thomhartmann
thomhartmann's JournalI endorse Senator Chris Murphy
to replace Chuck Schumer as Senate minority leader. There are some indications he’s interested in the job, too…
The GOP Is Winning by Rigging the System--Shouldn't Democrats Do the Same?
Democrats are at least 17 years late to the party and damn well better catch up soon if they want to win the House (or Senate) in next year’s election. The history — and lack of Democratic response — is shocking.
While a state must go to court to take away your gun, five Republicans on the US Supreme Court have refused to enforce the “right to vote” provisions of the National Voting Registration Act of 1993 so states don’t even have to notify you when they steal take away your vote.
And, wow, are Republicans committed to taking away your vote!
Back in 2008, following Barack Obama’s win, Chris Jankowski of the Republican State Leadership Committee (RSLC) organized a program called REDMAP (Redistricting Majority Project) to create, as closely as possible with the aid of sophisticated computer analyses, a permanent Republican majority, both in control of individual state legislatures and in the US House of Representatives.
They’d been running voter suppression scams for years, of course; an analysis by the Center for American Progress found that decades of gerrymandering had given Republicans a more-or-less permanent 19-seat advantage in the US House that they wouldn’t have had without it.
But that wasn’t enough for the GOP, which was facing the headwind of promoting unpopular policies like tax cuts for the rich and gutting the social safety net. So REDMAP was launched with the goal of creating a permanent Republican majority in the House.
The first step was to seize such complete control of a handful of decisive states that they could then engage in outrageous levels of partisan gerrymandering after the 2010 census; this was done with roughly $30 million (much from the US Chamber of Commerce) spent in usually sleepy state house and senate races.
That money spent on 107 state legislative races across 16 states, including pivotal then-swing states Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, Wisconsin, North Carolina, and Florida, flipped 19 legislative bodies from Democratic to Republican control.
As a result, following the 2010 election 10 of the 15 states that were set to redraw their congressional maps in 2011 were firmly in the hands of the GOP.
Then they set about surgically gerrymandering those ten states and the result, according to research done by the Brennan Center for Justice, was that Republicans picked up (and Democrats lost) 16 additional seats in the US House of Representatives and would be able to hold onto them with a high level of confidence in future elections.
REDMAP worked spectacularly: in the 2012 congressional elections, despite Democrats receiving over 1 million more votes for House members nationwide, that gerrymandering campaign helped Republicans capture a 33-seat majority in the U.S. House of Representatives.
That year in Pennsylvania, for example, Democrats won 51% of the congressional vote but only 5 of 18 US House seats; in Ohio, Democrats also won 51% of the statewide congressional vote but because of the extreme gerrymander got only 4 of 16 seats in the House. In North Carolina, Democrats received 50.6% of the vote but ended up with only 4 House seats compared to 9 held by Republicans.
While Republicans were pulling off this evil deed, “good government Democrats” (encouraged by local rightwing media) were embracing an end to gerrymandering in their states with California, Arizona, Colorado, Hawaii, New Jersey, Washington state, and Michigan putting nonpartisan or bipartisan commissions in charge of their redistricting to draw maps that are “fair” to both sides.
And now, Trump — looking at an election wipeout next year as he destroys the economy, deploys gestapo-like secret police, and engages in foreign policy that may well plunge the world into WWIII — is demanding that Texas, Ohio, Indiana, and other Red states make their existing gerrymanders so extreme that they’ll essentially lock out most all House Democrats from those states.
Finally, it seems to be waking up Democrats. California’s Governor Gavin Newsom wrote a sternly-worded letter to Trump saying:
“You are playing with fire, risking the destabilization of our democracy, while knowing that California can neutralize any gains you can hope to make. This attempt to rig congressional maps to hold onto power before a single vote is cast in the 2026 election is an affront to American democracy. …
“If you will not stand down I will be forced to lead an effort to redraw the maps in California to offset the rigging of maps in red states. But if the other states call off their redistricting efforts, we will happily do the same. And American democracy will be better for it.”
Will he follow through? If he does, it’ll be a huge departure from past Democratic Party practices of simply ignoring Republican voter suppression efforts.
Similarly, Illinois Governor JB Pritzker said of the proposed Texas gerrymander:
“I think cheating the way the president wants to is improper. … What Texas Gov. Greg Abbott is doing … is trying to cheat mid‑decade here. … They’re attempting to change the map.”
But Pritzker won’t commit Illinois to re-gerrymandering. At least not yet.
And even if they do, gerrymandering California and Illinois is a good beginning but frankly is weak tea. Democrats should never have abandoned gerrymandering when Republicans were hanging onto it; it was a stupid form of unilateral surrender in the name of fairness and good government. They’re noble ideas, but they’ve also stripped the Party of its political power.
Every Democratic state should begin gerrymandering right now, regardless of what Republicans do in Texas, Ohio, Florida, etc. It’s necessary to undo the impact of REDMAP, if nothing else.
But Democrats shouldn’t stop there. An analysis by reporter and statistician Greg Palast — using numbers exclusively from official federal and state sources — found that 4,776,706 mostly-Democratic (and mostly minority) voters were purged from the election rolls in the months leading up to the 2024 election.
Republicans had also organized a nationwide campaign to have partisan election judges sit with vote-counters in swing states where mail-in ballots were counted. They challenged so many signatures or found small errors in ballot markings that an additional 2,121,000 mail-in ballots (again, mostly Democratic) were disqualified from being counted.
Additionally, Republican election officials made sure that 1,216,000 “provisional” ballots were rejected and thus not counted, and 3.24 million new 2024 voter registrations — gathered by Democrats in Get Out The Vote campaigns — were rejected or not entered on the rolls in time to vote.
As Palast writes, using official US Election Assistance Commission, Federal Election Commission, and state-level official numbers:
“Trump lost. That is, if all legal voters were allowed to vote, if all legal ballots were counted, Trump would have lost the states of Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Georgia. Vice-President Kamala Harris would have won the Presidency with 286 electoral votes.
“And, if not for the mass purge of voters of color, if not for the mass disqualification of provisional and mail-in ballots, if not for the new mass vigilante challenges in swing states, Harris would have gained at least another 3,565,000 votes, topping Trump’s official popular vote tally by 1.2 million.”
The main weapon the GOP is using to purge voting rolls is called “caging.” They were under a federal consent decree forbidding its use from 1982 to 2018, but that year five Republicans on the US Supreme Court legalized the practice.
In the direct-mail business, when junk mail is returned because it’s undeliverable those pieces of mail were put in a “cage” to be later fed into a computer to remove the bad addresses, which is where the term caging came from.
Republicans, though, have elevated caging into a partisan art form. They mail postcards — that intentionally look like junk mail — into heavily Democratic areas that must be returned within a specific time period or the voter will be scrubbed from the rolls for “inactivity.” The typical return rate is 6.8%.
When Democrats sued in 2018 to stop Ohio Secretary of State John Husted from caging voters in that state, Sonja Sotomayor wrote in her dissent in the Husted v Randolph case that voters were purged after missing an election and “…after failing to send back one piece of mail, even though there is no reasonable basis to believe the individual actually moved. … At best, purged voters are forced to ‘needlessly reregister’ if they decide to vote in a subsequent election; at worst, they are prevented from voting at all because they never receive information about when and where elections are taking place.”
She added:
“As one example, amici point to an investigation that revealed that in Hamilton County, ‘African-American-majority neighborhoods in downtown Cincinnati had 10% of their voters removed due to inactivity’ since 2012, as ‘compared to only 4% of voters in a suburban, majority-white neighborhood.’”
In his dissent, Justice Stephen Breyer pointed out that only around 4 percent of Americans move every year, revealing the lie that Ohio’s Husted was “just trying to keep the voting rolls clean”:
“The record shows that in 2012 Ohio identified about 1.5 million registered voters—nearly 20% of its 8 million registered voters—as likely ineligible to remain on the federal voter roll because they changed their residences.”
When Democrats are talking about “fighting fire with fire,” organizing partisan ballot challenges, voter roll challenges, and caging in heavily Republican districts should also be weapons in their arsenal.
After all, there are huge, well-funded Republican organizations like True The Vote actively challenging voter registrations and attempting to remove individuals from the rolls. They include:
— Soles to the Rolls, active in Michigan, formally affiliated with Citizens Outreach Foundation.
— Pigpen Project, based in Nevada. Linked to former GOP operatives; involved in trying to purge over 11,000 voter registrations in Washoe County.
— The People’s Audit operating in Florida, Texas, North Carolina, and Georgia.
— Look Ahead America, active across multiple states, including Missouri, Arizona, Pennsylvania, and others, founded by a Trump campaign alum.
— Wisconsin’s North of 29 connected to Mike Lindell; active in Wisconsin.
— Clean Elections USA (CEUSA) operates in Arizona and has been accused of intimidating voters by showing up at drop boxes in military gear, with drones, and photographing voters.
— FEC United operating in Colorado and Michigan; has ties to Mike Lindell and Kash Patel
— Liberty Center for God and Country operates in Texas to challenge voter rolls
— Strong Communities Foundation of Arizona (aka EZAZ), is engaged in voter roll challenges or suppression-type activity
— Wisconsin Voters Alliance and Wisconsin Center for Election Justice used methods like change-of-address data to target voters for removal; their tactics were questioned by election experts.
— Georgia Nerds: one member challenged over 1,000 voters in Chatham County alone.
— Restoring Integrity and Trust in Elections (RITE) was founded in 2022 by political figures like Bill Barr and Karl Rove and has pursued lawsuits aimed at gaining access to voter data and influencing registration practices.
— Rockbridge Network functions like a conservative “venture capital” hub, funding projects including map influence and political coalition-building at the state level.
— Organizations like Heritage Action, the American Principles Project, FreedomWorks, and others are directing substantial funds toward restrictive voting laws and election procedure changes in numerous states.
While there are multiple Democratic-aligned groups working to register voters or encourage election turnout — Stacy Abrams’ Fair Fight Action, Rock The Vote, and Voto Latino — there isn’t even one dedicated to suppressing the Republican vote.
Immediately after the five Republican appointees on the U.S. Supreme Court gutted the Voting Rights Act in 2013, 14 GOP-controlled states moved, within a year (some within days), to restrict access to the vote, particularly for communities of color, students, and retired people.
In North Carolina, for example, 158 polling places were permanently closed in the 40 counties with the most African American voters just before the 2016 election, leading to a 16 percent decline in African American early voting in that state. An MIT study found that, nationwide, Hispanic voters wait 150 percent longer in line than white voters, and Black voters can expect to wait 200 percent longer in line to vote.
This is how Republicans work to win elections, and although it’s not a legal crime (under interpretations by the Republican majority on the Supreme Court) it’s certainly a moral crime and an all-out assault on what remains of our democracy.
In Indiana, then-Governor Pence’s new rigorous voter ID law — the first in the nation at the time (2005) — caused an 11.5 percent drop in African American voting. Students sued for their right to vote and lost, and in Red states, retired people who no longer drive but care passionately about their Social Security and Medicare are routinely turned away at the polls by the tens of thousands for lack of a “current” drivers’ license, another GOP trick. In 2008, around six million eligible voters did not vote because of difficulties associated with registration requirements, according to the Census Bureau.
In the months leading up to the 2012 election in Pennsylvania, Republicans had just passed that state’s first voter suppression law. It eliminated the right to vote of 758,000 registered voters because they lacked a Department of Transportation-issued ID, meaning over 9 percent of that state’s then 8.2 million registered voters could no longer cast a ballot.
As the US Commission on Civil Rights noted about the 2000 election after Governor Jeb Bush purged over 90,000 mostly-Black voters and Republicans began seriously challenging voters’ right to vote:
“14.4 percent of Florida’s black voters cast ballots that were rejected. This compares with approximately 1.6 percent of nonblack Florida voters who did not have their presidential votes counted. … n the state’s largest county, Miami-Dade, more than 65 percent of the names on the purge list were African Americans, who represented only 20.4 percent of the population.”
It’s not like Republicans don’t know what they’re doing. This is at the core of their ability to seize and hold power. As Pennsylvania’s GOP House Majority Leader Mike Turzai famously bragged:
“Voter ID, which is gonna allow Governor Romney to win the state of Pennsylvania, done.”
But the GOP was just getting warmed up. In 2018 in Georgia, then-Secretary of State Brian Kemp purged 340,134 mostly Black and entirely legitimate voters (out of the 534,000 total purged) from the state’s rolls. He then “won” the election for governor against Stacy Abrams by about 55,000 votes.
Florida and Texas are among other “close” states where Republican officials hang onto office in part through aggressive culling of voters from the rolls. The DeSantis administration has purged almost a million voters from the Florida voter rolls using the excuse that they failed to vote in a midterm election.
Just between 2020 and 2022 fully 19,260,000 Americans — 8.5% of all registered voters — were purged, flipping control of the House to the GOP in the 2022 election. The purge rate in Republican-controlled Red states was 40% higher than the rest of the country.
When Florida essentially criminalized voter registration drives ($250,000 fines for even minor errors), the League of Women Voters and other groups simply stopped operating in those states. Similar laws were put in place over the past 15 years by Republican legislators in Idaho, Kansas, Missouri, Montana and Tennessee, and are pending in other Red states (and will probably pass soon).
To make matters worse, in March 2025 Trump signed an executive order to overhaul and exert partial control over our nation’s election systems.
He’s demanding that voters must show a passport or similar citizenship document to register to vote, wants all voting equipment re-certified (only one voting system meets their certification standards and that company’s systems were only certified on July 7, 2025), and is demanding voter lists with sensitive, personal information from Blue states so they can be combed for “fraud.”
Democrats are finally talking about “fighting fire with fire,” but Republicans have been going after Democratic voters with flame throwers for two decades and now have the support of the Republicans on the Supreme Court, along with Trump’s efforts to involve the federal government in even worse voter suppression.
Democrats, in addition to gerrymandering, should start caging operations and challenging Republican voters the way the GOP has been doing against Democratic communities for decades. The resulting squeals that will come from Republican operatives and officials might provoke a change in the law outlawing caging and gerrymandering.
If the Democrats’ goal is to prevent the 2026 and 2028 elections from looking like those in Hungary and Russia, they need to be raising absolute hell and get on the ball quickly. Time’s a-wasting…
Dear MAGA: You Stormed the Capitol for a Guy Who Couldn't Even Storm Out of Epstein's Pedo Pool Party
Well, now we — and all of MAGA-land — have discovered that Donald Trump and all the senior law-enforcement officials around him have known since May that his name is in multiple places in the Epstein documents, at least according to the Wall Street Journal.
That would almost certainly include the senior law-enforcement official, Todd Blanche, who is on his way to interview Ghislaine Maxwell in prison. Totally without bias, of course; no way the guy who was Trump’s personal criminal defense attorney is going to try to get Maxwell to point the finger at Bill Clinton and away from Donald Trump, right? Right…..
Donald Trump and Jeffrey Epstein were, apparently, storming teenagers while MAGA followers were storming the Capitol.
It’s a tough time for the true believers, and that may signal a real opportunity for us in the reality-based world to wake up some of our brothers and sisters in MAGA-land.
Recently, one of the Trump-following MAGA faithful called into my radio/TV program about Epstein. He’d called in before, usually spouting some random rightwing talking point as if it would instantly win him an argument; the strategy usually doesn’t work out well for him, but he keeps trying.
This time, though, the topic was Epstein and he seemed lost. All he could do was dismissively call me “Tommy” and “liar.” He sputtered a bit and then hung up before I could say more than, “You’re on the air.”
Increasingly, as Van Morrison sings in his song Brand New Day, MAGA cultists are saying out loud, “I was lost, double-crossed” by Trump. They’d believed him when he was campaigning in October 2020 and was asked, on an NBC town hall, about Qanon:
“[What do you think about their] theory that Democrats are a satanic pedophile ring and that you are the savior of that?”
He replied:
“Let me just tell you, what I do hear about it, is they are very strongly against pedophilia. And I agree with that. I mean, I do agree with that. And I agree with it very strongly.”
In other words, Trump suggested, yes, there is an international ring of rich and powerful men running pedophile rings, and they’re associated with the Democratic Party and Democrats more generally.
Now that it’s come out that there was, in fact, a major pedophile ring whose members abused, exploited, and raped over 1,000 girls and young women — and for more than a decade Trump was right there in the middle of it, a ring run by his “best friend” Jeffrey Epstein — MAGA followers are reeling from the cognitive dissonance.
If you are one of those Trump followers — or pass this note along to somebody who is — here’s, as Paul Harvey used to say, The Rest of the Story.
Dear MAGA follower,
Trump didn’t just nakedly lie to you when he promised you he’d smash the pedo rings and “drain the swamp,” he’s been lying to you his entire political career.
He lied to you when he told you that Barack Obama wasn’t born in the United States; that lie was promoted by billionaire-owned media like Fox “News” that wanted Trump in office. Why? So he could do favors for the morbidly rich who give him money.
He lied to you when he said he supported blue-collar workers; in fact, Trump appointed a professional union-buster (Eugene Scalia) as Labor Secretary in his last term, and his current Labor Secretary (Lori Chavez-DeRemer) went so far as to brag to Republican senators that she “fully” supports virulently anti-union “Right To Work For Less” laws that have gutted union membership since the Reagan Revolution. Why? Because billionaires who give Republicans money hate unions.
He lied to you when he said he’d clean up the environment; instead, he’s dismantling the Environmental Protection Agency, has shut down their scientific Office of Research and Development, fired thousands of employees and scientists, and has rolled back over 100 rules that protect our air, water, and soil. Why? Because the fossil fuel industry and big polluters gives him money.
He lied to you when he said he wanted a good future for your children; here in the reality-based world, Trump killed Biden’s efforts to reduce student loan debt, is pushing programs to defund public schools, and has all but shut down the entire federal Department of Education. Why? Because the private school industry gives him money.
He lied to you when he said he’d lower healthcare costs; because of his and the GOP’s massive cuts to Medicaid and his deregulation efforts, giant insurance companies that administer Affordable Care Act policies are rolling out rate increases of as much as 75% for next year. Why? Because the giant insurance companies give them money.
He lied to you when he said he’d protect Social Security; instead, he laid off 7,000 Social Security workers, causing absolute chaos in the agency and hours-long (sometimes days-long) telephone waits for help or to sign up for new benefits. Why? Because the big banks, which want to take over Social Security, give him money.
He lied to you when he said he’d bring home manufacturing jobs; instead, his erratic tariff policies have discouraged American companies from building facilities here because they can’t rely on the tariffs being around (like they would be if, like the Constitution says, they were imposed by Congress instead of the president). Because of his freezing Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act funds for helping entrepreneurs with new factories, many are shutting down, leading to a loss of over 100,000 manufacturing jobs since his inauguration. Why? Because (illegally) wielding tariffs gives him a sense of power and forces other nations’ leaders to come groveling to him with flattery worthy of Idi Amin and billion-dollar bribes for himself, his company, and his family.
He lied to you when he said he’d lower the cost of groceries; instead, he’s pushing for more monopolies in the grocery sector, his tariffs are driving up prices, and his refusal to do anything about climate change is making crop yields continue to collapse (driving up produce, meat, and egg prices). Why? Because tariffs give him power and bribes, and the fossil fuel industry gives him money.
He lied to you when he said he’d lower the cost of housing; instead, his gutting the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is letting rip-off mortgage lenders have a field day. Why? Because the banking industry gives him money.
He lied to you when he said he’d give working class people a tax cut; instead, virtually all of the new tax cuts from the Big Ugly Bill go to the top 1 percent of Americans and in 2 years taxes will go up on working-class people. And he gutted the IRS so they can no longer effectively audit morbidly rich people. Why? Because he’s a billionaire, 13 of his cabinet members are billionaires, his buddies (like Epstein) are billionaires, and none of them (particularly Trump) want to pay their damn taxes.
He lied to you when he said, “I’ll eliminate the federal debt…”; instead, Trump has added more to the national debt, faster, than any president in the entire 249-year-long history of the United States. Why? He’s forcing our government to borrow money our children must pay back in order to give that cash to himself and his billionaire buddies.
He lied to you when he said, “We’re going to rebuild America” with a “trillion-dollar infrastructure bill”; instead, he not only never offered such legislation but is actively kneecapping the trillion-dollar infrastructure bill that Democrats passed during Biden’s presidency. Why? Because billionaires hate paying taxes for things that benefit the “little people” who need roads and bridges while they live on their estates and travel by private jet.
He lied to you when he said he was only going to arrest undocumented immigrants who’d committed crimes and were “the worst of the worst”; instead, over 70% of the people ICE has arrested in recent months have had spotless records in the US, and many were already approved for asylum or other status that allowed them to stay in the US or even work on becoming citizens. Why? Because he’s a racist and has been ever since he was a kid when the feds busted him for writing a big “C” on “Colored” people’s rental applications for his father’s apartments so they could be turned down.
The list goes on: Trump said he’d protect voting rights and instead is trying to make it harder for women and minorities to vote; he said he’d protect women’s rights and instead women in Red States are bleeding out in unprecedented numbers; he said he’d protect our democracy but instead is taking an axe to it; he said he’d respect the law but has taken bribes and violated the Hatch Act since taking office; he said he’d protect veterans and instead is gutting the VA; he said he’d respect police but instead led a charge against them that killed three officers.
Why all the lies? Because he’s a compulsive liar and he found advantage, either politically or financially, in each of his lies. He thinks of you, dear MAGA, the same way he thinks of the people who’ve patronized his university, bought products from his failed businesses, or paid the absurd fees to join his seedy gulf motel clubs: All of you are, in his mind, suckers!
So, dear MAGA, please reconsider your slavish devotion to this lifelong liar, convicted felon, and adjudicated sexual assaulter and rejoin the rest of us in the real world. You’ve been lied to for too long, and we’re here to help with your reentry into normal, civil society.
Why are Trump and the GOP Working So Hard to Ruin America?
Every day, it seems, we see or hear about another way in which Trump and his lickspittles in Congress and the various federal agencies are tearing down our country, weakening our defenses, pitting Americans against each other, looting our government, and making life harder for everybody except the morbidly rich.
The question nobody seems to have an answer to is, “Why?”
— Is it that, as Craig Unger seems to suggest, that he’s been a Russian agent for decades and is setting us up to lose to the newly-forming Axis of Russia and China?
— Is it that he spent so many years burning with rage and embarrassment at not being accepted by New York high society that he’s just come to hate America?
— Could it be that America-fearing foreign powers that have poured literally billions of dollars into the Trump family are paying him to tear us apart so they’ll never again have to endure the humiliation of having their human, civil, and women’s rights records called out by a future administration?
— Is it possible it’s all just to pay for tax cuts for billionaires?
— Or are his, Vance’s, and Musk’s white supremacist, Christian nationalist, libertarian, and/or neo-Nazi ideologies so intense that they’re willing to essentially burn the country down just to expel people of color, elevate the rich, and re-subordinate women?
These are serious questions for which I can’t find credible answers that explain the entire spectrum of their behavior. Why would Trump and the GOP:
— Condemn 12 million Americans to sickness and early death by gutting Medicaid?
— Destroy American soft power by killing USAID, thus condemning millions to death?
— Fire so many workers at the Social Security Administration that just getting through to sign up or get help has turned into a multi-day slog?
— Gut the State Department at a time diplomacy is most needed for world peace?
— End food assistance (SNAP) for millions when one-in-five American children experience hunger?
— Refuse to enforce laws and rules that allow workers to form unions in their workplaces?
— Propose forcing all new Medicare recipients onto Medicare “Advantage” corporate scam plans?
— Refuse military aid to Ukraine for seven long months and then give Russia 50 days to finish off their genocidal job?
— Stop the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau from going after fraudsters and banks when they rip people off?
— Eliminate a major NOAA program designed to warn communities about the dangers of flooding and other extreme weather crises?
— Politicize the FBI, the Department of Justice, and the Federal Election Commission?
— End net neutrality so none of us are safe online?
— Shut down anti-cyber-warfare operations in the federal government?
— Defund university research that leads to innovation and saves lives?
— Cut unemployment insurance benefits across Red states?
— Terminate support for people with student loans and gut scholarship programs?
— Slash Affordable Care Act outreach budgets and allow junk insurance plans?
— Reverse over 100 environmental rules, including those on clean air, clean water, and chemical safety?— Weaken Dodd-Frank, including gutting oversight of “too big to fail” banks and stress tests for mid-size financial institutions?
— Dial back OSHA workplace safety standards and inspections?
— Cut taxes to rich people while raising them via tariffs on working class folks?
— Change the Federal Trade Commission to allow more monopolistic, rip-off corporate behavior?
— Make it harder to vote and harass Blue states by demanding their voter information?
— Work to prosecute women who have miscarriages or abortions?
— Make it harder to qualify for Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI) and Supplemental Security Income (SSI)?
— End auto emission standards and increase our reliance on fossil fuels?
— Pack the courts with judges the American Bar Association says are “unqualified”?
— Destroy our faith in our elections and set up election workers for harassment?
— Fire the Inspectors General (who find waste, fraud, and abuse) across multiple federal agencies?
— Weaken whistleblower protections?
— Put the military on the streets of our cities in violation of Posse Comitatus?
— Use state power to punish political opponents and those who’ve investigated Trump’s crimes, alleged Russian collusion, and corruption?
— Create a network of concentration camps across America?
— Allow a shadow cabinet of billionaires and theocrats via Project 2025?
— Attack judges and prosecutors, leading to violence and threats of violence?
— Foment violence (like on January 6th) as a political strategy?
— Destroy our asylum and refugee systems?
— Pardon insurrectionists, rapists, cybercriminals, and other wealthy criminals?
— Defund the IRS so they can no longer audit the morbidly rich, leading to the loss of hundreds of billions in federal revenues?
— Ban books and censor libraries?
— Criminalize trans and queer people?
— Roll back gun safety measures? — Defund the arts, humanities, and public media?
— Gut vaccine and other programs that keep Americans healthy?
— Nakedly politicize the military?
— Expand federal surveillance powers while kneecapping oversight?
— Criminalize free speech, particularly on college campuses?
— Attempt to revoke birthright citizenship?
— Attack press freedom and bar the Associated Press from the White House?
— Sabotage the US Postal Service?
— Undermine the census?
— Scale back civil and women’s rights enforcement?
— Normalize autocratic language like “vermin,” “scum,” and calling immigrants “animals”?
— Expel millions of brown-skinned immigrants who’ve already gone through the legal process to get work permits and are on a path toward citizenship?
— Create international fiscal chaos with an on-again, off-again TACO tariff policy?
— Cancel the suicide hotline for queer kids?— Gut our national parks and sell off our federal lands to wealthy friends of the administration?
— Create a vast, secret, unaccountable police force with masked officers whose identity is concealed?
— Allow the president to accept hundreds of millions in obvious bribes from foreign powers in violation of the Constitution?
— Work so hard to conceal the crimes of a notorious sexual predator?
And this, of course, is just a partial list of the ways Trump and the GOP have weakened our nation, reduced our standing and prestige in the world, corrupted our government, and immiserated working class families.
Many of the theories about why Trump and the GOP would enthusiastically do so much damage to our people, our military, and our democracy contradict others.
For example, why would billionaires want tax cuts at the expense of damaging the economy that made them rich? Why would we promote a muscular military policy like bombing Iran while simultaneously destroying morale within the ranks and kneecapping our intelligence agencies?
“Something is happening here but you don’t know what it is,” sang Bob Dylan back in the 1960s.
Today, we’re there.
Why do you think Trump and the GOP are working so hard to ruin our country?
Does the EPA Die Today?
Republicans on the Supreme Court are, it appears, planning to gut most of America’s regulatory agencies, in what could be the most consequential re-write of the protective “deep state” since it was largely created during the New Deal in the 1930s.
The vehicle for this radical transformation of America is a case that will be argued today, in just a few hours, before the Court: Loper Bright Enterprises v Gina Raimondo.
If they pull it off, these six corrupt Republicans on the Court could destroy the ability of:
— the EPA to regulate pollutants,
— the USDA to keep our food supply safe,
— the FDA to oversee drugs going onto the market,
— OSHA to protect workers,
— the CPSC to keep dangerous toys and consumer products off the market,
— the FTC to regulate monopolies,
— the DOT to come up with highway and automobile safety standards,
— the ATF to regulate guns,
— the Interior Department to regulate drilling and mining on federal lands,
— the Forest Service to protect our woodlands and rivers,
— the FCC to protect us from internet predators,
— and the Department of Labor to protect workers’ rights.
Among other things on the rightwing billionaire wish-list: virtually the entirety of America’s ability to protect its citizens from corporate predation rests on what’s called the Chevron deference (more on that in a moment), which the Court appears prepared to overturn.
Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy says he wants to eliminate the Department of Education “on day one” if he’s elected president. If the Supreme Court has its way, he wouldn’t have to bother. It’ll become impotent.
Far-right conservatives and libertarians have been working for this destruction of agencies — the ultimate in deregulation — ever since the first regulatory agencies came into being with the 1906 creation of the Pure Food and Drugs Act, a response to Upton Sinclair’s bestselling horror story published that year (The Jungle) about American slaughterhouses and meat-packing operations.
Gutting these agencies is what Steve Bannon meant when Trump brought him into the White House and he said one of the main goals of that administration was to “deconstruct the administrative state.” If there’s any coherent explanation of the phrase “deep state” as used by Republicans, it’s our nation’s regulatory agencies.
The modern effort to destroy or at least neuter America’s protective agencies began when Ronald Reagan put Anne Gorsuch in charge of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).
She directed the agency to dial back restrictions on expansion of factories and other operations that were already polluting the atmosphere. That provoked a challenge to the Supreme Court, Natural Resources Defense Council, v. Gorsuch, where the Court overruled the Reagan administration.
Gorsuch nonetheless continued her efforts to gut the EPA. In her first year heading the agency, there was a 79 percent decline in enforcement cases, and a 69 percent drop in cases the EPA referred to the Justice Department for prosecution. She pushed a 25 percent cut in her own agency’s funding into Reagan’s first budget proposal.
It took Congress years to overturn her cuts to the Clean Air Act “on everything from automobiles to furniture manufacturers,” according to Phil Clapp, president of the National Environmental Trust.
She took a meataxe to President Carter’s renewable energy programs and “set solar back a decade” according to Clapp.
Gorsuch finally resigned her office to avoid prosecution for what Newsweek described as “a nasty scandal involving political manipulation, [Super]fund mismanagement, perjury, and destruction of subpoenaed documents, among other things.”
Her son, Neil Gorsuch, was devastated by his mother’s resignation. In her memoir Are You Tough Enough? she tells the story of how Neil confronted her when she resigned:
“Neil,” she wrote, “got very upset. Halfway through Georgetown prep and smart as a whip, Neil knew from the beginning the seriousness of my problems. He also had an unerring sense of fairness, as do so many people his age.
“‘You should never have resigned,’ he said firmly. ‘You didn’t do anything wrong. You only did what the president [Reagan] ordered. Why are you quitting? You raised me not to be a quitter. Why are you a quitter?’
“He was really upset,” she added.
Now, it appears, her son is preparing his revenge.
To get there, he and the other Republicans on the Court appear hell-bent-for-leather to turn regulatory agency rule-making upside-down, which will make the billionaires who give them luxury vacations, buy them homes, and pay them absurd speaking fees (and paid Roberts’ wife over $10 million).
Here’s how regulatory law — using the example of the EPA and CO2 — is supposed to work (in super-simplified form):
1. Congress passes a law that says, for example, that the Environmental Protection Agency should limit the damage that pollutants in the environment cause to the planet. Congress (the Constitution’s Article I branch of government) defines the broad goal of the legislation, but the Executive Branch (Article II, which encompasses the EPA and other regulatory agencies) has the responsibility to carry it out.
2. The EPA, part of that Executive Branch and answering both to the law and the President, then convenes panels of experts. They spend a year or more doing an exhaustive, deep dive into the science, coming up with dozens or even hundreds of suggestions to limit atmospheric CO2, ranging from rules on how much emission cars can expel to drilling and refining processes that may leak CO2 or methane (which degrades into CO2), etc.
3. The experts’ suggestions are then run past a panel of rule-making bureaucrats and hired-gun rule-making experts for the EPA to decide what the standards should be. They take into consideration the current abilities of industry and the costs versus the benefits of various rules, among other things.
4. After they’ve come up with those tentative regulations, they submit them for public review and hearings. When that process is done and a consensus is achieved, they make them into official EPA rules, publish them, enforce them, and the CO2 emissions begin to drop.
This is a process that simply comports with common sense, as the Supreme Court ruled in 1984 when they established what’s called the “Chevron deference” to legitimize and defend our regulatory agencies.
That doctrine — established by the Supreme Court and reflecting a century of the will of Congress and presidents of both parties who signed regulatory agencies into existence — says that when a regulatory agency does its due diligence and determines reasonable rules for a substance or behavior they have the legal authority to regulate, the courts should “defer” to the judgment of the agency.
Congress passes laws that empower regulatory agencies to solve problems, the agencies figure out how to do that and put the rules into place, and the solutions get enforced by the agencies. And when somebody sues to overturn the rules, if the courts determine they were arrived at through a reasonable process without corruption, those rules stand.
Then came a group of rightwing Supreme Court justices — including Neil Gorsuch — who overturned rules made by the EPA about CO2 emissions from power plants in their June, 2022 West Virginia v EPA decision. This set up today’s arguments.
Their rationale was that because the legislation that created the EPA doesn’t specifically mention “regulating CO2,” the agency lacks that power. And now it has lost that power, the result of that West Virginia v EPA decision a year-and-a-half ago.
The coal-, oil-, and natural-gas-fired power plant industry has been popping champagne corks for almost two years now, as CO2 levels continue to increase along with the temperature of our planet.
In addition to Gorsuch, the Court’s decision-makers in West Virginia v EPA included Amy Coney Barrett whose father was a lawyer for Shell Oil for decades, and John Roberts, Samuel Alito, and Brett Kavanaugh who are all on the Court in part because of support from a network funded by fossil fuel billionaires and their industry (among others).
And, of course, Clarence “on the take” Thomas, who supported the Chevron deference 15 years ago but in 2020 wrote:
“Chevron compels judges to abdicate the judicial power without constitutional sanction. … Chevron also gives federal agencies unconstitutional power.”
Giving us a clue to how this will probably go down, all six Republicans on the Court voted to gut the EPA’s ability to regulate CO2; all 3 Democratic nominees opposed the decision.
Justice Elena Kagan wrote that the Court:
“[D]oes not have a clue about how to address climate change...yet it appoints itself, instead of congress or the expert agency...the decision-maker on climate policy. I cannot think of many things more frightening."
Their ruling was, essentially, that all of that research into the specifics of anticipated regulations — all those hundreds of scientists, millions of public comments, and hundreds of thousands of science-hours invested in understanding problems and coming up with workable solutions — must be done by Congress rather than administrative regulatory agencies.
As if Congress had the time and staff. As if Congress was stocked with scientific experts, a much larger budget, and had millions of hours a year for hearings. As if Republicans in the pockets of fossil fuel billionaires wouldn’t block any congressional action even if it did.
Gorsuch, et al, succeeded in the West Virginia v EPA case, but it was narrowly focused on CO2.
In the case being argued today, however, the Court is explicitly preparing to expand that victory by blowing the entire Chevron deference out of the water, thus ending or severely limiting most protective government regulations in America and opening the door to court challenges to every regulatory agency listed at the open of this article (and more).
They’re saying, essentially, that the EPA (and any other regulatory agency) can’t do all the steps listed above: instead, that detailed and time-consuming analysis of a problem, developing specific solutions, and writing specific rules has to be done, they say, by Congress itself.
Specifically, this case the Court is hearing today — Loper Bright Enterprises v Gina Raimondo — has to do with whether or not fishermen should have to pay fees that help cover the cost of the agency that regulates them.
But when you look at the briefs being filed by billionaire- and corporate-funded rightwing groups like the CATO Institute, Competitive Enterprise Institute, Pacific Legal Foundation, Independent Women’s Law Center, Southeastern Legal Foundation, Christian Employer’s Alliance, National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation, Advancing American Freedom, and the Buckeye Institute, you find the real goal of this litigation.
CATO, for example, writes:
“t is now clear that Chevron deference is unconstitutional and ahistorical. Over the past forty years and counting, it has wreaked havoc in the lower courts upon people and businesses.”
Competitive Enterprise writes of the National Marine Fisheries Service:
“The agency lacks inherent legislative power: it may only use the powers that Congress gives it. … Only Congress can decide if a power given to it by the Constitution should be exercised. … The agency’s attempt to exercise this never- assigned power not only goes beyond the authority Congress gave it; it goes beyond any authority that Congress could legitimately give it.”
Pacific Legal Foundation cuts right to the heart of the ability of agencies to regulate anything, saying the case turns on:
“Whether the Court should overrule Chevron…”
The Buckeye Institute writes they’re submitting their amicus brief to the Court:
“[T]o speak on behalf of the thousands of small businesses concerned with agency aggrandizement of power through Chevron deference…”
On the side of you, me, and most other average Americans who just want clean air and water, safe drugs and cars, and reasonable protections in the workplace, the Biden administration has stepped up.
In defense of America’s regulatory agencies, the federal government’s brief filed with the Court lays out what’s at stake:
“Petitioners bear an especially heavy burden in asking this Court to overrule Chevron, which stands at the head of ‘a long line of precedents’ reaching back decades. The Court in Chevron described its approach not as an innovation, but as the application of “well-settled principles” concerning the respective roles of agencies and courts in resolving statutory ambiguities.
“Federal courts have invoked Chevron in thousands of reported decisions, and Congress has repeatedly legislated against its backdrop. Regulated entities and others routinely rely on agency interpretations that courts have upheld under the Chevron framework.
“By centralizing interpretive decisions in agencies supervised by the President, Chevron also promotes political accountability, national uniformity and predictability, and it respects the expertise agencies can bring to bear in ad- ministering complex statutory schemes.
“Petitioners offer no persuasive ‘special justification’ for overruling Chevron, let alone the type of ‘particularly special justification’ that would be required to overturn such a deeply ingrained part of administrative law.
“Petitioners principally contend that Chevron improperly transfers the authority to ‘say what the law is’ from the Judicial Branch to the Executive Branch. But this Court has explained that the Chevron framework rests on a presumption that ‘a statute’s ambiguity constitutes an implicit delegation from Congress to the agency to fill in the statutory gaps.’ (emphasis mine)
This could be the big enchilada, the case that fundamentally transforms America and American government from a modern, well-functioning nation into a third-world backwater where massive corporations and the billionaires they made rich, instead of We the People through elected representatives, set the rules. It’s corporate America’s dream.
It could fulfill Bannon’s and Trump’s promise to dismantle — or at least eviscerate — most of America’s regulatory agencies, leaving us all subject to the tender mercies of the country’s CEOs.
Several groups have called on Gorsuch to recuse himself from the case because one of his friends and patrons is a billionaire who’ll profit greatly from the destruction of our regulatory agencies. Not to mention fulfilling his mother’s legacy.
So far, though, he doesn’t seem to care about the apparent conflict of interest: the Republicans on this Court seem incapable of feeling shame or behaving ethically.
Keep an eye on this case and pay attention to the reporting on today’s arguments before the Court. Knowing what’s coming down the road — and why, and from whom — may well be vital for those of us concerned with the future of our country and our children’s safety.
(First published at https://hartmannreport.com/p/does-the-epa-die-today-800)
Dear GOP: You'll Never Wash the Stink of Trump Off You or Your Party. Never.
Dear Republicans,
After the corruption of the Coolidge and Hoover administrations crashed the world economy, kicking off the Republican Great Depression in 1929, it took your party decades to rid itself of the stink.
After Nixon extended the Vietnam War to get himself re-elected, unnecessarily killing over 20,000 American soldiers and a million Vietnamese civilians, and then got busted for Watergate and the bribes he solicited in the White House, it took you almost a generation to rid yourselves of the stink.
But you’ll never rid yourself of the stink of Donald Trump. At least never in the lifetime of anybody around today. Trump’s stench is a tragic part of American history that will last generations.
The entire world knows the foetor of his whipping up a crowd of thousands to try to assassinate the Vice President of the United States and the Speaker of the House.
Trump’s minions urinated on the carpets in the hallowed halls of Congress, smeared feces on the walls, damaged priceless paintings from the founding era of our country, and murdered police officers protecting our nation’s Capitol. That stink will never fade, no matter how often his allies try to rewrite history, blur faces, or tell stories about bizarre “deep state” conspiracies.
Did you think Americans would forget the stink of the 30,000+ documented lies he told America and the world while he was president? Or the lies he routinely spouts every time he speaks in public, so frequent now that even Fox “News” has to correct the facts when covering him?
How about the reek of his dictator-like pronouncements that he will destroy the American Civil Service and fill our government with corrupt toadies, then imprison his political enemies and send the military into the streets like Maduro has done in Venezuela and tinpot dictators do all across the world?
Do you really believe that we would forget the stink of his sucking up to murderous dictators like Putin, MBS, and Kim? Now that effluvium is being smeared all over Republican politicians, one after another, as they follow Trump’s orders — which he no doubt received from Putin — to abandon Ukraine.
You are cowards, all. Covered in your wretched, cowardly, unpatriotic stink.
This is the man who tried to blackmail a democratic ally into manufacturing dirt on his political opponent, withholding aid to Ukraine in the face of Russian attacks. The stink of that crime was so heinous he was impeached for it.
What about the stink Trump created when he referred to mostly-Black nations as “shithole countries” and our veterans who’d died in war as “suckers” and “losers”? When he told General Mark Milley he didn’t want to again share the stage with an injured veteran because such heroes don’t “look good”?
Or when, at the height of the pandemic in April 2020, Trump ordered people back to work and began to ridicule wearing masks, leading to hundreds of thousands of unnecessary deaths (according to his own science advisors: the British journal Lancet put the number at around a half-million)?
At that time, most Covid deaths were in Blue states (CT, NY, WA, NJ) and Trump agreed with Jared that they could politically benefit by blaming the deaths on Democratic governors. An “effective political strategy” they called this decision redolent with the stink of mass death.
That same son-in-law, by the way, who Trump helped hustle $2 billion from the Saudis in exchange, apparently, for downplaying the murder of a Washington Post journalist and looking the other way at how they oppress women. Do you think we failed to notice the reek of nepotism and corruption?
Speaking of women, do you really believe that stink of your support of a man credibly accused of rape and sexual assault by over 20 women, including one as young as 13, would just go away? Even after he was found by a court of law to have raped the first woman whose case finally made it through the courts?
As average working Americans struggle to pay their taxes, Trump pushed through an odious $2 trillion tax cut for himself and his billionaire buddies, creating the largest budget deficit by any president in the history of the nation. Do you think America will forget?
Or the stink of his multiple business frauds? He was convicted and forced to pay millions in restitution to victims of his Trump University fraud; they shut down his phony New York charity; now he’s been found by a New York court to have committed bank, tax, and insurance fraud: they’re just trying to figure out how big the stink is so they can quantify it as a fine.
How about the overwhelming stench of tearing babies from their mothers’ arms at the border and then trafficking them into phony “Christian adoption” services that then vanished, leaving over 1000 grieving families still not knowing the whereabouts of their little girls and boys to this day?
Or the stink from the naked campaign lies he blithely told to get votes, promising a new national healthcare system, a revitalization of America’s infrastructure, or his claims that he supported organized labor at the same time his appointees to the Department of Labor were working to block unionization efforts across the nation?
Even worse, this adulterer — who had affairs outside his marriage with every one of his three wives and never goes to church but still claimed to be a Christian — told sincerely religious people he was their champion. Not noticing the sulfurous smell that surrounds Trump, many believed him and still do. In actual fact, he was only championing the hypocritical multimillionaire TV preachers who shared their hustle with him: he supported their violations of tax law in exchange for their endorsement from the pulpit.
Then he tried to overthrow an election he knew he lost by 7 million votes, and is today threatening to try it again. The whole world is aghast at the stink of that tinpot dictator effort, and terrified that he may succeed the next time.
Germans still struggle with the stink of a leader who referred to his political opponents as “vermin” and promised he was going to “root them out.” Who attacked the press because they told the truth about him. Who played on and amplified people’s fear of “the other.” You will, too, for generations after Trump himself has shuffled off this mortal coil.
Pathetically, you Republican members of Congress have now smeared yourselves with the slime that has surrounded Donald Trump his entire criminal life. Have you noticed how many of your colleagues are fleeing? Do you really think you can ever wash off yourself the reek of your association with treason, an attempt to betray and overthrow America, even worse than what Benedict Arnold tried?
Seriously, Republicans, do you not think America can smell what’s going on? Trump bragging that he ended women’s rights to bodily autonomy? His promotion of guns and assault weapons because the racist nutcases who follow him think they’re going to be soldiers in a coming civil war? His refusal to do anything about the climate change that is now killing Americans every day?
America has had a few truly awful presidents. Andrew Jackson “The Indian Killer.” Andrew Johnson who tried to undo Lincoln’s legacy. Calvin Coolidge and Teapot Dome. Richard Nixon’s criminality, Ronald Reagan’s commitment to destroy America’s middle class, George W. Bush lying us into two wars as part of his 2004 re-election strategy.
But none stink as bad as this miserable cartoon of a man, with his bizarre orange spray-tan, absurd comb-over, and compensatory phallic-length red ties.
America is not going to forget, and many Americans will never forgive.
You will never wash the stink of Donald Trump off yourselves or your party. Never.
How the Fossil Fuel Industry Pays for Lies to School Children
The fossil fuel industry has not just bought US senators and members of congress; it’s even buying school board and state board of education members. And, in some states, they’re demanding books or course instruction materials that explicitly lie — or at least confuse students — about the connection between fossil fuels and our climate emergency.
You can thank Clarence Thomas, the most corrupt Supreme Court justice in American history, for this one. After years of wining-and-dining from billionaires who would really, really like to be able to buy their very own politicians, in 2010 Thomas was the tie-breaking vote to legalize political bribery in the Citizens United decision, as I lay out in detail in The Hidden History of the Supreme Court and the Betrayal of America.
A 2019 NPR/Ipsos poll found that four out of five Americans — and two out of three Republicans — believe our schoolchildren should be taught accurate scientific information about the known and well-documented relationship between climate change and fossil fuels. Yet, the fossil fuel industry has inserted itself deeply into the schoolbook selection process, to the detriment of our children and their future.
Texas is the epicenter right now, although other Red states are following their lead. Texas is one of the nation’s largest purchasers of schoolbooks, so their influence on which books are used elsewhere in the nation is huge.
The last time Texas re-evaluated their public school textbooks was 2009, and, like now, the battleground was around science. Specifically what’s called the Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills (TEKS): the core standards for what must be in textbooks and thus taught in Texas classrooms.
The battle back in 2009 was over evolution. The Texas State Board of Education was chaired by a dentist and avowed “young earth creationist” (people who believe the universe was created by their god around 6,000 years ago) named Don McLeroy. When the topic of evolution came up, he declared in a public meeting, “Somebody’s got to stand up to experts!”
When a reporter asked him how he responded to the overwhelming evidence that the Earth is warming because of fossil fuels, McLeroy’s response was, “[C]onservatives like me think the evidence is a bunch of hooey.”
Fast-forward ten years to the 2019 textbook debate and McLeroy had moved on, but many members of the board appear to still hold his position that climate change, like evolution, is “hooey.”
People affiliated with a front group for the fossil fuel industry weighed in heavily at several critical junctures in the process, arguing that instead of teaching the connection between fossil fuels and climate change, teachers should tell students that all forms of energy have both costs and benefits, including renewables, and that climate change has been historically caused by natural variations in the earth’s atmosphere.
While all technically true, the main (and desired) effect of emphasizing these positions while removing the scientific consensus is to cause children to think that there’s no urgency about lowering (or ending) the use of fossil fuels. Let the profits continue to roll!
The board largely adopted their recommendations, and now Texas is looking at which textbooks will meet their criteria. As noted by the Editorial Board of The Washington Post in a scathing takedown of the process last month:
“Will Hickman, a Republican [Texas school] board member who works as a senior legal counsel for the oil giant Shell, asked whether Texas textbooks should also discuss the benefits from burning fossil fuels, given that modern life is still powered by hydrocarbons such as oil and gas. Patricia Hardy, another board member, said at a board meeting that students should learn that fossil fuels and naturally occurring climatic changes can both lead to increasing temperatures, which would downplay conclusive research showing fossil fuel use is rapidly warming the planet.”
In Florida, presidential wannabee Ron DeSantis didn’t even wait for a cumbersome process like Texas goes through every ten years.
He simply ordered his education people to authorize videos and other content to be used to teach science in that state’s schools. As the Post editorial noted, “Florida approved for use material from the conservative Prager University Foundation, which includes climate change denial videos.”
In North Carolina, Republicans tried this spring to replace Earth Sciences — which would expose students to the concept of climate change — with Computer Science as one of the three science classes required to graduate.
As Republican State Superintendent of Public Instruction Catherine Truitt told the state’s House K-12 Education Committee last February:
“Of all the things that keep me up at night, eliminating earth science isn’t necessarily one of them if it means we could replace it with computer science.”
In May of this year, climate change survived an effort to remove it altogether from Utah’s public schools by an 8 to 7 single vote margin. Few doubt the fossil fuel industry won’t be back next year to remedy that.
None of this could have happened if it weren’t for the sad reality that it’s almost impossible to find an elected Republican at the state or federal level who is willing to admit that the science linking our deadly weather to burning fossil fuels is real. Rejecting climate science is the price of admission to today’s GOP: fossil fuel billionaires have built much of the political infrastructure and provide many of the campaign contributions, state and federal, that sustain the party in election after election.
Political bribery was a felony crime in the United States virtually from the beginning of our republic. The first strengthening of those anti-bribery laws came in 1867, when Congress outlawed politicians from taking money from Navy Yard workers.
Those laws were strengthened repeatedly at both the federal and state levels over the past 156 years, including dozens of prohibitions at the state level on corporations bribing politicians.
Teddy Roosevelt’s 1907 Tillman Act, for example, made it a federal crime for any corporation to give any money or other support to any candidate for federal office:
“It is unlawful for any … corporation organized by authority of any law of Congress, to make a contribution or expenditure in connection with any election to any political office, or in connection with any primary election or political convention or caucus held to select candidates for any political office, or for any corporation whatever, or any labor organization, to make a contribution or expenditure in connection with any election at which presidential and vice presidential electors or a Senator or Representative in, or a Delegate or Resident Commissioner to, Congress are to be voted for, or in connection with any primary election or political convention or caucus held to select candidates for any of the foregoing offices, or for any candidate, political committee, or other person knowingly to accept or receive any contribution prohibited by this section, or any officer or any director of any corporation … to consent to any contribution or expenditure by the corporation … prohibited by this section.” [emphasis mine]
Numerous state laws echoed the Tillman Act and other anti-bribery and anti-corruption laws. For example, Wisconsin’s law was quite explicit:
“No corporation doing business in this state shall pay or contribute, or offer consent or agree to pay or contribute, directly or indirectly, any money, property, free service of its officers or employees or thing of value to any political party, organization, committee or individual for any political purpose whatsoever, or for the purpose of influencing legislation of any kind, or to promote or defeat the candidacy of any person for nomination, appointment or election to any political office.
“Any officer, employee, agent or attorney or other representative of any corporation, acting for and in behalf of such corporation, who shall violate this act, shall be punished upon conviction … by imprisonment in the state prison for a period of not less than one nor more than five years … and if a domestic corporation it may be dissolved … and if a foreign or non-resident corporation its right to do business in this state may be declared forfeited.” [emphasis mine]
Five corrupt Republicans on the Supreme Court, however, struck down that and over a hundred other state and federal anti-bribery laws in their corrupt 2010 Citizens United decision. As mentioned, Clarence Thomas was the deciding vote (with John Roberts’ concurrence).
Justice John Paul Stevens wrote the main dissent, pointing out how corrupt the decision itself was:
“The Court’s ruling threatens to undermine the integrity of elected institutions across the Nation. The path it has taken to reach its outcome will, I fear, do damage to this institution. … These concerns are heightened when judges overrule settled doctrine upon which the legislature has relied.
“The Court operates with a sledge hammer rather than a scalpel when it strikes down one of Congress’ most significant efforts to regulate the role that corporations and unions play in electoral politics. It compounds the offense by implicitly striking down a great many state laws as well.”
He added that the decision defining corporations as “persons” with rights under the First Amendment and money as protected “free speech” is bizarre in the extreme and predicted the exact corruption that we’re seeing today, including foreign governments and overseas oligarchs setting up US companies to buy off American legislators:
“If taken seriously, our colleagues’ assumption that the identity of a speaker has no relevance to the Government’s ability to regulate political speech would lead to some remarkable conclusions. Such an assumption would have accorded the propaganda broadcasts to our troops by ‘Tokyo Rose’ during World War II the same protection as speech by Allied commanders.
“More pertinently, it would appear to afford the same protection to multinational corporations controlled by foreigners as to individual Americans: To do otherwise, after all, could ‘enhance the relative voice’ of some (i.e. humans) over others ( i.e. nonhumans). Under the majority’s view, I suppose it may be a First Amendment problem that corporations are not permitted to vote, given that voting is, among other things, a form of speech.”
Nonetheless, that breathtaking decision striking down over 150 years of anti-bribery laws and prohibitions on corporate electioneering, with both Roberts’ and Thomas’ full endorsement, stands and is now US law.
In the wake of that decision, state courts were forced to strike down similar anti-bribery laws in Alaska, Arizona, Colorado, Connecticut, Iowa, Kentucky, Minnesota, Montana, North Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, West Virginia, and Wisconsin.
As a result, today Democrats in the “corporate problem solver’s” caucus and the entire Republican caucus in both the US House and Senate along with virtually every Republican in every state house and senate in America are on the take from the highest corporate or billionaire bidders.
That’s a huge backstop for state board of education members, many of whom themselves were elected with money from fossil fuel corporations or fossil fuel billionaires.
If it weren’t for the ability to bribe politicians and school board members with impunity, we’d have honest science textbooks in Red states; instead, their children are being criminally dumbed down and misinformed.
Stripping out the damage Thomas and Roberts did to our republic with this decision won’t be easy or quick. When Democrats passed out of the House the For The People Act in 2022 that would have placed slight limits on dark money in politics, every single Republican in both the House and Senate voted against it.
It failed to become law because Kirsten Sinema and Joe Manchin — both deeply corrupted Senators — refused to vote to break a Republican filibuster. The money they received to incentivize their votes was made possible by — you guessed it — Citizens United.
Democrats are committed to trying again, and to taking even larger steps to reverse this corrupt SCOTUS ruling. But to get there they’ll need a much larger majority in the Senate, to hold the White House, and to regain control of the House of Representatives.
The upcoming 2024 election will be the most expensive in world history because of five corrupt Republicans on the Supreme Court. And it will almost certainly be our last chance to rescue America and American democracy from the corruption of big money.
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Links to all sources in the article are here.
Why It's Impossible for Right-Wing Governments to Handle a Crisis
Over at The New York Times yesterday, Jerusalem-based reporter Isabel Kershner writes about the horrors of the past two weeks and the worries Israelis have for how the ongoing war against Hamas may go.
“All this is happening,” she notes in the article’s third paragraph, “amid a total breakdown of trust between the citizens and the state of Israel, and a collapse of everything Israelis believed in and relied on.”
She then quotes a Tel Aviv author, Dorit Rabinyan, who speaks of the sobering reality Israelis are facing because they’d chosen Benjamin Netanyahu as their prime minister:
“We have woken to a terrible sobriety about whose hands we put our fate in. … We thought we had military superiority, but there’s a feeling that someone up there forgot why he is there.”
What happened? Instead of taking seriously now-confirmed warnings about a coming Hamas attack shared by Egyptian and, apparently, US intelligence, the prime minister was instead occupied by “months of political and social turmoil over the divisive plans of Mr. Netanyahu’s ultranationalist government to curb the judiciary and undermine the country’s liberal democracy.”
And even now, she notes, one of the great frustrations of Israeli citizens is “Mr. Netanyahu’s refusal so far to openly accept any responsibility for the Oct. 7 disaster.”
Netanyahu’s authoritarianism and corruption are making it more difficult for Israel to deal with the horrific crisis Hamas has inflicted upon them. To deal with the crisis, he had to surrender some power to form a coalition/crisis government.
Here in the US, we had a similar experience, although, unfortunately, nobody moderated the corruption and incompetence of the Bush administration. President George W. Bush and his Vice President, Dick Cheney, were repeatedly warned that Bin Laden was “determined to strike inside the US.”
Bush, however, was busy trying to get Congress to pass a trillion-dollar tax cut for billionaires and Cheney was in secret meetings drawing up maps of the Iraqi oil fields that he and George would pass out to crony companies if they could find an excuse for a war.
Bush got his final and most alarmed warning from the CIA on August 6, 2001, a full month before the attack. Instead of putting the FBI and airport security on full alert, Bush decided to leave DC and take the longest vacation in presidential history, keeping him out of town until after the attack.
This was all just one month after Bush had attended a G8 summit in Genoa, Italy, where the Italian government had mobilized a battery of anti-aircraft missiles to protect the venue because of credible threats that Osama Bin Laden was planning to have his men hijack passenger jets to crash into Bush’s hotel, a threat that was well known to Bush and Condoleezza Rice.
Similarly, Donald Trump was warned by both China and his own scientists in December of 2019 and again in January of 2020 about how deadly and contagious Covid was and how it could potentially kill over a million Americans. He largely ignored the warnings (other than telling Bob Woodward about it), instead attending rallies and doing rightwing media hits non-stop, until hospitals in New York and Connecticut were having to use refrigerated trucks as morgues.
After only one month (March) of paying attention to his scientists and locking down the country, when the April 7th, 2020, New York Times front page headline proclaimed that the majority of non-geriatric Covid victims were Black people in Blue states, Jared Kushner came up with the bright idea that letting people die and blaming it on Democratic governors would be “an effective political strategy.”
Thus, that was the week Trump ended the lock-downs and began pushing people back to work, leading America to suffer the highest Covid mortality rate in the world with at least 500,000-700,000 unnecessary deaths. People who believe Trump continue to get sick and die to this day because of his lies about Covid: citizens today in Red counties are twice as likely to die of the disease as are Americans living in Blue counties.
The common denominator between Bush, Netanyahu, and Trump — and all the unnecessary deaths on all their watches — is that all three are corrupt far-right demagogic politicians who put their own personal wealth and power above the good of their nation.
That is, by and large, the norm for rightwing governments worldwide. Because they generally rule against the will of large parts of their populations, they instead spend their time figuring out ways to raid the public treasury or exploit their position in government to hang onto power.
Examples include:
— Bush’s attempt to hand the 2.6 trillion-dollar Social Security trust fund over to New York banks;
— Cheney’s massive military bailout of the company he’d nearly bankrupted as CEO and his desire to seize Iraq’s oil fields on its behalf;
— Netanyahu’s multiple corrupt deals for which he’s now under indictment,
— Trump’s hustling Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and Qatar for billions to be paid out via his son-in-law and the LIV Golf Tour, his kids hustling Trump properties from the White House, his relentless lies while in office, etc.
It turns out that philosophies of governance matter. Hugely.
President Franklin D. Roosevelt famously said, “Better the occasional faults of a government that lives in a spirit of charity than the consistent omissions of a government frozen in the ice of its own indifference” and Democratic administrations have taken it to heart ever since that 1933 speech.
When Democrats have control of Congress and the White House they pass all sorts of legislation to advance the public good, aid workers, care for the poor and disabled, strengthen public education, and provide for the needs of ordinary people. Occasionally they overreach or their programs don’t work or even backfire; they then fix them or try something different.
When rightwingers run our government, though, they pass laws like Taft-Hartley that gutted union rights, rip up voting rights, make it easier for fossil fuel companies to pollute and timber companies to clear-cut, and dial back people’s access to welfare and healthcare programs. And, of course, start wars (Grenada, Iraq/Kuwait, Afghanistan, Iraq) and pass tax cuts for their billionaire patrons.
Roosevelt, Truman, Kennedy, Johnson, Clinton, Obama, and Biden all proposed and put into law sweeping programs to build America and enhance the public good ranging from Social Security, the right to unionize, the minimum wage, Medicare, food stamps, Medicaid and greater funding for education.
Nixon, Reagan, Bush, Bush, and Trump all went for tax cuts for billionaires and worked to gut or privatize the agencies, infrastructure, and programs Democrats had set up.
There’s a reason for this.
— Leftwing governments believe in democracy, and so try to accomplish what’s best for the majority of people while protecting the rights of the minority; rightwing governments practice autocracy on behalf of the morbidly rich. Sometimes, like the old USSR or modern Venezuela, repressive and authoritarian rightwing governments pretend to be left-wing, but the police state aspects of their governance give the game away.
— Rightwingers don’t see democracy as a benefit or even an ideal; they see it as an impediment to further comforting the already-comfortable while enriching themselves in the process. Instead of building up disaster preparedness through strengthening, for example, FEMA, they work to redirect those government dollars back to their friends through things like $600 billion a year in oil industry subsidies and over $20 trillion (cumulatively) in Republican tax cuts to billionaires since 1981.
The result — when rightwingers are in charge — is government that’s not paying attention to real threats and, when they come, responds with profound incompetence or cynical exploitation. Bush and “heckofajob Brownie”; Netanyahu and Gaza; Trump and Covid, or his cynically tossing paper towels at hurricane victims.
Bush was not only incompetent in allowing 9/11 to happen despite multiple warnings that he refused to respond to, but when it did happen he tried to use it to his own political advantage and that of his Vice President by lying us into two unnecessary and illegal wars. After all, way back in 1999, as he was still planning his run for the White House, he told his biographer, Mickey Herskowitz:
“One of the keys to being seen as a great leader is to be seen as a commander-in-chief. My father had all this political capital built up when he drove the Iraqis out of Kuwait and he wasted it. If I have a chance to invade, if I had that much capital, I’m not going to waste it. I’m going to get everything passed that I want to get passed and I’m going to have a successful presidency.”
Rightwing governments rarely put the good of the people of a nation first; instead, it’s axiomatic that they achieve and wield power by scapegoating minority groups — usually racial or religious — and suppressing both voting rights and the rights of women to full participation in society.
While there have been a few self-declared left-wing authoritarian kleptocracies in history (most notably the USSR), the vast majority have been rightwing in their origin and nature. And, over time as their corruption becomes evident, their citizens grow to hate them.
In fact, over the past few years Spain, Brazil, and most recently Poland have rejected rightwing, bigoted, kleptocratic governments in favor of a return to normalcy and a progressive democracy. Israel could be next. The United States took a big step in that direction three years ago when we overwhelmingly rejected Donald Trump.
Nonetheless, the hard right here in America has funding from multiple “libertarian” billionaires, social media oligarchs, and a bought-off and corrupt Supreme Court that has legalized political bribery, making it much harder to dislodge authoritarian Republicans.
In fact, here in America, Jim Jordan is about to reboot Donald Trump’s attempt to damage Americas readiness and defense of democracies around the world if he achieves the speakership.
A popular meme today, predictive of the dysfunction of the Trump administration and the GOP-run House of Representatives, is: “Elect a clown, expect a circus.”
But a much wider and internationalized perspective could rewrite it as: “Elect a right-winger, expect a poorly-handled crisis and an explosion of great wealth at the top.”
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All the links are here.
Will "Speaker" Gym Jordan Create an "Axis of Evil" with Trump & Putin-Aligned MAGA GOP?
Republicans appear on the verge of picking Jim Jordan as the next Speaker of the House of Representatives; if they do, they’ll be putting Donald Trump, by proxy, in charge of the House half of Congress.
This is a true danger to our republic and an embarrassment in front of the rest of the world.
Trump is a convicted rapist and sexual predator. With this decision, Republicans would put a man who stands accused with covering up the sexual assault of multiple students when he was a wrestling coach as Trump’s front man in Congress.
You’d have thought that after Republican Speaker Dennis Hastert went to prison for what Jordan is accused of covering up, the GOP would have figured out this isn’t a good look, but, no.
Trump is an unrepentant liar who continues to lie literally every day and has used deceit as the foundation of his strategy to build his business empire. Jordan also casually lies and distorts the truth — loudly and publicly — to satisfy his own lust for wealth and power.
Jordan has lied:
— Claiming in 2020 that Democrats were preparing to steal the election (a meme Trump was promoting then, too, as both saw the polls showing that Trump would lose the election).
— Taking Putin and Trump’s side in defending the Russian terrorist attack on Ukraine.
— Promoting a Russian lie that then-Vice President Biden got a Ukrainian prosecutor fired to help out Hunter Biden (the reality was literally the opposite).
— Arguing that Social Security and Medicare must be “reformed” (cut) to keep the programs solvent when simply having rich people pay the same FICA tax as the rest of us would solve any problems.
— Trying to blow up Fani Willis’ investigation of Trump’s alleged crime of demanding the Georgia secretary of state “find” over 11,000 votes.
— Siding with Trump and his Republican conspiracy to overthrow our government on January 6th.
— Telling false stories about “Hunter Biden’s laptop.”
— Smearing Robert Mueller and Rod Rosenstein as he led an effort to impeach Rosenstein for investigating Trump’s ties to Putin.
— Advancing a strategy to gin up an impeachment effort against President Biden.
— Supporting a corrupt strategy by Wisconsin Republicans to impeach the new Chief Justice of that state’s Supreme Court.
— Helping cover up revelations of fraud in Donald Trump’s tax returns.
— Participating at the center of the conspiracy to storm the Capitol and then voting not to certify President Biden as the legal winner of the 2020 election.
— Alleging that the Biden administration was targeting “Catholic traditionalists” for punishment by the IRS.
— Smearing the IRS and their efforts to get billionaires to pay the taxes they owe.
But don’t just take it from me. here’s what Liz Cheney, no Democratic shill, says about Jordan:
“Jim Jordan knew more about what Donald Trump had planned for January 6th than any other member of the House of Representatives. Jim Jordan was involved, was part of the conspiracy in which Donald Trump was engaged as he attempted to overturn the election.”
She and former Republican Congressman Adam Kinsinger wrote on Twitter/X:
“Jim Jordan was involved in Trump’s conspiracy to steal the election and seize power; he urged that Pence refuse to count lawful electoral votes. If Rs nominate Jordan to be Speaker, they will be abandoning the Constitution.”
He then refused to honor a subpoena from the January 6th Committee and is still in contempt of Congress for his cowardice.
Former Speaker of the House John Boehner (R-OH) wrote in his 2021 book about Jordan, who he called a “legislative terrorist”:
“I just never saw a guy who spent more time tearing things apart — never building anything, never putting anything together.”
As Dan Friedman and David Corn wrote for Mother Jones:
“Jordan was an early and enthusiastic recruit in Trump’s war on the republic and reality—in public and in private.
“Days after the November election, he spoke at a “Stop the Steal” rally in front of the Pennsylvania state capitol. He spread election conspiracy theories within right-wing media. He endorsed Rudy Giuliani and Sidney Powell’s bogus claims that Dominion Voting Systems and Smartmatic had robbed Trump of electoral victory. He called for a congressional investigation of electoral fraud for which there was no evidence and demanded a special counsel be appointed. He endorsed state legislatures canceling vote tallies and selecting their own presidential electors. He urged Trump not to concede. He demanded Congress not certify Joe Biden’s victory in the ceremony scheduled for January 6, 2021.”
During the 2019 impeachment probe into Trump blackmailing Ukrainian President Zelenskyy to fabricate dirt on then-candidate Joe Biden, Jordan helped criminally storm a secure room in the Capitol where evidence against Trump was held, delaying the proceedings by hours.
The stunt prompted cybersecurity concerns because Jordan and Gaetz brought people without security clearances carrying cellphones with cameras into the top-secret secured SCIF, prompting Congressman Eric Swalwell to note:
“They not only brought in their unauthorized bodies, they may have brought in the Russians and the Chinese with electronics into a secure space, which will require that the space at some point in time be sanitized.”
As a reward for Jordan’s loyal service to Trump’s MAGA/Putin cause, in his final weeks as president the Orange Rapist awarded him the rare Presidential Medal of Freedom, an honor established by President Kennedy for people who have given outstanding service to America in the fields of national security and world peace.
As anybody who has ever watched a hearing chaired by Jordan knows, he is an unrepentant bully who will say or do nearly anything to win an argument or get his way. It’s so well known that the Politico headline says it bluntly: “Will Jim Jordan bully his way to the speakership?”
Jordan has been in Congress for 16 years and gone from being an Ohio wrestling coach to having a net worth of over $30 million; he has sponsored four pieces of legislation in all that time, none of which became law.
The Children’s Defense Fund notes that Jordan has been no friend to America’s families and youth, cataloging part of his voting record just last year:
— voted against H.R.1 the For the People Act of 2021.
— voted against H.R.5984 the IDEA Full Funding Act.
— voted against H.R.7989 the Protecting Infants from Formula Shortages Act of 2022.
— voted against H.R.5080 the Secure Background Checks Act of 2021.
— voted against H.R.4464 the Fighting Homelessness Through Services and Housing Act.
— voted against H.R.4837 the Honoring Family-Friendly Workplaces Act.
— voted against H.R.128 the RAISE Act of 2021.
— voted against H.R.131 the Kalief’s Law.
— voted against H.R.137 the Mental Health Access and Gun Violence Prevention Act of 2021.
— voted against H.R.1603 the Farm Workforce Modernization Act of 2021.
— voted against H.R.1620 the Violence Against Women Act Reauthorization Act of 2021.
— voted against H.R.1808 the Assault Weapons Ban of 2022.
— voted against H.R.2377 the Federal Extreme Risk Protection Order Act of 2021.
— voted against H.R.3617 the Marijuana Opportunity Reinvestment and Expungement Act.
— voted against H.R.5129 the Community Services Block Grant Modernization Act of 2022.
— voted against H.R.5305 the Extending Government Funding and Delivering Emergency Assistance Act.
— voted against H.R.5746 the Freedom to Vote: John R. Lewis Act.
— voted against H.R.6531 the Targeting Resources to Communities in Need Act of 2022.
— voted against H.R.7309 the Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act of 2022.
— voted against H.R.7780 the Mental Health Matters Act.
— voted against H.R.7790 the Infant Formula Supplemental Appropriations Act, 2022.
— voted against H.R.7910 the Protecting Our Kids Act.
— voted against H.R.8326 the Ensuring a Fair and Accurate Census Act.
— voted against H.R.8404 the Respect for Marriage Act.
— voted against H.R.8542 the Mental Health Justice Act of 2022.
— voted against H.R.8876 the Jackie Walorski Maternal and Child Home Visiting Reauthorization Act of 2022.
An Ohio newspaper warns that putting Jordan in the Speaker’s position, two heartbeats away from the presidency, will create an “Axis of Evil” between Trump, Jordan, and the other Putin-aligned MAGA Republicans in that body.
The Cleveland Plain Dealer’s former Editorial Director wrote:
“Placing second in the line of presidential succession, a man willing to besmirch everything America stands for in service of Trump by rights should prove too risky for many of the House’s 221 Republican members.”
Truer words were never spoken. Jim Jordan represents a real and existential threat to democracy in our country, the rights of women and minorities, and peace in the world.
For hot links to all the back up sources in this article, the original is at: https://hartmannreport.com/p/will-speaker-gym-jordan-create-an-445
Starting a nationwide "Indictment Party"?
Anybody have ideas on how to start a movement for upscale Democrats across the nation to call their local bar and say, “Here’s my credit card; drinks on the house when the indictment of Donald Trump is announced and charge it to me without mentioning my name.”
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Name: Thom HartmannGender: Male
Hometown: Portland, OR
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