If you think the GOP’s Congress of Clowns represents the fringiest, freakiest, pack of politicos that MAGA-world can hurl at us – you haven’t been to Texas.
It’s widely known, of course, that Ted Cruz, Greg Abbott, and most other top Republican officials here are obsequious Trump acolytes. Thus, Texas is infamously racing against Florida to be declared the stupidest, meanest, most-repressive state government in America, constantly making demonic attacks on women’s freedom, immigrants, voting rights, public schools, poor people, and so on. But I’m confident Texas will win this race to the bottom for one big reason: GOP crazy runs extraordinarily deep here.
We have a county-level layer of ultra-MAGA cultists constantly pressing the state’s far-right officials to march all the way to the farthest edge of extremism – then leap into absurdity. Therefore, the party officially supports abolishment of labor unions, elimination of the minimum wage, privatization of social security, legalization of machine guns, and… well, you get the drift. Now, though, local mad-dog Trumpistas are pushing their party straight into the abyss of autocracy by declaring war on H-E-B.
What’s that? H-E-B is a Texas chain of supermarkets beloved in communities throughout the state. “Beloved,” because the stores fully embrace the rich diversity of all people in our state, has affordable prices, values employees, and supports community needs.
Nonetheless, county Republican zealots screech that H-E-B violates their party ideology by accepting food stamps, opposing privatization of schools, and (horrors!) sponsoring some LBGTQ pride events. So, they’re demanding official condemnation of the grocery chain for – GET THIS – “advocating for policies contrary to the Republican Party of Texas platform.”
Yes, violating the party platform is to be criminalized. It’s the reincarnation of Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four: Be MAGA… or else.
North Carolina has a serious problem. Its GOP has controlled the state since 2010, despite having a Democratic Governor for 8 years, who was made powerless by the legislature (General Assembly).
The GOP that swept the state in 2010 was Tea Party. But the top three GOP candidates in 2024—for governor, for attorney general, for state superintendent—are radical extremists. Not just MAGA, but QAnon batshit crazy.
Chris Seward of the Raleigh News & Observer wrote:
The woman who would take charge of K-12 education in this state has addressed her noxious trail of online posts — including calls to, you know, kill people — by not addressing them.
Ask the Republican nominee for state superintendent of public instruction, Michele Morrow, whether and, if so, why she would write such things and she seems irked that it should matter.
For instance, when confronted by a CNN reporter following a recent Wake County GOP event, Morrow deflected repeated questions about social media posts such as the one suggesting the execution of Barack Obama by firing squad on pay-per-view TV.
“Have a good night,” she said….
Meanwhile, Morrow is fueling her campaign with rhetoric that accused the state’s public schools of teaching “political and sexual and racially explicit stuff that’s poisoning our children’s minds and keeping them from getting a good education.”
Uh, maybe it’s only us, but calls to shoot people with whom you disagree seems a lot more harmful to our young children than teaching them that slavery was a bad thing.
Then again, CNN did ambush Morrow with a microphone and a camera.
Maybe in a friendlier environment, say, on the March 25 podcast of former Trump adviser Steve Bannon, she finally could explain herself and put this issue to rest once and for all?
She did, however, describe her Democratic opponent, former Guilford County Schools Superintendent Maurice “Mo” Green, as “the farthest left, extreme candidate they (Democrats) have ever thought about putting out for superintendent.”
She warned gravely: “Our state will be unrecognizable” if Green is elected.
Surely, the state GOP establishment has issues with Morrow’s over-the-edge pronouncements and provocations?
House Speaker Tim Moore, soon to take a seat in Congress in a gerrymandered district, addressed Morrow’s controversies with what probably will become a boilerplate response.
“I certainly wouldn’t have made those comments,” Moore said Wednesday.
Moore added that he plans to “support all the Republican nominees for office, and voters have to make up their own mind on what you think is a good choice for that office.”
Describing himself as a “good loyal, fellow Republican,” Moore said, “I’m going to vote for the Republican nominees for office.”
Translation: Yes, it’s a bad thing to endorse killing people. But if a Republican does it, Moore will support him or her for the good of the team.
That’s obviously the case as well with the state’s most powerful Republican, Senate leader Phil Berger. Berger earlier endorsed the GOP nominee for governor, Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson, who has posted or spoken out loud a veritable smorgasbord of offensive references to Jews, Muslims, Black people and the LGBTQ community.
“I just think he’s got a good head on his shoulders,” Berger said in November.
In fact, Robinson and Morrow have attracted so much attention that another GOP candidate vying for statewide office, Dan Bishop, has gone relatively unnoticed in his bid for attorney general.
Bishop, a sitting member of Congress, voted against certifying Joe Biden’s victories in Arizona and Pennsylvania. Bishop also opposed the debt-ceiling and budget deals former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy made with Democrats.
Before that, as a member of the General Assembly, Bishop sponsored HB 2, the “bathroom bill” that required transgender people to use public bathrooms matching the gender on their birth certificates. The bill, which also banned local anti-discrimination ordinances, cost the state’s economy an estimated $525 million in revenue from canceled business projects and sports and entertainments events before lawmakers partially repealed it.
Now he could become the head of the state’s Department of Justice.
What all of this means is that the norms have shifted in the Republican Party.
With the likes of Robinson, Bishop and Morrow on the Nov. 5 ballot, the GOP nominee for state superintendent may be right about at least one thing: Our state could be “unrecognizable” … not if they lose, but if they win.
We’ve got 99 problems in North Carolina, and Michele Morrow is only one of them.
No matter how many times he is caught lying, no matter how many top-secret documents he squirreled away, no matter how lavishly he praises dictators, no matter how many porn stars he has partied with, no matter how many millions he took from foreign governments during his term, no matter how many criminal counts he faces, no matter how many times he was indicted, the base of the GOP loves him.
Trump owns the Republican Party. It used to be the party of “family values,” but that pretense has been tossed aside. Trump, a thrive-married philanderer, has never talked about family values.
INDIANOLA, Iowa — They lined up for hours, some of them, in the minus-38-degree wind chill to see their candidate. It was the only rally Donald Trump was giving in the state in the TV days before Monday’s caucuses, so for the MAGA faithful, this was the golden ticket.
For the lucky 500 Trump followers admitted to the event space, the Trump campaign played a video reminding voters that Trump had already come in first place in the God primary.
“And on June 14, 1946, God looked down on his planned paradise and said, ‘I need a caretaker.’ So God gave us Trump,” the narrator proclaimed.
“God said, ‘I need somebody willing to get up before dawn, fix this country, work all day, fight the Marxists, eat supper, then go to the Oval Office and stay past midnight. … So God made Trump.” “‘I need somebody with arms strong enough to rassle the deep state and yet gentle enough to deliver his own grandchild.’ … So God gave us Trump.”
And then it came to pass, a few minutes later, that this midwife-turned-prophet took the stage in the ballroom, and he spake thus to his flock:
“We’ve got a crooked country,” run by “stupid people,” “corrupt,” “incompetent,” “the worst.” Trump, in the gospel according to Trump, was the victim of “hoaxes,” “witch hunts,” “lies,” “fake indictments,” “fake trials,” judges who “are animals,” a “rigged election,” “rigged indictments,” and a “rigged Department of Justice where we have radical left, bad people, lunatics.”
The nation’s capital, Washington, D.C., “is a rat-infested, graffiti-infested shithole,” he said, with swastikas all over the national monuments.
His opponents, the prophet Trump continued, are “Marxists,” “communists,” “fascists,” “liars, cheaters, thugs, perverts, frauds, crooks, freaks, creeps,” “warmongers” and “globalists.” Immigrants are like a “vicious snake,” whose “bite is poisonous,” he told them, and there is an “invasion” at the border by “terrorists,” “jailbirds” and “drug lords.”
“Our country is dying,” he informed them. And, by the way, “You’re very close to World War III.” Have a nice day!
It was, in short, a slightly updated version of the rage, paranoia, victimhood, lies and demonization that propelled Trump’s popularity over the past eight years. Yet there was something else Trump said in his appearance here at Simpson College, south of Des Moines, that, I’m sorry to say, seems reasonably accurate.
“MAGA is taking over,” he told his chilled but enraptured supporters. “On the fake news, they say MAGA represents 44 percent of the Republicans. No, no. MAGA represents 95 percent of the Republican Party.”
His numbers might be off, but the observation is true. Iowa’s Republican presidential caucuses Monday night were an overwhelming triumph for Trump, who in early results was more than 30 points ahead of his nearest competitor and getting more votes than the rest of the field combined. The voters had shown that there essentially is no Republican other than a MAGA Republican…
Nikki Haley points out that she polls better against Biden than the others, and it’s true. Were she the nominee, Republicans would likely win the presidency in a landslide. But this Republican electorate wants something different.
They want a guy who talks about being a “dictator” on day one, echoes Hitler in his rhetoric about ethnic minorities, demands absolute immunity from legal liability and threatens “bedlam” if he’s prosecuted.
They want a guy who, after all these years, still derides “Barack Hussein Obama” and “Pocahontas” Elizabeth Warren, as he did in Indianola on Sunday. They want a guy who threatens, as president, to “direct a completely overhauled DOJ to investigate every radical, out-of-control prosecutor because of their illegal, racist … enforcement of the law.”
And they want a man who promises: “We will demolish the deep state. We will expel the warmonger … We will drive out the globalists. We will cast out the communists, Marxists and fascists. We will throw off the sick political class that truly hates our country. We will rout the fake news media. And we will evict Crooked Joe Biden from the White House.” The crowd, in their MAGA caps and Trump 47 jerseys, cheered their candidate and broke into spontaneous chants of “Trump!” and “USA!”
Let there be no more excuses made that Republican voters haven’t been given an alternative. They had a choice — and they chose Trump.
Iowa is an atypical state. It is overwhelmingly white and has a large number of evangelicals. Let’s see how other states vote.
Despite his paranoia, despite his character—or because of them— Trump swept 51% of the vote in Iowa.
However. CBS News reported that less than 15% of registered Republicans turned out in the bitter cold to cast a vote.
Several stories collided within the bounds of Trump’s unhinged posts on his vanity social media platform on Monday. As Speaker Kevin McCarthy goes through the motions of passing a spending bill over the objections of the extremist elements of his extremist caucus, Trump weighed into the fight:
The Republicans lost big on Debt Ceiling, got NOTHING, and now are worried that they will be BLAMED for the Budget Shutdown. Wrong!!! Whoever is President will be blamed. UNLESS YOU GET EVERYTHING, SHUT IT DOWN! Close the Border, stop the Weaponization of ‘Justice,’ and End Election Interference.
[Note to Readers: I will not be linking to Trump’s posts on Truth Social. You can run a word search on the text if you want to view the source posts.]
For a nation hoping to avoid the pain of a shutdown on tens of millions of Americans, the post was not welcome news. Although Trump dresses his post in language that seems to focus on negotiating tactics, the real reason for the post is contained in the phrase “stop the Weaponization of “Justice” and End Election Interference.”
That’s right, Trump is asking Republicans to shut down the government to help him evade accountability for his crimes. Surely, no member of Congress would place the personal interests of Donald Trump over the interests of tens of millions of Americans who will be hurt in a shutdown, right? Don’t hold your breath!
The last time anyone heard from Kevin McCarthy, he was promising a third vote on the defense bill (and a few others?) on Tuesday. Don’t hold your breath!
All of this means that the prospect of a government shutdown is increasing with each passing hour. See NYtimes, A Shutdown Is Looming. What Comes Next? (This article is accessible to all.)
Per the Times, “Medicare and Social Security also continue uninterrupted because they are authorized by Congress in separate laws that do not need to be renewed every year. Medical care of veterans also goes on unaffected.”
The GOP House caucus was dysfunctional before Trump injected himself into the budget fight. Trump just made that process more unmanageable. But perhaps he has hastened the moment when some Republicans concede that there is no path forward except for a bipartisan effort with Democrats. For all our sakes, let’s hope that moment arrives sooner rather than later.
Trump threatens retribution against the liberal media if he is elected.
Last week, Trump called for the death penalty for General Milley, the retiring Chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. The media yawned. On Sunday, Trump accused the liberal media of treason and threatened retribution if he is elected. He wrote:
They are almost all dishonest and corrupt, but Comcast, with its one-side and vicious coverage by NBC NEWS, and in particular MSNBC, often and correctly referred to as MSDNC (Democrat National Committee!), should be investigated for its “Country Threatening Treason.”
Why should NBC, or any other of the corrupt & dishonest media companies, be entitled to use the very valuable Airwaves of the USA, FREE? They are a true threat to Democracy and are, in fact, THE ENEMY OF THE PEOPLE! The Fake News Media should pay a big price for what they have done to our once great Country!
Picking through Trump’s word salad with a fork, we see that he combines the concepts of “treason” and “paying a big price” in reference to NBC, MSNBC, and the “Fake News Media.” Threatening the media with treason and shuttering presses is the favorite tactic of fascist dictators everywhere. Criticism by the press is not permitted by fascists—and Trump has put the media on notice about his intentions if re-elected.
What did the media do in response to this broadside threat? Yawned. Oh, rather, it ran another story about voters worried about Joe Biden’s age and the price of gas.
The media has an important role in protecting democracy. If it can’t rouse itself to condemn threats against freedom of the press, it will deserve what happens if Trump is elected.
Trump demands that all Democratic Senators resign.
Before you roll your eyes at a third story about Trump’s unhinged posting on Truth Social, stick with me. I have a point. See Concluding Thoughts.
Democratic Senator Robert Menendez refused to resign while he defends himself against bribery charges. That decision put Trump in a bind: Trump claims he can run for president, win, and serve from a jail cell, so he can’t call for Menendez to resign. The next best thing (in Trump’s view) is for all Democratic Senators to resign—which is what he did:
Why doesn’t the FBI raid Senate Democrat’s homes like they illegally raided Mar-a-Lago, where nothing was done wrong based on the Presidential Records Act. Menendez is a ‘piker’ compared to some of those Election Stealing THUGS.
Menendez is one of many, a small timer at that. EVERY DEMOCRAT SHOULD RESIGN FROM THE SENATE!
Trump is confused about the facts surrounding the search of Menendez’s house. No matter. The point is that Trump does not call on Menendez to resign because they are brothers in arms when it comes to placing personal interest ahead of that of their constituents. Why that means that all Democratic Senators should resign requires logical fallacies served with a dollop of lies.
Menendez should resign because his continued service provides cover for Trump’s corrupt campaign for the presidency. As Dennis Aftergut explains in Why Menendez must resign | The Hill, a resignation by Menendez would
· Honor the public trust that holding elected office embodies.
· Show the public that no one should hold or seek office while under a serious indictment.
· Distinguish Democrats from Donald Trump, Rep. George Santos, and MAGA Republicans who defend individuals holding or running for office while indicted.
The last point is the most important: By refusing to resign, Menendez legitimizes the notion that politicians under indictment should fight those indictments while serving in (or seeking) positions of honor and trust. It is hard to imagine that Menendez could make matters better for Trump or worse for Biden….
So, here’s my point about Trump: Any rational observer of any other elected official in America who made the same posts would conclude that the official is having an emotional break. Over the last four days, Trump has called for the death penalty for the former Chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the resignation of all Democratic Senators, and for prosecuting the press for treason for writing unfavorable stories about him.
That’s a lot. But I have quoted only snippets of Trump’s lengthy and rambling statements on his vanity social media platform. In context, they are reminiscent of the ramblings of Ted Kaczynski—the Unabomber.
My point is not (merely) to engage in Trump-bashing. It is that standing alone, Trump’s statements raise serious questions about his mental stability, even as compared to his steady-state level of chaos and confusion. I do not follow Trump directly on Truth Social. Those who do say that his most recent postings are reaching a different pitch of madness. And yet, they are largely being ignored by the media.
Trump apparently believes there are no boundaries that constrain his social media postings. He is wrong; there is a line that cannot be crossed—and Trump will find it. When he does, it should be a bigger story than “Biden is older than Trump.”
Some of you will undoubtedly disagree. Your position is not unreasonable given the sorry history of the media’s coverage of Trump up to this point. But I have an ember of hope that there is enough integrity and professionalism remaining in the media to hold Trump to account for his deranged postings.
Thom Hartmann is an insightful, incisive journalist and blogger. In this terrifying post, he describes what to expect if the Republican Party wins the presidency.
Please read and react.
Thom Hartmann
So, yeah, let’s take seriously the existential threat a GOP president represents to our nation, the nations of the world, and all life on Earth. The stakes have literally never been higher…
Hartmann writes:
Every day that goes by, even with yesterday’s newest indictment, looks more and more like Donald Trump will be the GOP’s standard bearer in 2024. After all, his popularity stood at 44 percent when NY DA Alvin Bragg indicted him; it then rose to 49 percent when he was indicted in the documents crime; following his conviction for raping E. Jean Caroll it rose to 54 percent among Republicans.
But even if he’s not the candidate, Republican primary voters will demand a candidate with the same affection for Putin and other dictators; the same disdain for racial, religious, and gender minorities; the same abusive attitude toward women and girls; the same faux embrace of Confederate and hillbilly values and hatred of city-dwellers and college graduates; the same cavalier attitude toward guns and fossil fuels.
There’s also the growing possibility that Trump or another MAGA Republican could win the White House. Yesterday, both the New York Times and CNN reported on polls showing that Trump and Biden are right now at a dead heat.
And even if Trump collapses in the polls as the result of the indictments, which is unlikely (Netanyahu is under indictment for bribery and some pretty terrible stuff and he just got re-elected), there are numerous other Republicans who would love to take his place.
And no matter who it is, if they are MAGA inclined, Trump has shown them where there are levers of power and corruption that are consequential in ways that they never dreamed of before him.
Joe Biden, at 81, faces multiple possible personal scenarios that could pull him out of the race. No Labels and the Green Party’s candidates (presumably Joe Manchin and Cornell West) could pull enough votes from Biden to hand the election to Trump as Jill Stein did in three swing states in 2016 (she pulled more votes in each of those states than Trump’s margin of victory).
The prosecution of Trump (which almost certainly won’t be resolved before the election — and it’s not even remotely possible that appeals would be resolved by then — because of Garland’s dithering for two years) could backfire politically and make him into a popular martyr even with Republicans who disliked him before.
And don’t discount the impact Putin throwing millions of rubles into social media can have: his previous fleet of trolls overwhelming social media helped get Trump elected in 2016 and drove Brits to make the crazy decision to separate from the European Union.
So, it’s important to examine what a second Trump or 2025 MAGA presidency would look like, what effect it would have on America and the world, and how it will impact average Americans.
Forewarned, after all, is forearmed, and all these predictions are based on past behavior and public statements:
Women make up 51 percent of the American populace but they won’t be spared by a MAGA presidency.
MAGA voters celebrate Trump’s “proof of manhood” through his multiple sexual assaults, from his alleged rape of 13-year-old Katie Johnson (with Jeffrey Epstein) to the adult E. Jean Carroll and more than 20 others. He publicly bragged that he just “grabs them by the…” whenever he wants, and Republicans — including more than half of all white women voters — ran to the polls to mark his name on their ballots.
The MAGA base supports bans on abortion: the white nationalist part of that base is fervent about having more white babies (and middle class white women are the most likely to get abortions when they’re legal, according to these people).
Catholics and evangelicals even support bans on birth control, an issue that’s already been floated by Clarence Thomas on the Supreme Court and in several state legislatures. Fully 195 Republican members of the House of Representatives voted against protecting birth control from state bans. And all of the Republicans on the Court are conservative Catholics (Gorsuch attends his wife’s church, but was raised Catholic).
Additionally, MAGA Republicans support ending no-fault divorce and limiting alimony, putting women back under husband’s thumbs; lowering the marriage age for girls to as low as 12, as Republicans have already attempted in Idaho, Wyoming, Tennessee, Missouri, and Louisiana; and seizing and monitoring the health and doctor’s records of all childbearing-age women to catch early pregnancies so those women can be detained or surveilled “for their own good” (yes, it’s already happened).
The LGBTQ+ community will come under assault in ways not seen for decades.
Like in Germany in 1933, the trans communitywill be the first to come under assault, a process that’s already begun as Red state after Red state enacts laws banning gender-affirming healthcare. Drag queens are already criminalized in multiple states.
Gays and lesbians won’t be far behind; Republicans are already trying to outlaw gay marriage and adoption. Three-quarters of all House Republicans voted against a Democratic bill protecting gay marriage; all but one Republican on the House Appropriations Committee voted for a Republican bill that would allow states to ban gay and lesbian parents from adopting.
Stochastic terrorism against the LGBTQ+ community will explode, and, in a throwback to the 1980s (when Reagan refused to say the word “AIDS” for 8 long years as tens of thousands, including close friends of mine, died) and before, rural law enforcement will often yawn when queer people are assaulted or even murdered.
Terror against racial and religious minorities will become routine.
The last time Trump was president and sanctioned a “very fine people on both sides” climate of hate and bigotry, incidents of lone-wolf terrorism exploded. Jews executed at Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life synagogue; Blacks gunned down in a supermarket in Buffalo and executed at Mother Emmanuel church in Charleston; Hispanics slaughtered in El Paso. All of the killers cited or wrote what were essentially MAGA or MAGA-aligned propaganda instruments as part of their motivation.
When minority communities rise up in indignation and step out into the streets to demand protection from roving bands of street Nazis, armed vigilantes will threaten and even kill them with impunity. As I noted yesterday, Kyle Rittenhouse is now lionized by Republicans and three states have passed into law provisions that hold people who kill protestors with their cars free from prosecution.
American support for democracy around the world will end and Putin will destroy Ukraine.
During his first four years, Trump did everything he could to ridicule and minimize our democratic allies and suck up to strongman dictators around the world.
He tried to blackmail Ukraine’s president and then withheld defensive weapons from that country when Zelenskyy refused to go along.
He told the world that he trusts Putin more than America’s intelligence services. After meeting privately with Putin, he demanded a list of all of America’s spies and their stations around the world; within months, the CIA reported that their assets were being murderedwith an unprecedented speed and efficiency.
He or his son-in-law conveyed top-secret documents to the brutal murderer MBS in Saudi Arabia that enabled him to stage a coup and seize control of that nation, a gift for which the Trump family has already received at least $2.5 billion with more coming every day.
Trump has now said that he will end the Ukraine war “in 24 hours.” His strategy? As Mike Pence (who would know) said, “The only way you’d solve this war in a day is if you gave Vladimir Putin what he wanted.”
Putin’s allies, in fact, have told the press that his main strategy for seizing all of Ukraine is to wait for Trump to re-take the White House (and, of course, he’ll do everything he can to make that happen). And just last week, in Erie, Pennsylvania, Trump came right out and saidthat he’d end all arms support to Ukraine on day one.
Seeing that America will no longer defend democracies, China will take Taiwan and North Korea may well attack South Korea. It could trigger a nuclear World War III, although instead of America being the “bulwark of freedom” as we were in the 1940s, that burden will fall to Europe, Japan, and Australia.
Reagan’s Republican War on Workers will resume and even pick up steam.
The Heritage Foundation already has a 900+ page plan to change the American government, stripping the DOJ, FBI, FCC and the Fed of their independence while ending most union rights and effectively outlawing strikes.
Billionaires will receive more tax cuts, Social Security and Medicare will be fully privatized, and public schools will be replaced with vouchers for private, segregated, religious academies as has already happened under Republican administrations in Arizona and Florida.
The EPA and other regulatory agencies that protect workers, consumers, and the environment will be gutted to the point of impotence in the face of corporate and billionaire assaults.
Efforts to mitigate the climate emergency will be rolled back and fossil fuel extraction and use will explode.
The world just lived through the hottest month in human history; ocean waters off Florida are at the temperature Jacuzzi recommends for their hot tubs; the world’s oceans are dying and winter sea ice isn’t forming in Antarctica.
Right now we humans are adding heat to the atmosphere (because of higher levels of greenhouse gasses) at a rate identical to 345,600 Hiroshima bombs going off in our atmosphere every day: four nuclear bombs per second, every second, minute, and hour of every day.
In response, our planet is screaming at us.
Fossil fuel billionaires and their shills, however, are unconcerned as they continue to fund climate denial nonprofits and Republican politicians who claim it’s all a hoax. They apparently believe their vast wealth will insulate them from the most dire effects.
And they’re probably right: a third of poverty-stricken Bangladesh was underwater this year, as drought, floods, wildfires, heat domes, bomb cyclones, tornadoes, derechos, and typhoons ravaged America with unprecedented ferocity. Increasingly, those without the financial means to withstand weather disasters are killed or wiped out, losing their family homes and often their livelihoods.
Scientists tell us we may have as few as fiveyears, and certainly not more than 20, to end our use of fossil fuels and fully transition to clean renewables. Even within the five-year window it’s technically feasible, but if Trump or another MAGA Republican is elected, civilization-ending weather and the death of much of humanity is virtually assured.
We must wake up America.
So, yeah, let’s take seriously the existential threat a MAGA president represents to our nation, the nations of the world, and all life on Earth. The stakes have literally never been higher.
Ruth Marcus is deputy editor of the Washington Post and is a consistent voice for sanity and reason. In this article, she describes one of the worst federal court decisions ever. If this decision is upheld by the Supreme Court, we will all need guns to protect ourselves. Good news for the gun industry, bad news for public safety. Marcus wrote this article before the latest school shooting in Nashville, where three adults and three children were murdered. The killer was armed with three weapons, including an AR-15, which has no purpose except as a killing machine. Hunters don’t use it because it destroys what it kills.
She writes:
When the Supreme Court ruled in 2008 that the Second Amendment protects individuals’ right to gun ownership, it emphasized the ability “of law-abiding, responsible citizens to use arms in defense of hearth and home.” When it expanded that decision last year in New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen, the court noted that “ordinary, law-abiding citizens have a similar right to carry handguns publicly for their self-defense.”
Zackey Rahimi was, one presumes, not the kind of upstanding citizen the justices had in mind.
Over a six-week stretch from December 2020 to January 2021, Rahimi took part in five shootings around Arlington, Tex. He fired an AR-15 into the home of a man to whom he had sold Percocet. The next day, after a car accident, he pulled out a handgun, shot at the other driver and sped off — only to return, fire a different gun and flee again. Rahimi shot at a police car. When a friend’s credit card was declined at a fast-food restaurant, he fired several rounds into the air.
Or, as the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit put it in vacating Rahimi’s conviction for illegal gun possession, “Rahimi, while hardly a model citizen, is nonetheless part of the political community entitled to the Second Amendment’s guarantees, all other things equal.”
This is the insane state of Second Amendment law in the chaotic aftermath of Bruen. The problem isn’t that decision’s precise outcome, striking down New York state’s gun licensing law because it required a showing of “special need for self-protection” to obtain a concealed carry permit.
The problem is that in doing so, the six-justice conservative majority imposed a history-based test — a straitjacket, really — for assessing the constitutionality of gun laws. No longer can judges decide whether restrictions are a reasonable means to protect public safety.
Instead, they have to hunt down obscure, colonial-era statutes to determine if there are counterparts to modern rules. So it’s little surprise that conservative judges in the lower courts are now busy declaring all sorts of perfectly sensible gun laws unconstitutional.
Those cases are just making their way to the appellate level, and Thursday’s ruling by the Fifth Circuit is one of the earliest to be decided. The court may be the most conservative — and most dangerous — in the country. The ruling in Rahimi’s case, written by one Trump-appointed judge, Cory T. Wilson, and joined by Trump appointee James C. Ho and Reagan appointee Edith H. Jones, shows why.
When Arlington police searched Rahimi’s home, they found multiple guns — and a domestic violence restraining order imposed after Rahimi allegedly assaulted his ex-girlfriend. Federal law prohibits those subject to such orders from possessing guns, and Rahimi was indicted by a federal grand jury.
Before Bruen, the Fifth Circuit had upheld such charges against constitutional challenge, and it had previously rejected Rahimi’s claim that the law violated his Second Amendment rights. But on Thursday, it did an about-face.
“We know the increased risk women in abusive relationships face when the abuser has a gun, and the Fifth Circuit just essentially greenlighted arming domestic abusers,” Adam Skaggs, vice president of the Giffords Law Center, told me. “As a matter of public safety, this is a horrendous decision.”
Wilson, who was a fervent opponent of gun regulation as a Mississippi state legislator, strained to read the Supreme Court’s language about law-abiding citizens out of the precedents. That was just “shorthand,” he insisted, and “read in context, the Court’s phrasing does not add an implied gloss that constricts the Second Amendment’s reach.”
This is simply wrong. As the Justice Department argued, the court in Bruen emphasized that “nothing in our analysis” threatened licensing laws in 43 states, which, the court said, “are designed to ensure only that those bearing arms in the jurisdiction are, in fact, ‘law-abiding, responsible citizens.’” Such as, say, Texas, which prohibits those subject to domestic violence protective orders from obtaining licenses.
Wilson was having none of it. Under the government’s approach, he asked, “Could speeders be stripped of their right to keep and bear arms? Political nonconformists? People who do not recycle or drive an electric vehicle?”
Seriously? This isn’t about political correctness. It’s about a man accused of dragging his girlfriend into his car, shooting at a witness who saw him assault her, and warning the girlfriend that he would shoot her if she told anyone what had happened.
As to historical analogues, Wilson acknowledged that there were “laws in several colonies and states that disarmed classes of people considered to be dangerous, specifically including those unwilling to take an oath of allegiance, slaves, and Native Americans.”
But, he said, despite some “facial similarities” with laws disarming domestic abusers, “the purpose of these ‘dangerousness’ laws was the preservation of political and social order, not the protection of an identified person from the specific threat posed by another.”
As Pepperdine law professor Jacob Charles pointed out on Twitter, this criticism is “absolutely bonkers” — it faults the domestic abuse law for being “too tailored.” The law applies to those who have been determined, after a court hearing, to present a “credible threat to the physical safety” of an intimate partner or child.
All of which serves to underscore the real difficulty with the Supreme Court’s history fetish: As Bruen itself demonstrated, the matter of what historical examples to accept and what to reject is open to manipulation by judges predisposed to strike down gun laws.
And it poses a dilemma for the conservative justices, who are about to find this issue back in their laps. Are they going to instruct lower courts they have gone too far, or are they going to let it rip, while bullets fly and judges scour statutes from the age of muskets?
Denver Post columnist Krista Kafer worries that crazy people now control the state GOP. The man who was just elected state chairman, Dave Williams, had his name legally changed to add “Let’s Go Brandon” as his middle name.
She writes:
After the Colorado GOP chose former state Rep. Dave Williams as party chair, many sane Republicans wonder if there is a place for them within the Colorado Republican Party. By sane, I mean rational, evidence-based thinkers who get, at a minimum, that Trump lost the 2020 election, vaccines save lives, and Trump’s repellent, mendacious style has hurt Republicans’ standing in a once purple state.
Williams, an election denier and conspiracy theorist, believes Trump won in 2020 sans evidence. He alleged without proof that 5,600 dead people voted in the 2020 Colorado election. Despite 300 years of vaccine science and millions of saved lives, Williams is a proud anti-vaxxer. Upon beating out six contenders for chair (all but one of the conspiracy theorists or tinfoil hat-lite variety), Williams stated, “Our party doesn’t have a brand problem. Our party has a problem with feckless leaders who are ashamed of you,” implying that GOP leaders lost because they were insufficiently Trumpist, an assertion belied by evidence that such candidates fared worse in Colorado and around the country.
Speaking of feckless, Williams tried and failed to have the tacky phrase “Let’s Go Brandon” added to his name on the ballot for the 2022 primary against Rep. Doug Lamborn.
Williams has vowed to be a “wartime leader” leaving many of us to wonder if mainstream Republicans are a battlefield target. Former Minority Leader of the Colorado House of Representatives Mark Waller queried Williams via social media about the future, “I have been called a RINO and told I no longer belong in our Party. I don’t believe the election was stolen, and I believe the events of January 6th were a disgrace to our Country and our Party. I am also a proud Republican who believes in our foundational principles. Please let me know if I have a place in our fractured Party.”
Some Republicans have determined that there is no place for the sane, and they do not want to be associated with the lunatic fringe. Popular center-right KOA radio host Mandy Connell and the former Republican University of Colorado Regent Sue Sharkey are no longer affiliated with the party. They are two of the more than 133 Republicans who changed their voter registration since Williams won, according to an analysis by 9 News reporter Marshall Zelinger.
As I noted in a previous column, Republicans have been lagging behind unaffiliated voters since 2014 and behind Democrats since 2017. Today, Republicans account for 24% of Colorado registered voters. If sane Republicans leave the party, the con artist-crackpot contingent will gain more influence and visibility, prompting the flight of other mainstream Republicans. Unmitigated, this could trap the Colorado GOP in a death spiral just when the party should be rebounding as Trump sinks into ignominious insignificance.
Colorado isn’t alone. In Michigan, the state GOP picked Kristina Karamo for party chair. A rabid conspiratorialist, she has yet to concede her loss in the Michigan secretary of state race. The Kansas and Idaho GOP chose election deniers to chair their state parties. In Arizona, former chief operating officer for Trump’s campaigns, Jeff DeWit, beat out other contenders with the endorsement of uber-Big Lie proponents like failed gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake, state Sen. Wendy Rogers, and the former president. Fortunately, the contagion has not spread to other states.
This is one of the most bizarre stories I have ever read. The Republican-dominated Missouri legislature voted down a ban on children openly carrying weapons on public grounds without adult supervision. To this insane political party, no one is too young to carry a weapon.
The Republican-controlled Missouri House of Representatives rejected a proposal Wednesday that would have banned children from being able to openly carry firearms on public land without adult supervision.
The proposal, which was part of a long debate in the chamber on how to fight crime in St. Louis, was defeated by a vote of 104-39, with just one Republican voting in support of the ban. After the amendment on the open-carry restrictions for minors was initially supported by the Republican legislator sponsoring a broader crime bill, GOP lawmakers on a committee that he leads removed the firearms provision last week.
“Every time we talked about the provision related to guns, we knew that was going to be difficult on our side of the aisle,” state Rep. Lane Roberts (R) said Wednesday, according to the Associated Press. State Rep. Donna Baringer (D), who represents St. Louis and sponsored the amendment to H.B. 301, said she brought the proposal to the chamber after police in her district requested tighter regulations to stop “14-year-olds walking down the middle of the street in the city of St. Louis carrying AR-15s.”
“Now they have been emboldened, and they are walking around with them,” Baringer said. “Until they actually brandish them, and brandish them with intent, our police officers’ hands are handcuffed.”
While critics and Democrats denounced Republican lawmakers for defeating the proposal, some GOP lawmakers, such as state Rep. Tony Lovasco, defended the decision.
“Government should prohibit acts that directly cause measurable harm to others, not activities we simply suspect might escalate,” Lovasco, who represents the St. Louis suburb of O’Fallon, told The Washington Post in a statement. “Few would support banning unaccompanied kids in public places, yet one could argue such a bad policy might be effective. While it’s reasonable to be wary of minors’ carrying guns, any solution to juvenile crime needs to be crafted properly and respectful of individual rights…”
Since 2017, Missouri residents have not been required to have a permit for concealed carry, after lawmakers in the Missouri House voted to override a veto by then-Gov. Jay Nixon (D) of a broad gun-rights bill. The law does not require gun owners to take safety training or have a criminal-background check to carry concealed firearms in most public places. The move was celebrated by Republicans, but law enforcement officials warned that the law was “going to make officers a lot more apprehensive,” St. Louis Public Radio reported at the time….
The Republicans must figure that a child is a citizen, and every citizen has the right to bear arms. Even if that citizen is only six years old.
One Republican, Rep. Lane Roberts supported the bill.
“This is about people who don’t have the life experience to make a decision about the consequences of having that gun in their possession,” Roberts said, according to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. “Why is an 8-year-old carrying a sidearm in the street?”
But Roberts’s sentiment was not supported by his GOP colleagues on the House Crime Prevention and Public Safety Committee, who removed the provision.
“I just have a different approach for addressing public safety that doesn’t deprive people, who have done nothing to any other person, who will commit no violence, from their freedom,” Republican state Rep. Bill Hardwick, who represents Pulaski County and Fort Leonard Wood, told the Post-Dispatch. Critics noted how quickly the momentum shifted on the proposal.“I am old enough to remember when Missouri Republicans were pretending to care about gun violence in St. Louis. Like, 2 days ago,” Post-Dispatch columnist Tony Messenger tweeted on Friday. “That was short-lived.”
On Wednesday, Baringer offered an amendment to try to add the provision back into the broader crime bill that was being voted on by the chamber, but it was overwhelmingly voted down.
The vote was met with blowback from Democrats and gun control advocates. Among those was Shannon Watts, founder of the gun violence prevention nonprofit Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in America. “Republicans can’t claim to be tough on crime when they’re soft on guns,” she wrote on Twitter.
State Rep. Peter Merideth (D) argued that the state cares more about drag shows than children openly carrying guns. One bill currently proposed in Missouri notes that it wants to change “the definition of a sexually oriented business to include any nightclub or bar that provides drag performances.” Another proposed bill would categorize drag performances on public property or viewed by minors as Class A misdemeanors.
You do have to wonder what legislation the House Crime Prevention and Public Safety Committee passes. What do they do?
John Thompson, a retired teacher and historian in Oklahoma, has written frequently about events in his state for this blog. Here, he describes the political coercion that determined right-wingers are promoting in Oklahoma and calling it “choice.” From his description, some Republican legislators are worried about “liberal indoctrination,” transgender students using the “wrong” bathroom, litter boxes for children who think they are cats (this seems to be a QAnon idea), and the danger of “social-emotional learning.” Apparently students in Oklahoma have no social or emotional issues.
Ryan Walters, Oklahoma’s newly elected, extreme rightwing Secretary of Education, first says that “the state should have the ‘most comprehensive school choice in the country.’” Secondly, Walters pushes the rightwing Michigan-based Hillsdale College curriculum; he doesn’t want to allow schools to choose to retain research-based curriculums that he identifies as “liberal indoctrination.” As Clark Frailey, executive director of Pastors for Oklahoma Kids, says, Walters seems to be pushing for “Christian Dominionism,” which is “based on the philosophy that Christianity is at the core of America’s foundation and all institutions need to align with that viewpoint. If people won’t convert, then a government religion must be forced upon them.”
Two voucher programs for private schools and homeschools have been filed. The most interesting one is Sen. Shane Jett’s Oklahoma Parent Empowerment Act for Kids (PEAK). Even extremely conservative Republicans legislators worry that vouchers would undermine the finances of their rural schools. Jett seems to be offering a carrot and a stick to those vulnerable constituencies. He would impose vouchers only in counties with a population of more than 10,000 people. But, vouchers would be offered in counties with fewer than 10,000 residents if they are served by a “trigger district.”
The Oklahoman then reports:
Jett defined a “trigger district” as a public school system that allows or tolerates House Bill 1775 violations, use of school bathrooms according to gender identity, anthropomorphic behavior known as “furries,” disparagement of the oil and gas industry, lesson plans promoting social-emotional learning and animal rights activism, among other topics.
In other words, the bill would coerce schools into “choosing” to comply with the entire extremist agenda. But that begs the question about how educators would choose to deal with today’s threats to public education. Republican Sen. Adam Pugh’s newly revealed plan for school improvement was based on meetings with 200 public school superintendents; every college president in Oklahoma; and “hundreds, if not thousands” teachers and parents and advocacy groups. Based on these listening sessions, Pugh did not propose vouchers.
Pugh’s plan would raise teacher pay so the minimum starting salary was $40,000, “with graduated raises to the minimum salary schedule based on longevity.” The estimated cost would be $241 million, which is less than the cost of Sen. Julie Daniels’ voucher bill ($275 million). They would also create an “Oklahoma Teacher Corps” and a teacher mentoring system; provide certain teachers at least 12 weeks of maternity leave; update the school funding formula, and pass Pugh’s seven other constructive reforms.
As Pugh explained, “I hope this plan will demonstrate to teachers that we’re serious about the work that you do, and we appreciate how you pour your heart and your soul into educating kids, as we need you to stay in the classroom, and we need more of you.”
While that offers us a bit of a sigh of relief, Oklahomans should be aware that the push [to] move taxpayer money into private schools isn’t going anywhere. It’s a well-funded campaign and the state’s administrators and board members have been handpicked to make that a top priority.
I’m afraid I agree with the Stillwater News. Pugh’s bills raise hope. But Oklahoma Republicans will continue to coerce schools into compliance with their extremist privatization and Christian Dominionism ideologies – and call it “choice.”
On the other hand, more Republicans sound like they are getting fed up by Walters and his minions. This week, the Secretary of Education was supposed to present a budget to a legislative subcommittee for planning purposes, but a letter obtained by the Tulsa World shows that Walters seems to be prioritizing “ridding public education of ‘liberal indoctrination.’” Walters’ “spokesman” said he “has requested additional information on diversity, equity, inclusion programs (DEI) to fully understand the extent of indoctrination happening in higher education.”
The letter said:
Please provide a full outline and review of every dollar that has been spent over the last 10 years on diversity, equity, inclusion. Additionally, I want an overview of your staffing and the colleges underneath your oversight as the Chancellor of Oklahoma Higher Regents within every DEI program … and expenditures,” Walters wrote on letterhead of the Office of the Secretary of Education. “Lastly, please provide a copy of the materials that are being used in any of these programs.”
Neither has Walters followed legislative norms for presenting a public education budget. As Nondoc reported, Walters said he instituted a hiring freeze and a spending freeze for the State Department of Education when he took office and all related decisions require his approval. And, in addition to demanding vouchers, he has insisted on any teacher pay raise being performance-based. Above all, Walters said he would be bringing a completely different budget than the one his predecessor drafted.
Republican Toni Hasenbeck (R-Elgin) responded saying, “district superintendents had expressed concern for ‘the next four years’” because of Walters’ campaign comments. Rep. Dell Kerbs, (R-Shawnee) commented, “I don’t need elevator speeches. I need details.” Subcommittee Chairman Mark McBride (R-Moore) understood the argument that performance pay could be a part of teacher pay, but he said that Walters’ plan went too far. And then he tried to get Walters back to the normative procedures which the subcommittee follows for helping craft funding priorities.
McBride “interrupted Walters,” and asked, “Are you saying the budget will totally change — you’re presenting a budget that’s not going to be the same budget, and you’re going to totally change it?”
Nondoc reported that “McBride seemed confused and paused for a moment.” When Walters tried to change the subject, [McBride] interrupted him and asked why Walters was presenting a budget that would not exist in a week. Walters again changed the subject and, as Nondoc reported, “McBride interrupted him again, asking him to stay on topic presenting monetary figures rather than discussing policy and slipping into “campaign rhetoric.” McBride said, “With all due respect, I need the performance review for last year. That’s what you’re here to present.” Then, after that interruption, Walters stopped his presentation.
After the meeting, Matt Langston, Walters’s “spokesman” (a paid GOP consultant based in Texas) said, “Not one person in Oklahoma is surprised that Democrats are unhappy with the political theater that was orchestrated today.” According to Langston:
They do not want transparency, accountability or even basic reform because they are used to playing in the shadows. Union bosses, whining and liberal tears will not stop education reform, and the superintendent is looking forward to next week’s actual budget hearing.
Stay tuned! When Walters reveals his budget, chaos and vitriol will increase, and we’ll see whether Walters really believes he can implement his promise or “suggestion,” that “received some pushback from lawmakers in 2022,” a ten-year plan to reject all federal spending on education …
Harold Meyerson of The American Prospect reflects on the Republican debacle of the past few days. Kevin McCarthy wants desperately to be Majority Leader of the House of Representatives. He needs a majority of all members present. But he can’t get a majority because 20 members of the far-right “Freedom Caucus” oppose him. He has conceded to all of their demands for power. Yet after nine ballots, they still oppose him. They want to impeach Biden. They want to impeach cabinet members. They want to humiliate Dr. Anthony Fauci. They are the Chaos Caucus, the party of No. They don’t know how to govern. They are obstructionists.
Like the Jacobins and Stalinists of yore, today’s Republicans have extirpated their moderates and have no one left to execute besides themselves.
Time was when the conservative credo was “That government is best which governs least.” If that needed quantitative metrics, Grover Norquist came along to say that government should be small enough that “it can be drowned in a bathtub.”
But that was oh, so then. Today’s Republicans repudiate those nostrums as way too statist. What they’re making ridiculously clear (and just plain ridiculous) on the floor of the House this week is that their new credo is “That government is best which cannot even convene.”
The process of revolutions growing more radical by bumping off every previous revolutionary cadre is well established. In revolutionary France, the Girondins supplanted the royalists, the Montagnards supplanted and executed the Girondins, the Jacobins supplanted and executed the Montagnards, and having run out of rival factions, the Jacobins executed each other. In revolutionary Russia, the Leninists overthrew and executed the czarists, the Stalinists overthrew and executed the Leninists. And having run out of Leninists, the Stalinists executed each other.
Today’s Republicans seem to have reached that final phase this week, the supplanting and political execution of each other. Here’s a quote from a speech preceding the eighth ballot for Speaker, in which a Republican described the candidate he was nominating:
“He’s not Paul Ryan! He’s not Mitch McConnell! He’s not John Boehner! He’s different!”
That was not, however, from a speech nominating the Gang of 20’s oppositionist de jour. It was the nominating speech for the hapless Kevin McCarthy, who apparently still clings to the forlorn hope that he can win the Speakership by repudiating every Republican leader and tenet to the left of Matt Gaetz and the Proud Boys.
To be sure, that’s a strategy that didn’t play all that well at the polls last November. Arizona Republican gubernatorial nominee Kari Lake made clear that she didn’t want the votes of Republicans who’d supported that squishy John McCain. In that, she succeeded, which was a major reason why she lost. But today’s Republicans are undaunted by anything so ephemeral as electoral results.
Even in comparison with the first two days of McCarthy’s public humiliation, today has been particularly cruel. The news this morning was full of reports that a team from McCarthy’s opposition had spent the night bargaining with McCarthy’s minions and came away with every concession under the sun. McCarthy agreed that a single member of the Republican caucus could call for ousting the Speaker and that would be all that was required to force a vote. McCarthy’s PAC cut a deal with the Club for Growth that it would no longer intervene in open-seat primaries. Hope sprung yet again among the Kevinoids that these concessions would bring perhaps 10 of the 20 malcontents into Kevin’s camp. In fact, however, through today’s seventh and eighth ballots, precisely none of those 20 dissidents, including those in last night’s meetings, came into Kevin’s column. McCarthy’s vote total remained stuck at 201.
There are some reports that the Gang of 20’s negotiators want the agreements in writing. To get his total up to the required 218, however, I suspect McCarthy will have to go beyond that, promising committee chairmanships and seats on the Koch Brothers board of directors to every one of the 20, and that he’ll have to sign this promissory note in his own blood. And a small cut on the finger won’t suffice.
Diane Ravitch's blog 