Ron's Gone Wrong, Con't

With 2nd quarter fundraising numbers upon us for 2023, Ron DeSantis is now entering the crash and burn phase. 

 

Ron DeSantis’ presidential campaign has fired roughly a dozen staffers — and more are expected in the coming weeks as he shakes up his big-money political operations after less than two months on the campaign trail.

Those who were let go were described to NBC News by a source familiar as mid-level staffers across several departments whose departures were related to cutting costs. The exits come after the departures of David Abrams and Tucker Obenshain, veterans of DeSantis’ political orbit, which were first reported by Politico.

Sources involved with the DeSantis campaign say there is an internal assessment among some that they hired too many staffers too early, and despite bringing in $20 million during its first six weeks, it was becoming clear their costs needed to be brought down.

Some in DeSantis’ political orbit are laying the early blame at the feet of campaign manager Generra Peck, who also led DeSantis’ 2022 midterm reelection bid and is in the hot seat right now.

“She should be,” one DeSantis donor said.

“They never should have brought so many people on, the burn rate was way too high,” said one Republican source familiar with the campaign’s thought process. “People warned the campaign manager but she wanted to hear none of it.”

“DeSantis stock isn’t rising,” the donor added. “Twenty percent is not what people signed up for.”

The person noted that DeSantis has a penchant for switching out staff, which means that he has no core team that has worked together before. DeSantis had three different campaign teams for each of his three runs for Congress, and notably had a huge campaign shakeup during his first run for governor in 2018.

"Americans are rallying behind Ron DeSantis and his plan to reverse Joe Biden’s failures and restore sanity to our nation, and his momentum will only continue as voters see more of him in-person, especially in Iowa. Defeating Joe Biden and the $72 million behind him will require a nimble and candidate driven campaign, and we are building a movement to go the distance," DeSantis campaign spokesman Andrew Romeo told NBC News.

 

Did I mention that DeSantis is losing his home state of Florida by 20 points to Trump? Because he is, and that's not going to get any better in the months ahead for him. Remember, everyone else in the race is running for Trump's veep slot and that includes DeSantis, even if nobody in his campaign will admit it.

 

The fact remains however that the media dog pile on DeSantis is now in full effect.

 

DeSANTIS IN DISARRAY? — This morning, with FEC filings in hand, one thing is clear: Serious doubts now cloud the future of RON DeSANTIS’ presidential campaign.

When you’re running for office, there are a few words and phrases you never want to see up top in news articles about your campaign …

1. ‘SOLVENCY’: If that’s in the lede of an article, good news is almost certain not to follow. And yet, there it was in an NBC piece that blew up group chats all over D.C. shortly after being published last night:

“DeSantis tapped out top donors and burned through $7.9 million in his first six weeks as a presidential candidate, according to an NBC News analysis of his new campaign finance disclosure,” wrote Jonathan Allen, Bridget Bowman, Ben Kamisar and Alexandra Marquez. “The numbers suggest, for the first time, that solvency could be a threat to DeSantis’ campaign, which has touted its fundraising ability as a key measure of viability.”

Those numbers, in brief: DeSantis raised $20.1 million between mid-May and the end of June.About $3 million of that can only be used in the general election — making it irrelevant to his fight against DONALD TRUMP.Of that $20.1 million, more than two-thirds came from donors who are now maxed out and can’t give him any more money.About 40% of the money DeSantis raised has already been spent. A decent chunk of that went to payroll: Notably, DeSantis had 92 people on his campaign staff — “by far the biggest staff footprint of the GOP presidential candidates,” NBC notes. Which brings us to number two …

2. ‘SHEDDING STAFF’ and ‘CASH CRUNCH’: “DeSantis’ presidential campaign is shedding staff as it navigates a cash crunch and looks to refocus resources on Iowa,” Alex Isenstadt scooped last night.

“Fewer than 10 staffers were let go by the Florida governor’s campaign Thursday … Each of the aides was involved in event planning, and some of them may soon wind up at an allied outside group. Never Back Down, the pro-DeSantis super PAC, has received resumes from staffers who’ve been let go.”

3. ‘SKEPTICISM’ and ‘PRIVATE CONCERNS’ and ‘INSULARITY’: “More than seven weeks in, skepticism about the Florida governor’s 2024 bid has grown,” report WaPo’s Hannah Knowles, Josh Dawsey, Michael Scherer and Marianne LeVine. “Some people who have advised and supported DeSantis have raised private concerns about his message, and the effectiveness and insularity of his campaign operation, according to people familiar with the comments, among the more than 30 people interviewed for this story.

“The doubts extend to long-friendly Fox News … and its owner, the conservative media magnate RUPERT MURDOCH, according to another person who speaks regularly with Murdoch about the presidential race. ‘He was excited about him at the beginning, but the more he shows himself, the less appealing he is,’ said this person, who, like others, spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe private deliberations and talk more freely. Murdoch will ‘come back to Trump if he thinks Trump can win,’ this person added. A representative for Murdoch declined to comment Saturday.”

How is the DeSantis camp shifting in response? “The campaign has started rolling out national policy — economic issues next, then foreign policy in August — and plans to do more mainstream media interviews around those proposals,” the Post reports.

Those lines caught the eye of Bill Scher, the savvy politics editor at Washington Monthly: “Lordy, the ELIZABETH WARREN white paper strategy is not going to help,” Scher tweeted. “Team DeSantis refuses to see the race for what it is. The race is not about who has the best tax plan. The race is: Trump, yes or no.”

One sign the DeSantis media pivot is underway: CNN just announced that on Tuesday the Florida governor will sit down with JAKE TAPPER for an interview in South Carolina.

WHAT IT ALL ADDS UP TO: The “DeSantis in decline” storyline is a body blow to one of the central arguments for his campaign: that he’d be a competent, disciplined version of Trump. Trump without the chaos. Trump, but with a more professional operation.

That’s an easier sell when things are going well: People on the team are generally satisfied, and there’s no need to point fingers.

But things are not going well for DeSantis. At the start of the year, the average national GOP primary poll had Trump at 43% and DeSantis close behind at 37%, according to FiveThirtyEight. Compare that to today: Trump averages just under 50%, while DeSantis has sunk to 21%. Since DeSantis announced his campaign on May 24, he has gained just 0.4 percentage points in the national polling average.

This is not just an issue of financial solvency. It’s an issue of strategy.

A negative narrative is taking hold about his campaign — that it is bloated, is overconfident, lacks a clear strategy, etc. Pair that with preexisting negative impressions about the candidate himself (that he is combative, not personable, awkward in retail settings, etc.) and a press corps that is — let’s be honest — somewhat tired of Trump and remains fascinated by the Florida governor, and there are real hurdles ahead for DeSantis.

The good news for him, if we can call it that, is that narratives can change, and the six months between now and the Iowa caucuses provide ample time to turn things around. But that’s also a whole lot of time for new articles to be published about him and his campaign — and they may contain phrases altogether more damning than “cash crunch” and “private concerns.”

 

If DeSantis has lost Team WIN THE MORNING, he's in dire straits. 

 

Having said that, Trump is not 100% inevitable as the 2024 GOP candidate. There are things that could stop him, and most of all that's Trump himself.

More indictments for Trump will be coming. Whether or not that will be enough to break his run and give DeSantis a window, we'll see.

Bottom line is these are still very much the bad guys. Anyone not named Trump will still try to implement 99% of Trump's racist, hateful, bigoted and unconstitutional policies. Don't be fooled. They're all just as bad.

 

Or worse.

Sunday Long Read: The Neighbors From Hell

Our Sunday Long Read this week comes from the Washington Post's Tim Carman, detailing a small-town northern Virginia restaurant ran by a gay couple that was doing perfectly fine until their new neighbors moved in, and started a war against the idea that a restaurant ran by a gay couple in small-town anywhere should be allowed.

 

As soon as she spotted the lifeless vermin, Tiffany Foster had a hunch about how it appeared near the trash bins behind the Front Porch Market and Grill in The Plains, Va. The general manager went inside, pulled out her phone and reviewed security-camera footage. Her suspicion was confirmed: The dead rat had been tossed onto the property.

The suspect? Mike Washer. The businessman and his wife, Melissa, first complained to the Front Porch proprietors about pre-dawn vendor deliveries in 2019, not long after the conservative Christian couple moved their financial firm right next door to the restaurant, which flies a gay Pride flag. The renovated building doubles as the Washers’ residence, where they have a front-row view of the Front Porch’s operation.

By the time the rat appeared last summer, the relationship between the two businesses had devolved. A year earlier, the Washers had started filing complaints about their neighbor’s trash with the health department. Fed up with what they viewed as harassment, the Front Porch owners filed a no-trespassing order against their neighbors. The Washers responded by installing signs to prevent diners from parking in spaces the Washers own in the shared lot. They confronted or towed drivers who ignored the signs. Their attorney threatened legal action against the restaurant’s suppliers if their trucks continued to “trespass” in the lot. The same attorney wrote a town official, challenging the restaurant’s right to operate under its existing permit.


Still, when she spotted the rat last August, Foster was not prepared for what she saw on the video: Mike Washer flipping the rodent onto the Front Porch’s property and taking photos of it, in what she assumed was a staged effort to flag health officials about an infestation. Foster remembers thinking, “I cannot believe that someone would stoop so low to try to put someone out of business.”

The Washers don’t deny Mike’s actions but dispute the motivation: They say they have no interest in closing the Front Porch. They claim the rat was first dumped near their back door by restaurant employees, and Mike was returning the favor.

What’s more, the Washers say, the dead rat was just one more insult that the couple, who once planted an “all lives matter” sign in their front yard, have endured since moving next door to a restaurant owned by a gay couple. They are not the harassers, the Washers argue. They are the harassed. They say they are being treated unfairly because they are conservative. They say they have been insulted by staff, including Foster, have lived with a bright security light shining into their home, and have found used chewing tobacco next to their car doors.

“We still feel like somebody put it there to, excuse me, eff with us,” Melissa Washer said about the rat. “Because they had done so many other little s---ty things to us.”

This conflict has dragged on for years, creating friction where friendships used to be and often forcing residents to pick sides. The conflict has dragged on so long that some people in The Plains, population 250 or so, have been left to develop theories about what’s driving it, some perhaps more rooted in reality than others: Some fear the Washers’ actions could break the town financially with hearings, lawsuits and paperwork. They even fear the couple’s legal challenge could end up compromising The Plains’ ability to maintain its old-world charm.

“Part of what makes our community special are long-standing social networks and special traditions built on trust,” the Rev. E. Weston Mathews, rector of Grace Episcopal Church in The Plains, said in a statement to The Washington Post.

“But like so many places in our country, our community is not immune to dangerous conspiracy theories, extremism and tribalism,” Mathews continued. “In my view, what began as a difficult dispute between two neighboring businesses has become something much greater, is accelerating through social media and is damaging our sense of trust in each other as neighbors in a close-knit village.”

The Washers — the newcomers in a village where families that have lived there 20 years still feel like outsiders — say they’re misunderstood. They love this tiny town. They’re not out to destroy it, or remake it.

 

This is a story of the classic conservative "I'm the real victim here having to put up with those people!" fight that consumed an entire village. One side of the fight is an older Gen X gay couple making pancakes and the other side is an older Gen X straight couple who went to DC on January 6th, 2021. Not even the WaPo's bothsiderism can hide the level of pure hate radiating from the right-wing assholes here. The rat was just one part of it.

As a bigger picture in America of the 2020's, this one is going to stick with you.

The Road To Gilead, Con't

Iowa GOP Gov. Kim Reynolds has signed one of America's most draconian state bans on abortion into law, making the procedure illegal after just six weeks of pregnancy. and the ACLU (now having lots of experience fighting these bans across the US) has already sprung into action, asking a state judge to block the law for now.

 

Republican Gov. Kim Reynolds signed a new "fetal heartbeat" law Friday, banning nearly all abortions after cardiac activity is detected in the embryo, which happens at about six weeks of gestation. Abortion providers say that will prohibit the vast majority of abortions in Iowa.

At the same time, in a courthouse less than a mile away from the bill signing, Polk County District Judge Joseph Seidlin heard arguments from abortion providers and the state about whether the law should be allowed to remain in effect as a legal challenge continues.

The American Civil Liberties Union of Iowa and abortion providers asked Seidlin to block the bill immediately. He refused but said he will try to issue a ruling by the end of the day on Monday.

Seidlin said the case requires his "strong and lengthy attention."

"I cannot think of anything that would be more insulting to either side than for a judge, who, before Wednesday at 11 o'clock, had no idea that he was going to be involved in any of this, to listen to arguments and to rule from the bench," Seidlin said at the hearing's conclusion.

A nearly identical law passed in 2018 was blocked. On Friday, Reynolds condemned abortion providers' attempt to once again impede the restrictions.

"As we gather here today, at this very moment, the abortion industry is in the court trying to prevent this law from taking effect and stop once again the will of the people," Reynolds said.

The American Civil Liberties Union of Iowa, Planned Parenthood of the Heartland, the Emma Goldman Clinic and Dr. Sarah Traxler filed a lawsuit against the law Wednesday, before it was signed.

The plaintiffs seek a temporary injunction, which would block the new restrictions from being enforced until a court decides otherwise.

They sought to prove that the law would “irreparably harm” Iowans if it were enacted and enforced — and that they will be able to make a solid case to strike it down permanently.

Peter Im, a staff attorney for Planned Parenthood Federation of America, argued Friday that the law would prohibit the “vast majority” of abortions that take place in Iowa, forcing pregnant people to carry their pregnancies to term, to “self-manage” their abortion, or to seek care out of state.

 

Of course, the Iowa 2018 law was deemed unconstitutional before Dobbs. Now, it's anyone's guess. And if you think the right is going to stop at making women travel hundreds of miles to get healthcare, I have bad news for you.

 

Mississippi authorities need access to information about residents who obtain abortions or gender-affirming care in other states, Attorney General Lynn Fitch told the Biden administration in a June 16 letter. Attorneys general from 18 other states attorneys general signed onto the letter.

Fitch’s letter calls on U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra to drop a proposed rule change that would prevent states from obtaining private health information “for a criminal, civil, or administrative investigation into or proceeding against any person in connection with seeking, obtaining, providing, or facilitating reproductive health care … outside of the state where the investigation or proceeding is authorized” and “is lawful in the state where it is provided.”

Fitch’s letter accuses the Biden administration of pushing “a false narrative that States are seeking to treat pregnant women as criminals or punish medical personnel who provide lifesaving care.”

“Based on this lie, the Administration has sought to wrest control over abortion back from the people in defiance of the Constitution and Dobbs,” the letter says. “… The proposed rule defies the governing statute, would unlawfully interfere with States’ authority to enforce their laws, and does not serve any legitimate need.”

 

The road to Gilead is as clear as day. Red states arresting women and anyone who assists them in getting an out-of-state abortion, filling jails and prisons, leaving people in fear?

 

That was always the plan.

 

Your womb belongs to the state, ladies.

Last Call For The Devil Went Down To Georgia, Con't

Donald Trump's legal team is asking Georgia's state supreme court to toss Fulton County DA Fani Willis's entire investigation into Trump's 2020 election interference conspiracy in the state, claiming Willis has no legal right to investigate Trump or to bring charges against him for acts he may have taken while in the Oval Office.

 

Weeks before he’s expected to be indicted in Fulton County, former President Donald Trump revived his push to disqualify District Attorney Fani Willis from investigating him for election interference.

In a petition filed before the Georgia Supreme Court, Trump’s attorneys also sought to quash the final report of a special purpose grand jury that recommended people be indicted. Additionally, they requested a ruling that would forbid Willis from using any evidence obtained by the investigative jury, which heard testimony from about 75 witnesses between May 2022 and Jan. 2023.

The motion filed on Thursday asks Georgia’s highest court to put a halt to any ongoing proceedings “related to and flowing from the special purpose grand jury’s investigation until this matter can be resolved.” This would include any consideration of a possible indictment for alleged criminal meddling in Georgia’s 2020 presidential election by one of two regular Fulton grand juries that were seated on Tuesday.


Trump’s attorneys — Drew Findling, Marissa Goldberg and Jennifer Little — acknowledged that such a petition filed before Georgia’s highest court is typically a long shot. But they said “extraordinary circumstances” justify it now.

“Even in an extraordinarily novel case of national significance, one would expect matters to take their normal procedural course within a reasonable time,” the motion said. “But nothing about these processes have been normal or reasonable. And the all-but-unavoidable conclusion is that the anomalies below are because petitioner is President Donald J. Trump.”

In March, Trump’s attorneys filed a motion in Fulton Superior Court also asking officials to disqualify Willis and toss out the special grand jury’s findings. They noted this time that Judge Robert McBurney, the supervising judge of the special grand jury, has yet to rule on the motion and that Willis has notified local court officials and law enforcement she is likely to seek an indictment at some point between July 31st and Aug. 18th.

“Stranded between the supervising judge’s protracted passivity and the district attorney’s looming indictment, (Trump) has no meaningful option other than to seek this court’s intervention,” the motion said.

Willis’s office previously said Trump’s arguments for dismissal were barred by lack of standing, untimeliness and other procedural flaws. The Republican’s efforts were premature because no one has been charged with a crime yet, prosecutors said.

“If an investigation results in actual criminal charges against (Trump), the justice system ensures they will have no shortage of available remedies to pursue,” the DA’s May response argued.

Trump’s lawyers also filed a similar motion in Fulton Superior Court on Friday, saying they did so out of an abundance of caution.

A spokesman from the DA’s office declined to comment on the state Supreme Court filing. McBurney did not immediately respond to a request for comment.


Both motions contend that Willis and McBurney “at every turn” have trampled on the procedural safeguards and rights of Trump and others under investigation.

“The whole of the process is now incurably infected,” the motion said. “And nothing that follows could be legally sound or publicly respectable.”

It asserted that the Georgia statute allowing for the operation of special grand juries was unconstitutionally vague. It said that publication of excerpts of the final report would violate the former president’s rights to fundamental fairness and due process and lead to “irremediable injury” to his reputation as he runs for the GOP nomination for president for a third time.

“(Trump) now sits on a precipice,” his lawyers’ motion said. “A regular Fulton County grand jury could return an indictment any day that will have been based on a report and predicate investigative process that were wholly without authority.”

 

The motion is nonsense, of course. It assumes plenary executive immunity to state crimes, and assumes that indictments will wreck Trump's 2024 campaign run, which won't actually happen (it should) but that's not a reason to grant Trump immunity and wipe out the investigation.

It's a long shot but the play here is victimization, setting the table for what Trump's lawyers know is coming: criminal charges that he can't absolve himself of if convicted.

Of course, Georgia GOP Gov. Brian Kemp could do exactly that, so...

We'll see.

Retribution Execution, Con't

ABC News's Tal Axelrod is mostly right about his article today documenting Trump's campaign promise of revenge against the federal government. Mostly.

 

Donald Trump has told supporters not to just see him as a candidate but as "your retribution."

In his comeback bid for the White House, the former president -- twice impeached but twice acquitted and now twice indicted -- has vowed that if reelected, he will wield his power to personally remake parts of the federal government to a degree that historian Mark Updegrove said was unprecedented. Trump has promised to hamstring perceived enemies, including in the Department of Justice, which is currently investigating him, and target Republican bogeymen like President Joe Biden.

He swore in June to appoint a special prosecutor to "go after" the Bidens and that he would "totally obliterate the deep state," referring to a conspiratorial view of how the government operates.

"This is the final battle. ... Either they win or we win," he said in March.

Among Trump's policy proposals is reviving an executive order from the final months of his presidency, revoked by Biden, that observers say would let him essentially turn broad swaths of federal workers into at-will employees whom he could fire and replace -- rather than terminating them only for cause, such as bad performance, and after satisfying certain employment protections.

Shortly after being indicted in New York in April on felony charges of falsifying business records, which he denies, related to money paid to an adult film actress during his 2016 campaign, Trump exhorted Congressional Republicans via social media to "DEFUND THE DOJ AND FBI UNTIL THEY COME TO THEIR SENSES."

He's also directed ire at longtime nonpartisan institutions, deriding national security and intelligence workers as "corrupt," and he's crassly attacked both the special counsel who is investigating his alleged mishandling of government secrets -- and the prosecutor's family.

Experts says all of this is stretching -- maybe snapping -- the boundaries of how past presidential candidates have criticized the very government they hope to lead.

"Time and time again, we have seen Donald Trump attempt to remake our government in his image, not based on our country’s ideals and traditions, but based on a personal agenda," said Updegrove, a presidential historian and ABC News contributor.

But conversations with GOP insiders and attendees at recent Trump campaign events confirm the base's appetite hasn't waned for the revenge he promises. According to FiveThirtyEight, early polls show Trump is the clear front-runner for his party's nomination, with his support not stifled by either of his two historic indictments, to which he has pleaded not guilty.

"It makes me more supportive and more prone to help him in any way I can," Larry Miller from Merrimack, New Hampshire, told ABC News earlier this month at an event Trump held in New Hampshire.

Another attendee at that event, Krisia Santiago, said she was a two-time Trump voter who was sticking with him. She spoke bluntly: "They're scared because he can finish this war. … If you believe in him, you're gonna be a supporter no matter what."

 

What Trump is promising isn't retribution against the "federal government" though, what he's really promising is retribution against Democrats, some "RINO" Republicans, and the people who voted them into office. 

 

That subtext, that Trump will use the power of a government he controls to immiserate those people, is increasingly becoming overt policy. It's not just revenge but purge, anyone who isn't destroyed outright will be rendered a second-class citizen with optional, situational rights.

That's the actual promise Trump is selling, and tens of millions of Americans are buying the dream of a country where they are making the choices and the rest of us have to live with it. Or, die with it.

They'll be powerless of course, Trump's donors will be the ones making the choices. But at least white MAGA voters figure they'll be last on the list for revenge because they will submit freely to their cult leader.

Maybe that's true.

Maybe.

The GOP's Race To The Bottom, Con't

Chief Justice John Roberts all but begged for a case to outlaw diversity efforts by employers in his decision ending affirmative action in college admissions, and it looks like he's going to get one sooner rather than later.

 

More than a dozen Republican attorneys general sent a letter to major corporations Thursday warning them to refrain from using racial preferences in hiring and promotion decisions.

Pointing to the Supreme Court’s decision undercutting the use of affirmative action in college admissions, the group said that companies would expose themselves to “serious legal consequences” for discriminating against different groups “even for benign purposes.”

“The Supreme Court’s recent decision should place every employer and contractor on notice of the illegality of racial quotas and race-based preferences in employment and contracting practices,” the letter from 13 attorneys general states.

Though the high court’s ruling in the college admissions cases did not directly implicate so-called diversity, equity or inclusion policies that have seen widespread adoption among the country’s largest employers, many legal experts believe workplace diversity efforts will see additional challenges that they unlawfully boost some groups over others.

The letter, which was directed at Fortune 100 companies and other large businesses, alleges that racial discrimination is “all too common” and violates federal and state civil rights laws.

“Responsible corporations interested in supporting underprivileged individuals and communities can find many lawful outlets to do so,” wrote the group, led by the attorneys general of Kansas and Tennessee. “But drawing crude lines based on skin color is not a lawful outlet, and it hurts more than it helps.”

Conservatives have stepped up their attacks on businesses over what they perceive as “woke” policies, namely around diversity initiatives and ESG-related efforts.

DEI’s defenders note that many of the things that employers have adopted, such as statistical breakdowns of their workforce or setting hiring goals, are aspirational and nonbinding.

Nevertheless, the attorneys general argue that many of these efforts effectively serve as illegal race-based quotas and called on companies to stop.

“If your company previously resorted to racial preferences or naked quotas to offset its bigotry, that discriminatory path is now definitively closed,” the letter states, citing the Supreme Court opinion. “Your company must overcome its underlying bias and treat all employees, all applicants, and all contractors equally, without regard for race.”

 

As I said earlier this week:

 

Oh, and wait until the Roberts Court gets rid of the EEOC. If you're Black and employed in anything more than an entry-level minimum-wage job, well, that's affirmative action, and you need to be fired as a result.

 

It's bad enough having to constantly prove socially to people that as a Black person, you belong at the job you've been hired for.

 

Pretty soon, we'll have to prove it legally, too.

 

 

 

Last Call For Shutdown Countdown, Military Edition

House Speaker Kevin McCarthy has lost control of his caucus again, with MAGA Republicans now threatening to sink the yearly Pentagon budget over abortion, gender-affirming health care, and Ukraine funding.

 

The House is set to vote on Thursday on whether to limit abortion access, bar transgender services and end diversity training for military personnel, part of a series of major changes that hard-right Republicans are seeking to the annual defense policy bill, including pulling U.S. aid to Ukraine.

The debate was unfolding after Speaker Kevin McCarthy capitulated late Wednesday to a small group of ultraconservative Republicans who had threatened to block the legislation, which provides a yearly pay raise for U.S. troops and sets Pentagon policy, if their proposals did not receive consideration.

Instead the House moved forward on Thursday, with the fate of the $886 billion bill still in doubt. The far right’s proposals to strip away military assistance for Ukraine stand little chance of passage given the strong bipartisan consensus behind the aid, but it was not clear whether a proposal to bar the Biden administration from sending cluster munitions might draw enough bipartisan backing to succeed.

And the measures imposing socially conservative policies on the Pentagon are extremely popular among Republicans. Should they pass, Democrats are likely to abandon the bill in droves, sinking it altogether.

Shortly before debate got underway, Representative Katherine M. Clark of Massachusetts, the Democratic whip, told CNN that there would be no support for the bill in her party if it contained the provision to bar the Pentagon from providing time off and reimbursement to service members traveling out of state to get an abortion or other reproductive health services.

It was an unusual situation for the defense bill, normally a bipartisan matter that is considered one of the few must-pass items to come before Congress. This year, with Republicans in control of the House, it has become a partisan battleground whose very survival is in doubt.

“It is outrageous that a tiny minority of MAGA extremists is dictating how we’re going to proceed,” Representative Jim McGovern, Democrat of Massachusetts and the ranking member of the Rules Committee, said early Thursday morning, denouncing G.O.P. leaders for accepting the demands of what he called “a dozen far-right wing nuts.”

“When you have a razor-thin majority in one half or one branch of government, you don’t get to dictate every single amendment that comes to the floor,” Mr. McGovern said. “Democracy means compromise.”

Republican leaders, who can afford to lose no more than four votes on their side if Democrats remain united, have been counting on Democratic votes to help pass the defense bill. Some of them have expressed frustration with hard-right lawmakers’ demands to load the bill with a deeply conservative cultural agenda that could cost them those critical votes.

“We’ve got some people that want all the things that will cost us Democratic support, but won’t guarantee you yet, if they don’t get X, Y, or Z, that they will actually vote for final passage or even for a rule,” Representative Tom Cole, Republican of Oklahoma and chairman of the rules panel, said in an interview Wednesday.

Still, Mr. Cole said he would likely vote in favor of the socially conservative amendments.

The proposals have alienated some mainstream Republicans, including those from politically competitive districts. Their opposition could block the changes, potentially salvaging the defense measure.

If you think that the MAGA meatballs are going to be allowed to sink the defense bill, normally I'd say no way in hell.

But Kevin McCarthy's "in charge".

So who knows?  

Expect scores of amendments for the legislation, any which could sink the bill, and if Republicans manage to get things passed like stripping all assistance for Ukraine's defense or banning abortions for military personnel, well, things are going to get bad.

We'll see.

mage

Birth Control To Major Fight

Republicans are almost certainly going to find a way to block today's FDA's approval of over-the-counter birth control in red states at the battlefield for womens' rights over their own bodies expands to yet another front.

 

Federal regulators on Thursday approved the nation’s first over-the-counter birth control pill in a landmark decision that will soon allow American women and girls to obtain contraceptive medication as easily as they buy aspirin and eyedrops.

The Food and Drug Administration cleared once-a-day Opill to be sold without a prescription, making it the first such medication to be moved out from behind the pharmacy counter. The manufacturer, Ireland-based Perrigo, won’t start shipping the pill until early next year, and there will be no age restrictions on sales.

Hormone-based pills have long been the most common form of birth control in the U.S., used by tens of millions of women since the 1960s. Until now, all of them required a prescription.

Medical societies and women’s health groups have pushed for wider access for decades, noting that an estimated 45% of the 6 million annual pregnancies in the U.S. are unintended. Teens and girls, women of color and those with low incomes report greater hurdles in getting prescriptions and picking them up.

The challenges can include paying for a doctor’s visit, getting time off from work and finding child care.

“This is really a transformation in access to contraceptive care,” said Kelly Blanchard, president of Ibis Reproductive Health, a nonprofit group that supported the approval. “Hopefully this will help people overcome those barriers that exist now.”

Perrigo says Opill could be an important new option for the estimated 15 million U.S. women who currently use no birth control or less effective methods, such as condoms. They are a fifth of women who are child-bearing age.

But how many women will actually gain access depends on the medication’s price, which Perrigo plans to announce later this year.

“The reason why so many of us worked tirelessly for years to get over-the-counter birth control pills is to improve access ... cost shouldn’t be one of those barriers,” said Dr. Pratima Gupta of the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists.

Most older birth control pills cost $15 to $30 for a month’s supply without insurance coverage.

Over-the-counter medicines are generally much cheaper than prescriptions, but they typically aren’t covered by insurance.

 

This is an excellent development for those who need and take birth control medication, which almost certainly means the approval will be locked up in the courts and red state legislatures will be banning the sale of Opill in the months ahead. If Republicans want to have that fight, well, we can always practice GOP control at the ballot box in 2024. 

 

AI, Oh You And Sometimes Why

The Federal Trade Commission is taking aim at ChatGPT at a time when the agency has been slapped down by the courts on multiple occasions, and chair Lina Khan is under heavy fire from Republicans.

 

The Federal Trade Commission has opened an expansive investigation into OpenAI, probing whether the maker of the popular ChatGPT bot has run afoul of consumer protection laws by putting personal reputations and data at risk.

The agency this week sent the San Francisco company a 20-page demand for records about how it addresses risks related to its AI models, according to a document reviewed by The Washington Post. The salvo represents the most potent regulatory threat to date to OpenAI’s business in the United States, as the company goes on a global charm offensive to shape the future of artificial intelligence policy.

Analysts have called OpenAI’s ChatGPT the fastest-growing consumer app in history, and its early success set off an arms race among Silicon Valley companies to roll out competing chatbots. The company’s chief executive, Sam Altman, has emerged as an influential figure in the debate over AI regulation, testifying on Capitol Hill, dining with lawmakers and meeting with President Biden and Vice President Harris.

But now the company faces a new test in Washington, where the FTC has issued multiple warnings that existing consumer protection laws apply to AI, even as the administration and Congress struggle to outline new regulations. Senate Majority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) has predicted that new AI legislation is months away.

The FTC’s demands of OpenAI are the first indication of how it intends to enforce those warnings. If the FTC finds that a company violates consumer protection laws, it can levy fines or put a business under a consent decree, which can dictate how the company handles data. The FTC has emerged as the federal government’s top Silicon Valley cop, bringing large fines against Meta, Amazon and Twitter for alleged violations of consumer protection laws.

The FTC called on OpenAI to provide detailed descriptions of all complaints it had received of its products making “false, misleading, disparaging or harmful” statements about people. The FTC is investigating whether the company engaged in unfair or deceptive practices that resulted in “reputational harm” to consumers, according to the document.

The FTC also asked the company to provide records related to a security incident that the company disclosed in March when a bug in its systems allowed some users to see payment-related information, as well as some data from other users’ chat history. The FTC is probing whether the company’s data security practices violate consumer protection laws. OpenAI said in a blog post that the number of users whose data was revealed to someone else was “extremely low.”

OpenAI and the FTC did not immediately respond to requests for comment sent on Thursday morning.

News of the probe comes as FTC Chair Lina Khan is likely to face a combative hearing Thursday before the House Judiciary Committee, where Republican lawmakers are expected to analyze her enforcement record and accuse her of mismanaging the agency. Khan’s ambitious plans to rein in Silicon Valley have suffered key losses in court. On Tuesday, a federal judge rejected the FTC’s attempt to block Microsoft’s $69 billion deal to buy the video game company Activision.

The agency has repeatedly warned that action is coming on AI, in speeches, blog posts, op-eds and news conferences. In a speech at Harvard Law School in April, Samuel Levine, the director of the agency’s Bureau of Consumer Protection, said the agency was prepared to be “nimble” in getting ahead of emerging threats.

“The FTC welcomes innovation, but being innovative is not a license to be reckless,” Levine said. “We are prepared to use all our tools, including enforcement, to challenge harmful practices in this area.”

 

Khan, quite frankly, has been less than effective in battling Big Business so far, having lost on a number of antitrust court battles involving everything from Facebook to Altria to this week's loss to stop Microsoft from buying gaming giant Activision Blizzard. 

I don't exactly have a lot of faith in her or the agency to stop ChatGPT from running rampant.

Still, she's the FTC chair we have, and I just hope the agency is able to rein in ChatGPT and its competitors before the thousands of layoffs becomes, say, millions.

With the Hollywood writers' strike now turning into a full blown actors' strike, you'd better believe entertainment companies are going to be moving quickly on using AI to replace as much creative talent as possible and as soon as they can, and that's only going to be the start.

Last Call For Blacked Out In College

The Nation's Elie Mystal doesn't mince words, stating plainly that colleges and universities are going to have to all but eliminate Black students from admissions, lest they be sued out of existence by white students accusing them of back-door, unconstitutional affirmative action.

 

The Supreme Court’s decision in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, the case banning race consciousness in college admissions, is facially unenforceable. That’s an underreported aspect of Chief Justice John Roberts’s gobbledygook ruling, mainly because most of the white people doing the reporting have adopted the gospel of “race-neutral” and “color blindness” without giving those concepts a whole lot of critical thought. But humans cannot retroactively make themselves unaware of race. People cannot un-conscious themselves, and ordering them to not think about race just ensures that they will. (In her dissent, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson called it a “classic pink-elephant paradox.”) The court expects college admissions officers to know about the race of their applicants, and not care, but there’s really not going to be any way to tell if colleges are disregarding the precise bit of information the court wants them to.

As a result, the real upshot of the affirmative action ruling is this: Colleges and universities must now punish Black applicants by decreasing the enrollment of Black students, by any means necessary. That’s because the only way universities can show compliance with Roberts’s new rules is to show that they’ve decreased the number of Black kids they let into school. Anything less than that will likely trigger litigation from the white supremacists who have already promised to hunt down schools that admit too many Black people, as determined by their own white-makes-right accounting system.

This intended revival of segregationist educational opportunities flows directly from the sheer hubris of Roberts’s attempt to legislate how admissions officers think, along with his open threats to universities that do not comply with his version of thought-policing. In his decision, Roberts expects that colleges and universities will be responsible for self-enforcing his ruling, but he also warns them that additional litigation will be coming their way if they try a work-around to achieve racial diversity in their classes. Again, the white media has made a big deal about the part of Roberts’s ruling where he says that colleges can still consider how race has affected an applicant (for instance, as described in a college essay), but they’ve ignored the last lines of his ruling where he specifically threatens schools that use those very essays to achieve racial diversity.

Roberts writes:

But, despite the dissent’s assertion to the contrary, universities may not simply establish through application essays or other means the regime we hold unlawful today…. “[W]hat cannot be done directly cannot be done indirectly. The Constitution deals with substance, not shadows,” and the prohibition against racial discrimination is “levelled at the thing, not the name.”… A benefit to a student who overcame racial discrimination, for example, must be tied to that student’s courage and determination. Or a benefit to a student whose heritage or culture motivated him or her to assume a leadership role or attain a particular goal must be tied to that student’s unique ability to contribute to the university.

I’s sho hopes Massa Roberts thinks I is a good Negro wit the determination to keeps learnin’ my letters at the fancy school.

Roberts’s closing flourish here is trash on many levels. First of all, I don’t recall anyone appointing him as the chief judge for how Black people are supposed to overcome racial discrimination. Second, I’d argue that college admissions officers should pay special attention to applicants who didn’t fully overcome the hurdles white people put in their way, but might do so in the future. And third, Roberts’s paean to model minorities is still a white man’s wishes disguised as a legal remedy: How in the hell will Roberts know if some essay reader saw “courage and determination” in an applicant? How can Roberts possibly know what constitutes a unique contribution to a university, and how can Roberts place himself in a position to second-guess what the admissions officers on the ground think are worthwhile contributions?

Most important of all, how can Roberts, or anybody else, know if universities are following his rules? Roberts doesn’t tell us outright, but he sure drops a powerful hint. In his decision, he effectively accuses Harvard of using a backdoor quota system to maintain a consistent rate of Black students. He writes: “For the admitted classes [at Harvard] of 2009 to 2018, black students represented a tight band of 10.0%-11.7% of the admitted pool.” He adds in a footnote: “Harvard must use precise racial preferences year in and year out to maintain the unyielding demographic composition of its class.”

Even if you think Roberts is right (and I’ll point out that Roberts offered no evidence that Harvard “must” be using precise racial preferences to achieve this kind of diversity, nor did the trial court, whose presentation of facts was what Roberts was supposed to be bound by, instead of his own conglomeration of fact-free inferences), how will a school like Harvard prove, to Roberts’s satisfaction, that it is not using racial preferences in the future?

The answer: Only a decrease in Black enrollment is likely to satisfy Roberts. If Harvard maintains its class diversity, Roberts will accuse it of using racial preferences. If Harvard increases Black enrollment, Roberts will accuse it of using newly unconstitutional race-consciousness to promote Black applicants—beyond historical levels, he’ll likely say. Only a decrease in Black enrollment will satisfy Roberts’s unworkable standard of ignoring race. It doesn’t actually matter how Harvard goes about putting together its class: If this doesn’t produce Roberts’s desired outcome of decreasing Black enrollment, Roberts will accuse it of thinking about race.

Of course, Roberts doesn’t say by how much universities will have to decrease their Black enrollment to satisfy his new legal requirements. If he had, white media might actually have reported on this aspect of his ruling. Instead, Roberts can almost certainly rely on the efforts of outsourced goons to keep an eye on universities and sue them if too many Black kids get in. One goon squad leader in particular, Trump political adviser Stephen Miller, has already volunteered to do this work, and has basically said the quiet part aloud.

 

Every Black student at a non-HBCU is going to have to "prove" they didn't get in from affirmative action, just like we've been doing for decades now. The difference with the end of race in college admissions is now non-Black students can sue.

 

Expect a sharp drop in college admissions for Black students as a result.

 

Which is the point.

 

Oh, and wait until the Roberts Court gets rid of the EEOC. If you're Black and employed in anything more than an entry-level minimum-wage job, well, that's affirmative action, and you need to be fired as a result.

 

Stay tuned.

Supremely Corrupt Cads, Crooks, and Creeps, Con't

You have got to be friggin' kidding me.

 

Several lawyers who have had business before the supreme court, including one who successfully argued to end race-conscious admissions at universities, paid money to a top aide to Justice Clarence Thomas, according to the aide’s Venmo transactions. The payments appear to have been made in connection to Thomas’s 2019 Christmas party.

The payments to Rajan Vasisht, who served as Thomas’s aide from July 2019 to July 2021, seem to underscore the close ties between Thomas, who is embroiled in ethics scandals following a series of revelations about his relationship with a wealthy billionaire donor, and certain senior Washington lawyers who argue cases and have other business in front of the justice.

Vasisht’s Venmo account – which was public prior to requesting comment for this article and is no longer – show that he received seven payments in November and December 2019 from lawyers who previously served as Thomas legal clerks. The amount of the payments is not disclosed, but the purpose of each payment is listed as either “Christmas party”, “Thomas Christmas Party”, “CT Christmas Party” or “CT Xmas party”, in an apparent reference to the justice’s initials.

However, it remains unclear what the funds were for.

The lawyers who made the Venmo transactions were: Patrick Strawbridge, a partner at Consovoy McCarthy who recently successfully argued that affirmative action violated the US constitution; Kate Todd, who served as White House deputy counsel under Donald Trump at the time of the payment and is now a managing party of Ellis George Cipollone’s law office; Elbert Lin, the former solicitor general of West Virginia who played a key role in a supreme court case that limited the Environmental Protection Agency’s ability to regulate greenhouse gas emissions; and Brian Schmalzbach, a partner at McGuire Woods who has argued multiple cases before the supreme court.

Other lawyers who made payments include Manuel Valle, a graduate of Hillsdale College and the University of Chicago Law School who clerked for Thomas last year and is currently working as a managing associate at Sidley, and Liam Hardy, who was working at the Department of Justice’s office of legal counsel at the time the payment was made and now serves as an appeals court judge for the armed forces.

Will Consovoy, who died earlier this year, also made a payment. Consovoy clerked for Thomas during the 2008-09 term and was considered a rising star in conservative legal circles. After his death, the New York Times reported that Consovoy had come away from his time working for Thomas “with the conviction that the court was poised to tilt further to the right – and that constitutional rulings that had once been considered out of reach by conservatives, on issues like voting rights, abortion and affirmative action, would suddenly be within grasp”.

None of the lawyers who made payments responded to emailed questions from the Guardian.

According to his résumé, Vasisht’s duties included assisting the justice with the administrative functioning of his chambers, including personal correspondence and his personal and office schedule.

 

I mean Venmo is convenient and all.

 

It also leaves a transaction record for this exact reason.

 

Don't do crimes with Venmo, kids.

Their Gal Friday

TPM's Josh Marshall recounts the long, crazy ride of Gal Luft, the House GOP's supposed star mystery witness in the Biden "bribery scandal", who apparently is also a wanted fugitive by the Justice Department.  Republicans are howling at the indictment, but the problem is Luft was indicted last year, well before his spurious accusations.

“The timing is always coincidental according to the Democrats and the Department of Justice,” Comer told Fox News host Laura Ingraham on Monday evening. Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI), who said that Luft could be a key witness, said on Sunday that he “does not trust the Department of Justice.”

The facts, as laid out in and around the indictment, tell a far more familiar story of D.C. grubbiness.

Per the docket, unsealed on Tuesday, the indictment came down on Nov. 1, 2022. That’s eight months before the DOJ made it public, and three months before Luft himself first loudly alleged that he was the victim of a Biden political persecution.

And per the indictment, Luft’s assertion that he’s been charged with “thought crimes” appears far-fetched.

He faces eight separate counts, including two charges of making false statements to federal officials, one for conspiracy to violate the Foreign Agents Registration Act, and five counts relating to separate schemes which allegedly involved Luft trying to trade in sanctioned Iranian oil and broker deals for a Chinese firm to supply, among other things, “strike UAVs” to Kenya and anti-tank missile launchers to Libya.

The foreign agent scheme, prosecutors say, had less to do with the Bidens than it did with the Trump administration’s entrance to power in 2016.

Luft, while co-director for a Maryland energy security think tank, allegedly agreed in 2015 to receive annual payments of $350,000 from CEFC, the Chinese energy firm that would go on to ink contracts with Hunter Biden. The payments were made, prosecutors say, as part of an agreement with Luft to advance China’s interests in the U.S.

Luft was, the indictment alleges, to do three things in exchange for the payments: arrange an “international meeting” in a major U.S. city on “energy security issues,” secure CEFC’s chair an honorary position at a separate energy group that Luft advised, and help make a member of that energy group a “senior advisor” to CEFC.

The arrangement allegedly continued through the 2016 election, when Luft began to develop a relationship with a person whose description in the indictment matches that of former CIA Director James Woolsey.

At one point, prosecutors cite a quote from a December 2016 conference in D.C. about China’s Belt and Road project, in which Woolsey allegedly said that “We want to joyfully participate with China in international trade operations and economic growth.” The same quote appears attributed to Woolsey in a China Daily article about the meeting.

When Woolsey was named in a September 2016 article as a Trump campaign adviser on national security policies, Luft allegedly sent a celebratory email to an unnamed associate.

Luft, prosecutors say, tried to use his relationship with Woolsey — and the prospect that Woolsey might be asked to take a top position in the Trump administration — as part of his agreement to help China. That included an alleged plan for Luft’s think tank to make a monthly payment of $6,000 to Woolsey from November 2016 to October 2017, in exchange for which Woolsey would allegedly publish pro-China articles. In one case alleged by prosecutors, Luft purportedly edited an introductory email that Woolsey planned to send to another Trump adviser post-election.

 

Knowing that he was indicted, Luft came up with a scheme to not only skip town, but to accuse President Biden of "bribery" and to contact House Republicans as a wanted fugitive. Doesn't exactly seem like the "star witness" that Jim Comer promised, does he? 

No, all this seems like nonsense to try to cover up the fact that Luft was a spy for China during the Trump regime, and that he faces a long stint in prison if convicted as a result. Republicans are going to call him as a witness anyway, it seems.

Good luck with that, I guess.

Last Call For Climate Of Destruction, Con't

This year's El Nino climate event is already on top of record surface temperature, and that means the oceans are several degrees above normal in North America, including the state of Florida, setting new temperature records daily this July.

 

Not only is Florida sizzling in record-crushing heat, but the ocean waters that surround it are scorching, as well. The unprecedented ocean warmth around the state — connected to historically warm oceans worldwide — is further intensifying its heat wave and stressing coral reefs, with conditions that could end up strengthening hurricanes.

Much of Florida is seeing its warmest year on record, with temperatures running 3 to 5 degrees above normal. While some locations have been setting records since the beginning of the year, the hottest weather has come with an intense heat dome cooking the Sunshine State in recent weeks. That heat dome has made coastal waters extremely warm, including “downright shocking” temperatures of 92 to 96 degrees in the Florida Keys, meteorologist and journalist Bob Henson said Sunday in a tweet.

“That’s boiling for them! More typically it would be in the upper 80s,” tweeted Jeff Berardelli, chief meteorologist and climate specialist at WFLA-TV in Tampa.

The temperatures are so high that they are off the scale of the color contours on some weather maps.

The warmth registers as a Category 3 out of 5 on the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s marine heat wave scale. NOAA defines a marine heat wave as a period with persistent and unusually warm ocean temperatures, “which can have significant impacts on marine life as well as coastal communities and economies.” The agency describes Category 3 as “severe.”

Such warm water temperatures “would be impressive any time of year, but they’re occurring when the water would already be rather warm, bringing it up to bona fide bathtub conditions that we rarely see,” Brian McNoldy, senior research associate at the University of Miami and hurricane expert for Capital Weather Gang, said in an email.

The toasty waters are influencing temperatures on land by raising the humidity, which makes it harder for temperatures to cool off at night. Numerous records for temperatures and heat indexes have been broken since mid-June, and the heat wave is expected to continue for at least a week. According to McNoldy, Miami’s heat index soared to 110 degrees on Monday and has reached at least 100 on 30 straight days.

Miami, Tampa and Fort Myers are expected to hit a heat index of 105 or higher on each of the next seven days, according to the The Washington Post’s heat tracker.

“It’s an astounding, prolonged heat wave even for a place that’s no stranger to sultry weather,” said McNoldy, who also cautioned that the warm waters could make tropical storms or hurricanes stronger. “It’s not something we like to see near land simply because it would allow a storm to maintain a high intensity right up to landfall or rapidly intensify as it approaches landfall.”

Hurricane forecasters have recently upped their predictions for the season in response to the rising ocean temperatures.

The marine heat wave is also causing coral bleaching, which can leave corals vulnerable to deadly diseases. NOAA’s Coral Reef Watch has recorded an “Alert Level 1” off the coast of South Florida. That is the second-highest level, described by NOAA as “significant bleaching likely.”

 

Not that I expect Ron DeSantis to do anything, he'll just block any efforts to mitigate the damage and scream something about diesel and microbeads being good for fish.

 

When Florida's tourism, fishing, and farming industries collapse, you can thank him.

Oh, and the latest insurance provider to pull out of the state is Farmers, and President Biden's energy efficiency program to provide consumers rebates for saving energy? DeSantis trashed those too: nearly $400 million has just gone up in smoke for Florida residents.

Guess the state's going to have to drown, burn, and melt before Florida gets rid of him.

Orange Meltdown, Con't

Donald Trump's lawyers want to delay his federal documents trial indefinitely, claiming that a trial date can't be set until all of the legal motions surrounding the case have been decided by Trump Judge Aileen Cannon.  

 

The written filing — submitted 30 minutes before its deadline of midnight on Tuesday — presents a significant early test for Judge Aileen M. Cannon, the Trump-appointed jurist who is overseeing the case. If granted, it could have the effect of pushing Mr. Trump’s trial into the final stages of the presidential campaign in which he is now the Republican front-runner or even past the 2024 election.

While timing is important in any criminal matter, it could be hugely consequential in Mr. Trump’s case, in which he stands accused of illegally holding on to 31 classified documents after leaving the White House and obstructing the government’s repeated efforts to reclaim them.

There could be complications of a sort never before presented to a court if Mr. Trump is a candidate in the last legs of a presidential campaign and a federal criminal defendant on trial at the same time. If the trial is pushed back until after the election and Mr. Trump wins, he could try to pardon himself after taking office or have his attorney general dismiss the matter entirely.

Some of the former president’s advisers have been blunt in private conversations that he is looking to winning the election as a solution to his legal problems. And the request for an open-ended delay to the trial of Mr. Trump and his co-defendant, Walt Nauta, a personal aide, presents a high-stakes question for Judge Cannon, who came into the case already under scrutiny for making decisions favorable to the former president in the early phases of the investigation.

Mr. Trump’s lawyers pitched their request to Judge Cannon as a plea for cautious deliberation and as a means of safeguarding democracy.

“This extraordinary case presents a serious challenge to both the fact and perception of our American democracy,” wrote the lawyers, Chris M. Kise and Todd Blanche for Mr. Trump, and Stanley Woodward Jr. and Sasha Dadan for Mr. Nauta.

“The court now presides over a prosecution advanced by the administration of a sitting president against his chief political rival, himself a leading candidate for the presidency of the United States,” they wrote. “Therefore, a measured consideration and timeline that allows for a careful and complete review of the procedures that led to this indictment and the unprecedented legal issues presented herein best serves the interests of the defendants and the public.”

The lawyers also took note of the unusual intertwining of law and politics in the case, suggesting that Mr. Trump’s status as a presidential candidate should be factored into the timing of the trial.

“President Trump is running for president of the United States and is currently the likely Republican Party nominee,” they wrote. “This undertaking requires a tremendous amount of time and energy, and that effort will continue until the election on Nov. 5, 2024.”

“Mr. Nauta’s job requires him to accompany President Trump during most campaign trips around the country,” they continued. “This schedule makes trial preparation with both of the defendants challenging. Such preparation requires significant planning and time.”

 

The question isn't whether the motion is bullshit (it is) but whether Judge Cannon will grant it. Trump having the trial pushed back to after the 2024 election means if he wins the election he can dispose of the case, or more likely order the interim Attorney General he has after firing Merrick Garland drop the case as Trump would then be president.  If he doesn't win, and Cannon still has the case, Trump will just file for 2028 and demand another delay, and get it. 

We're about to find out whether this case goes to trial at all, and that's solely up to a judge that has already ruled that the government completely overstepped its bounds in obtaining evidence in the case in the first place.

Judge Cannon has the means here to effectively eliminate this case. We'll see if she does. Remember, she's tried to before. And I don't think being smacked down by the 11th Circuit previously will matter to her all that much, and there's not a lot the 11th Circuit can do here to interfere without blowing up the case and delaying it further.

It's literally in her court now.

Tales Of The Shattered Rainbow, Con't

As widely expected, and widely demonstrated by Republican lawmakers in red states, anti-trans policies to "protect children" are now anti-trans policies directly targeting trans adults. 

 

A Kansas judge has ordered Gov. Laura Kelly's administration to stop changing gender markers on driver's licenses for transgender people.

Shawnee County District Court Judge Teresa Watson issued the temporary restraining order on Monday at the request of Attorney General Kris Kobach, who is suing two officials at the Kansas Department of Revenue over the practice.

The lawsuit is an attempt from Kobach, a Republican, to force the agency under Kelly, a Democrat, to follow new state law from Senate Bill 180.

The law went into effect July 1 with a strict biological definition of sex. The attorney general and governor have disputed whether or not the law bans the current practice of changing gender markers on both driver's licenses and birth certificates.

"The Attorney General points out that driver's licenses are issued for a period of six years and are difficult to take back or out of circulation once issued," Watson wrote. "Licenses are used by law enforcement to identify criminal suspects, crime victims, wanted persons, missing persons, and others. Compliance with stated legal requirements for identifying license holders is a public safety concern.

Taryn Jones, vice chair and lobbyist for the LGBTQ+ rights group Equality Kansas, acknowledged the concern that allowing the state to keep making changes would make it more difficult for law enforcement, but asked, “How many criminals are you having that are trans?” She said trans people will still be able to change their names to align with their gender identities.

Jones also said potential problems for law enforcement should be weighed against the harm to the mental health and safety of transgender people who don’t have licenses that match their gender identities.

“You know, it’s hard enough being trans right now in America, especially in a conservative place like Kansas,” she said.

"Allowing Respondents to issue non-compliant driver's licenses pending a court hearing is an immediate and irreparable injury that supports the grant of a temporary restraining order on the terms requested by the Attorney General."

The order is in effect for 14 days, but may be modified, vacated or extended by the court.

Under Kansas law, a court is allowed to issue a temporary restraining order without providing prior notice to the other party if the facts "clearly show that immediate and irreparable injury, loss or damage will result to the movant before the adverse party can be heard in opposition."

 

First of all, it's our old fascist friend Kris Kobach, who I have covered extensively on ZVTS over the last decade plus years, so you know this is some fascist bullshit of the nth degree.

 

But second, did you catch that? The legal argument is that the state acknowledging trans people existing in official identification is a public safety concern preventing law enforcement from doing their jobs.

The state recognizing trans folks existing is a public safety concern that has to be stopped. That's where we are, and if you define a group out of existence, the state can simply eliminate members of that group.

Do you see where the GOP is going on this? Germans did this 90 years ago, folks.

It will end badly.