Cornyn during one lunch, "Are we focusing on gang violence and inner-city murders? And the response was, 'No, we're not focusing on that' ... And more than a few of us wondered why the hell not?" 

"It would be prudent, and I think Sen. Cornyn knows this … it would be prudent to give senators plenty of time to read the bill and research the issues," Kennedy told Axios.

"We're being told that Schumer wants to vote next week," the senior Republican added. "And that the Republicans engaged in negotiations are fine with that. Even though nobody's seen bill text, nobody's seen anything more than a couple of bullet points on a one-pager."

 

Keep in mind nothing was ever going to pass.  It was always going to be smoke and mirrors run by Actual Senate Majority Leader Mitch from behind the stage. But now Mitch gets to blame John Cornyn and Chuck Schumer, and he keeps his hands clean again. The one thing McConnell would allow a vote for was red flag laws, and he doesn't even have ten votes for that.

So in a couple of weeks or so, we'll see headlines like "Senate Fails Again To Pass Gun Laws" and most Americans won't know or care that Mitch and the GOP set this up to fail.

Just another day in Gunmerica.