Month: October 2020

“Two-hundred-fifty million dollars is a lot of money to spend if you’re not getting anything for it,” Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse said. “So that raises the question: What are they getting for it ?”

Whitehouse asked that near the end of a 30-minute presentation Tuesday during Senate Judiciary confirmation hearings for Supreme Court nominee Amy Coney Barrett. Whitehouse outlined the well-funded, years-long, conservative dark money effort behind selecting judges and undoing Roe, Obergefell, and the Obamacare cases.

The Center for Media and Democracy has the complete transcript. But to get the full effect, spend the time to watch Whitehouse present his case.

The Washington Post last year in a lengthy expose described how the Federalist Society and its dark-money funders have spent — nay, invested — all that money to get something they badly want. Not just overturning the 80 5-to-4 decisions on the Affordable Care Act and same-sex marriage, and undoing Roe v. Wade. those cases, but much more:

They’re about power. And if you look at those 80 decisions, they fall into four categories over and over and over again. One, unlimited and dark money and politics. Citizens United is the famous one, but it’s continued since with McCutcheon and we’ve got one coming up now. Always the five for unlimited money in politics. Never protecting against money dark money in politics, despite the fact that they said it was going to be transparent.

And who wins when you allow unlimited dark money in politics? A very small group. The ones who have unlimited money to spend and a motive to spend it in politics. They win. Everybody else loses. And if you’re looking at who might be behind this, let’s talk about people with unlimited money to spend and a motive to do it. We’ll see how that goes.

Next, knock the civil jury down. Whittle it down to a nub. The civil jury was in the Constitution, in the Bill of Rights, in our darn Declaration of Independence, but it’s annoying to big corporate powers because you can swagger your way as a big corporate power through Congress. You can go and tell the president you put money into to elect what to do. He will put your stooges at the EPA. It’s all great until you get to the civil jury, because they have an obligation, as you know, Judge Barrett, they have an obligation under the law to be fair to both parties irrespective of their size.

You can’t bribe them. You’re not allowed to. It’s a crime to tamper with the jury. It’s standard practice to tamper with Congress. And they make decisions based on the law. If you’re used to being the boss and swaggering your way around the political side, you don’t want to be answerable before a jury. And so one after another, these 80 5-to-4 decisions have knocked down, whittled away at, the civil jury, a great American institution.

Third – first was unlimited dark money, second was demean and diminish the civil jury – third is weaken regulatory agencies. A lot of this money, I’m convinced, is polluter money. The Koch Industries is a polluter, the fossil fuel industry is a polluter. Who else would be putting buckets of money into this and wanting to hide who they are behind DonorsTrust or other schemes?

And what are – if you’re a big polluter – what do you want? You want weak regulatory agencies. You want ones that you can box up and run over to Congress and get your friends to fix things for you in Congress. Over and over and over again, these decisions are targeted at regulatory agencies to weaken their independence and weaken their strength. And if you’re a big polluter, a weak regulatory agency is your idea of a good day.

And the last thing is in politics. In voting. Why on earth the Court made the decision, a factual decision – not something appellate courts are ordinarily supposed to make, as I understand it Judge Barrett – the factual decision that nobody needed to worry about minority voters in preclearance states being discriminated against, or that legislators would try to knock back their ability to vote. These five made that finding in Shelby County against bipartisan legislation from both houses of Congress, hugely passed, on no factual record.

They just decided that that was a problem that was over, on no record with no basis, because it got them to the result that we then saw. What followed? State after state after state passed voter suppression laws. One so badly targeting African Americans that two courts said it was surgically, surgically tailored to get after minority voters.

And gerrymandering, the other great control. Bulk gerrymandering where you go into a state, like the Red Map project did in Ohio and Pennsylvania, and you pack Democrats so tightly into a few districts that all the others become Republican majority districts. And in those states, you send a delegation to Congress that has a huge majority of Republican members, like 13 to 5, as I recall, in a state where the five, the party of the five actually won the popular vote.

You’ve sent a delegation to Congress that is out of step with the popular vote of that state and court after court figured out how to solve that, and the Supreme Court said nope. 5 to 4 again. Nope. We’re not going to take an interest in that question. In all these areas where it’s about political power for big special interests, and people who want to fund campaigns, and people who want to get their way through politics without actually showing up, doing it behind DonorsTrust and other groups, doing it through these schemes over and over and over again, you see the same thing.

Preserving democracy and the U.S. Constitution is not their goal. Preserving their control is. To that end, quietly and out of public view, they whittle away the parts of the U.S. Constitution that annoy them, rendering them inoperative. Calling them oligarchs would be accurate, but far too clinical.

Sen. John Kennedy, Republican of Louisiana, complained on Monday, “It hurts to be called a racist. I think it’s one of the worst things you can call an American.” What’s worse is being on the receiving end of racism, something Kennedy did not consider.

Sen. John Kennedy (R-LA): "It hurts to be called a racist. I think it's one of the worst things you can call an American." pic.twitter.com/XobtSQLDtm

— The Recount (@therecount) October 12, 2020

But the people Whitehouse described I call royalists: people dedicated to a system of rule by hereditary (or monetary) royalty and landed gentry. They and their Tory hangers-on have been with us since the beginning. There are lots of American racists. They too have been with us since the beginning. But if racist is one of the worst things you can call an American, royalist is worse. Royalists are Americans in name only.

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I can’t imagine why people think that Bill Barr and his DOJ are operating as the president’s personal attorney:

The Department of Justice has filed a lawsuit against Melania Trump’s former best friend, accusing her of breaking a non-disclosure agreement and not submitting a draft of her tell-all book about her relationship with the first lady to the federal government for pre-publication review.

Stephanie Winston Wolkoff, the planner of President Donald Trump’s 2017 inauguration, penned Melania and Me: The Rise and Fall of My Friendship with the First Lady about the sudden souring of her relationship with the first lady. The look into Melania’s inner circle, published nearly two months ago, painted an unflattering portrait of the first lady, as did several clandestine recordings Wolkoff later shared.

Filed in Washington, D.C. District Court, the lawsuit accuses Wolkoff of breach of contract and breach of fiduciary obligations. Justice Department prosecutors contend that a “gratuitous services agreement” Wolkoff and Melania Trump signed in August 2017 had no end date and that Wolkoff had access to sensitive “deliberative information” about the the first lady’s duties, similar to claims the agency made when attempting to keep the book, which was published in September, from store shelves.

I’m sure you realize that this is not normal:

“This was a contract with the United States and therefore enforceable by the United States,” Justice Department spokeswoman Kerri Kupec said.

Wolkoff’s attorneys previously called the claims “unfounded and meritless” and said the contract had been terminated more than two years ago.

Justice Department lawyers wrote, “Ms. Wolkoff agreed, among other things, ‘that [she was] specifically prohibited from publishing, reproducing or otherwise divulging any such information to any unauthorized person or entity in whole or in part.’” The Department has requested the court redirect any profits earned from the book to the federal government via a constructive trust.

She didn’t reveal classified information. She revealed that the First Lady is a self-serving, cold and reprehensible person who cares nothing for the American people. That is not the business of the Department of Justice.

It looks like this is yet another corrupt act by the Trump administration that will have to be dealt with by a new congress and president.

Just think about this for a minute:

In 2020 in America, the President, Vice President, and their Supreme Court nominee refuse to commit to a peaceful transfer of power. https://t.co/NvWAEuzdR0

— Amy Spitalnick (@amyspitalnick) October 13, 2020

Booker asked her whether it was constitutional for a president to pardon himself and she couldn’t say because it might come before the court. He asked her if a president should reveal that they have hundreds of millions of dollars in debt, possibly to foreign governments and she said she couldn’t talk about it because it’s before the courts. Earlier, she had refused to say whether a president could delay the election.

A s Booker noted, what’s astonishing about all this is that we are talking about it at all. In fact, it’s the most distressing line of questioning I heard all day. The contentious issues around health care and abortion and race are all very disturbing but they are familiar. We have been arguing over them for a long time, for better or worse.

This is new. And it is chilling.

By the way, not one Republican had a word to say about any of it. And that’s because they are Trump’s collaborators, accomplices and henchmen. They will be there for him if he pulls that trigger. And so will Justice Amy Coney Barrett.

You can say that about virtually everything in our country if Donald Trump gets a second term. But in this case it’s Dr. Fauci talking about the pandemic. Oh God:

U.S. coronavirus cases are rising again, driven by rapid transmission in Midwestern states and sparking fears that a forewarned wave of infections this fall and winter has begun.

For almost a month, new U.S. cases have been trending upward. On Monday, 17 states hit a new high in their seven-day average of case counts, and eight of those states hit records again by Tuesday afternoon.

The rising numbers are especially concerning because they set the stage for an even greater surge this winter when the virus will be helped by drier conditions and people spending more time indoors. The upward trend comes before the increased mingling of people expected to arrive with Halloween, Thanksgiving and Christmas.

The virus has become especially rampant in Midwestern states after dominating U.S. coastal and urban areas in the spring, according to data tracked by The Washington Post.AD

It is unclear what factors are driving the recent increase — whether it is the long-feared winter effect already taking place or the resumption of business and schools, or simply fatigue and people letting down their guard on social distancing efforts.

Because of day-to-day fluctuations in the reporting of cases, experts often look at the seven-day average of case counts to accurately spot trends.

In 40 states, cases are higher when compared with the week before.

Indiana, Minnesota and North Dakota have set a new average high for cases each of the past eight days. More than a dozen other states have set new average highs in recent days.

“A lot of the places being hit are Midwest states that were spared in the beginning,” said William Hanage, a Harvard University infectious-diseases researcher. “That’s of particular concern because a lot of these smaller regions don’t have the ICU beds and capacity that the urban centers had.”AD

Even D.C. and some Northeastern states — including Connecticut, New Jersey and New York — are beginning to see case counts creep back up.

Hospitalizations for covid-19, the illness caused by the virus, have also begun rising in almost a dozen states — including Ohio and Pennsylvania — raising the specter that increasing death counts will soon follow.

On Tuesday, Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine (R) warned in a tweet: “In all likelihood, things will get worse before they get better. This virus is sneaky and cunning and won’t give up. It has a mind of its own.”

And instead of taking it seriously, we are whistling past the graveyard:

Anthony S. Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said on Monday he hopes the numbers “jolt the American public into a realization that we really can’t let this happen, because it’s on a trajectory of getting worse and worse.” In a CNN interview, he called the rising numbers “the worst possible thing that could happen as we get into the cooler months.”

The IMHE model (which correctly predicted 215,000 right about now) says we could be looking at nearly 400,000 dead by February.

The U.S. trajectory highlights the urgent need for action by federal and state leaders as well as everyday Americans before transmission grows out of control, experts said.

Many experts, including Fauci, have emphasized that such actions do not have to be as drastic as the shutdowns of the spring. Public health experts say that if Americans adopted even the simplest measures discussed for months, it could make a big difference. That includes universal mask-wearing, physical distancing, avoiding crowds and hand-washing.AD

“The earlier you do it the better, because it requires less time and less severe interventions,” Hanage said. “The later you wait, the more difficult it becomes because of the exponential growth of the virus.”

Other countries have recorded alarming increases in recent weeks, including Britain, France, Germany and Italy. European leaders have told their residents to brace themselves, warning of a “decisive moment” and “perilous turning point.”

The warnings have come in sharp contrast with the stance of President Trump, who has continued to play down the severity of the U.S. outbreak, which has been the worst in the world by many measures.

It’s quite clear that the Republicans only care about getting re-elected and if there are tens of thousands of preventable deaths because they are committed to happy-talk and nonsense as a campaign strategy, it’s not their problem.

Our government is totally broken. We have to fix it.

I know you know all this, but it’s worth pointing out again and again. Donald Trump and his Republican collaborators have weaponized the US Government in alliance with violent right wing extremists. There is no other way to look at it. And I don’t know what it will take to unravel it. But there is more to this story that we do not know when it comes to national security and Trump’s decision making.

This is by Elizabeth Neumann, former  Assistant Secretary of Homeland Security for Counterterrorism and Threat Prevention in the Trump administration:

Everything we saw during the first presidential debate is indicative of how President Donald Trump behaves in the White House. His business model is chaos. He has no organization, no leadership, and sees every interaction as a contest or a battle, even when it doesn’t have to be. Chris Wallace now knows how so many administration staffers feel — and how I felt when the president got in the way of me doing my job. He is dangerous for our country.

I served as the Assistant Secretary of Homeland Security for Counterterrorism and Threat Prevention, and my job was to help keep Americans safe from terrorist attacks. My time in office coincided with a dramatic rise in white nationalist violence, but my colleagues and I couldn’t get the president to help address the problem. At the debate, America saw what I saw in the administration: President Trump refuses to distance himself from white nationalists. I realized after watching the White House response to the terrorist attack in El Paso that his rhetoric was a recruitment tool for violent extremist groups. The president bears some responsibility for the deaths of Americans at the hands of these violent extremists. 

Yes, yes he does. But this next part is even more disturbing:

Early on in the administration, I represented the Department of Homeland Security at several meetings in which a White House staff member implied that the president had approved, and that we should begin to carry out, plans that could have led the United States into war. Thankfully, there were experienced people in the room who had enough clout to suggest that these catastrophic plans needed a second look. Many of us weren’t sure what, if anything, the president had actually approved, or that he had been properly briefed to ensure he understood the risks involved. These people helped us avoid war.

Hello? Might we know more about this please? I think this is relevant!

Every day, the number of experienced people in the administration that have the ability to speak truth to power shrinks. We are seeing the results: abandoning our allies and  cozying up to dictators, emboldening our enemies and weakening our standing in the world. This would only get worse in a second Trump term.

I don’t think Trump’s horrific foreign policy and national security performance has had enough attention. His relationship with Vladimir Putin has been discussed ad nauseum but what about the rest of the world? When did he almost take us on a path to war???

God help us if he manages to steal this election. There will only be sycophants and fascist opportunists left in the room.

And this is where we are. Fasten your seatbelts it’s going to be a wild ride:

Trump’s personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani went all in on President Trump’s efforts to portray himself as an all-powerful strongman who has beat COVID-19 (he has not) during an indoors Italians for Trump rally in Philadelphia Monday night.

Speaking to a crowd of about 75 Trump supporters at the campaign’s Northeast Philadelphia office space — which was originally scheduled to be held at the 15,000-square-foot 2300 Arena, but was forced to relocate when the arena’s owners canceled the night before after finding out the event was a Trump rally — Giuliani falsely declared victory over COVID-19 as the country tops more than 215,000 fatalities amid the pandemic.

“People don’t die of this disease anymore,” Giuliani said, before baselessly insisting that “young people don’t die at all” and that “middle age people die very little”

“And even elderly people have only 1 percent chance of dying,” Giuliani said, without evidence.

Giuliani’s latest rosy picture of COVID-19 comes amid Trump’s return to the campaign trail despite an outbreak among those in his orbit, which included a rally in Florida on Monday night when he doubled down on his unfounded assertion that he’s now immune to COVID-19 after being diagnosed and hospitalized for it less than two weeks ago.

“I went through it, now they say I’m immune,” Trump said at his Florida rally on Monday night. “I feel so powerful, I’ll watch into that audience, I’ll walk in there, I’ll kiss everyone in that audience. I’ll kiss the guys and the beautiful women.”

We are at the beginning of a monumental surge in COVID cases, hospitalizations and, inevitably, deaths.

And Giuliani says people don’t die of the disease anymore while Trump is out on the campaign trail saying he wants to kiss guys and beautiful women.

Here we go.

I think this process has been going on for a long time. The alternate wingnut reality has been tearing families apart for at least two decades. But now it’s really gone off the rails:

There was a time not long ago when the letter held no special meaning for Jacob, a 24-year-old in Croatia. The 17th letter of the alphabet, usually followed by “u” in English words. What else was there to know? He certainly never expected it to end the tightknit relationship he shared with his mother.

But Jacob, who grew up in the United States, told The Washington Post that he has cut all contact with his mother now that she’s become an ardent believer of the QAnon conspiracy theories.

Though they long held different political beliefs, they had “a really, really strong relationship,” he said. “We were inseparable.” He had no reason to think anything had changed. But during the holidays in 2019, “our relationship just completely tanked.”

QAnon can be traced back to a series of 2017 posts on 4chan, the online message board known for its mixture of trolls and alt-right followers. The poster was someone named “Q,” who claimed to be a government insider with Q security clearance, the highest level in the Department of Energy. QAnon’s origin matters less than what it’s become, an umbrella term for a loose set of conspiracy theories ranging from the false claim that vaccines cause illness and are a method of controlling the masses to the bogus assertion that many pop stars and Democratic leaders are pedophiles.

The choose-your-own-adventure nature of QAnon makes it compelling to vulnerable people desperate for a sense of security and difficult for Twitter and Facebook to control, despite their efforts. It’s becoming increasingly mainstreamed as several QAnon-friendly candidates won congressional primaries. And the FBI has warned that it could “very likely motivate some domestic extremists to commit criminal, sometimes violent activity.”

As QAnon has crept into the news, it’s become a testament to our age of political disinformation, not to mention easy online comedic currency. But what’s often forgotten in stories and jokes are the people behind the scenes who are baffled at a loved one’s embrace of the “movement,” and who struggle to keep it from tearing their families apart.

According to Jacob’s recollection, his mother spent her days browsing these various theories on YouTube and Twitter. “I told her, ‘I came here to visit you,” he recalled. But she refused to stay offline.

“I finally got her to turn [her phone] off once, and it was unreal. She treated it like a chore,” he said. “It’s like she’s addicted. It feels like she’s been swallowed up by a cult.”

“Finally, I realized that my relationship with her had brought me nothing but stress and unhappiness for, at that point, really years,” he said. “That smart, awesome person that I used to know just didn’t exist anymore. So I decided to cut my losses and cauterize the wound.”

If what these people were selling was truly political or represented a real ideological difference of opinion it would be one thing. People disagree. But this is different. It’s 100% bullshit. And it’s ineffably tragic.

I did not watch Kentucky’s U.S. Senate debate Monday night, but the image above of Amy McGrath debating what looks like a cackling Halloween skeleton haunted my Twitter feed.

Susie Madrak observes that McGrath pounded Sen. Majority Leader “Moscow” Mitch McConnell:

… again and again for his lack of leadership, and reminded Kentuckians that for the first time in a century, we have an international crisis where “no one in the world looks to the United States for leadership. We can’t get the coronavirus under control.”

McConnell thinks 200,000-plus Americans dead is funny.

“Sen. McConnell built a Senate that is so dysfunctional and so partisan that even in the middle of a national crisis he can’t get it done,” McGrath said. “Think about that.”

Trying to figure out what he is laughing about. pic.twitter.com/1bF0TuOBzy

— Claire McCaskill (@clairecmc) October 13, 2020

Madrak thinks the debate could change the race’s dynamics:

This debate might be what they call “a game changer.” Last I heard, Amy McGrath was 15 points down (they don’t poll much in Kentucky) — but I suspect her performance last night changed a lot of minds and we should expect that spread to tighten up. Yeah, it’s Kentucky and the idea of beating Mitch McConnell seems too far out of reach, but I’m at least a little more hopeful this morning.

Moscow Mitch is likely to remain in the Senate, but relegating him to the minority next session might still provide some satisfaction. He’ll still be dangerous there, of course.

Control of the Senate hangs in the balance. Incumbent Republican Joni Ernst is in trouble in Iowa (facing Theresa Greenfield), as is Kelly Loeffler in a Georgia special election (facing Rev. Raphael Warnock). Steve Bullock (D) needs your help in Montana against incumbent Steve Daines. Dr. Barbara Bollier (D) has a tougher climb running in Kansas against Roger Marshall (R) for an open seat there. This will be a nail-biter.

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“Infrastructure week” became a running joke early in this vaporware administration. The New York Times counted ten such weeks through March 2020. Donald Trump invoked his $1 trillion plan for remaking America’s crumbling roads and bridges and creating jobs whenever he needed a distraction from the scandal du jour. Or else the scandal du jour rendered any rollout stillborn. Infrastructure weeks are like the acting president’s forever promise to present his plan to replace the Affordable Care Act “in about two weeks,” as he has periodically since taking office coming on four years ago.

The pitch has all but disappeared. The need has not, K. Sabeel Rahman writes in The Atlantic:

When I refer to public infrastructure, I mean something much more expansive than roads and bridges; I mean the full range of goods, services, and investments needed for communities to thrive: physical utilities such as water, parks, and transit; basics such as housing, child care, and health care; and economic safety-net supports such as food stamps and unemployment insurance. But under America’s reigning ideology, public infrastructure like this is seen as costly, inefficient, outdated, and low-quality, while private alternatives are valorized as more dynamic, efficient, and modern. This ideology is also highly racialized. Universal services open to a multiracial public are vilified, coded in dog-whistle politics as an undeserved giveaway to communities of color at the expense of white constituents. The result has been a systematic defunding of public infrastructure since the 1970s.

Same as it ever was. The “taxes are theft” ideology promoted for decades proved convenient rationale for allowing the slow decay of systems once seen as symbols of American dynamism. The only ways to justify public works spending was if public investment was limited and if private hands stood to profit not just from the building of them, but the operation too. Fiscal conservatives never really objected to spending taxes so long as they flowed into the right pockets and did not benefit the Irresponsibles.

On an economic score alone, massive investments in public infrastructure would pay off. Every dollar invested in transit infrastructure generates at least $3.70 in returns through new jobs, reduced congestion, and increased productivity, without accounting for the environmental and health benefits. For each dollar invested in early-childhood education, the result is $8.60 worth of economic benefit largely through reductions in crime and poverty. A universal health-care system would save Americans more than $2 trillion in health-care costs (even accounting for the increased public expenditure that would be needed) while securing access to life-saving care for more than 30 million Americans. The fact that federal and state governments fail to make these investments is not a matter of limited resources, but rather of skewed priorities. The 2017 Trump tax cuts of $1.9 trillion sent most of its gains to corporations and the wealthiest Americans; the United States has spent more than $820 billion on the Iraq War since 2003, and hundreds of billions every year to fund the prison-industrial complex.

Rahman observes public-investment (or lack of it) reflects “who and what we value: Too often, the decision to underinvest in public infrastructure has stemmed from a desire to restrict access to those  goods and services for people of color, in an attempt to preserve the benefits of public infrastructure for wealthier and whiter communities.”

President Barack Obama’s stimulus spending during the Great Recession planted signs across America announcing public works projects. Republicans blasted them as partisan propaganda. Clearly, Acting President Donald Trump would not have missed the chance to plant even more roadside monuments emblazoned with his own name if he gave infrastructure any serious thought. Which of course he has not.

With control of the U.S. Senate, a President Joe Biden might actually do what “President Vaporware” has not. He might redefine the very concept of public infrastructure, Rahman suggests:

First, the public needs to broaden its conceptions of public goods and infrastructure. Beyond roads and bridges, reformers should focus on those services and systems that are essential for full-fledged membership and well-being, that expand the capabilities and capacities of individuals and communities, and where leaving the provision in private hands would create too great a risk of exclusion or unfair, arbitrary, and extractive pricing. Concretely, this means focusing on two types of public infrastructure in particular: foundational back-end services such as water, electricity, mail, credit, broadband, and the like; and the safety net and systems for community care, including health care, child care, public schools, and more.

Second, we need to ensure that these infrastructures are, in fact, public. That means subjecting them to stringent regulations ensuring quality, nondiscrimination, fair pricing, and equitable access. It might mean outright public provision—either through a public option as in the health-care debate, or through outright nationalization or municipalization. And it means creating oversight to ensure racial and gender equity in access, just as the Civil Rights Act led to the creation of administrative offices charged with preventing discrimination and resegregation in access to services including hospital health care.

The immediate barrier to a Biden “build back better” effort is decay in the instruments of governance themselves. Years of Republican efforts to neuter government, to privatize what once was public, and to concentrate veto power in whichever bodies Republicans control (including the courts) have left an incoming Democratic administration needing to rebuild America’s governing infrastructure as well.

Reflecting on Republican efforts to affect through the courts what they could not through legislation, Michelle Goldberg observes:

Republicans did all this because they could. Now that Democrats might respond in kind, diluting conservative control of the courts and thus depriving Republicans of their prize for enabling Trump, Republicans have the audacity to pose as scandalized norm-protectors.

Should they win control of Congress and the presidency, Democrats really do hope to restore some of the checks and balances immolated by Trumpism. Consider the Protecting Our Democracy Act, an omnibus reform bill introduced by Democratic leaders in the House that would, among other things, strengthen Congress’s subpoena power, limit presidents’ use of emergency declarations, and make it harder for them to use acting appointments to circumvent the Senate confirmation process.

Democrats fully understand that this bill would constrain Joe Biden’s power, particularly if Republicans won back control of Congress in the 2022 midterms. Last month Adam Schiff, chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, told me that that’s why he expects some Republicans to vote for it. “Republicans would never want a Democratic president to do half the things that Donald Trump has done,” he said. This bill exists because Democrats don’t either.

It will take more that a week to build back what the Midas cult has either allowed to decay or actively destroyed. It will take a season or several presidential terms.

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"We know that that is asking for trouble when you do that. We've seen that when you have situations of congregate settings where there are a lot of people without masks, the data speak for themselves" — Fauci says Trump's pandemic rallies are bad from a public health standpoint pic.twitter.com/eNV07VMQj6

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) October 12, 2020