stay tuned…
Rolling Stone reports:
THIS IS HOW petty and aggressively stupid the 2024 GOP presidential primary has become: several close aides and allies to Donald Trump want to challenge Ron DeSantis to a literal dick-measuring contest.
It wouldn’t be the first juvenile move by Team Trump in this young primary season. Already, Trump has suggested that DeSantis, his chief rival, might be secretly gay. He’s gone after DeSantis over pronunciation of his own last name. He has claimed to have salacious dirt on Florida’s governor, that he might release during the primary. Recently, Trump’s campaign went after one of DeSantis’ top aides, apparently insulting her physical appearance.
Now, some of Trump’s longtime advisers are even urging him to continuously make reference to the size of DeSantis’ penis, telling him such insults could stick with GOP primary voters and mess with his rival’s head, two sources with knowledge of the matter tell Rolling Stone. Trump’s team discussed having Trump refer to the Florida governor as “Tiny D,” Bloomberg reported in March. While some understood it as a shot at DeSantis’ height, the sobriquet was specifically intended to suggest diminutive genitalia, four people familiar with the topic say.
“He’s also short but … yes of course it’s about his penis, that’s why we’re doing it,” says a source involved in the effort to get the former president to use the line of attack against DeSantis.
Team Trump’s attempts to focus the public on DeSantis’ anatomy underscores just how dark and puerile the GOP primary promises to be — even as the former president asks voters to return him to a seat of awesome power and responsibility.
His venom towards DeSantis is enhanced by a campaign staff whose personal loathing of DeSantis eclipses even Trump’s. Several of the former president’s lieutenants have worked for DeSantis and come away from it with such bitter experiences that they wish not just to defeat the governor and his team, but to abjectly humiliate them.
A DeSantis campaign spokesperson declined to comment but flagged recent comments from the Florida governor that cast attacks on him as recognition that his campaign represents a “threat.”
[…]
Trump’s allies are open about his plans to wage a personal war on the Florida governor, saying that it may be more critical to winning than any policy differences. “As the primary progresses, emasculating Ron is going to be a big part of the Trump campaign’s efforts,” says a Trump ally close to the ex-president’s campaign. “It is important to make the policy argument. But one of Donald Trump’s biggest talents is defining his opponent’s character traits and highlighting their biggest personality flaws. Doing that — defining who Ron DeSantis, the person, is to the American voter, before he has the chance to do it himself — is arguably more important than any policy contrast.”
In the past several weeks, a handful of key political advisers and confidants have told Trump he should start using “Tiny D” as his principal DeSantis nickname, instead of only ones like “DeSanctimonious” or “DeSaster,” according to two sources with direct knowledge of the situation. One of these sources refers to it as the “small-dick PsyOp.”
So far, however, it’s Trump — famous for both a lack of restraint and vicious campaign attacks — who has resisted this particular line of attack. The ex-president has barely used the “Tiny D” epithet publicly, and has only occasionally done so offhandedly.
Still, the former president and his top advisers have made no secret of the fact that a key component of their strategy against DeSantis involves a constant stream of “mindfucking” the Florida governor and going after his personal insecurities as much as they can.
Some of Trump’s aides and longtime allies have repeatedly told Trump that, in their personal experiences, DeSantis is a uniquely “sensitive,” “thin-skinned,” and “insecure” man, making him a perfect target for Trump’s needling. (Trump himself, of course, is also famously sensitive to personal slights, and known for going to extreme lengths to respond to them — even to his personal detriment.)
While Trump has held off on the “Tiny D” messaging, members of his team are going all-in on the nickname — and the ugly strategy. After top Trump campaign spokesman Steven Cheung mixed it up with the pro-DeSantis super PAC Never Back Down on Twitter last week, Cheung responded with the “pinching hand” emoji, which is used to suggest diminutive size. Chris LaCivita, one of the operatives leading Trump 2024 and the engineer of the 2004 “Swift Boat” campaign against John Kerry, also joined in on the campaign messaging earlier this month, when he tweeted: “what happened to Tiny d?”
According to two people familiar with the matter, some Trump campaign aides have encouraged outside allies and informal media surrogates to routinely use “Tiny D” in recent weeks, telling them it is by far the most effective moniker to mess with DeSantis and get in his head. “There is absolutely an effort underway to make the ‘Tiny Dick’ the nickname most linked to Ron,” one of the sources says.
During Trump’s last contested GOP primary in 2016, it took until February of election year for genitalia measuring to become part of the contest.
With his campaign struggling, Sen. Marco Rubio threw out a laugh line at a campaign rally about Trump having small hands, strongly implying that Trump had a small penis. At a Republican debate in Detroit the following month, Trump defended himself: “I guarantee you there’s no problem. I guarantee.”
Later that year, Rubio would admit to CNN host Jake Tapper that he “apologized to” the then-future president, adding: “I said, ‘You know, I’m sorry that I said that. It’s not who I am and I shouldn’t have done it.’”
Taking its cues from Trump, MAGAworld has trained the same schoolyard insults at newly launched primary rival and erstwhile ally Chris Christie with an ugly campaign of fat-shaming. Trump himself took to his Truth Social account to post a video of Christie’s campaign launch edited to depict the former New Jersey governor at a buffet. MAGA Inc, the Trump-aligned super PAC, matched the rhetoric with a hackneyed pun — “Chris Christie will waste no time eating DeSantis’ lunch”— in a statement distributed Tuesday.
At his campaign launch, Christie threw his own jabs at the former president. Trump, he told voters in New Hampshire, is “a lonely, self consumed, self-serving, mirror hog” who “never admits a mistake” and “always finds someone else and something else to blame for whatever goes wrong.”
Yeah. I’m sure you’re shocked. Who would have ever thought Donald Trump would act like a schoolyard bully?
And more decent. His White House will be hosting a huge LGBTQ+ party on Sunday. (It was originally scheduled for today but was postponed due to the air quality emergency) It’s an important gesture:
The party, which is expected to include thousands of guests on the White House’s South Lawn, is a deliberate contrast to a cascade of Republican legislation and other attacks targeting LGBTQ+ people, Biden officials have said.
Biden, a Democrat, planned an evening celebration of LGBTQ+ families featuring singer Betty Who and Baltimore DJ Queen HD.
This is good too:
Biden announced that the Department of Homeland Security, working with the Justice and Health and Human Services departments, will partner with LGBTQ+ community organizations to provide safety resources and training to help thwart violent attacks.
Separately, HHS and the Department of Housing and Urban Development will provide resources to help LGBTQ+ young people with mental health needs, support in foster care and homelessness.
To confront a spike in book bans, the Department of Education’s civil rights office will appoint a new coordinator to work with schools to address that threat. The White House said banning books erodes democracy, deprives students of material needed for learning and can contribute to the stigma and isolation that LGBTQ+ youth feel because books about them are often the ones that are prohibited.
The White House points to Biden’s support for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer individuals. He has appointed many to prominent positions in the White House, such as Jean-Pierre, and throughout the federal government. He signed legislation to protect marriage equality and continues to urge Congress to send him the Equality Act, which would add civil rights protections for LGBTQ+ individuals to federal law.
They have to stand up against the grotesque bigotry and threats against this community.
For the first time in decades there is a fissure in the Republicans party on the issue of guns:
Young Republicans aren’t clinging to guns like the rest of the GOP.
As former President Donald Trump and new campaign entrants, including former Vice President Mike Pence, tout their Second Amendment bonafides and opposition to “gun confiscation” to 2024 primary voters, some Gen Z and millennial Republicans are moving in the opposite direction: A significant share of younger conservatives, reared in an age of mass violence, embrace firearm restrictions.
One poll conducted by Harvard’s political institute this spring found that a clear majority of young conservatives supported mandatory psychological exams for gun purchasers. A separate, recurring survey from YouGov concluded in March that Gen Z and millennial Republicans are more likely to believe in tougher gun laws than older Republicans and that young conservatives’ support for the idea has grown in the past year.
The generational disconnect suggests broader GOP opposition to gun restrictions will be a steady irritant inside a party already struggling to appeal to young voters. It could also challenge White House hopefuls and members of Congress to eventually refine their message on guns with Republican primary and general election voters, even if the concerns of young people won’t transform GOP politics overnight.
“But at the same time, I really don’t know when and where that conversation within the party will happen,” Hernandez said in an interview. “You still have a lot of elected officials and Republicans within the party who don’t believe we should have government interference when it comes to owning guns.”
The Democrats need to make the case that this is a top priority and not be afraid to put it on the menu. They’re getting better but ever since 2000 when Al Gore’s very close election was partially blamed on the gun issue, they’ve tip-toed around it in elections. There’s an opening here and they need to start working it.
The right wants a culture war. Democrats have the support of the country on two culture war issues that are far more salient than Dr Seuss and bathroom bills: abortion and guns. Bring it.
Update: Gavin Newsom goes there
Paralysis, limbo, stalemate — any of them describe the state of the House of Representatives this week.
On Wednesday, Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) sent the House home until Monday after spending an entire day talking with a group of far-right conservatives who held up all floor action over their dissatisfaction with the debt limit bill signed into law last week, among other grievances.
They failed to reach any path forward.
McCarthy told reporters that he’s not exactly sure what they want and that different members are asking for different things.
This is a significant challenge to McCarthy’s leadership and his ability to govern and run the House. While it’s not as dire as the motion to vacate — the procedural maneuver by which a single House Republican could trigger a vote to depose McCarthy as speaker — supporters of the rebels say that their tactic of bringing the chamber to a halt by voting against House rules could be just as damaging.
They weren’t doing anything real anyway. All they had on the agenda were messaging bills for the wingnut faction. So, in reality, the MAGA Reps are just denying themselves the ability to say they passed the “Save Our Gas Stoves Act” on Fox News.
They didn’t have the guts to raise the Motion to Vacate and truly challenge McCarthy mainly because nobody else wants the job. So they are doing a little kabuki Dance to pretend they have power in circumstances that don’t matter. Hookay.
But the “Republicans in disarray” narrative is just delicious:
Rank-and-file Republicans are not happy — this is an understatement — about a small group grinding the entire body to a halt.
“This is, in my opinion, political incontinence on our part. We are wetting ourselves … and can’t do anything about it,” Rep. Steve Womack (R-Ark.) said. “This is insane. This is not the way a governing majority is expected to behave, and, frankly, I think there’ll be a political cost to it.”
The discontent with the small group is widespread. It includes some far-right lawmakers in safe Republican districts, including Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.), one of five Freedom Caucus members who voted for McCarthy and Biden’s debt limit deal last week.
“I don’t see any need for this,” she said.
Republicans in districts President Biden won are particularly stressed. One such member called the group the “Dysfunction Caucus.”
Who’s gumming up the works?
The group of disrupters include Reps. Matt Gaetz (Fla.), Dan Bishop (N.C.), Lauren Boebert (Colo.), Ralph Norman (S.C.), Chip Roy (Tex.), Ken Buck (Colo.), Bob Good (Va.), Andy Biggs (Ariz.), Matt Rosendale (Mont.), Eli Crane (Ariz.) and Tim Burchett (Tenn.). They blocked a rule on the House floor Tuesday about gas stoves (a conservative priority that has nothing to do with the current fight), essentially halting all business.
“At the center of the far-right’s concern is an argument that McCarthy violated an agreement several of them struck in January in exchange for supporting his speakership bid. No list of those promises made exists publicly, so it’s unclear exactly what lawmakers and McCarthy agreed to. But several members of the Freedom Caucus have claimed he violated three main components of the agreement: Supporting legislation that reduces spending back to 2022 appropriation levels; putting legislation on the floor that is not passed overwhelmingly by Democrats; and not taking up bills that don’t have unanimous support from Republicans on the House Rules Committee,” our colleagues Amy B Wang, Marianna Sotomayor, Paul Kane and Leigh Ann write.
The tactics are reminiscent of the struggle McCarthy endured to become speaker, a process that spanned four days and 15 rounds of voting, to appease fewer than two dozen conservatives.
But McCarthy and Republicans said that the conference came out of that painful exercise stronger and more united than before.
The fallout
Now, Republicans worry that this standoff will play into the Democratic narrative that Republicans are a “party of chaos” that can’t govern, potentially threatening their fragile control of the House in next year’s elections.
“We have to govern,” Rep. Blake Moore (R-Utah) said. “If we can’t govern, we won’t get a chance to govern.”
Rep. Mike Garcia (R-Calif.), who represents a district Biden won by 12 points, said Republicans should be focusing on Biden.
“The goal is to operate as a team,” Garcia said. “To provide solutions in contrast to the problems being created by the Biden administration right now.”
Moderate angst
While McCarthy dealt with the rebels on the second floor of the Capitol, a group of moderate House Republicans met in Republican Whip Tom Emmer‘s office on the first floor about their legislative priorities.
While the meeting was not related to the drama ensuing above, it did come up, according to several members who attended. The lawmakers worried that some of their priorities, some of which are bipartisan, would be blocked by far-right members.
They also discussed a specific conservative priority: bringing H.R. 7, a bill to make permanent the Hyde Amendment which prohibits taxpayer dollars from being used for abortion, up for a vote soon. It was supposed to be one of the first bills voted on in the new House but was never brought up because it didn’t have the votes.
“I think some people are putting their own interests ahead of that of the conference,” Rep. Mike Lawler (R-N.Y.), a freshman whose seat is a top target for Democrats next year. “And I think they need to think long and hard about that.”
There is fear that the far-right’s demands will spill into bigger, more significant fights, including during the annual process to fund the government.
“You got a small group of people who are pissed off that are keeping the House of Representatives from functioning today, and I think the American people are not going to take too kindly to that,” Womack, a senior appropriator, said.
Keep it coming MAGAs. We need the laughs.
From Professor Melissa Murray:
Some initial thoughts on Allen v. Milligan.
Media is trumpeting this as a “victory” for the Voting Rights Act. And it is. And I don’t want to be a turd in the punchbowl… but this is pretty weak sauce from this Court.
First, this doesn’t “strengthen” the VRA. It preserves the status quo. And the status quo is that this Court has done an A+ job of hobbling the VRA over the last 10 years.
In 2013’s Shelby County v. Holder, it eviscerated the preclearance formula. The preclearance regime required states with a history of voting discrimination to first “preclear” any changes to their voting rules and regs with the DOJ or a three-judge federal court panel
The Court invalidated the preclearance formula on the ground that progress had been made and minorities were voting and blah blah blah.
This progress narrative prompted RBG to note in dissent that throwing out the preclearance formula was like throwing out your umbrella in a rainstorm because you weren’t getting wet. She was right.
SCOTUS didn’t invalidate the whole preclearance regime–just the formula. And Congress could have written a new preclearance formula… if it weren’t super-polarized and dysfunctional.
As it happened, Congress did not write a new formula. And the preclearance regime died.
Which has led to an uptick in laws that seem aimed at suppressing the vote among certain constituencies.
When confronted with this possibility in Shelby County, CJ Roberts, who wrote for the 5-4 maj, assured us that Sec 2 of the VRA remained a viable path for dealing with this.
Except that the Court was determined to hobble that too!
And it did in 2021’s Brnovich v. DNC, which made it harder for litigants to establish violations of Section 2.
And that’s not all!
After the 2020 census Alabama drew its new Congressional map… and it seemed to many that the map was drawn for the purpose of diluting the electoral power of Black people, who comprise 27% of the state’s population
Black voters, represented by the @NAACP_LDF and other groups, sued the state under Section 2, arguing that the map, as drawn, was an unconstitutional racial gerrymander.
A lower federal court agreed with the Black voters and said that the map was an impermissible gerrymander and that AL had to redraw its map before the midterm election.
AL appealed the matter to SCOTUS on the shadow docket. SCOTUS, in a 5-4 decision, stayed the lower court’s ruling, allowing the map to go into effect and be used in the 2022 midterm election.
You will recall that in the 2022 midterms, the Democrats lost control of the House. This was due to a lot of different factors, but many have noted the impact of gerrymandering and other democratic distortions in the outcome of the election.
SCOTUS in 2019’s Rucho v. Common Cause said that federal courts could not review (and adjudicate) claims of partisan gerrymandering.
And in February 2022, it allowed AL’s map–the map it now agrees was an unconstitutional racial gerrymander–to go into effect.
So, yes, today’s decision is a victory that maintains the status quo for Section 2 of the VRA.
But it is cold comfort when one considers the way this Court through its decisions has actively distorted the electoral landscape and made true representative government more elusive.
I think it’s “rule-washing.” Roberts and Kavanaugh are political animals and they know the reputation of the Court is shit. So they’re going to throw a few bones to take some of the heat off. It’s good, as far as it goes. But no on e should be comforted that they are actually moderating.
I can’t tell you how much I love this:
Had it come from anyone else, the transition would have been amusing.
“The media lie,” the host says, looking into the camera for a video posted on Twitter. “They do. But mostly, they just ignore the stories that matter.”
Stories like what, you ask? Well, fast-forward a few seconds and you get your answer.
“Yesterday, for example,” he explains, “a former Air Force officer who worked for years in military intelligence came forward as a whistleblower to reveal that the U.S. government has physical evidence of crashed, non-human-made aircraft, as well as the bodies of the pilots who flew those aircraft.”
Ah, okay. Everyone over the age of 13 can see where this is going.
But the speaker here wasn’t one of the unidentifiable talking phenomena that litter social media. It wasn’t even Alex Jones, who made a career out of elevating skepticism in authority so high that people might even believe that his nutritional supplements were worth the cost.
It was, instead, Tucker Carlson, booted from cable news and landing amongst the proletariat he so strenuously claims to love. Yes, the production value of his video was higher than most, but the argumentation very much was not.
Before we get too far ahead of ourselves, we will note that there was, in fact, a report from a niche website, later picked up by the upstart cable channel NewsNation, in which a former military officer claims that the government is in possession of alien craft.
The website (which I, at least, had never heard of before) has a dedicated section for discussing UFOs and was co-founded by a guy who’s written books about UFOs. One would assume that its claims would be considered in that context; this is a site eager to elevate the idea that such craft exist. The story depends almost entirely on the credibility of the former military official.
Good enough for Carlson.
“It was clear he was telling the truth,” he said. “In other words, UFOs are actually real and apparently so is extraterrestrial life. Now we know. In a normal country, this news would qualify as a bombshell, the story of the millennium. But in our country, it doesn’t.”
Well, yeah, because the bar for accepting sweeping allegations about government coverups is higher than the word of one guy. That’s particularly true when it comes to UFOs, perhaps the most stereotypical example of conspiratorial allegations by fringe actors.
We’ve been through this before with Carlson. When he was at Fox, he had an ancillary streaming show that wasn’t aired in prime time. There, he elevated similarly specious assertions, including a multipart investigation into mutilations of cattle that he suggested was linked to alien beings.
As made obvious in his new Twitter video, the intent was clear. Carlson, like Alex Jones, wants his audience to be skeptical of authority, in part because he himself is skeptical and in part, obviously, because it makes his audience more pliable and gives him more power.
Back then, though, the claims at least carried the imprimatur of Fox News, albeit through its “Fox Nation” streaming offshoot. Puck News analyst Julia Alexander made a useful point about that distinction after Carlson’s video was posted.
“There’s an air of cautious belief, especially amongst the core (dwindling) cable news audience — and doubly so Fox’s audience — that if it’s airing, there’s semblance of authenticity,” she wrote on Twitter. “Because it’s on TV, and it’s labeled news. On Twitter it’s more noise in a sea of endless noise.”
That’s true. There’s a reason that right-wing organizations like One America and Newsmax exist as cable-news channels: It lends a credibility that a generic, unheard-of website lacks. In November 2020, I wrote about the way Trump’s false election-fraud claims were being laundered through these news-source simulacra, with coifed anchors sitting at translucent desks as colors slipped slowly around on video screens behind them. It wasn’t news, much less objective news, but it sure did look like it was. Particularly among the oldest Americans — Carlson’s core audience — cable news is a much more trusted source of political information than social media.
But now that’s gone. Yes, Carlson can boast that, by Twitter’s metrics, the first “episode” of his new Twitter “show” — one with all of the visual-effect accoutrements of a dude recording his thoughts on the Burger King menu while sitting in his parking lot in his car — scooped up more than 73 million views in less than 18 hours. Unlike Fox News, though, where viewership is measured by an agreed-upon third party and tied to actual consumption of the product, Elon Musk’s Twitter counts almost any observation of the video as a “view.” How many people actually watched Carlson’s 10-minute video is impossible to determine.
Carlson will presumably press on. Perhaps his commentary will layer on more of the familiar visual cues of cable news over time. Maybe he will develop this response to his ouster into something differentiated from the thousands of other videos that offer commentary on Twitter on a given day.
For now, though, Carlson’s first offering — once the standard maybe-Russia-isn’t-that-bad stuff was out of the way — came down to one simple message: The media is lying to you and won’t tell you about UFOs.
It is fitting that this, the hoariest of conspiracy theories, should mark Carlson’s debut as a social-media commentator.
You should see his “set.” It’s pathetic
Luckily, Marcy Wheeler keeps up better than anybody.
Breaking news of Donald Trump’s forever-imminent indictment on federal and state charges came so thick and fast on Wednesday that I missed this detailed New Yorker essay from Andrew Marantz until MSNBC’s Chris Hayes interviewed him on set last night.
“How a Fringe Legal Theory Became a Threat to Democracy” charts the journey of the independent-state-legislature theory (I.S.L.T.) from crank theory supporting the Bush v. Gore decision that settled the 2000 presidential election to one mainstream enough to reach the U.S. Supreme Court again. Marantz reviews this one, Moore v. Harper, from North Carolina:
In 2021, with Tim Moore as the speaker of the North Carolina House, the majority-Republican legislature drew gerrymandered congressional maps—that is, even more egregiously gerrymandered than usual. Several voters (one of them named Becky Harper) and a handful of nonprofits (including Common Cause, where [democracy activists Sailor]Jones works) sued to block the implementation of those maps, and the state Supreme Court ruled in their favor. The U.S. Supreme Court was asked to decide whether the legislature’s maps should stand—and, by extension, whether the state court had the power to review them at all.
I.S.L.T. advocates contend that the Constitution gives plenary power to state legislatures over the conduct of elections. Not even the courts may review their decisions for compliance with the state or federal constitution.
“That’s just not how it works,” said legal scholar Vikram Amar who, with his brother Akhil, published a law-review article last year entitled “Eradicating Bush-League Arguments Root and Branch” that took on I.S.L.T. another scholar called “right-wing fanfic.”
Harvard’s Laurence Tribe described the lack of historical support for the theory, saying, “This wasn’t something that had an organic development in the law. It was, frankly, something that was pulled out of somebody’s butt, because they thought it was a convenient way to fulfill a short-term partisan agenda.”
Like putting a thumb on the scale in a presidential election. The theory was an aside in 2000. In 2020, I.S.L.T. found its way into Team Trump’s efforts to overturn the election he lost by seven million votes.
A familiar cast of MAGA characters were involved in promoting I.S.L.T. for overturning the assignment of electoral votes in key states: Rudolph Giuliani, Sidney Powell, John Eastman, Cleta Mitchell, Ginni Thomas.
The entire piece is worth the read.
Why I.S.L.T. has come to a head in North Carolina is familiar territory. The GOP has worked assiduously at rigging the political game here since taking control of the legislature after the 2010 REDMAP wipeout:
American activists of all stripes, paraphrasing Justice Louis Brandeis, have long referred to the states as laboratories of democracy. But the adage has started to reverse itself: in the past two years alone, there has been one book called “Laboratories Against Democracy” and another called “Laboratories of Autocracy.” North Carolina is often cited as a paradigmatic case. It’s a purple state—Barack Obama won it in 2008 and lost it in 2012—but in many recent years Republicans have enjoyed super-majorities in the legislature, and they have used this power to grant themselves more power. After the Republican Pat McCrory was elected governor, in 2012, the state passed what voting-rights advocates called the monster election law—a combination of voter-I.D. requirements, reduced access to polling sites, and other obstacles that made it, at the time, among the most suppressive laws of its kind in the country. (A court later overturned the law, ruling that it would “target African Americans with almost surgical precision.”)
[…]
In 2016, the anti-democratic maneuvers grew more brazen. McCrory ran for reëlection and narrowly lost, but he didn’t concede to his Democratic successor, Roy Cooper, for nearly a month, citing “serious concerns of potential voter fraud.” This received less attention than it might have, given the Presidential election that happened at the same time. (McCrory recently told me that he now believes Cooper’s victory was legitimate, although he mentioned that the election had included some “bad things” and “unfortunate coincidences,” including faulty Dominion voting machines.) During McCrory’s remaining time in office, the legislature convened for a special session and stripped the incoming governor of a wide range of powers. “Partisanship, hardball politics—that we were familiar with,” Mike Woodard, a Democratic state senator, told me. “But not just pulling the rug out like that.”
N.C. Democrats fought battles in court over redistricting and newly restrictive voting laws since 2011. Much of that I’ve covered in past posts. What’s changed today is that Republicans have tired of losing in court. Now they want to cut the courts, including the state Supreme Court, entirely out of the review process.
“We can’t control who wins statewide office … and we can’t control who’s on the state Supreme Court,” Hayes commented last night [timestamp 42:40], speaking in the voice of the G.O.P. “The one thing we’re sure we can always control are two things in America: state legislature bodies (because we gerrymander them) and the federal judiciary which we pack with our people. And it just so happens that our constitutional theory gives these two entities the most power over how elections are run.”
“Such a strange coincidence,” snarked Marantz.
What could happen when SCOTUS rules on Moore v. Harper ?
The conventional wisdom was that the three liberal Justices would almost certainly reject I.S.L.T., and the three most conservative Justices almost certainly would not. This left the three Justices who currently pass for moderates—the three who worked for the Bush legal team in 2000—as the likely swing votes. Not long ago, I met up with Chris Shenton and his colleagues at the Southern Coalition for Social Justice, in an office park on the outskirts of Durham, as they prepared potential arguments in Moore v. Harper. “There are a couple of ways to split the baby on this one, but not many,” Shenton told me. “You either think the whole concept of I.S.L.T. is coherent or you don’t.” In 2015, in a case called Arizona State Legislature v. Arizona Independent Redistricting Commission, the Court had rejected a version of I.S.L.T. Another coalition lawyer, Hilary Harris Klein, said that it would be highly unusual for the Court to reverse such a recent major precedent.
“They could probably find a way,” Shenton said.
“Well, sure,” Klein said, “they could do anything, if logic and principles go out the window.”
In the wake of the Dobbs decision overturning Roe? Don’t count on logic and principles.
Meantime, Republicans in Raleigh last week introduced a new set of election hurdles for voters to overcome (Senate Bill 747). Cleta Mitchell met with Republican leaders in Raleigh about the bill before it became public. They bristled at the idea that Cleta Mitchell influenced its drafting, reports WRAL:
A main focus of the bill is mail-in voting. It would add new obstacles to people seeking to vote by mail. It would enact an earlier deadline for mail-in ballots to arrive and still be counted. And it would make it easier for people to challenge the validity of others’ mail-in ballots. The bill also would ban outside grant funding for elections and enact more aggressive rules for removing people from the list of registered voters, among other changes.
That description is more anodyne than the actual implications. Election officials must maintain a record of anyone giving assistance to a voter inside the voting booth. The bill also requires “county boards of elections to use verification software to check the signatures of voters noted on executed absentee ballots before those ballots are accepted by the county boards.” How they manage that is their problem. Can you say, “unfunded mandate”?
“And here they go with advice from election deniers and fraud perpetrators,” Cooper tweeted last Thursday. “Don’t be fooled. This isn’t about protecting elections. It’s about rigging them to help Republicans.”
Marantz attended a bipartisan forum in Hickory last year meant to reassure voters about the integrity of North Carolina’s election. (I attended the same one when it came to Asheville.) Marantz writes:
The audience raised several stubborn narratives about voter fraud, familiar from Trump rallies and right-wing memes, and a series of election officials took turns patiently demystifying the process. Still, at least a few listeners were able to remain mystified. A local I.T. official started a sentence “When it comes to cybersecurity . . .” at which point he was interrupted by a heckler, who shouted, “No such thing as cybersecurity! Anything that’s hooked up to the Internet can be hacked.” The I.T. official did his best to explain that North Carolina’s voting machines were not—in fact, could not be—connected to the Internet, but this seemed to have no effect. Afterward, in the parking lot, I approached the heckler, identified myself as a journalist, and asked if anything he’d heard had changed his mind. “Go pound sand,” he said. He got in his car and slammed the door. Then, perhaps worried that he had been unclear, he rolled down his window, shouted, “Go fuck yourself,” and peeled off.
The GOP has cultivated a market for this stuff for decades. Trump shot the conspiracists full of adrenaline, just not in the middle of Fifth Avenue.
