Digby's Hullabaloo Posts

No defense except offense

A call for a lefty demagogue has popped up for the second time in a week. This time from Jonathan Last at The Bulwark. Trumpism represents a break from the old politics for which America has few defenses. Trump has “extrapolated existing dynamics while also transforming the public’s attitudes toward violence, democracy, and the rule of law,” he writes. So now what?

Setting aside his ‘druthers (and morality, for the moment), how do we win elections in this environment?

Joe Biden’s (and Democrats’) theory of the case was, as I’ve complained, same-old, same-old. Govern and run on kitchen tables issues, insists Nancy Pelosi’s generation. Democrats did, and delivered for red, rural areas in particular where Democrats have bled support. Who noticed?

And Trump?

The 2024 Trump campaign was not posited on ideas about growth, prosperity, or progress. It was posited on the infliction of pain.

• Deporting immigrants who “poison the blood” of the nation.
• Retribution against Trump’s domestic political enemies.
• Inflicting tariffs on disfavored countries.

Trump did not promise to improve the lives of his voters. He promised to punish the people his voters wanted to hurt. That was the entirety of his electoral proposition and it was not subtext. It was the explicit, bold-face, ALL CAPS text.

Ellis Island and the Statue of Liberty are museum pieces, not guideposts, these days. A plurality of Americans is now more interested in pulling up the ladder behind them, Last suggests. (I’m reading between his lines.) They’d rather kick down than lift up latecomers to the threadbare American Dream. Making the pie higher is out. Zero-sum is in. Even undocumented immigrants are in on the game. YOU! Keep out!

Remember the Biden COVID stimulus? People were unhappy with it because they thought money was going to those who didn’t need it.

Remember Biden’s Child Tax Credit? People didn’t like that it was helping “other” families.

Remember Biden’s student loan forgiveness program? ’Nuff said.

You can go further back: Democrats and Barack Obama had to drag voters kicking and screaming to the ACA because people were furious that this new program might help some other group.

There’s always been xenophobia and a kind of national hazing of the last wave of immigrants (my maternal grandmother never forgot discrimination against the Irish). But the trending negative mood for the last generation, say, post-Sept. 11 is something new. “[T]he cumulative effect of this unhappiness has been to reorient people away from a desire for progress for themselves and toward a desire for retribution against others.”

Again, what now?

Last offers a thought experiment. What’s more likely to get more traction in 2028, offering improved access to better healthcare or promising to bring the hammer down on “health insurance companies, their CEOs, and oligarchs”?

It’s not that Last wants to see that kind of demagoguery from the left, but “it is not clear to me that Democrats can succeed in 2028 with a positive, forward-looking vision in which they propose to improve the lives of voters.”

Ho-kay. It strikes me that what Last thinks will win votes in this environment is something akin to what Bernie Sanders has been selling for years with his “millionaires and billionaires” rants. He got quite a lot of traction with that in Appalachia in 2016, but Democratic Party primary voters were not ready for it. He won the presidential primary in my WNC district that sent Mark Meadows back to Congress that fall.

I’m not sure how much stomach Democrats have for the kind of feistiness Last is suggesting, but they need some. Sanders’s pitches resonated with younger voters but felt a little one-trick-pony to me. But it’s fer damn-sure that same-old (and I mean old) won’t cut it. And thank God there is at least some movement among “younger” Democrats on the Hill to challenge the party’s gerontocracy.

Chris Smith at Vanity Fair suggested days ago that New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is the kind of Democrat to bring the heat and perhaps a new, Bernie-friendlier, working-class narrative, and more social media savvy to their sales pitch. I just don’t know. There’s still the extant media environment hostile to the left. But same-old ain’t cutting it.

As it turns out most Americans don’t care all thatm uch about abortion rights after all. And that means they don’t care all that much aboutwhether some women lose their health or their lives for lack of ability to obtain one. I wish I could say that shocks me, but it doesn’t. When the price of eggs is higher than it was four years ago nothing else really matters.

Here’s how it’s going in the courts:

The case now before the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, centers on whether federal emergency room mandates — enshrined in EMTALA, the Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act — preempt state abortion bans when they conflict. EMTALA requires that emergency rooms stabilize patients in crisis. Idaho maintains that they don’t overlap, that the ban’s exception for preventing the woman’s death covers all emergencies. The Biden administration and the hospital system counter that pregnant women can experience a range of medical emergencies that put them on the path to permanent injury or illness, if not death. 

Look at the way one of the judges frames his question:

“Your argument is: If the mother wants to kill the baby even though it’s not necessary to prevent [her death] — then they have to be airlifted,” Judge Lawrence VanDyke, a Trump appointee and former solicitor general of Nevada and Montana, asked the lawyer for an Idaho hospital system after she explained that patients had been airlifted out of the state because they might need what Idaho classifies as a criminal abortion. 

Gee, I wonder what his position is?

Where’s this going? Well, the Supremes teed it up beautifully for Sam Alito:

VanDyke and the other Trump appointees painted the case as federal government overreach by the Biden administration, which is seeking to enforce the commonly held interpretation of EMTALA. “How is this not regulation of the practice of medicine?” Judge Daniel Bress asked. VanDyke mused about whether “ethics” have a place in medicine, and why it shouldn’t be left to the states to decide what they are.

Judge Consuelo Callahan, a George W. Bush appointee, cut through the attempts to accurately depict an anti-abortion regime to ask: “Is this an exercise in futility?” 

She pointed out that a new administration is coming in, and asked whether the judges should just send the case back down to the district court. 

The Supreme Court’s delay — incurred by preemptively taking the case from the 9th Circuit, getting fully briefed and hearing arguments, then deciding that it intervened too early and sending it right back — has made it near-certain that the case will still be percolating when Joe Biden’s Department of Justice becomes Donald Trump’s. It’s very unlikely that Trump’s DOJ will share the Biden one’s interest in preserving abortion rights in emergency rooms, likely ending the case at least in its current posture. 

Don’t kid yourself. If the Court felt slightly singed by the criticism around the reversal of Roe, you can bet that this last election soothed them. If they had worried at all about the poular backlash it proved to be a paper tiger in terms of partisan politics and that’s uppermost in their minds these days. They’re likely to open the door to criminalizing this, in fact any kind of travel for the pupose of obtaining an abortion. Why wouldn’t they?

Instead of making Trump fire him, Christopher Wray let Trump off the hook and has politely bowed out and resigned today. This is not how this is supposed to work. The whole idea of the year term was to keep the FBI director out of partisan politics while not allowing him to create a J. Edgar Hoover-style fiefdom of its own. As with so much else, Trump cares nothing about intentions, traditions or norms and the fact is that he has the power to fire him so there was never any doubt that he would do it. Everyone in America exists to serve him.

Here’s the usual classy response from Trump:

Paul Krugman’s quit his NY Times column and although he hasn’t said it in so many words, it’s most likely because he felt constrained from saying what he wants to say the way he wants to say it. He does have a newsletter and he’s already bringing the fire:

Once upon a time a Republican president, sure that large parts of federal spending were worthless, appointed a commission led by a wealthy businessman to bring a business sensibility to the budget, going through it line by line to identify inefficiency and waste. The commission initially made a big splash, and there were desperate attempts to spin its work as a success. But in the end few people were fooled. Ronald Reagan’s venture, the President’s Private Sector Survey on Cost Control — the so-called “Grace commission,” headed by J. Peter Grace — was a flop, making no visible dent in spending.

Why was it a flop? There is, of course, inefficiency and waste in the federal government, as there is in any large organization. But most government spending happens because it delivers something people want, and you can’t make significant cuts without hard choices.

Furthermore, the notion that businessmen have skills that readily translate into managing the government is all wrong. Business and government serve different purposes and require different mindsets.

In any case, the Grace commission’s failure taught everyone serious about the budget, liberal or conservative, an important lesson: Anyone who proposes saving lots of taxpayer money by eliminating “waste, fraud and abuse” should be ignored, because the very use of the phrase shows that they have no idea what they’re talking about.

OK, you know where this is going. There’s an obvious parallel between the Grace commission and Donald Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency, DOGE, led by Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy. (The picture above is Leonardo Loredan, doge of Venice from 1501 to 1521, painted by Bellini.) But there are differences too: Muskaswamy bring a level of arrogant ignorance and clownish amateurishness that Grace never came close to emulating.

Grace, after all, assembled a staff of nearly 2,000 business executives divided into 36 task forces, who spent 18 months on the job, although they mostly came up empty. So far, at least, Muskaswamy don’t seem to be doing anything besides credulously scooping up random posts from social media.

Oh, and putting supervision in the hands of Marjorie Taylor Greene won’t help.

That said, there’s a pattern in their pronouncements so far, which I’d describe as Willie Sutton (the man who robbed banks because “that’s where the money is”) in reverse: going where the money isn’t.

He goes on to list some of the half-baked blather we’ve heard from Musk and Ramaswamy and it’s even dumber when you see it all together. Here’s just one of their bright ideas:

Moving on: In what I guess we should consider their opening manifesto, published in the Wall Street Journal, Muskaswamy call for “mass head-count reductions across the federal bureaucracy.” This suggests that they believe that bloated payrolls are a major budget issue. But how big a factor is employee compensation in federal spending? This big:

Again, going where the money isn’t.

But wait: aren’t there tens of millions of Americans employed by the government? Yes, there are — but they overwhelmingly work for state and especially local governments, not the federal government DOGE is supposed to be tackling. In fact, federal employment is about the same now as it was in the 1950s:

What are all those state and local workers doing? The Census offers a very useful chart:

The lion’s share of state and local employment is in education. Much of the rest is either in hospitals and other health care or in law enforcement. So when someone says “government worker” you shouldn’t imagine a paper-pusher in a cubicle — I mean, the government, like the private sector, does have lots of guys in cubicles, but they aren’t the typical employee. You should instead picture a schoolteacher, or maybe a nurse or a police officer.

He goes on to explain that the US is basically an insurance company with an army. In other words, the military and the safety net. As he points out there are inefficiencies in some things but certainly not in Social Security which is an extremely efficient program.

Health care is a more complicated story; there are some real inefficiencies in our system. But Musk seems to have the nature of these inefficiencies completely backwards:

Yes, American health care has uniquely high administrative costs. But Musk pretty clearly imagines that these costs reflect government inefficiency, when the real reason health care in America involves so much bureaucracy is the exceptional degree to which we rely on private insurance companies. Comparing administrative expenses for public and private insurance is tricky, but there’s no question that they’re much higher in the private sector.

This comes back to the point that running the government isn’t at all the same as running a business. The purpose of Medicare and Medicaid is to pay for peoples’ health care. The purpose of health insurance companies is to collect premiums; paying for care is a cost — the industry actually calls the share of premiums that end up paying medical bills the “medical loss ratio” — and they devote considerable resources to finding ways to avoid covering medical expenses.

Obligatory disclaimer given recent events: No, I’m not offering a justification for killing health-industry executives. Murder is evil, and in this case it’s also stupid. The problem with the U.S. health insurance industry isn’t that it’s run by bad people, it’s the antisocial incentives created by the system.

Read on for much more accessible wonkery, which is his specialty and why I’m glad he’s still going to be writing about this stuff. The NY Times is poorer for the loss.

His conclusion:

Now, in the end none of this may matter. The real purpose of DOGE is, arguably, to give Elon Musk an opportunity to strut around, feeling important. And while it’s a clown show, these clowns — unlike some of the other people Trump may put in office — won’t be in a position to inflict major damage on national security, public health and more.

But it is a clown show, and everyone should treat it as such.

I suspect that’s true but I will admit that I’ve lost faith in my ability to see beyond the next week when it comes to politics. This weird billionaire populism has me off-balance and I honestly can’t predict what they are going to do. Perhaps it will become more clear as time goes on.

Some of them agree wholeheartedly that their Democratic colleagues should be put in jail. The Bulwark reports:

“With politicians, if you’ve used a congressional committee and you’ve lied and tried to set people up and falsely imprisoned people, then you should be held accountable,” Rep. James Comer (R-Ky.) told The Bulwark.

“If they broke the law, then they should [be imprisoned],” said Rep. Tim Burchett (R-Tenn.). “Now we know that they’ve manipulated evidence, so—if that’s the case, then absolutely.”

“It’s not looking good for them,” said Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-Colo.). “You know, they’re asking for their preemptive pardon. So it kind of sounds suspect and guilty. I think anybody who has politically imprisoned American citizens and completely ruined their lives needs to be investigated.”

I don’t know wtf Boebert is babling about — nobody in congress has “politically imprisoned American citizens and completely ruined their lives.” But she’s extremely stupid so who knows what’s in her head?

It feels like it’s only a matter of time before we have literal fights breaking out on the floors of congress. Maybe even duels?

Comer had some especially tart words for the ranking member on his own committee:

“I haven’t kept up with the January 6th stuff like other people,” Comer said. “I don’t know exactly what Trump was referring to. But I have two years of experience working with one of the January 6th Committee members, and I can tell you he’s been nothing but completely dishonest.”

Comer’s shot was aimed at Rep. Jamie Raskin, the ranking member on the Oversight Committee.  You can understand why he would say that. He’s a Trumper-style liar himself and Raskin makes him look like the moron simply by speaking like an educated person whenever there is a public hearing. It’s bound to sting.

Raskin responsed to the Hill:

In America, we jail people only for having committed criminal offenses that they are found guilty of by a unanimous jury of their peers. We don’t jail people for doing their jobs and living up to their constitutional oaths of office.

It would be nice to live in a time again when people can do their jobs without being threatened with jail time or worse for doing their jobs and living up to their oaths of office. We’re proud of the work we did on the Jan. 6 select committee. We are proud of standing up for the Constitution and the rule of law, and we’re still doing it. And we will keep doing it.]

I really wonder how wwe’re going to get through this with the caliber of idiots the GOP is electing ton congress and the presidency. It’s great that Raskin still believes in the Constitution but it’s hard to see how that’s going to be enough. These Republicans are living in a bizarroworld in which they project everything they are doing on to their sworn enemies, the people who don’t worship Donald Trump. It’s a very big cult and its getting more dangerous by the day.

Why? Because he believes the CIA was involved in JFK’s assassination.

Of course he does:

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. believes the CIA had a role in assassinating his uncle, President John F. Kennedy — part of RFK Jr.’s motivation for pushing his daughter-in-law, Amaryllis Fox Kennedy, for deputy CIA director, Axios has learned.

According to Axios, that request is causing a great deal of “drama” but no details.

 If Fox Kennedy were named deputy to John Ratcliffe, Trump’s pick for CIA director, she’d be in a position to dig into what the CIA knows about the assassination — and potentially could urge the release of documents. Podcaster Joe Rogan and others have been agitating for that.

“The evidence is overwhelming that the CIA was involved in the murder and in the cover-up,” Kennedy said about his uncle’s death in a podcast in May of last year.

He also said that there is “convincing” but “circumstantial” evidence that the CIA was involved in his father’s death, as well.

By the way, here;s something else to be angry/depressed about:

RFK Jr. has real influence. Trump has embraced the former Democrat — viewing him as a symbol of a broadening MAGA coalition and tapping him for his Cabinet.

He really believes that I guess. And why not? According to CNN his approval rating is at 55% right now. MAGA forever…

Athens, the worst is yet to come.

video courtesy @BettyBowers pic.twitter.com/pIlcIiKGxL

— Hoodlum 🇺🇸 (@NotHoodlum) December 10, 2024

If it feels as though the new Trump administration is taking shape at warp speed, that’s because it is. It’s unusual for a new administration to be announcing all these cabinet and staff nominations in such rapid succession, but that’s part of the Project 2025 manifesto to hit the ground running as fast as possible. And they’re using the Steve Bannon tactic of flooding the zone to keep the media and the opposition off balance.

Trump’s getting awards from Fox News, gallivanting around Paris with his best buddy, naming one billionaire after another to his administration and giving his family members anything they want. He has even named his son’s (apparently) ex-fiance Kimberly Guilfoyle to be Ambassador to Greece. And for any recalcitrant Senators who still believe they have a say in any of it, he’s bringing the hammer down.

Take for example the case of Nebraska Senator Joni Ernst, a former female combat officer who had some serious reservations about Trump’s choice to be Secretary of Defense. After all, as someone who has experienced sexual assault she was logically a bit disturbed by the rape allegations against him as well as his recent comments that he doesn’t think women should be allowed in combat.

Well, Trump and his henchmen made sure Ernst understood that they were not going to stand for any guff from her. Politico reported:

In recent days, allies of Trump adopted an approach that is not novel for the president-elect and his followers: Make life extremely uncomfortable for anyone who dares to oppose him. The swarm of MAGA attacks that Sen. Joni Ernst has experienced is a warning of what’s in store for others who express skepticism of his personnel choices.

Hegseth “became a cause,” said a Trump ally who was granted anonymity to speak freely. “Not even for the official Trump operation, but the movement who is going apeshit for him.”..

“Joni, I’m told,” said a Trump ally with insider knowledge of the transition process, “got the message loud and clear.”

On Monday Ernst said that she will now support Hegseth through the process and demanded that any of the women he assaulted come forward and testify against him or she will discount their accusations. She, of all people, knows exactly what will happen to them if they do.

Whatever resistance the Republican senators may have felt toward Trump’s autocratic demands has fizzled in the face of Dear Leader deploying MAGA threats. It is a feature of Trump’s Republican Party. Recall what Senator Mitt Romney biographer McKay Coppins told CNN when he was asked if Romney was planning to endorse Vice President Kamala Harris:

“Mitt Romney knows that he would be on that enemies list. He’s worried about protecting his family. He said, ‘You know, I have 25 grandkids. How do you protect 25 grandkids?’”

Let’s just say the pressure is intense and most of these GOP officials apparently value their seats more than they value their integrity in any case. The way to succeed in Republican politics these days is to follow orders, no questions asked.

So, it appears that Trump is most likely going to get his way and every miscreant nominee will be confirmed. How long they last is another story. If you recall Trump’s first term, the turnover was historic. It’s hard to imagine that most of them will go the distance.

From what we can tell, they plan to do as much as possible through executive orders, many of which are bound to be at least delayed through litigation. But when it comes to appropriations there’s no getting around the congress. Even if Trump and his Office of Management and Budget wizard Russell Vought are able to employ “impoundment” (the currently illegal process by which the president can spend appropriated funds contrary to the congress’s negotiated agreement ) they still have to get the budget passed through legislation. And that may just mess up Trump’s first 100 days in ways they can’t anticipate.

Over the weekend, Trump’s senior adviser and deportation zealot Stephen Miller appeared on Fox News Sunday where he told Maria Bartiromo that Senate Majority Leader John Thune ,R-S.D., and Sen. Lindsey Graham R-S.C., promised the president they can get the full funding for his massive deportation plan done by early February, weeks before the continuing budget resolution from last year expires in March. The plan is to do two big bills through reconciliation (which means they’re filibuster proof) the first being some kind of border/energy/defense bill that could cost in the neighborhood of $120 billion and the second down the road to extend and expand the Trump tax cuts along with whatever other draconian plans they have to destroy the health, safety and economic security of the American people.

According to Axios, Thune wants this first bill to be budget neutral or negative and is thinking about reversing the Biden administration’s student loan relief to pay for it. You have to wonder if he’s consulted with the shadow president Elon Musk about whether that’s going to be ok. After all, he’s working on reducing the government altogether by $2 trillion so he probably needs to use that student loan relief for that. Who’s Trump going to choose?

Meanwhile, there’s the House of Representatives which, the last I heard, still has something to say about all this and they will be operating with a one vote margin during the first two months of the new administration. They are already reportedly chafing at the Musk “DOGE” contraption since budgeting really is their bailiwick and they want to do the cutting themselves. Apparently, the Rep. Jason Smith, R-Mo., who chairs the House Ways and Means Committee, insists there will just be one big reconciliation bill later in the year.

And then there’s the House Freedom Caucus which is never satisfied and almost always refuses to take yes for an answer. If there is any negotiation to be done, and one expects there will be with such a small margin and every member having leverage, we can expect that they will take their demands to places even Donald Trump may fear to tread.

So yes, Republicans are all cowed by Trump and his MAGA army and none of them are operating out of principle. You might think that means Trump will have smooth sailing. But he is a chaos agent and it’s very difficult to know if he even understands what he’s saying half the time. His inner circle already has competing priorities and half the people he’s chosen are without any experience while the other half have agendas that clash with one another. The two houses of congress are already butting heads and there is dissension within each of them.

The bottom line is that when it comes to these complicated budgetary matters this administration will have no leadership at all. I don’t doubt that they are going to do a whole lot of very bad things and it’s entirely possible that the worst of it, the deportation plan, will pass early on just as Stephen Miller says it will. But the rest of it is going to be a shitshow with possible government shutdowns and speaker challenges and the most powerful man in the world eventually facing down the richest man in the world when their egos finally can’t fit in the oval office at the same time. If you have any spare change, you might want to invest in popcorn futures.

Salon

.

Do Republicans build anything?

Temperatures here are expected to fall steadily over the next 24 hours. There is also a wind advisory.* How do I know? The National Weather Service. Where do you think The Weather Channel and other weather information sites get their information? From a bevy of satellites owned or operated by NOAA, NWS’s parent organization.

I rather like having that info free and at my fingertips. I rather like that air traffic controlers from the FAA keep my flight from colliding with others in the sky nearby.

But our Republican friends are not into that so much. Nor into public education, as we’ve long known:

Cultists’ push to charterize, voucherize, or tax-credit scholarship public education out of existence — supported by a religious right profiteers have co-opted — is a betrayal of the country’s founding vision. Public education is the largest portion of annual budgets in all 50 states. The cult sees public schools (and children) as resources to strip-mine.

Donald Trump nominating vaccine skeptic RFK Jr. to head the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services is another brick knocked out of the schoolhouse wall.

Casey Quinlan writes at The New Republic that Kennedy’s opposition to childhood vaccinations will further undermine public support for public schools and advance right-wing efforts to shrink systems until they can be drowned in the bathtub:

Anti-vax movements align well with conservative designs for public education. Under Project 2025, which is essentially the agenda of Trump’s second term, concocted by the Heritage Foundation, the Trump administration plans to greatly weaken the public education system through several policy changes, such as having states eventually take over Title I funding, which provides financial assistance to school districts with a high concentration of low-income students.

Trump has said he would dismantle the U.S. Department of Education—though it’s unclear how long this planned deconstruction will take. In the meantime, his choice of Linda McMahon, the former CEO of World Wrestling Entertainment, is at the very least a demonstration of Trump’s commitment to reducing education funding. She is the chair of the board at the America First Policy Institute, a conservative think tank that supports a “cut in federal education spending and redirected resources toward school choice.”

[…]

The movement for parental rights is no grassroots campaign. It’s spawned wholesale from conservative think tanks and advocacy groups such as the Heritage Foundation and American Principles Project, which have helped power legislation opposing all mention of LGBTQ people and people of color in schools. Some of the groups and activists involved in stoking the parental rights movement have been vocal opponents of public schooling more broadly. This lines up well with long-standing conservative pushes for more school privatization and less support for public schools.

I’ve said it before, the end game is to divert all education funding mandated by state constitutions to private, for-profit actors for the same reason Willie Sutton robbed banks: it’s where the money is in the budgets of all 50 states.

Do these people build anything?

* Wind events here these days induce PTSD among some survivors of Helene.

And spaghetti against the wall

Political skulduggery is born here and raised elsewhere. The North Carolina GOP should advertise.

When Republicans won control of North Carolina’s state Supreme Court in 2022, the new 5-2 court quickly reversed a previous ruling and ordered a new redraw of the state’s congressional districts. The new map turned a 7-7 partisan balance in this evenly divided state into an 11-3 split favoring Republicans. Results borne out on Nov. 5 will be felt on Capitol Hill and across the nation. Down-ballot races matter. A lot.

A month after Election Day, political power struggles continue in North Carolina. The GOP supermajority in the state House will attempt today to override Gov. Roy Cooper’s veto of a bill marketed as “disaster relief” for western North Carolina. Branded “a sham” by Cooper, the bill “appropriated no new money for areas hit by Helene, nor created the small-business grants requested by local business leaders and Gov. Roy Cooper, a Democrat.” But the measure does strip powers from Democrats elected on Nov. 5 to the state’s executive branch. The veto override hangs on the votes of three WNC Republicans who voted against bill.

Also today, the state’s Board of Elections is expected to hear election protests by Court of Appeals Judge Jefferson Griffin in his race for a seat on the state Supreme Court. The Board on Tuesday issued a press release denying Griffin’s request for a statewide hand recount. After multiple recounts, Griffin trails incumbent State Supreme Court Justice Allison Riggs by 734 votes.

Griffin has challenged the validity of 60,000 votes cast across the state, nearly 1,600 in my county alone, four of them my friends. Griffin alleges those voters, some of whom have voted for decades, are ineligible to cast ballots.

Chris Cooper, a political science professor at Western Carolina University, believes Griffin’s “incentive is to throw everything at the wall and see what sticks.”

End game

The Raleigh News & Observer reports:

The final count of votes in the race on Tuesday upheld Democratic incumbent Allison Riggs’s victory, reports Kyle Ingram. That means Griffin’s protests, which the North Carolina Democratic Party has challenged in federal court, may be his only avail. If they’re accepted, it could change the race’s outcome.

[…]

If the board rules against Griffin, he could appeal to the Wake County Superior Court. From there, he could eventually appeal the case to the state Supreme Court.

This is the GOP’s end game, suggests a former Democratic consultant:

“The question is, can the Republicans take what’s going on here and turn it into a semi-legitimate case?” said Pope McCorkle III, known as Mac, a former Democratic political consultant and professor of public policy at Duke University. “If they can, Riggs might lose.”

The odds are stacked in a North Carolina court that’s already handed control of the U.S. House of Representatives to Republicans.

“What’s happening in North Carolina is sinister, and it will have a chilling effect on our democracy and our country if they’re able to get away with what they’re trying to achieve,” said N.C. Democratic Party chair Anderson Clayton at a Tuesday news conference.

But there is something more sinister going on than Griffin’s challenge to 60,000 voters in his race. If state Republicans can make their ineligible voter allegations stick in court, they might trigger a state provision for holding new elections in multiple races, not just in his. By triggering a do-over, they could get a second chance to hold onto the veto-proof majority they lost in the House on Nov. 5.

§ 163-182.13.  New elections.

(a) When State Board May Order New Election. – The State Board may order a new election, upon agreement of at least five of its members, in the case of any one or more of the following:

(1) Ineligible voters sufficient in number to change the outcome of the election were allowed to vote in the election, and it is not possible from examination of the official ballots to determine how those ineligible voters voted and to correct the totals.

(2) Eligible voters sufficient in number to change the outcome of the election were improperly prevented from voting.

(3) Other irregularities affected a sufficient number of votes to change the outcome of the election.

(4) Irregularities or improprieties occurred to such an extent that they taint the results of the entire election and cast doubt on its fairness.

Utterly specious

Republicans in the state have long loathed Gene Nichol, a UNC-Chapel Hill law professor and News & Observer columnist. NC Republicans are “trying to break down the fundaments,” he argued in his 2020 book, “Indecent Assembly.” Nichol adds, “That’s a bigger transgression than being wrong or being stupid. It’s a rejection of what it means to be a North Carolinian, what it means to be an American.”

Nichol writes in Tuesday’s News & Observer:

Jefferson Griffin thinks his fanciful, already judicially-rejected, election-busting ideological claim counts more than the personal franchise of tens of thousands of Tar-Heel citizens. He also likely has a quiet confidence that the most partisan state supreme court in the United States — which he is anxious to join — will ignore the law and sweep him in. Though it now appears Democrats are trying to head this off in federal court.

In embracing the North Carolina Republican “politics of façade,” Griffin shows he shouldn’t become a justice.

We’re awfully familiar with “façade” politics in Carolina. When Republican lawmakers used “surgical precision” to disenfranchise Black voters with a “monster” voter ID bill, federal courts found the proffered interest in “ballot integrity” was mere ruse, since no evidence of voter fraud could be produced.

Mere ruses and voter fraud smoke bombs are SOP for the GOP everywhere.

Utterly specious justification takes one a long way in North Carolina Republican politics. The first Republican president Abraham Lincoln advised: “Tell the truth and you won’t have so much to remember.” They must have dropped that from the platform.

Oh, decades ago.

Will the Real Americans in Trump country put their money where their votes are or will they fight as hard as they usually do against Democrats when they make even the slightest attempt to have kids eat vegetables or go outside to play:

The Archer Daniels Midland wet mill on the outskirts of Decatur, Ill., rises like an industrial behemoth from the frozen, harvested cornfields of Central Illinois. Steam billowed in the 20-degree cold last week, as workers turned raw corn into sweet, ubiquitous high-fructose corn syrup. Three miles away, a Primient mill, which sprawls across 400 acres divided by North 22nd Street, was doing the same.

To Robert F. Kennedy Jr., President-elect Donald J. Trump’s nominee for secretary of health and human services, this bedraggled city — set deep in Trump country — is the belly of the agribusiness beast, churning out products that he says poison America, rendering its children obese and its citizens chronically ill.

To the workers here, those mills — the largest in the world — are their livelihoods.

“It’d have a huge impact,” a 37-year-old electrician who would identify himself by only his first name, Tyler, said of Mr. Kennedy’s declaration of war on corn syrup and corn oil. He was grabbing lunch at Debbie’s Diner in the shadow of the mills. “That shuts down Central Illinois, if A.D.M. shuts down.”

Mr. Trump’s alliance with Mr. Kennedy during the presidential campaign was the ultimate marriage of convenience, uniting a right-wing populist presidential candidate with a scion of the nation’s most famous Democratic family, whose appeal to would-be Trump voters rested mainly with his conspiracy theories on Covid-19 and vaccines. Mr. Kennedy said at the time that Mr. Trump had promised him control of the nation’s public health agencies.

Mr. Kennedy’s other track record — on environmental protection and an abiding hatred of America’s unhealthy diet — may have been less of a draw to the fast-food-loving, regulation-hating Mr. Trump, but the former and future president said he would keep Mr. Kennedy’s environmentalism in check while letting him “go wild” on health.

Then Mr. Trump nominated him to head the sprawling Department of Health and Human Services, which has partial purview over America’s diet through a powerful subsidiary, the Food and Drug Administration, and enormous influence on health through its control of Medicare and Medicaid.

Now a brewing battle over corn syrup and vegetable oils is raising the prospect of a fight between Mr. Kennedy and Mr. Trump’s own voters in farm country.

I doubt Trump really cares about any of this. He doesn’t think he owes the farmers or Big Ag anything. He doesn’t owe anyone anything. And he certainly doesn’t care about the health of the economy or the American people. But if the local Senators come begging and scraping or if Big Ag can find a way for him to wet his beak, he might step in and put a leash on Bobby.

Whatever happens, it will be interesting to see how Trump voters react. I’m pretty sure they’ll find a way to rationalize it even if Trump gives him the go ahead. The cult is just that strong.