Month: July 2023

On this Independence Day Republicans around the nation are high-fiving their success in depriving their fellow citizens of their liberty. They are so happy and proud to be Americans.

This piece by Jill Lawrence spells out what they are celebrating today:

Despite the promises of America’s founding documents, on Independence Day 2023, justice, the “general welfare,” “equal protection of the laws” and “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” are all at risk. The Supreme Court, conservative governors and gerrymandered state legislatures are racing to shrink fundamental rights and freedoms, enabled and empowered by structural inequities built into the Constitution. The result is that tens of millions of Americans are being deprived of rights that other Americans have.

On Independence Day 2023, justice, the “general welfare,” “equal protection of the laws” and “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” are all at risk.

The scale of the disparity is frightening and growing, taking us ever further from America’s founding ideal that “all men are created equal” and its continuing journey toward equal rights for all.

The marquee setback came last year with the high court’s Dobbs decision, which erased a constitutional right that had been in place for nearly half a century. A year later, free to do as they pleased, 14 states fully banned abortion, and a 15th, Georgia, banned it after six weeks of pregnancy (before many women know they are pregnant). At the same time, 20 states where abortion is legal added protections over the past year.

While abortion is a particularly stark example of the democracy divide, U.S. courts and state legislatures are advancing inequality of rights in countless other ways: from last week’s Supreme Court decisions allowing a prospective wedding website designer to refuse services to hypothetical same-sex couples and removing race from the many factors colleges and universities use to assemble diverse student bodies to states’ trying to restrict and ban medical care for transgender people, discussions of gay issues in classrooms and which books can be accessed in libraries.

The solution in many cases is federal legislation, which would require, at minimum, Democrats to reclaim a House majority next year. The party would also have to elect 50 or more senators willing to abolish the filibuster, at least in cases when America’s most sacred promises are threatened.

Here are the inequities that divide the nation most egregiously on Independence Day and are most in need of congressional action:

Voting. Some states make it much harder to vote than others. Why is that allowed? Congress should enact a national law on ballot access and election protection. It already has a vehicle in the 2021 Freedom to Vote Act, based on a bill proposed by Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., which would make Election Day a holiday and set minimum standards for mail voting, early voting, drop boxes and voter ID and address partisan gerrymandering, voter roll purges, interference with election workers and other issues.

Republicans refused to buy in to the bill last year, and Manchin refused to abandon the Senate filibuster tradition, which requires 60 senators to advance a bill. But other Democrats could make resistance from Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema, I-Ariz., less relevant. Sen. John Fetterman, D-Pa., is a filibuster opponent, and some 2024 Democrats are running on a promise to end it.

Abortion. Congress should codify Roe v. Wade, the 1973 Supreme Court decision that legalized abortion up to fetal viability. For decades, this ruling allowed doctors to deliver the best medical care possible. Now that abortion is a crime in so many states, doctors fear losing their licenses or going to prison, and the choice for women with doomed or dangerous pregnancies is to leave the state for treatment or wait until they are at death’s door, at which point doctors may decide it’s legal to end their pregnancies. Roe also accommodated many religious views about abortion, not just those of conservatives who insist on bans.

Sending the issue to the states guaranteed massive infringements on personal privacy and self-determination.

The First Amendment promotes respect for all religions (or no religion), but by overturning Roe, the Supreme Court freed states to violate that principle. (The court itself just last week violated that principle by blessing a Christian conservative’s desire to deny gay people service on religious grounds.)

Sending the issue to the states guaranteed massive infringements on personal privacy and self-determination, health risks for women and girls and vast gulfs in access. Why should women in Texas risk infertility, disability and death under the state’s bans while women in California (Americans just like them) have safe access to the full range of reproductive care? How is that equal protection?

We are even seeing attempts to ban interstate travel for abortion care and to make it harder to put abortion rights on the ballot for voters to decide directly. How is that freedom? A right so significant it was until recently a constitutional right should not be decided by state legislatures.

Guns. As eagerly as the Supreme Court tossed abortion to the states a year ago, in its Bruen decision the same month, it ran roughshod over state regulation of guns. In that ruling, the court said regulations must be consistent with “history and tradition” from centuries ago. Federal judges of all political stripes are finding this unworkable, absurd, illogical and exclusionary (given that women and nonwhite people could not vote centuries ago), as well as disrespectful to the nation’s 18th-century founders.

States are racing to loosen gun laws. In regions with lax laws and more gun-owning households, there is less training, and, as documented by Colin Woodard, director of the Nationhood Lab at Salve Regina University, the per capita death rate from homicides and suicides is two to three times higher than in regions with tighter laws and fewer guns. President Barack Obama once borrowed anti-abortion rhetoric to argue that all Americans have a right to life.

Lives should not be more expendable in one state or region of these United States than in another.

Lives should not be more expendable in one state or region of these United States than in another. Congress must find the backbone to act. A good starting point would be the four broadly popular elements of California Gov. Gavin Newsom’s proposed 28th Amendment — universal background checks, a minimum purchase age of 21, a reasonable waiting period and an assault weapons ban.

Voting reforms are a step toward representation that better reflects the will of the voters, but the real game changer would be a long-term project to jettison the Electoral College. The country’s founders believed it was a way to ensure responsible leaders, but it has not worked as planned.

In a 16-year span, George W. Bush and Donald Trump lost the popular vote but won the presidency. That is a system failure. It is not fair or democratic, and it led directly to today’s unbalanced Supreme Court. Five of the six conservative justices were appointed by these two presidents. Getting rid of the Electoral College would take a constitutional amendment, which is always a hard sell. But think of the arguments you could make to both parties. There are over 5 million registered Republicans in California whose votes would finally count. Wyoming’s nearly 23,000 Democrats would also factor in.

Red and blue states are not monolithic. Therefore, we should stop pretending, for example, that there are no injured parties when red states ban abortion or make it easy for teenagers and careless people to buy whatever weapons they want — no permits or instruction required. We should also stop pretending that we are 50 walled-off states, each deciding how many freedoms we should enjoy or how many it gets to restrict. Guns cross state lines. People who need abortions cross state lines. We are in this together, and Congress and the courts should be protecting our rights — not encouraging a free-for-all that leaves some states with far less democracy than others and some Americans feeling far less equal than others.

Right wingers love to talk about freedom. But what they mean by that is actually domination. They and only they are allowed to be free. Everyone else must conform to them .

It’s an especially good day to read Frederick Douglass’ “What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?” It’s never been more relevant.

It messes with your head

This may piss off some. Ever since North Carolina state Rep. Tricia Cotham, former Democrat, switched parties and handed Republicans a supermajority in the state House of Representatives (and an abortion ban) after proclaiming herself an “unwavering advocate for abortion rights.”

Now, more than ever we need leaders who will be unwavering and unapologetic in their support of abortion rights. I’ll fight to codify Roe in the #ncga and continue my strong record of defending the right to choose.#ncpol #WomensRights #SCOTUS #Mecklenburg

— Tricia Cotham (@triciacotham) May 3, 2022

The stunning shift has not led me to the angry conclusion that she was a fraud waiting to happen. There was something of conspiracy theory to the narrative that she was a Trojan candidate. With her history as a progressive, it did not wash. And it’s a bad look for the left.

Fully vaccinated and boosted, Cotham had had Covid three times, ending up in the emergency room straining to breathe during her third bout. Doctors worried about blood clots.

In February 2022, WSOC Charlotte reported:

Her kitchen island is covered in pills and medical devices to treat lingering and long-lasting symptoms of COVID-19. Cotham says she has to use inhalers and drink three liters of water a day. She has IV drips brought to her house every Wednesday.

“My treatment plan consists of a lot of focused breathing, so a lot of inhalers, a lot of steroids, a lot of nebulizers,” Cotham said. “Night is the worst. It’s the hardest. It’s when everything starts to, I think, flare up. I take it tremendous amount of supplements that have been recommended by trials and doctors.”

“This is a very individual disease that we’re finding or the way that this virus is impacting individuals is very unique and different,” said Atrium Health Senior Director of Advanced Practice Britney Broyhill.

Long Covid can mess with your head.

I raise the issue this morning after Leah McElrath posted this video and thread on the subject.

https://twitter.com/leahmcelrath/status/1675965647887511553?s=20

I had to look up “the Simulation.” Apparently, it’s a thing.

https://twitter.com/leahmcelrath/status/1675968494192525313?s=20

https://twitter.com/leahmcelrath/status/1675970906601017352?s=20

For Cotham, was it the long Covid? There are cognitive impacts, poorly understood. And personality changes (Rolling Stone; paywall):

Although “personality change” may seem like an imprecise, colloquial way to describe what happens when someone’s character or temperament shifts, when it’s the result of an illness or chronic condition, it’s known as “medical personality change,” (MPC) and is an official diagnosis with its own billing code. 

Marjorie Roberts ended up in an Atlanta area emergency room three times. “My 40-year-old daughter said to me, ‘I want my mom back.”  

As a neurologist specializing in cognitive disorders of the brain, Anna Nordvig, MD, has frequently seen these personality shifts in older adults with dementia, whom she has treated throughout her career. After noticing an increase in cognitive difficulties in patients who had previously been infected with the novel coronavirus, Nordvig co-founded the Post-COVID “Brain Fog” Clinic at the Columbia University Irving Medical Center and New York-Presbyterian Hospital in May 2020 (she and the clinic have since moved to Weill Cornell).

According to Nordvig, many of these personality changes — which she describes as “a temporary or prolonged tendency towards personality traits with which one was not previously identified” — are seen in neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s, as well as traumatic brain injury. Additionally, she says, many chronic conditions can also cause a change in personality comparable with what Long Covid patients are experiencing, especially the low frustration tolerance that people with myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome (ME/CFS) experience.

I don’t know if this is what happened to Cotham. But I’m open the possibility. It makes more sense than the rumors and political conspiracy theories.

Still yearning to breathe free

The sun is up. The flag is out. Justice for all is still elusive. As is our country treating all of us as if we really were created equal.

I mistrust public pieties. As much as Jesus mistrusted hypocrites who pray in public “that they may be seen by others.” As much as the immediate past president’s flag hugging. The phoniness, it burns.

But still, as with relations we love despite annoying flaws and uninformed opinions, yes, liberals do still love their country. Shining through its dappled history are snippets of grace we cling to like the hope that that sibling or aunt or uncle or cousin retains the potential to be more than pedestrian.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

It took a few years for the generation that declared independence from England to hash out just what they thought a more perfect union might look like. They did not get it quite right. (My God, the flaws!) But they allowed for their new country to be what it remains to this day, like the rest of us, a work in progress.

We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.

The work of perfection is never done, an asymptote never reached. There is grace in the striving, though, despite countrymen whose sense of the country is cramped by prejudice and fear never fully overcome.

Standing in New York harbor is the statue bearing on its pedestal the 1883 Emma Lazarus poem that, once again, speaks to American aspirations that, when fear and prejudice are at an ebb, lift hearts and spirits, reminding us of what we could and should be.

Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!

An avenue near here today will be lined with American flags. Americans today, many from the far right, will ritualistically pledge allegiance to it “and to the Republic for which it stands,” not realizing they are words most often attributed to Francis Bellamy, a Baptist minister and Christian socialist (though that may be incorrect).

… one nation, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all

Still working on all four on the Fourth.

I like this:

NEW ELEVEN FILMS#GenerationDemocracy

A new generation has entered the chat.

Please tweet & quote retweet:#GenerationDemocracy pic.twitter.com/SoKKRsuGKK

— Eleven Films (@ElevenFilms) July 3, 2023

It’s a super great idea to crack down on immigrant labor during a time of full employment and a building boom in a big agriculture state. So smart. And that’s what Ron DeSantis has done so that he can pretend he’s a tough hombre in a border state (which he isn’t.)

He’s already getting some great results:

Florida’s agricultural and construction industries say they are experiencing a labor shortage because a new immigration law that took effect July 1 is leading migrant workers to leave the state.

The law, signed in May by Florida Gov. and GOP presidential candidate Ron DeSantis, seeks to further criminalize undocumented immigration in the state. It makes it a third-degree felony for unauthorized people to knowingly use a false identification to obtain employment. Businesses that knowingly employ unauthorized workers could have their licenses suspended, and those with 25 or more employees that repeatedly fail to use the E-Verify system to check their immigration status can face daily fines. 

Business owners and workers alike say the ranks of laborers in Florida have grown noticeably thinner.

“The employee who wants to work on the farm is not available anymore,” said Hitesh Kotecha, owner of a produce packaging facility in South Florida who leases land to farmers. “How are we going to run the farms?”

At downtown Miami’s construction sites, the story is the same: Workers have fled. Others are waiting to see what happens.

In Miami’s booming construction market, developers, construction companies and construction workers say the change happened as soon as DeSantis signed the legislation this spring. Workers at several construction sites in South Florida say a quarter to half of their teams are gone, exacerbating an already challenging labor shortage across the industry. 

“We’ve seen some fallout on job sites, particularly as it relates to hourly labor as a result of this new law,” said Tom C. Murphy, co-president of Coastal Construction, which has more than 30 active projects across the state of Florida.

In addition to increasing penalties on employers and workers, the new law requires hospitals that accept Medicaid to question a patient’s immigration status, and invalidates out-of-state driver’s licenses issued to people unauthorized to be in the U.S. It makes it a third-degree felony to knowingly transport into Florida a person who is undocumented and illegally entered the U.S. The law also adds $12 million to the amount of money the state has earmarked for its migrant-relocation program, bringing the total to $22 million this year. 

A spokesman for DeSantis said the law counteracts the effects of illegal immigration on Florida. “Any business that exploits this crisis by employing illegal aliens instead of Floridians will be held accountable,” he said.

On Saturday, the day the law went into effect, hundreds of people gathered in Homestead, Fla., to march in protest. At the march, the Farmworker Association of Florida announced that it and several advocacy and watchdog groups, including the Southern Poverty Law Center, were exploring how they might challenge the law in federal court. 

In 2019 there were an estimated 772,000 undocumented immigrants living in Florida, according to the Migration Policy Institute. Since then, there has been a massive influx of immigrants into the country, and last year Florida’s population grew more than any other state, according to census data. 

Lawyers in Florida are rushing to figure out how best to advise their clients regarding their hiring practices to comply with the law. 

“It’s kind of extreme that Florida passed a law like this,” said Daniela Barshel, an immigration lawyer based in Miami. Typically, immigration is a federal area of law, and figuring out how to interpret these new statewide rules alongside federal law will be complicated, she said. Blanket advice, such as telling clients to avoid hiring noncitizens altogether, isn’t an option since that could constitute discrimination on the basis of race or national origin. 

Pushing Disney to cancel thousands of new jobs was an excellent move too. But he’s showing woke what’s what and that’s all that matters.

DKos’s Laura Clawson reports on a Washington Post story about the very lame House “moderates” (who have just as much power as the MAGA winguts):

The far-right House Freedom Caucus’s antics have gotten so bad that Republicans who represent districts won by President Joe Biden have actually started trying to affect what legislation comes to the House floor. They’re not trying very hard, mind you—whining to the media remains their main weapon, and they’ll get outsized credit for anything they accomplish, including the whining, but doing slightly more than nothing is a change.

The Washington Post reports, “In recent weeks, these lawmakers have kept some abortion-related measures from being put to a vote and sunk an amendment that would have derailed a government oversight bill.” Okay, that’s a start, as is the successful effort by some first-term New York Republicans to sink anti-union amendments.

It continues: “They also have tried to convince their far-right counterparts to avoid altering appropriation bills during committee markups, warning that any poison pills could force a big enough group to reject the bills on the House floor if they feel they could hurt their reelection chances.” They’ve tried. Huh. Is that new? Were swing district Republicans not trying to do that all along?

This, though—this is special:

Several lawmakers who represent districts President Biden won have also asked leadership to go a step further and allow them in the negotiating room with their far-right colleagues during high-profile debates to explain why the groups’ demands could jeopardize their five-vote majority, according to two people familiar with the request who, like others who spoke to The Washington Post, did so on the condition of anonymity to detail private conversations.

They’re asking to be allowed in the negotiating room. Doesn’t that seem like something that would have happened on Day One? Doesn’t it seem like Kevin McCarthy might have asked them himself?

Swing-district Republicans also have been pushing leadership to be strategic about which messaging bills they bring to the floor, arguing it’s not worth forcing vulnerable members to take tough votes on legislation that will die in the Senate.

I don’t know, all of this seems like something leadership might have figured out for itself. If Kevin McCarthy were a competent leader who hadn’t given away every shred of leverage he possessed to squeak in as speaker on the 15th vote, maybe it would have.

Some swing district Republicans say they’re nervously looking ahead to being put on the spot about expunging Donald Trump’s impeachments. Yet when it came to votes on referring Rep. Lauren Boebert’s Biden impeachment resolution to two committees and on censuring Rep. Adam Schiff, the so-called moderates knew their place. Those were party-line votes.

These Republicans should get credit for doing the right thing to the exact extent that they do the right thing. No bonus points for whining to the media. And when the media does report on them, be it the whining or the actually getting things done, those moments they fell in line on the extreme votes need to be included in the coverage.

They are useless, let’s face it. If they were true moderates they would show some gumption or leave the party. Complaining on background isn’t doing anything.

I should hope so

The Wall St Journal reports:

Special counsel Jack Smith’s team in recent weeks has taken a growing interest in the role of lawyers and other figures involved in legal efforts aimed at reversing Donald Trump’s loss in the 2020 election, people familiar with the matter said.

Prosecutors from Smith’s team have issued subpoenas and asked questions centered on several key figures in those postelection efforts, including Sidney Powell, a pro-Trump lawyer who spread baseless claims of widespread voter fraud. The subpoenas have also requested communications with Emily Newman, a lawyer who worked with Powell, and Mike Roman, a Republican operative who headed Election Day operations for the Trump campaign and dispatched lawyers to swing states before November 2020.

Federal prosecutors also recently interviewed Rudy Giuliani, who served as Trump’s personal lawyer at the time, for roughly eight hours on topics including Powell, people familiar with the testimony said. They were interested, among other things, in a December 2020 meeting in the Oval Office, during which Powell pitched a plan to have the U.S. military seize control of the voting machines. 

The meeting erupted into a shouting match between White House lawyers and Powell and her associates, prompting Trump to call Giuliani, who left a dinner in Georgetown to referee the dispute. Giuliani recounted some details of the episode in his testimony before the House committee that investigated the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol and efforts to overturn the 2020 election.

Following the meeting, in the early morning hours of Dec. 19, Trump tweeted: “Big protest in D.C. on January 6th. Be there, will be wild!”

Powell and her defense lawyer didn’t return requests for comment. Giuliani and a spokesman for Smith didn’t return calls seeking comment.

Smith’s investigation into efforts to overturn the 2020 election is unfolding as his office prosecutes Trump on separate charges that he retained classified government documents and obstructed efforts to retrieve them.

Giuliani, whose interview was reported earlier by CNN, and others voluntarily spoke with investigators under a so-called proffer agreement, the people said—known colloquially as a “queen for a day” deal—in which a witness provides information to prosecutors, who in turn promise not to use it against them in potential criminal proceedings unless they determine the witness was untruthful.

Roman spoke with prosecutors under a similar agreement for a voluntary interview, a person familiar with the proffer said. In a previous interview with the House committee that investigated the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol, Roman invoked his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination when asked about his interactions with Giuliani following the 2020 election. He and his lawyer didn’t respond to requests for comment.

Prosecutors have also been asking other witnesses about the involvement of Giuliani and other Trump lawyers, including Jenna Ellis and Kenneth Chesebro, people familiar with the matter said. 

Ellis, who once described herself as part of an elite strike force representing Trump, was formally disciplined by a judge earlier this year after admitting to falsely claiming the 2020 election was stolen from Trump. Powell, too, was sanctioned by a federal judge for widely promoting conspiracy theories that voting machines were hacked by foreign governments or otherwise rigged in now-President Biden’s favor. 

Prosecutors questioned Giuliani about the role of another lawyer, John Eastman, who was the architect of strategies to stop Congress from certifying Biden’s victory and sought to persuade then-Vice President Mike Pence to interfere in the certification of the election results. Giuliani and Eastman were central figures in the so-called war room at the Willard hotel in downtown Washington, where some of Trump’s most loyal advisers worked to overturn the 2020 election results.

Smith’s probe has been focused on whether anyone in Trump’s orbit committed crimes by sending fake slates of electors to Congress. The grand jury has issued subpoenas to local officials in several battleground states seeking communication between election officials and Trump, his campaign and a broad group of his allies.

Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger was questioned recently by Smith’s team in Atlanta. Trump in a 2021 phone call pressured Raffensperger to find 12,000 votes so he could reverse Biden’s victory in that state. An official in Raffensperger’s office confirmed the visit and added that one of the people the team asked about was Giuliani.

Prosecutors on Smith’s team have also scrutinized efforts to fundraise off of false claims of election fraud. Like the inquiry in the fake-elector scheme, the focus on fundraising has raised questions about where political activity might be so detached from the truth that it crosses the line from First Amendment-protected speech to potentially criminal conduct.

I could easily see Rudy taking the fall for Trump. But if he doesn’t he certainly has a lot to share…

Nobody likes him

Former president Donald Trump held his first big rally over the weekend in a little town called Pickens, South Carolina. Reports of the crowd size vary, with Trump claiming 75,000 which is absurd, but it was a large and very enthusiastic crowd. He gave his usual spiel, whining “I am being indicted for you” and he once again delivered his creepy new mission statement, declaring that this 2024 election is the “Final Battle” against the “Communists,,” “globalists” “warmongers” and the “sick people” and “degenerates” who “hate our country.” It was the usual cheery, positive vision of the future we’ve come to expect from him and it was especially uplifting on the 4th of July weekend. It makes you proud to be an American.

He was very well received which isn’t surprising since the district went for him in big numbers in both 2016 and 2020. The weather was very hot but they were ready to party:

Woman at Trump rally is asked what Trump should do on day 1 if elected. She says he should put Biden in jail then round up people in the Deep State and “take them to the train station.” pic.twitter.com/5p0sIFL84e

— Ron Filipkowski (@RonFilipkowski) July 1, 2023

Georgia Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene appeared as well, and was her usual ray of sunshine as well. She even inspired a good old fashioned “lock her up” chant, much to the delight of the gathered throng.”

But something very odd and somewhat inexplicable also happened at this rally. The South Carolina crowd turned on their homeboy, Sen. Lindsey Graham, and I’m honestly not entirely sure exactly what it’s all about.

6 minutes of Lindsey Graham being booed in his own state, by members of his own party, is better than coffee. pic.twitter.com/Unum7OqinB

— Keith Edwards (@keithedwards) July 2, 2023

It was brutal. Later, when Trump tried to give him a shout-out the jeers started all over again prompting Trump to make this weird statement:

You know, you can make mistakes on occasion. Even Lindsey down here, Senator Lindsey Graham. [more booing] We’re gonna love him. We’re gonna love him.

I know, it’s half and half. But when I need some of those liberal votes, he’s always there to help me get them, OK. We got some pretty liberal people, but he’s good.He’s there when you need him. We know the good ones. We know the bad ones too. We’ve got some real bad ones. But even he makes mistakes on occasion.

Trump seemed surprised by the vehement hostility even laughing and muttering “Jesus” under his breath at one point.

This has happened before. You may recall that Graham suffered a humiliating experience being heckled in an airport. Feelings were running hot in the aftermath of January 6th for his momentary lapse of MAGA supplication in failing to vote to challenge the electoral count after the insurrection.:

https://twitter.com/politico/status/1347631968003960832?s=20

Maybe they’re still harboring a grudge even though Trump himself seems to have forgiven him.

The most often cited reason in the Youtube comments is his support for Ukraine. But is it so important to them that they would boo him through an entire speech — in South Carolina, probably the most historically militant state in the nation? Perhaps, but if you listen to what Trump says on the issue he’s not nearly as anti-Ukraine as some of the more vociferous opponents in the Congress. He evades saying what should be done by accusing Biden of “doing it wrong” and insisting that he has a secret plan that will end the war the day after he’s elected. It’s not as if he’s been railing about the waste of money or proclaiming that it’s all a NATO plot as Rep. Greene does.

This is an interesting question because it exposes how much Trump is influenced by his unruly mob. Graham is probably closer to him than any other Senator and has been with him since the first days of his presidency. It’s true that from time to time he would stray and say something vaguely critical but over the course of Trump’s term he became progressively sycophantic to the point of embarrassing self-abegnation.

William Saletan at The Bulwark recently published a series of essays about Graham’s abandonment of his will and his conscience since 2015 as he dedicated himself to serving Trump called “The Corruption of Lindsey Graham. A Case Study in the Rise of Authoritarianism.” He had once fashioned himself as a “maverick” like his idol John McCain who loathed and despised Trump and during the 2016 campaign Graham breathlessly denounced him in colorful terms —  “hateful,” a “kook,” a “demagogue,” and a “race-baiting, xenophobic, religious bigot” who “represents the worst in America.” That was just for starters. But once Trump won, Graham turned himself around quickly, seeing an opportunity to school the buffoon on foreign policy. It took some work but he made it into the “inner orbit” over the course of a few months and was soon spending time with him on the golf course and becoming a close confidant.

Over the course of Trump’s four years in office, Graham went through the looking glass, abandoning himself to the emotional appeal of being a Trump courtier. His crucible was the hysterical speech he gave during the Brett Kavanaugh Supreme Court confirmation hearings in which a red-faced Graham seemed to completely come unhinged. The reviews from Trump and the MAGA faithful were rapturous, however, and Graham was hooked.

By the time the 2020 election came around, Lindsey Graham was so deeply attached to Donald Trump that he became one of his strongest surrogates, even involving himself in the attempts to get the election results overturned in the states. He made dozens of appearances on television spreading the Big Lie and stood by his man all the way up until January 6th. At that point, if Graham had simply been an opportunist who was trying to deal with the situation in which he found himself, he could have written Trump off and moved on. He was out of power. Instead he was among the first to tell Trump that he needed to immediately plan his restoration to the throne. He didn’t want to let him go.

Saletan’s piece traces Graham’s evolution from a man who believed that he could manipulate Trump to someone wholly in his thrall, stuck in the Trumpian vortex without any idea of exactly how he got there o any real desire to get out. He serves as a perfect example of how a demagogue, even one as ignorant as Trump, can seduce a party and its voters into authoritarianism. .

It had to smart to hear those boos after all he’s done for their idol Donald Trump. It must be frightening to hear Trump give him such a tepid endorsement, agreeing that he’s only “half and half” and that he’s good for bringing liberals on board Trump’s plans (suggesting that Graham is some kind of liberal symp, which is preposterous.) But that’s how authoritarian systems work. Trump heard those boos and the writing is on the wall for Lindsey Graham. Trump will never respect him again.

Salon

It’s gonna be a summer

Next week I head north to Chicago for Netroots Nation. Hopes for cooler, tamer weather to the north are just that.

Axios:

Torrential rains flooded Chicago’s streets and forced NASCAR officials to postpone a race through the city, as the National Weather Service issued hazardous weather alerts for over 110 million Americans during the extended July Fourth holiday weekend.

State of play: Chicago train services were suspended, buses were temporarily rerouted and Illinois State Police said parts of Interstate highways 55 and 290 were shut due to flooding, per WLS-TV.

MWRD Storm Update

At approx 4 p.m., we began reversing to the lake at the Chicago River locks downtown. We have far exceeded the previous record for July 2 rainfall which was two inches. Final numbers are not in yet but some areas have exceeded five inches of rain already today

— MWRD (@MWRDGC) July 2, 2023

The National Weather Service (a branch of the Commerce Department that Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis promises to eliminate as president) reports:

Meanwhile, the heat wave across the South will be less oppressive today, before confining southward even more on Independence Day. Nevertheless, heat indices could approach 105-110 degrees with high temperatures into the mid-90s, which can be dangerous if spending an extended amount of time outdoors. Additionally, heat will be the main story throughout the Desert Southwest and West Coast today and Tuesday. Highs well into the triple digits are forecast throughout the Central Valley region of California and Desert Southwest. A few daily high temperature records could be challenged today, before the record-breaking heat potential shifts up the West Coast into northern California and western Oregon. Here, highs are forecast to reach into the 90s and low 100s on Tuesday.

So far, no smoke here, but….

By the numbers: More than 18 million people were under excessive heat warnings on Sunday night, as dangerously hot weather continued for parts of the Southeast, Gulf Coast, Southwest and interior sections of California northward into Oregon.

• It’s particularly hot in Sacramento, which the NWS noted Sunday had tied the record high for July 2 of 109 degrees Fahrenheit that had stood since 1991.
• Record daily temperature highs for July 2 were set across Northern California — including in Redding (116°F), Red Bluff (114°F), Stockton (110°F) and Modesto (108°F), according to the weather service.

Be careful out there.

Southern Baptists double down on decline

“No one could accuse the Baptists of excessive cheeriness,” David Siders begins in his Politico report from the Southern Baptist Convention conclave in New Orleans:

“We are living in dark and perilous times in America,” read the billing for a night with former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, “as our culture descends into a spiritual abyss …”

It is a stark change of mood for hundreds of pastors and church members from their Trump-years triumphalism. The U.S. has been both steadily secularizing and religiously diversifying for decades. This leaves Southern Baptists, once dominant in a region of churches on every streetcorner, unsettled at their declining ability to dictate local culture. Evangelicals of whom Southern Baptists are a fraction, saw Trump, the “thrice-married former casino owner” with his “two Corinthians” pandering as an imperfect champion. At least he was pandering. “Great again” for them meant more than white dominance. He represented renewal of their religious and cultural dominance.

Since then, Siders explains, all seems to have gone to Hell.

The midterm elections had not produced the sweeping conservative victories Republicans promised. The overturning of Roe v. Wade, the signature accomplishment of the religious right, had become a major liability for the GOP, contributing to losses in a series of elections. In December, the Democratic president, Joe Biden, signed legislation codifying same-sex marriage into law — with the support of 39 Republicans in the House and 12 in the Senate.

There was the transgender rights movement, which pastor after pastor complained they saw seeping into their pews. A panel conversation one afternoon entitled “Re-Forming Gen Z: Sexuality, Technology and Human Formation” drew such a large crowd that organizers turned away late-comers and a moderator was forced to combine what he called “a lot of questions related to gender and sexuality” into a few. They included how best to respond to a teenager who insists on a preferred pronoun and how to “navigate conversations with a teen who believes in God but also thinks that same-sex attraction is OK.”

And then there was the temerity of some Southern Baptist churches to allow women to serve as pastors, which had been the focus of feuding within the denomination.

The shrinking denomination doubled down by expelling the Saddleback Church, a megachurch in Orange County, Calif., (and another in North Carolina) for having a female pastor, something other mainline Protestant churches now allow.

The group is now left “trying to hold the line,” one attendee lamented outside.

“It’s almost like Christianity’s being attacked,” said Angela Mathews, a retired high school history and English teacher from Murphy, Texas.

“When you’re accustomed to privilege, equality feels like oppression,” as the expression goes.

Siders has much more on trends within the church that parallel strains within the Republican Party. Particularly, that changing demographics are working against the group’s once-undisputed dominance across the South.

Something these pieces never seems to detect is the interplay between cultural drift and fringe-right activists’ need to “organize discontent.” Culture-war entrepreneurs like Christopher Rufo mine Page 15 stories about critical race theory, gender-affirming care or drag queen story hour, and gin them up into threats of apocalyptic proportions. Thus are Evangelicals already sensitized to their declining influence manipulated by titular allies for political gain. Any accelerant to keep the rubes inflamed, voting, and donating. Conservative politicos make bank on catalyzed discontent. So do the churches.

Moderating a panel before a keynote by [Mike] Pompeo, Trump’s former secretary of state, Ryan Helfenbein*, executive director of Liberty University’s Standing for Freedom Center, acknowledged the decline of what he called a “biblical world view” in America. But he also said millions of people who regularly attend church do not vote. Those people, perhaps, are reachable.

Reachable not in the come-to-Jesus sense. They already go to church. Reachable in the vote for conservative authoritarians sense.

Toxic codependency is why Siders finds a dearth of “excessive cheeriness” in these circles.

*We last saw Helfenbein referencing Hitler.