Our Little White Supremacist Domestic Terrorism Problem, Con't

More indispensable reporting from The Guardian's Hugo Lowell on the ongoing January 6th prosecutions of white supremacist domestic terrorists like the Oath Keepers, with the latest revelation that the group's leader, Stewart Rhodes, begged the Trump regime to put the group in direct contact with Trump himself in order to coordinate stopping the peaceful transfer of power on January 6th.

Stewart Rhodes, the Oath Keepers militia group leader charged with seditious conspiracy over the January 6 attack on the Capitol, tried to get a Donald Trump confidant to ask the former US president to allow his group to forcibly stop the peaceful transfer of power, the Justice Department has alleged in court papers.

The previously unknown phone call with the unidentified individual appears to indicate the Oath Keepers had contacts with at least one person close enough to Trump that Rhodes believed the individual would be a good person to consult with his request.

Once the Oath Keepers finished storming the Capitol, Rhodes gathered the Oath Keepers leadership around 5pm and walked down a few blocks to the Phoenix Park hotel in Washington DC, the Justice Department said on Wednesday in a statement of offense against Oath Keepers member William Wilson.

The group then huddled in a private suite, the Justice Department said, where Rhodes called an unidentified person on speakerphone and pressed the person to get Trump to authorize them to stop the transfer of power after the Capitol attack had failed to do so.

“Wilson heard Rhodes repeatedly implore the individual to tell President Trump to call upon groups like the Oath Keepers to forcibly oppose the transfer of power,” the document said. “This individual denied Rhodes’s request to speak directly with President Trump.”

The extraordinary phone call indicates that Rhodes believed two important points: first, that he was close enough to the Trump confidant that he could openly discuss such a request, and second, that the confidant was close enough to Trump to be able to pass on the message.

Rhodes and his attorney were not immediately able to be reached for comment.

The previously unknown phone call surfaced on Wednesday in charging documents against Wilson, the leader of the North Carolina chapter of the Oath Keepers, who pleaded guilty to seditious conspiracy and obstruction of an official proceeding as part of a plea agreement.

The statement of offense said that Wilson was involved in efforts to prepare for January 6 with the national leadership of the Oath Keepers, and how Rhodes added Wilson to the “DC OP: Jan 6 21” group chat on the encrypted Signal messaging app.

“Rhodes, Wilson, and co-conspirators used this Signal group chat and others to plan for January 6, 2021,” the Justice Department said.

On the morning of the Capitol attack, Rhodes confirmed on the group chat that they had several well equipped QRFs outside DC – a reference to quick reaction forces, that the government said it believes were on standby to deploy to the Capitol with guns and ammunition.

Around 2.34pm, the Justice Department said, Wilson stormed into the Capitol through the upper West Terrace doors as one of the first co-conspirators to breach the building, and by 2.38pm, was helping to pry open the doors to the rotunda from the inside.

The seditious conspiracy charge against Wilson is the latest in a string of recent such indictments. In January, Rhodes and 10 other Oath Keepers were charged with seditious conspiracy – an offense that carries up to 20 years in federal prison.

 

The smart money is that the "unnamed individual" is Mark Meadows.

 

The smarter money is that it's Roger Stone.

 

The brilliant, gifted, post-grad doctorate money is on the DoJ leaving the individual unnamed in order to charge them later. 

We'll see.

We Don't Need No Education, Con't

I do so hate being right about things like this.

Gov. Greg Abbott said Wednesday that Texas would consider challenging a 1982 U.S. Supreme Court decision requiring states to offer free public education to all children, including those of undocumented immigrants.

"Texas already long ago sued the federal government about having to incur the costs of the education program, in a case called Plyler versus Doe," Abbott said, speaking during an appearance on the Joe Pags show, a conservative radio talk show. "And the Supreme Court ruled against us on the issue. ... I think we will resurrect that case and challenge this issue again, because the expenses are extraordinary and the times are different than when Plyler versus Doe was issued many decades ago."

The remarks came days after a leaked draft of a forthcoming U.S. Supreme Court opinion revealed that a majority of justices are poised to revoke Roe v. Wade, the landmark case establishing the right to abortion.

More:Abortion would be illegal in Texas if the Supreme Court overturns Roe v. Wade

Although the court has yet to officially issue a ruling in the case, civil rights advocates have raised concerns that the court's conservative majority might be amenable to other attempts to overturn established precedent, including those related to LGBTQ rights and interracial marriage.

Abbott raised the possibility of challenging the ruling on education during a discussion about border security, after Pagliarulo asked whether the state could take steps to reduce the "burden" of educating the children of undocumented migrants living in Texas.

There are of course of possible outcomes from this when it gets to SCOTUS just in time for the 2024 election season, I figure:

 

1. SCOTUS doesn't touch it and refuses to grant cert,
2. SCOTUS rules to uphold Plyler in its entirely,
3. SCOTUS upholds Plyler but allows states to restrict funding for undocumented kids,
4. SCOTUS says Texas doesn't have to provide education for undocumented kids but does for citizens,
5. SCOTUS Texas doesn't have to provide education for kids at all and states can decide on it,
6. SCOTUS says states can decide what services, if any, for undocumented people at all.

 

One and two, well. Probably not. Abbott wouldn't be doing this or even bringing this up if he didn't have a good chance at winning this, because then it becomes a huge landmine for his 2024 hopes (Although one allows him to blame the court and come back for another bite at the apple.) 

 

Numbers 3, 4, 5, under the Alito Roe logic, then becomes an opinion where Alito/Thomas/Evil is begging for a case to then get to 6. 

And six, well, six is the end of a lot of things involving undocumented folk being here at all.

Point is, anyone who thought Repu9blicans would stop at Roe clearly has not been paying attention to the last, I dunno, 40? years. Alito's opinion now allows states like Texas and Florida to get a head start on legal bullshit they want to see gone in the next term or two, yet another point in the column of "It was leaked by the right."

We'll see, as always.

Last Call For The Cruelty Is The Point, Con't

Adam Serwer reminds us once again, that with Justice Alito and the Republican appointees on the Roberts Court and Alito's leaked opinion overturning Roe, the cruelty is absolutely the point.

Alito claims to be sweeping away one of the great unjust Supreme Court precedents, such as Dred Scott v. Sanford, which held that Black people had no rights white men were bound to respect, or Plessy v. Ferguson, which upheld racial segregation. But in truth, Alito is employing the logic of Plessy, allowing the states to violate the individual rights of their residents in any way their legislatures deem “reasonable,” as the opinion in Plessy put it. Homer Plessy’s argument was that the segregation law violated his Fourteenth Amendment rights, and that those rights should not be subject to a popularity contest in every state in the union; what Alito describes as a “restrictive regime” of constitutional protection for abortion rights is the kind of safe harbor Plessy himself sought.

In Plessy, Justice Henry Billings Brown held that Louisiana’s segregation law, as far as the Fourteenth Amendment was concerned, “reduces itself to the question whether the statute of Louisiana is a reasonable regulation, and, with respect to this, there must necessarily be a large discretion on the part of the legislature.” Alito has now applied this same logic to abortion—but not just abortion—arguing that in the future, courts should defer to state legislatures “even when the laws at issue concern matters of great social significance and moral substance.” There’s no doubt that the Louisiana legislature felt the 1890 Separate Car Act was such an issue.

“Plessy is, at its absolute core, a states’-rights case, in which the Court envisioned a notion of federalism so weak, so toothless, so bereft of substance that the federal government had no legitimate role in protecting Black people from states imposing racial segregation upon them,” Aderson Francois, a law professor at Georgetown University, told me. “This draft does the same thing: It envisions a notion of federalism so weak, so toothless, so bereft of substance that the federal government has no legitimate role in protecting women from states imposing forced births upon them.”

The implications of this ruling are therefore tremendous. Notwithstanding the reality that being a woman does not mean being pro-abortion-rights, all over the world the right to decide when and whether to give birth is tied to the political, social, and economic rights of women as individuals. That right is likely to be severely curtailed or to vanish entirely in at least 26 states if this decision takes effect. If the draft becomes the Court’s decision, however, it would have implications for more than just abortion. In the U.S., the rights of many marginalized groups are tied to the legal precedents established in the fight for abortion rights. This opinion, if adopted, provides a path to nullifying those rights one by one.

“The majority can believe that it’s only eviscerating a right to abortion in this draft,” Stephen Vladeck, a law professor at the University of Texas at Austin, told me, “but the means by which it does so would open the door to similar attacks on other unenumerated rights, both directly, by attacking the underpinnings of those doctrines, and indirectly, by setting a precedent for such an attack.”

Aside from rights specifically mentioned in the text of the Constitution, Alito argues, only those rights “deeply rooted in the nation’s history in tradition” deserve its protections. This is as arbitrary as it is lawless. Alito is saying there is no freedom from state coercion that conservatives cannot strip away if conservatives find that freedom personally distasteful. The rights of heterosexual married couples to obtain contraception, or of LGBTQ people to be free from discrimination, are obvious targets. But other rights that Americans now take for granted could easily be excluded by this capricious reasoning.

 

Understand that if Alito's opinion holds, everything you take for granted as a right guaranteed by America is now solely up to the state legislature where you live, and that state legislature can take that right away. 

This was always the long game, as I've said before. State legislatures gerrymandered into permanent Republican control with super-majority margins to override vetoes from governors means the civil rights era all goes away.

Unless something radical changes, that is our destination by the end of the decade, if not the middle.

The cruelty, to women, to LGTBQ+ folks, to immigrants, to Black folk, to Latinos, to Asian and Pacific Islander folks, to Muslims and Jews, to anyone who is not a straight white Christian male, is the damn point.

And that cruelty will fall like summer rain.

Or, well, to be more accurate, like blood.

Ryan Versus The Hillbilly Hypocrite

 I've still not forgotten how Ohio Rep. Tim Ryan went after Nancy Pelosi with the intent of replacing her as Speaker and got his ass so thoroughly handed to him that he had to put out his palms to sit down.

But here we are in 2022 and Ohio's US Senate race is Ryan versus JD Vance, and Ryan wasted no time going after Hillbilly Hypocrite.

JD Vance doesn’t care about Ohioans and he thinks our country is a joke.

Now he wants to represent us in the Senate? You’ve got to be kidding. pic.twitter.com/UM7A5nL3al

— Tim Ryan (@TimRyan) May 4, 2022

 

Ryan it seems actually has learned his lesson, and remembers which team he actually works for. Vance is an absolute clown and this is a winnable seat for the Dems now. You'd better believe Trump will be all over this race, and that's exactly what Ryan needs in order to turn out voters to remind them of what the other side actually represents.

Oh yeah, and Roe v. Wade is dead and a number of other civil rights are going down, so suddenly flipping this Senate seat because an absolute priority.

Give to Ryan here.

 

 

 

 

The Return Of The Time Turner

Looks like OH-11 Rep. Shontel Brown has more than made her case to run again in November to Cleveland voters as she handed primary challenger and Bernout Nina Turner a far more embarrassing loss than in last August.

Rep. Shontel Brown, D-Ohio, won a rematch Tuesday against Nina Turner, a progressive activist and former state senator who is known nationally for her work on Sen. Bernie Sanders’ Democratic presidential campaigns, NBC News projects.

Brown was leading 63.4 percent to 36.6 percent, with 53 percent of precincts reporting at 10:32 p.m. ET.

Brown beat Turner by 5.5 percentage points in a crowded special primary last summer and then easily won the vacant seat in Ohio’s overwhelmingly Democratic 11th Congressional District in the general election. Turner had hoped that new district boundaries, which now include more of Cleveland and the liberal bordering suburb of Lakewood, would be friendlier turf for her.

This year’s battle was quieter, lacking the national establishment-vs.-progressive intrigue that Brown and Turner played into the first time. Brown, who chairs the Cuyahoga County Democratic Party, aligned herself closely with President Joe Biden and Housing and Urban Development Secretary Marcia Fudge, the district’s former representative, whose appointment to the Cabinet opened the seat. Turner co-chaired Sanders’ 2020 campaign against Biden and was on record making an obscene comment about the future president.

After losing last year, Turner decried the influx of what she called “evil money” into the race — a reference to spending by outside organizations and pro-Israel groups that saw Brown as a more reliable ally. Some Jewish leaders found the remark to play into antisemitic stereotypes. 

 

So Turner went from a 5.5 percent loss to a 25+ point loss. Yes, it sure was a great idea to waste all that money going after a primary race for a party that Turner said five years ago that she wanted no part of anymore, wasn't it?

Turner immediately blamed "outside money" for her loss, after fundraising nationally for...outside money using endorsements from Bernie and AOC. Smart!

Anyway, she announced her 2024 effort to primary Joe Biden/run against Kamala Harris which should go even better for her next time.

Right?

Last Call For The Wolf Of Lie Street, Con't

Yes, former Trump DHS Acting Secretary Chad Wolf doctored the agency's intel report on Russian interference in the 2016 election on behalf of Donald Trump.

 

Former Homeland Security Acting Secretary Chad Wolf changed and delayed an intelligence report detailing Russian interference in the 2020 U.S. presidential election, according to a new review by the Department of Homeland Security's (DHS) top watchdog.

The decision to deviate from DHS standard review procedures "rais[ed] objectivity concerns," according to the report, and led to the perception that unorthodox interference by a top DHS official was intended to help Donald Trump's reelection bid.

The Office of the Inspector General (OIG) at DHS, through its Office of Intelligence and Analysis (I&A), released the redacted results of its investigation into Russian interference in the election — "DHS Actions Related to an I&A Intelligence Product Deviated from Standard Procedures" — on Tuesday.

 

Changed and delayed, on purpose, to protect Trump.

Tuesday's report found that, after months of delay, analysts inserted a "tone box" – a highlighted section of text – detailing efforts by Chinese and Iranian influence actors to amplify unsubstantiated narratives questioning the mental health of former President Donald Trump.

When watchdog investigators probed the CYMC manager on why the additional material – outside the scope of the initial report – was added, the DHS officials contradicted themselves.

"He told us it was a feature intended to draw a contrast between the actions of Russia and those of Iran and China, but also described the tone box as a 'blunting feature' meant to balance the product. When asked whether intelligence products require balancing, he said the addition of the tone box was not politicization, yet also said it showed I & A's political savviness, as the state and local customers of their products tended to be political," the OIG report reads.

The analytic ombudsman from I & A flagged serious concerns with the September version of the intelligence product, noting in his review that "problems with the piece undermine the original message and give the perception of a lack of objectivity or an attempt at political influence."

That assessment also suggested the addition of Iran and China "[seem] to almost avoid the main message that is made explicit in the key judgment — that Russian influence actors are targeting the Democratic candidates in 2020… The tone box on Iran/China seemingly unrelated to the main message are all areas that could be seen as 'being political,' whether intentional or not," the assessment read.

DHS' top watchdog determined that DHS deviated from its own internal requirements for editing and disseminating the report to state and local partners.

"Since January 2021, the [Office of Intelligence and Analysis] has renewed its commitment to continually assess the policies, guidelines and processes that govern the review and dissemination of its finished intelligence products, including to identity and implement and necessary improvements," wrote John Cohen, senior official performing the duties of the under secretary for the office, to Joseph Cuffari, DHS inspector general, in a memo responding to the report.

Cohen has since left his role, which is currently being filled by Melissa Smislova. President Biden's nominee to lead the office, Kenneth Wainstein, is awaiting Senate confirmation.

"This troubling report raises concerns over the prior Administration's inappropriate interference in the review and clearance process for an intelligence product," a DHS spokesperson said in a statement to CBS News. "Under the Biden-Harris Administration and the leadership of Secretary Mayorkas, the Department of Homeland Security is focused on ensuring the safety and security of communities across our country, while conducting our work with integrity and in ways that protect privacy, civil rights, and civil liberties. Since January 2021, DHS has renewed its commitment to providing accurate, timely, and actionable information and intelligence, free from politicization and bias, to the public and our partners across every level of government, in the private sector, and local communities."

Describing its methodology, the DHS watchdog wrote that Wolf requested an interview in writing rather than orally or in-person. According to the report, DHS Senior Official Performing the Duties of the Deputy Secretary Ken Cuccinelli "did not provide any responses despite agreeing to do so."

Wolf resigned his post in January 2021, after the Government Accountability Office and several federal judges deemed that he had served illegally, a judgment that he disputes.

 

If you think anything's going to happen to Wolf, well, I have news for you.

Chad Wolf, the former acting secretary of Homeland Security in the Trump administration, is launching a consulting firm to provide companies, NGOs and government agencies with advice on homeland and national security matters.

The new firm is called Wolf Global Advisors, and Wolf is launching it with three former other senior Trump DHS officials: former acting chief of staff Scott Erickson, former deputy chief of staff Tyler Houlton and legislative affairs director Beth Spivey.

“During my time at DHS, I came to know and came to realize that a number of organizations, whether they’re companies or non-profits really struggle with assessing risk and security issues facing their respective organizations,” Wolf said in an interview. “Others want to better understand the department, whether they’re regulated by the department, or perhaps they have technology or services to help the department better fulfill their mission.”

Wolf said he already has a few clients signed up, but declined to name them unless one of the principals at the firm has to register as a lobbyist for them. He said he could potentially work with foreign governments as well, but won’t do any work that would require him or his firm to register under the Foreign Agents Registration Act at this time.

 

Just two months after his resignation, he had his own consulting fir, and he's doing rather well for himself on the Wingnut Gravy Train too.

Somebody needs to catch this Bad Wolf, I think.

 

Welcome To Post-Roe America

Senate Republicans are already ready to go on the end of Roe.

 

The Senate Republicans' campaign arm is circulating a three-page memo, obtained by Axios, laying out how candidates and lawmakers can maximize their messaging on the U.S. Supreme Court's leaked draft decision to overturn Roe v. Wade.

Why it matters: The National Republican Senatorial Committee (NRSC) recognizes the decision will have major implications in this fall's midterms and the 2024 presidential race. The memo is its attempt to have its members speak to voters with a unified voice."Be the compassionate, consensus-builder on abortion policy. ... While people have many different views on abortion policy, Americans are compassionate people who want to welcome every new baby into the world," it says.

"Expose the Democrats for the extreme views they hold," the document says, arguing, "Joe Biden and the Democrats have extreme and radical views on abortion that are outside of the mainstream of most Americans."

"Forcefully refute Democrat lies regarding GOP positions on abortion and women's health care," it adds, saying Republicans do not want to take away contraception, mammograms and female health care or throw doctors and women in jail.

 

The laughable part is a number of states have already done this. In a dozen states, if Roe goes, doctors will face prison time and loss of license if they perform abortions. Texas's vile bounty law openly encourages people to rat out women who get abortions in order to collect money from the state and to then prosecute these women.

 

These laws already exist.

 

Between the lines: The document includes sample language for anti-abortion ads."Sarah Republican," making an ad against "John Democrat," should say, "Here’s my view — I am pro-life, but, in reality, forget about the political labels, all of us are in favor of life." 

An NRSC official told Axios the memo is "based on national polling and focus groups the NRSC has conducted across the country over the last few months.

 

Yes, lying and gaslighting are poll-tested and voter-approved! 

Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee spokesperson Nora Keefe told Axios: “Senate Republicans’ candidates have spent months campaigning on overturning Roe v. Wade — and now this election will determine whether the GOP is able to put in place new, cruel and punishing restrictions.” 

”No memo can change the fact that Republicans are grossly out of step with the voters that will decide the 2022 election, and it will lead their campaigns to defeat."

 

Sadly, the notion that white women will vote to punish Republicans for overturning Roe is also gaslighting.  They will do what their husbands, pastors, mothers, aunts and other authority figures tell them and they will vote to be on the "winning" team.

"Don't worry hon, you'll never have to make this choice."

But a third of women and pregnant folk will.

The Road To Gilead: The Final Steps

A shocking leak of what Team WIN THE MORNING says is the initial draft of Justice Alito's preliminary opinion ending Roe and Casey and if it's true, not only is it alarmingly unprecedented but the beginning of the final steps to Gilead.

The Supreme Court has voted to strike down the landmark Roe v. Wade decision, according to an initial draft majority opinion written by Justice Samuel Alito circulated inside the court and obtained by POLITICO.

The draft opinion is a full-throated, unflinching repudiation of the 1973 decision which guaranteed federal constitutional protections of abortion rights and a subsequent 1992 decision – Planned Parenthood v. Casey – that largely maintained the right. “Roe was egregiously wrong from the start,” Alito writes.

“We hold that Roe and Casey must be overruled,” he writes in the document, labeled as the “Opinion of the Court.” “It is time to heed the Constitution and return the issue of abortion to the people’s elected representatives.”

Deliberations on controversial cases have in the past been fluid. Justices can and sometimes do change their votes as draft opinions circulate and major decisions can be subject to multiple drafts and vote-trading, sometimes until just days before a decision is unveiled. The court’s holding will not be final until it is published, likely in the next two months.

The immediate impact of the ruling as drafted in February would be to end a half-century guarantee of federal constitutional protection of abortion rights and allow each state to decide whether to restrict or ban abortion. It’s unclear if there have been subsequent changes to the draft.

No draft decision in the modern history of the court has been disclosed publicly while a case was still pending. The unprecedented revelation is bound to intensify the debate over what was already the most controversial case on the docket this term.

The draft opinion offers an extraordinary window into the justices’ deliberations in one of the most consequential cases before the court in the last five decades. Some court-watchers predicted that the conservative majority would slice away at abortion rights without flatly overturning a 49-year-old precedent. The draft shows that the court is looking to reject Roe’s logic and legal protections.

A person familiar with the court’s deliberations said that four of the other Republican-appointed justices – Clarence Thomas, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett – had voted with Alito in the conference held among the justices after hearing oral arguments in December, and that line-up remains unchanged as of this week.

The three Democratic-appointed justices – Stephen Breyer, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan – are working on one or more dissents, according to the person. How Chief Justice John Roberts will ultimately vote, and whether he will join an already written opinion or draft his own, is unclear.

The document, labeled as a first draft of the majority opinion, includes a notation that it was circulated among the justices on Feb. 10. If the Alito draft is adopted, it would rule in favor of Mississippi in the closely watched case over that state’s attempt to ban most abortions after 15 weeks of pregnancy.

A Supreme Court spokesperson declined to comment or make another representative of the court available to answer questions about the draft document.

POLITICO received a copy of the draft opinion from a person familiar with the court’s proceedings in the Mississippi case along with other details supporting the authenticity of the document. The draft opinion runs 98 pages, including a 31-page appendix of historical state abortion laws. The document is replete with citations to previous court decisions, books and other authorities, and includes 118 footnotes. The appearances and timing of this draft are consistent with court practice.

 

Whoever leaked this is preparing the country for the end of legalized abortion in half the states, and the beginning of an era where your rights as an American are solely determined by where you live here. That state legislatures now control your basic human rights, and that those rights will differ from state to state, well that's not entirely new, but a total repudiation of Roe means everything else is on the table for decimation: civil rights, voting rights, marriage equality, sodomy laws, contraception...

Everything.

As I said yesterday, if the prospect of losing your rights as a human depending on which state you live in isn't enough to get you to vote, nothing will, and we've lost.

Better vote, better fight, better show up, or it's ballgame, folks.

You can see the Gilead border sign up the road.

We're almost there.

The Road To Gilead, Con't

Senate Republicans, anticipating the end of Roe v Wade by July 4th, want to introduce a national abortion ban to help them win Congress back in November.

Leading antiabortion groups and their allies in Congress have been meeting behind the scenes to plan a national strategy that would kick in if the Supreme Court rolls back abortion rights this summer, including a push for a strict nationwide ban on the procedure if Republicans retake power in Washington.

The effort, activists say, is designed to bring a fight that has been playing out largely in the courts and state legislatures to the national political stage — rallying conservatives around the issue in the midterms and pressuring potential 2024 GOP presidential candidates to take a stand.

The discussions reflect what activists describe as an emerging consensus in some corners of the antiabortion movement to push for hard-line measures that will truly end a practice they see as murder while rejecting any proposals seen as half-measures.

Activists say their confidence stems from progress on two fronts: At the Supreme Court, a conservative majority appears ready to weaken or overturn the Roe v. Wade decision that has protected abortion rights for nearly 50 years. And activists argue that in Texas, Republicans have paid no apparent political price for banning abortion after cardiac activity is detected, around six weeks of pregnancy.

While a number of states have recently approved laws to ban abortion after 15 weeks of pregnancy — the limit established in the Mississippi legislation at the heart of the case pending before the high court — some activists and Republican lawmakers now say those laws are not ambitious enough for the next phase of the antiabortion movement. Instead, they now see the six-week limit — which they call “heartbeat” legislation — as the preferred strategy because it would prevent far more abortions.

“This is a whole new ballgame,” Kristan Hawkins, president of Students for Life Action, one of the country’s biggest antiabortion groups, said in an interview. “The 50 years of standing at the Supreme Court’s door waiting for something to happen is over.”

A group of Republican senators has discussed at multiple meetings the possibility of banning abortion at around six weeks, said Sen. James Lankford of Oklahoma, who was in attendance and said he would support the legislation. Sen. Joni Ernst (R-Iowa) will introduce the legislation in the Senate, according to an antiabortion advocate with knowledge of the discussions who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal strategy. Ernst did not respond to a request for comment.

One top advocate, Marjorie Dannenfelser, president of the antiabortion group Susan B. Anthony List, has spoken privately with 10 possible Republican presidential contenders, including former president Donald Trump, to talk through national antiabortion strategy. Most of them, she said in an interview, assured her they would be supportive of a national ban and would be eager to make that policy a centerpiece of a presidential campaign.

And Students for Life Action, along with nine other prominent antiabortion groups, plans to send a letter to every Republican member of Congress on Monday pushing them to embrace a “heartbeat bill.” The letter, which the group shared with The Washington Post, argues that a national 15-week ban would not go far enough.

“If we are not focusing on limiting early abortions, we are not really addressing the violence of abortion at all,” Hawkins writes.

 

That's the bad news. The good news is we have time to change course:

A nationwide abortion ban would be extraordinarily difficult to pass, particularly given the need for 60 votes in the Senate to overcome a filibuster under current rules. Such a measure would encounter resistance from nearly all Democrats in addition to a handful of Republicans, who might raise questions about its constitutionality. The Senate is split 50-50, but with a handful of competitive races this year, neither party is expected to attain a filibuster-proof majority.

A strict national ban is also likely to be impossible without an antiabortion Republican president willing to sign it.

Moreover, picking such a fight could ignite liberal activists who would be energized to push back against the prospect of abortion being banned not just in red-state America but Democratic bastions from California to New York. The early years of the Trump administration prompted huge protests, starting with the first Women’s March the day after Trump’s inauguration in 2017 — though it remains unclear whether a rollback of Roe would reignite that energy.

The possibility of a nationwide ban is “terrifying,” said Kelley Robinson, executive director of Planned Parenthood Action Fund, adding that the proposal would be a major motivator for Democrats in the midterm elections.

“By them saying out loud that their goal is to push a nationwide abortion ban, it makes it clear that we have to elect more pro-reproductive health champions on the national level and in the states,” she said.

 

If the very real prospect of SCOTUS striking down Roe/Casey in an election year and making it clear Republicans want to end abortion for everyone doesn't rally Democratic support in November, then we're as good as toast anyway.

The nightmare scenario then becomes a GOP congress where Mitch McConnell eliminates the filibuster completely, passes the ban in the House and Senate, and then attaches it to must-pass legislation so Biden will have to choose to either ban abortion nationwide or shut down the government next year.

They won't have to wait for 2025, in other words.

You can see Gilead in the distance now, and it's getting much closer.

Our Little White Supremacist Domestic Terrorism Problem, Con't

Remember that the seditious conspiracy that Donald Trump formulated in order to overturn President Biden's election didn't just involve white supremacist domestic terrorism groups like the Proud Boys, it involved still-sitting GOP members of Congress that should be tossed from office and into prison. One of those members is GOP Rep Jim Jordan of Ohio.

Rioters who smashed their way into the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, succeeded — at least temporarily — in delaying the certification of Joe Biden’s election to the White House.

Hours before, Rep. Jim Jordan had been trying to achieve the same thing.

Texting with then-White House chief of staff Mark Meadows, a close ally and friend, at nearly midnight on Jan. 5, Jordan offered a legal rationale for what President Donald Trump was publicly demanding — that Vice President Mike Pence, in his ceremonial role presiding over the electoral count, somehow assert the authority to reject electors from Biden-won states.

Pence “should call out all electoral votes that he believes are unconstitutional as no electoral votes at all,” Jordan wrote.

“I have pushed for this,” Meadows replied. “Not sure it is going to happen.”

The text exchange, in an April 22 court filing from the congressional panel investigating the Jan. 6 riot, is in a batch of startling evidence that shows the deep involvement of some House Republicans in Trump’s desperate attempt to stay in power. A review of the evidence finds new details about how, long before the attack on the Capitol unfolded, several GOP lawmakers were participating directly in Trump’s campaign to reverse the results of a free and fair election.

It’s a connection that members of the House Jan. 6 committee are making explicit as they prepare to launch public hearings in June. The Republicans plotting with Trump and the rioters who attacked the Capitol were aligned in their goals, if not the mob’s violent tactics, creating a convergence that nearly upended the nation’s peaceful transfer of power.

“It appears that a significant number of House members and a few senators had more than just a passing role in what went on,” Rep. Bennie Thompson, the Democratic chairman of the Jan. 6 committee, told The Associated Press last week.

Since launching its investigation last summer, the Jan. 6 panel has been slowly gaining new details about what lawmakers said and did in the weeks before the insurrection. Members have asked three GOP lawmakers — Jordan of Ohio, Rep. Scott Perry of Pennsylvania and House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy of California — to testify voluntarily. All have refused. Other lawmakers could be called in the coming days.

So far, the Jan. 6 committee has refrained from issuing subpoenas to lawmakers, fearing the repercussions of such an extraordinary step. But the lack of cooperation from lawmakers hasn’t prevented the panel from obtaining new information about their actions.

The latest court document, submitted in response to a lawsuit from Meadows, contained excerpts from just a handful of the more than 930 interviews the Jan. 6 panel has conducted. It includes information on several high-level meetings nearly a dozen House Republicans attended where Trump’s allies flirted with ways to give him another term.

Among the ideas: naming fake slates of electors in seven swing states, declaring martial law and seizing voting machines.

The efforts started in the weeks after The Associated Press declared Biden president-elect.

In early December 2020, several lawmakers attended a meeting in the White House counsel’s office where attorneys for the president advised them that a plan to put up an alternate slate of electors declaring Trump the winner was not “legally sound.” One lawmaker, Rep. Scott Perry of Pennsylvania, pushed back on that position. So did GOP Reps. Matt Gaetz of Florida and Louie Gohmert of Texas, according to testimony from Cassidy Hutchinson, a former special assistant in the Trump White House.

Despite the warning from the counsel’s office, Trump’s allies moved forward. On Dec. 14, 2020, as rightly chosen Democratic electors in seven states — Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, New Mexico, Nevada, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin — met at their seat of state government to cast their votes, the fake electors gathered as well.

They declared themselves the rightful electors and submitted false Electoral College certificates declaring Trump the true winner of the presidential election in their states.

Those certificates from the “alternate electors” were then sent to Congress, where they were ignored.

The majority of the lawmakers have since denied their involvement in these efforts.

Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia testified in a hearing in April that she does not recall conversations she had with the White House or the texts she sent to Meadows about Trump invoking martial law.

Gohmert told AP he also does not recall being involved and that he is not sure he could be helpful to the committee’s investigation. Rep. Jody Hice of Georgia played down his actions, saying it is routine for members of the president’s party to be going in and out of the White House to speak about a number of topics. Hice is now running for secretary of state in Georgia, a position responsible for the state’s elections.

Rep. Andy Biggs of Arizona didn’t deny his public efforts to challenge the election results but called recent reports about his deep involvement untrue.

In a statement Saturday, Rep. Paul Gosar of Arizona reiterated his “serious” concerns about the 2020 election. “Discussions about the Electoral Count Act were appropriate, necessary and warranted,” he added.

Requests for comment from the other lawmakers were not immediately returned.

 

Understand that these fraudulent electors were in violation of the law, and understand that multiple GOP lawmakers were in contact with these crooks in a conspiracy to use their fraudulent slate of electors to elect Trump.

 

Understand this only failed because VP Mike Pence wouldn't go along with it.  If Pence had chosen to cooperate, we'd still have a Constitutional crisis on our hands, but Trump would still be in the WHite House most likely.

Last Call For The Return Of Nerd Prom

Donald Trump famously canceled the White House Correspondents' Association Dinner at the White House because of his equally famous inability to take a joke at his expense, and then COVID sank the affair for another two years. The WHCA finally held their dinner over the weekend and President Biden and headliner Trevor Noah got in some epic burns of the Village Idiots.

The White House press corps’ annual gala returned Saturday night along with the roasting of Washington, the journalists who cover it and the man at the helm: President Biden.

The White House Correspondents’ Assn. dinner, sidelined by the pandemic in 2020 and 2021, featured Biden as the first president in six years to accept an invitation. President Trump shunned the event while in office.

“Just imagine if my predecessor came to this dinner this year,” Biden told an audience of 2,600, among them journalists, government officials and celebrities. “Now that would really have been a real coup.”

The president took the opportunity to test out his comedic chops, making light of the criticism he has faced in his 15 months in office while taking aim at his predecessor, the Republican Party and the members of the press.

“I’m really excited to be here tonight with the only group of Americans with a lower approval rating than I have,” Biden said to the Hilton ballroom filled with members of the media.

Biden also made light of the “Let’s Go Brandon” slogan, which has become the right’s stand-in for swearing at the president.

“Republicans seem to support one fella, some guy named Brandon,” Biden said, causing an uproar of laughter among the crowd. “He’s having a really good year. I’m happy for him.”

As far as roasting the GOP, he said, “There’s nothing I can say about the GOP that Kevin McCarthy hasn’t already put on tape.”

He also took a jab at Fox News. “I know there are a lot of questions about whether we should gather here tonight because of COVID. Well, we’re here to show the country that we’re getting through this pandemic. Plus, everyone has to prove they are fully vaccinated and boosted,” Biden said. “Just contact your favorite Fox News reporter. They’re all here. Vaccinated and boosted.”

In addition to speeches from Biden and comedian Trevor Noah, the hours-long event had taped skits from talk show host James Corden, comedian Billy Eichner and the president himself.

“Thank you for having me here,” Noah said to Biden. “And I was a little confused on why me, but then I was told that you get your highest approval ratings when a biracial African guy is standing next to you.”

While the majority of the speech was filled with cutting jabs, Biden did make note of the important role journalism plays in American democracy, especially in the last decade.

“I mean this from the bottom of my heart, that you, the free press, matter more than you ever did in the last century,” he said. “You are the guardians of the truth.”

The dinner had other serious moments, with tributes to pioneer journalists of color, aspiring student reporters and a dedication to the journalists detained, injured or killed during the coverage of the ongoing Russian war in Ukraine. 

 

Noah's closing monologue at the end of the night made it clear how much trouble journalism is across the globe, and how America's local reporters are the backbone to freedom of the press here. It was good to see them getting a major shoutout. Lord knows none of them would rate an invite to Nerd Prom. 

Still, let's not forget that the relationship between the government and the media in 2022 is 100% transactional access, and it's been that way for decades now. It's definitely necessary to poke fun at it, but it's more so to reform it.

Border Line Fascism, Con't

Texas GOP Gov. Greg Abbott sees his path to the White House going over the corpses of women needing abortions and immigrants in a culture war defending white "Christian" ethno-nationalism, and now he's dropping the pretense of war on Brown People and looking to make it official.

For the past year, Mr. Abbott has transformed an unceasing flow of migrants over the border into a potent political message, seizing the role of defending the country from unauthorized migration as he runs for a third term in November. His aggressive posture has done little to stem the tide and also exposed him to fierce criticism that he is using his authority to meddle in a policy area that belongs to the federal government. Still, his efforts to tighten border security and harden Texas’ 1,254-mile frontier have helped Mr. Abbott, a Republican, hold off challenges from his right and made the lawyerly governor into a regular on Fox News.

Now Mr. Abbott is weighing whether to invoke actual war powers to seize much broader state authority on the border. He could do so, advocates inside and outside his administration argue, by officially declaring an “invasion” to comply with a clause in the U.S. Constitution that says states cannot engage in war except when “actually invaded.”

Top lawyers for Mr. Abbott and for the Texas attorney general, Ken Paxton, met this month to debate the move, which would put the state in a head-on collision with the federal government by allowing state police to arrest and deport migrants, according to two people familiar with the discussions. Mr. Abbott says he remains open to the approach, but he has expressed concern about unintended consequences.

“If we do use this strategy, it could expose law enforcement in the state of Texas to being prosecuted,” Mr. Abbott said during a recent news conference. But, he added: “Is it something we’re looking into? Yes.”

Already, the governor has mobilized thousands of National Guard troops to sit at border posts, and ordered safety inspections of trucks coming from Mexico, disrupting international trade. He has overseen construction of 20 miles of new border fencing, repurposed certain state prisons to hold migrants charged with trespassing, poured money into border towns for law enforcement and paid for buses to take willing migrants from Texas to Washington, D.C.

The Biden administration has been dismissive of Mr. Abbott’s actions on the border, at times calling them a “political stunt,” and has not taken steps to intervene, despite calls from Texas Democrats to do so. Any attempt by Texas to enforce federal immigration laws would almost certainly end up in court.

Even as Mr. Abbott has directed more than $3 billion to border security, and approved an additional $500 million on Friday, he has little to show for it beyond drug seizures and arrest figures. The overlapping state actions have not held back the rush of arrivals.

Federal agents recorded nearly 129,000 crossings into Texas in March, about 11,000 more than during the same month last year, when Mr. Abbott began the effort known as Operation Lone Star. The biggest increase occurred in an area of the border that includes Eagle Pass, a sun-faded city of 28,000 people, numerous stray cats and dogs and few resources to spare.

Costs have been mounting. Just maintaining the National Guard deployment through the summer will require another $531 million, state officials said this month. A 22-year-old soldier assigned to the mission drowned last week while attempting to rescue two migrants in swift water.

And now officials in Texas are bracing for an even larger influx of migrants, who are expected to come when the Biden administration ends a pandemic policy of turning back many asylum seekers under the public health rule known as Title 42.

Across from Eagle Pass in the Mexican city of Piedras Negras, large numbers of migrants are awaiting the policy change, ready to cross. Many others are not waiting.

“What’s most important is prevention,” Steven C. McCraw, the director of the Texas Department of Public Safety, said. “And we’ve got a ways to go.”

 

At some point this summer, Abbott is going to make good on this threat to militarize the state and seize emergency war powers, and then the raids and mass incarcerations and deportations will begin as Texans are encouraged to rat out undocumented neighbors and friends with a bounty system similar to that of women getting abortions.

 

Now, we all know that Abbott being "tough" on border security is a con job, the feds are stopping drugs and trafficking but he gets to go on FOX and say they're a failure for not stopping 100% of it. He's also learned that if he disrupts the border or even closes it for a worth period of time as he did last month, he can cost America billions per day.

Now imagine him drafting state police, Texas Rangers, and the Texas National Guard to round up, imprison, and deport undocumented immigrants carte blanche. You want to talk about fear?

Do you want to bet that the Roberts Court will stop this? Do you want to bet that the Biden Administration will stop this? Because I don't think either will be able to.

Abbott's going to make good on this threat, and all the mass incarceration infrastructure that was put in place under Trump is going to get used spectacularly this summer.

I hope I'm wrong on this.

I don't think I will be.

Sunday Long Read: Tucker Up, America

The NY Times gives us a multi-part long read this week, the subject being how FOX News carbuncle Tucker Carlson became America's Favorite TV Racist, and how he has been the voice of white supremacy for years now and has an audience of tens of millions, some of which or more than willing to conduct violence for the cause.

Tucker Carlson burst through the doors of Charlie Palmer Steak, enfolded in an entourage of producers and assistants, cellphone pressed to his ear. On the other end was Lachlan Murdoch, chairman of the Fox empire and his de facto boss.

Most of Fox’s Washington bureau, along with the cable network’s top executives, had gathered at the power-class steakhouse, a few blocks from the office, for their annual holiday party. Days earlier, Mr. Carlson had set off an uproar, claiming on air that mass immigration made America “poor and dirtier.” Blue-chip advertisers were fleeing. Within Fox, Mr. Carlson was widely viewed to have finally crossed some kind of line. Many wondered what price he might pay.

The answer became clear that night in December 2018: absolutely none.

When “Tucker Carlson Tonight” aired, Mr. Carlson doubled down, playing video of his earlier comments and citing a report from an Arizona government agency that said each illegal border crossing left up to eight pounds of litter in the desert. Afterward, on the way to the Christmas party, Mr. Carlson spoke directly with Mr. Murdoch, who praised his counterattack, according to a former Fox employee told of the exchange.

“We’re good,” Mr. Carlson said, grinning triumphantly, as he walked into the restaurant.

In the years since, Mr. Carlson has constructed what may be the most racist show in the history of cable news — and also, by some measures, the most successful. Though he frequently declares himself an enemy of prejudice — “We don’t judge them by group, and we don’t judge them on their race,” Mr. Carlson explained to an interviewer a few weeks before accusing impoverished immigrants of making America dirty — his show teaches loathing and fear. Night after night, hour by hour, Mr. Carlson warns his viewers that they inhabit a civilization under siege — by violent Black Lives Matter protesters in American cities, by diseased migrants from south of the border, by refugees importing alien cultures, and by tech companies and cultural elites who will silence them, or label them racist, if they complain. When refugees from Africa, numbering in the hundreds, began crossing into Texas from Mexico during the Trump administration, he warned that the continent’s high birthrates meant the new arrivals might soon “overwhelm our country and change it completely and forever.” Amid nationwide outrage over George Floyd’s murder by a Minneapolis police officer, Mr. Carlson dismissed those protesting the killing as “criminal mobs.” Companies like Angie’s List and Papa John’s dropped their ads. The following month, “Tucker Carlson Tonight” became the highest-rated cable news show in history.

His encyclopedia of provocations has only expanded. Since the 2020 presidential election, Mr. Carlson has become the most visible and voluble defender of those who violently stormed the U.S. Capitol to keep Donald J. Trump in office, playing down the presence of white nationalists in the crowd and claiming the attack “barely rates as a footnote.” In February, as Western pundits and politicians lined up to condemn the Russian president, Vladimir V. Putin, for his impending invasion of Ukraine, Mr. Carlson invited his viewers to shift focus back to the true enemy at home. “Why do I hate Putin so much? Has Putin ever called me a racist?” Mr. Carlson asked. “Has he threatened to get me fired for disagreeing with him?” He was roundly labeled an apologist and Putin cheerleader, only to press ahead with segments that parroted Russian talking points and promoted Kremlin propaganda about purported Ukrainian bioweapons labs.

Alchemizing media power into political influence, Mr. Carlson stands in a nativist American tradition that runs from Father Coughlin to Patrick J. Buchanan. Now Mr. Carlson’s on-air technique — gleefully courting blowback, then fashioning himself as his aggrieved viewers’ partner in victimhood — has helped position him, as much as anyone, to inherit the populist movement that grew up around Mr. Trump. At a moment when white backlash is the jet fuel of a Republican Party striving to return to power in Washington, he has become the pre-eminent champion of Americans who feel most threatened by the rising power of Black and brown citizens. To channel their fear into ratings, Mr. Carlson has adopted the rhetorical tropes and exotic fixations of white nationalists, who have watched gleefully from the fringes of public life as he popularizes their ideas. Mr. Carlson sometimes refers to “legacy Americans,” a dog-whistle term that, before he began using it on his show last fall, appeared almost exclusively in white nationalist outlets like The Daily Stormer, The New York Times found. He takes up story lines otherwise relegated to far-right or nativist websites like VDare: “Tucker Carlson Tonight” has featured a string of segments about the gruesome murders of white farmers in South Africa, which Mr. Carlson suggested were part of a concerted campaign by that country’s Black-led government. Last April, Mr. Carlson set off yet another uproar, borrowing from a racist conspiracy theory known as “the great replacement” to argue that Democrats were deliberately importing “more obedient voters from the third world” to “replace” the current electorate and keep themselves in power. But a Times analysis of 1,150 episodes of his show found that it was far from the first time Mr. Carlson had done so.

“Tucker is ultimately on our side,” Scott Greer, a former deputy editor at the Carlson-founded Daily Caller, who cut ties with the publication in 2018 after his past writings for a white nationalist site were unearthed, said on his podcast last spring. “He can get millions and millions of boomers to nod along with talking points that would have only been seen on VDare or American Renaissance a few years ago.”

That pattern is no accident. To a degree not broadly appreciated outside Fox, “Tucker Carlson Tonight” is the apex of a programming and editorial strategy that transformed the network during the Trump era, according to interviews with dozens of current and former Fox executives, producers and journalists. Like the Republican Party itself, Fox has sought to wring rising returns out of a slowly declining audience: the older white conservatives who make up Mr. Trump’s base and much of Fox’s core viewership. To minimize content that might tempt them to change the channel, Fox News has sidelined Trump-averse or left-leaning contributors. It has lost some of its most respected news journalists, most recently Chris Wallace, the longtime host of Fox’s flagship Sunday show. During the same period, according to former employees and journalists there, Fox has leaned harder into stories of illegal immigrants or nonwhite Americans caught in acts of crime or violence, often plucked from local news sites and turbocharged by the channel’s vast digital news operation. Network executives ordered up such coverage so relentlessly during the Trump years that some employees referred to it by a grim nickname: “brown menace.”

 

I understand the argument, we've gone from "free speech is free speech" to "free speech has consequences" to "who decides those consequences, and why do they decide that my free speech specifically should have them, that's censorship" to where we are now, which is "If I suffer any consequences, it's proof that you don't believe in free speech, and I will stop you."

Which is, you know, actual fascism.

America Goes Viral Yet Again, Con't

As I warned weeks ago, all the evidence pointed to another surge in COVID-19 cases as the Omicron.BA2 variant, because the virus does not care about your mask politics, and now cases are rising across the country in yet another pandemic spread.

Coronavirus cases and hospitalizations are rising in a majority of American states, in what appears to be the first widespread increase since the peak of the Omicron surge in January.

Reports of new cases were nearly flat in the United States at the beginning of April, but as the month draws to a close, they are increasing in all but three states, signaling a wave that is increasingly national in scope.

“Most of the cases are relatively mild,” said Dr. Eric S. Toner, a senior scholar at the Center for Health Security at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.

The recent increase was once concentrated in the Northeast, but the effects of the highly contagious BA.2 subvariant is growing more geographically diverse. In the last two weeks, cases have more than doubled in states from West Virginia to Utah.

Hospitalizations are also on the rise nationwide, after plummeting early this month to their lowest point since March 2020. More than 30 states and territories have seen their hospitalization rates tick up in the past two weeks, and in much of the Northeast, the number of people hospitalized with the coronavirus has increased since mid-month by 40 percent or more.

“It’s not over yet,” Dr. Toner said in an interview on Friday. “It may be a mistake to relax all of our protective measures too quickly.”

Still, new data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention shows that more than 60 percent of Americans have been infected with the coronavirus at least once, lending credence to the belief that the modest effects of this surge could reflect growing immunity from previous infections and vaccinations.

The number of new cases announced each day in the United States — about 55,000 — remains at its lowest level since last summer, and hospitalizations, despite recent growth, are still nearly as low as they have been at any point in the pandemic.

Case counts have become an increasingly unreliable measure of the virus’s true toll, as Americans increasingly turn to at-home tests that go unreported. That has prompted some officials to put more emphasis on hospitalization rates as a measure of the virus’s true impact.

“What we’re not seeing is a lot of stress on hospitals, and that’s very encouraging,” Dr. Toner said.

The nightmare scenario isn't happening thanks to vaccinations, but the people dying are unvaccinated still. COVID-19 continues to rip across the country every 3-5 months and we're in for a bad spring. The country has crossed more than one million COVID deaths, and people keep using wishful thinking to make the virus leave, but of course that's not happening.

What I fear is that people who do mask up are going to be attacked, banned, and harmed by the CHUDs. We're already seeing that in red states, and that will only get worse too.

America has largely given up on fighting the virus.

The (Burned) Bridges Of Madison Cawthorn, Con't

GOP Rep. Madison Cawthorn has now reached the "embattled and besieged" stage of his rapidly fading political career, and I have neckties older than he is. Republicans want him gone like the fart in the wind he is, apparently.

Besieged by multiplying scandals and salacious accusations, Representative Madison Cawthorn, Republican of North Carolina, is under mounting pressure from both parties to end his short career in Congress.

In rapid succession, Mr. Cawthorn, who entered Congress as a rising star of the party’s far right, has been accused of falsely suggesting that his Republican colleagues routinely throw cocaine-fueled orgies, insider trading and an inappropriate relationship with a male aide. This week, he was detained at an airport, where police said he tried to bring a loaded handgun onto an airplane, the second time he has attempted that.

That came just days after pictures surfaced of him wearing women’s lingerie as part of a cruise ship game, imagery that might not go over well in the conservative stretches of his Western North Carolina district. And last month he was charged with driving with a revoked license for the second time since 2017.

The deluge of revelations and charges have left him on an island even within his own party. A political group supporting Senator Thom Tillis, Republican of North Carolina, has been pouring money into an ad campaign accusing Mr. Cawthorn of being a fame-seeking liar. The group is supporting the campaign of a more mainstream Republican, State Senator Chuck Edwards, who is running against Mr. Cawthorn. And the far-right, anti-establishment wing of the party now views the first-term congressman with similar skepticism, as someone who is falsely selling himself as a gatekeeper in his state to former President Donald J. Trump.

After initially blaming Democrats for the onslaught, Mr. Cawthorn on Friday said it was Republicans who were targeting him because he threatens the status quo.

“I want to change the GOP for the better, and I believe in America First,” he wrote on Twitter. “I can understand the establishment attacking those beliefs, but just digging stuff up from my early 20s to smear me is pathetic.”

At 26 years old, Mr. Cawthorn is not far removed from his early 20s, and Republicans running to unseat him in the May 17 North Carolina primary said the drumbeat of revelations could put his seat at risk if he secures the nomination for a second term.

Washington Republicans scoff at the notion that a solidly conservative district could be at risk during a year in which they are heavily favored, but early voting began this week as the avalanche of accusations against Mr. Cawthorn was gaining steam.

“He could absolutely lose,” said Michele Woodhouse, one of seven Republicans challenging Mr. Cawthorn in the primary.

His leading Democratic opponent, the Rev. Jasmine Beach-Ferrara, continues to raise money off her Republican opponent’s foibles. Ms. Beach-Ferrara called Mr. Cawthorn “a troubled young man.”

“I hold him in my prayers, but I believe he is not fit to serve in office,” she said in an interview.

 

For those of you who don't speak Southern, "I hold you in my prayers" is the formal version of "Bless your heart" and it's just about the worst thing anyone can say about you in Carolina politics.

Oh, but it gets worse for the Madman...

Still, the dirt being dished is coming from Republicans — not in Washington but in North Carolina, said David B. Wheeler, president of American Muckrakers PAC, a group he said was put together to “hold Cawthorn accountable.”

Mr. Wheeler’s group, run by Western North Carolina Democrats, filed an incendiary ethics complaint on Wednesday that included a video of Mr. Cawthorn with a senior aide, Stephen L. Smith. In the video, Mr. Cawthorn, in the driver’s seat of a car, appears to say, “I feel the passion and desire and would like to see a naked body beneath my hands.”

The camera then pans back to Mr. Smith who says, “Me too” as he places his hand onto Mr. Cawthorn’s crotch.

The ethics complaint said Mr. Cawthorn has provided loans to Mr. Smith in violation of House rules. It also suggested that Mr. Cawthorn, who, according to the complaint, lives with the aide, has violated rules put in place during the #MeToo movement that bar lawmakers from having sexual relationships with employees under their supervision.

After the story broke in The Daily Mail, Mr. Cawthorn posted on Twitter, “Many of my colleagues would be nowhere near politics if they had grown up with a cell phone in their hands” — not exactly a denial but a suggestion that other members should not cast stones.

Mr. Wheeler provided The Times with a screenshot of the anonymous text he received that included the video, and he said he believed the tipster to be a former Cawthorn campaign aide. Another former aide, Lisa Wiggins, went public in an audio recording released by Mr. Wheeler with her consent, saying, “We all want the ultimate goal of him never serving again.”

Republicans in the state insist that accusations of lawlessness and neglect of his district are more damaging than details of his sex life. Democrats say they are most concerned with Mr. Cawthorn’s support for the protesters who attacked the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. A legal effort led by North Carolina Democrats to label him as an “insurrectionist” and constitutionally disqualify him from the ballot failed last month.

 

The legal, ethical way to get this little skidmark off the ballot may have failed, but it's now Republicans who are doing him in just weeks before his primary, and I couldn't be happier.  Yes, it means that Chuck Edwards may end up in Congress and he's a giant Republican racist asshole too, but it also means Cawthorn might survive his primary and end up losing a safe seat to a Democratic challenger, too.

We'll see.