Month: May 2022

We’re going to need it

With Roe on the chopping block, we’ll need it, says Dan Froomkin bluntly:

The Republican Party wants to usher in a new Dark Age in America.

For starters, its leaders want to roll the calendar back 50 years and more, to a time when pregnant women’s medical decisions were made by the government.

Other human and civil rights, especially for the LGBTQ community and people of color, would inevitably be next.

They want to wipe away decades of slow, painstaking progress toward becoming a more inclusive, tolerant and humane society.

They consistently use lies and conspiracy theories to mislead the public and the press. They thrive on disinformation and misinformation. They have their own propaganda outlets to incite hatred and division. They want to use the power of government to punish people and corporations who speak out against them or teach their children the truth.

The “party of radical reactionaries,” says Froomkin, has “no governing agenda beyond wanting to punish and rebuke and marginalize and demonize.”

The left has its authoritarians. Mostly young, black-and-white thinkers spun up on their own righteousness. Determined to remold the world as they see it, they stay angry at their inability to impose their will. Like libertarians that way. A lot of them read Ayn Rand in high school. Most grow up. Most of the left’s authoritarians mellow.

But the right’s authoritarians are raised from birth to see the world as hostile, Devil-occupied territory to be conquered. For Jesus. Or just to put snotty, overeducated, urban elites in their places. When the righteous come into their God-promised inheritance, the last (them, of course) shall be first, and the first last. Women shall remain silent and submit to their husbands. Every knee shall bow. To Jesus, to them, whatever.

Feeling persecuted is reflexive, a sign you’re doing their brand of Christianity right, and that ruling is just around the corner. If it takes 50 years, well, they are still waiting for Jesus to return after 2,000.

“We will govern over kings and judges and they will have to submit. … We’re called to rule! To change history! To be co-regents with God,” says “The Keys to Dominion.”

Although the anti-abortion movement began as a reaction to the collapse of segregation, today it is a key part of that right’s fight to put everyone not aligned with them in their places.

Ashton Pittman of the Mississippi Free Press cites Dr. Anthea Butler, author of “Evangelical Racism: The Politics of Morality in America.” She teaches religion and Africana studies at the University of Pennsylvania. Pittman writes:

“What is hard for people to understand about Christian dominionism is that it is not just about being evangelical. It’s about a certain way of looking at the world and saying that Christians are supposed to rule in every area, sort of the ‘seven mountains’ of power,” Butler said, referring to the late NAR founder C. Peter Wagner’s ideas about Seven Mountains Dominionism, which says Christians must seize power in the realms of family, religion, education, business, government, media and the arts.

“What you’re looking at with dominionism is something very different. They’re not only talking about spiritual warfare, they’re talking about principalities and powers that rule over nations and places.”

Just as activism is a way of life for some on the left, for some on the right winning the power to dominate Others is all-consuming. Women’s rights, education, politics, culture. All will bow.

Take some advise about where they are headed from a guy who spent a few formative years in a WWII internment camp. In. This. Country:

My best, worst-case scenario right now is that the Supreme Court kills off Roe in June and Democrats in Congress (don’t ask me how) restore it with the Women’s Health Protection Act in July and save the republic in November. The choice for the majority of Americans could not be more black hat vs. white hat.

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They wanted to freeze the votes

Obviously, the leak could have come from either side for any number of reasons. But this leak from the Wall Street Journal last week is a hint that someone on the conservative side was worried that Roberts was on the verge of moving on of the Justices away from the Alito opinion.

Judging from the Dec. 1 oral argument in Dobbs, the three liberal Justices would bar the Mississippi law that bans abortion after 15 weeks as a violation of Roe and Casey. Justices Thomas, Neil Gorsuch and Samuel Alito are likely votes to sustain the law and overturn both precedents. Justices Kavanaugh and Barrett seemed, in their questioning, to side with the three conservatives.

But Chief Justice John Roberts tried during the oral argument to find a middle way. He appeared to want to sustain the Mississippi law on grounds that it doesn’t violate Casey’s test of whether there is an “undue burden” on the ability to obtain an abortion. If he pulls another Justice to his side, he could write the plurality opinion that controls in a 6-3 decision. If he can’t, then Justice Thomas would assign the opinion and the vote could be 5-4. Our guess is that Justice Alito would then get the assignment.

The Justices first declare their votes on a case during their private conference after oral argument, but they can change their mind. That’s what the Chief did in the ObamaCare case in 2012, much to the dismay of the other conservatives. He may be trying to turn another Justice now.

It seems that somebody was worried enough about this to whisper in the Wall St. Journal’s ear. Leaking the draft would be a Hail Mary to try to embarrass the wavering Justice[s] into sticking with the program.

It’s more plausible to me than a liberal thinking that any of those five right wingers would be moved to vote with the liberals because of the leak. That really doesn’t make any sense at all.

It’s hard to know what to do. But there are some immediate actions we can take.

Dan Pfeiffer has some thoughts about immediate next steps in this battle:

Decisions in the governor and state legislative races in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Georgia, Arizona, Michigan and elsewhere will be key in determining the rights and freedoms of women in those states. There are many ways to make an impact in those campaigns. Here are a few:

Contribute to NARAL or Planned Parenthood, the Democratic Governors Association and/or the Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee;

Donate to Run for Something;

Sign up for Vote Save America’s Midterm Madness Program;

Sign up to volunteer or contribute to the candidates and state parties in those and other states;

If you want to help individual women, here is a list of abortion funds to which you can contribute.

None of this is easy. I know it is far from satisfying. The fact that we have a Supreme Court majority installed by two Presidents who received fewer votes than their opponents is a symptom of a democracy that was broken long before Donald Trump waddled onto the scene. The effort to overturn Roe is part of an extreme agenda that includes banning books and attacking LGBTQ+ kids.

There was a dumb circular debate among Democrats about whether to engage in the “culture war” attacks from Republicans. That debate ended with the leak of this opinion.
We have no choice but to fight back. We have the moral and political high ground. It won’t be an easy fight, but it will be a righteous one.

This is just the beginning. The institution of an anti-democratic, theocratic, authoritarian government is well on its way to being enacted. We have no choice but to fight back.

A visibly shaken and angry Senator Elizabeth Warren just spoke in-front of #SCOTUS. @TheNationalNews pic.twitter.com/KzQ2Z0Lg3b

— Willy Lowry (@willy_lowry) May 3, 2022

The Grim Reaper cares about nothing else. From “This Will Not Pass”:

For the life of him, the top Senate Republican could not understand why Cheney had kept criticizing Trump … McConnell told an adviser that the congresswoman had signed her own death warrant. In his mind she was committing a cardinal sin — relinquishing power. “When you’re in leadership, the last thing you want to be is a liability for your members …”

So the cardinal sin is relinquishing power? I’d say Donald Trump agrees with him on that. In fact, they are fully in accord.

Her cynical, political opportunism killed Roe

“If this leaked draft opinion is the final decision and this reporting is accurate, it would be completely inconsistent with what Justice Gorsuch and Justice Kavanaugh said in their hearings and in our meetings in my office. Obviously, we won’t know each Justice’s decision and reasoning until the Supreme Court officially announces its opinion in this case.” — Susan Collins today

I wrote about Collins’ little dance solo during the Kavanaugh hearings. I think it holds up:

Back in February of this year, Axios reported that Donald Trump had a plan for the midterms:

A source close to the White House tells me that with an eye to getting Republicans excited about voting for Republicans in midterms, the president this year will be looking for “unexpected cultural flashpoints” — like the NFL and kneeling — that he can latch onto in person and on Twitter. The source said Trump “is going to be looking for opportunities to stir up the base, more than focusing on any particular legislation or issue.”

I think we can accurately observe that the confirmation of the right-wing political operative and accused attempted rapist Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court counts as just such an “unexpected cultural flashpoint.” And as predicted, Donald Trump is taking full advantage of it. Since it happens to be the same “cultural flashpoint” that hit his campaign at roughly the same moment in 2016, when the “Access Hollywood” tape of him bragging about assaulting women was reported, he undoubtedly sees it as a winning strategy. It worked for him, after all.Advertisement:

Recall that after the tape hit and women started to come forward to say that Trump had assaulted them in exactly the way he described, he went on the offensive — in both senses of the word — by going before his cheering crowds and insulting the women as being too ugly to attack and declaring that they were all liars. He got angry. He promised to sue them all. And his crowds cheered him on. By this point in the campaign it had become nothing more than a rank racist misogyny festival, punctuated with chants of “Build That Wall!” and “Lock Her Up!”

Trump being Trump and believing that his every passing thought is genius, obviously believes that attacking women is an excellent way to win elections. And so, after insincerely proclaiming that he found her testimony credible, he switched gears and went after Kavanaugh’s accuser Christine Blasey Ford:

WATCH: President Trump mocks Dr. Christine Blasey Ford, who has accused Trump's Supreme Court pick Judge Kavanaugh of sexual misconduct, during rally in Mississippi. https://t.co/pZfWN8IFMV pic.twitter.com/81YEs8oXr5

— MSNBC (@MSNBC) October 3, 2018

After the vote, Trump took credit for getting Kavanaugh over the line with this attack, telling Fox News’ Jeanine Pirro, “There were a lot of things happening that weren’t true and a lot of things left unsaid. I thought I had to even the playing field. Once I did that, it started to sail through.” This was nonsense in terms of the confirmation battle, but according to the Washington Post, GOP strategists believe it does fire up the conservative base.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell is certainly on board. He’s been pushing the other “unexpected cultural flashpoint” they’ve adopted, which is that those women who came to Washington to protest the Kavanaugh confirmation, many of them assault survivors, are an angry, threatening mob who frightened those poor senators to death with all their chanting and  yelling.

Fox News has taken it to the next level, telling their anxious elderly white viewers that Democrats are coming to kill them in their beds, following Trump’s rallying cry: “You don’t hand matches to an arsonist, and you don’t give power to an angry left-wing mob.” (This would be in contrast to the torch-bearing, murderous Nazis in Charlottesville whom Trump described, at least in part, as “very fine people.”)

Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., having fully morphed into a poisonous, reptilian Trump toady, is on it as well. But then, Graham was obviously one of the strategists behind Kavanaugh’s explosive testimony in the hearing. He had telegraphed the white male rage tactic out in the hallway just prior, brushing off a rape survivor who was trying to talk to him by saying, “You should have told the cops.” Clearly that was meant to suggest that women who don’t report their rapes are not to be believed. As Salon’s Amanda Marcotte wrote on Tuesday, the mask has fallen from Republicans’ faces, at least for now, and the misogyny is staggering.

Republicans have also exploited their insulting thesis that #MeToo is really about lying or delusional women falsely accusing men, which they are trying to spin into a female lament about sons and husbands and fathers and brothers being the real victims. Graham, naturally, finds a clever way to make the point:

Twenty-nine days from now you’ve got a decision to make, America. Do you want to live in the world of Sen. [Mazie] Hirono where you’re guilty until proven innocent because you’re a Republican, or do you want to live in the Susan Collins world where you will be listened to and evaluated?

Graham likes to use Hirono as his example of the angry woman trying to railroad the poor, white male, mostly because she made the statement “Men, shut up and step up” which he instinctively understands are fighting words to misogynist abusers. The fact that she is a woman of color makes it all the more potent.

But what of our nice Republican white lady, Sen. Susan Collins, the woman the entire political world, including Democrats, has put on a pedestal for years as the representation of modest, feminine moderation? Trump was effusive in his compliments after her speech — and her vote to confirm Kavanaugh. He told the press, “I thought that Susan was incredible yesterday. She gave an impassioned, beautiful speech yesterday. And that was from the heart, that was from the heart.”

He was referring to the speech in which Collins gaslighted the entire country with a paean to a man who doesn’t exist, calling him “an exemplary public servant, judge, teacher, coach, husband and father.” She told the entire country that the real Brett Kavanaugh was not the angry, petulant, bully they watched testify in front of the Senate Judiciary Committee. She whitewashed his record on health care and women’s rights, insisting that the man who just months ago, as a federal appeals court judge, voted to force a 17-year-old rape victim to give birth against her will, was not a threat to Roe vs Wade.

She attacked the protesters complaining about “dark money” being used to whip them into a “frenzy.” Worst of all, she adopted the absurd line that while she believed Christine Blasey Ford had likely suffered an attack, Kavanaugh was not the attacker. This has become the “empathetic” approach among Republicans who can read polls and see that women are running from the party as fast as they can. 

But this line is nothing new. Women have been told they were “crazy” when they say things that people don’t want to hear since the beginning of time. And the echoes of the cruder formulation deployed against Anita Hill back in 1991 — “a little bit nutty and a little bit slutty” — are obvious. It’s progress, I suppose, that they dropped the “slutty” part in 2018.

Collins was lobbied heavily by George W. Bush, Kavanaugh’s benefactor, and her deceitful speech shows the final absorption of the tattered remains of the GOP establishment into Trumpism.

Collins and Trump are now two sides of the same coin, bound together with a common willingness to tell their voters that they can believe them or they can believe their lying eyes.  It’s all there is.

She was re-elected in 2020 so she got what she wanted. But would she have lost if she had voted against Kavanaugh and Gorsuch? I doubt it. She just wanted the Republicans to maintain power at all costs. Like McConnell and McCarthy and Trump she cares about nothing.

No, the leak isn’t as serious as the decision to force American women to give birth against their will. It’s not even as serious as the naked vehemence and maliciousness of Alito’s language. Still, this leak had a very serious purpose.

The leak waters down the impact of the official release of the decision (a la Barr and the Mueller Report). When it’s finally official, it will be old news. Also, the “premature release” of the decision throws into disarray any planning for protests and legal/legislative opposition to the overturning of Roe. Those opposed thought they had until June to organize. Now, they’re scrambling. And for extra measure, the heads up that Roe will be killed (with extreme prejudice) is useful for all those pushing forced birth bills in Republican-led states.

Despite the ravings of the right on social media,I can’t think, as per Digby, of any good reasons why this would have been leaked by someone interested in affirming Roe. Everyone knew it was coming and many could have guessed it would be written as belligerently as possible. It serves no purpose for those in opposition to the overturn and would surely lead to a firing.

I think it was most likely leaked with the full knowledge of at least one of those in the majority. This stunt has all the hallmarks of far right political activism.

A majority of Americans, that’s who

You’ll notice that the numbers in the Gallup poll are the same as they were in 1989. For 30 years, a majority of the public has been opposed to overturning Roe vs. Wade.

Not that such a thing matters in America. We are ruled by a radical rump group of power mad authoritarians.

If they can do this, they can do anything.

It’s much more logical that it was a conservative

This:

I clerked at the Supreme Court. Last night, I assumed a liberal clerk leaked the draft opinion overturning Roe. Now I think MUCH more likely it was leaked by a conservative fanatically committed to every word of Alito’s monstrous opinion.

Timing: This draft was circulated in Feb. If a liberal was mad about it, why wait until April to send it to Politico? The op will be out in June. What are the benefits of releasing it early? And a BIG downside – the focus on the leak itself instead of the opinion.

If you work inside the Court, you know that the most concrete impact of the leak is to lock in this opinion essentially as is. Any edits at this point reveal jockeying between Justices, undermine the majority, and Court itself. Embarassing to the majority.

Liberals have lived for years trying to eke out a sentence here or there in SCOTUS opinions to make these conservative decisions less terrible. Why leak something and undermine that whole strategy?

Far and away most likely impact of the leaked draft is that it locks in 5 votes for this opinion, essentially without edits. Who would want that? So: This is about as extreme an opinion as you can have overturning Roe.

It talks about fetuses being people as a matter of ancient law (teeing up idea that fetuses are constitutionally PROTECTED – no abortion anywhere as matter of conlaw.) And its arguments undermine all of SCOTUS’s gay rights and contraception decisions.

Back to timing. Draft majorities circulate first, and then concurrences and dissents. So this is about the right timing for concurrences to come out. I think best bet is that Chief Justice Roberts circulated one recently, adopting a more moderate position.

Maybe Roberts says abortions ok in some time frame, preserving exceptions for the life of the woman, etc. And Kavanaugh is tempted by it – maybe not enough to vote for it, but enough to demand some changes to the Alito opinion.

Now let’s talk psychology of SCt clerks. The kinds of liberal students who end up at the Court are not an activist bunch. They are enormously risk averse and rule-abiding. Hard to see how one of them blows their career out of the water in this way (for what benefit?).

Leaking is much more of the style of conservatives right now. Think about what Justice Thomas is doing as a model for a clerk here – making a mockery of the Court’s recusal rules re. his wife’s role in the Jan 6 coup attempts.

https://www.npr.org/2022/03/30/1089595933/legal-ethics-experts-agree-justice-thomas-must-recuse-in-insurrection-cases

Conservatives have shown that they are willing to break the public trust in the Court to get their way.

If you want the liberal view, read Justice Breyer’s recent book – LITERALLY CALLED “the peril of politics.”

https://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674269361

Conservatives also know that the leak will be blamed on the left, distracting from how devastating the reversal of Roe will be to the credibility of the Court. The career consequences of someone found out are far smaller on right than left, too, I’d wager.

This is in NO WAY the most important story here. Alito’s opinion is horrific, and we have failed the young people of this country yet again. It’s a devastating moment. Much more to say about that, soon.

But I’m with @steve_vladeck and @joeyfishkin about what likely happened here. (Though I think done by a clerk, not a Justice). Occam’s razor. It just makes sense.

Originally tweeted by Amy Kapczynski (@akapczynski) on May 3, 2022.

As I wrote last night, I don’t really care about the leak. The decision was coming down in June anyway and even if some of the rough edges were sanded off of it, it’s obvious that Roe is a goner and this country is devolving into a primitive state ever faster. But when you think about it, this draft had to have been leaked by someone who wanted it to have an impact on the decision (leaking it a month early would hardly be important for electoral purposes) and the most logical reason would be to try to lock in this Alito opinion, not to have them rework it in a month.

No, it’s likely some radical wingnut working in the Court (or a radical Justice) decided that it was important to get Alito’s draft out there to stop whatever compromises might have been made. I don’t know if we’ll ever find out what happened and frankly I’m not super interested. The decision is what’s important and it’s a nightmare for this country. We’re heading back to the 50’s alright. The 1850s.

A wealth of untapped political power lies waiting to be flexed this fall

Your state looks the same. Trust me.

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Edward Abbey was not as radical as today’s conservatives

The leaked draft opinion by Justice Samuel Alito in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization indicates the U.S. Supreme Court is poised to overturn Roe v. Wade when the opinion is released in June. As unprecedented as rolling back women’s rights protected for the last half century is the leaked draft itself. Politico’s report indicates that after oral arguments in December, Alito, Justice Clarence Thomas, and all three Donald Trump appointees, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett, voted to overturn Roe.

There will be hell to pay at the Supreme Court this morning as staff and the justices investigate who leaked the opinion and why.

It’s impossible to overstate the earthquake this will cause inside the Court, in terms of the destruction of trust among the Justices and staff. This leak is the gravest, most unforgivable sin.

— SCOTUSblog (@SCOTUSblog) May 3, 2022

The report went off like a fuel-air explosion overnight (Washington Post):

Such was the force of the report that crowds gathered outside the Supreme Court on Monday night, and political leaders issued fiery statements based on the article.

“If the report is accurate, the Supreme Court is poised to inflict the greatest restriction of rights in the past fifty years — not just on women but on all Americans,” read a joint statement from Senate Majority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.). “… Several of these conservative Justices, who are in no way accountable to the American people, have lied to the U.S. Senate, ripped up the Constitution and defiled both precedent and the Supreme Court’s reputation — all at the expense of tens of millions of women who could soon be stripped of their bodily autonomy and the constitutional rights they’ve relied on for half a century.”

Slate’s Dahlia Lithwick characterized the opinion Monday night for MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow. The “gobsmacking” leak itself confirms that norms and traditions that have steadied Supreme Court jurisprudence for decades and even centuries have been discarded. The court’s public approval has plummeted to new lows in a compressed amount of time, Lithwick observes.

The lack of formal ethics rules, and especially Thomas’s wife’s apparent participation in planning the Jan. 6 insurrection, has damaged the court’s legitimacy. Yet several of the court’s conservatives have argued people must not criticize the court for the very reason that it undermines the court’s legitimacy.

Those arguments echo the pretext conservatives use to justify passing restrictive state voting laws to restore voter confidence in elections they themselves have spent decades relentlessly undermining with false claims of fraud. The conservative Supreme Court majority treads that same path.

Alito argues that Roe was “egregiously wrong from the start. Its reasoning was exceptionally weak, and the decision has had damaging consequences. And far from bringing about a national settlement of the abortion issues, Roe and Casey have enflamed debate and deepened division.”

You ain’t seen nothin’ yet.

Dear Republicans, It’s the middle of the night and a lot of angry voters are at the Supreme Court right now. You made this a partisan court and they will remember in November. This isn’t going away… #RoeVWade pic.twitter.com/PClKGKQs4r

— Aaron Black (@ABlackPolitical) May 3, 2022

“[T]his is not a court,” tweeted the Post’s Jennifer Rubin, “it’s a partisan outfit out to enforce Christian Nationalism.”

Let’s look at that with help last night from Fred Clarkson of Religion Dispatches:

Earlier this year, Ashton Pittman of the Mississippi Free Press published an ahead of the curve, now essential, three part investigation of how the Dobbs case and its potential to overturn Roe was the result of a long term Dominionist religious and political strategy.
Part 3 https://bit.ly/3JKGkKU
Part 2 https://bit.ly/ChristianDomionistWarOnAbortionPart2
Part 1 https://bit.ly/ToRuleHistoryWithGod

Part 1 reinforces what I’ve written for years about the Christian Dominionist right and the far right in general. They don’t want to govern, they want to rule.

In “The Keys to Dominion,” a teaching guide [anti-abortion activist Lou] Engle sells on his website, the preacher tells Christians that “the church’s vocation is to rule history with God.”

“We will govern over kings and judges and they will have to submit. … We’re called to rule! To change history! To be co-regents with God,” the guide says.

Bow before us … er, Jesus.

To fulfill their destiny, conservatives and allied Christian nationalists are willing, if not to burn the country to the ground, to monkeywrench any and all of the norms that have held the United States together for nearly two and a half centuries. Edward Abbey was not this radical.

In Ohio, Republicans are again ignoring the court orders to redraw new districts the state Supreme Court ruled unconstitutional.

And now he has "serious concerns" that even if the commission miraculously OKs a constitutional map by Friday's deadline…the only map that can be used for an Aug 2 primary is one the Ohio Supreme Court already has deemed unconstitutionally gerrymandered in favor of Republicans

— Darrel Rowland (@darreldrowland) May 2, 2022

Refusal to call meetings to count electoral votes in select states or in Congress are ways it’s suggested Republicans will monkeywrench the 2024 presidential election. We are seeing the delaying tactic used in Ohio to manipulate outcomes. TFG has built his life around court delays. Norms are for suckers, not for rulers.

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