Month: June 2022

The alternate electors part of the coup looks more and more nefarious

Sure, this was all on the up and up. And I’m sure Georgia wasn’t the only state involved:

A staffer for Donald Trump’s presidential campaign instructed Republicans planning to cast electoral college votes for Trump in Georgia despite Joe Biden’s victory to operate in “complete secrecy,” an email obtained by The Washington Post shows.

“I must ask for your complete discretion in this process,” wrote Robert Sinners, the campaign’s election operations director for Georgia, the day before the 16 Republicans gathered at the Georgia Capitol to sign certificates declaring themselves duly elected. “Your duties are imperative to ensure the end result — a win in Georgia for President Trump — but will be hampered unless we have complete secrecy and discretion.”

The Dec. 13, 2020, email went on to instruct the electors to tell security guards at the building that they had an appointment with one of two state senators. “Please, at no point should you mention anything to do with Presidential Electors or speak to the media,” Sinners continued in bold.

The admonishments suggest that those who carried out the fake elector planwere concerned that, had the gathering become public before Republicans could follow through on casting their votes, the effort could have been disrupted. Georgia law requires that electors fulfill their duties at the State Capitol. On Dec. 14, 2020, protesters for and against the two presidential candidates had gathered on the Capitol grounds.

Georgia was one of seven states won by Biden where Republican electors gathered Dec. 14, 2020, signing certificates purporting to affirm Trump as the actual victor of their states. Though Biden’s win in Georgia had been formally certified — and reconfirmed after a recount and court cases — Trump supporters later cited the actions of the electors to argue Biden’s win in Georgia and elsewhere remained in doubt.

They argued that when Congress met on Jan. 6, 2021,to count the electoral college votes that Vice President MikePence could choose to recognize Trump’s electors over Biden’s. Trump supporters violently stormed the U.S. Capitol after Pence announced he believed that the Constitution required him to recognize only official electors.

In a statement, Sinners said he was working at the direction of senior campaign officials and Georgia Republican Party Chairman David Shafer, who served as a Trump elector in the state. “I was advised by attorneys that this was necessary in order to preserve the pending legal challenge,” he said.

“Following the Former President’s refusal to accept the results of the election and allow a peaceful transition of power, my views on this matter have changed significantly from where they were on December 13th,” said Sinners, who now works for Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger (R), who resisted Trump’s efforts to overturn the result.

Well, that’s news. Someone’s views on this matter have changed significantly. How novel.

This is one investigation the DOJ does seem to be pursuing. I don’t know where it’s going but instructing people to lie in order to carry out an allegedly lawful act doesn’t exactly look innocent. Stay tuned on this one.

A new book aims to tell us how

Dan Pfeiffer’s new book called “Battling the Big Lie” is out tomorrow and it looks to be pretty good. I enjoy his newsletter so I’m not surprised. He offered an excerpt of the book today:

Let’s do a thought exercise. It’s Election Night 2024. For the third election in a row, it all comes down to Wisconsin. This campaign is a rematch of 2020. President Biden is once again running against Donald Trump, who has somehow avoided prison for his sundry crimes.

If Democrats were still capable of feeling good about elections, we would be feeling pretty good on this night. President Biden has run a strong campaign. The economy is roaring. Unemployment is under 4 percent. Wages are up. Costs are down. The Biden Economic Plan has ushered in a new era of prosperity. Heck, some commentators are calling it “the new New Deal.” The Democratic Senate has even passed a voting rights bill that unwound the rash of voter suppression laws passed by Republicans in the wake of the 2020 election.

The pandemic is in the rearview mirror. America’s oft-delayed return to normalcy is in full swing. We are once again gathering indoors, going to concerts, and generally socializing without fear of contracting a potentially deadly disease. Masks are worn only on Halloween, during surgeries, and by hockey goalies. Sure, we have to get a COVID-19 booster every six months, but Republicans and Democrats agree that this is a small price to pay. To use a term from political science, Americans are in a great fucking mood.

All Americans except Trump, that is. The campaign hasn’t gone well for him. He refused to participate in any of the presidential debates because the Biden campaign wouldn’t agree to any of his chosen moderators. Trump’s choice of podcaster Joe Rogan as  vice-presidential candidate has not turned out to be the political masterstroke Politico Playbook believed. Many Americans are skeptical that the former host of Fear Fac-tor, a man who made a living encouraging contestants to eat live cock-roaches on television, should be a heartbeat away from the presidency. (In this hypothetical, Trump is still a famously unhealthy man with a penchant for McDonald’s and Diet Cokes by the case.) And the Republican National Committee’s decision to host the party’s convention in authoritarian Budapest was not the messaging bonanza for which Trump hoped.

Biden is a clear favorite for reelection against the twice-impeached, two-time loser of the popular vote, but there are, of course, obstacles. The Electoral College dramatically favors the Republicans. Although Biden is widely expected to exceed his 2020 popular vote margin, the election will once again come down to a couple of states whose populations are just a little bit more MAGA than the rest of the nation. This is worrisome for so many reasons— not the least of which is the fact that the safeguards that prevented Trump from stealing the 2020 election are no longer in place. The Republicans now control the House and the Senate. Also, the brave election officials who were the bulwark against the Big Lie the last time around have all been purged. In their place now is a coterie of conspiracy-believing opportunists, not-so-well-hidden MAGA sleeper cells waiting for the signal to overturn the election.

Election Nights have taken on a familiar, but painful rhythm. The redder, rural counties report first, and then Democrats wait with broken glass in our stomachs for the big cities and the mail ballots to come in. We listen to every word uttered by Steve Kornacki and read every tweet by a nerd named Nate, straining for threads of hope. Are there enough votes left to overcome Trump’s lead? In 2016, there weren’t. In 2020, there were. In 2024, there is real optimism that not only will Biden win, but he will win by a margin large enough to render the inevitable Big Lie 2.0 moot.

As we wait with an underlying dread for the votes to be counted— we are Democrats, after all— there is some evidence that 2024 will be the election we hoped for in 2016 and 2020, the electoral ass- whipping that Trump so richly deserves. Based on early returns, it appears the MAGA base has not turned out at anywhere near the level of the previous campaigns.

With most of the other battleground states decided, Wisconsin will be the one deciding the next president of the United States. As we wait and wait for the votes in the Democratic strongholds of Milwaukee and Madison to come in, CNN and MSNBC fill airtime with blabbering pundits and pointless interviews.

Democrats are either dismissive or blithely unaware of what is happening in the right-wing media ecosystem.

Seven in ten Republicans still believe Trump was the actual winner of the 2020 election, but that was an incredibly close election, conducted in the middle of a once-in-a-century pandemic. If Biden wins by more this time, the Big Lie will fall on deaf ears.

On CNN, just as Rick Santorum is confirming his status as America’s dumbest pundit on one of those eight-person goat rodeos masquerading as roundtables, Wolf Blitzer interrupts him for a “KEY RACE UPDATE”:

“With a new batch of votes from Milwaukee and Madison,” Blitzer says, “Joe Biden has now taken a  one- hundred- fifty-thousand- vote lead in the key state of Wisconsin, and CNN is prepared to declare that Joe Biden has been reelected president of the United States.”

A bigger popular- vote win, larger margins in the battleground states— surely any effort to sow distrust in the integrity of the election, let alone overturn the election, will be a fool’s errand. Republicans may not believe in science, but they have to believe in math, right?

Nope.

While we are all listening to the dulcet tones of David Axelrod on CNN or geeking out on Kornacki’s knack for back-of-the-envelope math on MSNBC, over on Fox, a different conversation is happening. There, it is all conspiracy-mongering and nonstop reporting about specious claims of imaginary voter fraud. The same folks who lied about 2020 are lying about 2024. Even though Mark and Sheryl repeatedly promised to do better, Facebook has once again been chock-full of disinformation about mail-in ballots and the integrity of the electoral process. There were stories about dead people who registered to vote, about boxes of mail-in ballots found outside a Smoothie King. Each of these unproven, out-of-context allegations has been shared thousands, if not millions, of times. Trump has echoed these false claims on the stump and in his Gettr posts.

After the other networks call the election for Joe Biden, Fox refuses, based on the same trumped-up bullshit it has been peddling for months. And as Joe Biden is giving his victory speech in front of a raucous COVID-19-free crowd in Wilmington, Delaware, Trump calls into Fox, which is refusing to air Biden’s speech.

“The Fake News is at it again,” he says. “I won this election, and the Democrat mayors, the elites, and illegals are trying to steal it. It’s mail fraud and fake votes. We have to take our country back. The Big Lie is Sleepy Joe won. Many people are saying that Sleepy Joe’s friends in China tapped the machines.”

It makes no sense. This is the ranting of a sad, deranged man, but that hardly matters. People tune in, and Trump’s MAGA base buys every word.

Using a smuggled phone, Steve Bannon starts a Facebook Live stream on Dan Bongino’s page from the toilet of the federal penitentiary that has been his home for the previous eighteen months and will be for the next seven years:6 “It’s time for real Americans to stand up and take our country back,” Bannon says. “Every Republican has a duty to stop the steal by any means necessary.”

A meme with Trump’s face superimposed over the famous “By Any Means Necessary” photo of Malcolm X begins to make the rounds on social media.

At first, Republican officials are dismissive of Trump’s claims. They make promises to honor the election. In a sign of good faith, Mitch McConnell heads to the White House for a photo op with Biden.7

The blowhards on Fox go bananas. Tucker Carlson calls on his viewers to protest the Vichy Republicans unwilling to fight. Protestors show up at GOP offices. A new poll by Crooked  Media— by 2024, Crooked is the premier polling unit in American media8— shows that eight in ten Republicans believe the election was stolen.

Not long after, Rudy Giuliani is called to testify before the hastily convened Special Congressional Committee on Voter Fraud. The former New York City mayor, arriving with crates of affidavits from supposed “witnesses” who claim voter fraud, spins an incredible and not-so-sober tale of foreign election interference that has all the logical consistency of QAnon. One by one, the Republican leaders announce that they will not vote to certify the election.

The Republican governor of Wisconsin announces that his own hastily formed commission, this one helmed by former Trump aide Stephen Miller, has found sufficient evidence of foul play. Therefore, he will not certify the election. Instead, the Wisconsin state legislature will send a slate of electors who intend to cast their votes for Trump. Michigan and Pennsylvania quickly follow suit, denying Biden the requisite 270 electoral votes. Despite no real evidence of malfeasance and a larger margin of victory, another Big Lie takes hold— this time, faster and with more force.

America faces its greatest political crisis in history. The person who won the popular vote and the Electoral College will be denied the presidency.

This is what we are facing. The clock is ticking. The consequences are real. The threats are growing.

I will be deadly honest with you: I don’t have all the answers. There are no easy solutions, and addressing the disinformation will take time we don’t have. But just because we as a society can’t solve the whole problem, it doesn’t mean we can’t do better, fight harder, and think smarter. If we don’t, we are doomed. With that in mind, I have put together a series of ideas about what to do— a plan for Democrats, the media, and every one of us to take up arms in the battle against the Big Lie.

I’ll look forward to reading his ideas. I certainly don’t have any smart ones. But I do see what he sees which is a crisis of democracy that seems to be getting worse. All it will take is one state to throw us into total chaos and spark a real constitutional crisis. And I certainly do not expect the Supreme Court to save us when it happens. That majority is part of the conspiracy.

Meanwhile, you might want to check this out:

Trump on Trial: A Guide to the January 6 Hearings and the Question of Criminality by Norman Eisen, Donald Ayer, Joshua Perry, Noah Bookbinder, and E. Danya Perry Monday, June 6, 2022

With Congress undertaking landmark hearings on all of that, our new Brookings report “Trump on Trial: A Guide to the January 6 Committee Hearings and the Question of Criminality” is a comprehensive guide to the proceedings. The report covers the Committee’s work to date, the key players in the attempt to overturn the election, the known facts regarding their conduct that are expected to be covered at the hearings, and the criminal law applicable to their actions.

The report goes beyond prior analyses to provide the first in-depth treatment of the voluminous publicly available evidence and the relevant law, including possible defenses. It reviews the evidence as to whether Trump as a matter of law conspired with his outside counsel John Eastman, administration lawyer Jeffrey Clark, and others to defraud the United States in violation of 18 U.S.C. § 371 by scheming to block the electoral count on January 6, 2021 and to subvert the Department of Justice’s election enforcement work. The report similarly reviews the evidence as to whether Trump and Eastman violated 18 U.S.C. § 1512(c) with their scheme to obstruct the congressional count.

This is no time for Democrats to entrust the future of the republic to some Capitol Hill fraternity brother. Democrats, if you care about preserving democracy, hire professionals to manage your Jan. 6 presentation and media presence. From outside the Beltway. And pay them.

The Jan.6 committee needs to tell a compelling story, not simply regurgitate dry facts.

It seems they’ve already looked into it. Vanity Fair:

The January 6 committee is apparently not taking any chances with their media strategy on Thursday, when the first in a series of public hearings will air in prime time. Veteran network executive James Goldston, the former president of ABC News, “has joined the committee as an unannounced adviser,” Axios reported Monday. The committee tapped Goldston, whose storytelling expertise breathed life into programs such as Nightline, to shape the cache of material that the committee has amassed over the past year, which reportedly includes more than 140,000 documents and disclosures from over 1,000 depositions and interviews. Thursday’s prime-time hearing, which Goldston is producing, is said to feature both live witnesses and pre-produced video—including clips from some depositions. Goldston “plans to make it raw enough so that skeptical journalists will find the material fresh, and chew over the disclosures in future coverage,” while also getting the attention “of Americans who haven’t followed the ins and outs of the Capitol riot probe,” Axios’s Mike Allen reports.

ABC adds some background:

Tapping Goldston, who was president of ABC News from 2014 to 2021, is an effort to bring storytelling drama to the high stakes story of the attack on the Capitol, which aimed to subvert the certification of the election of President Joe Biden following the November plebiscite. The hearings will look to attract and inform both journalists and citizens who have closely followed the Capitol riot probe as well as viewers who may not be aware of the specifics of the 11-month investigation.

[…]

Goldston was named president of ABC News in 2014 after spending a decade producing prime-time specials and investigative reports for the network. He departed in 2021 after 17 years, saying it was “time for a change” following the election cycle. Since leaving ABC in 2021, Goldston has started his own production company with Kapital Entertainment.

David Roberts of Vox cautions that facts alone won’t change minds. Stories can.

Can't be said enough: if the Dem mental model is …
Jan. 6 hearings lay out facts -> public hears, understands, draws its own conclusions -> public spontaneously rises up to demand accountability
… they are doomed, because that is definitely, definitely not going to happen.

— David Roberts (@drvolts) June 7, 2022

Roberts continues:

If Dems want the public to draw from the committee report a particular narrative, a particular set of meanings, a particular set of responses/reforms, they have to SAY SO, again & again, in every medium, in one voice. They must tell the story, not just the facts.

In a word, they must *politicize* the hearings — they must make it clear that this is a political issue, a political fight over basic questions of law & democracy, to be addressed through democratic politics. Letting the right’s (inevitable) accusations of politicization …

… cow them into some pretense of “just the facts” objectivity, into relying on the public to pull the story out of the facts on its own, would mean they lose again & this moment will disperse & fade just like the impeachment(s).

No minds will be changed on the right. They have their narrative. Dems need to create a narrative that can capture swingy tuned-out voters. That requires some drama & moral clarity, but even more, it requires repetition, repetition, repetition.

“Enrique Tarrio, the former chairman of the Proud Boys, and four other members of the far-right group were indicted on Monday for seditious conspiracy,” reports the New York Times. It seems Democrats will begin their story of intrigue with testimony from a documentary filmmaker and the first Capitol Police office injured in the Jan. 6 riot:

… Nick Quested, a British documentarian who was filming the group with its permission during the riot, and from Caroline Edwards, a Capitol Police officer who was injured, according to videotape of the incident, by a rioter who had been in a conversation moments earlier with one of the Proud Boys indicted on the sedition charge.

The men had already been indicted for attempting to obstruct certification of the 2020 presidential election.

Quested was filming the Proud Boys with their permission before and on Jan. 6, including a planning meeting held in with Stewart Rhodes*, the leader and founder of the Oath Keepers militia, in underground garage the night before.

Ms. Edwards, a well-respected Capitol Police officer, is believed to be the first officer injured in the attack, and suffered a concussion during the assault.

Other officers around the building recall hearing Officer Edwards on the radio calling for help — one of the first signs that day that the mob violence was beginning to overwhelm the police. Months after the attack, Officer Edwards continued to have fainting spells believed to be connected to her injuries.

Now, let’s hope the veteran of Nightline can make their story must-see TV. A lot is riding on bringing the guilty to justice.

*Rhodes’ trial for seditious conspiracy is scheduled for late September.

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Request a copy of For The Win, 4th Edition, my free, countywide get-out-the-vote planning guide for county committees at ForTheWin.us.
If in a position to Play to win in 2022 (see post first), contact tpostsully at gmail dot com.

My hand’s up for contempt

Opposing forces are dug in deep. Whatever Rep. Bennie Thompson’s (D-Miss.) investigative committee presents beginning this week on the Jan. 6 insurrection and its planning is not likely to sway those whose minds are locked like a steel safe.

Benghazi Republicans will insist the committee is illegitimate. They are already preparing counter-programming to focus on economic and cultural issues. The former president will issue more caps-littered press releases and urge the MAGA faithful to defend his honor. Steve Bannon will “weaponize” whatever he hasn’t already weaponized.

Jim Jordan will be Jim Jordan. Fox News will be Fox News.

Fox News ran 1,098 primetime segments on Benghazi from the day of the attack until the committee hearings, which they carried live for more than 7 hours.

Today they announced they won’t cover the hearings on the January 6th insurrection.

— Sawyer Hackett (@SawyerHackett) June 7, 2022

Televised hearings begin Thursday at 8 p.m.

Greg Sargent and Paul Waldman advise Democrats to push back. Hard. Hammer them both as bad-faith actors and as complicit (Washington Post):

Democrats need a strategy to push back. Whatever they do should foreground a simple truth: Many Republicans were either complicit in Trump’s effort to destroy our constitutional order to remain in power illegitimately, have since worked hard to cover it up or both.

So Republicans have zero credibility on these matters, and they should be granted zero standing to address them. Democrats need to say this clearly and forcefully.

The news media will be possessed by a powerful urge to present all of this in the familiar “he said, she said” style that gives equal weight to both sides of an argument, regardless of what each side is saying.

The very Republican players protesting too much will be those implicated in planning, supporting, covering up for and excusing the attempted coup. Jordan among them.

What’s more, as many as a dozen House Republicans were reportedly involved in Trump’s effort to overturn the election in the weeks leading up to Jan. 6. And GOP leaders such as McCarthy are refusing to honor a lawful congressional subpoena in order to keep direct knowledge of Trump’s state of mind during the violent insurrection attempt shielded from the public.

These Republicans, of course, have the right to make their case. But they don’t have a right to have their inevitably fantastical, bad-faith-saturated claims passed on to readers and viewers uncritically.

The media should take especial care not to treat Republicans’ “absurdly transparent effort to muddy the waters” as anything other than a sideshow.

“Their BS deserves nothing but pure contempt,” Sargent tweeted.

Fox & Friends once again fearmongers that the "largest-ever migrant caravan" is gathering in Mexico https://t.co/j9rBHkFx9Q pic.twitter.com/eFpV8FSW8u

— Media Matters (@mmfa) June 6, 2022

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Request a copy of For The Win, 4th Edition, my free, countywide get-out-the-vote planning guide for county committees at ForTheWin.us.
If in a position to Play to win in 2022 (see post first), contact tpostsully at gmail dot com.

Republicans just can’t figure out what to do about him

I love these Selena Zito dispatches from Pennsylvania where she frets and fulminates about the crazies taking over the Republican party. This is a woman who loves Donald Trump and apparently sees no connection between the two men:

The first time Cheryl Rubio ever heard of Doug Mastriano was when she caught his interview on Steve Bannon’s “War Room” television show. This was shortly after the retired Army colonel won a special election in the state Senate’s 33rd District to fill the seat vacated by former Sen. Rich Alloway, a Chambersburg Republican who resigned in 2019.

“He just appeared to me as a very strong individual; he came across as bright and informative. I looked him up, and I just read about him and thought he was interesting,” the small business owner said.

Ms. Rubio, 66 and a Republican primary voter, explained that in general elections she does not vote straight Republican: “I split my vote all of the time; I vote for the individual. However, in a primary here we have to vote in the party we are registered, so I did my homework and thought he was the best for the job for the general election in November.”

She wasn’t alone. Despite nine GOP candidates on the ballot battling it out for their party’s nomination, the truth is there was no battle at all: Mr. Mastriano, the first-term state legislator, earned just a smidge fewer votes than all his rivals combined.

And Republicans here were really juiced to vote in this year’s primary: GOP turnout hit 38%, the highest primary turnout in a midterm election in decades.

Mr. Mastriano’s rapid ascent in Pennsylvania Republican politics took an odd path. He seems to have hired no strategists to help him beat the other well-funded candidates for governor. He just hit the road and held tent revival-type rallies in places none of the experts sent their candidates.

And he used Facebook. A lot.

Former state party chairman Rob Gleason said Mr. Mastriano knew the base, something every strategist and advisor including himself — he helped former U.S. Attorney Bill McSwain — miscalculated: “He not only understood them; he outworked everyone else on the ballot,” Mr. Gleason admitted.

Mr. Gleason also admits that a weak state party — including way too many strategists making money off of candidates who had no chance to win — made Mr. Mastriano’s win more likely.

“I was in denial about that at the beginning, but as things went on, I found it to be difficult; I didn’t realize how entrenched his supporters were and how out of touch everyone else was with them,” Mr. Gleason said.

Ask a Republican why he or she voted for Mastriano, and the answer is often “Why not?”

But what do we know about him really? I’ve called Mr. Mastriano directly several times to get that answer, to no avail. But his voicemail message pretty much says everything:

“Hi. You know who you called. Leave a message. Maybe they’ll call you back. Then again, maybe they won’t. That’s how life is. Point is you’ve done what you can.”

There’s a deep “Frank Underwood” cynicism in that message — but I indeed have done what I can: Text messages are delivered but never answered, and his Bucks County event a few days before the election physically barred any journalist from entering — a situation that was repeated at nearly all of his rallies.

I called the Republican Governors Association, the campaign committee that helps Republican gubernatorial candidates raise money for their campaigns, and they told me they only had an email address for a Mastriano staffer who, to date, has yet to respond.

What we do know about Mr. Mastriano is that his rigid ideology hovers on the fringe of American politics. He has appeared with proponents of the QAnon conspiracy theory; his speeches are chock full of religious nationalism; he led the charge to overturn Mr. Biden’s victory here; and at the start of the coronavirus pandemic, he pushed for a public registry of people who had tested positive for the virus.

Mr. Mastriano’s ploy to run as a mini-Trump has holes: He bars the press coverage Mr. Trump relished, and he has no interest in building a coalition to win, instead apparently believing God will guide him to victory with only the right wing at his side. Mr. Trump, on the other hand, always intuitively understood that building coalitions was the only way to win.

Mr. Trump could get away with his quips because he had years of experience doing just that in the public eye and he never took himself too seriously. Mr. Mastriano is serious about everything he says and expects everyone to take him seriously.

But the things Mr. Mastriano is serious about — like re-litigating the 2020 election — are wildly out of touch with the things voters are concerned about, like education, inflation, taxes, roads and bridges and economic opportunity. People rarely vote for the past; they are always living and looking in the moment and towards the future.

Many Republican primary voters I interviewed said they were much more focused on the U.S. Senate race than the gubernatorial race, admitting they voted for the name they knew most when they went into the voting booth.

It was hard not to know who Mr. Mastriano was; you either tripped over one of his thousands of yard signs or got a mailer from either Democrat Josh Shapiro or the Commonwealth Partners telling you not to vote for him. We all know the “reverse effect” those efforts tend to have — which is why Mr. Shapiro paid to mail them.

Both Terry Madonna and Keystone College political science professor Jeff Brauer agree that Republicans are going to have a very big year in this November’s midterm election cycle; they also both agree that Mr. Mastriano will be one of the rare Republicans who will struggle even to get near the winners’ circle.

She goes on to blame “the consultant class” and the state party but not once does she look to her idol Trump as perhaps being the cause of this devolution to lunacy in the Pennsylvania GOP. She even says Trump “never took himself too seriously” which is ridiculous. Nobody takes himself as seriously as Trump does and he’s deadly serious about re-litigating the 2020 election because he’s a monumental sore loser who cannot admit that he didn’t win “in a landslide.”

There are many fathers and mothers of the GOP slide into surreal wingnuttia and it began long ago. But Mastriano is purely a Trump creature, first generation. If you want to understand why he won all you have to do is look at the Big Orange guy who endorsed him.

Very popular

We are once again held hostage by a batshit minority:

Seventy percent of Americans think enacting new gun control laws should take precedence over protecting ownership rights, according to an ABC News/Ipsos poll out Sunday.

The findings indicate widespread support for stricter gun control laws in the wake of mass shootings in Buffalo, New York, Uvalde, Texas, and Tulsa, Oklahoma.

 On the flip side, 29% of respondents believe protecting the right to own a wide variety of guns should be a higher priority than enacting new gun control laws, the poll suggests.

The gap between the two positions has widened by 9 points since March 2021, when the same poll found that 66% of people favored new gun control laws, while 34% preferred protecting gun ownership rights.

The results were split along partisan lines, with 90% of Democrats and 75% of independents surveyed prioritizing new gun laws. Fifty-six percent of Republicans in the poll said protecting gun ownership rights takes priority.

Thirty-five percent of respondents approved of President Biden’s handling of gun violence, an increase from when the question was asked in January and December.

 Both parents and children are concerned about gun violence in schools, according to a new CBS News poll released Sunday.

Among parents of school-aged kids, 72% described themselves as very or somewhat concerned about the possibility gun violence at their children’s schools.

A large majority of parents of school-aged children described themselves as sad, scared, nervous and angry in the wake of the Uvalde mass shooting at Robb Elementary School.

Nearly one-third of parents said their children worry “a lot” about gun violence at school, and more than half of the parents surveyed said their children felt scared and sad in the wake of the Uvalde shooting.

 Seventy-two percent of respondents in the ABC News/Ipsos poll said they viewed gun violence as extremely or very important in determining their votes in the upcoming midterms.

Seventy-four percent of those surveyed saw gas prices as extremely or very important, while taxes (67%) and abortion (63%) were also standout issues.

I don’t know if people will be as acutely interested in gun control in Novemeber. The Democrats should do everything they can to ensure they are. But if issues govern how people vote (they don’t) the November race would be a toss-up. GOP wins on gas [prices and taxes and the Dems win on guns and abortion.

If only it were that simple…

It’s all we need

Josh Marshall has an op-ed in the NY Times about how to mobilize voters to protect a woman’s right to choose. I think he’s right:

After the Democrats came up with just 49 votes to bring a Roe-protecting bill before the Senate on May 11, they promised to keep fighting and, in the words of Senator Amy Klobuchar, “take that fight right to the ballot box” in November. But you can’t make an election into a referendum on an issue if you can’t point to anything winning the election would accomplish. To make the 2022 elections a referendum on Roe, Democrats have to put protecting Roe and abortion rights on the table.

Here’s one way to do that: get clear public commitments from every Senate Democrat (and candidate for Senate) not only to vote for the Roe bill in January 2023 but also to change the filibuster rules to ensure that a majority vote would actually pass the bill and send it to the White House for the president’s signature.

At present, there are likely 48 Senate Democrats who can make that pledge. Senators Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema are dead set against any changes to the filibuster — a fact you likely know because most of President Biden’s agenda has been bottled up behind their refusal for the past year. Some claim that Senators Manchin and Sinema are just taking the public heat for a number of other Senate Democrats who are also unwilling to change the filibuster rules. That’s highly unlikely. But if any do have misgivings, that’s why the public commitments are so important. Getting a list of holdouts down to a publicly named handful is the first step to persuading them to fall in line.

If my math is right and there are 48 Senate Democrats ready to make that pledge, they need two additional Democratic senators in the next Congress. And that is the party’s message that makes the 2022 midterms a referendum on Roe: “Give us the House and two more senators, and we will make Roe law in January 2023.”

It’s common sense.
A woman’s right to choose is a popular position. For many people it’s fundamental. Democrats should make a pledge to actually do something specific to ensure that women maintain that right when they have the power to do it.

Waving hands and whataboutism

Check out the GOP attempts to talk about anything but their attempted coup:

I think we know who likes to talk about the coup more than anyone in the whole country, don’t we? That’s right. Dear Leader. He doesn’t like to talk about January 6th. But he sure loves to talk about the Big Lie which is what led up to it.

White nationalist tech bros

We’ve heard a lot about Elon Musk lately and his former comrade peter Thiel’s fair-haired boy JD Vance. Here’s another one:

Tech investor and Arizona Republican Senate hopeful Blake Masters acknowledges that the United States has a gun violence problem. But he also has a theory about why there’s a problem—it’s “Black people, frankly.”

Masters boiled the issue down in an April 11 interview on the Jeff Oravits Show podcast, telling the host that “we do have a gun violence problem in this country, and it’s gang violence.”

“It’s people in Chicago, St. Louis shooting each other. Very often, you know, Black people, frankly,” Masters clarified. “And the Democrats don’t want to do anything about that.”

It’s unclear why Masters—who has pushed the baseless “great replacement” conspiracy theory narrative—felt compelled to single out Black people. Moments earlier in the interview, during a discussion about Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson’s confirmation hearings, Masters told Oravits that “most Americans just, you know, just want to stop obsessing about race all the time,” adding that “the left’s biggest tool in their toolkit is just to divide people on the basis of race, and that’s really messed up.”

He kind of shows his cards there, doesn’t he? “Don’t talk about race! Pssst…. it’s Black people frankly,”

He’s not just hostile to immigrants and Black people though. Check out this ad from his Republican rival:

Devastating new campaign ad against Trump-endorsed AZ Senate candidate Blake Masters by his primary opponent that has Junior furious this morning. pic.twitter.com/24fuZIHJSV

— Ron Filipkowski (@RonFilipkowski) June 6, 2022

Masters—who has also likened federal campaign disclosure laws to Kristallnacht—veered into conspiratorial territory.

Democrats “don’t like the Second Amendment,” he said, because “it frankly blocks a lot of their plans for us”—an unhinged, fact-free statement that liberal officials have cooked up a plot to physically force conservatives to comply with some unarticulated maleficent regime, but have been bayed by fears that a constitutionally endowed populace will shoot them if they try…

“They talk about crime but I find it crocodile tears,” Masters said, an apparent reference to Democratic outrage over an unending drumroll of domestic massacres. “Because if they were actually tough on crime they would get serious about gang violence.” (Masters himself did not put forward a solution to gang violence in the interview.)

He also has extreme views on abortion and birth control:

I am 100% pro-life. Roe v. Wade was a horrible decision. It was wrong the day it was decided in 1973, it’s wrong today, and it must be reversed. But the fight doesn’t stop there,” Master’s campaign website reads. It goes on to pledge the candidate will “vote only for federal judges who understand that Roe and Griswold and Casey were wrongly decided, and that there is no constitutional right to abortion.”

Typical libertarian bro, in my experience. Freedom isn’t really for the girls…

Billionaire Thiel is pouring money into his campaign. And Trump just endorsed him.

It’s everywhere this week. And for good reason.

In a couple of weeks, the United States will “celebrate” one of the most shameful political events in its history: the 50th anniversary of Watergate.

The infamous break-in started out as what the Nixon White House dismissively called a “third rate burglary,” but over the course of the following two years an incredible story of crude criminality, corruption, and even possible treason unfolded before the public, resulting in dozens of jail sentences and the only presidential resignation in American history. It may seem odd to commemorate such a notorious event but it could not be more relevant to our modern times.

This week begins the first public hearings aiming to unravel an equally serious White House scandal, featuring another corrupt president and all his men and women, that could have even more far-reaching consequences for the country than the first one. The original gumshoe reporters on Watergate, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, who became the most famous journalists in the country, have reported on both events. Unsurprisingly, they both draw some predictable parallels between the two. Writing in the Washington Post over the weekend, the two veterans made this observation:

As reporters, we had studied Nixon and written about him for nearly half a century, during which we believed with great conviction that never again would America have a president who would trample the national interest and undermine democracy through the audacious pursuit of personal and political self-interest.

And then along came Trump.

Their column recapitulates all of the highlights of Watergate (and it’s always shocking to see it again in narrative form) and draws the parallels with Trump, showing where he crossed similar lines — and went beyond even Nixon. Woodward and Bernstein call Trump “the first seditious president in American history” and characterize Nixon and him this way:

Both Nixon and Trump created a conspiratorial world in which the U.S. Constitution, laws and fragile democratic traditions were to be manipulated or ignored, political opponents and the media were “enemies,” and there were few or no restraints on the powers entrusted to presidents. […] Both Nixon and Trump have been willing prisoners of their compulsions to dominate, and to gain and hold political power through virtually any means. In leaning so heavily on these dark impulses, they defined two of the most dangerous and troubling eras in American history.

As Washington warned in his Farewell Address more than 225 years ago, unprincipled leaders could create “permanent despotism,” “the ruins of public liberty,” and “riot and insurrection.”

Watergate caused a lot of damage to the United States. It created a new layer of cynicism and distrust that never quite went away and the pardon of Richard Nixon was probably the biggest error in political judgment. While many of his accomplices did face serious prison terms, the man himself — the mastermind — was never held to account legally. That sent Richard Nixon’s own message to a whole generation of conservative legal minds: “When the president does it, it’s not illegal.” In fact, they fully embraced a doctrine around it called the Unitary Executive Theory, which they then whispered in Donald Trump’s ears as he smashed every rule and norm of the Executive branch. He did this publicly rather than surreptitiously as Nixon had done because he didn’t know any better. Recall his oft-repeated insistence on his power to “do anything I want”:

There were a number of instances in which both presidents issued insane and illegal orders with some functionaries eagerly signing on while others blocked and tackled to prevent anyone from carrying it out. Recall that Nixon ordered a break-in of the Brookings Institute (which G. Gordon Liddy then proposed should be firebombed) and Trump wanted to launch missiles into Mexico to “take out the drug labs” and then deny it. They both wanted protesters shot and considered the free press the enemy. But it is not comforting to know that the only thing standing between America being a democratic nation and a fully formed tyranny is a few functionaries failing to follow his orders.

It’s fair to wonder if Nixon had been fully held to account for his crimes if there would have been a Donald Trump. You can certainly bet that the lesson Trump took from Nixon was that he would never have to pay a price for what he did as president. And it looks more and more as if he was right. In fact, it may be that he won’t even have to pay a political price much less a legal one.

Congresswoman Liz Cheney, R-Wy., told Robert Costa of CBS on Sunday that the January 6th Committee has evidence of an “extremely broad and “extremely well-organized” conspiracy to overturn the 2020 election. When asked if she thinks people will watch the hearings, she said:

“We are, in fact, in a situation where he continues to use even more extreme language, frankly, than the language that caused the attack. And so, people must pay attention. People must watch, and they must understand how easily our democratic system can unravel if we don’t defend it.”

Saying they must is not the same as saying they will. I certainly hope they will but I don’t think we can count on Republicans tuning in. As Cheney herself said, many Republicans have “pledged their allegiance” to Trump over country although she also thinks “the majority of Republicans across the country don’t want to see our system unravel.” I’m not so sure about that.

It’s worrying that the right is going to ignore, lie, obfuscate, distract, whatever it takes to keep people believing that Trump’s lawbreaking was simply a presidential prerogative instead of a coup attempt by the greatest sore loser in history. They certainly do not expect that Trump will be held legally responsible for what he did. After all, he had his “Article II” that says it’s not illegal if the president does it.

Last week we found out that the Department of Justice has declined to prosecute former White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows and former adviser Dan Scavino for contempt of congress. They didn’t specify why, and there might be good reasons for it if they are investigating White House involvement, including the president, in the coup attempt. If that’s the case, it’s one of the most tight-lipped DOJ investigations in history.

In one of the big Watergate cases concerning the cover-up of the burglary, in which John Mitchell the former Attorney General and top White House staffers H. R. Haldeman, John D. Ehrlichman among others were convicted, the president was named an unindicted co-conspirator. It remains to be seen if Trump’s attempt to overturn the election will merit comparable accountability, however tepid it might be.

This week begins a new phase in this ongoing crisis of democracy. Let’s hope the Jan. 6 committee can lay out the story in such stark terms that at the very least there will be political fall-out for Donald Trump that shakes loose a few of his cult followers. I’m afraid that may be the best we can hope for. 

Salon