Month: April 2023

Ron DeSnowflake didn’t make much of an impression overseas I’m afraid. But why would he? He’s just the latest great whitebread hope of the GOP with a personality that’s as flat as a pancake:

He hopes to win the hearts and minds of devoted Donald Trump supporters ahead of next year’s U.S. election.

But Republican presidential hopeful Ron DeSantis failed to impress British business chiefs at a high-profile London event Friday, in a tired performance described variously as “horrendous,” “low-wattage” and “like the end of an overseas trip.”

The Florida governor, expected to launch his bid next month to challenge Trump as the Republican nominee for the 2024 presidential race, met with more than 50 representatives of major U.K. firms and business lobbying groups as a part of a four-country “trade mission” ending in London Friday.

His trip was officially billed as an attempt to build Florida’s economic relationships with the U.K., Israel, South Korea and Japan, but it has been widely seen in Washington as a chance for DeSantis to present himself as a statesman on the world stage.

For several of those present, however, the statesmanship was lacking.

One U.K. business figure said DeSantis “looked bored” and “stared at his feet” as he met with titans of British industry in an event co-hosted by Lloyd’s of London — the world’s largest insurance marketplace.

“He had been to five different countries in five days and he definitely looked spent, but his message wasn’t presidential,” they told POLITICO. “He was horrendous.”

A second business figure who was in the room said it was a “low-wattage” performance and that “nobody in the room was left thinking, ‘this man’s going places’.”

They said: “It felt really a bit like we were watching a state-level politician. I wouldn’t be surprised if [people in attendance] came out thinking ‘that’s not the guy’.”

God I hope not.

The “autopsy” is finished. And they want to bury the results:

Republican Party officials plan to keep private an internal “autopsy” report assessing why many of their candidates fell short in the 2022 midterm elections, two people familiar with the party’s thinking on the matter told NBC News on Friday.

In late November, Republican National Committee Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel announced that the party would conduct a post-election review of the GOP’s disappointing performance in a cycle that should have favored Republicans.

A panel created by the Republican National Committee has completed a draft of the introduction of the report, but in a break from past practice, it’s not likely to be widely available.

“I believe that the post-election analysis is meant to be for internal use only; taking the lessons we’ve learned so we can improve,” one RNC member said. “I don’t think it will be made publicly available.”

After the 2012 presidential election, the RNC commissioned a frank review of the party’s shortcomings at the ballot box and publicly released recommendations for the future. The resulting 100-page report, titled the “Growth & Opportunity Project,” provided an unsparing look at the party’s struggle to win over voters and communicate a winning message. 

Many of the suggestions were brushed aside by the party’s next standard-bearer, Donald Trump, who went on to defeat Democrat Hillary Clinton in 2016. After his defeat in 2020, Trump played an outsize role in the midterms elections two years later, vetting Republican candidates and endorsing those who championed his agenda.

Yet the draft introduction of the report doesn’t mention his name, nor that of any candidates, according to a person familiar with the matter.

Of course it doesn’t. He is Dear Leader. I doubt this report is meaningful in any case. They are not in a place to be honest about what they’ve done to themselves.

The party is at war with itself so I expect this will leak before long. I wouldn’t expect much.

Kyrsten Sinema is interviewed by McCay Coppins and makes a very poor impression. The woman has a shockingly unpleasant personality:

Sinema tells me that there are several popular narratives about her in the media, all of them “inaccurate.” One is that she’s “mysterious,” “mercurial,” “an enigma”—that she makes her decisions on unknowable whims. She regards this portrayal as “fairly absurd”: “I think I’m a highly predictable person.”

“Then,” she goes on, “there’s the She’s just doing what’s best for her and not for her state or for her country” narrative. “And I think that’s a strange narrative, particularly when you contrast it with”—here she pauses, and then smirks—“ya know, the facts.”

You can see, in moments like these, why she bothers people. She speaks in a matter-of-fact staccato, her tone set frequently to smug. She says things like “I am a long-term thinker in a short-term town” and “I prefer to be successful.” The overall effect, if you’re not charmed by it (and a lot of her Republican colleagues are), is condescension bordering on arrogance. Sinema, who graduated from high school at 16 and college at 18, carries herself like she is unquestionably the smartest person in the room.

No one would mistake her for being dumb, though. In the past two years, Sinema has been at the center of virtually every major piece of bipartisan legislation passed by the Senate, negotiating deals on infrastructure, guns, and a bill that codifies the right to same-sex marriage. She has also become a villain to the left, proudly standing in the way of Democrats’ more ambitious agenda by refusing to eliminate the filibuster. The tension culminated with her announcement in December that she was leaving the Democratic Party and registering as an independent.

Sinema hasn’t given many in-depth interviews since then, but she says she agreed to meet with me because she wants to show that what she’s doing “works.” She thinks that, unfashionable though it may be, her approach to legislating—compromise, centrism, bipartisan consensus-building—is the only way to get anything done in Washington. I was interested in a separate, but related, question: What exactly is she trying to get done? Much of the discussion around Sinema has focused on the puzzle of what she really believes. What does Kyrsten Sinema want? What Does Kyrsten Sinema stand for? The subtext in these headlines is that if you dig deep enough, a secret belief system will be revealed. Is she a progressive opportunistically cosplaying as a centrist? A conservative finally showing her true colors? The truth, according to Sinema herself, is that there is no ideological core to discover.

She believes in nothing, that’s clear. She’s an empty vessel filled with gaseous self-regard.

I learn this when I describe for Sinema the story I hear most often about her: that she started out as an idealistic progressive activist—organizing protests against the Iraq War, marching for undocumented immigrants in 100-degree heat, leading the effort to defeat a gay-marriage ban in Arizona—but that gradually she sold out her youthful idealism and morphed into a Washington moderate who pals around with Republicans and protects tax breaks for hedge-fund managers.

To my surprise, Sinema doesn’t really push back on this one. For one thing, she tells me, she’s proud that she outgrew the activism of her youth. It was, in her own assessment, “a spectacular failure.”

I ask her to elaborate.

“Well,” she says, with a derisive shrug. “You can make a poster and stand out on the street, but at the end of the day all you have is a sunburn. You didn’t move the needle. You didn’t make a difference … I set about real quick saying, ‘This doesn’t work.’”

Still no word on what it is that she wants to work. Who knows? She just wants to build some kind of compromise around anything and call it success. The end result is clearly not of interest to her.

She’s just a facilitator for others apparently. Maybe she should become a mediator instead of a politician.

[…]

She doesn’t like civil disobedience, thinks it drives more people away than it attracts. More to the point, Sinema contends, the activists who spend their time noisily berating her in person and online aren’t doing much for the causes they purport to care about. “I am much happier showing a two-year record of incredible achievements that are literally making a difference in people’s lives than sharing my thoughts on Twitter.” She punctuates these last words with the sort of contempt that only someone who’s tweeted more than 17,000 times can feel.

Her contempt for other people just drips off of her. You can almost feel Coppins’ recoil from her.

She tells him that her “evolution” from left wing firebrand to centrist tool is a result of age and maturity and contends that politicians should be allowed to change their minds. True. But it would be helpful to know why they did it. To her it’s all about being “successful” and it doesn’t matter what the substance of her “success” is. She admits it:

“I never think about where [my position] is on the political spectrum, because I don’t care,” she tells me. “People will say, ‘Oh, we don’t know what her position is.’ Well, I may not have one yet. And I know that’s weird in this town, but I actually want to do all of the research, get as much knowledge as possible, spend all of the time doing the work before I make a decision.”

I ask her if there’s any ideological through line at all that explains the various votes she’s taken in the Senate. She thinks about it before answering, “No.”

The article goes on to discuss her role in getting the gun safety legislation through last year. She seems to think that was an earth shattering accomplishment when it was really just a very tiny step toward sanity. She deserves whatever credit they attribute to her for getting it done but it wasn’t exactly the civil rights act.

Patient, painful bipartisan dealmaking, she tells me, is “the only approach that works. Because the other approaches make a lot of noise but don’t get anything done.”

I ask her what other approaches she’s thinking of.

“I don’t know,” Sinema says with a shrug. “Yelling?”

Members of her former party would argue that there was another option for enacting their policy vision—eliminating the filibuster, which requires 60 votes for most legislation in the Senate, to start passing bills with simple majorities—but Sinema ensured that was impossible. She makes no apologies for voting to preserve the filibuster last year. In fact, she tells me, she would reinstate it for judicial nominees. She believes that the Democrats who want to be able to pass sweeping legislation with narrow majorities have forgotten that one day Republicans will be in control again. “When people are in power, they think they’ll never lose power.”

Right. But when they come to power they won’t repeal any of her successes because … well, I don’t know why. Why are her “successes” so much more durable? Because they’re bipartisan? So what, they weren’t passed with 40 Republicans. It was just a handful and they are all considered RINOs by the voters.

One might look at what’s happened with Obamacare as the best evidence that what she is saying is total bullshit. Give the people what they need and it’s not going to be easy to take it back.

Before departing her hideaway, I return to Sinema’s central argument—that her approach “works.” It’s hard to evaluate objectively. What to make of a senator who leaves her party, professes to have no ideological agenda, and yet manages to wield outsize influence in writing the laws of the nation? Some might look at her record and see a hollow careerism that prizes bipartisanship for its own sake. Others might argue that in highly polarized times, politicians like her are necessary to grease the gears of a dysfunctional government.

One thing is clear, though: If Sinema wants to persuade other political leaders to take the same path she has taken, she’ll need to demonstrate that it’s electorally viable. So far, the polls in Arizona suggest she would struggle to get reelected as an independent in 2024; she already has challengers on the right and the left. A survey earlier this year found that she was among the most unpopular senators in the country.

Sinema tells me she hasn’t decided yet whether she’ll seek reelection, but she talks like someone who’s not planning on it. She’s only 46 years old; she has other interests. “I’m not only a senator,” she tells me. “I’m also lots of other things.” I ask if she worries about what lessons will be drawn in Washington if her independent turn leads to the end of her political career.

She pauses and answers with a smirk: “I don’t worry about hypotheticals.”

I had always thought that she had her eye on the White House and that political power was her main ambition. Now I’m not so sure. This interviews shows that she really doesn’t give a shit about anything so maybe she really is just setting herself up for a big corporate job or some kind of entrepreneurial project to make a lot of money. She does like the good life. And it’s quite clear that she thinks people who actually believe in things are stupid so why bother with all this parochial politicking? She’s so much better than that.

Just a little bit out of touch…

“Just two ounces is equivalent to three joints” — the Republican arguments against legal cannabis are going well. #mnleg

I don’t know how to explain to you that other states have legal cannabis and are doing fine

pour one out for all the victims of cannabis overdoses. RIP

"How I almost wrecked my life" — anti-cannabis Minnesota Republican says he used weed in college and it made him lazy and hurt his grades. I guess this is his reason to keep it illegal.

the same Republican who is against weed because it made him lazy talks about getting a DUI during the same speech

This probably made sense in his head

Originally tweeted by Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) on April 28, 2023.

People actually vote for clowns like this. Go figure.

Jamelle Bouie’s newsletter makes an important observation about the state of our democracy. As I watched what they did to that brave transwoman in Montana fighting for her right to …well, exist it just shocks me how cruel these people are. It’s the same look on those people’s faces as those above. It’s an ugly, ugly display. And as Bouie explains, it’s a threat to all of us, our democracy in general, as they use whatever power they have to silence dissent:

On Tuesday, I wrote about the Republican effort to limit the reach and scope of initiatives and referendums as another instance of the party’s war on majority rule. One thing I wanted to include, but couldn’t quite integrate into the structure of the column, was a point about the recent use of legislative expulsion to punish Democratic lawmakers who dissent from or challenge Republican majorities.

We saw this in Tennessee, obviously, where Republicans expelled two Democratic members — Representatives Justin Jones of Nashville and Justin J. Pearson of Memphis — for loudly supporting a youth protest for gun control from the statehouse floor using a bullhorn.

We saw another example this week, in Montana, after State Representative Zooey Zephyr, a transgender woman, spoke out against a bill that would ban gender-affirming care for minors. Calling her comments (“If you vote yes on this bill and yes on these amendments, I hope the next time there’s an invocation, when you bow your heads in prayer, you see the blood on your hands.”) “disrespectful and “inappropriate,” Montana Republicans have barred Zephyr from attending — or speaking during — the House session for the rest of the legislative term, which ends next week.

In Nebraska, a Democratic lawmaker is being investigated by an ethics panel for a conflict of interest regarding her filibuster of another bill to ban gender-affirming health care for minors. The conflict? She has a transgender child.

And if we look back to last year, we’ll recall that House Republicans censured former Representatives Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger for their roles in investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol.

What to make of this?

Expelling or censuring members isn’t necessarily an attack on majority rule or popular government, and yet it feels more sinister, in a way, than an impenetrable partisan gerrymander or even a strict voter ID law. I think that’s because these moves against dissenting members constitute an attack on representation itself.

No one forced Tennessee Republicans to expel Representatives Jones and Pearson. They could have ignored them. But they were so incensed by the show of opposition that they deprived about 130,000 people of their representation in the legislature. Silencing and effectively banning Representative Zephyr means that about 10,000 people in Montana’s 100th District don’t have a voice in the legislature.

The foundation of modern American democracy is that all Americans deserve some kind of representation in the rooms where law and policy are made. Not content to control those rooms in states where they dominate the political scene, some Republicans have said, in essence, that representation is a privilege for communities whose chosen lawmakers don’t offend their sensibilities.

The Constitution guarantees to each state a “republican form of government.” I’ve written before about how this “republican form” is mostly undefined; neither the framers nor the courts have really said what it means for a state to have one. But I think we can at least say that when legislatures are stripping communities of representation over dissent and disagreement, it doesn’t exist.

———-

My Tuesday column was, as I mentioned, on the Republican attack on referendums and initiatives, and how the party has committed itself to circumventing the will of the majority wherever it thinks it’s necessary.

There’s still room for innovation, however, and in the past year Republicans have opened new fronts in the war for minority rule. One element in these campaigns, an aggressive battle to limit the reach of the referendum process, stands out in particular. Wherever possible, Republicans hope to raise the threshold for winning a ballot initiative from a majority to a supermajority or — where such a threshold already exists — add other hurdles to passage.

The American right has always been in tension with democracy. It is authoritarian at heart. In fact, it’s paeans to “freedom” have always been fatuous — freedom for me but not for thee. As long as they could persuade enough people to go along they were happy to pretend they believe in democracy. The minute the people object they change the rules.

BTW:

More than half of registered voters believe political attacks on transgender children and families are a “major problem,” according to a Fox News poll. 

The poll found that 57 percent of respondents said the attacks are a major problem, while 26 percent said they are a minor problem. Only 15 percent said they were not a problem, while 3 percent said they were unsure. 

Watch your backs

Just Google shooting. Really. Just shooting.

Praise the Lord and pass the ammunition:

Oh, look here. Wonder who it could be?

What’s the world coming to when you can’t go to a CONVENIENCE STORE without getting shot?

You know, we’re getting really good at this. Anyone have a friend at the IOC? If shooting people was an official event, American competitors would sweep all the medals. Those who survive.

Obviously, this kid isn’t ready for the U.S. trials:

This one is a gem from The Guardian:

An Illinois man using a leaf blower in his yard was killed by his neighbor, local television reported.

William Martys, 59, was reportedly using his leaf blower in his yard in Antioch when his neighbor, 79-year-old Ettore Lacchei, got into an argument with him then shot him in the head.

Lacchei was arrested and charged with two counts of first-degree murder.

A neighbor told WLS, Chicago’s ABC affiliate, the two men had a history, and Lacchei had pulled a gun on Martys before.

“No one deserves anything like that, and it’s just kind of crazy to think someone can just break like that over just a simple argument that can be fixed just talking,” the neighbor, JR McCarty, told the station.

How naive! This is the US of NRA. Enough is never enough.

Perhaps when we all carry personal nukes (SNL, 1982)?

In 1983, Julie Brown was parody. Now it’s bad taste or news at six.

Watch your backs.

UPDATE: As I was saying.

A man killed five people, including an 8-year-old boy, with an AR-15-style weapon Friday night in an angry response to his neighbors’ request that he stop shooting in his yard while their baby was trying to sleep, according to Texas authorities.

Instead of heeding his neighbors’ request, the man allegedly took the gun, went to their house and killed half the people inside. He then fled, sparking an overnight manhunt around Cleveland, Tex., that continued through Saturday afternoon.

If “politicians in robes” fits

“The attempt of a radical minority to enforce their will on the rest of us, who constitute a majority, by stealing control of the states and then, through them, control of the federal government is precisely what the Confederates tried to do before the Civil War: it is no accident that one of the insurrectionists who attacked the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, carried a replica of a Confederate battle flag,” writes Heather Cox Richardson in her “Letters from an American” this morning. She cites events Friday in North Carolina.

There’s a word for this sort of thing: Bad (CBS News):

In massive victories for Republicans, the North Carolina Supreme Court on Friday threw out a previous ruling against gerrymandered voting maps and upheld a photo voter identification law that colleagues had struck down as racially biased.

The rulings likely give the GOP-controlled legislature the ability to rework the state’s congressional map for next year’s election to help Republicans gain seats in the narrowly divided U.S. House. Under the previous map, Democrats won seven of the state’s 14 congressional seats last November.

The new edition of the court, which became a Republican majority this year following the election of two GOP justices, ruled after taking the unusual step of revisiting opinions made in December by the court’s previous iteration, when Democrats held a 4-3 seat advantage. The court held rehearings in March.

Goodbye 7-7 congressional delegation. Hello 10-4 in ’24.

Short version: North Carolina is one governor’s election away from being North Florida. And maybe closer than that with GOP supermajorities in both houses and Mark Robinson as Lt. Governor.

We’re working on it. The youngest state party chair in the country, Anderson Clayton, is working on it rather furiously. As the Washington Post put it, A Gen Z party chair hopes to change Democrats’ fortunes in N.C.

“So many people across the state are fed up. I don’t know about y’all, but I’m tired of losing,” Clayton said, drawing cheers and applause from the crowd. “I’m tired of Republicans coming in and threatening my rights. … We all should be so tired and angry.”

Clayton was rather put out by the court’s decisions on Friday:

There’s never been a single-day rollback of racial progress as there was today in North Carolina.

The NCGOP and our Republican Supreme Court delivered on disenfranchisement of Black communities at the ballot box with 3 tragic rulings that make it harder to vote in our state. 🧵

— Anderson Clayton☀️ (@abreezeclayton) April 28, 2023

🚨 GERRYMANDERING

In a 5-2 ruling, the republican majority court struck down its prior ruling that gerrymandering violates the state constitution.

People should choose their leaders instead of politicians choosing their voters through partisan gerrymandering.

— Anderson Clayton☀️ (@abreezeclayton) April 28, 2023

We should be making it easier to vote – not harder. Today, the Republican majority court pushed their own partisan goals instead of defending our democracy and the freedom of North Carolinians to vote to choose their elected leaders — a shameful and un-American power grab.

— Anderson Clayton☀️ (@abreezeclayton) April 28, 2023

Clayton just outhustled Wisconsin’s Ben Wikler in winning a poll for which state Daily Kos should focus efforts in 2024. DKos is already raising money for the state Democratic Party to help with field organizing. Wikler is even requesting monthly donations for NCDP.

If anyone can build momentum and stop this state from becoming North Florida, Clayton can.

Baby Spider Monkeys!

Three boisterous baby Spider Monkeys have been thrilling visitors to Taronga Western Plains Zoo these school holidays.

Born over the space of a few months to mums Rosa, Hiccups and Jai, the three young females are thriving as they learn to eat, play and climb on the Primate Islands.

“It’s really exciting to have three new babies, and to see the whole troop pitching in, it’s a real family affair,” said Primate Keeper Sasha Brook.

Hiccups has always been a really good aunty to the other babies we’ve had in the troop, but hasn’t had offspring herself for a really long time, so it’s really nice to see her having a baby of her own.”

“The eldest of these babies in particular has been getting more and more adventurous, venturing away from mum, interacting with her keepers, experimenting with eating solid foods and even clambering over other monkeys. It’s really cute to see!”

The Spider Monkeys are very active throughout the day but the best time to see them is during feeding time, which occurs between 12.30pm and 1pm daily.

The three babies are yet to be named, however Keepers do have a shortlist of names that are South American in origin.

“Spider Monkeys are critically endangered thanks to factors like habitat loss, hunting and the pet trade, so breeding programs like ours are crucial,” Sasha said.

Every dollar spent at Taronga Western Plains Zoo has the Power to Protect. Tickets, Animal Encounters, Tours and even Zoo Friends annual memberships are a great way to support Taronga’s vital conservation work.

Visitors can also hire a four-seater Pedal Boat and venture out onto the Savannah Lake to see the Spider Monkeys, as well as critically endangered Black and White Ruffed Lemurs, like never before. Boat hire is situated outside of the Zoo’s main café, and boats can be hired between 10am-3pm Thursday to Sunday, with extra days available during the school holidays. A 30-minute boat hire is only $20 per boat.

For more information about planning a visit to Taronga Western Plains Zoo or to purchase your tickets online visit www.taronga.org.au/dubbo-zoo. 

Trump won't answer this question, or even say if there should be federal action.

Trump: "We'll get something done where everyone is going to be very satisfied."

Sexton: On the national level?

Trump: "I think we'll get it done on some level. It can be on different levels." https://t.co/6eKH78Fpg7

— Shane Goldmacher (@ShaneGoldmacher) April 28, 2023

There’s secret, top-secret, code-word-secret — and then there’s whatever President Trump’s health-care plan is.

It’s apparently so deeply classified that the people overseeing the plan don’t even know they’re involved.

The Republican Party has promised (and failed) to repeal and replace Obamacare for more than a decade — that is, the entirety of the law’s existence. Trump began teasing his own replacement plan during his first presidential bid, five years ago. Back then, he pledged to swap out the Affordable Care Act for “something terrific,” details TBD.

Over subsequent months and years, Trump boasted about the benefits of his plan. It would be cheaper yet somehow also more generous than Obamacare. It would be “so easy,” even though “nobody knew health care could be so complicated.” It would “take care of everybody,” even as it took literal care away from many.

Trump proclaimed the GOP will become “the party of healthcare,” but a conservative replacement to Obamacare would probably look something like…Obamacare. (Video: Joshua Carroll/The Washington Post)

This plan was always “two weeks” away — coincidentally the timeline promised for most every Trump announcement,including thoseabout wiretapping, infrastructure and Melania Trump’s immigration history.

As the fortnights passed, suspense grew. Finally, an announcement came this week: This Godot-like plan, this girlfriend-who-lives-in-Canada of public policies — it exists!

“I have it all ready,” Trump said at a town hall Tuesday, “and it’s a much better plan for you, and it’s a much better plan.”

Alas, Trump remains unable to share this “much better plan” with the public. Or, it seems, anyone within his administration.

A day after Trump’s town-hall statement, several senior health officials testifying before the Senate were asked whether they were aware of any specific administration proposal to replace Obamacare.

“I’m not involved in the replacement plan,” said Adm. Brett Giroir, assistant secretary for health at the Department of Health and Human Services. “I don’t know what that is. I supply public health advice as much as I can for whatever that plan would be.”

His colleague Robert Kadlec, assistant secretary for preparedness and response, likewise said the mythical proposal is “not in my portfolio” and “I have no awareness of that.” The director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Robert Redfield, echoed that an Obamacare replacement plan is “really not in my main lane, but I’m not aware of one.”

Now, it might seem improbable that Trump wouldn’t clue in his most senior health officials about a health–care program they would oversee. But it’s less strange when considering other tasks explicitly in these officials’ portfolios that they also apparently know nothing about.

On Thursday, for instance, White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows said that Redfield’s testimony about when the public would have access to a covid-19 vaccine — a timeline the president had criticized — was wrong. The CDC director, Meadows explained, hasn’t had “intimate discussions” with those involved in vaccine distribution. Never mind that just a day earlier, the CDC had published a playbook for vaccine distribution.

Asked who was working on the Obamacare replacement, White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany explained that planning involved “a wide array of people.” Also: “I’m not going to give you a readout of what our health-care plan looks like and who’s working on it.”

Finally: “If you want to know, come work here at the White House.”

In other words, Trump’s brainchild is so sensitive, so secret, it must remain within the cone of silence. There it will stay, under lock and key, presumably alongside evidence from Area 51, the names of the real Kennedy assassins and the nuclear codes. (But not the country’s secret new weapons system; that Trump is happy to blab about to Bob Woodward, unprompted.)

I guess this must be yet another one of the great “policies” that the Republicans who hem and haw about Trump are always saying were so great. I would expect that Trump will start saying that he did pass a great health care plan and everyone loves it just as he says he built the wall.

Fighting words:

Tiffany Justice, co-founder of the right-wing book-purging organization Moms for Liberty, offered a righteous-sounding answer when asked this past weekend on “CBS Sunday Morning” what sort of book she wants to see remain in schools.

“Books that don’t have pornography in them,” she piously declared. “Let’s just put the bar really, really low. Books that don’t have incest, pedophilia, rape.”

That’s hard to square with what just happened in Martin County, Fla. The school district there recently decided to yank from its high school library circulation eight novels by Nora Roberts that are not “pornography” at all — largely prompted by objections from a single woman who also happens to be a Moms for Liberty activist.

“All of it is shocking,” Roberts told us. “If you don’t want your teenager reading this book, that’s your right as a mom — and good luck with that. But you don’t have the right to say nobody’s kid can read this book.”

This signals a new trend: Book banners are increasingly going after a wide variety of titles, including romance novels, under the guise of targeting “pornography.” That term is a very flexible one — deliberately so, it appears — and it is sweeping ever more broadly to include books that can’t be described as such in any reasonable sense.

Martin County is where 20 Jodi Picoult novels were recently pulled from school library shelves. This, too, was largely because of objections from that same Moms for Liberty activist, Julie Marshall, head of the group’s local chapter.

In addition to eight Roberts novels, the latest books removed from some Martin County high schools include Judy Blume’s 1975 classic “Forever …” featuring a high school couple extensively debating whether to have sex. Also purged: “The Fixer” by Bernard Malamud, which won a Pulitzer Prize.

The basis for Marshall’s objections to Roberts’s books, according to parental objection forms obtained and provided to us by the Florida Freedom to Read Project, is this: “These books are adult romance novels. They have absolutely no reason to be in school libraries.”

One can debate whether “adult romance novels” belong in high school libraries, but this process is absurd. That sole objection, with no elaboration, was lodged against a bunch of books written by a single author, leading to their removal.

What’s more, the objection to Roberts’s books appears extremely flimsy. Four of those books, which make up “The Bride Quartet,” are about friends seeking love as they build their wedding-planning business.

The books have some sex scenes, but the language is often vague enough that a child would have little idea what was happening. (“He touched, he tasted, he lingered until her quivers became trembles.”) And — spoiler alert — each book ends with a marriage proposal.

Roberts allowed that the books contain “sex” but noted that it is “monogamous” and “consensual.” Speaking of the censors, Roberts told us: “I’m surprised that they wouldn’t want teenagers to read about healthy relationships that are monogamous, consensual, healthy and end up in marriage.”

I guess those Moms for Liberty hide their Nora Roberts novels in their underwear drawers because you can be sure some of them read her. If it’s pornography then there are a whole lot of women, hooked on porn. Roberts has sold over 500 million books.