North Carolina Republicans held the state budget and Medicaid expansion hostage to a failed attempt to expand casino gambling for three months. They finally passed the budget on September 22. Gov. Roy Cooper allowed it to become law without his signature. A veto and inevitable override vote would have been a pointless additional delay.
We sounded the 🚨 on this when the NC budget dropped with this hidden language. Now the national media are paying attention. Thanks to @JuddLegum and @tesszeeks for putting some ☀️on what’s happening here in NC. https://t.co/vnl6425yhP
There was one teensy rider added. Judd Legum reports in a thread:
1. Buried in North Carolina’s 600+ page budget is a little-noticed provision that creates a secret police force, controlled by Republicans, with extraordinary powers
🧵
2. The budget grants the Gov Ops Committee the right to seize “any document or system of record” from anyone who works in or w/state & local government
This includes contractors or any entity that directly or indirectly receives state funds, including charities and colleges
3. It gets worse. Gov Ops staff will be authorized to enter “any building or facility” owned or leased by a state or non-state entity without a judicial warrant.
This includes private homes, if it includes a home office of a contractor
4. Alarmingly, public employees under investigation will be required to keep all communication and requests “confidential.” They cannot alert their supervisor of the investigation nor consult with legal counsel.
Those who refuse to cooperate face jail time and fines of up to 1K
5. Gov Ops is dominated by Republicans and pursues partisan investigations. It is co-chaired by Senate Leader Phil Berger (R) and House Speaker Tim Moore (R).
Gov Ops launched an inquiry into diversity training programs at the University of North Carolina earlier this year.
6. Berger and Moore claim this is all about oversight and transparency. But a separate provision of the budget allows them to reject any public records requests concerning the operation of Gov Ops.
7. This is part of a broader effort to restrict public access to public records. The budget also repeals a law that required “communications regarding redistricting” be made publicly available when new legislative maps were adopted.
8. North Carolina is one of the most gerrymandered states in the country. In 2022, a gerrymandering trial exposed a top Republican redistricting official for using “secret maps to help draft the state’s redistricting plan.”
The Raleigh News and Observer reported in that September 21 story, “Plaintiffs in the lawsuit requested copies of those maps, but were told by the legislature that they no longer existed…. Previous legal challenges to redistricting, including some brought by the North Carolina NAACP, have used draft materials as evidence.”
Furthermore, another section of the new public records restrictions, “broadly exempts legislators from the state’s public records law, stating that lawmakers, even those who are no longer in office, ‘shall not be required to reveal or to consent to reveal any document, supporting document, drafting request, or information request made or received by that legislator while a legislator.’”
We’ll see y’all in court. As we have again and again and again ever since 2010.
Ben Kingsley as The Mandarin in Iron Man 3 (2013).
If the threat posed by the authoritarian right is as existential as it seems, some of us might want to unhunch our shoulders and not be as reflexive about running off potential allies. If Digby’s Monday post about Red Caesarism was not a wake-up call, you just ain’t woke.
About that. A repeated theme in Anand Giridharadas’s “The Persuaders” is “Is there room among the woke for the waking?” Do those on the left edge of the left — at the cutting edge of consciousness, if you prefer — possess enough critical mass to achieve the progressive goals they seek:
Veteran activists Giridharadas profiles have decided they do not. Success means expanding their movements without compromising them. They’ve learned to “call in” progressives with whom they mostly agree rather than just calling them out for their failings, to focus more on conversion than on hunting heretics. They walk a fine line seeking to coalition with more moderate allies without watering down their own goals.
A listserv I once enjoyed blew up when the “call out” fad hit the progressive movement. Where there had been months of friendly banter, meet-ups, networking, and idea exchanges there were suddenly micro-aggressions to be called out, privileges to be checked, and demands for self-criticism reminiscent of the Cultural Revolution. What seemed more like online Esalen turned overnight into Salem. A liberal desire for purification became Puritanism. Community collapsed.
It’s a critical flaw on the left that could prove fatal in the face of a gathering authoritarian movement. We need more room among the woke, etc.
Back in high school, fundamentalists from Bob Jones University (always men) had a shtick when they were street evangelizing. They’d approach, bibles in hand, and ask if you were “saved” or “knew Jesus” or whatever. (Of course, if they approached you they’d already sized you up and decided you were unclean.) If you answered in the affirmative, they’d say, “Praise the Lord,” then pivot to a 20 Questions game I called “Unmask the Heretic.”
They’d interrogate where you went to church, how often, what Bible translation you preferred, etc. Because if you didn’t check all the right boxes, you were a Christian in name only with one foot in Hell. Unclean! You needed saving. Again. By them. By joining their cult … um, church. If you didn’t practice their style of Christianity, woe be unto you.
This is a behavior where fringes of both sides really do do it.
Sure, there have been too many progressive disappointments, too much hippie punching, too many trojan moderates sold as lefties. Perhaps what’s nagging me now, though, is Bob Inglis’ experience with the T-party and his Times op-ed about his regrets about the political small stuff he wasted time on in Congress when there were more serious problems needing attention.
Perhaps it was Gov. Gavin Newsome choosing EMILY’s List President Laphonza Butler to serve out the late Sen. Dianne Feinstein’s unexpired term. Butler checks a lot of boxes. There are plenty of reasons why she’s a good pick. But not enough for the picky.
Look! For a time, Butler consulted for a firm whose corporate clients included Uber and PG&E, writes Lee Fang. Unclean!
CNN reported Monday night that former Trump White House chief of staff John Kelly has spoken out against his former boss. Here’s just a portion. Trump is:
A person who is not truthful regarding his position on the protection of unborn life, on women, on minorities, on evangelical Christians, on Jews, on working men and women,” Kelly continued. “A person that has no idea what America stands for and has no idea what America is all about. A person who cavalierly suggests that a selfless warrior who has served his country for 40 years in peacetime and war should lose his life for treason – in expectation that someone will take action. A person who admires autocrats and murderous dictators. A person that has nothing but contempt for our democratic institutions, our Constitution, and the rule of law.
“There is nothing more that can be said,” Kelly concluded. “God help us.”
Yes, but.
“Interestingly, in this statement from Gen. Kelly excoriating Trump, he mentions awful things Trump did during the 2016 election and yet… Kelly happily went to work for Trump after 2016, first at DHS and then at the White House, as chief of staff,” tweeted the estimable Mehdi Hasan. He added, “By the way, has Gen. Kelly apologized yet to Congresswoman Frederica Wilson for lying about her?”
Unclean!
I can’t understand the need on the left to dredge up past sins of people willing to help when democracy is on the line. God help Cassidy Hutchinson, Michael Cohen, Rick Wilson, Stuart Stevens, and too many more to count.
Over the weekend, Adam Serwer pointed Chris Hayes to a related blog post on the attention economy online. It’s reminiscent of call-outs I saw on that listserv and among evangelical interrogators. Venkatesh Rao of Ribbonfarm identifies as a driver of the attention economy beef-only thinking:
A beef-only thinker is someone you cannot simply talk to. Anything that is not an expression of pure, unqualified support for whatever they are doing or saying is received as a mark of disrespect, and a provocation to conflict. From there, you can only crash into honor-based conflict mode, or back away and disengage.
Ours is not a time for disengaging, not a time for calling out but for calling in to a movement to preserve our imperfect democratic republic. Are we really going to purity-police our friends and potential allies while MAGA works at burning the place down?
Look again at the Guardian article on Red Caesarism incubating in right-wing think tanks like the Claremont Institute:
Their calls for a “red Caesar” are now only growing louder as Donald Trump, whose supporters attempted to violently halt the election of Joe Biden in 2020, has assumed dominant frontrunner status in the 2024 Republican nomination race. Trump, who also faces multiple criminal indictments, has spoken openly of attacking the free press in the US and having little regard for American constitutional norms should he win the White House again.
The idea that the US might be redeemed by a Caesar – an authoritarian, rightwing leader – was first broached explicitly by Michael Anton, a Claremont senior fellow and Trump presidential adviser.
They want a dictator. Their “think tank thinked it up.” Heard that somewhere before? It was funny when Ben Kingsley said it as a fictional “custom-made terror threat” controlled by a puppet master. Not so funny when there are real autocrats-in-waiting.
What was it Damon Linker said? “Thirty years ago, if I told you that a bunch of billionaires and intellectuals on the right are waiting in the wings to impose a dictatorship on the United States, you would have said that I was insane.”
Look, I fully expect many Never Trumpers from the Lincoln Project, The Bulwark, and others to return to their conservative fetishes once we defeat rising fascism together. But for now, we need each other.
I will be eternally grateful to all the scientists who made the mRNA vaccines that have saved millions of lives during he COVID pandemic. Today two of them received the Nobel Prize for medicine:
Two scientists won the Nobel Prize in medicine on Monday for discoveries that enabled the creation of mRNA vaccines against COVID-19 that were critical in slowing the pandemic — technology that’s also being studied to fight cancer and other diseases.
Hungarian-American Katalin Karikó and American Drew Weissman were cited for contributing “to the unprecedented rate of vaccine development during one of the greatest threats to human health,” according to the panel that awarded the prize in Stockholm.
The panel said the pair’s “groundbreaking findings … fundamentally changed our understanding of how mRNA interacts with our immune system.”
Traditionally, making vaccines required growing viruses or pieces of viruses and then purifying them before next steps. The messenger RNA approach starts with a snippet of genetic code carrying instructions for making proteins. Pick the right virus protein to target, and the body turns into a mini vaccine factory.
In early experiments with animals, simply injecting lab-grown mRNA triggered a reaction that usually destroyed it. Those early challenges caused many to lose faith in the approach: “Pretty much everybody gave up on it,” Weissman said.
But Karikó, a professor at Szeged University in Hungary and an adjunct professor at the University of Pennsylvania, and Weissman, of the University of Pennsylvania, figured out a tiny modification to the building blocks of RNA that made it stealthy enough to slip past immune defenses.
Karikó, 68, is the 13th woman to win the Nobel Prize in medicine. She was a senior vice president at BioNTech, which partnered with Pfizer to make one of the COVID-19 vaccines. Karikó and Weissman, 64, met by chance in the 1990s while photocopying research papers, Karikó told The Associated Press.
Dr. Paul Hunter, a professor of medicine at Britain’s University of East Anglia, described the mRNA vaccines made by BioNTech-Pfizer and Moderna Inc. as a “game changer” in shutting down the coronavirus pandemic, crediting the shots with saving millions of lives.
“We would likely only now be coming out of the depths of COVID without the mRNA vaccines,” Hunter said.
John Tregoning, of Imperial College London, called Karikó “one of the most inspirational scientists I have met.” Her work together with Weissman “shows the importance of basic, fundamental research in the path to solutions to the most pressing societal needs,” he said.
The duo’s pivotal mRNA research was combined with two other earlier scientific discoveries to create the COVID-19 vaccines. Researchers in Canada had developed a fatty coating to help mRNA get inside cells to do its work. And studies with prior vaccines at the U.S. National Institutes of Health showed how to stabilize the coronavirus spike protein that the new mRNA shots needed to deliver.
Dr. Bharat Pankhania, an infectious diseases expert at Exeter University, predicted the technology used in the vaccines could be used to refine vaccines for other diseases like Ebola, malaria and dengue, and might also be used to create shots that immunize people against certain types of cancer or auto-immune diseases including lupus.
I won’t go into my usual rant about how the nihilist MAGA death cult has killed massive numbers by brainwashing their followers to refuse the vaccines. If we manage to get past this bizarre period in our history, the record of this chapter will not be kind to them Luckily some of the good guys are being recognized in their own time. And most of us are very, very grateful for their work.
Women in science can cheer just a little bit today:
The Guardian reports on the latest “intellectual” vomit spewing forth from the centers of right wing academia:
June, rightwing academic Kevin Slack published a book-length polemic claiming that ideas that had emerged from what he called the radical left were now so dominant that the US republic its founders envisioned was effectively at an end.
Slack, a politics professor at the conservative Hillsdale College in Michigan, made conspiratorial and extreme arguments now common on the antidemocratic right, that “transgenderism, anti-white racism, censorship, cronyism … are now the policies of an entire cosmopolitan class that includes much of the entrenched bureaucracy, the military, the media, and government-sponsored corporations”.
In a discussion of possible responses to this conspiracy theory, he wrote that the “New Right now often discusses a Red Caesar, by which it means a leader whose post-Constitutional rule will restore the strength of his people”.
For the last three years, parts of the American right have advocated a theory called Caesarism as an authoritarian solution to the claimed collapse of the US republic in conference rooms, podcasts and the house organs of the extreme right, especially those associated with the Claremont Institute thinktank.
Though on the surface this discussion might seem esoteric, experts who track extremism in the US say that due to their influence on the Republican party, the rightwing intellectuals who espouse these ideas about the attractions of autocracy present a profound threat to American democracy.
Their calls for a “red Caesar” are now only growing louder as Donald Trump, whose supporters attempted to violently halt the election of Joe Biden in 2020, has assumed dominant frontrunner status in the 2024 Republican nomination race. Trump, who also faces multiple criminal indictments, has spoken openly of attacking the free press in the US and having little regard for American constitutional norms should he win the White House again.
The idea that the US might be redeemed by a Caesar – an authoritarian, rightwing leader – was first broached explicitly by Michael Anton, a Claremont senior fellow and Trump presidential adviser.
Anton has been an influential rightwing intellectual since in 2016 penning The Flight 93 Election, a rightwing essay in which he told conservatives who were squeamish about Trump “charge the cockpit or you die”, referencing one of the hijacked flights of 9/11.
He gave Caesarism a passing mention in that essay, but developed it further in his 2020 book, The Stakes, defining it as a “form of one-man rule: halfway … between monarchy and tyranny”.
The Guardian contacted Anton at his Claremont Institute email address, but received no response.
Anton and others in the Claremont milieu are not simply hypothesizing about the future: their dreams of Caesar arise from their dark view of the US.
Anton wrote the scene-setting essay in Up From Conservatism, an anthology of essays published this year and edited by the executive director of Claremont’s Center for the American Way of Life, Arthur Milikh.
In that essay Anton writes baldly that “the United States peaked around 1965”, and that Americans are ruled by “a network of unelected bureaucrats … corporate-tech-finance senior management, ‘experts’ who set the boundaries of acceptable opinion, and media figures who police those boundaries”.
His diagnosis of US social and cultural life unfolds under a series of subheadings that are almost comical in their disillusionment: “The universities have become evil”, “Our economy is fake”, “The people are corrupt”, “Our civilization has lost the will to live”.
Damon Linker, a senior lecturer at the University of Pennsylvania and an author of several books on the American right, was early in noticing the extreme right’s drift towards Caesarism.
Linker told the Guardian that Anton and others in the Claremont milieu “have convinced themselves thoroughly that the current order is decadent, corrupt and far removed from the proper, admirable origins of American government”.
“The current order is decadent, corrupt and far removed from the proper, admirable origins of American government” explains why Anton worked in the Trump administration in the National Security Council. It must have been so refreshing to work for such an upstanding, principled, moral leader.
This seems very logical to me. After all, Trump’s best nickname is Orange Julius Caesar.
They aren’t trying to hide it people. It’s right out there. And they have happened on to a demagogue cult leader who can persuade almost half the country that this is exactly what they need. And it might even work if we don’t make sure they lose before they finally succeed in destroying the democratic republic.
Democrats are being pouty because they don’t have a young, dazzling superstar like Barack Obama to fall in love with. But they will vote and they will vote for Biden because they hate Trump. Negative partisanship is as powerful a motivator as 2008 style adoration.
According to CNN, Trump has decided that it will be good for him to appear at this trial and sit sullenly at the table with the expression he had on his face for the mug shot because he thinks it makes him look tough. The assumption is that it will help with the fund raising since the mug shot was so successful.
Given both his personal history and the recent pattern in white-collar accountability, Trump might understandably be surprised he finds himself in so much trouble. https://t.co/JB3vLz2NVK
All of that is incredibly sick, but that’s how the cult works. They love their big, manly criminal Dear Leader.
By the way, Trump has been whining that he should have a jury trial:
“I have a Deranged, Trump Hating Judge, who RAILROADED this FAKE CASE through a NYS Court at a speed never seen before, refusing to let it go to the Commercial Division, where it belongs, denying me everything, No Trial, No Jury. He made up this crazy ‘KILL TRUMP’ decision, assigning insanely low values to properties, despite overwhelming evidence…”
But he had the chance to ask for one two years ago and opted not to have one.
“Donald Trump’s lawyers screwed up again,” trial lawyer Michael Popok said when talking about the development. “His then-lawyer Alina Habba screwed up the procedures in New York, didn’t file the appropriate paper on time, and therefore, Donald Trump was properly denied a jury trial.”
Habba is cute but she’s a terrible lawyer. Trump is sticking with her anyway. Maybe it’s because he can’t find anyone else but it’s possible that he just has a lot of faith in her for some “other” reason.
You’d think he’d be a little bit more practical when it comes to his fortune but you have to remember that he’s living in his MAGA bubble and believes that he’s somehow going to be saved when he becomes president again.
And remember, he’s been a terrible businessman on the brink of disaster over and over again. He’s always escaped accountability and naturally assumes that he can do it again through sheer force of his personality. And now he has an army of cultists backing him up.
Matt Gaetz on the House floor: “It is going to be difficult for my Republican friends to keep calling President Biden feeble while he continues to take Speaker McCarthy’s lunch money in every negotiation.” pic.twitter.com/LXNxi9YMs4
That will make a nice campaign ad, don’t you think?
Gaetz didn’t pull the trigger on the motion to vacate. But he told the press on the capitol steps that he still plans to do it later when the full congress is back in town. Stay tuned.
Last week President Biden gave a speech that went largely unmarked in the press and it’s really too bad. It may be the best speech he’s ever given and if people saw it it might set their minds at ease a little bit about his prospects in the next election and the following four years. He’s never been much of a speaker but the speeches he’s been making on the threat to democracy are excellent. This is the fourth one he’s given and it’s a sincere effort on his part to which we should all pay attention. After all, while we are all painfully aware of the right wing’s anti-democratic turn, he is the president and it stands to reason he sees this from a different perspective. That he is so determined to sound the alarm should get much more attention than it does.
On the heels of a bizarre impeachment inquiry hearing last week in which Republicans House members threw out outrageous smears against him without a shred of evidence and a GOP primary debate that had the candidates yelling at each other like drunk sports hooligans, Biden traveled to Arizona to open the John McCain Institute and Library. He spoke at length about his long friendship with the former senator reminding people of a time when the divisions between the two parties were not as uniformly bitter and hostile as they are now.
But he didn’t linger too long on that. He used the legacy of McCain the Never-Trump patriot to pivot to the Republican MAGA movement’s assault on democracy saying that for the late senator “it was country first” subtly pointing the finger at Republicans putting Trump before the constitution. He said:
Let me begin with the core principles. Democracy means rule of the people, not rule of monarchs, not rule of the monied, not rule of the mighty. Regardless of party, that means respecting free and fair elections; accepting the outcome, win or lose. It means you can’t love your country only when you win.
Democracy means rejecting and repudiating political violence. Regardless of party, such violence is never, never, never acceptable in America. It’s undemocratic, and it must never be normalized to advance political power.
He talked about what it’s like to meet with world leaders who ask him, “is it going to be ok?” and wonder whether Americans understand just how unstable this big powerful country appears to the rest of the world. “There is something dangerous happening in America,” he said. “There is an extremist movement that does not share the basic beliefs of our democracy. The MAGA Movement.”
He said, “my friends, they’re not hiding their attacks. They’re openly promoting them — attacking the free press as the enemy of the people, attacking the rule of law as an impediment, fomenting voter suppression and election subversion.” And then he made it absolutely clear what we’re facing:
They’re pushing a notion the defeated former President expressed when he was in office and believes applies only to him. And this is a dangerous notion: This president is above the law, with no limits on power.Trump says the Constitution gave him, quote, “the right to do whatever he wants as President,” end of quote. I’ve never even heard a president say that in jest. Not guided by the Constitution or by common service and decency toward our fellow Americans but by vengeance and vindictiveness.
Do most Americans know about that? I don’t think they do. I have been astonished at the media shrugging when Trump literally proclaimed on more than one occasion, “I have an Article II that says I can do whatever I want” as if a president saying such a thing isn’t automatically disqualifying.
He went on to exhort Americans to take this threat seriously and recognize that the whole thing falls apart if these people are allowed to seize power. It was very simple and straightforward without a lot of fancy rhetoric, just a strong, clear denunciation of something very dangerous that’s happening in our society and which it seems has somehow been accepted by too many as business as usual.
After he gave that speech Biden sat down with John Harwood of Pro-Publica for an interview largely on the same topic. If you have the time, I urge you to watch it and then ask yourself if it’s really the case that this man is somewho incapacitated.
At the moment there is a lot of angst about Biden’s reelection chances. It seems almost incomprehensible that it could be so close. But it’s important to remember that these are not normal political circumstances and that the GOP has pretty much devolved into a cult rather than a political party. Biden doesn’t say as much but the concept comes through loud and clear in his comments. So, while many of the usual suspects are demanding that he find a way to talk about “kitchen table issues,” he seems to recognize that something deeper than economic malaise is going on which explains why the improving economy and incredible job market doesn’t make people feel any better.
He sees that a majority of this country is simply frightened that the country has gone off the rails in some fundamental way and they don’t know exactly how to deal with it — they don’t even know how to define it. It’s about our sense that for all of Trump’s clownishness, something seriously disconcerting is happening. We see it in Trump’s flouting of every norm, rule and law with his followers cheering him on. We see it in their defense of January 6th. We see it in the insane gun fetish, the conspiracy theories, the authoritarian impulse growing in the right wing. We see it in book banning and cruelty toward transgender kids and COVID denialism. We see it in the fact that the moment they get the power to do it they start taking away constitutional rights.
Biden’s insistence on talking about this over the objections of many Democratic strategists and pundits shows confidence in his own judgement which proved to be right in 2022 when he ignored their pleas to change his closing argument from political extremism to the economy. He was right then and he’s right now. Americans are palpably nervous and agitated and it’s not about the price of eggs or gasoline. It’s about freedom. And they are justified in being so.
Obviously, nobody knows what the future holds and he is 80 years old. But as I watched all the celebrations over the weekend for former president Jimmy Carter’s 99th birthday, recognizing that he is reportedly as with it as ever although very physically feeble, it made me realize that it would be helpful if people paid a little less attention to the fact that he’s old and a little more attention to what he’s done and what he’s saying. It’s quite impressive.
I say this even though I was one of those progressives who would have chosen several of the 2020 Democratic candidates over him, but came around like the rest of us did because he earned the nomination and Donald Trump had to be defeated. But since then
Jen Psaki Morning Joe
Why is it important. It is the framework for something that is underlying the palpable nervousness that so many in the country are worried about. It’s not all about money. It’s about freedoms… this is not normal.
Insurrections, stealing supreme court seats, impeaching Biden, gerrymandering (wisconsin) political violence and threats, Trump, abortion, gun proliferation, Milley
Image of Brooklyn subway flooding from Sept. 29 via Twitter/X.
Brooklyn flooded on Friday. Again. Subway lines shut down as water poured off streets, down stairways and into stations. A niece reported she had to take cabs into the city for work and the basement entry was knee-deep.
New York City’s sewer system is built for the rain of the past—when a notable storm might have meant 1.75 inches of water an hour. It wasn’t built to handle the rainfall from Hurricane Irene, Hurricane Sandy, or, more recently, Hurricane Ida—which dumped 3.15 inches an hour on Central Park. And it wasn’t built to handle the kind of extreme rainfall that is becoming routine: The city flooded last December, last April, and last July—an unusual seasonal span. “We now have in New York something much more like a tropical-rainfall pattern,” Rohit Aggarwala, New York City’s environmental-protection commissioner, said yesterday at The Atlantic Festival. “And it happens over and over again.”
It happened today. Less than 24 hours after Aggarwala’s statements, rain arrived in New York City—the kind that sends waterfalls through Brooklyn subway ceilings, dangerously floods basements, and floats carson the road like rubber ducks. Mayor Eric Adams said earlier today that the city could receive up to eight inches of rain today; parts of Brooklyn saw a month’s worth of rain in just three hours. New York State Governor Kathy Hochul has declared a state of emergency, and New York City residents received emergency alerts cautioning them to avoid travel (unless, ominously, they were evacuating), seek high ground, and avoid driving.
“That’s not a pattern New York City is accustomed to,” Aggarwala told the audience. “That’s a pattern that Miami might be accustomed to, maybe Singapore.”
Donald Trump could solve New York’s problem quickly and easily. He’d send the free water to California to dampen the forests and prevent wildfires. People would have enough to wash their hair. Rich people from Beverly Hills could shower and smell good again. “You’re going to be happy and I’m going to get it done fast,” Trump promised California Republicans the same day Brooklyn flooded.
Maybe he can get it done while he’s in New York for his civil trial.
Crisp fall air on the first Monday in October is perhaps a reminder to take a moment
Yes, the ethics-challenged U.S. Supreme Court begins its new term, God help us. Slate’s Dahlia Lithwick and Mark Joseph Stern do some teeth-grinding over having to write the obligatory journalistic “curtain-raiser” as the new term opens. The question “is not if we should be worried, but exactly how worried we should be.” What will the Roberts court do next with “the most dangerous and radical ideas to emerge from the conservative legal movement” courtesy of Donald Trump and Leonard Leo?
Yes, despite all the oddsmakers’ bets on which elected Black woman California Gov. Gavin Newsom, would appoint to fill out the term of the late Sen. Dianne Feinstein, he chose instead Emily’s List president Laphonza Butler. The Washington Post reports, “She will become the second Black woman after Harris to represent California in the Senate and the first Black lesbian to openly serve in Congress, a statement from Newsom’s office said. In picking Butler, Newsom kept his 2021 promise to appoint a Black woman to the chamber.” Newsom had suggested his appointee would serve an interim role so as not to shake up the primary field of Democrats already vying for the seat. At this late date, it would be difficult for Butler to launch and staff a Senate campaign even with her Emily’s List fundraising base.
Yes, Donald Trump’s civil trial begins today in New York City. The very unstable former and would-be president faces the judge who has already given his family business the corporate death penalty. He faces prosecution by New York’s attorney general, Letitia James, who accuses Trump, “his adult sons and their family business of inflating the value of Mr. Trump’s assets to secure favorable loan terms from banks.”
And yes, with Halloween still weeks away, MAGA maniacs inside the House still mean to slash the throats of key government programs, Ukraine funding, and Kevin McCarthy’s speakership.
But take a breath. There remain islands of sanity even among Republicans, former Rep. Bob Inglis of South Carolina reminds us in the New York Times.
Inglis, who lost his Fourth District seat to T-party Trey Gowdy in the 2010 GOP primary, has had plenty of time to reflect on his years in Congress. He has regrets. Both for the small-mindedness of positions he took in office and for what has become of the Republican Party to which he still belongs. He still holds many conservative positions, but with a softer edge now. MAGA extremists who demonize their opponents and threaten to blow up the government if they don’t get their way? Inglis sees them making the same mistakes he made.
When politicians grow up, they search their careers for substantive accomplishments. The temporary affections of the political crowd, the petty disagreements, the party rivalries are lost in a quest for greater significance. “Am I/was I about something big enough to be about?” the grown-up politician wonders. “Am I/was I about leading or following — the wandering crowd, the party leader presenting a clear danger to the Republic, the aging colleague needing to leave the stage?” “Was I an agent of chaos in a house divided, or did I work to bring America together, healing rifts and bridging divides?”
Former members like me need to be careful not to write revisionist histories. Our times involved plenty of small-mindedness. In the retelling, we often sanitize our stories, removing some of the smallness. Even the irksomeness of the other side is omitted. The vitriol subsides. Former members of Congress even speak of the “others” with newfound fondness.
When I was in Congress, I butted heads with Representative Pat Schroeder, a Democrat from Colorado who served from 1973 to 1997. She was pro-choice; I’m pro-life. She supported nearly every progressive cause; I opposed nearly every progressive cause. The record of our exchanges in the Judiciary Committee will show real acrimony, but when I read the news of her passing in March, I was truly saddened. Someone with whom I had served was no more. A milepost was gone. I had seen Ms. Schroeder several years after we had both left Congress. We were in an elevator at the Capitol. The struggle was gone. The harsh, competitive looks had vanished. I might have even joked with her about using a line I’d heard her say before: “Don’t tell my mother I’m a member of Congress; she thinks I’m a prostitute!” I wish I had asked her if we could be friends.
