Month: February 2021

Shameless wingnuts are smearing a Biden Nominee for the Justice Department by saying she is in favor of reducing sentences for white supremacists. She ran the Civil Rights division during the Obama years. You read that correctly. Right wingers are accusing a civil rights lawyer of being soft on white supremacy. It’s just too much.

Needless to say, it’s a lie:

President Joe Biden’s nominee for the No. 3 position at the Department of Justice is coming under attack from a right-wing group trying to smear her as anti-law enforcement. But a number of conservatives and law enforcement organizations have enthusiastically endorsed her nomination, and even the nation’s largest police union ― which twice endorsed former President Donald Trump ― praised her as someone they looked forward to working with, saying she could “find common ground even when that seemed impossible.”

Vanita Gupta, the former leader of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division during the final years of the Obama administration, is Biden’s nominee for associate attorney general. During the Trump era, Gupta headed up the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, a coalition of more than 200 civil rights organizations sometimes referred to as the lobby for the civil rights movement. If confirmed, she’d oversee a number of key Justice Department divisions and take a leadership role in what the DOJ describes as a “broad range of civil justice, federal and local law enforcement, and public safety matters.”

Top Justice Department leadership positions tend to be filled by attorneys who built their careers as prosecutors or corporate lawyers. Gupta would be the first Justice Department official since Thurgood Marshall (the former solicitor general and Supreme Court justice) to have built a high-profile career in civil rights and then be named to a top leadership role at DOJ. Gupta ― who has spoken out passionately on issues such as structural racism, police misconduct, mass incarceration, police militarization, voting rights and the “disastrous” war on drugs ― would arguably be one of the most progressive top Justice Department officials in history.

But Gupta also has a long list of allies and supporters in conservative circles and in law enforcement, and has shown a remarkable tact for building bridges across partisan and ideological divides. Her nomination was endorsed or positively received by the Major Cities Chiefs Association, the International Association of Chiefs of Police, the National Organization of Black Law Enforcement Executives, the Hispanic American Police Command Officers Association, the Police Executive Research Forum and, perhaps most surprisingly, the National Fraternal Order of Police (FOP), which twice endorsed Trump.

That’s why some law enforcement leaders were taken aback by an attack ad released Thursday by the Judicial Crisis Network. The ad, even by the low standards of political attack ads, is pretty detached from reality, fluctuating between falsehoods and misleading claims. Titled “Dangerous Appointee,” it features imagines from riots over the summer of 2020 and claims that Gupta supports “defunding the police,” led a group to “reduce punishments on white supremacists” and wants to “let convicts out of jail.”

As Politico reported, the article the Judicial Crisis Network ad cites to support its claim that Gupta favors defunding police “does not actually say that she favors defunding the police.” The claim that Gupta wants to “reduce sentences for white supremacists” comes as a voiceover atop an image of Dylann Roof ― the white supremacist killer whose prosecution Gupta oversaw while at the Justice Department. (The ad cites a letter ― sent by the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights to Biden more than a month after Gupta took leave from the organization because of her nomination ― that calls for Biden to commute all federal death sentences. Such a commutation would “reduce” Roof’s penalty insomuch as it would condemn him to a natural death behind bars rather than death by lethal injection.) And her statement last summer that “COVID-19 is killing people in federal prison who could be released” is one that even former Attorney General William Barr would agree with.

The Judicial Crisis Network’s attempt to portray Gupta as some sort of anti-police radical flies in the face of the experiences of law enforcement organizations that have actually worked with her, even in somewhat adversarial settings.

Patrick Yoes, the national president of the FOP, wrote in a letter to Congress that Gupta ― even in the aftermath of high-profile police shootings and Justice Department investigations in Chicago, Baltimore and Ferguson, Missouri ― was dedicated to dialogue and “always worked with us to find common ground even when that seemed impossible.” While the FOP had and continues to have disagreements, Gupta’s “open and candid approach has created a working relationship that is grounded in mutual respect and understanding,” which they expected would continue if she’s confirmed, he wrote.

Jim Pasco, the FOP’s executive director, told HuffPost on Thursday that there was a natural “dynamic tension” between Gupta and the FOP ― “the regulator and the regulated” ― during her time as the head of the Civil Rights Division. But he said some tension could be “healthy” as long as there’s communication, which Gupta always worked to maintain.

“The real crisis in this country is not a judicial crisis,” Pasco said, when asked about the Judicial Crisis Network ads. “The real crisis in this country is partisan demagoguery and the politics of personal destruction.”

“We’re not necessarily ready to wade into a fight with well-heeled so-called think tanks, but if they pick one and we feel it’s detrimental to our objectives, we’ll do our best to refute their assertions,” Pasco said. “We’ll go to bat for the truth.”

I wouldn’t have expected that sort of clarity from the FOP. But maybe after Trump’s thugs beat the shit out of cops on January 6th some of the cop organizations are rethinking their affinity for the extremist right wing. It’s not good for their health.

Back in 2014, former Trump staffer Sam Nunberg was assigned to listen to talk radio all day and summarize the talking points for his boss as he assessed whether he was going to enter the presidential race. Trump had already learned the power of the right-wing media when he flirted with a run in 2012 by flogging the absurd “Birther” conspiracy theory and had decided that if he ran it would be as a Republican. But he didn’t really know right-wing media. His experience with talk radio over the years had been with Howard Stern, whose show appealed to a different crowd. He was a TV guy and in those days he watched CNN as much as he watched Fox News.

So he got the notes and picked out the issues that appealed to him, like immigration and terrorism, and chose a few about which he was clueless but were crowd-pleasers like railing against “common core.” He picked up some discrete stories that seemed to resonate with the GOP base such as the story of “Bowe Bergdahl, the dirty, rotten traitor” which also signaled his aggressive attitude toward military matters. And, of course, he added his own hobby horses like foreign trade which fit into this issue matrix perfectly since it was driven by the same xenophobia that drove the anti-immigrant fervor that was already at fever pitch on the right.

As it turned out, Trump was perfectly suited to become the first Republican nominee to run exclusively on the culture war issues that had animated conservative talk radio for the previous two decades. He may not have been a listener but he was a member of the tribe. And because he was naive about politics he had no sense that projecting the worst of hate radio was politically dangerous so he just put it all out there, unfiltered. I think most observers, including his GOP rivals, assumed that would be the kiss of death. Instead, it turned out to be massively popular among Republican voters.

They should have known, of course. The right had been primed for such a thing for years. And there is no one more responsible for that than Rush Limbaugh.

His radio show almost single-handedly created the culture war narrative that has come to define conservative politics. It’s not that Limbaugh came up with every element on his own. There were plenty of racists, xenophobes, sexists, religious hypocrites and violent extremists long before he came along. But he found a way to synthesize their point of view into one over-arching worldview: coastal elites, Black people, immigrants, gays, feminazis and environmentalists are your enemy and they want to destroy America.

Seeing its organizing potential back in the early 90s, backbench congressman Newt Gingrich turned Limbaugh’s narrative into a partisan weapon, launching a program designed to teach fledgling, right-wing politicians how to talk about themselves as heroic warriors for the American way and portray their political opponents as depraved savages bent on destroying everything Real Americans hold dear. When the Republicans won the House majority for the first time in decades in 1994, Limbaugh was made an honorary member of the freshman class. The new House Speaker said he couldn’t have done it without him.

Gingrich was right. And there would have been no Donald Trump without Limbaugh either because there would have been no Trump base without him. Gingrich may have turned partisan, electoral politics into a blood sport but it was Rush Limbaugh who brought in the fans.

Limbaugh passed away this week and the right-wing encomiums to his decency and intellectual prowess are unsurprising but infuriating nonetheless. I don’t think any single political figure other than Donald Trump has ever been this polarizing, so seeing these flowery tributes to his decency and fine character is hard to take. But if there’s one thing the entire country, regardless of party or ideology, can agree upon it’s that Rush Limbaugh is one of the most influential political figures of our time. His mean-spirited, crude “guy at the end of the bar” routine was the template for all of right-wing media and remains so today.

And for a time, the mainstream media was more than willing to accept him as one of their own. Back in 2002, the former Majority Leader Tom Daschle, D-SD, complained that Limbaugh had unleashed a torrent of invective against him, resulting in death threats to Daschle’s family. The reaction from then Washington Post media critic Howard Kurtz was stunning:

Has Tom Daschle lost a couple of screws? Did the normally mild-mannered senator accuse Rush Limbaugh of inciting violence? He came pretty darn close. There were cameras there. You can watch the replay.

We can understand that Daschle is down, just having lost his majority leader’s job and absorbed plenty of blame for this month’s Democratic debacle. What we can’t understand is how the South Dakotan can suggest that a mainstream conservative with a huge radio following is somehow whipping up wackos to threaten Daschle and his family.

Has the senator listened to Rush lately? Sure, he aggressively pokes fun at Democrats and lionizes Republicans, but mainly about policy. He’s so mainstream that those right-wingers Tom Brokaw and Tim Russert had him on their Election Night coverage.

Limbaugh had indeed appeared on election night coverage, shocking anyone who knew what a depraved character assassin he was. The idea that he “poked fun” at Democrats “mainly about policy” was beyond absurd. After all, this was the man who shared insane conspiracy theories for years, like the one that claimed Vince Foster had been murdered in an apartment owned by Hillary Clinton. The mainstream media were finally forced to stop featuring Limbaugh after he made racist comments on ESPN, but that only made him more powerful in the GOP. Nicole Hemmer, author of “Messengers of the Right: Conservative Media and the Transformation of American Politics”, observed:

As Limbaugh’s political strength became evident, many Republican politicians felt they couldn’t cross him, or run the risk of alienating his millions of listeners, Hemmer said. “Many of these listeners didn’t care if Rush Limbaugh crossed the line (of propriety),” she said. “They cared more about loyalty to him than any kind of underlying set of principles.”

As you can see, the cult Limbaugh created was simply appropriated by Donald Trump. The “Us vs Them” ethos fit him to a T. He saw no need to pander to anyone but his own voters and set about demonizing those who didn’t vote for him, even to the point of threatening to withhold federal aid and favoring the states that voted for him. And he in turn has inspired a whole new generation of politicians to follow his example:

UPDATE: DeSantis responded to the allegations of favoritism on Wednesday by threatening to pull vaccines from Manatee County altogether https://t.co/GGVtw7JYhS

— The Daily Beast (@thedailybeast) February 17, 2021

Rush Limbaugh’s legacy will, unfortunately, live on in the Republican politicians who grew up listening to his derisive, contemptuous rhetoric and then watched as Donald Trump used it to wield power. He created a monster and we’ll, unfortunately, be living with it for a long time to come.

Salon

Fauci on Trump:

Dr. Anthony Fauci, who serves as White House chief medical adviser to President Joe Biden, is still grappling with the dangers of contradicting now-former President Donald Trump’s falsely rosy portrayal of the COVID-19 pandemic by presenting grim, science-based facts on the virus.

Trump’s retaliatory attacks on Fauci’s integrity whipped up fury from MAGA supporters “to the point that to this day I have to have armed federal agents guarding me all the time,” Fauci said in an interview with the Telegraph published on Friday. The doctor and his family have had security detail since at least April last year.

Fauci described how Trump would do or at least allow “terrible” things to happen to him if the official’s somber remarks on COVID-19 clashed with the artificially positive messaging coming from the White House.

“Like he allowed [White House trade adviser] Peter Navarro to write an editorial in USA Today saying that almost everything I’ve ever said was wrong,” the doctor said. “He allowed the communications department of the White House to send out a list to all of the media, all of the networks, all of the cables, all of the print press, about all of the mistakes I’ve made, which was absolute nonsense because there were no mistakes.”

It wasn’t necessarily the first time Fauci had to work with a president who dragged his feet during a public health crisis: As the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) during the AIDS epidemic, Fauci had to lead efforts to find treatment for the virus that was ravaging the LGBTQ community while President Ronald Reagan infamously stood silent.

However, Reagan “never did anything to obstruct what I was trying to do,” unlike Trump, the health official told the Telegraph.

“I was trying to let science guide our policy, but [Trump] was putting as much stock in anecdotal things that turned out not to be true as he was in what scientists like myself were saying,” Fauci said. “That caused unnecessary and uncomfortable conflict where I had to essentially correct what he was saying, and put me at great odds with his people.”

Besides Navarro’s op-ed and the White House’s list of anti-Fauci talking points to the media, Trump himself bashed the doctor as the COVID-19 death toll continued to rise.

“People are tired of hearing Fauci and all these idiots,” the President complained during a call with his staffers in October. “Fauci is a disaster.”

Trump also tweeted that Fauci ought to “make better decisions” and griped about the amount of media attention the official was getting.

He doesn’t mention it here, but one of the terrible things he allowed to happen was death threats against Fauci’s family. Trump never said a word. Probably because he thinks the thugs doing the threatening were very special.

The illegal resident of Mar-a-Lago fears he may face lawsuits for the rest of his life. One of the potentially most damaging is the investigation by Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus R. Vance Jr. into the finances of Donald Trump and his Trump Organization. The New York Times on Thursday reported one sign that the Manhattan D.A. is taking that investigation very seriously. Vance has added a heavy hitter to his staff:

The former prosecutor, Mark F. Pomerantz, has deep experience investigating and defending white-collar and organized crime cases, bolstering the team under District Attorney Cyrus R. Vance Jr. that is examining Mr. Trump and his family business, the Trump Organization.

The investigation by Mr. Vance, a Democrat, is focused on possible tax and bank-related fraud, including whether the Trump Organization misled its lenders or local tax authorities about the value of his properties to obtain loans and tax benefits, the people with knowledge of the matter said, requesting anonymity because of the sensitive nature of the investigation. Mr. Trump has maintained he did nothing improper and has long railed against the inquiry, calling it a politically motivated “witch hunt.”

In recent months, Mr. Vance’s office has broadened the long-running investigation to include an array of financial transactions and Trump properties — including Trump Tower on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan, various Trump hotels and the Seven Springs estate in Westchester County — as prosecutors await a ruling from the United States Supreme Court that could give them access to Mr. Trump’s tax returns.

What’s more, Pomerantz “developed a specialty in organized crime and was involved in a 1988 case that helped determine the legal definition of racketeering.” Trump family beware.

Law and Crime adds:

Pomerantz, who sits on the advisory board for the Quattrone Center for the Fair Administration of Justice, will now bring decades of public and private sector white-collar legal expertise to the table. He recently took leave from his “of counsel” position in the litigation department of the Paul Weiss law firm to join Vance’s squad.

“Mark has represented some of the largest companies in the United States in investigations undertaken by the U.S. Department of Justice and various state and local prosecutors. He has tried cases on behalf of commercial clients and individuals before juries and arbitration panels, and also has substantial appellate experience, arguing dozens of appeals before appellate courts throughout the country,” his Quattrone Center bio states. “Additionally, Mark has a great deal of experience in matters involving the financial services industry, and has handled major matters and internal investigations involving all aspects of alleged corporate misconduct, including securities and bank fraud, mail and wire fraud, RICO and FCPA violations, tax offenses and bribery. In recent years, he has represented clients in matters involving equity research analysts, structured finance, the allocation of initial public offering shares, reform of the mutual fund industry and other leading issues relating to securities law enforcement by federal and state authorities.”

Meaning Trump likely has goons already digging up dirt on Pomerantz, and balmy Palm Beach, Florida just felt a blast of cold air.

Joe Biden knows a big f#*king deal when he sees one. On Thursday, Democrats in Congress introduced the first major immigration overhaul since the Reagan administration. The 353-page U.S. Citizenship Act of 2021 announced on Biden’s first day in office would provide 11 million undocumented residents an eight-year path to citizenship.

With Democrats’ five-vote margin in the House and a 60-vote threshold for advancing legislation in the Senate (Democrats have 50, in theory), the bill faces an uphill climb reports CNN. The administration is willing to pass it as one bill or to address it in pieces, if necessary.

“Even though I support full, comprehensive immigration reform, I’m ready to move on piecemeal, because I don’t want to end up with good intentions on my hands and not have anything,” said Texas Rep. Henry Cuellar tells the Associated Press. “I’d rather have progress.”

AP continues:

“I know what it’s like to lose on big bills and small bills. The fear that people have experienced in the last four years deserves every single opportunity, every single bill to remedy,” said Greisa Martinez Rosas, executive director for United We Dream, an immigration advocacy group.

“The biggest thing here is that we’re going to get something across the finish line, because not doing so is not an option.”

We Are Home stated in its press release welcoming the legislation:

“We applaud today’s actions and will continue working in partnership with the Biden administration and Congress to expend every resource available, including all immediately available legislative vehicles, to advance this bill and others. Immediately. The We Are Home campaign is committed to delivering a path to citizenship to the millions who have been waiting in the frontlines. We will not go back to our communities empty handed.”

Lorella Praeli, president of Community Change Action, feels the same. She told MSNBC’s “All In with Chris Hayes” Thursday the bill is groundbreaking [timestamp 38:55]:

“It addresses the root causes of migration from Central America. On border, it signals a shift away from border security framework to really a border management framework. Now, the crucial, crucial paradigm shift here [is] the bill doesn’t include new enforcement as a trade-off. This is a sea change from proposals we’ve seen in the past. Legalization coupled with enforcement is a failed strategy, and it’s morally indefensible. And I commend President Biden and the Democrats for finally abandoning it.”

But like Rosas, Praeli believes failure now is not an option. In 2010, the movement could not even get all Democrats in the Senate on board with The Dream Act:

“A good faith attempt here is not going to cut it. You can’t win the elections — you can’t do it because low-income people of color, because Latinos and immigrant voters delivered for you — and then come home empty-handed or tell us, we tried.”

Praeli suggested moving forward now is about strategy. “We’re not holding out for Republicans,” she says, who as a party have shown themselves “fundamentally opposed to the multiracial democracy that we seek to build.”

“We do not have the luxury in our movement of performing gestures of bipartisanship with actors who we know are acting in bad faith,” Praeli continued, adding a warning for Democrats.

“It is solely within their power to either secure a historic win for immigrants or once again fail us. That’s really the question here.” 

So, not only strategy on advancing immigration is at issue. With immigrant advocates flexing organizational muscles developed over decades, the pressure to use “every single opportunity” and all “available legislative vehicles” to advance this bill, the pressure on Democrats to eliminate the filibuster just stepped up a few notches. Without saying so, Biden too just turned the screws on Senate Democrats.

This piece by Laurie Garrett is a scathing indictment of Trump’s pandemic response. And it’s absolutely correct. She homes in on one specific aspect of his failure that produced catastrophic results:

At long last, we see glimmers of hope. The COVID-19 epidemic in the United States has fallen below the numbers of daily new cases tallied on the eve of the presidential election, the point at which this viral nightmare soared. Using the New York Times’ coronavirus data tracker, on Nov. 1, 2020, there were 74,195 new cases counted in the country; by Feb. 16, new case reports came in at 64,376.

But in between those dates, a national horror unfolded, peaking on Jan. 8 with 300,619 new cases reported in just 24 hours. This staggering wave, one full year into the pandemic, was completely unnecessary for the world’s richest country. Achieving any sense of closure will require holding Donald Trump accountable for the failure.

[…]

Even after Trump and the first lady contracted COVID-19, compelling emergency treatment that included, in Trump’s case, hospitalization at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center and round-the-clock treatment from an army of physicians and nurses, the president refused to regularly don a mask. On the day of his hospital admission, Oct. 2, the United States had cumulatively logged more than 200,000 deaths to COVID-19—an undercount, as are all U.S. COVID-19 numbers, but an official data point that would more than double by the Jan. 20 inauguration of Biden. According to a new Lancet Commission report compiled by an international team of august scientists and public health leaders, some 40 percent of America’s COVID-19 death toll during the Trump administration was needless, meaning it could have been averted with available nonmedical interventions.

By the time the election took place, Trump had ignored the pandemic, not attending a single COVID-19 White House meeting for at least five months, since late May. Behind the scenes in the fall, the Trump administration lobbied Congress vigorously to block the movement of funds to states for vaccine rollout efforts, leaving them unable to efficiently execute mass immunizations.

And going forward from election night, on Nov. 3, to the inauguration on Jan. 20, Trump was fully fixated on overturning Biden’s victory. He ceased speaking to the press on Dec. 8, held no public events after Nov. 4, and made his final public appearance at a Dec. 12 football game. According to White House schedules, Trump had few official meetings for days, left Washington for Mar-a-Lago on Dec. 23, and did not resurface until New Year’s Eve, when he delivered a video address to the nation celebrating Food and Drug Administration emergency approval of SARS-CoV-2 vaccines. On Jan. 6, the president delivered his now infamous speech to supporters, exhorting them to march down Pennsylvania Avenue to the Capitol. From Jan. 7 until he moved out of the White House on the morning of Jan. 20, Trump made few public remarks, frustrated by his loss of access to social media. As his much-touted Operation Warp Speed sputtered, unable to speed vaccines into the arms of Americans, Trump was silent. And the White House became COVID-19 central, with chief of staff Mark Meadows, four other White House staff, Secretary of Housing and Urban Affairs Ben Carson, and David Bossie, Trump’s designated leader of efforts to challenge the election, all infected. In line with the president’s mantra that COVID-19 wasn’t all that serious—“Don’t let it take over your lives”—none of these individuals regularly wore protective face masks in the White House or on the election-counting trail.

So, I level the charge of pandemicide against Trump for his failure to say or do anything to halt the soaring burden of infection and death across the United States from Election Day to his departure from office. During a period when experts inside his government warned that holiday travel and interactions over Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Year’s could lead to massive spread of the virus, and states clamored for aid to disseminate vaccines, Trump was mum.

He ignored the pandemic on Nov. 3, when 92,000 people were newly infected, bringing the nation’s cumulative total to 9.4 million and its death toll to 225,000.

He remained taciturn as more than 1 million Americans per day, over the four-day Thanksgiving weekend, flew on commercial planes and millions more traveled by other means to visit families, despite stay-at-home pleas from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. By Nov. 30, more than 13.5 million Americans had tested positive for COVID-19, and 259,000 had died.

As Christmas approached, public health leaders again pleaded for Americans to resist temptation, stay home, and avoid family gatherings. By Dec. 22, 18 million Americans had acquired COVID-19, and 314,000 had died from it. But the president was silent, and, again, millions of Americans traveled and celebrated with friends and families.

As the new year neared, on Dec. 31, the total case count was almost 20 million, with 336,000 deaths. And still, Trump was silent.

As his insurrection mob gathered on Capitol Hill, the case tally topped 21 million, with 352,000 deaths.

And by the time Trump boarded Marine One for his final helicopter ride at taxpayer expense, en route to Mar-a-Lago, 24 million Americans had tested positive with SARS-CoV-2, killing nearly 400,000 of them.

Between the election and the inauguration, the number of infected Americans more than doubled, skyrocketing from 9.4 million cases to 24 million—adding some 15 million cases, on Trump’s watch, when he was fixated on overturning Biden’s victory and AWOL on the pandemic front.

And in his absence from pandemic duty—his duty to protect the American people—172,000 Americans died, nearly doubling the mortality toll since Election Day.

Republicans have, of course, decided that Trump cannot be impeached now that he is a private citizen. As a matter of formality, then, my call is moot. But let history record that no sitting U.S. president—since April 30, 1789, when George Washington took the first oath on the balcony of Federal Hall on Wall Street in New York City—has willfully allowed such preventable carnage to unfold on the American people.

Let history record that Donald Trump is guilty of the crime of pandemicide.

It is so recorded. I wish I was more sure that it would stop him from ever being president again. But I honestly don’t know.

🔴🔴NEWS ALERT🔴🔴

OCGOP Censures Senator Richard Burr

Please see http://orange.nc.gop for full text of Censure Resolution

Therefore, be it resolved, the Executive Committee of Orange County, North Carolina Republican Party formally and irrevocably censures U.S. Senator Richard Burr for gross impropriety in a position of trust and honor for disloyalty to President Trump and his constituents of Orange County, North Carolina during his service to the State and Nation as a U. S. Senator

Be it further resolved, the Executive Committee of the Orange County GOP permanently bans Richard M. Burr from entering the premises of the Orange County GOP and from participating in any future Orange County GOP activities.

Originally tweeted by Orange County GOP (@orange_gop) on February 18, 2021.

They banned him from entering the premises.

Richard Burr is a hardcore conservative Senator. He’s retiring in 2022. His only crime is following his conscience and voting to impeach Donald Trump after he was out of office, in a proceeding in which everyone knew he would not be convicted. His vote did not change anything. So this is only about public fealty to Donald Trump.

These people are frightening.

Trump really should be a lot nicer to Mitch McConnell. He may have saved his bacon with his rank, partisan manipulation of the Supreme Court:

Lawsuits involving Donald Trump tore apart the Supreme Court while he was president, and the justices apparently remain riven by him.For nearly four months, the court has refused to act on emergency filings related to a Manhattan grand jury’s subpoena of Trump tax returns, effectively thwarting part of the investigation.

The Supreme Court’s inaction marks an extraordinary departure from its usual practice of timely responses when the justices are asked to block a lower court decision on an emergency basis and has spurred questions about what is happening behind the scenes.

Chief Justice John Roberts, based on his past pattern, may be trying to appease dueling factions among the nine justices, to avoid an order that reinforces a look of partisan politics. Yet paradoxically, the unexplained delay smacks of politics and appears to ensnarl the justices even more in the controversies of Trump.

The Manhattan investigation, led by District Attorney Cyrus Vance, continues to draw extensive public attention. The grand jury is seeking Trump personal and business records back to 2011. Part of the probe involves hush-money payments Trump lawyer Michael Cohen made to cover up alleged affairs. (Trump has denied those allegations.)

For more than a year, Trump’s attorneys have raised challenges to prevent enforcement of the subpoena. The controversy appeared to culminate at the Supreme Court last July, when the justices rejected Trump’s claim that a sitting president is absolutely immune from criminal proceedings.

The 7-2 decision crafted by Roberts left some options for Trump on appeal, but lower court judges have since spurned Trump arguments, and his lawyers returned last fall to the high court for relief. Vance agreed to wait to enforce the long-pending subpoena until the justices acted on Trump’s emergency request. The Supreme Court’s lack of response has given Trump at least a temporary reprieve.

And his lawyers could soon seek more. CNN has learned that Trump’s legal team is preparing to submit a petition to the justices by early March, based on a standard deadline for appeals, asking them to hear the merits of Trump’s claim in oral arguments. In Trump’s October filing, his lawyers continued to maintain that the grand jury subpoena was overly broad and issued in bad faith to harass him. They said it “makes sweeping demands and … crosses the line — even were it aimed at some other citizen instead of the President.”

The process for a petition for certiorari, as it is called, could add months to the case. If the justices agreed to hear the dispute fully on the merits, resolution could be a year off. A spokesman for Vance declined to comment. Lawyers for Trump also declined to comment for the record.

When the latest round of litigation began, both sides premised their October filings on relatively quick court action and alerted the court to their pact requiring Vance to refrain from enforcement of the subpoena until the justices acted on the emergency request.The Trump team added that it would abide by an expedited schedule for its petition that the court hear oral arguments on the merits of the case.

The justices did not respond to that offer or to any part of the filing. Typically, soon after an emergency request and response are filed, the justices announce whether they will grant the requested “stay.” (A grant, rather than denial, takes five votes; the filings in this chapter of Trump v. Vance were complete on October 19.)

A majority of the justices might have opted against action close to the November 3 election, to avoid any signal for or against Trump in his quest to keep his tax returns private. But the election, the recounts, the Electoral College certification and the January 20 inauguration have all come and gone.

Now that Trump is out of office, the heart of the case tied to his role as president could be moot, irrelevant as a legal matter. But neither side has raised that possibility in a supplemental filing, nor have the justices raised the question in anything made public. And the election results have been known for months. In their initial October 13 request, Trump’s lead lawyers noted that Vance had agreed to earlier delays as the case progressed and argued, “His need to secure these records did not somehow become uniquely pressing in the last few weeks.”

Vance’s office countered that the grand jury has waited long enough. The DA’s office argued that the subpoena to Trump accountants Mazars USA had been issued in August 2019 and that the high court has warned in past cases against frustrating the public interest by delaying a grand jury’s work. “This litigation has already substantially hampered the grand jury’s investigation,” Vance’s team wrote.

Throughout the Trump presidency, cases involving Trump regularly split the justices. Disputes over his administration policies, such as the travel ban, often were decided by 5-4 votes. Controversies over his personal financial records appeared even more difficult. Yet Roberts was able to convince seven of the justices to join together in the July case of Trump v. Vance.

In elevated language and reference to the great Chief Justice John Marshall, Roberts wrote, “Two hundred years ago, a great jurist of our Court established that no citizen, not even the President, is categorically above the common duty to produce evidence when called upon in a criminal proceeding.” Roberts emphasized the public interest in comprehensive access to evidence. The majority said, however, that Trump could return to lower courts to assert certain state law claims, including that the subpoena was too broad or issued in bad faith.

Trump’s lawyers indeed pressed those claims in a second round but were rejected by lower US appeals court judges. When a New York-based US appellate court ruled in early October, it said of the financial records sought, “There is nothing to suggest that these are anything but run-of-the mill documents typically relevant to a grand jury investigation into possible financial or corporate misconduct.”

Until October, when Justice Amy Coney Barrett succeeded the late Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the court was divided 5-4 along ideological and political lines. It is now a 6-3 court, with the six Republican appointees generally voting conservative and the three remaining Democratic appointees voting liberal. On the 5-4 court, Roberts, an appointee of Republican President George W. Bush, was at the ideological middle. That is no longer the situation with the three Trump appointees in place.

That changed dynamic among the justices may be complicating consideration of the new Trump v. Vance case. Even in the momentous July ruling, Justices Brett Kavanaugh and Neil Gorsuch (Trump’s first two appointees) concurred only in Roberts’ bottom-line judgment and expressed a competing rationale that could bolster a president’s ability to fight a subpoena. Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito dissented.

The possible scenarios involving internal debate over Trump v. Vance are numerous, based on individual interests and regard for institutional integrity. Roberts may believe that airing differences privately over many months represents the best option, although it leaves the parties and public to wait and wonder.

If Trump’s lawyers still have no word by the first week in March, they would submit a petition asking that the merits of the case be put to oral arguments. Under current rules, apart from the “emergency” framework of this dispute, an individual who has lost in a lower court has 150 days from the date of that decision to petition the justices for review. If the individual has first made an emergency request to block the effect of the lower court ruling, the justices usually would have responded by either granting or denying the stay.

That’s because the party seeking court intervention would want immediate relief. Here, however, because Vance agreed to hold off on enforcement of the subpoena, his office, rather than the Trump side, is disadvantaged by the court’s inaction. The path the justices have taken — or, rather, not taken — has baffled lawyers following the case. Long known for its secretive ways, the court has added a new dimension of mystery with Trump v. Vance. All that’s evident is the justices have diverged from long-standing practice and hindered the investigation of a former president.

Gee, I wonder why?

They’re going to protect him, aren’t they? All of our fantasies about legal ramifications for Trump, both criminally and civilly are probably going nowhere. Packing the courts may have been McConnell’s greatest gift to Trump. He really should be more grateful.

Honestly, my feeling is that Donald Trump will die a rich, free, man in his bed at the age of 96. Life doesn’t always offer up real karma for the worst people, especially the ones who are rich, white and politically powerful. What I don’t know is if he can manage to totally destroy the country before he goes.

And he’s not going to entertain anyone who is planning to run for president in 2024. Politico Playbook reports:

NIKKI HALEY reached out to former President DONALD TRUMP on Wednesday to request a sit-down at Mar-a-Lago, but a source familiar tells Playbook that he turned her down. The two haven’t spoken since the insurrection on Jan. 6, when Haley blasted Trump for inciting his supporters to storm the Capitol.

The snub comes on the heels of Tim Alberta’s deep dive in POLITICO Magazine last week on Haley’s presidential ambitions and how she’s trying to have it both ways with Trump.

Channeling George Costanza in mid-December, Haley refused to confront Trump over his election lies because he believed they were true. “I understand the president. I understand that genuinely, to his core, he believes he was wronged,” Haley told Alberta. “This is not him making it up.”

After Jan. 6, Haley changed her tune.

“I think he’s going to find himself further and further isolated,” Haley said of the defeated president. “I think his business is suffering at this point. I think he’s lost any sort of political viability he was going to have. I think he’s lost his social media, which meant the world to him. I mean, I think he’s lost the things that really could have kept him moving.”

And: “I don’t think he’s going to be in the picture,” she said, matter-of-factly. “I don’t think he can. He’s fallen so far.”

Haley tried to recover Thursday with a damage-control op-ed in the WSJ wrapped in blame-the-media rhetoric. But Trump, apparently, isn’t having it.

Why in the world would she think he would be amenable to giving her a Dear Leader visitation after that?

The only person who has been able to finesse the Trump bootlicking with some vague public criticism is Lindsey Graham. I don’t think Trump feel that Graham is any threat to him. He knows that Haley is.

Republicans are going to have to pick a side. Cheney, Sasse and some of the Governors who have presidential ambitions are betting that Trump will have imploded by then and having been a stand-up guy and facing him down is a selling point. Most of the others are assuming that the Trump cult will still be running the GOP and they need to be on the right side of him, even if he doesn’t run. Haley is trying to have it both ways and that just will not work anymore. The cult demands total loyalty.

The Comet neon sign adorns the Comet Ping Pong restaurant in Northwest Washington. (Michael S. Williamson/The Washington Post)

Where does this end?

He slipped out of bed before sunrise and started driving, spurred by the baseless claims he would soon help make famous. As he sped the 350 miles from his hometown in North Carolina to the nation’s capital, Edgar Maddison Welch tilted his cellphone camera toward himself and pressed record.

“I can’t let you grow up in a world that’s so corrupt by evil,” he told the two young daughters he had left sleeping back in Salisbury, “without at least standing up for you and for other children just like you.”

So on he drove, to the supposed center of that corruption: Comet Ping Pong, a popular pizzeria in Northwest Washington where, according to the false claims known as Pizzagate, powerful Democrats were abusing children. And Welch, a struggling 28-year-old warehouse worker, intended to rescue them.

Four years later, thousands of people would follow Welch’s fevered path to Washington, drawn from across the country by an ever more toxic stew of disinformation and extremism, including Pizzagate’ssuccessor: QAnon.

This time, instead of a pizzeria, they would target the U.S. Capitol.

The Jan. 6 siege would lead to five deaths, more than 200arrests and the second impeachment of President Donald Trump. Its brazenness would shake faith in American democracy.

Above all, it would reveal how baseless claims had spread under a president who often promoted them, growing from Welch’s trip to Washington shortly after the 2016 election to the hundreds who stormed the Capitol to keep Trump in office, some proudly wearing T-shirts with the QAnon motto: “Where we go one, we go all.”

Pizzagate was an early warning of how misinformation can lead to violence, said Joan Donovan, a scholar of media manipulation, social movements and extremism.

“The big difference between 2016 and Pizzagate and QAnon [now] isn’t the themes … it’s the scale,” said Donovan, research director of the Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School. “Four years later it has reached so many more people.”

That fellow is out of jail now. And a whole bunch of new conspiracy nuts are facing charges. During the Trump years, this conspiracy mongering metastasized and now we have tens of millions of people who believe them. Many probably haven’t bought into QAnon, but a vast number believe the election was stolen despite all the evidence saying otherwise.

76% of self-identified Republicans in a new national Quinnipiac University poll. That’s the number of Republicans who said they believe there was “widespread fraud in the 2020 election.”Yes, you read that right. Three in every four Republicans in the poll agreed with the idea that there was “widespread” wrongdoing in last November’s election.

And it’s not just Republicans. More than one in three political independents said the same in the Quinnipiac poll. Overall, 36% said there was widespread fraud in the election while 59% said there was not.

That is a conspiracy theory and it’s a big one because it doesn’t come from some shadowy internet message board. It was spread by the president and his henchmen and it was debunked in real time by various officials, judges, analysts, and media. The results are not in dispute. Yet, more than 50 million people believe it.

This means that these people will believe anything. I don’t know about you, but that seems like a very big problem.