Of loss and Labor day and cultural shifts On Labor Day 2023, I’m thinking about the town of Canton, NC, just west of here. Their 100-plus year-old paper mill abruptly closed this year throwing over 1,000 workers out of their jobs. The mill was the town’s life’s blood. Now it’s gone. The city obtained the shift whistle from the mill as a reminder of the sounds that marked the days there for decades. People gathered downtown earlier this year to shed tears as the whistle blew for the last time. “This is not just 1,300 jobs; this is our blue-collar identity,” said Canton Mayor Zeb Smathers. Gov. Roy Cooper has pledged millions in support for the region’s displaced workers. Canton was also one of the few outposts of labor unions in the region. In March, Smathers told the Carolina Journal: “We’ve had a death in the family,” he said. “I had a mill worker tell me that. That’s exactly what it is and exactly what it feels like. Like a death, you just experience the numbness and shock of a sudden loss and that’s what happened out of the blue. I had to call the governor’s office and let them know.
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Nor their cultural blemishes Predictions of calamity always attend change, be it cultural, economic or political. Preachers love to associate natural catastrophes with God’s judgement against unbelievers (until the storms and floods strike their own communities). Somehow, change always seems to bring out the doomsayer in us. So, it’s interesting that as church attendance declines, former churchgoers still maintain their sense of morality despite theocrats’ claims that that’s not possible. Daniel K. Williams writes in The Atlantic that, if nothing else, people shedding their churchgoing identities does not means losing their moral and political ones: So, as church attendance declines even in the southern Bible Belt and the rural Midwest, history might seem to suggest that those regions will become more secular, more supportive of abortion and LGBTQ rights, and more liberal in their voting patterns. But that is not what is happening. Declines in church attendance have made the rural Republican regions of the country even more Republican and—perhaps most surprising—more stridently Christian nationalist.
Outside the California State Capitol last month, a fitness trainer turned school board president fired up the crowd at a parental rights rally, telling them they were all fighters in “a spiritual battle” for their kids and must answer the call from God. Sonja Shaw, who was elected to the Chino Valley Unified School District board of education last November with an assist from a local megachurch and its Christian nationalist pastor, didn’t equivocate in naming the enemy: state Democratic officials who are challenging her right-leaning policies—and drafting laws that hinder book bans and protect teachers from harassment. “Today we stand here and declare in his almighty name that it’s only a matter of time before we take your seats and we be a God-fearing example to the nation, how God is using California to lead the way,” Shaw crowed, adding, “We already know who has won this battle. You will be removed in Jesus’s name!
Back in the day, presidential campaigns started on Labor Day — in the election year! And it wasn’t that long ago. I remember George Bush Sr saying, “I’ll get into on labor day” when asked when he was going to hit the trail in 1988. Sure, you have the conventions in the summer but the barnstorming and advertising didn’t really kick in until then. I’m not nostalgic about much but that’s one thing that was better in the good old days. The permanent campaign is exhausting. Well, it looks as though Joe Biden is keeping with the tradition, sort of. he appears to have kicked off his presidential campaign in earnest today. He went after Trump directly: Maybe it’s just that everyone has accepted the fact that barring some unusual circumstance that knocks him out, Trump is the nominee and he has a record that needs to be attacked since he’s been out there saying his term was heaven on earth and people are starting to believe it. Good. As much as I wish we could ignore all this for a while, it’s time to engage and engage seriously.
Michael Luttig makes the case that the question of whether the 14th Amendment precludes Trump from running again will be decided shortly by the Supreme Court: I don’t doubt the Supreme Court will decide this. I do doubt that they will uphold the idea that Trump is disqualified from running. It would be the most shocking decision ever. And I don’t think anyone can even guess what it might mean politically. I have my doubts that it would end well but who knows?
You’d think that would give GOP voters pause. But … The WSJ reports: Donald Trump has expanded his dominating lead for the Republican presidential nomination, a new Wall Street Journal poll shows, as GOP primary voters overwhelmingly see his four criminal prosecutions as lacking merit and about half say the indictments fuel their support for him. The new survey finds that what was once a two-man race for the nomination has collapsed into a lopsided contest in which Trump, for now, has no formidable challenger. The former president is the top choice of 59% of GOP primary voters, up 11 percentage points since April, when the Journal tested a slightly different field of potential and declared candidates. Trump’s lead over his top rival, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, has nearly doubled since April to 46 percentage points. At 13% support, DeSantis is barely ahead of the rest of the field, none of whom has broken out of single-digit support. I’m actually a little surprised it took this long. There was never a question that this would be the dynamic. I suppose anything can happen but if all goes as usual, Trump will be the nominee.
Judge slaps down DeSantis redistricting map “Today’s redistricting victory in Florida was proof that if you aren’t paying attention to the courts you aren’t paying attention to democracy,” Democratic elections attorney Marc Elias posted Saturday after a Florida circuit judge struck down a Republican congressional map promoted by Gov. Ron DeSantis. Republicans “hate me because I fight, they fear me because I win,” Elias crowed. Because the plan diminishes Black voters’ “ability to elect representatives of their choice,” per the Fair Districts Amendments, “The Enacted Plan is DECLARED an unconstitutional violation of the Florida Constitution, Article III, Section 20,” wrote Circuit Judge J. Lee Marsh who sent it back to the Florida Legislature for a do-over (Politico): Judge J. Lee Marsh’s ruling is a rebuke to the governor, who previously vetoed the Legislature’s attempts to redraw Florida’s congressional maps and pushed lawmakers to approve his map that dismantled a North Florida seat formerly held by Rep. Al Lawson, a Black Democrat. Yeah, they’re predictable that way.
Meadows may have committed perjury Izzy Einstein and Moe Smith, the legendary prohibition agents, raided illegal speakeasies a century ago, often using ruses and costumes to finagle their way inside to order drinks. Izzy would surreptitiously pour his drink down a funnel hidden in his vest. A hose led to a bottle for preserving evidence. He would announce he had “bad news.” You’ve just been raided. There was more bad news for Mark Meadows and Donald Trump last week in Meadows’ hearing transcript. But wait! There’s more. Ryan Goodman of Just Security observes in a thread that Meadows got involved in coordinating the fake electors scheme because he “would get yelled at” if he didn’t. “By whom?” the judge asked Meadows. “By the president of the United States,” Meadows replied, implicating both Trump’s knowledge of the scheme and active participation in it. It’s also a Hatch Act violation for a president, says Goodman. Meadows also admitted involving Cleta Mitchell in Georgia to help the campaign.
I’m not quite sure what I think about this push to invoke the 14th Amendment to keep Trump off the ballot. It certainly seems to be straightforwardly correct on the merits. But whether it’s politically viable — or wise — is still unresolved for me. Would it save democracy or destroy it? TPM takes a look at the inside of the move to do this: Those on the vanguard of invoking the seldom-used Disqualification Clause of the 14th Amendment, under which Trump’s role in Jan. 6 would preclude him from running for office again, acknowledge that what they’re doing is unprecedented in the modern era. But so is a president attempting to foment an insurrection. “It’s Donald Trump’s fault if some people end up not being able to vote for him,” Gerard Magliocca, an Indiana University law professor who specializes in the Disqualification Clause, told TPM.
Yeah, a lot of people thought that after Nixon resigned. But we are in a different country and one thing that’s very different is that the idea of vengeance has overtaken the Party of Grievance. Even if the majority that loathes and despises Donald Trump decides to let bygones be bygone (which is unlikely) it would never be enough for the MAGA “winners.” They will demand blood no matter what. And they will be led by the man who was given the pardon, Donald Trump himself. So no, there will be no “binding up of the nation’s wounds.” The right is entirely organized around the fight now. It IS illegal. Many other people have been convicted for doing much less. Sigh. Whatever. It doesn’t really matter what he says. This guy’s so full of shit it’s boring to even talk about it. But I think he’s the future of the GOP unfortunately. The whole political apparatus is nothing but hustlers and grifters now and they will say and do anything to keep the base riled up. Trump is the prototype. This guy is 2.0. And he and others like him can probably count on tens of millions of people to buy what they’re selling.