Lol…
I’m sure he’s relieved that he isn’t the center of attention today.
"what digby sez..."
Month: January 2023
Historic weakness
At this moment, we don’t have any idea what will happen. He could pull it out or we could end up with several ballots and someone else. By the time you read this we may know. But whatever happens we are going to be dealing with a House majority in chaos and historically weak. Lol.
Ron Brownstein analyzed the ramifications of this:
No matter how they resolve Tuesday’s vote choosing the next speaker of the House, Republicans appear poised to double down on the hard-edged politics that most swing state voters rejected in last November’s midterm election.
Stubborn conservative resistance to House GOP Leader Kevin McCarthy has put the party at risk of precipitating the first speakership election that extends to more than a single ballot since 1923 – and only the second since the Civil War. But even if McCarthy ultimately prevails, the show of strength from the GOP’s conservative vanguard has ensured it enormous leverage in shaping the party’s legislative and investigative agenda. And that could reinforce the image of extremism that hurt Republicans in the midterm election, especially in the key swing states likely to decide the next presidential contest – Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Georgia and Arizona.
Whoever Republicans ultimately select as speaker “will be subject to the whims and the never-ending leveraging of a small group of members who want to wield power,” said former GOP Rep. Charlie Dent, a CNN political commentator. “You’re going to have this group on the far right that is going to continue to push the leadership to go further right on issues.”
Tuesday’s vote may create a kind of drama that was common in the House during the 19th century but has virtually disappeared since. Before the Civil War, when party allegiances were more fluid, the House failed to elect a speaker on the first ballot 13 times, according to the House historian’s office. The most arduous struggles occurred in roughly the decade before the Civil War, as the existing party system crumbled under the pressure of the escalating conflict between the North and South, and the newly formed Republican Party supplanted the Whigs as the major competitor to the Democrats, then the dominant party. One speakership election during that tumultuous decade required 133 ballots (and two months of balloting) to resolve; the final speaker selection before the Civil War began took 44 ballots.
Since then, the only selection that has required more than a single ballot came in 1923, when Republicans holding only a narrow majority comparable to their advantage this year took nine ballots to select their speaker. Then the complication was that a minority of left-leaning progressive Republicans initially resisted conservative incumbent Speaker Frederick Gillett.
Today McCarthy faces resistance from the opposite pole of his caucus-a circle of hard-right conservatives who have pledged not to support him, at least on the first ballot. Many in the party establishment still believe that even if conservatives initially block McCarthy, he will ultimately succeed – largely because there is no other alternative likely to draw broader support across the party.
“I think he prevails because there is no other candidate with his experience and fundraising ability and at the end of the day the party base will close ranks because nothing happens until you have a Speaker: No investigations… nothing,” former GOP Rep. Tom Davis, who served as chair of the National Republican Congressional Committee, wrote me in an email. “And the vast majority of the Conference is loyal to him.”
But whether or not McCarthy ultimately claims the prize, the difficulty he’s faced securing the votes makes clear that whoever the GOP selects as speaker will be operating on a very narrow ledge and subject to constant threat of revolt from an aggressive conservative wing. That was the formula that ultimately led to premature retirements by the previous two GOP speakers, John Boehner and Paul Ryan. McCarthy “is in a tough spot, as was Boehner and Ryan,” Davis notes. Dent believes a Speaker McCarthy would face an even more precarious situation than those two predecessors because “there are more of the ultra-MAGA types than they were then” while the party’s overall margin in the House “is smaller.”
Operating on such a tight leash, McCarthy (or whoever else the GOP eventually chooses) seems highly unlikely to exert much discipline on the party’s militant conservative vanguard. He’s already signaled deference in multiple ways to the party’s most conservative members. Among them: McCarthy has promised to restore committee assignments for Reps. Marjorie Taylor Greene and Paul Gosar, who Democrats stripped of such assignments after they embraced violent imagery and rhetoric. (Greene in particular has emerged as a critical ally for McCarthy as he tries to secure enough conservative votes to lock down the speakership.) McCarthy reportedly has agreed as well to drastically lower the number of members required to force a vote on ousting the speaker at any point.
McCarthy also pledged an aggressive investigative agenda against the Biden administration that will highlight conservative priorities such as Hunter Biden’s business activities, and the treatment of the January 6, 2021, rioters. The Wall Street Journal reported that McCarthy has also acceded to conservative demands for a panel that will launch far-reaching probes on alleged politicization of the Justice Department and FBI. (The panel, the Journal reported, will be established under the Judiciary Committee as the “Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government.”) McCarthy likewise has left open the door to pursuing impeachment against Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas.
Dent, like Davis, believes that aggressive investigation will produce worthwhile revelations, including some that are inevitably uncomfortable for the Biden administration. But Dent acknowledges the potential for the hearings to backfire on Republicans if they appear shrill or focused on far-right grievances and conspiracy theories. “It’s the way you do things and the tone that matters,” Dent says. “You can find all sorts of issues they are going to want to jump on that … won’t play well [with the public]. The speaker is going to be in this position to have to mediate these disputes constantly.”
As telling as what McCarthy has said has been what he has not said. He’s remained utterly silent on the scandals enveloping incoming GOP Rep. George Santos of New York (who Greene has vociferously defended) and the revelations in the final report from the January 6 committee that multiple members of the GOP caucus were intimately involved in then-President Donald Trump’s campaign to overturn the 2020 election. (The committee especially singled out incoming House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan as, in its words, “a significant player in President Trump’s efforts.”)
Whether McCarthy wins the speakership, or conservatives (in a less likely scenario) succeed in installing an alternative to his right, Democrats believe all these early markers guarantee that the House GOP’s most militant members will be front and center in defining the party over the next two years.
“In some ways, win or lose [for McCarthy] it doesn’t matter,” says Leslie Dach, a senior adviser to the Congressional Integrity Project, a Democratic-aligned group established to respond to the coming House investigations of the Biden administration. “I think the die on the next two years has been cast by giving these people the power and the podium.”
By ensuring that hardline Trump allies such as Jordan and Greene will be highly visible – and authorizing them to pursue conservative grievances like the charge that the FBI has become “weaponized” against the right – Dach and other Democrats believe the House majority will reinforce the GOP’s image as the party of Trump precisely as more party strategists, donors and elected officials are insisting Republicans must move beyond him.
“The real show is going to be these empowered, extreme MAGA types,” Dach insists. “Every day that they are on a committee, every day they are on television, is a bad day for the entire Republican Party.”
In some respects, McCarthy’s early signs of deference to the right only reflect the balance of power inside his caucus. The vast majority of House Republicans, in fact, represent “Trump country” – districts outside of the nation’s major metropolitan areas where the former president ran strongly in 2020. Fully 170 of the House Republicans, roughly three-fourths of the total, hold seats that Trump won by at least 10 percentage points two years ago.
But in bending to the confrontational and culture war politics preferred by those members, McCarthy is ensuring problems for the 18 House Republicans who won districts that voted for Biden in 2020. More than half of those are in New York and California alone – states where the turnout in the presidential year of 2024 will likely favor Democrats more than in 2022.
McCarthy (or whoever else wins the speakership) is also ignoring the clear signs of resistance to the right’s agenda that emerged last November in the most closely contested swing states. Despite widespread discontent over the economy and President Joe Biden’s performance, Democrats in November beat every Trump-aligned gubernatorial and US Senate candidate in the five states that decided the 2020 election by flipping from Trump to Biden: Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania. (The only Republicans who won such contests in those states were incumbents who had an identity independent of Trump, Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp and Wisconsin Sen. Ron Johnson.)
Michael Podhorzer, the former political director of the AFL-CIO, notes that the GOP has cumulatively lost enormous ground in those states since Trump took office.
“When he made his inauguration speech [in 2017], there was only one Democratic governor in those five states, only four Democratic Senators, no speaker of the state assembly or majority leader in the senate in those states,” says Podhorzer, now chairman of the board of the Analyst Institute, a consortium of liberal groups. “In a month, four of the five states will have Democratic governors, 9 of the 10 Senators are Democrats, and three of the state legislative chambers are led by Democrats.” Since 2016, he adds, Democrats in those places “have done nothing but win because those states are not going to elect MAGA” Republicans.
Looking more broadly, Podhorzer concluded in a new analysis that the midterm election demonstrated resistance to Trump-style politics across a broad range of competitive states. Podhorzer calculated that in the key House, Senate and gubernatorial races across the 15 states with the most competitive statewide contests involving candidates clearly identified with a Trump-style agenda, Democrats largely matched or even exceeded their 2020 margins – a remarkable showing during the first midterm election for the party holding the White House. By contrast, the party suffered the usual midterm reversals across the other states.
“It was two midterms happening at the same time – depending on whether you were in a place where that new bubble of Democratic voters believed they had to come out to beat MAGA again,” Podhorzer argued.
The dynamics of the GOP leadership struggle that will culminate Tuesday has now virtually ensured that the House will spend two years amplifying the Trump-style politics that produced that bifurcated result.
That’s unlikely to create many problems for Republicans in the places where they are already strong. In the midterm, Republicans, as I’ve written, mostly consolidated their control over red-leaning America, easily holding governorships and state legislatures in many of the states (such as Florida, Texas, Iowa and Tennessee) that pursued the most aggressive conservative agendas over the past two years.
But the prominent role for the right already evident in the incoming Republican House risks further identifying the party with the politics that repelled so many voters across the key swing states the GOP must reclaim to recapture the White House in two years. If McCarthy only gains the speakership by unleashing the most militant voices in his caucus, his victory could quickly prove Pyrrhic for the GOP overall.
It will be ugly because these are people who love ugliness. They will do their worst, which includes refusing to raise the debt ceiling even if it takes down the entire world economy. So this isn’t a benign problem. But if Brownstein is right these freaks may just put the final nail in the Trumpist coffin in 2024. It’s not playing well.
As I write this we are awaiting the Speaker vote which is looking to be an all-day dumpster fire. Couldn’t happen to a nicer party.
Meanwhile, the Democrats are all together, everyone committed to voting against mcCarthy, no game playing at all. Unbelievable. We really are in Bizarroworld.
There are some great moments among the crazy, though. Here’s one:
Awesome.
Bernie Sanders has health lobbyists spooked
The Vermont senator is immune to their charms (Politico):
The Vermont independent is set to take over the Senate’s Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee next month. Leading the panel gives the Medicare-for-All proponent oversight authority over some of his policy priorities — drug pricing, workers’ rights and income inequality, and student and medical debt.
But Sanders’ well-chronicled antagonism toward lobbyists has some concerned they’ll be unable to blunt criticism of their clients’ profits or corporate executive salaries. They are anxious Sanders might seek to revive policies like importing drugs from Canada and other nations, an idea loathed by drugmakers.
Oh, the horror!
Lobbyists also worry they’ll struggle to get traction on any push to make changes to a drug discount program involving pharmaceutical companies and hospitals or revisit association health plans after a Trump-era rule around them was voided.
“This will not be business as usual for K Street. It will be harder for companies to get in and make a case,” said Michaeleen Crowell, a lobbyist at lobbying and public affairs firm S-3 Group who served as Sanders’ chief of staff for more than five years. “The culture in the office is one where lobbyists are mistrusted, and they’re more likely to discount what they hear directly from companies.”
I would. Wouldn’t you?
“It’s not status quo … we’re going to have to be creative with patient groups to get him to listen,” said a lobbyist with health system, health insurance and pharmaceutical clients granted anonymity to speak freely. “If I’m going to be completely honest, we’re still trying to figure out what we’re going to do.”
Poor, poor things. Perhaps two weeks in Akron?
Preparing to wreck the constitution to save it
What is the difference between armed “patriots” and armed Taliban? Choice of personal weapon, perhaps? Laura Jedeed attended the Patriot Academy’s “Constitutional Defense” training camp last summer in New Mexico and writes about it for The New Republic. “The handgun course is a loss leader,” she came to see. “The ideology is the product.”
Founder Rick Green’s trainees are not preparing so much for armed insurrection as for getting 34 state legislatures to petition for an Article V convention of the states to rewrite the Constitution to better align with biblical principles. Many familiar conservative names and organizations back the efforts of Convention of States Action (COSA): the Mercer family, former Senator Jim DeMint, the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), David Barton, and more.
In 2016, COSA organized a mock convention of the states in Virginia. The results delivered “the libertarian goods“:
After three days, the delegates emerged with six proposed amendments that abolished the federal income tax, imposed congressional term limits, and made it more difficult for the federal government to take on debt. They closed the commerce clause loophole and passed something Feingold described as the “John C. Calhoun amendment”: nullification of any federal law or regulation if 30 state legislatures vote to overturn it.
Underlying the effort, for the foot soldiers, if not for the funders, is the belief that the country must return to an imagined 18th-century utopia. They believe they are engaged in an existential struggle against evil. Only Christian principles, however defined, can save the U.S. from destruction. Yes, the Seven Mountains mandate is in there, too. Plus a staggeringly brazen claim that freedom is not possible without Christianity, a shoddy syllogism trainers expect inductees to accept without question:
“Benjamin Rush said if you don’t teach the Bible in every generation to the children, a constitutional republic will not survive,” Rick Green told my Constitutional Defense course in his opening lecture. “Because, without religion, you don’t have morality. And without morality, you don’t have liberty.”
“Biblical principles are what produce freedom of society,” Barton proclaims in Patriot Academy’s Biblical Citizenship class. “But you won’t have biblical principles in society in which you don’t have citizens with a biblical worldview.”
COSA means to ensure they do via a convention of the states:
This may sound like a theocracy to the untrained ear. Green wants you to know that it is not. “I don’t know a single person in our movement that wants a theocracy or wants a nation where everybody’s got to be a Christian,” he tells me. “Whether you’re atheist, Muslim, Buddhist, Christian, Jewish … everybody benefits from the freedom principles that came from a Christian society.”
I am beginning to get the picture. You will not be forced to accept Jesus as your Lord and Savior in Biblical America. You will not be forced to attend church. But there will be prayer in school, and our history will be highly sanitized. Trans people will not have access to gender-affirming care, and marriage will be between a man and a woman. No one will force you to be a Christian in Rick Green’s America. But you will largely need to live like one.
Green hopes to construct a sprawling compound for year-round constitutional training,
… a combination of education facility and vacation destination that, for lack of a better phrase, he describes as “Disneyland for Patriots.” The campus will feature a full-scale replica of Independence Hall, where visitors can take constitutional classes (“without having to go to Philadelphia and get shot,” Green tells the class during his introductory lecture), and a mock-up of the Rotunda, where visitors can look at replica art (“without going to D.C. and getting arrested and having to spend a year and a half at the gulag”).
Once they finish retooling the Constitution, that dripping paranoia will turn to bliss.
Their remade America will not be like the Taliban’s Afghanistan, no. The Taliban carry AK-47s. Christian America carries AR-15s.
Can you believe this is necessary? That the House Republicans are feared to be such lawless monsters that they would endanger the lives of people who testified truthfully is outrageous — if it weren’t so predictable:
The leaders of the House January 6 select committee investigation have asked the White House to help shield the identities of key witnesses who gave evidence regarding White House officials’ fears that President Trump’s desire to walk to the Capitol with a riotous mob of his supporters indicated his intention to mount a coup against the government he led at the time.
In a letter to Richard Sauber, a White House attorney who serves as special counsel to President Joe Biden, Representatives Bennie Thompson and Liz Cheney — the panel’s chair and vice-chair — noted that the committee had reached agreement with the White House Counsel’s Office to obtain testimony from certain White House personnel on the condition that the identities of any such witnesses would remain secret.
Mr Thompson and Ms Cheney said those White House employees had “provided very important information for the Committee’s investigation” and have had their identities shielded, but warned that the dissolution of the select committee at the conclusion of the 117th Congress means the panel’s former members “will no longer exercise control over this material, and thus cannot ensure enforcement of the commitment to maintain the confidentiality of the identity of the witnesses”.
“Pursuant to long-standing House rules, the official records of the Committee will be archived and pass into the control of the National Archives,” they said, adding that they share an unnamed official’s concern for “the safety, security, and reputations” of the witnesses.
If the identities of witnesses who cooperated with the panel are leaked, it is highly likely that they will be targeted for death threats and harassment by Mr Trump and his allies in the same way other non-political government workers have been targeted after speaking out or acting in a way that put them at odds with Mr Trump.
When then-Lieutenant Colonel Alexander Vindman, at the time an active duty US Army officer detailed to the National Security Council, testified against Mr Trump during the inquiry that led to his first of two impeachment trials, the Defence Department made preparations to move him and his family to a secure location due to threats from Mr Trump’s supporters. And when documents relating to the FBI’s 8 August search of Mr Trump’s home were made public in an unredacted form by Mr Trump’s right-wing media allies, two of the agents whose names appeared in the documents immediately began receiving death threats.
Mr Trump’s ex-White House Communications Director, Alyssa Farah Griffin, told the committee that the president “knows” that he is able to spur his followers to threaten the lives of anyone he chooses to target.
“When he attacks me, I do get death threats … very specific, very violent,” she said, adding later that “he doesn’t care” and that “the team around” the ex-president also knows his statements targeting individuals “results in these kind of things”.
[…]
While most of the panel’s records will pass into the hands of the Committee on House Administration at the conclusion of the 117th Congress, Mr Thompson and Ms Cheney informed Mr Sauber that the transcripts of those witnesses’ testimony will be provided to an unnamed official for “appropriate review, timely return, and designation of instructions for proper handling” by the National Archives and Records Administration, which will eventually become the custodian of all select committee records.
They have recommended that the official provide the Archives with “any necessary written guidance regarding the need for limitations on release or other sensitivities”.
The testimony discussed in the article is pretty anodyne stuff — someone testifying that they knew if Trump went to the Capitol that it would change from being a rally/protest into “something else.” But you can bet that if Trump and his minions find out who these people are they will be targeted. That’s just how it works. And it is an outrage.
Newtie’s spawn take the wheel and he doesn’t like it
Did he think that when he enabled the extreme right wing, playing to their basest instincts, that it would never blow back on him? Has he ever read the Bible? Shakespeare? History?
Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich attacked Republicans who are opposing Rep. Kevin McCarthy’s, R-Calif., bid for speaker Monday.
Gingrich launched the salvo against McCarthy’s opponents during a Monday appearance on Fox & Friends, saying the vote threatens to throw the GOP into “chaos.” He argued that the small group of hard line lawmakers don’t have the “moral right” to oppose the will of the overwhelming majority of Republicans who do support McCarthy for speaker.
“I don’t understand what they’re doing. They’re not voting against Kevin McCarthy, they’re voting against over 215 members of their own conference. Their conference voted overwhelmingly, 85%, for McCarthy to be speaker, so this is a fight between a handful of people and the entire rest of the conference,” Gingrich said.
“They’re saying they have the right to screw up everything,” he continued. “Well, the precedent that sets is…any five people can get up and say, well, I’m now going to screw up the conference too. The choice is Kevin McCarthy or chaos.”
After a mob stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, a top aide to Ivanka Trump and presidential adviser Hope Hicks fumed about tweets posted by supermodel Karlie Kloss, the wife of Jared Kushner’s brother.
That’s according to text messages released by the House’s Jan. 6 committee—which also reveal the aide, Julie Radford, and Hicks were worried that the insurrection would destroy their reputations.
After the riot, Kloss took to Twitter to write: “Accepting the results of a legitimate democratic election is patriotic. Refusing to do so and inciting violence is anti-American.” She also responded to a Twitter user who encouraged her to “tell your sister-in-law and brother-[in]-law” by replying, “I’ve tried.”
The newly released texts show that Hicks flagged the Kloss tweets for Radford, who responded, “Unreal. She just called me about it.”
Hicks then texted back: “I am so done” and added, “Does she get how royally fucked they all are now?”
Hicks and Radford also fretted that they would face fallout from the deadly Capitol riots.
“In one day, he ended every future opportunity that doesn’t include speaking engagements at the local proud boy’s chapter,” Hicks wrote, apparently referring to lame-duck President Trump.
“And all of us that didn’t have jobs lined up will be perpetually unemployed,” she continued. “I’m so mad and upset. We all look like domestic terrorists now.”
Radford wrote that she’d “been crying for an hour.”
The self-pity didn’t end there, with Hicks moaning that she and other Trump White House officials would be “unemployable” and “untouchable” after the violence aimed at overturning the election of Joe Biden
“God, I’m so fucking mad,” she wrote.
Radford, who was Ivanka’s chief of staff, said the backlash was underway. “Visa also sent me a blow-off email today. Already,” she said.
“Not being dramatic, but we are all fucked,” Hicks fired back—while privately admitting Trump White House official Alyssa Farah Griffin’s resignation made her look like a “genius.”
The worries for the people being hunted in the Capitol and others being trampled is touching. Their concern about the assault on the peaceful transfer of power is very impressive.
Poor Hopey. January 6th was an attack on her career options. How awful for her.
Imagine that
Politico provides us with some data about mail in and early voting that proves Donald Trump is a total fool:
If there was any doubt Donald Trump’s vilification of early voting is only hurting the GOP, new receipts from the midterm elections show it.
Election data from a trio of states that dramatically expanded the ability to cast ballots before Election Day, either early or by mail, demonstrate that the voting methods that were decidedly uncontroversial before Trump do not clearly help either party.
Lawmakers of both parties made it easier to vote by expanding availability of mail and early voting in a politically mixed group of states: Vermont, Kentucky and Nevada.
The states had divergent results but shared a few key things in common. Making it easier to vote early or by mail did not lead to voter fraud, nor did it seem to advantage Republicans or Democrats. In Kentucky, Republicans held on to five of the state’s six congressional districts and a Senate seat. Both Vermont and Nevada saw split-ticket voters decide statewide races, by a gaping margin in Vermont and a narrow one in Nevada.
It reflects a broad lesson for other states that might consider expanding voter access or encouraging voting before Election Day: While voting methods have become deeply polarized by party, expanding access to early and mail voting does not appear to benefit one party over the other. Republicans do not do themselves any favors when they follow in Trump’s footsteps and vilify early voting: It puts more onus on their voters to cast ballots on a single day.
But there is little evidence that expanding voter access tilts elections toward Democrats, either.
“We’ve shown that it is bipartisan,” said Kentucky Secretary of State Michael Adams, a Republican, of his state’s new early voting window. “Both sides are comfortable using it.”
Well, duh. In fact, for many years the Republicans were the one’s pushing early and mail-in voting because it makes sense. Democrats were late to the game. Thrn Trump came along and in setting up the whining excuses he would use in case he lost in 2020 he vilified those forms of voting and trained many Republicans to believe that the only way to win was to vote on election day. And then they had the nerve to complain about long lines after years of making it harder for Black and brown people to vote by insisting they stand in long lines.
The whole thing was idiotic but when you are catering to a narcissistic cretin this is the sort of thing you should expect. But they all went along. Take, for example, Bill Barr, his Attorney General, who spread one paranoid conspiracy theory about these voting methods after another:
In an interview with a Chicago Tribune columnist published last week, Barr argued that people would pay off U.S. Postal Service workers in order to commit election fraud.
“There’s no more secret vote with mail-in vote. A secret vote prevents selling and buying votes. So now, we’re back in the business of selling and buying votes. Capricious distribution of ballots means (ballot) harvesting, undue influence, outright coercion, paying off a postman … ‘here’s a few hundred dollars, give me some of your ballots,’” the attorney general said, according to the Tribune.
This is extremely misleading. Mail ballots are not transferable votes. Election workers verify voters’ identities by matching signatures and verifying identifying information, so that a misdirected ballot — such as those sent to a wrong address — cannot be cast by just anyone.
And it’s not true that mail ballots aren’t “secret” as a rule. States use a variety of precautions to try andkeep people’s absentee votes private: 16 states require the use of secrecy sleeves by law, though other states may choose to use them, as well. Other states have privacy precautions to keep election workers from tying specific votes to the ballot envelopes that are used for verifying voters’ identities…
Claim: Foreign countries could counterfeit mail ballots
In late June, Barr suggested in an interview with NPR that foreign countries could counterfeit mail ballots – days after Trump made the same claim in a tweet.
“There’s so many occasions for fraud there that cannot be policed. I think it would be very bad. But one of the things I mentioned was the possibility of counterfeiting,” Barr said then of voting by mail, adding he didn’t have any evidence of counterfeiting, instead saying it was “obvious.”
Pressed on this claim Sept. 2 in an interview with CNN, Barr said, “I’m basing that on logic.”
Speaking with NBC News on Sept. 9, the attorney general said fraud and coercion are bigger concerns, but that “mail-in ballots do provide a vector for foreign influence.”
“It might even be cheaper for the foreign government to counterfeit ballots in some critical districts than to engage in the other kinds of activities they have,” Barr continued. “What I’m saying is foreign intelligence services are very able. They can counterfeit currency and they have a lot of capacity. And I don’t think counterfeiting a state ballot is particularly challenging for them if they wanted to do it.”
This is baseless, according to experts. As NBC News has reported previously, there are numerous safeguards that keep American elections secure. Absentee ballots are printed on a particular paper stock — by specific vendors — and are traceable, sometimes with preprinted bar codes. They are then sent to registered, eligible voters. Once voters fill them out, most states use the voter’s signature to confirm that the eligible voter cast the ballot. They’re also all paper, allowing for an audit or recount over any concerns.
Claim: We haven’t done widespread mail voting before
“We haven’t had the kind of widespread use of mail-in ballots as being proposed. We’ve had absentee ballots, from people who request them from a specific address. Now, what we’re talking about is mailing them to everyone on the voter list when everyone knows those voter lists are inaccurate,” Barr said in the Sept. 2 interview with CNN.
This is misleading. Before the pandemic, five states (Washington, Colorado, Oregon, Utah, and Hawaii) already voted entirely or almost entirely by mail. In other states, mail ballot options — often called absentee ballots — are widely used. A quarter of the electorate voted by mail in 2018, according to the U.S. Election Assistance Commision’s survey of election administrators. It may not be the predominant method of voting nationwide, but in western states including California, Arizona, Washington and Colorado, mail voting is how the vast majority of people vote. What’s more, mail voting and absentee ballots are in essence the same thing. Barr’s criticism — which mirrors the president’s — has to do with election administration — whether states mail ballots to voters or make them request the ballots first…
Claim: Mail elections have found substantial fraud and coercion
“Elections that have been held with mail have found substantial fraud and coercion,” Barr told CNN on Sept. 2.
This is not the case in the U.S. Numerous studies have debunked the notion that there is substantial, widespread voter fraud in American elections, whether those elections are conducted predominantly by mail or otherwise. The five states that vote almost entirely by mail do not report higher rates of fraud or coercion than states that vote in person mostly at polling sites. When incidents of fraud do occur rarely — like a local New Jersey election in May that saw an attempted fraud operation, for example — they are prosecuted.
Weiser said the attorney general’s repeated false claims were “demoralizing” and “damaging” to both the electoral system and the rule of law. But she said she’s been heartened to see people stepping up to rally behind the election system amid a pandemic that’s challenged every facet of it…
Claim: Trump can use federal law enforcement to prevent voter fraud
Asked on Fox News on Aug. 20 if he’d use “poll watchers” to prevent voter fraud, the president said he’d be sending “sheriffs” and “law enforcement” and “hopefully, U.S. attorneys, and we’re going to have everybody and attorney generals.”
Asked about the claim, Barr backed Trump up, saying in the Sept. 2 CNN interview that “it depends on if he’s responding to a particular criminal threat” and said that such authority had been used in the past to enforce civil rights.
This is false. The president cannot legally send federal law enforcement officials to patrol polling places, and he has no authority over local officials. Federal election monitors — often attorneys — have gone to polling sites to enforce voting rights in the past, but they weren’t law enforcement officials.
“It’s actually criminal to have armed federal or military officials in polling places,” Weiser said. “If something like that happened, it would be a coup.”
Yeah well, coup plotting was definitely on the menu.
The GOP’s crusade against democracy has blown back in their faces in any number of ways. But it also degraded the system in such a way that the whole thing is much more vulnerable than it was before. Trump is primarily to blame, of course, but people like Bill Barr certainly helped.
Kevin McCarthy capitulated to the crazies yesterday and agreed to reinstate the “vacate the chair” rule with a compromise that would allow five Representatives to challenge the Speaker and call for a vote (a sort of “no confidence” move.) This rule was in place for decades allowing only on Rep to call for the vote but was withdrawn after wingnuts decided to abuse it. Now they want it back and McCarthy, for obvious reasons, has not been receptive. But finally he came up with this compromise which … didn’t help. There are still a whole bunch of nos (the last I saw was it was 14) against his for speaker. And they all have different demands. Meanwhile, the so-called “moderates” (which simply means they’re only 50% batshit crazy) are starting to get restive as well. It’s a mess.
Harry Enten at CNN has an analysis of poor Kev’s current troubles. The problem is that nobody likes him:
House Republican leader Kevin McCarthy is hoping all’s well that ends well when it comes to becoming speaker of the chamber. The current minority leader and former majority leader may have thought he’d have the speakership locked up by now, but, ahead of the new Congress that begins on Tuesday, he doesn’t.
McCarthy’s problems in securing the top spot in the House are more easily understood when you realize the hand he’s been dealt. He has a historically small majority for a potential first-time speaker, and McCarthy, himself, is historically unpopular compared with other House members who have tried to become speaker.
McCarthy’s Republican Party secured only 222 seats in the 2022 midterms, leaving him little room for error to get to 218 votes – the number needed to achieve the speakership assuming all members vote. McCarthy can only afford to lose the support of four Republicans, and the list of GOP lawmakers who’ve said they will vote against him is longer than that.
[…]
A CNN/SSRS poll last month found that his net favorable (i.e. favorable minus unfavorable) rating was +30 points among Republicans. That’s certainly not bad. (Senate GOP leader Mitch McConnell has notoriously low ratings among Republicans.) But a net favorability rating of +30 points isn’t really good either.
Another way to frame it: McCarthy is liked by Republicans, but far from beloved. There’s no groundswell of support from the grassroots demanding he become speaker.
McCarthy has the second-lowest net favorability rating among his own party members of all first-time potential speakers in the last 28 years. Only Gingrich’s +24 points in late 1994 was lower. Others such as Boehner (in late 2010) and Nancy Pelosi (in late 2006) had net favorability ratings above +50 points among the party faithful.
Enten points out that McCarthy’s biggest asset is that there’s no dreamboat like Paul Ryan waiting in the wings like there was back in 2015. (Remember, Kevin got shoved aside because nobody liked him much then either…)
Will they find someone else? Steve Scalise seems to be the only viable option and he’s keeping his cards very close to the vest.
A number of Republicans may come to realize that while they can’t vote for McCarthy, there does not appear to be a viable Republican alternative to him becoming speaker at this time. They, therefore, may simply not vote “yes” or “no” on McCarthy at all. This would allow him to slip by assuming he still gets more votes for speaker than the new House Democratic leader Hakeem Jeffries.
Either way, all of this GOP angst is a pretty decent consolation prize for Democrats after losing the House majority. If nothing else, they’re watching a Republican Party that can’t seem to get its act together after a historically bad midterm for an opposition party.
And if McCarthy does become speaker, his net favorability rating of -19 points among all adults would by far be the worst for any first-time House speaker in the last 30 years. He’s far more unpopular than either Gingrich (-9 points) or Pelosi (+18 points) were among all Americans when they were first elected speaker. Both of them later became political targets for the minority party to exploit.
Heh. Couldn’t happen to a nicer guy.
I still suspect that he will end up speaker. But he is weak, weak, weak. And the wingnuts smell blood.