Digby's Hullabaloo Posts

Hell, yeah! No, wait.

Donald Trump has had it out for non-European, non-whites on these shores since the Muslim ban of his first weeks in office in 2017. And before that, really, with his post-escalator ride tirade about Mexicans in 2015. Now with a second shot at cleaning house starting in January, Trump and his henchmen-xenophobes are poised to round up and deport millions of undocumented immigrants and anyone who looks like one. And they’ll erase the four years of the Biden presidency while they’re at it out of spite, if they can.

But out where reality intersects with rhetoric, that tough talk is raising eyebrows, Greg Sargent explains. “Republicans or GOP-adjacent industries … suggest gingerly that a slight rethink might be in order.”

Rolling back President Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act could decimate nascent green technology manufacturing in Georgia, for example, “from electric vehicles to batteries to solar power.” State representative Beth Camp worries that repealing Biden’s climate measures could leave factories in Georgia “sitting empty.”

Despite Trump’s claims that growth in green technologies would kill jobs, writes Sargent, “the IRA is spurring an outpouring of private investment that’s creating hundreds of thousands of new jobs, many in advanced manufacturing and well suited for people without college degrees.” You know, in places the MAGA faithful believe “were abandoned by liberal and Democratic elites.”

Whoops. Trump rolling back Biden initiatives could be the real job-killing move.

And then there are those brown-skinned migrants:

Something similar is also already happening with Trump’s threat to deport millions of undocumented immigrants. Reuters reports that agriculture interests, which are heavily concentrated in GOP areas, are urging the incoming Trump administration to refrain from removing untold numbers of migrants working throughout the food supply chain, including in farming, dairy, and meatpacking. 

Notably, GOP Representative John Duarte, who just lost his seat in the elections, explicitly tells Reuters that farming interests in his California district depend on undocumented immigrants—and that Trump should exempt many from removal. Duarte and industry representatives want more avenues created for migrants to work here legally—the precise opposite of what Trump promised.

Now over to Texas. NPR reports that various industries there fear that mass deportations could cripple them, particularly in construction, where nearly 300,000 undocumented immigrants toiled as of 2022. Those workers enable the state to keep growing despite a native population that isn’t supplying a large enough workforce. Local analysts and executives want Trump to refrain from removing all these people or create new ways for them to work here legally. Even the Republican mayor of McKinney, Texas, is loudly sounding the alarm.

But surely Americans who believe migrants stole their jobs will flock to fill those low-skilled meatpacking, construction, and long-hour farm jobs once the deportations bite.

Paul Krugman thinks not. Immigrants, he told Sargent last month, “take very, very different jobs. They just bring a different set of skills, a different set of preferences. There’s very little head-to-head competition. In fact, immigrants are really complements to American workers, even American workers without college degrees.”

So what does that mean for Trump’s plans for ethnically cleansing America? It means, as with his plans for slapping tariffs on anything not made in America, that he’ll find ways to exempt companied and industries that kiss his ass and fill his pockets, all while claiming he’s smacked down the downtrodden just as he promised at his rallies. And use selective enforcement to punish blue cities and towns, those cesspools of migrant crime where, according to MAGA myth, little boys go to school with penises and come home girls.

It’s significant that this emotionally stunted septuagenarian is stunted in other ways. His world view seems stuck in the 1980s. He never learned much, but what he thinks he knows about the world is by now decades old. He’s wedded to fossil fuels, for example, and hates “green.” He complained about the Navy wanting electromagnetic catapults for its aircraft carriers. He prefers steam. Why? Because there’s steam heating and steam boilers in his properties. He knows this much (thumb and forefinger an inch apart) about steam, so that’s what he thinks is preferable.

As we know, he’s always the smartest person in the room.

Sigh:

A hearing of the bipartisan task force investigating the assassination attempts against President-elect Donald Trump devolved into a shouting match when Republican Rep. Pat Fallon accused acting Secret Service Director Ronald Rowe of “playing politics” when he attended a 9/11 memorial event with the nation’s top leaders.

Yelling between the two broke out after Fallon displayed a photo of Trump, President Biden, Vice President Kamala Harris and Vice President-elect JD Vance at the event in New York City in September. Rowe was standing directly behind Harris, then a candidate for the presidency, in the second row.

“Who is usually, at an event like this, closest to the president of the United States, security-wise?” Fallon, of Texas, asked Rowe.

“The SAC of the detail,” Rowe answered, referring to the special agent in charge of security. Fallon then questioned whether the acting director was serving in that role at the 9/11 memorial.

Rowe did not answer directly. He said the photo did not show the special agent in charge because he was just out of the frame and told Fallon that he was at the event to show respect for Secret Service members who died on 9/11. “That is the day where we remember the more than 3,000 that have died on 9/11,” he said. “I actually responded to Ground Zero. I was there going through the ashes at the World Trade Center.”

Rowe condemned Fallon, telling him, “Do not invoke 9/11 for political purposes.”The video player is currently playing an ad.Skip Ad

The congressman, meanwhile, said Rowe’s explanation was “a bunch of horse hockey.”

“Don’t try to bully me,” Fallon told Rowe. “I am an elected member of Congress and I’m asking you a serious question and you are playing politics.”

The acting director then shouted back: “And I am a public servant who has served this nation and spent time on our country’s darkest day. Do not politicize it.”

Apparently some weaponized MAGA “whistleblower” told the Republicans on the committee that this guy was angling for his promotion by being in the picture and somehow that endangered Donald Trump. Or something.

But it says everything a bout our juvenile, macho political culture. Maybe they should just stage wrestling matches on the House floor. It would be just as fake but more entertaining. At least for the people who get off on this stuff. I prefer Animal Planet but that’s just me.

They can’t even agree on their legislative priorities:

Republicans are already bickering over how to pass major parts of President-elect Donald Trump’s platform.

There is serious disunity regarding how and when to pass Trump’s legislative agenda, Politico reported Wednesday. Senator John Thune told his fellow senators that he wanted to accelerate the president-elect’s plans via budget reconciliation so that both the border policy and tax policy portions can pass within the first 30 days of Trump’s presidency.

Some House Republicans don’t think that’s the right approach, though, as passing border policy so early could make it harder for their committee to pass tax law later on. And then there’s also the fact that Republicans already have some significant disagreements on tax policy in general.

While Republican House leaders Mike Johnson and Steve Scalise have been in Trump’s ear in Mar-a-Lago, dissent has been fomenting in D.C.

“Our members need to weigh in on that. This doesn’t need to be a decision that’s made up on high, okay?” said Texas House Budget Chair Jodey Arrington. “We’re all unified around the objectives, [but] how we roll it out, the tactics and strategies, still under discussion.”

Trump loyalist Marjorie Taylor Greene noted that Republicans ought to rebuke Thune if he doesn’t approve the entire bill, while Freedom Caucus member Chip Roy also thinks that reconciliation should be forced through and then they can “maybe do a second version that gets at true long-standing permanent tax reform.

The GOP will have a 2 seat majority in the House in the first months. Only a five vote after that. Maybe they will be so euphoric over Dear Leader’s victory that they’ll all just sign off on anything he tells them to sign off on. But that’s a dicey proposition. As you can see they’re already fighting amongst themselves.

The Vivek and Elon show came to the Hill today and everyone was v ery excited to be in the company of such VIPs. We haven’t heard many details about what they plan to cut but there was this:

— Social Security Works (@socialsecurityworks.org) 2024-12-05T20:05:20.621Z

Incoming Senate Majority Leader John Thune told her that the mandatory programs such as Social Security and Medicare are on the table.

Good luck with that.

Brian Beutler’s newsletter today proposes the idea that in light of the Hunter Biden pardon statement, in which Biden alluded to serious prosecutorial abuses in the case, that Biden needs to tell everything they know about Trump’s and the Republicans’ abuses before he leaves office. He writes:

We don’t know what these Democrats chose to leave buried. But the Hunter Biden saga, culminating in his Sunday pardon, and his father’s accompanying statement justifying the decision, all suggest the party still fails to grasp the importance of sunlight, accountability, and clear communication. The election is over and they lost, but now the question is whether they will cede all power to the GOP in six weeks without doing everything they still can to inform and protect the country

Between the lines, it’s clear Biden knows quite a lot that never made big splashy headlines.

He knows Republicans in Congress and the first Trump administration broke rules—indeed, committed impeachable offenses—to target Hunter in retributory fashion; that their subversion of the rule of law tainted his son’s prosecution; and that his son won’t be safe from Republican harassment without broad presidential clemency.

I happen to understand his allusions, and think they’re completely correct. But they raise big, fundamental questions about what all he and his party have been doing about it these past four years. Why are these recent Republican abuses forbidden instead of common knowledge? And if the looming danger to the people Republicans intend to target is so severe, what more is Biden prepared to do to help them, and warn the country? Or does it end with one pardon for a member of his own family,

He believes that because the Democrats (especially in the Senate which had the majority the whole time) and the DOJ shrugged off the abuses that gave permission for the even worse abuses to come.

It fell instead to a handful of independent journalists, Marcy Wheeler most prominently, to track the provenance of the Hunter Biden investigation, the improper workaround Trump and his allies used in an attempt to frame him and his dad, and the compromised nature of David Weiss, the Trump U.S. attorney-cum-Merrick Garland special counsel who oversaw the case.

This “weaponization of government” could on its own have formed the basis of a concerted congressional inquiry, starting in the second half of Trump’s first presidency, continuing into Biden’s. On the basis of all this wrongdoing, Garland could’ve terminated the Hunter Biden investigation, or fired Weiss, or reassigned the case, or launched new investigations of criminal activity in the first Trump administration.

But for reasons peculiar to Washington Democrats—a paralyzing fear of backlash, or of “appearing” partisan—they decided both to let the Hunter case run its course and to sweep the Trump-era perversions of justice under the rug.

Prior to Biden’s election, Democratic oversight of the Trump DOJ was extraordinarily weak.

In one memorable exchange five and a half years ago, then Sen. Kamala Harris (D-CA) asked then-Attorney General Bill Barr, “Has the president or anyone at the White House ever asked or suggested you open an investigation into anyone?”

Barr responded: “Ahhhm… I wouldn’t, I wouldn’t… ahmmm! Could you repeat that question?”

This could, rather it ought, to have been the jumping-off point for an aggressive investigation of its own, rather than simply a feather in Harris’s cap. But Democrats just skipped past the breadcrumbs.

When one year later Trump, through Barr, tried to edge Geoffrey Berman out of his job as U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, and got caught, House Democrats held one hearing on the matter.

Naturally, in 2022, Berman published a tell-all full of extraordinarily damning detail about the Trump-Barr effort to harass and even prosecute Trump’s enemies. The midterms arrived quickly thereafter, but Democrats retained control of the Senate, and still did nothing with this information.

Without publicly litigating all the Trump DOJ’s aberrant ways, how its investigations of people like Hunter were tainted by partisan politics and corruption, there was no public, common-knowledge basis to set things right. And so they woke up on November 6, learned that Trump had been elected to a second term, and will have live with the fact that they could’ve done more, but chose not to.

The pardon is one of the consequences.

Beutler says that Biden should lay it all out before he goes and I think that’s right. Needless to say, all the handwringing over the pardon and Biden “lying” when he said he wouldn’t pardon his son (rather than changing his mind after Orange Hitler was elected) I’d imagine that’s a long shot. If anything I’m watching the Democrats’ spines melting before our eyes and much of the press seems to be resigned to submission.

This old Yiddish joke I’ve posted many times in the past illustrates how the Democrats tend to behave.

There is a joke about three Jews who are about to be executed by firing squad. The sergeant in charge asks each one whether he wants a blindfold. “Yes,” says the first Jew, in a resigned tone. “OK,” says the second Jew, in a quiet voice. “And what about you?” he enquires of the third Jew. “No,” says the third Jew, “I don’t want your lousy blindfold,” followed by a few choice curses. The second Jew immediately leans over to him and whispers: “Listen, Moshe, take a blindfold. Don’t make trouble.”

For quite a while the Democrats and the media showed some resistance in the face of Trump but since the election I’m seeing more and more “don’t make trouble.”

Beutler’s newsletter is one of the best. He writes a lot and it’s always interesting. Highly recommend.

Those of you who have been following this blog over the years will remember how the Freedom Caucus has blown up one “deal” after another, often to the dismay of Republicans who realize that getting most of what you want is better than getting nothing at all. They can always be counted upon to refuse to take yes for an answer.

Mike Johnson, with his tiny majority, is facing the same old challenge and I’m not sure even Donald Trump will be able to control them:

Speaker Mike Johnson is in talks when his own conference about how to fund the government. But he’s got at least two “no” votes no matter what he does.

Reps. Matt Rosendale (R-Mont.) and Andy Biggs (R-Ariz.), two House Freedom Caucus members, told POLITICO they would oppose any short-term government funding bill, known as a continuing resolution or a CR, regardless of whether Johnson attaches disaster aid to it. The Freedom Caucus took an official position this week that any disaster relief needs to be paid for and limited to what is “absolutely necessary” right now. President Joe Biden requested nearly $100 billion in emergency disaster aid.

“I have never voted for a CR and I don’t intend on concluding my time here by voting for one now. We have a $36 trillion dollar national debt and Congress has failed to do its job by funding government through the appropriations process, as mandated by the Budget Act of 1974, again,” said Rosendale, who is retiring at the end of this term.

GOP aides already expect there are enough Republicans who will vote against a CR no matter that Johnson will need to depend on Democrats to avoid a shutdown. The deadline to pass funding legislation is Dec. 20.

This will not be the last time he confronts this. These people are fanatics and they love to pose and preen — and lose. Freedom Caucus politics are much more performative than substantive. And they all love to be on camera.

Good luck, Mike. You’re going to need it.

Bolts has another of their “Ask Bolts” Q&A features up right now, this time on immigration. You can still get in on it:

Donald Trump’s promise of “mass deportations” looms over millions of people who live in the United States. But the infrastructure to detain and incarcerate immigrants didn’t start with Trump.

U.S. Immigration & Customs Enforcement (ICE) detains an average of 37,000 people per night, often partnering with sheriffs who hold immigrants in their local facilities in exchange for a profit. This practice has a long history that predates ICE and other modern federal immigration agencies: For over a century, the U.S. government has relied on local jails to detain immigrants, creating a vast network of incarceration that operates with minimal oversight. The incoming Trump administration is likely to tap into this network in coming years.

Historian Brianna Nofil traces these developments in her new book, The Migrant’s Jail. From the detention of Chinese migrants in New York in the early 1900s to the jailing of Caribbean refugees in the South in the 1980s, her writing explains how federal authorities and local law enforcement have helped each other create a patchwork of policies that incentivizes incarceration. 

We suspect you have questions about these issues in the wake of Trump’s victory, so we asked Nofil if she would be willing to answer them—and she agreed. 

By the way, did you know that the US Government used Zyklon B on migrants at the border to disinfect them? They did:

Zyklon B arrived in El Paso in the 1920s courtesy of the US government. In 1929, for example, a Public Health Service officer, J.R. Hurley, ordered $25 worth of the material–hydrocyanic acid in pellet form–as a fumigating agent for use at the El Paso delousing station, where Mexicans crossed the border from Juárez. Zyklon, developed by Degesch (short for the German vermin-combating corporation), was made in varying strengths, with Zyklon C, D and E representing gradations in potency and price. As Raul Hilberg describes it in The Destruction of the European Jews, “strength E was required for the eradication of specially resistant vermin, such as cockroaches, or for gassings in wooden barracks. The ‘normal’ preparation, D, was used to exterminate lice, mice, or rats in large, well-built structures containing furniture. Human organisms in gas chambers were killed with Zyklon B.” In 1929 Degesch divided the Zyklon market with an American corporation, Cyanamid, so Hurley likely got his shipment from the latter.

As David Dorado Romo describes it in his marvelous Ringside Seat to a Revolution: An Underground History of El Paso and Juárez: 1893-1923 (Cinco Puntos Press, El Paso), Zyklon B became available in the United States when, in the early 1920s, fears of alien infection were being inflamed by the alarums of the eugenicists, most of them political “progressives.”

Donald Trump is a eugenecist. So is Stephen Miller. Just saying.

I know it’s hard to accept but there it is. They love him more than ever. And it’s not just that they hate Democrats, which they do. They affirmatively voted for Trump. Maybe it’s time to stop asuming they don’t support what he says and does?

By the way:

Trump won and hasn’t called fraud so that means it was fair. Like him his voters are happy to accept the election results — if they win.

Oh, the stories behind these stories

It’s getting noticed, that story I mentioned Tuesday about Judge Jefferson Griffin, the losing Republican N.C. Supreme Court candidate’, and his desperate attempt to cancel 60,000 votes in an effort to narrow the 734 vote gap between himself and sitting Justice Allison Riggs.

Judd Legum’s Popular Information:

The contest between Griffin and Riggs was very close. The initial count showed Riggs with a lead of 734 votes out of 5.5 million cast. Griffin then exercised his legal right to request a machine recount of all ballots. After that recount, Riggs was still ahead by the same margin. Griffin has now requested a second recount of the ballots, this time by hand. Under North Carolina’s procedures, there will first be a hand recount of 3% of the ballots cast. If the North Carolina Election Board determines that the partial hand recount revealed a sufficient number of discrepancies to suggest the outcome could change, a full hand recount will take place.

There is nothing particularly unusual about requesting recounts in close elections. But Griffin is also taking a page out of President-elect Donald Trump’s playbook and claiming that tens of thousands of votes were cast illegally. Griffin’s campaign sent postcards to the voters whose ballots it is seeking to invalidate, alerting them of the protest. Popular Information obtained a photo of one of the postcards. [See above]

Riggs’ campaign says the “postcards have sowed confusion, anger, and frustration among voters who cast their ballots in good faith to make their voices heard.” Among those receiving a postcard notifying them that their vote was under protest were Riggs’ parents.

The now four friends on my county’s list have had a rude awakening. I don’t think they got the postcards. They were contacted by me. Griffin has challeged nearly 1,600 voters in my county alone.

The Asheville Watchdog’s Peter Lewis (formerly senior writer, editor, and columnist with The New York Times and more) quotes campaign spokespersons:

“Our priority remains ensuring that every legal vote is counted and that the public can trust the integrity of this election,” state Republican Party spokesperson Matt Mercer said in a news release. Embry Owen, Riggs’s campaign manager, said Griffin’s protests were a “last-ditch effort to deny the will of voters across the state.”

Those unfamiliar with election proccesses may not grasp the weediness of the challenge.

The bulk of the challenges involve the Help America Vote Act of 2002, which in North Carolina requires voters to provide the last four digits of their Social Security number or their NC driver’s license number. Anyone attempting to vote in 2024 whose voter registration records did not already include the ID numbers should have been required at the polls to provide those numbers. 

Under state law, all voters in 2024 were required to show proper identification before being allowed to vote. But there is no uniform method among the counties for capturing that information on voter forms. Even if a poll worker requested and verified a voter’s ID, precinct computers are not linked to any database for security reasons, so no corrections or additions to the registration could be made.

That’s correct. It’s not as if these people never presented that information. The state has no process outside the local board offices for logging it. Not the voters’ problem. But that’s the loophole Republicans now want to drive a bus through to narrow the vote gap and overturn the election results.

Republicans insist we need more accurate voter rolls but won’t pay for making it happen. As in so many other cases, they’d rather have the issue to run on than fix the problem. But they will exploit the problem to cancel people’s votes, including their own. There are 300 Republican voters on the challenge list in my county alone.

Oh, the stories behind these stories. But that’s for another time.

Resistance could be fruitful

Step back from the ledge. Take a break from news about the punishments the Jan. 20 Revolution plans to roll out against its enemies, and against friends who won’t publicly abase themselves before the king. “That wasn’t humiliating enough. Grovel lower!”

Need a redoubt against Trumpism that doesn’t require a passport? Fifteen blue states, especially those in which Democrats control both executive and legislative branches, are preparing to hold the line against the incoming Trump administration’s predations. Their weapon of choice? Federalism. What a concept.

Democrats and their lawyers have laid plans to defend reproductive rights and hold the line against mass deportations. But more than that, they’ve outlined “a new progressive vision of federalism—pugilistic and creative, audacious and idealistic.” They mean to “filch tactics” deployed to punishing effect by Texas Gov. Greg Abbott who has perfected a form of “hegemonic federalism” to work his will and annoy Democratic state governments.

Franklin Foer explains at The Atlantic:

I have heard a few hastily sketched ideas for how Democrats could mimic Abbott’s coercive ploys. Blue states might aggressively recruit ob-gyns from states with severe restrictions on abortion, leaving behind a red-state shortage of medical care. Women in those states, even ones who aren’t especially passionate about abortion, might begin clamoring to ease abortion bans—or punishing the Republican politicians who installed them in the first place. The goal is to apply pressure on Republican governors by provoking a political backlash from within.

Another set of proposals involves deploying massive public-employee pension funds that Democratic states control to make strategic investments in red states. By sinking money into Texas’s wind industry, for instance, blue states would do more than just expand alternative-energy options in the state. They would unleash a powerful interest group, which might help reshape the political dynamic in the state.

Muahahaha!

The goal, Foer writes, is to get blue state governors “to think sensationalistically in order to call attention to the failures of Republican policies.” But there’s a more virtuous side too. Think Progressive Era Wisconsin Gov. Robert La Follette and his “Wisconsin Idea.”

Consider: California’s economic clout and population size mean that policies like auto emission standards born there eventually migrate east, not by force of ideology, but by force of the Almighty American Dollar.

The innovation that the new federalists propose is that the blue states begin to leverage their big budgets—and their outsize influence—by acting in concert. Banding together into a cartel, they can wield their scale to bargain to buy goods at discount. There are drafts of plans to form a collective of states that would purchase insulin and other prescription drugs, which might help mitigate the higher costs of living in their states. (After the Dobbs decision, California Governor Gavin Newsom spearheaded an alliance that began to stockpile the abortion pill misoprostol.) Or they could cooperate to buy solar panels en masse, with the hopes of transforming clean-energy markets.

It’s not just about teaming up for the sake of bulk purchases. They can collaborate on creating a joint set of standards, which becomes the basis for legislating and regulating. By creating uniform rules for, say, corporate governance or animal welfare or the disclosure of dark-money contributions to nonprofits, they stand a chance of shaping the standard for the entirety of the country, because it’s cumbersome for a national corporation to adhere to two sets of guidelines for raising chickens.

Whether Democrats can get their acts together enough to act in concert is the trick.

Oh great, another one:

Donald Trump’s pick to head the Internal Revenue Service pressed the agency to investigate and consider stripping the country’s leading animal welfare group of its tax status after it supported an initiative to protect dogs, according to documents reviewed by The Lever.

If former Missouri Republican Rep. Billy Long is confirmed to run the Internal Revenue Services (IRS), he would be in a position to strip — and effectively shut down — the tax status of such nonprofit groups whose missions he disagrees with. And Long could have new powers to do so if Congress enacts a pending House-passed bill to grant the Trump administration new powers to rescind the tax status of groups it deems “terrorist supporting organizations.”

In 2011, Long signed a letter pushing the IRS to launch a probe of the tax-exempt status of the Humane Society of the United States, a nonprofit that focuses on animal welfare and opposes animal cruelty. The letter followed the Humane Society’s support of a successful Missouri ballot measure strengthening regulations on dog breeders.

The letter, which was signed by Long and five other members of Congress, claimed that public documents showed “beyond question that lobbying is a ‘substantial part’ of [the Human Society’s] activities, and feel the IRS’s failure to act is attributable to the politically sensitive nature of [the society’s] activities,” they argued. “Due to this, we write to request investigations by the Inspector General into [the Human Society’s] apparent improper activities and its tax-exempt status.” 

He’s a far-right, Trump worshipping troll. His twitter feed might as well be some Q-Anon freak’s hobby and he’s clearly on it night and day. He even believes that shutting down cruel puppy mills is a socialist plot.

Kakistocracy: government by the least suitable or competent citizens of a state.

Idiocracy: a society or group that is controlled by or consists of people of low intelligence.