Despite all of the voter suppression efforts, threats of voter intimidation and a raging pandemic, the people of the United States participated in record numbers in last November’s election. And they voted Trump out. Continue reading
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The Wisconsin State Senate refused this week to take up a resolution that would honor a number of Black figures in recognition of Black History Month, but within the same session also voted in favor of a resolution giving honors to the late talk show host Rush Limbaugh.
Ostensibly, Republicans said they did not want to pass the Black History Month resolution, authored by Black lawmakers in the Wisconsin legislature, because it was too specific and included figures they deemed to be controversial.
“We asked them to do [a Black History Month resolution] that was more generic, like the ones we had done in the past,” State Assembly Speaker Robin Vos said. “They really didn’t want to. So we never reached consensus.”
Those same concerns, however, did not stop the Republican-led State Senate on Tuesday from passing a resolution for Limbaugh, who dispensed hatred and vitriol toward a number of groups on his radio program for decades, largely without remorse, prior to his death. In defending their vote, some Republicans even painted Limbaugh in a positive light, while ignoring his blatantly hostile and hate-filled history as a broadcaster.
“He was a bold conservative voice, he was a cultural phenomenon, but also very importantly, he was a philanthropist,” Republican State Sen. André Jacque said.
The resolution on Limbaugh further described him as “a talk radio pioneer beloved by millions of loyal listeners for his ardent defense of conservative politics.”
Democratic lawmakers were fast to condemn their colleagues from across the political aisle.
“The Republicans have issues with who we as a Black body choose to honor, but yet we have to sit in this body and honor somebody like Rush Limbaugh who was a homophobic, xenophobic racist,” State Sen. LaTonya Johnson, a Democrat, said.
“You own this. You own his rhetoric. You own his sentiment. The (GOP caucus) owns this — his racism,” Johnson added in other remarks.
Johnson made attempts to read some of the remarks from Limbaugh’s past that Republicans refused to recognize. However, as she was doing so, some members of the GOP State Senate caucus decided to leave the room instead.
Limbaugh, who died of lung cancer last month, attacked a number of groups on his radio program, including members of the LGBTQ community, feminists and people of color.
The radio host promoted the racist “birtherism” conspiracy theory, which wrongly alleged that former President Barack Obama was not born in the U.S., and frequently played a racist parody song about the former chief executive that included a racial epithet in its title and lyrics. Limbaugh also mocked and openly celebrated the deaths of gay men on his show during the AIDS epidemic, and disparaged Georgetown University law student Sandra Fluke by calling her a “slut” and a “prostitute” for testifying before Congress in 2012 about access to birth control.
Immediately after his death last month, Vos requested that Wisconsin Gov. Tony Evers, a Democrat, issue an order that all flags throughout the state be lowered to recognize Limbaugh’s life. Evers ignored the request, and instead ordered flags to be lowered to commemorate the 500,000 Americans who had perished at that point across the U.S. as a result of the coronavirus pandemic — another topic that Limbaugh often minimized and lied about to listeners of his radio program.
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
Minority Leader Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Kentucky) on Tuesday threatened to grind rulemaking in Congress to a halt if Democrats get rid of or reform the filibuster, which currently requires a 60-vote consensus for most bills to pass the Senate.
“Nobody serving in this chamber can even begin to imagine what a completely scorched earth Senate would look like,” McConnell said on the floor on Tuesday. Republicans would make the Senate, he said, look like a “100-car pileup, nothing moving.”
Without the filibuster, McConnell said that previous actions will be like “child’s play.” “I want our colleagues to imagine a world where every single task, every one of them, requires a physical quorum,” he threatened.
He also said that Republicans would try passing conservative policies like defunding Planned Parenthood and sanctuary cities and expanding abortion restrictions, right-to-work laws and oil drilling if they regain control of the Senate. Most of these proposals poll overwhelmingly unfavorably with the public.
This is the second time this year that McConnell has warned Democrats against removing the filibuster. “A scorched-earth Senate would hardly be able to function,” he said in January. “It wouldn’t be a progressive’s dream. It would be a nightmare.”
Back in January, soon after the new Congress came in, McConnell held up the Senate by forcing a stalemate on Senate-sharing agreements with Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-New York) over the filibuster issue. He only relinquished that stalemate after moderate Senate Democrats Joe Manchin (D-West Virginia) and Kyrsten Sinema (D-Arizona) said that they would vote against filibuster abolition.
Today’s Senate, however, is hardly a progressive’s dream anyway. The filibuster is currently already blocking a broad spectrum of Democratic and progressive legislation, and the recent stimulus was only able to pass because it was considered under budget reconciliation, which only requires a simple majority. Proposals like Democrat’s election-reforming H.R.1, the pro-union PRO Act and the $15 minimum wage are basically dead in the water due to the filibuster even though they’ve been passed by the House.
The filibuster, reporting has found, already hurts the Democrats more than it does Republicans. In past administrations, Republicans have obstructed more than their fair share of bills by using the filibuster and are generally more willing to use the filibuster as a political weapon.
McConnell has a particular mastery of using the filibuster, as he demonstrated numerous times under President Barack Obama. And he knows that he can use the filibuster to grind the Senate to a halt anyway. “So long as it applies only to legislation, the filibuster is a Republicans-only weapon,” wrote Hayes Brown for MSNBC in January. “There’s nothing left, it seems, for the GOP to fear from it — aside from its eventual demise.”
McConnell’s comments come at a time when the future of the filibuster is more uncertain than it was earlier this year, though still unlikely to be abolished. On Monday, the number two ranking Senate Democrat Dick Durbin (D-Illinois) said that the filibuster is a “weapon of mass destruction” that is obstructing progress by holding the Senate “hostage.” And last week, Manchin signaled an openness to filibuster reform, which is a softer stance than his previous fiery opposition to axing it altogether.
Many progressives view the filibuster, with its racist history of being used to oppose civil rights, as the biggest current legislative hurdle for progress on the federal level. In Arizona, progressives are reminding Sinema that her own stated views mesh better with filibuster abolition than her current stance of upholding it, and that she could face primary challenges from the left if she doesn’t change her mind.
Progressive groups like the Sunrise Movement have committed to continue turning up the heat on politicians to get the filibuster removed. The movement to end the filibuster has already succeeded in getting more moderate lawmakers like Senators Amy Klobuchar (D-Minnesota) and John Tester (D-Montana) to say they’ll vote against it or at least consider filibuster reform.
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
A judge from the Maricopa County Superior Court of Arizona has ordered the state’s Republican Party and its lawyers to pay over $18,000 in attorney fees that were incurred during their failed attempts to mount a legal challenge to the election results and President Joe Biden’s win in the state.
Judge John Hannah was scathing in his decision released on Friday, saying that the suit was “groundless,” partially because the Republicans sued the wrong people and because their reasons for bringing the lawsuit were “flimsy” and “improper.” The Republican Party claimed that the Arizona secretary of state had misstated the law but then named county election officials as the defendants in their suit instead of the secretary of state. It failed to acknowledge this error.
The judge says that the Republican Party has admitted that it “filed this lawsuit for political reasons. ‘Public mistrust’ is a political issue, not a legal or factual basis for litigation,” Hannah wrote. The party’s lawyers had stated that their reason for filing the suit was mistrust in the election results — though they fail to mention that that mistrust was created by former President Donald Trump and the Republican Party itself.
The judgment was issued for “reasonable attorney’s fees and expenses against an attorney or party that brings or defends a claim without substantial justification or solely or primarily for delay or harassment,” Hannah wrote. The party “made no serious pre-filing effort” to ensure their argument was justified before bringing the suit, the judge argued.
He also says in his decision that the arguments from the party’s lawyers represented “a lack of good faith” and that their questioning of the Court’s inquiries into their own arguments was “gaslighting.”
“Arizona law gives political parties a privileged position in the electoral process on which our self-government depends,” Hannah concludes. “The public has a right to expect the Arizona Republican Party to conduct itself respectfully when it participates in that process. It has failed to do so in this case.” The $18,000 in fees had previously been paid for with taxpayer money.
In statements protesting the judge’s decision, the party’s attorneys doubled down on their arguments, which had been refuted by the judge, saying that the order “encourages public distrust in the government for being openly hostile to them.” As the judge stated, however, public perceptions, in this case, are not legal grounds for a lawsuit.
The Arizona Republican Party filed two of the eight lawsuits that challenged the results of the election in Arizona. All of them failed, and there has been no evidence of voter fraud in the state.
Following the slate of failed lawsuits after the election, Republicans across the country have been trying a myriad of other tactics to try to skew future election results in their favor.
In January, a Republican state lawmaker introduced a bill to grant the Arizona legislature the ability to overturn the results of a presidential election in the state. The bill would “effectively disenfranchise voters” across the state, wrote Truthout’s Chris Walker. The bill was never brought to a vote.
Arizona has also been a hot spot for Republicans introducing bills aimed at suppressing voters in the state, with lawmakers filing two dozen bills that make it harder to vote. Several of them are aimed at imposing restrictions on voting by mail and limiting them to a very narrow window. Republicans have been particularly targeting voting by mail after it was expanded in many states due to COVID-19 — and it was used by many Black voters in places like Georgia.
Republicans in Arizona have also basically admitted that they want fewer people to vote because they believe that it will help them win elections. A lawyer representing the Arizona Republican Party told the Supreme Court that laws allowing more people to vote puts them “at a competitive disadvantage relative to Democrats.”
And last week, a Republican lawmaker in the state said that Republicans are looking to place restrictions on voting because they believe that “everybody shouldn’t be voting.”
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
On Sunday, Stacey Abrams panned the slate of voter suppression laws being pushed by Republicans in Georgia, saying that the “racist” laws are “a redux of Jim Crow in a suit and tie.”
“We know that the only thing that precipitated these changes — it’s not that there was a question of security. In fact, the secretary of state and the governor went to great pains to assure America that Georgia’s elections were secure,” Abrams told CNN’s Jake Tapper on Sunday.
Following their losses in the 2020 election in Georgia and across the country, Republicans in state legislatures have introduced hundreds of bills aimed at making it harder to vote. The bills introduced in Georgia are particularly far-reaching, and, if signed into law, would severely restrict early and absentee voting in the state.
Democrats won big in Georgia in recent elections, due partially to the work of voting rights activists like Abrams who helped turn out more voters in the state, especially Black voters and voters of color. Black voters especially turned out in droves to vote early or by mail this election, and reporting found that some were even driven by what they viewed as previous voter suppression efforts in the state.
Now, following record voter turnout, Republicans are trying to suppress voting in the state, and many of the attacks on voting seem to be aimed squarely at getting fewer Black voters to vote. One of the provisions they’ve proposed and passed is a bill restricting early voting to only one Sunday prior to election day, perhaps due to the fact that Sundays are big for Black voter turnout thanks to “souls to the polls” events.
“And so the only connection that we can find is that more people of color voted, and it changed the outcome of elections in a direction that Republicans do not like,” Abrams said. “Instead of celebrating better access and more participation, their response is to try to eliminate access to voting for, primarily, communities of color.”
“There’s a direct correlation between the usage of dropboxes, the usage of in-person early voting, especially on Sundays, and the use of vote-by-mail and a direct increase in the number of people of color voting,” Abrams continued.
Republicans last week voted to end Georgia’s no-excuse absentee voting, which they’ve had in place since 2005 and was originally a Republican proposal that they now view as having turned against them politically. The state Senate had also moved forward with a Republican proposal to end automatic voter registration, which led to record voter turnout after it was implemented in 2016, but the senators ended up tabling that proposal.
Voter suppression has a long, racist and violent history in the U.S., and scholars say that the Jim Crow era of racist laws still has an effect on voter suppression today. Even before this year’s wave of state laws, voter suppression efforts ahead of the 2020 election — like Donald Trump’s sabotaging of the United States Postal Service’s ability to deliver mail-in ballots — were so similar to Jim Crow era laws that some activists have taken to calling them “Jim Crow 2.0.”
Republicans’ push to limit the windows for early voting in the state, for instance, is a law that appears to affect everyone equally but in reality would likely further subjugate voters in nonwhite communities. Nonwhite voters in Georgia already have to wait for hours in line to vote as the number of polling locations were decreased precipitously in places like Atlanta, which has a majority Black population.
The measures to narrow the period for early voting would likely increase the already long lines in certain areas. Republicans have further proposed outlawing the handing out of water and food to people waiting in line to vote, making it a misdemeanor crime to do so.
These bills in Georgia are part of Republicans’ efforts nationwide to suppress voting — and Republicans have basically admitted as such. Last week, a Republican in Arizona offered his reasoning for the efforts within his state to pass similar voter restrictions. “Everybody shouldn’t be voting,” he said in explaining why Republicans are working so hard to suppress the vote. “Quantity is important, but we have to look at the quality of votes, as well.”
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
A new study, which examines the outcomes of different states’ approaches to the coronavirus pandemic based on what party their governors belonged to, shows that, for most of 2020, states with Republican governors were more likely to see higher incidence rates and death tolls versus states with Democratic governors.
Published in the peer-reviewed American Journal of Preventive Medicine this month, the study, conducted by researchers at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and the Medical University of South Carolina, took a look at different parts of the pandemic and saw a noticeable shift happening at the start of summer last year.
At the onset of the pandemic, from March until early June, there were higher per capita incidence rates as well as deaths from the virus within Democratic states. But from July through the remainder of the year, states with Republican governors had worse outcomes.
“From March to early June, Republican-led states had lower Covid-19 incidence rates compared with Democratic-led states. On June 3, the association reversed, and Republican-led states had higher incidence,” the study said.
“For death rates, Republican-led states had lower rates early in the pandemic, but higher rates from July 4 through mid-December,” the study added.
“Governors’ party affiliation may have contributed to a range of policy decisions that, together, influenced the spread of the virus,” said the study’s senior author Sara Benjamin-Neelon, a professor in the Bloomberg School’s Department of Health, Behavior and Society. “These findings underscore the need for state policy actions that are guided by public health considerations rather than by partisan politics.”
Why did “blue” states fare worse at the start of the pandemic than “red” ones? The researchers theorize it had less to do with policies implemented by Democratic governors, and more because those areas were “home to initial ports of entry for the virus in early 2020.”
Meanwhile, researchers said, “The subsequent reversal in trends, particularly with respect to testing, may reflect policy differences that could have facilitated the spread of the virus,” the study stated.
The pandemic, the authors added, “became increasingly politicized in the U.S. and political affiliation of state leaders may contribute to policies affecting the spread of the disease.”
Several Republican governors did indeed prioritize “reopening” their states’ economies, with detrimental outcomes, around the time the study said things began to shift. Former President Donald Trump himself seemed to politicize methods to stem the spread of coronavirus, stating in a Wall Street Journal interview that he thought people wore masks in order to demonstrate their disapproval of him.
Trump also tried to wrongly suggest in September that drastic rises in the number of cases and deaths due to COVID-19 were not because some states were loosening standards, but rather due to Democratic leadership.
“Blue states had tremendous death rates. If you take the blue states out, we’re at a level that I don’t think anybody in the world would be at,” Trump had claimed. “We’re really at a very low level. But some of the states, they were blue states and blue-state-managed.”
The findings of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and the Medical University of South Carolina study demonstrate that the former president’s assertions were way off.
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
Across the country, Republicans have been behind a flurry of over 250 laws introduced to suppress voting after their candidate lost the presidential election. One Arizona lawmaker on Thursday had an answer for why the GOP is pushing these laws: “[Republicans] don’t mind putting security measures in that won’t let everybody vote — but everybody shouldn’t be voting.”
Democrats, GOP Rep. John Kavanagh of Arizona explained to CNN, want everyone to be able to vote and are “willing to risk fraud.” Republicans, especially since former President Donald Trump lost the election, are more concerned about voter fraud — which is statistically insignificant according to voting officials — so they’re willing to suppress votes, Kavanagh said.
“Not everybody wants to vote, and if somebody is uninterested in voting, that probably means that they’re totally uninformed on the issues,” Kavanagh told CNN. “Quantity is important, but we have to look at the quality of votes, as well.”
CNN does not specify what Kavanagh means by the “quality” of votes, though it’s possible that Kavanagh may be referring to the party that the vote is for. After all, when asked to explain why the Republican Party wants to gut the Voting Rights Act last week, the attorney for the Arizona Republicans told the U.S. Supreme Court that allowing more people to vote “puts us at a competitive disadvantage relative to Democrats.”
Though it’s been clear to observers that the Republicans are trying to suppress votes — especially the votes of Black, Indigenous, and other people of color — with bills restricting voting access and challenging the Voting Rights Act, it’s rare that a lawmaker has said it as directly as Kavanagh has.
Kavanagh, it should be noted, is wrong in his sweeping statement about why people don’t vote. Some don’t vote in presidential elections in the spirit of protest; others may choose not to vote even if they are well informed on the issues because they don’t think their single vote makes a difference; and still others don’t vote not because they don’t want to, but because they cannot, owing to their inability to overcome the many barriers that have been created — largely with the underlying intention of suppressing their votes — such as those pushed by Republicans in many states where they control the government.
In Arizona alone, Republicans are targeting voting rights with two dozen measures. Several of them, CNN reports, impose new restrictions on voting by mail and limit mail-in ballots to a very narrow window.
Republican Arizona State Sen. Michelle Ugenti-Rita claims that the reason she sponsored the law shrinking the early voting period is that she wants to ensure that mail-in ballots aren’t sent to the wrong people. The bill would automatically exclude people from receiving mail-in ballots if they haven’t voted in the last four elections and they don’t respond to a mailing from the state. “Allowing voters to sign up in perpetuity does increase the opportunity for things to go wrong,” Ugenti-Rita said.
The issue of ballots being sent to the wrong place is a vanishingly small issue since election officials can recognize if people have double voted. Since 2010, the Arizona attorney general’s office has only successfully prosecuted 30 counts of voter fraud.
Nevertheless, the Brennan Center’s February analysis of voter suppression bills across the country found that Arizona led the country in proposed bills that make it harder to vote — though, with bills filed since then, Georgia may be giving Arizona a run for its money. Georgia and Arizona are particular targets for Republicans since they surprisingly voted blue on Election Day last November, leading to the GOP losing control of Congress and the White House.
Many of the voter suppression efforts being waged by Republicans are almost explicitly racist. A bill that passed Georgia’s Senate last week, for instance, ends no-excuse absentee ballots in the state after Black voters turned out in droves with mail-in ballots. The state’s House has also passed legislation that severely limits early voting in the state on Sundays, which are typically huge days for Black voting due to church-led “souls to the polls” events.
Republicans are also waging challenges, as referenced earlier, to the Voting Rights Act in the Supreme Court. The Voting Rights Act was originally established to ensure that racial discrimination didn’t prevent Black and other nonwhite people from voting, but Republicans are going to bat to gut what’s left of the law.
Congressional Democrats have been fighting back against these efforts with H.R.1, the For the People Act. The House passed the act last week, and if it became law, would increase transparency in campaign financing, attempt to prevent gerrymandering and establish a nationwide automatic voter registration system. No Republicans voted for the bill.
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
While Democrats were busy passing the latest COVID stimulus package that will provide relief to millions of Americans through Congress, Republican leaders were pleased to introduce their own legislation: a renewed attempt at repealing the estate tax.
The legislation was unveiled on Tuesday by Senators John Kennedy (R-Louisiana) and John Thune (R-South Dakota) and has been co-sponsored by 24 other Republican senators, or about half of all Senate Republicans, including Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Kentucky), according to a Kennedy press release. Rep. Jason Smith (R-Missouri) has also introduced similar legislation in the House.
The federal estate tax’s current top rate is 40 percent, but thanks to exemptions that grow every year, an estate in 2021 would have to be worth $11.7 million for individuals and $23.4 million for married couples before the estate tax kicks in. The exemption was previously around $5 million but was doubled by then-President Donald Trump in 2018.
Because the threshold is so high, an estimated less than 0.1 percent of estate tax returns will pay the federal estate tax for 2020. In other words, Republicans are fighting for a repeal of a tax for the richest 0.1 percent of dead people.
Republicans are touting this legislation as helpful for families, especially farmers, who pass down their homes and property to their children. The repeal of the estate tax, in similar GOP attempts past, has had the endorsement of the conservative American Farm Bureau (AFB).
But, as the LA Times points out, the estate tax also only applies to the biggest and richest of farming families. The AFB estimated that, in 2020, a farm would have to be about 3,700 acres to be subject to the estate tax. Meanwhile, the average farm, according to the Department of Agriculture, is 444 acres.
“Couching the estate tax repeal as a benefit for America’s valiant business and farm owners is a scam. The largest category of assets in estates by far is publicly traded stock,” wrote business reporter Michael Hiltzik for the LA Times. “Repealing the estate tax would be a massive handout to rich families, enabling them to concentrate their wealth to an extent the Founding Fathers found inimical to society.”
President Joe Biden proposed a host of increased taxes on the rich on his campaign trail, including reducing the tax exemption on estate taxes drastically to $3.5 million for individuals, going back not only to pre-Trump levels but pre-2011 levels. Though he has not endorsed a wealth tax, other Democrats and progressives like Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Massachusetts) have been working on a wealth tax on the ultrarich to level the playing field and help raise funds for the federal government.
Republicans like to claim that they’re the party of the working class: As MSNBC points out, just a few weeks ago, Sen. Ted Cruz, a co-sponsor of the estate tax repeal, said, “The Republican Party is not just the party of country clubs. The Republican Party is the party of steel workers, construction workers, pipeline workers, police officers, firefighters, waiters, and waitresses.”
While Republicans were unveiling this legislation this week, Democrats were negotiating and voting through the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan, which, by some estimates, is expected to lift 16 million out of poverty this year. This stimulus plan, which has sorely needed relief for Americans in the form of $1,400 relief checks and tax credits for the middle and lower classes, got zero Republican votes.
In fact, Republicans (and some notable centrist Democrats) fought tooth and nail through the stimulus negotiations to get the $1,400 checks and $15 federal minimum wage out of the bill — the same minimum-wage proposal that would be a huge boon to the servers that Cruz says he represents.
Though the estate tax currently raises much less than it could since the exemption is so high, the Office of Management and Budget has still projected that estate and gift taxes will raise $205 billion from 2019 to 2028. That’s enough to cover the $54 million that the Congressional Budget Office estimated a $15 minimum wage would add to the deficit over a similar time period more than 3.5 times over.
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
Noting that his Republican colleagues seem to be more interested in the fate of children’s books than workers’ rights, Rep. Tim Ryan (D-Ohio) reprimanded his fellow lawmakers from across the political aisle with a fiery speech on the House floor, deriding them for having their priorities out of order.
Ryan’s rousing diatribe came about during debate on Tuesday regarding the Protecting the Right to Organize (PRO) Act, a piece of pro-union legislation that passed the House mostly along party lines. The bill received 225 votes in favor of passage, with just five Republicans backing it.
Among other provisions, the bill would impose harsher civil penalties on companies that try to fire union organizers, would outlaw tactics businesses use to delay unionization, and would override so-called “right-to-work” anti-union laws that have passed in several states across the U.S.
During debate of the bill prior to its passage, several Republicans complained about what the proposal would entail, with some expressing qualms about it being too drastic a change in favor of workers. Ryan dismissed those fears, condemning them as being out of line.
“One of the earlier speakers said, ‘This is the most dramatic change in labor law in 80 years.’ And I say, thank God,” Ryan said.
Tim Ryan goes off on GOP from the House floor and the world is better for it. pic.twitter.com/tyKbA5w2D0
— Scott Dworkin (@funder) March 9, 2021
“In the late ’70s, a CEO made 35 times” what a worker earned back then, Ryan noted. “Today, it’s three to 400 times the worker. And our friends on the other side [are] running around with their hair on fire.”
Becoming more animated in his delivery, Ryan spoke forcefully against GOP opposition to the bill:
Heaven forbid we pass something that’s going to help the damn workers in the United States of America. Heaven forbid we tilt the balance that has been going in the wrong direction for 50 years.
Ryan also noted that Republicans seemed to oppose every effort possible to help American workers over the past several years.
“We talk about pensions, you complain. We talk about the minimum wage increase, you complain. We talk about giving them the right to organize, you complain,” he said. “But if we were passing a tax cut here, you’d all be getting in line to vote yes for it.”
“Now stop talking about Dr. Seuss and start working with us on behalf of the American workers,” Ryan added.
The last line Ryan delivered before yielding the floor referenced a decision earlier this month by the company that runs the estate of children’s author Dr. Seuss (real name Theodor Geisel) to halt the printing of his books that contained racist caricatures. The decision only affects six of Seuss’s books out of many dozens that are still in print, and effectively discontinues the publication of titles that include pictures portraying Asian and African people in negative and hateful ways.
Several right-wing commentators, as well as many Republican lawmakers, have seized upon the move as proof of a supposed “cancel culture” being pushed by the left, even though the decision was made by the company itself without outside pressure. Some right-wing voices have even falsely suggested that President Joe Biden played a role in the cancelation of the six titles.
In one example of the manufactured outrage by Republicans regarding the Dr. Seuss books, House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-California) recently shared a video of himself declaring that he still likes the author, while reading “Green Eggs and Ham” — a book that is not among the six by Geisel that the company managing his titles has decided to stop printing.
The speech from Ryan has been viewed and shared tens of thousands of times on social media. Its popularity is perhaps twofold, as those who are sharing or liking it are likely promoting the expansion of workers’ rights while also attempting to highlight the absurdity of right-wing lawmakers trying to create controversy where none appears to actually exist.
Despite most in the U.S. holding positive views of unions, the PRO Act faces difficult odds of passage in the Senate, where a Republican filibuster of the proposed bill will likely halt it from becoming law.
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
In a Sunday interview with Axios, Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., described former President Trump’s hold over the Republican Party as something of a hostage situation.
The former President, Graham said, “could make the Republican Party something that nobody else I know could make it. He could make it bigger. He could make it stronger. He could make it more diverse. And he also could destroy it.”
The senator continued to describe the former President along the lines of the duality of man. Trump, he said, has both a “dark side” and some “magic” in him. “What I’m trying to do is just harness the magic.”
Prior to Trump’s nomination in 2016, Sen. Graham had been a staunch critic of the former President, arguing that he was not mentally fit for the role. After Trump was nominated, however, Graham quickly fell into Trump’s good graces, becoming one of his most ardent allies.
Although Graham did not support Trump’s impeachment, the senator admitted that Trump “needs to understand that his actions were the problem” leading up the Capitol insurrection.
“Donald Trump was my friend before the riot,” Graham said. “And I’m trying to keep a relationship with him after the riot. I still consider him a friend. What happened was a dark day in American history, and we’re going to move forward.”
He continued, “So here’s what you need to know about me: I’m going to continue — I want us to continue the policies that I think will make America strong. I believe that the best way for the Republican Party to do that is with Trump, not without Trump.”
The senator’s comments come amid a great reckoning among conservatives about Trump’s influence in the future of the Republican Party.
Several Republicans, such as Rep. Adam Kinzinger, R-Ill., and Sen. Mitt Romney. R-Utah, have expressed an interest in charting a new course without Trump. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., has criticized Trump in the past several weeks, but said that he would ultimately support the former President’s potential bid in 2024.
Trump has been selective about his endorsements in the upcoming Senate elections. Weeks ago, Trump backed the primary opponent of Rep. Anthony Gonzalez, R-Ohio, who was one of the ten senators who voted to impeach him. The former president also endorsed Sen. John Kennedy, R-La., Sen. Jerry Moran, R-Kan., and Sen. Tim Scott, R-S.C. the only black Republican in the Senate.
Trump has also shown signs of breaking with certain Republican organizations cashing in on his political capital. On Saturday, NBC News reported that the former president’s lawyers sent cease-and-desist letters to three Republican organizations — the Republican National Committee, the National Republican Congressional Committee, and the National Senate Committee — demanding that they discontinue the usage of Trump’s name and likeness.
During Trump’s CPAC speech two weeks ago, the former president listed off the names of Congressional Republicans who voted to impeach him, urging his followers to “get rid of them all.” He said that the only way to support “our efforts” is to elect Trump-supporting Republicans.
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
Georgia’s Republican-controlled State Senate passed an omnibus bill Monday that would end no-excuse absentee voting in the state.
The omnibus legislation severely restricts who can vote by mail, requires those without a driver’s license to submit a copy of approved ID twice while registering to vote by mail, bars election officials from sending unsolicited absentee ballot request forms, and requires emergency election rule changes to be approved by lawmakers within 20 days. That package is expected to pass the House.
In addition to Monday’s bill, the Senate is also considering an omnibus that passed the House last week that includes further ID requirements for absentee voting and restricts more racially diverse counties that lean Democratic from offering early voting on weekends. Last week, the state’s House also passed a law that would criminalize handing out water bottles to people waiting in line to vote.
In its marathon session, the legislature is also considering additional election-related bills that would aid Republican efforts at voter suppression. One would end the automatic voter registration that has led to a 93 percent increase in voter registrations and record voter turnout in the state since it was implemented in 2016. Another would create a statewide jury to hear cases of election fraud, which is currently basically nonexistent in the country.
The wave of bills to restrict voting in Georgia is a keystone in the countrywide Republican effort to restrict voting after the 2020 election drew record turnout. Georgia is a particular target after the state flipped blue in November due largely to the state’s Black voters turning out in droves, thanks to the work of grassroots organizers. Georgia voters aided in handing Democrats the White House and the Senate this election cycle.
Though Republicans have offered a host of reasons for offering these bills, many of them are squarely aimed at suppressing the vote. When more voters turn out, Republicans are more likely to lose elections. In a hearing on the Senate omnibus, SB 241, American Civil Liberties Union of Georgia Director Christopher Bruce said that the bill “treats the government like a babysitter who has to give voters permission to cast a ballot.”
The restrictions won’t affect everyone equally, and some of them seem to openly target Black voters. The House omnibus limits early voting to only one Sunday prior to elections, for instance, and Sundays are known to be huge drivers of Black voter turnout across the country thanks to “souls to the polls” events.
Voters of color also disproportionately have to wait in long lines in order to vote, which could be a reason for Republicans trying to bar handing out food and water in voting lines. All of these restrictions combined led Democratic State Rep. Jasmine Clark to call the House bill “textbook voter suppression.”
“The only reason you have these bills is because they lost,” Bishop Reginald T. Jackson, who oversees the African Methodist Episcopal Church churches in Georgia, told The New York Times. “What makes it even more troubling than that is there is no other way you can describe this other than racism, and we just need to call it what it is.’’
One Democratic lawmaker denounced the Republican efforts as “white supremacy.” “It’s pathetically obvious to anyone paying attention that, when Trump lost the November election and Georgia flipped control of the U.S. Senate for Democrats shortly after, Republicans got the message that they were in a political death spiral,” said Georgia State Rep. Renitta Shannon during the House’s debate of the omnibus. “And now they are doing anything they can to silence the voices of Black and brown voters specifically because they largely powered these wins.”
A report by the Brennan Center for Justice found that Georgia Republicans’ pushes to restrict voting will hurt Black voters the most. Voting by mail surged among Black voters in the state during the 2020 election. And, in 2020, Black voters made up 36 percent of the share of Sunday early voters in the state versus only about 27 percent of early voters on other days.
No-excuse absentee voting was initially a Republican proposal when it passed in 2005, aimed at getting more Republicans to vote. But absentee voting has turned against them, and they’re now trying to repeal that bill.
“This is voter suppression under the spurious guise of ‘election integrity,’” noted The New York Times’s 2020 election correspondent Trip Gabriel.
“There were simply not all of these questions about the integrity about voting by mail when it was mostly Republicans, largely white seniors, using this method,” said Shannon last week. “But now that Black and brown voters have used vote [by] mail to show up in ways like they never have before, now there are questions about the integrity of vote by mail.”
The Georgia bills are part of efforts by Republicans across the country to restrict voting. Republicans have introduced, pre-filed or carried over 253 bills as of February with the goal of restricting voting access, according to the Brennan Center. Republicans are also behind a case in the Supreme Court that could severely weaken what’s left of the Voting Rights Act, which prohibits laws that result in racial voting discrimination.
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
Republican lawmakers, led by Sen. Ron Johnson of Wisconsin, are attempting to grind the Senate to a halt to delay passage of a sprawling $1.9 trillion coronavirus relief package as Democrats race to get the legislation to President Joe Biden’s desk before March 14, when millions of jobless Americans will begin losing their unemployment lifelines.
After the Senate on Thursday afternoon approved a procedural motion to begin consideration of the aid bill — with all 50 Republicans voting no — Johnson objected to Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer’s (D-N.Y.) request for unanimous consent to dispense with the reading of the bill in order to start debate, forcing the Senate staff to read aloud all 628 pages (pdf) of legislative text.
What followed was nearly 11 hours of barely comprehensible speed-reading by alternating Senate staffers to a nearly empty chamber; not even Johnson, who forced the reading, remained on the floor through the whole process, which finally came to an end at around 2:00 am ET Friday.
“When Sen. Johnson voted to cut taxes for the wealthiest Americans, he didn’t force staff to read the bill,” tweeted Sen. Michael Bennet (D-Colo.). “But now that working people need help, he’s forcing a delay.”
518,000 Americans are dead from this pandemic, struggling families desperately need help – and every single Senate Republican just tried to stop the COVID-19 relief bill. They should be ashamed. pic.twitter.com/1dve3uL1WN
— Elizabeth Warren (@SenWarren) March 4, 2021
Johnson’s stunt likely represented just the start of Republican efforts to delay passage of a popular bill that would send direct relief checks to an estimated 280 million people in the U.S., extend and boost unemployment benefits, significantly expand the child tax credit, bolster coronavirus vaccine distribution efforts, deliver aid to state and local governments, and more.
On Friday afternoon, the Senate is expected to kick off the notorious and dreaded vote-a-rama, which Republican lawmakers are expected to drag out by putting forth a slew of unrelated and doomed-to-fail amendments to the $1.9 trillion package, potentially delaying a final vote for days. The package will then return to the House, which will have to decide whether to make changes or simply push through the Senate’s version.
“Historically what’s happened is… we offer a couple of hundred amendments on the Republican side,” Johnson said Thursday. “And we get a couple of dozen voted on, and people tire out. I’m coming up with a process that keeps people from tiring out. I’m getting sign-ups. I’m laying out a three-shift schedule.”
Asked how long he wants the amendment process to last, Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) said earlier this week, “I’m hoping for infinity.”
Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.), chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, noted on Twitter that Republicans are delaying “a relief package that 76% of Americans support — including 60% of Republicans.”
“The goal isn’t compromise,” said Jayapal, “it’s obstruction of all of our priorities.”
In response to new Labor Department figures showing that more than a million Americans filed initial unemployment claims last week, Jeremy Funk, spokesperson for Accountable.US, said in a statement Thursday that “in the face of ongoing economic struggles due to the pandemic, all Senate Republicans seem to want to do is listen to themselves talk.”
“If the polls are any judge, the only political points they’re scoring with obstruction are against themselves,” said Funk. “The longer McConnell and company hold back help, the longer the Trump recession will be — and the public won’t soon forget who sat on their $1,400 checks in the middle of it.”
They are doing this for a relief package that 76% of Americans support—including 60% of Republicans. The goal isn’t compromise, it’s obstruction of all of our priorities. https://t.co/KNHHVhwTm7
— Pramila Jayapal (@PramilaJayapal) March 4, 2021
One expected amendment that is actually relevant to the relief package is Sen. Bernie Sanders’ (I-Vt.) $15 minimum wage proposal, a last-ditch effort to include the pay raise in the aid bill after the Senate parliamentarian advised that it runs afoul of budget reconciliation rules.
Originally a part of the $1.9 trillion package, Senate Democrats removed the $15 wage provision following the unelected parliamentarian’s advisory opinion, which Vice President Kamala Harris is refusing to overrule despite having the constitutional authority to do so. Sanders is urging the Senate Democratic majority to ignore the parliamentarian’s advice and approve the long-overdue wage increase.
“Many millions of workers are earning starvation wages — and I underline that, starvation wages — in this country,” Sanders said Thursday in a floor speech making the case for his amendment. “I’d love to hear anybody get up here and tell me that they could live on $7.25 an hour, they could live on 8 bucks an hour, they could live on 9 bucks an hour — you can’t.”
Watch:
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
Republicans in Georgia are passing restrictive voting laws, ostensibly to “protect” people’s votes but which critics have said create unnecessary burdens to voters, particularly within communities of color.
Georgia House Bill 531, which passed in the Georgia General Assembly on Monday, would add a voter ID requirement for absentee ballots, limit the number and locations of early voting drop-off boxes, and reduce early voting days during the weekends prior to an election — including allowing just one Sunday to vote early.
If passed into law, individuals could be charged with misdemeanor crime if they hand out food or drinks to voters standing in line on election days.
Critics warn that some of the restrictions are completely unnecessary and could harm get-out-the-vote “Souls to the Polls” events that are common among Black churches across the state.
Voting lines in Georgia are notoriously long, particularly in Black and Brown communities, where the number of voting locations has been cut drastically in recent years. It can take voters several hours to cast their ballots at polling places on election day.
“Why do we have to add in making it illegal to give a bottled water to someone? If we’re really not trying to suppress the vote, why are we even making giving water to someone an issue?” Democratic State Rep. Patty Bently told 13WMAZ.
Democratic Rep. Kimberly Alexander said that GOP lawmakers are ramping up voter suppression efforts after two incumbent Republican U.S. senators and former President Donald Trump lost the state in recent elections.
“Republicans in the Georgia General Assembly are trying to change the rules of the election here in Georgia, rules that you wrote, because you were handed defeat,” Democratic Rep. Kimberly Alexander said to Capitol Beat News Service. “You know that your only chance of winning future elections is to prevent Georgians from having their votes counted and their voices heard.”
The bill is scheduled for debate and a vote in the Republican-run Senate. A separate set of measures are also being considered in that legislative chamber, which would limit which voters could apply for absentee ballots, disallowing the state’s “no-excuse” practice of granting any voter who requests a ballot to get one.
The Senate bill would restrict absentee ballots to voters who are over age 65, physically disabled or are out of town at the time of an election.
Several states across the U.S. have adopted or pursued restrictive voting laws following Trump’s loss to Joe Biden in the 2020 election.
“Republicans responded to historic turnout by introducing a wave of legislation restricting voting rights in states across the country,” Anoa Changa wrote for Truthout. “Safeguarding our rights, which are constantly under attack at the state level, requires the same level of engagement (if not more) than that given to presidential and other federal elections.”
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
Framed as a battle to save democracy, the 2020 election and its aftermath only exposed the vulnerabilities within the U.S. political system. While millions of voters overcame the “big lie” at the national level, the focus on federal elections has overshadowed the ongoing struggle at the state level to protect democracy.
Republicans responded to historic turnout by introducing a wave of legislation restricting voting rights in states across the country. Repeatedly debunked lies about fraud and election administration continue to fuel the proposed changes to a manufactured problem.
In Georgia, where a multiracial coalition sent shock waves through the political world, Republicans introduced several dozen bills aimed at limiting the turnout seen in the general and runoff elections. Advocates have recently honed in on two bills, calling them the worst voting legislation since the Jim Crow era. Georgia Senate Bill 241 would end no-excuse absentee ballots and add witnessing and ID requirements for those using absentee ballots.
Early Monday morning, concerned citizens gathered to protest the passage of Georgia House Bill 531, a far-reaching bill being pushed through the state house under the pretense of improving election integrity and security. The bill would do the opposite by limiting availability of absentee ballot drop boxes, limiting early and weekend voting, and shortening the length of period for runoff elections and absentee ballot deadlines. The bill would also prohibit a practice commonly known as “line warming,” which can include providing people in the vicinity of a polling location with snacks, water or even an umbrella. The bill passed the house 97-72.
But protecting democracy is more than beating political opponents at the federal level. Safeguarding our rights, which are constantly under attack at the state level, requires the same level of engagement (if not more) than that given to presidential and other federal elections. The current attack on voting rights and election administration runs parallel to efforts to undermine progress on critical issues, such as reproductive rights and criminal legal system reforms.
“When we think about democracy, we think about everyone being able to participate in government,” said Ohio State Rep. Erica Crawley in an interview with Truthout. “And be able to participate in how they are governed and who is representing their interests, whether it’s at the local, state or federal level.”
Crawley, who represents Ohio’s 26th legislative district, sees the current round of legislative attacks on voting rights as having broader repercussions. “We can’t talk about democracy without talking about voter suppression, without talking about gerrymandering, without talking about how it impacts reproductive health and health care,” Crawley said.
Despite the Republican supermajority in the Ohio legislature, Crawley says it is her duty to continue to make sure her constituents are aware of the many fights always in motion. Regarding reproductive health care, Crawley said she specifically pushes for reproductive justice.
“It’s not just whether someone has the ability to choose whether to have children or not to have children, but it also takes them to account those social determinants of health that have continued to be barriers for communities of color,” Crawley explained. She also raised the need for continuing to push legislation protecting and advancing Medicaid, Medicare and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP). Crawley sees Ohio Senate Bill 17 as one example of the threats to communities in need. Allegedly to address fraud, advocates say the bill could cost over 100,000 families needed food benefits.
“We know those things are fundamental to taking care of a family and moving up the economic mobility ladder,” said Crawley.
Crawley is not alone in her efforts. As a member of the State Innovation Exchange’s Reproductive Freedom Leadership Council, Crawley is one of over 400 legislators across the country who champion reproductive rights and reproductive justice. Coined in 1994, reproductive justice is defined as “the human right to maintain personal bodily autonomy, have children, not have children, and parent the children we have in safe and sustainable communities.”
And like Crawley, many of her counterparts see the parallels between safeguarding the right to vote and reproductive health rights and justice.
“Voting rights doesn’t stand on its own, and reproductive health rights and justice isn’t on [their] own,” Jennifer Driver told Truthout. Driver serves as the senior director for reproductive rights at the State Innovation Exchange. “These two things are actually linked and really do impact one another.”
Driver said that people often forget about the power of state policymakers. “Policy is localizing,” Driver said. “All policies really do happen at the local level.” Driver recognized the work of state and local grassroots organizations, but noted the need to support progressive legislators in terms of partnerships, coalition-building and policy education.
Driver also said that part of the challenge is helping voters understand there is more to reproductive rights than abortion, but without stigmatizing the word “abortion.”
While some have moved to seeing these issues as intersecting concerns, Driver said people need to move away from siloed approaches to work. In conversation with Truthout, Allison Coffman named the Amplify-GA campaign as an example of how people are seeing the intersecting lanes of elections, voting rights, and reproductive health and justice.
“Although Amplify’s work doesn’t focus on elections, we know that in order to achieve reproductive justice, everyone must be able to freely cast their votes and have a say in the leadership of policymaking that affects us,” said Coffman, the director of Amplify-GA.
Coffman described Amplify-GA as a “collaborative space for reproductive health rights and justice organizations and allies, working to expand abortion access in Georgia, and to advance reproductive justice more broadly.” Amplify-GA member organizations include Access Reproductive Care Southeast, Feminist Women’s Health Center, National Asian Pacific American Women’s Forum, New Georgia Project, SisterSong Women of Color Reproductive Justice Collective, SPARK Reproductive Justice Now, and URGE: Unite for Reproductive and Gender Equity.
“Rights do not guarantee access,” Coffman explained. “And the same groups that are being impacted by the voting restrictions are being impacted by restrictions around reproductive justice, and specifically abortion access.” Historically marginalized groups like Black, Brown, Indigenous and LGBTQ folks, as well as young people and immigrants are the same groups that are being targeted by both attacks, according to Coffman.
Georgia State Rep. Park Cannon agreed with Coffman’s assessment. “No one should face a mandate on the health and strength of their body,” Cannon told Truthout. She called on her legislative colleagues to continue building with their respective constituents and broader communities to bring about a future of peace and grace.
“This pandemic has shown us the importance of personal decision making and autonomy,” Cannon said. “Georgia needs to do a better job with caring for the health of its people. We have not expanded Medicaid, which is why I’ve signed a piece of legislation to expand Medicaid in the state of Georgia.” She pointed to the expansion of Medicaid for new mothers postpartum as a step in the right direction.
By now it should be clear that decades of political appeasement have not worked. The fundamentals of democracy purportedly are about freedom and access to the things people need for life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
“The same lobbying firms, nonprofits and religious associations are attacking critical rights, and are doing it without regard for the impact on Black and Brown Georgians,” said Cannon.
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
In the classic 1950 movie Sunset Boulevard, Gloria Swanson plays the has-been Hollywood diva, Norma Desmond, desperate for adoration, utterly infatuated with the spotlight. One of its most famous lines — “Alright, Mr. DeMille, I’m ready for my close up” — captures the unseemly spectacle of someone far past their sell-by date who refuses to accept their fall from stardom.
“You see,” the has-been actress utters with undistilled terror, “This is my life. It always will be. There’s nothing else. Just us and the camera — and those wonderful people out there in the dark.”
When Donald Trump stepped up to the podium at the CPAC event in Orlando, Florida, this weekend, it was, unsurprisingly, both a ghastly and incredibly tired remake of Sunset Boulevard, a reprise of yesterday’s news, of the former president’s greatest hits, from a man who cannot imagine a world without himself at the center.
During a bizarre CPAC presentation, Trump named all the Republicans who had crossed him and threatened to destroy their careers. He asked his audience — plaintively — whether they missed him yet. He claimed he had won the last election and would, if he so chose, win again in 2024. To this last point, his cult-like audience — which had already paraded through the conference center, in imitation of strong-men idolatrous cults in locales such as North Korea, a golden bust of the disgraced ex-president — responded, on cue, and overwhelming evidence to the contrary notwithstanding, “You won! You won! You won!”
Trump, in gilded retirement at Mar-a-Lago not only refuses to accept that Joe Biden won last year’s election, but he also hasn’t even remotely begun to consider the possibility that the GOP might ever be anything other than a vehicle for the enrichment of the Trump family. He has, these past months, teased the possibility of starting a third party; at the CPAC event, however, he scotched those rumors, instead urging GOP members to donate to political action committees controlled by Trump himself, along with members of his inner circle.
That decision wasn’t exactly a surprise; after all, most of the GOP is still in lockstep with Trumpism, convinced the election was stolen, and, as January 6th fades into the past, more than willing to forgive and forget the ex-president’s incitement to deadly violence. In the past couple weeks, House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy traveled to Mar-a-Lago to pay an obsequious homage to the man whom, back in January, he had screamed at during a profanity-laden phone call at the height of the Capitol siege. So, too, did GOP whip Steve Scalise, make a kiss-the-ring visit to the exiled president.
Mitch McConnell, who bared just a touch of courage after the Senate impeachment vote by saying on the Senate floor that there was no doubt that Trump was responsible for the events of January 6th, followed up with an astounding public display of gorging himself on humble pie. What would he do if the inciter-to-insurrection ran again in 2024? He would, he promptly answered, “absolutely” support Trump in 2024 if the party nominated him again as its presidential candidate.
Even Mike Pence — yes, the same Mike Pence who ran for his life as a Trump-inspired mob, responding in real time to Trump tweets, hunted him down to hang him for treason — has been sweet-talking the Don in recent weeks. At least Pence had the good sense to skip CPAC this year. Other Trump cabinet members, including Mike Pompeo, took the event as an opportunity to climb ever further up Trump’s private orifices, banking on a display of unflinching loyalty to Number 45 as their best chance to become Number 47 should the Don suffer an unfortunate mishap — say a short spell in prison for tax evasion, or for threatening elections officials.
Meanwhile, state GOP chapters around the country are busily censuring GOP congressmembers and senators who voted to impeach or convict Trump. And GOP-controlled legislatures are pushing through legislation aimed to prevent the sort of non-existent “fraud” that Trump still claims cost him the last election. Of course, since the fraud wasn’t real, what this means in practice is a vast effort to contract the electorate and to make it harder for people of color, the poor and students to cast ballots in coming elections.
The ungodly CPAC display this past four days made two things absolutely clear. The first is that CPAC, and by extension most of the GOP, is nothing more or less than a personality cult; the values that have traditionally animated conservative movements in the U.S. have, now, been entirely subjugated to the allure of Trumpism. The second is that Trump’s financial interests — which are all he really cares about at this point — clearly lie not in putting his own dollars on the line by building up a third party, but in milking the GOP faithful for all he can, as quickly as he can, before his myriad legal woes catch up to him.
Toward the end of Sunset Boulevard, Desmond shoots an ex-lover as he attempts to walk out on her. In a bizarre twist, the dead man then narrates his posthumous understanding of how this will all end. He imagines the headlines that will accompany the announcement of his murder. “Forgotten star, a slayer, aging actress, yesterday’s glamor queen.” Instead, as Desmond is perp-walked down her palace steps, the cameras keep clicking, and the diva remains, even in delusional disgrace, the star of her own show.
Having failed to deal Trump a political death-blow in the Senate during the impeachment trial, the GOP is now stuck with its very own Norma Desmond. Trump is always ready for his close-up, because without the sound of the adoring claque, he is nothing.
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
A truck seen January 6 on Capitol grounds sporting a far right militia’s symbol belongs to the husband of Rep. Mary Miller (R-Illinois), Chris Miller, the Daily Beast has confirmed.
Twitter users were the first to find the truck, which displayed a decal from the Three Percenter militia in footage taken during the breach of the U.S. Capitol. The truck was also identified in earlier photos carrying campaign posters for Mary Miller, and with Chris and Mary Miller posing in front of it.
On Thursday, Chris Miller, a Republican state representative in Illinois, confirmed in an email to the Daily Beast that it was his truck, but claimed that he wasn’t aware of the group associated with the sticker, which a friend had given to him. Miller also said that the story about the truck was a “fake story” by the “fake news,” while confirming that the story was true.
The #Sedition3PTruck with government plates parked in a restricted zone from 1:02. #SeditionHunters #Sedition3P
Source: https://t.co/DubmxJhjSZ pic.twitter.com/INCs6geEYg
— Phoenix on Wheels (@phoenixonwheels) February 25, 2021
In the footage from January 6 the truck also appeared to have an Illinois license plate that can only be used by politicians like Chris Miller, the Daily Beast reported. The Three Percenters sticker appears to have been a new addition, applied sometime between when the truck was out campaigning and January 6.
The Three Percenters were one of several right-wing militias that helped break past police lines into the Capitol on January 6. Several people affiliated with the group have been charged with crimes relating to the attack, including trespassing and assaulting police officers.
The militia group is named after the debunked idea that only 3 percent of American colonists fought against the British during the American Revolution, and the group has been associated with white supremacist hate crimes. It also has a presence in Illinois.
Though Chris Miller has feigned ignorance about the militia group, both Millers have expressed views that align with right-wing extremist rhetoric.
In another video from January 6, Chris Miller is seen at the “Save America” rally at which former President Donald Trump incited the crowd to march on the Capitol. “We’re engaged in a great cultural war to see which worldview will survive,” Miller says in the video, saying that it was Republicans like him fighting against “Democrat terrorists” and “socialism.”
Mary Miller expressed sympathy toward Adolf Hitler in a speech at a rally the day before. “You know, if we win a few elections, we’re still going to be losing, unless we win the hearts and minds of our children,” she said. “This is the battle. Hitler was right on one thing: He said, ‘Whoever has the youth, has the future.’ Our children are being propagandized.”
Mary Miller’s office defended the speech until backlash grew online, after which she apologized for the remark and said that people were trying to “intentionally twist my words.”
Though no official reports have identified ties between the January 6 attack and members of Congress, some Democrats suspect that Trump militants received assistance from Republicans that day. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-New York) has said that she feared her fellow colleagues that day. Rep. Mikie Sherrill (D-New Jersey) saw her Republican colleagues giving what appeared to be “reconnaissance” tours of the building on January 5. A U.S. attorney in D.C. is looking into the latter allegation.
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
The Democrats’ second trial of Trump ends like the first: the outcome known in advance, the entire process designed to sell to the anti-Trump masses that the Democrats were leading some progressive counter-attack. Both impeachments enabled these politicians to present a national diversion to avoid addressing real issues the US people suffer from: the pandemic, lack of vaccines, no national health care program, increasing homelessness, closed schools.
The Democrats’ first impeachment over Trump’s phone call to Ukraine aimed to sully his name for the benefit of the 2020 Democratic presidential campaign. They purposely did not address Trump’s actual crimes: his cruelty to Latino immigrants on the border, his indifference to police abuse of Blacks and Latinos, his racist attacks on non-white US citizens and residents, his neglect of the threat of global warming, funding the genocidal war against Yemen, bombing other countries, such as Syria, illegal and cruel sanctions on Cuba and Venezuela.
The second impeachment, for the vague charge of “incitement of insurrection” sought to permanently ban Trump from “holding any office,” removing him as an election opponent in 2024. The Democrats reduced themselves to presenting as “evidence” of inciting insurrection Trump’s statement “’if you don’t fight like hell you’re not going to have a country anymore.” However, this insubstantial statement could easily be used to indict any progressive social change movement, much as the Smith Act of 1940 had been used against leftists. The Democrats conveniently avoided mention that Trump in his January 6 speech explicitly told protesters to “peacefully march to the Capitol.”
The second impeachment also charged Trump with refusing to accept the November 2020 election results. However, the Constitution states Congress must officially certify the Electoral College votes and the presidential victor, giving Trump the constitutional right to challenge these votes in Congress. The articles of impeachment concluded “Donald John Trump, by such conduct, has demonstrated that he will remain a threat to national security, democracy, and the Constitution”. Whatever our opinion of the man, this only continues the Democratic Party-national security state McCarthyite campaign against Trump begun in earnest in 2016. Trump’s second acquittal marked a setback for this McCarthyism the Democrats have been pushing.
Trump’s “coup” and the Democrats’ “coup”
Trump’s attempt on January 6 pales in comparison to the Democrats’ well-orchestrated lawfare coup operation set in motion in 2016. As Consortium News, The Grayzone, Stephen Cohen, Glenn Greenwald have documented, by late 2015 the Democrats were working with national security state officials to paint Trump as beholden to Putin – including stories of Putin’s alleged ownership of “pee tapes” of Trump with prostitutes in Moscow hotels. The Democrats funded the Steele Dossier fabrication, beginning a years-long fact-free story of Trump collusion with Russia to steal the election.
While Democrats charge Trump with propagating his Stop the Steal story, they have not renounced their own fake Trump-Putin collusion story. In fact, it set the stage for their first impeachment. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi even tweeted – after Congress certified the 2016 Electoral College vote “Our election was hijacked. There is no question. Congress has a duty to #ProtectOurDemocracy & #FollowTheFacts.”
The continuous Democratic Party double standard and hypocrisy in relation to Trump explains a great deal of his supporters’ anger. As Scott Ritter noted, “For the supporters of Donald Trump, the events of Jan. 6 did not occur in a vacuum but were rather the culmination of what they believed to be a four-year campaign to undermine the legitimacy of the president they voted for and, by doing so, disenfranchising not only their vote, but by extension their role as citizens.”
The second impeachment show intended to divert the 81 million Biden voters from their expectations and demands for progressive change, given the Democrats have won the presidency and both houses of Congress. It stifled any budding movement demanding the Democrats take action for a national health care program, a bailout for the people, a jobs program, a Green New Deal, etc. Their impeachment spectacle sought to vilify Trump and his supporters, as well as solidify what Glenn Greenwald describes as the new alliance of the national security state, Wall Street, Silicon Valley, Bush era neo-cons, and mainstream corporate media with the neoliberal Democratic Party.
Who were the Trump voters
Central to the Democratic Party – and even leftist – spin is that Trump supporters are racist, sexist white men, the “deplorables.” This prejudiced stereotype hardly explains why 9 million Obama voters switched to Trump in 2016. Nor explain why, after four years of hostile mainstream media coverage, he won 10.5 million more votes in 2020. A look at the 2020 election voter breakdown contradicts their condescending stereotype.
In 2016, Trump won the white women vote by a margin of 9%, even though his opponent would have been the first woman president. In 2020 this vote margin increased to an 11% margin. In 2016, Trump won 28% of the Latina vote; in 2020, 31%. In 2016, Trump won 5% of the Black women vote; in 2020, 9%, despite Kamala Harris being on the Democratic ticket. In 2016, he won 13% of the Black male vote; in 2020 it rose to 19%. Overall, comparing 2016 and 2020, Trump’s vote share rose 4% with Blacks, 3% with Latinos, and 5% with Asian Americans. Of the LGBT community, Trump was said to have won 28% of the vote, double his 2016 percent. In sum, people of color, LGBTs the very ones said to be central to the Democratic coalition, shifted toward Trump.
The group where Trump lost vote share involved white men, even though he won 35% more of the white working class vote than Biden. In 2016, Trump won 65% of the white men vote; in 2020 it fell to 61%. This hardly squares with liberal and pro-Democrat mythology that a Trump supporter is a racist white man.
The US leftist movement co-opted by the Democratic Party
Despite the November election choice coming down to two corporate neoliberals disliked by the great majority of the US population, more than 159.6 million Americans turned out to vote. The corporate rulers’ effort to neutralize popular opposition to their two parties and lure in social movements was so successful that the election turnout marked the highest percent of voter population in 120 years, 66.7%. Even leftist groups capitulated, dressing this up as “fighting fascism” as they climbed aboard the two corporate party bandwagon.
Typically, every four years the liberal-left, in order to justify a vote for the corporate Democrat presidential candidate, tries to paint the Republican candidate as a herald of fascism. In Fascism? First Two Months in Power: Hitler vs. Trump, I wrote:
Leftists recognize corporate America owns the two parties, yet many still vote Democrat. Every four years, we must first defeat the fascist, then build our movement. So is the story we are told. This has been an effective strategy to trap us in the Democratic Party. It has worked for generations. Not only does it reinforce our domination by corporate America, but it seriously miseducates people about fascism.
Needless to say, so long as corporate America has the liberal-left tied to their two party system, they have no need for fascism. They need fascism only when their customary method of rule breaks down and they face a very direct threat of losing control to revolutionary forces. The historic function of fascism is to smash the radicalized working class and its allies, destroy their organizations, and shut down political liberties when the corporate rulers find themselves unable to govern through their charade of democracy. No such problem here.
This capitulation to the corporate Democrats, including by self-described leftist groups, was hard to imagine just earlier in 2020, with the massive Black Lives Matter protests and the anti-neoliberal Bernie Sanders movement.
While the vast majority of voters for both parties voted for their version of the “lesser evil,” the record election turnout for this charade was a great victory for corporate America irrespective of who won.
A successful Trump coup would be a worse outcome for the corporate rulers
The Democratic Party, liberals and leftists claimed Trump was planning a coup, a fascist coup even, on January 6. We are supposed to be grateful this alleged fascist insurrection was put down. But to play along with this coup story, if it were successful, the result would ignite massive nationwide protests by anti-Trump voters. After Trump’s election in November 2016, there were large “Not My President” protests in over 20 cities and many universities around the country. In 2020 between 15-26 million are said to have mobilized in Black Lives Matter rallies. Between 3-5 million participated in the anti-Trump Women’s Marches in 2017. Trump and his supporters have also shown they can turn out their base not only in large rallies but in armed protests.
Murders by individuals in both camps have already occurred in Charlottesville, Portland and Kenosha. Both anti-Trump and pro-Trump protesters firmly believe they are the ones defending US democracy and freedom against their opponents, that their own candidate legitimately won the presidential election. Right wing Trumpers fear socialists will take over the US, while the anti-Trump left fear fascists will.
Nationwide confrontations and mobilizations by these opposing forces following a successful Trump coup could seriously damage the overall political stability of the US system for some time. This would weaken the US empire’s ability to sell its “freedom and democracy” image and political leadership role abroad. It would undermine US capacity to assert its military and world cop ideological power around the world.
Consequently, the best result for the US empire would be for Trump to lose the election, his “coup” to fail, and he be banned from running for political office. The US rulers achieved almost all that agenda. US leftists, declared opponents of the empire, must ask themselves why this very agenda was also their own agenda.
The post The Failure of Trump’s “Coup”: A Victory for the US Empire first appeared on Dissident Voice.This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
The Democrats’ second trial of Trump ends like the first: the outcome known in advance, the entire process designed to sell to the anti-Trump masses that the Democrats were leading some progressive counter-attack. Both impeachments enabled these politicians to present a national diversion to avoid addressing real issues the US people suffer from: the pandemic, lack of vaccines, no national health care program, increasing homelessness, closed schools.
The Democrats’ first impeachment over Trump’s phone call to Ukraine aimed to sully his name for the benefit of the 2020 Democratic presidential campaign. They purposely did not address Trump’s actual crimes: his cruelty to Latino immigrants on the border, his indifference to police abuse of Blacks and Latinos, his racist attacks on non-white US citizens and residents, his neglect of the threat of global warming, funding the genocidal war against Yemen, bombing other countries, such as Syria, illegal and cruel sanctions on Cuba and Venezuela.
The second impeachment, for the vague charge of “incitement of insurrection” sought to permanently ban Trump from “holding any office,” removing him as an election opponent in 2024. The Democrats reduced themselves to presenting as “evidence” of inciting insurrection Trump’s statement “’if you don’t fight like hell you’re not going to have a country anymore.” However, this insubstantial statement could easily be used to indict any progressive social change movement, much as the Smith Act of 1940 had been used against leftists. The Democrats conveniently avoided mention that Trump in his January 6 speech explicitly told protesters to “peacefully march to the Capitol.”
The second impeachment also charged Trump with refusing to accept the November 2020 election results. However, the Constitution states Congress must officially certify the Electoral College votes and the presidential victor, giving Trump the constitutional right to challenge these votes in Congress. The articles of impeachment concluded “Donald John Trump, by such conduct, has demonstrated that he will remain a threat to national security, democracy, and the Constitution”. Whatever our opinion of the man, this only continues the Democratic Party-national security state McCarthyite campaign against Trump begun in earnest in 2016. Trump’s second acquittal marked a setback for this McCarthyism the Democrats have been pushing.
Trump’s “coup” and the Democrats’ “coup”
Trump’s attempt on January 6 pales in comparison to the Democrats’ well-orchestrated lawfare coup operation set in motion in 2016. As Consortium News, The Grayzone, Stephen Cohen, Glenn Greenwald have documented, by late 2015 the Democrats were working with national security state officials to paint Trump as beholden to Putin – including stories of Putin’s alleged ownership of “pee tapes” of Trump with prostitutes in Moscow hotels. The Democrats funded the Steele Dossier fabrication, beginning a years-long fact-free story of Trump collusion with Russia to steal the election.
While Democrats charge Trump with propagating his Stop the Steal story, they have not renounced their own fake Trump-Putin collusion story. In fact, it set the stage for their first impeachment. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi even tweeted – after Congress certified the 2016 Electoral College vote “Our election was hijacked. There is no question. Congress has a duty to #ProtectOurDemocracy & #FollowTheFacts.”
The continuous Democratic Party double standard and hypocrisy in relation to Trump explains a great deal of his supporters’ anger. As Scott Ritter noted, “For the supporters of Donald Trump, the events of Jan. 6 did not occur in a vacuum but were rather the culmination of what they believed to be a four-year campaign to undermine the legitimacy of the president they voted for and, by doing so, disenfranchising not only their vote, but by extension their role as citizens.”
The second impeachment show intended to divert the 81 million Biden voters from their expectations and demands for progressive change, given the Democrats have won the presidency and both houses of Congress. It stifled any budding movement demanding the Democrats take action for a national health care program, a bailout for the people, a jobs program, a Green New Deal, etc. Their impeachment spectacle sought to vilify Trump and his supporters, as well as solidify what Glenn Greenwald describes as the new alliance of the national security state, Wall Street, Silicon Valley, Bush era neo-cons, and mainstream corporate media with the neoliberal Democratic Party.
Who were the Trump voters
Central to the Democratic Party – and even leftist – spin is that Trump supporters are racist, sexist white men, the “deplorables.” This prejudiced stereotype hardly explains why 9 million Obama voters switched to Trump in 2016. Nor explain why, after four years of hostile mainstream media coverage, he won 10.5 million more votes in 2020. A look at the 2020 election voter breakdown contradicts their condescending stereotype.
In 2016, Trump won the white women vote by a margin of 9%, even though his opponent would have been the first woman president. In 2020 this vote margin increased to an 11% margin. In 2016, Trump won 28% of the Latina vote; in 2020, 31%. In 2016, Trump won 5% of the Black women vote; in 2020, 9%, despite Kamala Harris being on the Democratic ticket. In 2016, he won 13% of the Black male vote; in 2020 it rose to 19%. Overall, comparing 2016 and 2020, Trump’s vote share rose 4% with Blacks, 3% with Latinos, and 5% with Asian Americans. Of the LGBT community, Trump was said to have won 28% of the vote, double his 2016 percent. In sum, people of color, LGBTs the very ones said to be central to the Democratic coalition, shifted toward Trump.
The group where Trump lost vote share involved white men, even though he won 35% more of the white working class vote than Biden. In 2016, Trump won 65% of the white men vote; in 2020 it fell to 61%. This hardly squares with liberal and pro-Democrat mythology that a Trump supporter is a racist white man.
The US leftist movement co-opted by the Democratic Party
Despite the November election choice coming down to two corporate neoliberals disliked by the great majority of the US population, more than 159.6 million Americans turned out to vote. The corporate rulers’ effort to neutralize popular opposition to their two parties and lure in social movements was so successful that the election turnout marked the highest percent of voter population in 120 years, 66.7%. Even leftist groups capitulated, dressing this up as “fighting fascism” as they climbed aboard the two corporate party bandwagon.
Typically, every four years the liberal-left, in order to justify a vote for the corporate Democrat presidential candidate, tries to paint the Republican candidate as a herald of fascism. In Fascism? First Two Months in Power: Hitler vs. Trump, I wrote:
Leftists recognize corporate America owns the two parties, yet many still vote Democrat. Every four years, we must first defeat the fascist, then build our movement. So is the story we are told. This has been an effective strategy to trap us in the Democratic Party. It has worked for generations. Not only does it reinforce our domination by corporate America, but it seriously miseducates people about fascism.
Needless to say, so long as corporate America has the liberal-left tied to their two party system, they have no need for fascism. They need fascism only when their customary method of rule breaks down and they face a very direct threat of losing control to revolutionary forces. The historic function of fascism is to smash the radicalized working class and its allies, destroy their organizations, and shut down political liberties when the corporate rulers find themselves unable to govern through their charade of democracy. No such problem here.
This capitulation to the corporate Democrats, including by self-described leftist groups, was hard to imagine just earlier in 2020, with the massive Black Lives Matter protests and the anti-neoliberal Bernie Sanders movement.
While the vast majority of voters for both parties voted for their version of the “lesser evil,” the record election turnout for this charade was a great victory for corporate America irrespective of who won.
A successful Trump coup would be a worse outcome for the corporate rulers
The Democratic Party, liberals and leftists claimed Trump was planning a coup, a fascist coup even, on January 6. We are supposed to be grateful this alleged fascist insurrection was put down. But to play along with this coup story, if it were successful, the result would ignite massive nationwide protests by anti-Trump voters. After Trump’s election in November 2016, there were large “Not My President” protests in over 20 cities and many universities around the country. In 2020 between 15-26 million are said to have mobilized in Black Lives Matter rallies. Between 3-5 million participated in the anti-Trump Women’s Marches in 2017. Trump and his supporters have also shown they can turn out their base not only in large rallies but in armed protests.
Murders by individuals in both camps have already occurred in Charlottesville, Portland and Kenosha. Both anti-Trump and pro-Trump protesters firmly believe they are the ones defending US democracy and freedom against their opponents, that their own candidate legitimately won the presidential election. Right wing Trumpers fear socialists will take over the US, while the anti-Trump left fear fascists will.
Nationwide confrontations and mobilizations by these opposing forces following a successful Trump coup could seriously damage the overall political stability of the US system for some time. This would weaken the US empire’s ability to sell its “freedom and democracy” image and political leadership role abroad. It would undermine US capacity to assert its military and world cop ideological power around the world.
Consequently, the best result for the US empire would be for Trump to lose the election, his “coup” to fail, and he be banned from running for political office. The US rulers achieved almost all that agenda. US leftists, declared opponents of the empire, must ask themselves why this very agenda was also their own agenda.
This post was originally published on Radio Free.
Rep. John Sarbanes (D-Maryland) announced on Monday that all House Democrats have now co-sponsored the 2021 version of the For the People Act, or H.R. 1. House Democrats have said that they will hold a vote on the legislation during the first week of March.
H.R. 1 is a sweeping election reform act that is a bundle of election- and voting-related laws, and it’s been favored by Democrats and progressives for several years now. The law targets corporate campaign finance by exposing “dark money” campaign contributions and ending the Citizens United ruling that unleashed massive amounts of corporate spending in politics.
It also greatly expands voting access by automatically registering eligible voters; making Election Day a holiday for federal employees and encouraging the private sector to do the same; and curbing partisan gerrymandering — which gives Republicans who are in control of a majority of state legislatures an advantage — and voter roll purging. In other words, as many journalists and political experts have said, it could save democracy.
Democrats passed the bill in the House in 2019, but then-Majority Leader Mitch McConnell refused to bring it to a vote in the Senate. Republicans — and many organizations that support them in their campaigns — are opposed to the bill.
“Our democracy is in a state of deep disrepair,” said House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-California), House Administration Chair Zoe Lofgren (D-California) and Democracy Reform Task Force Chair Sarbanes in a statement when they reintroduced H.R. 1 in January. “Across the country, people of all political persuasions — including Democrats, Independents and Republicans — are profoundly frustrated with the chaos, corruption and inaction that plague much of our politics.”
The lawmakers also point out in their statement that 2020 was a particularly fraught year for elections. Former President Donald Trump and the Republican Party fought hard to undermine and question the election and its results. Those unprecedented attacks on the election have now led to a huge wave of bills introduced in states by Republicans seeking to restrict voting rights.
The Brennan Center for Justice has found that, as of this month, over 165 bills that seek to limit voting have been filed in states, as compared to only 35 at this time last year. They are particularly aimed at limiting mail-in voting, imposing stricter voter ID requirements, restricting voter registration and expanding voter roll purging.
Efforts to limit voting have been particularly egregious in Georgia which turned blue in the most recent election and where Black voters, in particular, were instrumental in clinching the Democrats’ victory. Last month, a Republican lawmaker there attempted to pass a bill that would require voters to send in two copies of their ID when requesting an absentee ballot.
On Friday, Georgia Republicans filed legislation that proposes sweeping changes to election laws as well as further restrictions to absentee and early voting. It would impose more restrictions on voter IDs when requesting an absentee ballot and limit the window for voters to request and counties to send out the ballots. It also prohibits counties from conducting early voting on Sundays, which NPR reports is traditionally a day with more turnout from Black voters through “souls to the polls” events.
The Nation said that this drive from Republicans to limit voting is voter suppression that is, in many cases, specifically aimed at Black voters. “At the beating heart of the Big Lie — the deranged fantasy that the 2020 election was stolen from its loser, Donald Trump — is the Republican belief that the votes of Black people shouldn’t count,” wrote The Nation’s Elie Mystal. “The new laws cover everything Republicans could think of to make it harder for people to cast a vote.”
Republicans seem to be specifically targeting mail-in voting and early voting after many states opened both massively to avoid crowds and gathering on election day because of COVID-19. These bills follow the many attempts by Republicans to quash voting before the election last year where they tried every which way to limit who could vote, as well as when and where they could vote.
Polling shows, however, that the expanded voting access in the 2020 election due to COVID was quite popular among voters from both parties. Seventy percent of voters support the adoption of no-excuse absentee voting that many states allowed last year and two-thirds support expanding early voting periods before the election, according to a new poll by Strategies 360 and Voting Rights Lab.
H.R. 1 also enjoys wide support among the public; according to polling from Data for Progress and Equal Citizens, 67 percent of Americans support the legislation, including 77 percent of Democrats and 56 percent of Republicans.
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
As the U.S. reaches the grim milestone of 500,000 deaths from COVID-19, the National Institutes of Health Director Francis Collins has said that the proliferation of the virus due to partisan resistance and politicization around wearing a face mask could be responsible for tens of thousands of deaths.
Collins said that misinformation around COVID was particularly harmful around mask-wearing. In the early months of the pandemic, evidence showed that wearing a mask helped to stop the spread of the disease, said Collins. “And yet, with a variety of messages through a variety of sources, mask-wearing became a statement about your political party or an invasion of your personal freedom,” he said.
“A mask is nothing more than a life-saving medical device, and yet it got categorized in all sorts of other ways that were not factual, not scientific, and, frankly, dangerous,” Collins continued. “And I think you could make a case that tens of thousands of people died as a result.”
Last year, as the pandemic was setting in within the U.S., wearing a mask became especially stigmatized among the right wing. Former President Donald Trump was saying that he didn’t trust masks and that people were wearing masks just to spite him. Those statements from the then-president, coupled with people’s personal beliefs about things like masculinity stigmatized mask-wearing among conservatives. Following Trump’s lead, many other Republicans also took to criticizing mask-wearing, even making bizarre and harmful claims about the practice in some cases.
“It’s so disappointing that such behaviors could be chosen intentionally by people who have access to real public health information and yet would decide not to put on the mask in order to make some other kind of statement,” Collins said when asked about Trump’s resistance to wearing a mask. “Perhaps with some sense that they’re immune from the consequences.”
Though Trump did eventually begin occasionally wearing a mask, the damage had been done. According to a Pew Research Center poll done in June, 23 percent of Republicans were saying that masks should either rarely or never be worn when in public, as opposed to 4 percent of Democrats saying the same thing. Only 29 percent of Republicans at the time said that masks should always be worn in public, as compared to 63 percent of Democrats.
By late summer, Republicans mentioned masks or mask-wearing the most compared to other things when describing the biggest negative impacts on their lives from COVID, according to a different poll by Pew. By contrast, Democrats’ top two concerns mentioned were related to family and work, and masks ranked closer to the bottom.
In some ways, this contrast persists even now, as mask-wearing has become increasingly normalized and recommended by health officials over the course of the pandemic. When President Joe Biden said last year that he would call Republican governors to ask them to install mask mandates and followed it up this year by signing a mask mandate on federal property, Republicans were quick to raise objections. First they countered by telling people not to bother with masks and following Biden’s executive order, said they would challenge the mask mandate in court.
The U.S. is still in the throes of the pandemic, but some Republican governors are lifting their mask mandates as infection numbers fall slightly following the post-holiday spike. In Montana, for example, where the governorship just flipped from Democrat to Republican in the recent election, the new GOP governor has rescinded the previous governor’s mask mandate. All in all, the 15 states that don’t currently have a statewide mask mandate are all run by Republican governors.
Even though some governors may think that it’s time to lift mask mandates, Anthony Fauci, Biden’s chief medical adviser, said on Sunday that Americans who wish to protect themselves and others by wearing a mask may expect to wear one through the end of 2021 and even into 2022. Though cases are currently declining, and vaccine distribution is ramping up, “I want it to keep going down to a baseline that’s so low there is virtually no threat,” said Fauci.
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
Donald Trump may be spending his post-presidency golfing at Mar-a -Lago but he remains front and center in the hearts and minds of millions of Republican voters, as evidenced by the 46% who said in a new Suffolk University/ USA Today poll released over the weekend that they would join a Trump Party if he decided to split off from the GOP. A whopping 80% of Republican respondents said they support punishing any Republicans in Congress who voted for Trump’s impeachment. He is still their Dear Leader even in exile.
So the GOP still has a Trump problem. If it loses 20-30% of its voters, it will prove difficult to win any elections whether it’s called the Trump Patriot Party or the plain old GOP. That is because the polarization that powers the extreme right-wing under Trump depends upon having every last self-identified Republican vote their way. There are no more crossovers when it comes to Donald Trump.
This is the dilemma now Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., finds himself trying to navigate as he tries to take back the Senate in 2022. So far, he’s tried to have it both ways. Perhaps he and South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham are playing some elaborate game of “good cop-bad cop” with Graham ostentatiously currying Trump’s favor while McConnell writes op-eds in the Wall Street Journal desperately trying to assuage big money donors and appalled suburban voters with reassurances that the Republican establishment hasn’t gone completely mad.
It’s impossible to know how any of that will work out but whatever happens, the GOP is taking advantage of one major aspect of Trump’s legacy: The Big Lie. A recent Quinnipiac poll found that 76% of Republicans still say they believe there was widespread fraud in the 2020 election and that Trump was the legitimate winner. Republican lawmakers in states across the country are now rushing to pass various draconian vote suppression schemes.
It’s not that they haven’t been doing that all along, of course. That’s conservative electoral strategy 101, about which I’ve written many times. Having lost the popular vote seven out of the last eight presidential elections, they know very well that they do not have the support of a majority of voters in the country. Now that Trump conveniently persuaded GOP voters that the presidential election was stolen from them in broad daylight, the opportunity to curb voting in some new and ingenious ways has presented itself and they are going for it.
So far this year at least 165 bills that would restrict voting access are being considered in state legislatures nationwide reports the Brennan Center for Justice. And the excuse Republicans are using is that they must do this to “restore trust” in the voting system — trust that was destroyed by the outrageous lies of Donald Trump and his henchmen. What a neat trick. Apparently, the only way they can restore trust is to “fix” problems that don’t exist but which also happen to suppress Democratic votes. Take Georgia, for instance, ground zero for Trump’s post-election machinations. According to the Brennan Center, the Republican legislature has proposed curtailing early voting — including on Sundays when historically Black churches have caravaned congregations in what is called “souls to the polls” — making drop boxes more onerous to access and requiring several new steps in order to vote by mail. One of the most counterintuitive restrictions is a new process that disallows dropping ballots off on Election Day and three days prior. It makes no sense. If you’ve forgotten to get your ballot in the mail you should be able to walk it in. What can possibly be a reasonable rationale against that?
You can see how important this issue is right now by the fact that this week’s CPAC conference is featuring seven panel discussions on “election protection” with names like “The Left Pulled the Strings, Covered It Up, and Even Admits It.” “Failed States (PA, GA, NV, oh my!)” and “They Told Ya So: The Signs Were Always There.” Here’s one of the featured speakers, a lawyer who secretly helped Trump behind the scenes:
.@CletaMitchell is a national election law expert who will share her on-the-ground experiences in #Georgia and the true facts about what happened on Nov 3rd and since then at #CPAC2021 in #Orlando. pic.twitter.com/xrL1DqHuFp
— CPAC 2021 (@CPAC) February 20, 2021
It goes without saying that the right-wing media continues to flog this lie but it is spread far and wide by the the major networks as well which continue to feature guests who find subtler ways to poison the public’s mind. Take Rep. Steve Scalise, R-La, on ABC’s “This Week” dodging the question in a different way, suggesting that the “real problem” is that the states didn’t follow their own laws in the election, as some of Trump’s bush league lawyers argued at the time before being shot down by every judge who heard them.
This version of the Big Lie is what MSNBC’s Chris Hayes dubbed “High Hawley-ism”, after the unctuous mewlings of Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo, during the post-election period, which Hayes says is a trial balloon for GOP state legislators to unilaterally award electoral college votes to whomever they choose. You may recall that was what Trump was trying to do up until the very minute his rabid mob sacked the Capitol. Hayes wrote:
This dubious theory, that only state *legislatures* can make these kinds of changes also invites all kinds of mischief by federal judges to reach in and overrule state supreme courts. It didn’t work in 2020, but that doesn’t mean it won’t.
Further, as Scalia memorably noted there is no constitutional guarantee of the right to vote for president; we vote for electors. Every state with R control could pass a law awarding all state electors to the candidate that won the most counties and basically guarantee R victory.
As the New York Times reported at the time, the conservative majority on the Supreme Court gave plenty of signals during the election campaign that they were amenable to this idea, making it clear that they believe state legislatures have the right to enact strict measures against (non-existent) voter fraud. As Wendy R. Weiser, the director of the Democracy Program at the Brennan Center for Justice, told the Times:
Even without the reasoning, it’s very clear that what the court has done throughout this election season has made it clear that federal courts are not going to be significant sources of voting rights protection in the lead up to elections. It’s the unique constitutional role of the courts to protect individual rights like voting rights, and they’re treating it like policy decisions.
That’s what Trump put Amy Coney Barrett on the Supreme Court to do for him last fall, but the cards just didn’t fall his way enough to put it to use. Even so, the Big Lie about the stolen election has opened the door for a wave of voter suppression not seen in decades with a Supreme Court ready to rubber stamp it. It may end up being his greatest legacy.
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
Motivated by their justifiable aversion to former US President Donald Trump, many analysts have rashly painted a rosy picture of how Democrats could quickly erase the bleak trajectory of the previous Republican administration. This naivety is particularly pronounced in the current spin on the Palestinian-Israeli discourse, which is promoting, again, the illusion that Democrats will succeed where their political rivals have failed.
There are obvious differences in the Democrats’ approach to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, but only in semantics and political jingoism, not policy. This assertion can be justified if the Democratic administration’s official language on Palestine and Israel is examined, and such language considered within the context of practical policies on the ground.
Take recent remarks, made by the new US Secretary of State, Antony Blinken, during a CNN interview on February 8. Blinken’s comments reminded us of the clever – albeit disingenuous – US foreign policy under previous Democratic administrations. His select words may seem as a complete departure from the belligerent, yet direct, approach of former US Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo.
“Look, leaving aside the legalities of that question (meaning the illegal Israeli occupation of the Syrian Golan Heights), as a practical matter, the Golan is very important to Israel’s security,” Blinken said. Later in the interview, he went on to, once again, acknowledge, yet, at the same time, sideline the question of ‘legalities’. “Legal questions are something else,” he said, before continuing to speak vaguely and non-committedly about the future of Syria.
Juxtapose Blinken’s position on the illegal Israeli occupation of the Golan Heights with statements made by Pompeo in November, just before the end of Trump’s Presidency. “This is a part of Israel and central part of Israel,” Pompeo said, as he was accompanied by Israeli Foreign Minister, Gabi Ashkenazi, and speaking from the occupied Golan Heights.
Pompeo’s position, which is a stark violation of international law, was duly condemned by Palestinians and Arabs and criticized by various governments and international bodies. Blinken’s position, however, generated little media attention and negligible, if any, serious reprimand regionally or internationally. This should not have been the case.
By acknowledging the relevance of the issue of legality, then “leaving it aside”, in favor of the seemingly more pressing question of Israeli security, Blinken simply defended the status quo, that of perpetual Israeli military occupation, which is also championed enthusiastically by Republicans.
Succinctly, this is the Democratic doctrine on Palestine and Israel, in effect largely since the Bill Clinton era. The current Administration of Joe Biden is, undoubtedly, following the same blueprint, which allows Washington to offer itself as a neutral party – an ‘honest peace-broker’ – while helping Israel achieve its strategic goals at the expense of the Palestinian and Arab peoples.
The clear distinction between the Democratic and Republican discourses on Palestine and Israel is a relatively new phenomenon. Interestingly, it was the Republican George H. W. Bush Administration that, in 1991, established the current Democratic narrative on Palestine. At the end of the First Gulf War, Bush championed the multilateral talks between Israel and Arab States in Madrid, Spain. Within a few years, a whole new American discourse was formulated.
The September 11, 2001 attacks on the US supplanted the peace process discourse in Republican foreign policy literature with a new one, which is avowedly dedicated to fighting ‘Islamic terror’. Israel cleverly used the new American language and conduct in the Middle East to present itself as a direct partner in the US-led global ‘war on terror’.
To stave off the collapse of US global political leadership as a result of the Iraq invasion of 2003, the Barack Obama Administration quickly restored the traditional American position, once again offering US services as a benefactor of peace in the Middle East. True, Obama labored to restore America’s relevance as a ‘peacemaker’. His administration still utilized the disingenuous language of the past, one which constantly put the onus on the Palestinians, while gently reminding Israel of its responsibilities towards Palestine’s civilian population.
Obama’s Cairo speech in April 2009 remains the most powerful, yet indicting document on the numerous moral lapses and legal blind spots of US foreign policy, particularly under Democratic administrations. The speech, which was meant to serve as a watershed moment in the US’ approach to the Middle East region, fully exposed the caveats of US bias towards Israel, predicated mostly on emotional manipulation and historical misrepresentations.
Obama deliberately fluctuated between the persecution of Jewish communities throughout history and Israel’s ‘right’ to ensure its security at the expense of oppressed Palestinians, as if the systematic Israeli violence was carried out as genuine attempts to prevent further persecution of world’s Jewry.
Contrastingly, Obama insisted, with little sympathy or context, that “Palestinians must abandon violence”, thus painting the Palestinians and their rightful resistance as the true obstacle to any just peace in Palestine. Concerning Palestine and Israel, blaming the victim has been a central pillar of US foreign policy, shared by Democrats and Republicans alike.
Yet, while Republicans increasingly ignore the rights and, sometimes, the very existence of the Palestinians, Democrats, who continue to support Israel with equal passion, use more moderate – although inconsequential – language.
For Democrats, Palestinians are the instigators of violence, although Israel may have, at times, used ‘disproportionate force’ in its response to Palestinian violence; for them, international law exists, but can easily be ‘left aside’ to accommodate Israeli security; for them, there is such a thing as internationally recognized borders, but these borders are flexible in order to accommodate Israel’s demographic fears, strategic interests and ‘military edge’.
Hence, it is easier to discredit the foreign policy agenda of Trump, Pompeo and other Republicans as their aggressive, dismissive language and action are unmistakably objectionable. The Democratic discourse, however, cannot be as easily censured, as it utilizes a mix of superficial language, political platitudes and historical clichés, worded meticulously with the aim of placing the US back at the driving seat of whatever political process is underway.
While the Democratic discourse remains committed to arming and defending Israel, it provides Palestinians and Arabs with no meaningful change, because substantive change can only occur when international law is respected. Unfortunately, according to Blinken’s logic, such seemingly trivial matters should, for now, be ‘left aside’.
The post “Leaving Aside” International Law: Why Democrats are as Dangerous as Republicans to a Just Peace in Palestine first appeared on Dissident Voice.This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
Motivated by their justifiable aversion to former US President Donald Trump, many analysts have rashly painted a rosy picture of how Democrats could quickly erase the bleak trajectory of the previous Republican administration. This naivety is particularly pronounced in the current spin on the Palestinian-Israeli discourse, which is promoting, again, the illusion that Democrats will succeed where their political rivals have failed.
There are obvious differences in the Democrats’ approach to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, but only in semantics and political jingoism, not policy. This assertion can be justified if the Democratic administration’s official language on Palestine and Israel is examined, and such language considered within the context of practical policies on the ground.
Take recent remarks, made by the new US Secretary of State, Antony Blinken, during a CNN interview on February 8. Blinken’s comments reminded us of the clever – albeit disingenuous – US foreign policy under previous Democratic administrations. His select words may seem as a complete departure from the belligerent, yet direct, approach of former US Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo.
“Look, leaving aside the legalities of that question (meaning the illegal Israeli occupation of the Syrian Golan Heights), as a practical matter, the Golan is very important to Israel’s security,” Blinken said. Later in the interview, he went on to, once again, acknowledge, yet, at the same time, sideline the question of ‘legalities’. “Legal questions are something else,” he said, before continuing to speak vaguely and non-committedly about the future of Syria.
Juxtapose Blinken’s position on the illegal Israeli occupation of the Golan Heights with statements made by Pompeo in November, just before the end of Trump’s Presidency. “This is a part of Israel and central part of Israel,” Pompeo said, as he was accompanied by Israeli Foreign Minister, Gabi Ashkenazi, and speaking from the occupied Golan Heights.
Pompeo’s position, which is a stark violation of international law, was duly condemned by Palestinians and Arabs and criticized by various governments and international bodies. Blinken’s position, however, generated little media attention and negligible, if any, serious reprimand regionally or internationally. This should not have been the case.
By acknowledging the relevance of the issue of legality, then “leaving it aside”, in favor of the seemingly more pressing question of Israeli security, Blinken simply defended the status quo, that of perpetual Israeli military occupation, which is also championed enthusiastically by Republicans.
Succinctly, this is the Democratic doctrine on Palestine and Israel, in effect largely since the Bill Clinton era. The current Administration of Joe Biden is, undoubtedly, following the same blueprint, which allows Washington to offer itself as a neutral party – an ‘honest peace-broker’ – while helping Israel achieve its strategic goals at the expense of the Palestinian and Arab peoples.
The clear distinction between the Democratic and Republican discourses on Palestine and Israel is a relatively new phenomenon. Interestingly, it was the Republican George H. W. Bush Administration that, in 1991, established the current Democratic narrative on Palestine. At the end of the First Gulf War, Bush championed the multilateral talks between Israel and Arab States in Madrid, Spain. Within a few years, a whole new American discourse was formulated.
The September 11, 2001 attacks on the US supplanted the peace process discourse in Republican foreign policy literature with a new one, which is avowedly dedicated to fighting ‘Islamic terror’. Israel cleverly used the new American language and conduct in the Middle East to present itself as a direct partner in the US-led global ‘war on terror’.
To stave off the collapse of US global political leadership as a result of the Iraq invasion of 2003, the Barack Obama Administration quickly restored the traditional American position, once again offering US services as a benefactor of peace in the Middle East. True, Obama labored to restore America’s relevance as a ‘peacemaker’. His administration still utilized the disingenuous language of the past, one which constantly put the onus on the Palestinians, while gently reminding Israel of its responsibilities towards Palestine’s civilian population.
Obama’s Cairo speech in April 2009 remains the most powerful, yet indicting document on the numerous moral lapses and legal blind spots of US foreign policy, particularly under Democratic administrations. The speech, which was meant to serve as a watershed moment in the US’ approach to the Middle East region, fully exposed the caveats of US bias towards Israel, predicated mostly on emotional manipulation and historical misrepresentations.
Obama deliberately fluctuated between the persecution of Jewish communities throughout history and Israel’s ‘right’ to ensure its security at the expense of oppressed Palestinians, as if the systematic Israeli violence was carried out as genuine attempts to prevent further persecution of world’s Jewry.
Contrastingly, Obama insisted, with little sympathy or context, that “Palestinians must abandon violence”, thus painting the Palestinians and their rightful resistance as the true obstacle to any just peace in Palestine. Concerning Palestine and Israel, blaming the victim has been a central pillar of US foreign policy, shared by Democrats and Republicans alike.
Yet, while Republicans increasingly ignore the rights and, sometimes, the very existence of the Palestinians, Democrats, who continue to support Israel with equal passion, use more moderate – although inconsequential – language.
For Democrats, Palestinians are the instigators of violence, although Israel may have, at times, used ‘disproportionate force’ in its response to Palestinian violence; for them, international law exists, but can easily be ‘left aside’ to accommodate Israeli security; for them, there is such a thing as internationally recognized borders, but these borders are flexible in order to accommodate Israel’s demographic fears, strategic interests and ‘military edge’.
Hence, it is easier to discredit the foreign policy agenda of Trump, Pompeo and other Republicans as their aggressive, dismissive language and action are unmistakably objectionable. The Democratic discourse, however, cannot be as easily censured, as it utilizes a mix of superficial language, political platitudes and historical clichés, worded meticulously with the aim of placing the US back at the driving seat of whatever political process is underway.
While the Democratic discourse remains committed to arming and defending Israel, it provides Palestinians and Arabs with no meaningful change, because substantive change can only occur when international law is respected. Unfortunately, according to Blinken’s logic, such seemingly trivial matters should, for now, be ‘left aside’.
This post was originally published on Radio Free.
The ongoing civil war within the GOP broke wide open on Monday, and it was nothing short of delicious to behold. The two biggest heavyweights that party has produced — former President Donald Trump and current Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell — went after each other like those paper-mache monsters in the creature double-features from the television of my youth. This time, however, the blood was real.
The trouble started when McConnell concluded his involvement in Trump’s second impeachment trial with a speech that laid the 1/6 debacle at the former president’s feet — although McConnell, hypocritically, voted to acquit the president. “January 6th was a disgrace,” he intoned, “American citizens attacked their own government. They used terrorism to try to stop a specific piece of democratic business they did not like.”
“Former President Trump’s actions preceding the riot were a disgraceful dereliction of duty…. Let me put that to the side for one moment and reiterate something I said weeks ago: There is no question that President Trump is practically and morally responsible for provoking the events of that day,” McConnell continued.
Of course, McConnell’s heavy-handed statement was calculated; with his acquittal vote — using a constitutional fig leaf that focused incorrectly at process and not at the facts of the case — he was able to have it both ways. The former majority leader was attempting a dangerous straddle: Denounce the man beloved by the GOP base but vote to clear his name. People who gamble on horses lay this kind of parlay bet all the time, putting money on multiple horses in the same race. Usually, they go home busted.
McConnell wasn’t busted, but it did not take long for the outrage of this betrayal to summon the wrath of the Beast of Palm Beach. Bereft of his usual instant-reply Twitter platform, Trump required actual time to form sentences and paragraphs — someone wrote it, anyway — and the result was a screed that sounds like a needle scratching off the largest record in the universe.
“The Republican Party can never again be respected or strong with political ‘leaders’ like Sen. Mitch McConnell at its helm,” said Trump in a lengthy statement. “McConnell’s dedication to business as usual, status quo policies, together with his lack of political insight, wisdom, skill, and personality, has rapidly driven him from Majority Leader to Minority Leader, and it will only get worse.”
“Mitch is a dour, sullen, and unsmiling political hack,” continued Trump, “and if Republican Senators are going to stay with him, they will not win again. He will never do what needs to be done, or what is right for our Country. Where necessary and appropriate, I will back primary rivals who espouse Making America Great Again and our policy of America First.”
Thus, the gauntlet was thrown. Trump, at this point, may retain enough power and influence within the party to tear it apart from the inside out if he so chooses, much as he tore the Capitol building apart on 1/6.
McConnell’s people were quick to rally to the senator’s defense. “Trump going total mean girl ought to feed the cable beast for weeks,” tweeted McConnell’s first chief of staff, Janet Mullins Grissom.
“It seems an odd choice for someone who claims they want to lead the GOP to attack a man who has been unanimously elected to lead Senate Republicans a history-making eight times,” noted former McConnell aide Billy Piper. “But we have come to expect these temper tantrums when he feels threatened — just ask any of his former chiefs of staff or even his vice president.”
Trump’s people got busy, too, none more so than world-class lickspittle Lindsey Graham. “I’m more worried about 2022 than I’ve ever been,” Graham moaned to Sean Hannity on Fox News. “I don’t want to eat our own. President Trump is the most consequential Republican in the party. If Mitch McConnell doesn’t understand that, he’s missing a lot.… We need to knock this off. Kevin McCarthy is the leader of the house Republicans. He has taken a different approach to President Trump. I would advise Senator McConnell to do that.”
I dunno, Lindsey. “Eating our own” looks to be the top special on the GOP menu for the foreseeable. Feel free to call for seconds.
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
Republicans in the Senate voted to acquit Donald Trump in the former president’s second impeachment trial. Although a bipartisan majority of senators found Trump guilty of inciting an insurrection on Jan. 6 with his monthslong campaign of lies about election fraud, most Republicans blocked his conviction.
Thus, in 57-43 Senate vote, Trump was found not guilty — again — falling 10 votes short of the 67 votes needed to convict.
Seven Republican senators did join with all 50 Democrats to find Trump guilty, including Richard Burr of North Carolina, who just barely won reelection in the election Trump claimed was fraudulent; Bill Cassidy of Louisiana, who surprised observers when he switched his earlier vote to declare the trial constitutional; Susan Collins of Maine; Lisa Murkowski of Alaska; Mitt Romney of Utah; Ben Sasse of Nebraska and Pat Toomey of Pennsylvania, who is retiring after this term.
Other retiring Republican senators — Rob Portman of Ohio and Richard Shelby of Alabama — voted to acquit even without the looming threat of soon facing Trump voters.
“I want to first thank my team of dedicated lawyers and others for their tireless work upholding justice and defending truth,” Trump said in a statement released after the verdict. “My deepest thanks as well to all of the United States Senators and Members of Congress who stood proudly for the Constitution we all revere and for the sacred legal principles at the heart of our country.”
The Republican leader of the Senate, Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, voted to acquit Trump and then immediately took to the Senate floor to blast Trump’s actions, calling the former president “morally responsible” for the mob attack on Congress.
Responding to McConnell, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., blasted his decision to have held the trial over until after Trump left office. “It is so pathetic that Senator McConnell kept the Senate shut down so that the Senate could not receive the Article of Impeachment and has used that as his excuse for not voting to convict Donald Trump.”
“Whatever it was, it was a very disingenuous speech,” she continued of McConnell, “and I say this regretfully.”
“But we will be going forward to make sure that this never happens again.”
Other Senate Republicans spent the four days of the trial working with Trump’s defense team to undermine the process, deflect blame to Democrats who attacked on Jan. 6 and downplay the historic attack on Capitol Hill.
After presenting a convincing case full of harrowing footage of the Capitol riot, House managers surprised the Senate trial when they moved for a vote to call witnesses, which passed with 55 votes. Democrats then frantically backed away from their position after Sen. Chris Coons, D-Del., reportedly warned House managers that calling witnesses could cost them Democratic votes to convict in the Senate.
“People want to get home for Valentine’s Day,” Coons reportedly said.
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
Republican senators in three swing states recently announced their retirements, opening the floodgates for a slew of candidates vying for the highly-coveted spots in 2022.
In the past election cycle, Democrats raised unprecedented amounts of money but still largely lost Senate seats to Republicans in states that had the most expensive races, with Democratic wins in the Georgia runoffs marking a turning point. In 2022, with Democrats controlling the presidency and thin majorities in the House and Senate, the stakes will be high as Senate hopefuls throw their hats in the ring and start fundraising for likely volatile contests.
In North Carolina’s 2020 senate race, incumbent Sen. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.) held on to his seat despite being outspent by former state Sen. Cal Cunningham. Tillis’s campaign raised about $25.3 million while Cunningham’s raised around twice that number with approximately $51.2 million. North Carolina has two GOP senators and mostly Republican representatives representing the state on the national stage.
But Sen. Richard Burr (R-N.C.) said in 2016 that his current term would be his last, meaning there is an open seat on the horizon that could shake up the Senate’s party balance. Burr’s campaign raised about $12.9 million in 2016 and around $10.9 million in the 2010 election cycle. He has served as senator since 2005 and was a House representative before that from 1995.
In February, before the onset of the coronavirus pandemic in the United States, Burr publicly declared his faith in the U.S. government’s response to the virus. But he privately warned those around him about the virus’ possible economic percussions before selling anywhere from $628,000 to $1.7 million in publicly traded stocks on Feb. 13.
North Carolina state Sen. Jeff Jackson (D) officially joined the Senate race on Jan. 26, launching a “100 county campaign” with a promise to hold town halls in every North Carolina county. He joins fellow state Sen. Erica Smith (D), who announced her entrance in January and previously competed with Cunningham for the Democratic nomination in 2020.
According to his campaign, Jackson raised $500,000 in the two days following his announcement with 90 percent of contributions coming from North Carolina, nearly 80 percent of which are donations of under $100.
As for the GOP, Rep. Mark Walker (R-N.C.) released a video revealing his Senate challenge on Dec. 1. He said that his campaign raised almost $370,000 in a little over a month after he launched his bid. Lara Trump, wife of former President Donald Trump’s son Eric Trump, is said to be considering a run, according to the New York Times.
The North Carolina Senate race is expected to be one of the highest profile and most expensive in the 2022 midterm elections. North Carolina’s Senate race broke records in the 2020 election, coming in as the third most expensive race ever with about $298.9 million spent in total.
The Keystone State was the state to watch in the 2020 election, turning blue by a slim margin after helping elect Trump in 2016. The state has a Democratic governor and GOP majorities in the state House and Senate.
Lt. Governor John Fetterman (D), a favorite among Pennsylvanian Democrats, particularly labor interests, initiated his campaign to fill Toomey’s seat on Monday after conducting an exploratory effort. According to Politico, he raised over $1.4 million in the weeks leading up to his announcement. Fetterman previously ran for Senate in 2016 and raised about $760,000, millions short of what winner Toomey and Democratic nominee Katie McGinty each raised.
Last summer, during a period of civil unrest sparked by George Floyd’s death, Fetterman wrote about the need for “discretion and de-escalation measures” to address police brutality. On Feb. 9, in what appears to be a preemptive move, Fetterman’s campaign released a video of the lieutenant governor defending a 2013 incident in which he chased and pulled a gun on an unarmed Black man who was jogging. Fetterman claimed that he had heard shots fired near his home in the events leading to the incident. While the jogger, Christopher Miyares, never pressed charges, he and Fetterman told different accounts of what happened.
Former Norristown borough council member John McGuigan has also launched his Senate campaign.
Fetterman’s bid comes after Sen. Pat Toomey (R-Pa.) announced in October that he would not run for reelection or for governor and would instead return to the private sector. Toomey, a two-term senator, raised $30.8 million in the 2016 election. Prior to becoming senator, he served three terms in the U.S. House from 1999 to 2005.
While Toomey supported Trump’s reelection, he called on the former president to resign after the deadly Jan. 6 Capitol riot. But Toomey and Trump’s relationship was fraught with tension even before the riot, with the two clashing over Trump’s decisions such as imposing tariffs on steel and aluminum during the coronavirus pandemic.
His retirement leaves the Pennsylvania seat up for grabs in the 2022 election, which could thwart Republicans’ plans to take back control of the Senate and instead assist Democrats in holding on to their slim majority.
On Feb. 10, Rep. Madeleine Dean’s (D-Pa.) son tweeted that she “seems comfortable in the Senate” after she condemned Trump for spreading lies and using violent rhetoric in his speeches during his impeachment trial, leading to speculation that she might run for the open seat. Dean is one of nine House members prosecuting Trump during the trial. She has not announced a Senate bid.
Insiders say other potential Democratic contenders include U.S. Reps. Conor Lamb, Brendan Boyle, Chrissy Houlahan, and Susan Wild; Philadelphia Mayor Jim Kenney; former state Treasurer Joe Torsella; Montgomery County Commissioner Val Arkoosh; state Sen. Sharif Street; Philadelphia City Council member Helen Gym; and state Rep. Malcolm Kenyatta.
As for Republicans, Craig Snyder, a Never-Trump Republican and political consultant who founded the Republicans for Hillary PAC in 2016, said on Feb. 3 that he is considering a run. Others speculated to be potential candidates include Pennsylvania Reps. Ryan Costello, Charlie Dent, Dan Meuser, Lou Barletta, Brian Fitzpatrick, Mike Kelly and Guy Reschenthaler; former U.S. Secretary of the Navy Kenneth Braithwaite; 2018 lieutenant governor candidate Jeff Bartos; state Sen. Mike Regan; state Rep. Martina White; Chester County Commissioner Michelle Kichline; 2018 Senate candidate Jim Christiana; state Sen. Jake Corman; 2018 gubernatorial candidate Paul Mango; former U.S. Attorney William McSwain; former U.S. Ambassador to Denmark Carla Sands; 2020 congressional candidate Sean Parnell; and former state House Speaker Mike Turzai.
With a majority GOP congressional delegation and a Republican governor, Ohio has leaned more right than ever in recent years with electoral votes going to Trump in both the 2016 and 2020 general presidential elections.
Sen. Rob Portman (R-Ohio) said on Jan. 25 he would not seek reelection following the end of his second term in 2022. The senator, who has shifted more moderate in recent years compared to his more conservative colleagues, said in the statement announcing his retirement that “this is a tough time to be in public service.”
“We live in an increasingly polarized country where members of both parties are being pushed further to the right and further to the left, and that means too few people who are actively looking to find common ground,” he said.
Portman served in the House from 1993 until 2005, when he joined then-President George W. Bush’s Cabinet as U.S. Trade Representative. His campaign raised approximately $25.4 million in 2016 and about $13.2 million in 2010, when he was first elected to the Senate.
Despite Trump allies’ high expectations for a Senate bid, a spokesperson for Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) said that he would not be running for the position and would instead run for reelection in the House. The congressman was first elected in 2004, and his campaign raised about $18 million in the 2020 election cycle, a considerable jump from the approximately $1.2 million he raised in 2018.
As for other candidates vying for the open seat, former Ohio State Treasurer Josh Mandel (R) launched his campaign on Wednesday. In the 2012 Senate race, he won the Republican nomination but ultimately lost against incumbent Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio), whose campaign raised about $24.8 million. Mandel, who was heavily favored by outside spending groups, raised around $18.9 million. He ran again in 2018 but lost early on with Rep. Jim Renacci (R-Ohio) becoming the Republican nominee. Mandel received about $5.3 million during his run. His platform this time around is targeted at continuing Trump’s legacy.
“I’m going to Washington to fight for President Trump’s America First Agenda and to pulverize the Uniparty – that cabal of Democrats and Republicans who sound the same, stand for nothing and are more interested in cocktail party invites than defending the Constitution,” Mandel said in a statement.
According to Politico, other GOP candidates who could compete with Mandel include J.D. Vance, a venture capitalist and author of the popular book “Hillbilly Elegy”; Ohio Secretary of State Frank LaRose; and U.S. Reps. Steve Stivers, Brad Wenstrup, Michael Turner and Warren Davidson.
On the opposite side of the political aisle, Rep. Tim Ryan (D-Ohio) is expected to make his bid public in early March according to the New York Times. He is already asking supporters for donations via email. Ryan has considered running for statewide office before and previously ran for president in the 2020 election cycle before bowing out in October of 2019. He raised $1.3 million during his short-lived campaign. In 2016, he unsuccessfully challenged House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) for the top spot in Democratic leadership.
Other potential entrants on the Democrats’ side include Ohio House Minority Leader Emilia Sykes and U.S. Rep. Joyce Beatty (D-Ohio).
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
Republican Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky informed colleagues in an email Saturday morning that he will vote to acquit Donald Trump on the charge of inciting a deadly insurrection, despite admitting less than two weeks after the January 6 assault that the former president “provoked” the right-wing mob.
McConnell hid behind a procedural justification for his decision to vote to acquit, echoing the position of many of his Republican colleagues.
“While a close call,” McConnell wrote, “I am persuaded that impeachments are a tool primarily of removal and we therefore lack jurisdiction.”
He is who we thought he was. https://t.co/xotpezwJTW
— Matt Ford (@fordm) February 13, 2021
Rep. Don Beyer (D-Virginia) tweeted in response to news of McConnell’s decision that “it is disappointing but not at all surprising that Trump’s worst enablers will stand with him.”
“McConnell’s failure to put the needs of the country before partisan politics will define his legacy, and shape the future of a Republican Party increasingly embracing authoritarianism,” wrote Beyer. “McConnell kept the trial from starting until Trump had left office. Now McConnell says he won’t convict Trump because he is no longer in office.
“Pure cynical partisanship to let Trump get away with inciting the attack on the Capitol, and all the death and destruction it caused,” Beyer added.
A final verdict in the Trump impeachment trial could come as early as Saturday afternoon. A two-thirds vote is needed to convict.
McConnell’s email came after a more than 190 legal scholars published an open letter urging senators not to “rely solely on a procedural argument that has already been voted down by this body, and certainly not on legal sophistry.”
“It is now your turn to honor your oath as you weigh the evidence and arguments presented, even though it may require you to put our Constitution and the rule of law ahead of your own political allegiances,” the letter reads. “The eyes of the entire nation and future generations are upon you. Will you stand true to your oath?”
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
When former President Donald Trump’s second impeachment trial wraps up in the coming days, it’s entirely possible that a large majority of Republican senators will vote to acquit him of inciting an insurrection.
If they do so, it will not be because of lack of evidence but because of a stunning lack of moral fortitude. They will acquit not because the House managers didn’t prove their case, but because by and large, GOP senators — with a few exceptions — regard their oath to deliver impartial justice about as flippantly as Trump regarded his oath to preserve, protect and defend the U.S. Constitution.
Over the course of three days, the nine House managers, led by constitutional law scholar Rep. Jamie Raskin, presented an entirely devastating picture of Trump and of Trumpism. They showed, through a meticulous use of Trump’s own quotes, film footage, and a variety of firsthand accounts from participants and victims, just how dangerous the January 6 mob attack was. They showed Trump egging on the enraged “Stop the Steal” crowds in Washington, D.C., that morning. They showed the mob actively hunting down Congress members, beating and attempting to crush police officers. And they showed — through social media posts, radio and TV interviews, and phone conversations — how many of the Trump loyalists believed that the former president had summoned them to D.C. with no aim other than to use brute force to stop Congress’s certification of the Electoral College vote.
The speech Trump gave to D.C. protesters that morning, as well as his tweets in the run-up to the protests and during the assault on the Capitol itself, were laid out in full, technicolor detail at the trial. Trump’s odious words contained no nuance, no subtlety. His “Stop the Steal” rhetoric was a lie pushed in plain view, and his attacks on political figures — including his own vice president — who dared to put the Constitution above fealty to Donald J. Trump were clearly aimed at cultivating a violent response from the MAGA mob.
But, at least as importantly as documenting the days immediately surrounding January 6, the House managers established years-long patterns that led up to that day. In a sense, they put Trump’s entire political modus operandi on trial in the court of U.S. and global public opinion. The presentations clearly showed that throughout his presidency, Trump was busy defending and cozying up to extremist groups — from calling the neo-Nazis of the Charlottesville riot “very fine people”to calling on militias to “liberate” Michigan and several other states from public health-mandated COVID restrictions in the spring of 2020 to telling the Proud Boys to “stand back and stand by.” Trump was encouraging acts of violence against counterprotesters at his political rallies and elsewhere. He was glorifying former Rep. Greg Gianforte’s beating up of a Guardian newspaper reporter. (Gianforte is now the governor of Montana.) Trump was presiding over rallies in which his supporters, with his clear support, were calling for his opponents to be jailed and, in some instances, to be physically harmed.
The House managers gave a devastatingly thorough presentation that let Trump — for so long the star of his own show — speak for himself. In speaking for himself, he damned himself before the eyes of the world.
It’s impossible to imagine that an impartial juror could sit through the three days of presentations the House managers put together and not vote to convict Trump. It’s impossible to imagine, as Trump’s inept attorneys wanted their audiences to do, that Trump was simply exercising his free speech rights, with no ill intent, with no hope that his words would activate the mob to march on Congress and try to prevent a peaceful transfer of power.
Perhaps that’s why, by Thursday afternoon, as the Democrats prepared to wrap up their case, 15 GOP senators had simply absented themselves from the proceedings. For them, it would be easier to vote to acquit — a decision they had made before any of the evidence was even presented — if they weren’t forced to actually confront the overwhelming evidence of the culpability of the man they were readying themselves to exonerate.
But does GOP senators’ ostrich stance mean that the trial was a waste of time? Not in the slightest. The impeachment managers were, in part, playing for the history books, seeking to indelibly frame the Trump presidency in the public’s mind as one configured, from the get-go, to deliver violence and to whip up fanaticism. They were seeking to shape history’s understanding of Trump, to ensure that, generations from now, his name remains synonymous with insurrection, with demagoguery, with violence and with bloodlust. They succeeded.
As the proceedings continue, Trump’s lawyers won’t be able to effectively counter this effort; they seem to have realized this early on, providing a ludicrously flimsy, poorly prepared defense. Their opening arguments on Tuesday afternoon were the stuff of dime-store shills. “Mediocre” would be a charitable description of the legal arguments they delivered. There was, in their hurried, ill-argued presentations, simply no evidence of the top legal brains that one would expect an ex-president to be able to marshal in his defense. In fact, Trump didn’t really field a legal team at all; instead, he went from one rejection to the next, as top-tier law firms fled his toxic embrace and refused to represent him, until finally he found a couple of random lawyers who were willing to argue (albeit poorly and with minimal preparation) his case in public.
Yet in all likelihood, when the voting begins, more than a third of the Senate will move to acquit Trump.
That outcome will, I predict, be something of a pyrrhic victory for the GOP. In fact, it will likely hang like an albatross around the party’s neck for a long, long time to come — for a majority of Americans believe that Trump is guilty of inciting an insurrection and should, in consequence, forfeit the right to run for public office again. And, given the power of the House managers’ presentation this week, I’d guess that the needle of public opinion will shift further against Trump — and by extension, the Trumpified GOP — in the coming weeks.
Former U.K. Prime Minister Winston Churchill supposedly once noted that “history is written by the victors.” Trump, out of power, living in a gilded cage in Mar-a-Lago, is, at this point, most assuredly not a victor. He has lost the presidency and lost his previously vast social media platform, and after attempting to incite an insurrection, he has lost any last vestiges of credibility. Most importantly, he has lost much of the power to create his own narrative. Instead, the history of Trump and of Trumpism is largely being written by others. And it’s a narrative that, as the impeachment trial has so vividly shown, will not be kind to him.
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
The top-ranking Republican in the state of Michigan told members of a GOP county group that he did not believe that most of those who took part in the attacks of the U.S. Capitol building last month were supporters of former President Donald Trump.
In spite of absolutely zero evidence existing to support such claims that have been made over the past month, Michigan’s Senate Majority Leader Mike Shirkey (R-Clarklake) suggested that the breach of the Capitol on January 6 was a faked event.
“That wasn’t Trump people. That’s been a hoax from day one. It was all staged,” Shirkey told members of the Hillsdale County Republican Party.
His comments were recorded and uploaded on YouTube by a member of that county’s GOP organization. Shirkey was facing censure from his party over his failure to do more to oppose Democratic Gov. Gretchen Whitmer.
While speaking to members of the group, Shirkey also placed blame on then-U.S. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Kentucky) and other congressional leaders for not providing more security at the Capitol building on the day of the breach. “I think they wanted to have a mess,” he added.
In trying to defend his record on opposing Governor Whitmer, Shirkey then resorted to disturbingly sexualized language, stating that Republicans in the state legislature “spanked her hard on budget, spanked her hard on appointments.”
After his comments on the Capitol attacks and Whitmer were made public, Shirkey offered up a half-hearted apology in words that did not express a change of opinion and implying he may still believe that the attack on Congress last month was staged.
“I said some things in a videoed conversation that are not fitting for the role I am privileged to serve,” Shirkey explained. “I own that. I have many flaws. Being passionate coupled with an occasional lapse in restraint of tongue are at least two of them.”
Bobby Leddy, a spokesman for Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, condemned Shirkey’s rhetoric.
“It’s disappointing that Sen. Shirkey is spending his time on political potshots, indulging conspiracy theories, and expressing empathy for the insurrection at the U.S. Capitol building,” Leddy said. “Gov. Whitmer is staying laser-focused on keeping people safe and getting Michigan back to work.”
Shirkey’s comments are indicative of an alarming trend seemingly taking over the Republican Party in areas all across the U.S. — that of embracing extremist viewpoints and disseminating misinformation that has, at times, caused some on the far right to act out in violent ways.
In Oregon, for example, the state Republican Party recently passed a resolution falsely describing the Capitol attack as a “false flag” event. And on Tuesday morning, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Georgia), whom Trump has described as a “rising star” in the party, and who was recently removed from committee assignments in the House after a number of her controversial comments from the past were highlighted, also expressed doubts about the Capitol breach.
“If the #Jan6 organizers were Trump supporters, then why did they attack us while we were objecting to electoral college votes for Joe Biden? The attack RUINED our objection that we spent weeks preparing for, which devastated our efforts on behalf of Trump and his voters,” Greene wrongly suggested.
Several fact checks and investigations into the backgrounds of those who were involved in the breach have revealed that it was, in fact, Trump loyalists who attacked the Capitol.
Vitriolic and patently false statements like these and others often come with grave consequences. Adherence to Trump and the false claims he has made in the past, for example, particularly against Whitmer, may have led to extremists in Michigan to plan a kidnapping plot against her last year.
In October, the FBI announced that it had arrested a number of men who had planned to abduct Whitmer and transport her to Wisconsin where they would try her in a kangaroo court of their own making. The scheme had advanced to the point where the men involved had surveilled the governor’s summer home, and had planned to purchase explosives.
Notably, the early stages of the plot started shortly after Trump sent out a tweet urging Michiganders to “liberate” their state from Whitmer’s coronavirus guidelines, which he viewed as being too restrictive.
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
In spite of expressing some regrets last week over comments she’s made in the past alleging conspiracy theories and promoting violence toward others, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Georgia) reverted back to asserting such false notions, peddling the already debunked claim that individuals who attacked the U.S. Capitol building last month were not actual supporters of former President Donald Trump.
Some have wrongly asserted in the past that the breach of the Capitol might have been a “false flag” attack, meant to tarnish Trump’s image as he attempted to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election. Others have errantly asserted that the non-existent organization called “antifa” had pretended to be Trump loyalists in order to attack the Capitol. None of these claims, nor any others like them purporting that anyone else besides Trump’s own base of supporters attacked Congress, have any shred of validity to them.
Yet on Tuesday morning, Greene made the bold — and false — assumption that there could be no logical way that those who attacked the Capitol were Trump backers, since they interrupted her and other GOP lawmakers’ efforts to challenge the outcome of the presidential election results by breaching the building.
“If the #Jan6 organizers were Trump supporters, then why did they attack us while we were objecting to electoral college votes for Joe Biden? The attack RUINED our objection that we spent weeks preparing for, which devastated our efforts on behalf of Trump and his voters,” Greene said in the first of a series of tweets making the false allegations.
“The Capitol attack was planned and organized, NOT incited in the moment by President Trump, and NO Republican Member was involved,” Greene further claimed.
Greene’s commentary is a drastic rewriting of history, as Trump’s words that day, just prior to the attack on the Capitol, were indeed incendiary. The former president had asserted, without evidence of any kind, that the election was stolen from him “by emboldened radical left Democrats” and “the fake news media.” He also told his supporters they could “never take back our country with weakness,” and directed them to go to the Capitol that day to demonstrate their grievances in person.
A number of Trump loyalists who took part in the violence on January 6 have since cited Trump’s very words as the direct reason why they attacked Congress.
Due to a plethora of controversial statements from Greene in the past, the House of Representatives voted last week to remove the Georgia lawmaker from two committee assignments she had held. In addressing the action on the House floor, Greene, who continued to attack the media for holding her accountable for her past statements, seemed to express at least some amount of remorse for what she had said.
“I was allowed to believe things that weren’t true and I would ask questions about them and talk about them, and that is absolutely what I regret,” Greene said, acknowledging that tragedies she had belittled or said were fake in the past — including school shootings and the attacks on 9/11 — were “absolutely real.”
Having expressed a belief on Tuesday in yet another conspiracy theory, however, disputing who actually took part in the attacks on the Capitol, it’s apparent that Greene will not change her ways anytime soon, and that her expression of regret last week was short lived, if it was sincere in the first place.
Several Democrats had previously called on Greene to be expelled from Congress altogether, but that action would have required two-thirds of the House to agree to do so, which would have meant some Republicans would have had to join in the efforts to remove her from office. Attempts to hold her accountable now, after promulgating yet another false conspiracy theory, likely won’t come about, due to the current political infighting within the GOP, and the real possibility that the party may soon embrace, rather than reject, the same QAnon philosophies promoted by Greene in the near future.
Indeed, a number of other actions across the U.S. seem to indicate that Republicans are gravitating toward such extremist views rather than trying to push them away. The Oregon Republican Party, for example, passed a resolution backing the former president, and professing, much like Greene has implied, that the January 6 attack on the Capitol was a “false flag” event. The Texas GOP also recently adopted a common QAnon catchphrase as a slogan on its social media accounts.
These actions by the GOP, and others like them, suggest that the propensity to disseminate false statements and blatant lies that was commonplace under the former president is being mainstreamed on the political right among Republican lawmakers in Congress, as well as conservative political organizations across the country, showcasing the fact that extreme misinformation in U.S. politics will continue to pose a problem in the months and years ahead.
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.