Month: January 2022

There has been a lot of garment rending and hand wringing the last few days over a new Gallup poll which shows that party identification amongst voters has shifted dramatically over the past few months from Democratic to Republican. Coming as it does at the one-year mark of the Biden administration, this does seem to portend doom for Democratic hopes for midterm election success in November. Party identification is one of the traditional predictors of future results, and this one doesn’t look good. The shift in 2021 was the largest shift since 2006, as Gallup reported:

On average, Americans’ political party preferences in 2021 looked similar to prior years, with slightly more U.S. adults identifying as Democrats or leaning Democratic (46%) than identified as Republicans or leaned Republican (43%). However, the general stability for the full-year average obscures a dramatic shift over the course of 2021, from a nine-percentage-point Democratic advantage in the first quarter to a rare five-point Republican edge in the fourth quarter.

It is a dramatic shift to be sure. But it’s important to realize that at the beginning of last year there was another dramatic shift away from Republicans, likely because of the events surrounding the election and the deadly COVID surge of winter 2021. Reversion to a relatively common partisan split isn’t surprising.

And the reasons for this split are obvious.

Some of it just goes back to the polarization we’ve been living in for the last few years. There’s also been a slew of bad news over the past four months, from the messy Afghanistan withdrawal to inflation that has everyone spooked to a new COVID variant. 

A year ago, nobody thought we’d be back where we are right now. Back then, the vaccines were rolling out and it appeared that we had “rounded the curve” as Trump would say. Most of us assumed that virtually everyone would get vaccinated and we would get past the point at which there could be so much hospitalization and death that the health care system was on the brink of collapse. But here we are today. And the Democrats are in charge so they are being blamed, rightly or wrongly.

But let’s not forget that the Republicans haven’t been sitting quietly knitting in the corner for the past year. They have been relentlessly pounding the Democrats with culture war propaganda, from demagoguing critical race theory and school closures to Dr. Suess and Mr. Potatohead and some of it has successfully penetrated the mainstream. If you happen to catch any kind of right-wing media, this is the sort of thing you will see day in and day out:

Chyrons on Fox over last few minutes:

RANDOM MURDERS IGNITE FEAR ACROSS COUNTRY

APOCALYPTIC HELLSCAPES TAKE OVER AMERICAN CITIES

DECLINING QUALITY OF LIFE AS CITY DECAY SPREADS

— Oliver Darcy (@oliverdarcy) January 18, 2022

Of course, bashing America’s cities has long been a staple of right-wing dogma. They know who lives there, after all, and it isn’t “their kind of people.” Cities are also the places where they believe the election was stolen from Donald Trump, which is the shrill MAGA rallying cry.

It’s obvious how potent that Big Lie has been among Republican die-hards and most likely some independents as well. And even if you know it’s a crock, the mere fact that so many people believe it is disorienting and depressing.Advertisement:

All of these things have contributed to this pervasively grim mood that exists throughout the culture despite the fact that the economy is actually doing extremely well. (If nothing else, this state of affairs proves that economic determinism is a very narrow way to explain the political behavior of the American public.) People feel tired and dispirited and when that happens a “throw the bums out” attitude often takes hold. The Washington Post’s Philip Bump argues that this shift proves the Democratic Party’s focus on Republican anti-democratic behavior has failed as a political message and that any thoughts the GOP might be permanently harmed by its complicity in January 6th simply haven’t resonated:

Gallup’s new data undercuts that idea severely. Americans don’t appear to be particularly concerned about the Republican Party’s response to 2020, particularly given the significant role that Trump still plays in setting its direction. Democrats have repeatedly hoped that Trump would prove so poisonous that the electorate would turn against the GOP. It worked in 2018, when the midterms served as a repudiation of Trump’s politics. It didn’t work in 2016, though, when Trump first won, and it offered only limited utility in 2020, when Trump earned significantly more support than he had four years prior, even while losing the popular vote by a wider margin. Democrats had unified control of government — but only barely.

And that was before Trump and congressional Republicans tried to subvert Biden’s victory. There are a lot of reasons for the swing back to the right over the past year, most of which center on Biden, not Trump. But Democratic efforts to cast the GOP as hostile to democracy itself either aren’t landing — as polling has suggested — or aren’t compelling.

The polling to which he refers shows that it’s actually Republicans who believe that democracy is in danger more fervently than Democrats —because they believe Trump’s Big Lie. That doesn’t, however, mean that the Democrats’ argument isn’t landing. It just means that Democratic voters still have some faith that the system will hold. That isn’t a rejection of the argument that the Republican Party has become a toxic force. In fact, it may just mean that many voters accept that they are and simply believe that American democracy is strong enough to withstand it. (That may be naive, but it strikes me as quintessential American optimism.)

In any case, there is some other polling that seems to contradict all the agita over the Gallup findings, evidence that the media overlooked. USA Today reported this just a couple of weeks ago:Advertisement:

Republicans lost their lead on a generic congressional ballot, according to a new USA Today-Suffolk University poll, a red flag for the party ahead of this year’s midterm elections.The poll found Democrats leading Republicans on a generic ballot 39% to 37%, within the poll’s margin of error of 3.1 percentage points but a significant drop from Republicans’ 8-point lead in the same poll in November.

This is hard to reconcile with the reaction to the Gallup numbers and it’s impossible to know exactly what might have precipitated the drop. But these findings are no less determinative than Gallup’s, and none of it can accurately predict what’s going to happen next November.

We are living through a very weird, unprecedented time and predictions are a fool’s game in these circumstances. I would suggest, however, that if Bump is correct and the Democrats’ legitimate alarm about the anti-democratic behavior of the GOP has been falling on deaf ears, there’s one thing that will almost certainly get the public’s attention: Donald Trump’s return. There’s no one in the country who makes that argument for the Democrats more clearly than he does. 

Salon

Associated Press:

A bill pushed by Republican Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis that would prohibit public schools and private businesses from making white people feel “discomfort” when they teach students or train employees about discrimination in the nation’s past received its first approval Tuesday.

The Senate Education Committee approved the bill that takes aim at critical race theory — though it doesn’t mention it explicitly — on party lines, with Republicans in favor and Democrats opposed.

Poor white people. Poor, poor, put-upon white people. It must be awful being them.

“This bill’s not for Blacks, this bill was not for any other race. This was directed to make whites not feel bad about what happened years ago,” said state Sen. Shevrin Jones, who is Black. “At no point did anyone say white people should be held responsible for what happened, but what I would ask my white counterparts is, are you an enabler of what happened or are you going to say we must talk about history?”

I’ve got something for them that Black people have to feel “discomfort” about:

That’s from the Register of Deeds office in my North Carolina county. Well over 300 “property” records of people owned by other people. As you can see, many of those records are for multiple persons, multiple families. One county. Out of 100 in this one southern state. And not in the coastal plain where large plantations once operated.

Descendents of those people on the “slave deed’ list, and of others enslaved in this hemisphere, have little record of their family history, something white people take for granted. Mustn’t allow them to feel guilty about it.

The former guy (TFG) needs to devote more time to covering his own ass than undermining the country. The longer he goes not having to defend himself and his business in court, the more energy he will have to pour into destroying his enemies and the country while he’s at it.

TFG will, of course, attack, attack, attack those seeking to hold him accountable for, let’s face it, a life of white-collar crime. It’s the Roy Cohn way. One hopes he will soon be too busy sweating legal jeopardy to focus his limited attention on his opponents.

The Associated Press reports that New York Attorney General Letitia James will bring a civil lawsuit against TFG’s family business over “fraudulent or misleading” asset valuations used for obtaining loans and dodging taxes.

Little here is new in New York’s investigation of Trump Organization fraud. Former Trump personal attorney Michael Cohen testified to the House Oversight and Reform Committee in 2019 that “Trump inflated his total assets when it served his purposes, such as trying to be listed among the wealthiest people in Forbes, and deflated his assets to reduce his real estate taxes.” James is just simply trying to hold him to account for it, civilly if not criminally. The statute of limitations checks TFG’s criminal liability. But now James wants to depose those roguish Trump kids, daughter Ivanka and Donald Jr. :

In the court documents, Attorney General Letitia James’ office gave its most detailed accounting yet of a long-running investigation of allegations that Trump’s company exaggerated the value of assets to get favorable loan terms, or misstated what land was worth to slash its tax burden.

The Trump Organization, it said, had overstated the value of land donations made in New York and California on paperwork submitted to the IRS to justify several million dollars in tax deductions.

The company misreported the size of Trump’s Manhattan penthouse, saying it was nearly three times its actual size — a difference in value of about $200 million, James’ office said, citing deposition testimony from Trump’s longtime financial chief Allen Weisselberg, who was charged last year with tax fraud in a parallel criminal investigation.

James’ office detailed its findings in a court motion seeking to force Trump, his daughter Ivanka Trump and his son Donald Trump Jr. to comply with subpoenas seeking their testimony.

Investigators, the court papers said, had “developed significant additional evidence indicating that the Trump Organization used fraudulent or misleading asset valuations to obtain a host of economic benefits, including loans, insurance coverage, and tax deductions.”

TFG whines that it is all so unfair to be accountable to the law that applies to ordinary, unrich people. It’s another witch hunt. It’s all political. His constitutional rights are being violated, etc.

James has already deposed son Eric, and she is cooperating with the Manhattan District Attorney’s office on a parallel criminal case. The Trump Organization and its former chief financial officer Allen Weisselberg were charged last year with tax fraud in that case. Weisselberg has pleaded not guilty.

The House Jan. 6 investigators on Tuesday issued subpoenas for another former Trump personal attorney, Rudy Giuliani, plus Kraken lawyers Jenna Ellis and Sidney Powell, and former Trump campaign advisor, Boris Epshteyn. The investigation is drawing closer to TFG.

CNN:

“The four individuals we’ve subpoenaed today advanced unsupported theories about election fraud, pushed efforts to overturn the election results, or were in direct contact with the former President about attempts to stop the counting of electoral votes,” Democratic Rep. Bennie Thompson of Mississippi, who chairs the committee, said in a statement Tuesday.

The subpoenas mark a significant escalation in the sweeping probe as the committee is now seeking to compel cooperation from those at the heart of Trump’s push to overturn the election predicated on the lie that it was stolen. The panel has an entire investigative team dedicated to examining efforts by Trump and his allies to pressure Department of Justice officials, as well as those at the state level, to overturn the results of the election.

Giuliani’s attorney, Robert Costello, tells CNN that the House select committee subpoenaing his client amounts to “political theater” and indicated that his client doesn’t plan to provide information because he has claims of executive privilege and attorney-client privilege.

Not if those conversations involved the planning for or commission of crimes, they don’t.

The committee has also subpoenaed and obtained phone records for Trump kid, Eric, and those of Donald Jr.’s fiancé, Kimberly Guilfoyle. The pair were heavily involved in the planning of the Jan. 6, 2021 rally at The Ellipse that ended with a march on the U.S. Capitol and a violent insurrection:

It appears to be the first time the select committee has issued a subpoena that targeted a member of the Trump family, in what marks a significant escalation of the investigation into Trump’s role in the January 6 insurrection. The decision to subpoena communication records involving the Trump family underscores the aggressive tack the committee is taking as it races to complete its investigation while battling Trump in court over access to documents from his administration.

The phone records obtained by the committee are part of a new round of call detail records subpoenaed from communication companies, multiple sources tell CNN. These records provide the committee with logs that show incoming and outgoing calls, including the date, time and length of calls. The records also show a log of text messages, but not the substance or content of the messages.

The investigation has already subpoenaed phone records for over 100 other people as it pieces together who spoke to whom and when, prior to, during, and after the attack on the Capitol that left several dead and nearly 150 officers injured.

Watching this all play out is like watching paint dry. While the investigations in New York, on Capitol Hill, and (less visibly) at the Department of Justice methodically plod along, Republican efforts to rig or overturn the next election proceed in plain sight.

Colorado Secretary of State Jena Griswold is trying to get Mesa County Clerk and Recorder Tina Peters, accused of a data breach, removed from election oversight even as TFG’s allies attempt to elect more officials willing to manipulate election results in 2022 and 2024.

When justice “comes at the king,” we don’t want it to miss a third time. But any pressure that limits the man’s ability to set his cronies in place for the future will be welcome. And as soon as possible. If evidence justifies, indictments would be nice.

Should TFG gain power again, he will have two agenda items: redemption (of his brand) and revenge. Let’s not get to that point.

This report from the Trump rally last weekend is just … wow:

Ray Kallatsa is a die-hard Trumper who “definitely” wants to see former President Donald Trump run for office again in 2024.

So it was natural that he’d travel from Tucson to see Trump’s first rally of 2022. But as Kallatsa stood there on Saturday, pondering whom he would like to see as Trump’s next veep — from Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, to former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, to onetime national security adviser turned ardent conspiracy theorist Mike Flynn — an unorthodox idea came to him.

“JFK Jr.,” he said, referencing the son of the 35th president who died in a plane crash in 1999. Kallatsa realized he might have come off a bit odd with the suggestion. “I don’t want to sound too much like a conspiracy theorist, but he’s coming back,” he explained. “He’s supposed to reveal himself on the 17th if he’s truly alive. I think we’ll see him.”

If Kallatsa was worried about sounding too conspiratorial, he shouldn’t have been. He was not alone among the crowd in believing that JFK Jr. is not only still alive but is also a secret Trump supporter embedded far in the “deep state.” One attendee was spotted wearing a red shirt with the faces of Trump, Kennedy and Kennedy Jr. in the crowd. Michael Protzman, the QAnon influencer who organized the event last year in Dallas’ Dealey Plaza where he and others also believed John F. Kennedy and John F. Kennedy Jr. would reappear from the dead, was spotted in the rally stands.

MAGA = total, unadulterated lunacy.

Elsewhere were individuals in hats that read “Trump Won” and buttons with “Q.” Figures from fringe QAnon online groups, like Jim and Ron Watkins, shared their visit to the rally with online followers. And conservative activist Ali Alexander — who helped organize last year’s Jan. 6 “Stop the Steal” rally, which has led to countless arrests and fears about the erosion of American democracy — was given priority access to the event.

One of the introductory speakers, Rep. Paul Gosar (R-Ariz.), who represents the district that includes Florence, invoked a “storm coming” — a phrase used by QAnon — in his speech. Another speaker was Arizona state Rep. Mark Finchem, who is running to be Arizona’s secretary of state, has been linked to QAnon and has reportedly discussed conspiracies about a network of elected officials involved in a network of pedophilia. Both have been endorsed by Trump.

Trump himself indulged:

Up on stage Saturday night, Trump pushed a right-wing conspiracy suggesting that some of the people who attacked the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6 were actually FBI informants.

“Exactly how many of those present at the Capitol complex on January 6 were FBI confidential informants agents or otherwise working directly or indirectly with an agency of the United States government? People want to hear this,” Trump said.

Days earlier, the congressional committee investigating the capital attacks said it had interviewed Ray Epps, the Arizona man central to the theory that the FBI was secretly involved in the riots. Epps, the select committee said, had informed investigators “that he was not employed by, working with or acting at the direction of any law enforcement agency on Jan. 5 or 6 or at any other time, and that he has never been an informant for the F.B.I. or any other law enforcement agency.”

But that did not stop the former president, who, following the footsteps of allies like Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.) and Sen. Ted Cruz, (R-Texas), as well as Fox News host Tucker Carlson, suggested Epps was part of a “false flag” operation. “How about the one guy, ‘Go in, get in there everybody.’ Epps,” Trump declared.

And then there was the usual Big Lie stuff, for which they all cheered lustily. They were having the time of their lives:

Thousands had come out on a cold, windy night an hour south of Phoenix to dusty desert fairgrounds to see and hear the former president. Decked out in red, white and blue Trump gear or wearing T-shirts with, shall we say, colorful words for Biden, his supporters danced to his MAGA rally playlist, took selfies with one another and high-fived strangers as they walked past.

And as the warm-up acts and Trump spoke, they joined together in chorus to chant “Let’s Go Brandon,” a popular GOP slogan that gives the middle finger to Biden, and “Lock him up,” aimed at Anthony Fauci, the infectious disease expert turned conservative enemy.

They were all maskless. And Trump didn’t push the vaccines. He’s learned his lesson.

Few, if any, masks were worn. Nor was there much concern played to the pandemic ripping through the country (Trump, for his part, did not encourage followers to get Covid booster shots, as he had done in recent appearances, but instead railed against vaccine mandates). They were happy to be in a crowd of like-minded people, but also angry — at Biden, at Democrats, at the media for, among other things, their portrayal of the Jan. 6 riots. After all, some of them had been there.

And they enjoy nothing more than whining about how persecuted they are:

That included Diane Meade from La Verne, Calif., who said she traveled 6.5 hours to Florence on Saturday night because she believes the 2020 election was stolen and wants to be on the “right side of history.” Meade said she was at the Capitol the day of the riot, and since then has felt “persecuted.”

As the rally came to a close, the fieriness of the festivities had become dotted with anger. Terry Schultz, an Arizona snowbird from North Dakota, waited on the tailgate of a truck. His friends described the rally as “invigorating.” Schultz, however, seemed agitated by, as he explained, “all the corruption the Democrats pulled.” The election, he said, was stolen. Trump was robbed.

“It was all a bunch of bullshit,” he said.

Those are exactly the words Trump used. He is their Dear Leader.

Those of you who have read this blog and others over the years are no doubt very familiar with “Church of the Savvy” critique by journalism professor Jay Rosen. This describes it in a nutshell:

[W]hat is the savvy style? This is from 2011: 

In the United States, most of the people who report on politics aren’t trying to advance an ideology. But I think they have an ideology, a belief system that holds their world together and tells them what to report about. It’s not left, or right, or center, really. It’s trickier than that. The name I’ve given to the ideology of our political press is savviness.

In politics, our journalists believe, it is better to be savvy than it is to be honest or correct on the facts. It’s better to be savvy than it is to be just, good, fair, decent, strictly lawful, civilized, sincere, thoughtful or humane. Savviness is what journalists admire in others. Savvy is what they themselves dearly wish to be. (And to be unsavvy is far worse than being wrong.)

Savviness is that quality of being shrewd, practical, hyper-informed, perceptive, ironic, “with it,” and unsentimental in all things political. And what is the truest mark of savviness? Winning, of course! Or knowing who the winners are.

Click over to read his full definition. It’s as right on the money as it ever was. Here’s what Rosen says about that today:

[T]he savvy temptation still thrives in American journalism. It’s as strong as ever. 

Greg Sargent, columnist for the Washington Post, points out how Republican opposition to protecting voting rights through Federal legislation has become a natural fact, part of the background of political life in Washington, rather than something journalists might probe and inquire about. 

As Democrats once again debate whether to end the filibuster to pass protections for democracy, a deeply perverse dynamic has taken hold, one in which Republicans enjoy a hidden benefit from being entirely united against such protections.

Precisely because this GOP opposition is a foregone conclusion, Republicans are too rarely asked by reporters to justify it. This in turn causes that opposition to become accepted as a natural, unalterable, indelibly baked-in backstop condition of political life.

Realistically — which is a golden word in the savvy style — Senate Republicans will not consider any action that protects the right to vote or encourages more people to vote. So it’s up to the Democrats to pass such legislation, currently called the Freedom to Vote Act. That’s politics! 

But realistically is not the same as justifiably. And as Sargent points out, “The bill would require states to allow no-excuse absentee voting. Despite claims otherwise, there is no evidence that mail voting advantages either party. It simply makes voting easier for everyone who chooses to take advantage of it.” 

So the question for Republicans is: why not make voting easier for your voters and everyone else’s? What justifies the GOP’s opposition to no-excuse absentee voting? And do their explanations hold up under scrutiny? That’s politics too. It’s called reason-giving. Journalists ought to be pressing for those answers, but in the savvy style “realistically” is allowed to push “justifiably” out of the frame. 

I used to call this the “Kewl Kidz” phenomenon — the insiders who sit at the right cafeteria table in high school. But Rosen’s critique is deeper than that — he captures the cynicism and hostility to any kind of earnestness or true commitment. I think it’s best illustrated these days by NY Times reporter Jonathan Allen, Punch Bowl’s Jake Sherman and most of the people who write Politico Playbook. These are people whose hot takes lead others in the business (looking at you Chuck Todd) to follow with their savvy takes.

It’s a destructive as ever.

What could go wrong?

 A plan by Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis would establish a special police force to oversee state elections — the first of its kind in the nation — and while his fellow Republicans have reacted tepidly, voting rights advocates fear that it will become law and be used to intimidate voters.

The proposed Office of Election Crimes and Security would be part of the Department of State, which answers to the governor. DeSantis is asking the GOP-controlled legislature to allocate nearly $6 million to hire 52 people to “investigate, detect, apprehend, and arrest anyone for an alleged violation” of election laws. They would be stationed at unspecified “field offices throughout the state” and act on tips from “government officials or any other person.”

DeSantis highlighted his plan as legislators opened their annual 60-day session last week.

“To ensure that elections are conducted in accordance with the rule of law, I propose an election integrity unit whose sole focus will be the enforcement of Florida’s election laws,” he said during his State of the State address. “This will facilitate the faithful enforcement of election laws and will provide Floridians with the confidence that their vote will matter.”

Voting rights experts say that no state has such an agency, one dedicated to patrolling elections and empowered to arrest suspected violators. Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton (R) announced the formation of a “2021 Texas Election Integrity Unit” in October, but that office is more limited in scope, has fewer than 10 employees and isn’t under the governor’s authority.

“There’s a reason that there’s no office of this size with this kind of unlimited investigative authority in any other state in the country, and it’s because election crimes and voter fraud are just not a problem of that magnitude,” said Jonathan Diaz, a voting rights lawyer at the nonprofit Campaign Legal Center. “My number one concern is that this is going to be used as a tool to harass or intimidate civic-engagement organizations and voters.”

Florida’s congressional Democrats expressed similar worries when they asked the U.S. Justice Department to investigate “a disturbing rise in partisan efforts at voter suppression” in the state. They took aim specifically at DeSantis’s call for election police.

It sounds as though he wants to put undercover cops at election offices to investigate election workers based on “tips” from god-knows-who. Wtf?

In many ways, this guy is showing himself to be worse than Trump. DeSantis is a true fascist and he knows what fascism is. Trump is chaotic and ignorant and his impulses are all authoritarian but he’s drive by his own personal demons. He understands that the real key to authoritarian power is law enforcement. And you don’t work through the existing institutions. You create your own.

Nina Totenberg has the inside scoop. Neil Gorsuch is a real monster. And more…

It was pretty jarring earlier this month when the justices of the U.S. Supreme Court took the bench for the first time since the omicron surge over the holidays. All were now wearing masks. All, that is, except Justice Neil Gorsuch. What’s more, Justice Sonia Sotomayor was not there at all, choosing instead to participate through a microphone setup in her chambers.

Sotomayor has diabetes, a condition that puts her at high risk for serious illness, or even death, from COVID-19. She has been the only justice to wear a mask on the bench since last fall when, amid a marked decline in COVID-19 cases, the justices resumed in-person arguments for the first time since the onset of the pandemic.

Now, though, the situation had changed with the omicron surge, and according to court sources, Sotomayor did not feel safe in close proximity to people who were unmasked. Chief Justice John Roberts, understanding that, in some form asked the other justices to mask up.

They all did. Except Gorsuch, who, as it happens, sits next to Sotomayor on the bench. His continued refusal since then has also meant that Sotomayor has not attended the justices’ weekly conference in person, joining instead by telephone.Article continues after sponsor message

Gorsuch, from the beginning of his tenure, has proved a prickly justice, not exactly beloved even by his conservative soulmates on the court.

At his first sitting in 2017, he sought to dominate the argument and repeatedly suggested that a complex case, involving conflicting provisions, was really very simple.

“Wouldn’t it be easier if we just followed the plain text of the statute?” he asked over and over. “What am I missing?”

A lot, said his colleagues, both liberal and conservative.

“This is unbelievably complicated,” lamented conservative Justice Samuel Alito. Whoever wrote the statute must be “somebody who takes pleasure tearing the wings off flies,” he said, provoking loud snickers on the bench.

The court’s liberals are upset

Of course, anybody who regularly watches Supreme Court arguments is used to seeing some testy moments in both big and little cases. But you don’t have to be a keen observer these days to see that something out of the ordinary is happening.

Some of it is traceable to the new conservative supermajority, including three Trump appointees, a court that may well end up more conservative than any since the 1930s. It’s a majority that has evidenced less and less respect for precedent, or the notion of deference to Congress in setting policy.

So it’s not surprising that the court’s three liberal justices would be upset. It is the degree of the upset, though, that telegraphs something different. When the court in November seemed prepared to overturn Roe v. Wade, Justice Sotomayor had some well placed verbal jabs at the ready.

Noting that 15 justices over 50 years have reaffirmed the basic framework of Roe, and only four have dissented, she asked this pointed question: “Will this institution survive the stench that this [turnaround] creates in the public perception that the Constitution and its reading are just political acts?”

At oral argument, Justice Elena Kagan, one of the court’s best questioners, sometimes takes a different approach. She just shuts down, rather than alienate her colleagues. Still, her anger is often palpable, the color literally draining from her face. And Justice Stephen Breyer on occasion just holds his head.

Neither, however, could contain themselves 12 days ago at the argument testing the government’s vaccine-or-test mandate for large employers, adopted under provisions of the Occupational Safety and Health Act. Breyer called the challengers argument “unbelievable.” And Kagan pointedly observed, “This is a pandemic in which nearly a million people have died, by far the greatest public danger that this country has faced in the last century… and this is the policy that is most geared to stopping all this.”

Conservatives are divided, too, amid frustrated ambitions

There isn’t a lot of love lost among the court’s six conservatives either. They often agree on the outcome of a case but not the legal reasoning, with Chief Justice Roberts sometimes trying to rein in the court’s most aggressive conservatives. If you watch carefully, you can see conservative eyes rolling from time to time.

All of which is contrary to the picture both liberal and conservative justices like to paint for the public. Just over three years ago, Kagan and Sotomayor, speaking at Princeton University, talked about how hard all the justices work to maintain good relationships and contrasted the court in 2018 to the court in the 1940s, when the justices detested each other so much they were known as “nine scorpions in a bottle.” We are not scorpions, Kagan and Sotomayor said.

“I think all of us need … to realize how precious the court’s legitimacy is,” said Kagan, noting that the court doesn’t have an army to enforce its rulings. “The only way we get people to do what we say that they should do is because people respect us and respect out fairness,” she said.

Justice Clarence Thomas, perhaps the court’s most conservative member, said something similar at Duquesne University in 2013.

“The people at the court, in my time at least, think that the Constitution, the country … the court is much more important than they are and they somehow keep it together to decide cases appropriately and to get along with each other in a civil way,” he said.

These days, however, the elbows are a lot sharper. Some of it may be attributable to COVID and the bizarre conditions under which the court has had to conduct its business, without the usual set of of full, in-person interactions.

At the same time, many of the conservatives are vying for the position of intellectual leader of the conservative majority, while the chief justice privately worries about going too far too fast.

There are, in addition, some long and perhaps not so buried resentments among the conservatives. Alito on occasion barely conceals his disdain for Roberts. That may stem from the way Roberts became chief justice.

In 2005, the Bush White House was preparing for the retirement of the ailing Chief Justice William Rehnquist, and according to reliable sources, Alito was led to believe that he would be nominated to become chief justice. But Rehnquist did not retire at the end of the term in June, as expected. Instead Justice Sandra Day O’Connor did, and President George W. Bush, after a botched effort at naming a woman, picked Roberts to be O’Connor’s successor.

Then, just as Roberts’ confirmation hearing was about to start, Chief Justice Rehnquist died.

Bush, who had hit it off with Roberts in their interview, immediately moved Roberts up, withdrawing his nomination as associate justice and instead nominating him to be chief justice. That allowed Roberts’ confirmation hearing to move forward almost on schedule and right away. And Alito was instead slotted into the now empty position to replace O’Connor, his expectation to be chief dashed into smithereens.

If Rehnquist had died a month later, and Roberts had already been confirmed to replace O’Connor in the interim, perhaps Alito would in fact have been nominated to be chief justice. But that was not to be.

Who is Justice Scalia’s intellectual heir?

Harvard law professor Noah Feldman, author of Scorpions, a book about the 1940s court, notes some big differences between the justices on that court and this one. Many of the justices on the court in the 1940s were very famous; they were household names; they were from very different professional backgrounds, both political and legal. In contrast, the justices today have had very similar careers; they were and are largely unknown to the public as individuals. And while they initially got on reasonably well, says Feldman, two things are happening to change that.

One, he observes, is that conservative justices “are on the cusp of what, from their perspective, is a historic opportunity to reverse some liberal decisions that their whole movement grew out of hating, with Roe v. Wade the most famous.” And the second is “that you’re seeing fissures in the conservative legal movement based on its success.”

And linked to all this is personal ambition. Several of the conservative justices see themselves as the heir apparent, the intellectual leader of the conservative wing, taking the place of the late Justice Antonin Scalia, the conservative icon, whose work led to the rise of the conservative legal movement first off the court, and then on the court.

But, as Feldman observes, Scalia referred to himself as a “fainthearted originalist” and “what he meant by that was that he was an originalist, but not if it meant overturning some of the things that have existed for a long time, like the administrative state.”

In short, Scalia often voted to uphold the power of Congress to delegate to agencies and experts the power to regulate public health and safety, and to protect the integrity of the marketplace. Indeed, as Harvard law professor Richard Lazarus observes. Twenty years ago, Scalia, in a unanimous opinion for the court, “rejected an argument pretty similar to” the one the six current conservatives embraced last week in essentially striking down the vaccine-or-test OSHA mandate.

So, it turns out that some or all of today’s conservative justices are not at all fainthearted. They are “come-what-may originalists,” says Feldman, “while others are more moderate and reasonable in their exercise of originalism.”

Yeah whatever. They are rank partisans when it counts. And don’t worry, they have enough room to spare to lose a justice here and there on some of those other issues that they’ll win anyway. They have a 6-3 majority.

That said, those are not the issues that grab people’s attention. The issues that do are the flashpoint social issues of our times — guns, religion and abortion. And on those, Feldman maintains, “The conservatives are playing with fire.”

In recent decades, the court has built its legitimacy on a certain degree of moderation — giving the left some of what it wanted and the right some of what it wanted. The left got gay rights and gay marriage, and some limits on presidential power exercised in the name of national security. And the right got expanded religious liberty and expanded free speech, which brought with it expanded corporate spending in elections. And it got a gutted Voting Rights Act.

But now “the current conservative majority is on the cusp of ending that game,” Feldman believes.

And, he says, if the conservative majority overturns Roe v. Wade, “as it looks like it probably will, it will be doing something the Supreme Court has never done … in its history, and that is, reverse a fundamental right that ordinary people have enjoyed for 50 years, and say, ‘Whoops, … you never really had this right at all.” The court, he maintains, “has never turned back the clock of liberty in that way before.”

What would be the longer-term consequence of that for the court? Perhaps nothing. It certainly seems preposterous today to imagine enough votes in Congress, especially in the Senate, to expand the size of the court and allow a Democratic president to fill the new seats. And clearly President Biden doesn’t want to do that. But some constitutional scholars, like Feldman, see the kind of conservative judicial activism that is unfolding as posing a danger to the court itself not too far down the road.

“Abortion, guns and religion are and will always be hot-button front page topics in the United States,” Feldman observes, adding that over time, those kinds of decisions “add up,” and sooner than one might imagine, there can come a breaking point.

“I don’t think it will happen through the drip, drip drip,” he says. “I think it will happen through the tsunami. But I also think that overturning Roe v. Wade … could well turn out to be the beginning of that tsunami.”

So? What’s anyone going to do about it? It will just end up being another partisan institution that makes our lives miserable.

But we knew that in 2016 when the Grim Reaper refused to allow Obama to replace Scalia with Merrick Garland. That was when it broke. The fact that it was that replacement, Neil Gorsuch, is the most reviled Justice on the court — even by Republicans — says everything about that outrageous power grab.

Then, when this country inexplicably elected an unfit orange freak for president and Anthony Kennedy resigned, the die was cast. We were screwed.

The Republicans are trying to have it both ways. And maybe they can persuade the media to go along with this drivel but it doesn’t mean it has any basis in fact:

Republicans are feeling so good about their chances of retaking Congress this fall that they’re already debating their governing relationship with President Joe Biden. And they’re divided over how to handle their potential big wins.

With Biden and Democrats floundering right now, the GOP is increasingly favored to vault back to partial power in Washington by flipping the House, and potentially also the Senate, in the coming midterms. What comes next isn’t quite clear: Some Republicans are mulling ways to collaborate with Biden on issues like trade, energy or tech; others are prepared to go scorched-earth as their party eyes the bigger prize of retaking the White House in 2024.

The GOP’s pro-bipartisanship camp may not have a lot of space in 2023 to work with the president: funding the government and raising the debt ceiling will be a major challenge, given how often House and Senate Republicans diverge on critical pieces of legislation. And former President Donald Trump will continue trying to influence the party’s direction, criticizing Senate GOP Leader Mitch McConnell and anyone else who steps out of line with his combative politics.

Given those dynamics, there’s no unified GOP agenda for voters to examine this fall — other than an up-or-down vote on Biden and congressional Democrats’ record. Republicans aren’t sure what will happen next if they actually win.

“It’s really going to be a referendum on him and his administration and on the Democrat leadership in the Congress,” John Thune, the No. 2 Senate Republican who is also running for reelection this fall, said of Biden. “So we need to stay out of our own way.”

“It’s really important for us to highlight our differences, how we would do it differently,” the South Dakotan added. “And then … have some things that we would do or could do if there was a willingness to work together.”

That must be why Mitch McConnell announced that they would not have an agenda for the 2022 election.

Thune is running so there’s that. But this shows once again that the GOP is in a corner with their crazies — and their numbers are legion. They are going to do nothing but run investigations because that’s what their Dear Leader will demand of them. Moreover, they don’t want to “work together” on anything. If they did, they’d be negotiating in good faith on the massive number of initiatives the Democrats have already proposed.

Republicans care about three things: obstruction, tax cuts and judges. Period. Biden even gave them a gift by letting them bring home the bacon in the infrastructure bill without having to vote for it.

If they win it will be a shitshow. Count on it.

This is a nightmare. Get boosted, people:

It’s six AM. I’m still in bed and my eyes are barely open. I reach for my phone. I check my email. Last night’s sign out just arrived. I scan last the names I don’t recognize, looking for one in particular…

I admitted you just hours before, just a few days into your symptoms. You got sicker fast. I remember you insisted that intubation ‘wasn’t within your wishes’ to every clinician before me. I wasn’t so sure…

You were in your 50s, no major health issues. Didn’t like doctors or the healthcare system. I recognized the fear. I walked into your room. I knew how this would go- nothing new. I introduced myself- “I’ll be the senior ICU doctor taking care of you. Is it ok if I examine you?”

In situations like this, I start with the exam. There isn’t much to discover, but few things convey how much we care as the amount of time & attention we devote with our hands and stethoscope. I spent longer than usual. There was work to be done here. I was laying the foundation.

Next, I describe the findings. Slowly. Then I make some guesses. They stopped being guesses long ago. ‘You probably feel OK right now, just really wiped out. Not short of breath at all. That oxygen in your nose is pretty intense. Your back starting to get sore from this bed yet?’

‘They keep freaking out about your numbers, right? How far do you think you can walk? The bathroom? What would happen if you tried to go to the bathroom right now?’

I explain how we try to make the most out of the lung that isn’t sick. Oxygen is one part of that. Reducing how much oxygen the body needs is another. I talk about bedrest, bedpans, catheters, spending time on your belly. I avoid talking about what happens if that isn’t enough.

Next, we talk about your People. I start with the story- how’d you end up coming in? That gives me some names. Who else is at home? Who knows you’re here? Knowing the People is so important. I find out who to call. Who not to call. Today the calls go to Miles. OK… It is time.

‘I know you’re scared. This is more frightening by the moment. You’ve heard the stories. What are you worried about?’ You mention your kids. Your dog. Almost always you talk about someone who depends on you. You don’t talk about intubation. Neither do I.

I take your hand. ‘I want you to know something. You’re in good hands. We are here for you. Whatever happens. It doesn’t matter what happened before. We are here for you.’ the response is palpable. Your hand tightens on mine.

You know that I get it. How real it is. How bad it is. ‘I want to tell you this, right now. This can get bad. I hope it doesn’t. But it might. If it does, we are here for you. We will do whatever we can, whatever we need to do to get you back to Miles. You’re in the right place.’

The high flow oxygen is blasting. I’m almost screaming through the n95 & face shield. I’m staring into your eyes. You nod. “You know what that means. In an emergency- only in an emergency, only to save your life- we will do anything needed. Including putting in a breathing tube.”

Your face tightens. A stiff nod. “One of three things will happen and I have no idea which one. First, you might just get better quickly. I so hope that’s what happens for you. But it may not…

You might also stay like this for days or weeks. Sore. Tired. Weak. Uncomfortable. But some of those people get better just like that, so every day you spend like this is a win too. Or…

Or you might get worse. Bad enough that you need the ventilator. Bad enough that you need more. I hope that doesn’t happen to you but if it does we will be here with you every single minute. You are not alone. I’m going to call Miles now.”

I called Miles. That was a tough conversation. It was important. I learned more about what mattered to you. And before I left I did dozens of other small things to make it safer, to make it better. And I made sure your code status was clear: Full Code.

Back in my bed. I keep scrolling through the sign out. I find what I’m looking for. Your oxygen sat dropped around 2am. You were confused and agitated. They intubated you. Almost immediately your heart stopped and you arrested. They performed cpr for 35 minutes. You were gone.

I put my phone away. It’s time to go back to work.

Originally tweeted by #TeamCriticalCare (he/him) (@laxswamy) on January 17, 2022.

Following up on my previous post about who bears responsibility for our crisis of democracy (and on Greg Sargent’s observation on that), Dan Froomkin asked for some crowd-sourced help on Monday:

This is a really good one.https://t.co/QhMGcPfShh

— Sophie ZnS (@SophieZnS) January 17, 2022

Our neighbors to the north are unnerved enough to wonder aloud if their once-stable, once-democratic neighbors to the south might well be by 2030 “a right-wing dictatorship.”

Let’s listen for a moment to Thomas Homer-Dixon, a scholar of violent conflict (from 12/31/21):

We mustn’t dismiss these possibilities just because they seem ludicrous or too horrible to imagine. In 2014, the suggestion that Donald Trump would become president would also have struck nearly everyone as absurd. But today we live in a world where the absurd regularly becomes real and the horrible commonplace.

Does it show?

I’m not surprised by what’s happening there – not at all. During my graduate work in the United States in the 1980s, I sometimes listened to Rush Limbaugh, the right-wing radio talk show host and later television personality. I remarked to friends at the time that, with each broadcast, it was if Mr. Limbaugh were wedging the sharp end of a chisel into a faint crack in the moral authority of U.S. political institutions, and then slamming the other end of that chisel with a hammer.

In the decades since, week after week, year after year, Mr. Limbaugh and his fellow travellers have hammered away – their blows’ power lately amplified through social media and outlets such as Fox News and Newsmax. The cracks have steadily widened, ramified, connected and propagated deeply into America’s once-esteemed institutions, profoundly compromising their structural integrity. The country is becoming increasingly ungovernable, and some experts believe it could descend into civil war.

The precipitating factors are many and familiar. We don’t need to be told. Homer-Dixon warns that should Republicans regain control of Congress, Trump’s return is that much more likely. His agenda will be personal: vindication and vengeance.

Hoping Trump’s “manifest managerial incompetence” and U.S. federalism will prevent him from consolidating dictatorial power is perhaps the best of outcomes, Homer-Dixon explains, “because there are far worse scenarios.” Including something resembling civil war, or even the growth of an “infrastructure” of ideas that “sets” an extremist mindset and allows someone with similar dictatorial aspirations and more managerial skills to succeed Trump and … succeed.

For that “Canada is woefully unprepared.”

I just keep coming back to this: The Republican Party has gone stark-raving brown-shirt crazy but is still expected to win back Congress next year and political journalists are going yeah, OK, instead of going WHAT THE FUCK??? AAAAH! https://t.co/Upqqqd9T7O

— Dan Froomkin (PressWatchers.org) (@froomkin) January 16, 2022

On this side of the 49th parallel, Froomkin returns to his observation from earlier this month that failure to hold Trump accountable has simply made things worse:

This failure to hold Trump to account has been consistent ever since he declared his candidacy. When he actually won in 2016, the heads of our major newsrooms made a terrible mistake: They clung to their devotion to treating both political parties with equal deference – even though that meant abandoning their even more fundamental commitment to truth-telling and accountability. “Balanced” treatment of a profoundly unbalanced situation normalized Trump’s and his party’s behavior, no matter how dishonest, extreme and anti-democratic it was.

Well before Jan. 6, Trump had thoroughly proven himself to be dangerous, inept at governing, corrupt and demagogic. In one of my first columns for Press Watch, in October 2019, I wrote that the main storyline of the 2020 election should be that we made a terrible mistake in 2016 and we need to fix it.

For a few days post-Jan. 6, the press found its voice, and found Trump blameworthy. But that did not last.

If trying to steal an election does not disqualify a political party from governing, what does, Froomkin wants to know. Yet even as it is clear that the Party of Trump is laying the groundwork for another insurrection, the elite press “can’t bring itself to say what kind of party that is” or to state clearly the stakes. It is not “Democrats vs. Republicans here. It’s us-who-support-democracy vs. them-who-don’t.”

Froomkin lists a series of accountability fails on the part of the press, but the blame for Trump does not fall exclusively on the press:

Repeatedly calling out the Republican Party as unfit and undeserving to compete in a democratic election sounds awfully partisan. But wanting to hold the powerful accountable is hardly an endorsement of the Democratic Party.

In fact, outside of the media, one of the biggest reasons for the low expectations of accountability for government officials is the precedent set by Barack Obama, when he refused to hold anyone accountable for the Bush-Cheney administration’s torture of detainees. Not demanding some form of justice or recrimination from a president, vice president, on down – the people who proposed, approved, or performed brutal and unforgivable acts on human beings – was one of the most disappointing things ever for those of us who consider ourselves accountability journalists.

Not shouting from the rooftops that democracy is under assault is what just might bring those roofs down on our heads.