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Trump Vows to Cut Federal Funding to Any School That Mandates Vaccines or Masks

By dianeravitch
March 7, 2024 //
69

The political landscape of American politics gets weirder by the moment, if you pay attention to what one former President is saying on the campaign trail.

In a campaign appearance in Richmond, Virginia, Trump promised that “I will not give one penny to any school that has a vaccine mandate or a mask mandate.” He is obviously appealing to the anti-vaxxers who refused to take the vaccine that Trump himself rushed to completion and that Trump and his family did take while in the White House.

Assuming that he is serious about his threat, he is promising to eliminate public health measures that are now the law in every state. It is now commonplace (and has been for decades) to require children to be vaccinated for various diseases before they enter school—measles, chickenpox, mumps, polio, diphtheria, etc.

Even Florida, which is officially opposed to vaccine mandates, requires students to be vaccinated before they start public school. As of July 12, 2023:

What immunizations are required for a child to attend school in Florida?

  • 5 doses DTaP (diphtheria-tetanus-pertussis).
  • 4-5 doses Polio (Kindergarten). … 
  • 2 doses MMR (measles-mumps-rubella).
  • 3 doses Hepatitis B.
  • 2 doses Varicella (chickenpox).

Despite this mandate, Florida is currently experiencing an outbreak of measles. The surgeon general of the state has told parents that it’s up to them to decide whether to send their sick child to school.

A number of contagious diseases are reappearing, according to WebMD. Among them are tuberculosis, scarlet fever, measles, mumps, and whooping cough. Some come back because the vaccines are not as effective as the bacteria evolves, and some return because people are not vaccinated.

Michael Hiltzik, columnist for the Los Angeles Times, wrote that Trump and RFK Jr. are competing for the anti-vaccine vote. If Trump is re-elected and follows through on his threats, we can expect to see a resurgence of diseases like polio that were eliminated decades ago.

Hiltzik’s column is titled: “Trump and RFK Jr. want to make the world safe again for polio and measles. You should be terrified.”

People will die from diseases that were conquered by science decades ago.

Hiltzik wrote:

Trump’s words elicited febrile cheers from his Virginia audience, which may be a sign of what I earlier identified as the phenomenon of “herd stupidity” connected with the anti-vaccine movement. 

Did these people have any conception of what they were cheering? (We can assume that Trump didn’t.) Did they cotton on to the fact that Trump was advocating depriving all Virginia public and private K-12 schools, nursery schools, child care centers and home schools of federal funding?

We know that would be the consequence of his pledge, because we know that Virginia requires children attending any of those institutions to be vaccinated against 15 diseases, with boosters where appropriate. Virginia’s mandated schedule, like those of every other state, follows the recommendations of the CDC, which calls for some vaccinations within a month or two of birth.

Trump issued his ukase against vaccine mandates right after declaring at the Richmond rally that he would “sign a new executive order to cut federal funding for any school pushing critical race theory, transgender insanity, and any other inappropriate racial, sexual, or political content onto our children,” thus covering pretty much the entire right-wing culture battleground, almost all of which is based on manufactured outrage.

In context, Trump’s opposition to vaccine mandates falls into the category of glorifying individual “freedom” over the communal interest. As I’ve written before, opposing vaccine mandates as a substitute for opposing vaccination itself is a fundamentally incoherent position — little more than garden variety small-government Republican ideology almost invariably invoked to protect the interests of the “haves” over the “have-nots.”

What makes it incoherent is that mandates do work. They’ve saved the lives of millions of schoolchildren who would otherwise be exposed to deadly diseases at school and play.

Categories Elections, Extremism, Health, Ignorance, Science, Stupid, Trump

North Carolina: MAGA Home-Schooler Wins GOP Race for State School Superintendent

By dianeravitch
March 6, 2024 //
12

Can things get worse for teachers and public schools in North Carolina? Yes!

An ultra-conservative beat out a conservative for the state’s top education position in the Republican primary.

A homeschooling mother with extremist views upset the establishment incumbent for the position of state superintendent of public schools. The incumbent had a 10-1 financial advantage but still lost.

Ultra-conservative challenger Michele Morrow defeated incumbent Catherine Truitt in the Republican primary for state superintendent of public instruction.

With 99% of precincts reporting, Morrow has 52% of the vote to 48% for Truitt, who is the only incumbent Council of State member who lost to a primary challenger. Truitt had entered the Republican primary with a major fundraising lead and the endorsement of many prominent GOP elected officials.

Morrow will face off against former Guilford County Superintendent Mo Green, who has nearly two-thirds of the vote in the Democratic primary…

Truitt, 53, was elected superintendent in 2020. The former classroom teacher has political credentials such as having been senior education adviser to then GOP Gov. Pat McCrory. 

Truitt’s endorsements included U.S. Rep. Virginia Foxx; state Sens. Phil Berger and Ralph Hise; and state Reps. John Bell, Destin Hall and Jason Saine. Truitt had raised $327,003 compared to $37,764 for Morrow.

But Morrow and her supporters portrayed Truitt has being a liberal, pointing to how she had been supported by U.S. Sen. Thom Tillis, who is unpopular with many conservative Republicans.

Morrow, 52, is a home-school parent and former missionary who is an activist working with groups such as Liberty First Grassroots and the Pavement Education Project.

Morrow was among the supporters of then President Donald Trump who protested in Washington on Jan. 6, 2021, but says she did not storm the Capitol Building.

During her unsuccessful run for the Wake County school board in 2022, Morrow apologized for past social media posts that included “ban Islam” and “ban Muslims from elected offices.”

She says her plan is to “Make Academics Great Again” in North Carolina by prioritizing scholastics and safety over Critical Race Theory and DEI (Diversity, Equity and Inclusion). Morrow has accused public schools of indoctrinating students, “teaching children to hate our country” and training students in “transgender theory.”

If elected, Morrow says she will “make sound basic moral instruction priority number one.” Morrow also promises that “you better believe that our teachers will be well versed in the true history of our great nation.”

Categories Accountability, Education Reform, Elections, Extremism, Home Schooling, North Carolina, Privatization, Republicans, Trump

George Conway: The Supreme Court Decided Based on Fear

By dianeravitch
March 5, 2024 //
29

George Conway is a constitutional lawyer and a conservative Republican who is an outspoken critic of Donald Trump. His tweets are memorable, as are his appearances on MSNBC, where he is often a guest. He also writes for The Atlantic, where he published his commentary on the Supreme Court’s latest Trump decision. Conway was initially dubious about Colorado’s case for disqualifying Trump but, upon reflection, decided that the Constitution plainly required the Supreme Court to exclude him from the ballot. In his view, the case was not decided on its merits and the legal argument was “utterly flimsy.”

In this post, he analyzes the decision and points out its inconsistencies and fallacies. I am quoting only his conclusion. If you want to read it in full, open the link or subscribe to The Atlantic:

This case wasn’t about legal reasoning; it was about fear. Fear from all the justices, conservatives and liberals, about the impact on the Court of removing Trump from the ballot. And the second paragraph of Justice Barrett’s opinion bleeds fear onto the page. “This is not the time to amplify disagreement with stridency,” she writes. Was that directed at any of her colleagues? Justice Sotomayor’s opinion is hardly strident at all, as far as Supreme Court separate opinions go, even if it makes little more sense than the majority’s. “The Court has settled a politically charged issue in the volatile season of a Presidential election,” Barrett continues. “Particularly in this circumstance, writings on the Court should turn the national temperature down, not up. For present purposes, our differences are far less important than our unanimity: All nine justices agree on the outcome of this case. That is the message Americans should take home.”

Each of these sentences is true. But why say this? Why not let the Court’s unanimity of judgment and reasoning speak for itself, including that of Sotomayor’s concurrence? Because Justice Barrett—and, I suspect, all the justices—were terrified by the case and what it actually required them to do: affirm Trump’s disqualification.

That may sound depressing, but I see reason to take heart. To be sure, it’s a shame, because this was one circumstance where it would have been nice for the Supreme Court justices to show the courage that some of their colleagues in the lower courts have shown when faced with Trump—judges like Lewis Kaplan, in the Carroll case; Tanya Chutkan, in the federal January 6 case; Justice Arthur Engoron in Trump’s New York civil fraud case; and Justice Juan Merchan, in the upcoming New York criminal case stemming from Trump allegedly cooking his books to pay off an adult-film star. Ultimately, though, litigation will not save us from Trump, and no one should believe that it will.  

But litigation will have done its part—even Trump v. Anderson, with its dearth of reasoning and not-quite-satisfactory result. Because there was one very important thing the Court didn’t do yesterday. It didn’t cast one word of doubt, and expressed not a hint of a disagreement with, the amply supported factual conclusion reached by the Colorado courts: Donald Trump engaged in an insurrection. Just as Trump today stands as an adjudicated sexual abuser, so too he remains an adjudicated insurrectionist. It is up to us, as voters, to make use of those findings come November.

Put another way: You can’t always get what you want, but if you try sometimes, you get what you need.

Categories Accountability, Democracy, Elections, Justice, Trump

David French: The Supreme Court Just Erased Part of the Constitution

By dianeravitch
March 5, 2024 //
30

David French is a regular columnist for The New York Times. He writes here about the radical implications of the Supreme Court ruling on Trump’s eligibility to run for president.

As of Monday, March 4, 2024, Section 3 of the 14th Amendment of the Constitution is essentially a dead letter, at least as it applies to candidates for federal office. Under the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling that reversed the Colorado Supreme Court’s decision striking Donald Trump from the state’s primary ballot, even insurrectionists who’ve violated their previous oath of office can hold federal office, unless and until Congress passes specific legislation to enforce Section 3.

In the aftermath of the oral argument last month, legal observers knew with near-certainty that the Supreme Court was unlikely to apply Section 3 to Trump. None of the justices seemed willing to uphold the Colorado court’s ruling, and only Justice Sonia Sotomayor gave any meaningful indication that she might dissent. The only real question remaining was the reasoning for the court’s decision. Would the ruling be broad or narrow?

A narrow ruling for Trump might have held, for example, that Colorado didn’t provide him with enough due process when it determined that Section 3 applied. Or the court could have held that Trump, as president, was not an “officer of the United States” within the meaning of the section. Such a ruling would have kept Trump on the ballot, but it would also have kept Section 3 viable to block insurrectionists from the House or Senate and from all other federal offices.

A somewhat broader ruling might have held that Trump did not engage in insurrection or rebellion or provide aid and comfort to the enemies of the Constitution. Such a ruling would have sharply limited Section 3 to apply almost exclusively to Civil War-style conflicts, an outcome at odds with the text and original public meaning of the section. It’s worth noting that, by not taking this path, the court did not exonerate Trump from participating in an insurrection.

But instead of any of these options, the court went with arguably the broadest reasoning available: that Section 3 isn’t self-executing, and thus has no force or effect in the absence of congressional action. This argument is rooted in Section 5 of the amendment, which states that “Congress shall have power to enforce, by appropriate legislation, the provisions of this article.”

But Section 5, on its face, does not give Congress exclusive power to enforce the amendment. As Justices Elena Kagan, Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson pointed out in their own separate concurring opinion, “All the Reconstruction amendments (including the due process and equal protection guarantees and prohibition of slavery) ‘are self-executing,’ meaning that they do not depend on legislation.” While Congress may pass legislation to help enforce the 14th Amendment, it is not required to do so, and the 14th Amendment still binds federal, state and local governments even if Congress refuses to act.

But now Section 3 is different from other sections of the amendment. It requires federal legislation to enforce its terms, at least as applied to candidates for federal office. Through inaction alone, Congress can effectively erase part of the 14th Amendment.

It’s extremely difficult to square this ruling with the text of Section 3. The language is clearly mandatory. The first words are “No person shall be” a member of Congress or a state or federal officer if that person has engaged in insurrection or rebellion or provided aid or comfort to the enemies of the Constitution. The section then says, “But Congress may by a vote of two-thirds of each house, remove such disability.”

In other words, the Constitution imposes the disability, and only a supermajority of Congress can remove it. But under the Supreme Court’s reasoning, the meaning is inverted: The Constitution merely allows Congress to impose the disability, and if Congress chooses not to enact legislation enforcing the section, then the disability does not exist. The Supreme Court has effectively replaced a very high bar for allowing insurrectionists into federal office — a supermajority vote by Congress — with the lowest bar imaginable: congressional inaction.

As Kagan, Sotomayor and Jackson point out, this approach is also inconsistent with the constitutional approach to other qualifications for the presidency. We can bar individuals from holding office who are under the age limit or who don’t meet the relevant citizenship requirement without congressional enforcement legislation. We can enforce the two-term presidential term limit without congressional enforcement legislation. Section 3 now stands apart not only from the rest of the 14th Amendment, but also from the other constitutional requirements for the presidency.

In one important respect, the court’s ruling on Monday is worse and more consequential than the Senate’s decision to acquit Trump after his Jan. 6 impeachment trial in 2021. Impeachment is entirely a political process, and the actions of one Senate have no bearing on the actions of future Senates. But a Supreme Court ruling has immense precedential power. The court’s decision is now the law.

It would be clearly preferable if Congress were to pass enforcement legislation that established explicit procedures for resolving disputes under Section 3, including setting the burden of proof and creating timetables and deadlines for filing challenges and hearing appeals. Establishing a uniform process is better than living with a patchwork of state proceedings. But the fact that Congress has not acted should not effectively erase the words from the constitutional page. Chaotic enforcement of the Constitution may be suboptimal. But it’s far better than not enforcing the Constitution at all.

Categories Accountability, Democracy, Elections, Justice, Trump

Robert Hubbell: The Supreme Court’s Latest Decision Was a Disgrace: Vote!

By dianeravitch
March 5, 2024 //
47

Robert Hubbell is outraged by the Supreme Court’s latest decision regarding the insurrection clause (Section 3 of the Fourteenth Amendment). The conservative majority on the Court usually claim to be “originalists” who scrutinize the language in the Constitution and divine the intent of those who wrote it.

In this case, the language was crystal clear. Any officer of the federal government who swore an oath to defend the Constitution and then participated in an insurrection against the Constitution was disqualified from running again for office. But the majority said that the official who had engaged in insurrection must first be subject to a Congressional vote; that language is not in the Constitution although there is specific language about the vote needed to remove the disqualification.

Hubbell was furious that Clarence Thomas was allowed to vote in this case since his wife was an active participant in the plot to overturn the election. He should have recused himself but that would require an ethical compass that the justice lacks.

Here is an excerpt from Hubbell’s post. You should open the link and read it in full.

He writes:

The most important lesson from Monday’s disqualification ruling is that the Supreme Court is broken beyond repair. The reactionary majority made that fact abundantly clear by unilaterally amending the Constitution to remove the Insurrection Clause from the 14th Amendment. 

Those sworn to protect the Constitution are dismantling it. The protectors of the Constitution have become its adversary in order to protect a failed insurrectionist who has promised a second effort to overthrow the Constitution. (“I said I want to be a dictator for one day.”)

There are many reasons to ensure that Donald Trump is not elected to the presidency in 2024. Rehabilitating and reforming the Court is chief among them. Sadly, reforming the Court is below the radar for most voters. But the lawless reactionary majority has already denied women the full protection of the liberty clause of the 14th amendment; it is refusing to enforce the clear intent of the 14th to ensure that descendants of enslaved people have a meaningful right to vote and equal protection under law. And the logical force of the Dobbs opinion strongly suggests that the Court will withdraw existing protections for same-sex marriage, contraception, and “inter-racial” marriages.

Monday’s opinion is a clear warning to all Americans that the threat to their liberties is immediate and real. Those who seek to protect existing liberties (and reclaim those already abrogated Court) must vote as if their freedoms depend on the outcome of the 2024 election—because they do! 

The Court has abandoned the Constitution; the last line of defense is the American people exercising their most fundamental right—the right to elect their representatives, who can (in turn) enlarge the Court and limit its jurisdiction.

There is abundant evidence that many Americans are not inspired by either presidential candidate or feel betrayed, forgotten, or ignored by the political process. But one candidate will seek to defend their freedoms by preserving and enforcing the Constitution (in part, by reforming the Court). The other has promised to overturn the Constitution “for one day”—which means “overturn the Constitution” period. The duration of a suspension of the Constitution is irrelevant.

Feelings of anger and upset over Monday’s ruling are understandable and warranted. But the most appropriate response is to redouble our efforts to defeat Trump. Nothing else matters. If we achieve that goal, we can work to advance all other goals. If we do not, we will be at the mercy of a renegade majority on the Court and an out-of-control, aspiring dictator for four years.

What happened?

On Monday, the Court overruled the Colorado Supreme Court’s decision removing Trump from the Colorado primary ballot. The opinion is here: 23-719 Trump v. Anderson (03/04/2024).

The ruling was ostensibly 9-0 with three justices writing a concurring opinion that reads like a dissent and a concurrence by Amy Coney Barrett that criticized the overreach of reactionary majority. In fact, as explained below, the ruling was 5-4, meaning that Justice Thomas’s refusal to recuse himself (as required by statute and rule) was outcome-determinative. Justice Thomas’s corruption saved Donald Trump’s slot on the Colorado ballot.

Distilled to its essence, the US Supreme Court’s ruling in Trump v. Anderson removed the Insurrection Clause from Section 3 of the 14th Amendment.

How did the Court effectively remove the Insurrection Clause from the 14th Amendment?

The 14th Amendment creates a self-executing disqualification for insurrectionists who previously took an oath to support the Constitution. The self-executing nature of that disqualification is consistent with other provisions of the 14th Amendment (equal protection, due process) that are likewise self-executing—as are other qualifications on the presidency (such as age, citizenship, and tenure of residency in the US).

Despite the plain language of the 14th Amendment—which creates a bar to holding federal office based on the conduct of the insurrectionist standing alone—the Court ruled that the Insurrection Clause is ineffective unless Congress affirmatively passes legislation that conforms to narrow prescriptions of the Court’s opinion in Trump v. Anderson.

The reactionary majority ignores that Section 3 of the 14th Amendment speaks to the role of Congress in enforcing the Insurrection Clause. It says that Congress can remove an insurrectionist’s disqualification by a two-thirds vote. But under the Court’s ruling in Trump v. Anderson, Congress can prevent any disqualifications of insurrectionists by simply refusing to pass the enabling legislation prescribed by the reactionary majority.

As Justice Sotomayor wrote in her concurring opinion,

It is hard to understand why the Constitution would require a congressional supermajority to remove a disqualification if a simple majority could nullify Section 3’s operation by . . . declining to pass implementing legislation.

As George Conway noted on Monday on MSNBC, the reactionary majority arrived at its conclusion by simply ignoring the language of the Constitution. The reactionary majority regularly uses the text of the Constitution as a cudgel when they want to deny liberties embraced by the language of the Constitution. But when they seek to ensure that a failed insurrectionist and aspiring dictator remains on the ballot, they act as if the text of the Constitution does not exist.

A reader wrote to me after the issuance of the opinion and asked, “What can we do?” My answer is this:

Elect Democrats. Reform the Court. Defend the Constitution. Preserve Democracy.

Categories Accountability, Civil Rights, Democracy, Elections, Ethics, Extremism, Failure, History, Justice, Trump

Jay Kuo: Don’t believe the New York Times/Siena Presidential Poll!

By dianeravitch
March 3, 2024 //
46

When I saw the latest presidential poll in the New York Times, it literally ruined my day. The New York Times/Siena poll showed Trump leading Biden by five points nationally. Of course, that set off another round of hand-wringing about Biden’s age.

Happily a friend pointed me to a blogger I had never read: Jay Kuo, who blogs at The Status Kuo.

Today, Jay deconstructed the poll and made my day!

He wrote:

Leave it to the New York Times to stir up Democratic anxiety right before the State of the Union address, with a poll showing Trump beating Biden by five points nationally. A number of my friends sent the poll to me. Some of them are now filled with such gloom and doom that I wanted to lay out my thoughts on it plainly here for a wider audience.

It seems no matter how often I beat the drum about the polls being unreliable, premature and wrong, it doesn’t allay people’s fears enough. Talk of “ditching Biden” then ensues, which of course is not going to happen. We should just stop any discussion of it right now if we know what’s good for us.

So what about this poll? Isn’t the NYT / Siena a reliable indicator? They wouldn’t publish something that is basically false information, right?

Polls aren’t “false.” They report what people actually told the pollsters. But they can be misleading, and they are often faulty. Importantly, we shouldn’t trust any polls to be predictive of the final result when there are still more than 200 days to go till the election and a whole lot of unknowns. But let me focus in particular on this poll and what some experts on polling and methodology are saying about it. I hope you come away with the same conclusion I did: that this is some data, yes, but it’s not very reliable or useful except to make big headlines.

Women voters

One of the things I look for in a polling result is if any of the breakdowns, found in what’s called the “crosstabs,” raise red flags. One jumped out right away for me in this poll, and others saw it, too. As LSU professor and political historian Robert Mann noted,

I do not believe Biden is tied with women nationally 46-46… Biden got 57% of women in 2020. You’re telling me that, post-Dobbs, his support among that demo group will drop to 46? Not credible.

I agree. If you see a poll and half the women are voting for Trump, something went wrong in the polling sample. If women voted like they did in 2020, which we should assume would at least be the case especially since Dobbs, that’s an 11 point difference from this poll. Assuming the poll is half men, half women, that would put the two candidates about even.

Democrats

Here’s a thing I’m sure the Dean Phillips campaign would love to see become reality: The NYT/Siena poll has Phillips at 12 percent support among Democrats. 

Really? Because last time I checked, in the actual official contests that have been held, his actual vote haul averages 1.5 percent. As UCLA professor Matt Barreto noted,

There have been 3 DNC sanctioned primaries and Phillips vote:

South Carolina – 1.7%

Nevada – 0.0%

Michigan – 2.7%

So what people are *telling* the NYT/Sienna does not square with how they are VOTING.

It’s fair to ask which Democrats are bothering to respond to and answer these polls to completion. Perhaps it’s those who, on average, tend to be more disgruntled and want to voice their displeasure to a pollster? Are these Democrats also more likely to say they are unhappy with the current president? Just throwing it out there.

Young people

The news in this poll was partway decent for Biden when it came to young voters age 18-29. He leads Trump by 13 points among them, 54 to 41 percent—but that’s still around half the spread that other major polls have on this age group. But when it comes to messaging on the youth vote, the NYT prefers to emphasize the negatives, and its own data seems at odds with itself.

For example, as former pollster and turned sometime polling industry critic Adam Carlson notes, the NYT/Siena poll of swing states conducted back in late October showed Trump actually leading in this age group in AZ and GA, while being tied with Biden in MI. On this contrary, surprising and incorrect result, Nate Cohn of the Times did a whole serious write upabout what it could mean.

But when the new poll shows Biden actually leading nationally within this group by 14 points, Carlson observes, the NYT analysis completely ignored this. 

Perhaps that’s because it is hard to square that earlier result of Trump leading with this very different one of Trump trailing without calling one or both into serious question. Such huge swings in such a short amount of time don’t suggest that the electorate is moving quickly so much as that the polling might be way off.

[Please open the link and keep reading the rest of his analysis. It will make you happy.]

Categories Biden, Elections, Opinion Polling, Trump

Trump’s Debt to Putin

By dianeravitch
March 3, 2024 //
35

Our occasional commenter, who uses the sobriquet “Democracy” posted the following analysis of Putin’s involvement in the 2016 election. Russia and Wikileaks crippled Hillary Clinton’s campaign, and at least eight Republican Senators knew it. They endorsed a report which reached that conclusion. Yet they continued to defend Trump.

Democracy posted:

Volume V of the Senate Intelligence Committee investigative report on the 2016 election:

“the Russian government engaged in an aggressive, multifaceted effort to influence, or attempt to influence, the outcome of the 2016 presidential election…Manafort’s presence on the Campaign and proximity to Trump created opportunities for Russian intelligence services to exert influence over, and acquire confidential information on, the Trump Campaign. Taken as a whole, Manafort’s highlevel access and willingness to share information with individuals closely affiliated with the Russian intelligence services, particularly Kilimnik and associates of Oleg Deripaska, represented a grave counterintelligence threat…”

“Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered the Russian effort to hack computer networks and accounts affiliated with the Democratic Party and leak information damaging to Hillary Clinton and her campaign for president. Moscow’s intent was to harm the Clinton Campaign, tarnish an expected Clinton presidential administration, help the Trump Campaign after Trump became the presumptive Republican nominee, and undermine the U.S. democratic process…While the GRU and WikiLeaks were releasing hacked documents, the Trump Campaign sought to maximize the impact of those leaks to aid Trump’s electoral prospects. Staff on the Trump Campaign sought advance notice about WikiLeaks releases, created messaging strategies to promote and share the materials in anticipation of and following their release, and encouraged further leaks. The Trump Campaign publicly undermined the attribution of the hack-and-leak campaign to Russia and was indifferent to whether it and WikiLeaks were furthering a Russian election interference effort.”

Click to access report_volume5.pdf

And if you’ve not read it before, here’s Adam Silverman, a national security expert, on that investigative report:

The Real Takeaway From the Senate Select Committee On Intelligence’s Bipartisan Report On Russia’s Active Measures Campaign and Interference In the 2016 Election: They All Knew Before They Voted To Acquit!!!!!

It’s quite clear…Trump and Republicans (and the NRA) are enthralled by and beholden to Putin.

Categories Accountability, Corruption, Elections, Ethics, Evil, Extremism, Hillary Clinton, Republicans, Trump

Heather Cox Richardson: The GOP is a Dying Party

By dianeravitch
March 2, 2024 //
43

Historian Heather Cox Richardson brilliantly analyzes the current moment.

She writes:

Behind the horse race–type coverage of the contest for presidential nominations, a major realignment is underway in United States politics. The Republican Party is dying as Trump and his supporters take it over, but there is a larger story behind that crash. This moment looks much like the other times in our history when a formerly stable two-party system has fallen apart and Americans reevaluated what they want out of their government.

Trump’s takeover of the party has been clear at the state level, where during his term he worked to install loyalists in leadership positions. From there, they have pushed the Big Lie that he won the 2020 election and have continued to advance his claims to power. 

The growing radicalism of the party has also been clear in Congress, where Trump loyalists refuse to permit legislation that does not reflect their demands and where, after they threw House speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) out of office—dumping a speaker midterm for the first time in history—Trump lieutenant Jim Jordan (R-OH) threatened holdouts to vote him in as speaker. Jordan failed, but the speaker Republican representatives did choose, Mike Johnson (R-LA), is himself a Trump loyalist, just one who had made fewer enemies than Jordan. 

The radicalization of the House conference has led 21 members of the party who gravitate toward actual lawmaking to announce they are not running for reelection. Many of them are from safe Republican districts, meaning they will almost certainly be replaced by radicals.  

The Senate has tended to hang back from this radicalization, but in a dramatic illustration of Trump’s takeover of the party, Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell today announced he would step down from his leadership position in November. McConnell is the leading symbol of the pre-Trump party, a man whose determination to cut taxes and regulation led him to manipulate the rules of the Senate and silence warnings that Russian disinformation was polluting the 2016 campaign so long as it meant keeping a Democrat out of the White House and Republicans in control of the Senate.

The extremist House Freedom Caucus promptly tweeted: “Our thoughts are with our Democrat colleagues in the Senate on the retirement of their Co-Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (D-Ukraine). No need to wait till November…Senate Republicans should IMMEDIATELY elect a *Republican* Minority Leader.”

Trump has also taken control of the Republican National Committee (RNC) itself. On Monday, RNC chair Ronna McDaniel announced that she is resigning on March 8. Trump picked McDaniel himself in 2016 but has come to blame her both for the party’s continued underperformance since 2016 and for its current lack of money.

Now Trump has made it clear he wants even closer loyalists at the top of the party, including his own daughter-in-law, Lara Trump. She has suggested she is open to using RNC money exclusively for Trump. This might be what has prompted the Koch-backed Americans for Prosperity to pull support from Nikki Haley in order to invest in downballot races. 

But the party that is consolidating around Trump is alienating a majority of Americans. It has abandoned the principles that the party embraced from 1980 until 2016. In that era, Republicans called for a government that cut taxes and regulations with the idea that consolidating wealth at the top of the economy would enable businessmen to invest far more effectively in new development than they could if the government interfered, and the economy would boom. They also embraced global leadership through the expansion of capitalism and a strong military to protect it. 

Under Trump, though, the party has turned away from global leadership to the idea that strong countries can do what they like to their neighbors, and from small government to big government that imposes religious rules. Far from protecting equality before the law, Republican-dominated states have discriminated against LGBTQ+ individuals, racial and ethnic minorities, and women. And, of course, the party is catering to Trump’s authoritarian plans. Neo-nazis attended the Conservative Political Action Conference a week ago. 

But these changes are not popular. Tuesday’s Michigan primary revealed the story we had already seen in the Republican presidential primaries and caucuses in Iowa, New Hampshire, and South Carolina. Trump won all those contests, but by significantly less than polls had predicted. He has also been dogged by the strength of former South Carolina governor Nikki Haley. With Trump essentially running as an incumbent, he should be showing the sort of strength Biden is showing—with challengers garnering only a few percentage points—but even among the fervent Republicans who tend to turn out for primaries, Trump’s support is soft.

It seems that the same policies that attract Trump’s base are turning other voters against him. Republican leadership, for example, is far out of step with the American people on abortion rights—69% of Americans want the right to abortion put into law—and that gulf has only widened over the Alabama Supreme Court decision endangering in vitro fertilization by saying that embryos have the same rights as children from the moment of conception. That decision created such an outcry that Republicans felt obliged to claim they supported IVF. But push came to shove today when Senator Tammy Duckworth (D-IL) reintroduced a bill to protect IVF that Republicans had previously rejected and Senator Cindy Hyde-Smith (R-MS) killed it again. 

The party has also tied itself to a deeply problematic leader. Trump is facing 91 criminal charges in four different cases—two state, two federal—but the recently-decided civil case in which he, the Trump Organization, his older sons, and two associates were found liable for fraud is presenting a more immediate threat to Trump’s political career.

Trump owes writer E. Jean Carroll $88.3 million; he owes the state of New York $454 million, with interest accruing at more than $100,000 a day. Trump had 30 days from the time the judgments were filed to produce the money or a bond for it. Today he asked the court for permission to post only $100 million rather than the full amount in the New York case, as required by law, because he would have to sell property at fire-sale prices to come up with the money.

In addition to making it clear to donors that their investment in his campaign now might end up in the hands of lawyers or the victorious plaintiffs, the admission that Trump does not have the money he has claimed punctures the image at the heart of his political success: that of a billionaire businessman.   

Judge Anil C. Singh rejected Trump’s request but did stay the prohibition on Trump’s getting loans from New York banks, potentially allowing him to get the money he needs.  

As Trump’s invincible image cracks with this admission, as well as with the increased coverage of his wild statements, others are starting to push back on him and his loyalists. President Biden’s son Hunter Biden testified behind closed doors to members of the House Oversight and Judiciary Committees today, after their previous key witness turned out to be working with Russian operatives and got indicted for lying.

Hunter Biden began the day with a scathing statement saying unequivocally that he had never involved his father in his business dealings and that all the evidence the committee had compiled proved that. In their “partisan political pursuit,” he said, they had “trafficked in innuendo, distortion, and sensationalism—all the while ignoring the clear and convincing evidence staring you in the face. You do not have evidence to support the baseless and MAGA-motivated conspiracies about my father because there isn’t any.” 

After an hour, Democratic committee members described to the press what was going on in the hearing room. They reported that the Republicans’ case had fallen apart entirely and that Biden had had a “very understandable, coherent business explanation for every single thing that they asked for.” While former president Trump invoked his Fifth Amendment right not to incriminate himself more than 440 times during a deposition in his fraud trial, Biden did not take the Fifth at all. 

The discrediting of the Republicans continued later. When Representative Tim Burchett (R-TN) tried to recycle the discredited claim that “$20 million flowed through” to then–vice president Biden, CNN host Boris Sanchez fact-checked him and said, “I’m not going to let you say things that aren’t true.” 

That willingness to push back on the Republicans suggests a new political moment in which Americans, as they have done before when one of the two parties devolved into minority rule, wake up to the reality that the system has been hijacked and begin to reclaim their government. 

But can they prevail over the extremists MAGA Republicans have stowed into critical positions in the government? Tonight the Supreme Court, stacked with Trump appointees, announced that rather than let the decision of a lower court stay in place, it would take up the question of whether Trump is immune from criminal prosecution for his actions in trying to overturn the 2020 presidential election. That decision means a significant delay in Trump’s trial for that attempt. 

“This is a momentous decision, just to hear this case,” conservative judge Michael Luttig told Nicolle Wallace of MSNBC. “There was no reason in this world for the Supreme Court to take this case…. Under the constitutional laws of the United States, there has never been an argument that a former president is immune from prosecution for crimes that he committed while in office.” 

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Categories Accountability, Bigotry, Democracy, Elections, Ethics, Extremism, Republicans, Trump

Anand Giridharadas: The Supreme Court’s Attempted Suicide

By dianeravitch
February 29, 2024 //
155

Anand is a brilliant writer and thinker who blogs at The Ink. Consider subscribing.

Here is his take on the Supreme Court’s decision to delay judgment on Trump’s claim of absolute immunity for criminal actions while he was president.

Yesterday the right-wing-dominated Supreme Court decided to step in and rescue Donald Trump’s presidential aspirations, agreeing to hear his claim of broad immunity and to delay his federal trial on charges of election interference stemming from his involvement in the January 6 insurrection. But it’s much worse than that. We agree with Timothy Snyder that this is no simple stalling tactic. By taking up the question of whether a single American citizen is above the law — simply by entertaining a question that shouldn’t be — the right-wing justices are undermining the legitimacy of the Court itself, and the very notion of a nation of laws.

The Supreme Court is attempting to end its own life as an institution above politics. If it has been doing moving in this direction for some time, this week it came to a head.

This can only be read as a blow to democracy itself. With this stay now in place, it’s unlikely that any trial could be concluded by (and even more likely that it will be delayed entirely until after) Election Day. Of course, at that point, should Trump win re-election, the case would not move forward at all: the Justice Department would be unlikely to pursue a case against a newly elected president, and of course in his second term Trump could stop the proceedings entirely. Which, of course, is the plan.

Categories Accountability, Democracy, Elections, Ethics, Extremism, Justice, Trump

Lincoln Project: What Fred Trump Thinks of Donald

By dianeravitch
February 29, 2024 //
16

The Lincoln Project, a group of anti-Trump Republicans, create videos intended to get into Trump’s head. This is one of their best.

Categories Elections, Humor, Shame, Trump
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