Crazy state parties are on their own

Reuters reports that GOP donors are getting sick of throwing good money after bad to the Trump kooks who have taken over various state parties:

Real estate mogul Ron Weiser has been one of the biggest donors to the Michigan Republican Party, giving $4.5 million in the recent midterm election cycle. But no more.

Weiser, former chair of the party, has halted his funding, citing concerns about the organization’s stewardship. He says he doesn’t agree with Republicans who promote falsehoods about election results and insists it’s “ludicrous” to claim Donald Trump, who lost Michigan by 154,000 votes in 2020, carried the state.

“I question whether the state party has the necessary expertise to spend the money well,” he said.

The withdrawal of bankrollers like Weiser reflects the high price Republicans in the battleground states of Michigan and Arizona are paying for their full-throated support of former President Trump and his unsubstantiated claims that the 2020 election was stolen from him.

The two parties have hemorrhaged money in recent years, undermining Republican efforts to win back the ultra-competitive states that could determine who wins the White House and control of the U.S. Congress in next November’s elections, according to a Reuters review of financial filings, plus interviews with six major donors and three election campaign experts.

Arizona’s Republican Party had less than $50,000 in cash reserves in its state and federal bank accounts as of March 31 to spend on overheads such as rent, payroll and political campaign operations, the filings show. At the same point four years ago, it had nearly $770,000.

The Michigan party’s federal account had about $116,000 on March 31, a drop from nearly $867,000 two years ago. It has yet to disclose updated financial information for its state account this year.

The two parties have “astonishingly low cash reserves,” said Seth Masket, director of the non-partisan Center on American Politics at the University of Denver, adding that state parties play a key election role, helping promote candidates, fund get-out-the-vote efforts, pay for ads and recruit volunteers.

“Their ability to help candidates is severely limited right now.”

The Arizona party spent more than $300,000 on “legal consulting” fees last year, according to its federal filings, which do not specify the type of legal work paid for.

In that period, legal fees were paid to a firm that had filed lawsuits seeking to overturn Trump’s defeat in Arizona, according to separate campaign and legal disclosures. Money was also paid to attorneys who represented Kelli Ward, the former party chair when the Justice Department subpoenaed her over her involvement in a plan to falsely certify to Congress that Trump, and not Democratic President Joe Biden, had won Arizona, plus when a congressional committee subpoenaed her phone records.

More than $500,000 was also spent in Arizona on an election night party and a bus tour for statewide Trump-backed candidates last year, the financial filings show. All of those candidates, who supported the former president’s election-steal claims, lost in last November’s midterms.

It’s not just Weiser who’s had enough.

Five other Republican donors to the Arizona or Michigan parties, who have each donated tens of thousands of dollars over the past six years, told Reuters they had also ceased giving money, citing state leaders’ drives to overturn the 2020 election, their backing of losing candidates who support Trump’s election conspiracy and what they view as extreme positions on issues like abortion.

“It’s too bad we let the right wing of our party take over the operations,” said Jim Click, whose family has been a longtime major Republican donor in Arizona. He and other donors said they would give money directly to candidates or support them through other political fundraising groups.

Kristina Karamo, chair of the Michigan state party, didn’t respond to a request for comment for this story. In the campaign for her position, she said that she wanted to break ties with established donors, accusing them of exploiting the party for their own gain, and wants to rely more on grassroots members.

Ward, who stepped down as Arizona party chair in January after four years at the helm, told Reuters that she and her team had always had revenues to cover outgoings and had left her successor at least three months’ operating expenses plus a “robust fundraising operation.”

Dajana Zlaticanin, a spokesperson for new chair Jeff DeWit, said that when he took over, “cash reserves were extremely low and previous bills kept coming in.” Contributions are on the uptick, she said, with over $40,000 raised in May.

The Republican National Committee, which oversees Republican political operations nationally, didn’t respond to a request for comment about the finances of the two state parties.

‘I SEE NO SUN COMING OUT’

Arizona and Michigan, both won by Biden in 2020, are among just a handful of swing states that will likely decide the race for the presidency in November 2024.

Not all Republican parties have fared as badly financially as Arizona and Michigan. For example, the swing state of North Carolina – where Republican leaders haven’t focused so heavily on Trump’s election-steal fight – ended 2022 with nearly $800,000 in its federal accounts, according to the filings.

It is difficult to get a complete picture of parties’ finances, though, given time lags in disclosures and because not all of their accounts are subject to reporting requirements.

Furthermore, state parties don’t rely solely on individual donors, they also receive money from national party organizations, outside groups and political action committees.

Michigan was a hotbed of conspiracy theories after Trump lost the 2020 election, and this month Karamo was fined by a county judge for filing a lawsuit that made unfounded claims about voting irregularities in Detroit.

Tensions over transparency have started to boil over.

Last week former state party budget chairman Matt Johnson launched a broadside against Karamo, two days after she removed him from his post, accusing her of keeping his committee in the dark about the party’s finances.

“As far as we could tell from the piecemeal information we received, the party’s fundraising had been extremely meager, and the spending was so far out of proportion with income as to put us on the path to bankruptcy,” he said.

Jason Roe, a former executive director of the Michigan Republican Party, said the financial figures disclosed so far by the party underscore the difficult task of supporting operations without the financial backing of big donors.

“They are effectively broke and I don’t see the clouds parting and the sun coming out on their fundraising abilities,” he said.

‘DETRIMENTAL TO CAMPAIGNS’

The review of the two Republican state parties’ filings shows that a near shut-off of the donor spigot is contributing to their financial woes.

The Michigan party’s federal account took in $51,000 in the fist three months of this year, putting it on pace to raise less than a quarter of its haul in the first half of 2019, the same period in the last presidential election cycle.

In March, Karamo told a gathering of local officials that the party had $460,000 in liabilities after the 2022 midterm elections. While not unusually large, the debt would normally be covered by fresh fundraising.

The Arizona party, meanwhile, raised roughly $139,000 in the first three months of this year, according to state and federal filings. In the comparable period in 2019, in the months after the 2018 midterm elections, it raised more than $330,000.

New Arizona chair DeWit, who was NASA’s chief financial officer in the Trump administration, is working to make the party attractive to donors again by focusing on winning elections, spokesperson Zlaticanin said.

Some donors in Michigan said they had started talking with each other about how best to bypass the state party and support individual Republican candidates. But the state party’s organizational heft will be hard to replicate, said Jeff Timmer, a former executive director of the Michigan Republican Party.

“You have to have boots on the ground and you can’t build that kind of infrastructure quickly enough to win the 2024 election,” Timmer said.

Jonathan Lines, who preceded Ward as Arizona’s party chairman up to 2019, said he expected new donor money to mostly go to political action committees, and other groups who fund campaigns, rather than the state party.

“But not having the state party well funded is detrimental to many Republican campaigns next year,” he added.

Until Trump gets off the stage it’s hard to see how they can get their act together and the long term damage will be severe. Couldn’t happen to a nicer bunch of weirdos.

TPM reports:

As Trump-appointed judges vie to see who can produce the most nakedly partisan rulings completely divorced from precedent and case law, a new contender has thrown his hat in the ring. 

U.S. District Judge Terry Doughty on Tuesday barred Biden administration officials — everyone from Heath and Human Services to the Centers for Disease Control to the FBI — from flagging posts that spread misinformation to social media companies. Doughty ruled that such contact is a violation of the First Amendment. The companies include Facebook/Meta, Twitter, YouTube/Google, Instagram and many more. 

The judgment bans the named officials from meeting with the companies, flagging worrying content, emailing or calling the companies about content, following up with the companies or even collaborating with groups like the Election Integrity Partnership to identify troublesome posts. 

“Although this case is still relatively young, and at this stage the Court is only examining it in terms of Plaintiffs’ likelihood of success on the merits, the evidence produced thus far depicts an almost dystopian scenario,” Doughty writes. “During the COVID-19 pandemic, a period perhaps best characterized by widespread doubt and uncertainty, the United States Government seems to have assumed a role similar to an Orwellian ‘Ministry of Truth.’”

The case now goes through the familiar gauntlet of right-wing-friendly venues: the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals, and, likely, the Supreme Court. Should Doughty’s ruling survive, it’d be a sea change in the interpretation of this area of law. His injunction, at least, will likely remain in place for months, given the conservative dominance of the 5th Circuit and the time it’ll take for the case to reach the Supreme Court.  

Many anti-Biden administration litigants have recently filed lawsuits in the same pipeline — Trumpy district judge to 5th Circuit to Supreme Court — on everything from abortion to the Affordable Care Act.

The high court, though, has overturned Doughty before; he made the initial ruling banning the Biden administration’s vaccine requirements for health care workers at facilities that receive funding from Medicare and Medicaid, which the Court ultimately let stand.

Doughty tosses in a few exceptions to the contact ban, including on matters of national security and “criminal efforts to suppress voting, to provide illegal campaign contributions, of cyber-attacks against election infrastructure, or foreign attempts to influence elections.” 

Doughty tipped his cards far earlier in the process, allowing the plaintiffs — a pair of red state attorneys general plus individuals including The Gateway Pundit’s Jim Hoft — to extract extensive discovery from administration officials like far-right archenemy Dr. Anthony Fauci, who’s said he wasn’t involved in online content moderation. 

This newest ruling also dribbled out of the right-wing media vortex of conspiracy theories, where “government censorship” of conservatives’ social media activity is a constant complaint.

Fury about supposed “shadow banning,” stifling of content and throttling of follower counts is not relegated to right-wing cranks on message boards or those who host Fox News shows: Republican elected officials consistently echo the conspiracy theory, occasionally hauling in tech CEOs before their committees to answer shouted questions on the topic.

The Republican-majority House Judiciary Committee, among the censorship-obsessed and which has already subpoenaed the likes of Mark Zuckerberg, interrupted its anodyne Fourth of July posts to gleefully retweet news of the judge’s ruling, festooned with American flag emojis. 

“HAPPY INDEPENDENCE DAY!” the committee celebrated.

This is going to be a common occurrence going forward. The Federalist Society salted the judiciary with many of these MAGA fools and they are working hand in glove with the looney MAGA right conspiracy freaks. And some of this nonsense is going to make it all the way to the top and we’ll just have to see how far down the rabbit hole the Supremes are willing to go.

Last week in Philadelphia Moms for Liberty held a cattle call for presidential candidates at their “Joyful Warriors” conference and they got all the big names to show up. This was quite a get for a group that only started in 2021 by Sarasota Florida school board members Tiffany Justice, Tina Descovich and Bridget Ziegler to protest masking and vaccine mandates in public schools during COVID-19. They are big players now in Republican politics with big donors and major politicians competing for their favor.

And like so many others in the GOP they also have ties with the Proud Boys, a far-right hate group and have been designated antigovernment extremists by the Southern Poverty Law Center which they are wearing it with pride, as right wing groups tend to do:

Like for instance, when you actually quote Adolph Hitler in one of your newsletters.
Although, with this one, what kind of apology can there really be?

Sorry we got directly quoting Hitler? pic.twitter.com/OCGaomCV0a

— Jo (@JoJoFromJerz) July 2, 2023

Florida GOP Chairman Christian Ziegler, quoted above, also happens to be married to Bridget Ziegler, one of the founders of Mom’s for Liberty so for all its claims to being a grassroots organization, let’s just say they had friends in high places from the very beginning. (Their very first conference was sponsored by the Heritage Foundation and Turning Point USA.) It’s not at all surprising that it very quickly grew into a national “parents rights” movement protesting the teaching of America’s racial history and LGBTQ issues, banning books, abridging free speech, ending tenure for teachers, militant anti-transgender activism and fervent opposition to the teachers unions among other things. They are soldiers in the culture war, fighting what Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis would call the “woke” agenda, the most animating issue among the hardcore GOP base. So of course, the presidential candidates showed up for their little confab.

Their origins being in Florida, they have a special affinity for DeSantis. He was the star of their first gathering last year where they presented him the “Sword of Liberty” which is kind of like a wingnut Oscar, for him apparently. This year he assured them he would keep fighting the woke wherever it appears:

Six ‘wokes’ in 19 seconds today at the Moms for Liberty conference. He’s really fighting the woke. pic.twitter.com/n4n58se4Ef

— Ron Filipkowski (@RonFilipkowski) June 30, 2023

Sadly for him, he was upstaged by the big man, Donald Trump who gave the keynote and was received with the usual MAGA ecstasy. The moms really loved him. (And why not? He’s been married to three different women and had kids with every one.) He called them ” the best thing that ever happened to America” and they swooned. He made them some explicit, if completely unworkable, promises like this one:

Trump tells Moms for Liberty that as President he will allow parents to elect the Principals of schools every year, so if they don’t like a school Principal they can vote them out of the job. pic.twitter.com/QEdpMYqR3E

— Ron Filipkowski (@RonFilipkowski) June 30, 2023

Gadfly candidate  Vivek Ramaswamy told the gathered throng that he was”privileged to join my favorite hate group and extremist group today” and Nikki Haley called herself a terrorist in solidarity:

“When they mentioned that this was a terrorist organization, I said ‘Well then, count me as a mom for liberty because that’s what I am.”

People seem to be very impressed by these “joyful warriors” even those who are appalled by the extremism. They seem to believe that they have done something unprecedented by inspiring all these women to become involved in politics and form grassroots chapters all around the country. They claim to have over 100,000 members who are involved at the local level. But are they really that extraordinary?

One of the largest global protest marches in history took place on January 21st, 2017, the day after Donald Trump was sworn in as president. The Women’s March that day spawned what was soon to become known as “the Resistance” which started out as a sort of worldwide support group made up of mostly women who felt, rightly, that the election over the unfit, sexually abusing, reality show host over the first woman nominee was a portent of very bad things to come. They bought t-shirts and books by the thousands, they created activist aps and online groups and came together wherever possible to commiserate and share their angst and anger over what had happened. But it wasn’t long before they began to organize.

Within a year, the Resistance had created dozens of grassroots electoral organizations like Indivisible, Run for Something and Swing Left mostly led and staffed by women, dedicated to electing Democrats to congress to put a check on Trump. It worked. The Democrats took back the House of Representatives in the 2018 midterms and the Resistance groups got much of the credit.

Now. as time went on some of these groups got funding from big donors. But they weren’t married to state chairmen of the Democratic party or throwing conferences sponsored by major Democratic think tanks in the first year. It was an authentic reaction to a cataclysmic event. These Moms for Liberty are a GOP front group fanning the flames of the culture war as a cynical political strategy.

And they have miscalculated. Like Twitter CEO Elon Musk who recently agreed that childless people probably shouldn’t have a right to vote because they “have little stake in the future,” their fetishization of “parents rights” as some kind of right wing monolith is just wrong. Philip Bump of the Washington Post looked at the numbers:

[I]t is not the case that parents are inherently politically conservative. When Sen. J.D. Vance (R-Ohio) suggested letting parents cast votes for their kids — a different flavor of this same discussion — The Washington Post looked at the effect that might have. But we can summarize the divides here more succinctly, using data from the biennial General Social Survey.

More than half of those without any kids identify as Democrats or Democratic-leaning independents. (From here on, I’ll just lump independents who lean toward a party in with the party itself.) More than a third of that group identify as liberal Democrats. Among those with children who are all under the age of 18, just under half identify as Democrats, nearly double the percentage that identifies as Republicans.

And that’s because people with young children are young themselves and young people are not flocking to the GOP these days. Republicans are older and while they may have kids they’re long out of school. There just isn’t a huge constituency for this crusade.

As Bump points out, while parents have always had lots of advice about how children should be raised, “schools and other institutions, meanwhile, hired professional educators and administrators who focused on understanding how to educate a diverse range of children generally with an eye toward creating well-rounded citizens.” Today everyone is an expert on everything because they “do their own research” on Facebook and it’s easily exploitable by savvy operators. Tell those people what they want to hear and they’ll believe it.

Moms for Liberty doesn’t speak for parents of schoolkids who aren’t onboard with book banning and bullying trans kids and second guessing every word that comes out of a teacher’s mouth and that’s most of them. If they are fooling themselves into believing that they do they are in for a rude awakening. But I doubt their leaders care one way or another about any of this. It’s just about getting the elderly Fox News voters riled up about the latest brouhaha. It’s infuriating that as with all these culture war battles, hardworking people and innocent kids are sacrificed so they can keep their base terrified and angry.

Salon

You can’t win if you don’t show up to play

Howie Klein this morning addresses why it’s important that Democrats recruit candidates (even “feckless” ones) and run everywhere. Run For Something is working on that. So is North Carolina Democrats’ new state chair, Anderson Clayton, 25. She’ll appear on a featured panel next week at Netroots Nation-Chicago with three other women state chairs: Lavora Barnes of Michigan, Shasti Conrad of Washington, and Jane Kleeb of Nebraska.

“In 2022, we left 44 seats uncontested last cycle,” Clayton told MSNBC’s Ali Velshi in May. That cannot happen again. “Democracy is not democracy without choices.”

Plus, you can’t win if you don’t show up to play.

Awesome.

Run. Everywhere. https://t.co/9STnEEasx4

— David Pepper (@DavidPepper) May 20, 2023

Democrats need to give voters a reason to show up, Klein writes. What matters to them is results. In Minnesota, for example, where Democrats in 2022 won a narrow trifecta. Democrats chose to show voters what they could do with their narrow governing majorities. They passed transformsational legislation to benefit constitutents (Down With Tyranny):

“The house speaker, Melissa Hortman, said state Democrats viewed the trifecta as a fleeting window to legislate aggressively. ‘Having Republicans in control of part of state government for the last 10 years and being prevented from doing really anything progressive at all created a lot of pent-up demand to chalk up some progressive victories,’ said Hortman.”

Working with grassroots community activists, Democrats passed laws protecting women’s Choice, unions, renters’ rights and voting rights. “During the same session that the felony re-enfranchisement bill passed, the state passed the Democracy for the People Act, which, among other reforms, allows 16- and 17-year-olds to preregister to vote, establishes automatic voter registration in some state agencies, requires voting materials be available in the three most commonly spoken languages in the state, and penalizes voter intimidation and lies.”

That and a lot more.

Republicans, naturally, complain about “overreach” about which they’d have no qualms if it was them. Klein’s friend, Dorothy, a Democratic political operator from California, tells him:

“Democrats need to focus on where they are going– not how they are going to get there, on outcomes instead of process. For example– not getting your pay docked if you have to take time off to take your child to the doctor even if it’s for a well-baby checkup, being able to afford enough bedrooms to house your family, knowing that the foods you eat are safe to eat, knowing the water you drink is safe to drink, knowing the air you breathe is safe to breathe, knowing that that guy standing next to you is not carrying an AK-15, knowing that if you need an abortion you can get one. Democrats need to tell people what the outcomes will be if they vote for them. They don’t need lectures on history. They don’t need to know where we once were or how we got where we are today. They need to know what Democrats will do for them now.”

Dorothy is quoting the Gospel according to Anat Shenker-Osorio:

“Inspire through outcome, not process,” says progressive messaging guru Anat Shenker-Osorio, citing an example from a pollster.

“When we are walking through the grocery aisle and want to buy brownies,” she begins, “what is the image on the brownie box? The brownie! What’s not staring you in the face? The recipe! … We need to stop messaging our policy and talk about what our policy achieves.”

"When you go off to work you know that your kid is safe, loved & cared for. and you can afford it."@anatosaurus on @TheLastWord on how to talk about great policies in Build Back Better.
Watch @Lawrence smile when she says,"Stop selling the recipe, start selling the brownies." pic.twitter.com/iwURuFxEGe

— Spocko (@spockosbrain) October 13, 2021

Outcome, not process. “Paint the beautiful tomorrow.” Run everywhere. And once in office, fight like hell for the deliverables.

The ambulance’s red glare

“Make America Great Again” is Donald Trump’s freighted message to a conservative political base longing for “the good, old days.” You know, when men were men, women were women, white Christians were dominant, non-whites knew their place, and the biggest worry on the Fourth of July was fireworks injuries.

Somehow, I don’t think MAGAstan is fretting about that last bit.

From CNN’s daily “5 Things” news summary:

Independence Day celebrations were marred by violence over the holiday weekend after several mass shootings took place across the US. At least nine people were injured in a shooting early this morning in Washington, DC, as the victims were celebrating the Fourth of July in the nation’s capital. In Philadelphia, a shooting Monday left five people dead and two others wounded. On the same night in Fort Worth, Texas, a shooting killed three people and wounded eight others. Separately, block parties recently turned deadly in Indianapolis and Baltimore, leaving investigators scouring the crime scenes for answers. Data shows the Fourth of July has accounted for the most mass shootings of any other day of the year in nearly a decade, according to a CNN analysis.

If you missed the memo that shooting your neighbors is now how “patriots” celebrate the holiday, you’re not alone.

Hot August nights in July

Another factoid about yesterday’s July Fourth festivities (Washington Post):

Tuesday was the hottest day on Earth since at least 1979, with the global average temperature reaching 62.92 degrees Fahrenheit (17.18 degrees Celsius), according to data from the U.S. National Centers for Environmental Prediction.

As a result, some scientists believe July 4 may have been one of the hottest days on Earth in around 125,000 years, due to a dangerous combination of climate change causing global temperatures to soar, the return of the El Niño pattern and the start of summer in the northern hemisphere.

In the United States, 57 million people were exposed to dangerous heat on Tuesday, according to The Washington Post’s extreme heat tracker. At the same time, China was gripped by a sizzling heat wave, the Antarctic is hotter than usual during its winter, and temperatures in the north of Africa reached 122F, Reuters reported.

The heat record has stood since … Monday.

A “triple whammy” is on its way in coming months, says Myles Allen, a professor of geosystem science at Oxford University, “when so “when global warming, El Niño and the annual cycle all line up together.”

Meaning?

Meaning the world’s deadliest animal, the mosquito, is “on the move,” bringing with it malaria and other mosquito-borne diseases (Washington Post):

In June alone, five cases of locally transmitted malaria were discovered in Texas and Florida: the first cases acquired in the United States in two decades. These cases, experts say, are unlikely to have a connection to warming temperatures — conditions in Florida and Texas are already suitable for malaria-carrying mosquitoes. But as urban heat islands expand and temperatures rise, mosquito-borne diseases are expected to travel outside of their typical regions.

“Climate change allows the creeping edge of mosquito ranges to expand,” said Sadie Ryan, a professor of medical geography at the University of Florida.

Not just northward but into higher elevations.

Different mosquitoes thrive under different temperatures. The Anopheles mosquito carries malaria; the Aedes aegypti and the Aedes albopictus mosquitoes carry diseases like dengue and chikungunya. But the A. aegypti thrives at higher temperatures than the A. albopictus. As different parts of the world warm at different rates, some mosquito-borne diseases will thrive while others will be put under stress.

According to a study published in 2019, both species are expected to spread northward in the United States over the next 30 years. By 2050, the A.aegypticould increase its range in the Mid-Atlantic and the Midwest; the A. albopictus could make it as far north as Michigan and Minnesota.

We are sleepwalking into the end of our existence on this planet. https://t.co/ZeIxfBfFAZ

— Mehdi Hasan (@mehdirhasan) July 4, 2023

The good news? It might not be sea level rise or gunfire that gets you.

(h/t CT)

We live in hope…

Langston Hughes 

Let America be America again.
Let it be the dream it used to be.
Let it be the pioneer on the plain
Seeking a home where he himself is free.

(America never was America to me.)

Let America be the dream the dreamers dreamed—
Let it be that great strong land of love
Where never kings connive nor tyrants scheme
That any man be crushed by one above.

(It never was America to me.)

O, let my land be a land where Liberty
Is crowned with no false patriotic wreath,
But opportunity is real, and life is free,
Equality is in the air we breathe.

(There’s never been equality for me,
Nor freedom in this “homeland of the free.”)

Say, who are you that mumbles in the dark?
And who are you that draws your veil across the stars?

I am the poor white, fooled and pushed apart,
I am the Negro bearing slavery’s scars.
I am the red man driven from the land,
I am the immigrant clutching the hope I seek—
And finding only the same old stupid plan
Of dog eat dog, of mighty crush the weak.

I am the young man, full of strength and hope,
Tangled in that ancient endless chain
Of profit, power, gain, of grab the land!
Of grab the gold! Of grab the ways of satisfying need!
Of work the men! Of take the pay!
Of owning everything for one’s own greed!

I am the farmer, bondsman to the soil.
I am the worker sold to the machine.
I am the Negro, servant to you all.
I am the people, humble, hungry, mean—
Hungry yet today despite the dream.
Beaten yet today—O, Pioneers!
I am the man who never got ahead,
The poorest worker bartered through the years.

Yet I’m the one who dreamt our basic dream
In the Old World while still a serf of kings,
Who dreamt a dream so strong, so brave, so true,
That even yet its mighty daring sings
In every brick and stone, in every furrow turned
That’s made America the land it has become.
O, I’m the man who sailed those early seas
In search of what I meant to be my home—
For I’m the one who left dark Ireland’s shore,
And Poland’s plain, and England’s grassy lea,
And torn from Black Africa’s strand I came
To build a “homeland of the free.”

The free?

Who said the free? Not me?
Surely not me? The millions on relief today?
The millions shot down when we strike?
The millions who have nothing for our pay?
For all the dreams we’ve dreamed
And all the songs we’ve sung
And all the hopes we’ve held
And all the flags we’ve hung,
The millions who have nothing for our pay—
Except the dream that’s almost dead today.

O, let America be America again—
The land that never has been yet—
And yet must be—the land where every man is free.
The land that’s mine—the poor man’s, Indian’s, Negro’s, ME—
Who made America,
Whose sweat and blood, whose faith and pain,
Whose hand at the foundry, whose plow in the rain,
Must bring back our mighty dream again.

Sure, call me any ugly name you choose—
The steel of freedom does not stain.
From those who live like leeches on the people’s lives,
We must take back our land again,
America!

O, yes,
I say it plain,
America never was America to me,
And yet I swear this oath—
America will be!

Out of the rack and ruin of our gangster death,
The rape and rot of graft, and stealth, and lies,
We, the people, must redeem
The land, the mines, the plants, the rivers.
The mountains and the endless plain—
All, all the stretch of these great green states—
And make America again!

Looks like it.

Law professor Steve Vladek takes a look at the actual record. It’s not good.

The effective end of the Supreme Court’s term on Friday touched off what has become an annual tradition: hot takes summarizing the justices’ work over the preceding nine months based upon data aggregated from the justices’ decisions. These accounts typically focus on surprising-sounding results (50% of the decisions were unanimous!) in service of pushing back against the most obvious summary of the current court: that it is sharply divided between the six justices appointed by Republican presidents and the three justices appointed by Democrats. You can spin the data however you want, but the reality is actually simple. The conservative majority is pushing American law decisively to the right.

Statisticians call this phenomenon the “tyranny of averages” — the fact that averaging a data set tells us nothing about the size, distribution or skew of the data. But these kinds of “judge the Supreme Court by its data” assessments are even worse than just ordinary statistical errors.

First, they fail to account for the Supreme Court’s own role in choosing the cases it decides — so that the data isn’t random to begin with. Second, they ignore all of the Supreme Court’s significant rulings in other cases — those that don’t receive full briefings and arguments. Finally, even within the carefully cultivated subset of cases on which these claims generally focus, these commentaries both miscount the divisions and treat as equal disputes that bear no resemblance to each other. It’s not that this data is completely irrelevant, but anyone relying upon it should take it with a very substantial grain of salt.

Let’s start with the court’s docket. With one tiny exception (which accounted for exactly one case during the justices’ current term), the court chooses each and every one of its cases (and, even within those cases, which specific issues it wants to decide). This docket control, which is entirely a modern phenomenon, means the justices are pre-selecting the cases they decide — including technical disputes on which they may be likely to agree (or, at least, not disagree along conventional ideological lines). Thus, from the get-go, the entire data set on which too many commentators rely is biased toward the justices’ own behavior.

Thus, statistical claims about the court tend to neglect the thousands of other rulings the Supreme Court hands down every term — on what has become known as the “shadow docket.” These rulings are unsigned and almost always unexplained, and they run the gamut from agreeing or refusing to take up an appeal to agreeing or refusing to block a lower-court ruling while the appeal runs its course.

Many of these rulings are relatively insignificant, but some are just as important as — if not more important than — cases that receive plenary consideration.

Consider the April ruling that preserved nationwide access to mifepristone or the December ruling that left in place a controversial Covid-related border control policy. Indeed, there have been 35 shadow docket orders from the court since October from which at least one justice publicly dissented — including six from which all three of the Democratic appointees registered their opposition. (That’s in contrast with a total of seven argued cases in which all three dissented.) Shouldn’t that data figure in any putatively comprehensive summary, too?

Finally, even within the skewed subset on which these statistical claims rest, there are serious false equivalency issues. It’s not just that a 237-page ruling invalidating race-based affirmative action policies at virtually every college and university in the country has a far greater impact (and is far more important in almost all respects) than a 16-page technical resolution of a question of bankruptcy procedure; it’s that the way we count votes doesn’t necessarily reflect the true divisions among the justices.

Consider Sackett v. EPA — a major decision in which the court dramatically curtailed the federal government’s ability to prevent pollution of wetlands. Raw data treats that ruling as unanimous — because all nine justices agreed that the lower court applied the wrong test. But with regard to the rule going forward, the justices divided 5-4 — with Justice Brett Kavanaugh breaking from the other conservatives and writing for himself and the Democratic appointees in a sharp separate opinion that embraced a broader reading of the statute. No statistical summary of the court’s work treats that decision as 5-4 — even though, for all intents and purposes, it was.

There’s no question that there were a handful of rulings this term in which the more visibly “conservative” position did not win.

There’s no question that there were a handful of rulings this term in which the more visibly “conservative” position didn’t win. In Haaland v. Brackeen, a 7-2 majority rejected a challenge to the Indian Child Welfare Act. In Moore v. Harper, six justices rejected the broadest version of the so-called independent state legislature theory — which would have given state legislatures carte blanche to run roughshod over state courts and state constitutions when it comes to federal elections. In United States v. Texas, eight justices held that Texas and Louisiana lacked standing to challenge the Biden administration’s immigration enforcement priorities. And in perhaps the biggest surprise of the term, a 5-4 majority ruled in Allen v. Milligan that Alabama’s congressional district maps violate the Voting Rights Act.

But except for the Alabama redistricting decision, each of those rulings was less of a “victory” for progressives than meets the eye. The most important claims in Brackeen were rejected not on their merits, but because the plaintiffs weren’t the right ones to bring them. Ditto United States v. Texas — which didn’t uphold the Biden administration policy but merely said Texas and Louisiana couldn’t challenge it.

And in Moore, even as the justices rejected the most alarming version of the independent state legislature doctrine, they actually embraced a weaker form of it. This leaves the door open, in the future, for state legislatures to violate state constitutions in federal elections. Again, just looking at the vote counts in these cases doesn’t come close to telling their full stories — or the overall story of the term.

In contrast, the “conservative” victories were enormous. Gutting race-based affirmative action in higher education, recognizing for the first time that certain business owners have a First Amendment right to refuse to provide services to members of groups whose behavior they oppose, tossing President Joe Biden’s student loan debt relief program in a ruling that will make it easier for anyone going forward to challenge a dizzying array of federal policies, and the list goes on.

In the end, assessments of the Supreme Court’s work during its current term should privilege what the court has actually done (and not done) over how its efforts are superficially (and misleadingly) quantified through incomplete, inaccurate and ultimately unrevealing data. And when that’s the focus of our study, what becomes clear is just how powerful the six-justice conservative majority is — and just how significant its implications are for the current and future trajectory of American law.

Trump and MAGA may fade and the Republican party could theoretically disappear but this court is going to be around long after they are gone. The remedies are radical. But necessary. Term limits, adding seats, many things. If we don’t they are going to change the character of this nation in ways that can only be described as nightmarish. They already are.

Alert the media

Somebody’s regretting betting on the wrong horse:

A top spokesperson for Ron DeSantis’ super PAC is sounding a decidedly dour note on the Florida governor’s presidential prospects, saying his campaign is facing an “uphill battle” and is trailing badly in the key nominating states.

Steve Cortes, who previously supported Donald Trump, also heaped praise on the former president, calling him a “runaway frontrunner” and “maestro” of the debate.

“Right now in national polling we are way behind, I’ll be the first to admit that,” Cortes said in a Twitter spaces event that was recorded on Sunday night. “I believe in being blunt and honest. It’s an uphill battle but clearly Donald Trump is the runaway frontrunner.”

Calling the DeSantis campaign the “clear underdog,” he added: “In the first four states which matter tremendously, polls are a lot tighter, we are still clearly down. We’re down double digits, we have work to do.”

DeSantis said the opposite last week.

Ooops…

The remarks amounted to a remarkably blunt admission of vulnerability from within the ranks of a leading presidential operation, contrasting with the projection of confidence that other DeSantis aides often adopt. Cortes did say he thought the gap between Trump and DeSantis could be closed once DeSantis’ personal and political story is shared more widely on the campaign trail. But he also rationalized a DeSantis primary campaign failure by predicting healthy competition could benefit Trump in a general election.

“If we do not prevail — and I have every intent on winning, I didn’t sign up for this to come in second — but if we do not prevail I will tell you this, we will make President Trump better for having this kind of primary,” Cortes said.

Good luck with that Steve. I’m sure Trump is very grateful.

When asked about his comments, Cortes responded in an email that Trump “has debated through two successive presidential cycles, so of course he possesses a lot of experience in that arena. But I am convinced that Governor DeSantis will outperform expectations and inform large audiences about his amazing life, political record, and winning agenda for the presidency.“

Actually, it seems to be the opposite. The more people see of him, the less they like him.

This next would normally be seen as standard expectations lowering for a debate, but in DeSantis’ case it happens to be true. He is a terrible debater. So this is really just Trump fluffing:

Next month, the 2024 Republican field will have the opportunity to square off in a debate hosted by the Republican National Committee and moderated by Fox News. But Trump has made clear he is unlikely to join. Cortes said it would be a “great disservice” if Trump didn’t debate. But he also suggested that DeSantis might benefit from his absence.

“Is Ron the debater that Trump is?” he said. “No, no he isn’t.”

“Absolutely Donald Trump is the maestro of it right, no doubt about it, right. When he gets on the debate stage, you know, and on his feet, in front of a microphone, he debates like Jack Nicklaus played golf, there’s no doubt about it,” Cortes said.

In addition to providing some of the most candid observations about the race from within the DeSantis camp, Cortes talked about some of the personal attacks and backlash he faced for choosing to endorse the Florida governor over Trump.

“I was honored to work for [Trump],” he said.

But he added, “I believe we can be reasonable about where he fell short and what the path is moving forward.

Basically, he conceded defeat. CNN’s Dana Bash opined that Cortes was actually trying to publicly wake up DeSantis (who is definitely not “woke”) because Super Pacs are not allowed to coordinate with the Governor. Nah. This was Cortes seeing the writing on the wall and attempting to save his career.

It might even work. If he grovels enough and licks Trump’s boots with enough enthusiasm, he might get back in his good graces, especially if he has some dirt to share with the Trump campaign, But he’s going to have to work at it. I’d say he’s off to a good start. Calling Trump a “maestro” at debating is *chef’s kiss*

… that we know of

The Washington Post:

Among many striking things about the July 2021 audio of Donald Trump seeming to discuss a classified document with guests is how casual it all was. In real time, the now-indicted former president seems to recognize that what he’s doing is not kosher, requesting that it be off the record and drawing an aide to comment with an apparently uneasy laugh, “Yeah, now we have a problem.”

It’s as if those involved were familiar with the dance of Trump being cavalier with sensitive information. Which, even before this latest entry, is indeed what his full record demonstrates.

Appearing on MSNBC over the weekend, former Trump White House press secretary Stephanie Grisham said she personally witnessed the way Trump shared information at Mar-a-Lago during his presidency.

Asked whether it was plausible that Trump was actually showing off classified documents in July 2021 — Trump has suggested it was mere “bravado” — Grisham said: “The short answer is yes. I watched him show documents to people at Mar-a-Lago on the dining room patio. So he has no respect for classified information. Never did.”

Grisham’s account is not a detailed one. But it comports with plenty of history. With the indictment accusing him of sharing classified documents with unauthorized people on two separate occasions in 2021, it’s worth running through what we know about the other major episodes in re: Trump and sensitive information.

(A note: While president, Trump had broad authority to declassify information at will. But that doesn’t mean doing so was a particularly good idea.)

Trump’s first month

Trump was arguably propelled into office in part thanks to his opponent’s cavalier handling of sensitive information. But within his first weeks as president, it was clear he wasn’t exactly overcompensating for the sins of Hillary Clinton.

On Feb. 8, 2017, Trump appeared at an Oval Office photo op with Intel CEO Brian Krzanich, where an Associated Press photo appeared to show a lockbag with a key in it on Trump’s desk, in the presence of people without security clearances. Sen. Martin Heinrich (D-N.M.) noted that this raised questions about whether sensitive information was being appropriately safeguarded.

Just three days later, on Feb. 11, Trump turned the Mar-a-Lago terrace into what The Washington Post called an “open-air situation room” following a ballistic missile test by North Korea. Trump and Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe appeared to be discussing a highly sensitive national security issue and reviewing documents using the light of an aide’s cellphone, all out in the open.

The White House claimed at the time that “no classified material” was discussed openly.

The phones

By this point, it had already been reported that Trump was using an unsecured cellphone. And it was a storyline that would follow him for many months.

Within days of his taking office, the New York Times reported that Trump was using an old, unsecured Android phone to post on Twitter.

In May 2018, Politico reported that Trump was using a White House cellphone without sophisticated security features and that he declined to swap out his Twitter phone on a monthly basis, citing convenience.

By October 2018, the Times reported that intelligence showed Chinese spies were often listening to Trump’s conversations on his iPhone, and even that aides warned Trump that Russian spies were eavesdropping. Aides failed to prevail upon Trump to use more secure landlines. “White House officials say they can only hope he refrains from discussing classified information when he is on them,” the Times noted.

Trump disputed the Times’s report. But by late 2019, phone logs obtained in his first impeachment inquiry appeared to substantiate key aspects of the reporting.

The Russians

Perhaps the most infamous event of all came in May 2017. While the above raised the prospect of Trump’s having exposed classified information, this time we know he actually did it — and to the Russians, no less.

The Post broke the news that Trump had revealed highly classified information to Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov and Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak during a meeting in the Oval Office. The information, considered so sensitive that its details were withheld even from key allies, concerned the Islamic State. It was obtained through an intelligence-sharing arrangement with another country, later revealed to be Israel.

The Post has reported that Trump didn’t identify the information as coming from Israel but that the level of detail he offered would have made it relatively easy to identify the source and possibly how the information was acquired.

It has also reported that intelligence officials initially asked reporters not to identify Israel as the source, suggesting such information might have endangered the life of a spy with access to key information about the Islamic State’s inner workings.

The Iranian explosion

Perhaps the other most direct evidence of Trump’s sharing classified information under questionable circumstances while serving as president came in August 2019, when he tweeted a detailed aerial image of an Iranian launchpad that experts at the time described as “almost certainly highly classified.”

The image appeared to be from a briefing Trump had received about an explosion there, complete with what appeared to be the flash of a camera taking a picture of the document.

The Times later reported that aides had tried to talk Trump out of tweeting the image, cautioning that it could reveal the United States government’s surveillance capabilities. The image also raised questions about whether it revealed Americans to be violating Iran’s airspace, given that its clarity suggested it wasn’t taken via satellite.

In late 2022, the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency formally declassified the photo.

The other incidents

Two other incidents were less well publicized but are worth recalling in this moment.

One came in the summer of 2017, when Trump tweeted a response to a Post story reporting that he had ended a covert CIA program to arm moderate Syrian rebels — thereby seemingly confirming that such a classified program did, in fact, exist. (A judge later found that Trump hadn’t technically declassified the program with his statements.)

Another came that same year, in April, when Trump told Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte that the United States had two nuclear submarines off the coast of the Korean Peninsula. The disclosure was revealed in a Philippine transcript of the call between the leaders. It wasn’t clear whether Trump was referring to nuclear-armed submarines or nuclear-powered ones, and he did not appear to give specifics. But the disclosure reportedly caused consternation at the Defense Department.

Witch hunt! Hoax! I don’t think you understand. All government documents belong to Trump, even today. He is omnipotent and always knows exactly the right thing to do. If he wants to share sensitive intelligence, it is just fine, no matter what it is. Because he is perfect, just like his phone calls.

A bunch of white guys who founded a country:

For the July Fourth holiday, I have some fare that’s lighter than the doom and gloom about today’s politics that I usually dish up: a little tour some of the statuary art in the U.S. Capitol Building. Each state submits two statues to be on display; they are strategically placed throughout the Capitol. Some of my favorites include Hawaii’s King Kamehameha I and California’s Junípero Serra. There are also a handful of statues on permanent display that are not part of the Statuary Hall collection. But today is all about the American Revolution, so here are some of the Founding Fathers, including many lesser known ones, all photographed by my Bulwark colleague Hannah Yoest.

Roger Sherman, Connecticut

Caesar Rodney, Delaware

Charles Carroll, Maryland

Samuel Adams, Massachusetts

John Stark, New Hampshire

Richard Stockton, New Jersey

Robert Livingston, New York

John P.G. “Peter” Muhlenberg, Pennsylvania

Nathanael Greene, Rhode Island

Ethan Allen, Vermont

George Washington, Virginia

Benjamin Franklin

Thomas Jefferson