Month: August 2022

And they continue to do nothing today

This, by AB Stoddard is very important to remember. And it’s why anyone who has an R after their name is not to be trusted:

Watching the House Select Committee on January 6th hearings I was struck by one overriding question.

As the various members of the White House staff and counsel’s office testified to witnessing a deranged president trying to overturn an election by sending a mob he knew was armed to sack the Capitol and harm his vice president—how much of this did Senate Republicans know when they voted to acquit Trump in his second impeachment on February 13, 2021?

Probably most of it. Maybe even all of it.

And what have they rushed to condemn since this all became public? None of it.

First, what did they know: The idea that the tiny network of the nation’s top Republicans were not circulating the ghastly details of Trump’s actions beginning on Election Day defies credulity.

Of course they would have known about the pressure Pence was under, surely by late December. Not only were these discussions happening all over town, but Pence himself was out and about seeking counsel, asking various Republicans if they could see any way out for him. If Dan Quayle knew what was going on from his house 600 miles away in Indiana, then Mitch McConnell and Ted Cruz and the rest of the Republican Senate caucus must have known what was happening a mile from their offices.

But they had secrets to keep until the Senate runoffs in Georgia January 5. Mitch McConnell was only willing to say that overturning the election “would damage our Republic forever” after he’d lost his position as majority leader. To slightly invert Churchill, McConnell was given the choice of defeat or dishonor. He chose dishonor. And then he got defeat in the bargain, anyway.

Yet let’s pretend that, somehow, Republican senators had truly been innocent—like children they had genuinely not known anything about Trump’s intentions and actions before January 6.

Well, they surely learned about them on January 6. We know this because during the 187 minute span that afternoon, Trump called Republican senators. We know that he spoke with Tommy Tuberville and Josh Hawley. Who else did Trump call? And are we supposed to believe that neither of these men conveyed what they learned about Trump’s state of mind to their colleagues?

Again with the credulity.

And then there’s Mitch McConnell. The Republican leader’s wife, Elaine Chao, resigned from the administration because of the insurrection. Is there a separation of church-and-state in the McConnell household? Are we supposed to believe (1) that Chao resigned without knowing any of the details of Trump’s behavior and/or that (2) she never discussed any of this with her husband?

Or maybe she shared all of it and maybe that’s why McConnell delayed the impeachment trial until after Trump had left office. Since the base was nonplussed by the insurrection, Senate Republicans needed something to hide behind. Their cover story, for their grandchildren, is that they were counseled by their own renowned constitutional scholar, Sen. Rand Paul, who said they couldn’t convict someone who wasn’t president anymore.

Get it? Senate Republicans wouldn’t allow a vote on impeachment until after Trump had left and then claimed that they couldn’t vote to impeach because he wasn’t in office. Heads they win, tails America loses.

In the end only seven Republicans found Trump guilty of inciting an insurrection. Judging from all of the private concern anonymous sources have expressed, it seems safe to assume that most of the other 43 privately agreed. Probably even Hawley and Cruz, the 2024 wannabes who led the effort to decertify Joe Biden’s election. Certainly the other senators who didn’t vote to decertify, but who couldn’t vote to convict because they fancy they can run for president. Tom Cotton, Tim Scott, and Rick Scott all understood that doing their constitutional duty would get them evicted from MAGA-ville.

But there were other men in the Upper Chamber who dirtied their hands for Trump without any fantasies of a presidential campaign dancing in their heads. They sat at the leadership table or thought they were poster boys for the Constitution and they likely looked down on Cruz and Hawley running their pre-campaigns on Fox News and Twitter.

Lindsey Graham had also pressured Georgia election officials. Chuck Grassley suggested he could step in for Pence on the 6th, telling reporters the night before: “Well, first of all, I will be—if the vice president isn’t there and we don’t expect him to be there, I will be presiding over the Senate.” Mike Lee texted White House chief of staff Mark Meadows to “please tell me what I should be saying,” and worked to get Sidney Powell in to see Trump. Ron Johnson’s chief of staff tried to arrange for an envelope of fake electors to be given to Pence on January 6th but was rebuffed. Johnson, Grassley and Graham have all chaired powerful Senate committees, on variously Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs, the Judiciary and the Budget.

If we subtract those nine ambitious (or seditious) men, that still leaves 34 possible Republicans who could have joined the seven voting with Democrats to convict Trump. Like Richard Burr and Pat Toomey—who voted to convict—Rob Portman, Richard Shelby, and Roy Blunt are retiring and had no reelection campaigns to protect. And there are plenty of other Senators, safe in red-state seats, who must have known even more than what the House impeachment managers presented at the trial. Among those 34 surely ten of them could have helped bar Trump from future office by providing the votes to reach the required 67 supermajority for conviction.

Senate Republicans’ refusal to convict Trump for insurrection has not only invited future crises, but has permanently disemboweled impeachment as a constitutional mechanism. If the attempt to overturn democracy isn’t a convictable offense, then literally nothing is. We no longer have a workable mechanism for removing corrupt, wicked, or dangerous chief executives. And with that deterrence gone, we should expect more corruption, wickedness, and danger from future presidents.

McConnell’s historic cop out after the vote, blaming Trump for the attack after letting him off the hook, is one for the ages. Admitting that Trump had gotten away with it, McConnell said “He didn’t get away with anything yet,” and said Trump was “still liable for everything he did while in office.”

And yet McConnell is not, as one might have imagined on February 13, 2021 when he excoriated Trump, now calling for the attorney general to investigate whether the former president committed a crime.

Because months later, after all of the cowardice with their impeachment votes, Senate Republicans had a chance to redeem themselves. Instead they blocked the creation of a 9/11-style, independent commission to investigate the insurrection.

Today, a year and a half after January 6, Donald Trump is on his way to announce his third campaign for the presidency, 70 percent of Republicans believe the Big Lie, the Department of Justice is investigating the largest crime in history—and Senate Republicans are silent.

Trump corrupted our democracy because people let him. Senate Republicans were complicit in it. They absolved him twice knowing everything. They attempted to prevent the rest of the public from uncovering what they knew. And now that the public is finding everything out anyway, yet they say nothing.

Long after Trump is gone, their legacy will remain.

It’s not just that they are cowards, which they are. They believe they will benefit from Trumpism so they are saying nothing. If it helps them win, they are fine with it.

Josh is right:

A lot of the energy behind the “cynical Dems behind MAGA crazies” storyline is driven by pundits who feel very, very off balance needing to say constantly that the GOP is now a sectarian revanchist party thats a threat to democracy over&over because it remains true. Again & gain.

This more or less non-story is like a pressure valve for the built up angst of bothsides journos who’ve been desperate for something to work with for months. For those who don’t like it, I respect the opinion. But I’d add these four points. First of all, in some cases where Dems were allegedly boosting MAGAs its not even true. PA Gov is a good example of this. Where this has happened is in a number of House contests, run from out of the DCCC. Second, let’s be clear what this “boosting” or “running ads for” actually means.

In every case it’s involved the DCCC running ads that say some version of, ‘This person is terrible. They’re totally loyal to Trump and want to overthrow the constitution.’ And that, we’re told, makes them irresistible to GOP voters. That makes it fairly clear where the problem is. They’re not funneling money to GOPs or running sham campaigns to advantage Trumpers. They’re IDing them. Third, have great respect for Peter Meijers vote to impeach President Trump. A very honorable decision. But he is still a vote for Kevin McCarthy to be Speaker.

He is still a vote for the GOP which is currently the party of the Big Lie and the party of Trump. That is reality. That one decision doesn’t change that. If you oppose the Big Lie and oppose the revanchist authoritarianism of Trumpism right now that means keeping Republicans out of power. That’s not cynical or “pathetic grab for some evanescent political advantage”, as this frivolous bellowing puts it. That is looking closely at what is actually happening.

Me on the DCCC's repulsive drive to boost the Trumpiest candidates:

"Democrats can stop asking how Republicans could have sold out their principles and their country in a pathetic grab for some evanescent political advantage. Because now they know."https://t.co/aPqHE7JZU7

— Megan McArdle (@asymmetricinfo) August 4, 2022

The contrary argument would be, ‘How are pro-democracy Republicans supposed to reclaim the GOP if they can’t get nominated.’ This puts the whole matter in the proper relief. Democrats must not only win every election because the GOP has turned agst democracy itself.

They’re also responsible for cultivating and protecting the handful of Not Always Trump Republicans who do things like voting to impeach the President when he leads a violent assault on the Capitol to stay in office in defiance of the constitution and American people.

All of which is to say that Democrats are not only responsible for protecting the republic from Republicans. They’re also responsible for repairing a GOP that doesn’t want to be repaired. Has anyone asked why the NRCC or RNC or any other org wasn’t spending more aggressively to defend Meijer? It simply asks too much. Fourth, the goal of people who run campaigns is to win them. In a handful of House races, Democrats decided they stood a better shot against a Loud Big Lie supporter than a Quieter one. They’re almost certainly right.

They’re entitled to make that call without worrying what tsk tsking WaPo columnists or Republicans working to put the Trump GOP back in power have to say about it.

Originally tweeted by Josh Marshall (@joshtpm) on August 4, 2022.

Thank you.

Orban in America

“My country Hungary is the lone star state of Europe” pic.twitter.com/4DrckE6ht1

— Acyn (@Acyn) August 4, 2022

"We should unite our forces."

Says the man whose recent push for racial purity was so brazen that a longtime ally called it a "Nazi diatribe worthy of Joseph Goebbels" that appeals to the “most vile racists.” https://t.co/aH7OAb9RJd

— Justin Baragona (@justinbaragona) August 4, 2022

They love him:

Viktor Orban, the Hungarian prime minister who has consolidated autocratic power with hard-right opposition to immigration and liberal democracy, addressed a crowd of thousands of American admirers in Dallas on Thursday with a red-meat speech that could have easily been delivered by any Republican candidate on the campaign trail this year.

Orban presented the two countries as twin fronts in a struggle against common enemies he described as globalists, progressives, communists and “fake news.”

“The West is at war with itself,” Orban said. “The globalist can all go to hell. I have come to Texas,” he added, stumbling over a famous slogan attributed to Texas legend Davy Crockett.

The speech to the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) went ahead despite Orban’s latest controversy: a speech in which he railed against Europe becoming “mixed race,” saying that Europeans did not want to live with people from outside the continent. One of his own close advisers resigned in protest, calling the speech “pure Nazi.”

But Orban has found defenders among prominent American conservatives, including former president Donald Trump, Fox News host Tucker Carlson and Ohio Senate candidate J.D. Vance. On his way to Dallas, Orban stopped to visit Trump at his golf club in Bedminster, N.J. In a statement, Trump called Orban his “friend” and said he valued his perspective. “Few people know as much about what is going on in the world today,” Trump said.

On Wednesday, Carlson defended Orban from the negative media coverage of the speech.

“So Viktor Orban is now a Nazi because he wants national borders?” Carlson said. Carlson helped raise Orban’s U.S. profile with a special broadcast from Budapest last year, during which he praised Orban’s Hungary, a country of less than 10 million people with the 17th-largest economy in the EU, as a role model for Americans.

Orban did not address his “mixed-race” remarks on Thursday. But he did indirectly defend himself by saying, “Don’t worry, a Christian politician cannot be racist,” and falsely portraying the Nazis as having been anti-Christian.

He also blamed enemies in the press and on the left for wanting to silence him.

“I can already see tomorrow’s headlines: Far-right European racist, anti-Semite strongman — the Trojan horse of Putin — holds speech at the conservative conference,” Orban said. “They did not want me to be here, and they made every effort to drive a wedge between us. They hate me and slander me and my country as they hate you and slander you.”

Matt Schlapp, who leads the American Conservative Union that organizes CPAC, has defended Orban’s invitation in the name of free speech.

“Let’s listen to the man speak,” Schlapp told Bloomberg News. “We’ll see what he says. And if people have a disagreement with something he says, they should raise it.”

Some at the convention Thursday said they had hopedto hear Orban clarify his remarks on race.

“As a person who, I am mixed race, I’m in a mixed-race relationship, I would like to see what he is going to say to that, put something positive to that,” said Raven Harrison, an unsuccessful primary candidate for Congress from outside Dallas. “I’m not willing to villainize him for that at this point.”

Orban spoke to a half-full but enthusiastic ballroom, receiving a standing ovation and frequent bursts of applause and cheers. “Welcome to Texas!” one attendee shouted when he took the stage. When he described himself as the “leader of a country that is under the siege of progressive liberals day by day,” someone in the audience called back, “Yes!”

His speech was peppered with pop culture references, quoting Clint Eastwood’s dialogue from “Unforgiven” and describing Hungary’s stance against LGBTQ content for minors as “less drag queens and more Chuck Norris.” There was loud applause when Orban described the surge of Syrian refugees toward Europe in 2015 as an “invasion of illegal migrants” and likened them to the armies of Genghis Khan. (Orban did not mention which nation the migrants were fleeing or the conflicts driving them abroad.)

“To stop illegal immigration, we have actually built that wall,” said Orban, who referred only briefly to the negative coverage of his CPAC appearance.

The crowd booed when Orban brought up George Soros, a Hungarian American investor who is one of the Democratic Party’s largest donors and who is Jewish. The applause was even louder when Orban talked about traditional families, and the fact that Hungarian women, upon the birth of a fourth child, paid nearly no taxes for the rest of their lives.

“If you are not married yet, you should immediately find a Hungarian wife,” Orban said. Later, he read from the country’s updated constitution, as amended in 2011.

“The mother is a woman, the father is a man, and leave our kids alone,” Orban said, cracking a smile as many in the crowd got up and cheered. “Full stop. End of discussion.”

He concluded by looking to elections that will be held in both the United States and European Union in 2024.

“These two locations will define the two fronts in the battle being fought for Western civilization,” Orban said. “Today we hold neither of them yet. We need both. You have two years to get ready.”

Orban’s appearance in Dallas comes after a CPAC spinoff hosted in Hungary in May, featuring a videotaped address from Trump in which he said he was “honored” to endorse Orban’s recent reelection.

In power since 2010, Orban has come to dominate and reshape Hungary’s political system not through a Soviet-style police state but rather through constitutional changes and the weakening of civil society. He has alienated NATO allies with opposition to punishing Russian President Vladimir Putin for invading Ukraine. Orban’s increasing isolation in Europe has added urgency to his long-running overtures to bolster relations with the United States through the Republican Party.

CPAC Hungary was a celebration of Orban’s policies, including its sidelining of mainstream media. Several of the outlets that applied to cover the conference were denied credentials. Schlapp said that didn’t do much to change the coverage.

“I went out and gave a press conference and they still called me a white nationalist,” Schlapp recalled. “I was like, I don’t know if it does any good, if that’s what their editors are intent on them writing.”

In his own speech at CPAC Hungary, Orban called his country “the laboratory in which we tested the antidote to dominance by progressives,” listing 12 points for conservative success — from prioritizing economic growth to “expos[ing] your enemies’ intentions.”

That approach has clicked with American conservatives. Under Schlapp’s leadership, the American Conservative Union has organized more CPACs around the world and also invited right-wing populists to address the crowds in the United States.

A year before voters in Britain voted to leave the European Union, Brexit Party founder Nigel Farage got a high-profile CPAC speaking slot. Three years later, the crowd got to hear from Marion Maréchal-Le Pen, a politician and niece of Marine Le Pen, standard-bearer of France’s far-right party. After the 2018 election of Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro, Schlapp’s group began holding conferences in Brazil, where politicians from the leading right-wing party discussed how to defeat a left that “denies family values.”

Vance, the “Hillbilly Elegy” author and Republican nominee for Senate in Ohio, said at a conservative academic conference last year that the “childless left” was undermining America, and he pointed to Orban’s policy of generous tax breaks for parents who have three or more children.

“Why can’t we do that here?” Vance asked. “Why can’t we actually promote family formation?”

After Orban’s party won this year’s election, One America News anchor Jack Posobiec celebrated on a podcast hosted by Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk. “He stands for nationalism. He stands for borders,” Posobiec told Kirk. “He stands for sovereign national identity for his people, and standing up for a new type of conservatism where it’s not about tax cuts to corporations; [it’s] about taking the family unit and centering it.”

Both Vance and Posobiec will speak to the conference Friday.

Standing ovation from the crowd here pic.twitter.com/jYHRc650Qn

— Acyn (@Acyn) August 4, 2022

It's hilarious watching the US Right cheer the anti-globalist shtick of a leader whose ministers are currently begging the EU for more money as the Hungarian economy gets driven into a ditch https://t.co/s7K965F0zc

— Alexander Clarkson  (@APHClarkson) August 5, 2022

Also, just saying:

This one’s unique, I’ll give her that

Her heart may be in the right place but her approach is counter-productive, to say the least:

When a bipartisan group of lawmakers visited the Ukraine border in March, an unexpected guest showed up on the trip: GOP Rep. Victoria Spartz of Indiana.

Spartz, the first Ukrainian-born member of the US Congress and an outspoken advocate for her home country, had expressed interest in joining the congressional delegation but wasn’t invited to attend the trip, which consisted primarily of House Foreign Affairs Committee members, a panel where Spartz is not a member.

So, she used her own funds to fly to the border of Ukraine in Poland and linked up with lawmakers once there to join in on some of their meetings, according to multiple sources familiar with the situation.

Her surprise appearance, the circumstances of which have not been previously reported, was initially viewed as a welcome addition — albeit an unusual one — as lawmakers sought to rally Western support for Ukraine amid Russia’s bloody assault on the country that began a week earlier.

But members who were part of the official trip told CNN that Spartz was “argumentative,” “accusatory,” and “unhelpful” during key meetings with NATO members, generals and government officials, sparking concern that her presence was doing more harm than good.

“She crashed our CoDel. She was like a bull in a China shop,” said one GOP lawmaker, who like other members for this story was granted anonymity to speak more freely about a colleague and due to the sensitive nature of the subject. “I don’t know if it was pent-up frustration or she didn’t feel like she was getting enough proper information, but she was just accusatory and rude.”

[…]

That bipartisan frustration over Spartz’s behavior was only the beginning. In the nearly six months since the war began, Spartz has publicly criticized the Ukraine government, peddled corruption allegations against the Ukrainian government and some of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s top aides, and spurred complaints from her colleagues that she is mirroring pro-Russia talking points.

“President Zelensky has to stop playing politics and theater, and start governing to better support his military and local governments,” Spartz said in a press release last month, in one example of her outspoken criticisms of Kyiv.

Spartz, a 43-year-old businesswoman, has repeatedly insisted, publicly and privately, that she wants Ukraine to win, and that she is only attacking Kyiv because she wants to help remove any potential obstacles to a Ukrainian victory over Russia. She says she has visited Ukraine six times since the invasion began and has also slammed Russia consistently, including as recently as Tuesday when she tweeted that Russia should be declared a terrorist state.

Still, Spartz’s bellicose rhetoric aimed at Zelensky and his advisers has frustrated lawmakers in both parties, White House officials and members of the Ukrainian parliament alike. They worry she is undermining their efforts to stay united behind Ukraine at a pivotal moment and openly question where she is getting some of her information, according to interviews with over a dozen lawmakers, aides and administration sources.

Meanwhile, multiple briefings from the Biden administration and private pleas from senior Republicans have done little to rein in Spartz’s vocal criticism, sources said.

“Because she’s the only Ukrainian-born member of Congress, she has outsize megaphone, outsize influence,” Rep. Elissa Slotkin, a Michigan Democrat and former CIA analyst, said to CNN. “I think there’s an open question of why she’s so openly saying something that’s so clearly aligned with Russian talking points.” […]

Some lawmakers — even those unhappy with her rhetoric — came to Spartz’s defense, arguing she is well-intentioned and just desperate to help her motherland as it’s being ripped apart by war. Spartz was a vocal champion of key legislation to speed up the administration’s ability to send weaponry and other critical resources to Ukraine, attending the bill signing ceremony with President Joe Biden. And lawmakers in both parties have shared in her calls for more rigorous oversight of the weapons heading into Ukraine.

“She was overcome with emotion. And I think what you’re seeing now is a manifestation of that,” said a second GOP lawmaker. “What I’m trying to tell her is, I’m well aware of the corruption problem. … But talking about corruption now, when they are under siege, is like wall-papering your bathroom when the house is burning down around you. It’s counterproductive.”

Where do they find these people?

It’s not Trump…

In his big announcement today, Desantis says he is suspending Hillsborough (Tampa) State Attorney Andrew Warren, after he said he would refuse to prosecute certain abortion cases and new laws restricting trans rights. pic.twitter.com/dfNk1KqnmJ

— Ron Filipkowski (@RonFilipkowski) August 4, 2022

This is how a true autocrat operates. He doesn’t tweet insults (although his spokesperson does) he just acts and lets everyone else scream. From Boltsmag.org:

Florida Governor Ron DeSantis took the extraordinary step on Thursday of suspending the locally elected prosecutor of Hillsborough County, home to Tampa. Andrew Warren, the suspended prosecutor, promptly denounced the move as an “illegal overreach.” 

The suspension of this Democratic official, announced by the Republican governor at a news conference where he was flanked by Hillsborough County’s Republican sheriff and other local officials, is the latest chapter in the GOP’s sustained attacks on reproductive rights and transgender rights in Florida, as well as broader criminal justice reform efforts. 

DeSantis based the suspension on Warren’s statements that his office would not prosecute abortion-related cases and cases involving anti-transgender laws. DeSantis also mentioned Warren’s policies establishing a presumption against prosecuting certain behaviors.

DeSantis claimed that with those statements and policies Warren “neglected” his duties and “display[ed] a lack of competence” to carry out his duties. 

DeSantis replaced Warren with Susan Lopez, a local judge who is a member of the conservative legal organization the Federalist Society. His decision effectively kicked the Democratic Party out of an office it won in both 2016 and 2020, in a county that DeSantis himself lost by nine percentage points in 2018.

Florida Representative Anna Eskamani, a Democrat and fierce critic of DeSantis, called the governor’s move “a fascist approach to governing, if you can even call it governing.”

“It’s not about law and order. It’s about control,” Eskamani told Bolts. “He’s not only stripping away our personal liberties, but he is removing those who have the guts to stand up to him.” 

The move comes as Florida, in the wake of the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision overturning Roe v. Wade, implements its 15-week abortion ban and considers more extreme bans. It also comes as the state fights challenges in court to the law known as the “Don’t Say Gay” bill, as well as a law banning trans girls and women from girls and women’s sports. In a particularly extreme step, the DeSantis administration also has filed a complaint against a restaurant in Miami because of its drag brunch, attempting to take away the business’s liquor license.

Warren had also pledged to not prosecute any ban on gender-affirming care for minors, though Florida does not have such a ban right now.

Warren’s statement on Thursday suggested he would be fighting back, although Warren himself declined to comment to Bolts and an adviser did not respond to a question asking if Warren planned to challenge the suspension.

“Today’s political stunt is an illegal overreach that continues a dangerous pattern by Ron DeSantis of using his office to further his own political ambition,” Warren said in the statement. “It spits in the face of the voters of Hillsborough County who have twice elected me to serve them, not Ron DeSantis.”

The move from DeSantis represents the most aggressive action yet from opponents of criminal legal reform efforts to derail the ambitions of local prosecutors elected on promises to reform the system and reduce incarceration. 

“We don’t elect people in one part of the state to have veto power over what the entire state decides on these important issues,” DeSantis said at the press conference. 

“Andrew Warren has put himself, publicly, above the law,” he added, citing concerns about “individual prosecutors nullify[ing] laws that were enacted by the people’s representatives.” He compared Warren to reform-minded prosecutors elected in California. “We are not going to allow this pathogen that’s been around the country of ignoring the law, we are not going to let that get a foothold here in the state of Florida,” DeSantis said.

But Aramis Ayala, a former state attorney who has faced her own attacks from DeSantis, called the governor’s move “the latest assault on Floridians’ fundamental rights and freedoms.”

“The rapid slide towards autocracy when it suits their political agenda is dangerous, appalling, and incredibly concerning,” Ayala, a Democrat who is now running for attorney general, said in a statement she shared with Bolts. 

Ayala announced shortly after becoming the chief prosecutor in the district that includes Orlando in 2016 that she would not bring capital prosecutions and declined to do so in a specific case. Republican Governor Rick Scott countered by reassigning the prosecution to another state attorney. Although Ayala challenged the move, the state’s Supreme Court eventually upheld the governor’s authority to reassign death-eligible cases under her jurisdiction in a 5-2 decision in 2017. 

On Thursday, DeSantis went much further, immediately suspending Warren from his office. 

[….]

Republicans elsewhere in the country have mounted parallel efforts to sideline prosecutors who promote criminal justice reform, though none has yet to go as far as DeSantis’s move on Thursday. Many governors do not have the power to unilaterally suspend local officials.

Pennsylvania Republicans have sought impeachment proceedings against Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner, a progressive who easily won re-election last year; one Republican this year even ran for governor on a platform of ending DA elections in Philadelphia and nowhere else in the state. Lee Zeldin, the Republican nominee for governor in New York, is promising to take action against Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg, who has like Warren set presumptions of not prosecuting some lower-level crimes. 

The Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision is likely to dramatically increase these clashes between the anti-abortion Republican politicians who run the state government in red states and Democratic officials who often govern urban areas in those states. Dozens of prosecutors in states like Arizona, Michigan, Texas, and Wisconsin, have said they will not enforce abortion bans, and some Republicans have signaled that they are looking for workarounds specific to their state like having the attorney general step in. 

In Florida, DeSantis’s executive order asserted that he has the authority to suspend Warren under Article 4, Section 7, of the state’s constitution, which sets out the governor’s authority for suspensions over issues like “neglect of duty.” DeSantis also used the provision in 2019 to suspend the Broward County sheriff from office, using the same claims of neglect of duty and incompetence. There, however, DeSantis acted shortly after a report was issued on the 2018 mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School where 17 students were killed. DeSantis’s decision to suspend the sheriff was based on that report’s conclusions about the training and preparation of law enforcement under the sheriff’s command, and it was upheld by the Florida Supreme Court.

But the broad move by DeSantis against Warren included no such report underlying it. It also made no mention of any cases that DeSantis objects to. The governor’s executive order instituting the suspension only mentions the prosecutor’s “public proclamations of non-enforcement.” These issues are certain to come up in any challenge to the suspension.

DeSantis’s claim that the announcement of a declination policy constitutes a failure of duty that fits under the state constitution rules may also come under scrutiny. 

Earlier this year, a conservative state Senator in Florida championed a bill this year that would have authorized the governor to suspend a local prosecutor who announces a blanket policy of not declining certain cases. The bill provided “that a state attorney adopting certain blanket policies constitutes a failure to execute his or her duty.” That bill did not pass the legislature, dying in the state Senate. Still, DeSantis interpreted Warren’s blanket policies as a neglect of duty in his announcement today.

Eskamani highlighted the hypocrisy of DeSantis suspending Warren because of steps he’s taken not to enforce certain laws, saying, ”this is the same governor who’s told school districts to ignore federal Title IX guidelines, especially on LGBTQ+ care and discrimination.”

Another thing: no abortion ban or LGBT cases to which DeSantis objects have been brought before the DA. The 15 week ban is still being decided in the courts. He removed him for what he said, not what he did.

This is an ugly turn but it’s how DeSantis operates. Unlike Trump he knows how to work the lever of government.

Who thinks thoughts and prayers stop .223 bullets?

The GOP's shameless inaction but make it A Chorus Line. #ThoughtsAndPrayers 😇💭🙏🏻🎶 pic.twitter.com/wsFbtAe70V

— Randy Rainbow (@RandyRainbow) August 4, 2022

Cleanup on aisle GOP.

● ● ● ● ● ● ● ●

Request a copy of For The Win, 4th Edition, my free, countywide get-out-the-vote planning guide for county committees at ForTheWin.us.

Newly registered voters are highly likely to vote

Sure, you can send volunteers with clipboards to accost random passersby on street corners or at the farmers market and ask if they are registered to vote. Or your state party could be, you know, strategic.

This post from Wisconsin Public Radio is from July 6, but if you like the idea of Democrats winning in November (and you have any clout with your state party), heads up:

The Wisconsin Election Commission will mail about 178,500 postcards to eligible voters who are not yet registered to vote.

The postcards, which will be mailed Friday, tell recipients they can register to vote online. The mailing does not include a voter registration form.

The postcards are required under Wisconsin’s membership agreement with the Electronic Registration Information Center, a multi-state database of government records known as ERIC.

Wisconsin joined ERIC in 2016 under a law passed by GOP legislators and signed by former Republican Gov. Scott Walker. It has since come under scrutiny from Republicans who’ve cast doubt on the 2020 election.

Wisconsin has sent similar postcards every two years dating back to 2016. That year, the WEC sent the cards to 1.28 million eligible but unregistered residents.

“Wisconsinites will likely receive numerous election-related mailings this summer that may appear official but in reality, are not,” said WEC Administrator Meagan Wolfe in a press release announcing the mailing. “Wisconsin voters, however, can rely upon the information provided in these official postcards about how eligible citizens can register to vote.”

The WEC said the mailings won’t be sent to people who are not eligible to vote, such as those serving a sentence for a felony. People who have recently moved but did not fill out a form for a forwarding address also won’t receive the postcard.

People who receive the postcard can register online, by mail, at their clerk’s office or at their polling place on Election Day.

The WEC says people who are registered to vote but are inadvertently sent the postcard can check their voting status at myvote.wi.gov.

There are currently 31 ERIC member states, red and blue, plus the District. Over 20 have governors’ and senatorial races in 2022. All states have congressional races. Florida mailed 2.2 million ERIC postcards in 2020.

A couple of studies (2013 and 2020) have shown the mailings result in a roughly 1% rise in voter registration and a 0.9% increase in voter turnout. (Sound small?)

ERIC cross-references states’ DMV databases against the voter registration database (and a couple others) to identify potentially eligible but unregistered persons, then sends their proprietary target lists to member states’ boards of elections. The states send out the invitations which, by definition, are nonpartisan. They go to people with no party affiliation.

National Voter Registration Day Returns on September 20th 2022!

Wisconsin is an early bird. Other ERIC states send their postcards just after Labor Day.

Democratic state executive directors able to think outside the VoteBuilder box could exploit this state-funded outreach if they do their homework over the next month. Surveys suggest contacts from official state sources are more effective in generating a response than partisan mailings. Follow-up statewide canvasses in targeted neighborhoods could boost both the postcard-driven registration rise and Democratic lean of new registrants. Plus, inform the less-engaged that an election key to preserving our freedoms is just weeks away.

How, you ask?

Ask me fast: tpostsully at gmail dot com

● ● ● ● ● ● ● ●

Request a copy of For The Win, 4th Edition, my free, countywide get-out-the-vote planning guide for county committees at ForTheWin.us.

How can he be an anti-semite?

This is so absurd:

The Republican nominee for governor of Pennsylvania is pushing back against Jewish criticism over his association with Gab, a social media platform rife with antisemitism, by highlighting his campaign announcement, where a man donned a tallit and blew a shofar. 

At  a campaign stop in New Castle, northwest of Pittsburgh, on Tuesday, the nominee, State Sen. Doug Mastriano called it “bizarre” that he was “lambasted” by Democrats and journalists  for, as he put it, “having too much Jewish symbology in our announcement.” 

“We had a shofar, a prayer shawl,” Mastriano said in remarks that were livestreamed on Facebook, ”and then suddenly … you’re an antisemite. Like, make up your mind! You know, you have too much Jewishness in your events, now you’re antisemitic.” 

Blowing a shofar at political events has become something of a trend for far-right Christian nationalists like Mastriano to signal that they see their campaigns as a spiritual quest. But many Jews take issue with such appropriation of their ritual objects.

The person who blew the shofar at the Mastriano event was identified by the emcee as “Pastor Don” and wore a Lion of Judah Messianic prayer scarf. 

Rabbi Seth Frisch of the New Shul of America in Rydal, Pennsylvania, for example, pointed to the use of the shofar during an interview with the Forward last week decrying Mastriano’s entanglement with Gab.

Mastriano, a leader of the “Stop the Steal” movement aiming to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election, is running against Pennsylvania’s Jewish attorney general, Josh Shapiro. Democrats and Jewish Republicans alike criticized Mastriano after it was reported that he paid Gab and its founder, Andrew Torba, a $5,000 consulting fee in April and maintained an active account on the site. 

Amid mounting pressure, Mastriano last week condemned “antisemitism in all forms” and disassociated himself from Torba, who frequently shares his antisemitic beliefs online. But he stopped short of denouncing the site or asking for a reimbursement. Following that, Gab users stepped up their antisemitic postings — including death threats and calls for violence against Jews. 

He fits the perfect profile of a Gab user. He is one of them. And any members of an American minority religion should be alarmed by him because he is a true blue Christian Nationalist. He’s even been involved with that loon Sean Moon (son of Sun Myung Moon of Moonie fame) who runs a cult called the the “Rod of Iron Ministries” at which adherents perform ceremonies wearing bullet crowns and carrying AR-15s.

He’s also a moron.

You knew this was going to happen, right?

Here it is:

“Personally, I’m not itching to prosecute people under this law. I don’t think anybody else is either. But I think it’s improper to say I’ll never prosecute anybody under the law,” Douglas County DA Ryan Leonard said. “We don’t have the luxury to say, ‘I don’t like this law and I’m not going to enforce it.’”

May 22, 2019 at 07:39 PM

Douglas County District Attorney Ryan Leonard told the Daily Report on Wednesday that women in Georgia need to be on notice that they can potentially be prosecuted for murder if they have abortions after the new “heartbeat law” takes effect in January.

“If you look at it from purely a legal standpoint, if you take the life of another human being, it’s murder,” Leonard said of the “heartbeat bill” Gov. Brian Kemp signed into law this month.

They have always denied that they had this in mind. It never made sense otherwise.

And it’s a mistake

Ron Brownstein takes a look at the recent primaries and concludes that while Democrats know they must find a way to appeal to some non-college educated voters in the long term to firm up a majority, the GOP’s neglect and rejection of the college educated suburban voters continues and provides an opportunity for Democrats to win.

The more realistic route for Democrats in key races may be to defend, as much as possible, the inroads they made into the white-collar suburbs of virtually every major metropolitan area during the past three elections. Although, compared with 2020, the party will likely lose ground with all groups, Democrats are positioned to hold much more of their previous support among college-educated than noncollege voters, according to Ethan Winter, a Democratic pollster.

An array of recent public polls suggest he’s right. A Monmouth University poll released today showed that white voters without a college degree preferred Republicans for Congress by a 25-percentage-point margin, but white voters with at least a four-year degree backed Democrats by 18 points.

A recent Fox News Poll in Pennsylvania showed the Democratic Senate nominee John Fetterman crushing Republican Mehmet Oz among college-educated white voters, while the two closely split those without degrees. Another recent Fox News poll in Georgia found Senator Raphael Warnock trailing his opponent Herschel Walker among noncollege white voters by more than 40 percentage points but running essentially even among those with degrees (which would likely be enough to win, given his preponderant support in the Black community). The most recent public surveys in New Hampshire and Wisconsin likewise found Republicans leading comfortably among voters without advanced education, but Democrats holding solid advantages among those with four-year or graduate degrees. A poll this week by Siena College, in New York, found Democratic Governor Kathy Hochul splitting noncollege voters evenly with Republican Lee Zeldin, but beating him by more than two-to-one among those with a degree.

This strength among college-educated voters may be worth slightly more for Democrats in the midterms than in a general election. Voters without a degree cast a majority of ballots in both types of contests. But calculations by Catalist, a Democratic-voter-targeting firm, and Michael McDonald, a University of Florida political scientist who specializes in voter turnout, have found that voters with a college degree consistently make up about three to four percentage points more of the electorate in a midterm than in a presidential election. “When we see lower turnout elections,” like a midterm, “the gap between high-education and low-education voters increases,” McDonald told me. In close races, that gap could place a thumb on the scale for Democrats, partially offsetting the tendency of decreased turnout from younger and nonwhite voters in midterm elections.

Republicans have mostly counted on voters’ dissatisfaction with inflation and Biden’s overall performance to recover lost ground in white-collar communities. But as the polls noted above suggest, many voters in those places are, at least for now, decoupling their disenchantment with Biden from their choices in House, Senate, and governor’s races. “Voters have concerns about the direction of the country,” the Democratic strategist Jesse Ferguson told me, “but they’re terrified of the direction it would take if these MAGA Republicans took power.”

One reason for this decoupling may be that, although all families are feeling the effects of inflation, for white-collar professionals, it generally represents something more like an inconvenience than the agonizing vise it constitutes for working-class families.

That doesn’t mean white-collar voters are unconcerned about the economy, but with less worry about week-to-week financial survival, they are more likely to be influenced by the trifecta of issues that have exploded in visibility over the past several months: abortion rights,  gun control, and the threats to American democracy revealed by the House committee investigating the January 6 insurrection.

As last night’s Kansas result showed, abortion rights may be an especially powerful weapon for Democrats in white-collar areas. Polls, such as a recent survey by the nonpartisan Pew Research Center, have generally found that about two-thirds or more of voters with at least a four-year college degree believe abortion should remain legal in all or most circumstances. That support is evident even in states that generally lean toward the GOP: Recent public surveys found that strong majorities of voters with college degrees supported legal abortion in Georgia and Texas, and another survey showed majority backing among more affluent voters in Arizona.

In deep-red Kansas, two-thirds or more of voters have just supported abortion rights in four of the state’s five largest counties. Particularly noteworthy was the huge turnout and massive margin (68 percent to 32 percent at latest count) for the pro-choice position in Johnson County, a well-educated suburb of Kansas City that demographically resembles many of the suburban areas that have moved toward Democrats around such cities as Philadelphia, Detroit, Atlanta, Austin, and Phoenix.

Republican candidates this year have ceded virtually no ground to the pro-abortion-rights or pro-gun-control sentiments in those suburban areas. With the national protection for abortion revoked by the Supreme Court, almost all Republican-controlled states are on track to ban or restrict the practice. In swing states that have not yet done so, GOP gubernatorial candidates are promising to pursue tight limits. Dixon, the GOP’s Michigan nominee, said recently that she would push for an abortion ban with no exceptions for rape, incest, or the health of the mother (while she would allow them only in cases that threaten the mother’s life). Asked during a recent interview about a hypothetical case of a 14-year-old who had been impregnated by an uncle, Dixon explicitly said the teenager should carry the baby to term because “a life is a life for me.”

Brownstein quotes other analysts making the point that a referendum like the one in Kansas is different than a general election in which people are voting on a full array of issues. (Are they? I don’t really know if that’s true but whatever…)

But Democrats believe that the contrast on abortion will be highly consequential, especially in governor’s races, where Democrats such as the incumbent Gretchen Whitmer in Michigan and the nominee Josh Shapiro in Pennsylvania are presenting themselves as a last line of defense against Republicans intent on banning the procedure. Suburban “voters might have been thinking about voting Republican because they are unhappy with the direction of country and inflation, and they might decide to back Whitmer because of abortion,” Winter, the Democratic pollster, told me.

The choice may not carry such immediate implications in House and Senate races, but leading Democrats are running on promises to pass legislation restoring the national right to abortion, while Republicans are either opposing such a bill or signaling openness to imposing a national ban. The two top Democratic challengers for Republican-held Senate seats (John Fetterman in Pennsylvania and Mandela Barnes in Wisconsin) have both called for ending the filibuster to pass legislation codifying national abortion rights.

Davis, the former NRCC chair who represented a suburban Northern Virginia district, believes that even in white-collar communities supportive of abortion rights and gun control, Democrats won’t escape discontent over inflation. If Republicans could frame the election simply as a referendum on Biden’s performance, Davis told me, “that’s their path to victory and a path to an electoral landslide.” But, he added, the choice by GOP voters in so many states to nominate “exotic candidates” mostly linked to Trump has provided Democrats with an opportunity, particularly in higher-profile Senate and governor contests, to make this “a choice election.” And that, he said, gives Democrats a shot at winning enough “white ticket-splitters” to at least hold down their losses.

“Exotic candidates.” Lol. How about “batshit crazy fascists”?

The bottom line is that the voters who like Trump and his various accomplices and henchmen are going to vote Republican no matter what. They are lost. But among the remainder of the American electorate is still the feeling that the GOP remains in the grip of Donald Trump with the Supremes going off the rails and extremist policies dominating the party. Had the party pulled back from Trumpism, even just rhetorically, it’s likely this would be a more traditional election cycle. But they didn’t. They can’t.