Month: March 2021

Yes they lied all the way down:

U.S. Postal Service investigators found no evidence to support a Pennsylvania postal worker’s claim that his supervisors had tampered with mail-in ballots, according to an inspector general’s report — allegations cited by top Republicans to press baseless claims of fraud in the presidential election.

Richard Hopkins, a mail carrier in Erie, alleged in November that he overheard the local postmaster discussing plans to backdate ballots received after the Nov. 3 vote and pass them off to election officials as legitimate. Working with Project Veritas, a nonprofit entity that seeks to expose what it says is bias in the mainstream news media, Hopkins publicly released a sworn affidavit recounting those allegations.

That should have been a tip off from the get. James O’Keefe is dirty trickster, character assassin. And he’s not very good at what he does.

But some people will use any excuse to fluff Donald Trump:

Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.) cited Hopkins’s claim in a letter to the Justice Department in Novembercalling for a federal investigation into election results in Pennsylvania, where Joe Biden beat President Donald Trump by more than 81,000 votes, and Democratic candidates outperformed GOP challengers in votes submitted by mail.AD

Graham and many other congressional Republicans refused to accept the outcome of the election for weeks, even after states audited and certified results.

Then-Attorney General William P. Barr subsequently authorized federal prosecutors to open investigations into credible allegations of voting irregularities and fraud before results were certified, a reversal of long-standing Justice Department policy.

But Hopkins soon recanted, officials from the Postal Service’s Office of Inspector General told members of Congress on Nov. 10, and the new investigation confirmed. In an interview with federal agents, Hopkins “revised his initial claims, eventually stating that he had not heard a conversation about ballots at all — rather he saw the Postmaster and Supervisor having a discussion and assumed it was about fraudulent ballot backdating,” the report states.

Hopkins “acknowledged that he had no evidence of any backdated presidential ballots and could not recall any specific words said by the postmaster or supervisor,” according to the report, which was published by the inspector general’s office in late February and posted Monday to the blog 21st Century Postal Worker.

The Erie postmaster, Rob Weisenbach, called the allegations “100% false” in a Facebook post in November and said they were made “by an employee that was recently disciplined multiple times.”

“The Erie Post Office did not back date any ballots,” Weisenbach wrote.

Hopkins’s name is redacted in the investigative report, but the document refers extensively to his claim and involvement with Project Veritas and the group’s founder, James O’Keefe.

Hopkins has been suspended without pay since Nov. 10, according to a person with knowledge of the situation, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss confidential personnel matters. A disciplinary letter to Hopkins from a Postal Service supervisor states that Hopkins’s “actions may have placed employees and yourself as well as the reputation of the U.S. Postal Service in harm’s way,” the person said.AD

In a statement through Project Veritas, Hopkins called the investigative report “vague and deceptive” and said it “underscores the importance of recording conversations. I wish I hadn’t stopped recording.”

They’re still working together.

Representatives from Graham’s office did not respond to requests for comment.

Agents of the inspector general visited the Erie County Courthouse to interview election officials and review ballots processed at the local post office. “Both the interview of the Erie County Election Supervisor and the physical examination of ballots produced no evidence of any backdated presidential election ballots at the Erie, PA Post Office,” the report states.

On Nov. 11, Project Veritas published a two-hour recording of Hopkins’s interview with investigators. Hopkins in that recording said he made “assumptions” based on overheard snippets of conversation and said he never heard his supervisors utter the word “backdate.”

Hopkins and Project Veritas asserted that agents pressured the postal worker into backtracking. O’Keefe, in a statement on Wednesday, said agents “coerced and twisted Hopkins to water down his allegations.” The claims, however, are not supported by their recording. Hopkins did not respond directly to requests from The Washington Post for comment.

It’s just fodder for the delusional wingnuts and it doesn’t matter whether it’s true. Clumsy lies, easily disproved, are O’Keefe’s specialties.

Wow:

The number of Republicans voting to reauthorize has plummeted in recent years. It used to have wide bipartisan support.
2000: 206 GOP Votes
2005: 225 GOP votes
2013: 87 GOP votes
2019: 33 GOP Votes
2021: 29 GOP votes https://t.co/wSg4R6ycy1

— Drew Savicki (@DrewSav) March 17, 2021

This really says it all.

"There's old sayings in Texas about find all the rope in Texas and get a tall oak tree. You know, we take justice very seriously, & we ought to do that. Round up the bad guys." — here's Rep. Chip Roy (R-TX) glorifying lynchings during hearing on violence against Asian-Americans

Chip Roy pivoted from glorifying lynchings to criticizing the Chinese Communist Party during a hearing about violence against Asian Americans

Originally tweeted by Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) on March 18, 2021.

I can hardly believe what I’m seeing here, but it actually happened. In the wake of the mass shooting in Atlanta, the House happened to be holding a hearing on the rise in Asian-American violence. And:

Rep. Chip Roy (R-TX) kicked off Thursday’s House hearing on violence and discrimination against Asian-Americans by railing against the Chinese Communist Party and extolling lynchings, saying he takes “justice very seriously.”

The House Judiciary Committee hearing, which was originally scheduled to address the marked increase in anti-Asian hate crimes and violence in recent months, took on added urgency after a 21-year-old white man went on a murderous rampage on Tuesday that left eight dead, including six Asian women.

In his opening statement, Roy first acknowledged that the shootings were a tragedy and that the “victims of race-based violence and their families deserve justice.” From there, however, the Texas lawmaker immediately criticized the very nature of the hearing while deploying some whataboutist logic.

“The case we are talking about here the tragedy we just saw occur in Atlanta, Georgia,” Roy declared. “I would also suggest that the victims of cartels moving illegal aliens deserve justice. The American citizens in south Texas, they are getting absolutely decimated by what’s happening at the southern border deserve justice.”

The conservative congressman continued: “The victims of rioting and looting in the street… last summer deserve justice. We believe in justice.”

And then came an admiring reference to lynchings, a violent and public form of vigilante action that most often targeted people of color: “There’s an old saying in Texas about ‘find all the rope in Texas and get a tall oak tree.’ You know, we take justice very seriously. And we ought to do that. Round up the bad guys. That’s what we believe.”

Roy further grumbled: “My concern about this hearing is that it seems to want to venture into the policing of rhetoric in a free society, free speech, and away from the rule of law and taking out bad guys.”

While many have expressed growing concern that the heated rhetoric from conservatives and former President Donald Trump regarding the coronavirus—including calling it the “China virus” and “Kung flu”—has potentially led to increased anti-Asian sentiment in the states, Roy decided to launch into a rant against the Chinese government.

“I think the Chinese Communist Party running the country of China, I think they are the bad guys,” Roy exclaimed. “I think that they are harming people and I think they are engaging in modern-day slavery.”

“What they are doing to undermine our national security, and what they are doing to steal our intellectual property, and what they are doing to rattle throughout the Pacific, I think it’s patently evil and deserving of condemnation,” he continued. “And I think that what they did to hide the reality of this virus is equally deserving of condemnation.”

That’s right. The idiot chose today to go on a rant about “Communist China” and what a threat the Chinese are to America while blathering on about how we need to lynch more people.

At a hearing on anti-Asian violence.

He was rebuked by a fellow member of congress, Rep. Grace Meng (D-NY) who said, “Your president and your party and your colleagues can talk about issues with any other country that you want, but you don’t have to do it by putting a bull’s eye on the backs of Asian-Americans across this country! On our grandparents and on our kids!”

He was undeterred:

In response to Meng’s comments and the media coverage of his own remarks, Roy later issued a statement doubling down: “Apparently some folks are freaking out that I used an old expression about finding all the rope in Texas and a tall oak tree about carrying out justice against bad guys. I meant it. We need more justice and less thought policing. We need to stop evil doers, such as those who carried out the attack in Atlanta this week, or cartels abusing little children, or those who kill our cops on the streets. We should restore order by tamping out evil actors, not turn America into an authoritarian state like the Chinese Communists who seek the destroy us. No apologies.”

A total lack of decency, empathy and common sense is what defines the Republican party today. It wouldn’t have taken much for him to keep his big trap shut about “the Chi-coms” for one day and refrain from his apparent need to endorse lynching as a solution to the problem. But he can’t do it.

Mother Jones makes an important point that may just keep you up tonight if you think about it. The real crazies aren’t in the US congress or the Senate. They’re in the state legislatures and they are nuttier than fruitcakes — and dangerous as hell:

Erika Geiss felt a tinge of déjà vu on January 6. She watched in horror and disbelief as thousands of rioters—driven by Trump’s lie that the 2020 election was fraudulent—scaled the outer walls of the USCapitol and violently forced their way inside the building and into the Senate chambers. But the “ire and vitriol” that Geiss says she saw watching live coverage of the Capitol insurrectionists on TV at her home didn’t surprise her. It was all too familiar. “We saw that here,” says Geiss, a state senator in Michigan representing a district just south of Detroit. “And we saw it mounting and escalating throughout April.”

On April 30, 2020, as Geiss and her colleagues convened for a legislative session in the Michigan Statehouse, a demonstration against the state’s stay-at-home orders took a harrowing turn as the protesters forced their way inside the building. Just as the insurrectionists did on January 6, the Michigan rioters broke through barricades and doors and pushed their way past security personnel until they entered the Senate chamber. Though the Michigan event never turned physically violent against lawmakers, it came quite close as protesters hovered and shouted in the galleries, many wearing bulletproof vests and armed with rifles and AR-15-style assault weapons. In hindsight, the riot at the Michigan Statehouse in April seems like a dress rehearsal for what happened eight months later at the US Capitol.

But there’s a key difference in the aftermath of both riots that highlights an alarming divide growing in the Republican Party. Whereas the Congressional Republicans are trying to figure out what the future of their party looks like—weighing how much of Trumpism and its extremist elements they can cling to without totally repelling more moderate voters—a growing number of GOP lawmakers at the state level are doubling down on their radical viewpoints, dangerous conspiracy theories, and association with paramilitary militias and other violent extremist groups. For every Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) currently in Congress, there are dozens of more like her at the state level—and with close ties with right-wing extremist groups. 

Jesus…

I have no doubt this is true but it is very frightening. These are the incubators for wingut extremism and they’re everywhere:

The scene at the state level makes one thing clear: Trump still dominates. The Wyoming GOP formally censured Rep. Liz Cheney for voting to impeach Trump. (And a number of other state Republican parties followed suit and censured their respective congressional leaders for not pushing election-related conspiracy theories and turning their back on the former president.) Meanwhile, radical Republican state lawmakers who were once considered fringe members of their own party have moved to the front and center, thanks to the Trump playbook. “Many of these folks have been in our legislatures for a while,” says Carolyn Fiddler, the communications director for Daily Kos. “And they always leaned in that direction. But Trump normalized it. And he demonstrated that you can use it as a way to gain and exercise power.”

Michigan:

In the immediate aftermath of the April riot in Michigan, the state’s top Republican, Senate Majority Leader Mike Shirkey, initially condemned the local militia that organized the protest, calling them “a bunch of jackasses.” The outrage didn’t last long.

A few days after Shirkey issued that statement, he privately met with one of the organizers of the Michigan riot, according to the New York Times, during which he said “the optics weren’t good” of armed protesters in paramilitary gear storming the Michigan Capitol. After the protesters threatened to return to the Capitol with weapons, Shirkey publicly cozied up with their cause and two weeks later he spoke at one of their rallies against the state’s COVID regulations, where he appeared onstage with at least one member of a local militia who was later arrested for allegedly conspiring to kidnap Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer. “Stand up and test that assertion of authority by the government,” Shirkey said at the rally. “We need you now more than ever.”

Since then, Shirkey has been the face of the Michigan Republican Party’s descent into extremism. In the aftermath of the January 6 insurrection, Shirkey was caught on video parroting claims that the Capitol riot was a “hoax” staged by people to make Trump supporters look bad. “It was arranged by somebody who was funding it…It was all staged,” he says in the video, which was first reported by the Detroit Metro Times. Later in the video, Shirkey suggests that McConnell is in on the conspiracy. “I think they wanted to have a mess,” Shirkey said. “They would have had to recruit this other group of people.”

Virginia:

But Shirkey isn’t the exception in Michigan’s GOP. As the most powerful Republican in the state, he sets the tone and manner for which the rest of the party follows. “That is where you have to ask, ‘Is this who the GOP is?’” wonders Geiss. “To a certain degree, I do believe it is. At least, it is who they are trying to become. And it’s almost like the conversion is complete at this point.”

Michigan is far from the only state whose Republican Party has become dominated by extremists. In Virginia, the current frontrunner for the GOP gubernatorial nomination is Amanda Chase, a state senator who has been at the center of a number of controversies since she assumed office in 2016, including an incident in January 2019 where she introduced legislation in a senate committee meeting with a sidearm strapped to her hip. In July 2019 she responded to someone who criticized her extreme Second Amendment views on her Facebook page by saying, “It’s those who are naive and unprepared that end up raped. Sorry but I’m not going to be a statistic.”

Over the past year, Chase has boosted her popularity among her party’s growing radical constituency, thanks to her anti-mask stunts, comments encouraging Trump to declare martial law to overturn the results of the election, and for speaking at the January 6 rally on the Ellipse, the 52-acre park just south of the White House, that preceded the insurrection. In the aftermath of the insurrection, Chase both referred to the rioters as “patriots” and alleged, without any evidence, that antifa had infiltrated the Trump mob and led the insurrection. “The insurrection is actually the deep state with the politicians working against the people to overthrow our government,” she told the New York Times. 

Arizona:

Mark Finchem, a staunch Trump ally, member of the extremist militia group the Oath Keepers, and a Republican member of Arizona’s House of Representatives, has similarly stirred up controversy within his own party for promoting conspiracy theories related to the election as well as his role in the January 6 insurrection. Like Chase, Finchem was at the Ellipse that day; afterward he posted pictures on Twitter from the Capitol grounds of the mob storming the building, with a caption that read, “What happens when the People feel they have been ignored, and Congress refuses to acknowledge rampant fraud.” Finchem has continued to praise the insurrectionists and promote conspiracy theories about the election; last month it was revealed that he was actually paid by the Trump campaign to help overturn Arizona’s election results. Finchem had 82 ethics complaints lodged against him over his comments and actions related to the election and the insurrection, but in early February the Arizona House Ethics Committee cleared him of all complaints, with the committee’s chair writing that all the complaints simply amount to “an objection to Representative Finchem’s advocacy of controversial political opinions.” 

Finchem isn’t an outlier in his own state party, either. In late January, Arizona’s GOP officially censured three of its top members, Gov. Doug Ducey, former Sen. Jeff Flake, and Cindy McCain, the widow of Sen. John McCain, for anti-Trump comments and actions. Both Flake and McCain were censured by their party specifically for endorsing Biden, calling out McCain for her support for “leftist causes such as gay marriage and growth of the administrative state” and for Biden, which they said was “in direct opposition to Republican values, the interests of the American people and the Constitution of the United States.” The group condemned Ducey for his emergency orders to fight the spread of the coronavirus, which they said are unconstitutional and “restrict personal liberties.”

[…] Democrats may have won control of the White House and Congress, but Republicans still have party control of governments in 30 states. And when redistricting happens in the next two or three years, after the most recent census is released, most of those GOP-controlled legislatures will redraw district lines to further gerrymander and ensure that their party can retain control and grow in power for another decade. And if extremism is what helps Republicans win elections at the state level, that’s what the party will ultimately embrace, according to Fiddler. “Republicans value numbers more than sort of managing the direction of their party, and they will take wins where they can get that,” she says. “I think you’re going to see a strengthening of the grip of these extremists, these QAnon believers and whatnot, on the Republican Party before it has any hope of swinging the other way.”

These people are dangerous. And I don’t think Trump is intrinsic to any of their extremism. He may have mainstreamed it, but these people were already there. You can thank Rush and breitbart and Hannity and O’Reilly and Roger Ailes and Rupert Murdoch and Ann Coulter and Laura Ingraham and dozens of others for that. Trump was just the hustler who took it to the next level.

https://twitter.com/petestrzok/status/1372336093044088835

And never forget that “no collusion, no obstruction” was a lie.

This week we have lurid verbal attacks on immigrants and grotesque physical attacks on immigrants. He’s still the one.

During congressional testimony yesterday, a GOP congresswoman rolled out one of those patented Trump storeid about a violent immigrant who hurt a Real American and demanded that he tell her how many more people have to be kidnapped before he decides to “take action.”

.@DHSgov Sec. Mayorkas called one of my questions "extraordinarily disrespectful" when I mentioned a classmate's kidnapping at the hands of an illegal immigrant.

What I find disrespectful is the crisis at the border due to @POTUS' executive order.

WATCH: pic.twitter.com/xQPsVm3abP

— Rep. Cammack Press Office (@RepKatCammack) March 17, 2021

He was rightly offended by the implication, saying it was “extraordinarily disrespectful … disrespectful not only to me, but disrespectful to the men and women of the Department of Homeland Security and to all the front-line personnel across this country who dedicate themselves to the safety and security of the American people.” She was unmoved, so assured of her (white) righteousness that it didn’t mean a thing.

Meanwhile, we had a white, religious fanatic, gun nut kill 7 people in Atlanta, five of them Asian women, because they “tempted” him. And he was able to buy a gun that day to carry out his demented plot because people like this women demand that we allow violent, right wing freaks like him to have easy access to lethal weapons.

I don’t think I have to remind anyone of the multiple other mass shooting that have taken place over the last few years in which the perpetrators were regurgitating all the disgusting racist, misogynist, xenophobic, eliminationist rhetoric these people spew. Maybe they should take a look at their own record. The body count is massive.

Number One Observatory Circle, the official residence of the Vice President of the United States, sits on the grounds of the U.S. Naval Observatory in Washington, D.C. While eyes looked south toward the spa shootings in Atlanta, another gun-related incident drew less attention:

Washington, DC, police arrested a Texas man outside Vice President Kamala Harris’ official residence, the US Naval Observatory, in the nation’s capital on Wednesday and he’s now facing weapons and ammunition charges.

A spokesperson for Washington’s Metropolitan Police said officers responded “at approximately 12:12 pm, to the 3400 block of Massachusetts Avenue, NW in reference to a suspicious person based on an intelligence bulletin that originated from Texas, who was detained by US Secret Service.” Law enforcement contacted the man after a region-wide intelligence bulletin had been issued for the suspect.

DC police say officers arrested and charged 31-year-old Paul Murray, of San Antonio, and that a rifle and ammunition were recovered from his vehicle.

A police report obtained by CNN shows officers allege Murray was in possession of an “AR-15 semi-automatic rifle, 113 rounds of unregistered ammunition, and five 30 round magazines.”

D.C. gun laws are especially strict. I had to look up the unfamiliar “unregistered ammunition” offense. Arrests made surrounding the Jan. 6 Trump insurrection made clear large-capacity magazines are illegal in the District.

NPR reported on Wednesday:

The arrest comes as the district is in a state of heightened security following the Jan. 6 insurrection attempt at the U.S. Capitol.

Violent pro-Trump extremists, fueled by the idea that President Biden and Harris had stolen the election from Donald Trump, stormed the Capitol, threatening lawmakers and law enforcement.

Vice President Kamala Harris is not currently living at the official residence while under renovations. She and her husband are staying at Blair House closer to the White House.

BREAKING: My Video of a Suspicious person detained near Vice President’s house ON YOUTUBE NOW– https://t.co/gL58uJJD7h @YouTube

— Andrew Leyden (@PenguinSix) March 17, 2021

“I saw that kind of scraggly looking guy, cuffed,” said videographer Andrew Leyden, who posted video online.

Just as with the Atlanta shooter, right now there are few details about this suspect, his intentions, or why there was a “be on the lookout” alert for him.

A UK news source reports Murray is an Army vet:

Murray, from San Antonio, Texas, is said to have experienced ‘paranoid delusions of people in the military and government wanting to harm him’, according to an intelligence bulletin from Texas warning authorities about the suspect.

Bolo says he was Army drone operator who started service in 2010, medically discharged in 2014. Recently complained to police he wasn’t getting VA support and not taking prescribed meds. Also recently bought AR-15, per police.

— Lindsay Watts (@LindsayAWatts) March 17, 2021

Lovely.

“The law, in its majestic equality, forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal their bread.” ― Anatole France

“You just can’t be racist the way you used to,” begins Charles M. Blow .

No. Not most places. Using the N-word with abandon meant freedom to some people. During EMT training in the emergency room decades ago, one of my patients wore a black tee shirt with white block letters reading “I HATE (N-words).” There was a large-caliber, blue-black hole in his foot where he’d shot himself with a percussion-cap revolver as antique as the racial attitudes broadcast across his chest.

That was then. Nowadays they wear their tee shirts under oxford shirts and ties while writing legislation to suppress the votes of poor people. “Poor” now being a proxy for Black.

“There are two ways to win an election: convince enough voters that you are best suited for the job, or rid the electorate of as many people who would vote against you as possible,” Blow writes. Republicans have chosen the latter:

It can sound reasonable enough to demand that people have a state-issued ID to vote. After all, proponents ask, don’t you need an ID to drive, fly or open a bank account? But that argument ignores the fact that there are millions of Americans who don’t drive, have never flown and have no bank or credit union account.

So long as the burden is everyone’s, Republicans can hide behind their lawmaking’s majestic equality.

But the burden of voter ID laws falls heaviest on poorer voters who tend to be Black and tend to vote for Democrats. Racial discrimination under the cover of “election integrity” or “ballot security” is by design.

When state legislatures make it less convenient to register or to vote, it also greatly affects the poor. Poverty is the ultimate inconvenience. It is incredibly time consuming to be poor. The things that people with money take for granted — like shopping for groceries or making a doctor’s appointment — require considerably more time and energy when you lack money. If you make tasks like voting harder, it means that poor people will do them less often.

Prohibiting Sunday voting, “souls to the polls” communal voting favored in Black communities is another legislated inconvenience with a target demographic. Plus limiting poll hours and early voting sites as well as siting early voting sites more remote to minority communities than white ones.

Blow adds:

What we are seeing across the country are effectively Republican attempts to resurrect a poll tax — to use poverty and income inequality (which white supremacy helps to create) to further racial oppression.

We are witnessing attempts to use poverty and disadvantage as tools to silence voices. It is a further dehumanizing and delegitimizing of the poor.

In the early days of the Republic, only rich landowning white men were routinely allowed to vote. The ability to participate in how the country was governed was inherited or acquired in life — and many were excluded.

I have always believed that conservatives in this country have bemoaned the expansion of the franchise and have continuously fought to make it more narrow again.

"They are the ones making the lines longer through these draconian actions. Then they want to make it a crime to bring grandma some water while she's waiting in a line that they're making longer. Make no mistake, this is democracy in reverse." — Warnock pic.twitter.com/Alz9WtVqSN

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) March 17, 2021

Across the country conservative legislators have set about making barriers to voting even higher for Black voters by targeting the poor. Even now, for all the heat Georgia Republican legislators feel for their efforts to head off losses in 2022, they are preparing yet another assault (CNN):

Word of a new 93-page bill came about an hour before a scheduled hearing of a special election integrity committee in the Georgia House, and it set off outrage from voting rights activists who called it a “disgraceful” bait-and-switch tactic.

“They are attacking voting rights from every single angle,” Hillary Holley of Fair Fight Action, a voting rights group, said in a hastily arranged news conference.

Earlier in the day, the committee’s public agenda had described the hearing as centered on a two-page bill, dealing narrowly with absentee voting provisions — only to substitute it with the sweeping bill.

In his first Senate floor speech, Georgia Democrat Raphael Warnock addressed the widespread effort by Republicans to choose their voters rather than allow an open democratic process to choose them.

The full speech is below.

He just came out and said it.:

It’s just very odd the way in which the Tea Party etc fetishized the whole Revolution-era aesthetic and speak of the blood of tyrants watering the tree of liberty and on and on and here a guy just straight up saying he should be installed as sovereign over the will of voters https://t.co/tdSuPxMeR8

— David Freedlander (@freedlander) March 17, 2021

Update:

Now watch this.

Just … wow.

I’m speaking of Republicans, of course. According to Politico, some of them are wondering where they went wrong with the COVID relief bill. My favorite part of this Politico piece is that the “luminaries” they quote as being unhappy with the GOP response are Steve Bannon and Newt Gingrich. If that’s the best they can do…

The overwhelming sentiment within the Republican Party is that voters will turn on the $1.9 trillion bill over time. But that wait-and-see approach has baffled some GOP luminaries and Trump World figures who expected Republicans to seize their first opportunity to cast newly-in-charge Democrats as out of control. Instead, they fear the party did little to dent Biden’s major victory — a victory that could embolden the administration in forthcoming legislative fights and even the lead up to the midterm elections.

“The lack of response to this bill in an organized messaging and aggressive media push back is shown by the fact that Democrats have now gone from $2 trillion to a $4 trillion infrastructure package. If Covid relief was that easy, why not just run the table?” said former Trump White House chief strategist Steve Bannon.

“It’s a fairly popular bill that polled well because it’s been sold as a Covid relief bill with direct cash payments to Americans — what’s not to like?” he added. “However, that’s not what the bill is. That’s a huge problem because 2022 has already started and you don’t see the fight here.”

Bannon isn’t alone in his lament. Elsewhere in conservative circles, a feeling of missed opportunity has taken root in the wake of the passage of the Covid-relief bill last week. Republicans were never expected to support the measure and unanimously opposed it when the time came for a vote. But in interviews with top GOP operatives, Trump confidantes, and congressional aides, there was a common refrain that the party could have done more to frame it for the public. Instead, periodic claims that the bill was bloated with progressive add-ons and bailout money for blue states were overshadowed by a more relentless focus on the culture wars du jour.

“Whenever there is something that goes into pop culture and now all this cancel culture stuff, it is catnip for the base and the media and Republicans are going to talk about that,” said GOP strategist Doug Heye…

They are relying on that. It’s their whole strategy.

“I think this is a missed opportunity and the GOP has to improve its communications campaign pretty dramatically,” said former House speaker Newt Gingrich, who said he had to assign his production team to do a deep-dive examining the bill for political vulnerabilities.

They didn’t have the guts to strenuously oppose a bill that was delivering necessary, material relief to many Republicans. Once the aid is in people’s hands and we’re past the emergency they’ll almost certainly come back with a lot of jabber about “boondoggles” and “wishlists.” It remains to be seen how well that will work. If they manage to tickle the racist lizard brain enough, the Trumpers will never admit they took the money and back whatever lies the GOP puts out.

The Republican Party’s stumbles around the passage of the Covid-relief bill were, to a degree, a microcosm of the difficulties it has had finding its footing in the post-Trump era. Indeed, some Republicans said their party was hamstrung in the relief bill fight by the fact that they had so recently supported bills that relied on deficit-spending and pushed similar provisions, like direct payments.

“Republicans lost credibility on that issue during the Trump years, especially the first couple years when we had the power to do something about it,” said Brendan Steinhauser, a Republican consultant and former campaign manager to Texas Sen. John Cornyn. “There was no interest in doing anything about it. It was just, ‘let’s not even talk about spending or the debt or deficit or anything like that.’”

They are shameless. I really don’t think this had anything to do with it. They don’t need no stinkin’ credibility. They just lie with impunity.

This is probably a bit more true bit they really should stop and think about what they’re saying:

One Senate GOP aide noted that members held press conferences to push back on the bill, but that the capacity to sustain and prosecute an argument through the press wasn’t there, in part because of former President Donald Trump.

“We were spending the early part of the year dealing with the insurrection and impeachment trial and then we jumped right into passage,” the aide said. “So the attention of the D.C. media wasn’t on this legislation, it was on the fallout of Jan 6.”

Yes. They were very distracted by their energetic defenses of the violent insurrection and sacking of the capitol at the behest of their Dear Leader Donald Trump. It’s so hard to find enough hours in the day when you’re trying to overthrow the government.

And this pretty much proves that they wouldn’t have moved the needle much even if they’d made the case for “small government” as they might have done back in 1990s.

In the absence of a cohesive strategy from congressional GOP leaders or the party apparatus, individual Republicans like Gingrich and GOP-aligned outside groups were left to mount their own attacks against Biden’s American Rescue Plan. Some criticism focused on pet projects within the legislation. Others accused Democrats of using the shadow of a pandemic to expand the welfare state.

“This bill was so extreme and so little about it was actually Covid relief,” said Tim Phillips, president of Americans for Prosperity, which has accused Democrats of “leveraging” the latest legislative response to the Covid-19 crisis “to advance partisan priorities at the expense of everyday Americans.”

None of the attack lines seemed to resonate with voters, who began receiving stimulus checks as early as last weekend and appear overwhelmingly supportive of the law. A CBS-YouGov survey released on Sunday showed 71 percent of adults believe the American Rescue Plan will benefit the middle class more than wealthy Americans. The bill’s passage coincides with an uptick in vaccinations and recognition from Democrats and allied teachers unions that schools need to reopen soon — which together have the potential for improving the electoral landscape for Democrats as they try to keep both chambers of the Congress.

Their people don’t care about ideology. And really, they never did. They are now entirely motivated by blatant culture war issues. Their base cares about “cancel culture” for sure. But they also care about immigration, race relations, crime etc. The Republicans will regroup around that and it will be a much more pitched battle than anything about spending. Democrats are going to have to fight those but should keep going with the safety net improvements, infrastructure and investment programs without concern for right wing opposition.

By the way, this came out today:

The coronavirus relief and stimulus legislation signed into law by President Joe Biden last week is earning high marks from voters, according to a new POLITICO/Morning Consult poll.

More than seven in 10 voters, 72 percent, support the new law, the poll shows — far greater than the paltry 21 percent who oppose it.

Support is nearly universal among Democrats — 95 percent — and strong among independents at 69 percent. Despite the law’s earning no support from Republicans in Congress, GOP voters are split in the new poll: 44 percent support it, and 48 percent oppose it.