Has U.S. Democracy Been Trumped?

[Winstonm]

Blood on their hands and god on their side.

As I said previously: You can’t fix stupid.

[Chas_P]

As I said previously: You can’t fix stupid.

Get over yourself Winnie. You are not the sole arbiter of who's stupid. I saw a poll just today which showed that 75% of Americans think the country is headed in the wrong direction. Call them stupid if you like but they, like you, also have one vote.

[y66]

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/16/us/politics/senate-governor-pennsylvania-republicans.html

 

To a degree surpassing any other contest in the 2022 midterms so far, Donald Trump has poured his personal prestige into Pennsylvania’s Republican Senate primary race, which is going through a final spasm of uncertainty as Kathy Barnette, an insurgent candidate with a sparse résumé, gives a last-minute scare to Trump’s pick, Dr. Mehmet Oz.

 

The outcome of that election, as well as the G.O.P. contest for governor, is threatening to implode the state’s Republican Party — with a blast radius that might be felt in states as far away as Arizona, Georgia and North Carolina over the coming weeks and months.

 

The turbulence also has major implications for Trump’s hold on the party, which is growing more alarmed that the former president’s involvement in primaries could scupper Republicans’ chances of reclaiming the Senate despite President Biden’s unpopularity.

 

Trump endorsed Oz, a celebrity physician, over the advice of many Republicans inside and outside Pennsylvania. The bill is coming due, those Republicans now say.

You hate to see it.

[pilowsky]

Get over yourself Winnie. You are not the sole arbiter of who's stupid. I saw a poll just today which showed that 75% of Americans think the country is headed in the wrong direction. Call them stupid if you like but they, like you, also have one vote.

 

"I saw a poll"!

There's a reason the silent majority don't have much to say.

[Chas_P]

There's a reason the silent majority don't have much to say.

Well it is somewhat discomfiting to know that the "silent majority" exceeds 75% of those polled. They must all be in Australia. LOL.

[Winstonm]

How about that, I found an ass#ole locator: You can’t fix stupid!

[Chas_P]

You can’t fix stupid!

Quite true. But hopefully it can be voted out of office. And you, like Biden, need to eat more fiber.

[Gerardo]

Get over yourself Winnie. You are not the sole arbiter of who's stupid. I saw a poll just today which showed that 75% of Americans think the country is headed in the wrong direction. Call them stupid if you like but they, like you, also have one vote.

 

Finally the GOP is on its way to getting its wet drean of reversing Roe v Wade.

 

And ONLY 75% thinks that's the wrong direction? Doomed you are

[y66]

https://messaging-custom-newsletters.nytimes.com/template/oakv2?campaign_id=9&emc=edit_nn_20220517&instance_id=61553&nl=the-morning&productCode=NN&regi_id=59211987&segment_id=92459&te=1&uri=nyt%3A%2F%2Fnewsletter%2F095cc587-8474-5c7c-834e-f5a99763488e&user_id=2d8b72dd84a9ff194896ed87b2d9c72a

 

Over the past decade, the Anti-Defamation League has counted about 450 U.S. murders committed by political extremists.

 

Of these 450 killings, right-wing extremists committed about 75 percent. Islamic extremists were responsible for about 20 percent, and left-wing extremists were responsible for 4 percent.

 

Nearly half of the murders were specifically tied to white supremacists:

 

Source: Anti-Defamation League

 

As this data shows, the American political right has a violence problem that has no equivalent on the left. And the 10 victims in Buffalo this past weekend are now part of this toll. “Right-wing extremist violence is our biggest threat,” Jonathan Greenblatt, the head of the ADL, has written. “The numbers don’t lie.”

 

The pattern extends to violence less severe than murder, like the Jan. 6 attack on Congress. It also extends to the language from some Republican politicians — including Donald Trump — and conservative media figures that treats violence as a legitimate form of political expression. A much larger number of Republican officials do not use this language but also do not denounce it or punish politicians who do use it; Kevin McCarthy, the top House Republican, is a leading example.

 

It’s important to emphasize that not all extremist violence comes from the right — and that the precise explanation for any one attack can be murky, involving a mixture of ideology, mental illness, gun access and more. In the immediate aftermath of an attack, people are sometimes too quick to claim a direct cause and effect. But it is also incorrect to pretend that right-wing violence and left-wing violence are equivalent problems.

[kenberg]

Mass killings, where the killer does not even know his victims, are different from other killings. For one thing, the killer is a male in all cases I can think of. ADL has data cited above, I wonder if any mass shooting in their data set was done by a woman.

 

We should go carefully in comparing numbers. There are roughly the same number of men as there are women in the USA. There are, I believe, far more who are on the "American political right" than there are Islamic adherents. It's harder to say of there are more people on the "extremist American political right" than extreme Islamic adherents because we would have to decide what qualifies as extreme and probably the usage of "extreme" would be different.

 

None of this contradicts the fact that the political right has a violence problem, although I think of it more as those who are inclined toward violence are likely to favor right-wing political views. The difference being that some people are inclined toward violence and those that are, especially violence of the mass killing sort, gravitate toward extreme right-wing views. The tendency for violence was there first. No doubt the tendency for violence and the right-wing political chatter feed on each other.

 

The Right is very good at being stupid. The article says " Marjorie Taylor Greene supported the idea of executing Barack Obama, Nancy Pelosi and other top Democrats." Well, not explicitly exactly. She "liked" a post about shooting Nancy Pelosi. She explained others on her staff get to do some of these "likes". Or some such explanation. She did not make a speech saying "Let's shoot Nancy Pelosi". So then she could say "My, my, who would have thought that would happen, I never actually said we should do that". That is pretty much the argument that Trump and his supporters make about Jan 6, and people did die there. Roughly it's "Oh, gee, I never said they should hang Mike Pence, how could I have thought they would try that?" Insanity can be a legal defense, this is more like an idiocy defense. "I am just too stupid to understand that what I said could lead to what happened".

The Right needs to tell the Extreme Right to hit the road. I have often felt that it would help if we did not use adjectives like "extreme". There could be the "Right" and the "Idiots" It's true that the Idiots often speak as if they are part of the Right, but the Right should completely disown them. Liking a post about shooting Pelosi does not put you on the Extreme Right, it puts you among the Idiots.

[Winstonm]

I 100% agree with Dr. Berg that it is imperative to once again marginalize those who insist their brand of radicalism as a sole solution and suggest violent enforcement of those doctrines.

 

At present that is primarily white supremacy, and the Republican Party is their home but such has not always been. The South used to be solidly Democratic and the white supremacists like George Wallace ran on blue tickets.

 

However, Republicans are losing now and are too desperate to alienate any voter, regardless of radicalism.

 

Until the Tucker Carlsons and Alex Joneses of the world are stuffed back into a box and relegated to the closet there is no end in sight. It is both a problem of morality and patriotism whether country or political power is supreme.

[barmar]

I readily agree that the Republicans are not perfect. But the Democrats, in my opinion, are insane.

What do you think about the sanity of R's who believe, and make legislative policy based on:

 

- The "big lie"

- Replacement Theory

- Critical race theory teaches that we're all racists, and grade schools are teaching it

- Abortion should be banned when the majority of the country believes that it should be available in some form.

- Gun ownership isn't a serious problem

 

These people just ignore reality.

[Winstonm]

Our problems are not political; they are religious.

Specifically, the enemy is the Christian religion. This notion was re-enforced by this article about the racist shooting in Buffalo, NY:

 

And they say they saw nothing of the kind of racist rhetoric seen in a 180-page online diatribe, purportedly written by Gendron, in which he describes in minute detail how he researched ZIP codes with the highest concentrations of Black people, surveilled the Tops supermarket in Buffalo, and carried out the assault to terrorize all nonwhite, non-Christian people into leaving the country.

my emphasis

 

Another phrase that could be used for executions due to refusal to accept religious doctrine is The Inquisition. The white supremacist dogma is deeply imbued with those ideas that are dramatically fundamentalist Protestant; the fundamentalist Catholic voice is based on historical

hierarchy structures, which also places man the gender and man as white race at the top. (See any of Bill Barr's rants speeches.)

This is why there can be no debate; you can't use reason to win an argument of faith.

And, oh yeah, you also can't fix stupid. (Alert! Troll Bait!)

[y66]

All Republicans are zombies? Not so fast.

 

https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2022-05-18/midterms-2022-republican-voters-aren-t-trump-zombies?utm_medium=email&utm_source=newsletter&utm_term=220518&utm_campaign=author_18529680

 

Let’s be clear about the lessons that can be drawn so far from this year’s Republican midterm primary elections: Republican voters are not behaving like zombies who automatically do what former President Donald Trump tells them to do. With Pennsylvania, Idaho and North Carolina speaking on Tuesday, a strong pattern regarding candidates endorsed by Trump has emerged.

 

In Ohio on May 3, J.D. Vance won the Senate nomination with 31% of the vote.

 

In Nebraska a week later, Charles Herbster lost the gubernatorial nomination with 29% of the vote.

 

In Pennsylvania this week, Mehmet Oz has 31% of the vote in a Senate primary that’s still too close to call.

 

And in Idaho, also this week, Janice McGeachin lost the nomination for governor with around 29% of the vote.

 

Trump’s endorsed candidates did better in two other contests. In North Carolina, Ted Budd won the Senate primary with almost 60% of the vote, but experts attributed that more to heavy spending from the conservative Club for Growth than to Trump’s endorsement, which was one of many for Budd. And Trump jumped very late onto the bandwagon of gubernatorial hopeful Douglas Mastriano in Pennsylvania, but I doubt many will attribute much of his 44% showing to the last-minute endorsement.

 

On the other hand, while many House incumbents Trump endorsed won easily, as incumbents almost always do in primary elections, one of them lost: North Carolina’s Madison Cawthorn, with 32% of the vote.

 

Win or lose, then, Trump’s candidates are winning about a third of the vote. That’s not nothing, but it does mean that two-thirds of Republican primary voters are either ignoring or opposing his wishes.

 

Trump’s real effect is surely smaller than that. Yes, there’s a good chance Vance would have wound up as a single-digit also-ran without the endorsement. But McGeachin is lieutenant governor of Idaho and the radical portion of the party that backed her challenge to the sitting governor is strong in that state; it seems likely that Trump added very little there. Surely Oz’s fame as a celebrity TV doctor would have won him some votes in Pennsylvania, Trump or no Trump.

 

There’s more to the story of Trump’s influence than the fact that most Republican voters ignore or oppose his endorsement. But I’ll disagree with elections analyst Nathan Gonzalez, who tweeted on Wednesday, “This is still Trump's GOP whether his endorsed candidates win or not.”

 

I think political scientist Nadia Brown is closer to the mark in her comment about Pennsylvania: “The hot takes will all be about Trump & his influence. I'm so over this angle of reporting. Trump is the kingmaker because everything he does is covered & less attention is paid to the candidate.”

 

What I’d add is that party actors — the Club for Growth, big individual funders such as the Silicon Valley billionaire and Vance backer Peter Thiel, politicians with local clout such as Republican Senator Thom Tillis in North Carolina, a big player in Cawthorn’s defeat, and most of all Republican-aligned media such as Fox News and talk radio hosts — are probably a much bigger story in terms of actually moving votes than Trump is.

 

Moreover, while it’s convenient to slap the Trumpism label on the radicalism of the dominant coalition within the party, it’s far from clear that Trump has much say in what Trumpism actually means. Sure, he’s successfully pushed candidates to talk about fictional fraud in the 2020 election, but Republicans were obsessed with fictional voter fraud long before Trump began his 2016 campaign, and resentment has been a winning theme in Republican politics far longer than that.

 

So when the Washington Post’s Annie Linskey says that “Trumpism is having a better record than Trump himself tonight,” I’d say that the strain of the party that emerges as Trumpism or Tea Partyism or Gingrichism or Nixonism or McCarthyism — and yes, there are differences among those incarnations of right-wing radicalism but it’s not hard to see continuity as well — is particularly dominant within the party now, but it just doesn’t have all that much to do with Trump.

[Winstonm]

Moreover, while it’s convenient to slap the Trumpism label on the radicalism of the dominant coalition within the party, it’s far from clear that Trump has much say in what Trumpism actually means.

Actually, it's pretty easy to determine Trumpism: it's redefining American foreign policy according to foreign government wishes and then auctioning off American foreign policy to the highest bidder, i.e., monetizing the presidency.

https://www.emptywheel.net/2022/05/17/edny-accuses-tom-barrack-of-harvesting-assets-by-crafting-policy-in-a-trump-presidency/

[Chas_P]

And, oh yeah, you also can't fix stupid.

The world will little note, nor long remember, what you say here. But please do carry on. You truly are a legend in your own mind.

[pilowsky]

A new game for the whole family: 'Guess the news source'

As Ukraine remains in a life-and-death struggle for its existence, Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., took to the Senate floor last week to temporarily block U.S. aid to this embattled nation.

 

The bill up for passage would provide immediate military and humanitarian assistance – some $40 billion to Ukraine.

 

The timing is critical as numerous cities remain under Russian siege, and as Ukraine is finally gaining momentum in repulsing Russian President Vladimir Putin's savage invasion.

 

Paul is indifferent to the emergency situation and makes the fantastical claim that the aid package would "doom the U.S. economy."

 

It would do nothing of the sort.

[y66]

May 18, 2022 https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/may-18-2022?token=eyJ1c2VyX2lkIjo3NTkzNjUyLCJwb3N0X2lkIjo1NTU2NzU0OSwiXyI6IlFBcEZlIiwiaWF0IjoxNjUyOTc0NDcxLCJleHAiOjE2NTI5NzgwNzEsImlzcyI6InB1Yi0yMDUzMyIsInN1YiI6InBvc3QtcmVhY3Rpb24ifQ.qX7z0WuBgczK4bisGr-9YZGNejSfVDqmmbnrntTV1yg&s=r

 

There was big news today from a quarter that made it easily overlooked. In a decision about the power of the Securities and Exchange Commission to judge those accused of engaging in securities fraud, the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit ruled that “Congress unconstitutionally delegated legislative power to the SEC by failing to provide an intelligible principle by which the SEC would exercise the delegated power, in violation of Article I’s vesting of ‘all’ legislative power in Congress….”

 

Congress created the Securities and Exchange Commission in 1934, after the Great Crash of 1929 revealed illegal shenanigans on Wall Street. The SEC is supposed to enforce the law against manipulating financial markets. The Fifth Circuit covers Louisiana, Texas, and Mississippi, and its judges lean to the right. Today’s decision suggests that the leaked draft of the decision that would overturn Roe v. Wade has empowered other judges to challenge other established precedents.

 

What is at stake with this decision is something called the “nondelegation doctrine,” which says that Congress, which constitutes the legislative branch of the government, cannot delegate legislative authority to the executive branch. Most of the regulatory bodies in our government since the New Deal have been housed in the executive branch. So the nondelegation doctrine would hamstring the modern regulatory state.

 

According to an article in the Columbia Law Review by Julian Davis Mortenson and Nicholas Bagley, the idea of nondelegation was invented in 1935 to undercut the business regulation of the New Deal. In the first 100 days of his term, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt set out to regulate the economy to combat the Great Depression. Under his leadership, Congress established a number of new agencies to regulate everything from banking to agricultural production.

 

While the new rules were hugely popular among ordinary Americans, they infuriated business leaders. The Supreme Court stepped in and, in two decisions, said that Congress could not delegate its authority to administrative agencies. But FDR’s threat of increasing the size of the court and the justices’ recognition that they were on the wrong side of public opinion undercut their opposition to the New Deal. The nondelegation theory was ignored until the 1980s, when conservative lawyers began to look for ways to rein in the federal government.

 

In 2001, the Supreme Court unanimously rejected the argument in a decision written by Justice Antonin Scalia, who said the court must trust Congress to take care of its own power. But after Justice Clarence Thomas suggested that he might be open to the argument, conservative scholars began to say that the framers of the Constitution did not want Congress to delegate authority. Mortenson and Bagley say that argument “can’t stand…. It’s just making stuff up and calling it constitutional law.” Nonetheless, Republican appointees on the court have come to embrace the doctrine.

 

In November 2019, Justice Brett Kavanaugh sided with Justice Neil Gorsuch-—Trump appointees both—to say the Court should reexamine whether or not Congress can delegate authority to administrative agencies. Along with Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Thomas, they appear to believe that the Constitution forbids such delegation. If Justice Amy Coney Barrett sides with them, the resurrection of that doctrine will curtail the modern administrative state that since the 1930s has regulated business, provided a basic social safety net, and promoted infrastructure.

 

As Justice Elena Kagan pointed out, the nondelegation doctrine would mean that “most of Government is unconstitutional.”

 

In today’s decision, it is no accident that Judge Jennifer Walker Elrod's majority opinion recalls what President Ronald Reagan, at a press conference in 1986, called the “nine most terrifying words in the English language”: “I'm from the government, and I'm here to help.” Reagan began the process of dismantling the New Deal government, and its achievement seems now to be at hand.

 

The decision will almost certainly be appealed.

[pilowsky]

Australian election Saturday - wish us luck.

[Winstonm]

That’s like a Jew appealing to Hans Frank.

 

To clarify, this was a response to the post of y66 that the verdict wii be appealed.

[kenberg]

Australian election Saturday - wish us luck.

 

I am guessing I am not the only one who was at best only slightly aware, or perhaps aware but unable to say more than aware, of the upcoming elections in Australia. So I browsed a bit. one source:

 

https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2022/may/20/australia-federal-election-2022-labor-liberal-coalition-australian-policy-guide-who-should-can-i-vote-for-aged-care-icac-childcare-climate-change

 

Yes, it occurs to me that maybe I should find an Australian source. Yes, I should.

 

But it's something.

 

And wish you luck? Yep.

 

Good luck. A good result for you is good for you and good for us.

[pilowsky]

I am guessing I am not the only one who was at best only slightly aware, or perhaps aware but unable to say more than aware, of the upcoming elections in Australia. So I browsed a bit. one source:

 

https://www.theguard...-climate-change

 

Yes, it occurs to me that maybe I should find an Australian source. Yes, I should.

 

But it's something.

 

And wish you luck? Yep.

 

Good luck. A good result for you is good for you and good for us.

 

You chose a good source - The Guardian (Australian Edition) is an excellent addition to our fourth estate - although I commonly find myself in the fifth estate.

Here's a quote from them:

The prime minister, Scott Morrison, denied he was a "buffoon", courting controversy as he again hardened his position against the type of federal anti-corruption body Labor wants set up.

Opinions differ on the matter of SM.

[pilowsky]

A lecture from the University of Chicago entitled:

I think it probably applies in other countries as well.

[y66]

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/05/21/voting-is-surging-georgia-despite-controversial-new-election-law/?utm_campaign=wp_post_most&utm_medium=email&utm_source=newsletter&wpisrc=nl_most&carta-url=https%3A%2F%2Fs2.washingtonpost.com%2Fcar-ln-tr%2F36e5a97%2F628909f8956121755a881339%2F597304a9ade4e21a84895037%2F8%2F70%2F628909f8956121755a881339

 

GRIFFIN, Ga. — When the Spalding County Board of Elections eliminated early voting on Sundays, Democrats blamed a new state law and accused the Republican-controlled board of intentionally thwarting “Souls to the Polls,” a get-out-the-vote program among Black churches to urge their congregations to cast ballots after religious services.

 

But after three weeks of early voting ahead of Tuesday’s primary, record-breaking turnout is undercutting predictions that the Georgia Election Integrity Act of 2021 would lead to a falloff in voting. By the end of Friday, the final day of early in-person voting, nearly 800,000 Georgians had cast ballots — more than three times the number in 2018, and higher even than in 2020, a presidential year.

[y66]

How Elise Stefanik, ‘bright light’ of a generation, chose a dark path

 

It’s a story told a thousand times: Ambitious Republican official abandons principle to advance in Trump’s GOP. But perhaps nobody’s fall from promise, and integrity, has been as spectacular as the 37-year-old Stefanik’s. “I was just so shocked she would go down such a dark path,” said her former champion, Bridgeland. “No power, no position is worth the complete loss of your integrity. It was just completely alarming to me to watch this transformation. I got a lot of notes saying, ‘What happened to her?’ ”

“Once you give up your integrity, the rest is a piece of cake.” - JR Ewing