Digby's Hullabaloo Posts

It’s awful

NeverTrumper Tim Miller has some interesting thoughts on Supreme Court reform:

How Normal Is This Court, Really: A Meditation From a Conflicted Man 

People on the right bristled at a frank comment from President Joe Biden as he exited a press conference last Thursday: “This is not a normal Court,” he said. In their view, this was an example of Biden betraying his promise to be a steward of our norms and institutions and taking an unnecessary swipe at a SCOTUS that has executed constitutionally sound, conservative jurisprudence. 

Here’s a version of this position that was posted by an pseudonymous anti-Trump conservative I follow on Twitter: 

Supreme Court rules against racial discrimination in college admissions. A position supported by an overwhelming majority of Americans. Biden responds by questioning the normalcy of the court. This is not a normal President.

Preparing for today and tomorrow has been the whole point of the recent campaign to try to undermine the legitimacy of the court majority. They cannot defend their legal positions so instead they do this and we get deafening silence from much of the norms crowd.

I assume we at The Bulwark are part of the “norms” crowd he is referring to, and while I don’t speak for everyone here, my view is that critiques of this Court and discussions of reform are totally legitimate and within the bounds of standard political discourse. 

For starters, the size of the Supreme Court has changed several times before; the current number of justices was not set out on stone tablets delivered from on high. Lifetime appointments are written in the Constitution, but they’re opposed by a majority of Americans. Norms-abiding Republican legal luminaries like Don Ayer have expressed openness to adding more justices to the high court. 

Personally, I think there would be value in hearing all kinds of different arguments for how we might best redesign the system so that every SCOTUS appointment doesn’t turn into a partisan deathmatch where fundamental rights hang in the balance. To the extent that “normal” people think about this issue at all, I suspect this kind of openmindedness is pretty typical. 

These kinds of conversations make even more sense when you put the Democratic agita over the current Court into a fuller context. The reality is the GOP stole a Supreme Court seat. That might sound overwrought, but if you strip away all the talking points and all the bullshit, it becomes clear that in any fair system, either Merrick Garland should have the Gorsuch seat or a Biden appointee should have the Barrett seat. The situations were exactly the same, and the McConnell Senate blocked one appointee while jamming through another.  The fact that they did it without even having majority popular support adds to the distrust, as I’ve written about before. 

If this were a situation where because of term limits the left could get another shot at one or both seats in 4 or 8 or 12 or, hell, even 20 years that would be one thing. But those were lifetime appointments of young judges. So if you are a conservative who thinks Cocaine Mitch deserves praise for the extreme lengths he went to to take those seats, then you can’t clutch your pearls when the left looks at ways—within the Constitution and the law—to try to balance the playing field. 

But despite all the reasons a person who values institutions might sincerely think the Court would benefit from some reforms, there is one prominent institutionalist who disagrees: President Biden!

That’s right. He might have made a little jab about the Court’s normalcy in the wake of a decision he found disappointing. But then he went on Nicolle Wallace’s show and said he opposes reforms because he worries it will politicize the Court in a way that isn’t fixable. Here’s Biden: “I put together a group of constitutional scholars to try to expand the Court . . . [and] the judgment was, ‘That doesn’t make sense because it can become so politicized in the future.’”

On the one hand, I’m not sure that’s right. Our current system might be hopelessly politicized already, and the Court is partly responsible. Moreover, it’s hard to say that expanding the Court, if it could be accomplished, would exacerbate the ills of our politics; predicting the downstream effects of changes like that is a fool’s errand.

But there’s something to be said for Biden’s argument. As imperfect and enraging as some of the present Court’s decisions have been, the Trump appointees have demonstrated a willingness to buck GOP partisans desires on some cases touching major issues like LGBT rights, immigration, and, most importantly, democracy/voting rights.

Given all that, maybe the best long-term answer to the problem presented by the Court’s current 6-3 conservabloc is to follow Biden’s lead and ride it out, let elections take care of themselves, and hope that with John Roberts’s pseudo-moderateness and the possibility of a Democratic president replacing SCOTUS’s oldest current member, there might be a path away from the extremes. Or maybe that’s naïve wishcasting and more dramatic action is called for.

But regardless of whether Biden is right about Court reform, the unmistakable reality is that he is the only one acting with even a modicum of proportionality in the debate. He is trying to do right by SCOTUS even after they ruled against him on a series of major issues! I don’t even need to ask, but: Can anyone imagine Trump doing that? In fact, of all the leading players in American political life right now—McConnell, Trump, DeSantis, McCarthy—it is Biden who has by far shown the most willingness to sacrifice partisan gains for the sake of protecting democratic institutions including the Court.

In spite of his good intentions and continued norms-loving rectitude, he finds himself in the sour spot on this issue: upsetting progressives who want more radical action faster, and catching heat from the dwindling number of reasonable Republicans for being “divisive” even as he resists those on his left flank who want to rebalance a court that the right went to extreme lengths to stack in their favor. 

Maybe staring every day at a big painting of Franklin Roosevelt in the Oval Office reminds Biden that this is the sort of issue that can almost sink a presidency.

It did almost sink a presidency — but it also had the effect of moderating the court. I’m not sure that would happen with the collection of corrupt wingnut weirdos and theocrats that make up the current majority but I suppose you never know.

Biden is an institutionalist for better or worse. But Miller is right to condemn those Never Trump conservative lawyers for criticizing him when he’s the guy who is actually taking his lumps from the court and accepting his fate. These guys like what the court is doing and they don’t care that Mitch stole the majority from the Democrats to get it. So are they really the great believers in norms they pretend to be or is it just that Trump is an embarrassing buffoon and they want to replace him with someone a bit less personally repugnant?

They’re super white too…

Those numbers of Millennials and Gen Z are just astonishing. NBC News reports:

Republican primary voters are older, whiter and much more conservative than the electorate at large.

That should surprise no one who follows American politics, but our most recent national NBC News poll captures the profile of what the GOP primary electorate looks like.

Thirty-nine percent of Republican primary voters are age 65 and older, compared with 25% of the overall electorate and 25% of Democratic primary voters, according to the poll.

Eighty-nine percent of GOP primary voters are white, versus 72% of all voters.

And 67% of Republican primary voters say they are conservative, including 41% who are “very” conservative. 

That compares with 36% of all voters who are conservative, including 18% who are “very” conservative.

There are two slight — but significant — changes to the composition of the Republican electorate since the 2016 election cycle, when Donald Trump won the party’s presidential nomination and the White House, per the NBC News poll’s historical results.

One, the GOP is slightly more diverse than it was in 2016, when 92% of all Republican voters were white (versus 89% now). 

And two, the share of the GOP electorate without college degrees is larger. In 2012, 48% of Republicans didn’t have college degrees. By 2016, that percentage had increased to 58%.

Now it’s 63%, according to the NBC News poll

That last is actually bad news for Trump:

One of the most significant developments in the run-up to the 2024 presidential election has emerged largely under the radar. From 2016 to 2022, the number of white people without college degrees — the core of Donald Trump’s support — has fallen by 2.1 million.

Over the same period, the number of white people who have graduated from college — an increasingly Democratic constituency — has grown by 13.3 million.

These trends do not bode well for the prospects of Republican candidates, especially Trump.

They have lost many college educated over the past 8 years. And the ranks of the non-college educated is shrinking. It’s a bad formula for victory.

Not exactly news, but this analysis pulls it all together:

Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, looking to shift his run for president into a higher gear after an early series of missteps, spent the last two weeks rolling out an immigration policy and holding town halls with voters. But rather than correcting course, he stumbled again this week, raising questions about where his campaign is heading.

First, Mr. DeSantis’s team was forced to battle allegations, including from fellow Republicans, that it had shared a homophobic video on social media. Then, a top spokesman for the main super PAC supporting Mr. DeSantis acknowledged that former President Donald J. Trump was the race’s “runaway front-runner,” while Mr. DeSantis faced an “uphill battle.”

“Right now in national polling we are way behind, I’ll be the first to admit that,” the adviser, Steve Cortes, said in a livestream Twitter event on Sunday. It was an admission notably at odds with the confidence that the governor’s advisers usually project in public.

To top it off — in a visual representation of his recent troubles — Mr. DeSantis got soaked by a rainstorm as he marched in an Independence Day parade alongside several dozen supporters in New Hampshire — the crucial early nominating state where his super PAC, Never Back Down, stopped running television advertisements in mid-May.

Meanwhile, Mr. Trump hosted a rally in South Carolina that attracted thousands of people over the holiday weekend, a reminder of his enduring popularity with Republicans despite losing in 2020 and now facing at least two criminal trials.

The race is still in its early days, but Mr. DeSantis’s rough week highlights the challenges his underdog campaign faces as it seeks a coherent strategy to break through against Mr. Trump.

So far, Mr. DeSantis has tried to undermine his chief rival by subtly contrasting their ages, temperaments and records on issues like the coronavirus pandemic without saying anything too unkind about the former president, whom he almost never mentions by name. He has also attempted to move to the right of Mr. Trump on issues like abortion and L.G.B.T.Q. rights, at the same time as he argues that he is the Republican candidate best placed to attract swing voters and defeat President Biden.

But Mr. DeSantis, who has not shown that he is a natural campaigner, has failed to take off in the polls, and his carefully choreographed public events have offered few headline-generating moments, as his campaign, until recently, has worked to shield him from potentially awkward unscripted interactions with voters and the news media.

The wobbly launch of his presidential campaign makes for a stark contrast with the confident way Mr. DeSantis has governed Florida, where he silenced opposition within his own party and crushed Democrats at the polls during the midterm elections. It also has given hope to other primary candidates, several of whom have jumped into the race in recent weeks, that they can replace him as the party’s most plausible alternative to Mr. Trump.

“DeSantis’s argument is electability,” said Sarah Longwell, a Republican strategist who holds regular focus groups with G.O.P. voters. “But he is undermining the electability argument by running to Trump’s right. He is alienating college-educated, suburban voters who want to move past Trump,” as well as the independents he would need to beat Mr. Biden in a general election.

Ms. Longwell said Mr. DeSantis’s efforts to differentiate himself from Mr. Trump without directly criticizing him risked leaving the Florida governor without a natural constituency in the primaries.

“You cannot go around Trump,” she said. “You have to go through him.”

National polls show Mr. DeSantis trailing Mr. Trump by roughly 30 points — a gap that has widened significantly since Mr. DeSantis began traveling the country this spring to introduce himself to voters.

He defended his grotesque anti-LGBTQ ad yesterday, saying it’s fair game to accuse Trump of being soft on transgender people which is as sick as the ad itself. (And anyway, Trump changed his attitude once in office — remember his transgender military ban?)

Mr. DeSantis has also become known as a provocateur, successfully drawing criticism from liberals and using it to gin up support from his base. But a recent attempt that seemed devised to garner such attention — a video that condemned Mr. Trump for expressing support for L.G.B.T.Q. people — appeared to backfire over the weekend, leading to criticism not only from Democrats but also from other Republicans, including the largest group representing gay, lesbian and transgender conservatives.

The video, taken from another Twitter user and reposted by Mr. DeSantis’s rapid-response campaign account, relied heavily on obscure conservative memes.

Richard Barry, a former New Hampshire state lawmaker who attended a rainy Fourth of July breakfast visited by several presidential candidates, said he was eager to support someone other than Mr. Trump. But Mr. DeSantis has turned him off, he said, citing a criticism some voters have leveled against Mr. Trump — a sign that Mr. DeSantis is not yet differentiating himself from the former president in a meaningful way.

“He has a street kid attitude that says, ‘It is my way or the highway,’” Mr. Barry said of Mr. DeSantis. “He doesn’t listen to people.”

Hey, he’s just trying to give the GOP voters what they want. But they like their hate to be fun. And nothing about DeSantis is fun.

Tom Cruise gets endless rehearsals. We don’t.

“Well, this is more than a little terrifying. Shouldn’t we all be paying a little bit more attention?” asks Dan Froomkin.

It’s like something out of Mission Impossible. Recent Wagner mercenaries’ moves against Moscow leave the West wondering about Vladimir Putin’s fate, the stability of the Russian state, and the security of the Russian nuclear arsenal (Washington Post):

And in recent weeks the drumbeat has intensified, with some well-connected Russian strategic analysts and think tank experts openly proclaiming the “necessity” for Moscow to carry out a preemptive tactical nuclear strike on a NATO country, like Poland — to avoid defeat in the war on Ukraine and to revive Western terror of Russia’s nuclear might.

Since the Wagner rebellion, Sergei Karaganov, a former Kremlin adviser and influential Russian political scientist, has doubled down on calls for Moscow to do so. In an earlier article last month headlined, “A Difficult but Necessary Decision,” Karaganov argued the risk of a retaliatory nuclear strike on Russia, and nuclear Armageddon, “can be reduced to an absolute minimum.”

No sane American president would put the United States at risk by “sacrificing conditional Boston for conditional Poznań,” he wrote, referring to a city in Poland.

A hawkish Moscow-based military analyst, Dmitry Trenin, supported Karaganov, arguing that “an unambiguous — and no longer verbal — signal should be sent” to Washington.

Karaganov and Trenin sound like Mission Impossible villains. Zealots. Karaganov believes Russia was “chosen by history” to destroy the “Western yoke.”

You picked a bad week to stop sniffing glue, right?

Many Russian nuclear arms experts gasped in horror at the calls from Karaganov and Trenin. One, Ivan Timofeev, called it “extremely dangerous.”

There is no indication that Putin would deploy nukes save in the event of an existential threat to Russia.

But a worrying question is what would comprise an “existential threat” to Russia in Putin’s mind, given his profound conviction that he is the state’s sole guardian and protector.

It’s all a lot easier to live with in the dark of a movie theater when you know Ethan Hunt and his IMF team always save the day. The world does not get rehearsals.

[last lines]
Benji Dunn: How close were we?
Ethan Hunt: The usual.
Ilsa Faust: [incredulous] Usual?
Ethan Hunt: [chuckling] Please, don’t make me laugh.

The right is relentless. The left needs to be.

Several small stories this morning worth attention.

Lin Wood retired to avoid being disbarred (NBC News):

Lin Wood, a high-profile Georgia lawyer who embraced and promoted former President Donald Trump’s bogus 2020 election claims, told the state bar he was retiring amid disciplinary probes.

“I understand that this request is unqualified, irreversible and permanent,” Wood, 70, said in a letter to the State Bar of Georgia seeking to be transferred to “Retired Status.”

“I further understand and acknowledge that if granted Retired Status I am prohibited from practicing law in this state and in any other state or jurisdiction and that I may not reapply for admission,” he wrote in the letter, which he posted on his Telegram account.

Jack Smith is looking closely at state-level efforts to muck about with 2020 electors (TPM):

Special Counsel Jack Smith subpoenaed the Arizona secretary of state’s office as recently as May for information related to the unsuccessful lawsuits brought by the Trump campaign and the Arizona Republican Party about supposed errors in the 2020 election. As you’ll recall, Arizona was a hotbed of conspiracy theories tied to the effort to overturn the election after President Biden flipped the longtime Republican stronghold state, leading to Trumpworld outrage, a phony and expensive state election “audit” and the lawsuits.

The previously unreported subpoenas were revealed in a new report by the Arizona Republic Wednesday, which found that Smith’s office also spoke with Republican state lawmakers this spring about events post-2020 election.

[…]

Smith is reportedly interested in documents “related to discovery, proposed exhibits and communications with opposing attorneys,” in the Republic’s words. An outside counsel for the secretary of state’s office reportedly complied with the request from Smith. As the Republic also notes, it’s unclear if Smith’s office has contacted former Republican Gov. Dough Ducey with similar requests. It was Ducey who reportedly silenced his phone when Donald Trump tried to call him while he was certifying the results in the state in 2020.

Florida seems to have a problem “governing within the bounds set by the United States Constitution,” said a federal judge in a small victory against voter suppression (Democracy Docket):

On Monday, July 3, a federal judge temporarily blocked provisions of Florida voter suppression law, Senate Bill 7050, which was signed into law by Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) in late May. 

One of the blocked provisions bars noncitizen volunteers from conducting voter registration activities on behalf of third-party voter registration organizations (3PVROs) — groups that engage in community-based voter registration. The other blocked provision criminalizes routine retention of voter information for any purpose except voter registration, thus making it a felony to maintain voter information for other activities such as get-out-the-vote efforts.

[…]

“This case arises from Florida’s latest assault on the right to vote,” wrote Chief Judge Mark E. Walker of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Florida at the onset of the order. Walker, who was appointed by former President Barack Obama, also struck down the most harmful provisions of Florida’s 2021 voter suppression law, Senate Bill 90, in March 2022.  “[T]he challenged provisions exemplify something Florida has struggled with in recent years; namely, governing within the bounds set by the United States Constitution,” he continued.

[…]

Finally, Walker held that the voter information retention ban — which exposes 3PVRO volunteers to criminal prosecution if they violate the provision — is “unconstitutionally vague” because it fails to “provide notice of what is prohibited” and authorizes “arbitrary and discriminatory enforcement.” Walker added: “The statute’s text is so devoid of meaning that it cannot possibly give people of ordinary intelligence fair notice of what information they are allowed to retain and for what purposes they may do so.” 

In a particularly symbolic victory, which came down on the eve of Independence Day, Florida voters prevailed. Walker concluded his order by acknowledging the backdrop against which this voting rights win transpired: “Tomorrow, Floridians across the state will commemorate our Nation’s birthday…And amid these patriotic festivities, some may feel moved, for the first time, to embrace their solemn privilege as citizens by registering to vote…In doing so, they would embody those democratic ideals that, for nearly two hundred forty-seven years, have made our system the envy of the world.”

Having to play Whac-A-Mole with these clowns is tedious. Sadly, the right seems to have endless resources for screwing with democracy. Their lack of faith in the red, white and blue should be disqualifying in the eyes of voters, but isn’t. Not when money is power, and money mixed with unquenchable thirst for more money and more power is a toxic brew that holds the right’s attention long term. Not so on the left.

A recent off-the-record conclave of high-dollar liberal donors a friend attended simply reinforced the impression. Lefty millionaires/billionaires would rather throw money at high-profile personalities than into building political infrastructure for the long term. They’d rather bask in the glow of political stardom so they can brag to their friends. Meantime, the right eats our lunch and we play defense.

I don’t know how many of you care about this but it really seems to have reached critical mass over this past weekend and I suspect the end is nigh. You will notice that my twitter feed on the sidebar is gone and I don’t have an explanation for it except that twitter is now so fubared that it isn’t picking up the feed.

I’m still there @digby56 but the writing is on the wall I’m afraid. I’m trying out all the new platforms, Mastadon, BlueSky, Post etc. I’ve kept my handle digby56 at all of them so you can probably find me (or possibly one of the imposters that have crept on some of them…) They all have their good and bad points but they just don’t have the scale. Supposedly Meta is rolling out its new twitter-like platform tomorrow (it’s somehow associated with Instagram) so we’ll see how it goes. I’ll let you know if I land in a particular spot.

It’s a shame. I loved twitter and it was an important resource for my work. But Elon bought it as a toy and he’s smashed it to pieces as spoiled little bully boys tend to do.

Here’s Josh Marshall on the recent events:

The ups and downs of social media platforms aren’t usually a focus of my writing. But they interest me to the extent they intersect with politics and public conversation in this country. You may have heard that over the weekend Twitter went into a kind of extended meltdown, rapidly introducing a series of “rate limiting” restrictions because the platform was having a hard time staying online. Behind the jargon of “rate limiting,” this essentially meant the site was forced to start rationing Tweets and the ability to engage with them, an ominous move for a company whose business is literally selling engagement. The site’s owner, Elon Musk, later claimed that this was in response to various online bad actors overwhelming the site’s infrastructure. The site’s (for the moment) CEO later claimed that it was all done out of the blue to catch the online bad guys unaware and off guard. Giving any advanced warning (even to employees, it turns out) would have given the online bad guys a heads up and allowed them to escape.

This is all such transparent nonsense that it beggars belief that even a company as chaotic and mercurially managed as Twitter under Elon Musk would try to claim it with any kind of straight face. We don’t know the precise details of what happened under the hood at Twitter. But the big picture is pretty clear. And you don’t need to be too versed in tech to understand it at that level. Think of it this way: You have an amusement park with 10,000 visitors a day. You cut staffing and ride maintenance so you can only accommodate 5,000 visitors a day. What happens is elementary: Things start falling apart and you’re forced to limit how many people can come in the front gate. That’s your “rate limiting,” rationing tweets.

Most of the drama about Musk and Twitter over the eight months since he took over the site has focused on his antic involvement in the online culture wars, a kind of public midlife crisis played out on the stage of a $44 billion vanity purchase. Probably the best way to understand Musk is that he’s another rich middle-aged divorced guy whose hot new girlfriend is white nationalism. But there’s a whole other part of the drama. He also made draconian staffing cuts, dramatically reduced the core technical capacity to keep the site online and also simply refused to pay various bills, figuring that he and the site are big enough that vendors won’t have the nerve to cut off services. While this was going on Musk’s public antics have savaged the company’s advertising revenues. They come together in a self-reinforcing cycle of budget cuts and revenue shortfalls. Since Twitter is no longer a public company it’s hard to know precisely what mix of expedients led to this weekend’s drama. But that big picture is clear enough.

The ongoing drama since last December has spawned a number of Twitter clone sites offering a refuge to those who want to escape Musk’s Twitter. But each has come up against the same challenge. What makes Twitter Twitter is that everyone’s there. It’s a classic case of inertia and network effects, a basic problem of collective action. Even if most of the site’s users would like to be somewhere else, those network effects keep most of them locked in place. The increasing instability of the site’s infrastructure has that effect even on those who are indifferent to Musk’s politics and conspiracy theories -— which is certainly the bulk of the site’s users. Most of the sites also lack the vast sums of money required to succeed at it. Musk has clearly relied on this fact and mostly he’s been on firm ground doing so.

I frequently note the subject lists I curate on Twitter — resources I find immensely helpful for keeping up on the news topics that interest me most. You can’t reproduce these on the competitor sites because the people I put on the lists aren’t there. Or maybe one or two of them are on one site and a couple on another. But that’s the same difference. Everybody being there is what makes Twitter Twitter.

But now something’s different. In the background, clearly sensing the expanding opportunity, Meta (née Facebook) has been prepping a Twitter replacement. Just as this absurd chaos was enfolding over the weekend they announced that “Threads” will go live tomorrow, July 6. It’s hard to know just how this will play out. But if anyone has the cash and network power to put Twitter out of its misery, it’s Meta. Unsurprisingly, since Facebook is terminally uncool and now basically the social network of old people, Threads will be launched as a discussion app that is part of Instagram. It will be its own separate app but in brand and possible account terms it will be part of Instagram.

This opens a number of possibilities. Numerous celebrities have millions or tens of millions of followers on Instagram. If they can simply port that clout to Threads, or if that’s a quick and relatively simple transition, that really does make it a potentially existential, near-term threat to Twitter.

Your guess is as good as mine how it will pan out. I tend to side with the people who think there won’t be a Twitter replacement. Even Twitter also won’t be the Twitter replacement. It’s probably on a glide path to Friendsterization where Musk acolytes and alt-righters will continue to taunt and own an ever-dwindling number of normal people who keep logging in. You’ll have fragmentation without a single place where everyone is. But whatever … I’m not here to do any big think on that front. What’s notable to me is that Elon Musk is clearly the best thing that ever happened to Mark Zuckerberg. Zuckerberg and Facebook became the symbol, if not always the reality, of everything bad about the platforms and social media: the threats to privacy, monopoly, hate speech, inequality, election subversion, society-wide short attention spans. But Musk — through his mix of billionaire grievance and adolescent rage — has managed to make Zuckerberg now appear to be a comparatively benign figure.

I mean, think about it: His big pitch in 2020 was personally cutting a check for various local governments to fund their pandemic emergency election work. That may have been PR to make up for the disaster of 2016. But in comparison to Elon Musk it looks visionary. And there are worse things than doing good things at least in part for the PR boost. There was never anything about Zuckerberg that made you think he set out to do bad things for the sake of it. That’s been Musk’s calling card with Twitter: transgressive behavior, owning the libs. After all the essence of the whole story, the root of everything that followed, is that he was motivated to purchase Twitter because of his enmity toward the site’s most prominent users. Like Trump, predation is his thing.

I’ve seen tons of people cheering on Threads and hoping it deals a death blow to Twitter because Musk is such a loathsome and dystopic figure. No shame: I’m cheering Zuckerberg too. This may be Musk’s greatest accomplishment — making people cheer on Mark Zuckerberg, in its own way a more improbable and challenging feat than creating Space X or developing Tesla.

Sigh. I hate this crap. I just want stuff that works and I don’t care about all the drama. But it’s caught up to me anyway and now I guess I’ll have to deal with it…

The once-liberal NYT editorial board is calling for cuts to Social Security and Medicare in a sad and misguided attempt to be seen as Serious. ⁦@AGSNYT⁩ is an elitist before anything else. https://t.co/7KjC4Vaatw

— Dan Froomkin (PressWatchers.org) (@froomkin) July 5, 2023

Is this about privatizing social security to further enrich Wall St? Or maybe they want Donald Trump to be president again? I can’t think of another reason why they wouldn’t just say, “raise taxes on rich people” and leave it at that. (That is the answer to this problem if, in fact, there is one.) After all, other countries are somehow able to provide universal health care and retirement benefits for their citizens. France is experiencing massive protest right now over a proposal to raise the full retirement age from 62 to 64. We should be so lucky. The usual suspects are talking about raising our retirement age to 72!

Maybe they should have a chat with Professor Paul Krugman, their own columnist, who exposed the Deficit Scolds just last May (for the hundredth time) during the debt ceiling negotiations. It’s all nonsense.

Greg Sargent and Paul Waldman have the story. All these right wingers bellowing about free speech all the time are beyond hypocritical:

At first glance, the plight of Katherine Rinderle, a fifth-grade teacher in Georgia, might seem confusing. Rinderle faces likely termination by the Cobb County School District for reading aloud a children’s book that touches on gender identity. Yet she is charged in part with violating policy related to a state law banning “divisive concepts” about race, not gender.

This disconnect captures something essential about state laws and directives restricting classroom discussion across the country: They seem to be imprecisely drafted to encourage censorship. That invites parents and administrators to seek to apply bans to teachers haphazardly, forcing teachers to err on the side of muzzling themselves rather than risk unintentionally crossing fuzzy lines into illegality.

“Teachers are fearful,” Rinderle told us in an interview. “These vague laws are chilling and result in teachers self-censoring.”

In short, when it comes to all these anti-woke laws and the MAGA-fied frenzy they’ve unleashed, the vagueness is the point.

As CNN reported, the district sent Rinderle a letter in May signaling its intent to fire her for a lesson using “My Shadow Is Purple.” The book is written from the perspective of a child who likes both traditionally “boy” things like trains and “girl” things like glitter. Its conclusion is essentially that sometimes blue and pink don’t really capture kids’ full interests and personalities — and that everyone is unique and should just be themselves.

The district’s letter, which we have obtained, criticized Rinderle for teaching the “controversial subject” of “gender identity” without giving parents a chance to opt out. She was charged with violating standards of professional ethics, safeguards for parents’ rights and a policy governing treatment of “controversial issues.”

But Rinderle and her lawyer, Craig Goodmark, argue that the policy on “controversial issues” is extremely hazy. They point out that it prohibits “espousing” political “beliefs” in keeping with a 2022 state law that bans efforts to persuade students to agree with certain “divisive concepts” that don’t reasonably apply here.

After all, in that law, those “divisive concepts” are all about race. Among them are the ideas that the United States is “fundamentally racist” and that people should feel “guilt” or bear “responsibility” for past actions on account of their race. It’s not clear how this policy applies to Rinderle’s alleged transgression.

What’s more, we have learned that this action was initiated by a parent’s troubling email to the district, provided to us by Rinderle and her lawyer, in which the parent notes that teachers were told to avoid “divisive” concepts. The parent then writes, “I would consider anything in the genre of ‘LGBT’ and ‘Queer’ divisive.”

That is a highly debatable point. Even if some might consider anything related to “LGBT” as divisive for students in fifth grade, should this really be treated as self-evident? And should it really lead to a teacher’s firing?

“This particular email initiating a termination is absurd,” Goodmark told us. “This is one parent’s view of what’s ‘divisive’ being adopted by a whole district.”

Asked for comment, the district declined to discuss specifics but said it’s “confident” that its action is “appropriate” given Rinderle’s history. The district’s letter to her says students and parents have previously complained about her choices of subject matter and class conduct.

We think it’s reasonable to debate whether parents of fifth-graders deserve a heads-up on a lesson about a book like this. And we understand that a parent might not want their fifth-grader to undergo such a lesson. These matters will be litigated during Rinderle’s hearing in August.

Nonetheless, it’s absurd that Rinderle is charged with flouting policy on “controversial issues” via such a ridiculous utilization of state law. Her predicament illustrates the danger teachers face in trying to navigate policies that seem designed to be hard to follow: The incentives strongly encourage some to avoid challenging topics (lest they face a fate such as Rinderle’s), and others to go searching for transgressions on absurd pretexts (as a parent did here).

“This is the shocking new normal in American public schooling,” Jonathan Friedman, director of free expression and education at PEN America, told us. “In many states, a widening circle of content can get someone in trouble. More and more educators are getting the message: There’s a target on their backs.”

Last weekend, at the national summit of the absurdly named right-wing group “Moms for Liberty,” GOP presidential contenders all raged against wokeness, demonstrating to the base how attuned they are to the hunger for more laws cracking down on open discussions in classrooms.

“We’re not going to have the sexualization of our children in our schools!” fumed Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis. Former president Donald Trump outdid DeSantis, vowing to “liberate our children from the Marxists, lunatics and perverts.”

The essence of this mania is that it is forever hunting for new offenders on the flimsiest of pretexts. As GOP legislatures put the force of state power behind this push, they are creating an array of blunt weaponry, which in turn further encourages parents and local officials to sniff out new sexualizers of children, new Marxists, new lunatics and new perverts wherever they can be found. Whatever becomes of Rinderle, the scalps will assuredly continue piling higher.

This makes me so sad. They really want to go back to the creepy gender-conforming of the 1950s. It won’t work, of course. People aren’t going back to that. But a lot of people are going to suffer anyway as these fucked up people get their thrills torturing vulnerable people, especially their own kids. It’s just sick.

Of course keep in mind that they have always been hostile to teachers, a unionized group the majority of which are educated women and a pathway to the middle class for racial and ethnic minorities. They have been attacking them as public employees for decades, taking over school boards and starving public schools of funds. The war on knowledge and education is long running. This is just the latest battle and they are taking no prisoners.

Crazy state parties are on their own

Reuters reports that GOP donors are getting sick of throwing good money after bad to the Trump kooks who have taken over various state parties:

Real estate mogul Ron Weiser has been one of the biggest donors to the Michigan Republican Party, giving $4.5 million in the recent midterm election cycle. But no more.

Weiser, former chair of the party, has halted his funding, citing concerns about the organization’s stewardship. He says he doesn’t agree with Republicans who promote falsehoods about election results and insists it’s “ludicrous” to claim Donald Trump, who lost Michigan by 154,000 votes in 2020, carried the state.

“I question whether the state party has the necessary expertise to spend the money well,” he said.

The withdrawal of bankrollers like Weiser reflects the high price Republicans in the battleground states of Michigan and Arizona are paying for their full-throated support of former President Trump and his unsubstantiated claims that the 2020 election was stolen from him.

The two parties have hemorrhaged money in recent years, undermining Republican efforts to win back the ultra-competitive states that could determine who wins the White House and control of the U.S. Congress in next November’s elections, according to a Reuters review of financial filings, plus interviews with six major donors and three election campaign experts.

Arizona’s Republican Party had less than $50,000 in cash reserves in its state and federal bank accounts as of March 31 to spend on overheads such as rent, payroll and political campaign operations, the filings show. At the same point four years ago, it had nearly $770,000.

The Michigan party’s federal account had about $116,000 on March 31, a drop from nearly $867,000 two years ago. It has yet to disclose updated financial information for its state account this year.

The two parties have “astonishingly low cash reserves,” said Seth Masket, director of the non-partisan Center on American Politics at the University of Denver, adding that state parties play a key election role, helping promote candidates, fund get-out-the-vote efforts, pay for ads and recruit volunteers.

“Their ability to help candidates is severely limited right now.”

The Arizona party spent more than $300,000 on “legal consulting” fees last year, according to its federal filings, which do not specify the type of legal work paid for.

In that period, legal fees were paid to a firm that had filed lawsuits seeking to overturn Trump’s defeat in Arizona, according to separate campaign and legal disclosures. Money was also paid to attorneys who represented Kelli Ward, the former party chair when the Justice Department subpoenaed her over her involvement in a plan to falsely certify to Congress that Trump, and not Democratic President Joe Biden, had won Arizona, plus when a congressional committee subpoenaed her phone records.

More than $500,000 was also spent in Arizona on an election night party and a bus tour for statewide Trump-backed candidates last year, the financial filings show. All of those candidates, who supported the former president’s election-steal claims, lost in last November’s midterms.

It’s not just Weiser who’s had enough.

Five other Republican donors to the Arizona or Michigan parties, who have each donated tens of thousands of dollars over the past six years, told Reuters they had also ceased giving money, citing state leaders’ drives to overturn the 2020 election, their backing of losing candidates who support Trump’s election conspiracy and what they view as extreme positions on issues like abortion.

“It’s too bad we let the right wing of our party take over the operations,” said Jim Click, whose family has been a longtime major Republican donor in Arizona. He and other donors said they would give money directly to candidates or support them through other political fundraising groups.

Kristina Karamo, chair of the Michigan state party, didn’t respond to a request for comment for this story. In the campaign for her position, she said that she wanted to break ties with established donors, accusing them of exploiting the party for their own gain, and wants to rely more on grassroots members.

Ward, who stepped down as Arizona party chair in January after four years at the helm, told Reuters that she and her team had always had revenues to cover outgoings and had left her successor at least three months’ operating expenses plus a “robust fundraising operation.”

Dajana Zlaticanin, a spokesperson for new chair Jeff DeWit, said that when he took over, “cash reserves were extremely low and previous bills kept coming in.” Contributions are on the uptick, she said, with over $40,000 raised in May.

The Republican National Committee, which oversees Republican political operations nationally, didn’t respond to a request for comment about the finances of the two state parties.

‘I SEE NO SUN COMING OUT’

Arizona and Michigan, both won by Biden in 2020, are among just a handful of swing states that will likely decide the race for the presidency in November 2024.

Not all Republican parties have fared as badly financially as Arizona and Michigan. For example, the swing state of North Carolina – where Republican leaders haven’t focused so heavily on Trump’s election-steal fight – ended 2022 with nearly $800,000 in its federal accounts, according to the filings.

It is difficult to get a complete picture of parties’ finances, though, given time lags in disclosures and because not all of their accounts are subject to reporting requirements.

Furthermore, state parties don’t rely solely on individual donors, they also receive money from national party organizations, outside groups and political action committees.

Michigan was a hotbed of conspiracy theories after Trump lost the 2020 election, and this month Karamo was fined by a county judge for filing a lawsuit that made unfounded claims about voting irregularities in Detroit.

Tensions over transparency have started to boil over.

Last week former state party budget chairman Matt Johnson launched a broadside against Karamo, two days after she removed him from his post, accusing her of keeping his committee in the dark about the party’s finances.

“As far as we could tell from the piecemeal information we received, the party’s fundraising had been extremely meager, and the spending was so far out of proportion with income as to put us on the path to bankruptcy,” he said.

Jason Roe, a former executive director of the Michigan Republican Party, said the financial figures disclosed so far by the party underscore the difficult task of supporting operations without the financial backing of big donors.

“They are effectively broke and I don’t see the clouds parting and the sun coming out on their fundraising abilities,” he said.

‘DETRIMENTAL TO CAMPAIGNS’

The review of the two Republican state parties’ filings shows that a near shut-off of the donor spigot is contributing to their financial woes.

The Michigan party’s federal account took in $51,000 in the fist three months of this year, putting it on pace to raise less than a quarter of its haul in the first half of 2019, the same period in the last presidential election cycle.

In March, Karamo told a gathering of local officials that the party had $460,000 in liabilities after the 2022 midterm elections. While not unusually large, the debt would normally be covered by fresh fundraising.

The Arizona party, meanwhile, raised roughly $139,000 in the first three months of this year, according to state and federal filings. In the comparable period in 2019, in the months after the 2018 midterm elections, it raised more than $330,000.

New Arizona chair DeWit, who was NASA’s chief financial officer in the Trump administration, is working to make the party attractive to donors again by focusing on winning elections, spokesperson Zlaticanin said.

Some donors in Michigan said they had started talking with each other about how best to bypass the state party and support individual Republican candidates. But the state party’s organizational heft will be hard to replicate, said Jeff Timmer, a former executive director of the Michigan Republican Party.

“You have to have boots on the ground and you can’t build that kind of infrastructure quickly enough to win the 2024 election,” Timmer said.

Jonathan Lines, who preceded Ward as Arizona’s party chairman up to 2019, said he expected new donor money to mostly go to political action committees, and other groups who fund campaigns, rather than the state party.

“But not having the state party well funded is detrimental to many Republican campaigns next year,” he added.

Until Trump gets off the stage it’s hard to see how they can get their act together and the long term damage will be severe. Couldn’t happen to a nicer bunch of weirdos.

TPM reports:

As Trump-appointed judges vie to see who can produce the most nakedly partisan rulings completely divorced from precedent and case law, a new contender has thrown his hat in the ring. 

U.S. District Judge Terry Doughty on Tuesday barred Biden administration officials — everyone from Heath and Human Services to the Centers for Disease Control to the FBI — from flagging posts that spread misinformation to social media companies. Doughty ruled that such contact is a violation of the First Amendment. The companies include Facebook/Meta, Twitter, YouTube/Google, Instagram and many more. 

The judgment bans the named officials from meeting with the companies, flagging worrying content, emailing or calling the companies about content, following up with the companies or even collaborating with groups like the Election Integrity Partnership to identify troublesome posts. 

“Although this case is still relatively young, and at this stage the Court is only examining it in terms of Plaintiffs’ likelihood of success on the merits, the evidence produced thus far depicts an almost dystopian scenario,” Doughty writes. “During the COVID-19 pandemic, a period perhaps best characterized by widespread doubt and uncertainty, the United States Government seems to have assumed a role similar to an Orwellian ‘Ministry of Truth.’”

The case now goes through the familiar gauntlet of right-wing-friendly venues: the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals, and, likely, the Supreme Court. Should Doughty’s ruling survive, it’d be a sea change in the interpretation of this area of law. His injunction, at least, will likely remain in place for months, given the conservative dominance of the 5th Circuit and the time it’ll take for the case to reach the Supreme Court.  

Many anti-Biden administration litigants have recently filed lawsuits in the same pipeline — Trumpy district judge to 5th Circuit to Supreme Court — on everything from abortion to the Affordable Care Act.

The high court, though, has overturned Doughty before; he made the initial ruling banning the Biden administration’s vaccine requirements for health care workers at facilities that receive funding from Medicare and Medicaid, which the Court ultimately let stand.

Doughty tosses in a few exceptions to the contact ban, including on matters of national security and “criminal efforts to suppress voting, to provide illegal campaign contributions, of cyber-attacks against election infrastructure, or foreign attempts to influence elections.” 

Doughty tipped his cards far earlier in the process, allowing the plaintiffs — a pair of red state attorneys general plus individuals including The Gateway Pundit’s Jim Hoft — to extract extensive discovery from administration officials like far-right archenemy Dr. Anthony Fauci, who’s said he wasn’t involved in online content moderation. 

This newest ruling also dribbled out of the right-wing media vortex of conspiracy theories, where “government censorship” of conservatives’ social media activity is a constant complaint.

Fury about supposed “shadow banning,” stifling of content and throttling of follower counts is not relegated to right-wing cranks on message boards or those who host Fox News shows: Republican elected officials consistently echo the conspiracy theory, occasionally hauling in tech CEOs before their committees to answer shouted questions on the topic.

The Republican-majority House Judiciary Committee, among the censorship-obsessed and which has already subpoenaed the likes of Mark Zuckerberg, interrupted its anodyne Fourth of July posts to gleefully retweet news of the judge’s ruling, festooned with American flag emojis. 

“HAPPY INDEPENDENCE DAY!” the committee celebrated.

This is going to be a common occurrence going forward. The Federalist Society salted the judiciary with many of these MAGA fools and they are working hand in glove with the looney MAGA right conspiracy freaks. And some of this nonsense is going to make it all the way to the top and we’ll just have to see how far down the rabbit hole the Supremes are willing to go.