Beware, per Rep.Greene Bill Gates is trying to force you to eat fake meat grown in " peach tree dishes" and the " Gazpacho police" are trying to take away your rights.
https://www.yahoo.com/entertainment/mar ... 46605.html
If the voters in Greene's district moved to Texas ,appears the average IQ of both States would be increased ?
TrumpReich in action
Re: TrumpReich in action
More of the Greene show, aided by dangerous lizard Paul Gosar and the malignant Alex Jones:
Yahoo News today:
Greene pushed a baseless conspiracy theory about the Texas gunman being into "cross-dressing."
She also speculated without evidence that the shooter had "mental issues."
Rep. Paul Gosar pushed a similar theory, calling the shooter a "transsexual leftist illegal alien."
Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene pushed a baseless rumor on Sunday about the Texas elementary school massacre, positing without evidence that the gunman was into "cross-dressing."
Greene was speaking during a live Facebook broadcast, where she referenced the school shooting at the Robb Elementary School, during which 21 people, including 19 children, were killed.
"He clearly had a lot of mental issues going on, as was shown with him wearing eyeliner, cross-dressing, a lot of his language, being a loner," Greene said, adding that more information was still coming out about the school shooter.
She also questioned how the shooter got the money to buy the guns he used in the shooting despite coming from a low-income household.
"He must have really been saving up!" Greene said.
In her broadcast, Greene appeared to touch on two separate conspiracy theories swirling around the shooting. Greene seemed to be referencing the baseless rumor pushed by her colleague, Rep. Paul Gosar, that the shooter was a transgender individual.
Last week, Gosar began spreading a baseless, transphobic rumor via a now-deleted tweet that the shooter was a "transsexual leftist illegal alien" hours after the shooting. This is factually wrong on all counts and originated from 4Chan, an unmoderated fringe messaging board. 4Chan users posted images of trans women and falsely claimed they were the shooter, despite these women having nothing to do with what happened in Uvalde.
Greene also casually referenced a baseless conspiracy theory that the Texas massacre was a false flag operation. Conspiracy theorist Alex Jones and several QAnon influencers posited without any substantiation that the mass shooting was a staged event, with Jones speculating that it was "very suspicious timing, just days before the Houston NRA convention — and wondering how the shooter got "all that money" to purchase his guns.
Jones previously claimed the 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting, which took the lives of 20 children and six adults, was a hoax. After multiple families sued the right-wing radio host, he said in a deposition that "a form of psychosis" made him believe the Sandy Hook shooting wasn't real and admitted that he spread misinformation about it.
As for Greene, she took a pro-gun stance hours after the Uvalde shooting, asserting that the US doesn't need "more gun control" but should "return to God instead." At the time, she also speculated without evidence that "meds can be the problem."
Greene has run on a pro-gun platform. She has been known to hold gun raffles for fundraising campaigns and videotaped harassing a survivor of the 2018 Parkland school shooting in January 2021.
Yahoo News today:
Greene pushed a baseless conspiracy theory about the Texas gunman being into "cross-dressing."
She also speculated without evidence that the shooter had "mental issues."
Rep. Paul Gosar pushed a similar theory, calling the shooter a "transsexual leftist illegal alien."
Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene pushed a baseless rumor on Sunday about the Texas elementary school massacre, positing without evidence that the gunman was into "cross-dressing."
Greene was speaking during a live Facebook broadcast, where she referenced the school shooting at the Robb Elementary School, during which 21 people, including 19 children, were killed.
"He clearly had a lot of mental issues going on, as was shown with him wearing eyeliner, cross-dressing, a lot of his language, being a loner," Greene said, adding that more information was still coming out about the school shooter.
She also questioned how the shooter got the money to buy the guns he used in the shooting despite coming from a low-income household.
"He must have really been saving up!" Greene said.
In her broadcast, Greene appeared to touch on two separate conspiracy theories swirling around the shooting. Greene seemed to be referencing the baseless rumor pushed by her colleague, Rep. Paul Gosar, that the shooter was a transgender individual.
Last week, Gosar began spreading a baseless, transphobic rumor via a now-deleted tweet that the shooter was a "transsexual leftist illegal alien" hours after the shooting. This is factually wrong on all counts and originated from 4Chan, an unmoderated fringe messaging board. 4Chan users posted images of trans women and falsely claimed they were the shooter, despite these women having nothing to do with what happened in Uvalde.
Greene also casually referenced a baseless conspiracy theory that the Texas massacre was a false flag operation. Conspiracy theorist Alex Jones and several QAnon influencers posited without any substantiation that the mass shooting was a staged event, with Jones speculating that it was "very suspicious timing, just days before the Houston NRA convention — and wondering how the shooter got "all that money" to purchase his guns.
Jones previously claimed the 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting, which took the lives of 20 children and six adults, was a hoax. After multiple families sued the right-wing radio host, he said in a deposition that "a form of psychosis" made him believe the Sandy Hook shooting wasn't real and admitted that he spread misinformation about it.
As for Greene, she took a pro-gun stance hours after the Uvalde shooting, asserting that the US doesn't need "more gun control" but should "return to God instead." At the time, she also speculated without evidence that "meds can be the problem."
Greene has run on a pro-gun platform. She has been known to hold gun raffles for fundraising campaigns and videotaped harassing a survivor of the 2018 Parkland school shooting in January 2021.
Re: TrumpReich in action
This kind of cr@p just makes me tired.
Why don't they just give up and go back to their kennels?
Why don't they just give up and go back to their kennels?
Re: TrumpReich in action
From AxiosPM tonight:
Michael Sussmann, a cybersecurity lawyer who represented the Hillary Clinton campaign in 2016, was acquitted today of a felony charge of lying to the FBI.
Why it matters: This was the first trial in special counsel John Durham's three-year review of possible government misconduct in investigating potential ties between Russia and former President Trump's 2016 campaign, Axios' Jacob Knutson writes.
Between the lines: Trump supporters have looked to the probe to expose what they contend was bias against Trump by the intelligence community and law-enforcement officials, AP notes.
Prosecutors said Sussmann lied to the FBI when he said he wasn't representing a client when he presented allegations about a secret Trump Organization back channel to a Russian bank.
His allegation led to a four-month FBI inquiry into a possible internet back channel between the Trump Organization and the Kremlin-linked Alfa Bank.
Zoom out: Durham's only criminal conviction so far is against a low-level former FBI lawyer, who was sentenced to 12 months' probation after pleading guilty to altering an email used to obtain a surveillance warrant for Trump campaign aide Carter Page.
Michael Sussmann, a cybersecurity lawyer who represented the Hillary Clinton campaign in 2016, was acquitted today of a felony charge of lying to the FBI.
Why it matters: This was the first trial in special counsel John Durham's three-year review of possible government misconduct in investigating potential ties between Russia and former President Trump's 2016 campaign, Axios' Jacob Knutson writes.
Between the lines: Trump supporters have looked to the probe to expose what they contend was bias against Trump by the intelligence community and law-enforcement officials, AP notes.
Prosecutors said Sussmann lied to the FBI when he said he wasn't representing a client when he presented allegations about a secret Trump Organization back channel to a Russian bank.
His allegation led to a four-month FBI inquiry into a possible internet back channel between the Trump Organization and the Kremlin-linked Alfa Bank.
Zoom out: Durham's only criminal conviction so far is against a low-level former FBI lawyer, who was sentenced to 12 months' probation after pleading guilty to altering an email used to obtain a surveillance warrant for Trump campaign aide Carter Page.
Re: TrumpReich in action
These alt.Right ( ie. all GOP ) wack jobs ,Trump included, kill people. The crazies listen, then figure only an AR-15 will " stop the steal."
https://www.cnn.com/2022/06/01/politics ... index.html
https://www.cnn.com/2022/06/01/politics ... index.html
Re: TrumpReich in action
How Influential Election Deniers Have Fueled a Fight to Control Elections
Several prominent promoters of election misinformation are backing a slate of Republican candidates running for secretary of state in races across the country.
By Alexandra Berzon
June 5, 2022, 5:00 a.m. ET
Key figures in the effort to subvert the 2020 presidential election have thrown their weight behind a slate of Republican candidates for secretary of state across the country, injecting specious theories about voting machines, foreign hacking and voter fraud into campaigns that will determine who controls elections in several battleground states.
The America First slate comprises more than a dozen candidates who falsely claim the 2020 election was stolen from Donald J. Trump. It grew out of meetings held by a conspiracy-mongering QAnon leader and a Nevada politician, and has quietly gained support from influential people in the election denier movement — including Mike Lindell, the MyPillow founder, and Patrick Byrne, the former Overstock.com executive who has financed public forums that promote the candidates and theories about election vulnerabilities.
Members of the slate have won party endorsements or are competitive candidates for the Republican nomination in several states, including three — Michigan, Arizona and Nevada — where a relatively small number of ballots have decided presidential victories. And in Pennsylvania, where the governor appoints the secretary of state, State Senator Doug Mastriano, who is aligned with the group, easily won his primary for governor last month.
The candidates cast their races as a fight for the future of democracy, the best chance to reform a broken voting system — and to win elections.
“It doesn’t really matter who’s running for assembly or governor or anything else. It matters who is counting the vote for that election,” said Rachel Hamm, a long-shot contender in California’s primary on Tuesday, at a forum hosted by the group earlier this year.
But even in losing races, the slate has left its mark. As they appeal for votes on the stump and on social media, the candidates are seeding falsehoods and fictions into the political discourse. Their status as candidates amplifies the claims.
The information being tossed out under the guise of election reform, particularly the machine manipulation of votes, threatens to corrode Americans’ trust in democracy, said John Merrill, the Republican secretary of state in Alabama. “What you do is you encourage people not to have confidence in the elections process and people lose faith.”
In private weekly calls that stretch on for hours on Friday mornings, the candidates discuss policies and campaign strategy, at times joined by fringe figures who have pushed ploys to keep Mr. Trump in power. In 11 states, the group has sponsored public forums where prominent activists unspool intricate conspiracies about vulnerabilities in voting machines.
Secretary of state races were once sleepy affairs, dominated by politicians who sought to demonstrate their bureaucratic competence, rather than fierce partisan loyalty. But Mr. Trump’s attempt to overturn the results — including his failed attempt to pressure Brad Raffensperger, Georgia’s secretary of state, to “find” votes to reverse his loss — has thrust the office’s power into the spotlight.
Since its founding last year, the America First slate has ballooned from a handful of candidates to a high of around 15. Many have little chance of succeeding. On Tuesday, Ms. Hamm will compete to place among the top two candidates in California, and Audrey Trujillo, who is running unopposed in New Mexico, will cinch her G.O.P. nomination. Neither candidate is favored to beat Democratic opponents in their solidly blue states.
But America First candidates could be competitive in at least four battleground states: Nevada, Arizona, Pennsylvania and Michigan. Two of them have already scored primary victories in these states: In Michigan, Kristina Karamo, a novice Republican activist who gained prominence challenging the 2020 results there, won her party’s endorsement at an April convention, all but securing her nomination in August. The Republican primary winner for Pennsylvania governor, Mr. Mastriano, was involved in an effort to keep the state’s electoral votes from President Biden in 2020. He has said he wants to cancel all voter registrations and force voters to re-register.
A leading candidate in Nevada’s primary next week is Jim Marchant, one of the organizers of the America First slate. The former state assemblyman and another candidate won the endorsement of the central committee of the state Republican Party, giving them a boost before voters go to the polls on June 14. The group’s candidate in Arizona, Mark Finchem, is a leading contender and the top fund-raiser in the primary race.
Mr. Marchant has said he was urged to start the coalition by unnamed people close to Mr. Trump. The project picked up steam in the spring of last year, after Mr. Marchant attended a meeting of activists hosted by a man known in QAnon circles by the alias Juan O’Savin, according to an account from one of the people involved in the group.
Major figures in the election denier movement were drawn in. In May 2021, when Mr. Marchant organized an all-day meeting in a suite at the Trump International Hotel Las Vegas, Mr. Lindell appeared remotely briefly. Soon after, the group gathered again at a distillery in Austin, Texas, according to two people who attended the meeting.
The host of that session was Phil Waldron, a retired Army colonel and a leading proponent of a machine-hacking theory involving Communists, shell companies and George Soros, the Democratic financier. Mr. Waldron is perhaps best known for circulating a PowerPoint presentation that recommended Mr. Trump declare a national emergency to delay the certification of the 2020 results. The document made its way to the inbox of the White House chief of staff, Mark Meadows, and is now part of the congressional investigation into the deadly riot at the Capitol on Jan. 6.
The group posted a platform that calls for moving to paper ballots, eliminating mail voting and “aggressive voter roll cleanup.”
In recent months, the core group has been recruiting new candidates. Around 25 people, including some of the candidates and people seeking to influence them, join the weekly conference calls, according to some of the candidates who were recruited. The group discusses campaigns and policy ideas, including how to transition to hand-counting all ballots — a notion election experts say is impractical and can lead to errors and cause chaos.
“It’s startling to have statewide candidates, multiple candidates for a really important statewide office, running on a deeply incoherent policy plank,” said Mark Lindeman, an expert on elections with Verified Voting, an election security nonprofit.
Mr. Byrne, who spent millions on the discredited “audit” of votes in Arizona, has taken particular interest in sponsoring public forums. He has pledged to spend up to $15,000 on each event, and has contributed around $83,000 to a political action committee controlled by Mr. Marchant.
In an interview, Mr. Byrne said he is primarily interested in spreading ideas about “election integrity and how it needs to be fixed” rather than promoting specific candidates for office.
“I see them as gatherings of highly concerned citizens,” Mr. Byrne said.
At one forum in Dallas, speakers delivered lectures purporting to demonstrate weaknesses of American voting systems. Some issued dark warnings about the forces they claim are manipulating the system, including Mark Zuckerberg, Mr. Soros, Democrats, communists and establishment Republicans.
“They took the ability to cheat to a global scale,” said Lara Logan, a former CBS journalist who moderated the event.
Tina Peters, an America First candidate in Colorado, assailed the “evil, evil people” she’s up against. Ms. Peters, a county clerk in Colorado, is under indictment related to allegations she tampered with elections equipment, and a judge has barred her from overseeing this year’s elections.
Ms. Peters and her attorney did not respond to a request for comment. Her campaign has said her legal troubles amount to a political witch hunt.
Other speakers included Russell J. Ramsland Jr., a Texas businessman whose firm produced a widely circulated report that Mr. Trump and his associates presented as evidence of fraud. The report, which focused on results in one Michigan county, was later debunked by Republicans in the State Senate.
Mark Cook, a technology consultant who has worked for Mr. Lindell, also spoke to the group, telling them that “this system controls our freedom.”
In a statement to The New York Times, Mr. Cook said he hoped his work would “make our election system more accurate, more transparent and more understandable by the public.”
Mr. Lindell told The Times he has gotten involved because he believes “most” secretaries of state are corrupt and should all be replaced.
“They let our country be taken through computers,” he said.
Some of the candidates have aired similar ideas on the campaign trail. In Nevada, Mr. Marchant has called to decertify Dominion voting machines, and urges the use of paper ballots in a state that first began allowing machines to count votes in 1951. “Your vote hasn’t counted for decades,” Mr. Marchant said in a February debate, according to the Nevada Independent. “You haven’t elected anybody.”
In an interview on Facebook in March, Ms. Trujillo, the New Mexico candidate, asserted that U.S. voting systems are “no better than any other communist country like Venezuela or any of these other states where our elections are being manipulated.” She called the 2020 presidential election a “coup.”
And in Arizona, Mr. Finchem has sued to try to ban the use of voting machines in the November elections. Mr. Lindell says he is financing the lawsuit.
Mr. Marchant, Ms. Trujillo and Mr. Finchem did not respond to requests for comment.
Alyce McFadden contributed reporting and Alain Delaquérière contributed research.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/05/us/p ... dates.html
Several prominent promoters of election misinformation are backing a slate of Republican candidates running for secretary of state in races across the country.
By Alexandra Berzon
June 5, 2022, 5:00 a.m. ET
Key figures in the effort to subvert the 2020 presidential election have thrown their weight behind a slate of Republican candidates for secretary of state across the country, injecting specious theories about voting machines, foreign hacking and voter fraud into campaigns that will determine who controls elections in several battleground states.
The America First slate comprises more than a dozen candidates who falsely claim the 2020 election was stolen from Donald J. Trump. It grew out of meetings held by a conspiracy-mongering QAnon leader and a Nevada politician, and has quietly gained support from influential people in the election denier movement — including Mike Lindell, the MyPillow founder, and Patrick Byrne, the former Overstock.com executive who has financed public forums that promote the candidates and theories about election vulnerabilities.
Members of the slate have won party endorsements or are competitive candidates for the Republican nomination in several states, including three — Michigan, Arizona and Nevada — where a relatively small number of ballots have decided presidential victories. And in Pennsylvania, where the governor appoints the secretary of state, State Senator Doug Mastriano, who is aligned with the group, easily won his primary for governor last month.
The candidates cast their races as a fight for the future of democracy, the best chance to reform a broken voting system — and to win elections.
“It doesn’t really matter who’s running for assembly or governor or anything else. It matters who is counting the vote for that election,” said Rachel Hamm, a long-shot contender in California’s primary on Tuesday, at a forum hosted by the group earlier this year.
But even in losing races, the slate has left its mark. As they appeal for votes on the stump and on social media, the candidates are seeding falsehoods and fictions into the political discourse. Their status as candidates amplifies the claims.
The information being tossed out under the guise of election reform, particularly the machine manipulation of votes, threatens to corrode Americans’ trust in democracy, said John Merrill, the Republican secretary of state in Alabama. “What you do is you encourage people not to have confidence in the elections process and people lose faith.”
In private weekly calls that stretch on for hours on Friday mornings, the candidates discuss policies and campaign strategy, at times joined by fringe figures who have pushed ploys to keep Mr. Trump in power. In 11 states, the group has sponsored public forums where prominent activists unspool intricate conspiracies about vulnerabilities in voting machines.
Secretary of state races were once sleepy affairs, dominated by politicians who sought to demonstrate their bureaucratic competence, rather than fierce partisan loyalty. But Mr. Trump’s attempt to overturn the results — including his failed attempt to pressure Brad Raffensperger, Georgia’s secretary of state, to “find” votes to reverse his loss — has thrust the office’s power into the spotlight.
Since its founding last year, the America First slate has ballooned from a handful of candidates to a high of around 15. Many have little chance of succeeding. On Tuesday, Ms. Hamm will compete to place among the top two candidates in California, and Audrey Trujillo, who is running unopposed in New Mexico, will cinch her G.O.P. nomination. Neither candidate is favored to beat Democratic opponents in their solidly blue states.
But America First candidates could be competitive in at least four battleground states: Nevada, Arizona, Pennsylvania and Michigan. Two of them have already scored primary victories in these states: In Michigan, Kristina Karamo, a novice Republican activist who gained prominence challenging the 2020 results there, won her party’s endorsement at an April convention, all but securing her nomination in August. The Republican primary winner for Pennsylvania governor, Mr. Mastriano, was involved in an effort to keep the state’s electoral votes from President Biden in 2020. He has said he wants to cancel all voter registrations and force voters to re-register.
A leading candidate in Nevada’s primary next week is Jim Marchant, one of the organizers of the America First slate. The former state assemblyman and another candidate won the endorsement of the central committee of the state Republican Party, giving them a boost before voters go to the polls on June 14. The group’s candidate in Arizona, Mark Finchem, is a leading contender and the top fund-raiser in the primary race.
Mr. Marchant has said he was urged to start the coalition by unnamed people close to Mr. Trump. The project picked up steam in the spring of last year, after Mr. Marchant attended a meeting of activists hosted by a man known in QAnon circles by the alias Juan O’Savin, according to an account from one of the people involved in the group.
Major figures in the election denier movement were drawn in. In May 2021, when Mr. Marchant organized an all-day meeting in a suite at the Trump International Hotel Las Vegas, Mr. Lindell appeared remotely briefly. Soon after, the group gathered again at a distillery in Austin, Texas, according to two people who attended the meeting.
The host of that session was Phil Waldron, a retired Army colonel and a leading proponent of a machine-hacking theory involving Communists, shell companies and George Soros, the Democratic financier. Mr. Waldron is perhaps best known for circulating a PowerPoint presentation that recommended Mr. Trump declare a national emergency to delay the certification of the 2020 results. The document made its way to the inbox of the White House chief of staff, Mark Meadows, and is now part of the congressional investigation into the deadly riot at the Capitol on Jan. 6.
The group posted a platform that calls for moving to paper ballots, eliminating mail voting and “aggressive voter roll cleanup.”
In recent months, the core group has been recruiting new candidates. Around 25 people, including some of the candidates and people seeking to influence them, join the weekly conference calls, according to some of the candidates who were recruited. The group discusses campaigns and policy ideas, including how to transition to hand-counting all ballots — a notion election experts say is impractical and can lead to errors and cause chaos.
“It’s startling to have statewide candidates, multiple candidates for a really important statewide office, running on a deeply incoherent policy plank,” said Mark Lindeman, an expert on elections with Verified Voting, an election security nonprofit.
Mr. Byrne, who spent millions on the discredited “audit” of votes in Arizona, has taken particular interest in sponsoring public forums. He has pledged to spend up to $15,000 on each event, and has contributed around $83,000 to a political action committee controlled by Mr. Marchant.
In an interview, Mr. Byrne said he is primarily interested in spreading ideas about “election integrity and how it needs to be fixed” rather than promoting specific candidates for office.
“I see them as gatherings of highly concerned citizens,” Mr. Byrne said.
At one forum in Dallas, speakers delivered lectures purporting to demonstrate weaknesses of American voting systems. Some issued dark warnings about the forces they claim are manipulating the system, including Mark Zuckerberg, Mr. Soros, Democrats, communists and establishment Republicans.
“They took the ability to cheat to a global scale,” said Lara Logan, a former CBS journalist who moderated the event.
Tina Peters, an America First candidate in Colorado, assailed the “evil, evil people” she’s up against. Ms. Peters, a county clerk in Colorado, is under indictment related to allegations she tampered with elections equipment, and a judge has barred her from overseeing this year’s elections.
Ms. Peters and her attorney did not respond to a request for comment. Her campaign has said her legal troubles amount to a political witch hunt.
Other speakers included Russell J. Ramsland Jr., a Texas businessman whose firm produced a widely circulated report that Mr. Trump and his associates presented as evidence of fraud. The report, which focused on results in one Michigan county, was later debunked by Republicans in the State Senate.
Mark Cook, a technology consultant who has worked for Mr. Lindell, also spoke to the group, telling them that “this system controls our freedom.”
In a statement to The New York Times, Mr. Cook said he hoped his work would “make our election system more accurate, more transparent and more understandable by the public.”
Mr. Lindell told The Times he has gotten involved because he believes “most” secretaries of state are corrupt and should all be replaced.
“They let our country be taken through computers,” he said.
Some of the candidates have aired similar ideas on the campaign trail. In Nevada, Mr. Marchant has called to decertify Dominion voting machines, and urges the use of paper ballots in a state that first began allowing machines to count votes in 1951. “Your vote hasn’t counted for decades,” Mr. Marchant said in a February debate, according to the Nevada Independent. “You haven’t elected anybody.”
In an interview on Facebook in March, Ms. Trujillo, the New Mexico candidate, asserted that U.S. voting systems are “no better than any other communist country like Venezuela or any of these other states where our elections are being manipulated.” She called the 2020 presidential election a “coup.”
And in Arizona, Mr. Finchem has sued to try to ban the use of voting machines in the November elections. Mr. Lindell says he is financing the lawsuit.
Mr. Marchant, Ms. Trujillo and Mr. Finchem did not respond to requests for comment.
Alyce McFadden contributed reporting and Alain Delaquérière contributed research.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/05/us/p ... dates.html
Re: TrumpReich in action
From Axios today, the GOP's continued deadly assault on America:
"...The share of white Americans who have received a Covid vaccine shot has barely budged since last summer.
The main culprit is politics. Only about 60 percent of Republican adults are vaccinated, compared with about 75 percent of independents and more than 90 percent of Democrats, according to Kaiser. And Republicans are both disproportionately white and older. Together, these facts help explain why the white death rate has recently been higher than the Asian, Black or Latino rate.
In heavily conservative, white communities, leaders have not done as good a job explaining the vaccine’s benefits — and Covid’s risks — as leaders in Black and Latino communities. Instead, many conservative media figures, politicians, clergy members and others have amplified false or misleading information about the vaccines. Millions of Americans, in turn, have chosen not to receive a lifesaving shot. Some have paid with their lives.
With Covid aid stalled in Congress, the White House will shift some money marked for testing toward vaccines and treatments. "
"...The share of white Americans who have received a Covid vaccine shot has barely budged since last summer.
The main culprit is politics. Only about 60 percent of Republican adults are vaccinated, compared with about 75 percent of independents and more than 90 percent of Democrats, according to Kaiser. And Republicans are both disproportionately white and older. Together, these facts help explain why the white death rate has recently been higher than the Asian, Black or Latino rate.
In heavily conservative, white communities, leaders have not done as good a job explaining the vaccine’s benefits — and Covid’s risks — as leaders in Black and Latino communities. Instead, many conservative media figures, politicians, clergy members and others have amplified false or misleading information about the vaccines. Millions of Americans, in turn, have chosen not to receive a lifesaving shot. Some have paid with their lives.
With Covid aid stalled in Congress, the White House will shift some money marked for testing toward vaccines and treatments. "
Re: TrumpReich in action
Paladino Draws Backlash for Calling Hitler ‘the Kind of Leader We Need’
Carl Paladino, a Republican House candidate from New York, has been endorsed by Representative Elise Stefanik, a member of party leadership.
By Nicholas Fandos
June 9, 2022
Carl P. Paladino, a Republican running for a House seat in Western New York, praised Adolf Hitler last year for inspiring his followers, describing the fascist dictator as “the kind of leader we need today.”
Mr. Paladino did not specifically condone Hitler’s actions in his remarks, which he made in a 2021 radio interview that was unearthed on Thursday. But he said he was impressed by how the German leader and head of the Nazi Party “aroused the crowd” in his speeches and suggested that Republicans in New York and Washington ought to emulate his approach.
“He would get up there screaming these epithets and these people were just, they were hypnotized by him,” he said in the interview, resurfaced by the left-leaning watchdog group Media Matters. “I guess, I guess that’s the kind of leader we need today. We need somebody inspirational. We need somebody that is a doer.”
“Our Republicans are sound asleep,” he added, referring to party officials as captive to “RINOism,” a derogatory acronym meaning Republicans in name only.
The remarks, for which he apologized on Thursday, were striking even by the incendiary standards of Mr. Paladino, who has previously said that children should not be “brainwashed” into thinking that being gay was acceptable and suggested that Michelle Obama, the former first lady, should be “let loose in the outback of Zimbabwe.”
They could cause major headaches for G.O.P. leaders, particularly Representative Elise Stefanik of New York, the No. 3 House Republican, who has championed his fledgling candidacy.
“Carl is a job creator and conservative outsider who will be a tireless fighter for the people of New York in our fight to put America First to save the country,” she recently wrote on Twitter.
She also invited him to a fund-raiser on Monday at former President Donald J. Trump’s Westchester County golf course, where the two men were photographed together.
The chairman of the New York Democratic Party singled out Ms. Stefanik on Thursday as he called on Republican leaders to condemn Mr. Paladino for “blatant antisemitism.”
“How has the Republican Party stooped so low to support a man who has gone on record idolizing a monster that senselessly killed millions?” said the chairman, Jay Jacobs.
In a statement on Thursday, a spokesman for Ms. Stefanik said she had “one of the strongest records in the U.S. Congress condemning antisemitism” and had pushed bipartisan Holocaust education legislation. But the spokesman did not indicate whether the congresswoman maintained her support for Mr. Paladino.
A Buffalo-based developer who was the Republicans’ 2010 nominee for governor of New York, Mr. Paladino, 75, entered the House race just last Friday after Representative Chris Jacobs said he would not seek re-election. Mr. Jacobs was facing an intense backlash from party leaders angry over his support for an assault weapons ban and other gun safety measures, which he expressed after recent mass shootings.
Mr. Paladino will face a formidable primary challenge from Nicholas A. Langworthy, the chairman of the state Republican Party, who announced his candidacy on Thursday as the developer’s comments reverberated through the 23rd Congressional District.
His entrance set the stage for the kind of explosive primary that New York Republicans had hoped to avoid this year as they seek to retake the House majority in Washington. While the 23rd District is likely to remain in Republican hands, a primary battle could divert resources away from other swing seats the G.O.P. believes it can flip.
But in an interview, Mr. Langworthy argued that allowing Mr. Paladino, a one-time ally, to proceed to a general election would be worse.
“That’s exactly why I am running for Congress, because I provide a candidacy free of distraction,” he said, adding: “We can’t have a circus sideshow on the ticket in Buffalo in the fall that would hurt our statewide prospects.”
He said he would remain party chairman during his campaign.
Mr. Paladino’s comments about Hitler were not even the first time this week that he has drawn condemnation and been forced to apologize.
In a Facebook post and email blast sent last Wednesday, just two days before he said he would run for the House, Mr. Paladino promoted an essay by a Rochester man casting doubt on the official accounts of recent mass shootings in Buffalo and Uvalde, Texas, where he asserted that the purported gunman “was receiving hypnosis training.”
“In almost every mass shooting including the most recent horrific Buffalo Tops Market & the Texas school shootings, there are strange occurrences that are never fully explained,” the man wrote, including conspiratorial references to the suicide of Jeffrey Epstein and the assassinations of John F. Kennedy and Robert F. Kennedy.
Media Matters was also first to report on Mr. Paladino’s post, which was later removed.
In an emailed statement on Thursday, Mr. Paladino said that his invocation of Hitler had been a “serious mistake and rightfully upsets people,” but he blamed the news media for taking his remarks out of context.
“Any implication that I support Hitler or any of the sick and disgusting actions of the Nazi regime is a new low for the media,” he wrote, adding that he would stay in the race against Mr. Langworthy.
Mr. Paladino initially denied sharing the essay on gun control, claiming he did not know how to post on Facebook, but later admitted doing so to The Buffalo News, adding that he did not agree with all the “conspiracy theories” it cited.
Nicholas Fandos is a reporter on the Metro desk covering New York State politics, with a focus on money, lobbying and political influence. He was previously a congressional correspondent in Washington.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/09/nyre ... itler.html
Carl Paladino, a Republican House candidate from New York, has been endorsed by Representative Elise Stefanik, a member of party leadership.
By Nicholas Fandos
June 9, 2022
Carl P. Paladino, a Republican running for a House seat in Western New York, praised Adolf Hitler last year for inspiring his followers, describing the fascist dictator as “the kind of leader we need today.”
Mr. Paladino did not specifically condone Hitler’s actions in his remarks, which he made in a 2021 radio interview that was unearthed on Thursday. But he said he was impressed by how the German leader and head of the Nazi Party “aroused the crowd” in his speeches and suggested that Republicans in New York and Washington ought to emulate his approach.
“He would get up there screaming these epithets and these people were just, they were hypnotized by him,” he said in the interview, resurfaced by the left-leaning watchdog group Media Matters. “I guess, I guess that’s the kind of leader we need today. We need somebody inspirational. We need somebody that is a doer.”
“Our Republicans are sound asleep,” he added, referring to party officials as captive to “RINOism,” a derogatory acronym meaning Republicans in name only.
The remarks, for which he apologized on Thursday, were striking even by the incendiary standards of Mr. Paladino, who has previously said that children should not be “brainwashed” into thinking that being gay was acceptable and suggested that Michelle Obama, the former first lady, should be “let loose in the outback of Zimbabwe.”
They could cause major headaches for G.O.P. leaders, particularly Representative Elise Stefanik of New York, the No. 3 House Republican, who has championed his fledgling candidacy.
“Carl is a job creator and conservative outsider who will be a tireless fighter for the people of New York in our fight to put America First to save the country,” she recently wrote on Twitter.
She also invited him to a fund-raiser on Monday at former President Donald J. Trump’s Westchester County golf course, where the two men were photographed together.
The chairman of the New York Democratic Party singled out Ms. Stefanik on Thursday as he called on Republican leaders to condemn Mr. Paladino for “blatant antisemitism.”
“How has the Republican Party stooped so low to support a man who has gone on record idolizing a monster that senselessly killed millions?” said the chairman, Jay Jacobs.
In a statement on Thursday, a spokesman for Ms. Stefanik said she had “one of the strongest records in the U.S. Congress condemning antisemitism” and had pushed bipartisan Holocaust education legislation. But the spokesman did not indicate whether the congresswoman maintained her support for Mr. Paladino.
A Buffalo-based developer who was the Republicans’ 2010 nominee for governor of New York, Mr. Paladino, 75, entered the House race just last Friday after Representative Chris Jacobs said he would not seek re-election. Mr. Jacobs was facing an intense backlash from party leaders angry over his support for an assault weapons ban and other gun safety measures, which he expressed after recent mass shootings.
Mr. Paladino will face a formidable primary challenge from Nicholas A. Langworthy, the chairman of the state Republican Party, who announced his candidacy on Thursday as the developer’s comments reverberated through the 23rd Congressional District.
His entrance set the stage for the kind of explosive primary that New York Republicans had hoped to avoid this year as they seek to retake the House majority in Washington. While the 23rd District is likely to remain in Republican hands, a primary battle could divert resources away from other swing seats the G.O.P. believes it can flip.
But in an interview, Mr. Langworthy argued that allowing Mr. Paladino, a one-time ally, to proceed to a general election would be worse.
“That’s exactly why I am running for Congress, because I provide a candidacy free of distraction,” he said, adding: “We can’t have a circus sideshow on the ticket in Buffalo in the fall that would hurt our statewide prospects.”
He said he would remain party chairman during his campaign.
Mr. Paladino’s comments about Hitler were not even the first time this week that he has drawn condemnation and been forced to apologize.
In a Facebook post and email blast sent last Wednesday, just two days before he said he would run for the House, Mr. Paladino promoted an essay by a Rochester man casting doubt on the official accounts of recent mass shootings in Buffalo and Uvalde, Texas, where he asserted that the purported gunman “was receiving hypnosis training.”
“In almost every mass shooting including the most recent horrific Buffalo Tops Market & the Texas school shootings, there are strange occurrences that are never fully explained,” the man wrote, including conspiratorial references to the suicide of Jeffrey Epstein and the assassinations of John F. Kennedy and Robert F. Kennedy.
Media Matters was also first to report on Mr. Paladino’s post, which was later removed.
In an emailed statement on Thursday, Mr. Paladino said that his invocation of Hitler had been a “serious mistake and rightfully upsets people,” but he blamed the news media for taking his remarks out of context.
“Any implication that I support Hitler or any of the sick and disgusting actions of the Nazi regime is a new low for the media,” he wrote, adding that he would stay in the race against Mr. Langworthy.
Mr. Paladino initially denied sharing the essay on gun control, claiming he did not know how to post on Facebook, but later admitted doing so to The Buffalo News, adding that he did not agree with all the “conspiracy theories” it cited.
Nicholas Fandos is a reporter on the Metro desk covering New York State politics, with a focus on money, lobbying and political influence. He was previously a congressional correspondent in Washington.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/09/nyre ... itler.html
Re: TrumpReich in action
The next steps in the alt.Right insurrection and sedition:
The Texas Criminal Court of Appeals thumbs its nose at direct instructions from SCOTUS, and the craven Alito Court lets Texas get away with it :
https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/2 ... 1_3d9g.pdf
Steve Bannon tells AG Garland the GOP will impeach Garland if he indicts Trump.I believe such a threat is a criminal act on which Bannon should be arrested now.
https://www.cnn.com/videos/politics/202 ... ot-vpx.cnn
The Texas Criminal Court of Appeals thumbs its nose at direct instructions from SCOTUS, and the craven Alito Court lets Texas get away with it :
https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/2 ... 1_3d9g.pdf
Steve Bannon tells AG Garland the GOP will impeach Garland if he indicts Trump.I believe such a threat is a criminal act on which Bannon should be arrested now.
https://www.cnn.com/videos/politics/202 ... ot-vpx.cnn
Re: TrumpReich in action
From AxiosAM today:
About a third of the way through the 2022 primaries, voters have nominated at least 108 Republican candidates for statewide office or Congress (more than half of races) who have directly denied or questioned the 2020 election result, a Washington Post analysis finds.
• The number jumps to at least 149 winners — out of 170+ races (80%+) — "when it includes those who have campaigned on a platform of tightening voting rules or more stringently enforcing those already on the books, despite the lack of evidence of widespread fraud."
About a third of the way through the 2022 primaries, voters have nominated at least 108 Republican candidates for statewide office or Congress (more than half of races) who have directly denied or questioned the 2020 election result, a Washington Post analysis finds.
• The number jumps to at least 149 winners — out of 170+ races (80%+) — "when it includes those who have campaigned on a platform of tightening voting rules or more stringently enforcing those already on the books, despite the lack of evidence of widespread fraud."
Re: TrumpReich in action
There Are No Winners on Team Chicken
June 14, 2022
By Michelle Cottle
Ms. Cottle is a member of the editorial board.
“Team Normal” and “Rudy’s Team.” This is how Bill Stepien, Donald Trump’s former campaign manager, categorized the two camps of advisers swirling around Mr. Trump in the chaotic days after the 2020 election.
According to recorded snippets of Mr. Stepien’s testimony before the House select committee on Jan. 6 that were aired at Monday’s hearing, Team Normal consisted of folks like him who acknowledged that there had been no mass election fraud and that Mr. Trump had lost the presidency fair and square.
By contrast, Team Rudy, captained by an increasingly erratic Rudy Giuliani, was stocked with the Trumpworld players who were either untethered from or unwilling to bow to reality. These dead-enders — people like the attorneys Sidney Powell and Lin Wood and the Trump adviser Peter Navarro — were committed to peddling the defeated president’s voter fraud B.S., no matter the cost.
“I didn’t mind being characterized as being part of Team Normal,” Mr. Stepien told the committee. Noting that he has been in the political game a long time, the political consultant, 44, boasted, “I’ve built up a pretty good — I hope — a good reputation for being honest and professional. I didn’t think what was happening was necessarily honest or professional at that point in time. So that led to me stepping away.”
“Stepping away” from Trumpworld’s dishonesty and lack of professionalism. Well, that is certainly one way to spin Mr. Stepien’s behavior.
A more accurate, less self-aggrandizing way might be to say that he slunk away, coat collar flipped up and hat brim pulled low in the hopes that no one would notice him fleeing the spiraling freak show to which he had sold his services and his soul. And he has since taken pains to stay on Mr. Trump’s good side: In the 17 months after the Jan. 6 insurrection, he has served as a consultant to the former president’s Save America PAC and signed on to work with Trump-backed candidates who have peddled, or have at least flirted with, the election-fraud fiction. Two of these candidates are challenging Republican incumbents, Representative Liz Cheney and Senator Lisa Murkowski, whom Mr. Trump has targeted for removal for their respective votes to impeach and convict him over his role in the Jan. 6 attack.
Mr. Stepien may have tried to separate himself from the shadier schemes being pushed by Team Bonkers — er, Team Rudy. But he is apparently cool with Mr. Trump’s basic plan to burn down the nation by advancing conspiracy theories about a rigged election.
Team Normal? More like Team Chicken.
But let’s not pick on Mr. Stepien. His tale is sadly similar to those of so many other Trump courtiers. These are the people who could distinguish reality from delusion; they just chose not to do all that much about it. Some of them tried to privately nudge Mr. Trump in the right direction. But when that failed, most were far too frightened to kick up a fuss and risk ruining their special relationships with Mr. Trump. Many still haven’t totally abandoned him, even as he continues to spread the election-fraud lies eating away at the heart of American democracy.
The most notable and most galling member of Team Chicken — its M.V.P. — is Bill Barr, who became Mr. Trump’s attorney general in early 2019. Mr. Barr made more of an effort to push back against the big lie than most, going so far as to tell the president that the election-fraud claims not only were “crazy stuff” and “bull crap” but also were doing “a great, great disservice to the country,” as he testified.
Mr. Barr stressed to the committee how frustrating he found his former boss’s powers of denial and delusion. The second you finished debunking one ridiculous claim, he recalled, Mr. Trump would simply move on to the next. “There was never an indication of interest in what the actual facts were,” he said, noting that he became “somewhat demoralized” by Mr. Trump’s behavior, thinking that “if he really believes this stuff,” then “he has become detached from reality.”
When Mr. Barr told The Associated Press that there were no signs of systematic fraud, Mr. Trump took it about as well as you’d expect. “This is, you know, killing me,” Mr. Barr recalled a furious Mr. Trump telling him. “You must have said this because you hate Trump. You hate Trump.”
And yet, despite everything he witnessed — Mr. Trump’s disregard for the truth, his antidemocratic machinations, his emotional instability and his possibly failing grasp on reality — Mr. Barr has publicly said that he would again vote for the former president if he secures the Republican nomination in 2024.
And herein lies the rot at the heart of Team Chicken. These normies found Mr. Trump’s lying and plotting disturbing enough to want to avoid standing too close, lest they get spattered. But they don’t care enough to take a strong, sustained stand in defense of democracy — to make clear that the former president’s ongoing efforts to defraud the American people and his assault on our electoral system are unacceptable. Not unacceptable in a mealy-mouthed, “Oh, well, I’d prefer that someone else lead the party, but I’ll support him if it comes down to it” way but genuinely unacceptable, as in, “I have seen this man up close, and he should be disqualified from holding high office again. Ever.”
Mr. Barr, Mr. Stepien and their ilk recognize that they set their professional and ethical reputations aflame by joining Mr. Trump’s circus. They are now looking to rehabilitate their brands. They want credit, perhaps even thanks, for having refused to cross certain lines. And yet too many remain willing to support Mr. Trump and his corrosive brand of politics, enabling and emboldening him to blow past even more frightening lines in the future.
This, apparently, is what constitutes “normal” in today’s Republican Party. No member of any team should feel good about that.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/14/opin ... day-2.html
June 14, 2022
By Michelle Cottle
Ms. Cottle is a member of the editorial board.
“Team Normal” and “Rudy’s Team.” This is how Bill Stepien, Donald Trump’s former campaign manager, categorized the two camps of advisers swirling around Mr. Trump in the chaotic days after the 2020 election.
According to recorded snippets of Mr. Stepien’s testimony before the House select committee on Jan. 6 that were aired at Monday’s hearing, Team Normal consisted of folks like him who acknowledged that there had been no mass election fraud and that Mr. Trump had lost the presidency fair and square.
By contrast, Team Rudy, captained by an increasingly erratic Rudy Giuliani, was stocked with the Trumpworld players who were either untethered from or unwilling to bow to reality. These dead-enders — people like the attorneys Sidney Powell and Lin Wood and the Trump adviser Peter Navarro — were committed to peddling the defeated president’s voter fraud B.S., no matter the cost.
“I didn’t mind being characterized as being part of Team Normal,” Mr. Stepien told the committee. Noting that he has been in the political game a long time, the political consultant, 44, boasted, “I’ve built up a pretty good — I hope — a good reputation for being honest and professional. I didn’t think what was happening was necessarily honest or professional at that point in time. So that led to me stepping away.”
“Stepping away” from Trumpworld’s dishonesty and lack of professionalism. Well, that is certainly one way to spin Mr. Stepien’s behavior.
A more accurate, less self-aggrandizing way might be to say that he slunk away, coat collar flipped up and hat brim pulled low in the hopes that no one would notice him fleeing the spiraling freak show to which he had sold his services and his soul. And he has since taken pains to stay on Mr. Trump’s good side: In the 17 months after the Jan. 6 insurrection, he has served as a consultant to the former president’s Save America PAC and signed on to work with Trump-backed candidates who have peddled, or have at least flirted with, the election-fraud fiction. Two of these candidates are challenging Republican incumbents, Representative Liz Cheney and Senator Lisa Murkowski, whom Mr. Trump has targeted for removal for their respective votes to impeach and convict him over his role in the Jan. 6 attack.
Mr. Stepien may have tried to separate himself from the shadier schemes being pushed by Team Bonkers — er, Team Rudy. But he is apparently cool with Mr. Trump’s basic plan to burn down the nation by advancing conspiracy theories about a rigged election.
Team Normal? More like Team Chicken.
But let’s not pick on Mr. Stepien. His tale is sadly similar to those of so many other Trump courtiers. These are the people who could distinguish reality from delusion; they just chose not to do all that much about it. Some of them tried to privately nudge Mr. Trump in the right direction. But when that failed, most were far too frightened to kick up a fuss and risk ruining their special relationships with Mr. Trump. Many still haven’t totally abandoned him, even as he continues to spread the election-fraud lies eating away at the heart of American democracy.
The most notable and most galling member of Team Chicken — its M.V.P. — is Bill Barr, who became Mr. Trump’s attorney general in early 2019. Mr. Barr made more of an effort to push back against the big lie than most, going so far as to tell the president that the election-fraud claims not only were “crazy stuff” and “bull crap” but also were doing “a great, great disservice to the country,” as he testified.
Mr. Barr stressed to the committee how frustrating he found his former boss’s powers of denial and delusion. The second you finished debunking one ridiculous claim, he recalled, Mr. Trump would simply move on to the next. “There was never an indication of interest in what the actual facts were,” he said, noting that he became “somewhat demoralized” by Mr. Trump’s behavior, thinking that “if he really believes this stuff,” then “he has become detached from reality.”
When Mr. Barr told The Associated Press that there were no signs of systematic fraud, Mr. Trump took it about as well as you’d expect. “This is, you know, killing me,” Mr. Barr recalled a furious Mr. Trump telling him. “You must have said this because you hate Trump. You hate Trump.”
And yet, despite everything he witnessed — Mr. Trump’s disregard for the truth, his antidemocratic machinations, his emotional instability and his possibly failing grasp on reality — Mr. Barr has publicly said that he would again vote for the former president if he secures the Republican nomination in 2024.
And herein lies the rot at the heart of Team Chicken. These normies found Mr. Trump’s lying and plotting disturbing enough to want to avoid standing too close, lest they get spattered. But they don’t care enough to take a strong, sustained stand in defense of democracy — to make clear that the former president’s ongoing efforts to defraud the American people and his assault on our electoral system are unacceptable. Not unacceptable in a mealy-mouthed, “Oh, well, I’d prefer that someone else lead the party, but I’ll support him if it comes down to it” way but genuinely unacceptable, as in, “I have seen this man up close, and he should be disqualified from holding high office again. Ever.”
Mr. Barr, Mr. Stepien and their ilk recognize that they set their professional and ethical reputations aflame by joining Mr. Trump’s circus. They are now looking to rehabilitate their brands. They want credit, perhaps even thanks, for having refused to cross certain lines. And yet too many remain willing to support Mr. Trump and his corrosive brand of politics, enabling and emboldening him to blow past even more frightening lines in the future.
This, apparently, is what constitutes “normal” in today’s Republican Party. No member of any team should feel good about that.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/14/opin ... day-2.html
Re: TrumpReich in action
Who Is Financing Trump’s ‘Big Lie’ Caucus? Corporations You Know.
June 15, 2022
By Alex Kingsbury
Mr. Kingsbury is a member of the editorial board.
Immediately after the Jan. 6 attack, hundreds of corporations announced freezes on donating money to Republican lawmakers who had voted against certifying Joe Biden’s victory. “Given recent events and the horrific attack on the U.S. Capitol, we are assessing our future PAC criteria,” a spokesperson for Toyota said a week after the attack.
For many corporations, that pause was short-lived.
“By April 1, 2021, Toyota had donated $62,000 to 39 Republican objectors,” the journalist Judd Legum wrote in his newsletter, Popular Information. That included a donation of $1,000 that Toyota gave to Representative Andy Biggs, a Republican from Arizona who is a close ally of Donald Trump and a fervent devotee of the “big lie.”
In July 2021, Toyota reversed course and announced another hiatus from donating to lawmakers who voted to overturn the election results. Six months later, the money started to flow again. The company, in a statement to The Times, said it donates equally to both parties and “will not support those who, by their words and actions, create an atmosphere that incites violence.” (Corporations aren’t allowed to give directly to campaigns but instead form political action committees that donate in the name of the company.)
Giving equally to both parties sounds good. But what if a growing faction of one political party isn’t committed to the rule of law and the peaceful transfer of power?
In the year and a half since the attack, rivers of cash from once skittish donors have resumed flowing to election deniers. Sometimes tens of thousands of dollars. Sometimes just a thousand. But it adds up. In the month of April alone, the last month for which data is available, Fortune 500 companies and trade organizations gave more than $1.4 million to members of Congress who voted not to certify the election results, according to an analysis by the transparency group Accountable.US. AT&T led the pack, giving $95,000 to election objectors.
Of all the revelations so far from the hearings on the Jan. 6 attack, the most important is that the effort to undermine democratic elections in the United States is continuing. More than a dozen men and women who participated in the Jan. 6 insurrection or the rallies leading up to it have run for elected office this year. Supporters of Mr. Trump have also run for public offices that oversee elections. And according to an investigation by The Times, at least 357 Republican legislators in nine states have used the power of their offices to attack the results of the 2020 election.
This isn’t a hypothetical threat. On Tuesday, New Mexico’s secretary of state was forced to ask the State Supreme Court to compel a Republican-led county election commission to certify primary election results. The commission had refused to do so, citing its distrust of its own voting machines.
There is also an active effort underway to frustrate the Jan. 6 committee’s work, including refusing to comply with subpoenas. Mr. Biggs, for instance, has refused to comply with a congressional subpoena to testify, as have other Republican members of Congress, including Jim Jordan, Kevin McCarthy, Mo Brooks and Scott Perry. (Mr. Perry, among other congressmen, asked for a presidential pardon for efforts to challenge and overturn the 2020 election, according to Representative Liz Cheney, the vice chair of the committee. He has denied that charge.) Representatives Barry Loudermilk and Ronny Jackson have yet to agree to interview requests from the committee. Six of these congressmen alone have brought in more than $826,000 from corporate donors since Jan. 6, according to Accountable.US. (Mr. Brooks didn’t receive any money from the Fortune 500 companies and trade groups tracked in the report.)
We tend to think of the past and future threat to elections as coming from voters for Donald Trump and those whom they’d elect to office. But the success of these politicians also depends on money. And a lot of money from corporations like Boeing, Koch Industries, Home Depot, FedEx, UPS and General Dynamics has gone to politicians who reject the 2020 election results based on lies told by the former president, according to a tally kept by the Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, known as CREW.
All told, as of this week, corporations and industry groups gave almost $32 million to the House and Senate members who voted to overturn the election and to the G.O.P. committees focused on the party’s congressional campaigns. The top 10 companies that gave money to those members, according to CREW’s analysis of campaign finance disclosures, are Koch Industries, Boeing, Home Depot, Valero Energy, Lockheed Martin, UPS, Raytheon, Marathon Petroleum, General Motors and FedEx. All of those companies, with the exception of Koch Industries and FedEx, once said they’d refrain from donating to politicians who voted to reject the election results.
Of the 249 companies that promised not to fund the 147 senators and representatives who voted against any of the results, fewer than half have stuck to their promise, according to CREW.
Kudos aplenty to the 85 corporations that stuck to their guns and still refuse to fund the seditious, including Nike, PepsiCo, Lyft, Cisco, Prudential, Marriott, Target and Zillow. That’s what responsible corporate citizenship looks like. It’s also patriotic.
We’re going to need more patriotic companies for what’s coming. Not only are Republican lawmakers who refused to certify the election results still in office; their party is poised to make gains during the midterm elections. Their electoral fortunes represent not only an endorsement from voters who support their efforts to undermine our democracy; they also represent the explicit financial support of hundreds of corporations that pour money into their campaign coffers.
Money in politics is the way of the world, especially in this country. But as the Jan. 6 committee’s investigation has made clear, Mr. Trump’s attempted coup was orders of magnitude different from the normal rough-and-tumble of politics. Returning to the status quo where corporate money flowed to nearly every politician elected to office isn’t just unseemly; it is helping to fund a continuing attack on our democracy.
Many Americans say they’ve moved on from the attack on Jan. 6. For those who haven’t, a good place to focus their attention is on the continuing threat to the Republic posed by politicians who are actively undermining it, and the money that helps them do so.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/15/opin ... onate.html
June 15, 2022
By Alex Kingsbury
Mr. Kingsbury is a member of the editorial board.
Immediately after the Jan. 6 attack, hundreds of corporations announced freezes on donating money to Republican lawmakers who had voted against certifying Joe Biden’s victory. “Given recent events and the horrific attack on the U.S. Capitol, we are assessing our future PAC criteria,” a spokesperson for Toyota said a week after the attack.
For many corporations, that pause was short-lived.
“By April 1, 2021, Toyota had donated $62,000 to 39 Republican objectors,” the journalist Judd Legum wrote in his newsletter, Popular Information. That included a donation of $1,000 that Toyota gave to Representative Andy Biggs, a Republican from Arizona who is a close ally of Donald Trump and a fervent devotee of the “big lie.”
In July 2021, Toyota reversed course and announced another hiatus from donating to lawmakers who voted to overturn the election results. Six months later, the money started to flow again. The company, in a statement to The Times, said it donates equally to both parties and “will not support those who, by their words and actions, create an atmosphere that incites violence.” (Corporations aren’t allowed to give directly to campaigns but instead form political action committees that donate in the name of the company.)
Giving equally to both parties sounds good. But what if a growing faction of one political party isn’t committed to the rule of law and the peaceful transfer of power?
In the year and a half since the attack, rivers of cash from once skittish donors have resumed flowing to election deniers. Sometimes tens of thousands of dollars. Sometimes just a thousand. But it adds up. In the month of April alone, the last month for which data is available, Fortune 500 companies and trade organizations gave more than $1.4 million to members of Congress who voted not to certify the election results, according to an analysis by the transparency group Accountable.US. AT&T led the pack, giving $95,000 to election objectors.
Of all the revelations so far from the hearings on the Jan. 6 attack, the most important is that the effort to undermine democratic elections in the United States is continuing. More than a dozen men and women who participated in the Jan. 6 insurrection or the rallies leading up to it have run for elected office this year. Supporters of Mr. Trump have also run for public offices that oversee elections. And according to an investigation by The Times, at least 357 Republican legislators in nine states have used the power of their offices to attack the results of the 2020 election.
This isn’t a hypothetical threat. On Tuesday, New Mexico’s secretary of state was forced to ask the State Supreme Court to compel a Republican-led county election commission to certify primary election results. The commission had refused to do so, citing its distrust of its own voting machines.
There is also an active effort underway to frustrate the Jan. 6 committee’s work, including refusing to comply with subpoenas. Mr. Biggs, for instance, has refused to comply with a congressional subpoena to testify, as have other Republican members of Congress, including Jim Jordan, Kevin McCarthy, Mo Brooks and Scott Perry. (Mr. Perry, among other congressmen, asked for a presidential pardon for efforts to challenge and overturn the 2020 election, according to Representative Liz Cheney, the vice chair of the committee. He has denied that charge.) Representatives Barry Loudermilk and Ronny Jackson have yet to agree to interview requests from the committee. Six of these congressmen alone have brought in more than $826,000 from corporate donors since Jan. 6, according to Accountable.US. (Mr. Brooks didn’t receive any money from the Fortune 500 companies and trade groups tracked in the report.)
We tend to think of the past and future threat to elections as coming from voters for Donald Trump and those whom they’d elect to office. But the success of these politicians also depends on money. And a lot of money from corporations like Boeing, Koch Industries, Home Depot, FedEx, UPS and General Dynamics has gone to politicians who reject the 2020 election results based on lies told by the former president, according to a tally kept by the Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, known as CREW.
All told, as of this week, corporations and industry groups gave almost $32 million to the House and Senate members who voted to overturn the election and to the G.O.P. committees focused on the party’s congressional campaigns. The top 10 companies that gave money to those members, according to CREW’s analysis of campaign finance disclosures, are Koch Industries, Boeing, Home Depot, Valero Energy, Lockheed Martin, UPS, Raytheon, Marathon Petroleum, General Motors and FedEx. All of those companies, with the exception of Koch Industries and FedEx, once said they’d refrain from donating to politicians who voted to reject the election results.
Of the 249 companies that promised not to fund the 147 senators and representatives who voted against any of the results, fewer than half have stuck to their promise, according to CREW.
Kudos aplenty to the 85 corporations that stuck to their guns and still refuse to fund the seditious, including Nike, PepsiCo, Lyft, Cisco, Prudential, Marriott, Target and Zillow. That’s what responsible corporate citizenship looks like. It’s also patriotic.
We’re going to need more patriotic companies for what’s coming. Not only are Republican lawmakers who refused to certify the election results still in office; their party is poised to make gains during the midterm elections. Their electoral fortunes represent not only an endorsement from voters who support their efforts to undermine our democracy; they also represent the explicit financial support of hundreds of corporations that pour money into their campaign coffers.
Money in politics is the way of the world, especially in this country. But as the Jan. 6 committee’s investigation has made clear, Mr. Trump’s attempted coup was orders of magnitude different from the normal rough-and-tumble of politics. Returning to the status quo where corporate money flowed to nearly every politician elected to office isn’t just unseemly; it is helping to fund a continuing attack on our democracy.
Many Americans say they’ve moved on from the attack on Jan. 6. For those who haven’t, a good place to focus their attention is on the continuing threat to the Republic posed by politicians who are actively undermining it, and the money that helps them do so.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/15/opin ... onate.html
Re: TrumpReich in action
The GOP Big Lie, for your GOP " friends" to consider:
From NYT today:
...Given the prominence of the issue, it’s jarring to see how little effort its proponents have put into making an argument on behalf of their claims. They have offered no good evidence, because there is not any. They have also failed to offer even a logically consistent argument. Consider:
If anything, the rare examples of cheating from 2020 tend to involve Trump supporters. Prosecutors charged three registered Republicans living at The Villages, a Florida retirement community, with voting more than once in the presidential election. One of them has since pleaded guilty: he both voted in Florida and cast an absentee ballot in Michigan.
Trump and his allies have never explained how other Republicans could have done so well if fraud were widespread. In the 2020 House elections, Republicans gained 14 seats. In the Senate, Democrats did win a 50-50 split, but the party lost races in Maine, Montana and North Carolina that it had hoped to win. In the 2021 elections, Republicans did well again, winning the governor’s race in Virginia. It’s hardly a picture consistent with Democratic election rigging.
During the 2022 primaries, most Republican candidates have accepted the results without claiming fraud. That’s been true even of candidates who lost their races, as my colleagues Reid Epstein and Nick Corasaniti have reported. Examples include Representative Madison Cawthorn in North Carolina; Representative Mo Brooks in the Senate primary in Alabama; and two Trump-backed candidates in Georgia. When Trump supporters lose to other Republicans, they generally accept defeat.
From NYT today:
...Given the prominence of the issue, it’s jarring to see how little effort its proponents have put into making an argument on behalf of their claims. They have offered no good evidence, because there is not any. They have also failed to offer even a logically consistent argument. Consider:
If anything, the rare examples of cheating from 2020 tend to involve Trump supporters. Prosecutors charged three registered Republicans living at The Villages, a Florida retirement community, with voting more than once in the presidential election. One of them has since pleaded guilty: he both voted in Florida and cast an absentee ballot in Michigan.
Trump and his allies have never explained how other Republicans could have done so well if fraud were widespread. In the 2020 House elections, Republicans gained 14 seats. In the Senate, Democrats did win a 50-50 split, but the party lost races in Maine, Montana and North Carolina that it had hoped to win. In the 2021 elections, Republicans did well again, winning the governor’s race in Virginia. It’s hardly a picture consistent with Democratic election rigging.
During the 2022 primaries, most Republican candidates have accepted the results without claiming fraud. That’s been true even of candidates who lost their races, as my colleagues Reid Epstein and Nick Corasaniti have reported. Examples include Representative Madison Cawthorn in North Carolina; Representative Mo Brooks in the Senate primary in Alabama; and two Trump-backed candidates in Georgia. When Trump supporters lose to other Republicans, they generally accept defeat.
Re: TrumpReich in action
The Illinois GOP's 2022 candidate for State Governor, " Move On" , AR-15 loving,Darren Bailey:
https://www.yahoo.com/news/ar-15-raffle ... 08685.html
https://www.yahoo.com/news/ar-15-raffle ... 08685.html
Re: TrumpReich in action
Republicans May Have Set Themselves Up for a Showdown With the Supreme Court
July 6, 2022
By Noah Millman
Mr. Millman has written extensively about politics, policy and culture, and writes the newsletter Gideon’s Substack.
Last week’s decision in West Virginia v. Environmental Protection Agency limiting the E.P.A.’s ability to regulate a shift to a less carbon-intensive economy should have surprised no one familiar with conservative complaints about the administrative state. The alphabet soup of federal executive branch agencies — from the F.D.A. to the S.E.C. — that regulate much of American economic life have long been the targets of Republican criticism.
If Republicans retake Congress in 2022 and the presidency in 2024, the country may see an even more dramatic showdown over the administrative state. But that showdown might well pit Republicans against themselves.
There are actually two Republican critiques of the administrative state — and they are fundamentally in contradiction with each other. One seeks to restrain its power, the other to wield it against new targets.
The former has advanced for decades through the courts. Its roots lie in what is known legally as the non-delegation doctrine, a largely Depression-era theory that sought to deny or curtail Congress’s power to delegate its authority to administrative agencies. Its more recent incarnation has sought to limit the discretion of administrative agencies even when that discretion has been delegated to them by Congress.
The second critique comes from the populist right. It aims not to check powerful executive branch bureaucracies but to wrestle control of them away from liberal technocrats and put them to work for “the people” as they understand it, unhampered by interference from the courts.
The judicial critique is more familiar, but the courts have grown bolder of late in demanding that new rule-making follow explicit legislative mandates. For example, in April a federal judge struck down the C.D.C.’s extension of the mask mandate for airlines by narrowly reading the agency’s authority to regulate personal behavior. And in May, in Jarkesy v. S.E.C., the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit rebuked the S.E.C. for deciding a question of fraud before an administrative law judge rather than before a jury, even though it was operating under a broad grant of authority under the Dodd-Frank law.
West Virginia v. Environmental Protection Agency is the latest case in this sequence. It didn’t give conservative critics everything they wanted, but it ruled that even if the text of a statute granted broad authority to an agency, the court would read that grant narrowly and stop the agency from making rules on “major questions” without explicit instruction from Congress.
Democrats tend to view this crusade as a backdoor effort to deregulate the economy. But in practice, obstructing the regulatory process may come with potentially perverse results. The E.P.A., for example, retains the authority to regulate coal-fired power plants — indeed, it could take a far more severe stance than the Obama administration took. It just can’t facilitate a smoother transition to a cleaner energy mix without explicit instruction from Congress.
Even as this judicial project has advanced, though, a growing part of the Republican Party has been moving away from free market ideology — and embracing the idea of turning the administrative state to its own purposes.
John Marini, the Claremont Institute’s vigorous critic of the administrative state, has called it not merely unconstitutional but anti-constitutional. His preferred solution may be inferred from the fact that he saw the real tragedy of Watergate as having prevented President Richard Nixon from bringing a (reduced) administrative state more fully under his personal control. Adrian Vermeule, a Harvard professor and prominent Catholic integralist, has made common cause with some liberals to argue that the administrative state can be “redeemed” by infusing it with the proper moral spirit. In 2017, Steve Bannon declared that to “deconstruct[ … ] the administrative state” was a top priority for a new populist movement. And in April, J.D. Vance, the Ohio Republican candidate for the Senate, said that in a prospective second Trump administration, the president should “fire every single midlevel bureaucrat, every civil servant in the administrative state, replace them with our people.”
This critique is as much cultural as political or economic. It argues that precisely because it is staffed with technocratic professionals, the administrative state derives its legitimacy from the credentials of that class and a pretension to rational analysis. The bureaucracy’s own interests and the ideological orientation of its staff will increasingly bring it into conflict with the people whose lives and livelihoods it regulates. Meanwhile, the administrative state will tend to view democratic accountability itself as an intrusion on its own prerogatives.
To solve this problem, as these critics see it, it isn’t enough to clip the administrative state’s wings or even to overthrow it, because the same phenomenon is manifested in large corporations, the media, academia — any large institution that values educational credentials. So populists like Mr. Bannon and Mr. Vance seek to restaff the administrative state with politically friendly people who can be relied on to turn its regulatory powers on those same organizations. It’s a culture-war twist on the progressive goal of using centralized government power to check concentrated private interests.
Populist governments in Hungary and Poland have transformed their respective governments in just this manner, transformations that have been denounced as corrupt because they are indistinguishable from corruption. But Hungary and Poland have also transformed their judiciaries to bring them into line with regime goals.
By contrast, a move by a second Trump administration (or a DeSantis administration) to seize and transform the American administrative state could put it on a collision course with a conservative judiciary. After all, if an executive branch agency exceeds its power when it makes rules under a broad grant of power from Congress, surely it exceeds them when it ignores explicit instructions from Congress, which a wholesale politicization of the administrative state would certainly do.
This is where the two visions from the right could come into sharp conflict. Would a conservative Supreme Court rebuke a conservative administration if it acts outside the bounds of what the court sees as legitimate? It’s not clear.
On the one hand, the Roberts court has sometimes taken the view that the best way to make the administrative state politically accountable is to treat it as part of the “unitary” executive. On the other hand, the same court rebuked the Trump administration repeatedly for failing to follow administrative law procedures, notably on immigration. It’s hard to imagine it would look kindly on a wholesale dismissal of those procedures, much less the unilateral jettisoning of the Civil Service Reform Act (which sets out rules for the management of the federal bureaucracy).
That’s why Mr. Vance, in calling for Mr. Trump to do just that, went on to say: “And when the courts stop you, stand before the country, and say: The chief justice has made his ruling. Now let him enforce it.”
If we take these critiques seriously, one thing really stands out. Absent from this projected clash between the executive and judiciary is the branch that represents the people and is empowered to make laws in their name: Congress. With decisions like West Virginia v. E.P.A., the least-accountable branch — the judiciary — has appointed itself the defender of Congress’s powers against encroachment by the executive, when Congress is perfectly capable of defending them itself.
That’s an odd way to defend democracy. But the populist critique is even stranger when you consider that an aspiring legislator like Mr. Vance is basically calling for the executive to ignore Congress’s laws. Ambitious politicians don’t generally run to weaken the offices they seek to claim, nor do advocates of small-r republicanism yearn for a new Caesar.
So if conservatives are serious about fidelity to the Constitution and about wanting to cure the administrative state’s democratic deficit, Congress is where they should focus their attention.
For Congress to take more responsibility, however, it would first have to defend its own prerogatives even against presidents of the same party and invest in its own policymaking apparatus. Most fundamentally, it would have to be willing to shape public opinion by making policy rather than passing the buck to the administrative state, to lead rather than to demagogue.
If that’s difficult to imagine the Republican Party supporting, then perhaps their critiques really are mere expressions of the will to power. Or perhaps conservatives themselves see the Constitution that they claim to venerate as no longer well designed for the country that actually exists.
In that case, they’ve effectively given a backhanded compliment to the progressives who invented the modern administrative state. They may not have designed an eternally perfect political mechanism any more than the founders did. But in calling for new government structures that respond to new conditions, they may have had a point after all.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/07/06/opin ... state.html
July 6, 2022
By Noah Millman
Mr. Millman has written extensively about politics, policy and culture, and writes the newsletter Gideon’s Substack.
Last week’s decision in West Virginia v. Environmental Protection Agency limiting the E.P.A.’s ability to regulate a shift to a less carbon-intensive economy should have surprised no one familiar with conservative complaints about the administrative state. The alphabet soup of federal executive branch agencies — from the F.D.A. to the S.E.C. — that regulate much of American economic life have long been the targets of Republican criticism.
If Republicans retake Congress in 2022 and the presidency in 2024, the country may see an even more dramatic showdown over the administrative state. But that showdown might well pit Republicans against themselves.
There are actually two Republican critiques of the administrative state — and they are fundamentally in contradiction with each other. One seeks to restrain its power, the other to wield it against new targets.
The former has advanced for decades through the courts. Its roots lie in what is known legally as the non-delegation doctrine, a largely Depression-era theory that sought to deny or curtail Congress’s power to delegate its authority to administrative agencies. Its more recent incarnation has sought to limit the discretion of administrative agencies even when that discretion has been delegated to them by Congress.
The second critique comes from the populist right. It aims not to check powerful executive branch bureaucracies but to wrestle control of them away from liberal technocrats and put them to work for “the people” as they understand it, unhampered by interference from the courts.
The judicial critique is more familiar, but the courts have grown bolder of late in demanding that new rule-making follow explicit legislative mandates. For example, in April a federal judge struck down the C.D.C.’s extension of the mask mandate for airlines by narrowly reading the agency’s authority to regulate personal behavior. And in May, in Jarkesy v. S.E.C., the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit rebuked the S.E.C. for deciding a question of fraud before an administrative law judge rather than before a jury, even though it was operating under a broad grant of authority under the Dodd-Frank law.
West Virginia v. Environmental Protection Agency is the latest case in this sequence. It didn’t give conservative critics everything they wanted, but it ruled that even if the text of a statute granted broad authority to an agency, the court would read that grant narrowly and stop the agency from making rules on “major questions” without explicit instruction from Congress.
Democrats tend to view this crusade as a backdoor effort to deregulate the economy. But in practice, obstructing the regulatory process may come with potentially perverse results. The E.P.A., for example, retains the authority to regulate coal-fired power plants — indeed, it could take a far more severe stance than the Obama administration took. It just can’t facilitate a smoother transition to a cleaner energy mix without explicit instruction from Congress.
Even as this judicial project has advanced, though, a growing part of the Republican Party has been moving away from free market ideology — and embracing the idea of turning the administrative state to its own purposes.
John Marini, the Claremont Institute’s vigorous critic of the administrative state, has called it not merely unconstitutional but anti-constitutional. His preferred solution may be inferred from the fact that he saw the real tragedy of Watergate as having prevented President Richard Nixon from bringing a (reduced) administrative state more fully under his personal control. Adrian Vermeule, a Harvard professor and prominent Catholic integralist, has made common cause with some liberals to argue that the administrative state can be “redeemed” by infusing it with the proper moral spirit. In 2017, Steve Bannon declared that to “deconstruct[ … ] the administrative state” was a top priority for a new populist movement. And in April, J.D. Vance, the Ohio Republican candidate for the Senate, said that in a prospective second Trump administration, the president should “fire every single midlevel bureaucrat, every civil servant in the administrative state, replace them with our people.”
This critique is as much cultural as political or economic. It argues that precisely because it is staffed with technocratic professionals, the administrative state derives its legitimacy from the credentials of that class and a pretension to rational analysis. The bureaucracy’s own interests and the ideological orientation of its staff will increasingly bring it into conflict with the people whose lives and livelihoods it regulates. Meanwhile, the administrative state will tend to view democratic accountability itself as an intrusion on its own prerogatives.
To solve this problem, as these critics see it, it isn’t enough to clip the administrative state’s wings or even to overthrow it, because the same phenomenon is manifested in large corporations, the media, academia — any large institution that values educational credentials. So populists like Mr. Bannon and Mr. Vance seek to restaff the administrative state with politically friendly people who can be relied on to turn its regulatory powers on those same organizations. It’s a culture-war twist on the progressive goal of using centralized government power to check concentrated private interests.
Populist governments in Hungary and Poland have transformed their respective governments in just this manner, transformations that have been denounced as corrupt because they are indistinguishable from corruption. But Hungary and Poland have also transformed their judiciaries to bring them into line with regime goals.
By contrast, a move by a second Trump administration (or a DeSantis administration) to seize and transform the American administrative state could put it on a collision course with a conservative judiciary. After all, if an executive branch agency exceeds its power when it makes rules under a broad grant of power from Congress, surely it exceeds them when it ignores explicit instructions from Congress, which a wholesale politicization of the administrative state would certainly do.
This is where the two visions from the right could come into sharp conflict. Would a conservative Supreme Court rebuke a conservative administration if it acts outside the bounds of what the court sees as legitimate? It’s not clear.
On the one hand, the Roberts court has sometimes taken the view that the best way to make the administrative state politically accountable is to treat it as part of the “unitary” executive. On the other hand, the same court rebuked the Trump administration repeatedly for failing to follow administrative law procedures, notably on immigration. It’s hard to imagine it would look kindly on a wholesale dismissal of those procedures, much less the unilateral jettisoning of the Civil Service Reform Act (which sets out rules for the management of the federal bureaucracy).
That’s why Mr. Vance, in calling for Mr. Trump to do just that, went on to say: “And when the courts stop you, stand before the country, and say: The chief justice has made his ruling. Now let him enforce it.”
If we take these critiques seriously, one thing really stands out. Absent from this projected clash between the executive and judiciary is the branch that represents the people and is empowered to make laws in their name: Congress. With decisions like West Virginia v. E.P.A., the least-accountable branch — the judiciary — has appointed itself the defender of Congress’s powers against encroachment by the executive, when Congress is perfectly capable of defending them itself.
That’s an odd way to defend democracy. But the populist critique is even stranger when you consider that an aspiring legislator like Mr. Vance is basically calling for the executive to ignore Congress’s laws. Ambitious politicians don’t generally run to weaken the offices they seek to claim, nor do advocates of small-r republicanism yearn for a new Caesar.
So if conservatives are serious about fidelity to the Constitution and about wanting to cure the administrative state’s democratic deficit, Congress is where they should focus their attention.
For Congress to take more responsibility, however, it would first have to defend its own prerogatives even against presidents of the same party and invest in its own policymaking apparatus. Most fundamentally, it would have to be willing to shape public opinion by making policy rather than passing the buck to the administrative state, to lead rather than to demagogue.
If that’s difficult to imagine the Republican Party supporting, then perhaps their critiques really are mere expressions of the will to power. Or perhaps conservatives themselves see the Constitution that they claim to venerate as no longer well designed for the country that actually exists.
In that case, they’ve effectively given a backhanded compliment to the progressives who invented the modern administrative state. They may not have designed an eternally perfect political mechanism any more than the founders did. But in calling for new government structures that respond to new conditions, they may have had a point after all.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/07/06/opin ... state.html
Re: TrumpReich in action
Interesting that Johnson is in a tight race for re-election.Rach3 wrote: ↑Fri Jul 08, 2022 10:09 amSicko Sen.Ron Johnson:
https://www.yahoo.com/news/gop-senators ... 43470.html
Re: TrumpReich in action
From WAPO and Huffington Post tonight:
"Florida and other Republican-led states are trying to use federal covid aid to finance tax cuts. The $1.9 trillion coronavirus relief package was meant to help states fight the pandemic, shore up local economies and prepare for a potential recession. Congress explicitly told states not to use the funds to subsidize tax cuts or make up for reductions in tax revenue, because once the federal funds dried up there would be budget shortfalls with no easy fix. States have challenged that rule in court – and most of them have won.
Jenna Ellis, a lawyer for Donald Trump’s failed reelection campaign took to Twitter to gripe that the Presidential Medal of Freedom was being given to Olympic gymnast Simone Biles and World Cup-winning soccer star Megan Rapinoe. Twitter users quickly noted that Biles and Rapinoe each have a boatload of achievements, while Ellis has a series of election suit losses."
Middle-ground with these folks ?
"Florida and other Republican-led states are trying to use federal covid aid to finance tax cuts. The $1.9 trillion coronavirus relief package was meant to help states fight the pandemic, shore up local economies and prepare for a potential recession. Congress explicitly told states not to use the funds to subsidize tax cuts or make up for reductions in tax revenue, because once the federal funds dried up there would be budget shortfalls with no easy fix. States have challenged that rule in court – and most of them have won.
Jenna Ellis, a lawyer for Donald Trump’s failed reelection campaign took to Twitter to gripe that the Presidential Medal of Freedom was being given to Olympic gymnast Simone Biles and World Cup-winning soccer star Megan Rapinoe. Twitter users quickly noted that Biles and Rapinoe each have a boatload of achievements, while Ellis has a series of election suit losses."
Middle-ground with these folks ?
Re: TrumpReich in action
From New Yorker Magazine today:
A week ago, the Republican Party’s nominee for the United States Senate from Georgia explained his opposition to the Green New Deal. Given the decades of Republican denials, obfuscations, and outright falsehoods on the subject of climate change, it would be difficult for nearly any G.O.P. candidate’s erroneous comments to stand out. It was a challenge Herschel Walker, a former N.F.L. star, was ready to meet. He explained, “Since we don’t control the air, our good air decided to float over to China’s bad air, so when China gets our good air, their bad air got to move. So it moves over to our good air space. Then, now, we got to clean that back up.”
Fighting climate change, in Walker’s telling, is as productive as trying to sweep sand off the beach. Amid the tide of criticism that his remarks generated, his campaign resorted to a dodge that Donald Trump’s team had often used in response to his most indefensible campaign comments: they were just a joke. If there is a joke being told, though, Walker almost certainly is not in on it. Yet in some polls he currently trails his opponent, the Democratic senator Raphael Warnock, by just a few points, and it seems that, no matter the final outcome, Walker will receive the votes of millions of Georgians this fall.
The tale of how Walker came to be the Republican nominee is a clear example of the warping effect that Trump has had on the Party nationally. Having lost Georgia in the 2020 election, he launched a crusade to invalidate the results there, famously pressing the secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, to “find” him more than eleven thousand votes—an act that is now the subject of a criminal probe—while he insisted to supporters that the state’s election had been rigged. He did so irrespective of the impact that such claims could have on other Republican candidates, including Georgia’s two incumbent senators, Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue, who faced runoff elections against their respective Democratic opponents, Warnock and Jon Ossoff. A Trump supporter in Marietta asked Ronna McDaniel, the Republican National Committee chair, “Why should we vote in this election when we know it’s already decided?” After Warnock and Ossoff won, Trump, in a fit of internecine score-settling, pushed Perdue, a viable contender to take on Warnock this November (Warnock’s victory was in a special election), to run as a primary challenger to Brian Kemp, the Republican Governor, who had also rejected Trump’s entreaty to throw out the 2020 results. Kemp easily beat Perdue, and Trump’s grievance left an open lane for Walker to pursue the Senate seat.
During three seasons with the University of Georgia Bulldogs, Walker, who is now sixty, recorded more than five thousand rushing yards. In 1982, he won the Heisman Trophy. These are his primary qualifications for representing Georgia in the Senate. He has also cited his work in law enforcement, his graduation from U.G.A. in the top percentile of his class, and his success in running businesses, including one of the largest minority-owned food-service companies in the country. These claims would be impressive, if they were accurate. (The Atlanta Journal-Constitution found that he had never worked in law enforcement, that he did not graduate from college, and that he has exaggerated the size of his various business ventures.) The state G.O.P. had a long list of potential candidates to challenge Warnock. Walker, however, had effusively praised and diligently defended Trump during the 2020 election and after it. Trump looked at the unqualified newcomer, who was prone to rambling disquisitions on subjects he knew little about, and saw in him a winner. Game recognizes game.
Trump’s endorsement helped Walker become the nominee despite a devastating ad from a primary opponent pointing to Walker’s alleged history of domestic violence, including an incident years ago in which he is said to have pointed a firearm at his now ex-wife. (He has said that he does not remember that episode, citing a struggle with dissociative-identity disorder, and has denied accusations from other women.) His personal life has continued to prove complicated. A frequent commentator on the perils of “fatherless” households in Black communities, he has highlighted the role he has played in the life of his twenty-two-year-old son, Christian. In June, though, the Daily Beast reported that Walker was also the father of a ten-year-old son, whom he had not publicly acknowledged, and that the boy’s mother had sued him for child support. Walker then admitted that he had fathered a daughter during his college years, and also that he had another child, a thirteen-year-old son. Hypocrisy has seldom been less of a political liability than it is now, so it’s not particularly shocking that a candidate for high office would rail against men shirking their paternal responsibilities while evidently evading his own. Yet Walker also appears not to have told his campaign staff the truth when he was asked directly how many children he has; an unnamed adviser told the Daily Beast that Walker lies “like he’s breathing.”
Walker has not spoken much on matters of policy, but his statement about air quality was not an outlier. (At the same event, he said that China had created the coronavirus, which he had previously said could be killed by a “dry mist.”) Asked how he would prevent needless gun tragedies such as the Uvalde massacre, he said, “What I like to do is see it and everything and stuff.” In response to a similar query from Fox News, he replied, “What about getting a department that can look at young men, that’s looking at women, that’s looking at social media?”
We have learned the hard way that, in American politics, integrity is optional. We’ve seen the wreckage that unqualified leadership yields. Yet Walker’s deficits are not the only cause for concern here. Warnock and Ossoff were elected on January 5, 2021. The next day, a Trumpist mob laid siege to the United States Capitol. We are not yet beyond that moment. Trump will reportedly announce a 2024 run for the Presidency ahead of this year’s election, when a Walker victory could return control of the Senate to the Republicans. A number of state legislatures have made their systems less amenable to fair elections, and next year the Supreme Court may assist those efforts. No one in the G.O.P. leadership can possibly believe that Walker is fit to hold a Senate seat, but the hope—as dangerous as it is cynical—is that he may be able to win one. And that joke would most certainly be on us. ♦
A week ago, the Republican Party’s nominee for the United States Senate from Georgia explained his opposition to the Green New Deal. Given the decades of Republican denials, obfuscations, and outright falsehoods on the subject of climate change, it would be difficult for nearly any G.O.P. candidate’s erroneous comments to stand out. It was a challenge Herschel Walker, a former N.F.L. star, was ready to meet. He explained, “Since we don’t control the air, our good air decided to float over to China’s bad air, so when China gets our good air, their bad air got to move. So it moves over to our good air space. Then, now, we got to clean that back up.”
Fighting climate change, in Walker’s telling, is as productive as trying to sweep sand off the beach. Amid the tide of criticism that his remarks generated, his campaign resorted to a dodge that Donald Trump’s team had often used in response to his most indefensible campaign comments: they were just a joke. If there is a joke being told, though, Walker almost certainly is not in on it. Yet in some polls he currently trails his opponent, the Democratic senator Raphael Warnock, by just a few points, and it seems that, no matter the final outcome, Walker will receive the votes of millions of Georgians this fall.
The tale of how Walker came to be the Republican nominee is a clear example of the warping effect that Trump has had on the Party nationally. Having lost Georgia in the 2020 election, he launched a crusade to invalidate the results there, famously pressing the secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, to “find” him more than eleven thousand votes—an act that is now the subject of a criminal probe—while he insisted to supporters that the state’s election had been rigged. He did so irrespective of the impact that such claims could have on other Republican candidates, including Georgia’s two incumbent senators, Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue, who faced runoff elections against their respective Democratic opponents, Warnock and Jon Ossoff. A Trump supporter in Marietta asked Ronna McDaniel, the Republican National Committee chair, “Why should we vote in this election when we know it’s already decided?” After Warnock and Ossoff won, Trump, in a fit of internecine score-settling, pushed Perdue, a viable contender to take on Warnock this November (Warnock’s victory was in a special election), to run as a primary challenger to Brian Kemp, the Republican Governor, who had also rejected Trump’s entreaty to throw out the 2020 results. Kemp easily beat Perdue, and Trump’s grievance left an open lane for Walker to pursue the Senate seat.
During three seasons with the University of Georgia Bulldogs, Walker, who is now sixty, recorded more than five thousand rushing yards. In 1982, he won the Heisman Trophy. These are his primary qualifications for representing Georgia in the Senate. He has also cited his work in law enforcement, his graduation from U.G.A. in the top percentile of his class, and his success in running businesses, including one of the largest minority-owned food-service companies in the country. These claims would be impressive, if they were accurate. (The Atlanta Journal-Constitution found that he had never worked in law enforcement, that he did not graduate from college, and that he has exaggerated the size of his various business ventures.) The state G.O.P. had a long list of potential candidates to challenge Warnock. Walker, however, had effusively praised and diligently defended Trump during the 2020 election and after it. Trump looked at the unqualified newcomer, who was prone to rambling disquisitions on subjects he knew little about, and saw in him a winner. Game recognizes game.
Trump’s endorsement helped Walker become the nominee despite a devastating ad from a primary opponent pointing to Walker’s alleged history of domestic violence, including an incident years ago in which he is said to have pointed a firearm at his now ex-wife. (He has said that he does not remember that episode, citing a struggle with dissociative-identity disorder, and has denied accusations from other women.) His personal life has continued to prove complicated. A frequent commentator on the perils of “fatherless” households in Black communities, he has highlighted the role he has played in the life of his twenty-two-year-old son, Christian. In June, though, the Daily Beast reported that Walker was also the father of a ten-year-old son, whom he had not publicly acknowledged, and that the boy’s mother had sued him for child support. Walker then admitted that he had fathered a daughter during his college years, and also that he had another child, a thirteen-year-old son. Hypocrisy has seldom been less of a political liability than it is now, so it’s not particularly shocking that a candidate for high office would rail against men shirking their paternal responsibilities while evidently evading his own. Yet Walker also appears not to have told his campaign staff the truth when he was asked directly how many children he has; an unnamed adviser told the Daily Beast that Walker lies “like he’s breathing.”
Walker has not spoken much on matters of policy, but his statement about air quality was not an outlier. (At the same event, he said that China had created the coronavirus, which he had previously said could be killed by a “dry mist.”) Asked how he would prevent needless gun tragedies such as the Uvalde massacre, he said, “What I like to do is see it and everything and stuff.” In response to a similar query from Fox News, he replied, “What about getting a department that can look at young men, that’s looking at women, that’s looking at social media?”
We have learned the hard way that, in American politics, integrity is optional. We’ve seen the wreckage that unqualified leadership yields. Yet Walker’s deficits are not the only cause for concern here. Warnock and Ossoff were elected on January 5, 2021. The next day, a Trumpist mob laid siege to the United States Capitol. We are not yet beyond that moment. Trump will reportedly announce a 2024 run for the Presidency ahead of this year’s election, when a Walker victory could return control of the Senate to the Republicans. A number of state legislatures have made their systems less amenable to fair elections, and next year the Supreme Court may assist those efforts. No one in the G.O.P. leadership can possibly believe that Walker is fit to hold a Senate seat, but the hope—as dangerous as it is cynical—is that he may be able to win one. And that joke would most certainly be on us. ♦
Re: TrumpReich in action
Once again, Right - crazies adults who fail to grasp their children are smarter than they are.But, to keep them safe, dont teach your children well:
Check out this article, at no cost to you: The unsubstantiated claim led to a backlash against sex ed that helped topple local Republican Party leaders and propelled a wave of far-right candidates for local and statewide school board.
https://wapo.st/3vch7En
Check out this article, at no cost to you: The unsubstantiated claim led to a backlash against sex ed that helped topple local Republican Party leaders and propelled a wave of far-right candidates for local and statewide school board.
https://wapo.st/3vch7En
Re: TrumpReich in action
NYT today ( you can access below):
The lawless GOP and Right.
https://tinyurl.com/bde5t49h
Conservative activists are working to recruit the law enforcement officers to their cause. Several sheriffs have already clashed with election officials, including making criminal referrals against 5 of the 6 members of the Wisconsin Board of Elections and harassing a Michigan official.
The lawless GOP and Right.
https://tinyurl.com/bde5t49h
Conservative activists are working to recruit the law enforcement officers to their cause. Several sheriffs have already clashed with election officials, including making criminal referrals against 5 of the 6 members of the Wisconsin Board of Elections and harassing a Michigan official.
Re: TrumpReich in action
The GOP candidate for Governor of Pennsylvania hired a neo-Nazi for "consulting " :
https://www.cnn.com/2022/07/28/politics ... index.html
https://www.cnn.com/2022/07/28/politics ... index.html
Re: TrumpReich in action
What's this I hear about a vast Right-wing conspiracy?Rach3 wrote: ↑Thu Jul 28, 2022 5:42 pmThe GOP candidate for Governor of Pennsylvania hired a neo-Nazi for "consulting " :
https://www.cnn.com/2022/07/28/politics ... index.html
Never forget.
Re: TrumpReich in action
Justice Alito let’s the obvious cat out of the bag. The Dobbs decision was all about the personal religious beliefs of the 6 Justices, Had zero to do with the “ no mention of abortion” in the Constitution, nor with Roe v Wade being “ egregiously wrong.” Alito should not have been even addressing such a conference as that one in Rome. His vengeful remarks about foreign leaders tarnish the Court and reveal him as the bully is opinions reveal he is.He’s unfit to serve.
https://www.yahoo.com/gma/justice-alito ... 00545.html
https://www.yahoo.com/gma/justice-alito ... 00545.html
Re: TrumpReich in action
From northwest Georgia:
In Georgia, two young men who want to be the "good guys with guns" have differing views.
https://wapo.st/3OPp0Xi
The lights are still out in Georgia.Where is General Sherman when we need him ?
In Georgia, two young men who want to be the "good guys with guns" have differing views.
https://wapo.st/3OPp0Xi
The lights are still out in Georgia.Where is General Sherman when we need him ?
Re: TrumpReich in action
Austin American-Statesman
Sandy Hook parents in protected isolation after 'encounters' in Austin, lawyer says
Chuck Lindell, Austin American-Statesman
Tue, August 2, 2022, 12:50 PM
The parents of Sandy Hook victim Jesse Lewis, facing off against conspiracy theorist Alex Jones in an Austin courtroom, have been placed in isolation under the protection of a beefed-up security force, their lawyer said Monday.
"Unfortunately, after some encounters — which did not occur in the courthouse, there were some encounters here in the city of Austin — my clients are now in isolation, and they are being protected by a large security staff," said Mark Bankston, a lawyer for Scarlett Lewis and Neil Heslin.
Bankston declined to provide any details about the encounters.
"I can tell you that they are terrified, but they very much intend to continue this saga and finish this trial because they know a lot of people around the world are watching them," he said. "They know the responsibility they have, and we're going to keep them safe and we're going to finish this."
Sandy Hook parents in protected isolation after 'encounters' in Austin, lawyer says
Chuck Lindell, Austin American-Statesman
Tue, August 2, 2022, 12:50 PM
The parents of Sandy Hook victim Jesse Lewis, facing off against conspiracy theorist Alex Jones in an Austin courtroom, have been placed in isolation under the protection of a beefed-up security force, their lawyer said Monday.
"Unfortunately, after some encounters — which did not occur in the courthouse, there were some encounters here in the city of Austin — my clients are now in isolation, and they are being protected by a large security staff," said Mark Bankston, a lawyer for Scarlett Lewis and Neil Heslin.
Bankston declined to provide any details about the encounters.
"I can tell you that they are terrified, but they very much intend to continue this saga and finish this trial because they know a lot of people around the world are watching them," he said. "They know the responsibility they have, and we're going to keep them safe and we're going to finish this."
Re: TrumpReich in action
Jones should be facing a criminal trial, not civil. He should be in jail. What a vile human being.
Re: TrumpReich in action
How Republicans Are ‘Weaponizing’ Public Office Against Climate Action
A Times investigation revealed a coordinated effort by state treasurers to use government muscle and public funds to punish companies trying to reduce greenhouse gases.
By David Gelles
David Gelles reviewed more than 10,000 pages of documents and emails while reporting for this article.
Aug. 5, 2022
Updated 10:58 a.m. ET
Nearly two dozen Republican state treasurers around the country are working to thwart climate action on state and federal levels, fighting regulations that would make clear the economic risks posed by a warming world, lobbying against climate-minded nominees to key federal posts and using the tax dollars they control to punish companies that want to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
Over the past year, treasurers in nearly half the United States have been coordinating tactics and talking points, meeting in private and cheering each other in public as part of a well-funded campaign to protect the fossil fuel companies that bolster their local economies.
Last week, Riley Moore, the treasurer of West Virginia, announced that several major banks — including Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan and Wells Fargo — would be barred from government contracts with his state because they are reducing their investments in coal, the dirtiest fossil fuel.
Mr. Moore and the treasurers of Louisiana and Arkansas have pulled more than $700 million out of BlackRock, the world’s largest investment manager, over objections that the firm is too focused on environmental issues. At the same time, the treasurers of Utah and Idaho are pressuring the private sector to drop climate action and other causes they label as “woke.”
And treasurers from Pennsylvania, Arizona and Oklahoma joined a larger campaign to thwart the nominations of federal regulators who wanted to require that banks, funds and companies disclose the financial risks posed by a warming planet.
At the nexus of these efforts is the State Financial Officers Foundation, a little-known nonprofit organization based in Shawnee, Kan., that once focused on cybersecurity, borrowing costs and managing debt loads, among other routine issues.
Then President Biden took office, promising to speed the country’s transition away from oil, gas and coal, the burning of which is dangerously heating the planet.
The foundation began pushing Republican state treasurers, who are mostly elected officials and who are responsible for managing their state’s finances, to use their power to promote oil and gas interests and to stymie Mr. Biden’s climate agenda, records show.
The New York Times reviewed thousands of pages of internal emails and documents obtained through public records requests by Documented, a watchdog group, that shed light on the treasurers’ efforts since January 2021.
At conferences, on weekly calls, and with a steady stream of emails, the foundation hosted representatives from the oil industry and funneled research and talking points from conservative groups to the state treasurers, who have channeled the private groups’ goals into public policy.
The Heritage Foundation, the Heartland Institute and the American Petroleum Institute are among the conservative groups with ties to the fossil fuel industry that have been working with the State Financial Officers Foundation and the treasurers to shape their national strategy.
Many Democratic state treasurers support efforts to combat climate change and want banks and investment firms to be clear about risks posed to returns for retirees and others. Democratic lawmakers in California and New Jersey are working on legislation that would require their state pension systems to divest from fossil fuels. But Democrats have not mounted anything like the national campaign being orchestrated by the State Financial Officers Foundation.
The Republican treasurers skirt the fact that global warming is an economic menace that is damaging industries like agriculture and causing extreme weather that devastates communities and costs taxpayers billions in recovery and rebuilding. Instead, they frame efforts to reduce emissions as a threat to employment and revenue, and have turned climate science into another front in the culture wars.
“This is a departure from their traditional roles,” said Robert Butkin, the former Oklahoma treasurer and a professor at the University of Tulsa. “There used to be a strong nonpartisan and bipartisan ethic among treasurers, but you’ve seen a lot of that erode over the past several years.”
In November, as major banks and corporations at a global summit in Glasgow were promising to take climate action, the Republican state treasurers were huddling at a State Financial Officers Foundation conference in Orlando, Fla., talking about ways to stop them.
At the meeting, the group’s chief executive, Derek Kreifels, made a presentation about a new law that had been signed by Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas, a Republican. It prohibited state agencies from investing in businesses that have cut ties with fossil fuel companies.
Within weeks, Mr. Moore was working with legislators in West Virginia to write a similar bill, which became law in March. While Texas officials have been slow to enforce their law, Mr. Moore was quick to put it into action.
Last week, he notified five major financial institutions — Goldman Sachs, BlackRock, Wells Fargo, JPMorgan and Morgan Stanley — that they are barred from doing business with West Virginia because they have intentionally wound down their dealings with coal companies.
“If a bank, for instance, decides to say they have a no-lending policy as relates to thermal coal, well, then we’ll find a bank that doesn’t have that policy,” Mr. Moore said in an interview.
Mr. Moore went on to offer a classic denial of the overwhelming scientific consensus that the continued burning of oil, gas and coal will lead to planetary catastrophe.
“The climate has been changing in the world since Earth was created,” Mr. Moore said. “Whether these greenhouse gas emissions are contributing to the warming of the globe, I’m not sure I necessarily agree with that.”
The banks targeted by Mr. Moore say they are not boycotting the fossil fuel industry. All of them still do substantial business with oil and gas companies, but in the long run, they say, moving away from fossil fuels makes economic sense. West Virginia, for example, is the second-largest coal-producing state in the country, but production has declined significantly during the past two decades.
“He’s trying to counter pressure that’s coming from progressives on the left,” said Loren Allen, general counsel of the West Virginia Bankers Association, which lobbied against the new law celebrated by Mr. Moore. “Our banks are tied up in the center of a battle that no one can really win.”
Mr. Kreifels declined an interview but said in a statement that concerns over issues like climate change were “putting politics over profits, and likely reducing shareholder value.”
Kentucky, Tennessee and Oklahoma have passed similar laws this year. “Kentucky joins our growing coalition of states that have taken concrete steps to push back against the woke capitalists who are trying to destroy our energy industries,” Mr. Moore said in a news release praising the moves by the states.
Republican lawmakers in more than a dozen other states, including New York, Oregon and Virginia, are trying to advance similar legislation.
The laws could cost taxpayers. A recent study found that Texas cities, where some financial institutions have voluntarily left the market because of laws targeting companies that embrace environmental, social and governance priorities, collectively known as E.S.G., are likely to incur up to $532 million in higher interest costs in less than a year because of the legislation.
“These officials are using the public finance market to make political statements,” said Daniel Garrett, a finance professor at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania and one of the authors of the study. “They can use these laws as a carrot or stick as they desire, but the costs can be potentially quite large.”
The treasurers are increasingly going after individual financial institutions.
In addition to the banks targeted by Mr. Moore, the treasurers of Utah and Idaho are criticizing plans by S&P Global, the ratings agency, to integrate climate risk into its credit ratings of states. And BlackRock, which manages some $8.5 trillion, has been the target of withering attacks for its stance on environmental issues.
Larry Fink, the BlackRock chief executive, has been outspoken in his desire to steer away from fossil fuels and toward what he considers a more sustainable, greener economy.
“Every government, company, and shareholder must confront climate change,” Mr. Fink wrote in a public letter in 2020 in which he described the integration of climate risk into investment decisions as “a fundamental reshaping of finance.”
In response, Mr. Moore’s office stopped using BlackRock to help manage West Virginia’s operating funds, withdrawing about $20 million.
“Larry Fink has stated it very clearly that he thinks capitalism has the power to shape society,” Mr. Moore said. “But my state doesn’t want the same shape of society that Larry Fink does.”
Other treasurers followed suit. In March, the Arkansas treasurer, Dennis Milligan, pulled $125 million from BlackRock. And in April, the treasurer of Louisiana, John Schroder, emailed Mr. Moore and Marlo Oaks, the Utah treasurer, and boasted about withdrawing more than $600 million from BlackRock accounts. Mr. Schroder said he had also blocked Citibank, Bank of America and JPMorgan from almost $1 billion in bond financing.
“That’s excellent, John!!!” Mr. Moore replied, according to emails reviewed by The Times. “Great work!!!”
BlackRock declined to comment.
Mr. Milligan, the Arkansas treasurer, emailed a statement in which he said, “I feel a strong sense of responsibility to do my part in not allowing the liberal ‘woke’ agenda to disadvantage the very people I was elected to serve.” Mr. Schroder and Mr. Oaks declined requests for interviews.
Withdrawals by a few states represent a tiny slice of BlackRock’s business. But inside banks and investment firms, there is mounting concern that the state bans could spread to pension funds, which account for nearly $4 trillion in investments across the country.
“We already have a lot of divisions in this country,” said Noah Friend, the former general counsel for the Kentucky treasurer. “I don’t like the idea that if you’re a Republican you have to bank with this company and if you’re a Democrat you have to bank with that company. Everything becomes this politicized decision about who you do business with.”
Behind the treasurers and the State Financial Officers Foundation is a complex web of conservative groups linked to the fossil fuel industry, as well as some of the biggest names on Wall Street.
In March, Julie Ellsworth, the Idaho treasurer, asked Mr. Kreifels to distribute a memo about the fossil fuel boycott bills to other state treasurers, according to the emails.
The memo had been prepared using research from the Heartland Institute, a think tank with a history of denying climate science, and it misrepresented how banks and other financial institutions were implementing their E.S.G. strategies.
“If you’re a small-business owner with a gasoline powered car, you’re eventually going to be phased out of banks’ portfolios, unless you switch to electric vehicles, of course,” the memo said in a section about how banks would use E.S.G. to force businesses to change. “Similarly, if you want to buy a house in the future that runs on natural gas, you, too, won’t be able to get a mortgage until you put solar panels on the roof.”
No banks have proposed such measures. Ms. Ellsworth declined to comment.
The Heartland Institute has also worked to amplify the treasurers’ message and connect them with influential conservative media personalities including Glenn Beck, records show.
Other groups supporting the treasurers’ efforts include the Heritage Foundation, a think tank that has long opposed action to combat climate change and that has received substantial funding from the oil billionaires Charles G. Koch and David H. Koch.
The State Financial Officers Foundation this year hired CRC Advisors, a conservative strategy firm that was founded by Leonard Leo, who has led a multiyear effort to stack federal courts with judges who oppose climate action. In recent months, CRC Advisors has helped coordinate media responses for treasurers, including Mr. Oaks of Utah, according to emails reviewed by The Times.
And the State Financial Officers Foundation shares many ties with the American Legislative Exchange Council, or ALEC, a conservative group with longstanding ties to the Koch brothers.
The American Legislative Exchange Council chief executive, Lisa Nelson, is on the State Financial Officers Foundation board, and ALEC’s chief economist, Jonathan Williams, is a senior policy adviser to the foundation.
Last July, the State Financial Officers Foundation hosted a conference in conjunction with ALEC, and the two groups have even shared blocks of discounted hotel rooms for their event. Mr. Moore and Mr. Kreifels were among the treasurers attending ALEC’s annual meeting in Atlanta last week.
“The State Financial Officers Foundation is a key node in a network of political groups waging a coordinated attack on climate policy,” said Jesse Coleman, a senior researcher at Documented, the watchdog organization that obtained the emails. The group is working “to weaponize state treasurers’ offices against federal appointees, regulations, and corporate policies that address climate change,” he said.
As a nonprofit organization, the State Financial Officers Foundation is not legally required to disclose its funders. A partial list of the organization’s financial supporters on its website shows that it gets funding from not only conservative groups but also from some of the biggest companies in the world, many of which say they are committed to reducing greenhouse gas emissions. They include JPMorgan, Wells Fargo, Visa, Mastercard, Fidelity, Federated Hermes and SAP — all of which have publicly embraced E.S.G. principles.
Most of the sponsors declined to comment, and many of their contributions were relatively small. In a statement, Beth Richek, a Wells Fargo spokeswoman, acknowledged the bank’s support for the group. “While we may not agree with every position they take, our mutual engagement is important for our company, employees, and customers,” she said.
Mr. Biden came to office with a vision: the entire federal government would be focused on reducing the country’s emissions, with new rules implemented across federal agencies staffed by political appointees who embraced the effort.
Among the obstacles Mr. Biden didn’t anticipate were the state treasurers.
An early sign of turbulence came in May 2021, when 15 treasurers sent a letter to John Kerry, Mr. Biden’s climate envoy, raising concerns about what they said was the administration’s hostility toward the oil and gas industry.
“Reckless attacks on the fossil fuel industry ultimately cut off paychecks for workers and take food off the table for hard-working middle-class families,” the letter read.
By the end of the year, the treasurers were publicly lobbying against a bevy of proposed rules and nominees.
Among their first targets was Saule Omarova, Mr. Biden’s nominee for comptroller of the currency. Ms. Omarova was heavily criticized by Republican senators, some moderate Democrats and the banking industry for her desire to limit speculative trading by banks and to open the Federal Reserve to retail banking.
But she drew the ire of the treasurers for saying that if fossil fuel companies went bankrupt it would help fight climate change. The State Financial Officers Foundation issued a letter signed by more than 20 financial officers calling her a “radical extremist.”
When Ms. Omarova withdrew her nomination in December, Mr. Kreifels sent an email to the treasurers congratulating them. “It’s an honor to work along side you all,” he said in an email titled “VICTORY!”
Two months later, the treasurers focused on another nominee: Sarah Bloom Raskin, whom Mr. Biden had nominated to be the Federal Reserve’s head of bank oversight. Ms. Raskin, a former Federal Reserve and Treasury official, has argued that financial regulators should police climate risks more diligently.
Mr. Kreifels urged the treasurers to speak out against Ms. Raskin, describing her as an “anti-energy climate change alarmist.”
In emails to state treasurers, the foundation provided draft tweets and other messaging strategies. “We must make as much noise about this as possible,” Mr. Kreifels wrote. “Make this THE ‘kitchen table’ issue in your state for the week.”
Like Ms. Omarova, Ms. Raskin withdrew her nomination. “Sarah was subject to baseless attacks from industry and conservative interest groups,” Mr. Biden said in a statement.
The treasurers have also set their sights on new federal rules and regulations intended to strengthen the government’s ability to act on climate change.
Late last year, the State Financial Officers Foundation worked with the Heritage Foundation to respond to proposals from the Financial Stability Oversight Council, a government panel assigned to minimize risk in the financial sector, on ways to reduce the threats posed by climate change, records show.
And soon after that, Mr. Oaks, the Utah treasurer, drafted a letter opposing a potential Department of Labor rule that would allow retirement plans to consider risks from global warming in their investment strategy. Mr. Kreifels distributed the draft to the foundation’s members, and more than a dozen treasurers signed the final letter. The Department of Labor has not decided whether to implement the rule.
This year, the treasurers targeted the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency. After the agency proposed a rule to require banks to consider climate-related financial risk, executives from the Heritage Foundation sent Mr. Kreifels and Mr. Oaks a memo outlining their opposition. Within weeks, dozens of state treasurers and attorneys general from Republican-led states submitted comments objecting to the proposed rule.
“This special concern for and attention to climate-related risks is irrational,” one comment read.
And in May, Mr. Kreifels organized a call with the treasurers to discuss regulations proposed by the Securities and Exchange Commission that would require companies to publicly disclose climate risks to investors. The featured guest was a representative from the American Petroleum Institute, the lobbying arm of the fossil fuel industry.
The next month, the State Financial Officers Foundation sent a 20-page letter signed by more than a dozen treasurers, calling the S.E.C.’s proposed rule, which has not yet been enacted, “irrational climate exceptionalism, elevating climate issues to a place of prominence in disclosures that they do not deserve.”
David Gelles is a correspondent on the Climate desk, covering the intersection of public policy and the private sector.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/05/clim ... hange.html
A Times investigation revealed a coordinated effort by state treasurers to use government muscle and public funds to punish companies trying to reduce greenhouse gases.
By David Gelles
David Gelles reviewed more than 10,000 pages of documents and emails while reporting for this article.
Aug. 5, 2022
Updated 10:58 a.m. ET
Nearly two dozen Republican state treasurers around the country are working to thwart climate action on state and federal levels, fighting regulations that would make clear the economic risks posed by a warming world, lobbying against climate-minded nominees to key federal posts and using the tax dollars they control to punish companies that want to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
Over the past year, treasurers in nearly half the United States have been coordinating tactics and talking points, meeting in private and cheering each other in public as part of a well-funded campaign to protect the fossil fuel companies that bolster their local economies.
Last week, Riley Moore, the treasurer of West Virginia, announced that several major banks — including Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan and Wells Fargo — would be barred from government contracts with his state because they are reducing their investments in coal, the dirtiest fossil fuel.
Mr. Moore and the treasurers of Louisiana and Arkansas have pulled more than $700 million out of BlackRock, the world’s largest investment manager, over objections that the firm is too focused on environmental issues. At the same time, the treasurers of Utah and Idaho are pressuring the private sector to drop climate action and other causes they label as “woke.”
And treasurers from Pennsylvania, Arizona and Oklahoma joined a larger campaign to thwart the nominations of federal regulators who wanted to require that banks, funds and companies disclose the financial risks posed by a warming planet.
At the nexus of these efforts is the State Financial Officers Foundation, a little-known nonprofit organization based in Shawnee, Kan., that once focused on cybersecurity, borrowing costs and managing debt loads, among other routine issues.
Then President Biden took office, promising to speed the country’s transition away from oil, gas and coal, the burning of which is dangerously heating the planet.
The foundation began pushing Republican state treasurers, who are mostly elected officials and who are responsible for managing their state’s finances, to use their power to promote oil and gas interests and to stymie Mr. Biden’s climate agenda, records show.
The New York Times reviewed thousands of pages of internal emails and documents obtained through public records requests by Documented, a watchdog group, that shed light on the treasurers’ efforts since January 2021.
At conferences, on weekly calls, and with a steady stream of emails, the foundation hosted representatives from the oil industry and funneled research and talking points from conservative groups to the state treasurers, who have channeled the private groups’ goals into public policy.
The Heritage Foundation, the Heartland Institute and the American Petroleum Institute are among the conservative groups with ties to the fossil fuel industry that have been working with the State Financial Officers Foundation and the treasurers to shape their national strategy.
Many Democratic state treasurers support efforts to combat climate change and want banks and investment firms to be clear about risks posed to returns for retirees and others. Democratic lawmakers in California and New Jersey are working on legislation that would require their state pension systems to divest from fossil fuels. But Democrats have not mounted anything like the national campaign being orchestrated by the State Financial Officers Foundation.
The Republican treasurers skirt the fact that global warming is an economic menace that is damaging industries like agriculture and causing extreme weather that devastates communities and costs taxpayers billions in recovery and rebuilding. Instead, they frame efforts to reduce emissions as a threat to employment and revenue, and have turned climate science into another front in the culture wars.
“This is a departure from their traditional roles,” said Robert Butkin, the former Oklahoma treasurer and a professor at the University of Tulsa. “There used to be a strong nonpartisan and bipartisan ethic among treasurers, but you’ve seen a lot of that erode over the past several years.”
In November, as major banks and corporations at a global summit in Glasgow were promising to take climate action, the Republican state treasurers were huddling at a State Financial Officers Foundation conference in Orlando, Fla., talking about ways to stop them.
At the meeting, the group’s chief executive, Derek Kreifels, made a presentation about a new law that had been signed by Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas, a Republican. It prohibited state agencies from investing in businesses that have cut ties with fossil fuel companies.
Within weeks, Mr. Moore was working with legislators in West Virginia to write a similar bill, which became law in March. While Texas officials have been slow to enforce their law, Mr. Moore was quick to put it into action.
Last week, he notified five major financial institutions — Goldman Sachs, BlackRock, Wells Fargo, JPMorgan and Morgan Stanley — that they are barred from doing business with West Virginia because they have intentionally wound down their dealings with coal companies.
“If a bank, for instance, decides to say they have a no-lending policy as relates to thermal coal, well, then we’ll find a bank that doesn’t have that policy,” Mr. Moore said in an interview.
Mr. Moore went on to offer a classic denial of the overwhelming scientific consensus that the continued burning of oil, gas and coal will lead to planetary catastrophe.
“The climate has been changing in the world since Earth was created,” Mr. Moore said. “Whether these greenhouse gas emissions are contributing to the warming of the globe, I’m not sure I necessarily agree with that.”
The banks targeted by Mr. Moore say they are not boycotting the fossil fuel industry. All of them still do substantial business with oil and gas companies, but in the long run, they say, moving away from fossil fuels makes economic sense. West Virginia, for example, is the second-largest coal-producing state in the country, but production has declined significantly during the past two decades.
“He’s trying to counter pressure that’s coming from progressives on the left,” said Loren Allen, general counsel of the West Virginia Bankers Association, which lobbied against the new law celebrated by Mr. Moore. “Our banks are tied up in the center of a battle that no one can really win.”
Mr. Kreifels declined an interview but said in a statement that concerns over issues like climate change were “putting politics over profits, and likely reducing shareholder value.”
Kentucky, Tennessee and Oklahoma have passed similar laws this year. “Kentucky joins our growing coalition of states that have taken concrete steps to push back against the woke capitalists who are trying to destroy our energy industries,” Mr. Moore said in a news release praising the moves by the states.
Republican lawmakers in more than a dozen other states, including New York, Oregon and Virginia, are trying to advance similar legislation.
The laws could cost taxpayers. A recent study found that Texas cities, where some financial institutions have voluntarily left the market because of laws targeting companies that embrace environmental, social and governance priorities, collectively known as E.S.G., are likely to incur up to $532 million in higher interest costs in less than a year because of the legislation.
“These officials are using the public finance market to make political statements,” said Daniel Garrett, a finance professor at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania and one of the authors of the study. “They can use these laws as a carrot or stick as they desire, but the costs can be potentially quite large.”
The treasurers are increasingly going after individual financial institutions.
In addition to the banks targeted by Mr. Moore, the treasurers of Utah and Idaho are criticizing plans by S&P Global, the ratings agency, to integrate climate risk into its credit ratings of states. And BlackRock, which manages some $8.5 trillion, has been the target of withering attacks for its stance on environmental issues.
Larry Fink, the BlackRock chief executive, has been outspoken in his desire to steer away from fossil fuels and toward what he considers a more sustainable, greener economy.
“Every government, company, and shareholder must confront climate change,” Mr. Fink wrote in a public letter in 2020 in which he described the integration of climate risk into investment decisions as “a fundamental reshaping of finance.”
In response, Mr. Moore’s office stopped using BlackRock to help manage West Virginia’s operating funds, withdrawing about $20 million.
“Larry Fink has stated it very clearly that he thinks capitalism has the power to shape society,” Mr. Moore said. “But my state doesn’t want the same shape of society that Larry Fink does.”
Other treasurers followed suit. In March, the Arkansas treasurer, Dennis Milligan, pulled $125 million from BlackRock. And in April, the treasurer of Louisiana, John Schroder, emailed Mr. Moore and Marlo Oaks, the Utah treasurer, and boasted about withdrawing more than $600 million from BlackRock accounts. Mr. Schroder said he had also blocked Citibank, Bank of America and JPMorgan from almost $1 billion in bond financing.
“That’s excellent, John!!!” Mr. Moore replied, according to emails reviewed by The Times. “Great work!!!”
BlackRock declined to comment.
Mr. Milligan, the Arkansas treasurer, emailed a statement in which he said, “I feel a strong sense of responsibility to do my part in not allowing the liberal ‘woke’ agenda to disadvantage the very people I was elected to serve.” Mr. Schroder and Mr. Oaks declined requests for interviews.
Withdrawals by a few states represent a tiny slice of BlackRock’s business. But inside banks and investment firms, there is mounting concern that the state bans could spread to pension funds, which account for nearly $4 trillion in investments across the country.
“We already have a lot of divisions in this country,” said Noah Friend, the former general counsel for the Kentucky treasurer. “I don’t like the idea that if you’re a Republican you have to bank with this company and if you’re a Democrat you have to bank with that company. Everything becomes this politicized decision about who you do business with.”
Behind the treasurers and the State Financial Officers Foundation is a complex web of conservative groups linked to the fossil fuel industry, as well as some of the biggest names on Wall Street.
In March, Julie Ellsworth, the Idaho treasurer, asked Mr. Kreifels to distribute a memo about the fossil fuel boycott bills to other state treasurers, according to the emails.
The memo had been prepared using research from the Heartland Institute, a think tank with a history of denying climate science, and it misrepresented how banks and other financial institutions were implementing their E.S.G. strategies.
“If you’re a small-business owner with a gasoline powered car, you’re eventually going to be phased out of banks’ portfolios, unless you switch to electric vehicles, of course,” the memo said in a section about how banks would use E.S.G. to force businesses to change. “Similarly, if you want to buy a house in the future that runs on natural gas, you, too, won’t be able to get a mortgage until you put solar panels on the roof.”
No banks have proposed such measures. Ms. Ellsworth declined to comment.
The Heartland Institute has also worked to amplify the treasurers’ message and connect them with influential conservative media personalities including Glenn Beck, records show.
Other groups supporting the treasurers’ efforts include the Heritage Foundation, a think tank that has long opposed action to combat climate change and that has received substantial funding from the oil billionaires Charles G. Koch and David H. Koch.
The State Financial Officers Foundation this year hired CRC Advisors, a conservative strategy firm that was founded by Leonard Leo, who has led a multiyear effort to stack federal courts with judges who oppose climate action. In recent months, CRC Advisors has helped coordinate media responses for treasurers, including Mr. Oaks of Utah, according to emails reviewed by The Times.
And the State Financial Officers Foundation shares many ties with the American Legislative Exchange Council, or ALEC, a conservative group with longstanding ties to the Koch brothers.
The American Legislative Exchange Council chief executive, Lisa Nelson, is on the State Financial Officers Foundation board, and ALEC’s chief economist, Jonathan Williams, is a senior policy adviser to the foundation.
Last July, the State Financial Officers Foundation hosted a conference in conjunction with ALEC, and the two groups have even shared blocks of discounted hotel rooms for their event. Mr. Moore and Mr. Kreifels were among the treasurers attending ALEC’s annual meeting in Atlanta last week.
“The State Financial Officers Foundation is a key node in a network of political groups waging a coordinated attack on climate policy,” said Jesse Coleman, a senior researcher at Documented, the watchdog organization that obtained the emails. The group is working “to weaponize state treasurers’ offices against federal appointees, regulations, and corporate policies that address climate change,” he said.
As a nonprofit organization, the State Financial Officers Foundation is not legally required to disclose its funders. A partial list of the organization’s financial supporters on its website shows that it gets funding from not only conservative groups but also from some of the biggest companies in the world, many of which say they are committed to reducing greenhouse gas emissions. They include JPMorgan, Wells Fargo, Visa, Mastercard, Fidelity, Federated Hermes and SAP — all of which have publicly embraced E.S.G. principles.
Most of the sponsors declined to comment, and many of their contributions were relatively small. In a statement, Beth Richek, a Wells Fargo spokeswoman, acknowledged the bank’s support for the group. “While we may not agree with every position they take, our mutual engagement is important for our company, employees, and customers,” she said.
Mr. Biden came to office with a vision: the entire federal government would be focused on reducing the country’s emissions, with new rules implemented across federal agencies staffed by political appointees who embraced the effort.
Among the obstacles Mr. Biden didn’t anticipate were the state treasurers.
An early sign of turbulence came in May 2021, when 15 treasurers sent a letter to John Kerry, Mr. Biden’s climate envoy, raising concerns about what they said was the administration’s hostility toward the oil and gas industry.
“Reckless attacks on the fossil fuel industry ultimately cut off paychecks for workers and take food off the table for hard-working middle-class families,” the letter read.
By the end of the year, the treasurers were publicly lobbying against a bevy of proposed rules and nominees.
Among their first targets was Saule Omarova, Mr. Biden’s nominee for comptroller of the currency. Ms. Omarova was heavily criticized by Republican senators, some moderate Democrats and the banking industry for her desire to limit speculative trading by banks and to open the Federal Reserve to retail banking.
But she drew the ire of the treasurers for saying that if fossil fuel companies went bankrupt it would help fight climate change. The State Financial Officers Foundation issued a letter signed by more than 20 financial officers calling her a “radical extremist.”
When Ms. Omarova withdrew her nomination in December, Mr. Kreifels sent an email to the treasurers congratulating them. “It’s an honor to work along side you all,” he said in an email titled “VICTORY!”
Two months later, the treasurers focused on another nominee: Sarah Bloom Raskin, whom Mr. Biden had nominated to be the Federal Reserve’s head of bank oversight. Ms. Raskin, a former Federal Reserve and Treasury official, has argued that financial regulators should police climate risks more diligently.
Mr. Kreifels urged the treasurers to speak out against Ms. Raskin, describing her as an “anti-energy climate change alarmist.”
In emails to state treasurers, the foundation provided draft tweets and other messaging strategies. “We must make as much noise about this as possible,” Mr. Kreifels wrote. “Make this THE ‘kitchen table’ issue in your state for the week.”
Like Ms. Omarova, Ms. Raskin withdrew her nomination. “Sarah was subject to baseless attacks from industry and conservative interest groups,” Mr. Biden said in a statement.
The treasurers have also set their sights on new federal rules and regulations intended to strengthen the government’s ability to act on climate change.
Late last year, the State Financial Officers Foundation worked with the Heritage Foundation to respond to proposals from the Financial Stability Oversight Council, a government panel assigned to minimize risk in the financial sector, on ways to reduce the threats posed by climate change, records show.
And soon after that, Mr. Oaks, the Utah treasurer, drafted a letter opposing a potential Department of Labor rule that would allow retirement plans to consider risks from global warming in their investment strategy. Mr. Kreifels distributed the draft to the foundation’s members, and more than a dozen treasurers signed the final letter. The Department of Labor has not decided whether to implement the rule.
This year, the treasurers targeted the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency. After the agency proposed a rule to require banks to consider climate-related financial risk, executives from the Heritage Foundation sent Mr. Kreifels and Mr. Oaks a memo outlining their opposition. Within weeks, dozens of state treasurers and attorneys general from Republican-led states submitted comments objecting to the proposed rule.
“This special concern for and attention to climate-related risks is irrational,” one comment read.
And in May, Mr. Kreifels organized a call with the treasurers to discuss regulations proposed by the Securities and Exchange Commission that would require companies to publicly disclose climate risks to investors. The featured guest was a representative from the American Petroleum Institute, the lobbying arm of the fossil fuel industry.
The next month, the State Financial Officers Foundation sent a 20-page letter signed by more than a dozen treasurers, calling the S.E.C.’s proposed rule, which has not yet been enacted, “irrational climate exceptionalism, elevating climate issues to a place of prominence in disclosures that they do not deserve.”
David Gelles is a correspondent on the Climate desk, covering the intersection of public policy and the private sector.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/05/clim ... hange.html
Re: TrumpReich in action
And DeSantis is weaponizing public office against abortions and gays and Blacks and schools as evidenced by his " Dont say Gay " bill , anti-CRT rules, and sanctioning of Disney, and his suspension of an ELECTED State's Attorney who said the attorney wouldn't criminally prosecute women who obtain an abortion.
A couple more beauties , info from CNN, AP :
Alex Jones ordered to pay only $ 4.1M compensatory damages to 2 parents ?!! $2M each ?!! Per AP today,Jones’ attorney had asked the jury to limit damages to $8 — one dollar for each of the compensation charges they considered. (Rach3 : Reynal gives even lawyers a bad name.) Jones’ lead attorney, Andino Reynal, winked at his co-counsel before leaving the courtroom. He declined to comment on the verdict. Hopefully, this jury will now award punitive damages as well,and in a large amount , or America has gone to the Dark Side and Jones will laughing all the way to the bank ( where he parked a reported $62M ). Jones' attorney, Reynal, argued for a far lower sum, suggesting that the jurors should multiply Jones' purported earnings per hour of $14,000 and the 18 hours that he said Jones talked about Sandy Hook on Infowars, for a sum of around a quarter million dollars. Of course, this was a Texas jury, and the parents are from Connecticut.
Last, but not least:
Viktor Orban , darling of Tucker Carlson and vice versa, addressed CPAC in Texas yesterday.Hitler and Goebbels at Nuremberg Nazi Party rallies in the 30’s, deja vu.
A couple more beauties , info from CNN, AP :
Alex Jones ordered to pay only $ 4.1M compensatory damages to 2 parents ?!! $2M each ?!! Per AP today,Jones’ attorney had asked the jury to limit damages to $8 — one dollar for each of the compensation charges they considered. (Rach3 : Reynal gives even lawyers a bad name.) Jones’ lead attorney, Andino Reynal, winked at his co-counsel before leaving the courtroom. He declined to comment on the verdict. Hopefully, this jury will now award punitive damages as well,and in a large amount , or America has gone to the Dark Side and Jones will laughing all the way to the bank ( where he parked a reported $62M ). Jones' attorney, Reynal, argued for a far lower sum, suggesting that the jurors should multiply Jones' purported earnings per hour of $14,000 and the 18 hours that he said Jones talked about Sandy Hook on Infowars, for a sum of around a quarter million dollars. Of course, this was a Texas jury, and the parents are from Connecticut.
Last, but not least:
Viktor Orban , darling of Tucker Carlson and vice versa, addressed CPAC in Texas yesterday.Hitler and Goebbels at Nuremberg Nazi Party rallies in the 30’s, deja vu.
Re: TrumpReich in action
New Yorker Magazine today. For those who think Nazi analogies are over-blown:
State Legislatures Are Torching Democracy
Even in moderate places like Ohio, gerrymandering has let unchecked Republicans pass extremist laws that could never make it through Congress.
By Jane Mayer
August 6, 2022
As the Supreme Court anticipated when it overturned Roe v. Wade, the battle over abortion rights is now being waged state by state. Nowhere is the fight more intense than in Ohio, which has long been considered a national bellwether. The state helped secure the Presidential victories of Barack Obama in 2008 and 2012, then went for Donald Trump in 2016 and 2020. Its residents tend to be politically moderate, and polls consistently show that a majority of Ohio voters support legal access to abortion, particularly for victims of rape and incest. Yet, as the recent ordeal of a pregnant ten-year-old rape victim has illustrated, Ohio’s state legislature has become radically out of synch with its constituents. In June, the state’s General Assembly instituted an abortion ban so extreme that the girl was forced to travel to Indiana to terminate her pregnancy. In early July, Dr. Caitlin Bernard, the Indiana obstetrician who treated the child, told me that she had a message for Ohio’s legislature: “This is your fault!”
Longtime Ohio politicians have been shocked by the state’s transformation into a center of extremist legislation, not just on abortion but on such divisive issues as guns and transgender rights. Ted Strickland, a Democrat who served as governor between 2007 and 2011, told me, “The legislature is as barbaric, primitive, and Neanderthal as any in the country. It’s really troubling.” When he was governor, he recalled, the two parties worked reasonably well together, but politics in Ohio “has changed.” The story is similar in several other states with reputations for being moderate, such as Wisconsin and Pennsylvania: their legislatures have also begun proposing laws so far to the right that they could never be passed in the U.S. Congress.
Ohio’s law prohibits abortion after six weeks—or even earlier, if doctors can detect fetal cardiac activity—unless the mother is at risk of death or serious permanent injury. Dr. Bernard noted that the bill’s opponents had warned about the proposed restrictions’ potential effect on underage rape victims. “It was literally a hypothetical that was discussed,” she told me. Indeed, at a hearing on April 27th, a Democrat in the Ohio House, Richard Brown, declared that if a thirteen-year-old girl “was raped by a serial rapist . . . this bill would require this thirteen-year-old to carry this felon’s fetus.”
The bill’s chief sponsor, State Representative Jean Schmidt, is an archconservative Republican who represents a district east of Cincinnati. At the hearing, she responded to Brown by arguing that the birth of a rapist’s baby would be “an opportunity.” She explained, “If a baby is created, it is a human life. . . . It is a shame that it happens. But there’s an opportunity for that woman, no matter how young or old she is, to make a determination about what she’s going to do to help that life be a productive human being.” The rapist’s offspring, she suggested, could grow up to “cure cancer.” Her remarks were deemed so outlandish that they were denounced everywhere from the Guardian to the New York Post.
According to David Niven, a political-science professor at the University of Cincinnati, a 2020 survey indicated that less than fourteen per cent of Ohioans support banning all abortions without exceptions for rape and incest. And a 2019 Quinnipiac University poll showed that only thirty-nine per cent of Ohio voters supported the kind of “heartbeat” law that the legislature passed. But the Democrats in the Ohio legislature had no way to mount resistance: since 2012, the Republicans have had a veto-proof super-majority in both chambers. The Democratic state representative Beth Liston, a pediatrician and an internist in Ohio, who voted against the bill, told me, “Doctors are going to be afraid of providing ordinary care. Women are going to die.”
In a referendum on August 2nd, Kansas voters strongly rejected an abortion ban, indicating that even voters in deep-red states—when given the chance to express themselves—oppose radical curtailments of reproductive rights. Yet Ohio voters have had no such recourse, and the General Assembly is poised to pass even more repressive restrictions on abortion when it returns from a summer recess. State Representative Gary Click—a pastor at the Fremont Baptist Temple and a Republican who serves the Sandusky area—has proposed a “Personhood Act,” which would prohibit any interference with embryonic development from the moment of conception, unless the mother’s life is endangered. If the bill passes, it could outlaw many kinds of contraception, not to mention various practices commonly used during in-vitro fertilization. In an e-mail, Click told me that “the ultimate question that needs to be answered” is “When does life begin?” He added, “I believe the answer to that question is self-evident.” Click is a graduate of an unaccredited Christian school in Michigan, Midwestern Baptist College, whose Web site says that “civil government is of divine appointment” and must be obeyed “except in things opposed to ‘the will of our Lord Jesus Christ.’ ”
Click acknowledged that the story of the ten-year-old rape victim is discomfiting, adding that “we all have a visceral reaction” to such a scenario, “regardless of one’s political leaning.” But the news had not made him question his position; rather, he questioned the girl’s story, calling it “suspicious,” and noting that the incident “fit too neatly” with the pro-choice agenda. (According to law-enforcement authorities, a twenty-seven-year-old Ohio man confessed to twice raping the girl when she was nine. He has since pleaded not guilty.) Click also echoed an argument made by Ohio’s Republican attorney general, Dave Yost, who claimed that the ten-year-old—“if she exists”—would have qualified for the new statute’s medical-emergency exception. This assertion, however, has been disputed by various doctors, including State Representative Liston. “I don’t know the child’s health condition,” she acknowledged to me. “But it’s hard to say that simply because she is young she would meet the requirement of risk as defined by the new law.” Mortality rates are generally higher for pregnant girls who are younger than fifteen, but, Liston said, “there’s nothing in the law that states that age is a sufficient exception.”
Click, who is a close ally of the Republican congressman Jim Jordan, is one of Ohio’s most extreme legislators, but he’s hardly out of place among the General Assembly’s increasingly radical Republican majority. Niven, the University of Cincinnati professor, told me that, according to one study, the laws being passed by Ohio’s statehouse place it to the right of the deeply conservative legislature in South Carolina. How did this happen, given that most Ohio voters are not ultra-conservatives? “It’s all about gerrymandering,” Niven told me. The legislative-district maps in Ohio have been deliberately drawn so that many Republicans effectively cannot lose, all but insuring that the Party has a veto-proof super-majority. As a result, the only contests most Republican incumbents need worry about are the primaries—and, because hard-core partisans dominate the vote in those contests, the sole threat most Republican incumbents face is the possibility of being outflanked by a rival even farther to the right. The national press has devoted considerable attention to the gerrymandering of congressional districts, but state legislative districts have received much less scrutiny, even though they are every bit as skewed, and in some states far more so. “Ohio is about the second most gerrymandered statehouse in the country,” Niven told me. “It doesn’t have a voter base to support a total abortion ban, yet that’s a likely outcome.” He concluded, “Ohio has become the Hindenburg of democracy.”
Three days before the Supreme Court overturned Roe, I went to a luncheonette in Columbus, Ohio, to meet with David Pepper, an election-law professor, a novelist, a onetime Cincinnati city councilman, and a former chairman of the state’s Democratic Party. Pepper, who is fifty-one, looked boyish and preppy in a polo shirt. He had recently become a small phenomenon on Twitter, having posted videos in which he delivered impassioned short lectures, punctuated with frantic scribbles on a whiteboard, about the growing crisis of democracy in America’s state legislatures. When he attended Yale Law School, in the nineties, his geniality and Buckeye boosterism had led his classmates to name him the Most Likely to Be President of the Cincinnati Board of Tourism, but he spoke to me with an almost desperate alarmism.
Last year, Pepper wrote a book, “Laboratories of Autocracy,” whose title offers a grim spin on a famous statement, attributed to the Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis, calling America’s state legislatures “laboratories of democracy.” The subtitle of Pepper’s book, “A Wake-Up Call from Behind the Lines,” is a bit more hopeful. He is determined to get the Democratic political establishment to stop lavishing almost all its money and attention on U.S. House, Senate, and gubernatorial races (say, the current Senate race in Ohio between Tim Ryan and J. D. Vance) and to focus more energy on what he sees as a greater emergency: the collapse of representative democracy in one statehouse after another.
Pepper understands that few Americans share his obsession. “No one knows anything about statehouses,” he said. “They can’t even name their state representatives. And it’s getting worse every year, since the local media’s dying and the statehouse bureaus are being hollowed out.” Columbus has an unusually strong press corps, but it is an exception. And it is precisely because so few Americans pay attention to state politics that the legislatures have become ideal arenas for manipulation by extremists and special interests—who often work in tandem. “I’m banging my head against the wall,” Pepper told me. With a nod to the political consultant James Carville, he added, “My God, Democrats, don’t you see it? It’s the statehouse, stupid! That’s where the attack is happening!”
Pepper scoffed at recent claims, made by conservative Justices on the U.S. Supreme Court, that the state legislatures are more suited than the judiciary to adjudicate the divisive issue of abortion. In Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the case that overturned Roe, Brett Kavanaugh issued a concurring opinion in which he argued that the Court was merely restoring “the people’s authority to address the issue of abortion through the processes of democratic self-government.” Pepper said of Kavanaugh’s concurrence, “It’s so disingenuous—total gaslighting. Many statehouses no longer have representative democracy. Because they’ve been gerrymandered, they don’t reflect the will of the people.”
With Trump, he believes, the situation became a lot worse—the former President “made people a little more willing to be lawless, and he gave oxygen to white supremacy.” But Pepper thinks that “people make a huge mistake when they equate the attack on democracy entirely with him.” In his view, Democrats, including President Joe Biden, who have portrayed Trump as a singular aberration are failing to see that “the Republican attack on democracy preceded him”—and that “if Trump was locked up tomorrow it would continue.”
The shift began, Pepper believes, with the shock of Obama’s 2008 victory. The election of the country’s first Black President provoked a racial and cultural backlash, and many Republican officials panicked that their party, which was overwhelmingly white, was facing a demographic demise. Swept out of power in Washington, the Republican Party’s smartest operatives decided to exploit the only opening they could find: the possibility of capturing state legislatures in the 2010 midterm elections. They knew that, in 2011, many congressional and local legislative districts would be redrawn based on data from the 2010 census—a process that occurs only once a decade. If Republicans reshaped enough districts, they could hugely advantage conservative candidates, even if many of the Party’s policies were unpopular.
In 2010, the Supreme Court issued its controversial Citizens United decision, which allowed dark money to flood American politics. Donors, many undisclosed, soon funnelled thirty million dollars into the Republicans’ redistricting project, called redmap, and the result was an astonishing success: the Party picked up nearly seven hundred legislative seats, and won the power to redraw the maps for four times as many districts as the Democrats.
Gerrymandering the shapes of districts to create safe seats is an old trick that has been used by both sides in American politics. I recently spoke with Jonathan Jakubowski, the chairman of the Republican Party in Wood County, Ohio, and the author of “Bellwether Blues: A Conservative Awakening of the Millennial Soul,” and he emphasized that, in the nineteen-eighties, it was the Democrats who gerrymandered the state’s districts. “We’re all equal-opportunity offenders,” he said. But the redmap project—powered by advances in digital mapping and by billionaire donors such as the fossil-fuel magnates Charles and David Koch—took electoral distortion to a new level. And Ohio, which had become one of the most fiercely fought battleground states in Presidential politics, was subjected to an especially tortured dissection.
The journalist David Daley tells the story of redmap in his 2016 book, “Ratf **ked.” By 2012, he writes, the Republicans’ plan had already begun to pay off handsomely: even though Obama was reëlected in Ohio that year, by three percentage points, and Sherrod Brown, a progressive Democrat, was easily reëlected to the Senate, Republicans had a resounding triumph in the state legislature. They won a 60–39 super-majority in the House.
The Ohio statehouse has grown only more lopsided in the past decade. Currently, the Republican members have a 64–35 advantage in the House and a 25–8 advantage in the Senate. This veto-proof majority makes the Republican leaders of both chambers arguably the most powerful officeholders in the state—and they proved it when they undermined Governor Mike DeWine’s initial public-health-minded approach to the covid-19 pandemic. DeWine is a Republican, yet he was a leader in imposing such emergency health orders as mask mandates and the closing of schools and businesses. Ohio voters had widely supported these measures. But anti-vaccine and anti-mask extremists in the statehouse passed a law stripping the Governor and his health director of the authority to issue such orders. (One Republican lawmaker, a doctor, suggested that “the colored population” was more vulnerable to covid-19 because “they do not wash their hands as well as other groups.” The lawmaker was subsequently named the chairman of the Ohio Senate’s health committee.) Since the legislature’s rebellion, DeWine—once regarded as a centrist conservative—has increasingly capitulated to his party’s radical base, on public-health policy and much else. (Reached for comment, a spokesperson for the Governor said that “we disagree with that sentiment.”) Daley told me that the redmap campaign “took a state that was slightly red and gave it a hue more like Elizabeth Taylor’s lipstick,” adding, “The upshot has been some of the most far-right, noxious, pay-for-play politics we’ve seen over the last decade. That’s what gerrymandering enables. When voters lose the ability to throw the rascals out, the rascals do whatever they please.”
Matt Huffman, the influential president of the Ohio Senate, recently said as much himself. Speaking in May to the Columbus Dispatch about the Republicans’ super-majority, he said, “We can kind of do what we want.”
For Pepper, the state’s transformation has been crushing. He has watched the reputation of Ohio’s public-school system slide as Republicans have siphoned off public funding to support failing, politically connected charter schools. In 2010, Education Week ranked the state’s schooling as the fifth best in the country; in 2021, U.S. News & World Report ranked it thirty-first. Last year, F.B.I. agents told USA Today that public-corruption cases in Ohio were the most egregious in the country. In the past five years, the state has had five speakers of the House, because two were forced out as a result of the biggest bribery scandals in Ohio’s history. Larry Householder, who was removed from office in July, 2020, is scheduled to be tried on federal racketeering charges this coming January.
This wasn’t the path that Pepper had foreseen for his state. A native of Cincinnati, he grew up in a relatively apolitical, upwardly mobile household: his father climbed the ranks at one of Ohio’s largest companies, Procter & Gamble, ultimately becoming its chairman. After Pepper graduated from Yale Law School, he returned to Cincinnati and clerked for Nathaniel R. Jones, a Black federal judge, who ignited in him an interest in public service. In 2001, Pepper ran for the city council, and to everyone’s surprise he won, partly owing to a catchy slogan: “Just Add Pepper.” After two terms in office, he moved up to the county commission, eventually presiding over it, and in 2010 he was recruited by the state’s Democratic governor, Strickland, to run for auditor, a statewide office. At the time, the auditor was one of five state officials on a commission overseeing the redistricting process, and could therefore act as an effective curb against gerrymandering. On the campaign trail, Pepper recalls, “I was running around, talking about gerrymandering, and no one knew what the hell I was talking about.” Meanwhile, his opponent was getting a torrent of suspicious contributions from people who worked for out-of-state energy companies—many of which, Pepper deduced, had ties to the controversial coal baron Bob Murray, the chief executive officer of Murray Energy, an Ohio-based company. Such donations initially made little sense to Pepper—the auditor’s role had nothing to do with coal mines—until he discovered that redmap had targeted his state, and that his candidacy stood in the project’s way. He lost the race. In 2014, he made a second bid for statewide office, running this time for Ohio attorney general. Again, he was defeated. In 2015, he became the chairman of the state’s Democratic Party, a position that he stepped down from at the end of 2020.
Pepper had become consumed by the problem of gerrymandering, but the subject drew only blank stares from Democratic Party officials. To counter this apathy, he told me, he decided “to write a novel about gerrymandering—which, of course, is a horrible idea.” In the book, “The People’s House,” a Russian oligarch modelled on Vladimir Putin rigs an American election after figuring out that, thanks to gerrymandering, he needs only to flip a few dozen swing districts. The book appeared in the summer of 2016, when Putin’s clandestine efforts on behalf of Trump were making headlines; Politico called the book “the thriller that predicted the Russia scandal.” Pepper was pleased about the media attention, but he was disappointed that more people didn’t focus on the novel’s message: “how bad gerrymandering is.” With evident frustration, he told me that media and political insiders prefer “to talk about politics in terms of personalities.”
A recent study by the Institute for Research and Education on Human Rights, a nonpartisan nonprofit, documents how deeply right-wing extremism has infiltrated U.S. statehouses. Of the 7,383 people who served in state legislatures in the 2021-22 session, eight hundred and seventy-five had joined far-right Facebook groups. (All but three were Republicans.) The study describes the fringe beliefs that many of these members shared, including “the idea that Christians constitute a core of the American citizenry and/or that government and public policies should be reshaped to reflect that.” A group promoting this view, the Ohio Christian Alliance, counts eleven Ohio state legislators among its Facebook members, including Gary Click. Last year, the organization helped block a bill, the Ohio Fairness Act, that would have barred housing and employment discrimination against the L.G.B.T.Q. community.
State Representative Casey Weinstein, a second-term Democrat from a suburban swing district between Akron and Cleveland, and one of the General Assembly’s two Jewish members, told me that he’s recently become “really concerned” about a new level of extremism. On January 23, 2022, a protest outside his house shattered a peaceful Sunday afternoon with his wife and young children. Some thirty vehicles blocked the entrance to his driveway; one had a flag bearing the message “kneel for the cross.” Weinstein told me, “I thought it was a Trump group, but it turned out to be a church, Liberty Valley, near Macedonia, Ohio. Some of these churches are militant, and some are basically militias operating under the guise of religion. They’re weaponizing religion into a power grab.” He went on, “So, I’m the Jew, and they came to my house to try to intimidate me and my family. That’s what’s happening, and where this is going.”
Weinstein became further alarmed this past March, when Republicans in the statehouse pushed legislation prohibiting public-school teachers from teaching “divisive concepts.” The bill, aimed at censoring class discussions of critical race theory—which was never part of the Ohio public-school curriculum to begin with—threatened teachers with suspension unless they neutrally instructed students about “both sides of a political or ideological belief.” When Morgan Trau, an enterprising statehouse reporter for a television station in Cleveland, pressed one of the bill’s co-sponsors, Sarah Fowler Arthur, for details, the lawmaker provoked an uproar by offering the Holocaust as an example of a topic that required a “both sides” approach. “You should talk about these atrocities that have happened in history, but you also do have an obligation to point out the value that each individual brings to the table,” Fowler Arthur said, adding that students should consider the Holocaust “from the perspective of a German soldier.” As Fowler Arthur went on, she seemed to misunderstand both the scope and the nature of the Holocaust, referring to it as an event in which “hundreds of thousands,” rather than six million, Jews were killed, and suggesting that victims were murdered “for having a different color of skin.” Weinstein and other Jewish leaders in Ohio vociferously denounced what came to be known as the Both Sides of the Holocaust Bill. “That was enough for me,” Weinstein told me. “What unique value did the German Nazis bring to the table?” He noted that Fowler Arthur, who sits on the Ohio House’s Primary and Secondary Education Committee, “was homeschooled her entire life, has never set foot in a public school, and elected not to go to college.” Weinstein added, “There’s nothing wrong with that, until she starts censoring what can and cannot be taught in public schools.” (Fowler Arthur declined to comment.)
The real intent behind attacking public-school curricula, Weinstein believes, was to “fire up the Republican base” about the teaching of slavery, the Civil War, and the civil-rights movement—in other words, to get out the conservative vote by inflaming the racial grievances of white Ohioans. The “divisive concepts” bill championed by Fowler Arthur opposes teaching any reading of American history suggesting that “the United States and its institutions are systemically racist.”
Pepper noted that the efforts to control the curriculum in Ohio are “very similar to the meltdown in democracy in other places.” Like Russia’s attempts to censor what is taught to students about Ukraine, he said, the legislation promoted by Fowler Arthur represents an attempt to put forth a sanitized view of history—in this case, “to ban teaching parts of our history that cast a bad light on white America.” Pepper asked me, “If this was happening in another country, what would you say? You’d say, ‘Oh, my gosh—your democracy is under attack!’ Well, it’s happening in Columbus.” Indeed, he warned, it’s happening in state capitols across the country.
Ohio Republicans put the “divisive concepts” bill on hold after the idea of teaching neutrally about the Holocaust provoked national condemnation. But Ohio’s General Assembly otherwise proceeded at a breakneck pace this past spring—debating a bill enabling the inspection of the genitals of transgender student athletes, and passing a raft of legislation about guns. Many of these new laws were so extreme that they inspired fierce protests from Ohio residents.
A 2018 poll conducted by Baldwin Wallace University, in Berea, Ohio, showed that Ohioans, by clear majorities ranging from sixty-one to seventy-five per cent, wanted the state legislature to enact new gun-control laws: banning high-powered semi-automatic rifles, including the AR-15; banning extended ammunition magazines; banning bump stocks that, in effect, make semi-automatic rifles automatic; enacting a mandatory waiting period for gun purchases; raising the minimum age to buy semi-automatic rifles from eighteen to twenty-one. But no such measures were passed. Instead, the state legislature has turned Ohio into a so-called “stand your ground” state, where it is legal for residents to kill a trespasser without first attempting to de-escalate the situation. Lawmakers also passed a bill that allows Ohioans aged twenty-one or older to carry concealed handguns virtually anywhere, without first obtaining a permit or undergoing a background check and firearms training. In response to the school massacre in Uvalde, Texas, the Ohio General Assembly rushed through a law that enables any school board to arm teachers and other staff—including cafeteria workers and bus drivers—after only minimal gun training. The legislation was written by a lawmaker who owns a business in tactical-firearms training, and the lawmaker’s business partner gave testimony in the Ohio Senate in support of the bill, which specified that armed school personnel needed only twenty-four hours of firearms training. (Law-enforcement officers in Ohio must undergo some seven hundred hours of training.) The bill was so extreme that it was denounced in hearings by more than three hundred and fifty speakers—including representatives of the Ohio Federation of Teachers and of the state’s largest police organization, the Fraternal Order of Police of Ohio.
In an interview, Michael Weinman, the head of government affairs for the Ohio chapter of the Fraternal Order of Police, which represents some twenty-four thousand law-enforcement officers, described the new gun laws as “dangerous” and “insane.” Thanks to the legislation, he explained, “anyone can come into Ohio and carry a concealed firearm,” and need not mention having the gun if stopped by law enforcement. Weinman pointed out that the law about arming school employees contains no provision requiring that lethal weapons be locked safely, adding, “Can you imagine a kindergarten student sitting down to be read to, and there’s a gun in the kid’s face?” He noted that, other than teachers, most employees of a school “haven’t been taught how to discipline people—and most school shooters are students.” Melissa Cropper, the president of the Ohio Federation of Teachers, told me, “It’s unbelievable. The more guns you have in schools, the more accidents and deaths can happen, especially with such minimal training.” She added, “We are every bit as bad as Texas and Florida when it comes to these laws. We are becoming more and more extreme.”
Weinman said that the rightward turn on guns in Ohio has been driven, in no small part, by “very aggressive gun groups,” some of which profit from extremism by stoking fear. This helps to sell memberships and to expand valuable mailing lists. “These groups are very confrontational,” Weinman said. He recently testified in the Ohio General Assembly against loosening state gun laws; afterward, he told me, Chris Dorr, the head of a particularly militant group called Ohio Gun Owners, chased him out of the room and down a hallway, demanding that he be fired. In an online post, Dorr, who maintains that the National Rifle Association is too soft in its defense of gun rights, posted a closeup shot of Weinman with the caption “remember this face,” adding in another post that Weinman is “the most aggressive gun-rights hater in Ohio.” Dorr and his two brothers, Ben and Aaron, operate affiliated gun groups around the country, which share the slogan “No Compromise.” During the pandemic, the Dorrs’ groups expanded into other vehemently anti-government causes, and helped lead anti-mask and anti-vax protests. Niven, the political scientist, said that the Dorrs “cultivate relationships with the hardest-right members of the state legislature, and can get their bills heard.” Ninety per cent of Ohio voters favor universal background checks for people trying to buy guns, Niven noted, “but the Democrats can’t get a hearing.”
Teresa Fedor, a Democratic state senator who has served in the General Assembly for twenty-two years, described Ohio’s new gun and abortion laws as the worst legislation that she has ever witnessed being passed. She told me, “It feels like Gilead”—the fictional theocracy in Margaret Atwood’s novel “The Handmaid’s Tale.” Fedor added, “We’ve got state-mandated pregnancies, even of a ten-year-old.”
The issue is personal to her. Fedor, a grandmother, is a former teacher; in her twenties, when she was serving in the military, she was raped. She had an abortion. Fedor was a divorced single mother at the time, trying to earn a teaching degree. “I thought my life was going to be over,” she said. “But abortion was accessible, and it was a way back. To me, that choice meant I’d be able to have a future. I feel like I made it to the other side, and have the life I dreamed of as a little girl, because I had that choice.” Without the freedom to have an abortion, she said, “I wouldn’t be a state senator today.”
In 2015, during a floor debate over abortion policy, Fedor testified about her experience. As she was speaking, she was enraged to notice that another lawmaker, who opposed her view, was chuckling. She said that Republicans who serve in districts that have been engineered to be impervious to voters are “just not listening to the public, period—there’s no need to.” Many of the most extreme bills, Fedor believes, have been written not by the legislators themselves but by local and national right-wing pressure groups, which can raise dark money and turn out primary voters in force. Nationally, the most influential such group is the American Legislative Exchange Council, an organization that essentially outsources the drafting of laws to self-interested businesses. In Ohio, Fedor told me, it is often extreme religious groups that exert undue influence. She then noted that one such organization is about to have “an office right across from the statehouse chamber.”
Facing Ohio’s Greek Revival statehouse is a vacant six-story building that is slated to become the new headquarters of the Center for Christian Virtue, a once obscure nonprofit that an anti-pornography advocate founded four decades ago, in the basement of a Cincinnati church. In 2015 and 2016, the left-leaning Southern Poverty Law Center classified the organization as a hate group, citing homophobic statements on its Web site that described “homosexual behavior” as “unhealthy and destructive to the individual” and “to society as a whole.” The group subsequently deleted the offending statements, and, according to the Columbus Dispatch, it has recently evolved into “the state’s premier lobbying force on Christian conservative issues.” In the past five years, its full-time staff has expanded from two to thirteen, and its annual budget has risen from four hundred thousand dollars to $1.2 million. The group’s president, Aaron Baer, told me that the new headquarters—the group bought the building for $1.25 million last year, and plans to spend an additional $3.75 million renovating it—is very much meant to send a signal. “The message is that we’re going to be in this for the long haul,” Baer said. “We’re going to have a voice on the direction of the state—and the nation, God willing.”
The center already commands unusual influence. E-mails obtained by a watchdog group, Campaign for Accountability, show that Baer has been in regular contact with Governor DeWine’s office about an array of policies. The center’s board of directors includes two of the state’s biggest Republican donors, one of whom, the corporate lobbyist David Myhal, previously served as DeWine’s chief fund-raiser. A third director, Tom Minnery, who has served as the center’s board chair, is a chairman emeritus of the Alliance Defending Freedom, a powerful national legal organization that was created as the religious right’s answer to the American Civil Liberties Union. And, until earlier this year, a fourth director at the center was Seth Morgan, who is currently the vice-chairman of the A.D.F.
The most recently available I.R.S. records show that the center and the A.D.F. share several funding sources—notably, the huge, opaque National Christian Foundation—and have amplified each other’s messages. In April, the center celebrated the A.D.F.’s legal defense of an Ohio college professor who refused to use a student’s preferred pronouns. In addition, the center works in concert with about a hundred and thirty Catholic and evangelical schools, twenty-two hundred churches, and what it calls a Christian Chamber of Commerce of aligned businesses. Jake Grumbach, a political scientist specializing in state government who teaches at the University of Washington, told me that the center illustrates what political scientists are calling the “nationalization of local politics.”
The Center for Christian Virtue appears to be the true sponsor of some of Ohio’s most extreme right-wing bills. Gary Click, the Sandusky-area pastor serving in the Ohio House, acknowledged to me that the group had prompted him to introduce a bill opposing gender-affirming care for transgender youths, regardless of parental consent. The center, in essence, handed Click the wording for the legislation. Click confirmed to me that the center “is very proactive on Cap Square”—the Ohio capitol—adding, “All legislators are aware of their presence.” Click’s transgender bill isn’t yet law, but a related bill, also promoted by the center, has passed in the Ohio House. It stipulates that any student on a girls’ sports team participating in interscholastic conferences must have been born with female genitals. The legislation also calls for genital inspections. Niven observed that “many anti-trans sports bills were percolating” in Republican-ruled statehouses, but “leave it to Ohio to pass a provision for mandatory genital inspection if anyone questions their gender.” He went on, “That’s gerrymandering. You can’t say ‘Show me your daughter’ and stay in office unless you have unlosable districts.”
In a phone interview, Baer told me that his mother and father, who divorced, were Jewish Democrats. But his father converted to Christianity, and became a Baptist pastor. After a rocky adolescence, Baer himself converted to a more conservative form of evangelical Christianity. He told me that the only “real hope for our nation is in Jesus, but we need safeguards in the law.” He described gender-confirming health care for transgender patients as “mutilation.” Baer believes that the Supreme Court should overturn the legalization of same-sex marriage, and he opposes the use of surrogate pregnancy, which he called “renting a womb,” because it “permanently separates the children from their biological mothers.” He supports the Personhood Act—State Representative Click’s proposal to ban abortions at conception. As for Ohio’s much publicized ten-year-old rape victim, Baer told me that the girl would have been better off having her rapist’s baby and raising it, too, because a “child will always do best with the biological mother.”“Even if the mother is in grade school?” I asked.“Yes,” he said.
Baer is untroubled by the notion that gerrymandering has enabled minority rule. “I think the polls that matter are the polls of the folks turning out to vote,” he said.
The vast majority of Ohio residents clearly want legislative districts that are drawn more fairly. By 2015, the state’s gerrymandering problem had become so notorious that seventy-one per cent of Ohioans voted to pass an amendment to the state constitution demanding reforms. As a result, the Ohio constitution now requires that districts be shaped so that the makeup of the General Assembly is proportional to the political makeup of the state. In 2018, an even larger bipartisan majority—seventy-five per cent of Ohio voters—passed a similar resolution for the state’s congressional districts.
Though these reforms were democratically enacted, the voters’ will has thus far been ignored. Allison Russo, the minority leader in the House, who is one of two Democratic members of the seven-person redistricting commission, told me, “I was optimistic at the beginning.” But, she explained, the Republican members drafted a new districting map in secret, and earlier this year they presented it to her and the other Democrat just hours before a deadline. The proposed districts were nowhere near proportional to the state’s political makeup. The Democrats argued that the Republicans had flagrantly violated the reforms that had been written into the state constitution.
This past spring, an extraordinary series of legal fights were playing out. The Ohio Supreme Court struck down the map—and then struck down four more, after the Republican majority on the redistricting commission continued submitting maps that defied the spirit of the court’s orders. The chief justice of the Ohio Supreme Court was herself a Republican. Russo told me, “If norms were being obeyed, we would expect that there would have been an effort to follow the first Ohio Supreme Court decision. But that simply didn’t happen.”
The Republicans’ antics lasted so long that they basically ran out the clock. Election deadlines were looming, and the makeup of Ohio’s districts still hadn’t been settled. “They contrived a crisis,” Russo told me. At that point, a group allied with the Republicans, Ohio Right to Life, urged a federal court to intervene, on the ground that the delay was imperilling the fair administration of upcoming elections. The decision was made by a panel of three federal judges—two of whom had been appointed by Trump. Over the strenuous objection of the third judge, the two Trump judges ruled in the group’s favor, allowing the 2022 elections to proceed with a map so rigged that Ohio’s top judicial body had rejected it as unconstitutional.
On Twitter, Bill Seitz, the majority leader of the Ohio House, jeered at his Democratic opponents: “Too bad so sad. We win again.” He continued, “Now I know it’s been a tough night for all you libs. Pour yourself a glass of warm milk and you will sleep better. The game is over and you lost.”
Ohio Democrats, including David Pepper, are outraged. “The most corrupt state in the country was told more than five times that it was violating the law, and then the federal court said it was O.K.,” he told me. “If you add up all the abnormalities, it’s a case study—we’re seeing the disintegration of the rule of law in Ohio. They intentionally created an illegal map, and are laughing about it.”
Russo likens the Republicans’ stunning contempt for the Ohio Supreme Court to the January 6th insurrection: “People are saying, ‘Where is the accountability when you disregard the rule of law and attack democracy?’ Because that’s what’s happening in the statehouses, and Ohio is a perfect example.”
Pepper has resorted to giving nightly Zoom lectures to small groups of Democratic activists and donors from across the country, in the hope of opening their eyes to what’s happening at the ground level in the statehouses. Meanwhile, he recently co-founded a group called Blue Ohio to fund even seemingly doomed races in deep-red local districts. Even if these Democratic candidates lose in 2022, he says, they will at least be making arguments that voters in many districts would never otherwise hear. “You can’t just abandon half the country to extremism,” he warns.
As Pepper sees it, Republicans understand clearly that, “if it were a level playing field, their positions would be too unpopular to win.” But “this is not a democracy to them anymore.”
He told me, “There are two sides in America, but they’re fighting different battles. The blue side thinks their views are largely popular and democracy is relatively stable—and that they just need better outcomes in federal elections. The focus is on winning swing states in national elections. The other side, though, knows that our democracy isn’t stable—that it can be subverted through the statehouses. Blue America needs to reshape everything it does for that much deeper battle. It’s not about one cycle. It’s a long game.”
State Legislatures Are Torching Democracy
Even in moderate places like Ohio, gerrymandering has let unchecked Republicans pass extremist laws that could never make it through Congress.
By Jane Mayer
August 6, 2022
As the Supreme Court anticipated when it overturned Roe v. Wade, the battle over abortion rights is now being waged state by state. Nowhere is the fight more intense than in Ohio, which has long been considered a national bellwether. The state helped secure the Presidential victories of Barack Obama in 2008 and 2012, then went for Donald Trump in 2016 and 2020. Its residents tend to be politically moderate, and polls consistently show that a majority of Ohio voters support legal access to abortion, particularly for victims of rape and incest. Yet, as the recent ordeal of a pregnant ten-year-old rape victim has illustrated, Ohio’s state legislature has become radically out of synch with its constituents. In June, the state’s General Assembly instituted an abortion ban so extreme that the girl was forced to travel to Indiana to terminate her pregnancy. In early July, Dr. Caitlin Bernard, the Indiana obstetrician who treated the child, told me that she had a message for Ohio’s legislature: “This is your fault!”
Longtime Ohio politicians have been shocked by the state’s transformation into a center of extremist legislation, not just on abortion but on such divisive issues as guns and transgender rights. Ted Strickland, a Democrat who served as governor between 2007 and 2011, told me, “The legislature is as barbaric, primitive, and Neanderthal as any in the country. It’s really troubling.” When he was governor, he recalled, the two parties worked reasonably well together, but politics in Ohio “has changed.” The story is similar in several other states with reputations for being moderate, such as Wisconsin and Pennsylvania: their legislatures have also begun proposing laws so far to the right that they could never be passed in the U.S. Congress.
Ohio’s law prohibits abortion after six weeks—or even earlier, if doctors can detect fetal cardiac activity—unless the mother is at risk of death or serious permanent injury. Dr. Bernard noted that the bill’s opponents had warned about the proposed restrictions’ potential effect on underage rape victims. “It was literally a hypothetical that was discussed,” she told me. Indeed, at a hearing on April 27th, a Democrat in the Ohio House, Richard Brown, declared that if a thirteen-year-old girl “was raped by a serial rapist . . . this bill would require this thirteen-year-old to carry this felon’s fetus.”
The bill’s chief sponsor, State Representative Jean Schmidt, is an archconservative Republican who represents a district east of Cincinnati. At the hearing, she responded to Brown by arguing that the birth of a rapist’s baby would be “an opportunity.” She explained, “If a baby is created, it is a human life. . . . It is a shame that it happens. But there’s an opportunity for that woman, no matter how young or old she is, to make a determination about what she’s going to do to help that life be a productive human being.” The rapist’s offspring, she suggested, could grow up to “cure cancer.” Her remarks were deemed so outlandish that they were denounced everywhere from the Guardian to the New York Post.
According to David Niven, a political-science professor at the University of Cincinnati, a 2020 survey indicated that less than fourteen per cent of Ohioans support banning all abortions without exceptions for rape and incest. And a 2019 Quinnipiac University poll showed that only thirty-nine per cent of Ohio voters supported the kind of “heartbeat” law that the legislature passed. But the Democrats in the Ohio legislature had no way to mount resistance: since 2012, the Republicans have had a veto-proof super-majority in both chambers. The Democratic state representative Beth Liston, a pediatrician and an internist in Ohio, who voted against the bill, told me, “Doctors are going to be afraid of providing ordinary care. Women are going to die.”
In a referendum on August 2nd, Kansas voters strongly rejected an abortion ban, indicating that even voters in deep-red states—when given the chance to express themselves—oppose radical curtailments of reproductive rights. Yet Ohio voters have had no such recourse, and the General Assembly is poised to pass even more repressive restrictions on abortion when it returns from a summer recess. State Representative Gary Click—a pastor at the Fremont Baptist Temple and a Republican who serves the Sandusky area—has proposed a “Personhood Act,” which would prohibit any interference with embryonic development from the moment of conception, unless the mother’s life is endangered. If the bill passes, it could outlaw many kinds of contraception, not to mention various practices commonly used during in-vitro fertilization. In an e-mail, Click told me that “the ultimate question that needs to be answered” is “When does life begin?” He added, “I believe the answer to that question is self-evident.” Click is a graduate of an unaccredited Christian school in Michigan, Midwestern Baptist College, whose Web site says that “civil government is of divine appointment” and must be obeyed “except in things opposed to ‘the will of our Lord Jesus Christ.’ ”
Click acknowledged that the story of the ten-year-old rape victim is discomfiting, adding that “we all have a visceral reaction” to such a scenario, “regardless of one’s political leaning.” But the news had not made him question his position; rather, he questioned the girl’s story, calling it “suspicious,” and noting that the incident “fit too neatly” with the pro-choice agenda. (According to law-enforcement authorities, a twenty-seven-year-old Ohio man confessed to twice raping the girl when she was nine. He has since pleaded not guilty.) Click also echoed an argument made by Ohio’s Republican attorney general, Dave Yost, who claimed that the ten-year-old—“if she exists”—would have qualified for the new statute’s medical-emergency exception. This assertion, however, has been disputed by various doctors, including State Representative Liston. “I don’t know the child’s health condition,” she acknowledged to me. “But it’s hard to say that simply because she is young she would meet the requirement of risk as defined by the new law.” Mortality rates are generally higher for pregnant girls who are younger than fifteen, but, Liston said, “there’s nothing in the law that states that age is a sufficient exception.”
Click, who is a close ally of the Republican congressman Jim Jordan, is one of Ohio’s most extreme legislators, but he’s hardly out of place among the General Assembly’s increasingly radical Republican majority. Niven, the University of Cincinnati professor, told me that, according to one study, the laws being passed by Ohio’s statehouse place it to the right of the deeply conservative legislature in South Carolina. How did this happen, given that most Ohio voters are not ultra-conservatives? “It’s all about gerrymandering,” Niven told me. The legislative-district maps in Ohio have been deliberately drawn so that many Republicans effectively cannot lose, all but insuring that the Party has a veto-proof super-majority. As a result, the only contests most Republican incumbents need worry about are the primaries—and, because hard-core partisans dominate the vote in those contests, the sole threat most Republican incumbents face is the possibility of being outflanked by a rival even farther to the right. The national press has devoted considerable attention to the gerrymandering of congressional districts, but state legislative districts have received much less scrutiny, even though they are every bit as skewed, and in some states far more so. “Ohio is about the second most gerrymandered statehouse in the country,” Niven told me. “It doesn’t have a voter base to support a total abortion ban, yet that’s a likely outcome.” He concluded, “Ohio has become the Hindenburg of democracy.”
Three days before the Supreme Court overturned Roe, I went to a luncheonette in Columbus, Ohio, to meet with David Pepper, an election-law professor, a novelist, a onetime Cincinnati city councilman, and a former chairman of the state’s Democratic Party. Pepper, who is fifty-one, looked boyish and preppy in a polo shirt. He had recently become a small phenomenon on Twitter, having posted videos in which he delivered impassioned short lectures, punctuated with frantic scribbles on a whiteboard, about the growing crisis of democracy in America’s state legislatures. When he attended Yale Law School, in the nineties, his geniality and Buckeye boosterism had led his classmates to name him the Most Likely to Be President of the Cincinnati Board of Tourism, but he spoke to me with an almost desperate alarmism.
Last year, Pepper wrote a book, “Laboratories of Autocracy,” whose title offers a grim spin on a famous statement, attributed to the Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis, calling America’s state legislatures “laboratories of democracy.” The subtitle of Pepper’s book, “A Wake-Up Call from Behind the Lines,” is a bit more hopeful. He is determined to get the Democratic political establishment to stop lavishing almost all its money and attention on U.S. House, Senate, and gubernatorial races (say, the current Senate race in Ohio between Tim Ryan and J. D. Vance) and to focus more energy on what he sees as a greater emergency: the collapse of representative democracy in one statehouse after another.
Pepper understands that few Americans share his obsession. “No one knows anything about statehouses,” he said. “They can’t even name their state representatives. And it’s getting worse every year, since the local media’s dying and the statehouse bureaus are being hollowed out.” Columbus has an unusually strong press corps, but it is an exception. And it is precisely because so few Americans pay attention to state politics that the legislatures have become ideal arenas for manipulation by extremists and special interests—who often work in tandem. “I’m banging my head against the wall,” Pepper told me. With a nod to the political consultant James Carville, he added, “My God, Democrats, don’t you see it? It’s the statehouse, stupid! That’s where the attack is happening!”
Pepper scoffed at recent claims, made by conservative Justices on the U.S. Supreme Court, that the state legislatures are more suited than the judiciary to adjudicate the divisive issue of abortion. In Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the case that overturned Roe, Brett Kavanaugh issued a concurring opinion in which he argued that the Court was merely restoring “the people’s authority to address the issue of abortion through the processes of democratic self-government.” Pepper said of Kavanaugh’s concurrence, “It’s so disingenuous—total gaslighting. Many statehouses no longer have representative democracy. Because they’ve been gerrymandered, they don’t reflect the will of the people.”
With Trump, he believes, the situation became a lot worse—the former President “made people a little more willing to be lawless, and he gave oxygen to white supremacy.” But Pepper thinks that “people make a huge mistake when they equate the attack on democracy entirely with him.” In his view, Democrats, including President Joe Biden, who have portrayed Trump as a singular aberration are failing to see that “the Republican attack on democracy preceded him”—and that “if Trump was locked up tomorrow it would continue.”
The shift began, Pepper believes, with the shock of Obama’s 2008 victory. The election of the country’s first Black President provoked a racial and cultural backlash, and many Republican officials panicked that their party, which was overwhelmingly white, was facing a demographic demise. Swept out of power in Washington, the Republican Party’s smartest operatives decided to exploit the only opening they could find: the possibility of capturing state legislatures in the 2010 midterm elections. They knew that, in 2011, many congressional and local legislative districts would be redrawn based on data from the 2010 census—a process that occurs only once a decade. If Republicans reshaped enough districts, they could hugely advantage conservative candidates, even if many of the Party’s policies were unpopular.
In 2010, the Supreme Court issued its controversial Citizens United decision, which allowed dark money to flood American politics. Donors, many undisclosed, soon funnelled thirty million dollars into the Republicans’ redistricting project, called redmap, and the result was an astonishing success: the Party picked up nearly seven hundred legislative seats, and won the power to redraw the maps for four times as many districts as the Democrats.
Gerrymandering the shapes of districts to create safe seats is an old trick that has been used by both sides in American politics. I recently spoke with Jonathan Jakubowski, the chairman of the Republican Party in Wood County, Ohio, and the author of “Bellwether Blues: A Conservative Awakening of the Millennial Soul,” and he emphasized that, in the nineteen-eighties, it was the Democrats who gerrymandered the state’s districts. “We’re all equal-opportunity offenders,” he said. But the redmap project—powered by advances in digital mapping and by billionaire donors such as the fossil-fuel magnates Charles and David Koch—took electoral distortion to a new level. And Ohio, which had become one of the most fiercely fought battleground states in Presidential politics, was subjected to an especially tortured dissection.
The journalist David Daley tells the story of redmap in his 2016 book, “Ratf **ked.” By 2012, he writes, the Republicans’ plan had already begun to pay off handsomely: even though Obama was reëlected in Ohio that year, by three percentage points, and Sherrod Brown, a progressive Democrat, was easily reëlected to the Senate, Republicans had a resounding triumph in the state legislature. They won a 60–39 super-majority in the House.
The Ohio statehouse has grown only more lopsided in the past decade. Currently, the Republican members have a 64–35 advantage in the House and a 25–8 advantage in the Senate. This veto-proof majority makes the Republican leaders of both chambers arguably the most powerful officeholders in the state—and they proved it when they undermined Governor Mike DeWine’s initial public-health-minded approach to the covid-19 pandemic. DeWine is a Republican, yet he was a leader in imposing such emergency health orders as mask mandates and the closing of schools and businesses. Ohio voters had widely supported these measures. But anti-vaccine and anti-mask extremists in the statehouse passed a law stripping the Governor and his health director of the authority to issue such orders. (One Republican lawmaker, a doctor, suggested that “the colored population” was more vulnerable to covid-19 because “they do not wash their hands as well as other groups.” The lawmaker was subsequently named the chairman of the Ohio Senate’s health committee.) Since the legislature’s rebellion, DeWine—once regarded as a centrist conservative—has increasingly capitulated to his party’s radical base, on public-health policy and much else. (Reached for comment, a spokesperson for the Governor said that “we disagree with that sentiment.”) Daley told me that the redmap campaign “took a state that was slightly red and gave it a hue more like Elizabeth Taylor’s lipstick,” adding, “The upshot has been some of the most far-right, noxious, pay-for-play politics we’ve seen over the last decade. That’s what gerrymandering enables. When voters lose the ability to throw the rascals out, the rascals do whatever they please.”
Matt Huffman, the influential president of the Ohio Senate, recently said as much himself. Speaking in May to the Columbus Dispatch about the Republicans’ super-majority, he said, “We can kind of do what we want.”
For Pepper, the state’s transformation has been crushing. He has watched the reputation of Ohio’s public-school system slide as Republicans have siphoned off public funding to support failing, politically connected charter schools. In 2010, Education Week ranked the state’s schooling as the fifth best in the country; in 2021, U.S. News & World Report ranked it thirty-first. Last year, F.B.I. agents told USA Today that public-corruption cases in Ohio were the most egregious in the country. In the past five years, the state has had five speakers of the House, because two were forced out as a result of the biggest bribery scandals in Ohio’s history. Larry Householder, who was removed from office in July, 2020, is scheduled to be tried on federal racketeering charges this coming January.
This wasn’t the path that Pepper had foreseen for his state. A native of Cincinnati, he grew up in a relatively apolitical, upwardly mobile household: his father climbed the ranks at one of Ohio’s largest companies, Procter & Gamble, ultimately becoming its chairman. After Pepper graduated from Yale Law School, he returned to Cincinnati and clerked for Nathaniel R. Jones, a Black federal judge, who ignited in him an interest in public service. In 2001, Pepper ran for the city council, and to everyone’s surprise he won, partly owing to a catchy slogan: “Just Add Pepper.” After two terms in office, he moved up to the county commission, eventually presiding over it, and in 2010 he was recruited by the state’s Democratic governor, Strickland, to run for auditor, a statewide office. At the time, the auditor was one of five state officials on a commission overseeing the redistricting process, and could therefore act as an effective curb against gerrymandering. On the campaign trail, Pepper recalls, “I was running around, talking about gerrymandering, and no one knew what the hell I was talking about.” Meanwhile, his opponent was getting a torrent of suspicious contributions from people who worked for out-of-state energy companies—many of which, Pepper deduced, had ties to the controversial coal baron Bob Murray, the chief executive officer of Murray Energy, an Ohio-based company. Such donations initially made little sense to Pepper—the auditor’s role had nothing to do with coal mines—until he discovered that redmap had targeted his state, and that his candidacy stood in the project’s way. He lost the race. In 2014, he made a second bid for statewide office, running this time for Ohio attorney general. Again, he was defeated. In 2015, he became the chairman of the state’s Democratic Party, a position that he stepped down from at the end of 2020.
Pepper had become consumed by the problem of gerrymandering, but the subject drew only blank stares from Democratic Party officials. To counter this apathy, he told me, he decided “to write a novel about gerrymandering—which, of course, is a horrible idea.” In the book, “The People’s House,” a Russian oligarch modelled on Vladimir Putin rigs an American election after figuring out that, thanks to gerrymandering, he needs only to flip a few dozen swing districts. The book appeared in the summer of 2016, when Putin’s clandestine efforts on behalf of Trump were making headlines; Politico called the book “the thriller that predicted the Russia scandal.” Pepper was pleased about the media attention, but he was disappointed that more people didn’t focus on the novel’s message: “how bad gerrymandering is.” With evident frustration, he told me that media and political insiders prefer “to talk about politics in terms of personalities.”
A recent study by the Institute for Research and Education on Human Rights, a nonpartisan nonprofit, documents how deeply right-wing extremism has infiltrated U.S. statehouses. Of the 7,383 people who served in state legislatures in the 2021-22 session, eight hundred and seventy-five had joined far-right Facebook groups. (All but three were Republicans.) The study describes the fringe beliefs that many of these members shared, including “the idea that Christians constitute a core of the American citizenry and/or that government and public policies should be reshaped to reflect that.” A group promoting this view, the Ohio Christian Alliance, counts eleven Ohio state legislators among its Facebook members, including Gary Click. Last year, the organization helped block a bill, the Ohio Fairness Act, that would have barred housing and employment discrimination against the L.G.B.T.Q. community.
State Representative Casey Weinstein, a second-term Democrat from a suburban swing district between Akron and Cleveland, and one of the General Assembly’s two Jewish members, told me that he’s recently become “really concerned” about a new level of extremism. On January 23, 2022, a protest outside his house shattered a peaceful Sunday afternoon with his wife and young children. Some thirty vehicles blocked the entrance to his driveway; one had a flag bearing the message “kneel for the cross.” Weinstein told me, “I thought it was a Trump group, but it turned out to be a church, Liberty Valley, near Macedonia, Ohio. Some of these churches are militant, and some are basically militias operating under the guise of religion. They’re weaponizing religion into a power grab.” He went on, “So, I’m the Jew, and they came to my house to try to intimidate me and my family. That’s what’s happening, and where this is going.”
Weinstein became further alarmed this past March, when Republicans in the statehouse pushed legislation prohibiting public-school teachers from teaching “divisive concepts.” The bill, aimed at censoring class discussions of critical race theory—which was never part of the Ohio public-school curriculum to begin with—threatened teachers with suspension unless they neutrally instructed students about “both sides of a political or ideological belief.” When Morgan Trau, an enterprising statehouse reporter for a television station in Cleveland, pressed one of the bill’s co-sponsors, Sarah Fowler Arthur, for details, the lawmaker provoked an uproar by offering the Holocaust as an example of a topic that required a “both sides” approach. “You should talk about these atrocities that have happened in history, but you also do have an obligation to point out the value that each individual brings to the table,” Fowler Arthur said, adding that students should consider the Holocaust “from the perspective of a German soldier.” As Fowler Arthur went on, she seemed to misunderstand both the scope and the nature of the Holocaust, referring to it as an event in which “hundreds of thousands,” rather than six million, Jews were killed, and suggesting that victims were murdered “for having a different color of skin.” Weinstein and other Jewish leaders in Ohio vociferously denounced what came to be known as the Both Sides of the Holocaust Bill. “That was enough for me,” Weinstein told me. “What unique value did the German Nazis bring to the table?” He noted that Fowler Arthur, who sits on the Ohio House’s Primary and Secondary Education Committee, “was homeschooled her entire life, has never set foot in a public school, and elected not to go to college.” Weinstein added, “There’s nothing wrong with that, until she starts censoring what can and cannot be taught in public schools.” (Fowler Arthur declined to comment.)
The real intent behind attacking public-school curricula, Weinstein believes, was to “fire up the Republican base” about the teaching of slavery, the Civil War, and the civil-rights movement—in other words, to get out the conservative vote by inflaming the racial grievances of white Ohioans. The “divisive concepts” bill championed by Fowler Arthur opposes teaching any reading of American history suggesting that “the United States and its institutions are systemically racist.”
Pepper noted that the efforts to control the curriculum in Ohio are “very similar to the meltdown in democracy in other places.” Like Russia’s attempts to censor what is taught to students about Ukraine, he said, the legislation promoted by Fowler Arthur represents an attempt to put forth a sanitized view of history—in this case, “to ban teaching parts of our history that cast a bad light on white America.” Pepper asked me, “If this was happening in another country, what would you say? You’d say, ‘Oh, my gosh—your democracy is under attack!’ Well, it’s happening in Columbus.” Indeed, he warned, it’s happening in state capitols across the country.
Ohio Republicans put the “divisive concepts” bill on hold after the idea of teaching neutrally about the Holocaust provoked national condemnation. But Ohio’s General Assembly otherwise proceeded at a breakneck pace this past spring—debating a bill enabling the inspection of the genitals of transgender student athletes, and passing a raft of legislation about guns. Many of these new laws were so extreme that they inspired fierce protests from Ohio residents.
A 2018 poll conducted by Baldwin Wallace University, in Berea, Ohio, showed that Ohioans, by clear majorities ranging from sixty-one to seventy-five per cent, wanted the state legislature to enact new gun-control laws: banning high-powered semi-automatic rifles, including the AR-15; banning extended ammunition magazines; banning bump stocks that, in effect, make semi-automatic rifles automatic; enacting a mandatory waiting period for gun purchases; raising the minimum age to buy semi-automatic rifles from eighteen to twenty-one. But no such measures were passed. Instead, the state legislature has turned Ohio into a so-called “stand your ground” state, where it is legal for residents to kill a trespasser without first attempting to de-escalate the situation. Lawmakers also passed a bill that allows Ohioans aged twenty-one or older to carry concealed handguns virtually anywhere, without first obtaining a permit or undergoing a background check and firearms training. In response to the school massacre in Uvalde, Texas, the Ohio General Assembly rushed through a law that enables any school board to arm teachers and other staff—including cafeteria workers and bus drivers—after only minimal gun training. The legislation was written by a lawmaker who owns a business in tactical-firearms training, and the lawmaker’s business partner gave testimony in the Ohio Senate in support of the bill, which specified that armed school personnel needed only twenty-four hours of firearms training. (Law-enforcement officers in Ohio must undergo some seven hundred hours of training.) The bill was so extreme that it was denounced in hearings by more than three hundred and fifty speakers—including representatives of the Ohio Federation of Teachers and of the state’s largest police organization, the Fraternal Order of Police of Ohio.
In an interview, Michael Weinman, the head of government affairs for the Ohio chapter of the Fraternal Order of Police, which represents some twenty-four thousand law-enforcement officers, described the new gun laws as “dangerous” and “insane.” Thanks to the legislation, he explained, “anyone can come into Ohio and carry a concealed firearm,” and need not mention having the gun if stopped by law enforcement. Weinman pointed out that the law about arming school employees contains no provision requiring that lethal weapons be locked safely, adding, “Can you imagine a kindergarten student sitting down to be read to, and there’s a gun in the kid’s face?” He noted that, other than teachers, most employees of a school “haven’t been taught how to discipline people—and most school shooters are students.” Melissa Cropper, the president of the Ohio Federation of Teachers, told me, “It’s unbelievable. The more guns you have in schools, the more accidents and deaths can happen, especially with such minimal training.” She added, “We are every bit as bad as Texas and Florida when it comes to these laws. We are becoming more and more extreme.”
Weinman said that the rightward turn on guns in Ohio has been driven, in no small part, by “very aggressive gun groups,” some of which profit from extremism by stoking fear. This helps to sell memberships and to expand valuable mailing lists. “These groups are very confrontational,” Weinman said. He recently testified in the Ohio General Assembly against loosening state gun laws; afterward, he told me, Chris Dorr, the head of a particularly militant group called Ohio Gun Owners, chased him out of the room and down a hallway, demanding that he be fired. In an online post, Dorr, who maintains that the National Rifle Association is too soft in its defense of gun rights, posted a closeup shot of Weinman with the caption “remember this face,” adding in another post that Weinman is “the most aggressive gun-rights hater in Ohio.” Dorr and his two brothers, Ben and Aaron, operate affiliated gun groups around the country, which share the slogan “No Compromise.” During the pandemic, the Dorrs’ groups expanded into other vehemently anti-government causes, and helped lead anti-mask and anti-vax protests. Niven, the political scientist, said that the Dorrs “cultivate relationships with the hardest-right members of the state legislature, and can get their bills heard.” Ninety per cent of Ohio voters favor universal background checks for people trying to buy guns, Niven noted, “but the Democrats can’t get a hearing.”
Teresa Fedor, a Democratic state senator who has served in the General Assembly for twenty-two years, described Ohio’s new gun and abortion laws as the worst legislation that she has ever witnessed being passed. She told me, “It feels like Gilead”—the fictional theocracy in Margaret Atwood’s novel “The Handmaid’s Tale.” Fedor added, “We’ve got state-mandated pregnancies, even of a ten-year-old.”
The issue is personal to her. Fedor, a grandmother, is a former teacher; in her twenties, when she was serving in the military, she was raped. She had an abortion. Fedor was a divorced single mother at the time, trying to earn a teaching degree. “I thought my life was going to be over,” she said. “But abortion was accessible, and it was a way back. To me, that choice meant I’d be able to have a future. I feel like I made it to the other side, and have the life I dreamed of as a little girl, because I had that choice.” Without the freedom to have an abortion, she said, “I wouldn’t be a state senator today.”
In 2015, during a floor debate over abortion policy, Fedor testified about her experience. As she was speaking, she was enraged to notice that another lawmaker, who opposed her view, was chuckling. She said that Republicans who serve in districts that have been engineered to be impervious to voters are “just not listening to the public, period—there’s no need to.” Many of the most extreme bills, Fedor believes, have been written not by the legislators themselves but by local and national right-wing pressure groups, which can raise dark money and turn out primary voters in force. Nationally, the most influential such group is the American Legislative Exchange Council, an organization that essentially outsources the drafting of laws to self-interested businesses. In Ohio, Fedor told me, it is often extreme religious groups that exert undue influence. She then noted that one such organization is about to have “an office right across from the statehouse chamber.”
Facing Ohio’s Greek Revival statehouse is a vacant six-story building that is slated to become the new headquarters of the Center for Christian Virtue, a once obscure nonprofit that an anti-pornography advocate founded four decades ago, in the basement of a Cincinnati church. In 2015 and 2016, the left-leaning Southern Poverty Law Center classified the organization as a hate group, citing homophobic statements on its Web site that described “homosexual behavior” as “unhealthy and destructive to the individual” and “to society as a whole.” The group subsequently deleted the offending statements, and, according to the Columbus Dispatch, it has recently evolved into “the state’s premier lobbying force on Christian conservative issues.” In the past five years, its full-time staff has expanded from two to thirteen, and its annual budget has risen from four hundred thousand dollars to $1.2 million. The group’s president, Aaron Baer, told me that the new headquarters—the group bought the building for $1.25 million last year, and plans to spend an additional $3.75 million renovating it—is very much meant to send a signal. “The message is that we’re going to be in this for the long haul,” Baer said. “We’re going to have a voice on the direction of the state—and the nation, God willing.”
The center already commands unusual influence. E-mails obtained by a watchdog group, Campaign for Accountability, show that Baer has been in regular contact with Governor DeWine’s office about an array of policies. The center’s board of directors includes two of the state’s biggest Republican donors, one of whom, the corporate lobbyist David Myhal, previously served as DeWine’s chief fund-raiser. A third director, Tom Minnery, who has served as the center’s board chair, is a chairman emeritus of the Alliance Defending Freedom, a powerful national legal organization that was created as the religious right’s answer to the American Civil Liberties Union. And, until earlier this year, a fourth director at the center was Seth Morgan, who is currently the vice-chairman of the A.D.F.
The most recently available I.R.S. records show that the center and the A.D.F. share several funding sources—notably, the huge, opaque National Christian Foundation—and have amplified each other’s messages. In April, the center celebrated the A.D.F.’s legal defense of an Ohio college professor who refused to use a student’s preferred pronouns. In addition, the center works in concert with about a hundred and thirty Catholic and evangelical schools, twenty-two hundred churches, and what it calls a Christian Chamber of Commerce of aligned businesses. Jake Grumbach, a political scientist specializing in state government who teaches at the University of Washington, told me that the center illustrates what political scientists are calling the “nationalization of local politics.”
The Center for Christian Virtue appears to be the true sponsor of some of Ohio’s most extreme right-wing bills. Gary Click, the Sandusky-area pastor serving in the Ohio House, acknowledged to me that the group had prompted him to introduce a bill opposing gender-affirming care for transgender youths, regardless of parental consent. The center, in essence, handed Click the wording for the legislation. Click confirmed to me that the center “is very proactive on Cap Square”—the Ohio capitol—adding, “All legislators are aware of their presence.” Click’s transgender bill isn’t yet law, but a related bill, also promoted by the center, has passed in the Ohio House. It stipulates that any student on a girls’ sports team participating in interscholastic conferences must have been born with female genitals. The legislation also calls for genital inspections. Niven observed that “many anti-trans sports bills were percolating” in Republican-ruled statehouses, but “leave it to Ohio to pass a provision for mandatory genital inspection if anyone questions their gender.” He went on, “That’s gerrymandering. You can’t say ‘Show me your daughter’ and stay in office unless you have unlosable districts.”
In a phone interview, Baer told me that his mother and father, who divorced, were Jewish Democrats. But his father converted to Christianity, and became a Baptist pastor. After a rocky adolescence, Baer himself converted to a more conservative form of evangelical Christianity. He told me that the only “real hope for our nation is in Jesus, but we need safeguards in the law.” He described gender-confirming health care for transgender patients as “mutilation.” Baer believes that the Supreme Court should overturn the legalization of same-sex marriage, and he opposes the use of surrogate pregnancy, which he called “renting a womb,” because it “permanently separates the children from their biological mothers.” He supports the Personhood Act—State Representative Click’s proposal to ban abortions at conception. As for Ohio’s much publicized ten-year-old rape victim, Baer told me that the girl would have been better off having her rapist’s baby and raising it, too, because a “child will always do best with the biological mother.”“Even if the mother is in grade school?” I asked.“Yes,” he said.
Baer is untroubled by the notion that gerrymandering has enabled minority rule. “I think the polls that matter are the polls of the folks turning out to vote,” he said.
The vast majority of Ohio residents clearly want legislative districts that are drawn more fairly. By 2015, the state’s gerrymandering problem had become so notorious that seventy-one per cent of Ohioans voted to pass an amendment to the state constitution demanding reforms. As a result, the Ohio constitution now requires that districts be shaped so that the makeup of the General Assembly is proportional to the political makeup of the state. In 2018, an even larger bipartisan majority—seventy-five per cent of Ohio voters—passed a similar resolution for the state’s congressional districts.
Though these reforms were democratically enacted, the voters’ will has thus far been ignored. Allison Russo, the minority leader in the House, who is one of two Democratic members of the seven-person redistricting commission, told me, “I was optimistic at the beginning.” But, she explained, the Republican members drafted a new districting map in secret, and earlier this year they presented it to her and the other Democrat just hours before a deadline. The proposed districts were nowhere near proportional to the state’s political makeup. The Democrats argued that the Republicans had flagrantly violated the reforms that had been written into the state constitution.
This past spring, an extraordinary series of legal fights were playing out. The Ohio Supreme Court struck down the map—and then struck down four more, after the Republican majority on the redistricting commission continued submitting maps that defied the spirit of the court’s orders. The chief justice of the Ohio Supreme Court was herself a Republican. Russo told me, “If norms were being obeyed, we would expect that there would have been an effort to follow the first Ohio Supreme Court decision. But that simply didn’t happen.”
The Republicans’ antics lasted so long that they basically ran out the clock. Election deadlines were looming, and the makeup of Ohio’s districts still hadn’t been settled. “They contrived a crisis,” Russo told me. At that point, a group allied with the Republicans, Ohio Right to Life, urged a federal court to intervene, on the ground that the delay was imperilling the fair administration of upcoming elections. The decision was made by a panel of three federal judges—two of whom had been appointed by Trump. Over the strenuous objection of the third judge, the two Trump judges ruled in the group’s favor, allowing the 2022 elections to proceed with a map so rigged that Ohio’s top judicial body had rejected it as unconstitutional.
On Twitter, Bill Seitz, the majority leader of the Ohio House, jeered at his Democratic opponents: “Too bad so sad. We win again.” He continued, “Now I know it’s been a tough night for all you libs. Pour yourself a glass of warm milk and you will sleep better. The game is over and you lost.”
Ohio Democrats, including David Pepper, are outraged. “The most corrupt state in the country was told more than five times that it was violating the law, and then the federal court said it was O.K.,” he told me. “If you add up all the abnormalities, it’s a case study—we’re seeing the disintegration of the rule of law in Ohio. They intentionally created an illegal map, and are laughing about it.”
Russo likens the Republicans’ stunning contempt for the Ohio Supreme Court to the January 6th insurrection: “People are saying, ‘Where is the accountability when you disregard the rule of law and attack democracy?’ Because that’s what’s happening in the statehouses, and Ohio is a perfect example.”
Pepper has resorted to giving nightly Zoom lectures to small groups of Democratic activists and donors from across the country, in the hope of opening their eyes to what’s happening at the ground level in the statehouses. Meanwhile, he recently co-founded a group called Blue Ohio to fund even seemingly doomed races in deep-red local districts. Even if these Democratic candidates lose in 2022, he says, they will at least be making arguments that voters in many districts would never otherwise hear. “You can’t just abandon half the country to extremism,” he warns.
As Pepper sees it, Republicans understand clearly that, “if it were a level playing field, their positions would be too unpopular to win.” But “this is not a democracy to them anymore.”
He told me, “There are two sides in America, but they’re fighting different battles. The blue side thinks their views are largely popular and democracy is relatively stable—and that they just need better outcomes in federal elections. The focus is on winning swing states in national elections. The other side, though, knows that our democracy isn’t stable—that it can be subverted through the statehouses. Blue America needs to reshape everything it does for that much deeper battle. It’s not about one cycle. It’s a long game.”
Re: TrumpReich in action
It is indeed about the long game, and the radical right is winning.
Never forget.
Never forget.
Re: TrumpReich in action
WAPO today :
Republican lawmakers on Sunday successfully stripped a $35 price cap on the cost of insulin for many patients from the ambitious legislative package Democrats are moving through Congress this weekend, invoking arcane Senate rules to jettison the measure.
The insulin cap is a long-running ambition of Democrats, who want it to apply to patients on Medicare and private insurance. Republicans left the portion that applies to Medicare patients untouched but stripped the insulin cap for other patients. Bipartisan talks on a broader insulin pricing bill faltered earlier this year.
The Senate parliamentarian earlier in the weekend ruled that part of the Democrats’ cap, included in the Inflation Reduction Act, did not comply with the rules that allow them to advance a bill under the process known as reconciliation — a tactic that helps them avert a GOP filibuster. That gave the Republicans an opening to jettison it.
“Republicans have just gone on the record in favor of expensive insulin,” said Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.). “After years of tough talk about taking on insulin makers, Republicans have once against wilted in the face of heat from Big Pharma."
Some Republicans did support the price cap in the 57-43 vote for the measure, but not enough joined Democrats in support of it to meet the threshold for passage.
More than 1 in 5 insulin users on private medical insurance pay more than $35 per month for the medicine, according to a recent analysis from the Kaiser Family Foundation.
Some 7 million Americans require insulin daily. A Yale University study found that 14 percent of those insulin users are spending more than 40 percent of their income after food and housing costs on the medicine.
Despite an adverse ruling from the chamber’s parliamentarian, Democrats opted to keep the full price cap provision in the bill anyway. That gave Republicans, led in debate by Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.), an opening for a challenge on the Senate floor. Democrats would have needed 60 votes — their entire caucus plus the support of 10 GOP members — to beat back that challenge. They came up short.
The fight was a policy loss for Democrats, but it was also a political win, as lowering the price of drugs like insulin is popular with voters.
"The only way it doesn’t pass is if folks on the other side of the aisle decide to block it,” said Sen. Raphael G. Warnock (D-Ga.), who had previously put forward legislation calling for a price cap.
GOP lawmakers had earlier tried to offer their own, more scaled-back version of an insulin price limit, but Democrats rejected it as too narrow.
“The cost of insulin isn’t just out of control, it is devastating people," Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.) said on the Senate floor, imploring the GOP not to strip the price cap from the bill. "This should not be a hard vote to cast.”
(Rach3:So far, the Dems have done a poor job capitalizing on GOP terrors, even egregious acts by Trump ReichFuhrers Abbott and DeSantis.)
Republican lawmakers on Sunday successfully stripped a $35 price cap on the cost of insulin for many patients from the ambitious legislative package Democrats are moving through Congress this weekend, invoking arcane Senate rules to jettison the measure.
The insulin cap is a long-running ambition of Democrats, who want it to apply to patients on Medicare and private insurance. Republicans left the portion that applies to Medicare patients untouched but stripped the insulin cap for other patients. Bipartisan talks on a broader insulin pricing bill faltered earlier this year.
The Senate parliamentarian earlier in the weekend ruled that part of the Democrats’ cap, included in the Inflation Reduction Act, did not comply with the rules that allow them to advance a bill under the process known as reconciliation — a tactic that helps them avert a GOP filibuster. That gave the Republicans an opening to jettison it.
“Republicans have just gone on the record in favor of expensive insulin,” said Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.). “After years of tough talk about taking on insulin makers, Republicans have once against wilted in the face of heat from Big Pharma."
Some Republicans did support the price cap in the 57-43 vote for the measure, but not enough joined Democrats in support of it to meet the threshold for passage.
More than 1 in 5 insulin users on private medical insurance pay more than $35 per month for the medicine, according to a recent analysis from the Kaiser Family Foundation.
Some 7 million Americans require insulin daily. A Yale University study found that 14 percent of those insulin users are spending more than 40 percent of their income after food and housing costs on the medicine.
Despite an adverse ruling from the chamber’s parliamentarian, Democrats opted to keep the full price cap provision in the bill anyway. That gave Republicans, led in debate by Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.), an opening for a challenge on the Senate floor. Democrats would have needed 60 votes — their entire caucus plus the support of 10 GOP members — to beat back that challenge. They came up short.
The fight was a policy loss for Democrats, but it was also a political win, as lowering the price of drugs like insulin is popular with voters.
"The only way it doesn’t pass is if folks on the other side of the aisle decide to block it,” said Sen. Raphael G. Warnock (D-Ga.), who had previously put forward legislation calling for a price cap.
GOP lawmakers had earlier tried to offer their own, more scaled-back version of an insulin price limit, but Democrats rejected it as too narrow.
“The cost of insulin isn’t just out of control, it is devastating people," Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.) said on the Senate floor, imploring the GOP not to strip the price cap from the bill. "This should not be a hard vote to cast.”
(Rach3:So far, the Dems have done a poor job capitalizing on GOP terrors, even egregious acts by Trump ReichFuhrers Abbott and DeSantis.)
Re: TrumpReich in action
Maps in Four States Were Ruled Illegal Gerrymanders. They’re Being Used Anyway.
A Supreme Court shift, frowning on changes close to elections, gives House Republicans a big advantage in November.
By Michael Wines
Aug. 8, 2022, 5:00 a.m. ET
WASHINGTON — Since January, judges in Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana and Ohio have found that Republican legislators illegally drew those states’ congressional maps along racial or partisan lines, or that a trial very likely would conclude that they did. In years past, judges who have reached similar findings have ordered new maps, or had an expert draw them, to ensure that coming elections were fair.
But a shift in election law philosophy at the Supreme Court, combined with a new aggressiveness among Republicans who drew the maps, has upended that model for the elections in November. This time, all four states are using the rejected maps, and questions about their legality for future elections will be hashed out in court later.
The immediate upshot, election experts say, is that Republicans almost certainly will gain more seats in midterm elections at a time when Democrats already are struggling to maintain their bare majority.
David Wasserman, who follows congressional redistricting for the Cook Political Report, said that using rejected maps in the four states, which make up nearly 10 percent of the seats in the House, was likely to hand Republicans five to seven House seats that they otherwise would not have won.
Some election law scholars say they are troubled by the consequences in the long run.
“We’re seeing a revolution in courts’ willingness to allow elections to go forward under illegal or unconstitutional rules,” Richard L. Hasen, a professor at the U.C.L.A. School of Law and the director of its Safeguarding Democracy Project, said in an interview. “And that’s creating a situation in which states are getting one free illegal election before they have to change their rules.”
Behind much of the change is the Supreme Court’s embrace of an informal legal doctrine stating that judges should not order changes in election procedures too close to an actual election. In a 2006 case, Purcell v. Gonzalez, the court refused to stop an Arizona voter ID law from taking effect days before an election because that could “result in voter confusion and consequent incentive to remain away from the polls.”
The Purcell principle, as it is called, offers almost no guidance beyond that. But the Supreme Court has significantly broadened its scope in this decade, mostly through rulings on applications that seek emergency relief such as stays of lower court rulings, in which the justices’ reasoning often is cryptic or even unexplained.
Conservatives say the Supreme Court’s wariness of interfering with election preparations is common sense.
“It creates all kinds of logistical issues. Candidates don’t know where they’re running,” said Michael A. Carvin, a lawyer at the firm Jones Day who has handled redistricting cases for Republican clients in a host of states and helped lead the legal team supporting George W. Bush in the 2000 presidential election dispute. Should the original map be upheld later, he said, returning to it would be “triply disruptive to the system.”
Critics argue, though, that the court is effectively saying that a smoothly run election is more important than a just one. And they note that the longstanding guidance in redistricting cases — from the court’s historic one person, one vote ruling in 1964 — is that using an illegal map in an election should be “the unusual case.”
The Purcell doctrine is not always applied to Republicans’ benefit. In March, the court cited an approaching primary election in refusing to block a North Carolina Supreme Court order undoing a Republican gerrymander of that state’s congressional map.
But scholars say such decisions are the exception. “It just so happens that the unexplained rules in election cases have a remarkable tendency to save Republicans and hurt Democrats,” said Steven I. Vladeck, a University of Texas law professor who addresses the issue in a forthcoming book, “The Shadow Docket.”
“It would be one thing if the court was giving us a compelling or even plausible explanation,” he added. “But the granting of a stay these days is often done with no explanation at all.”
The headline example came in January in Alabama, where a three-judge federal panel said the State Legislature had likely violated the Voting Rights Act by diluting Black voters’ power in its new map of the state’s seven House seats.
The judges ordered the Legislature to draw a new map exactly four months before the May primary elections — a stretch of time that, not long ago, another Supreme Court would have considered generous.
But the Supreme Court issued an emergency stay blocking the order two weeks later, restoring the rejected map for this election. Justice Brett Kavanaugh called the Purcell principle “a bedrock tenet of election law: When an election is close at hand, the rules of the road must be clear and settled.”
In dissent, Justice Elena Kagan shot back: “Alabama is not entitled to keep violating Black Alabamians’ voting rights just because the court’s order came down in the first month of an election year.”
A month later, a federal judge in Georgia cited Mr. Kavanaugh’s words in deciding not to order a new congressional map for that state — this time three months before primary elections — even though he said the State Legislature’s map, like Alabama’s, probably violated the Voting Rights Act.
And in June, the Supreme Court blocked a lower court order for a new congressional map in Louisiana on the same grounds. The justices did not explain their reasoning.
Allowing elections using maps rejected by lower courts has been exceedingly rare in the last half-century. The principal instances occurred after the Supreme Court’s one person, one vote ruling in 1964 forced the redrafting of political maps nationwide.
Politicians have taken notice of the change. In Georgia, the Republican governor, Brian P. Kemp, waited 40 days after the legislature approved a congressional map before signing it into law, leaving a sliver of time for the succeeding court battle.
“The relevant actors are well aware of both Purcell and the court’s inconsistent application of it,” Professor Vladeck said. “So there’s plenty of upside, and very little downside, to try to manipulate the circumstances as much as possible.”
Slow-walking redistricting issues is not confined to federal courts. In Ohio, both congressional and legislative elections this year are being run under maps that the state Supreme Court has ruled are unconstitutional partisan gerrymanders.
The G.O.P.-led Ohio Redistricting Commission, which drew the rejected maps, was threatened with contempt for foot-dragging in producing maps of State Legislature districts. It waited nearly seven weeks this spring to produce a second congressional map after the state Supreme Court rejected the first one.
A three-judge federal panel later imposed the Redistricting Commission’s state legislative maps this spring, citing looming election deadlines. The state Supreme Court again rejected the second congressional map as a partisan gerrymander — but in July, after a long trial, and months after the map had been used in the state’s May primary election.
“What happened in Ohio is an especially egregious flouting of the rule of law, purely for partisan advantage and contrary to what the state’s voters wanted with redistricting reform,” said Ned Foley, an Ohio State University law professor and a leading election law expert. “It’s outright defiance of democracy, and a warning sign for the rest of the nation on how ugly and dangerous this kind of power-grabbing can be.”
Critics say they agree that practical issues matter when elections are imminent. But the Supreme Court “is putting next to no weight on the democratic harms caused by unlawful district maps, while it overstates the administrative inconvenience of redrawing districts,” said Nicholas Stephanopoulos, an election law scholar at Harvard University.
There is, however, one other potential explanation for allowing the use of the rejected maps in November. Some election law experts speculate that the court intends to reverse lower-court decisions striking down the Alabama and Louisiana maps after it hears a crucial elections case in October.
The Voting Rights Act clause invoked in those cases, known as Section Two, is used mostly to pursue racial bias in political maps. Mr. Carvin, the Jones Day lawyer, said he fully expected the court to take aim at it this term.
“The reality on the ground has changed dramatically” since the act was passed, he said, citing the election of politicians like former President Barack Obama with broad support among white voters. “The Pavlovian requirement that states with a history of racial discrimination need to automatically max out the number of minority-majority districts is no longer the law.”
Critics of the court say it very much is the law, seeing as federal judges in Alabama, Georgia and Louisiana have said so this year. And that is why maps deemed in violation of it should have been replaced, Professor Stephanopoulos said.
But he also said he believed Mr. Carvin’s prediction was probably correct.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/08/us/e ... icans.html
A Supreme Court shift, frowning on changes close to elections, gives House Republicans a big advantage in November.
By Michael Wines
Aug. 8, 2022, 5:00 a.m. ET
WASHINGTON — Since January, judges in Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana and Ohio have found that Republican legislators illegally drew those states’ congressional maps along racial or partisan lines, or that a trial very likely would conclude that they did. In years past, judges who have reached similar findings have ordered new maps, or had an expert draw them, to ensure that coming elections were fair.
But a shift in election law philosophy at the Supreme Court, combined with a new aggressiveness among Republicans who drew the maps, has upended that model for the elections in November. This time, all four states are using the rejected maps, and questions about their legality for future elections will be hashed out in court later.
The immediate upshot, election experts say, is that Republicans almost certainly will gain more seats in midterm elections at a time when Democrats already are struggling to maintain their bare majority.
David Wasserman, who follows congressional redistricting for the Cook Political Report, said that using rejected maps in the four states, which make up nearly 10 percent of the seats in the House, was likely to hand Republicans five to seven House seats that they otherwise would not have won.
Some election law scholars say they are troubled by the consequences in the long run.
“We’re seeing a revolution in courts’ willingness to allow elections to go forward under illegal or unconstitutional rules,” Richard L. Hasen, a professor at the U.C.L.A. School of Law and the director of its Safeguarding Democracy Project, said in an interview. “And that’s creating a situation in which states are getting one free illegal election before they have to change their rules.”
Behind much of the change is the Supreme Court’s embrace of an informal legal doctrine stating that judges should not order changes in election procedures too close to an actual election. In a 2006 case, Purcell v. Gonzalez, the court refused to stop an Arizona voter ID law from taking effect days before an election because that could “result in voter confusion and consequent incentive to remain away from the polls.”
The Purcell principle, as it is called, offers almost no guidance beyond that. But the Supreme Court has significantly broadened its scope in this decade, mostly through rulings on applications that seek emergency relief such as stays of lower court rulings, in which the justices’ reasoning often is cryptic or even unexplained.
Conservatives say the Supreme Court’s wariness of interfering with election preparations is common sense.
“It creates all kinds of logistical issues. Candidates don’t know where they’re running,” said Michael A. Carvin, a lawyer at the firm Jones Day who has handled redistricting cases for Republican clients in a host of states and helped lead the legal team supporting George W. Bush in the 2000 presidential election dispute. Should the original map be upheld later, he said, returning to it would be “triply disruptive to the system.”
Critics argue, though, that the court is effectively saying that a smoothly run election is more important than a just one. And they note that the longstanding guidance in redistricting cases — from the court’s historic one person, one vote ruling in 1964 — is that using an illegal map in an election should be “the unusual case.”
The Purcell doctrine is not always applied to Republicans’ benefit. In March, the court cited an approaching primary election in refusing to block a North Carolina Supreme Court order undoing a Republican gerrymander of that state’s congressional map.
But scholars say such decisions are the exception. “It just so happens that the unexplained rules in election cases have a remarkable tendency to save Republicans and hurt Democrats,” said Steven I. Vladeck, a University of Texas law professor who addresses the issue in a forthcoming book, “The Shadow Docket.”
“It would be one thing if the court was giving us a compelling or even plausible explanation,” he added. “But the granting of a stay these days is often done with no explanation at all.”
The headline example came in January in Alabama, where a three-judge federal panel said the State Legislature had likely violated the Voting Rights Act by diluting Black voters’ power in its new map of the state’s seven House seats.
The judges ordered the Legislature to draw a new map exactly four months before the May primary elections — a stretch of time that, not long ago, another Supreme Court would have considered generous.
But the Supreme Court issued an emergency stay blocking the order two weeks later, restoring the rejected map for this election. Justice Brett Kavanaugh called the Purcell principle “a bedrock tenet of election law: When an election is close at hand, the rules of the road must be clear and settled.”
In dissent, Justice Elena Kagan shot back: “Alabama is not entitled to keep violating Black Alabamians’ voting rights just because the court’s order came down in the first month of an election year.”
A month later, a federal judge in Georgia cited Mr. Kavanaugh’s words in deciding not to order a new congressional map for that state — this time three months before primary elections — even though he said the State Legislature’s map, like Alabama’s, probably violated the Voting Rights Act.
And in June, the Supreme Court blocked a lower court order for a new congressional map in Louisiana on the same grounds. The justices did not explain their reasoning.
Allowing elections using maps rejected by lower courts has been exceedingly rare in the last half-century. The principal instances occurred after the Supreme Court’s one person, one vote ruling in 1964 forced the redrafting of political maps nationwide.
Politicians have taken notice of the change. In Georgia, the Republican governor, Brian P. Kemp, waited 40 days after the legislature approved a congressional map before signing it into law, leaving a sliver of time for the succeeding court battle.
“The relevant actors are well aware of both Purcell and the court’s inconsistent application of it,” Professor Vladeck said. “So there’s plenty of upside, and very little downside, to try to manipulate the circumstances as much as possible.”
Slow-walking redistricting issues is not confined to federal courts. In Ohio, both congressional and legislative elections this year are being run under maps that the state Supreme Court has ruled are unconstitutional partisan gerrymanders.
The G.O.P.-led Ohio Redistricting Commission, which drew the rejected maps, was threatened with contempt for foot-dragging in producing maps of State Legislature districts. It waited nearly seven weeks this spring to produce a second congressional map after the state Supreme Court rejected the first one.
A three-judge federal panel later imposed the Redistricting Commission’s state legislative maps this spring, citing looming election deadlines. The state Supreme Court again rejected the second congressional map as a partisan gerrymander — but in July, after a long trial, and months after the map had been used in the state’s May primary election.
“What happened in Ohio is an especially egregious flouting of the rule of law, purely for partisan advantage and contrary to what the state’s voters wanted with redistricting reform,” said Ned Foley, an Ohio State University law professor and a leading election law expert. “It’s outright defiance of democracy, and a warning sign for the rest of the nation on how ugly and dangerous this kind of power-grabbing can be.”
Critics say they agree that practical issues matter when elections are imminent. But the Supreme Court “is putting next to no weight on the democratic harms caused by unlawful district maps, while it overstates the administrative inconvenience of redrawing districts,” said Nicholas Stephanopoulos, an election law scholar at Harvard University.
There is, however, one other potential explanation for allowing the use of the rejected maps in November. Some election law experts speculate that the court intends to reverse lower-court decisions striking down the Alabama and Louisiana maps after it hears a crucial elections case in October.
The Voting Rights Act clause invoked in those cases, known as Section Two, is used mostly to pursue racial bias in political maps. Mr. Carvin, the Jones Day lawyer, said he fully expected the court to take aim at it this term.
“The reality on the ground has changed dramatically” since the act was passed, he said, citing the election of politicians like former President Barack Obama with broad support among white voters. “The Pavlovian requirement that states with a history of racial discrimination need to automatically max out the number of minority-majority districts is no longer the law.”
Critics of the court say it very much is the law, seeing as federal judges in Alabama, Georgia and Louisiana have said so this year. And that is why maps deemed in violation of it should have been replaced, Professor Stephanopoulos said.
But he also said he believed Mr. Carvin’s prediction was probably correct.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/08/us/e ... icans.html
Re: TrumpReich in action
Trump Asked Aide Why His Generals Couldn’t Be Like Hitler’s, Book Says
Mr. Trump once asked his chief of staff why his military leadership couldn’t be more like the German generals who had reported to Adolf Hitler, according to an excerpt.
By Michael D. Shear
Aug. 8, 2022
Updated 9:14 a.m. ET
WASHINGTON — Former President Donald J. Trump told his top White House aide that he wished he had generals like the ones who had reported to Adolf Hitler, saying they were “totally loyal” to the leader of the Nazi regime, according to a forthcoming book about the 45th president.
“Why can’t you be like the German generals?” Mr. Trump told John Kelly, his chief of staff, preceding the question with an obscenity, according to an excerpt from “The Divider: Trump in the White House,” by Peter Baker and Susan Glasser, published online by The New Yorker on Monday morning. (Mr. Baker is the chief White House correspondent for The New York Times; Ms. Glasser is a staff writer for The New Yorker.)
The excerpt depicts Mr. Trump as deeply frustrated by his top military officials, whom he saw as insufficiently loyal or obedient to him. In the conversation with Mr. Kelly, which took place years before the attack on the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, the authors write, the chief of staff told Mr. Trump that Germany’s generals had “tried to kill Hitler three times and almost pulled it off.”
Mr. Trump was dismissive, according to the excerpt, apparently unaware of the World War II history that Mr. Kelly, a retired four-star general, knew all too well.
“‘No, no, no, they were totally loyal to him,’ the president replied,” according to the book’s authors. “In his version of history, the generals of the Third Reich had been completely subservient to Hitler; this was the model he wanted for his military. Kelly told Trump that there were no such American generals, but the president was determined to test the proposition.”
Much of the excerpt focuses on Gen. Mark A. Milley, who served as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the country’s top military official, under Mr. Trump. When the president offered him the job, General Milley told him, “I’ll do whatever you ask me to do.” But he quickly soured on the president.
General Milley’s frustration with the president peaked on June 1, 2020, when Black Lives Matter protesters filled Lafayette Square, near the White House. Mr. Trump demanded to send in the military to clear the protesters, but General Milley and other top aides refused. In response, Mr. Trump shouted, “You are all losers!” according to the excerpt. “Turning to Milley, Trump said, ‘Can’t you just shoot them? Just shoot them in the legs or something?’” the authors write.
After the square was cleared by the National Guard and police, General Milley briefly joined the president and other aides in walking through the empty park so Mr. Trump could be photographed in front of a church on the other side. The authors said General Milley later considered his decision to join the president to be a “misjudgment that would haunt him forever, a ‘road-to-Damascus moment,’ as he would later put it.”
A week after that incident, General Milley wrote — but never delivered — a scathing resignation letter, accusing the president he served of politicizing the military, “ruining the international order,” failing to value diversity, and embracing the tyranny, dictatorship and extremism that members of the military had sworn to fight against.
“It is my belief that you were doing great and irreparable harm to my country,” the general wrote in the letter, which has not been revealed before and was published in its entirety by The New Yorker. General Milley wrote that Mr. Trump did not honor those who had fought against fascism and the Nazis during World War II.
“It’s now obvious to me that you don’t understand that world order,” General Milley wrote. “You don’t understand what the war was all about. In fact, you subscribe to many of the principles that we fought against. And I cannot be a party to that.”
Yet General Milley eventually decided to remain in office so he could ensure that the military could serve as a bulwark against an increasingly out-of-control president, according to the authors of the book.
“‘I’ll just fight him,’” General Milley told his staff, according to the New Yorker excerpt. “The challenge, as he saw it, was to stop Trump from doing any more damage, while also acting in a way that was consistent with his obligation to carry out the orders of his commander in chief. ‘If they want to court-martial me, or put me in prison, have at it.’”
In addition to the revelations about General Milley, the book excerpt reveals new details about Mr. Trump’s interactions with his top military and national security officials, and documents dramatic efforts by the former president’s most senior aides to prevent a domestic or international crisis in the weeks after Mr. Trump lost his re-election bid.
In the summer of 2017, the book excerpt reveals, Mr. Trump returned from viewing the Bastille Day parade in Paris and told Mr. Kelly that he wanted one of his own. But the president told Mr. Kelly: “Look, I don’t want any wounded guys in the parade. This doesn’t look good for me,” the authors write.
“Kelly could not believe what he was hearing,” the excerpt continues. “‘Those are the heroes,’ he told Trump. ‘In our society, there’s only one group of people who are more heroic than they are — and they are buried over in Arlington.’” Mr. Trump answered: “I don’t want them. It doesn’t look good for me,” according to the authors.
The excerpt underscores how many of the president’s senior aides have been trying to burnish their reputations in the wake of the Jan. 6 attack. Like General Milley, who largely refrained from criticizing Mr. Trump publicly, they are now eager to make their disagreements with him clear by cooperating with book authors and other journalists.
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, who never publicly disputed Mr. Trump’s wild election claims and has rarely criticized him since, was privately dismissive of the assertions of fraud that Mr. Trump and his advisers embraced.
On the evening of Nov. 9, 2020, after the news media called the race for Joseph R. Biden Jr., Mr. Pompeo called General Milley and asked to see him, according to the excerpt. During a conversation at General Milley’s kitchen table, Mr. Pompeo was blunt about what he thought of the people around the president.
“‘The crazies have taken over,’” Mr. Pompeo told General Milley, according to the authors. Behind the scenes, they write, Mr. Pompeo had quickly accepted that the election was over and refused to promote overturning it.
“‘He was totally against it,’ a senior State Department official recalled. Pompeo cynically justified this jarring contrast between what he said in public and in private. ‘It was important for him to not get fired at the end, too, to be there to the bitter end,’ the senior official said,” according to the excerpt.
The authors detail what they call an “extraordinary arrangement” in the weeks after the election between Mr. Pompeo and General Milley to hold daily morning phone calls with Mark Meadows, the White House chief of staff, in an effort to make sure the president did not take dangerous actions.
“Pompeo and Milley soon took to calling them the ‘land the plane’ phone calls,” the authors write. “‘Our job is to land this plane safely and to do a peaceful transfer of power the 20th of January,’ Milley told his staff. ‘This is our obligation to this nation.’ There was a problem, however. ‘Both engines are out, the landing gear are stuck. We’re in an emergency situation.’”
The Jan. 6 hearings on Capitol Hill have revealed that a number of the former president’s top aides pushed back privately against Mr. Trump’s election denials, even as some declined to do so publicly. Several, including Pat A. Cipollone, the former White House counsel, testified that they had attempted — without success — to convince the president that there was no evidence of substantial fraud.
In the excerpt, the authors say that General Milley concluded that Mr. Cipollone was “a force for ‘trying to keep guardrails around the president.’” The general also believed that Mr. Pompeo was “genuinely trying to achieve a peaceful handover of power,” the authors write. But they write that General Milley was “was never sure what to make of Meadows. Was the chief of staff trying to land the plane or to hijack it?”
Gen. Milley is not the only top official who considered resignation, the authors write, in response to the president’s actions.
The excerpt details private conversations among the president’s national security team as they discussed what to do in the event the president attempted to take actions they felt they could not abide. The authors report that General Milley consulted with Robert Gates, a former secretary of defense and former head of the C.I.A.
The advice from Mr. Gates was blunt, the authors write: “‘Keep the chiefs on board with you and make it clear to the White House that if you go, they all go, so that the White House knows this isn’t just about firing Mark Milley. This is about the entire Joint Chiefs of Staff quitting in response.’”
The excerpt makes clear that Mr. Trump did not always get the yes-men that he wanted. During one Oval Office exchange, Mr. Trump asked Gen. Paul Selva, an Air Force officer and the vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, what he thought about the president’s desire for a military parade through the nation’s capital on the Fourth of July.
General Selva’s response, which has not been reported before, was blunt, and not what the president wanted to hear, according to the book’s authors.
“‘I didn’t grow up in the United States, I actually grew up in Portugal,’ General Selva said. “‘Portugal was a dictatorship — and parades were about showing the people who had the guns. And in this country, we don’t do that.’ He added, ‘It’s not who we are.’”
Michael D. Shear is a veteran White House correspondent and two-time Pulitzer Prize winner who was a member of team that won the Public Service Medal for Covid coverage in 2020. He is the co-author of “Border Wars: Inside Trump's Assault on Immigration.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/08/us/p ... illey.html
Mr. Trump once asked his chief of staff why his military leadership couldn’t be more like the German generals who had reported to Adolf Hitler, according to an excerpt.
By Michael D. Shear
Aug. 8, 2022
Updated 9:14 a.m. ET
WASHINGTON — Former President Donald J. Trump told his top White House aide that he wished he had generals like the ones who had reported to Adolf Hitler, saying they were “totally loyal” to the leader of the Nazi regime, according to a forthcoming book about the 45th president.
“Why can’t you be like the German generals?” Mr. Trump told John Kelly, his chief of staff, preceding the question with an obscenity, according to an excerpt from “The Divider: Trump in the White House,” by Peter Baker and Susan Glasser, published online by The New Yorker on Monday morning. (Mr. Baker is the chief White House correspondent for The New York Times; Ms. Glasser is a staff writer for The New Yorker.)
The excerpt depicts Mr. Trump as deeply frustrated by his top military officials, whom he saw as insufficiently loyal or obedient to him. In the conversation with Mr. Kelly, which took place years before the attack on the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, the authors write, the chief of staff told Mr. Trump that Germany’s generals had “tried to kill Hitler three times and almost pulled it off.”
Mr. Trump was dismissive, according to the excerpt, apparently unaware of the World War II history that Mr. Kelly, a retired four-star general, knew all too well.
“‘No, no, no, they were totally loyal to him,’ the president replied,” according to the book’s authors. “In his version of history, the generals of the Third Reich had been completely subservient to Hitler; this was the model he wanted for his military. Kelly told Trump that there were no such American generals, but the president was determined to test the proposition.”
Much of the excerpt focuses on Gen. Mark A. Milley, who served as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the country’s top military official, under Mr. Trump. When the president offered him the job, General Milley told him, “I’ll do whatever you ask me to do.” But he quickly soured on the president.
General Milley’s frustration with the president peaked on June 1, 2020, when Black Lives Matter protesters filled Lafayette Square, near the White House. Mr. Trump demanded to send in the military to clear the protesters, but General Milley and other top aides refused. In response, Mr. Trump shouted, “You are all losers!” according to the excerpt. “Turning to Milley, Trump said, ‘Can’t you just shoot them? Just shoot them in the legs or something?’” the authors write.
After the square was cleared by the National Guard and police, General Milley briefly joined the president and other aides in walking through the empty park so Mr. Trump could be photographed in front of a church on the other side. The authors said General Milley later considered his decision to join the president to be a “misjudgment that would haunt him forever, a ‘road-to-Damascus moment,’ as he would later put it.”
A week after that incident, General Milley wrote — but never delivered — a scathing resignation letter, accusing the president he served of politicizing the military, “ruining the international order,” failing to value diversity, and embracing the tyranny, dictatorship and extremism that members of the military had sworn to fight against.
“It is my belief that you were doing great and irreparable harm to my country,” the general wrote in the letter, which has not been revealed before and was published in its entirety by The New Yorker. General Milley wrote that Mr. Trump did not honor those who had fought against fascism and the Nazis during World War II.
“It’s now obvious to me that you don’t understand that world order,” General Milley wrote. “You don’t understand what the war was all about. In fact, you subscribe to many of the principles that we fought against. And I cannot be a party to that.”
Yet General Milley eventually decided to remain in office so he could ensure that the military could serve as a bulwark against an increasingly out-of-control president, according to the authors of the book.
“‘I’ll just fight him,’” General Milley told his staff, according to the New Yorker excerpt. “The challenge, as he saw it, was to stop Trump from doing any more damage, while also acting in a way that was consistent with his obligation to carry out the orders of his commander in chief. ‘If they want to court-martial me, or put me in prison, have at it.’”
In addition to the revelations about General Milley, the book excerpt reveals new details about Mr. Trump’s interactions with his top military and national security officials, and documents dramatic efforts by the former president’s most senior aides to prevent a domestic or international crisis in the weeks after Mr. Trump lost his re-election bid.
In the summer of 2017, the book excerpt reveals, Mr. Trump returned from viewing the Bastille Day parade in Paris and told Mr. Kelly that he wanted one of his own. But the president told Mr. Kelly: “Look, I don’t want any wounded guys in the parade. This doesn’t look good for me,” the authors write.
“Kelly could not believe what he was hearing,” the excerpt continues. “‘Those are the heroes,’ he told Trump. ‘In our society, there’s only one group of people who are more heroic than they are — and they are buried over in Arlington.’” Mr. Trump answered: “I don’t want them. It doesn’t look good for me,” according to the authors.
The excerpt underscores how many of the president’s senior aides have been trying to burnish their reputations in the wake of the Jan. 6 attack. Like General Milley, who largely refrained from criticizing Mr. Trump publicly, they are now eager to make their disagreements with him clear by cooperating with book authors and other journalists.
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, who never publicly disputed Mr. Trump’s wild election claims and has rarely criticized him since, was privately dismissive of the assertions of fraud that Mr. Trump and his advisers embraced.
On the evening of Nov. 9, 2020, after the news media called the race for Joseph R. Biden Jr., Mr. Pompeo called General Milley and asked to see him, according to the excerpt. During a conversation at General Milley’s kitchen table, Mr. Pompeo was blunt about what he thought of the people around the president.
“‘The crazies have taken over,’” Mr. Pompeo told General Milley, according to the authors. Behind the scenes, they write, Mr. Pompeo had quickly accepted that the election was over and refused to promote overturning it.
“‘He was totally against it,’ a senior State Department official recalled. Pompeo cynically justified this jarring contrast between what he said in public and in private. ‘It was important for him to not get fired at the end, too, to be there to the bitter end,’ the senior official said,” according to the excerpt.
The authors detail what they call an “extraordinary arrangement” in the weeks after the election between Mr. Pompeo and General Milley to hold daily morning phone calls with Mark Meadows, the White House chief of staff, in an effort to make sure the president did not take dangerous actions.
“Pompeo and Milley soon took to calling them the ‘land the plane’ phone calls,” the authors write. “‘Our job is to land this plane safely and to do a peaceful transfer of power the 20th of January,’ Milley told his staff. ‘This is our obligation to this nation.’ There was a problem, however. ‘Both engines are out, the landing gear are stuck. We’re in an emergency situation.’”
The Jan. 6 hearings on Capitol Hill have revealed that a number of the former president’s top aides pushed back privately against Mr. Trump’s election denials, even as some declined to do so publicly. Several, including Pat A. Cipollone, the former White House counsel, testified that they had attempted — without success — to convince the president that there was no evidence of substantial fraud.
In the excerpt, the authors say that General Milley concluded that Mr. Cipollone was “a force for ‘trying to keep guardrails around the president.’” The general also believed that Mr. Pompeo was “genuinely trying to achieve a peaceful handover of power,” the authors write. But they write that General Milley was “was never sure what to make of Meadows. Was the chief of staff trying to land the plane or to hijack it?”
Gen. Milley is not the only top official who considered resignation, the authors write, in response to the president’s actions.
The excerpt details private conversations among the president’s national security team as they discussed what to do in the event the president attempted to take actions they felt they could not abide. The authors report that General Milley consulted with Robert Gates, a former secretary of defense and former head of the C.I.A.
The advice from Mr. Gates was blunt, the authors write: “‘Keep the chiefs on board with you and make it clear to the White House that if you go, they all go, so that the White House knows this isn’t just about firing Mark Milley. This is about the entire Joint Chiefs of Staff quitting in response.’”
The excerpt makes clear that Mr. Trump did not always get the yes-men that he wanted. During one Oval Office exchange, Mr. Trump asked Gen. Paul Selva, an Air Force officer and the vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, what he thought about the president’s desire for a military parade through the nation’s capital on the Fourth of July.
General Selva’s response, which has not been reported before, was blunt, and not what the president wanted to hear, according to the book’s authors.
“‘I didn’t grow up in the United States, I actually grew up in Portugal,’ General Selva said. “‘Portugal was a dictatorship — and parades were about showing the people who had the guns. And in this country, we don’t do that.’ He added, ‘It’s not who we are.’”
Michael D. Shear is a veteran White House correspondent and two-time Pulitzer Prize winner who was a member of team that won the Public Service Medal for Covid coverage in 2020. He is the co-author of “Border Wars: Inside Trump's Assault on Immigration.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/08/us/p ... illey.html
Re: TrumpReich in action
And here is the New Yorker story.I can post the entire New Yorker piece if anyone interested or the link here does not work:
Inside the War Between Trump and His Generals
How Mark Milley and others in the Pentagon handled the national-security threat posed by their own Commander-in-Chief.
By Susan B. Glasser and Peter Baker
August 8, 2022
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2022 ... new-yorker
Inside the War Between Trump and His Generals
How Mark Milley and others in the Pentagon handled the national-security threat posed by their own Commander-in-Chief.
By Susan B. Glasser and Peter Baker
August 8, 2022
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2022 ... new-yorker
Re: TrumpReich in action
Hope you dont get sick next time you're in Florida ( although, why ever go there ?! ):
WAPO tonight:
" Vaccine-skeptical conservatives are running a campaign to take control of a board that oversees a flagship public hospital in Sarasota, Fla. Victor Rohe, one of the candidates, said he did not trust a hospital to treat him when his blood-oxygen levels plummeted because of covid-19. Instead, he rented his own oxygen unit and solicited medical advice from friends. Experts worry that Rohe and his three fellow candidates’ attempt to take over the hospital board signals a “new disregard for the professional training that medical people have, and a disregard for the science of what is best for the population.”
WAPO tonight:
" Vaccine-skeptical conservatives are running a campaign to take control of a board that oversees a flagship public hospital in Sarasota, Fla. Victor Rohe, one of the candidates, said he did not trust a hospital to treat him when his blood-oxygen levels plummeted because of covid-19. Instead, he rented his own oxygen unit and solicited medical advice from friends. Experts worry that Rohe and his three fellow candidates’ attempt to take over the hospital board signals a “new disregard for the professional training that medical people have, and a disregard for the science of what is best for the population.”
Re: TrumpReich in action
Every new revelation is more shocking. Yet 70 million imbeciles votes for this vile human being, despite knowing what he is like.
Re: TrumpReich in action
True. That is simply a manifestation of the desperation that so many Americans are now living with. They want change for the better, and have no clue how to make it happen. The former guy speaks to that fear in the same way that witch doctors everywhere do.
Re: TrumpReich in action
It very troubling this civic leader felt such protective legislation was now necessary. Guess there is a risk now a landlord will say a person who had an abortion cant rent because abortion is against the landlord's "religion" , just like the baker who refuses to bake wedding cakes for gays.Current SCOTUS would buy that argument. From Axios DM today:
Des Moines police would not be able to investigate complaints about health care providers that facilitate access to abortion under a resolution shared with Axios that was drafted by city councilperson Josh Mandelbaum.
It would also direct city staffers to draft an ordinance to prohibit discrimination in housing or employment against someone who has had an abortion or accesses reproductive health services — similar to those that protect sexual orientation and gender identity.
Why it matters: Abortion remains legal in Iowa during the first 20 weeks of pregnancy but that could change in the coming months, either through evolving court or legislative initiatives.
Mandelbaum’s resolution lays the groundwork to resist enforcement should stricter abortion regulations or bans be enacted.
Big picture: Multiple cities in other states have passed ordinances to protect access to abortion following June's decision by the U.S. Supreme Court that overturned Roe v. Wade.
Meanwhile, some states are acting quickly to further restrict abortions. For example, on Friday, Indiana lawmakers passed a near-total abortion ban.
Of note: Mandelbaum doesn't yet have the support of Mayor Frank Cownie or enough council members to add the resolution to an upcoming regular city council agenda.
Des Moines police would not be able to investigate complaints about health care providers that facilitate access to abortion under a resolution shared with Axios that was drafted by city councilperson Josh Mandelbaum.
It would also direct city staffers to draft an ordinance to prohibit discrimination in housing or employment against someone who has had an abortion or accesses reproductive health services — similar to those that protect sexual orientation and gender identity.
Why it matters: Abortion remains legal in Iowa during the first 20 weeks of pregnancy but that could change in the coming months, either through evolving court or legislative initiatives.
Mandelbaum’s resolution lays the groundwork to resist enforcement should stricter abortion regulations or bans be enacted.
Big picture: Multiple cities in other states have passed ordinances to protect access to abortion following June's decision by the U.S. Supreme Court that overturned Roe v. Wade.
Meanwhile, some states are acting quickly to further restrict abortions. For example, on Friday, Indiana lawmakers passed a near-total abortion ban.
Of note: Mandelbaum doesn't yet have the support of Mayor Frank Cownie or enough council members to add the resolution to an upcoming regular city council agenda.
Re: TrumpReich in action
The intellectual vacuity of the Right:
Article: https://www.huffpost.com/entry/republic ... 63gt2jcad4
Article: https://www.huffpost.com/entry/republic ... 63gt2jcad4
Re: TrumpReich in action
From Axios tonight:
An armada of 2020 election deniers is running in major battleground races. Lots of the candidates are winning GOP nominations.
The big picture: 54 of the 87 GOP nominees for battleground state offices with a say in election certification have questioned the 2020 presidential election results, The Washington Post reports.
Those offices include governor and lieutenant governor, secretary of state and attorney general, and members of Congress.
The list of 2020 deniers includes:
12 of 13 candidates in Arizona.
13 of 19 in Georgia.
10 of 16 in Michigan.
5 of 9 in Nevada.
1o of 19 in Pennsylvania.
4 of 11 in Wisconsin.
Nationwide, more than half of GOP primary winners have questioned the 2020 results, The Post reports.
(Sieg Heil !)
An armada of 2020 election deniers is running in major battleground races. Lots of the candidates are winning GOP nominations.
The big picture: 54 of the 87 GOP nominees for battleground state offices with a say in election certification have questioned the 2020 presidential election results, The Washington Post reports.
Those offices include governor and lieutenant governor, secretary of state and attorney general, and members of Congress.
The list of 2020 deniers includes:
12 of 13 candidates in Arizona.
13 of 19 in Georgia.
10 of 16 in Michigan.
5 of 9 in Nevada.
1o of 19 in Pennsylvania.
4 of 11 in Wisconsin.
Nationwide, more than half of GOP primary winners have questioned the 2020 results, The Post reports.
(Sieg Heil !)
Re: TrumpReich in action
From Axios today:
"Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, a top potential '24 presidential candidate, announced that his Office of Election Crimes and Security, formed in April, was arresting 20 people for breaking Florida elections law.
The press release was headlined: "In Florida, if you commit an Elections Crime, you will do the time."
Quick context: The charges mark the opening salvo from the Office of Election Crimes and Security, which from its conception drew widespread criticism from Democrats and voting rights groups who feared the unit would serve as a political tool for the governor, AP reports.
Reality check: The 20 people were among more than 11 million Florida voters who cast ballots in the 2020 election. Voter fraud is rare and is generally detected."
(Sieg Heil ! )
"Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, a top potential '24 presidential candidate, announced that his Office of Election Crimes and Security, formed in April, was arresting 20 people for breaking Florida elections law.
The press release was headlined: "In Florida, if you commit an Elections Crime, you will do the time."
Quick context: The charges mark the opening salvo from the Office of Election Crimes and Security, which from its conception drew widespread criticism from Democrats and voting rights groups who feared the unit would serve as a political tool for the governor, AP reports.
Reality check: The 20 people were among more than 11 million Florida voters who cast ballots in the 2020 election. Voter fraud is rare and is generally detected."
(Sieg Heil ! )
Re: TrumpReich in action
Per WAPO today. Trump thug Patel cashes in :
Meet King Donald’s point man in his Mar-a-Lago fight against the ‘deep state’
By David Ignatius
Columnist
August 19, 2022 at 4:27 p.m. EDT
"As the country has debated the immense legal issues surrounding the Justice Department’s search for documents at Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate, my mind has wandered back to an odd little intelligence flap in 2018 that was known to House of Representatives investigators as the “turducken incident.”
A turducken, apologies to vegetarian friends, is a chicken stuffed into a duck stuffed into a turkey. In the 2018 case, it referred to a super-classified report on the origins of the Trump-Russia probe produced that year by Republican investigators on the House Intelligence Committee. It was so sensitive that it was held in a lockbox inside a safe inside CIA headquarters in Langley — a classified version of a turducken, in other words. Trump supporters have long been trying to make public juicy details that were inside.
The House investigation was led by a staffer named Kash Patel, who has argued that his report for then-chairman Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Calif.) showed FBI “tradecraft failings” that compromised its investigation of Trump and Russia from the start. Patel went on to become a senior official at the National Security Council and Pentagon — and he would have had even bigger jobs if Trump had had his way. As I noted in an April 2021 profile, Patel has been “almost a ‘Zelig’ figure in President Donald Trump’s confrontation against what he imagined as the ‘deep state.’ ”
Cut to Mar-a-Lago, where Zelig has emerged once more. It turns out that Trump, in a June 19 letter, designated Patel as one of his two representatives to the National Archives for dealing with his records, classified and otherwise. Patel has also emerged as a chief public exponent of Trump’s claim that he could declassify information, including highly sensitive Russia-probe material, at will.
Patel was touting Trump’s declassification powers long before the Aug. 8 search at the Florida estate, back when Trump’s representatives were still negotiating with the FBI over access. Indeed, on May 5 Patel made a startling claim on a right-wing radio show that Trump had unilaterally declassified an extraordinarily broad range of documents — implicitly raising the possibility that these documents might be at Mar-a-Lago.
“On his way out of the White House, he declassified — made available to every American citizen in the world — large volumes of information relating, not just to Russiagate, but to national security matters, to the Ukraine impeachment, to his impeachment one, impeachment two,” Patel told radio hosts Clay Travis and Buck Sexton.
On June 21, two days after Trump designated him as a point man in the National Archives battle, Patel announced on a podcast hosted by David Scarlett, a conservative Christian pastor, that he was going to “march down” to the archives and “identify every single document that they blocked from being declassified … and we are going to start putting that information out.”
That broad declassification claim — covering not just the much-disputed Russia documents but “large volumes” relating to other unspecified “national security matters” — is said to have alarmed former senior members of the Trump administration, as well as Biden administration officials. In Trump’s mind, the Russia documents may have been the crown jewels. But sources say they probably were not what the FBI team went looking for at Mar-a-Lago, and they probably weren’t among the 11 sets of classified documents taken by FBI agents from the residence.
Patel has channeled the rage that Trump supporters feel about the Mar-a-Lago incident. He calls the FBI “government gangsters” and “corrupt cops” — arguing that they conspired with Democrats and the media to push the Russia investigation. This combative style endeared him to Trump, who brought him to the NSC as senior director for counterterrorism in 2018 and then, in 2020, made him principal deputy to the acting director of national intelligence.
Patel was Trump’s kind of disrupter, and in mid-2020, the then-president tried to appoint him as deputy director of the FBI, according to former attorney general William P. Barr. Barr recounts in a recent memoir that he told White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows that Patel would get the job “over my dead body.” Barr explains: “Patel had virtually no experience that would qualify him to serve at the highest level of the world’s preeminent law enforcement agency.”
Trump then tried to install Patel as deputy CIA director. In mid-December, Meadows approached Director Gina Haspel and told her that Trump planned to fire her deputy, Vaughn Bishop and appoint Patel to the position. Haspel said she would quit rather than take Patel, and after Meadows conveyed that threat to Trump, he backed down, according to knowledgeable sources who spoke to me last year about Haspel’s exchange and reiterated their accounts this week.
In the last two turbulent months of the Trump administration, Patel served as chief of staff to acting defense secretary Christopher C. Miller. Patel continued to press a range of Trump initiatives, including troop withdrawals from Afghanistan and Somalia and changes in the intelligence community.
Patel moved even closer to Trump after the former president left the White House. He became a director of Trump Media and Technology Group, which runs Truth Social; the company’s chief executive is Nunes, his former boss. And Patel became an increasingly visible advocate for Trump’s arguments that he had been throttled and forced from office by a Deep State conspiracy.
Patel didn’t comment on the details in this article, but he criticized the author. He said Thursday through a spokeswoman that rather than “question authority” in the Justice Department’s investigation of Trump, I was “acting as an unthinking, loyal mouthpiece for deep-state goons and the Democratic Party.”
Patel now is a media brand of his own. He has a website, selling hoodies, tank tops and other gear with his logo, “K$H.” And he’s written a children’s book, “The Plot Against the King,” in which the evil Hillary Queenton tries to spread lies against King Donald claiming that he’s working with the Russionians — until a knight called Kash exposes the plot.
I fear that a sequel is coming, where Kash and King Donald’s other knights will joust with what they claim are government gangsters — and this won’t be a children’s book."
Meet King Donald’s point man in his Mar-a-Lago fight against the ‘deep state’
By David Ignatius
Columnist
August 19, 2022 at 4:27 p.m. EDT
"As the country has debated the immense legal issues surrounding the Justice Department’s search for documents at Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate, my mind has wandered back to an odd little intelligence flap in 2018 that was known to House of Representatives investigators as the “turducken incident.”
A turducken, apologies to vegetarian friends, is a chicken stuffed into a duck stuffed into a turkey. In the 2018 case, it referred to a super-classified report on the origins of the Trump-Russia probe produced that year by Republican investigators on the House Intelligence Committee. It was so sensitive that it was held in a lockbox inside a safe inside CIA headquarters in Langley — a classified version of a turducken, in other words. Trump supporters have long been trying to make public juicy details that were inside.
The House investigation was led by a staffer named Kash Patel, who has argued that his report for then-chairman Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Calif.) showed FBI “tradecraft failings” that compromised its investigation of Trump and Russia from the start. Patel went on to become a senior official at the National Security Council and Pentagon — and he would have had even bigger jobs if Trump had had his way. As I noted in an April 2021 profile, Patel has been “almost a ‘Zelig’ figure in President Donald Trump’s confrontation against what he imagined as the ‘deep state.’ ”
Cut to Mar-a-Lago, where Zelig has emerged once more. It turns out that Trump, in a June 19 letter, designated Patel as one of his two representatives to the National Archives for dealing with his records, classified and otherwise. Patel has also emerged as a chief public exponent of Trump’s claim that he could declassify information, including highly sensitive Russia-probe material, at will.
Patel was touting Trump’s declassification powers long before the Aug. 8 search at the Florida estate, back when Trump’s representatives were still negotiating with the FBI over access. Indeed, on May 5 Patel made a startling claim on a right-wing radio show that Trump had unilaterally declassified an extraordinarily broad range of documents — implicitly raising the possibility that these documents might be at Mar-a-Lago.
“On his way out of the White House, he declassified — made available to every American citizen in the world — large volumes of information relating, not just to Russiagate, but to national security matters, to the Ukraine impeachment, to his impeachment one, impeachment two,” Patel told radio hosts Clay Travis and Buck Sexton.
On June 21, two days after Trump designated him as a point man in the National Archives battle, Patel announced on a podcast hosted by David Scarlett, a conservative Christian pastor, that he was going to “march down” to the archives and “identify every single document that they blocked from being declassified … and we are going to start putting that information out.”
That broad declassification claim — covering not just the much-disputed Russia documents but “large volumes” relating to other unspecified “national security matters” — is said to have alarmed former senior members of the Trump administration, as well as Biden administration officials. In Trump’s mind, the Russia documents may have been the crown jewels. But sources say they probably were not what the FBI team went looking for at Mar-a-Lago, and they probably weren’t among the 11 sets of classified documents taken by FBI agents from the residence.
Patel has channeled the rage that Trump supporters feel about the Mar-a-Lago incident. He calls the FBI “government gangsters” and “corrupt cops” — arguing that they conspired with Democrats and the media to push the Russia investigation. This combative style endeared him to Trump, who brought him to the NSC as senior director for counterterrorism in 2018 and then, in 2020, made him principal deputy to the acting director of national intelligence.
Patel was Trump’s kind of disrupter, and in mid-2020, the then-president tried to appoint him as deputy director of the FBI, according to former attorney general William P. Barr. Barr recounts in a recent memoir that he told White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows that Patel would get the job “over my dead body.” Barr explains: “Patel had virtually no experience that would qualify him to serve at the highest level of the world’s preeminent law enforcement agency.”
Trump then tried to install Patel as deputy CIA director. In mid-December, Meadows approached Director Gina Haspel and told her that Trump planned to fire her deputy, Vaughn Bishop and appoint Patel to the position. Haspel said she would quit rather than take Patel, and after Meadows conveyed that threat to Trump, he backed down, according to knowledgeable sources who spoke to me last year about Haspel’s exchange and reiterated their accounts this week.
In the last two turbulent months of the Trump administration, Patel served as chief of staff to acting defense secretary Christopher C. Miller. Patel continued to press a range of Trump initiatives, including troop withdrawals from Afghanistan and Somalia and changes in the intelligence community.
Patel moved even closer to Trump after the former president left the White House. He became a director of Trump Media and Technology Group, which runs Truth Social; the company’s chief executive is Nunes, his former boss. And Patel became an increasingly visible advocate for Trump’s arguments that he had been throttled and forced from office by a Deep State conspiracy.
Patel didn’t comment on the details in this article, but he criticized the author. He said Thursday through a spokeswoman that rather than “question authority” in the Justice Department’s investigation of Trump, I was “acting as an unthinking, loyal mouthpiece for deep-state goons and the Democratic Party.”
Patel now is a media brand of his own. He has a website, selling hoodies, tank tops and other gear with his logo, “K$H.” And he’s written a children’s book, “The Plot Against the King,” in which the evil Hillary Queenton tries to spread lies against King Donald claiming that he’s working with the Russionians — until a knight called Kash exposes the plot.
I fear that a sequel is coming, where Kash and King Donald’s other knights will joust with what they claim are government gangsters — and this won’t be a children’s book."
Re: TrumpReich in action
Two GOP psychos in action.
Trump pressuring FDA over the horse - med hoax:
https://www.axios.com/2022/08/24/house- ... ign-on-fda
Florida well positioned given its lax gun laws ( Pulse Nightclub, Marjorie Stoneman Douglas High School ,etc.) which facts nut-case DeSantis knows very well.
Huffington Post tonight:
All but five of the school board candidates endorsed by Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis won or advanced to runoffs in their primaries Tuesday, furthering the Republican’s crusade against “wokeness” in schools as he looks to build a base of local allies. In all, 25 of the 30 candidates backed by DeSantis and his 1776 Project PAC in the traditionally nonpartisan primaries were victorious, according to media reports. “We will never, ever surrender to the woke agenda. Florida is the state where woke goes to die,”
Trump pressuring FDA over the horse - med hoax:
https://www.axios.com/2022/08/24/house- ... ign-on-fda
Florida well positioned given its lax gun laws ( Pulse Nightclub, Marjorie Stoneman Douglas High School ,etc.) which facts nut-case DeSantis knows very well.
Huffington Post tonight:
All but five of the school board candidates endorsed by Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis won or advanced to runoffs in their primaries Tuesday, furthering the Republican’s crusade against “wokeness” in schools as he looks to build a base of local allies. In all, 25 of the 30 candidates backed by DeSantis and his 1776 Project PAC in the traditionally nonpartisan primaries were victorious, according to media reports. “We will never, ever surrender to the woke agenda. Florida is the state where woke goes to die,”
Re: TrumpReich in action
AxiosPM tonight, your 401k under attack from the Right,DeSantis similar action with Florida's State pension plan ,but apparently Texas unique with individual plans , too:
"Everything's bigger in Texas — except the political viability of limiting investments in fossil-fuel companies in the name of environmental concerns, Nathan writes.
Driving the news: Texas Republicans are cracking down on investment firms that they say are "boycotting" fossil fuel companies, Axios' Dan Primack reports.
Texas' Republican comptroller Wednesday released a list of 10 companies and 348 investment funds said to be in violation of the state's restriction affecting publicly traded firms.
BlackRock, Credit Suisse and UBS made the banned list, along with sustainable investment funds from other banks.
Why it matters: At stake are trillions in investments — including by state pension funds and individuals’ retirement savings, Axios Generate co-author Andrew Freedman writes.
The big picture: Red state politicians have been railing against so-called “woke capitalism,” assailing environmental, social and corporate governance funds in particular, Andrew writes."
"Everything's bigger in Texas — except the political viability of limiting investments in fossil-fuel companies in the name of environmental concerns, Nathan writes.
Driving the news: Texas Republicans are cracking down on investment firms that they say are "boycotting" fossil fuel companies, Axios' Dan Primack reports.
Texas' Republican comptroller Wednesday released a list of 10 companies and 348 investment funds said to be in violation of the state's restriction affecting publicly traded firms.
BlackRock, Credit Suisse and UBS made the banned list, along with sustainable investment funds from other banks.
Why it matters: At stake are trillions in investments — including by state pension funds and individuals’ retirement savings, Axios Generate co-author Andrew Freedman writes.
The big picture: Red state politicians have been railing against so-called “woke capitalism,” assailing environmental, social and corporate governance funds in particular, Andrew writes."
Re: TrumpReich in action
The Illinois GOP's 2022 candidate for Governor. The cretin cant even pronounce words correctly:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-MO5dON44mk
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-MO5dON44mk
Re: TrumpReich in action
From NYT today:
By Tiffany Hsu
Aug. 29, 2022, 12:01 a.m. ET
Dozens of QAnon-boosting accounts decamped to Truth Social this year after they were banned by other social networks and have found support from the platform’s creator, former President Donald J. Trump, according to a report released on Monday.
NewsGuard, a media watchdog that analyzes the credibility of news outlets, found 88 users promoting the QAnon conspiracy theory on Truth Social, each to more than 10,000 followers. Of those accounts, 32 were previously banned by Twitter.
Twitter barred Mr. Trump over fears that he might incite violence after the riot at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. He started Truth Social as an alternative in February 2022. He has amplified content from 30 of the QAnon accounts to his more than 3.9 million Truth Social followers, reposting their messages 65 times since he became active on the platform in April, according to the report.
“He’s not simply President Trump the political leader here — he’s the proprietor of a platform,” said Steven Brill, co-chief executive of NewsGuard and the founder of the magazine The American Lawyer.
By Tiffany Hsu
Aug. 29, 2022, 12:01 a.m. ET
Dozens of QAnon-boosting accounts decamped to Truth Social this year after they were banned by other social networks and have found support from the platform’s creator, former President Donald J. Trump, according to a report released on Monday.
NewsGuard, a media watchdog that analyzes the credibility of news outlets, found 88 users promoting the QAnon conspiracy theory on Truth Social, each to more than 10,000 followers. Of those accounts, 32 were previously banned by Twitter.
Twitter barred Mr. Trump over fears that he might incite violence after the riot at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. He started Truth Social as an alternative in February 2022. He has amplified content from 30 of the QAnon accounts to his more than 3.9 million Truth Social followers, reposting their messages 65 times since he became active on the platform in April, according to the report.
“He’s not simply President Trump the political leader here — he’s the proprietor of a platform,” said Steven Brill, co-chief executive of NewsGuard and the founder of the magazine The American Lawyer.
Re: TrumpReich in action
Nebraska School Shuts Down Student Newspaper After L.G.B.T.Q. Publication
In its final edition, the paper at a high school in Grand Island, Neb., published two opinion columns focused on L.G.B.T.Q. issues.
By Eduardo Medina
Aug. 29, 2022, 7:43 a.m. ET
On March 31, the first period bell at Northwest High School in Grand Island, Neb., had just rung when the principal walked into a journalism classroom adorned with punctuation posters to deliver a new rule directly from administrators.
Students, including at least three who were transgender, were ordered to use the names they were given at birth for bylines because using their preferred names was “controversial,” according to a former student who was in the classroom and a lawyer for the Student Press Law Center.
In response, the student journalists dedicated their final issue in June to L.G.B.T.Q. issues, writing two columns on the topic and a news article about the origins of Pride Month. Then, after publication, the school retaliated, said Mike Hiestand, the Student Press Law Center lawyer.
Northwest Public Schools administrators and the superintendent, Jeff Edwards, shut down its newspaper program in June, infuriating student journalists and press freedom advocates who have denounced the move as censorship.
“I think they said that if they can’t stop it, can’t control it, then they’re just going to get rid of it,” Mr. Hiestand said of the school officials.
The elimination of the program and the student newspaper, Viking Saga, was first reported by The Grand Island Independent on Wednesday. The paper, which had about 15 students on staff, had been in print for 54 years at Northwest High, which has about 700 students and is the district’s sole high school in Grand Island, a small city about 95 miles west of Lincoln, the state capital.
Mr. Edwards and Tim Krupicka, the former principal, did not respond to emails and calls seeking comment last week. Mr. Edwards told The Independent that cutting the program was an “administrative” decision.
Zach Mader, the vice president of the Northwest Public Schools board, declined to comment last week. But he told The Independent that there had been talks of “doing away with our newspaper” if the board saw content deemed “inappropriate.” He said that when the final issue came out, there had been “a little bit of hostility amongst some.”
“There were editorials that were essentially, I guess what I would say, L.G.B.T.Q.,” Mr. Mader told The Independent.
Max Kautsch, a First Amendment rights lawyer who works on media law cases in Nebraska and Kansas, said by phone that Mr. Mader’s comments were evidence of discrimination against a certain viewpoint and censorship.
“The motives aren’t a mystery,” Mr. Kautsch said. “The motives are to squelch the opinion of students who feel positively toward L.G.B.T.Q. movement.”
The shuttering of the paper was the latest instance of students contending with school officials seeking to prevent the distribution of yearbooks or the publication of articles, particularly in cases dealing with L.G.B.T.Q. issues.
In May, school officials in Longwood, Fla., ordered stickers to be placed over a photo spread in the Lyman High School yearbook showing students protesting a new state law that prohibits classroom instruction and discussion about sexual orientation and gender identity in some elementary school grades.
Last August, school officials in Arkansas removed a two-page year-in-review spread from one high school’s yearbook that mentioned the pandemic, the murder of George Floyd and the 2020 election.
“It’s something we’re definitely seeing more of,” Mr. Hiestand said.
At least 16 states have laws intended to safeguard school publications from interference. A similar measure died in the Nebraska Legislature this year.
Marcus Pennell, 18, is a transgender man who was among the students in the newspaper class at Northwest High this spring. He graduated this year and said by phone that the administrators’ decision to shut down the school’s newspaper was disheartening.
“Honestly, I felt so defeated,” Mr. Pennell said.
He added that his journalism teacher, Kirsten Gilliland, who declined a request for comment last week, delivered the news to students in June, saying: “I don’t know who, or really why, but this is what happened.”
In the final issue, which featured two rainbows on the front page, Mr. Pennell wrote an editorial that appeared under the name he was given at birth, Meghan, as dictated by the school’s new policy. In it, he discussed Florida’s “Don’t Say Gay” bill, writing, “The more resources students have available to put into words what they are feeling, the more ready they’ll be for anything, or any person, that life throws at them.”
Students who had enrolled in the journalism class this fall were put in other classes, Mr. Hiestand said. Mr. Pennell said a friend of his was switched into a random “animal science class.”
It was unclear if students and their parents planned to pursue litigation in the hopes of reinstating the newspaper and journalism program. Mr. Hiestand said it was “something that is being contemplated, but I think it is a ways off.”
Mr. Pennell said he felt bad for the students who may never experience the thrill and pressure of deadlines inside Northwest High.
“It would be nice if the paper could come back,” he said. “But obviously that’s out of my hands and out of our hands.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/29/us/n ... dit-eng30s
In its final edition, the paper at a high school in Grand Island, Neb., published two opinion columns focused on L.G.B.T.Q. issues.
By Eduardo Medina
Aug. 29, 2022, 7:43 a.m. ET
On March 31, the first period bell at Northwest High School in Grand Island, Neb., had just rung when the principal walked into a journalism classroom adorned with punctuation posters to deliver a new rule directly from administrators.
Students, including at least three who were transgender, were ordered to use the names they were given at birth for bylines because using their preferred names was “controversial,” according to a former student who was in the classroom and a lawyer for the Student Press Law Center.
In response, the student journalists dedicated their final issue in June to L.G.B.T.Q. issues, writing two columns on the topic and a news article about the origins of Pride Month. Then, after publication, the school retaliated, said Mike Hiestand, the Student Press Law Center lawyer.
Northwest Public Schools administrators and the superintendent, Jeff Edwards, shut down its newspaper program in June, infuriating student journalists and press freedom advocates who have denounced the move as censorship.
“I think they said that if they can’t stop it, can’t control it, then they’re just going to get rid of it,” Mr. Hiestand said of the school officials.
The elimination of the program and the student newspaper, Viking Saga, was first reported by The Grand Island Independent on Wednesday. The paper, which had about 15 students on staff, had been in print for 54 years at Northwest High, which has about 700 students and is the district’s sole high school in Grand Island, a small city about 95 miles west of Lincoln, the state capital.
Mr. Edwards and Tim Krupicka, the former principal, did not respond to emails and calls seeking comment last week. Mr. Edwards told The Independent that cutting the program was an “administrative” decision.
Zach Mader, the vice president of the Northwest Public Schools board, declined to comment last week. But he told The Independent that there had been talks of “doing away with our newspaper” if the board saw content deemed “inappropriate.” He said that when the final issue came out, there had been “a little bit of hostility amongst some.”
“There were editorials that were essentially, I guess what I would say, L.G.B.T.Q.,” Mr. Mader told The Independent.
Max Kautsch, a First Amendment rights lawyer who works on media law cases in Nebraska and Kansas, said by phone that Mr. Mader’s comments were evidence of discrimination against a certain viewpoint and censorship.
“The motives aren’t a mystery,” Mr. Kautsch said. “The motives are to squelch the opinion of students who feel positively toward L.G.B.T.Q. movement.”
The shuttering of the paper was the latest instance of students contending with school officials seeking to prevent the distribution of yearbooks or the publication of articles, particularly in cases dealing with L.G.B.T.Q. issues.
In May, school officials in Longwood, Fla., ordered stickers to be placed over a photo spread in the Lyman High School yearbook showing students protesting a new state law that prohibits classroom instruction and discussion about sexual orientation and gender identity in some elementary school grades.
Last August, school officials in Arkansas removed a two-page year-in-review spread from one high school’s yearbook that mentioned the pandemic, the murder of George Floyd and the 2020 election.
“It’s something we’re definitely seeing more of,” Mr. Hiestand said.
At least 16 states have laws intended to safeguard school publications from interference. A similar measure died in the Nebraska Legislature this year.
Marcus Pennell, 18, is a transgender man who was among the students in the newspaper class at Northwest High this spring. He graduated this year and said by phone that the administrators’ decision to shut down the school’s newspaper was disheartening.
“Honestly, I felt so defeated,” Mr. Pennell said.
He added that his journalism teacher, Kirsten Gilliland, who declined a request for comment last week, delivered the news to students in June, saying: “I don’t know who, or really why, but this is what happened.”
In the final issue, which featured two rainbows on the front page, Mr. Pennell wrote an editorial that appeared under the name he was given at birth, Meghan, as dictated by the school’s new policy. In it, he discussed Florida’s “Don’t Say Gay” bill, writing, “The more resources students have available to put into words what they are feeling, the more ready they’ll be for anything, or any person, that life throws at them.”
Students who had enrolled in the journalism class this fall were put in other classes, Mr. Hiestand said. Mr. Pennell said a friend of his was switched into a random “animal science class.”
It was unclear if students and their parents planned to pursue litigation in the hopes of reinstating the newspaper and journalism program. Mr. Hiestand said it was “something that is being contemplated, but I think it is a ways off.”
Mr. Pennell said he felt bad for the students who may never experience the thrill and pressure of deadlines inside Northwest High.
“It would be nice if the paper could come back,” he said. “But obviously that’s out of my hands and out of our hands.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/29/us/n ... dit-eng30s
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