Month: October 2022

Social Security and Medicare on the chopping block

Of course they are. They haven’t had a new idea in half a century.

For a few weeks now, they’ve been open about their intention to hold the debt ceiling hostage, a tactic they’ve used repeatedly since Tea Party Republicans tried it out in 2011. It works more or less the same way each time: Republican lawmakers say they will not vote to raise or suspend the debt ceiling, threatening to let the United States default on its debts, which would almost certainly trigger a global economic crisis. In exchange, they demand political concessions from the Democratic President. 

This time, they’re planning to demand cuts to Medicare and Social Security — a policy position so staggeringly unpopular, one would expect them to keep it shelved until after they’d procured enough votes to enact it. 

House Republicans, some of whom are poised to take over major committees in the case of a congressional flip, have been open about this intent both in interviews and, in terms of their desired changes to the programs, in the Republican Study Committee budget released earlier this year.

House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) said more in an interview with Punchbowl News published Tuesday. 

“You can’t just continue down the path to keep spending and adding to the debt. And if people want to make a debt ceiling [for a longer period of time], just like anything else, there comes a point in time where, okay, we’ll provide you more money, but you got to change your current behavior. We’re not just going to keep lifting your credit card limit, right?” he said. “And we should seriously sit together and [figure out] where can we eliminate some waste? Where can we make the economy grow stronger?”

He added that he would not “predetermine” anything in terms of extorting cuts to Social Security and Medicare during a debt ceiling standoff. 

House Republican Whip Steve Scalise (R-LA) said on Fox News Sunday that calling what Republicans want to do to the two programs “cuts” is misleading. He said they actually want to “strengthen” and “shore up” the programs. 

In the study committee budget, Republicans call for raising the age of eligibility for both Medicare and Social Security, and encourage increased means testing for Medicare. 

To keep the programs solvent, Democrats have suggested raising taxes on the wealthy rather than making more people ineligible. 

Someone needs to ask Dear Leader about this. The last I heard, he was against it. Has he changed his mind? Or does he want to “strengthen” it by cutting it too?

Breaking these out again

Left image above is from the 2016 election. The right is from 2020. Notice any difference? Not just a spike in registration on the left side, but in turnout? Notice any difference in presidential outcomes?

There is still a lot of political clout going unused on the left side of those charts.

In 2020, people on the right outvoted registered voters on the left by 3:2. That’s nearly 20 points difference in turnout. If voters on the left matched the turnout of those on the right in 2020, more than 650k more votes would have been cast in North Carolina.

Guess why politicians spend more effort appealing to voters on the right?

Early voting starts here on Thursday.

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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

We’re defined not only by our friends but by whose hatred we welcome

Writer Anand Giridharadas is a distinctive voice on politics and culture. His newest book, “The Persuaders: At the Front Lines of the Fight for Hearts, Minds, and Democracy” is out today. Coincidentally, he comments this morning in the New York Times on the knife’s edge between liberal democracy and fascism where U.S. political culture sits just now:

It is time to speak an uncomfortable truth: The pro-democracy side is at risk not just because of potential electoral rigging, voter suppression and other forms of unfair play by the right, as real as those things are. In America (as in various other countries), the pro-democracy cause — a coalition of progressives, liberals, moderates, even decent Republicans who still believe in free elections and facts — is struggling to win the battle for hearts and minds.

One of the wonky left’s greatest weaknesses it considers its greatest strength: its smarts. Geeks considered “brains” in high school found that in the wider world their smarts were more reliably marketable than looks and personality.

“I’ve worked in the private sector. They expect results,” Ray Stanz (Dan Ackroyd) tells his fellow Ghostbusters.

True. But a quick review of members of Congress should disabuse the left that smarts is all it takes to get ahead. Yet the left refuses to be disabused. And here we are, staring down an authoritarian movement inimical to the principles it claims to revere.

Giridharadas point up the flaw in the left’s sense of itself. The reality-based community needs to expand its palette, to get more muscular, less reactive, and less dependent on cold facts for winning hearts and minds:

The pro-democracy side can still very much prevail. But it needs to go beyond its present modus operandi, a mix of fatalism and despair and living in perpetual reaction to the right and policy wonkiness and praying for indictments. It needs to build a new and improved movement — feisty, galvanizing, magnanimous, rooted and expansionary — that can outcompete the fascists and seize the age.

I believe pro-democracy forces can do this because I spent the past few years reporting on people full of hope who show a way forward, organizers who refuse to give in to fatalism about their country or its citizens. These organizers are doing yeoman’s work changing minds and expanding support for true multiracial democracy, and they recognize what more of their allies on the left must: The fascists are doing as well as they are because they understand people as they are and cater to deep unmet needs, and any pro-democracy movement worth its salt needs to match them at that — but for good.

In their own circles and sometimes in public, these organizers warn that the right is outcompeting small-d democrats in its psychological insight into voters and their anxieties, its messaging, its knack for narrative, its instinct to make its cause not just a policy program but also a home offering meaning, comfort and belonging. They worry, meanwhile, that their own allies can be hamstrung by a naïve and high-minded view of human nature, a bias for the wonky over the guttural, a self-sabotaging coolness toward those who don’t perfectly understand, a quaint belief in going high against opponents who keep stooping to new lows and a lack of fight and a lack of talent at seizing the mic and telling the kinds of galvanizing stories that bend nations’ arcs.

We need to get louder. But more than that. We need to learn how to get and hold attention. To shed the depressive glass-half-empty progressivism for the glass-half-full kind.

“The right presently runs laps around the left in its ability to manage and use attention. It understands the power of provocation to make people have the conversation that most benefits its side,” Giridharadas writes. We need to tell stories more than recite statistics, to trumpet our successes even as opponents try to divert attentions elsewhere. We’d rather rant about the right’s latest outrages than about how wiping out student debt will change people’s lives forever. So much so that they advertise it to their friends for us.

We hate repeating things. Message discipline is tough, especially when the message is flat and not compelling. But repetition is powerful. Did you know repetition is powerful?

The right, Giridharadas reminds, is always seeking ways to weave together disparate, small harbingers of social change people notice everyday into sweeping, John Ford-ish narratives about threats to hearth and home. The left is always bringing “four-point plans to gunfights.”

But we need to win those gunfights, and sometimes start them. We are defined not only by our friends but by whose hatred we welcome, as FDR loudly declared.

Why did the Texas Democratic gubernatorial candidate, Beto O’Rourke, go viral when he confronted the Republican governor, Greg Abbott, during a news conference or called a voter an incest epithet? Why does the Pennsylvania Senate candidate John Fetterman so resonate with voters for his ceaseless trolling of his opponent, the celebrity surgeon and television personality Mehmet Oz, about his residency status and awkward grocery videos? In California, why has Gov. Gavin Newsom’s feisty postrecall persona, calling out his fellow governors on the right, brought such applause? Because, as Anat Shenker-Osorio, a messaging expert who advises progressive causes, has said, people “are absolutely desperate for moral clarity and demonstrated conviction.”

A collateral benefit is that moral clarity, powerfully and unreservedly defended, give voters an ideological place to call home. Trump hates the people MAGA hates. His rallies may appeal to people’s baser instincts, but they come back again and again because it feels like home. The right, Giridharadas says, has erected “a metaphorical roof over the head of adherents, giving them a sense of comfort and belonging to something larger than themselves.”

“The right deeply understands people,” Black Lives activist Alicia Garza tells Giridharadas. “It gives them a reason for being, and it gives them answers to the question of ‘Why am I suffering?’ On the left, we think a lot about facts and figures and logic that we hope will change people’s minds. I think what’s real is actually much closer to Black feminist thinkers who have said things like ‘People will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.’”

The left needs to be as creative as it thinks it is. It needs to deepen its understanding of and empathy for its audience, and to weave a story to which Americans want to belong.

What the country is trying to do is hard. Alloying a country from all of humankind, with freedom and dignity and equality for every kind of person, is a goal as complicated and elusive as it is noble. And the road to get there is bumpy, because it has yet to be paved. Embracing a bigger “we” is hard.

The backlash we are living through is no mystery, actually. It is a revolt against the future, and it is natural. This, too, is part of the story. The antidemocracy upheaval isn’t a movement of the future. It is a movement of resistance to progress that is being made — progress that we don’t celebrate enough and that the pro-democracy movement doesn’t take enough credit for.

It is time for the pro-democracy cause to step it up, ditch the despair, claim the mantle of its achievements and offer a thrilling alternative to the road of hatred, chaos, violence and tyranny. It’s going to take heart and intelligence and new strategies, words and policies. It’s going to take an army of persuaders, who believe enough in other people to try to move — and join — them. This is our righteous struggle that can and must be won.

Rewatch Silverado, for heaven’s sake.

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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

She’s even worse than you thought

This profile in the NY Times will make the hair on the back of your neck stand up. And she is gaining power. A lot of it:

“There’s going to be a lot of investigations,” Marjorie Taylor Greene said, describing what she anticipates if the Republicans regain the House majority this November. “I’ve talked with a lot of members about this.”

It was early September, two months before the midterm elections, and Greene, the first-term congresswoman from Georgia, was sitting in a restaurant in Alpharetta, an affluent suburb of greater metropolitan Atlanta. Among the fellow Republicans with whom Greene said she had been speaking about these investigations was the House minority leader, Kevin McCarthy. Just a couple of weeks later, on Sept. 23, Greene sat directly behind McCarthy in a manufacturing facility in Monongahela, Pa., as he publicly previewed what a House Republican majority’s legislative agenda would look like. Among the topics she and her colleagues have discussed is the prospect of impeaching President Joe Biden, a pursuit Greene has advocated literally since the day after Biden took office, when she filed articles of impeachment accusing Obama’s vice president of having abused his power to benefit his son Hunter Biden’s business dealings in Ukraine. “My style would be a lot more aggressive, of course,” she told me, referring to McCarthy. “For him, I think the evidence needs to be there. But I think people underestimate him, in thinking he wouldn’t do it.”

This article is adapted from “Weapons of Mass Delusion: When the Republican Party Lost Its Mind,” published this month by Penguin Press.

In Greene’s view, a Speaker McCarthy would have little choice but to adopt Greene’s “a lot more aggressive” approach toward punishing Biden and his fellow Democrats for what she sees as their policy derelictions and for conducting a “witch hunt” against former President Trump. “I think that to be the best speaker of the House and to please the base, he’s going to give me a lot of power and a lot of leeway,” she predicted in a flat, unemotional voice. “And if he doesn’t, they’re going to be very unhappy about it. I think that’s the best way to read that. And that’s not in any way a threat at all. I just think that’s reality.”

Though the 48-year-old self-described “Christian nationalist” possesses a flair for extreme bombast equal to that of her political role model Trump, Greene’s assessment of her current standing within the Republican Party — owing to the devotion accorded her by the party’s MAGA base — would seem to be entirely accurate.

Over the past two years, Greene has gone from the far-right fringe of the G.O.P. ever closer to its establishment center without changing any of her own beliefs; if anything, she has continued to find more extreme ways to express them. When she entered electoral politics in 2019, she had spent much of her adult life as a co-owner, with her husband, of her family’s construction company. (Her husband, Perry Greene, recently filed for divorce.)

She threw herself into her first campaign, that May, with almost no strategic planning or political networking, and a social media history replete with hallucinatory conspiracy theories. When she switched to a more conservative district in the middle of the 2020 campaign and won, she was roundly dismissed as an unacceptable officeholder who could be contained, isolated and returned to sender in the next election. And yet in 2021, her first year in Congress, Greene raised $7.4 million in political donations, the fourth-highest among the 212 House Republicans, a feat made even more remarkable by the fact that the three who outraised Greene — McCarthy, the minority leader; Steve Scalise, the minority whip; and Dan Crenshaw of Texas — were beneficiaries of corporate PACs that have shunned Greene. (As Trump did during his candidacy, Greene maintains that it is in fact she who refuses all corporate donations.)

In another measure of her influence within the national party, Greene’s endorsement and support have been eagerly sought by 2022 G.O.P. hopefuls like the Arizona gubernatorial nominee Kari Lake and the Ohio U.S. Senate candidate J.D. Vance. Within the House Republican conference, McCarthy has assiduously courted her support, inviting her to high-level policy meetings (such as a discussion about the National Defense Authorization Act, which sets Department of Defense policy for the year) and, according to someone with knowledge of their exchanges, offering to create a new leadership position for her.

McCarthy’s spokesman denies that the minority leader has made such an offer. When I asked Greene if the report was inaccurate, she smiled and said, “Not necessarily.” But then she added: “I don’t have to have a leadership position. I think I already have one, without having one.”

Greene’s metamorphosis over the past year and a half from pariah to a position of undeniable influence presents a case study in G.O.P. politics in the Trump era. The first time I saw Greene in person was on the morning of Jan. 6, 2021. She was barreling down a crowded corridor of the Longworth House Office Building, conspicuously unmasked at a time when masks were still mandated by U.S. Capitol rules. Her all-male retinue of staff members striding briskly beside her were also maskless. In the late hours after that day’s insurrection — one that the Georgia freshman arguably had egged on with her innumerable claims that the 2020 presidential election had been stolen and her assertion to a Newsmax interviewer that Jan. 6 would be “our 1776 moment” — Greene stood on the House floor and objected to the Michigan election results, a move that was promptly dismissed by the presiding officer, Vice President Mike Pence, because the congresswoman had no U.S. senator to join her in the motion as the rules prescribed.

The day after the insurrection, Greene sat in a corner of her office in the Longworth building, being interviewed for a right-wing YouTube show by Katie Hopkins, a British white nationalist who had been banished from most social media outlets for her Islamophobic and racist comments (the channel that carried her show has since been taken down by YouTube). The Georgia freshman reflected somberly on the events of the previous day: “Last night and into the early-morning hours was probably one of the saddest days of my life. Scariest and loneliest days of my life. On the third day on the job as a new member of Congress, um, just having our Capitol attacked, being blamed on the president that I love, and I know it’s not his fault; and then having it blamed on all the people that support him, 75 million people — 75-plus million people that have supported President Trump and have truly appreciated all his hard work and America First policies and everything about Make America Great Again.” (Trump received 74.2 million votes in 2020.) “It was extremely lonely in there, watching, basically, the certification of the Electoral College votes for Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, even though we know the election was stolen, and the Democrats were working so hard on it, but Republicans too, there were Republicans also.”

Hopkins listened attentively, her face knotted with anguish, and observed, “It’s almost as if you’re one of them — you’re almost like one of those who could’ve been at the rally.”

“I am one of those people,” Greene said emphatically. “That’s exactly who I am.”

Hastily, as if realizing the implication of what she had said, she added: “I’m not one of those people that attacked the Capitol yesterday. I completely condemn that. I completely condemn attacking law enforcement; I support our police officers. And I thank them for their courage yesterday in keeping us safe. I know there were bad actors involved and investigations are underway — and it’s Antifa.” (In subsequent months, Greene would blame the F.B.I. for possibly instigating the violence on Jan. 6. She also voted against awarding police officers who defended the Capitol that day the congressional gold medal, its highest honor.)

Greene also said to Hopkins, “I’m not a politician.” Like much of what she said during their interview, this statement was not altogether accurate. Her precocious gift for offending and demonizing qualified her as a natural for the trade as it had come to be reimagined by Trump and his acolytes.

She is the Queen of the Trump Cult. And she is evil. Read it all if you can. Oy….

It’s going to be horrible

They aren’t running on a real agenda. But there are things they plan to do if they win the House::

Investigations, and then some more investigations 

It would be Benghazi on steroids, over and over. Hunter Biden alone could spawn multiple hearings, as Republicans and the Fox News apparatus that supports them have become singularly fixated on Biden’s son. 

“We’re not investigating Hunter Biden for political reasons,” Rep. James Comer (R-KY), who is poised to chair the House Oversight Committee in the case of a GOP flip, told TIME this month. “We’re investigating Hunter Biden because we believe he’s a national security threat, who we fear has compromised Joe Biden.” 

Comer then quickly told on himself, adding: “The Hunter Biden investigation is slowly becoming the Joe Biden investigation.”

Republicans have also said they’ll investigate Dr. Anthony Fauci, Biden’s immigration policies, the pullout from Afghanistan, the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic, the causes of inflation, the Jan. 6 committee and baseless claims of voter fraud in the 2020 election. 

Many of these topics are shot through with conspiracy theories, and will all revolve around trying to make the Biden administration look bad. 

Debt ceiling hostage-taking 

In the case of a split Congress, Republicans would be stymied legislatively. But they would be able to indulge in their habitual pastime when a Democrat occupies the Oval Office: taking the global economy hostage to extort political concessions from him. 

The tactic was first used in earnest by Tea Party Republicans in 2011, and the party has warmed to it ever since. Each time, Republican members say they won’t help suspend or raise the debt ceiling, threatening to let the United States default on its debts, which would almost certainly trigger a global financial crisis. In exchange for relinquishing their hostage, they demand that Democrats give them what they want. (Concerns about the national debt conveniently fell by the wayside during the Trump administration.)

This time, they plan to demand cuts to Medicare and Social Security — a position so staggeringly unpopular with voters that it may explain why they didn’t attempt to enact the cuts during the two years they had unified control under then-President Donald Trump. 

After 2011 when Democrats unwisely tried to negotiate with Republicans, the GOP lawmakers have largely had to capitulate after some kind of standoff. As the GOP becomes increasingly dominated by hard-right actors, though, the danger only grows. 

Impeach Biden and assorted Cabinet members 

Republicans have been mulling impeaching Biden since before he was even the Democratic nominee. 

Sen. Joni Ernst (R-IA) said in February 2020 that “I think this door of ‘impeachable whatever’ has been opened” by conspiracy theories about Biden’s supposed role in the ousting of Ukraine’s top prosecutor, Viktor Shokin. (These, you may recall, are the same conspiracy theories that Trump tried to extort Ukraine President Volodomyr Zelensky to investigate, an episode that resulted in Trump’s first impeachment.) Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) introduced articles of impeachment related to the same conspiracy theory the day after Biden was inaugurated. 

Some Republicans have been explicit about the political motivations underlying such an impeachment push. 

“I believe there’s a lot of pressure on Republicans to have that vote, to put that legislation forward, and to have that vote,” Rep. Nancy Mace (R-SC) said on NBC last month. 

Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) said on his podcast last winter that a Republican House would likely impeach Biden “whether it’s justified or not.”

Republicans have tended to be vague on exactly why they would impeach Biden, though some have tossed out their displeasure with his handling of the southern border, and others have pointed in Hunter Biden’s direction. They’ve frequently named Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas as another likely target. 

It only takes a simple majority of House members to impeach a President, but two-thirds of the Senate to convict him. Even if Republicans took over both chambers, there’s virtually no chance they’d take enough Senate seats to actually remove Biden or a Cabinet member from office. 

(Try to) Slash the social safety net 

This goes hand-in-hand with the debt ceiling threats, but Republicans have been expansive on this point. 

“Entitlements are gonna consume the budget,” Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) said recently on Fox News, adding: “Entitlement reform is a must for us to not become Greece.”

The Republican Study Committee released a budget this summer that elaborated on these priorities. It calls for raising the age of eligibility for both Medicare and Social Security, and encourages increased means testing for Medicare. It also contemplates reducing payroll taxes that fund Social Security, instead redirecting them to private alternatives. 

Separately, Sen. Rick Scott (R-FL), chair of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, released his “Plan to Rescue America” which called for letting “all federal legislation” — presumably including Medicare and Social Security — sunset every five years unless Congress reauthorizes it. Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI) has also floated funding the two programs through the annual budget rather than letting the spending be automatically dispersed, as it is now. 

The Republican Study Budget goes after other social programs too. 

It would make SNAP — formerly known as food stamps — more selective, and make home visits — “as a means of deterring welfare fraud” — a condition of eligibility. It would eliminate the Community Eligibility Provision from the school lunch program, which allows schools in low-income areas to provide free lunch to all students, regardless of individuals’ eligibility. It would also push those on the waitlist for public housing to have to live with roommates, so as to stop “needlessly increasing costs for both the federal taxpayer and the beneficiaries.”

Republicans would not be able to institute these changes legislatively over either a Democratic Senate or Biden’s veto. But we’d see energy channeled in this direction, particularly if they take over House committees with jurisdiction over these programs. 

Pass dead-on arrival, culture war red meat 

Finally, Republicans would introduce a raft of bills that won’t go anywhere. 

House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy’s (R-CA) Commitment to America gives some clues in its promise to “defend fairness by ensuring that only women can compete in women’s sports” and “uphold free speech, protect the lives of unborn children and their mothers, guarantee religious freedom and safeguard the Second Amendment.” 

The Republican Study Budget has more, decrying “woke politics” in the military, naming a slate of anti-abortion bills and decrying “discrimination” towards people who oppose same-sex marriage.

These bills too would run into the buzzsaw of a Democratic Senate, a Republican Senate with a filibuster or Biden’s veto. But they’d provide hours of Fox News fodder and Republican floor speeches. 

If they win the Senate they’ll do exactly the same thing.

Also look for them to remove their hated Reps from all their committees in revenge for Marjorie Taylor Green. Swallwell, AOC and Schiff are likely names. They might even go after Pelosi and the House leadership. I would not be surprised.

They’ll be busy — sabotaging the government.

And the Supreme Court is helping them do it

This is only the beginning:

The Republican National Committee and other major campaign organs of the party on Monday seized on a recent Supreme Court order in an attempt to get undated and incorrectly dated Pennsylvania absentee ballots invalidated for the upcoming elections. 

The Supreme Court last week rendered moot a March decision from the United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit that undated ballots should be counted, as the date or lack thereof has no bearing on whether the individual is qualified to vote. The appeals court found that requiring the date is a technicality that violates the “materiality provision” of the Civil Rights Act.

That decision came from a dispute over the ballots in a 2021 race for a spot on the Lehigh County Court of Common Pleas. The Republican candidate, who lost by a handful of votes, asked the Supreme Court to nullify the appellate court’s decision.

Last week, the Court complied. Justice Samuel Alito, joined by Justices Neil Gorsuch and Clarence Thomas, had written previously that the Third Circuit’s decision was “very likely wrong” and invited an involved party to file a petition for certiorari so the justices could correct it.

The RNC, joined by the National Republican Congressional Committee and the Republican Party of Pennsylvania, heeded the conservative justice’s advice and went to the Pennsylvania Supreme Court. The Republicans are asking that the court uphold the date requirement for the upcoming midterms, invalidate the acting Secretary of State’s guidance that undated ballots should be counted and order that all county boards of election segregate undated or incorrectly dated ballots from the rest. 

Acting Pennsylvania Secretary of State Leigh Chapman had issued a statement after the Supreme Court mooted the lower court’s ruling last week. 

“Today’s order from the U.S. Supreme Court vacating the Third Circuit’s decision on mootness grounds was not based on the merits of the issue and does not affect the prior decision of Commonwealth Court in any way,” she said. “It provides no justification for counties to exclude ballots based on a minor omission, and we expect that counties will continue to comply with their obligation to count all legal votes.”

While the Republicans argue that counting undated ballots will “erode public trust” in Pennsylvania’s elections at a “vital time” in the country’s history — while conveniently omitting their party’s own role in creating an environment of doubt and conspiracy theories around elections — the political calculus here is clear. Pennsylvania Democrats voted by mail significantly more than Republicans did in 2020. The stakes are all the higher given that Pennsylvania is hosting marquee elections for a critical Senate seat and a governor’s mansion, the occupant of which gets to select the secretary of state. 

The GOP organizations are candid in their intent to remove ballots they think will work against Republican candidates. 

“Absent this relief, a county board of elections that counts undated or incorrectly dated ballots cannot remove non-compliant ballots from its certified election results if this Court upholds the General Assembly’s date requirement,” the Republicans write. “The resulting dilution of Voter Petitioners’ votes — and harm to the Republican Committees’ voters and candidates — cannot be compensated through an award of damages.” 

In their filing, the Republicans also cite the independent state legislature theory, an increasingly popular idea on the right that state legislatures — and only state legislatures, to the exclusion of state courts and even of state constitutions and ballot initiatives, in some interpretations — control federal elections. 

“State courts wield no authority to regulate federal elections and may not deploy broad and amorphous state constitutional provisions to rewrite state laws governing those elections,” they write. They also cite Alito’s dissent from a denial of application of stay in Moore v. Harper, a case the Court will hear this term that could upend the functioning of American democracy. 

The Republicans argue that there is not enough time for “ordinary processes of law” to play out over the dating issue, so the Pennsylvania Supreme Court should just issue the order now. This immediately pre-election chaos was inevitable ever since the Supreme Court handed down the order to nullify the appellate court decision just a few weeks before the election — a decision seemingly at odds with conservative justices’ insistence on upholding the Purcell principle and resisting interfering with election laws close to when voting begins for other cases in which they’ve struck down voter protections. 

They’re not even trying to hide it. They say right out that allowing votes to be counted which don’t have a date written in on the outside of the envelope (I guess the postmark is considered a hoax too) will hurt Republicans.

This is voter suppression endorsed by the right wing Supreme Court. If they rule that the Independent State Legislature Theory is correct it’s hard to see how we will ever have another Democratic president. As long as Republicans control the areas where white, rural racists dominate, Democrats will not be able to compete despite having much larger numbers of followers.

I wish I knew what to do about this but I don’t. This court is shamelessly partisan and they obviously don’t care that they are rapidly losing all legitimacy. It’s about power, nothing more.

And he did!

I think we knew this was happening but now there is proof:

Former president Donald Trump’s company charged the Secret Service as much as five times more than the government rate for agents to stay overnight at Trump hotels while protecting him and his family, according to expense records newly obtained by Congress.

The records show that in 40 cases the Trump Organization billed the Secret Service far higher amounts than the approved government rate — in one case charging agents $1,185 a night to stay at the Trump International Hotel in D.C. The new billing documents, according to a congressional committee’s review, show that U.S. taxpayers paid the president’s company at least $1.4 million for Secret Service agents’ stays at Trump properties for his and his family’s protection.

“The exorbitant rates charged to the Secret Service and agents’ frequent stays at Trump-owned properties raise significant concerns about the former President’s self-dealing and may have resulted in a taxpayer-funded windfall for former President Trump’s struggling businesses,” Rep. Carolyn B. Maloney (D-N.Y.) wrote to Secret Service Director Kimberly Cheatle.

The records contradict the repeated claim made by Eric Trump, the president’s son and the Trump Organization’s executive vice president, that the family’s company often gave the Secret Service agents the hotel rooms “at cost” or sometimes free, providing steep discounts for the security team to stay at Trump properties.

The Secret Service did not immediately responded to a message from The Washington Post about the new congressional report.

Eric Trump disputed that the Trump Organization profited off Secret Service stays at his family’s properties.

“Any services rendered to the United States Secret Service or other government agencies at Trump owned properties, were at their request and were either provided at cost, heavily discounted or for free,” he said in a statement. “The company would have been substantially better off if hospitality services were sold to full-paying guests, however, the company did whatever it took to accommodate the agencies to ensure they were able to do their jobs at the highest levels.”

While the documents do not cover all Secret Service expenses at Trump properties during his presidency and reflect only a fraction of those expenses since he left office, they offer a more detailed financial accounting than previously known of what taxpayers paid for Trump’s frequent choice to stay at his properties. Trump visited his properties more than 500 times during his presidency.

Documents obtained in February 2020 under the Freedom of Information Act revealed the rates the Secret Service paid at then-President Donald Trump’s properties. (Video: Zach Purser Brown/The Washington Post)

Maloney, chairwoman of the House Oversight and Reform Committee, obtained the records as part of her investigation into how Trump may have profited off his security agents’ duty to follow him wherever he traveled. She wrote a letter Monday to Cheatle demanding a complete accounting of what taxpayers have paid — and continue to pay — the Trump Organization.

“Given the long-standing concerns surrounding the former President’s conflicts of interest and efforts to profit off the presidency, the committee has a strong interest in obtaining a complete accounting of federal government spending at Trump properties,” Maloney wrote. “The Committee continues to examine potential legislation to prevent presidential self-dealing and profiteering, as well as to curb conflicts of interest by ensuring that future presidents are prevented from exercising undue influence on Secret Service spending. ”

In 2019, Eric Trump said the Trump Organization was saving the Secret Service agents — and taxpayers who paid the bill — huge sums.

“If my father travels, they stay at our properties free,” he said. “So everywhere that he goes, if he stays at one of his places, the government actually spends, meaning it saves a fortune because if they were to go to a hotel across the street, they’d be charging them $500 a night, whereas, you know we charge them, like $50.”

In 2020, Eric Trump reiterated that Trump Organization was giving these public servants — and ultimately taxpayers — discounted rates.

“We provide the rooms at cost and could make far more money renting them to members or guests,” he said.

But the reality was different, the records reveal. During Trump’s presidency, Secret Service supervisors frequently asked for special waivers to let the agency pay far more than the government-approved nightly rate for a hotel in D.C. — usually $195 to $240. Instead, they paid the higher costs the Trump Organization was charging.

In April 2017, when Eric Trump and his wife, Lara, were staying at the Trump International Hotel in D.C., the president’s company charged the Secret Service agents $1,160 — more than four times the government rate at the time — the records show.

In November 2017, when Donald Trump, Jr., stayed at the same hotel, the government was charged $1,185 a night for his security detail staying overnight at the hotel to protect him — almost six times the government rate, which varies based on time and location.

The idea that Trump wasn’t grifting from the secret service being forced to stay at his hideous properties was never believable. Of course he was taking as much as he possibly could and no doubt still is. Imagine how much they are charging for his secret service protection now that he’s out of office.

Remember this?

In June, former Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin visited Israel to scout investments for his new company, then flew to Qatar for a conference. At the time, Mnuchin had been out of office for five months.

But, because of an order given by President Donald Trump, he was still entitled to protection by Secret Service agents. As agents followed Mnuchin across the Middle East, the U.S. government paid up to $3,000 each for their plane tickets, and $11,000 for rooms at Qatar’s luxe St. Regis Doha, according to government spending records.

In all, the records show U.S. taxpayers spent more than $52,000 to guard a multimillionaire on a business trip.

These payments were among $1.7 million in additional government spending triggered by Trump’s highly unusual order — which awarded six extra months of Secret Service protection for his four adult children and three top administration officials — according to a Washington Post analysis of new spending documents.

These are all filthy rich people, scamming off the taxpayers. And many voters just seem to love it.

They’re all getting a new toy: a social media company

Of course:

Ye, formerly known as Kanye West, plans to acquire Parler, a Twitter-like social media app that has become a haven for conservatives.

 In a statement, Ye said he’s buying the platform to ensure people with conservative opinions “have the right to freely express ourselves” online.

Earlier this month, Ye’s Instagram and Twitter accounts were restricted in response to antisemitic posts.

In a statement, Parler’s parent company Parlement Technologies said it has entered into “an agreement in principle” to sell Parler to Ye for an undisclosed amount.

“The proposed acquisition will assure Parler a future role in creating an uncancelable ecosystem where all voices are welcome,” the company said in a statement.

Under the terms of the agreement, Parler has agreed to sell fully to Ye, but Parler will continue to receive technical support from Parlement Technologies, including access to its private cloud services and its data center infrastructure.

Ye has already created an account on Parler, but has yet to post anything.

 Parler was created in September 2018 as a free speech alternative to apps like Twitter and Facebook. The app was de-platformed from Google and Apple’s app stores in January 2021, following the January Capitol siege.

It was reinstated by Apple in April of last year and it only returned to Google’s app store last month.

Parler raised $20 million in new funding in January. The app’s founding investor is Rebekah Mercer, a Trump supporter and major Republican donor.

In a statement, Parler said it expects the deal to close later in 2022.

More on the rich boys:

Elon Musk doesn’t seem to have much of a vision for how to actually run Twitter, if his takeover bid succeeds. He’s not alone.

A small group of tech moguls believe America is in the midst of what they call a “free speech” crisis, and they’re investing time and money to change the terms of public discourse. But so far, they’ve made more headlines than progress.

 Just hours after announcing his bid, Musk took the stage at the TED conference in Vancouver, Canada, to explain his takeover rationale. In doing so, he gave Twitter’s board of directors ample reason to reject his bid.

Instead of delivering a distinct plan for Twitter’s future, Musk gave meandering and sometimes contradictory answers about how he would address Twitter’s content moderation challenges.

He said Twitter should use human judgment to evaluate free speech — while also saying Twitter shouldn’t regulate users’ speech, except to follow the laws of the countries it operates in.

He said he wants Twitter to hold on to as many current shareholders as possible once it goes private. Later he asserted: “I don’t care about the economics” that would be paramount to many of those shareholders.

Social media companies are increasingly willing to remove certain types of content, and ban those who post it, after years of casting themselves as neutral platforms.

This change has triggered an opposite reaction by individuals who prefer the earlier approach.

A lot of social media content moderation, like removing illegal photos or videos, is widely accepted.

But there are deep divisions when things turn to “misinformation” on COVID or Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Some of this runs along partisan lines. But it would be an oversimplification to limit the issue to politics.

Most of the discourse revolves around Twitter, because that’s where so many tech moguls, politicians and journalists spend their time.

Marc Andreessen has repeatedly tweaked Twitter and some of its users over the past month, often employing the “I support the current thing” meme, and also leads a venture capital firm that’s invested millions of dollars into paid newsletter platform Substack and audio app Clubhouse.

Conservative billionaires have opted to create or back various versions of their own Twitter-like platforms — like Parler, Gettr, and Truth Social. But those apps are tiny compared to mainstream platforms. Truth Social still hasn’t launched after months of tech and financing issues.

Both Musk and Andreessen appear sincere in their critiques of Twitter, but also have some negative personal experiences that may have influenced their opinions.

Musk got in trouble with the SEC for a false tweet about having “funding secured” to take Tesla private, and Andreessen was hammered for criticizing “anti-colonialism” in India, while defending Facebook’s Free Basics program.

Musk settled with the SEC, but is now trying to back out of that agreement. Andreessen apologized for and deleted the tweet, and then largely stopped posting on Twitter for a few years (before returning with a vengeance).

Not everyone endorsing “free speech” has a history of consistency.

Peter Thiel, who for years has sat on Facebook’s board with Andreessen, has put money behind “free speech” YouTube alternative Rumble. But he also financed the lawsuit that bankrupted Gawker. Plus, Facebook has implemented many of the same content moderation policies as Twitter, including banning Donald Trump.

Truth Social, the new social media app founded by Trump, originally had terms of service that allowed users to be banned for disparaging Truth Social or its team. That clause was later removed.

Left-leaning billionaires Reid Hoffman and George Soros are among those who recently backed a new public benefit corporation that aims to tackle disinformation by funding left-leaning local news sites.

And Jeff Bezos, Marc Benioff and Laurene Powell Jobs have bought up venerable, established media properties.

Rich people want to control terms of discourse. They always have and always will.

But controlling a major social media platform takes more than money: It requires deep commitment to product and attention to legal and societal expectations around content moderation. So far, few billionaires have cracked that code as well as Silicon Valley titans.

It’s one thing for rich people to own media companies.That’s nothing new. But we are in a different era now, in which the social and political discourse if happening on new participatory platforms.These narcissistic weirdos have no idea what they’re doing but since they all think they are Renaissance men, they assume they can just run something as complex as social media knowing fuckall about it.

God help us.

This election is like no other

We are three weeks out from the midterm elections and by all accounts many races are within the margin of error. It’s pretty clear that the “red tsunami” everyone was expecting has not materialized. Republicans are still favored to win (at least in the House) but it’s looking more and more as if it will be a very narrow victory if they do — and there’s a decent chance they won’t.

So, of course, Democrats are going on television arguing that everyone is doing it wrong. It’s just how they roll. The latest disagreements come from those who think candidates should focus on the old saw, “It’s the economy, stupid,” because inflation has people so spooked. Sen. Bernie Sanders appeared on “Meet the Press” over the weekend and gave his familiar spiel about income inequality and big corporations, suggesting that some Trump voters would be open to that argument. He begged Democrats to focus more intently on the economy and attack the Republican threats to Social Security and Medicare.

Others believe that the best issue for Democrats this fall is the Supreme Court’s decision overturning Roe v. Wade, which has already been shown to motivate women of all demographics in the primaries and special elections. And some believe the fascist turn of the GOP and its assault on democracy is the most important issue and must be addressed head-on.

If only we were living in a world in which one could pick and choose issues of importance to the American people from an à la carte menu. But that’s just not where we are as a country. The Democrats have to be prepared to address all those things and more.

No doubt the economy is a difficult issue this year, even though Democrats have an excellent legislative record to run on and the best job market in 40 years. But there’s simply no denying that inflation is a big problem for everyone. Democratic strategist Mike Lux has circulated a memo based on polling from Stan Greenberg and Celinda Lake that recommends five economic points for candidates to emphasize. The first is to grab the Bernie Sanders complaints about multinational corporations — Big Oil, Big Food, Big Shipping, etc. — which are making record profits in this time of inflation by gouging consumers, and point out that the Republicans have nothing to offer to tame these abuses, which is true. (This report in the Washington Post suggests that swing voters already understand this.)

Lux also suggests that candidates remind people that the Democrats are lowering drug prices and health insurance premiums, point out that Social Security recipients are going to get the biggest raise they’ve gotten in 40 years, inform voters that manufacturing is coming back to America (which they probably don’t realize) and, finally, promise to fight for reinstating the child tax credit that has now expired. All of that certainly beats the stale GOP talking points about cutting taxes and “entitlements.”

The abortion issue is straightforward. In the wake of the Dobbs decision, Republicans all over the country have raced to restrict abortion rights in the most draconian way possible, in some states banning abortion altogether. Stories of rape and incest survivors being denied care are everywhere. Women often can’t get needed medication and procedures because ill-informed zealots have drafted sloppy laws that make it impossible for doctors to perform their duties without risking legal jeopardy. It’s a mess, and Democrats are morally bound to talk about it.

Meanwhile, on the other side we are seeing a full-fledged racist and antisemitic festival of hate used as the primary motivator to get their base out to vote. Take a look at this ad that has played throughout the Major League Baseball playoffs on Fox, which, according to Will Bunch of the Philadelphia Inquirer, is brought to you by a group run by Trump’s “immigration czar” Stephen Miller:

https://twitter.com/citizens_sanity/status/1566131407654715394?s=20&t=7mhDvKheTnsvZDejS5G8VA

That makes the infamous Willie Horton ad — which ran only briefly 34 years ago, because it was considered too blatantly racist — look like child’s play.

And now we have the former president of the United States blithely posting antisemitic tropes on his struggling social media platform, demanding that American Jews be grateful for everything he has supposedly done for them and suggesting they get with the program “before it’s too late.” Too late for what, he doesn’t say.

So yes, Republicans have gone back to the deep well of racism once again, obviously believing that’s what motivates their base. They aren’t wrong.

When you see all of that laid out, you might think we were dealing with a standard issues-based election, more or less, however critical those issues are and however extreme the Republicans have become. Certainly, the media is trying to treat it that way. But this is an election like no other and it’s got nothing to do with “issues” in the normal sense. The Republicans are intent upon electing hundreds of election deniers to office, and are bent on destroying our election system as we’ve known it for the last half-century or more.

Mainstream media is eager to treat this as a standard issues-based election, no matter how extreme the Republicans have become. But this is an election like no other and it’s got nothing to do with “issues” in the normal sense.

Bolts Magazine has compiled a comprehensive analysis of the election deniers running for secretary of state around the country. Seventeen out of 35 Republican nominees have either denied the results of the 2020 election, sought to overturn them or refused to affirm the legitimacy of the outcome. Six of those 17 candidates are in crucial battleground states. There are hundreds of candidates in down-ballot races that feature similarly delusional or malicious candidates.

Plenty of big Republican names running on election denial as well, even if some of them are willing to modulate that just a little. When asked if they think Joe Biden won the 2020 election they’ll respond by saying things like, “Joe Biden is the president,” which I guess they think fools some people. But everyone knows what they mean. They are making it clear that, like their mentor Donald Trump, they will only accept election results if they win:

And this is how democracy ceases to be.👇 https://t.co/XgBs62yCfi

— Joe Walsh (@WalshFreedom) October 17, 2022

Donald Trump plotted the Big Lie long before the 2020 election, and it had been on his mind since at least 2016. That was clear enough shown in real time and was recently laid out in detail by the House Jan. 6 committee. Any Republican officials who are not fully on board with this dangerous attack on the election system are seemingly paralyzed and unwilling to deny it.

The MAGA movement is openly assaulting democracy. Yet as we head into the final days of this campaign, mainstream media keeps trying to portray this as just another election. Gas prices are going up and down and Republicans are running scary ads with Black and brown people and threatening to cut Social Security, all of which is important and must be addressed. But none of that will matter if these authoritarian, anti-democratic election deniers win their races. There is nothing ordinary about any of this. I don’t know whether the voters understand the true implications of this election, and I’m not sure the media does either. 

Salon

Republicans reject “that voters have the right to choose their leaders”

“A majority of Republican candidates on the ballot this fall for major state and federal elective offices,” Marc Fisher writes in the Washington Post, join the former president in rejecting the outcome of the 2020 presidential election and, by extension, elections they do not win this fall. This “epidemic of election denialism” historians and political scientists see as clear indication of the U.S. “drift toward authoritarian rule.”

Valorization of strongmen and tech giants as men (it’s always men, isn’t it?) “who get the job done” is growing around the world, observes Nikolas Gvosdev, a professor of national security studies at the U.S. Naval War College.

Rejection of popular sovereignty is a feature of this trend. The defense of basic rights takes a back seat to economic concerns, especially for Republicans:

A new Monmouth University poll asked people what issues were most important as they considered their votes this fall, and 54 percent cited concerns about the economy and cost of living, while 38 percent said they were most concerned about fundamental rights and democratic processes. Republicans overwhelmingly put the economy first — 71 percent of them — and Democrats largely put rights first, at 67 percent.

That the people elect their leaders is fundamental to the country’s origin story. Yet it is that story Republicans have undermined now for decades. The current rise of authoritarianism in the U.S. is an outgrowth of those efforts, not a recent development, Heather Cox Richardson recounts in her newsletter:

Republicans’ rejection of the idea that voters have the right to choose their leaders is not a new phenomenon. It is part and parcel of Republican governance since the 1980s, when it became clear to Republican leaders that their “supply-side economics,” a program designed to put more money into the hands of those at the top of the economy, was not actually popular with voters, who recognized that cutting taxes and services did not, in fact, result in more tax revenue and rising standards of living. They threatened to throw the Republicans out of office and put back in place the Democrats’ policies of using the government to build the economy from the bottom up.

So, to protect President Ronald Reagan’s second round of tax cuts in 1986, Republicans began to talk of cutting down Democratic voting through a “ballot integrity” initiative, estimating that their plans could “eliminate at least 60–80,000 folks from the rolls” in Louisiana. “If it’s a close race…, this could keep the Black vote down considerably,” a regional director of the Republican National Committee wrote.

When Democrats countered by expanding voting through the National Voter Registration Act of 1993, more commonly known as the Motor Voter Act, a New York Times writer said Republicans saw the law “as special efforts to enroll core Democratic constituencies in welfare and jobless-benefits offices.” While Democrats thought it was important to enfranchise “poor people…people who can’t afford cars, people who can’t afford nice houses,” Republicans, led by then–House minority whip Newt Gingrich of Georgia, predicted “a wave of fraudulent voting by illegal immigrants.”

From there it was a short step to insisting that Republicans lost elections not because their ideas were unpopular, but because Democrats cheated. In 1994, losing candidates charged, without evidence, that Democrats won elections with “voter fraud.” In California, for example, Senator Dianne Feinstein’s opponent, who had spent $28 million of his own money on the race but lost by about 160,000 votes, said on “Larry King Live” that “frankly, the fraud is overwhelming” and that once he found evidence, he would share it to demand “a new election.” That evidence never materialized, but in February 1995 the losing candidate finally made a statement saying he would stop litigating despite “massive deficiencies in the California election system,” in the interest of “a thorough bipartisan investigation and solutions to those problems.”

Yeah, well, absence of evidence is not evidence of absence in conspiracy circles, circles that have widened dramatically on the right since the 1990s. Ask Republicans to produce evidence of alleged massive voter fraud and they’ll boldly assert the proposition that it exists but the press refuses to cover it. Arizona Republican gubernatorial nominee Kari Lake did so on Sunday. This absolves them of having to produce any and subject it to evaluation. Because they cannot.

“A proposition is a picture of reality,” wrote Wittgenstein. Statements that cannot be evaluated true or false are not propositions, and are more akin to statements of faith.

"Why do you keep saying that?"@DanaBashCNN presses Republican gubernatorial candidate for Arizona Kari Lake about her claims on the campaign trail that there was election fraud in the 2020 election. @CNNSotu #CNNSOTU pic.twitter.com/dDuZDrQ7ns

— CNN (@CNN) October 16, 2022

Republicans have lost theirs in the system they put tremendous time and expense into controlling with no intention of governing.

It was not so very long ago that historians taught the Wilmington coup as a shocking anomaly in our democratic system, but now, 124 years after it happened, it is current again. Modern-day Republicans appear to reject not only the idea they could lose an election fairly, but also the fundamental principle, established in the Declaration of Independence, that all Americans have a right to consent to their government.

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