Last week in Philadelphia Moms for Liberty held a cattle call for presidential candidates at their “Joyful Warriors” conference and they got all the big names to show up. This was quite a get for a group that only started in 2021 by Sarasota Florida school board members Tiffany Justice, Tina Descovich and Bridget Ziegler to protest masking and vaccine mandates in public schools during COVID-19. They are big players now in Republican politics with big donors and major politicians competing for their favor.

And like so many others in the GOP they also have ties with the Proud Boys, a far-right hate group and have been designated antigovernment extremists by the Southern Poverty Law Center which they are wearing it with pride, as right wing groups tend to do:

Like for instance, when you actually quote Adolph Hitler in one of your newsletters.
Although, with this one, what kind of apology can there really be?

Sorry we got directly quoting Hitler? pic.twitter.com/OCGaomCV0a

— Jo (@JoJoFromJerz) July 2, 2023

Florida GOP Chairman Christian Ziegler, quoted above, also happens to be married to Bridget Ziegler, one of the founders of Mom’s for Liberty so for all its claims to being a grassroots organization, let’s just say they had friends in high places from the very beginning. (Their very first conference was sponsored by the Heritage Foundation and Turning Point USA.) It’s not at all surprising that it very quickly grew into a national “parents rights” movement protesting the teaching of America’s racial history and LGBTQ issues, banning books, abridging free speech, ending tenure for teachers, militant anti-transgender activism and fervent opposition to the teachers unions among other things. They are soldiers in the culture war, fighting what Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis would call the “woke” agenda, the most animating issue among the hardcore GOP base. So of course, the presidential candidates showed up for their little confab.

Their origins being in Florida, they have a special affinity for DeSantis. He was the star of their first gathering last year where they presented him the “Sword of Liberty” which is kind of like a wingnut Oscar, for him apparently. This year he assured them he would keep fighting the woke wherever it appears:

Six ‘wokes’ in 19 seconds today at the Moms for Liberty conference. He’s really fighting the woke. pic.twitter.com/n4n58se4Ef

— Ron Filipkowski (@RonFilipkowski) June 30, 2023

Sadly for him, he was upstaged by the big man, Donald Trump who gave the keynote and was received with the usual MAGA ecstasy. The moms really loved him. (And why not? He’s been married to three different women and had kids with every one.) He called them ” the best thing that ever happened to America” and they swooned. He made them some explicit, if completely unworkable, promises like this one:

Trump tells Moms for Liberty that as President he will allow parents to elect the Principals of schools every year, so if they don’t like a school Principal they can vote them out of the job. pic.twitter.com/QEdpMYqR3E

— Ron Filipkowski (@RonFilipkowski) June 30, 2023

Gadfly candidate  Vivek Ramaswamy told the gathered throng that he was”privileged to join my favorite hate group and extremist group today” and Nikki Haley called herself a terrorist in solidarity:

“When they mentioned that this was a terrorist organization, I said ‘Well then, count me as a mom for liberty because that’s what I am.”

People seem to be very impressed by these “joyful warriors” even those who are appalled by the extremism. They seem to believe that they have done something unprecedented by inspiring all these women to become involved in politics and form grassroots chapters all around the country. They claim to have over 100,000 members who are involved at the local level. But are they really that extraordinary?

One of the largest global protest marches in history took place on January 21st, 2017, the day after Donald Trump was sworn in as president. The Women’s March that day spawned what was soon to become known as “the Resistance” which started out as a sort of worldwide support group made up of mostly women who felt, rightly, that the election over the unfit, sexually abusing, reality show host over the first woman nominee was a portent of very bad things to come. They bought t-shirts and books by the thousands, they created activist aps and online groups and came together wherever possible to commiserate and share their angst and anger over what had happened. But it wasn’t long before they began to organize.

Within a year, the Resistance had created dozens of grassroots electoral organizations like Indivisible, Run for Something and Swing Left mostly led and staffed by women, dedicated to electing Democrats to congress to put a check on Trump. It worked. The Democrats took back the House of Representatives in the 2018 midterms and the Resistance groups got much of the credit.

Now. as time went on some of these groups got funding from big donors. But they weren’t married to state chairmen of the Democratic party or throwing conferences sponsored by major Democratic think tanks in the first year. It was an authentic reaction to a cataclysmic event. These Moms for Liberty are a GOP front group fanning the flames of the culture war as a cynical political strategy.

And they have miscalculated. Like Twitter CEO Elon Musk who recently agreed that childless people probably shouldn’t have a right to vote because they “have little stake in the future,” their fetishization of “parents rights” as some kind of right wing monolith is just wrong. Philip Bump of the Washington Post looked at the numbers:

[I]t is not the case that parents are inherently politically conservative. When Sen. J.D. Vance (R-Ohio) suggested letting parents cast votes for their kids — a different flavor of this same discussion — The Washington Post looked at the effect that might have. But we can summarize the divides here more succinctly, using data from the biennial General Social Survey.

More than half of those without any kids identify as Democrats or Democratic-leaning independents. (From here on, I’ll just lump independents who lean toward a party in with the party itself.) More than a third of that group identify as liberal Democrats. Among those with children who are all under the age of 18, just under half identify as Democrats, nearly double the percentage that identifies as Republicans.

And that’s because people with young children are young themselves and young people are not flocking to the GOP these days. Republicans are older and while they may have kids they’re long out of school. There just isn’t a huge constituency for this crusade.

As Bump points out, while parents have always had lots of advice about how children should be raised, “schools and other institutions, meanwhile, hired professional educators and administrators who focused on understanding how to educate a diverse range of children generally with an eye toward creating well-rounded citizens.” Today everyone is an expert on everything because they “do their own research” on Facebook and it’s easily exploitable by savvy operators. Tell those people what they want to hear and they’ll believe it.

Moms for Liberty doesn’t speak for parents of schoolkids who aren’t onboard with book banning and bullying trans kids and second guessing every word that comes out of a teacher’s mouth and that’s most of them. If they are fooling themselves into believing that they do they are in for a rude awakening. But I doubt their leaders care one way or another about any of this. It’s just about getting the elderly Fox News voters riled up about the latest brouhaha. It’s infuriating that as with all these culture war battles, hardworking people and innocent kids are sacrificed so they can keep their base terrified and angry.

Salon

You can’t win if you don’t show up to play

Howie Klein this morning addresses why it’s important that Democrats recruit candidates (even “feckless” ones) and run everywhere. Run For Something is working on that. So is North Carolina Democrats’ new state chair, Anderson Clayton, 25. She’ll appear on a featured panel next week at Netroots Nation-Chicago with three other women state chairs: Lavora Barnes of Michigan, Shasti Conrad of Washington, and Jane Kleeb of Nebraska.

“In 2022, we left 44 seats uncontested last cycle,” Clayton told MSNBC’s Ali Velshi in May. That cannot happen again. “Democracy is not democracy without choices.”

Plus, you can’t win if you don’t show up to play.

Awesome.

Run. Everywhere. https://t.co/9STnEEasx4

— David Pepper (@DavidPepper) May 20, 2023

Democrats need to give voters a reason to show up, Klein writes. What matters to them is results. In Minnesota, for example, where Democrats in 2022 won a narrow trifecta. Democrats chose to show voters what they could do with their narrow governing majorities. They passed transformsational legislation to benefit constitutents (Down With Tyranny):

“The house speaker, Melissa Hortman, said state Democrats viewed the trifecta as a fleeting window to legislate aggressively. ‘Having Republicans in control of part of state government for the last 10 years and being prevented from doing really anything progressive at all created a lot of pent-up demand to chalk up some progressive victories,’ said Hortman.”

Working with grassroots community activists, Democrats passed laws protecting women’s Choice, unions, renters’ rights and voting rights. “During the same session that the felony re-enfranchisement bill passed, the state passed the Democracy for the People Act, which, among other reforms, allows 16- and 17-year-olds to preregister to vote, establishes automatic voter registration in some state agencies, requires voting materials be available in the three most commonly spoken languages in the state, and penalizes voter intimidation and lies.”

That and a lot more.

Republicans, naturally, complain about “overreach” about which they’d have no qualms if it was them. Klein’s friend, Dorothy, a Democratic political operator from California, tells him:

“Democrats need to focus on where they are going– not how they are going to get there, on outcomes instead of process. For example– not getting your pay docked if you have to take time off to take your child to the doctor even if it’s for a well-baby checkup, being able to afford enough bedrooms to house your family, knowing that the foods you eat are safe to eat, knowing the water you drink is safe to drink, knowing the air you breathe is safe to breathe, knowing that that guy standing next to you is not carrying an AK-15, knowing that if you need an abortion you can get one. Democrats need to tell people what the outcomes will be if they vote for them. They don’t need lectures on history. They don’t need to know where we once were or how we got where we are today. They need to know what Democrats will do for them now.”

Dorothy is quoting the Gospel according to Anat Shenker-Osorio:

“Inspire through outcome, not process,” says progressive messaging guru Anat Shenker-Osorio, citing an example from a pollster.

“When we are walking through the grocery aisle and want to buy brownies,” she begins, “what is the image on the brownie box? The brownie! What’s not staring you in the face? The recipe! … We need to stop messaging our policy and talk about what our policy achieves.”

"When you go off to work you know that your kid is safe, loved & cared for. and you can afford it."@anatosaurus on @TheLastWord on how to talk about great policies in Build Back Better.
Watch @Lawrence smile when she says,"Stop selling the recipe, start selling the brownies." pic.twitter.com/iwURuFxEGe

— Spocko (@spockosbrain) October 13, 2021

Outcome, not process. “Paint the beautiful tomorrow.” Run everywhere. And once in office, fight like hell for the deliverables.

The ambulance’s red glare

“Make America Great Again” is Donald Trump’s freighted message to a conservative political base longing for “the good, old days.” You know, when men were men, women were women, white Christians were dominant, non-whites knew their place, and the biggest worry on the Fourth of July was fireworks injuries.

Somehow, I don’t think MAGAstan is fretting about that last bit.

From CNN’s daily “5 Things” news summary:

Independence Day celebrations were marred by violence over the holiday weekend after several mass shootings took place across the US. At least nine people were injured in a shooting early this morning in Washington, DC, as the victims were celebrating the Fourth of July in the nation’s capital. In Philadelphia, a shooting Monday left five people dead and two others wounded. On the same night in Fort Worth, Texas, a shooting killed three people and wounded eight others. Separately, block parties recently turned deadly in Indianapolis and Baltimore, leaving investigators scouring the crime scenes for answers. Data shows the Fourth of July has accounted for the most mass shootings of any other day of the year in nearly a decade, according to a CNN analysis.

If you missed the memo that shooting your neighbors is now how “patriots” celebrate the holiday, you’re not alone.

Hot August nights in July

Another factoid about yesterday’s July Fourth festivities (Washington Post):

Tuesday was the hottest day on Earth since at least 1979, with the global average temperature reaching 62.92 degrees Fahrenheit (17.18 degrees Celsius), according to data from the U.S. National Centers for Environmental Prediction.

As a result, some scientists believe July 4 may have been one of the hottest days on Earth in around 125,000 years, due to a dangerous combination of climate change causing global temperatures to soar, the return of the El Niño pattern and the start of summer in the northern hemisphere.

In the United States, 57 million people were exposed to dangerous heat on Tuesday, according to The Washington Post’s extreme heat tracker. At the same time, China was gripped by a sizzling heat wave, the Antarctic is hotter than usual during its winter, and temperatures in the north of Africa reached 122F, Reuters reported.

The heat record has stood since … Monday.

A “triple whammy” is on its way in coming months, says Myles Allen, a professor of geosystem science at Oxford University, “when so “when global warming, El Niño and the annual cycle all line up together.”

Meaning?

Meaning the world’s deadliest animal, the mosquito, is “on the move,” bringing with it malaria and other mosquito-borne diseases (Washington Post):

In June alone, five cases of locally transmitted malaria were discovered in Texas and Florida: the first cases acquired in the United States in two decades. These cases, experts say, are unlikely to have a connection to warming temperatures — conditions in Florida and Texas are already suitable for malaria-carrying mosquitoes. But as urban heat islands expand and temperatures rise, mosquito-borne diseases are expected to travel outside of their typical regions.

“Climate change allows the creeping edge of mosquito ranges to expand,” said Sadie Ryan, a professor of medical geography at the University of Florida.

Not just northward but into higher elevations.

Different mosquitoes thrive under different temperatures. The Anopheles mosquito carries malaria; the Aedes aegypti and the Aedes albopictus mosquitoes carry diseases like dengue and chikungunya. But the A. aegypti thrives at higher temperatures than the A. albopictus. As different parts of the world warm at different rates, some mosquito-borne diseases will thrive while others will be put under stress.

According to a study published in 2019, both species are expected to spread northward in the United States over the next 30 years. By 2050, the A.aegypticould increase its range in the Mid-Atlantic and the Midwest; the A. albopictus could make it as far north as Michigan and Minnesota.

We are sleepwalking into the end of our existence on this planet. https://t.co/ZeIxfBfFAZ

— Mehdi Hasan (@mehdirhasan) July 4, 2023

The good news? It might not be sea level rise or gunfire that gets you.

(h/t CT)

We live in hope…

Langston Hughes 

Let America be America again.
Let it be the dream it used to be.
Let it be the pioneer on the plain
Seeking a home where he himself is free.

(America never was America to me.)

Let America be the dream the dreamers dreamed—
Let it be that great strong land of love
Where never kings connive nor tyrants scheme
That any man be crushed by one above.

(It never was America to me.)

O, let my land be a land where Liberty
Is crowned with no false patriotic wreath,
But opportunity is real, and life is free,
Equality is in the air we breathe.

(There’s never been equality for me,
Nor freedom in this “homeland of the free.”)

Say, who are you that mumbles in the dark?
And who are you that draws your veil across the stars?

I am the poor white, fooled and pushed apart,
I am the Negro bearing slavery’s scars.
I am the red man driven from the land,
I am the immigrant clutching the hope I seek—
And finding only the same old stupid plan
Of dog eat dog, of mighty crush the weak.

I am the young man, full of strength and hope,
Tangled in that ancient endless chain
Of profit, power, gain, of grab the land!
Of grab the gold! Of grab the ways of satisfying need!
Of work the men! Of take the pay!
Of owning everything for one’s own greed!

I am the farmer, bondsman to the soil.
I am the worker sold to the machine.
I am the Negro, servant to you all.
I am the people, humble, hungry, mean—
Hungry yet today despite the dream.
Beaten yet today—O, Pioneers!
I am the man who never got ahead,
The poorest worker bartered through the years.

Yet I’m the one who dreamt our basic dream
In the Old World while still a serf of kings,
Who dreamt a dream so strong, so brave, so true,
That even yet its mighty daring sings
In every brick and stone, in every furrow turned
That’s made America the land it has become.
O, I’m the man who sailed those early seas
In search of what I meant to be my home—
For I’m the one who left dark Ireland’s shore,
And Poland’s plain, and England’s grassy lea,
And torn from Black Africa’s strand I came
To build a “homeland of the free.”

The free?

Who said the free? Not me?
Surely not me? The millions on relief today?
The millions shot down when we strike?
The millions who have nothing for our pay?
For all the dreams we’ve dreamed
And all the songs we’ve sung
And all the hopes we’ve held
And all the flags we’ve hung,
The millions who have nothing for our pay—
Except the dream that’s almost dead today.

O, let America be America again—
The land that never has been yet—
And yet must be—the land where every man is free.
The land that’s mine—the poor man’s, Indian’s, Negro’s, ME—
Who made America,
Whose sweat and blood, whose faith and pain,
Whose hand at the foundry, whose plow in the rain,
Must bring back our mighty dream again.

Sure, call me any ugly name you choose—
The steel of freedom does not stain.
From those who live like leeches on the people’s lives,
We must take back our land again,
America!

O, yes,
I say it plain,
America never was America to me,
And yet I swear this oath—
America will be!

Out of the rack and ruin of our gangster death,
The rape and rot of graft, and stealth, and lies,
We, the people, must redeem
The land, the mines, the plants, the rivers.
The mountains and the endless plain—
All, all the stretch of these great green states—
And make America again!

Looks like it.

Law professor Steve Vladek takes a look at the actual record. It’s not good.

The effective end of the Supreme Court’s term on Friday touched off what has become an annual tradition: hot takes summarizing the justices’ work over the preceding nine months based upon data aggregated from the justices’ decisions. These accounts typically focus on surprising-sounding results (50% of the decisions were unanimous!) in service of pushing back against the most obvious summary of the current court: that it is sharply divided between the six justices appointed by Republican presidents and the three justices appointed by Democrats. You can spin the data however you want, but the reality is actually simple. The conservative majority is pushing American law decisively to the right.

Statisticians call this phenomenon the “tyranny of averages” — the fact that averaging a data set tells us nothing about the size, distribution or skew of the data. But these kinds of “judge the Supreme Court by its data” assessments are even worse than just ordinary statistical errors.

First, they fail to account for the Supreme Court’s own role in choosing the cases it decides — so that the data isn’t random to begin with. Second, they ignore all of the Supreme Court’s significant rulings in other cases — those that don’t receive full briefings and arguments. Finally, even within the carefully cultivated subset of cases on which these claims generally focus, these commentaries both miscount the divisions and treat as equal disputes that bear no resemblance to each other. It’s not that this data is completely irrelevant, but anyone relying upon it should take it with a very substantial grain of salt.

Let’s start with the court’s docket. With one tiny exception (which accounted for exactly one case during the justices’ current term), the court chooses each and every one of its cases (and, even within those cases, which specific issues it wants to decide). This docket control, which is entirely a modern phenomenon, means the justices are pre-selecting the cases they decide — including technical disputes on which they may be likely to agree (or, at least, not disagree along conventional ideological lines). Thus, from the get-go, the entire data set on which too many commentators rely is biased toward the justices’ own behavior.

Thus, statistical claims about the court tend to neglect the thousands of other rulings the Supreme Court hands down every term — on what has become known as the “shadow docket.” These rulings are unsigned and almost always unexplained, and they run the gamut from agreeing or refusing to take up an appeal to agreeing or refusing to block a lower-court ruling while the appeal runs its course.

Many of these rulings are relatively insignificant, but some are just as important as — if not more important than — cases that receive plenary consideration.

Consider the April ruling that preserved nationwide access to mifepristone or the December ruling that left in place a controversial Covid-related border control policy. Indeed, there have been 35 shadow docket orders from the court since October from which at least one justice publicly dissented — including six from which all three of the Democratic appointees registered their opposition. (That’s in contrast with a total of seven argued cases in which all three dissented.) Shouldn’t that data figure in any putatively comprehensive summary, too?

Finally, even within the skewed subset on which these statistical claims rest, there are serious false equivalency issues. It’s not just that a 237-page ruling invalidating race-based affirmative action policies at virtually every college and university in the country has a far greater impact (and is far more important in almost all respects) than a 16-page technical resolution of a question of bankruptcy procedure; it’s that the way we count votes doesn’t necessarily reflect the true divisions among the justices.

Consider Sackett v. EPA — a major decision in which the court dramatically curtailed the federal government’s ability to prevent pollution of wetlands. Raw data treats that ruling as unanimous — because all nine justices agreed that the lower court applied the wrong test. But with regard to the rule going forward, the justices divided 5-4 — with Justice Brett Kavanaugh breaking from the other conservatives and writing for himself and the Democratic appointees in a sharp separate opinion that embraced a broader reading of the statute. No statistical summary of the court’s work treats that decision as 5-4 — even though, for all intents and purposes, it was.

There’s no question that there were a handful of rulings this term in which the more visibly “conservative” position did not win.

There’s no question that there were a handful of rulings this term in which the more visibly “conservative” position didn’t win. In Haaland v. Brackeen, a 7-2 majority rejected a challenge to the Indian Child Welfare Act. In Moore v. Harper, six justices rejected the broadest version of the so-called independent state legislature theory — which would have given state legislatures carte blanche to run roughshod over state courts and state constitutions when it comes to federal elections. In United States v. Texas, eight justices held that Texas and Louisiana lacked standing to challenge the Biden administration’s immigration enforcement priorities. And in perhaps the biggest surprise of the term, a 5-4 majority ruled in Allen v. Milligan that Alabama’s congressional district maps violate the Voting Rights Act.

But except for the Alabama redistricting decision, each of those rulings was less of a “victory” for progressives than meets the eye. The most important claims in Brackeen were rejected not on their merits, but because the plaintiffs weren’t the right ones to bring them. Ditto United States v. Texas — which didn’t uphold the Biden administration policy but merely said Texas and Louisiana couldn’t challenge it.

And in Moore, even as the justices rejected the most alarming version of the independent state legislature doctrine, they actually embraced a weaker form of it. This leaves the door open, in the future, for state legislatures to violate state constitutions in federal elections. Again, just looking at the vote counts in these cases doesn’t come close to telling their full stories — or the overall story of the term.

In contrast, the “conservative” victories were enormous. Gutting race-based affirmative action in higher education, recognizing for the first time that certain business owners have a First Amendment right to refuse to provide services to members of groups whose behavior they oppose, tossing President Joe Biden’s student loan debt relief program in a ruling that will make it easier for anyone going forward to challenge a dizzying array of federal policies, and the list goes on.

In the end, assessments of the Supreme Court’s work during its current term should privilege what the court has actually done (and not done) over how its efforts are superficially (and misleadingly) quantified through incomplete, inaccurate and ultimately unrevealing data. And when that’s the focus of our study, what becomes clear is just how powerful the six-justice conservative majority is — and just how significant its implications are for the current and future trajectory of American law.

Trump and MAGA may fade and the Republican party could theoretically disappear but this court is going to be around long after they are gone. The remedies are radical. But necessary. Term limits, adding seats, many things. If we don’t they are going to change the character of this nation in ways that can only be described as nightmarish. They already are.

Alert the media

Somebody’s regretting betting on the wrong horse:

A top spokesperson for Ron DeSantis’ super PAC is sounding a decidedly dour note on the Florida governor’s presidential prospects, saying his campaign is facing an “uphill battle” and is trailing badly in the key nominating states.

Steve Cortes, who previously supported Donald Trump, also heaped praise on the former president, calling him a “runaway frontrunner” and “maestro” of the debate.

“Right now in national polling we are way behind, I’ll be the first to admit that,” Cortes said in a Twitter spaces event that was recorded on Sunday night. “I believe in being blunt and honest. It’s an uphill battle but clearly Donald Trump is the runaway frontrunner.”

Calling the DeSantis campaign the “clear underdog,” he added: “In the first four states which matter tremendously, polls are a lot tighter, we are still clearly down. We’re down double digits, we have work to do.”

DeSantis said the opposite last week.

Ooops…

The remarks amounted to a remarkably blunt admission of vulnerability from within the ranks of a leading presidential operation, contrasting with the projection of confidence that other DeSantis aides often adopt. Cortes did say he thought the gap between Trump and DeSantis could be closed once DeSantis’ personal and political story is shared more widely on the campaign trail. But he also rationalized a DeSantis primary campaign failure by predicting healthy competition could benefit Trump in a general election.

“If we do not prevail — and I have every intent on winning, I didn’t sign up for this to come in second — but if we do not prevail I will tell you this, we will make President Trump better for having this kind of primary,” Cortes said.

Good luck with that Steve. I’m sure Trump is very grateful.

When asked about his comments, Cortes responded in an email that Trump “has debated through two successive presidential cycles, so of course he possesses a lot of experience in that arena. But I am convinced that Governor DeSantis will outperform expectations and inform large audiences about his amazing life, political record, and winning agenda for the presidency.“

Actually, it seems to be the opposite. The more people see of him, the less they like him.

This next would normally be seen as standard expectations lowering for a debate, but in DeSantis’ case it happens to be true. He is a terrible debater. So this is really just Trump fluffing:

Next month, the 2024 Republican field will have the opportunity to square off in a debate hosted by the Republican National Committee and moderated by Fox News. But Trump has made clear he is unlikely to join. Cortes said it would be a “great disservice” if Trump didn’t debate. But he also suggested that DeSantis might benefit from his absence.

“Is Ron the debater that Trump is?” he said. “No, no he isn’t.”

“Absolutely Donald Trump is the maestro of it right, no doubt about it, right. When he gets on the debate stage, you know, and on his feet, in front of a microphone, he debates like Jack Nicklaus played golf, there’s no doubt about it,” Cortes said.

In addition to providing some of the most candid observations about the race from within the DeSantis camp, Cortes talked about some of the personal attacks and backlash he faced for choosing to endorse the Florida governor over Trump.

“I was honored to work for [Trump],” he said.

But he added, “I believe we can be reasonable about where he fell short and what the path is moving forward.

Basically, he conceded defeat. CNN’s Dana Bash opined that Cortes was actually trying to publicly wake up DeSantis (who is definitely not “woke”) because Super Pacs are not allowed to coordinate with the Governor. Nah. This was Cortes seeing the writing on the wall and attempting to save his career.

It might even work. If he grovels enough and licks Trump’s boots with enough enthusiasm, he might get back in his good graces, especially if he has some dirt to share with the Trump campaign, But he’s going to have to work at it. I’d say he’s off to a good start. Calling Trump a “maestro” at debating is *chef’s kiss*

… that we know of

The Washington Post:

Among many striking things about the July 2021 audio of Donald Trump seeming to discuss a classified document with guests is how casual it all was. In real time, the now-indicted former president seems to recognize that what he’s doing is not kosher, requesting that it be off the record and drawing an aide to comment with an apparently uneasy laugh, “Yeah, now we have a problem.”

It’s as if those involved were familiar with the dance of Trump being cavalier with sensitive information. Which, even before this latest entry, is indeed what his full record demonstrates.

Appearing on MSNBC over the weekend, former Trump White House press secretary Stephanie Grisham said she personally witnessed the way Trump shared information at Mar-a-Lago during his presidency.

Asked whether it was plausible that Trump was actually showing off classified documents in July 2021 — Trump has suggested it was mere “bravado” — Grisham said: “The short answer is yes. I watched him show documents to people at Mar-a-Lago on the dining room patio. So he has no respect for classified information. Never did.”

Grisham’s account is not a detailed one. But it comports with plenty of history. With the indictment accusing him of sharing classified documents with unauthorized people on two separate occasions in 2021, it’s worth running through what we know about the other major episodes in re: Trump and sensitive information.

(A note: While president, Trump had broad authority to declassify information at will. But that doesn’t mean doing so was a particularly good idea.)

Trump’s first month

Trump was arguably propelled into office in part thanks to his opponent’s cavalier handling of sensitive information. But within his first weeks as president, it was clear he wasn’t exactly overcompensating for the sins of Hillary Clinton.

On Feb. 8, 2017, Trump appeared at an Oval Office photo op with Intel CEO Brian Krzanich, where an Associated Press photo appeared to show a lockbag with a key in it on Trump’s desk, in the presence of people without security clearances. Sen. Martin Heinrich (D-N.M.) noted that this raised questions about whether sensitive information was being appropriately safeguarded.

Just three days later, on Feb. 11, Trump turned the Mar-a-Lago terrace into what The Washington Post called an “open-air situation room” following a ballistic missile test by North Korea. Trump and Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe appeared to be discussing a highly sensitive national security issue and reviewing documents using the light of an aide’s cellphone, all out in the open.

The White House claimed at the time that “no classified material” was discussed openly.

The phones

By this point, it had already been reported that Trump was using an unsecured cellphone. And it was a storyline that would follow him for many months.

Within days of his taking office, the New York Times reported that Trump was using an old, unsecured Android phone to post on Twitter.

In May 2018, Politico reported that Trump was using a White House cellphone without sophisticated security features and that he declined to swap out his Twitter phone on a monthly basis, citing convenience.

By October 2018, the Times reported that intelligence showed Chinese spies were often listening to Trump’s conversations on his iPhone, and even that aides warned Trump that Russian spies were eavesdropping. Aides failed to prevail upon Trump to use more secure landlines. “White House officials say they can only hope he refrains from discussing classified information when he is on them,” the Times noted.

Trump disputed the Times’s report. But by late 2019, phone logs obtained in his first impeachment inquiry appeared to substantiate key aspects of the reporting.

The Russians

Perhaps the most infamous event of all came in May 2017. While the above raised the prospect of Trump’s having exposed classified information, this time we know he actually did it — and to the Russians, no less.

The Post broke the news that Trump had revealed highly classified information to Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov and Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak during a meeting in the Oval Office. The information, considered so sensitive that its details were withheld even from key allies, concerned the Islamic State. It was obtained through an intelligence-sharing arrangement with another country, later revealed to be Israel.

The Post has reported that Trump didn’t identify the information as coming from Israel but that the level of detail he offered would have made it relatively easy to identify the source and possibly how the information was acquired.

It has also reported that intelligence officials initially asked reporters not to identify Israel as the source, suggesting such information might have endangered the life of a spy with access to key information about the Islamic State’s inner workings.

The Iranian explosion

Perhaps the other most direct evidence of Trump’s sharing classified information under questionable circumstances while serving as president came in August 2019, when he tweeted a detailed aerial image of an Iranian launchpad that experts at the time described as “almost certainly highly classified.”

The image appeared to be from a briefing Trump had received about an explosion there, complete with what appeared to be the flash of a camera taking a picture of the document.

The Times later reported that aides had tried to talk Trump out of tweeting the image, cautioning that it could reveal the United States government’s surveillance capabilities. The image also raised questions about whether it revealed Americans to be violating Iran’s airspace, given that its clarity suggested it wasn’t taken via satellite.

In late 2022, the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency formally declassified the photo.

The other incidents

Two other incidents were less well publicized but are worth recalling in this moment.

One came in the summer of 2017, when Trump tweeted a response to a Post story reporting that he had ended a covert CIA program to arm moderate Syrian rebels — thereby seemingly confirming that such a classified program did, in fact, exist. (A judge later found that Trump hadn’t technically declassified the program with his statements.)

Another came that same year, in April, when Trump told Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte that the United States had two nuclear submarines off the coast of the Korean Peninsula. The disclosure was revealed in a Philippine transcript of the call between the leaders. It wasn’t clear whether Trump was referring to nuclear-armed submarines or nuclear-powered ones, and he did not appear to give specifics. But the disclosure reportedly caused consternation at the Defense Department.

Witch hunt! Hoax! I don’t think you understand. All government documents belong to Trump, even today. He is omnipotent and always knows exactly the right thing to do. If he wants to share sensitive intelligence, it is just fine, no matter what it is. Because he is perfect, just like his phone calls.

A bunch of white guys who founded a country:

For the July Fourth holiday, I have some fare that’s lighter than the doom and gloom about today’s politics that I usually dish up: a little tour some of the statuary art in the U.S. Capitol Building. Each state submits two statues to be on display; they are strategically placed throughout the Capitol. Some of my favorites include Hawaii’s King Kamehameha I and California’s Junípero Serra. There are also a handful of statues on permanent display that are not part of the Statuary Hall collection. But today is all about the American Revolution, so here are some of the Founding Fathers, including many lesser known ones, all photographed by my Bulwark colleague Hannah Yoest.

Roger Sherman, Connecticut

Caesar Rodney, Delaware

Charles Carroll, Maryland

Samuel Adams, Massachusetts

John Stark, New Hampshire

Richard Stockton, New Jersey

Robert Livingston, New York

John P.G. “Peter” Muhlenberg, Pennsylvania

Nathanael Greene, Rhode Island

Ethan Allen, Vermont

George Washington, Virginia

Benjamin Franklin

Thomas Jefferson

On this Independence Day Republicans around the nation are high-fiving their success in depriving their fellow citizens of their liberty. They are so happy and proud to be Americans.

This piece by Jill Lawrence spells out what they are celebrating today:

Despite the promises of America’s founding documents, on Independence Day 2023, justice, the “general welfare,” “equal protection of the laws” and “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” are all at risk. The Supreme Court, conservative governors and gerrymandered state legislatures are racing to shrink fundamental rights and freedoms, enabled and empowered by structural inequities built into the Constitution. The result is that tens of millions of Americans are being deprived of rights that other Americans have.

On Independence Day 2023, justice, the “general welfare,” “equal protection of the laws” and “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” are all at risk.

The scale of the disparity is frightening and growing, taking us ever further from America’s founding ideal that “all men are created equal” and its continuing journey toward equal rights for all.

The marquee setback came last year with the high court’s Dobbs decision, which erased a constitutional right that had been in place for nearly half a century. A year later, free to do as they pleased, 14 states fully banned abortion, and a 15th, Georgia, banned it after six weeks of pregnancy (before many women know they are pregnant). At the same time, 20 states where abortion is legal added protections over the past year.

While abortion is a particularly stark example of the democracy divide, U.S. courts and state legislatures are advancing inequality of rights in countless other ways: from last week’s Supreme Court decisions allowing a prospective wedding website designer to refuse services to hypothetical same-sex couples and removing race from the many factors colleges and universities use to assemble diverse student bodies to states’ trying to restrict and ban medical care for transgender people, discussions of gay issues in classrooms and which books can be accessed in libraries.

The solution in many cases is federal legislation, which would require, at minimum, Democrats to reclaim a House majority next year. The party would also have to elect 50 or more senators willing to abolish the filibuster, at least in cases when America’s most sacred promises are threatened.

Here are the inequities that divide the nation most egregiously on Independence Day and are most in need of congressional action:

Voting. Some states make it much harder to vote than others. Why is that allowed? Congress should enact a national law on ballot access and election protection. It already has a vehicle in the 2021 Freedom to Vote Act, based on a bill proposed by Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., which would make Election Day a holiday and set minimum standards for mail voting, early voting, drop boxes and voter ID and address partisan gerrymandering, voter roll purges, interference with election workers and other issues.

Republicans refused to buy in to the bill last year, and Manchin refused to abandon the Senate filibuster tradition, which requires 60 senators to advance a bill. But other Democrats could make resistance from Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema, I-Ariz., less relevant. Sen. John Fetterman, D-Pa., is a filibuster opponent, and some 2024 Democrats are running on a promise to end it.

Abortion. Congress should codify Roe v. Wade, the 1973 Supreme Court decision that legalized abortion up to fetal viability. For decades, this ruling allowed doctors to deliver the best medical care possible. Now that abortion is a crime in so many states, doctors fear losing their licenses or going to prison, and the choice for women with doomed or dangerous pregnancies is to leave the state for treatment or wait until they are at death’s door, at which point doctors may decide it’s legal to end their pregnancies. Roe also accommodated many religious views about abortion, not just those of conservatives who insist on bans.

Sending the issue to the states guaranteed massive infringements on personal privacy and self-determination.

The First Amendment promotes respect for all religions (or no religion), but by overturning Roe, the Supreme Court freed states to violate that principle. (The court itself just last week violated that principle by blessing a Christian conservative’s desire to deny gay people service on religious grounds.)

Sending the issue to the states guaranteed massive infringements on personal privacy and self-determination, health risks for women and girls and vast gulfs in access. Why should women in Texas risk infertility, disability and death under the state’s bans while women in California (Americans just like them) have safe access to the full range of reproductive care? How is that equal protection?

We are even seeing attempts to ban interstate travel for abortion care and to make it harder to put abortion rights on the ballot for voters to decide directly. How is that freedom? A right so significant it was until recently a constitutional right should not be decided by state legislatures.

Guns. As eagerly as the Supreme Court tossed abortion to the states a year ago, in its Bruen decision the same month, it ran roughshod over state regulation of guns. In that ruling, the court said regulations must be consistent with “history and tradition” from centuries ago. Federal judges of all political stripes are finding this unworkable, absurd, illogical and exclusionary (given that women and nonwhite people could not vote centuries ago), as well as disrespectful to the nation’s 18th-century founders.

States are racing to loosen gun laws. In regions with lax laws and more gun-owning households, there is less training, and, as documented by Colin Woodard, director of the Nationhood Lab at Salve Regina University, the per capita death rate from homicides and suicides is two to three times higher than in regions with tighter laws and fewer guns. President Barack Obama once borrowed anti-abortion rhetoric to argue that all Americans have a right to life.

Lives should not be more expendable in one state or region of these United States than in another.

Lives should not be more expendable in one state or region of these United States than in another. Congress must find the backbone to act. A good starting point would be the four broadly popular elements of California Gov. Gavin Newsom’s proposed 28th Amendment — universal background checks, a minimum purchase age of 21, a reasonable waiting period and an assault weapons ban.

Voting reforms are a step toward representation that better reflects the will of the voters, but the real game changer would be a long-term project to jettison the Electoral College. The country’s founders believed it was a way to ensure responsible leaders, but it has not worked as planned.

In a 16-year span, George W. Bush and Donald Trump lost the popular vote but won the presidency. That is a system failure. It is not fair or democratic, and it led directly to today’s unbalanced Supreme Court. Five of the six conservative justices were appointed by these two presidents. Getting rid of the Electoral College would take a constitutional amendment, which is always a hard sell. But think of the arguments you could make to both parties. There are over 5 million registered Republicans in California whose votes would finally count. Wyoming’s nearly 23,000 Democrats would also factor in.

Red and blue states are not monolithic. Therefore, we should stop pretending, for example, that there are no injured parties when red states ban abortion or make it easy for teenagers and careless people to buy whatever weapons they want — no permits or instruction required. We should also stop pretending that we are 50 walled-off states, each deciding how many freedoms we should enjoy or how many it gets to restrict. Guns cross state lines. People who need abortions cross state lines. We are in this together, and Congress and the courts should be protecting our rights — not encouraging a free-for-all that leaves some states with far less democracy than others and some Americans feeling far less equal than others.

Right wingers love to talk about freedom. But what they mean by that is actually domination. They and only they are allowed to be free. Everyone else must conform to them .

It’s an especially good day to read Frederick Douglass’ “What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?” It’s never been more relevant.

It messes with your head

This may piss off some. Ever since North Carolina state Rep. Tricia Cotham, former Democrat, switched parties and handed Republicans a supermajority in the state House of Representatives (and an abortion ban) after proclaiming herself an “unwavering advocate for abortion rights.”

Now, more than ever we need leaders who will be unwavering and unapologetic in their support of abortion rights. I’ll fight to codify Roe in the #ncga and continue my strong record of defending the right to choose.#ncpol #WomensRights #SCOTUS #Mecklenburg

— Tricia Cotham (@triciacotham) May 3, 2022

The stunning shift has not led me to the angry conclusion that she was a fraud waiting to happen. There was something of conspiracy theory to the narrative that she was a Trojan candidate. With her history as a progressive, it did not wash. And it’s a bad look for the left.

Fully vaccinated and boosted, Cotham had had Covid three times, ending up in the emergency room straining to breathe during her third bout. Doctors worried about blood clots.

In February 2022, WSOC Charlotte reported:

Her kitchen island is covered in pills and medical devices to treat lingering and long-lasting symptoms of COVID-19. Cotham says she has to use inhalers and drink three liters of water a day. She has IV drips brought to her house every Wednesday.

“My treatment plan consists of a lot of focused breathing, so a lot of inhalers, a lot of steroids, a lot of nebulizers,” Cotham said. “Night is the worst. It’s the hardest. It’s when everything starts to, I think, flare up. I take it tremendous amount of supplements that have been recommended by trials and doctors.”

“This is a very individual disease that we’re finding or the way that this virus is impacting individuals is very unique and different,” said Atrium Health Senior Director of Advanced Practice Britney Broyhill.

Long Covid can mess with your head.

I raise the issue this morning after Leah McElrath posted this video and thread on the subject.

https://twitter.com/leahmcelrath/status/1675965647887511553?s=20

I had to look up “the Simulation.” Apparently, it’s a thing.

https://twitter.com/leahmcelrath/status/1675968494192525313?s=20

https://twitter.com/leahmcelrath/status/1675970906601017352?s=20

For Cotham, was it the long Covid? There are cognitive impacts, poorly understood. And personality changes (Rolling Stone; paywall):

Although “personality change” may seem like an imprecise, colloquial way to describe what happens when someone’s character or temperament shifts, when it’s the result of an illness or chronic condition, it’s known as “medical personality change,” (MPC) and is an official diagnosis with its own billing code. 

Marjorie Roberts ended up in an Atlanta area emergency room three times. “My 40-year-old daughter said to me, ‘I want my mom back.”  

As a neurologist specializing in cognitive disorders of the brain, Anna Nordvig, MD, has frequently seen these personality shifts in older adults with dementia, whom she has treated throughout her career. After noticing an increase in cognitive difficulties in patients who had previously been infected with the novel coronavirus, Nordvig co-founded the Post-COVID “Brain Fog” Clinic at the Columbia University Irving Medical Center and New York-Presbyterian Hospital in May 2020 (she and the clinic have since moved to Weill Cornell).

According to Nordvig, many of these personality changes — which she describes as “a temporary or prolonged tendency towards personality traits with which one was not previously identified” — are seen in neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s, as well as traumatic brain injury. Additionally, she says, many chronic conditions can also cause a change in personality comparable with what Long Covid patients are experiencing, especially the low frustration tolerance that people with myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome (ME/CFS) experience.

I don’t know if this is what happened to Cotham. But I’m open the possibility. It makes more sense than the rumors and political conspiracy theories.