As the Supreme Court prepares to hear a case that could fundamentally change how elections are run in the U.S., Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-New York) is sounding the alarm about extremist justices’ apparent intentions to stage a “judicial coup.”
On Thursday, the Supreme Court agreed to hear Moore v. Harper, a case in which right-wing plaintiffs argue that the North Carolina Supreme Court did not have the jurisdiction to strike down gerrymandered maps that gave the GOP undue advantage in state elections. If the Supreme Court rules for the plaintiff, it could completely undermine the democratic process and empower politicians to draw gerrymandered election maps nearly unilaterally.
In response to news of the Moore case, Ocasio-Cortez said that it is time for political leaders to take decisive actions to stop the far right Supreme Court from further eroding Americans’ rights.
“We are witnessing a judicial coup in process,” she wrote. “If the President and Congress do not restrain the Court now, the Court is signaling they will come for the Presidential election next. All our leaders – regardless of party — must recognize this Constitutional crisis for what it is.”
“At this point we should be well beyond partisanship,” continued Ocasio-Cortez. “Members of Congress have sworn an oath to the Constitution. It is our duty to check the Court’s gross overreach of power in violating people’s inalienable rights and seizing for itself the powers of Congress and the President.”
Just in the past eight days, the Supreme Court has ruled to: (1) limit the enforcement of Americans’ Miranda rights; (2) shoot down a New York law that restricted the ability to carry concealed guns in public; (3) wrench bodily autonomy from millions of Americans who can get pregnant; (4) allow public school employees to lead students in prayer; and (5) severely limit the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) ability to regulate greenhouse gasses.
With the Moore case on the docket and extremist justices demonstrating their willingness to overturn long-held Court precedents, the Supreme Court’s next session starting in October is shaping up to be equally severe. Right-wing politicians have begun fantasizing about which rights they can target next since Justice Clarence Thomas wrote in the Dobbs v. Jackson decision to overturn Roe that gay marriage and contraception should also be reconsidered in the wake of the decision on abortion rights.
In response to these rulings, Ocasio-Cortez has called for Supreme Court justices to be impeached. Lawmakers have accused at least three justices of lying in their confirmation proceedings; Brett Kavanaugh, Neil Gorsuch and Amy Coney Barrett all said that they would be willing to uphold precedents like Roe. Lawmakers say those three justices essentially lied under oath in order to secure their spot on the Supreme Court. Ocasio-Cortez has also called for Thomas to be impeached over his wife Ginni Thomas’s ties to the January 6 attempted coup.
“Catastrophic,” the New York progressive said in response to the Court’s EPA decision. “A filibuster carveout is not enough. We need to reform or do away with the whole thing, for the sake of the planet.”
The House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol revealed Thursday that six Republican members of Congress who supported Donald Trump’s lies sought broad presidential pardons for their involvement in the campaign to discredit the election results: Mo Brooks of Alabama, Matt Gaetz of Florida, Louie Gohmert of Texas, Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, Scott Perry of Pennsylvania and Andy Biggs of Arizona. “The only reason I know to ask for a pardon is because you think you’ve committed a crime,” noted Republican committee member, Congressmember Adam Kinzinger.
The Justice Department on Wednesday served numerous subpoenas to Trump supporters involved in the fake elector scheme in a sign that its probe is expanding.
Federal agents served subpoenas to Georgia GOP Chairman David Shafer, who served as a Trump elector, according to The Washington Post. Other subpoenas were served at the homes of Brad Carver, a Georgia lawyer involved in the fake elector scheme, and Thomas Lane, who worked on the Trump campaign’s efforts in Arizona and New Mexico, FBI officials told the outlet. Trump supporters involved in the Michigan fake elector scheme also received subpoenas, though it’s unclear if they were related to the federal investigation or a separate state probe. The New York Timesreported that Shawn Flynn, a Trump campaign aide in Michigan, was subpoenaed in the federal probe.
FBI agents also served a search warrant at the home of Nevada GOP Chairman Michael McDonald and seized his phone as part of the fake elector probe, according to local news outlet KLAS. A second warrant was issued to state GOP secretary James DeGraffenreid but FBI agents could not track him down on Wednesday.
Shafer, who has also met with Fulton County prosecutors investigating Trump’s efforts to overturn his loss in the state, played a central role in organizing the slate of fake electors in Georgia and coordinated his efforts with the Trump campaign, according to CNN. The network also reported that the FBI sought phone contents from Carver, who signed on as a fake elector, as it investigates communications by state Republicans in a private Signal chat.
The DOJ previously served subpoenas to 15 other individuals involved in the fake elector scheme. Former President Donald Trump and his allies unsuccessfully plotted to block the certification of President Joe Biden’s Electoral College votes in contested states by offering up so-called alternate slates of electors in hopes of sending the election to the House, where a majority of Republican-majority state delegations could ostensibly re-elect Trump. The National Archives alerted investigators to the scheme after flagging forged documents awarding Trump Electoral College votes in states he lost.
“From Virginia to Nevada today, several coordinated subpoenas and search warrants served and executed by the FBI and DOJ surrounding fake elector scheme. Sure doesn’t feel like a ‘nothingburger,’” tweeted former FBI investigator Peter Strzok.
“Turns out a massive conspiracy to produce false documents to Congress to overturn an election is maybe a bad idea?” quipped Amanda Carpenter, a columnist and former adviser to Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas.
FBI agents served a subpoena to Lane in Virginia, where he worked for the Republican National Committee after leaving the Trump campaign, according to the Post. A 2020 video showed him handing out documents for would-be Trump electors at an Arizona GOP event more than a month after the election.
The Jan. 6 committee on Tuesday linked Trump directly to the fake elector scheme, playing a clip of RNC Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel’s deposition in which she recalled how Trump put her on the phone with attorney John Eastman “to talk about the importance of the RNC helping the campaign gather these contingent electors in case any of the legal challenges that were ongoing changed the result of any of the states.”
The committee also showed a message exchange showing that a top aide to Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wis., sought to hand fake elector information to then-Vice President Mike Pence during the Jan. 6 certification process but Pence’s aides demurred.
The DOJ previously interviewed other would-be Trump electors. Investigators appear to be interested in communications with about a dozen Trump allies, according to the Post, including Rudy Giuliani, Bernard Kerik, Jenna Ellis and Eastman.
Would-be Trump elector Patrick Gartland, who was appointed to the Cobb County, Ga., Board of Elections, told the Post, “They wanted to know if I had talked to Giuliani.”
On Tuesday, a bipartisan group of lawmakers announced that they have reached a consensus on a bill to extend the universal school meals program that’s helped keep millions of children fed throughout the pandemic — but the agreement removes the universal aspect of the program.
Senators Debbie Stabenow (D-Michigan) and John Boozman (R-Arkansas) and Representatives Bobby Scott (D-Virginia) and Virginia Foxx (R-North Carolina) have unveiled the Keep Kids Fed Act, which would extend a supplemented school meal waiver program through the upcoming school year and provide 40 cents more in federal reimbursements for school lunches and 15 cents in reimbursements for breakfast.
Lawmakers had rushed to reach an agreement with Republicans, who wanted to weaken the program, ostensibly because they were concerned about its cost. While the proposal comes just before the current waiver program is set to expire on June 30, it requires the federal school meal program to be restricted to families making under a certain salary range.
Stabenow and Scott have acknowledged that the agreement is weaker than they originally wanted. Still, the lawmakers and advocates for the waiver program celebrated that they were able to reach an agreement with Republicans on the legislation at all, just nine days before the current program is set to expire.
“While the country is on the road to recovery, many schools are still struggling with supply chain shortages and other increased costs that will make it more difficult to serve meals next year,” Scott said in a statement. “While this bill does not go as far as I would like in supporting our nation’s students, it is a meaningful step in the right direction.”
In a press release on the bill, the Republicans in the group specifically praised the fact that the waivers would now reach fewer children than they have been in the past two years of the universal program. “This legislation will uphold our responsibility to taxpayers and abide by the principle that aid should be targeted and temporary while also helping students truly in need,” Foxx said. Boozman also celebrated the fact that the new bill will be “fully paid for.”
While it’s true that the new proposal is cheaper — with a price tag of about $3 billion, while extending the universal program would have cost about $11 billion — commentators have pointed out that conservatives who handwring about the cost of feeding children often have no qualms about supporting the country’s annual injection into the massive Pentagon budget. This year, for instance, senators have stacked $45 billion on top of the already record-breaking defense budget on a bipartisan basis, bringing the total proposed budget to a whopping $847 billion for next year.
Meanwhile, schools and local groups say that a reduction in funding for their meal programs will be devastating to their ability to ensure that children are fed. This impact could be felt widely across the country, as the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) estimates that 90 percent of school nutrition programs are currently receiving funds from the universal meals program.
Placing income limits on the program could block millions of children from being able to access meals. About 30 million children are currently receiving meals under the program, while only 20 million children were on federal meal assistance before the pandemic. Many of the 10 million children who started receiving free meals when the pandemic began are from families who were above the income threshold for the program but still struggling to put food on the table — a problem that has been exacerbated by high inflation rates in recent months.
Activists and progressives have long advocated for universal free meals for children. Without means testing, families won’t be forced to jump through hoops in order to receive the meal benefits, and stigma against kids who benefit from free meals could be reduced. Meanwhile, doing reimbursements rather than reducing the cost of the meal upfront could negatively impact families who can’t afford the meals to begin with, compounding problems with school lunch debt.
Adam Laxalt — an erstwhile naval officer who served as a one-term state attorney general, ran for and lost a race for the governorship in 2018 and then moved on to head Donald Trump’s reelection campaign in the state — is a dyed-in-the-wool Trumpite. In 2020, that meant that he went to bat for the embattled president in going to court to challenge votes cast for Joe Biden in Las Vegas, and to cast doubt on the accuracy of the signature-verification machines used for mail-in ballots in Clark County.
Like other such lawsuits around the country, Laxalt’s went nowhere, and Nevada’s Electoral College votes were certified for Biden. Outside of the courts, however, he also mounted a full-court effort in conservative media to convince audiences that thousands of dead people and people who were alive but no longer in Nevada had illegally voted in the presidential election.
These days, Laxalt’s fealty to Trumpism largely means that he continues to buy hook, line and sinker into the notion that the 2020 presidential election, certified by Congress after dozens of lawsuits failed and after the January 6 insurrection fizzled, was stolen and that, moving forward, his primary duty is to push to manipulate the franchise in ways likely to secure ongoing GOP electoral victories.
In the months since, a range of polling — which, in the run-up to the primaries, and before voters have really dialed into the races, is notoriously fickle — has produced an all-over-the-map set of outcomes: Some polls show Cortez Masto with a double-digit lead; others have Laxalt up by as much as 7 percent. Overall, The New York Times’s FiveThirtyEight site estimates that the incumbent Democrat currently has a roughly 4-point lead over Laxalt.
In a high-turnout election, it’s hard to see how Cortez Masto would lose to Laxalt. But 2022 could clearly shape up to be a low-turnout election, especially if inflation, high interest rates and a slowing economy combine to create a general sense of malaise — a gnawing feeling that no politician, whatever their party affiliation is capable of turning things around — and of anxiety about the direction the country is heading in. Turnout in the June primaries was a mere 25 percent; this compares with nearly 30 percent in the 2020 primaries (and fully 77 percent in the 2020 general election).
Yet even these numbers aren’t entirely doom and gloom for Cortez Masto. In fact, despite the decline between 2020 and 2022, the percentage of the electorate participating in this year’s primaries is actually far higher than was the miserably low primary turnout in 2018 and in 2016; and that augurs well for Cortez Masto in her contest against Laxalt. If she can motivate enough of the Democratic base to turn out in November, she should eke out a win. But there are a lot of “ifs” in that scenario.
Laxalt, by contrast, is hoping that his fealty to Trumpism will rally the faithful to his cause. Laxalt’s career trajectory, from his being a traditional conservative to becoming a conspiracy theorist willing to carry water for Trump at all times, is similar to much of what is going on at a state level in the GOP throughout the country. Look around the U.S., and you see one Republican Party organ after the next working to outdo their rivals in embracing evermore outlandish conspiracy theories about the 2020 election and the COVID-19 crisis. And Republican candidates and leaders are pursuing ever more conservative goals to restrict voting rights and promote a highly partisan vision of election oversight.
Just this past week, the Texas GOP, for example, voted to include in its far right party platform a bizarre statement asserting that the 2020 presidential election was stolen, that Biden is only the “acting president,” and that the Voting Rights Act ought to be repealed in its entirety. In Pennsylvania, a “Stop the Steal” supporter is the GOP’s candidate for governor. In Arizona, the Trump-backed front-runner in the race to be GOP nominee for governor has called for the arrest of National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Director Anthony Fauci, and so on.
Back in his home state, Laxalt’s GOP has an ominous warning on its website, announcing that the state is “Ground Zero” for “Democrat skullduggery.” The Clark County GOP site pushes a package of “election integrity reforms,” chief among which are voter ID requirements. Further, Jim Marchant, the winner of the primary contest to be the GOP candidate for secretary of state, says that his first priority, if elected, would be to “overhaul the fraudulent election system in Nevada.”
The race between Laxalt and Cortez Masto may well determine which party controls the U.S. Senate come next year. Given the policy stances of the Nevada GOP and its leading candidates, as well as Laxalt’s history over the past few years, it’s a fair bet that if the GOP Senate candidate makes it to D.C., he will use his power to further erode voting rights and further damage the U.S.’s already fragile democratic infrastructure.
On Thursday night, during the January 6 select committee’s first primetime hearing on the Republican-led attack on the U.S. Capitol building, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-New York) took to social media to call out Republican lawmakers for attempting to downplay the violence of the attempted coup.
As the committee played video after video of the attack, showcasing not only the harrowing evidence of the brutality of the Donald Trump militants who breached the Capitol but also the violent intentions of Republican leaders like Trump himself, Republicans downplayed the attack online. “All. Old. News,” the Twitter account for House Judiciary Republicans wrote.
Ocasio-Cortez shot back, saying: “Oh, so if it’s old news surely you wouldn’t mind reminding us which of your members sought pardons after the attack … So who were they?”
“Was it [Rep. Andrew] Clyde? [Rep. Paul] Gosar? [Rep. Matt] Gaetz? [Rep. Jim] Jordan? [Rep. Lauren] Boebert? [Rep. Majorie Taylor] Greene? Others?” she said. “Please remind us, [House Republicans,] which of your current sitting members sought pardons after the attack? In addition to [Rep. Scott Perry] of course.”
On Thursday night, vice chairwoman of the January 6 committee Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyoming) revealed that Perry was one of the Republican representatives who contacted the White House in the weeks after the attack in order to seek a presidential pardon from Trump for his role in the rally that led up to the breach of the Capitol building. Perry, a Republican from Pennsylvania, has denied the allegation.
However, the revelation has prompted renewed scrutiny of what Republican lawmakers did to aid the attempted coup, as the fact that Perry and several other unnamed GOP members had sought pardons suggests that they were afraid they’d be convicted for their roles in the future.
Ohio Republican Jim Jordan, who reportedly spoke to Trump on the phone as militants were storming the Capitol, also downplayed the violence, saying, “When’s the primetime hearing on record crime in Democrat-run cities?”
“According to CBS News, out of the Top 10 deadliest cities in America, seven of them are in Republican-run states,” Ocasio-Cortez replied. “Now, follow-up question: were you one of the members who sought a pardon after Jan 6th? I didn’t.”
Ocasio-Cortez also reminded followers that, after she shared her close-call experience with the attackers, major conservative figures like Boebert, Fox News’s Tucker Carlson and Rep. Nancy Mace (R-South Carolina) mocked her fear during the attack.
Look at this footage. @laurenboebert was tweeting the Speaker’s location as this was all happening.
When I spoke of my fear of being raped again while locked in my office bathroom, @TuckerCarlson mocked it. So did Boebert. @NancyMace insinuated to her supporters it was a lie. pic.twitter.com/I151oTFGP1
“There was (and continues to be) a widespread GOP campaign to downplay the scale of this attack,” Ocasio-Cortez wrote in an Instagram story on Thursday as she showed a portion of the attack’s footage. “Does this look like a small localized attack to you? They were EVERYWHERE. The screams were everywhere. If you were anywhere within this area, would you have been scared?”
The scope of the violence was one of the revelations that was unveiled by the committee on Thursday; testimony from White House officials has confirmed that Trump wanted to stoke this violence and keep it going. As the mob chanted “hang Mike Pence,” Trump said that the supporters “perhaps have the right idea,” and that Pence “deserves it,” Cheney said of the witness testimony.
Later in the night, the committee revealed that a member of the far right militia Proud Boys said that membership of the group tripled after Trump remarked in a presidential debate months before the attack that the group should “stand back and stand by.” The Proud Boys played a key role in the attempted coup, acting as part of the armed muscle that mobbed the Capitol that day.
Every Republican in the House voted against a measure passed on Wednesday that condemns the recent mass shooting in Buffalo, New York, and denounces the white supremacist theory that supposedly motivated the shooter.
Rep. Jamaal Bowman’s (D-New York) measure, which passed 218 to 205 largely by party lines, explicitly condemns the “Great Replacement” theory — a bunk white supremacist and far right conspiracy theory that global elites are implementing a plan to saturate traditionally white countries with a majority of people of color.
The conspiracy theory, which has taken hold among right-wingers across the world, was allegedly the inspiration behind the shooting. The Buffalo mass shooter killed 10 people and injured three people; out of the 13 who were shot, 11 were Black.
“It takes two things to kill multiple people whom you don’t even know. It takes hate, and evil in someone’s heart, and a weapon of mass destruction,” Bowman said in a press conference for the resolution. Congress “need[s] to fight against hate in all of its forms to truly build a multiracial Democracy,” he said.
“The ‘Great Replacement’ theory believes that only white people are responsible for progress in our society, and that the growth of a multiracial and multi-religious society is a threat to white people’s existence and the health of our nation,” Bowman continued. “This has spread and infected the minds of so many.”
The procedural measure, which had 147 cosponsors in the House, was voted on before debate on Democrats’ bill to raise the age limit for purchasing semiautomatic guns and restrict the amount of ammunition that can be bought at once.
While it’s common for the minority party to vote against the majority party’s procedural measures, the move also highlights Republicans’ recalcitrance to condemn white supremacy as the party hurtles further to the right. Indeed, after the shooting, Republican leaders refused to condemn the hateful theory which has been openly embraced by far right politicians in the party; Fox News further amplified the lie on the network in the days following the shooting.
Though the theory has garnered national attention due to the recent shooting in Buffalo, it’s been at least partially responsible for several mass shootings and hate rallies over the past years; the shooter who killed 51 people in two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, named his manifesto after the theory, and referenced it multiple times.
In a broader sense, white supremacy, which Republicans also refuse to condemn, has been at the roots of other recent mass shootings, including the 2015 massacre of worshipers at a historically Black church in Charleston, South Carolina.
Instead, Republicans now seem more open than ever to embracing murder and violence when it’s done in the name of dangerous far right ideologies. In the past years, Republicans have made an idol out of Kyle Rittenhouse, who shot three people at a protest against police brutality in 2020, killing two of them. Rittenhouse has cavorted with far right militia members and has displayed white nationalist hand signals — and, when he was acquitted of murder charges after a biased trial, Republicans showered the killer with praise.
Just weeks after a number of Republican candidates in Michigan were purged from the primary ballot for failing to attain enough signatures on their nomination papers, a GOP candidate who did qualify was arrested for his participation in the breach of the U.S. Capitol building on January 6, 2021.
Ryan Kelley was arrested at his home on Thursday morning on charges relating to his involvement in the Capitol attack. According to a statement from prosecutors, he faces misdemeanor charges for being on restricted grounds of the Capitol building and for engaging in disorderly conduct, among others.
Kelley, who has acknowledged being at the Capitol that day, has denied ever entering the actual building. However, the Justice Department received multiple tips regarding his actions, including videos and images of him in a restricted area on the Capitol grounds, climbing structures and encouraging others to follow him. Some of those tips came about just 10 days after the attack took place.
Kelley was in Washington D.C. on January 6 due to his belief that the election was “stolen” from former President Donald Trump through election fraud. (No claims of fraud have ever been substantiated.) Kelley has pushed such claims himself, speaking at a November 2020 “Stop the Steal” rally in Lansing, Michigan, and encouraging the crowd to “stand and fight” for Trump and against the election’s outcome.
According to a Target Insyght and Michigan Information and Research Service poll published in late May, Kelley had the support of 19 percent of Republican voters across the state. His second-place competitor, businessman Kevin Rinke, had 15 percent, and businesswoman Tudor Dixon came in third place with just 9 percent. Notably, because all of the candidates are not household names in Michigan, 49 percent of respondents in the poll said they were still undecided.
Organizers of a Republican-backed Michigan petition to enact voter restrictions to combat would-be voter fraud missed the state’s filing deadline on Wednesday after discovering tens of thousands of fraudulent signatures.
Michigan Republicans are backing the citizen initiative petition known as Secure MI Vote, which would impose strict voter ID requirements, restrict absentee voting and ban private donations that help keep polling places open. The petition drive was launched after Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, a Democrat, vetoed a slew of voting restrictions passed by the Republican-led legislature. Though the petition is ostensibly a citizen initiative, voters are not expected to see the measure appear on the ballot. Republicans have openly plotted all along to exploit a bizarre provision in the state constitution that allows the legislature to adopt a citizen initiative and pass it with a simple majority that the governor cannot veto.
Organizers had planned to submit the petition to the state by Wednesday’s deadline but abruptly backed down after discovering that around 20,000 signatures were fraudulent. Organizer Jamie Roe insisted that the effort had gathered 435,000 signatures, more than the 340,047 required, but said the group did not submit the petition out of an “abundance of caution.”
“The fact of the matter is our volunteers, our supporters had put in too much hard work for us to end up getting bounced off the ballot due to some technicality,” he told reporters at a press conference on Wednesday.
The announcement came just days after the state’s Bureau of Elections and Board of Canvassers disqualified five of the 10 Republicans running for governor, including frontrunners James Craig and Perry Johnson, after discovering that thousands of the signatures on the petitions they circulated to qualify for the ballot were fraudulent. The Bureau of Elections identified 36 petition circulators who submitted at least 68,000 fraudulent signatures in the gubernatorial primary, as well as in nine other nominating contests. Craig and Johnson argued they were victims of the fraud, not its perpetrators, but a court upheld both of their disqualifications this week.
Roe similarly argued that petition circulators victimized the Secure MI Vote effort.
“We would also be filing today if it weren’t for some people who tried to defraud the process,” Roe said while standing beside boxes of petitions. “This is all fraud – what we believe is fraudulent petitions. Petitions that were circulated by fraudsters similar to those who have victimized some of the gubernatorial campaigns in the state.”
Roe said he was not sure whether fraudulent circulators caught by the campaign are the same ones that were caught in the gubernatorial primary but said “I would bet that they are.”
Roe said the committee would turn over the petitions to law enforcement.
“There’s just a huge financial incentive to participate in fraud,” Roe said, “which is why it has to be punished.”
Other organizers who have led petition drives in the state took issue with Roe’s explanation.
“At the end of the day, you have to take responsibility for who you hired to collect your signatures,” said Nancy Wang, executive director of Voters Not Politicians, a nonpartisan advocacy group that successfully backed a citizen initiative to reform redistricting.
Wang accused the campaign of trying to “abuse” the citizen initiative process.
“They’re trying to use it as a way to do an end-run around the voters,” she said. “In fact, they’re supposed to be using it to demonstrate that they have a level of support, that they have the right to be on the ballot. They haven’t been able to do that.”
Roe suggested that the petition circulators had faked the signatures. But long before Wednesday’s announcement, the Secure MI Vote drive was plagued by allegations that petition circulators were misleading voters. Numerous reports on social media and in local news outlets alleged that petition circulators made blatantly false statements to Black voters while trying to convince them to sign a petition that could “risk their own disenfranchisement.”
State Rep. Amos O’Neal recalled his own run-in with a Secure MI Vote petition circulator at a Saginaw County barbershop.
“All he said was, ‘Hey, can you guys sign my petition? It’s going to help improve voting.’ When I asked him exactly what it was he was petitioning for, he couldn’t articulate,” O’Neal told MLive.
When O’Neal urged others in the barbershop not to sign, the petition circulator “became irate,” he said.
“He said — and these are his exact words — ‘You’re messing with my money.’ I took that as meaning, he’s being paid to go around — particularly in Black communities — to get signatures,” he told the outlet.
Voters Not Politicians launched a tool allowing voters to report deception or misinformation by Secure MI Vote circulators, and heard many similar complaints.
“We’ve been collecting stories from people who really have signer’s remorse,” Wang told Salon. “The accounts we’ve been getting are sort of consistent: Petition circulators have been saying, for example, ‘However you think about voting rights, this is just to put the question to the voters.’”
When one voter pressed circulators on what was in the actual petition, “they refused to say anything else about the petition, about what’s in it,” one account said, according to Wang.
“It just illustrates the fact that they don’t have any policies in there that they can publicly and openly and proudly discuss, even with the people they’re trying to get to sign. They’re playing this game where they’re trying to mislead voters into signing the petition.”
This trend has played out in several other petition drives as well in the Mitten State. The 2020 Unlock Michigan petition, which aimed at repealing Whitmer’s powers to lock down businesses, was plagued by allegations of forged signatures and misleading language. Petition circulators for the Let MI Kids Learn petition, a Betsy DeVos-linked initiative aimed at boosting funding for private schools, were also accused of misleading voters. Fred Wszolek, a spokesman for the Let MI Kids Learn campaign, told Axios that the group also did not plan to submit its petition to the secretary of state and would instead rely on the legislature to pass the proposal, “which was going to happen anyway.”
Wang said Wednesday’s announcement drops the pretense that Secure MI Vote is actually a citizen initiative.
“It’s never been their plan to qualify for the ballot. The reason they were collecting signatures was to give these voter-suppression measures to the legislature, which would pass them and do an end-run around both the voters and the governor,” she said. “This legislature has already passed a number of measures that are on the Secure MI Vote petition, and they’ve been very clear that they’re willing to use their power in an anti-democratic way to keep themselves in power at the expense of our democracy.”
Roe on Wednesday insisted that the group plans to submit the signatures to the Bureau of Elections “within a couple of weeks,” although since the filing deadline was missed, the bureau may delay the review of the petition until 2024.
“We hope that we can count on the professionalism of the Bureau of Elections to — when we do submit it — promptly go through and certify the results,” Roe said, adding that the extra time will help ensure “they are going to have no choice but to approve us and move on to the next step of the process,” which would be submission to the state legislature.
Despite mounting allegations of misleading or fraudulent practices by petition circulators, lying to get petition signatures is not illegal in Michigan. State officials have increasingly warned voters to be careful about what they’re signing.
State Attorney General Dana Nessel urged “anyone who is approached by a petitioner to carefully read and make every best effort to understand what you are agreeing to sign.”
Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson called on the legislature to ban petition circulators from lying.
“For decades we’ve seen Michigan citizens intentionally deceived about ballot petitions, and particularly our most vulnerable populations,” Benson said in a statement. “The recent increase in complaints demonstrates it’s high time for the Legislature to act to make it a crime to intentionally mislead a voter into signing a petition.”
Democrats in the state Senate have pushed to enact new restrictions on petitions, but have been blocked in the GOP-led legislature. Democrats previously introduced a package of bills that would hold ballot organizations liable if their circulators intentionally mislead voters, ban groups from paying per signature and allow voters to remove their name from a petition.
“Ballot proposals are critical for citizens to have a say in how our democracy operates, but the process is sullied when bad actors use deception as a tool to obtain signatures,” state Sen. Jeremy Moss, a Democrat who led the legislative package, said in a statement. “Petition gatherers should not be lying to the public to promote their cause.”
Those kinds of measures have drawn pushback from groups like the ACLU over free speech concerns, however, and Wang also expressed worries about the “ramifications” of legislation cracking down on petition gatherers.
“I think the solution is that campaigns shouldn’t be putting petitions out there trying to get signatures based on misleading statements,” she said.
The Republican Party is hatching a plan to infiltrate polling places using GOP-trained operatives and to create an “army” of right-wing lawyers in order to make it easier for the party to challenge and overturn election results, newly leaked video recordings reveal.
According to an outline of the plan by a Michigan-based Republican National Committee (RNC) staffer, the party is hoping to create an online database to help build a network of Republican-friendly lawyers and poll workers that can work in tandem to challenge election results at polling places in Democratic-majority locations, Politico reports. By installing trained GOP operatives as poll workers, the party can get more access to ballots and power to overturn elections, party members say.
“Being a poll worker, you just have so many more rights and things you can do to stop something than [as] a poll challenger,” Michigan RNC election director Matthew Seifried said in a recorded meeting with GOP activists last November. Ensuring that GOP operatives take on roles as official poll workers is key to the plan, he said.
The party has been crafting this plan for months, according to Politico, which obtained tapes recorded between the summer of 2021 and May of this year. An RNC spokesperson told the publication that the goal is to “even [the] playing field” in traditionally Democratic-leaning areas — all while the Republican Party works to erode voting rights and potentially overturn election results entirely.
The plan is an extension of the party’s goal of biasing elections toward Republicans after Donald Trump lied about the 2020 presidential election being affected by widespread voter fraud — even as Republican voters move on from the 2020 election. If successful, it would operate at a less visible and less transparent level than moves like voter suppression bills, which state legislators have been passing en masse.
In order to win those legal battles, party operatives say, Republicans will have to amass a huge number of sympathetic lawyers. “It’s going to be an army” of lawyers to back up the poll workers, Seifried said at a training session in October, appearing to acknowledge that the party will have to go through extralegal or otherwise legally intricate means to obtain the results Republicans want. “We’re going to have more lawyers than we’ve ever recruited, because let’s be honest, that’s where it’s going to be fought, right?”
Most states have requirements for the partisan makeup of poll workers to be balanced in hopes of protecting elections from bias. But Republicans have been attacking elections at every level, working to pass legislation to bias election officials toward the right while waging loud and violent attacks on poll workers. This could have a chilling effect on Democratic poll workers’ ability to help run elections — indeed, in some places, it has already led to the ousting of Democratic election officials.
If the party successfully recruits poll workers to contest votes, and those contests work, it could essentially lead to bottom-up local coups at a scale that may be difficult for Democrats to combat.
Republicans have already reached their recruiting goal for the plan, with over 5,600 people having signed up to be poll workers since the winter. Sefried has submitted 850 of these people to Detroit election officials. Conservative activists have also been holding trainings in multiple states, meeting with activists in hopes of compiling a list of district attorneys who would be sympathetic to Republican election challenges.
“Remember, guys, we’re trying to build out a nationwide district attorney network. Your local district attorney, as we always say, is more powerful than your congressman,” said Tim Griffin, legal counsel to the Amistad Project, which Trump’s former lawyer Rudy Giuliani once identified as a “partner” to Trump’s lawsuits over the 2020 election, in a training. “They’re the ones that can seat a grand jury. They’re the ones that can start an investigation, issue subpoenas, make sure that records are retained, etc.”
Republicans have also been using other covert strategies to win votes. As the American Prospect reports, the RNC has been setting up local centers aimed at swaying poor and non-white voters — groups that the Democratic Party establishment often take for granted — toward Republicans, even as politicians in the party embrace violent white supremacist ideologies.
While corporations post rainbows on social media to showcase their supposed support for the LGBTQ community during Pride month, many of these companies are quietly donating tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars to politicians who are pushing for anti-LGBTQ legislation, a new analysis shows.
According to Data for Progress, dozens of companies that sponsor Pride celebrations across six major cities in the U.S. or that have signed pledges to support the LGBTQ community have collectively donated over $1.5 million to anti-LGBTQ politicians across six states. Fortune 500 companies have spent more than $2.8 million overall on anti-LGBTQ campaign donations.
The analysis highlights offenders that are sponsoring Pride festivities in Atlanta, Houston, Los Angeles, Miami, New York and San Francisco.
The biggest donor among the group of sponsors is Toyota, which has donated $601,500 to anti-LGBTQ politicians since 2019. Texas GOP Gov. Greg Abbott alone has received $400,000 from the company within the last few years — even while Abbott has worked to erode rights for the community and is currently one of the leaders of a nationwide conservative campaign to attack transgender children and thus threaten their lives.
AT&T is also among the lead donors to anti-LGBTQ campaigns, the analysis shows, even though the company is a Pride sponsor. The company has donated nearly $300,000 to a wide range of right-wing politicians, much of which has also gone toward Abbott’s campaign.
Both Toyota and AT&T have their headquarters in Texas, and have received huge tax incentives for operating in the state. Comcast, another Pride sponsor which has business operations in Texas, has also given tens of thousands of dollars to Abbott, and over $120,000 in donations to anti-LGBTQ politicians in total.
While these companies purport to be good allies to the LGBTQ community with public-facing entities like their rainbow-colored logos and Pride-themed products, they are fighting to keep politicians in office who will ensure that their corporate tax rates remain low, actively bolstering anti-LGBTQ hate campaigns across the country.
Donating to politicians who cosponsor or introduce anti-LGBTQ legislation is an unpopular practice, Data for Progress finds. According to a recent poll, about 54 percent of likely voters disapprove of corporations donating to such causes, while only 36 percent of voters approve; when voters are informed that companies like Disney, Walgreens and Lowe’s are giving to anti-LGBTQ politicians, the companies’ favorability among the poll respondents dropped by up to 37 points.
It’s unlikely that most consumers are aware of these practices, however, meaning that corporations’ bottom lines are likely unaffected by their hypocrisy on LGBTQ rights and other issues. Many corporations that vowed to protect voting rights in wake of the January 6 Capitol attack later donated to Republicans who voted against certifying the 2020 presidential election, for example.
Over the past years, LGBTQ activists have been fighting to keep corporations out of Pride altogether, saying that “support” from companies only serves to boost their public image while obscuring the purpose of Pride celebrations, which were borne out of radical grassroots movements and uprisings.
The current threat to the landmark Roe v. Wade decision on abortion rights — which is widely expected to be overturned by right-wing appointees to the Supreme Court this month — comes in the context of years of counter-majoritarian efforts by dark money groups to strike down the widely popularRoe precedent and then block abortion rights in the states.
In this context, GOP Supreme Court appointee Samuel Alito’s effort to dress up his recently leaked draft decision in the Dobbs v. Jackson case as pro-democracy is riddled with deception. On page two of his draft decision, Alito falsely characterized Roe as striking down the abortion laws of every state, despite the fact that Roe allowed states to impose some abortion restrictions in the last two trimesters of pregnancy, even as it outlawed the total criminalization of abortion. Alito doubled down several pages later, declaring “It is time to … return the issue of abortion to the people’s elected representatives.” What Alito failed to mention is that the Supreme Court on which he sits has been captured by right-wing forces seeking to entrench minority rule over the rule of law — and that they are replicating this process at the state level.
This agenda has been decades in the making. At the center of the story is Leonard Leo, the far right lawyer and Federalist Society fundraiser behind the right-wing capture of the Supreme Court that paved the way for the likely fall of Roe.
As one of Leo’s former public relations staffers described it, “He figured out twenty years ago that conservatives had lost the culture war. Abortion, gay rights, contraception — conservatives didn’t have a chance if public opinion prevailed. So they needed to stack the courts.” Leo played a key role in Alito’s elevation to the Court 15 years ago and then became former President Donald Trump’s “judge whisperer,” hand-picking Amy Coney Barrett, Brett Kavanaugh and Neil Gorsuch for Trump’s list of Supreme Court nominees.
The Federalist Society is just one cog in Leo’s dark money network that has raised more than $580 million in recent years via a dizzying array of nonprofits and pass-through funds financed by secret wealthy donors.
The Judicial Crisis Network, another major group in Leo’s network, has donated heavily to organizations like the Republican State Leadership Committee and the Republican Attorneys General Association, which focus on securing control of state seats of power to help them solidify their regressive agenda. These groups have been preparing for a post-Roe United States by targeting two kinds of officials who will be central in efforts to ban abortions at the state level: state judges and attorneys general.
Anti-Choice Dark Money Is Flooding State Courts
Though often overlooked, state courts will play a decisive role in the scope of Americans’ reproductive rights if Roe is overturned. A State Supreme Court, for example, may rule that a state’s constitution protects abortion rights for its residents, as the courts in Kansas, Montana and five other states have done.
Over the last decade, special interests and the politicians who serve them have sought to exert more control over the judicial branch because it has ruled in ways they dislike. Politicians in 35 states introduced more than 150 bills that would have “politicized or undermined the independence of state courts,” according to analysis by the Brennan Center.
One of the tactics employed largely by Republican legislatures has been to inject partisanship into judicial selection by eliminating nonpartisan judicial nominating commissions. Another has been to add party affiliation to candidates in judicial elections, where even a million dollars in ads by a special interest group can enormously overshadow the spending by the candidates themselves.
At the center of the effort to control state courts by packing them with ideological partisans rather than experienced judges known for their fairness is the Republican State Leadership Committee.
The Republican State Leadership Committee (RSLC) is a national “527” electoral group that calls itself the “largest organization of Republican state leaders in the country.” RSLC, which has become one of the largest outside spenders influencing key state court elections, launched its so-called “Judicial Fairness Initiative” (JFI) in 2014 to help GOP-aligned state judicial candidates.
In 2022, 32 states are holding elections for State Supreme Court seats, with 87 of 344 total seats up for election. In February, RSLC-JFI announced its plans to break its previous spending records, meaning it will drop several million dollars on court races. A recent report from the Brennan Center pegged RSLC’s court spending between 2019 and 2020 at $5.2 million.
RSLC’s major funders include the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the tobacco industry, and some of the largest corporations in the world, like oil baron Charles Koch’s Koch Industries.
Another of RSLC’s top donors is far right lawyer Leo’s Concord Fund (the formal legal name of Judicial Crisis Network), which has made big cash transfers to the group — more than $6 million from 2012 to 2020 — and was its biggest funder in 2018.
Though that may not sound enormous, its effect is consequential because of how the funding is deployed. We’ve tracked RSLC’s playbook for years: to move a million dollars or more to JFI for last-minute political ads just after the primary fundraising disclosure deadlines in a state. Those cash bombs spent in the week before the general election — which the judicial candidates they target do not have the time or cannot raise the funds to effectively counter — have won seats for RSLC’s right-wing picks for the bench.
RSLC has already run ads this year in North Carolina, where control of its highest court is on the line. North Carolina is one of the few southern states which currently does not have severe restrictions on access to abortion.
The anti-choice right has seemingly keyed into this effort to capture state courts because they regard independent courts as a roadblock to their agenda to outlaw abortion.
In Montana, Republican Attorney General Austin Knudsen has worked with the state GOP to smear the state court’s reputation over rulings they dislike, including on abortion. The state courts recently blocked their effort to impose the election of judges by district instead of statewide elections, which would in effect have been a judicial gerrymander to give right-wing districts disproportionate representation.
AG Knudsen has even called for the court to overturn its landmark Armstrong v. State ruling from 1999, which protects the right to abortion in the Montana constitution. In an unprecedented move, Knudsen, along with Montana Gov. Greg Gianforte, Sen. Steve Daines and the state GOP, have now thrown their weight behind James Brown in the Supreme Court race to unseat Montana Supreme Court Justice Ingrid Gustafson. Brown previously represented a dark money group that grossly violated numerous anti-corruption laws in Montana.
Jeff Laszloffy, the president of the Montana Family Foundation — a state-level affiliate of the anti-LGBTQ Christian dark money organization Family Policy Alliance — called for the state court to be replaced in order to undo Armstrong after Montana’s March for Life in January 2022. “We [marched] over to the court … to put the court on notice: We understand that Dobbs could go our way.… We will use decisions that are rendered by judges across the state … in our efforts to get pro-life judges elected in the next election cycle,” Laszloffy said.
In Kansas, another state where the State Supreme Court has protected the right to seek an abortion, the right wing has also tried to undermine judicial independence by attempting to change how justices are selected. Kansas’s selection system is widely considered effective at insulating the court from political meddling or public backlash over rulings.
But two state constitutional amendments, nearly placed on the ballot this year by the right-wing dominated state legislature, would have replaced the merit-based system, opening the floodgates to outside spending like the cash bombs from RSLC. Kansas Family Voice, a Christian right dark money group opposed to abortion and LGBTQ+ rights, backed the measures.
Following failed efforts to remove sitting justices through anti-retention campaigns earlier this decade, the Kansas GOP and anti-choice groups have pivoted to an even more extreme strategy: circumventing the court’s authority altogether by backing a ballot measure that would overturn its 2019 ruling protecting the right to abortion. Right-wing religious groups have launched a “Value Them Both” PR campaign to support the ballot measure ahead of voting in August. It had raised over $1.2 million as of February 2022, the majority of which has come from large Kansas churches.
The Brennan Center documented 65 bills in 28 states last year that “would have either enabled the override of court decisions or prohibited state officials, including judges, from enforcing particular laws or court decisions, especially those related to abortion or guns.” This year is slated to see the highest number of statewide initiatives on abortion since 1986.
State Attorney General Races Take on a Renewed Urgency
Dark money groups on the right are also attempting to influence the selection of the highest law enforcement officer in key states. In a post-Roe nation, state attorneys general would have broad latitude over how state abortion bills are interpreted and whether or not they are enforced.
State attorney general races have attracted significant corporate and dark money cash, much of which has been through the Republican Attorneys General Association. This year, the Republican Attorneys General Association plans to spend nearly $700,000 in a last-minute ad blitz to unseat AG Kaul. In 2018, the Republican Attorneys General Association spent nearly $3 million against him. (It also launched an attack ad against AG Nessel during her 2018 campaign.)
The Republican Attorneys General Association — a pay-to-play group created more than two decades ago out of RSLC — essentially sells access to Republican state attorneys general. Its 527 status allows it to take in unlimited sums from corporations, dark money groups and individuals, which it then uses to help Republican candidates for AG win elections. The Republican Attorneys General Association’s corporate donors often have major financial interests in cases brought and defended by the same AGs whose political ambitions they are funding.
Since it became legally distinct from RSLC in 2014, the Republican Attorneys General Association’s largest contributor has been far right lawyer Leo’s Concord Fund/Judicial Crisis Network, itself a darkly funded operation that passes through millions from its secret donors. It has received more than $14 million from the group, including $1 million in the first quarter of 2022 alone.
The so-called “Rule of Law Defense Fund,” the 501(c)(4) arm of the Republican Attorneys General Association, has also received significant funding from Judicial Crisis Network. The fund helped organize the rallies that culminated in the January 6 insurrection, as first reported by Documented. In a robocall on January 5, it told listeners, “At 1:00 p.m., we will march to the Capitol building and call on Congress to stop the steal.”
Democrats currently occupy 24 of 51 attorney general seats, and 30 seats will be up for election in 2022. Given Leo’s role in raising funds for the Republican Attorneys General Association, restricting abortion — as well as limiting regulation of corporations — will doubtless be a key part of their agenda to capture these offices in the upcoming elections.
The takeover of state courts and attorneys general posts is a longstanding effort by dark money groups, but Roe is likely just the beginning of its pernicious payoff. Alito’s leaked opinion indicates a hostility to other core rights and freedoms, including same-sex marriage, mixed-race marriage, and even access to contraception.
The central notion of fundamental rights is that they are essential and protected so they cannot be overcome by the whim of a mere majority or an impassioned effort by reactionaries. But the right-wing judges in control of the Supreme Court and the dark money groups that helped install them appear determined to destroy Americans’ rights to their most intimate decisions, and more.
The silver lining is that the expected fall of Roe has pulled back the veil on the anti-democratic forces trying to reshape the judiciary and has illustrated the power of oft-overlooked state offices. Alito’s gambit to “let the states decide” may prove to be the spark for a stronger movement against the corruption of dark money and for a more democratic political system that will protect against assaults on reproductive justice and fundamental freedoms in all 50 states.
True North Research Executive Director Lisa Graves contributed to this article.
As Democrats’ efforts to prevent voter suppression and election tampering bills have stalled in Congress, state lawmakers are still quietly passing bills to make it easier to intimidate and criminalize voters and election officials, a new report reveals.
In a report released last week, the Brennan Center for Justice states that, in roughly the first four months of 2022, six states have passed nine election interference laws — laws that have opened the door for partisan actors to tamper with elections and election results. Such bills have been passed in Alabama, Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky and Oklahoma; Georgia Republicans are responsible for four of the bills.
Three Georgia bills have made it easier for partisan forces to be appointed to or control election boards in Miller, Montgomery and Dawson counties, all counties that heavily favored Donald Trump in the 2020 presidential election.
Georgia and Florida lawmakers have also passed a particularly extreme set of bills that grant new powers to police forces, ostensibly to enforce election laws — though, in reality, these laws will likely disproportionately target and disenfranchise already marginalized voters.
The Georgia bill gives the Georgia Bureau of Investigation the ability to launch a criminal probe into supposed election fraud allegations without support from another agency. Florida’s law, first proposed by far right Gov. Ron DeSantis, creates a 25-person election crimes office, which experts say will serve only to suppress voters.
Meanwhile, Alabama, Kentucky and Oklahoma have created laws that criminalize actions that an election official would normally take to run elections smoothly; typical moves like accepting private funding in order to help with logistics like ballot sorting or registering Native American people to vote are now outlawed.
Arizona has also made it a felony offense for an election official to fail to comply with a new complex and racist law to verify a potential voters’ citizenship status.
Overall in the 2022 legislative session, the report finds, lawmakers have introduced at least 148 election interference bills, even as federal lawmakers have largely moved on from efforts to prevent GOP lawmakers from passing bills to skew elections in their favor. Lawmakers in 39 states have also considered at least 393 voter suppression bills in this year’s legislative session.
On the other hand, however, lawmakers in 44 states and Washington, D.C. have introduced hundreds of bills aimed at expanding voting access so far in 2022.
States have also enacted voter suppression laws this year. Arizona and Mississippi have created new proof of citizenship laws that would restrict voting access, while lawmakers in at least five other states have passed restrictive bills that have either been vetoed or are waiting for action from the states’ governors.
After spending years pushing former President Donald Trump’s “Big Lie,” the Michigan Republican Party is defending its own candidates who were caught up in a massive fraud scheme.
The Michigan Bureau of Elections released a report on Monday recommending that leading Republican gubernatorial candidates James Craig and Perry Johnson, as well as three others, be disqualified from the ballot after submitting too many fake petition signatures. The bureau said it had identified 36 petition circulators who submitted more than 68,000 fake signatures across 10 sets of nominating contests, including the governor’s primary. The state Board of Canvassers on Thursday deadlocked on whether to accept or reject the recommendation, effectively leaving in place the bureau’s decision to disqualify all five candidates, although Republicans have vowed to challenge the outcome in court.
Republican election attorney John Pirich told Salon that the fraud scheme uncovered by the election officials is “the largest I’ve ever seen.”
“This is of a magnitude beyond my imagination,” he said, describing it as the “most despicable abuse of the circulation process that I’ve ever witnessed.”
Despite the Republican Party’s years-long campaign to stoke fears of election fraud, the Michigan GOP intervened on behalf of the disqualified candidates. Paul Cordes, chief of staff of the Michigan Republican Party, told the board that disqualifying the candidates over fraudulent petition signatures would disenfranchise voters.
“Disqualifying two of the highest polling candidates in this primary, as well as three others who have expended significant resources in their campaigns, is disenfranchising to Republican voters who ultimately should be the decision-makers,” he argued.
Michigan GOP Chairman Ron Weiser also criticized the decision, arguing in a statement that the party was “fighting against voter disenfranchisement.”
Pirich, a former assistant state attorney general, refuted the GOP argument, noting that “no one was on the ballot so you’re not disenfranchising anyone.”
“Most of the people who signed these petitions of the five candidates that were involved in this process weren’t real people,” he said. “So there’s no real legal harm to anyone, in the sense that these weren’t real voters. These were fictitious signatures of fraudulent circulators. So that’s a bogus argument.”
Other Republicans also took issue with the state party’s attempt to intervene.
“The Michigan Republican Party candidates ran garbage operations,” tweeted Stu Sandler, political director of the National Republican Senatorial Committee and former executive director of the Michigan GOP. “The fact the Michigan Republican Party is defending all this fraud is embarrassing.”
Craig called Thursday’s outcome a “travesty” and vowed to file an “immediate appeal” to the courts. An attorney for Johnson said that the process that disqualified him had “fatal flaws that didn’t follow election laws.”
The candidates and their attorneys argued that they were the victims of the circulators’ fraud and that it was the Bureau of Elections’ responsibility to prove that every individual signature was fraudulent. The bureau said it has no evidence that the candidates were aware of the fraud but said in its report that it did not fully process all the signatures because it had already identified enough fake ones to put the candidates well short of the 15,000 valid signatures needed to qualify for the ballot.
Republicans on the board sided with the candidates, though it would have required three votes to overturn the Bureau of Elections’ recommendation. Republican Chairman Norman Shinkle argued that the circulators “should all go to prison” but said he was “not prepared to shift any burden to the candidates.”
Tony Daunt, the other Republican on the board, said there was no question “a widespread and disgraceful effort to defraud the voters of the state has occurred,” but insisted that Republican candidates were the real victims.
Though the board has frequently broken down party lines, Pirich said he was surprised by the Republican members’ votes because of the “amount of evidence and the detail of the evidence.”
“I don’t know how anyone in good conscience would say these candidates should be on the ballot when they couldn’t do something as fundamental as circulate properly registered voter signatures and turn them in,” he said. “I mean, to put them on the ballot would be an insult to the whole process.”
Pirich argued that the candidates are responsible for the petition signatures they turn in. “If you hire scum-buckets to do your work, you’re gonna get some scum-bucket results and you should be associated with those results,” he said.
Craig insisted that he expects to prevail in court. Pirich, however, predicted the candidate would lose his bid to get on the ballot.
“The report of the Board of Canvassers staff was incredibly detailed and legally overcomes any presumption of validity associated with each one of those candidates’ petition drives,” he said.
The Michigan Democratic Party criticized Republicans on the Board of Canvassers for voting to ignore the evidence of fraud and called on the disqualified Republicans to drop out rather than fight the decision in court.
Fraud is fraud, and under Michigan law, candidates are required to submit a minimum of 15,000 lawfully collected signatures. They did not meet that requirement,” LaVora Barnes, chairwoman of the Michigan Democratic Party, said in a statement. “To keep the integrity of Michigan’s democratic process intact, all Republican gubernatorial candidates whose petitions were under consideration at today’s meeting should swiftly withdraw from the race. Michiganders deserve accountable leaders, and these candidates have shown they are not capable of that.”
Last March, Texas Democrats demanded that Rep. Chip Roy resign after the Texas Republican made blatantly hateful statements during a House Judiciary Committee hearing on hate crimes against Asian Americans. Just days earlier, a racist gunman targeting Asian women had gone on a killing spree in Atlanta that left eight people dead. Roy called for bringing the “bad guys” to “justice” — and favorably invoked the legacy of lynching in Texas, where a white supremacist campaign of organized terror led to the extrajudicial murders of more than 600 people between 1882 and 1945.
Asian American lawmakers were outraged. Rep. Ted Lieu of California tweeted about a Los Angeles lynch mob that murdered 17 to 20 Chinese immigrants in 1871. Meanwhile, Roy was angered by advocates who warned Republicans that calling COVID-19 the “China virus” put Asian people in danger. He refused to apologize for favorably invoking the legacy of lynching, insisting in a statement to the Austin-American Statesmen that his critics were “thought policing” like “Communist China.” Roy’s stunt, of course, had not been censored; it was picked up by media outlets and presumably put into the congressional record.
This week, Roy was going on again about “thought police” — this time, in a speech against the Domestic Terrorism Prevention Act of 2022, which Democrats rushed to update and pass in the House in the wake of the racist massacre at a supermarket in Buffalo. The bill would require federal agencies to document and report domestic terrorism threats, including white supremacists and neo-Nazis inside law enforcement agencies. Roy said the legislation would “target us for what we believe.”
All but one House Republican voted against the domestic terror prevention bill, including lawmakers who supported a previous version back in 2020, just a few months before former President Trump’s lies about a stolen election would inspire a right-wing mob to invade the U.S. Capitol and call for Vice President Mike Pence to hang in the gallows (which apparently pleased Trump). Senate Republicans unanimously blocked the bill, and with it, any debate on gun safety and hate crimes in the wake of the mass shooting at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas, where an 18-year-old gunman killed 19 students and two teachers before police finally entered the school and killed him.
The domestic terrorism bill would not provide law enforcement with new powers or authority to surveil and make arrests; instead, it would direct federal agencies to establish offices focused on the threat of white supremacist terrorism and report any findings to Congress. Republican opposition to the bill appears to have been triggered by its focus on white supremacists, who are widely considered the greatest domestic terror threat. Thanks to Trump and others on the far right, white supremacist ideologies such as “replacement theory” that motivated the Buffalo gunman are going mainstream among GOP voters.
Like other Republicans, Roy argued the anti-terrorism bill would be used by the Biden administration to target right-wing activists. He repeated a debunked conspiracy theory about the FBI investigating parents who speak out at school board meetings. (The FBI said it only looked into credible threats of violence against educators, which balloonedlast year as Trump and the GOP whipped conservatives into a frenzy over what they erroneously call “critical race theory” and other issues.) Since the bill focuses on extremists on the right, the argument goes, Democrats would have used it to target political opponents while ignoring violence on the left.
It’s no secret white supremacists and far right extremists have claimed far more lives with violent attacks in the U.S. than leftists. Trump and other Republicans attempt to obfuscate this fact by conflating property damage during left-wing protests with “terrorism,” even if no one gets hurt.
Citing opposition from civil liberties groups to a previous version of the legislation, progressives in the House amended the terrorism prevention bill to protect activists, protesters and anyone exercising their constitutional rights. They also narrowed the definition of “domestic terrorism.” The amended language is broad, and there is intense debate over how to define “violent” speech that is not protected by the First Amendment. However, the additional language was meant to protect Americans of all political stripes.
Whether the civil liberties amendment would have protected activists from the prying eye of the government is still up for debate, as is the efficacy of relying on federal law enforcement to prevent white supremacist violence. Law enforcement routinely fails to prevent mass shootings, even when perpetrators were previously flagged by police. The Uvalde school district has its own police and a plan for responding to active shooters, but police who were at the scene are under intense scrutiny for waiting more than an hour to bust into a classroom where the gunman took most of his victims.
However, given that the white supremacist attack in Buffalo was premeditated (and, according to some of the bill’s advocates, may have been prevented if white supremacist activities were more thoroughly tracked), it’s not a surprise that groups such the NAACP supported the legislation and hoped it could prevent the recruitment of more white supremacists into police ranks.
The American Civil Liberties Union, one of the groups that opposed a previous version of the bill in 2019, did not respond to a request for comment on the new amendment. The office of Rep. Cori Bush of Missouri, a Democrat who championed the civil liberties amendment, did not respond to follow-up questions over email.
Of course, Republicans’ opposition to the bill had nothing to do with its potential impacts on marginalized groups. Instead, they argued that the legislation would target his supporters for what they think and believe, even after Democrats added civil rights “guardrails” to the bill to protect people on any end of the political spectrum. And Republicans rejected the focus on identifying white supremacists working in law enforcement.
A close reading of the failed legislation shines some light on the GOP’s actual intentions. The legislation would have directed an inter-agency effort through new offices at the Departments of Justice and Homeland Security and the FBI. Those offices would be required to document domestic terror threats, including the threat of overt white supremacists infiltrating the military and the police at every level of government. These are very real and well-documented threats. White supremacists and neo-Nazis in law enforcement are trained to use weapons and wield the violent power of the state and the authority it brings. Activists also argue that lynching is not a thing of the past, and police departments, the Border Patrol and Immigration and Customs Services are already sources of racist terror whether or not avowed whites supremacists are wearing the uniform.
Under the bill, terrorism prevention offices would have been required to produce reports on their findings and turn them over Congress on a biannual basis. Democrats would undoubtedly have made the reports public, which could have helped expose how deeply overt white supremacy is burrowed into the uniformed services. In the age of Trump, fascist gangs and far right militias that recruit cops and soldiers — including groups like the Oath Keepers who stormed the Capitol and now face charges — are proud members of the GOP base.
Republicans have vocally supported “anti-terrorism” efforts in the past, when Muslims or racial justice activists were the targets. The GOP’s nearly universal opposition to the latest anti-terrorism legislation, which focuses on white supremacists, is a clear signal to armed extremists and racist police that the Republican Party has their backs.
More recently, Idaho Lt. Gov. Janice McGeachin appeared as a speaker at a white nationalist event, the “America First Political Action Conference.” She has also denounced the governor, fellow Republican Brad Little, as being a sellout for permitting localities to impose mask mandates during the pandemic. At one point in 2021, she used a period when the governor was traveling to put an executive order in place to ban such mandates. (Governor Little reversed that order when he returned.)
Giddings soundly lost to Idaho House Speaker Scott Bedke, the epitome of “establishment” in the state’s politics. In the primary for the secretary of state’s position, a moderate county clerk, Phil McGrane, beat out two opponents who denied the legitimacy of President Joe Biden’s November 2020 election victory.
Since Trump won more than 63 percent of the vote in Idaho in the 2020 presidential election, it would not be surprising if candidates either running with his backing or buying into his signature grievances around stolen elections and politicians he denounces as being “Republican in name only” (RINOs) would do well in the primaries. Instead, they have been resoundingly defeated.
It hasn’t gotten much attention in the national press, but a battle has begun in Idaho between moderate Republicans and the wreckers of the right who want to just blow it all to kingdom come. In 2022, notwithstanding the lurch rightward of much of the GOP throughout the country, the old guard in Idaho seems to have at least temporarily emerged on top.
The GOP establishment knows that, while candidates such as McGeachin are skilled at throwing red meat to their base, they are less adept at pivoting to the middle come the general election. McGeachin’s taped address to the white nationalist America First Political Action conference earlier this year may not have phased Trump, but it surely spooked mainstream Republicans in Idaho.
It’s true that, in many states, Trump’s ongoing death-grip on the GOP remains as tight as ever. Certainly, for example, his intervention was effective in pushing J.D. Vance over the finish line in the Ohio primary contest for the party’s Senate candidate. It was also a key factor in moving Mehmet Oz into the lead in the Pennsylvania primary (although as of May 26, that race, in which Oz maintains a tiny margin over Dave McCormick, remains uncalled, with a recount looking likely).
Yet, below the radar, in many states what remains of the pre-Trumpian “establishment” within the GOP seems to be mobilizing in support of candidates who aren’t entirely in thrall to Trump, to his outrageous claims about fraudulent elections, and to his allies within the militia and white nationalist movements.
The primaries’ loss by Trump-aligned candidates in Idaho mirrors failings by the twice-impeached ex-president’s chosen gubernatorial candidates in Nebraska, in Georgia, and, in all likelihood, in Maryland later in primary season.
If Trump’s star begins to wane in the GOP, as, surely, it eventually will, what happened in Idaho in the spring of 2022 will likely come to be seen as a turning point. That Trump’s backing so spectacularly failed to lift McGeachin’s candidacy shows that even the grand puppet master himself is, at the end of the day, limited in his powers of manipulation.
Five Republican candidates for governor in Michigan could be disqualified after the state’s election board found evidence of thousands of forged signatures in the politicians’ petitions for ballot access.
In a report issued on Monday, the Michigan Bureau of Elections found that petition circulators had submitted at least 68,000 forged signatures across 10 sets of candidates, including James Craig and Perry Johnson, the two top Republicans candidates who are hoping to challenge Democratic Gov. Gretchen Whitmer this fall.
Craig, a former Detroit Police Chief, had only submitted 10,192 valid signatures alongside 11,113 forged signatures, while Johnson submitted 9,393 invalid signatures with 13,800 valid ones, the bureau reported. After the invalid signatures were removed, both candidates failed to meet the 15,000 signature threshold to qualify for the ballot. The deadline to submit petitions was in late April.
Three other Republican candidates fell short of the threshold to qualify for the ballot, with each candidate submitting over 10,000 invalid signatures, the agency found. Errors included petition sheets with multiple signatures sharing a distinctive handwriting style, consistent errors or misspellings on the same sheet, and signatures from people who aren’t registered to vote or from voters who had died months or years ago.
The bureau’s findings will now go to the Board of State Canvassers, a bipartisan group made up of two Republicans and two Democrats, with a Republican as the chair of the group and a Democrat as vice chair. The group is scheduled to meet on Thursday.
If the board upholds the bureau’s findings, it would result in a major shake up for the Republican primary for the governor’s seat, which is scheduled for August. With half of the 10 gubernatorial candidates disqualified, a new leading candidate could be DeVos family- and Donald Trump-backed Tudor Dixon, who has denied the results of the 2020 presidential election.
The fact that Republican candidates would be disqualified due to election-related fraud is ironic considering that the GOP has spent years crowing about Democrats committing election fraud in the 2020 election on a broad scale — claims that have been found to be untrue in every U.S. state. In fact, it is high-ranking Republicans who have been found to have committed voter fraud to elect Trump.
The Michigan bureau said that this amount of forged signatures in one election cycle is potentially unprecedented. “Although it is typical for staff to encounter some signatures of dubious authenticity scattered within nominating petitions, the Bureau is unaware of another election cycle in which this many circulators submitted such a substantial volume of fraudulent petition sheets consisting of invalid signatures, nor an instance in which it affected as many candidate petitions as at present,” according to the report.
At least one candidate, Johnson, says their team is planning to challenge the bureau’s findings. The report stated that it’s unlikely that candidates were aware of the high amount of signature forgeries.
The investigation into the signatures was started after citizens and the state Democratic Party had submitted complaints last month about the signatures.
“The extensive evidence of fraud and forgery found throughout the nominating petitions submitted by James Craig, Tudor Dixon, and Perry Johnson indicate not only that their irresponsible campaigns are grossly negligent, but that they are not capable of being accountable leaders,” state Democratic Party Chair Lavora Barnes said in a statement. The challenge to Dixon was ultimately found invalid by the bureau.
A group of Republican state lawmakers in Texas are threatening to ban companies from doing business in the state if they help their employees obtain an abortion in a state where the procedure is legal if the Supreme Court overturns Roe v. Wade.
According to the Texas Tribune, at least 14 Republican state representatives have pledged to introduce a ban that would stop companies from being able to offer their employees abortion-related health care. Pre-Roe legislation that was never repealed would allow any shareholders of a public company to go after corporate executives for criminal prosecution, according to the lawmakers.
The threat is the latest in Texas Republicans’ quest to place a wide-ranging chilling effect on abortion and to vastly increase criminalization of the procedure. The move is yet another show of the Republican Party’s willingness to take extreme measures to restrict and legislate the population’s bodily autonomy, even if it means contradicting their reputation as the pro-business party or even risking corporations backing out of the state.
The plan was first announced via a letter to Lyft CEO Logan Green that lawmakers sent last week, led by state Rep. Briscoe Cain. The letter was in response to an announcement from Green that Lyft would provide its Texas- and Oklahoma-based drivers compensation for legal fees if they were sued for aiding someone in getting an abortion. The company also vowed to cover travel costs for abortion seekers within the company that have a health care plan, in order to combat undue costs under “these cruel laws.”
“The state of Texas will take swift and decisive action if you do not immediately rescind your recently announced policy to pay for the travel expenses of women who abort their unborn children,” lawmakers wrote in the letter.
The extent of lawmakers’ overall support for the legislation is currently unclear. But with a Republican trifecta in the state, and with many extremist right-wing legislators in office, the legislation could pass and make it even harder for people to access abortion care. In emails with the Texas Tribune, Cain appeared to be confident that the bill would get support among the party.
Other companies, including Texas-based ones, have also announced plans to provide abortion aid to their employees in recent weeks, as the country is facing a likely overturn of Roe v. Wade. Corporations offering these benefits have likely calculated that paying for abortion care is cheaper than paying for a pregnancy and parental leave; people who plan on becoming pregnant are often discriminated against by employers.
With many major corporations — including Amazon, Citigroup, Apple, and Starbucks — announcing plans to help employees receive aid to pursue an abortion in another state, the bill could have a vastly negative effect on the state’s economy and employment.
Even if there are economic consequences for Republicans’ far right laws, however, the party seems increasingly willing to feud with corporations in order to get their way, threatening to withdraw companies’ government support and to boycott if corporations don’t fall in line.
GOP lawmakers in Florida recently waged a battle with Disney over the company’s extremely tepid and largely symbolic opposition of Republicans’ homophobic and transphobic “Don’t Say Gay” bill to ban teachers from discussing sexual orientation or gender in classrooms. Florida Republicans passed a measure revoking Disney’s special tax status last month in response — a move that Democrats said would cost taxpayers billions of dollars.
July 2022: Zelensky stars as himself in action biopic co-starring The Rock
August 2022: Zelensky releases his own breakfast cereal and clothing line
September 2022: Celebrities are flocking to the new Hollywood pop religion known as Zelenskyyology
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It’s often a long, awkward process learning that literally everyone in both mainstream political factions serves the oligarchic empire. For most people you have to get your hopes dashed over and over again by your heroes before learning this lesson, and even then many don’t.
It runs counter to everything you’re taught in life that nobody in either camp is there to help you. There’s a fundamental assumption that someone among them must be decent. But if you watch carefully with enough intellectual honesty you’ll see it again and again: there’s a line that, for one justification or another, none of them ever end up crossing, and it’s the line where they would have to begin providing meaningful opposition to the oligarchic empire.
At first it makes no sense. How can there be no good guys? Not one? Then you realize: it’s because you’re living in an oligarchic empire which only elevates people who serve its interests, whether it’s in politics, government, or media. The “opposition” between mainstream factions is an illusion cooked up by the empire and continually reinforced by its narrative managers.
But you only see this if you’re intellectually honest enough to overcome your own cognitive biases. Otherwise you’ll keep doing mental gymnastics to justify the bullshit coming from Bernie, AOC, TYT, Tucker Carlson, Trump, MAGA pundits, wherever your biases are located on the map.
And then when you do see it people accuse you of being an angry hater who doesn’t have anything positive to say about anyone in politics or media, when really it’s got nothing to do with being negative but with your understanding that the machine always protects the machine.
❖
The more weapons you pour into this war, the further the mission will creep. You'd have to be blind not to see it at this point. It's a bottomless money pit geared not toward stopping an invasion but toppling Moscow and securing US unipolar domination. https://t.co/jgHhFUUeoY
This proxy war isn’t about defending Ukraine, it’s about quashing a nation which has consistently resisted absorption into the US-centralized imperial blob. That agenda is best served by keeping this war going as long as possible and making it as gruelling and costly as possible for Moscow. Peace is not on the menu.
Even if Ukraine does somehow achieve total victory in the near term, it wouldn’t mean peace, it would mean more war. If Russia is driven out the war will just change shape into a concerted effort to oust Putin and shatter the Russian Federation.
This war could easily have been avoided with a little diplomacy and low-cost, high-reward concessions. The US had good visibility into the Kremlin’s plans, so they knew this. They chose not to because they wanted to use this war to hurt Putin.
❖
A massive percentage of the people who are getting Russia and Ukraine right are going to turn into the worst people in the world once conflict shifts to China. Pretty much only the anti-imperialist left and a specific subset of antiwar libertarians will get both issues entirely correct.
❖
I get asked if I think the US should do anything if China attacks Taiwan. I tell them I don’t think the US should do anything if any nation does anything. The US is the very last nation on earth that should ever do anything about any other nation.
❖
We don’t talk enough about how disturbing it is that Silicon Valley megacorporations have just accepted that it’s their job to help the US win a propaganda war against Russia and everyone’s just going along with that like it’s fine and normal.
❖
Man: [steals most of everyone’s wealth]
Everyone: Hey give that back!
Man: You’re all just jealous of my success.
❖
People ask why I write about the US government instead of my own government. It's because the US is my own government. I just skip the irrelevant middle man. https://t.co/qx0K0dPbMr
Can’t believe empire managers have the gall to keep babbling about “disinformation” even as they work to extradite a journalist to the United States to defend the empire’s right to lie to us about its war crimes.
❖
I’ve met some cute kids in my time but nobody’s as adorable as people who think Assange can get a fair Espionage Act trial in the United States of America.
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I want to live in this idyllic fantasy world where the US pours weapons into foreign nations because it cares deeply about their freedom and orchestrates the military encirclement of Russia and China because it wants to protect the world from tyranny.
The mainstream news media is empire fanfic for slow kids.
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Your average Ivy League graduate working for a prominent military industrial complex-funded think tank has less insight into what’s happening with Russia and China than your average random citizen with internet access and sincere curiosity about those nations.
❖
People who’ve escaped abusive relationships with bitchy, vindictive, passive aggressive manipulators have a natural advantage when in comes to deciphering the malevolence of the US empire.
___________________
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The House select committee investigating the attack on the U.S. Capitol building that took place on January 6, 2021, is requesting information from a Republican legislator who previously said that he did not host a tour of the building on the day prior to the attack.
New evidence obtained by the committee suggests that Rep. Barry Loudermilk’s (R-Georgia) and other Republicans’ claims that such a tour never took place were false.
“Based on our review of evidence in the Select Committee’s possession, we believe you have information regarding a tour you led through parts of the Capitol complex on January 5, 2021,” the committee wrote in a letter to Loudermilk yesterday.
The Georgia Republican hasn’t explained why he and other Republicans lied about the fact that they provided a tour that day. After the committee stated that it had evidence showing a tour had taken place, Loudermilk did acknowledge that he led a group of people around the Capitol grounds, but claimed that no one in the group — which he and other Republicans denied even existed up until yesterday — had been criminally charged for participating in the breach of the U.S. Capitol building.
In a press release, Loudermilk claimed that the tour group consisted of a family, not members of the mob that attacked the building. “A constituent family with young children meeting with their Member of Congress in the House Office Buildings is not a suspicious group or ‘reconnaissance tour,’” he said.
However, any tour of the Capitol on that date is considered suspect, as the building had been closed off to the public due to restrictions relating to the coronavirus pandemic. It’s also possible that the information Loudermilk shared with members of the tour group could have been shared with people who weren’t present during the tour.
The select committee said that Loudermilk possesses information that is critical to understanding what happened in the run-up to the violent breach of the Capitol building by the mob of Trump loyalists. The committee also said that it has evidence that such tours were used to provide information about the layout of the building.
“The foregoing information raises questions to which the Select Committee must seek answers,” the committee’s letter to Loudermilk said. “Public reporting and witness accounts indicate some individuals and groups engaged in efforts to gather information about the layout of the U.S. Capitol, as well as the House and Senate office buildings, in advance of January 6, 2021.”
In the wake of domestic “terrorism,” civil rights groups often warn that the expansion of federal law enforcement powers will likely be used to target Muslims, Black activists, leftist protesters, and other citizens.
So, when House Democrats rushed this week to pass legislation to prevent domestic terrorism in the wake of the racist mass shooting that left 10 Black people dead in Buffalo, New York, Rep. Cori Bush (D-Missouri) and other progressives added “guardrails” to the legislation to ensure federal law enforcement remains focused violent extremists and white supremacists.
“As an activist, I know first-hand the ways in which law enforcement agencies have targeted, surveilled and prosecuted marginalized communities,” Bush said in a statement on Thursday.
After internal negotiations among Democrats and intense partisan debate, the House narrowly passed the Domestic Terrorism Prevention Act of 2022 by a 222-203 vote on Wednesday. The legislation would direct the Department of Homeland Security, the Department of Justice and the FBI to open offices that analyze and monitor domestic terror threats. The new offices would be required to submit biannual reports on threats posed by white supremacists, with a focus on “white supremacist and neo-Nazi infiltration” of law enforcement agencies and the military.
“I was proud to lead my colleagues in a successful effort to strengthen protections in this bill for protesters, narrow the domestic terrorism definition, and enhance the scope of congressional oversight to ensure that civil rights and civil liberties continue to be protected,” Bush said.
With the exception of Illinois Rep. Adam Kinzinger, all Republican lawmakers opposed the bill, including those who voted for similar legislation in 2020. A few months after that voice vote in September 2020, the January 6 attack on Congress by pro-Trump fanatics, militia groups and fascist gangs changed the landscape of conservative politics.
In an interview with NPR before the vote, House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer said GOP votes against the bill would effectively say that “the Republican Party is not as focused on domestic terrorism as they need to be, because they think a lot of their ‘stand back and stand by guys’ may be implicated.” Hoyer was alluding to violent groups such as the Proud Boys and far right militias that are egged on by Trump and the GOP’s turn toward Christian nationalismand conspiracy theories.
“Unfortunately, the Republican Party has become the party of unfettered white supremacist violence,” Bush said.
Earlier versions of the bill enjoyed some bipartisan support but raised red flags for civil rights groups. In 2019, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) warned that an earlier version would “double down on an already flawed domestic terrorism framework that has long targeted marginalized populations, ranging from Muslim, Arab, Middle Eastern, and South Asian communities and Black civil rights activists to animal and environmental rights activists, as well as other groups the government views as having ‘unpopular’ or controversial beliefs.”
Mainstream Democrats have voted to extend controversial mass surveillance powers, for example, even when the Trump administration had control of federal law enforcement agencies. Progressives and groups such as the ACLU vigorously opposed these moves, given the government’s extensive history of targeting Muslims, anti-war activists and movements for racial justice.
In response to these concerns, Bush and other progressives worked with Democrats to narrow the definition of domestic terrorism, expand congressional oversight of the new terrorism offices to protect civil liberties, and add a provision ensuring that people cannot come under surveillance for simply attending protests.
Bush said she previously led efforts to hold police accountable for the “surveillance and targeting” of Black protesters who rose up in response to the police murders of Breonna Taylor and George Floyd in 2020. By adding civil liberties “guardrails” and requiring federal agencies to focus on violent white supremacists, who are widely considered the top domestic terror threat, progressives likely hope to prevent Republicans from using the law to target Black and anti-fascist activists if they win the White House.
Black activists say lawmakers cannot rely only on law enforcement to combat far right violence. Bush said white supremacist violence “is not an aberration — it is embedded in American institutions.”
Amara Enyia, a policy and research coordinator for the Movement for Black Lives, said white supremacists are emboldened when the government fails to hold them accountable for terror, and racial justice activists appreciate legislation acknowledging that police departments across the U.S. have been “safe havens for anti-Black domestic terrorists.” However, combating anti-Black terrorism means addressing systemic racism without providing the state with more tools for incarceration and violence.
“While this act is timely, it is only a piece of the puzzle,” Enyia said in an email. Preventing racist terror means addressing the anti-Black racism that is embedded in institutions throughout this country from the criminal legal system, healthcare system, economic system, education systems, and so many others.”
While the domestic terrorism bill encourages federal law enforcement to focus on violent hate groups and white supremacist chatter online, it does not enhance criminal penalties or authorize new methods of surveillance.
The Biden administration issued a statement this week in support of the legislation and said it has already working with federal law enforcement to make domestic terrorism, including hate crimes, a priority. It’s unclear whether the bill will meet the 60-vote threshold for passing in the Senate.
Nearly all House Republicans voted against a bill to provide funding to address the baby food shortage and prevent future such crises despite the GOP’s complaints over the past weeks about the White House’s approach to the issue.
The Infant Formula Supplemental Appropriations Act, which passed the House 231 to 192 on Wednesday, would provide $28 million in emergency funds to the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in order to alleviate the current shortage and prevent future shortages. All 192 “no” votes came from Republicans, with only 12 members of the party voting with Democrats to pass the bill. House Appropriations Chair Rosa DeLauro (D-Connecticut), who introduced the bill, said that the funds are necessary to address the problem.
“This bill takes important steps to restore supply in a safe and secure manner. Additionally, with these funds, FDA will be able to help to prevent this issue from occurring again,” DeLauro said in a statement. “While we know we have more work to do to get to the bottom of serious safety concerns at an Abbott facility and the FDA’s failure to address them with any sense of urgency, this bill is the first step to help restock shelves and end this shortage.”
The Senate will take up the legislation soon, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-New York) said, adding that “We hope no one will block it. It is such an immediate need.”
The House also passed a bill on Wednesday that would expand the types of baby formula that can be purchased by people who benefit from the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children, or the WIC program, which benefits low-income families. Only nine Republicans voted against this proposal, all of them extremist right-wing lawmakers.
Republicans opposed to the FDA funding claim that it wouldn’t address the shortage and that it politicizes the issue. The bill “does nothing – I repeat, nothing – to put more formula on store shelves or hold Biden’s FDA accountable for ignoring this crisis,” Rep. Guy Reschenthaler (R-Pennsylvania) said on the House floor ahead of the vote.
The FDA has indeed faced scrutiny over its delay in investigating a major recall that contributed to the crisis — but commissioner Robert Califf says that the FDA’s shortcomings in the crisis are largely due to a lack of funding and resources. DeLauro also emphasized the need to build up the FDA’s infrastructure in order to fix the problem. “FDA does not have the adequate inspection force to be able to do that and to do it in a timely way,” she said.
Despite their complaints, however, Republicans have offered little other than criticism in response to the problem. They have spent the last weeks criticizing the Biden administration for the problem, waging racist and xenophobic criticisms for unverified reports of baby food being offered in facilities located at the southern border. GOP lawmakers also held a press conference to criticize Biden for the issue while offering few solutions.
While Biden has faced legitimate criticism for not acting to address the shortage sooner, Republicans’ dismissal of steps taken by Democrats boost supply shows, perhaps, their drive to politicize the issue. Indeed, their own party may be partially at fault for the issue, as a trade deal that President Donald Trump approved in his last year of Congress imposes high tariffs and fees on baby formula imports — mechanisms that were enough to lead the U.S. to import zero tons of baby formula from Canada in 2021.
The monopolization of the baby food market may also be to blame, as progressive lawmakers pointed out in a letter this week. Four companies control nearly 90 percent of the U.S. baby food market, with Abbott Nutrition, which recently issued a large recall of formula products, controlling about 20 percent of it.
Supply chain issues also factor into current shortages, and Democratic lawmakers are also scrutinizing financial activities and safety violations by Abbott in helping to cause shortages.
On Wednesday, the president invoked the Defense Production Act to ramp up domestic manufacturing to increase supply. In an attempt to speed up imports of formula, Biden also directed his administration to begin using commercial aircraft to transport FDA-approved formula to the U.S. from overseas.
In a layered display of cruelty, Republican lawmakers and conservative talking heads are complaining that the Biden administration appears to have sent baby formula to the southern border in order to ensure that children who are being imprisoned in detention centers by the U.S. government are able to eat.
Using the current baby formula shortage as a political bludgeon, prominent Republican lawmakers are saying that it’s “reckless” for the administration to be providing formula for asylum seekers and migrant children, claiming that President Joe Biden is putting “America last” by choosing not to withhold formula from babies at the border — language that echoes the rhetoric of former President Donald Trump.
Rep. Kat Cammack (R-Florida) was the first to allege that the border had baby formula in stock, tweeting that a border patrol agent sent her a photo of a shelf of baby food between two shelves of snacks for older children. She also tweeted a photo that supposedly depicts a store near her home with baby food stocked on otherwise empty shelves. There is currently no proof that the photo of the baby formula was actually taken at a border facility.
“The first photo is from this morning at the Ursula Processing Center at the U.S. border. Shelves and pallets packed with baby formula,” Cammack wrote. “The second is from a shelf right here at home. Formula is scarce. This is what America last looks like.”
Soon after, several Republicans began tweeting and speaking out about the issue, essentially implying that Biden shouldn’t give border facilities baby formula and that he should instead allow babies at the border to starve. Babies at the border already face inhumane conditions and are sometimes separated from their parents; others are under the care of parents who have undergone traumatic conditions that have stopped their bodies from producing breast milk.
In a press conference on Thursday, Rep. Michael Waltz (R-Florida) blamed Biden for the baby formula shortage while also perpetuating racist stigma about drug use. “In Joe Biden’s America, it seems like it’s easier to get a crack pipe in a government funded smoking kit than it is to find baby formula,” he said.
Waltz’s statement references a long-debunked claim that the Biden administration has been giving out drug paraphernalia for free — which is false, although harm reduction groups do give out drugs and drug-related items in order to help drug users access these items in a safe environment that could help lead them to services like medical and addiction treatment.
Meanwhile, in a joint statement with National Border Patrol Council President Brandon Judd, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott said, “While mothers and fathers stare at empty grocery store shelves in a panic, the Biden Administration is happy to provide baby formula to illegal immigrants coming across our southern border.” Lawmakers like Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tennessee) and Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Georgia) also joined in on the racism and xenophobia.
“Rather than having the state of Texas help mothers, Governor Abbot [sic] apparently thinks Biden should starve babies locked in Border Patrol detention centers,” wrote senior policy counsel for the American Immigration Council Aaron Reichlin-Melnick on Thursday. “And to be clear, the amount of baby formula used at the border is infinitesimal compared to the national demand.”
Indeed, the photo that launched the deluge of conservative complaints appears to show that border officials supposedly have at least 2,016 units of baby formula. But previous similar recalls of baby formula have affected millions of units, while manufacturers rake in billions of dollars from the U.S. infant formula market each year.
A report from last month found that about 43 percent of formulas are currently out of stock across the country as a result of recalls and supply chain problems. A Trump-era trade agreement currently limits imports of baby food from Canada, one of the U.S.’s most prominent trading partners. Republicans are on the attack about the issue, saying that the Biden administration should have had a plan to address the shortage.
The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is planning to announce increases in imports from other countries in order to address the issue, and the White House is in talks with manufacturers and grocers about increasing access to formula. White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki has said that the administration is exploring all options to increase production, including invoking the Defense Production Act.
The House select committee investigating the January 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol building has issued five new subpoenas to Republican lawmakers in the House, including GOP leader Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-California).
In addition to McCarthy, the select committee is sending subpoenas to Reps. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), Mo Brooks (R-Alabama), Scott Perry (R-Pennsylvania) and Andy Biggs (R-AZ) — individuals whom committee chair Rep. Bennie Thompson (D-Mississippi) said in a statement have “information relevant to our investigation into the attack on January 6th and the events leading up to it.”
The subpoenas come one month ahead of the committee’s plan to hold public hearings to directly inform the American people about its findings on the Capitol attack, which was carried out by a mob of Trump loyalists to interrupt the congressional certification of the 2020 presidential election.
The subpoenas follow previous requests from the committee for the Republican lawmakers to voluntarily testify before them. “Regrettably, the individuals receiving subpoenas today have refused and we’re forced to take this step to help ensure the committee uncovers facts concerning January 6th,” Thompson said.
The Select Committee has subpoenaed Representatives Kevin McCarthy, Scott Perry, Jim Jordan, Andy Biggs, and Mo Brooks for deposition testimony as part of the committee’s investigation into the January 6th attack on the U.S. Capitol and its causes.
— January 6th Committee (@January6thCmte) May 12, 2022
The committee’s statement also details why it is seeking the testimony of each of the five Republicans.
McCarthy was “in communication with President Trump before, during, and after the attack on January 6th,” the committee noted. In one of those discussions, the House Minority leader reportedly got Trump to admit “some culpability for the attack.” The committee will likely ask McCarthy questions regarding his promise to Republican caucus members that he would ask Trump to resign from office due to what had transpired that day.
Perry was involved in a plot to install Jeffrey Clark, a Trump loyalist within the Department of Justice (DOJ), as acting Attorney General, in order to make the department more open to promoting state investigations into Trump’s false claims of election fraud, or investigating such claims itself;
Jim Jordan spoke with Trump numerous times in the days surrounding the attack, including on January 6, and was involved in meetings about overturning the 2020 presidential election results;
Andy Biggs attended meetings regarding the planning of events on January 6, and helped coordinate plans to bring Trump loyalists to Washington D.C.; according to the committee, he was also “involved in efforts to persuade state officials that the 2020 election was stolen”;
And Mo Brooks spoke at the same “Stop the Steal” rally where Trump instructed his followers to go directly to the Capitol building; in his speech, Brooks encouraged the mob of Trump loyalists to “start taking down names and kicking ass.” The committee also wants to speak to Brooks regarding his discussions with Trump about rescinding the election results and reinstalling the former president as commander in chief.
The committee was originally reluctant to issue subpoenas to the five Republicans due to time constraints, as lawmakers will likely sue to avoid complying with the subpoenas. Such litigation could take several months and extend beyond the 2022 midterms; if Republicans win the midterms, they’ll likely dissolve the select committee, rendering the subpoenas moot.
The committee has also expressed concern that Republicans could retaliate against committee members if the GOP wins the House during the midterm races.
These subpoenas are rare in that congressional committees don’t typically seek to compel other members of Congress to testify. But committee member Rep. Adam Schiff (D-California) says that the lawmakers’ testimonies could shed light on the events of January 6, as well as the plot to keep Trump in office.
“These are people who participated in the rally, were on the phone with the president, who the president reportedly told to rescind the election and one of whom may have been pursuing pardons for those involved,” January 6 committee member Schiff said. “It’s hard to imagine witnesses with more directly relevant evidence for our committee and more important information for the American people.”
The US House of Representatives has voted 368-57 to spend $40 billion on a world-threatening proxy war while ordinary Americans struggle to feed themselves and their children. All 57 “no” votes were Republicans. Every member of the small faction of progressive House Democrats popularly known as “The Squad” voted yes.
The massive proxy war bill then went to the Senate, where it was stalled with scrutiny not from progressive superstar Bernie Sanders, but from Republican Rand Paul.
This is because the left-wing Democrat is a myth, like the good billionaire or the happy open marriage. It’s not a real thing; it’s just a pleasant fairy tale people tell themselves so they don’t have to go through the psychological turmoil of acknowledging that their entire worldview is built on lies.
Last night, 57 House Members voted NO on the bill to send another $40 billion (on top of the $14b already spent) to the war in Ukraine.
All 57 NO votes were Republicans. *All Squad members* joined all other Democrats to vote YES.
“I’ve avoided the term, but ‘Fraud Squad’ feels pretty apt,” journalist Aaron Maté tweeted of the House vote. “Challenging the military industrial complex is leftism 101. The Squad just voted to give it another $40 billion via the Ukraine proxy war. So, insofar as they claim to be a leftist contingent, how are they not a fraud?”
The best assessment I’ve ever read about the clique of House Democrats comprised of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, Ayanna Pressley, Rashida Tlaib, Cori Bush and Jamaal Bowman comes from Columbia University’s Anthony Zenkus, who made the following observation:
“The Squad doesn’t exist. They have never used their power as a bloc to push for votes on progressive legislation or to block regressive legislation. They are not protesting on the Capitol steps or outside the White House. They are a media creation and a brand who won’t disrupt status quo.”
That’s it right there. “The Squad” has no real existence outside of the media, particularly social media. It’s a glorified online PR campaign for the Democratic Party, one which only came about because the party’s gerontocratic leaders are too senile to use Twitter and Instagram.
They don’t actually use their supposed “sisterhood” to push progressive agendas as a bloc like third parties and left-wing factions often do in other countries with parliamentary systems, they just generate viral tweets and cute Instagram photos while marching right along with the machinery of a globe-spanning empire.
And lately they can’t even do that right.
.@AOC, what is the carbon footprint of the proxy war with Russia you voted to fund?
— Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (@RepMTG) May 13, 2022
When you’ve got braindead Republicans like Marjorie Taylor Greene scoring easy Twitter dunks on Squad members for pouring money into a horrific proxy war while Americans worry about paying their bills and obtaining formula for their babies, it’s safe to say that you’ve failed at your PR campaign, and that you have ceded what would normally be progressive ground to the far right.
Normally a brash and confrontational tweet by Marjorie Taylor Greene would have AOC Incorporated instantly scrambling to come up with a retweet-friendly retort that trends on Twitter all day fueled by US partisan culture war frenzy. But Ocasio-Cortez hasn’t tweeted anything for days. Getting embarrassed by Greene is like getting your ass kicked by a quadriplegic. Getting outflanked on the left by Greene is like getting your ass kicked by a quadriplegic who is wearing a blindfold.
“The Squad”, and other so-called progressive Democrats like Bernie Sanders and Ro Khanna, are not here to oppose the oligarchic empire that is crushing people to death at home and abroad. They are here to let people feel like there’s some opposition to that empire. They exist to legitimize the Democratic Party as a valid path toward change, when in reality it exists to obstruct change at all cost.
The elites who rule our world consider the operation of the empire too important to be left to the democratic impulses of the common riff raff who inhabit the nation that empire is built around. So they give them something to play with, something that lets them feel like they’ve got some degree of control, something that lets them feel like they’re participating. That’s what the Democratic Party is. It’s the unplugged remote control you gave your kid brother so he’d stop nagging to play video games with you.
“The Squad” exists solely to reinforce and legitimize that illusion. To let people feel like maybe their video game controller is plugged in after all. Oh hey, I think the guy just moved left when I moved the joystick maybe? This is awesome, I’m good at this game!
The US doesn’t have political parties, it has perception management operations disguised as political parties. An elephant and a donkey fight in a puppet show and the crowd cheers for one or the other while thieves pick their pockets. And when people start to notice their wallets are missing, they’re told they can stop the pickpocketing by cheering louder for their favorite puppet.
That’s all they are doing with the whole “progressive Democrat” song and dance. Americans will be told at the midterm elections in November and the presidential elections in 2024 that their vote matters and this is the most important election of their lives, even after they just watched nothing meaningful change when Republicans ran things and when Democrats ran things, after being told the same thing both times. It’s just a shiny sideshow distraction to keep you from realizing that your damn controller is unplugged so you won’t stand up to your oppressors in a more meaningful and confrontational way.
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My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, following me on Facebook, Twitter, Soundcloud or YouTube, or throwing some money into my tip jar on Ko-fi, Patreon or Paypal. If you want to read more you can buy my books. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list for at my website or on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. Everyone, racist platforms excluded, has my permission to republish, use or translate any part of this work (or anything else I’ve written) in any way they like free of charge. For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what I’m trying to do with this platform, click here. All works co-authored with my American husband Tim Foley.
The House voted on Tuesday night to allow its staffers to form unions, a major win for congressional staffers who have been organizing for over a year in order to gain power over what they say are often abusive working conditions.
The resolution, introduced by Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Maryland), passed along with a slate of other measures in a party line vote of 217 to 202. Since the resolution doesn’t need the approval of the Senate to go into effect, House staffers will now be allowed to file petitions to form unions on an office-by-office basis.
The Congressional Workers Union celebrated the win as “a historic moment.” “Tonight is a reminder of the power of collective action and what the freedom to form a union truly means – democracy not just in our elections, but in our workplaces too,” the union said in a statement. “To our fellow congressional workers: today belongs to us. Tomorrow, we continue the fight – solidarity forever and onwards!”
Congressional staffers wishing to unionize can now go through a similar process to that of unionizing workers across the country, with legal protections against retaliation that they didn’t have before. Thirty percent of staffers in an office can file a petition for a union election with the Office of Congressional Workplace Rights in order to go through an election.
The union will allow the workers to negotiate provisions like promotions and working conditions – but workers are limited by congressional rules in their ability to negotiate things like health care and retirement benefits. Staffers, especially those who are nonwhite, say that they face long hours and abusive bosses in Congress with no accountability while having little to no opportunity for recourse.
Crucially, workers will also be able to negotiate wages, which staffers hope will help to combat “brain drain” from Congress and open the door for people from poor and nonwhite backgrounds to be able to take jobs in Congress. There are still limits on wage raises, however, as members of congress get a certain allowance for their office each year – an allowance that members have said before is inadequate to pay their workers better wages.
Last week, Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-California) announced that the House would, for the first time, establish a minimum pay rate for congressional staffers. While the new minimum annual pay of $45,000 will likely be a raise for many workers, it is certainly not a living wage for a single adult without children in Washington, D.C. according to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology living wage calculator.
In a speech on the House floor ahead of the vote, Levin emphasized that passing his resolution would help congressional workers to access the same protections under labor laws as other workers across the country. “The power of workers to unite and demand fair wages, better benefits and safer working conditions was central to the creation of the American middle class, and it’s central right now for working families simply trying to get by,” Levin said in a speech on the House floor ahead of the vote.
“For months now, our workers have been organizing in the shadows because they lack the legal protections to come forward,” he continued. “The least we can do is honor and respect their effort to organize in Congress, giving them the long overdue right to find their collective voice.”
While Republicans didn’t speak against the measure on the House floor, not a single GOP member voted to pass it. Daniel Schuman, policy director for Demand Progress, argues that Republicans have still been waging anti-worker campaigns, however, by delegitimizing government work in part to keep staffer salaries low, the New York Times reports.
I remember feeling such solidarity with Democrats who opposed Bush’s warmongering. I sincerely did not know it was just empty political posturing for them and they’d happily sign off on any war no matter how insane as long as the president doing it had a (D) next to their name.
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All the Democratic Party’s actions make sense when you switch from thinking of it as a political party whose job is to enact the will of voters to thinking about it as a narrative control operation whose job is to prevent the local riff raff from tampering with the gears of a globe-spanning empire.
The US doesn’t have political parties, it has narrative control ops disguised as political parties. One of them overtly promotes capitalism and imperialism by appealing to Americans’ worst impulses, the other covertly diverts healthy impulses back into capitalism and imperialism.
An elephant and a donkey fight in a puppet show and the crowd cheers for one or the other while thieves pick their pockets. And when people start to notice their wallets are missing, they’re told they can stop the pickpocketing by cheering louder for their favorite puppet.
People ask why the Democrats never codified Roe vs Wade into law, and the answer is, because that’s not their job. Their job is not to enact the policies you elected them to enact. Their job is not even to win elections. Their job is to keep you staring at the puppet show while the empire has its way with the world.
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The Democratic Party is like one of those perpetual fuckups who does all the wrong things and makes all the wrong decisions and never stops blaming all their self-generated problems on everyone else.
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Calls for civility and polite protesting always have a lot less to do with the actual protest at hand than with elites getting nervous about the commoners figuring out that their superior numbers mean they can do whatever they want to whoever they want and nobody can stop them.
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Democracy is when you get to vote on which oligarchic muppet will ceremonially pardon a turkey on Thanksgiving but not on whether your government should greatly escalate the risk of nuclear war.
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Still can’t believe US officials flat out admitted to the press that they’ve been circulating disinformation to the public about the Ukraine war and then like three weeks later it came out that the US government now has a Ministry of Truth for countering disinformation.
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Yes the Department of Homeland Security’s Ministry of Truth is headed by a weird ridiculous person. Please don’t let that distract from the vastly more significant fact that the Department of Homeland Security has a Ministry of Truth.
I already know that my plea here is in vain, because focusing on the ridiculous shitlib has a mainstream partisan slant while focusing on empire narrative management about wars and foreign enemies does not. The mainstream partisan angle wins out every time.
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All Americans need to really deeply ingest the fact that their government is currently decoupling Covid relief funding from Ukraine proxy war funding because it wants to make sure that the proxy war funding actually passes. Really sit with what that says about everything.
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Imagine if instead of deliberately provoking and funding a proxy war against Russia that could get everyone killed, the US had pledged to back Zelensky militarily against the Nazi factions who were threatening to kill him if he made peace with Russia like he campaigned on doing?
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The US proxy war in Ukraine is more serious than Iraq. It’s more serious than Vietnam. The body count is lower for now, but this is a confrontation that Russia has increasingly valid reasons to see as a direct existential threat. This war truly endangers every life on earth.
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Ah for the good old days before 2022 when “We should try to avoid nuclear war” was an uncontroversial position.
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It’s evident now that there’s literally no cap on how much more US interventionism the western political/media class will support in Ukraine. There’s no escalation the Biden administration could propose that they wouldn’t support and call everyone a Kremlin agent who opposes it.
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There doesn’t seem to be any conscious, thinking force driving the escalations against Russia and China. It’s more like watching a force of nature like a hurricane or a wildfire. Just microbes mindlessly responding to the stimulus of global capitalism, with no one ultimately in the driver’s seat.
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U2 performing in Kyiv should reassure Gen Xers that as much as people bitch about Instagram influencers and TikTok stars our phony pop culture bullshit still has everyone else beat.
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Zelensky: So what we need from you Americans is your continued military support, your continued financial support, your continued moral support, and your LIVE FROM NEW YORK IT’S SATURDAY NIGHT!
[music starts playing, we all die a little inside]
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Elon Musk became the Libertarian Messiah because he’s their strongest argument that capitalism can save the world. A billionaire Pentagon contractor is their strongest argument that capitalism can save the world.
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The English language has many words for insanity. Probably for the same reason people who live way up north have many words for snow.
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My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, following me on Facebook, Twitter, Soundcloud or YouTube, or throwing some money into my tip jar on Ko-fi, Patreon or Paypal. If you want to read more you can buy my books. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list for at my website or on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. Everyone, racist platforms excluded, has my permission to republish, use or translate any part of this work (or anything else I’ve written) in any way they like free of charge. For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what I’m trying to do with this platform, click here. All works co-authored with my American husband Tim Foley.
We are once again witnessing history being made, folks. Today, in the Year of our Lord two thousand and twenty-two, we get the great privilege of bearing witness to the single most American thing that has ever happened.
The Biden administration has asked top Democrats to decouple the federal government’s Covid relief spending package from its much larger bill for funding of the US proxy war against Russia in Ukraine, because one of those two things is too controversial and contentious to pass quickly.
Guess which one.
NEW: President Biden has asked congressional leadership to decouple a Ukraine aid package from COVID relief money in an attempt to pass the aid for Ukraine without having to deal with thorny partisan opposition to the COVID relief funds, a Congressional source tells NBC News.
Congressional Democratic leaders reached a bipartisan accord to send $39.8 billion to Ukraine to bolster its monthslong battle against a brutal Russian assault.
And that deal is now expected to move swiftly to President Joe Biden’s desk after Democrats agreed to drop another one of their top priorities — billions of dollars in pandemic aid that has stalled on the Hill. The Ukraine aid could come to the House floor for a vote as soon as Tuesday, according to a person familiar with the discussions who spoke candidly on condition of anonymity.
That nearly $40 billion worth of proxy war funding eclipses the paltry $10 billion in Covid relief funding that was being debated in congress, and is in fact well in excess of the already massive $33 billion sum requested by the White House.
“President Joe Biden and top Democrats have agreed to a GOP demand to disentangle a stalled COVID-19 response package from a separate supplemental request for military and humanitarian aid to Ukraine so the latter can move more quickly,” Roll Call reports. “At the same time, House and Senate Democrats have upped the price tag on the Ukraine package by $6.8 billion above Biden’s initial $33 billion request. Democrats proposed including an additional $3.4 billion for food aid and $3.4 billion more to replace U.S. military equipment sent to Ukraine, according to a source familiar with the offer.”
Biden initially requested $33 billion for Ukraine and $22.5 billion for Covid in an emergency funding bill; now Biden says he’s willing to sign off on $40 billion for Ukraine and $0 for Covid: https://t.co/U3yGtDiIYL
I defy you to find me anything more American than Washington decoupling relief for its own citizens from its proxy war funding because it wants to make sure the proxy war funding actually passes.
It’s almost too perfect. You couldn’t come up with a better summation of the US empire in a nutshell if you tried. Taking money away from needful Americans because congressional opposition to helping them so was putting too much inertia on Washington’s games of nuclear brinkmanship is the single most American thing that has ever happened.
There’s actually a real poetic beauty to it, if you look close enough. The government which runs a globe-spanning empire is dubious about the need to help its own citizenry recover from an economy-flattening pandemic, but throws its full bipartisan support behind a proxy war which threatens the life of every living organism.
That’s it. That’s the whole entire point I wanted to make here. It’s so insane you’ll cry if you don’t laugh. And we’ll always have those little moments of laughter. Even if these psychos get us all killed.
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My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, following me on Facebook, Twitter, Soundcloud or YouTube, or throwing some money into my tip jar on Ko-fi, Patreon or Paypal. If you want to read more you can buy my books. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list for at my website or on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. Everyone, racist platforms excluded, has my permission to republish, use or translate any part of this work (or anything else I’ve written) in any way they like free of charge. For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what I’m trying to do with this platform, click here. All works co-authored with my American husband Tim Foley.
When Emily Drabinski was elected president of the American Library Association (ALA) in mid-April, she tweeted her excitement that someone like her, a self-proclaimed Marxist lesbian, could garner enough votes to head the oldest and largest association of library workers in the United States. The ALA was founded in 1876 “to enable librarians to do their present work more easily and at less expense,” thereby incorporating the Gilded Age’s capitalist efficiency into libraries from its very beginning. Given the now near-total dominance of neoliberalism in the field — from ever-escalating austerity budgets to constant calls to manage libraries as if they were businesses — Drabinski’s election was anything but a given. It’s exciting, because only a densely organized library workforce can have the power to push back against political entities that would strip libraries, alongside other public institutions, of what remaining power we have to make our communities better places to live for everyone. Strong libraries are what most people want. According to the Pew Research Center, almost 80 percent of American adults, across the political spectrum, believe libraries help people find trustworthy and reliable information. This comes as little surprise. After all, who could be against a library?
Well, it turns out that enough people could be. Drabinski’s election was immediately picked up by right-wing trolls who cast her as yet another “groomer” pushing gay books on young children. These attacks mirror the attacks on library workers — particularly at school and public libraries — who have been battling challenges to books about racial inequality and gender and sexual identity at rates not seen since the McCarthy era.
We can understand these challenges as part of a white supremacist and patriarchal backlash against social movements that have produced waves of protest against police violence, a mainstreaming of prison abolition as a political possibility, the normalization of queer life in media, and a union movement seeing wins once thought impossible against corporations, such as Starbucks and Amazon. These are also attacks against labor. Librarians are trained to select books and other resources to be shared in common by groups of readers. This is the job we are paid to do. The books that are making it to target lists, such as Angie Thomas’s The Hate U Give, Kyle Lukoff’s Call Me Max and Maia Kobabe’s Gender Queer, don’t find their way to library shelves as part of the gay or Black “agenda.” They are selected and acquired by librarians who use funds to purchase books that meet the reading needs and interests of our communities. Of course, those decisions are often made collaboratively with those communities — faculty and students make book requests, parents express concerns that are then managed through existing policy and protocols. But this current spate of highly politicized and well-organized challenges is meant to circumvent all of these ordinary library processes. What we see now are concerted attacks not just on books and authors, but on the expertise of library workers.
Nobody knows this better than rank-and-file library workers. As many of us work a second shift pushing back against these incursions, we need the support of our institutions and the public to do our work effectively. If libraries are the terrain of struggle, we are the people most directly involved in the fight. Our efforts are made all the more difficult when our institutions actively work against us. Alongside the very public efforts to ban books from library shelves, library workers face a host of other challenges that directly impact our capacity to do the work necessary to preserve these institutions. Management rolls out absurdly strict attendance policies in the wake of a union campaign in Baltimore County, Maryland. Library boards are taken over by people who then vote to slash funding and hours in Flathead County, Montana, and Niles, Illinois. Full-time librarians flee to other employment sectors or to retirement, and are replaced by part-time positions. Core library functions, including collection development and resource description, are contracted out to for-profit private companies that lock us into expensive systems we don’t control. School librarian ranks are thinned as only wealthy ZIP codes choose to afford that staff. These issues may not be as well-discussed as Breitbart calling us all “groomers,” but they are every bit as insidious, stripping our institutions of the very people best positioned to save them.
Libraries are crucial social infrastructure. Like the post office, they are a site for the circulation of public goods such as books and films, but also tax forms, overdose-prevention medications such as Narcan, and COVID tests. Like parks, library buildings produce space for the public where anyone can use the bathroom, grab some computer time, sit down, stay warm in the cold and cool in the heat. And like all social infrastructure, libraries are under attack from an organized right that knows well that the best way to crater public institutions is to relentlessly attack them until they become unusable, leading to their abandonment by everyone except those who have no other choice. We need a strong library workforce equipped to resist the dismantling of our public institutions. Rightfully, there has been ample public outcry in response to right-wing attacks on our libraries, the books and other materials they contain, and the people who read those books. However, what worries me is that in our focus on book burnings we’ll forget to build the power of our most potent weapon: the people who work in the library.
Drabinski’s election to the presidency of ALA — in a year that saw more votes cast than any in the past decade — represents a vote for labor organizing as a mode of both vocational and political change. Her campaign put labor front and center, making a very public argument that organizing collectively on the behalf of the public good is the most important thing library workers can be doing right now. Whether she’ll make good on this Marxist lesbian promise remains to be seen, and will require all of us who work in and use libraries to join the fight.
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell has signaled that the GOP could pursue a federal ban on abortion if the right-wing Supreme Court overturns Roe v. Wade and Republicans regain control of Congress in the fast-approaching midterm elections.
“If the leaked opinion became the final opinion, legislative bodies — not only at the state level but at the federal level — certainly could legislate in that area,” McConnell (R-Ky.) toldUSA Today in an interview late last week, days after the publication of Justice Samuel Alito’s draft ruling in a Mississippi abortion-ban case sparked nationwide outrage.
“If this were the final decision, that was the point that it should be resolved one way or another in the legislative process,” McConnell said of a federal abortion ban, which polling suggests would be broadly unpopular with the U.S. electorate. “So yeah, it’s possible.”
While the Republican leader claimed he would not be willing to weaken the legislative filibuster to push through a federal abortion ban, the GOP’s 2017 decision to nuke the filibuster for Supreme Court nominees paved the way for the confirmation of Justices Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett — each of whom is reportedly preparing to vote with Alito to end Roe.
“No one should be surprised at what the leak of Alito’s opinion taking away abortion rights revealed. There is a plan, and this is just one part of it,” Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.) said Saturday. “This is why Mitch McConnell refused to let the Senate consider Judge Merrick Garland.”
“This is why they eliminated the filibuster for Gorsuch,” Whitehouse added. “This is why they pressured the FBI to tank the Kavanaugh investigation. This is why they broke the ‘Garland rule’ to stuff Barrett on the court mid-election. This is why $580 million was spent to capture the court. This is why the Federalist Society was the turnstile for Supreme Court nominees.”
The Supreme Court is expected to hand down its final ruling in the case, which is centered on a sweeping abortion ban in Mississippi, in late June or early July.
McConnell’s remarks to USA Today came as Senate Democrats geared up for a possible Wednesday vote on the Women’s Health Protection Act, legislation that would codify into federal law the right to abortion care free from medically unnecessary restrictions.
The bill is certain to fail if Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) remains opposed to the measure and Democrats refuse to eliminate or reform the legislative filibuster.
The last time Republicans held the Senate, they tried and failed to pass Trump-backed legislation that would have banned abortion at the federal level after 20 weeks of pregnancy. Manchin joined most Senate Republicans in supporting the 2018 proposal, which garnered 51 votes—not enough to overcome the 60-vote filibuster.
The Washington Postreported last week that “leading anti-abortion groups and their allies in Congress have been meeting behind the scenes to plan a national strategy that would kick in if the Supreme Court rolls back abortion rights this summer, including a push for a strict nationwide ban on the procedure if Republicans retake power in Washington.”
“A group of Republican senators has discussed at multiple meetings the possibility of banning abortion at around six weeks, said Sen. James Lankford (Okla.), who was in attendance and said he would support the legislation,” the Post noted. “Sen. Joni Ernst (R-Iowa) will introduce the legislation in the Senate, according to an antiabortion advocate with knowledge of the discussions.”
Though such a bill would go nowhere as long as Democrats control the presidency, it would lay the groundwork for a sweeping ban as the GOP seeks to win back the White House in 2024.
Nationwide abortion ban: that’s the goal of anti-abortion politicians if they regain power in Washington this November. https://t.co/fVgLHHDJ5s
With abortion rights under grave threat, people took to the streets in major U.S. cities on Saturday to voice opposition to Alito’s draft opinion and GOP efforts to roll back reproductive freedoms at the national level and in states across the country. The Guttmacher Institute estimates that 26 U.S. states are “certain or likely to move quickly to ban abortion” if the Supreme Court overturns Roe.
On Saturday evening, abortion rights advocates held protests outside the homes of Chief Justice John Roberts and Kavanaugh:
When pro-choice activists rallied at Justice Roberts's house tonight, police warned of a rule that, "you can't picket any single private residence."
"If you stay here, I'll start give orders, which could lead to your arrest."
Demonstrators are also expected to rally in support of reproductive rights at the U.S. Supreme Court on Sunday.
“Mother’s Day is for us and what we deserve to take care of our families, including the right to have an abortion,” tweeted Shaunna Thomas, the co-founder of UltraViolet. “See you there.”
(@RepMTG) 
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