Has U.S. Democracy Been Trumped?

[Winstonm]

Feral hogs are a nice attempt at a distraction. Some conservatives will obviously try anything to distract. The simple reality is that a lot of Americans are being shot. A lot of American children are being shot. In around half the states it is easier to buy a gun than a car or even a Bible. And it is much easier to buy a gun and shoot someone than to get an abortion, a divorce or even to vote. Let's not lose sight of the farm for the pigs. Any politician who thinks that fighting <0.1% voter fraud is more important than taking simple and easy steps to save lives does not deserve your vote. If enough Americans are consequential on this, eventually it will result in something changing.

 

I understand there have been many lousy choices elected US president, and I hate to be pessimistic but I do believe that only a country that is irreparably broken could have elected a Donald Trump.

[y66]

https://www.thebulwark.com/how-to-think-about-the-january-6th-hearings/

 

What should we expect?

 

On paper, the committee was tasked with investigating the events that led up to Jan. 6th and caused the violence to unfold that day, and with proposing legislative solutions to mitigate future threats.

 

Practically, that means delving into the story of the current state of the Republican party and how far its various actors—from its most powerful leader to his boots on the ground—were willing to go in order to overturn the election and keep Donald Trump in power.

 

Here’s just a sample platter of the stories the committee has to nail down:

 

Trump’s lies.

 

How the GOP and its many aligned advocacy organizations fundraised off Trump’s meritless legal challenges to cancel Democratic votes.

 

The efforts to squeeze state officials to “find the votes” in swing states Trump lost.

 

The schemes inside the Department of Justice to launch sham investigations into voter fraud.

 

The wild ideas entertained inside the White House to seize voting machines in order to “rerun” the election.

 

The pressure campaign on Republican members of Congress and Vice President Mike Pence to deny Electoral College votes for Biden.

 

How Trump summoned a real-life mob, bearing tactical gear and weapons, that resorted to physical violence to stop Congress from certifying Biden as president.

It’s a lot. Give it time to sink in. And do not let the political junkies rush the process with their relentless questions about whether or not the hearings will “work” in changing public opinion.

 

Give the facts a chance to speak for themselves.

[y66]

If the House GOP really believed no one cared about Jan 6 they’d ignore the hearings. This kind of leadership prebuttal suggests their polling shows swing voters and some Republicans are discomfited by January 6th, Trump’s election subversion attempt, and Republicans’ complicity.

 

NEW from me & @AnnieGrayerCNN: The House GOP is holding a press conference tmrw morning to offer their prebuttal to the Jan 6 select committee hearings.

 

Among the GOP lawmakers expected to attend: Elise Stefanik, Steve Scalise, Jim Banks, Jim Jordan & Richard Hudson.

[y66]

Republican members of Congress said today that school shootings are a) a mental health problem (Cornyn), b) a school prayer problem (Gohmert), and c) not a problem since we didn’t ban planes after 9/11 (Scalise). Also, January 6th wasn’t and isn’t a problem. But the caravan…��

 

…oops, missed d) Rep. Fallon saying the school shootings are an “overuse of these dang smartphones” problem.

The refusal to make anything resembling a serious argument is not a bug but a feature of the new MAGA Republican establishment. Contempt for the very enterprise of reasonable argumentation is central to Trumpism. It’s one of the key ways Trumpism is adjacent to fascism.

[y66]

I’m old enough to remember when conservatives believed in, or at least claimed to believe in, agency, responsibility, and accountability. And liberal democracy. But that was then and that is not now.

When asked about his previous statement that Trump bears responsibility for Jan. 6, @GOPLeader [Kevin McCarthy] now says, “I think everyone in the country was responsible.”

[y66]

Liz Cheney's presentation will, in my judgment, go down in the history books: Congress at its best, truth-telling at its best, American democracy at its best.

[PeterAlan]

“Tonight, I say this to my Republican colleagues who are defending the indefensible. There will come a day when Donald Trump is gone, but your dishonor will remain.”

[thepossum]

Any investigation by the Committee into the role of media in the long run up to the events of Jan 6 and the ongoing circus

 

EDIT Apologies if I seem disrespectful to Congress but I am trying to respect the US Constitution and Democracy

[y66]

https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2022-06-10/jan-6-panel-made-the-case-against-donald-trump?utm_medium=email&utm_source=newsletter&utm_term=220610&utm_campaign=author_18529680

 

At long last, the House Jan. 6 committee held its first hearing, and made it a pretty good one. Right at the top, Chairman Bennie Thompson gave us the right wording: Former President Donald Trump’s actions and those of his associates were an effort to “overthrow the government.” That’s what this is all about. That’s why the investigation is so important; it’s why the public side of the committee’s responsibilities are so critical. If the committee is correct, then this was among the most heinous and disloyal actions by a president in the history of the US.

 

In the two-hour, prime-time session, the committee members only outlined the case that they’re making — what Representative Liz Cheney, one of two Republicans on the panel, called a “sophisticated seven-part plan” by Trump to overturn the election. Thompson and Cheney were clear: While the violence of Jan. 6 was part of the plan, no one should think that the attack by itself was the central story line.

 

The committee emphasized two further points.

 

One was that everyone inside Trump’s White House and his campaign knew that he had lost; that there was nothing to any of the wild stories of fraud; and that they all told Trump exactly that. This may be important for any legal case against the former president or his allies, since it shows that they knew what they were peddling was false. It’s also useful in understanding the bigger picture. The truth is, there was nothing extraordinary about the 2020 election. It was close, but not especially so. If anything, it was unusually clean. The professionals on the campaign and Trump’s legal team knew it, and told him so. Claims to the contrary not only amounted to a lie, but a lie in service of overturning the government.

 

The second point was that Jan. 6 wasn’t just the spontaneous action of a mob. It was an organized attack by extremist groups that had been egged on by Trump. It’s still not clear whether Trump and his allies actively coordinated the mayhem, or just recklessly invited it. But Trump in particular certainly did invite it, and once the violence began he refused multiple entreaties to use either his official position or his influence with the mob to put an end to it.

 

As for the presentation: Video of the attacks, live testimony from a Capitol police officer who had been brutally injured, and snippets from the depositions the committee has conducted made for compelling television. Of course, most voters weren’t watching. But it was never a realistic goal to entice a large audience to watch gavel-to-gavel coverage. What the committee members needed to do was to convince key elites — the non-aligned media, high-visibility Republicans who aren’t entirely comfortable defending Trump, and any skittish Democrats — that this is all extremely important. The more successful they are in doing so, the more the hearings will become a continuing event, with people being exposed to it in news coverage and social media and everywhere else. It’s likely that the committee took a big step toward achieving that on Thursday.

 

These hearings are unusual in that the minority party is represented only by two members (out of nine) who are defying their own party’s boycott. That means the whole thing can be as scripted as the committee chooses, without interruptions from the minority or attempts to debunk or reframe what’s happening. In that sense, the boycott has been a tremendous gift to the committee. There was no squabbling over rules or procedures, no objections, no complaints about etiquette — nothing that would make it easy to bash the whole thing as partisanship. Helping things further? Seven committee members, everyone but Thompson and Cheney, were willing to sit quietly throughout the session. Presumably everyone will get a turn to shine over the five remaining hearings, but very few politicians are willing to sacrifice an opportunity to be seen by a prime-time audience. And that in turn helped to emphasize the seriousness of the occasion.

 

I hope that the committee plans quite a bit of live testimony in the daytime sessions; the clips from taped depositions can be effective, but they’re not nearly as gripping as watching full answers, especially by people who once appeared to be loyal to the former president but now are telling the truth about him. We’ll see what they have soon, with three daytime sessions next week beginning on Monday morning. And yes, I do think this would all have been more effective months ago, and with more time. We had several short clips Thursday night from rioters; I could easily imagine two weeks of testimony walking them through the entire thing.

 

Perhaps the most effective moment of the hearing came from Cheney, who talked about the portrait in the Capitol rotunda of George Washington resigning his commission at the end of the revolution. Washington’s action made him world famous; he could have been king of the new nation, but he rushed, as the painting shows, to give up power as soon as it was safe to do so. Even more astonishingly, he managed to repeat the act by retiring from the presidency after two terms, setting an example that lasted for more than a century and was so powerful that when Franklin Roosevelt shattered the precedent the response was eventually to put the two-term limit into the Constitution. The contrast with Trump, who refused — still refuses — to accept the verdict of the people in a free and fair election, could not be stronger.

[y66]

It’s actually a pretty simple story of a president who lost, who couldn’t stand losing, who cared nothing about the constitution and was determined to hold on to power and who incited a mob when everything else failed.

[kenberg]

From PeterAlan

 

Liz Cheney said:

 

"Tonight, I say this to my Republican colleagues who are defending the indefensible. There will come a day when Donald Trump is gone, but your dishonor will remain."

 

There is, and will be, plenty to choose from but for me this might well be the best summary. Those who wish the whole thing to just go away can pick at some minor point, they can distort a point, they can refute a point that no one has put forth, but at the end of the day, when the chips are down, they will defend the indefensible or they will not.

 

The choices that they make will have major consequences.

[johnu]

These hearings are unusual in that the minority party is represented only by two members (out of nine) who are defying their own party’s boycott. That means the whole thing can be as scripted as the committee chooses, without interruptions from the minority or attempts to debunk or reframe what’s happening. In that sense, the boycott has been a tremendous gift to the committee. There was no squabbling over rules or procedures, no objections, no complaints about etiquette — nothing that would make it easy to bash the whole thing as partisanship. Helping things further? Seven committee members, everyone but Thompson and Cheney, were willing to sit quietly throughout the session. Presumably everyone will get a turn to shine over the five remaining hearings, but very few politicians are willing to sacrifice an opportunity to be seen by a prime-time audience. And that in turn helped to emphasize the seriousness of the occasion.

Can you imagine the clown show that somebody like "Gym" Jordan would have put on if they were allowed to be on the committee? Jordan was front and center in the committee's investigation for his traitorous actions in the events leading up to January 6. Only the QOP thinks that having a subject of the investigation be part of the investigation team is in any way a good idea.

[Winstonm]

The telling indictment from day 1 to me was how many Republican lawmakers thought themselves lawbreakers and asked for preemptive pardons.

[y66]

From The Moral Desolation of the GOP:

 

The sheer scale of Donald Trump’s depravity is unmatched in the history of the American presidency, and the Republican Party—the self-described party of law and order and “constitutional conservatives,” of morality and traditional values, of patriotism and Lee Greenwood songs—made it possible. It gave Trump cover when he needed it. It attacked his critics when he demanded it. It embraced his nihilistic ethic. It amplified his lies. When House Republican Leader Kevin McCarthy—a man who for a few fleeting hours after the January 6 insurrection dared to speak critically of Donald Trump—traveled to Mar-a-Lago a few days later to kiss his ring, it was an act of self-abasement that was representative of his party, his morally desolate party.

 

Make no mistake: Republicans are the co-creators of Trump’s corrupt and unconstitutional enterprise. The great majority of them are still afraid to break fully with him. They consider those who have, like Liz Cheney, to be traitors to the party. They hate Cheney because she continues to hold up a mirror to them. They want to look away. She won’t let them.

 

Perhaps the most withering sentences of Cheney’s extraordinary presentation last night were these: “Tonight, I say this to my Republican colleagues who are defending the indefensible: There will come a day when Donald Trump is gone, but your dishonor will remain.”

 

Those in the Republican Party and on the American right who defended Trump and continue to do so—who went silent in the face of his transgressions, who rationalized their weakness, who went along for the ride for the sake of power—must know, deep in their hearts, that what she said is true. And it will always be true.

 

Their dishonor is indelible.

[y66]

Cornyn’s rejection of the 21-year age limit is craven, nauseating, insane on the merits, and more evidence that the GOP’s negotiations are in bad faith.

 

https://www.thebulwark.com/republicans-should-pay-for-their-gun-control-cowardice/

[y66]

The House committee investigating the Capitol attack today held its second public hearing. They weren’t going to, but then Rudy Giuliani said, ‘Make it a double!’

 

So we’re just going to blame this entire thing on the alcohol?

[kenberg]

Alcohol can sometimes be part of an explanation but of course not the whole thing. For example, the excessive use of alcohol needs an explanation. I guess it could be interesting, in a morbid sort of way, to try and understand some of the choices.

 

A woman with three growing children, limited job prospects and a lousy husband is in a tight spot. She has few options. But it is completely different for those who were around Trump. They had options, plenty of options. As Jan 6 approached some effectively said "If you are going down that path, it will be without me" and they got out of there. Others stuck with him. As I understand it, those who stuck with him did not really think the election was fraudulent, but Trump said it was so they said it was fraudulent. When someone has options, sticking with a scumbag like Trump is difficult to understand.

 

Maybe doing so created a need for a lot of booze.

[kenberg]

This is just a "Maybe others will also find this interesting" post.

 

WaPo writer John Kelly posted the WaPo front page from June 18, 1972.

 

https://www.washingt...e-post-stories/

 

Kelly wrote mostly about the other stories of the day, just for interest.

 

The full WaPo story on the arrest of five men in Watergate is here:

 

https://www.washingt...gate/part1.html

 

It struck me as interesting history.

[Winstonm]

I was thinking today the best chance the NRA offers to save kids is to hand out Colt 45s to all grade school students and instead of history show them the movie Tombstone.

[Chas_P]

I was thinking today the best chance the NRA offers to save kids is to hand out Colt 45s to all grade school students and instead of history show them the movie Tombstone.

Did the NRA produce Tombstone?

[Chas_P]

I was thinking today the best chance the NRA offers to save kids is to hand out Colt 45s to all grade school students and instead of history show them the movie Tombstone.

Did the NRA produce Tombstone? Please answer. Let's place the guilt where it lies.

[hrothgar]

Did the NRA produce Tombstone? Please answer. Let's place the guilt where it lies.

 

Good thing that Tombstone never got shown outside the United States

 

Otherwise places like Canada and the UK would be having similar problems with mass shootings...

 

You're such an ignorant little *****wit

And the worst thing is, you probably think that you were being clever.

[kenberg]

Did the NRA produce Tombstone? Please answer. Let's place the guilt where it lies.

 

I liked Hopalong Cassidy when I was quite young. Red River with John Wayne came out when I was nine and thought that was much better. Key Largo was the same year and I liked that. Laer I saw a war movie, I can't remember the name, where someone used a flamethrower to kill someone in a tree. That was the last war movie I saw for quite a while.

 

I don't get it with all of these hyper-violent movies. AFAIK I do not have a gender identity issue. As a young child I played equally with boys and girls, as a teen I dated girls and worked on cars with my male friends (females welcome but none seemed interested), but I never got into hyper-violent movies. I did like On The Waterfront. I still do. "I could have been a contender" is a much-quoted line but my favorite comes in an intense confrontation where Brando tells Eva Marie Saint "You know you love me" and she says "I didn't say I didn't love you, I said for you to go away".

 

All of this shooting seems to be so they don't have to worry about creating an actual storyline.

 

Splendor in the Grass (1961) was on TCM the other night. Becky and I have both seen it before, more than once. She watched it all again, I came in for the last half. It was Warren Beatty's first film role (I think) and very likely his best. Anyway, he and Natalie Wood are teens with parents who, for one reason or the other, are at best useless. The Natalie Wood character goes to pieces and spends two and a half years in a mental institution. I got to thinking this could be a good parable with the government in the role of the parents. The country needs some serious therapy.

 

The title comes from a poem by Wadsworth https://apoemaday.tu...ur-in-the-grass

[y66]

https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2022-06-17/jan-6-hearings-are-finally-unveiling-details-of-trump-s-coup-attempt?utm_medium=email&utm_source=newsletter&utm_term=220617&utm_campaign=author_18529680

 

The most important comments from the third public hearing this month of the House Jan. 6 committee came right at the end. After the panel heard testimony detailing the efforts to pressure Vice President Mike Pence to illegally try to overturn the election, former Judge J. Michael Luttig pointed out that even now, “Trump and his allies and supporters are a clear and present danger to American democracy.”

 

That’s “because to this very day, the former president and his allies and supporters pledge” — if they lost next time — “they would attempt to overturn that 2024 election … but succeed in 2024 where they failed in 2020.” Luttig, who advised Pence prior to Jan. 6, continued: “I don't speak those words lightly. I would have never spoken those words ever in my life, except that that's what the former president and his allies are telling us.”

Even in the deadly serious business of investigating an attempt to overthrow the government, hearings can provide light moments, giving us entertaining characters — some sympathetic, some not at all — and memorable phrases and anecdotes. We heard on Thursday that Pence reacted to Trump lawyer John Eastman’s suggestions that he break the law by saying it was “rubber room stuff.”

 

More appears to be left on the cutting-room floor. Referring to White House lawyer Eric Herschmann and presidential son-in-law Jared Kushner, my Bloomberg colleague Timothy L. O’Brien was surely correct to point out “the contrast between Herschmann's clear, principled testimony and the smug, scurvy testimony from Kushner that those worried about illegalities were ‘whining.’”

 

But that contrast would have been so much more notable had we had live testimony rather than taped highlights from both Herschmann and Kushner. This wasn’t going to happen given the schedule the committee set — a choice it could have made differently.

 

Such criticisms aside, what the committee is presenting continues to be devastating. Thursday’s hearing detailed how Trump and his allies were committed to using methods of trying to overturn the election that were obviously contrary to the law, and that they knew and simply didn’t care. Earlier in the week, we heard how they also knew, and didn’t care, that their accusations of fraud were not true.

 

We learned again, too, just how close the nation came to an even worse disaster on Jan. 6 — that the mob stirred up by Trump came within only 40 feet of Pence and his security escort as they fled to safer ground.

 

It’s still almost hard to believe that it all happened. And that many Republicans are running in 2022 — and already for 2024 — on a platform of making sure they’ll finish the job next time.

[Winstonm]

It’s still almost hard to believe that it all happened. And that many Republicans are running in 2022 — and already for 2024 — on a platform of making sure they’ll finish the job next time.

Here is Oklahoma, every Republican primary ad deifies Trump and makes promises based on Trumpian nonsense. One even wants to have a Donald J Trump highway in Oklahoma. I would go along with that as long as it intersected with Benedict Arnold Overpass.