Digby's Hullabaloo Posts

It’ usually the debt ceiling or the budget. This time it’s the border. Can this ritualized GOP stunt make Democrats pay this time?

Generally, it’s always fair to assume that the American right wing is 100% hypocritical in all things. They do not practice what they preach and they preach a lot. So, I think we would all have thought that while they desperately want to give Donald Trump dictatorial power, it’s the last thing they would want to grant President Joe Biden. And yet as these negotiations over immigration have played out, it’s clear they want Biden to seize dictatorial powers as well, at least on that issue. I guess we can say that they have some consistency after all.

After years of insisting that the congress must act to “protect the border” and browbeating the Democrats for their alleged failure to do it, they are now giving Joe Biden the green light to use executive orders the way Donald Trump used them. They once railed against such supposed usurpation of congressional prerogatives when a Democrat was in the White House but now they argue that they have no role to play and it’s all up to the president. (They say this, by the way, even as they whine incessantly over Biden’s attempts to relieve Americans of their crushing burden of student loan debt, claiming that he’s behaving like a tyrant.)

All of this is nothing but another right wing kabuki dance, staged by the Republican Party whenever they come close to getting what they’ve asked for. For them, this is all a game in which they believe they can strong arm Democrats into total capitulation. They put on quite a show but it never works.

In the past they tended to play this hand around economic issues, rending their garments over the deficit, demanding that Democrats slash domestic spending to the bone or they will refuse to raise the debt ceiling or fund the government. In fact, they have done just that in the past year which resulted in the ouster of former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy by the right wing when he negotiated a deal with the Democratic Senate and the White House to raise the debt ceiling and avoid economic catastrophe. This wasn’t the first time they did this and it also resulted in the resignation of an earlier GOP speaker. This tactic doesn’t hurt the Democrats, it hurts their own leaders.

The plan this year was to jam the White House in an election year over the budget to hammer home the allegedly terrible Biden economy in the run up to the election. But as it happens the economy has made a robust recovery from the mess created by the pandemic so that issue doesn’t look like it’s going to be the big winner they expected it to be. They’ve shifted their focus to immigration after having turned to issue into a roiling “crisis” by shipping migrants to Democratic run cities around the country to own the libs and inflame the xenophobic right.

The idea with the legislation was to up the ante by combining funding for more border security with the vital need for military equipment to Ukraine and further support for Israel and Taiwan. The thinking was that the bipartisan desire to help Ukraine and Israel would push through the border part but it didn’t turn out that way. When he finally started to see the writing on the wall, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell dryly said last week, “the politics have changed” but actually, they really haven’t.

The original concept that everyone would have something to love and hate in the bill and they’d all make their peace with it and move on is how negotiations are supposed to work and there are members who still think that’s how it should be, particularly in the Senate. The MAGA faction however, like the Tea Party before them, think negotiating is for losers. So the Republicans got tough and told Biden that he was going to have to swallow a terrible border deal that offers nothing to the Democrats in return for not allowing Russia to prevail in Ukraine and supplying more military aid for Israel.

Biden capitulated and they got what they said they wanted. And, surprise, it turns out it wasn’t what they wanted after all. Now they say they want Biden to unilaterally declare war on the border via executive order and are refusing to do any deal at all. They argue that the deal that’s being discussed authorizes the president to “close the border” when the number of crossings reaches a certain threshold and that’s just not good enough. Speaker Mike Johnson tweeted this utterly fatuous statement last night: “Any border “shutdown” authority that ALLOWS even one illegal crossing is a non-starter. Thousands each day is outrageous. The number must be ZERO.”

There has never been nor will there ever be “zero” migrant crossings on the US Mexico border. Nothing could be more absurd. But that makes it very clear that they have no intention of doing any kind of deal. They have shifted the responsibility completely on to Biden and that’s where they will leave it.

This is reminiscent of the budget negotiations back in 2011 when then VP Joe Biden got involved in the delicate budget negotiations and agreed to give away the store on Social Security only to have the Tea Party refuse to take yes for an answer. We ended up with a Rube Goldberg sequestration compromise that ended up serving the Democrats better than the Republicans, thankfully. There were no cuts to Social Security and the Republicans lost badly in 2012, largely because the country was appalled by their antics.

The question today is whether the dynamic has changed in their favor or if this issue is more potent than government shut downs and threats of economic catastrophe. This time, the real incentive for the Republicans to tank this negotiation is because Donald Trump wants them to. He has said so plainly, making it clear that doesn’t want the Democrats to have a win on this issue.

The last thing any of them want is to stop the bleeding and that includes the horror of children drowning in the Rio Grande because Trump ally Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, joined by 25 other red state governors, is provoking a constitutional crisis by defying the Supreme Court and refusing to allow the Border Patrol to do its duty. And they are about to put on a full-fledged spectacle by impeaching the DHS Secretary over policy differences, which even their own legal allies say does not fit the definition of high crimes and misdemeanors. And, as we know too well, there can be no conviction in the Senate without a 2/3rd majority so it’s really just another exercise in futility.

The big question is whether or not this latest stunt will succeed for the GOP where all the others have failed. The ongoing chaos in the House and Trump’s blatant demand to keep the issue for his election argue in favor of it ending with a whimper not a bang. But nothing can be taken for granted right now and we have to hope that somehow we find our way through this mess without too many people suffering and dying because of it. It’s not looking very hopeful at the moment.

Salon

As MAGAs pitch hissy fit over Taylor Swift and immigration

Axios reports this morning that our Biden-led, post-pandemic U.S. recovery is outpacing other G7 economies:

The United States economy grew faster than any other large advanced economy last year — by a wide margin — and is on track to do so again in 2024.

Why it matters: America’s outperformance is rooted in its distinctive structural strengths, policy choices, and some luck. It reflects a fundamental resilience in the world’s largest economy that is easy to overlook amid the nation’s problems.

By the numbers: U.S. GDP looks to have grown 2.5% in 2023, according to the IMF’s hot-off-the-presses World Economic Outlook, the highest among the G7 economies (Japan was second at 1.9%).

• IMF economists forecast similarly best-in-class growth this year, with 2.1% U.S. growth (second place: Canada at 1.4%).

The largest federal investments in infrastructure and manufacturing in decades, championed by the Biden administration, contributed significantly.

Growth in the U.S labor force also helped, Axios adds, “both due to more Americans choosing to enter the workforce and a surge in immigration.” Read that again.

Adam Posen, president of the Peterson Institute for International Economics (no, not that one) tells Axios:

• “The enormous labor market churn of COVID in 2020-21 had the unintended benefit of moving millions of lower income workers to better jobs, more income security, and/or running their own businesses,” Posen tells Axios.
• “We are reaping the benefits of it now in labor force participation, wage growth, and improved productivity,” which was “very different from Europe and Japan where most workers remained tied to their pre-COVID jobs.”

Meantime, House Republicans refuse to do productive legislative work for which you and I are paying them.

The GOP-led House Homeland Security Committee on Tuesday passed two articles of impeachment against Alejandro N. Mayorkas, Biden’s homeland security secretary, the New York Times reports, despite lack of evidence “of a crime or acts of corruption.” Republicans on the panel argue “that the Biden administration border policies he implemented ran afoul of the law. Legal scholars, including prominent conservatives, have argued that the effort is a perversion of the constitutional power of impeachment, and Democrats remained solidly opposed (New York Times):

In an 18-to-15 party-line vote, the panel endorsed a resolution charging Mr. Mayorkas with refusing to uphold the law and breaching the public trust by failing to choke off a surge of migrants across the United States border with Mexico.

That, as Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) refuses to take up any remedy for border security. Rep. Robert Menendez (D) of New Jersey let loose on his GOP colleagues.

Menendez: We have not lived up to our oversight obligation on this committee because you all bend the knee to the orange Jesus pic.twitter.com/kGjacyunOr

— Acyn (@Acyn) January 31, 2024

Clowns to the left of him, jokers to the right.

The GOP has no king but orange Jesus, and no policies to run on in 2024 except immigration and being against wholesome, Disney-esque romance.

Pennsylvania Supremes condemn Dobbs

While MAGA went gaga over Democrats’ secret plot “to turn Taylor Swift into an international pop star and the Kansas City Chiefs into a football dynasty so Swift could then date a Kansas City player and leverage the collective media coverage to get Joseph R. Biden, Jr. elected as President,” the Pennsylvania Supreme Court was throwing the Dobbs decision overturning Roe back in the U.S. Supreme Court’s faces.

Pennsylvania’s highest court ruled on Monday that a woman’s right to reproductive autonomy is “fundamental” (WHYY):

With four separate concurring opinions — three of which also dissented in part from the majority opinion — the 219-page decision in Allegheny Reproductive Health Center v. PA Department of Human Services is complex. However, the key — and unanimous — finding was that patients and abortion providers could challenge the state’s 1982 Abortion Control Act, which prohibits the use of Medicaid to cover funding for abortions.

The lower court, the Commonwealth Court, had previously said that access to abortion didn’t have anything to do with women’s rights or women’s equality and, therefore, the petitioners did not have merit to file the case — a decision the Supreme Court overruled.

“Justice Samuel Alito’s majority opinion rested largely on the views of dead white men who condoned the rape, beating, and murder of women to maintain female subjugation in every realm of life,” Dahlia Lithwick and Mark Joseph Stern write at Slate. Abortion restrictions, the Pennsylvania court ruled, amount to sex-based discrimination that is “presumptively unconstitutional” under the state’s equal protection amendment.

[Note: The Slate column misidentifies the link to the concurrence as the 219-page majority opinion.]

Justice Christine Donohue wrote, “the right to make healthcare decisions related to reproduction is a core important right encompassed by the enmeshed privacy interest protected by our Charter.”

Tori Oten writes for The New Republic:

The case will now return to the lower Commonwealth Court to determine if Medicaid should cover abortion and if abortion is constitutionally protected. The state government must prove that banning Medicaid from covering most abortions does not violate the ERA.

Lithwick and Stern lay out the implications:

The majority vehemently rejected Dobbs’ history-only analysis, noting that, until recently, “those interpreting the law” saw women “as not only having fewer legal rights than men but also as lesser human beings by design.” Justice David Wecht went even further: In an extraordinary concurrence, the justice recounted the historical use of abortion bans to repress women, condemned Alito’s error-ridden analysis, and repudiated the “antiquated and misogynistic notion that a woman has no say over what happens to her own body.”

The Pennsylvania Supreme Court’s decision thus spurned Dobbs in two ways. First, the majority held that laws regulating a woman’s body do discriminate on the basis of sex, a truth that has been widely understood by legal scholars for decades. And second, the majority explained that rooting women’s rights in the past is, itself, a form of sex discrimination, perpetuating misogynistic beliefs about gender inequality by judicial decree. As it was leaked and then published with almost no corrections to its myriad errors, Dobbs set off a firestorm of real-time criticism within the public, the legal academy, and the media, and that criticism is now finally returning to the courts—in the form of decisions that both defy and rebuke Dobbs’ chauvinistic logic.

Wecht took on Dobbs directly, describing it as myopic for disregarding “the broader guarantees” of the Constitution.

In his concurrence, Wecht explicitly linked Donohue’s equality-based argument to Dobbs’ flaws. “We cannot examine particular laws in their historical context without also examining the society in which those laws developed,” he wrote. “The Dobbs majority relied upon the patriarchal notions of eminent authorities of old English common law, including Lord Matthew Hale,” whose “beliefs were driven by his goal of keeping women from encroaching upon the rights of men.” Hale, “who presided over the hanging of two women accused of being witches,” thought that giving women “legally enforceable rights over their own bodies was a threat to the freedom of men.” He also insisted that marital rape “was never a crime because marriage amounted to the wife’s (but not the husband’s) irrevocable consent to sex.”

Those days are done, no matter what Samuel Alito thinks. What the Pennsylvania case demonstrates is that “state constitutions will be more essential than ever to protect against the misogynistic and revanchist efforts to restore women to subordinate and indeed powerless vessels,” Lithwick and Stern conclude.

Let’s hope more such cases in additional states challenge Dobbs based on equal protection provisions in their state constitutions. Guess we should have ratified that Equal Rights Amendment after all, huh?

Adam Serwer with an interesting observation on the Supreme Court’s decision in the Texas border case which Gov. Abbott and 25 other red state extremist Governors are openly defying:

There are many factors that led to this point. One is the reigning Republican ideology of Trumpism, which holds that only conservative electoral victories, conservative laws, and conservative governments are legitimate and must be obeyed—the ideology that led a mob to ransack the Capitol to overturn an election. Another is the steady drumbeat of catastrophizing right-wing propaganda about the recent rise in migrants at the border, which seeks to validate extreme responses, including violence and lawlessness. But even accounting for those two elements, the most significant proximate reason for Abbott’s response may be that four Supreme Court justices sent Abbott an implicit message that they agreed with him.

When the Court sided with the Biden administration, it was a 5–4 split, with Justices John Roberts and Amy Coney Barrett joining the three Democratic appointees. This should have been a unanimous ruling; for more than a century, the Supreme Court has held that the federal government has jurisdiction over immigration law in most cases and that the states cannot usurp that jurisdiction just because they disapprove of federal policy. Abbott is now thumbing his nose at the federal government and, by extension, the authority of the high court itself, and four Republican appointees—Brett Kavanaugh, Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, and Neil Gorsuch—are saying: Go right ahead.

That’s certainly how the right wingers interpreted it. Roberts and Barrett are RINO squishes and might as well be Nancy Pelosi’s bffs. The only ones who count are the Fascist Four and they said that defying the federal government was just fine.

Serwer points out that this is actually stupid on their part:

The four justices’ little act of sympathy with Abbott’s antics has created a problem for the Court. If states can openly defy Supreme Court orders, then the justices no longer have influence. All of the justices grasped this dilemma last September, when they smacked down an attempt by Alabama Republicans to refuse to follow a Supreme Court decision on the Voting Rights Act. Abbott’s reaction should give them some perspective: Their decision was not merely symbolic; it undermines their own power and legitimacy.

Conservatives may believe that they are the only ones entitled to play constitutional hardball and ignore the law if they don’t feel like following it. But the more the Supreme Court allows Republican politicians and GOP-run states to get away with defying the law, the less obligated their Democratic counterparts will feel to follow their dictates. And at that point, they won’t have any power at all.

They don’t believe that any Democratic state would dare to do that because their voters aren’t inclined to the kind of extremism that would lead to civil war. But things can change. They’re pushing it.

JV Last at the Bulwark points out that everyone needs to take a breath and remember that Nikki Haley is untrustworthy. All you have to do is look back at the way she’s been trying to have it both ways throughout the primary campaign to realize it. I would add that her decision to work for Trump and then sing his praises when she left the administration, promising to campaign for “this one” gesturing to Dear Leader was a low point.

Anyway, Last writes:

Nick Catoggio argues that Haley is trying to execute “the Half Liz.” He means that she’s attempting to thread the needle between the Liz Cheney and Ron DeSantis positions on Trump:

[Q]uestioning his mental stability and vouching for the defamation judgment are meaningful, if lesser, transgressions to GOP orthodoxy in their own right. By moving past policy to blame him for causing his own biggest problems, Haley is rejecting the first commandment. From “chaos follows him” to “he surrounds himself in chaos”: That’s the half Liz.

But Catoggio points out that what Haley is saying about Trump now will ultimately matter a lot less than what she says after she quits the race:

[W]hat Nikki Haley says about Trump after her campaign ends will be much more significant than what she says about him during its current “hospice care” stage. The half Liz strategy is fine for now—she’s earned the benefit of the doubt on her political instincts by overperforming in the primary—but if she turns around after exiting the race and supports Trump, she’ll have proved my critique correct. Unless it eventually progresses to the full Liz, the half Liz is ultimately just a “permission structure” to vote MAGA in the general election, albeit a bit more grudgingly than you otherwise might have.

I wouldn’t get my hopes up. Last notes that she is still trying to hedge her bets quoting her saying that despite all his problems, “I trust the American people to make good decisions.”

“I trust the American people to make good decisions” is tautological. It’s declaring that any decision which the public makes is, by definition, the good one.

But it’s not just tautology. It’s a permission structure. Haley is laying the groundwork to endorse Trump because, if the voters choose Trump as the nominee, then they must be correct. Nikki Haley has off-loaded her capacity to reach critical judgments concerning Trump. That’s simply in the hands of The People.

And who is she to tell Republican primary voters that they’ve made a terrible decision?

The logical contradiction is obvious. Here’s the first theorem:

IF, Nikki Haley trusts the American people to make good decisions . . .

AND in 2016 and 2020 one group of the American people—Republican voters—chose to nominate Trump . . .

THEN these must have been good decisions.

But how does that gibe with the second theorem:

IF in 2020 an even larger group of the American people decided that they preferred Joe Biden to Donald Trump . . .

THEN that was a good decision, too.

You can reconcile them by simply agreeing that Biden > Trump.

But Haley has to square it with a third theorem:

IF Republican voters decide to nominate Trump for a third time . . .

THEN this is a good decision . . .

AND People should vote for Biden this time, too . . .

BECAUSE Biden > Trump.

As Last concludes, she is certainly going to endorse Trump when all is said and done. It will be a total shock if she doesn’t.

Meaning that, again, this is a politicians who will simply say anything.

Of course she is. She will do anything to preserve her viability. But, in truth, she will have none. If he wins he will never forgive her. If he loses the base will never forgive her. She should probably go full-Liz in the hopes that somehow the GOP will come to its sense in the next few years and reward those who stood up. But she won’t. She’s cooked.

Elected Republicans can’t agree on anything these days. (Well, except for their love and commitment to Dear Leader Trump.)

Fireworks erupted during a closed-door House Republican whip meeting on Monday night, Axios has learned.

House Republicans are bitterly divided over the bipartisan tax deal struck by Ways and Means Chair Jason Smith (R-Mo.), but they’re being side-stepped by Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.).

Smith and Rep. Mike Lawler (R-N.Y.) could be overheard in a heated exchange outside the meeting, with the New York Republican hammering the measure for not including a provision on raising the State and Local Tax deduction (SALT) cap — a key priority for members in high-tax states.

The tense conversation came as Johnson told a group at a Congressional Institute event that House GOP leadership has decided to move forward with the tax deal on suspension.

This procedural move requires a 2/3 vote to pass the House, but prevents small groups of members from blocking a vote.

 “I understand these guys’ frustration, both political and policy wise,” bill supporter Rep. Kelly Armstrong (R-N.D.) told Axios.

“But I think at the end of the day you’ve got to try and get as many votes as you can otherwise you’re not gonna have any chance of movement in the Senate.”

“I get it if you’re from New York and California you’d like to get some tweaks,” another member said.

The deal struck by Smith and Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) would bolster the child tax credit and provide research and development credits for businesses.

Multiple GOP members argued they think more time should be provided to members to be briefed and allowed to provide their input on the bill.

Some conservatives have argued that they’re concerned the Child Tax Credit language not requiring a parent to have a Social Security number would provide a tax break for undocumented immigrants and feel it shouldn’t be brought up under suspension.

When the Republicans can’t agree among themselves on a tax bill you know they are just fighting for the sake of fighting. Chaos is their middle name.

U.S. troops killed by hostile action:

• From 2017 thru 2020: 𝟲𝟱
• From 2021 to Present: 𝟭𝟴

👉🏻 https://t.co/rbIKXC6df0 https://t.co/74kUclnf7q

— Frank Luntz (@FrankLuntz) January 29, 2024

The right is pimping this fatuous notion that Trump never lost a life (not counting the hundreds of thousands from COVID, of course) during his presidency. Why do they think this? Because Dear Leader says so:

“we would right now have Peace throughout the World” if Jesus Christ … er… Donald Trump were president. He says that and they believe it.

His and others’ recitation of the Trump presidency is not true. Trump pulled out of the Iran nuclear deal and set them back on the course to being a pariah state. It hasn’t gone well.

CNN’s Briana Keilar on Monday got into a heated exchange with Rep. Mike Waltz (R-FL) over the Biden administration’s Middle East policy, which he said was emboldening Iran to sign off on proxy attacks on American soldiers.

During an interview, Keilar argued to Waltz that figuring out how to deter Iran-backed proxies had plagued multiple administrations, including Trump’s whose policies Waltz touted as a better alternative.

“I know you’re critical of President Biden, that you think he is emboldening Iran, but how should the U.S. respond when even former President Trump — I mean, you said that peace broke out [under his watch], but his direct and controversial action like taking out [late Iranian Gen. Qasem Soleimani] did not stop the deadly attacks on U.S. troops,” she noted.

Waltz replied that Trump ordered the assassination of Soleimani after Iran-backed proxies had launched multiple strikes on the U.S. and its allies, and he claimed that those strikes single-handedly fixed the problem.

“They launched some missiles and that was it!” he claimed.

“Service members died!” Keilar interjected.

“Who died, post-Soleimani strike?” Waltz demanded to know.

“March 2020, service members died,” she said. “You had Iranian-backed proxies… the one in March was determined that it likely was [Iran] and you had service members, two Americans and one Brit, who were killed… So if we’re talking realistically on what deters and what does not deter the proxies, then let’s use those facts to talk about what might actually be a way to… get them to stop.”

https://youtu.be/oFQWqApBzU4?si=ZPG18npC-XP2pyrb

This is the kind of clip that could win Trump the election. https://t.co/1tLsBAcWYO

— Megyn Kelly (@megynkelly) January 30, 2024

I can usually suss out what they’re talking about but in this case I just don’t get it. Why is this going to win him the election? E. Jean Carroll going shopping with the 83 million in damages she won from Trump defaming her? That she offered to take Rachel Maddow with her? So what? How is that the political death blow to Biden?

Whatever. I guess I shouldn’t question the logic of people who think Taylor Swift is a Pentagon Psy-op to sabotage Trump’s election. There’s no point.

A party of frauds

E. Jean Carroll’s attorney Shawn Crowley last week rebutted Donald Trump lawyers’ argument to the jury in his $83.3 million defamation case. She distilled Trump and Trumpism to his/its essence (CNN):

Crowley concluded her rebuttal by saying essentially that Trump believes he is above the law.

Trump believes that “He gets to lie. He gets to threaten. He gets to ignore a jury verdict. He gets to defy the law and the rules of this courtroom,” Crowley said. “You saw how he behaved through this trial. Rules don’t apply to Donald Trump.”

“Ladies and gentleman, this isn’t a campaign rally. It’s not a press event. It’s a court of law and Miss Carroll’s life,” Crowley said. “Donald Trump sexually assaulted her. He defamed her. He is not the victim.”

But MAGA Republicans are MAGA Republicans because they believe, as Trump believes of himself, that they are victims. Trump portrays himself as the patron saint of victims, and their avatar.

Trump is special. Oh so special.

“Donald Trump is just not a regular man,” Doug Roberts, a retired electrician and Trump fan, said outside a Nikki Haley rally in South Carolina on Sunday. Roberts showed off his “I Voted For Trump” tee shirt for the AP camera. White on black.

“Through him, and with him, and in him,” as the Eucharistic Prayer concludes, MAGA partakes of Trump’s glory. Elevated, sanctified in his body and blood, they are, as Trump is, above the law and beyond it. They may lie, threaten, reject election results, sack the Capitol, and claim “hostage” status when held to account. In His Name their sins are forgiven.

And increasingly without him. Trumpism is a symbol of conservatives’ rejection of all they once claimed holy. But he is not the source of their apostacy. He is its expression.

Aaron Blake writes (Washington Post):

A consequential development of the Trump era is what increasingly looks like the Republicans’ acrimonious divorce from the rule of law.

The party that once prided itself as the law-and-order side has leaped headlong into highly speculative theories about the “weaponization” of the justice system, spurred by former president Donald Trump. Both Trump and his former lawyer Rudy Giuliani recently flouted civil defamation verdicts against them by continuing to defame their victims — cheered on by many on the right. Republican voters increasingly want a president who is willing to break both rules and laws to get things done.

But some members of the party have in recent days crossed a new threshold: by suggesting that it’s okay to disregard the Supreme Court.

After the Supreme Court ruled last week that federal authorities can remove razor wire that Texas put on the U.S.-Mexico border, Rep. Chip Roy (R-Tex.) posted on X, formerly Twitter, that “Texas should ignore it.”

Chip Roy was not alone.

By Friday, Oklahoma Gov. Kevin Stitt (R) had gone on CNN and indicated that it would be okay to disregard the Supreme Court in certain circumstances.

Stitt’s office did respond to a request for clarification.

The behavior, even if not an explict violation of the Supreme Court ruling, now adds to a pattern of defiance not unlike that of southern states ahead of April 1861.

The Roy and Stitt comments come after Alabama Republicans last year flouted a Supreme Court order regarding the state’s congressional map. The court had upheld a lower-court ruling that required a second district “in which Black voters either comprise a voting-age majority or something quite close to it.” The resulting district was just 40 percent Black. The lower court again rejected it, saying it was “not aware of any other case in which a state legislature” declined to abide by such an order. The Supreme Court again upheld that ruling.

Republican claims to the rule of law are as much a fraud as Trump himself. We are headed into “dicey territory,” Blake writes, with rhetorical clashes that “come from a party that has demonstrated increasingly little regard for the current application of the rule of law.”

Except when it can be used as a cudgel against adversaries.

Sunlight to a vampire

Formerly Twitter observed that there are more images and video of Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce hugging and kissing after Sunday’s AFC Championship Game than of the JFK assassination. It’s been nagging at me in a good way.

Every MAGA man wants to be Kelce. Every MAGA woman wants to be Taylor Swift. Imagine that. No wonder MAGA so sad.
😂😂😂 pic.twitter.com/xuiHvTd9oy

— Larry Middleton, Proud Liberal Vermin 💙🇺🇸🌻 (@l78lancer) January 29, 2024

David Letterman called it “a lovely thing.” He calls Swift “a glowing, bright light of goodness in the world,” and sorely needed.

Fans began calculating travel time, and whether Swift will be able to fly back from her Tokyo show in time to make the Super Bowl. Others noted that during the celebration on the field that Swift stepped aside so Travis Kelce could share a moment alone with his brother Jason. Swift shared warm hugs with Travis’ mother and father and sister. It’s an entire glowing, bright light of family values goodness.

Naturally, the right web is seething and losing what’s left of its mind.

The right’s lunatic fringe is floating insane consipracy theories about the left using Swift to rig the Super Bowl, and Swift planning to endorse Joe Biden at halftime, etc. The entire relationship is fabricated for ratings and political advantage, dontcha know?

Apparently Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce are faking a relationship in coordination with the NFL rigging the Super Bowl just to try to get Biden a meaningless celebrity endorsement.

Vivek isn’t dumb, he just doesn’t think much of his audience. pic.twitter.com/msYGrJRhCC

— AG (@AGHamilton29) January 29, 2024

User Andrew Nadeau snarked, “I love the idea that liberals conspired to get Taylor Swift to date Travis Kelce and then rigged the playoffs because this somehow abstractly helps Biden. That’s where we shine. We can’t get free healthcare but perfectly execute a Riddler-esque conspiracy to ruin a football game.”

The right’s freakout is about more than Kelce being vaccinated against Covid. It’s about this:

They’re scared. They should be.

Fox News guest Charly Arnolt: “It is so scary! There’s a recent poll, 1/5 of Taylor Swift fans said they would back whatever candidate she endorsed… please don’t believe everything Taylor Swift says. We’re begging you!” pic.twitter.com/KeQ4TJP7kF

— Justin Baragona (@justinbaragona) January 29, 2024

But here’s the thing. Let’s go back to what Anat Shenker-Osorio said last week:

The thing is, people need to see, “Oh, that’s what my kind of a person thinks.” Humans are social creatures. We’re tribal. We want to find cues in our environment that tell us what our category subscribes to.

The left needs (and habitually fails to adopt) powerful symbols to indicate belonging and to provide those on the fence with social proof of what “people like me” think. “The left needs hats,” Anand Giridharadas suggests, a symbol that makes fence-sitters say, “I’ll have what she’s having.”

Shenker-Osorio writes:

As we’ve touched on previously, social proof  — where people think the thing they think people like them think — is real. It’s one of the most persuasive tools in our arsenal. It’s the reason why the MAGA hat is so important and effective, and, conversely, why the green bandana has been so effective in Argentina and across Latin America. We used it in the abortion rights campaign in Argentina, and we used it in Mexico, we used it in Colombia.

But the Swift-Kelce relationship is more than just a symbol without a hat. The contrast between their “bright light of goodness” and the ugliness of what Trump’s MAGA movement represents to the U.S. and to the world could not be more stark. The right sees it plainly and recoils. It makes them seethe. It’s sunlight to a vampire. Swift’s good-girl image and her “lovely thing” relationship has (as I use too often) cut the right over the eye. Go out and work the eye.

Now to find a symbol for it that lefties will actually adopt and share.

Update from Brian Beutler:

There are many things to say about this brewing GOP conspiracy theory, but the most important one is a warning—of the rot that will ultimately consume any party that organizes itself around scheming and rat fucking and propaganda to manipulate voters, in lieu of trying to be decent and likable.