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Regulating Unregulated Militias

Published by Tom Sullivan on January 12, 2024

Raskin and Markey will need increased security

PROUD BOYS marching in front of the US Supreme Court along First Street between Maryland Avenue and East Capitol Street, NE, Washington DC on Wednesday morning, 6 January 2021. Photo by Elvert Barnes Photography CC BY-SA 2.0.

“Democrats Propose Bill to Neuter Militias” is how Vice News described it:

Militias who like to spend their weekends training to overthrow the government could find themselves running afoul of federal law, under new legislation being proposed in the House and Senate Thursday that seeks to curtail paramilitary activity. 

The “Preventing Private Paramilitary Activity Act” is being introduced by Senator Ed Markey from Massachusetts, and Congressman Jamie Raskin of Maryland, both Democrats. 

Here’s the bill.

Here’s Raskin’s statement:

Washington, DC – Following the anniversary of the January 6th attack on the United States Capitol, Congressman Jamie Raskin (MD-08) and Senator Edward J. Markey (D-Mass.) introduced the Preventing Private Paramilitary Activity Act,legislation that wouldcreate a federal prohibition on paramilitary groups through civil and criminal enforcement. The prohibition would hold individuals liable who directly engage in certain types of conduct, including intimidating state and local officials, interfering with government proceedings, pretending to be law enforcement, and violating people’s constitutional rights, while armed and acting as part of a private paramilitary organization.  

There are currently no federal laws that address paramilitary activity or protect millions of Americans whose rights are threatened by this type of violent anti-democratic intimidation. Although all 50 states prohibit private paramilitary conduct, these laws are far too often outdated, underenforced, or ignored. Private military organizations pose a threat not only to national security, but they also present a public safety problem that extends beyond any single state; for example, private paramilitary actors like the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers traveled across state lines on January 6th.  

“Patrolling neighborhoods, impeding law enforcement and storming the U.S. Capitol, private paramilitary groups like the Oath Keepers, the Three Percenters and the Proud Boys are using political violence to intimidate our people and threaten democratic government and the rule of law,” said Congressman Raskin. “Our legislation makes the obvious but essential clarification that these domestic extremists’ paramilitary operations are in no way protected by our Constitution. I’m grateful to Senator Markey for his partnership on this critical effort to protect the rule of law, deter insurrection and defend our democracy.” 

Here’s an excerpt from Markey’s backgrounder:

Legislation Overview: This legislation builds on existing state anti-paramilitary laws to create a new prohibition on unauthorized private paramilitary activity, with both civil and criminal enforcement mechanisms. The prohibition does not bar mere association with paramilitary groups; instead, it holds individuals liable if they engage in certain types of conduct while armed and while acting as part of a private paramilitary organization, which is narrowly defined as a group that is organized in a military-style command structure for the purpose of engaging publicly in pseudo-military or law enforcement-style operations. The categories of prohibited conduct address dangerous conduct engaged in by private paramilitaries:

(1) publicly patrolling, drilling, or engaging in deadly paramilitary techniques;
(2) interfering with or interrupting government proceedings;
(3) interfering with the exercise of someone else’s constitutional rights;
(4) falsely assuming the functions of law enforcement and asserting authority over others; and
(5) training to engage in such behavior.

The legislation creates different tiers of criminal penalties based on whether violations result in injury or property damage; provides harsher penalties for repeat offenders; and allows for a probationary sentence for first-time offenders. Importantly, it also creates civil remedies by authorizing the Department of Justice to seek injunctive relief against paramilitary activity and by creating a private right of action for individuals harmed by paramilitary activity to seek injunctive relief and/or damages. The legislation also contains clear exceptions for activities such as historic reenactments, state-sanctioned trainings, and veterans’ parades.

Penalties for violating the act ramp up from a year of probation for violators with no prior convictions to fines and 5 years for violations involving bodily injury and fines and life imprisonment for violations involving death.

There’s more: they could forfeit their private aresnals under Section 413 of the Controlled Substances Act:

But wait! There’s even more. Members could face civil penalties:

Any person injured as a result of any violation of section 2742 may bring a civil action, individually or jointly with other aggrieved persons, in an appropriate district court of the United States for preventive relief, including an application for a permanent or temporary injunction, restraining order, or other order, or for damages incurred as a result of any violation of section 2742, including reasonable attorney fees and costs.

One weakness is that for any of Items 1-5 (above) to be a violation, actions have to be taken “while acting as part of or on behalf of a private paramilitary organization and armed with a firearm, explosive or incendiary device, or other dangerous weapon.” In the Jan. 6 insurrection photo at the top, no one is openly displaying weapons as militiamen did in 2020 when they occupied the Michigan state capitol to protest COVID closures. But at least it could deter a repeat of events like that.

In 2022, a federal judge “ordered armed members of a group monitoring ballot drop boxes in Arizona to stay at least 250 feet away from the locations following complaints that people wearing masks and carrying guns were intimidating voters.” Pass the Preventing Private Paramilitary Activity Act and it might not get that far. Unless the U.S. Supreme Court sides with the domestic terrorists and their inevitable freedom challenges.

“If enacted, the PPPA will provide tools necessary to deter and prevent paramilitary efforts to undercut our democratic processes and the free exercise of constitutional rights,” said Mary McCord, Executive Director of the Institute for Constitutional Advocacy and Protection at the Georgetown University Law Center.  

For militia types who might wear a couple years in jail as a badge of honor, threatening jail may not be as effective as threatening to confiscate their toys.

Friday Night Soother

Published by digby on January 12, 2024

I usually do animals but I thought this was pretty heartwarming for a cold January night:

JV Last at the Bulwark featured this. It’s about a minor league hockey team, the Hershey Bears, which has a fundraising event in which locals bring stuffed animals for donation. When the team scores its first goal they throw them on to the ice.

Last wrote:

This year, Hershey fans donated almost 74,599 stuffies during the game and you have to see the video to believe it. The rain comes slowly at first and then it picks up. But then it just keeps going, a flood-tide of plush.

Watch and bask in the warmth of people being good.

It’s out there. We just have to look for it.

People Are Not Sufficiently Alarmed

Published by digby on January 11, 2024

Senator Brian Schatz tweeted this yesterday:

He made these remarks today:

People didn’t take Hitler seriously either. Once they realized he meant it, it was too late.

Whining

Published by digby on January 11, 2024

I thought I had heard it all but I’d never heard this before today. It’s from 2015:

As JV Last pointed out in the Bulwark a couple of days ago, this is what Trump means when he says he “negotiates.”

Trump simply demands what he wants, over and over, in different venues, and offers nothing in return except that if you give him what he wants, he’ll let you have peace. For a time.

It’s the tactic of a spoiled child. Which is what he is. And he has another spoiled bully-boy tactic that works for him very well: “I know you are but what am I.” It’s a maddening form of gas lighting that he’s deployed forever but uses pretty adroitly in his political life, mainly because the media just throws up its hands and retreats to “both sides” coverage because it’s easier.

But here’s Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan in the NY Times today actually talking about this tactic:

[A]dvisers say he believes the court appearances dramatize what is fast becoming a central theme of his campaign: that President Biden — who is describing the likely Republican nominee as a peril to the country — is the true threat to American democracy.

Mr. Trump’s claim is the most outlandish and baseless version of a tactic he has used throughout his life in business and politics. Whenever he is accused of something — no matter what that something is — he responds by accusing his opponent of that exact thing. The idea is less to argue that Mr. Trump is clean than to suggest that everyone else is dirty.

It is an impulse more than a strategy. But in Mr. Trump’s campaigns, that impulse has sometimes aligned with his political interests. By this way of thinking, the more cynical voters become, the more likely they are to throw their hands in the air, declare, “They’re all the same” and start comparing the two candidates on issues the campaign sees as favorable to Mr. Trump, like the economy and immigration.

His flattening moral relativism has undergirded his approach to nearly every facet of American public life, including democracy.

[…]

Now, Mr. Trump is repurposing his favored tool to neutralize what many see as his worst offense in public life and greatest political vulnerability in the 2024 campaign: his efforts, after he lost the 2020 election, to disrupt the peaceful transfer of power and remain in office.

Now he’s doing “I know you are but what am I” on Biden:

And his campaign apparatus has kicked into gear along with him, as he baselessly claims Mr. Biden is stage-managing the investigations and legal action against him. Mr. Trump’s advisers have coined a slogan: “Biden Against Democracy.” The acronym: BAD.

Steve Bannon, Mr. Trump’s former chief strategist, said he thought his onetime client was on to something. Mr. Trump is now fighting Mr. Biden over an issue that many Republican consultants and elected officials had hoped he would avoid. They had good reason, given that candidates promoting election denial and conspiracy theories about the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol cost their party winnable races in the 2022 midterm elections.

Mr. Bannon sees it differently.

“If you can fight Biden almost to a draw on this, which I think you can, it’s over,” Mr. Bannon said in an interview, referring to the imperiling of American democracy. “He’s got nothing else he can pitch. This is his main thing.”

Mr. Bannon added, “If Biden wants to fight there, about democracy and all this kind of ephemeral stuff, Trump will go there in a second.”

It does make some MAGA sense in that Trump has been saying the electoral system is rigged since 2016, even after he won. That’s just taken as a given by Republicans. In fact, “voter fraud” has been a rallying cry for decades, long before Trump came along. Just last night Nikki Haley fatuously proclaimed that all ballots should be counted and the election decided onj election night, which is one of the stupidest ideas Trump has ever had.

So now, he’s saying that it’s Biden who’s attacking democracy. But he’s emphasizing the alleged “weaponization” of the Justice Department against him, which is not something that most Americans are buying into. Unfortunately, the “democracy” thing has worked to some extent, at least up until now:

Voter attitudes related to Mr. Biden have shifted as Mr. Trump has tried to suggest that efforts to hold Mr. Trump accountable for his actions are a threat to democracy. In an October 2022 New York Times/Siena College poll, among voters who said democracy was under threat, 45 percent saw Mr. Trump as a major threat to democracy, compared with 38 percent who said the same about Mr. Biden. The gap was even wider among independent voters, who were 14 percentage points more likely to see Mr. Trump as such a threat.

But Mr. Trump’s rhetoric seems to have already altered public opinion, even before the campaign deployed his new slogan. In another more recent survey, 57 percent of Americans said Mr. Trump’s re-election would pose a threat to democracy, and 53 percent said the same of Mr. Biden, according to an August 2023 poll by the Public Religion Research Institute. Among independent voters, nearly identical shares thought either candidate would be a threat to democracy.

The repetition that Mr. Trump has used consistently in his public speeches is a core part of his approach.

“If people think he’s inconsistent on message, he ain’t inconsistent on this message,” Mr. Bannon said of Mr. Trump’s effort to brand Mr. Biden as the real threat to democracy. “Go back and just look at how he pounds it. Wash, rinse, repeat. Wash, rinse, repeat. It’s very powerful.”

Obama adviser David Axelrod told the Times that once the people see Trump in and out of courtrooms facing justice for his crimes, people will feel differently. I hope he’s right. I will say that unless the mainstream media stops this high minded refusal to allow their audience to see how nuts he is, I’m not sure anyone will really understand the depth of his depravity.

Christie To No Labels?

Published by digby on January 11, 2024

FFS

Please, no. Just no:

Former Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.) said Thursday that he wants former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie (R) to consider a third-party presidential bid with No Labels after Christie ended his GOP campaign.

Lieberman, chair of No Labels, brushed off previous comments from Christie denouncing the group’s push for a bipartisan third-party ticket.

“Look, earlier in the year when he was asked about No Labels, he basically said it was not an effort that had any chance of succeeding, but maybe the world will look different to him now,” Lieberman said in a SiriusXM interview with Michael Smerconish. “And I’d like to reach out to him and see if he, Gov. Christie, is at all interested in being on a bipartisan No Labels Unity ticket this year. He could be a very strong candidate.”

Lieberman said Christie “might well be” No Labels “material,” referring to the anti-Trump former governor as “refreshingly independent.” 

“That’s the kind of candidate No Labels is looking for,” he said.

When asked about No Labels in July, Christie called its effort “a fool’ s errand.”

“I’m not in this for showtime. I’m not in this for making a point,” he said. “I’m in this to get elected President of the United States, and there are only two people who will get elected President of the United States: the Republican nominee for president and the Democratic nominee for president.”

Christie is an egomaniac so I won’t be surprised if he goes back on his word and joins up. There are plenty of reports that he’s been talking to them. He is, after all, a Republican. And he is without a home and has no political future so maybe he can sabotage the country. It’s one way to stay relevant I guess.

It appears that they’re going ahead with this outrageous nonsense. Former Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan quit the board, apparently so that he could be put on the ticket. Why so many people feel that this is the moment to make a political point even if it results in Trump winning, I will never understand. Why now?

Trump Had His Moment

Published by digby on January 11, 2024
Lisa Rubin wrote this thread about Trump’s final word this morning:

Chris Kise asks for permission to have Trump speak. Engoron, “Do you promise to just comment on the facts and the law?” Trump starts talking immediately without agreeing. 

“This was a political witch hunt; we should receive damages for what they have taken our company through. They have no documents—they have nothing!” The only thing they have, Trump concedes, is the triplex, which was a mistake. 

“I am not sure the dollar amount would have been that far off, if you want to know!” But Trump continues, “I am an innocent man. I have been politically persecuted. . . . This statute is vicious.” 

“What has happened here is a fraud on ME. . . . The amount of taxes I have paid over this period is close to $300 million. They don’t want me here anymore. I have a problem; they want to make sure I don’t run again.” 

Trump goes on — without any interruption from Engoron or her team — and attacks James, accusing her of election interference. “You have your own agenda,” Trump angrily says to Engoron. “You can’t listen for more than one minute!” 

Engoron pleads with Kise, “Mr. Kise, please control your client.” Trump nonetheless accuses James of going after him for her political gain, including an allegedly “failed” run for Governor, at which point Engoron shuts it down. 

But it’s too late. Everything Trump wanted to say was said. And now, having said it, he has left the courtroom after insisting James should pay him for the havoc she’s wreaked on his company. 

He does what he wants. The man is a total degenerate who has been convinced by his lifetime of flagrantly flouting the law that there are no limits on his behavior. I honestly wouldn’t be surprised if he actually shot someone on 5th Avenue at this point.

Lulz

Published by digby on January 11, 2024

It’s not just pandemic recovery. Job creation under Biden has outstripped Trump’s (and every president in the last 60 years) in every way. Unfortunately, Trump has convinced Americans that his economy was the best the world has ever seen by lying about it constantly and it’s permeated the minds of even those who can’t stand him.

About Last Night

Published by digby on January 11, 2024

I’m not going to recap that runner-up debate last night because it’s completely irrelevant and you missed nothing. (I did watch it and that’s two hours I’ll never get back.) The only thing of note that happened in this primary yesterday was Chris Christie’s speech dropping out of the race which is only worth mentioning because he said a lot of things that Republicans need to hear (not that Fox carried them, needless to say.)

But it is important to hear what Trump is saying because he is going to be the GOP nominee and he is a danger to all of us. He had a competing town hall last night. A few highlights:

Well, actually, he’s answered it many times:

Trump has said the town hall was wonderful and congratulated the Fox moderators for being very professional. In other words it was a love fest where he felt very safe and cozy. Nonetheless, he did say the quiet part out loud a number of times.

Is That A Real Crisis?

Published by Tom Sullivan on January 11, 2024

Or is that a Sears crisis?

Something Anand Giridharadas shares at The Ink is worth noting. He spoke with Daniel Ziblatt, the Eaton Professor of Government at Harvard University and director of the ​​Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies about how world democracies respond to antidemocratic movements.

Giridharadas writes, “People speak of this as an existential moment for democracy, but it also feels like a business-as-usual moment in terms of how many citizens invest their time and energy.”

That’s the way it feels to me too, more like a Sears crisis. People want a movement. Few want to start one.

To preseve this republic, Democrats need to step it up a notch. Except here on the ground their idea of stepping it up a notch is typically doing the same thing, the same way, just more of it. Telling ourselves every freakin’ election is the most important of our lifetimes is counter-productive. Because what do we do in the face of an existential crisis? We play it safe. We stick with what we know. We don’t experiment. That’s a mistake. 

I am trying.

Giridharadas interviews Ziblatt:

I see an imbalance between the professed level of outrage by very large numbers of people about Trump, about Trumpism, about democratic decay, about lies, and the lack of an actual movement. Can you talk about that imbalance?

There’s a book by Eitan Hersh called Politics is for Power. He makes this case about how to move beyond what he calls political hobbyism: people watching MSNBC and feeling like they’re engaged in politics. This is like the community I live in, a place where when you go take your dog for a walk at night, you see everybody’s TVs are on and they’re watching MSNBC, but voter turnout for local elections is 15 percent. And so that’s really a problem that afflicts both red states and blue states.

Institutional change is something that not everybody cares about. Or it’s like a bank shot to get to what you want; it’s an indirect route. If you’re not happy with your life, the idea that we need to introduce, say, proportional representation is an abstraction. So how do you get people to think in institutional terms?

The way to do that is to link institutional reform to the issues that people really care about in their daily lives. Whether that’s abortion rights or gun control; it could be economic policy.

I also think there’s something to be drawn from looking at America’s own great tradition of institutional reform. Up until about 1970, there was a tradition of reforming the Constitution and making our system more democratic. We’ve stopped doing that, and reimagining what’s possible is really important.

The mistake the left makes, Democrats make, and a Biden administration still working from a 20th-century political paradigm makes is to think what people care about most is kitchen table issues. It’s how they express their everyday anxieties, yes, but that’s because what’s eating them goes much deeper than economics. They don’t know how to put into words what they’re really anxious about, or else they have enough residual shame not to talk about it in public.

It seems like authoritarians perfectly understand the actual emotional landscape of the country and of people. And generally pro-democratic leaders don’t. Can you talk about that?

We say emotion, but what’s that mean? It means fear, it means hope, it means aspiration, anxiety.  It’s this fear, fear of loss. This idea that if you have been at the top of the hierarchy, equalization feels like you’re now at the bottom of the hierarchy — that, I think, is a lot of what’s driving our politics, particularly on the Republican side of things.

I would say the hypothesis of the Biden presidency was that if you address people’s material concerns, this will take some of the steam and anger out of the populist movement — this rage that fuels Trump and continues to fuel MAGA. And I think there’s a lot to that. It’s a pretty good bet to make.

But if you look at the persistent low poll numbers and the perception of the economy — I think this is something that people haven’t really dealt with: why are people still not happy? — maybe there’s something else that’s going on. And I think it does have to do with these broader demographic and cultural changes that people are responding to, and not really understanding.

And so I don’t quite know what political leader out there is doing this. I think Biden tries to speak to it to some degree. I think he thinks of himself as being able to do that. He does it better than lots of politicians, but it’s still probably not sufficient.

I think that’s right. The truth lies just below the surface, underneath a scab perhaps, and many are not ready to dig deeper. Meantime, MAGA Republicans are fine with manipulating people’s anxieties about being left out to their advantage. Democrats keep playing to people’s pocketbook “best interests.” Their pitch is, “Democracy is under a threat, imperiled, this could be the last election ever…but I know you’re really concerned about the price of bananas,” as Giridharadas puts it.

Tapping people’s “guts,” as Stephen Colbert famously put it, feels beneath them. We’re forever trying to prove we’re the smartest kids in the room. We rely on political abstractions. Republicans play to raw emotions.

“What we need is to present a vision of what kind of democracy, what kind of society we want — something that can tap into people’s hopes and aspirations,” Ziblatt says.

Paint the beautiful tomorrow. Sell the brownie, not the recipe. Barack Obama did that and went from obscure freshman senator to president.

Ziblatt thinks Biden is on the right track, but to be most effective needs to present a more unifying tableau.

Instead of the campaign speech Biden just gave on Friday [President Biden’s speech in Blue Bell, Pennsylvania on January 5, 2024, which focused on Donald Trump’s threat to democracy], I’d like to have seen a speech given to commemorate January 6th, with Liz Cheney sitting right next to A.O.C., with Dick Cheney in the audience. This shouldn’t be a partisan event. This needs to be a moment of national recognition and consensus, like Spain in 1981. 

Giridharadas laments the lack of visibility on TV of any pro-democracy movement. “Where is this movement? I want to be in it. Can you connect me to something?” people write him in emails.

I’m forwarding the emails to you.

First of all, you have to get involved with real organizations, where people are coming together face to face. This can mean volunteering at your local precinct office of the Democratic Party. It turns out it’s a really low bar to get involved. You could very quickly become the leader of the local precinct office. And then you notice that nobody can meet regularly because they all have kids. So you work to set up a thing where people are sharing childcare duties, and next everyone is thinking about who should be the candidate in the next election.

A dose of Hopium

Yeah, it’s actually work. But it’s work that makes a difference and grows the Democratic bench. People like Trump and George W. Bush were born on third base and think they hit a triple. Many progressives want to start on third base or it’s not worth their time. Get over yourselves.

Last question. Is there a case you’d make for hope? Is there anything in the United States that gives you hope that the authoritarian threat will be overcome?

There are overwhelming majorities of Americans who do value these institutions and value liberal principles, and value principles of racial equality. I was looking at some survey data on whether or not you think there should be rules, restrictions on where people can live on the basis of race. In the mid-1970s, very high percentages of Americans agreed that there should be. Today, overwhelming percentages of Americans think the opposite, conservative and liberal alike.

On a whole series of questions like this, there’s been a major transformation in people’s views about race and racial equality. And as much as we have this moment of Nazis in the streets and racists feeling like it’s possible to talk more vocally, if you look at the numbers, most Americans reject this stuff. If you think of Richard Nixon’s effort to inflame the silent majority in the late 60s and early 70s, it was incredibly successful. Donald Trump’s attempt to do that in 2020 just foundered. And I think it’s because there have been profound changes in most Americans’ basic attitudes. 

There are serious ailments — guns, violence, etc. — but our society at some level has this vibrancy, this health, and our economy is pretty strong as well, though our institutions just don’t reflect that. And so that’s why I’m obsessed with the institutions. I feel like, if we could get our politics right, then it could reflect that more. That’s where I find hope and optimism.