Digby's Hullabaloo Posts

Hamlet never imagined this

It’s long seemed as if this country is suffering a severe case of mass insanity. The truth is out there. It is more than QAnon, but please see that obligatory nonsense at the bottom later.

The occasion for revisiting societal mental breakdown is a couple of headlines this morning. This will take a moment.

Texas doctors do not need to perform emergency abortions, court rules (Washington Post)

A federal appeals court on Tuesday ruled that Texas hospitals and doctors are not obligated to perform abortions under a long-standing national emergency-care law, dealing a blow to the White House’s strategy to ensure access to the procedure after the Supreme Court overturned the constitutional right to abortion in 2022.

The federal law “does not mandate any specific type of medical treatment, let alone abortion,” the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit concluded, faulting the Biden administration’s interpretation of the Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act, or EMTALA. The law “does not govern the practice of medicine,” the court added.

The three-judge panel also faulted the Biden administration’s process of issuing its emergency-care guidance, saying that federal officials did not go through the proper rulemaking process when the administration instructed health-care providers that they were protected by EMTALA if they believed an abortion to be medically necessary. The panel further said that the federal emergency-care law did not “directly conflict” with a near-total abortion ban in effect in Texas, which was written by the state’s Republican legislators and includes exceptions for medical emergencies.

We know already that those Texas exceptions functionally do not exist.

The White House and federal health officials have invoked EMTALA — the 1986 law that requires hospitals and physicians to treat emergency medical conditions or risk fines, civil lawsuits and being blacklisted from federal health programs — in the wake of the Supreme Court’s June 2022 decision that overturned the national right to abortion and led to about two dozen state bans on the procedure. The Biden administration is now engaged in several lawsuits that are expected to set precedent over whether the emergency-care law applies to abortion access, including the Texas case.

Pregnant women in distress in Texas can just die untreated, says the 5th Circuit. No harm, no foul. Abortion rights advocates, the Post reports, “decried the ruling, which they said signaled a disregard for women in life-threatening pregnancy situations.”

Meanwhile, doctors must never stop treating anorexia patients.

Should Patients Be Allowed to Die From Anorexia? (New York Times, gifted)

Naomi “had been starving herself for 26 years.” Nothing was helping. “I’ll either die of anorexia or I’ll die of suicide,” Naomi told reporter Katie Engelhart when they first spoke. “I’ve accepted that.”

Should Naomi be allowed to check out of the hospital? Should she be allowed to stop medical and psychological treatments and seek palliative care until she dies?

The field of palliative care was developed in the 1960s and ’70s, as a way to minister to dying cancer patients. Palliative care offered “comfort measures,” like symptom management and spiritual guidance, as opposed to curative treatment, for people who were in pain and would never get better. Later, the field expanded beyond oncology and end-of-life care — to reach patients with serious medical illnesses like heart disease, H.I.V. and AIDS, kidney failure, A.L.S. and dementia. Some people who receive palliative care are still fighting their diseases; in these cases, the treatment works to mitigate their suffering. Other patients are actively dying or in hospice care. These patients are made “comfortable,” or as comfortable as possible, until the end.

But not for patients with unremitting anorexia whose conditions appear futile. Naomi’s doctor, Jonathan Treem, discussed options:

To Treem, it felt as if Naomi was asking for something more than his nonintervention; she wanted his mercy. His permission to let go, his compassion. It made him think about the other doctors who had treated her. “This is where it gets into a passionate discussion,” he told me. “If you are going to accept responsibility for the people you save, and you’re going to elevate them as examples of why everyone should undergo compulsory treatment, you had better recognize the blood on your hands. That, on some level, in order to ‘save everyone,’ you are perpetuating suffering in others.”

Yet Treem had his limits. He told Naomi that he could not look away if she was actively suicidal. Several times, after an especially unsettling appointment, Treem walked her down to the emergency room, where she was put on a 72-hour mental-health hold.

It is a very long, very complex story reminiscent of Whose Life Is It Anyway? (1981). It raises serious medical ethics questions:

What’s more, in somatic medicine, a patient didn’t need to have a good reason for stopping care. She didn’t even have to try getting better in the first place. A cancer patient could decline chemotherapy that would very likely save her life. Because she didn’t think the benefit was worth the pain. Because she wanted to go home to her children. Because she preferred to be treated by a homeopath. She could do what she wanted, just because she wanted to. Why should patients with mental illnesses be held to a different standard?

“It doesn’t make sense,” says Dr. Joel Yager. A paper he co-authored argues “that psychiatry needed its own subfield of palliative care: specifically for the 15 to 20 percent of patients whose anorexia developed a ‘chronic course’ and did not respond to standard treatment — and for the fraction of those patients who did not want to keep trying to get better.”

“They’re ‘incompetent’ unless they want treatment?” His critics, he said, had no data at all to back up their claim of universal incapacity among anorexic people. Existing studies showed the opposite. Yager thought his critics were suffering from “positive outcome bias”; they remembered the patients who were saved and were grateful for it, but not the ones who died slowly and suffered all the while.

“Absolutely unconscionable,” a Denver-based forensic psychiatrist focused on eating-disorder care ethics said of the paper’s ideas.

To be or not to be

So here we have America in 2024. U.S. states prevent doctors from easing the suffering of women with nonviable pregnancies, and the conservative 5th Circuit absolves them of responsibility should the women die. Meantime, the medical profession insists Naomi stay alive no matter how much and how long she suffers with anorexia. In both cases, women’s lives are not their own.

I don’t have answers. But excuse me for thinking we’ve gone around the bend.

Not to be missed, further evidence from The Hill:

House Republicans are beginning a crucial election year with a heightened focus on border issues as negotiations in the Senate on asylum policy changes drag on and the conference prepares to bring impeachment proceedings against Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas.

Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R. Ga.) is on the case. Impeached for what, you ask?

Republicans have also claimed Mayorkas has violated the law, failing to meet the standards of the Secure Fence Act, which defines operational control of the border as a status in which not a single person or piece of contraband improperly enters the country. 

But not a single secretary of Homeland Security has met that standard of perfection, something Mayorkas has pointed out as the GOP has grilled him on the law.

You were expecting electeds voted in by these people (below) to act reasonably or rationally?

Remind me again why we’re not allowed to mock MAGA cult members?pic.twitter.com/2BxAXTHc8j

— Republicans against Trump (@RpsAgainstTrump) December 23, 2023

Can you point to me a single judge who ruled the election was stolen?

MAGA cult member: “Look at the Supreme Court”

But the SC hasn’t accepted any of these cases

MAGA cult member: “I have alternative news and I find out differently”

These people vote🤦‍♂️pic.twitter.com/jYeb18ywDq

— Republicans against Trump (@RpsAgainstTrump) December 30, 2023

If you don’t know, you don’t care

From Civil Discourse with Joyce Vance, A Warning:

One morning before Christmas, I was working out with a friend who I adore, and workout with regularly. She’s young, smart, and a recent college graduate. In the middle of our session, my phone started going off incessantly and I finally picked it up. It was, of course, breaking news. That day, it was about the Giuliani bankruptcy.

I apologized to her for taking the call. I got off quickly and told her, by way of explanation, “Rudy Giuliani just filed for bankruptcy.”

“Who’s Rudy Giuliani?” she asked.

Vance realizes that her friend born after 9/11 has no idea that Giuliani was once “America’s Mayor.” And has no reason to know.

I decided to get a gut check from my 21-year-old. “Do you know who Rudy Giuliani is?” I asked. He rolled his eyes. Of course he does. He reminded me he’s my son. But then, he schooled me on how it works for his generation. College kids, or most of them, don’t watch TV news or read newspapers. They get it from their social media feeds.

Intellectually I know this.

“Giuliani and Trump are all over your newsfeed Mom but now newsfeeds are customized. The only news I’ve seen today is about chess and rap music. [editor’s note: have I failed as a parent?] The algorithm generates your feed based on what you’re interested in, and over time, you just get what you’re already into.” So it makes sense that my friend hadn’t seen anything about Rudy Giuliani. She’s not a politics junkie or a news junkie.

This explains, in part anyway, why youth turnout in elections is so low. Remember the excited reports of a big percentage jump in the level of youth turnout in 2018 and 2022, the first election after Trump’s ascendance? The stories don’t emphasize where that level started or how far it has to go to match the turnout of voters over 45.

You can run this joint

Vance urges readers to discuss with younger friends urgent matters like, oh, the impending collapse of American democracy if Donald Trump gets reelected in 2024.

Not everyone watched the January 6 committee hearings or has been exposed to the overwhelming evidence of Donald Trump’s perfidy. Take the time to start the conversation, whether it’s over a cup of coffee, in line at the supermarket, or in the gym. One voter at a time.

The youth vote is both democracy’s salvation and its Achilles heel. Younger voters lean left and unaffiliated. They just don’t turn out like us oldsters (see by-now familiar graphic at top). Where is the greatest potential for increasing turnout that favors Democrats? In the blue-shaded area to the left of the white vertical line. I tell the young’uns: If you and your friends just vote, you can run this joint. But not if you aren’t sitting at the table.

Republicans know this. It’s why they make it as hard as possible for younger Americans to vote by splitting university campuses, limiting on-campus voting sites, and passing voter ID laws. And that’s why we’re fighting back.

Folks, the @NCDemParty can proudly say 7️⃣0️⃣ out of 1️⃣1️⃣3️⃣ universities and community colleges will have their students IDs count as *valid voter IDs* for the 2024 election cycle. This would NOT have been possible without the hard work of @linville_nathan & @CollegeDemsNC. #ncpol https://t.co/JWvFIVnrUx

— Anderson Clayton☀️ (@abreezeclayton) December 29, 2023

Vance’s conversation yielded benefits:

I got lunch with my friend after we worked out today. She told me she’d read a few articles about Giuliani and realized what it was about. She asked a couple of questions about the election interference case against Trump. Apparently, those few articles she’d looked at piqued her interest—and influenced her algorithm.

Donald Trump will end American democracy if he’s reelected. He will corrupt our country for his own benefit. He has not made a secret of it. The only question is whether enough of our fellow citizens will be aware of what the 2024 election means for the future and care enough when we go to the polls to prevent Trump from returning to power. The small steps that we take during the next few months will pay big dividends.

One voter at a time.

(h/t KS)

That is 100% a lie. They did none of that. All the evidence is available. Nancy Pelosi did not turn down his request for the National Guard on January 6th. And no, unless you are saying that Jonathan Turley represents the “most respected legal minds in the Country” there is virtually no one saying that he’s “fully entitled” to immunity for what he did.

MSNBC keeps saying that they won’t show what Trump is saying because “there’s a cost” to them. Actually, there’s a cost to everyone if they don’t. People need to see it and they need to see the arguments against it. Today I saw them put up Liz Cheney’s response to this but not the post itself which didn’t show just how deranged he really is.

Trump needs to be seen by everyone in all his glory. What they’re doing now is inadvertently covering for him. They need to stop it.

So much information has gone under the bridge about the insurrection that I’ve lost sight of some of the more interesting details that flush out what happened on January 6th — and who is responsible. (People like Marcy Wheeler who follow the trials are very well aware, of course.)

This piece from June 2021 by Amanda Carpenter came to my attention over the holidays and I thought it was interesting. If you still think that Trump didn’t actually incite the insurrection, this is important to consider:

To understand January 6, 2021, we must first look back to June 1, 2020.

That was the day Donald Trump delivered a terse Rose Garden speech threatening to deploy the U.S. military to any city or state that “refuses to take the actions that are necessary to defend the life and property of their residents.” The speech was prompted by the protests that began on May 26 in Minneapolis and spread throughout the country after George Floyd was killed by police. Trump’s staff argued that the threatened military deployment would have been permitted under the Insurrection Act of 1807, which empowers the president to deploy federal troops for domestic law enforcement under certain circumstances.

As Trump spoke, federal law enforcement officers, joined by officers from other local jurisdictions, clashed with protesters near Lafayette Square, just north of the White House. Officers outfitted in riot gear pushed protesters away from the square, firing rubber bullets at them. Tear gas was used. Army helicopters buzzed the crowds. Trump then marched across the square, flanked by officials and aides, including Secretary of Defense Mark Esper and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley. All so Trump could have a photo op in front of St. John’s Church.

The message was clear. Trump had a military and was willing to use it. But the backlash from the military community came quickly. Admiral Mike Mullen, a former chairman of the Joint Chiefs, said he was “sickened” to “see security personnel—including members of the National Guard—forcibly and violently clear a path through Lafayette Square to accommodate the president’s visit outside St. John’s Church.” Gen. James Mattis, the respected Marine general who had preceded Esper as Trump’s defense secretary, said he was “angry and appalled.”

Secretary Esper soon distanced himself from Trump, albeit after the fact. He told reporters at a June 3 Pentagon briefing, “The option to use active-duty forces in a law enforcement role should only be used as a matter of last resort, and only in the most urgent and dire of situations. We are not in one of those situations now. I do not support invoking the Insurrection Act.” Gen. Milley later reportedly got into a “heated discussion” with Trump over whether to send active-duty troops to the streets, and in July he publicly apologized, saying, “I should not have been there” for Trump’s photo op.

But Republican politicians and conservative commentators supported Trump’s move. Sen. Tom Cotton wrote an op-ed for the New York Times titled “Send in the Troops”; it was so controversial that the paper later said it should never have been published and one of the responsible editors resigned.

Through it all, Trump never let go of the idea. And as summer changed into fall, talk on the right of an “insurrection” that might be met with a military response shifted from the George Floyd protests and civil unrest to the 2020 election. The same terms and the same proposed action, just a new target.

In a Fox News appearance in September, host Jeanine Pirro asked Trump how he would react if he won the 2020 election and Democrats rioted. “We’ll put them down very quickly if they do that. We have the right to do that. We have the power to do that if we want,” Trump said. “Look, it’s called ‘insurrection.’ We just send in, and we do it, very easy. I mean, it’s very easy.” That same month, in an appearance on conspiracy theorist Alex Jones’s InfoWars program, Trump’s longtime ally Roger Stone—who would later be pardoned by Trump for witness tampering in the Russia investigation and lying to Congress—also talked up the idea of Trump invoking the Insurrection Act.

Although Trump and his allies were in disagreement with the military community about the Insurrection Act, Trump seemed to have other ideas about whom he could call for backup.

During the September 29 debate, Fox News anchor Chris Wallace asked Trump whether he was willing to “condemn white supremacists and militia groups and . . . say that they need to stand down.” Trump replied “sure” but then said the Proud Boys groups should “stand back and stand by” for the election.

“But I’ll tell you what,” Trump continued, “somebody’s got to do something about Antifa and the left because this is not a right-wing problem.”

After the press called the election for Joe Biden on November 7, Trump quickly fired Esper, who had openly opposed invoking the Insurrection Act, and installed Christopher Miller as acting defense secretary. And, as “Stop the Steal” efforts gained steam through November and December, Trump’s allies Sidney Powell, Lin Wood, and Michael Flynn often advocated using the Insurrection Act as a catch-all solution to any number of problems Trump faced. One disturbing Politico headline makes the point: “MAGA leaders call for the troops to keep Trump in office.”

I know the J6 Committee pursued some of this. But I haven’t seen it put so succinctly before. We knew that Trump had been basically calling for the Insurrection Act since the George Floyd protests and kept talking about it all the way up to January 6th. I think what I didn’t understand before was how much having “insurrection” out there in the ether was being interpreted by his own followers.

If anyone was primed to take marching orders about insurrection from Commander-in-Chief Trump, it was Oath Keepers founder Stewart Rhodes. To him, it must have sounded like a bugle call directly in his ears.

Rhodes, who founded the group in 2009, has been talking about insurrection for years. And the combination of COVID lockdowns and BLM protests apparently triggered his militant aspirations more than ever. He wrote on Facebook in August 2020 that “Civil war is here, right now” and warned there would be “open warfare with Marxist insurrectionists by Election Day.” Shortly after the media called the election for Biden, Rhodes said in a livestreamed speech that viewers should “stand up now and call on the president to suppress the insurrection.”

He meant it.

Court filings from the Department of Justice containing communications from Oath Keeper militants—some of whom are said to have acted as personal security for Roger Stone at “Stop the Steal” rallies, including on the eve of the January 6 insurrection—show how clear Rhodes’s thinking was about it.

According to prosecutors, Rhodes held a planning meeting for the attack on November 9, 2020. During it, he said:

-“We’re going to defend the president, the duly elected president, and we call on him to do what needs to be done to save our country. Because if you don’t guys, you’re going to be in a bloody, bloody civil war, and a bloody—you can call it an insurrection or you can call it a war or fight.”

-He told his followers they needed to be prepared to fight Antifa, which he characterized as a group of individuals with whom “if the fight comes, let the fight come. Let Antifa—if they go kinetic on us, then we’ll go kinetic back on them. I’m willing to sacrifice myself for that. Let the fight start there. That will give President Trump what he needs, frankly. If things go kinetic, good. If they throw bombs at us and shoot us, great, because that brings the president his reason and rationale for dropping the Insurrection Act.”

-He continued, “I do want some Oath Keepers to stay on the outside, and to stay fully armed and prepared to go in armed, if they have to. . . . So our posture’s gonna be that we’re posted outside of D.C., um, awaiting the president’s orders. . . . We hope he will give us the orders. We want him to declare an insurrection, and to call us up as the militia” (emphasis added).

Rhodes was convicted of seditious conspiracy and sentenced to 18 years in federal prison. Others were as well. They heard Trump talking about insurrection and “stand back and stand by” and thought he was giving instructions.

He didn’t evoke the Insurrection Act on January 6th. Instead, he sent the crowd to the Capitol and watched as they stormed the building to stop the peaceful transfer of power.

Paul Krugman agrees that things are looking up. Will people recognize it in time or will they continue to blame Joe Biden for the chaos and ugliness that Trump and his cult are creating?

Almost four years have passed since Covid-19 struck. In America, the pandemic killed well over a million people and left millions more with lingering health problems. Much of normal life came to a halt, partly because of official lockdowns but largely because fear of infection kept people home.

The big question in the years that followed was whether America would ever fully recover from that shock. In 2023 we got the answer: yes. Our economy and society have, in fact, healed remarkably well. The big remaining question is when, if ever, the public will be ready to accept the good news.

In the short run, of course, the pandemic had severe economic and social effects, in many ways wider and deeper than almost anyone expected. Employment fell by 25 million in a matter of weeks. Huge government aid limited families’ financial hardship, but maintaining Americans’ purchasing power in the face of a disrupted economy meant that demand often exceeded supply, and the result was overstretched supply chains and a burst of inflation.

At the same time, the pandemic reduced social interactions and left many people feeling isolated. The psychological toll is hard to measure, but the weakening of social ties contributed to a range of negative trends, including a surge in violent crime.

It was easy to imagine that the pandemic experience would leave long-term scars — that long Covid and early retirements would leave us with a permanently reduced labor force, that getting inflation down would require years of high unemployment, that the crime surge heralded a sustained breakdown in public order.

But none of that happened.

You may have heard about the good economic news. Labor force participation — the share of adults in today’s work force — is actually slightly higher than the Congressional Budget Office predicted before the pandemic. Measures of underlying inflation have fallen more or less back to the Federal Reserve’s 2 percent target even though unemployment is near a 50-year low. Adjusted for inflation, most workers’ wages have gone up.

For some reason I’ve heard less about the crime news, but it’s also remarkably good. F.B.I. data shows that violent crime has subsided: It’s already back to 2019 levels and appears to be falling further. Homicides probably aren’t quite back to 2019 levels, but they’re plummeting.

None of this undoes the Covid death toll or the serious learning loss suffered by millions of students. But overall both our economy and our society are in far better shape at this point than most people would have predicted in the early days of the pandemic — or than most Americans are willing to admit.

For if America’s resilience in the face of the pandemic shock has been remarkable, so has the pessimism of the public.

By now, anyone who writes about the economic situation has become accustomed to mail and social media posts (which often begin, “You moron”) insisting that the official statistics on low unemployment and inflation are misleading if not outright lies. No, the Consumer Price Index doesn’t ignore food and energy, although some analytical measures do; no, grocery prices aren’t still soaring.

Rather than get into more arguments with people desperate to find some justification for negative economic sentiment, I find it most useful to point out that whatever American consumers say about the state of the economy, they are spending as if their finances are in pretty good shape. Most recently, holiday sales appear to have been quite good.

What about crime? This is an area in which public perceptions have long been notoriously at odds with reality, with people telling pollsters that crime is rising even when it’s falling rapidly. Right now, according to Gallup, 63 percent of Americans say that crime is an “extremely” or a “very” serious problem for the United States — but only 17 percent say it’s that severe a problem where they live.

And Americans aren’t acting as if they’re terrified about crime. As I’ve written before, major downtowns have seen weekend foot traffic — roughly speaking, the number of people visiting the city for fun rather than work — recover to prepandemic levels, which isn’t what you’d expect if Americans were fleeing violent urban hellscapes.

So whatever Americans may say to pollsters, they’re behaving as if they live in a prosperous, fairly safe (by historical standards) country — the country portrayed by official statistics, although not by opinion polls. (Disclaimer: Yes, we have vast inequality and social injustice. But this is no more true now than it was in earlier years, when Americans were far more optimistic.)

The big question, of course, is whether grim narratives will prevail over relatively sunny reality in the 2024 election. There are hints in survey data that the good economic news is starting to break through, but I don’t know of any comparable hints on crime.

In any case, what you need to know is that America responded remarkably well to the economic and social challenges of a deadly pandemic. By most measures, we’re a nation on the mend. Let’s hope we don’t lose our democracy before people realize that.

Biden didn’t do all of that, of course. The country has shown itself to be resilient in many ways and that’s to our credit. But he’s the guy who presided over this remarkable recovery and he should get the credit.

Unfortunately, we are awash in hideous cultural nastiness caused by right wing authoritarians and it’s caused a sour mood throughout the country. Overcoming that isn’t going to be easy.

I got my law degree from watching “Law and Order” so I’m not what anyone would call an attorney. But I do find this stuff fascinating. I came across this last night on the presidential immunity question. (That question drives me crazy because it seems so obvious I can’t even imagine how it can be debatable but here we are.)

Anyway:

A new wrinkle has emerged in former President Donald Trump‘s immunity battle in his federal election interference case, with a watchdog group filing a brief on Friday calling for his appeal effort to be dismissed and for his trial allowed to resume.

Trump is currently contending with four criminal indictments at the state and federal levels, totaling 91 criminal charges in all. Among these cases is the federal one brought by the Department of Justice (DOJ) and special counsel Jack Smith pertaining to Trump’s alleged efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election, which ultimately led to the January 6, 2021, Capitol riot. Trump, the frontrunner in the 2024 GOP presidential primary, has maintained his innocence in the case.

Trump’s current tactic in the case has been to claim that he has complete immunity from criminal prosecution for anything that he did while he was president. This claim was previously shot down by the judge overseeing the case, Tanya Chutkan, and is now set to go before the D.C. Circuit appeals court. Meanwhile, an effort by Smith to try and accelerate the appeals process straight to the U.S. Supreme Court was recently dismissed. As the process winds on, the trial has been put on hold, leading some observers to accuse Trump of trying to delay it as long as possible.

American Oversight, a nonprofit legal watchdog group, filed an amicus brief on Friday that said the D.C. Circuit appeals court lacks the jurisdiction to take up Trump’s appeal, and should therefore send the matter back to Chutkan and allow the trial to resume.

“As the American Oversight amicus brief argues, Supreme Court precedent [from 1989] prohibits a criminal defendant from immediately appealing an order denying immunity unless the claimed immunity is based on ‘an explicit statutory or constitutional guarantee that trial will not occur,'” the group’s official statement explained. “Trump’s claims of immunity rests on no such explicit guarantee. Therefore, given that Trump has not been convicted or sentenced, his appeal is premature. The D.C. Circuit lacks appellate jurisdiction and should dismiss the appeal and return the case to district court for trial promptly.”

In response to the filing, various legal experts and analysts chimed in on social media, with some calling the move “an interesting wrinkle.”

“Interesting wrinkle in the battle over Trump’s claims of presidential immunity: American Oversight, in an amicus brief, says the issue did not merit immediate appeal and the DC Circuit should simply kick the case back to Judge Chutkan for trial,” New York Times legal reporter Alan Feuer wrote on X, the platform previously known as Twitter.

“Interesting argument in new amicus brief by conservative lawyers that Trump’s immunity appeal is subject to final judgment rule and must wait until after trial,” former U.S. Attorney Barbara McQuade, who previously served the Eastern District of Michigan from 2010 to 2017 and appointed by former President Barack Obama, wrote. “Brief uses textual reading of Constitution to argue stay should be lifted immediately.”

American Oversight describes itself as a nonpartisan group, not conservative.

As I have said before, I won’t be surprised if the Supremes (who will hear it eventually anyway) decide to let this case drag until after the election in which case Trump will have it dismissed or they will let it continue since he’ll be out of politics. (Won’t he???)

It’s going to be a nail biter either way. It’s impossible to believe that even the most ardent “unitary executive” justice would think this man has immunity after he’s out of office because trying to overturn an election that had been fully adjudicated by the courts was part of his job. It’s ridiculous.:

Right:

[Y]ou have to go back to check from past years with respect to signatures. And if you check with Fulton County, you’ll have hundreds of thousands because they dumped ballots into Fulton County and the other county next to it. So what? So what are we going to do here, folks? I only need 11,000 votes. Fellas, I need 11,000 votes. Give me a break. You know, we have that in spades already, or we can keep it going.

So what are we going to do here, folks? I only need 11,000 votes. Fellas, I need 11,000 votes. Give me a break.

He was just doing his job.

Stephen Miller will be a very important influence in Trump 2.0

Judd Legum talks about the Trump threat in his newsletter today. I thought I would highlight just one little passage for those who think it might be useful to punish Biden and the Democrats by letting Trump have another term. It’s pretty clear it won’t just be the Democrats who suffer at Trump’s hands.

He talks about Trump’s close adviser Stephen Miller (and he is extremely influential) and what they have planned for the border:

Miller, on behalf of Trump’s campaign, pledged that “Trump will unleash the vast arsenal of federal powers to implement the most spectacular migration crackdown.” Miller described plans to “deport people by the millions per year” with a “blitz” intended “to overwhelm immigrant-rights lawyers.”

New tactics will include “workplace raids and other sweeps in public places aimed at arresting scores of unauthorized immigrants at once.” The scope of these raids would exceed the current capacity of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, so the effort would enlist personnel from the National Guard and other law enforcement agencies. Arrested migrants would be shuttled to “vast holding facilities that would function as staging centers.” These tent cities would be built by the military “on open land in Texas near the border,” according to Miller. 

The facilities would initially be “focused more on single adults because the government cannot indefinitely hold children under a longstanding court order known as the Flores settlement.” Miller said a second Trump administration would renew its efforts to overturn the Flores settlement. Reimplementing the child separation policy is also a possibility.  

Maybe it’s important to make many, many more people suffer than already are in order to make a political point. But I doubt people of good faith really want that. They must realize that knowingly making things worse for millions more people is a moral abomination.

Wayne LaPierre is going on trial.

As further evidence of the total corruption of the conservative movement, despite being shown to have ripped off the membership in the millions LaPierre was welcomed back into the fold. But this could be the end of him, God willing:

For decades, Wayne LaPierre, the National Rifle Association’s longtime leader, has been a survivor. He has endured waves of palace intrigue, corruption scandals and embarrassing revelations, including leaked video that captured his inability to shoot an elephant at point-blank range while on a safari.

But now, Mr. LaPierre, 74, faces his gravest challenge, as a legal showdown with New York’s attorney general, Letitia James, goes to trial in a Manhattan courtroom. Ms. James, in a lawsuit filed amid an abrupt effort by the N.R.A. to clean up its practices, seeks to oust him from the group after reports of corruption and mismanagement.

Much has changed since Ms. James began investigating the N.R.A. four years ago. The organization, long a lobbying juggernaut, is a kind of ghost ship. After closing its media arm, NRATV, in 2019, it has largely lost its voice, and Mr. LaPierre rarely makes public pronouncements. Membership has plummeted to 4.2 million from nearly six million five years ago. Revenue is down 44 percent since 2016, according to its internal audits, and legal costs have soared to tens of millions a year.

When the N.R.A. filed for bankruptcy in Texas nearly three years ago, the step was part of a strategy to move to the state amid the New York investigation. But a Texas judge dismissed the case, saying the N.R.A. was using the filing “to address a regulatory enforcement problem, not a financial one.” Now, longtime insiders say, the organization may be reaching a point where a legitimate bankruptcy filing is necessary.

Even with the N.R.A. moribund, Mr. LaPierre’s legacy as a lobbyist, if not as a marksman, remains intact. The gun rights movement has become a bulwark of red state politics during his more than three decades at the group’s helm. In recent years, significant federal gun control measures have been a nonstarter for Republicans despite a proliferation of mass shootings.

Mr. LaPierre is among four defendants in the suit brought by Ms. James in 2020. Others include John Frazer, the N.R.A.’s general counsel, and Wilson Phillips, a former finance chief. The fourth defendant, Joshua Powell, was the organization’s second-in-command for a time, but later turned against it and even called for universal background checks for those buying guns and so-called red flag laws that allow the police to seize firearms from people deemed dangerous.

Ms. James seeks to use her regulatory authority over nonprofit groups to impose a range of financial penalties against the defendants and to remove Mr. LaPierre; any money recovered would flow back to the N.R.A. Jury selection is scheduled to begin on Tuesday before State Supreme Court Justice Joel M. Cohen. The trial is expected to last six to eight weeks.

Let’s hope a NY jury has the good sense to put LaPierre out of business for good.

Section 3 of the 14th Amendment isn’t the only one forgotten

Move over Section 3. Michael Meltzner reminds readers of The American Prospect that America should not treat Section 2 of the 14th Amendment as a dead letter either. There is another lawsuit pending based on it:

About a year ago, I reported in the Prospect on a pending lawsuit filed on behalf of a citizens group by former Department of Justice lawyer Jared Pettinato. The suit asks that the Census Bureau be required to enforce Section 2 of the 14th Amendment, enacted in 1868 to strip congressional representation from states that disfranchise voters. The text applies to general methods states adopt that keep people from voting and is not limited to racial discrimination. The proportional loss of congressional representation would also reduce the votes that states would get in the Electoral College.

The Section 2 case is now moving toward resolution. Briefs have been filed, and oral argument is expected shortly before the court of appeals in Washington, D.C

It’s another one of those constitutional sections that seems to have been ratified and quickly forgotten. As someone who lives in one of the most heavily gerrymandered states in the nation and where voting law fuckery is a growth industry….

On a structural level, enforcing Section 2 for the first time would conceivably sanction and thus potentially eliminate the web of restrictions and hurdles that keep substantial numbers of citizens from casting a vote. Some states would lose representatives, and electoral votes, to states that make it easier to vote. In contrast, the Section 3 insurrection issue is individualized, dealing only with a former president whose misdeeds are unique in American history.

What the pending Section 2 case is about:

Wisconsin’s 2011 voter ID law prevented 300,000 registered voters who lacked identification from casting a ballot, according to U.S. District Court Judge Lynn Adelman. This finding was accepted as true on appeal, and should be accepted as true at this stage of the Section 2 litigation. As 300,000 registered voters is approximately 9 percent of Wisconsin’s total registrants, the complaint reasons that Wisconsin should lose 9 percent of its representatives, equal to one member of Congress and one electoral vote. Another state would gain that representative.

Yet, we know how these things tend to play out. Little guys who mistakenly violate election law or get stopped for driving while Black face the law’s full weight (and/or extrajudicial execution). The elite walk. Righting that problem is what the Section 3 lawsuits and prosecuting Donald Trump’s 91 felony indictments is about. Or is all our boasting about the rule of law no more than that?

Lucky us, the Roberts Supreme Court will likely decide whether their chosen profession is obsolete too.

It’s amazing that, given the central role courts construing constitutional texts play in our public life, the terms of operationalizing the 135 words of Section 2 have never been settled in over 150 years. The few lawsuits brought under its terms have almost all found ways to avoid enforcement. Only one case, which I filed in the 1960s when I was first assistant counsel at the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, had a different and unusual outcome. In that case brought by a group led by feminist and civil rights leader Daisy Lampkin, the judges unanimously took remedying disfranchisement by enforcing Section 2 seriously, but stayed their hand because they supposed the Voting Rights Act of 1965 might make enforcing it unnecessary.

Regardless of the outcome in the court of appeals, the Supreme Court will be asked to decide whether the Constitution’s explicit remedy for disfranchisement has life or should be ignored. The Court has many tools that can be used to continue the tradition of nonenforcement. Standing to sue doctrine allows avoiding decisions on the merits; but with respect to Section 2, continued use of it in case after case amounts to saying that what the Constitution says doesn’t matter. For a judiciary that roams across the scope of American life in its decisions, such an outcome can only be seen as random, and thus really political, decision-making. And deciding the Section 3 case to allow Trump back onto the ballot while avoiding a decision in the Section 2 case would have clear political overtones.

And social ones. That is, your JDs are BS.

Walking the crooked and narrow path

“We’ve reached the part of the campaign where Trump destroys Nikki Haley’s career and she then thanks him for it,” LOLGOP (Jason Sattler) posted this morning at Blue Sky. The former South Carolina governor has gained ground on Donald Trump in recent polling but has checked herself from launching direct attacks against TFG.

Politico’s Burgess Everett is also pondering the how swiftly 2024 Republican presidential also-rans and other Republican Trump critics will have their come-to-Donald moments. With the Iowa caucuses and New Hampshire primary held within the month, it will happen faster than the demon made Linda Blair’s head spin.

Trump has already contacted Sen. John Hoeven (R-N.D.) about an endorsement. Hoeven had endorsed fellow North Dakotan Gov. Doug Burgum before Burgham dropped out:

The Hoeven call shows how Trump’s campaign for Capitol endorsements is accelerating as he nears the first GOP nominating contest in Iowa. He won five endorsements from Republican senators during December alone, after snagging just three of them over the preceding four months. So far, Trump’s secured 18 endorsements from the Senate GOP, a group that ranges from establishment-minded Republicans to confrontational conservatives who will be vocal allies if he wins another term.

That success winning over the Hill GOP was hardly guaranteed — and comes just three years after Trump mounted a public campaign to overturn his 2020 loss that’s gotten him indicted on dozens of criminal charges. But a combination of behind-the-scenes courtships like that of Hoeven and the growing feeling of inevitability that Trump will win the nomination is peeling off Republican senators who might otherwise have longed for a new, less divisive standard-bearer. These days, many in the GOP see only upside to early support for Trump.

Haley was once Trump’s U.N. ambassador. Perhaps she imagines a promotion in a second Trump administration if she plays nice.

His recent converts include freshman Sen. Katie Britt (R-Ala.), who initially said her RNC job precluded an endorsement before endorsing Trump in December, as well as Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.), who led a challenge to Trump’s 2020 defeat by President Joe Biden.

Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), the second senator to endorse Trump in his 2024 bid, said the growing tide of pro-Trump senators signals that the former president’s path to the nomination is now “more clear” than ever in the days before Republicans cast their first ballots.

Graham’s head has been in a dark place for years. There was never any question how much farther up he would go.

There may be GOP holdouts, Everett explains. Republicans not facing reelection this year, for example. And men like Sen. Mitch McConnell of Kentucky. The Senate minority leader secured his power long before Trump. Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) claims he will remain neutral until Republicans have selected their candidate, then offer his enthusiastic support.

There will remain only a handful of critics. Sens. Mitt Romney of Utah or Alaska’s Lisa Murkowski, for example. The rest will fall in line behind Trump, however malodorous that position may be.

“He’s a weak human being,” former Republican congressman Adam Kinzinger notes. What does that say about his supporters, especially elected “leaders,” that they will debase themselves to join Trump’s fraternity?

Adam Kinzinger describes Donald Trump’s odor situation as “not good” and says he smells like arm pits, ketchup, makeup, and ass pic.twitter.com/LvqQ5As9Ez

— Acyn (@Acyn) December 28, 2023

“That strength among Republican primary voters has always been there,” said Sen. Mike Braun of Indiana, a Trump supporter who is running for governor. “A lot of this is [senators] seeing what folks are telling them back home.”

Trump’s elected and unelected supporters want to rule. As much as they want to be ruled. It is no accident that his evangelical supporters were raised from childhood to long for the return of their risen king. Shy of getting Him, they’ll settle.

Update: They’re falling in line.

Republican loyalty to Trump, rioters climbs in 3 years after Jan. 6 attack