Digby's Hullabaloo Posts

Outside the California State Capitol last month, a fitness trainer turned school board president fired up the crowd at a parental rights rally, telling them they were all fighters in “a spiritual battle” for their kids and must answer the call from God.

Sonja Shaw, who was elected to the Chino Valley Unified School District board of education last November with an assist from a local megachurch and its Christian nationalist pastor, didn’t equivocate in naming the enemy: state Democratic officials who are challenging her right-leaning policies—and drafting laws that hinder book bans and protect teachers from harassment.

“Today we stand here and declare in his almighty name that it’s only a matter of time before we take your seats and we be a God-fearing example to the nation, how God is using California to lead the way,” Shaw crowed, adding, “We already know who has won this battle. You will be removed in Jesus’s name! You, Satan, are losing.”

Now Shaw is in the national spotlight in wake of her Chino school board passing codes that ban pride flags in classrooms and force educators to inform parents if their children identify as transgender—the first such policy to be passed in the state.

This summer, Shaw’s school board meetings, about 35 miles east of Los Angeles, became chaotic spectacles, ones that attracted the Proud Boys and other right-wing extremists and pitted them against students and parents protesting what they’re calling anti-LGBTQ practices that endanger children. When California superintendent of schools Tony Thurmond appeared at the July meeting in opposition, Shaw unceremoniously silenced him.

Weeks after state Attorney General Rob Bonta announced a civil rights probe into Shaw’s “gender disclosure” policy, his office sued the school board. Bonta said the policy violates the California constitution and state law, and would cause LGBTQ+ students, “mental, emotional, psychological and potential physical harm,” according to a press release.

Other right-leaning school boards across the state have followed Chino Valley Unified’s lead. Shortly before filing suit against the Chino board, Bonta issued statements denouncing the Anderson Union High School District, Temecula Valley Unified and Murrieta Valley Unified school boards’ decisions to pursue “copycat” anti-trans policies.

“These students are currently under threat of being outed to their parents against their will, and many fear that the District’s policy will force them to make a choice: either ‘walk back’ their constitutionally and statutorily protected rights to gender identity and gender expression, or face the risk of emotional, physical, and psychological harm,” Bonta said.

To concerned observers in Chino, Shaw’s tack is not unlike what’s happening at school boards across the country, with brawls over curriculum, social emotional learning, and the banning of books that focus on race and LGBTQ issues. Extremist groups like Moms for Liberty have spawned a mainstream narrative that public schools are “indoctrinating” children with “woke” ideology and into believing they’re a different gender.

But in Chino Valley, the school board’s new direction appears to be spurred on by a man behind the curtain: Shaw’s megachurch pastor Jack Hibbs.

Of course.

Indeed, three of the board’s five members belong to his church, Calvary Chapel Chino Hills.

At the Sacramento rally, Hibbs boasted of his congregation’s work in electing Shaw. Calling her a “true modern-day Deborah,” Hibbs said the soccer mom “heeded the call to run for the school board” and that “when churches get involved and get informed, people vote.”

God, Hibbs said, installed Shaw into her position.

“Get on your knees every night,” Shaw told the crowd. “All day I talk to him. People probably think I’m crazy, but I’m really just talking to God all day.” After reciting a Bible verse, she added, “I have looked demons straight in the eye and with God’s authority rebuked them back to hell where they belong.

“You can do that too, trust me.”

Residents have long raised alarms about the school board’s religious bent. And Pastor Hibbs and members of his megachurch congregation appear to be more involved than ever in Chino’s public schools.

Last week, in an interview with right-wing provocateur Charlie Kirk, Hibbs said that he brought the policy language to the school board after Republican state Assemblyman Bill Essayli’s “parental notification” legislation died without a hearing.

“He came back thinking he was defeated,” Hibbs said. “What we did is that we read his bill and we took the verbiage from that bill and then introduced it to our unified school district school board and they voted and adopted the verbiage.

“Guess what happened?” Hibbs continued. “We found out something, Charlie, that the most powerful politics is local…”

Hibbs then turned to Bonta’s lawsuit against the board, saying, “We’re going to take that on, we’re going to make sure that this goes to the U.S. Supreme Court.”

The pastor, who hasn’t returned messages left by The Daily Beast, wasn’t shy about his fight on the school board’s behalf.

Before he signed off, Hibbs told Kirk that children are “groomed” into trans ideology in the classroom and that schools want to “castrate your children” and “mutilate them.”

Ahead of the parental notification vote in July, Hibbs also urged people to flock to the fiery board meeting. “We’re asking people to show up by the thousands,” he said in a video announcement on the church’s Facebook page. “Please make it a priority.”

Churches have long been hubs of political activism for people all over the political map. It stands to reason that this particularly virulent form of Christian bigotry would be involved in the homophobic fever that’s broken out on the right. Trans rights seems to have pushed them over the bend but gay marriage lies underneath it all as the main affront. They’re already trying to get it on the books in the states if they can get the high court to reconsider. It worked with abortion.

Nor their cultural blemishes

Predictions of calamity always attend change, be it cultural, economic or political. Preachers love to associate natural catastrophes with God’s judgement against unbelievers (until the storms and floods strike their own communities). Somehow, change always seems to bring out the doomsayer in us.

So, it’s interesting that as church attendance declines, former churchgoers still maintain their sense of morality despite theocrats’ claims that that’s not possible. Daniel K. Williams writes in The Atlantic that, if nothing else, people shedding their churchgoing identities does not means losing their moral and political ones:

So, as church attendance declines even in the southern Bible Belt and the rural Midwest, history might seem to suggest that those regions will become more secular, more supportive of abortion and LGBTQ rights, and more liberal in their voting patterns. But that is not what is happening. Declines in church attendance have made the rural Republican regions of the country even more Republican and—perhaps most surprising—more stridently Christian nationalist.

Williams suggests taking part in a church community may have a moderating effect on one’s politics:

In fact, people become even more entrenched in their political views when they stop attending services. Though churches have a reputation in some circles as promoting hyper-politicization, they can be depolarizing institutions. Being part of a religious community often forces people to get along with others—including others with different political views—and it may channel people’s efforts into charitable work or forms of community outreach that have little to do with politics. Leaving the community removes those moderating forces, opening the door to extremism.

I didn’t see that coming. Church communities may not be as diverse as the Bronx, but membership does require a modicum of tolerance.

So perhaps it is not unsurprising that people without a lot of tolreance to spare are not regular churchgoers, as PRRI found earlier this year. While they attend church more than the average American, “roughly half of all Christian nationalists rarely, if ever, go to church.”

The nation’s most historically Catholic states, such as Massachusetts and Rhode Island, have retained the Democratic leanings that they had half a century ago, when more residents went to church. As white Catholics left church, they continued to practice the values of the Social Gospel that perhaps they or their parents or grandparents had learned there, and they channeled those energies into the political community. Although perhaps breaking with the church on issues of sexuality, gender, and abortion, they continued to embrace the ethic of concern for the poor and marginalized, and insisted that the government champion these causes. But among dechurched white evangelicals (a group heavily concentrated in the South and rural Midwest), the political values that remain are focused on culture wars and the autonomy of the individual.

Unless you’re an individual female.

Perhaps it is not so surprising. The influence of regional settlement patterns carry induring weight in local culture, folkways and mores. They even influence how we die. What religious beliefs settlers brought with them, or what cultures relocated with them from settlers’ (and the enslaveds’) places of origin may be too deeply intertwined to separate. Chicken or egg?

As Jamelle Bouie implied the other day (or as I read in), in places settled by enslavers those atop the social hierarchy never quite shed their feudalism whetever their Bibles tell them about Jesus setting men free. It is not as surprising, then, that in the region that brought us The Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, states now insists they may control what women do with their bodies far beyond their borders.

Of loss and Labor day and cultural shifts

On Labor Day 2023, I’m thinking about the town of Canton, NC, just west of here. Their 100-plus year-old paper mill abruptly closed this year throwing over 1,000 workers out of their jobs. The mill was the town’s life’s blood. Now it’s gone. The city obtained the shift whistle from the mill as a reminder of the sounds that marked the days there for decades. People gathered downtown earlier this year to shed tears as the whistle blew for the last time.

“This is not just 1,300 jobs; this is our blue-collar identity,” said Canton Mayor Zeb Smathers.

Gov. Roy Cooper has pledged millions in support for the region’s displaced workers.

Canton was also one of the few outposts of labor unions in the region.

In March, Smathers told the Carolina Journal:

“We’ve had a death in the family,” he said. “I had a mill worker tell me that. That’s exactly what it is and exactly what it feels like. Like a death, you just experience the numbness and shock of a sudden loss and that’s what happened out of the blue. I had to call the governor’s office and let them know. It’s shameful that we had to find out through social media that the workers were losing their jobs. I saw workers coming in with tears in their eyes, and I am heartbroken. I hear stories of kids in the school system crying because they are going to have to move away from their friends so their parents can find jobs elsewhere. There’s just sadness and hurt.”

Zeb is a friend. He spoke at a small gathering this week about the meaning of home, the warm embrace of place, not just physically but in the heart. Even politically. The county may be red, but Zeb is a Democrat, and respected there.

Canton boasts the state’s oldest Labor Day celebration. Even amidst the economic struggles, people there plan to maintain their celebration and their spirit. They are down but not out.

#HappyLaborDay
Workers & organized labor are cool again. Young Americans are the country’s most pro-union generation. Labor has poll ratings most politicians only dream about & the Biden administration is making workers’ pay, benefits and rights its calling card.
Free link below https://t.co/YaGey3lcSW

— EJ Dionne (@EJDionne) September 4, 2023

E.J. Dionne writes this morning that what Joe Biden, the most pro-labor president in years, has done for workers this year is, as he might say, a BFD:

Consider that on Wednesday, Biden’s Labor Department proposed a rule that would make an estimated 3.6 million salaried workers eligible for overtime pay. The week before, the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), transformed by Biden’s appointments, issued a decision that will boost union organizing after decades in which management held the upper hand.

When a majority of workers sign up for a union, employers can either begin bargaining with the new unit or agree to an election in which workers decide whether to unionize. Under the new rule, if an employer is deemed to have engaged in unfair labor practices during the run-up to the vote, the NLRB will order the employer to recognize the union. This is a big deal because unfair labor practices are common in such campaigns.

On top of that, the day before, the NLRB issued another rule requiring prompt union elections, a further blow against employer delaying tactics.

In June, the NLRB issued guidelines that make it harder for employers to classify workers as independent contractors. That hits home. I was one for years.

Lest anyone doubt where the administration stands, the Treasury Department released what it proudly called a “First-of-Its-Kind Report” on the economic value of organized labor. It found that unions raise the wages of their members by 10 to 15 percent, have “spillover effects” that benefit nonunion workers, “reduce race and gender wage gaps” and “boost businesses’ productivity.”

The report reflected how a large majority of the country feels. A recent Gallup survey found that 67 percent of Americans approve of unions. That’s down slightly from 71 percent last year, but Gallup emphasized that 2023 was “the fifth straight year this reading has exceeded its long-term average of 62%,” up from an “all-time low of 48% in 2009.” The survey also found a record-high 61 percent saying “unions help rather than hurt the U.S. economy.”

Economic Policy Institute president Heidi Shierholz perceives a large cultural shift. That’s good. But for now, a large group in Haywood County are still missing their shifts.

Marjorie Taylor Greene says she’ll move to shut down the government unless all the criminal charges against crooked Trump are dropped,
No more aid to Ukraine and
Congress start an impeachment inquiry against Biden

It's scary that someone like MTG has so much power in today’s GOP pic.twitter.com/DoCNu9qEFH

— Republicans against Trump (@RpsAgainstTrump) September 1, 2023

Cue the whining:

Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) seemed defensive after being called part of the “hardcore fringe” of the Republican party following her vow to vote against government funding if House Republicans do not open an impeachment inquiry into President Joe Biden.

The Georgia lawmaker claimed she was being persecuted for having “the audacity” to ask questions as she railed against the White House in a Saturday thread on X, the social media platform formerly known as Twitter.

“The White House is attacking me for demanding an impeachment inquiry before I’ll vote to fund one penny to our over bloated $32 TRILLION dollar in debt failing government,” Greene simmered.

Last week, the far-right House member pledged to block funding to prevent a government shut-down if her repeated calls for impeachment are not heeded. She also claimed she’d withdraw her vote if any more federal funding was provided for the war in Ukraine or for COVID-19 vaccines.

Still, Greene seemed confident she had “evidence” on her side to merit an inquiry.

“We have the evidence they have desperately been trying to hide to just ask the question,” she continued. “Should we inquire? Should we just take a look? Dare we investigate further? The answer is YES but the White House is outraged at my audacity to demand it.”

Here’s the full rant:

The White House is attacking me for demanding an impeachment inquiry before I’ll vote to fund one penny to our over bloated $32 TRILLION dollar in debt failing government.

We have the evidence they have desperately been trying to hide to just ask the question. Should we inquire? Should we just take a look? Dare we investigate further?

The answer is YES but the White House is outraged at my audacity to demand it. 

The White House is filled with pathetic blind fools led by one corrupt criminal mentally incompetent old man who has been in Washington seats of power longer than I’ve been alive. Over 50 years!

For the White House and administration, 

Your administration, or regime rather, is fueled by policies that legally partner with Mexican criminal cartels that enables the largest human trafficking and drug trafficking industry in world history… 

..Child sex trafficking and Chinese fentanyl murdering our people is your legacy.

Instead of sending military force against the cartels, you beat your chest and spew tough talk while funding and fueling a war defending another corrupt country’s border.. 

..while being too damn weak and pathetic to defend our own border. And you lie everyday to Americans about Ukraine, refusing to admit that Ukraine is losing the war.

Real men and real leaders defend their own country, their own homes, their own people, and their own children… 

..You would rather send our sons and daughters to be blown to shreds in another foreign war and sent home in flag draped coffins than actually do your constitutional duty of defending our own states.

And at home… 

Bidenomics is responsible for the highest inflation in 40 years that is kicking down our senior citizens in poverty and stealing their hope of a good future for their grandchildren. They shed tears daily over the America they knew that is no longer while they scrap together.. 

..pennies to buy food that has doubled and tripled in cost and medicines they can’t afford while you support brainwashing their grandchildren of the most evil disgusting lie that they can change their gender from what God created them to be. 

Joe Biden has been in office over 50 years and many of his uniparty colleagues have been there decades as well. All miraculously becoming wealthy millionaires while making a set taxpayer-funded paycheck.

Yeah, the math doesn’t add up. 

And simultaneously destroying American industries by sending jobs and manufacturing overseas propping up economies in third world countries and destroying our own while throttling China’s strength and shoving rural manufacturing America into crumbling forgotten towns. 

Then you brag and boast about bringing jobs to Americans when you give away millions and millions of taxpayers’ money in tax credits to a foreign country’s company and get them to move into a rural district like mine. Then our home grown businesses have their workers stolen.. 

..by the very company you paid to move in with their own hard earned tax dollars. You are actually competing with our own businesses and making it even harder for them to survive and you think they don’t notice?!

You are America last fools. 

Go ahead and mock me, I could care less, and the American people know the truth.

See you soon. 

She seems a little bit upset.

By the way, this line about having our “homegrown workers stolen” is something I’ve never seen before. She’s complaining that jobs are coming into her district. That’s a new one. Not that it matters. The cult will whine and complain about anything and everything. (We saw that years ago when they had a total hissy fit over getting health care.)

Marge’s rant there is the essence of the MAGA critique. It’s complete nonsense but as you can see it’s quite fully fleshed out.

Nobody can deny the impact of climate crises—at least nobody intelligent can deny the impact of the climate crisis anymore. Just look around, around the nation and the world for that matter,” Biden said while in Live Oak, Fla. “Historic floods, intense droughts, extreme heat, deadly wildfires that have caused serious damage that we’ve never seen before.”

The right wingers are having a fit over this saying Biden insulted them by saying they aren’t intelligent. It says a lot.

The truth hurts.

This is a fascinating essay by Jamelle Bouie looking at the role federalism has played and is playing on the issue of bodily autonomy. In the end, this is the big flaw, isn’t it?

One of the ironies of the American slave system was that it depended for its survival on a federal structure that left it vulnerable and unstable.

Within the federal union, the slave-dependent states had access to a national market in which they could sell the products of slave labor to merchants and manufacturers throughout the country. They could also buy and sell enslaved people, as part of a lucrative internal trade in human beings. Entitled to representation under the supreme charter of the federal union, slave owners could accumulate political power that they could deploy to defend and extend their interests. They could use their considerable influence to shape foreign and domestic policy.

And because the states had considerable latitude over their internal affairs, the leaders of slave-dependent states could shape their communities to their own satisfaction, especially with regard to slavery. They could, without any objection from the federal government, declare all Black people within their borders to be presumptively enslaved — and that is, in fact, what they did.

But the federal union wasn’t perfect for slaveholders. There were problems. Complications. Free-state leaders also had considerable latitude over their internal affairs. They could, for example, declare enslaved Black people free once they entered. And while leaders in many free states were unhappy about the extent of their free Black populations — in 1807, as the historian Kate Masur tells us in “Until Justice Be Done: America’s First Civil Rights Movement, From the Revolution to Reconstruction,” Ohio lawmakers passed a law requiring free Black migrants to register with the county clerk and have at least two white property owners vouch for their ability to support themselves — they ultimately could not stop the significant growth of free Black communities within their borders, whose members could (and would) agitate against slavery.

The upshot of all of this was that, until the Supreme Court’s decision in Dred Scott v. Sandford settled the matter in favor of slaveholders, the status of an enslaved Black person outside a slave state was uncertain. It was unclear whether property in man extended beyond the borders of states where it was authorized by law.

It was also unclear whether a slave state’s authority over an enslaved Black person persisted beyond its borders. And on those occasions when a free Black person was within the reach of slave-state law — as was true when free Black sailors arrived in Southern ports — it was unclear if they were subject primarily to the laws of their home states or the laws of the slave states. South Carolina assumed the latter, for example, when it passed a law in 1822 requiring that all “free Negroes or persons of color” arriving in the state by water be placed in jail until their scheduled departure.

One would have to conclude, surveying the legal landscape of slavery before Dred Scott, that federalism could not handle a question as fundamental as human bondage. The tensions, contradictions and conflicts between states were simply too great. As Abraham Lincoln would eventually conclude, “A house divided against itself cannot stand. I believe this government cannot endure, permanently half slave and half free. I do not expect the Union to be dissolved — I do not expect the house to fall — but I do expect it will cease to be divided. It will become all one thing or all the other.”

“The overturning of Roe v. Wade reveals the Supreme Court’s neglectful reading of the amendments that abolished slavery and guaranteed all people equal protection under the law. It means the erasure of Black women from the Constitution.”

I want you to keep all this in mind while you read about the latest developments in state and local laws regarding abortion. On Monday, Steve Marshall, Alabama’s Republican attorney general, announced in a court filing that the state has the right to prosecute people who make travel arrangements for women to have out-of-state abortions. Those arrangements, he argued, amount to a “criminal conspiracy.”

“The conspiracy is what is being punished, even if the final conduct never occurs,” Marshall’s filing states. “That conduct is Alabama-based and is within Alabama’s power to prohibit.”

In Texas, anti-abortion activists and lawmakers are using local ordinances to try to make it illegal to transport anyone to get an abortion on roads within city or county limits. Abortion opponents behind one such measure “are targeting regions along interstates and in areas with airports,” Caroline Kitchener reports in The Washington Post, “with the goal of blocking off the main arteries out of Texas and keeping pregnant women hemmed within the confines of their anti-abortion state.”

Alabama and Texas join Idaho in targeting the right to travel. And they aren’t alone; lawmakers in other states, like Missouri, have also contemplated measures that would limit the ability of women to leave their states to obtain an abortion or even hold them criminally liable for abortion services received out of state.

The reason to compare these proposed limits on travel within and between states to antebellum efforts to limit the movement of free or enslaved Black people is that both demonstrate the limits of federalism when it comes to fundamental questions of bodily autonomy.

It is not tenable to vary the extent of bodily rights from state to state, border to border. It raises legal and political questions that have to be settled in one direction or another. Are women who are residents of anti-abortion states free to travel to states where abortion is legal to obtain the procedure? Do anti-abortion states have the right to hold residents criminally liable for abortions that occur elsewhere? Should women leaving anti-abortion states be considered presumptively pregnant and subject to criminal investigation, lest they obtain the procedure?

Laws of this sort may not be on the immediate horizon, but the questions are still legitimate. By ending the constitutional guarantee of bodily autonomy, the Supreme Court has fully unsettled the rights of countless Americans in ways that must be resolved. Once again, a house divided against itself cannot stand.

Maybe the federalism is the fundamental problem. Perhaps institutionalizing dozens of different cultural/political/tribal sovereign power structures within a larger country maybe isn’t such a hot idea after all? It’s screwing us royally right now with the nonsensical electoral college that makes a mockery of our democracy. And this ongoing battle with the idea of individual autonomy and the rule of law in 50 different jurisdictions has been our great achilles heel from the very beginning. The authoritarian, white supremacist, patriarchy always seems to get a huge benefit from it even as they wave the American flag and call everyone else unpatriotic.

“If Donald Trump's the nominee, yes, I will support him. And if I'm the president, yes, I will pardon him, because that will help reunite the country,” GOP presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy tells @GStephanopoulos. https://t.co/kucMYBDfN6 pic.twitter.com/jXjRFyyuWO

— This Week (@ThisWeekABC) September 3, 2023

Yeah, a lot of people thought that after Nixon resigned. But we are in a different country and one thing that’s very different is that the idea of vengeance has overtaken the Party of Grievance. Even if the majority that loathes and despises Donald Trump decides to let bygones be bygone (which is unlikely) it would never be enough for the MAGA “winners.” They will demand blood no matter what. And they will be led by the man who was given the pardon, Donald Trump himself.

So no, there will be no “binding up of the nation’s wounds.” The right is entirely organized around the fight now.

“Would I have done the same thing and held on to those documents? No, I would not have,” GOP candidate Vivek Ramaswamy tells @GStephanopoulos of Trump’s Mar-a-Lago classified documents case.

“Do I think it’s an illegal behavior…No, I do not.” https://t.co/KInxWHwCkT pic.twitter.com/99ZKeYNzG4

— This Week (@ThisWeekABC) September 3, 2023

It IS illegal. Many other people have been convicted for doing much less.

Sigh. Whatever. It doesn’t really matter what he says. This guy’s so full of shit it’s boring to even talk about it. But I think he’s the future of the GOP unfortunately. The whole political apparatus is nothing but hustlers and grifters now and they will say and do anything to keep the base riled up. Trump is the prototype. This guy is 2.0. And he and others like him can probably count on tens of millions of people to buy what they’re selling. Ridiculous BS like this:

He depresses me.

I’m not quite sure what I think about this push to invoke the 14th Amendment to keep Trump off the ballot. It certainly seems to be straightforwardly correct on the merits. But whether it’s politically viable — or wise — is still unresolved for me. Would it save democracy or destroy it?

TPM takes a look at the inside of the move to do this:

Those on the vanguard of invoking the seldom-used Disqualification Clause of the 14th Amendment, under which Trump’s role in Jan. 6 would preclude him from running for office again, acknowledge that what they’re doing is unprecedented in the modern era. But so is a president attempting to foment an insurrection. 

“It’s Donald Trump’s fault if some people end up not being able to vote for him,” Gerard Magliocca, an Indiana University law professor who specializes in the Disqualification Clause, told TPM. “He took that right away from them by his misconduct.” 

In interviews with TPM, some of the outside groups leading the charge to enforce the Disqualifications Clause acknowledged the legal realities and complexities involved in disqualifying a major presidential candidate in a country where each state runs its own election and has its own disqualification process. But they also hew to the belief that Trump’s attempt to stay in power against the will of the people not only should bar him from further office, but already does under the Constitution. 

Their plans involve a mixture of public campaigning to apply pressure on the state-level secretaries of state and election boards who decide matters of disqualification. Accustomed to asking judges to rule on petitions involving the age or citizenship of local candidates, good government groups are now crafting bids to have these officials disqualify Trump.

Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) and Free Speech for People (FSFP), among the groups most active on the Disqualification Clause, are tight-lipped about where they plan to file formal legal challenges to disqualify Trump, though FSFP sent letters this week asking officials in Florida, Ohio, Wisconsin, New Hampshire and New Mexico to drop Trump from the ballot. That, in turn, has prompted some other states to start examining the process. 

Getting Underway

The disqualification clause has been the subject of renewed buzz since two conservative scholars — associated with the Federalist Society, no less — published a preview paper in the University of Pennsylvania Law Review endorsing the argument that Trump is disqualified from running. 

That buy-in forced a closer look from observers and even elected officials who might’ve been predisposed to shrug the argument off as the latest liberal wishcasting.   

But while the proposal’s resurgence in the post-Reconstruction era is new, CREW and FSFP have already tested it in court.  

FSFP, a Boston-based nonprofit helmed by attorney John Bonifaz, started filing in 2021 to disqualify candidates — including Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) and former Rep. Madison Cawthorn (R-NC) — from the ballot. 

The group’s legal director, Ron Fein, told TPM that FSFP is gearing up for a legal fight to disqualify Trump in several states before the Republican primaries begin.

“We’re pursuing both advocacy to persuade secretaries of state to disqualify Trump on their own and we will also be filing formal legal challenges to Trump’s candidacy in multiple states,” Fein said.

FSFP has already gotten part of its plans underway. 

Their strategy is two-pronged: keep up public pressure via letters to secretaries of state, election boards, and public protests at state election offices. 

But it’s the second part that will constitute the real test of the process. That will come down to formal petitions and lawsuits that the group is planning to file, asking whichever the relevant authority is in a given state to find that Trump is disqualified. Fein said that that will require FSFP to prove not only that Trump’s effort to reverse his loss in 2020 qualified as an insurrection, but that he undertook real acts to “engage” in it — thereby meeting a Reconstruction-era legal standard.

“Our predecessors wrote Section 3 of the 14th Amendment of the Constitution because they learned a bloody lesson from the Civil War,” Fein said. “When someone foments a violent insurrection against the U.S., they can’t be trusted with public office.”

51 Different Elections

Many of the same archaic processes which Trump tried to use to his advantage in his attempt to undermine the 2020 election results also make disqualification difficult. Each state runs its own election for presidential electors, and each one has its own disqualification procedures to navigate. The effect is that piecemeal, individual efforts are less likely to achieve an outsized effect than organizations which can coordinate nationally. 

They also only need to knock Trump off a few swing state ballots before the electoral math becomes very difficult for him, meaning they don’t have to succeed in every state to effectively disqualify him nationally. That math will help inform the plan, as will homing in on venues where the challengers will have the latitude to collect and display evidence — something judges have blocked in other disqualification cases. 

“That very consideration is part of what informs where we’ll file — we want to file in a forum that will allow you to do those sorts of procedures,” Nikhel Sus, CREW’s director of strategic litigation, told TPM, adding: “We have trial plans, plans to put on evidence and witnesses. Just having some sort of evidentiary hearing or trial has value in and of itself.” 

In some states, that’ll play out in administrative court. In others, normal state court.

Sus told TPM that the group will file lawsuits challenging Trump’s eligibility on the Republican primary ballot by the end of this year. 

That effort will encompass the idiosyncrasies of the various states, and will entail “a mix of both” complaints through election officials and complaints through the courts, befitting each state’s requirements.  

In North Carolina, for example, former state Supreme Court justice Robert Orr found himself combing through pages from an 1869 case testing the Disqualification Clause to see how it might apply.

“The intent of the framers of that constitutional amendment, that provision in the 14th Amendment, was to send a very distinct message not only to all the old Confederates, but to those who potentially might try it again,” Orr told TPM. 

Orr worked with FSFP on a bid to disqualify Cawthorn, and said he expects bids against Trump in his state.

Mixed Early Results

Most of those attempts, made after Jan. 6 to disqualify various Big Lie-friendly Republicans — Reps. Andy Biggs (R-AZ) and Paul Gosar (R-AZ), Mark Finchem, the GOP nominee for Arizona Secretary of State, Green and Cawthorn — were unsuccessful. 

In the Georgia and Arizona cases, judges blocked the challengers from obtaining and displaying the evidence on which the disqualification was predicated. That made it very difficult to prove that the lawmakers had engaged in an insurrection. 

In the one successful disqualification so far — CREW’s effort to remove Otero County, New Mexico commissioner Couy Griffin, who joined the mob on Jan. 6, from his post — the challengers put on an extensive trial with witnesses and video footage. 

Some of the problems that plagued FSFP in these cases would be unlikely to so thoroughly bedevil attempts to disqualify Trump. Along with the groups’ wariness about the evidentiary roadblocks and plans to file where they can put on a whole trial, much more of Trump’s actions before and during Jan. 6 are in the public record. The House Jan. 6 committee and subsequent indictments create a comprehensive record of what exactly Trump did. 

These groups would also simply have more bites at the apple with Trump. Instead of relying on one judge, or at best, one series of courts, they’ll challenge Trump’s qualification in a wide swath of states with an eye to where they’ll most likely find success. 

“The odds that everyone is gonna agree that he’s eligible are pretty low,” Magliocca said. “As long as you have somebody saying he’s ineligible, this is going to the Supreme Court, and probably pretty quickly.” 

I dunno. It’s such a tremendous threat that it seems that any legal and constitutional means to keep him out of the White House again is justified. But what then? I’m not convinced that this particular cure wouldn’t end up being worse than the disease. I guess I’ll need to watch this play out and see where it leads.

Meadows may have committed perjury

Izzy Einstein and Moe Smith, the legendary prohibition agents, raided illegal speakeasies a century ago, often using ruses and costumes to finagle their way inside to order drinks. Izzy would surreptitiously pour his drink down a funnel hidden in his vest. A hose led to a bottle for preserving evidence. He would announce he had “bad news.” You’ve just been raided.

There was more bad news for Mark Meadows and Donald Trump last week in Meadows’ hearing transcript.

2. Separately, this is a bit in the legal weeds, but DA makes very strong point.

Judge Jones' question assumed some of Meadows' overt acts were beyond the bounds of his official duties.

That's game over for the third element he would need to remove the case to federal court.👇 pic.twitter.com/vEv9LlcJDO

— Ryan Goodman (@rgoodlaw) August 31, 2023

But wait! There’s more. Ryan Goodman of Just Security observes in a thread that Meadows got involved in coordinating the fake electors scheme because he “would get yelled at” if he didn’t.

“By whom?” the judge asked Meadows.

“By the president of the United States,” Meadows replied, implicating both Trump’s knowledge of the scheme and active participation in it. It’s also a Hatch Act violation for a president, says Goodman.

1/ NEW and big revelations in Meadows’ hearing transcript.

Meadows testified he got involved in false electors scheme – why did he do it?

"Because I know I would get yelled at by" Trump if I didn't.

This will bolster prosecutors' cases

I discussed @OutFrontCNN w/@brikeilarcnn pic.twitter.com/k50GdhnAJm

— Ryan Goodman (@rgoodlaw) September 2, 2023

3/

On left:

Meadows testimony that he got involved in the false electors scheme or else would suffer Trump's anger.

On right:

Hatch Act criminal provision that applies to Presidents – if they command or intimidate a federal employee to help a political candidate. pic.twitter.com/jlPT1fSJ8h

— Ryan Goodman (@rgoodlaw) September 2, 2023

5/ As I explained @OutFrontCNN, Meadows' admission – his working on false electors to preserve options for Trump campaign – (1) undermines his aim to remove case to federal court and (2) guts his immunity defense.

It also has knock-on effects for Trump in those two respects.

— Ryan Goodman (@rgoodlaw) September 2, 2023

Meadows also admitted involving Cleta Mitchell in Georgia to help the campaign.

“Note how these admissions also contradict Meadows’ attempt to claim he was trying to ‘land the plane’ to move toward the transfer of power to Biden,” Goodman told CNN. “Helping set up the false electors as a backup plan is NOT landing the plane.”

7/ Note how these admissions also contradict Meadows' attempt to claim he was trying to "land the plane" to move toward the transfer of power to Biden.

Helping set up the false electors as a backup plan is NOT landing the plane.

— Ryan Goodman (@rgoodlaw) September 2, 2023

Right down the funnel

Special prosecutor “Jack Smith may need to consider possible perjury charges,” Goodman adds. “The entire house of cards – falsely claiming all his conduct was pursuant to government duties – fell apart under cross examination.”

In a court filing, Fulton Country District Attorney Fani Willis wrote that “after insisting that he did not play ‘any role’ in the coordination of slates of ‘fake electors’ throughout several states, the defendant was forced to acknowledge under cross-examination that he had in fact given direction to a campaign official in this regard.”

In a footnote, Willis adds, “The Court has ample basis not to credit some or all of the defendant’s testimony.”  

Trump may not, but Meadows may have needed a few drinks after his last week.

Judge slaps down DeSantis redistricting map

“Today’s redistricting victory in Florida was proof that if you aren’t paying attention to the courts you aren’t paying attention to democracy,” Democratic elections attorney Marc Elias posted Saturday after a Florida circuit judge struck down a Republican congressional map promoted by Gov. Ron DeSantis.

Republicans “hate me because I fight, they fear me because I win,” Elias crowed.

Because the plan diminishes Black voters’ “ability to elect representatives of their choice,” per the Fair Districts Amendments, “The Enacted Plan is DECLARED an unconstitutional violation of the Florida Constitution, Article III, Section 20,” wrote Circuit Judge J. Lee Marsh who sent it back to the Florida Legislature for a do-over (Politico):

Judge J. Lee Marsh’s ruling is a rebuke to the governor, who previously vetoed the Legislature’s attempts to redraw Florida’s congressional maps and pushed lawmakers to approve his map that dismantled a North Florida seat formerly held by Rep. Al Lawson, a Black Democrat.

Yeah, they’re predictable that way.

The congressional map pushed by DeSantis broke up Lawson’s district, which linked Black neighborhoods and towns stretching from just west of Tallahassee to Jacksonville. Lawson, who lost election last year, previously said he would consider running for his old seat if lawmakers reinstate it to a similar configuration as when he held it.

Florida Secretary of State Cord Byrd, in a text message, said that he disagrees with the decision and that the state will appeal the ruling to the state Supreme Court.

PBS provides some background:

The decision was the latest to strike down new congressional maps in Southern states over concerns that they diluted Black voting power.

In June, the U.S. Supreme Court overturned a Republican-drawn map in Alabama, with two conservative justices joining liberals in rejecting the effort to weaken a landmark voting rights law. Not long after that, the Supreme Court lifted its hold on a Louisiana political remap case, increasing the likelihood that the Republican-dominated state will have to redraw boundary lines to create a second mostly Black congressional district.

In each of the cases, Republicans have either appealed or vowed to appeal the decisions since they could benefit Democratic congressional candidates facing 2024 races under redrawn maps. The Florida case likely will end up before the Florida Supreme Court.

Yeah, they’re predictable that way.

In an unprecedented move, DeSantis interjected himself into the redistricting process last year by vetoing the Republican-dominated Legislature’s map that preserved Lawson’s district. He called a special session, submitted his own map and demanded lawmakers accept it.

In their lawsuit, the voting rights groups claimed the redrawn congressional map violated state and federal voting rights protections for Black voters.

Yeah, they’re … it’s Ron DeSantis fer cryin’ out loud. He signed the maps into law in April 2022.

Here in the Tar Heel State, the governor has no veto over redistricting. Democrats led by then-state Sen. Roy Cooper saw to that back in the late 1990s when they ran the show. Should a Democrat ever regain control in Florida, expect a lame duck Republican legislature to attempt to replicate that posthaste.

https://twitter.com/marceelias/status/1698065683022549500?s=20