Former President Donald Trump reportedly encouraged supporters in an email Wednesday to help choose a design for a “membership” card, meant to signal the holder’s loyalty to Trump and his “America First” vision.
But people quickly noticed a few problems with the designs — the word “official” was misspelled on one, and another featured an eagle logo that bore an uncanny resemblance to the Nazi eagle emblem first used by the party in 1920s Germany.
The call to action was included in at least two emails sent by Trump’s Save America PAC, according to Insider, which first reported the news.
“We recently met with the President in his Florida office and showed him four designs,” one read. “Originally we were planning on releasing just one design, but when President Trump saw the cards on his desk, he said, ‘These are BEAUTIFUL. We should let the American People decide – they ALWAYS know best!'”
The email went on to say that the cards would only be “reserved for President Trump’s STRONGEST supporters” and “will be carried by Patriots all around the Country.”
Of the four red-and-black designs, one features a gold eagle with its wings outstretched, another shows the U.S. Seal, and a third is set on a backdrop with an image of the U.S. flag waving. All include Trump’s signature in a prominent position.
The flag card was also emblazoned with “Trump Offical [sic] Card,” quickly sparking mockery online.
I have no doubt that they will be thrilled to show this card to anyone. Proof of vaccination? Not on your life. Where to you think we are, Nazi Germany?
It’s no secret that former President Donald Trump plotted to overturn the 2020 election if he lost. He had set up the scenario for months, even declaring at one point that the only way the Democrats could win the election was by stealing it. He’d done the same in 2016, telling his cheering crowd that he would only accept the results of the election if he won, and as it turned out, he didn’t even accept that – insisting that Hillary Clinton stole the popular vote. Trump then formed an “election integrity commission” to investigate voter fraud in the election he won. (That commission was eventually abandoned after they were unable to find any proof of voter fraud.)
The election hysteria in 2020 over mail-in votes and Trump’s ludicrous contention that any votes counted after midnight on Election Day were illegitimate would have been easy enough to just chalk up to Trump being a sore loser had January 6th not happened. But the Big Lie was adopted by the GOP establishment for their own cynical, political reasons and Republicans continue to prop it up to this day. That has made it impossible to ignore and requires the attention of everyone who still values democracy and the rule of law. Clearly, we have not seen the end of this.
Just this week, we learned that the coup attempt engineered by Trump and his cronies was much more serious than the silly clown show run by the looney lawyers led by Rudy Giuliani or Trump’s breathless fulminating about his “landslide” win being stolen from him. It turns out that the most alarming threat came from within the government itself and, had it succeeded, would have been the gravest constitutional crisis since the civil war.
According to notes turned over to the House Oversight Committee last week, after Attorney General Bill Barr left the Justice Department (DOJ) in late December of 2020, Trump pressured the Acting Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen to declare that “the election was corrupt and leave the rest to me and Republican congressmen.” In other words, Trump wanted the DOJ to back his Big Lie despite both Barr and Rosen telling him there was no fraud. (Trump even proclaimed, “you guys may not be following the Internet the way I do.”) David Laufman, a former senior Justice Department official, told the Washington Post:
“These notes reveal that a sitting president, defeated in a free and fair election, personally and repeatedly pressured Justice Department leaders to help him foment a coup in a last-ditch attempt to cling to power. And that should shock the conscience of every American, regardless of political persuasion.”
But it gets even worse.
ABC News published a draft of a letter prepared by a Trump loyalist in the DOJ named Jeffrey Clark, a faceless GOP lawyer who had previously worked in the Bush administration and had been the head of the DOJ’s civil division since September of 2020. On the same day that Trump was leaning on the acting AG to declare the election was “corrupt,” Clark circulated a letter addressed to Georgia’s GOP Gov. Brian Kemp and state legislative leaders, dishonestly claiming that the DOJ had “identified significant concerns that may have impacted the outcome of the election.” The letter recommended that the Georgia legislature “convene in special session so that its legislators are in a position to take additional testimony, receive new evidence, and deliberate on the matter.” Clark suggested in this letter that the legislature could refuse to accept the outcome of the election and select electors for Trump instead. This was the essence of the coup plot. According to NBC News, Clark had drafted similar letters to all six states that Trump was contending had been stolen: Arizona, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Nevada and Georgia.
Thankfully, Rosen and his deputy Richard Donoghue, who recorded these events and turned his notes over to Congress, rejected Clark’s outrageous attempts to overturn the election. But that was still not the end of it.
The New York Times reported last January that Trump had been introduced to Clark by a Pennsylvania politician who assured him that Clark was on the team. When Rosen rejected Clark’s attempt to use the DOJ to foment a coup by enlisting Trump loyalists in the state legislatures, Clark went directly to Trump. The president subsequently threatened to replace Rosen with Clark. He even convened what was described as a bizarre “Apprentice-like meeting” with the two men in the White House that lasted for hours. Evidently, Trump was only dissuaded from doing it when he was told that the entire top leadership of the DOJ would resign if he did. According to the Times, Trump worried that mass resignations would distract from his election fraud claims.
It’s easy to say now that “the system worked” but it was a very close thing, entirely dependent on the good faith actions of certain members of the government. What if Trump had gone ahead and made Clark the acting Attorney General and he had sent those letters to the state legislature basically giving a green light from the DOJ to overturn the election results and illegitimately put Trump back in the White House? It’s clear they were serious about doing it and even clearer that this inane notion of state electors constitutionally rejecting the will of the voters has seriously gained currency on the right. This is not the last we will hear of it.
And what of this man Jeffrey Clark, Trump’s willing accomplice in the attempted coup? Is there any accountability for him? Apparently not. He landed a cushy job as Chief of Litigation and Director of Strategy at the New Civil Liberties Alliance, a conservative-libertarian law firm. The conservative legal establishment takes care of its own — even when they plot to overthrow the government.
And there will almost certainly be a next time.
The New Yorker’s Jane Mayer recently reported on all the Big Money Republicans who are backing the “Stop the Steal” movement around the country. (It’s the usual suspects, proving once again that they are no more driven by principle and ideology than the average MAGA-hatted Trump fan.) She mentioned this in passing:
Few people noticed at the time, but in … Bush v. Gore, Chief Justice William Rehnquist, along with Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas, hinted at a radical reading of the Constitution that, two decades later, undergirds many of the court challenges on behalf of Trump. In a concurring opinion, the Justices argued that state legislatures have the plenary power to run elections and can even pass laws giving themselves the right to appoint electors. Today, the so-called Independent Legislature Doctrine has informed Trump and the right’s attempts to use Republican-dominated state legislatures to overrule the popular will. Nathaniel Persily, an election-law expert at Stanford, told me, “It’s giving intellectual respectability to an otherwise insane, anti-democratic argument.”
Jeffrey Clark was no rogue. He was doing a dry run for a coup long in the making.
Trumka ran the AFL-CIO with the same plainspokenness he displayed that day in TNR’s offices. In an October 2008 speech before the United Steelworkers in Las Vegas, he confronted head-on the racism of white union members who didn’t want to vote for Barack Obama. “There’s not a single good reason for any worker, especially any union member, to vote against Barack Obama,” he said. “And there’s only one really bad reason … and that’s because he’s not white.”
Trumka talked in that speech about going back to Nemacolin and hearing an elderly Democratic activist he knew say, “There’s no way that I’d ever vote for Obama.” When he asked why, she said, “Well, he’s Muslim.” Trumka told her Obama was a Christian, and anyway, “So what if he’s Muslim?” Then she said, “He won’t wear that American flag pin on his lapel.” Trumka pointed out that he wasn’t wearing one and neither was she, and that Obama had worn a flag lapel pin plenty of times. “Well, I just don’t trust him,” she said finally. He asked why not. “She drops her voice a bit. She said, ‘Because he’s Black.’”
Trumka told the woman to look around. This town is dying, he said. Our kids are moving away because there aren’t any jobs. Obama says he’ll fight for us. And you won’t vote for him because of his skin color? “Are you out of your ever-lovin’ mind, lady?”
“We can’t tap-dance around the fact that there’s a lot of folks out there just like that woman,” Trumka told the crowd. “And a lot of them are good union people.… Those of us who know better can’t afford to sit silently or look the other way while it’s happening.”
Eight years later, as rank-and-file union members flocked to Donald Trump, Trumka made clear not only that Trump wasn’t anyone the labor federation could support but also that he felt personal disgust for the man. “Trump wants to talk to people like you and me,” he said in January 2016, then recited instances of Trump’s amply documented bigotry and thuggery. “I’ve been around awhile,” Trumka said, “and I’ve heard that kind of thing before. Politicians trying to divide working people. Talking about us and them.”
Trumka was forthright to the end. On July 27, he was asked whether he supported a vaccine mandate. Many union leaders (including, surprisingly, the usually tough-minded Randi Weingarten of the American Federation of Teachers) have been hesitant to endorse such mandates, neglecting their responsibility to protect members’ health in deference to a few crank anti-vaxxers among the rank and file. Not Trumka. “Yes we do,” Trumka told C-SPAN. “If you come back in, and you’re not vaccinated, everybody in that workplace is jeopardized.” In the current climate, regrettably, a union leader who doesn’t dither about the need for vaccine mandates in the workplace is showing real gumption.
We need more leaders like Trumka but they are few and far between. Plain spoken truth tellers have a much better chance of penetrating the veil of conspiracies and propaganda the Big Money wingnuts have created to keep power and money to themselves.
A few neighbors attended the local school board meeting on Thursday. Not a mask in sight as a crowd protested a decision making face coverings mandatory for unvaccinated Buncombe County Schools staff and students when the school year begins on Aug. 23.
Aspiring thespian, Rep. Madison Cawthorn (R-N.C.) made a surpise appearance [timestamp 51:20]. The freshman congressman began his remarks by trolling school board members. Cawthorn seems to believe trolling is a congressperson’s primary job function.
Madison Cawthorn crashed the Buncombe, NC School Board meeting tonight and berated the members for passing a mask mandate: “You have sacrificed the social, emotional, and psychological development of our children on the altar of wokeness.” pic.twitter.com/zWEM9Ngn7B
MyPillow's CEO keeps pushing false claims about the 2020 election.
"No matter who says there was no widespread fraud in the election… Mike Lindell's conclusion is the same — they are all wrong," reports @DrewGriffinCNN. pic.twitter.com/NDHZY0BqL6
I was an election judge at 18. I’ve worked with/beside election officials for the last 9 cycles. Lindell is completely nuts. Still, I was ready to despair for my country last night.
But after a good night’s sleep, it’s back to work. It’s that or surrender.
Three prominent law professors, two of them former U.S. attorneys, described in the Washington Post Thursday actions taken by former president Donald J. Trump to subvert election results in multiple states that merit Department of Justice investigation as federal crimes. Laurence Tribe, Barbara McQuade, and Joyce White Vance argue that Attorney General Merrick Garland has a duty, at the very least, to investigate Trump based on information already in the public record. Not doing so would be “a grave mistake.”
Allowing the crimes of high-profile malefactors to go unpunished has a history in this country stretching from the end of the Confederacy through the Nixon and Reagan presidencies. Reluctance to prosecute those in the highest offices as well as in corner offices, one could argue, led to an attempted coup by Trump and the attack on the Capitol by domestic terrorists on Jan. 6. Trump was born into wealth that his whole life insulated him and his family from accountability. To restore some sense of “justice for all” requires an end to that Teflon streak. Not just for Trump, but for his kind.
That buck starts with Trump as a unique threat to this democratic republic. “Attempted coups cannot be ignored,” the trio write. As in, let Trump get away with it and he and his allies will try again.
Election law expert Rick Hasen worries that groundwork is underway for the next such election challenge.
Hasen told The New Yorker‘s Jane Mayer he is “scared shitless” about the array of new laws enacted in red states to empower legislatures to undertake not just vote suppression, but election subversion. “Election officials are being put in place who will mess with the count.”
Hasen writes at Slate, “Forget bonkers accusations about Italy using lasers to manipulate American vote totals and expect white-shoe lawyers with Federalist Society bona fides to argue next time about application of the “independent state legislature” doctrine in an attempt to turn any Republican presidential defeat into victory. “
Trump himself pointed to that prospect in his interview with the Washington Post’s Carol Leonnig and Phil Rucker for their book, “I Alone Can Fix It.” Other conservative operators sent the same signals via Mayer’s reporting, Hasen writes, including Leonard Leo, co-Chairman of the conservative Federalist Society:
So how does this argument work? Article II of the Constitution of the United States provides that state legislatures get to set the “manner” for choosing presidential elections. Similarly, Article I, section 4 gives the state “legislature” the power to set the time, place, and manner for conducting congressional elections, subject to congressional override. In practice, these clauses have been understood as allowing the legislature to set the ground rules for conducting the election, which are then subject to normal state processes: election administrators fix the details for administering the vote, state courts interpret the meaning of state election rules, and sometimes judges and officials decide when state rules violate state constitutional rights to vote.
For example, in the run-up to the 2020 election, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court decided that a state law requiring that mail-in ballots must arrive by Election Day to count violated the state constitution’s provisions protecting voting rights in light of the election being conducted during the pandemic. It extended the receipt of ballots by three days.
Republicans challenged that extension, arguing that the U.S. Constitution makes the legislature supreme, even if the state legislature would otherwise be violating the state constitution as determined by the state supreme court. This is the “independent state legislature” doctrine because it proposes that the legislature is supreme against all other actors that might run elections. This is a wacky theory of legislative power, but it is one that four Supreme Court justices (Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Clarence Thomas) expressed support for in various opinions during the 2020 elections, and it echoes an alternative argument that former Chief Justice William Rehnquist, joined by Justice Thomas and former Justice Antonin Scalia, made in the Bush v. Gore case ending the 2000 election and handing victory to Republican George W. Bush.
That argument failed in the Pennsylvania case, but the five or six conservatives on the Supreme Court might see it otherwise the next time Federalist lawyers present it, more carefully refined.
Now maybe the courts won’t bite on this theory—in 2020, Justice Kavanaugh seemed wary of the argument because it came very late in the process. But it might not take court involvement to create chaos and try to flip election results. A state legislature dominated by Republicans in a state won by Democrats could simply meet and declare that local administrators or courts have deviated from the legislature’s own rules, and therefore the legislature will take matters into its own hands and choose its own slate of electors.
Should Republicans control Congress in early 2024, they could well accept these arguments as they count Electoral College votes, even as such arguments were rejected by a Democratic-led Congress (over the objections of well over 100 Republican members of Congress) in 2020. They might try to count the votes from the state legislature rather than votes reflecting the people’s will. The independent state legislature argument—which would essentially overturn U.S. elections to make the loser the winner—would have an air of respectability that would not depend upon a claim that the election was rife with fraud or stolen, but that the actions of the state’s governor, or courts, or election administrators violated the Constitution by usurping the legislature’s rights. Again, all of this is scarily plausible.
Thus could end two and a half centuries of popular democracy.
Trump and his family business are already under investigation for financial crimes in New York City and state. But Trump and any co-conspirators must be held to account not just in the court of public opinion but, if justified, in federal courts. There is a slow-motion coup in the planning stages for the next presidential election Republicans lose, and popular democracy be damned.
Here’s an example of the “diseased immigrant” meme I wrote about during one of the many recent immigrant meltdowns:
The anti-immigrant protests in Murrieta, California last week brought the issue of Central American children flooding to the border to national attention. The influx of kids applying for asylum under a law signed by George W. Bush is becoming a humanitarian crisis, with services being stretched to the limit and calls for the children to be immediately deported back to their troubled homelands. It’s now the focus of intense political debate as the Republicans try to blame Obama and demand he use his executive powers to close the border. On Wednesday he threw the gauntlet back and requested that the House pass his emergency supplemental request to ease the social services on the border and pass the Senate comprehensive immigration reform bill. As of today, the stand-off continues.
But while the intense reaction among conservatives may seem to have only developed recently, it’s been simmering for some time on conservative media. Talk radio show hosts like Laura Ingraham had been demagoguing the issue for weeks, fulminating about the threat to America’s “way of life” and grumbling that the ungrateful tykes were complaining about the food, going so far as to mock them by playing the “Yo quiero Taco Bell” tag line. When the administration submitted a request for more funds to house and keep the children in temporary quarters, an “anti-amnesty” group was inspired to suggest sending their used underwear to save the government from having to procure any. The Koch-funded conservative blog American Prosperity Network issued shrill dispatches claiming that the influx of children on the border was an “orchestrated campaign” by the Democratic Party to draw government-dependent kids to the United States in order to steal jobs from Americans and add to their voter rolls. Republican luminaries such as possible presidential candidate and Texas Governor Rick Perry signed on to that conspiracy theory saying on ABC’s This Week, “I hate to be conspiratorial, but I mean how do you move that many people from Central America across Mexico and then into the United States without there being a fairly coordinated effort?”
But the controversy really boiled over with news reports last week that these children were “diseased” and were being shipped all over the nation, infecting Americans with everything from H1N1 flu to scabies to Cangas fever. Whatever other problems these people may have had with these children being allowed to seek asylum in America, it was now a public health threat.
The Drudge Report pulled out its trusty siren and blared that Border Patrol agents had tested positive for “diseases carried by immigrants.” Talk radio show host Bryan Fischer hysterically tweeted that 4 out of 5 border patrol agents were infected. (The report actually said “4 or 5” border patrol agents….) The Daily Beast, quoting anonymous sources, breathlessly reported that two children had tested positively for the H1N1 virus and erroneously proclaimed that it had been eradicated in the US until now. In fact, H1N1 is a common flu virus in the US and it is included in the flu vaccines for 2014. Nonetheless, the word went forth that the “pint-sized carriers” needed to be quarantined lest decent Americans be infected by deadly swine flu.
Michael Savage, the radio talk show host best known for being kicked off of television for telling a viewer that he hoped he would “get AIDS and die” has long been an advocate of closing the borders due to the threat of disease. He styles himself an “epidemiologist” but in reality has a Phd in a field called “ethnomedicine” which, according to Wikipedia, is “the study of traditional medicine practiced by various ethnic groups, and especially by indigenous peoples.” He spent years in the field of alternative medicine until his final health and nutrition manuscript (Immigrants and Epidemics) was rejected by publishers for being inflammatory and he turned full-time to right-wing radio. He is to epidemiology what far-right Christian historian David Barton is to American history: a quack. But that did not stop him from issuing a hysterical public health advisory:
Right now, you’re not going to hear this, but we have tuberculosis, hand-foot-and-mouth disease, Chagas disease – previously eradicated from Southern California – on the rise and testing positive in … Border Patrol agents,” Savage said.
Other diseases emerging among Border Patrol agents, he said, include H1N1 swine flu and chicken pox.
“The Border Patrol is being threatened with lawsuits and firing if they disclose this,” he said. “Congressmen are being turned away from the border as they go to investigate this surge of infected illegal aliens being thrown across the border at us.”
The rumors of agents and other caretakers being threatened with firing were given a full airing on Fox News after one of its online opinion writers published an overwrought report that a “government-contracted security force” at the border facilities had threatened doctors and nurses if they divulged any facts about the threat of an epidemic in the camps. Some of them came forward anyway, at what they perceived to be great risk to themselves because “taxpayers deserve to know about the contagious diseases and the risks the children pose to Americans.” They said these security forces called themselves the “Brown Shirts” and claimed, “It was a very submissive atmosphere. Once you stepped onto the grounds, you abided by their laws – the Brown Shirt laws…Everyone was paranoid. The children had more rights than the workers.”
These “brownshirts” turned out to be employees of the emergency management firm BCFS. They’ve been around since the ’40s, and if you’ve ever been through a natural disaster you’ve undoubtedly seen them. And what they were supposedly covering up was the fact that some of the kids had lice and strep throat as well as other childhood diseases and some mental and emotional issues. (One hopes they keep the brownshirts away from the average American elementary school. Those places are overrun with exactly the same problems.)
Unfortunately, this is a very old story, familiar to immigrants everywhere. Superstition and racial and ethnic hostility often lead people to blame them for disease epidemics and outbreaks regardless of the facts. Those who arrived at Ellis Island were subjected to crude medical examinations with those who were decreed to be disabled or diseased often denied entry. But the migrants who enter the US over its southern border have been subjected to especially terrible treatment over the years in the name of public health.
In fact, one of America’s most shameful episodes in its long history of immigrant mistreatment took place at the US Mexican border after 1917 when the federal government passed a new immigration act which for the first time placed harsh restrictions on immigration. New regulations required that inspectors bathe and “delouse” the migrants and fumigate all of their belongings before allowing them into the country. (This only applied to the “second class” migrants—it was estimated that at least 4 or 5 people were allowed in each day without having to pass medical inspection based on the inspector’s visual evaluation.)
These procedures were precipitated by a manufactured typhus scare. In the beginning, the Progressive mayor of El Paso, who had won his office promising to reform government by rooting out both corruption and the “lousy” immigrants, had proposed to quarantine all migrants to ensure they weren’t carrying typhus, a disease he was so phobic about that he wore silk underwear because he’d been told typhus could not survive in that material. He was overruled by a public health official with the compromise to bathe, delouse and fumigate.
In a famous act of civil disobedience, a 17-year-old maid from Juarez who crossed the border daily to clean American houses, led a large group of women to rebel against the humiliating process and confront the inspectors. It devolved into a riot appropriately called “The Bath Riots.” Unfortunately, it failed to change the process which remained in place for many decades.
The process was toxic in the extreme. It has been well known that the inspectors used DDT and other harsh pesticides directly on the migrants. They routinely poured gasoline on migrants’ bodies to kill lice resulting in episodes of human beings being accidentally set afire. And astonishingly, David Dorado Romo, in his book Ringside Seat to a Revolution: An Underground Cultural History of El Paso and Juarez, 1893-1923 revealed that he found evidence in the National Archives that one of the chemicals used was Zyclon-B, the deadly gas used by the Nazis in their WWII death camps. In fact, a letter from a German scientist in 1938 showed that the Germans were so impressed by America’s success with this fumigant that they adopted it for their own notorious use.
There is no evidence that these immigrants were ever carrying disease that did not already exist on the American side of the border. Indeed, it’s an absurd concept. The border is an imaginary line that germs and viruses do not acknowledge. It’s even more absurd today than it was then with travelers from all over the world flying into America and Americans traveling all over the world in massive numbers.
Needless to say, this behavior is an expression of xenophobia, not a fear of disease. It’s been used since time immemorial to characterize “the other” as a threat. It has been a fact of life along the United States’ southern border for nearly a century. But there’s a particular ugliness to this latest outbreak of nativism because the alleged carriers of disease are children who are escaping a violent and repressive environment, alone, without any support or guidance beyond their parents’ desperate instructions to try to make it to safety. To add to their burden with taunts of being foul and infectious is hideously cruel. It’s long past time for Americans to evolve and see these migrants as human beings. They are kids, not carriers of disease—just innocent kids, no different from yours or mine.
NPR did a nice historical rundown of the Reconciliation process which I thought you might be interested in. I wasn’t aware of the context for the Byrd rule myself and it’s kind of fascinating:
During the 93rd Congress (1973 to 1974), the House and Senate were busy bringing down President Richard Nixon. In addition to the impeachment process that would force Nixon to resign, Congress passed two landmark laws to limit his powers over the military and federal spending. Presidents have had to live with those laws ever since.
Among those engineering the War Powers Act and the Budget and Impoundment Control Act was the second-ranking Democrat in the Senate, Majority Whip Robert C. Byrd of West Virginia.
Then in his third term, Byrd had first been elected in 1958 and would be reelected eight times before his death in 2010. He remains the longest-serving senator in history.
But back in 1974, Byrd was among those convinced that Congress needed to reassert itself after letting presidents wage undeclared war in Vietnam and re-engineer domestic spending through the White House Office of Management and Budget.
Byrd supported the creation of standing budget committees in the House and Senate along with a Congressional Budget Office. There would be a congressional “budget resolution” to guide changes to revenue and spending, and a procedure to reconcile each year’s changes with existing appropriations law.
The Senate’s provision for extended debate, commonly known as the filibuster, had long been used to delay bills to death. So the Budget Act provided that, if necessary, the reconciliation bill would come to a floor vote in the Senate with no more than 20 hours of debate.
Without the threat of a filibuster, final passage needed only a simple majority. Like other Democrats at the time, Byrd hoped this would make Congress more agile in its struggles with the executive.
Along came Reagan
Ronald Reagan on the 1980 campaign trail with Paula Hawkins, then a Republican U.S. Senate candidate from Florida.
Reconciliation was not a big deal in its first years of existence, but it was brought to prominence after 1980 when newly elected President Ronald Reagan brought a new Republican majority to the Senate.
Reagan and Co. used reconciliation in their first budget season to slash taxes and domestic programs while increasing spending for defense, and Democrats who opposed the changes could not filibuster them in the Senate. (They passed in the House with the votes of Republicans and conservative Democrats, mostly from the South.)
This use of reconciliation continued through Reagan’s first term, and Senate Republicans used it for nonbudget items such as the size of federal commissions. At that point, Byrd rebelled and led a group of senators opposed to what he called “extraneous” provisions.
First used in 1985, and made permanent in 1990, the Byrd Rule allowed for any senator to raise a point of order against anything in reconciliation that was deemed extraneous. Defining extraneous was up to the Senate’s presiding officer in consultation with the Senate parliamentarian.
That definition, or the point of order itself, could only be overruled by a 60-vote supermajority. So, while not directly related to the filibuster, the Byrd Rule had the effect of restoring the Senate’s 60-vote threshold for legislative success on nonbudget measures.
There has been some talk about including the Voting Rights Bill in Reconciliation which they explain may not be possible. (That was my impression as well.)
Most of what has been proposed for this year’s reconciliation process, including the framework of Biden’s $3.5 trillion spending plan, would be described as relevant to revenues and spending.
But some have suggested that other urgent Democratic priorities be folded in, such as the voting rights protection bill known as the For the People Act.
Republicans who filibustered the legislation as a stand-alone bill this summer would surely raise a point of order against its inclusion in reconciliation.
Democrats would be hard-pressed to find the 10 votes from across the aisle they would need to prevail, at least as the bill is written now. Anything that passed muster with Democrats would be difficult to sell across the aisle in the current climate.
This strikes me as the better option although I don’t know if it will be possible either since His Majesty Joe of Manchin has said no — so fat:
In recent weeks, as the battle lines have hardened on the voting rights issue, some Democrats have argued for another route around the 60-vote obstacle.
House Majority Whip James Clyburn, a South Carolina Democrat, has suggested a “carve-out” might be created to enable this specific piece of legislation to reach the floor and ultimately become law.
Clyburn, who played a key role in Biden’s primary campaign and nomination in 2020, has urged the president to press for an exception to current Senate rules.
“My dad used to say to me: ‘Anything that’s happened before can happen again,’ ” Clyburn said, pointing to past exceptions and exhorting Biden to “call Joe Manchin.”
Manchin is the West Virginia Democrat elected to the Senate when Byrd died. Often seen as the most conservative Democrat in Congress, Manchin has repeatedly defended the filibuster as a guarantee of “involvement of the minority.”
This week, Manchin said he does not support a “carve-out” as proposed by Clyburn.
One big exception to the filibuster is, of course, reconciliation itself. But the 1974 act was enacted over Nixon’s veto and would have had plenty of votes to overcome a filibuster. That is not true of the voting rights legislation today, which would be subject to filibuster.
As an alternative, Clyburn has suggested the Senate could use the same procedure again that it used in 2013 when Nevada Democrat Harry Reid was the Senate majority leader. Frustrated by Republicans who had threatened to filibuster more than 100 nominations to executive positions during then-President Barack Obama’s second term, Reid used his majority to “establish a new precedent.”
Reid’s new precedent in essence barred filibusters on the confirmation of presidential appointees. It made an exception for Supreme Court nominees. But that exception was removed four years later when Republicans were in the majority and their leader, Mitch McConnell, extended Reid’s precedent to include the Supreme Court. It was no accident that all three of former President Donald Trump’s appointees to the high court were confirmed under this precedent.
So why not another “new precedent” for voting rights? It could happen, in theory, but it faces a far higher hurdle. Because, unlike the Reid and McConnell precedents, the “Clyburn carve-out” would enable passage of a piece of legislation.
“Any such exception would be a very unstable equilibrium and a first step down a quick road to full filibuster abolition,” said Molly Reynolds, senior fellow in governance studies at the Brookings Institution.
It would be the end of the filibuster — not just “as we know it,” but period.
That was the Rubicon both Reid and McConnell explicitly refused to cross and promised not to cross. It has also been called, in a more modern metaphor, the “nuclear option.” No leader to date has pushed a vote on this, in part, because none could be sure of the support of all his own party members.
After all, the Senate is still the Senate. Its rules and customs are rooted in its origins as a 26-member club with no parties and a penchant for individualism.
At a glacial pace, the chamber has inched toward simple majority rule. Cloture was established in 1917, creating a means for cutting off debate, and cloture got easier with the lower vote requirement in 1975.
But that led to its increased use, indeed almost casual reliance, on the threat to filibuster. Instead of there being a handful of filibusters in a two-year Congress, there are now scores of them. Senators threaten filibusters on virtually anything requiring a vote, and the 60-vote threshold has all but become the chamber’s defining feature.
No public vote has been taken on the question, but whichever party is in the minority can be assumed to oppose eliminating the filibuster. And at the present moment, Manchin is far from the only Democrat with doubts.
Life in the Senate without the filibuster would be much like life in the House, only with longer terms and much higher fundraising requirements.
So what? The Senate is a superfluous, undemocratic institution in which places with many fewer people get more representation. This would be an improvement.
The talking filibuster is talked up as a solution but I suspect it wouldn’t really make that much difference. But maybe …
Biden this summer has said the solution is to make the filibustering senators talk until they collapse, as was the custom in the 1950s and 1960s.
“People finally got tired of the talking and collapsing, and you could get to a vote on the bill,” Biden said.
That was the pressure, both physical and in terms of media and public attention, that finally brought the filibusters against civil rights legislation to an end, especially since C-SPAN began broadcasting Senate proceedings in 1985.
In the last half century, the threat to filibuster (sometimes called a virtual or silent filibuster) has proven a more durable and effective weapon. Television came to the Senate in the 1980s, and since then senators have used their right to extended debate occasionally to give what Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont has called “very long speeches.”
But when Republicans such as Ted Cruz of Texas or Rand Paul of Kentucky have gone on for hours, it has been for the purpose of calling attention to something or someone.
Biden’s suggestion, which has been made by others over the years, would be to require extended debate be done live and in color on the floor of the Senate for as many days and nights as necessary.
That might well bring the Senate to a full halt for months, but at least it would make clear who was responsible.
I’m for Clyburn’s solution for voting rights in the short term. I’m sure there are complications with it that we haven’t adequately thought through (such as what constitutes a “constitutional” issue) but it’s worth a try.
A Florida woman who has filed a lawsuit aimed at stopping airlines from implementing mask requirements for passengers has a long history of promoting bogus medical information — including claims that people would be healthier if they didn’t take antibiotics
The Tampa Bay Times reports that Tampa resident Sarah Pope this week joined a lawsuit this week filed against the Biden administration, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the Department of Health and Human Services that aims to overturn mask mandates on public transportation and major transportation hubs.
As the Tampa Bay Times notes, Pope publishes an “alternative medicine” blog and YouTube channel called “The Healthy Home Economist,” in which she pushes more “natural” remedies to health problems.
Among her more controversial positions is promoting a return to her grandparents’ generation’s ways of beating diseases without using antibiotics.
“When they got sick, they didn’t need the crutch of pharmaceuticals or antibiotics to get better,” she said in one video cited by the Tampa Bay Times. “They just got sick and they got well.”
The world has fought many battles against the novel coronavirus since January 2020, losing more than 4.2 million people and vanquishing some of its spread. But the war is still raging and will do so for a long time. I predicted early last year, in a best-case scenario, that we would face a 36-month battle before COVID-19 could be considered under human control. We are only now in month 19.
Sure enough, the United States is again awash in virus, with the incidence of new COVID-19 cases having soared 131 percent in the third week of July. To be clear, the vaccines available work well—especially the Pfizer and Moderna products based on mRNA technology. But it is likely that waning vaccine efficacy, coupled with a stubborn one-fifth of the adult population refusing any immunization, has opened the door for the dangerous mutant delta variant of SARS-CoV-2 to wreak havoc among the vaccinated and unvaccinated alike.
That’s why the United States is going to need a third dose of mRNA vaccines; for the nation’s older population, the triple play is already overdue. “I don’t see the virus just disappearing,” said Stanley Plotkin, considered the godfather of vaccinology. The University of Pennsylvania vaccine inventor and immunologist told me that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) should comply with requests from Pfizer, following Israel’s example, and immediately approve third-dose immunization for adults over the age of 60, with general triple dosing for all Americans to follow. I agree.
The World Health Organization (WHO) has voiced opposition to third dosing in richer nations before making primary doses available to billions of people in middle-income and poorer countries. It’s a completely reasonable point, both morally and strategically, in the war against COVID-19. But evidence now points in an alarming new direction, suggesting that fully vaccinated individuals can carry the delta variant in their noses and mouths, shedding in some cases just as much virus to infect others as do unvaccinated infected individuals.
Moreover, in the absence of fully effective vaccination of better than 75 percent of adults, a society may act as a herd of walking petri dishes, cultivating immune-escape mutant forms of SARS-CoV-2—that is, mutants that evade existing vaccines. The vaccine that rolls out tomorrow in a poorer country may have already been rendered less effective by its prior inadequate, or incorrect, use in richer countries.
Urgent action is required from the FDA, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), and their counterparts in Europe, Canada, and other parts of the world that have already widely administered vaccines. And recommending the usage of masks, while necessary, is no longer enough. The message must be that if you’ve had a second shot, it’s time to start planning to get a third.
I’m ready and willing to get shots any time they are necessary and will do whatever it takes to get one. I’ve been worried about the virus evolving from the beginning and it’s the main practical, if not moral, reason for having everyone vaccinated. We are walking petri dishes providing opportunity for this deadly bug to get worse and worse.
We need a WWII level global program to knock this thing out or we’re going to be stuck with it for a long time to come. If the wingnuts are worried about losing their “way of life” they should be looking at this rather than taco trucks on every corner and doing what’s necessary to deal with it.
Forget the self-aggrandizing PR. Republicans don’t believe in free markets, small government, family values or personal responsibility. Prostrating themselves before Donald Trump, the amoral and unscupulous, demonstrates that that was all a fraud. This came as a shock to movement conservatives who had bought their own BS about their party’s principles since at least the Reagan administration. It was what they were selling. They thought it’s what their voters were buying. Then came Trump.
Rick Wilson toldReason in 2018, “We are no longer a party that believes in fiscal discipline. We are increasingly a party that doesn’t believe in the law. And we’re less and less a party that thinks that conservatism is about principles and policies, and more about a man and a mob.” We saw both in all their glory on Jan. 6, 2021. Investigations and prosecutions are ongoing.
Paul Krugman appeared on MSNBC Wednesday night to discuss why in Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’s assessment defending freedom — as in the “radical left” is coming for yours — takes precedence over protecting his consituents’ lives. The “freedom of the grave,” as Hayes put it.
The radical right, Krugman noted in his column, sees wearing masks or getting vaccinated as matters of personal choice. So is driving drunk, he allows. There are laws and penalties for making that choice. So why not similar concern over pandemic-related choices that put others at risk?
My answer is that when people on the right talk about “freedom” what they actually mean is closer to “defense of privilege” — specifically the right of certain people (generally white male Christians) to do whatever they want.
Not incidentally, if you go back to the roots of modern conservatism, you find people like Barry Goldwater defending the right of businesses to discriminate against Black Americans. In the name of freedom, of course. A lot, though not all, of the recent panic about “cancel culture” is about protecting the right of powerful men to mistreat women. And so on.
Once you understand that the rhetoric of freedom is actually about privilege, things that look on the surface like gross inconsistency and hypocrisy start to make sense.
Why, for example, are conservatives so insistent on the right of businesses to make their own decisions, free from regulation — but quick to stop them from denying service to customers who refuse to wear masks or show proof of vaccination? Why is the autonomy of local school districts a fundamental principle — unless they want to require masks or teach America’s racial history? It’s all about whose privilege is being protected.
Thus, cruise ship companies are prohibited in Ron DeSantis’s Florida from requiring their passengers to have vaccinations, prohibited not only from protecting their customers but from protecting their businesses. No choice for you!
Of all the hills to die on, Krugman observed last night, you have a right to endanger other people’s health is a demented one.
Dante Atkins’s comment on Shontel Brown’s primary win Tuesday over Nina Turner in Ohio reminds us again that the self interest motivating people not always involves money:
Example infinity that intentionally antagonizing people because your base thralls to it is maybe not the best way to win elections https://t.co/m5ljEl8h0q
It is the same reason telling conservative-leaning voters that they are “voting against their best interests” gets under my skin. It’s a lefty dog whistle for “stupid” that others hear loud and clear. Right before smart lefties ask for their votes and wonder why they are rebuffed. (And an attitude unwelcome on my canvass.)
Some people value their privilege over cash. Protecting that in their minds is their best interest.
