A top House conservative’s conversations with allies in Congress and the Trump White House about overturning the 2020 election are off-limits to special counsel Jack Smith, an appeals court ruled in a newly unsealed court opinion.
A three-judge panel of the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals concluded that prosecutors’ effort to access the cellphone communications of Rep. Scott Perry (R-Pa.) with colleagues and executive branch officials violated his immunity under the Constitution’s Speech or Debate clause, which shields members of Congress from legal proceedings connected to their official duties.
“While elections are political events, a Member’s deliberation about whether to certify a presidential election or how to assess information relevant to legislation about federal election procedures are textbook legislative acts,” Judge Neomi Rao wrote in the opinion issued last week.
The decision breaks new ground in a decadeslong tug-of-war between Congress and the executive branch. For the first time, an appeals court has held that lawmakers’ cellphones are subject to the same protections as their physical offices. And it is the first significant legal setback for Smith in his bid to obtain evidence about involvement by allies of then-President Donald Trump in his effort to subvert the 2020 election.
The decision from Rao, a Trump appointee, was joined by another Trump appointee, Judge Greg Katsas, and by Judge Karen LeCraft Henderson, who was nominated by President George H.W. Bush. However, Katsas filed a separate concurring opinion saying he viewed the privilege for lawmakers more narrowly than the other judges on the panel, but the disagreement wasn’t meaningful in Perry’s case.
The FBI seized Perry’s phone under a court-approved search warrant in August 2022, before Smith was tapped as special counsel but as the Justice Department had ramped up its investigation of Trump’s actions preceding the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol. Prosecutors, however, did not immediately access Perry’s phone and instead sought a second search warrant governing its ability to review Perry’s communications with other members of Congress, the executive branch and others related to the 2020 election.
In the new ruling, the three-judge D.C. Circuit panel overturned a lower-court ruling by U.S. District Judge Beryl Howell that had largely sided with the Justice Department’s effort to access Perry’s phone. Howell argued that Perry’s “informal” fact-finding about the 2020 election was not protected by the Speech or Debate clause and could not be shielded from DOJ’s review.
These are the worst judges on the court. They know Democrats are not going to do this. They are allies in the coup plot now.
Perry was intrinsic to the plot to overturn a legal, legitimate election. He was one of the primary organizers. And he is immune from legal accountability. When Trump told the acting Attorney General to just sent a letter saying there was fraud and he and “his Republican congressmen” would take care of the rest he knew what he was doing.
I thought this piece by Don Moynihan was one of the best analyses I’ve seen of the attack on democracy we’re seeing in Wisconsin. It’s long but if you have time, read the whole thing. You’ll understand what’s happening in Wisconsin but also where the Republicans are headed nationally. This is who they are now:
“DEMOCRACY IS A SYSTEM IN WHICH parties lose elections,” according to the political scientist Adam Przeworski. By that measure Wisconsin is not really a democracy.
Sure, the Republican Party of Wisconsin routinely is defeated in statewide elections. Indeed, since 2018, they have lost fourteen of seventeen such races. But can they be said to really lose when they refuse to accept their defeat and instead use power accrued by undemocratic means to minimize or even reverse those losses?
In this, Wisconsin was the pre-Trump canary in the coal mine, alerting us to the undemocratic depths to which the GOP would descend. The state’s Republicans then became bolder following Trump’s Big Lie example. Now they are threatening to impeach a newly elected justice on the state’s high court, Janet Protasiewicz, who has not heard a single case. Their rationale? That she had characterized the state’s election maps as “rigged.” Never mind that she’s right about Wisconsin’s highly gerrymandered districts; her election threatens their hold on power and they are growing desperate.
IMAGINE YOU ARE A VOTER IN WISCONSIN. Let’s say you want Medicaid expansion, a broadly popular policy. Wisconsin is now only one of ten states that does not have it, along with Wyoming and other deep-red states in the South. You vote for a governor who makes Medicaid expansion the centerpiece of his campaign. But as soon as he is elected, the gerrymandered legislature strips him of his traditional power of overseeing Medicaid.
The governor loses other powers, too. The legislature refuses to hold hearings for his cabinet appointees, and removes acting officials when they are critical of the legislature. Ultimately, the governor can use his veto pen to stop things from happening, but he cannot initiate change. He can call special sessions of the legislature on topics of public concern like criminal justice reform or abortion, but the legislature simply gavels in and out, refusing to do anything.
Or, speaking of abortion, let’s say you are unhappy with the 1849 anti-abortion law that comes back into effect after last year’s Dobbs decision. You are in the majority that favors maintaining broad access to abortion. But the legislature will not listen to you.
Fundamentally, state Republicans do not feel they need to respond to majority opinion—most clearly on abortion rights. And they are right, they can get away with being unresponsive—because of the gerrymander. It cements their huge majorities in both houses of the legislature. And this, in turn, makes judicial campaigns more politicized, since the judiciary becomes the only realistic venue where voters can expect a measure of democratic responsiveness. Your only real hope under these conditions is the state Supreme Court. They decide on key issues, like abortion access. And they are the only actor that can fix the source of democratic unresponsiveness: the gerrymander.
So you find a state Supreme Court candidate who agrees with you on abortion. She even calls the gerrymandered maps “rigged.” You vote for her. She wins by 11 points, a landslide in Wisconsin, amid record turnout. A victory, finally, for democracy.
Just one problem: The party that designed the gerrymander, and benefits from it, is threatening to impeach her if she dares rule on the case.
HOW BIG OF A DEAL is the gerrymander in Wisconsin? After all, since liberal voters are concentrated in urban areas, isn’t the Republican majority simply a function of geography?
This is partly true: Republicans really are advantaged by the geography of the state. But if the gerrymander didn’t matter, Republicans would not be fighting so hard to protect maps designed in secret by their political consultants.
The overriding purpose of the gerrymander in Wisconsin is to maximize Republican votes. And in this, it is incredibly effective. Political scientists have come up with different models that consistently show how biased the maps are. The data visualizations produced by the Washington Post’s Philip Bump powerfully illustrate the point:
A party that routinely loses statewide elections has a supermajority in both the Assembly and Senate. Even in cases of Democratic wave elections, such as 2018, the outcome barely budges. Indeed, the maps are most effective at putting a floor under Republican losses in election years where they are overwhelmingly rejected by voters.
Jamelle Bouie puts it this way in the New York Times:
The gerrymandering alone undermines Wisconsin’s status as a democracy. If a majority of the people cannot, under any realistic circumstances, elect a legislative majority of their choosing, then it’s hard to say whether they actually govern themselves.
The problem with gerrymanders is there is no obvious way to fix them. Federal courts might intervene. Justice Anthony Kennedy had signaled for years in Supreme Court rulings that he might be open to overturning a gerrymandered maps if someone could come with a credible formula. People did, but the case got turned back anyway. The current Supreme Court is even less amenable, having in 2022 ordered the state supreme court not to impose a slightly less bad version of the 2010 maps after the 2020 Census. The legislature, which benefits from the status quo, won’t solve the problem. The only viable means of reversing an electoral system is to vote in a state supreme court majority that is likely to overturn the map. And now Republicans are taking this off the table.
WHAT IS GALLING about the whole thing is how much the basic claims against Protasiewicz are a flimsy pretext for the exercise of raw power to protect the gerrymander at all costs. Republicans are making up new standards as they go. Here are the facts:
Protasiewicz’s actions fall short of any constitutional standard or precedent justifying impeachment.
The state constitution allows for impeachment of judges in cases of corruption or commission of a crime. There is no real case that can be made on that count. And to give a sense of how unprecedented this action would be, the last judicial impeachment in the state occurred 170 years ago, for a lower-court judge who engaged in bribery.
Protasiewicz’s actions were not substantively different from those of other judges, including her opponent.
Everyone knows this debate would not be occurring if Protasiewicz’s opponent had won. Not because he was less political, but because Daniel Kelly was political for the right party. He was a paid consultant and legal adviser for the Republicans on election issues that he would have to rule on, he ran his campaign from state GOP headquarters, he worked for a former Republican governor who appointed him as judge, and he even defended the disputed maps in court.
Before running for the state supreme court, Kelly told reporters, “It’s a good map. It’s a solid map. It’s constitutional. It reflects the judgment of the people of the state of Wisconsin.” When former Milwaukee Sheriff David Clarke asked Kelly if right-wing voters should have to worry about whether he might not follow their wishes on gerrymandering and other issues, Kelly responded, “I don’t think you have to worry about that with me.”
This is the model of judicial neutrality to which Republicans say Protasiewicz should aspire.
Protasiewicz did not violate the Code of Judicial Conduct.
To give this coup an air of legitimacy, Republicans are saying that Protasiewicz violated some rules.
Here is the problem with that claim. The body that reviews ethical violations, the Wisconsin Judicial Commission, dismissed this complaint, pointing out that judges have wide range to express personal views without making a promise to rule in a specific way. Indeed, if previous writings or statements by judges that hinted at how they might think about issues that came before the court were grounds for violation, few of the sitting justices on the state’s high court would be likely to keep their seat.
One last ugly irony: Wisconsin Republicans apparently see no contradiction between their belief that Donald Trump should be allowed to run for president again despite trying to overturn an election and their belief that a judge should be forced out of office for having made some mildly pro-democratic comments.
THE REPUBLICAN PLAN for Protasiewicz may not actually be to impeach and remove her, which would allow Democratic Gov. Tony Evers to name her replacement. If they vote for impeachment in the Assembly, which requires only a simple majority, she would be prevented from actively serving on the court while the impeachment trial is pending in the Senate. But the state constitution does not specify what happens if the impeachment process is never completed; it assumes that legislators had good-faith intentions and that an impeachment trial will in due order follow an impeachment.
But Republicans are not in the good-faith business nowadays. They’re in the norm-busting business. And the Republicans in Wisconsin can follow the norm-busting example set by the Republicans in the U.S. Senate in the last few years, as when Mitch McConnell stonewalled the confirmation hearings for Merrick Garland’s U.S. Supreme Court nomination.
If Protasiewicz is left in limbo without a trial, the Wisconsin Supreme Court would effectively be down a justice, left with a 3-3 tie. Protasiewicz would have few options but to resign at this point, forced out without even the charade of due process that a completed impeachment process would offer.
Since Republican leaders proposed impeaching Protasiewicz, they have faced a national backlash and an aggressive Democratic state outreach campaign. Historically, this has not stymied their willingness to break norms, and Assembly Speaker Robin Vos said on Friday that his colleagues might proceed with the threatened impeachment process, at least if Protasiewicz does not “recuse herself on cases where she has prejudged.”
But Vos may now be looking for another way out. On Tuesday, he announced an “Iowa-style nonpartisan redistricting” approach that the Assembly might vote on this week. Vos and fellow Republicans have opposed this idea for years. Why the change of heart, and the speed? Vos apparently hopes that quickly passing the bill would remove the gerrymandering case from the courts in the first place. And the Iowa model allows the state legislature to reject the maps created by the nonpartisan commission and substitute its own. And so, the gerrymandered legislature is looking to remain the master of its own gerrymandered domain, having found a new way to cut a now-unfriendly court out of the process. Advocates for fairer maps, including Gov. Evers, swiftly rejected the Vos proposal, which indicates both how little trust there is and that the showdown over the maps will not be over anytime soon.
THE MISTREATMENT OF PROTASIEWICZ is hardly the only example of the Wisconsin GOP acting abusively to protect their political dominance. It is very much part of a broader pattern. Another example made headlines this week, as Republican state legislators are seeking to remove the administrator of the state’s bipartisan election board, Meagan Wolfe. On Monday, a Senate committee voted to remove her from office, and the whole Senate could vote to remove her as soon as this week. The state’s attorney general, a Democrat, has said this would not be legal, potentially setting up a clash that could go to the state Supreme Court.
Wolfe—whose plight Bill Lueders laid out here in July—is being punished for not going along with the Big Lie, for not entertaining the fantasy that Wisconsin Republicans won the 2020 election, and for imposing a set of electoral procedures that Republicans retrospectively decided disadvantaged them by allowing too many people to vote.
And so Wolfe’s fate is likely to be the same as the leaders of the Government Accountability Board; they were fired and the board disbanded in 2015 after they looked too aggressively into Republican Gov. Scott Walker’s campaign finance practices.
Or the leaders of the state ethics commission and the elections commission, who were removed from their positions in 2018 because they had worked for the Government Accountability Board.
In other words, Wolfe is discovering that it is impossible for a statewide election official to keep her job in Wisconsin if she is seen as an enemy to the Republican Party of Wisconsin, which at this point can be triggered merely by trying to ensure a functional election and refusing to embrace conspiracy theories.
I worked at the University of Wisconsin-Madison as a professor for 13 years, from 2005 to 2018. During that time the democratic health of the state steadily weakened. But the state is at a new and shocking low. The removal of a judge who threatens the existing power structure by calling for more democratic representation is the sort of things we associate with authoritarian regimes. And now we associate it with Wisconsin.
Vladimir Putin could barely contain his excitement Tuesday while discussing Donald Trump, telling a forum in Vladivostok that the criminal cases against the former president are “good” for Russia and that the Kremlin took delight in Trump’s claim he’d swiftly force an end to Moscow’s war against Ukraine.
“As for the persecution of Trump… for us, what is happening in these conditions, in my opinion, is good, because it shows the whole rottenness of the American political system, which cannot claim to teach others about democracy,” Putin said, echoing the former American president’s own oft-repeated claim that “what’s happening with Trump is a persecution of a political rival for political motives.”
The man who is responsible for trying to kill his rival with poison and then locking him up in a prison camp for life says what?
Trump’s response:
Hmmm. I’d guess he didn’t really think that through. (But when does he ever think anything through?) But I’m sure Putin doesn’t care. He’s enjoying the chaos Trump has produced and sees him as the potent tool to damage America that he is.
On August 28th, Donald Trump had had enough of his House Republicans dilly-dallying around. He took to his social media platform Truth Social and issued an order:
The Republicans in Congress, though well meaning, keep talking about an Impeachment ‘Inquiry’ on Crooked Joe Biden.Look, the guy got bribed, he paid people off, and he wouldn’t give One Billion Dollars to Ukraine unless they ‘got rid of the Prosecutor.’ Biden is a Stone Cold Crook-You don’t need a long INQUIRY to prove it, it’s already proven. These lowlifes Impeached me TWICE (I WON!), and Indicted me FOUR TIMES – For NOTHING!Either IMPEACH the BUM, or fade into OBLIVION. THEY DID IT TO US!
Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy heard him loud and clear. On Tuesday he announced that he was unilaterally ordering an impeachment inquiry into the president during his term as Vice President nearly a decade ago. No one was surprised that he went back on his stated principle that an impeachment inquiry can only be launched with a full vote of the House or the still binding determination by Trump’s Department of Justice which came to the same conclusion. He doesn’t have the votes to launch a legitimate inquiry so this was the only thing he could do to stave off a temper tantrum from Donald Trump and the Freedom Caucus. He was, as he has been since the day he took the speaker’s gavel, just trying to get through the day.
This particular day has been coming since November 2022 when the Republicans managed to eke out a very narrow victory in the House. The fact that their majority was much smaller than they expected did not daunt them anymore than it daunted the House Republicans in 1998 when they when they unexpectedly lost seats as they pursued the impeachment of President Clinton. When they want to impeach a president, they don’t care what it costs.
They have already established that in the months and months of investigations they’ve waged since they got their majority that there is no evidence to support an impeachment inquiry. Nonetheless, McCarthy laid out six specific allegations which sounded as though they are proven but they are nothing but innuendo about Hunter Biden’s business about which the president has never been shown to have knowledge or involvement. And anyway, we know what this is all about, don’t we?
Either IMPEACH the BUM, or fade into OBLIVION. THEY DID IT TO US!
This is payback as anyone with eyes can see. And Trump is no doubt thrilled that they are going after Biden for the same stale lie that got him impeached the first time. The so-called investigation revolves around the disproved nonsense about then Vice President Biden demanding the Ukrainians fire a prosecutor to help his son’s business in Ukraine. The timeline doesn’t line up any better now than it did when Trump was trying to sell it to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in his “perfect phone call.” Maybe he thinks that by having an impeachment tying Biden to the case it will prove him innocent of wrongdoing and lead to the “expungement” of his impeachment. (McCarthy has said that he’s all for it even though expungement isn’t a thing.)
But it has some other utility for the Republicans. Trump instinctively projects his own shortcomings and problems on his enemies and then attacks them which is what he’s doing with the “Biden Crime Family” thing. I don’t know what specific psychology is at work but it serves a tactical purpose for him and his allies by muddying the water and contributing to the widespread cynicism in American life that leads people to think everyone is corrupt and there’s nothing to be done about it.
It’s already worked to some degree in this case. According to a recent CNN poll, “61%, say they think that Biden had at least some involvement in Hunter Biden’s business dealings, with 42% saying they think he acted illegally, and 18% saying that his actions were unethical but not illegal.”
There is literally no evidence of any of that. Well played, Republicans, well played.
McCarthy also got the impeachment inquiry demand off the table to appease the extremists in his caucus but some of them don’t seem to be appeased. Florida Rep. Matt Gaetz has been agitating for impeachment for months and threatened on Monday to make a motion to vacate the chair the next day, essentially calling for a no confidence vote for McCarthy, if the speaker didn’t step up. After McCarthy did as he asked, Gaetz took to the floor and had this to say:
Gaetz: Mr. Speaker, you are out of compliance with the agreement that allowed you to assume this role. The path forward for the House of Representatives is to either bring you into immediate total compliance or remove you, pic.twitter.com/KbrkpZ14hZ
You just can’t please some people. In the meantime, Marjorie Taylor Greene who has been filing impeachment papers against Biden since the first day of his presidency is angry that Gaetz is taking credit:
Correction my friend.
I introduced articles of impeachment against Joe Biden for his corrupt business dealings in Ukraine & China while he was Vice President on his very first day in office.
You wouldn’t cosponsor those and I had to drag you kicking and screaming to get you to… https://t.co/kArIYslAFi
Greene might have a point. She had dinner with Trump on Sunday and met with McCarthy on Monday so she may very well have brought McCarthy an offer he couldn’t refuse from Mar-a-lago.
The truth is that there just aren’t enough votes to impeach Biden in the House and there will never be enough votes to convict him in the Senate. They can draw this out over months to keep it in the headlines and hope that something shakes loose as it did when the Benghazi investigation turned up Hillary Clinton’s personal email server. The media will be paying very close attention out of a misplaced belief that they must treat this sideshow with the same seriousness they treated the Trump impeachments.
Conventional wisdom has it that McCarthy is terrified of losing his job so he’s dancing as fast as he can to please the crazies and the normies as well as their Dear Leader. But hard right Colorado Rep. Ken Buck, a vocal and unexpected opponent of opening the impeachment inquiry (and he’s taking some heat for it) isn’t intimidated by Gaetz and his crew because he doesn’t think McCarthy has anything to worry about. He told CNN’s Anderson Cooper that all this ostentatious talk of “leverage” isn’t going to dislodge the Speaker because there’s no one else who wants McCarthy’s job.
Normally I would think that’s ridiculous. There are always ambitious politicians. But I think he has a point. There is no one stupid enough to want the job who could also be elected. We already know that from the night of the endless speaker votes last winter. Right now, it’s the worst job in the world and that means McCarthy has a freer hand than it appears. Maybe that threat Gaetz and his pals are holding over McCarthy’s head is just another act in the ongoing performance art installation otherwise known as the House Republican caucus.
We’ve seen this show before. Rudy Giuliani had his law license suspended for bringing meritless lawsuits, unsupported by evidence, alleging massive voter fraud in the 2020 election. He had it, oh yes, massive amounts of evidence he hyped endlessly before cameras but never produced to be independently scrutinized.
“What actual evidence do you have as opposed to allegations to show to the American public that would merit an actual impeachment inquiry of Joe Biden?” the off-camera reporter asked Rep. Scott Perry (R-Pa.)
Notably, during a CPAC event in March Perry made clear his penchant for political revenge. Perry, whose cell phone was seized by the FBI during its investigation into Donald Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election, fantasized aloud at CPAC about “leftists” and “Marxists” “quaking in fear” and “losing weight because they’re not eating” because they are so afraid the government may jail them.
Kevin Kruse posted, “As always, the linchpin of their case is that Biden bragged about getting rid of a Ukrainian prosecutor that everyone — even Republicans — said was NOT prosecuting corruption, but they’ve spun it around completely to claim the opposite.”
Why not just subpoena Hunter Biden and get him to answer questions under oath, a “Wake Up America” interviewer asked Rep. James Comer (R-Miss.), chair of the House Oversight Committee. Comer squirmed. Facts are not his friends.
House Republicans choose to open an impeachment inquiry against President Joe Biden. They could choose to join (most) Democrats to re-fund the pandemic-period child tax credit expansion, but no:
Five million more American kids fell into poverty last year. Or maybe it’s more accurate to say they were pushed.
The child poverty rate more than doubled in 2022, the U.S. Census Bureau reported Tuesday, in the largest annual increase in child poverty on record. For the most part, these kids didn’t become poor because the economy is lousy, or their parents were fired, or they were newly orphaned. Most fell below the poverty threshold because, as a country, we chose to make them poor. Specifically, we chose to make them poor again, by snatching a short-livedsafety-net program away.
Governing is not what they’re in Congress for. Most likely their constituents don’t care. “Handouts” they care about. Paying for political reality TV they’re okay with.
“We need to remind people that they work for the employer, not the other way around.”
For those looking for an excuse to use “gobsmacked.”
An X-post video clip from Tuesday: Gurner Group founder Tim Gurner tells the Financial Review Property Summit workers have become “arrogant” since COVID and “We’ve got to kill that attitude.”
The current unemployment rate needs to rise by 40 per cent to 50 per cent to boost the Australian economy’s productivity, Tim Gurner has said.
“In my view, we need to see pain in the economy. We need to remind people that they work for the employer, not the other way around,” he said.
Gurner told the Summit that the cultural shift towards a more pro-employee climate had led to tradies pulling back on productivity.
“When there’s been a systematic change where employees feel the employer is extremely lucky to have them as opposed to the other way around it’s a dynamic that has to change. We’ve got to kill that attitude.”
Gurner has received some blowback over his remarks about “tradies.”
“Just a reminder corporate profits and CEO pay are at historic highs,” wrote Greens MP Stephen Bates. “Workers deserve a fairer slice of the pie.” (The Guardian):
The Labor MP Jerome Laxale wrote the comments were what you’d “associate with a cartoon supervillain, not the ceo of a company in 2023”.
“Reminder that major CEOs have skyrocketed their own pay so much that the ratio of CEO-to-worker pay is now at some of the highest levels *ever* recorded,” shot back Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
There were blunter responses.
“Couldn’t script a better distillation of why capital hates tight labor markets and full employment. Also lol at ‘Property Summit.'” replied Chris Hayes.
“Wow. Quiet part out loud. Capitalism raw and uncensored?” posted Mehdi Hasan.
Capitalism, my ass. What Gurner and his revanchist cohort represent is a pining for feudalism and an iron hand to keep the “filthy peasants” in line, a longing not unlike that of white supremacists for the good old days of chattel slavery. Like fascism, the latter went into hiding more recently. But like Michael Meyers, all three never fully died out. Like the poor they despise (and like cinematic homicidal maniacs), they are with us always and, like zombies, periodically rise to shamble again.
Gurner might have launched into an anecdote about The Lady of the Lake, “her arm clad in the purest shimmering samite” bestowing on him a sword “from the bosom of the water.”
Our American experiment in government by consent of the governed was frought from the beginning. Our unsteady truce with slavers held barely more than 70 years before erupting into civil war, the bloodiest in U.S. history.
Those who fancy themselves the ruling class know, for the most part, to keep their monarchial impulses to themselves. Instances of candor as blatant as Gurner’s are rare. They’ll otherwise cloak royalist sentiment in meritocratic clothing, in boasts of entrepreneurial genius, and in free-market fundamentalism. Occasionally, they’ll let slip a belief in genetic superiority. People such as Gurner believe themselves not exploiters of workers but “job creators” to whom their lessers owe obeisance.
Recall what venture capitalist Nick Hanauer said at TED about job creators in 2012:
Significant privileges have come to capitalists like me for being perceived as “job creators” at the center of the economic universe, and the language and metaphors we use to defend the fairness of the current social and economic arrangements is telling. For instance, it is a small step from “job creator” to “The Creator”. We did not accidentally choose this language. It is only honest to admit that calling oneself a “job creator” is both an assertion about how economics works and a claim on status and privileges.
Not just privileges, but a claim to a mandate to rule.
As it happens, I stumbled Tuesday morning across this clip from Ghandi (1982) depicting the 1919 Jallianwala Bagh massacre during the British Raj. The YouTube clips above are satirical. This one is not.
“I was going to give them a lesson,” Gen. Reginald Dyer told the Hunter Commission after his troops fired on unarmed men, women and children. “My idea was that it should make a wide impression throughout the Punjab.”
Josh Marshall has a smart column on the right’s attempt to jettison the phrase “pro-life” because it’s toxic.(As a twitter wag quipped, “when ‘pro-life’ is a losing slogan for you, you’ve got bigger problems.”) Marshall points out just how thoroughly the anti-abortion movement has been pushed back on its heels:
It now seems clear that the only thing that will be at all memorable about the GOP’s first presidential debate of the 2024 cycle on August 23rd will be that brief speech from Mike Pence in which he staked his campaign on his bible-rooted, evangelical, pro-life record and endorsed a 15-week national ban.
I remember finding it stunning in the moment. Kate Riga took it up the next day. The U.S. doesn’t keep perfect data on abortion care in the United States. The most readily available numbers look at the number of abortions on or before the 13th week (91.1%) and 21st week (98.7%). Even this anti-abortion rights group says that 6% of abortions take place on or after week 15, for instance. It is likely that roughly 95% of abortions in the United States happen within the 15-week window that dyed-in-the-wool pro-life politicians now claim to endorse. If the most diehard of pro-life evangelical politicians are now willing to concede 95% of abortions in the U.S., it’s as though they never meant the whole decades long argument in the first place.
It’s probably best to see Pence’s statement, all the more telling and striking for how comparatively little attention it attracted, as marking the end of the “Pro-Life” movement itself. Of course, this doesn’t mean that the fight for abortion rights is over. Far from it. Abortion rights are more restricted today than at any time in the last half century. Indeed, even the proposed 15-week “national” ban turns out to be a clever sham. It’s not a uniform standard to apply across the United States. It leaves all the draconian red-state bans in place. It’s simply a national “maximum,” a kind of freebie ban Republicans and pro-lifers can get in blue states for nothing in return. But Republicans who have made pro-life politics a sheet anchor of Republican campaigns for four decades now seem unwilling to make any affirmative case for their notional position.
Indeed, it’s not just politicians, who by definition will usually move with public opinion. Even many pro-life ideologues are now proposing comparable bans as a way to at least halt the hemorrhaging of support for pro-life policies or simply batten down behind gerrymandered legislatures and an all-out push to prevent as many state referenda as possible. As Patrick T. Brown put it somewhat optimistically, pro-life governors can win elections after signing draconian abortion bans. (In other words, when it’s packaged in with countless other issues voters care about.) The problem is that “the pro-choice side beats the pro-life side when the issue is heads-up in the ballot box.” The fact that Pence, running in a Republican primary felt it necessary to endorse the national 15 week ban suggests that the evolving reality of post-Dobbs politics makes even Brown’s argument about avoiding “heads-up” votes outdated.
Movements that can’t make positive arguments for their favored positions, even to friendly audiences, cease to be political movements properly understood and become something more like rearguard actions. They seek to use inertia, incumbency and stratagems to hold on to gains and do their best to avoid fights on the open ground of public opinion where at least incremental losses seem inevitable. That’s where anti-abortion, “pro-life” politics stands on the eve of the 2024 election.
I hear DeSantis side-step questions about his 6 week ban and instead take credit for earlier signing the 15 week ban that’s still in the courts. They are on the run.
And they aren’t getting a federal 15 week ban either. After decades of bleating about states’ rights and a Supreme Court decision that was explicitly based on that,. I’m fairly sure it’s going nowhere. It’s their new “overturn Roe vs. Wade” but it’s not going to have the same moral logic they’ve always evoked. Getting rid of their pro-life identity proves it.
They have awakened a sleeping giant and it’s going to hurt them for some time to come.
You’ve probably already heard about the Ukraine/Russia controversy surrounding Walter Isaacson’s new book about Elon Musk. (If not, you can click this link.) But there’s a lot more in the book apparently, which is discussed here in this piece by Matt Pearce in the LA Times:
Musk is already one of the most well-known and extensively covered leaders in American corporate life (and one of its most unavoidable figures on the service he has renamed X). Isaacson’s biography is a Musk agonistes: a portrait of a (largely) self-made, emotionally volatile entrepreneur from South Africa who has a tortured relationship with his father and an addiction to crises of the self-inflicted variety.
Musk is tormented, erratic and rude, over and over again
Musk’s moods are variously described as cycling through “light and dark, intense and goofy, detached and emotional, with occasional plunges into what people around him call ‘demon mode’”; he’s “childlike, almost stunted,” “a drama magnet,” “not bred for domestic tranquility”; he has “a craving for storm and drama” and “erratic emotional oscillations.” Multiple people describe him as having undiagnosed Asperger’s. At one point, Musk calls himself bipolar. His volatile emotional states are the biggest constant in a book that zigzags from cars to rockets, tunneling to AI, solar energy to neural implants.
Isaacson repeatedly likens Musk to his estranged father, Errol Musk, also reportedly prone to volatile moods, abrasive behavior, credit-grubbing, flimflammery and conspiracy theories. Elon’s mother, Maye, said Errol “hit her” before the pair divorced, something that Errol denied. Musk cut off his father after Errol had a child with a woman Elon considered his half-sister — Jana — whom Errol had raised as his stepdaughter since she was 4. In an email Errol wrote to Elon for Father’s Day in 2022, he called Joe Biden a “freak, criminal, pedophile president” and that in South Africa, “with no Whites here, the Blacks will go back to the trees.”
Nothing Elon Musk says in the book is as jarring as his own father’s sometimes bizarre and racist comments. But elsewhere, Elon’s own frequent lack of empathy is bolstered by ample evidence. During the first dance at his wedding with his first wife, Justine, he whispered to her, “I am the alpha in this relationship.” In 2016, he accused journalists of “killing people” (by discrediting self-driving technology) after they asked questions about the first drivers to die in Tesla Autopilot accidents. He was briefly estranged from his brother, Kimbal, after the latter — who once helped rescue Tesla financially — asked for help with his own restaurants. Elon replied that they were doomed, and “I think they should die.”
It’s natural for a reader to wonder whether trying to decarbonize the auto industry or avoid humanity’s extinction justifies the chaos, the bullying, the poor labor standards — the trouble. Isaacson weighs in on the subject only at the end of his book: “Do the audaciousness and hubris that drive him to attempt epic feats excuse his bad behavior, his callousness, his recklessness? The times he’s an a—? The answer is no, of course not.”
Then, a few paragraphs later, the needle on Isaacson’s moral compass wobbles: “But would a restrained Musk accomplish as much as a Musk unbound? … Sometimes great innovators are risk-seeking man-children who resist potty training. They can be reckless, cringeworthy, sometimes even toxic. They can also be crazy. Crazy enough to think they can change the world.”
And they can be incredibly destructive too, as Musk is showing himself to be. Please…
The two Elon Musks, before and after 2018’s Tesla ‘production hell’ (or Amber Heard, or his daughter’s transition)
The year 2018 was an inflection point in the perception of Musk as a public figure, one that foreshadowed his pandemic evolution in 2020 from moderate Democrat to trolling conservative. When a group of children were trapped in a cave in Thailand, Musk tweeted that one rescue diver who dismissed his offer to build a submersible was a “pedo guy.” (Musk later apologized, but not easily.) On Joe Rogan’s podcast, he smoked marijuana, risking his status as a U.S. government contractor. He shot a Tesla Roadster into space.
Behind the scenes, the summer of 2017 through the fall of 2018 encompassed the most “hellacious” period of Musk’s life, Isaacson writes: “Musk went through periods when he oscillated between depression, stupor, giddiness, and manic energy.” Isaacson traces Musk’s tailspin to the news of his father’s relationship with his stepdaughter — as well as his own stormy relationship with the actor Amber Heard, who had recently gone through a tumultuous divorce with the actor Johnny Depp.
Heard “drew [Musk] into a dark vortex” around 2017, Isaacson writes, “that lasted more than a year and produced a deep-seated pain that lingers to this day. … His brother and friends hated her with a passion.”
There were plenty of other stressors that didn’t involve a public figure who’s already taken enough public bludgeoning after the Depp-Heard defamation trial. One of the biggest was the “production hell” at Tesla in 2018, when the survival of the company (and Musk’s reputation) hinged on meeting a seemingly impossible production target for the Tesla Model 3. Musk prowled the factory in a “frenzy of insanity,” he recalled later, “getting four or five hours’ sleep, often on the floor. I remember thinking, I’m like on the ragged edge of sanity.”
What gave his turmoil a political bent was his daughter Jenna’s gender transition around 2020, followed by her decision to cut ties with him. Musk blamed this on her becoming “a full communist” as a result of her progressive education at a Los Angeles private school, Crossroads. This is around the time “woke mind virus” worked its way into his vocabulary.
There’s more and it all points to Elon Musk being a very, very unstable, fucked up human being who has no business having any power over our politics (much less national security.) At this point I’m just hoping for a total breakdown — which may be imminent.
Krugman discusses why people people believe things that just aren’t true:
Remember “American carnage?” Donald Trump’s 2017 inaugural address was peculiar in many ways, but one of the most striking oddities was his obsession with a problem — urban crime — that had greatly diminished over the past generation. For reasons we still don’t fully understand, violent crime in America fell rapidly from around 1990 to the mid-2010s:
True, there was a crime surge after the pandemic, which now seems to be ebbing. But that lay in the future. Trump talked as if crime was running rampant as he spoke.
Yet if Trump had false beliefs about trends in crime, he had plenty of company. Gallup polls Americans about crime every year, and all through the great decline in violent crime a majority of Americans said that crime was increasing:
Were the crime statistics misleading? Homicide numbers are pretty solid. And people behaved as if crime were falling; notably, there was a wave of gentrification as affluent Americans moved into newly safe central cities. But all the same, people told pollsters that they believed crime was rising.
Why am I talking about public perceptions of crime? Well, last week, I wrote about the gap between public perceptions of a terrible economy and the reality of an economy that is doing very well by normal standards. I also noted that Americans seem relatively upbeat about their own financial circumstances; they just think that bad things are happening to other people.
Not surprisingly, I got a lot of pushback. That’s OK; after all these years writing for The Times I have a pretty thick skin, although I have to admit to being annoyed at pundits who try to cut off discussion by asserting that anyone who questions widely held beliefs is an “elitist” who thinks Americans are stupid. For the record, I don’t think Americans are stupid. I think they have jobs to do and children to raise and lives to live. They don’t have time to study policy issues, so most of them get their sense of what’s happening to the country from what they see on TV or hear from politicians. Unfortunately, some of what they’re told isn’t true.
But in any case, I thought it might be useful to draw parallels with the discourse on crime, where there is a similar disconnect between what people tell pollsters they believe is happening and what the available facts say. In fact, the resemblance between how people talk about crime and how they talk about the economy is eerily strong.
Many of those talking about a disconnect on views about the economy cite, among other sources, Federal Reserve data that compares household views of their own financial situation with their views of the economy (highlighting added):
Notice that the survey also asks people about the state of their local economy, where they are likely to have at least some personal experience of what’s going on; these views are much more favorable than their views of the national economy. Now look back at that chart on perceptions of crime. Gallup also asks Americans about crime “in your area,” and sure enough, people’s perceptions of local crime were much more favorable than what they said about the nation as a whole.
Wait, there’s more: Perceptions of crime, like perceptions about the economy, have become strongly partisan, with people becoming more pessimistic when the party they don’t support holds the White House:
And there are huge partisan gaps in assessments of how safe cities are:
As it happens, the Republican perception of Los Angeles and New York as unsafe compared with southern cities is wildly off base. Both have low homicide rates — half as high as Miami’s — and New York City is overall one of the safest places in America.
What does all this tell us, besides the fact that Americans are very confused about crime? It shows that on an important public issue, people can hold beliefs about what is happening to other people — people who live in other places, or in the nation as a whole — that are not just false but also at odds with their personal experience.
Why should this kind of disconnect be restricted to crime? There are, in fact, strong reasons to believe that there’s a similar disconnect when it comes to the economy. And we shouldn’t be afraid to say that out of fear that we’ll be considered elitist.
He doesn’t mention the media in this but they play a huge part. If you are watching local TV in the morning as you get ready for work to see the traffic or the weather, all you see is the old “if it bleeds it leads” and doom and gloom about the economy. If you follow the right wing media or have people on social media who feed you that stuff you’ll get the same thing. For a lot of busy people the idea that the country is falling apart from crime and recession is just conventional wisdom.
During Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign, the Republican faced a dilemma. On the one hand, the economy was relatively healthy at the time, and the unemployment rate was steadily improving in the runup to Election Day. On the other hand, Trump wanted voters to believe the United States was in the midst of an economic disaster, which only he could fix.
The GOP nominee settled on a specific rhetorical strategy to resolve the tension: Trump would simply peddle nonsense and tell the public to believe him, instead of reality. As we discussed at the time, at different points during the campaign, the Republican publicly argued, for example, that the unemployment rate was 20% — or possibly 42% — even as reality pointed to a rate below 5%.
After the election, at a pre-inaugural press conference, Trump declared there are “96 million really wanting a job and they can’t get,” which was ridiculous, even for him. Around the same time, the then-president-elect declared that the unemployment rate was “totally fiction.”
Soon after, as Trump settled into the White House, and the economic conditions he inherited continued to improve, the then-president decided he believed economic data after all.
That was nearly seven years ago. Now, wouldn’t you know it, the Republican has re-embraced the same outlandish rhetorical tactics he used during his successful candidacy in 2016. At a campaign event in South Dakota on Friday night, for example, Trump told attendees, in reference to economic data on employment:
“Now you’re given phony numbers — because far fewer people are looking for jobs. … They throw around 3.5%, 3.6%, 3.7%, but it’s a different group of people. … So it’s a fake number.”
He went on to describe the unemployment rate as “crooked,” before declaring, “During Biden’s first 30 months in office, just 2.1 million new jobs have been created.” As part of the harangue, the former president concluded, “The fact is, we’re probably heading into a Great Depression.”
So, a few things.
First, the unemployment rate is not “phony,” “fake,” or “crooked.” Yes, it fluctuates based on people looking for work and exiting the workforce, but that was true during Trump’s term, too, and it didn’t stop him from touting the data when he saw encouraging jobs reports.
Second, during the first 30 months of Joe Biden’s presidency, the U.S. economy created 13.6 million jobs, not 2.1 million. (If we start the count in February 2021, instead of January 2021, economy created 13.5 million jobs over Biden’s first 30 months.) Trump and some of his allies apparently want the public to believe that the rapid economic recovery that began after Trump left office led to job growth that doesn’t really count, but that’s not a serious argument.
Third, there is literally zero evidence of the domestic economy “heading into a Great Depression.”
But as relevant as these details are, let’s also not forget that the incumbent Democratic president has recently taken some rhetorical shots at his predecessor’s weak record on job creation. On Friday night, Trump was apparently eager to return fire.
The problem, of course, was that the Republican, unable to rely on facts, was firing imaginary bullets.
In his newsletter today, Dan Pfeiffer looks at the bizarre phenomenon of a presidential candidate getting much more popular after he’s indicted four times:
A number of theories surfaced to explain this unexpected and deeply concerning outcome — Republicans are a cult, Ron DeSantis sucks, etc. Elections are dynamic enterprises. There are a lot of interrelated factors that lead to an outcome. It’s not as simple as “Ron DeSantis sucks,” even if he is one of the most maladroit candidates in modern political history. Here are X findings from recent polls that help explain why Republican voters are flocking to Trump as his likelihood of spending the rest of his life in prison skyrockets:
1. Republicans Trust Trump Over Everyone Else
Donald Trump is one of the most prolific and obvious liars the world has ever known. Here’s how the Washington Post fact checker summarized Trump’s presidency:
Over time, Trump unleashed his falsehoods with increasing frequency and ferocity, often by the scores in a single campaign speech or tweetstorm. What began as a relative trickle of misrepresentations, including 10 on his first day and five on the second, built into a torrent through Trump’s final days as he frenetically spread wild theories that the coronavirus pandemic would disappear “like a miracle” and that the presidential election had been stolen — the claim that inspired Trump supporters to attack Congress on Jan. 6 and prompted his second impeachment. The final tally of Trump’s presidency: 30,573 false or misleading claims — with nearly half coming in his final year.
Trump’s dishonesty is so blatant that most Americans find it disqualifying, but Trump’s voters see only qualifications. They do not believe he is dishonest. They think he is the only honest man in public life. ACBS News/YouGov poll asked Trump voters who they feel tells them the truth. Trump was seen as more truthful than friends and family or religious leaders.
This finding helps explain why all of this damaging information about Trump from the various indictments, not to mention the January 6th committee or the media, keeps voters in Trump’s corner — they trust Trump more. If Jack Smith or Fani Willis says Trump did all these bad things and Trump says (or Truths) “I’m innocent” it’s clear who they will believe. Trump isn’t their most trusted source of information, he is their only trusted source of information.
2. A Hermetically Sealed Information Bubble
In addition to not believing the negative information about Trump, many Republican voters simply aren’t getting the other side. If they do encounter news about Trump’s crimes, it’s refracted through the lens of the Right Wing media.
The Republican base lives in a hermetically sealed information bubble that protects Trump from the damaging revelations that have undone so many other political figures.
3. Republicans Think Trump Can’t Lose
If you have spent any time recently on Twitter or in group chats with politically active Democrats, you’ve witnessed their mild panic about the 2024 election. Poll after poll show an alarmingly close race, which has sent Democratic blood pressures skyrocketing. Even though these very same polls have Trump tied with Biden, Republican voters are not concerned. According to aCBS News/YouGov poll, 61% of Republican voters think Trump would DEFINITELY beat Biden.
The level of confidence is delusional given two facts. One, Trump is in grave legal jeopardy; and two, Biden beat Trump less than three years ago. This delusion is fueled by the Right Wing media’s caricature of Biden’s age and competence, but also explains why Republicans are sticking with Trump — they believe to their core that he is the best chance to beat Biden.
DeSantis’s pitch that he is Trump without the baggage falls flat because GOP voters simply don’t believe Trump has baggage.
They also don’t believe Trump really lost in 2020. They think he’s a proven winner against Biden.
4. GOP Voters are Nonplussed by the Charges
There is a possibility that Donald Trump will be sentenced to prison before the 2024 election. Presidential primary voters support candidates for two reasons — they think a candidate can win and if that candidate wins, they will be a president who effectively implements their vision. On paper, at least, it would seem that campaigning in prison would pose a real obstacle to one’s success and a functional presidency. Even if you believed to your core that Trump was innocent — as most Republican voters do — the circumstances of his indictments should give you some pause about his ability to win and govern.
For whatever reason, Republicans are not in the least worried about the logistical or political impact of the indictments. A recentCNN poll found that majorities of Republicans are not at all concerned about the political or substantive impact of the charges.
Nearly seven in ten Republicans are unconcerned about 91 felony counts that could lead to decades of prison time. They don’t believe it will impact Trump’s efficacy as president. This is the whole story of the GOP primary contest that is barely a contest.
That’s crazy. But they think he has magical powers apparently and will be able to function as president even though he’s a convicted felon looking at jail time. The only explanation for this is that these people are cult followers or they are so cynical they just don’t care and are willing to say anything because they want to win. It’s ridiculous.
Keep in mind that this is probably the biggest cult in world history. Over 50 million people are participating to one degree or another.
