The modern conservative movement that grew out of the Goldwater campaign in 1964 understood that the country was changing and that they could benefit from the cultural backlash that ensued. But they always knew they were playing with fire with their appeals to white nationalism and southern Lost Cause mythology as well _ they just thought they could control it. For a long time, they managed to more or less keep a lid on their crazies. 

By the time George W. Bush ran in 2000, the GOP establishment had largely outsourced their coarsest rhetoric to the hugely popular talk radio and congressional showboaters so they could run the presidential campaign as “compassionate conservatives” and pretend that their base wasn’t anything but either. They knew they were barely keeping the extremist genie in the bottle but they just stayed with the program. If all those years had taught them anything, it was that the Republican base was active and engaged when they were angry and resentful. But with the new media coming into its own and the radical right-wing feeling their power, it was only a matter of time before the base took things into their own hands.

The election of the first Black president broke it all wide open. And when that wild genie burst out of the bottle, the establishment pretty much gave up the ghost.

Backed by wealthy fanatics, the grassroots of the party grew more extreme, engaging in conspiracy theories and gobbling up radical propaganda, egged on by backbenchers in the congress who joined the movement (or cynically exploited it.) Most GOP elected officials knew the Tea Party was nonsense and that the anti-immigration militia groups were fools and that the right-wing media was becoming unhinged. But they had lost control. Donald Trump just hopped on board the crazy train as it pulled out of the station.

There’s no need to recite all the ways in which Trump made everything worse. We’ve all lived it. But it’s important to remember that it was preordained that at some point this strategy of always feeding their voters just enough red meat to keep them interested but never delivering on their implicit promise to redress their grievances would end badly. And so it has.

The right-wing is now completely running wild.

The most obvious example is the January 6th insurrection but there is so much more going on. From the moment armed militants stormed state capitols to protest lockdowns and mask-wearing during the early months of the pandemic, members of the Republican base have been acting like a bunch of thugs, threatening politicians, non-partisan election officials, health care workers, airline employees, parents, teachers, store clerks, waiters and anyone else they come in contact with who follow the pandemic protocols. They are threatening school board members over mask-wearing, vaccine mandates, and the teaching of critical race theory (which they aren’t actually teaching.) This report from a school board official is representative of many such incidents:

Are all of these protests coming from Republican voters? No. But the Republican Party is the only institution that’s profiting from them. And it couldn’t be more cynical.

There has been some disagreement as to whether or not Republicans are consciously pushing vaccine and mask refusal among their followers. I think Crooked Media’s Brian Beutler set forth a convincing argument that they are. He asks if the anti-vax Republicans would take that position if Trump had been re-elected:

I think the answer … is self-evidently “no,” and if it’s no, then they are indeed spreading COVID to harm the incumbent, and to great effect. This is why the news that Biden would miss his July vaccination target was an applause line at CPAC, and Ron DeSantis is mum on vaccines, but loudly promotes monoclonal antibody therapy, and then blames Biden for not “end[ing] covid.” It’s why Murdoch-owned media is pro-vaccine in the United Kingdom, where the government is conservative, but is the most destructive source of vaccine disinformation here in the U.S. 

There might have been a time in the past when the GOP would take an active role in suppressing such a destructive impulse among their voters, if only for fear of electoral backlash from the majority. But they can’t control them so have decided to join them.

Over the years when Democrats promised to revive the economy after a Republican government ran it into the ground, as often happens, the GOP sets about sabotaging that recovery and then excoriates the Democrats for failing to live up to their promises. It’s a cynical trick but falls into the realm of hardball politics. What we are seeing now with the unleashing of the right-wing beast, the economic fallout is very different.

COVID has had a profound effect on the workplace, with working from home, virtual school, etc. But throughout the pandemic, frontline workers continued to go to work, often at real risk, to keep the country going. The government stepped in and helped with the big rescue package and unemployment insurance for those who couldn’t work during lockdowns and beyond. But something odd is happening now that the economy has opened back up and jobs are plentiful: a lot of people aren’t going back to work or are quitting, particularly in retail and hospitality jobs.

Many of them have probably decided to try their lot in other fields or have reassessed their place in the workforce. Plenty of parents are having so much trouble finding childcare that they simply can’t do it. But there is another big reason why people are quitting jobs that deal with the public: Their customers are treating them like dirt, Axios reported:

Aggressive and violent clashes between customers and service workers over COVID safety protocols over the past nearly two years have led to prison sentences, fines and deaths. Many workers say they’re simply not willing to put up with the abuse any longer — and their employers are often taking their side, even in industries that have long deferred to their customers. Businesses have shut down in support of their employees. Some industries have provided self defense classes and banded together on public awareness campaigns.

This is the same problem facing health care workers, election administrators, school board members, teachers and airline employees. These thuggish consumers are chasing them out of their jobs.

And the GOP profits from this just as they profit from the anti-vax and mask protests. Creating the perception that Democrats are failing to fix the pandemic and the sluggish economy is their plan for 2022. But they might want to think about how that’s going to work out for them. These folks don’t like them any more than they like the Democrats. They’re ready to burn down both parties and I don’t think anyone’s going to like what’s going to take their place.

Republicans used to understand this. But they couldn’t help themselves and they let that genie get bigger and bigger until it just exploded out of its bottle. Now they can’t put it back in  — and I’m not sure they want to. 

Salon

If you think the upcoming abortion rulings in Texas and Mississippi are bad, you don’t know the half of it:

[T]he right to abortion is not the only fundamental right at risk. The arguments being advanced by Mississippi, if accepted, would destabilize a central part of the court’s jurisprudence protecting fundamental constitutional rights. As a result, Dobbs also threatens the fundamental rights to use birth control, marry a loved one, and make decisions about sexual intimacy.

The linchpin of Mississippi’s attack on Roe and Planned Parenthood v. Casey, the 1992 case that reaffirmed Roe, is that the right to abortion cannot be a constitutional right because states restricted abortion in 1868 at the time of the ratification of the 14^th Amendment. Mississippi argues that the public in 1868 would have understood the 14^th Amendment to permit state restrictions on abortion to continue.

This is not a new argument—it formed the basis of then-Justice William Rehnquist’s dissent in Roe and was made repeatedly by Justice Antonin Scalia over the course of his career on the bench, including in his dissent in Casey—but it is a far-reaching and radical one. It would not only hollow out the 14^th Amendment’s protection of liberty, but also jettison many decades of Supreme Court precedent safeguarding a broad range of fundamental rights. And as Chief Justice John Roberts recognized in his confirmation testimony, it is “completely circular,” using state practice to interpret the constraints the 14^th Amendment was written to impose on the states.

Reading the 14^th Amendment to allow states to enact laws similar to those in effect in 1868 is a perversion of originalism. In fact, the text and history of the 14^th Amendment provide no support for the idea that the courts should look to state practice in 1868 to define the scope of the amendment’s protections. The 14^th Amendment sought to disrupt discriminatory state laws and practices, not perpetuate them. In the wake of a bloody Civil War fought over slavery, the 14^th Amendment attempted to transform our federal system against the backdrop of a long history of suppression of fundamental rights. It makes little sense to make state practice at the time of ratification determinative of the amendment’s sweeping protections of fundamental rights. Indeed, the court’s wholesale failure to vindicate the 14^th Amendment, in cases like the Slaughter-House Cases and United States v. Cruikshank, in the years after Reconstruction speaks to how an approach that slights the 14^th Amendment’s transformative guarantees and broadly defers to the states utterly fails. The 14^th Amendment was written to redress state denials of fundamental rights, not leave them in place in perpetuity.

For good reason, state practice in 1868 has never been a measure of what fundamental, personal rights are guaranteed against state infringement by the 14^th Amendment. This is illustrated not only by Roe and Casey—which explicitly rejected the idea that the state practice in 1868 fixes the fundamental rights for all future generations—but also by many other landmark Supreme Court rulings vindicating the 14^th Amendment’s promise of liberty for all.

For example, in 1967, in Loving v. Virginia, the Supreme Court struck down Virginia’s anti-miscegenation statute, holding that the freedom to marry a person of another race is a fundamental right. It did not matter that anti-miscegenation laws had been common in Virginia as far back as the colonial period because, under the 14^th Amendment, the right to marry cannot be infringed by the government.

Similar examples abound. In 1965, in Griswold v. Connecticut, the Supreme Court struck down a restriction on the use of birth control dating back to 1879, holding that it infringed on the right of a married couple to choose whether to start a family and bear children. The fact that restrictions on birth control had a long historical lineage did not give the government the right to intrude on a married couple’s decision about whether and when to start a family.

In 2003, in Lawrence v. Texas, the Supreme Court held that the 14^th Amendment protected a right to sexual intimacy by LGBTQ adults, despite a very long history of laws that prohibited same-sex intimacy and sexual conduct. In Obergefell v. Hodges in 2015, the Supreme Court held that the 14^th Amendment guaranteed the right to marry a loved one of the same sex, even though marriage had historically been limited to a union of a man and a woman. Both decisions drew on Loving to safeguard bedrock rights to love, marry, and form a family, ensuring equal dignity to LGBTQ persons.ADVERTISEMENT

The lesson of more than half a century of 14^th Amendment jurisprudence is that a state cannot defend a law challenged for violating a fundamental right merely by pointing to the fact that similar enactments existed at the time of the ratification of the 14^th Amendment. Otherwise, as the court recognized in Obergefell, “received practices could serve as their own continued justification and new groups could not invoke rights once denied.”

All of these landmark precedents are now in the crosshairs. If the fundamental rights protected by the 14^th Amendment are determined by looking to state practice in 1868—as Mississippi and its allies urge—Loving’s holding protecting the right to marry as a fundamental right would be in doubt, as would many other landmark precedents, including Lawrence and Obergefell.

Indeed, the amicus brief filed in Dobbs on behalf of Texas Right to Life—and signed by Adam Mortara, a former clerk to Justice Clarence Thomas, and Jonathan Mitchell, the architect of S.B. 8—demonstrates that Dobbs is just the beginning, and conservatives are seeking a much larger jurisprudential reversal. In urging the Supreme Court to overrule Roe, the brief contends that virtually all of the court’s fundamental rights jurisprudence is questionable. It explicitly rejects Loving’s reasoning, arguing that the Supreme Court was wrong to recognize a fundamental right to marry in that case. It claims that Lawrence and Obergefell are “lawless” rulings and urges the Supreme Court in Dobbs to leave “those decisions hanging by a thread.”

The stakes in Dobbs are sky-high. The court has never recognized—and then stripped away—a fundamental right that millions of Americans have relied on to determine the course of their lives and participate as equals in American life. And the right to abortion is not the only right at risk of being taken away. The endgame for conservatives is to roll back the 14th Amendment’s broad protection of fundamental rights essential to autonomy, dignity, and equality.

Will they do it? It’s certainly possible, maybe even probable. This extremist majority is committed to an archaic view of human civilization. I would not be at all surprised if they just go for it. That’s the current right wing mentality from the top down.

And, by the way, the Republican voters will justify it by saying that that this is a restoration of their rights… to dominate everyone that doesn’t agree with them.

The U.S. Supreme Court dashed off a breif, September 1st order allowing the patently unconstitutional Texas abortion ban to stand until a case reached it challenging the law’s controversial private bounty hunter enforcement mechanism. Standout among the action’s critics was The Atlantic‘s Adam Sewer, a Texas resident.

In his Sept. 2 takedown of court conservatives’ use of the “shadow docket,” Serwer wrote:

The shadow docket has begun to look less like a place for emergency cases than one where the Republican-appointed justices can implement their preferred policies without having to go through the tedious formalities of following legal procedure, developing arguments consistent with precedent, or withstanding public scrutiny. And so after initially allowing the Texas law banning abortion before most women know they are actually pregnant to go into effect, five conservative justices told Republican-controlled states they could disregard Roe while insisting that wasn’t what they were doing at all.

Justice Samuel Alito was not amused. He fired back at Serwer’s article, quoting from it in a Sept. 30 speech at Notre Dame, calling it “false and inflammatory” to suggest say that, in effect, the court’s action allowed Texas to nullify Roe v. Wade in Texas without judicial review. That would come once the case reaches his court again. Meantime, ladies, good luck.

Here is Justice Alito condemning @AdamSerwer’s Atlantic article about the Texas abortion order as “false,” “inflammatory,” and “ridiculous.” https://t.co/daAwrZwzmI pic.twitter.com/lK4OoxYbbT

— Mark Joseph Stern (@mjs_DC) September 30, 2021

On Tuesday, Serwer thanked Alito for proving his point about the court’s political slant. A sample:

The rank dishonesty and arrogance of Alito’s speech at Notre Dame are symptoms of the conservative majority’s unchecked power on the Court, and the entitlement that flows from having no one around you who can tell you what you sound like. It is not simply enough for the right-wing justices to have this power; Alito insists that the peasantry be silent about how they use it, and acquiesce not only to their delusions of impartiality but to their mischaracterization of verifiable facts. These are imperious demands for submission from someone who is meant to be a public servant.

I understand the value of pursuing impartiality as a judge—there is a similar case made in journalism for pursuing objectivity. Even if humans are incapable of being impartial or objective, the thinking goes, they should try. But it is one thing to pursue impartiality or objectivity in good faith, and another to use those concepts in the defense of ideologically motivated conclusions. Alito’s approach to the law, and to criticism of the Court, is an example of the latter.

The justices’ claims to be apolitical are belied by the decades of advocacy by the conservative legal movement and oceans of cash that it has spent to put them on the Court. They are belied by the trajectory of their own careers, which they pursued with the desperate ambition of being elevated to the Court. And they are belied by their own actions on the Court, despite their insincere, performative testimonies about judicial restraint.

Serwer 1, Alito 0

Adam Serwer: Justice Alito Proved My Point by Attacking Me – The Atlantic https://t.co/FiKozu8zL4

— Rick Hasen (@rickhasen) October 13, 2021

“Judges turning into political actors, giving speeches attacking journalists, is terrible for the court and terrible for democracy,” tweeted Connecticut Democrat, Sen. Chris Murphy in response to the Alito speech.

Steve Benen concurred:

It was, after all, just last fall when Alito delivered surprisingly political remarks at a Federalist Society event, at which the conservative complained about public-safety restrictions during the pandemic, before directing his frustrations at marriage equality, reproductive rights, and five sitting U.S. senators, each of whom happen to be Democrats.

“This speech is like I woke up from a vampire dream,” University of Baltimore law professor and former federal prosecutor Kim Wehle wrote soon after. “Unscrupulously biased, political, and even angry. I can’t imagine why Alito did this publicly. Totally inappropriate and damaging to the Supreme Court.”

Yet here we are, with democracy hanging in the balance and the courts stacked with Federalist Society judges.

Everyone but Trump cultists seems to feel it: exhaustion and ennui stemming from years of political trench warfare. The right keeps its foot soldiers juiced on heapin’ helpings of red meat the way the Sacklers kept doses of OxyContin flowing to rural America no matter the harm inflicted. The rest of us are worn out.

Outrage at the election of misogynist-in-chief Donald Trump drove millions of women into the streets in January 2017. Their turnout at the polls in November 2018 handed the House majority to Democrats and the Speaker’s gavel to Rep. Nancy Pelosi of California for a historic second time.

There are signs, however, that with Trump out of public disservice and with Joe from Scranton in the Oval Office, that enthusiasm for fighting may have waned, writes Karen Tumulty for the Washington Post:

A raft of evidence suggests that female voters, whose engagement and activism fueled the gains that Democrats made during Donald Trump’s presidency, are increasingly tuning out politics. In one survey conducted in May by the Democratic super PAC American Bridge 21st Century, nearly half of women in key swing states said they were “paying less attention to what happens in Washington” than they were when Trump was in the White House. This was particularly true among female Biden voters who are independents, under the age of 35, college graduates and city dwellers. Focus groups that American Bridge 21st Century conducted in August with women in Pennsylvania and Arizona found much the same thing.

This sense of growing political ennui among women comes through in focus groups, says Democratic pollster Celinda Lake. “People are exhausted,” she explains. “We have people deliberately saying, ‘I am just taking a break — enough.’ ” While enactment of a draconian Texas law that all but outlaws abortion in the state stirred women briefly, that frisson of anger has dissipated among many, Lake says. “Voters nationwide decided Texas isn’t going to happen in you-name-the-state.”

That assumption could be a historic mistake.

Black women, key Democratic voters, are also cynical. “Our base voters are looking for a little more work to be done in Washington,” finds Lake Research partner Joshua Estevan Ulibarri finds in Virginia polling. He believes Democrats inside the Beltway should feel that much more urgency to deliver on their promises of better child care, paid time off, education, etc. in Biden’s Build Back Better plan.

Polling from CBS indicates most of the public doesn’t even know what’s in it. Only about a third believe the plan would help them directly, including only 61% of Democrats, although the elements of the plan are popular in principle.

But they know what it is supposed to cost. Eric Boehlert complains that knowledge gap is “because news outlets like CBS have done such a poor job explaining it.” Additionally, Democrats have, as usual, failed to sell the brownie.

"When you go off to work you know that your kid is safe, loved & cared for. and you can afford it."@anatosaurus on @TheLastWord on how to talk about great policies in Build Back Better.
Watch @Lawrence smile when she says,"Stop selling the recipe, start selling the brownies." pic.twitter.com/iwURuFxEGe

— Spocko (@spockosbrain) October 13, 2021

But even passing the Biden plan might not be enough. Democrats chronically expect their results to speak for themselves and don’t take the victory laps needed to set in the public mind whose efforts brough them good things. Fail to define yourself first and your opponent will define you. You’d think professional politicians would have internalized that principle.

Tumulty cautions:

Off-year elections bring fewer voters to the polls than contests where the White House is at stake, and are generally won by the side that does a better job of turning out its base. Virginia “will be a really important indicator of where relative enthusiasm is going into 2022,” says Michael Podhorzer, top political strategist for the AFL-CIO. “That’s the whole ballgame.”

Keep an eye in particular on whether female voters turn up for Democrats as they have in the past few election cycles. Right now, it appears the party has plenty of reason to worry.

It is one reason I’m keeping a close eye on the U.S. Senate race in North Carolina. Two Black women are in the hunt for the Democratic nomination: former chief justice of the state Supreme Court, Cheri Beasley, and former state senator, Erica Smith. The Senate race will top the state’s ticket in 2022. Democrats’ best bet for turnout in an otherwise low-turnout, midterm election may be for Black women across the state to insist everyone they know get out to vote.

https://twitter.com/Tarkloon/status/1447975808195301376

September 1, 1939

W. H. Auden – 1907-1973

I sit in one of the dives
On Fifty-second Street
Uncertain and afraid
As the clever hopes expire
Of a low dishonest decade:
Waves of anger and fear
Circulate over the bright
And darkened lands of the earth,
Obsessing our private lives;
The unmentionable odour of death
Offends the September night.

Accurate scholarship can
Unearth the whole offence
From Luther until now
That has driven a culture mad,
Find what occurred at Linz,
What huge imago made
A psychopathic god:
I and the public know
What all schoolchildren learn,
Those to whom evil is done
Do evil in return.

Exiled Thucydides knew
All that a speech can say
About Democracy,
And what dictators do,
The elderly rubbish they talk
To an apathetic grave;
Analysed all in his book,
The enlightenment driven away,
The habit-forming pain,
Mismanagement and grief:
We must suffer them all again.

Into this neutral air
Where blind skyscrapers use
Their full height to proclaim
The strength of Collective Man,
Each language pours its vain
Competitive excuse:
But who can live for long
In an euphoric dream;
Out of the mirror they stare,
Imperialism’s face
And the international wrong.

Faces along the bar
Cling to their average day:
The lights must never go out,
The music must always play,
All the conventions conspire
To make this fort assume
The furniture of home;
Lest we should see where we are,
Lost in a haunted wood,
Children afraid of the night
Who have never been happy or good.

The windiest militant trash
Important Persons shout
Is not so crude as our wish:
What mad Nijinsky wrote
About Diaghilev
Is true of the normal heart;
For the error bred in the bone
Of each woman and each man
Craves what it cannot have,
Not universal love
But to be loved alone.

From the conservative dark
Into the ethical life
The dense commuters come,
Repeating their morning vow;
“I will be true to the wife,
I’ll concentrate more on my work,”
And helpless governors wake
To resume their compulsory game:
Who can release them now,
Who can reach the deaf,
Who can speak for the dumb?

All I have is a voice
To undo the folded lie,
The romantic lie in the brain
Of the sensual man-in-the-street
And the lie of Authority
Whose buildings grope the sky:
There is no such thing as the State
And no one exists alone;
Hunger allows no choice
To the citizen or the police;
We must love one another or die.

Defenceless under the night
Our world in stupor lies;
Yet, dotted everywhere,
Ironic points of light
Flash out wherever the Just
Exchange their messages:
May I, composed like them
Of Eros and of dust,
Beleaguered by the same
Negation and despair,
Show an affirming flame.

From Another Time by W. H. Auden, published by Random House. Copyright © 1940 W. H. Auden, renewed by the Estate of W. H. Auden. Used by permission of Curtis Brown, Ltd.

Here’s something else to keep you up at night. Oy vey:

The Supreme Court is more conservative than it’s been in almost a century.

​​Its new term begins today, and by next June, when the term ends, Americans might finally understand what that means. Public opinion of the court is already at a record low after the court allowed a strict abortion law to go into effect in Texas in early September. Now, the justices are preparing to hear the court’s first major gun rights case since 2010 as well as a case on the future of abortion in the U.S. Both cases could result in decisions that are far more extreme than most Americans want. 

In the past, a desire to preserve the court’s apolitical reputation kept the justices from straying too far from public opinion. That could happen again — in fact, Chief Justice John Roberts has so far proven remarkably adept at producing decisions that protect the court’s reputation and that are often portrayed as more moderate and mainstream than they really are.

This term, though, the other conservative justices might be fine with taking a very public right turn. Neither expanding gun rights nor overturning Roe v. Wade would be popular, yet the court is considering both — a sign of how conservative it has already become. The question now is whether the risk of a backlash is enough to keep the conservative majority from, say, overturning Roe in an election year. 

The justices are already entering the term with mixed reviews from the general public. A Marquette University Law School poll conducted in September found that only 49 percent of Americans approved of the court, down from 60 percent just a year earlier. A Gallup poll conducted in September found a similar drop: Only 40 percent of U.S. adults approved of the court, down from 53 percent a year earlier. According to Gallup, a majority (53 percent) of U.S. adults now disapprove of the way the court is handling its job.

In theory, the justices should have no reason to watch their polling numbers. Our system is actually designed that way: Federal judges have life tenure in part to insulate them from the vagaries of politics. But research suggests that the justices are influenced by what Americans think, at least to a certain extent. For example, several studies have found that the Supreme Court’s ideological tilt tracks with public opinion over time, which is unlikely to be coincidental. And Tom Clark, a political scientist at Emory University, found in a separate review of congressional bills that when Congress introduced more bills designed to curb the court, the justices struck down fewer laws. According to Clark, that suggests that the court saw the bills as a signal from Congress that they were going too far, even though the bills were unlikely to pass.

Earlier this year, President Biden arguably introduced his own version of a court-curbing bill, in the form of a commission to study expanding the Supreme Court. But the conservatives don’t have a lot to fear there, at least for now, because the commission seems unlikely to recommend big changes. And even if it did, GOP senators won’t support court reform, which means Democrats would have to abolish the filibuster to make that happen — currently a no-go in the Senate. All in all, the conservative justices don’t have a lot of reason to see Biden’s move as a threat.

It’s also possible that Supreme Court justices mostly care about their reputation among a select group of Americans. Baum and Neal Devins, a professor of law and government at the College of William & Mary, have argued that Supreme Court justices are more interested in how they’re regarded by elites. 

This is significant for understanding why the conservative justices’ behavior has become more predictably right-wing. Baum and Devins argue that as elites have grown more politically polarized, the justices’ partisan tendencies have hardened as well. In other words, the people influencing the conservative justices’ thoughts are probably much more right-wing than the public at large. On top of that, some of the justices may be willing to risk backlash for the outcome they believe is correct. “Is legitimacy something that’s enough to get a justice to move away from something [he or she] strongly feels?” Baum told me. With the possible exception of Roberts, who is particularly focused on the court’s image, Baum doesn’t think the public’s views will be enough to sway a justice who cares deeply about the issue they’re deciding.

And this might be right. On one hand, it’s not obvious that a single unpopular ruling — even if it’s high-profile — would be enough to sow widespread doubt in the Supreme Court’s legitimacy. Take the outcome in Bush v. Gore, where a divided Supreme Court, split along partisan lines, effectively handed the presidency to George W. Bush. The ruling was intensely controversial at the time, but it appears to have had little lasting impact on the court’s image. And although it might be hard to imagine, the same could be true of a decision that overturns or reshapes Roe — particularly if the justices  merely limit the constitutional right to abortion, rather than eliminate it. 

But the question of how a highly conservative Supreme Court majority will navigate public opinion isn’t going away. And it becomes even more relevant if the conservatives maintain control of the court for years or even decades.

“In the past, even if the court was trending conservative overall, it wasn’t like the conservatives always won and the liberals always lost,” said Michael Salamone, a political science professor at Washington State University who studies the Supreme Court and public opinion. “Now it’s looking like conservative victories are going to be a lot more consistent and a lot more far-reaching.”

In that sense, this new term might be a turning point — and not just because of the importance of the cases or the risk of a backlash to an individual decision. The next few months might be the beginning of a new era in which the conservative justices move sharply away from where most Americans stand on major issues, and dare politicians to do something about it.

This has been the right wing project for more than 40 years. They have a total control of one branch of government now, which can serve as a veto point for virtually everything that the Democratic Party wants to do if they are lucky enough to assume control of the other two branches.

This is going to be a battle for the next generation.

Democrats could meet them where they are an take steps to expand the court but that would require that they don’t have some obstructions in the persons of Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema who won’t even carve out a filibuster exception to raise the debt ceiling or ensure that their own constituents can vote. Obviously they aren’t going to do anything more aggressive which is shameful. This country is in very serious danger from this right wing and it’s coming from a number of different directions, including the Supreme Court.

More insanity in Texas:

An elections administrator in North Texas submitted her resignation Friday, following a monthslong effort by residents and officials loyal to former President Donald Trump to force her out of office.

Michele Carew, who had overseen scores of elections during her 14-year career, had found herself transformed into the public face of an electoral system that many in the heavily Republican Hood County had come to mistrust, which ProPublica and The Texas Tribune covered earlier this month.

Her critics sought to abolish her position and give her duties to an elected county clerk who has used social media to promote baseless allegations of widespread election fraud.

Carew, who was hired to run elections in Hood County two-and-a-half months before the contested presidential race, said in an interview that she worried that the forces that tried to drive her out will spread to other counties in the state.

“When I started out, election administrators were appreciated and highly respected,” she said. “Now we are made out to be the bad guys.”

Critics accused Carew of harboring a secret liberal agenda and of violating a decades-old elections law, despite assurances from the Texas secretary of state that she was complying with Texas election rules.

Carew said she is joining an Austin-based private company and will work to help local elections administrator offices across the country run more efficiently. She will oversee her final election in early November before leaving Nov. 12.

David Becker, executive director of the Center for Election Innovation and Research, a nonprofit that seeks to increase voter participation and improve the efficiency of elections administration, said Carew’s departure is the latest example of an ominous trend toward independent election administrators being forced out in favor of partisan officials.

“She is not the first and won’t be the last professional election official to have to leave this profession because of the toll it is taking, the bullies and liars who are slandering these professionals,” said Becker, a former Department of Justice lawyer who helped oversee voting rights enforcement under presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush. “We are losing a generation of professional expertise. We are only beginning to feel the effects.”

Though experts say it is difficult to determine how many elections officials have left their positions nationally, states like Pennsylvania and Ohio have seen numerous departures. According to the AP, about a third of Pennsylvania’s county election officials have left in the last year and a half; in Ohio, one in four directors or deputy auditors of elections have left in the southwestern part of the state, according to The New York Times.

Hood County would seem an unlikely place for disputes over the last presidential election given that Trump won 81% of the vote there, one of his largest margins of victory in the state.

Yeah, it’s very unlikely. These goons just wanted to get in on the fascist action and run someone out of her job just for the sport of it and install a Trump toadie because they can.

So, is the fever breaking yet?

Salon is featuring an excerpt from a new book by the former Ambassador to Vietnam Ted Osius. He describes his first visit to the White House for a meeting between Trump and the prime minister of Vietnam. Apparently, the oval office was a crowd scene with people running in and out willy nilly, including the president who got up and walked out in the middle of a meeting. It sounds like the stories you hear about courtiers crowding around the royal bed and the hovering over the privy chamber trying to get the King’s attention.

Total chaos:

Standing behind a cluster of aides and attempting to get the president’s attention, National Security Advisor General H.R. McMaster tried to introduce me to President Trump: “Mr. President, this is our ambassador to Vietnam.”

I stared at a stiff helmet of orange hair as the president looked up and said, “You’re lucky. That’s a good job.”

“Yes, sir, I’m very lucky,” I said. “I love my job and feel privileged to do it.”

“So, who are we meeting?” the president asked.

“The prime minister of Vietnam,” McMaster replied.

“What’s his name?”

“Nguyen Xuân Phúc,” a senior National Security Council official said. “Rhymes with ‘book.'”

“You mean like Fook You?” President Trump asked. “I knew a guy named Fook You. Really. I rented him a restaurant. When he picked up the phone, he answered ‘Fook You.’ His business went badly. People didn’t like that. He lost the restaurant.”

All those present laughed dutifully.

“Mr.President,” McMaster interrupted, “we only have five minutes for this briefing.”

More people slipped in and out. I wondered how anyone could concentrate in all the chaos. After hearing that Vietnam had a trade surplus with the United States and a trade deficit with China, the president interjected: “The Chinese always get great deals. Except with me. I did a great deal in China.”

President Trump then instructed Lighthizer to “bring the U.S. trade deficit with Vietnam to zero in four years.”

Lighthizer nodded, perhaps not knowing how to reply. It was an impossible task. He then tried to shift the president’s focus. “The ambassador [to Vietnam] is trying to finish a deal to build a new embassy,” he said. “We can have a groundbreaking ceremony when you visit.”

A member of Lighthizer’s staff had told me, earnestly, that President Trump liked groundbreaking ceremonies. He enjoyed holding a gold- plated shovel for the photographers.

“I’m visiting?” the president asked, apparently unaware that he had agreed to join an autumn summit of APEC in Vietnam. He then disappeared into another room.

Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law and a White House advisor, was paying attention to our conversation about building a new embassy in Hanoi. “How much will it cost?” Kushner asked. I replied that the U.S. embassy in Beijing cost more than $1 billion. A new embassy in Hanoi might be built for less— perhaps half as much, depending on the cost of the land.

“$500 million?” Kushner seemed surprised. “that’s a lot. Why are we spending so much? If we’re going to give them that, we should get something back.”

I wondered if he understood that we were trying to build a new embassy for the United States and not for Vietnam. “Our current leased space is dilapidated,” I told him. “It was supposed to be temporary twenty-two years ago. It’s not safe. A truck bomb could drive right up to it and blow us up in a moment. Like in Benghazi.”

Kushner had already formed an opinion. “If they’re going to get that [embassy],” he said, “We need something in return. Tell them we’ll build it if they bring our trade deficit to zero.”

I repeated my argument about security for American citizens, but Kushner’s dark eyes had shifted elsewhere. He was no longer listening.

Ushered out of the Oval Office, I stood in the hallway and chatted with Vice President Mike Pence. He had just returned from Jakarta, Indonesia, where he had addressed the Association of Southeast Asian Nations. I told Pence that Vietnam had received his speech warmly. Smiling, his blue eyes focused on mine, the vice president demonstrated an uncanny ability to make me feel like I was the most important person in the world.

We waited while President Trump and Prime Minister Phúc met in the Oval Office “one-on-one”— with interpreters and about a hundred television and print journalists. President Trump noted that the United States has “a major trade deficit with Vietnam, which will hopefully balance out in a short period of time. We expect to be able to do that.”

The prime minister showed the president a map of the South China Sea as a reminder that China’s behavior concerned Vietnam most of all. The president and prime minister then moved to the Cabinet Room, where the vice president, cabinet members, and I joined them. President Trump again urged Prime Minister Phúc to reduce Vietnam’s trade deficit with the United States from $32 billion to zero in four years. He also encouraged Vietnam to ratchet up its pressure on North Korea, and he asked that Vietnam accelerate its acceptance of Vietnamese refugees subject to deportation orders. I knew the source of the third request: I had seen [Steven] Miller slip in and whisper into the president’s ear just as he was heading to the Cabinet Room. It was left to the prime minister of Communist Vietnam to extol the virtues of free and fair trade. He said that trade “leads to growth and jobs. Our two economies are more complementary than competitive.”

President Trump spoke again about trade deficits and said, “we must make more progress before the APEC summit.” The president told the prime minister that Saudi Arabia had placed orders worth $450 billion during the president’s recent visit there. “Jared [Kushner] and Rex [Tillerson] worked really hard,” he said. The message was clear: presidential visits came with a price tag.

When McMaster suggested that “an aircraft carrier visit would be historic and an important symbol,” the prime minister replied carefully that Vietnam “appreciated the initiative to bring an aircraft carrier. When we have the capability, we’ll receive it.” He added, “We are not yet in a position to do so.”

Vietnamese leaders needed first to gauge the Chinese reaction before committing to a date for an aircraft carrier visit. In a joint statement released following the prime minister’s White House visit, the Vietnamese said only that the two leaders had “looked into the possibility of a visit to a Vietnamese port by a United States aircraft carrier.”

As President Trump walked Prime Minister Phúc out of the West Wing, the group ran into Marc Kasowitz, one of the president’s lawyers. Kasowitz also represented Falcone. In December 2016, Kasowitz and Falcone had arranged for President-elect Trump to speak by phone with the Vietnamese prime minister.

Kasowitz grinned when he saw the prime minister. He appeared to have been waiting outside to show that he had access to the West Wing and therefore “juice” with the current president. Surprised to see him, the prime minister smiled, his head tilted to one side.

“You know him?” the president asked, and the prime minister acknowledged that he did. Kasowitz shook my hand vigorously. “You know him, too?” the president asked me. I nodded.

[…]

After a January 12, 2017 meeting in Hanoi with Kasowitz, Falcone, and a gaggle of New York real estate lawyers associated with President Trump, an embassy colleague and I had compared notes. “I feel like I need to take a shower,” she said. I, too, wanted to scrub away the scent of corruption. Before meeting me, Kasowitz had asked a friend, “What leverage do we have over the ambassador? What do we need to give him to bring him onto our side?” My friend explained patiently that any U.S. ambassador has a responsibility to help American businesses succeed. No leverage or quid pro quo was needed for me to do my job.

It was a thoroughly corrupt administration all the way down. We knew that. Trump’s cronies were lining up to use their relationship with him to make as much money as humanly possible and they didn’t even try to hide it. It was especially rich that Trump and the Republican screamers projected all this graft onto Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden — and they are still doing it today (with the help of the media…)

I have no doubt that Trump was privately making financial deals for his friends and himself throughout. Why wouldn’t he? He believes that hat’s good for Trump is good for the USA. And if it wasn’t good for the USA, who cares?

Claremont Institute’s finest takes issue with the New York Times:

An editorial board member, Jesse Wegman, responded on twitter:

So now @DrJohnEastman claims, in a letter to the editor, that our editorial on his Jan. 6 memo misrepresents the advice he gave to Trump and Pence about how to subvert the election.

Au contraire, mon traitre.

Our editorial reflects the content of that memo — which states, among other things, that the VP is the “ultimate arbiter” and should move ahead with the plan “without asking for permission.”

His attempted clean-up job nine months after the fact is less than compelling.

I’ll note that, as a general matter, when you help foment an insurrection, you shouldn’t expect to be welcomed back into polite society, which includes faux-high-minded complaints about media coverage of your acts.

You’ve found your tribe, Dr. Eastman; go lie with them.

Originally tweeted by Jesse Wegman (@jessewegman) on October 12, 2021.

He is trying to salvage his reputation after helping to foment a coup which fortunately he and his fellow conspiracists failed to pull off. Good luck. Even the Federalist Society is queasy about him now, although that’s probably just a pose. After all, Eastman’s fellows on the right have been working up this “state legislator” theory of legal coups.

And it’s now become a GOP article of faith:

Steve Scalise on Fox News Sunday repeatedly refuses to acknowledge that the 2020 election was not stolen from Donald Trump pic.twitter.com/EME1lBK1vA

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) October 10, 2021

Democrats find themselves, in the midst of an intense battle to pass President Biden’s domestic agenda while avoiding a debt limit showdown, once again asking the perennial post-election question: How can they win back white, non-college-educated voters?

This has been the Democrats’ big conundrum for over 30 years now and most of the time they end up with exactly the same possible strategies. Either appeal to the white working class’ economic self-interest, pander to their prejudices or triangulate against their own base. Sure there are other strategies for winning elections thrown out there, like find the apathetic voters who don’t bother with politics and get them to the polls or wait for demographic changes that will bring more voters into their coalition. Often there is a “one from column A and one from column B” quality about this discussion, but there really hasn’t been anything new added to the mix for several decades.

At this moment, the discussion is being waged around a couple of takes on these basic ideas. The New York Times’ Ezra Klein interviewed data specialist David Shor for his column to talk about a theory they are calling “popularism” which they defined this way:

Democrats should do a lot of polling to figure out which of their views are popular and which are not popular, and then they should talk about the popular stuff and shut up about the unpopular stuff. 

It may surprise you, as it did me, that this is considered some kind of breakthrough idea but apparently some people think it is.

Of course, Democratic politicians don’t actually have that kind of control over the narrative. Politics are much more national than they used to be with the press out there contributing their takes and independent activists trying to advance their issues and causes. And needless to say, there are the Republicans who are very, very good at ruthlessly hijacking the political narrative. The idea that Democrats can just keep their less popular ideas on the down-low isn’t remotely realistic. 

The problem began with the Southern Strategy in 1968 and gained steam throughout the 80s as all the old Southern Democratic lions retired, switched parties or died, making the two parties polarized ideologically and demographically. In fact, 30 years ago this issue was considered a regional problem and the consultants and strategists all said that we needed presidential candidates from southern states so that they could relate to the “bubbas” as they called them. Essentially, the advice boiled down to finding (or creating) cultural affinity combined with an economic pitch to the working man, which always polls well.

Jimmy Carter was the first stab at this approach and it worked out in 1976. But when a movie star from California challenged him in 1980, all that affinity for authentic Southern identity went right out the window. Ronald Reagan appealed on a whole other level. His slogan was “Let’s Make America Great Again” and those white, working-class Democrats ate it up with a spoon. Those voters became known as Reagan Democrats. They’re all old or dead now but the Democratic Party is still trying to get them back.

Bill Clinton, a southern boy from Arkansas, was the first candidate after Carter to win the presidency, reactivating the argument that southern cultural affinity would signal to this elusive group of white voters that the Democrats weren’t snobby elites from the Big City trying to impose their deviant ways on Real Americans. He didn’t make a populist argument. He was a DLC Democrat, a group that had decided that old-fashioned new deal style government needed to go the way of the Dodo, so they adopted a technocratic “market” approach, thinking that would be a better way to deliver government to the masses. The populism was left to a billionaire named Ross Perot, who took one of the largest 3rd party shares in US history in 1992.

And at the same time, you had a Republican Party that was radicalizing rapidly under the leadership of a crude demagogue by the name of Newt Gingrich who was heating up the culture war and feeding red meat to these contested voters. Clinton was caught in that crossfire and never won a majority. He survived because the radicalized Republican Party had succumbed to hubris and tried to remove a popular president on trumped-up charges. Clinton was very lucky in his enemies. There’s an important lesson for the present day in that.

Shor obviously thinks that President Obama was able to win two terms by following what he prescribes, arguing that Obama downplayed the unpopular culture war issues that bother these voters and emphasized the issues that drew them in. Sure, that’s true, but Obama embodied racial progress and generational change which meant he didn’t have to say much about it in order to keep his base happy, at least in the beginning. Unfortunately, the backlash on the right was fierce and it dogs the party to this day. The first Black president may have won two campaigns but his election drove the Republican Party over a cliff.

These last few decades have been backlash followed by a backlash against the backlash, and we are still in the middle of that dynamic. Democrats have tried everything to offset the structural disadvantage they have as the party of multi-urban voters in a system that over-represents rural citizens. Better messaging isn’t going to solve that problem.

But that doesn’t mean the Democrats are doomed, at least not yet.

If polarization and backlash are what drives the political dynamic, then the Republicans have given Democrats a gift that keeps on giving. His name is Donald Trump.

While Democrats dither over which “Kitchen Table Issue” will appeal to some rural voter in Iowa, the Republicans are becoming frantic that Trump is going to ruin 2022 and 2024 for them. Politico reports that the party wants to talk about inflation and Afghanistan and crime etc, while Trump is out there ginning up the MAGA faithful with non-stop talk about the Big Lie. Republicans are reportedly very nervous that “in focusing on that issue above all others, Trump effectively makes the 2022 election a referendum on him instead of Biden.“

Republican Senators are also deeply concerned that Trump is going to mess up their chances of retaking the upper chamber, according to The Hill:

“I think we’re better off when he’s not part of any story,” said a Republican senator, who said his view is widely shared in the GOP conference.

That’s a shame for them because he’s not going anywhere. In fact, this past weekend the Senate’s elder statesman Chuck Grassley, R-IA, decided if you can’t beat them, join them and attended Trump’s rally to receive his blessing from the Dear Leader himself.

Trump’s meddling in the primaries is causing huge headaches as well.

The AP reported that there is no vetting of the candidates he’s choosing and a good number of them are very dicey characters accused of violent behavior and criminal financial activity. Their only qualification is their total loyalty to Donald Trump. They will no doubt be popular with the Trump base but they will have difficulty winning general elections.

Republicans have a very big, orange albatross around their necks right now and even though they know it could cripple their chances to regain the majority, they can’t get it off. We’ll have to see if the Democrats and their consultants can stop navel-gazing long enough to recognize it. 

Salon