Month: December 2023

The whole point of the Hunter scandal is to make Joe Biden cry

Right wingers are saying that the new prosecution of Hunter Biden on tax charges proves that the Justice department is doing Joe Biden’s bidding. I’m not kidding:

Comer not satisfied with Hunter Biden charges and says Weiss needs to probe president
“Unless US Attorney Weiss investigates everyone involved in the Bidens’ fraud schemes and influence peddling, it will be clear President Biden’s DOJ is protecting Hunter Biden and the big guy”

— Manu Raju (@mkraju) December 8, 2023

It’s completely daft. Obviously, the Special Prosecutor has been stung by the right wing accusations of being in the tank which is why he’s bringing these new tax charges against Hunter Biden, replete with all the salacious details the wingnuts love to drool over. You’d think that would be enough to placate them but of course it isn’t.

Everyone on TV today is talking about how the White House isn’t worried about the legal ramifications for Biden but rather the emotional toll this is taking, That is, after all, their intent. I wrote about that a couple of years ago:

The right has attempted to turn Joe Biden’s care and concern for a son who was going through a major life crisis, which included substance abuse, wild partying and a range of self-destructive behavior, into a corruption scandal. No one can possibly read the emails from father to son that have been extracted from Hunter Biden’s laptop and see anything but compassion and love. In fact, I’m sure Republicans understand that: What they are really trying to do is push Joe Biden to break down and cry in public.

Seriously: It’s an old ratfucking trick from the Nixon years whose dastardly crew famously goaded Sen. Edmund Muskie, the Democratic frontrunner early in the 1972 campaign, into getting emotional over a fake letter impugning his wife. I have no doubt that the right-wing dirty tricksters of today are believing their own propaganda that Biden is a feeble old man who is overly sentimental about his family, and they think they can push him into doing the same thing.

We are a long way from 1972 and I suspect that even if Biden did cry about his son, the country would feel kinship with him, not disdain. There is hardly a family in America that is not touched by similar trauma.

But mostly what the Hunter Biden laptop “scandal” is about is the dirty pictures. Sex scandals are where the dirty tricksters and ratfuckers of the GOP really shine. Think about 1987, when a picture of Sen. Gary Hart of Colorado, Democratic heir apparent at the time, with a woman who wasn’t his wife derailed his presidential ambitions. There is evidence, which emerged many years after the fact, that Hart was set up by none other than Lee Atwater, the Republican Party’s most notorious political operative of the 1980s.

Bill Clinton was known to be a womanizer before he ever ran for president, and offered an irresistible target for the right in that respect. And did they ever. The GOP’s sex-scandal industry of the 1990s produced nonstop prurient rumors so relentless and over the top that by the time Clinton’s affair with Monica Lewinsky was revealed, the public was disgusted with the president’s behavior — but even more repulsed by the sanctimonious gossips who could not stop chattering about it like a bunch of horny teenagers.

Hunter Biden’s laptop has the right in the throes of ecstasy. They don’t care about Trump crapping on the Constitution. They care about the dirty pictures on that laptop, and want the whole country talking about them.

Years later, when Hillary Clinton ran for president, the right’s hit men tried it again with a whisper campaign about her and her assistant Huma Abedin. They had long since planted rumors that Hillary was a closeted lesbian who was only with Bill to power her ruthless ambition. (Why do you think they wanted so desperately to get hold of all those personal emails?)

The mainstream media has always jumped right into these scandal stories with enthusiasm — and if they hadn’t done so, it’s unlikely such narratives would have gained traction with the broader public. For instance, the New York Times actually published a front-page story headlined “Huma Abedin, a Clinton Aide, Is Back in Spotlight as Republicans Seize on Emails” in 2015, which began with this suggestive lead:

“Among the trove of emails released from Hillary Rodham Clinton’s tenure as secretary of state was this instruction to a trusted aide who needed to brief her on a matter that could not wait: “Just knock on the door to the bedroom if it’s closed,” Mrs. Clinton wrote in November 2009 to Huma Abedin, then her deputy chief of staff.”

The Times wasn’t the only publication pushing this line.

The pseudo-scandal surrounding Hunter Biden’s laptop is yet another chance for right-wingers to embarrass and harass their political enemies by talking incessantly about their sex lives. The laptop — which, by the way, has been handled by so many people with dubious intentions that it can’t be authenticated — would be their October surprise, something like Anthony Weiner’s laptop back in 2016, which arguably cost Hillary Clinton the presidential election. They seem to be trying to convince people that pictures of Hunter Biden with lots of drugs and various different women would have shocked people into voting for Donald Trump over Hunter’s dad, which is patently ridiculous. They are delicately choosing not to mention that he’s the guy who has been accused by dozens of women of sexual assault and who paid off a porn actress during his 2016 campaign.

I don’t know if conservatives really believe that the laptop would have turned the tide or they just get off on sharing naked pictures of the president’s son and talking about his problems. But they expected the media to jump on that story and for the most part it didn’t, largely because of all the hacking and ratfucking and foreign interference on the Republicans’ behalf that had gone on during the 2016 campaign. I wish I were confident that the national media has finally learned its lesson about right-wing scandal-mongering in general, but that may be too much to hope for. 

The Special Prosecutor is promising to use the tax case to get this same sort of salacious material into a court of law by using it to show that Hunter improperly deducted personal expenses on drugs and women at the height of his drug addiction. Maybe they can eve call in some hookers and drug dealers to describe Hunter’s degradation. But if Weiss hope to appease James Comer and the GOP scandal mongers he’s in for a rude awakening. Nothing will appease them except Joe Biden crying on national TV.

And even then. That brain damaged lunatic Alex Jones is spreading the lie that Biden is so completely addled that he’s wandering around the White House naked not knowing where he is so I’m guessing Comer won’t be satisfied until he does that on national TV. I think we can be sure that he’ll keep pushing for it.

She trapped those college presidents and they fell for it

Michelle Goldberg has a very astute observation about this brouhaha over the Ivy League presidents allegedly failing to condemn antisemitism in a congressional hearing this week. As she points out, if you only see the highlights that have been circulating you would agree they they were expressing tolerance for hate speech against Jews but when you view the whole thing it’s obvious that there was more to it:

In the questioning before the now infamous exchange, you can see the trap Stefanik laid.

“You understand that the use of the term ‘intifada’ in the context of the Israeli-Arab conflict is indeed a call for violent armed resistance against the state of Israel, including violence against civilians and the genocide of Jews. Are you aware of that?” she asked Gay.

Gay responded that such language was “abhorrent.” Stefanik then badgered her to admit that students chanting about intifada were calling for genocide, and asked angrily whether that was against Harvard’s code of conduct. “Will admissions offers be rescinded or any disciplinary action be taken against students or applicants who say, ‘From the river to the sea’ or ‘intifada,’ advocating for the murder of Jews?” Gay repeated that such “hateful, reckless, offensive speech is personally abhorrent to me,” but said action would be taken only “when speech crosses into conduct.”

So later in the hearing, when Stefanik again started questioning Gay, Kornbluth and Magill about whether it was permissible for students to call for the genocide of the Jews, she was referring, it seemed clear, to common pro-Palestinian rhetoric and trying to get the university presidents to commit to disciplining those who use it. Doing so would be an egregious violation of free speech. After all, even if you’re disgusted by slogans like “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free,” their meaning is contested in a way that, say, “Gas the Jews” is not. Finding themselves in a no-win situation, the university presidents resorted to bloodless bureaucratic contortions, and walked into a public relations disaster.

I do not blame American Jews for feeling under siege in academia and elsewhere right now. This sort of thing circulates all over social media these days:

pic.twitter.com/enziFjyM16

Jews aren't allowed in the restrooms in a coffee shop and restaurant in Oakland, CA Farley's East coffee house (33 Grand Ave.)

America has been giving more and more 1933 vibes lately.

What is going on in America?

— Ella Travels (Ella Kenan) (@EllaTravelsLove) December 7, 2023

That viral videowas circulated by a notorious right wing troll named Ian Miles Cheong. (The owners apologized but naturally, most people are unwilling to accept it and want to drive the store out of business. And so it goes in 2023.)

Anyway, Goldberg continues:

…This week, when I wrote that the backlash to anti-Israel protests threatens free speech, I received many emails from people who felt I was refusing to grapple with an evident crisis. “You are worried about an overreaction when there hasn’t yet been a sufficient reaction to the antisemitism terrifying Jewish students on campus,” said one.

But it seems to me that it is precisely when people are legitimately scared and outraged that we’re most vulnerable to a repressive response leading to harmful unintended consequences. That’s a lesson of Sept. 11, but also of much of the last decade, when the policing of speech in academia escalated in ways that are now coming back to bite the left.

Amid the uproar over the campus antisemitism hearing, many have claimed that if Stefanik were asking about attacks on any other ethnic group, there would have been no waffling. But Stefanik did ask about another group. Her first question to Gay was, “A Harvard student calling for the mass murder of African Americans is not protected free speech at Harvard, correct?” Gay started to respond, “Our commitment to free speech,” but Stefanik, perhaps realizing she wasn’t going to get the answer she wanted, cut her off and changed tack.

Yet clearly, at many universities, the defense of free speech has been inconsistent. Some elite schools now cloaking themselves in the mantle of the First Amendment to ward off charges of coddling antisemites have, in the past, privileged community sensitivity over unbridled expression. So when university administrators say, as Gay did, “We embrace a commitment to free expression, even of views that are objectionable, offensive, hateful,” many in the Jewish community see a galling double standard.

But as the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, a libertarian-leaning civil liberties group, said in a statement about the hearings, “Double standards are frustrating, but we should address them by demanding free speech be protected consistently — not by expanding the calls for censorship.” Unfortunately, that is not what’s happening.

“The general point that there’s a hypocrisy around free speech and an imbalance around free speech on college campuses is right,” said Ryan Enos, a Harvard professor of government. But, he said, many of the people pointing this out “are not doing it to stand up for free speech; they’re just doing it because they want to shut down speech they disagree with.”

This was inevitable. Putting rhetorical sensitivity to the oppressed over the abstract concept of free speech sounds like the right thing to do but when two groups of historically oppressed people come into conflict the construct falls apart. And that’s where we are now:

Enos was a founding member of the Council on Academic Freedom at Harvard, formed this year. In October he resigned, because, he said, “Some of the leadership led the charge to restrict pro-Palestinian speech on campus.” When it comes to speech about Israel, there is plenty of hypocrisy to go around.

Like me, Enos found the hearings shocking, though not for the reasons many supporters of Israel did. At one point, Virginia Foxx, the North Carolina Republican who is the chairwoman of the committee holding the hearing, asked each of the presidents whether she believed that Israel has the right to exist as a Jewish state. Now, I think that calls to dismantle Israel are misguided at best and often despicable, but it was wildly inappropriate for educational leaders to be asked to affirm their Zionism before a government panel. It felt reminiscent of the anti-Communist witch hunts of the House Un-American Activities Committee: “Are you now, or have you ever been, an anti-Zionist?”

“I have a real problem with questions where you think there’s only one right answer,” said Enos. “You’re not asking a true question. You’re asking for some kind of loyalty display. And I think those things are especially dangerous.”

It’s not clear that these college presidents will keep their jobs after their performance at the hearing. But whatever happens, we’re likely to see a crackdown on many forms of pro-Palestinian expression. On Wednesday, amid mounting calls for her resignation, Penn’s Magill posted an apologetic video statement online. For decades, said Magill, Penn’s policies on speech have been guided by the Constitution and the law, but going forward, a different framework may apply.

“In today’s world, where we are seeing signs of hate proliferating across our campus and our world in a way not seen in years, these policies need to be clarified and evaluated,” she said. Expect more safety and less freedom.

These cultural upheavals happen from time to time, mostly out of the necessity to upend the status quo in order to effect progress. College campuses are often the petri dishes for such experiments in social change. Now we see that the current crisis in Israel and Gaza has exposed one of the fault lines in the movement to curtail hurtful speech in academia. When your own oppressed ox is being gored with accusations of insensitivity and racism, the whole thing starts to look a little bit different.

As we can see with smarmy Stefanik and that wingnut video troll, the right is coiled to exploit it. Lefties should not fall for it.

Oh my God

Many breathless headlines have appeared in the mainstream media over the past few weeks about the impending dictatorship of Donald Trump if he were to win the election next fall. All the major newspapers and magazines have finally begun to delve into exactly what Trump and his henchmen have in store in order to exact his revenge and enact the white nationalist agenda of the MAGA far right. It’s about time. Let’s hope they keep it up.

Here are just a few of the proposals that we know about. He plans to gut the EPA, and drill in Alaska to under the illusion that somehow the “profits” will pay for Social Security and medicare (a totally absurd proposal.) He’s going to use the Insurrection Act to deploy the military to quell domestic dissent and he’ll ban homeless camps in cities and put the unhoused in camps as well. And there are very detailed plans to round up millions of migrants and put them in detention camps prior to mass deportation. (We’re going to have a whole lot of “camps” in America under Donald Trump.) He plans to pardon “a large portion” of the Jan 6th insurrectionists and “go after” Joe Biden and other political enemies using the Department of Justice as well as the media. And he’s going to pull out of NATO, abandon Ukraine and back the right wingers in the Israeli Government. He will essentially declare war on blue states, particularly the cities where he plans to send in what amounts to an occupying federal force.

If you can believe it, those are just a few examples of what has been proposed. The entire program is beyond belief and there’s something new every day.

Trump appeared with his favorite courtier Sean Hannity this week and was asked very politely if he had any intention of becoming a dictator. Trump said only on day one when he planned to close the border and drill, drill, drill. “After that,” he said, “I won’t be a dictator.” But everyone should realize that Trump has always believed that he had unlimited power as president and continuously patted himself on the back for restraining himself from overusing them.

He’s not going to be a “dictator.” He just plans to use the power he believes he already had, that’s all.

But for all his dictatorial impulses, it is also true that Trump has a fatally disorganized mind and a tendency to lose focus and there is no way that he will be able to accomplish any of this by himself. So the big question on everyone’s mind is just who is he going to get to help him fulfill his goals? We know that the top qualification for all jobs in the administration will be that they can demonstrate 100% fealty to Donald Trump. In fact, that may be the only requirement.

Axios reported that job questionnaires are already being circulated and they match what was being used in the final days of the first Trump term when a wholesale reshuffling of the Executive Branch took place. The questions included:

What part of Candidate Trump’s campaign message most appealed to you and why?”

“Briefly describe your political evolution. What thinkers, authors, books, or political leaders influenced you and led you to your current beliefs? What political commentator, thinker or politician best reflects your views?”

This tracks with the questions in the “Talent Database” that’s being assembled by the Heritage Foundation which, as I wrote about here, has a very spotty record of accomplishment in similar endeavors.

But what about the big jobs that everyone will see — cabinet members and department heads. and powerful White House positions? It’s highly unlikely anyone who isn’t already in the Trump inner circle will stick his or her neck out “for the sake of the country” after what happened to those who did that in the first term, nor would Trump want anyone like a General Mattis or even a Bill Barr in the cabinet this time. He will put his closest cronies into “acting” positions wherever he can, just as he did in the last year, and if the Republicans take the Senate I expect they’ll be happy to change the filibuster to give him anyone he wants.

So what are we looking at? Axios had another report this week that revealed the top contenders.

For VP, he’s considering Ohio Sen. JD Vance; Arkansas Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders; MAGA superstar Kari Lake; South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem and Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene. Byron Donalds, R-Fl., is also on the list as is fellow Floridian Matt Gaetz. Melania Trump is reportedly pushing for Tucker Carlson. Seriously. (Nobody thinks he would be a good fit because “he can’t be controlled” which is hilarious.)

Carlson and Trump are on the horn regularly, however, and he is apparently advocating for the odious Stephen Miller, the mastermind of Trump’s heinous immigration program, for, wait for it, Attorney General because he’s “a serious person.” It’s not a bad guess that this is being considered since Miller is currently working on the recruitment of army of right-wing lawyers to staff a MAGA-dominated executive branch.

Then there is the swashbuckling Mike Davis the former General Counsel to Chuck Grassley who announced that he would immediately launch a “three-week reign of terror” in which he would “put kids in cages” and jail prosecutors and journalists who have gone after Trump. That’s exactly what Trump wants to hear so don’t be surprised if he is chosen.

Podcaster Steve Bannon, who was fired from the first Trump administration but is back in the in-crowd is being discussed as a Chief of Staff and Kash Patel, the man Trump promoted from the ranks to sabotage the Pentagon is assumed to be Trump’s CIA pick. Trump’s former body man and enforcer Johnny McEntee is expected to be given a powerful position, possibly even in the cabinet and Ric Grenell, the erstwhile twitter troll turned Ambassador in the first term is generally considered to be the front runner for Secretary of State.

Uber wingnut Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ar., is mentioned for Defense Secretary and Jared Kushner is definitely on the list for something if he wants it. There’s no mention of Michael Flynn but don’t be too surprised if he turns up too. It’s a pretty thin bench.

Just look at that list. What a rogues gallery. It’s nothing but the worst MAGA blowhards and the last standing retreads from the first term and the list isn’t very long. Would they end up having to choose from nutty failed candidates like Pennsylvania’s Doug Mastriano or Herschel Walker? Maybe Kanye West could be Treasury Secretary and Alex Jones could be the White House Counsel. Why not? Would they be any worse than Marjorie Taylor Greene?

It’s really not a joking matter actually. All the people mentioned in the Axios piece may be third rate political figures but they are also dangerous authoritarians and Trump syncophants who would have no compunction about pushing whatever buttons they have at their disposal to punish their enemies and vanquish the political opposition. What they lack in integrity they make up for in malevolence and it’s simply unthinkable that the US Government would be in their hands.

Salon

A Texas Tornado of it

“Telegraphing” is a euphemism for unconsciously signalling your intentions. Telegraphing a punch in the boxing ring. Like a player’s “tell” in poker. Donald Trump must be the worst player in either arena. Arrogance works like that. Where once he spoke in code like a mob boss, now Trump speaks like an aspiring dictator.

When Trump promised Waco, Texas rallygoers in March, “I am your retribution,” collaborators began singing his song like a Greek chorus (ABC News):

“We will go out and find the conspirators not just in government, but in the media,” said former Defense Department official Kash Patel during an appearance on Steve Bannon’s War Room podcast.

Patel, who served as chief of staff in the Department of Defense during the Trump administration and Trump’s counterterrorism adviser on the National Security Council, was asked by Bannon if he would be able to deliver “serious prosecution and accountability” against their political opponents during a second Trump presidency.

“We’re going to come after you whether it’s criminally or civilly,” Patel said of Trump’s political foes. “We’ll figure that out.”

Retribution tomorrow

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton (yes, he still holds that job) heard Trump’s Waco message five by five. He was sitting there. Retribution? Yes, sir!

After (in Paxton’s words) “an activist Travis County Judge” issued a temporary restraining order Thursday allowing Kate Cox, a 31-year-old mother of two and pregnant with a fatal fetal condition, to receive an abortion under Texas’ near-total abortion ban, Paxton was not amused (Washington Post):

The Texas attorney general, Ken Paxton, threatened legal action if the abortion takes place. In a letter addressed to the hospitals involved with Cox’s care, Paxton said that Cox’s doctor did not meet “all of the elements necessary to fall within an exception to Texas’ abortion laws” and that the judge was “not medically qualified to make this determination.”

And Paxton and Texas Republican lawmakers who passed the ban are?

Paxton said the judge’s order would not excuse the hospital or doctor from civil or criminal liability “including first degree felony prosecutions.” He added that the temporary restraining order “will expire long before the statute of limitations for violating Texas’ abortion laws expires.”

The Texas Tribune has more.

Retribution now

Texas was not done, however (Texas Monthly):

After visiting the Varner-Hogg plantation an hour south of Houston, amateur historian Michelle Haas was incensed by what she had seen. At an exhibit that details the farm’s use as a sugar plantation worked by at least 66 slaves in the early nineteenth century, she’d watched an informational video. To her mind, it focused too much on slavery at the site and not enough on the Hogg family, which had turned its former home into a museum celebrating Texas history. She’d also seen books in the visitor center gift shop written by Carol Anderson and Ibram X. Kendi, two Black academic historians who have been outspoken on the issue of systemic racism. Outraged, she emailed David Gravelle, a board member of the Texas Historical Commission, the agency that oversees historical sites at the direction of leaders appointed by Governor Greg Abbott. “What a s—show is this video,” Haas wrote on September 2, 2022. “Add to that the fact that the activist staff member doing the buying for the gift shop thinks Ibram X. Kendi and White Rage have a place at a historic site.”

Haas spent eight months agitating to have the books and video removed. She got her wish this month.

The Texas Historical Commission no longer sells White Rage by Anderson or Stamped From the Beginning by Kendi, or 23 other works to which Haas later objected, at two former slave plantations in Brazoria County, including Varner-Hogg. Among the literature no longer available for purchase is an autobiography of a slave girl, a book of Texas slave narratives, the celebrated novel Roots by Alex Haley, and the National Book Award–winning Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison. 

[…]

In 2022, Haas launched the Texas History Trust, a nonprofit advocacy organization that aims to fight back against what it describes as “historical societies, university history departments and authors who warp Texas history based on feelings, not the historical record.” She has protested the inclusion of so-called “woke ideology,” “neo-Marxist” influence, and critical race theory in Texas schools, even though CRT—a framework for examining systemic racism, for example in lending patterns—is not taught below the college level in the Lone Star State. 

“We stand in defense of fact-based history,” the Texas History Trust declares. They’re just highly discriminatory about what Texas history they’ll defend.

That culturally significant books about slavery were apparently made casualties of the culture war deeply concerns historians such as Michael Phillips, who is writing a book on eugenics in Texas, was recently a senior fellow at Southern Methodist University, and who filed an initial records request regarding the commission’s efforts to remove the works from gift shops. “We have an appalling situation,” Phillips said. “The idea that these books are irrelevant somehow is really striking.” He added, “to eliminate books about racism at slave plantation sites is like doing an Auschwitz tour and never mentioning antisemitism.”

Lord Acton warned in 1887 about the corrupting seductiveness of power. Trump has never known life without it. He’s never been without money shielding him from accountability for sins as uncountable as his lies. Now he’s tasted real power in the White House even if he was clumsy about wielding it. Winning the presidency again means shielding himself from justice. It means punishing his enemies. Or sending his cult to do it for him. The Oval Office must be like heroin compared to mere wealth.

Hangers-on in Trump’s orbit, like Bannon and Patel and Paxton, and those a few astronomical units distant, like Haas and Moms for Liberty co-founder Bridget Ziegler, have had their taste. Just enough to be besotted. They want more.

Too much fun to miss

Brighten your weekend.

Holding the North Carolina governor’s mansion is my Hanukkah wish.

Happy Hanukkah! May your holiday season be full of light, joy, and family. pic.twitter.com/v66sluUgcd

— Josh Stein (@JoshStein_) December 7, 2023

Forcing women to carry fetuses with fatal chromosomal disorders to term is a grotesque violation of human rights

Kate Cox, the mother of two whose request for an abortion was granted by a Texas judge, speaks out to NBC News after the ruling. “We’re going through the loss of a child,” Cox says of her grief. We have coverage of the landmark case on “NBC Nightly News with Lester Holt” 

By the way, here’s a look at what the anti-abortion zealots want Trump to do if he’s elected by Elaine Godfrey from the “If Trump Wins” issue of The Atlantic. Do you think that he wouldn’t do it once he’s back in the White House, burning with vengeance?

A federal ban, which would require 60 votes in the Senate, is unlikely. But some activists believe there’s a simpler way: the enforcement by a Trump Justice Department of a 150-year-old obscenity law.

The Comstock Act, originally passed in 1873 to combat vice and debauchery, prohibits the mailing of any “article or thing” that is “designed, adapted, or intended for producing abortion, or for any indecent or immoral use.” In the law’s first 100 years, a series of court cases narrowed its scope, and in 1971, Congress removed most of its restrictions on contraception. But the rest of the Comstock Act has remained on the books. The law has sat dormant, considered virtually unenforceable, since the Roe v. Wade ruling in 1973.

Following the Supreme Court’s Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision in 2022, the United States Postal Service asked the Justice Department for clarification: Could its workers legally transport abortion-inducing medications to states with bans? The DOJ replied by issuing a memo stipulating that abortion pills can be legally mailed as long as the sender does not intend for the drugs to be used unlawfully. And whether or not the drugs will be used within the bounds of state law, the memo notes, would be difficult for a sender to know (the pills have medical uses unrelated to abortion).

If Donald Trump is reelected president, many prominent opponents of abortion rights will demand that his DOJ issue its own memo, reinterpreting the law to mean the exact opposite: that Comstock is a de facto ban on shipping medication that could end a pregnancy, regardless of its intended use (this would apply to the USPS and to private carriers like UPS and FedEx). “The language is black-and-white. It should be enforced,” Steven H. Aden, the general counsel at Americans United for Life, told me. A broader interpretation of the Comstock Act might also mean that a person receiving abortion pills would be committing a federal crime and, if prosecuted, could face prison time. Federal prosecutors could bring charges against abortion-pill manufacturers, providers receiving pills in the mail, or even individuals.

The hopes of some activists go further. Their ultimate aim in reviving the Comstock Act is to use it to shut down every abortion facility “in all 50 states,” Mark Lee Dickson, a Texas pastor and anti-abortion advocate, told me. Taken literally, Comstock could be applied to prevent the transport of all supplies related to medical and surgical abortions, making it illegal to ship necessary tools and medications to hospitals and clinics, with no exceptions for other medical uses, such as miscarriage care. Conditions that are easily treatable with modern medicine could, without access to these supplies, become life-threatening.

Legal experts say that the activists’ strategy could, in theory, succeed—at least in bringing the issue to court. “It’s not hypothetical anymore,” Mary Ziegler, a law professor at the UC Davis School of Law, told me. “Because it’s already on the books, and it’s not ridiculous to interpret it this way, [the possibility] is not far-fetched at all.”

Eventually, the Supreme Court would likely face pressure to weigh in. Even though a majority of the Court’s justices have supported abortion restrictions and ruled to overturn Roe, it’s unclear how they’d rule on this particular case. If they were to uphold the broadest interpretation of the Comstock Act, doctors even in states without bans could struggle to legally obtain the supplies they need to provide abortions and perform other procedures.

This is what activists want. The question is whether Trump would accede to their demands. After years of championing the anti-abortion cause, the former president seemed to pivot when he blamed anti-abortion Republicans’ extremism for the party’s poor performance in the 2022 midterm elections (only a small fraction of Americans favors a complete abortion ban). Recently, he’s come across as more moderate on the issue than his primary opponents by condemning Florida’s six-week abortion ban and endorsing compromise with Democrats.

As president, Trump might choose not to enforce Comstock at all. Or he could order his DOJ to enforce it with discretion, promising to go after drug manufacturers and Planned Parenthood instead of individuals. It’s hard to be certain of any outcome: Trump has always been more interested in appeasing his base than reaching Americans in the ideological middle. He might well be in favor of aggressively enforcing the Comstock Act, in order to continue bragging, as he has in the past, that he is “the most pro-life president in American history.”

There is no reason to believe he won’t do it. He doesn’t care about the Republican party. He cares about revenge. And he is a true believing misogynist.

If you think it can’t get worse, think again.

Update:

After a judge granted a Texas woman’s request for an emergency abortion, the state’s attorney general sent letters threatening prosecution of any hospital or provider who allows her abortion.

"He basically said, 'Ignore that, I don’t care.'" says Rep. Jasmine Crockett. pic.twitter.com/Vsk9IVkRTR

— All In with Chris Hayes (@allinwithchris) December 8, 2023

The courts are going to decide that question. And it could come too late.

The January 6th case Judge Tanya Chutkan issued a ruling stating that Donald Trump is not immune from the rule of law because he was president. She famously wrote:

Defendant’s four-year service as Commander in Chief did not bestow on him the divine right of kings to evade the criminal accountability that governs his fellow citizens … A former President’s exposure to federal criminal liability is essential to fulfilling our constitutional promise of equal justice under the law

This may seem obvious to all of us. If a president is immune from criminal liability when he is out of office he is a defacto dictator during his term and theoretically could use that status to ensure his term is endless. But according to the legal beagles, this is a n issue that will need to be decided by the appeals courts and probably the Supremes. Trump is undoubtedly hoping they decide to stay Chutkan’s ruling and leave the whole thing until after the election — at which point Trump would have legitimate presidential immunity if he wins.

The Washington Post has a good run down on this issue:

Donald Trump filed notice on Thursday saying he will appeal a D.C. judge’s ruling that he was not immune from being charged with federal crimes for his efforts to undo the outcome of the 2020 election, either by his former role as president or the Constitution’s rules for impeachment.

The notice is a minor procedural step. But it sets in motion one of the most potentially consequential parts of Trump’s legal saga as the first former president to be charged with crimes. How and when the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit and the Supreme Court handle his appealcould have a huge impact on whether Trump — who is again running for president — goes on trial before voters go to the polls in 2024, or ever.

Trump’s legal team says the charges that he conspired to obstruct Joe Biden’s 2020 victory should be thrown out for two reasons. First, his lawyers contend that he had presidential immunity. Second, they argue that charging him with trying to block the election resultsviolates the legal principle of double jeopardy, because Trump was already acquitted at his congressional impeachment for his conduct leading up to the riot-marred Jan. 6, 2021 formal tabulation of electoral college votes.

U.S. District Judge Tanya S. Chutkan’s 48-page opinion last weekrejected those claims, as well as a different challenge that said the indictment never should have been filed because it improperly tries to criminalize Trump’s constitutionally protected rights to speech and advocacy as a political candidate.

Since a grand jury voted to bring the criminal charges this summer, prosecutors have sought to try Trump as quickly as possible. Trump’s lawyers have insistedtheir client needs and deserves more time, both as a defendant reviewing evidence and as a former president trying to win back the White House.

Appeals courts consider very few legal issues before a criminal case goes to trial and averdict is reached. But questions of immunity and double jeopardy are often among the exceptions, because if the defendant is right that they cannot be charged, courts have held that they should not be forced to go through a trial at all.

And since the Supreme Court has never grappled with some of the legal questions at issue in Trump’s claims — particularly whether a president is immune from indictment and criminal prosecution for actions undertaken while in office,even after he has left office — many lawyers say they believe the courts will have to wrestle with those aspects of the Trump case.

The key issue, according to legal experts, is how long will the higher courts consider that question. Trump is scheduled to go on trial in Washington, D.C., starting March 4, and potential jurors in the nation’s capital have received notices that they are being considered for a three-month trial to start on that date. It would be the first of four criminal trials Trump could face, including a federal case involving classified documents in southern Florida; a state-level election-obstruction case in Georgia; and a state-level business fraud case in New York.

Now that Trump has filed his notice of appeal on Chutkan’s immunity ruling, the case cannot proceed to trial while the appeals court takes up his claims, legal analysts said. That makes the question of timing especially critical, with the other trials looming and the campaign season soon to be in full swing.

[…]

One critical factor will be which three appellate judges end up hearing the case. If judges can agree on how quickly they want to move forward, such panels can issue decisions in under two months. Other cases, however, can take more than a year.

Last week, in a separate ruling issued hours before Chutkan denied Trump’s bid to dismiss the criminal case,the D.C. appeals court denied Trump’s claims of immunity from a civil lawsuit over his conduct leading up to Jan. 6. That decision took 20 months to reach.

“The D.C. Circuit can go really fast, I’ve learned that over 45 years of practice,” said Douglas N. Letter, who was House general counsel from 2018 to 2023 and before that was director of the Justice Department civil division’s appellate staff. “On the other hand, sometimes even when it rules in your favor it can wait 10 months to issue even a short opinion.”

I wish I had more faith in the appellate court to do the right thing. Maybe they will here:

Still, the high court has shown it can rapidly settle — or duck — complex and controversial cases. It quickly let stand a D.C. Circuit decision turning over Trump’s White House communications records to the House Jan. 6 committee in 2022. And the justices took only one day after oral arguments to issue a ruling that shut down vote-counting in the 2000 election between George Bush and Al Gore.

“I could easily see the Supreme Court thinking, ‘We don’t want to get anywhere near this matter now; we’re going to deny review at this point and see what happens at trial,’” Letter said. After a trial, if Trump has been convicted and has not been reelected president, the court could take its time to issue a historic ruling on whether he should be immune from prosecution.

The bottom line is that both the appeals court and the Supreme Court would have to act swiftly to allow Trump’s trial to go forward next year.

And the question for the courts may ultimately be to decide whether under America’s system of democracy, Trump should face accountability at the ballot box, or a jury box —or whether U.S. citizens should cast their votes in the 2024 election without knowing if he is criminally culpable for trying to overturn the results in 2020.

Needless to say, Trump’s strategy regardless is to delay this trial as long as possible regardless. I’m trying to remain optimistic that this January 6th case will go to trial before the election but I don’t want to hope too much. I think there’s an excellent chance that none of the cases will, which would be horrible.

The following statement isn’t from Vivek Ramaswamy or Alex Jones. It’s the NRSC, the most establishment GOP institution imaginable:

The National Republican Senatorial Committee on Wednesday took a swing at Rep. Matt Rosendale, R-Mont., following Rep. Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., announcing he’ll be leaving Congress.

“A lot of people are starting to wonder if Matt Rosendale is a plant from the Democrats,” NRSC Communications Director Mike Berg said in a statement responding to McCarthy’s retirement. “He is benefitting from millions of dollars in television ads from a Chuck Schumer-aligned super PAC and has been a great ally to Hakeem Jeffries and Nancy Pelosi in their efforts to take back the House.”

Rosendale was one of eight House Republicans who joined with Democrats to oust McCarthy as Speaker in October.

His departure will now leave Republicans with just a two seat majority in the House.

Rosendale is gearing up for a potential Senate run in Montana, which would pit him in a rematch against Sen. Jon Tester, D-Mont., after his Senate campaign failed in 2018.

They really don’t want this guy in the race, do they? It’s not because he’s a left wing plant, God knows. He’s as right wing as it comes. In fact, that’s the reason they don’t want him to run. They think they can pick up this seat and they know that he’s such a nut that if he wins the nomination, which he might because the base loves MAGA, that Tester could pull it off. They want Tim Sheehy, a former Navy SEAL and current CEO of Bridger Aerospace, and they are putting all their muscle behind him. But there are a couple of other candidates in the race too alone with, Rosendale if he decides to run. It’s already a free-for-all and Rosendale will make it even more chaotic.

Get out your popcorn. There’s a lot of this going on around the country and after 2022, they really want to avoid more Kari Lake and Mastriano situation. But they aren’t in the driver’s seat so …

According to Axios, JD Vance is on the Trump short list for Vice President.

Just an item in today's Reliable Sources newsletter

Sen. J.D. Vance has asked Attorney General Merrick Garland if his department will "open an investigation" into The WaPo columnist Robert Kagan for authoring a piece waring that a "Trump dictatorship is increasingly inevitable."

— Jay Rosen (@jayrosen_nyu) December 7, 2023

For real:

According to Fox News, Vance is accusing Kagan of inciting “open rebellion” against the United States, for suggesting in his article, “A Trump dictatorship is increasingly inevitable. We should stop pretending,” that Democratic-controlled states might resist federal power under a second Trump term should he move to enact his controversial plans to reshape the federal government to do his bidding.

“Resistance could come from the governors of predominantly Democratic states such as California and New York through a form of nullification,” wrote Kagan. “States with Democratic governors and statehouses could refuse to recognize the authority of a tyrannical federal government. That is always an option in our federal system,” he added that this sort of standoff is also possible from Republican-controlled states under a second Biden term.

In a letter to Attorney General Merrick Garland, Vance claimed that this amounts to inciting insurrection.

“As you know, prosecutors in the Department of Justice have embraced several stunningly broad interpretations of federal law in their bid to ensnare President Trump in criminal wrongdoing,” wrote Vance. “For example, prosecutors … argue that President Trump has conspired to ‘threaten’ or ‘intimidate’ one or more persons in their free exercise of the ‘right to vote, and to have one’s vote counted.’ By that standard, I would like to know whether a supporter of President Trump might be ‘intimidate[d]’ into foregoing the right to vote after learning that Robert Kagan has encouraged large blue states to rebel against the United States if Trump is elected. If so, I wonder further whether the editors of The Washington Post, having put Kagan’s call to arms in print, might have conspired to suppress the vote.”

Columnists enjoy broad-based protection to engage in such hypothetical scenarios by virtue of the First Amendment.

However, Vance’s demand to prosecute an opinion columnist comes as allies of Trump are ramping up their threats to curtail press freedom under a second Trump term. Kash Patel, a top security official in the Trump administration, threatened that Trump will “come after” reporters and other “conspirators” in media who “helped Joe Biden rig presidential elections.”

Vance is being cutesy, of course. But don’t kid yourself. If Trump takes over the Justice Dept as he plans to do if he wins another term, this is exactly what they plan to do.