151 search results for ""14th amendment""

TFG had a particularly bad last week. New York’s attorney general, Letitia James, essentially declared that charges against his family business are coming (The Guardian):

“We have uncovered significant evidence that suggests Donald J Trump and the Trump Organization falsely and fraudulently valued multiple assets and misrepresented those values to financial institutions for economic benefit,” James said after the filing was lodged in a New York court.

The new material disclosed by James was so compelling that some close observers of Trumpland are now convinced that he is in serious legal trouble. Michael Cohen, Trump’s former personal attorney and an ex-vice president of the Trump Organization, told the Guardian: “The House of Trump is crumbling.”

But hers is a civil case that could result in steep fines and penalties. The investigation into accounting, bank, tax and insurance fraud by Trump led by Manhattan’s new district attorney, Alvin Bragg, is a criminal one:

“Trump could end up in an orange jumpsuit at the end of that one,” said Timothy O’Brien, a senior columnist for Bloomberg Opinion.

Richard Luscombe writes this morning in The Guardian abaout the avalanche of bad news for TFG:

It included a rebuke from the supreme court over documents related to the 6 January insurrection which Trump incited; news that the congressional committee investigating the riot was closing in on Trump’s inner circle; evidence from New York’s attorney general of alleged tax fraud; and, perhaps most damaging of all, a request from a Georgia prosecutor for a grand jury in her investigation of Trump’s attempt to overturn the 2020 election.

The week ended with the leaking of a document showing that Trump at least pondered harnessing the military in his attempts to overturn Joe Biden’s victory.

TFG-adjacent participants as well as his inner circle are beginning to spill what they know about the conspiracy to overturn the 2020 election. The walls are beginning to close in.

“He’s Teflon Don, he said he could shoot somebody on Fifth Avenue and survive it, his supporters are going to support him no matter what, but I’m starting to think more and more that the walls are closing in on this guy,” said Kimberly Wehle, a respected legal analyst and professor of law at the University of Baltimore.

“The most immediate thing is the grand jury in Georgia because there’s audio of him trying to get [secretary of state] Brad Raffensperger to ‘find’ votes. Under Georgia election laws as I read them that is potentially a crime.

“The looming question is whether Trump will be indicted along with 11 others so far for seditious conspiracy [over the 6 January Capitol attack]. To me that’s the biggest turn of events … the justice department believes they have evidence beyond a reasonable doubt of an agreement, a meeting of minds to overturn a legitimate election.

“And that there are a lot of high-level people that are looped into it, including potentially Donald Trump himself, and of course he’s not president, so he’s not immune from prosecution any more.”

Where Merrick Garland’s Department of Justice investigation into former White House officials stands is still guesswork. But revelations already circulating from documents obtained last week from the Trump White House are increasing the pressure on TFG as well as on the DOJ. These include a shoddily constructed draft executive order to have the Secretary of Defense seize voting machines.

The result of investigations might mean some candidates for reelection in November could be deemed ineligible for public office. Under a 14th Amendment provision, those who have participated in insurrection or rebellion against the United States may not “hold any office, civil or military, under the United States, or under any state. Voters in North Carolina are attempting to get Rep. Madison Cawthorn (R) disqualified on that basis.

Wehle spoke to that issue, saying:

“We have to think about the January 6th committee as getting information to voters before November about sitting members who might be up for reelection,” she said.

“The question is not so much whether Trump will be indicted, but who in a seat of power in the US Congress was potentially involved in this conspiracy.

“Frankly, if American democracy is to be saved from single-party minority rule, November is absolutely vital.”

One way or another, 2022 is going to be a shit show.

If you think the upcoming abortion rulings in Texas and Mississippi are bad, you don’t know the half of it:

[T]he right to abortion is not the only fundamental right at risk. The arguments being advanced by Mississippi, if accepted, would destabilize a central part of the court’s jurisprudence protecting fundamental constitutional rights. As a result, Dobbs also threatens the fundamental rights to use birth control, marry a loved one, and make decisions about sexual intimacy.

The linchpin of Mississippi’s attack on Roe and Planned Parenthood v. Casey, the 1992 case that reaffirmed Roe, is that the right to abortion cannot be a constitutional right because states restricted abortion in 1868 at the time of the ratification of the 14^th Amendment. Mississippi argues that the public in 1868 would have understood the 14^th Amendment to permit state restrictions on abortion to continue.

This is not a new argument—it formed the basis of then-Justice William Rehnquist’s dissent in Roe and was made repeatedly by Justice Antonin Scalia over the course of his career on the bench, including in his dissent in Casey—but it is a far-reaching and radical one. It would not only hollow out the 14^th Amendment’s protection of liberty, but also jettison many decades of Supreme Court precedent safeguarding a broad range of fundamental rights. And as Chief Justice John Roberts recognized in his confirmation testimony, it is “completely circular,” using state practice to interpret the constraints the 14^th Amendment was written to impose on the states.

Reading the 14^th Amendment to allow states to enact laws similar to those in effect in 1868 is a perversion of originalism. In fact, the text and history of the 14^th Amendment provide no support for the idea that the courts should look to state practice in 1868 to define the scope of the amendment’s protections. The 14^th Amendment sought to disrupt discriminatory state laws and practices, not perpetuate them. In the wake of a bloody Civil War fought over slavery, the 14^th Amendment attempted to transform our federal system against the backdrop of a long history of suppression of fundamental rights. It makes little sense to make state practice at the time of ratification determinative of the amendment’s sweeping protections of fundamental rights. Indeed, the court’s wholesale failure to vindicate the 14^th Amendment, in cases like the Slaughter-House Cases and United States v. Cruikshank, in the years after Reconstruction speaks to how an approach that slights the 14^th Amendment’s transformative guarantees and broadly defers to the states utterly fails. The 14^th Amendment was written to redress state denials of fundamental rights, not leave them in place in perpetuity.

For good reason, state practice in 1868 has never been a measure of what fundamental, personal rights are guaranteed against state infringement by the 14^th Amendment. This is illustrated not only by Roe and Casey—which explicitly rejected the idea that the state practice in 1868 fixes the fundamental rights for all future generations—but also by many other landmark Supreme Court rulings vindicating the 14^th Amendment’s promise of liberty for all.

For example, in 1967, in Loving v. Virginia, the Supreme Court struck down Virginia’s anti-miscegenation statute, holding that the freedom to marry a person of another race is a fundamental right. It did not matter that anti-miscegenation laws had been common in Virginia as far back as the colonial period because, under the 14^th Amendment, the right to marry cannot be infringed by the government.

Similar examples abound. In 1965, in Griswold v. Connecticut, the Supreme Court struck down a restriction on the use of birth control dating back to 1879, holding that it infringed on the right of a married couple to choose whether to start a family and bear children. The fact that restrictions on birth control had a long historical lineage did not give the government the right to intrude on a married couple’s decision about whether and when to start a family.

In 2003, in Lawrence v. Texas, the Supreme Court held that the 14^th Amendment protected a right to sexual intimacy by LGBTQ adults, despite a very long history of laws that prohibited same-sex intimacy and sexual conduct. In Obergefell v. Hodges in 2015, the Supreme Court held that the 14^th Amendment guaranteed the right to marry a loved one of the same sex, even though marriage had historically been limited to a union of a man and a woman. Both decisions drew on Loving to safeguard bedrock rights to love, marry, and form a family, ensuring equal dignity to LGBTQ persons.ADVERTISEMENT

The lesson of more than half a century of 14^th Amendment jurisprudence is that a state cannot defend a law challenged for violating a fundamental right merely by pointing to the fact that similar enactments existed at the time of the ratification of the 14^th Amendment. Otherwise, as the court recognized in Obergefell, “received practices could serve as their own continued justification and new groups could not invoke rights once denied.”

All of these landmark precedents are now in the crosshairs. If the fundamental rights protected by the 14^th Amendment are determined by looking to state practice in 1868—as Mississippi and its allies urge—Loving’s holding protecting the right to marry as a fundamental right would be in doubt, as would many other landmark precedents, including Lawrence and Obergefell.

Indeed, the amicus brief filed in Dobbs on behalf of Texas Right to Life—and signed by Adam Mortara, a former clerk to Justice Clarence Thomas, and Jonathan Mitchell, the architect of S.B. 8—demonstrates that Dobbs is just the beginning, and conservatives are seeking a much larger jurisprudential reversal. In urging the Supreme Court to overrule Roe, the brief contends that virtually all of the court’s fundamental rights jurisprudence is questionable. It explicitly rejects Loving’s reasoning, arguing that the Supreme Court was wrong to recognize a fundamental right to marry in that case. It claims that Lawrence and Obergefell are “lawless” rulings and urges the Supreme Court in Dobbs to leave “those decisions hanging by a thread.”

The stakes in Dobbs are sky-high. The court has never recognized—and then stripped away—a fundamental right that millions of Americans have relied on to determine the course of their lives and participate as equals in American life. And the right to abortion is not the only right at risk of being taken away. The endgame for conservatives is to roll back the 14th Amendment’s broad protection of fundamental rights essential to autonomy, dignity, and equality.

Will they do it? It’s certainly possible, maybe even probable. This extremist majority is committed to an archaic view of human civilization. I would not be at all surprised if they just go for it. That’s the current right wing mentality from the top down.

And, by the way, the Republican voters will justify it by saying that that this is a restoration of their rights… to dominate everyone that doesn’t agree with them.

Here’s a good explainer by Ian Millhiser on the Texas abortion atrocity:

Allowing a law to stand that violates the Supreme Court’s 1992 Planned Parenthood v. Casey decision means that the constitutional right to an abortion is effectively dead. States now have the power to ban abortion for the first time since the Roe v. Wade ruling was handed down in 1973.

While it is theoretically possible that the Court could reverse course in subsequent litigation and strike down SB 8, the sort of justices who would allow such a law to take effect are exceedingly unlikely to do so. And the Court is already planning to hear a case in its next term, Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, which it can use to overrule Roe explicitly.https://71efe1b4f27048570c4dc4d1ae291707.safeframe.googlesyndication.com/safeframe/1-0-38/html/container.html

The right to an abortion was killed in a one-paragraph order in a case that arose on the Supreme Court’s “shadow docket,” a mix of emergency motions and other decisions that receive only cursory briefing and no oral argument. The justices took action after considering the case for less than three days.

Whole Woman’s Health, in other words, is a sea change in the Court’s approach to not only abortion rights but also all other litigation.

The Court has now signaled that it will permit states to enact laws that were intentionally drafted to frustrate judicial review, at least if a majority of the Court agrees with what that law is trying to accomplish. And it handed down one of the most monumental decisions of our era — a decision effectively overturning Roe v. Wade — in a shadow docket order that offers virtually no reasoning.

The reason why SB 8 can only be enforced by private lawsuits brought by individuals who are not employed by the state of Texas is that this structure makes it very difficult to challenge the law in federal court.

Under a doctrine known as “sovereign immunity,” private parties typically cannot sue states directly. In Ex Parte Young (1908), however, the Supreme Court held that a private party who wishes to block a state law may sue the state officer charged with enforcing that law. So, for example, if Texas had enacted a law permitting its attorney general to prosecute abortion providers, an abortion provider could sue the attorney general in federal court and seek a court order blocking that law.

But SB 8 states that it “shall be enforced exclusively through … private civil actions.” State officers and employees are explicitly forbidden from enforcing the law. So, it’s not at all clear who the appropriate defendant is in a federal lawsuit attempting to block SB 8.

It’s worth noting that, even after the Supreme Court’s decision that effectively endorses this method of dodging judicial review, abortion providers still have a way to challenge the state law. They can violate it, wait for someone to sue them, and then argue in that lawsuit that SB 8 is unconstitutional.

But here’s the rub: Under SB 8, “any person” except for a state employee may bring a lawsuit against an abortion provider. That lawsuit may be filed in any number of different Texas state courts, including a trial court in the same county where the plaintiff resides (assuming the plaintiff lives in Texas).

That means anyone who is even suspected of performing an abortion after the sixth week of pregnancy can be hauled into court at any time, in nearly any venue in the state, and potentially by hundreds or even thousands of different litigants. The abortion provider will then have to hire a lawyer and defend itself against all of those lawsuits. And if it loses just one, it will have to pay a bounty of “not less than $10,000 for each abortion that the defendant performed or induced in violation of this subchapter.”

It’s worth emphasizing the words “not less than.” A judge with particularly strong anti-abortion views might award a bounty of $20,000, or $50,000, or $18 million.

The law also subjects anyone who “aided or abetted” an abortion after the sixth week of pregnancy to similar penalties — a term that’s not defined in the statute but could be construed to endanger parties who have exceedingly loose ties to an abortion clinic. As NYU School of Law professor Melissa Murray recently noted, even an Uber driver who gives a pregnant woman a ride to a clinic may be vulnerable to suit.

SB 8, in other words, is likely to subject abortion providers (and maybe even Uber drivers) to a blizzard of lawsuits that they cannot possibly afford to defend themselves against, even if they ultimately prevail in each case. And should an abortion provider lose even one case, they could face truly draconian financial sanctions.

For these reasons, many abortion clinics in Texas have simply stopped providing abortions. As Justice Stephen Breyer notes in his dissenting opinion, “One of the clinic applicants has stated on its website that ‘[d]ue to Texas’ SB 8 law,’ it is ‘unable to provide abortion procedures at this time.’” Others may try to provide abortions prior to the sixth week of pregnancy, but they do so at tremendous risk.

The law normally prevents situations like this by allowing a party who faces an imminent risk of legal harm to sue to block a law before it is brought to bear against them. But, of course, SB 8 was drafted to frustrate such lawsuits. And the Supreme Court has now endorsed Texas’s effort to frustrate a pre-enforcement lawsuit.

He goes on to explain how this law was specifically designed to avoid judicial review, which is one of the most astonishingly radical things about it. And we might hope that Democrats would use the logic (if you want to call it that) to fashion similar laws to effect outcomes that they support as well, if only to show the Court that they have opened Pandora’s Box.

Unfortunately:

There’s also a profound practical reason why the Supreme Court should not bless laws like SB 8 — and why it almost certainly would not bless a similar law that applied to a topic other than abortion.

Imagine, for example, that New York passed a law permitting “any person” to sue gun owners and collect a $10,000 bounty from those gun owners. Or, for that matter, imagine if a state allowed anyone to file a lawsuit against Justice Samuel Alito, seeking a $10,000 bounty every time Alito used the word “the.”

Does anyone think this Supreme Court would rule that a law authorizing thousands of harassment suits against gun owners is compatible with the Second Amendment? Or that it would force those gun owners to hire lawyers and litigate a seemingly endless stream of lawsuits to avoid paying a bounty?

Similarly, does anyone think this Court would allow one of its own members to be bombarded with lawsuits whose sole purpose is to hound him and impoverish him with legal fees?

With their decision in Whole Woman’s Health, the justices have unleashed a monster. If taken seriously, that decision would allow any state to subject any person or institution to an overwhelming wave of lawsuits that they cannot possibly defend against. SB 8 is a direct attack on the rule of law and the principle that everyone should have their day in court before they are punished by the state.

It’s an attack on the 14th Amendment, which provides that no state may “deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law.”

But, of course, if a state were to target gun owners, or Alito, or anyone else the Supreme Court’s most conservative justices approve of, the Court would almost certainly step in to protect a conservative litigant. Just last month, in Chrysafis v. Marks, the Supreme Court blocked part of New York state’s eviction moratorium because it “denies the landlord a hearing” before that landlord is required to house an unwanted tenant.

The Supreme Court is quite protective of due process — when the right litigant seeks the Court’s protection. One of the most disturbing things about Whole Woman’s Health is that it suggests the Court has abandoned its most fundamental principle: equal justice under law.

There is no appeal beyond the Supreme Court. This majority of radical wingnuts can do as they please. Get ready for a very bumpy ride.

Notice a theme here this morning?

“Fueled by hostility to the civil rights movement and other societal changes that attempted to give equal rights to Black and brown people, the Republican Party has now fully embraced white supremacy and white identity politics as its dominant strategy for winning and keeping power,” Chauncey DeVega writes at Salon:

If the American people as a group had listened to Black folks’ warnings — and in particular Black women’s warnings — about the danger represented by Donald Trump, he would never have been elected president in the first place. If the mainstream news media and other prominent public voices had listened to Black and brown folks’ warnings about ascendant fascism and white supremacy, the Jan. 6 coup attempt and lethal attack on the Capitol would not have taken place.

Black and brown folks are now trying to warn the Democrats and Joe Biden that American democracy has been imperiled to such an extreme that the 2022 midterms may be the last “free and fair elections” in the United States — and even that is an optimistic prediction.

Black people are demanding the “urgency of now” to save the country’s democracy. Joe Biden and the Democratic Party’s leadership have instead chosen to celebrate “infrastructure” and “bipartisanship” while refusing to end the filibuster.

If America had listened to Black people’s wisdom and warnings across the centuries, it would be a safer, more secure, more prosperous and more free nation today. America’s future depends on heeding that wisdom now. There is no time to lose.

J.D. Vance’s comments last weekend confirm the exclusionary, royalist bent among about 20 percent of Americans that I have argued has been here since before the Treaty of Paris. Speaking before a conservative conference, the Republican candidate for Senate in Ohio “took a swipe at Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg and other Democratic politicians by suggesting that people with children should have more voting power than those of the ‘childless left.’”

Specifically, Vance said, “When you go to the polls in this country as a parent, you should have more power, you should have more of an ability to speak your voice in our Democratic republic, than people who don’t have kids.”

Move over, poll tax. Stand aside, white, male property owners. Out of the way, “one dollar, one vote.” Adults with children should have bonus political power. Those without lack literal skin in the game, Vance believes.

I don’t think Vance has thought through the demographic implications, do you? Still, if he’s doing performative trolling for his Republican base, he knows what will juice them before they think too much about it.

But the very idea that this occurs to Vance is a tell. Should the new Republican minority sink its hooks more firmly into the mechanisms of formerly democratic governance at the state and national levels, expect new and inventive ways for them to turn what was a the world’s most enduring democratic republic into a one-party state.

Republicans would consider amending the 14th Amendment with a long list of new prerequisites for citizenship. Being “born or naturalized in the United States” will no longer be sufficient in the Republican States of America.

This is harsh but there is an element of truth in it:

A “parasite” on the Democratic Party is how journalist Edward Isaac Dovere describes former President Obama in his forthcoming tell-all book “Battle for the Soul: Inside the Democrats’ Campaign to Defeat Trump.”

In a chapter entitled “Benign Neglect,” Dovere writes that the section’s namesake is how Obama aides privately described his abandonment of the Democratic Party once in the White House. “‘Negligence’ might be more accurate,” Dovere, writer for The Atlantic and former chief Washington correspondent for Politico, writes.

“The numbers are hard to ignore: during his eight years in office, Obama oversaw a net loss of 947 state legislative seats, 63 House seats, 11 senators, and 13 governors,” he continues.

In 2008, Democrats increased their majorities in the House and Senate, delivering Obama the legislature for his first two years in office. In 2010, Republicans took the majority in the House with the Tea Party wave and Democrats maintained but shrunk their majority in the Senate. In 2014, Republicans gained control of both the House and Senate.

Dovere writes that the 44th president carried himself with a “self-assured self-regard.”

“Obama never built a Democratic bench and never cared to, aside from a few scattered candidates who interested him,” according to the book.

Dovere writes that “defenders” of Obama have argued he didn’t want to “taint” his presidency by ” mucking about in fundraising,” or that he didn’t want to spoil the image voters had of him as an independent politician, or that faced with the choice to campaign or govern, he would always choose govern.

Dovere writes that during his first term, Obama used the party structure as a “host” for his next campaign.

In 2009, Obama hired his friend Tim Kaine to head the DNC, even though Kaine was also serving as governor for the first year on the job.

In a scathing passage Dovere claims Kaine was at the time “commuting two days a week to oversee the pilfering of talent, money, resources, and purpose for the Obama reelection effort that was already under way.”

“In his second term, he cared about what happened to the husk as much as any parasite does,” Dovere says.

Dovere pointed to the Obama team’s decision to strike a deal with the Democratic National Committee (DNC) that saddled the committee with $2.4 million in leftover debt from Obama’s 2012 election. In return, “Obama for America” gave the DNC its email list, and Obama was supposed to headline additional fundraisers.

Obama’s peak pride came in 2015, Dovere writes, when on back-to-back days the Supreme Court upheld ObamaCare, his signature achievement, and ruled the 14th Amendment requires all states to grant same-sex marriages.

“‘In hindsight it’s hard not to see delusion in the self-assurance and the celebration and the sense of moving forward of those two weeks in America,” Dovere writes.

People who’ve read this blog for a long time will recall that I was apoplectic about the Grand Bargain which I knew was a chump move. The Republicans had made it clear for quite some time that they had passed from normal political horse-trading into all-out partisan combat. I was particularly appalled by Obama’s assurance to the red state Democratic Reps who tried to tell him that they were going to lose their seats in 2010 that they didn’t need to worry because “you have me.” There was a whole lot of hubris in that first term. (And it wasn’t just Obama, although he set the tone. His entire entourage was full of themselves.)

However, I did think they wised up in the final term and became a lot less arrogant. And they did a lot of good. I certainly personally benefited from Obamacare. And I think you also have to recognize that they were up against a rabid opposition that was hardly less crazed than they were under Trump. It’s a tough time to be president. The country is coming apart.

More resources need to be directed at state legislative races, says Raymond Paultre, the executive director of the Florida Alliance, a network of progressive donors. The New York Times spends many paragraphs arguing that Democrats are “struggling to build a surefire legal strategy to block new Republican-backed restrictions on voting rights,” but without providing much evidence for one. And before pointing out even winning legal strategies are inadequate.

North Carolina Democrats know too well that legal victories take time. Republicans have learned they can run out the clock in court on an entire decade before losing. Then, if they retain control of state redistricting, start the ten-year clock all over:

“Case-by-case litigation in the voting context is time-consuming, costly, and ultimately inadequate because even if you win a case, frequently these kinds of laws remain on the books for one or more election cycle before litigation can be complete, and there’s no way to compensate people after the fact,” said Dale Ho, the director of the Voting Rights Project at the American Civil Liberties Union, which litigated several major cases last year.

The same week Florida’s Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis appeared on Fox & Friends to sign a bill making it harder to vote in Florida, and the same week Texas House Republicans passed their own set of new restrictive voting rules, Paultre told the Times:

“We are living in and through sort of the remnants and results of a lack of investments in state infrastructure for the last 30 years,” Mr. Paultre said. “We don’t have a clear way of stopping these bills. Let’s use this as a wake-up call. Let’s get as upset with ourselves as we are with the Republicans.”

Still, Democrats are trying to stop the erosion of democracy through the courts, as they must:

Democrats’ legal case against the Florida law, filed by the party’s top election lawyer, Marc Elias, argues that the legislation violates the First Amendment’s protection of free speech, and the 14th Amendment on the grounds that it would adversely affect people of color. Another suit, filed on Thursday by the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, also argues that the law violates the First and 14th Amendments, as well as Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act and the Americans With Disabilities Act — because many drop boxes are likely to be moved to indoor locations that are inaccessible to people with disabilities.

Sam Spital, the director of litigation for the legal defense fund, said that while he believed the lawsuits would prevail, the only comprehensive solution to Republican efforts to restrict voting would come from the federal government — both Congress and the Justice Department.

And how does that happen without Democratic control of both Congress and the Justice Department? And without a Supreme Court averse to gutting the Voting Rights Act? And without control of state legislatures to keep Republicans from passing these antidemocratic measures in the first place?

Democrats in Congress are struggling to advance voting rights legislation that would put the brakes on Republican efforts to codify Republican minority rule. But they lack the votes in the Senate to pass the For the People Act and the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act. Building the capacity to beat back Republican efforts begins in state legislatures where in many places Democrats often lack a bench deep enough to build numbers at the federal level.

Republicans’ core ideological principle is contempt for democracy, “Late Night” host Seth Meyers told his audience this week. “Rather than appeal to a majority of voters, [Republicans] would rather just rig the game so they always win,” Meyers said, referencing the Fox News stunt by DeSantis.  

From The Guardian:

In a move Meyers called “bizarre and deeply unnerving”, DeSantis signed the bill, which imposes new limits on voting by mail and ballot drop boxes, live in an exclusive for Fox News. “I’m sure [the bill is] bipartisan if they’re signing it exclusively on Fox News,” Meyers deadpanned. “It’s like your spouse saying they have something to tell you, and they want to do it live on Maury.

“Signing the bill on Fox & Friends really gives the game away, doesn’t it?” Meyers continued. “It’s like when a loan shark knocks on your door with two goons on either side – you know what he’s there for.”

Taking them to court is not your best bet for solving the problem.

Trump wasn’t the only one inciting the Insurrection:

Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-CA) on Thursday night released an absolutely massive report compiling the social media posts of every Republican who voted to object to the counting of certain states’ Electoral College votes on Jan. 6.

Then-President Donald Trump had hyped that Jan. 6 congressional objection effort as his last real hope of stealing a second term, and on the morning of Jan. 6, he urged the thousands of supporters that he’d summoned to Washington, D.C. to march on the Capitol and provide some “courage” to the members of Congress voting inside.

Many of those members spent weeks spreading what Democrats have begun calling the “big lie” — the false claim that the 2020 election was fraudulent, and that Joe Biden was not the rightfully elected president. Lofgren’s report, documenting over 1,900 pages of tweets, creates a detailed record of the effort to justify overturning an election. Here are some takeaways:

The Lofgren review of social media posts — it’s more like a PDF database, organized alphabetically by member — makes one thing clear: A small handful of congressmen and women made much of the social media noise from November through January.

Rep. Paul Gosar (R-AZ) appears to have been the most prolific. The Trump die-hard, who recently spoke at a political conference organized by the white nationalist Nicholas Fuentes, takes up a full 176 pages of the 1,900 page report. Reps. Mo Brooks (R-AL), Matt Gaetz (R-FL) and Billy Long (R-LA) aren’t far behind, taking up around 120 pages each. Rep. Majorie Taylor Greene’s (R-GA) tweets take up 94 pages.

The posts from these loyalists offer a real-time view of the Trumpian strategy. Brooks, for example, shifts over time from complaints about “en masse” mail-in voting, to his own dubious claims about voting machines, to assertions about votes from an “illegal alien block” and people other than “eligible American citizens.” On the morning of Jan. 6, Brooks said from the rally stage in front of the White House that patriots ought to start “taking down names and kicking ass.” But in the middle of the attack, he’d already begun shifting blame for the riot: “Rumor: ANTIFA fascists in backwards MAGA hats” he tweeted at 2:20 p.m., the start of a lie that persists today.

All but one member of GOP House leadership (Republican Conference Chair Liz Cheney from Wyoming) voted to overturn the election: House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA), House Minority Whip Steve Scalise (R-LA) and Republican Policy Committee Chair Gary Palmer (R-AL)

Lofgren’s compilation included a McCarthy tweet that promoted a clip of his Fox Business interview on November 4, when Joe Biden was beginning to emerge as the winner. McCarthy declares in the clip: “We’re going to have to fight because we want to make sure every legal vote is counted.”

That soundbite — ”every legal vote needs to be counted” — and demands for “transparency” became the codewords employed by the House minority leader and Scalise in their attempts to legitimize Trump’s lies about election fraud. Their language indicates how they were careful not to lean too much into Trump’s more outlandish claims; they never explicitly accuse Democrats of stealing the presidential election (though McCarthy did accuse them of trying to steal the razor-thin race in Iowa’s 2nd Congressional District). Rather, their tweets show them trying to chip away at the legitimacy of the election in more subtle ways, by raising supposedly “serious” questions “about election integrity” and baseless claims that “millions” of ballots are “ripe for voter fraud.”

(Lofgren’s compilation did not include posts from Palmer. The methodology notes that a lawmaker may not be listed if they didn’t post relevant content in the study’s set time frame.)

For weeks after Election Day, Republicans following Donald Trump’s lead amped up the rhetoric as his options for a legal victory dwindled. As the vote-counting continued and the reality of Biden’s lead became clear, the violent rhetoric only grew.

On Nov. 6, for example, Gaetz tweeted “I’ll fight on the floor of the House of Representatives to stop the Electoral College from being certified.”

Gosar quote-tweeted him and commented, “Where do I sign up?”

Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene frequently tweeted about the need to “fight” the election results. On Dec. 19, when Trump first announced a “wild” protest in Washington, D.C. for Jan. 6, Greene tweeted “I’m planning a little something on January 6th as well, @realDonaldTrump.” She tweeted the #FightForTrump hashtag the following day, before boosting details of the Jan. 6 protest as it came together. “I need a massive grassroots army behind me to STOP THE STEAL,” she wrote a week before the rally. The day prior to the rally, she referred to “OUR 1776 MOMENT” in an interview with Newsmax.

Even on clean-up duty after weeks of false and inflammatory claims, some Republicans used the prospect of violence as a lever: Brooks, on Jan. 7, wrote that when citizens lose faith in the system, they have “three bad options”: Emigrating, submitting, or fighting back with violence. “We don’t ever want citizens in America feeling they have been forced into the aforesaid box, with 3 bad options,” he wrote.

The conservative media’s role in amplifying Trump’s bogus claims about the election has already been well-established.

However, this study highlighted the extent to which the ex-president’s foot soldiers in the House used pro-Trump outlets like Fox and Newsmax as a bullhorn in their crusade to overturn the election and then to do damage control as they tried to shift blame away from themselves and Trump for the insurrection. When they weren’t posting clips of themselves ranting to Lou Dobbs and other sympathetic pro-Trump media cranks, they were sharing bogus articles from fringe websites like the Epoch Times or Town Hall to boost their false claims.

One example of this was when Gaetz and Greene shared a Washington Times article that falsely claimed that facial recognition technology found that members of antifa were part of the mob that stormed the Capitol. The Times was forced to issue a correction after the tech company stated that their article was “outright false” and that their software had actually caught two neo-Nazis, with no evidence of antifa being present.

The existence of the mammoth document is notable in the first place, and marks a major step from Lofgren in creating a social media record for any investigations that may be coming down the pike. On her website, the congresswoman noted that she participated, either as a staffer or as a member of Congress, in all four modern presidential impeachment hearings, in addition to congressional removal proceedings for other government officials including former federal Judge G. Thomas Porteous, Jr. and former Rep. James Traficant. Lofgren is today the chair of the Committee on House Administration.

In light of that experience, Lofgren wrote, colleagues have asked her for guidance on what can be done about other members’ of Congress “involvement in the January 6th attempt to overthrow the lawful government of the United States.” Lofgren cited some potential avenues of accountability, including expulsion from Congress for violating the 14th Amendment’s provisions related to insurrection, congressional punishment for disorderly behavior and even potential criminal investigation.

Disciplinary action, the congresswoman wrote, “is a matter not only of the Constitution and law, but also of fact.” To establish those facts, Lofgren said, she asked her staff to take a “quick look” at social media posts from members who voted to overturn the 2020 presidential election. The 1,900-page document is an attempt to compile statements that may be part of Congress’ future responsibilities.

I’m still hopeful there will be a commission that will investigate everything that happened but I’m afraid there will be no accountability for Republican members of congress for what they did. They are backed by their voters and that is not likely to change, unfortunately. But time will pass and there needs to be a record. This is a good start.

This needs to happen. I don’t know who the “impartial non-partisan” people might be and anyway, it doesn’t matter because the right wingers would smear Washington and Franklin if they needed to:

 Lawmakers fresh off the impeachment acquittal of former President Donald J. Trump are issuing growing calls for a bipartisan commission to investigate the administrative and law enforcement failures that led to the mob attack on the Capitol on Jan. 6 and recommend changes to prevent another siege.

Such a commission appears to be the primary remaining option for Congress to try to hold Mr. Trump to account for his role in the assault. Top lawmakers have quashed the idea of a post-impeachment censure of the former president, and the possibility of barring him from future office under the 14th Amendment, which prohibits any official involved in “insurrection or rebellion” from holding office, seems remote.

Lawmakers in both parties have called for a commission modeled on the bipartisan panel established after the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, 2001. Representative Madeleine Dean, Democrat of Pennsylvania and an impeachment manager, described it on ABC’s “This Week” on Sunday as “an impartial commission, not guided by politics, filled with people who would stand up to the courage of their conviction.”

President George W. Bush signed a law establishing the 9/11 Commission in 2002, mandated to investigate what caused the attack and what might have stopped it, and to outline how to prevent a similar attack. After a 20-month investigation, the commission offered three dozen recommendations for how to reshape intelligence coordination and congressional oversight.

“We need a 9/11 Commission to find out what happened and make sure it never happens again, and I want to make sure that the Capitol footprint can be better defended next time,” Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina, said on “Fox News Sunday.”

In the House, rank-and-file lawmakers in both parties have introduced legislation that would establish a commission, with some Democrats proposing a broader examination of the federal government’s response to domestic terrorism and violent extremism.

“We will have an after-action review,” Speaker Nancy Pelosi of California told reporters late last month. “There will be a commission.” She has since been briefed repeatedly by retired Gen. Russel L. Honoré, who has been tapped to examine security on Capitol Hill, which remains surrounded by fences lined with razor wire and under the watch of National Guard troops.

“In the near future, Congress needs to smartly transition to a more sustainable security presence,” Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the minority leader, said in late January. “Keeping the Capitol safe cannot and will not require huge numbers of uniformed troops and vast systems of emergency fencing to remain in place forever.”

Democrats, who abruptly dropped what had been a successful demand for witnesses during the final day of the trial on Saturday, framed a possible commission on Sunday as a way to not only understand the failures that had led to the breach of the Capitol but also to underscore Mr. Trump’s role in the events.

“There’s still more evidence that the American people need and deserve to hear,” Senator Chris Coons, Democrat of Delaware, said on “This Week,” adding that a commission would “make sure that we secure the Capitol going forward and lay bare the record of just how responsible” Mr. Trump was for the attack.

Graham seems to think this would be an opportunity to own the libs. He might be right. But I doubt it.

In a speech before the American Society of Newspaper Editors in 1925, President Calvin Coolidge famously declared “the chief business of the American people is business.” Coolidge was succeeded by another Republican, Herbert Hoover, who in a 1928 campaign speech called for American government to foster “rugged individualism” and self-reliance. Republicans have not strayed from that catechism in the hundred years since.

https://twitter.com/waltshaub/status/1265007167242997761

Senior White House Economic Adviser Kevin Hassett, former resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, coauthored “Dow 36,000” in 1999. He has advised multiple Republican campaigns and administrations and is now a distinguished visiting fellow a at the Hoover Institution. Perhaps his comments on Sunday about “human capital stock” will land him in the history books beside the Republican presidents whose administrations preceded the Great Depression.

Asked about the prospect of double-digit unemployment coming down before the November election, Hassett told CNN’s Dana Bash, “Our capital stock hasn’t been destroyed, our human capital stock is ready to get back to work, and so there are lots of reasons to believe that we can get going way faster than we have in previous crises.”

“Human capital stock” must be put back to work in America’s chief business, “producing, buying, selling, investing,” as Coolidge put it. Therein lies true freedom. It’s what the Revolutionaries died for, dontcha know. They could do all those things under the British, sure, but don’t cloud the issue.

Calling people “stock,” writes Peter Wade at Rolling Stone, “so casually lines up with the lack of empathy shown to the victims of the coronavirus by Trump’s administration and Republicans since the crisis began months ago.”

Asking just who owns and controls our “human capital stock” is the next logical question.

Andrew Naughtie at The Independent elaborates:

The term “human stock” has long been associated with eugenics, a discredited pseudoscience that enjoyed some mainstream credibility in the early 20th century. Many of its adherents, who believed that selective breeding was a self-evident way to better the human race, argued for limiting or cutting off the reproductive capacity of those showing “undesirable” traits.

Author H.G. Wells, whose early views on the hierarchy of racial groups are notorious, wrote in 1904 that “the way of nature has always been to slay the hindmost, and there is still no other way, unless we can prevent those who would become the hindmost being born. It is in the sterilisation of failure, and not in the selection of successes for breeding, that the possibility of an improvement of the human stock lies”.

The idea was so influential that in 1927, the US Supreme Court itself passed a verdict, in Buck v Bell, that compulsory sterilisation “for the protection and health of the state” did not violate the 14th amendment.

While it is not to be implied that Mr Hassett was advocating for the sterilisation of the disabled and “feebleminded”, the furore caused by his phrasing itself testifies to the depth of offence caused by the resurfacing of eugenicist ideas and phraseology.

It is not as if ideas just “lying around” are not there waiting to be picked up in a crisis, as Milton Friedman once said. They’re inside the house. Inside the White House.

President Trump: "The company founded by a man named Henry Ford — good bloodlines, good bloodlines." pic.twitter.com/faCEBwDpwN

— The Hill (@thehill) May 21, 2020

Henry Ford had “good bloodlines, good bloodlines,” Donald Trump told Ford employees last week in a deviation from his script. Then with a grin and a delighted chuckle, Trump added a third time, “if you believe in that stuff, you got good blood.”  

Those who don’t are, if not canon fodder, economic inputs to be used up and discarded when no longer productive.

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For The Win, 3rd Edition is ready for download. Request a copy of my free countywide GOTV mechanics guide at ForTheWin.us. This is what winning looks like.
Note: The pandemic will upend standard field tactics in 2020. If enough promising “improvisations” come my way by June, perhaps I can issue a COVID-19 supplement.

Nevertheless, watch your backs
by Tom Sullivan

Image via Twitter / @eloc8

The Republican Party’s disregard for voting rights is enough to make one cynical. How cynical?

Tuesday afternoon at 4:29 p.m. EDT, Ari Berman (“Give Us the Ballot“) tweeted, “Rigged census one of biggest threats to democracy in US. Trump admin dropping push for citizenship question is enormous deal.”

Champagne corks were popping among members of the voting rights community. Government lawyers had confirmed an hour earlier that the administration had decided to print 2020 census forms without adding the controversial citizenship question the Supreme Court struck down in Department of Commerce v. New York.

My first reaction was elation. My next one was heightened alert for a knife in the back.

By 9:08 p.m. EDT, Election Law Blog’s Rick Hasen added to that sense of foreboding by tweeting, “All’s Well That Ends Well, or All’s Well That Evenwel? How the Commerce Department May Still Help States to Draw Districts with Equal Numbers of Voter Eligible Persons to Minimize Hispanic (and Democratic) Voting Strength.”

Hasen explains:

But as I understand it from people who have been following this [more] closely than I am, the Census Department is still going to create citizenship data which can then be used for redistricting. Ross ordered the Census Bureau to compile citizenship data through existing administrative records, something bureau experts had told him would be cheaper and more accurate than a question anyway.

Now maybe by the time this data is compiled, a Democratic administration could block its release. But if Trump is reelected, these data could be made available, and states could try the Evenwel gambit.

Readers may recall the administration’s true purpose in adding a citizenship question to the census, as revealed in the Hofeller documents, was to enable drawing districts based on citizen voting age population (CVAP) instead of total population. In addition to a citizenship question depressing minority response to the census, drawing CVAP districts “would clearly be a disadvantage to the Democrats” and “advantageous to Republicans and Non-Hispanic Whites,” Hofeller wrote.

In Evenwel v Abbott (2016), plaintiffs in Texas argued that drawing legislative districts based on total population violated the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment by diluting the votes of the voting eligible population. A favorable ruling could have shifted power to older, whiter, more conservative areas. In a unanimous 8-0 decision affirming the constitutionality of drawing districts based on total population, Justice Ginsburg wrote:

In sum, the rule appellants urge has no mooring in the Equal Protection Clause. The Texas Senate map, we therefore conclude, complies with the requirements of the one-person, one-vote principle. Because history, precedent, and practice suffice to reveal the infirmity of appellants’ claims, we need not and do not resolve whether, as Texas now argues, States may draw districts to equalize voter-eligible population rather than total population.

The last statement leaves a hole big enough for red states to drive a semi decked out in Confederate flags through if only they could get the citizenship data to redistrict using CVAP. They may yet try the Evenwel gambit with data provided to the Census Bureau by the Social Security Administration, the Department of Homeland Security and the State Department.

Republicans stretching the law to the breaking point for partisan advantage is becoming ever more strident. Texas Republican congressman Chip Roy urged the president to simply ignore the Supreme Court ruling and add the citizenship question because he can.

This is a sitting Republican member of Congress urging the President to ignore a Supreme Court order.

I'm looking for his colleagues denouncing this.

The warning signs that the GOP wants to abandon our system of govt for one that simply gives them power are blinking red. https://t.co/QcS02tVa8H— Ian Bassin (@ianbassin) July 3, 2019

From the Executive branch on down, Republican leaders treat the law as an inconvenience applicable only to lessers.

At a strategy meeting last weekend, I told a friend I was more focused on state-level races and the U.S. Senate than the presidential contest. So long as Mitch McConnell controls the Senate, Democrats holding the presidency is no guarantee of legislative progress, nor even of McConnell allowing a Democratic president to appoint another nominee to the Supreme Court.

The last statement drew an “Oh, come on” smile, as if that could ever happen. Where were people during the last year of the Obama presidency?

Memories may be short, but habits have a frustrating way of hanging around long after they’ve become obsolete. Democrats on the Hill seem determined to keep conducting business on the basis of rules — and a system of government — their opponents have already abandoned.

Lights are blinking red? There will be tanks on display in the streets of Washington, D.C. tomorrow.

But not on parade:

“You’ve got to be pretty careful with the tanks because the roads have a tendency not to like to carry heavy tanks so we have to put them in certain areas but we have the brand new Sherman tanks and we have the brand new Abrams tanks,” Trump added.

While the US continues to operate the M1 Abrams tank the US military has not used World War II-era M4 Sherman tanks since the 1950s.

Hail to the Chief.