Also, this happened:
We can’t let these people take power. We just can’t.
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Digby's Hullabaloo Posts
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
It’s astonishing that anyone would think that man is fit to be president.
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.
Of camels’ noses and tents
We’ve warned plenty about the New Apostolic Reformation and the Seven Mountains people. Long before us, Richard Hofstadter warned about the paranoid style in American politics in 1964 in the wake of the McCarthy era. The paranoid style in American religion is closely related.
In the late 1970s, Republican operatives decided on mobilizing useful idiots on the religious right for conservative political purposes. They invited the camel to poke its nose under the tent. And in the fullness of time we got QAnon and Trump and MAGA. ALL ONE, like the pepermint soap.
Of camels’ noses and tents
Axios reports this morning that while Christian nationalism is on the rise, it still remains widely unpopular:
About two-thirds of Americans reject or are skeptical about Christian nationalism despite its rising influence that’s shaping education, immigration and health care policies, a new survey finds.
Why it matters: Some Republicans are openly expressing Christian nationalist views, which have ranged from calls for more religion in public schools to book bans and even suggestions that democracy should die.
- 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 big picture: 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.”
Zoom in: 7 out of 10 Americans said they were rejecters (30%) or skeptics (37%) of Christian nationalism, the PRRI survey said.
How fringe are Christian nationalists? In echoes of Steve Bannon’s nihilistic rhetoric about burning the government to the ground, Fred Clarkson reports that these “prophets” want to burn down religion too:
It is more than paradoxical that an ostensibly Christian university leader would say, “We are here to put a knife to the throat of religion.” But that’s what Apostle Greg Hood, the founder of Kingdom University in Franklin, Tennessee believes so heartily he emblazoned it on a KU t-shirt.
This is not a hoax. In fact, the bloody tee epitomizes the paradoxes of the New Apostolic Reformation—a movement that says it means to bust out of the “demonic prison” of religion, knives out. Religion is, of course, one of the seven mountains of culture that NAR seeks to conquer to achieve Christian dominion (the other six being government, family, education, business, media, and arts & entertainment). The rhetoric they employ when discussing how to do it can be violent, if not always t-shirt worthy. But understanding the paradox of religion killing religion helps us understand this campaign for a paradigmatic change in the direction of American and world Christianity.
There’s a certain tension in the NAR, between the metaphorical and the physical; the hyperbolic and the actual. But most often, these are not mutually exclusive.
Trump played that tension like a violin ahead of Jan. 6. These dudes do the same. Apostle Greg Hood said, “We’re dealing with demonic strongholds that are controlling people, that are using people to keep their agenda.” Spooky much?
He nevertheless claims “we’re not attacking people”—even as he employs military metaphors and scenarios in which people would inevitably be killed in real life, including by nuclear weapons and drone strikes.
“Wicked things… are happening in our nation,” he says, because “wicked people are ruling at the moment.”
You know how this works. Trump did on Jan. 6: “We fight like hell. And if you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore.”
It’s a heavenly battle and a real one.
Even as top apostles prime the pump for possible real-world violence, and encourage the Ekklesia to envision themselves as an End Times army, they are, paradoxically, also planning for the future governance of society. While it’s not uncommon for churches to sponsor Christian schools, at least one apostolic center, Impact Church International in Concord, North Carolina, not only hosts a KU campus, but also the K4-12 Daniel Christian Academy, which is explicitly devoted to teaching about the seven mountains of dominion.
What, no blood-drinking pedophiles?
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Simon sums it up
The press loves a horse race like the kid in the story assumes in a room full of manure there must be a pony. Naturally, the Washington Post reports “warning signs for Biden, Trump and Haley” in the Michigan primary results from Tuesday night. The race is on! And it’s a nail-biter!
President Biden and former president Donald Trump won the Democratic and Republican primaries in Michigan by huge margins Tuesday night — but there were serious problems for both candidates lurking under the surface.
Trump crushed Nikki Haley by over 40 points.
Biden, meanwhile, won the Democratic primary by an even more overwhelming margin — but 13 percent of voters marked their ballots “uncommitted” following a campaign to persuade voters to not to support Biden in protest of his support for Israel and his refusal to call for a cease-fire in Gaza.
The protesters want a cease-fire. They don’t want Biden to call for one. Biden and his team have been pressing Israel’s Bibi Netanyahu unsuccessfully for a cease-fire for weeks.
The press wants to build suspense, though.
While Trump has won every primary so far, Haley’s ability to keep winning so many votes even though she lacks a clear path to the nomination raises questions about how many of her voters will back Trump in November.
There’s trouble for Biden as well.
More than 100,000 Democratic primary voters marked their ballots “uncommitted,” far exceeding the modest goal of 10,000 votes set by Listen to Michigan, the group that organized the campaign.
It wasn’t just protest votes by Palestinian Americans and allies horrified over carnage in Gaza. Protest votes by Armenians muddy the waters further. They mounted their own “uncommitted” effort over Biden’s support for Azerbaijan “which launched a military offensive in the disputed Nagorno-Karabakh region last year. The region had been under the control of Armenian separatists for decades.”
With no exit polls conducted in Michigan, what the “uncommitted” vote means is unclear (New York Times):
A vote for “uncommitted” was a serious form of protest against Mr. Biden, but it’s just not the same as voting for Donald J. Trump in the general election. That simple fact limits how much we can read into the results for November, especially as there was no exit poll to offer insight into the attitudes of protest voters.
At the same time, it’s also possible that Mr. Biden’s problems go well beyond those who voted uncommitted in a primary. The typical Democratic primary voter is disproportionately old, white and loyal to Democrats. Mr. Biden might be faring even worse among the kinds of Democratic-leaning voters who stayed home.
But despite overwhelming wins by both Trump and Biden, anything could happen!
Simon Rosenberg doesn’t have to sell papers or advertising. His message to Democrats has remained consistent for months: “I would much rather be us than them.”
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