Digby's Hullabaloo Posts

Another MAGA kook planning to hijack the US House and there’s nothng Mike Johnson can do about it. (That’s assuming he wants to.) The aptly named Ann Paulina Luna from Florida is going to force a vote to have the House sergeant at arms to take Merrick Garland into custody. Seriously:

“It is imperative that Congress uses its inherent contempt powers and instructs the Sergeant at Arms to bring Attorney General Garland to the House for questioning and compel him to produce the requested evidence,” Luna wrote to her colleagues in a letter on Monday.

“This power is not a mere formality, but a vital tool for us to carry out our legislative responsibilities. It is not enough to issue a subpoena; we must also have the power to enforce it,” she added in the letter, a copy of which was obtained by POLITICO.

Inherent contempt hasn’t been used in 90 years. But whatever.

Get a load of this:

Luna’s resolution requires that Garland be brought “before the bar of the House of Representatives” to answer questions and that he be kept “in custody to await the further order of the House of Representatives.” One GOP lawmaker questioned, under the scenario, where the House would hold Garland and if there was actually a much-rumored Capitol jail.

There isn’t, to be clear. But the Capitol Police have holding facilities at their headquarters — and Luna noted in her letter they could also hold him in the Capitol building itself.

That’s right. She wants to have the Attorney general arrested and held in the Capitol to “await the further order of the House of Representatives.” Will they bring out their gallows?

It would bring the House to a complete halt (which may not be a bad thing actually.)

Experts on House process and procedure warn that an inherent contempt vote could trigger months and months of deliberations, from hashing out separation of powers authorities governing the initial arrest to a makeshift trial on the House floor. Adding in another curveball, Garland has a security detail due to his attorney general title, and it’s unclear how bringing a sitting Cabinet official into custody would play out, particularly given Biden’s assertion of executive privilege.

“Inherent contempt has been described as ‘unseemly,’ cumbersome, time-consuming, and relatively ineffective, especially for a modern Congress with a heavy legislative workload that would be interrupted by a trial at the bar,” according to a report on the process and history by the nonpartisan Congressional Research Service.

I’m surprised Marge doesn’t want a piece of this.

Luna is indeed a lunatic. But she isn’t alone. The MAGA bubble has dozens of them convinced that they have a Trump-given right to punish anyone who doesn’t do exactly what they want them to. And then they wail like tired toddlers when anyone tries to hold them to account for anything.

Divorce of course

They’ve got so many plans:

Some prominent conservative lawmakers and commentators are advocating for ending no-fault divorce, laws that exist in all 50 US states and allow a person to end a marriage without having to prove a spouse did something wrong, like commit adultery or domestic violence.

The socially conservative, and often religious, rightwing opponents of such divorce laws are arguing that the practice deprives people – mostly men – of due process and hurt families, and by extension, society. Republican lawmakers in Louisiana, Oklahoma, Nebraska and Texas have discussed eliminating or increasing restrictions on no-fault marriage laws.

Defenders of the laws, which states started passing a half-century ago, see legislation and arguments to repeal them as the latest effort to restrict women’s rights – following the overturning of Roe v Wade and passage of abortion bans around the country – and say that without such protections, the country would return to an earlier era when women were often trapped in abusive marriages.

“No-fault divorce is critical to the ability, particularly the ability of women, to be able to exercise autonomy in their own relationships, in their own lives,” said Denise Lieberman, an adjunct professor at the Washington University School of Law in St Louis, who has a specialty in policies concerning gender, sexuality and sexual violence.

Before 1969, when then California Republican governor Ronald Reagan, who had been divorced, approved the country’s first no-fault divorce law, women, who are more likely to experience violence from an intimate partner, were often forced to stay in marriages. If they could not prove that their husband had been abusive or persuade him to grant a divorce, they would not be able to take any assets from the marriage or remarry, according to a study in the Quarterly Journal of Economics.

Of course they want to make sure that women are held prisoner in abusive marriages. That’s kind of at the heart of patriarchy.

When they liberalized the divorce laws there were some consequences that these throwbacks just can’t stand:

Between 1976 and 1985, states that passed the laws saw their domestic violence rates against men and women fall by about 30%; the number of women murdered by an intimate partner declined by 10%; and female suicide rates declined by 8 to 16%.

It’s not just the far right evangelical nuts either:

Conservative commentators such as Matt Walsh, Steven Crowder and lawmakers such as the Republican senator JD Vance of Ohio have argued that the laws are unfair to men and hurt society because they lead to more divorces.

The divorce rate in the United States increased significantly from 1960, when it was 9.2 per 1,000 married women, to 22.6 in 1980. But by 2022, the rate had fallen to 14.5.

On the increase in divorces, Vance said in 2021: “One of the great tricks that I think the sexual revolution pulled on the American populace” is the idea that “these marriages were fundamentally, you know, they were maybe even violent, but certainly they were unhappy, and so getting rid of them and making it easier for people to shift spouses like they change their underwear, that’s going to make people happier in the long term”.

I think Vance is going to be a force in politics for a long time to come and may be the heir apparent after this election. He is a dangerous piece of work. But he isn’t alone.

This is the world that real Christian nationalism will be seeking once the libertine imbecile is off the stage. I’m not sure America really wants this but if the Project 2025, Opus Dei weirdos have their way, they aren’t going to have a choice.

Dr Jeffrey A. Sonnenfeld, the president of the Yale Chief Executive Leadership Institute wrote this in the NY Times this week:

Recent headlines suggest that our nation’s business leaders are embracing the presidential candidate Donald Trump. His campaign would have you believe that our nation’s top chief executives are returning to support Mr. Trump for president, touting declarations of support from some prominent financiers like Steve Schwarzman and David Sacks.

That is far from the truth. They didn’t flock to him before, and they certainly aren’t flocking to him now. Mr. Trump continues to suffer from the lowest level of corporate support in the history of the Republican Party.

I know this because I work with roughly 1,000 chief executives a year, running a school for them, which I started 35 years ago, and I speak with business leaders almost every day. Our surveys show that 60 to 70 percent of them are registered Republicans.

The reality is that the top corporate leaders working today, like many Americans, aren’t entirely comfortable with either Mr. Trump or President Biden. But they largely like — or at least can tolerate — one of them. They truly fear the other.

The money talks, as you can see by the chart above. And that’s extremely weird considering that the Republican Party has been the party of Big Business for the last century. Not anymore.

According to Sonnenfeld, business didn’t like his “populist” image in 2016 but gave him a chance. (They liked the tax cuts, of course.) But he didn’t endear himself to them otherwise:

Several chief executives resented Mr. Trump’s personal attacks on businesses through divide-and-conquer tactics, meddling and pitting competitors against each other publicly. Scores of them rushed to distance themselves from Mr. Trump’s more provocative stances, resigning en masse from his business advisory councils in 2017 after he equated antiracism activists with white supremacists. Dozens of them openly called for Mr. Trump’s impeachment in 2021 after the Jan. 6 insurrection.

They aren’t all that fond of Biden either. They don’t like antitrust enforcement and his attacks on corporate greed. On the other hand, they like the infrastructure investment and CHIPs Act and they are giddy, as one might expect, over the roaring stock market and the US’s new status as the world’s largest oil and natural gas producer.

They’re very nervous about the fact that Trump will have MAGA extremists running things in the next administration and really hate some of his new policy proposals:

Mr. Trump and his team are doubling down on some of his most anti-business instincts, including proposing draconian 10 percent tariffs on all imports; unorthodox monetary and fiscal policies, including stripping the Federal Reserve Board of its independence; possibly putting in place yield curve control to force interest rates lower; and devaluing the dollar — all of which would drive inflation much higher. These Trump positions have more in common with Karl Marx than Adam Smith.

I don’t actually think Karl Marx has anything to do with it, but setting that aside, these execs seem to be sane enough to recognize that Trump is totally inept:

As such, it was hardly surprising that just as when Mr. Trump faced a chilly reaction from hundreds of top executives when he spoke at my Yale Chief Executive summit in 2005, he appeared to face a similarly frigid reception when he spoke to the Business Roundtable this month, with no noticeable applause at any point during his “remarkably meandering” remarks, according to CNBC’s Andrew Ross Sorkin, and with Mr. Trump assuming a subdued, if not hostile, posture. Chief executives are not protectionist, isolationist or xenophobic, and they believe in investing where there is the rule of law, not the law of rulers.

These are not my people, obviously, and I don’t look up to them as paragons. But they are practical enough to see that Trump is bad for business, just as he’s bad for the country as a whole. I appreciate any signs of GOP sanity wherever I can find it these days. It’s rare.

Since the wingnuts actually have the nerve to promote the psychopath Trump as an anti-war hero , John Fugelsang helpfully supplies a corrective:

Since the right wing MAGA guys are pulling the “There Were No Wars Under Trump” lie, let’s quickly cover this propaganda you’ll be hearing that Trump was the “Peace President.”

Because the same angry white guys who berated us for opposing the Iraq War, now berate us for not appreciating Donald Trump’s incredible commitment to world peace. And being blindly obedient, true MAGA males view critical thinking skills as “woke.”

1. Once in office, Trump massively increased the U.S. defense budget. He quickly escalated our existing wars in multiple theaters, which led to skyrocketing casualties.

2. Trump sent MORE troops to Afghanistan, ordered missile strikes on Syria in 2017 and 2018 & abandoned our Kurdish allies to slaughter.

3. In Afghanistan, the star of “Celebrity Apprentice” substantially increased the airstrikes, leading to a 330 % increase in civilian deaths. He bragged about dropping of the “Mother of All Bombs” (MOAB), the largest non-nuclear bomb in the US arsenal, on Afghanistan in 2017.

4. Trump also tore up a peace deal with Iran, which our own generals uniformly maintained Iran was honoring (I know, Real Christians love tearing up peace deals when it’s w/countries they’re allowed to hate).

5. Trump pardoned convicted war criminals, assassinated Iran’s top general, and was the 1st POTUS to order an attack on the Syrian govt.

6. Trump sent troops to take Syria’s oil — openly admitting he wanted to give the reserves to ExxonMobil. “We’re keeping the oil. I’ve always said that. We want to keep the oil. Forty-five million dollars a month? Keep the oil.” Oh, FOX didn’t tell you any of this? Did wee Ben Shapiro’s serious journalists at Daily Wire somehow forget to convey this info? Breitbart failed to bring this information to you as well? I’m shocked. Well, Hunter Biden affects your life more.

7. In Iraq and Syria alone, Trump’s drone strikes killed an estimated 13,400 civilians.

8. Trump carried out more airstrikes against Somalia than Obama did; Trump sold unguided “dumb” bombs to the Saudis to use against Yemen.

9. Trump negotiated to give Afghanistan to the Taliban, & freed 5,000 Taliban terrorists, which turned out great!

10. He even established “Space Force” so we can have war in brand-new places.

11. Donald Trump is so anti-war he put on a cheerleader skirt & pom poms for Putin’s murderous imperialist invasion of Ukraine, which Trump called “genius” & “savvy” you amoral knob. Trump called the invading army, killing children & raping women, “peacemakers.”

12. Trump wanting to remove our troops from Germany & S. Korea wasn’t “anti-war” – it was Donny’s most passionate hobby, “doing what Putin wants”

13. He withdrew from the Intermediate-range Nuclear Forces (INF) agreement & the Open Skies Treaty.

14. Oh and he’s already asked advisers for “battle plans” to invade Mexico so US troops can fight cartels. Having surrendered their critical thinking to a reality TV landlord with an addiction to too-much makeup, MAGA dudes know none of this. Donald Trump stole from US vets with a fraud online University. Stealing from vets – along with sexual assault – was not a dealbreaker for these good Christian folk.

The notion that Trump is a peacenik is a one of the most preposterous ideas they ever came up with.

They’ll turn back the clock more, then break it

A reminder from April 2003 (The Nation):

The [conservative] movement’s grand ambition—one can no longer say grandiose—is to roll back the twentieth century, quite literally. That is, defenestrate the federal government and reduce its scale and powers to a level well below what it was before the New Deal’s centralization. With that accomplished, movement conservatives envision a restored society in which the prevailing values and power relationships resemble the America that existed around 1900, when William McKinley was President.

[…]

Looking back over this list, one sees many of the old peevish conservative resentments—Social Security, the income tax, regulation of business, labor unions, big government centralized in Washington—that represent the great battles that conservatives lost during early decades of the twentieth century. That is why the McKinley era represents a lost Eden the right has set out to restore.

Oh, they won’t stop there.

Holy sh*t have you seen this video???

Spread this like wildfire. #VoteDemToRestoreRoe pic.twitter.com/KLvRnwruQU

— Nick Knudsen 🇺🇸 (@NickKnudsenUS) June 24, 2024

● ● ● ● ● ● ● ●

For The Win, 5th Edition is ready for download. Request a copy of my free countywide GOTV planning guide at ForTheWin.us.

If only

Everybody’s got advice for Joe Biden on how to slay Donald Trump at this week’s debate. Obviously, don’t play Trump’s game and be sure to throw him off his.

Monica Alba and Carol E. Lee of NBC News suggest Biden should be prepared for whichever version of Trump takes the stage:

WASHINGTON — President Joe Biden is preparing to face a few different Donald Trumps on Thursday’s debate stage: the more bombastic and “unhinged” one known for his grievance-filled, stem-winding rallies, and a fairly disciplined version who largely refrains from tirades and sticks to policy.

If it’s more sedate than incensed, the goal for Biden will be to elicit what his aides see as “the true Trump,” according to three people familiar with Biden’s debate prep. 

[…]

“If I were advising Biden, I’d try to make fun of Trump,” former Republican vice president Dan Quayle told NBC News in an interview. “Try to ridicule him. That will get him mad.”

Obviously. The Great Manipulator melts into a puddle when flattered by an autocrat, but he’s also so thin-skinned you could slice him open with a butter knife. Insulted well, and with a smile, he’d have another sort of meltdown.

Oh, for the one Nicolle Wallace recommends. Punch him in the face with his own boasts.

Nicolle Wallace's debate advice for @POTUS Joe Biden is spot-on. 🔥🔥🔥 pic.twitter.com/xzmMPhgd9C

— Bill Madden (@maddenifico) June 24, 2024

● ● ● ● ● ● ● ●

For The Win, 5th Edition is ready for download. Request a copy of my free countywide GOTV planning guide at ForTheWin.us.

Holy sh*t have you seen this video???

Spread this like wildfire. #VoteDemToRestoreRoe pic.twitter.com/KLvRnwruQU

— Nick Knudsen 🇺🇸 (@NickKnudsenUS) June 24, 2024

Today is the 2-year anniversary of the Dobbs decision. Today one third of American women have lost their rights.

It looks like CNN is planning to let Trump lie at will and they’ll only correct him after the debate is over. Great.

The role of a moderator is often in dispute, and David Chalian, CNN’s political director, said that Thursday’s live debate “is not the ideal arena for live fact-checking.” Instead, Ms. Bash and Mr. Tapper would focus on “facilitating the debate between these candidates, not being a participant in that debate,” he said, noting that CNN analysts would assess the veracity of the candidates’ comments immediately after the telecast.

Most people will tune out after the debate because the panel conversation is always tedious for anyone but the most addicted political junkies. The result will be that Biden has to correct the record and will spend most of his time doing that (and probably getting his mic cut because of the sheer volume of lies) and won’t be able to get his own message out effectively — or the lies will stand uncorrected.

It appears that CNN is simply planning to enable a freak show instead of doing its job as journalists. I hope the Biden campaign is fully prepared for that.

CNN knows Trump is playing games:

Trump is scared of President Biden. So cringe. Trump is humiliating himself. Sort of like pathetically begging for votes.

First clip, Trump says he will lose debate on purpose

Next, says President Biden will be a worthy debater

Then, wonders if he should obstruct debate pic.twitter.com/MQCaB5lMdM

— RiotWomenn (@riotwomennn) June 24, 2024

There was a time when the Republicans were constantly in a state of apoplexy over the deficit and the national debt (even though they always raise it more than Democrats do when they are in charge.)

As you can see, it wasn’t just COVID…

 The winner of November’s election faces a gloomy fiscal outlook, with rapidly rising debt levels at a time when interest rates are already high and demographic pressure on retirement programs is rising.

• Both candidates bear a share of the responsibility, as each added trillions to that tally while in office.
• But Trump’s contribution was significantly higher, according to the fiscal watchdogs at the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, thanks to both tax cuts and spending deals struck in his four years in the White House.

By the numbers: Trump added $8.4 trillion in borrowing over a ten-year window, CRFB finds in a report out this morning.

• Biden’s figure clocks in at $4.3 trillion with seven months remaining in his term.
• If you exclude COVID relief spending from the tally, the numbers are $4.8 trillion for Trump and $2.2 trillion for Biden.

For Trump, the biggest non-COVID drivers of higher public debt were his signature tax cuts enacted in 2017 (causing $1.9 trillion in additional borrowing) and bipartisan spending packages (which added $2.1 trillion).

For Biden, major non-COVID factors include 2022 and 2023 spending bills ($1.4 trillion), student debt relief ($620 billion), and legislation to support health care for veterans ($520 billion).

The article goes on to say “both sides” are more or less equally to blame, blah,blah, blah…. But the reality is that there is only one party that obsesses over “the deficit” when a Democrat is in charge and spends like drunken sailors when Republicans are in the White House. And it isn’t the Democrats.

I’m sure it won’t matter in this election because it’s very inconvenient for them due to Trump’s tax cutting spree which they want to continue if he wins. But they should at least be questioned about this whenever the media gets the chance.

The Heritage Foundation has outsourced the new MAGA SS to an operative in Kentucky who is putting together target list of enemy bureaucrats for crazies:

From his home office in small-town Kentucky, a seasoned political operative is quietly investigating scores of federal employees suspected of being hostile to the policies of Republican Donald Trump, a highly unusual and potentially chilling effort that dovetails with broader conservative preparations for a new White House.

Tom Jones and his American Accountability Foundation are digging into the backgrounds, social media posts and commentary of key high-ranking government employees, starting with the Department of Homeland Security. They’re relying in part on tips from his network of conservative contacts, including workers. In a move that alarms some, they’re preparing to publish the findings online.

With a $100,000 grant from the Heritage Foundation, the goal is to post 100 names of government workers to a website this summer to show a potential new administration who might be standing in the way of a second-term Trump agenda — and ripe for scrutiny, reclassifications, reassignments or firings.

“We need to understand who these people are and what they do,” said Jones, a former Capitol Hill aide to Republican senators.

The concept of compiling and publicizing a list of government employees shows the lengths Trump’s allies are willing to go to ensure nothing or no one will block his plans in a potential second term. Jones’ Project Sovereignty 2025 comes as Heritage’s Project 2025 lays the groundwork, with policies, proposals and personnel ready for a possible new White House.

Isn’t that great? Just don’t call them fascist because that would be very rude.

In case you were wondering who these people are, they are very well connected in establishment GOP circles:

The American Accountability Foundation (AAF) is a nonprofit launched by the far-right Conservative Partnership Institute (CPI), which refers to itself as a “government oversight and research organization” that uses “aggressive research and investigations to advance conservative messaging, rapid response, and Congressional investigations.” 

However, much of AAF’s work is actually focused on discounting and discrediting President Biden and his executive nominees through opposition research and negative, often factually inaccurate narratives. The organization uses the X handle @ExposingBiden to push its point of view. During the confirmation hearings for Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown-Jackson, for instance, AAF “put forward [the narrative] that she had supported lighter sentences for people who had been involved with child pornography,” according to journalist Maggie Severns.

AAF has released a number of reports to assist right-wing attacks on “woke capitalism” and ESG investing. In July 2023, it published Naming and Shaming: The ESG Movement’s Efforts to Defund Trade Associations and Put the Advocacy Community Out of Business. The report argues that ESG-related shareholder resolutions at public companies are actually “ideologically motivated to suppress the speech of conservatives and business groups,” specifically through defunding corporate lobbying.

In July 2023, AAF also produced Proxy Wars: Glass Lewis, a report claiming that the proxy advisory company Glass Lewis has an “overwhelmingly liberal” bias that has fueled the “implementation of ESG policies at major corporations.”

In April 2023, AAF published what it calls an investigative report titled None of It Is Our Money: An Introduction to the Leftist Activists and Liberal DC Insiders at BlackRock, Vanguard, and State Street Using Your Money to Advance Their Political Agenda. The report has been publicized by other anti-ESG groups such as the Independent Women’s Forum.

AAF’s anti-ESG research support was also cited in the March 2023 Consumers’ Research report titled Defeating the ESG Attack on the American Free Enterprise System. 

In February 2023, AAF joined other major anti-ESG groups in signing a group letter calling on U.S. senators to “stop Biden’s ideological embezzling of Americans’ retirement accounts.” The following month, it signed onto an Advancing American Freedom letter thanking senators who opposed President Biden’s “woke 401(k)” rule. 

AAF is led by Tom Jones, a former legislative director for Senator Ron Johnson (R-WI) and was head of opposition research for Texas Senator Ted Cruz’s 2016 presidential campaign. According to the Wall Street Journal, AAF has received funding from Leonard Leo’s Marble Freedom Trust, but the Center for Media and Democracy has not been able to document this.

AAF is being investigated by the IRS for violating its tax-exempt status, Politico reported in March 2024.

Of course it is.

This isn’t Trump, folks. This is the GOP establishment marshaling its forces to turn the US Government into an arm of the party. That’s what authoritarian regimes do. Even if Trump goes away, this party apparatus won’t. And the next guy — say, J.D. Vance who seems to really get the program will use it for their purposes.