#passing those laws would require democrats to control not only the presidency and the house

[captainjonnitkessler]

Guys I'm starting to think that the "not voting will increase our political influence" crowd doesn't know shit about American politics

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Jonathan Cohn at HuffPost:

“Folks, he’s coming for your health care, and we’re not going to let that happen.” Those are the closing words of a new 30-second ad from the Biden campaign, focusing on the Affordable Care Act and the possibility of repeal if Donald Trump becomes president again. The ad buy is significant: $14 million to run the spot in a half dozen swing states, as my colleague S.V. Dáte reported. And it’s not difficult to understand why.

Trump’s attempt to repeal the Affordable Care Act in 2017 was highly unpopular. The backlash was almost certainly a big reason Republicans managed to lose both houses of Congress and the presidency over the next two elections. Reminding voters of this history can only help Biden and the Democrats, especially amid polls that show the 2010 health care law to be more popular than ever. And the threat to the law is real. Trump spent his entire presidency trying to tear down the program; when legislation failed, he tried to undermine the law by ― among other things ― taking away funds for advertising and promotion. Last fall, he returned to the subject in a Truth Social post, declaring, “The cost of Obamacare is out of control, plus, it’s not good Healthcare. I’m seriously looking at alternatives.”

Trump followed up with what was supposed to be a clarification, stating, “I don’t want to terminate Obamacare, I want to REPLACE IT with MUCH BETTER HEALTHCARE. Obamacare Sucks!!!” But of course, that was just another version of the promises he made before taking office last time ― you may remember vows like “I’m going to take care of everybody” or “We’re going to have insurance for everybody.” He then proceeded to push bills that, according to the Congressional Budget Office, would have added more than 20 million Americans to the ranks of the uninsured.

[...] Democratic leaders vowed to address that issue by increasing the subsidies, effectively realizing their original vision for the law. And they did precisely that in 2021. The American Rescue Plan, which Democrats passed and Biden signed, boosted the Affordable Care Act’s financial assistance so that nobody has to pay more than 8.5% of household income on a standard plan.

It was a temporary measure tied to the pandemic, but in 2022, they extended the subsidies through 2025. The impact has been substantial. Roughly 15 million Americans are saving an average of about $800 a year on their insurance, according to calculations by the Department of Health and Human Services. And like all averages, that covers a range of people. The savings amount to only a pittance for some, but it’s literally thousands of dollars a year for others. The enhanced subsidies have also had more subtle effects. Some insurers still sell “non-compliant” plans that resemble the old policies. These plans can be sold more cheaply because they have big coverage gaps that can leave beneficiaries exposed to punishing, catastrophic medical bills. (Loopholes in the law allow this.) However, fewer people are now buying those policies, opting for the more comprehensive plans available than the Affordable Care Act, according to a study from the non-partisan health research organization KFF. That’s because, with the extra subsidies, the more comprehensive plans don’t cost as much as they did before.

[...]

A Familiar Debate, An Uncertain Political Future

The new Biden ad says he wants to make the assistance permanent, consistent with a proposal in his latest budget. That wouldn’t be cheap. CBO pegged the cost at about $25 million a year back in 2022. It’d probably require more money more now. The inability to find enough offsetting cuts or revenue to cover that cost is one reason Biden and the Democrats didn’t make the bigger subsidies permanent last time. That could happen again. But it’s safe to assume that, at the very least, Biden and the Democrats would approve another temporary extension if they are in office and have enough leverage in Congress after 2024. If Democrats don’t have that kind of power come next year, the fate of these increased subsidies will be in the hands of Trump and the Republicans. And while they haven’t had much to say about the issue, it’s hard to imagine they’d be enthusiastic about extending the subsidies given their traditional hostility to government spending on social welfare, to say nothing of their animus towards Obamacare. Conservative intellectuals are already laying the groundwork. Brian Blase, the former Trump administration official now president of the conservative-leaning Paragon Health Institute, has assailed the extra subsidies as regressive because they have made higher-income Americans eligible for assistance.

If Donald Trump wins in 2024, then there could be big consequences for Obamacare… and it won’t be pretty.

[beardedmrbean]

ATLANTA (AP) — Georgia’s Republican Senate Caucus is suspending a GOP state senator who attacked them for opposing his plan to impeach Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis for indicting former President Donald Trump.

The caucus announced Thursday that it was indefinitely suspending state Sen. Colton Moore of Trenton, who represents a district in Georgia’s northwest corner.

“Sen. Moore has a right to his opinion,” the caucus said in a statement. “However, during his advocacy for his ill-conceived proposal, Sen. Moore has knowingly misled people across Georgia and our nation, causing unnecessary tension and hostility, while putting his caucus colleagues and their families at risk of personal harm,” said the group, which has 32 of the Georgia Senate’s 56 members.

Moore attacked his colleagues as “Republicans in name only,” or RINOs.

“The Georgia RINOs responded to my call to fight back against the Trump witch hunts by acting like children and throwing me out of the caucus,” Moore wrote on X, formerly Twitter. “But I’m not going anywhere.”

It’s the latest display of a divide between Gov. Brian Kemp and many elected Republicans, on the one hand, and grassroots Trump backers who have captured control of Georgia’s Republican Party organization.

Kemp refused to endorse Trump’s false claims about the 2020 election and help him try to overturn his narrow loss in the state. Willis has charged Trump and 18 others, including the former state Republican Party chair, with crimes related to the effort. All have pleaded not guilty.

Moore will still be a member of the Senate and will still be a Republican, but may find it hard to pass legislation without support of the majority caucus. But he already often functioned like a party of one in the body, voting against measures that all other Republicans or all other senators supported.

Moore was the most prominent backer of a special session to impeach and remove Willis or defund her office, winning Trump’s endorsement. Kemp denounced the call as “some grifter scam” to raise campaign contributions for Moore, in a news conference that was unusually impassioned for the buttoned-up Kemp.

Kemp called the push “political theater that only inflames the emotions of the moment,” saying a special session “would ignore current Georgia law and directly interfere with the proceedings of a separate but equal branch of government.” Kemp said he didn’t think Willis had done anything to merit removal.

Moore launched a petition for lawmakers to call themselves into special session, requiring signatures by three-fifths of both houses. That would require some Democratic support because Republicans have a less than 60% majority in each chamber. And the Senate would have required a two-thirds vote to remove Willis after the House impeached her. Moore never got close to persuading fellow Republicans, much less Democrats, winning the signatures of one Republican House member and one other Republican senator.

However, Moore attacked some other state senators. After Republican state Sens. Bo Hatchett and Shelly Echols issued a joint statement criticizing Moore’s call, they said Moore targeted them for retaliation and they received threats.

The caucus claimed Moore violated internal rules and was suspended by Republican leaders after refusing to follow those rules. The caucus claimed Moore was not being retaliated against for “his wrongheaded policy position.”

Some other Georgia Republicans have freely attacked Willis, including U.S. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene.

“Fani Willis should be ashamed of herself and she’s going to lose her job. We’ll make sure of that,” Greene told reporters outside the Fulton County Jail, shortly before Trump arrived by motorcade to submit to booking and a mug shot.

Despite Moore getting the boot, some Republican state senators are backing a plan to seek Willis’ removal by a new state prosecutorial oversight commission. The Prosecuting Attorneys Qualifications Commission is supposed to begin work sometime after Oct. 1, when the state Supreme Court approves its rules. The body was created with the aim of disciplining or removing wayward prosecutors.

Some district attorneys, not including Willis, are already suing to overturn the law, saying it improperly infringes on their authority.

Kemp, while criticizing the timing of the Trump indictment, has said he hasn’t seen any evidence that the commission should discipline or remove Willis.

[lady-raziel]

sidebar addition based off of something that came up in replies-- this honestly deserves its own short post but I'm going to put it here so people already reblogging can reference.

One of Biden's big campaign promises is that he will restore Roe v Wade. It is very frustrating and very misleading of him to promise this, because even though it is something that very much needs to happen and people want, it is not something he could actually follow through on with the ease that he seems to imply.

Like, yes, he could issue an Executive Order protecting abortion. He could do that right now in this term, even. But that is not a real solution to this problem. Executive Orders are not actually as powerful as popular perception thinks they are, because they can very, very easily be overturned by the next president who takes office, regardless of who that is. Executive Orders can also be challenged by a lot of other parties too-- the courts, Congress, etc.

If Biden were to declare abortion legal nationwide via Executive Order, it would create a system where abortion would only be legal in many places if a Democrat was in office. So potentially providers would be able to legally give this service for four or eight years on, and then if the presidency switched have to shut down again until a pro-choice president came back into office. For providers in states where abortion is already protected, this wouldn't be an issue. But for those in states who don't protect these rights or are trying to ban abortion, a flip-flopping legal status might make many decide it is not worth it or too risky to try to provide these services at all. Protecting abortion by Executive Order is too risky and not a real solution to reproductive rights challenges.

So what's the alternative? The answer is that outside of getting the Supreme Court to rule on a different case and reverse their previous reversal (which the current Court will not do), only a large piece of legislation passed through Congress would work. For such a highly contentious issue, Democrats would need control of the House, the Senate, and the White House in enough of a majority that they wouldn't be fighting for individual votes and could actually pass the legislation. And that wouldn't even touch on the insane challenges that would follow and how much of a fight anti-abortion activists would throw. Simply put, when even the prerequisite conditions are nearly impossible to achieve, getting a large-scale abortion protections codified into law would be very, very difficult.

Here's a good article from NBC that details all this further if you're interested.

To me, all of this is WHY the overturning of Roe v Wade was such a big deal. Because otherwise actually protecting reproductive rights in the current political environment is nearly impossible without it. Pro-lifers know this-- and that's why they did this in the first place. They want to make protecting abortion so impossible to do that few even try, and then they can relentlessly send all their forces against those who do try until anyone who opposes them is destroyed. It's horrible, and it's insane, and you can drive yourself crazy thinking of what it would be like if all these people who claim to care about life used all this energy to better the lives of those who are, well, alive instead of people who don't exist.

Anyway. That's an explainer of one of Joe Biden's most frustrating campaign promises. But to bring it back around to the original point of this post, this is why it still important to vote on the rest of the ballot. State-by-state ballot measures can protect abortion, so check where you live to see if one of those is coming up in November. And electing pro-choice Congresspeople and Senators would build the majority needed to get real abortion rights legislation instituted in a way that counts!

Anyway anyway important reminder time that even if you cannot stomach voting for Biden it is STILL important to vote because of EVERYTHING ELSE ON THE BALLOT. The people in local level positions like school boards or city councils will have ENORMOUS impacts on your daily lives and it’s where a lot of these egregious national level positions start. The difference is that while you might not be able to change the entire presidential system, you and your community can definitely stop bad actors in local positions from doing harm if you take action and put pressure on them.

THAT is the reason to vote even if you feel like your vote in the presidential election won’t make a difference. Yes—my personal opinion is that people should try to vote for Biden simply because of the sheer level of damage another Trump presidency will to do the structure of the federal government that will allow conservatives enormous power to do all the abusive and destructive things they’ve wanted to do for a long time. Voting for Biden is a hard, strategic choice towards the ability to have better candidates in the future. But if it’s something you still can’t bring yourself to do please still vote for the sake of the rest of the ballot.

[arpov-blog-blog]

..."In late April, House Republicans passed their Limit, Save, Grow Act by the narrowest of margins. In exchange for raising the debt ceiling until next March, the bill would cut the discretionary spending budget, then cap its future growth. It would claw back unspent COVID funds, apply work requirements to various federal benefit programs for poor Americans, repeal the Inflation Reduction Act’s IRS expansion and clean energy tax credits, and enact a bunch of Republican energy priorities.

Because Senate Democrats lack 60 votes to pass a so-called clean debt limit increase, House Speaker Kevin McCarthy has been able to force the Biden administration to the negotiating table with this bill. But there is some spin at work here from Biden’s team. The administration, which had refused to negotiate over the debt ceiling, is saying that it’s negotiating with Republicans just on the normal budget and appropriations process. Uh-huh.

Let’s be serious. Biden is inviting McCarthy into his office every week now because he needs the debt limit raised by the beginning of June.

Certain areas of overlap of a would-be deal came into view ahead of Tuesday’s meeting. The Biden administration has made clear that it is not going to allow Republicans to repeal the entire clean energy title of their signature legislative act from the most recent Congress. But some elements of the Limit, Save, Grow Act are still on the table.

The lowest-hanging fruit appears to be unspent COVID funds. Sure, both parties can agree to claw back some of that.

Both sides also seem to agree there can be some sort of restraint on discretionary spending. But what, exactly?

Republicans want to cut more than $100 billion from nondefense spending right off the bat, and then cap spending growth at 1 percent for the next 10 years. Democrats will never agree to a deal that allows for substantial cuts exclusively to domestic spending while leaving defense spending growing at its usual pace. Democrats also don’t want to agree to 10-year caps. Where’s the deal to be had here? Perhaps some sort of spending freeze for the next year or two, something that became an inevitability the instant Republicans reclaimed control of the House.

One area in which Republicans and Democrats could both get a win would be through permitting reform, which is a live part of the discussions now. The only question is: What permitting reform? Are we talking just making it easier to jump-start traditional fossil-fuel extraction projects? Or will it be an all-of-the-above approach that allows Democrats to more quickly ramp up their clean energy investments? Here’s another question: Do these sound like decisions that are going to be put together in a week? (Not really.)

The most confounding area of live engagement right now is on the question of work requirements. It seemed like a sop to the Freedom Caucus when additional requirements for beneficiaries of Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, and Medicaid were tossed into the Limit, Save, Grow Act. Those weren’t actually going to go anywhere, right? Biden, however, wasn’t as dismissive when talking to reporters during a weekend bike ride.

“I voted for tougher aid programs that’s in the law now,” Biden said of the work requirements, “but for Medicaid it’s a different story. And so I’m waiting to hear what their exact proposal is.”

The cleanup statement from the White House didn’t categorically rule out changes to SNAP or TANF either.

“As the President said, Medicaid is a different story, and the President has been clear that he will not accept proposals that take away peoples’ health coverage,” spokesman Michael Kikukawa told Politico. “The President has also been clear that he will not accept policies that push Americans into poverty. He will evaluate whatever proposals Republicans bring to the table based on those principles.

If the White House agrees to tighten the screws on welfare and SNAP eligibility, House Democrats will absolutely lose their minds. If McCarthy doesn’t get the White House to tighten the screws at all, the hard-right might decide that dear Kevin didn’t quite get the job done and should have his speakership reexamined."

[mednerds]

Why every state should adopt a mask mandate, in 4 charts

Deborah Birx, the coordinator of the White House coronavirus task force, recently toured North Dakota to meet with officials battling one of the worst Covid-19 outbreaks in the country. While she commended the state’s testing efforts, she was distraught by the noticeable lack of face masks in public spaces. “This is the least use of masks that we have seen in retail establishments of any place we have been,” she said at an October 26 press conference.

As it turns out, North Dakota, which doesn’t require masks anywhere, had the lowest mask-wearing rate in the country in October, according to survey data. It also had 171 coronavirus cases per 100,000 as of November 6, the highest per capita rate of any state in the county, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

North Dakota is not the only state without a mask policy in the throes of a major outbreak, however: Eight of the top 10 states that saw the highest new cases per capita in October do not have a mask mandate, as the chart below shows. (Several of these Great Plains and Midwestern states were spared significant outbreaks of the virus until the fall.)

Over the course of the pandemic, America has been engaged in a massive and uncontrolled mask experiment: Some jurisdictions implemented and enforced mask mandates; others rejected them as public health guidance became politicized. President Donald Trump has repeatedly questioned and even scorned the use of masks, and several Republican governors have followed his lead. President-elect Joe Biden, meanwhile, has called for a national mask mandate.

But the different state-level approaches mean researchers can now parse the results of a trial they never would have received approval to conduct. New unpublished research from Kansas and Tennessee suggests that not only do mask mandates prevent Covid-19 spread, they may also blunt the severity of illness and reduce the number of serious cases that require hospitalization. Other findings support the argument more and more public health experts are making: that masks remain among our cheapest most effective tools to control the pandemic — if worn consistently.

“If you’re not in the ICU, the only tools at our disposal that we know work are the tried-and-true public health measures, like social distancing, hand-washing, and masks,” says Vin Gupta, a critical care pulmonologist and affiliate assistant professor for the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington. “We’re bearing the brunt of those things being implemented poorly.”

“You’re less likely to get Covid-19 if you’re wearing a mask,” says Donna Ginther, an economist and director of the Institute for Policy and Social Research at the University of Kansas. And “even if you do get sick while wearing a mask, you’re less likely to get deathly ill.”

Let’s walk through some of the latest research on mask mandates and what it means as we head into one of the most perilous seasons in the pandemic so far.

New evidence from Kansas and Tennessee that mask mandates control the spread of Covid-19

One intriguing piece of evidence of the effect of mask mandates on controlling the spread of the virus comes from Kansas. In July, Laura Kelly, the Democratic governor of Kansas, issued a mandate requiring everyone in public places to wear a mask where 6 feet of social distancing couldn’t be maintained. It prompted an immediate outcry from conservatives. Because of a state law passed in June that allowed counties to supersede the governor’s emergency powers, 81 counties out of 105 opted out of the mask mandate altogether, and only 21 counties decided to enforce it.

Two researchers from the University of Kansas analyzed what happened next.

Ginther, the economist working on this analysis, found that in the counties that enforced mask-wearing, new cases stayed roughly steady. But in the counties without mandates, even after controlling for how often people left their homes, they doubled. “We were stunned by the strength of the effect,” she says.

The public health officer of Johnson, the state’s largest county, was so impressed he asked Ginther to share her work with the Board of County Commissioners, even though it’s not yet peer-reviewed or even written up into a paper. She is currently working on publishing the results.

Ginther says it wasn’t until 12 weeks after the mandates took effect that the growth in cases began to slow. But she thinks her results are likely conservative. “A 50 percent reduction in cases is likely to be a lower-bound on the true effect of wearing a mask,” she says. “If you had 100 percent compliance, I would expect to see an even larger effect.”

Other researchers have made related findings. A nonprofit group called Prevent Epidemics recently published a report showing that, following mask mandates, coronavirus cases declined in Alabama, Oklahoma, South Carolina, and Texas. The CDC found that in Arizona, after a mask mandate was put in place, Covid-19 cases dropped 75 percent. Conversely, cases spiked 151 percent when stay-at-home orders were lifted, demonstrating that behavior has a significant impact on viral transmission.

In addition to slowing the spread of the virus, new evidence from Tennessee shows that mask mandates could reduce the severity of the virus. A paper by researchers at Vanderbilt found that at Tennessee hospitals where at least 75 percent of Covid-19 patients came from counties with mask requirements, coronavirus hospitalization rates are the same as they were in July. In hospitals where fewer than 25 percent of patients come from places with a mask mandate, hospitalizations are 200 percent higher. What’s more, the researchers wrote, hospitals in areas with mask requirements and other mitigation strategies “are in a much better position to serve the entire spectrum of community health needs, not just Covid-19 patients.”

Mask mandates lead to more people wearing masks

Even if they aren’t always followed, mask mandates appear to be an effective tool in encouraging behavior change. The Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) at the University of Washington found in August that mask use increased 8 percentage points after mask mandates, and increased 15 points if those mandates were enforced.

Only around 65 percent of Americans currently regularly wear masks, according to IHME. But in Singapore, for instance, around 95 percent of people wear masks, and they have one of the world’s lowest coronavirus death rates. “We know that countries that wear masks are doing much better,” says Ali Mokdad, the chief strategy officer of public health at the University of Washington.

Thirty-three states and Washington, DC, implemented statewide mask mandates between April and August. During the same period, an increasing number of Americans began to wear masks regularly, according to a weekly survey started in mid-April by the data intelligence company Premise.

There is one caveat of all the analyses mentioned above: They simply observe behavior, which means that they can demonstrate associations — like case counts falling after mask mandates are put in place — but not causation. The gold standard to prove that would be a randomized controlled trial. But that’s a hard study to design in a pandemic because of ethical concerns.

Even without randomized trials, Rebekah Gee, a public health policy expert and secretary of the Louisiana Department of Health, says the body of evidence “confirms what public health experts have known since early on in this pandemic, which is that masks work.”

Masks could save 130,000 lives by February, but more Americans would have to wear them consistently

In fact, a study published October 23 in Nature Medicine by IHME’s forecasting team modeled current public health interventions — projecting case numbers based on current behavior — and found that universal mask use could save as many as 130,000 lives by the end of February 2021.

Mokdad says that’s why it’s essential to have clear, consistent recommendations to wear masks. He adds, “We never debate seatbelts. Is it okay if only 80 percent of people wear them? We say everybody should.” But while he would prefer that 100 percent of people wear masks, Mokdad says at this point, any incremental increase in mask use “for me is a celebration.”

Unfortunately, in many parts of the US, mask use is actually decreasing. In Florida, for example, which grappled with a serious surge in cases this summer, Mokdad says 70 percent of people were wearing masks in August. Now, only 65 percent are. “Wearing masks has been a response to fear rather than a good, persistent behavior,” Mokdad says.

Vox analyzed the relationship between the frequency of wearing masks from the Premise survey data and the Covid-19 cases in states from April to October. As the charts below show, in states with mandates where cases surged in the spring, more people now wear masks. These states — where more people consistently wear masks — are now less likely to see another huge surge in cases.

Even though mask use has risen in many states, the nation as a whole is on a troubling trajectory, with new daily cases, hospitalizations, and deaths all on the rise. Mokdad says he’s very concerned about the holidays. “As we go be with our loved ones — our grandparents, our kids — do you want to go sit at a table and risk the people you care about most, or do you want to wear a mask?” IHME models predict that if some US states increased their mask use from now on, they could reduce the number of future Covid-19 deaths by about 50 percent.

The stakes for getting this right are high — not just for the holidays, but for the rest of the pandemic, however long that might be.

Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, recently echoed Biden’s call for a national mask mandate. “If you don’t want to shut down, at least do the fundamental, basic things,” Fauci told the editor-in-chief of JAMA, “the flagship of which is wearing a mask.”

Rather than thinking about a mask mandate as something that takes away a freedom, as anti-mask protestors have claimed, Leana Wen, a physician and the former Health Commissioner for the City of Baltimore, says, “Mask-wearing allows you to do things.” If everyone wears a mask, it will keep transmission low, allowing businesses and schools to stay open.

“If you want a more normal life, we need to adjust our behavior, as opposed to locking ourselves away,” Ginther says. “Masks rise to the top as an approach we can take as a society to have a more open economy but not get everyone sick.”

By Lois Parshley and Youyou Zhou (Vox) 

[robertreich]

For RBG it was all Principle, for Mitch McConnell it’s all Power

People in public life tend to fall into one of two broad categories – those who are motivated by principle, and those motivated by power.

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who died Friday night at the age of 87, exemplified the first.

When he nominated her in 1993, Bill Clinton called her “the Thurgood Marshall of gender-equality law,” comparing her advocacy and lower-court rulings in pursuit of equal rights for women with the work of the great jurist who advanced the cause of equal rights for Black people. Ginsburg persuaded the Supreme Court that the 14th Amendment’s guarantee of equal protection applied not only to racial discrimination but to sex discrimination as well.

For Ginsburg, principle was everything – not only equal rights, but also the integrity of democracy. Always concerned about the consequences of her actions for the system as a whole, she advised young people “to fight for the things you care about but do it in a way that will lead others to join you.”

Mitch McConnell, the Senate majority leader, exemplifies the second category. He couldn’t care less about principle. He is motivated entirely by the pursuit of power.

McConnell refused to allow the Senate to vote on President Barack Obama’s nominee to the Supreme Court, Merrick Garland, in March, 2016 – almost a year before the end of Obama’s term of office – on the dubious grounds that the “vacancy should not be filled until we have a new president.”

McConnell’s move was a pure power grab. No Senate leader had ever before asserted the right to block a vote on a president’s nominee to the Supreme Court.

McConnell’s “principle” of waiting for a new president disappeared Friday evening, after Ginsburg’s death was announced.

Just weeks before one of the most consequential presidential elections in American history, when absentee voting has already begun in many states (and will start in McConnell’s own state of Kentucky in 25 days), McConnell announced: “President Trump’s nominee will receive a vote on the floor of the United States Senate.”

This is, after all, the same Mitch McConnell who, soon after Trump was elected, ended the age-old requirement that Supreme Court nominees receive 60 votes to end debate and allow for a confirmation vote, and then, days later, pushed through Trump’s first nominee, Neil Gorsuch.

Ginsburg and McConnell represent the opposite poles of public service today. The distinction doesn’t depend on whether someone is a jurist or legislator -- I’ve known many lawmakers who cared more about principle than power, such as the late congressman John Lewis. It depends on values.

Ginsburg refused to play power politics. As she passed her 80th birthday, near the start of Obama’s second term, she dismissed calls for her to retire in order to give Obama plenty of time to name her replacement, saying she planned to stay “as long as I can do the job full steam,” adding “There will be a president after this one, and I’m hopeful that that president will be a fine president.”

She hoped others would also live by principle, including McConnell and Trump. Just days before her death she said, "My most fervent wish is that I will not be replaced until a new president is installed.”

Her wish will not be honored.

If McConnell cannot muster the senate votes needed to confirm Trump’s nominee before the election, he’ll probably try to fill the vacancy in the lame-duck session after the election. He’s that shameless.

Not even with Joe Biden president and control over both the House and Senate can Democrats do anything about this – except by playing power politics themselves: expanding the size of the court or restructuring it so justices on any given case are drawn from a pool of appellate judges.

The deeper question is which will prevail in public life: McConnell’s power politics or Ginsburg’s dedication to principle?

The problem for America, as for many other democracies at this point in history, is this is not an even match. Those who fight for power will bend or break rules to give themselves every advantage. Those who fight for principle are at an inherent disadvantage because bending or breaking rules undermines the very ideals they seek to uphold.

Over time, the unbridled pursuit of power wears down democratic institutions, erodes public trust, and breeds the sort of cynicism that invites despotism.

The only bulwark is a public that holds power accountable -- demanding stronger guardrails against its abuses and voting power-mongers out of office.

Ruth Bader Ginsburg often referred to Justice Louis Brandeis’s famous quote, that “the greatest menace to freedom is an inert people.” Indeed.

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

September 24, 2021

Heather Cox Richardson

On Monday, we learned that after last year’s election, John Eastman, a well-connected lawyer advising former president Donald Trump, outlined a six-point plan to overturn the outcome of the election and install Trump as America’s leader. They planned to cut the voters’ actual choice, Democrat Joe Biden, out of power: as Trump advisor Steve Bannon put it, they planned to “kill the Biden presidency in the crib.” This appears to have been the plan that Trump and his loyalists tried to execute on January 6.

That is, we now have written proof of an attempt to destroy our democracy and replace it with an autocracy.

This was not some crazy plot of some obscure dude in a shack in the mountains; this was a plan of the president of the United States of America, and it came perilously close to succeeding. The president of the United States tried to overturn the results of an election—the centerpiece of our democracy—and install himself into power illegitimately.

If this is not a hair-on-fire, screaming emergency, what is?

And yet, Republican lawmakers, with the notable exceptions of Representatives Liz Cheney (R-WY) and Adam Kinzinger (R-IL), have largely remained silent about the fact that the head of their party tried to destroy our democracy.

The best spin on their silence is that in refusing to defend the former president while also keeping quiet enough that they do not antagonize the voters in his base, they are choosing their own power over the protection of our country.

The other option is that the leaders of the Republican Party have embraced authoritarianism, and their once-grand party—the party of Abraham Lincoln, the party that saved the United States in the 1860s, the party that removed racial enslavement from our fundamental law—has become an existential threat to our nation.

Democracy requires at least two healthy parties capable of running a government in order to provide oversight for those currently in control of the government and to channel opposition into peaceful attempts to change the country’s path rather than into revolution. But Republicans appear to believe that any Democratic government is illegitimate, insisting that Democrats’ calls for business regulation, a basic social safety net, and infrastructure investment are “socialism” that will destroy the country.

With Democrats in charge of the federal government, Republicans are cementing their power in the states to support a future coup like the one Eastman described. Using “audits” of the 2020 elections, notably in Arizona but now also in Pennsylvania and Texas, Trump loyalists have convinced their supporters to distrust elections, softening the ground to overturn them in the future. According to a new poll by NORC at the University of Chicago, 26% of Americans now believe that “[t]he 2020 election was stolen from Donald Trump and Joe Biden is an illegitimate president,” and 8% believe that "[u]se of force is justified to restore Donald Trump to the presidency."

Arguing that they have to stop the voter fraud they have falsely claimed threw the election to Biden, Republican lawmakers in 18 states have passed more than 30 laws to cut down Democratic voting and cement their own rule. Trump supporters have threatened election workers, prompting them to quit, and have harassed school board members and local officials, driving them from office.

Although attorneys general are charged with nonpartisan enforcement of the law, we learned earlier this month that in September 2020, 32 staff members of Republican attorneys general met in Atlanta, where they participated in “war games” to figure out what to do should Trump not be reelected. The summit was organized by the Rule of Law Defense Fund, the fundraising arm of the Republican Attorneys General Association (RAGA), which sent out robocalls on January 5 urging recipients to march to the Capitol the following day “to stop the steal.” In May, RAGA elevated the man responsible for those robocalls to the position of executive director, prompting others to leave.

In states where Republicans have rigged election mechanics, party members need to worry about primary challengers from the right, rather than Democratic opponents. So they are purging from the party all but Trump loyalists, especially as the former president is backing challengers against those who voted in favor of his impeachment in the House in January 2021. Last week, one of those people, Representative Anthony Gonzalez (R-OH), announced he was retiring, in part because of right-wing threats against his family.

Trump loyalists are openly embracing the language of authoritarianism. In Texas, Abbott is now facing a primary challenger who today tweeted: “Texans deserve a strong and robust leader committed to fighting with them against the radical Left. They deserve a leader like Brazil has in Jair Bolsonaro…..” Bolsonaro, a right-wing leader whose approval rating in late August was 23%, is threatening to stay in power in Brazil against the wishes of its people. He claims that the country’s elections are fraudulent and that “[e]ither we’ll have clean elections, or we won’t have elections.”

Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) today used language fascists have used in the past to stoke hatred of their political opponents, tweeting that “ALL House Democrats are evil and will kill unborn babies all the way up to birth and then celebrate.” Yesterday, the leader of Turning Points U.S.A., Charlie Kirk, brought the movement’s white nationalism into the open when he told a YouTube audience that Democrats were backing “an invasion of the country” to bring in “voters that they want and that they like” and to work toward “diminishing and decreasing white demographics in America.” He called for listeners to “[d]eputize a citizen force, put them on the border, give them handcuffs, get it done.”

Today, we learned that the 2022 Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) will be held in Budapest, Hungary, where leader Viktor Orbán, whom Fox News Channel personality Tucker Carlson has openly admired, is dismantling democracy and eroding civil rights. When former vice president Mike Pence spoke in Budapest earlier this week at a forum denouncing immigration and urging traditional social values, he told the audience he hoped that the U.S. Supreme Court would soon outlaw abortion thanks to the three justices Trump put on the court.

Establishment Republicans who are now out of power are not on board the Trump train. They are quietly backing anti-Trumpers like Representative Cheney. Former House speakers John Boehner and Paul Ryan, former Florida governor Jeb Bush—who was widely expected to win the Republican nomination in 2016, only to be shut out of it by Trump—and former president George W. Bush's former adviser Karl Rove have all donated money to Cheney to help her stave off a challenge from a Trump loyalist in the 2022 election. Next month, former president Bush himself will hold a fundraiser for Cheney in Texas.

Other establishment Republicans currently in power might be staying quiet about the party’s slide toward authoritarianism because they are simply hoping that the Trump fire will burn itself out. The former president is no longer commanding the crowds he once did, and his increasing legal woes as well as the investigation into the insurrection will almost certainly take up his time and energy. The mounting coronavirus deaths among his unvaccinated supporters also stand to weaken support for his faction.

But the fact that Republican lawmakers have ignored the Eastman memo, which outlines the destruction of our democracy, suggests that the party, which organized in the 1850s to protect the nation against those who would destroy it, has come full circle.

—

Notes:

https://bbj.hu/politics/foreign-affairs/world/budapest-to-host-cpac-in-2022

https://www.kptv.com/former-president-george-w-bush-to-hold-fundraiser-next-month-for-liz-cheney/article_8ba92a10-7103-5ee0-94ef-4bd813437e28.html

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/09/24/arizona-audit-just-destroyed-big-gop-lie-more-ways-than-one/

https://www.exposedbycmd.org/2021/05/04/more-staff-flee-gop-attorneys-general-group-after-it-doubles-down-on-insurrection/

https://bbj.hu/politics/foreign-affairs/world/budapest-to-host-cpac-in-2022

https://abcnews.go.com/Lifestyle/wireStory/pence-hopeful-supreme-court-restrict-abortion-us-80185222

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/republican-ags-group-sent-robocalls-urging-march-capitol-n1253581

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/16/us/politics/anthony-gonzalez-ohio-trump.html

https://kansasreflector.com/2021/09/08/kansas-ag-aides-attended-war-games-summit-where-group-planned-to-combat-biden-win/

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-08-17/more-than-half-of-brazilians-disapprove-of-bolsonaro-poll-shows

https://www.mediamatters.org/charlie-kirk/charlie-kirk-deputize-citizen-force-put-them-border-order-protect-white-demographics

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2021/07/23/brazil-bolsonaro/

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

[from comments]

Mobiguy

It is time to call this out as what it is - a well-documented attempt to overthrow the government, led by people too unconcerned or too stupid to worry about leaving a paper trail.

The January 6th sheep currently in court are not the problem. It's time to round up the ringleaders of this attempted coup and prosecute them on an open and shut case of treason.

Reasonable people insist on framing this coup as a robust political debate, but reasonable people are wrong. It is a naked power grab, an assault on the popular will, and blatantly illegal. Three evidence is there, in the seditionists' own hands.

A crime has been committed, even if it was unsuccessful. Failed bank robbers don't get to walk because they got no money. Failed murderers are still prosecuted. The evidence is there for all to see, and the alleged criminals aren't denying it. They're doubling down, and we're letting them. Either prosecute them, or remove the treason laws from the books since they're clearly meaningless and unenforceable.

In short: lock them up.

[reading-writing-revolution]

Heather Cox Richardson

September 30, 2021 (Thursday)

Tonight, President Joe Biden signed into law a bill that extends funding for the government until December 3, 2021. The government won’t shut down tomorrow.

In the Senate, Republican Tom Cotton (R-AR) tried to amend the measure to stop aid for Afghan refugees who were evacuated to the United States. That amendment reflected the demands of former president Donald Trump, who insisted that Republicans should oppose the bill, calling it “a major immigration rewrite that allows Biden to bring anyone he wants from Afghanistan for the next year—no vetting, no screening, no security—and fly them to your community with free welfare and government-issued IDs.” Trump suggested they would bring “horrible assaults and sex crimes” that would be “just be the tip of the iceberg of what’s coming if this isn’t shut down.”

For all their talk of concern about taking care of our Afghan allies during the evacuation of Afghanistan, all 50 Republican senators voted for Cotton’s measure. Democrats killed it on a strict party line vote.

Senator Roger Marshall (R-KS) also tried to amend the bill. He wanted to prohibit the use of federal funds to implement vaccine requirements for the coronavirus. This failed, too, but only after all Republicans voted for it.

The Senate went on today to confirm Rohit Chopra to direct the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) for a five-year term. Chopra worked with Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) to establish the CFPB after the financial crisis of 2008, and in its first five years it recovered about $11.7 billion for some 27 million consumers. Former president Trump appointed former South Carolina representative Mick Mulvaney to head the bureau while he was also the director of the Office of Management and Budget; when he was in Congress, Mulvaney had introduced legislation to abolish the bureau. At its head, Mulvaney zeroed out the bureau’s budget and set about dismantling it.

When he took office, Biden began to rebuild the bureau and, in mid-February, appointed Chopra to head it, but Republicans objected to him. Now, more than seven months later, with Republicans insisting he would be anti-business, Vice President Kamala Harris cast the deciding vote to confirm his appointment.

The rest of the congressional day was consumed with Democrats trying to hash out a final version of the Build Back Better infrastructure bill. While the Republicans largely sat the debate out—they oppose the Build Back Better plan altogether—conservative Democrats want to pass a smaller $1.2 trillion bipartisan infrastructure measure before taking up the larger $3.5 trillion measure currently under discussion. That smaller measure focuses on repairing roads and bridges and extending broadband, and lobbyists for construction industries are very keen indeed on getting it into law.

But progressive Democrats cut a deal months ago that the smaller measure would go forward together with the larger one, and they are refusing to allow conservatives to change the terms of that deal now. The Build Back Better bill appropriates $3.5 trillion over ten years to expand child care and elder care, expand Medicare, cut prescription drug prices, provide two years of community college, extend the child tax credit, and combat climate change.

Aside from the measure itself, there are two issues at stake in the debate over it.

The first is about how the Democrats should interpret their victory in 2020. Conservative Democrats like Senators Joe Manchin (WV) and Kyrsten Sinema (AZ) appear to think the Democrats should limit the scope of their legislation to try to pick up moderate Republican votes in the future. More progressive Democrats, led by Pramila Jayapal (WA), who chairs the Congressional Progressive Caucus, believe the Democrats were elected to pass laws that help ordinary Americans who have felt unrepresented by Republicans.

The other fight behind the Build Back Better measure is over how Americans choose to spend their tax dollars. Republicans, and even some conservative Democrats like Manchin, believe that spending $3.5 trillion on human infrastructure is a waste of money and that the new programs will create an “entitlement mentality.”

In contrast, though, Congress spends very little time discussing the defense budget, which, at its current rate, would cost $7.78 trillion over the next ten years. That amount is significantly higher than the defense spending of any other nation in the world. In 2020, the U.S. spent $778 billion on defense, making up 39% of our overall spending. China, the country with the next highest defense budget, spent 13% of its overall spending on defense at $252 billion, India spent 3.7% at $72.9 billion, Russia spent 3.1% at $61.7 billion, and the United Kingdom spent 3% at $59.2 billion.

At the heart of the question of how we spend our tax dollars, of course, is who pays those tax dollars. The Biden administration wants to fund the Build Back Better plan not by borrowing, but by closing tax loopholes and clawing back some of the 2017 cuts to corporate taxes and income taxes on the nation’s highest earners. At Rolling Stone today, reporters Andy Kroll and Geoff Dembicki wrote that political groups funded by the network of right-wing libertarian billionaire Charles Koch, who is deeply invested in fossil fuels, are pouring money and effort into killing the Build Back Better plan.

Meanwhile, the Senate still has not taken up either of the two voting rights acts passed by the House or the Freedom to Vote Act hammered out this month by Democratic senators led by Manchin.

Yesterday, the nonpartisan Voting Rights Lab released a report that noted the new voter suppression laws in place in 18 Republican-dominated states but focused instead on 17 new election subversion laws in 11 of those same states. Those new laws put into place the policies former president Trump’s campaign demanded in 2020. They threaten election officials with prosecution if they send out mail-in ballots to anyone who has not requested one, require legislatures to agree to changes in election rules, transfer control of elections or reporting results from nonpartisan officials to political operatives, and allow candidates to demand recounts at will.

A new law in Arizona, for example, “shifts control of election litigation from the secretary of state (currently a Democrat) to the attorney general (currently a Republican). The provision is designed to sunset on January 2, 2023, when a new attorney general potentially takes office.”

“When Voting Rights Lab launched a few years ago, we knew we’d be busy tracking many disturbing, and oftentimes veiled efforts to suppress the vote of historically excluded Americans,” the report concludes. “What we couldn’t have anticipated at that time was that current officeholders would warp the election process itself….”

[beatrice-otter]

$26 million is not 1/4 of a billion. 1/4 of a billion is $260 million. Your math is waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay off.

The main things making housing so expensive are things like bad zoning laws that are in the power of local government with some state oversight; the Federal Government has very little power over them. You want to talk housing, talk to your city council about eliminating short term rentals like Air B&B, and rezoning parts of down for mixed-use development and higher density development, reducing parking minimums, and getting rid of some of the red tape that makes houses and apartment buildings more expensive to build without making them safer or better.

As for raising wages, that's not something that would affect the federal budget at all because most wages don't come from the government, they come from employers. In order for the government to raise wages, congress would have to pass a bill to raise minimum wage. Biden can't do it; no president can make laws. The president can only approve or veto laws that congress makes. Any bill has to pass through both houses to become a law, and right now the Democrats control the Senate by one vote and the Republicans control the House by nine votes. In other words, for any Democrat-sponsored bill to become law, at least nine Republicans have to vote with the Democrats. The chances of getting nine Republicans to break with their party to raise the minimum wage: pretty much nonexistent. If we can flip nine seats in the House in 2024 and keep control of the Senate, then a bill to raise minimum wage becomes possible.

Biden can propose laws, and Biden can negotiate with congresspeople to influence them to vote the way he wants, but he can't force congress to do anything.

What a president can do, regardless of congressional support, is

appoint people to key positions in government departments who will use the power of those departments in a way the President wants them to. Biden is really good at doing this, and he's done it in a way that will bear long-term fruit. For example, the National Labor Relations Board has changed some rules about labor organizing that make it much easier for workers to form a union and much harder for companies to stop them, and penalizes companies that try to break up unions.

shift money within the Federal budget. He can't increase the budget, and he can't take money from one category and put it in a different category instead, so he can't take money earmarked for the Department of Defense and give it to Health and Human Services or Housing and Urban Development instead. (Alas.) But he can direct how money is spent within departments, and he's using that power. For example, the Justice 40, which requires that at least 40 percent of the overall benefits of certain Federal investments flow to disadvantaged communities that are marginalized, underserved, and overburdened by pollution. Now, you may think "surely the poorest and most marginalized communities should already be getting at least 40% of the Federal government's money" and you would be right, but they're not, because money often goes to the people with the most connections. Biden changed that.

Biden can't force Congress to stop being dysfunctional; he can't force Congress to pass the laws he wants (nobody can). But he is really good at doing things that are small on the scale of the Federal Government, and yet have huge positive impacts on the way America works and how the government responds to the problems America is facing.

$26 million is unfathomably huge to thee and me, but it's pennies to the Federal government ... and it has the potential to mitigate a ton of environmental damage caused by the damming of the Columbia River.

And you know who gets hurt the hardest by environmental problems? Poor people. Marginalized people.

And that's leaving aside the deep spiritual and practical importance of salmon to the Native American tribes in the Pacific Northwest.

So it's not a matter of "fish vs. affordable housing" or "fish vs. raising wages." It's a matter of figuring out the places where small rule changes and funding changes--the kind that don't need Congress to approve them or make a law for them--will make a huge difference in poor and marginalized communities. Sometimes that means funding environmental programs that restore habitat and help fish as part of helping the people who depend on the fish and their habitat.

In the 1930s, the US put lots of dams along the Columbia River to provide power and prevent flooding. As a side effect, it destroyed the salmon populations of the upper Columbia River and its tributaries, because salmon have to be able to migrate out to the ocean and back. (They live most of their lives in the ocean, but come upriver to spawn.) The local tribes have been trying to figure out a way of restoring salmon habitat ever since.

The Biden administration just committed $26 million to build infrastructure that will allow fish to bypass dams, and also help with the tribal studies on the best way to reintroduce salmon to the area. And the programs they've agreed to fund were developed by the tribes, so native voices will have a strong say.

[noctomania]

I want you to understand the cause and effect of what has led to what is going on in texas at least re: abortion laws.

First off let me clarify: Roe v Wade was not law...yet. When you see a ___ v ___, that is an opinion. Not in the sense you may think. It's an opinion decided through litigation which means it's a powerful opinion that has been hammered out through the judicial process of a lawsuit being drawn up, and worked out in court. It could be a local, state, or federal court. Typically the ones that are most significant are federal, or ones that have come before the US Supreme Court - either because it is the federal government that is being challenged, the defendant petitions to move it to federal, or that the case has been elevated through appeals.

There are particular circumstances that determine if a case can go federal level:

"Federal court jurisdiction, by contrast, is limited to the types of cases listed in the Constitution and specifically provided for by Congress. For the most part, federal courts only hear:

Cases in which the United States is a party;

Cases involving violations of the U.S. Constitution or federal laws (under federal-question jurisdiction);

Cases between citizens of different states if the amount in controversy exceeds $75,000 (under diversity jurisdiction); and

Bankruptcy, copyright, patent, and maritime law cases.

In some cases, both federal and state courts have jurisdiction. This allows parties to choose whether to go to state court or to federal court."

Federal courts may hear cases concerning state laws if the issue is whether the state law violates the federal Constitution.

In the case of Roe v Wade, the attorney's filed to the Supreme Court since the argument was that the state law was a violation of a federal law - specifically the 14th amendment assertion of right to privacy. That is what determines the jurisdiction in this case.

RvW was decided in 1973 with a 7-2 ruling in favor of Roe's right to privacy and ultimately right to choose how to treated her pregnancy. Why hasn't it been turned into law? Obvious reasons over the years include what party is in power in executive, congressional, or even judicial circles. Right now though we have a D in the executive and congress, but something many are overlooking is the critically important and understates judicial branch - which holds significant changes Trump installed.

Also regarding congressional, though there is a stronger hold on the house (even with 3 vacancies), the senate is just barely D majority with 50 R, 48 D and 2 independent as shown in the charts below. The two Independent Senators, Bernie Sanders of Vermont and Angus King of Maine, caucus with the Democrats which brings it 50/50 and the US VP - Harris (D) in this case - is the President of the senate and ultimately serves as a tie breaker for votes as well as situations like this even divide of party members. Were the VP a republican than republicans would still have a senate majority.

I will dive more into what's going on with the senate and why even with a D majority it isn't where it needs to be as it's a bit less straight forward.

So how the hell are abortion rights being challenged? Why aren't the all powerful democrats doing anything?!

Well, they are and have been doing a lot - and I urge you in moments when you are frustrated by feeling as though "dems aren't doing anything" to dig deeper to understand how our government operates. It's very clear there is a poor comprehension of our civics system by the general population which is why I'm using this as an opportunity to not only inform but also to learn more myself. I was educated primarily in Texas public education system. I was privileged enough to have decent teachers, but there is still much to learn. I'm doing research as I write this. I've already learned a lot. Come learn with me!

Alright, you're on board with learning more? Great choice! Let's get into it.

So with dem control of executive and congressional branch, all that is left is judicial.

"Trump appointed 54 federal appellate judges in four years, one short of the 55 Obama appointed in twice as much time."

Trump also had a major influence on the nation’s highest court. The three Supreme Court justices he appointed – Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett – are the most by any president since Ronald Reagan (who appointed four) and the most by any one-term president since Herbert Hoover

Donald Trump has appointed and the Senate has confirmed 220 Article III federal judges through November 1, 2020, his fourth year in office.

The average number of federal judges appointed by a president through November 1 of their fourth year in office is 200.

Judges are supposed to be neutral impartial parties who use only what is presented in court and through the judicial process (which involves looking at current standing laws) to determine their decisions in court instead of using their personal opinion or political sway to inform them. However, as we saw all too often, trump was not interested in impartiality. He was interested in control, asserting his own personal opinion, even on occasion insisting he himself as president had more control than the constitution actually allows. So with that conflict and the fact he installed so many judges really makes huge impact on the judicial branch of our government. Since every branch is supposed to be fair and equal this causes a lot of road block when one branch is neither fair nor equal. You can't simply use the other two the gain up on the third - though in this case that would be convenient for dems, it would be much less convenient when the parties were reversed. It's also important to acknowledge the reality that D are not always impartial either - which again we will get to after judicial chat - nor are all R unfair. This can be a hard pill to swallow, even for me. Reality is not always easy to accept.

So of course appointments made by trump, of which there were many, can not be trusted to actually be acting in good faith, but in favor of personal or political interests (which also often come down to personal interest of a financial persuasion). When judges are not impartial, they may make decisions that ultimately contradict what was presented in court or what the law of the land says. Typically if a hearing with the Senate Judiciary Committee (you can see an example here of the first day of Amy Comey Barrett's hearing day 1/3) determines that there is a conflict of interest or that they are illgitimate, then ideally a judge will be blocked from appointment. This clearly also depends on the makeup and impartiality of the Senate and thus the Committee. The Committee will debate and vote on whether or not to confirm every nomination made by a President. (it used to require 3/5 of the senate or 60 votes but since 2017 only requires a "simple majority" or 51 votes for confirmation)

I want to take a quick aside here and go a little philosophical in understanding judicial impartiality, because I hope it will help you have some perspective on how it's an inherently difficult matter. Ultimately the court's impartiality comes down to checks/balances and faith. Not religious faith, but faith in humanity and honesty. Trusting that there is no hidden motive or lies or manipulation at play. We tend to have to rely heavily on the checks and balances part since faith in humanity can be easily manipulated with lobbying and politicians eagerness to look bipartisan for popularity in elections (appealing as more bipartisan is considered a way of winning over more votes like centrists and those just left and right of it). Checks and balances allows oversight of the 3 branches over one another and attempting to keep the scales balanced in order to prevent any one branch being too powerful and ultimately to avoid the US being something more like a monarchy - which was a primary goal at the time of forming the constitution and government since it is what we had fought to escape in the first place.

"So judges aren't allowed their 1st amendment rights?!"

Humans are merely humans no matter what title they have or role they play and humans are inherently flawed and partial. Nobody is perfect and some make mistakes as well as bad faith decisions for ulterior motives (could be a matter of loyalty to well funded lobbyists or even general unchecked and ultimately supported ignorance or a power grab). After and throughout checks and balances, that is where the faith part comes in that we hope we can trust judges to put their personal opinion aside and go with what the evidence presented in court and the law and super precedents tell them. We trust the Committee to do their due diligence in researching nominees and asking them tough questions. Realistically everyone can and likely will have some kind of opinion on any major issue, so it is not that anyone expects a justice to not have a personal opinion, only that they not use it to determine their decision in court. So, say i was a judge looking at a defendant accused of a civil rights infringement and i personally felt that they were guilty but there was no or not enough "valid" evidence to prove it, I couldn't assert they are guilty just based off my own opinion. I would have to depend on the evidence shown in court proving that it has infringed on precedents or existing law.

(All the appointments made by trump can be viewed more in detail here.)

"BLAHBLAHBLAH WHAT ABOUT THE SUPREME COURT"

It would be too tumultuous for me to dig into each of the 3 Supreme Court judge appointments by trump in regards to current issues around Roe v Wade, so I'm going to focus on one that is likely most relevant in particular: Amy Coney Barrett. Barrett was an appointment made when Ruth Bader Ginsburg's passing caused a vacancy in the court. (Why didn't she retire under Obama? The Senate was GOP controlled which made the odds of a pro-choice appointment being confirmed low). RGB was well known for being a strong advocate for the right to choose and for a long time was a stronghold in the court to ensure Roe v Wade was upheld. Since trump wouldn't want to lose too many votes from women and allies to women, he made the clear choice to appoint a woman which is what i would call performative in the case that though Barrett is a woman she does not particularly stand on the side of women's rights.

In day two of Barrett's confirmation hearing, Senator Klobuchar honed in on Barrett's opinions regarding Roe v Wade - especially as to whether it is considered what is called a "super precedent", an important matter when talking about codification. Klobuchar makes it clear that Barrett has said she finds Brown v BoE to be a super precedent despite the Supreme Court never impressing that opinion, but refuses to consider Roe v Wade a super precedent despite that being a Supreme Court opinion. Barrett's argument is that "scholarly literature" she has read has asserted it is not a super precedent because calls for its overrule has never ceased, where as cases such as Brown v Board "nobody questions anymore". Klobuchar digs in again asking if US v Virginia Military is a "super precedent" and Barrett refuses to answer - or as she phrases it "grade" - because it wasn't one of the cases Barrett spoke about in an article she had written.

After Klobuchar asked Barrett if Roe v Wade is a super precedent, Barrett asked Klobuchar how the Senator defines a super precedent. Reasonably so, Klobuchar - who is a senator and not a judge - scoffs and puts that responsibility back on Barrett who was nominated to be a Supreme Court judge. Barrett obliges and asserts a definition that she uses is of (supposedly not conservative) ONE scholarly opinion which depends on a case being "so well settle that no political actors and no people seriously push to overrule"

In a scholarly opinion in 2006 by Michael J Gerhardt at University of North Carolina School of Law defined a super precedent in many ways one being "decisions whose correctness is no longer a viable issue for courts to decide; it is no longer a matter on which courts will expend their limited resources."

However:

in the Roberts hearings, Charles Fried, a prominent conservative legal scholar at Harvard, agreed explicitly that Roe was a superprecedent. As solicitor general under President Ronald Reagan, Mr. Fried had asked the court to overturn Roe. But testifying on behalf of Judge Roberts, he said that Roe had become a super-duper precedent that would not and should not be overturned, because it was reaffirmed in 1992 and extended in subsequent decisions protecting gay rights and the right to die.

Here is a good example of what happens in academia and why i take "scholarly research" with a heap of salt since I have experience in doing scholarly research. When you are doing research, your audience is trusting that you have run through all the hard work of researching both sides of a specific matter - not just looking up opinions based on whether they are from a conservative or a liberal as that is not supposed to be what determines their opinion on any particular matter.

You are supposed to be actually looking into all the differing opinions on the specific subject matter. While it does help to have a context of the profile of the one giving the opinion, it is the evidence they present in their argument that is what should be prioritized in research. The audience is also trusting that the sources the researcher uses are valid, researched, and impartial and that any studies they use are peer reviewed and use proper methodology and are also impartial without any sway from funders. Since many academic resources that would elaborate on these details are often gatekept through paywalls or language or other accessibility barriers, it can be difficult for the general population to do their own research - the majority of which do not have access for one reason or another - they are left with nothing but to choose to have faith the researcher they are reading did their job earnestly.

Barrett focusing on opinions from scholars (actually it seems she is more dependent on one particular scholar's opinion - Gerhardt as seen in notes 128-132) based on whether or not they are typically conservative scholars is basing it on an irrelevant matter when she should have been taking on all opinions about super precedents and digging into comparing and contrasting them based on whether or not they hold water. It seems more like she sought a defense for her pre-determined opinion and insulated it from challenge by excluding any other assertions despite their significance. She ultimately failed at her responsibility as a researcher.

On Wednesday 9/2/21, the Supreme Court voted 5-4 to not block Texas SB8, a decision that weakens Roe v Wade.

Now this has been a very long form way of spelling out just SOME of the impact that trump has had on the judicial branch. I want to now go back to 2016 when he was elected, and try to extrapolate why what happened in that election was a serious failure in regards to those responsible for casting their votes: The People.

"We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America."

"We the people" is every single resident and/or citizen of the nation at any time. The constitution is essentially a contract drawn up between every single one of us including those born and raised here, those who move here, those who's communities were here before the formation of the nation, and those who may be a citizen but living elsewhere. The diversity of The People in every faucet of human life makes this document necessarily complicated and amendable. In consequence the way in which our government is also complicated but also amendable. One matter that has been a point of contention since the dawning of the nation is the right to vote.

Who could vote & When (.):

1776: white men over 21 who owned land

1870 Racial barriers eliminated tho 15th is not enforced by states

1920: white women can vote

1924: Native american's given voting rights

1964: Civil Rights Act - all above 21y/o may vote regardless of identifiers such as race - ensures Black people's right to vote

1971: Voting age lowered to 18

1984: Accessibility extended to disabled americans by setting accessibility standards

In between all of these are other matters that challenged the accessibility to voting for one population or another such as literacy tests, naturalization, and polling taxes. Many of the challenges were directly challenging to People of Color particularly Black Women. To this day there are still many who must fight to assert their right - a right that should never be denied, never be thought of as less than inherent. Access is less a concern for the wealthy and well to do as their needs are never on the line the way it is for people who are poor, Black, disabled, immigrant, or even just have a primary language other than English.

For those of us who have never had to fight to utilize our right to vote in our life have too often shown that we do not respect the power in this right. Or rather know exactly how powerful it is and choose to use that power in a destructive way because we aren't getting our faves. For the first many many years I was eligible to vote, I refused to at all because I do not like how our government and politicians conducts themselves. As soon as I learned about the filibuster I was so pissed I didn't want to partake at all. Have I be impacted by this personally? To an effect, but not in a way that impacts my life significant enough for me to really notice. But in congruence with other privileged decisions not to vote, it has certainly impacted many lives. In a nation where communities are still fighting to have the law meant to protect them properly enforced, it is entirely a privilege abused to choose not to vote.

Though I was 18 in 2007, 2016 I cast my first vote.

Why? Because it was finally looking as though I may face personal consequences if I didn't. Prior to 2016 i wasn't worried bc there was obama, i wasn't old enough to vote when bush was up for relection and seeing him win again embittered me further. by the time I was 18, I saw how unreliable 3rd party was despite my parents being all in that gambit, and otherwise it all felt like nobody was paying attention to the issues only on popularity contests. All i thought of though was my perspective on the matter. It was all me-centric, my choice to withhold from voting in any election. When trump started to look less like a joke and actually got traction, I saw my neighbors trump signs and i looked at where i was in life. I had also began to actually do the work and stop letting apathy guide my decisions, but to rather listen to my humanity and my responsibility as my neighbor's neighbor.

Quite literally. At the time my neighbor was a Black woman. I only spoke to her once and it was when she came by to selflessly make sure I was going to be ok when our landlord was kicking us out to sell the place out from under our feet - something I hadn't even considered doing yet seemed like second nature for her to do (to be fair i was struggling to find a place but i've no idea about her life). I wish i had gotten her name and stayed in touch, it's kind-hearted people like that that are hard to come by. I'm still working on being as selfless.

I was and am proud to have not only voted in 2016, but for my first vote to have been for a woman. I was scared and for someone other than myself for once in 2016. I had high hopes for Clinton based on name recognition and basic common sense.

Humans are not perfect. Nor are they inherently humble.

Trump encouraged arrogance among the most ignorant leaning right. Sanders encouraged arrogance in the most ignorant leaning left. Clinton seemed to always get the most dramatic fire though from both sides, which signaled to me some kind of mess was going on. My own parents tried to sell me on Sanders, but by this point I had a better concept of how to properly research and untangle the mythologies that were parroted by my own parents about Clinton. Even when I proved their parroted lies wrong they were unwilling to concede, only to move the goal post or deflect.

Now, I get to my point.

Which is to really smack upside the head of anyone who chose not to vote in 2016, everyone who is left or liberal but voted for trump, everyone who wrote in someone else. If trump hadnt made it in as POTUS, paired with the republican majority senate, the landscape of the judicial branch would not have faced such a conservative shift, it wouldn't have given mcconnell so much influence, it wouldn't have resulted in the pandemic being so much worse than it needed to be. Many lives would have been spared. You can only blame the government for so long until you realize we are the government, we install the government, and we hold power we must use wisely. We the People.

Many who voted for clinton have been critical of her. As we always should be critical of those we choose in any level of government. We the people hold responsibilities that build this nation from the ground up, and without adherence to those responsibilities it puts other's rights in danger. When we decide that something doesn't matter that much to us or weighing it against the consequences we may personally face - you're failing in your responsibility to your neighbor who is likely doing far more justice to you than you are extending to them.

Yes my white people i look at you.

Yes my white men I look at you.

Yes my white queers I look at you.

Yes my white degree holders I look at you.

Yes white youth I look at you where I once was. When I was younger and arrogant and naive and apathetic and bitter and I let all that guide my choices instead of my concern for the neighbor who was looking out for me.

I still matter in the formation and function of tomorrow's government and I'm going to make sure I let my impact be constructive for all my neighbors who have extended such courtesy to me by not shirking my main duty to make an informed vote in every election i may partake in from local to national.

The differences among us in this nation may seemingly tend to fall along party lines, what the real metric is:

Do you give a fuck outside your own home?

Or is it just about what you want, what you think, what you feel? Nothing in this nation is just involving you or your bestie or your family, we're in this together whether we like it or not. Trust me as someone who struggles daily to find the humanity in others, I know how toxic that can be to your perspective when you give into it. Believe in benefit of the doubt, believe in change, believe in your power to do good for others. Believe and invest in your humanity.

While i can be mad at conservative votes for trump that was to be expected. I'm far more disappointed in the right AND DUTY to vote being given up by so many on the left simply because their fave didn't make it to the finals. That is not how establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, or secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity. AOC and Pressley and Porter did not make it where they are by their supportive constituents abdicating their right to vote.

I accept my faults in never having voted before 2016 even in local elections. It was stupid and selfish and 2016 woke me up to that reality. You don't go from 0 to trump overnight. Do you accept your fault in not voting in 2016 when one of the most detrimental candidates was running and won?

[somethingusefulfromflorida]

Grover Cleveland is the only president to be elected to two non-consecutive terms, and that was exceptional because he actually won the popular vote three times: he won in 1884, got screwed by the electoral college in 1888, then won again in 1892. Conversely, his successor/predecessor Benjamin Harrison was NOT popular, and only coasted into the office because his grandfather William Henry Harrison had briefly served in 1841 (shortest presidency in history, only 31 days).

For those of you wondering if the Gonad Lump is gonna try and run for another term in 2024, I don’t see him being more popular this time around. He lost the popular vote twice; George W. Bush is the only president to lose the popular vote and go on to be re-elected, in no small part because his approval rating skyrocketed to 90% after 9/11 and everyone thought the new Iraq war was justified at the time. History remembers him as the warmonger he was (though slightly more favorable in comparison to the Gonad Lump himself). If the Lump runs in 2024, he absolutely will not win the popular vote, though given how Republicans are trying to restrict voting rights, he very well could win the electoral college; he’d be the anti-Cleveland, losing the vote three times in a row.

His ego is torn; on the one hand he doesn’t want to run again because he doesn’t want to lose again, but on the other hand he can’t drop out of the race or else he’ll look like an even bigger loser for giving up. If he doesn’t run, he’ll have to pass the mantle of party leader to someone else, though let’s be honest, whatever stooge runs in his place will basically be running for him anyway. They’ll be running as his successor, framing themselves as a continuation of Trump’s term rather than a term of their own; he’d be president vicariously through them, they’d keep him on as an advisor or Secretary of State. But what Republicans are only just now starting to realize is that he’s a ball and chain weighing the party down; sure his base thinks he’s the most popular human being to ever live (ahead of Jesus and behind Ronald Reagan), but they only represent 30% of he country. He is SUPER unpopular overall, having lost them the House and the presidency and the Senate in quick succession; instead of cutting their losses and running someone new, they’re in denial and insist he actually won and the other side cheated, so they’re changing the rules going forward to give themselves an advantage (“the other side cheated, so we also have to cheat to beat them at their own game”)

It’s pathetic, but it works. What they’re doing is not technically illegal, because the constitution doesn’t actually say elections have to be free and fair. Elections don’t even have to exist; from the Revolution to the Civil War a handful of states never held presidential elections, instead leaving it up to the state legislatures to pick a winner and award electors themselves. Nowadays all 50 states hold elections and award electors based on the popular vote, but Oklahoma recently proposed going back to the old system; they’re very likely going to get rid of elections going forward because they can. That’s inexcusably anti-democratic, it’s morally reprehensible and wrong, but it’s not illegal, so there’s nothing we can do about it because the Supreme Court doesn’t care about morals. Just because something should be a law doesn’t make it a law; the system is FUCKED that way. The constitution technically says that the states may appoint electors however they see fit, so while getting rid of elections would be unpopular and despotic, the only way to stop them from doing so would be to pass a new amendment requiring all states to hold elections. That would require supermajorities in both houses of congress and then majority votes in three-fourths of all the state legislatures. We’re so politically polarized that I don’t think we’ll pass another amendment ever again.

The last real amendment was passed in 1971 (pre-Watergate), the 26th amendment, giving 18 year olds the right to vote; the 27th amendment was technically passed later in 1992, but it was written in 1789, intended to be the 11th amendment, but stuck in limbo because it was originally voted down. It wasn’t until 200 years later that a college student realized it was still a live amendment and could be passed if enough new states joined on (most amendments have clauses saying that if they’re voted down, then they fail, but this one was still technically in play); he wrote and encouraged state politicians to pass it just to see if it could be done. It isn’t even a controversial amendment, it says Congress can’t change their salaries in the middle of the term, they can only go into effect after the next elections.

So yeah. Electoral reform is probably doomed to fail because the Supreme Court will decide that the states can do whatever they want. It’s like how the electoral college is pointless and keeps letting losers win, but just because it’s bad doesn’t mean it’s “illegal.” It should be illegal, but barring an amendment we’re stuck with it. If the For The People Act passes and the 6-3 consecutive SCOTUS let’s it stand, states will one by one stop holding elections to get around it. You can’t reform an election is there’s no election to reform! Republicans will be taking a huge bet though, hoping that their constituents care more about winning than playing fair; it would be wildly unpopular to stop holding elections, but Republican voters would see nothing but the benefits, so they might accept it as a necessary evil, “for the greater good.” They don’t need to vote if their guy is guaranteed to win.

We need to overhaul the country, and if that means pissing off conservatives who are IN THE MINORITY then so be it (more Americans identify as democrats or left-leaning independents than Republicans or right-leaning ones). If that leads to a civil war, then so be it too! We can’t hold ourselves responsible for he behaviors of evil people; we can’t keep appeasing them, we can’t keep letting them threaten to tear the country apart if they don’t get what they want. Democrats don’t get what they want on a regular basis, and they have yet to tear the country apart (if you mention the George Floyd Protests, I need to remind you that the country is still in once piece), so Republicans need to learn to live with being powerless. If they throw a tantrum, it’s not our job to make them feel better. If an abuser threatens to do something drastic if you leave them, it’s not your job to stay. If someone is blackmailing you, you shouldn’t have to comply; they’re gonna be evil either way, you can’t control them, they’re trying to make you think it’s your fault when they do something wrong.

[originalleftist]

There is no point asking for things that the President will not do, cannot do, and that asking for could get you arrested. I asked, therefore, for things that the President might (I hope) be willing to consider doing. Court reform can't happen before the election, as it requires control of both houses of Congress as well as the Presidency to pass the necessary legislation. But Biden backing it now would send a clear message to SCOTUS that continued subversion of the Constitution will not be tolerated, and would also galvanize Democratic voters.

I also push back strongly against the idea that violence is necessarily more effective, and the implication that only violence constitutes "real" or "serious" action. In fact I would argue that this is a fundamentally authoritarian and indeed fascist perspective, not dissimilar to that of MAGA. My goal is to save democracy and rule of law, not just to have a dictator with a D next to their name instead of an R.

In any case, there's no point in asking the administration to do something that I know they will not do, and that will either achieve nothing at best, or at worst get you arrested. We need to be focussed and strategic right now, not impulsive and reckless.

If you want to do something beyond just petitioning and election campaigning, then I would suggest getting in touch with local activists and unions (or your union, if your workplace is unionized) and discussing plans for a general strike in the event that Republicans try to steal the election. A widespread general strike would be the first and most powerful action we could take in the event of an attempted coup, one that could shut down the country in a day if it had wide enough support, and it's something a number of unions considered in 2020. But those plans need to be made now- once the coup happens, it will be too late.

If anyone wishes to contact the Biden Administration, for example to urge them to support the issue of Court Reform/term limits/expansion, here is the link to the White House Contact page:

Here is the message I submitted tonight:

[creepingsharia]

Tennessee’s Worst Pro-Illegal Immigration GOP State Legislators

If you care about this issue, then this information can be used for the 2022 Tennessee state House member primaries.

If you care about getting rid of “Tennesseeans Last” legislators, then this information is for you.

The Biden-Harris administration is working overtime to make sure that the idea of illegal immigration becomes a thing of the past.  The flurry of executive orders is a mere taste of what is to come. Consider that on his first day in office, Biden signed 6 executive orders undoing some of President Trump’s best policies to protect Americans and preserve jobs for Americans.

Tonight, Biden issued three more executive orders designed to massively expand legal and illegal immigration. His directive to the Census Bureau that the report to Congress for apportionment must include all illegal aliens is clearly intended to keep radical Democrats controlling Congress for decades to come.

Abetted by DC RINOs, don’t be surprised when the DC elite legislate a pathway to citizenship for the otherwise illegal immigrants known as DACA. Watch at how easily the parents who entered the U.S. by violating our laws and created the pool known as DACA, are granted amnesty. This is precisely the long game which groups like the TN Immigrant & Refugee Rights Coalition (TIRRC) and all their affiliated groups, have been playing.

Opening the borders to anyone and everyone who is a potential Democrat cheating voter, will be welcome. But make no mistake, the establishment-elite – GOPee, wants this cheap labor as well and is willing to sell out the deplorables who supported President Trump’s immigration agenda and policies.

The Tennessee General Assembly has its own Republican illegal immigration protectionist legislators.

The two most reprehensible GOP state House members on the issue of illegal immigration are Rep. Bob Ramsey (R- Maryville) and Rep. Patsy Hazlewood (R- Signal Mountain). These two stand in a virtual tie for having the worst voting record on key legislation addressing illegal immigration.

In 2007, when Tennessee Democrats held the majority and still opposed illegal immigration, laws against illegal immigration were passed with strong bipartisan support. In fact, many of the bills were passed with unanimous votes in the House and only one or two Democrat “no” votes in the Senate.

However, when the Republicans became the majority party in both the Senate and House of the Tennessee General Assembly, all that bipartisanship opposition to illegal immigration went out the window.

No different than in DC, Tennessee Democrats have turned to fiercely protecting, rewarding and endorsing illegal immigration – and they are joined by some Tennessee “R”s.

In 2018, the General Assembly passed a strong anti-sanctuary city bill. To no great surprise, then Governor Haslam who campaigned as a hawk on illegal immigration, let it go into law without his signature.

That year, Hazlewood served on both the subcommittee and full committee of the House Finance, Ways & Means committee. She consistently sided with Democrats opposing the sanctuary city bill and actually tried to sideline the bill during the committee process.

But before the bill got to Hazlewood’s committee, it had to pass through the State Government committee chaired by Bob Ramsey where he chose to not vote for or against the bill. On the House  floor, Ramsey, who was definitely there, having voted to stop debate and got a final vote on the bill, again passed on voting to address the problem of criminal illegal aliens in Tennessee.

Biden has halted the deportation of criminal aliens, the same result of Hazlewood and Ramsey’s failure to vote in support of the anti-sanctuary city bill.

Ramsey repeated the same pattern – voted on the motion for the previous question but failed to vote for SJR467, the joint Senate-House resolution authorizing the Tenth Amendment challenge to the federal refugee resettlement program.

The bills to award in-state college tuition to illegal immigrant students

The next two worst GOP legislators on issues related to illegal immigration, are Rep. Mark White (R-Memphis) and Sen. Todd Gardenhire (R- Chattanooga). These two legislators are responsible for the multiple bills filed between 2015 and 2018, trying to award in-state college tuition to illegal immigrant students residing in Tennessee.

The first White-Gardenhire bill filed in 2015, HB675/SB612, failed to pass the House by a single vote since a 50-vote minimum is required by the state Constitution.

Hazlewood and Ramsey both voted for this bill, along with a bunch of other R’s, some of whom were re-elected this past November.

Rep. Pat Marsh (R-Shelbyville) also voted for this in-state tuition bill. In fact, he spoke passionately in support of it by openly insulting every U.S. citizen and legal immigrant student in his district. While glorifying the achievements of the students who would benefit from the White-Gardenhire bill, he conveniently ignored the fact that these students were living in Tennessee in violation of U.S. immigration law. Marsh said  – “I live in Bedford County and our schools are probably 25 percent immigrants there. We’re already paying for these students. I go into the local schools and see these immigrants in leadership roles in our schools. They’re the star athletes. They’re the star students. They deserve a chance to move forward in their lives …”

Marsh should have to answer to his county GOP for this vote and another more recent vote addressed below.

The three subsequent White-Gardenhire bills (HB660/SB635, HB863/SB104 and HB2429/SB2263), failed in their respective committees. On the last one, even with White abusing his sub-committee chairmanship, he could not strong-arm enough votes to get the bill all the way through the committee process.

In 2019, Hazlewood, Marsh and White (of the in-state tuition bills), voted with Democrats against HB1239/SB1165, a bill which modestly improved the Tennessee Lawful Employment Act (commonly referred to as “E-verify”). The Senate didn’t even bother to take up the bill in committee.

E-verify is a tool which helps stop illegal immigration by cutting off access to employment for illegal aliens. The other direct benefit of E-verify is that it “protects American workers by ensuring employers only hire individuals authorized to work in the United States.”

During the committee discussion, Rep. Mike Sparks (R- Smyrna) complained about the fines levied on employers who failed to follow the law.

There are plenty of Republicans in Congress who readily turn their backs on law-abiding Americans and all too willingly seek to cut deals that put their political interests before the interests of those they were elected to serve. Washington, DC appears to be beyond repair. The Tennessee General Assembly may still be salvaged – 2022 is not that far away.

----------------------------------------------

Don’t forget the refugee importer Marsha Blackburn...a total fraud.

[foreverlogical]

A few months after losing the White House, Republicans across the country have had a revelation: The Electoral College could use some improvements. The problem is that they have contradictory proposals for how to fix it—and contradictory arguments for why those proposals would help Americans pick their president. In Wisconsin, Michigan, and New Hampshire, GOP lawmakers want to award Electoral College votes by congressional district, just like Nebraska and Maine currently do. But in Nebraska, Republicans want to do the opposite, and return to the same winner-takes-all method used by, well, Wisconsin, Michigan, New Hampshire, and almost every other state.

These Republicans do agree on one thing, however: They insist that their proposals have nothing—absolutely nothing—to do with Donald Trump’s defeat in the 2020 election.

“I think people would just feel better knowing that their vote went to the candidate that they chose in their area,” Gary Tauchen, a GOP state legislator in Wisconsin, told me recently. Tauchen is 67 and retiring next year, and the measure he’s introduced, which would split Wisconsin’s electoral votes by congressional district, could be a capstone to a 16-year career in the legislature. Under his bill, even if deep-blue Milwaukee and Madison pushed the state into the Democratic column—as they have in eight of the past nine presidential elections—shutting out Republicans entirely would be virtually impossible. Tauchen said he would have introduced his bill even if Trump had won Wisconsin last year. Why, then, didn’t he push it after 2016, when Trump narrowly carried the state? “The timing wasn’t right, I don’t think,” he said. “This just seemed more appropriate for right now.”

In New Hampshire, Bill Gannon, a Republican state senator, has proposed similar legislation. He told me he got the idea from his son, a college student who had read about how Maine divvies up its electoral votes. Republicans control New Hampshire’s governorship and legislature, and if they pass Gannon’s bill, the GOP could wind up with an extra electoral vote in 2024 even if Democrats carry the state again. Around the time Gannon offered up his proposal, a prominent Michigan Republican suggested that his state do the same.

Meanwhile, in Nebraska, a 24-year-old Yale graduate named Julie Slama wants her state to go in the other direction. A state senator first appointed by Governor Pete Ricketts in 2018, Slama has introduced a bill that would award all of Nebraska’s electors to the winner of the statewide vote. The last Democrat to carry the reliably red state was Lyndon B. Johnson. Trump won the statewide vote last year by nearly 20 points. But Joe Biden, like Barack Obama before him, walked away with one of Nebraska’s five electors by winning a district that comprises Omaha and its suburbs. Had Biden won about 44,000 fewer total votes across Wisconsin, Georgia, and Arizona, that single electoral vote in Nebraska would have decided the election.

Yet when I raised this with Slama, she never mentioned the advantage her party would gain. Instead, she drew her argument from the Constitution. “The Founders and the Framers made it very clear that states, not segments of states, were intended to determine the president,” Slama told me, “and we really shouldn’t have presidential elections determined by lines drawn by politicians.”

[Read: The secret to beating the Electoral College]

Taken together, the changes these legislators are seeking would likely ensure that the next Republican presidential nominee wins at least a few more electoral votes in the race to 270. But the proposals could also backfire. All of the states trying to imitate Nebraska are battlegrounds; Trump won Wisconsin and Michigan in 2016, and he came within 3,000 votes of carrying New Hampshire that year. All of them could be competitive in 2024. “At the end of the day, I think that they might live to regret those things,” warns Ryan Hamilton, the executive director of the Nebraska Republican Party.

The desired result of the proposals, however, is clear: These bills are aimed at making it harder for Democrats to win. At this point, they are all long shots; none of the proposals currently has the votes to pass. But Democrats are taking them seriously, seeing the attempts to tweak the Electoral College system as linked to the GOP’s much more widely publicized efforts to suppress voter turnout.

If Republicans are trying to tinker with the Electoral College to boost their chances, many Democrats want to go much further to strengthen theirs. Some have long wanted to abolish the institution altogether. Others are pushing legislation that would effectively neutralize the Electoral College by creating a multistate compact to elect as president the winner of the national popular vote, an idea that arose in response to the disputed 2000 election of George W. Bush. Fifteen states and the District of Columbia—all controlled by Democrats—have endorsed the measure over the years, but few supporters believe that it will win over enough states to succeed anytime soon.

Unlike in Wisconsin, Michigan, and New Hampshire, the push to change Nebraska’s system isn’t new—Republicans have been trying to abolish the state’s Electoral College split almost from the moment it was enacted. Nebraska has the nation’s only unicameral, nonpartisan legislature, which requires legislation to muster a supermajority to pass. A Democratic state senator succeeded in winning bipartisan support to implement the Electoral College change in 1991, and Nebraska’s Democratic governor at the time signed it into law. Hamilton, the state GOP executive director, concedes that his party’s desire to return to the winner-takes-all system plays to its advantage, but he has a tough time accounting for the fact that Republicans in other states are moving in the opposite direction. When I asked him about this contradiction, he paused for a few seconds. “I’m trying to answer judiciously,” he told me. “I respect what they’re trying to do.”

Nebraska Republicans likely would have succeeded already if it were not for Ernie Chambers. A Democratic 46-year veteran of the legislature from Omaha, Chambers mounted a days-long filibuster in 2016 to preserve the current system. Republicans at one point had the votes they needed to adopt the winner-takes-all method, but a couple of members peeled off after Chambers commandeered the floor and jeopardized the passage of other bills before the legislative session expired. Chambers, who is Black and has long described himself as a “defender of the downtrodden,” argues that the change would silence the voices of nonwhite citizens in Omaha, Nebraska’s biggest city. “There is very little impact that the people who are not white and Republican in Nebraska can have,” he told me. “But that doesn’t mean people will not do with the  little they have to work with.”

Chambers, 83, is now out of office, having been forced to leave last year for the second time in his career because of term limits. When I spoke with him recently, he said he didn’t know if the defenders of Nebraska’s unusual approach would prevail again. But he was unsentimental. “Politics is a dirty, backstabbing, double-crossing racket,” Chambers said. “If you’ve got the numbers, you want winner-take-all. If you don’t have the numbers, you want to at least have a little bit of an opportunity for your voice to be heard.”

“There’s nothing mystical about it, nothing philosophical about it,” Chambers said about the fight over the Electoral College, both in Nebraska and elsewhere. “It’s politics, pure and simple.”

[newstfionline]

Tuesday, September 21, 2021

UN chief warns China, US to avoid Cold War (AP) Warning of a potential new Cold War, the head of the United Nations implored China and the United States to repair their “completely dysfunctional” relationship before problems between the two large and deeply influential countries spill over even further into the rest of the planet. U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres spoke to The Associated Press this weekend ahead of this week’s annual United Nations gathering of world leaders. Guterres said the world’s two major economic powers should be cooperating on climate and negotiating more robustly on trade and technology even given persisting political fissures about human rights, economics, online security and sovereignty in the South China Sea. “Unfortunately, today we only have confrontation,” Guterres said.

Canada votes in pandemic election that could cost Trudeau (AP) Prime Minister Justin Trudeau gambled on an early election in a bid to win a majority of seats in Parliament, but now faces the threat of being knocked from power in Canada’s election on Monday. Polls indicate Trudeau’s Liberal Party is in a tight race with the rival Conservatives: It will likely win the most seats in Parliament, but still fail to get a majority, forcing it to rely on an opposition party to pass legislation. “Trudeau made an incredibly stupid error in judgement,” said Robert Bothwell, a professor of Canadian history and international relations at the University of Toronto. Trudeau entered the election leading a stable minority government that wasn’t under threat of being toppled.

Biden easing foreign travel restrictions, requiring vaccines (AP) President Joe Biden will ease foreign travel restrictions into the U.S. beginning in November, when his administration will require all foreign nationals flying into the country to be fully vaccinated. All foreign travelers flying to the U.S. will need to demonstrate proof of vaccination before boarding, as well as proof of a negative COVID-19 test taken within three days of flight, said White House COVID-19 coordinator Jeff Zients, who announced the new policy on Monday. Biden will also tighten testing rules for unvaccinated American citizens, who will need to be tested within a day before returning to the U.S., as well as after they arrive home. Fully vaccinated passengers will not be required to quarantine, Zeints said. The new policy replaces a patchwork of travel restrictions first instituted by President Donald Trump last year and tightened by Biden earlier this year that restrict travel by non-citizens who have in the prior 14 days been in the United Kingdom, European Union, China, India, Iran, Republic of Ireland, Brazil and South Africa.

Recall vote highlights California’s geopolitical divisions (AP) The California recall election was a blowout win for Gov. Gavin Newsom that reinforced the state’s political divisions: The Democratic governor won big support in coastal areas and urban centers, while the rural north and agricultural inland, with far fewer voters, largely wanted him gone. “It’s almost like two states,” Menlo College political scientist Melissa Michelson said. Though California is a liberal stronghold where Democrats hold every statewide office and have two-thirds majorities in the Legislature, it is also home to deeply conservative areas. Those residents have long felt alienated from Sacramento, where Democrats have been in full control for more than a decade. A conservative movement in far Northern California has for years sought to break away and create its own state to better reflect the area’s political sensitivities.

US launches mass expulsion of Haitian migrants from Texas (AP) The U.S. is flying Haitians camped in a Texas border town back to their homeland and blocking others from crossing the border from Mexico in a massive show of force that signals the beginning of what could be one of America’s swiftest, large-scale expulsions of migrants or refugees in decades. More than 320 migrants arrived in Port-au-Prince on three flights Sunday, and Haiti said six flights were expected Tuesday. In all, U.S. authorities moved to expel many of the more 12,000 migrants camped around a bridge in Del Rio, Texas, after crossing from Ciudad Acuña, Mexico. The U.S. plans to begin seven expulsion flights daily on Wednesday, four to Port-au-Prince and three to Cap-Haitien, according to a U.S. official who was not authorized to discuss the matter publicly.

Madrid street party (Reuters) Roughly 25,000 Spaniards joined in an illegal mass drinking party on the streets of Madrid on Friday, which took police until 7 a.m. the following day to break up. The huge outdoor parties, known as “macro-botellon,” have been resisted by Spanish authorities for years, and have taken on renewed significance as coronavirus restrictions limit public interactions. Police may find quieter streets next weekend as closing times for Madrid’s bars and clubs are finally extended to 6 a.m. from their previous 2 a.m. limits.

Thousands flee as lava spewing from volcano on Spain’s La Palma island destroys houses (Reuters) Authorities have evacuated about 5,000 people from villages in the Spanish Canary Island of La Palma as lava spews from an erupting volcano, local officials said. The 15-meter high lava flow has already swallowed 20 houses in the village of El Paso and sections of roads, Mayor Sergio Rodriguez told TVE radio station on Monday morning. Since erupting on Sunday afternoon, the volcano has shot lava up hundreds meters into the air and poured flows of molten rock towards the Atlantic Ocean over a sparsely populated area of La Palma, the most northwestern island in the Canaries archipelago. La Palma had been on high alert after more than 22,000 tremors were reported in the space of a week in Cumbre Vieja, which belongs to a chain of volcanoes that last had a major eruption in 1971 and is one of the most active volcanic regions in the Canaries.

Shooting at Russian university leaves at least 6 dead, 24 injured (Washington Post)  At least six people were killed and 24 were wounded after a gunman opened fire at a university in the northwestern Russian city of Perm, the government in the region said Monday. President Vladimir Putin called the shooting at Perm State University “a tremendous tragedy, not only for the families who lost their children, but for the entire country.” Such a rampage, which sent students hurling themselves from windows in a bid to escape the gunfire, is extremely rare for Russia, which has little experience of the kind of mass shootings routinely seen in the United States. Russia’s Investigative Committee, a law enforcement agency, said the attacker was a student who had purchased a hunting rifle in May. The agency said he had been apprehended and is in the hospital for treatment of wounds suffered while resisting arrest. Russia has strict laws on civilian gun ownership and requires people to pass psychological exams before obtaining a license for hunting and sport firearms.

Evergrande debts (NYT) Once China’s most prolific property developer, Evergrande has become the country’s most indebted company. It owes money to lenders, suppliers and foreign investors. It owes unfinished apartments to home buyers and has racked up more than $300 billion in unpaid bills. Regulators fear that the collapse of a company Evergrande’s size would send tremors through the entire Chinese financial system. Yet so far, Beijing has not stepped in with a bailout, having promised to teach debt-saddled corporate giants a lesson. Evergrande is on the hook to buyers for nearly 1.6 million apartments, according to one estimate, and it may owe money to tens of thousands of its own workers. As Beijing remains relatively quiet about the company’s future, those who are owed cash say they are growing impatient.

Pacquiao for president? (Foreign Policy) Manny Pacquiao, the former professional boxer and Philippine senator, has said he would run for president in next year’s election, accepting the nomination put forward by a faction of the ruling PDP-Laban party. His decision comes after Christopher “Bong” Go rejected a presidential nomination from a rival PDP-Laban faction earlier this month, although his running mate, President Rodrigo Duterte, accepted the nomination for vice president. If electoral authorities recognize Pacquiao’s nomination, he may still face competition from Sara Duterte-Carpio, the mayor of Davao and daughter of the president. Duterte-Carpio has topped recent opinion polls but has been cagey about her plans for higher office, saying last week that she would run for another term as Davao mayor in 2022.

Talibanning Women From Work (Guardian, BBC) In mid-August, with American troops still present, the Taliban vowed to respect women’s rights, forgive those who fought against them, and ensure that Afghanistan won’t become a haven for terrorists. Zabihullah Mujahid, long-time Taliban spokesman, gave his first ever public news conference, saying leaders had encouraged women to return to work and girls to return to school. He promised women would retain their rights, but qualified that as being “within the framework of Islamic law”—specifically, Sharia law. To no one’s surprise, it was just ‘happy talk’ meant to allay suspicions of world powers and the fears of Afghans. Soon there were ample reports of Taliban soldiers going house to house, searching for “traitors” and executing them. Working women were told to stay home and schools were shut down, although it was labeled a temporary security measure. In Kandahar, women bank tellers were forced out of their jobs at gunpoint. In the next days and weeks the group’s new government issued decrees restricting more rights of girls and women. Female students in middle and high schools were told they couldn’t return to classes, although boys were allowed to. Female university students were informed studies would now take place in gender-segregated settings, and they must abide by a strict Islamic dress code. Other crippling measures from when the Taliban ruled in the 1990s surfaced unofficially, including a requirement that Afghan women have a male guardian accompany them in any public place. On Friday, female employees in Kabul city government were told they couldn’t return to work if their job could be performed by men, meaning almost 1,000 women who were part of the city’s workforce of nearly 3,000 lost their jobs. The Taliban shut down the Women’s Affairs Ministry, replacing it with a ministry for the “propagation of virtue and the prevention of vice” tasked with enforcing Islamic law.

The Taliban vs. ISIS (Washington Post) After years of waging a holy war to overthrow the U.S.-backed government in Afghanistan, Taliban fighters have struggled to adjust to their new day job: the mundane task of securing a city. “All of my men, they love jihad and fighting. So when they came to Kabul they didn’t feel comfortable. There isn’t any fighting here anymore,” Taliban commander Abdulrahman Nifiz told The Post. But the Taliban still faces a violent foe: the Islamic State affiliate in Afghanistan, which claimed responsibility Sunday for a series of blasts over the weekend in the country’s east that reportedly killed several people and injured tens more. The improvised explosive devices were set off Saturday and Sunday around the city of Jalalabad, known as a stronghold for the Islamic State-Khorasan (ISIS-K).

Troll Farms (MIT Technology Review) A report produced by a Facebook employee details the enormous impact troll farms—that is, organized networks designed to spread misinformation—have on the social network. The October 2019 report identified that the most popular pages for Christians and Black Americans were, in fact, operated out of Kosovo and Macedonia. As of October 2019, 15,000 Facebook pages with a predominantly American audience were operated out of those countries, reaching 140 million U.S. users every month. Troll farms operated the fifth-largest women’s page, the second-largest Native American page, 10 of the top 15 African-American interest pages, and every single one of the 15 top pages targeting Christian Americans.