The new first principle of politics The Games of the XXXIII Olympiad take place in Paris in July 2024. The organizers periodically add new events and remove others from sports that have fallen out of use/favor. Not having checked to see if that’s happened for the upcoming Olympics, I have a suggestion for a new event. Credit where due, David Frum inspired the idea. Frum (indirectly) identifies in The Atlantic the dominant principle held by the Party of Trump: flexibility. “Flexibility is the first principle of politics,” Richard Nixon once advised a staffer and, hoo-boy, are Republicans flexible.* Frum provides a few examples where the Trump faithful nimbly pivot whenever it suits them. There’s a new first principle on the block. Point out where Republicans benefit from and leverage our system’s anti-majoritarian features to engineer for themselves permanent minority rule? We’re a republic, not a democracy. States rule that Donald Trump, post-insurrection, is ineligible under the 14th Amendment to hold public office in any capacity? Let the people decide!
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Teach Yellow Dogs new tricks Even if a Democrat wins the White House in November 2024, we could a year from now be sitting on pins and needles wondering if Coup 2.0 is in the works. Watching the January 6, 2021 insurrection unfold may have been the most harrowing day in the lives of ordinary Americans who’ve never served in combat. One wonders if Trump country watched with beer and pretzels as if it was the Super Bowl halftime show. In any event, the Department of Justice, D.C. and Capitol Police, and nearby national guard units, will be anxious as well, and better prepared. There’s a lot to do between now and then. You help keep me/us sane by reading our daily rants. Thank you so very much for that and for your support. I don’t say it enough, thank God for readers: [T]his blog’s proprietor, began writing here New Year’s Day 2003 after attracting a following at Atrios’s blog. She wrote that being invited to write by Atrios was “kind of like having Eddie Van Halen invite you up on stage to join him in a guitar solo.” That’s how I felt when Digby invited me to join her in August 2014.
We’d better hope not Jack Smith’s office has been working over the holiday and they’ve dropped quite a filing responding to Trump’s claim of immunity. The consequences of the court granting it are dire: Special counsel Jack Smith warned in a new filing Saturday that ex-President Donald Trump’s bid for immunity could “license presidents to commit crimes to remain in office.” The brief lodged in the D.C. Court of Appeals came in response to the ex-president’s claims that he is immune to prosecution for his efforts to undo his 2020 defeat because he survived an impeachment proceeding in the Senate, and because his plotting fell within the powers and duties of his office. If these arguments—which District Court Judge Tanya Chutkan rejected earlier this month—won out, a president could commit crimes freely so long as he threw up sufficient hurdles to keep two-thirds of U.S. senators from voting to remove him, Smith said.
Dispatch from the Trump cult Watch the whole thing if you have time. Are there people like this at Biden events? I’m not saying there aren’t. But I’ve never seen them. Democrats do have many crazies in their midst. it’s a big coalition. And I know there’s lots of woo and irrationality. Take RFK Jr. for example — there are plenty of left leaners who think he’s great. But I’d be surprised if there were many who believe that Donald Trump, for all his immense flaws, is draining blood from the brains of children and using it to drug the population. Yet Donald Trump has a not insignificant number of such people who believe this of Joe Biden and Hillary Clinton following him. Even worse than that (if that’s possible) is the fact that the woman in the video dismisses every indisputable fact by questioning, “where did you hear that?” and insisting that it’s fake news. You can’t deal with people who believe that all reality they don’t like isn’t real. This is cult stuff and it goes way beyond the kind of grotesque propensity for racism and bigotry that characterizes so much of our species.
Pwnallthethings lampoons 14th Amendment punditry I’m ripping this off wholesale for the reading enjoyment of those not on Blue Sky. First replace Trump with Obama and the 14th Amendment with the 22nd, says Pwnallthethings: Now do it everywhere: If you know, you know: Naturally The Wall Street Journal gets in on the act: One Connor Lynch comments: These rewrites really capture the solipsistic pedantry of the highly implausible counter arguments that keep popping up in editorial pages.
Up is down, black is white, in is out, and wrong is right The Bizarros at Fox News stand reality on its head every day and make money for the Murdoch family doing it. The Fox audience tunes in to lap up bald-faced lies. Here their talking heads claim that Donald Trump turned aound the “miserable” Obama economy (that crashed under George W. Bush). Joe Biden’s looks the same to them, dontcha know? MSNBC contributor Brian Tyler Cohen (No Lie with Brian Tyler Cohen) was having none of this Foxsense. He responds on the hellsite: Every good economic trend that happened under Trump started under Obama. Trump then wrecked it with his disastrous COVID response, and Biden fixed it. Cohen backs that up with some Washington Post graphics from September 5, 2020 (the thick of the pandemic): Now let’s get some current data for the Biden administration. I can’t find a chart-for-chart comparison, but…. The current unemployment rate is 3.7%. The unemployment rate under Trump before the pandemic was 3.5%. The S&P 500 closed on Friday at 4,769.83. It peaked at 4,766.18 at the end of 2021. Job creation is another point of departure between Trump and Biden.
Here’s yet another disturbing story about the malign influence of Leonard Leo, Federalist Society founder and architect of the conservative Supreme Court we are now stuck with for a generation or more: Groups aligned with the conservative legal movement and its financial architect, Leonard Leo, are working to promote a publicly funded Christian school in Oklahoma, hoping to create a test case to change the Supreme Court’s interpretation of the First Amendment’s separation of church and state. At issue is the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Oklahoma’s push to create the St. Isidore of Seville Catholic Virtual School, which would be the nation’s first religious school entirely funded by taxpayers. The school received preliminary approval from the state’s charter school board in June. If it survives legal challenges, it would open the door for state legislatures across the country to direct taxpayer funding to the creation of Christian or other sectarian schools. Brett Farley, executive director of the Catholic Conference of Oklahoma, acknowledges that public funding of St. Isidore is at odds with over 150 years of Supreme Court decisions.
Nikki Haley finally gets some scrutiny Over the holiday I heard a few people saying that we liberals really should get behind Haley and help her beat Trump because even though she polls better than Biden we should do what we can to defeat him even if it means losing the general election. My response (in my head) was “wtf are you smoking? Haley is horrible!” Sure, maybe she’s not as bad as Trump in some ways but we don’t really know that because she is an empty vessel and nobody knows what she really thinks about anything. Politico took a look at the flap and what it says about her: After evading attacks for weeks from her Republican rivals, it was a town hall question about the origins of the Civil War that finally seemed to stick. And it couldn’t have come at a worse time. With weeks to go before voting starts, Haley is now facing the first major test of her ability to withstand a maelstrom in the presidential campaign. It is a significant moment not only for the former South Carolina governor, but for the broader effort among Republicans hoping to stop Donald Trump from steamrolling to the nomination.
Her name is Marge The Hill interviewed Marjorie Taylor Greene who has obviously feeling irrelevant since she bet on the wrong horse in MyKev. She’s loaded for bear: In an extensive interview with The Hill, Greene did not hold back when asked about Johnson’s early Speakership record — “terrible” — or his need to earn her trust. “He went from having a voting record to literally a month later … going against his own voting record and being Speaker of the House,” Greene later added. “Literally all of a sudden talking about doing things that he had literally voted against only a month before that. And, you know, that was unacceptable to me, and it still is.” In the first two months of the Johnson era, Greene moved to force votes on a pair of politically prickly issues that split the Republican conference, hurled sometimes explicit insults at GOP colleagues who opposed those efforts, and frequently criticized the Speaker’s strategy on major issues including government funding, Ukraine aid and the annual defense policy bill.
This isn’t the first time he’s said this, of course. He claims he actually won the popular vote in 2016 because of all the undocumented immigrants who voted for Clinton. He even created a commission to investigate it and, of course, they came up with nothing because it’s utter nonsense. But today this actually refers to the Great Replacement Theory, which is much more pernicious. Sure, he’s laying the groundwork to claim he actually won again. And his people will be convinced of it, of course. But the Republican Party has now adopted this white supremacist theory and it’s inspiring people to take matters into their own hands. Example: The Tree of Life and El Paso mass murders, which were clearly inspired by this grotesque, racist propaganda. Trump may be doing it for his personal purposes, but a whole lot of people are absorbing this idea as a major threat to their way of life. It’s bad.