The coach won’t give up. And he has a little MAGA minion helping him now. More GOPer on GOPer acrimony: Republican Senators Tommy Tuberville and Mike Lee maintained the Alabama Republican’s hold on military nominations despite a group of Republican senators who attempted to push through nominations when they returned to the Senate floor in the wee hours of Thursday morning. Sens. Dan Sullivan, Joni Ernst, Lindsay Graham and Todd Young began their effort to confirm nominees around 12:15a.m. ET and wrapped around 3:45a.m. ET. Tuberville was joined by Lee, who objected to confirming every nominee brought up for consideration. Once it became clear that Lee would speak at length every time he objected, the group of senators began reading the resumes of each of the nominees rather than attempting to confirm them one at a time. As he objected, Lee acknowledged that he understood his colleagues’ concerns about military readiness and politicizing the military and noted that he wouldn’t necessarily have chosen the same approach as Tuberville. However, he insisted that he needed to “defend” the Alabama Republican.
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Tread carefully or go for it? Pick your metaphor. Whistling past a graveyard. Tiptoeing through a minefield. Every day feels like the country is doing a tightrope walk between the Twin Towers. And we know what happened to them. The question of Donald Trump’s qualification for any elected office is a hot potato neither the courts nor election officials nor Congress want to touch. Hayes Brown writes: Efforts to block former President Donald Trump from being on the ballot next year have yet to score a major win in court. Nobody in power seems willing to decide whether the 14th Amendment’s insurrection clause disqualifies him from returning to the White House. Instead, judges and state officials have either pawned off that decision to someone else or determined that there will be some other, better time to make a judgment. The result is a rapidly shrinking window for that decision to be made. And, based on the standard in a ruling issued in Michigan on Tuesday, we might not know the answer until after all the votes have been cast on Election Day next year. It might be after the presidential electors have met and submitted their ballots.
It’s been a wild one. Does it matter? Dahlia Lithwick on the stakes: It’s been just a clutch of days since former President Donald Trump and his allies made clear that if he wins reelection, he plans to gut the existing U.S. government and “install a pre-vetted, pro-Trump army of up to 54,000 loyalists” to take over senior legal, judicial, defense, regulatory, and domestic policy jobs in the civil service.
What the physical violence in the US Congress portends Philip Bump takes a look at the possible meaning of GOP officials resorting to threats and physical violence this week on Capitol Hill. It is probably not terribly useful to draw sweeping conclusions from Sen. Markwayne Mullin’s demand Tuesday that a witness at a Senate hearing stand up and fight him. Mullin’s background is atypical for a senator, including a brief stint about 15 years ago during which he did mixed-martial arts fighting. The witness, meanwhile, was the head of the Teamsters union; his willingness to goad Mullin (R-Okla.) into the challenge was probably also atypical for someone appearing on Capitol Hill. We might also be cautious about the weird, probably overheated interaction between Reps. Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) and Tim Burchett (R-Tenn.), also on Tuesday, in which the latter accuses the former of elbowing him. Or the scuffle in January when the Republican Party was trying to elect McCarthy speaker in the first place. These were all isolated incidents, explainable in isolated contexts.
We are living in a deadly nightmare, right here in the USA This epic analysis of the horrific carnage caused by the AR-15 by the Washington Post is essential reading for every American with a conscience. It’s not easy. You may want to pour a drink or save some time to take a walk afterwards. But it’s important to bear witness. Mass shootings involving AR-15s have become a recurring American nightmare. The weapon, easy to operate and widely available, is now used more than any other in the country’s deadliest mass killings. Fired by the dozens or hundreds in rapid succession, bullets from AR-15s have blasted through classroom doors and walls. They have shredded theater seats and splintered wooden church pews. They have mangled human bodies and, in a matter of seconds, shattered the lives of people attending a concert, shopping on a Saturday afternoon, going out with friends and family, working in their offices and worshiping at church and synagogue. They have killed first-graders, teenagers, mothers, fathers and grandparents. But the full effects of the AR-15’s destructive force are rarely seen in public.
There is no debating what this is We can argue all day about whether supporting Palestinians or criticizing Israel is antisemitism but this is the real deal and can’t be denied. And it was disseminated by the man who owns one of the world’s most powerful social media platforms directly to his 160 million followers. Media Matter writes: The conspiracy theory, that Jewish populations are pushing “hatred against whites” and supporting “hordes of minorities” coming into the country, is the same one that motivated the 2018 Tree of Life shooter in Pittsburgh, as noted by The Atlantic’s Yair Rosenberg. Holocaust denier Nick Fuentes and other figures linked to white nationalism are cheering on Musk.
We need it The world is exhausting right now and I’ve reached my bandwidth for the day. So here’s a little something less important that might bring a little happiness: Chinese President Xi Jinping signaled that China will send new pandas to the United States, calling them “envoys of friendship between the Chinese and American peoples.” “We are ready to continue our cooperation with the United States on panda conservation, and do our best to meet the wishes of the Californians so as to deepen the friendly ties between our two peoples,” Xi said Wednesday during a dinner speech with business leaders. The gesture came at the end of a day in which Xi and President Biden held their first face to face meeting in a year and pledged to try to reduce tensions. Xi did not share additional details on when or where pandas might be provided but appeared to suggest the next pair of pandas are most likely to come to California, probably San Diego. The bears have long been the symbol of the U.S.-China friendship since Beijing gifted a pair of pandas to the National Zoo in Washington in 1972, ahead of the normalization of bilateral relations.
I know it’s mean to say it, but it’s important to acknowledge. Jill Filipovic writes about “that which cannot be mentioned” in her great newsletter today. It has to be said: One basic rule of being a person who opines on politics is that you are not allowed to disrespect voters. Voters, you are supposed to say, are very smart and thoughtful people; it is the politicians who are bad, who do not deliver, who do not give them what they want or need. If politicians behaved differently, then voters — good people, rational people — would respond accordingly…. But also, a lot of people are stupid, paranoid, incompetent and irrational. I know, this is a very disrespectful thing to say (“deplorable” would have been more polite). And there are of course some Trump voters who are perfectly kind of their neighbors and I am sure are, in many contexts, utterly decent people. There are some Trump voters who aren’t cult loyalist but normie Republicans who want normie Republican things, like tax breaks for the rich, unfettered capitalism, and women forced into submission.
Philip Bump took a deep dive into Trump (and Barr’s) successful effort to turn Russia’s manipulation of him into a “fake news” story. There’s a lot there and I can only excerpt a piece of it. But you can read the whole thing with this link: Out there in the broader world, the “Russia collusion hoax” skeptics are abundant, if not a plurality of the public. There has perhaps been no sales pitch offered by Donald Trump that has paid larger dividends than his immediate, long-standing push to cast any questions about Russia’s efforts to influence the 2016 campaign as the deranged rantings of weirdo liberals. He’s inculcated an immediate, visceral reaction from members of his base as well as Americans more broadly that when they hear “Russia” in the context of “Trump,” they should dismiss what follows as false and defamatory. This reaction has provided him an enormous amount of space to avoid very serious questions about the ways in which Russia worked to his benefit while he was in office — and may continue to do so. There is news on this front.
Judge Luttig tweet this today, writing, “Prophetic words from Alexander Hamilton to George Washington in 1792 — as apt and timely today as they were over 230 years ago.” “A people so enlightened and so diversified as the people of this Country can surely never be brought to [monarchy], but from convulsions and disorders, in consequence of the acts of popular demagogues. The truth unquestionably is, that the only path to a subversion of the republican system of the Country is, by flattering the prejudices of the people, and exciting their jealousies and apprehensions, to throw affairs into confusion, and bring on civil commotion. Tired at length of anarchy, or want of government, they may take shelter in the arms of monarchy for repose and security. Those then, who resist a confirmation of public order, are the true Artificers of monarchy—not that this is the intention of the generality of them.