Senator Mitch McConnell is extending an open invitation to Senator Joe Manchin III — come on over to our side.
Mr. McConnell, the Kentucky Republican and minority leader, said on Tuesday that he was astonished by the angry response that Mr. Manchin of West Virginia elicited from the White House and his fellow Democrats with his Sunday bombshell that he would oppose President Biden’s signature domestic policy bill.
The Senate, Mr. McConnell noted, is an institution where the most important vote is the next one, leaving the Republican leader perplexed as to what drove Democrats to impugn Mr. Manchin’s integrity by accusing him of reneging on commitments to the president.
“Why in the world would they want to call him a liar and try to hotbox him and embarrass him?” Mr. McConnell, who is just one Senate seat away from regaining the majority leader title, asked in an interview. “I think the message is, ‘We don’t want you around.’ Obviously that is up to Joe Manchin, but he is clearly not welcome on that side of the aisle.”
It is hardly a secret, Mr. McConnell said, that he has wooed Mr. Manchin for years, only to have Mr. Manchin, a lifelong Democrat, resist. And Mr. Manchin this week said he “hoped” there was still a place for him in the party.
Despite his break with Mr. Biden over the sprawling safety net and climate change bill, Mr. Manchin would not be an exact fit for the Republican Party. He is closer to Republicans than Democrats on some flashpoint cultural issues like guns and abortion. But he has a more expansive view than most Republicans of the role of government in social and economic policy. And in both of former President Donald J. Trump’s impeachment trials, Mr. Manchin voted to convict.
But Mr. McConnell seemed to see the clash over the spending measure as potentially providing a new opening for a party switch that would both restore him as majority leader and shift the ground in Washington. And he is also not against stirring up trouble for Democrats however and whenever he can.
“Obviously we would love to have him on our team,” said Mr. McConnell. “I think he’d be more comfortable.”
I suspect that even Manchin knows being a “maverick” in a closely divided senate is a lot more fun as a Democrat than a Republican. If he pulled this sort of thing on Mitch McConnell, he’d learn what being bullied really is.
Of course, Mitch doesn’t want to do anything but obstruct Biden and Manchin wouldn’t hav any power to stop him so he’d just be a cipher anyway. Moreover, I don’t think he’d survive a GOP primary with his record on abortion and voting for Trump’s impeachment. So he’ll stick with the Democrats where he can preen and pose and cause the most damage. That’s his thing.
But you have to admire McConnell’s chutzpah. What a troll.
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In their ongoing quest to recast January 6th as anything but what it was, the right is trying a “look over here” strategy to cast doubt on the fairness of he prosecutions. It’s a doozy:
It remains wild that there is still, to this day, a concerted effort to suggest that the violence at the Capitol on Jan. 6 was somehow not directly a function of President Donald Trump and his supporters. It’s not as though there were four guys wearing generic street clothes who snuck into the Capitol. There were hundreds from a sea of thousands, people bedecked in gear with Trump’s name and slogans all over it. Those subsequently arrested for their involvement in the violence have repeatedly identified Trump’s rhetoric as the impetus, in case anyone might somehow not have connected the then-president’s false claims about the election and his exhortations to show up in Washington that day to what followed.
Yet Trump and his allies still try. They still lift up small pieces of the day and declare them to be suspicious, from unidentified individuals mentioned in court filings to people later revealed to be exactly who they appeared to be. The idea isn’t to inform but to mislead and to distract. The idea is to distance Trump from the violence by suggesting that it had some non-obvious catalyst, like trying to argue that it was the metal used in the mooring tower that caused the Hindenburg to explode and not the combination of location and hydrogen.
In the past week or two, Trumpworld has coalesced around a different element of the day’s events as a way to blame outside influence for what followed: the pipe bombs left outside of the Democratic and Republican Party headquarters the night before.
There was Tucker Carlson on his Fox News show last week, suggesting that the House select committee investigating the violence that day was somehow avoiding looking at the attempting bombing, insisting that they — “They” — had “stopped talking about this person.”
There was Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.), tweeting something similar on Wednesday evening.
“A person placing pipe bombs at the RNC and the DNC was targeting both political parties the night before the J6 Capitol riot,” she wrote, elevating a tweet from right-wing activist Jack Posobiec echoing Carlson’s claim. “Those should be the phone records subpoenaed. Why don’t they care about the pipe bomber?”
And then there was Trump himself, speaking to right-wing media personality Candace Owens. She began the interview by raising the same idea.
“Everybody talks about January 6th,” Owens said. “I actually want to talk about January 5th.” She claimed that the FBI “has showed us a couple of stills of those individuals” and that Carlson and podcast host Joe Rogan had proven that the FBI was involved in encouraging violence on Jan. 6, which is not true both in the senses that no such thing was proven and that there’s no evidence that it’s provable.
But Trump, obviously understanding the utility of having others be blamed for the violence, took the bait.
“This pipe bomber or bomber — who knows if it was a pipe, who knows what it was — they never found him?” Trump said. “I’ve seen pictures of them, and very clear pictures. And you know that they do have cameras — not just a camera, they have many cameras on every corner. And I would imagine they probably know who he was, and I guarantee he wasn’t one of the people that were at that protest for the right reason.”
“Why aren’t they finding this pipe bomber and how come other people haven’t been revealed?” he added later. “Because I think that were more than just — let’s call them MAGA people. … You have BLM and you had antifa people, I had very little doubt about that, and they were antagonizing and they were agitating.”
What nonsense. There have been numerous alerts on this case with videos and graphics. And not there weren’t numerous BLM and Antifa people anywhere near that insurrectionist mess.
The tactic being used here is to suggest that the lack of an arrest is evidence that the FBI doesn’t want the individual to be found, or, more nefariously, that it knows who he is because the Bureau was somehow involved in the incident. Greene and Owens appear to be arguing that it’s suspicious in particular because so many other suspects from the Capitol riot have already been rolled up thanks to the government’s ability to track their movements.
This isn’t suspicious; it’s a logical fallacy. There were thousands of people at the Capitol and hundreds have been arrested. But many haven’t been arrested, despite video of their actions and, presumably in some cases, digital evidence of their actions and locations. Go to the FBI’s page focused on the Capitol riot and you’ll see literally hundreds of photos of other people the government is trying to track down. Those are the people to whom the pipe-bomb suspect should be compared, not those who have already been tracked down and charged with crimes. In that context, there’s nothing suspicious about the lack of an arrest at all.
But we should not make the mistake of assuming that these questions are being raised in good faith. None of these individuals — Greene, Trump, Carlson or Owens — should be presumed to be assessing the situation with critical objectivity, only raising questions after carefully considering the evidence and the weight of their assertions. Instead, each is interested in promoting some aspect of the Trump good-government bad duality. If defending Trump or undercutting the government means elevating unfounded doubt about the role of government actors in violence, so be it.
It’s actually a feature, not a bug. They love to cast themselves as anti-government rebels who are being persecuted by the government — even as they exhort the government to persecute others.
I swear they are living out their own warped counter-culture Woodstock fantasies. Instead of long hair and bell-bottoms they drape themselves in Trump flags and gatish red-white and blue costumes. If they weren’t so violent, it would be amusing. Unfortunately, it’s anything but funny.
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First, the good news: It does not appear that a majority of the Supreme Court is prepared to find that religious liberty claims require an exemption to COVID vaccine mandates everywhere and anywhere. This is profoundly good news given that COVID rates appear to be spiking yet again as we prepare to enter the holiday season. Twice now, in six weeks, a six-justice majority has flicked away claims from religious health care workers who assert a First Amendment right to refuse vaccination against the coronavirus. Two of these justices, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett, have certainly left the door open to changing their minds. For the time being, though, these two junior justices appear to be unwilling to exacerbate the pandemic in the name of religious liberty.
Now the bad news: Three justices, led by Neil Gorsuch, say there is a First Amendment right to refuse the vaccine on religious grounds. Worse, they are defending this position with dangerously broad and overheated rhetoric that undermines the constitutional foundation of all vaccine mandates. Gorsuch, along with Justices Clarence Thomas and Sam Alito, has rejected the principle that preventing the spread of communicable diseases qualifies as an inherently compelling state interest. And he is fighting to transform litigation over religious exemptions into an elaborate game of chutes and ladders the government will always lose. These radical and polarizing arguments may have alienated Kavanaugh and Barrett for now. But they are swiftly gaining purchase among extremist lower court judges, who are seizing on Gorsuch’s dissents to swat down mandates—all while toppling a pillar of public health in the process […]
Gorsuch’s most alarming argument is more fundamental: He openly scorned the notion that the government’s interest in halting the spread of a lethal global virus is always “compelling.” While the justice begrudgingly acknowledged that limiting COVID is a compelling interest today, he added that it “cannot qualify as such forever.” Pointing to the development of vaccines and treatments, he suggested that state efforts to fight COVID will no longer qualify as “compelling” in the very near future because if these treatments work, people won’t get sick and die. “If human nature and history teach anything,” he concluded with a grandiose flourish, “it is that civil liberties face grave risks when governments proclaim indefinite states of emergency.”
As Northwestern University law professor Andrew Koppelman has explained, this logic is terrifying on its face.* The Supreme Court has increasingly applied the highest standard of judicial review, known as “strict scrutiny,” to any infringement on free exercise rights, forcing the government to prove again and again that it has a “compelling” interest in burdening religion. The government automatically flunks this test any time the court determines that it lacks such an interest. So Gorsuch, along with Thomas and Alito, are preparing to rig the game against COVID restrictions: With every passing day, goes the logic, the government’s interest becomes less compelling. With every life saved, the urgency of saving future lives diminishes.
If all this sounds like the Supreme Court’s decision to gut the Voting Rights Act’s preclearance provision because it successfully suppressed racist voting laws, it’s because the logic is the same. As Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg pointed out then, scrapping a law because of its success is “like throwing away your umbrella in a rainstorm because you are not getting wet.” Throwing out an umbrella for keeping you dry is bad enough. Now Gorsuch seems to be suggesting that the more effective those umbrellas are, the less government interest there can be in requiring them. As Koppelman notes in his piece, Gorsuch seems to be floating the principle that we can soon achieve some acceptable rate of unnecessary death, such that the state will no longer have a compelling interest in preventing these deaths at all.
And his logic extends far beyond this pandemic. Gorsuch seems to think that unless a disease is actively killing tens of thousands of Americans a month, the state cannot curb its spread in a manner that hampers “religious liberty.” Under this theory, mandatory vaccination laws for all kinds of diseases—polio, smallpox, measles—would be suspect, particularly if those diseases no longer ravage the population. (Never mind that these diseases have been largely eradicated in the United States because of vaccine mandates.) And states like California and New York could no longer refuse religious exemptions to school vaccination rules. In his dissent, Gorsuch felt no compunction about accusing New York Gov. Kathy Hochulof anti-religious hate. Condemning Hochul for declaring that “God wants” everyone to get vaccinated, the justice proclaimed that this comment “exudes suspicion” and “animosity” toward “those who hold unpopular religious beliefs” in violation of the First Amendment.
Lithwick notes that this theory does not have a majority on the Court yet but it’s “blazing its way through the lower courts as a clarion cry on behalf of religious dissenter who believe they are being singled out for hostile treatment by state officials seeking to do nothing more than save lives.” A bunch of Trump judges have already cited this fatuous piece of nonsense in their opinions halting mandates in various states
One lower court judge has taken Gorsuch’s ideas a step further. Dissenting this week from a decision allowing United Airlines’ COVID-19 vaccine mandate for employees to remain in place, Judge James Ho of the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals made Gorsuch sound almost reasonable. In a six-page dissent, Ho, a Trump appointee, described United’s vaccine mandate as proof of a “calloused approach to” and “apparent disdain for” people of faith. Ho’s dissent was full of his usual Newsmax flourishes: “To hypothesize that the earthly reward of monetary damages could compensate for these profound challenges of faith is to misunderstand the entire nature of religious conviction at its most foundational level.” He noted that “as if all this weren’t enough, to top it all off, United is forcing this crisis of conscience on the eve of Christmas—one of the holiest times of the year, the season when Christians cherish devoting their hearts and souls to both faith and family alike, not to choosing between the two.”
Gag me. If I have ever dismissed all those people who have been screaming that these people want to establish a theocracy, I apologize.
Josh Marshall wrote this long twitter thread in response, which I think is correct:
Specifically, it is a new theory, in the Court minority for now, which seems poised to invalidate ALL vaccine mandates on the theory, among others, that the state simply has no compelling interest in preventing the spread of communicable diseases. It’s part of the broader right wing judicial agenda to put much of the power of the state at the mercy of a novel sort of Calhounite minority veto. But there’s a whole other layer of this corruption that gets too little attention. In the overwhelming number of cases the idea that these mandates are violating ANYBODYS religious scruples, let alone liberties, is just bullshit. Here’s an example.
There are many people who believe it is an abuse of the free exercise clause to put civil rights legislation or abortion rights legislation at the mercy of claims of religious liberty. I am definitely one of those people. But there are large communities of belief in this country who believe abortion is deep moral evil and that belief is deeply interwoven with their confessional identity. I don’t think that means they should be able to veto public laws or get carve out or whatever. But I grant that these are at least issues that their religious beliefs directly speak to.
There are close to no religions in this country who have anything like that with vaccinations. Christian science does. A very small very small sects. But VERY few. Overwhelmingly this religious objection is just totally made up. There are basically no mainstream Christian denominations that say anything about vaccination.
Now it is true that we really don’t want to get the state into the business of litigate what your religion says and what you do and don’t believe. But this is why the has always been on the believer to make some good faith effort to demonstrate that something the state is requiring impinges on some actual body of belief, or even some demonstrated personal history.
Otherwise, it’s just an ability to opt out of or actually overthrow any law that doesn’t match with your current preferences or political impulses or beliefs. We’d all like to do that sometimes. But that’s the burden of living in society, living in a democracy. The whole notion of religious liberty has become a mockery of the original conception – which was the liberty to **practice** your own religion, not the ability to use your religious confession as a sort of constitutional force field that allows you to ignore or break laws you don’t happen to like.
But we shouldn’t lose sight of the fact that these vaccine claims are actually already that reductio ad absurdum. Religions these litigants purport to subscribe to have no objection to vaccination. Very few of these individuals even have personal histories of such opposition. Have they ever gotten a tetanus shot? These latest ruling go beyond the rulings of recent years which make religious liberty less a defense against the hand of the state so much as a cudgel to be used against here.
Here, again, the claims of religious scruple are just made up out of whole cloth because the path has already been created for such fabulisms by the corruption of free exercise doctrine. None of this is a surprise to anyone. We know this stuff is made up. It’s bullshit even on its own terms.
I don’t think any of us have full grokked just how much the Federalist Society judiciary is going to change all our lives. It is going to be profound and very, very difficult to reform. I wish I thought the Democrats were up to the task, but if there is one institution that seems to be off limits by the Centrist Consensus it’s that. Let’s hope that changes because if it doesn’t we are in trouble.
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There is a lot of media finger pointing at Biden going on right now, criticizing the administration for failing to anticipate this latest surge, some of which seems pretty fair. Even if Omicron had not come along, Delta was still raging and failing to have more rapid tests available going into the winter was a serious error. I’ll never understand why the testing situation has been so fraught in this country. They managed to roll out the vaccines pretty efficiently, why not testing?
When COVID-19 started sweeping across America in the spring of 2020, Irene Bosch knew she was in a unique position to help.
The Harvard-trained scientist had just developed quick, inexpensive tests for several tropical diseases, and her method could be adapted for the novel coronavirus. So Bosch and the company she had co-founded two years earlier seemed well-suited to address an enormous testing shortage.
E25Bio — named after the massive red brick building at MIT that houses the lab where Bosch worked — already had support from the National Institutes of Health, along with a consortium of investors led by MIT.
Within a few weeks, Bosch and her colleagues had a test that would detect coronavirus in 15 minutes and produce a red line on a little chemical strip. The factory where they were planning to make tests for dengue fever could quickly retool to produce at least 100,000 COVID-19 tests per week, she said, priced at less than $10 apiece, or cheaper at a higher scale.
Bosch’s prototype attracted a top Silicon Valley venture capital firm, which pitched in $2 million.
“We are excited about what E25Bio is capable of shipping in a short amount of time: a test that is significantly cheaper, more affordable, and available at-home,” said firm founder Vinod Khosla. (Disclosure: Khosla’s daughter Anu Khosla is on ProPublica’s board.)
On March 21 — when the U.S. had recorded only a few hundred COVID-19 deaths — Bosch submitted the test for emergency authorization, a process the Food and Drug Administration uses to expedite tests and treatments.
A green light from the FDA could have made a big difference for the many Americans who were then frantically trying to find doctors to swab their noses, with results, if they were lucky, coming back only days later.
But the go-ahead never came.
In the months that followed, Bosch responded to repeated requests from FDA reviewers for data and studies. When the agency finally put out guidance that summer about the performance over-the-counter home tests needed to meet, officials required that such tests be nearly as sensitive as the lab tests used to definitively determine whether a patient has COVID-19.
That standard proved difficult to meet. Rapid tests are usually sensitive enough to detect viral antigens when someone has enough of them to be able to spread the disease. Such tests are not as good at picking up cases in either earlier or later stages of infection, when viral loads are lower.
Bosch’s tests missed the FDA’s high bar. It wasn’t until the spring of 2021 that much larger companies were able to design similar tests — relatively inexpensive, over-the-counter rapid tests — that the agency found acceptable.
“You could have antigen tests saving lives since the beginning of the pandemic,” said Bosch, sitting in her lab at MIT. “That’s the sad story.”
A sad story, indeed. And a story that shows our sclerotic health institutions just didn’t have the necessary flexibility to respond to a fast moving crisis.
Again, I don’t understand this particular failure. Rapid tests were always going to be a useful tool in the arsenal, at least for responsible people who want to go the extra mile before interacting with vulnerable people who aren’t protected. (There doesn’t seem to be much you can do with the refusniks.) It’s always made sense to have a boatload of them at the ready for future waves.
I don’t know if they thought the tests wouldn’t work on future mutations or what, but there was a ton of money going out the door for all kinds of things that may or may not have been necessary (ventilators manufactured by Kodak anyone?) and home tests always should have been on the menu.
I bought some a while back at a fairly reasonable price but I assume that most people didn’t. It should have been easy — just pick one up at the grocery or drug store for free or just a couple of bucks. This mad rush is a mistake and one that I’m afraid the Democrats are going to pay for. This kind of thing is exactly what the public is so sick of. Oy …
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The Hunters in the Snow by Pieter Bruegel the Elder (1565)
Perry Bacon at the Washington Post has written a smart column about what he calls “performative centrism.” He describes a phenomenon that I and other members of what we used to call the Netroots have been railing about for years — the reflexive impulse of the political establishment to downplay the radicalism of the right, overplay the the threat from “the left” and generally distort the political environment in reaction to a conscious right wing strategy to elicit exactly that response. And one of its most effective tactics is to conscript liberal and centrist members of establishment institutions to pooh-pooh anyone who points out what they are doing or observe that the sky is, in fact, falling.
This has been happening since the 1970s, growing to extreme proportions during the early aughts, when the post 9/11 political establishment completely lost its collective mind. But it’s never gone away and the last year shows that the impulse still runs deep.
Bacon comes at this from the perspective of a Black columnist, which is very interesting and brings its own set of urgent concerns. But I think the general thesis applies to any of us who have been sounding the alarms about this for years:
In basically every major institution in America, there are powerful figures who I doubt voted for Donald Trump but nonetheless play down the radicalism of the Republican Party, belittle those who speak honestly about it or otherwise act in ways that make it harder to combat that radicalism. That needs to change. Americans desperately need leaders and institutions that are fully grappling with Republicans’ dangerous anti-democratic drift.
On Capitol Hill, Democratic Sens. Joe Manchin III (W.Va.) and Kyrsten Sinema (Ariz.) have cast liberal critics of the filibuster as overly partisan even as state-level Republicans pass voting restrictions that Democrats can’t override without ending the filibuster. In the media, journalists like NBC’s Chuck Todd and outlets such as Politico at times treat calls to rethink how the media covers politics as demands for it to cheerlead for Democrats.
It’s entirely possible for someone to like the legal positions of Trump’s Supreme Court nominees or think that Republican lawmakers were correct to vote to disqualify the election results in certain states. But there is no indication that those I list above actually hold those views.
So why this posture? Some of it is probably about career and financial incentives. Since the media prizes neutrality and counterintuitive views, Democrats who defend Republicans or cast other Democrats as alarmists get op-eds published in major papers and land on big news shows. Facebook won’t make as much money if Republicans abandon the platform, creating obvious incentives to appease the right.
A related explanation is that this approach distinguishes those who take it from their peers. The left-leaning figures who praised Trump judicial appointees, intentionally or not, communicated: “I am more thoughtful than my hyperpartisan liberal friends who just complain about all Republicans no matter what.”
A third explanation is that, consciously or unconsciously, centrist institutionalists believe the radicalism of the Republican Party is overstated. Centrist institutionalists are often male, upper-income White residents of blue states. Such people did fine when Trump was president, and they aren’t likely to be directly affected if the Supreme Court makes it harder to vote or get an abortion. If the United States moves to one-party Republican rule, those Democrats who haven’t been all that critical of the GOP will fare best.
But I think the most important explanation is simple elitism. Institutionalists worked hard to enter America’s bipartisan elite,and they value that status. Admitting that the Supreme Court has become highly partisan would diminish Breyer’s 27 years there. Admitting that the main divide in the legal world is between conservatives and liberals, not super-smart people and those who aren’t quite as smart, isn’t that useful for a Harvard law professor. Media outlets could lose influence if frank coverage of Republican radicalism cost them access to GOP officials.
Here’s the big problem with all this performative centrism: Real harm is being done. It’s harder to push for changes to the Supreme Court when one of the liberal justices is playing down the danger. It’s harder to get political journalists to adapt to the radicalism of the GOP when some of the most prominent figures in the field suggest that covering Republicans honestly amounts to left-wing activism. It’s harder to prevent false information from reaching millions of Americans when the leaders of the biggest social media companies aren’t fully committed to that cause.
Throughout the Trump era, a pattern has played out over and over: Those in the center or on the left, often women and people of color, warn that Republicans are about to take a radical step. They are cast as alarmist by institutionalists. Republicans take that radical step. The pattern repeats.
Before I became a columnist, I personally felt real tension around this issue: How could I speak honestly about how I see the Republican Party and still advance my career as a nonpartisan reporter? This is something a lot of journalists, particularly those of color, have felt the past several years as institutionalists — disproportionately White — in the media have often suggested that the press is divided between left-wing partisans and neutral observers.
It’s a real problem for journalists working for the big institutions and I don’t envy them. It’s one of the reasons why the blogosphere was created as an independent media space where these observations could be aired and discussed openly by people all over the country and the world. Things have changed somewhat with other forums for independent journalism, crowdfunding etc, but the need still remains. People like Bacon and Dana Milbank may be speaking out about the problem these days from within the institutions they are criticizing, but the problem persists.
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Bacon offers some solutions to the problem, which I think are useful:
How do we deal with these misguided institutionalists?
First, by criticizing them, forcefully and often. Coverage of the radicalism of the Republican Party is getting more honest and frank in part because journalists who engage in both sides-ism are increasingly being scolded by their peers.
Second, by building up and supporting alternative institutions and people. Analysis of the Supreme Court was once dominated by lawyers who regularly argued before the court, former Supreme Court clerks and people who teach at law schools like Harvard and Yale. This legal elite, heavily invested in the court’s legitimacy and power, consistently played down the rightward shift of the court. But a new set of observers, such as the website Balls and Strikes and the Nation’s Elie Mystal, has emerged that describes the court’s conservatives as the Republican partisans that they are. Establishment outlets will have to adapt or lose respect — and potentially their audiences, too.
Third, by reminding them that they, too, will suffer if a Trumpified GOP takes over the country. Trump didn’t quite know how to execute his vision, particularly in his first years in office, so he allowed his administration to be filled with traditional Republicans who adhered to democratic norms. But a similar or second Trump administration would assuredly be staffed with anti-democratic figures from the start. One-party, autocratic governments don’t allow private companies, media outlets and other institutions to operate freely.
I’m not calling for everyone who didn’t vote for Trump to fawningly praise President Biden. What I am asking for is the end of “let me show how not liberal I am” performances from powerful elites. They are disingenuous and lazy and, most important, they harm the real work so many are doing to defend the United States’ democracy in this perilous moment.
Obviously, I am all for supporting alternative institutions and media. 🙂
But I think his advice to point out to many of those establishment figures who persist in defending “norms” even as the other sides dismantles them that they are at the top of the right’s enemies list is particularly important. They will never get the same benefit of the doubt. I don’t think they know that. We must let them know.
I have written about this thesis since the very first week I started this blog. I even came up with a meme that was, for a time, ubiquitous even among the media establishment. (“The Village.”) I will continue observing how this evolves and changes (or doesn’t) over time — as long as you keep reading. If you’d like to support this site as we go into yet another tumultuous, unpredictable year you can hit one of the buttons below.
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The House Select Committee of investigation of the Jan. 6 attack placed Rep. Jim Jordan (R) of Ohio on notice Wednesday that it would like a few hours of his time. Maybe even 11?
Chairman Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.) wrote to Jordan that the committee would like his “voluntary cooperation in advancing our investigation.” Why is already a matter of public record:
We understand that you had at least one and possibly multiple communications with President Trump on January 6th. We would like to discuss each such communication with you in detail. And we also wish to inquire about any communications you had on January 5th or 6th with those in the Willard War Room, the Trump legal team, White House personnel or others involved in organizing or planning the actions and strategies for January 6th.
What is needed here is a full accounting and timeline of who did what and when leading up to and the day of the breach of the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6. Jordan knows already that involves him.
Asking for Jordan’s cooperation is easy. Getting his cooperation is something else. As Rep. Eric Swalwell (D-Calif.) noted last night on MSNBC, Jordan is already “moonwalking away” from testifying before the panel. It is not the first time, Swalwell said pointedly, that Jordan has been accused “of witnessing a crime and then not wanting to report it or help investigators.” (See Ohio State wrestlers’ allegations.)
When asked if he spoke with the president on Jan. 6 “before, during or after the Capitol was attacked,” Jordan famously stumbled through answering.
Politico reported in August that Jordan had at least two calls with Trump that day. One of those occurred during the attack.
Jordan later denied speaking to Trump during the attack while in a House Rules Committee meeting. When pressed, Jordan tried to change the subject. He was not under oath (IIRC).
Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH), who previously said he didn’t know if he spoke with President Trump before, during, or after the 1/6 insurrection:
In his calls that day, was Jordan coordinating with Trump on ways to stop the electoral vote certification? Was he pleading with Trump, as others in Congress did, for him to call off his supporters? However Jordan answers, he will face the wrath of Trump and the MAGA faithful. That, he will never do voluntarily.
The chances that Jordan will cooperate are slim. (I first mistyped “slime.”) Will he defy a subpoena? He will try. His allegiance to Trump is all-consuming. If he does appear as a witness, under oath, we can expect his usual theatrics, shouting and filibustering. He’ll turn his testimony into a televised circus.
I had to have some fun with that last night:
Whenever @Jim_Jordan performs a tantrum for the cameras, I want to ask #Trump what Axel Foley asked Victor Maitland in #BeverlyHillsCop:
Failure to issue an official report on the events of Jan. 6 will leave Trump and MAGA-world to rewrite their own history.
I’m looking forward to purchasing the official House report on the Jan. 6 insurrection. It would not be the first time in my lifetime such a report was necessary.
Just Security on Tuesday offered an expanded explanation for the military’s hours-long delay in deploying the National Guard to put down the Jan. 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol. Officials worried that the outgoing president might with a tweet repurpose the troops to support the insurrection and stop certification of Joe Biden’s win (and Donald Trump’s loss).
The delay was not just about the optics of or bureaucratic bungling of any troop deployment:
According to a report released last month, Christopher Miller, who served as acting Secretary of the Defense on Jan. 6, told the Department’s inspector general that he feared “if we put U.S. military personnel on the Capitol, I would have created the greatest Constitutional crisis probably since the Civil War.” In congressional testimony, he said he was also cognizant of “fears that the President would invoke the Insurrection Act to politicize the military in an anti-democratic manner” and that “factored into my decisions regarding the appropriate and limited use of our Armed Forces to support civilian law enforcement during the Electoral College certification.”
“General Mark Milley, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, as well as former CIA Director and at the time Secretary of State Mike Pompeo” feared that with troops in place Donald Trump might invoke the Insurrection Act to shut down congressional counting of electoral votes.
The top officials’ fears were warranted: Donald Trump, his close aides and a segment of Republican political figures had openly discussed the possibility of invoking the Insurrection Act or using the military to prevent the transfer of power on the basis of false claims that the election was “stolen.” But the Pentagon’s actions with respect to the National Guard suggest a scenario in which, on the basis of such concerns, a potentially profound crisis of command may have played out on Jan. 6.
Close observers of the events of Jan. 6 have mainly posited two reasons for the delay in mobilizing the Guard. The first explanation is one of bureaucratic failures or managerial weaknesses in the military’s procedures that day. A second explanation is that the military was deliberately serving Trump’s effort to interfere with the election by withholding assistance.
We identify a third explanation: that senior military officials constrained the mobilization and deployment of the National Guard to avoid injecting federal troops that could have been re-missioned by the President to advance his attempt to hold onto power.
Obi-Wan Kenobi wanted to avoid “any Imperial entanglements.” Milley wanted to avoid a Trumpish “Reichstag moment.” Make that Trumpstag moment. Donald plasters his name on everything.
Ryan Goodman and Justin Hendrix add:
What was at stake was the prospect of an illegal order from the President and thwarting a potential scheme to undermine the peaceful transfer of power. Ultimately, the outcome of the Pentagon’s decisions may have been best for the nation, even if it extended the period of time during which Congress was in harm’s way.
The report provides multiple citations in which Trump toyed with invoking the Insurrection Act as a tool for quelling street protests over police violence and/or for demonstrating his power. Trump and multiple supporters in his orbit reinforced the idea of invokingmartial law should he lose the election.
Those events plus post-election personnel changes at the Pentagon added fuel to rumors that Trump might be putting loyalists in place to carry out orders for a military deployment to keep himself in power.
Adding to the Pentagon’s concerns is the revelation from a Jan. 5 email sent by former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows that “said that the National Guard would be present to ‘protect pro Trump people’ and that many more would be available on standby.”
A clash between counter-protesters and Trump supporters on Jan. 6 could have been the trigger Trump’s stubby finger was itching to pull to invoke some form of martial law. But counter-protesters largely stayed away.
Ryan Goodman and Justin Hendrix conclude with the hope that there should be a complete compilation of the events of Jan. 6, and the actions and thoughts of the major players:
It is important for many reasons to get to the truth of what happened inside the Department of Defense in the runup to and on Jan. 6. One reason is to ensure accountability of those most responsible for the attempt to interfere with the transfer of power.
In the absence of such clarity, Trump recently highlighted his having told Miller to prepare 10,000 troops for Jan. 6 – as though such an account would be exculpatory for the former president. In his “History Tour” with conservative media personality Bill O’Reilly earlier this month, Trump said, “I asked the Secretary of Defense, I said, I think you should recommend to Nancy Pelosi and to Congress, because they are the ones that control it, I would like to recommend 10,000 National Guardsmen.” (The side reference to Pelosi has been well and repeatedlydebunked.) “That undercuts the entire premise that Donald Trump instigated the Capitol attacks,” said O’Reilly in a subsequent video production.
It would be a cruel and strange twist if the mystery about actions taken by senior Pentagon officials to avoid Trump’s use of the military in his bid to hang onto power became a cornerstone of Trump’s defense for his actions that day.
The House Jan. 6 panel plans weeks of public hearings on the events of that day. In the end, there should be a full report published. Failure to do so will allow Trump and MAGA-world to write one instead, even if not in print.
Matthew Greene, 34, of Syracuse on Wednesday became the first Proud Boy member to plead guilty to “obstructing Congress and conspiring to obstruct law enforcement.” According to court accounts, he pushed past police lines during the Jan. 6 riot but never entered the Capitol building. Greene helped program handheld radios for the Proud Boys the night before:
After the riot, Greene bragged that “we took the capital,” and then ordered over 2,000 rounds of assault-rifle ammunition and a gas mask, according to court records. In encrypted conversations with other Proud Boys, he said they had to “take back our country,” and “stand together now or end up in the gulag separately,” according to court records. He downplayed his association with the group to the FBI, prosecutors said, while telling members to be on guard for law enforcement.
His attorney claims Greene has changed his tune about affiliating with the Proud Boys. Has Donald Trump?
What happened to Greene’s stockpile of ammo?
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Former Harry Reid aide Adam Jentleson understands the Senate and he has some ideas about how to move forward now that the BBB Bill has been scuttled by Joe Manchin. It’s complicated, but the Senate is complicated and there are no simple fixes to the problem of a 50-50 split.
A productive path forward will involve making some tough choices, restoring a modicum of trust and engaging in the hard work of persuasion. But the outcome could be a big win for Biden — and Manchin. Substantively, it might also be our best shot at saving the planet, moving America toward its peers in child care and education and keeping children from going hungry.
Here’s the path that the White House and Manchin might follow.
First, Democrats have a huge opening in Manchin’s $1.8 trillion proposal, which was reported by The Washington Post. The bill Manchin would approve includes nearly $2 trillion worth of sound policy, including universal prekindergarten programs. Securing major federal action on climate always depended on the vote of Manchin, a coal state senator, and Manchin’s offer reportedly includes funding levels close to what Biden was seeking, among other things. Democrats could put it on the floor, with the addition of a short-term (say, six-month) extension of the child tax credit. This would mean giving Manchin everything he told Biden he wants.
Manchin’s bottom line only looks bad through the lens of what it leaves out. On that front, Democrats could make an eminently reasonable ask: In return for giving Manchin everything he wants, and putting aside trillions’ worth of their demands, all they will be asking for is a short-term extension of the child tax credit, which Manchin has voted for previously and which will prevent millions of children from sliding into poverty this holiday season. Some quick back-of-the-envelope calculations off the $1.4 trillion cost of a full 10-year extension suggest that a six-month extension would cost just $70 billion. That means that cost-wise, in a $1.8 trillion bill, a short-term extension of the child tax credit is a rounding error.
A short-term extension gives Manchin something else he claims to want: the chance to negotiate a bipartisan solution to extend the credit on a long-term basis. Again, all the White House would be asking for is to keep 10 million kids out of poverty while those negotiations occur. What could be more reasonable?
Of course, it would be irresponsible for Democrats to simply hope and pray that these negotiations succeed. Therefore, while Manchin is pursuing bipartisan negotiations, Democrats could introduce a new Families Bill, with a long-term extension of the child tax credit as the centerpiece. This bill can move through the budget reconciliation process, since we already know the tax credit can comply with reconciliation’s strict rules, and the Senate parliamentarian has ruled that additional reconciliation vehicles are available for Democrats to use next year.
This approach would also set up something that typically forces Congress to act: a deadline. It is a sad commentary on our dysfunctional system that Congress needs cliffs to avoid crashing over, but as someone who lived through several crises in my own time working in the Senate, it is true. If the child tax credit is extended for six months, that will create a “CTC cliff” next summer, providing a backstop that will prevent negotiations from dragging on interminably, forcing action and driving media attention.
Meanwhile, the Families Bill would be a boon for Democrats. Build Back Better is an agenda, not necessarily a bill. A major messaging challenge on the legislation itself has been its amorphous, sprawling nature. For example, the reason there is not more attention on the expiration of the child tax credit at the end of this year is that the news is too crowded with the many other issues in the current version of Biden’s legislation.
By contrast, a Families Bill might be much easier to sell to the public, especially in an election year. Having already banked other key elements of Build Back Better, Democrats could make the highly popular child tax credit the centerpiece of their 2022 campaign messaging and highlight Republicans’ refusal to join them in saving kids from poverty. Biden can make the child tax credit a major focus of his State of the Union and use the bully pulpit to demand that Congress refuse to go on summer recess unless it avoids going over the cliff.
The big question remains: How will Manchin vote? Predictions are a fool’s game at this point. But the solution is probably a combination of old-fashioned engagement, elbow grease and persuasion. Opposing Biden’s amorphous, multitrillion-dollar spending plan was always an automatic winner for Manchin in West Virginia, a state Trump won by 39 points. But the child tax credit, as a stand-alone, is different. Whatever Manchin’s plans are, killing a tax credit that even Trump supported and sending millions of kids into poverty as a result is a bad look.
He goes on to suggest that the big tax hikes that Kyrsten Sinema tanked be reintroduced with the hopes that she can be worn down. (I don’t know about that.) But he believes this would take the Democrats into the midterms with a strong agenda in any case:
Taken together, this approach is not just a way to make the best of a tough situation, but a path to rounding out two years that will, if something like Manchin’s proposal passes, have been very successful legislatively for Biden. Manchin’s bill plus a stand-alone child tax credit extension would come to close to $3 trillion, which is much more than is on the table at the moment. In the child tax credit, Democrats will be giving themselves a focused, popular, bread-and-butter issue to run on in 2022, and forcing Republicans to explain why they oppose a tax credit for families.
I honestly don’t know if any of that will make a difference, but the Democrats have to try. They simply can’t leave all this hanging out there with no resolution.
Sometimes legislation does die, especially big bills that Democrats want to pass for the good of working families. The headwinds are always strong. (I’m thinking about Clinton;s health care plan which was rolled out with great fanfare and never even made it to a vote.) But we have a crisis on our hands with climate change and it has to be dealt with now. They are close enough to getting something done on that — just one vote shy — that they have to try to push through.
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After dropping a gun at TJ Maxx, a customer shoots herself in the foot. #GunFail #ShootingWhileShopping
OPELIKA, Alabama. — A shopper at a TJ Maxx in east Alabama shot herself in the foot when her gun accidentally discharged, police said.
The gunfire happened when she dropped the gun Monday afternoon in the TJ Maxx at the Tiger Town shopping center in Opelika, The Opelika-Auburn News reported.
The 55-year-old woman was taken to a hospital. No other injuries were reported.
AP Via Fox 13,
In Texas you need TWO signs. One to ban concealed guns one to ban open carry.
According to the story, only the woman was injured. If I was in the store when this happened, even if I wasn’t physically injured, I would sue. And I would win because TJ Maxx failed to take the simple step of putting up a sign saying no guns in the store. Here’s my logic:
The store has a duty of care to shoppers. By allowing people with guns to enter as customers, they are taking on a certain level of responsibility to protect them. If they fail, and someone is injured while in the store, the company can be held liable. How liable they are depends on the steps they did or, or didn’t take, to keep customers safe.
The Sign that saved millions of dollars in Slip and Fall lawsuits.
In Premises Security law if a store had the option to do something reasonable to protect customers from injury–like put up a sign saying, “CAUTION WET FLOOR” or “CONCEALED HANDGUN PROHIBITED” but didn’t, and someone is injured, the company takes on a greater percentage of the responsibility for the injury to person who is hurt. And that translates to more financial compensation.
A judge could look at this case and say, “This is 80% the woman’s fault and 20% the store’s.” The woman doesn’t have to carry insurance, and likely has none, but TJ Maxx has to carry insurance. It’s typically $5 million for each store.
What people don’t know is that accidental gun discharges happen all the time and many are in retail stores. From the CENG article on this “Since January 1, 2021, 45 people have been injured in Alabama’s as a result of an accident discharge of a firearm, According to the Gun Violence Archive, 9 were women.”
DESOTO, Texas – A shopper at a Walmart store in the Dallas suburb of DeSoto was hit by accidental gunfire. It happened around 6 p.m. Tuesday at the superstore on Belt Line Road.
DeSoto police said another shopper who was carrying a concealed handgun was to blame. It appears to have been an “accidental discharged.”
The victim was hit by shrapnel and is expected to be okay. The man who fired the gun did not have a license to carry, police confirmed.
He was gone by the time police arrived but police said they know who he is and may file charges.
In fact, Walmart has a special insurance/ legal team that settles cases where people were injured by negligently discharged guns. Walmart keeps a lid on the size and number of the cash settlements following in-store incidents. The settlements are mostly sealed. The media aren’t going to do follow ups. By the way, the injuries don’t have to be only physical. PTSD is a real thing. There is also the option to sue for endangerment.
UNLEASH THE LAWYERS! Bring the personal injury lawyers who sue for slip and fall accidents in stores to sue for accidental gun discharges. The stores need to pay a price for their decision to allow poorly trained and inexperienced concealed gun carriers in their stores.
I want to see big settlements in the news because it tells other people they can sue too. And according to my highly-places sources in the insurance industry, lots of big settlements lead to policy changes and enforcement of policies at the store level.
S.C. woman gets $10 million in Walmart lawsuit after stepping on rusty nail, losing most of leg (Nov. 30, 2021 WMBF/Gray News)
BTW, nowhere in any of the stories I read was it mentioned if she had a concealed carry license. Concealed carry in Alabama requires a license. Open Carry doesn’t and is legal in Alabama. (Giffords Link on Alabama law) If she didn’t have a CCL she would be charged, that increases HER liability, but as I noted, she doesn’t have to carry insurance. However if she has a CCL, and the store permits concealed guns in the store, then the lawyer suing the company can say.
“This is not about criminals ignoring signs. If TJ Maxx had banned guns in the store by putting up signs, the law-abiding concealed carrier would have left her gun in the car and my client never would have been injured.”
If you want to more detail about this issue, and how it can be used by customers and lawyers, applied to corporation to insurance policies, read my 2016 letter to Alex Gourlay the EVP of the Walgreens Boots Alliance, Inc.
When you allow a few customers to carry concealed guns into your stores you are trusting them with the lives of your employees, all the other customers and their children.
You may not know just how poorly trained and inexperienced some concealed gun carriers are. In 25 states people aren’t even required to show they know how to shoot a gun to get a permit. In eight states, no permit or training is required at all to carry a concealed gun.
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Oh my. Cancun Cruz spoke the words you’re not allowed to speak:
Ted Cruz actually thinks that he is going to get elected President of the United States in 2024. This is too good! Interview this morning. pic.twitter.com/EpUELXaLtO
Citing the likes of former Presidents Ronald Reagan and Richard Nixon, as well as former GOP nominees John McCain and Mitt Romney, Cruz said history is on his side should he run in 2024.
“You know, there’s a reason, historically, why the runner-up is almost always the next nominee,” Cruz said, citing what he described as “a huge base of support.”
As Insider’s Robin Bravender reported in September, Cruz has been eyeing another presidential bid and largely maintained a group of loyal staffers who could help him spring another one into action.
Cruz is also up for reelection in his Senate seat in 2024.
I remember thinking at the time of the Republican conventions, when Cruz stood alone and refused to endorse Trump (and got lustily booed) that he might lead the conservative Never Trump opposition. But that was ridiculous. He almost immediately turned himself into the smarmiest sycophant this side of Mike Pence.
He probably thought that saying this on some obscure little Youtube channel would go unnoticed. You can bet that the big orange elephant in the corner of the room has heard about it. And he’s not going to be pleased.
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