If all printers were determined not to print anything till they were sure it would offend nobody, there would be very little printed. -- Benjamin Franklin
The Republican-controlled State Legislature in Arizona voted Thursday to revoke the Democratic secretary of state’s legal authority in election-related lawsuits, handing that power instead to the Republican attorney general.
The move added more discord to the politics of a state already roiled by the widely derided move by Senate Republicans to commission a private firm to recount the vote six months after the November election. And it was the latest in a long series of moves in recent years by Republicans to strip elected Democrats of money and power in states under G.O.P. control.
The measure was part of a grab bag of proposals inserted into major budget legislation, including several actions that appeared to address conspiracy theories alleging manipulated elections that some Republican lawmakers have promoted. One of the items allotted $500,000 for a study of whether social media sites tried to interfere in state elections by promoting Democrats or censoring Republicans.
The State House approved the legislation late Thursday. It now goes to Gov. Doug Ducey, a Republican, who has the power to accept or reject individual parts of the measure.
Secretary of State Katie Hobbs and Attorney General Mark Brnovich have sparred before over election lawsuits, with Mr. Brnovich arguing that Ms. Hobbs would not adequately defend the state against suits, some of them filed by Democrats, that seek to broaden access to the ballot. Ms. Hobbs has denied the charge.
The bill approved on Thursday gives Mr. Brnovich’s office exclusive control of such lawsuits, but only through Jan. 2, 2023 — when the winners of the next elections for both offices would be about to take power. The aim is to ensure that the authority given to Mr. Brnovich would not transfer to any Democrat who won the next race for attorney general.
On Friday, Ms. Hobbs called the move “egregious,” saying Republicans were “weaponizing the process to take retribution against my office.”
The move against Ms. Hobbs continues a Republican strategy of weakening elected Democrats’ authority that dates at least to 2016, when the G.O.P.-controlled legislature in North Carolina stripped the state’s executive branch of political appointments and control of state and county election boards just before Roy Cooper, a Democrat, took over as governor.
Lawmakers said then that Democrats had behaved similarly in the past, citing a Democratic governor’s decision in 1976 to oust 169 policymakers hired by Republicans. But similar tactics have since been employed to weaken new Democratic governors in Kansas, Wisconsin and Michigan. Democrats in many states with Republican-controlled legislatures have fought efforts to curb their governors’ emergency powers to deal with the pandemic.
Most recently, Georgia Republicans have been in the forefront of G.O.P. attempts nationwide to exert more control over local election officials. In both Georgia and Kansas, legislators even voted to defang the offices of Republican secretaries of state who had defended the security and fairness of elections.
Most other election provisions in the Arizona budget legislation are billed as safeguards against fraud, almost none of which has been found in the past election. One orders a review of voter registration databases in counties with more than a million residents — that is, the counties that are home to the Democrat-leaning cities of Phoenix and Tucson.
A new Election Integrity Fund would dole money to county election officials to toughen security and to finance hand counts of ballots after elections. That would appear to open the door to more fraud investigations like the Republican-ordered review of November election ballots in Maricopa County, which was carried by President Biden and Arizona’s two Democratic senators.
That effort has been mocked by experts for its high-resolution examination of ballots for evidence of fakery, including bamboo fibers and watermarks that, according to a QAnon conspiracy theory, are visible only under ultraviolet light.
The move is purely to strip a Democratic elected official of legal power as a punitive measure. I hope Hobbs sues the bejesus out of them and wins, but that's unlikely given the makeup of Arizona's state Supreme Court, having all been appointed by Ducey and his predecessor, Republican Jan "Wagging her finger at the Black president" Brewer.
The bigger issue is the continued efforts by the GOP to reduce elections to nothing more than a joke where Republicans are simply declared the winners 100% of the time. Wins by Democrats in GOP-controlled states will be nullified because of "fraud" in 2022, I guarantee it.
What happens from there determines whether or not we survive as anything other than an authoritarian regime.
Donald Trump on Saturday will kick off his revenge tour against Republicans who defied him in the aftermath of the 2020 election and January 6 insurrection, hoping to convince his supporters to fire Ohio Rep. Anthony Gonzalez.
The effort to oust the Republicans who crossed him will be one of the biggest tests of Trump's post-presidential power, assessing whether the former President still has the sway with base Republican voters that he enjoyed during his four years in the White House. Trump's trip to Northeast Ohio is expressly meant to remind voters in the area of Gonzalez's vote to impeach the Republican president earlier this year, and boost Max Miller, a former Trump aide who is challenging the congressman in the district's Republican primary next year.
Trump cheered as Republicans in the Ohio congressional district erupted in anger after Gonzalez, a two-term congressman who had largely toed the Republican line, voted in favor of impeachment. Some voters accused him of doing the "unthinkable," while others fumed that they had to wait until 2022 to oust him.
But time has helped Gonzalez, with even his most ardent opponents admitting that the furor around his vote has since dissipated, as voters go about their daily lives and, in part, forget about the outrages of early 2021.
"If the election was (months ago), I do believe Gonzalez would have lost," said Jim Renacci, a longtime Ohio Republican who is mounting a primary challenge against incumbent Gov. Mike DeWine. "If the election was today, he is probably still in a danger zone... I think it would be a very tough race for him today, but he has got a year to prove himself out and voters do forget."
Trump's goal this weekend is to make sure that doesn't happen.
"President Trump will aggressively campaign against any and all RINOS who do not represent the will of their voters," Liz Harrington, a spokeswoman for the former president, said, referring to "Republicans in Name Only."
Republicans are hoping that Gonzalez survives, but there's zero chance of that. It's a swingish Cleveland suburban district, but the bloodlust will change everything after today, and Trump will start the process of collecting another head. Best case scenario for Gonzales is that he's allowed to go about his days without any violence targeting him or his family, as Trump has months and months to rage against him, and the dam will break.
Best case for America is of course that Max Miller, the Trump thug who will certainly crush Gonzalez in the GOP primary next spring, will lose to a Democrat. I'm hoping Trump becomes the deciding factor...for the Democratic Party to keep the House, that is.
PRESIDENT AHAB: Well, we’ll be damned. JOE BIDEN appears to have all but secured that elusive bipartisan infrastructure deal that both parties have been prattling on about for years. The core group of 10 Senate centrists working on the proposal emerged from a meeting with White House officials Wednesday night and declared that they had a working framework.
TODAY members of that group have been invited to the White House to meet with the president.
Republican Sens. ROB PORTMAN (Ohio) and SUSAN COLLINS (Maine) cautioned that there are still a few details to iron out. But a well-positioned administration source tells us this thing is basically cooked. All that’s left are the handshakes.
SO NOW WHAT? While lawmakers draft up the text, expect the White House to start leaning on Democrats to get in line. We know that so far at least 11 Senate Republicans have agreed to back this plan, but just as many Democrats have expressed reservations, creating tricky math for leadership. Sen. CHRIS MURPHY (D-Conn.) alluded to this predicament on CNN on Wednesday night. “That deal has 20 votes — not 60 votes,” he said, noting that the group of 21 that wrote the plan will now need to sell this to their colleagues.
The whipping campaign will heat up at a time when party tensions are on the rise. Sen. BERNIE SANDERS (I-Vt.) — who, at least in the immediate term, looks like the loser in this deal — fumed Wednesday on national television that he’s sick of talking about Sen. JOE MANCHIN (D-W.Va.). (We hear you, senator!) Our colleagues Laura Barrón-López and Nicholas Wu have a story up today about how Biden’s honeymoon with the left is over, as progressives are now calling him out by name.
The winners, aside from Biden? Manchin and Sen. KYRSTEN SINEMA (D-Ariz.) top the list. The Democratic duo comes out of this with not only their bipartisan deal, but also effective veto power over the massive reconciliation bill that Sanders et al. are drafting. Neither moderate senator has offered an assurance they’ll back it, despite demands from liberals.
Indeed, the big remaining question about the almost-done deal — which we’re told includes $559 billion in new spending — is whether progressives will go along. It’s one thing to issue threats via the media, another to reject a personal plea from your president. But progressives will also be taking a risk if they do abide. The list of priorities they’d like to pack into the reconciliation bill runs off the page: paid family leave, child care subsidies, climate investments, free community college, an expansion of Medicare, corporate tax hikes. And who knows what Manchin and Sinema will insist on axing after the thing they wanted most — infrastructure — will already be signed into law.
The optimistic view of the situation, from the White House perspective, goes something like this: Manchin and Sinema will be under enormous pressure to support a reconciliation bill after Biden bucked his left flank to make a bipartisan deal on infrastructure. They also point out that by first moving $1 trillion of infrastructure spending through a bipartisan bill, it reduces the price tag of the reconciliation bill by that same amount, making it easier for moderates to support it. There’s also an argument that with $1 trillion of infrastructure removed from the bigger bill, progressives have some more room now for their other priorities.
Seems a bit rosy, but then again, we would not have predicted the bipartisan talks would go this far.
Finally, the Biden-Schumer-Pelosi plan is to move these two bills simultaneously, with each bill needing the other to pass. “We can’t get the bipartisan bill done unless we’re sure we’re getting the budget reconciliation bill done,” Schumer said Wednesday night. “We can’t get the budget reconciliation bill done unless we’re sure of the bipartisan [bill].” Democratic leaders are trying to lash Manchin and the moderates to Bernie and the progressives. The message seems to be: If one side’s bill goes down, so does the other’s.
Lot of chances here for Lucy to yank the football away from Charlie Brown, and Nancy Pelosi's margin in the House is extremely thin. If Kevin McCarthy was as crafty as Mitch, he'd find a way to extort huge cuts in the bill in exchange for support that the Squad couldn't sabotage, for instance,but McCarthy's not that crafty, and Nancy is much better at the job.
We'll see how this pans out. I expect further cuts to the already massively scaled-down bill. But we're about to get a huge helping of "Don't let the perfect become the enemy of the good" again, as our politics have been for all of my adult life on the Democratic side.
Republicans are pretending to be very, very angry about President Biden’s newly-announced plans to pursue infrastructure and jobs proposals on two tracks — one bipartisan, the other via a simple majority “reconciliation” vote.
But behind this display of fake histrionics lies a very real trap, one designed to bait Democrats into turning on one another.
In case any Democrats are tempted to take this bait, don’t. The only response to GOP anger is for Democrats to remain solidly unified, though this situation also illustrates how challenging this will prove.
Biden and House Democratic leaders haveannounced that they will not pass a bipartisan Senate bill on infrastructure — one in keeping with the newly-reached bipartisan deal — until the Senate completes a second reconciliation package advancing progressive priorities.
“I’m not doing that. That’s extortion! I’m not going to do that. The Dems are being told you can’t get your bipartisan work product passed unless you sign on to what the left wants, and I’m not playing that game.”
Meanwhile, a senior GOP aide told Politico that in announcing this two-track strategy, Biden “did real damage” to the possibility of passing the bipartisan bill.
This line was also voiced by Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), who insisted that Democrats are showing their intention to “hold the bipartisan agreement hostage” to getting reconciliation done.
The clear threat here is that Democrats must drop plans to pass a reconciliation package or forget about getting a bipartisan package first. This is empty bluster sitting atop a pile of baloney.
Republicans have long known that Democrats would converge on this endgame. Indeed, Democrats publicly vowed for months to proceed on “two tracks.”
While working toward a bipartisan compromise on bricks-and-mortar infrastructure, Democrats would craft a reconciliation package containing Biden’s other priorities: Child supports, paid family and medical leave, and investments in education, health care and climate.
If the bipartisan deal were reached (as it now has been), Democrats would pass the reconciliation piece by a simple majority. If the bipartisan deal falls apart, they’d pass everything that way. Republicans have always known that even with a bipartisan deal, Democrats will do a lot more alone.
Now Republicans think they can bluff Democrats into killing a whole host of their most cherished priorities as a precondition for their support for something way more modest that largely consists of previously existing highway and covid-19 relief funding? No way. This is why the GOP threat is an empty one. If Republicans do sink the bipartisan deal, Democrats still have the option of passing a large package by themselves, via reconciliation.
The trap here is to try to force Manchin and Sinema to drop the reconciliation bill threat and take the "bipartisan" bill, otherwise Republicans will go on TV and say bad things about them. If Manchin and/or Sinema are dumb enough to fall for this, the game is over, and then Republicans can still scuttle the bill and leave Dems with nothing, blaming Biden It would be a complete victory for McConnell.
But I don't think even Manchin and Sinema are this thickheaded to kill reconciliation even after the GOP pulls the plug on the deal they worked for. It's an empty threat...unless Manchin and Sinema do Republicans' work for them.
Progressive Democrats’ concerns that their more centrist colleagues won’t support President Joe Biden’s larger spending and tax agenda are starting to bear out.
Oregon Rep. Kurt Schrader, a member of the fiscally conscious Blue Dog Coalition, said in an interview that he’s planning to vote against a budget resolution that would include reconciliation instructions for trillions of dollars in additional spending. Another moderate House Democrat, who requested anonymity to speak freely about a position that would upset party leaders, said the same.
With those two expected “no” votes, Speaker Nancy Pelosi doesn’t have much more room to maneuver on that first step toward passing a big spending bill, let alone the reconciliation legislation itself that would contain all the details.
She can only lose two more Democratic votes and still adopt the budget resolution in her narrowly divided 220-211 chamber, since no Republicans are likely to vote for it, as budget resolutions are designed to be partisan wish lists.
The Big Lie continues, and Lee Drutman of the Democracy Fund's Voter Study Group has an in-depth report on just how twisted Republican rank-and-file voters are, who continue to overwhelmingly believe the 2020 election was stolen from Donald Trump, and that increasingly dangerous measures need to be taken in order to correct that "fraud".
On January 6, 2021, a mob of pro-Trump supporters stormed the United States Capitol. The mob came directly from a Trump rally where the president had urged them to “show strength” and told them that “When you catch somebody in a fraud, you are allowed to go by very different rules.”(i)
In the months leading up to the election, Trump had repeatedly claimed that the only way Democrats could win would be through massive fraud. The pandemic shift to mailed ballots gave him and his allies a convenient target for their allegations. After the election, the president doubled down on his claims of fraud. A growing cadre of Republican elected officials and conservative media commentators followed along, pushing the Stop the Steal narrative: Democrats had somehow cheated, and Trump was the rightful winner.
In the months since, Republican politicians across the country have supported the narrative of a stolen election. The embrace has been especially strong in state Republican parties, and especially in states where the contest was relatively close. Republican Party officials who have argued that Biden won the 2020 election fair and square, like Georgia Republican Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger and Nevada Republican Secretary of State Barbara Cegavske, have been censured by state party committees.(ii) In Congress, House Republicans voted to remove Representative Liz Cheney from her leadership post for speaking out against the narrative of a stolen election.
The Stop the Steal movement is also driving a new wave of Republican-drafted state laws that restrict voting access — specifically targeting modes of voting favored by Democratic constituencies(iii) — and that change the ways in which elections are administered, empowering partisan state legislatures over professional election administrators and secretaries of state.(iv)
Meanwhile, Trump himself looms as a significant presence and the likely frontrunner in the 2024 Republican primary, should he decide to run. One sign of his sway over the party is the extent to which Republican elected officials at all levels, as well as conservative advocacy groups, devoted themselves to changing the rules of elections, in response to alleged, but unproven, fraud.(v) These developments raise an obvious question: Is this the future of the Republican Party? One way to answer this question is to ask another: What do Republican voters think about Trump and his claims of a stolen election? And more specifically, what other attitudes are most common among Republicans who most strongly believe the election was stolen and are most loyal in their support of Trump?
Republicans widely supported Trump both before and after the election,(vi) and Republicans also widely believe that the 2020 election was stolen.(vii) But we know less about which Republicans are most bought into the claim of a stolen election and which Republicans are most devoted to Trump.
A typical approach when answering questions such as these is to focus on specific and frequently binary polling questions, such as whether Republicans think of themselves as Trump Republicans or Party Republicans;(1) or whether Republicans believe Joe Biden fairly won the election or that Biden’s win was due to widespread fraud.(2) It’s important to keep in mind that any singular polling question misses the gradations of support or ambivalence.
In this analysis, I take a different approach. Using data from the Democracy Fund Voter Study Group VOTER Survey (Views of the Electorate Research Survey), I combine answers across numerous survey questions to generate various “scores” that reflect more complexity and diversity of attitudes among Republican voters. By averaging across multiple questions, we can see how deeply devoted some Republicans are to both the stolen election narrative and to Trump, as well as what other attitudes and outlooks are most prevalent among these devotees.
The results of this analysis confirm much of what many others have observed — Republican support for Trump and the stolen election narrative is broad but not universal. This variation among Republicans is important because it allows us to identify the characteristics of the most devout supporters and better understand the challenges the Republican Party faces in moving past the grievance politics of Trump and his acolytes.
This analysis shows Republicans most committed to both Trump and the narrative of election fraud also tend to have the highest levels of antipathy toward Democrats and toward immigrants, strongest belief that racism is not a problem, highest levels of nationalism, greatest support for traditional family values and gender roles, and strongest belief in a very limited role for government in the economy.
The ugliest part of the survey is that 46% of Republicans wanted GOP state legislatures to overturn election results in states Biden won, and another third of Republicans weren't happy about it but would have accepted it. There's a reason state legislative annulment is something both Georgia's and Florida's new election rigging laws allow, and something Texas's proposed law allows as a special legislative session in that state is expected soon.
As Michigan state Rep. Donna Lasinski got out of her car at the state Capitol in Lansing on a sunny morning last week, she was greeted by two people carrying what she described as assault rifles while protesters outside the building called for an audit of the 2020 election.
Such disconcerting encounters are not uncommon in Lansing — a reflection of persistent and growing tension gripping Michigan eight months after Joe Biden defeated President Donald Trump and more than a year after arrests were made in a plot to kidnap and kill Gov. Gretchen Whitmer.
Attacks on the integrity of the 2020 election have persisted in this state, where local county officials are contending with demands by some residents to review ballots for possible fraud. The mounting calls by Trump supporters to revisit the election results are creating a thorny dilemma for the state Republican Party, which has sought to fend off those efforts, even as GOP officials seek changes to election law.
On Wednesday, a Republican-controlled state Senate committee issued a report forcefully rejecting the claims of widespread fraud in the state, saying citizens should be confident in the results and skeptical of “those who have pushed demonstrably false theories for their own personal gain.”
The chairman of the Oversight Committee that produced the report, Sen. Ed McBroom, said in an accompanying letter that “at this point, I feel confident to assert the results of the Michigan election are accurately represented by the certified and audited results.”
But the report also recommended changes to the election system, providing fodder for Republican officials who — like their counterparts in other states — are seeking to pass strict new voting rules, hoping to use a quirk in state law to sidestep an expected veto from the Democratic governor.
Last week, a few hundred demonstrators carrying boxes of affidavits signed by thousands of people demanding a state ballot audit showed up at the Capitol. On Tuesday, a GOP legislator introduced a bill to start the audit process, although it so far does not have support among other lawmakers.
The drumbeat for audits has been accompanied by increasingly violent and vitriolic threats against state and local officials. The escalating rhetoric has left legislators from both parties lamenting what happened to the state that was home to moderate political consensus builders such as President Gerald Ford, governor George Romney and the late representative John Dingell.
As Lasinski, the House Democratic leader, walked to her office last week, speakers on the Capitol steps lambasted officials who have resisted requests to review last year’s ballots and asserted that the election was well-run and that Biden received more votes than Trump.
“They are lying,” said Matthew DePerno, a lawyer who is spearheading the petition drive. A small crowd cheered as he denounced Michigan’s secretary of state as a “tyrant” and the state’s Democratic governor as “the Fuhrer” and claimed that county clerks — many of them Republicans — had engaged in racketeering and conspiracy.
“These people have committed crimes,” he said.
“Put them in shackles,” shouted a man in the crowd, to whoops and applause.
Lasinski said the atmosphere has grown more fraught by the day.
“It seems we have become ground zero in this effort we see across the country to suppress democracy and deny the peaceful transfer of power,” she said.
DePerno did not respond to a request for comment.
Already this is a state where the feds had to break up a plot to kidnap Democratic Gov. Gretchen Whitmer by terrorists who wanted to force her to overturn the election, to kill her, or both.
It took less than 30 minutes for protesters to derail a school board meeting in Kentucky's largest district, as a workshop on a strategic plan rapidly devolved into screaming matches and security kicking out several people.
Jefferson County's school board meeting Tuesday evening echoed scenes from across the nation as opponents of "critical race theory" flood school board meetings, demanding districts' stop teaching it. Critical race theory, though, is rarely taught at the K-12 level. The academic framework appeared in a Jefferson County Public Schools guiding document for a Black studies elective, but the references were scrubbed as the theory became politicized.
Instead, opponents — including those at JCPS Tuesday — mischaracterize the term to refer to any racial equity effort schools use to improve outcomes for students of color.
A few dozen protesters gathered outside of JCPS' central office shortly before Tuesday's meeting, staging the first in-person demonstration against critical race theory in JCPS.
Most in the predominantly white crowd clutched signs opposing critical race theory: "No CRT in schools," "Kids aren't born racist." A handful of signs mentioned a far-right militia group.
A press gaggle that began with two protesters quickly grew, with a series of people cycling past the mic as members of the crowd drew near reporters.
One man told reporters CRT seeks to divide people. One woman accused JCPS of sneaking CRT into schools under the guise of "equity," even though racial equity and critical race theory are two different concepts.
The group's opposition appeared directed towards the academic framework and more towards JCPS' focus on equity — the practice of giving students what they need to be successful and close racial disparities. Instead, many in the crowd appeared to favor equality — all students getting the same, regardless of what they need.
Asked by a reporter to define critical race theory, one woman inaccurately responded: “It’s judging people strictly on the color of their skin.”
A different woman said they "do not see color of skin." She later approached a Black reporter and asked if he believed he deserved reparations.
Behind her, a woman told reporters she had visited Africa four times — likely more than most African Americans, she said.
“I am amazed by the Africans," she said.
Protesters then moved into the district's school board meeting, falsely believing JCPS was considering building critical race theory into the district's strategic plan — the first item on Tuesday's agenda.
Understand that these clowns aren't protesting actual critical race theory, they are protesting teaching kids about race at all. The people shouting I DON'T SEE RACE are going to make it illegal for anyone else to "see" it either.
Former top aides to President Donald Trump have begun an aggressive push to combat the teaching of critical race theory and capitalize on the issue politically, confident that a backlash will vault them back into power.
These officials, including Trump’s former campaign chief and two former budget advisers, have poured money and organizational muscle into the fight. They’ve aided activists who are pushing back against the concept that racism has been systemic to American society and institutions after centuries of slavery and Jim Crow. And some of them have begun working with members of Congress to bar the military from holding diversity trainings and to withhold federal funds from schools and colleges that promote anything that can be packaged as critical race theory.
The immediate goal, two Trump alumni said, is to get legislative language included in a must-pass bill. The larger one is to harness a national movement that could unseat Democrats.
“This is the Tea Party to the 10th power,” Steve Bannon, Trump’s former adviser who has zeroed in on local school board fights over critical race theory, said in an interview. “This isn’t Q, this is mainstream suburban moms — and a lot of these people aren’t Trump voters.”
Concerns about critical race theory, which examines how race and racism permeates society, have been percolating for months in what activists describe as a sincere grassroots phenomenon led by parents. Critical race theory dates back to the 1970s, but as the country remains in a prolonged conversation about race following George Floyd’s death, a new political battle over how to teach American history has emerged.
It has increasingly become a major focus of the Republican establishment, which has sought to capitalize on the angst even as some officeholders have failed to define what critical race theory is and the threat it poses. (Critical race theory, for example, does not imply white students should feel guilty about past civil rights issues and is not taught in many of the schools where lawmakers are seeking to ban it). Their efforts to elevate the issue have worked.
Republicans don't know what CRT is, but they've mutated it into a catchall term for, as the Louisville Courier-Journal puts it above, "any racial equity effort schools use to improve outcomes for students of color." That's what these assholes are protesting.
They want it all stopped. They want Black folk rendered second-class citizens, with second-class rights. Most of all, they want the history that shaped Black second-class status to be eliminated from schools. They don't want their kids asking questions about why things are different for us, only that it is, and that we deserve it.
This is how they get Zoomers back into the GOP, as the party of "Being white is terrific, and your generation is outnumbered, so get on the winning side now!"
If Democrats ignore this fight, they are going to lose absolutely everything.
Before Wednesday, the Court distinguished between two different types of violations of the takings clause. “Per se” takings involved unusually severe intrusions on private property — such as if the government strips a plot of land of all of its economic value — and were treated with particular skepticism by courts. Less severe intrusions, meanwhile, were classified as “regulatory” takings.
Property owners subject to a per se taking nearly always prevail in court, while property owners alleging a regulatory taking are much less likely to succeed — even when the government imposes fairly strict limitations on how they can use their property. In one famous regulatory takings case, the Court upheld a New York City law preventing the owners of Grand Central Terminal from constructing a high-rise office building on top of the station.
Because the Court views per se takings with such extraordinary skepticism, past decisions held that very few intrusions on private property qualify as such. A per se taking did not occur unless the government deprived a property owner of “all economically beneficial or productive use” of their property, or subjected the property owner to a “permanent physical occupation” of their land.
Thus, California’s regulation did not qualify as a per se taking prior to Cedar Point, as the presence of union organizers does not strip a worksite of all of its economic value, and the regulation did not allow those organizers to permanently occupy a worksite. It only allowed them to enter the property for three hours a day, and for only about a third of the year.
Roberts’s opinion didn’t eliminate this distinction between regulatory and per se takings altogether, but it significantly blurred the line. Under the new rule announced in Cedar Point, any law or regulation that “appropriates a right to invade” private property amounts to a per se taking. If California allowed union organizers to enter an employer’s land for a single minute, then California committed a per se taking.
“The right to exclude is ‘one of the most treasured’ rights of property ownership,” Roberts writes. And much of his opinion suggests that any intrusion on this right to exclude amounts to a taking.
But then Roberts’s opinion takes an unusual turn, in an apparent effort to ward off some of the radical implications of its expansive vision of per se takings. Roberts isn’t willing to live with the implications of his opinion for cases that don’t involve unions
One problem with Roberts’s expansive view of the takings clause is that it could prevent the government from performing very basic functions, such as health and safety inspections. Suppose, for example, that a restaurant has a disgusting, rat-infested kitchen that violates numerous local health ordinances. The restaurant’s owners obviously do not want these violations to be discovered, so they refuse to admit any government health inspectors. Under Roberts’s reading of the takings clause, it’s not clear why the restaurant owner should not be allowed to do so — or why it shouldn’t be able to, at the very least, demand compensation from the government before health inspectors can be allowed on their property.
After all, if “the right to exclude is ‘one of the most treasured’ rights of property ownership,” why should an employer be allowed to exclude union organizers but not health inspectors?
Indeed, as California warned in its brief, the expansive vision of the takings clause laid out in much of Roberts’s opinion “would also imperil a wide variety of health- and safety-inspection regimes” (including “food and drug inspections, occupational safety and health inspections, and home visits by social workers”) as well as a federal law providing that “underground mines must be inspected ‘at least four times a year.’” Roberts’s opinion recognizes that it would be untenable to hold that health and safety inspections violate the Constitution, so he carves out a special rule allowing such inspections to stand. “The government may require property owners to cede a right of access as a condition of receiving certain benefits,” such as a license to operate a business, Roberts writes, so long as that condition “bears an ‘essential nexus’ and ‘rough proportionality’ to the impact of the proposed use of the property.”
Those are some very large and very vague words, and it’s not entirely clear what it means for an inspection requirement to be roughly proportional to “the impact of the proposed use of the property.” Nor is it clear why, if the government can require restaurants to admit health inspectors as a condition of doing business, it can’t also require that restaurant to admit union organizers as a condition of employing workers.
It's a brutally clunky decision, and it only serves the purpose of busting unions. As with the Hobby Lobby decision, it'll be up to the courts to determine who and what qualifies for exemptions and who does not in the future and that of course will be determined by Trump-appointed judges and the 6-3 Roberts Court.
The Road To Gilead series of posts documents red state America's journey into the fictional Christian theocracy of Gilead, the setting of The Handmaid's Tale books and Hulu series. I've been told by more than a few Village Betters™ types that it's overreaction, that the GOP wouldn't dare press women too hard or end up losing them altogether and becoming a rump reactionary mess with no power.
Missouri is at risk of losing $4.5 billion in tax revenue and federal funding for Medicaid because of a fight between lawmakers over contraceptives.
At issue is a state tax on hospitals, doctors and other health care providers that is used to draw down billions of dollars in federal funding for the government health insurance program, which covers children, low-income adults and people with disabilities.
The Republican-led Legislature adjourned last month without reauthorizing the tax after fighting over whether to include a ban on Medicaid coverage for “any drug or device approved by the federal Food and Drug Administration that may cause the destruction of or prevent the implantation of, an unborn child.”
Federal law requires Medicaid programs cover family planning.
The tax expires Sept. 30.
Republican Gov. Mike Parson has said he’ll start cutting the state budget if lawmakers don’t reup the tax by the start of the next fiscal year, July 1.
Now, three states, NC, AK, and TX, have already made cuts to contraception coverage in Medicaid. NC and AK allow insurers to provide plans without coverage of family planning, and Texas doesn't mandate coverage of emergency contraception at all.
But the Missouri GOP bill would in fact ban Medicaid from covering any birth control, IUDs, or any female contraception options. It's monstrous.
This is the future the GOP has in store for women, robbing them of their bodily autonomy the second their wombs become involved, and a government that can successfully revoke Medicaid coverage for birth control can revoke all insurance coverage for birth control.
Ron DeSantis continues his "The Former Guy™ But Smarter" routine with GOP state lawmakers forcing new legislation that requires surveys of the "beliefs" of all Florida college and university students, with the heavy implication that he will find "indoctrination" no matter what the actual results are, and use it as justification to make massive cuts to the state's education system.
In his continued push against the “indoctrination” of students, Gov. Ron DeSantis on Tuesday signed legislation that will require public universities and colleges to survey students, faculty and staff about their beliefs and viewpoints to support “intellectual diversity.”
The survey will discern “the extent to which competing ideas and perspectives are presented” in public universities and colleges, and seeks to find whether students, faculty and staff “feel free to express beliefs and viewpoints on campus and in the classroom,” according to the bill.
The measure, which goes into effect July 1, does not specify what will be done with the survey results. But DeSantis and Sen. Ray Rodrigues, the sponsor of the bill, suggested on Tuesday that budget cuts could be looming if universities and colleges are found to be “indoctrinating” students.
“That’s not worth tax dollars and that’s not something that we’re going to be supporting moving forward,” DeSantis said at a press conference at a middle school in Fort Myers.
University faculty members have worried the new measure could create a chilling effect on their freedom of speech. Democratic lawmakers also have argued the bill might allow politicians to meddle in, monitor and regulate speech on campus in the future.
DeSantis, however, said the intent of the measure is to prevent public universities and colleges from becoming “hotbeds for stale ideology.”
“It used to be thought that a university campus was a place where you’d be exposed to a lot of different ideas,” DeSantis said. “Unfortunately, now the norm is, these are more intellectually repressive environments. You have orthodoxies that are promoted, and other viewpoints are shunned or even suppressed.”
The governor did not name specific state universities or colleges with this problem. He was broad in his accusations about the higher education system and used vague anecdotes to justify the need for such a survey.
For instance, the governor said he “knows a lot of parents” who are worried that their children will be “indoctrinated” when they go off to college, and that universities are promoting “orthodoxies.” But he did not offer specifics on those claims.
Officials at some of the state’s major universities, including Florida State University and Florida International University, did not immediately respond to requests for comment on the governor’s claims.
The University of Florida issued a statement that upheld the Gainesville-based school as a “marketplace of ideas where a wide variety of opinions are expressed and independent inquiry and vigorous academic deliberation are valued.”
“We believe the survey will reflect that, and we look forward to widespread participation across campus,” the statement said.
As I said though, the results of the "survey" are already in.
But in what appeared to be a coordinated effort, Senate President Wilton Simpson, R-Trilby, and House Speaker Chris Sprowls, R-Palm Harbor, slammed universities for lacking a “diversity of thought.”
Simpson, speaking at a state university system’s Board of Governors meeting on Tuesday in St. Petersburg, said there appear to be “socialism factories” in the state’s public university system.
“We always hear about the liberal parts of the university system, and we don’t hear so much of that from the college system,” Simpson said.
Sprowls echoed some of that sentiment at the governor’s press conference.
“As the governor said, we are at great risk, as a nation and as a state, on the lack of intellectual diversity that is on our university campuses,” Sprowls said. “We have decided that one ideological standard will win the day, but the thing is we’re losing because we’re not having real conversations.”
Here's where the real pogrom begins however:
In addition to the survey, the measure DeSantis signed into law will bar university and college officials from limiting speech that “may be uncomfortable, disagreeable or offensive,” and will allow students to record lectures without consent for educational purposes or to support a civil or criminal case against a higher education institution.
When debating the bill on the Senate floor, Rodrigues said students should be able to “shed a light” on wrongdoing in a classroom. Professors, however, would have civil cause of action against any student — whether they are an adult or a minor — if they publish the recording for any other purpose.
DeSantis did not go into all the details of the bill, but lauded it in broad terms, saying it will allow “robust First Amendment speech on our college and university campuses.”
Sure.
The point of the bill is to give the right-wing the tools it needs to sue professors, instructors, and entire departments out of existence, if not to drown universities in civil lawsuits to the point where they are shut down. It's a fascist attack on getting rid of all public education in the US, leaving it only for the super-elite to be able to afford.
Fascism 101, folks. Get rid of the smart people.
And should DeSantis run for the White House and win in 2024 or 2028, this will be taken nationwide by his education Secretary. He's as dangerous as they come, folks.
Four Saudis who participated in the 2018 killing of the Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi received paramilitary training in the United States the previous year under a contract approved by the State Department, according to documents and people familiar with the arrangement.
The instruction occurred as the secret unit responsible for Mr. Khashoggi’s killing was beginning an extensive campaign of kidnapping, detention and torture of Saudi citizens ordered by Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, Saudi Arabia’s de facto ruler, to crush dissent inside the kingdom.
The training was provided by the Arkansas-based security company Tier 1 Group, which is owned by the private equity firm Cerberus Capital Management. The company says the training — including “safe marksmanship” and “countering an attack” — was defensive in nature and devised to better protect Saudi leaders. One person familiar with the training said it also included work in surveillance and close-quarters battle.
There is no evidence that the American officials who approved the training or Tier 1 Group executives knew that the Saudis were involved in the crackdown inside Saudi Arabia. But the fact that the government approved high-level military training for operatives who went on to carry out the grisly killing of a journalist shows how intensely intertwined the United States has become with an autocratic nation even as its agents committed horrific human rights abuses.
It also underscores the perils of military partnerships with repressive governments and demonstrates how little oversight exists for those forces after they return home.
Such issues are likely to continue as American private military contractors increasingly look to foreign clients to shore up their business as the United States scales back overseas deployments after two decades of war.
The State Department initially granted a license for the paramilitary training of the Saudi Royal Guard to Tier 1 Group starting in 2014, during the Obama administration. The training continued during at least the first year of former President Donald J. Trump’s term.
Louis Bremer, a senior executive of Cerberus, Tier 1 Group’s parent company, confirmed his company’s role in the training last year in written answers to questions from lawmakers as part of his nomination for a top Pentagon job during the Trump administration.
The administration does not appear to have sent the document to Congress before withdrawing Mr. Bremer’s nomination; lawmakers never received answers to their questions.
In the document, which Mr. Bremer provided to The New York Times, he said that four members of the Khashoggi kill team had received Tier 1 Group training in 2017, and two of them had participated in a previous iteration of the training, which went from October 2014 until January 2015.
“The training provided was unrelated to their subsequent heinous acts,” Mr. Bremer said in his responses.
He said that a March 2019 review by Tier 1 Group “uncovered no wrongdoing by the company and confirmed that the established curriculum training was unrelated to the murder of Jamal Khashoggi.”
It's all related. The number of horrific things that happened during the Trump years that start with "following Obama administration policy" is disturbingly high, but there you are. For all his loud screaming about how awful Obama was, Trump was sure good at taking a bad Obama idea that he liked and making it into a hideous one.
Why we continue to be friends with the Saudi regime, well, we all know the answer to that.
After Senate Republicans killed any idea of a bipartisan January 6th Commission to investigate the Trump insurrection to kill lawmakers in the US Capitol, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is going ahead with a select committee anyway, and Republicans will of course do everything they can to stall, attack, and discredit it.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi plans to appoint a select committee to investigate the deadly January 6 attack on the US Capitol after Senate Republicans blocked the creation of an independent commission to probe the insurrection, according to two sources familiar with the matter.
Pelosi announced Tuesday evening to the House's Steering and Policy Committee that she will create a select committee, the sources said. She told Democrats the January 6 inquiry will be a "pursuit of truth" investigation, according to one source who heard her remarks.
One of the sources said Pelosi indicated she believes a regular standing committee of several dozen members just would not work, and notes the House has already given the Senate several weeks to get a bill on an independent commission passed and that has not happened.
Pelosi later denied that she had made a decision. "No, I did not make that announcement. Somebody put out a false report," she told reporters.
After CNN and numerous news outlets reported on her decision, her spokesman, Drew Hammill, later tweeted, "Clarification on tonight's meeting of the Steering and Policy Committee. Speaker Pelosi told Members she plans to announce WHETHER she will create a select committee THIS WEEK. Her preference continues to be a bipartisan commission which Senate Republicans are blocking."
However, CNN stands by its reporting and the sources who confirmed her initial remarks.
The decision to appoint a select committee to investigate the attack means that House Democrats will channel their various efforts examining the events surrounding January 6 into one place. It was one of several options Pelosi had been considering after Senate Republicans filibustered legislation creating an independent commission that had passed in the House.
The commission is likely to fuel the political brawl that's played out in the House the aftermath of January 6, in which Democrats have charged that Republicans are trying to whitewash the insurrection carried out by supporters of former President Donald Trump. Republicans, meanwhile, have accused Democrats of trying to use the commission and their committee investigations for political gain.
Trump's role in the lead-up to the January 6 attack is sure to be a focus of the select panel, and the committee could look into actions of some House members, too.
I don't expect much of anything from the committee anyway. I'm not even sure the Biden White House or Justice Department will even cooperate very much, given both of those entities looking to protect Trump and the executive branch more than reach the truth. Certainly Republicans will ignore any subpoenas, and they won't be enforced.
Hell, I don't even expect public hearings. I expect all of this to be done behind closed doors, and for us to get a quickly-forgetten Committee report late next year. Hell, if the GOP wins the House back, we may not even get the report at all if Trump and friends can drag it out long enough. And even if the report does come out, it'll be heavily redacted.
No, absolutely nothing will come of this, let alone any real consequences for the Republicans who voted to overturn the election. Nearly all of them will be re-elected in 2022.
Well, we've apparently gotten the desired outcome of the death of the For The People Act: all Republicans voted against it, all Democrats voted for it, but the Republicans still win because the Democrats let them keep the filibuster. Precisely none of this makes voting any more fair or more safe, but it's the thought that counts as Republicans at the state level lock in permanent GOP majorities for decades to come.
After months of build-up, Democrats are boxed in on their party’s signature election reform plan. And there’s no apparent escape route.
Senate Republicans blocked Democrats’ sweeping ethics and elections legislation on Tuesday, a filibuster that many in President Joe Biden’s party hoped would turbocharge the demise of the chamber’s 60-vote threshold for most bills. But Democratic moderates’ support of the filibuster has only hardened in recent days, culminating in an emphatic defense of the supermajority requirement by Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (D-Ariz.) on the eve of Tuesday’s vote.
Liberals eager to change the minds of Sinema, Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) and nearly a dozen other senators reluctant to eliminate or reform the filibuster had staked their success on a series of Republican blockades on former President Donald Trump’s impeachment, a Jan. 6 commission, equal pay standards and most notably, the elections bill dubbed “S1.”
In today’s 50-50 Senate, Democrats would need every single one of their members to vote in favor of any changes to the rules, and there is no sign that’s close to happening.
It gets worse for Biden’s party: Now that the GOP has rejected debating the legislation that would overhaul federal elections, Democrats are without a new strategy to show party activists some momentum before the 2022 midterms. At the moment, the party doesn't have a backup plan on elections and Democratic senators acknowledged their internal maneuvering over the filibuster has only begun after months of dominating their time in control of Washington.
“There doesn’t seem to be much of a path to getting any Republican votes on voting reforms. So what does that leave?” said Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.). “It leaves a conversation in the caucus about whether you want to give Republicans the authority to continue to strip away from people the right to vote.”
Democratic leaders have told members that Tuesday’s vote is only the beginning of the discussion, not the end. And some Senate Democrats took it as a positive sign that all 50 members of the caucus — including Manchin — were united in Tuesday’s vote.
Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer did not detail next steps during Tuesday’s private caucus meeting, according to an attendee. But later on the floor, he said that Democrats will “have several, serious options for how to reconsider this issue" and "are going to explore every last one.”
Many in his caucus are desperate to find a path forward. “A body that won’t defend itself from an internal attack hardly deserves the name of a U.S. Senate,” said Sen. Tim Kaine (D-Va.). “No consequences for Trump, no impeachment, no censure, no January 6 commission ... no agreement on voting rights.”
Potential backup plans after the filibuster include breaking up the elections bill into pieces to force more votes on the GOP or waiting until the fall to push a voting-rights-specific bill. Democrats could also put elections spending in a party-line budget reconciliation bill.
But on Tuesday evening success looked far off, even as Democrats vowed not to give up after Schumer promised that “failure is not an option.” Vice President Kamala Harris told reporters that “the fight is not over.”
In the meantime, the Senate is left with a handful of bipartisan gangs negotiating critical legislation on infrastructure and policing — and a lot of angry progressives who want to exercise their party’s power while they still have full control of Congress.
I understand the actual problem is Republicans voting to make sure that Republican states can caontinue to disenfranchise millions, but we've wasted five months to get to a guaranteed failure point, and everyone is asking "So now what?"
That question should have been answered months ago.
To those who want to eliminate the legislative filibuster to pass the For the People Act (voting-rights legislation I support and have co-sponsored), I would ask: Would it be good for our country if we did, only to see that legislation rescinded a few years from now and replaced by a nationwide voter-ID law or restrictions on voting by mail in federal elections, over the objections of the minority?
To those who want to eliminate the legislative filibuster to expand health-care access or retirement benefits: Would it be good for our country if we did, only to later see that legislation replaced by legislation dividing Medicaid into block grants, slashing earned Social Security and Medicare benefits, or defunding women’s reproductive health services?
To those who want to eliminate the legislative filibuster to empower federal agencies to better protect the environment or strengthen education: Would it be good for our country if we did, only to see federal agencies and programs shrunk, starved of resources, or abolished a few years from now?
This question is less about the immediate results from any of these Democratic or Republican goals — it is the likelihood of repeated radical reversals in federal policy, cementing uncertainty, deepening divisions and further eroding Americans’ confidence in our government.
And to those who fear that Senate rules will change anyway as soon as the Senate majority changes: I will not support an action that damages our democracy because someone else did so previously or might do so in the future. I do not accept a new standard by which important legislation can only pass on party-line votes — and when my party is again in the Senate minority, I will work just as hard to preserve the right to shape legislation.
Good-faith arguments have been made both criticizing and defending the Senate’s 60-vote threshold. I share the belief expressed in 2017 by 31 Senate Democrats opposing elimination of the filibuster — a belief shared by President Biden. While I am confident that several senators in my party still share that belief, the Senate has not held a debate on the matter.
It is time for the Senate to debate the legislative filibuster, so senators and our constituents can hear and fully consider the concerns and consequences. Hopefully, senators can then focus on crafting policies through open legislative processes and amendments, finding compromises that earn broad support.
A group of 10 Democrats and 11 Republicans that I am helping lead has reached an agreement on an infrastructure investment framework. We are now negotiating with the administration. Bipartisan working groups to which I belong are negotiating how to address our broken immigration system and raise the federal minimum wage. I strongly support bipartisan discussions underway on police reform. The Senate recently passed a critical water infrastructure bill, as well as crucial research, development and manufacturing legislation.
It’s possible that not all of these efforts will succeed — and those that do may not go as far as some of us wish.
But bipartisan policies that stand the test of time could help heal our country’s divisions and strengthen Americans’ confidence that our government is working for all of us and is worthy of all of us.
And as several people, myself included, several of you in the comments, pundits and columnists ranging from Never Trumpers to progressives and everyone in between have all exhaustively noted over the last several months, Sinema's argument about the filibuster as a tool of moderation would be correct if it wasn't for the fact that Republicans are currently using it to block everything the Democrats are trying to do, just as they did during the Obama years.
The second strike against this curious naiveté is the fact that the GOP also refuses to operate in good faith on nearly anything. Mitch McConnell is on record as opposing the entire Biden administration, Sen. John Barasso has openly said that he wants to make Biden a half-term President, burying his agenda. This isn't two opposing sides of democracy, folks, this is one side wants democracy and the other side wants authoritarian dictatorship.
Thirdly, Sinema's "Group of 21" is also a trap, one designed to give both Democrats and Republicans cover to not do anything about the filibuster and keep it as is as a tool of obstruction. The For The People Act is about to be blocked by every single Republican senator. The infrastructure bill isn't being made better by Republican filibuster threats, every time the bill gets smaller and smaller. Sinema is just as guilty as using this bipartisanship as an excuse to pass no legislation, so she doesn't have to answer for failure. Senators rarely do.
A right-wing populist wave in Eastern Europe, lifted by Donald J. Trump’s surprise victory in 2016, has not crashed as a result of his defeat last November. But it has collided with a serious obstacle: Its leaders are not very popular.
After winning elections by railing against widely disliked elites, right-wing populists on Europe’s formerly communist eastern flank, it turns out, are themselves not much liked. That is due in large part to unpopular coronavirus lockdowns, and, like other leaders no matter their political complexion, their stumbling responses to the health crisis. But they are also under pressure from growing fatigue with their divisive tactics.
In Hungary, Prime Minister Viktor Orban is being countered by an uncharacteristically united opposition. In Poland, the deeply conservative government has made an abrupt shift to the left in economic policy to win back support. And in Slovenia, the hard-right governing party of the Trump-loving prime minister is slumping disastrously in the polls.
Slovenia’s leader, Janez Jansa, who made international headlines by congratulating Mr. Trump on his “victory” in November and is a self-declared scourge of liberal, or what he calls communist, elites, is perhaps the most at risk of the region’s unpopular populists.
This has since plunged to 26 percent and Mr. Jansa is so unpopular that allies are jumping ship. Street protests against him have attracted as many as tens of thousands of people, huge turnouts in a normally placid Alpine nation with a population of just two million.
Mr. Jansa has staggered on, narrowly surviving a no-confidence vote in Parliament and a recent impeachment attempt by opposition legislators and defectors from his coalition.
But he has been so weakened “he does not have the power to do anything” other than curse foes on Twitter, said Ziga Turk, a university professor and cabinet minister in an earlier government headed by Mr. Jansa, who quit the governing party in 2019.
An admirer of Hungary’s Mr. Orban, Mr. Jansa has sought to bring the news media to heel, as nationalist governments in Hungary and Poland have largely succeeded in doing, at least with television.
But the only television station that consistently supports him, a bombastic and partly Hungarian-funded outfit called Nova24TV, has so few viewers — less than one percent of the television audience on most days — that it does not even figure in ratings charts.
Slavoj Zizek, a celebrity philosopher and self-declared “moderately conservative Marxist” — one of the few Slovenians well-known outside the country, along with Melania Trump — said it was too early to write off leaders like Mr. Jansa, Mr. Orban and Jaroslaw Kaczynski of Poland, whose three countries he described as a “new axis of evil.”
Nationalist populists, he said, have rarely won popularity contests. Their most important asset, he said, has been the disarray of their opponents, many of whom the philosopher sees as too focused on “excessive moralism” and issues that do not interest most voters instead of addressing economic concerns.
“The impotence of the left is terrifying,” Mr. Zizek said.
The same problem as always: the fractured left can't get it together against the unified right, but the right has become fractured again, and that is giving the left hope.
America barely escaped COVID-19 being an order of magnitude worse as The Former Guy was so worried about the disease becoming his bete noir that he nearly scrapped the federal response entirely and left 100% of the work to dealing with infected Americans to the states. WaPo's new book on the early days of COVID-19 reveals Trump's response was just as horrible as I imagined.
“Testing is killing me!” Trump reportedly exclaimed in a phone call to then-Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar on March 18, yelling so loudly that Azar’s aides overheard every word. “I’m going to lose the election because of testing! What idiot had the federal government do testing?”
“Uh, do you mean Jared?” Azar responded, citing the president’s senior adviser and son-in-law, Jared Kushner. Just five days earlier, Kushner had vowed to take charge of a national testing strategy with the help of the private sector, Abutaleb and Paletta write.
Trump countered that the U.S. government never should have become involved in testing, arguing with his health secretary over why the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention was seeking to track infections at all. “This was gross incompetence to let CDC develop a test,” Trump reportedly said as he berated Azar.
Public health experts contend it was inadequate testing that allowed the novel coronavirus to spread largely undetected across the United States in early 2020, making contact tracing and isolation all but impossible in the early days of the outbreak and fueling the first staggering wave of infections, hospitalizations and deaths.
Trump’s rages frequently distracted senior officials and slowed the national response, the authors found, with the president touting his hunches and eventually turning to handpicked advisers including the radiologist Scott Atlas, who had no infectious-disease or public health experience. But the book also depicts the president as ineffectual and out of touch while his health and national security officials tried to manage the worsening outbreak.
Despite his famous reality TV catchphrase “You’re fired,” Trump proved markedly ineffective at removing staffers during the pandemic, Abutaleb and Paletta write, boxed in by deputies who worried about political fallout and the implications of undermining public health.
For instance, Trump repeatedly told his aides in February to fire a senior State Department official who allowed 14 coronavirus-infected Americans on the Diamond Princess cruise ship to return home. The decision “doubles my numbers overnight,” the president complained to Azar, as the number of official U.S. coronavirus cases rose to 28.
But senior officials balked at firing the diplomat, and Trump and then-acting White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney eventually “gave up,” Abutaleb and Paletta write, adding that the official’s decision to bring the sick Americans back to the United States may have saved their lives, given there were no later flights they could take.
Trump also would call for firing Robert Kadlec, the HHS emergency preparedness chief who signed off on the Diamond Princess evacuation. Later, he would push to replace Food and Drug Administration Commissioner Stephen Hahn when the agency chief refused to expedite vaccine approvals before the election and deferred to career FDA officials instead. Both men would stay on for the duration of Trump’s presidency, along with Anthony S. Fauci — the longtime infectious-disease expert who became a top target of Trump and his allies but whose public popularity helped insulate him. Rather than fire Fauci, White House officials increasingly tuned out the advice from him and other top health officials, the book says, with Trump instead leaning on Kushner, an array of economic advisers and other trusted allies who lacked infectious-disease expertise.
Trump’s top deputies adopted a similar strategy of issuing threats or isolating their rivals, undermining efforts to manage the outbreak, Abutaleb and Paletta write.
Kadlec, who had overseen the purchase of 600 million masks, took the plan in late March to Kushner — who exploded in anger, throwing his pen against the wall in frustration when he learned the masks would not arrive until June. “You f---ing moron,” Kushner reportedly said. “We’ll all be dead by June.”
Mark Meadows, whom Trump abruptly installed as White House chief of staff with little warning to Mulvaney, also berated Kadlec as the federal government struggled to distribute a new antiviral treatment called remdesivir, whose use the FDA had just authorized.
“I’m going to fire your a-- if you can’t fix this!” Meadows reportedly yelled at Kadlec in a surprise phone call as the remdesivir rollout sputtered when scarce supplies were wrongly delivered to hospitals without eligible patients or appropriate refrigeration and the White House’s hopes for positive headlines slipped away.
“That was what the response had turned into: a toxic environment in which no matter where you turned, someone was ready to rip your head off or threatening to fire you,” Abutaleb and Paletta write.
I know the term "kakistocracy" gets tossed around a lot when referring to the Trump regime, government by the least suitable individuals, and yet here we are with reams and mountains and terabytes of evidence affirming that for four years we trudged through that flaming manure pile and we barely made it out as a democratic nation.
And notice that all the major Trump villains were present: Jared Kushner, Mark Meadows, Mick Mulvaney. The worst possible chief executive hired the worst possible people to run the show.
Last month, I texted Tucker Carlson to ask him a question that was on my mind: “Did you get vaccinated?”
“When was the last time you had sex with your wife and in what position?” he replied. “We can trade intimate details.”
Then we argued back and forth about vaccines, and he ended the conversation with a friendly invitation to return to his show. “Always a good time.”
One question you may be asking, if you are a New York Times reader, is: Why are you exchanging texts with Tucker Carlson, the Fox News host who recently described the media at large as “cringing animals who are not worthy of respect”?
And if you are a Tucker Carlson viewer, you may also be asking: How can the guy who tells you every night that the media is lying be texting with the enemy?
The answer is one of Washington’s open secrets. Mr. Carlson, a proud traitor to the elite political class, spends his time when he’s not denouncing the liberal media trading gossip with them. He’s the go-to guy for sometimes-unflattering stories about Donald J. Trump and for coverage of the internal politics of Fox News (not to mention stories about Mr. Carlson himself). I won’t talk here about any off-the-record conversations I may have had with him. But 16 other journalists (none from The Times; it would put my colleagues in a weird position if I asked them) told me on background that he has been, as three of them put it, “a great source.”
“In Trump’s Washington, Tucker Carlson is a primary supersecret source,” the media writer and Trump chronicler Michael Wolff writes in his forthcoming collection of essays, “Too Famous.” Mr. Wolff, who thanked Mr. Carlson in the acknowledgments of his 2018 book, “Fire and Fury,” explained, “I know this because I know what he has told me, and I can track his exquisite, too-good-not-to-be-true gossip through unsourced reports and as it often emerges into accepted wisdom.”
Mr. Carlson was particularly well positioned to be a source about the Trump administration. His Fox platform, where in May he had a nightly average of three million viewers, made him someone who mattered to Mr. Trump, a close follower of television ratings. He has a former reporter’s eye for detail and anecdote, and his observations can be detected in the lurid tales of Mr. Trump’s chaotic court and Fox’s own tumultuous internal politics.
A coming book by the Wall Street Journal reporter Michael Bender, “Frankly, We Did Win This Election: The Inside Story of How Trump Lost,” includes a moment in which Mr. Carlson sends Mr. Trump’s calls to voice mail after the first presidential debate last fall, when he was criticized for repeatedly interrupting Joe Biden. When Mr. Trump finally reaches the Fox host, the book describes, verbatim, an exchange between the two men that casts Mr. Carlson in a flattering light. (“Everyone says I did a good job,” Mr. Trump tells Mr. Carlson. “I don’t know who told you that was good,” Mr. Carlson says. “It was not good.”) Mr. Bender declined to comment on the sourcing that allowed him to so precisely reconstruct a conversation between the two men.
And Brian Stelter, the host of the CNN program “Reliable Sources,” told me that “you can see Tucker’s fingerprints all over the hardcover” edition of his 2020 book “Hoax,” which excoriates Fox News for amplifying Mr. Trump’s falsehoods. He said that he “couldn’t stomach” talking to Mr. Carlson, who has grown ever more hard-line, for the updated paperback version that was just released.
Mr. Carlson was born to a world of insiders and story shapers, and makes no secret of it. His father was a reporter in Los Angeles and San Diego before Ronald Reagan appointed him director of the Voice of America, and the son grew up with a generation of elite Washington journalists. “I’ve always lived around people who are wielding authority, around the ruling class,” he said in a 2018 interview. A former New York Observer media writer, Sridhar Pappu, recalled to me that when he first traveled to Washington to cover the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner in the early 2000s, it was Mr. Carlson who asked him, “Do you have an invitation to Tammy’s?” referring to the annual brunch for media insiders co-hosted by Tammy Haddad, the well-connected former MSNBC producer.
Mr. Carlson has said he turned against his fellow elites after the 2008 financial crisis. His political shift also transformed his long journeyman’s career as a magazine writer and MSNBC conservative, and made him Fox’s leading tribune of the pro-Trump masses. But his decades of Washington relationships have produced a tiresome conversation among Mr. Carlson’s old friends about what he really stands for, whether he’s really a racist or whether he cynically plays one on TV. Who knows, and what does it matter anyway? Mr. Carlson’s recent fixations include suggesting that the Jan. 6 Capitol insurrection was, in fact, a provocation staged by the F.B.I. and that making children wear masks is abuse. The Anti-Defamation League recently called for him to be fired from Fox News for warning that Democrats are plotting to “replace” the current electorate with “more obedient voters, from the third world.” The Pentagon rebuked him for a sexist riff on women in the military.
And then there are his stated views on the media. “I just can’t overstate how disgusted I am,” he told the Fox-owned sports media site Outkick in April. “The media is basically Praetorian Guard for the ruling class, the bodyguards for Jeff Bezos. That’s the opposite of what we should have. I really hate them for it, I’ll be honest.”
The answer of course is "since nobody really knows what Carlson is thinking, and that he's just a media cypher, does it matter when he's here to play a role, and that he plays it better than anyone else?"
That's letting him off too easily, but the media ecosystem isn't meant to punish obvious assholes like Carlson. He's played the game expertly and he continues being handsomely rewarded for doing so. The point is to hate the guy, but to recognize that he runs his little sick high school clique.
Even with the Biden Administration adults in charge and Democrats in control on Congress (barely), there remains an increasingly crumbling global economy imperiling the world, rising nationalism and deadly racism across Europe and Asia, a seemingly endless war against terror, a federal government nobody trusts or believes in, global climate change putting us on the brink of destruction and a Village media that barely does its job on even the best day.
Needless to say there's a lot of Stupid out there when we need solutions. Dangerous levels of Stupid.
Into the fray, dear Reader. Tray tables, crash helmets, arms inside blog at all times.
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