Month: July 2022

Or, sinking while the music plays

Getting Democrats to think outside the box is one helluva challenge. Unless you are selling some silver-bullet campaign tech. The wise ones on the Hill are still convinced kitchen table issues are what motivate voters. What you regularly see on the ground is Democrats’ attachment for doing what they’ve always done no matter how many times they lose doing it. Among the elite, there is a fixed way of thinking about politics that has not kept up with reality.

Brian Beutler addressed that problem this week as a difference between how Dempcrats and Republicans conceive of their roles, writing, “At bottom, I think the explanation is that the right has imagined itself as an insurgent force in American politics and the center-left has accepted its incumbency, or the inevitability of progress on a long-enough time scale.” It’s why Democrats sometimes seem so slow to respond to crisis:

Since the New Deal, through eras of ascendency and retreat, Democrats have sought political power almost exclusively as a means of modifying and expanding the terms of a social contract for Americans. They are driven by the pursuit of ideological goals and interest group demands, nearly all of which entail passing significant pieces of legislation. Their presidents view their own legacies as synonymous with how much they can get done on that front, and how well it stacks up to what FDR managed to achieve. If not FDR, then LBJ; if not LBJ, then Barack Obama. Be like them, and not only will history remember you fondly, but your party will thrive as the public rallies to the side of solidary leaders.

They have also, rightly and wrongly, projected mirror-image ambitions on to their opponents, imagining the great pendulum swings of politics as a tit-for-tat between common-good liberals and libertarian-minded conservatives; a world where the Republican ideal of political greatness runs through the Reaganesque devolution of the welfare state and other institutions of collective power. 

It’s a pleasingly symmetrical model, and there have been times when it resembled reality, but I think it’s mostly wrong, and completely outmoded today. FDR was a rare leader, but it’s reductionist in the extreme to attribute the durability of Democratic power after he died entirely to the way he governed, rather than, say, to the fact that the Democratic coalition included segregationists who rigged elections for themselves. Reagan really did preside over a hollowing-out of the New Deal, but the New-Deal coalition was already in tatters by the 1980s, and it’s incorrect to think of Reagan’s “success” in purely fiscal terms. Even then, Republicans viewed fleeting control over the federal government as an opportunity to undermine Democratic power centers, to structurally weaken their opponents. 

If anything’s changed it’s the level of GOP zest for frontal attacks on the welfare state. Through the 2010s, Republicans used power principally to sever the connection between popular Democratic majorities and their ability to claim and wield power for themselves. They still cut taxes for the rich and sabotaged social programs when the opportunity arose. But the first thing they did after the 2010 midterms was gerrymander Democrats into semi-permanent minority status anywhere they could. Then they came for labor rights and public-sector unions and campaign-finance regulations and voting rights and the Census. When they’ve lost, they’ve used their expiring trifectas to strip incoming Democrats of the authorities they had wielded gleefully. They use power not just to remake the social contract, but as a means of power accretion in itself. In the Trump and post-Trump era, the core Republican aspiration is to torment and persecute liberals and their purported allies; to wield power from the minority through nullification and judicial fiat; to own the libs.

The Democratic Party’s ambitions haven’t changed to counter this rogue turn. 

Democrats’ conviction that their adversaries hold symmetrical but opposing policy stances is failing the country. Anyone needing further confirmation of that analysis should read Jonathan Swan’s chilling account of Republican plans to reclassify a large swath of mid-level public servants as Schedule F employees the next time they hold the White House. Then eliminate them. Perhaps as early as Jan. 20, 2025, they could begin replacing people who’ve dedicated themselves to public service with reactionary, misogynistic “Christians” like this guy:

Right-wing groups have already drawn up lists of candidates for positions to be re-filled (those they don’t plan to eliminate). Think Trump 1.0 was chaos? Just wait. Even if Trump 2.0 is not named Trump, Trumpism will live on. As Digby noted Friday:

If you don’t think this could literally destroy the country you are unaware of how much our nation relies on the federal government to make everything we take for granted on a daily basis function. These people are nihilists and they do not care about that.

Democrats do. But they won’t counter it any better than they did the overturn of Roe if they don’t reconceptualize how they think about politics. Policy and program design is fun and all that, but for Republicans more than for Democrats, personnel is policy.

Beutler again:

The broad left has effectively redoubled its conviction that the best way to deal with the right’s politics of rule or ruin is to pull the policy lever ever harder. Different Democrats have different intuitions about how the policy lever is supposed to work. Progressives imagine transformational, redistributive policies will generate working-class solidarity and an unbeatable rainbow coalition. Moderates believe competent management, along with popular but incremental new reforms will capture the political center, without which Republicans can’t win.

But both believe that good policy, and good execution, are destiny, and that consensus is visible in the party’s vast technocratic class, the army of Mr. Fix-its who ride to the rescue after Republicans leave everything in a smoldering heap.

They two parties are not even playing the same game. Democrats are playing one their opponents have long abandoned, and by rules Republicans think are for suckers.

Anymore, when I see more-progressive-than-thou wonks debating the weakneeses of policy proposals that won’t pass anyway, I’m out. They are playing Risk in a bomb shelter while shells explode around them.

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You’ve probably already seen this but here it is again:

Sea lions often rest on the beach and inevitably some dumbass gets up close and bothers them. It’s infuriating and when I see it I always go up and tell them that the animals are diseased and will get them sick if they get too close and the idiots usually back off.

Those sea lions took care of business on their own. I love it.

Here’s some cute seal action:

It’s the stuff of nightmares

Jonathan Swan has the details. Oh My God:

Former President Trump’s top allies are preparing to radically reshape the federal government if he is re-elected, purging potentially thousands of civil servants and filling career posts with loyalists to him and his “America First” ideology, people involved in the discussions tell Axios.

The impact could go well beyond typical conservative targets such as the Environmental Protection Agency and the Internal Revenue Service. Trump allies are working on plans that would potentially strip layers at the Justice Department — including the FBI, and reaching into national security, intelligence, the State Department and the Pentagon, sources close to the former president say.

During his presidency, Trump often complained about what he called “the deep state.”

The heart of the plan is derived from an executive order known as “Schedule F,” developed and refined in secret over most of the second half of Trump’s term and launched 13 days before the 2020 election.

The reporting for this series draws on extensive interviews over a period of more than three months with more than two dozen people close to the former president, and others who have firsthand knowledge of the work underway to prepare for a potential second term. Most spoke on condition of anonymity to describe sensitive planning and avoid Trump’s ire.

As Trump publicly flirts with a 2024 comeback campaign, this planning is quietly flourishing from Mar-a-Lago to Washington — with his blessing but without the knowledge of some people in his orbit.

Trump remains distracted by his obsession with contesting the 2020 election results. But he has endorsed the work of several groups to prime an administration-in-waiting. Personnel and action plans would be executed in the first 100 days of a second term starting on Jan. 20, 2025.

Their work could accelerate controversial policy and enforcement changes, but also enable revenge tours against real or perceived enemies, and potentially insulate the president and allies from investigation or prosecution.

They intend to stack thousands of mid-level staff jobs. Well-funded groups are already developing lists of candidates selected often for their animus against the system — in line with Trump’s long-running obsession with draining “the swamp.” This includes building extensive databases of people vetted as being committed to Trump and his agenda.

The preparations are far more advanced and ambitious than previously reported. What is happening now is an inversion of the slapdash and virtually non-existent infrastructure surrounding Trump ahead of his 2017 presidential transition.

These groups are operating on multiple fronts: shaping policies, identifying top lieutenants, curating an alternative labor force of unprecedented scale, and preparing for legal challenges and defenses that might go before Trump-friendly judges, all the way to a 6-3 Supreme Court.

I doubt Trump really cares about any of this. He just wants to prove he’s not the loser that he is by winning. Whatever happens after that is an afterthought.
But other people do care and they are preparing to seize power for their own reasons.

Trump signed an executive order, “Creating Schedule F in the Excepted Service,” in October 2020, which established a new employment category for federal employees. It received wide media coverage for a short period, then was largely forgotten in the mayhem and aftermath of Jan. 6 — and quickly was rescinded by President Biden.

Sources close to Trump say that if he were elected to a second term, he would immediately reimpose it.

Tens of thousands of civil servants who serve in roles deemed to have some influence over policy would be reassigned as “Schedule F” employees. Upon reassignment, they would lose their employment protections.

New presidents typically get to replace more than 4,000 so-called “political” appointees to oversee the running of their administrations. But below this rotating layer of political appointees sits a mass of government workers who enjoy strong employment protections — and typically continue their service from one administration to the next, regardless of the president’s party affiliation.

An initial estimate by the Trump official who came up with Schedule F found it could apply to as many as 50,000 federal workers — a fraction of a workforce of more than 2 million, but a segment with a profound role in shaping American life.

Trump, in theory, could fire tens of thousands of career government officials with no recourse for appeals. He could replace them with people he believes are more loyal to him and to his “America First” agenda.

Even if Trump did not deploy Schedule F to this extent, the very fact that such power exists could create a significant chilling effect on government employees.

It would effectively upend the modern civil service, triggering a shock wave across the bureaucracy. The next president might then move to gut those pro-Trump ranks — and face the question of whether to replace them with her or his own loyalists, or revert to a traditional bureaucracy.

Such pendulum swings and politicization could threaten the continuity and quality of service to taxpayers, the regulatory protections, the checks on executive power, and other aspects of American democracy.

Trump’s allies claim such pendulum swings will not happen because they will not have to fire anything close to 50,000 federal workers to achieve the result, as one source put it, of “behavior change.” Firing a smaller segment of “bad apples” among the career officials at each agency would have the desired chilling effect on others tempted to obstruct Trump’s orders.

They say Schedule F will finally end the “farce” of a nonpartisan civil service that they say has been filled with activist liberals who have been undermining GOP presidents for decades.

Unions and Democrats would be expected to immediately fight a Schedule F order. But Trump’s advisers like their chances in a judicial system now dominated at its highest levels by conservatives.

Rep. Gerry Connolly (D-Va.), who chairs the subcommittee that oversees the federal civil service, is among a small group of lawmakers who never stopped worrying about Schedule F, even after Biden rescinded the order. Connolly has been so alarmed that he attached an amendment to this year’s defense bill to prevent a future president from resurrecting Schedule F. The House passed Connolly’s amendment but Republicans hope to block it in the Senate.

If you don’t think this could literally destroy the country you are unaware of how much our nation relies on the federal government to make everything we take for granted on a daily basis function. These people are nihilists and they do not care about that.

Please go and read the whole article. It’s long but it’s worth it. The list of people who are working on this project are familiar and terrifying — Navarro, Patel etc, even Ginni Thomas.

It cannot happen. Not again. It will be one hundred times worse than the first time.

And the media reaction to Biden’s diagnosis

James Fallows discusses Biden’s diagnosis and the press corps’ inane reaction to it yesterday in his newsletter today:

I am roughly two presidential-terms younger than Joe Biden. He is 79. I am 72. I can only begin to imagine how disorienting it is for Biden to be a living fossil in American politics, considering that at age 29 he was one of the youngest people ever elected to the U.S. Senate.

(Anyone first known as remarkably “young” in a particular job, as Biden was, has to adjust to becoming known as “old.” Bill Clinton, now senior statesman, was a boy-wonder governor of Arkansas. Jimmy Carter, the oldest-ever former president, was among the youngest presidents when sworn in. Al Gore was in Congress in his 20s and first ran for president at age 39.)

But I’ll share my experience of what it is like, as a “mature” American, to finally get a positive test result. This happened to me about six weeks ago.

I had tried like crazy to avoid exposure. Some people are now “double-boosted”—the original two vaccinations, plus two boosters. I’ll just say, I’ve had at least that many shots. My wife, Deb, and I barely left our home during the first year of the pandemic. Since then, we’ve avoided most travel, and have gone by car or our propeller plane whenever we could.

But about six weeks ago, I suddenly tested positive—on the excellent free library-based PCR tests in DC, confirmed on our rapid-result home antigen test. How did I get it? No doubt by going to a college reunion a few days earlier—either en route through airport exposure, where people with violent hacking coughs wore no masks (though I had a N95 mask on the whole time), or at a reunion dinner.

Who knows exactly where or how. It doesn’t matter.

I would rather not have gotten infected. I live in fear of long-term Covid effects. But once it happened, it wasn’t that bad. For two days I had a cough and felt tired. Then for about ten days I felt entirely normal—but stayed hermit-like by myself in a separate part of the house. Deb, who kept her distance, has still always tested negative.

Via Zoom, I talked with my doctor the first day I tested positive. I asked about Paxlovid; she said that unless the symptoms got worse (which they didn’t), I should avoid it or any other drugs (which I did). By Day 11 after the first positive test, I was testing negative again. Soon after that, I was able to do a public event in DC—a wonderful Politics & Prose bookstore discussion with the author Patrick Radden Keefe, about his new book Rogues. For now, my Covid experience seems to be over.

Moral? You’d rather not get this disease. But if you’re vaccinated, it doesn’t have to be that bad, even if you’re old. Let’s hope that is the case for Biden.

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2. The White House press corps has lost its mind, or at least its perspective.

More than twenty-five years ago, in my book Breaking the News, I wrote about the gulf between the gotcha obsessions of the White House press corps, and the issues most Americans were most interested in learning about.

The press is supposed to be a proxy for the public’s interests. Too often, it’s a proxy only for itself.

Today offered a classic illustration—if you can stand to watch it, which I recommend that you don’t. It’s the C-Span clip of this afternoon’s full White House briefing, when officials Karine Jean-Pierre (the press secretary) and Dr. Ashish Jha (the Covid advisor) answered questions about Biden’s diagnosis

The questions included: Where was a comma placed, and why, in the White House doctor’s letter? (Time 30:30). And, was a White House videographer unfairly exposed when recording a video of Biden that was shot outdoors. (Time 13:17)? And, what about wild hypotheticals? (Time 50:09). And, how was the White House going to track people Biden had met recently? (Trust me: this is not hard. Anyone who has met an incumbent president, remembers it.)

That is, the representatives of the public asked questions it would not have occurred to any other Americans to wonder about.

The whole tone was nit-picking and prosecutorial. And it reflected no awareness of the difference between the last time a serving president tested positive for Covid—when Trump was rushed to Walter Reed, in secrecy and with lies about his real condition—and now, when Biden’s team promptly and routinely announced the testing news.

“There are real flashbacks to when Trump got Covid, and he ended up spending several days at Walter Reed,” a White House reporter for a major network told the network’s anchor just after the press conference. (I’m intentionally not using the reporter’s name, or the network’s; it’s a systemic rather than an individual problem.)

Actually, there aren’t “real flashbacks.” Trump lied about his condition, and co-opted his staff in that effort. He was also in much more serious medical peril, in an era before vaccinations and boosters. Comments like these are meant as “context,” but appear without any context. History is important. Just plugging in “here’s something that happened before” isn’t history and doesn’t help.

I’ll say it again: the hoary phrase, “See things steady, and see them whole” is a goal for the media. These are words you won’t see in the White House press room, or a TV green room.

That performance by the media yesterday was one of the worst I’ve seen. Embarrassing. On the other hand, all you have to do is recall the utter insanity around Hillary Clinton’s illness on the campaign trail.

And yes, they reacted dramatically to Trump’s Covid diagnosis, but there was good reason for that! He denied it, almost died and he had been running around holding super-spreader rallies and trying to give it to Joe Biden. Biden is quadruple vaxxed, his symptoms are very mild, they immediately informed the public when he tested positive and doctors are being open and transparent. I know Biden is old and it’s very exciting to contemplate him dying in office but really, their performance yesterday was just ghoulish.

He had a real meltdown

You can’t imagine the replies on these posts. Truth Social is a cesspool, loaded with disgusting trolls on both sides, and I do mean disgusting. And post after post is full of memes like these from the true believers:

Those are actually tame compared to a lot of what you see there. It makes twitter look like the Oxford debate club by comparison. It’s perfect for Trump.

New polling shows serious erosion in support

What????

The Republican Party has suffered a heavy loss of support from senior voters in recent months, a key demographic for the party in November’s midterms and for Donald Trump‘s presidential ambitions, according to polls.

A recent survey conducted by CNN and the research firm SSRS found that 47 percent of those aged 65 and over said they would vote for a GOP candidate if the midterm congressional election for their district were held “today,” with slightly more people aged 65 and over saying they would vote for a Democratic candidate (49 percent).

This is a major turnaround from May, when a previous CNN/SSRS poll found that nearly two-thirds of those aged 65 and over (62 percent) said they would back a Republican candidate in the midterms, compared to just 37 percent of seniors who said they would back a Democratic candidate.

According to the results, the GOP has seen a 15 percent drop in support from those aged 65 and over—one of the main demographics in any election—in just two months between the two polls being conducted.

As noted by John Della Volpe, director of polling at the Harvard Kennedy School Institute of Politics, the GOP has also seen an “erosion” of support between other key demographics between the two polls in May and July.

These include a fall of 3 percent (49 to 46) from registered voters and a 4 percent drop in support from potential women voters. The survey results are troublesome for the GOP as they hope to regain control of both the House and Senate in November’s midterms.

It’s also the case that younger baby boomers are entering that cohort in large numbers and they have tended to be more liberal in recent years than the older cohort so maybe that’s having an effect. On the other hand, Trump is still very popular among the over-65 Republicans and they will be decisive in choosing the nominee.

I don’t know exactly what accounts for this change. I suppose it’s possible that a few oldsters are having second thoughts about leaving the planet to fascists? But whatever it is, the Republicans can’t afford to lose even one over-65. That is their main demographic and they are in trouble if they lose them.

The Committee homes in on Trump’s January 6th

If Donald Trump knew any history — which he most certainly does not — you might think that he based his January 6 rally and march to the Capitol on the infamous March on Rome, a 1923 coup d’etat orchestrated by Benito Mussolini. That is when Mussolini’s blackshirts staged a dramatic march to the Italian capitol and took over the government. (Like Donald Trump, Mussolini didn’t actually accompany his followers on their march but did have his picture taken with them.) The existing Italian government didn’t put up any resistance and Mussolini easily assumed power the next day without any blood being shed. Everyone had already known the mob violence the blackshirts were capable of, they’d been wreaking havoc on the population for some time.

Of course, Trump knew nothing of this when he called for his mob to assemble in the nation’s Capitol on the day the congress certified the election for Joe Biden. He just has the same fascistic instincts as Benito Mussolini and thought he could use his crowd to intimidate Congress into going along with his crackpot plans to overturn the election with fake electors. If that didn’t work, he even had members of his party, such as Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Tx., prepared to demand that the count be delayed for 10 days so he could continue his pressure on Republican officials.

As it turned out, his crowd staged a violent assault on the Capitol injuring hundreds of police officers. Trump had incited them to not only stop the count but got them to hunt down his allegedly disloyal vice president by tweeting in the middle of the violence, “Mike Pence didn’t have the courage to do what should have been done to protect our Country and our Constitution, giving States a chance to certify a corrected set of facts, not the fraudulent or inaccurate ones which they were asked to previously certify. USA demands truth!”

Like Mussolini, the president may not have been with them in person but he was leading them just the same.

Thursday’s primetime hearing, the last in this first summer series, looked at Trump’s behavior during the time he returned to the White House after giving his incendiary speech in which he told the crowd to march to the Capitol up until the morning after the insurrection when he was coerced into giving an insincere speech condemning the rioters. We had learned in earlier hearings and from news reports that Trump sat in the dining room off the Oval Office watching the big TV on the wall, rebuffing everyone’s entreaties to stop the violence.

He did manage to call GOP senators, however, to try to get them to go along with his daft plan even as his people were storming the building. He also spoke to his lawyer and co-conspirator Rudy Giuliani a couple of times, although we can only speculate about what they discussed. But after sending that inflammatory tweet targeting Mike Pence, Trump refused to do anything more than belatedly release another tweet saying not to harm the Capitol police. It is then that one rioter is heard on tape laughing and saying, “he didn’t say anything about not hurting the congressmen!”

They got the message: He didn’t say anything about not hurting Mike Pence, either.

The committee revealed some harrowing testimony from an anonymous national security employee who apparently had access to radio traffic from that period and he testified to how very close the Pence came to being confronted by that rabid mob:

“Members of the VP detail at this time were starting to fear for their own lives. There was a lot of yelling, um a lot of — a lot of very personal calls over the radio. So, it was disturbing. I don’t like talking about it. But there were calls to say goodbye to family members, so on and so forth. It was getting — for whatever the reason was on the ground, the VP detail thought that this was about to be very ugly.”

They also played audio of Pence’s Secret Service detail as they decided to evacuate the VP to a safer space and you could hear the frantic concern in their voices.

The committee asked former White House counsel Pat Cipollone to comment on what the people in the White House were thinking and saying as this unfolded:

https://twitter.com/amandacarpenter/status/1550292859546488832?s=20&t=FVs7fZu_rAC0ffO06UJXSQ

When asked about the president, Cipollone said he couldn’t reveal communications “but obviously I think you know … yeah.”

Yes, we do.

The committee also showed outtakes from two speeches Trump made, the first on Jan. 6 in which he told the mob to go home and that he loved them, after which he sent his final tweet which said: “These are the things and events that happen when a sacred landslide election victory is so unceremoniously & viciously stripped away from great patriots who have been badly & unfairly treated for so long. Go home with love & in peace. Remember this day forever!”

They also showed the outtakes from a “conciliatory” speech that Trump clearly didn’t want to give the next day. That blooper reel shows just how insincere Trump was — and how angry he remained:

"I don't want to say the election is over." https://t.co/PocYjfCsJS

— Victoria Brownworth (@VABVOX) July 22, 2022

It is an astonishing 24-hour period in American history, meticulously detailed by the January 6 Committee in all its hideous glory.

Most of the TV lawyers opined later that what Trump did that day — incite the rioters with his speech and then lead the insurrection with his inflammatory tweets and verbal silence from the Oval Office — probably doesn’t rise to the level of a criminal violation. (Other aspects of his coup-plotting almost certainly do.) But his behavior on that day is a perfect example of a president violating his oath of office so completely that to even consider allowing him to become president again should be unthinkable. 

Yet from Donald Trump’s perspective, his crusade to overturn the election isn’t over yet.

Just this week, we learned that he is still calling up state officials to strong-arm them into “decertifying” the 2020 election. And while many of the punditocracy suggest that his day is done and his voters are getting tired of him, Trump remains the frontrunner for the Republican nomination in 2024.

The committee showed some previously unheard audio and still pictures of the congressional leadership on the evening of Jan. 6 speaking to acting Defense Secretary Chris Miller. Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., and Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., are heard insisting they want to go back that night to certify the election to prove that the insurrection failed and asking when the building will be cleared for that purpose. We all know that Pence refused to leave the Capitol largely because knew he would be necessary to preside when (if) the violence was controlled. Remarkably, they all did their duty that night.

But before we get too enraptured with the notion that the Republicans rallied to the defense of the Constitution and saved our republic, consider that later that night 139 GOP House members and 8 senators still objected to the certification. The Senate had the chance two weeks later to ensure that Trump could never run again when the House impeached him and they couldn’t even get the 16 Republican senators necessary to do it. After all that Trump had put them and the country through they could not summon the will to do anything about it. Just like Trump on Jan. 6, they are leading the GOP’s authoritarian take-over by the simple act of letting it happen. 

Salon

Operant conditioning for Democrats

A tweet this morning got me thinking again about Scooby snacks, positive reinforcement for Democrats. It’s campaign season. Reinforce good behaviors.

Pennsylvania Lt. Governor John Fetterman has launched a petition seeking to induct Dr. Oz into the New Jersey State Hall of Fame.

— Kyle Griffin (@kylegriffin1) July 22, 2022

John Fetterman, Pennsylvania Democrats’ U.S. Senate candidate, is trolling the hell out of New Jersey’s Mehmet Oz. He’s made Oz’s questionable residency in Pennsylvania, and his character, into a major campaign issue that could well sink the quack’s candidacy. You’ve seen the airplane banner and the clip of Snooki from “Jersey Shore”. Send that man a Scooby snack.

We on the left are quick to apply sticks and way too stingy with carrots. So, when you see candidates coloring outside the lines, when you see incumbents taking a tough stand on issues you support, maybe coloring outside their lines, toss them a Scooby snack, won’t you?

Activist Darcy Burner defined Scooby snacks in an appearance at Netroots Nation in 2009 as she discussed raising her son. Positive reinforcement. Your state representative or senator does something you like? Send them $5 or $10. Same with Congress. Every time. Don’t just make angry calls when they disappoint you. Reinforce the good behavior you want to see more of. It works with kids and pets.

Adrian Fontes, candidate for Secretary of State in Arizona, posts a video dismantling 2nd Amendment nonsense? Scooby snack. (I got a Thank You postcard made up to look like his mom wrote it by hand. Nicely done.)

Wow. In 4 minutes, former U.S. Marine Marksmanship Instructor and Arizona Sec. of State candidate @Adrian_Fontes dismantles the right's Second Amendment lies. Watch this till the end. pic.twitter.com/KDesJBUExr

— MeidasTouch (@MeidasTouch) June 1, 2022

NC U.S. Senate candidate Cheri Beasley’s campaign finally exhibits signs of life? (I had to look up Billy Eichner. Whatever.)

for a dollar name a cooler email signer pic.twitter.com/CAOs4qQJ4d

— kylie marshall (@ky__marsh) July 18, 2022

“I absolutely will not stand for Republicans and their right-wing Supreme Court taking away marriage equality before I’ve even had the chance to get through my first marriage and divorce,” Eichner writes. Scooby snack, for you Cheri.

First time I’ve responded to one of these in a long time. Go forth and do likewise.

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Investigation isn’t over, J6 committee makes clear

Thursday night’s “season finale” of public hearings from the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol was anything but. Evidence continues to pour in, members made clear. They will return in September with more. But last night’s finale dished up plenty.

From the outset of this series of hearings, Wyoming Republican Rep. Liz Cheney made clear that responsibility for the deadly Jan. 6 violence lay with Donald Trump.

“President Trump summoned the mob, assembled the mob and lit the flame of this attack,” she said on opening night, June 9.

A White House security official the committee did not identify testified (audio only) to being “in a state of shock” about Trump’s announcement that he would lead rallygoers in a march on the Capital. The constitutionally protected rally would become something much darker if Trump went to the Capitol.

Thursday’s hearings provided more corroboration of Cassidy Hutchinson’s secondhand story that an argument broke out between the president and his security detail about taking him to the Capitol following the rally on The Ellipse. An unidentified White House staffer confirmed her story via Deputy Chief of Staff for Operations Tony Ornato that Trump was “irate” at being whisked back to the White House. Sgt. Mark Robinson (Ret.) of the D.C. Metropolitan Police Department also heard that a “heated discussion” had taken place in the motorcade.

Trump learned that the march had become violent upon returning to the White House (Washington Post):

But instead of harnessing the power of the Oval Office by ordering military or police intervention or exhorting the rioters to go home, Trump continued to fan the flames of discord — and remained focused on trying to overturn the 2020 election,even as his aides implored him to stop the violence.

He demanded a list of senators’ phone numbers to cajole them not to certify the forthcoming electoral college count. He resisted aides’ entreaties that he make a public statement condemning the insurrection. And at 2:24 p.m., the same moment members of his national security staff were learning how close rioters had come to Vice President Mike Pence, Trump tweeted that his second-in-command was a coward.

The deadly violent insurrection that followed is already documented history.

It's now 100 percent clear that Pence's security detail thought his life was in serious danger at around the time that Trump sent the 2:24 tweet urging the mob to essentially target Pence as a traitor.

— Greg Sargent (@GregTSargent) July 22, 2022

The committee played radio exchanges between alarmed Secret Service agents protecting Pence as rioters overran the building and called for Pence to be hanged. Recordings included word of agents “saying goodbye to family members.”

Post again:

“President Trump sat in his dining room and watched the attack on television, while his senior-most staff, closest advisers and family members begged him to do what was expected of any American president,” said Rep. Elaine Luria (D-Va.), who led the questioning Thursday along with Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R-Ill.).

“President Trump did not fail to act during the 187 minutes between leaving the Ellipse and telling the mob to go home,” Kinzinger said. “He chose not to act.”

What testimony also made clear was that during the violence, Pence was acting as president while Trump did nothing. From a loading dock below the Capitol, Pence called Acting Secretary of Defense Christopher Miller and Joint Chiefs Chairman Mark Milley and delivered orders to get the military and the National Guard engaged to “put down this situation,” in Milley’s words.

In his closing statement, Kinzinger was on fire. Only once it became clear that the insurrection had failed, said Kinzinger, did Trump engage “in the political theater of telling the mob to go home.”

Trump’s conduct, Kinzinger continued, was “a supreme violation of his oath of office and a complete dereliction of his duty to our nation. It is a stain on our history, it is a dishonor to all those who have sacrificed and died in service of our democracy.”

Perhaps most stunning revelations were the outtakes of Trump’s late afternoon taping in the Rose Garden of a message for rioters to go home, and his formal message regarding the attack the next day. He could not bring himself to admit the election was over and that he had lost.

Embarrassing details

As the rioters raged, Jared Kushner was taking a shower.

The committee played video of Sen. Josh Hawley’s infamous raised-fist encouragement to protesters before the riot, followed by clips of him running from the building once the riot began. The clips drew laughter from the committee room and instant mockery on the internet.

I can’t stop watching this. pic.twitter.com/b1DoQ2B9Kq

— Daniel Uhlfelder (@DWUhlfelderLaw) July 22, 2022

“I don’t know who put that Hawley hit out, but right now his tiny tiny testicles are a hood ornament on Liz Cheney‘s SUV,” tweeted former Republican adviser Rick Wilson.

Prior to testimony by former White House communications staffer Sarah Matthews, the House GOP account tweeted and deleted that she was “just another liar and pawn in Pelosi’s witch-hunt.”

Does the person running this official account know that Sarah Matthews is, according to Legistorm and her LinkedIn, currently the communications director for House GOP side of the Climate Crisis committee? pic.twitter.com/TIGZRTAbiu

— Jacob Rubashkin (@JacobRubashkin) July 22, 2022

House Republicans during the hearing also suffered an autocorrect faceplant.

Damn autocratcorrect pic.twitter.com/QzP5mqicKT

— The Daily Show (@TheDailyShow) July 22, 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.

The religious right’s long term strategy to influence the Supreme Court

I wrote about this the other day but this story in Politico sheds way more light on what they were up to. For a country that was founded on the enlightenment idea that religion and state should be separate, this is truly astonishing. But then I guess it explains why the conservative majority is harkening back to the 1600s to justify their decisions:

A former leader of the religious right contends that an effort he helped lead to influence conservative Supreme Court justices through prayer sessions, private dinners and other social events contributed to the stridency of the court’s opinion last month striking down Roe v. Wade.

Rev. Rob Schenck said on a religion-focused podcast released last week that the behind-the-scenes lobbying effort led by his former group Faith and Action to encourage the conservative justices to “be bolder and far more assertive in their opinions” on social issues like abortion contributed to the sweeping nature of the five-justice majority’s decision to roll back abortion rights.

“I can say with a certain level of certainty I don’t think we would have gotten the decision as it is worded from Justice Alito without the work we did,” Schenck said during an interview with another prominent Washington-area religious leader, Rabbi Jack Moline, on a podcast sponsored by the left-leaning Interfaith Alliance.

Schenck’s latest claims are fueling a heated debate about outside influences on the court and whether justices’ family and social relationships are driving the court’s agenda and increasingly conservative bent.

The high court has often been thought of as immune from the lobbying that is commonplace in Congress, at the White House and at executive agencies, but some of the recent revelations indicate activists have sought to steer some justices in ways that go beyond the usual advocacy in legal briefs and oral arguments.

For almost two decades, Schenck headed Faith and Action, now known as Faith & Liberty, which he described as an activist group aimed at penetrating the walls of the Supreme Court and persuading justices to be bolder in their faith-based conservatism. He broke sharply with the religious right over the past decade because of what he viewed as its extreme tactics and refusal to support restrictions on gun ownership.

Schenck said Justice Samuel Alito’s 79-page opinion in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization included language and framing that Schenck and other anti-abortion activists had touted for years in their efforts to stir up sentiment to ban abortion in the U.S.

“It was a polemic from our side of the movement, which startled me, took my breath away,” the reverend said. “He was using phrases we had invented as bumper sticker slogans in a Supreme Court decision. It was breathtaking to me.”

POLITICO reported earlier this month that the Supreme Court-focused campaign Schenck mounted, known as “Operation Higher Court,” sought to use social interactions with a slew of religiously-conservative couples to coax justices to be more vocal about defending and promoting conservative religious views and values in their opinions.

The couples built relationships with the justices through dinners at private homes, vacation getaways and swanky restaurants and subtly offered suggestions that the justices were the nation’s last line of defense against surging liberalism, said Schenck, who pointed to Justices Alito, Clarence Thomas and the late Antonin Scalia as the most frequent targets of Faith and Action’s overtures.

“We coined a phrase that we called in those years the ministry of emboldenment. And what we meant by that was shoring up the sympathetic justices so that they would use stronger language,” the ordained former Assemblies of God minister said in the podcast. “We were there to bolster their courage.” […]

“You know, Washington is built on relationships. So, you build relationships and the Supreme Court justices have a very tight constellation of people that they keep company with,” he said. “I set out to meet those people and build relationships with them and to set up arrangements where there were reciprocal debts owed. And one of the ways you pay a debt in Washington is you give access — you open doors for people that are in some cases, as with the court, that are otherwise impenetrable. I benefited from that. It took a long time to do that. At least a decade.”

Schenck said the effort was rather haphazard at first but grew more organized.

“The first decade I was at the court, it was mostly serendipity. The second decade, it was mostly payoff of investment. And so I was able to talk with the justices, to visit with them in their chambers often,” he said, later clarifying that he didn’t see justices in their offices often but primarily at various functions, including meetings elsewhere at the Supreme Court, the Capitol, and around Washington.

Schenck said the group and its emissaries tried to be subtle in their approach to avoid alienating the justices or their aides.

“We were careful,” he said. “You had to observe boundaries with the justices always and even in your language. So, for example, it would be a big no-no to pray something like: ‘Lord, we pray that same sex marriage will never be legalized in America.’ That, that would be too forward. It would be everything from boorish to a technical violation of their quasi-ethical rules.”

Instead, Schenck said, he or others enlisted by the group would offer a prayer like: “Lord, we thank you that justice so-and-so is on the bench when we must defend the sanctity of marriage and the family.” He said that was “code language” — meaning the court should block same-sex marriage and other measures he considered to be part of what he viewed at the time as the “homosexual agenda.”

Still, some justices occasionally seemed uncomfortable at the group’s overt references to social issues.

“We would get a little bit of pushback,” Schenck said on the podcast. “Even on occasion, a justice might squirm uncomfortably, turn and leave a little circle that began as a conversation circle and turned into a prayer circle. So, we pushed the envelope. I certainly did.”

While Faith and Action’s parallel efforts to press members of Congress to be more vocal backers of social conservatism were more open, the group’s work with justices was more secretive. Still, such prayer sessions were occasionally mentioned in newsletters and similar publications.

And last month, Rolling Stone reported on what appeared to be audio recorded outside the court around the time of the recent abortion ruling. The recording of Peggy Nienaber, who worked with Schenck at Faith and Action and who is now vice president of Faith & Liberty, captured her seeming to boast of holding prayer sessions at the court with justices. She later retreated from her apparent comments, insisting that she had not been part of such sessions in recent years.

Schenck, who now serves as president of the Dietrich Bonhoeffer Institute, criticized the court’s ethical strictures as lax and said he hopes his disclosures about previously-opaque efforts to influence the justices will prompt reforms either by Congress or the court itself.

“I think things need to change at the court,” he declared. “I’m not the best messenger for that and I realize that but somebody needs to herald that message.”

Yes, someone does. The Court is now a rogue institution, refusing to follow either the traditions and norms of the court, ethical guidelines or even take public opinion into account. They have untrammeled power and there seems to be little political will to do anything about it. It’s actively participating in the destruction of democracy.

If I thought this majority gave damn, I’d think this was an important finding: