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PA institutes automatic voter registration

Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro (D) announced this morning that “eligible voters getting a new driver’s license or ID card in Pennsylvania will now be automatically registered to vote,” reports NBC News.

Shapiro’s office issued a statement:

“Pennsylvania is the birthplace of our democracy, and as Governor, I’m committed to ensuring free and fair elections that allow every eligible voter to make their voice heard,” said Governor Josh Shapiro. “Automatic voter registration is a commonsense step to ensure election security and save Pennsylvanians time and tax dollars. Residents of our Commonwealth already provide proof of identity, residency, age, and citizenship at the DMV – all the information required to register to vote — so it makes good sense to streamline that process with voter registration. My Administration will keep taking innovative actions like this one to make government work better and more efficiently for all Pennsylvanians.”

The howls you hear outside belong to opponents of universal suffrage who believe the goal is to “bloat” voter rolls to boost Democratic turnout. Shapiro campaigned on implementing automatic voter registration (AVR).

The Washington Post’s Greg Sargent adds:

An underappreciated success story, it has been put into effect in two dozen states, mostly by Democrats. It typically works by automatically registering customers at state Department of Motor Vehicles offices (or other agencies) or by automatically extending them that option, while offering an opt-out alternative.

[…]

By keeping a registration process in place while removing the need to affirmatively initiate it, studies show, AVR encourages democratic participation. AVR also tends to make voter rolls more accurate and more up to date.

Despite the right’s insistence that voter roll accuracy is critical to “election integrity,” GOP-led states are exiting the Electronic Registration Information Center (ERIC), the voter roll maintenance consortium, under pressure from the usual assortment of conspiracy theorists and election deniers. Election integrity is a right-wing marketing slogan for disguising efforts to undermine popular sovereignty.

Sargent continues:

Republicans at the state level have been gerrymandering, restricting ballot access and manipulating the rules of political competition for decades. But Trump has exacerbated these tendencies: Right now, Republicans in numerous states are responding to recent election losses by supercharging anti-democratic, anti-majoritarian tactics — even though evidence is mounting that people are growing accustomed to voting in defense of democracy.

That is encouraging at a time when democracy is under constant attack.

Not to rain on anyone’s parade, but a caveat about AVR. As part of an ongoing outreach effort to my local Hispanic/Latino community (designated HL in the state voter file), I surveyed multiple county precincts with concentrations of HL registrants.

Of the HL voters 45 and under, some unscientific observations. Note bolded section:

• About 60% of HL registrants 45 and under are registered unaffiliated.
• Only 9% report being born outside the U.S.; for another 18% birth_state is left blank.
• 35% of voters vote irregularly; women more than men by 3 to 2. (Many are presidential-year-only voters.)
• Of the nearly one-quarter (22%) of registrants who vote consistently, women outperform men by 2 to 1.
• Women and men who register but never vote (30%) do so about equally.

A local elections official suspects many of the non-voters register as an afterthought when prompted during a visit to the DMV or a social services agency, then forget about it. Registering them automatically could be even more invisible (depending on the style of AVR), even if citizens receive registration cards in the mail.

As the AVR study notes, while AVR “ultimately has a net positive effect on turnout,” new registrants “have a somewhat lower propensity to vote.”

Automatic registration is no panacea for boosting election participation. Outreach and voter engagement is key, especially since campaigns typically prioritize outreach to registrants with solid voting track records (the low-hanging fruit). What my limited survey in one population suggests is that many lower propensity registrants may not even remember they are registered by election time. They’ll need encouraging no matter their track record.

Is Kavanaugh standing back and standing by?

The GOP loves a twofer, or even a threefer. Political maneuvering some might call strategic might less flatteringly be called sneaky or outright dishonest. Diabolical is not out of the running.

Donald Trump withholds final payments to subcontractors, for example, just enough that court costs make it a losing proposition for a subcontractor to take him to court to recover what he owes. Or Trump plays delay, delay, delay when he finds himself in court holding a losing hand.

Gerrymandering cases are another example. GOP legislatures draw district maps patently illegal under the Voting Rights Act (VRA). Democrats and aligned groups take them to court, win, and judges orders new maps. Then GOP legislators draw a second set of unacceptably gerrymandered maps, and the exasperated court appoints a special master to draw them instead. It happened in North Carolina. Or the GOP-led legislature might simply defy the courts until there is no time left before the next election to implement new maps. Something like what happened in Ohio.

Or in the case of Alabama, that maneuver is where dark money meets hidden agenda.

The Alabama Political Reporter (APR) offers a “twofer” explanation for Alabama Republicans’ defying a U.S. Supreme Court ruling in Allen v. Milligan that Alabama draw a second majority Black congressional district. Leonard Leo, the “hidden architect of the Supreme Court,” is allegedly involved:

APR’s reporting shows the extent to which Alabama’s calculation to defy the Supreme Court was made not simply by state legislators in Alabama but has been driven by nationally connected political operatives at the center of the well-documented right-wing effort to reshape the composition and jurisprudence of the Supreme Court and to overturn the remaining key protections established by the 1965 Voting Rights Act. 

[…]

As APR reported on July 27, Alabama lawmakers working in conjunction with state Attorney General Steve Marshall’s office and Washington D.C. lawyers had “intelligence” that Supreme Court Associate Justice Brett Kavanaugh — who voted with the majority in Milligan just weeks ago to order the new maps under the statutory language — is open to rehearing the case as a constitutional challenge to the validity of Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act. 

The Alabama government’s briefs before the three-judge panel in September referenced a concurring opinion by Kavanaugh that questioned whether “race-based redistricting” can “extend indefinitely into the future.” Alabama further relied on arguments — also rejected by the U.S. District Court — that a subsequent U.S. Supreme Court decision this same term ending affirmative action in college admissions (called Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard ) compels the Court to find that a state’s use of a map in which “race predominates” now violates the 14th Amendment’s guarantee of equal protection. As in Milligan, Kavanaugh filed a concurrence in Students for Fair Admissions, emphasizing the potential for time limits on race-related policies. 

Having gutted Section 5 (pre-clearance) in Shelby (2013), the right is now gunning for Section 2 (ban on discrimination on the basis of race, color or minority status).

APR’s Bill Britt writes, “The tangled web of previously unreported ties centers around Marshall, Alabama Solicitor General Edmond LaCour — dubbed “the architect behind Alabama’s voting rights defiance” — and the D.C.-area law firm Consovoy McCarthy, the firm founded by William Consovoy, a now-deceased former clerk to Justice Clarence Thomas who represented Shelby County in Shelby County v. Holder.” He maps out a web of connections between LaCour and his wife, the D.C. law firm, Leo, “the Catholic far-right,” and Kavanaugh.

Joan McCarter at Daily Kos cautions:

None of this proves that Kavanaugh is involved in the effort to allow Alabama’s racist gerrymander and effectively gut the Voting Rights Act; that’s resting on that supposed “intelligence” that Alabama Political Reporter sources assert. What is clear is that strands of Leo’s web of dark money are at work here, with the goal of eradicating the scraps of the VRA that still exist. There’s no denying that Kavanaugh owes his lifetime appointment on the court to that network.

Alabama joined forces with Leo’s team to file this as an emergency petition, one that’s decided on the shadow docket. They want the Supreme Court to blow up the VRA behind closed doors—again.

MSNBC’s “The ReidOut” interviewed Britt Monday night.

“I cannot say with any certainty that Justice Kavanaugh will join in the scheme but when you look at the bedfellows it is an awfully crowded queen-size bed.” –@BillBritt on the Alabama GOP reportedly trying to force the Supreme Court to strike down Voting Rights Act. #TheReidOut pic.twitter.com/5ZnMUfONT5

— The ReidOut (@thereidout) September 19, 2023

What has long been clear is that “an authoritarian minority,” its political and cultural preeminence threatened by an expanding multicultural, secularizing society, is bent on preventing further slippage in its role as apex dominator. However many thumbs it must apply to the scales of fairness, so be it.

I think Philip Bump’s analysis of the Trump interview problem is on point. The rest of the media should know this by now:

Donald Trump’s success in the 2016 Republican nominating contest was, at its essence, uncomplicated.

Running against a cadre of sitting and former elected officials, Trump said things they wouldn’t — mostly the things that were being said in the right-wing media and by pundits on Fox News. The reputation for “truth-telling” his supporters embrace was born of his willingness to elevate false, popular claims, particularly about the left. He wasn’t elected for his policies; in fact, he broadly rejected the idea that people cared much about policy.

The only thing that’s changed over the past eight years, really, is that everyone should know the playbook by now. We should know that he will 1) flood the zone with things that are burbling on the right-wing fringe, 2) make sweeping promises without much follow-through and 3) reject any criticism out of hand, spinning it into a reason to praise himself.

And so it was with his interview on NBC’s “Meet the Press” that aired Sunday.

One of only a few interviews with a traditional news outlet since he announced his 2024 candidacy last November, the discussion began precisely as his 2015 announcement at Trump Tower had begun: He would make America great again in part by repelling the hordes of criminal immigrants flooding into the country.

“They come from prisons. They come from mental institutions, insane asylums,” he said as he was answering the first question from host Kristen Welker. “They say, ‘Sir, please don’t use that term,’ but it’s true.”

As was the case eight years ago, this is not generally true. Some of those seeking to enter the country may have criminal records or even mental illness, of course, but there’s no indication that this constitutes a significant component of those seeking asylum or work in the United States. It’s almost certainly true that the universe of people who have served in senior positions on Trump’s political campaigns is more densely populated with accused criminals than the pool of recent immigrants.

Welker didn’t push back on this claim, in large part because Trump quickly moved on to another bit of patter. Flooding the zone.

She did offer some resistance to his attempt to present the film “2000 Mules” as a legitimate indictment of the 2020 election. Created by Dinesh D’Souza, recipient of one of Trump’s first presidential pardons, the film’s allegations of drop-box-stuffing have been completely eviscerated. When Trump told Welker, for example, that “we have thousands of essentially motion pictures of people stuffing the ballot boxes,” he’s referring to a common belief about the movie that is entirely false. The movie shows only a few examples of someone casting more than one vote at a drop box; none has been shown to have been illegal. One clip, described in the film as committing a crime, was determined to have depicted a man legally adding the ballots of family members. That man is now suing D’Souza.

Welker rejected Trump’s assertion, eager to move on to a different subject. There was probably a way for someone well-versed in the arcana of the allegations to push back harder on Trump’s claims; it’s very safe to assume that his ability to defend the movie is untested and flimsy. But this would almost certainly have simply led to Trump shifting the goal posts somewhere else, until he made a claim that his interviewer didn’t rebut. Falsehoods and conspiracy theories will always find a sturdy enough foundation on which they can rest.

Once you hand Trump a megaphone, he’s going to do with it what he wants. He knows how to use it. This is why it’s better to pretape his interviews, allowing for obvious dishonesties such as the one about “2000 Mules” to be elided or presented with context. For whatever reason, despite taping the interview in advance, NBC chose not to make such edits.

The interview was very difficult for me to watch. My rage at the fact that almost half the country supports this obviously corrupt, lying, imbecile has become almost too much to bear. If an interviewer ever actually did what Bump suggests I think I would feel a lot better but they don’t seem capable of it. They just let him go on and on and on with chaotic word salad perhaps in the hope that his ignorance and narcissism will be obvious to the audience. But after years of this his absurd meanderings have been normalized and I’m not sure that many people see him that way anymore. Certainly, you have to assume that young people who’ve grown up listening to him over the last 8 years think it’s normal. It’s all they know.

I guess the conventional wisdom is that the mainstream media does this for ratings (and that Chris Licht episode at CNN certainly corroborates that.) But I have to wonder if they’ve thought this through. Wouldn’t they get good ratings if they did something creative like fact checking a recorded interview like that on MTP, within the broadcast? It would be arduous but I’ll bet people would watch it. It might result in Trump refusing to ever appear with them again, but so what? He’s not on there very often anyway and there will be plenty of public appearances to cover.

As I wrote in my Salon piece this morning, Trump is not a novelty as he was in 2015 nor is he a sitting president. He’s just another and he doesn’t deserve any special deference. In fact, he deserves less deference than any of the others. After all, he’s also a criminal defendant in four separate cases. Treating him like a respectable government official is ridiculous.

Remember those so-called sensible Republicans who didn’t think they should launch an impeachment inquiry? Well, they’ve seen the light:

Before House Speaker Kevin McCarthy unilaterally launched an impeachment inquiry, center-right Rep. Don Bacon, R-Neb., urged his party not to go down that road, saying it was “too early” given the lack of evidence against President Joe Biden.

But two days after McCarthy made that decision last week, Bacon, who represents an Omaha-based district that voted for Biden in 2020, shifted his tone and said he wasn’t taking issue with it.

“If there’s a high crime or misdemeanor, well, let’s get the facts,” Bacon told NBC News, adding that he had been “hesitant” about it earlier — but now it’s done, and he stands by McCarthy, R-Calif.

“I don’t think it’s healthy or good for our country. So I wanted to set a high bar. I want to do it carefully. I want to do it conscientiously, do it meticulously,” Bacon said. “But it’s been done. So, at this point, we’ll see what the facts are.”

His remarks represent a trend: McCarthy’s decision to proceed with the impeachment inquiry has faced scant public pushback from House Republicans, even though many of them objected to taking that momentous step. The softening of stances is the latest example of swing-district and center-right Republicans standing by their leadership team, even as it bends to pressure from far-right lawmakers to take actions that could backfire politically on these more centrist members and endanger their competitive seats.

If those same far-right lawmakers try to overthrow McCarthy for failing to meet their demands on other issues, like spending, Bacon made it clear he and others would protect McCarthy. “There’s 200 of us or so, maybe more, that will stick by the speaker,” Bacon said.

In the 2024 election cycle, Democrats will be targeting the seats of the 18 Republicans who represent districts Biden won, with the hope of recapturing control of the House. The man in charge of protecting the GOP majority, Rep. Richard Hudson, R-N.C., said he supports the inquiry but hasn’t seen enough evidence to actually impeach the president.

“I’ve seen enough that we need to continue to ask questions,” Hudson, who chairs the National Republican Congressional Committee, said in an interview. “But I think we just need to continue to talk about what we’ve found and keep looking. And let’s follow the facts. And if the facts show the president is innocent, then let’s tell the American people that’s the case.”

Another skeptic of an impeachment inquiry was Rep. David Joyce, R-Ohio, who chairs the center-right Republican Governance Group, and said last month he hadn’t seen any “facts” to justify such a step.

But after McCarthy greenlighted the inquiry, Joyce had no complaints.

“I support Speaker McCarthy’s decision to direct the House Committees on Oversight, Judiciary, and Ways and Means to open a formal impeachment inquiry into President Joe Biden,” he said in a statement, adding that he’s “confident” the committee leaders in charge “will conduct thoughtful and thorough investigations into allegations against the President, which I will carefully review.”

Other impeachment-inquiry critics in the group of the “Biden 18” Republicans, who represent the crossover districts, include Reps. Mike Lawler, R-N.Y., and Brian Fitzpatrick, R-Pa. Their offices didn’t return emails seeking comment on whether they support McCarthy’s decision to launch the inquiry.

Notably, other Republicans in Biden-won districts supported pursuing an impeachment inquiry. That includes Rep. Mike Garcia, R-Calif., who said the international business dealings and transgressions of Biden’s son Hunter Biden create “a requirement to seek truth and to seek accountability” for the House in terms of exploring so far unproven links to the president.

“There’s smoke there, right? So we have a requirement to go investigate that to see if there’s actually fire there,” he said.

McCarthy opened the inquiry by himself, bypassing a vote of the House as it was unclear he had enough votes to succeed in his paper-thin Republican majority with Democrats opposed. But Garcia said he would have voted “yes” to launch such an inquiry.

“I would have voted for it,” Garcia said. “That’s the great fallacy. There seems to be this national narrative that people in swing districts don’t want accountability and truth. That’s not the case.”

But he also said that in the end, “if it’s not substantiated, we should oppose” proceeding to articles of impeachment.

Some Republicans in districts that Biden carried have steered clear of the issue. Asked about her position, Rep. Young Kim, R-Calif., who represents an Orange County area, directed NBC News to contact her office, which didn’t respond to a request for comment.

Rep. Marc Molinaro, R-N.Y., who represents a Hudson Valley district, said he supports the inquiry, but his focus is elsewhere.

“When there’s questions or impropriety, it’s the appropriate responsibility of Congress to be the check and balance on the administration,” Molinaro said after McCarthy launched the inquiry. “I didn’t come here to impeach anybody, but the responsibility of Congress is to provide the appropriate oversight.”

But now that the House has begun the impeachment inquiry, failing to move forward with articles of impeachment would be sure to spark a rebellion from far-right Republicans. Many of them are already prepared to impeach Biden even though the House has yet to produce evidence implicating him in bribery or abuse of power. They believe that a failure to impeach would give their GOP base the impression that they’re exonerating Biden.

“The American people support impeachment of Joe Biden and an investigation of the entire family and every person who covered it up,” Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., a McCarthy ally who introduced articles of impeachment against Biden over a different issue the day after he was sworn in as president, said Tuesday on X, formerly Twitter. “It’s time to hold Democrats accountable.”

I really hope that Democrats target these people and use this against them in their re-election campaigns. Biden’s impeachment (and there is going to be one) is going to be a shitshow and these people should not be let off the hook for it.

If you are a member of the GOP today you are MAGA and you are no better than Marjorie Taylor Greene.

To those who thought that Trump calling the 6-week abortion bans “terrible” in his interview this weekend would cause the “pro-life” movement to abandon him, think again. Aaron Blake of the WaPo asked Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America about it and this is what they said:

If you ever thought the anti-abortion movement was about anything other than rank politics, you know better now. They are just another political interest group trying to maintain its power in the party. It’s what they’ve always been.

These are people who’ve spent the last five decades screaming that abortion is murder. Now they’re talking about “ambition and common sense” and trying to sell a 15 week abortion ban in order to get votes for their side. Apparently, fetuses may be endowed with all the rights of fully formed human beings but maybe a little genocide under 15 weeks is a small price to pay to maintain political power? Looks like it.

I would guess that most of you haven’t ever heard of Sneako, a right wing Youtube “influencer.” Here’s a short bio:

Nicolas “Nico” Kenn De Balinthazy (born: September 8, 1998 [age 25]), better known online as Sneako, is a right-wing Muslim-American internet personality. Sneako is closely associated with figures such as Andrew and Tristan Tate, rapper Kanye “Ye” West, white nationalist streamer Nick Fuentes, LeafyIsHere and the hosts of the Fresh&Fit Podcast.

Through his main channel “SNEAKO” and second channel “SHNEAKO” on YouTube, Sneako amassed over 2,000,000 subscribers, up until his termination from the platform after repeated community guideline violations. He now posts content on the “alt-tech” platform Rumble.com

You can get more details here but let’s just say this guy is a real piece of work.

Here he is with some of his ardent fans:

sneako finally realizes he got himself in a bubble with his red pill content 🤣 pic.twitter.com/enVlvMBAlz

— FearBuck (@FearedBuck) September 17, 2023

I guess that’s supposed to be funny but it sends a chill down my spine. Those little boys are watching this misogynist, homophobic pig online. What did he think was going to happen? God help this country.

Over the last few days as most of the media was blathering on about Joe Biden’s “bad week” , Donald Trump was stepping up his campaign and appearing at various venues saying things and behaving in ways that should have made journalists’ ears perk up, wondering if he’s lost more than a step. He was wildly dishonest and incredibly self-destructive even for him.

It started with an interview with Megyn Kelly for her Sirius XM show last Thursday, the first since Trump crudely insulted her back in 2015 in the first presidential primary debate. Trump seemed to expect a friendly, Fox-like, interview and she gave him plenty of softballs and expressed her agreement with much of his nonsense. But she did ask some probing questions about his legal troubles and once again he more or less confessed to his crimes. He must have said the words “Presidential Records Act” a dozen times, reiterating over and over that he had every right to take any document he chooses. And he slipped up continuously, providing the prosecution plenty of fodder:

Trump on taking classified documents: “I’m allowed to have these documents. I’m allowed to take these documents…When I have them, they become unclassified. People think you have to go through a ritual. You don’t, at least in my opinion.” pic.twitter.com/IAkdGsGnWo

— Republican Accountability (@AccountableGOP) September 14, 2023

When the Special Prosecutor presents this case to the jury they will be told exactly what is supposed to happen with classified documents and they will understand how utterly ridiculous it would be for a president to secretly declassify documents and not tell anyone that they’ve been declassified.

Over the Weekend he spoke at the Christian Right “Pray, Vote, Stand” Summit in Washington and mocked President Biden mercilessly over his alleged mental unfitness and then said this:

Trump says Joe Biden is “cognitively impaired” and then accuses him of getting us into World War TWO.

No, he really did. 🤭 pic.twitter.com/03KKUm24XT

— Jim Stewartson, Anti-disinfo activist 🇺🇸🇺🇦💙 (@jimstewartson) September 16, 2023

Any normal person would have just corrected himself for misspeaking but he can never admit he did anything wrong so instead he twisted himself into a verbal pretzel that had it been delivered by Joe Biden would have resulted in national call to check him into a nursing home immediately.

He later appeared at the Concerned Women for America conference and was a little bit sharper but repeated nonsense such as his silly claim that you need ID to buy a loaf of bread, another sign that he simply cannot retain information. He has certainly heard by now that this is silly and could easily substitute something like “you have to have ID to travel on an airplane” to make his point but he can’t do that. Once he gets something like “low flow showers” or “windmills cause cancer” in his head there’s no getting it out. That’s not normal.

The final segment of his week-end odyssey was the highly anticipated interview on Meet the Press which was filmed earlier in the week. To say it was infuriating would be an understatement. As he always does, he ran circles around the host, Kristen Welker, and basically made a mockery of American democracy by demonstrating that an incoherent con artist is going to be the Republican nominee for president. Again.

He once again showed he is completely oblivious to the legal damage he is doing to himself every time he agrees to answer questions about his cases. Here he confesses that he only listened to lawyers who told him what his own “instincts” told him was true. When pressed he says that the decision about whether the election was rigged was his alone, although he dances away from Welker’s question about whether he was “calling the shots.”

WATCH: Kristen Welker asks former President Trump to clarify if he was listening to his lawyers’ advice or his own instincts after he lost the 2020 election.

Trump: “It was my decision.” pic.twitter.com/a3Hl4HPbEX

— Meet the Press (@MeetThePress) September 17, 2023

Watching these events is intensely frustrating and I think it’s even more difficult to watch now than before. He is no longer a first time candidate taking the political press by surprise. Neither is he the president whose office confers such immense power that even a dolt like Trump is automatically given more deference than he deserves. Today he is just another candidate for president and he doesn’t deserve to be treated with any more respect than any of the others. In fact, he deserves less since he is a criminal defendant in four different cases and was recently found liable for sexual assault to the tune of $5 million.

The man sat in all the interviews and appearances and made it crystal clear that he believes he is above the law. In fact, with his endless blathering about how he can do whatever he wants with classified documents he makes it clear that he believes he is the law. And yet, the befuddled yet eager media is treating Donald Trump with the same consideration they always did, before they knew how disordered and his mind was and what a danger he is to American democracy and the rule of law.

I had thought after the widely criticized CNN Trump town hall everyone understood that you simply cannot allow Trump to ramble incoherently to cover for his unwillingness to answer the questions. They have to find another way to cover him. And yet there he was this weekend on Meet The Press doing exactly that and inspite of the interview being on tape they aired it as if it was live only putting a lame fact check on their website after the fact.

For every viewer who saw that he’s completely unfit to be president there is another who got lost in the overwhelming rush of words, or what’s known to rhetoricians as “the Gish Gallop” which is a tactic designed to “defeat one’s opponent by burying them in a torrent of incorrect, irrelevant, or idiotic arguments.” That’s what he does, however unconsciously, and the media aides and abets him by treating him as if he’s just another politician.

The Guardian’s Margaret Sullivan wrote about this problem last week pointing out

Trump is covered mostly as an entertaining sideshow – his mugshot! His latest insults! – not a perilous threat to democracy, despite four indictments and 91 charges against him, and despite his own clear statements that his re-election would bring extreme anti-democratic results; he would replace public servants with the cronies who’ll do his bidding. “We will look back on this and wish more people had understood that Biden is our bulwark of democratic freedoms and the alternative is worse than most Americans can imagine,” commented Ruth Ben-Ghiat, author of Strongmen, and an expert in authoritarian regimes.

She says the solution for journalists is simpler than we think:

Remember at all times what our core mission is: to communicate truthfully, keeping top of mind that we have a public service mission to inform the electorate and hold powerful people to account. If that’s our north star, as it should be, every editorial judgment will reflect that.Headlines will include context, not just deliver political messaging. Overall politics coverage will reflect “not the odds, but the stakes”, as NYU’s Jay Rosen elegantly put it. Lies and liars won’t get a platform and a megaphone.

I wish I had more confidence that this would happen. At this point I think we just have to fervently hope that there are enough people in this country who can see through that cacophony of bs and vote as if their future depends upon him never holding office again — because it does.

Salon

Are there not enough real problems to fret over?

Democrats should have learned from the 2016 presidential race not to underestimate the commitment of the Republican tribe to its presidential frontrunner. Savvier GOP play-ahs may be nervous about having Donald Trump and his indictments running atop their 2024 ticket, but from what Mitt Romney revealed last week, many, many of them are too afraid of their violence-prone MAGA base to openly oppose him/them. An emergent “existential brand of cowardice,” as McKay Coppins put it, permeates the party leadership.

That is to say that Democrats should know better this time than to count on some deus ex machina to recast the race that seems already cast … for both parties. What was it Andy Dufresne said in Shawshank?

But Democrats being Democrats, they will. One thing Democrats are good at is self-doubt. Slate’s David Faris suggests (obliquely) that they get busy instead. He finger-wags at murmurings about a second-term VP for Biden:

“Maybe the president should dump the veep” is a Beltway parlor game as old as time. Or at least as old as the writers doing the speculating. There were calls for George H.W. Bush to replace Dan Quayle with Colin Powell in 1992, and gossip that George W. Bush would toss the gruff Dick Cheney overboard in 2004. Before the 2012 election, some thought that Barack Obama, reeling from his historic “sh ellacking” in the 2010 midterms, should eighty-six then–Vice President Biden and replace him with his 2008 rival, Hillary Clinton. In 2019, D.C. was rife with rumors that Mike Pence would be sacked as Trump’s running mate for former U.N. Ambassador and South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley.

Not to give away the ending to Titanic here, but none of these incumbents cashiered their vice presidents. No elected incumbent in the binding primary era that began in 1972 has switched running mates before standing for reelection, and the last time it happened at all was in 1944, when Harry Truman replaced Henry Wallace on the ballot to be FDR’s vice president—and then that was only because he had made too many ideological enemies inside the Democratic Party to stay, a problem Harris does not have. And while Gerald Ford, whose journey to the presidency was highly unusual, picked Bob Dole in 1976, and not incumbent Vice President Nelson Rockefeller, that was because Rockefeller made it clear he had no interest in the job.

If Democrats could wave a magic wand and replace Harris with someone like Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, as New York magazine’s Eric Levitz suggests, without the ensuing backlash and “Democrats in disarray” news cycles, would that be a good idea? Possibly. (Not so much for Washington Post columnist David Ignatius’ bananas idea to swap in Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo, who was for a time the least popular governor in America.) But there are no magic wands in politics—only unappealing options and constraints imposed by choices made in the past, what social scientists call “path dependence.” The moment Biden selected Harris as his partner in 2020, he all but ensured that she would be more or less irreplaceable.

Harris has some weaknesses, sure, writes Faris. She “has failed to stake out a clear policy space for herself inside the party,” and Biden putting her in charge of the southern border did her no favors. Her polling, like Biden’s, leaves much to be desired. Nonetheless, “Vice President Harris isn’t going anywhere.” Deal with it.

Faris suggests, “If Democrats are worried about her favorability ratings, they should remember that the best thing they could do for them is to somehow boost Biden’s.” Harris has something special going for her: Republicans fear a second Black president should Biden win in 2024 and leave the Oval Office … unexpectedly. Might that prospect further energize the MAGA base? Okay then, more than what?

Don’t you love how Republican candidates say, “A vote for Biden is really a vote for Kamala Harris”? WE SEE YOU. We know EXACTLY what you’re saying. #dogwhistle

— Suburban Guerrilla 💙 (@SusieMadrak) September 13, 2023

And for those taking the “he’s too old” bait, Joe’s not going anywhere either. Democrats need to get busy winning or get busy losing.

Values drag

Honestly, the headline summarizes well a column that tells us little we don’t already know, but let’s run with that: The Republican Party Has Devolved Into a Racket. But you knew that.

Professors Sam Rosenfeld and Daniel Schlozman make their case that “the G.O.P. has lost a collective commitment to solving the nation’s problems and become purposeless.” But you knew that too.

Trump, his Big Lie co-defendants, and Mitt Romney’s assessment of his Senate Republican colleagues marks a party “aimless … beyond the struggle for power and the demonization of its enemies.”

The pair include a walk down memory lane from the 1970s until the party was consumed with conspiracism and its “long provenance on the American right, reaching back to McCarthyism and the John Birch Society.”

“For Republicans, the only election results they respect are the ones that they win… I guess “heads I win, tails you lose” is the GOP approach to electoral democracy in America in 2023.

My @MSNBC opening monologue tonight on GOP election denialism:pic.twitter.com/tFPlSCQDht

— Mehdi Hasan (@mehdirhasan) September 18, 2023

The development of political parties was a mixed blessing, the pair admit. They help channel “individual ambition into collective public purposes.” Their structures provided another set of guardrails that on the right have broken down:

Parties organize political conflict — what the political theorists Russell Muirhead and Nancy Rosenblum term “the discipline of regulated rivalry” — but they also offer projects with visions, however blinkered and partial, for how societies should handle their challenges and build their futures.

Solving problems, improving people’s lives is no longer relevant on the right. Upholding democratic institutions and norms is gone. There are individual Republicans who retain a commitment to those and to public service, yes, but they exist alongside “a conspicuously missing party project.” What remains of the hollowed out GOP is simply a will to power and posturing about patriotism and family values that is simply marketing. Principles are marketing too.

Take your children to CHURCH, not drag bars.

— Lauren Boebert (@laurenboebert) June 6, 2022

Rep. Lauren Boebert of Colorado is not a role model for anyone. But along with reality show luminaries such as Reps. Matt Gaetz and Marjorie Taylor Greene, she has made herself a conspicious spokesperson for what her party claims to and doesn’t stand for.

A friend this morning sent over a Daily Kos post that cites a Daily Mail report on Boebert’s male companion in the photo above:

Now, DailyMail.com can reveal, that Boebert, 36, and divorced father of a 16-year-old son, [Aspen bar owner Quinn] Gallagher, 46, have been secretly dating for several months.

He is reputedly one of those Democrats politicians like Boebert publicly loathe.

DKos:

The Advocate was happy to point out that the bar owned by Boebert’s boy toy has hosted several LGBTQ+ events, such as a party for Aspen Gay Ski Week and a drag performance called “A Winter Wonderland Burlesque & Drag Show.” There were no age limits posted.

But then you knew that the right’s “values drag” is marketing too, as empty as their oaths to the Constitution. As if their embrace of Donald Trump and defense of his insurrection and attempted coup did not make that a slam-dunk case.

ON LAUREN BOEBERT’S UNDYING DEDICATION TO TRASHNESS pic.twitter.com/8MKbSQN7YS

— Trae Crowder (@traecrowder) September 13, 2023

(h/t BF)

DeSantis should be held liable for this malfeasance

Will Bunch takes on the latest far-right GOP plot to kill Americans. That’s not really hyperbole. The way they behave about public health is a crime. It’s one thing to tell people to be practical and do what they can to protect themselves and others without requiring lockdowns or mandates. That seems to be the consensus as we go into this new surge. But to say the vaccines are dangerous is just plain evil.

They just don’t give a damn about the vulnerable people in our country. I guess that’s nothing new. But it’s never been more obvious.

The initial, overrepeated mantra of Gov. Ron DeSantis’s presidential campaign was that “Florida is the state where ‘woke’ goes to die.” Now, a growing number of scientists and public-health experts are worried that the governor of America’s third-largest state may be adding a second risk of death to that list.

His own citizens.

In what should be seen as an alarming moment in America’s descent into misinformation and political demagoguery, DeSantis’s hand-picked state surgeon general, Joseph Lapado, is telling Florida residents under age 65 to avoid a new anti-COVID booster vaccine. That’s the exact opposite of what the nation’s public-health agencies and most experts are recommending to prevent a fall 2023 resurgence of the pandemic. Our would-be POTUS DeSantis is totally on board with his anti-vax medical adviser, claiming he won’t allow healthy Floridians to be “guinea pigs.”

But history and science suggest that some folks who refuse to become “guinea pigs” could become corpses, or will suffer the debilitating impact of long COVID. Paul Offit, director of the Vaccine Education Center at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, had two words for the Washington Post about Florida’s anti-vaccine guidance: “It’s dangerous.”

Offit told the newspaper there’s legitimate debate over who should be prioritized for receiving the new booster — reformulated to attack recent, dominant strains of the coronavirus — but that what Lapado and DeSantis are doing is casting deeper and unwarranted doubt on the effacy of COVID-19 vaccines more generally. “They have been given a platform and abused it,” he said.

Indeed, at a moment when objective testing — such as levels of the coronavirus in municipal sewage wastewater — is showing a COVID-19 spike equal to some of the worst peaks in 2020 and 2021, Florida is already at severe risk. In fact, the state with one of the five oldest populations in the United States is currently leading the nation in new COVID-19 hospitalizations, with 11.81 per 100,000 residents, and those numbers have been increasing.

[…]

On one level, the current anti-vax follies in the Sunshine State are a grim warning of how the United States might respond — or not respond — to the next pandemic that arrives on our shores. But the dangerous doctoring of Lapado also points to something even more insidious: the GOP promise, through a formal agenda known as Project 2025, to “demolish the administrative state” by undoing civil service protection, so that career servants and experts could be replaced with true believers in the religion of Trumpism.

That would mean that key federal decisions about your health and welfare would be made by zealots like Lapado, who was hired in 2022 by DeSantis as the state’s top health official even after his colleagues at the University of California-Los Angeles said the surgeon exaggerated his own experiences in treating COVID-19 and that they wouldn’t recommend him for the Florida post because he had “created stress and acrimony” with his anti-vaccine views.

It wasn’t a total surprise, then, that a special task force at the University of Florida, where Lapado was given a tenured faculty post, found that the state’s top doc used flawed science and may have violated the school’s integrity rules when he recommended that men under 40 should not take the then-current iteration of the COVID-19 vaccine. The panel found that his recommendation — claiming an increased risk of heart problems — was based on a small sample studied with shaky methodology.

And yet Lapado was not disciplined. Instead, he has become point man for DeSantis’s 90-degree right-turn on vaccine science, which has coincided with his run for the presidency. The Florida governor’s early support for COVID-19 vaccines was reflected in the state’s early 70% vaccination rate, on par with the rest of the United States. That was before DeSantis stuck his finger in the wind and grasped that public-health measures and the public face of those interventions, Dr. Anthony Fauci, were increasingly seen by core GOP voters as threats to liberty from “a deep state.” Now, only 12% of Floridians received the most recent booster shot, compared to 17% nationwide.

An in-depth analysis by the New York Times earlier this year found that Florida’s drop-off in vaccinations left the state ill-prepared when the Delta variant of COVID-19 hit in late 2021. During those months, the newspaper found, Florida actually had a higher death rate than almost any other state. The 23,000 who died in Florida included 9,000 people under age 65, the group that Lapado now urges not to get a booster; most of those who succumbed, according to the Times, were unvaccinated or had not received the second dose.

How many thousands more of Floridians will die needlessly this fall because of the politically poisonous Big Lie about vaccines from DeSantis and Lapado? In fact, the current anti-vaccine and anti-federal government is so extreme that public health experts are deeply concerned they’ll be a drop in other vaccines like the flu shot or protection against respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) headed into the winter virus season. That could be disastrous in a state with so many elderly residents.

These are the stakes, looking ahead to next year’s election. We don’t have to speculate about what Republican government in 2025 and beyond would look like. Just look south to Florida, an authoritarian regime where knowledge and expertise are increasingly despised, cruelty is the point of government, and needless death and despair is on the rise. Meanwhile, pray for the souls of those swayed by the cynical anti-science of DeSantis and Lapado. They are the only real “guinea pigs” here.

If Trump wins, you don’t need to have any doubt that he will never allow himself to be on the wrong side of the anti-health wingnuts again. You don’t even want to think about what might happen.