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Published by Tom Sullivan on February 29, 2024

Do not underestimate Gen Z

“North Carolina could flip blue this November, for the first time since Obama won the state in 2008,” reports The Independent.

Let’s push back on the narrative that young people are not excited about their likely choice of two old men for president in 2024. They are. But that’s not the end of the story.

The Independent interviewed young voters at the North Carolina Young Democrats’ annual convention in Durham earlier this month. (Full disclosure: I attended and was one of the event’s sponsors.) Granted, it was a biased crowd:

“The thing that I think people miss the most right now about what’s happening is there’s this narrative that young people are not engaged in politics,” North Carolina Democratic State Party Chair, Anderson Clayton, said. “[People say that] they don’t care. They’re not going to vote this year. And I’m like, ‘No, they are.’ Because young people are not stupid. They are a lot smarter than people give them credit for.”

Maxwell Frost (D-FL), the youngest member of Congress, pointed to young voters’ support of Bernie Sanders’ 2020 presidential campaign as evidence of their voting behavior.

“A lot of young people really loved Bernie Sanders, right? He’s also old. So it’s not really about age, but it’s about policies,” Frost said.

Senator Sanders, who was 78 during his presidential run, obtained nearly half of the youth vote in the Iowa and New Hampshire primaries before suspending his campaign.

“The highest youth voter turnout we’ve ever had in our country’s history was in 2020. Who did they vote for? Joe Biden,” Frost added.

Clayton makes the point even more strongly in a related video.

Ariana Baio (The Independent): Are people excited to vote?

Clayton (bluntly): No. I mean, I’m not going to lie to anybody, right, and I shouldn’t.

But she asks a followup question the press is not asking.

Clayton: I went to UNC Charlotte’s campus the other day and I asked every single one of those students, raise your hand if you are excited to vote for the 80 year old president? Not saying which 80 year old, because Donald Trump might as well be up there too. Nobody in that class raised their hand. But how many of you are still going to vote? Every single one of them raised their hand, except for one.

Clayton: And the thing that I think people miss the most right now about what’s happening is, like, there’s this narrative that young people are not engaged with politics, they don’t care, they’re not going to vote this year. And I’m like, no, they are. The narrative around young folks don’t want to vote for Joe Biden because he’s old? I wish people would dig a little bit deeper into that narrative. To me, young people look at Joe Biden and they say you’re not as progressive, maybe, as we need you to be right now. But we can push him. We can’t push a Donald Trump who doesn’t want young people to have the right to vote right now. We can’t push a Donald Trump who doesn’t want people to have the right to abortion. We cannot push that type of president. We can push a president, though, that believes and cares about young people.

Eve Levenson, Director of Youth Engagement for the Biden-Harris campaign, attended the Durham convention. It is the earliest a presidential campaign has placed a youth organizer in the field, she said.

Ken Martin, Democratic National Committee vice chairman Ken Martin, also chair of Minnesota’s Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party (DFL), was in North Carolina last weekend in a sign that Biden-Harris and the national party believes North Carolina is flippable this year, and that Clayton could make that happen.

Young voters, as Frost said, may have posted the “highest youth voter turnout we’ve ever had in our country’s history” in 2020. But even if they turn out strongly this fall, they’ll have a way to go to catch up with the turnout rates of the oldsters over 45. But Clayton is pushing them hard, not just in this state, but around the country.

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A Second American Revolution

Published by Tom Sullivan on February 29, 2024

MAGA wanted a second Civil War? They wish.

Once again the majority-conservative U.S. Supreme Court has put its thumb on the scales of justice to preserve minority dominance and elite impunity. In what once seemed a stable democratic republic, the equal justice to which it once aspired, at least on parchment, hangs by slender threads. On Wednesday, the court announced in a one-page proclamation that it would review the D.C. Circuit’s ruling that, no, presidents may not assassinate political rivals (or commit other crimes) without legal sanction.

Mark Joseph Stern at Slate:

The Supreme Court has all but guaranteed that Donald Trump will not face trial for his efforts to subvert the 2020 election before this November’s presidential election. On Wednesday, after more than two weeks’ delay, the court issued an order refusing to lift the stay that’s preventing the Jan. 6 trial, prosecuted by Special Counsel Jack Smith, from moving forward. Instead, the court took up the case, scheduling oral arguments for the week of April 22—nearly two months from now. On this timeline, the justices will probably issue a decision near the end of June. That punt gives Trump exactly what he wanted: an extended pause that will make it impossible for Judge Tanya Chutkan to hold a trial in time for the upcoming election.

If Trump wins that election, of course, he will ensure that his Justice Department halts the prosecution and dissolves the charges against him. Which means that SCOTUS has awarded him a powerful incentive to beat Joe Biden by any means necessary, and a good reason to hope that he can evade accountability for Jan. 6.

At least in federal courts. TheTrumpian high from evading federal prosecution will spur his drive to short-circuit remaining state prosecutory efforts, again, by any means necessary. Cultists will cheer on their sovereign.

For the moneyed elite behind Trump, further padding their accounts is a goal, certainly. But for them, for MAGA foot soldiers, for QAnon conspiracists, and Christian nationalists desirous of monarchy in democracy’s clothing, dominance is the real opiate. Or at the least, a return to the strict-father hierarchy George Lakoff mapped out. Put one way, “For my friends everything, for my enemies the law.” Put another, “There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.”

Trump’s case is frivoulous, Stern and others rightly note. Unless the high court means to strip itself of its remaining legitimacy, already in shreds, it will uphold the lower court’s ruling. Eventually. Just not in time for a decision in Jack Smith’s insurrection case before Americans cast their fall ballots. Their actions will reinforce what equal justice has always meant in America: one gets just as much process as one can afford. Including justice denied.

The alarm among MSNBC panelists Thursday evening was palpable, save for Lawrence O’Donnell, convinced more than ever that Trump cannot win another term and make the federal government a Trump-branded fiefdom. I wish I shared his confidence. I shared it in 2016. Briefly.

In calling for revolution in the 1960s, yippie leader Jerry Rubin declared there “one word which Amerika hasn’t destroyed.” Four letters beginning with “F.” The American right has certainly destroyed another with seven letters beginning with “F”: freedom. Their conception is freedom from, not freedom for, someone reiterated recently.

There remains one guardrail left to check the conservative goal of restoring rich, white-Christian hegemony and the destruction of America’s pluralistic, multicultural democracy: Voters.

Chris Hayes said it bluntly Thursday evening. It’s on you, on us, to preserve the republic this fall. I hesitate to use “us or them,” but that’s how the Roberts Court has teed up the 2024 elections.

Your freedoms are on the line. Not abstractions like democracy and the rule of law. Your freedom. Freedom for everyone or for an elite few. This is serious.

You say you want a revolution

The fringiest of the fringe, some even among the Christian right, imagine waging a second Civil War, AR-15s a-blazing, to restore the old times they’ve never forgotten. Their conception: God in his heaven, every man master of his domain, women and children obedient, and non-whites (and non-Christians) subservient and docile.

What’s really at hand is a second Revolution to overthrow the zombie monarchy that two and a half centuries after the first remains shambling and undead. This revolution will be fought with votes.

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The Supremes Just Put Their Thumbs On The Scale

Published by digby on February 28, 2024

They decided to take the immunity case so they’ll hear oral arguments two months from now despite what everyone believes is a bulletproof appellate decision. They didn’t need to hear it and if they did, they sure as hell could have made that decision weeks ago. It’s pretty clear they’re going to slow walk this thing so there’s little chance of a trial before the election.

Former Judge Michael Luttig happened to be on MSNBC when this came down and he said that the fact that they’ve decided to hear this case indicates that there are dissents from the appellate decision. (Gee, I wonder who that could be?) As a result, there is every likelihood that if their ultimate decision is that a president can’t be a blatant criminal with total immunity, there will be dissents and they will take their sweet time.

Recall, it didn’t used to be that way:

It was on [July 24] in 1974 that the U.S. Supreme Court dealt a fatal blow to President Richard Nixon’s presidency, in a decision that led to the release of the Watergate tapes.

The case of United States v. Nixon reached the Court on July 8, 1974, after it had concluded its prior term. The Justices found themselves in new territory as the Court had to deal with an executive privilege claim filed by President Nixon’s attorneys.

A grand jury had returned indictments against seven Nixon aides, including former Attorney General John Mitchell, as part of the Watergate investigation. Leon Jaworski, a special prosecutor appointed by President Nixon, and the seven defendants wanted access to audio tapes of conversations recorded by President Nixon in the White House.

Nixon argued that  the concept of executive privilege gave him the power to withhold sensitive information, such as the tapes, from other government branches in order to maintain confidential communications within the executive branch and to secure the national interest.

On July 24, 1974, a unanimous Court (with Justice Rehnquist not taking part due to a prior role in the Nixon administration) ruled against the President. Chief Justice Warren Burger said that the President didn’t have an absolute, unqualified privilege to withhold information.

“We conclude that when the ground for asserting privilege as to subpoenaed materials sought for use in a criminal trial is based only on the generalized interest in confidentiality, it cannot prevail over the fundamental demands of due process of law in the fair administration of criminal justice. The generalized assertion of privilege must yield to the demonstrated, specific need for evidence in a pending criminal trial,” Burger said.

I lost all respect for the Court when they took Bush v Gore and then decided it on the most fatuous logic ever with a 5-4 partisan decision. I have had little faith in the institution ever since then. By the way, the Bush campaign filed for a stay of the recount on December 8, 2000, the court granted it immediately and agreed to take up the case and then released their decision on December 12. As you can see with US v. Nixon and Bush v. Gore, it doesn’t have to take this long.

I suppose there might be a silver lining in this, but only if the court ultimately decides that a president isn’t immune from the rule of law. If that happens then the election campaign becomes electrified, probably on both sides. We know that if he’s re-elected, on January 20th he will immediately order the DOJ to drop the case or give himself a pardon. If that doesn’t sober up anyone who cares about our country, nothing will.

If the court decides that a president has immunity from prosecution we are not longer a democracy. Even if Trump subsequently loses the election, this will almost certainly end up with a Republican president in the not so distant future who will test this in ways even Trump hasn’t thought of.

A Little Much Needed Levity

Published by digby on February 28, 2024

Trump really did say his rambling is “total genius” and “if I were cognitively impaired, I think I’d know about it.”

How about this?

He has been addled for years. But whether it’s encroaching dementia of some kind or just his panic and distraction over the legal and financial problems he’s facing, he’s getting worse.

I know I don’t have to point out what would happen if Joe Biden said anything like that.

Christian Nationalism On The Rise

Published by digby on February 28, 2024

Even as the vast majority of Americans reject it

Axios reports on the latest PRRI poll on Christian Nationalism. Surprise! Most Americans aren’t for it:

This once-fringe ideology has become prevalent in some deeply red states at a time when the nation overall is increasingly diverse and less religious.

The new data from the nonpartisan Public Religion Research Institute’s American Values Atlas come days after the Alabama Supreme Court ruled that frozen embryos should receive legal protections as “unborn life” — and cited Christianity in its reasoning.

7 out of 10 Americans said they were rejecters (30%) or skeptics (37%) of Christian nationalism, the PRRI survey said.

In California, New York and Virginia, more than 75% of respondents said they were rejecters or skeptics.

 In five deeply red states, at least 45% of respondents said they were adherents or sympathizers of Christian nationalism: North Dakota (50%), Mississippi (50%), Alabama (47%), West Virginia (47%) and Louisiana (46%).

States with the highest levels of support for Christian nationalism form a horseshoe shape, starting in the upper Midwest, dipping down into the deep South, and then through the Appalachian Mountains.

Republicans (55%) are more than twice as likely as independents (25%) and three times more likely than Democrats (16%) to hold Christian nationalist views, the survey found.

Majorities of two religious groups hold Christian nationalist beliefs: white evangelicals (66%) and Hispanic evangelicals (55%). Both groups are strong supporters of former President Trump, other polls have indicated.

 This ideology is mainstream in the Republican party. This is the crisis of democracy as much as anything.

Christian nationalism is a set of beliefs centered around white American Christianity’s dominance in most aspects of life in the United States.

Many Christian nationalists believe the federal government should declare the U.S. a Christian nation.

Many also believe U.S. laws should be based on Christian values and that God has called Christians to exercise dominion over all areas of American society.

“It’s really a claim for an ethno-religious state, and so there’s nothing democratic about that worldview,” Robert P. Jones, president and founder of PRRI, tells Axios. Jones said some Christian nationalists view political foes as evil or demonic rather than as fellow citizens with different opinions, and see them as needing to be conquered.

We may think this is just another group of fringe wingnuts and GOP opportunists angling for power. But the reality is that our democratic system favors minoritarian government (largely due to the necessity of appeasing the slave holders) and this is not something anyone should dismiss out of hand. There is a lot of money and power pushing this stuff for their own reasons. And these people are very serious.

The Grave Digger Of Democracy’s Legacy Is Secure

Published by digby on February 28, 2024

Bye Mitch:

I don’t think anyone who reads this blog needs me to recite chapter and verse of what this man has done to America with his “ends justify the means” tactics. We all know what he’s done. But even he isn’t hardcore enough for the MAGAs.

He says that he knows the politics of his party and he knows that they have become so extreme that they will no longer tolerate him. He’s lost control of them. God help us if Trump wins another term and gets a congressional majority.

Remember The Stem Cell Research Controversy?

Published by digby on February 28, 2024

They insisted that an embryo’s stem cells represented a human with full human rights. Of course IVF is on the chopping block

This was the reason that those “fetal personhood”laws were all passed originally — to placate the extremists who would rather see actual people suffering and dying than allow embryos or fetal tissue to be used for life-saving research. Every time a Republican has been in the white house it’s been a huge controversy. IVF wasn’t discussed much on the right and when it was they turned to the far right Evangelicals who call the embryos “snowflake babies” and insist they should be adopted and implanted. (Considering how many of them there are it would obviously take a “Handmaids Tale” level of forced pregnancies to make that happen.)

Now that they got Roe overturned, the chickens have come home to roost. Here’s Greg Sargent on the GOP’s dilemma on the IVF issue:

When Donald Trump attacked the recent Alabama Supreme Court ruling that frozen embryos should be considered children, it was widely seen as a glaring indicator of a new political reality. Trump and Republicans, analysts noted, recognize the dangers of appearing aligned against in vitro fertilization and are bolting from the decision as fast as possible.

But for a largely overlooked reason, this political morass will be harder for Republicans to extricate themselves from than they might think. This issue will continue playing out not just on the federal level but also at the level of the states, where the true implications of GOP positions on reproductive rights will be harder to evade.

Democrats are planning to make a big issue out of IVF in this year’s battle for control of state legislatures, strategists tell me. This will entail highlighting state-level bills and laws that define fetuses as people and could impact access to IVF, especially now that anti-choice activists are emboldened by the Alabama ruling.

[…]

Democrats plan to highlight the GOP push for so-called “fetal personhood bills,” which seek to enshrine full rights for fetuses on the grounds that life begins at fertilization. According to the Guttmacher Institute, proposals have been introduced in at least a dozen states, reflecting the rush of anti-abortion legislation unleashed by the U.S. Supreme Court decision in 2022 striking down abortion rights.

Many of these bills don’t have protections for IVF, says Candace Gibson, the institute’s director of state policy. Gibson notes that the implications of these proposals for IVF remain murky, as this is largely uncharted legal territory. But she says the Alabama ruling could galvanize some anti-choice activists to push a fetal personhood agenda “even more aggressively.”

The Alabama ruling revolved largely around language in the state constitution. But as The New Republic’s Matt Ford has explained, it demonstrates that the logic of fetal rights leads fairly straightforwardly to prohibitions on IVF, making it a highly significant moment for the fetal personhood movement’s pursuit of state-level legislation.

People have been warning that these “fetal personhood” bills inevitably lead to banning IVF and ultimately surveillance of pregnant women for “suspicious” miscarriages if Roe was overturned. It is the logical consequence of banning abortion.

Think about it. These people have been outlawing stem cell research with embryos successfully going back decades because they say that it’s killing a child That’s the basis for “fetal personhood” bills in the congress and around the country. How on earth can they now say that IVF should be exempt but life-saving research isn’t?

These anti-abortion zealots have always been extremists. They been terrorists, fergwdsakes, blowing up clinics and assassinating doctors! Sure, they can be pragmatic for the sake of their crusade but they aren’t giving it up. They know they need Trump in the White House so they may back off of a national ban until he gets back in but they’ll keep pressuring the state houses. And they’ll keep electing judges like those in Alabama who made their decision for religious not constitutional reasons.

I’m not saying that Alito and Gorsuch and Kavanaugh and the rest of the sadistic six can’t dance on the head of a pin to find some illogical reason why IVF is different than stem cell research or miscarriage and therefore should be exempt, but it will obviously be fallacious. The fact is that if an embryo is considered a person with full human rights in one situation it has to be considered a full human being in all situations and there are few people in this country who agree with any of that, even among the fetal crusaders. And that’s because it doesn’t meet any real world test that most of us have to face in one way or another.

As of right now, there are 14 states with pending Fetal Personhood Bills. The proposed federal Life At Conception Act, was co-sponsored by 125 House Republicans. There’s no carve out for IVF in their bill.

Another Day Another Looming Shutdown

Published by digby on February 28, 2024
https://twitter.com/highbrow_nobrow/status/1762586419384496597?s=20

Here we are again looking right down the barrel of a government shutdown because one half of one of the three branches of government is completely dysfunctional under GOP leadership. We’re talking about the Republican House of Representatives of course. They are simply incapable of passing legislation. In fact, 2023 was the least productive year since the Great Depression with congress passing just 27 bills that became law. (In 1948 President Harry Truman famously called the legislative branch the “do nothing congress” because they only managed to pass 511 bills.)

This is the third time in six months that the country has been on the brink of a shutdown because the hard right in the House is holding their breath until they turn blue. It’s not clear what they want except perhaps to cause more chaos. The last time it cost Speaker Kevin McCarthy his job and the same fate may very await Speaker Mike Johnson as well. There’s nothing in his performance so far that suggests he has the skill or the desire to finesse this situation.

There’s no need to reiterate the saga that continues over the Ukraine and border funding. We know that both parties came to the table and negotiated in good faith to come to an agreement on both of those issues to meet the demands of the right wingers. But Donald Trump directed them to walk away because he believes passage of any bill will help Joe Biden in the election in the fall and they did it. So, at the moment, funding for Ukraine, the border, Israel, Taiwan and Gaza is dead and Republicans are screaming incoherently about how the border must be dealt with even though they just shot down a bill that any hard-line, immigrant hating right winger should have been thrilled to vote for. None of that makes any sense at all.

But there are a whole bunch of other spending bills caught in limbo as well, while the government continues to operate on the 2022 budget that was passed by the Democratic House under former Speaker Nancy Pelosi. As it stands, unless they pass another continuing resolution or come to some kind of agreement, about 20 percent of the federal budget will shut down on March 2. The rest of the government goes down one week later, at midnight on March 9. 

Johnson bought himself some time last fall when he first succeeded McCarthy and managed to pass the continuing resolution that’s coming due this week. The House returned from another extended break this week (they’re very tired) and found that whatever talks had been going on during their vacation had gotten nowhere. It’s hard to know exactly what the hang-up is but according to the NY Times, the far right has an assortment of demands such as reversal of “a rule that aims to broaden access to abortion medication or a policy that could make it harder for some veterans deemed mentally ill to purchase guns” and they insist on limiting food stamps for the poor.

On Tuesday the four congressional leaders, Johnson, House Minority leader Hakeem Jeffries, Senate Majority leader Chuck Shumer and Senate Minority leader Mitch McConnell met with President Biden and VP Kamala Harris in the White House to assess the lay of the land. They all reported that they were “optimistic” that they can reach an agreement but they were short on details.

They all ganged up on Johnson, including McConnell, on the Ukraine funding, trying to get him to let that bill come to the floor so they can get it done. Johnson used to be in favor of it, but he’s firmly under Trump’s thumb so who knows if he’ll budge on that? He’s now pushing the fatuous notion that he can only do it if Biden uses executive authority to close the border immediately. The NY Times reported:

After the meeting, Mr. Johnson said of the foreign assistance bill that House Republicans were still “actively pursuing and investigating all the various options on that, and we will address that in a timely manner.”

But he reiterated his stance that the effort should take a back seat to immediate action to crack down on migration at the U.S. border with Mexico. “The first priority of the country is our border and making sure it’s secure,” Mr. Johnson said. “I believe the president can take executive authority right now today to change that.”

Biden tried to educate him about how it would cost money to do that, which will only be available if they pass the bill that appropriates it.

Axios reports that one of the negotiators, Sen. Susan Collins, R-Me, thinks they could unveil a compromise as early as today. But after what the Republicans pulled with the Ukraine/border agreement it’s hard to imagine how anyone could trust them to keep their word. Who knows what they’ll pull out of their hat at the last minute? And has anyone consulted Dear Leader Donald Trump? In the past he has been in favor of a government shutdown because he thinks it hurts the Democrats, the same rationale he used when he ordered them to scuttle the border bill. He’s a bit distracted with all his legal problems at the moment, so maybe they can slip something by before he looks up and realizes they’ve actually done something.

It’s all up to Johnson in the end. He knows he can pass these bill in minutes and get everything funded, including Ukraine and the border, immediately if he will bring the bills to the floor and allow it to pass with Democratic votes and a handful of sane Republicans. But he may very well lose his speakership if he does it, just as McCarthy did. There is nothing so far to indicate that he has the character or the guts to sacrifice his ambition to do that even though many lives are at stake here in the US and around the world. But considering that he always says that if you want to know his values all you have to do is read the Bible, if there’s one guy you’d think who would ask himself “what would Jesus do?” it would be Mike Johnson. So far, it appears he’s more likely to ask himself “what would Trump do?” instead.

Last night Jake Sherman of Punchbowl News reported that despite promising that there would be no more continuing resolutions, he has proposed to extend the deadlines from March 1st to March 8th and March 22nd. There is no word as of this writing whether the Senate and the White House will accept it.

Salon