Month: April 2022

Too few immigrants.

Surprise. Catherine Rampell has the story:

Democrats are terrified that a coming border surge might tank their midterm chances.

Ok, I just have to stop there. I know what she says it’s true. But it makes me crazy. What doesn’t have Democrats “terrified” about their midterm chances? Maybe they could just shut up about it when talking to reporters? It’s embarrassing.

But they have largely ignored a much more serious immigration-related political risk. The problem in the months ahead isn’t that the United States will allow in too many immigrants; it’s that we’ll admit too few, particularly the kinds of workers who can fill critical labor-market shortages.

Ok,let’s stop right here. This is ridiculous.

The Biden administration recently announced it would soon end Title 42, a Trump-era border-control policy. Citing the public health emergency when it invoked the policy in March 2020, the Trump team used the pandemic as a pretext to expel all arriving migrants without first allowing them to apply for asylum, as they have a legal right to do. Public health experts and immigration advocates — and many elected Democrats — have long condemned the policy, which has been used to carry out more than 1.7 million migrant expulsions.Advertisement

President Biden’s own appointees have called the policy illegal and inhumane, with multiple high-level officials blasting it when they resigned. But Bidendelayed reversing Title 42, fearing bad optics and attacks from Fox News. (Which arguably was going to attack him as an “open borders” president regardless.)

As expected, right-wingers are now catastrophizing about the looming “Armageddon” that will follow Title 42′s unwinding.

As a result, some worried Democrats are demanding that Biden keep this (likely illegal) policy in place. They have been so fixated on bad-faith right-wing attacks that they have missed the bigger, and much more serious, immigration-related liability: the millions of immigrants whose absence from the U.S. workforce is putting upward pressure on inflation.

Which Democrats are being blamed for, and which voters appear to care much more about.

The United States is experiencing inflationary levels not seen in four decades. Americans are unhappy, and they are more than five times as likely to cite “inflation,” “cost of living” or the economy in general than immigration as the nation’s biggest problem. These economic concerns are, however, rooted at least partly in immigration policy.

Worker shortages are pervasive, with vacancies hovering around record highs. The resulting disruptions to supply chains and normal business operations have raised costs for companies and consumers. Some of these “missing” workers retired; some dropped out of the labor force because of care issues or illness. But a huge chunk were foreign-born workers who either never arrived in the United States in recent years or who were already here but have been forced out of their jobs because of government incompetence.

There are about 1.8 million fewer working-age immigrants in the United States today than would be the case if pre-2020 immigration trends had continued unchanged, economic researchers Giovanni Peri and Reem Zaiour estimate. Unsurprisingly, they also find that industries that had a higher percentage of foreign workers in 2019 — such as hospitality and food services — tend to have higher rates of unfilled jobs now.

These immigrants, legal and otherwise, are “missing” because of a combination of Trump policies, covid-19 (which the Trump administration cited to justify imposing even more immigration restrictions) and Biden’s foot-dragging.

Although Biden pledged more humane and efficient immigration policies when he ran for president, he has been slow to reverse many of President Donald Trump’s onerous paperwork requirements and other policies designed to reduce legal immigration. Biden’s sluggishness owes partly to the magnitude of the challenge of rebuilding the U.S. immigration infrastructure — and partly to that deep Democratic fear of how Fox News et al. might portray any efforts to help immigrants.

As a result, last year, the United States experienced the lowest levels of new international migration in decades, census data shows.Advertisement

There remains huge demand among foreign-born workers to contribute to the U.S. economy. But backlogs for processing immigration and work-permit applications have grown under Biden. Many foreign-born workers already here, who already had jobs, have lost their legal authorization to continue working because of how slowly their work-permit renewals are being processed.

And so, the many businesses that rely on these workers are losing critical staff, making inflation worse.

I’m sure that’s a feature not a bug for the Republicans. But the Democrats should realize that inflation is a much bigger problem than immigration even on a political level. We’ve been arguing about that for decades. Inflation is something most Americans haven’t experienced and it’s freaking them out. They should concentrate on that. Obviously.

But Manchin really is Lucy Van Pelt

Rolling Stone reports on how the negotiations on the voting rights bills went down. It’s clear that in the end, Manchin was never going to eliminate the filibuster which was required. Sinema wouldn’t budge either. And I suspect Biden and co. knew that. They concentrated on BBB and Infrastructure because they could go through reconciliation and voting rights couldn’t. Nonetheless when the chips were down the White House didn’t really try and Biden himself blundered badly.

Here’s the story. It’s not pretty. Our future depended on two Senators who are dumb egomaniacs. And we lost:

“Giddy” is not a word people use to describe Jon Tester. The towering senior U.S. senator from Montana is blunt and pragmatic. In the halls of Congress, he’s one of the last surviving rural Democrats. When he’s not in Washington, D.C., Tester runs a dirt farm in Montana that’s been in his family for three generations. 

A dirt-farming rural Democrat knows better than to overhype. So it came as a surprise when, one day this winter, Tester showed up visibly excited at the office of his friend Michael Bennet, one of Colorado’s two Democratic senators, to share a tantalizing piece of information. 

“I think we’re gonna get this voting-rights thing done,” he said to Bennet.

“You got to be kidding me,” Bennet said. 

Tester said that Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia, a critical swing vote on sweeping voting-rights reforms, had signaled his support for the bill and, more crucially, the parliamentary-rules change needed to bypass a Republican filibuster of that bill. “I think it’s gonna happen,” Tester said. 

For the previous six months, Tester and two of his colleagues, Tim Kaine of Virginia and Angus King of Maine, had lobbied Manchin on voting rights and the fate of the filibuster. On weekends and holidays, on conference calls and huddled in one another’s hideaways in the bowels of the Capitol, Kaine, King, and Tester had urged Manchin to support his party’s proposal for overhauling the country’s voting laws.

They needed him, with Senate Democrats holding onto the barest majority possible — 50 votes, with Vice President Kamala Harris acting as tiebreaker. Not a single Republican had said they would support the voting bill, which left Democrats with only one path to passage: Change the filibuster, the procedural tactic that requires a 60-vote majority to advance most types of legislation. Manchin had remained steadfast in his opposition to this plan, arguing that the filibuster protected small states like his and forced lawmakers to seek bipartisan compromise. Yet during months of conversations with Kaine, King, and Tester, Manchin had increasingly lamented the dysfunction in the Senate. He wanted, as he put it, “some good rule changes to make the place work better.”

By early January, Manchin had given the impression — at least according to his colleagues — that he was ready to amend the filibuster in a way that would open a path to passing voting rights. At the end of one of their calls, Tester recalls saying that with everyone in agreement on a filibuster deal, all they had to do was put the finishing touches on the voting legislation itself and they were ready to proceed. “Yeah,” Manchin replied, according to Tester. 

A “yes” vote from Manchin could not have been more critical for free and fair elections. The Republican Party responded to Joe Biden’s victory with a backlash on the right to vote. Last year, GOP-run legislatures passed 34 laws in at least 19 states that limit access to voting, put partisan operatives in charge of running elections, and make it harder to participate in American democracy. At the same time, a belief that the last election was somehow stolen or fraudulent — the so-called Big Lie — has become an article of faith for many Republicans. 

In response to this onslaught, Democrats in Congress introduced multiple pieces of legislation and vowed to pass the bills in time for the 2022 midterms. In public, Democratic leaders spoke in existential terms about the need for reform. “Failure is not an option,” Majority Leader Chuck Schumer said. In private, lawmakers and activists predicted victory, arguing that the importance of the issue would overcome the challenge of unifying a 50-member caucus.

They were wrong.

Rolling Stone interviewed more than 30 key figures inside and outside of Congress to understand how the most ambitious voting-rights bill in generations and the Democratic Party’s main policy response to the Jan. 6 insurrection ended in failure. The blame for this defeat, sources say, lies with multiple parties: Manchin either strung along his party for months with no intention of actually supporting the reforms or gave indications to his colleagues that he was on board only to reverse his position on multiple occasions. Senate Democrats, meanwhile, miscalculated that if they could flip Manchin, another swing vote, Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona, would follow his lead. As for the White House, these sources say, President Biden — despite saying as a candidate that “one of the first things I’ll do as president” is restore the Voting Rights Act — never seemed fully committed to passing voting-rights legislation. When Biden, who had vowed to run an “FDR-sized presidency,” did inject himself into the negotiations late in the fight, his contributions did more harm than good.

Manchin spokeswoman Sam Runyon says the senator “never said he was open to eliminating the filibuster.” If his colleagues believed that, she adds, they were mistaken. The White House responds by saying just because “we didn’t get the result we wanted, we can’t say the power of the presidency wasn’t behind it.” Nevertheless, a question lingers: Why did Democrats’ efforts fail? 

“It was like riding a roller coaster,” Sen. Tester tells Rolling Stone. “There were many nights when I went to bed and I thought, ‘This thing is done. We just have to hammer out the details.’ But then something would always happen,” he added. “I don’t know what happened. I can guess. But I don’t know.”

One day last spring, Sen. Kaine got a call from Sen. Schumer, the Democratic leader. The House of Representatives had passed the For the People Act, a massive bill that sought to make it easier to vote, drag so-called dark money into the sunlight, combat gerrymandering, and modernize election equipment. Now, it was the Senate’s turn to take up the For the People Act. Every Senate Democrat had endorsed the bill except for one: Manchin. Schumer knew that Kaine had a good working relationship with Manchin dating back to their days as governors, and so according to Kaine, Schumer asked him, “Can you try to get Manchin on this bill?”

Kaine wasn’t on the judiciary or rules committees, but he made sense for other reasons. Before Kaine got into statewide politics in Virginia, he had worked as a civil-rights lawyer for 18 years, and voting rights had long been an obsession of his. The seat he now held in the Senate previously belonged to Harry Byrd Sr. and Harry Byrd Jr., two giants of 20th-century politics who were unapologetic racists and segregationists who opposed the landmark civil-rights laws of the 1960s and 1970s. The historical legacy of the Byrd family weighed on Kaine; so, too, did the more recent experience of witnessing firsthand an attack on the Capitol that was intended to disenfranchise 80 million people. “The seat that I hold and the moment in history in which I’m in the Senate, they have made this a cause unlike any other for me,” Kaine says.

Kaine began talking with Manchin about the For the People Act and what it would take for Manchin to support it. Manchin had concerns about giving the federal government more power to approve or reject voting-rule-changes at the local level. The broad use of consent decrees made Manchin fear that “savvy lawyers could go into cash-strapped localities” and bog those places down in lawsuits about voting practices. Mostly, though, Manchin couldn’t support Congress approving an 800-page bill about American elections along strict party lines. Doing so, he explained, “will destroy the already weakening binds of our democracy.” Republicans needed to be a part of the process.

On this point, Kaine knew he had a problem. It would take 10 Senate Republicans to join all 50 Democrats to pass any voting changes. Only six Republicans had voted in favor of a bipartisan panel modeled after the 9/11 Commission to investigate the Jan. 6 attack. “I said, ‘That is the North Star,’ ” Kaine recalls. “ ‘We will never get more votes than that from them for anything in the voting space.’ ” What’s more, a Republican senator (whom Kaine declined to name) told him that Minority Leader Mitch McConnell had two red lines: voting rights and campaign-finance reform. “Those are his only two thou-shalt-nots,” the unnamed GOP senator told Kaine. (McConnell’s office didn’t respond to a request for comment.)

The path to passage for any voting law would instead require reforming the filibuster. Kaine and his colleagues needed to find a way to persuade Manchin to support such a move. Democrats also needed to do the same with Sen. Sinema from Arizona. Unlike Manchin, Sinema had co-sponsored the For the People Act and considered herself a vocal supporter of stronger voting protections. Yet from the moment she joined the Senate, Sinema opposed any changes to the filibuster. Despite her clear position, some Senate Democrats as well as leading activists believed that Sinema would not want to be the lone “no” vote on reform if Manchin signed on. “All along our theory was: Get Manchin, and if we get Manchin, we get Sinema,” a source involved in the negotiations tells Rolling Stone.

One Friday in July, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Majority Leader Schumer met with President Biden at the White House. Eventually, the discussion turned to voting rights and the filibuster. When the time came to change the Senate rules for voting rights, Biden told them, he would take an active role lobbying any wavering Senate Democrats. According to a source briefed on the White House’s position, Biden told Schumer: “Chuck, you tell me when you need me to start making phone calls.”

Up to that point, senators and activists saw the White House as MIA in the voting-rights push. Anonymous quotes given by people close to the White House voiced skepticism about the prospect of passing any voting legislation in Congress. The Associated Press reported that “frustrated” White House aides “seeing the reality in the Senate, believe too much of a focus has been placed on federal legislative measures” to protect the vote. To activists, each negative blind quote felt like a stab in the back.

Civil-rights leaders pressed Biden to “take to the bully pulpit and fight” against the GOP’s voter-suppression laws, says Rev. Al Sharpton. Biden responded by traveling to Philadelphia and giving a rousing speech, but back in Washington, his priorities appeared to be elsewhere. 

Throughout the fall of 2021, the president focused his negotiating energies on two other bills: a bipartisan deal to fund infrastructure repairs and the sweeping, $1.75 trillion Build Back Better (BBB) Act. Biden seemed to believe his transformative, FDR-esque moment had come, and he spent the next several months in talks with Manchin and Sinema to persuade them to support Build Back Better. Voting rights, by all indications, was a secondary concern. 

In the background, though, Kaine kept up the pressure on Manchin. Even after Manchin declared his opposition to the original For the People Act in a widely read op-ed, saying he couldn’t envision passing such a bill with only Democratic votes, Kaine and several other Senate allies, a group that would come to include Tester and independent King, continued their talks with Manchin, asking him what it would take to get his support. They saw it as an encouraging sign that Manchin had said that “inaction is not an option” on protecting the right to vote. Eventually, Manchin took out a piece of paper and jotted down a list of priorities. He wanted automatic voter registration any time someone went to the DMV or interacted with state government. He wanted to make Election Day a federal holiday. He wanted a mandatory 15 days of early in-person voting in every state and a ban on partisan gerrymandering. His demand for some version of a voter ID requirement rankled liberal activists, but Democrats believed that to be a minor concession in exchange for passing the larger bill. The new measure would also include policies to stop future attempts at election subversion. The new bill, per Manchin’s request, would be named the Freedom to Vote Act.

But before Manchin would commit to the new bill and tweaking the filibuster, he wanted to try the Republicans again, with Kaine’s help. The two senators met with their GOP colleagues and offered them deals that Schumer hadn’t authorized. “We were trying every skeleton key on the key ring to see if we could unlock the door to get Republican support,” Kaine says.

One outcome of this exercise, Kaine says, was to show Manchin that no amount of good-faith bargaining would win over Republicans. Instead, McConnell and his caucus used the filibuster to block debate on every piece of democracy-related legislation introduced by Democrats. The same GOP senators who had sung the praises of the late John Lewis would not allow the Senate to even debate the John Lewis Voting Rights Act or the Freedom to Vote Act despite Manchin’s across-the-aisle outreach.

While Manchin remained opposed to filibuster reform in public, he began making comments in private meetings that seemed to suggest he was moving closer to yes. In a late-August meeting with a small group of West Virginia faith leaders, Manchin said that he valued the filibuster but did not believe preserving the filibuster outweighed protecting voting rights, according to a person who was briefed on the meeting. (Manchin’s spokeswoman disputes this characterization.) This was seen as an encouraging sign — short of a hard commitment, but evidence that Manchin could be moved. Democrats and outside activists agreed that any talk of “abolishing” or “weakening” the filibuster would scare off Manchin, so they framed their lobbying blitz as an effort to “restore the Senate” and make it work better. 

A filibuster-reform proposal crafted by Sen. Jeff Merkley of Oregon and several others was a far cry from eliminating the filibuster. The proposal had three parts: It lowered the 60-vote threshold needed to begin debating a bill to a simple majority; guaranteed that each party could offer at least five amendments to a bill; and replaced the secret filibuster with the talking filibuster, allowing the minority party to block a vote for weeks and possibly months so long as it had a member speaking on the Senate floor. But when that extended debate period was up, the Senate would vote and a simple majority was good enough to pass the bill. “It eliminated the potential of one person having veto power over the other 99,” Kaine says. “It restored the filibuster back to what I thought the filibuster was supposed to be.”

With Manchin deeply involved in the negotiations over filibuster reform, Senate Democrats and their outside partners looked to Biden to follow through on his pledge to pressure Manchin and Sinema. “The key for Biden never was what he was going to say publicly,” says Fred Wertheimer, founder and president of the clean-government group Democracy 21. “The key was what he was going to do in the endgame.” But the White House kept its focus on Build Back Better even as the talks there showed no sign of a breakthrough. Manchin refused to support the expanded child-tax credit in the bill, claiming it would incentivize parents not to work, and he opposed several key climate provisions as a senator who represented a coal-producing state and earned a small fortune from holdings in his family’s coal-processing business. He wanted to shelve the deal until a later time and, according to Kaine and Tester, turn his attention fully to voting rights and the filibuster.

A decisive moment came on Dec. 14, when Manchin went to the White House to meet with Biden. According to two sources briefed on the meeting, Manchin had expected a productive conversation about pausing BBB and shifting focus to voting rights and the filibuster. Instead, Biden was upset. He criticized Manchin for what he felt was the senator’s duplicity during the BBB talks, accusing Manchin of backtracking on a pledge to support BBB he’d made weeks earlier during a visit to Biden’s house in Wilmington. (Manchin’s spokeswoman says this was “not a correct accounting of this meeting” but declined to say why. The White House wouldn’t comment on it.) Later that week Manchin appeared on Fox Newsand declared BBB dead. “I cannot vote to continue with this piece of legislation,” he said. “This is a no.” 

The next morning, Manchin met again with his filibuster working group. The progress Kaine, King, and Tester felt they had made over the preceding months was slipping away. “[Biden] chose to sequence the debate by insisting he deal first with Build Back Better and only then would he consider voting rights, and that sequencing was costly,” says Wade Henderson, the interim president of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights. But King, Kaine, and Tester believed that they could still win over Manchin despite the breakdown between Manchin and the White House. The four senators stayed in constant contact over the holiday break and into the new year. Even when Kaine was stranded overnight on I-95 on his way from Richmond, Virginia, to attend a voting-rights meeting in Washington, with nothing but an orange and Dr. Pepper to fuel him, he called into the meeting from his car.

His colleagues’ commitment was not lost on Manchin. It was soon afterward that Manchin gave one of his most encouraging signs related to the filibuster, according to Tester, which prompted the senator from Montana to relay that promising news to Bennet. Kaine, too, believed they had gotten Manchin to yes. “I thought we were there a couple of times,” Kaine says. “But maybe that was just me.” 

Finally, after months of waiting, the moment had arrived. Democrats and voting-rights activists sprang into action for a final frantic push to persuade Manchin and Sinema to support filibuster changes and the John Lewis Voting Rights Act and Freedom to Vote Act. Schumer told allies on one call that he had mobilized every high-profile surrogate possible, including Oprah Winfrey, to sway the two senators. Biden traveled to Atlanta and delivered a fiery speech calling on the Senate to deliver new voting protections. “I ask every elected official in America: How do you want to be remembered?” he said. “At consequential moments in history, they present a choice: Do you want to be on the side of Dr. King or George Wallace? Do you want to be on the side of John Lewis or Bull Connor? Do you want to be on the side of Abraham Lincoln or Jefferson Davis?”

Two days later, Biden said he would make an appearance at a private meeting of the Senate Democratic caucus to rally the group before a scheduled vote on the John Lewis and Freedom to Vote bills. Just as Biden was about to head to the Capitol that day, Sen. Sinema appeared on the Senate floor to give a speech. There had been warning signs: Sinema’s recent interactions with civil-rights leaders and other influential progressive groups had left the groups frustrated. On a Zoom call with the heads of the Leadership Conference, NAACP, Urban League, and other African American organizations, Sinema seemed to be tuned out. She refused to turn her camera on, and her disembodied voice suggested she was dismissive of the arguments put before her on why she should vote to amend the filibuster. “As my grandmother would say, she blew by that argument like a freight train blowing past trash,” says Henderson of the Leadership Conference.

The attempts to win over Sinema had come in the final stages of the filibuster battle. John LaBombard, who was Sinema’s top spokesman at the time, says there was much less of an effort to persuade the Arizona senator to change her mind than there had been with Joe Manchin, even though Sinema’s vote was just as crucial as Manchin’s in the final count. LaBombard says he couldn’t escape the impression that Democratic leadership either took Sinema’s vote for granted or considered her long-standing opposition to changing the filibuster somehow less sincere or authentic than Manchin’s. “It would be a mistake on anyone’s part to engage in any wishful thinking that Sen. Sinema’s policy or tactical positions are somehow contingent on the positions of other colleagues and are not sincerely held,” LaBombard says.

On the morning of Biden’s planned visit to the Democratic caucus in mid-January, Sinema gave one of the longest floor speeches of her career. She restated that she would not under any circumstances get rid of the 60-vote filibuster. “When one party need only negotiate with itself, policy will inextricably be pushed from the middle towards the extremes,” she said.

Soon after Sinema finished speaking, Biden arrived at the closed-door Senate Democratic caucus meeting. Anyone hoping for a rousing call to action or LBJ-style browbeating was disappointed. Biden drifted from one side of the room to the other, at times speaking so softly that senators struggled to hear him, according to one source in the room. “His style was very much ‘I’m here among friends,’ ” the source says. “He decided not to give the stump speech of someone who stands up and says, ‘This is the moment that history changes in America and you all decide which way it goes.’ ” When Manchin asked Biden a question about the history of the filibuster, Biden’s answer was so unconvincing that Schumer motioned to Sen. Jeff Merkley to intervene and give a more substantive response, according to multiple witnesses.

Once the meeting was over, Biden walked to the crowd of reporters gathered outside the room and did something inexplicable: With the final vote still days away, he declared defeat. “I hope we can get this done, but I’m not sure,” he told the press. “Like every other major civil-rights bill that came along, if we miss the first time, we can come back and try it a second time. We missed this time.”

It was mystifying to the senators and the activist groups that had spent the past year and tens of millions of dollars trying to get this far. Yet it also felt representative of the Biden White House’s half-assed and confusing role in the entire voting-rights campaign. “We have seen what an all-out effort from the White House looks like when they are trying to pass a bill, and we never saw that same level of effort from the White House to pass the Freedom to Vote Act,” says Tiffany Muller, president of End Citizens United and End Citizens United Action Fund, one of the leading outside groups pushing for voting-rights and filibuster reform. There were brief moments of help from the White House, she adds, “but we never got a White House that was fully bought into winning this fight.”

The White House declined to comment on the record for this story. A senior administration official, who refused to be named, says these criticisms of the administration are “people playing Monday-morning quarterback.” Within months of taking office, the official adds, Biden said he supported restoring the talking filibuster. He gave speeches and made private entreaties to senators. As for Manchin and Sinema, the official says, “I don’t think there was anything the president could do to change those two votes on the filibuster.” 

Going into the final vote on filibuster reform on Jan. 19, it was clear that the votes weren’t there. Sinema had given her forceful floor speech, and Manchin announced he would not in the end vote to alter the filibuster. In a statement sent to Rolling Stone, Manchin said: “Since coming to the Senate in 2010, I have come to understand that the filibuster is our last check on power no matter who is in the majority. And it has protected our great nation from volatile political swings for more than 233 years.” 

When Schumer called the final vote on the combined John Lewis Voting Rights and Freedom to Vote acts, Republicans filibustered the legislation yet again. And when Democrats at last forced a vote on changing the filibuster, Manchin and Sinema voted with the Republicans against it. Some Democrats and activists couldn’t help but notice that Vice President Harris, who had come to the Senate to preside over the vote, left before it officially finished.

In a recent interview, Kaine, the Democratic senator, said that while he and many of his colleagues are “discouraged” by how the voting-rights battle finished, he hasn’t given up. 

“The guys that held my seat, Harry Byrd Sr. and then Harry Byrd Jr., were masters at using the filibuster to try to block passage of civil-rights legislation, including voting-rights legislation,” Kaine says. “But it didn’t stop. The temporary setbacks were not accepted as permanent setbacks, and we’re not going to accept them either.”

When I last spoke with Sen. Tester, he had just come from a classified briefing on China. He drew a connection between what he’d heard in that briefing and the voting-rights push. “The gridlock and the division here in the United States, they [the Chinese] love it,” Tester says. “It plays into their hands; it plays into what they want to do. And so consequently, we are where we are, and we may not even realize that oftentimes we’re our own worst enemy.” 

Sausage making is much too nice a metaphor for that mess.

Republican who voted to fix roads and potholes is called a sell-out RINO

Donald Trump ran on fixing America’s crumbling infrastructure (because he is a “builder”) and the Republicans cheered and cheered. But he couldn’t get the job done. Biden got it passed in the first year and now they are all against “government spending”, natch.

A few Republicans did vote for the infrastructure bill and they are being hammered by Trump and his minions:

On the eve of the House vote to pass a massive infrastructure bill last year, Rep. David McKinley (R-W.Va.) received a pointed call from a Donald Trump adviser: If he voted for the package, the former president would endorse his primary opponent.

But McKinley, a civil engineer by trade, had been waiting 11 years for this moment. He couldn’t be persuaded, setting into motion a contentious primary that is bound to break a big rule of politics no matter who wins on May 10.

Either McKinley loses after bringing home a major federal investment in crumbling local infrastructure, or he manages the rare feat of knocking off a Trump-endorsed candidate in a Republican primary — in this case, fellow GOP Rep. Alex Mooney, who was drawn into the same district as McKinley after West Virginia lost one of its three seats in redistricting.

Their clash has turned into one of the most hard-fought Republican primaries of the midterms, testing everything from Trump’s influence and the potency of ideological purity to small government to whether a GOP congressman can sell his primary voters on the merits of a bipartisan compromise in a hyper-polarized climate.

In an interview, McKinley declined to name Trump’s messenger but recalled telling the adviser: “We have the worst conditions. Some of the roads and bridges are 50, 70 years old. We have water lines built in 1880. I can’t do this. This is not a time to play politics. I’m voting for West Virginia.”

Mooney cast the vote another way: “I’m willing to fight for conservatism. I think he enables and cooperates with the Democrats’ liberal agenda,” said Mooney, who did not support the the infrastructure bill, citing its cost. “He’s caving in. He’s selling out. He’s doing their bidding.”

You would think that the West Virginians whose roads are falling apart would want to vote for the guy who wants to fix them but it’s far from a sure thing. Voting on the right is especially performative and they no longer see the connection between government and any meritorious work to help their material well being. It’s all negative. So, I would imagine they will vote for the Trump guy.

And there’s one more big contrast roiling the race. McKinley is a 7th-generation native of West Virginia’s northern panhandle and a former state GOP chair, who has represented most of the people in the newly drawn district for years. Mooney has represented far less of the current district, and he is a former Maryland state senator whose ambition helped propel him across state lines shortly before he ran for Congress in 2014.

“I don’t know the conditions of the roads and bridges in Maryland, but I do know what conditions are in West Virginia,” McKinley shot back, in an oft-repeated dig at Mooney’s roots.

McKinley’s support for the infrastructure bill helped earn him a surprise endorsement from Republican Gov. Jim Justice, a popular figure and Trump ally. And former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo plans to endorse McKinley this month and visit the state next week to fundraise for him, his campaign told POLITICO.

Sparsepolling has shown mixed results. A pro-McKinley group released a survey last month showing him leading Mooney by 5 points. An internal Mooney poll from early April found him leading by 11 points, a margin similar to surveys conducted in January and February.

And the ads have been negative from the start, with McKinley slamming Mooney as an interloper from Maryland under investigation from the House Ethics Committee for potential improper use of campaign money. Mooney has shot back, calling his opponent a RINO who voted for a bipartisan committee to investigate the Jan. 6 attacks.

Yet its the pros and cons of President Joe Biden’s $1.2 trillion infrastructure package and Trump’s influence that have dominated the final stretch of the race. The anti-tax Club for Growth, which is backing Mooney, launched a $1.1 million ad buy last week going hard on both topics — though the spots notably lacks any directreference to infrastructure, calling it only “Biden’s spending binge.”

McKinley said he never considered voting against the bill, despite the pressure, and he touts it constantly in his campaign stops. He’s living out his political dream, traversing the state trying to help the governor determine the best uses for some of $6 billion in funds he estimates West Virginia will receive, tapping both his engineering degree and legislative experience.

At a roundtable with business and manufacturing leaders Monday morning in Clarksburg, McKinley was rattling off the benefits the state was already seeing from the legislation. Some examples: After two years of talks, Nucor Corp. announced in January it would build a steel mill in Mason County — a decision McKinley said it felt comfortable making because of the improvements in the state’s sewage, roads, bridges and broadband enabled by the infrastructure bill. The state will also get $200 million to finish Corridor H, a highway in the eastern region of the state, where construction began in the 1970s.

“I’m not worried about Idaho and Montana,” McKinley said. “I’m worried about West Virginia. So I want to make sure we get our fair share.”

But Mooney, a member of the House Freedom Caucus, is a limited government hardliner. He said he supports investing in infrastructure (and has voted for smaller bipartisan bills in the past), but Mooney saidthis particular bill was padded with superfluous nontraditional initiatives driving up the cost. Fellow GOP Rep. Carol Miller, West Virginia’s other House member, also voted against it.

“The answer is to defeat this bill. Come back with a bill that’s less than half the amount and do roads or bridges on it. Pass it,” Mooney said. “We’re for infrastructure. We’re just not for bankrupting our country.”

The bill passed the Senate in August with 19 Republicans voting in favor, including Sen. Shelley Moore Capito (R-W.Va.).

“I’ve supported the infrastructure package and I’m glad that Congressman McKinley did as well,” Capito said in a brief interview in the U.S. Capitol. “There’s a lot of pluses to it. And for me, the pluses outweigh the minuses.”

Still, Republican polling from the Club for Growth suggests infrastructure is not popular. And the group’s president, David McIntosh, said their data suggests GOP voters see McKinley’s support for the bill not as a way to bring money to the state, but as a sign of his willingness to capitulate.

“It’s a good test for which direction the party is going to go in,” McIntosh said of the primary. “The whole establishment likes someone like that,” he said, referring to McKinley, “where they can count on him voting for the compromise bills, the infrastructure bills and working with the Democrats.”

Mooney said he believed he would have secured Trump’s backing regardless of McKinley’s infrastructure vote. When he visited the former president to ask for an endorsement, he was armed with a 15-page memo on the race that included the two candidates’ statements about Trump dating back to 2016.

“Given my voting record, and McKinley’s honestly, I think it would have been, it would have been more noticeable if he didn’t endorse me,” Mooney said.

Trump has yet to schedule a campaign rally or cut a TV ad for Mooney — which would amplify his support. Mooney did say Trump’s team had been in contact with chief of staff, Maryland state Sen. Michael Hough, to ask how they could be helpful.

On the stump, Mooney leans heavily into his Trump endorsement. While knocking doors, he told voters about the time he spent with Trump at Mar-a-Lago last year, and his campaign literature prominently features a photo of the two standing side-by-side.

“As long as you got Trump on there, you got my vote,” one man said after looking at the paper Mooney handed to him.

Yep.

But you knew that

The New York Times interviewed some of Trump’s national security advisers and they were unsparing in their criticism:

Former President Donald Trump threw a fit and launched into a profanity-laced rant at a 2019 meeting when the topic of Ukraine came up, according to a former aide, falsely accusing the country of trying to defeat him in the 2016 US election.

Speaking to The New York Times Magazine, Charles Kupperman, then serving as deputy national security adviser, accused his former boss of being incapable of understanding global politics and the importance of Ukraine. For him, Kupperman said, it was all personal.

That became clear in a May 23, 2019, meeting. According to Kupperman, who left the Trump administration five months later, Trump “just let loose” when the topic of Ukraine came up.

“They’re [expletive] corrupt. They [expletive] tried to screw me,'” Trump said, Kupperman told The Times.

Later that year, Trump was impeached by the House after withholding some $400 million in security aide for Ukraine that had been approved by Congress, telling Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenksyy in a September phone call that he first wanted a “favor”: that he publicly announce an investigation into his rival’s son, Hunter Biden. He also asked for an investigation into the unsubstantiated claim it was Ukraine — not Russia — that interfered in the 2016 presidential campaign.

“I would like you to find out what happened with this whole situation with Ukraine, they say CrowdStrike… The server, they say Ukraine has it,” Trump told Zelenskyy, referencing a false claim — pushed by his personal attorney, Rudy Giuliani, and Russian intelligence — that Kyiv had sought to aid the presidential campaign of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

In his interview with the Times, Kupperman said it was clear this — and manufacturing dirt on the Biden family — was the extent of his interest in Ukraine.

“If one were to ask him to define ‘balance of power,’ he wouldn’t know what that concept was,” Kupperman said. “He’d have no idea about the history of Ukraine and why it’s in the front pages today. He wouldn’t know that Stalin starved that country. Those are the contextual points one has to take into account in the making of foreign policy. But he wasn’t capable of it, because he had no understanding of history: how these countries and their leadership evolved, what makes these countries tick.”

Fiona Hill also had some choice words:

“In the course of his presidency, indeed, Trump would come more to resemble Putin in political practice and predilection than he resembled any of his recent American presidential predecessors,” said Hill, per the outlet.

Hill compared Trump to the presidents before him, noting how meetings with George W. Bush in 2008 differed from her experience during the two years she served in the Trump administration, per The Times.

She told the outlet that Bush, unlike Trump, actually read his briefing materials. She added that she was allowed to give unpopular opinions to Bush without being punished or frozen out and that Bush asked respectful questions.

In comparison, Hill said it was a tall order to try to steer policy under Trump.

“It was extraordinarily difficult. Certainly, that was the case for those of us who were serving in the administration with the hopes of pushing back against the Russians, to make sure that their intervention in 2016 didn’t happen again. And along the way, some people kind of lost their sense of self,” she said, per the outlet.

Hill also told The Times that Trump “was using Ukraine as a plaything for his own purposes” — particularly when he sent his personal attorney Rudy Giuliani on a “domestic political errand” and pressured Ukraine to investigate then-former Vice President Joe Biden. 

Trump responded:

“Fiona Hill is a Radical Left RINO, but the word RINO is too good. She doesn’t know the first thing she’s talking about. If she didn’t have the accent she would be nothing. During the Impeachment Hoax #1, she had no credibility, obviously, because we won unanimously. Never listened to her, I hardly knew her at all. She knew nothing about me, I knew nothing about her, and I liked it that way,” Trump said, according to his chief spokeswoman, Liz Harrington.

Actually he didn’t win unanimously. All Democrats voted to convict as did one Republican. But whatever…

You have to love this from the NY Times Magazine article:

The relationship between the Trump campaign, and then the Trump administration, and Russia would have implications not just for the United States but, eventually, for Ukraine as well. The litany of Trump-Russia intersections remains remarkable: Citizen Trump’s business pursuits in Moscow, which continued throughout his candidacy. Candidate Trump’s abiding affinity for Putin. The incident in which the Trump campaign’s national security director, J.D. Gordon, watered down language in the 2016 Republican Party platform pledging to provide Ukraine with “lethal defense weapons” to combat Russian interference — and did so the same week Gordon dined with Russia’s ambassador to the United States, Sergey Kislyak, at an event. Trump’s longtime political consigliere Roger Stone’s reaching out to WikiLeaks through an intermediary and requesting “the pending emails,” an apparent reference to the Clinton campaign emails pirated by Russia, which the site had started to post. Trump’s chiming in: “Russia, if you’re listening, I hope you’re able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing.” The meeting in the Seychelles islands between Erik Prince (the founder of the military contractor Blackwater and a Trump-campaign supporter whose sister Betsy DeVos would become Trump’s secretary of education) and the head of Russia’s sovereign wealth fund in an effort to facilitate a back-channel dialogue between the two countries before Trump’s inauguration. The former Trump campaign chief Paul Manafort’s consistent lying to federal investigators about his own secretive dealings with the Russian political consultant and intelligence operative Konstantin V. Kilimnik, with whom he shared Trump campaign polling. Trump’s two-hour meeting with Putin in Helsinki in the summer of 2018, unattended by staff. Trump’s public declaration, at a joint news conference in Helsinki, that he was more inclined to believe Putin than the U.S. intelligence team when it came to Russia’s interference in the 2016 election. The dissemination by Trump and his allies in 2019 of the Russian propaganda that it was Ukraine that meddled in the 2016 election, in support of the Clinton campaign. Trump’s pardoning of Manafort and Stone in December 2020. And most recently, on March 29, Trump’s saying yet again that Putin “should release” dirt on a political opponent — this time President Biden, who, Trump asserted without evidence, had received, along with his son Hunter Biden, $3.5 million from the wife of Moscow’s former mayor.

Totally fine! Let’s get him back in office ASAP!

“Democracy is under siege,” says Urban League annual report

The title of the Urban League’s annual “State of Black America” report puts it bluntly: UNDER SIEGE: THE PLOT TO DESTROY DEMOCRACY.

The document, Axios reports, “alleges that some lawmakers, consultants and violent extremists are plotting to ‘disenfranchise, delude, manipulate and intimidate American voters and establish a one-party rule.'” Hardly shocking at this juncture. The news is full of it.

Nevertheless, “political forces” are assaulting feverishly the voting rights of Black and Brown Americans:

Never has the fragility of our Democracy been more exposed than it is today. Fueled by “The Big Lie,” that there was mass voter fraud in the 2020 election, state legislatures are restricting voting access in districts with large populations of African Americans and other people of color. Some states are taking measures even further by actively targeting election oversight roles held by people of color.

“Political forces”? Guess who. Republican lawmakers are not even trying to hide their efforts to rig elections and suppress opponents’ votes. There is a naked power grab happening before our eyes.

Axios:

How we got here: The report says former President Trump spread misinformation and sowed doubt about the 2020 presidential election, inspiring and giving cover for GOP-controlled state legislatures to pursue even more voting restrictions.

• • But it said the modern-day effort has been building since the 2008 election swept Barack Obama into the White House, and that it accelerated after the Supreme Court’s Shelby County vs. Holder decision in 2013 gutted critical provisions of the Voting Rights Act.
  • State legislatures have been restricting voting access in districts with large populations of Black Americans, Latinos and Native Americans. The report uses data from the Brennan Center for Justice to make its case.

Speaking of cases, Charles Blow of the New York Times responded Monday night to the fact that former president Donald Trump could become a defendent in a Jan. 6 conspiracy case that goes to the Supreme Court. Justice Clarence Thomas shows no inclination to recuse himself from hearing such a case involving his own wife.

H.R.4766 – Supreme Court Ethics Act stands before the House now awaiting action. It would require judicial ethical standards apply to the U.S. Supreme Court, including Thomas. Those rules do not apply now. Even then, who could enforce them?

Blow summed up where “rule of law” Republicans now stand on MSNBC’s “The Last Word.”

“Liberals are still playing by the rulebook,” said Blow. “Republicans burned that rulebook a long time ago…. Democrats and liberals in general need to wake up to this idea…. This is guerrilla warfare for Republicans. It is ‘win at all costs,’ and nothing is off the table.”

Ginni Thomas said it herself in an email to White House chief Mark Meadows, “[T]here are no rules in war.”

They’ve fired on Fort Sumter. Have Democrats noticed?

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For The Win, 4th Edition is ready for download. Request a copy of my free, countywide get-out-the-vote planning guide for county committees at ForTheWin.us. This is what winning looks like.

Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack has yet to schedule public hearings

For months the question of when and if the Jan. 6 committee would hold public hearings on its findings has gone unanswered. There is no answer on that this morning. But the teasing is becoming tedious. Multiple stories on Sunday explored whether the committee would make a criminal referral against Donald J. Trump to the Department of Justice if it has the guts to.

Standing out among the panelists is Rep. Elaine Luria (D-Va.), a 20-year U.S. Navy veteran who spent her military career serving on combat ships and rising to the rank of commander. Duty is in her blood.

Ben Jacobs (New York Magazine) interviewed Luria on how she believes the committee’s work product will be received:

“We can’t continue that indefinitely, just each witness leading to more people,” Luria said. “So we really are sensitive to the timeframe that the American people want to hear the body of our work and want to understand the facts surrounding January 6th. It’s our focus now to get to that point where we’re ready to present the information that has been collected through the course of the investigation.”

Luria predicted the hearings will change minds when the public is presented with the scheme “in its entirety, and understood how much of a concerted, deliberate effort there was and how many people at high levels of government were involved in trying to implement a plot that was going to change the outcome of the election.” She thought that if the committee laid out what it found, “it will have a very far reach,” like what happened during the congressional hearings into Watergate.

While the Virginia Democrat wouldn’t go into details about what the committee has found, Luria said it’s been jarring to learn how near the plotters came to success. “The most concerning part to me is to know how close we were to a different outcome,” she said. “If a few people had not been in the right place and done the right thing, like the former vice-president, for example.” Especially surprising to her was the brazen “public display” of the scheme, such as coming up with fake pro-Trump electors. “There are things that are shocking, sort of the extent to which people went to carry out this plan, although good judgment and logic would tell any average person that there was no legal basis to overturn the election,” she said.

Except the Trump cult does not attract average people whose minds are open to being changed. Rudy Giuliani, John Eastman, Sidney Powell, Lin Wood, Mike Lindell the pillow guy, and Ashli Babbitt. It attracts people fed steady diets of grievance by right-wing media, people who would spend thousands to follow Trump around the country. It attracts people susceptible to believing conspiracy theories who, accustomed to privilege, think equality feels like oppression. It attracts people who would fight for hours with police and break into the U.S. Capitol shouting “1776!” Others would come with a plan, tactical gear and weapons. Their minds will not be changed.

“So there were people that were pushing this conspiracy and this big lie, but there were lots of people enabling that,” Luria says. “There were lots of people who could have stood up earlier and spoken against it.” They did not. Even until today.

Since retirement, there has been time for many things I never got to. One is “reading” (audiobook) Hannah Arendt’s “The Origins of Totalitarianism” (first published 1951). In light of Jan. 6, consider:

“A mixture of gullibility and cynicism had been an outstanding characteristic of mob mentality before it became an everyday phenomenon of masses. In an ever-changing, incomprehensible world the masses had reached the point where they would, at the same time, believe everything and nothing, think that everything was possible and that nothing was true. The mixture in itself was remarkable enough, because it spelled the end of the illusion that gullibility was a weakness of unsuspecting primitive souls and cynicism the vice of superior and refined minds. Mass propaganda discovered that its audience was ready at all times to believe the worst, no matter how absurd, and did not particularly object to being deceived because it held every statement to be a lie anyhow. The totalitarian mass leaders based their propaganda on the correct psychological assumption that, under such conditions, one could make people believe the most fantastic statements one day, and trust that if the next day they were given irrefutable proof of their falsehood, they would take refuge in cynicism; instead of deserting the leaders who had lied to them, they would protest that they had known all along that the statement was a lie and would admire the leaders for their superior tactical cleverness.”

Trump simply knew in his gut what authoritarian followers wanted to hear. They lapped it up like mother’s milk. Their minds won’t be changed.

I still want to see public hearings.

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For The Win, 4th Edition is ready for download. Request a copy of my free, countywide get-out-the-vote planning guide for county committees at ForTheWin.us. This is what winning looks like.

The election may be ok

The first round of the French election came down to Macron and LePen, with the lefty Melanchon coming in a strong third which apparently bodes well for Macron since the Melanchon voters are unlikely to break for LePen. This is good news — maybe.

But if you are wondering why it is so close:

Now is not the time to mess with people’s money. There’s just too much instability already.

“What are these principles you speak of?”

Philip Bump explores why the GOP is now just openly and brazenly backing Trump’s stolen election lie. They think it works for them:

Making her case to Republican voters before next month’s primary in her state, Alabama Gov. Kay Ivey (R) released a new ad succinctly capturing how Donald Trump’s false claims about the 2020 election are being weaponized.

“The fake news, big tech and blue state liberals stole the election from President Trump,” Ivey says in the spot, which is titled “Stole.” She later adds that “the left is probably offended. So be it.”

Ivey’s assertion that the election was stolen is indefensible nonsense. But the specific phrasing of it, suggesting a conspiracy that involved the machinations of those long-hated elites rather than some cadre of as-yet-unidentified poll workers and schemers, is exactly how non-Trump Republicans plan to appeal to the voters who have been convinced that Trump was the real winner.Advertisement

Not that Ivey shies away from unfounded fraud claims. But we’ll come back to that.

From the earliest days of his candidacy, Donald Trump forced Republicans and the conservative media to figure out how to make his most extreme rhetoric defensible, if not palatable. Trump would say something and his base of supporters would quickly seize on it. His allies were left playing catch up, needing to nod along with Trump in order not to alienate voters or viewers while still often insisting on some tether to reality.

So the specific claim that Trump Tower had been wiretapped became a story about intelligence agencies revealing the identity of someone who had been talking to Russia’s ambassador. The insistence that the Russia probe was a witch hunt — offered even before we learned anything about its genesis — became a complicated story about improperly obtained warrants and, more recently, a false claim that it was all Hillary Clinton’s fault.Advertisement

When Trump lost in November 2020, the party might have been forgiven for assuming that the defeat marked the end of the pattern. One official infamously told The Washington Post that even as Trump continued to fume about alleged fraud, the party could simply let him burn himself out.

“What is the downside for humoring him for this little bit of time?” the official said. “… It’s not like he’s plotting how to prevent Joe Biden from taking power on Jan. 20.”

Rarely have quotes aged so poorly.

Trump’s continuation of months of rhetoric alleging that mail ballots were suspect became weeks of complaining about counting those ballots became months of elevating any accusation about wrongdoing that came across his transom, however obviously false. An ecosystem arose around his claims — “stop the steal” — that generated a lot of money by propagating the narrative. Trump’s most loyal supporters believed (and still believe) that the election was stolen.

So the right got to work. As with the Russia investigation, it needed to come up with a way to agree that the election was stolen without embracing the junk that was obviously false or deranged. The result? Maybe there was rampant fraud, maybe there wasn’t. But everyone could agree that the election was rigged against Trump by the very elites he was trying to disempower.

One of the earliest articulations of this approach came from Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.). He argued that the law expanding voting access in Pennsylvania was unconstitutional, implying that this gave Biden an unfair advantage. The law, passed by Republicans, had gotten to the state’s Supreme Court, with the chief justice saying that even if the law was invalid, the votes weren’t — a preview of how many similar allegations about “rigging” would play out.

In the 17 months since Trump lost, this alternate narrative has been dutifully fleshed out. The media rigged the election by not reporting on Hunter Biden’s laptop, it is claimed, often conflating the social media restrictions on the initial New York Post story with the media at large and occasionally overstating the purported effect of that restriction. Nonprofit groups rigged the election by encouraging voter turnout in places where turnout was often low — places that often had heavier densities of Democratic voters. (This particular argument was aided by Time magazine’s deeply unfortunate framing of an effort to bolster election systems as a conspiracy.) Democratic states rigged the election by making it easier to vote during the pandemic.

This line of argument suffers from the fatal flaw that there’s no allegation that any significant number of ballots cast were themselves illegal, as officials and even critics have acknowledged. It’s primarily an argument that encouraging more people to vote without hindrance is unfair to Republicans — and, more ominously, something to be treated as dishonest or illegal. The Republican Party and the Trump campaign spent millions of dollars explicitly trying to get people to vote for Trump. That nonprofits and state governments spent millions trying to get people to vote, though, is cast as proof that the system is rigged.

The end result is this ad from Kay Ivey. If you are a Republican who thinks the election was stolen — you’re right, though perhaps not in the way that you have been led to think by Trump. It’s the rhetorical equivalent of a 5-year-old keeping his fingers crossed behind his back; if interrogated, Republicans can clarify that they meant that the election was stolen solely through devious machinations, not literal stealing of votes.

Except that Ivey takes the argument a step further.

“Here in Alabama,” she pledges, “we are making sure that” — stealing an election — “never happens. We have not and will not send absentee ballots to everyone and their brother. We banned the corrupt curbside voting and our results will always be audited.”

This isn’t simply the “rigged” argument but instead sits in the middle between that and what Trump alleges. Curbside voting is “corrupt” because … why? Because of fraud? Or because it’s an expansion of access in more Democratic areas? That it could be perceived as either, of course, is the point. If expanding the vote in general is treated as dishonest or illegal, as above, then you can simply wave your hand at any tool for making voting easier as something to be avoided at all costs.

The reason the vote wasn’t “stolen” in Alabama is because Alabama is a deeply Republican state, not because of any putative prevention that Kay Ivey supports. It elected a Democrat in 2017 — barely — solely because of how Trump energized the left and because the Republican was credibly accused of inappropriately touching a teenage girl. But because the state has so many Republicans, Ivey also needs to pledge to fight against this nonexistent election theft.

While it was often the case that Republican efforts to backstop Trump’s false claims were simply an effort to move past what he’d said, this one bears ancillary benefits. New laws aimed at scaling back voting access as passed in Georgia and Florida apply a legislative response to frustrations about Trump’s loss.

Republican legislators are, indeed, making sure that stealing an election never happens again. But only where “stealing an election” means “more Democrats came out to vote because it was easier for them to do so.

Well, yeah … they just believe that making it easier for people to vote is unfair to them because most people will not vote for them. In the minds of people without any morals or principles that makes perfect sense.

Seems she doesn’t like being held accountable for her coup plotting

Somebody’s a little bit upset:

1. Talk about destroying democracy and killing people’s free speech & free elections!

These hard left political activists are trying to literally take away my district’s ability to re-elect me again to Congress by perverting our courts using their J6 conspiracy theory and lies.

2. The Democrats (and RINO’s) who hate me bc I unapologetically stand up to their America last ways and the lying leftists in the propaganda media have tried their hardest to get my district to stop supporting me, but they’ve failed.

I have MORE support than any of them.

Cont’d

3. Now these LOSERS are so upset they couldn’t destroy me with their constant lies in the headlines that they have launched funded frivolous lawsuits of lies against me and other Republicans to take our names off the ballots so our voters are not allowed to vote for us!

4. This organized funded effort by the communists at Free Speech For People (hilarious hypocritical name btw) is a true threat to our elections and should be investigated immediately as an attempt to thwart and steal elections.

This is a very dangerous attack on our Republic.

5. Free & fair elections must be protected at all cost else we cease to be a free country.

Fraudster lawyers from NY and Mass had to seek out 5 voters in my district and did the same thing in other districts in order to organize their unconstitutional war on our elections.

6. The radical communist left is terrified bc their disastrous policies have so quickly destroyed our country and the American people hate it.

They know they will lose BIG in November and have launched law fare against Republicans in a desperate attempt to keep power.

7. Everyone knows the danger and extreme consequences if this deceitful coordinated attack on our elections is allowed to stand.

Courts should not be used as political platforms that entertain political conspiracy theories and lies invented by one party against another.

8. Just like Democrats objected to Republican President’s electoral college votes in 2001, 2005, and 2017, I along with my Republican colleagues legally objected on Jan 6, 2021 under Electoral College Act of 1887.

Accusing any of us of anything further is slander and libelous.

9. The audacity of these nasty arrogant elites looking down on the GREAT people of NW GA & attempting to control who GA-14 is allowed to vote for!

Who exactly do you think you are that you can fly into town and LIE in court so you can control the names allowed on OUR ballots?

10. Anyone thinking GA-14 is going to allow scumbag lawyers from NY & Mass to control who they vote for..

well bless your idiotic little hearts.

Oh boo fucking hoo.

Seriously, this woman actually has the nerve to say, “everyone knows the danger and extreme consequences if this deceitful coordinated attack on our elections is allowed to stand.
Courts should not be used as political platforms that entertain political conspiracy theories and lies invented by one party against another.”

I mean, we are so far down the rabbit hole we are coming out the other side.

Pennsylvania Trump voters worry about his endorsement of yet another quack, Dr. Oz

This piece is by Selena Zito, the erstwhile “Trump voter whisperer” best known for coining the phrase “the press takes Trump literally but not seriously and the Trump voters take him seriously but not literally” who ventured back to the wilds of Pennsylvania to see what they thought of Trump’s endorsement of Dr. Oz:

Jackie Kulback has a very detailed list of criteria that the county party she chairs, the Cambria County Republican Committee, requires to endorse candidates in next month’s U.S. Senate primary contest.

“There are some basic things,” she said, “such as, have they ever been to Cambria County and talked to the voters? Do their values line up with our values? Which is very important because we are a very pro-life county. Can they raise money? Can they do the job? And finally, can they actually get elected in a general election?”

Kulback, who has worked tirelessly over the past seven years to register new voters and make Republicans a local majority in this working-class western Pennsylvania county, never put much stock in the endorsement of former President Donald Trump as a deciding factor.

Kulback says that is not a rap on the former president, who remains deeply beloved in this county. Many “Trump” signs are still hanging up 18 months after he narrowly lost Pennsylvania to Joe Biden. “It is just that voters here have to vote for what is best for us and our state, and we have to make the decisions based on that,” she said.

It is a sentiment that was shared by voters and party chairs across the state hours after Trump unexpectedly endorsed Mehmet Oz, the celebrity heart surgeon better known as Dr. Oz, in the race here for the Republican Senate nomination.

It was a decision that left many dedicated Trump supporters perplexed. Why did he choose someone who had not resonated with conservatives in such a key state on the Senate map? Who whispered in his ear that this was a good idea?

“President Trump was very out of sync in picking Oz,” said Dave Ball, chairman of the Washington County Republican Party. “I’d like to know who it is who lives in Pennsylvania that knows the voters well told Trump to pick Oz.”

“I think that President Trump very, very seldom does anything that’s not thought out and doesn’t have a very reasoned and logical basis, but, for whatever reason, in this particular instance, he chose to ignore all of that and endorse Oz,” he said.

Ball says he fielded calls all day from conservatives unhappy with the former president’s decision. They complained about the reasons Trump gave — noting his celebrity status, Harvard credentials, New York Times bestseller status, and praise Oz had for the former president’s health. “People have been calling me all day and asking, ‘What the hell was he thinking?’”

Trump’s comment that “women, in particular, were drawn to Dr. Oz for his advice and counsel” didn’t sit well with many female Trump supporters who were interviewed.

“Five years ago, there were 13,000 more Democrats than Republicans in this county,” he said. “And right now, there are 7,120 more Republicans than there are Democrats; that is an important number in a county that has a very suburban component in the Peters Township, North Strabane, Cecil Township area. We also have a very rural, agricultural region, as well as the Mon Valley, which is very blue-collar. In last November’s off-year election, we swept all nine row offices, the county commissioner race, and we have six state representatives, two state senators, and a congressman.”

Trump’s decision didn’t just shock many involved in the nuts and bolts of Pennsylvania Republican politics. It also shocked a lot of people on social media. Oz has been struggling in the polls since January despite the enormous amount of money he has spent on advertising. He gambled early that his celebrity status would drown out the other candidates in the race, including former Gulf War veteran and hedge fund manager David McCormick, political commentator Kathy Barnette, former ambassador Carla Sands, and real estate developer Jeff Bartos. But his expected advantage has not materialized.

Trump’s Oz endorsement also came across as odd to a lot of former Trump confidantes who have either watched this race with interest or are working on the McCormick campaign. McCormick has risen in the polls since January, going from a virtual unknown outside of Pittsburgh or Bloomburg to the front-runner in the race, thanks to a lot of retail campaigning, handshaking, and a healthy influx of cash.

But none of that really matters at the end of the day; what does matter is how the conservative voters here feel about the endorsement. They will be the ones who ultimately decide what it means in the May 17 primary.

For Heather Wilhelm, it’s a nonstarter. “In talking to other conservative voters in my circles, there hasn’t been a lot of support for Dr. Oz,” she told me. “I think maybe the people Oz attracts are moderate voters.”

The Nottingham township mother says she likes Trump and voted for him twice. But when she walks into that voting booth next month, she will not be voting for Oz. She’s not alone. Interviews with Republican primary voters across the state, even those who consider themselves staunch Trump supporters, suggest they aren’t necessarily going to follow his lead on this one.

Wilhelm said a huge issue for her is having conservative leadership representing Pennsylvania in D.C. “I am raising kids; so what is happening in the realm of education is very important to me,” she said. “But I am also concerned about energy independence and who will advocate for it, and the negative impact that government overreach has had on people’s livelihoods.”

She has not made up her mind about whom to vote for, but she states emphatically that she is not even considering Oz, no matter what Trump says.

This is interesting, although it’s wrong. It is a Trump cult but they have never voted for anyone he endorses. He endorsed Judge Roy Moore! The point of the cult is that they love him no matter what he does, even if he endorses people they don’t vote for. It’s all about him, nobody else.

Youngstown State political scientist Paul Sracic said a Trump endorsement may provide an important “cue” for some voters, particularly voters who don’t know a lot about the candidates running, but that it will not likely be dispositive. “The problem for Trump,” he said, “is that primary voters tend to be more interested in politics than general election voters.”

If Trump-endorsed candidates don’t end up winning, it provides even more evidence for the thesis that Trump did not create the movement that has supported him since 2016, Sracic said. “In other words, the Republican Party has not become a Trump cult, as some in the media, and even in the Republican Party, seem to think.”

Trump’s presence in the GOP, with his larger-than-life personality and some of his policies, did provide the spark necessary to make working-class voters more comfortable with Republicans. But, the reasoning goes, they were already moving in the party’s direction prior to 2016 — Trump simply became the occasion for that movement.

Sracic said now that the party itself has changed, even down to local party organizations, Trump is less crucial personally. “Most Republicans still like Trump, and if he runs in 2024, he will be a force to be reckoned with,” he said. But voters may consider other options.

Sracic said the Oz endorsement seems to him particularly problematic for a former president often hailed for his political instincts. “Trump seems to think that since his own popularity was initially driven by the fact that he was a television celebrity, Dr. Oz will enjoy the same benefit.” That may not prove true. Trump’s show, The Apprentice, presented him as the strong, decisive executive, willing to fire incompetents. It was a nearly perfect vehicle to promote a candidacy for president at a time when people were losing faith in government. Other types of celebrity exposure might not have been so advantageous, and might not be today.

Kulback, Ball, and Wilhelm have not changed their minds about Trump. They still like him. But his endorsement has not changed their minds about Oz.

“Will all of this harm Trump?” asks Sracic. “Maybe. But the former president is quite skilled at spinning results in his favor. He will simply argue that candidates would have done even worse without him, and that is probably true.”

No it will not harm him. Nothing harms him with these people.

They ask what he’s thinking in endorsing Oz and it’s pretty obvious: he sees a “star” just like him (and one who said he was in perfect health which is hugely important in a US Senator) and that’s all that matters. As far as his own popularity is concerned, that’s true. He’s their star and that’s all that matters. But it doesn’t transfer to anyone else.