Month: March 2021

Sen. Joe Manchin repeated this week that he is a big No on ending the filibuster. The West Virginia Democrat said on Monday the legislative relic would “never” be eliminate as long as he was around. Pressed again by a reporter, Manchin said, “Jesus Christ, what don’t you understand about ‘never’?”

Norm Ornstein cautioned Democrats the next day not to push Joe Manchin too hard on ending the filibuster to move forward the Biden agenda:

In 2001, I warned that if Republicans harangued Sen. Jim Jeffords (Vt.) over his apostasy on their party’s policy priorities, they would regret it. He would switch parties and, in a 50-50 Senate, shift the Senate majority. The next month, it happened. The same concern now applies to Democrats with Manchin. Push too far, and the result could be Majority Leader McConnell, foreclosing Democrats’ avenue to pursue infrastructure, tax reform and health reform legislation.

The rest of us might not like being in this situation, but then again, we don’t like a year-plus of pandemic isolation either. So now what?

Ornstein proposed (as Ian Millhiser had in February at Vox) ways to modify the filibuster to retain minority input while preventing the Senate from becoming a “glorified House,” as Manchin, digging in his heels back in November. Millhiser notes that the Senate has modified filibuster rules “many times — and with increasing frequency” in the last century.

It reminded me of a successful tactic used against another “rule” opponents find hard to eliminate. We’ll come back to that.

Ornstein offers three changes that might allow the Democratic agenda to move forward while preserving Manchin’s and Kyrsten Sinema’s (Ariz.) vision of how the Senate should work:

Make the minority do the work. Currently, it takes 60 senators to reach cloture — to end debate and move to a vote on final passage of a bill. The burden is on the majority, a consequence of filibuster reform in 1975, which moved the standard from two-thirds of senators present and voting to three-fifths of the entire Senate. Before that change, if the Senate went around-the-clock, filibustering senators would have to be present in force. If, for example, only 75 senators showed up for a cloture vote, 50 of them could invoke cloture and move to a final vote. After the reform, only a few senators in the minority needed to be present to a request for unanimous consent and to keep the majority from closing debate by forcing a quorum call. The around-the-clock approach riveted the public, putting a genuine spotlight on the issues. Without it, the minority’s delaying tactics go largely unnoticed, with little or no penalty for obstruction, and no requirement actually to debate the issue.

One way to restore the filibuster’s original intent would be requiring at least two-fifths of the full Senate, or 40 senators, to keep debating instead requiring 60 to end debate. The burden would fall to the minority, who’d have to be prepared for several votes, potentially over several days and nights, including weekends and all-night sessions, and if only once they couldn’t muster 40 — the equivalent of cloture — debate would end, making way for a vote on final passage of the bill in question.

Go back to the “present and voting” standard. A shift to three-fifths of the Senate “present and voting” would similarly require the minority to keep most of its members around the Senate when in session. If, for example, the issue in question were voting rights, a Senate deliberating on the floor, 24 hours a day for several days, would put a sharp spotlight on the issue, forcing Republicans to publicly justify opposition to legislation aimed at protecting the voting rights of minorities. Weekend Senate sessions would cause Republicans up for reelection in 2022 to remain in Washington instead of freeing them to go home to campaign. In a three-fifths present and voting scenario, if only 80 senators showed up, only 48 votes would be needed to get to cloture. Add to that a requirement that at all times, a member of the minority party would have to be on the floor, actually debating, and the burden would be even greater, while delivering what Manchin and Sinema say they want — more debate.

Narrow the supermajority requirement. Another option would be to follow in the direction of the 1975 reform, which reduced two-thirds (67 out of a full 100) to three-fifths (60 out of 100), and further reduce the threshold to 55 senators — still a supermajority requirement, but a slimmer one. Democrats might have some ability to get five Republicans to support their desired outcomes on issues such as voting rights, universal background checks for gun purchases or a path to citizenship for Dreamers. A reduction to 55, if coupled with a present-and-voting standard would establish even more balance between majority and minority.

Ornstein does not explicitly mention the Senate requiring an actual talking filibuster again. That kind almost never occurs these days.

Adam Jentleson, author of “Kill Switch,” discussed with Terry Gross of NPR’s “Fresh Air” how different today’s “silent filibuster” is from the Mr. Smith Goes To Washington kind:

But in the modern Senate, the filibuster looks nothing like that. And actually, speaking is not even required. All you have to do when a bill comes to the floor is have a member of your staff send an email to what’s called the cloakroom, which is sort of the nerve center of action on the floor, saying that your member, your – the senator you work for, has an objection to this bill. That single email could be a phone call, could be a conversation in the hallway. That single objection raises the threshold from passing a bill from the simple majority, where technically the rules still have the threshold today, to a supermajority of what is now 60 votes.

And that is a filibuster. There’s no speaking required. No one has to take the floor. No one has to explain themselves. If a senator raises this objection and increases the threshold from a majority to a supermajority, they never actually have to explain themselves at any point. They just do it. And it’s become accepted. And that is why it’s become normalized that most bills in the Senate require 60 votes to pass.

But I just want to emphasize that this is not actually a matter of the rules themselves because the rules still state that a simple majority is what’s required to pass. This is a matter of a procedural hurdle that’s come to be developed over the last few decades and become routinized. The reason bills need 60 votes to pass is that they can’t clear that procedural hurdle to get to the final vote. And that is the problem that is paralyzing the Senate today.

Which gets us back to Manchin’s reasoning behind preserving the filibuster:

“The minority should have input — that’s the whole purpose for the Senate. If you basically do away with the filibuster altogether for legislation, you won’t have the Senate. You’re a glorified House. And I will not do that.”

But under the procedural hurdle of the silent filibuster no minority input is required, offered, or heard. By Manchin’s own reckoning, that defeats the “whole purpose of the Senate” as the practice stands today.

The silent filibuster has made it so convenient for a single senator to stop a piece of legislation with no public justification that there has been no real push to eliminate it. But since the urgency of the moment requires Democrats advance legislation and Democrats such as Manchin and Sinema stand in the way of abolishing the filibuster outright, salutary modifications might be the most expedient way forward.

Ornstein’s advice recalls of how conservatives in the states attack Roe v. Wade. When they could not abolish Roe outright, they changed their strategy. Conservative states nibbled around the edges of the ruling by erecting enough administrative barriers to getting an abortion to make Roe‘s guarantees functionally meaningless. Still there and yet not there.

Like it or not (as conservatives wield it), that is a proven strategy. Democrats might want to deploy it against the filibuster.

(h/t NS)

Via Zooborns:

World Wildlife Day 2021 was particularly special for Woodland Park Zoo this year because it ushered in the 1st birthday of little Kitoko, a male western lowland gorilla born March 4 during the pandemic. “While the zoo was closed for nearly four months, we shared loads of photos of Kitoko—his milestones and tender moments—with our community and zoo family. He has touched the hearts and minds of hundreds of thousands of people during a tumultuous time and brought so much joy,” said Martin Ramirez, mammal curator of Woodland Park Zoo.

“Kitoko’s wild cousins live in tropical rain forests, so his birthday is the perfect time to pay tribute to the communities and wildlife who depend on those forests for survival,” added Ramirez. Western lowland gorillas live in seven countries across west equatorial Africa, including Congo, southeast Nigeria, Gabon and Central African Republic.
 
Forests and woodlands are mainstays of human livelihoods and well-being. Indigenous and rural communities have a particularly close relationship with these natural systems. They rely on these systems to meet their essential needs, from food and shelter to energy and medicines. Forests, forest wildlife, and the livelihoods that depend on them are facing multiple crises: from climate change to deforestation and biodiversity loss, as well as the health, social and economic impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic.

One of Woodland Park Zoo’s Conservation Partners is the Mondika Gorilla Project, whose long-term goal is to improve the conservation status of African apes and the forests they inhabit by addressing multiple threats to their survival. Observations of individually recognized gorillas over time are allowing researchers to better understand their respective societies, social structures, interactions, resources and habitat needs. They also provide information on the effects that human activities are having on wildlife and the ecosystem.
 
“Saving gorillas, chimpanzees, and their habitats requires valuing local human cultures and land-use rights,” said Woodland Park Zoo’s Vice President of Conservation Initiatives Peter Zahler. The Mondika Gorilla Project has built a strong relationship with the local people of Bomassa, Bon Coin and Bayanga. “The project employs community members, providing ways for them to support their families and offering alternatives to unsustainable hunting practices. All of this allows the local people to feel empowered and to take an active role in conservation efforts in their region. This is community-based conservation that works for wildlife and for people.”
 
The majority of remaining critically endangered western lowland gorillas are found in the northern Republic of Congo, which also harbors 33% of western equatorial Africa’s closed canopy forest. The rapid decline of pristine forests has resulted in widespread international concern. Insights gained from Mondika’s long-term, detailed monitoring are critical in identifying areas important to conserve.
 
Emerging infectious diseases have increased significantly in recent decades, with roughly 70% of these originating in wildlife such as great apes. The Mondika study site has been at the forefront of gorilla health monitoring in central Africa. Despite the COVID-19 pandemic, Mondika’s locally-based field staff continued daily monitoring of the habituated groups of lowland gorillas at below normal levels but almost uninterrupted since last April.
 
Learn about Woodland Park Zoo and the Association of Zoos & Aquariums’ new initiative, “Reduce the Risk: A Crisis in Human and Animal Health”: www.aza.org/reduce-the-risk.

More baby gorilla action:

This adorable clip shows a baby gorilla trying to entice his father to play 😂 pic.twitter.com/Dzc4SOrqkm

— NowThis Impact (@nowthisimpact) March 5, 2021

They saw it:

October 2, 2013 A warning from Bruce Bartlett, former Senior Policy Analyst in the Reagan White House and former Deputy Assistant Secretary for Economic Policy in the G.H.W. Bush administration, and Michael Lofgren, a former staff member on the House and Senate Budget Committees. pic.twitter.com/Qhku8NvGMT

— UsHadrons (@ushadrons) March 5, 2021

This is an excerpt from an article written about the same time:

This points to a reason why firm Republican control of the House has a downside. That control results largely from gerrymandering—the redistricting after the 2010 census gave the GOP many safe seats where the Republican was virtually guaranteed to win. With the nominating process heavily controlled by very conservative Tea Party members, the Republican class elected in 2010 is very ideological and unwilling to compromise on anything.

Former Republican Congressman Ray LaHood recently commented on the constraints that these members impose on the party’s leadership. Said LaHood in an interview with the Washington Post: “[There is] a small group, maybe 30, 40 in the House, who have come here to do nothing — and that’s what they’ve done. They’ve done nothing. They’ve accomplished nothing. . . . They didn’t come here to vote for solutions. They came here to do nothing, and they stand in the way of the president and his agenda.”

That would account for the entire party today.

Bartlett thought they would lose in 2016 and it would force a reckoning on race and inclusion because the big donors would balk. And then long came Trump and he squeaked out an electoral college victory showing how it could be done without any of that.

Bartlett didn’t fully understand the lengths they would be willing to go to hold power at all costs. Like sack the capitol and call for Mike Pence to be hanged because he refused to try to overturn the election.

Or pass laws all over the country to make it difficult for everyone to vote — even their own voters. They are openly contemptuous of democracy now. And the idea that they are interested in reforms just seems quaint.

The Republicans want to pull a lot of stunts and try to make things difficult for the Democrats. But they are lazy:

This is the moment @ChrisVanHollen outsmarted the GOP: after the full reading of the bill demanded by Ron Johnson, which delayed a vote by nearly 11 hours, he left and there were no Republicans around to object when Van Hollen proposed cutting debate from 20 hours to three. https://t.co/QjXIx80A56

— Helen Kennedy (@HelenKennedy) March 5, 2021

They are very low energy about this stuff. In the following discussion of filibuster reform josh Marshall addresses the idea of making them a “talking” filibuster, or some form thereof. This one would require that they all stay around:

For instance, what if … the Majority Leader could bring a bill to a vote and to block it the minority would have to get forty votes on the floor to say no. You could mix that with some requirement to stay on the floor to keep it up. I guarantee you that would get old for the minority party really quick. That is not only hard to do – have everyone available at a moment’s notice – it’s visible. If Democrats were trying to get a vote on the minimum wage under this system you’d have repeated instances of the Democrats starting to hold a vote only to have 40 Republicans show up and say no we won’t let you hold a vote. That’s a bad look. And it’s central to the modern filibuster that it’s function doesn’t ‘look’ like anything. Because, as I said, it’s invisible.

How long would they keep it up?

We don’t entirely have to speculate.

This is what prompted me to discuss this today. The conciliation process actually has what amounts to a talking filibuster embedded within it – at least to a degree. And it just started this morning. It’s generally called the “vote-o-rama”. Basically there is an unlimited opportunity to offer amendments, all of which have to be voted on. It’s unlimited. So Republicans can basically just keep offering amendments indefinitely. But they don’t. That never, ever happens. Never. They get tired of it. They won’t to go to dinner. They want to go to the beach. They need to go to a fundraiser. They want to go home and go to sleep. No less important, after a certain number of days they would start to seem ridiculous.

One Senate veteran tells me that it’s not quite the same because at a certain point the chair can say the amendments have become ‘dilatory’, basically an obvious and excessive delaying tactic. It then goes to the parliamentarian for a ruling. But as we’ve just seen a majority can overrule the parliamentarian. At the end of the day, if 51 votes say it’s dilatory it’s dilatory and that’s the end. But there’s little question that the process could be delayed much, much longer than it normally is before that cudgel came into play.

This tells me pretty clearly – I mean, we have a clear test case – that if the filibuster required an on-going concrete action from the GOP it wouldn’t go on very long at all. As indeed, this vote-o-rama won’t go on for that long. Annoying, a spectacle, a time to make the majority wait. But it won’t go on that long.

I raise all this because if there’s a positive end game to all this battle for majority rule in Congress it’s ‘reform’ that allows folks like Manchin and Schumer to say they didn’t ‘abolish’ the filibuster. They saved the filibuster for future generations! By reforming it and taking away the incentives to get rid of it. But such reforms would likely make all the difference in the world for the reasons I note here.

They couldn’t even sustain their stupid “read the bill” stunt.

Marshall is right here about how to frame this for the Manchin and Sinema types who think their voters stay up night worrying about the filibuster: “Mend it don’t end it!” It could work.

This piece about the merging of QAnon and white, conservative evangelical Christianity is very disturbing:

It’s Trump’s refusal to acknowledge reality, combined with the increasingly intricate nature of Republican conspiracy mythology — theories that are becoming more intertwined with the flavor of evangelical Christianity that dominates the GOP — that have extremism experts and former Republicans warning the violent movement centered on the 45^th president is not going away. In fact, they say, it will most likely become more violent. 

Colin Clarke, a senior research fellow at The Soufan Center who studies extremist violence, said the upheaval wrought by the Covid-19 pandemic, the recent presidential election, and the continued prosecution of several overseas wars has created a confluence of circumstances that scholars would consider a perfect incubator for belief in conspiracy theories and apocalyptic mass delusions. 

“It’s not going to get better anytime soon, unfortunately… Conspiratorial thinking is very closely associated with high-anxiety situations and endless wars, elections and national tragedies,” he said. 

“Religious terrorism tends to be more lethal, because people believe they’re serving a higher purpose by committing acts of violence, as opposed to secular groups or ethno-nationalists who are fighting over territory or land,” he explained. “You can’t negotiate with these people, and you especially can’t negotiate with QAnon, because how do you assuage grievances that don’t exist?”

Clarke also posited that synergies between QAnon and the American anti-abortion movement — another religiously inspired faction that dominates the GOP — could spark extremist violence in the mould of the string of bombings carried out by Eric Robert Rudolph between 1996 and 1998. 

Another prominent researcher of extremist movements and disinformation, former GOP Representative Denver Riggleman, said the connections between QAnon and white evangelical Christianity have “metastasized” into something else that is both “messianic” and “apocalyptic”.

“This has grown well beyond just something that we can categorize as QAnon,” said Riggleman, who was defeated by a far-right primary challenger after officiating a same-sex wedding and is now chief strategist with the Network Contagion Research Institute. “It’s almost become a conspiracy industry that is evangelical.”

Like Clarke, Riggleman said there are parallels between the radicalization process that is being driven by QAnon in the evangelical community and the Islamic radicalism that the US has been trying to combat since 2001: “There certainly is radical Islam, but there’s now radicalism on certain evangelical sides, and I think people have been afraid to call it for what it is.”

But Joe Walsh, the former GOP congressman and conservative radio host who mounted a brief primary challenge to Trump during the 2020 election cycle, said such problems go far beyond QAnon believers in the Republican Party. 

Walsh said Trump’s insistence that he, not Biden, won the 2020 election, has been eagerly adopted by a Republican base that is more primed for conspiratorial thinking than ever. “When I ask people specifically about QAnon, it’s only a rare Trump supporter that can give me any specifics, but damn near all of them are just general conspiracists,” he added. “There’s just a huge general overlap in that most of the Republican Party base voters now are conspiracy believers… Because the base is evangelical, the base is now conspiratorial, and they are one and the same.”

Walsh adds:

“Any religion, the more fundamentalist and extreme they become, the more prone they are to violence. I don’t know if we’re there yet, but when we enter the era when the FBI or whoever can say that fundamentalist evangelical extremism is a domestic terror threat, then our government can do what it has to do,” he said. “If we continue down this road, it’s coming… and we’re gonna fall into the world where all of the people like me — all of these conservative Republicans who demanded that the government do what it has to do to weed out radical Islam in our country — they are going to be the ones standing at the church door, telling the government to stay out.”

I don’t even want to think about how that would go. The idea of trying to fight militant, Christian,extremists is something out of the middle ages.

This faction in the GOP is huge and they are, apparently, accustomed to following authority and subject to conspiracy theories. They for the core of MAGA and they have been radicalized.

He may be out of office but he’s still got Kevin McCarthy’s cojones in his pocket:

After Kevin McCarthy visited Donald Trump at Mar-a-Lago in late January, the House minority leader released a picture of the two men smiling side by side. The image — accompanied by a statement announcing Trump had “committed” to helping the GOP flip the lower chamber — suggested all was well between the House GOP and the ex-president.

It wasn’t.

Sources tell Playbook that McCarthy has been trying to persuade Trump not to seek revenge against 10 Republicans who voted to impeach the former president — members who could be critical to McCarthy’s bid to retake the House and become speaker.

Not only has Trump refused to commit, he has publicly repeated his vow to primary those incumbents.

That’s not all. Trump and his new campaign team are also cracking down on the use of the president’s name for fundraising — a huge draw attracting small-dollar donors. Three sources told us that Trump, who made his fortune licensing his name, has felt burned and “abused” by the GOP bandying about his name to haul in money.

His team has conveyed that any Republican or GOP committee seeking to use it needs explicit approval, according to five sources familiar with the situation. One Trump adviser said they’ve been sending out cease-and-desists to faux PACs using Trump’s name to fundraise, among other demands to knock it off.

They really don’t know him, do they? Did they think any of this is about them? Did they not know that Trump’s “brand” is his name and it’s everything to him? Lol.

In his CPAC speech last weekend, Trump reinforced the point by directing all fundraising to his own campaign entities. He told attendees “there’s only one way” to donate to Trump Republicans: through his own Save America PAC.

That move came around the same time that McCarthy’s own reelection campaign took down a website called Trumps-Majority.com, a landing page for donations that appeared to go live around the time McCarthy met with Trump in Florida. McCarthy’s office said the website, which was used in 2020, went up by mistake. The McCarthy and Trump camps denied that its removal had anything to do with Trump’s concern about how his name is being used.

Still, the situation highlights an awkward two-step between the House GOP (particularly McCarthy) and Trump. They need the ex-president to raise gobs of money from and turn out the base. But any cash collected off the Trump name would also be used to protect some of the 10 Republicans who voted to impeach him — members like California Rep. DAVID VALADAO, a McCarthy ally who’s in a difficult reelection.

Setting aside Trump’s appetite for revenge against those members, even some House Republicans aren’t even comfortable with McCarthy & Co.’s Trump entreaties. At a private meeting in February, Rep. TOM RICE (R-S.C.), one of the pro-impeachment Republicans, said the conference shouldn’t be using the ex-president at all in its effort to retake the House, according to people in the room.

Caught in the middle is McCarthy, who is notorious for trying to please everybody. McCarthy has made no secret of his belief that the House GOP needs Trump in 2022. But placating a president who doesn’t hear nuance when it comes to his detractors is not going to be easy for “My Kevin.”

Yeah well, “My Kevin” is just a functionary of the Trump cult. That’s his job. And he’s on thin ice with Trump for failing to show properly fealty already. He’d better watch his step.

One of the more revealing political moments of recent times was when the Republican Party decided they weren’t going to bother writing a platform for the national convention in 2020. They simply announced that they supported President Trump and pretty much left it at that. It’s not that platforms necessarily guide the party’s agenda, but they are an indicator of its priorities, philosophy, ideology, etc. Yet the erstwhile “party of ideas” didn’t think it was important enough to even make a half-baked stab at writing them down ahead of the last election. That’s because they don’t have ideas anymore, at least any that could possibly be translated into a legislative program.

Maybe it’s the influence of Donald Trump or the fact that the right-wing media’s culture war machine is permanently turned up to 11, 24 hours a day, but the right has clearly decided that turning politics into a non-stop circus is all they need to do. That’s why we have Republicans in Congress refusing to negotiate in good faith on the COVID relief bill and pulling stunts like forcing the clerk of the Senate to read the bill aloud for no good reason other than to delay the process.

And that’s just Congress.

Out in the states, Republicans are a beehive of activity, putting all of their energy wherever they have any power to roll back voting rights. This isn’t new, of course. Conservatives have been trying to suppress the vote of their political opponents and racial minorities literally for centuries. But we had made some progress in the latter half of the 20th century with the enactment of the Voting Rights Act, which the Supreme Court recently ruled meant that we no longer needed the federal government to protect the right of those who’ve traditionally been disenfranchised.

Democrats knew that would unleash a wave of voter suppression and in the last Congress, the House passed H.R.1, the For The People Act, which would expand voting rights, change campaign finance laws to reduce the influence of money in politics, limit partisan gerrymandering, and create new ethics rules for federal officeholders. Needless to say, the Senate under the leadership of Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., never took it up because they weren’t in the business of doing anything but confirming judges, appearing on Fox News and golfing with the president if they were lucky.

Trump’s Big Lie that the election was stolen has now allowed Republicans across the board to go into overdrive, fatuously insisting that they must pass hundreds of laws all over the country making voting as difficult as possible for poor and working people, students, racial and ethnic minorities and people who live in dense population areas, in order to “restore faith” in our elections. Lie blatantly about a stolen election and then use that as an excuse to steal future elections. You have to admire the chutzpah.

H.R.1 once again passed the House this week on a party-line vote and the Senate will take it up once the Republicans get tired of putting on a sideshow and the COVID relief package is finally finished. This bill cannot be dealt with through the reconciliation process that allows for only a simple majority to pass so it is subject to the filibuster and the Democrats are going to have to do a very serious gut check. This is an existential battle for the party and for American democracy. The Atlantic’s Ron Brownstein puts it this way.

If Democrats lose their slim majority in either congressional chamber next year, they will lose their ability to pass voting-rights reform. After that, the party could face a debilitating dynamic: Republicans could use their state-level power to continue limiting ballot access, which would make regaining control of the House or the Senate more difficult for Democrats—and thus prevent them from passing future national voting rules that override the exclusionary state laws.

Perhaps that’s why former Vice President Mike Pence popped his head up for the first time since he was evacuated from the U.S. Capitol on January 6th to argue against this bill, accusing Democrats of trying to “give leftists a permanent, unfair, and unconstitutional advantage in our political system,” which is laughable considering the state of our tattered democracy.

The Democrats currently hold 50 Senate seats but represent 41,549,808 more people than the 50 Senate Republicans. GOP presidents appointed six of the nine Justices of the Supreme Court while winning the popular vote only once in the past seven elections. Of course, the anachronistic Electoral College can grant a Republican president the White House even though he or she might actually lose by millions of votes, and partisan gerrymandering in red states consistently benefits Republicans.

Unless Democrats can persuade centrist Sens. Joe Manchin, D-WV, Kyrsten Sinema, D-Az, and institutionalists like Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., that U.S. democracy is in dire straits and the filibuster has to either be eliminated or “reformed” in some way, H.R.1 and the upcoming John Lewis Voting Rights Act will not pass and this barrage of voting restrictions and gerrymandering may very well cement GOP minoritarian rule permanently. Not passing these bills really isn’t optional.

The U.S.-funded NGO Freedom House, which has been around since 1941, recently released its annual report on democracy around the world. The outlook is not good.

Democratic governments have been on the decline for 15 years and it’s not getting any better. But the most startling finding is that the U.S., once the exemplar of modern democracy in the post-war world, has declined by 11 points on Freedom House’s aggregate Freedom In The World score, placing it among the 25 countries that have suffered the steepest declines over the past 10 years.

The report discusses the long term degradation of America’s democratic norms but focuses on the accelerating decline in U.S. freedom scores during the Trump years, “driven in part by corruption and conflicts of interest in the administration, resistance to transparency efforts, and harsh and haphazard policies on immigration and asylum that made the country an outlier among its Group of Seven peers.” But it reserves its harshest criticism for Trump’s attempt to overturn the election which it rightly characterizes as his most destructive act. And even more concerning was the fact that “nationally elected officials from his party backed these claims, striking at the foundations of democracy and threatening the orderly transfer of power.” That is not something any of us would have expected to read in a Freedom House report.

The Democrats have a small window of opportunity to prevent this undemocratic movement from gaining steam and securing minority rule for the foreseeable future. Trump himself is not out of the picture and his party is single-mindedly focused on attaining power by any means necessary. Democrats must act decisively now and make sure that all 50 Senators understand the stakes and do what is necessary to pass H.R.1.

I would hope that neither Kyrsten Sinema or Joe Manchin want to be remembered as the Strom Thurmond of their time, but that’s exactly who they will be if they allow the filibuster to once more stand in the way of ensuring voting rights for all Americans.

Salon

The FBI on Thursday arrested a former Trump State Department appointee, Federico Klein, for his participation in the Jan. 6 Trump insurrection.

Politico notes:

The alleged presence of a Trump political appointee at the riot may tie those events more closely to the president, although there is already ample evidence that many of those charged were inspired by Trump’s false claims about widespread election fraud and by his call for supporters to descend on Washington on Jan. 6 for events that he promised would be “wild.”

Klein assaulted police officers during the siege, the Washington Post adds:

Klein was still employed at the State Department as a staff assistant on Jan. 6 when he joined a mob in a tunnel leading into the U.S. Capitol, the FBI said. Then he allegedly “physically and verbally engaged with the officers holding the line” at the building’s entrance, according to the complaint. After ignoring officers’ orders to move back, he assaulted officers with a riot shield that had been stolen from police, the complaint said, and then used the shield to wedge open a door into the Capitol.

At one point, Klein was caught on video shouting for more insurrectionists to come to the front lines, where officers were struggling to hold back the mob.

“We need fresh people, need fresh people,” he said, according to the complaint.

No wonder the right is so feverishly working to divert public attention from the Capitol breach investigation. Federal authorities have indicted hundreds of Trump supporters for assaulting the Capitol and Capitol police officers on Jan. 6. Hundreds more arrests are expected. Unless I missed it, none of those arrested so far are identified as anything other than Trump supporters. Not a good look. Either for them, for Trump, or for Trump’s accomplices in Congress.

I've got 139 mentions of "Seuss" on Fox News between 4 a.m. yesterday and midnight, the author's purported cancelation was mentioned on all but three hours of the network's programming. pic.twitter.com/ngoxArNmrP

— Matthew Gertz (@MattGertz) March 3, 2021

The right needs a distraction. A big, loud one. So did you hear Dr. Seuss has been “cancelled”? By Joe Biden and Democrats, to hear Fox News tell it. Nothing like performative outrage and a nice, shiny culture war to distract conservative voters from noticing their politcal party voted to overturn the 2020 election and abetted sedition:

“The cancel culture is canceling Dr. Seuss,” lamented Fox & Friends host Brian Kilmeade, adding later, “It’s out of control.”

In fact (I’m catching up here from Tuesday):

Six Dr. Seuss books will no longer be published because of their use of offensive imagery, according to the business that oversees the estate of the children’s author and illustrator.

In a statement on Tuesday, Dr. Seuss Enterprises said that it had decided last year to end publication and licensing of the books by Theodor Seuss Geisel. The titles include his first book writing under the pen name Dr. Seuss, “And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street” (1937), and “If I Ran the Zoo” (1950).

“These books portray people in ways that are hurtful and wrong,” Dr. Seuss Enterprises said in the statement. The business said the decision came after working with a panel of experts, including educators, and reviewing its catalog of titles.

Naturally, Ohio’s jacketless Republican congressman, Jim Jordan, got in on the act in a big way (Vanity Fair):

While discussing Dr. Seuss on Tuesday, The Five cohost Dana Perino brought up Republican Rep. Jim Jordan’s push for a congressional hearing focused on cancel culture and posited that Democrats should be open to the idea due to all the electoral defeats they have suffered “because of this very issue. If you go back to even just 2020, but I would even go back to 2016, the issues of this cancel culture mentality––‘defund the police,’ for example, things like that––they really had an impact on hurting Democrats in those downballot races in the state legislatures, in Congress.” Perino then added that “if Democrats were smart, they would realize they’re actually going to start losing even more elections because of this.” Later that day one of the news stories leading Fox’s website read: “Biden ‘cancels’ Dr. Seuss from ‘Read Across America’ proclamation.

It appears Dr. Seuss Enterprises, a private company, made a private business decision about its private property. Republicans, those stalwart defenders of private property and free-market capitalism, are up in arms.

Have they any “principles” left they haven’t sold out?

Sen. Ron Johnson, Republican of Wisconsin, spreader of conspiracy theories about the Jan. 6 Trump insurrection, is “the dumbest man in the Senate.” Digby awarded Johnson that title one year ago. Johnson, she wrote, “is a millionaire businessman proving once again that you can make a whole lot of money even if you are barely sentient.”

Wealth is a poor measure of intelligence, as the maskless, eclipse-gazing, last resident of the Oval Office displayed for all the world.

Not that the marketer of plastic packaging is uncolorful himself. He too has a flair for the shameless if not the clueless. Thursday afternoon he objected to dispensing with the formal reading when Democrats introduced their $1.9 trillion, 628-page relief bill. Johnson insisted that clerks read the entire thing however many hours that required.

Jim Newell of Slate takes up the tale in appropriately colorful fashion:

Johnson says that he’s submitting the Senate clerks to this trial of vocal-cord durability not to be a jerk, but because the “American people deserve to know what’s in it.” It’s hard to think of a less effective way to inform the American people about what’s in a bill than by forcing an hourslong recitation of incomprehensible legislative language on the Senate floor, but that’s the message.

And when that’s done, Johnson and other Republicans have more plans for dragging out the process. After the bill text has been read aloud—and Middle America is out with pitchforks, infuriated by learning through C-SPAN that the legislation would strike the semicolon in subparagraph 4(b) from Section 2104 of the Semiconductor Transparency Act of 1986—there’s a period of up to 20 hours of debate, followed by the rapid-succession, open-amendment process known as a “vote-a-rama.”

All God’s children got amendments, dontcha know, and the opposition typically offers hundreds on a major bill like this. Only a few actually come to a vote. But it’s a rapid-fire affair often lasting well into the night, as it did during the budget debate in February.

The ringleader of this show is, again, Ron Johnson. Johnson is trying to set up a process, as he told reporters Thursday, to “make sure that all the amendments that are offered are actually voted on.” This would involve Republican senators working in shifts on the floor to ensure that the body doesn’t tire out. “I was in a business that had continuing shift operations in manufacturing,” he told reporters, “so this is, this is just what we did.” (Gumming up the machines to delay output—it’s Manufacturing 101.) Johnson and his gang could also try to force the reading of each amendment, if they wanted to. The Senate, and its accumulated detritus of forgotten 18^th-century procedure, is theirs to do with it what they wish.

To streamline the process, Democrats worked to settle disagreements among themselves before introducing the bill, Newell reports. Republicans will propose divisive amendments aimed at peeling off even one Democratic senator. Even one defector would kill the bill if Republicans are unified in opposition.

Republicans in Congress have partisaned themselves into a corner here. The country is hurting so badly after a year in near-quarantine that Americans could care less if the bill passes on a bipartisan basis. They would rather have relief checks in hand than watch Republicans delay them to score political points (USA Today):

More than two-thirds of Americans (68%) said that $1,400 stimulus checks should remain in the stimulus package even if it meant the bill had no support from the opposite party. Democrats have proposed a $1.9 trillion relief package that includes $1,400 stimulus checks; some Republicans have complained that that amount for checks, and the total cost of the bill, are too large.

However, 53% of Republicans polled, agreed that $1,400 direct payments should be left untouched in the bill. About two-thirds (65%) of independents and 85% of Democrats agreed.

Overall, 53% of Americans said $1,400 checks to the public are about the correct amount; 28% of the public would like to see larger payments issued, while 14% think the amount should be reduced.

Nowhere in the ‘‘American Rescue Plan Act of 2021’’ does the word stimulus appear, although that is how Monmouth and others frame these payments. So it bears noting how easily these checks (named “recovery rebates”) went from being about relief to economic stimulus. Relief is about helping people. Stimulus is about helping the economy. The framing speaks to what what you value. Pay attention to who uses which language. This is insidious.

Boo hoo hoo:

The alleged Capitol intruder best known for snatching House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s (D-CA) mail and mugging for cameras with his feet up in her office blew up in anger at a federal judge Thursday. 

Richard “Bigo” Barnett was upset at having been in federal custody for a weeks, and he let D.C. District Court Judge Christopher Cooper know that the situation was “not fair.” 

“Everybody else who did things much worse are already home,” Barnett said, according to NBC4’s Scott MacFarlane. “You can’t keep pushing me out month by month.”

“They’re dragging this out!” he yelled, per The New York Times. “They’re letting everybody else out!”

.A self-described white supremacist, armed with a stun gun stormed the US Capitol, broke into the Speaker’s office, had his picture taken lolling at a desk and bragging about it afterwards thinks it’s not fair that he is being held accountable.

Barnett was charged criminally the day after the attack, and later indicted by a federal grand jury on eight counts, including obstruction of an official proceeding, aiding and abetting, and disorderly and disruptive conduct in a restrictive building with a deadly or dangerous weapon. Barnett has pleaded not guilty on all counts.

Prosecutors have so far argued successfully for Barnett’s pre-trial detention, asserting that he was photographed reclining at Pelosi’s desk with a stun gun on his hip. 

The chief justice of the D.C. District Court, Beryl A. Howell, wrote in late January that Barnett’s alleged conduct on Jan. 6 “was brazen. He bragged about what he had done after leaving the Capitol.” 

This guy would be calling for the death penalty if a BLM member did what he did.

By the way, the judge said he’s consider releasing the guy id his lawyers made a motion to do it. Lol.