Month: January 2022

This guy got less than 20% of the vote in a special election and refuses to concede:

An election in South Florida this week may serve as a marker for where the Republican Party stands in 2022, and how much American democracy has already changed since Donald Trump lost reelection.

The election on Tuesday was not national news, nor should it be. It was a special election to replace a House Democrat who died in office in April. The race itself was hardly contested by national political parties even though the US House is closely divided. Joe Biden won the area with 77 percent in the 2020 election. Given that Democrats outnumber Republicans by a 5 to 1 margin in the district, it was almost certain that a Democrat would win.

The Democratic winner, Sheila Cherfilus-McCormick, is interesting. She is a progressive who spent her own money to win and backs the concept of universal basic income. She also becomes the first Haitian-American woman in Congress to represent Florida.

She won 79 percent of the vote over Republican Jason Mariner, who was born in Boston and founded a drug and alcohol detox center in Florida. Mariner got less than 20 percent of the vote and trails Cherfilus-McCormick by over 32,000 votes. For context, Biden beat Trump statewide in Georgia by 11,000 votes.

“Now they called the race, I did not win, so they say, but that does not mean that they lost either, it does not mean that we lost,” Mariner was quoted by the Miami CBS affiliate as saying.

He said he will file a lawsuit. Election officials say it takes 14 days to certify the results. Mariner, then, has 10 days to challenge them.

To be clear, Cherfilus-McCormick doesn’t need Mariner to concede to be seated in Congress. Members of the House approve who sits in the chamber and Democrats, for now, control the House.

It’s Florida so I assume he’s trying to get Donald Trump’s attention. And it may just work. He’ll probably be in the cabinet in 2025.

Historian Kevin Kruse notes Joe Biden’s contention in his Georgia speech this week that reauthorization of the Voting Rights act has been bipartisan ever since it was passed and only recently have Republicans been united against it. Kruse says that’s correct as far as it goes, but the right has always been wobbly on the issue:

For some Republicans, support for voting rights has been a solid stance grounded in principle. Even as their numbers were beginning to thin in the 1960s and 1970s, liberal and moderate Republicans provided crucial support for the original passage of the law and remained vocal supporters of voting rights protections in the years that followed. Congressional leaders such as Illinois Sen. Everett Dirksen and Pennsylvania Sen. Hugh Scott did considerable work getting the legislation passed and renewed, while prominent Republicans outside Congress — including Michigan Gov. George Romney, a major presidential contender — provided significant public support.

Such figures, however, have increasingly been exceptions in Republican circles, rather than the rule. For other Republicans — including the presidents Biden praised — support for voting rights has come less from a sincere belief in the rightness of the cause and more from a cynical belief that it would benefit them politically.

When the Voting Rights Act came up for its original reauthorization in 1970, for instance, the Nixon administration was torn on how to handle it. Nixon had rolled back his earlier support for civil rights legislation during his 1968 campaign. As president, he insisted no new measures were needed because, as he put it in his inaugural address, “the laws have caught up with our conscience.”

When Congress proceeded to reauthorize the Voting Rights Act anyway — extending the right to vote to 18-year-olds along the way — many of Nixon’s aides urged him to veto the law because they believed a surge in African American voters would only help Democrats and hurt Republicans. “A veto,” Nixon’s assistant for legislative affairs urged, “would help solidify your support in Dixie.”

This internal debate in Republican circles — between cynical supporters and cynical opponents — stretched on for decades.

Such self-interest from opponents of voting rights might be expected, but nominal supporters could be just as cynical. Kevin Phillips, the Nixon campaign strategist whose 1969 book “The Emerging Republican Majority” presciently predicted a new conservative era, argued that the GOP should embrace the law, precisely because it meant more African Americans would vote Democratic.

“The more Negroes who register as Democrats in the South, the sooner the Negrophobe whites will quit the Democrats and become Republicans,” he told The New York Times Magazine in 1970. “That’s where the votes are.”

Ultimately, events forced Nixon’s hand. After National Guard members and police killed a half-dozen college students at Kent State University and Jackson State College that spring, sparking a massive wave of campus protests, Nixon worried that vetoing voting rights legislation might make that “volatile situation” even worse. In the end, he grudgingly signed the Voting Rights Act reauthorization, but just to prevent the “goddamn country” from “blowing up.”

For their part, conservative activists outside the government remained blunt in their opinion that voting rights harmed the conservative agenda. Paul Weyrich, a key architect of the New Right and a co-founder of the Heritage Foundation, put it bluntly in 1980 when he told a rally of religious conservatives: “I don’t want everybody to vote. Elections are not won by a majority of people. They never have been from the beginning of our country, and they are not now. As a matter of fact, our leverage in the elections quite candidly goes up as the voting populace goes down.”

Despite such advice from conservative strategists, the Voting Rights Act had by the 1980s been enshrined in a patriotic pantheon. As civil rights activist Ralph Neas noted, it had quickly secured a spot alongside “motherhood, apple pie, the Constitution and baseball.” Most politicians — who now faced truly multiracial electorates — treated voting rights as sacrosanct.

Accordingly, the 1982 reauthorization sailed through Congress fairly easily. North Carolina Republican Sen. Jesse Helms waged a lonely filibuster, but even longtime opponents of voting rights such as Strom Thurmond refused to go along. In the end, the reauthorization passed by stunning margins: 389-24 in the House and 85-8 in the Senate. Reagan hailed the Senate’s support as a “statesmanlike decision.” He vowed to sign it quickly, and he did.

Sen. Jesse Helms waged a lonely filibuster, but even longtime opponents of voting rights such as Strom Thurmond refused to go along.

As the Republican president approved the law, however, some in his administration sought to undermine it. William Bradford Reynolds, Reagan’s assistant attorney general for civil rights, asserted that the landmark laws of the 1960s amounted to “government-imposed discrimination” that had set up a “kind of racial spoils system” in the ensuing years. The extension of the Voting Rights Act, he stated in his Senate testimony, threatened to establish “quotas in the electoral process.”

Younger Republicans in the Justice Department took their cues here from Reynolds, not Reagan. Their ranks included a number of rising stars in the conservative legal movement, including future Chief Justice John Roberts. (A litigator in the Civil Rights Division’s voting unit called Roberts a “zealot” who had “fundamental suspicions when it came to the Voting Rights Act’s utility.”)

The 2006 reauthorization of the Voting Rights Act — whose overwhelming Republican support has been invoked by Biden and others this week — seemed on the surface to show the “bipartisan tradition” of support for voting rights was stronger than ever. After the resounding show of support for the act, President George W. Bush held a grand signing ceremony on the White House lawn. With legislators and civil rights leaders arrayed around him, Bush asserted that “Congress has reaffirmed its belief that all men are created equal.”

But some of the support for the reauthorization was insincere. As Amanda Becker astutely noted in Congressional Quarterly, several of the lawmakers gathered around Bush at the bill signing had, just the day before, signed on to a report that challenged the means and ends of the Voting Rights Act, warning it represented a “tool for political and racial gerrymandering.” The report, largely ignored at the time, set off alarm bells for voting rights experts. “It was clear,” law professor Rick Hasen told Becker, “that the seeds were being sown for a legal challenge.”

That challenge, of course, came seven years later, in the landmark ruling of Shelby County v. Holder. With that decision, the conservative majority on the court — led by Roberts, a Bush appointee — gutted key sections of the Voting Rights Act.Then-President George W. Bush signs the Voting Rights Act of 2006 during a ceremony on the South Lawn of the White House in Washington on July 27, 2006. Brooks Kraft LLC / Corbis via Getty Images

In response, Republicans who truly supported voting rights called for a new law to shore up our democratic institutions but also to confirm our democratic principles.

“The Voting Rights Act is not only about ending discrimination at the polls,” Sensenbrenner urged in 2017. “It also gives faith to the voters who need to know that their vote counts and the election process is fair.”

Such pleas for new voting rights protection have, of course, been ignored. Republican politicians, who long feared the political costs of a vote against voting rights, now benefit from the political cover that conservatives like Roberts spent a career providing.

The “bipartisan tradition” backing voting rights is, in many ways, a mirage. The liberal and moderate Republicans who helped create the Voting Rights Act are long gone, as are the prominent conservatives who saw no conflict between their ideology and democracy and who were confident their party could win elections even if everyone voted. What remains in the Republican ranks is a core that sees voting rights as a clear and present danger to the party.

As long as I can remember, the activist right has been screeching about “voter fraud” whether it’s “Operation Eagle Eye” In Arizona in the 1960s or it’s groups like “True the Vote” in Texas. They spent decades seeding the ground for Donald Trump to drop his Big Lie priming the wingnuts to believe him despite all evidence to the contrary. This is a long term project of the old conservative movement brought to final fruition by the Trump cult.

Biden is right that there used to be bipartisanship on the voting rights act. But as Kruse makes clear, with the exception of a few sincere moderates — who have gone extinct in the Republican party — they were always planning to go back to the pre-civil rights voting regime. Now they have.

It’s very hard to fathom why the right seems so determined to prolong the deadly COVID-19 pandemic but it’s obvious that they are. From politicians banning mask requirements to media celebrities pushing disinformation about vaccines, there is no escaping the fact that Republicans and their allies simply do not care that more than 850,000 thousand Americans are dead in less than two years from this scourge and that hundreds of thousands of them are still dying because they refuse to take life-saving vaccines. That the majority of them are their own constituents who have died because they believe right-wing conspiracy theories is just mind-boggling, but apparently they are convinced that this is good for them politically and gives them great ratings.

I guess I was hoping against all evidence to the contrary that there was some corner of the former conservative world that was above exploiting a global health catastrophe for their own gain but that was a silly illusion. Not even the Supreme Court could set aside their partisan and ideological goals in the face of a calamitous crisis. Yesterday they joined the anti-vax fanatics of Fox News and Info-Wars and blocked the implementation of the Biden administration’s “vax or test” requirements for large businesses. If they could bend the rules just a little bit further the majority no doubt would have joined Tucker Carlson last night for a celebration.

The court did manage to scrape up a majority with the three liberals plus Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Brett Kavanaugh to decline to block the mandate for health care workers — although the fact that four justices voted to block that as well is stunning. Remember, however, that there are still cases in the pipeline about that mandate so I’d guess the conservatives still hope they will be able to convince Kavanaugh or Roberts to join them on the dark side down the road. For now, the federal government has the right to mandate that institutions that serve Medicare and Medicaid patients require their employees to not willfully spread a deadly virus to their patients for no good reason. A rare moment of sanity.

Still, it’s quite something to see the entire right-wing of the U.S. political system, all the way up to the Supreme Court, work together to hobble efforts to contain the pandemic so they can blame their political rivals for failing to contain the pandemic. Talk about teamwork.

Early reports suggest that the big businesses that were to be affected by the mandate are divided on the issue. Some, like United Airlines, which imposed its own mandate, reported that they have 99% compliance and are happy with the results. Others are planning to scrap their plans now that the federal mandate is gone. And if anyone was under the illusion that this was about freedom or markets or small government, ideas that used to be the backbone of conservative thought, some red states have imposed bans on private employers requiring vaccines. So without the federal mandate, even employers who would like to protect their workforce and their customers are going to be forced to allow unvaccinated employees to get sick, transmit the virus and make them bear the costs. Apparently, the Supreme Court agrees that this makes sense, which is terrifying.

The majority opinion rested on the idea that the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) exceeded its authority because COVID is not specific to the workplace. They say that because people can also get it elsewhere an agency that is tasked with ensuring workplace safety has no business making this rule. I would just point out that this reasoning is going to come as quite a surprise to the people who have been working from home for the past year and a half, along with school employees, frontline workers and basically anyone who works for a living.

It’s absurd. Nothing has been more disrupted by the pandemic than work — you know, that place where people gather inside buildings to spend at least 8 hours with other people breathing all over the place? Of course COVID is being spread at work, probably more than anywhere else. This rationale makes no sense at all. People can get poisoned by asbestos at places other than the workplace but employers are still required to ensure that they can’t get it at work. The dissent by the three sane justices made clear how ludicrous the majority’s decision was:

“Underlying everything else in this dispute is a single, simple question: Who decides how much protection, and of what kind, American workers need from Covid-19? An agency with expertise in workplace health and safety, acting as Congress and the president authorized? Or a court, lacking any knowledge of how to safeguard workplaces, and insulated from responsibility for any damage it causes?”

What is remains unstated but has been really illuminated in all this is the larger agenda of this Supreme Court. As law professor Kim Wehle explained in this piece for The Atlantic, this ruling is the first salvo in the conservative court’s crusade to dismantle the administrative state:

“If Congress is hindered in its ability to employ agencies to fill in the details of its broad mandates, life in the United States could change dramatically. Agencies make rules and regulations affecting stock markets, consumer-product safety, the use and trafficking of firearms, environmental protection, workplace discrimination, agriculture, aviation, radio and television communications, financial institutions, federal elections, natural gas and electricity, the construction and maintenance of highways, imports and exports, human and veterinary drugs, and even the licensing and inspection of nuclear-power plants.”

That is the goal. It’s grotesque that they would exploit a deadly disease that’s killing thousands of people every day to advance it, but they have a mission and nothing will stand in their way. In fact, there’s a whole school of thought devoted to the idea that not only is it unconstitutional for the federal agencies to enact regulations, but Congress also has no authority to delegate that task to them in the first place. In this view, public health and safety is solely a state function.

If you are not one to follow the dark machinations of the right-wing legal community, and who can blame you, this idea may nonetheless sound familiar because you’ve heard it from some other less exalted sources. Recall that none other than Steve Bannon has been blathering on about the “deconstruction of the administrative state” ever since he came to national prominence. Recently, he’s been telling people that he’s training 4,000 “shock troops” who will be ready on day one when Donald Trump is restored to the presidency to take over all the federal agencies to clean out the bureaucracies and take a wrecking ball to government regulations.

The goal of destroying the government regulatory apparatus that makes America a first-world country is shared by Republicans from Bannon to Utah Sen. Mitt Romney to Wyoming Rep. Liz Cheney to Chief Justice John Roberts and every conservative in between. And it’s one of the most radical agendas any political faction has ever advanced. If you want to know why all the Republicans backed Donald Trump even when they knew he was monumentally unfit, this was it. They got their court and their dream is about to come true. Unfortunately, it’s a nightmare for the rest of us. 

Without lingering on the gory particulars, our neck of the world is beginning to feel like Act 1 of Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar (2014). We have a climate going haywire and while we know what to do about it, we can’t seem muster the collective will to do it. We have people denying science and rewriting history not because they are obsessed with feeding themselves or with not raising false hopes, as in the film, but with retaining political and cultural dominance.

What saved mankind in the film was drastic action. Visionary, drastic action, not dress-up soldier antics.

This week’s events in Congress and in the Supreme Court bode ill for the immediate future. Perhaps the saving grace is seeing the hammer come down on the Oath Keepers. But the jury is not only literally out on them, it hasn’t been selected yet.

Jim Newell at Slate has nothing optimistic to offer:

This week’s spectacle from Democratic leaders is just that, an effort from party leaders to show it exhausted every effort on voting rights. The anxiety of the moment is compounded by the fact that this might be the end of the line not just on voting rights, but on the Democratic agenda as well—and for a long time.

As with Cooper’s planet, time is running out.

So what the hell, thinks Jordan Weissmann. Might as well get crazy. How about Democrats give the deficit-obsessed Sen. Joe Manchin what he wants: deficit reduction. His arguments about BBB fueling inflation, like Kyrsten Sinema’s “arguments” about the filibuster, make no sense. “But reality isn’t what matters here. Joe Manchin’s perception of it does.”

Could that entice Manchin into supporting Joe Biden’s economic agenda before the planet sears?

Weissmann writes at Slate:

Why might deficit reduction bring Manchin to the table? First, it’s something he actually wants, unlike much of what’s contained in BBB. One of the odd dynamics of this entire negotiation is that Democrats have consistently ignored Manchin’s explicit demands when it came to how the bill should be structured, and then acted surprised when he turned down their offers. They also haven’t tried to lure him with something big he truly desires.

The man has said he’s open to spending on pre-k, and open to a lot of the climate agenda, but they don’t appear to be must-haves in his mind. By all accounts, however, Manchin really, truly does care about the deficit. This is a man who reportedly asks his aides to text him every morning with how much the national debt grew overnight. Democratic aides have semi-jokingly told me that Manchin would probably be happiest with a bill that just raised taxes, and put the money toward debt reduction. Nobody thinks he’s kidding on this issue (even if the infrastructure bill he helped negotiate was funded in large part with gimmicks; nobody’s accusing him of total consistency). Making deficit reduction at least a part of Build Back Better might actually give him something to be excited about.

Second, including deficit reduction in BBB would address some of Manchin’s concerns about inflation, at least on a cosmetic level. After all, in theory, tightening fiscal policy and reducing demand is a straightforward way to take pressure off prices, not to mention one which is perpetually popular with American political moderates. In reality, eliminating $200 billion or $300 billion from the deficit over 10 years probably isn’t going to have any significant impact on near term inflationary pressures. But it would at least let Democrats make a more convincing surface-level argument that their bill is a sincere response to rising consumer costs — both to voters, and to Manchin. Keep in mind, the Biden administration has already tried to frame BBB as a response to inflation, by arguing that it will reduce the cost of major family expenses like daycare and health care. But polling from Data for Progress has shown that voters only find that argument mildly compelling, and Manchin doesn’t seem to be buying it at all. If Biden wants to look like he’s trying to respond decisively to inflation, he probably needs a new approach.

Finally, as I mentioned earlier, the Washington Post reports that Manchin wants Democrats to “fundamentally rethink their approach” on Build Back Better. Turning it into an oh-so virtuous deficit reduction bill, instead of a mere spending bill, would fulfill that demand.

I’m no policy wonk. (Does it show?) And I have no time just now to back-check Weissmann’s figures for how a re-crafted BBB might work. Because in the end pulling the country and the planet out of its Covid-fueled, climate-threatened, antidemocratic funk is what matters. Manchin does not seem to be negotiating in good faith anyway, especially on addressing the climate.

Jordan concludes, “It at least seems plausible that the promise of deficit reduction might lure Manchin back to the table for a deal. Even if the gamble fails, is not as if Biden and the Dems have much else left to lose.”

A country? planet? And what do you do with people who want to rewrite history to support their myopic agenda?

“We’ve always defined ourselves by the ability to overcome the impossible. And we count these moments. These moments when we dare to aim higher, to break barriers, to reach for the stars, to make the unknown known. We count these moments as our proudest achievements.” — Cooper, Interstellar

Many of those at Donald Trump’s Jan. 6 rally a year ago were Trump tourists, rank-and-file cultists answering Dear Leader’s altar call. Others had more on their mind than speeches and the warm, fuzzy thrill of having Trump validate their grievance.

They brought gear and guns.

The Department of Justice on Thursday in Texas arrested Stewart Rhodes, founder of the Oath Keepers militia group, charging him with seditious conspiracy along with 10 other members previously charged for other crimes. Another eight Oath Keepers are defendents in two other cases.

The Department’s statement describes the indictment against Rhodes:

The seditious conspiracy indictment alleges that, following the Nov. 3, 2020, presidential election, Rhodes conspired with his co-defendants and others to oppose by force the execution of the laws governing the transfer of presidential power by Jan. 20, 2021. Beginning in late December 2020, via encrypted and private communications applications, Rhodes and various co-conspirators coordinated and planned to travel to Washington, D.C., on or around Jan. 6, 2021, the date of the certification of the electoral college vote, the indictment alleges. Rhodes and several co-conspirators made plans to bring weapons to the area to support the operation. The co-conspirators then traveled across the country to the Washington, D.C., metropolitan area in early January 2021.

According to the seditious conspiracy indictment, the defendants conspired through a variety of manners and means, including: organizing into teams that were prepared and willing to use force and to transport firearms and ammunition into Washington, D.C.; recruiting members and affiliates to participate in the conspiracy; organizing trainings to teach and learn paramilitary combat tactics; bringing and contributing paramilitary gear, weapons and supplies – including knives, batons, camouflaged combat uniforms, tactical vests with plates, helmets, eye protection and radio equipment – to the Capitol grounds; breaching and attempting to take control of the Capitol grounds and building on Jan. 6, 2021, in an effort to prevent, hinder and delay the certification of the electoral college vote; using force against law enforcement officers while inside the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021; continuing to plot, after Jan. 6, 2021, to oppose by force the lawful transfer of presidential power, and using websites, social media, text messaging and encrypted messaging applications to communicate with co-conspirators and others.

All were prepared to take up arms on Rhodes’ direction, the indictment explains. The former Army paratrooper and Yale Law graduate denies any guilt, saying, “I don’t do illegal activities. I always stay on this side of the line. I know where the lines are, and it drives them crazy.”

Here's a thought. Let's base our view on whether 1/6 was an "insurrection" on whether those arrested are charged with insurrection. So far, none has been. https://t.co/szsAGU3bz0

— Brit Hume (@brithume) January 13, 2022

The Washington Post adds:

In splitting up the largest charged case into smaller groups of defendants, prosecutors effectively drew a distinction between two alleged conspiracies: one by Oath Keepers associates who worked together and breached the Capitol that day with angry Trump supporters, as initially charged; and a second, allegedly led by Rhodes, to thwart the results of the election and the transfer of power, starting immediately after the 2020 presidential election.

Fox News political analyst Brit Hume argued Thursday morning via Twitter that Jan. 6 could not have been an insurrection because no one had been charged with seditious conspiracy. That tweet held up for about four hours, the Washington Post’s Aaron Blake noted. Others on Fox, Tucker Carlson, Greg Gutfeld, Laura Ingraham, journalist Glenn Greenwald, and others have repeated that talking point for months:

And the thing is, the writing has been on the wall for some time that this day could come. Yet for months, those who have sought to downplay the Capitol riot decided to cite the lack of such criminal charges as some kind of proof that Jan. 6 wasn’t that bad. In the most dubious cases, they suggested the lack of certain indictments legitimized conspiracy theories that some people involved were actually federal agents who fomented the Capitol riot. (These theories, which have included ones about Rhodes himself, have routinely fallen apart.)

They did so even as a former top federal prosecutor who handled the cases suggested in March last year that sedition-related charges could indeed be on the way.

https://twitter.com/AaronBlake/status/1481789453026959360?s=20

But it takes time to assemble a case for a crime like sedition. Conservatives were quick to dismiss the riot as the work of antifa and Black Lives Matter activissts only to abandon those talking points for others once they lost their news-cycle appeal.

Blake continues:

The question now is what those who have spearheaded downplaying a violent attempt to overturn an election will do about it. Will those who suggested that the lack of sedition charges proved the situation wasn’t serious acknowledge that, by the standard they set out, it appears potentially quite serious?

In all likelihood, not. They’ll note that these are merely charges — not proven crimes. They’ll note these particular charges don’t implicate Donald Trump or those around him. They’ll suggest this might be a response to the criticism Garland received from the left for not moving more quickly (ignoring how difficult and arduous it is to build such a case over many months). Some might even be tempted to pitch these people as further victims of overzealous political persecution, as Cain did with Meggs, and as Carlson did with Thomas Caldwell, who was the subject of multiple sympathetic segments on his show and is now among those charged with seditious conspiracy.

If all else fails, especially if the criminal process leads to convictions, the right may eventually deploy its “strategy of psychological innocence,” and abandon the seditionists as not “really” conservatives. Because as Rick Perlstein famously observed, in conservative cricles, “Conservatism never fails. It is only failed.” Because as Digby wrote during blogging’s prehistory:

There is no such thing as a bad conservative. “Conservative” is a magic word that applies to those who are in other conservatives’ good graces. Until they aren’t. At which point they are liberals.

Ask Donald Trump how that works with his once-sycophants turned enemies. He’s a master. No doubt without ever having read Orwell.

I think Greg Sargent’s possible scenario here is very likely right:

Let’s be clear: In refusing to testify to the House select committee examining Jan. 6, House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy may well be helping to cover up potential crimes committed by Donald Trump.

The California Republican has announced that he will not cooperate with the select committee, which has demanded that McCarthy testify about the Jan. 6 attack and Trump’s weeks-long effort at a procedural coup leading up to it.Opinions to start the day, in your inbox. Sign up.

McCarthy’s refusal may be the most significant moment thus far in the wide-ranging effort by Trump allies to cover up his Jan. 6-related corruption. That’s because McCarthy, who reportedly appealed to Trump as the violence unfolded, likely has some of the most direct knowledge available of Trump’s conduct as the mob rampage continued.

That could have criminal implications, if Trump’s attempt to subvert the electoral count in Congress amounted to an effort to obstruct an official proceeding.

“There’s no doubt that McCarthy is a material witness to a possible crime by the former president,” New York University School of Law professor Ryan Goodman told me. “His conversation with Trump during the height of the riot could provide direct evidence of Trump’s mind-set and scheme.”

The true nature of what that conversation could tell us keeps getting lost. It’s not just that it could reveal that Trump displayed extraordinary depravity and malevolence in ignoring numerous frantic pleas to call off the rioters.

It’s also that this knowledge could reveal that Trump may have come to see the violence as instrumentally helpful to his cause of subverting the election’s outcome.

You can see the importance of this in the select committee’s letter to McCarthy. In it, the committee notes that McCarthy screamed at Trump to call off the rioters. Trump reportedly replied: “Well, Kevin, I guess these people are more upset about the election than you are.”

The committee wants to know more about that. Its letter notes:As is readily apparent, all of this information bears directly on President Trump’s state of mind during the January 6th attack as the violence was underway.

The committee wants to question McCarthy about that conversation and other communications with Trump, his legal team and others.

Behind this anodyne language about Trump’s “state of mind” lies something potentially very grave. The committee plainly wants to know if Trump hinted or even somehow indicated to McCarthy — or others — that his calling off the rioters was in some way contingent on Republicans subverting or delaying the electoral count.

To be clear, such an occurrence would only be marginally different from what actually did reportedly happen. In Trump’s reported phone call with McCarthy, he clearly sided with the rioters and directly linked their violence to his goal of disrupting the congressional count of electors.

Trump also attested to that disruptive goal while inciting the rioters before they attacked. And as Marcy Wheeler details, some of the rioters themselves allegedly demonstrated this was their goal in invading the Capitol.

It would only be the tiniest leap from what Trump did say to a hint or an open indication that he would only call off the rioters if Republicans delayed the electoral count.

Remember, while the violence was happening, Trump and his lawyer Rudolph W. Giuliani reportedly called at least one GOP senator and urged him to secure such a delay. Also recall that Trump thought his procedural coup was in the process of failing — as the committee’s letter notes — and that he needed Republicans to do more that day.

It’s easy to see Trump communicating this to McCarthy in his trademark mob-speak: Look, if you want me to call off the rioters, you’re gonna have to do the right thing.

It is not the select committee’s job to investigate criminality, of course. But it can make criminal referrals to the Justice Department, and it is reportedly exploring whether to recommend that the department investigate whether Trump, in trying to subvert the electoral count, criminally obstructed an official proceeding.

Does anyone think he wouldn’t do it? Of course he would. In fact, I think it’s almost certain that he did.

I don’t think this is provable, unfortunately. He is a boot-licking sycophant and his ambitions are so overweening that he’d give Donald Trump a massage and a happy ending on national TV if he thought it would ensure his elevation to Speaker. He won’t admit it. But if it happened, he’d better hope that nobody else was in earshot.

In the words of one of Kyrsten Sinema’s staff today, “she had Joe Biden for lunch” by announcing before his visit to the Hill that she would not budge on the filibuster. Reportedly, she looked at her phone the whole time Biden was addressing the caucus shortly thereafter. I’m sure she was wanted to know how many Republicans were licking her boots in gratitude. That is apparently what she lives for. The Voting Rights bills are, therefore, effectively dead.

So where are we? Here’s Ari Berman:

Over the course of 2021, 19 states passed 34 laws making it harder to vote—the greatest rollback of voting access since the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Those changes include more than a dozen GOP-controlled states passing new provisions to interfere with impartial election administration, while Trump and his allies aggressively recruit “Stop the Steal”–inspired candidates to take over key election positions like secretary of state offices and local election boards in major battleground states.

“What we’re seeing is a multifaceted, multilevel attack on American democracy,” says Colorado Secretary of State Jena Griswold, chair of the Democratic Association of Secretaries of State.

He goes into the extreme gerrymandering being done in Republican states. It’s just terrible. And then there’s this:

And make no mistake, if Republicans prevail in rigging the 2022 election, they’ll be even more emboldened in 2024, especially if Trump is on the ballot. The lies of a stolen election propagated by Trump—and exploited by Republican lawmakers who know better—are now being used to lay the groundwork to sabotage elections for real. “Their endgame?” President Joe Biden asked rhetorically during a major speech in Atlanta on January 11. “To turn the will of the voters into a mere suggestion—something states can respect or ignore.” This isn’t just about the normal ebb and flow of partisan politics; it’s a test of whether a party that is deadly serious about ending American democracy as we know it will regain control of ostensibly democratic institutions.               

 “The insurrection, the gerrymandering, the voter suppression, the attacks on professional election officials—all of this puts our democracy at risk to a degree we have not seen since the Civil War,” former Obama administration Attorney General Eric Holder told me recently. “That’s how serious this is.”

The targeting of McBath is not an isolated incident. It’s a stark illustration of the GOP’s nationwide playbook for undermining voting rights, with Georgia at ground zero of this battle. Georgia was an epicenter of the Trump campaign’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election, with the defeated president famously telling Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to “find 11,780 votes” to nullify Biden’s victory. Raffensperger refused, despite threats against him and his family, but Trump’s Big Lie persuaded Georgia Republicans to pass a sweeping voter-suppression law last March that set the bar for restrictive voting legislation that proliferated across GOP-controlled states.

At the heart of Trumpism is the fear of a majority-minority future where white power no longer dominates. So it’s no coincidence that this battle is being fought hardest in the state where Black voters who vote overwhelmingly Democratic have the most to gain or lose. Along with McBath, Sen. Raphael Warnock is running for reelection in 2022 and Stacey Abrams is mounting a second bid for governor. But the voters supporting them first need to overcome more than a dozen provisions designed to reduce their access to the ballot, including a reduction in the number of drop boxes in metro Atlanta from 97 to 23, new voter-ID requirements for mail-in ballots, a far lower bar for rejecting ballots cast in the wrong precinct, less time to request and return mail ballots, a prohibition on election officials sending out mail-in ballot applications to all voters, and even a ban on giving voters food or water while they’re waiting in line.

These policies are already having an impact—during local elections in November, the number of rejected absentee-ballot applications rose from less than 1 percent in 2020 to 4 percent, according to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, a troubling indicator of how easy it would be to tilt the outcome in a state decided by just over 11,000 votes in 2020.

LaTosha Brown, co-founder of the Atlanta-based voting rights group Black Voters Matter Fund, calls the Georgia law a “death by a thousand cuts” that “has the potential to change the results of the election.” But “the scariest part of the process,” she says, is “what they’re doing with the election boards.”

That’s right: The newest—and potentially most dangerous—anti-democratic threat are new laws designed to give Trump-backed election deniers unprecedented control over how elections are run and how votes are counted.

After Raffensperger defended the integrity of the 2020 election, Republicans removed him—and all his successors—as chair and voting member of the state election board, which oversees voting rules and election certification, and gave the GOP-controlled legislature the power to appoint the board’s chair, allowing them to control a majority of the members.

The reconstituted state board, in turn, has extraordinary power to take over up to four county election boards that it views as “underperforming” or where local officials (read: fellow Republicans) have lodged complaints. In other words, partisan election officials appointed by and beholden to the heavily gerrymandered Republican legislature could control election operations in Democratic strongholds like Atlanta’s Fulton County, where the Trump campaign spread lies about “suitcases” of ballots being counted on election night after GOP poll monitors left. The state board has already appointed a panel, led by Republicans, which immediately began a performance review of Fulton County requested by Republicans in the legislature—the first step toward a possible takeover.

Meanwhile, in at least eight Georgia counties, Republicans have already changed the composition of local election boards—which not only certify elections but determine things like the number of polling places and ballot drop boxes, as well as voting hours—by ousting Democratic members and replacing them with Republicans. Not just any Republicans, of course, but those who claim the election was stolen. (In Lincoln County, the recently reconfigured election board recently proposed closing six of the county’s seven polling sites.)

This radicalization of previously evenhanded bodies will affect not just who oversees elections, but whose votes are counted. During the January 2021 Senate runoffs, the right-wing group True the Vote challenged the eligibility of hundreds of thousands of voters who it claimed had moved. Only a few dozen votes were ultimately thrown out, but now Georgia’s new law explicitly allows an unlimited number of voters to be challenged and requires local election boards to hear these challenges within 10 days or face sanctions from the state election board. Based on these challenges, local boards could then decline to certify election results or disqualify enough voters to swing a close election—exactly the gambit Trump tried to pull off in 2020.

 “More than just reducing turnout, they’re stacking the deck to actually manipulate the results,” Brown says. “That’s very scary to me.”

Terrifying is a better word. That’s what Biden was talking about today:

“If we miss the first time, we can come back and try it a second time. We missed this time.”

— President Biden seems to indicate filibuster rules change/voting rights bill is dead as he raises his voice while speaking to reporters after meeting with Senate Democrats. pic.twitter.com/Ani0pGEEpg

— The Recount (@therecount) January 13, 2022

That’s not all. Precisely because they certified the 2020 election results, Raffensperger and Gov. Kemp are now facing Trump-endorsed primary challengers, raising the prospect that Georgia’s top executive and top election official heading into 2024 could be Big Lie champions predisposed to helping steal a future election for Trump or another Republican candidate.

Former GOP Sen. David Perdue (who lost a January 2021 runoff election to Democrat Jon Ossoff) announced in December he’d challenge Kemp. Perdue has insisted he would not have certified the 2020 election; instead, he would have called a special session of the legislature to enable Republicans to appoint pro-Trump presidential electors to nullify the will of Georgia voters. Just days after announcing his candidacy, Perdue filed a Trump-like lawsuit falsely claiming that thousands of “unlawfully marked” absentee ballots were counted in Fulton County in November 2020.

Raffensperger, meanwhile, is being challenged by GOP Rep. Jody Hice, who voted to reject presidential electors from Pennsylvania and Arizona after the insurrection, signed on to a lawsuit by the state of Texas asking the Supreme Court to throw out election results in Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, and has said he was not “convinced at all, not for one second, that Joe Biden won the state of Georgia.”

Hice is not an outlier. More than 160 Republican candidates who’ve amplified the Big Lie are running for statewide positions with authority over how elections are run. “That’s akin to giving a robber a key to the bank,” says Colorado’s Griswold. Many more election deniers are running for local positions like poll worker and election judge. And Republicans are not coy about their intentions. “We are going to take over the election apparatus,” former Trump chief strategist Steve Bannon, an architect of this strategy, said on his podcast in late December, calling for the “overthrow” of county election clerks.

If hijacking election administration fails, extreme gerrymandering makes it more likely that Republican legislators in increasingly safe districts, insulated from public accountability, will decide to overturn the will of their states’ voters in presidential contests.  

Meanwhile, gerrymandering has made the red districts eve redder than before.

That means that GOP legislators not only can ignore the views of a majority of voters, but in deep-red districts they’ll be chiefly concerned with primary challenges, accelerating the party’s radicalization against democracy. “They’re going to have more Marjorie Taylor Greenes in their caucus,” says Michael Li, an expert on redistricting at the Brennan Center for Justice.  

This is how Trump’s end goal for January 6 becomes far more likely in 2024: If Republicans take back the House through aggressive gerrymandering, they’ll not only derail Biden’s agenda, but they’ll be much more inclined to reject the results of a contested presidential election if a Democrat wins. Sixty-five percent of House Republicans refused to certify the election results in 2020 just hours after the insurrection, and that caucus will become even more radical after 2022.

 “The people who don’t want to certify free and fair elections,” predicts Rep. Mondaire Jones (D-N.Y.), “will regain control of the federal government. They will make it harder for representative government to ever exist moving forward.”

Berman says the Democrats haven’t prioritized this and so we are in ytrouble:

Indeed, a remarkable asymmetry in tactics has defined this fight. While Republicans have made the hostile takeover of the country’s election system their central organizing principle, the Biden administration prioritized economic legislation over voting rights, going so far as to list the passage of the infrastructure bill as the first item in a fact sheet touting the steps it had taken to “restore and strengthen American democracy” ahead of a global democracy summit in December. Biden believed that passing popular pieces of legislation would “prove democracy works” and restore the public’s faith in the democratic process, but the administration’s focus on economic policy—and its pursuit of bipartisanship—failed to blunt the growing radicalization of the GOP. 

GOP-controlled states have passed new voter-suppression laws, gerrymandered maps, and election-subversion bills through simple majority, party-line votes. Yet recalcitrant centrist Democratic Sens. Joe Manchin (W.Va.) and Kyrsten Sinema (Ariz.) have insisted that any federal legislation stopping such measures requires a bipartisan supermajority, portraying the filibuster not as an impediment to protecting democracy, but as integral to its functioning.Republicans are not coy about their intentions. “We are going to take over the election apparatus,” former Trump chief strategist Steve Bannon said on his podcast in late December.

It’s a situation that evokes the end of Reconstruction. Back then, insurrectionist Democrats (then the party of white supremacy) used every means necessary—including violence and vote-rigging—to retake control of the state and federal governments, while accommodationist Republicans (then the party of civil rights) appealed to bipartisan unity, touted economic legislation, and supported the filibuster to block voting rights legislation, leading to nearly a century of Jim Crow.            

This time Jim Crow will end up being the law of the land, not just the law of the southern states. They run the federal courts.

Berman discusses the Voting Rights Legislation that Manchin and Sinema tanked today but notes that in any case,  time is running out for it to have much impact on the midterms.

Most key battleground states have already passed new redistricting maps that courts could be reluctant to alter in the thick of an election year—and, though many states quickly expanded voting options during the pandemic in 2020, it takes time to properly implement pro-voter policies like online and automatic registration. As Li notes, “Congress is in danger of losing the 2022 election cycle” to anti-democratic forces.

Republicans who falsely maintain that the election was stolen say they are extremely motivated to vote in 2022, with the Big Lie functioning as a new Lost Cause movement, similar to how embittered Southerners used the death of the Confederacy as a rallying cry to fuel the backlash to Reconstruction. At the same time, the blockage of voting rights legislation is demoralizing the Democratic base—which views democracy protection as a pressing priority—and threatening to depress turnout, making it easier for Republicans to prevail in the midterms and advance their assault on democracy.

For months, voting rights advocates and scholars of democracy have issued hair-on-fire warnings about the danger that the GOP’s death-by-a-thousand-cuts strategy poses to the very foundation of representative democracy. “The American experiment is at risk,” Holder says. This is not hyperbole. And by 2024 the damage may have already been done. The members of Congress, governors, secretaries of state, attorneys general, state legislators, and local officials elected this November will determine to a large extent whether there will be fair elections for years to come.

I will say this: after the election a whole lot of people, including lefties, who were pooh-poohing those of us who saw the Big Lie as an existential threat. They demanded the economic agenda go first and Biden and his people agreed. People were saying “we just have to organize and win bigger, that’s all.”

Good luck with that.

It’s simple. There’s no mystery:

NEW w/ ⁦@mkraju⁩: With Republicans in a strong spot to win the majority, they’re plotting an onslaught of probes into the Biden administration, from Afghanistan to Hunter Biden to Covid-19 origins.

“There'll be a lot of pretty aggressive oversight.” https://t.co/XVndvdeQ9H

— Melanie Zanona (@MZanona) January 13, 2022

Here’s a taste:

this Marjorie Taylor Greene rant on Steve Bannon's show is insane but it also highlights where Trumpers are at these days with their Covid conspiracy theories. pic.twitter.com/0fLBphhpN3

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) January 13, 2022

Meanwhile, the “Speaker in waiting” is refusing to cooperate with the January 6th Committee:

Kevin McCarthy is soooo bad at this pic.twitter.com/5MFA5d9d8S

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) January 13, 2022

I don’t know how the country can survive this shamelessness.

Here we are. The public health experts of the right wing extremist Supreme Court decided that this was a perfect time to start their crusade against government regulation, by limiting the scope of OSHA as they have long dreamed of doing:

The Supreme Court on Thursday blocked the Biden administration from enforcing a vaccine-or-testing mandate for large employers, dealing a blow to a key element of the White House’s plan to address the pandemic as cases resulting from the Omicron variant are on the rise.

But the court allowed a more modest mandate requiring health care workers at facilities receiving federal money to be vaccinated.

The vote in the employer mandate case was 6 to 3, with liberal justices in dissent. The vote in the health care case was 5 to 4, with Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh joining the liberal justices to form a majority.

Aand, just so it’s clear how we came to this:

A reminder on a day about filibuster rule changes that the three of the justices here confirmed after GOP-led Senate went nuclear to allow SCOTUS noms to move forward with 50, not 60 votes https://t.co/1qObd4i84x

— Mike Memoli (@mikememoli) January 13, 2022

What a day. Just one slap in the face after another.

I’m sure it’s all Joe Biden’s fault. I’ll wait for the media to tell me why later.

MORE: Sinema has told the White House about a possible floor speech, per Senate source, adding "Sinema is having Joe Biden for lunch." https://t.co/gKPflKBoV2

— Tara Palmeri (@tarapalmeri) January 13, 2022

Actually she is having the Democratic Party and American democracy for lunch. I guess she likes the bitter taste of betrayal.

Also, she is liar:

Sinema lied today when she claimed she has always been a supporter of the 60 vote threshold. https://t.co/e7fFRxchdB

— Lawrence O'Donnell (@Lawrence) January 13, 2022

I don’t know what to say about her anymore. Manchin agrees with her by the way. Sigh.