Mitch McConnell came out against the January 6th commission. Of course he did. And while they are waving their hands about it being unnecessary and wanting to investigate BLM at the same time, this is the real issue:
Senior Republicans are making clear they have little interest in moving forward with a sweeping January 6 investigation in part because a detailed probe could become politically damaging and amount to a distraction for their party just as control of Congress is at stake in next year’s midterm elections.
Publicly and privately, Republicans are making that case, with Senate GOP Whip John Thune noting that there’s concern among some GOP members that the findings of the probe “could be weaponized politically and drug into next year.”
“I want our midterm message to be on the kinds of things that the American people are dealing with: That’s jobs and wages and the economy and national security, safe streets and strong borders — not relitigating the 2020 elections,” Thune told CNN. “A lot of our members, and I think this is true of a lot of House Republicans, want to be moving forward and not looking backward. Anything that gets us rehashing the 2020 elections I think is a day lost on being able to draw a contrast between us the Democrats’ very radical left-wing agenda.”
Thune’s comments came moments after Senate GOP Leader Mitch McConnell announced his opposition on the floor, contending it would duplicate ongoing probes and contending the deal — which was reached between a House Republican and House Democrat — is designed to find a conclusion that would be in “Democrats’ hands.”
They’re going to have to have a little chat with their Dear Leader. He’s about to hit the campaign trail with some big rallies next month. What are the chances he doesn’t mention the 2020 election and focuses on the GOP agenda?
I have to admit that I’ve never thought they’d be able to get a commission. After all, the people who would have to vote for it are implicated in the crime.
I was just wondering the other day whatever happened to Congressman Devin Nunes. During the first two years of the Trump administration, the California Republican was Trump’s most loyal henchman, running interference for the White House from within the House Intelligence Committee where as chairman he worked diligently to sabotage any meaningful investigations of the president’s curious dealings with Russia during the 2016 campaign. For a time you couldn’t turn on the TV without seeing Nunes’ doleful, hangdog, visage defending Trump through thick and thin.
Nunes had been a member of the Trump transition and in another era would have had to recuse himself from any of the investigations into Trump and Russia since the transition period was heavily implicated. He did not do that and instead jumped right in and proved himself to be a willing spinner on Trump’s behalf, denying that he had any knowledge of calls between Trump’s adviser Michael Flynn and Russian Ambassador Sergei Kislyak. There were indeed calls and they ended Flynn’s short tenure as National Security Adviser. It turned out that the White House had requested this allegedly independent committee chairman and others to pooh-pooh the Russia scandal in the media and Nunes, being an eager soldier, did as he was ordered.
But Devin Nunes will likely be remembered for one of the lamest political gambits in history for what’s known as his “Midnight Ride.”
On March 4th 2017, just a little over a month after Trump took office, he tweeted that Obama had “wire tapped” Trump Tower “just before the victory” and called it McCarthyism. This led to a frenzy among right-wingers to prove that Obama had illegally used the power of the federal government to spy on Trump. The night after Nunes was riding in a car when he got a text message that was so urgent he made the Uber driver stop and he raced over to the White House. He met with a couple of young Trump toadies named Ezra Cohen-Watnick and Michael Ellis, who hysterically informed him that they had found evidence of “unmasking” of Americans’ identities intercepted on foreign surveillance calls during the Trump transition. The following morning Nunes held a strange press conference in which he declared “I have confirmed that additional names of Trump Transition Team members were unmasked,” and raced to the White House to “brief” the president. Afterward, he held another press conference in front of the White House and told the press that Trump felt “somewhat vindicated” by what he had to say. The press asked him whether he was more bothered by the surveillance or the “unmasking” and he replied that he was especially bothered by the latter. To the question of whether it was appropriate for the Chairman of the House Intelligence Committee which was investigating the Russian interference in the 2016 election to rush over to brief the president he said, “the President needs to know that these intelligence reports are out there I have a duty to tell him that.”
The thing is, he obviously wasn’t telling the White House anything. They had given him the information the night before.
Nunes mumbled incoherently when confronted with his lie the next day saying, “the president didn’t invite me over, I called down there and invited myself because I thought he needed to understand what I say and he needed to get that information.” Two days later he finally admitted what he did, releasing a statement through his spokesman, but once again declaring his deep concerns about “unmasking” during the Obama administration and insisting that he had been on the trail even before the White House called him over in the middle of the night to show him the evidence.
He eventually recused himself from the investigation without ever really recusing. And it was clear from that point on that nothing the Intelligence Committee did going forward would be kept confidential. Devin Nunes was Trump’s man on the inside and there was nothing anyone could do about it. He issued his own highly anticipated “memo” that revealed nothing, called for the impeachment of FBI Director Christopher Wray, flogged the discredited “Uranium One” scandal, railed against the FISA process, and went hard after the Department of Justice, saying at one point, “I hate to use the word ‘corrupt,’ but they’ve become at least so dirty that who’s watching the watchmen? Who’s investigating these people? There is no one.”
After the Republicans lost their House majority, Nunes was apparently working on the Rudy Giuliani project to get Ukrainian dirt on Joe Biden. At least that’s what Lev Parnas, Giuliani’s accomplice currently under indictment, said when it was reported that they had spoken on the phone. And he was suing people who criticized him, from news organizations to watchdog groups and even a fruit farmer who called him a “fake farmer.” But his most famous lawsuit was against a satirical Twitter account that called itself “Devin Nunes’s Cow” which was, of course, dismissed.
We now know that Nunes’s thin-skinned crusade wasn’t just his personal folly.
It turns out that he had friends in high places using the full force of the federal government to help him “unmask” another Twitter handle called @NunesAlt another parody account that made fun of the very sensitive congressman. Two weeks after Trump’s defeat last November, the New York Times reported this week, the Justice Department got a grand jury subpoena, a unique power that requires no judge to sign off, to demand that Twitter hand over the identity of @NunesAlt. Twitter refused, citing free speech concerns and the fact that despite the government assertion that this person violated federal law by issuing a threat, they could not produce any evidence that they had. The Justice Department under Merrick Garland later withdrew the subpoena.
But this is yet another example of the level of partisan corruption throughout the Trump administration — especially in former Attorney General William Barr’s Justice Department.
Barr’s last-minute refusal to help Trump overturn the election was nothing more than a last-ditch effort to redeem some small piece of his reputation but he continued to do Trump and his allies’ dirty work nonetheless. Trump and his henchmen spent years caterwauling about the alleged “Deep State” conspiring against them for political purposes yet at every turn we found them abusing their power to punish their political opponents. Remember, it was Nunes himself who said of the DOJ, “I hate to use the word ‘corrupt,’ but they’ve become at least so dirty that who’s watching the watchmen?” I guess he knew what he was talking about for once.
New York Attorney General Letitia James’s investigation into the Trump Organization is now considered a criminal matter, James’s office said Tuesday night, noting that officials with the former president’s company were recently apprised of the development.
“We have informed the Trump Organization that our investigation into the company is no longer purely civil in nature,” said Fabien Levy, a spokesperson for the attorney general’s office. “We are now actively investigating the Trump Organization in a criminal capacity, along with the Manhattan DA. We have no additional comment at this time.”
The attorney general’s notification to the Trump Organization suggested a cooperative relationship has developed between investigators working for James and Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus R. Vance Jr., whose office has been heading a criminal probe into the company and its officers since 2018. Both officials are Democrats. A person familiar with the matter, who like others spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss an ongoing investigation, said the district attorney was not specifically mentioned in James’s letter to Trump’s company.
The attorney general’s decision appears to have increased the legal risk that former president Donald Trump faces in New York, where the parallel investigations run by James and Vance had already delved more deeply into Trump’s byzantine finances than any law enforcement authorities ever had.
Previously, the danger posed by James’s investigation seemed to be merely financial — the kind of lawsuit Trump had faced from New York attorneys general before over his Trump University and his charity. Those cost him money but didn’t threaten his liberty.
Now, however, James could also seek criminal penalties. And she appears to be cooperating with Vance’s office, a move that could allow the two wide-ranging investigations to share data.
[…]
A spokesman for Vance’s office declined to comment. His team obtained Trump’s personal and business tax returns earlier this year and is in the process of an extensive forensic evaluation of those documents and other records obtained over the course of years. The known focus of both state probes applies to business transactions and conduct in the years before Trump became president.
Previously, the investigative team under James was pursuing a strictly civil investigation, which remains active and could still result in a lawsuit against the company and its executives.
Andrew Weissman from the Mueller team had this speculation last night:
I would not be surprised if it has something to do with this:
The Trumps’ propensity to overstate sales led them, as ProPublica, WNYC and the New Yorker reported last year, to be investigated on potential felony fraud charges in one case. Ivanka had announced in June 2008 that 60 percent of the units at the SoHo tower had been bought when in fact 15 percent had, according to an affidavit filed by a Trump partner. The Manhattan district attorney’s office considered charging the Trumps but backed off after a visit from a donor — Trump’s attorney Marc Kasowitz . (The DA, Cyrus Vance , denied he was influenced by the donation but later changed his policy and now refuses donations from lawyers with cases before him.)
Trump arranged financing — his promised commission: $2.2 million or more — by bringing in investment bank Bear Stearns , which issued the bonds that paid for the Panama project’s construction.
Trump touted himself as a “partner” of the developer. His daughter Ivanka briefly boasted that she had personally sold 40 units. (A broker on the project said he couldn’t remember her selling even one.) Meanwhile, Ivanka told a journalist at the time that “over 90 percent” of the Panama units had sold — and at prices five times as high as comparable buildings. Both statements were untrue.
Not only were the Panama sales figures inflated, but many “purchases” turned out to be an illusion. That was no coincidence. The building’s financing depended on obtaining advance commitments from buyers, often before concrete had started pouring. But in between the sale of the bonds in 2007 and 2013, the year the building went bankrupt, buyers of 458 units in the 1,000-unit building abandoned their purchase contracts. Those buyers forfeited more than $50 million in deposits, and they never took possession of finished units. Given that the “buyers” were often shadowy shell companies or other paper entities, it was nearly impossible to discern who the actual purchasers were, let alone why they backed out.
Trump licensed his name for an initial fee of $1 million. But that was just the beginning of the revenue streams, a lengthy and varied assortment that granted him a piece of everything from sales of apartment units to a cut of minibar sales, and was notable for the myriad ways in which both success and failure triggered payments to him.
Consider the final accounting: In the wake of the project’s bankruptcy, a 50 percent default rate and his company’s expulsion from managing the hotel, Donald Trump walked away with between $30 million and $55 million.
Somehow, I doubt that was the last time they pulled that con. Bears Stern is no longer but his arrangements with all financial institutions are just as shady. How much did he lie to Deutsche Bank?
And by the way, Ivanka is in this stuff up to her neck.
“It’s bananas,” Olivia Zink, executive director of the nonpartisan voting rights organization Open Democracy, tells Talking Points Memo.
The For the People Act may have slim chances of passing Congress, but one New Hampshire House Republican is taking no chances. In an amendment to elections bill SB89, Rep. Barbara J. Griffin proposes a separate system of registration and voting for state elections should Congress open up the voting process for federal races:
Under the amendment, the state would keep its authority over “procedures and requirements relating to voter eligibility, voter registration, absentee voting, conducting the vote and counting of votes” in state elections.
“This would require two ballots to be distributed, ” Zink told TPM. “You’d have one set of rules to register to vote for the federal election, you’d have one set of rules to register to vote for the state elections. You’d have two different checklists, you’d have two different ways to request absentee ballots. It would double the cost of everything.”
Elections officials who supported SB89 will oppose it if it contains the Griffin amendment. TPM’s Tierney Sneed adds:
New Hampshire is not the only state where state-level Republicans appear to be contemplating workarounds in the event that the For the People Act became law, though none of those bills targeted the federal legislation as directly as the New Hampshire amendment. There were billsintroduced in Texas to create a separate system of voter registration for state elections vs. federal elections. Arizona bills that banned automatic voter registration and Election Day registration, meanwhile, were interpreted by election experts as taking aim at the policies in For the People Act. Neither of those states’ bills have ultimately gotten much traction.
This is also not the first time that Republicans have considered a bifurcated election system so that they can implement stricter voting laws. When then-Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach (R) wanted to evade a federal court order halting his proof-of-citizenship registration requirement, he sought to implement the requirement just for state and local elections instead. That workaround was blocked by a state court judge.
Griffin’s amendment may be a stunt, but one whose spirit echoes the beliefs of Paul Weyrich, one of the founders of movement conservatism, as well as those of others like-minded. They may celebrate the colonists who fled religious discrimination in England to settle here, but reserve the right to restrict who constitutes “the People.”
“The nation’s history is storied with the demands of disenfranchised groups to be included in the American electorate,” wrote Kay Schriner and Lisa A. Ochs in a study of disenfranchisement based on disability in 19th-century Massachusetts. “In most cases, the groups have succeeded. The property-less, immigrants, African-Americans, religious minorities, and women are among the groups that have fought for, and won, the right to suffrage.”
Republicans aiming to lead America into the future are set on getting there by walking back that storied history.
It’s not my area of competence. It’s important to know what you don’t know.
I worked with engineers and designers. From textiles to biotech, they were specialists in various aspects of factory design: electrical, civil, structural, process, instrumentation, equipment specification, process piping, and more. I might think I knew the answer to, say, a particular electrical question, but knew to ask the engineer whose job it was to know. If I guessed and guessed wrong, that mistake was on me. If I asked the person whose job it was to know and they gave the wrong answer, that was on him or her. That’s how you stay out of court.
A more concise example: Having an M.D. doesn’t make you a brain surgeon.
That is why I have avoided commenting on the violence in Israel. Not my area of competence.
Former megachurch pastor John Pavlovitz has the same problem. When someone asked him, he knew he was not up to the speaking to an issue “so sprawling and complicated and layered with time and history” as the conflict between Palestinians and Israelis.
Here’s what I know to be true: a world where a ten-year old girl is experiencing this kind of persistent trauma, in what should be the most joyous, most wide-open, most weightless time in her life—isn’t a world any of us should feel comfortable living in. It isn’t a fate we should accept. It isn’t a reality we should be able to abide.
So what does that mean for you and for me?
It means that rather than lament all that we don’t understand, we should read and listen, so that we understand more today than we did yesterday.
It means we allow ourselves to sit with the discomfort of facing the realities happening half a world away, because children there are as worth our discomfort as much as children here are.
It means we speak from the deepest recesses of our hearts about the human toll of conflicts we can’t fathom, and we endure the knee-jerk responses and angry outbursts from people around us who likely don’t know any more than we do but who have been weaned on the same hatred we see oceans away.
It means we defend humanity wherever it is threatened and assailed and destroyed.
In moments like these, people want you to pick a side because that’s how most people’s minds work. They need a hard and fast litmus test position so that can sum you up and decide whether they are for you or against you, whether you are good or evil. But that kind of all-or-nothing extremism seems to be what has fueled and perpetuated the conflicts were watching right now.
So, with all that I don’t know and all I can’t understand and with all the nuances that escape me, here’s the side I’m on:
I’m on the side of ten-year old girls and boys wherever they live and whoever they’ve been raised by and whatever God they pray to and whatever pigmentation their faces carry. I am for disparate humanity being treated with equal reverence without caveat or condition and I am against powerful people who dehumanize the powerless for political gain.
Good for him. That about sums it up. Plus disgust with the bad faith of people with God on their side flinging explosives at civilians on either side of the border.
I get a lot of former church friends telling me they feel sorry for me. They feel that way, because I'm trying to live out the teachings of a Jesus they no longer seem interested in listening to and because they've embraced what he spent his life opposing. I feel sorry for them.
There are a lot of congressional stars these days. On the right you have Marjorie Taylor Green, Lauren Boebert and Madison Cawthorne. On the left you have AOC and Katie Porter among others. I will put those two up against anyone the right has to offer when it comes to politics or policy. The right wing freakshow spectacle may entertain the nasty Fox viewers but it has nothing to do with government. These two, on the other hand, are real politicians.
I wrote about Trump henchman Lee Zeldin, R-NY, backing off of his support for Donald Trump as he launches his race for Governor in a state Joe Biden won by 23 points earlier this week. He is trying to present himself as a “moderate” now but it’s impossible to see how he can escape his Trumpist past or why anyone will trust anything he says. Now he has another problem — a Trumpist encouraged to throw his hat into the ring by the man himself:
Andrew Giuliani, the son of former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani and a former special assistant to disgraced ex-President Donald Trump, declared Tuesday that he’s running for New York governor in a bid to knock out Democratic incumbent Andrew Cuomo.
“Giuliani vs. Cuomo. Holy smokes. It’s Muhammad Ali vs. Joe Frazier. We can sell tickets at Madison Square Garden,” he told the New York Post on Tuesday. (The beleaguered Cuomo has not officially launched a reelection campaign for a fourth term.)https://862cda38b6a3aec4116396fa003ef6af.safeframe.googlesyndication.com/safeframe/1-0-38/html/container.html
Giuliani changed his Twitter bio to read “Candidate: 57th Governor Of New York.” He touted his run in a promo on Fox 5’s “Good Day New York,” saying it’s “where the road to Albany begins.” He also retweeted the Post’s article.
The younger Giuliani has never held public office. But as the son of Rudy Giuliani ― whose time during the Trump presidency was spent fruitlessly pursuing the ex-president’s baseless legal claims that the election was stolen, publicly ranting, and appearing with his hand down his pants while being pranked in the “Borat” sequel ― the gubernatorial run feels like a natural transition.
“I’m a politician out of the womb. It’s in my DNA,” Giuliani, 35, told the tabloid.
Giuliani, who previously said he was mulling a gubernatorial bid, has recently served as a contributor on the far-right Newsmax channel, NBC New York noted.
Andrew Giuliani is Trump’s favorite golfing partner. That makes him eminently qualified to be Governor of New York.
This is from last month:
Andrew Giuliani, the son of Trump lawyer and former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani, said in an interview Wednesday that he is “seriously considering” a run for governor in 2022 and spoke with former President Donald Trump earlier this week about his political ambitions.
“I did speak with President Trump on Monday and it was a great conversation,” Giuliani said. “We talked about New York politics and went through the numbers on this and I explained to him where I think I would be able to make inroads that no other potential candidate would be able to.”https://0318609956638298ce2c69aeefcb20dd.safeframe.googlesyndication.com/safeframe/1-0-38/html/container.html
A blessing from Trump would go a long way for any Republican candidate running in a GOP primary. That may be particularly true in New York, where the former president built his real estate empire and made his name before decamping to Florida in his post-presidency.
But for Giuliani, a former White House official and frequent golf partner of the 45th president, getting Trump’s backing is no slam dunk. The former president is said to be partial to Rep. Lee Zeldin (R-N.Y.), a longtime GOP congressman and friend of the Trump family, who has been floated as a possible candidate himself.
Zeldin’s clumsy walkback of his support for Trump and denunciation of January 6th foreclosed any possibility that Trump will endorse him unless he disavows all comments and publicly prostrates himself before Dear Leader. And even then …
Trump may not officially endorse Andrew simply because he may be convinced that he has no chance. But as long as Andrew is in the race fluffing Trump you can bet the base will be ecstatic about him. That is everything.
QOTD: NY Times reporter Nicholas Confessore on MSNBC:
I think [the Lieutenant Governor of Georgia] is wrong about the appetite for a policy over politics platform. I think that what Trump revealed is that there is a massive appetite for grievance politics, for attack politics, for the theatre of politics, for attacking the people you hate and seeing them attacked and brought low. That is the thrill of Trumpism, that is what he delivers. And once you’ve tasted that, I think for a lot of voters is hard to go back to tax cuts and judges and abortion
Dan Crenshaw is a slick operator with big ambitions. It’s important that he not be allowed to play the “reasonable Republican” on TV when he is clearly trying to have it both ways. So I appreciate this fact check from CNN’s Daniel Dale:
Texas Rep. Dan Crenshaw tried Sunday to downplay his December decision to sign on to a legal brief in support of the Texas lawsuit that sought to get the Supreme Court to overturn the 2020 presidential election.
The extraordinary and ultimately unsuccessful lawsuit from Texas’ Republican attorney general asked the Supreme Court to invalidate the results of the election in Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Georgia, all of which were won by Joe Biden.
“You guys in the press painted that as some extreme action, and of course it wasn’t,” Crenshaw said. “That amicus brief was a simple question of the Supreme Court, in saying, ‘Can you please speak to this question of whether, of whether process changes in the election — last minute, not approved by the legislature — can be deemed constitutional?’ It was a question, and they didn’t want to answer that question.”
Facts First: Crenshaw’s claim is misleading. The House Republican amicus brief did not merely ask the court to answer a constitutional question. In reality, the brief expressed a firm opinion — that the four Biden-won states had taken “unconstitutional actions” — and asked the Supreme Court for a specific response: to allow Texas’ lawsuit to proceed and to grant Texas’ request for a preliminary injunction forbidding the four states from certifying Biden’s victories until the lawsuit was resolved. The brief also invoked baseless claims of election fraud, saying that “the election of 2020 has been riddled with an unprecedented number of serious allegations of fraud and irregularities.”
[…]
When CNN invited Crenshaw spokesman Justin Discigil to comment for this fact check, Discigil made a claim that was even more untrue than Crenshaw’s original claim.
We’ll get into the spokesman’s statements in a moment. First, here’s a look at the problems with the congressman’s remarks.
There is a kernel of truth to Crenshaw’s comments on “Meet the Press.” The House Republican amicus brief did say the Supreme Court should “determine for the people if indeed the Constitution has been followed and the rule of law maintained.”
But Crenshaw made it sound as if the brief solely consisted of this kind of neutral request. It didn’t, as a plain read of the text makes obvious and as three election law experts told CNN on Monday.
“In fairness, the language of the amicus brief was restrained in a way that the language of Texas’s briefs was not. So I would not be surprised if some people believed that this amicus brief was simply asking the Supreme Court to review the case, nothing more. However, the text of the amicus brief clearly goes beyond that simple request,” Lisa Marshall Manheim, a law professor at the University of Washington, said in an email.
Manheim noted that the amicus brief “repeatedly stated that the conduct of defendant states was unconstitutional” and that the brief asked the court to grant the preliminary injunction.
David Schultz, a professor of political science and legal studies at Hamline University, said Crenshaw incorrectly made it sound like the brief was asking the Supreme Court for a non-binding “advisory opinion.” Since “the Supreme Court long ago said federal courts do not give advisory opinions,” Schultz said, a first-year law school student is taught that “you would never file something where you say, ‘We’re just kind of curious, what do you think?'”
This brief, Schultz noted, proposed that the Supreme Court take specific actions.
Rick Hasen, a law professor at the University of California, honed in on another component of the brief — the fact that it said its 126 signers believe “the unconstitutional irregularities involved in the 2020 presidential election cast doubt upon its outcome and the integrity of the American system of elections.”
“That’s taking a side in favor of the spurious allegations in Texas’s suit,” Hasen said in an email.
[…]
When we asked Crenshaw’s office for comment, Discigil said in an email: “The conclusion of the amicus brief specifically states that the Supreme Court should objectively review the argument presented in the Texas lawsuit and make a determination. It doesn’t make any specific request of the court or urge any specific outcome, and certainly didn’t ask the court to overturn election results in states. It asked the court to weigh in on the lawsuit, which ultimately did not happen.”
That’s just flat wrong. The conclusion of the amicus brief did make a specific request of the court beyond just objectively reviewing the Texas argument. In fact, it made two specific requests. Here’s how the conclusion ends:
“It is now the duty of this Honorable Court to objectively review the facts presented by the Plaintiff in this historic case, render judgment upon the unconstitutional actions in the Defendant states, and restore the confidence of all Americans that the rule of law will be upheld today and our elections in the future will be secured. For the reasons stated above, the Plaintiff’s Motion for Leave to File a Bill of Complaint and Motion for a Preliminary Injunction should be granted.”
So: there’s 1) an explicit request for the court not to dismiss the Texas lawsuit and 2) an explicit request for the court to impose a preliminary injunction. And right before that, there is an explicit argument that the four states had acted unconstitutionally.
Discigil also said in his email: “This amicus brief was filed in early December, when there were still questions regarding the constitutionality of changes certain states made to election procedures without the approval of their legislatures. Congressman Crenshaw signed the amicus brief to ask the Supreme Court to answer this question: were these moves constitutional? The amicus brief would not have overturned the election results and would not have disenfranchised anyone. Congressman Crenshaw would not have supported any effort to do either of those things.”
This is absurd. Of course the amicus brief would not itself have overturned the election: an amicus brief is not an actual lawsuit that gets ruled on by a court, just a legal submission that discusses a lawsuit. But there is no evading the fact that the amicus brief Crenshaw endorsed was filed in support of a lawsuit that sought to overturn the election — nor the fact that the amicus brief asked the court to halt the certification of Biden’s victory.
The Supreme Court declined on December 11 to hear the Texas lawsuit, citing Texas’ lack of standing in other states’ conduct of their elections. The Electoral College voted on December 14 to affirm Biden’s victory.
The spokesman was right that Crenshaw voted to certify the election on January 6th which was big of him. By that time, of course, it was clear that none of their tactics were working and he bailed. He’s always walking that line.
Speaking of narcissism, Paul Krugman makes an observation in his newsletter today that I confess to having contemplated myself: the propensity for ostentatious flattery, braggadocio and self-promotion in American society these days.
If there’s one thing that’s gone completely out of fashion it’s the concept of humility. I realize this makes me old and decrepit. Nobody cares about such a useless concept anymore, certainly not the conservative Christians who apparently haven’t read that book they insist should govern our lives. The New Testament is very big on humility.
Krugman writes:
When I was growing up, my father worked as a middle manager at a large insurance company. He was relatively new to the business world — he had previously taught at a community college — and used to marvel at the peculiarities of corporate culture. One thing he remarked on was the emphasis on informality — insincere but, I think, meaningful all the same. My father, his superior, and his subordinates were all expected to be on a first-name basis, without explicit use of titles. Your boss was your boss, and you’d better not forget it, but the power relations were supposed to be implicit.
I saw something of the same phenomenon when I became a professor myself. Some graduate students, especially foreigners, needed to be coached through a bit of acculturation. At first they would treat established figures with exaggerated deference, afraid to criticize their work. Then some would overreact, writing papers about “the stupid Tobin” or something like that. The balance between the reality of hierarchy — academic economics has a very steep prestige gradient, even though there isn’t much of a conventional authority structure — and democratic manners took a little while to get right.
So what happened to that America?
The most obvious change has come in the G.O.P. Once upon a time Republican leaders posed as regular guys even when they were anything but: Dwight Eisenhower led an immense military machine to victory in World War II, but his campaign slogan was “I like Ike.”
Today, of course, the Republican Party has turned into a Trump personality cult, even though Donald Trump’s actual accomplishments are hard to find. A failed nuclear deal with North Korea, a failed trade deal with China, a tax cut that never delivered the promised investment boom, a mishandled pandemic? Never mind. Obsequious professions of loyalty aren’t just expected, they’ve become a requirement for those who want to stay in the party.
I’ve been especially struck by the tendency of Trump acolytes to praise him for virtues he manifestly doesn’t have. After The Times offered a description of Joe Biden’s working style — not entirely flattering, but reassuring in the sense that he’s clearly someone who takes his job seriously and works hard at it — Kevin McCarthy, the House minority leader, enthused about Trump’s physical vigor. (Hey, he drives a mean golf cart.)
When Tomas Philipson, a Chicago economist who worked for a time in the White House, returned to academia, his parting letter praised the famously non-reading Trump as someone whose “economic instincts were on a par with many Nobel economists.”
These absurdities probably aren’t an accident; they’re proof of loyalty. Anyone can offer praise for qualities a man actually has; only the truly subservient will humiliate themselves by offering flattery totally untethered from reality.
The G.O.P. has also become a party that, like authoritarians everywhere, goes wild when subjected to ridicule. Incredibly, the Trump justice department tried to force Twitter to divulge the identity of the person behind an account devoted to making fun of Rep. Devin Nunes, a noted Trump loyalist.
Again, what happened?
A lot of this obviously has to do with the psychological sickness that has afflicted the Republican Party. But I also suspect that we’ve seen an erosion of egalitarian norms throughout American society, simply because we’ve become a lot less egalitarian. It’s a lot harder for top executives even to play-act at being regular guys now that they’re paid almost 300 times as much as the average worker, up from “just” 20 times in the 1960s.
True, there was always a strong element of hypocrisy in those democratic norms, but hypocrisy is the tribute vice pays to virtue, and there were some good aspects to the society we used to be. And I miss it.
I miss it too. And this relentless bragging and kow-towing to power just sets my teeth on edge.
