Digby's Hullabaloo Posts

DeSantis’ spectacular flame out sours his followers on his strategy

Oh my. It looks like Ron DeSantis has lost his clout. Florida’s sick of the “war on woke.” Just this last week the GOP legislature failed to even get a rainbow flag ban out of committee! What is this world coming to?

It wasn’t the only culture war proposal from conservative lawmakers to end up in the bill graveyard during the session that ended Friday. One rejected bill would have banned the removal of Confederate monuments. Another would have required transgender people to use their sex assigned at birth on driver’s licenses — something the state Department of Motor Vehicles is already mandating. A third proposed forbiddinglocal and state government officials from using transgender people’s pronouns.

Some of those ideas have come up in the past and may surface again next year. But the fact that the bills failed, even with public support from DeSantis, marks a change from the days when the GOP supermajority in Tallahassee passed nearly everything the governor asked for.

Florida has firmly cemented itself in recent years as ground zero for the nation’s culture wars. The Sunshine State is the birthplace of conservative parental rights group Moms for Liberty, the original law restricting LGBTQ+ discussion in classrooms, one of the strictest abortion laws in the country and legislation that has led to the banning of more books than in any other state in America.

But the pushback is growing.

Parents and others have organized and protested schoolbook bans. Abortion rights advocates gathered enough signatures to put the issue on the ballot in Florida in November. A bill that would have established “fetal personhood” stalled before it could reach a full vote.

Judges are also canceling some of DeSantis’s marquee laws, including the “Stop Woke Act.”A three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit ruled Monday that the law “exceeds the bounds” of the Constitution’s First Amendment right to freedom of speech and expression.

Even the governor recently admitted the state might have gone too far in trying to remove certain books from school shelves, suggesting laws on book challenges should be “tweaked” to prevent “bad actors” from having too much influence.

Democrats and other DeSantis critics say the laws that the governor has pushed will continue to shape public life in Florida for years to come, and they don’t expect the Republican supermajority in the state House to suddenly abandon conservative causes. But they do sense a shift.

“When his presidential race ended, I think that a lot of his influence and power died at the same time,” said state Sen. Shevrin Jones, a South Florida Democrat. “And I think that people in Florida and across the country, including Republicans, are starting to see that the culture wars are getting us nowhere.”

That’s what happens when you are the Great White Bread Hope and get knocked out in the first round. Nobody is frightened of you anymore and your fans are embarrassed. DeSantis is almost certainly going to run in 2028 and it will be interesting (and, no doubt, nauseating) to see what DeSanctimonious 2.0 looks like. It probably won’t look a lot like 1.0.

I wonder if any of this will have an effect on 2024 in Florida. I won’t get my hopes off. That state is way down the rabbit hole and it’s MAGA central now. But you never know. Rick Scott is extremely unpopular (I can’t imagine why) so maybe he’s vulnerable? He’s only leading his challenger Debbie Mucarsal-Powell by 3 points in the latest polling.

The culture war will never die, unfortunately. It always seamlessly morphs into something else. I think the new themes are going to come straight out of Christian Nationalism which is the Big New Thing on the right. Get ready. This next battle is going to be something else.

From the “you can’t make this stuff up” files

She is totally shameless so this won’t embarrass her. But it should embarrass someone.

The following won’t embarrass this looney tunes either. But it should:

I don’t think I’ve ever agreed with Kevin McCarthy about anything. But his loathing for this woman is well taken. I hope he succeeds in using his network to take her out. She’s almost as nuts as George Santos.

And then there’s this piece of work:

Oh really? Imagine that …

As I said, you can’t make this stuff up.

Will SCOTUS now revisit Dobbs and Heller?

Need I repeat that conservatives principles always seem to be a mile wide and an inch deep? Democracy, the rule of law, the peaceful transfer of power, peace through strength, the sacredness of the Constitution, etc.

“If you ask me what the biggest problem in America is, I’m not going to tell you debt, deficits, statistics, economics—I’ll tell you it’s moral relativism,” Congressman Paul Ryan insisted four years before becoming House Speaker. Relativism was for years a charge conservatives levied against liberals. Until it was no longer useful.

My memorable first introduction to Rick Perlstein in 2005 included something Richard Nixon once told a staffer, “Flexibility is the first principle of politics.” Expediency conservatives hold sacrosanct.

Jill Lepore asks in The New Yorker whether, having sacrificed the 14th Amendment in pursuit of political expediency, “originalists” on the Supreme Court now feel free to rexamine other amendments:

There’s more than one way to skin a Constitution. Here are two: a court might base a decision on the original intention, meaning, and public understanding, the “history and tradition,” of a constitutional provision, or it might base a decision on a consideration of the consequences. Ordinarily, a judge might apply both these and other methods, but a strict originalist might argue that the jurisprudence of originalism is fundamentally opposed to the jurisprudence of consequentialism—that it’s best to heed the past and damn the consequences. During oral arguments at the Supreme Court in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, for instance, Justice Samuel Alito asked about origins (“Can it be said that the right to abortion is deeply rooted in the history and traditions of the American people?”), and Justice Sonia Sotomayor inquired after consequences (“When does the life of a woman and putting her at risk enter the calculus?”). Alito wrote the majority opinion, declaring that no right to an abortion can be found in the Constitution’s history and tradition, and that therefore “the Fourteenth Amendment does not protect the right to an abortion.” Sotomayor joined a dissent that denounced “the majority’s refusal even to consider the life-altering consequences” of its decision.

This term, the tables turned. In Trump v. Anderson, the Court agreed to review a decision by the Colorado Supreme Court to strike the former President’s name from that state’s Republican primary ballot. That court had found that Donald Trump, owing to his role in the events of January 6th, had been disqualified under Section 3 of the Fourteenth Amendment, which prohibits people who have sworn an oath to the Constitution and then engaged in an insurrection against it from holding office. Maine and Illinois also determined that Trump had disqualified himself.

There are strong arguments against disqualifying Trump, but none involve the historical record: the evidence of history supported affirming the Colorado Supreme Court’s decision. (I and the historians David Blight, Drew Gilpin Faust, and John Fabian Witt made this argument in an amicus brief.) During oral arguments, Justice Sotomayor asked about origins: “History proves a lot to me.” Justice Alito worried about outcomes: “The consequences of what the Colorado Supreme Court did, some people claim, would be quite severe.” So did Chief Justice John Roberts, who asked Jason Murray, the lawyer representing Colorado voters, what he’d do with what “would seem to me to be plain consequences of your position?” Alito asked Murray “to grapple with what some people have seen as the consequences of the argument that you’re advancing.” Posing one hypothetical after another, Alito asked, “Then what would we do?”

Whether to err on the side with tradition or consequences, like other political debates, depends not on principle, but on whose ox is being gored. It’s not that both liberals and conservatives aren’t flexible in their principles. It’s that conservatives are utterly shameless in Texas-two-stepping around theirs when convenient.

Until very recently, the Second Amendment, known as “the lost amendment,” hardly ever came up. In a unanimous opinion in 1939, the Court ruled that it protected the right to bear arms only as part of a well-regulated militia. Then, beginning with D.C. v. Heller, in 2008, and continuing down through New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen, in 2022, the Court codified a new, individual-rights reading that it described as “original,” and devised history tests (including a “historical-analogy” test) that any effort to curtail gun violence must pass in order to be deemed constitutional. Without the fealty to originalism that these cases demanded, there could be no Dobbs—no impossible test for abortion to fail.

Historians protested that the Court’s interpretation of the Second Amendment was wrong and its tests preposterous. In Bruen, a case involving the question of where New Yorkers can and cannot carry guns, which was argued four weeks before Dobbs, oral arguments included groping for an eighteenth-century equivalent of a football stadium. Pressed by Justice Elena Kagan, the lawyer for the petitioner admitted the limits of historical analogies, given that, for instance, you can’t base denying felons the right to own guns on any eighteenth-century law, since, at the time, many crimes were capital crimes. Felons weren’t banned from carrying guns; they were executed. Justice Stephen Breyer later tried to intervene: “Even following Heller and following the history, which I thought was wrong,” he said, he wondered which way the Court could possibly rule that would not result in “a kind of gun-related chaos.” But why should anyone follow Heller or Bruen, whose reasoning attempts to defy the very passage of time? By that logic, the constitutionality of I.V.F. turns on identifying the eighteenth-century equivalent of a frozen embryo.

If the Court is now interested in consequentialist arguments, here’s one: in the past quarter century, more than three hundred thousand American children have experienced armed civilians attacking their schools. Last year, there were six hundred and fifty-six mass shootings in the United States. Four out of five murders and more than half of all suicides in this country involve a gun. Gun ownership is rising, and so is political violence. For nearly a century, beginning with the earliest public-opinion surveys, Americans have consistently supported safety measures and curbs on gun ownership. Since 2008, the Court has thwarted them.

And the Court will until gun violence reaches reaches their families. Consequences. Miraculously, the scales will fall from their eyes.

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Britt is as phony as Joe Biden is real

It was baked in that Saturday Night Live would use Alabama Sen. Katie Britt’s “absurdly overdramatic” SOTU performance as it’s cold open. My problem with SNL’s sketch? “Bless his heart” Britt will probably just be flattered that SNL asked Scarlett Johansson to play her.

“What was the point of that nonsense?” The American Conservative asked, descrbing Britt’s appearance as a ” hyper-emotional speech that verged from creepy to hormonal to giddy within the span of twenty minutes.” It’s a wonder SNL did not just replicate Britt’s address almost word-for-word, as Tina Fey once did in mocking Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin.

But The American Conservative‘s response to Biden’s SOTU was just as bizarre, judging it a declaration of war on half the country while calling Biden a liar and Britt “authentic.”

Judge for yourself which of the likely 2024 presidential candidates is the kind of authentic you want sitting in the Oval Office.

The American Conservative declares the SOTU a tradition draped in “pseudo-monarchic pomp” and out of character for “a country that defines itself against hereditary hierarchy,” yet “arch-feudal in spirit.” On that, we agree. Especially regarding conservatives who yearn for an emotionally stunted child-king.

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Add Katie Britt to the list of liars

Tom put up the viral reaction about Katie Britt as well as the TikTok from journalist Jonathan Katz this morning, proving that she’s a big fat liar. It took a while but the mainstream media finally caught up. Katz was right.

Here’s the WaPo fact check:

“We know that President Biden didn’t just create this border crisis. He invited it with 94 executive actions in his first 100 days. When I took office, I took a different approach. I traveled to the Del Rio sector of Texas. That’s where I spoke to a woman who shared her story with me. She had been sex trafficked by the cartels starting at the age of 12. She told me not just that she was raped every day, but how many times a day she was raped. The cartels put her on a mattress in a shoe box of a room, and they sent men through that door over and over again for hours and hours on end. We wouldn’t be okay with this happening in a Third World country. This is the United States of America, and it is past time, in my opinion, that we start acting like it. President Biden’s border policies are a disgrace.”

— Sen. Katie Boyd Britt (R-Ala.), in the Republican response to the State of the Union address, March 7

If you were watching Britt’s speech on Thursday night, you likely would have thought she was talking about a recent victim of sex trafficking who was abused in the United States andsuffered because of President Biden’s policies.

If you did, you would have been wrong. Sean Ross, Britt’s communications director, confirmed that she was talking about Karla Jacinto Romero — who has testified before Congress about being forced to work in Mexican brothels from 2004 to 2008. (A viral TikTok by journalist Jonathan Katz first revealed that Britt was speaking about Romero.) In a phone conversation and a statement, Ross disputed that Britt’s language was misleading.

We disagree. Let’s take a look.

Britt’s account of Romero’s experience was a centerpiece of her rebuttal to Biden’s address. The way Britt sets up the story, there is no indication that she is talking about a woman who was working in brothels in Mexico during the George W. Bush administration. This is how the passage unfolds.

-She first blames Biden for the surge of migrants at the border.

-Then she says she visited the border shortly after she took office. That would be 2023.

-At length, she details the story of an unnamed victim that she says she met on her trip. The implication is that the woman recently crossed the border — because of “sex trafficking by the cartels.”

-She strongly suggests that her abuse took place in the United States: “We wouldn’t be okay with this happening in a Third World country. This is the United States of America, and it is past time, in my opinion, that we start acting like it.”

-She ends by reinforcing that such alleged trafficking is Biden’s fault: “President Biden’s border policies are a disgrace.”

But Biden has nothing to do with Romero’s story. As she testified nine years ago, her mother threw her out of her house at age 12 and she “fell prey to a professional pimp.” She says she then spent the next four years in brothels before a regular client helped her escape when she was 16 years old. There is no indication in her story that drug cartels were involved, though Britt said that in the State of the Union response and has made a similar claim on at least one other occasion. Romero was never trafficked to the United States; instead, she says many men who paid to have sex with her were “foreigners visiting my city looking to have sexual interactions with minors like me.”

In a YouTube video, Britt features images of her hugging Romero during her 2023 trip to the border. “If we as leaders of the greatest nation in the world are not fighting to protect the most vulnerable, we are not doing our job,” she saidin the video. The implication again is that this happened on Biden’s watch.

When Donald Trump was president, he regularly decried human trafficking that he claimed was happening at the border, including that “thousands of young girls and women” were being smuggled across the border for prostitution. In 2019, we investigated that claim and found no evidence to support it. Most human trafficking prosecutions generally involve legal border crossings, visa fraud and travel into the United States on airplanes. Victim organizations say there are relatively few cases that involve forced kidnapping across the border. This might be one reason Britt regularly cites a case that happened long ago and did not involve crossing the border.

Ross, Britt’s spokesman, said that Romero’s story was indicative of trafficking that is now happening at the border and that should be clear from Britt’s framing in the speech.

He said the reference to a “Third World country” was generic and was not intended to refer to Mexico, which he said is not a Third World country. Third World is a dated Cold War-era term previously used to refer to poor or developing countries. Global South, indicating low income and high poverty, is a more common expression today. Mexico is considered part of the Global South, though it is also a member of the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development.

Right. The current term isn’t “third world country.” It’s “shit hole country.” Everyone knows that.

He went on to claim that Britt was “100% correct” because there are, in fact, women being trafficked right now, which she blames on Biden. Hoookay.

The Post gives her 4 Pinnocchios. Because she is a liar.

Oh, and by the way:

It appears that the campaign is hitting the ground running. Let’s hope they keep it up:

In “For You” President Biden discusses how his wisdom, experience, and—yes, even age—have been critical to getting big things done for the American people in his first term, and the choice Americans will face this November between Joe Biden’s experienced and effective leadership versus Donald Trump and his assault on Americans’ rights and democracy.

The six-week ad flight will air on national cable and local broadcast and cable television in Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, Arizona, Georgia, Nevada, and North Carolina. The ad campaign will target audiences in the key markets of Detroit, Flint, Grand Rapids, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Harrisburg, Milwaukee, Madison, Green Bay, Phoenix, Atlanta, Las Vegas, and Raleigh, with a focus on voters of color and young voters. The ad will air on popular entertainment and sports programming on stations like ESPN, TNT, FX, Adult Swim, and Comedy Central and during high-viewership moments like the NCAA March Madness Tournament. It will also run digitally across platforms – with a heavy emphasis on Instagram, Facebook, and YouTube.

The following is a statement from Biden-Harris Campaign Communications Director Michael Tyler:

“Y’all want to talk about age? Let’s talk about age. At 77, Joe Biden beat Donald Trump. At 78, he led us through the COVID crisis, put us on a path to creating nearly 15 million new jobs since the day he took office, and passed the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law to repair our roads and bridges and expand access to broadband internet to every community. At 79, he got us the most significant gun safety legislation in a generation and became the first president to beat Big Pharma and cap the cost of insulin at $35 for seniors. At the same time, he made the single largest investment in history to combat climate change – all before his 80th birthday. Meanwhile, the only helpful thing Donald Trump did for the American people in four years was lose the 2020 election to Joe Biden – and it’s the one thing he won’t take credit for.”

“Now, Joe Biden is 81 and he’s going to beat Donald Trump again because he wakes up every single day fighting for the American people while Trump wages a campaign of revenge and retribution focused on himself. Trump may be four years younger than Joe Biden, but his ideas are old as hell and they’ve already been rejected by the American people. Joe Biden is running to make sure we reject them for good.”

Biden had a good SOTU address and the press is laying off of him for the moment, This ad is good and hopefully there will be more of them that we can see and send around to people who might need to see it. But I do want to caution everyone to be aware that there are going to be many bad days to come. It’s the nature of this closely divided electorate and a media that craves the controversy so I have no doubt we’ll be losing sleep over the next few months. But this moment at least marks the beginning of Biden and his campaign taking the initiative to turn the ship around and it’s heartening to see it.

He doesn’t want women being reminded about his piggish behavior

I’m not surprised he’s having problems getting the money together to pay his massive judgments. He’s such a liar about his net worth and it’s hard to believe that any legitimate financial institution is going to issue a bond for that huge amount required in the fraud case. However, he can sell secrets to rich foreign actors and there’s not much anyone can do about it. I suspect someone is going to bail him out and I don’t know that we’ll ever know who it was or exactly why they did it.

Meanwhile, this piece, also by Haberman, was a delicious little bit of tea about how much Trump hates the hush money case, which may be the only trial that he has to face before the election at this point:

For the past couple of weeks, the spotlight has been focused on the timing of Donald Trump’s four criminal trials and the prospect that at least two of them might not go to a jury before this fall’s election. And the one trial that seems certain to be held before Election Day — his so-called hush money case — has often been dismissed by experts and observers as old, legally dubious and lacking in the sort of weighty issues that sit at the heart of, say, his two election interference cases.

But the hush money case arguably is an election interference case, centering on allegations that, on the eve of the 2016 presidential race, Trump falsified business records as part of a scheme to buy the silence of a porn star to keep her from going public with claims that they had an affair.

And as the trial draws nearer — it is set to start on March 25 in Manhattan — it’s become apparent that prosecutors would like to tell a wide ranging story full of tabloid details, one that could be personally embarrassing to Trump.

The hush money case, which is being prosecuted by Alvin Bragg, the district attorney in Manhattan, has always been an awkward mix of the serious and the profane, based around a seamy tale of extramarital sex, business records and presidential politics. Trump’s aides are blunt that he particularly hates this case given the nature of the story that prosecutors intend to put in front of the jury.

Huh. He doesn’t want to brag that he is the world’s greatest cocksman who bangs porn stars and playmates two at a time? How unusual.

Well good. He should hate it because it’s yet another illustration of one particularly odious aspect of his black character. He has been a disgusting pig toward women his entire life. And apparently, Bragg wants to bring up that fact in the trial

But recently, Bragg and his team asked Justice Juan Merchan, who is presiding over the trial, for permission to tell a much more sweeping tale, one involving not just a single secret payoff but three of them. They also want to relate in detail how Trump used his ties to a publisher of supermarket tabloids to preemptively stop embarrassing accounts about him from seeing the light of day, a process known as “catch and kill.”

And if that were not enough, the prosecutors want to introduce evidence about the infamous “Access Hollywood” tape. In the tape, which surfaced in the closing weeks of the 2016 campaign and captured a conversation from years earlier, Trump spoke openly about grabbing female body parts without permission.

Oh, and by the way, he’s been found guilty of assault and defamation in a federal civil suit and has to pay his victim almost a hundred million dollars. It’s not as if any of this is hard to believe. Everyone knows what he is, even his cult followers who simply admire him for being such a manly man.

They want to bring up Karen McDougal and the doorman they paid off not to say that he fathered a child with his housekeeper (which apparently is not true.) Trump’s lawyers are having a meltdown over this, saying that it’s nothing but an attempt to sully Trump’s reputation with these salacious details which is hilarious. As I said, a jury has already found him to be rapist and he’s on tape talking about grabbing women by the pussy so I think that ship sailed a long time ago.

They’re asking the judge not to allow the prosecution to say anything about trying to influence the election at all ludicrously asserting that he just didn’t want “adverse publicity” coming out about him. Right. I don’t think that’s going to fly since they went to great lengths to conceal the payments with false invoices which they needn’t have done if they weren’t flouting campaign finance laws, which is the heart of this case. It’s not like Melania was pouring over the books.

Haberman looks at the political implications:

When Justice Merchan makes his decision about how much of this extra evidence to allow into the trial, it could have political — and not just legal — ramifications.

Trump’s aides have long regarded the hush money trial as the least legally impactful, given that it relates to allegations of behavior between consenting adults. His supporters viewed the indictment as a partisan attack when it was handed down last March, and that perspective has only hardened as Trump has insisted he’s facing a “witch hunt.”

But the details of Trump’s behavior could also further alienate women and swing voters whose backing he needs in a general election. The details being made public also upset Trump, according to people who’ve spoken with him, and the impact the case may have on his behavior inside and outside court remains to be seen.

It is not in dispute that he paid off those women and he did it in a particularly devious way, working with the National Inquirer. He’ll have to contend with all those details being on the front pages and at the top of the news again and he deserves it. He can insist that it’s a witch hunt all he wants but he can’t dispute the facts. Donald Trump is a pig and the last thing he needs at a time when he’s bragging about banning abortion and IVF being outlawed is for women to be reminded of just how grotesque he really is. You bet he’s losing sleep over this one.

In case you were wondering:

The 2024 State of the Union address drew a larger TV audience than the 2023 address.

President Joe Biden’s speech to Congress averaged 32.23 million viewers across 14 broadcast and cable outlets, almost 5 million more viewers than the 2023 State of the Union. Viewership rose on all of the largest outlets as Biden’s address grew by about 18 percent.

The vast majority of viewers — 28.47 million — watched the State of the Union on the big four broadcast networks (ABC, CBS, Fox and NBC) and the three largest cable news outlets (CNN, Fox News and MSNBC). All seven outlets drew a bigger audience than they did for last year’s address.

Fox News led all outlets with 5.84 million viewers for Biden’s speech, beating out the 5.24 million for ABC, which had the biggest tune-in among the broadcast networks. NBC’s 4.47 million viewers finished third, followed by MSNBC (4.43 million, its biggest audience ever for a State of the Union), CBS (4.09 million), CNN (2.63 million) and the Fox broadcast network (1.77 million).

Univision (970,000 viewers) fell a little from 1.08 million for last year’s State of the Union, while Telemundo (900,000) gained 64,000 viewers, bringing the total for the address 30.34 million. The averages for both Spanish-language networks encompass pre- and post-speech analysis and the Republican response. The remaining 1.89 million viewers viewers came via CNNe, Fox Business, Newsmax, NewsNation and PBS.

Even without factoring in other broadcast and cable channels, the audience on the seven biggest networks surpassed the all-network total of 27.31 million viewers last year. Thursday’s speech was the second largest address to Congress of Biden’s term, behind the 38.2 million who watched the 2022 State of the Union.

NBC had the most viewers in the core news demographic of adults 25-54 with 1.18 million, just ahead of the 1.14 million for Fox News and 1.07 million for ABC. CBS averaged 824,000 viewers in 25-54 demo, followed by CNN (710,000), MSNBC (695,000) and Fox’s broadcast coverage (517,000).

This doesn’t count the many people who watched via streaming and later on Youtube. So, quite a few people saw Biden’s bravura performance.

Now I’m sure someone will find a way to say this is bad news for Joe Biden but in reality I’d imagine that the low bar the right wing (with the help of the media) has set for Biden ended up helping Biden by making more people tune in to see if he would drool on his tie and fall down the stairs. And he most assuredly did not do that.

Peas in a pod

In case you were wondering if all this dictator talk is just liberal hysteria, I give you exhibit A:

Need we say more?