Month: January 2022

Or will it cause them too much “discomfort?”

It’s hard to believe they are really going here but they are:

Days after blocking the advancement of vital voting rights legislation and corrupting the words of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Republican politicians are advancing their undemocratic agenda by advocating for the creation of “election police.”

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis is asking for $5.7 million to create an Office of Election Crimes and Security. In Georgia, former senator and gubernatorial candidate David Purdue promises a new Election Law Enforcement Division. Other Republicans pushing Trump’s Big Lie are sure to follow.

They aren’t breaking new ground, but joining a long tradition of dressing up efforts to suppress and intimidate Black voters as somehow protecting the integrity of our American democracy.

A tipping point of the 1960s voting rights movement was the march across the Edmund Pettus Bridge on March 7, 1965. Dr. Martin Luther King, John Lewis, and voting rights activists marching from Selma, Alabama, to the state’s capital were infamously attacked on what’s come to be known as “Bloody Sunday” by Southern police led by Theophilus Eugene “Bull” Connor, the president of the Alabama Public Service Commission. Americans nationwide saw for themselves as Connor’s goons attacked citizens protesting non-violently with bully clubs, dogs, and militarized vehicles. Lewis nearly died in the confrontation.

That August, the Voting Rights Act became law, and Black Americans could finally vote without the threat of government-sponsored or -sanctioned terrorism—that is, the voting police. This week, Senate Republicans voted against the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act that would have restored voting rights protections created by the 1965 legislation but removed by John Roberts’ Supreme Court in 2013, on the bizarre premise that racial disparities were no longer a problem. With those protections gone, conservative politicians in the South are again trying to militarize and police voting.

This was all too predictable to anyone who knows American history, and part of the Republican Party’s anti-Democratic agenda is to ensure that much of that history is ignored or forgotten. It’s good that many Americans know about the Edmund Pettus Bridge, but more of them should know about Edmund Pettus, a white terrorist and politician from Alabama.

Pettus, born in Alabama in 1821, was a brigadier general in the Confederate Army. Following the Civil War, he was pardoned by President Andrew Johnson along with thousands of other Confederates, and upon obtaining his freedom he became a Grand Dragon of the Ku Klux Klan.

From its inception, the Klan’s main purpose was to return, or “redeem,” the South to its pre-Civil War, antebellum status quo. The group existed to suppress newly emancipated Black voters and America’s first civil rights acts, known as the Force Acts, were created to outlaw the Klan and similar groups so that Black Americans could vote without the threat of terrorism.

Pettus’ status as a Grand Dragon reveals how the Klan was never the ragtag group of powerless, disgruntled Southerners that it sometimes presented itself as, but was actually led by the elites of Southern society and those with military experience. During Reconstruction, Pettus had his own law practice in Selma and was also the Alabama delegate to the Democratic National Convention. Publicly, he helped the Democratic Party—in the 1860s the Democrats opposed voting rights—select their presidential candidates while privately he undermined democracy and orchestrated terrorism.

The Klan, the White League, and other domestic terrorist groups in the South, collaborated with “Redeemer” politicians and law enforcement to undermine American democracy and help Americans who opposed the expansion of voting rights win elections and maintain power. Sometimes, voter suppression would be enough for a Confederate sympathizer to win an election, but when that failed, America’s white terrorists would launch coups d’état claiming voter fraud and that the election had been stolen from them.

On Sept. 14, 1874, near the end of Reconstruction, the White League attacked the Louisiana state house, then in New Orleans, and took control of the government for three days after they refused to admit defeat in the 1872 gubernatorial elections where pro-voting rights Republican politician William Kellogg defeated the Redeemer-Democrat John McEnery, and a Black man, Caesar Carpentier Antoine, was elected lieutenant governor. Federal troops were forced to intervene to reclaim control and defeat the White League.

Donald Trump’s “Make America Great Again” slogan, the Jan. 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol, and the Republican Party’s false claims of election fraud echo the Redeemers’ undemocratic, terrorist agenda.

As part of their dystopian agenda, Southerners after Reconstruction consciously named and re-named roads, bridges, and landmarks after treasonous, seditious Confederate “heroes,” and erected statues and monuments to celebrate the Confederacy. In 1891, Redeemers in New Orleans created the Battle of Liberty Place Monument to celebrate the terrorist coup d’état in 1874, and there was outrage from Republicans when the monument was finally removed in 2017.

In 1877, three years after the White League’s coup, Reconstruction came to an abrupt end and former Confederates quickly regained control of state governments across the South. Redeemer politicians then created poll taxes and literacy exams to suppress the Black vote, and advocated for “separate but equal” policies. They had a political agenda that created racist outcomes without racist language, and by the start of the 1900s their agenda had created Jim Crow in the South.

In 1897, Pettus was elected to the U.S. Senate, and represented Alabama until his death in 1907. In 1940, the Edmund Pettus Bridge was named after him. Black people in the South were forced to live in a world named after people whose mission in life had been to oppress Black people.

This is our basic history and, unsurprisingly, today’s Republicans want to make sure it’s not what Americans learn in school. DeSantis is even pushing a bill that would ban the teaching of history that could cause white Floridians “discomfort.”

If Republicans can prevent Americans from knowing our own history, Americans will remain surprised and unprepared when Republicans use the oppressive tactics of the past to take away our rights and freedoms in the present.

DeSantis is getting way out front with the worst fringe wingnuts. No wonder Trump is fuming.

Apparently, this was one order Trump didn’t want released by the national archives. I wonder why?

The executive order — which also would have appointed a special counsel to probe the 2020 election — was never issued. The remarks are a draft of a speech Trump gave the next day. Together, the two documents point to the wildly divergent perspectives of White House advisers and allies during Trump’s frenetic final weeks in office.

It’s not clear who wrote either document. But the draft executive order is dated Dec. 16, 2020, and is consistent with proposals that lawyer Sidney Powell made to the then-president. On Dec. 18, 2020, Powell, former Trump national security adviser Michael Flynn, former Trump administration lawyer Emily Newman, and former Overstock.com CEO Patrick Byrne met with Trump in the Oval Office.

In that meeting, Powell urged Trump to seize voting machines and to appointher as a special counsel to investigate the election, according to Axios.

A spokesperson for the House’s Jan. 6 select committee confirmed earlier Friday that the panel had received the last of the documents that Trump’s lawyers tried to keep under wraps and later declined to comment for this story on these two documents.

The draft executive order shows that the weeks between Election Day and the Capitol attack could have been even more chaotic than they were. It credulously cites conspiracy theories about election fraud in Georgia and Michigan, as well as debunked notions about Dominion voting machines.

The order empowers the defense secretary to “seize, collect, retain and analyze all machines, equipment, electronically stored information, and material records required for retention under” a U.S. law that relates to preservation of election records. It also cites a lawsuit filed in 2017 against Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger.

Additionally, the draft order would have given the defense secretary 60 days to write an assessment of the 2020 election. That suggests it could have been a gambit to keep Trump in power until at least mid-February of 2021.

It opens by citing a host of presidential authorities to permit the steps that Trump would take, including the Constitution and Executive Order 12333, a well-known order governing the intelligence community. But the draft executive order also cites two classified documents: National Security Presidential Memoranda 13 and 21.

The existence of the first of those memoranda is publicly known, but the existence of the second has not been previously reported. NSPM 13 governs the Pentagon’s offensive cyber operations. According to a person with knowledge of the memoranda, 21 makes small adjustments to 13, and the two documents are viewed within the executive branch as a pair.

The fact that the draft executive order’s author knew about the existence of Memorandum 21 suggests that they had access to information about sensitive government secrets, the person told POLITICO.

Hmmm… who could that be?

The draft order also greenlit “the appointment of a Special Counsel to oversee this operation and institute all criminal and civil proceedings as appropriate based on the evidence collected and provided all resources necessary to carry out her duties consistent with federal laws and the Constitution.”

To bolster its provisions, the draft order cites “the forensic report of the Antrim County, Michigan voting machines.” That report was produced by Russ Ramsland, who confused precincts in Minnesota for those in Michigan, according to the Washington Post. Michigan’s secretary of state, meanwhile, released an exhaustive report rebutting election conspiracy theories and concluding that none of the “known anomalies” in Antrim County’s November 2020 election were the result of any security breach.

“This draft order represents not only an abuse of emergency powers, but a total misunderstanding of them,” said Liza Goitein, co-director of the liberty and national security program at the nonprofit Brennan Center for Justice. “The order doesn’t even make the basic finding of an ‘unusual and extraordinary threat’ that would be necessary to trigger any action under [federal emergency powers law]. It’s the legal equivalent of a kid scrawling on the wall with crayons.”

Earlier reporting has shown that if the WH Counsel hadn’t pushed back hard on this, Trump was ready to sign off. Will future counsels’ offices be as adamant? Will future presidents (including Trump) be deterred?

Any system which has a massive hole like this in it is vulnerable. The US is deeply vulnerable.

I mentioned this earlier but new details are emerging. Do Trumpers really think this is ok? I guess they do — after all, they are fine with sacking the Capitol and threatening to hang Mike Pence:

FBI agents and the House panel investigating the January 6 attack on the Capitol have both learned of an alleged plan by allies of retired army Lt Gen Michael Flynn to gather “intelligence” on top Republicans to “move” them to back election audits in key states Trump lost, said ex-whistleblower Everett Stern who talked to the panel and the FBI.

Stern, who runs the intelligence firm Tactical Rabbit and is a Republican vying for a Senate seat in Pennsylvania, in multiple interviews with the Guardian said two Flynn associates with the rightwing Patriot Caucus group enlisted his help in April in a scheme to seek potentially damaging information on two Republican members of Congress to prod them to back an audit of the 2020 vote that Joe Biden won.

Stern told the Guardian he spent several hours in November telling House panel investigators about the alleged drive by Flynn associates who sought campaign finance and other dirt on Pennsylvania’s senator Pat Toomey and congressman Brian Fitzpatrick to win their support for an audit to bolster Trump’s debunked charges that Biden’s win was fraudulent.

A long shot candidate to succeed the retiring Toomey, Stern said he alerted the FBI in June when he learned more details of the bizarre drive by Flynn allies to specifically target the two Republicans, both of whom backed impeaching Trump after the January 6 insurrection.

The efforts by Flynn’s Patriot Caucus allies were launched after Trump failed to block Biden from taking office, and are part of a wider drive by Trump loyalists and Flynn to help boost Trump’s political fortunes via more state audits nationwide into false charges that Biden’s win was rigged, and elect like-minded candidates in key states to top electoral offices.

Stern provided text messages, emails and other documents revealing he had multiple contacts with one of the Patriot Caucus members, Velma Anne Ruth, and two other influential Flynn allies, Houston real estate mogul Al Hartman and former army green beret Ivan Raiklin, who were pushing audits in several key states.

Stern said Flynn’s Patriot Caucus associates first approached him in Pennsylvania for possible help after an April Republican party event, and soon after told Stern in phone calls they worked with Flynn and the Patriot Caucus, and planned to recruit “former domestic and foreign intelligence officials” to facilitate their scheme.

The plan by Flynn’s allies alarmed Stern, but as a former whistleblower involved in exposing a large bank money laundering scandal by HSBC in 2012, he told the Guardian he decided to play along for a few months to glean information to expose the Trump allies’ scheme.

Stern expressed dismay that Flynn’s Patriot Caucus associates “don’t understand that Biden is the president. They wanted to collect information through Tactical Rabbit and my campaign,” to turn up the heat on Toomey and Fitzpatrick to back an audit which Stern viewed as potentially “extortion”.

Stern gave the Guardian a voice mail he received in which Hartman talked about leaning on moderate Republican “RINOs” in Pennsylvania to gain support for an audit of that state’s vote which Biden won by over 80,000, and Hartman said a similar drive in Michigan was needed.

Stern said Hartman wanted to use Tactical Rabbit’s intelligence gathering tools and his campaign to dig up potentially embarrassing campaign finance information and other dirt about the Pennsylvania members, plus Republican political figures in Michigan who were also resisting audits.

Hartman and Raiklin also talked with Stern about meeting Flynn, Trump’s disgraced ex-national security adviser, and proposed compensating him for his information via campaign donations, said Stern.

In an April exchange of Hartman text messages seen by the Guardian, Hartman asked a Flynn scheduler to help “connect” Flynn with Stern whose Senate campaign and credentials he touted highly, calling Stern a “strong believer”, in their cause.

Although Stern tipped off the FBI in June about what he deemed a threat to national security and he said he met with agents again in November, it’s not clear if his allegations are still being pursued. Stern’s allegations have echoes of Flynn’s scheming with Trump and other loyalists in late 2020 to thwart Biden’s win, efforts that included a White House meeting with Trump where Flynn proposed declaring martial law in several states Biden won and then rerunning the election there.

In November, the House panel probing the January 6 Capitol attack subpoenaed Flynn who Trump had pardoned post election even though he had pled guilty twice to lying to the FBI during the Russia investigation. In response to the subpoena to testify and turn over documents, Flynn sued the panel but a judge quickly dismissed his lawsuit last month.

John Sipher, who was in the CIA’s clandestine services for 28 years, shares Stern’s view of Flynn who he knew in the military and shortly thereafter. “I am appalled by what he has become,” Sipher said in an email. Asked if he thought the FBI was pursuing Stern’s charges, Sipher said: “I would hope and assume they are taking this seriously.”

While Fitzpatrick and Toomey were the main “targets” Stern said other Pennsylvania officials including judges were also being targeted by the Flynn allies as they sought to ramp up pressure for an audit in the state. Neither Fitzpatrick or Toomey’s offices replied to multiple requests for comment.

The Patriot Caucus, a coalition of Patriot and other rightwing groups in some two dozen states with which Raiklin and Hartman have ties, according to Stern and documents, has worked with Trump loyalists like Flynn to push audits in key states Biden won, and backed Trump allies for governor, and other top posts in states like Pennsylvania and Arizona Trump lost.

Flynn himself on 7 January publicly endorsed another Trump ally and election audit promoter, Doug Mastriano for governor in Pennsylvania, at a campaign rally also attended by Raiklin.Flynn has also endorsed two Trump backed candidates in Arizona: Kari Lake, an ex-Fox News figure for governor, and Mark Finchem, a state representative who attended the January 6 Stop the Steal rally, for secretary of state.

To coordinate national efforts, Raiklin and Hartman on 3 July spearheaded one of a series of “Election Integrity” calls with Trump loyalists, lawyers and donors to discuss the status of audits efforts in several states and other plans to cast doubt on Biden’s win, according to an Arizona senate document shared by the watchdog group American Oversight.

“Join us every second Saturday for SITUATION UPDATES and COLLABORATION from active leaders in the election remediation process at state level – attorneys with Mike Lindell and Patrick Byrne, data analysts, state legislators, gubernatorial candidates, and grassroots activists whose goal is completing a cyber forensic audit in their state,” the Arizona document reads.

A who’s who list of Trump loyalists and groups invited to join these calls included the America Project and America’s Future, both of which Flynn played key roles with as they poured some $2m into a discredited audit of Arizona’s largest county, plus the Patriot Caucus’ Velma Anne Ruth, Finchem and Byrne, the millionaire chief financier of the Arizona audit.

Hartman in emails with Stern obtained by the Guardian invited him in June to attend a religious far right meeting known as Ziklag in Dallas where he could meet separately with Flynn. Stern said Hartman told him a “private meeting was going to be arranged with Flynn” who Stern was told wanted to meet him.

After indicating to Hartman he would attend, Stern opted to cancel at the last minute after his lawyer indicated there could be legal repercussions from a meeting with Flynn. “I thought it was extremely dangerous to meet with a three star general who I believed had broken the law.” “They planned to give my campaign funds to help me” develop damaging information on Toomey and Fitzpatrick, Stern claimed. “It was like a wink, wink. Hartman is the man behind the curtain. He’s an operative and financier,” promoting audits.

Hartman has long been a donor to the right. He’s on the advisory council for the pro Trump Turning Point USA and has been active in the conservative donor network led by oil billionaire Charles Koch.

Raiklin, an army reserve officer who reportedly has known Flynn since 2014, is facing an internal army reserve probe into possible violations of rules barring partisan political activity, according to a military official who spoke to Reuters last month.

Raiklin in December 2020 outlined a wild scheme in tweets and a podcast to thwart Biden’s win, charging a vast conspiracy that included Pence, intelligence, China and Big Tech, as Reuters reported. Raiklin told Trump to “activate the emergency broadcast system,” and deployed the hashtag #FightLikeAFlynn, stressing that “we the people are going to force this plan on them”.

Neither Hartman or Raiklin replied to multiple calls seeking comment. A Flynn scheduler did not respond to questions for the story.Velma Anne Ruth with the Patriot Caucus, who was photographed with Stern at a June event in Pennsylvania where she wore a tank top that said General Flynn, called Stern’s charges “delusional, fabricated and defamatory”, in a text message. Stern said he shared the photo and other documents involving exchanges he had with Ruth with the FBI.

Senior ex-prosecutors and intelligence officials say Stern’s allegations merit law enforcement attention. “Stern’s allegations suggest serious crimes,” said ex-prosecutor Paul Rosenzweig who worked on Ken Starr’s team during the impeachment of Bill Clinton. “If his allegations were corroborated by extrinsic evidence they clearly would warrant investigation.”

Former CIA official Sipher, who has spoken with Stern before, said: “Everett is someone with a strong sense of right and wrong, and willing to suffer the consequences of doing the right thing. We would be better served to have more people like Everett in public life.”

Just another tentacle of the ongoing Republican coup plot. There seem to be more of them every day.

Dahlia Lithwick captures the full humiliation of the Supremes. This country is so screwed up:

We are now six days into mask-mania at the U.S. Supreme Court. It all started during last Friday’s oral arguments in the vaccine-or-test mandate cases when Justice Neil Gorsuch was reportedly the only justice not masking throughout the session, though evidently Justices Sam Alito and Clarence Thomas removed their masks for extended periods. The masking protocol at the high court has long been a bit haphazard: When the justices began to hear cases in person again in October, Justice Sonia Sotomayor was the only justice wearing a mask. But the other justices all began to mask last Friday, the first sitting since the omicron surge, after more guidance from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Likely not by coincidence, Sotomayor participated telephonically last Friday. (She has diabetes, which is a comorbidity factor with COVID, even the milder forms.) The Supreme Court’s spokeswoman also confirmed to Slate that Sotomayor then participated remotely in conference, where only the justices are present.

The pattern has continued with slight modifications since then: On Monday, Gorsuch was the only one to take the bench without a mask according to the AP’s Mark Sherman, and Sotomayor again participated remotely. Gorsuch opted not to wear a mask for oral arguments again on Tuesday when both Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Stephen Breyer dialed in for the sessions. Breyer had a false positive test and was staying home out of an abundance of caution, but on Wednesday, we learned that Sotomayor would stay home all week.

All of this has launched a high-octane debate over whether Gorsuch is a monster or a hero of liberty. But all that strikes me as not quite the point. The point is not what Gorsuch’s lack of masking means; the point is that the justices get to do whatever they want, whenever they want to, and that they do so without any obligation to explain why. The real problem with the court’s masks-optional policy? It reflects the court’s much larger rules-optional policy on everything pertaining to judicial conduct.

Last Friday, the Washington Post’s Ruth Marcus published a scorching critique of Gorsuch’sdecision to “break with his colleagues and disdain the mask,” connecting it to his libertarian record, his comments in the vaccine arguments about coercive government attempts to “control” the citizenry, and the breakdown of institutional norms that mean that the trivial  inconvenience of wearing a mask out of respect for a high-risk colleague (Sotomayor) represents “intolerable incursions on liberty.”

Yvette Borja noted that given that Washington Mayor Muriel Bowser reinstated an indoor mask mandate for all public indoor spaces, “Gorsuch would be required to wear one basically anywhere else in D.C., from the grocery store to the pharmacy to his next speaking engagement at the Trump International Hotel,” even if he does not have to wear one on the bench. Like Marcus, she assumed that he is motivated by the symbolic value of owning the libs. “By publicly refusing to do so, Gorsuch aligns himself with some of the pandemic’s most insufferable people: the trolling culture warriors who are proud not to give a shit about anyone but themselves,” she wrote.

To be sure, we have heard from absolutely none of the justices themselves on the subject. The court’s spokeswoman has confirmed that Sotomayor is participating remotely but will not say why. The office did confirm that Breyer phoned into arguments because of his COVID test results. But the public information office will not explain why Gorsuch feels no need to mask around several colleagues who are high risk by virtue of their co-occurring conditions or their ages—despite the court’s express rule providing that everyone else who attends every sessionmust wear at least N95 or KN95 masks.

[…]

But the hyperfocus on Gorsuch’s unknown motivations strikes me as nearly as much of a distraction as the hyperfocus on who said incorrect things at oral argument, and who sought changes in official transcripts about what we thought we heard. Justices say mistaken things at oral argument all the time, especially when they are hearing fast-tracked cases. The big lesson here isn’t about verbal errors at argument or Gorsuch’s lack of concern for his colleagues. The reason his noncompliance with the court’s formal mask rule is news is because it is yet another example of the justices having rules but refusing to apply them to themselves. That’s the real issue with regard to masks, just as it is to judicial ethics, and that’s the reason why this debacle is damaging the court’s public standing. Several smart lawyers have written to ask me why Chief Justice John Roberts cannot simply order his colleagues to follow the same mask requirements imposed on everyone else. The short answer is that he cannot order his colleagues to do anything that falls within the realm of ethical behavior.

For decades, court reformers—and most recently President Joe Biden’s commission on court reform—have noted that the court’s financial and ethical rules are purely advisory, that nobody needs to follow them and that the justices will not enforce them against one another. When it comes to adopting a set of rules governing how the nine justices conduct themselves when giving speeches, or engaging in public activities, each of the nine is a law unto themselves. Efforts to remedy that, in the interest of making the court more accountable and also more legitimate, are persistently rebuffed. To extend Marcus’ analysis about Gorsuch, nobody is the boss of Gorsuch because nobody is the boss of any of the justices.

Two short weeks ago, in his annual state of the judiciary report, Roberts flicked obliquely at the connection between public confidence in the court and the need for judicial independence. Unsurprisingly, and in keeping with much of the lawyerly discourse around judicial behavior, he urged that public confidence in the court demands judicial independence at all costs. Judicial independence, in other words, is an end in itself, and public regard for the institution is, at best, a second-order concern. Roberts thus used the national decline in confidence in the courts and the existence of financial misconduct and workplace “incivility and disrespect” on the federal bench to insist that the courts themselves could handle it, and to decry efforts to exert “inappropriate political influence” on the courts’ procedures. Instead, he urged that “decisional independence is essential to due process, promoting impartial decision-making, free from political or other extraneous influence.” Roberts cited Chief Justice William Howard Taft, saying that he “was prescient in recognizing the need for the Judiciary to manage its internal affairs, both to promote informed administration and to ensure independence of the Branch.” Even the most obvious and necessary efforts to regulate judicial conduct are forever deemed a threat to the Supreme Court justices’ and their independence.A

When Ruth Marcus wrote last week about the way in which Gorsuch’s refusal to don a mask “goes to the heart of our fraying social fabric,” the issue was not just that Gorsuch has arrogated to himself the authority to determine, set, and model public health behavior. That is very much in keeping with the mood of the court and the mood of the country. The real issue is that the court as an institution has put a mask rule into effect, has allowed justices to evade it, has failed to offer any coherent explanation for why one justice has been exempted, and has thus launched another toxic and possibly unnecessary public debate. The court hasn’t just declined to be transparent about the application of its own rules to itself; it also feels no obligation to explain the breach to anyone. Into that silence falls institutional criticism that further erodes public confidence.

One way to describe this is “judicial independence”—John Roberts’ pledge to the nation that the justices answer to nobody but are driven by the imperative they take upon themselves, in the words of Taft, “the duty to remove, as far as possible, grounds for just criticism of our judicial system.” But what happens when the justices, with ever-increasing frequency, decline to evince concern for the public’s worries and uncertainties about the judicial system? What happens when day after day of raging debate over one justice’s refusal to adhere to a court rule is met with stony silence by the court? If the justices have no obligation to be ethical, or even civil, around a pandemic that has killed more than 800,000 Americans, do they at least have the burden to explain? Evidently not.

The other word for this behavior is “judicial immunity,” an immunity that requires no explanation. The court—while debating the necessity of COVID mitigation efforts—declined to enforce its own COVID mitigation efforts. Then, in the face of politically polarized reaction, the court declined to tell us why. Justices will be quick to blame the media for merely reporting on their behavior—Justice Sam Alito did so again during the vaccine arguments themselves. But when the media asks for clarity, the court fails to answer. Perhaps the problem here transcends Gorsuch, who refuses to accept that he answers to anyone. Perhaps the bigger problem is that the Supreme Court itself agrees with him, even as it declines to tell us why.

Judicial immunity. Good phrase. And these people have the nerve to wring their hands about “elitism.”

*And she doesn’t even mention the egregiously unethical conduct by Justice Thomas’s wife Ginni.

The claim that the Justices’ opinions are politically neutral is becoming increasingly hard to accept, especially from Thomas, whose wife, Virginia (Ginni) Thomas, is a vocal right-wing activist. She has declared that America is in existential danger because of the “deep state” and the “fascist left,” which includes “transsexual fascists.” Thomas, a lawyer who runs a small political-lobbying firm, Liberty Consulting, has become a prominent member of various hard-line groups. Her political activism has caused controversy for years. For the most part, it has been dismissed as the harmless action of an independent spouse. But now the Court appears likely to secure victories for her allies in a number of highly polarizing cases—on abortion, affirmative action, and gun rights.

Many Americans first became aware of Ginni Thomas’s activism on January 6, 2021. That morning, before the Stop the Steal rally in Washington, D.C., turned into an assault on the Capitol resulting in the deaths of at least five people, she cheered on the supporters of President Donald Trump who had gathered to overturn Biden’s election. In a Facebook post that went viral, she linked to a news item about the protest, writing, “love maga people!!!!” Shortly afterward, she posted about Ronald Reagan’s famous “A Time for Choosing” speech. Her next status update said, “god bless each of you standing up or praying.” Two days after the insurrection, she added a disclaimer to her feed, noting that she’d written the posts “before violence in US Capitol.” (The posts are no longer public.)

Later that January, the Washington Post revealed that she had also been agitating about Trump’s loss on a private Listserv, Thomas Clerk World, which includes former law clerks of Justice Thomas’s. The online discussion had been contentious. John Eastman, a former Thomas clerk and a key instigator of the lie that Trump actually won in 2020, was on the same side as Ginni Thomas, and he drew rebukes. According to the Post, Thomas eventually apologized to the group for causing internal rancor. Artemus Ward, a political scientist at Northern Illinois University and a co-author of “Sorcerers’ Apprentices,” a history of Supreme Court clerks, believes that the incident confirmed her outsized role. “Virginia Thomas has direct access to Thomas’s clerks,” Ward said. Clarence Thomas is now the Court’s senior member, having served for thirty years, and Ward estimates that there are “something like a hundred and twenty people on that Listserv.” In Ward’s view, they comprise “an élite right-wing commando movement.” Justice Thomas, he says, doesn’t post on the Listserv, but his wife “is advocating for things directly.” Ward added, “It’s unprecedented. I have never seen a Justice’s wife as involved.”

It’s an outrage. But since the court is answerable to no one that’s just the way it is.

Ron DeSantis is now trafficking in COVID conspiracy theories. He’s complaining about health care workers being required to get vaccinated and suggesting that the vaccines cause infertility.

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R), a foe of vaccine mandates, appeared to suggest Thursday that getting a shot to protect against the coronavirus could cause infertility.

“Think about how ridiculous it is what they’re doing by trying to force the nurses” to get immunized, he said in a speech announcing funding for nursing certification programs. “A lot of these nurses have had covid. A lot of them are younger. Some of them are trying to have families.”FAQ: What to know about the omicron variant of the coronavirus

But there is no evidence that getting vaccinated against the coronavirus makes it harder to conceive, according to a study released Thursday of heterosexual couples trying for pregnancy. DeSantis could not be immediately reached for a comment on his remarks.

By contrast, men infected with the coronavirus showed signs of a short-term decline in fertility, according to the research, which was led by an epidemiologist at Boston University and published in the peer-reviewed American Journal of Epidemiology. It was funded by the National Institutes of Health.

The researchers studied more than 2,000 people between the ages of 21 and 45, all of whom identified as women, in the United States and Canada between December 2020 and September 2021. (Their male partners were also invited to fill in a questionnaire.) Some 73 percent of the women had received at least one dose of a coronavirus vaccine during the study, with 74 percent of the men also having been administered at least one shot.

“Recent [coronavirus] infection has been associated with poor sperm quality, including … decreased concentration, lower motility,” the authors wrote. But “we found no adverse association between vaccination and fertility.”

Apparently he has decided that his political future depends upon him pushing the envelope on anti-vax conspiracies, putting him to the right of Donald Trump. It’s quite strategy…

I sure hope DeSantis doesn’t get this unfortunate side-effect:

A man’s agonizing penis pain was blamed on COVID infection, as docs warned of the rare side effect.

Writing in a medical journal, the Iranian team described how the virus led to blood clotting in the poor man’s shaft.  

The unnamed male had suffered penile pain for three days before being seen by a urologist in Iran, who referred him for tests.

The discomfort began following an erection while having sex, the 41-year-old married man told doctors.

If anything getting COVID seems to cause more trouble with men’s reproductive system’s than women. Maybe that ought to be publicized more. I’ll bet it would get a whole lot of men vaccinated if they knew.

If last week was considered Joe Biden’s no-good, very bad week, there’s a case to be made that this week was Donald Trump’s no-good, even worse week.

Let’s look at all of the legal cases and investigations that seem to be pushing forward against Trump despite his best efforts to repel them with lawsuits and delaying tactics. The good news for Trump is that it appears the Department of Justice (DOJ) has decided that all of the obstruction of justice Trump perpetrated in plain sight during the Russia investigation is not worth prosecuting. Unless they make a move very quickly, the statute of limitations is about to run out on that front. So much for Robert Mueller’s sanguine pronouncement that we needn’t worry about his refusal to recommend indictment because, of course, they could always do it after the president left office.

But that’s the only good news on this front that Trump’s received in recent days.

The former president is still facing a flurry of legal investigations from New York to Georgia while the evidence is piling up at the January 6th committee and the DOJ. The case that seems to be closest to coming to a head is the civil investigation by New York State Attorney General Leticia James. Last Tuesday, James filed a response to one of Trump’s frivolous arguments with a filing and a statement that her office has “uncovered significant evidence indicating that the Trump Organization used fraudulent and misleading asset valuations on multiple properties to obtain economic benefits, including loans, insurance coverage, and tax deductions for years.”

It’s not that anyone’s surprised by this. The New York Times exposed the massive tax fraud perpetrated by Trump’s father over decades — and Trump learned everything he knows about “business” from his daddy. There have been numerous other journalistic deep dives into Trump’s corrupt business practices defrauding customers, investors and insurance companies. The joint investigation by Pro-Publica and WNYC called Trump Inc. and the book by its main producer Andrea Bernstein called “American Oligarchs: The Kushners, the Trumps, and the Marriage of Money and Power” alone uncovered years of misrepresentations and double-dealing in Trump’s real estate businesses in the U.S. and abroad. This family business — as we know from previous cases such as the Trump University fraud case which Trump settled for 25 million dollars when he assumed the presidency and the embarrassing con game they ran called the “Trump Foundation” which turned out to be little more than a slush fund for themselves — has been skirting the edge of criminality for years.

This case by the NY attorney general is the first to take an official look at some of those allegations and it appears that there is plenty of evidence to back them up. For instance, James brought receipts showing that Trump had refinanced the loan on his 40 Wall Street tower in Lower Manhattan by claiming that it was worth $735 million when it was worth less than half of that. The Trump Organization’s Aberdeen Golf Club’s value was massively inflated based upon lies about how many luxury houses it was planning to build. The AG also claims that Trump gave untrue statements to the IRS, overstating the values of land at two of his golf courses by counting the values of nonexistent mansions for which he then took deductions. I don’t know about you, but I have a sneaking suspicion that if any of us tried to do something like that even on a tiny scale we would be in serious criminal trouble.

The Manhattan District Attorney’s office has an ongoing criminal investigation based upon the same evidence and there is some coordination between the two offices, a fact which Trump and his offspring are using to argue that they should not have to appear under subpoena. You see, if they wish to avoid incriminating themselves in the criminal case, they would have to take the 5th in the civil case, and unlike criminal cases, that can be used against them.

Just think about that: the former president of the United States and his children, one of whom was a senior white house adviser, are arguing that they will not be able to testify because they might incriminate themselves criminally. You might think they’re just trying to delay the proceedings but they must actually be very worried about criminal exposure. According to James, Eric Trump, the only one to testify until now, took the 5th 500 times in his deposition.

The criminal investigation has been much quieter than the New York attorney general’s but they have indicted the Trump Organization’s Chief Financial Officer on unrelated fraud charges and since the case is intertwined with the civil case, one can assume they are operating from the same evidence. It’s possible they won’t be able to put together criminal charges from what we’ve seen, but if what James says is true, that means something is terribly wrong with our criminal justice system.

Meanwhile, down in Georgia, the district attorney investigating Trump’s attempt to coerce state and local officials into committing voter fraud has requested a special grand jury to hear the case. That’s the one where he was recorded calling up the Secretary of State to tell him he would be in legal trouble if he didn’t “find” 11,800 votes to put Trump over the top. It looks as though that case isn’t going away any time soon either.

Back in DC, Trump’s hand-picked Supreme Court betrayed him once again, ruling this week that the National Archives can turn over the records requested by the January 6th committee. (I would be very surprised if lawyers in the White House who were reportedly so concerned about the president’s unconstitutional coup planning, did not write notes to the file outlining their objections.) The committee subpoenaed Trump’s lawyer Rudy Giuliani, Sidney Powell, Jenna Ellis and has asked Ivanka Trump to appear voluntarily to tell what she knows about her father sitting on his hands while his supporters sacked the Capitol.

And now we have this story of Giuliani coordinating the use of fraudulent Trump “alternate electors” who actually sent fake documents to the National Archives, which may end up being the most notorious case of voter fraud in history. (It’s enough to make your head explode.) Two state attorneys general have referred the case to the Department of Justice and it’s hard to imagine that they will not look into this. People are in jail right now for far less.

It’s raining bad legal news for Donald Trump. Unfortunately, what this means is that Trump will definitely run for president which he believes will insulate him and his family from legal exposure. Coming from the man who won his election with promises to “lock her up!” that’s especially rich, but this is Trump. And if he were to win (or “win”) in 2024, he would gain himself four more years in which to run out the clock on all prospective crimes since the DOJ policy is that a sitting president cannot be indicted. Perhaps that’s one norm that really deserves to be shattered. 

Eric Boehlert and Dan Froomkin have been all over this topic, but Magdi Semrau yesterday concisely summarized the press fascination with the exotic, right minority. It is a habit of mind (or myopia) that in practice marginalizes the mainstream majority of voters who do not support the Lyin King or his authoritarian party.

There's a dynamic in press coverage wherein Republican politicians' racism, authoritarianism, obstructionism, & lack of policy vision are treated as normal phenomena, but, conversely, Republican voters are viewed as exotic creatures straight out of a David Attenborough film.

— Magdi Jacobs (@magi_jay) January 20, 2022

The Republicans’ abjectly anti-democratic behavior is accepted as a baseline, rather than abnormal & worthy of intense inquiry, but Republican voters’ loyalty to this abnormal behavior is worthy of extreme curiosity. So we get a lot of “Trump voters still love Trump” stories.

Meanwhile, Democratic politicians are messy for attempting to participate in democracy. Democratic voters, in contrast, are treated as bores. The press largely ignores them. What’s interesting, after all, in being committed to a party that’s actually trying to be democratic?

This creates a situation where the GOP’s bad behavior gets obscured, but support for their behavior is entrenched in the public’s mind. Democrats’ pro-democratic behavior gets derided & voters’ support for this behavior is ignored. No “Biden voters still love Biden” articles.

It’s important to recognize these asymmetries. We know from psychology that hearing about a person or party’s popularity will either entrench that popularity or increase it. Hearing about a person or party’s unpopularity has the same effect, basically creating a doom spiral.

We’re in a bad spot when anti-democratic behavior is treated as normal, but support for that behavior is treated as ~fascinating~. This situation is rendered worse when pro-democratic behavior is treated as hopelessly messy & support for this behavior is treated as a snooze fest.

Bush II once complained of “the soft bigotry of low expectations.” For Republican leaders, low expectations is not bias, it’s camouflage.

Democrats haven’t mastered the whole “look, shiny” thing.

Michael Kinsley, the one-time co-host of “Crossfire” and founding editor of Slate, began dropping off the radar (or at least, off mine) over the last decade. His Parkinson’s diagnosis had something to do with that, as it would. Kinsley’s Twitter account went cold about the time in 2016 when he published “Old Age: A Beginner’s Guide.”

But among the witticisms Kinsley will be remembered for is the Kinsley gaffe, a form of Freudian slip: “A gaffe is when a politician tells the truth—some obvious truth he isn’t supposed to say.”

Rather than use Kinsley gaffe, the common turn of phrase of late is the clunkier “saying the quiet part out loud.” What a shame.

The occasion for this mini-retrospective is a Kinsley gaffe committed Wednesday by Senate Minority Leader and self-described “Grim Reaper,” Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, after his 50-member caucus unanimously refused (with help from two Democrats) to reauthorize the Voting Rights Act.

Asked by reporters about concerns non-white citizens express over the security of their voting rights, McConnell answered, “The concern is misplaced, because if you look at the statistics, African-American voters are voting in just as high a percentage as Americans.”

A purer example of a Kinsley gaffe is hard to find.

For anyone who wants the clip. Here it is. Minority Leader McConnell says the quiet part out loud. https://t.co/82sI1ehSot pic.twitter.com/0Wuf1l0icf

— Brendan Egan (@bse229) January 20, 2022

Admitting aloud that Republicans do not view Black people as bona fide Americans is so very Kinsleyish for the very reason that it is among the world’s most poorly kept secrets. The party abandoned its decades-old, nudge-nudge-wink-wink stance towards racial minorities when Donald Trump descended his golden escalator and immediately declared Mexicans rapists and murderers. The euphemisms and coded language deployed since passage of the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts in the 1960s have disappeared. Notwithstanding the black faces strategically placed behind Trump’s speech last weekend, Trump’s is a white-people’s party he’s set against everyone else.

Trump says white people are being discriminated against on covid treatment: “If you’re white, you don’t get the vaccine or if you’re white you don’t get therapeutics .. In NY state, if you’re white, you go to the back of the line if you want help.” pic.twitter.com/QLgkC3VESk

— Ron Filipkowski (@RonFilipkowski) January 16, 2022

Unsubstantiated Republican charges of widespread “voter fraud” by “others” have circulated for decades. But voting restrictions passed by Republican-held state legislatures in the wake of Barack Obama’s presidency have accelerated with Trump’s 2020 loss to Joe Biden. Hence, Democrats’ efforts not only to reinforce voting rights but to defend them, and democracy itself, from frontal assault.

I mock Republicans’ use the term Real American to describe their white base by adding a trademark symbol to it, but McConnell just made a mockery of my mockery. He spoke plainly.

It is a gaffe McConnell would be remembered for if not for the many calculated legislative atrocities he’s committed over his career. Greg Sargent recalls “a largely-forgotten, 11-year-old quote” from McConnell on how he approached his role during the fight over the 2010 Affordable Care Act. He explained himself to The Atlantic‘s Joshua Green:

“We worked very hard to keep our fingerprints off of these proposals,” McConnell says. “Because we thought — correctly, I think — that the only way the American people would know that a great debate was going on was if the measures were not bipartisan. When you hang the ‘bipartisan’ tag on something, the perception is that differences have been worked out, and there’s a broad agreement that that’s the way forward.”

Sargent continues:

The counterintuitive thought here runs as follows: Yes, Americans want the parties to cooperate in a bipartisan fashion. Yes, when the parties disagree, Americans might agree with one side more than the other. But in McConnell’s theory, those things don’t matter.

Instead, when government is seen as dysfunctional amid partisan fighting, the president and his party are blamed, because they run the place. When Republicans uniformly oppose the president’s policies, voters fault him for failing to secure bipartisan cooperation. That’s why McConnell wants to deny him “broad agreement.”

Biden famously described himself as a “gaffe machine,” and he made a few during his 2-hour press conference this week. McConnell, however, is so confident in his party’s ability to engineer minority rule in what was the world’s most prominent democracy that he can say plainly that he does not consider non-whites to belong here. It’s hardly a revelation.

UPDATE: Note McConnell’s us/them hand gesture.

I don’t know a better illustration of systemic racism than this:

Prior to a vote to move the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act to the Senate floor failed Wednesday, McConnell was asked by a reporter about concerns among voters of color. 

“Well the concern is misplaced, because if you look at the statistics, African American voters are voting in just as high a percentage as Americans,” McConnell responded.

For McConnell, it simply hasn’t registered, at any deep level, that Americans from Africa are, in fact, simply Americans.

(Adding: I’ll leave it to others to point out that it is because Blacks are, indeed voting that McConnell’s White supremacist party is using every single illegal and immoral tactic they can think of to ensure that Black votes don’t count. )

This piece at the Bulwark makes a (somewhat tortured) comparison of this emerging scandal of the fraudulent electors to Watergate makes the logical case that it’s just this sort of thing that can lead from the lower levels to the top. These people committed the very crime they are accusing the Democrats of committing:

To paraphrase an old English proverb, mighty consequences from small offenses sometimes grow.

Now, an offense committed by relatively unknown people acting at the state level could grow into “Trump’s Watergate.” Of course Trump, unlike Nixon, is already out of office, but he has other worries—like protecting his fortune, keeping the door open to run again in 2024, and staying out of jail.

If state and federal law enforcement authorities convene grand juries to investigate the low-level GOP officials who signed and submitted phony electoral certificates in the 2020 election, the entire conspiracy to overturn the 2020 election could unravel.

So far, there has been no visible indication that Attorney General Merrick Garland has any appetite to launch a sweeping investigation into Team Trump’s conspiracy to overturn the results of the 2020 election. Garland has said nothing about it. His silence could just be prudential—it can be unwise for a prosecutor to alert prematurely the subjects of investigations. Or he may be reluctant to pursue such a case at all, perhaps due to some combination of his cautious nature, fear that it might be perceived as partisan political retribution, the difficulty of drawing clear lines between protected speech and conspiracy, and the difficulty of proving criminal intent in the mind of a cult figure whose bizarre mental state is unfathomable.

But none of those inhibitions should apply to a routine investigation into the mundane crimes implicated by the creation, execution and submission to the government of phony electoral documents. Quite the opposite: The failure to investigate that kind of obvious election fraud would smack of political calculation.

Law enforcement officials investigating the phony documents, as distinguished from a broader conspiracy, would not have to search for a crime—they already have the smoking guns, documents that are fraudulent on their face. Nor would they need to search for the culprits. The fraudsters signed their names to the phony documents, many of them proudly recording the act on video.

This open-and-shut election fraud is a gift to Garland and his federal prosecutors. Without having to expend any political capital by opening a sweeping investigation targeting Donald Trump or those around him, prosecutors could chip away at the broader conspiracy.

The targets of the investigation would be the people who signed and transmitted the phony elector certificates, not Donald Trump.

A total of 59 individuals from five states signed the documents. We know virtually nothing about them. They are not national figures, and largely are not public figures, except perhaps in state and local circles. They seem to be a fairly representative sample of Americans with quotidian jobs, nice families, and cute pets—not hardened denizens of the criminal underworld.

Can you imagine what would happen if 59 otherwise respectable burghers were hauled before a grand jury, facing a very real prospect of going to jail? How long do you think it would take for some or all of them to seek plea deals that would keep them out of prison? How quickly will they line up to identify those who told them to do it?

In very short order, investigators would have a mountain of testimony identifying every single person who induced or aided and abetted the pseudo-electors in the planning, coordination, and execution of their fraudulent acts. And so on up the chain.

As far as it goes.

And it seems to go far:

The forged electoral certificates show coordination across seven states. Those fake certificates were key to the plan of the Eastman memo and to the Jeffrey Clark DOJ draft letter to Georgia. The conspiracy involved fraud and force. At the head of the conspiracy: Donald Trump.

— Bill Kristol (@BillKristol) January 15, 2022

Historian Heather Cox Richardson, writing in her January 17 newsletter, lays it all out in detail, leading to the inescapable conclusion that the scheme “appears to have been a coordinated attempt by members of the Trump administration and sympathizers around the country to overturn our government by committing election fraud.”

When the last person compelled to testify has had his or her time in the barrel before a grand jury, what started as a politically impeccable investigation of a mundane crime committed by nondescript individuals—like the investigation of the five Watergate burglars—could bring down the whole edifice.

Is it too much to hope for that the simple act of investigating a mundane fraudulent act could lead to widespread accountability in Trump World? Let’s find out. All it will take is for the Department of Justice to begin an investigation—for Attorney General Garland to prosecute the obvious crime right in front of him—and then to follow the facts upward as far as they go.

This one seems like it might have some legs to me. I don’t hold out a lot of hope for federal action against Trump. But this seems impossible to ignore. There are people in jail around the country for committing much less egregious crimes of “voter fraud.” These people wre trying to overturn the whole election by defrauding the voters of their states. It sure seems clear cut to me.