Month: January 2022

Nobody does it like Alexandra Petri:

Have you ever watched a wind sock deflate until it is just a sad polyester shell crumpled on the pavement? Have you ever left some soft cheese near a hot stove and come back to find a demoralized puddle in its place? Have you ever failed to properly care for a houseplant so that not only do you watch it die, but you spend several weeks witnessing it wither, crumple and lose all dignity?

Relatedly, did you see Ted Cruz on with Tucker Carlson on Thursday night?

Here is what I will say about that interview: Personally, just personally, if I were having exploratory surgery to make certain that no hint of a spine remained in any nook of my body I might have overlooked, I would not do it on national television. If I were plucking my voice out and giving it to Tucker Carlson to add to yet another of his magic seashells in the hopes that, in exchange, he would give me legs for 2024 — I would do that somewhere where the cameras were not rolling. I know that Ted Cruz has always loved soup, gelatinous, oozing, always taking the shape of its container. However, I did not want to watch him become soup. Some processes ought to be private.

I would take more joy in watching Ted Cruz be berated for his words (one of the few unalloyed delights that remain to us) if the words in question were not his description of Jan. 6, 2021, as a “violent terrorist attack”; I would also take more joy if the person doing the berating were not Tucker Carlson, complaining that this was no way to describe the very fine people who had so kindly vouchsafed their presence in the Capitol and if Carlson were not wondering why Cruz would utter such hideous slander.

“You told that lie on purpose,” Carlson began by saying, “and I’m wondering why you did.”

“I wasn’t saying the thousands of peaceful protesters supporting Donald Trump are somehow terrorists,” Cruz said, truckling. “I wasn’t saying the millions of patriots across the country supporting Trump are terrorists.” He went on: “Tucker, I agree with you. It was a mistake to say that yesterday, and the reason is what you just said, which is we have now had a year of Democrats and the media twisting words and trying to say that all of us are terrorists.”

The interview could not have been a more vivid reminder that the Republican Party has been undergoing a Change for some time. It would be bad enough if everyone in the GOP shocked the country by simply showing up one day transformed: new blandly smiling faces, new gelatinous substance barely holding their bodies upright, new minds wiped perfectly clean. But it’s somehow worse that it is all happening in public.

We have to watch the slow melting away of the original worried face, the replacement of the vestigial spinal column, the painful extraction of the memories. It is sickening to see, even if the victim is Ted Cruz. If anything, it’s more stomach-churning, because he is so eager and so transparent about it. He is thrilled to be undergoing this lobotomy! He tweeted out the interview himself!

There are some metamorphoses you simply do not sign up to look in on. If you had told me a decade ago that I would have to watch Ted Cruz oleaginously beseech Tucker Carlson to allow him to see the five fingers the party prefers rather than the four he knows are really there, I would have gone into another line of work.

Yes, here are the new parameters for acceptable Republican speech, and here, right on time for his scheduled reprogramming and groveling, is Ted! He knows which way the wind is blowing, and he will do his best to become a windbag that blows in that direction, whatever humiliating deflation is required first.

There was a time when Ted Cruz was widely seen as a force to be reckoned with. He came in second to Trump in 2016 and it was possible that he would lead the opposition to him. He refused to endorse him and got booed at the RNC. Look at him now.

Not that he hasn’t always been a weasel. But this level of debasement takes it to a whole new level. He is modeling the consequence of defying the party line. His fellow GOP weasels are no doubt taking note. They won’t make that mistake.

This is what you have to look forward to if the Republicans win the majority in November:

Ron Johnson says he'll continue investigating Dr. Fauci if he wins a third term pic.twitter.com/6ntJwZUcLz

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) January 9, 2022

Here is the head of the Freedom Caucus in House, which will be leading the impeachment of Joe Biden:

Who’s going to tell him?

So sure, let’s lay out next November because Biden hasn’t solved all of our problems in his first year. That’ll show them.

Facts already in evidence point to Donald J. Trump having a rendezvous with accountability. In New York state and/or via a Jan. 6 committee referral to the Department of Justice and/or via the DOJ. itself. It cannot come too soon. Or can it?

President Joe Biden came down pretty hard on his predecessor in his Jan. 6 anniversary speech. Attorney General Merrick Garland was more measured, promising to “follow the facts — not an agenda or an assumption.” That left more than a few pundits with the assumption that Garland is doing nothing. Nothing in evidence anyway.

I’m gonna go with E.J. Dionne on this one:

But when it comes to the possibility of prosecuting Trump, we should welcome the fact that Garland is not talking about what, if anything, he is doing. Recall that progressives and Democrats were rightly enraged in 2019 when then-Attorney General William P. Barr publicly distorted the findings of special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s inquiry and quickly dismissed the prospect of prosecuting Trump.

They were also angry when then-FBI Director James B. Comey, in announcing his 2016 decision not to prosecute Hillary Clinton in connection with her use of a private email server, also (inappropriately) chose to go on and on about the case. He criticized Clinton, during the presidential campaign, for being “extremely careless” and called her use of a private server “especially concerning.”

Comey’s job in the Clinton case was in law enforcement, not commentary. The same is true of Garland where Trump is concerned. Yes, the attorney general could announce that he is investigating Trump — if he is. But given how extraordinary indicting a former president would be, are we not better off with the standard Garland articulated? “We will and we must speak,” he said, “through our work.”

Much of the criticism aimed at Garland comes from him not announcing an investigation into Trump, as well as a lack of leaks from his department regarding a Trump investigation, leaks Robert Mueller trained his investigators not to make. This in spite of the fact that “legal scholars Laurence H. Tribe, Barbara McQuade and Joyce White Vance itemized potential crimes Trump may have committed in the course of his efforts to overturn the election.”

The political pitfalls of a Biden DOJ indicting the president he defeated are significant. But, Dionne reminds, it was “Republicans who, in opposing Trump’s impeachment, argued that he could face criminal indictment after he left office.” They themselves set out a welcome mat for a future attorney general.

The fear among progressives reflexively inclined to see Democrats as weak and feckless is that, hearing no announcement from the DOJ and hearing no whines from near-Trump allies, that Garland is doing nothing. No news suggests to them that Trump and his crew will escape accountablility just as Wall Street bankers did after the financial crash.

Marcy Wheeler believes that reaction is premature. On Saturday, she responded to criticism of Garland:

Because I keep having to lay out the proof that DOJ, in fact, has investigated close Trump associates of the sort that might lead to Trump himself, I wanted to make a list of those known investigations. Note that three of these — Sidney Powell, Alex Jones, and Roger Stone — definitely relate to January 6 and a fourth — the investigation into Rudy Giuliani — is scoped such that that it might include January 6 without anyone knowing about it.

A fifth investigation involves Tom Barrack, the man who recommended Paul Manafort as Trump campaign manager. He was indicted in July last year as an unregistered agent of the United Arab Emirates via a referral from Robert Mueller, proving Garland’s DOJ will move on such referrals. The sixth involves “one more grand jury investigation into a powerful Trump associate that I know of via someone who was subpoenaed in the investigation in the second half of last year.”

Wheeler concludes:

It baffles me why TV lawyers continue to claim there’s no evidence that Merrick Garland is investigating anyone close to Trump — aside from they’re looking for leaks rather than evidence being laid out in plain sight in court filings. One of the first things that Garland’s DOJ did was to take really aggressive action against the guy who led Trump’s efforts to launch a coup. Alex Jones and Roger Stone are clearly part of the investigation into how the breach of the East doors of the Capitol came together, and the two of them (Jones especially) tie directly back to Trump.

There are other reasons to believe that DOJ’s investigation includes Trump’s role in the assault on the Capitol, laid out in the statements of offense from insurrectionists who’ve pled guilty, ranging from trespassers to militia conspirators. But one doesn’t even have to read how meticulously DOJ is collecting evidence that dozens of people have admitted under oath that they participated in the attack on the Capitol because of what Trump had led them to believe on Twitter.

Because DOJ clearly has several other routes to get to Trump’s role via his close associates. I’m not promising they’ll get there. And this will take time (as I’ll show in a follow-up). But that’s different than claiming that this evidence doesn’t exist.

“Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence,” for those who doubt Wheeler’s reading.

Democrats have already “come at the king” twice and missed. They (and we) cannot afford to miss again. Patience. I’m not going to call for heads on pikes. That’s Trump’s style.

The video below from “The Late Show” is a few days old, but if you haven’t seen it yet, enjoy.

Notice the cheers erupting from the audience when singers announce that Jacob Chansley, the convicted “QAnon Shaman,” was sentenced to 3-1/2 years for his actions on Jan. 6, 2021.

We shake our heads over why so many people, otherwise ordinary people (Chansley not included), would believe conspiracy theories and the Big Lie, riot on behalf of Donald Trump, man of 30,000 false and misleading statements, and give their lives for him. Why? Because their world view has been shaken.

As the Webb telescope positions itself for a deeper look into the cosmos, consider Galileo. He was not the first to realize that Earth is not the center of it all. But from his perch at the University of Padua, with what he saw through his telescope, he was in a position to spread the idea across Europe as well as, eventually, to piss off the Vatican.

The Vatican Observatory’s website recounts:

In the 4th Session of the Council of Trent, the reformation council, the Catholic Church in opposition to Luther solemnly declared that Scripture could not be interpreted privately but only by the official Church:

Furthermore, to control petulant spirits, the Council decrees that . . . no one, relying on his own judgment and distorting the Sacred Scriptures according to his own conceptions, shall dare to interpret them according to his own conceptions, shall dare to interpret them contrary to that sense which Holy Mother Church . . . has held and does.

In 1613, over lunch at the palace of the Grand Duke of Tuscany, the Duke’s mother, Christina, became alarmed by the possibility that the Scriptures might be contradicted by private observations, such as those made by Galileo supporting a sun-centered universe. 

As others had noted, a sun-centered universe appeared to contradict Aristotelian natural philosophy in the eyes of the Church. This philosophy was fundamental to Catholic theology at the time. If Aristotelian natural philosophy was wrong, was Catholic theology undermined as well? 

That is, Galileo’s private observations, once published, threatened long-held assumptions about how the world worked. He was eventually tried for heresy in 1633. In 1992, Pope John Paul II officially declared that Galileo was right. It only took 359 years.

More was at stake than astronomy. That the Earth and humans were at the center of God’s creation was taken as given. The Bible account of creation and all that followed stood upon it. What did it mean if science contradicted that? What did it mean if our little sphere was just one of many floating insignificantly in an infinite cosmos?

Now consider everything that has happened since the Civil War. the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments recognized former slaves as citizens with voting rights (the men, anyway). The backlash to that spawned the Klan, a violent coup in Wilmington, a massacre in Tulsa, to decades of lynchings, and to 100 years of Black disinfranchisement. The Civil Rights movement that grew in the wake of WWII and Brown realigned politics in the South and created another backlash, spawning half a century of movement conservatism.

That White Christians stood at the center of economic, religious, and cultural life in America went largely unquestioned until the decade prior to the Civil War. For 100 years after, the Constitution notwithstanding, that perception refused to yield. For yet another 50, those whose place in the cosmos was defined by who they were better than resisted accepting the founders’ belief that all persons are created equal, and that this country meant to deliver on that promise.

Then Americans elected a Black man president. Once again, people lost their shit. We might as well have announced that the Earth is not the center of God’s creation.

This tumult is not over.

Update: Doh! Not enough coffee. Misreferenced the Bible creation on first pass. (h/t FS)

Legions of right wingers are dropping dead because of their insane fealty to conspiracy theories. Here are just a couple of examples:

A leading QAnon promoter who urged both her followers and strangers she passed on the street not to take the COVID vaccine died Thursday of the coronavirus, making her just the latest vaccine opponent killed by the disease.

Cirsten Weldon had amassed tens of thousands of followers across right-wing social media networks by promoting the pro-Trump QAnon conspiracy under the screenname “CirstenW.” She was prominent enough to become a sort of QAnon interpreter for comedian conspiracy theorist Roseanne Barr and started recording videos about QAnon with her.

Weldon focused on attacking vaccines and other efforts to fight COVID-19, saying in one video that Dr. Anthony Fauci “needs to be hung from a rope.” She claimed the vaccine killed people and even recorded herself yelling at people standing in line to receive vaccines.

“The vaccines kill, don’t get it!” Weldon warned the waiting vaccine recipients in an undated video posted to one of her online accounts. “This is how gullible these idiots are. They’re all getting vaccine!”

In late December, however, Weldon started showing symptoms of coronavirus infection. In her last video, posted on Dec. 28, Weldon struggled through her remarks about the coming overthrow of the United States government, coughing and complaining that she was exhausted.

Three days later, Weldon was hospitalized in Camarillo, California. She posted a picture of herself wearing an oxygen mask to Instagram and claimed she had “bacterial pneumonia.” Weldon wrote in a post on the social media network Telegram that she refused to take coronavirus treatment remdesivir, calling it “Dr Fauci’s Resmedervir (sic).”

Weldon’s death from COVID is just the latest instance of a far-right personality who opposed vaccination being killed by the virus. On Jan. 3, radio host Doug Kuzma died while infected with the coronavirus. In August, QAnon promoter Robert David Steele died of the virus shortly after posting a picture of himself in an oxygen mask and vowing to still refuse the vaccine.

In September, a QAnon follower named Veronica Wolski became a cause celebre in QAnon circles after she was hospitalized with the coronavirus. QAnon fans besieged the hospital with phone calls demanding that Wolski receive ivermectin, the deworming drug used by some as an unproven coronavirus treatment. Wolski died of the disease later that month.

In the face of these deaths, their surviving friends and supporters have started to allege that the dead QAnon figures are being murdered, either because they were refused internet folk remedies like ivermectin or hydroxychloroquine, or because they were killed by the deep-state to cover up their conspiracy theories. In December, Kuzma and a number of other conspiracy theorists were sickened with COVID-like symptoms after appearing together at a conference. Rather than acknowledge that they had COVID, the far-right influencers suggested they had been targeted by an anthrax attack.

After Weldon’s death, her QAnon allies threatened to pursue violent action against staff at the hospital where she died. Scott McKay, a QAnon personality known as the “Patriot Streetfighter,” said he would publicize the names of doctors and nurses involved in treating Weldon, saying he wanted to “put the fear into these medical professionals” in a Telegram post. McKay proposed the hospital staff be sentenced to death, or be murdered in vigilante violence.

“If it’s not done in a military tribunal then it’s going to be done in the street eventually and not to my wishes,” McKay wrote. “That’s my greatest fear. But if it’s necessary, it’s going to be necessary.”

Also:

Far-right podcast host Douglas Kuzma—who was an outspoken critic of the COVID-19 vaccine—has died while battling the coronavirus, which he contracted after attending a QAnon-friendly gathering in Texas that right-wingers baselessly claimed was the victim of an anthrax attack.

“I really loved him and I would do anything for him,” Amanda Kuzma told The Daily Beast on Thursday morning while confirming her father’s death earlier this week. “He was a great father.”

Kuzma, who hosted a program on the far-right “Frog News Network” and called his listeners “froganites,” had come down with COVID-19 after attending the right-wing “ReAwaken America Tour” gathering held in Texas in mid-December. Friends of Kuzma told The Daily Beast that Kuzma had fallen ill following the event and was later admitted to the hospital, causing many of his loyal allies to lose touch with him.

The news initially kicked off with pro-Trump attorney Lin Wood posting to Telegram in later December that Kuzma had “taken a turn for the worse” as his lungs aren’t responding to treatment. “Doug is suffering from Covid after returning from a recent patriot conference. Anna [a friend of Kuzma] informs me that Doug has taken a turn for the worse,” Wood wrote. “His lungs are not responding to treatment.”

Tim Greer, a fellow right-wing podcaster and good friend of Kuzma’s, told The Daily Beast in late December that his longtime pal tested positive for COVID-19 after attending Clay Clark’s right-wing event. The same conference was recently rife with right-wing rumors over the accusation that Clark had pumped anthrax through fog machines.

“Well, he didn’t have it before he went there, let’s say that,” Greer said.

Kuzma’s fellow right-wing radio host further told The Daily Beast that the Frog News Network radio host had been hospitalized. “Well, he [Kuzma] was tested positive for COVID, so COVID is what it is,” Greer told The Daily Beast while tossing cold water on the rumors that he might be sick due to anthrax poisoning. (Amanda Kuzma confirmed to The Daily Beast on Thursday morning, that her father had been admitted to the hospital before his death.)

“I do know he’s not responding on the telephone for the past three days,” Greer told The Daily Beast back at the end of December.

Clark, ReAwaken America Tour’s lead organizer, and his assistant didn’t respond to multiple request from The Daily Beast.

In a series of Telegram messages posted to Frog News Network’s channel on Christmas Day, a channel administrator claimed that Kuzma was in desperate need of prayers and had been sedated on a ventilator.

Rumors had begun circulating after the ReAwaken America Tour event around a baseless theory that attendees were victims of a “bioweapons” attack stemming from anthrax being pumped through fog machines—not the deadly virus that has been sweeping the globe for the last 18 months.

Clark has denied the anthrax rumors and insisted in an interview with The Daily Beast: “There was not anthrax through the fog machines!”

It’s got to be lead in the water, right? How else can we explain this lunacy?

This one came from my friend Murshed Zaheed:

“You’re like the only former staffer who hasn’t written a Harry Reid tribute,” was a DM I woke up to from the editor of this publication on the morning of New Year’s Eve.

He was right. The tributes had been pouring in since the giant of the Senate passed away on December 28. In the last few days, I have been sharing some thoughts sporadically on social media. Part of me wanted to put something together, but whenever I tried, my mind immediately started wondering about my parents.

I lost my mom two weeks ago, and went to her funeral just last week. And just three years ago, I lost my Dad suddenly, after he got hit by a speeding car during his morning walk down in Southern California. In fact, the last time I went to Vegas was specifically to meet with the senator to talk about my dad and how I was still figuring out how to move on without him in my life. More on that visit a bit later.

I was thinking about both my mom and dad on the afternoon my texts and DMs began lighting up about the news of Sen. Reid. I still feel discombobulated when it comes to processing this news about losing people in my life whom I loved unconditionally. I still haven’t completely come to terms with the process of death and grieving after losing my dad. And in a stretch of two weeks, when I lost my mom and then the boss I fell in love with years ago, it’s hard not to start crying when you try to sit down and write stuff like this. But here I go.

THE FIRST TIME I really heard a personal story about Reid was from my friend Mike O’Neil, my last roommate before I got married over a decade and a half ago. Mike shared a story with me about how Reid knew the starting lineup of every single player on the 1948 World Series champion Cleveland Indians, his favorite team. It’s a story he shared on Twitter a few days ago, explaining how a soft-spoken, understated Reid got the attention of Democratic donors in Cleveland at a DSCC fundraiser in 2005, while providing them a specific plan of how he was going to help the Democrats win back the Senate in 2006 by winning six seats. Which he did. The story came in extremely handy a couple of years later, when I had my first formal introduction to him as his new staffer.

I started in Sen. Reid’s office in late winter/early spring of 2007, when he was just taking the reins as Senate majority leader following the 2006 triumph. It was not going to be an easy gig. The Democratic majority in the Senate was fairly thin at 51-49, and there was a lot of pent-up enthusiasm and demand in the progressive base (and rightfully so) for the Democrats to mount an all-out counterattack against George W. Bush’s failed presidency. It was Ari Rabin-Havt, one of Reid’s key hires after he became Senate Democratic leader in 2005, who recruited me for the position, which back then had the title of “Director of New Media” but was essentially a senior leadership staffer position, synthesizing the interaction of tech, legislative policy, and political engagement with the progressive netroots.

Ari brought me to essentially my first one-on-one with Reid, formally introducing me as someone who was going to try to do Ari’s job. “You are following the Babe Ruth in your world,” Reid responded. I took a deep breath and said, “I sure am, Senator. My goal is to be hopefully as effective as Paul O’Neill.” He gave me that wry smile, and I had a feeling we were going to be OK from there on.

When Reid rose from the ash heap to become Democratic Senate leader after the Bush blitzkrieg of John Kerry’s milquetoast presidential campaign in 2004, there wasn’t a lot of excitement in the progressive base. Bush and the Republicans smoked the well-funded Democratic campaigns with textbook right-wing hate against LGBTQ communities, and playing up the fear of terrorism despite taking the country into a pointless, bloody war in Iraq based on lies and corporate media manipulation. The nascent netroots, rising out of the blogosphere, MoveOn.org, and Gov. Howard Dean’s presidential campaign, had good reason to be skeptical of the Democratic leadership.

But Reid had a plan. Susan McCue, his brilliant chief of staff, deployed every available tool to go to war against the Bush presidency. McCue created the first modern “multichannel” war room, before the concepts of digital media had even emerged. She brought in sharp and fiery progressive staffers like Rebecca Katz and Ari, who understood that fighting Republicans required not just deploying shiny tools, but leading with substance.

There is a lot to read about the rise of the netroots, but Reid was a central figure in its maturation. He recognized the power of digital communities, and the creation of a real progressive media infrastructure. He gave us, his media staffers, the green light to treat young reporters like Nico Pitney, Sam Stein, and Amanda Terkel from Huffington Post with the same reverence as regular communications flacks treated traditional corporate media outlets. It is not a stretch to assert that HuffPost would not have transformed from a blogger-centric startup into what it is today—a progressive-leaning media giant with fancy offices in the power center in D.C.—without the early support of Sen. Reid and his team.

#TeamReid pioneered concepts like blogger calls and meetings, honestly and substantively engaging leaders of digital communities with more than just talking points. It was not a superficial move for Reid to show up in the first Yearly Kos (today known as Netroots Nation) in Las Vegas in 2006. He didn’t show up there for the adulation, but to be a genuine partner to a community looking to build power.

HE WAS A CONSUMMATE LEADER who was willing to listen. In the summer of 2010, Reid was scheduled to appear at Netroots Nation when the conference was once again in Las Vegas. It was going to be tricky. As recounted by Joan McCarter on Daily Kos, “we were in the middle of two big political fights: justice for Dreamers and ending Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, the Clinton-era policy that forced LGBTQ service members to stay in the closet. We knew Lt. Dan Choi would be there, and we knew he was intent on making his point.” I was engaged in the negotiations between the netroots and Sen. Reid’s communications team, to figure out the best way to empower the activists while also having a meaningful engagement.

Well, Lt. Choi followed through with a direct action, jumping on the stage during Reid’s appearance. Reid promised him that he would lead the Senate to repeal Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell. Lt. Choi gave Reid his West Point ring, saying that Reid could only return it if he succeeded. Reid kept his promise.

What endeared Reid to the left was more than his willingness to take on the Republicans and beat them in strategic legislative combat. It was his genuine engagement, guided by his moral compass and anchored in a progressive vision for this country.

People forget how much of the left was skeptical of Reid in his early years as Democratic leader. When I started in his office in early 2007, his approval ratings at Daily Kos were in the teens, and there were calls for Chris Dodd for majority leader. He overcame that, not just with tactics but with strategy and vision around engagement.

Speaking of bloggers, after Reid passed away I tweeted about sharing with him clips of Elizabeth Warren’s posts on the liberal blog Talking Points Memo, back when she was blogging about the 2005 passage of the heinous bankruptcy bill. Reid saw Professor Warren as another tenacious fighter and a visionary who was well ahead of her time in terms of her grasp of the zeitgeist of progressive populism. He loved her for it.

It was Reid who asked Warren to come to Washington to oversee the TARP bank bailout; he also encouraged her to run for Senate. Leader Reid also championed Sen. Warren while in office, and especially had her back when she was taking on President Obama’s Wall Street–friendly positions and personnel. They were perfect partners.

He cared just as much about writings of Joan McCarter and David Waldman (“Kagro X”) from Daily Kos; Jane Hamsher, Marcy Wheeler, and Christy Hardin Smith from Firedoglake; Joe Sudbay and John Aravosis from AMERICAblog; Matt Stoller, Chris Bowers, and Scott Shields from MyDD; Digby (Heather Parton) and David Dayen from Hullabaloo; John Amato and Karoli from Crooks and Liars; Atrios (Duncan Black) from Eschaton; Steve Benen from The Carpetbagger Report; and so many others.

Reid’s magic was that he foresaw the power of “new media” as being more than just a medium. He knew it was a real community. He cared about those “approval polls” on Daily Kos, even when he was under 10 percent. He empowered us to tell him the truth about why folks were mad.

LET ME TELL YOU about the time when I thought he was going to fire me after I told him the truth. Perhaps one of the hardest points of Reid’s interaction with the left was during difficult springtime 2007 deliberations around a $120 billion bill to continue to fund Bush’s war in Iraq.

By this time, Reid had expressed regret for voting for the war, calling it the worst foreign-policy mistake in our history and observing correctly that America essentially lost in Iraq. Yet Reid ended up voting to continue to fund the conflict for the sake of supporting the troops, after failing to push the Bush administration to withdraw.

After much back-and-forth, Reid ended up voting with 79 other senators to fund the war, while 14 senators (including then–Democratic presidential candidates Clinton, Dodd, and Obama) voted against it. The vote took place on Thursday, May 24, 2007. The very next day, Ari and I had a weekly check-in with Sen. Reid, during which we got to debrief him on reactions and thoughts from the progressive online world to the news of the week. I got right to the point when he asked for our thoughts on the vote. I told him that while I understood his arguments that he did his best to push the debate and had to vote to fund the troops, I still believe he made the wrong decision, going against the wishes of not just the base of the Democratic Party but also his base in Nevada, who were sick and tired of the war. I told him that in his heart, he knew the war was wrong, and it was immoral to continue to fund it.

I remember how scared I felt; I thought for sure he was going to tell me to get out of his office and never come back. After I was done, he sat back a little in his chair. He then told Ari and me, “Boys, let’s make sure to keep this meeting every week during which it’s just the three of us. I appreciate it when you honestly share your thoughts without worrying about what makes me happy.”

I came out of his office in disbelief that I hadn’t gotten fired, and got a taste of what it felt like to gain Reid’s trust and also feel empowered.

THERE ARE PLENTY OF GREAT PIECES out there detailing how Sen. Reid became a legislative champion for the working class who was always guided by a moral compass, which often led to subtle confrontations with a Democratic president. Social Security remains intact and strong because of Sen. Reid’s successful fight to stop the Bush privatization scheme. He was ahead of his time and ahead of the rest of his peers in realizing the threat American democracy currently faces from the extreme right-wing conservative ideologues who have taken over the modern Republican Party. It is why he took the first step to kill the filibuster, to fix what he thought was becoming an undemocratic and broken Senate.

He also had thoughts about the Supreme Court.

In early September 2020, we were going through one of the toughest early stretches of the pandemic. I decided to drive down to Los Angeles to visit my ailing mom. I wanted to say hi to her from outside the window of her nursing home, because I wasn’t sure how many more times I’d get to see her. Afterward, I was getting ready to drive back to the Bay Area. Right as I was about to get on the 405, I got a call in my car. It was Sen. Reid.

“Murshed, I heard you are working these days to fix the Supreme Court,” he said. I was just done seeing my mom and in a different headspace.

“Yes, that’s right, Senator.”

“Well, tell me why we should be thinking about adding seats to the Supreme Court.”

I took a deep breath, and then went on for five minutes, laying out the arguments for expanding the Court. He then asked how he could be helpful. All I said was “Senator, it’d be amazing if you consider talking about this as something we all should take seriously. That’d be huge.”

All he responded with was “OK. Drive carefully,” and then gave me the infamous Reid hang-up.

Just a few days later, an article came out in The New Yorker in which Reid reflected on the stolen seats in the Supreme Court. “[T]he Supreme Court is not a static body,” Reid said in the article. “It’s not always been nine members—they have had five, eight, different numbers … I think it’s time that we did something after the election, something very publicly. We should hold some hearings, educate the public about this history. We should show that we’ve changed the number of Justices in the past, and we may have to do it again.”

As I said, the leader has always been ahead of his time.

THE LAST TIME I saw Sen. Reid in person was in May of 2019. The conversation was mostly about our families. It’s the first time I had seen him since my dad had passed away about a year earlier. I was telling him how my dad used to tell me that it was beyond his imagination that I’d end up working for someone like Reid when he decided to migrate to the U.S. back in the late 1980s.

Near the end of our visit, he motioned me to come toward him and then asked me to give him my phone number, so he could give me a call on the spot. He then said, “Now please text me every few days and share with me whatever is on your mind. Keep in closer touch.”

“Yes, sir. You got it.”

There have been countless remembrances of Sen. Reid and they are all worth reading, but it is worth underscoring how at the end of the day, the deep relationships he built with his staff were based on the F word—our families. His superpower that enabled him to generate such intense devotion and loyalty came from his sense of comfort in his own skin, derived from his own family and upbringing.

I don’t have a lot of regrets in life. But there is one I will never live down. After the historic 2008 election, Sen. Reid called me into his office and personally asked me to stay on with him for another two years. I didn’t listen, and left for a job that offered more money and supposedly more responsibilities. That was a mistake. Lesson learned.

I did promise him that I’d never leave his side and be there for him no matter what. And I put in countless hours organizing for #TeamReid’s re-election victory in 2010, one of the only key Democratic wins in a brutal midterm year. Like many others, even after I officially left his office, I never left him.

The pain we feel at times like this reflects the strength of the love we shared with those we lost.

I know how incredibly blessed and fortunate I am to have had the chance to serve the country under his leadership and as part of his team. I know how lucky I am to have been able to develop a relationship with him, one that I felt was as deep in terms of devotion and love as I had with my late parents. And I know he is up there smiling at all of us, with the decency and love he showed in his own ways to every member of his team.

So I am not going to write goodbye to the senator, and I am not going to talk about how much I love him in the past tense. I plan to be there for him again, whenever that time comes.

I love you, Senator.

Josh Marshall is allowing this members only article to be shared, so I’m sharing it. I know this is contentious stuff, but I think he right:

Yesterday we discussed the ‘schools must never close’ diehards who dominate much of the current COVID policy debate. I wanted to give you an update on the situation in the New York City public schools because I think it illustrates some Omicron-specific dynamics which haven’t really become part of that discussion. I don’t know precisely how far New York City and DC and other parts of the Northeast are ahead of the rest of the country right now. Maybe it’s like this everywhere. If not, likely it soon will be. But I know it’s like this here and in much of the Northeast. I’m going to reference some personal experiences but only to illustrate things I know are widespread if not universal throughout the city and region.

Yesterday attendance at my older son’s New York City public high school was 30%. In the city as a whole attendance was at 44%. Some measure of that may have been the snowfall on Thursday night. But not much. There wasn’t that much snow. What you currently have is a lot of students home with COVID, more who are quarantined and still more whose parents are keeping them home from school to avoid getting COVID. At the same time, many teachers and staff are out with COVID. In many schools the teachers who are still standing have temporarily set aside or modified the curriculum. Because if only a small minority of the students are in class it’s more disruptive to teach them and let everyone else fall behind than simply to wait. There are many reports of classes watching movies or simply amusing themselves because the teacher and half the class isn’t there.

Earlier in the week and before break as well (winter break in the New York City public schools is one week) it was clear that most of the function of the schools was a mix of administering COVID tests, scheduling durations of COVID quarantines and sending kids home with COVID. One image I remember was a class, as it was described to me later, in which the principal, herself coming down with COVID, was handing out two COVID tests to each students to administer at home over the next two evenings after classmates had come down with COVID. Everything I’ve seen over recent weeks has been principals, teachers and staff being incredibly conscientious and diligent under the most trying of circumstances. But increasingly the circumstances themselves seem absurd.

Through most of the last two years we’ve viewed the schools question either as a question of health safety for students, staff and teachers or efforts to ‘stop the spread’. Those remain critical issues, though vaccines have lowered the stakes for most involved. But there’s a separate issue which is that these schools aren’t really ‘open’ in any meaningful sense. They’re remaining open largely on principle and spending their time managing the COVID outbreak. What we’re seeing is not so much education or instruction as what we might call COVID perseverance theater, a political commitment to remain open at all times under all circumstances.

As I noted last week a lot of that is based on demands from comfortable knowledge workers who’ve spent the pandemic working from home and largely insulated from the worst ravages of the pandemic. But it is also clearly based on popular resistance to school closures because what began as a short-term emergency measure in the spring of 2020 lasted in many districts for more than a year. I don’t suggest any easy answers to the current situation. But I think it is important to make clear what schools being open under those circumstances actually means. It may be fine for the great majority of students and vaccinated teachers and staff – in terms of illnesses generally being mild. But it’s not actually instruction. That just doesn’t happen under these circumstances.

Everything we’ve learned about Omicron suggests that this current tidal wave will ebb in the next two to three weeks. So it’s not like this is some new normal. If it were the decisions would be much more complicated and merciless. But it’s not. Or at least we have every reason to believe that. So we’re powering through the outbreak. But let’s not call it school.

His point is so important. Yes, you can send your kid to school during this Omicroon surge and hope he or she isn’t one of the rare ones who gets a serious illness. That’ a reasonable risk assessment. But that won’t change the fact that millions of people are getting sick with this thing and are staying home because they either feel like shit or they don’t want to spread this incredibly transmissible disease around and make everything even worse. So “open the schools!” during a massive surge of COVID is not the same thing as normal school and not much is going to be taught under these extreme circumstances. Let’s not pretend otherwise. In fact, I would suspect that more will be learned by those who are in virtual school than in person right now.

And yes, I know this is just as much about working parents not having childcare, which is legit, but the arguments are all about how the kids must be in person school so they don’t get left behind. The reality is that in the middle of this surge they aren’t going to get a normal school day anyway. It’s just the way it is. We are in the middle of a pandemic.

I would just add one more thing. I certainly hope that all the people who have recently become fierce advocates for in-person public education will continue to advocate for it after this pandemic has receded. I don’t think a lot of these folks were out there pushing for more money for schools, higher pay for teachers and infrastructure improvements to improve education before. Maybe they’re more aware of the value of it now?

If you’re in the mood to listen to a podcast about what a dangerous moment we are in, I invite you to listen to this one with John Heilman, Brian Klaas and Anne Applebaum. Oy:

https://youtu.be/H6vzU_jnbQA

If you read the comments from the Trump voters in the post below, you’ll see that these people are just being “wusses.”

The New York Times conducted yet another focus group with Trump voters. I’m just going to leave it here. The human ability to rationalize bullshit is an amazing sight to see.

(And, by the way, the reasoning about why Trump shouldn’t run is very revealing. They know …)

Kristen Soltis Anderson: What are some of the biggest things that you remember happening in 2021?

Gayle (from Florida): The vaccine. More and more people getting vaccinated.

Judi (from Oklahoma): The economy started to go bad.

Barney (from Delaware): The price of everything going up, and we’re back to $50 fill-ups.

Matt (from Tennessee): Betty White was the final thing that 2021 was able to take from us.

Lorna (from Missouri): A lot of the concerts were canceled. They managed to pull off the Rolling Stones coming here, though. I didn’t go. I didn’t want to be around all them people.

Joshua (from Ohio): The social justice movement growing from 2020, definitely.

Judi: The great divide our country is in. With our new president and with issues with the vaccine. There are people that are all for it. There are some that will not even talk about it or take it, even look at it.

Sandy (from California): The vaccinations — you have to show your card. It’s almost like we’re having our civil rights taken away.

Kristen Soltis Anderson: When I say “Jan. 6,” I want to hear from each of you what the first word is that comes to mind.

Barney: Way overblown.

Judi: Scary.

Joshua: Misrepresented.

Lorna: One of the guys that was arrested, my mom worked with. It’s ridiculous the way they came out and searched his house.

Gayle: Definitely Trump and MAGA and CNN.

Sandy: Blowing out of proportion.

Kristen Soltis Anderson: In your own words, what happened on Jan. 6? How would you describe what happened?

Matt: I would say civilians stormed the Capitol building in an unwarranted fashion.

Gayle: Many people that were upset with how the election turned out and didn’t feel that Biden won fairly and wanted to, I guess, do some damage.

Jill (from Maine): People trying to take control because they felt like somehow they were wronged with the election.

Kristen Soltis Anderson: I want you to think about how you felt when you first heard about what had happened on Jan. 6, how you felt. A show of hands, did anybody feel angry?

[Matt and Jill raise their hands.]

Kristen Soltis Anderson: What about upset?

[Jill, Matt, Lorna, Judi and Barney raise their hands.]

Kristen Soltis Anderson: What about ashamed?

[No one raises a hand.]

Kristen Soltis Anderson: Ambivalent?

[Gayle raises her hand.]

Gayle: I kind of feel like, on one hand, you had a few bad apples in there, and then you had other people who truly were just trying to express their feelings of the election, and they didn’t feel that the outcome was right. So I don’t know what the intent was initially.

Patrick Healy: How important do you think Jan. 6 was in American history? Just thinking about other major events in American history, Sept. 11, Pearl Harbor.

Jill: I think it’s very important, and it’s much different than the other Pearl Harbors and stuff because it was Americans turning on Americans. It wasn’t somebody else doing damage. It was us doing damage to ourselves.

Sandy: It doesn’t really faze me. I mean, these Black Lives Matter people back in 2020 — that was the whole summer. You don’t hear anybody talking about that.

Kristen Soltis Anderson: Barney, I believe when I was going around and asking people to give one word, I believe you said “overblown.” Where do you see something like Jan. 6 in the scope of American history?

Barney: I’ve lived in Washington. And if you do like you’re supposed to do and get your permits and get security, there’s very peaceful demonstrations with millions of people, and nothing happens. And nobody listened to the warnings saying there’s people coming. So it’s not a Pearl Harbor. It’s not a 9/11. It’s Jan. 6, 2021, and it’s just another day. Every day, if you live in Washington, you turn on the news, you hear “Jan. 6” 100 times a day. And if you go out to Oklahoma, you don’t hear it. So it’s where you are and what you hear.

Gayle: People don’t talk about it. The issues that we’re dealing with right now, it’s Covid and inflation and the supply chain issues. It doesn’t matter if you’re Democrat or Republican. So I don’t know if it’s something that might eventually be in history books.

Kristen Soltis Anderson: Were there any things that anybody was saying or doing that made what happened on Jan. 6 more likely to occur the way it did?

Judi: People were saying that the states wanted to recount the votes because they saw fraud.

Jill: I would say Trump. Trump saying he lost the election, it was stolen from him, over and over and over again. And I think a lot of people were just getting very angry about it, feeling like the election was stolen.

Joshua: Trump’s speeches and his Twitter.

Kristen Soltis Anderson: I want to know if you think there’s anything that President Trump could have done or should have done to prevent the escalation and what happened on Jan. 6?

Judi: I don’t think you should have had that rally with all the people, with all the protesters. I think he just got everybody more ticked off.

Gayle: I think he could have stopped it earlier somehow. I remember watching it on TV and going, ‘What the hell is going on right now?’ And I was like, ‘Where is Trump during this?’ And that was the only thing that kind of came to mind in that moment, was Trump’s got to come in and do something about this. But he wasn’t, and that was a concern of mine.

Kristen Soltis Anderson: Based on what you’ve heard and your impressions of President Trump, what do you think was going through his mind when he was seeing all of this on television?

Barney: He wasn’t very happy. For sure. Because Trump’s people don’t act like that. A lot of these people were professional antagonists. I’ve lived in D.C. my whole life. They like to do it.

Sandy: People coming in there and storming and causing a ruckus didn’t achieve his goal.

Judi: His followers were not like that.

Kristen Soltis Anderson: I want to show you — this is a text from Donald Trump Jr. when he was texting with chief of staff Mark Meadows, where he said: “He’s got to condemn this ASAP. Capitol Police tweet is not enough.” Laura Ingraham: “Mark, the president needs to tell the people in the Capitol to go home. This is hurting all of us. He’s destroying his legacy.” Sean Hannity texting about this as well. Does this surprise you at all or not so much?

Gayle: That is very surprising to me because they’re saying what you would think almost a Democrat would say or a liberal would say.

Lorna: Kind of shocking to me. You’d think they’d back the president.

Kristen Soltis Anderson: How do you think Vice President Mike Pence handled everything on Jan. 6? Is there anything that you wish the vice president had said or done differently that day?

Sandy: I think he could have postponed the verification of the votes. To this day, there’s still recounts going on.

Judi: No, I think he was stuck in the middle. I think he didn’t want to make waves, and I think he really didn’t have a choice.

Gayle: He was stuck. I’m sort of stuck, myself, in thinking maybe he could have done more. But I don’t know what else he could have done other than to back Trump up.

Patrick Healy: A show-of-hands question: How many of you believe Joe Biden won the election fair and square?

[Jill raises her hand.]

Patrick Healy: And how many of you believe Trump really won the election?

[All but Jill and Matt raise their hands.]

Patrick Healy: Judi, you made a point at the beginning about your concern about the great political divide in the country. Do you think that Jan. 6 contributed to that political divide, or do you think other factors contribute to that divide?

Judi: I think it has a lot to do with the divide. Because there’s people like us. We feel that Trump should have won. Trump won the election. And there are others that will say no, Biden won fair and square. And that’s what’s dividing this country between the Republicans and the Democrats. I mean, even more so. I mean, really, really dividing us.

Gayle: I think the country has been divided especially since Trump went into office in 2016. It didn’t matter about his policies anymore. It just had to do with his personality that people hated so much. I never heard of it in such an extreme manner than I did — until 2016 — throughout his presidency. And I’ll be quite frank with you. I don’t think he should run again. It’s a mistake for him to run. If he runs, every Democrat is going to just vote Democrat just to not keep Trump in.

Kristen Soltis Anderson: “Gayle, can I ask you a little more, maybe a little bit more of a personal question to that — to your point? Did that come up in conversations for you with friends or family members, where there was real disagreement or you were seeing kind of a divide that maybe you hadn’t noticed before existed, just in terms of politics?”

Gayle:It’s a mistake for him to run. I understand people that like him. And I’m kind of a moderate, I’m an independent more so. But I think it’s a mistake if he runs because every Democrat is going to just vote Democrat just to not keep Trump in. People just don’t like who he is. It’s not about his policies, in my opinion. It’s more about the personality, the tweets. He’s not the best when it comes to his verbiage. And that’s what people don’t like. And it’s Republicans and Democrats, and not just —” “I think Biden kept it going too.”

Kristen Soltis Anderson: “Sorry?”

Gayle: “When he came into office and did all his executive orders and canceling everything that was in place with Trump — the oil pipelines, things like that. And now we’re all paying for it because of his spite. And it’s a divide, the Democrats and Republicans.” “Right. And so — and it has nothing to do with policies. It really doesn’t.” “Personal.” “It’s more personal. It’s more vindictive. Yeah.” “Yep, yeah.”

Kristen Soltis Anderson: Can I ask for a show of hands: How many of you would like to see President Trump run again in 2024?

[Judi, Joshua and Lorna raise their hands.]

Joshua: Under Trump, for most of his term — having our economy be great. Getting back to that.

Patrick Healy: Barney, could I ask you why you didn’t raise your hand?

Barney: His show’s over. We definitely need some new blood at the head of the country and different types of leaders. I mean, this divide among the parties is getting really crazy, crazy. And living where I do, I mean, it’s just every day. And I used to think it was really bad when George Bush II was president. I mean, no matter what he did, he got criticized. If you got a flat tire, it was Bush’s fault. Trump, no matter what, he couldn’t do anything. The Washington Post food critic, because [Trump] likes his steak well done, criticized him for that. What he likes.

Patrick Healy: How many of you voted for President Trump in 2020?

[Six raise their hands; Joshua and Jill do not.]

Kristen Soltis Anderson: In the days that followed Jan. 6, a number of prominent Republicans came out and said they were upset with what had happened and that they were upset with the way Trump had handled the situation. You had Republican House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy say, “The president bears responsibility for Wednesday’s attack on Congress by mob rioters.” You had some members of the White House staff and some members of President Trump’s cabinet who resigned in protest. Why do you think they came out and said that?

Matt: Absolutely save face with their constituency.

Judi: I don’t think they were honest, and I think they should have backed him regardless. I mean, you’re Republican or Democrat. You should back your president, and they didn’t. They didn’t back him. And that’s why I’m kind of — I’m going independent now.

Barney: Politicians don’t do anything unless it’s for their own best interests. They don’t do it for you or me. They do it for them. So they’re always covering their butt all the time.

Kristen Soltis Anderson: I think, Barney, you may have mentioned people coming in from other places. Who is antifa? Where are they coming in from, in your view?

Barney: I think there’s groups around the country that just — they’re professional hell-raisers, and they like to poke the bear. And they’re funded by, maybe, other countries. I’m not sure. I don’t know. Or maybe by Soros. But they’re always there, and they’re always in front.

Gayle: From what I understand, a lot of them are on college campuses, and they recruit that way. So they’re recruiting young folks, people that are new to — are very open-minded, and maybe they’re just looking for some sort of community, some sort of group that they can be a part of.

Kristen Soltis Anderson: “So I want to think about this. If our democracy was a patient who was at the doctor or at the hospital, how would you characterize the health of our democracy — healthy, fair, poor, critical condition? I want to get a show of hands, how many of you think our democracy is mostly healthy? How many of you would say — Sandy, tell me why you say ‘mostly healthy’?”

Sandy: “I think it’s just a matter of, you got something wrong with your head. You know, quit being such a wuss. Because you got hit in the playground with a ball in the head or something like that, what, shake it off. Things happen in life. That’s just my opinion.”

Kristen Soltis Anderson: So in your view, democracy is not —” “Quit being a wuss.” “OK. How many of you would say you think ‘fair condition’ might be a better way to describe it? Any hands for fair condition? Barney, and then Jill?”

Barney:“It’s between fair and healthy. It depends on who you’re talking to and what they want to get done. You can make a lot of things happen with a pencil if you have the right influence and the right amount of cash. A lot of things can happen.”

Kristen Soltis Anderson: “Is that good or bad for democracy?”

Barney: “I don’t think it’s good, but the way our country was set up is not like it is today. Because we’ve gone way, way away from that.”

Kristen Soltis Anderson: “In what ways have we gone away from it, in your view?”

Barney: “Well, like you were talking earlier, about missing votes. That never happened before. And politicians that are — how can I say this? They’re too sensitive. I mean, a lot of times, you have to say no, you know?”

Kristen Soltis Anderson: “Jill, you also put your hand up for ‘fair’ as how you would rate the condition of our democracy. Tell me a little bit about that.”

Jill: “I think that the basic theme is still there. I think people are still good, whether Republican or Democrat, and they’re still looking to work towards the good. They want to make things better.”

Kristen Soltis Anderson: “How many of you would say you think our democracy is in poor condition? Gayle, then Matt, then Josh. And then Lorna. So the rest of you — so nobody’s in — does anybody say ‘critical condition’?”

Gayle:“No, I mean, this is the United States.”Yeah, I mean, we’re not in a third-world country here, right? We still have rules and laws that we have to abide by. However, we do have freedom of speech — although sometimes I don’t know about that anymore. So far. Who knows? And that’s kind of the reason I say, poor, because I see things that are changing. I mean, if you really want to get into it, it’s more about the mandates, and the lockdowns, and this, and that, and these requirements that the federal government is now making us do, as opposed to giving more of that freedom back to the people, or to the states. And I just — to me, that’s not what democracy — democracy was based on ruling by having people make decisions, or having the constituents make decisions for people. But it’s not about the federal government taking over, controlling everything. And that’s what’s happening. It’s becoming a much more controlled government, and we are having to abide by these rules. And that’s why you see a lot of people now leaving their jobs — because they don’t want to get the vaccine, and yet, they’re mandated to do it. So it’s a problem. I’m very happy and very fortunate to be living in Florida, by the way, because I didn’t go through a lot of these mandates and lockdowns that were required. And thank goodness for that, because a lot of people say we’re heading into a socialist country. And that’s what they’re intending to do.”

Kristen Soltis Anderson: “Matt? Matt, tell me a little bit. You would rate our democracy as ‘poor.’ Tell me why?”

Matt: “I’m not sure about that. I mean, I’m going to piggyback on what Arnie said about too much money in politics, outside influence. He said, this isn’t the way our country was founded. He’s right. We used to have businessmen, farmers, you know, who would go represent us and go back home to their real job in order to get paid. Now, we have people whose job is to be a professional politician, but politician shouldn’t really be a career. It should be a platform to help your constituents get what they need, and then go back to what your real job is and go make your money over there. You shouldn’t be getting rich while you’re sitting in Washington representing me, my family, and my community, especially if things are not getting better.”

Kristen Soltis Anderson: “Judi, why do you say our democracy is in poor shape? I know earlier on, you said you were worried, would we have elections in the future? Which, to me, that sounds pretty critically ill. So tell me why you said ‘poor.’”

Judi:“Yeah, I was going to go critical, but no one else — well, I might be the only one. But I’ll say critical, because it’s just, our democracy is going downhill. Our rights are being taken away. We’re having less and less say on our freedom of choice, freedom of speech. And it’s just it’s just getting too crazy. It’s we want — we’re just turning into a third world country, a Communist country. Socialist country, which is — take your pick.”

Kristen Soltis Anderson: “Joshua, tell me a little bit about why you would say our democracy is in poor shape.”

Joshua;“Yes, I would say that the government looks for events like Covid-19 as ways to usher in the New World Order and just have everything be more socialist. Like losing our privacy after 9/11, like more spying, have things turn more electronic. So it’s very easy to hack into these things. It’ll only take a few minutes. But we can be prevented from going different places if we don’t have the vaccine or different health treatments. So I don’t know, so if we don’t do different things, say certain things.”

Kristen Soltis Anderson: “Lorna, how about you? Why would you say our democracy is in poor shape?”

Lorna:“Mainly the Democrats. I mean, over in St. Louis County, the guy in charge is Democrat. He’s talking about the lockdown again. You know, and that’s just hurting businesses. Places are going out of business. Restaurants can’t get people to work for them. A lot of places are closing. And it’s a lot of [inaudible] want to get their shots, you know?”

Patrick Healy: I want to ask specifically about the next presidential election, the 2024 presidential election. Are you concerned at all about the losing party, whether it’s Republicans or Democrats, trying to steal the election after the fact?

Barney: I think every election from now on is going to be like that.

Lorna: They’re already talking about the mail-in ballots with Covid. You know where that’s going to go.

Sandy: Yeah. It’s like they’re coming up with these — the right to vote thing. I’ve never been turned down to vote. Just show up and go vote. But this whole mail-in ballot thing? I think that should end right away.

Gayle: I’ll be quite frank: I think that the reason that they push Covid so much is because they’re going to try to keep the mail-in ballots. I think that they are putting the fear in people so that they can push Covid as long as possible for 2024. It’s all about control, and they’re keeping Covid as one of their biggest weapons.

Kristen Soltis Anderson: I have one final question. It’s probably the case that 100 years from now a historian is going to be writing a book about the 2020 election, and they’ll have a chapter on Jan. 6 and what happened. What would you want those historians, 100 years from now, to know about how you think about Jan. 6?

Matt: They would hopefully write that the process still stood strong. It did what it was supposed to do. Regardless of whether or not it was tested — the process was still the process, and it didn’t need to be rewritten because of some hurt feelings.

Joshua: About how the news was just trying to get out the story as fast as they could have and not worrying about the facts, just changing everything as they went on.

Barney: I hope they include both sides of the story and all the players involved.

Lorna: How the Democrats invaded the White House.

Gayle: I guess it would come down to what is a fair election. People just didn’t feel that the election was fair. What is the proper way to vote, I think, is really what I would say to write about.

Jill: It started off to be people expressing their opinion in a peaceful way, got out of hand, turned into a little bit of mob mentality, and things just got out of control in a way that normally wouldn’t happen.

Sandy: Yeah. It was no Boston Tea Party, so I don’t think it’ll be a big event in a history book. But people stood up for what they thought.

Steve M. Has some funny commentary. I just didn’t have the energy to try to find the lighter side in this. I think it’s depressing. On some level they know they’re full of shit. And I don’t think they really care. Why would they? They have huge media and political institutions backing them up.

And don’t kid yourself. The ones that don’t want Trump to run again know he’s an imbecile. But they’ll vote for him in a heartbeat. (I do love the one who says that if Trump runs Democrats will just vote for the Democrat because they don’t like him …imagine that.)

How do democracies collapse? By inattention as much as anything else. And by tuning out, cautions elections expert Rick Hasen. He reviews the litany of Republican efforts to subvert democratic processes in the various states, and recommends actions, not words, that might arrest our democratic backsliding (New York Times):

Here are the three principles that should guide action supporting democratic institutions and the rule of law going forward. To begin with, Democrats should not try to go it alone in preserving free and fair elections. Some Democrats, like Marc Elias, one of the leading Democratic election lawyers, are willing to write off the possibility of finding Republican partners because most Republicans have failed to stand up to Mr. Trump, and even those few Republicans who have do not support Democrats’ broader voting rights agenda, such as passage of the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act. Flying solo is a big mistake. Democrats cannot stop the subversion of 2024 election results alone, particularly if Democrats do not control many statehouses and either house of Congress when Electoral College votes are counted on Jan. 6, 2025. Why believe that any legislation passed only by Democrats in 2022 would stop subversive Republican action in 2024? A coalition with the minority of Republicans willing to stand up for the rule of law is the best way to try to erect barriers to a stolen election in 2024, even if those Republicans do not stand with Democrats on voting rights or other issues. Remember it took Republican election officials, elected officials, and judges to stand up against an attempted coup in 2020. Other Republicans may find it in their self-interest to work with Democrats on anti-subversion legislation. Senator Minority Whip John Thune recently signaled that his party may support a revision of the Electoral Count Act, the old, arcane rules Congress uses to certify state Electoral College votes. While Mr. Trump unsuccessfully tried to get his Republican vice president, Mike Pence, to throw the election to him or at least into chaos, Republicans know it will be Democratic vice president Kamala Harris, not Mr. Pence, who will be presiding over the Congress’s certification of Electoral College votes in 2025. Perhaps there is room for bipartisan agreement to ensure both that vice presidents don’t go rogue and that state legislatures cannot simply submit alternative slates of electors if they are unsatisfied with the election results. Reaching bipartisan compromise against election subversion will not stop Democrats from fixing voting rights or partisan gerrymanders on their own — the fate of those bills depend not on Republicans but on Democrats convincing Senators Manchin and Sinema to modify the filibuster rules. Republicans should not try to hold anti-election subversion hostage to Democrats giving up their voting agenda.

But they will if they value their political careers above their country. (Did I just answer the question I didn’t ask?) As I wrote earlier this morning, it is a mistake to lay the fate of our democracy (or blame for its collapse) on Manchin and/or Sinema alone. Any of the 50 Republicans in the Senate could come to the aid of their country. History will remember with disgust those who fail to. Republicans both in and out of office share blame for what comes next if we fail, just as Confederates did for the Civil War. Hasen recognizes the rest of us have a duty to the country as well:

Second, because law alone won’t save American democracy, all sectors of society need to be mobilized in support of free and fair elections. It is not just political parties that matter for assuring free and fair elections. It’s all of civil society: business groups, civic and professional organizations, labor unions and religious organizations all can help protect fair elections and the rule of law. Think, for example, of Texas, which in 2021 passed a new restrictive voting law. It has been rightly attacked for making it harder for some people to vote. But business pressure most likely helped kill a provision in the original version of the bill that would have made it much easier for a state court judge to overturn the results of an election. Business groups also refused to contribute to those members of Congress who after the insurrection objected on spurious grounds to Pennsylvania’s Electoral College votes for Mr. Biden. According to reporting by Judd Legum, “since Jan. 6, corporate PAC contributions to Republican objectors have plummeted by nearly two-thirds.” But some businesses are giving again to the objectors. Customers need to continue to pressure business groups to hold the line. Civil society needs to oppose those who run for office or seek appointment to run elections while embracing Trump’s false claims of a stolen election. Loyalty to a person over election integrity should be disqualifying.

Hasen is more optimistic about rank-and-file Republicans snapping out of it than I.

Finally, mass, peaceful organizing and protests may be necessary in 2024 and 2025. What happens if a Democratic presidential candidate wins in, say, Wisconsin in 2024, according to a fair count of the vote, but the Wisconsin legislature stands ready to send in an alternative slate of electors for Mr. Trump or another Republican based on unsubstantiated claims of voter fraud or other irregularities? These gerrymandered legislators may not respond to entreaties from Democrats, but they are more likely to respond to widespread public protests made up of people of good faith from across the political spectrum. We need to start organizing for this possibility now. The same applies if Kevin McCarthy or another Republican speaker of the House appears willing to accept rogue slates of electors sent in by state legislators — or if Democrats try to pressure Kamala Harris into assuming unilateral power herself to resolve Electoral College disputes. The hope of collective action is that there remains enough sanity in the center and commitment to the rule of law to prevent actions that would lead to an actual usurpation of the will of the people. If the officially announced vote totals do not reflect the results of a fair election process, that should lead to nationwide peaceful protests and even general strikes. One could pessimistically say that the fact that we even need to have this conversation about fair elections and rule of law in the United States in the 21st century is depressing and shocking. One could simply retreat into complacency. Or one could see the threats this country faces as a reason to buck up and prepare for the battle for the soul of American democracy that may well lay ahead. If Republicans have embraced authoritarianism or have refused to confront it, and Democrats in Congress cannot or will not save us, we must save ourselves.

One could also pessimistically say that Hasen, an academic, is likely not pleased to be on call for interviews about imminent threats to fair elections and rule of law in this country. But here we are. I’m not sure anyone can plan a mass protest years ahead. Those events, like the Women’s March or even the Stop the Steal rallies, tend to be more organic. They rely on immediate passions more than advance strategy to fuel them and make them in any way impactful. Still, I’ve had a pot and wooden spoon in the back of my car for a couple of years against the need presenting itself.