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The Koch Libertarian Project vs. America

By dianeravitch
July 4, 2022 //
56

What is happening to the America that we swore allegiance to every day in public school? what happened to the America that was “indivisible, with liberty and justice for all”? How did we get a rogue Supreme Court that recklessly demolishes women’s rights, the separation of church and state, gun control, public safety, and efforts by government to prevent climate disasters? Who kidnapped the conservative Republican Party that believed in stability and tradition? From whence came the people who scorn the commonweal and ridicule Constitutional norms?

Former state legislator Jeanne Dietsch has an answer. Connect the dots by looking at what has happened to New Hampshire. The coup failed in Washington, D.C. on January 6, she writes. But it is moving forward in New Hampshire, with many of the same characters and all of the same goals.

If you read one post today, read this.

She writes:

During the last few weeks, US House leaders documented the nearly successful January 6 coup piece by piece, before our eyes. That personal power grab failed. Meanwhile, the steps clinching takeover of our government by radical reactionaries have nearly triumphed. A plan decades in the making. A plan nearly invisible to the ordinary public.


I can barely believe myself how this story weaves from Kansas to Concord to DC to the fields of southern Michigan over the course of six decades. It starts in Witchita. Koch Industries is the largest privately held company in the US, with over $115 billion in revenues, mostly fossil-fuel related. For many years, two of the founders’ sons, Charles and David Koch, each owned 42% of the company.


The younger, David, studied in the engineering department of MIT for 5 years, simultaneous with young John H. Sununu. Both finished their Master’s degrees in 1963.

1980: THE KOCHS SET THEIR GOALS


Seventeen years later, David Koch ran for Vice President of the US on the Libertarian ticket. The campaign was largely funded by Koch interests. The Libertarian platform of 1980, shown below, may look disturbingly familiar to those following news today.

Open her post to read the Koch Libertarian platform of 1980.

Libertarians demanded the abolition of Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, public schools, aid to children, the Post Office, the Environmental Protection Agency, the Department of Energy, and more.

The infrastructure for achieving that platform was founded two years later. It was called the Federalist Society. It was a plan by a “small but influential group of law professors, lawyers, and judges.” Its goal?

To train members of their professions to believe in “originalism.” Originalists “strictly construe” the Constitution as they believed the Framers designed it way back in 1787. This matched David Koch’s 1980 platform. It would leave corporations free to do whatever profited them most without regard for social costs or regulations. Older Federalist Society members used their influence to advance their followers to higher judgeships.

SUNUNU FAMILY ROLES


Meanwhile, John Sununu became governor of New Hampshire, then Chief of Staff for President George W. Bush. In that role, John thwarted a plan for the US to join the international conference to address climate change in 1989. Actions like this, that benefitted Koch and the rest of the fossil-fuel industry, would become a hallmark of the Sununu family.


In 1993, an executive of Charles and David’s Koch Industries Michigan subsidiary, Guardian Industries, became a founding trustee of the Josiah Bartlett Center for Public Policy [JBC] in NH. Its mission was to advance many of the policies listed on David Koch’s platform of 1980. John Sununu, and later his son James, would chair the JBC board through today. Another of Sununu’s sons, Michael, would become a vocal climate denier and industry consultant. Still another, Senator John E. Sununu, would oppose the Climate Stewardship Act of 2003. But the Sununus were not coup leaders, just complicit.

BUILDING INFRASTRUCTURE FOR THE COUP


But let’s jump back to the Federalist Society. Its mission was succeeding. They were stacking the lower courts.?..Those justices hired young lawyers as clerks. From 1996-97, Thomas employed a Federalist Society clerk named John Eastman.


Twenty-three years later, Eastman would meet secretly with President Donald Trump. He would convince him that Vice President Pence could refuse to accept electoral college ballots on January 6. But back in 1999, Eastman became a senior fellow at the Claremont Institute. “The mission of the Claremont Institute is to restore the principles of the American Founding to their rightful, preeminent authority in our national life.”


Now we’re almost at the secret clubhouse of the coup. The Claremont Institute was run by a fellow regressive named Larry Arnn.(Photo below) In late 1999, Arnn was in the process of replacing the president of Hillsdale College because of a scandal that made national news. Hillsdale promotes conservative family values. Yet its leader was having an affair with his daughter-in-law. She committed suicide. Hillsdale was the central hub for Libertarian radicals so they needed a strong leader to pull them out of the mud.

Please read the rest of this fascinating post. There is one blatant error: she refers to “Clarence Thomas and Stephen Breyer” as Koch justices, but Breyer was a liberal justice appointed by Clinton. She must have meant the crackpot Alito.

Categories Betsy DeVos, Bigotry, Billionaires, Budget Cuts, Censorship, Charter Schools, Citizenship, Civil Rights, Corruption, Cruelty, Democracy, Disruption, Education Industry, Elections, Environment, Ethics, Evil, Extremism, For-Profit, Fraud, Funding, History, Injustice, Koch Brothers, New Hampshire, Privatization, Separation of church and state, Vouchers

Our Democracy Depends on the Integrity of Our Elections

By dianeravitch
July 4, 2022 //
33

Democracy cannot exist without free and fair elections.

Democracy depends on the general belief that elections are conducted honestly and that the results are reported honestly.

Since the 2020 Presidential election, Donald Trump has told his followers that the election he lost was fraudulent. Despite dozens of court cases that his team lost because they were unable to produce evidence of fraud, Trump insists that he won in a landslide.

Despite multiple recounts and hand recounts, Trump continues to lie.

Despite the testimony of Trump lawyers that Trump lost, Trump continues to claim he won.

Trump’s campaign of lies is a direct threat to our democracy.

NPR undertook an investigation to assess the influence of four election deniers who work at the local level, spreading propaganda and misinformation.

Every citizen concerned about the health of our democracy should read the NPR report. The election deniers can say whatever they want. It’s a free country.

But the public should know who they are and what they do.

If you want to protect our Constitution and our freedoms, be informed to combat lies with facts.

Categories Accountability, Democracy, Elections, Evil, Extremism, Fake, Fraud, Hoax, Lies

Dana Milbank: The Supreme Court Embraces Chaos

By dianeravitch
July 3, 2022 //
110

Dana Milbank wrote a wise analysis of the Trunp Supreme Court’s decisions on abortion and guns, which both threw away precedent and judicial restraint. The Supreme Court is supposed to be a guarantor of stability, law and order. Yet this Court removed restraints on guns even as the nation was reeling from gun violence. And in the Roe decision, it removed a constitutional right—granted 49 years ago— for the first time in history.

Milbank writes:

Nobody should be surprised that the Supreme Court’s conservative justices on Friday jettisoned nearly 50 years of precedent upon precedent in overturning Roe v. Wade. Heck, they didn’t even honor their own precedent articulated 24 hours earlier.


In their opinion Thursday morning forcing New York and other densely populated states to allow more handguns in public, the conservative majority, led by Justice Clarence Thomas, argued that medieval law imposing arms restrictions — specifically, the 1328 Statute of Northampton — “has little bearing on the Second Amendment” because it was “enacted … more than 450 years before the ratification of the Constitution.”


Yet in their ruling Friday morning in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health, setting women’s rights back half a century (and cracking the door to banning same-sex marriage and contraception), the conservative justices, led by Samuel Alito (who was also in the guns majority) and joined by Thomas, argued precisely the opposite. They justified abortion bans by citing, among others, “Henry de Bracton’s 13th-century treatise.” That was written circa 1250 and referred to monsters, duels, burning at the stake — and to women as property, “inferior” to men.

The right-wing majority’s selective application of history reveals the larger fraud in this pair of landmark rulings: Their reasoning is not legal but political, not principled but partisan.


Still, there is a commonality to the rulings. Both decisions foment maximum chaos and were delivered with flagrant disregard for the instability and disorder they will cause.


The high court was meant to be the guarantor of law and order. But the conservative justices, intoxicated by their supermajority, have abandoned their solemn duty to promote stability in the law and are actively spreading real-world disruption.

Worse, this invitation to disorder comes as the nation is trying to restore the rule of law after a coup attempt led by a president who appointed three of the five justices in the abortion majority. The spouse of a fourth — Ginni Thomas, Clarence’s wife — aggressively pushed state legislators and the White House to overthrow the election. Yet Thomas, the senior associate justice, has refused to recuse himself from related cases.


After decades of crocodile tears over imagined “judicial activism,” the conservative supermajority has shed all judicial modesty and embraced radicalism. The liberal justices, Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan and Stephen G. Breyer, wrote in their Dobbs dissent that the majority’s brazen rejection of stare decisis, respect for precedent, “breaches a core rule-of-law principle, designed to promote constancy in the law.”


Even Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., who joined the gun ruling, scolded fellow conservatives for blithely overturning the Roe v. Wade super-precedent. “Surely we should adhere closely to principles of judicial restraint here, where the broader path the court chooses entails repudiating a constitutional right we have not only previously recognized, but also expressly reaffirmed,” Roberts wrote. The majority’s “dramatic and consequential ruling is unnecessary,” he said, “a serious jolt to the legal system” that could have been avoided with a narrower decision that would have been “markedly less unsettling.”


Alito, in his (characteristically) sneering opinion in the abortion case, dismissed Roberts as unprincipled and public opinion as an “extraneous” concern. He likewise dismissed the pain the ruling would cause, writing that “this Court is ill-equipped to assess ‘generalized assertions about the national psyche.’ ” He washed his hands of answering the “empirical question” of “the effect of the abortion right … on the lives of women.”

The dissent said the majority’s refusal to address real-world consequences “reveals how little it knows or cares about women’s lives or about the suffering its decision will cause.” It is a “radical claim to power,” the dissent went on, to assert “the authority to overrule established legal principles without even acknowledging the costs of its decisions.”

The liberals described the bedlam to come, with suddenly unanswered legal questions about rape, incest, threats to a mother’s life, interstate travel for abortion, morning-after pills, IUDs, in vitro fertilization. “The majority’s refusal even to consider the life-altering consequences of reversing Roe and Casey is a stunning indictment,” they wrote.

Thomas’s gun ruling was much the same, 63 pages of a cherry-picked history of gun laws, with no concern for the real-life effect of allowing millions of people to carry handguns, with virtually no restriction, in the streets of New York or Los Angeles. Breyer, writing for the same liberal justices in dissent, upbraided the conservative majority for unleashing more guns “without considering the state’s compelling interest in preventing gun violence and protecting the safety of its citizens, and without considering the potentially deadly consequences of its decision.”
Alito added a concurring opinion to express contempt for Breyer’s points about gun violence, saying “it is hard to see what legitimate purpose can possibly be served” by his mentions of mass shootings and growing firearm mayhem.
The radicals have cast off any pretense of judicial restraint. Now the chaos begins.

Categories Accountability, Cruelty, Democracy, Disruption, Elections, Extremism, Guns, Justice

Mark Joseph Stern: The Most Hopeless Day of SCOTUS Term?

By dianeravitch
July 1, 2022 //
86

Mark Joseph Stern, the legal analyst for Slate, asks and answers the question: was yesterday the most hopeless day of the SCOTUS term?

Yes. Yesterday and last week demonstrated the fact that we have a Supreme Court that is completely in the grip of the far-right branch of the Republican Party. They are extremists. They have no respect for the role of the Court.

Stern writes:

No single day has better captured the current state of the Supreme Court than Thursday. At 10 a.m., the court issued a devastating assault on the Biden administration’s ability to regulate greenhouse gases in a 6–3 ruling joined by all of the court’s reactionary block. Ten minutes later, it issued a 5–4 opinion that just barely confirmed that the president, rather than a rogue judge in Texas, has authority over border policy, with Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Brett Kavanaugh lending the lone votes preventing an absolutely insane outcome. Shortly thereafter, the court issued a bombshell orders list that tees up, for next term, one of the most important and dangerous democracy cases in American history, which asks whether state legislatures have near-unlimited authority over election laws.

The court’s most immediately lethal decisionremains Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, which overturned Roe v. Wade. But do not let Dobbs distract from the onslaught that followed it. If anyone still doubted that the Supreme Court served as the nation’s chief policymaking institution after Dobbs, Thursday should put that to rest. The court is ruthlessly efficient, putting our gridlocked Congress to shame with its speedy and definitive resolution of the most pressing issues facing the country today. It does not require hourslong hearings or endless negotiations to operate. The six-justice conservative majority chooses which conflicts to prioritize, takes up cases that present them, then picks a winner, nearly always for the benefit of the conservative movement and the Republican Party.

Consider the issues that SCOTUS has resolved this term—the first full term with a 6–3 conservative supermajority. The constitutional right to abortion: gone. States’ ability to limit guns in public: gone. Tribal sovereignty against state intrusion: gone. Effective constraints around separation of church and state: gone. The bar on prayer in public schools: gone. Effective enforcement of Miranda warnings: gone. The ability to sue violent border agents: gone. The Environmental Protection Agency’s authority to regulate greenhouse gases at power plants: gone. Vast areas of the law, established over the course of decades, washed away by a court over a few months.

There is no serious risk of another branch overriding these decisions. The squabbling among our elected representatives is, increasingly, a sideshow, with the court nudging along the decline of voters’ ability to shape their democracy. One-third of the court was appointed by a president who lost the popular vote, yet the majority evinces not a shred of caution about overriding the democratic branches or its own predecessors on the bench. It imposes Republican policies far more effectively than the Republican Party ever could. Real power in this country no longer lies in the people. It resides at the Supreme Court.

Categories Accountability, Democracy, Elections

Rep. Boebert: “I’m Tired of This Separation of Church and State Junk”

By dianeravitch
June 29, 2022 //
129

Rep. Lauren Boebert, a Trump Republican from Colorado, apparently never took a class in civics, government or history and is an embarrassment to the Congress in which she serves. She won her primary on Tuesday. Boebert is a high school dropout who earned her GED in 2020, according to Wikipedia. She is a born-again Christian and a strident advocate of guns; she and her husband own a restaurant—Shooters Grill in Rifle, Colorado,where staff are encouraged to carry guns. From the following report, which appeared in the Washington Post, it is certain that she is ignorant about the Constitution and the Founding Fathers.

Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-Colo.)…says she is “tired” of the U.S. separation of church and state, a long-standing concept stemming from a “stinking letter” penned by one of the Founding Fathers.

Speaking at a religious service Sunday in Colorado, she told worshipers: “The church is supposed to direct the government. The government is not supposed to direct the church. That is not how our Founding Fathers intended it.”

She added: “I’m tired of this separation of church and state junk that’s not in the Constitution. It was in a stinking letter, and it means nothing like what they say it does.” Her comments were first reported by the Denver Post.

The Constitution’s First Amendment, which states that “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof,” has been widely interpreted to mean the separation of church and state — although the phrase is not explicitly used.


Gwen Calais-Haase, a political scientist at Harvard University, told The Washington Post that Boebert’s interpretation of the Constitution was “false, misleading and dangerous.” Calais-Haase said she was “extremely worried about the environment of misinformation that extremist politicians take advantage of for their own gains.”

Steven K. Green, a professor of law and affiliated professor of history and religious studies at Willamette University, agreed, saying, “Rep. Boebert is wrong on both matters.”


“While the phrase separation of church and state does not appear verbatim in the Constitution, neither do many accepted constitutional principles such as separation of powers, judicial review, executive privilege, or the right to marry and parental rights, no doubt rights that Rep. Boebert cherishes,” wrote Green, the author of “Separating Church and State: A History.”

Categories Colorado, Elections, Extremism, Religion, Republicans, Separation of church and state, Stupid

Thoughts on The Latest 1/6 Hearing

By dianeravitch
June 29, 2022 //
41

The testimony of Cassidy Hutchinson, the former aide to Mark Meadows (chief of staff to Trump) was riveting. If you didn’t see it, find it on the Internet and watch in full.

What she described was a conspiracy to overthrow the results of the election, a last-ditch effort to keep Trump in power by any means necessary.

Trump was speaking at the Ellipse and was disappointed by the crowd size (again!). When he realized that many of his supporters were excluded because they were carrying guns, he wanted the metal detectors removed so all his supporters could join the crowd because they weren’t gunning for him.

Trump expected to join an armed mob marching to the Capitol. That was the plan. But his own Secret Service guards wouldn’t let him go there because he might be in danger. He tried to grab the steering wheel of the SUV, but was thwarted by his personal guard, whom he tried to throttle. Personally, I regret that his security detail did not take him to the Capitol. Imagine the scene. The president in the midst of a mob, smashing windows, banging on the doors of the Senate Chamber, chanting “Hang Mike Pence,” perhaps putting his feet on Pelosi’s desk. If that had happened, not only would he have been disgraced in the eyes of the world, but he would have to abandon his phony protestations of innocence.

But his security detail protected him from himself.

Back at the White House, he watched the mob deface the Capitol and ignored pleas by friends like Kevin McCarthy, Jim Jordan, Laura Ingraham, Sean Hannity, even Ivanka and Don Jr. to call off the marauders. He did nothing. Meadows did nothing.

Hutchinson went on to describe his reaction when Trump learned in December that Bill Barr had told the AP that the Justice Department had not found fraud of a size that would change the election result: he threw his plate against the wall of the White House private dining room, smearing the walls with catsup and the floor with broken porcelain. This was not the only time this happened, she testified under oath. Trump was also known to pull the tablecloth off the table, sending the food and dishes to the floor. (Was he trying that magic trick where the magician pulls the cloth and all the dishes remain in place?)

After hours of violence in the Capitol, Trump finally made a video calling on his supporters to go home. He said “I love you.”

Not long afterwards, his political allies ludicrously claimed that the invasion of the Capitol had been staged by Antifa. Why did Trump tell Antifa “I love you”? If they were Antifa, why did he want so badly to join them as they rioted? If they were Antifa, why didn’t he tell them to go home immediately? Why were so many Proud Boys and Oathkeepers and other militant crackpots leading the crowd if they were Antifa?

The corpulent man-baby was a sore loser. He preferred to destroy our system of government and unleash violence and mayhem in the Capitol rather than admit defeat. He sent a mob that he knew was armed to wreak maximum damage on the Natuon’s Capitol. He would have been satisfied to see his servile Vice-President Mike Pence hung by the mob, to see Nancy Pelosi beaten to death by the mob, to see Senators and members of the House brutalized, and to unleash the raging horde on all his political enemies rather than admit that he lost the election.

The Republican Party and its elected leaders has embraced the bully who has dragged them into the muck of rebellion, violence, and contempt for the Constitution. As Liz Cheney memorably said to her colleagues at the first meeting of the 1/6 Commission: “There will come a day when Donald Trump is gone, but your dishonor will remain.”

Honor? When did we last hear that word mentioned in the same breath with the name of President 45? Will the Republican Party survive its servile embrace of the Malevolent Fool who would be King?

What, if any consequences, will there be for a man who attempted to overthrow the government and shred the Constitution? And for those who aided and abetted his treason?

Categories Accountability, Corruption, Cruelty, Disruption, Elections, Republicans, Trump

Dana Milbank: If Texas Secedes, Good Riddance!

By dianeravitch
June 27, 2022 //
164

Dana Milbank is my favorite columnist at the Washington Post. In this column, he responds to the Texas GOP platform, which proposes that the state secede from the US and become a sovereign nation. Milbank says. “Good riddance!” As a native Texan, I’m ashamed for my state, ashamed that it’s been taken over by theocrats and dumbbells.

The Lone Star State does not have the best track record as a sovereign power. The Republic of Texas survived only 10 years from independence to annexation by the United States in 1845. Texas seceded during the Civil War — and, with the rest of the Confederacy, was crushed.


But, as the saying goes: If at first you don’t secede, try, try again. The Texas GOP now wants the state to vote on declaring independence.


And the United States should let Texas go! Better yet, let’s offer Texas a severance package that includes Oklahoma to sweeten secession — the Sooner the better.

Over the weekend, while many Americans were celebrating the 167th anniversary of Juneteenth (when Union Gen. Gordon Granger, in Galveston, Tex., delivered the order abolishing slavery) the Texas Republican Party voted on a platform declaring that federal laws it dislikes “should be ignored, opposed, refused, and nullified.”


The proposed platform (it’s expected to be approved when votes are tallied) adds: “Texas retains the right to secede from the United States, and the Texas Legislature should be called upon to pass a referendum consistent thereto.” It wants the secession referendum “in the 2023 general election for the people of Texas to determine whether or not the State of Texas should reassert its status as an independent nation.”


Yee-haw!


Of course, protections would have to be negotiated for parts of Texas that wish to remain on Team Normal. Dallas, Houston, Austin, San Antonio and parts of South Texas would remain in the United States, and they will need guaranteed safe passage to New Orleans or Santa Fe, along with regular airlifts of sustainable produce, accurate textbooks and contraceptives.

But consider the benefits to the rest of the country: Two fewer Republican senators, two dozen fewer Republican members of the House, annual savings of $83 billion in defense funds that Texas gets. And the best reason? The Texas GOP has so little regard for the Constitution that it is calling for a “Convention of the States” to effectively rewrite it — and so little regard for the United States that it wishes to leave.


In democracy’s place, the Republican Party, which enjoys one-party rule in Texas, is effectively proposing a church state. If you liked Crusader states and Muslim caliphates, you’ll love the Confederate Theocracy of Texas.


The Texas GOP platform gives us a good idea what such a paradise for Christian nationalists would look like. Texas would officially declare that “homosexuality is an abnormal lifestyle choice.” It would redefine marriage as a “covenant only between one biological man and one biological woman,” and it would “nullify” any court rulings to the contrary. (The gay Log Cabin Republicans were banned from setting up a booth at the convention.) It would fill schools with “prayer, the Bible, and the Ten Commandments” but ban “the teaching of sex education.” It would abolish all abortions and require students to “learn about the Humanity of the Preborn Child.”


The Texas Theocracy, which maintains that President Biden “was not legitimately elected,” would keep only traces of democracy. It wants the Voting Rights Act of 1965 “repealed,” and it would rewrite the state constitution to empower minority rule by small, rural (and White) counties. It would rescind voters’ right to elect senators and the Constitution’s guarantee of birthright citizenship.

The Texas Theocracy would probably be broke; it wants to abolish the federal income tax, “Axe the Property Tax” and do away with the estate tax and various business taxes. Yet it is planning a hawkish foreign policy! The platform argues that Texas is currently “under an active invasion” and should take “any and all appropriate measures the sovereign state defines as necessary to defend” itself. It imagines attacks by a “One World Government, or The Great Reset” — an internet-born conspiracy belief — and proposes “withdrawal from the current United Nations.” The Theocracy would put the “wild” back in the West, abolishing the minimum wage, environmental and banking regulations, and “red-flag” laws or waiting periods to prevent dangerous people from buying guns.

Above all, the Confederate Theocracy of Texas would be defined by thought police. It would penalize “woke corporations” and businesses that disagree with the theocracy over abortion, race, trans rights and the “inalienable right to refuse vaccination.”

Government programs would be stripped of “education involving race.” Evolution and climate change “shall be taught as challengeable scientific theories subject to change.” There would be a “complete repeal of the hate crime laws.” The Texas Revolution “shall not be ‘reimagined’” in a way the theocracy finds “disrespectful.” Confederate monuments “shall be protected,” “plaques honoring the Confederate widows” restored, and lessons on “the tyrannical history of socialism” required.

In their platform, the Texas Republicans invoked “God” or the “Creator” 18 times and “sovereignty” or sovereign power 24 times. And the word “democracy”? Only once — in reference to China.

I hope you can read the comments. Readers suggest other states that should secede with Texas.

Categories Bigotry, Censorship, Civil Rights, Democracy, Elections, Extremism, Fascism, Guns, Ignorance, Lies, Privatization, Religion, Republicans, Separation of church and state, Texas, Trump

Arizona: Republican Candidates Ridicule the 1/6 Commission

By dianeravitch
June 27, 2022 //
18

Arizona Republican candidates are running as die-hard supporters of Trump’s Big Lie that the 2020 election was stolen. They laugh at the 1/6 Conmisssion and ignore the many Republicans who testified that Trump knew he lost the election but decided to destroy democracy rather than admit he lost.

Is stupidity contagious? Or is it gullibility?

Tens of millions of people have watched the first two Congressional hearings probing the insurrection at the U.S. Capitol last year, but several of Arizona’s Republican candidates for governor were not among those viewers.

The GOP candidates largely dismissed the hearings as political theater and wouldn’t answer a question from The Arizona Republic about former President Donald Trump’s role in the riot.

Meanwhile, their Democratic opponents seized on the chance to call out their conservative competitors as complicit in the false claims of election fraud that fueled the violence at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.

“The hearing is a stark reminder of the lengths at which they will go to attack America.”

“I watched the Jan. 6 hearing because right here in Arizona we face dangerous threats from candidates like Kari Lake who continue to spread conspiracy theories and lies to try to undermine our democracy,” Secretary of State and Democratic candidate for governor Katie Hobbs said.

Lake: ‘I think it’s a waste of time’

Lake, a leading Republican candidate and former Fox 10 news anchor, did not respond to questions for this article. During her campaign, Lake has championed the unproven claims the election was corrupt, and that insurrectionists were held without charges or were welcomed into the Capitol by police.

Lake said in an interview on the conservative channel Newsmax that she would not watch the Jan. 6 hearings, which she dismissed as an effort by Democrats, mainstream Republicans and the media to discredit Trump.

“So this is their effort to try to make Donald Trump and his followers go away forever and it’s not going to work,” Lake said in that interview Friday. “This is theater. They’ve obviously been spinning and splicing and taking different video clips, removing the pertinent parts that would put the truth out there and trying to tell a story that spreads their lies. So I’m not going to be watching it. I think it’s a waste of time.”

Categories Accountability, Arizona, Democracy, Elections, Lies, Stupid, Trump

Robert Hubbell: After the Fall of Roe, the Way Forward

By dianeravitch
June 25, 2022 //
153

Blogger Robert Hubbell brings clarity and reason to the abortion debate. The Court’s decision overturns a precedent that had been in place for 49 years. Both Justices Gorsuch and Kavanaugh pledged to Senators that they would not overturn roe. They lied. What now?

Hubbell writes:

There is much to discuss after the Supreme Court’s brutal ruling in Dobbs v Jackson Women’s Health, but the most important question is, “What are we going to do about it?” We have several effective paths forward and must pursue all simultaneously.

First, Alito claims he is returning the decision of reproductive freedom “to the people and their state representatives.” Let’s ignore (for the moment) Alito’s smoldering bad faith and thinly veiled contempt for the rights of women. We need to flip state legislatures to repeal antiabortion legislation and capture statewide executive offices that can veto legislation abortion bans. While this path is not an answer in every state, it can make a difference in states where the GOP margin of control is thin.

Second, we must demand that Congress pass legislation codifying Roe. That means gaining a 54-seat majority in the Senate, carving out an exception to the filibuster, and retaining control of the House. Will national legislation be challenged? Sure! Will the Supreme Court invalidate it? Possibly, but it is worth the effort.

Will national legislation be challenged? Sure! Will the Supreme Court invalidate it? Possibly, but it is worth the effort.

Third, we must break the Supreme Court. Democrats should expand the Court to thirteen justices. This path also requires holding the House, gaining a 54-seat majority in the Senate, and carving out an exception to the filibuster. Expanding the Court requires only a majority vote in both chambers of Congress and signing of the bill by the president. Will Republicans expand the Court to nineteen? Maybe. But what Republicans might do in the future shouldn’t deter us now. Will tit-for-tat expansions of the Court undermine its legitimacy? It is far too late for that.

Fourth, reproductive choice must be on the ballot in every race. Republicans have finally achieved what they wanted—no right to abortion and no exceptions for rape or incest. We must make every Republican running for every office in the land own the GOP position on abortion in its ugliest manifestation. The outcome in Dobbs is opposed by a strong majority of Americans and should provide a basis for a sweeping Democratic victory in 2022.

Finally, the right to same-sex marriage, same-sex relations, contraception, and other privacy-based rights must be on the ballot in every race. Justice Clarence Thomas’s concurrence declared war on those rights and invited reactionary legislatures to pass laws to serve as test cases. We would be foolish to assume that the other members of the reactionary majority will not follow his lead, given a chance.

None of these approaches will be easy or provide a complete answer. Readers have already sent emails that preemptively identify the problems with some of these approaches and dismiss their chances of success. But these are the paths available to us. We can choose to pursue them or do nothing. We must pursue them relentlessly until we have regained control of every branch of government, including the Supreme Court. Only then can we reverse the ruling in Dobbs and preserve other liberties grounded in the same right to privacy that supported reproductive rights for a half-century.

We are the majority, and American democracy presumes majority rule while protecting the rights of the minority. Republicans are attempting to reverse that presumption by seeking to impose permanent minority rule with no protection for the rights of the majority. That cannot stand. It will not stand. But it is up to us to restore the natural balance to democracy. It is not enough that we vote with greater passion or conviction. We must motivate those who did not believe this day would not come or who were not paying attention. We can do that—if we act with greater passion, conviction, and urgency.

The ruling.

Alito’s final decision is a judicial insult. In a single blow, he has demoted American women to second-class citizens. It is filled with venom and contempt in addressing a contentious issue on which people of good faith can disagree. He refers to physicians as abortionists when they seek to save a woman’s life or terminate a pregnancy forced on a teenager by a rapist. He misrepresents, minimizes, and dismisses the burdens and risks of pregnancy. He substitutes his Catholic dogma for judicial analysis.

Alito’s final version of his opinion changed little from the draft leaked last month. As such, it retains the dishonesty and intellectual sophistry of the “deeply rooted tradition” analysis contained in the draft—an analysis that deliberately misrepresents the American tradition relating to abortion. See Aaron Tang in The Los Angeles Times, Op-Ed: The Supreme Court flunks abortion history.

But most ominously, Alito’s “deeply rooted” analysis signals Alito’s intent to attack other privacy-based rights, such as same-sex marriage. Alito dissented in the Court’s decision recognizing same-sex marriage, Obergefell v. Hodges. Alito wrote in Obergefell, as follows:

          To prevent five unelected Justices from imposing their personal vision of liberty upon the American people, the Court has held that “liberty” under the Due Process Clause should be understood to protect only those rights that are ‘deeply rooted in this Nation’ s history and tradition.’ And it is beyond dispute that the right to same-sex marriage is not among those rights.

There it is: Alito’s analysis in overruling Roe v. Wade does not stop with reproductive rights. It reaches to same-sex marriage. He said so in his dissent in Obergefell. And Justice Thomas made that explicit in his concurrence in Dobbs:

          In future cases, we should reconsider all of this Court’s substantive due process precedents, including Griswold, Lawrence, and Obergefell.

Griswold recognized the right to use contraceptives of choice; Lawrence recognized the right to enter into a same-sex relationships; and Obergefell recognized the right of same-sex couples to marry. Justice Thomas notably omitted a right based on “substantive due process precedents”—the right of members of different “races” to marry, a right first granted in Loving v. Virginia in 1967. If the Court reverses Loving v. Virginia, Thomas’s marriage to Ginny Thomas would be illegal in some states.

For a longer discussion of the threat to other rights, see Mark Joseph Stern in Slate, The Supreme Court decision overruling Roe v. Wade puts marriage equality in immediate jeopardy.

It will take weeks to understand the implications of Justice Alito’s decision, but a good place to start is with Ian Millhiser’s analysis in Vox, The Roe v. Wade abortion decision, explained.

Finally, for a discussion of self-inflicted damage to the Court’s legitimacy, see Dahlia Lithwick, in Slate, Roe v. Wade overturned: The Supreme Court will pay for abortion decision.

The corruption and illegitimacy of the Supreme Court.

As currently constituted, the Supreme Court is illegitimate and corrupt. It is illegitimate because two justices appointed by Trump resulted from norm-busting “rules” made up by Mitch McConnell on the fly. Gorsuch sits in a seat stolen from an Obama appointee, and Barrett sits in a seat that belonged to the incoming president.

The Court is corrupt because Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, and Barrett lied to the Senate about their pre-determined intent to overrule Roe v. Wade. And it is corrupt because Justice Thomas has refused to recuse himself from cases in which his wife assisted in an attempted coup.

The trust of the American public in the Court has plummeted to an all-time low of 25%. It will decline further if the January 6th Committee proves that Ginny Thomas funneled information about Court deliberations to John Eastman. It will fall further if the Committee demonstrates that Justice Thomas knew of and condoned his wife’s insurrectionist activities.

Jennifer Rubin succinctly summarizes the death blow to the Court’s legitimacy in her column in WaPo, The Supreme Court eviscerates abortion rights and its own legitimacy. Per Rubin,

The hypocrisy and intellectual dishonesty of the court’s right-wing justices lead to the conclusion that they have simply appointed themselves super-legislators free to impose a view of the United States as a White, Christian and male-dominated society despite the values, beliefs and choices of a majority of 330 million modern Americans.

The court’s decision may result in women’s deaths. But it has certainly killed off what is left of the court’s credibility. And for that, there is no solution in sight.

Concluding Thoughts.

On a day like today, it does not feel right to end on an optimistic note. Rather, we should acknowledge the anger, frustration, fear, and grief that tens of millions of women in America are feeling after the ruling. There will be a time to rally and rejoin the fight for the dignity and equality of women—a fight we will win.

But today, we should acknowledge what women have lost and give them the time and space to absorb and recover from a once-in-a-generation shock. As they do, everyone in their lives should let them know we are at their side every step of the way. Walk along in silence and listen. Nothing can be “fixed” today, but we can begin the long journey back in the coming days.

Categories Accountability, Civil Rights, Cruelty, Democracy, Disruption, Elections, Extremism, Freedom, Health, Inequality, Injustice, Lies, Trump

Charles P. Pierce: Supreme Court Declares Establishment Clause Unconstitutional

By dianeravitch
June 23, 2022 //
74

Charles P. Pierce is a super writer who is smart and insightful, especially when he writes about education. He writes regularly for Esquire. In this post, he slices and dices the absurdity of the Carson vs. Makin ruling that compels Maine to pay tuition for students at evangelical Christian schools that openly discriminate against students, families, and teachers who do not share their religious views. The six justices in the majority are certainly not Originalists. Their decision overturns a key principle embedded in the Constitution, which prohibits the state from sponsoring or “establishing” religion.

He writes:

It’s been a big week for Christian nationalism in our politics. In the case of Carson v. Makin, which involved a Maine law that forbade public money to go to religious schools, the Supreme Court ruled that the Establishment Clause of the United States Constitution is…unconstitutional. The Court’s carefully engineered conservative majority has been heading in this direction, finding anti-religious—primarily anti-Christian—discrimination in laws deliberately written to be religiously neutral. This was a pole-vault over that line, and one that conceivably could threaten public education as a whole. Writing for the majority, Chief Justice John Roberts said:

This case concerns two families that live in SAUs that neither maintain their own secondary schools nor contract with any nearby secondary school. Petitioners David and Amy Carson reside in Glenburn, Maine. When this litigation commenced, the Carsons’ daughter attended high school at Bangor Christian Schools (BCS), which was founded in 1970 as a ministry of Bangor Baptist Church. The Carsons sent their daughter to BCS because of the school’s high academic standards and because the school’s Christian worldview aligns with their sincerely held religious beliefs.

Translation: the school discriminates against LGBTQ citizens. Here, from a brief filed in this case, is what Bangor Christian Schools are up to.

BCS believes that a student who is homosexual or identifies as a gender other than on his or her original birth certificate would not be able to sign the agreement governing codes of conduct that BCS requires as a condition of admission.

If a student was openly gay and regularly communicated that fact to his or her classmates, “that would fall under an immoral activity” under BCS’ Statement of Faith and if “there was no change in the student’s position” after counseling, the student would not be allowed to continue attending BCS.

BCS does not believe there is any way to separate the religious instruction from the academic instruction – religious instruction is “completely intertwined and there is no way for a student to succeed if he or she is resistant to the sectarian instruction.”

One of the objectives in the ninth-grade social studies class is to “[r]efute the teachings of the Islamic religion with the truth of God’s Word.”

Shrug, says John Roberts. Pay up, suckers.Me? I am planning to open a taxpayer-funded madrassa out in the woods somewhere. I’ll keep you advised.

Open the link. The post has an interesting take on Herschel Walker and on Arizona official Rusty Bower’s view that the Constitution was divinely inspired.

Categories Accountability, Bigotry, Civil Rights, Democracy, Elections, Extremism, Funding, Maine, Religion, Separation of church and state
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