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A former James O’Keefe antagonist believes that if the law can hold Trump accountable then it’s possible. I wish I felt confident that they were following the same path but I’m not

During its 13-year history, the right-wing group Project Veritas tried to infiltrate progressive organizations, political campaigns and mainstream media organizations, and it published selectively edited videos intended to discredit those groups and compromise their operations.

In February, the tables turned, as Project Veritas founder and president James O’Keefe was questioned by his own board for what it called “financial misconduct.” (Allegations that O’Keefe has disputed.) He left the organization, and it sued O’Keefe some months later. Now Project Veritas has announced that it’s suspending operations indefinitely.

When O’Keefe founded Project Veritas in 2010, he unwittingly provided a model for Donald Trump’s MAGA Republican right.

When O’Keefe founded Project Veritas in 2009, he unwittingly provided a model for Donald Trump’s MAGA Republican right.

Both Project Veritas and the MAGA movement were built around powerful, egocentric leaders who see themselves as above the law. Both were also constructed on the quicksand of conspiracy theories and lies.

Veritas was brought down by a combination of outside demands for accountability, O’Keefe’s egotistical overreach, and internal divisions. And it appears that a similar fate awaits Trump’s MAGA empire.

In his first big “sting,” O’Keefe, purportedly dressed as a pimp, created a widely watched, selectively edited video in which he and a colleague approached Juan Carlos Vera, then an employee of the community organization ACORN, to get ACORN’s assistance with an ostensible scheme to smuggle young women into the United States from Mexico to work as prostitutes. What their video did not show was that Vera informed the police about the incident after they left.

The next year, the California attorney general issued a report that exonerated ACORN, and in 2013 O’Keefe settled a lawsuit brought by Vera for $100,000. But it was too late for ACORN. O’Keefe’s videos had frightened away its major financial backers, and the organization collapsed.

The ACORN sting began a long line of operations, all aimed at luring targets into making comments that could be edited in ways to discredit them — and to support right-wing conspiracy theories and candidates like Trump.

An investigative team at The Washington Post won a Pulitzer Prize in 2018 for its series that documented Veritas’ attempts to trick the Post into publishing false information about Alabama Senate candidate Roy Moore. Earlier this year, Veritas edited together some clips from a conversation with a Pfizer employee to claim that the company was “mutating” the Covid-19 virus (scientists who reviewed the video called the employee’s comments “bumbling nonsense”).

And in 2016 my firm, Democracy Partners, was infiltrated by Project Veritas operatives.

At the time I was a consultant for the Democratic National Committee and the Clinton campaign. I oversaw a program that worked with local leaders to do press events to promote the Democratic message on the same day, in the same media market, wherever Trump or his running mate, Mike Pence, campaigned. Overall, the program helped coordinate and/or generate 368 press events.

The Project Veritas attack on Democracy Partners was well planned and involved excellent spy-craft. Early in 2016, a Veritas operative, who many months later would come to work for our operation, had secretly recorded an organizer in a bar-room conversation. During the banter, he mentioned my name.

Later, the operative told the organizer that he had a “donor” who wanted to support our efforts. I talked to the “donor” and we agreed to have a drink — where he secretly recorded our conversation. Afterward, he called to say that his “niece” wanted to volunteer to do political work. I set her up with some of our organizers, where she did well. Still later, he called to say that his “niece” was moving to Washington, D.C., and would love to intern with us. Several weeks later, she began helping out in our office. Without our knowledge, she was also secretly wearing video recording equipment.

Project Veritas claimed to be “investigative journalists,” when it would be more accurate to say they were in the business of political espionage.

One day she accompanied me to the Democratic National Committee headquarters. O’Keefe would later write in his book “American Pravda” that his operative was “literally living out her character in America’s capital city much as Americans overseas did in Moscow during the Cold War.” He bragged that it was the first time an operative had infiltrated the DNC since Watergate. Project Veritas claimed to be “investigative journalists,” when it would be more accurate to say they were in the business of political espionage.

Three weeks before the November election, after a lunch with another Veritas operative posing as a donor adviser, I was ambushed by an interviewer from Sinclair Broadcast Group who showed me two of Veritas’ misleading videos and asked for comment. One of them purported to show me entertaining a scheme being pitched by a Project Veritas operative to bus voters from state to state to vote illegally. Their clip excluded that fact that I made clear in the same conversation that such a scheme was illegal and that we would have nothing to do with it. O’Keefe was planning to release the videos, alleging a variety of misdeeds, including trying to provoke violence at Trump events. Of course, none of our 368 press events had involved any violence whatsoever.

That evening, my lawyers demanded a meeting with the Sinclair reporters and subsequently with Sinclair’s editors and lawyers. After they had reviewed the full footage and the facts together, Sinclair never ran anything. But Project Veritas proceeded to release its misleading videos as best it could.

In 2017, Democracy Partners filed a civil suit against Project Veritas, and in the fall of 2022, a jury ordered Veritas to pay Democracy Partners $120,000 for violating wiretapping laws and for fraudulent misrepresentation.

Ours was not the only legal action that brought O’Keefe and Project Veritas to account. O’Keefe and his collaborators pleaded guilty to entering a federal building under false pretenses after they entered a U.S. senator’s New Orleans office, some of them disguised as telephone repairmen. Veritas was sued by a chapter of the American Federation of Teachers, and attempted to prevent The New York Times from reporting on its activities. After the FBI raided the homes of Veritas employees (including O’Keefe) in 2021, two Floridians pleaded guilty for delivering the stolen diary of Joe Biden’s daughter Ashley to Project Veritas ahead of the 2020 election in exchange for $20,000 each.

There was other outside pressure. Democracy Partners’ Lauren Windsor began a website called Project Veritas Exposed, which revealed the identity of more than 140 Veritas operatives.

And internal division began to mount. When he was ousted, the Veritas board accused O’Keefe of misusing the group’s funds for his own personal use. In one example offered, O’Keefe is accused of spending $14,000 “on a charter flight to meet someone to fix his boat under the guise of meeting with a donor.” They accused him of spending $150,000 on luxury “black car” services and $10,000 on a helicopter trip to Maine.

Veritas’ own employees became infuriated with O’Keefe’s behavior. In a memo, disgruntled employees complained that he abused staff. According to the Daily Beast, one staffer accused O’Keefe of being “a power drunk tyrant.” In August, the Westchester County district attorney, in New York, confirmed his office was investigating O’Keefe.

O’Keefe’s willingness to lie and his sense of being above the law were a precursor for Donald Trump.

The final blow came just this week, when Project Veritas announced it’s finally going dark.

O’Keefe’s willingness to lie and his sense of being above the law were a precursor for Donald Trump when he entered the presidential race, riding down the escalator at Trump Tower, accusing immigrants of being rapists and “not sending their best,” and later claiming he could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and not lose political support, or brazenly offering to pay the legal bills of anyone who would “knock the crap out” of those who disrupted his rallies. 

O’Keefe was even the Trump campaign’s guest in the spin room after the last 2016 presidential debate.

O’Keefe allegedly treated Project Veritas’ funds like his own piggy bank — much the way Trump treated the government’s classified documents, which he famously says are “mine.”

Like O’Keefe, Trump is now beginning to be held accountable by the courts and prosecutors who disagree that he is above the law.

And now, like the team at Project Veritas, the MAGA Republicans in Congress — and across the country — are increasingly divided, in disarray, at each other’s throats.

America — and democracy — are safer now that Project Veritas is done. It will be much safer yet when the entire MAGA movement follows Project Veritas into the dustbin of histor

Sick, sick, sick

More evidence of the war on science gaining ground:

For years, groups at the vanguard of the anti-vaccine movement had been operating with relatively small budgets and only a handful of staff.

Now, they’re awash in cash.

The Covid-19 pandemic has produced a remarkable financial windfall for anti-vaccine nonprofits. Revenue more than doubled for the Informed Consent Action Network and Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s Children’s Health Defense in 2021 compared to the year prior, according to a POLITICO analysis of tax filings. The nonprofits that survived on operating budgets of around a few million dollars just a few years prior are now raking in more than $10 million each.

“Covid vaccines have been the foot in the door for the more general anti-vaccine movement. And unfortunately, that door is open pretty wide now,” said Dr. Dave Gorski, a Michigan-based oncologist who has been tracking anti-vaccine efforts for two decades.

The funding spike reflects a sea change for once-fringe entities. The anti-vaccine movement has now emerged as a modern political force. In practical terms, greater funds enable anti-vaccine groups to expand their public reach, sue federal agencies and organize like-minded activists at the state level, as well as expand their reach abroad.

Though these groups have been trying to roll back vaccine requirements for years, the movement has gained new traction in a post-pandemic world. Earlier this year, a lawsuit funded by the anti-vaccine group Informed Consent Action Network forced Mississippi to allow religious exemptions for mandatory childhood vaccinations for the first time in more than four decades.

That case, perhaps the greatest policy achievement for the movement to loosen vaccine requirements in schools or workplaces, alarmed public health experts. Depressed vaccination rates have led to more deaths from Covid-19, and have the potential to enable the return of potentially fatal childhood diseases such as measles.

This is simply outrageous. Nuts like RFK Jr are becoming folk heroes for their nonsensical stands and people are going to die. And it’s helped by the likes of Ron DeSantis who is listening to the ant-vaxx quack doctor he named as Florida Surgeon General.

Some Republicans think that McCarthy spent too much time on investigations and not enough on dealing with actual governing. Haha. Ya think?

House Republicans have vowed to take a long, methodical approach to investigating President Biden over potential wrongdoing.

“I want this to take a long time. I really do,” Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.), a member of the House Oversight and Accountability Committee, said in a recent interview.

“We’re just going to keep plowing ahead, doing our work,” Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), chairman of the Judiciary Committee, told reporters Thursday.

But there are whispers from some rank-and-file Republicans that their leadership got too fixated on these investigations, losing focus on processing the government funding bills from the House Appropriations Committee.

That’s now left the House GOP certain to face the blame if there’s a shutdown of the federal government starting next Sunday — unless they can pull off a fast legislative trick.

Moreover, when the House Oversight Committee gathers Thursday for its first formal hearing on the impeachment inquiry, the shadow of the looming shutdown will blot out any spotlight the GOP hopes to shine on Biden — leaving the hearing to play at least second fiddle to the ongoing machinations to fund the government.

“We allowed ourselves to basically get so distracted with all the other shiny objects that we didn’t actually get ahead of our real job, which is to be appropriators,” Rep. Cory Mills (R-Fla.) told reporters after leaving an emergency GOP meeting late Thursday.

There’s a certain irony for House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) to have his own members blaming the impeachment focus for the looming shutdown.

After taking a longer-than-usual 46-day legislative break in the late summer, McCarthy’s first day back in the Capitol, Sept. 12, turned into a frenzy as he unilaterally announced that the Oversight, Judiciary and Ways and Means committees were entering an official impeachment inquiry.

His rank-and-file Republicans saw the move mostly as a ploy to try to quell angst among far-right lawmakers ahead of the Sept. 30 deadline to keep federal agencies funded. Those ideological warriors dismissed the impeachment move as something otherwise overdue and then ratcheted up their demands on cutting government spending.

Rather than focusing on impeachment, the far-right faction of 10 to 15 Republicans has instead paralyzed the House and set in motion a convoluted strategy with little hope for success.

Mills, a freshman who has not previously been part of the far-right troublemaking crowd, declared “I blame leadership” because the entire summer drifted away without resolving this mess.

“We had the time to do this. We had the entire month of August; we had all of September,” he said.

The speaker is fond of defending his leadership style by saying that he allows for a wide-open process that would allow for plenty of oversight investigations and legislation. “People can actually have a say. It’s not one way or the highway,” McCarthy told reporters Tuesday morning.

McCarthy’s allies, in a briefing with reporters on Friday, suggested the negotiating process with fellow Republicans took so many months because so many newcomers had never been in the majority and didn’t understand how government funding works.

“This was a new concept to some members‚” said Rep. Patrick T. McHenry (R-N.C.), who was McCarthy’s lead negotiator on the debt-and-budget deal with Biden administration officialsearlier this year.

Still, House GOP leaders set a rather lackluster overall timing and pacing for the summer and early fall, given that this funding showdown has always loomed large for McCarthy. In early January, arch conservatives forced him through 15 rounds of voting and obtained many concessions on the appropriations process before allowing him to become speaker.

Once the deal with Biden in late May set a two-year framework for spending, the House seemed poised to get moving on the 12 spending bills.

Then the far-right crowd opposed those spending levels as too high, using the narrow, four-vote margin to tie the House up in knots by defeating procedural votes. Instead of finishing up those talks in the early summer, House Republicans drifted into a series of unrelated distractions.

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The last couple weeks of June were dominated by McCarthy’s decision to force a censure vote against Rep. Adam B. Schiff (D-Calif.) for his leadership of the 2019 impeachment effort of ex-president Donald Trump. And Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-Colo.) forced a vote on her resolution calling for the immediate impeachment of Biden, which prompted a wild, expletive-laden shouting match between Boebert and Greene over who should get credit for pushing impeachment.

Republicans blocked that resolution and referred it to committees on June 23, and later that day, the House broke for a longer-than-usual 17-day recess over the Fourth of July break.

In mid-to-late July, the House floor was dominated by debate over the annual Pentagon policy bill, for which conservatives won major concessions on social culture war issues. In the last week of July, the House approved the usually noncontroversial funding outline for the Department of Veterans Affairs and military construction projects.

However, facing right-wing objections, McCarthy pulled consideration for the also usually noncontroversial bill to fund the Department of Agriculture. That left 11 of the 12 government funding bills languishing.

The House then adjourned for its lengthy summer break.

Put another way, from June 24 through Sept. 11, the House was in session just 11 days. And after returning to the Capitolthis month, Republicans spent their first week focusing on whether Biden should be impeached.

Letting the MAGA fanatics run things probably wasn’t the greatest idea in the world. But what choice did he have? After brainwashing their voters for the past 30 years, they have completely lost control of the agenda — and now they’ve lost control of the caucus.

More on Sideshow Bob Menenedez and his gold bars and stacks of bills (U.S. News):

It was the second time Menendez has faced serious legal trouble. He avoided conviction on different federal bribery charges when a jury deadlocked in 2017, and he successfully ran for reelection in 2018.

But this time, Democrats – who are demanding accountability for former President Donald Trump and who are battling GOP claims that the Department of Justice has been “weaponized” against Republicans under President Joe Biden’s administration – are not rallying around Menendez.

In a stunning rebuke of a member of his own party and state delegation, Democratic Gov. Phil Murphy Friday afternoon called on Menendez to resign from office, saying the “deeply disturbing” allegations “are so serious that they compromise the ability of Senator Menendez to effectively represent the people of our state.”

“Therefore, I am calling for his immediate resignation,” Murphy said in a statement.

As the day went on after the bombshell indictment, Democrats began bailing on their legally troubled colleague. New Jersey Democrats, including state assembly Speaker Craig Coughlin, state Democratic Party Chairman Leroy Jones, Rep. Andy Kim and Rep. Mikie Sherrill, and former Rep. Tom Malinowski called on Menendez to step down from the Senate.

Kim has announced he will primary Menendez in 2024.

The three-term senator, whose vote is essential to the Democrats’ single-seat majority in the Senate, was forced to give up his gavel as chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, per caucus rules.

Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington quickly called for Menendez’s resignation from the Senate, with CREW president Noah Bookbinder saying that “the stain of corruption continuously taints Menendez.”

John Fetterman, freshman Democratic senator of Pennsylvania, he of the hoodies and cargo shorts, is having none of it:

“Senator Menendez should resign,” Fetterman wrote in a post on social media. “He’s entitled to the presumption of innocence, but he cannot continue to wield influence over national policy, especially given the serious and specific nature of the allegations.”

“I hope he chooses an honorable exit and focuses on his trial,” Fetterman added.

I want the contrast with how Republicans defend and even bow before their (until proven guilty) miscreants. The GOP, always unctuously insisting we must restore Americans’ confidence in elections (that they’ve spent decades eroding), will not take a stand against their 2024 frontrunner. Democrats have to police their own.

It’s not even Thanksgiving before 2024

Bill Scher on formerly Twitter calls the Washington Post-ABC News poll “obviously ridiculous.“

How ridiculous? This ridiculous:

Among voters under age 35, Trump leads Biden in the new Post-ABC poll by 20 points. Some other recent public polls show Biden winning this group by between six and 18 points. In 2020, Biden won voters under age 35 by double digits. Among non-White voters, the poll findsBiden leads by nine points. In four other public polls, Biden’s lead among non-White voters ranges from 12 points to 24 points.

Higher up in the story (emphasis mine):

The Post-ABC poll shows Biden trailing Trump by 10 percentage points at this early stage in the election cycle, although the sizable margin of Trump’s lead in this survey is significantly at odds with other public polls that show the general election contest a virtual dead heat. The difference between this poll and others, as well as the unusual makeup of Trump’s and Biden’s coalitions in this survey, suggest it is probably an outlier.

Jeff Jarvis of CUNY’s Newmark Graduate School of Journalism has some Mastodon words for the Washington Post and its front-page headline about Joe Biden. “The Washington Post cannot see that this is not a poll about Biden but instead a poll about journalism and its failures to inform the public. Polls are their self-fulfilling prophesies. They are damaging to public discourse.”

Ya think? But, hell, the paper paid for the poll and, shitty or not, we’re just gonna slap it across the front page anyway. Watch for it to pop up in discussion on the Sunday talkies this morning.

In another poll from New Hampshire this week, the Post headlined: Fox News viewers love Trump. Newsmax viewers idolize him. Earth-shaking, right?

Pollsters have a business model and a product to sell. The horse-race media obliges the public’s hunger for who’s in and who’s out, who’s ahead and who’s behind, the way television furnishes reality shows when the writers are on strike. Even contentless content is preferable if it generates clicks. We already covered the only polls that matter.

As if Washington isn’t ridiculous enough, silly season is already here.

Clay Higgins says Fetterman’s clothes are communist. pic.twitter.com/wDqb7ykcWz

— Ron Filipkowski (@RonFilipkowski) September 24, 2023

.@mikerogersforMi comes out in favor of launching insurrections and stealing the nation’s most sensitive secrets.

Given that he was HPSCI chair, this should raise questions about whether he, too, stole secrets from the government. https://t.co/GZn9bPDXTi

— emptywheel (@emptywheel) September 24, 2023

Trump has been systematically ensuring that the GOP delegate rules benefit him in the primaries. I’m not saying it’s cheating exactly. But he’s using every lever of his power to make sure nobody else can come even close to him. It’s shady to say the least:

Massachusetts Republicans just handed Donald Trump another win in his quest to tilt state delegate-selection rules in his favor.

Republican state committee members in this Super Tuesday state voted unanimously on Thursday night to pass a primary delegate plan that keeps a winner-take-all threshold likely to benefit Trump.

“It’s obviously a good thing,” Tom Hodgson, a former county sheriff running Trump’s campaign in Massachusetts, said in an interview. Trump, he said, “is in a very good position” here.

The vote on the delegate plan comes as Trump’s campaign has aggressively worked to overhaul state party rules to benefit the former president’s bid for the White House. Their behind-the-scenes work so far has paid off, with states across the country revising state delegate selection rules. Recently in California, the state party’s executive committee voted to award all of the state’s delegates to the candidate who secures more than half of the statewide vote — giving an advantage to Trump and essentially making it harder for challengers to turn the primary into a two-person race.

The Republicans are so far down Trump’s rabbit hole that they can’t even resist allowing him to cheat them. I’ve never seen anything more pathetic.

Defend science

There was nobody to defend Galileo back in the day. There’s no excuse for that sort of thing now. Dr. Peter Hotez wrote this:

Nearly a century ago, when global dominance in scientific research began shifting to the United States from Europe, our nation built an empire firmly grounded in the natural sciences. America’s research universities and institutes flourished and provided the discoveries leading to the Manhattan Project, Silicon Valley’s tech industry, NASA and space exploration, vaccines to fight polio and other global infections, and new treatments for cancer, Alzheimer’s disease, diabetes and depression.

As a science envoy for the State Department, I saw first-hand how global leaders and technocrats admired the U.S. for its higher education system of scientific training and support. They spoke to me with pride about their time spent at U.S. universities or their hopes and aspirations that one day their sons and daughters might study here.

I have devoted my life to vaccine science. During the pandemic, our team at the Texas Children’s Hospital and Baylor College of Medicine developed a low-cost COVID vaccine that was scaled for production in India and Indonesia, where almost 100 million doses were administered.

But here in the United States, thousands of Americans needlessly perished because they refused a COVID-19 immunization during our awful Delta wave in the summer and fall of 2021 and the BA.1 Omicron wave in the winter of 2022. Analyses by myself and colleagues have found that 200,000 unvaccinated Americans died during this period. Overwhelmingly, those deaths occurred in Republican strongholds, including 40,000 in my state of Texas. A closer examination reveals that the redder the county, the lower the immunization rates and the higher the death rates.

The dead were victims of what we too often label as “misinformation,” as though these victims succumbed to random junk on the internet. This was not always the case. The unvaccinated were targeted by a well-financed and newly politicized anti-vaccine movement.

It accelerated at the CPAC conference of conservatives in Dallas in the summer of 2021, when prominent anti-vaccine activists were featured speakers and one Republican lawmaker from the House Freedom Caucus announced that vaccinations would lead to government confiscations of Bibles and guns.

Just before CPAC, another prominent Freedom Caucus member had disparaged vaccinators as “medical brown shirts,” meaning Nazis, and she later attacked me and other scientists by name on Steve Bannon’s podcast. Other caucus members regularly made unsupported and spectacular claims about the benefits of hydroxychloroquine or ivermectin as COVID treatments, while disparaging COVID-19 vaccinations.

Fox News piled on, misleading a huge swath of Americans. The partisan divide driving low COVID vaccinations and high deaths in 2021-22 was so profound that Liz Hamel of the Kaiser Family Foundation pronounced: “If I wanted to guess if somebody was vaccinated or not and I could only know one thing about them, I would probably ask what their party affiliation is.”

Now in 2023 the GOP Senate and House have intensified their efforts to promote conspiracies or denigrate science. Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) went on Fox News in August claiming the pandemic “was all pre-planned by an elite group of people.”

Partisan politics is not the only factor driving vaccine disinformation, but this aspect has become the most intractable and lethal. It is also uncomfortable to discuss. I was taught that science and politics do not mix, and that we scientists need to be neutral. But what happens when the data overwhelmingly demonstrate that thousands of Americans died from political targeting?

During the 1930s, Joseph Stalin’s rise to authoritarian control relied on exiling or imprisoning prominent scientists. This had catastrophic consequences for Soviet productivity, especially in agricultural science.

Now American biomedical scientists have become targets. A 2021 survey found that 15% of scientists who engage with the news media about COVID-19 have received death threats. Another in 2022 found that almost 40% of COVID-19 scientists report experiencing at least one confrontation either online or in person, including death threats.

I’ve been singled out regularly by political extremists and Fox News anchors. Such statements reverberate and result in online threats or actual stalking.

How can America preserve its hard-earned dominance in science, especially given the volume of recent attacks on biomedicine?

First, we must protect biomedical scientists. So far there have been few public statements of support from any branch of the U.S. government, and our university leaders and scientific societies are mostly silent. There are no organizations on which biomedical scientists can depend for legal help if they are targets of public smear campaigns. This silence could well shape the plans of young people now choosing careers, as they see how scientists are treated in America.

The U.S. must also recognize how anti-science rhetoric has emerged as a new lethal force and find mechanisms to halt its advance. Pseudoscience carved a path of destruction in the U.S.S.R. almost 100 years ago, and now it is happening again. Beyond the 200,000 deaths that have already occurred, as activism against COVID vaccines morphs into panic about all immunizations, we could see the return of catastrophic childhood infections such as measles or polio. The fact that polio genomes have been detected recently in the wastewaters of New York and London is an ominous warning. Over the last two decades we made steady progress in vaccinating the world’s children, with impressive declines in pediatric deaths. But those gains are fragile.

We must find ways to preserve our achievements in biomedicine and support scientists, even if that means both the scientists and those in positions of power engage political leaders and challenge ideologues to reject their anti-science rhetoric and agenda. Otherwise, almost a century of America’s preeminence in science will soon decline, our democratic values will erode, and our global stature will fall.

We are coming into a period I think of as the Wingnut Inquisition, where any form of modernism is squelched by these throwbacks who can’t stand the idea of any change. The demonization of science is is one of the most dangerous consequences of this movement.

It’s unprecedented:

His decision to stand alongside the striking workers represents perhaps the most significant display of union solidarity ever by a sitting president. Biden’s announcement comes a week after he expressed solidarity with the UAW and said he “understand[s] the workers’ frustration.”

The announcement of his trip was seen as a seismic moment within certain segments of the labor community. “Pretty hard-core,” said one union adviser, who spoke anonymously because they were not authorized to speak publicly.

Biden had earlier attempted to send acting Labor Secretary Julie Su and senior adviser Gene Sperling, who has been the White House’s point person throughout the negotiations, to Detroit to assist with negotiations. However, the administration subsequently stood down following conversations with the union. Press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said earlier Friday it was a “mutually agreed upon decision.”

The president’s plans come as some Democrats have begun to question his response to the strike, recognizing that he needs the full backing of union workers in his presidential reelection bid.

Meanwhile, waaaaah!

Did Dark Brandon step on Trumpies speech? Oh heck.

By the way, there’s a GOP debate that night too. But nobody cares.

I’m sure you’ve read all about the potential impeachment of Wisconsin Supreme Court Justice Janet Protasiewicz in Wisconsin despite her recent massive electoral win because of her promise to revisit the gerrymander laws in the state which have given Republicans a huge majority.I had not heard that there was a precedent for this back in 2018.

Bolts magazine has the story:

Margaret Workman is watching Wisconsin Republicans threaten Justice Janet Protasiewicz with impeachment from several states away. But she can relate to Protasiewicz like very few can. 

Workman sat on West Virginia’s supreme court in 2018—one of the three Democratic justices in the court’s majority—when Republican lawmakers decided to impeach that entire court. The GOP had flipped the legislature in 2014 for the first time in decades, and it had seized the governorship in 2017; only the supreme court stood in the way of one-party rule in the state. 

“All of a sudden, we had this right-wing legislature wanting to impeach everybody,” she recalls, “and they wanted in my opinion to get rid of us so they could put their own.”

West Virginia’s GOP in 2018 similarly tested the bounds of their power once they had the votes. “Impeaching the entire court was entirely political,” says Robert Bastress, professor at the West Virginia College of Law, “it was motivated by Republicans who had just recently taken over the legislature, and they were flexing their muscle.” 

[…]

The overhaul of West Virginia’s supreme court dates back to 2018, when Chief Justice Allen Loughry, a Republican, was federally indicted on fraud and witness tampering charges that stemmed from allegations of him using state funds for his personal enjoyment and spending excessive amounts of money on furnishing his office. A concurrent fraud scandal also engulfed Justice Menis Ketchum, a Democrat. By mid-2018, Ketchum had pled guilty in a federal case and resigned, and Loughry was suspended from the court. 

But Republicans also went after the remaining members of the supreme court, alleging in part that they were all responsible for the court’s insufficiently clear ethics policies. 

“They had very good reasons for impeaching two of the justices—two of them were convicted of federal felonies—there were no grounds for impeaching the other three,” Bastress says. 

Workman stood her ground after her impeachment and fought the proceedings until a panel of state judges blocked the Senate from holding a trial and ruled that the legislature was violating procedural requirements in its impeachment proceedings. The state Senate, which by then had acquitted the GOP chief justice and was gearing up for a trial against Workman, fought the ruling but the U.S. Supreme Court let it stand. As a result, Workman got to stay on the court, though she then chose not to seek re-election in 2020. 

But by the time a court intervened to stop West Virginia’s impeachment trials, another Democratic justice, Robin Davis, had already chosen to resign rather than let the proceedings against her drag out. To replace Davis, Governor Jim Justice appointed Evan Jenkins, one of the state’s Republican U.S. representatives. 

“What the legislature was attempting to do was to stack the court with what I would call their puppets,” Davis told Bolts. “They were hell bent on getting control of the court.” She says she did not want to participate in what she viewed as “a very unfair, highly political proceeding.”

They are systematically destroying the judiciary, one state at a time.

They may be backing off a bit in Wisconsin, however. We’ll have to see:

Unlike West Virginia in 2018, Wisconsin is a closely divided swing state with obvious stakes for national politics, making it likely that a judicial impeachment would receive far more attention and become a magnet for fundraising and political activism. That also gives Democrats an additional avenue to respond: activating public opinion.

In an interview with Bolts, Ben Wikler, chair of the Wisconsin Democratic Party, stressed that he is focused on putting pressure on Republican lawmakers. Democrats have also launched a multimillion-dollar campaign to air ads on this situation. 

“Our number one goal in the first phase of this fight is to make sure that every Wisconsin voter knows Republicans are threatening to overturn the election, and to encourage them to contact their legislators to let them know how they feel about it,” Wikler says. “It’s going to remind voters exactly why they voted for Democrats in the midterms and threw out Trump in the first place, which is that the Wisconsin Republicans are a clear and present danger to democracy.”

Politically-speaking, Democrats’ strongest asset in the confrontation over their new supreme court majority is the governor’s mansion: If Republicans manage to remove Protasiewicz, Evers would have the power to appoint a new justice to fill the vacancy, and he would presumably pick another liberal-leaning justice to replace her.

Vos and his allies may still be thinking it’s worthwhile to float impeachment because the threat alone could persuade Protasiewicz to bow to their demand and recuse herself on at least redistricting cases; Protasiewicz has not at this stage indicated what she would do. In addition, if they do impeach and convict Protasiewicz before Dec. 1, it would trigger a special election in 2024, giving conservatives a shot to flip back the court next year. 

Still, even if there is an election in 2024, Evers’ interim appointment would sit on the court for long enough that the court would have time to strike down gerrymanders.

To tie Evers’ hands, Republicans may turn to a very aggressive maneuver. If the Assembly impeaches Protasiewicz, it would suspend her and therefore deprive liberals of their majority until the Senate holds a trial that results in either an acquittal or conviction. But the Senate could indefinitely delay trial on the articles of impeachment and keep Protasiewicz sidelined without allowing Evers to appoint a replacement. The state constitution sets no timeline for how quickly the Senate has to take up articles of impeachment. 

“It’s one of those situations where the constitution assumes good faith, regularity of proceedings, and doesn’t spell it out,” Oldfather says.

Protasiewicz could still try to sue to force a resolution, some legal observers say. But here again, she and state Democrats also have political leverage that may prove more important than possible lawsuits. 

At any moment, Protasiewicz could break the logjam by resigning, allowing Evers to appoint a replacement even if at a personal cost to her. In a bizarre twist due to the particularities of state law regarding the timing of elections (there can be no more than one supreme court seat on the ballot on any given year), if Protasiewicz resigned on or after Dec. 1, Evers’ replacement appointee would get to serve until 2031 without facing an special election (seats on the court are currently scheduled for re-election each year from 2025 to 2030)—hardly an appealing prospect for the GOP. 

Seifner, the University of Wisconsin professor, also envisions a scenario in which Evers could claim the authority to appoint a justice if the Senate is delaying a trial.

“It’s hard to say how the courts or other actors will respond in this unprecedented situation,” says Seifner. “For example, the governor could declare that the legislature’s inaction creates a temporary judicial vacancy, or a court—whether the high court or a lower court—could reject the holdup as an encroachment on the judicial function. There isn’t clarity at this point on who would have the final word.”

Republican lawmakers this week also introduced articles of impeachment this week against the state’s elections chief, Meagan Wolfe, whom they have been aiming to fire all summer. The charges against Wolfe stem largely from conspiracies about the 2020 presidential election that have been debunked. Either Protasiewicz or Wolfe would be the first Wisconsin official impeached in roughly 170 years.

Such extraordinary events, if they unfold in coming months, may also ratchet up what other politicians are willing to consider in other states. Republican lawmakers in Montana, Ohio, and Pennsylvania in recent years have talked about impeaching state supreme court justices whose decisions they disliked, but have ended up not moving forward. 

“You see states learning from one another and adopting the strategies that legislators have found successful in other states to gain an upper hand in their courts,” says Keith of the Brennan Center. “And so if this happens in one state, I would not be surprised to see other states follow.”

Threats often have a chilling effect. That’s why they work.

The Republicans have much more often used the states as their laboratories of fascism. They have organizations devoted to sharing their experiences and modeling their strategies. Wisconsin wasn’t the first and it won’t be the last.

I blame Trump. And Newt Gingrich

Pew has a new survey. America is a culture in distress. After what we’ve been through how could it be any other way? The rightwingers have been brainwashed by Fox, Trump and the erstwhile conservative movement to believe that liberals are destroying their way of life and must be stopped at all costs and the rest of us can see that the right has gone batshit crazy because of it.

A comprehensive new Pew Research Center study of the state of the nation’s politics finds no single focal point for the public’s dissatisfaction. There is widespread criticism of the three branches of government, both political parties, as well as political leaders and candidates for office.  

Notably, Americans’ unhappiness with politics comes at a time of historically high levels of voter turnout in national elections. The elections of 2018, 2020 and 2022 were three of the highest-turnout U.S. elections of their respective types in decades.

But voting in elections is very different from being satisfied with the state of politics – and the public is deeply dissatisfied.

Just 4% of U.S. adults say the political system is working extremely or very well; another 23% say it is working somewhat well. About six-in-ten (63%) express not too much or no confidence at all in the future of the U.S. political system.

Positive views of many governmental and political institutions are at historic lows. Just 16% of the public say they trust the federal government always or most of the time. While trust has hovered near historic lows for the better part of the last 20 years, today it stands among the lowest levels dating back nearly seven decades. And more Americans have an unfavorable than favorable opinion of the Supreme Court – the first time that has occurred in polling going back to the late 1980s.

A growing share of the public dislikes both political parties. Nearly three-in-ten (28%) express unfavorable views of both parties, the highest share in three decades of polling. And a comparable share of adults (25%) do not feel well-represented by either party.

Candidate choices are underwhelming. As the presidential campaign heats up, 63% of Americans say they are dissatisfied with the candidates who have emerged so far. Setting aside the presidential campaign, there has been a downward trend in views of the quality of all political candidates. Just 26% rate the quality of political candidates as very or somewhat good, down about 20 percentage points since 2018.

Majorities back age and term limits and eliminating the Electoral College. Reflecting the public’s frustration with the federal government and political leaders, large shares of Americans support various changes to the political system, including for such long-standing proposals as establishing term limits for members of Congress and scrapping the Electoral College. Age limits – for both federal elected officials and members of the Supreme Court – draw broad support. But there is little appetite in the public for increasing the size of the U.S. House or modifying the allocation of Senate seats.

The new study of Americans’ views of the state of the political system is primarily based on a survey conducted July 10-16, 2023, among 8,480 adults, with additional data from a survey conducted June 5-11, 2023, among 5,115 adults. Both were conducted on Pew Research Center’s nationally representative American Trends Panel.

A little more than a year before the presidential election, nearly two-thirds of Americans (65%) say they always or often feel exhausted when thinking about politics, while 55% feel angry. By contrast, just 10% say they always or often feel hopeful about politics, and even fewer (4%) are excited.

The survey also provides people several opportunities to describe in their own words their feelings about the political system and elected officials. When asked to sum up their feelings about politics in a word or phrase, very few (2%) use positive terms; 79% use negative or critical words, with “divisive” and “corrupt” coming up most frequently.

We also asked people to identify the strengths of the political system, as well as its weaknesses. Among the positive responses, roughly one-in-ten point to the structures of U.S. government, including its system of checks and balances (12%), freedoms and democratic values (9%) and the opportunity to vote in elections (8%).

Yet it is telling that a majority of Americans are unable or unwilling to identify strong points of the nation’s political system. While about a third gave no answer, another 22% write “nothing” – meaning that in their view, the political system does not have any strengths.

This overview covers key takeaways from our study of Americans’ attitudes about the political system and political representation. For more in-depth analysis, we encourage you to explore the full report. All chapters are listed out in the table of contents and at the bottom of the page.

These views and other negative sentiments are widely shared among older and younger Americans, White, Black, Hispanic and Asian adults, people who are highly engaged in politics and those who are less engaged. And in most cases, the partisan differences in these attitudes are relatively modest.

In an era defined by partisan polarization, the parties share little common ground politically. But they do share a deep unhappiness with the current state of politics.

The impact of partisan polarization

Ordinary Americans are more polarized than in the past. Partisan divisions on issues wider than they were a few decades ago, and many Americans hold deeply negative views of those on the “other side” of politics.

Yet the public also is highly critical of the impact of partisan polarization on politics.

More than eight-in-ten Americans (86%) say the following is a good description of politics: “Republicans and Democrats are more focused on fighting each other than on solving problems.”

Asked to describe in their own words the biggest problem with the political system, 22% of Americans volunteer partisan polarization or lack of partisan cooperation. Only critiques of politicians (31%) are mentioned more frequently.

Most people (57%) also believe that conflicts between Republicans and Democrats receive too much attention these days. And 78% say there is too little focus on important issues facing the country.

Persistent concerns over money in politics

The public’s belief that special interests and campaign donors have too much influence on politics is not new. Since the 1970s, large majorities have said that the government “is run by a few big interests looking out for themselves,” rather than for the benefit for all the people.

Yet money in politics emerges again and again as a major source of public frustration.

Most say the cost of campaigns keeps good candidates from running. An overwhelming majority (85%) holds the view that “the cost of political campaigns makes it hard for good people to run for office.”

Members of Congress are widely seen as mixing financial interests with their work. About eight-in-ten Americans (81%) say members of Congress do a very or somewhat bad job of “keeping their personal financial interests separate from their work in Congress.”

Americans feel major donors have too much influence. Large majorities say big campaign donors (80%) and lobbyists and special interests (73%) have too much influence on decisions made by members of Congress.

People in members’ own districts, by contrast, are widely viewed as having too little influence (70% say this).

A sizable majority (72%) – including comparable majorities in both parties – support limits on the amounts of money individuals and organizations can spend on political campaigns. And 58% believe it is possible to have laws that would effectively reduce the role of money in politics. (Explore this further in Chapter 5.)

Views of the parties and possible changes to the two-party system

Neither party is particularly popular with the public. Only about four-in-ten adults have a favorable view of the Democratic Party (37%), while about as many (36%) have a favorable impression of the Republican Party.

An increasing share of Americans express negative opinions of both parties. Currently, 28% of the public has an unfavorable opinion of both the Republican and Democratic parties.

That is little changed from a year ago, but nonetheless is the highest share expressing dislike of both parties in nearly three decades. In 1994, just 6% of Americans viewed both parties negatively.

Many people are open to the idea of having more political parties: 37% say the phrase “I often wish there were more parties to choose from” describes their views extremely or very well. Nearly half of independents and those who identify with other parties (47%) – including 56% of Democratic-leaning independents – say this. (Views of the two major parties, the party system and support for additional parties are discussed in more detail in Chapter 4 and Chapter 9.)

However, there is considerable skepticism that having more parties would make it easier for the country to solve its problems. About a quarter (26%) say it would make it easier to solve problems, while nearly as many (24%) say it would make it harder; a quarter say it would not have much impact.

The survey includes a number of proposals to change the way politics is run in this country. Some have attracted majority public support for many years, including ending the Electoral College system, placing term limits on members of Congress, automatically registering all citizens to vote and requiring all voters to show government-issued photo identification to vote. (Opinions about proposals for changing the political system are covered in Chapter 10.)

Large majorities of Americans also support:

Age limits for federal elected officials. Amid widespread concern over the advanced age of many political leaders, including President Joe Biden, former President Donald Trump and some members of Congress, 79% of the public favors putting a maximum age in place for elected officials in Washington, D.C. These views also are widely shared across partisan lines.

Age limits for the Supreme Court. Nearly as many Americans (74%) support putting age limits in place for justices of the Supreme Court. Democrats (82% favor) are more supportive of creating age limits for the justices than are Republicans (68%).

Another proposal that would dramatically affect the Supreme Court – increasing the number of justices – attracts considerably less support from the public.

Slightly more Americans oppose (51%) than favor (46%) increasing the number 0f justices on the court. There is a wide partisan gap in these views: Democrats (66%) are more than twice as likely as Republicans (27%) to favor expanding the court.

Other important findings

Recent presidential campaigns viewed as too long, not informative. Americans are not just unhappy about the current state of politics; they also take a critical view of recent presidential campaigns. Nearly eight-in-ten (78%) say recent nominees have not been good candidates, while large majorities also say the campaigns have not focused on the right issues or been informative, and 72% say they “lasted too long.” (Chapter 8)

Growing public concerns over different dimensions of federal-state relations. A majority of Americans (54%) are extremely or very concerned that “the rights and protections a person has might be different depending on which state they are in,” up from 43% just a year ago. Increasing shares also express concerns about the federal government doing too much that is better left to the states, as well as state governments not being willing enough to work with the federal government. (Chapter 2)

Elected officials are held in extremely low regard. When asked why local and national elected officeholders run for office, relatively small shares of Americans say they run to serve the public or address issues they care about. By contrast, majorities say all or most politicians are motivated by selfish reasons, including 63% who say all or most ran for office to make a lot of money. (Chapter 7)

Majority says voting can affect the country’s direction. Nearly six-in-ten (57%) say voting by people like them can affect the country’s future direction, though just 20% say it can affect this a lot. Adults younger than 50 are less likely than older people to say voting can have at least some effect on the country’s future direction. (Chapter 5)

It’s depressing but understandable. And let’s not forget the pandemic. Here we were in a massive crisis that shut down the whole world and the response by many of our leaders was an embarrassment. It’s even worse now, with people like Ron DeSantis saying that if he becomes president the government will not fund any vaccines if we have a similar crisis. It’s more than depressing. It’s downright terrifying.