Sixty-five percent of registered voters said they strongly or somewhat support funding Biden’s infrastructure plan through 15 years of higher taxes on corporations, while 21 percent somewhat or strongly oppose it.
With Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) already pledging that there will be no GOP support in Congress for increasing corporate tax rates to fund the infrastructure plan, this could be the Biden administration’s second large spending package pushed through reconciliation, a process that allows a simple majority vote.
However, Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) has already drawn a line in the sand on raising the corporate tax rate, telling a West Virginia radio station that 25 percent would be a more appropriate rate.
While the new poll doesn’t mention a specific level of taxation, the concept of raising taxes on corporations to fund Biden’s infrastructure plan is overwhelmingly backed by Democratic voters, with 85 percent support. Just 4 percent of Democrats said they oppose the tax hike.
Republican voters were nearly split: 42 percent back the president’s plan to raise corporate taxes, while 47 percent oppose it. Independents were much more likely to support funding the infrastructure plan through corporate tax hikes (60 percent) than not (21 percent).
When voters were presented with the choice between making improvements to America’s infrastructure funded through increases to the corporate tax or improving infrastructure only if it were done without the tax increases, 53 percent backed the former option.
Biden should have said he wanted to raise it to 31 percent (still lower than it was just five years ago) so that Manchin could flex his muscle by saying he would only accept 28. That’s obviously how to deal with him.
That isn’t really enough. I think they should just raise it back up to 35%. That’s still very low by historical standards and business is booming. A large majority of the public is clearly enthusiastic about a big infrastructure investment and it is fine with taxing corporations. Now is the time. Biden has to find a way to deal with Emperor Manchin.
This piece by Joshua Green explains how the Repubicans came to be in this mess:
Like so much else in American politics, the corporate backlash to Republican-led voter-suppression bills in Georgia and Texas is a direct consequence of Donald Trump’s presidency—in this case, the manner in which it ended.
Companies from Coca-Cola Co. to Delta Air Lines Inc. to Microsoft Corp. and dozens of others have condemned a wave of new voting restrictions pushed by Republicans to limit or ban absentee voting, mail voting, drop boxes, and even providing water to people standing in line to cast their ballot.
The sudden blitz of voting restrictions has an unmistakable purpose: A report from the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University Law School found that “the cumulative effect of so many targeted bills will reduce access to the ballot box for Black voters.” By making it harder to vote, Republican lawmakers are responding to Trump’s false claim that he lost the presidential election due to minority voter fraud, and they’re carrying on Trump’s efforts—this time proactively—to limit votes in minority-heavy areas from being counted.
The Republican attack is blatant enough that it has forced corporate America, under boycott threats from consumers and pressure from Black executives, to respond. “There is no middle ground here,” Kenneth Chenault, the Black former chief executive officer of American Express Co., told the New York Times. “You either are for more people voting, or you want to suppress the vote.”
That stark binary choice led Major League Baseball to announce it was moving July’s All-Star Game from Atlanta to Denver, with Commissioner Rob Manfred stating, “Major League Baseball fundamentally supports voting rights for all Americans and opposes restrictions to the ballot box.” Delta CEO Ed Bastian, whose company is based in Atlanta, blasted Georgia’s restrictions as “based on a lie” and designed to “make it harder for many Georgians, particularly those in our Black and Brown communities, to exercise their right to vote.” Fort Worth-based American Airlines Group Inc. issued a statement criticizing a Texas bill with similar curbs on voting access that just cleared the state’s senate: “At American, we believe we should break down barriers to diversity, equity and inclusion in our society—not create them.”
Rather than try to assuage its corporate donors, Republicans have threatened companies by vowing to impose punitive taxes in retaliation for the criticism. “Corporations will invite serious consequences if they become a vehicle for far-left mobs to hijack our country from outside the constitutional order,” Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell warned on April 5. “Our private sector must stop taking cues from the Outrage-Industrial Complex.” Republicans in the Georgia House of Representatives attempted to punish Delta by voting to end a $35 million tax break for jet fuel; the state senate adjourned on April 1 without taking up the bill.
This latest blowup between Republicans and big business could be a harbinger of something that until recently was all but unthinkable: a divorce between the GOP and corporate America. Such a split already appears to be under way in Georgia, where Republican House Speaker David Ralston justified his caucus’s effort to punish Delta, one of his state’s largest employers, by saying, “You don’t feed a dog that bites your hand.”
In the past, corporations worked hard to avoid being dragged into political disputes for fear of drawing a partisan backlash. But Trump’s racially divisive presidency made a stance of corporate neutrality all but impossible. His frequent attacks on Blacks and Latinos and use of racist tropes forced corporations to take sides or endure brand-destroying boycotts and social media campaigns for not speaking out. Last summer’s racial justice protests following George Floyd’s death showed that public expectations for expressions of companies’ moral values now extend beyond just controversies created by Trump.
Although Trump dragged corporate America into the political arena, his presidency showed that companies may not have as much to fear from taking public positions on cultural and policy issues as they once imagined—especially not those involving race.
Nike Inc.’s decision to feature Colin Kaepernick in an ad campaign, after Trump criticized the former National Football League quarterback for kneeling to protest police violence, outraged many Republicans. But a conservative boycott campaign did nothing to hurt Nike’s bottom line, despite Trump’s claim that the company was “getting absolutely killed with anger and boycotts.” Since debuting the Kaepernick ad in September 2018, Nike’s stock price has almost doubled.
Car rental companies including Avis Budget Group Inc., Hertz Global Holdings Inc., and Enterprise Rent-a-Car Co. faced boycotts from pro-Trump Republicans after ending discounts for members of the National Rifle Association following the gun massacre at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla., in 2018. That pressure campaign soon fizzled out.
In the wake of the Jan. 6 Capitol insurrection, dozens of companies including Marriott International Inc., AT&T Inc., and Airbnb Inc. halted contributions from their political action committees to the 147 Republican politicians who refused to certify the presidential election results. None faced meaningful blowback. Neither have the organizations that severed ties to Trump’s personal business, including PGA of America and Shopify Inc.
That’s a big reason why Trump’s latest call to boycott MLB, Coke, and Delta over their reaction to the new voter-suppression push rings so hollow and hasn’t prevented dozens of companies from speaking out. Even as Texas Governor Greg Abbott fell in line with Trump’s edict and protested MLB’s action by refusing to throw out the first pitch at the Texas Rangers’ home opener on April 5, the game itself was a sellout.
But an even bigger reason is that the interests of corporate America and the Republican Party began to diverge under Trump’s racialized style of politics. The GOP has sacrificed its traditional pro-business suburban supporters to become ever more reliant on a shrinking pool of older White voters. Its grip on power depends on limiting the votes of people who fall outside that category, including young people and minorities. Georgia is an object lesson in the limits of this approach—Joe Biden won the state and Democrats carried both U.S. Senate seats—and also how Republicans intend to overcome it.
In the 1960s, Atlanta lured corporations to relocate there by billing itself as “The City Too Busy to Hate,” a business-friendly paradise of low taxes and weak labor unions. Georgia became reliably red. But today’s Republican message doesn’t hold nearly the same appeal. The consumers that companies covet most and the employees they’re keenest to hire are the same young people and minorities that Trump and other Republicans routinely demonize. The civic dysfunction that Trump ushered in has even altered the adversarial relationship between labor and business. On Election Day, the AFL-CIO and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce released a striking joint statement calling on all Americans to respect the results “of a free and fair election”—a message directed at Trump and his party.
As the current battles in Georgia, Texas, Iowa, and other states show, Republican politicians are loath to do that. But many companies are increasingly leery of this new approach—and more and more willing to speak up and say so.
As the GOP completes its devolution into a strictly white, nationalist party with nothing more on its agenda than opposing the Democratic coalition, it makes sense that its business patrons would back off. The Trump cult isn’t their customer base and anyway, Trumpers have shown they don’t see Trump’s boycotts as MAGA requirements. They have other ways of showing their loyalty to the team — big Trump flags, red hats, violent insurrection. They see no need to give up diet coke and baseball.
Let’s be honest, America has a long history of vote suppression going back to the founding of the republic. It tends to come in waves, usually following one of our regular paroxysms of racist hysteria. In the bad old days of Jim Crow, vote suppression was enforced by physical violence. Thankfully that hasn’t happened in recent years. But our current surge of suppressive activity includes various forms of intimidation, from unscrupulous “poll watchers” to armed guards patrolling voting places as well as lots of propaganda and disinformation to confuse voters and try to frighten them out of voting. The most aggressive forms of vote suppression we face today, however, remain the same as they ever were: The law is still used to make it difficult for people of color to vote.
In the wake of Donald Trump’s Big Lie about the 2020 election, Republicans have gone into overdrive, using his pathetic inability to admit he lost as an excuse to enact voting restrictions in the name of “restoring trust” in the electoral system. The Brennan Center reports that as of March 24, Republican legislators have introduced 361 bills with restrictive provisions in 47 states:
Most restrictive bills take aim at absentee voting, while nearly a quarter seek stricter voter ID requirements. State lawmakers also aim to make voter registration harder, expand voter roll purges or adopt flawed practices that would risk improper purges, and cut back on early voting. The states that have seen the largest number of restrictive bills introduced are Texas (49 bills), Georgia (25 bills), and Arizona (23 bills). Bills are actively moving in the Texas and Arizona statehouses, and Georgia enacted an omnibus voter suppression bill last week.
Georgia and Arizona are both states Trump narrowly lost. Texas Republicans sense an ominous shift in power with the formerly GOP-voting white suburbs voting Democratic for the past few cycles. Georgia’s bill has gotten the most national attention, largely because Trump’s crude attempts to strongarm the Republican election officials into cheating on his behalf became big news. Rather than praising the integrity of their state’s election process, the state Republican-controlled legislature reacted by making it harder to vote.
The resulting decision by major Georgia corporations Delta and Coca-Cola to publicly protest these moves and Major League Baseball moving the All-Star game to Denver shows the highly controversial nature of the state’s actions. It’s 2021 not 1921, and a majority of the public does not approve of these actions. If corporations care about their brand and their bottom line they can’t afford to not weigh in. These undemocratic, racist policies are being enacted after 60 years of public awareness of voting rights as a moral issue in the wake of the Civil Rights Movement and a majority of the country is appalled.
This seems to have confused the Republican party. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., the man who believes so strongly that corporations have a right to spend as much money as they choose to influence politics he took a case all the way to the Supreme Court, said on Monday, “my warning to corporate America is to stay out of politics!” He quickly added, “I’m not talking about political contributions,” which is absurd. Basically, he is saying that corporations may support Republicans but not oppose them.
What this illustrates most vividly is not just the collapse of any ideological consistency in the Republican party — we’ve had plenty of examples of that recently — but also that their shamelessness knows no bounds. The power of that attitude is likely going to empower the GOP in ways that will test our democracy beyond the familiar vote suppression methods like intimidation.
The New York Times’ Nate Cohn wrote a controversial analysis of the Georgia voting law that seemed to give short shrift to the immorality and total unacceptability of its attack on voting rights because it may have the unintended effect of boosting turnout among Democrats as a backlash ensues. It was a thoughtless take in many ways, suggesting somehow that the opportunity costs of voting rights groups having to expend massive amounts of energy and Black voters having to jump through ridiculous hoops, particularly based upon the lie that they are cheaters who must be restrained, was good for them. Voting should be simple, easy and accessible for every eligible citizen. All of these restrictions are nothing more than undemocratic, racist attempts by Republicans to hold on to power, even in the minority, by any means necessary. So Cohn wrote a follow-up analysis that makes a number of very important observations about the Republican efforts to hold on to power. In it he wonders what would have happened if Donald Trump had been successful in his attempt to get Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to “find” the 11,789 voted he “needed”? We don’t know. But we do know that Georgia has moved to make it more likely that someone will succeed in the future:
[T]rying to reverse an election result without credible evidence of widespread fraud is an act of a different magnitude than narrowing access. A successful effort to subvert an election would pose grave and fundamental risks to democracy, risking political violence and secessionism.
Beyond any provisions on voting itself, the new Georgia election law risks making election subversion easier. It creates new avenues for partisan interference in election administration.
Cohn goes into the details of the bill, showing exactly how it might have been used to overturn the 2020 election on Trump’s behalf. It’s chilling. And it’s happening all over the country, not just in Georgia. He recalls that after the November election, “a majority of Republican members of Congress and state attorneys general signed on to efforts that would have invalidated millions of votes and brought about a constitutional crisis.”
As we know, Trump had it in his head on January 6th that the vice president could refuse to certify the election and “send it back” to the state legislatures because someone told him they might overturn the results. That belief didn’t come out of nowhere. The concept that state legislatures have supremacy over the state courts and other officials is one that’s gaining currency on the right since they have managed to gerrymander themselves into majorities in many states. In places like Wisconsin if a Democrat wins the governorship they simply pass veto-proof laws that remove the governor’s powers to do much of anything, In Kentucky last month, Mitch McConnell worked with the Republican-controlled legislature to remove the power of the sitting Democratic governor to name a temporary replacement to the Senate should the seat become vacant. It too was passed over the governor’s veto.
This behavior demonstrates that they would not have any reluctance to use their power to overturn elections either. They are quite clearly setting the table to enact an “Independent State Legislature Doctrine” that would make that much more possible. Election expert Richard Hasen calls this “a ticking time bomb.”
Unfortunately, as Nate Cohn points out, the big voting rights bills in Congress don’t address this problem at all. The “For the People Act” was conceived before the 2020 election debacle and I don’t think anyone anticipated Republicans’ actions would be quite this extreme. The Democrats need to consider how to deal with it or all the provisions to protect voting won’t be worth anything if partisan state legislatures have the power to throw out their votes after they’ve been counted.
Looks like alumni of the most corrupt and incompetent and anti-American presidential administration to date are having trouble finding work. Bummer:
Before she joined the Trump administration as transportation secretary, Elaine Chao earned millions of dollars over the past decade by serving on the boards of big public companies such as Dole Foods, Protective Life and Wells Fargo, according to corporate filings.
She offered sterling credentials to businesses eager to keep current with the Republican leadership: A former banking executive, she became the first Asian American woman to serve in a Cabinet when President George W. Bush tapped her to serve as labor secretary. She has been a regular at conservative think tanks including the Heritage Foundation and the Hudson Institute. Her husband is Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.).
But now Chao is encountering a fraught reentry into the private sector.
Headhunters who have sought similarly prominent work for Chao have found little interest, according to two headhunters she’s consulted personally…
While the small numbers make comparisons difficult, corporations don’t seem to have an immediate interest in other top Trump administration alums either. Roughly half of the S&P 500 companies have filed their 2021 investor disclosure reports, listing a total of 108 new or prospective board members, according to data from Insightia, which provides information to shareholders. No Trump Cabinet officials who served in the final quarter of his term are among those nominated.
Very sad. But memories are short. And it is only a matter of time before each and every one of these Trump-enablers, even the worst of them, will find eventually find work.
Homeland Security Today, the nation’s leading news and analysis site for homeland security, today announced that Kirstjen Nielsen, former Secretary of Homeland Security, has joined the editorial board.
It’s not yet clear exactly what role Nielsen played in creating and implementing the set of policies that led the administration to separate more than 2,700 children from their parents. But while other departments (including the Department of Justice and the Department of Health and Human Services) played a part, the task of defending family separation at hearings and press conferences frequently fell to Nielsen, making her the public face of the policy…
April 23rd, 2018: This is the date the government notes at the top of the “smoking gun” memo obtained through Freedom of Information Act requests by watchdog organizations. In the memo, the heads of ICE and CBP offered Nielsen three options for implementing zero tolerance. Nielsen signed off on the option they suggested, which, in effect, made it possible for the DHS to “permissibly direct the separation of parents or legal guardians and minors held in immigration detention so that the parent or legal guardian can be prosecuted.”
TVA Hiwassee Dam and Reservoir, Cherokee County, NC.
Getting the neighborhood’s first flush toilet was cause to celebrate with an open-house. A friend shared that family story on a Zoom call just yesterday. The western mountains of North Carolina and plenty of other rural areas across the southeast were without power and water infrastructure until the Tennessee Valley Authority began building it as part of FDR’s New Deal ninety years ago.
Power and water are not roads and bridges. They are even more vital. But the New Deal built roads and bridges, too, and more. David B. Woolner writes at The Washington Post: “the Works Progress Administration (WPA), employed approximately 8.5 million people and built nearly 600,000 miles of rural roads, 67,000 miles of urban streets, 122,000 bridges, 1,000 tunnels, 1,050 airfields and 4,000 airport buildings.”
Here in WNC, the Blue Ridge Parkway (part of the National Parks system) begun in the last century remains an economic engine for the region in this one.
FDR’s team took a broad-minded approach to defining infrastructure:
To improve the nation’s water supply, for example, the WPA built water and sewage treatment plants and miles of sewer lines and storm drains. To help bolster the nation’s education system and enhance public safety, WPA workers also built thousands of schools, hospitals and firehouses, along with nearly 20,000 other state, county and local government buildings.
FDR saw a need. He filled it.
By 1940, about 40 percent of all American farms had electricity, and by the end of the 1940s, 9 in 10 farms had electricity, a complete reversal of what had existed at Roosevelt’s inauguration.
"I even heard some Republicans oddly suggesting that water pipes, wastewater pipes aren't infrastructure," Sec. Buttigieg says. "I don't really care which label you apply to which part of the plan. Every part of the plan is popular and good." https://t.co/e5Na5qsXkR
The Biden administration sees similar issues plaguing the country now, especially access to reliable high-speed Internet — 35 percent of rural America does without. Ask my neighbors farther west. Now matter how scenic, it’s tough to attract businesses and jobs to areas lacking broadband.
Improviing “the quality of life for their fellow citizens” under the New Deal had an additional benefit, Woolner explains, one especially pertinent nearly a century after FDR:
In doing so, they helped counter the argument, so prevalent in the 1930s, that the best way to overcome economic hardship was to turn to fascism and autocracy. Today, anti-democratic ideas have again found appeal as the United States endures a festering of long-standing problems — including a lack of technical infrastructure, problems with education that keep Americans from getting good jobs, and the dangers of climate change. Roosevelt’s broad definition of infrastructure — and the positive impact that such an understanding had in a similar moment, both short- and long-term — is an endorsement for Biden to take a similar approach. If anything, Biden should be even bolder in ensuring that the fruits of these projects benefit all Americans.
As Roosevelt demonstrated, the infrastructure of a nation is much more than paved roads or physical structures. It includes the social and economic well-being of its people and the building of a society that provides a clean environment and equal opportunity for all.
Our conservative faction that reminds us there is no free lunch, yet has skated by and gotten rich on infrastructure they got, essentially, for free. Their parents and grandparents bequeathed it to them. Now they dislike the idea of making these kinds of investments after decades of neglect from which they benefitted.
“I even heard some Republicans oddly suggesting that water pipes, wastewater pipes aren’t infrastructure,” Sec. Buttigieg says. “I don’t really care which label you apply to which part of the plan. Every part of the plan is popular and good.”
The Biden plan is popular. Successful politicians are in the popularity business.
Republicans are determined to change their business model to one that runs on unpopularity.
“This is Intellectual History 101,” Calvin TerBeek tells Slate’s Mark Joseph Stern. TerBeek is a University of Chicago Ph.D. candidate whose article in the American Political Science Review argues that the Republican Party’s adoption of constitutional originalism arose not from scholarly roots but as backlash to the Supreme Court’s 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision. What constitutes originalism today would be unrecognizable by legal theorists who came before Brown. Nonetheless, originalism claims roots in that old-time Constitution.
TerBeek’s work draws on “14 archival collections, thousands of newspapers and magazines, and interviews with key players,” Stern writes, and undercuts notions that originalism arose from “original intent” ideas expressed in Barry Goldwater’s 1960 book, “The Conscience of a Conservative,” or a decade later with a 1971 article by Yale Law professor Robert Bork. So where did originalism come from?
A hell of a lot more abstract
Early conservative arguments for assaulting Brown suffered from being too “obviously rooted in antebellum Southern slavery,” TerBeek argues. What Brown critics needed was something, as Lee Atwater would say years later, a hell of a lot more abstract.
You mentioned that the theory had been floating around for a while before it migrated to law schools. Where did it crop up first?
It was one of the main charges against Brown from the jump. But initially, the conservatives making these arguments were not elite legal academics. They were mostly media impresarios who opposed desegregation, like Dan Smoot, Clarence Manion, folks on National Review’s masthead, and politicians like Goldwater. You do have some less elite academics, as well as some state court judges and lower federal court judges, making these intent-based arguments. They would say, well the original intent of the framers was only to secure a few basic rights for Black people; they certainly never meant to have desegregated schools.
As it became taboo to make more racially explicit arguments, these conservatives moved toward treating this as a matter of first constitutional principles of interpretation. They’d say: Whether or not segregation is moral or immoral has nothing to do with the inquiry. We must simply look to what the 14th Amendment’s framers thought, and that’s simply what the law is. And so, what Chief Justice Earl Warren did in Brown is not only wrong, but illegitimate as law. By moving the terrain of the argument to what they called first constitutional principles, it was no longer immediately apparent that this theory is racialized. Brown’s critics could say, “Well, are you claiming these first constitutional principles are themselves racist? That can’t be true.”
How did the argument catch fire with the conservative legal elite?
Some folks in the law schools—most notably a conservative lawyer and law professors named Alfred Avins, who defended literacy tests at the Supreme Court—started to build up this idea into an academic theory. Yale Law professor Robert Bork talked about the “framers’ intent” in a now-canonical law review article in 1971. Six years later, Harvard Law professor Raoul Berger endorsed “original intent” in his book Government by Judiciary. Berger’s book repeatedly attacked Brown. When Berger went on William F. Buckley’s show Firing Line to promote his book, he said “the intention” of the framers was “to create separate schools.” But Berger said he didn’t support overturning Brown because “the expectations have been aroused in the breasts of the Blacks.”
These are the type of racialized things that today’s originalists leave on the cutting room floor when they tell their own history of originalism. Originalists both on the court and in the legal academy have not dealt with the theory’s racist roots.
It was good for Strom and Pinckney
Bottom line, TerBeek tells Slate:
They did not mine specific clauses in constitutional amendments to figure out what the Framers thought when they wrote the text of the Constitution; that was just not part of their toolkit. Originalism as we know it today developed directly in response to Brown.
Once it had academics from elite schools to make it respectable, the theory migrated with the Reagan administration to the highest echelons in Washington, D.C.
Once conservatives seized power of the federal judiciary in the 1990’s after 12 years of Reagan/Bush judges and justices, a new form of originalism emerged, led by Justice Scalia’s pivot from original intent to original meaning and the work of academics such as Keith Whittington, Larry Solum, and Randy Barnett. These so-called New Originalists dropped the deference aspects of originalism touted by Bork and Berger and eventually moved away from a purely historical originalism to a more linguistic-focused originalism. Then came numerous other originalist theories, such as original-methods originalism and originalism-is-our law originalism. Today, most originalists admit that originalism is actually a family of different theories united by the ideas that the meaning of the Constitution was fixed at ratification and that meaning, where it exists, binds judges. This standard narrative is in my book Originalism as Faith as well as other historical summaries of originalism.
Segall cites an earlier analysis of his: “One would think anyone wanting judges to make decisions today based on a world where only white males had equal rights under the law would develop a sophisticated theory why that is something judges ought to do. Very few originalists deal with this problem in any manner, much less a persuasive one.”
Maybe it’s enough that they can sing it?
Give me that old-time religion Give me that old-time religion Give me that old-time religion Its’ good enough for me!
THREE MONTHS AFTER A mob of supporters of former President Donald Trump stormed the U.S. Capitol in an attempt to prevent the certification of the 2020 presidential election that he lost – an event that resulted in five deaths and a sprawling FBI manhunt – roughly half of Republicans believe it was instead a non-violent protest or the work of left-wing activists trying to make him look bad.
A new Reuters/Ipsos poll underscores the staying power of the former president in the GOP, his control over the Republican Party, and the effectiveness of the false and misleading messaging campaigns he and his political allies have waged in the wake of the attacks.
[…]
“Right from the start, it was zero threat,” Trump said last month on Fox News. “Look, they went in – they shouldn’t have done it – some of them went in, and they’re hugging and kissing the police and the guards, you know? They had great relationships. A lot of the people were waved in, and then they walked in, and they walked out.”
His narrative is bolstered by Republicans in the House and Senate, like Republican Sen. Ron Johnson of Wisconsin, who has clung to a revisionist history of the attack on the Capitol and repeatedly claimed, including at a Senate hearing, that the insurrection was the work of “fake Trump protesters.”
As it stands, federal prosecutors have criminally charged more than 200 rioters, including many who identify themselves as Trump supporters and who have documented ties to far-right extremist groups. There is no substantial evidence, federal prosecutors have said, that left-wing or anti-fascist activists provoked or posed as Trump supporters during the riot.
Yet the Reuters/Ipsos poll, which was conducted March 30-31, shows the messaging campaign of Trump and his supporters is working: While 59% of all Americans say Trump bears some responsibility for the attack, only 3 in 10 Republicans agree.
Moreover, the poll found that 6 in 10 Republicans believe Trump’s claim that November’s presidential election “was stolen” due to widespread voter fraud, and 6 in 10 Republicans also think he should run again in 2024.
In addition, the Reuters/Ipsos poll also found that Trump remains the most popular figure within the GOP, with 8 in 10 Republicans continuing to hold a favorable impression of him – a finding that gives some credence to the idea that the former president has been at least somewhat successful in painting himself as the victim.
People who believe January 6th was a peaceful protest and that anyone who committed violence were antifa are either liars or morons or both. I’m sorry, but they are.
Dan Pfeiffer makes an important point in his newsletter this morning. The GOP’s ridiculous obsession with “cancel culture” seems absurd. But there is a strategy involved and Pfeiffer makes it clear that Democrats should take it seriously:
The Cancel Culture crusade is not just the province of the blowhards on Fox News. The Republican Party leadership is making it a central part of their strategy. Representative Jim Banks, the chair of the Republican Study Committee, recently wrote a memo where he argues that the GOP should make “anti-wokeness” a pillar of the platform:
Wokeness was cooked up by college professors, then boosted by corporations, which is why it’s now an official part of the Democrat Party platform. Nothing better encapsulates Democrats’ elitism and classism than their turn towards “wokeness.” Wokeness and identity politics aren’t pro-Hispanic, pro-African American or pro-LQBTQ; they’re anti-American, anti-women, and most of all, anti-working class.
Yes, it’s stupid. But don’t think it’s meaningless:
By traditional definitions of politics, this should be a rout for the Democrats. Every Republican recently voted against a bill with 70 percent support. They ignore the pandemic and pretend something called “cancel culture” is an existential threat to the republic.
The collective Republican brain has been so pickled by Fox News’s stupidity that they often stumble into self-defeating buffoonery.
This is not one of those times.
Many Democrats — myself included — have mocked Republicans for focusing on trivialities during such a serious time. But there is a strategic logic to shifting the political battlefield from the economy to a cultural clash, as well as polling evidence that this shift packs more political power than many assume.
Heading into 2022, I would rather be the party passing the broadly popular agenda than the one trying to distract from that popular agenda. But the (cancel) culture wars aren’t going anywhere. Democrats must understand what the Republicans are doing and develop a plan to fight back.
He explains:
The term has been a primary Republican talking point for years now. It is a regular feature of Trump’s tweets and speeches, but “cancel culture” hasn’t taken hold with the American public. A January Huffington Post/YouGov poll found that only 52 percent of Americans have heard the term “cancel culture.”
“Cancel culture” is a clumsy and overly malleable term. Still, it is designed to embody the core idea of conservatism since the onset of the Civil Rights Era: America is changing in ways that are bad for the political and cultural power that white Christians believe is their birthright. “Make America Great Again” is a particularly unsubtle call to return to a bygone era where threats to the power of white people, and white men, in particular, were nonexistent.
The central strategic imperative of Republicans is scaring the living shit out of white people. America is always changing. Politics has always been a battle of framing that change. Elections hinge on whether the fear of an unknown future eclipses dissatisfaction with a known present. Because of the omnipresent dominance of social media, the pace of that change has seemed faster —and scarier — in the last decade or so. Republicans have weaponized this fear with relentless precision.
Mr./Mrs. Potato Head and Dr. Seuss B-side books have power when viewed through this context. They are totems of childhood in a different era. If Mr. Potato Head and Dr. Seuss can be canceled, so can you.
He points out that there are examples of Big Tech censoring voices and some excesses on the left. But let’s face facts. If you want examples of “cancel culture” just look at Trump trying to “cancel” the results of the 2020 election …
Anyway:
There is no doubt that a lot of what drives the Right-Wing’s focus on “cancel culture” is a sincere annoyance at the consequences of being a racist asshole in public. But there is a political logic underlying all of the carping, complaining, and crocodile tears.
First, as I have written about before, social issues unite Republicans, while economic issues divide them. This is particularly true right now. Half of Trump voters support Biden’s American Rescue Plan. More than 40 percent support a $15 minimum wage. There is an inherent and potentially irreconcilable tension for a Republican Party with a populist, working-class base and a pro-corporation and Wall Street agenda. A recent Pew poll demonstrates this Republican challenge: 63 percent of lower-income Republicans support the American Rescue Plan, and one-in-four lower-income Republicans believe the package’s spending is too little. Given this information, the decision by Fox News and other conservative media to focus on cultural controversies makes a lot of sense. […]
The focus on Dr. Seuss worked. A Morning Consult poll shows just how much the Seuss story resonated with Republican voters. The Right was able to distract their voters from the American Rescue Plan and focus their attention on a less internally divisive “issue.”
There is a sense among many Democrats that these cultural issues are just red meat to jack up Republican turnout. “Cancel culture” BS serves that purpose, but the political impact is much broader. CNN polling guru, Harry Enten, has a fascinating analysis that shows that the power of the “cancel culture” issue is broader than the Republican base. Harry cites evidence from the American National Elections Studies‘ pre-election survey, which includes a question about political correctness.
Respondents were asked whether they thought people needed to change the way they talked to fit with the times or whether this movement had gone too far, and people were too easily offended. People being too easily offended won by a 53% to 46% margin over people needing to change the way they spoke.
Keep in mind, the voters in this sample claimed they had either voted or would vote for Biden over Donald Trump by a 53% to 42% margin. This poll gives you an idea of how much more popular the opposition of “cancel culture” and political correctness is than the baseline Republican presidential performance.
The Republicans are not yet maximizing the opportunity before them. Their tone is hysterical. Their choice of topics is nonsensical. Their chief messengers have the charisma of algae. However, their best chance of success in 2022 and beyond is to use their substantial media advantage to shift the focus from a likely booming, post-pandemic economy to racially divisive battles of political correctness.
Their need to be snotty little bitches is working against them. If they took a more serious tone, they could be more successful. Pfeiffer thinks they may figure this out. He points out that Joe Biden, being an older, white, male has the luxury of ignoring the silliness in ways that Obama and Hillary Clinton (or Kamala Harris) cannot. He can talk about his economic program and its accomplishment and he should. But others can’t:
The candidates up for election in 2022 do not have the luxury of simply turning the other cheek. Armchair political strategists will take to Twitter to counsel candidates on ignoring the cultural wedge issues and focusing on kitchen-table issues. Others will push for Democrats to have a “Sister Souljah moment” with “cancel culture.” This advice is absurd and evidence of why these strategists are sitting in armchairs in the first place.
This is not advice that works in the real world. When a reporter, voter, or debate moderator asks about something like the Dr. Seuss controversy, a candidate cannot pretend the question wasn’t asked or default into rote talking points that make them sound as robotically dense as Marco Rubio. Anyone running in 2022 will need to find a way to navigate the cultural attacks that will dominate Fox News, Facebook, and Republican ads.
The cultural wedge issues that dominate cable and social media present a “pick your poison” situation for candidates. Address them and get sucked down into a rabbit hole of stupidity. Ignore them and allow the Republicans to define the political playing field. However, there is another way. Barack Obama used to always tell us that in situations like these, “you don’t play the game, you call out the game.” In other words, tell the voters exactly what the Republicans are trying to do, who benefits (their corporate and special interest donors), and who suffers (the voter).
Here’s one version of a sample message that calls out the game:
Republicans are spending all of their time talking Dr. Seuss and Potato Head toys, because they want to divide and distract from their unpopular, special interest message. While Democrats have been putting money in people’s pockets and shots in their arms, Republicans have been fighting to prevent Americans from getting a pay raise and pushing to cut taxes for multi-millionaires.
The key is to take the issue the Republicans want to raise and pivot back to the core economic issues. Republicans are raising these cultural topics to unite their party and divide ours. Therefore, we must aggressively move the conversation back to the economic issues that unite our party and divide theirs.
They gave the Democrats a great gift by obsessing over this silly bullshit in order to to own the libs and act like middle school idiots. No matter what they come up with to “illustrate” political correctness/cancel culture, Democrats should bring up Dr Suess and Mr Potatohead. It reduces their concerns to silly, childishness, which it is, with the names alone. They did it to themselves and Democrats shouldn’t let them forget it.
I’m sure baseball is concerned about all those fans who are upset. They can’t really afford to lose any. But they have a responsibility to their players, the majority of their fans and the country to do the right thing. And they did:
In a Morning Consult poll conducted over the weekend, 39 percent of U.S. adults said they supported MLB’s decision to move the game, scheduled for July 13, out of Atlanta, while 28 percent opposed the move. MLB fans were more likely than the general public to back the league’s exodus from Atlanta, with 48 percent supporting the decision and 31 percent opposing it.
MLB fans supporting the decision at a slightly higher rate than the general public can likely be attributed to two factors. First, MLB fans are more likely than the general public to trust the league’s leadership and decision-making processes. Second, the MLB fans surveyed were roughly 3 percentage points more likely to identify as Democrats than members of the general population.
Self-identified “avid” MLB fans were even more likely than the broader fan population to support the league moving its events out of Atlanta, with 62 percent backing the league and 28 percent opposing it. These more diehard baseball fans were also more likely to identify as Democrats than the overall population of MLB fans, which also includes “casual” fans.
People of color were slightly more likely than white, non-Hispanic fans to support MLB’s stance, but a plurality of both groups supported the league.
Meanwhile, this is puzzling:
While respondents were more likely to back MLB’s decision than to condemn it, there was also slightly more support than opposition for the new Georgia law that provoked MLB to move its events.
In the April 2-4 survey, 42 percent of U.S. adults said they supported the law, which made numerous changes to how elections are administered, including a new photo ID requirement for voting absentee by mail. A slightly smaller share of respondents — 36 percent — said they opposed the law, which has been criticized as disproportionately limiting the ability of people of color to vote. Among all MLB fans, and specifically among avid fans, support for the law also marginally outweighed opposition.
There seems to be some confusion about all this …
By the way:
Absurd comparison. 1) Georgia's ID requirements are much stricter. 2) *Colorado mails every active registered voter a ballot.* 90-plus percent voted by mail even in pre-pandemic elections. 3) Colorado allows people to register on Election Day.https://t.co/ZCqOf7rLWa
I don’t know about you, but I just assumed that the people who flew into DC for january 6th, dressed in fancy MAGA gear and staying at the Hyatt were all indigent coal miners who just wanted to make a statement about outsourcing.
When the political scientist Robert Pape began studying the issues that motivated the 380 or so people arrested in connection with the attack against the Capitol on Jan. 6, he expected to find that the rioters were driven to violence by the lingering effects of the 2008 Great Recession.
But instead he found something very different: Most of the people who took part in the assault came from places, his polling and demographic data showed, that were awash in fears that the rights of minorities and immigrants were crowding out the rights of white people in American politics and culture.
If Mr. Pape’s initial conclusions — published on Tuesday in The Washington Post — hold true, they would suggest that the Capitol attack has historical echoes reaching back to before the Civil War, he said in an interview over the weekend.
The Jan. 6 assault on the Capitol by a violent mob at the behest of former president Donald Trump was an act of political violence intended to alter the outcome of a legitimate democratic election. That much was always evident.
What we know 90 days later is that the insurrection was the result of a large, diffuse and new kind of protest movement congealing in the United States.
Those involved are, by and large, older and more professional than right-wing protesters we have surveyed in the past. They typically have no ties to existing right-wing groups. But like earlier protesters, they are 95 percent White and 85 percent male, and many live near and among Biden supporters in blue and purple counties.
The charges have, so far, been generally in proportion to state and county populations as a whole. Only Kentucky, Maryland, Missouri and Montana appear to have sent more protesters to D.C. suspected of crimes than their populations would suggest.
Nor were these insurrectionists typically from deep-red counties. Some 52 percent are from blue counties that Biden comfortably won. But by far the most interesting characteristic common to the insurrectionists’ backgrounds has to do with changes in their local demographics: Counties with the most significant declines in the non-Hispanic White population are the most likely to produce insurrectionists who now face charges.
For example, Texas is the home of 36 of the 377 charged or arrested nationwide. The majority of the state’s alleged insurrectionists — 20 of 36 — live in six quickly diversifying blue counties such as Dallas and Harris (Houston). In fact, all 36 of Texas’s rioters come from just 17 counties, each of which lost White population over the past five years. Three of those arrested or charged hail from Collin County north of Dallas, which has lost White population at the very brisk rate of 4.3 percent since 2015.
The same thing can be seen in New York state, home to 27 people charged or arrested after the riot, nearly all of whom come from 14 blue counties that Biden won in and around New York City. One of these, Putnam County (south of Poughkeepsie), is home to three of those arrested, and a county that saw its White population decline by 3.5 percent since 2015.
When compared with almost 2,900 other counties in the United States, our analysis of the 250 counties where those charged or arrested live reveals that the counties that had the greatest decline in White population had an 18 percent chance of sending an insurrectionist to D.C., while the counties that saw the least decline in the White population had only a 3 percent chance. This finding holds even when controlling for population size, distance to D.C., unemployment rate and urban/rural location. It also would occur by chance less than once in 1,000 times.
Put another way, the people alleged by authorities to have taken the law into their hands on Jan. 6 typically hail from places where non-White populations are growing fastest.
CPOST also conducted two independent surveys in February and March, including a National Opinion Research Council survey, to help understand the roots of this rage. One driver overwhelmingly stood out: fear of the “Great Replacement.” Great Replacement theory has achieved iconic status with white nationalists and holds that minorities are progressively replacing White populations due to mass immigration policies and low birthrates. Extensive social media exposure is the second-biggest driver of this view, our surveys found. Replacement theory might help explain why such a high percentage of the rioters hail from counties with fast-rising, non-White populations.
While tracking and investigating right-wing extremist groups remains a vital task for law enforcement, the best intelligence is predictive. Understanding where most alleged insurrectionists come from is a good starting point in identifying areas facing elevated risks of further political violence. At the very least, local mayors and police chiefs need better intelligence and sounder risk analysis.
To ignore this movement and its potential would be akin to Trump’s response to covid-19: We cannot presume it will blow over.The ingredients exist for future waves of political violence, from lone-wolf attacks to all-out assaults on democracy, surrounding the 2022 midterm elections.
Yeah.
I was writing about the right wingers having fits over immigrants “ruining” their culture back in the aughts. And needless to say, racism and xenophobia are All American characteristics going back to the beginning. But this latest paroxysm of hate has been bubbling up for quite some time and the arrival of a racist demagogue to bring it into the mainstream should have been expected. It certainly should have been recognized by the mainstream media when it happened. Instead we got all that bullshit about “economic anxiety” and years of forays into the wilds of Trump country to take the temperature of racists.
