Digby's Hullabaloo Posts

It was only a matter of time

I confess I didn’t see this coming. And I should have. Of course the normalization of the narcissistic imbecile Donald Trump would lead inexorably to a Nixon revival on the right. After all, how can you hold him responsible for his crimes if everything Trump has done is perfectly above board?

Politico reports:

In late August, Republican presidential hopeful Vivek Ramaswamy took a break from his typical campaign events to make a pit stop at an unusual venue for mainstream Republicans: The Richard Nixon Presidential Library. Speaking before a packed house, Ramaswamy was slated to deliver a speech on foreign policy. But his opening remarks served the more provocative purpose of challenging Nixon’s much-maligned status in the annals of conservative history.

“He is by and away the most underappreciated president of our modern history in this country — probably in all of American history,” said Ramaswamy, without a hint of irony.

Ramaswamy’s homage to America’s most disgraced ex-president perplexed some liberal commentators, for whom Nixon remains the ultimate symbol of conservative criminality. But Ramaswamy is far from alone in rethinking Nixon’s divisive legacy. Among a small but influential group of young conservative activists and intellectuals, “Tricky Dick” is making a quiet — but notable — comeback. Long condemned by both Democrats and Republicans as the “crook” that he infamously swore not to be, Nixon is reemerging in some conservative circles as a paragon of populist power, a noble warrior who was unjustly consigned to the black list of American history.

Across the right-of-center media sphere, examples of Nixonmania abound. Online, popular conservative activists are studying the history of Nixon’s presidency as a “blueprint for counter-revolution” in the 21st century. In the pages of small conservative magazines, readers can meet the “New Nixonians” who are studying up on Nixon’s foreign policy prowess. On TikTok, users can scroll through meme-ified homages to Nixon. And in the weirdest (and most irony laden) corners of the internet, Nixon stans are even swooning over the former president’s swarthy good looks.

“I’ve always been pretty fascinated with him,” said Curt Mills, a conservative journalist and self-professed Nixon fan. (Mills has contributed to POLITICO Magazine.) “I think the Nixon story is really an American story. He really is this guy who is from nowhere, and he’s just absolutely reviled … [but] I do think he has this charisma that’s sort of underrated.”

The Nixon renaissance is being driven in part by young conservatives’ genuine interest in Nixon, whom Mills colorfully described as “our Shakespearean president.” But when pressed about their pro-Nixon views, even his most sincere supporters readily admit that the Nixon-mania isn’t being driven solely — or even primarily — by academic interest in Nixon. Instead, the populist right’s ongoing effort to rehabilitate Nixon, which is unfolding against the backdrop of the 2024 Republican primary, is really about another divisive former Republican president: Donald Trump.

In the topsy-turvy historical tableau of 2023, to defend Nixon is to back Trump — and to rescue the former from historical ignominy is, according to the thinking of some young conservatives, to save the latter from the same fate.

“If we can rehabilitate Richard Nixon in a balanced and fair manner — or even if we can just create questions in the public discourse about Nixon and about Nixon’s presidency — then I think, by way of analogy, it will provoke similar questions about Donald Trump,” said the conservative activist Christopher Rufo, who published a lengthy defense of Nixon earlier this year for City Journal. “It will give us the kind of template, it will give us the precedents, it will give us the skills, where we can more effectively defend a conservative president against these kinds of attacks.”

Amid the surge of interest in Nixon, different conservatives are finding different things to admire in his legacy. Some — like Ramaswamy and Mills — have taken a shine to Nixon’s foreign policy realism, which they see as an alternative to the naive idealism that has led Democrats and Republicans alike into ill-fated entanglements abroad. In his speech at the Nixon Library, Ramaswamy identified Nixon as the forebear of his own foreign policy vision, which includes withdrawing from NATO, cutting off U.S. support for Ukraine and adopting a more combative military and economic posture toward China.

“No man is perfect — Richard Nixon definitely wasn’t — but one element of his legacy that I respect is reviving realism in our foreign policy,” said Ramaswamy in an interview from the campaign trail, pointing specifically to Nixon’s successful efforts to reestablish diplomatic relations with China during the 1970s. “Pulling Mao out of the hands of the USSR was one of the great victories that allowed us to come to the end of the Cold War … and it took an independent thinker like Nixon to lead us out of that.”

Meanwhile, other conservatives are looking to Nixon’s domestic policy as a template for the GOP’s battle against the liberal establishment and its alleged allies in government, academia and the media. In August, Rufo — who is best known for leading the conservative crusade against “critical race theory” — produced a short film called “Nixon Forever,” which identified the former president’s “law and order” policies and his efforts to constrain the power of the federal bureaucracy as “a blueprint for counter-revolution” in the 21st century. Rufo has gone so far as to suggest that the next Republican president look to Nixon’s brutal (and occasionally illegal) treatment of leftist groups like the Black Panthers and the Weather Underground as a model for their own war on the “radical left.”

“I think a Nixon-style effort — within the limitations of the law — would be correct,” Rufo told me. “The basic strategy would be to identify violent left-wing networks, to infiltrate them with confidential human sources, undercover agents [and] electronic communications — if that can pass muster with a judge — and then to start just imploding them from within.”

Bring on the Cointelpro baby!

I do love Rufo’s disclaimer “within the limits of the law” considering that Donald Trump is making it clear that he plans to deputize the Department of Justice as his personal goon squad to punish his enemies. They don’t need no stinkin’ laws or judges.

Nixon would have been impeached and convicted if he hadn’t resigned and would have faced jail time if he hadn’t been pardoned. But that was 40 years ago. What these people are really suggesting is that times have changed and Trump can get away with the things that Nixon did. And they are not wrong. Half the country is now enthusiastically supporting an openly corrupt half wit and the entire Republican Party is behind him too. Nixon would never have resigned under those circumstances.

But Rufo is one of those guys who says the quiet part out loud. He is the MAGA Goebbles:

Rufo says future generations will instead remember Tricky Dick, “as a good, honest man who rose from humble beginnings to the highest office in America, who loved his country, who tried to save the ideals of 1776.” Someone who, per Rufo, “was caught in the web of his own culpability, the tragic nature of politics, and a vicious bureaucratic coup set out to destroy him.”

Amid the overwrought comparisons to the founders, it’s worth asking how much the Nixon renaissance is, at its core, just an elaborate troll, one designed as much to provoke as to educate?

“Yes — yes, it is,” Rufo said, without hesitation, when I posed that question to him. “But,” he added, “it’s not just a troll, because there’s a substantive purpose to it. If we can rehabilitate Richard Nixon in the public mind, we will have demonstrated a capacity for reshaping how people think about political figures in the past, which gives us a lesson in actively shaping [the perception] in the present of political figures of our current day.” In other words, a blueprint for rehabilitating Trump.

What was it the Bushies used to call this? Catapaulting the propaganda? I don’t know if it could work but I wouldn’t be surprised. Rufo could also disappear like a relic of an embarrassing past and MAGA could be remembered as a severe form of mass delusion. Only time will tell.

Happy Hollandaise, everyone!

Moms For Liberty, flash in the pan

It looks like another vaunted group of culture warriors bites the dust:

Moms for Liberty, a national right-wing advocacy group, was born in Florida as a response to Covid-19 school closures and mask mandates. But it quickly became just as well known for pushing policies branded as anti-L.G.B.T.Q. by opponents.

So when one of its founders, Bridget Ziegler, recently told the police that she and her husband, who is under criminal investigation for sexual assault, had a consensual sexual encounter with another woman, the perceived disconnect between her public stances and private life fueled intense pressure for her to resign from the Sarasota County School Board.

“Most of our community could not care less what you do in the privacy of your own home, but your hypocrisy takes center stage,” said Sally Sells, a Sarasota resident and the mother of a fifth-grader, told Ms. Ziegler during a tense school board meeting this week. Ms. Ziegler, whose husband has denied wrongdoing, said little and did not resign.

Ms. Sells was one of dozens of speakers who criticized Ms. Ziegler — and Moms for Liberty — at the meeting, an outcry that underscored the group’s prominence in the most contentious debates of the pandemic era.

Perhaps no group gained so much influence so quickly, transforming education issues from a sleepy political backwater to a rallying cry for Republican politicians. The organization quickly became a conservative powerhouse, a coveted endorsement and a mandatory stop on the G.O.P. presidential primary campaign trail.

Yet, as Moms for Liberty reels from the scandal surrounding the Zieglers, the group’s power seems to be fading. Candidates endorsed by the group lost a series of key school board races in 2023. The losses have prompted questions about the future of education issues as an animating force in Republican politics.

Donald J. Trump, the dominant front-runner for the party’s nomination, makes only passing reference in his stump speeches to preserving “parental rights” — the catchphrase of the group’s cause. Issues like school curriculums, transgender students’ rights and teaching about race were far less prominent in the three Republican primary debates than abortion rights, foreign policy and the economy. And the most prominent champion of conservative views on education — Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida — has yet to unite conservatives behind his struggling presidential bid.

John Fredericks, a Trump ally in Virginia, said the causes that Moms for Liberty became most known for supporting — policies banning books it deemed pornographic, curtailing the teaching of L.G.B.T.Q. issues and policing how race is taught in schools — had fallen far from many voters’ top concerns.

“You closed schools, and people were upset about that. Schools are open now,” he said. “The Moms for Liberty really have to aim their fire on math and science and reading, versus focusing on critical race theory and drag queen story hours.”

He added: “It’s nonsense, all of it.”

It just goes to show you how quickly things change in today’s politics. It was just over a year ago that everyone was gnashing their teeth and wringing their hands over the new “parental rights” movement with many advising that Democrats needed to “moderate” on these issues or they would lost everything. As usual.

School board races and moral panics around education have been a feature of right wing politics as long as I can remember. And then it almost always turns out that they get exposed as hypocrites or move on to the next outrage and it settles down. It’s rare that one of the far right leaders is a woman involved in a three-way sex scandal (it’s common among the men…) but maybe we can call that progress?

It’s Happy Hollandaise time, folks!

Can we “match the level of in-the-streetsness”?

“I can’t seem to get out of my own way,” my best friend from college used to complain. By that he meant that all his smarts and cleverness were stumbling blocks to getting what he wanted out of life. Which was another way of saying he thought too much.

Democrats and lefty allies have the same problem: stubbornly insisting this is a survival-of-the-smartest world when it isn’t.

Anand Giridharadas the other night issued a warning about that. First he notes that while lefty anger is dialed up to 11, our actions do not reflect it. Are we serious about stopping fascism or what?

Three theses from my discussion with @chrislhayes last night about 2024.

1. Tens of millions profess to be as mad as they’ve ever been about Trump, but if we’re honest, we don’t have a national pro-democracy movement commensurate with the threat or with the professed passion. pic.twitter.com/3ocXVNtmjp

— The.Ink, from Anand Giridharadas (@AnandWrites) December 15, 2023

Do our actions “really match the level of in-the-streetsness” we saw in the 1960s, Giridharadas asks. Just as I’ve argued before:

Winning in your head is like bringing sports visualization training to the Olympics and thinking you’ll be competitive when you show up with no conditioning and no skills.

At some point, you have to play the game for real. At some point, you have to run the election and count the votes. At some point, you have to win on the ground instead of in your head. You’d best be good at it.

And that “on the ground” fight is won in part through stories, not data. Stories are how humans process data and make sense of their actual experiences. Abstractions like “the economy” or GDP do not carry the same weight.

Giridharadas doesn’t say it this way, but Democrats must quit thinking that being the smartest person in the room wins elections. Think George W. Bush vs. Al Gore. Or Donald Trump vs. Hillary Clinton. Someone this week on social media noted that even when he’s alone Donald Trump is not the smartest person in the room. And he won the presidency.

Trump’s movement was built on tapping into human sentiment, Giridharadas says, “in all the dark ways, in all the morally neutral ways,” but it persuades and turns out voters. It’s a skill. Neither the White House nor the DNC rely on those skills. The Lincoln Project gets it though.

3. When you dig below the day-to-day issues, this is a country full of anxious, unmoored voters, of every background.

To me, the central problem in American politics right now is that the bad guys know how to speak to the psychologically adrift, and the good guys don’t. pic.twitter.com/eFxPdE39Xo

— The.Ink, from Anand Giridharadas (@AnandWrites) December 15, 2023

What’s driving political sentiment in this country is much deeper than data, Giridharadas believes. Economic data does not address people’s psychological distress and feelings of displacement.

“And right now in America, the bad guys know how to speak to psychologically adrift people, and the good guys do not.”

If we’re as smart as we think we are, we’ll learn. And fast.

Here’s a spot that goes for the gut:

@nowthispolitics The latest ad from Mothers Against Greg Abbott and Mothers for Democracy darkly hits back at politicians’ thoughts and prayers on the 11-year mark of Sandy Hook #mothersagainstgreggabbott #texas #sandyhook #politics ♬ original sound – NowThis Politics

It’s Happy Hollandaise Time! You help keep lit this beacon of sanity.

On Democrats fighting the last war

Trying to teach Yellow Dogs new tricks sometimes seems pointless. With few exceptions, Democrats always seem to be fighting the last war because that’s the one they learned on. Brian Beutler sees it too.

Beutler perceives that social media has fundamentally shifted our political ground:

When Donald Trump won the presidency in 2016 on the strength of a media feeding frenzy over emails, it dawned on me that either my intuitions about partisan politics had been wrong, or something fundamental had changed. With the benefit of hindsight, I soon came to see the 2014 midterm campaign as a precursor. Republicans back then turned a closely fought election into a blowout in the final stretch by fanning a different media feeding frenzy—this one over a far-off outbreak of Ebola.

[…]

All of this happened because Republicans situated themselves to win an information war in 2014, then situated themselves to win another information war in 2016. I had simply been underestimating the effectiveness of their antics.

What allowed Democrats to win in 2018 and 2020 were not material conditions but “contagious ideas.” We could use some about now.

“A huge recession in 2008 drove the incumbent party from power,” Beutler writes, and the slow recovery precipitated the 2010 backlash. All fitting predictive models. Then social media took off.

The media once measured the economy by a standard set of metrics, whatever “gloom and doom” Republicans spread. But the right had fewer tools for spreading them. Today the Net is a toxic smorgasbord while collective media literacy has remained weak. (Undermining liberal arts and civics education has helped that, I’d add.)

“Within that glut, the lines between professional journalism and all other media have blurred, and liberal political elites were unprepared for it,” Beutler continues. All of the radical shifts in how people receive and process information off screens has occured in the last 15 years, he argues (emphasis mine):

While we weren’t paying attention, Republicans created a politics for the attention economy. Democrats are doing politics like it’s 1999. More generously, they’ve built politics around the insight that “the internet isn’t real life” and stuck with it for many years, even as the assumption itself has become less and less true.

Ask those beaten and injured in the “Be There. Will Be Wild!” insurrection if the internet isn’t real life.

This paragraph evokes memories:

Even before Republicans became terminally online, Democrats were no great visionaries about the power of the internet. When I began my career in online journalism almost 19 years ago, Democrats on Capitol Hill were quicker than Republicans to make small adjustments for it. But they were very small and very reluctant. It was common practice for Democrats to leave their standard communications operations intact, but create tiny, isolated digital-media outreach teams to contend with their online critics and allies. Real news and information was for the capital-J Journalists; “bloggers” (emphasis always on the “blah”) had to contend with the 22-year old staffer who had an RSS feed and no useful information to share. Over many years and under a lot of pressure, these teams typically became integrated. But the disdain lingered—many of the same people run the Democratic Party today. And under their watch, Republicans became savvier about the online world and overtook the left.

Before then, back when conservatives scheduled their Right Online conferences for the same dates and cities as Netroots Nation (2008-2011?), they held digital trainings that seemed to amount to teaching senior citizens how to “log on.” Ah, the good old days. We bloggers were DFHs then. Still are.

And this is ultimately why I’m not so sanguine about Republicans voting to formalize their baseless Biden impeachment inquiry. It’s why I suspect media is largely responsible for breaking the relationship between economic fundamentals and public sentiment, and why I don’t take it for granted that happier tidings will wash over the public in the coming months (though, of course, I hope they do). 

Most liberals see factual realities—of Biden’s unimpeachable conduct, or the economy’s resiliency—and assume they must break through to the masses at some point. I see artifacts of yet-more information wars that could cost Democrats a fateful election once again.

I have to interject yet again that this information war is an asymmetrical one. When people ask why the Democrats don’t have a messaging infrastructure as vast and as disciplined as the GOP’s, I remind them that the GOP doesn’t have one either. It just appears that way because Republicans are so well-supplied with information armaments by a network of billionaire-funded think tanks and billionaire-owned media outlets. Democrats are Ukrainians fending off Russia without support from NATO and the U.S.

Another problem is that Democrats are not as plucky and improvisational as the “outmatched” Ukrainian Army. Decades after the advent of near-universal early voting, their election organizing still echoes the days when precinct captains were tasked with turning out neighborhood voters in a single-day, fourteen-hour marathon. Like 1999, if not 1969. They’ve been slow to up their game at the county level.

It’s Happy Hollandaise Time! You help keep lit this beacon of sanity.

Animals opening their presents!

Aaaaand kids opening their presents:

Happy Hollandaise, folks. I know some of you like the Friday Night Soother more than anything else I do. If so … 🙂

What happened to all the missing secrets?

You may remember Cassidy Hutchinson saying that Mark Meadows took a binder full of information about the Russia investigation home with him during her January 6 Committee testimony:

According to transcripts released by the Jan. 6 committee last year, in closed-door testimony, former White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson told the committee she was “almost positive” the binder went home with former White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows. 

“I don’t think that would have been something that he would have destroyed. It was not returned anywhere, and it never left our office to go internally anywhere. It stayed in our safe in the office safe most of the time,” Hutchinson said, adding that she realized the binder was no longer in the safe on her last day at the White House. 

CNN has new reporting on what went on and the enduring mystery of the missing binder continues.

A binder containing highly classified information related to Russian election interference went missing at the end of Donald Trump’s presidency, raising alarms among intelligence officials that some of the most closely guarded national security secrets from the US and its allies could be exposed, sources familiar with the matter told CNN.

Its disappearance, which has not been previously reported, was so concerning that intelligence officials briefed Senate Intelligence Committee leaders last year about the missing materials and the government’s efforts to retrieve them, the sources said.

In the two-plus years since Trump left office, the missing intelligence does not appear to have been found.

The binder contained raw intelligence the US and its NATO allies collected on Russians and Russian agents, including sources and methods that informed the US government’s assessment that Russian President Vladimir Putin sought to help Trump win the 2016 election, sources tell CNN.

The intelligence was so sensitive that lawmakers and congressional aides with top secret security clearances were able to review the material only at CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, where their work scrutinizing it was itself kept in a locked safe.

The binder was last seen at the White House during Trump’s final days in office. The former president had ordered it brought there so he could declassify a host of documents related to the FBI’s Russia investigation. Under the care of then-White House chief of staff Mark Meadows, the binder was scoured by Republican aides working to redact the most sensitive information so it could be declassified and released publicly.

The Russian intelligence was just a small part of the collection of documents in the binder, described as being 10 inches thick and containing reams of information about the FBI’s “Crossfire Hurricane” investigation into the 2016 Trump campaign and Russia. But the raw intelligence on Russia was among its most sensitive classified materials, and top Trump administration officials repeatedly tried to block the former president from releasing the documents.

The day before leaving office, Trump issued an order declassifying most of the binder’s contents, setting off a flurry of activity in the final 48 hours of his presidency. Multiple copies of the redacted binder were created inside the White House, with plans to distribute them across Washington to Republicans in Congress and right-wing journalists.

Instead, copies initially sent out were frantically retrieved at the direction of White House lawyers demanding additional redactions.

Just minutes before Joe Biden was inaugurated, Meadows rushed to the Justice Department to hand-deliver a redacted copy for a last review. Years later, the Justice Department has yet to release all of the documents, despite Trump’s declassification order. Additional copies with varying levels of redactions ended up at the National Archives.

But an unredacted version of the binder containing the classified raw intelligence went missing amid the chaotic final hours of the Trump White House. The circumstances surrounding its disappearance remain shrouded in mystery.

We knew that Trump was determined to declassify all this stuff believing that it somehow exonerated him. Of course it didn’t and I would guess that most of the “redactions” done by his staff had little to do with classified secrets and more to do with information that pointed to Russian interference on Trump’s behalf.

They didn’t find it at Mar-a-Lago. Mark Meadows insists that he didn’t take it. So where is it?

The New York Times adds this:

Mr. Trump’s White House chief of staff, Mark Meadows, had a copy of material from the binder given to at least one conservative writer, according to testimony and court filings.

But when Justice Department officials expressed concerns that sharing some of the material would breach the Privacy Act at a time when the department was already being sued by Mr. Strzok and Ms. Page for having publicly released some of their texts, the copies were hastily retrieved, according to two people familiar with the matter.

Mr. Trump was deeply focused on what was in the binder, a person close to him said. Even after leaving the White House, Mr. Trump still wanted to push information from the binder into the public eye. He suggested, during an April 2021 interview for a book about the Trump presidency, that Mr. Meadows still had the material.

“I would let you look at them if you wanted,” Mr. Trump said in the interview. “It’s a treasure trove.”

Mr. Trump did not address a question about whether he himself had some of the material. But when a Trump aide present for the interview asked him, “Does Meadows have those?” Mr. Trump replied, “Meadows has them.”

“We had pretty much won that battle,” Mr. Trump added, referring to questions about whether his 2016 campaign had worked with Russia. “There was no collusion. There was no nothing. And I think it was maybe past its prime. It would be sort of a cool book for you to look at.”

Suuuuuure. He’d love to show it to the media but he doesn’t have it. Talk to Mark, maybe he’ll show it to you.

And where did it come from in the first place? Well, the usual suspects, of course:

The binder’s origins trace back to 2018, when Republicans on the House Intelligence Committee, led by Chairman Devin Nunes, compiled a classified report alleging the Obama administration skewed intelligence in its assessment that Putin had worked to help Trump in the 2016 election.

The GOP report, which criticized the intelligence community’s “tradecraft,” scrutinized the highly classified intelligence from 2016 that informed the assessment Putin and Russia sought to assist Trump’s campaign. House Republicans cut a deal with the CIA in which the committee brought in a safe for its documents that was then placed inside a CIA vault – a setup that prompted some officials to characterize it as a “turducken” or a “safe within a safe.”

It truly is the sign of a nation in decline that it would elect such imbeciles to govern it.

The Republicans on the Committee said the intelligence was rigged by former Obama officials to exclude intelligence that would have shown that the Russians really wanted Hillary Clinton to win. Seriously. The Democrats said that was nonsense, of course, and their view was validated by the bipartisan Senate report which found that they actually preferred Donald Trump.

It seems there will never be an end to revelations of just how corrupt Trump’s administration actually was. Sure, some of the people on the inside did what they could to stop them from doing their worst but so many didn’t. And we know that next time no one will even try.

And by the way, here’s another enduring mystery: why in the hell has Mark Meadows not been charged by the Special Counsel nor does he seem to be a cooperating witness? What’s up with that? The guy is in the middle everything. On the other hand, a federal appeals court heard his appeal to move his Georgia case to federal court and they didn’t sound convinced. So, at least there’s that. Trump can’t pardon him for that crime.

Happy Hollandaise everyone!

And his cult will probably believe it.

I don’t know how many of you are watching the Trump videos on his web site but almost all of them are terrifying. But among the atrocities are a few comic gems. This is one of them:

Former President Donald Trump on Friday proposed building up to 10 futuristic “freedom cities” on federal land, part of a plan that the 2024 presidential contender said would “create a new American future” in a country that has “lost its boldness.”

Commuters, meanwhile, could get around in flying cars, Trump said – an echo of “The Jetsons,” the classic cartoon about a family in a high-tech future society. Work to develop vertical takeoff and landing vehicles is already underway by major airlines, auto manufacturers and other companies, though widely seen as years away from reaching the market.

“I want to ensure that America, not China, leads this revolution in air mobility,” Trump, who announced his third bid for the presidency in November, said in a four-minute video detailing his plan.

He said he would launch a contest to charter up to 10 “freedom cities” roughly the size of Washington, DC, on undeveloped federal land.

“We’ll actually build new cities in our country again,” Trump said in the video. “These freedom cities will reopen the frontier, reignite American imagination, and give hundreds of thousands of young people and other people, all hardworking families, a new shot at home ownership and in fact, the American dream.”

Happy Hollandaise, everyone!

He manipulated the court’s norms to overturn Roe. And he’ll do it again whenever he chooses.

This piece in the NY Times about the deliberations in the Dobbs decision is a barn burner. I’ve included a gift link so that you can read the whole thing, but here is how it opens.

Alito is a beast, as are those in his thuggish crew:

On Feb. 10 last year, Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. showed his eight colleagues how he intended to uproot the constitutional right to abortion.

At 11:16 a.m., his clerk circulated a 98-page draft opinion in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization. After a justice shares an opinion inside the court, other members scrutinize it. Those in the majority can request revisions, sometimes as the price of their votes, sweating sentences or even words.

But this time, despite the document’s length, Justice Neil M. Gorsuch wrote back just 10 minutes later to say that he would sign on to the opinion and had no changes, according to two people who reviewed the messages. The next morning, Justice Clarence Thomas added his name, then Justice Amy Coney Barrett, and days later, Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh. None requested a single alteration. The responses looked like a display of conservative force and discipline.

In the months since, that draft turned into a leak, then law, then the rare Supreme Court decision that affects the entire country, reshaping elections, the practice of medicine and a fundamental aspect of being female. The story of how this happened has seemed obvious: The constitutional right to abortion effectively died with Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, whom President Donald J. Trump replaced with a favorite of the anti-abortion movement, Justice Barrett.

But that version is far from complete. Justice Barrett, selected to clinch the court’s conservative supermajority and deliver the nearly 50-year goal of the religious right, opposed even taking up the case. When the jurists were debating Mississippi’s request to hear it, she first voted in favor — but later switched to a no, according to several court insiders and a written tally. Four male justices, a minority of the court, chose to move ahead anyway, with Justice Kavanaugh providing the final vote.

Those dynamics help explain why the responses stacked up so speedily to the draft opinion in February 2022: Justice Alito appeared to have pregamed it among some of the conservative justices, out of view from other colleagues, to safeguard a coalition more fragile than it looked.

The Supreme Court deliberates in secret, and those who speak can be cast out of the fold. To piece together the hidden narrative of how the court, guided by Justice Alito, engineered a titanic shift in the law, The New York Times drew on internal documents, contemporaneous notes and interviews with more than a dozen people from the court — both conservative and liberal — who had real-time knowledge of the proceedings. Because of the institution’s insistence on confidentiality, they spoke on the condition of anonymity.

We are continuing to report on the Supreme Court. If you are able to share further information, please use our secure tip line to reach Jodi Kantor, Adam Liptak and the rest of our team. nytimes.com/tips

At every stage of the Dobbs litigation, Justice Alito faced impediments: a case that initially looked inauspicious, reservations by two conservative justices and efforts by colleagues to pull off a compromise. Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., a conservative, along with the liberal Justice Stephen G. Breyer, worked to prevent or at least limit the outcome. Justice Breyer even considered trying to save Roe v. Wade — the 1973 ruling that established the right to abortion — by significantly eroding it.

To dismantle that decision, Justice Alito and others had to push hard, the records and interviews show. Some steps, like his apparent selective preview of the draft opinion, were time-honored ones. But in overturning Roe, the court set aside more than precedent: It tested the boundaries of how cases are decided.

Justice Ginsburg’s death hung over the process. For months, the court delayed announcing its decision to hear the case, creating the appearance of distance from her passing. The justices later allowed Mississippi to perform a bait-and-switch, widening what had been a narrower attempt to restrict abortion while she was alive into a full assault on Roe — the kind of move that has prompted dismissals of other cases.

The most glaring irregularity was the leak to Politico of Justice Alito’s draft. The identity and motive of the person who disclosed it remains unknown, but the effect of the breach is clear: It helped lock in the result, The Times found, undercutting Chief Justice Roberts and Justice Breyer’s quest to find a middle ground.

In the Dobbs case, the court “barreled over each of its normal procedural guardrails,” wrote Richard M. Re, a University of Virginia law professor and former Kavanaugh clerk on a federal appellate court, adding that “the court compromised its own deliberative process.”

In his opinion, Justice Alito wrote that the court was stepping away from the abortion debate and intended to “return that authority to the people and their elected representatives.” Since the court’s ruling, access to abortion has dropped overall, with 21 states banning or restricting it and some others reinforcing abortion protections.

I don’t know if this dynamic and the reporting on it helps or hurts the chances that they go easy on the Mifepristone case. I don’t think we can know. But if I had to guess it may have a better outcome but only because there is enough partisan hackery in that majority that they may see it as useful for the Republican Party not to start another firestorm so soon. But they will do it eventually. The Alito majority is going to be around for a long time.

It’s Happy Hollandaise time, folks… 🙂 If you’d like to toss something in the old Hullabaloo stocking, you can do so here:

Or is it just more hopium?

I’m hoping to spread a little bit of hopium during this holiday season, not because I’m trying to blow smoke but because I’m honestly not as pessimistic about this coming election as a lot of people are. It’s not that I’m not extremely nervous. I know as well as you do that anything can happen and this political situation is extremely volatile. After all, just two years ago we had an attempted coup!

But after having lived through some earlier panics that inform my feelings about this election, I’m just not ready to call for the hemlock. Yet. I know it will take hard work and close attention to what’s going on over the next year, but I do believe it’s possible. I’ll try to bring you analysis that I find as I scour the internet everyday that may at least give you some pause.

JV Last of the Bulwark is a bit of a curmudgeon. Sometimes he is down right dark but I often find his analysis interesting. Today he discusses a conversation with economist Noah Smith about Biden’s chances in the election and why Smith believes he will win.

I don’t know if he’s right but it’s certainly worth taking into consideration. He starts off by pointing out something that I’ve said for years, based on my own experience, which is that consumer sentiment and economic polling are very lagging indicators. I’ve observed in the past that it always takes about a year for people to catch up to reality.

Last recounts Smith’s thesis:

Inflation is now—we think—finished. This week’s suggestion that the Fed is looking at multiple rate cuts in the coming months caused the markets to jump. Projections now suggest that the economy will continue to be strong through 2024.

Having achieved a soft landing, the next phase of the business cycle may be expansion. As such, Goldman Sachs believes 2024 will be even better than initially thought.

As these economic realities continue to stack on top of one another and prices remain stable, consumer sentiment will eventually come around—as it always does. By the middle of 2024 we should see a measurable uptick in people’s perception of the economy; by late 2024 voters should be fully caught up.

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Hopium? Maybe. But it doesn’t sound off base to me. I’m already seeing a change in the media which is an important first step.

Smith argues that Biden’s approval numbers will improve as will his polling. (God, let’s hope so.) “By staying the course, not panicking, and letting the growing economy do the work, Biden will be in a strong position for reelection simply because of the fundamentals.”

Last likes this argument because it doesn’t just rely on the polling being skewed or abortion being the magic bullet everywhere. It assumes instead that despite the bizarre nature of this election, what with a psychopathic would-be dictator currently under 91 felony indictments running against the incumbent, things haven’t changed so very much.

As he says:

And I like same-as-it-ever-was heuristics, because (1) they tend to be true¹ and (2) they assume persistent levels of low information among voters.

And I might add, if those normal heuristics, like a successful incumbent, a good economy and a monstrously dangerous opponent aren’t relevant at all, we are in much, much bigger trouble. So yeah, maybe it’s hopium but what else have we got?

Being Last, he’s still not happy with that argument, even if it’s true, because despite all that the odds still give Trump a pretty good fighting chance to pull it off which is as chilling as always. And why? Because we’ve got evidence that a massive number of Americans have been exposed to illiberalism — and they like it. This will be lasting legacy of Trump. They now know that the rules were made to be broken.

The whole Republican party has been activated and they now believe they have a right to attain power by any means necessary. Trump may lose but he’s just the beginning. This anti-democratic, authoritarian worldview is now the organizing principle of the Republican Party.

I do believe it’s possible that public opinion is on the verge of catching up to a good economy and a lot of the people who now say they disapprove of Biden will come around. I don’t know how many of them will, however, and no matter what, I believe the electoral college vote is going to be close. We just have to hope that reality and sanity will assert themselves in enough of the population that we can at least finally put Trump out to pasture. It may not cure the disease but we can cut out the tumor that caused it.

We’ll be keeping a super close eye on this seven days a week all year long here at Hullabaloo, as we always do. If you are of a mind to help me keep this thing going over what promises to be an unprecedentedly tumultuous year, I’d be most appreciative. Your support means the world to me and I am very, very grateful.

cheers,
digby

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Happy Hollandaise everyone!

It’s a mess and it’s getting messier

It appears that Speaker of the House Mike Johnson’s honeymoon is coming to an early conclusion. The Freedom Caucus is hopping mad that he allowed the Defense Authorization Bill to pass with Democratic votes, a big no-no signifying that the bill was obviously much too good. According to Puck’s Tara Palmieri, they accused Johnson of going behind their backs and using a “page ripped from the Boehner playbook” referring to the former speaker who, like Kevin McCarthy, was also chased out of the job for passing bills with Democrats.

Palmieri reports that a senior GOP aide told her that “people are turning on Mike fast; he won’t make a decision” because he wouldn’t choose between two competing bills. And apparently it has finally occurred to them that his lack of experience and expertise might be a problem, quoting the same aide saying, “his operation is minor league compared to Kevin’s team. At least they knew what they were doing and how the place ran. Mike’s team has no idea what they’re doing, and it’s pissing people off. We used to be able to get answers from people.” Who could have seen that coming?

It’s clear from his record that Johnson would love nothing more than to stand by their side and throw tantrums but his job as Speaker is coming into conflict with his ideology as a MAGA warrior and it’s probably not going to end well for him.

He has certainly gone out of his way to show the hardliners that he’s one of them. He immediately made the required pilgrimage to Mar-a-Lago to kiss the ring and then enthusiastically delivered his endorsement making it clear that he is still MAGA all the way. And despite just a few weeks ago suggesting that impeachment was no longer necessary since President Biden’s polls numbers are weak (therefore admitting that the whole thing is a partisan sham) he delivered for Trump and the MAGA faithful on their biggest priority this week. He brought the vote to formalize the inquiry to the floor and persuaded the so-called moderates in the party to go along. You’d think that would have appeased the Freedom caucus but let that be a lesson to him: that is simply not possible.

All the usual suspects have been making the rounds since the vote suggesting that the party line vote (which Johnson once insisted could destroy the Republic) shows that they have the goods. But once again, they are lying. They have still produced not one sliver of evidence that Joe Biden did any of the things they are implying he did with their histrionic innuendo about “the Biden Crime Family.”

Interestingly, there is one member of the House who may have actually done the things he’s accusing Biden of doing. A few weeks ago Roger Sollenberger of the Daily Beast broke a story about some shady dealings by House Oversight Chair James Comer that resembles some of the crimes he’s accusing Biden of committing. In a new report the AP unearthed new details and now it’s now pretty clear that his crusade is a clear example of projection.

Comer has been yammering about “the Biden family” shell companies, which Joe Biden had nothing to do with and were actually completely legitimate companies with real purposes, for months. He even once told Fox Business, “nobody creates shell companies.”

Actually, some people do. In fact, Comer himself has a shell company which grew from $50,000 and $100,000 at the time of purchase to between $500,001 and $1 million today. Evidently, he’s conveniently forgotten to report the assets within it which goes against House rules which require members to disclose assets held by companies worth more than $1,000. Oh, and this shell company was formed from a transfer of a piece of land co-owned with one of his major campaign donors and nobody can figure out what the purpose of it was or why he has gone to such lengths to obscure it.

When asked about this, he keeps saying that the questioner is “financially illiterate” which is hilarious considering the total illiteracy of his charges against Joe Biden. If you don’t believe that, I highly recommend this thorough fact check by the Washington Post’s Philip Bump or this one by Factcheck.org. It would be sad if it wasn’t so outrageous.

But the point of all this is to dirty up Joe Biden as corrupt to give some red meat to the Trump followers and make the rest of the country assume “where there’s smoke there’s fire” which is something they’ve been successful at doing against their enemies for decades. I’m sure I don’t have to remind people about Whitewater which bears some similarities with this current bogus scandal in both its lack of evidence or its relevance to the current presidency. The memory of Benghazi and “But Her Emails” against Hillary Clinton are still fresh. The Birther scandal enraptured the right wingers throughout the Obama presidency and launched Donald Trump’s political career.

This is what they do. And more often than not, when you examine these scandals closely you’ll find that it’s the Republicans doing the accusing who are actually guilty of the crimes. James Comer’s flagrant hypocrisy is just par for the course.

Donald Trump wants revenge for his two impeachments and if there was time he would demand that they impeach Biden three times just so he’d have one more than him on his record. And because they’ve pounded this story on right wing media for years now, the MAGA base is slavering over the prospect of taking down the president. It has nothing to do with any real crimes or evidence or anything else that would justify an impeachment.

Those Representatives from swing districts who voted to open the inquiry this week may believe this was essentially a free vote and hope that they won’t be asked to vote for an actual impeachment but I think they are deluding themselves. The constitutional standard for impeachment is “treason, bribery, or other high crimes and misdemeanors” but in practice, as the late president Gerald Ford put it, “an impeachable offense is whatever a majority of the House of Representatives considers it to be at a given moment in history.”

At this moment in history, Donald Trump, James Comer and Jim Jordan will be deciding what it is and it’s clear that their standard is literally nothing. They’ll do it because they can. That’s the only reason they need.

If you’d like to support Hullabaloo for another year, you can do so below or use the snail mail address on the left. Happy Hollandaise, everyone!