Month: March 2021

He didn’t have the power to defy the constitution as his Dear Leader required so the cult went after him with a hangman’s noose as they sacked the Capitol on January 6th. Now he’s come out of his hole to pretend that he cares about “election integrity” and he’s proposing a whole panoply of vote suppression laws to permanently enshrine undemocratic, authoritarian rule.

And it will do him absolutely no good:

Donald Trump is telling allies he’s strongly considering another run for president in 2024 — and close advisers want him to choose someone other than former Vice President Mike Pence for his ticket, according to people familiar with the discussions.

Trump publicly teased at the Conservative Political Action Conference on Sunday that he’s mulling another bid for president. Privately, he’s discussed alternatives to Pence as he takes stock of who he believes stood with him at the end of his term and who didn’t, according to two of the people.

They requested anonymity because the conversations have been private.

Trump’s advisers have discussed identifying a Black or female running mate for his next run, and three of the people familiar with the matter said Pence likely won’t be on the ticket.

Two advisers have suggested Trump consider South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem, the people said. Donald Trump Jr. and his girlfriend, Kimberly Guilfoyle, are hosting a fundraiser for Noem on Friday at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort and home in Palm Beach. The former president is planning to make an appearance, people familiar with the matter said.

And on Tuesday, Trump issued a public endorsement for South Carolina Senator Tim Scott’s re-election. Scott is the only Black Republican in the U.S. Senate

Trump is constitutionally unable to forgive Pence’s refusal to overthrow the government. Revenge is at the center of his worldview. He believes you have to show the world that you will destroy anyone who crosses you or no one will respect you. If Trump wins again I think it is highly unlikely that Pence will be with him. In fact, I’ll be surprised if Pence has any future in politics at all.

We just can’t seem to learn our lesson:

The U.S. may be on the verge of another surge in coronavirus cases, despite weeks of good news.

The big picture: Nationwide, progress against the virus has stalled. And some states are ditching their most important public safety measures even as their outbreaks are getting worse.

Where it stands: The U.S. averaged just under 65,000 new cases per day over the past week. That’s essentially unchanged from the week before, ending a six-week streak of double-digit improvements.

Although the U.S. has been moving in the right direction, 65,000 cases per day is not a number that indicates the virus is under control. It’s the same caseload the U.S. was seeing last July, at the height of the summer surge in cases and deaths.

What we’re watching: Texas Gov. Greg Abbott on Tuesday rescinded the state’s mask mandate and declared that businesses will be able to operate at full capacity, saying risk-mitigation measures are no longer necessary because of the progress on vaccines.

But the risk in Texas is far from over. In fact, its outbreak is growing: New cases in the state rose by 27% over the past week.

Mississippi Gov. Tate Reeves also scrapped all business restrictions, along with the state’s mask mandate, on Tuesday. New cases in Mississippi were up 62% over the past week, the biggest jump of any state.

The daily average of new daily cases also increased in eight more states, in addition to Mississippi and Texas.

How it works: If Americans let their guard down too soon, we could experience yet another surge — a fourth wave — before the vaccination campaign has had a chance to do its work.

The vaccine rollout is moving at breakneck speed. The U.S. should have enough doses for every adult who wants one by May, President Biden said this week.

At the same time, however, more contagious variants of the coronavirus are continuing to gain ground, meaning that people who haven’t gotten their vaccines yet may be spreading and contracting the virus even more easily than before.

What’s next: The bigger a foothold those variants can get, the harder it will be to escape COVID-19 — now or in the future.

The existing vaccines appear to be less effective against two variants, discovered in South Africa and Brazil, which means the virus could keep circulating even in a world where the vast majority of people are vaccinated.

And that means it’s increasingly likely that COVID-19 will never fully go away — that outbreaks may flare up here and there for years, requiring vaccine booster shots as well as renewed protective measures.

The bottom line: Variants emerge when viruses spread widely, which is also how people die.

Whatever “the end of the pandemic” looks like — however good it’s possible for things to get — the way to get there is through ramping up vaccinations and continuing to control the virus through masks and social distancing. Not doing those things will only make the future worse.

“Getting as many people vaccinated as possible is still the same answer and the same path forward as it was on December 1 or January 1 … but the expected outcome isn’t the same,” Shane Crotty, a virologist at the La Jolla Institute for Immunology in San Diego, told Reuters.

It’s a race against the variants at this point. And yet, we have neanderthals (as Biden called them) like Greg Abbott opening up his entire state as the virus is starting to surge there again. He can blame it on immigrants and refugees, but they are all getting tested before they’re allowed in the country. If they get COVID it will because they caught it from one of Abbot’s COVID denialist followers or some poor person who caught it from a COVID denialist.

This is madness.

There are two gigantic pieces of legislation on the table right now, the pandemic is still raging, the vaccines are rolling, the world is in turmoil and this is the utter bullshit the White House press corps is talking about:

Psaki says Biden’s “Neanderthal” comments reflect “his frustration and exasperation” with governors who aren’t listening to public health experts

Psaki on criticism that Biden isn’t giving Trump enough credit for his coronavirus response: “I don’t think anybody deserves credit when half a million people in this country have died of this pandemic.”

lol what even is this question?

Reporter suggests Biden should set a better example for the country by not traveling home to Delaware

Originally tweeted by Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) on March 4, 2021.

Ridiculous.

Susan Glasser spoke with Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, General Mark Milley:

Donald Trump’s image was flickering on the oversized TV screen in the private cabin of the Air Force jet that was flying General Mark Milley, Trump’s handpicked chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, back to Washington, after a round of meetings in Colorado. Just the day before, Trump had told Steve Hilton, of Fox News, that he had been so worried about the prospect of violence in Washington on January 6th that he had ordered the military to deploy ten thousand troops there, only to be rebuffed by “the people at the Capitol.”

Even as Trump said it, this new excuse from the former President who had incited a mob to march on the Capitol seemed flagrantly untrue. Not only were there no National Guard troops—none at all, never mind ten thousand—ordered to defend Congress but, once it was besieged by the pro-Trump crowd, Trump himself had done nothing to stop the rioters in their vain, and ultimately deadly, attempt to block the congressional certification of Joe Biden’s victory. Throughout his impeachment for his role in the insurrection, Trump and his lawyers had never mentioned this supposed order. Why would Trump and his former advisers—such as the ex-White House chief of staff Mark Meadows and the ex-White House press secretary Kayleigh McEneany—start bragging about it now, seven weeks later?

When I asked Milley about what Trump had said, his reply was clear. “As the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, if there was an order for ten thousand National Guardsmen, I would like to believe I would know that,” he said. “I know that was never transmitted to me by anyone—the President, the Secretary of Defense, or anyone else—for the 6th of January.”

[…]

Milley told me and two other reporters travelling with him this week that he was shocked at what the attack had revealed. “For me, January 6th clearly and unambiguously exposed a domestic extremist threat that I didn’t realize the size, scale, and scope of,” he said. “People are entitled to believe what they want,” he said, “but you can’t act out on it. And you can’t go smash windows at the Capitol. You can’t break into buildings. You can’t put bear spray into a police officer’s face. You can’t bash him with a stick. You can’t commit violence or other acts.” He warned that such crimes undermine “the very essence of what this Republic is all about.”

Milley’s comments were his first about the storming of the Capitol, and much was made this week of his statement that the National Guard had acted with “sprint speed” deploying troops to Capitol Hill once the order was given—a turnaround time of fewer than three hours, which, according to Milley, is as fast as the military’s most élite commandos. “For the Pentagon, that’s super fast,” he said. (The Pentagon’s time line of the day shows that Milley was present at the meeting in which the acting Defense Secretary, Christopher Miller, authorized the emergency deployment of the D.C. National Guard, at 3 p.m. Milley was not involved in a still-disputed back-and-forth that led General William Walker, the D.C. Guard’s commander, to testify this week that he was not given a final approval to deploy until after 5 p.m. on that awful day.)

The sad truth, though, as the conversation with Milley makes clear, is that, as we wait for investigators to definitively establish what the Pentagon did or did not do on the afternoon of January 6th, the troops controlled by America’s civilian leaders were not ready in advance—a state of affairs that could have allowed them to actually stop the storming of the Capitol.

And, for that, it’s hard not to blame Trump and his monthslong toxic attack on the institutions of democracy, including the sanctity of a principle that Milley holds dear: an independent, “apolitical military,” with officers who swear an oath to the Constitution, not to a man. The oath, not incidentally, also pledges officers to combat enemies “foreign and domestic,” and it’s the latter problem, I fear, that poses a challenge for which the U.S military—built to reckon with Vladimir Putin but not Donald Trump—is ill prepared.

We really don’t want them to be involved in any of that. The fact that we’re even talking about it is disturbing.

The real question, for Milley or any of the others at the Pentagon, is whether or not they were doing the bidding of the Commander in Chief during the insurrection. Dana Milbank’s column yesterday laid out the inquiry:

The man ultimately responsible for the delay, Christopher Miller, had been a White House aide before Donald Trump installed him as acting defense secretary in November, as the president began his attempt to overturn his election defeat. Miller did Trump’s political bidding at another point during his 10-week tenure, forcing the National Security Agency to install a Republican political operative as chief counsel.

Also involved in the Pentagon delay was Lt. Gen. Charles Flynn, brother of disgraced former Trump adviser Michael Flynn, convicted (and pardoned) for lying to the FBI. Michael Flynn had suggested Trump declare martial law, and he helped to rile Trump supporters in Washington the day before the Capitol attack. The Pentagon had falsely denied to Post journalists that Charles Flynn was involved in the pivotal call on Jan. 6.AD

Representing the Pentagon on Wednesday fell to Robert Salesses, who haplessly tried to explain the delay. An hour and six minutes of the holdup was because then-Army Secretary Ryan McCarthy “was asking a lot of questions” about the mission. Another piece of the delay: The 36 minutes between when the Pentagon claims Miller authorized the action and when the D.C. Guard was informed of the decision. “That’s an issue,” Salesses allowed.

Curiously, the Pentagon claims Miller’s authorization came at 4:32 — 15 minutes after Trump told his “very special” insurrectionists to “go home in peace.” Was Miller waiting for Trump’s blessing before defending the Capitol?

The Pentagon’s 199-minute delay looks worse in light of a Jan. 4 memo Miller issued saying that without his “personal authorization” the D.C. Guard couldn’t “be issued weapons, ammunition, bayonets, batons or ballistic protection equipment such as helmets and body armor.”

The Army secretary added more restrictions the next day, saying in a memo that he would “withhold authority” for the D.C. Guard to deploy a “quick reaction force” and that he would “require a concept of operation” before allowing a quick reaction force to react. McCarthy even blocked the D.C. Guard in advance from redeploying to the Capitol guardsmen assigned to help the D.C. police elsewhere in Washington.

Without such restrictions, Walker, the D.C. Guard commander, could have dispatched nearly 200 guardsmen soon after the Capitol Police mayday call. “That number could have made a difference,” Walker testified.

Sen. Rob Portman, an Ohio Republican, was incredulous. “There are three unarmed national guardsmen who are helping with traffic control … and they were not permitted to move a block away without getting permission from the secretary of the Army?”AD

“That’s correct,” Walker replied.

Miller “required the personal approval of the secretary of defense for the National Guard to be issued riot gear?” Portman asked.

“That’s correct,” Walker replied. “Normally for a safety and force-protection matter, a commander would be able to authorize his guardsmen to protect themselves.”

But this was not normal. The Pentagon claims the restrictions were in response to criticism of the heavy-handed deployment of the National Guard in Washington during racial justice protests last summer. Maybe so. But Walker testified that when the police chiefs “passionately pleaded” for the Guard’s help on Jan. 6, senior Army officials on the call said it wouldn’t be “a good optic.” They thought “it could incite the crowd” and advised against it.

During this moment of crisis — an attempted coup in the Capitol — the defense secretary and the Army secretary were “not available,” Walker testified.

The nation deserves to know why.

I don’t know the status of the Commission that Speaker Pelosi has in mind. The last I heard they were squabbling over how many Democrats and Republicans would be on it and it seemed obvious that since most Republicans are Trump acolytes there would be little point since they would sabotage the proceeding.

Democrats often do that, and I have a sneaking suspicion they will do it again before too long. But this time it’s the Republicans who have dusted off their playbook from the last administration and it’s likely that it’s going to be lazy and ineffectual:

Dan Pfeiffer’s newsletter this week takes on that subject. His recounting of what happened in 2009 is especially interesting since he was on the inside:

Earlier this week, Senator John Thune, Mitch McConnell’s deputy, predicted that every Republican Senator would vote against the Biden plan. Thune’s reasoning was typically cynical. He said the Republicans wanted to “make the Democrats own a piece of legislation that I think is going to have long-term adverse consequences.”

This was the latest example of Republicans saying the quiet part out loud. Thune is admitting they are making a bet that the Biden plan won’t work, and Republicans can reap the political rewards of a sub-standard economy in 2022. This is the same bet the Republicans made in 2009 when they decided to oppose Barack Obama’s efforts to address the financial crisis.

Politically, the 2009 bet paid off. The Republicans rode a wave of economic discontent to control of the House and a massive set of wins down-ballot that would impact politics for more than a decade. But just because it worked then doesn’t mean it will work now. The Republicans may be making a massive miscalculation by re-fighting the last war.

What happened in 2009:

If Republicans fighting tooth and nail to stop a Democratic President from cleaning up a mess made by a Republican President sounds familiar, it probably means you are old enough to have been around in 2009. As the Washington Post recounted1:

On inauguration night four years ago, pollster Frank Luntz organized a strategy session for leading Republicans at the Caucus Room, a steakhouse in downtown D.C. The widely reported dinner has become the creation myth of the Obama opposition, in which Luntz, former speaker Newt Gingrich, Reps. Eric Cantor (Va.), Paul Ryan (Wis.) and other leading Republican lawmakers from both chambers plotted how to confront the president. The Republicans giddily came away from the four-hour dinner with a plan to weaken Obama through blanket opposition.

The first test of this strategy was the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) — Obama’s first bill to address the spiraling financial crisis that was causing the economy to spiral and unemployment to spike. While the parties have always clashed, they have historically put those differences aside during times of national crisis. The Great Recession was one of those national crises. But this time, there was no unity. Every member of the House voted against the bill. All but three Senate Republicans did the same — and one of those three was under such assault by the GOP base that he became a Democrat a few months later.

The nearly unanimous opposition allowed the Republicans to sit back, watch the world burn, and win some elections. That is very clearly their plan again, but the circumstances and politics are very different this time around.

Biden’s bill is more popular

We live in the middle of an era of tremendous polarization, yet Joe Biden’s American Rescue Plan is shockingly popular. It’s one of the most popular, least polarizing pieces of legislation in recent memory. According to a recent Politico/Morning Consultpoll, 76 percent of voters support Biden’s plan, including a majority of Republicans.

It’s worth noting that most polls show that 70 percent or so of Republicans believe Joe Biden is an illegitimate president. Therefore, a large segment of people who think Biden stole the election also supports his COVID and economic recovery plans.

Obama’s Recovery Act was never this popular. A January 2009 Gallup poll found that the public favored Obama’s plan 52 percent to 38 percent.

These are good numbers but nowhere near the sky-high popularity of the Biden plan. At the time of this poll, Obama’s approval rating was hovering around 70 percent. Biden’s plan is more popular than he is — Biden’s job approval is 52.8 per FiveThirtyEight. That disparity is evidence of Biden’s COVID plan’s political durability — and the dangerous game Republicans are playing by opposing it. People who don’t like Biden but like his plan are the exact people who the Republicans need to win over to take back Congress.

Biden’s plan is more likely to work, more quickly

The mess that President Biden inherited from Trump is much worse than the one Obama inherited from Bush. However, the solution is more simple, and a quick turnaround is much, much more likely.

[…] The cause of the current economic difficulties is singular. The solution is simple — in conception, if not execution — vaccinate as many people soon as possible. The combination of vaccinations and economic aid is highly likely to make the Biden plan’s success widely felt when people start voting in 2022. Even the notoriously pessimistic Congressional Budget Office is optimistic. According to CNBC:

U.S. economic growth will recover “rapidly” and the labor market will return to full strength quicker than expected thanks to the vaccine rollout and a barrage of legislation enacted in 2020, according to a government forecast published Monday.

Notably, this rosy prediction does not factor in the passage of the American Rescue plan. It is reasonable to project that if everything goes as planned, the economy could look very good in November 2022.

Imagine the collective euphoria we will all feel when we can gather together again. Simple acts like attending a concert or a ballgame will be cause for celebration. Republicans are deciding to take no ownership of that success — a decision they could very much regret.

Republicans will only pay a political price for their blanket opposition if voters remember. And voters will only remember if we remind them. While every news outlet in the country ran a story about the House passage of the bill, it happened in the early hours of a Saturday morning — the single worst time to make news. The bill’s limited coverage — and the GOP opposition — was quickly overwhelmed by Trump’s speech at CPAC and a bunch of trumped-up controversies about absurd issues like a potato-shaped toy and Dr. Seuss. Democratic campaigns will need to start advertising quickly to drill home that Republicans are on the wrong side of this very popular and important plan. At every juncture, all of us need to remind our networks that Republicans deserve no credit for the success we very much hope is around the corner.

After passage of the Recovery Act in 2009, Republicans responded to every piece of economic news by screaming, “Where are the jobs?” at the top of their lungs. Democrats should respond to every piece of good vaccine and economic news by screaming at Republicans, “Where were you?”

Two years is an eternity in politics, and a lot can happen, but as we sit here today, it seems that the bet Republicans are making is much riskier than the one they made in 2009.

I agree. The Republicans are clearly planning to run on culture war nonsense for the foreseeable future because that’s the red meat their followers have now been indoctrinated to crave.

And they are out of ideas. Their ideology is stale and they are into a new, untried right wing populist nationalism that isn’t fully fleshed out. Without the demagogue in chief blindly signing off on judges and tax cuts while feeding the base what it demands, they are all at sixes and sevens.

Maybe this will work again. If things go wrong, they’ll certainly try to take advantage. But if things go right, I think they’ll just keep shrieking like harpies over the Dr. Seuss and Mr Potatohead outrage of the day while everyone else is out and about, enjoying life and thanking the Democrats for ending the pandemic — and the previous five years of hell under Donald Trump.

Here’s an example of some blatant racism in the UK :

Andrew Pierce, a senior editor at the Daily Mail who is a regular guest on British TV and radio shows, was hosting a talk radio show Wednesday when a caller suggested that Meghan had never been “fully accepted because of her skin color.”

Pierce, who is white, responded, “Oh God, that one again! Do you look at her… and see a Black woman? Because I don’t. I see a very attractive, a very attractive woman. It’s never occurred to me. I never look at her and think, ‘Gosh she’s Black!’ in the way you look at Oprah Winfrey, you would be in no doubt. When they sit down and do that interview, you will see a Black woman called Oprah Winfrey and you will see a woman who describes [herself] as a woman of color. Her mother is Black, she’s from a mixed-race family of course. But I just don’t think people look at Meghan and think, ‘Oh I hate her, because of her skin color.’ I don’t see it. I don’t buy it.”

I have heard exactly this sort of thing among my right wing relatives for years. They truly can’t see the racist assumptions in such a comment and when it’s pointed out they get very, very angry.

Older, white, liberal, people of good will are looking at many of our assumptions these days and discovering all kinds of blind spots, micro-aggressive behavior and structural forms of racism that we need to recognize, confront and change. I am more than willing to recognize my own failings in all these areas and will strive to continue the work of dealing with them.

But never in my life would I have made a comment like that younger, white, British man made about a biracial woman. That sort of thinking was just never in my head and I rebelled against it even when I was a child back in the dark ages. It’s shocking, frankly, in this day and age to see such a crude, oblivious racist statement from a journalist.

Good to see the paper bag test is alive and well in British media.

Christ, this is awful stuff. https://t.co/bhyP9tGS5q

— Ash Sarkar (@AyoCaesar) March 3, 2021

It’s Inauguration Day on the QAnon calendar, David Neiwert explains, “because March 4, according to the alternative universe occupied by far-right conspiracy theorists, is the official Inauguration Day for the real winner [blink blink] of the 2020 presidential election: Donald J. Trump.”

Yes, there’s more:

Capitol Police had issued a simple and clear warning: “We have obtained intelligence that shows a possible plot to breach the Capitol by an identified militia group on Thursday, March 4,” adding: “We are taking the intelligence seriously.” So the House wrapped up all of its Thursday business on Wednesday, canceling today’s session and leaving Congress vacant for the day.

The FBI and Department of Homeland Security issued a separate bulletin about an “unidentified group of [militia violent extremists]” who “discussed plans to take control of the US Capitol and remove Democratic lawmakers” on Thursday.

“Online chatter identified by authorities included discussions among members of the Three Percenters, an anti-government militia group, concerning possible plots against the Capitol on Thursday,” reports Michael Balsamo of the Associated Press.

ICYMI, The Sacramento Bee explains why the 19th president will be inaugurated today, March 4th:

The date is based on the original Inauguration Day for U.S. presidents. Before 1933, when the 20th Amendment was ratified, presidents were sworn into office on March 4 — with Franklin D. Roosevelt the first president to be sworn into office in January.

Feeld told CNN the March 4 conspiracy stems from a “sovereign citizen belief.”

“Certain QAnon followers have borrowed whole cloth from the belief that the last legitimate president was the 18th president, so this goes back to 1871, and this is the belief that Trump will be actually inaugurated as our 19th president,” he said. “Now of course this is illogical since he was the 45th.”

He said some QAnon followers also believe that no constitutional amendment after the 16th is “valid” and that there has been “no country known as the United States since ever since it was unstuck from the gold standard.”

“So they essentially believe that Ulysses S. Grant was the last valid American president.”

Can’t commit acts of sedition against a country that doesn’t exist, I guess, but then why get upset about the outcome of its last election? As for “the last valid American president,” Republicans running the gift shop at the Reagan Library will not be amused.

Meantime, Congress gets a holiday.

The U.S. House Wednesday night passed H.R. 1, the “For the People Act,” an omnibus voting rights, ethics and campaign finance bill. The legislation would set national standards for federal elections, require nonpartisan redistricting, and put the brakes on hundreds of bills introduced by Republican legislatures across the country to limit ballot access in the wake of Democrats gaining control of Congress and the White House.

If signed into law by President Joe Biden, the “For the People Act” would require states to use independent redistricting commissions for drawing congressional districts, but not until after the 2030 census. Among other features it would, the New York Times reports, “impose new national requirements weakening restrictive state voter ID laws, mandate automatic voter registration, expand early and mail-in voting, make it harder to purge voter rolls and restore voting rights to former felons — changes that studies suggest would increase voter participation, especially by racial minorities.”

The bill passed 220-210, with two Republicans not voting. One Democrat, Rep. Bennie G. Thompson of Mississippi, voted against the bill and expressed concern that independent redistricting might eliminate some majority-minority districts in red states.

Nicholas Fandos writes in the Times:

The prominence of the debate demonstrated the immense stakes of the fight over election laws, both for how Americans exercise their right to vote and how both parties aggregate political power. While Congress has worked for decades to expand access to the ballot, often with bipartisan support, the issue has become a sharply partisan one in recent years, as shifting demographics and political coalitions have led Republicans to conclude that they benefit from lower voter participation rates, particularly around cities.

“You can win on the basis of your ideas and the programs you put forward, which is what we choose to do,” said Representative John Sarbanes, Democrat of Maryland and a leading author of the bill. “Or you can try to win by suppressing the vote, drawing unfair districts across the country and using big money to spread disinformation.”

Vote suppression is by now the Republican default position. The party’s radicalization ratchet operates in one direction only. Mask-wearing seen as apostacy among the party’s base, Republicans are dropping the masks that once concealed the party’s authoritarian core while publicly feigning commitment to republican government and democratic principles. Unwilling to adopt ideas with appeal to a majority of Americans, the party has gone over to the dark side. The only election reform Republicans will unanimously accept is one that declares its candidates the winners no matter the election results. The wolf has cast aside the sheep’s clothing.

All of which makes Democrats’ passage of H.R. 1 and the John R. Lewis Voting Rights Act pivotal to both party and national survival. As Ron Brownstein wrote Wednesday in The Atlantic:

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.

But passage will require moderate Democrats in the Senate to accept the obsolescence of the Jim Crow-era filibuster and to vote to eliminate it. Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) gave her most definitive statement to date on favoring its retirement in an interview with Ari Berman of Mother Jones:

“We have a raw exercise of political power going on where people are making it harder to vote and you just can’t let that happen in a democracy because of some old rules in the Senate,” she says.

Moderate Democrats Sens. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) and Kyrsten Sinema (D-Ariz.) need to wake up and smell the antidemocratic bad faith perfusing the Republican party that once embraced Lincoln and Eisenhower. Those old rules no longer apply. The Republican Party is no longer republican. The Trump insurrection of Jan. 6 should have been enough to shatter any illusions, but some even higher up the ladder may be slow learners too, Brownstein found:

… several activists and scholars who support the election-reform bills told me they fear that neither the Biden administration nor Senate Democrats are sufficiently worried about the threat to small-d democracy coalescing in the red states. They are especially dumbfounded that Manchin and Sinema—and maybe others—would protect the filibuster on the grounds of encouraging bipartisan cooperation when Senate Republicans would be using it to shield red-state actions meant to entrench GOP control. “What’s the point of being a Democrat if you are just going to let Republicans systematically tilt the playing field so that Democrats can’t win?” Lee Drutman, a senior fellow at the centrist think tank New America, told me. “At that point, you should just be a Republican.”

With over half a million Americans dead of COVID-19, a year of school irretrievably lost to the nation’s students, a year of isolation and economic loss for the rest of us, plus the near-catastrophic violent insurrection that began the year, Americans living through the 2020s were born under a bad sign. Democratic moderates must recognize what allegiance the Republican Party holds for our constitutional republic is near-vestigial. If it wasn’t for bad faith, they wouldn’t have no faith at all.

Act accordingly. Now.

Who was it who spent months giving speeches saying if this or that happened “you’re not going to have a country”? That guy?

Maybe Senate Democrats and the White House should pay attention to that warning. It was a declaration of purpose.

For the past few days, musicians everywhere have had a blast harmonizing a remarkable* rendition of the National Anthem that this woman sung at CPAC. This is, imo, the best, from a quartet of Canadian singers.

*”remarkable” is a euphemism.

Some more officials testified before the Senate today about January 6th. This one actually produced some news. It appears that the National Guard was all suited up and ready to go but the Pentagon didn’t give the go-ahead for three hours after the request was made. Huh.

Here are five takeaways  from the hearing.

DC National Guard chief said his hands were tied

D.C. National Guard Commander Maj. Gen. William Walker dropped a bombshell before the hearing with a simple claim: three hours elapsed from when he first notified superiors that the National Guard was ready and from when he received authorization to deploy. 

It was a stunning claim, and one that teed up dozens of questions from senators during the hearing. 

Throughout, however, Walker returned to a central theme: unprecedented new restrictions that the Pentagon placed on his ability to react prevented him from responding to the calamity unfolding at the Capitol. 

Walker told senators that the secretary of the Army required him to seek authorization for any mobilization or movement of his forces on Jan. 6, an unprecedented requirement in his view. 

The D.C. commander added that he hadn’t seen requirements like those imposed on him for the Jan. 6 response in 19 years of service. He went on to say that, if not for the red tape, he would have “pulled all the guardsmen that were supporting the Metropolitan Police Department” and sent them to the Capitol immediately. 

Walker added that authorization itself wasn’t necessarily the problem. The chain of command can act quickly, so long as it recognizes a threat. 

“It’s an elaborate process, but it doesn’t always have to be when in extrem[e] circumstances,” Walker said. “We can get it done over the phone very, very quickly.”

Intel community: We can neither confirm not deny that there was an intelligence failure

As focused as the event was on the military response, senators entered the hearing with a focus on the intelligence failures that led to the insurrection as well.

But the two intelligence officials there — DHS Intelligence and Analysis Acting Chief Melissa Smislova and FBI Counterterrorism Chief Jill Sanborn — refused to give an inch on whether their offices bore any responsibility.

Neither of these officials were speaking in a vacuum. Last week, officials directly responsible for ensuring the security of the Capitol building complained that there were virtually no warnings from either intelligence officials or federal law enforcement in advance of the insurrection attempt.

But Smislova began the hearing with a straightforward denial that her office, charged with coordinating intelligence on domestic extremism, had done anything wrong.

“Before I summarize the actions my office took on Jan. 6, I am deeply concerned that despite our best efforts, they did not lead to an operational response to prepare to defend the U.S. Capitol.”

Sanborn, for her part, retreated to a different explanation for how the bureau missed planning for the insurrection, given that much of it took place in public forums online.

She said that the bureau needs the predicate of a criminal investigation in order to view even public posts. Without that, she argued, the FBI’s hands were tied.

Officials missed the broader threat of right wing terrorism in the United States

Those who found these explanations profoundly unsatisfying can count Intelligence Committee Chairman Sen. Mark Warner (D-VA) among them.

Warner noted that the missteps which led to Jan. 6 stand in for a broader problem in the intelligence community and federal law enforcement: the failure to reckon with the scale of the threat posed by far-right extremism.

Warner told Sanborn and Smislova that he was “pretty disappointed” in their responses, and added that “this is not a new threat.”

He tapped into a real trend in the hearing: officials consistently fell back on claiming that right-wing extremism constituted some kind of new, unprecedented threat. In reality, it’s been killing Americans for decades.

“We can’t always say we’re going to do better next time when it’s been around for years,” Warner said. He added that “it’s not going to disappear with Donald Trump, even though there’s never been someone so active in encouraging these individuals.”

Witnesses defended disparate responses to BLM protests and insurrection

Lawmakers pressed the officials on the stark contrast between the iron-fisted crackdown on the Black Lives Matter protests in the District last summer, when law enforcement fired pepper spray and rubber bullets at demonstrators while dressed head to toe in riot gear, and the feeble response to the Capitol siege.

Walker testified that senior officials were wary of receiving the same blowback over their militaristic response to the BLM protests, hence the worry over the “optics.” They were also allegedly concerned that the presence of uniformed guards during the Trump rally that preceded the insurrection would “incite” the attendees.

The National Guard commander did note that, unlike during the BLM protests, Army Secretary Ryan McCarthy wasn’t with him on Jan. 6. In contrast, McCarthy was “right next to me for days at a time” during the demonstrations last summer, Walker said.

Walker told senators that he didn’t know why McCarthy was absent on the day of the insurrection.

When Sanborn, the assistant director at the FBI Counterterrorism Division, was asked why the FBI had deployed its state-of-the-art surveillance plane to swoop over the BLM protests without doing the same on January 6, she said she didn’t “have any specifics” on the plane. However, Sanborn insisted that her agency’s approach to both gatherings was “equal opportunity.”

Was it about optics or not?

Walker told lawmakers that Army Lieutenant General Walter Piatt and Army Commanding General John Phillips expressed concern over the “optics” of deploying uniformed guards to the Capitol when he requested their approval to send his troops.

But then senior Defense official Robert Salesses, who wasn’t on the call with Walker and the senior Army leaders, said Piatt told him yesterday that he “didn’t say anything about optics” during that conversation. When Senate Rules Chair Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) pressed him on whether he was saying Walker’s account was false, Salesses clarified that the commanding general was claiming he did not use the word “optics.”

Walker stood by his testimony.

“There were people in the room with me on that call that heard what they heard,” the D.C. National Guard leader told the senators.

I have been sympathetic to the idea that the military might have been gunshy about deploying before the insurrection after what happened last June during the George Floyd protests. But once it started, it’s very hard to imagine how anyone could think it made sense to just let the cops get beaten and allow the mob to sack the Capitol because it might look bad if they showed up. In fact, it makes no sense at all.

I suspect that there was involvement from the White House and I think we know what they would have said if the National Guard wanted permission to intervene. There’s no proof of that but the mere fact that Michel Flynn’s brother was involved is suspicious.

The bad “optics” would have been the fear of upsetting some white extremists who support Donald Trump. In fact, Walker said Flynn explicitly said they were afraid of inflaming the “protesters” if there was a military presence. Why? That’s crazy.