Digby's Hullabaloo Posts

Thoughts and prayers, America. That’s all you get.

None of that matters. They have order from Dear Leader and they do what he wants:

House Republicans are preparing to formalize their impeachment inquiry into President Joe Biden with a House vote this week, as their investigation reaches a critical juncture while right-wing pressure grows.

Up until this point, House Republicans have not had enough votes to legitimize their ongoing inquiry with a full chamber vote. The probe has struggled to uncover wrongdoing by the president which is why it hasn’t garnered the unified support of the full GOP conference.

Former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy unilaterally launched the inquiry in September, even though he had previously criticized Democrats for taking the same step in 2019 when they launched the first impeachment probe of then-President Donald Trump without taking a vote at the beginning.

The dynamics for House Republicans changed, however, when the White House told the trio of GOP-led congressional committees leading the investigation that its subpoenas were illegitimate without a formal House vote to authorize the inquiry. The Trump administration made a similar argument against House Democrats at the start of his 2019 impeachment.

That gauntlet thrown by the White House has appeared to help reluctant, more moderate Republican members get on board with formalizing the inquiry.

The argument from Republican proponents of the effort, according to multiple GOP lawmakers and aides, is that a floor vote will strengthen their legal standing against the White House and fortify their subpoenas targeting witnesses like Hunter Biden, the president’s son, who has signaled he will not appear for his scheduled closed-door deposition this week.

“I didn’t come to Washington to expel a member of Congress or impeach a president,” Rep. Marc Molinaro, a swing district Republican from New York, told CNN. “The White House would do well by honoring subpoenas and participating in the investigation. If they chose not to and they obstruct, with all due respect, it’s the legislative branch’s responsibility to assert our right and responsibility to provide that oversight.”

Have I mentioned that they are shameless?

Even pre-schoolers understand this

In one of the Atlantic articles about “If Trump Wins” Mark Liebovich goes where everyone else is afraid to go. He talks about the Trump voter. Of course, he does it after explaining that you can’t really point any of this out because it upsets the MAGAs and we can’t have that. But he does explode this high minded myth that “we’re better than that,” meaning Americans write large, which clearly only applies to some of us. Anyway:

After the shock of Trump’s victory in 2016, the denial and rationalizations kicked in fast. Just ride out the embarrassment for a few years, many thought, and then America would revert to something in the ballpark of sanity. But one of the overlooked portents of 2020 (many Democrats were too relieved to notice) was that the election was still extremely close. Trump received 74 million votes, nearly 47 percent of the electorate. That’s a huge amount of support, especially after such an ordeal of a presidency—the “very fine people on both sides,” the “perfect” phone call, the bleach, the daily OMG and WTF of it all. The populist nerves that Trump had jangled in 2016 remained very much aroused. Many of his voters’ grievances were unresolved. They clung to their murder weapon.

Trump has continued to test their loyalty. He hasn’t exactly enhanced his résumé since 2020, unless you count a second impeachment, several loser endorsements, and a bunch of indictments as selling points (some do, apparently: more medallions for his victimhood). January 6 posed the biggest hazard—the brutality of it, the fever of the multitudes, and Trump’s obvious pride in the whole furor. Even the GOP lawmakers who still vouched for Trump from their Capitol safe rooms seemed shaken.

“This is not who we are,” Representative Nancy Mace, the newly elected Republican of South Carolina, said of the deadly riot. “We’re better than this.” There was a lot of that: thoughts and prayers from freaked-out Americans. “Let me be very clear,” President-elect Joe Biden tried to reassure the country that day. “The scenes of chaos at the Capitol do not reflect a true America, do not represent who we are.”

One hoped that Biden was correct, that we were in fact not a nation of vandals, cranks, and insurrectionists. But then, on the very day the Capitol had been ransacked, 147 House and Senate Republicans voted not to certify Biden’s election. Kevin McCarthy, the House minority leader, skulked back to the ousted president a few weeks later, and the pucker-up parade to Mar-a-Lago was on. Large majorities of Republicans never stopped supporting Trump, and claim they never stopped believing that Biden stole the 2020 election and that Crooked Joe’s regime is abusing the legal system to persecute Trump out of the way.

Here we remain, amazingly enough, ready to do this all again. Trump might be the ultimate con man, but his essential nature has never been a mystery. Yet he appears to be gliding to his third straight Republican nomination and is running strong in a likely rematch with an unpopular incumbent. A durable coalition seems fully comfortable entrusting the White House to the guy who left behind a Capitol encircled with razor-wire fence and 25,000 National Guard troops protecting the federal government from his own supporters.

You can dismiss Trump voters all you want, but give them this: They’re every bit as American as any idealized vision of the place. If Trump wins in 2024, his detractors will have to reckon once again with the voters who got us here—to reconcile what it means to share a country with so many citizens who keep watching Trump spiral deeper into his moral void and still conclude, “Yes, that’s our guy.”

I’ll just say this: Hillary was right. We knew it at the time and so did the press.

November 2024 is a referendum

Call it a referendum. Call it a ballot measure. Whatever. The race at the top of every voter’s ballot next year will not be a race for president. Not pumped enough to show up and vote in a race between (highly likely) two old white men? How do you feel about a choice between authoritarianism and democracy? That’s what’s really the first contest on your ballot.

Lt. Gen. Russel Honoré (Ret.) is counting on Gen Z, first-time voters to help save the country he served for decades:

In 2024, 41 million members of Gen Z will be eligible to vote. For the youngest 8 million of this group, Election Day in 2024 will be the first in which they are old enough to cast a ballot, according to recent findings by the Center for Information & Research on Civic Learning and Engagement at Tufts University.

This new generation of voters will be the most diverse our nation has ever seen. And already, these same young people have been politically engaged. In recent years, young people have been outspoken about some of the most contentious issues of our time, from climate change to reproductive rights to racial injustice. Yet the young people who have been engaged online, and in their communities, need to put that same energy into registering themselves and their peers to vote.

It’s become a cliché this century that every election is the “most important of our lifetimes.” It may be cliché, but it’s true. With every recent election, the stakes seem to become higher, and the consequences of low voter turnout have become greater.

(Yeah, I hate that cliché too. But for a different reason. When politicos pitch every election as a sky-is-falling event, Democrats, those policy liberals, become campaign conservatives. Playing it safe won’t save us.)

“Not the odds, but the stakes,” says NYU’s Jay Rosen. People need to focus on the stakes.

Where the stakes were women’s reproductive rights post-Dobbs, voters in state after state stepped up to preserve those rights. Balloptpedia provides an accounting:

2023

1. Ohio Issue 1, Right to Make Reproductive Decisions Including Abortion Initiative (2023)

2022

1. Michigan Proposal 3, Right to Reproductive Freedom Initiative (2022)
2. Kentucky Constitutional Amendment 2, No Right to Abortion in Constitution Amendment (2022)
3. Montana LR-131, Medical Care Requirements for Born-Alive Infants Measure (2022)
4. Vermont Proposal 5, Right to Personal Reproductive Autonomy Amendment (2022)
5. California Proposition 1, Right to Reproductive Freedom Amendment (2022)
6. Kansas No State Constitutional Right to Abortion and Legislative Power to Regulate Abortion Amendment (August 2022)

In every case, in red state and blue, voters chose to protect women’s reproductive freedom. That choice could be on ballots in 15 more states — at the bottom, not the top — across the country in 2024:

2024

1. Iowa No State Constitutional Right to Abortion Amendment (2024)
2. South Dakota Right to Abortion Amendment (2024)
3. Florida Right to Abortion Initiative (2024)
4. Nebraska Prohibit Abortion Procedures and Drugs Initiative (2024)
5. Missouri Right to Reproductive Freedom Amendment (2024)
6. Arizona Right to Abortion Initiative (2024)
7. Pennsylvania No State Constitutional Right to Abortion Amendment (2024)
8. Nevada Right to Reproductive Freedom Amendment (2024)
9. Colorado Abortion Ban Initiative (2024)
10. Missouri Regulations Regarding Abortion Amendment (2024)
11. Colorado Right to Abortion and Health Insurance Coverage Initiative (2024)
12. Nebraska Right to Abortion Initiative (2024)
13. Arkansas Right to Abortion Initiative (2024)
14. Montana Right to Abortion Initiative (2024)
15. New York Equal Protection of Law Amendment (2024)
16. Maryland Right to Reproductive Freedom Amendment (2024)

Just because climate change and racial injustice are not explicitly on your ballots as well doesn’t mean they aren’t there too. They are. Right at the top where you’ll choose between authoritarianism and democracy.

Democrats and aligned 501 groups must make it clear, especially to younger voters, that the 2024 presidential race is a referendum not only on preserving our democracy, but on reproductive rights, climate change and racial justice as well. Voters from all parties turned out to successfully defend reproductive rights in Kansas, in California and in Vermont, and in Montana, Kentucky, Michigan and Ohio.

Honoré lays out the stakes as a career soldier might:

The 2024 presidential election, however, is not about red versus blue, Republican versus Democrat. Think what you will of the incumbent, President Biden, but the frontrunner for the other party has made his intentions clear. Former President Trump — the leading Republican candidate — is campaigning on an “authoritarian vision for [a] second term.” He’s suggested turning the law enforcement power of the federal government against his political opponents. He’s asserted that military generals should be loyal to their leader — not, first and foremost, to the Constitution. He and his advisers have discussed using the Insurrection Act to turn the U.S. military on protesters in cities and on migrants at the southern border. And, as we’ve seen before, he’s more than willing to deny the outcome of any election he doesn’t win.

If young people don’t vote in droves in the 2024 election, alongside older Americans of goodwill and conscience, to keep Trump from returning to power and cementing power as an authoritarian leader, there may not be a 2028  presidential election. Historians and political scientists have warned that failed coup attempts — like the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol insurrection — are often “dress rehearsals” for a successful coup.

At this moment, we face two existential threats: the global rise of authoritarianism and the ongoing climate crisis. After decades of assessing and neutralizing threats, I have one message for young voters: If we do not preserve our democracy and our climate, nothing else matters. 

As the song written the same day as the Pearl Harbor attack goes, “We did it before and we can do it again | and we will do it again.”

Life’s a beach, ladies

Some guy seems not to have noticed that Taylor Swift’s hottest concert ticket of the year made her Time‘s Person of the Year. Or that Barbie was the hottest movie ticket of the year. Barbie ends with joke about women’s health care. It figures some clueless guy‘s name is Ken.

Alexandra Petri noticed (Washington Post, gifted):

“Judge Guerra Gamble is not medically qualified to make this determination and it should not be relied upon. A TRO is no substitute for medical judgment.”

— Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, writing to doctors who have received a court order allowing an abortion to end a nonviable pregnancy

There is no substitute for medical judgment, except the judgment of me, Ken Paxton.

Am I a doctor? No. I’m something better than a doctor: a Ken. My accessories include: no medical expertise and a boundless reservoir of cruelty. And one time, I saw a horse. I have also been told that my handwriting is bad and that I am not patient. This all screams “doctor” to me.

Move over Karen. Ken is here. Because when Just Ken found out the patriarchy wasn’t just about horses, he lost interest, picked up his clicky pen, and began writing letters restricting Texas women’s health care.

“Oh, and doctors? Cross me and I’ll prosecute,” says Retribution Now, Retribution Tomorrow, Retribution Forever Ken. (Sadly, not a limited edition.)

“This seems like a horrible, ghoulish way to behave when a person needs to access emergency medical care,” you might say. Sure! But we are not talking about a person in this case. We are talking about a woman. Totally different, in my medical opinion.

Life’s a beach, ladies (New York Times):

The Texas Supreme Court late Friday temporarily halted a lower court order allowing a Dallas woman to obtain an abortion in spite of the state’s strict bans, after she learned her fetus has a fatal condition.

The state court’s ruling was in response to an appeal from Attorney General Ken Paxton of Texas, who opposed the woman’s abortion.

Ruth Marcus (also from the Post) finds less humor in Just Ken’s un-pink meddling. A supporter of women’s reproductive rights, Marcus is willing to allow that some people on the anti side are motivated by deep moral convictions. But not Just Ken:

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton is an exception. He deserves no such respect, only condemnation for his unnecessary, inexplicable cruelty. No moral person — no person with true compassion for life — could be launched on Paxton’s current crusade against a Texan named Kate Cox.

Cox is a 31-year-old mother of two, about 20 weeks pregnant with a third, very much wanted. But the fetus has Trisomy 18, a severe genetic disorder. Some 95 percent of such pregnancies do not make it to term or are stillborn. Half of those born with the condition do not survive beyond the first week; 9 out of 10 die within the first year.

This is worse than heartbreaking; it is dangerous to Cox’s health and future fertility. Because she has had two previous Caesarean sections, Cox would have to have a third C-section because of the risk of uterine rupture. A repeat procedure would make it more difficult for her to carry a successful pregnancy in the future. Cox’s doctors have advised her and her husband that abortion would be the safest choice to protect her ability to have more children.

Texas argues that its abortion ban’s language is clear. Crystal.

“With allowing reasonable medical judgment, you avoid the possibility of getting it wrong and ending up in prison,” Texas Assistant Attorney General Beth Klusmann assured the court. “As long as your judgment is reasonable, you should be fine under this law.”

Now comes Paxton, Klusmann’s boss, to make clear that is not the state’s position at all. Not only can Cox’s doctor not use her judgment about what’s best for her patient, but she also can’t rely on a court order allowing her to do so. This isn’t regulating abortion — it’s terrorizing those who dare to perform the procedure and endangering the women who need it.

Just Ken thinks that’s much more fun than horses.

Lies, Laziness and Propaganda, that’s why

Chaos benefits strongmen. This sort of hysteria plays right into MAGA’s hands.

All the salacious details are there for a reason

Former prosecutor Harry Litman tweeted this about the Hunter Biden charges:

It’s one thing to bring more serious charges against a defendant who has refused to plead–that’s plea bargaining. But Hunter Biden had nothing to do w/ the unwinding of the plea agreement. To turn around after that and charge the same conduct as a nefarious scheme is an abuse.

There’s really no disputing that the grave charges against Hunter Biden would not have been filed v almost any other person who had gotten sober and paid back all tax and penalties. And the indictment is sleazy besides.

As a former prosecutor, I find the dovetailing of the indictment to the hackish agenda of a political party deeply troubling. Especially when the conduct is unchanged from when the prosecution was offering to plead this out to 2 misdemeanors.

Huge chunks of the 56-page indictment of Hunter Biden are about his “extravagant lifestyle,” drugs escorts etc. The relevance of this info to non-payment of taxes is tenuous in the extreme. But it certainly dirties him up.

David Weiss is a Republican who is now clearly responding to the pressure from his party and it’s pathetic.

Here’s former prosecutor Shan Wu with a full analysis:

The latest indictment of Hunter Biden adds to an embarrassing series of missteps in this case that makes the Department of Justice look petty and unable to withstand political pressure.

They look petty because Special Counsel David Weiss, who was given the new title of special counsel after already having worked on the case for five years, acts like he has hurt feelings following the spectacular public crash and burn of his attempt to plead out the case.

The pettiness seems on view in a letter from Hunter Biden’s legal team documenting Weiss’ refusal to meet prior to the tax indictment being brought. Such a refusal violates a norm in white-collar criminal defense where defense counsel are afforded a last-ditch effort to avoid indictment. No legal strategic reason exists for Weiss to turn down such a meeting unless he was concerned about wasting time, which would be ironic for a man who has spent nearly half a decade on a case. What’s one more meeting?

Weiss has no business having hurt feelings about his poorly handled plea bargain that collapsed under the commonsense questions asked by the presiding judge about the scope of the agreement and whether it was appropriate for the court—rather than the prosecution—to determine if Biden would be in compliance with the terms of his diversion agreement.

The diversion agreement would have “diverted” the gun charges from prosecution so long as Biden fulfilled certain conditions, which typically include community service and staying out of future criminal trouble. When I was a prosecutor, a failed plea bargain in open court would have necessitated some explaining back at the office, but the remedy was to go back to the drawing board. That is, unless the plea broke down because the defendant refused to admit guilt, which is not what happened in this case, as Biden was ready, willing, and able to accept criminal guilt. But if the plea broke down because of a lack of clarity or an error of law, then the solution was to fix the terms. A plea bargain is, in essence, a contract between the prosecution and defendant, and contract terms get revised all the time without the deal collapsing. But what you would never do as a prosecutor is to punish a defendant out of embarrassment or in an attempt to insulate yourself from political criticism. And Weiss faces plenty of both.

High-profile cases put a lot of pressure on both law enforcement and prosecutors, and a case involving any relative of a sitting president—much less a child of the president—is plenty high profile. Those kinds of cases require careful and thorough preparation to make sure the legal analysis is fair and can stand up to extra scrutiny. Weiss is failing on both.

Indicting Hunter Biden for tax evasion when he has already paid back the taxes smacks of unfair treatment. As former Attorney General Eric H. Holder, Jr. put it on CNN, numerous former U.S. Attorneys—both Democratic and Republican—told him that they would not have brought the tax case.

The amount is not astronomical like the case of telecommunications entrepreneur Walter Anderson, who made TIME magazine’s list of Top Ten Tax Dodgers, pled guilty and paid $400 million in penalties and fees. Perhaps more importantly, other more egregious cases have been resolved not by criminal prosecution but civilly. For example, in 2021, Roger Stone was sued by the federal government to collect over $1.5 million in federal income taxes dating back to 2007. Stone was not prosecuted, only subject to a civil suit.

In another high-profile case, a partner at a major law firm and his wife paid $7.3 million in April of this year to resolve taxes that had been unpaid between 2001 and 2006 as well as other years. Again, there was no criminal prosecution, only a civil lawsuit.

Moreover, Weiss’ indictment includes gratuitous digs at what can only be construed as Hunter Biden’s character rather than his alleged tax evasion. For example, Weiss states that Biden spent “money on drugs, escorts and girlfriends, luxury hotels and rental properties, exotic cars, clothing and other items of personal nature, in short, everything but his taxes.”

Weiss’ rhetorical flourish seems silly since I suspect most people who fail to pay the taxes also spend their money on things other than paying their taxes. Weiss’ focus on the more sensationalistic aspects of the spending seems to be a result of his wanting to play in the echo chamber of the holier-than-thou conservative right. But Biden isn’t being prosecuted for being a drug addict or engaging in prostitution. He’s being prosecuted for tax evasion.

DOJ guidelines for pursuing tax matters in criminal prosecutions emphasize seeking to “achieve maximum deterrence.” Such deterrence can certainly be achieved by prosecuting high-profile defendants. The actor Wesley Snipes comes to mind. He went to jail for three misdemeanor convictions after owing the government about $7 million in unpaid taxes and having failed to file any returns from 1999 through 2001. Snipes’ defense also begged to be made an example out of as it included the claim that the IRS was an illegitimate government agency.

A review of TIME magazine’s Top Ten Tax Dodgers shows most of them are celebrities in their own right, like Willie Nelson, Pete Rose, O.J. Simpson. Hunter Biden is not a celebrity in his own right, however, but a celebrity due only to being the son of the president of the United States. That’s a poor reason to make an example out of him.

Hunter knows what they’re doing:

President Joe Biden’s son, Hunter Biden, has accused Republicans of trying to “kill” him in an effort to undermine his father’s presidency. His death “would be a pain greater than my father could be able to handle”, the younger Biden told musician Moby in a podcast that aired on Friday.

The first of the two-part broadcast was recorded before Mr Biden was charged with nine major tax crimes on Thursday.

Hunter Biden, a recovering crack cocaine addict, was speaking from his home in Malibu, California, to Moby, whom he befriended while in recovery for drug and alcohol abuse.

“They are trying to, in their most illegitimate … but rational way, they’re trying to destroy a presidency,” he said in the episode of Moby Pod.

And David Weiss is happy to help.

The Supreme Court of Texas stayed the order that would have allowed a woman to abort a very high risk pregnancy last night. Here’s a short bio of one of the Justices, who happens to be a radical anti-abortion zealot who calls himself “The Ten Commandments Judge.”

John Devine has long been a staunch anti-abortion activist. At a June rally in Fort Worth, Devine told the crowd he had been arrested 37 times while protesting abortion clinics in the 1980s, Smith reported. Though, in a more recent interview, “he said he had been arrested during peaceful protests several times in the 1980s but did not remember how many,” Smith reported. Despite this history of activism, Devine insisted he “is still able to interpret the law impartially.”

In 2008, Devine and his wife, Nubia, showed everyone just how committed they were to the pro-life position when her seventh pregnancy endangered her life and that of the baby. The Texas Observer‘s Emily DePrang wrote about a video his campaign put out called “Elizabeth’s story.”

It documents the birth of his seventh child, Elizabeth, which his wife carried to term despite the fact that the fetus had a condition likely to kill her. She survived, and the baby died an hour later. The video opens, “What if your beliefs were so powerful, they allowed you to fearlessly risk your life for the life of your unborn child?” and concludes, “Though Elizabeth died only an hour after she was born, her life began at conception.”

That line about “fearlessly risking your life” for a child that has no chance of life is just stunning. They truly believe that a woman must be willing to die to ensure that her fatally damaged fetus can emerge from the womb and die an hour later. It’s pretty clear that these people don’t value women as anything more than a birthing vessel. It’s sickeningly grotesque.

Mrs. DeSantis makes a huge mistake. And it will cost them.

Lol.

They really can’t do anything right can they?