Finally Friday Reads: The Hypocrisy of the Sanctimonious Season
Posted: December 15, 2023 Filed under: Foreign Affairs, Republican politics, U.S. Politics | Tags: #RepublicanCrazyTrain, Abortion is Healthcare, abortion rights, democracy threatened, republican political games, Theocratic Scotus 7 Comments
Still life with a cup on a tray, 1919, Duncan Grant
Good Day, Sky Dancers!
I’m getting ready to be one of the huddled masses who stays at home to avoid the insanity and commercialism of Crassmas season. Check my closets! No ugly sweaters here! Some significant feature articles in the so-called ‘national’ newspapers highlight the decades we’ve endured where a small theocratic cult has managed to capture institutions. Nothing like staying home this time of year with good reads and a good cup of coffee with your favorite music.
I had two doses of the season watching my granddaughters put up a series of ‘squishmallows’ onto one tree branch. These little stuffed plushies are the latest versions of beanie babies or whatever is terrifically overpriced but terribly necessary this year. I frankly had difficulty telling them from the plushies Temple had as a puppy that only cost a few dollars. Puppy toys aren’t generally designer-branded. I also got a photo of the two of them terrified and screaming on a store Santa’s lap, whose smile was fixed in place. I learned there’s such a thing as Santa trauma from BB. I heard my mother’s voice coming from my depths, asking, “What did you do to them?” Music on. Coffee hot. Now, for the reads.
So, let me start with a New York Times article that features the national trauma brought on by Theocratic Inquisitor Samuel Alito and his co-conspirators. “Behind the Scenes at the Dismantling of Roe v. Wade .”
Justice Barrett, selected to clinch the court’s conservative supermajority and deliver the nearly 50-year goal of the religious right, opposed even taking up the case. When the jurists were debating Mississippi’s request to hear it, she first voted in favor — but later switched to a no, according to several court insiders and a written tally. Four male justices, a minority of the court, chose to move ahead anyway, with Justice Kavanaugh providing the final vote.
Those dynamics help explain why the responses stacked up so speedily to the draft opinion in February 2022: Justice Alito appeared to have pregamed it among some of the conservative justices, out of view from other colleagues, to safeguard a coalition more fragile than it looked.
The Supreme Court deliberates in secret, and those who speak can be cast out of the fold. To piece together the hidden narrative of how the court, guided by Justice Alito, engineered a titanic shift in the law, The New York Times drew on internal documents, contemporaneous notes and interviews with more than a dozen people from the court — both conservative and liberal — who had real-time knowledge of the proceedings. Because of the institution’s insistence on confidentiality, they spoke on the condition of anonymity.
At every stage of the Dobbs litigation, Justice Alito faced impediments: a case that initially looked inauspicious, reservations by two conservative justices and efforts by colleagues to pull off a compromise. Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., a conservative, along with the liberal Justice Stephen G. Breyer, worked to prevent or at least limit the outcome. Justice Breyer even considered trying to save Roe v. Wade — the 1973 ruling that established the right to abortion — by significantly eroding it.
To dismantle that decision, Justice Alito and others had to push hard, the records and interviews show. Some steps, like his apparent selective preview of the draft opinion, were time-honored ones. But in overturning Roe, the court set aside more than precedent: It tested the boundaries of how cases are decided.
Justice Ginsburg’s death hung over the process. For months, the court delayed announcing its decision to hear the case, creating the appearance of distance from her passing. The justices later allowed Mississippi to perform a bait-and-switch, widening what had been a narrower attempt to restrict abortion while she was alive into a full assault on Roe — the kind of move that has prompted dismissals of other cases.
The most glaring irregularity was the leak to Politico of Justice Alito’s draft. The identity and motive of the person who disclosed it remains unknown, but the effect of the breach is clear: It helped lock in the result, The Times found, undercutting Chief Justice Roberts and Justice Breyer’s quest to find a middle ground.
In the Dobbs case, the court “barreled over each of its normal procedural guardrails,” wrote Richard M. Re, a University of Virginia law professor and former Kavanaugh clerk on a federal appellate court, adding that “the court compromised its own deliberative process.”
Still Life, Duncan Grant
It’s a really tough and long read but one that every person concerned with freedom and privacy and every woman should read. Four men were behind the ultimate push. Four bullies got the say over the women
With their waiting game, the justices had nearly broken a record: Dobbs was the second most re-listed case ever granted review.
But sometime before the announcement, Justice Barrett had switched her vote. Just four members of the court, the bare minimum, chose to grant, with Justice Kavanaugh taking the side of Justices Alito, Gorsuch and Thomas. They overrode five colleagues — including all the female justices — who had an array of concerns. The men appeared to be betting that Justice Barrett would ultimately side with them, pushing herinto a case she had not wanted to take.
Her reasons for the reversal are unclear. But as a professor in 2013, she had written a law review article laying out the kind of dilemma she faced in spring 2021. “If the court’s opinions change with its membership, public confidence in the court as an institution might decline,” she noted. “Its members might be seen as partisan rather than impartial and case law as fueled by power rather than reason.”
That July, with its audience before the court secure, Mississippi made the case more monumental, abruptly changing its strategy. “Roe and Casey are egregiously wrong,” the state’s main brief declared on its first page. It urged the justices to be bold. “The question becomes whether this court should overrule those decisions. It should.”
Still Life with Bookcase, Duncan Grant
The Washington Post article is also about Zealot bullies whose patriarchal, xenophobic, and racist religion let them do, say, and back anyone to enable the codification of their deeply hateful beliefs. ” Let’s just melt into some pleasant painting and escape the overarching desire to control everyone for a while.
“Why Bob Vander Plaats thinks some evangelicals can’t quit Trump.” Might as well face it; they’re addicted to hate. Vander Plaats is an evangelical leader in Iowa who is behind Desantis now. As if, Trump wasn’t a big enough bully and control freak for them. The interview is based on a poll from the Iowa-based paper The Des Moines Register. This was my family newspaper of choice growing up. Yes, I feel strongly about these people. I’m glad I’ve moved away from them. They make awful neighbors!
The Early: The poll also found 51 percent of likely caucus-goers who describe themselves as evangelicals support Trump. Do you see a divide between evangelical leaders like yourself and evangelical voters when it comes to Trump?
Vander Plaats: No, I really don’t know if I do. There’s some evangelicals [who] believe Trump of 2016 is going to be Trump of 2024. And I get that. I understand where they’d be like, “I’d rather have Trump than Joe Biden. I want to bring Trump back because Trump was good.” I’m not discounting that stuff at all. I’m just saying I’m looking at electability and who’s going to move us forward.
There may be a disconnect there. I don’t see a huge disconnect otherwise.
The Early: How do you think the Trump of 2024 would be different from the Trump of 2016?
Vander Plaats: First of all, day one, you’re really a lame duck, because you’re in your second term.
And who’s going to make up his team? I’m very concerned about that. A lot of his team members have been under litigation, and it’s been expensive for them. And if that’s the track record — “I’m going to go serve but then I’m going to get sued” — and there’s been no real propensity to say, “I’ve got [former Trump lawyer Rudy] Giuliani‘s back,” or “I’ve got [former White House chief of staff Mark] Meadows’s back” or “I’ve got [former Trump lawyer] Jenna Ellis’s back. It’s awfully hard now to recruit people to come in.
The Early: DeSantis signed a six-week abortion ban in Florida. He has said he would support a 15-week national ban as president. Trump has not committed to doing so. Why do you think so many evangelical voters are supporting Trump over DeSantis?
Vander Plaats: Trump is well known — 100 percent name ID. And he did things that they remember. And so you’re not going to leave him until you’re sold on somebody. There’s also part of the evangelical community — which I fully understand — they want a disrupter. They just want a disrupter: “This is wrong, and we need a disrupter just to shake it up.” And I think they view Trump being a champion in that.
Still life with Ginger Jar, Sugar Bowl, Oranges, and Bath Towel, Camille Pissarro
Hunker Down! There’s more. This is from Wired‘s David Gilbert. “Moms for Liberty Is Tearing Itself Apart. One of the Republican Party’s most successful grassroots organizations is being torn apart by scandal, including accusations of sexual assault.”
Moms for Liberty, the extremist “parental rights group,” was supposed to help the Republican Party regain the White House. In July, former president Donald Trump called the anti-LGBTQ group with 300 active chapters across the county a “grassroots juggernaut.” They are credited with forcing schools to lift mask mandates, banning books featuring LGBTQ characters, and supporting anti-trans laws and policies across the country. The group was on track to be instrumental to the GOP in the 2024 election.
But, over the course of the past five months, the group has begun to unravel.
Experts have questioned the claims about the size of the group’s membership, and individual members have been exposed as sex offenders and acolytes of the Proud Boys. Then, last month, Moms for Liberty cofounder Bridget Ziegler admitted in a police interview to being in a relationship with her husband and another woman. The interview was conducted after the woman in question alleged that Ziegler’s husband, Florida GOP chair Christian Ziegler, had raped her.
Ziegler’s husband has denied the allegations and refused to resign from his position as GOP chair, despite calls from Florida governor Ron DeSantis and other state Republicans to do so. Ziegler is also a member of the Sarasota County School Board, and has been instrumental in ushering in Florida’s Don’t Say Gay bill, pushing a Christian agenda in public schools, and banning the teaching of critical race theory. On Tuesday night, the board voted 4–1 in favor of a nonbinding resolution calling for her to resign, marking a rapid fall from grace for Ziegler and a potential fatal blow to Moms for Liberty.
“The impact of the Zeigler scandal has been enormous on the Moms for Liberty structure,” Liz Mikitarian, the founder of the activist group STOP Moms for Liberty, which closely tracks the group’s activities, tells WIRED. “We see chapters moving away or taking a break, chapter leadership questioning their roles and scrambling at the national level to save their ‘mom’ brand. The organization is trying to distance itself from the Zieglers, but this is impossible because the Zieglers are interwoven into the very fabric of Moms for Liberty.”
Still Life with Teapot (French: Nature morte avec pot de thé), 1902 and 1906, by Paul Cézanne.
Not quite done yet. This is from Politico. “Republicans struggle as they keep getting forced to talk about abortion. The contrast between GOP candidates’ maneuvering toward the middle and real-world events that remind the public of the party’s most aggressively anti-abortion faction shows how vexing the issue remains for the party.” Yes, abortion again! It’s that fucking important. It should be more than vexing because I watched you let these freaks get away with all kinds of things, including murder, these days. The analysis is by Madison Fernandez.
Republicans keep trying to come up with a coherent message on abortion. And real life keeps intruding.
On the campaign trail this week, Nikki Haley was pressed — yet again — to say whether she’d sign a national abortion ban into law. She dismissed the prospect of such a ban as an effort to “scare people” and jostled with Chris Christie over who had the more reasonable position on abortion.
As the two traded shots, though, they were upstaged by events far away from New Hampshire.
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, an ally of former President Donald Trump, drew national attention for blocking Kate Cox, whose fetus had a terminal condition, from having an abortion. And then, on Wednesday, the Supreme Court decided to take up a case that could affect access to mifepristone — a ruling that could get in the way of GOP efforts to sound reasonable on the issue.
The contrast between the GOP candidates’ maneuvering toward the middle and the real-world events that remind the public of the party’s most aggressively anti-abortion faction shows how vexing the issue remains for the party. Eighteen months after the fall of Roe v. Wade, even Republicans who try to moderate — or, like Donald Trump, try not to talk about it — are struggling mightily to get on the right side of popular opinion.
“We have to humanize the situation and deal with it with compassion,” Haley told reporters at Tuesday’s New Hampshire town hall when asked about the Texas case.
The conversation around abortion rights has remained front and center since the Supreme Court overturned Roe last year — from Republicans’ ongoing debate about a national abortion ban to off-year elections reemphasizing the salience of abortion rights for voters.
Republicans continue struggling to find a position they can sell to both their base and the general public, a point that Christie stressed at a New Hampshire town hall on Wednesday: “The voters in this state have a right to know where [Haley] stands, not just her happy talk,” he said. “She wants to be everything to everybody on that issue.”
Haley’s comments on the Cox case in Texas stake out a less aggressive position on abortion than some of her fellow Republicans — and it’s not the first time she has taken such a stance. In November’s GOP presidential debate, Haley urged Republicans to be “honest” about the feasibility of enacting a federal abortion ban.
Still Life with a Pewter Jug and Pink Statuette,
Henri Matisse. 1910
Ah, I’m thankful today for Hazelnut Community Coffee and the music of Claude Debussy. Moving on. This is from Vox. “What Trump has already taken from us. Democracy is a culture — and Trump is destroying it.” This analysis is written by
Democracy has grown and matured by turning into a self-fulfilling prophecy: It persists because everyone in a society believes it should and will exist. If democratic culture dims, democracy’s prospects dim with it.
The United States, the first country to claim the mantle of democracy in the modern era, has long had an exceptionally strong democratic culture. Belief in democratic ideals, liberal rights, and the basics of constitutional government are so fundamental to American identity that they’ve been collectively described as the country’s “civil religion.”
Yet today, America’s vaunted democratic culture is withering before our eyes. American democracy, once seemingly secure, is now in so much trouble that 75 percent of Americans believe that “the future of American democracy is at risk in the 2024 presidential election,” according to a study by the Public Religion Research Institute and the Brookings Institution.
This withering took off during Donald Trump’s rise to power and has continued apace in his post-presidency. The more he attacks the foundations of the democratic system, the less everyone — both his supporters and his opponents — believe American democracy is both healthy and likely to endure.
Moreover, he has birthed an anti-democratic movement inside the Republican Party dedicated to advancing his vision (or something like it). These Republicans vocally and loudly argue American democracy is a sham — and that dire measures are justified in response. This faction is already influential, and will likely become more so given its especial prominence among the ranks of young conservatives.
As worrying as the prospect of a second Trump term is, the damage he and his allied movement have already done to American democratic culture is not hypothetical: It’s already here, it’s getting worse, and it will likely persist — even if Trump loses in 2024.
Put differently, Trump has already robbed us of our sense of security and faith in our democracy. The consequences of that theft are not abstract, but rather ones we’ll all have to deal with for years to come.
Winter Flowers William Henry Hunt, c.1850
The nations of NATO–of which we are still one–are coming to grips with having anti-democratic Hungary in its midsts as it looks to include Ukraine among its members. Hungary is taking active steps along with the Republican Party here that loves itself some Victor Orban to defund Ukraine’s freedom fight. This is a sad statement. This is from the BBC. “Hungary blocks €50bn of EU funding for Ukraine.”
Hungary – which maintains close ties with Russia – has long opposed membership for Ukraine but did not veto that move.
Mr Orban left the negotiating room momentarily in what officials described as a pre-agreed and constructive manner, while the other 26 leaders went ahead with the vote.
He told Hungarian state radio on Friday that he had fought for eight hours to stop his EU partners but could not convince them. Ukraine’s path to EU membership would be a long process anyway, he said, and parliament in Budapest could still stop it happening if it wanted to.
Talks on the financial package ended in the early hours of Friday. EU leaders said negotiations would resume early next year, reassuring Kyiv that support would continue.
Speaking later that day, European Council President Charles Michel said he was “confident and optimistic” the EU would fulfil its promise to support Ukraine.
Belgian Prime Minister Alexander De Croo echoed him: “The message to Ukraine is: we will be there to support you, we just need to figure out a few of the details together.”
Mr Michel had earlier confirmed that all but one EU leader had agreed on the aid package and wider budget proposals for the bloc – although Sweden still needed to consult its parliament. He vowed to achieve the necessary unanimity for the deal.
A long delay in financial aid for the country would cause big problems for Ukraine’s budget, Kyiv-based economist Sergiy Fursa told the BBC.
“It pays for all social responsibilities of the government – wages for teachers, doctors for pensions,” he said.
Ukraine is also desperately seeking the approval of a $61bn US defence aid package – but that decision is also being delayed because of major disagreements between Democrat and Republican lawmakers.
Ukraine’s counter-offensive against Russia’s occupying forces ground to a halt at the start of winter, and there are fears that the Russians could simply outgun Ukraine.
Olena Zelenska, Ukraine’s first lady, warned in a BBC interview last week that Ukrainians were in “mortal danger” of being left to die without further Western support.
On Thursday, President Putin mocked Ukraine and claimed Western “freebies” were running out.
Still Life against the Light, Henri Matisse, 1899
NATO is opening possible membership to Ukraine. President Biden, himself, says Ukraine will join NATO in the future while Trump wants to withdraw the U.S. from the organization. The U.S. Senate is still trying to get aid to the war-torn nation. This is from HuffPost. “Senate Sticks Around To Help Ukraine As House Republicans Skip Town. A bipartisan deal that includes sharper immigration limits and a tougher border policy in exchange for U.S. aid to Ukraine is proving elusive on Capitol Hill.” It seems they’ve forgotten the whole Prince of Peace thing surrounding this season, like so many.
The Senate delayed the start of its holiday break on Thursday to allow for more time to reach a deal on President Joe Biden’s emergency spending bill that lawmakers hope will pair U.S. assistance to Ukraine with major immigration reforms.
The upper chamber is expected to return to work on Monday. Meanwhile, the GOP-controlled House recessed and isn’t scheduled to return until Jan. 9, 2024, ensuring that critical military and financial assistance to Ukraine to defend against ongoing Russian aggression won’t be approved by Congress and delivered to Kyiv for at least another month.
“We have to get this done,” Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) insisted in a speech on the Senate floor on Thursday. “Our Republican colleagues who have said action on the border is so urgent should have no problem with continuing to work next week.”
“We know the world is watching,” he added. “We know autocrats like [Russian President Vladimir] Putin and [Chinese President Xi] Jinping are hoping for us to fail. So we need to try with everything we have to get the job done.”
Fa la la la la, la la la la … peace on earth, goodwill to everyone! I’ll be at home if you need me!
What’s on your reading and blogging list today?
Mostly Monday Reads: Asymmetric Political and Judicial Warfare
Posted: December 11, 2023 Filed under: open thread, Republican politics, U.S. Politics | Tags: asymmetric conflict 13 Comments
John Buss (@repeat1968) says Cat Turd blocked him so the X chaos agent missed this epic rendering.
Asymmetry is a strategy in warfare. Also, the strategy of this sort of warfare is asymmetrical. I will use this conflict type and its literature to posit a political theory on my own. Are you ready? I believe that the reason that Trump and his White Christian Nationalists have been so successful is that they use an asymmetric strategy with our political and judicial institutions, and they act asymmetrically. It’s the chaos and the show that matters. It’s also impacted the media. You cannot attempt to deal with the MAGA folks in the historical, democratic, and constitutional framework. Their approach to attacks on the traditional context of our institutions is asymmetric. You cannot deal with it using only the old frameworks that these institutions traditionally employ.
I found a lot of examples in the headlines to support this. This quote is from the National Defense University Press. It’s dated September. 30, 2014, so it’s right when we dealt with the Taliban, Afghanistan, and Iraq with our historical conflict strategies for a period. Its title is “Asymmetry Is Strategy, Strategy Is Asymmetry,” and is written by Lukas Milevski in Joint Force Quarterly 75. Just as this author states his argument thusly: ” War has allegedly now been transformed from a regular, conventional, purportedly symmetric exercise into an irregular, unconventional, asymmetric event, which must be understood anew.”
Form over Substance
Theorists of contemporary conflict, whether describing asymmetric or unconventional wars, war among the people, or other iterations of modern armed conflict, usually posit significant change in the character, if not actual nature, of war. Many of them accurately identify and analyze the characteristics of modern interventions. In perceiving significant differences between modern war and wars past, however, they caricature historical conflict.
Thus, Rupert Smith argues that “war as cognitively known to most non-combatants, war as battle in a field between men and machinery, war as a massive deciding event in a dispute in international affairs: such war no longer exists.”4 Martin van Creveld propounds the notion that “the demise of conventional war will cause strategy in its traditional, Clausewitzian sense to disappear.”5 Fourth-generation warfare theorists such as T.X. Hammes identify generations of warfare with particular styles of conducting war; third-generation warfare is, for example, maneuver warfare, and fourth-generation warfare Thus, Rupert Smith argues that “war as cognitively known to most non-combatants, war as battle in a field between men and machinery, war as a massive deciding event in a dispute in international affairs: such war no longer exists.”4 Martin van Creveld propounds the notion that “the demise of conventional war will cause strategy in its traditional, Clausewitzian sense to disappear.”5 Fourth-generation warfare theorists such as T.X. Hammes identify generations of warfare with particular styles of conducting war; third-generation warfare is, for example, maneuver warfare, and fourth-generation warfare “uses all available networks—political, economic, social, and military—to convince the enemy’s political decision makers that their strategic goals are either unachievable or too costly for the perceived benefit. It is an evolved form of insurgency.”6
You could posit that what is being called an attack on democracy also “uses all available networks—political, economic, social, and military—to convince the enemy’s political decision makers that their strategic goals are either unachievable or too costly for the perceived benefit. It is an evolved form of insurgency.” We can see the chaotic impact of diverse media outlets, including social media and streaming outlets. Tucker Carlson is ready to start one just in time for the primary season. How many alternative ‘news’ sources that weren’t even dreamed about before Fox News are now available?
Rather than having discussions on how disturbing this all is, we need to find a new approach, just like the British did when they got mowed down in the French-Indian Wars by lining up in columns when their enemy ambushed them from trees and bushes. Yes, I am an academic who is always challenging and looking for new theories. It comes with the job and the training. Here’s my current evidence.
Let’s start with the challenge to our judicial system. This analysis is provided by Jose Pagliery, writing for The Daily Beast. “Trump Has Found a Dangerous Workaround to Gag Orders. Donald Trump will have a number of opportunities to violate gag orders in the coming months. He may have just found a dangerous loophole.”. Who among us is not frustrated by the lack of our laws to shut this man up as he threatens everyone in sight?
Donald Trump is, once again, outmaneuvering the American court system.
No, his New York bank fraud trial is unlikely to end favorably for the former president. But that trial is quickly becoming a blueprint for defying gag orders—an issue that will only become more pressing as several criminal cases loom on the horizon.
Trump’s strategy has been simple: say whatever he wants, inspire a gag order, appeal the decision, and even if the gag order is upheld, refuse to delete the social media posts he made during the confusion.
Trump then watches his old posts take on a life of their own, inspiring violent threats against his intended targets while he quietly sits by.
Due to a layered series of court appeals, it’s an open question whether the Republican 2024 frontrunner is technically violating the law. But he’s essentially gotten away with ignoring the restriction.
Catherine Ross, a professor emeritus at George Washington University Law School, said the situation is clearly a preview of what’s to come as Trump faces criminal trials in Washington, New York, South Florida, and possibly even Georgia next year.
“Absolutely. We can fully expect anything that Trump thinks worked for him once, he will use again. He is testing, he is refining, and one would even speculate that he is issuing warnings to other judges: ‘You can’t tie me down. I’m impervious,’” she told The Daily Beast.
The nature of the larger threat was explicitly laid out on Friday, when a federal appellate court in Washington warned that in the D.C. case “some aspects of Mr. Trump’s public statements pose a significant and imminent threat to the fair and orderly adjudication of the ongoing criminal proceeding, warranting a speech-constraining protective order.”
But his ongoing bank fraud trial in New York shows that he knows no bounds.
Hugo Lowell writes this for The Guardian. “Trump tests federal gag order with attack on Bill Barr: ‘He was a coward.’ Audience at gala event included allies that Trump is expected to tap for top roles should he be re-elected next year.” Trump’s MAGA deplorables do not care what he does. They only love the vitriol spewing from his mouth. How does a democratic republic work when somewhere between 20 to 40 percent of the voting public don’t care if Trump’s new appointees will act totally outside the law? Doesn’t this seem like a form akin to terrorism without the vest bombs?
Donald Trump tested the contours of his gag order in the federal criminal case over his efforts to overturn the 2020 election results, assailing his former attorney general and potential trial witness William Barr in remarks at a Saturday night New York gala event.
“I make this commitment to you tonight: we will not have Bill Barr as our attorney general, is that OK?” Trump said as he discussed a potential second presidency. “He was a coward. He was afraid of being impeached.”
The US court of appeals for the DC circuit notably ruled days before that Trump remains barred from attacking potential trial witnesses in the 2020 election interference case pending against him in Washington as long as his attacks do not involve their participation in the criminal investigation or trial proceedings.
Under that standard, it was unclear whether Trump directly violated the conditions of the gag order, which he has vowed to appeal to the US supreme court. But it tested the restriction’s scope and cast into doubt his ability to stay clear of being held in contempt.
The remark about Barr came during a speech heavy with resentment about Trump’s four criminal indictments and vows for revenge before an audience that included allies he is expected to tap for top justice department roles should he be re-elected next year to the White House.
Trump compared himself again to the legendary mob boss Al Capone. But he appeared to press the point more in front of his most loyal allies, including Kash Patel – widely considered a candidate for FBI or CIA director – and Jeffrey Clark, a former justice department official who has himself been indicted.
Donald Trump and Steve Bannon were giving each other big bear hugs at the event. Bannon is a flame thrower if there ever was one.
Still, the Special Counsel persists. This is from NBC News , and it’s breaking news. “Special counsel asks Supreme Court to immediately decide Trump immunity question. A federal judge had rejected former President Donald Trump’s immunity claim over his prosecution in election interference case.” How broken is the Supreme Court with the assymetric strategies used by McConnell to get the worst appointees ever its bench?
Special Counsel Jack Smith on Monday asked the Supreme Court to immediately step in to decide whether former President Donald Trump has immunity from prosecution for his actions seeking to overturn the 2020 election.
“This case presents a fundamental question at the heart of our democracy: whether a former President is absolutely immune from federal prosecution for crimes committed while in office,” Smith wrote in the court filing.
Smith said it was “of imperative public importance” that the high court decide the question so that Trump trial, currently scheduled for March, can move forward as quickly as possible.
On Dec. 7, U.S. District Court Judge Tanya Chutkan, who is presiding over the election interference case, denied Trump’s motion to dismiss his the indictment on presidential immunity and constitutional grounds, prompting Trump to appeal and ask for the case to be put on hold.
In order to prevent a delay, Smith is seeking to circumvent the appeals process by asking the Supreme Court to take up the case and decide the issue on an expedited basis.
Smith asked the court to order Trump to respond by Dec. 18 and then immediately act on his request. Under the timeline proposed by Smith, the court — if it decides to step in — could hear arguments and issue a ruling in a matter of weeks.
This might be a big fucking deal if things work as were designed in the Constitution.
I laughed as I read that Wall Street Donors were coalescing behind Niki Haley, thinking that hiding radical policy plans behind a normal face was going to go anywhere. What worked with Reagan and the Bushes doesn’t work anymore. Their voters don’t want policies. They want pogroms of chaos and destruction. This is from Politico. The analysis is by Sam Sutton. I’m pretty convinced, and so is the DNC, because that’s what they say in volunteer Zoom calls to us to say that the only way to stop this is to overwhelm them in the polls. But, still, strategic gerrymandering has brought us unequal voter power. “Wall Street donors dreamed of a Trump alternative. Now they’re waking up. Setting aside Trump’s recent noodling on what he could accomplish in a one-day dictatorship, markets are increasingly wary of how U.S. political disruptions can ripple across the global financial system.”
Wall Street’s top GOP donors are slowly realizing that former President Donald Trump is all-but-certain to clinch the presidential nomination. While billionaires and their strategists continue to throw Hail Marys, they’re also thinking about when to throw in the towel.
“The street still hopes for somebody else,” Thomas Peterffy, the GOP megadonor and founder of Interactive Brokers, told POLITICO from the sidelines of the Goldman Sachs U.S. Financial Services Conference last week.
The odds are exceedingly narrow, even with former U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley’s recent surge in the polls. If Haley, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis or another Republican fails to overtake Trump, Peterffy said, he still hopes for a brokered GOP convention — which hasn’t happened since Thomas Dewey was on the ballot in 1948 — or a viable, as-yet unannounced No Labels candidate.
The risks of a second Trump presidency are “incalculable and unpredictable,” he said. Of course, Peterffy has previously gone on record saying that he would likely vote for Trump in 2024 if the former president clinches the nomination.
Peterffy’s comments reflect the collective angst of Wall Street Republicans whose views on Trump are completely divorced from those of the GOP base, according to conversations with more than a dozen bankers, attorneys, political consultants and asset managers. There was a period when it seemed as though Trump might fade; allowing a younger, calmer alternative to take his place. Instead, the opposite happened.
A series of criminal indictments have had no effect on his popularity. Some believe it crystallized his support. Now, unless Haley or DeSantis pull off the impossible — or if there’s a deus ex machina event that upends the political world — high-dollar GOP donors will soon face an uncomfortable decision as to how to proceed.
“My sense is Wall Street will be somewhat split on a Trump-Biden rematch,” former Republican Sen. Bob Corker of Tennessee told POLITICO. “The border issue, foreign policy, regulation, trade, stability and mental clarity will weigh on people in varying ways.”
For some, the thought of a second Trump term will be enough to keep them off the field. Wall Street likes predictability. And while some of the finance industry’s kingmakers might blanch at the thought of four more years of President Joe Biden, the potential dysfunction of a second Trump term could raise existential questions about the future of American democracy.
Again, we cannot analyze any of these folks trying to take this all like a slightly morphed usual. Once more, I make a comparison to Asymmetric Warfare and the article up-top.
Hew Strachan has suggested that “the real problem may well be that our policy has failed to recognise war’s true nature, and so has mistaken changing characteristics for something more fundamental than they actually are.”7 This mischaracterization is frequently manifested in the belief, as apparent before Iraq in 2003 and during some of the advocacy for intervention in Syria in 2013, that war is not adversarial, that enemies do not reciprocally interact with, and against, each other. The character of any war is not unilaterally set by any one implicated polity, but by the reciprocal hostility of all those involved. Thus, in not accounting for the enemy’s own initiative against us, the Western powers are blindsided by actions that are then interpreted as integral to the structure of contemporary war rather than as the consequence of something inherent in war, which is more fundamental and eternal.
Substitute the words ‘MAGA movement and Trump’ for the word ‘war.’ As for the Media, I can only shake my head when I read things like this from CNN. “CNN Polls: Trump leads Biden in Michigan and Georgia as broad majorities hold negative views of the current president.” It’s hard to know what to do with polls other than to look at the underlying movements as something to deal with in a strategy designed to approach the asymmetry of fact and poll findings.
Trump’s margin over Biden in the hypothetical matchup is significantly boosted by support from voters who say they did not cast a ballot in 2020, with these voters breaking in Trump’s favor by 26 points in Georgia and 40 points in Michigan. Those who report having voted in 2020 say they broke for Biden over Trump in that election, but as of now, they tilt in Trump’s favor for 2024 in both states, with Biden holding on to fewer of his 2020 backers than does Trump.
Those numbers hint at possible challenges for both candidates in the long campaign ahead. Trump’s advantage rests on the assumption that he can both maintain support among a fickle, politically disengaged group and convince them to actually vote, while Biden will need to win back the support of disaffected former backers who show little excitement about his reelection bid.
Biden’s struggles in both states are apparent in voters’ impressions of his performance as president, and their views on how his policy positions, ability to understand their problems, stamina and sharpness fail to live up to their image of an ideal president.
Overall, just 35% in Michigan and 39% in Georgia approve of Biden’s job performance, the surveys find, and majorities in both states say his policies have worsened economic conditions in the country (54% in Georgia, 56% in Michigan).
Those grim numbers partially reflect softness among his base: About one-quarter of Democratic and Democratic-leaning registered voters in each state disapprove of Biden, and a little more than 4 in 10 say his policies have not helped the country’s economy. Biden’s campaign is working to sell voters on the success of his economic agenda, with a recently launched ad in Michigan focused on small businesses and the middle class.
I’m surprised at Michigan given how tremendously popular their Governor, Gretchen Whitmer, polls. I’m going to leave you one more thought on strategies against assymetric conflicts from the Joint Force Quarterly journal. It speaks to the idea that continuing advantage in something may not be enough to resolve the conflict.
Strategy may be thus cast in a more absolute manner than merely the achievement of continuing advantage. Rather, strategy may be interpreted as the generation and exploitation of asymmetry for the purposes of the war. Roger Barnett complains that:
asymmetries arise if opponents enjoy greater freedom of action, or if they have weapons or techniques available to them that one does not. Perpetrators seek to void the strengths of their adversaries and to be unpredictable. They endeavor to take advantage of an ability to follow certain courses of action or to employ methods that can be neither anticipated nor countered effectively.10
Yet this is the very essence of strategy. Strategy is an adversarial act; the enemy also has a will, a capability, and a vote in the outcome. This reciprocal nature of strategy is a primary source of strategy’s nonlinearity, for defeat may beget renewed defiance and alternative attempts to achieve one’s goals, rather than the desired submission. Thus, Edward Luttwak, for instance, identifies the very pinnacle of strategic performance as “the suspension, if only brief, if only partial, of the entire predicament of strategy.”11 The predicament of strategy is the enemy. The pinnacle, therefore, is the removal of the enemy’s ability, however temporarily, to influence outcomes. Suffering from a position of weakness in an asymmetric relationship restricts one’s abilities to influence outcomes based on that relationship. To generate asymmetry effectively is to be, although not necessarily the only way to be, a skilled strategist.
Can the courts, the political process, and the media defang this enemy of democracy? And how? Thankfully, political cartooning already acts asymmetrically.
Anyway, some thing to think about, discuss, and question.
What’s on your reading and blogging list today?
I got a Holiday Card from The White House today so I thought I’d share it with you!
Thursday Reads: I read the News today, Oh Boy
Posted: December 7, 2023 Filed under: Republican politics, U.S. Politics | Tags: @repeat1968, Ayatollah Mike, fake electors, George Santos HBO, Georgia fake electors, Grifters, Here is the news, Kevin McCarthy PAC funds, political scandals, Rep Jim Jordan 8 Comments
John Buss @repeat1968
Good Day, Sky Dancers!
Is it just me, or do all news outlets have headlines that seem more appropriate for tabloids lately? I’m old enough to remember the late Fanne Fox, the stripper known as “the Argentine Firecracker” who brought down Representative Wilbur Mills in the 70s. I also remember toe-tapping Larry Craig and his adventure in the Minneapolis Airport back in 2007. Remember Mark Foley and the Senate Page Scandal in 2005? Oh, and then there was my Congressman Bill Jefferson and his refrigerated money from Nigeria in his refrigerator. These scandals were shocking in their days but are quaint compared to what we’ve got going on today.
Most of these folks would just not run for re-election and check themselves into some place to be rehabbed for alcohol abuse. None of them even have the slightest bit of shame today. HBO is already making a George Santos movie. At least The Hill is calling him a ‘disgraced politician.’
HBO is reportedly set to produce a movie about Rep. George Santos (R-N.Y.), who was just expelled from Congress after a damning ethics report.
Deadline reported on Monday that the network has optioned the rights to author Mark Chiusano’s new book on the disgraced politician.
Chiusano’s book, “The Fabulist: The Lying, Hustling, Grifting, Stealing, and Very American Legend of George Santos,” was published last week.
Former “Veep” and “Succession” producer Frank Rich and Mike Makowsky, writer-producer of HBO award-winning film “Bad Education,” will executive produce the Santos’ film project with Chiusano serving as a consulting producer, per Deadline.
The unnamed film, now under development, will focus on the meteoric rise of Santos, who won his state’s 3rd Congressional District in last November’s midterm elections. Santos became a national name after damning reports that he invented much of his biography, followed by criminal charges of financial fraud.
John Buss @repeat1968
I guess I wasn’t surprised that Santos was supported by Republican Leadership and most of the caucus during the vote to expel him. Holding power was even more important to them than being hypocritical in their positions on their GLBTQ+ policies and hatred of Drag Queens. However, we have had record-setting censures coming out of there, including this one for Rep. James Bowman of New York. This is reported by NBC News. “House censures Rep. Jamaal Bowman for pulling fire alarm. Bowman admitted to activating the alarm in September as Republican lawmakers sought to vote on a government funding measure, but said it was a mistake he made while in a rush to open a door.”
The House voted Thursday to censure Rep. Jamaal Bowman, D-N.Y., for pulling a fire alarm in a congressional building while the chamber was in session in September to consider a vote to fund the government.
The 214 to 191 vote was largely along party lines, with Democratic Reps. Chris Pappas of New Hampshire, Jahana Hays of Connecticut and Marie Gluesenkamp Perez of Washington joining all other Republicans in voting yes.
Democratic Reps. Glenn Ivey of Maryland, Susan Wild and Chrissy Houlahan of Pennsylvania, Deborah Ross of North Carolina and Republican Rep. Andy Harris of Maryland voted present.
Rep. Lisa McClain, R-Mich., on Tuesday introduced the privileged resolution to censure Bowman, giving the House two legislative days to act on it. The House voted down a Democratic motion Wednesday to kill McClain’s resolution in a party-line vote of 201 to 216.
Bowman admitted to pulling the alarm in the Cannon House Office Building in September as Republican lawmakers sought to vote on the spending measure. He said in a statement after the incident that he accidentally activated the alarm after he came across a door that was typically open for votes, but would not open that day.
Bowman pleaded guilty in October to one count of falsely pulling a fire alarm. Under a deferred prosecution agreement, he was ordered to pay a $1,000 fine and write an apology to the U.S. Capitol Police chief, after which prosecutors would dismiss the charge pending no further violations of the law.
Oh! The Humanity!
The retiring, short-lived Former Speaker Kevin McCarthy has achieved this headline today from the L.A. Times. “Kevin McCarthy uses PAC to lavish cash on high-end resorts, private jets and fine dining.” His inspiration must be Associate Justice Uncle Tom Clarence.
Rambling above the rust-colored cliffs of the Palos Verdes Peninsula, the Terranea Resort is known for its ocean views, world-ranked spa and villas that can command $3,000 a night or more.
The property is less well known as a gathering spot for federal elected officials and the campaign donors they wine and dine.
But one politician was very familiar with the luxurious resort: former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy. In 2 ½ years, the Bakersfield Republican’s election committees dropped nearly a quarter of a million dollars at Terranea, with most of the money coming from a thinly regulated leadership PAC, a Times investigation has found.
As he exits Congress two months after his historic ouster as speaker, political obituaries tout McCarthy’s skills as a prolific fundraiser on behalf of Republican candidates. Also setting him apart from other congressional leaders was his roughly decade-long pattern of using his Majority Committee PAC to spend lavishly on hotels, private jets and fine dining establishments, according to a Times analysis of campaign finance records on file with the Federal Election Commission.
From 2012 through last June, McCarthy’s PAC shelled out more than $1 million on hotels, private air travel and eateries, the FEC records show. That’s more than double the combined total spent by the leadership PACs of the seven other lawmakers who’ve held the top House and Senate positions for their parties during all or part of that period, according to the Times analysis..
Now we get a pantomime impeachment while we’re too broke supposedly to back up Ukraine’s defenses against Russia. This is rumored to be a way to take the heat off of Orange Caligula and his incredible number of indictments. This accompanies the Hunter Biden saga run by Gymbo Jordan. This is from The Hill. “House GOP releases Biden impeachment inquiry resolution ahead of planned vote.”
The House GOP released a resolution Thursday to formalize its months-long impeachment inquiry into President Biden, with a full House vote planned for next week.
The resolution authorizing the inquiry — released months after former Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) declared an impeachment inquiry to be underway in September — comes as a trio of committee leaders overseeing the probes enter a more combative phase of their investigation as they try to wrangle witnesses and documents.
It says the panels are “directed to continue their ongoing investigations as part of the House of Representatives inquiry into whether sufficient grounds exist for the House of Representatives to exercise its Constitutional power to impeach Joseph Biden.”
A markup of the resolution is scheduled for Tuesday.
Republicans hope that formally authorizing the inquiry will put more legal weight behind the probe and their ability to compel evidence, particularly if any of those battles end up in court.
While responding to subpoenas and interview requests in November, the White House had argued that the House GOP’s impeachment inquiry was unconstitutional because it had not been formalized with a vote of the whole House.
House Judiciary Committee Chair Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) told reporters this week that while the GOP disagreed with that assessment, the White House letter helped push the House GOP to formalize the inquiry.
Just a reminder here. Jim Jordan is still in contempt of Congress for ignoring a congressional subpoena while asking for one for Hunter Biden.
The threat from House Oversight and Accountability Committee Chair James Comer (R-Ky.) and House Judiciary Committee Chair Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) comes as the legal counsel for the president’s son, Abbe Lowell, has said that Biden is willing to sit for a public hearing but not for the private questioning.
“Contrary to the assertions in your letter, there is no ‘choice’ for Mr. Biden to make; the subpoenas compel him to appear for a deposition on December 13. If Mr. Biden does not appear for his deposition on December 13, 2023, the Committees will initiate contempt of Congress proceedings,” Comer and Jordan wrote to Lowell on Wednesday.
The letter represents an escalation of the battle between the House GOP and Biden as Comer and Jordan speed into the final stages of a multi-pronged impeachment inquiry probe into President Biden, which they aim to formalize with a vote next week.
Rep. Jamie Raskin (Md.), the top Democrat on the Oversight Committee, took a swipe at the House GOP threat by referencing Jordan’s refusal to comply with a subpoena from the Jan. 6 Select Committee in the last Democratic-controlled Congress — another panel that Raskin sat on.
“Hunter Biden will answer questions under oath in front of the world—but unless he testifies in secret so he can be misquoted, @RepJamesComer will hold him in contempt? What a joke. Jim Jordan blew off HIS subpoena. Comer doesn’t want the truth—and can’t handle it,” Raskin said in a post on X, formerly known as Twitter.
Here’s another totally normal thing, right?
Charles Pierce shreds Johnson at Esquire. Constitutional separation of Church and State, anyone?
There is absolutely nothing crazy about this. No, sir. Perfectly normal behavior for a leader in a secular democratic republic. Completely grounded in sanity, especially coming from the guy a couple of offices short of being the president of the United States. I feel confident in saying this. From Right Wing Watch:
Johnson began his remarks by claiming that weeks before he became House Speaker, God began preparing him to lead the nation through “a Red Sea moment.” Johnson said he didn’t know what that meant at the time, but assumed it meant that he was to serve as an Aaron to someone else’s Moses. But, it turned out, God intended for him to be that Moses. “The Lord impressed upon my heart a few weeks before this happened that something was going to occur,” Johnson said. “And the Lord very specifically told me in my prayers to prepare, but to wait.”
“I had this sense that we were going to come to a Red Sea moment in our Republican conference and in the county at large,” he continued. “[God] had been speaking to me about this, and the Lord told me very clearly to prepare and be ready.” Johnson said that once Rep. Kevin McCarthy was removed as Speaker of the House, God began to wake him up in the middle of the night “to speak to me, [telling me] to write things down; plans, procedures, and ideas on how we could pull the [Republican] conference together.”
“At the time, I assumed the Lord was going to choose a new Moses and thank you, Lord, you’re going to allow me to be Aaron to Moses,” Johnson declared. As one candidate after another stepped forward to run for Speaker but failed, Johnson said that “the Lord kept telling me to wait” but “then at the end, when it toward the end, the Lord said, ‘Now, step forward. Me? I’m supposed to be Aaron,” Johnson said. “No. The Lord said, ‘Step forward.’”
The Speaker of the House of Representatives believes he was in contact with the Eternal, who has taken what I consider an unhealthy interest in the doings of the Republican majority. I mean, what could the Almighty have against Kevin McCarthy? The Lord told Mike Johnson to be…Moses? Does that mean that the Republicans now will wander 40 years in the wilderness? (We can only hope.) Does that mean that, one day, Johnson will strike Matt Gaetz on the head and water will spring forth? What’s manna going for in the House cafeteria these days?
Mike needs to check himself into a mental hospital if he’s really hearing voices. And resign. If he really wants to be old-fashioned, he’d do that. But, back to Gymbo.
That’s some real overreach. This is from CNN. The thing that makes it even more outrageous is that these folks act like the country has cash to burn when they want to put on a performance for Dumpf. “House Judiciary Committee launches inquiry into Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis.”
The Republican-led House Judiciary Committee has opened a congressional investigation into Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis, a development that was first reported by CNN and comes the same day Trump is slated to surrender at the county jail after being charged for participating in schemes to meddle with Georgia’s 2020 election results.
The committee sent a letter to Willis on Thursday asking whether she communicated or coordinated with the Justice Department, who has indicted Trump twice on two separate cases, or used federal dollars to complete her investigation that culminated in the fourth indictment of Trump. The questions from Republicans about whether Willis used federal funding in her state-level investigation mirrors the same line of inquiry that Republicans used to probe Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, who indicted Trump in New York earlier this year for falsifying business records to cover up an alleged hush money scheme.
In the letter to Willis, House Judiciary Chairman Jim Jordan, an Ohio Republican, laid out why he believes his panel has jurisdiction over the state-level probe and accused Willis of being politically motivated, noting she set up a new campaign fundraising website days before the indictment came down and complained that she required mugshots for those charged – including Trump – which had not been the practice in his previous three indictments.
“You did not bring charges until two-and-a-half years later, at a time when the campaign for the Republican presidential nomination is in full swing,” Jordan wrote. “Moreover, you have requested that the trial in this matter begin on March 4, 2024, the day before Super Tuesday and eight days before the Georgia presidential primary.”
Jordan gave Willis a September 7 deadline to hand over any documents or communication related to their request.
The Fulton County DA’s office declined to comment. But Willis has previously denied that she coordinated with Special Counsel Jack Smith’s office and has consistently defended her investigation against accusations that it was politically motivated.
Here’s another reminder of Gymbo’s moral turpitude from The Guardian back in October. “Ex-Ohio State wrestlers say Jim Jordan unfit for speakership for ignoring sexual abuse scandal. Former athletes say Jordan, as assistant coach, ignored sexual abuse at university and ‘does not deserve to be House speaker’.” Shouldn’t he resign and go into rehab?
Let’s not leave DeSantis off the crazy train list. This is from NBC. “At the GOP debate, Ron DeSantis calls Middle Eastern garb ‘man dresses’.” What does it take to get rid of all this prejudice against Jewish and Muslim adherent? I really don’t want to go into the debate but the entire thing was a crazy train.
During the fourth Republican presidential primary debate on Wednesday, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, citing his time serving in the Middle East, referred to the clothing worn by Al Qaeda as “man dresses.”
DeSantis was answering a question at the debate, hosted by NewsNation, about his past remarks that he’d authorize shooting drug smugglers coming across the southern border.
“When I was in Iraq, the Al Qaeda wasn’t wearing a uniform. You’d see anyone walking down the street, they all had man dresses on. You didn’t know if they had a bomb, an IED, attached or not,” DeSantis said.
It wasn’t the first time DeSantis has used the term “man dresses” in an apparent reference to a thobe. He has used the term on the stump, including in Iowa and South Carolina.
The Florida governor has come under fire in the past for his comments about Muslims.
Let me end with signs of sanity coming from the Judicial Branch.
This is written by Hugo Lowell for The Guardian. “Georgia prosecutors predict jail sentences in Trump 2020 election case.”
Exclusive: Fulton county prosecutors say in emails their legal careers will continue long after defendants go to jail
Fulton county prosecutors have signaled they want prison sentences in the Georgia criminal case against Donald Trump and his top allies for allegedly violating the racketeering statute as part of efforts to overturn the 2020 election results, according to exchanges in private emails.
“We have a long road ahead,” the Fulton county district attorney, Fani Willis, wrote in one email last month. “Long after these folks are in jail, we will still be practicing law.”
The previously unreported emails, between Willis and defense lawyers, open a window on to the endgame envisioned by prosecutors on her team – which could inform legal strategies ahead of a potential trial next year, such as approaches toward plea deal negotiations.
Prosecutors are not presently expected to offer plea agreements to Trump, his former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows and his former election lawyer Rudy Giuliani, but left open the possibility of talks with other co-defendants, the Guardian previously reported.
This is from Daniella Silva at NBC News. “Texas judge grants pregnant woman’s request to get an abortion. A Dallas-area mother found out that her fetus has trisomy 18, a genetic condition that can cause stillbirth or death of a newborn. The court order allows her to end the pregnancy.” This hit home hard with me having lived through a high risk pregnancy along with my youngest daughter’s experience in October. Can you imagine the added trauma of asking a judge for urgent healthcare?
A Texas judge on Thursday granted an emergency order allowing a pregnant woman whose fetus has a fatal diagnosis to get an abortion in the state.
Late last month, Kate Cox, a 31-year-old Dallas-area mother of two who is about 20 weeks pregnant, found out that her developing fetus has trisomy 18, a rare chromosomal disorder likely to cause stillbirth or the death of the baby shortly after it’s born.
Texas law prohibits almost all abortions with very limited exceptions. So on behalf of Cox, her husband and her doctor, lawyers with the Center for Reproductive Rights filed a request for a temporary restraining order that would block the state’s abortion bans in Cox’s case and enable her to terminate her pregnancy.
Joyce Vance had this insight in her SubStack Civil Discourse with Joyce Vance. “What Jack Smith Says — The Special Counsel files his 404(b) notice.”
Jack Smith has filed his 404(b) notice, advising the Court and Trump of other crimes and bad acts committed by Trump that he intends to offer as evidence when the D.C. election interference case goes to trial. The notice is nine pages long, you can read the whole thing here. It contains a tremendous amount of new information about the case Smith intends to make against Trump. This is the best window we’ve had in on his strategy since the four count indictment was unsealed in August.
Smith starts about by advising the court that he intends to provide it with “extensive advance notice” of the evidence he’s going to introduce at trial in pleadings, including exhibit and witness lists, pre-trial motions, and his trial brief (a detailed layout prosecutors file in advance of trial discussing their evidence and issues they believe might come up during the trial). This is good news for all of us—it means we’ll have access to much if not all of this information as well.
You’ll recall that in “The Week Ahead” we took a look at Federal Rule of Evidence 404(b), which required Smith to file this notice. This rule tells prosecutors they can’t offer evidence that a defendant committed bad acts or crimes beyond what’s charged in the indictment to try and show that the defendant has a propensity to commit crimes, that he’s a bad guy. But the rule permits prosecutors to use the evidence for other purposes. Jack Smith tells the court that all of the evidence he’s going to introduce at trial is “intrinsic to the charged crimes”—in other words, admissible without the need to resort to Rule 404(b) because it’s part of the conduct Trump is charged with in the indictment. But, hedging his bets, Smith advises the court that in the alternative, any evidence the court might deem “extrinsic” is still admissible under 404(b) to prove “motive, intent, preparation, knowledge, absence of mistake, and common plan.”
This is important. As much as getting the case to trial and getting a conviction matters in the first instance, making sure that conviction gets affirmed on appeal is paramount in the larger scheme of things. So prosecutors like to have multiple independent arguments to justify a ruling by the appellate court that what happened at trial was proper.
Smith sets that up here, and the judge, who has broad discretion to determine what evidence is admissible at trial, will put on the record whether she is admitting evidence as intrinsic, extrinsic under 404(b), or as Smith suggests, admissible as both. Good judges make a clear record for the court of appeals to consider, and Chutkan has shown she is very good at doing this, most recently as she ruled against Trump on his presidential immunity motion.
So, that’s enough for today. My posts keep getting longer and longer!
What’s on your reading and blogging list today?
Finally Friday Reads: A Tale of Two Judges and an “Excitable Boy”
Posted: November 3, 2023 Filed under: Trump Trials and Tribulations, U.S. Politics | Tags: #CW Trump and Trumperz violent, and his little weener, head just like a pumpkin, Judge Aileen Cannon, Judge Arthur F. Engoron, Judge Tanya Chutkan, justice, Little Donald Dumpkins, misogynistic actions and words, neener, racist, Special Counsel Jack Smith 9 Comments
Good Day, Sky Dancers!
There is a distinct difference between what’s been happening in two Trump Cases. The one about mishandling and stealing National Security Documents is being handled in Florida by Judge Ailen Cannon. The case in DC is being handled by Judge Tanya Chutkan. This is the case where Trump is indicted for illegally conspiring to overturn his loss to President Biden in the election. Both are the result of work done by Special Counsel Jack Smith. Both cases have also had ongoing issues with Trump harassing court officials and possibly committing witness tampering. The Prosecution has been arguing that Trump has been undermining confidence in the Judicial System and scaring off potential jurors.
The contrast between the demeanor, decisions, knowledge, and temperament of the two Judges is obvious. Judge Cannon is slowing things down in her court in keeping with Trump’s desire to not do any of these trials before the next Presidential election in the hopes of being able to control the destiny of all federal cases and the DOJ. As reported in The New Republic, “Judge Chutkan: Full Steam Ahead With Speedy Trump Trial. Judge Tanya Chutkan has set a date for jury selection in Donald Trump’s D.C. trial.”
U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan is chugging along with jury selection in Donald Trump’s federal election subversion case, despite attempts to delay the proceedings by the former president’s legal team.
On Thursday, Chutkan endorsed a set of jury procedures that note prospective jurors will fill out a preliminary questionnaire on February 9, just over three months away. (As a reminder, Trump’s trial is scheduled to begin on March 4, 2024, one day before Super Tuesday.)
Certain language in the court order also hints that Chutkan is getting wise to Trump’s antics.
After slapping Trump with a gag order in the D.C. trial for leveraging his platform on social media and at speaking arrangements to lambaste prosecutors and office clerks associated with the case, Chutkan’s legal outline reads more like a warning to his defense to keep the former president from trash-talking his own jury.
“The parties must ensure that anyone permitted access to sensitive juror information understands that he cannot publicly disclose the information, and no party may provide jurors’ identifying information to any other entity (e.g., the defendant’s campaign) that is not part of the defense team or Government team assisting with jury selection,” Chutkan wrote.
The date, just three months from now, breezes past concerns over other possible Trump-induced delays in the trial. In October, Trump’s legal team claimed presidential immunity in the D.C. case charging him with plotting to overturn the 2020 presidential election results, in an attempt to argue that Trump’s actions fell within his White House responsibilities.
Trump is indeed introducing similar cases that caused Judge Aileen Cannon to slow the process way down. Former Federal Prosecutor and Law Professor Joyce Vance has this analysis of the recent decisions.
Three developments from today that are important:
First, on Thursday, Judge Chutkan gave us some idea of what the schedule in D.C., where Trump is scheduled to go to trial in March, looks like. She has ordered the lawyers to confer in advance of January 9 and submit proposed jury questions to her by that date. She will resolve any conflicts (there are bound to be quite a few) between the parties about what questions should be asked, and on February 9, she will begin the process of selecting a jury.
Hundreds of District of Columbia residents will be summoned to the E. Barrett Prettyman Federal Courthouse on February 9 to fill out the jury questionnaire the judge finalizes. That leaves plenty of time to select a jury in advance of the March 4 start date for Trump’s trial. In D.C., Trump will stand trial alone, although the indictment includes mention of conduct by unnamed and unindicted co-conspirators. We still don’t know if any of them will be testifying as cooperating witnesses for the government, including those like Sidney Powell and Kenneth Chesebro who previously pled guilty in Fulton County, Georgia.
Second: late Thursday evening, Trump appealed the gag order—readers of Civil Discourse know that it’s actually a (very) limited restraining order—to the Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia. And, he asked that court to suspend the gag order for as long as the appeal takes, something Judge Chutkan had previously declined to do.
Trump is actually asking the court to take several steps. He wants the court to enter a stay, which would mean the gag order won’t be in place during the the appeal. That could be take a while since Trump indicates his intent to appeal to the Supreme Court if he loses in the court of appeals. He asks the court to rule on his request by November 10, just over a week away. Finally, while the court decides whether to enter that stay, Trump wants them to enter a brief administrative stay immediately, so that he can get out from under the gag order pronto.
Of course, they hate the gag order. Trump cannot control his flagrant, abusive outbursts on all things related to every case. The restrictions imposed by Chutkan and Judge Engoran in the New York Trump Fraud Case have been nearly tailored to ensure Trump does not harass potential jurors, witnesses, or court employees. Trump harassment usually leads to the need for protection and arrests of crazed Trump fans. You may read about the specifics of the gag orders and Trump’s legal team’s argument at Vance’s Substance. Let’s return to the third reason, which dovetails into the decisions made by Judge Cannon in the other case.
The real question is, how long it will take the appellate courts to sort this out? The clock is ticking, and Trump is increasingly transparent about his desperation to delay his criminal trials until after the election. While the appeal of the gag order shouldn’t slow things down, what’s coming behind it are the four motions to dismiss Trump has filed (presidential immunity plus three others, which we will take up next week), some of which he can appeal before trial if he loses. With the gag order, Trump has asked the court to decide a motion in a week. It’s certain that if he returns to the appellate court seeking rulings on some of those motions, he’ll be content to see the courts take up as much time as possible, and preferably until after election day in 2024, to render their decision and return the case for trial. Delay when it helps him, speed when it harms him. Certainly the courts can see through that?
That’s the question raised by tonight’s third development. In the Mar-a-Lago case, the Special Counsel’s office filed a pleading entitled “Notice of Defendant’s Motion To Stay Proceedings In The District Of Columbia.” Interesting that they felt they needed to give Judge Aileen Cannon in Florida insight into what Trump was doing in the D.C. case.
The pleading referenced a hearing Judge Cannon held the previous day. In that hearing, Trump’s lawyers argued that the May trial date for the Mar-a-Lago case was too soon. Part of their argument was that because of the March 4, 2024, date in D.C., if the Mar-a-Lago case went to trial as scheduled on May 20, 2024, Trump would be required to be in two places at once.
Leave aside for the moment the Special Counsel’s estimate the trial in the District of Columbia will take four to six weeks, which would give Trump and his lawyers at least a five-week grace period in between the two trials. Here’s what the Special Counsel’s office wanted to make sure Judge Cannon was aware of: Trump’s lawyers failed to disclose to her that shortly after her hearing concluded, Trump asked Judge Chutkan in D.C. to delay his trial there for as long as it took the courts to decide his motion to dismiss that indictment on presidential immunity grounds. (If you need a refresher on Trump’s presidential immunity motion, here.)
The timing of Trump’s motion to delay the D.C. trial meant it had been in the planning stages for at least several days—lawyers don’t produce legal briefs like that in the space of an hour without advance planning. Most lawyers, consistent with the obligation to be candid to the court, would have alerted Judge Cannon that they were about to file a motion to delay the D.C. case. That didn’t happen here.
That raised eyebrows in the Special Counsel’s office, so lead Mar-a-Lago prosecutor Jay Bratt filed the notice to ensure that the record in the Mar-a-Lago case includes what many judges would view as a disingenuous, if not deceitful, strategy by the Trump camp. Bratt took it straight to the Judge in no uncertain terms, urging her not “to be manipulated in this fashion.” We’ll see if Cannon, who has spent the lion’s share of her orders lately criticizing the Special Counsel’s office, has any criticism to spare for Trump’s lawyers. Read the Special Counsel’s pleading here.
Vance’s explanations and rationale are always helpful on all things related to Trump and his Federal Court cases. Maggie Haberman and “Two Judges, Two Approaches. He avoids criticizing one. Another draws attacks.”
As the two federal criminal cases against Donald Trump make their way toward trial, they are bringing into focus a tale of two judges.
In the case taking place in Washington, D.C., where Trump is accused of plotting to overturn the 2020 election, Judge Tanya Chutkan, a former public defender appointed by Barack Obama, is taking a tough line with the former president and his legal team.
Trump, in turn, is assailing her.
In another courtroom in Fort Pierce, Fla., where Trump is under indictment for mishandling classified documents after leaving office and obstructing efforts to retrieve them, Judge Aileen Cannon, a former federal prosecutor named by Trump, has been more of a cipher but has been sympathetic at times to arguments from the former president’s lawyers.
Trump has pointedly avoided aiming any of his fire at her.
The contrast has been especially apparent in recent days.
The examples provided are startling but not unexpected.
When Judge Cannon asked Bratt if he was aware of any other situation in which a criminal defendant was confronting trials in multiple jurisdictions and could encounter the “unavoidable reality that the schedules might collide,” he sidestepped the question.
“I’m having a hard time seeing, realistically, how this work can be accomplished in this compressed period of time,” she told Bratt.
Twisting the knife a little further, she went on: “I’m not quite seeing in your position a level of understanding of our realities.”
On his social media site, Trump has been silent about Judge Cannon, sparing her from the vitriol he directs constantly at other judges, prosecutors and potential witnesses in the cases against him.
By contrast, after Judge Chutkan reimposed the gag order on him on Sunday night, Trump went after her once again, calling her a “very biased, Trump hating judge” and questioning the constitutionality of her decision.
The news is that Trump is trying to stall both prosecutions. Judge Cannon complied. This is from Marcie at her blog emptywheel. “HOURS AFTER AILEEN CANNON SUGGESTS SHE’LL STALL FLORIDA PROSECUTION, TRUMP MOVES TO STALL DC ONE.” This establishes the possibility of conflicting decisions by the two Courts of Appeals.
Judge Aileen Cannon has not yet released a ruling describing how much she’ll bow to Trump’s manufactured claims of classified discovery delays in the stolen documents case, but she made clear that she will delay the trial somewhat. As reported, at least, that delay will come because of the competing schedule in DC.
Trump’s lawyers argued that they need a delay in the documents case because preparations for it will clash with the federal election case, which is slated to go to trial on March 4 and could last several months.
Trump’s indictment in the election case — which came days after Cannon set her initial timeline for the document case — “completely disrupted everything about the schedule your honor set,” Trump lawyer Todd Blanche told Cannon.
Another Trump lawyer, Chris Kise, personified the crunch the former president’s attorneys are facing, phoning into the hearing from a New York courthouse where Trump is undergoing a civil trial targeting his business empire.
“It’s very difficult to be trying to work with a client in one trial and simultaneously try to prepare that client for another trial,” Kise said. “This has been a struggle and a challenge.”
Note: as DOJ pointed out, Kise’s NY trial schedule was already baked into Cannon’s schedule.
Having secured that delay, Trump turned to delaying his DC trial, with a motion to stay all other DC proceedings until his absolute immunity claim is decided, a 3-page motion Trump could have but did not submit when he was asking for a delay before submitting his other motions. Everything he points to in that 3-page motion, the completed briefing on the absolute immunity bid, was already in place on October 26. But he waited until he first got Cannon to move her trial schedule.
As I laid out the other day, Trump is not making legal arguments sufficient to win this case — certainly not yet. He is making a tactical argument, attempting to run out the clock so he can pardon himself.
Update: LOL. Trump filed the DC motion too soon, giving DOJ a chance to notice the cynical ploy in DC before Aileen Cannon issues her order.
“Cynical ploy’ is an excellent description of this checkers-level move. But again, it’s just another delay tactic so Trump can argue his case in the Public Arena and dance around gag orders.
Glenn Kirschner also brings the skills and analysis of a career spent prosecuting cases in varying courts. He suggests that a motion to recuse Judge Cannon may be in order. What will Jack Smith decide?
Trump is totally Looney Tunes in his responses to the decisions of all the relevant Judges but Cannon. You would think she would be embarrassed.
This article in Newsweek is about the analysis of Former FBI General Counsel Andrew Weissmann gave on the Cannon decision on who could access the documents. “Aileen Cannon’s ‘Snarky’ Trump Ruling Called Out by Former Prosecutor.”
The judge overseeing Donald Trump‘s classified documents case has been criticized by a former prosecutor after she ruled in favor of the former president’s co-defendants in the case.
Former FBI general counsel Andrew Weissmann was reacting to the ruling from Judge Aileen Cannon that two people charged alongside Trump in the federal investigation—aide and valet driver Walt Nauta and Mar-a-Lago maintenance worker Carlos De Oliveira—should be allowed to review some of the classified evidence provided to the defense under discovery, which forms the center of the case.
Trump has pleaded not guilty to 40 charges over allegations he illegally retained top secret and sensitive materials after he left the White House in January 2021, and then obstructed the federal attempt to retrieve them. Nauta and de Oliveira have also denied allegations they sought to conspire with the former president to obstruct the investigation into Trump’s possession of classified documents at his Mar-a-Lago resort.
While sharing Wednesday’s ruling which criticized arguments from Special Counsel Jack’s Smith’s team on X, formerly Twitter, Weissmann said the decision “goes straight for the capillaries” while condemning the language used by the judge.
“Almost pointless discussion, when so many real issue are left undecided,” Weissmann wrote. “And her language is far too snarky for a federal judge.”
The ruling from Cannon hit out at the federal prosecutor’s attempts to restrict Nauta and de Oliveira from reviewing the classified discovery while citing section 3 of the Classified Information Procedures Act [CIPA]. The section requires Cannon court to issue an order to protect against the disclosure of any classified information disclosed by the government “to any defendant in any criminal case.”
The ruling from Cannon hit out at the federal prosecutor’s attempts to restrict Nauta and de Oliveira from reviewing the classified discovery while citing section 3 of the Classified Information Procedures Act [CIPA]. The section requires Cannon court to issue an order to protect against the disclosure of any classified information disclosed by the government “to any defendant in any criminal case.”
“So again, we are left with the [special counsel’s] broad and unconvincing theory, which is that the Court must change the meaning of the word ‘defendant’ to mean, essentially, ‘defense attorney to the exclusion of defendant.’ The Court declines to do so,” Cannon wrote.
“‘Defendant’ means what it says—defendant—and although providing discovery to a defendant reasonably contemplates the defendant’s retained or appointed agent reviewing the information too, it does not support the very different proposition that ‘defendant’ means ‘not defendant.’
Cannon also said in her ruling that Smith’s office “[lacks] merit,” and reaffirmed the protective orders regarding classified information that were previously issued in the case.
Meanwhile, Trump continues to blurt out things on his Truth Social page that really should disturb all the Judges in all the Court Cases that involve him. This is from Liz Dye at Public Notice. “Trump’s Truth Social page is a riot of witness intimidation. Even his lawyers can’t really defend it.” Trigger Warning Obscene, Racist, and Violent Language.
On August 6, Alabama man Arthur Ray Hanson, II, left a voicemail threatening Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis with violence if she charged Donald Trump with interference in the 2020 election.
“I would be very afraid if I were you because you can’t be around people all the time that are going to protect you,” he said on the recorded call. “When you charge Trump on that fourth indictment, anytime you’re alone, be looking over your shoulder … What you put out there, bitch, comes back at you ten times harder, and don’t ever forget it.”
That same day, Hanson left a similar message for Fulton County Sheriff Patrick Labat:
If you think you gonna take a mugshot of my President Donald Trump and it’s gonna be ok, you gonna find out that after you take that mugshot, some bad shit’s probably gonna happen to you … I’m warning you right now before you fuck up your life and get hurt real bad … whether you got a fucking badge or not ain’t gonna help you none … you gonna get fucked up you keep fucking with my president.
The threats didn’t work, and on August 24, Trump surrendered at the Fulton County Jail. Trump raised $7.1 million off his mugshot, but Hanson fared much worse. This week he was indicted for using interstate communications to threaten to kidnap or injure a person.
The day before Hanson’s calls to officials in Georgia, a Texas woman named Abigail Jo Shry left a voicemail for federal judge Tanya Chutkan, who is presiding over Trump’s election interference case in DC.
“Hey you stupid slave n—– …. You are in our sights, we want to kill you,” she said. “If Trump doesn’t get elected in 2024, we are coming to kill you. So tread lightly, bitch … You will be targeted personally, publicly, your family, all of it.”
Shry was indicted in September and, like Hanson, was charged with making threats via interstate communication. But while Hanson and Shry were exceptionally careless about covering their tracks, they certainly weren’t alone in menacing the targets of Trump’s ire. Judges and prosecutors in every one of Trump’s cases have been subjected to threats and harassment for simply doing their jobs.
Dye follows with rationale, showing how Trump lawyers cannot possibly explain away the impact his posts have on his crazy followers. Judge Chutkan has been assigned extra security. The barrage at his former attorney, Michael Cohen, is incredible, too. He refers to himself in the third person, which is always weird to read, and calls Cohen a “sleazebag.” This was during Cohen’s testimony last month in the Trump Family Fraud Trial in New York City. You may recall BB provided an article that showed how Trump’s rhetoric is getting more violent and fascist. You can see it in these examples.
Trump’s escalation of hate is only going to get worse. What is also evident is the misogyny and racism in the taunts. This only further encourages his crazies. These trials need to start now and roll over him before we get any nearer to Election Day. The only Judge who doesn’t get this is Judge Cannon. Someone needs to do a deep dive into what is driving her evident special treatment of this particular alleged criminal.
I guess he’s just an ‘excitable boy’.
What’s on your reading and blogging list today?
Mostly Monday Reads: When the Devil Wears a Disguise
Posted: October 30, 2023 Filed under: U.S. Politics | Tags: Ayatollah Mike Johnson, Holy Rollers, MAGA, White Christian Nationalism 11 Comments
@Repeat1968
Good Day, Sky Dancers!
Journalists are surely doing their due diligence with the extreme and dangerous Speaker of the House, Ayatollah Mike. BB did some deep diving on a supposedly adopted young black man with a search that showed a lot of embellishments on a story that can’t be verified by anyone. Get ready to hold your nose as I go further down the Maga Mike rabbit hole.
I always like a good literary reference, so I’ll start with this one from Vox Ben Jacobs. ‘“Lord of the Flies”: New House Speaker Mike Johnson faces a chaotic opening era. New House Speaker Mike Johnson faces a long to-do list and a caucus with short patience for compromise.’ He’s even awakened the Kraken in Mitch McConnell with his pro-Putin stand on Ukraine. This should be interesting and painful.
Johnson insisted that “we’re not going to abandon [Ukraine,] but we have a responsibility, a stewardship responsibility over the precious treasure of the American people, and we have to make sure that the White House is providing the people with some accountability for the dollars.”
Already, he seemed to be getting slightly more breathing room from Rep. Matt Gaetz of Florida, who was the leader of the effort to oust McCarthy and has been an implacable opponent of aid to Ukraine. Gaetz left some wiggle room about whether it should receive a vote, saying, “They should definitely be separate questions. We have a lot of members who want to vote for Ukraine funding. And so that may be a vote that they are able to bring to bear through regular order.”
However, Gaetz cautioned that because a recent amendment on Ukraine aid did not receive the support of a majority of House Republicans, future legislation on aid to the Eastern European country should not receive any consideration in the House because it violated the Hastert Rule, the recent tradition among House Republicans that all legislation should have the support of “a majority of the majority.” He noted that “the last time Ukraine funding was on the floor of the House … [a] majority of the majority voted against it. That usually ends a measure’s prospects for consideration.”
Yet despite the drama around Ukraine, the fight over government funding is likely to be far less dramatic than past ones. McCarthy’s ouster was the result of his efforts to avoid a government shutdown by simply continuing current funding levels for the next six weeks at the beginning of October. Not only is Johnson enjoying a honeymoon period among his colleagues after the weeks of internecine warfare among House Republicans, he also starts off with fresh credibility among those who were most opposed to McCarthy to keep the government open for at least a few more months.
As Gaetz, the leader of the hard-right bloc that was opposed to the former speaker, put it, “Kevin McCarthy wanted to govern by continuing resolution to get us to the next continuing resolution. I think Mike Johnson has a lot more credibility [as a] … bridge to single-subject spending bills, not a bridge to just the old ways of Washington.”
But, for whatever criticism that there was of the “old ways of Washington,” at least everyone knew what they were. Everyone was working from the same playbook, and there was at least a basic set of agreed-upon norms. All of that has frayed after the last few chaotic weeks, and the challenges have only grown more complex. It’s a recipe for more weirdness to come.
I’d look for Putin to start making moves on Ukraine with this discussion coming out of the House. More research is revealing a lot about Johnson’s wife, too. Despite the rush to cleanse the internet of all references to their propensity to act like medieval-times demon dispensers, many folks have already put their weird history in files. So, I’m sure our local Dr. BB will have something to say on this one. It’s from the Business Insider. ‘”Kelly Johnson, who is married to House Speaker Mike Johnson, practices an ancient form of Christian counseling that classifies people into ‘choleric,’ ‘phlegmatic,’ and other personality types purportedly ordained by God.” I don’t recall reading this in my King James version back in the day, but who knows what I may have missed being a Presbyterian. I don’t call this “deeply religious,” I call it deeply disturbed.
Kelly Johnson, the wife of the newly elected House speaker, ran a Christian counseling service that is affiliated with an organization that advocates against abortion and homosexuality and whose practices are built on the teachings of the Greek physician Hippocrates.
It is not clear if Kelly Johnson will continue her practice. Not long after Rep. Mike Johnson became House speaker last week, Kelly Johnson’s website became inaccessible. Johnson, her husband of more than 24 years, rose overnight from a virtually obscure House lawmaker to the position that is second in line to the presidency. The couple is deeply religious; both Kelly and Mike Johnson previously worked with religious organizations and causes the religious right advocates for. Along with her counseling, Johnson is also listed as an advisor to the Louisiana Right for Life, an anti-abortion organization.
Kelly Johnson’s website listed a specialty in Temperament counseling, a specialty that she received training for from an organization founded in the 1980s by a Christian couple. According to the materials the organization provides, the National Christian Counselor’s Association is adamant that its offerings take place outside of more traditional state-licensed settings so that counselors and clients can be fully engaged through their faith.
“The state licensed professional counselor in certain states is forbidden to pray, read or refer to the Holy Scriptures, counsel against things such as homosexuality, abortion, etc,” a catalog of the organization’s offerings states. “Initiating such counsel could be considered unethical by the state.”
The temperament-based approach breaks people down into five types: Melancholy, Choleric, Sanguine, Supine, and Phlegmatic. Richard and Phyllis Arno, who established a test to identify people’s temperament, founded the National Christian Counselors Association in the early 1980s. They and their advocates prefer the term temperament over personalities as the term personality is characterized as a “mask” while temperaments are “inborn” and thus inherent to each individual regardless of outside influences such as parenting. Their work is largely based on Hippocrates’ view that there were four temperaments.
Tim LaHaye, a controversial and influential figure on the evangelical right, pointed to Hippocrates’ beliefs when he began his own work in the 60s and 70s. The Arnos cited LaHaye in one of their books. LaHaye was vehemently opposed to LGBTQ people, writing an entire book on why he believed gay people were depressed because homosexuality was immoral and antithetical to the Bible. According to The New York Times, LaHaye’s anti-Catholic and antisemitic writings led him to step down from an honorary position leading Congressman Jack Kemp’s 1988 GOP primary campaign. LaHaye later pushed President George W. Bush’s election in 2000 and worked with then-Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee in the 2008 presidential primaries. LeHaye became enormously popular and wealthy later in his life after he penned a series of apocalyptic novels.
One post for an affiliated counselor on the organization’s website describes a deliverance ministry in addition to temperament testing. Using this approach to drive demons out of a client makes sure the person is “better able to receive and act upon godly counsel, including recommendations from the APS profiles.” (APS profiles are the abbreviation for the couple’s temperament testing system.)
This sounds like some form of torture to me.
Public Notice has found a treasure trove of stuff like this. Be afraid! Be very afraid! This is by Noah Berlatsky. “The Christofascism of Mike Johnson. The new House speaker is an opposition researcher’s goldmine.” Derp Trigger Warning!
It took Mike Johnson just a couple days last week to rise from a relatively obscure Louisiana congressman to House speaker. Suffice it to say his background and policy positions did not hold up well under their first exposure to national attention.
Johnson is an opposition researcher’s goldmine. Even over the weekend, news reports and video clips steadily trickled out exposing the new speaker for embracing views that are far out of step with mainstream America.
In particular, Johnson is deep in the Christofascist derp. And if you didn’t know that already, it became clear last Thursday during his first big TV interview as speaker, a spot on Sean Hannity’s show where he explained that his position on any issue comes straight from the Bible.
“Well, go pick up a Bible off your shelf and read it. That’s my worldview; that’s what I believe,” Johnson told on Hannity, with a proud little head tilt.
Johnson’s statement is difficult to credit. The Bible is a heterogenous document with a long, complicated interpretive tradition, and lots of odd little injunctions tucked away. Johnson has not, as far as I know, come out strongly against mixing fabrics.
But it might be more comforting if he had. Because what Johnson means when he says that his worldview is that of the Bible is not that he’s going to make a good faith (as it were) effort to follow biblical prescriptions. Rather, it means he’s certain that his own particular white evangelical Christian nationalist tradition is sanctioned by God, and that, therefore, whatever smug and barmy thing comes out of his mouth is divinely inspired.
And much of what has come out of Johnson’s has been barmy indeed — not to mention smug, and often terrifyingly cruel. Based on his stated supposedly biblical positions, the Bible in Johnson’s head is a silly, vicious farrago of ignorance and bigotry, and a blueprint for Christofascist tyranny.
There’s a long list of his views and actions there if you can stand reading it. Here’s one Democratic Congresswoman’s take on her exchange with Ayatollah Mike on the Trump false election accusations. This is from HuffPo and reported by Josephine Harvey. ‘Chilling’: Dem Lawmaker Says She Had Election-Denying Exchange With Mike Johnson. Rep. Madeleine Dean said Johnson managed to become House speaker because “very few people knew him or knew what he stands for.”
Rep. Madeleine Dean (D-Pa.) described new House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) as an “extremist MAGA Republican” and remembered a telling exchange she says she had with him after the violent Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection.
“The secret to the success of Mike Johnson ascending to the speakership, after about a 24-hour run, is that very few people knew him or knew what he stands for,” she told MSNBC legal analyst Charles Coleman Jr. on Sunday.
Dean recalled that during the House floor vote to elect Johnson, a Democratic colleague asked her: “Do you know anything about this guy?”
Dean said that in fact, she did, because she serves with Johnson on the House judiciary committee.
She looked back on a conversation she said she had with Johnson shortly after the certification of President Joe Biden’s 2020 election victory.
Johnson “tried to defend to me, and to others on my side of the aisle, why he was such an architect of the election-denying scheme,” and “tried to argue his legal case about it,” she said.“And when I said to him: ‘But after all, there was an attempted insurrection. You were here for it. That didn’t change your sights at all?’ No, it did not,” she said.
She also noted that Johnson wouldn’t answer questions about whether the election was legitimate as recently as last week.
“It’s chilling to me that he is now third in line to the presidency,” she said.
This reporting is also from HuffPo. Ron Dicker has the lede. “NRA Proudly Shares Clip Of Mike Johnson Opposing Gun Laws After Maine Shooting. The NRA resurfaced a video of the new speaker of the House promoting the controversial group and criticizing Democratic gun control measures.” Gosh, he is soooo Pro-life!
Just days after a mass shooting in Maine killed 18 people, the National Rifle Association on Sunday shared an old clip of new House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) pledging to oppose gun safety measures.
The 2019 video shows Johnson promoting the organization of which he is a member and disparaging Democratic attempts at firearm reform.
“As NRA members, we understand the Second Amendment is grounded in fundamental freedoms,” says Johnson, whose declaration is used in the headline on X (formerly Twitter). “We make the point on the Hill all the time when these gun bills come up and when Democrats try to push their agenda on the people. We remind them that the Second Amendment is grounded in those fundamental freedoms ― those inalienable rights we have to personal liberty and personal security and private property.
“We can’t lose sight of that,” he continued. “So when they’re pushing a bill for universal background checks or trying to delay the amount of time that it takes for law-abiding citizens to obtain a firearm for self-defense, we have to remind them that what’s really at stake is that fundamental right that we have.”
While the right-wing Johnson’s message isn’t surprising, it was attention-grabbing that the NRA posted it days after Maine’s biggest mass shooting. It’s not clear what Johnson initially shot the video for. The NRA did not respond to a request for comment, nor did the lawmaker’s office on whether he approved of the video being posted now.
Who exactly backs this guy? I mean, other than holy rollers. Jude Legume has found a few of them. ” Walmart, Meta, AT&T, and Microsoft are among his most prominent corporate sponsors.
Other corporate backers of Johnson include Boeing ($10,000), Capital One ($1,000), Charter ($20,000), Chevron ($21,500), Cox Enterprises ($22,000), Koch Industries ($30,500), National Association of Realtors ($19,000), and Verizon ($4,000).
Here’s more of our history from his antics from Mother Jones’s David Corn. “Mike Johnson Conducted Seminars Promoting the US as a “Christian Nation.” The new House speaker called for “Biblically-sanctioned government.”
Rep. Mike Johnson, the newly elected Republican House speaker, used to conduct a seminar in churches premised on the idea that the United States is a “Christian nation.” This ministry, as he has referred to it, is yet more evidence that Johnson is committed to a hardcore Christian fundamentalism that shapes his views of politics and government.
The seminar, titled “Answers for Our Times: Government, Culture, and Christianity,” was organized by Onward Christian Education Services, Inc., a company owned by his wife, Kelly Johnson, a Christian counselor and anti-abortion activist who calls herself a “leader in the pro-family movement.” The website for her counseling service—which was taken down shortly after Johnson became speaker—described the seminar, which featured both her and Johnson, as exploring several questions, such as, “What is happening in America and how do we fix it?” The list includes this query: “Can our heritage as a Christian nation be preserved?” There were different versions of the seminar running from two-hour-long lectures to retreats lasting two days.
Mike and Kelly Johnson, each a fundamentalist Christian and culture war battler who advocates adhering to what they call a “Biblical worldview,” launched this initiative in 2019. After one such presentation on February 24, 2019, at the First Baptist Church in Bossier City, Louisiana, where they are members—an event that also featured Tony Perkins, president of the Family Research Council—a local television news show reported that the seminar’s goal was to “keep God in Government.” Johnson posted the article on his congressional website.
According to a Louisiana Baptist newsletter,the Johnsons intended to first pitch their seminars to Baptist churches in the Pelican State before expanding to other states. The publication reported that the couple’s goal was “to equip churches to take a stand against the cultural attacks now being directed at people of faith, the traditional family and basic freedoms embedded in the U.S. Constitution.” It noted that Johnson said he was compelled to create this new ministry while serving in the US House because he was concerned “that too many believers today feel ill-informed to provide substantive answers to fake arguments.” It quoted Johnson: “Our nation is entering one of the most challenging seasons in its history and there is an urgent need for God’s people to be armed and ready with the Truth.” He was referring to what fundamentalists call “Biblical truth.”
A promotion blurb for the seminar described it this way: “As polls show that Christianity is in rapid decline in America, and the culture is growing more secularized and more coarsened, many believers feel ill-informed and ill-prepared to do anything to reverse these trends. Scripture is clear that we have an obligation to provide substantive answers… But HOW?”
Well, I can tell you exactly why none of my family are Republican or Christian anymore. It has much to do with the demeanor of people like the Johnsons. Who would want to be like that? I remember when 8-year-old Dr. Daughter walked out of her last Sunday School session at our local Methodist Church. She asked if she really had to go back there. I asked why. She told me that her teachers had told her that her best friend–who was and still is Jewish–was going to hell. I said of course not. That’s the age kids really develop a sense of right and wrong. Shortly after that, I gave up on all that, too, and found some love, peace, and understanding in my current Buddhist practice, where telling people they’re on the wrong spiritual path is about the worst action you can take.
So, this guy freaks me out to no end. I know what it’s like to be stalked and threatened by these people. I’ve seen it in my neighborhood in Omaha, and they always show up to harass people at any Gay event. So, I googled what percentage of pedophiles prey on people in their churches. This is a peer-reviewed article that shows the offender levels in Protestant churches. Its focus is due to the massive number of studies on offenders in the Catholic churches. It’s not shocking at all.
Well, that’s the dank rabbit hole for this week. Hopefully, the end of the week will bring some news we could use and rejoice in.
What’s on your reading and blogging list today?
peej
Carissa
bostonboomer
dakinikat
ecocatwoman
jjlo
mablue2
Mama Lopez
peggysue22
quixote
skydancingguestblogger
Mona (aka Wonk the Vote)
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