Last Call For Ridin' With Biden, Con't

Despite my serious and considerable doubts that either Kyrsten Sinema would blow up the Inflation Reduction Act budget reconciliation legislation from the right, or that Bernie Sanders would blow it up from the left, or that Joe Manchin would super double secret probation blow it up from the moon anyhow, Senate Democrats got the votes started tonight and passed the first hurdle.

 

A divided Senate voted Saturday to start debating Democrats’ election-year economic bill, boosting the sprawling collection of President Joe Biden’s priorities on climate, energy, health and taxes past its initial test as it starts moving through Congress.

In a preview of votes expected on a mountain of amendments, united Democrats pushed the legislation through the evenly divided chamber by 51-50, with Vice President Kamala Harris breaking the tie and overcoming unanimous Republican opposition. The package, a dwindled version of earlier multitrillion-dollar measures that Democrats failed to advance, has become a partisan battleground over inflation, gasoline prices and other issues that polls show are driving voters.

The House, where Democrats have a slender majority, could give it final approval next Friday when lawmakers plan to return to Washington.

The vote came after the Senate parliamentarian gave a thumbs-up to most of Democrats’ revised 755-page bill. But Elizabeth MacDonough, the chamber’s nonpartisan rules arbiter, said Democrats had to drop a significant part of their plan for curbing drug prices.

MacDonough said Democrats violated Senate budget rules with language imposing hefty penalties on drug makers who boost their prices beyond inflation in the private insurance market. Those were the bill’s chief pricing protections for the roughly 180 million people whose health coverage comes from private insurance, either through work or bought on their own.

Other pharmaceutical provisions were left intact, including giving Medicare the power to negotiate what it pays for drugs for its 64 million elderly recipients, a longtime Democratic aspiration. Penalties on manufacturers for exceeding inflation would apply to drugs sold to Medicare, and there is a $2,000 annual out-of-pocket cap on drug costs and free vaccines for Medicare beneficiaries.

“The time is now to move forward with a big, bold package for the American people,” said Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y. “This historic bill will reduce inflation, lower costs, fight climate change. It’s time to move this nation forward.”

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., said Democrats “are misreading the American people’s outrage as a mandate for yet another reckless taxing and spending spree.” He said Democrats “have already robbed American families once through inflation and now their solution is to rob American families yet a second time.”

Saturday’s vote capped a startling 10-day period that saw Democrats resurrect top components of Biden’s agenda that had seemed dead. In rapid-fire deals with Democrats’ two most unpredictable senators — first conservative Joe Manchin of West Virginia, then Arizona centrist Kyrsten Sinema — Schumer pieced together a package that would give the party an achievement against the backdrop of this fall’s congressional elections.

A White House statement said the legislation “would help tackle today’s most pressing economic challenges, make our economy stronger for decades to come, and position the United States to be the world’s leader in clean energy.”

Assuming Democrats fight off a nonstop “vote-a-rama” of amendments — many designed by Republicans to derail the measure — they should be able to muscle the measure through the Senate.

“What will vote-a-rama be like? It will be like hell,” Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, the top Republican on the Senate Budget Committee, said of the approaching GOP amendments. He said that in supporting the Democratic bill, Manchin and Sinema “are empowering legislation that will make the average person’s life more difficult” by forcing up energy costs with tax increases and making it harder for companies to hire workers.

 

There's still time to sink the bill with poison pill amendments, so we're nowhere out of the woods yet.  I still think there's a disaster coming, as do some of you.

 

But for now, the bill is now one step closer to becoming law.

The Road To Gilead Goes Through Indiana, Con't

Indiana GOP Gov. Eric Holcomb signed into law a near total abortion ban in the state, with only very limited exceptions for rape or incest, making the Hoosier State the ninth state to put such an effectively complete ban on the healthcare procedure into effect on September 30.

Indiana lawmakers passed and the governor signed a near-total ban on abortion on Friday, overcoming division among Republicans and protests from Democrats to become the first state to draw up and approve sweeping new limits on the procedure since Roe v. Wade was struck down in June.

The law’s passage came just three days after voters in Kansas, another conservative Midwestern state, overwhelmingly rejected an amendment that would have stripped abortion rights protections from their State Constitution, a result seen nationally as a sign of unease with abortion bans. And it came despite some Indiana Republicans opposing the measure for going too far, and others voting no because of its exceptions.

The end of Roe was the culmination of decades of work by conservatives, opening the door for states to severely restrict abortion or ban it entirely. Some states prepared in advance with abortion bans that were triggered by the fall of Roe. Lawmakers in other conservative states said they would consider more restrictions.

But, at least in the first weeks since that decision, Republicans have moved slowly and have struggled to speak with a unified voice on what comes next. Lawmakers in South Carolina and West Virginia have weighed but taken no final action on proposed bans. Officials in Iowa, Florida, Nebraska and other conservative states have so far not taken legislative action. And especially in the last few weeks, some Republican politicians have recalibrated their messaging on the issue.

“West Virginia tried it, and they stepped back from the ledge. Kansas tried it, and the voters resoundingly rejected it,” State Representative Justin Moed, a Democrat from Indianapolis, said on the House floor before voting against the bill. “Why is that? Because up until now it has just been a theory. It was easy for people to say they were pro-life. It was easy to see things so black and white. But now, that theory has become reality, and the consequences of the views are more real.”

The Indiana bill — which bans abortion from conception except in some cases of rape, incest, fatal fetal abnormality or when the pregnant woman faces risk of death or certain severe health risks — was signed into law within minutes of its final passage late Friday night by Gov. Eric Holcomb, a Republican who had encouraged legislators to consider new abortion limits during a special session that he called.

“These actions followed long days of hearings filled with sobering and personal testimony from citizens and elected representatives on this emotional and complex topic,” Mr. Holcomb said in a statement. “Ultimately, those voices shaped and informed the final contents of the legislation and its carefully negotiated exceptions to address some of the unthinkable circumstances a woman or unborn child might face.”

Beyond those limited exceptions, the new law will end legal abortion in Indiana next month. The procedure is currently allowed at up to 22 weeks of pregnancy. Some Republicans have indicated that they expect the law to be challenged in court.

“If this isn’t a government issue — protecting life — I don’t know what is,” said Representative John Young, a Republican who supported the measure. He added: “I know the exceptions are not enough for some and too much for others, but it’s a good balance.”

The law’s passage came after two weeks of emotional testimony and bitter debates in the Statehouse. Even though Republicans hold commanding majorities in both chambers, the bill’s fate did not always seem secure. When a Senate committee considered an initial version of the bill last week, no one showed up to testify in support of it: The American Civil Liberties Union of Indiana called it a “cruel, dangerous bill,” Indiana Right to Life described it as “weak and troubling,” and a parade of residents with differing views on abortion all urged lawmakers to reject it.

The debate was supercharged by the case of a 10-year-old Ohio girl who had traveled to Indiana for an abortion after she was raped. The abortion provider in that case, Dr. Caitlin Bernard, became a target of some on the right.

Abortion rights protesters were a regular presence at the Statehouse during the session, sometimes chanting “Let us vote!” or “Church and state!” so loudly from the hallway that it could be difficult to hear lawmakers. Several Democrats invoked the vote in Kansas, in which 59 percent of voters decided to preserve abortion rights, as an example of the political risk Republicans were taking. Democrats suggested putting the issue to a nonbinding statewide vote in Indiana, which Republicans rejected.

“Judging by the results I saw in Kansas the other day,” said Representative Phil GiaQuinta, a Democrat who opposed the Indiana bill, “independents, Democrats and Republicans by their votes demonstrated what is most important to them, and me, and that is our personal freedoms and liberty.”

Todd Huston, the Republican speaker of the Indiana House, said he was pleased with the final version of the law. But asked about the protests in Indianapolis and the vote in Kansas, he acknowledged that many disagreed.

“We’ve talked about the fact that voters have an opportunity to vote, and if they’re displeased, they’ll have that opportunity both in November and in future years,” Mr. Huston said.

 

If you don't like the total abortion ban, vote them out!

Vote them out of a state legislature where anti-choice, women as property Republicans have a majority of state House seats with 20-point locks and another 15% with merely double digit margins, and the state Senate is even more gerrymandered.

Vote them out when Democrats would need to win by 18-22 points just to break even.

The only debate in a one-party fascist state like Indiana is how quickly the fascism happens in taking rights away from women, Black and brown folk, LGBTQ+ folk, the state's Jewish and Muslim populations, and more.

Job-A-Palooza, Con't

The "Are we in a recession?" nonsense was ended thunderously in the negative with Friday's spectacular July jobs report.

 

America’s employers added a stunning 528,000 jobs last month despite raging inflation and anxiety about a possible recession, restoring all of the positions lost in the coronavirus recession. Unemployment fell to 3.5%, the lowest level since the pandemic struck in early 2020.

There were 130,000 more jobs created in July than there were in June, and the most since February.

The red-hot jobs numbers from the Labor Department on Friday arrive amid a growing consensus that the economy is losing momentum. The U.S. economy shrank in the first two quarters of 2022 — an informal definition of recession. But most economists believe the strong jobs market has kept the economy from slipping into a downturn.

Friday’s surprisingly strong report will undoubtedly intensify the debate over whether America is in a recession or not.

“Recession – what recession?” wrote Brian Coulton, chief economist at Fitch Ratings, after the numbers came out. “The U.S. economy is creating new jobs at an annual rate of 6 million – that’s three times faster than what we normally see historically in a good year. ‘’

Economists had expected only 250,000 new jobs in July.

 

GDP may have slowed down, but jobs are roaring ahead. Is it possible that Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen and Fed Chairman Jerome Powell might actually know what they are doing? 

We'll see.

Sinema Verite', Con't

With the Inflation Reduction Act having gotten past Joe Manchin, this week is Kyrsten Sinema's turn, and as expected, her price is to remove all the tax hikes on billionaires and corporations.

Senator Kyrsten Sinema, Democrat of Arizona, announced on Thursday evening that she would support moving forward with her party’s climate, tax and health care package, clearing the way for a major piece of President Biden’s domestic agenda to move through the Senate in the coming days.

To win Ms. Sinema’s support, Democratic leaders agreed to drop a $14 billion tax increase on some wealthy hedge fund managers and private equity executives that she had opposed, change the structure of a 15 percent minimum tax on corporations, and include drought money to benefit Arizona.

Ms. Sinema said she was ready to move forward with the package, provided that the Senate’s top rules official signed off on it.

Ms. Sinema had been the final holdout on the package after Senator Joe Manchin III, Democrat of West Virginia, struck a deal with top Democrats last week that resurrected a plan that had appeared to have collapsed.

  

Sinema got her price: preserving tax cuts for the billionaires that fund her, preserving tax cuts for some corporations (manufacturers) and securing billions for Arizona's catastrophic drought, as Phoenix remains the least sustainable city in the US.

Ms. Sinema insisted on the removal of a provision that would have limited the preferential tax treatment of income earned by some wealthy hedge fund managers and private equity executives. Democrats instead added a new 1 percent excise tax that companies would have to pay on the amount of stock that they repurchase, said one Democratic official, who disclosed details of the plan on the condition of anonymity.

That provision, the official said, would ensure that the package still reduces the federal deficit by as much as $300 billion, the same amount Democrats aimed for with the original deal and a key priority for Mr. Manchin.

Democrats also agreed to a request by Ms. Sinema to include billions of dollars to combat droughts, according to officials briefed on the emerging plan, something that is crucial to Arizona as it suffers from a devastating megadrought. They were expected to restructure the 15 percent minimum tax on corporations to make it less burdensome on manufacturers. Earlier this week, business leaders in Arizona appealed directly to Ms. Sinema to simplify that proposal, which was included in part because she had resisted increasing tax rates as part of the plan.

“Manufacturers remain concerned that this bill will stifle new cures and therapies,” Jay Timmons, the president and chief executive of the National Association of Manufacturers, said on Twitter, even while praising the removal of certain tax provisions. He added, “We remain skeptical and will be reviewing the revised legislation carefully.”

 

Look, this is a win for Dems. It's an "Art of the Possible", "Don't let the Perfect become the enemy of the Good", "Don't ask how the Sausage is made" win. 

 

Besides, there's a huge chunk of sausage left in, and it's pretty tasty. 

 

The new agreement with Sinema includes a new 1 percent excise tax on stock buybacks that will bring in $73 billion, far more than the $14 billion raised by the carried interest provision, according to a Democrat familiar with the deal.

 

Now if this is true, then this is actually a very good deal. Sinema can certainly keep the Bernie wing of the Democrats happy with that provision, because its a good provision.

 

Still a long road to go with a test vote on Saturday. Still could fall apart, still could run into issues in the House.

 

We'll see.

Last Call For Black Lives Still Matter, Con't

Attorney General Merrick Garland today announced federal prosecutions of the four current and former Louisville police officers involved in the police murder of Breonna Taylor.

The U.S. Justice Department said Thursday federal charges have been filed against four former and current Louisville police officers in the apartment raid that killed Breonna Taylor in 2020.

The Justice Department on Thursday charged the four Louisville Metro Police officers -- Joshua Jaynes, Kyle Meaney, Kelly Goodlet, and Brett Hankison -- with civil rights offenses, unlawful conspiracy, unconstitutional use of force and obstruction of justice.

Jaynes, who was fired in January 2021 for lying on the search warrant that led to the raid that killed Taylor, is already in FBI custody, his attorney, Thomas Clay, told the Louisville Courier-Journal.

During a press conference Thursday, Attorney General Merrick Garland said the federal civil rights charges are for the officers' alleged falsification of the affidavit used to get the search warrant on Taylor's apartment. Her apartment was targeted by mistake.

"The federal charges announced today allege that members of the place-based investigations unit falsified the affidavit used to obtain the search warrant of Ms. Taylor's home, that this act violated federal civil rights laws and that those violations resulted in Ms. Taylor's death," Garland said at the Justice Department.

 

Hopefully this means all four of these monsters will be caged.

 

Breonna Taylor was murdered by LMPD.

 

Remember her name.

 

Black Lives Still Matter.

We Don't Need No Education, Con't

Republicans targeting teachers as "groomers" and other disgusting attacks on education itself has resulted in a "catastrophic" teacher shortage, especially in red states controlled by Republicans. This is of course being done on purpose, as Republicans are trying to get rid of public education anyway.

Rural school districts in Texas are switching to four-day weeks this fall due to lack of staff. Florida is asking veterans with no teaching background to enter classrooms. Arizona is allowing college students to step in and instruct children.

The teacher shortage in America has hit crisis levels — and school officials everywhere are scrambling to ensure that, as students return to classrooms, someone will be there to educate them.

“I have never seen it this bad,” Dan Domenech, executive director of the School Superintendents Association, said of the teacher shortage. “Right now it’s number one on the list of issues that are concerning school districts ... necessity is the mother of invention, and hard-pressed districts are going to have to come up with some solutions.”

It is hard to know exactly how many U.S. classrooms are short of teachers for the 2022-2023 school year; no national database precisely tracks the issue. But state- and district-level reports have emerged across the country detailing staffing gaps that stretch from the hundreds to the thousands — and remain wide open as summer winds rapidly to a close.

The Nevada State Education Association estimated that roughly 3,000 teaching jobs remained unfilled across the state’s 17 school districts as of early August. In a January report, the Illinois Association of Regional School Superintendents found that 88 percent of school districts statewide were having “problems with teacher shortages” — while 2,040 teacher openings were either empty or filled with a “less than qualified” hire. And in the Houston area, the largest five school districts are all reporting that between 200 and 1,000 teaching positions remain open.

Carlton Jenkins, superintendent of the Madison Metropolitan School District in Wisconsin, said teachers are so scarce that superintendents across the country have developed a whisper network to alert each other when educators move between states.

“We’re at a point right now, where if I have people who want to move to California, I call up and give a reference very quick,” he said. “And if someone is coming from another place — say, Minnesota — I have superintendent colleagues in Minnesota, they call and say, ‘Hey, I have teachers coming your way.’ ”

Why are America’s schools so short-staffed? Experts point to a confluence of factors including pandemic-induced teacher exhaustion, low pay and some educators’ sense that politicians and parents — and sometimes their own school board members — have little respect for their profession amid an escalating educational culture war that has seen many districts and states pass policies and laws restricting what teachers can say about U.S. history, race, racism, gender and sexual orientation, as well as LGBTQ issues.

“The political situation in the United States, combined with legitimate aftereffects of covid, has created this shortage,” said Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers. “This shortage is contrived.”

 

Republicans are driving teachers out of the profession, along with librarians, professors, instructors and educators. Republicans want angry parents and taxpayers to see how much of a "failure" schools and libraries and colleges are so that they can justify shutting them down.

 

If all the voters are uneducated, obnoxious Dunning-Kruger buffoons, they elect the same to run the country. Republicans want to keep 75% of non-college voters and they can win election after election by convincing stupid people to remain stupid. 

And in a lot of states, it's working.

Josh Hawley's Scandal-navian Adventures

While reductive fools like Kentucky's own GOP Sen. Rand Paul had the grace to vote "Present" in yesterday's 95-1 Senate vote ratifying NATO membership for Sweden and Finland, the lone "No" vote was Missouri dipstick GOP Sen. Josh Hawley, and even his own caucus is happy letting him since in the corner with the dunce cap on to stew in his "principled loss".

The resolution backs Finland and Sweden joining NATO. The House approved a resolution in a bipartisan 394-18 vote last month that formally supported the two Nordic countries joining the military alliance. All opposition in the House came from the Republican Party.

Hawley’s vote against the resolution did not come as a surprise. He had announced his intent to vote against the resolution earlier this week, outlining his opposition in an op-ed published by The National Interest.

He said he does not believe the U.S. should expand its security commitments in Europe, because America’s “greatest foreign adversary” is China.

Hawley argued that growing the country’s security commitments in Europe would make Americans less safe.

“Finland and Sweden want to join the Atlantic Alliance to head off further Russian aggression in Europe. That is entirely understandable given their location and security needs. But America’s greatest foreign adversary doesn’t loom over Europe. It looms in Asia,” Hawley wrote.

“I am talking of course about the People’s Republic of China. And when it comes to Chinese imperialism, the American people should know the truth: the United States is not ready to resist it. Expanding American security commitments in Europe now would only make that problem worse—and America, less safe,” he added.

The Missouri Republican elaborated on his stance in remarks on the Senate floor Wednesday, arguing that adding Finland and Sweden to NATO is not in the national security interest of the U.S.

“Finland and Sweden want to expand NATO because it is in their national security interest to do so, and fair enough. The question that should properly be before us, however, is, is it in the United States’s interests to do so? Because that’s what American foreign policy is supposed to be about, I thought,” Hawley said.

“Expanding NATO will require more United States forces in Europe, more manpower, more firepower, more resources, more spending. And not just now but over the long haul. But our greatest foreign adversary is not in Europe. Our greatest foreign adversary is in Asia. And when it comes to countering that adversary, we are behind the game. I’m talking, of course, about China. The communist government of Beijing has adopted a policy of imperialism,” he added.

Paul voted “present” on the resolution shortly after the Senate defeated his amendment to the measure in a 10-87 vote. Nine Republicans joined him in supporting the addition.

The amendment sought to emphasize that Article 5 of the NATO treaty does not supersede Congress’s control over declaring war.

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) on Wednesday delivered remarks in support of the resolution and wished those opposed to the measure “good luck” in finding a “defensible excuse” for their “no” votes.

“If any senator is looking for a defensible excuse to vote ‘no,’ I wish them good luck. This is a slam dunk for national security that deserves unanimous bipartisan support,” McConnell said.

“There’s just no question that admitting these robust democratic countries with modern economies and capable interoperable militaries will only strengthen the most successful military alliance in human history,” he added.

 

Even if Hawley is right about China being a bigger threat than Russia right now (which he's ludicrously not, given the fact that Russia is in an open shooting war with Ukraine and has been for six months, I thought that American exceptionalism meant that we could do more than one thing, given the fact we spend more than the total GDP of Switzerland on just the friggin' Pentagon every year.

No, when even Mitch thinks your position is indefensible given the fact the US has ratified Albania, Croatia, and in the last five years, North Macedonia, and Montenegro joining NATO, Hawley knows he doesn't have a leg to stand on.

So he should sit down and shut the hell up.

Last Call For Can't Win For Losing

A gentle reminder that even when they have a big night in primaries and in Kansas's defense of abortion rights, while Republicans can lose, Democrats can never, ever win in the Village press.

On the first anniversary of the Jan. 6 attacks at the U.S. Capitol, Roy Cooper, the governor of North Carolina, took to Twitter not just to condemn that day’s violence but also to warn that the dark forces behind it were still very much alive and still a threat to the future of American democracy.

“We know that those who wanted to topple our democracy haven’t given up and they have moved their assault to state capitols and legislatures across the country,” Mr. Cooper wrote. “Governors must help lead the way in standing up for the truth, protecting our democracy and making sure that it’s the vote of the people that decides elections.”

The governor was right to sound the alarm. So it is deeply troubling to see Mr. Cooper and the organization he chairs — the Democratic Governors Association — support and finance a cynical political strategy to support pro-Trump candidates in Republican primaries, on the theory that they would be easier for Democrats to beat in the fall general election.

Anyone who proclaims concern about the future of democracy shouldn’t come within a whiff of these democracy-denying candidates, let alone help them win votes. But Mr. Cooper and other Democratic Party groups have been elevating Big Lie proponents over their moderate Republican opponents all year, making a mockery of the American political system.

It is a terrible approach on two counts. First, it’s profoundly irresponsible: What if these election deniers actually win? And second, if Democrats believe that democracy is in danger and they need Republican support to save it — or at least a reality-based G.O.P. in our two-party system — then they have weakened their standing as defenders of democracy by aligning with those who would thwart it.

Maryland provides a vivid example of this foolishness. There, Mr. Cooper’s group threw its money, an estimated $2 million, toward ads boosting the candidacy of Dan Cox, a pro-Trumper who attended the rally leading up to the Jan. 6 riot and still preaches that Mr. Trump was cheated out of the presidency. The association reasoned that Democrats would stand a better chance of beating Mr. Cox in the general election than a moderate Republican like Kelly Shultz, the candidate backed by the popular outgoing governor, Larry Hogan. So far, this bizarre strategy has paid off. Mr. Cox won the primary.

The Democratic governors are not alone in their cynicism. In Michigan, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee bought a television ad highlighting the close relationship between Mr. Trump and a pro-Trumper named John Gibbs who was seeking to oust a popular moderate, Representative Peter Meijer. Mr. Meijer was among the handful of Republicans who voted to impeach Mr. Trump following the Capitol insurrection.

The basic playbook goes like this: On their face, the ads and mailers — the ad in Michigan reminds voters that Mr. Gibbs was “handpicked” by Mr. Trump — are framed as an attack and a warning. But its messaging, the Meijer camp believes, raised Mr. Gibbs’s appeal among the district’s conservative voters and gave him name recognition he could not otherwise afford. Mr. Meijer lost by roughly fewer than 4,000 votes on Tuesday to Mr. Gibbs.

Democrats have made similar moves in Colorado, Pennsylvania and California, where a Democratic super PAC funded an ad criticizing the bona fides of David Valadao, another of the 10 Republicans who voted to impeach. Mr. Valadao narrowly defeated a right-wing candidate in June’s primary. Overall, the results have been mixed. The most extreme candidates in Colorado’s Republican primaries for Senate, governor and in the hotly contested 8th Congressional District did not win in June, despite millions of dollars spent by Democrats earlier this summer on TV ads, mailers and text messages seeking that outcome. In Illinois, however, Democrats were able to help a far-right Republican candidate for governor win his primary over a more moderate opponent backed by the G.O.P. establishment.

 

Democrats get ravaged in the press if they play hardball in defense of keeping the country out of the hands of the people who want to reduce people who look like me to chattel, and the people who have vaginas to mere brood mares.

 

What the Village wants are good Republicans, and barring the non-existence of good Republicans because what Republican primary voters want are Nazis, they thing the Village wants even more are Democrats who let Republicans win. 

I said weeks ago that it was risky, but now I know these monsters would have won their primaries anyway.

Dems however can never, ever win.

Like A Kansas Tornado, Con't

As part of several state primary contests, Kansans went to the polls yesterday for the country's first post-Dobbs abortion vote on whether or not protections in the state's constitution for abortion rights should be removed. Overwhelmingly turning out to vote, Kansas voted no by a double-digit landslide.

The right to an abortion will remain in the Kansas Constitution. 

 

In the first ballot test of abortion rights in a post-Roe America, Kansas voters turned out in historic numbers to overwhelmingly reject a constitutional amendment that would have opened the door for state lawmakers to further restrict or ban abortions across the state. 

 

The Associated Press called the race at 9:40 p.m central. The vote “no” campaign led 59 % to 41 % after all precincts in the state had reported.

The vote stands as a major win for abortion rights advocates, preserving access in a red state as the procedure is banned or severely restricted in much of the region. It wasn’t just urban counties, like Democratic-leaning Wyandotte County, that turned out to protect abortion rights. Rural counties like Osage, Franklin and Lyon also favored vote “no” by significant margins.

Shortly after 10 p.m., Iman Alsaden, chief medical officer at Planned Parenthood Great Plains, said she was still processing the vote. 

 

“I am sort of speechless. I’m so proud to be a provider in this community. I’m so proud that I get to serve this community. I moved here two years ago from Chicago with the intention of providing abortion care in a place where there were not a lot of providers,” Alsaden said. “It’s sort of unbelievable. I’m so proud to be able go to work tomorrow and talk to my staff and give everyone a hug.” 

 

The vote upholds a 2019 Kansas Supreme Court ruling that, in response to an attempt to ban a common second trimester abortion procedure, said Kansans had a right to bodily autonomy and therefore the right to terminate a pregnancy.

The movement against the amendment succeeded in turning a wide swath of no voters out, despite the amendment’s placement on a primary ballot many assumed would favor conservatives because of the greater number of GOP primaries. They were able to keep margins to stay competitive in rural counties, keeping the loss margin in western Kansas smaller than anticipated. 

 

Secretary of State Scott Schwab said early in the evening that anecdotal evidence indicated the turnout could match the 2008 presidential race— 63.3%.

The first real test of whether or not protecting the right to an abortion matters, and doing so won, motivating presidential election year levels of turnout in a midterm year August vote.

"Astonishing" doesn't begin to describe it.

Three things:

One, voters clearly want to keep rights enshrined to them. Having the Supreme Court try to remove them isn't going to go over well in states where voters are actually given a choice.

Two, Democrats need to be running on abortion in every state, even red ones.  You know, like Kansas. Voters care about it and will vote to defend it.

In the wake of the Supreme Court decision on Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Center to overturn Roe, abortion access has become salient among key voting groups, including the population most impacted by abortion restrictions – women between the ages of 18 and 49. Among this population, there has been a fourteen percentage point increase in the share who say abortion will be “very important” to their 2022 midterm vote (59% in February to 73% in July). In addition, six in ten women voters between 18 and 49 now say they are “more motivated” to vote because of the Supreme Court’s decision (up 19 percentage points from May when the question was asked about a scenario in which Roe was overturned based on a leaked draft opinion). The vast majority (88%) of the more motivated group of women voters between 18 and 49 say they plan on voting for candidates who will protect access to abortions. 

While abortion is a motivating issue for some groups of voters, the issue still trails inflation and gas prices (74%) as the top voting issue overall. Abortion ranks alongside other top tier issues include gun control (57%), an issue on which Congress just recently passed legislation, and health care and prescription drug costs (55%), an issue that has been debated for the past several months and has gotten recent attention by Democratic lawmakers. With inflation and gas prices as the top issue overall, and for most voting groups, it is perhaps unsurprising that the share of adults who are worried about affording household expenses has increased since the beginning of the pandemic and over the past four months in particular, with the largest increases in affording basic living expenses like food (up 14 percentage points), utilities (up 12 percentage points), and mortgage or rent (up 8 percentage points). In the past two years, the share who are worried about being able to afford gas or other transportation costs has nearly doubled, growing from 40% in February 2020 to 76% in July 2022. 

Two-thirds of the public (65%) disapprove of the Supreme Court decision on Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Center that overturned Roe and allows individual states to decide the legality of abortion access within each state. In addition, most adults (61%) – including majorities of Democrats, independents, women between the ages of 18 and 49, and about half of those living in states with pre-Roe abortion bans or trigger laws – say want the laws in their state to guarantee access to abortion. About a quarter of the public, including more than half of Republicans (54%) say they want the laws in their states to ban abortions.

 

Yes, voters care about inflation, but a majority of voters, especially women under 50, will vote for it. Run on it, Dems.

Three, state polling was absolutely wrong. Again.

In this May article, Kansas was listed at roughly even (+1) in net support for abortion rights. You can check the polling estimates for each state. https://t.co/Ci8iaUYZnm

— The Upshot (@UpshotNYT) August 3, 2022

 

Only off by 18 points, guys.  Good job!

Voting Running The Gauntlet

Understand that Republicans are massing armies of "poll watchers" in multiple swing states in order to intimidate, challenge, and disenfranchise thousands and thousands of young, Black and brown voters in key precincts, with the aim of "stopping the steal" in November.

 

The Republican National Committee has been relying on a stable of the party’s most prolific spreaders of false stolen-election theories to pilot a sweeping “election integrity” operation to recruit and coach thousands of poll workers in eight battleground states, according to new recordings of organizing summits held this spring in Florida and Pennsylvania obtained by POLITICO.

On the tapes, RNC National Election Integrity Director Josh Findlay repeatedly characterizes the committee’s role as supporting in-state coalitions — delivering staff, organization and “muscle” in key states to the person they identify as the quarterback of the effort to create a permanent workforce: Conservative elections attorney Cleta Mitchell, who was a central figure in former President Donald Trump’s legal strategy to overturn the 2020 election.

“Cleta Mitchell, she’s like the best election and election law expert out there. We’re not going to tell her what to do,” Findlay told a March 31 Pennsylvania session organized by Mitchell.

Publicly, the RNC has insisted its goal is to ensure there are enough trained poll workers to protect the electoral process and ensure partisan parity at polling centers. The recordings, however, indicated that the RNC is relying heavily on people who have spread false or unproven claims of irregularities and conspiracies. The recordings feature Findlay speaking at a number of Mitchell’s “Election Integrity Network” summits, which her group has hosted in battleground states including Arizona, Florida, Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin. The RNC is just “part of the team,” he told a Florida summit the same month.

While Republicans have said the aim of their “election integrity” effort is to ensure there are well-trained poll workers during the next election, the recordings also feature Mitchell speaking openly about the need to challenge efforts by nonprofit groups aligned with Democrats to create a “new American majority” of young voters, people of color and unmarried women.

“It’s a place the left sees as a great target of opportunity, and we have to make sure that doesn’t happen,” she said, referring to Democratic efforts to register voters from traditionally underrepresented voting blocs.

Mitchell was on Trump’s post-election phone call directing a Georgia elections official to “find” him 11,700 votes after losing the state, and is she among those currently under subpoena in a criminal investigation by the Fulton County district attorney. Days after the 2020 election, she was exploring ways to keep Trump in power via a slate of fake electors from several battleground states. White House call logs show she is also among a handful of individuals with whom Trump spoke on Jan. 6, 2021, the day the Capitol was attacked, and she is suing to block the House Jan. 6 committee from obtaining her full phone records.

Mitchell, in a response to POLITICO, said her comments about the “new American majority” were referring to an executive order by the Biden administration directing federal agencies to help citizens register to vote and to educate them on how to do so. The effort amounts to turning “every federal agency into a Democratic turnout machine — using our tax dollars in the process,” said Mitchell.

 

This is why they want to eliminate early voting, eliminate voting places, eliminate mail voting, and eliminate voting drop boxes: to force anyone who does want to vote in urban areas to run the gauntlet of screaming assholes demanding identification, again and again, bogging down lines of voters, already slowed down by Republicans strategically eliminating voting machines in Black precincts. 

 

They want local news stories of "voter fraud" and "urban violence at polling places" to scare off other voters too. They sure won't touch my polling place, a senior citizens' center in Kentucky. It never takes me more than 20 minutes to vote, and when I was able to vote by mail in 2020, it was the easiest thing in the world. 

In 2022 they want people to spend an entire day waiting in line, and then accuse them of cheating.

If you can vote early in your state, do it.

All this is planned disenfranchisement and harassment, and it's going to be on a scale unheard of in November. The Roberts Court certainly isn't going to help. Democratic candidates are going to lose millions of votes in November as a result.

We have to vote in numbers they can't stop.

Last Call For A Text(ing) Book Coverup

OK, now it's definitely a widespread Trump regime coverup of the January 6th text messages that entails deletion of evidence by the US Secret Service, the Department of Homeland Security, and now the Pentagon.

The Defense Department wiped the phones of top departing DOD and Army officials at the end of the Trump administration, deleting any texts from key witnesses to events surrounding the January 6, 2021, attack on the US Capitol, according to court filings. 

The acknowledgment that the phones from the Pentagon officials had been wiped was first revealed in a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit American Oversight brought against the Defense Department and the Army. The watchdog group is seeking January 6 records from former acting Secretary of Defense Chris Miller, former chief of staff Kash Patel, and former Secretary of the Army Ryan McCarthy, among other prominent Pentagon officials -- having filed initial FOIA requests just a few days after the Capitol attack. 

Miller, Patel and McCarthy have all been viewed as crucial witnesses for understanding government's response to the January 6 Capitol assault and former President Donald Trump's reaction to the breach. All three were involved in the Defense Department's response to sending National Guard troops to the US Capitol as the riot was unfolding. There is no suggestion that the officials themselves erased the records. 

The government's assertion in the filings that the officials' text messages from that day were not preserved is the latest blow to the efforts to bring transparency to the events of January 6. It comes as the Department of Homeland Security is also under fire for the apparent loss of messages from the Secret Service that day. 

Miller declined to comment. Patel and McCarthy did not immediately respond to requests for comment. The Defense Department did not immediately respond to CNN's request. The US Army Public Affairs media relations chief, Col. Cathy Wilkinson, said in a statement that, "It is our policy not to comment on ongoing litigation." 

American Oversight is now calling for a "cross-agency investigation" by the Justice Department to investigate destruction of the materials.

"It's just astounding to believe that the agency did not understand the importance of preserving its records -- particularly [with regards] to the top officials that might have captured: what they were doing, when they were doing it, why they were doing, it on that day," Heather Sawyer, American Oversight's executive director, told CNN. 

Like I said, these messages aren't lost. The warrants needed to find these texts have almost certainly been issued, and the forensic work to recover them is already underway, if not already done. A shitload of Trump regime officials need to be cooling their heels in federal prison.

I think a lot of people are going to be very surprised at just how big the list is going to be when the indictments start. Including me.

Plan Fails First Contact With OpFor

After nearly a week of wall-to-wall bad press, Senate Republicans are scrambling to reverse their filibuster of legislation to help military veterans suffering from health problems stemming from exposure to burn pits in Afghanistan and Iraq, something so incomprehensibly petty and cruel that it got Jon Stewart off his famous "Both sides are garbage" stance in order to repeatedly blast Mitch and friends.

Senate Republicans are reversing course on a veterans health care bill, signaling they’ll now help it quickly move to President Joe Biden’s desk after weathering several days of intense criticism for delaying the legislation last week.

Republicans insist their decision to hold up the bill, which expands health care for veterans exposed to toxic substances while on active duty, was unrelated to the deal on party-line legislation that top Democrats struck last week. The GOP blocked the bill hours after Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) and Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) announced an agreement on a health care, climate and tax package — angering Republicans who thought the Democrats-only plan would be much narrower.

Regardless of their reasoning, the GOP was quickly forced to play defense against both Democrats and veterans’ advocates who were caught off-guard by Republican delaying tactics after the party greenlit a nearly identical bill in June.

Minority Leader Mitch McConnell declined to respond to a question Monday about why the legislation was held up.

“It will pass this week,” he said.

Other Republicans in Senate leadership struck a similar tone. Sen. John Barrasso (R-Wyo.) told POLITICO he would “expect it to pass” and Sen. John Thune (R-S.D.), McConnell’s No. 2, echoed that at “some point this is going to pass and it will pass big.”

Republicans say they blocked the bill because of concerns spearheaded by Sen. Pat Toomey (R-Pa.) over what the retiring senator called a “budgetary gimmick” — language that he argued could allow certain funds to be used for programs unrelated to veterans’ health care. That language was in the bill when it initially passed the Senate in an 84-14 vote, before a technical snag forced the chamber to vote on it again.

“This stuff got drug out, but remember why it got drug out. When they passed it over here the first time, they did it wrong,“ Thune said, adding it was Democrats who “screwed up the first time.”

Schumer is expected to force another vote on the veterans bill this week, vowing Monday that he would bring it up “in the coming days.”

“We’re going to give Senate Republicans another chance to do the right thing,” he said.

The New York Democrat will likely give Republicans an off-ramp by granting Toomey a vote on his proposed amendment, which the Pennsylvania Republican and many of his colleagues say he’s been requesting for months.

 

All I have to say is that the filibuster and the subsequent widely-played roasting of the GOP by Stewart and veterans' groups must have tested very, very badly in red state polling, enough so that the Senate GOP didn't want to face weeks of August recess back home explaining why this bill wasn't law yet.

 

And in the last couple of weeks, the Democrats have beaten Mitch McConnell like a rented mule.

Republicans actually have a shame/human decency factor that does exist if enough of their military-age male base turns on them.  Who knew?

The Road To Gilead Goes Through Kentucky, Con't

After weeks of legal wrangling over the state's existing trigger law banning abortion in nearly all cases once Roe was overturned, a state appeals court judge has reinstated the ban, overruling a lower court injunction that temporarily blocked it until the case could be taken before the Kentucky Supreme Court. The order means GOP Attorney General Daniel Cameron can immediately begin enforcing the ban.

 

A Kentucky judge reinstituted the state’s near-total abortion ban Monday, reversing a lower court’s order from less than two weeks ago that temporarily allowed the procedures to continue in the state.

The decision by Kentucky Court of Appeals Judge Larry E. Thompson means that abortions are again illegal in the state, unless the mother is at risk of death or serious permanent injury, with no exceptions for rape or incest. Health-care workers who provide abortion services can face up to five years in prison, though mothers are not subject to criminal liability.

The order came in response to a request by Kentucky Attorney General Daniel Cameron (R) that the appellate court overturn a July 22 decision by Jefferson Circuit Judge Mitch Perry, who had sided with abortion providers.

Last month, Perry had granted an injunction preventing Kentucky’s abortion ban from taking effect after the Supreme Court struck down Roe v. Wade in June. Perry sided with two abortion clinics that said the bans were unconstitutional because they went against the rights to privacy and self-determination enshrined in the state constitution

In his ruling, Perry reasoned there was a “substantial likelihood” that the bans were unconstitutional in Kentucky and blocked the abortion restrictions from taking effect until a final decision on their constitutionality could be made by state courts.

But Thompson overruled Perry, on grounds that allowing abortions to proceed — even temporarily — is unfair because the procedures would be irreversible, should state courts later rule the abortion restrictions to be constitutional. “The Court emphasizes, however, that it expresses no opinion whatsoever as to the merits of the underlying dispute,” he added.

Cameron welcomed Thompson’s ruling. “I appreciate the court’s decision to allow Kentucky’s pro-life laws to take effect while we continue to vigorously defend the constitutionality of these important protections for women and unborn children,” Kentucky’s attorney general said.

 

So yes, in Kentucky you will bear your rapist's child, because anyone in the state that helps you to end that pregnancy faces five years in prison. Ohio's ban is in place, Indiana's ban is expected to be passed soon, so if you live in the Cincinnati area, you have no right to bodily autonomy unless you drive to Illinois or Pennsylvania.

Republicans like Cameron are careful to say that women will not face prosecution for abortions or suspected abortions through miscarriages. Kentucky doesn't have Texas-style civil bounty bills for ratting out women who do end an unwanted pregnancy.

The "yet" is something that has a palpable presence, and that will be coming soon.

The borders of the states where women are second-class citizens are firming up.

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

Joe Manchin went on the Sunday shows yesterday to tout his commitment to the Inflation Reduction Act, but of all the people in the world, it was Chuck Todd who actually asked the right questions.

CHUCK TODD:

Do you trust -- I know that was the promise you got, and it's one of those where you were promised a bill later. You support reconciliation now, you're going to get permitting reform later. Why did you not insist on permitting reform first before you gave, gave them your vote for reconciliation?

SEN. JOE MANCHIN:

We would have done permitting reform in this bill but basically because of the Byrd bath and because of reconciliation being around finances, it did not fit. So with that we have an agreement -- from Speaker Pelosi to Majority Leader Schumer to President Biden – we all have made an agreement on this. And you know what, if someone doesn't fulfill, if I don't fulfill my commitment, promise that I will vote and support this bill with all my heart, there's consequences, and there's consequences on both sides. So I have all the trust and faith that this will be accomplished. We'll get this done. And if not, we both are going to face some consequences.

CHUCK TODD:

Speaker Pelosi and Chuck Schumer can keep their word, and the bill still wouldn’t -- and it's possible the bill still doesn't pass. So what are the consequences if you don't get your permitting reform because they don't have the votes?

SEN. JOE MANCHIN:

Well, as I've said before, there’s other avenues and vehicles that we can use. And I've been committed. I've been promised. And I do believe, and I trust. And if any of us don't keep our promises, then there are consequences to pay for this. I don't think that's going to happen at all, Chuck. There's too much at stake here. This is the greatest investment we've ever had in energy security. Energy security, and also investment in the innovation in technology that we need for the fuels of the future. This is an all-American bill – red, white, and blue all the way through.

Todd actually figures out what the "consequences" are if he doesn't get his future bill, his *real* price for the Inflation Reduction Act, passed by Pelosi and Schumer. It's a bill that Manchin expects will survive a Senate filibuster.

Democratic U.S. Senator Joe Manchin has secured a commitment from President Joe Biden, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and House of Representatives Speaker Nancy Pelosi to allow the Mountain Valley Pipeline to be completed, his office told a CBS affiliate on Monday.

The commitment to the West Virginia senator from Democrats Biden, Schumer and Pelosi will be used to pass legislation for the state's pipeline to be completed and "streamline the permitting process for all energy infrastructure," the news outlet reported, citing Manchin's office.

The legislation will be voted on by the end of the fiscal year, which is Sept. 30, 2022, according to the statement quoted in the news outlet.

Manchin's office did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Monday. The senator re-tweeted the report.

The pipeline project has faced legal setbacks and is years behind schedule and billions of dollars over budget.

 

So that's Manchin's price, an oil pipeline that he's long wanted for West Virginia If he doesn't get it, then there will be "consequences".

The consequences are of course Manchin making good on his threats to switch parties, and Todd tries to pin him down on this on later in the interview.

CHUCK TODD:

What’s your case for Democrats to keep control of the House and Senate this election year?

SEN. JOE MANCHIN:

I don’t know, I just -- if you look back through history, it makes it very difficult, especially in the most toxic times we've ever seen. So it's up in the air right now. With the House, it looks like the House is --

CHUCK TODD:

No, do you – right, but would you like -- do you hope Democrats keep control of the House and Senate?

SEN. JOE MANCHIN:

I think people are sick and tired of politics, Chuck. I really do. I think they're sick and tired of Democrats and Republicans fighting and feuding and holding pieces of legislation hostage because they didn't get what they wanted, or something or someone might get credit for something. Why don't we start doing something for our country? Why don't we just say, "This is good for America"? I've always said the best politics is good government. Do something good, Chuck. But I'm not going to predict what's going to happen.

CHUCK TODD:

I'm not asking you to predict--

SEN. JOE MANCHIN:

I just want to make sure we do something good, and this --

CHUCK TODD:

What result do you want? Do you want the Democrats to keep control of the United States Senate and the House of Representatives?

SEN. JOE MANCHIN:

Oh I’d love -- you know, I'm not making those choices or decisions on that. I'm going to work with whatever I have. I've always said that. I think the Democrats have great candidates that are running. They're good people I've worked with. And I have a tremendous amount of respect and friendship with my Republican colleagues. So I can work on either side very easily.

 

Now, maybe I'm giving Todd too much credit for finding the apple in the manure pile, but these also aren't answers from a guy 100% committed to staying with the Democrats in 2023, either.

 

Ironically, if Manchin actually is playing his party switch card, the one person he absolutely needs to have on his side is Kyrsten Sinema.

 

Ahh, but Manchin gets other things too, you see, and Schumer gets his budget reconciliation deal, or it all goes to hell and we get Senate Majority Leader McConnell well before November.

A side agreement reached between Democratic leadership and Sen. Joe Manchin III (D-W.Va.) as part of their broader deal on an economic package would overhaul the nation’s process for approving new energy projects, including by expediting a gas pipeline proposed for West Virginia, according to a one-page summary obtained by The Washington Post.

To win Manchin’s support for the climate, energy and health-care package that was etched last week, Democratic leaders agreed to attempt to advance separate legislation on expediting energy projects. These changes would fall outside the bounds of the Senate budget procedure the party is using to pass its budget bill, making it impossible for Democrats to approve that with just 51 votes. The new agreement would require 60 votes to be approved and would need GOP support to be signed into law. Republicans have supported similar measures in the past, but the agreement could face defections from liberal Democrats, who have warned against making it easier to open new oil and gas projects.

The 100-seat Senate is now evenly split between Democrats and Republicans, but Vice President Harris can cast a tiebreaking vote.

Like I said, still plenty of chances for this to detonate and take out the Democrats before November.

Ridin' With Biden, Con't

In a world where Republicans and the media serving them aren't complete dickbags, President Biden and the Democrats about to get Medicare prescription drug reform passed, along with the infrastructure bill, gun safety legislation, and unemployment under 4% would make Dems shoo-ins for maintaining 2022 control of Congress in the midterms.

Sadly, this is not the case.

 

Democrats have been campaigning for 30 years on promises they'd let Medicare directly negotiate the cost of prescription drugs — and after all that time, they might finally be about to achieve it.

Why it matters: The Senate's reconciliation bill would only open up negotiations for a small number of drugs, but even that is a threshold Democrats have never before been able to cross. And it opens the door to more aggressive policies in the future.

Flashback: Then-president Bill Clinton proposed direct negotiations between drug companies and the federal government in 1993.Clinton, Al Gore, Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden — and even Donald Trump — each embraced the idea while in office or as candidates, only to be thwarted by arguments it would squelch new drug development or limit seniors’ choices. 

Federal law has prohibited Medicare from directly negotiating how much it will pay for drugs since 2003.

“Finally eliminating the prohibition and empowering the secretary to negotiate is a historic precedent, and is something to protect and strengthen over time,” said Chris Jennings, a health policy advisor to Presidents Clinton and Obama.

Yes, but: The version of price negotiations contained in the Senate's bill is much narrower than most of those ambitious campaign proposals.“A baby step is the way I would describe this,” said Zeke Emanuel, a health policy advisor to former President Obama and chair of the department of medical ethics and health policy at the University of Pennsylvania. 

“We’re talking about 10 drugs and moving up at the end of the decade to a whopping 20 drugs. And unless they can get insulin included, how many people are going to be affected is, I think, a big question," he said.

If negotiations make it into law now, however, future administrations and Congress could expand them and make more drugs subject to negotiations.

 

It's a start.  It's better than the nothing before. But this country is still going to hand the reins over to the fascists because gas is $5 $4.50 $4 a gallon.

The Endgame Of The GOP Long Game

We know exactly what the final days of America as we know it looks like, because I've been warning you about it for nearly 15 years. When conservatives in California tried to rewrite that state's constitution with Prop. 8 in 2008, I warned you what was coming:

 

The really disturbing precedent here is that civil rights can be taken from a minority under the guise of "the will of the people." Under that logic, why not institute a new era of Jim Crow laws aimed at African-Americans or Latinos under a proposition vote? Why not put the practice of Islam in the US to a vote, and close down all mosques should the measure pass?

If you believe that you can take basic human rights like marriage away from a group based solely on sexual preference, you should be able to take rights based on religion, race, age, gender, or any other discriminatory criteria.

The danger that this effort represents is tantamount. The supporters of this effort will not stop there. Once you codify into law the ability of the many to take away the rights of the few, it will be used against any and every group. Once you've established a threshhold that one group cannot cross because of their minority status, all that remains is to steadily lower the bar until that group has no civil rights at all. Why not revoke the rights of gays and lesbians period? Why not apply the same standard to Muslims or Jews? Doesn't the Islamic or Jewish idea of marriage differ with the Christian one? Isn't that the argument used to deny gays and lesbians the right to marry?

 

And as I said back then, the endgame was always the ultimate example of working the refs by remaking the rulebook to make white supremacist Christian nationalism not only legal, but required. National Republicans like Marco Rubio have been openly talking about rewriting the Constitution through a convention of states for years now.

America was built on the revolutionary idea that our rights come from God, not from government. To protect those rights, our founders created a government of the people, by the people and for the people. But today, that government has been hijacked by politicians and bureaucrats who disregard the will of the people, rack up trillions in debt and expand the federal bureaucracy into more and more aspects of our lives. As president, I will promote a convention of states to amend the Constitution and restore limited government. 

The framers of our Constitution allowed for a constitutional convention because they knew our citizens were the ultimate defense against an overbearing federal government. They gave the American people, through their state representatives, the power to call a convention made up of at least 34 states, where delegates could then propose amendments that would require the support of 38 states to become law. 

This method of amending our Constitution has become necessary today because of Washington’s refusal to place restrictions on itself. The amendment process must be approached with caution, which is why I believe the agenda should be limited to ideas that reduce the size and scope of the federal government, such as imposing term limits on Congress and the Supreme Court and forcing fiscal responsibility through a balanced budget requirement. Limiting the agenda will prevent the convention from being overtaken by special interests.

The whole point of locking in state legislatures with extreme gerrymandering is to get to 38 Republican state legislatures in order to amend the Constitution completely, and get a Supreme Court that goes along with it.  It won't matter what blue states have to say when the tyranny of the majority becomes real and permanent.

This isn't an exercise, either. State lawmakers are invited to huddle in Denver starting on Sunday to learn more about the inner workings of a possible constitutional convention at Academy of States 3.0, the third installment of a boot camp preparing state lawmakers "in anticipation of an imminent Article V Convention."

Rob Natelson, a constitutional scholar and senior fellow at the Independence Institute who closely studies Article V of the Constitution, predicted to Insider there's a 50% chance that the United States will witness a constitutional convention in the next five years. Whether it happens, he said, is highly dependent on Republicans' success winning state legislatures during the 2022 midterm elections.

But not everyone in the conservative constitutional convention movement believes such a gathering is so imminent. It will likely take years more work to reach their goal, if they ever do. At minimum, Republicans will need to flip several Democratic-controlled state legislatures and convince remaining GOP holdouts of the necessity for a convention.

Republican white nationalists can and have done tremendous damage to the country without a constitutional convention.  But if they get to this point, the game ends.

For all of us.

Sunday Long Read: The Flames Of Bhalswa

As record high temperatures blaze through the US and Europe, the Indian subcontinent is also burning, and the over one billion there have even fewer methods to deal with literally unbearable heat, as the New Yorker's Dhruv Khullar notes in this week's Sunday Long Read.

 

The Bhalswa landfill, on the outskirts of Delhi, is an apocalyptic place. A gray mountain of dense, decaying trash rises seventeen stories, stretching over some fifty acres. Broken glass and plastic containers stand in for grass and stones, and plastic bags dangle from spindly trees that grow in the filth. Fifteen miles from the seat of the Indian government, cows rummage for fruit peels and pigs wallow in stagnant water. Thousands of people who live in slums near the mountain’s base work as waste pickers, collecting, sorting, and selling the garbage created by around half of Delhi’s residents.

This March was the hottest on record in India. The same was true for April. On the afternoon of April 26th, Bhalswa caught fire. Dark, toxic fumes spewed into the air, and people living nearby struggled to breathe. By the time firefighters arrived, flames had engulfed much of the landfill. In the past, similar fires had been extinguished within hours or days, but Bhalswa burned for weeks. “The weather poses a big challenge for us,” Atul Garg, the chief of the Delhi Fire Service, said, nine days after the fire began. “Firefighters find it difficult to wear masks and protective gear because of the heat.” A nearby school, blanketed by hazardous smoke, was forced to close. In the end, it took two weeks to extinguish the blaze. The charred bodies of cows and dogs were found in the debris.

I have family in Delhi, and have visited regularly over the decades. Each year has always felt hotter than the last. But this spring’s heat wave, which continued into the summer, has been unprecedented in its severity, duration, and geographic expanse. Across much of northern India, where more than a billion people live, temperatures have regularly soared past a hundred and ten degrees, and slightly lower temperatures have often combined with very high humidity—a dangerous combination. “The heat is rising rapidly and much earlier than usual,” Prime Minister Narendra Modi said, in April. “Fire has broken out in many forests, historical monuments, and hospitals.” Indians who work outside—about half the population—have sometimes had to stop in the afternoons, relinquishing their wages; schools and businesses have had to adjust their hours or shut entirely; and farmers have seen their crop yields drop by a third or more. On a particularly hot day in May, the high in Delhi hit a hundred and twenty-one, and overheated birds fell from the sky.

According to the official count, the heat wave has killed around a hundred people. But the true toll is certainly higher: in the summer of 2003, a less severe event killed seventy thousand across Europe. Only eight per cent of Indians have air-conditioning, and many lack reliable electricity, a situation that limits their use of fans and other cooling devices. In 2010, during a heat wave in Ahmedabad, the financial center of the state of Gujarat, officials counted seventy-six heatstroke deaths during the hottest week—but a later analysis of death certificates revealed that there had been at least eight hundred more deaths than usual during that time, some two hundred of them on a single day. Research has shown that, each day the temperature rises above ninety-five degrees in India, the annual mortality rate increases by three-quarters of a per cent. (In the United States, the rate increases by only .03 per cent.)

The dusty road leading to Bhalswa is lined with ramshackle shops and gutters full of stagnant water. When I visited, in May, some sections of the landfill were still releasing angry coils of smoke. In the car, I consulted my phone, which told me that it was a hundred and three degrees outside, with thirty-two-per-cent humidity. Still, when I opened the door, I was stunned by the three-dimensionality of the heat. The sun fried my skin but also somehow roasted me from within. I felt as if I’d swallowed a space heater.

A dirt path wound between tents and shacks. Tattered sheets, hung from wires attached to wooden poles, provided only a little shade. Fat plastic bags full of trash for resale leaned against crumbling brick walls; alongside them were broken chairs, metal buckets, plastic bottles, cracked pots, torn trousers, errant shoes, and a dirty diaper. Two women cooked over an open fire while an elderly man pushed a wooden cart, a young child lugging a sack behind him.

In a small brick hut, a man sat cross-legged amid a thick knot of flies, braiding human hair that he’d collected from the landfill. Half a dozen women in brightly colored clothing, their heads covered in scarves, sat on the floor.

“It didn’t use to be this hot,” Saira, the woman in charge of the group, said. “Before, it felt like it was possible for humans to work the landfill.” Now, because of the heat, they tried to stay out of the sun. “If you see five hundred people working there right now, you’ll see at least two thousand people up there at night,” she said.

“We eat up there, sleep up there sometimes,” another worker added.

Hema, a thin woman in a purple sari, sat on the stairs. “When the sun hits, it feels like your body is on fire,” she said. “I drape a shirt over my head—that makes it feel even hotter. When we come back home, our heads feel like they will explode. We take water with us, but it’s boiling by the time we can drink it.”

The women described headaches, exhaustion, dizziness, rashes, fever. The stench of the landfill—an acrid mixture of excrement and rotting trash—was sickening, they said, but the heat made it hard to tolerate masks. Outside the hut, children kicked a ragged soccer ball. A scrawny dog panted on a mound of refuse. Flies swarmed a heap of dung.

“We are living,” Saira said. “But we are also dying.”

 

As the earth's population approaches the eight billion mark later this year, it's important to note that we're now deep into the triage phase of global warming. The time to do something about this was 30 years ago. It's too late now, all we can do is try to regulate the damage.

 

Failure to do that will lead to unconscionable, uncountable deaths for years to come.

Our Little White Supremacist Domestic Terrorism Problem, Con't

In rural California, as in many parts of the country, wildfires, flooding, storms and mudslides cause by climate change are the perfect opportunity for white supremacist domestic terrorist militias to recruit from people whose lives have been devastated, posing as "helpful concerned citizens" when state and local officials are overwhelmed by increasingly powerful and more numerous disasters.

The parking lot of H&L Lumber in Mariposa, California, was host to a flurry of activity Sunday as members of a local militia sporting military-style fatigues handed out pancakes and steak sandwiches to evacuees of the Oak Fire raging nearby. Along with breakfast, they doled out business cards with QR codes and directions to join their militia.

Some say the members of the Echo Company militia served as a de facto checkpoint or an advertisement for the group during the crisis, according to witnesses who spoke to NBC News on condition of anonymity because they did not want to be identified.

“They had their whole setup with military-style trucks, and they were in their fatigues and whatnot,” said Rain Winchester, a manager at Mariposa’s nearby Monarch Inn. “I’m fine with them helping out with relief efforts as long as they don’t start to set up roadblocks or do any security work. I don’t want them doing the work of the sheriff’s office.”

The militia is becoming a consistent presence in rural Mariposa County southeast of Sacramento with a population of 17,131 scattered across 14 towns, according to the 2010 U.S. census.

Providing immediate assistance in military-style garb during an emergency is a recruiting tactic used by militias nationwide, and not confined to Mariposa County. As climate change creates more wildfires and adverse weather events, further straining local law enforcement and fire services, militias around the nation have seized on the disasters as opportunities to entangle themselves into the politics and emergency services of small communities.

In the aftermath of fires in Oregon in 2020, militias set up civilian roadblocks, which stopped at least one fleeing Black family and were ignored by local police. Members of the Oath Keepers have created a “community protection team,” six of whom were arrested for breaking a curfew during Hurricane Michael in 2018.

Joshua James, an Oath Keeper who stormed the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, met and joined the militia during relief efforts for Hurricane Irma in 2017.

Wildfires in the United States this year have consumed 5.6 million acres. The Oak Fire destroyed at least 116 homes and burned more than 19,000 acres, according to local fire authorities.

Serving as de facto aid organizations is a common recruitment and community ingratiation tactic used in rural areas to win support and acceptance during emergencies, said Rachel Goldwasser, a research analyst at the Southern Poverty Law Center.

“Although help is always needed in difficult times, it is incredibly important to remember that militias are providing it with an agenda,” she said.

“That agenda is to recruit members of the community, including victims into their organizations, legitimize them, and radicalize people into holding grievances against the government they may very well express through intimidation or violence.”

Echo Company is one of hundreds of active militias across the U.S., according to a 2016 tally by the Southern Poverty Law Center, numbers that have climbed steadily in recent years. Experts have warned that militia groups have been emboldened by former President Donald Trump and other leaders of the Republican Party.

It was not immediately clear how many members Echo Company has. In times where there are no disasters, it’s most commonly known for holding training sessions for its members and attending protests, common practices for U.S. militias.

Echo Company is, however, well known among California militias.

It was ousted from the larger California State Militia organization in 2020 for capitalizing on larger, fictitious fears of antifa looters and “for behavior that was interpreted as potentially inciteful and militant.”

Echo Company attended a “straight pride” rally in 2020, alongside the Central Valley Proud Boys.

But there are signs its efforts to provide services have worked. The group has in recent years gained favor among some in the community, as evidenced by the response to a sheriff’s office Facebook post that warned residents to “be aware of a local militia around the Mariposa town area.”

The post was soon flooded with support for the militia. Hours later, the sheriff’s department issued an “update” softening their stance.

“Clearing up confusion and answering the large amount of comments on this original post,” the updated post reads. “We are not unsupportive of community groups helping those affected by the Oak Fire, however it is important that we inform the community of resources available to them by the incident and Mariposa County.”

What I'm saying is if these militias get organized nationally, and move at the same time across the country, we're in a lot of trouble. Believe me when I say they are just waiting and training and hoping for the day Republican white nationalists give them the green light to become the law in rural counties, and they will have the support of local law enforcement and former military, maybe even active military, in these areas.

They know that if they get enough local county commissions, town councils, and sheriffs on their side, they can start causing serious damage when the mobilize. A lot of families would be caught in the crossfire and would either have to hide out, flee, or join the militias.

It gets bad from there. Real bad. Especially for non-white folk.

So far Homeland Security is keeping them guessing and cautious, but DHS can't be everywhere and know everything. At some point pretty soon, at the latest in the months after the 20244 election, these guys are going to decide that the countryside is theirs and that enough people at the state level are going to support them in order to do this.

You're going to see parts of rural America get extremely hostile to anyone from "the government" and "the city", even more than it is now. Most people just want to be left alone, but these assholes are going to start forcing people to pick sides.

If it becomes widespread enough, stretching states to the breaking point, history tells us breakdowns can happen pretty quickly.  Suddenly we've got little insurrections everywhere.

Things don't get better sooner from that point.

Take the threat of this seriously.

Last Call For Sinema Verite, Con't

As Ed Kilgore said earlier this week, there's no reason to consider Sen. Joe Manchin's deal on climate change legislation a done deal, simply because Democrats will need all 50 Senate vote to pass anything in budget reconciliation, and it also means Republicans only need to present a united front and peel off one vote to amend the package, perhaps fatally so. President Manchin has signed on.

Co-President Kyrsten Sinema has not.  And now we will learn how steep her price will be.

Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (D-Ariz.) had a message for her Democratic colleagues before she flew home to Arizona for the weekend: She's preserving her options.

Why it matters: Sinema has leverage and she knows it. Any potential modification to the Democrat's climate and deficit reduction package — like knocking out the $14 billion provision on carried interest — could cause the fragile deal to collapse. 

Her posture is causing something between angst and fear in the Democratic caucus as senators wait for her to render a verdict on the secret deal announced by Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and Sen. Joe Manchin last Thursday.

Driving the news: Sinema has given no assurances to colleagues that she’ll vote along party lines in the so-called “vote-a-rama” for the $740 billion bill next week, according to people familiar with the matter.The vote-a-rama process allows lawmakers to offer an unlimited number of amendments, as long as they are ruled germane by the Senate parliamentarian. Senators — and reporters — expect a late night. 

Republicans, steaming mad that Democrats have a chance to send a $280 billion China competition package and a massive climate and health care bill to President Biden, will use the vote-a-rama to force vulnerable Democrats to take politically difficult votes. 

They'll also attempt to kill the reconciliation package with poison pills — amendments that make it impossible for Schumer to find 50 votes for final passage.

The intrigue: Not only is Sinema indicating that she's open to letting Republicans modify the bill, she has given no guarantees she’ll support a final “wrap-around” amendment, which would restore the original Schumer-Manchin deal.

The big picture: Schumer made a calculated decision to negotiate a package with Manchin in secrecy. He assumed that all of his other members, including Sinema, would fall into line and support the deal.Now his caucus is digesting the specifics, with Sinema taking a printout of the 725-page bill back to Arizona on Friday for some dense in-flight reading. 

Schumer will find out this week if his gamble in keeping Sinema in the dark will pay off.

Frankly, with Democratic groups in Arizona already trying to primary her and without any luck in actually getting anyone to run against her so far, Sinema doesn't need to fear the Left on this, and she has no reason politically to pull her punches here. If she decides to take Schumer and Manchin working out a deal without including her as an insult, then this all gets burned down.

Remember, she's done it before.

Keep a weather eye on this one, because it could become a hurricane just as quickly as Manchin allowed a ray of sunshine to burn off the murk earlier this week.