I watched the hearings from start to finish. They were gripping. The first fact that was established was that the people closest to Trump told him that he had lost the election. His Attorney General William Barr told Trump in no uncertain terms that his claims that the election was stolen were “bullshit.” The outcome was not affected by election fraud, Barr said. Barr said his refusal to accept the result was hurting the country. Ivanka testified that she believed Bill Barr.
But unlike every other American president, Trump refused to admit he lost. He listened to Rudy Guiliani, Sidney Powell, and Michael Flynn, who encouraged his fantasy that he could overturn the election. His advisors tried to separate him from the loonies, but they were unsuccessful.
He and his lawyers filed 60+ lawsuits alleging fraud, but all of them failed because of lack of evidence.
Trump encouraged his zealous MAGA followers to believe that the election was rigged and stolen. His extremist followers—the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers—were eager to help. On December 19, after meeting with Guiliani, Powell, and Flynn, he tweeted to his followers to come to DC on January 6, the day the election results were to be certified. He predicted “it will be wild.” On January 5, Steve Bannon said that on the following day, “All hell will break loose.”
The Proud Boys and the Oath keepers were there, as were thousands of other MAGA zealots. Trump encouraged his followers to March on the Capitol. He said that everything hinges on Mike Pence “doing the right thing,” I.e. refusing to accept the results from states where the votes were close.
When the mob attacked the Capitol, they chanted “Hang Mike Pence.” They sought Nancy Pelosi. No one knows what they would have done had they broken into the chambers while members of Congress were present.
The committee showed video of the insurrection that had not been seen before. It was a violent and wild scene, with men beating police officers repeatedly, using clubs and even flag poles as weapons. It was a scene of carnage. The video was powerful and shocking. As the video ended, Trump’s voice was superimposed, saying something like “There was a lot of love that day.” But the scene of his MAGA buddies pummeling and brutalizing cops was not loving.
Through the hours in which the mob stormed the Capitol, Trump refused to call for help. He did not call out the National Guard or the Secretary of Defense or Homeland Security. Mike Pence, from his secret location, called desperately for help. So did other Republican members of Congress. But it was hours before reinforcements arrived.
Just for the hell of it, when the hearing was over, I turned on FOX News. It was sickening. Laura Ingraham ridiculed Liz Cheney and said she was interminable and boring. No mention of the evidence of Trump’s lies and inaction. Most outrageous was Ingraham’s spin: Our democracy was never at risk. The Democrats and traitor Cheney exaggerated, she lied. No, democracy was never at risk. So what if hundreds and thousands of violent insurrectionists tried to stop the peaceful transfer of power, a tradition that began with George Washington. So what if the Trump mob beat up the law officers. So what if one of the police died of a stroke and four committed suicide.
What if the cops had not held the mob out as long as they did? What if they had seized Pence, Pelosi, Schiff, Raskin and others they hated?
No threat to our democracy? How could Laura Ingraham lie so egregiously with a straight face?
Trump issued a statement about the blood assault on the seat of the US government:
“January 6th was not simply a protest, it represented the greatest movement in the history of our Country to Make America Great Again,” he wrote in a statement.
Liz Cheney was addressing her fellow Republicans. But more than that, she was speaking to posterity. “I say this to my Republican colleagues who are defending the indefensible,” she said at Thursday night’s opening hearing of the Jan. 6 House select committee. “There will come a day when Donald Trump is gone, but your dishonor will remain.”
The Wyoming congresswoman, daughter of the former vice president, and vice chair of the committee, outlined for the country, and for history, two contrasting stories about the bloody insurrection.
One was a tale of honor and duty. Officials in the Justice Department and White House, to a greater extent than was previously known, confronted Trump about his election lies and repeatedly threatened to resign if he followed through with his darkest impulses.
The other was a tale of brutality and deceit by Trump and a small band of loyalists. They knew he had lost, and yet, as Cheney put it, “Trump oversaw and coordinated a sophisticated, seven-part plan to overturn the presidential election and prevent the transfer of presidential power.”
In perhaps the most chilling moment of the hearing, Cheney spoke of former White House officials’ testimony about Trump’s bloodthirstiness toward his own vice president. “Aware of the rioters’ chants to hang Mike Pence, the president responded with this sentiment, quote, ‘Maybe our supporters have the right idea.’ Mike Pence, quote, ‘deserves it.’ ”
I never thought I would say this but it’s true: Mike Pence saved our democracy by refusing to follow Trump’s demand to hand him the election that he lost. Pence followed the Constitution and foiled the coup.
And after watching the hearings, I sent $100 to Liz Cheney’s re-election campaign.
Dana Milbank tells the sad story of Elise Stefanik, a promising moderate who was elected to Congress from Upstate New York. But when power beckoned, she threw aside character, ethics, and principle to join the Trump brigade. For this once-moderate member of Congress, there are no bounds to her willingness to go full MAGA. She echoes the Great Donald, walking in lockstep with him and his Big Lie, even endorsing the “great replacement theory” that terrifies MAGA-Carlson voters but inspired a massacre of ten innocent Black people in Buffalo. A week after the massacre of children and teachers in Uvalde, Texas, Stefanik said she opposes gun control, but favors more funding for mental health. Anything for the base. Anything for power. Sad.
When John Bridgeland left a senior position in George W. Bush’s White House and joined Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government in the fall of 2004, an eager undergraduate got assigned to him as a student fellow and facilitator of his seminar.
“She was so excited because I was one of the few Republicans” then at the school’s Institute of Politics (IOP), Bridgeland told me this week. He remembered her as “extremely bright” and “through-and-through public-service-oriented.” She was so impressive in the seminar that he chose her to do a project with him selling Harvard students on the Peace Corps, AmeriCorps and other service opportunities. “I thought the world of her,” Bridgeland said.
The young woman’s name was Elise Stefanik.
Bridgeland secured her a job in the White House when she graduated in 2006, personally appealing to Chief of Staff Josh Bolten and other former colleagues to hire her. Bridgeland later encouraged her to run for Congress, which she did, successfully, in 2014 — and the New York Republican quickly established herself as a leading moderate. “I was so incredibly happy and proud,” Bridgeland said. “I viewed her as the bright light of her generation of leaders. She was crossing the aisle. She was focused on problem-solving. She had the highest character.”
And then, he said, “this switch went off.” Today, the world sees a much different Stefanik. This past week, after the racist massacre in Buffalo, attention turned to her articulation of “great replacement” theory, the white-supremacist conspiracy beliefs said to have propelled the alleged killer. Before that, she had been a prominent election denier, voting to overturn the 2020 results after the Jan. 6 insurrection, and then using the issue to oust and replace House Republican Conference Chairwoman Liz Cheney (Wyo.) because she refused to embrace President Donald Trump’s election lies.
Now, Stefanik has thrown her support, as the No. 3 House GOP leader, behind a proposal to “expunge” Trump’s impeachment for his role in the insurrection. She has joined a small group of extreme backbenchers as co-sponsors of the resolution, which casts doubt again on Joe Biden’s “seeming” win, citing “voting anomalies.” The resolution has no purpose (there’s no constitutional way to expunge impeachment) other than to sow further distrust of democracy.
It’s a story told a thousand times: Ambitious Republican official abandons principle to advance in Trump’s GOP. But perhaps nobody’s fall from promise, and integrity, has been as spectacular as the 37-year-old Stefanik’s. “I was just so shocked she would go down such a dark path,” said her former champion, Bridgeland. “No power, no position is worth the complete loss of your integrity. It was just completely alarming to me to watch this transformation. I got a lot of notes saying, ‘What happened to her?’ ” The answer is simple: “Quest for power,” Bridgeland said. “But power without principle is a pretty dark place to go. She wanted to climb the Republican ranks and she has, but … she’s climbed the ladder on the back of lies about the election that are undermining trust in elections, putting people’s lives at risk.”
As a candidate in 2014, Stefanik refused to sign Grover Norquist’s no-tax pledge, a Republican purity test. Then the youngest woman ever elected to Congress, she became a co-chair of the Tuesday Group of Republican moderates. She boasted about being among the most bipartisan lawmakers. She criticized Trump’s “insulting” treatment of women, his “untruthful statements,” and his proposed Muslim ban and border wall.
But Trump’s huge popularity in her upstate New York district changed all that. She became one of Trump’s most caustic defenders during his first impeachment. After Trump’s 2020 loss, she embraced the “big lie,” making a stream of false claims about voter fraud, court actions and voting machines, and urging the Supreme Court to reject the results.
When Bridgeland saw his former protegee’s lies about the election, “I was shattered. I was really heartbroken,” he told me. Alumni of Harvard’s IOP petitioned to remove Stefanik from its advisory committee, and Bridgeland signed it. “I had to,” he said, “because Constitution first.” Stefanik called her removal a “badge of honor” and a decision on the school’s part “to cower and cave to the woke left.”
Bridgeland, a career-long policy innovator who still considers himself a Republican, retains a flicker of hope that his former student might return to her early promise, recant the lies, and prove true Ralph Waldo Emerson’s belief that if a “single man plant himself indomitably on his instincts, and there abide, the huge world will come round to him.”
“People become totally ruined by their failure to stand up for the good and the true, but I do think she has the spark still and could awaken to it,” Bridgeland said. “It’s not too late.”
For our country’s sake, I wish I could believe that.
So back in September the BLS [the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics] released the monthly Jobs number. A terribly disappointing 234,000 Jobs +- . It was disappointing because the same economic analysts who could not see a Housing Bubble bigger than the Stay Puff Marshmallow man had predicted 300,000 + . The fact that it was as high or higher than all but a handful of the previous 120 months never seemed to dawn on the talking heads. In October there were 677,000 Jobs added. And at the same time the number for October was adjusted 200,000 higher. It took the media all of 10 seconds to shift the narrative to “oh but inflation” As stated by some CNBC talking head that day, inflation is an expectations game. If workers expect inflation they will ask for higher wages. If employers expect inflation they will charge more for goods and services. Inflation in September was all of 4.4 ,% high but not earth shaking. Then the (respectable) media ran stories of almost $6 dollar a gallon gas as if that was the norm. Of a Tex-ass couple who goes through 9 gallons of milk a week and was bankrupted by the cost (don’t ask about birth control). Of a Station owner in NJ who spends $1000s a week on gas for his 1970 muscle car and his 2000 Escalade.
Well the message was received, the expectation of inflation was created. Wages now contribute 8.5% of the inflationary spike. Raw materials and supply chain issues 27% of the inflation we see. And excess profits contribute 53% of the price hikes we are seeing. (EPI). It would seem the right people got the right message but it was not the American worker who in spite of all the hype does not have the power to demand wage increases on a broad based scale as they did in the past. In previous inflationary spikes inflation was driven 70% by wage increases . The media hype on inflation prior to the Ukraine war enabled corporations to profit vastly. The expectation was there. Corporate America hopped right on the band wagon. Don’t expect the corporate media to hop on board calling for an excess profits tax, or even to harp on those excess profits. Instead we will hear nonsense about low wage workers holding out for a living wage.
Was it a conscious conspiracy ? Probably not . Is it a combination of of group think and inferior reporting (IMHO) absolutely.
Moving on to Crime in NYC . In a nut shell if NYC was the safest big city in America in 2010 (according to Bloomberg) than how did it get unsafe in 2021 when every Crime Stat released by the NYPD is lower than 2010, when people felt the City was safe.
My favorite NYC crime category is rape. In 2021 there were 1491 reported rapes in NYC up from 1427 in 2020. Women be afraid be very afraid!!!. But wait there were 1755 in 2019 and 1791 rapes in 2018, when everyone thought the City was very safe.
The Right wing media generates a narrative and instead of countering it, the supposedly Liberal MSM run with the story. . Cowardly Democratic politicians who call themselves moderates hop right on board not wanting to seem like they are ignoring an issue.
If Trump was President every Republican would be calling inflation fake news and their Ivermectin downing base would be swallowing it hook line and sinker.
Christopher Hooks of the Texas Monthly attended Trump’s latest tour date in Texas and reviewed the show. It seems to be a political revival show, with expensive tickets and opportunities to spend more money, with no explanation of what the money’s for. You really should subscribe to the Texas Monthly. It’s informative and delightful about a politically key state.
On Saturday, the presumptive 2024 Republican presidential nominee came to Austin to speak at a day-long conference attended by some six or seven thousand of his most passionate fans and supporters. In Ye Olden Days, that first sentence would be followed by a description of the future candidate’s remarks on politics and policy. But this has never been the way to cover a Donald Trump speech, and yesterday there wasn’t any new material. The only mystery was why his fans would wait for so long to see him, lining up before dawn to secure good seats.
Saturday’s riffs included an extended description of the contracting process for the replacement of Air Force One, and the story of how Trump crushed ISIS with the help of a general he identified only as “Raisin’ Cain.” I have been to a dozen or so Trump rallies, and these are stories I’ve heard several times. As had members of the audience, apparently: when Trump described how nervous he was flying into Iraq to visit troops, a man called out the punch line—“perhaps I should have been given a medal”—before Trump got there. When the former president caught up, the man laughed twice as hard as his neighbors.
Far more interesting were Trump’s supporters and allies. The conference, featuring speakers such as rock musician Ted Nugent and attended by allies such as Texas attorney general Ken Paxton, showed a movement falling deeper into a suffocating circle of televangelist-adjacent scammery—while its adherents grow ever more comfortable with the idea of the need for violence to triumph over their political opponents. Things are going great, in other words.
In late January, Trump held a rally in Conroe at the high point of the Texas’s GOP primary season. That rally, like most of the former president’s, was held by the joint fund-raising committee of Save America, an extension of Trump’s former (and possible future) campaign. Huge billboards hawked Trump’s new book, but the event was relatively civic-minded. He read, from the teleprompter, a careful speech endorsing all the requisite Texas GOP candidates.
By contrast, the event Saturday in Austin, at the city’s convention center, was a project of the American Freedom Tour, a for-profit traveling show that brings speakers to MAGA-heads around the country. The purpose is not to back candidates or even to get out the vote but to sell tickets. Trump was the headliner, while the undercard was filled out with relative heavyweights like former secretary of state Mike Pompeo and lighter weights, such as Kevin Sorbo, the actor who once starred in the nineties shlock show Hercules: The Legendary Journeys. While the turnout of seven thousand might not be impressive in another context, it was large given that each attendee had paid quite a bit to be there. The cheapest tickets, for the seats at the very, very back of the warehouse space, sold for between $45 and $95.
Attendees could purchase a seat halfway to the stage with a ticket at the “VIP” or “Delegate” level, at some $800 to $1,000, respectively. Both came with access to a breakfast with Dinesh D’Souza—the conservative filmmaker whose new work, 2000 Mules, makes the case that the 2020 election was stolen—and an invitation to an afterparty with Donald Trump Jr. Only the Delegate level, though, came with a “Full Color American Freedom Tour Program,” which turned out to be a mostly blank booklet in which attendees were encouraged to write notes about speakers’ remarks. The best seats, however, were reserved for the “Presidential” ticket holders, who paid some $4,000. As it turned out, attendees could actually pretty much sit anywhere. I walked in without a wristband and sat in an empty seat that was supposed to cost $3,000.
With this kind of cash exchanging hands, you might think that the American Freedom Tour was a fundraiser for conservative causes. Many folks who shelled out for a ticket doubtless expected this to be the case. But there is no information anywhere on the tour website about how the proceeds will be distributed. It is not a PAC, of course. The money goes to the speakers—including Trump and Trump Jr., presumably—and the folks who put the rally together.
The only stated goal of the American Freedom Tour is to hold more incarnations of the American Freedom Tour. Its website’s FAQ doesn’t explain exactly what the money is used for, but it does helpfully emphasize that no recording of any kind is allowed inside. There is a cursory “our values” page that explains that the four pillars of American Freedom are “faith, family, finance, and freedom,” which each are given a short paragraph. “Men, in particular our fathers and husbands,” it says, “are under attack, being maligned and parodied in popular culture.”
In the past, I’ve written that the marketplace for well-compensated speakers and evangelists for the right—sometimes derided by the left as an ecosystem of “grift”—is an enormous asset for conservatives. If oleaginous liberal would-be demagogues could make a healthy living touring the country, all the while firing up Democrats in tent rallies, the party might be in a better place. But there are limits, man. My jaw dropped a little when Brian Forte, CEO of the American Freedom Tour, got on stage for a fund-raising appeal for his own company. A giant QR code appeared on screen directing attendees to a donation page, and the older folks around me struggled to make it work. Forte, a thirty-year veteran of the motivational speaking industry, was asking for money from attendees who had already paid to be there.
He did it in unbelievable terms. “Freedom is not free! Think about that,” he told the audience, appropriating a phrase typically used to refer to the sacrifice made by dead American soldiers. He urged the audience to donate at least $20 for Trump’s sake, but the donation page offered options of up to $5,000. “You can’t afford to not do this,” he reasoned, “because America is at stake!”
He went on. “If you see someone next to you who does not have their phone out,” he said, give them the hard sell. “Tap them on the shoulder and say, ‘Come on, let’s do this together.’ Go ahead and do that now. Everyone should have their phone out.”
He wasn’t done. “This is your chance. We need you now. The president needs you now! America needs you now! It’s now or never! We’re warriors on the front lines to save America,” he said. “This is a battle between good and evil!”
The spiel went on for several more minutes, without Forte ever saying what the donations were for. Anyone who has ever been exposed to an evangelist of the Righteous Gemstones variety recognizes this kind of preaching. “Give me money and you’ll get into heaven” becomes “give me money and the country will be saved,” and it’s a more effective approach when you don’t explain the how.
A three judge federal appeals court struck down California’s ban on selling assault weapons to those from 18-21. Two of the three judges were appointed by Trump. Ironic that this decision was issued a week before an 18-year-old used an AR-15 assault weapon to murder 10 people in Buffalo, New York. As of this date, there have been more than 200 multiple killings by firearms since the beginning of the year.
California enacted the law to reduce gun violence and protect the lives of its citizens. The Court’s reasoning was as vapid as the meanderings of the man who appointed them.
A U.S. appeals court ruled Wednesday that California’s ban on the sale of semiautomatic weapons to adults under 21 is unconstitutional.
In a 2-1 ruling, a panel of the San Francisco-based 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals said Wednesday the law violates the 2nd Amendment right to bear arms and a San Diego judge should have blocked what it called “an almost total ban on semiautomatic centerfire rifles” for young adults. “America would not exist without the heroism of the young adults who fought and died in our revolutionary army,” Judge Ryan Nelson wrote.
Nelson added: “Today we reaffirm that our Constitution still protects the right that enabled their sacrifice: the right of young adults to keep and bear arms.”
Trump’s toxic legacy, directed by Mitch McConnell and the Federalist Society, lives on in the numerous judges he appointed to the federal bench.
Steven Rosenfeld runs a project for the Independent Media Institute called “Voting Booth.” His posts are informative. This one reviews the Republican primary for Governor in Pennsylvania, where all the candidates swear fealty to Trump and the Big Lie.
He writes:
Another extreme wing of the Republican Party is emerging, and it’s not all Trump.
J.D. Vance, the Ohioan who grew up poor, joined the Marines, got a Yale law degree, wrote a bestseller about his hardscrabble upbringing, became a venture capitalist, and panned Donald Trump before becoming a convert to Trumpism and winning Ohio’s GOP primary for U.S. Senate, is one brand of 2022’s Republican candidates—a shapeshifter, as the New York Times’ conservative columnist Bret Stephens noted.
“He’s just another example of an increasingly common type: the opportunistic, self-abasing, intellectually dishonest, morally situational former NeverTrumper who saw Trump for exactly what he was until he won and then traded principles and clarity for a shot at gaining power,” Stephens said in a conversation with New York Times liberal columnist Gail Collins that was published on May 9.
But the GOP’s frontrunner for governor in Pennsylvania’s crowded May 17 primary field, state Sen. Doug Mastriano, is an entirely different Republican: a man of deep religious and political convictions who, if he wins the nomination and the general election, could be problematic for Americans who do not want elected officials to impose their personal beliefs on the wider public, whether the topic is abortion, vaccines, denying election results, or calling on God’s help to seize political power.
Mastriano’s current lead among nine candidates, with nearly 28 percent, could be taken two ways. He could be an extremist, like Trump in 2016, who won because too many contenders split the mainstream vote in a low-turnout primary. (In 2018, less than one-fifth of Pennsylvania’s voters turned out—suggesting that 2022’s winner may be nominated by as little as 5 percent of its state electorate.) Or, if Pennsylvania’s GOP were more firmly in control of its nomination process, Mastriano’s support might pale next to the establishment’s pick.
It remains to be seen if voters’ allegiances will shift as May 17approaches, especially as the Democrats’ likely nominee, Pennsylvania Attorney General Josh Shapiro, has signaled that Mastriano is the Republican he would most like to run against in the general election by launching TV attack ads. Centrist Republicans also are attacking Mastriano, but the Philadelphia Inquirer reports it’s not working.
Mastriano’s prospects, and his chances in the upcoming general election in the fall as another breed of 2022’s GOP mavericks, suggest that wider currents are roiling American politics, including, in this national battleground state, a mainstreaming of white Christian nativism.
Mastriano is a retired Army military intelligence officer and Army War College historian (whose error-filled 2014 biography of a World War I heroic Christian soldier embarrassedits university press). In uniform, he served overseas in Eastern Europe, Kuwait, Iraq, and Afghanistan. His career in elected office started in a predictable rightward fashion: proposing a bill to ban abortion. But after 2020’s election, he emerged from local ranks as an early and fervent member of Trump’s “Stop the Steal” cavalry who sought to subvert the certification of its winner, Pennsylvania native Joe Biden, who officially beat Trump by 80,000 votes.
Mastriano invited Big Lie propagandist Rudy Giuliani and others to legislative hearings. On January 6, 2021, he bussed Trump supporters to the U.S. Capitol, and newly surfaced videosshow that he followed them past police barriers. He opposed COVID-19 mandates, and in mid-2021 started calling for an Arizona-style “audit” of the state’s 2020 presidential election results. But unlike Arizona’s effort, led by the Cyber Ninjas’ Doug Logan, another deeply observant but more private Christian, Mastriano is vocal about how much his religion influences his politics.
A New Yorker profile by Eliza Griswold on May 9 characterizes Mastriano as a white Christian nationalist—a term he rejects—who, before the January 6 Capitol riot, “exhorted his followers to ‘do what George Washington asked us to do in 1775. Appeal to Heaven. Pray to God. We need an intervention.’”
On the 2020 election denial front, Mastriano is not alone. Although he was leading in a crowded field, there are other candidates for governor who have been falsely proclaiming that Democrats stole their state’s 2020 election and the presidency, and even forged Electoral College documents sent to Washington, D.C.
“If you thought Donald Trump’s endorsement of Dr. Mehmet Oz for Senate was the worst development in Pennsylvania’s 2022 GOP primaries, wait until you hear about the Republicans running for governor,” wrote Amanda Carpenter, a political columnist for the Bulwark, an anti-Trump Republican news and opinion website.
“They’re all election conspiracists.” she continued. “The only thing differentiating them is how far down the rabbit hole they go. And, there’s an excellent chance the nuttiest bunny of them all, Doug Mastriano, is going to win the primary.”
But Mastriano is not a mere Trump imitator. He is cut from an older, more gothic American political cloth: mixing a nativist piety, conspiratorial mindset, and authoritarian reflexes. The Philadelphia Inquirer characterized his unbending religiosity as belonging to the “charismatic strand of Christianity.” The New Yorker’s Griswold concluded that “Mastriano’s rise embodies the spread of a movement centered on the belief that God intended America to be a Christian nation.”
This political type is not new, wrote Kevin Phillips, a former Republican strategist and historian, in 2006 in American Theocracy: The Peril and Politics of Radical Religion, Oil, and Borrowed Money in the 21st Century, which detailed how George W. Bush’s evangelism tainted his presidency. However, Mastriano’s ascension, coupled with a Trump-fortified U.S. Supreme Court that’s poised to void a woman’s right to abortion, affirms today’s reemergence of a radical right.
“Christianity in the United States, especially Protestantism, has always had an evangelical—which is to say, missionary—and frequently a radical or combative streak,” wrote Phillips. “Some message has always had to be preached, punched, or proselytized.”
Add in Mastriano’s embrace of Trumpian authoritarianism, and the Keystone State’s leading GOP candidate for governor is proudly part of this pantheon. As the Inquirer wroteon May 4, he “often invokes Esther, the biblical Jewish queen who saved her people from slaughter by Persians, casting himself and his followers as God’s chosen people who have arrived at a crossroads—and who must now defend their country, their very lives.”
“It is the season of Purim,” Mastriano said, according to the paper’s report of a “March [campaign] event in Lancaster, referring to the Jewish holiday celebrated in the Book of Esther.” The gubernatorial candidate continued, “And God has turned the tables on the Democrats and those who stand against what is good in America. It’s true.”
A Heavy Hand?
It’s hardly new for Republicans to demonize Democrats. But under Trump, the enemies list has grown to include not just the media (Mastriano has barred reporters from rallies and abruptly ended interviews), but America’s “secular democracy” (as Kristin Kobes Du Mez, a professor of history at Calvin University and the author of Jesus and John Wayne, put it in Griswold’s piece for the New Yorker). This targeting includes the government civil servants who administer elections and the technology used to cast and count votes.
When it comes to election administration, if elected governor, Mastriano gets to appoint the secretary of state, the state’s top election regulator. He also has pledged to sign legislation to curtail voting with mailed-out ballots, which was how 2.6 million Pennsylvanians—about 38 percent of voters, including nearly 600,000 Trump voters—cast 2020’s presidential ballots. (As of May 10, nearly 900,000 voters had applied for a mailed-out ballot for 2022’s primary.) Such a policy shift, if enacted, would deeply inconvenience, if not discourage, voter turnout.
Mastriano, if elected, could also play an outsized role should the presidency in 2024 hinge on Pennsylvania’s 19 presidential electors. In the wake of the 2020 election, as Trump and his allies filed and lost more than 60 election challenge suits, one of their arguments was the U.S. Constitution decrees that state legislatures set the “time, place and manner” of elections. That authority could include rejecting the popular vote in presidential elections and appointing an Electoral College slate favoring the candidate backed by a legislative majority, which, in Pennsylvania, has been Republican since 2011’s extreme gerrymander.
Pennsylvania has been at the forefront of recent litigation over this power grab, the so-called “independent state legislature doctrine.” If elected governor, Mastriano could hasten a constitutional crisis, because under the Electoral Count Act of 1887, which was designed to say how competing slates of presidential electors are to be resolved, the governor—not the state legislature—has the final say, according to Edward B. Foley, a widely respected election law scholar.
“A key provision of the act says that if the [U.S.] House and Senate are split [on ratifying a state’s Electoral College slate], the governor of the state in dispute becomes the tiebreaker,” Foley wrote in 2016, when scholars were gaming post-Election Day scenarios in Trump’s race against Hillary Clinton. While speculating about 2024 is premature, there’s some precedent to heed.
After the 2020 election, 84 people in seven battleground states that Biden won, including Pennsylvania, sent listsof unauthorized Trump electors to the National Archives in Washington. Two of Mastriano’s primary opponents, ex-congressman Lou Barletta and Charlie Gerow, signed the fake Electoral College slates. Mastriano, however, did not.
With days to go before the primary, Josh Shapiro, the Democrats’ likely nominee for governor (he is running unopposed in the party primary) is already running anti-Mastriano TV ads seeking to tie the Republican candidate to Trump. (Incumbent Gov. Tom Wolf, a Democrat, faces term limits and cannot seek reelection.) Shapiro’s strategy to elevate Mastriano is “dangerous,” according to Inquirer columnist Will Bunch, as it affirms Mastriano’s credentials to voters and could backfire in the fall—in a replay of Trump’s 2016 victory in the state.
“A Gov. Mastriano, Shapiro’s new TV spot says, would effectively ban abortion in the Keystone State and, the narrator continues, ‘he led the fight to audit the 2020 election,’” Bunch wroteon May 8. “‘If Mastriano wins, it’s a win for what Donald Trump stands for.’ Cue the Satanic music, maybe the only clue that the Shapiro campaign thinks these are bad things. The commercial’s closing pitch: ‘Is that what we want in Pennsylvania?’”
“The answer, for far too many people in a state where the wife-cheating, private-part-grabbing xenophobe won by 44,292 votes in 2016, would, unfortunately, be ‘yes.’”
But a Mastriano primary victory would be more than the latest affirmation of the ex-president’s sway over swaths of today’s GOP. It heralds the rise of “radicalized religion,” as Phillips wrote in American Theocracyabout fundamentalists and George W. Bush’s presidency, merged with more recent Trumpian authoritarianism.
“Few questions will be more important to the 21st-century United States than whether renascent religion and its accompanying political hubris will be carried on the nation’s books as an asset or as a liability,” Phillips wrote. “While sermons and rhetoric propounding American exceptionalism proclaim religiosity an asset, a sober array of historical precedents—the pitfalls of imperial Christian overreach from Rome to Britain—tip the scales toward liability.”
Steven Rosenfeld is the editor and chief correspondent of Voting Booth, a projectof the Independent Media Institute. He has reported for National Public Radio, Marketplace, and Christian Science Monitor Radio, as well as a wide range of progressive publications including Salon, AlterNet, the American Prospect, and many others.
Voting Booth is a project of the Independent Media Institute.
Republican Congressman Tom Rice of South Carolina is very conservative. He is seeking his sixth term. He is one of ten Republicans who voted to impeach Trump after the January 6 insurrection. Trump is determined to defeat every single one of them. But Rice refuses to endorse the lie that January 6 was a peaceful protest or “normal political discourse,” as the Republican National Committee absurdly claimed.
RICE: Democracy is a fragile thing. And the one thing that we have to protect us from tyranny is our Constitution. Our Constitution has to be protected at all costs. Our framers, to protect us against tyranny, set up a separation of powers, where the legislature makes laws but can’t enforce them. The executive enforces laws but can’t make them. And the judiciary decides disputes. They wanted us, they charged us in the Federalist Papers, each branch, with jealously protecting their powers. because they knew that men were corrupt. If they had too much power concentrated in one place, that corruption would overwhelm them.
My friends, I was there on January 6th. I wasn’t absent. I was there. I saw the bomb squads diffusing bombs. I smell the tear gas. I was on the House floor when the glass was breaking. They were getting broken and pulled from the lines. When we got to the spot we were evacuated, Fox News was on TV. I was getting calls from back here, from friends at the news. As I was talking to the news media back here, I was saying, ‘Where is the president? Where is the president? Where is the president?’ but he never came on.
I knew he was going to come on and say the violence has got to stop, but he didn’t for four hours. Later, I asked my staff to pull the records on what he was doing at that time. He was sitting in his dining room next to the Oval Office, proud that these people were ransacking the capitol, beating up the Capitol police officers, he did nothing to stop it. In fact, 20 minutes after they were in the Capitol, he tweeted out, ‘Mike Pence doesn’t have courage.’ My friends, you can argue about whether his speech that morning was inciting or not, but, to me, that one tweet was incitement.
If they’d have gotten ahold of Mike Pence, we could have lost our democracy that day. So if — in my opinion, my opinion is that our Constitution is too precious to risk. The one difference between me and all those leaders back in Washington who said, ‘Oh, Donald Trump went too far. He should be impeached. He should be removed’ and voted the other way. I took the principled stand and I defended our Constitution.
Please open the link and read the whole piece. I probably disagree with Mr. Rice about issues, but he has my respect for defending the Constitution, truth, and reality.
Historian Heather Cox Richardson wrote a fascinating column about Steve Schmidt’s recent revelations about important political figures. Like the good historian she is, she connects the dots.
At home, a big story broke over the weekend, reminding us that the ties of the Republican Party to Russians and the effect of those ties on Ukraine reach back not just to former president Trump, but at least to the 2008 presidential campaign of Arizona senator John McCain.
Late Saturday night, political strategist Steve Schmidt, who worked on a number of Republican political campaigns including McCain’s when he ran for president in 2008, began to spill what he knows about that 2008 campaign. Initially, this accounting took the form of Twitter threads, but on Sunday, Schmidt put the highlights into a post on a Substack publication called The Warning. The post’s title distinguished the author from those journalists and members of the Trump administration who held back key information about the dangerous behavior in Trump’s White House in order to include it in their books. The post was titled: “No Books. No Money. Just the Truth.”
Schmidt left the Republican Party in 2018, tweeting that by then it was “fully the party of Trump. It is corrupt, indecent and immoral. With the exception of a few governors…it is filled with feckless cowards who disgrace and dishonor the legacies of the party’s greatest leaders…. Today the GOP has become a danger to our democracy and our values.” Schmidt helped to start The Lincoln Project, designed to sink Trump Republicans through attack ads and fundraising, in late 2019.
The apparent trigger for Schmidt’s accounting was goading from McCain’s daughter Meghan McCain, a sometime media personality who, after years of slighting Schmidt, recently called him a pedophile, which seems to have been a reference to the fact that a colleague with whom Schmidt started The Lincoln Project was accused of online sexual harassment of men and boys. Schmidt resigned over the scandal.
Schmidt was fiercely loyal to Senator McCain and had stayed silent for years over accusations that he was the person who had chosen then–Alaska governor Sarah Palin as McCain’s vice presidential candidate, lending legitimacy to her brand of uninformed fire-breathing radicalism, and about his knowledge of McCain’s alleged affair with a lobbyist.
In his tweetstorm, Schmidt set the record straight, attributing the choice of Palin to McCain’s campaign director and McCain himself, and acknowledging that the New York Times had been correct in the reporting of McCain’s relationship with the lobbyist, despite the campaign’s angry denial.
More, though, Schmidt’s point was to warn Americans that the mythmaking that turns ordinary people into political heroes makes us unwilling to face reality about their behavior and, crucially, makes the media unwilling to tell us the truth about it. As journalist Sarah Jones wrote in PoliticusUSA, Schmidt’s “broader point is how we, as Americans, don’t like to be told the truth and how our media so loves mythology that they work to deliver lies to us instead of holding the powerful accountable.”
Schmidt’s biggest reminder, though, was that the director of the 2008 McCain campaign was Richard (Rick) Davis, a founding partner of Davis Manafort, the political consulting firm formed in 1996. By 2003, the men were representing pro-Russia Ukrainian oligarch Viktor Yanukovych; in July 2004, U.S. journalist Paul Klebnikov was murdered in Moscow for exposing Russian government corruption; and in June 2005, Manafort proposed that he would work for Putin’s government in former Soviet republics, Europe, and the United States by influencing politics, business dealings, and news coverage.
From 2004 to 2014, Manafort worked for Yanukovych and his party, trying to make what the U.S. State Department called a party of “mobsters and oligarchs” look legitimate. In 2016, Manafort went on to lead Donald Trump’s campaign, and the ties between him, the campaign, and Russia are well known. Less well known is that in 2008, Manafort’s partner Rick Davis ran Republican candidate John McCain’s presidential campaign.
Schmidt writes that McCain turned a blind eye to the dealings of Davis and Manafort, apparently because he was distracted by the fallout when the story of his personal life hit the newspapers. Davis and Manafort were making millions by advancing Putin’s interests in Ukraine and eastern Europe, working for Yanukovych and Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska. Schmidt notes that “McCain spent his 70th birthday with Oleg Deripaska and Rick Davis on a Russian yacht at anchor in Montenegro.”
“There were two factions in the campaign,” Schmidt tweeted, “a pro-democracy faction and…a pro Russia faction,” led by Davis, who—like Manafort—had a residence in Trump Tower. It was Davis who was in charge of vetting Palin.
McCain was well known for promising to stand up to Putin, and Palin’s claim that she could counter the growing power of Russia in part because “[t]hey’re our next-door neighbors, and you can actually see Russia from land here in Alaska, from an island in Alaska” became a long-running joke (the comment about seeing Russia from her house came from a Saturday Night Live skit).
But a terrific piece in The Nation by Mark Ames and Ari Berman in October 2008 noted: “He may talk tough about Russia, but John McCain’s political advisors have advanced Putin’s imperial ambitions.” The authors detailed Davis’s work to bring the Balkan country of Montenegro under Putin’s control and concluded that either McCain “was utterly clueless while his top advisers and political allies ran around the former Soviet domain promoting the Kremlin’s interests for cash, or he was aware of it and didn’t care.”
Trump’s campaign and presidency, along with Putin’s deadly assault on Ukraine, puts into a new light the fact that McCain’s campaign manager was Paul Manafort’s business partner all the way back in 2008.
Note: Richardson has a list of sources at the end of her post. For some unknown reason, WordPress did not permit me to copy her notes. I inserted some but not all. Open the post to check the links.
As a native Texan, I have not had a lot of reasons to proud of my state lately. The leadership—Governor Gregg Abbott and Lt. Governor Dan Patrick—compete to see who is meanest. They pushed through a very restrictive abortion law that pays bounties to people who squeal on women who got an abortion (the bill turns citizens into the Stasi of East Germany or the neighborhood spies of Cuba or the morality police of Iran). Dan Patrick is a voucher zealot, whose bad idea gets knocked down by the Legislature regularly. Abbott recently brought up his dim thought of revisiting a 1982 Supreme Court decision that ordered Texas and other states to educate the children of undocumented immigrants. Abbott wants them to remain illiterate, which is likely to cost the state more in the long run than allowing them to go to school (his proposal is also inhumane, but decency and humanity are not part of his calculus.)
But here is some good news from Texas! The editorial board of the Houston Chronicle won a Pulitzer Prize for writing about Trump’s absurd claim that the 2020 election was rigged and stolen from him. His team of lawyers brought dozens of lawsuits claiming election fraud, but lost all of them, even when the judges were appointed by Trump, even twice before the U.S. Supreme Court, which has a lop-sided majority of Republican-appointed justices.
The full series is here. The Chronicle is behind a paywall, and you may have to subscribe (as I do) to read them all. But I couldn’t resist sharing my favorite, which was published on January 8, 2021. It calls on Senator Ted Cruz to resign because of his shameful behavior in promoting The Big Lie.
The editorial says:
In Texas, we have our share of politicians who peddle wild conspiracy theories and reckless rhetoric aiming to inflame.
Think U.S. Rep. Louie Gohmert’s “terror baby” diatribes or his nonsensical vow not to wear a face mask until after he got COVID, which he promptly did.
This editorial board tries to hold such shameful specimens to account.
But we reserve special condemnation for the perpetrators among them who are of sound mind and considerable intellect — those who should damn well know better.
None more than U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz.
A brilliant and frequent advocate before the U.S. Supreme Court and a former Texas solicitor general, Cruz knew exactly what he was doing, what he was risking and who he was inciting as he stood on the Senate floor Wednesday and passionately fed the farce of election fraud even as a seething crowd of believers was being whipped up by President Donald Trump a short distance away.
Cruz, it should also be noted, knew exactly whose presidency he was defending. That of a man he called in 2016 a “narcissist,” a “pathological liar” and “utterly amoral.”
Cruz told senators that since nearly 40 percent of Americans believed the November election “was rigged” that the only remedy was to form an emergency task force to review the results — and if warranted, allow states to overturn Joe Biden’s victory and put their electoral votes in Trump’s column.
Cruz deemed people’s distrust in the election “a profound threat to the country and to the legitimacy of any administrations that will come in the future.”
What he didn’t acknowledge was how that distrust, which he overstated anyway, was fueled by Trump’s torrent of fantastical claims of voter fraud that were shown again and again not to exist.
Cruz had helped spin that web of deception and now he was feigning concern that millions of Americans had gotten caught up in it.
Even as he peddled his phony concern for the integrity of our elections, he argued that senators who voted to certify Biden’s victory would be telling tens of millions of Americans to “jump in a lake” and that their concerns don’t matter.
Actually, senators who voted to certify the facts delivered the truth — something Americans haven’t been getting from a political climber whose own insatiable hunger for power led him to ride Trump’s bus to Crazy Town through 59 losing court challenges, past state counts and recounts and audits, and finally taking the wheel to drive it to the point of no return: trying to bully the U.S. Congress into rejecting tens of millions of lawfully cast votes in an election that even Trump’s Department of Homeland Security called the most secure in American history.
The consequences of Cruz’s cynical gamble soon became clear and so did his true motivations. In the moments when enraged hordes of Trump supporters began storming the Capitol to stop a steal that never happened, desecrating the building, causing the evacuation of Congress and injuring dozens of police officers, including one who died, a fundraising message went out to Cruz supporters:
“Ted Cruz here,” it read. “I’m leading the fight to reject electors from key states unless there is an emergency audit of the election results. Will you stand with me?”
Cruz claims the message was automated. Even if that’s true, it’s revolting.
This is a man who lied, unflinchingly, on national television, claiming on Hannity’s show days after the election that Philadelphia votes were being counted under a “shroud of darkness” in an attempted Democratic coup. As he spoke, the process was being livestreamed on YouTube.
For two months, Cruz joined Trump in beating the drum of election fraud until Trump loyalists were deaf to anyone — Republican, Democrat or nonpartisan journalists, not to mention state and federal courts — telling them otherwise.
And yet, Cruz insists he bears no responsibility for the deadly terror attack.
“Not remotely,” he told KHOU Thursday. “What I was doing and what the other members were doing is what we were elected to do, which is debating matters of great import in the chamber of the United States Senate.”
Since the Capitol siege, Cruz has condemned the violence, tweeting after the death of Capitol Police officer Brian Sicknick that “Heidi and I are lifting up in prayer” the officer’s family and demanding the terrorists be prosecuted.
Well, senator, those terrorists wouldn’t have been at the Capitol if you hadn’t staged this absurd challenge to the 2020 results in the first place. You are unlikely to be prosecuted for inciting the riots, as Trump may yet be, and there is no election to hold you accountable until 2024. So, we call for another consequence, one with growing support across Texas: Resign.
This editorial board did not endorse you in 2018. There’s no love lost — and not much lost for Texans needing a voice in Washington, either.
Public office isn’t a college debate performance. It requires representing the interests of Texans. In your first term, you once told reporters that you weren’t concerned about delivering legislation for your constituents. The more you throw gears in the workings of Washington, you said, the more people back home love you. Tell that to the constituents who complain that your office rarely even picks up the phone.
Serving as a U.S. senator requires working constructively with colleagues to get things done. Not angering them by voting against Hurricane Sandy relief, which jeopardized congressional support for Texas’ relief after Harvey. Not staging a costly government shutdown to repeal the Affordable Care Act in 2013 that cost the economy billions. Not collecting more enemies than friends in your own party, including the affable former House Speaker John Boehner who famously remarked: “I get along with almost everyone, but I have never worked with a more miserable son of a bitch in my life.”
We’re done with the drama. Done with the opportunism. Done with the cynical scheming that has now cost American lives.
Resign, Mr. Cruz, and deliver Texas from the shame of calling you our senator.
Amber Phillips reported in The Washington Post that the Michigan Republican Party selected a Trump-chosen person for the role of Secretary of State—the official who oversees and certifies elections. She sounds like a true believer in conspiracy theories:
Until the 2020 election, secretaries of state — at least at the state level — worked mostly under the radar, overseeing state elections and certifying the results. But then an election in a pandemic, combined with efforts by the sitting president to call into question the results, suddenly made the job a politically charged one.
That’s still true for the 2022 midterm elections. Donald Trump and his allies have recruited, supported and endorsed candidates who have denied the results of the 2020 election to run for secretary of state in key swing states. That has election-integrity experts worried that people who haven’t recognized basic election facts could be in charge of deciding who wins the 2024 presidential contest.
In Michigan, one of those candidates just got nominated to be on the ballot in November. Kristina Karamo is one of the loudest provocateurs among a dozen or so secretary of state candidates running on false election-fraud claims. She has Trump’s endorsement.
This weekend, in a sign of how much the grass roots of the Republican Party is with Trump on election fraud, the Michigan GOP voted to nominate her. In addition to denying election results without evidence, she has called schools “government indoctrination camps,” opposes the teaching of evolution and opposes coronavirus vaccines and childhood vaccines.
Diane Ravitch's blog 