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Trump’s first federal indictment comes down

Published by digby on June 9, 2023

And Republicans once more circle the wagons

Another day, another Donald Trump indictment.

In April, the former president and current candidate for president was indicted by the Manhattan District Attorney on 34 counts of falsifying business records. Last month, he was found guilty in a civil court of sexually abusing and defaming E. Jean Carroll. And last night, as expected, he was indicted on federal charges pertaining to the collection of classified documents he refused to give back to the government after departing the White House.

And that’s just for starters.

Trump is still facing a huge civil case in New York over his shady business dealings and he’s under criminal investigations in both state and federal jurisdictions regarding his attempted coup in 2020.

One by one the legal dominoes are finally starting to fall.

These cases are hitting all of Trump’s sweet spots. He was found guilty of his grotesque behavior toward women (which he has bragged about publicly) and he’s going to be tried for paying hush money to women with whom he had affairs. There are literally dozens of women who have credibly accused him of assaulting them and who are now cheering that he’s finally being held liable for it. Now we have the first indictment that pertains to his behavior as a former president who was always planning to run again and his bizarre refusal to return classified documents when the government asked for them back is par for the course.

Trump has acted in inexplicably suspicious and self-defeating ways since he first ran for president in 2016. From calling on Russia to hack his rival’s emails to his strange affinity for the worst dictators on the planet to his pathological lying about everything, Donald Trump has acted in ways that only cult members could excuse as normal.

This Mar-a-Lago case is especially vexing. When he decided to tell the government to go pound sand, he was not some naif who hadn’t been in government before and didn’t know the rules. He’d been president for four years by that time and knew very well that he was not supposed to keep classified documents at his beach club. And if they had been taken by accident in his chaotic move from the White House, he also knew very well that he should just give them back. But he refused, once again raising suspicions that he must be doing something nefarious with them. His behavior ever since then has done nothing to allay those concerns. Again, nobody normal would behave this way.

But that’s Trump. His motives are always self-serving and often just plain dumb but you never know if he’s in it for money or influence or something worse. Whatever his reasons, it’s clear that he has zero respect for the law or the Constitution. He’s gotten away with this stubborn childishness his whole life assuming that nothing could stop him because nothing ever has. He did it as president and was legally protected by a DOJ policy that held that a president couldn’t be indicted and Republican Senate partisans who refused to convict him in two unprecedented congressional impeachments.

But now he’s lost the shield of the presidency that kept him safe for four years and the rule of law is coming for him. If the case is strong (and we don’t know that it is) he could face jail time. The only thing we do know about the indictment at this writing on Thursday night is that there are seven crimes charged. (We don’t know how many counts there might be.) Trump’s lawyer James Trusty appeared on television Thursday and said he had only seen a summary but the language indicates that one of the crimes falls under the Espionage Act and others refer to conspiracy, false statements and obstruction of justice. We’ll have to wait to see exactly what they are charging but these are very serious crimes.

And frankly, it’s even more serious that a former president committed them, not less. We really should be able to hold someone in that position to a higher standard than some faceless bureaucrat, many of whom have landed in jail for far less than what he’s done. It matters that a president would lie to federal law enforcement and crudely obstruct a lawful subpoena. It’s inexcusable for any former high official but for a man who is seeking to become president again, it should be disqualifying.

Unfortunately, none of that is relevant to the Republicans, many of whom were out in force on Thursday night hysterically defending Trump and proclaiming the end of the Republic. It’s really rich to watch a group of people who screeched “lock her up” on repeat for four long years now clutch their pearls over the inhumanity of holding this man accountable for defying the rule of law and claiming that he declassified every document in his possession just by thinking about it.

For a taste of how the right is reacting, take a look at Mark Levin on Fox News:

I think that fairly represents the general tenor of the right wing reaction tonight.

According to Jonathan Swan at the New York Times, the indictment was anticipated by the Trump political team which had a plan ready to go to deploy talking points and fundraising pleas the minute the indictment came down. Like clockwork, they all immediately responded confirming that the party would rally around him as they did after the Manhattan announcement.

And if anyone expected the other presidential candidates to step up, they will be sadly disappointed. 

Former VP Mike Pence and former South Carolina governor Nikki Haley didn’t bother to comment, former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie said he was waiting to see the actual charges, and the rest (including chief rival Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis) all ranted about the Justice Department (DOJ) being weaponized against Republicans and vowed to end political bias at the DOJ. (They might want to have a word with the accused who spent his entire four years in office demanding that the Justice Department and even foreign leaders take down his political rivals.) The only one with any integrity was former Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson, who said that Trump should drop out, which is correct.

CBS’s Robert Costa tweeted:

That’s a real bunch of heroic patriots, isn’t it? Just the kind of people we all dream of leading the most powerful nation on earth.

And then, of course, there’s the man himself. He was the first to announce that he’d been indicted and rushed to set the narrative before the details are released. In fact, according to Swan, they had it ready to go before the indictment even came down.

Will this end up redounding to Trump’s benefit in the long run? It’s hard to say. The cumulative effect of all these lawsuits and indictments might finally change the dynamic. But in the short run, it’s rallying the Trump faithful and causing the party to coalesce once again around the man whenever anyone attempts to hold him accountable for his many misdeeds. Trump’s greatest asset, perversely, is his bottomless talent for scandal, corruption and crime which inevitably motivated the Republicans to circle the wagons around him. Someday, maybe they’ll figure out that they’d all be better off if they just let him face the consequences. Of course, that would mean they’d be deprived of the fun of joining him in his pity party and since ostentatious whining is their main source of pleasure, I don’t see that happening any time soon.

Salon

The arrogance of stupid

Published by Tom Sullivan on June 9, 2023

“Hold my beer,” says MTG

https://twitter.com/RepMTG/status/1666807285543505920?s=20

Move over Samuel Beckett, the GOP is branching out into the theater of the absurd.

If you blinked during Thursday night coverage of the Donald Trump indictment in the classified documents case, you may have missed Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene’s (R-Ga.) appearance on “The Ingraham Angle.” While the non-propaganda press ran wall-to-wall coverage of the prosecution of the former president, Fox News worked to keep its audience fixated on the alleged misdeeds of the Joe Biden crime family.

Trump mishandled sensitive documents? “Hold my beer,” says Greene, stepping up to the microphone (Huffington Post):

Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) raised eyebrows with a claim she made during a TV interview on Thursday evening. 

Greene said she read a document inside a SCIF ― a sensitive compartmented information facility ― related to bribery allegations Republicans have made against President Joe Biden but have yet to provide evidence for.

Then, she described that document while speaking to Laura Ingraham on Fox News: 

And usually, information revealed in the SCIF can’t be repeated outside of it. 

But Greene ―a conspiracy theorist and close ally of House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) who has called for a “national divorce” and spoke last year at a white nationalist event ― said she copied as much as she could once she left the SCIF. 

“This is a document that all of America should be able to see, but the FBI is stonewalling us and they would only let us see it in a SCIF,” she said. “Well what I did after reading the document is I made notes when I walked out and I went up to the table.”

She held up those notes to the camera.

“I wrote down everything that I had just read so that I could come out and tell the American people what I read,” she said. 

The FD-1023 document Greene saw in the SCIF contains unsubstantiated allegations from an anonymous whistleblower regarding the Bidens, bribery, and Burisma, an old hobbyhorse on the right. Transcribing what she read inside the SCIF outside the SCIF sounded to me and others like a confession.

“Revoke her clearance,” tweeted former Republican congressman Adam Kinzinger.

USA Today humorist Rex Huppke tweeted:

The GOP really needs to get people who are better at doing crimes, because this one was like, “HEY, EXCUSE ME, IS THERE A CAMERA I CAN DO THIS CRIME IN FRONT OF, PLEASE?”

Greene’s actions are part of a full-court press by the right to change the subject or to cast aspersions on the Trump indictment.

“Everyone who died on the field at gettysburg to save this nation”? Confederate soldiers, 28,000 of them, died at Gettysburg — more than a third of Robert E. Lee’s army — in their attempt to destroy the United States of America. That is what the Jan. 6 investigations and recent sedition convictions are about. Trump may yet face indictment over his role in the attempted coup.

Mark Levin was in hysterics last night on Fox after the Trump indictment news and tried to divert attention onto Biden-Burisma as he raved that the federal indictment “is war on Trump, it is war on the Republican Party, and it is a war on the republic!”

The last time I watched Andrew Breitbart rave like that, I thought, “This guy’s going to have a coronary.” He died of heart failure soon after.

The Trumpish right is prepared to go down with the ship.

“It won’t matter. There’s nothing in the Constitution that says [Trump] can’t be president from inside prison. And then once he gets there, he can pardon himself,” said Grant Stinchfield of Real America’s Voice.

These reactions are even more reason to believe that the MAGA-GOP will attempt to win the 2024 elections by any means necessary or, should the votes still not go their way, try to overthrow the republic on their second try.

Conservatism is a hell of a drug:

“Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.”

Donnie “Seven Counts” indicted

Published by Tom Sullivan on June 9, 2023

Took long enough

Finally. Special prosecutor Jack Smith indicted former President Donald Trump in Florida Thursday on seven federal counts over his removal, possession, and retention of classified documents. Trump attorney Jim Trusty confirmed that Trump will appear in a Miami federal court Tuesday afternoon for processing.

Trusty told reporters Thursday evening that the summons mentioned the “Espionage Act, multiple false-statement charges and ‘several obstruction-based type charges.’ Specifically, he mentioned Section 1519 (which relates to obstructing an official effort and was widely expected because it was listed on the F.B.I. search warrant affidavit), but also a new one: Section 1512, which criminalizes witness tampering or other means of obstructing an official proceeding.” There may also be a conspiracy count. Charges will be unsealed on Tuesday.

Trusty told Fox News this morning that unlike other presidents Trump is being singled out for having “commingled” personal and government documents upon leaving office (Washington Post):

“For every other president in history, there’s a process of cooperation, a deference to the president to make that first cut — is something presidential or is it personal?” Trusty said. “Here we have a complete weaponization of something that’s never been criminal in history, and it’s a process that frankly is expected to take a long time.”

National defense documents were among those that the FBI discovered in a search of Trump’s Mar-a-Lago residence last summer. The FBI uncovered evidence that Trump had retained and insecurely stored classified documents in addition to those he had already returned to the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA). After two previous attempts by NARA to retrieve government records, Trump attorneys certified that Trump had returned everything. He had not.

While prosecution of a former president for such actions sets a precedent, such cases are not unprecedented. In February, Chief U.S. District Court Judge J. Michael Seabright of the U.S. District Court for the District of Hawaii sentenced Asia Janay Lavarello, 32, “to three months of imprisonment and a $5,500 fine for knowingly removing classified information concerning the national defense or foreign relations of the United States and retaining it at an unauthorized location.”

The federal indictments in Florida come two months after a New York state court charged Trump for falsifying documents connected to his hush money payments to a porn star.

Trump’s trial in Manhattan is scheduled to begin March 25, 2024, the middle of the primary season. As for the federal charges, Politico reports:

A federal case might operate on a similar timeline. The lengthy pretrial process allows time for Trump’s lawyers and prosecutors to exchange evidence, file motions and even discuss the unlikely prospect of a plea deal.

It’s always hard to predict how long pretrial matters will take, even in run-of-the-mill criminal trials. Dozens of cases stemming from the Jan. 6 attack on Congress have reached the trial stage in recent months, some of them more than a year after charges were filed.

Trump, historically, has sought to drag out litigation, and he’d have many tools in his arsenal to do so here — from seeking to change venue to fighting to dismiss the case altogether.

But Smith brought these Trump charges in South Florida, a jurisdiction known for its “rocket docket” (ABC News):

Walter Norkin, a former federal prosecutor in the Southern District of Florida, explains why that might be notable.

“The Southern District of Florida is one of the few districts in the country that operates under a ‘rocket docket’ and, in distinction from the District of Columbia, you can expect a criminal case to be resolved within six months of an indictment issuing,” Norkin told ABC News. “The judges in the Southern District of Florida adhere very strictly to the Speedy Trial clock, which, with limited exceptions, requires trial or conviction to occur within 70 days.”

As a strategic matter, according to Norkin, the special counsel may have chosen this particular venue as a means to circumvent that inclination as prosecutors face the prospect of “certain policy considerations that take effect as an election nears.”

The Associated Press notes “the willingness of GOP voters and party leaders to stick with a now twice-indicted candidate who could face still more charges. And it sets the stage for a sensational trial centered on claims that a man once entrusted to safeguard the nation’s most closely guarded secrets willfully, and illegally, hoarded sensitive national security information.” And twice-impeached, don’t forget.

So far, the GOP is falling in line behind their front-crimer, as Marcy Wheeler displays in a tweet thread:

Marcy has much more. Knock yourselves out.

Beyond this point, more Trump indictments could come thick and fast. Fulton County, Ga. District Attorney Fani Willis is expected to issue indictments this summer to Trump and others over interference in the 2020 election there. Smith’s investigation into Trump’s participation in the Jan. 6 coup plot may yet yield charges.

Throw in the smoke from wildfires in Canada and elsewhere and we may have to redefine “long, hot summer.”

Update: Seven was just the teaser.

The federal indictment against Trump has been unsealed

Trump and his associate have been charged in a 38-count federal indictment

(h/t DC for “Seven Counts”)

Welcome to the wingnut playground

Published by digby on June 8, 2023

They’re throwing sand in each other’s faces already

Rolling Stone reports:

THIS IS HOW petty and aggressively stupid the 2024 GOP presidential primary has become: several close aides and allies to Donald Trump want to challenge Ron DeSantis to a literal dick-measuring contest.

It wouldn’t be the first juvenile move by Team Trump in this young primary season. Already, Trump has suggested that DeSantis, his chief rival, might be secretly gay. He’s gone after DeSantis over pronunciation of his own last name. He has claimed to have salacious dirt on Florida’s governor, that he might release during the primary. Recently, Trump’s campaign went after one of DeSantis’ top aides, apparently insulting her physical appearance. 

Now, some of Trump’s longtime advisers are even urging him to continuously make reference to the size of DeSantis’ penis, telling him such insults could stick with GOP primary voters and mess with his rival’s head, two sources with knowledge of the matter tell Rolling Stone. Trump’s team discussed having Trump refer to the Florida governor as “Tiny D,” Bloomberg reported in March. While some understood it as a shot at DeSantis’ height, the sobriquet was specifically intended to suggest diminutive genitalia, four people familiar with the topic say.

“He’s also short but … yes of course it’s about his penis, that’s why we’re doing it,” says a source involved in the effort to get the former president to use the line of attack against DeSantis.

Team Trump’s attempts to focus the public on DeSantis’ anatomy underscores just how dark and puerile the GOP primary promises to be — even as the former president asks voters to return him to a seat of awesome power and responsibility.

His venom towards DeSantis is enhanced by a campaign staff whose personal loathing of DeSantis eclipses even Trump’s. Several of the former president’s lieutenants have worked for DeSantis and come away from it with such bitter experiences that they wish not just to defeat the governor and his team, but to abjectly humiliate them.

A DeSantis campaign spokesperson declined to comment but flagged recent comments from the Florida governor that cast attacks on him as recognition that his campaign represents a “threat.”

[…]

Trump’s allies are open about his plans to wage a personal war on the Florida governor, saying that it may be more critical to winning than any policy differences. “As the primary progresses, emasculating Ron is going to be a big part of the Trump campaign’s efforts,” says a Trump ally close to the ex-president’s campaign. “It is important to make the policy argument. But one of Donald Trump’s biggest talents is defining his opponent’s character traits and highlighting their biggest personality flaws. Doing that — defining who Ron DeSantis, the person, is to the American voter, before he has the chance to do it himself — is arguably more important than any policy contrast.”

In the past several weeks, a handful of key political advisers and confidants have told Trump he should start using “Tiny D” as his principal DeSantis nickname, instead of only ones like “DeSanctimonious” or “DeSaster,” according to two sources with direct knowledge of the situation. One of these sources refers to it as the “small-dick PsyOp.”

So far, however, it’s Trump — famous for both a lack of restraint and vicious campaign attacks — who has resisted this particular line of attack. The ex-president has barely used the “Tiny D” epithet publicly, and has only occasionally done so offhandedly.

Still, the former president and his top advisers have made no secret of the fact that a key component of their strategy against DeSantis involves a constant stream of “mindfucking” the Florida governor and going after his personal insecurities as much as they can.

Some of Trump’s aides and longtime allies have repeatedly told Trump that, in their personal experiences, DeSantis is a uniquely “sensitive,” “thin-skinned,” and “insecure” man, making him a perfect target for Trump’s needling. (Trump himself, of course, is also famously sensitive to personal slights, and known for going to extreme lengths to respond to them — even to his personal detriment.)

While Trump has held off on the “Tiny D” messaging, members of his team are going all-in on the nickname — and the ugly strategy. After top Trump campaign spokesman Steven Cheung mixed it up with the pro-DeSantis super PAC Never Back Down on Twitter last week, Cheung responded with the “pinching hand” emoji, which is used to suggest diminutive size. Chris LaCivita, one of the operatives leading Trump 2024 and the engineer of the 2004 “Swift Boat” campaign against John Kerry, also joined in on the campaign messaging earlier this month, when he tweeted: “what happened to Tiny d?”

According to two people familiar with the matter, some Trump campaign aides have encouraged outside allies and informal media surrogates to routinely use “Tiny D” in recent weeks, telling them it is by far the most effective moniker to mess with DeSantis and get in his head. “There is absolutely an effort underway to make the ‘Tiny Dick’ the nickname most linked to Ron,” one of the sources says.

During Trump’s last contested GOP primary in 2016, it took until February of election year for genitalia measuring to become part of the contest.

With his campaign struggling, Sen. Marco Rubio threw out a laugh line at a campaign rally about Trump having small hands, strongly implying that Trump had a small penis. At a Republican debate in Detroit the following month, Trump defended himself: “I guarantee you there’s no problem. I guarantee.”

Later that year, Rubio would admit to CNN host Jake Tapper that he “apologized to” the then-future president, adding: “I said, ‘You know, I’m sorry that I said that. It’s not who I am and I shouldn’t have done it.’”

Taking its cues from Trump, MAGAworld has trained the same schoolyard insults at newly launched primary rival and erstwhile ally Chris Christie with an ugly campaign of fat-shaming. Trump himself took to his Truth Social account to post a video of Christie’s campaign launch edited to depict the former New Jersey governor at a buffet. MAGA Inc, the Trump-aligned super PAC, matched the rhetoric with a hackneyed pun — “Chris Christie will waste no time eating DeSantis’ lunch”— in a statement distributed Tuesday.

At his campaign launch, Christie threw his own jabs at the former president. Trump, he told voters in New Hampshire, is “a lonely, self consumed, self-serving, mirror hog” who “never admits a mistake” and “always finds someone else and something else to blame for whatever goes wrong.”

Yeah. I’m sure you’re shocked. Who would have ever thought Donald Trump would act like a schoolyard bully?

Good old Joe

Published by digby on June 8, 2023

More modern than most

And more decent. His White House will be hosting a huge LGBTQ+ party on Sunday. (It was originally scheduled for today but was postponed due to the air quality emergency) It’s an important gesture:

The party, which is expected to include thousands of guests on the White House’s South Lawn, is a deliberate contrast to a cascade of Republican legislation and other attacks targeting LGBTQ+ people, Biden officials have said.

Biden, a Democrat, planned an evening celebration of LGBTQ+ families featuring singer Betty Who and Baltimore DJ Queen HD.

This is good too:

Biden announced that the Department of Homeland Security, working with the Justice and Health and Human Services departments, will partner with LGBTQ+ community organizations to provide safety resources and training to help thwart violent attacks.

Separately, HHS and the Department of Housing and Urban Development will provide resources to help LGBTQ+ young people with mental health needs, support in foster care and homelessness.

To confront a spike in book bans, the Department of Education’s civil rights office will appoint a new coordinator to work with schools to address that threat. The White House said banning books erodes democracy, deprives students of material needed for learning and can contribute to the stigma and isolation that LGBTQ+ youth feel because books about them are often the ones that are prohibited.

The White House points to Biden’s support for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer individuals. He has appointed many to prominent positions in the White House, such as Jean-Pierre, and throughout the federal government. He signed legislation to protect marriage equality and continues to urge Congress to send him the Equality Act, which would add civil rights protections for LGBTQ+ individuals to federal law.

They have to stand up against the grotesque bigotry and threats against this community.

It’s Time For Dems To Put Guns Front and Center

Published by digby on June 8, 2023

There is movement in the electorate

For the first time in decades there is a fissure in the Republicans party on the issue of guns:

Young Republicans aren’t clinging to guns like the rest of the GOP.

As former President Donald Trump and new campaign entrants, including former Vice President Mike Pence, tout their Second Amendment bonafides and opposition to “gun confiscation” to 2024 primary voters, some Gen Z and millennial Republicans are moving in the opposite direction: A significant share of younger conservatives, reared in an age of mass violence, embrace firearm restrictions.

One poll conducted by Harvard’s political institute this spring found that a clear majority of young conservatives supported mandatory psychological exams for gun purchasers. A separate, recurring survey from YouGov concluded in March that Gen Z and millennial Republicans are more likely to believe in tougher gun laws than older Republicans and that young conservatives’ support for the idea has grown in the past year.

The generational disconnect suggests broader GOP opposition to gun restrictions will be a steady irritant inside a party already struggling to appeal to young voters. It could also challenge White House hopefuls and members of Congress to eventually refine their message on guns with Republican primary and general election voters, even if the concerns of young people won’t transform GOP politics overnight.

“But at the same time, I really don’t know when and where that conversation within the party will happen,” Hernandez said in an interview. “You still have a lot of elected officials and Republicans within the party who don’t believe we should have government interference when it comes to owning guns.”

The Democrats need to make the case that this is a top priority and not be afraid to put it on the menu. They’re getting better but ever since 2000 when Al Gore’s very close election was partially blamed on the gun issue, they’ve tip-toed around it in elections. There’s an opening here and they need to start working it.

The right wants a culture war. Democrats have the support of the country on two culture war issues that are far more salient than Dr Seuss and bathroom bills: abortion and guns. Bring it.

Update: Gavin Newsom goes there

Good News

Published by digby on June 8, 2023

The Washington Post:

Paralysis, limbo, stalemate — any of them describe the state of the House of Representatives this week.

On Wednesday, Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) sent the House home until Monday after spending an entire day talking with a group of far-right conservatives who held up all floor action over their dissatisfaction with the debt limit bill signed into law last week, among other grievances.

They failed to reach any path forward.

McCarthy told reporters that he’s not exactly sure what they want and that different members are asking for different things.

This is a significant challenge to McCarthy’s leadership and his ability to govern and run the House. While it’s not as dire as the motion to vacate — the procedural maneuver by which a single House Republican could trigger a vote to depose McCarthy as speaker — supporters of the rebels say that their tactic of bringing the chamber to a halt by voting against House rules could be just as damaging.

They weren’t doing anything real anyway. All they had on the agenda were messaging bills for the wingnut faction. So, in reality, the MAGA Reps are just denying themselves the ability to say they passed the “Save Our Gas Stoves Act” on Fox News.

They didn’t have the guts to raise the Motion to Vacate and truly challenge McCarthy mainly because nobody else wants the job. So they are doing a little kabuki Dance to pretend they have power in circumstances that don’t matter. Hookay.

But the “Republicans in disarray” narrative is just delicious:

Rank-and-file Republicans are not happy — this is an understatement — about a small group grinding the entire body to a halt.

“This is, in my opinion, political incontinence on our part. We are wetting ourselves … and can’t do anything about it,” Rep. Steve Womack (R-Ark.) said. “This is insane. This is not the way a governing majority is expected to behave, and, frankly, I think there’ll be a political cost to it.”

The discontent with the small group is widespread. It includes some far-right lawmakers in safe Republican districts, including Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.), one of five Freedom Caucus members who voted for McCarthy and Biden’s debt limit deal last week.

“I don’t see any need for this,” she said.

Republicans in districts President Biden won are particularly stressed. One such member called the group the “Dysfunction Caucus.”

Who’s gumming up the works?

The group of disrupters include Reps. Matt Gaetz (Fla.), Dan Bishop (N.C.), Lauren Boebert (Colo.), Ralph Norman (S.C.), Chip Roy (Tex.), Ken Buck (Colo.), Bob Good (Va.), Andy Biggs (Ariz.), Matt Rosendale (Mont.), Eli Crane (Ariz.) and Tim Burchett (Tenn.). They blocked a rule on the House floor Tuesday about gas stoves (a conservative priority that has nothing to do with the current fight), essentially halting all business.

“At the center of the far-right’s concern is an argument that McCarthy violated an agreement several of them struck in January in exchange for supporting his speakership bid. No list of those promises made exists publicly, so it’s unclear exactly what lawmakers and McCarthy agreed to. But several members of the Freedom Caucus have claimed he violated three main components of the agreement: Supporting legislation that reduces spending back to 2022 appropriation levels; putting legislation on the floor that is not passed overwhelmingly by Democrats; and not taking up bills that don’t have unanimous support from Republicans on the House Rules Committee,” our colleagues Amy B Wang, Marianna Sotomayor, Paul Kane and Leigh Ann write.

The tactics are reminiscent of the struggle McCarthy endured to become speaker, a process that spanned four days and 15 rounds of voting, to appease fewer than two dozen conservatives.

But McCarthy and Republicans said that the conference came out of that painful exercise stronger and more united than before.

The fallout

Now, Republicans worry that this standoff will play into the Democratic narrative that Republicans are a “party of chaos” that can’t govern, potentially threatening their fragile control of the House in next year’s elections.

“We have to govern,” Rep. Blake Moore (R-Utah) said. “If we can’t govern, we won’t get a chance to govern.”

Rep. Mike Garcia (R-Calif.), who represents a district Biden won by 12 points, said Republicans should be focusing on Biden.

“The goal is to operate as a team,” Garcia said. “To provide solutions in contrast to the problems being created by the Biden administration right now.”

Moderate angst

While McCarthy dealt with the rebels on the second floor of the Capitol, a group of moderate House Republicans met in Republican Whip Tom Emmer‘s office on the first floor about their legislative priorities.

While the meeting was not related to the drama ensuing above, it did come up, according to several members who attended. The lawmakers worried that some of their priorities, some of which are bipartisan, would be blocked by far-right members.

They also discussed a specific conservative priority: bringing H.R. 7, a bill to make permanent the Hyde Amendment which prohibits taxpayer dollars from being used for abortion, up for a vote soon. It was supposed to be one of the first bills voted on in the new House but was never brought up because it didn’t have the votes.

“I think some people are putting their own interests ahead of that of the conference,” Rep. Mike Lawler (R-N.Y.), a freshman whose seat is a top target for Democrats next year. “And I think they need to think long and hard about that.”

There is fear that the far-right’s demands will spill into bigger, more significant fights, including during the annual process to fund the government.

“You got a small group of people who are pissed off that are keeping the House of Representatives from functioning today, and I think the American people are not going to take too kindly to that,” Womack, a senior appropriator, said.

Keep it coming MAGAs. We need the laughs.

The Voting Rights Act lives

Published by digby on June 8, 2023

But it’s on life support

From Professor Melissa Murray:

Some initial thoughts on Allen v. Milligan.

Media is trumpeting this as a “victory” for the Voting Rights Act. And it is. And I don’t want to be a turd in the punchbowl… but this is pretty weak sauce from this Court. 

First, this doesn’t “strengthen” the VRA. It preserves the status quo. And the status quo is that this Court has done an A+ job of hobbling the VRA over the last 10 years. 

In 2013’s Shelby County v. Holder, it eviscerated the preclearance formula. The preclearance regime required states with a history of voting discrimination to first “preclear” any changes to their voting rules and regs with the DOJ or a three-judge federal court panel 

The Court invalidated the preclearance formula on the ground that progress had been made and minorities were voting and blah blah blah. 

This progress narrative prompted RBG to note in dissent that throwing out the preclearance formula was like throwing out your umbrella in a rainstorm because you weren’t getting wet. She was right. 

SCOTUS didn’t invalidate the whole preclearance regime–just the formula. And Congress could have written a new preclearance formula… if it weren’t super-polarized and dysfunctional.

As it happened, Congress did not write a new formula. And the preclearance regime died. 

Which has led to an uptick in laws that seem aimed at suppressing the vote among certain constituencies.

When confronted with this possibility in Shelby County, CJ Roberts, who wrote for the 5-4 maj, assured us that Sec 2 of the VRA remained a viable path for dealing with this. 

Except that the Court was determined to hobble that too!

And it did in 2021’s Brnovich v. DNC, which made it harder for litigants to establish violations of Section 2. 

And that’s not all!

After the 2020 census Alabama drew its new Congressional map… and it seemed to many that the map was drawn for the purpose of diluting the electoral power of Black people, who comprise 27% of the state’s population 

Black voters, represented by the @NAACP_LDF and other groups, sued the state under Section 2, arguing that the map, as drawn, was an unconstitutional racial gerrymander. 

A lower federal court agreed with the Black voters and said that the map was an impermissible gerrymander and that AL had to redraw its map before the midterm election. 

AL appealed the matter to SCOTUS on the shadow docket. SCOTUS, in a 5-4 decision, stayed the lower court’s ruling, allowing the map to go into effect and be used in the 2022 midterm election. 

You will recall that in the 2022 midterms, the Democrats lost control of the House. This was due to a lot of different factors, but many have noted the impact of gerrymandering and other democratic distortions in the outcome of the election. 

SCOTUS in 2019’s Rucho v. Common Cause said that federal courts could not review (and adjudicate) claims of partisan gerrymandering.

And in February 2022, it allowed AL’s map–the map it now agrees was an unconstitutional racial gerrymander–to go into effect. 

So, yes, today’s decision is a victory that maintains the status quo for Section 2 of the VRA.

But it is cold comfort when one considers the way this Court through its decisions has actively distorted the electoral landscape and made true representative government more elusive.

I think it’s “rule-washing.” Roberts and Kavanaugh are political animals and they know the reputation of the Court is shit. So they’re going to throw a few bones to take some of the heat off. It’s good, as far as it goes. But no on e should be comforted that they are actually moderating.