Month: September 2021

It isn’t just happening in Texas or among wingnuts coddling their Dear Leader with frivolous lawsuits. Unsurprisingly, fun manufacturers are also behaving like thugs:

Gun company Remington has subpoenaed the report cards, attendance records, and disciplinary records of five kindergarten and first grade students murdered in the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting, according to new court filings in a civil lawsuit filed against the company. 

“In mid-July, the defense served a subpoena on the Newton Public School District seeking: ‘Any and all educational records in your possession including but not limited to, application and admission paperwork, attendance records, transcripts, report cards, disciplinary records, correspondence and any and all other educational information and records pertaining to’ each of the five first-graders whose Estates are plaintiffs in this case,” according to the motion filed today that sought to protect the victims’ families from further subpoenas. “There is no conceivable way that these [records] will assist Remington in its defense, and the plaintiffs do not understand why Remington would invade the families’ privacy with such a request. Nonetheless, this personal and private information has been produced to Remington.”

In addition, Remington subpoenaed employment records of four teachers who were killed in the shooting, in which a total of 20 children and six adults died. Some of the parents of the Sandy Hook victims have been suing the weapons manufacturer since 2014, alleging that the gun manufacturer advertised its line of semi-automatic weapons to civilians. Remington previously responded to a discovery request for its internal company communications by producing more than 18,000 unsorted files containing memes, cartoons, and ice bucket challenge videos.

“We have no explanation for why Remington subpoenaed the Newtown Public School District to obtain the kindergarten and first grade academic, attendance and disciplinary records of these five school children,” Josh Koskoff, one of the lawyers representing the Sandy Hook parents, told Motherboard. “The records cannot possibly excuse Remington’s egregious marketing conduct, or be of any assistance in estimating the catastrophic damages in this case. The only relevant part of their attendance records is that they were at their desks on December 14, 2012.”

I find it hard to believe that they are going to try to make the case that the tiny children and their teachers were a threat and were asking for it. It’s sheer intimidation, nothing more. They’re just causing even more senseless pain because they can. Horrifying.

This by JV Last in his newsletter contains important news that shows just what morons the right wing anti-maskers really are:

The COVID deniers simultaneously insisted that:It was proven that masks didn’t retard the spread of COVID.All of those studies showing the effectiveness of masks weren’t conclusive enough. They didn’t really prove anything with perfect epistemic certitude.

And that was all on top of the “I won’t wear your slave mask” / “let’s trigger the libs” performative mask refusals.The “there’s no settled science” on masks stuff was always bs. There were enough studies showing that masks provided at least some protection that anyone claiming otherwise was cherry picking in order to reach a preferred conclusion.

But now even that fig leaf has been removed.

Pardon me for saying so, but: No shit? The sky is blue.2+2=4. And wearing masks slows the spread of the respiratory virus COVID-19.If you want some of the details, here they are:

The researchers enrolled nearly 350,000 people from 600 villages in rural Bangladesh. Those living in villages randomly assigned to a series of interventions promoting the use of surgical masks were about 11% less likely than those living in control villages to develop COVID-19, which is caused by infection with the SARS-CoV-2 virus, during the eight-week study period.

The protective effect increased to nearly 35% for people over 60 years old.

Providing free masks, informing people about the importance of covering both the mouth and nose, reminding people in-person when they were unmasked in public, and role-modeling by community leaders tripled regular mask usage compared with control villages that received no interventions, the researchers found. . .

“Our study is the first randomized controlled trial exploring whether facial masking prevents COVID-19 transmission at the community level,” Styczynski said. “It’s notable that even though fewer than 50% of the people in the intervention villages wore masks in public places, we still saw a significant risk reduction in symptomatic COVID-19 in these communities, particularly in elderly, more vulnerable people.” . . .

There were significantly fewer COVID-19 cases in villages with surgical masks compared with the control villages. (Although there were also fewer COVID-19 cases in villages with cloth masks as compared to control villages, the difference was not statistically significant.) This aligns with lab tests showing that surgical masks have better filtration than cloth masks.

However, cloth masks did reduce the overall likelihood of experiencing symptoms of respiratory illness during the study period.Wearing masks protects people from COVID. Even if not everyone is doing it.

As of today, the official count is that 642,451 Americans have died from COVID. The real total—which we probably won’t piece together for another year or two—will be much higher.

And to every asshat who refused to wear a mask, who bullied people trying to do the right thing, who contorted the data and evidence with bad-faith mock seriousness, who posed and preened about how they weren’t going to wear a damn mask . . .

https://twitter.com/JoshMandelOhio/status/1399886781189853186?s=20

(That guy is currently the GOP frontrunner for the Ohio Senate seat.)

To all of those people: You did this.

A mea culpa from the anti-maskers wouldn’t make up for the death they helped spread. But it’d be nice all the same. At least it would be a signal that they acknowledge that they’ve been wrong and had remorse.I’m not holding my breath.

Here’s a good explainer by Ian Millhiser on the Texas abortion atrocity:

Allowing a law to stand that violates the Supreme Court’s 1992 Planned Parenthood v. Casey decision means that the constitutional right to an abortion is effectively dead. States now have the power to ban abortion for the first time since the Roe v. Wade ruling was handed down in 1973.

While it is theoretically possible that the Court could reverse course in subsequent litigation and strike down SB 8, the sort of justices who would allow such a law to take effect are exceedingly unlikely to do so. And the Court is already planning to hear a case in its next term, Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, which it can use to overrule Roe explicitly.https://71efe1b4f27048570c4dc4d1ae291707.safeframe.googlesyndication.com/safeframe/1-0-38/html/container.html

The right to an abortion was killed in a one-paragraph order in a case that arose on the Supreme Court’s “shadow docket,” a mix of emergency motions and other decisions that receive only cursory briefing and no oral argument. The justices took action after considering the case for less than three days.

Whole Woman’s Health, in other words, is a sea change in the Court’s approach to not only abortion rights but also all other litigation.

The Court has now signaled that it will permit states to enact laws that were intentionally drafted to frustrate judicial review, at least if a majority of the Court agrees with what that law is trying to accomplish. And it handed down one of the most monumental decisions of our era — a decision effectively overturning Roe v. Wade — in a shadow docket order that offers virtually no reasoning.

The reason why SB 8 can only be enforced by private lawsuits brought by individuals who are not employed by the state of Texas is that this structure makes it very difficult to challenge the law in federal court.

Under a doctrine known as “sovereign immunity,” private parties typically cannot sue states directly. In Ex Parte Young (1908), however, the Supreme Court held that a private party who wishes to block a state law may sue the state officer charged with enforcing that law. So, for example, if Texas had enacted a law permitting its attorney general to prosecute abortion providers, an abortion provider could sue the attorney general in federal court and seek a court order blocking that law.

But SB 8 states that it “shall be enforced exclusively through … private civil actions.” State officers and employees are explicitly forbidden from enforcing the law. So, it’s not at all clear who the appropriate defendant is in a federal lawsuit attempting to block SB 8.

It’s worth noting that, even after the Supreme Court’s decision that effectively endorses this method of dodging judicial review, abortion providers still have a way to challenge the state law. They can violate it, wait for someone to sue them, and then argue in that lawsuit that SB 8 is unconstitutional.

But here’s the rub: Under SB 8, “any person” except for a state employee may bring a lawsuit against an abortion provider. That lawsuit may be filed in any number of different Texas state courts, including a trial court in the same county where the plaintiff resides (assuming the plaintiff lives in Texas).

That means anyone who is even suspected of performing an abortion after the sixth week of pregnancy can be hauled into court at any time, in nearly any venue in the state, and potentially by hundreds or even thousands of different litigants. The abortion provider will then have to hire a lawyer and defend itself against all of those lawsuits. And if it loses just one, it will have to pay a bounty of “not less than $10,000 for each abortion that the defendant performed or induced in violation of this subchapter.”

It’s worth emphasizing the words “not less than.” A judge with particularly strong anti-abortion views might award a bounty of $20,000, or $50,000, or $18 million.

The law also subjects anyone who “aided or abetted” an abortion after the sixth week of pregnancy to similar penalties — a term that’s not defined in the statute but could be construed to endanger parties who have exceedingly loose ties to an abortion clinic. As NYU School of Law professor Melissa Murray recently noted, even an Uber driver who gives a pregnant woman a ride to a clinic may be vulnerable to suit.

SB 8, in other words, is likely to subject abortion providers (and maybe even Uber drivers) to a blizzard of lawsuits that they cannot possibly afford to defend themselves against, even if they ultimately prevail in each case. And should an abortion provider lose even one case, they could face truly draconian financial sanctions.

For these reasons, many abortion clinics in Texas have simply stopped providing abortions. As Justice Stephen Breyer notes in his dissenting opinion, “One of the clinic applicants has stated on its website that ‘[d]ue to Texas’ SB 8 law,’ it is ‘unable to provide abortion procedures at this time.’” Others may try to provide abortions prior to the sixth week of pregnancy, but they do so at tremendous risk.

The law normally prevents situations like this by allowing a party who faces an imminent risk of legal harm to sue to block a law before it is brought to bear against them. But, of course, SB 8 was drafted to frustrate such lawsuits. And the Supreme Court has now endorsed Texas’s effort to frustrate a pre-enforcement lawsuit.

He goes on to explain how this law was specifically designed to avoid judicial review, which is one of the most astonishingly radical things about it. And we might hope that Democrats would use the logic (if you want to call it that) to fashion similar laws to effect outcomes that they support as well, if only to show the Court that they have opened Pandora’s Box.

Unfortunately:

There’s also a profound practical reason why the Supreme Court should not bless laws like SB 8 — and why it almost certainly would not bless a similar law that applied to a topic other than abortion.

Imagine, for example, that New York passed a law permitting “any person” to sue gun owners and collect a $10,000 bounty from those gun owners. Or, for that matter, imagine if a state allowed anyone to file a lawsuit against Justice Samuel Alito, seeking a $10,000 bounty every time Alito used the word “the.”

Does anyone think this Supreme Court would rule that a law authorizing thousands of harassment suits against gun owners is compatible with the Second Amendment? Or that it would force those gun owners to hire lawyers and litigate a seemingly endless stream of lawsuits to avoid paying a bounty?

Similarly, does anyone think this Court would allow one of its own members to be bombarded with lawsuits whose sole purpose is to hound him and impoverish him with legal fees?

With their decision in Whole Woman’s Health, the justices have unleashed a monster. If taken seriously, that decision would allow any state to subject any person or institution to an overwhelming wave of lawsuits that they cannot possibly defend against. SB 8 is a direct attack on the rule of law and the principle that everyone should have their day in court before they are punished by the state.

It’s an attack on the 14th Amendment, which provides that no state may “deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law.”

But, of course, if a state were to target gun owners, or Alito, or anyone else the Supreme Court’s most conservative justices approve of, the Court would almost certainly step in to protect a conservative litigant. Just last month, in Chrysafis v. Marks, the Supreme Court blocked part of New York state’s eviction moratorium because it “denies the landlord a hearing” before that landlord is required to house an unwanted tenant.

The Supreme Court is quite protective of due process — when the right litigant seeks the Court’s protection. One of the most disturbing things about Whole Woman’s Health is that it suggests the Court has abandoned its most fundamental principle: equal justice under law.

There is no appeal beyond the Supreme Court. This majority of radical wingnuts can do as they please. Get ready for a very bumpy ride.

As it turns out, a majority of the country does.

You know doubt already know that the far right Trump Supreme Court majority refused to block the grotesque Texas abortion law late last night. But here’s a dry news report about it just in case:

Texas lawmakers wrote the law to evade federal court review by allowing private citizens to bring civil lawsuits in state court against anyone involved in an abortion, other than the patient. Other abortion laws are enforced by state and local officials, with criminal sanctions possible.

In contrast, Texas’ law allows private citizens to sue abortion providers and anyone involved in facilitating abortions. Among other situations, that would include anyone who drives a woman to a clinic to get an abortion. Under the law, anyone who successfully sues another person would be entitled to at least $10,000.

In her dissent, Justice Elena Kagan called the law “patently unconstitutional,” saying it allows “private parties to carry out unconstitutional restrictions on the State’s behalf.” And Justice Stephen Breyer said a “woman has a federal constitutional right to obtain an abortion during” the first stage of pregnancy.

After a federal appeals court refused to allow a prompt review of the law before it took effect, the measure’s opponents sought Supreme Court review.

In a statement early Thursday after the high court’s action, Nancy Northup, the head of the Center for Reproductive Rights, which represents abortion providers challenging the law, vowed to “keep fighting this ban until abortion access is restored in Texas.”

“We are devastated that the Supreme Court has refused to block a law that blatantly violates Roe v. Wade. Right now, people seeking abortion across Texas are panicking — they have no idea where or when they will be able to get an abortion, if ever. Texas politicians have succeeded for the moment in making a mockery of the rule of law, upending abortion care in Texas, and forcing patients to leave the state — if they have the means — to get constitutionally protected healthcare. This should send chills down the spine of everyone in this country who cares about the constitution,” she said.

Texas has long had some of the nation’s toughest abortion restrictions, including a sweeping law passed in 2013. The Supreme Court eventually struck down that law, but not before more than half of the state’s 40-plus clinics closed.

It won’t just be Texas. In fact, Florida wingnuts are already excited about it:

That might not work out as they plan it:

The same old divide.

New numbers from our most recent NBC poll show a majority of Americans — 54 percent — believe that abortion should be legal in all or most cases.

That includes clear majorities of women, young Americans, whites with college degrees and those living in the suburbs.

But majorities and pluralities of evangelical Christians, rural Americans, older Americans and southerners say that abortion should be illegal in all or most cases.

Here are the numbers:

All adults: 54 percent legal, 42 percent illegal (was 44 percent legal, 54 percent illegal in 2003)

18-34: 65 percent legal, 32 percent illegal

65+: 48 percent-49 percent

18-44: 60 percent-37 percent

60+: 48 percent-49 percent

Whites: 51 percent-46 percent

Blacks: 55 percent-39 percent

Latinos: 63 percent-35 percent

Men: 49 percent-47 percent

Women: 59 percent-38 percent

Whites with college: 60 percent-37 percent

Whites without college: 46 percent-50 percent

Urban: 65 percent-34 percent

Suburban: 54 percent-42 percent

Rural: 33 percent-63 percent

Northeast: 65 percent-34 percent

Midwest: 49 percent-48 percent

South: 43 percent-52 percent

West: 65 percent-31 percent

Evangelicals: 26 percent-70 percent

Non-evangelicals: 65 percent-32 percent

Once again, a minority of the country — white, rural,(fake) evangelical, mostly male, right wingers rule our world, aided and abetted by cynical politicians who are happy to tear the country to pieces if that’s what it takes.

I do not know if this assault on women’s basic human rights will motivate people to vote in 2022. It has tended to only motivate the right in the past. Democrats have tended to see it as a niche issue (after all, it only affects everyone, especially the 60% of their voters who happen to be female) so there’s no need to put it at the top of the agenda with the vaunted kitchen table issues. But maybe things have changed. It may motivate the young and the suburban white people they need to win elections but they have to actually try.

By the way, if anyone thinks that monster women’s march in 2017 wasn’t fundamentally about this, they need to think again. We all knew that Trump’s win meant the Supreme Court majority was gone and with it, abortion rights.

I’m speaking of Kevin McCarthy, of course:

The congressional committee spearheading an inquiry into January’s Capitol riot has asked 35 technology firms and 15 social media companies to preserve the phone and document records of 11 far-right members of Congress—and Republican Rep. Kevin McCarthy (CA) isn’t happy about it. On Tuesday, the House minority leader took to Twitter to threaten companies who might be tempted to cooperate. “If these companies comply with the Democrat order to turn over private information, they are in violation of federal law and subject to losing their ability to operate in the United States,” he wrote, failing to cite which law he meant.

McCarthy’s protestations were “typical of somebody who may or may not have been involved in Jan. 6,” the chairman of the committee told The New York Times in an interview, “and doesn’t want that information to become public.” The panel has not yet asked to preserve McCarthy’s records. But the unholy conglomerate of Republicans whose records the committee is interested in reviewing does include some of the usual marquee names: Reps. Matt Gaetz (R-FL), Madison Cawthorn (R-NC), Majorie Taylor Greene (R-GA), Jim Jordan (R-OH), and Scott Perry (R-PA), among others. These members of Congress, chummy Trump confidantes, were all involved in some way in the Stop the Steal rally that preceded the riot, whether attending, organizing, or promoting it.

Charlie Sykes newletter has this on the subject:

As you know, on Tuesday, Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy threatened retaliation against telecom companies who complied with requests for information from the House Select January 6 Committee. If they cooperated with the investigation, McCarthy warned, “a Republican majority will not forget.”

Since we are deep into legal analysis this morning, I wanted to share an email from a savvy reader:

Charlie – I was a high level federal prosecutor for a long time and I head the white collar practice at an AMLAW100 firm.  What the minority leader did looks to me to be a crime – obstructing the investigation of a congressional committee.  See 18 USC 1505 and 1515.  

Section 1505 of Title 18, United States Code, as amended by the Victim and Witness Protection Act of 1982, forbids anyone from corruptly, or by threats of force or by any threatening communication, influencing, obstructing, or impeding any pending proceeding before a department or agency of the United States, or Congress. In 1996 Congress enacted a clarifying amendment to 18 U.S.C. § 1515, which defines the term “corruptly” as used in section 1505 to mean “acting with an improper purpose, personally or by influencing another, including making a false or misleading statement, or withholding, concealing, altering, or destroying a document or other information.” False Statements Accountability Act of 1996, Pub. L. No. 104-292, §3, 110 Stat. 3459, 3460.

And see this for part of the DOJ’s own manual on this subject.  

The omnibus clause of 18 U.S.C. § 1505 parallels its counterpart in 18 U.S.C. § 1503 in language and purpose, and most of the law construing the latter is applicable to the former. Generally, a defendant may be found guilty under section 1505 if the government establishes that: (1) there was a proceeding pending before a department or agency of the United States; (2) the defendant knew of or had a reasonably founded belief that the proceeding was pending; and (3) the defendant corruptly endeavored to influence, obstruct, or impede the due and proper administration of the law under which the proceeding was pending. United States v. Price, 951 F.2d 1028, 1030-31 (9th Cir. 1991); United States v. Sprecher, 783 F. Supp. 133, 163 (S.D.N.Y. 1992).

I am not seeing an easy out for McCarthy on this.  I assume he will say his intention is not corrupt, but corrupt is interpreted to mean deliberately counseling witnesses to withhold documents without a good faith privilege, and instead to block the committee from getting the requested information.  McCarthy is a bit of a lunk, and he may well have stepped in it here.  I’m sure Merrick Garland has noticed. 

Maybe Kim Wehle has a take on this.  

[Name withheld]

I thought that was a good suggestion, so I forwarded the email to our resident constitutional scholar. Wehle responded:

Charlie,

I agree and Garland needs to step up soon. The inaction and unaccountability breeds more criminal activity. 

Kim

I wish I felt confident that this would happen. But I don’t. It’s pretty clear that we have decided Republicans are allowed to obstruct justice, particularly when it comes to blatant witness tampering and intimidation. Donald Trump showed that. So I doubt that McCarthy will be held responsible.

The good news is that the first time a Democrat tries anything close to this the law will come down on them like a ton of bricks in order to show regular people they can’t get away with doing it. They have to make an example of someone.

“We don’t take them by their word alone but by their actions,” President Biden said on Tuesday. “Them” being the Taliban. Democrats expecting to be taken at their word instead of their actions, take heed.

Words won’t cut it any more than Susan Collins’s “concern” or the Roberts Supreme Court’s “serious questions” about the constitutionality of the Texas law that effectively bans abortion and shows other Republican-controlled states how it’s done.

Dahlia Lithwick is done with words:

To President Joe Biden, and the Democrats who are madly tweeting that they are fighting to defend abortion rights in Texas, one does want to know what that looks like, beyond tweeting that you are fighting to defend abortion rights in Texas. What exactly is the plan here? The Presidential Commission on the Supreme Court of the United States is not about to reinstate the rule of law in Texas.

So, now what? I and others want to know what to do about a court that has “become terrifyingly adept” at “judging between the raindrops” and outside of public view via the shadow docket.

Lithwick recommends (in a dispatch written before the court’s opinion filed last night):

[T]he only things to do now are work to protect the vote and fix the courts—the boring tedious work that also happens outside the spotlight and beneath the fold. If the systemic machinery of justice isn’t immediately repaired, what happens in the shadows is going to keep catching us off guard, late at night, while we struggle to decide if Roe was overruled this week, or nullified, or merely paused for a few million people. Until the courts do their work in the open, according to the agreed-upon rules of the road, this slow erosion of the rule of law is always going to occur between the raindrops, and we’re going to feel surprised and powerless every single time.

Much of the work of politics is boring and tedious and outside the spotlight. Activists who prefer noisy protests in the streets have trouble seeing that Democrats “doing something” is not always noisy and public. Backchannel work often is more effective than showing out. Because you don’t see it does not mean something is not happening. And yet….

The problem now is that angry, noisy, and red-faced gets headlines above the fold where influencers see and feel it. Public pressure works. Especially in an era in which Republicans work feverishly in public to neuter election results and to threaten violence if they don’t get their way. Ask school board members worn down by shouts and threats if public pressure works.

But like the Civil Rights movement of over a half-century ago, how and where to apply public pressure matters. Voting rights activists had a disciplined strategy that depended on their opponents getting loud enough and angry enough in public to awaken the American conscience in revulsion. To date, Americans in what’s left of the mainstream are merely fed up. And whether the left has the stomach to renew its 1960s defense of democracy (or to invent a modern version) remains an open question.

Fed up won’t be enough to defeat what has become a creeping fifth column.

It took images of police clubs, dogs and firehoses turned on peaceful civil rights marchers in the 1960s to prick the conscience of the country. In 2021, it is not clear the country has any conscience left to prick. Almost half of the country has rejected democracy itself. Those who throw the loudest tantrums will have their way or else. They have become the mob the founders feared.

In a sane world, in a mature world, men and women would be too humiliated to be seen behaving in public as we see angry conservatives behave at school board meetings, in grocery stores, in parking lots, and on the grounds of the U.S. Capitol. But this world is neither sane nor mature. At least, not theirs.

Dana Milbank writes at the Washington Post that Texas has become the bellwether state for what the collapse of the American system of laws will look like.

“My body, my choice” shout angry antivaxxers in a state that allows women no choice over theirs. The state’s Rube Goldberg-esque ban on abortions after six weeks went into effect on Wednesday with no Supreme Court standing up to defend women’s rights.

On Wednesday as well, the state’s permitless carry law took effect, allowing all Texans to own guns and “to carry them in public, without a license and without training.” As if red-faced Covid spreaders needed more to signal what they’ll do if they don’t get their way. Twenty states now have similar laws, Milbank adds:

And on Tuesday, the Texas legislature passed the final version of the Republican voting bill that bans drive-through and 24-hour voting, both used disproportionately by voters of color; imposes new limits on voting by mail, blocks election officials from distributing mail-ballot applications unless specifically requested; gives partisan poll watchers more leeway to influence vote counting; and places new rules and paperwork requirements that deter people from helping others to vote or to register. At least 17 states have adopted similar restrictions.

Polling indicates majorities of Texans oppose the abortion ban and open carry. Pluralities —especially among Black and Latino voters — oppose the restrictions on drive-through voting and voting hours. But serving the needs of the majority of citizens is not the conservative program, if ever it was. Texas is said not to be red state, but a nonvoting state. That’s the way White voters in this “majority minority” state like it. And they mean to keep it that way.

The usually ironic Milbank declares that “unless we mobilize to arrest the Republicans’ destruction of democracy,” Texas is what lies ahead for us all.

But the looming question is who is “we”? Civil rights marchers mobilized by SNCC, Martin Luther King, and others, many of them people of faith and young people, had the fortitude and conviction to face down police dogs and firehoses to demand their share of the American Dream. Today, that dream lies in tatters or has evaporated like the illusion always it was for so many. Rev. Dr. William J. Barber II carries on King’s tradition, but there are too few people of faith these days to join him. “Faith” as practiced by the right amounts to white Christian nationalism. The young people of King’s generation are now pensioners and for most the fire in their bellies has gone out. The young today have little reason to fight for an America that, as the Supreme Court just demonstrated, will not fight for them.

The American right is driven by grievance. Does the American left have the stomach left to oppose them?

DKos’s Joan McCarter issues the cri-de-guerre:

The Supreme Court just made it absolutely clear that they’re ready to toss the one thing Democrats have been running on since 1973, the year Roe v. Wade was decided—protecting women’s right to choose an abortion and have control over their own bodies. By refusing to act to uphold Roe in Texas, the conservative majority played their hand. Without a signed order, with no action whatsoever, they’ll be able to show us what they are capable of doing in session when they hear a case from Mississippi this fall.

Any one of the conservative six could have intervened and asked Justice Samuel Alito to grant the application of Texas abortion providers to at least temporarily halt the most restrictive abortion law in the nation from going into effect. None did. And what we get from President Biden is a statement saying, “My administration is deeply committed to the constitutional right established in Roe v. Wade nearly five decades ago and will protect and defend that right.”

He’ll defend a right that has literally just been taken away in Texas.  How, President Biden? How are you going to stop Texas? How are you going to stop every single red state in the nation from passing that exact same bill and the Supreme Court allowing it? How?

Those questions go for House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, too.

Every woman, everywhere has the constitutional and moral right to basic reproductive health care. We will fight SB8 and all immoral and dangerous attacks on women’s health and freedoms with all our strength.

— Nancy Pelosi (@SpeakerPelosi) September 1, 2021

And Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer.

The Supreme Court’s decision to do nothing and let this appalling Texas law go into effect is an effort to rip away women’s rights, health, and reproductive freedoms.

This fight is only just beginning. Democrats will fight against #SB8 and for Roe v. Wade.

— Chuck Schumer (@SenSchumer) September 1, 2021

We’re “fighting,” they say. So do all the Democratic lawmakers (except Kyrsten Sinema and Joe Manchin, who are remarkably silent on the issue on Twitter). Like Sens. Patty Murray, Tina Smith, Catherine Cortez Masto, Tammy Baldwin, Maggie Hassan, Elizabeth Warren, Ron Wyden, Michael Bennet, Raphael Warnock . . . you get the idea. All of them are talking about “fighting” to “defend the right” that the Supreme Court just effectively ended.

Worse, the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee released a statement about how it intends to campaign on the issue. “This attack on women’s health care is a powerful reminder of the stakes in next year’s election—and why we must defend a Democratic Senate majority with the power to confirm or reject Supreme Court justices.”
 

Here’s a suggestion to the DSCC: Don’t run on the promise to do something. DO IT and RUN ON WHAT YOU JUST DID. To wit, the senator who gets it right:

Expand the Supreme Court.

— Ed Markey (@SenMarkey) September 1, 2021

So does Rep. Mondaire Jones:

Talk is cheap. To protect reproductive rights once and for all, we must #ExpandTheCourt.

— Mondaire Jones (@MondaireJones) September 1, 2021

They’ve got the legislation to do just that, legislation that hasn’t got a floor vote in the House and will require ending the filibuster in the Senate to pass.

That will take the full commitment from Joe Biden, from Nancy Pelosi, from Chuck Schumer, and every single Democrat who insists that they are fighting to stop talking and start doing. If it means threatening committee assignments and campaign help to Manchin, Sinema, and whoever is fighting filibuster reform, so be it. Put them on defense. All those other Democrats who keep insisting they’re fighting aren’t off the hook either. They need to be fully engaged in pressuring an end to the filibuster and expanding the Supreme Court.

The court has been spending the last few weeks showing the nation, and Democrats, exactly how dangerous it is. They struck down the Biden administration’s eviction moratorium in another unsigned shadow docket decision. That followed the precedent-breaking order from the court attempting to direct Biden’s foreign policy and force him to retain Trump’s cruel Remain in Mexico policy. And finally, this. Killing Roe and Casey from the shadows by simply refusing to act.

The Supreme Court has to be reformed, and it has to be expanded, period. Biden and Schumer, and  Pelosi have to do everything in their power to make that happen. What’s the point of having control of the House, the Senate, and the White House, along with the biggest bully pulpit in the world, if you won’t use it to secure the future of democracy? Because if they don’t, if the status quo continues, there won’t be a Democratic majority in either chamber or a Democrat in the White House again for the foreseeable future.

For any glitches you may have experienced on this website today. We had some technical problems, hopefully solved. (I pray they are solved….)

He’s killing people but that’s just part of his charm:

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis has cemented himself as the face of GOP opposition to anti-Covid-19 mandates — a position that is winning over not only rank-and-file voters ahead of the 2024 presidential primaries but also some of the Republican Party’s wealthiest donors.

How the race shapes up will first and foremost be determined by whether former President Donald Trump decides to run. But many donors are investing early in potential candidates like DeSantis, whom polling shows to be the leading Trump alternative in the prospective presidential field.

Campaign finance records covering the first seven months of this year showed that prominent contributors, including many beyond Florida, are investing in his 2022 re-election campaign — which could further solidify his prospects.

Writing a check now is a low-risk way to get into DeSantis’ circle early, an investment if he runs for president and wins the nomination. Unlike the potential presidential candidates who serve in Congress and can accept only relatively small donations, DeSantis is allowed to get unlimited checks from donors under Florida law.

Ken Griffin, the GOP megadonor and billionaire founder of the hedge fund Citadel, donated $5 million to DeSantis’ campaign in April — the largest donation he has received this year. DeSantis also raked in $500,000 in May from WeatherTech founder David MacNeil, $250,000 in March from Home Depot co-founder Bernie Marcus and $250,000 in February from former Illinois Gov. Bruce Rauner, who moved to Florida after he lost re-election. New York Jets owner Woody Johnson, an ambassador in the Trump administration, also donated.

Other Trump administration officials got in on the action, too: Former ambassadors Jamie McCourt and Kelly Craft and ex-Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross donated $10,000 to $50,000.

Nick Iarossi, a Tallahassee lobbyist and DeSantis fundraiser, said DeSantis is also raising plenty of small-dollar donations from across the country.

“The country is very divided right now on how to approach Covid, on how to approach Afghanistan, on the border crisis and illegal immigration,” Iarossi said. “The country is very, very split. I think a lot of folks feel like they’re being spoon-fed one side through the media and through the Washington, D.C., political class. And the only guy that’s really standing up to give that opposing view and give the other side a voice is Ron DeSantis.”

The 2024 buzz around DeSantis accelerated in late February, after he finished second to Trump in a poll at the Conservative Political Action Conference — held on friendly Florida terrain — and was by far the top choice in a hypothetical field that excluded Trump. DeSantis’ large donations, particularly from out of state, ramped up.

Among DeSantis’ other top donors are St. Louis Cardinals owner Bill DeWitt Jr., Los Angeles Chargers owner Dean Spanos, Hall of Fame baseball pitcher Nolan Ryan, UFC President Dana White, Jimmy John’s founder Jimmy John Liautaud, Jack Link’s CEO Troy Link and disgraced Papa John’s founder John Schnatter. Each has donated $5,000 to $100,000 this year.

“Florida is a large, diverse state and in many ways a bellwether of the nation,” the executive director of the state Republican Party, Helen Aguirre Ferré, a former DeSantis aide, wrote in an email. “Political contributions are a statement of support.”

Republican voters seem to like what they see.

Last month, polling by Tony Fabrizio, who has worked for Trump and DeSantis, found DeSantis atop a hypothetical field that didn’t include Trump. DeSantis outpaced rivals and made gains over a previous Fabrizio poll, suggesting that his standing nationally with Republicans is rising.

But first, DeSantis has to win a second term as governor. Already, two prominent Democrats — Rep. Charlie Crist, who previously served as governor as a Republican, and state Agriculture Commissioner Nikki Fried — have launched challenges. And recent statewide polling has shown that with Covid-19 surging in the state as a result of the highly contagious delta variant, DeSantis risks overplaying his hand as the anti-mandate standard-bearer.

A recent Quinnipiac University poll found DeSantis’ overall job approval rating at 47 percent, a plurality, but 51 percent disapproved of his handling of the pandemic. A plurality, 48 percent, said he should be re-elected, but 59 percent said they don’t want him to run for president in 2024.

Other questions found growing dissatisfaction with DeSantis over pandemic measures: 61 percent said the recent surge in Covid cases was preventable. And 69 percent said DeSantis’ threat to withhold salaries from local school officials who mandate masks was a bad idea.

DeSantis’ pandemic management is certain to be at the center of his re-election effort. But others have suggested that a bigger risk for the governor’s national ambitions would be Covid-19’s falling out of the news altogether.

“I think the longer that Covid politics play out, the better for him,” a Republican aide said. “No one really knows anything about the rest of his policies or anything else.”

His lethal COVID gamesmanship is what they like about him? Yeah, I guess I believe that.

If donors are worried about Florida’s and DeSantis’ trajectories, they’re not voicing their concerns. NBC News reached out to dozens of donors listed in DeSantis’ most recent campaign finance reports. Most didn’t respond or declined requests to discuss their support. Those who did share thoughts remain bullish on DeSantis.

“I think that Ron DeSantis has done an excellent job as governor and deserves reelection in 2022,” Ross, the former commerce secretary, who contributed $50,000 in April, responded via email. “His fiscal and education policies have been very strong. As to his future beyond re-election, he is relatively young, about 42, so he has a long career ahead of him.”

Jordy Spiegel, a private equity executive in California who contributed $10,000 in June, said he views DeSantis in the upper echelon of 2024 contenders.

“I put him in the camp with Kristi Noem, who I also am a fan of, or maybe Sen. Scott,” Spiegel said. “They could be part of the future leadership of the party.” Noem is the governor of South Dakota, and Scott is a senator from South Carolina.

Brian Sidman, founder of a Florida-based real estate advisory firm who donated $20,000 in April, said DeSantis’ “decisive” leadership style is what’s needed, “whether at the state or federal level.”

“We are fortunate to have DeSantis as the Governor of Florida and the country would be blessed to have him take a step into a larger role in the future,” Sidman said in an email.

God help us …