“Hold my beer,” says MTG Move over Samuel Beckett, the GOP is branching out into the theater of the absurd. If you blinked during Thursday night coverage of the Donald Trump indictment in the classified documents case, you may have missed Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene’s (R-Ga.) appearance on “The Ingraham Angle.” While the non-propaganda press ran wall-to-wall coverage of the prosecution of the former president, Fox News worked to keep its audience fixated on the alleged misdeeds of the Joe Biden crime family. Trump mishandled sensitive documents? “Hold my beer,” says Greene, stepping up to the microphone (Huffington Post): Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) raised eyebrows with a claim she made during a TV interview on Thursday evening. Greene said she read a document inside a SCIF ― a sensitive compartmented information facility ― related to bribery allegations Republicans have made against President Joe Biden but have yet to provide evidence for.
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There are dozens of other examples. And then there’s this:
I just read through it quickly and it’s much, much worse than we thought. He had very sensitive documents including war plans and classified info about America’s nuclear arsenal and showed them to people. He kept them in totally insecure locations, including an unlocked bathroom and a ballroom at Mar-a-Lago. When they asked for them back he moved them around, rummaged through them and tried to get his lawyer to lie about what was in them. I highly suggest that you read the whole thing if you have time. It’s better than a Nordic Noir. Meanwhile, here’s a first draft analysis from Politico: A federal indictment unsealed Friday charges former President Donald Trump with 37 felony counts stemming from an investigation into the presence of a trove of classified information at his Florida estate and other locations after he left office.
Election-rigging simplified Breaking news of Donald Trump’s forever-imminent indictment on federal and state charges came so thick and fast on Wednesday that I missed this detailed New Yorker essay from Andrew Marantz until MSNBC’s Chris Hayes interviewed him on set last night. “How a Fringe Legal Theory Became a Threat to Democracy” charts the journey of the independent-state-legislature theory (I.S.L.T.) from crank theory supporting the Bush v. Gore decision that settled the 2000 presidential election to one mainstream enough to reach the U.S. Supreme Court again. Marantz reviews this one, Moore v. Harper, from North Carolina: In 2021, with Tim Moore as the speaker of the North Carolina House, the majority-Republican legislature drew gerrymandered congressional maps—that is, even more egregiously gerrymandered than usual. Several voters (one of them named Becky Harper) and a handful of nonprofits (including Common Cause, where [democracy activists Sailor]Jones works) sued to block the implementation of those maps, and the state Supreme Court ruled in their favor. The U.S.
Trump-DOJ news took some keeping up with on Wednesday Luckily, Marcy Wheeler keeps up better than anybody.
This is what he’s come to I can’t tell you how much I love this: Had it come from anyone else, the transition would have been amusing. “The media lie,” the host says, looking into the camera for a video posted on Twitter. “They do. But mostly, they just ignore the stories that matter.” Stories like what, you ask? Well, fast-forward a few seconds and you get your answer. “Yesterday, for example,” he explains, “a former Air Force officer who worked for years in military intelligence came forward as a whistleblower to reveal that the U.S. government has physical evidence of crashed, non-human-made aircraft, as well as the bodies of the pilots who flew those aircraft.” Ah, okay. Everyone over the age of 13 can see where this is going. But the speaker here wasn’t one of the unidentifiable talking phenomena that litter social media. It wasn’t even Alex Jones, who made a career out of elevating skepticism in authority so high that people might even believe that his nutritional supplements were worth the cost.
But it’s on life support From Professor Melissa Murray: Some initial thoughts on Allen v. Milligan. Media is trumpeting this as a “victory” for the Voting Rights Act. And it is. And I don’t want to be a turd in the punchbowl… but this is pretty weak sauce from this Court. First, this doesn’t “strengthen” the VRA. It preserves the status quo. And the status quo is that this Court has done an A+ job of hobbling the VRA over the last 10 years. In 2013’s Shelby County v. Holder, it eviscerated the preclearance formula. The preclearance regime required states with a history of voting discrimination to first “preclear” any changes to their voting rules and regs with the DOJ or a three-judge federal court panel The Court invalidated the preclearance formula on the ground that progress had been made and minorities were voting and blah blah blah. This progress narrative prompted RBG to note in dissent that throwing out the preclearance formula was like throwing out your umbrella in a rainstorm because you weren’t getting wet.
The Washington Post: Paralysis, limbo, stalemate — any of them describe the state of the House of Representatives this week. On Wednesday, Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) sent the House home until Monday after spending an entire day talking with a group of far-right conservatives who held up all floor action over their dissatisfaction with the debt limit bill signed into law last week, among other grievances. They failed to reach any path forward. McCarthy told reporters that he’s not exactly sure what they want and that different members are asking for different things. This is a significant challenge to McCarthy’s leadership and his ability to govern and run the House. While it’s not as dire as the motion to vacate — the procedural maneuver by which a single House Republican could trigger a vote to depose McCarthy as speaker — supporters of the rebels say that their tactic of bringing the chamber to a halt by voting against House rules could be just as damaging. They weren’t doing anything real anyway. All they had on the agenda were messaging bills for the wingnut faction.
There is movement in the electorate For the first time in decades there is a fissure in the Republicans party on the issue of guns: Young Republicans aren’t clinging to guns like the rest of the GOP. As former President Donald Trump and new campaign entrants, including former Vice President Mike Pence, tout their Second Amendment bonafides and opposition to “gun confiscation” to 2024 primary voters, some Gen Z and millennial Republicans are moving in the opposite direction: A significant share of younger conservatives, reared in an age of mass violence, embrace firearm restrictions. One poll conducted by Harvard’s political institute this spring found that a clear majority of young conservatives supported mandatory psychological exams for gun purchasers. A separate, recurring survey from YouGov concluded in March that Gen Z and millennial Republicans are more likely to believe in tougher gun laws than older Republicans and that young conservatives’ support for the idea has grown in the past year.