Jennifer Rubin with an excellent piece about two Democratic State lawmakers who responded to GOP bullying by directly confronting their attackers. Good for them, this needs to start happening everywhere.
Her piece is called: Distinguished pols of the week: This is what moral outrage sounds like
I’ll disclose this from the start, for anyone who may have stumbled on this post — I am a member of the nefarious left wing conspiracy, particularly now that the sides are drawn so clearly — autocracy vs. democracy, indulging and empowering unlimited mass hatreds (for the outsized benefit of the very, very few) vs. engaging with political opponents to hammer out solutions to real problems and extending the benefit of the doubt to people on the other side of the political divide. Party of obstruction, vituperation, pollution, tax breaks for the wealthiest vs. party of everything else a free people might need.
Regarding the benefit of the doubt, I’m certain that any two right wing and left wing people have much more in common than things that actually divide them. There are hundreds of things virtually everyone would immediately agree on. Both sides love their children and want the best for them. Both sides are revolted by crimes against children. Even the strictest “spare the rod spoil the child” parents do not believe it is ever right to beat your child to a bloody pulp or break their little bones. Liberals and conservatives want old people to live their final years in dignity, without fear or deprivation. Nobody, not one of us, likes these constant mass shootings everywhere in the land of the free. All Americans believe in fairness, in certain unalienable rights like the right to live with integrity and to pursue your dreams without being attacked by the government, or anybody else. There are countless things human beings everywhere, all over the world, agree on, across all political affiliations.
The science of fascism is how to mobilize grievances and galvanize the hatreds that makes humans willing to march in armies to exterminate inhuman enemies. It is only by creating artificial, black and white tribes that are not people of differing political or cultural leanings but deadly enemies, that totalitarian regimes come to and retain power.
Those who hate “majoritarian tyranny” (and this anti-democratic trope predates the John Birch Society, Libertarianism and Charles Koch, goes back to John C. Calhoun and friends of slavery decades before the Civil War) find ways to make enough voters hate the “other side” to defeat it. They help themselves stay in power by passing laws to restrict their enemies’ right to vote, by irreversibly purging 100,000 enemy voters on the eve of an election they’ll win by 40,000 (see, for example, candidate Brian Kemp, in 2016, using his power as Secretary of State to remove tens of thousands of likely Stacey Abrams voters from the voting rolls in Georgia right before eking out a victory in the Peach State’s most recent gubernatorial election. Republicans in Florida’s state government did the same for DeSantis before his narrow victory).
Their party’s members on the highest court in the land will provide crucial tactical support by ruling that the Voting Rights Act will not henceforth be enforced and that unlimited secret money to influence political outcomes is merely free speech, to which legally created eternal “persons” are entitled under the Fourteenth Amendment.
The mass influence tactic most often employed by fascistic types, it seems, is what psychologists call “projection” — projecting your problems and fears onto others. Projection 101: I am prone to outbursts of racist anger, but don’t like to think of myself as an angry person, or a racist, so I will accuse anyone who wants to dispute anything with me of being an enraged racist psychopath. The shoe might fit me much better better than it fits you, but I will angrily cram it on your foot and fuck you, now you have to defend yourself, you angry racist piece of shit! The simplicity of this technique, the old three year-old’s taunting “I know you are, but what am I?” makes it an irresistible tool for cutting off debate of any kind.
This textbook example, a statement issued by the House “Freedom Caucus” (the most rabidly aggressive right wing members of the House, the stars of MAGA world) in defense of Marjorie Taylor Greene’s right to incite whoever the hell she feels like inciting, based on whatever she feels is right, with no push back from anyone, jumped out at me, a real masterpiece of MAGA art, that, like the rest of the far right ouevre only stands as brilliant art if it goes unscrutinized. Lack of scrutiny is key for this entire playbook. The beauty, of course, is when you’re angry you can’t see nuance or scrutinize anything but doing somebody about what is making you so goddamned mad you can hardly see. The real facts cannot be allowed into the echo chamber or the alternative facts (Trump advisor Kelleyanne Conway’s brazen rebranding of the old judgmental word “lie”) can’t take hold. Let’s walk through this classic example of right wing projection:
The left’s attempts to politicize the courts:
Well, the left has created a well-funded and powerful legal fraternity and career ladder, active in virtually every American law school, where leftist law students can get internships with left wing federal judges, help them research and craft activist left wing rulings, audition for becoming judges themselves with their bold left wing activism and then, after auditioning as lower level judges and showing a fierce and unwavering fealty to the left wing orthodoxy and judicial philosophy of their legal fraternity, wind up as lifetime political appointees on the federal bench. A majority of these disciplined, proven zealots will eventually control the Supreme Court for a generation.
Wait, that’s the right. That partisan judicial career network is the Federalist Society, the outfit Ginny Thomas and the Council for National Policy (a secret membership by invitation nonprofit corporation of the highest echelons in “movement conservatism”) made then-candidate Trump swear to choose all federal court nominees from their carefully vetted lists of candidates most dedicated to the principles of their legal fraternity.
The last century’s famous “activist” Supreme Court, the Warren Court, was an outlier in American history (most Supreme Courts are conservative, by nature and by design — only change the constitutional status quo if there is a pressing national need to do so). Chief Justice Earl Warren, appointed by Eisenhower, was a Republican and a conservative. He had the desirable judicial quirk of having strong beliefs but also being biased toward giving the cases before him a fair hearing before rendering a decision. He and his colleagues were amenable to being convinced by a superior legal argument. Warren, and his often unanimous court, ruled on the merits, the relative strengths and weaknesses, of the case presented, with an eye toward increasing, rather than restricting, the rights of citizens whenever possible.
This is a much different judicial philosophy than the one animating today’s Federalist Society Six, the 6-3 Trump/McConnell majority on our current Supreme Court, who select cases and render decisions in order to restrict rights for partisan advantage. Many of these cases are handled secretly on the “shadow docket” (where no legal argument need be noted in an unsigned majority decision) on a straight party line basis to advance their political beliefs and enhance the power of their party. John Roberts and a 5-4 Federalist Society majority invalidated enforcement of the Voting Rights Act the Senate reauthorized 98-0 and conservative president George W. Bush praised in a signing ceremony. Whose compelling liberty interest was Roberts’ activism vindicating?
On the other hand, we have Earl Warren’s most famous bit of “radical left” “judicial activism” that scandalized racists in every strata of American Society, 1954’s unanimous Brown v. Board of Education, which struck down the racist practice of segregation in public schools. After seeing vivid proof that “separate but equal” was a cruel farce, that there was nothing remotely equal in the racial separation at law, that it was a ruse to keep Blacks “in their place” by making them accept second class status and disproportionate poverty, the Warren court struck down segregation in public schools. If the proposition that segregation was racist and in violation of the Fourteenth Amendment needed proving, nine justices were convinced by the proof presented by Thurgood Marshall and the plaintiff opponents of the practice.
You need only look at photos from the Jim Crow era to see the brutal in-your-face mockery of this hoary “legal doctrine” of Separate but Equal. The modern refrigerated water fountain was for whites only, the hose marked “colored” was the equal facility for Blacks to refresh themselves on brutally hot summer days. Restaurant bathroom, whites only, the outhouse in the back, or the bushes, separate but equal. And so it was in schools, stated the Supreme Court after massive proof had been presented. Which enraged generations of a certain kind of angry white asshole, funded by white assholes of immense hereditary wealth. A group, once the lunatic fringe of the Republican party, now its highly energized base.
to achieve what they cannot at the ballot box
Leftists famously lawyered up and ran to the courts, their national committee footing the immense legal bills, before and after the last presidential election, to limit voting, contest pandemic voting rules, to have judges declare them right and their enemies shit out of luck. Leftists contested the results of the presidential election in courts everywhere their candidate lost. Leftist elected officials told left wing groups, on video, that if they didn’t stop their right wing enemies from voting en masse they’d never hold national office again. They passed laws in state after state to prevent perceived voter fraud they never proved exists (though they swear it does) and putting final electoral decisions in the hands of proven partisans ready to overturn fraudulent elections to ensure the “integrity” of those elections.
Oh, wait, that was the right doing all of those things, plus forming a well-funded dark money group, The American Accountability Foundation, to contest every single nomination by the new, illegitimate administration [1], the one who millions had been convinced had stolen the election with those eight million highly suspicious Black votes.
America is on a dangerous path
True dat, no question about that one. Sometimes all it takes is a drop of truth, to make the rest of the bullshit medicine slide right on down the old gullet.
[1] from one of America’s finest investigative journalists, Jane Mayer:
But the fierce campaign against (Ketanji Brown Jackson) was concerning, in part because it was spearheaded by a new conservative dark-money group that was created in 2020: the American Accountability Foundation. An explicit purpose of the A.A.F.—a politically active, tax-exempt nonprofit charity that doesn’t disclose its backers—is to prevent the approval of all Biden Administration nominees. . .
. . . Rather than attack a single candidate or nominee, the A.A.F. aims to thwart the entire Biden slate. The obstructionism, like the Republican blockade of Biden’s legislative agenda in Congress, is the end in itself. The group hosts a Web site, bidennoms.com, that displays the photographs of Administration nominees it has targeted, as though they were hunting trophies. And the A.A.F. hasn’t just undermined nominees for Cabinet and Court seats—the kinds of prominent people whose records are usually well known and well defended. It’s also gone after relatively obscure, sub-Cabinet-level political appointees, whose public profiles can be easily distorted and who have little entrenched support. The A.A.F., which is run by conservative white men, has particularly focused on blocking women and people of color. As of last month, more than a third of the twenty-nine candidates it had publicly attacked were people of color, and nearly sixty per cent were women.
source
Today there was sworn testimony in a lawsuit brought on behalf of Georgia voters contesting Marjorie Taylor Greene’s right to be on the ballot, as someone who took an oath to defend the Constitution and who then advocated loudly for extra-constitutional remedies to an election she claimed was stolen. The case was brought under section three of the Fourteenth Amendment, which reads:
No person shall be a Senator or Representative in Congress, or elector of President and Vice-President, or hold any office, civil or military, under the United States, or under any State, who, having previously taken an oath, as a member of Congress, or as an officer of the United States, or as a member of any State legislature, or as an executive or judicial officer of any State, to support the Constitution of the United States, shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof. But Congress may by a vote of two-thirds of each House, remove such disability.
The hearing was live streamed to anybody interested in hearing it in real time. I heard about an hour of Marjorie and then the closing arguments of both lawyers. Here are some new things I learned from Marjorie Taylor Greene’s testimony today.
She seems to have a fairly spotty memory for someone her age. She didn’t recall making any of the strong statements she made about the need to stop the peaceful transfer of power. When her own words were played on video she said they were taken out of context, but didn’t elaborate except to call CNN a lying outfit. She swore she had no recollection about people she talked to before or after January 6th because she was very busy running her new Congressional office. Her recollection is particularly poor when it comes to specific contacts of her’s who were arrested for the violent assault on the Capitol.
She says she really has little control over what appears on her Facebook page, or on her Twitter feed. She said she has many staffers and does not directly authorize the videos, even ones that have been on her facebook page for a year-and-a-half, prove good for fundraising (Biden stole Trump’s presidency and the radical left thinks we’re idiots) and are never taken down.
Marjorie believes that socialist liberals are out to portray her as stupid, her followers as not smart people. But she insists her supporters are smart enough to know that when she encourages them to show up in numbers on January 6th to flood the Capitol because it’s a 1776 moment, or that Pelosi and others might need to be executed, and we need you all there to help us right this evil injustice of a stolen election, that she is only referring to a peaceful lawful march to the Capitol to keep the pressure on fainthearted Republicans to legally overturn a stolen election. In other words, free speech. Plus, after the riot was stopped she immediately urged everyone to be peaceful and to obey the law.
I may have missed it, but when she spoke of a planned peaceful march to the Capitol, I thought the lawyer questioning her should have asked her if she was aware that the organizers of the January 6th Stop the Steal protest rally had not sought a permit for any kind of march that day. Why involve all those extra police and spend all that extra money when you can all just march down there as a bunch of individual free citizens and go into the people’s house which you already own and don’t need an invitation to, or permission to enter, even when its closed for a joint session of Congress?
And besides words like “fight like hell or you won’t have a country anymore”, or her “we can’t allow the peaceful transfer of power Joe Biden wants” are obviously metaphors meaning be peaceful, don’t insult the police, don’t hit them, gouge their eyes out or spray mace at them, if they tell you the building’s closed obey their lawful orders, and all like that.
And, of course, when she said that Nancy Pelosi had committed treason and that treason was punishable by death, she was a private citizen, in 2019, come on, she was just a regular person trying to get elected to Congress. In other words, she hadn’t taken the oath of office yet, the oath to defend the Constitution, so like are you going to go all the way back to when I was in high school looking for things I said that you can use to crucify me? (her lawyer interjected that bit about going all the way back to high school for compromising comments she made a year or two before the riot) [1].
And what we learned most of all is that she, like Boof Kavanaugh and her party’s raging leader, is the victim of a dark money-funded nefarious witch-hunt campaign, by cannibal pedophiles, no doubt, to bring shame to the people who voted her into office as their duly elected representative. (in the very election that was rigged against Trump!)
In summary, she is merely the victim of enraged, insane partisans trying to stop democracy by taking her off the ballot on some weird and farfetched old legal theory about not helping and encouraging, aiding and comforting, people who want to violently overturn a corrupt and evil election and stop them from “peacefully” putting a monster in the White House.
Her lawyer’s closing focused on the need to look only at the peaceful, lawful rally at the Ellipse that preceded the riot, something that was 100% protected by the Constitution, to wit, the First Amendment rights to free expression and to peacefully assemble, and that it’s not fair to punish someone merely for supposedly aiding and abetting a riot she later tweeted, once it was underway, should be done lawfully and peacefully. In fact, he took pains to read “or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof” right out of the Fourteenth Amendment.
Once the briefs are filed next week and the judge has a chance to weigh all the evidence and arguments, this could be a very interesting and helpful case going forward. Brad Raffensberger will then have to weigh the administrative law judge’s decision against his own political future and the number of death threats he recieves before likely leaving Marjorie on the ballot. I found it fascinating to watch how outwardly calmly Marjorie conducted herself during most of the part I saw, Like others before her she preferred to come off as a pinhead with the memory of a housefly rather than truthfully answer almost any question under oath. Her composure was particularly surprising after some of the overheated rants she made on right-wing media in the days leading up to her forced sworn testimony in a baseless case launched, no doubt, by moneyed Jewish space laser wielders and four black elected women she denounced by name in recent “out of context” rants.
[1] from the commies at Business Insider:
“She’s a traitor to our country, she’s guilty of treason,” Greene said of Pelosi in a 2019 Facebook video, according to CNN. “She took an oath to protect American citizens and uphold our laws. And she gives aid and comfort to our enemies who illegally invade our land. That’s what treason is. And by our law representatives and senators can be kicked out and no longer serve in our government. And it’s, uh, it’s a crime punishable by death is what treason is. Nancy Pelosi is guilty of treason.”
When former President Donald Trump told an angry mob that had burst into the Capitol that Mike Pence had betrayed them, it was not the first time in American history that a US president advocated hanging his own vice president. Perhaps there was no irony involved in the fact that the other president was the largely ignorant Trump’s favorite president, noted man of violent temper Andrew Jackson.
Unlike Trump, who with perfect deniability (his intent is still being debated by great legal minds) merely noted that his vice president was a traitorous coward and incited an angry mob to make good on their threat to hang him, Old Hickory announced that he was ready to go down to South Carolina and personally hang his seditious vice president. You can’t make this shit up.
John C. Calhoun, employing an early version of the now new again Independent State Legislature Doctrine, secretly authored South Carolina’s refusal to obey a federal law under a States’ Rights argument. He argued, arguably seditiously, that a state need not follow a federal law that it found repugnant to its traditions or offensive to its own interests, in this case the harm it would do to slaveholders to obey this federal tariff against Great Britain. South Carolina announced, almost thirty years before taking up arms against the US in the “War of Northern Aggression,” that it was officially nullifying this odious federal law in South Carolina. Predictably, Jackson was furious and ready to go down to South Carolina and personally hang John C. Calhoun.
It wasn’t that they disagreed about slavery, Andrew Jackson a self-made man of the people, had risen from modest circumstances, made his fortune in the slave trade. Jackson was not a man who took kindly to being undermined by his second-in-command, which is not hard to relate to, really.
Read all about the Nullification Crisis of 1832–33, in the online Britannica encyclopedia: https://www.britannica.com/topic/nullification-crisis
It only makes sense that I didn’t know this additional origin of the term “motherfucker” until recently because we are in a country where one can live to be an old man without ever hearing of the Red Summer of 1919. Red Summer, an exceptionally long and ugly season, had little to do with the communist scare, the decades-long J. Edgar Hoover-driven Red Scare that was the rationale for cracking down on workers’ rights. The red of the summer of 1919 was the blood spilled in over 36 American cities in pogroms against blacks, many of them returning veterans from World War One, the War to end War (and make the world safe for democracy). You know, as enraged citizen mobs do from time to time in the land of the free and the home of the brave.
And so I shouldn’t have been surprised to learn that the plausible description of the supremely flexible term motherfucker that my father laid on me as a boy was only part of the inflammatory word’s origin story. After the year 1807, when the “importation of such persons as the states shall see fit to admit” via the Atlantic slave trade was outlawed, the plantation system labor market would have to be replenished by native slaves reproducing so their monetized children could be sold.
So we learn of breeding farms, where these slave selling motherfuckers would force slaves to have sex with each other, to impregnate the females and produce more human capital. The men who ran these farms didn’t give a damn what degree of relation there might have been between the slaves, anymore than they would have considered the ancestry of a goat or other farm animal they were breeding, as long as they were of sturdy stock. More than one female slave was forced lie with her own child, in order to produce new baby slaves. A strong slave man would be forced to have sex with his own mother, to produce offspring his masters could sell. Who is the actual motherfucker in this scenario, is not hard to reckon.
This is a horror story, though true, documented and painful, that must, according to the faithful of MAGA world, never be discussed among today’s innocent, white, Christian school children. To force it on them is as evil as once upon a time forcing a young man to have sex with his own mother! That’s why we made it illegal in several states, so far, to teach this horrific racial, uh, stuff.
Jesus, it is so hard not to hate the present day evil motherfuckers who perpetrate this brazen, shameful erasure of vast, destructive, evil crimes that went on, with perfect legality, for generations. Ah, anyway, at the risk of seeming righteously angry, fuck those motherfuckers.
In the tit for tat, kick ’em hard, anywhere you can get a boot on ’em, marketing-driven world that is American politics, the advertising hungry corporate media still plays along, faithful as a terrier to the idea that fairness means presenting both sides of everything as having a more or less equal argument. It plays beautifully into a prevalent technique, persuasive to masses who already believe, hammered eternally by one side that is actively much worse than the other: whataboutism.
On one side, you have a long, well-funded multifarious plot culminating in a Hail Mary riot to stop the certification of Trump’s loss in Congress, after a “stolen election”. You have the wife of a staunchly conservative Supreme Court justice urging the outgoing president’s chief of staff to take action, in the name of Jesus Christ and all that is holy, to overturn the election results to keep Trump in office, somehow. We’ve read Donald Trump Jr’s seditious texts, starting a couple of days after the election his father was about to officially lose, about keeping his father in power no matter what, using the leverage of his massive government power. You have pinhead real estate fortune heir Jared Kushner, months after leaving his appointment as Trump’s minister with a dozen portfolios (Covid, peace in the Middle East, ending the Opioid epidemic, rooting out government corruption, making business deals with wealthy sheiks. etc.) getting two billion dollars from the murderer of a journalist, Muhammad bin Salman, a close friend of his he met as his father-in-law’s informal Saudi envoy.
On the other side, you have a shady character named Hunter Biden, son of the current president, and some shady consulting deals he made for large amounts of money. When Giuliani was making wild, unfounded claims about fraud that wasn’t actually fraud, your Honor, and lunatics like Sidney Powell were threatening to release a Kraken she later claimed (as defendant in a defamation case) no reasonable person could have believed existed, one GOP talking point that was out there, after Trump failed to get Ukrainian president Zelensky to announce a fake investigation into Hunter Biden’s alleged corruption, was that Hunter Biden forgot a laptop at a repair shop that was loaded with incriminating details (including, of course, the now ubiquitous Republican charge of sexual deviance) about him and his criminal father, Trump’s 2020 opponent in the presidential election. Giuliani announced on FOX that, along with proof of a stolen election, he had the incriminating laptop, or knew someone who had it, or had seen it, or heard about it. Rupert Murdoch’s NY Post pushed the theoretically devastating Hunter Biden story too, the story was Murdoch’s exclusive, claiming they had the laptop, or had seen it, or knew somebody who claimed to have seen it and did a thorough unbiased forensic study of its highly incriminating (for Joe Biden) contents.
What has been the Republican party’s corporate media-abetted answer to the many serious allegations against their top officials, the trove of devastating new evidence we see every other day, the proof of multiple crimes committed in the name of party loyalty? The loud, childish but effective (with corporate media dutifully playing along) GOP response to the mounting evidence that many of them participated eagerly in Trump’s mad plan to stay in power was “what about fucking Hunter fucking Laptop fucking Biden?!! What are the Democrats hiding and why?”
As stories about the insurrection culminating in the January 6, 2021 Trump riot at the Capitol (and continuing energetically since) continue to come out, as damning details create an increasingly gigantic mountain of evidence of a frenzied, sometimes insane, many-pronged plan, involving many prominent elected Republicans, to keep the losing candidate in power, the NY Times and the Washington Post both ran front page stories asking why Democrats had not believed or seriously investigated the sketchy Hunter Biden laptop story. Serious journalism, 2022, Tucker Carlson style — why did Democrats not seriously investigate this implausible story about a cunning criminal, son of their president, too stupid to cover his tracks? Just asking…
Read this post mortem from the Washington Post and see what you can make of this obvious horseshit story about a seeming scumbag who has, significantly for any intelligent analysis of this instance of Whataboutism, never worked in the US government, not for his father or anybody else. Thank God, say Republicans under their collective breath, that intelligent analysis is no longer even a thing when it comes to US politics!
Now warning about Hunter Biden laptop disinfo: guy who leaked it.
Jennifer Rubin, in today’s Washington Post, with an excellent analysis of corporate media’s yawning attitude toward a radicalized political party intent on taking power by any means necessary. Mass media treats GOP elected officials who refuse — seventeen months and counting — to concede their man Donald Trump lost a fair election in 2020, including those who plotted to “legally” overturn that election, as ordinary politicians.
There is nothing ordinary about pretending a last ditch riot intended to seize power never happened, about a far-reaching, well-funded, months’ long, coordinated plan to overturn a free and fair election, nothing ordinary about a party that insists it never lost literally hundreds of court cases (most before the election, trying to limit the “illegitimate” vote) on the merits, simply because they could not prove allegations of fraud they still insist, citing alternative facts, they have massive evidence of.
Nothing ordinary about a party that insists that what you are seeing, reading, watching has nothing whatsoever to do with what millions of faith-based Americans honestly believe about the other party and their most famous supporters (hi, Tom Hanks) sodomizing babies and drinking their blood.
Here’s Jennifer Rubin, preaching to the choir that includes about 60% of us, in a thoughtful word to the mass media called The media still haven’t learned how to cover the GOP threat to democracy.
The filibuster, which is now virtually automatic under Mitch McConnell, was introduced in the Senate over two hundred years ago by the advocates of a free market that included slave labor, men like South Carolina’s John C. Calhoun (pictured below), spokesman for the Peculiar Institution and perfecter of the modern filibuster [1]. It is a parliamentary device designed to defeat any proposal by cutting off all debate in the Senate [2]. The filibuster doesn’t just stop a vote on a proposed law, it blocks public discussion of the proposal in the Senate.
Think about that for a second, the tyrannical nature of that parliamentary move, an increasingly popular political ploy, with no constitutional support, that can presently be launched by any one senator in the minority party and requiring a super-majority to defeat. It rests on the idea that if people heard the argument, heard the reasons the policy was desirable, our side would lose. The only way to prevail, particularly if the act would be wildly popular, is to kill the idea before it can make its case.
So it is between people sometimes. If I am afraid of something you have to say, for any reason, I can filibuster you simply by making clear my refusal to talk about it. End of story. Good night and have a very nice day.
[1]
Mitch McConnell’s claim that “the filibuster is the essence of the Senate” has been tossed aside by his opponents as bad history, violently inconsistent with how Jefferson, Hamilton or Madison aimed to structure the Senate, and perhaps even unconstitutional. All true. But what McConnell’s screed should remind us is that the filibuster has always been the essence of the politics of white supremacy — even as it now poses a broader threat to democracy itself.
McConnell draws on a playbook stretching back to John C. Calhoun, who as vice president in 1841 forged the filibuster into a conscious instrument to block majoritarian democracy as part of his project of creating a durable framework for slavery in a nation he knew would eventually vote against it. Calhoun, generations of Southern senators and now McConnell have shared a determination that majority votes should not be the last word in the United States. Privileged minorities should be able to override the will of the entire people — if their interests are endangered. Yes, Calhoun was focused on slavery and race, but his first filibuster was over national banking. The interest he sought to protect from a national majority was that of the South as a region, extending beyond slavery to issues like tariffs. . .
. . . While the filibuster — the essence of Mitch McConnell’s Senate — is the most powerful weapon the right-wing opponents of democracy have seized, Republicans in 2020 are deploying the full panoply of anti-democratic strategies devised over two and a quarter centuries by Calhoun’s followers. The most important campaigns being waged by conservatives at this moment emphasize the spread of gerrymandered districts, purged voter rolls, legalized bribery, a politicized judiciary, state pre-emption of local home rule and crippling the executive authority of majoritarian governors, even Republican ones.
source
[2]
Gardenier was one of the earliest champions of the filibuster, a term that refers to the use of obstructive tactics such as long, dilatory speeches and the repeated introduction of parliamentary motions to block or delay legislation. Today, filibustering is almost exclusively associated with the Senate, where individual Senators wield extraordinary power over debate. In the modern House, on the other hand, the majority party rules, and individual Members have little influence concerning the course of debate; over the years, the House, which is more than four times the size of the Senate, has developed rules which strictly control who can speak and for how long.
Thom Hartmann produced an excellent short digest (below) of the problem with American oligarchs not paying taxes, being in open revolt against even a 20% minimum corporate tax (under FDR the rate was 48% on the wealthiest corporations). Joe Manchin and that narcissist asshole from Arizona, of course, support the billionaires on this insistence that they’re entitled to every penny they earn or inherit, making it unchallengeably bipartisan, thanks to the “bipartisan filibuster”. Hartmann presents the many popular programs instituted by Democrats against the united opposition of the Republican party, up to 1980, when the GOP regained national power.
On the Republican side, since Reagan, we have the slashing of tax on the wealthiest, protection of giant corporations, increased abuse of the filibuster and the dismantling of the administrative state. Also, a corruptly appointed majority of anti-abortion justices on the Supreme Court, legalizating, 5-4, unlimited secret money in political campaigns, eviscerating (5-4) Voting Rights and brazenly protecting unlimited gun and corporate rights.
Compare that policy record against these Democratic policies opposed by Republicans. Here’s Hartmann’s list (most of it):
Social Security, the minimum wage, [child labor laws– ed], unemployment insurance, world class public schools, free to inexpensive state colleges, the right to unionize, civil rights legislation, voting rights legislation, publicly owned utilities, new highways and airports, quality mass transit, antitrust laws to maintain competition and protect small businesses, Medicare, the Environmental Protection Agency, Medicaid, school lunch programs and food stamps, workplace nondiscrimination for women and racial minorities, federal deposit insurance to protect people from bank failures, Head Start and literally hundreds of laws that protected consumers and the environment from corporate predation and dangerous products.
As Franklin Roosevelt said: On the one hand there has been a vast majority of citizens who believe that the benefits of democracy should be extended and are willing to pay their fair share to extend them. And on the other hand there has been a small but powerful group which has fought the expansion of these benefits because they do not want to pay their fair share.
The next clip (both are from the video below) describes what the federal government accomplished for the citizens of our democracy just during the first few years of the New Deal, including this statement by FDR about the oligarchs of his day:
“You would think, to hear some people talk, that those good people who live at the top of our economic pyramid are being taxed into rags and tatters, but what is the fact? The fact is that they are much further away from the poor house than they were in 1932 and you and I know that as a matter of personal observation.”
Hartmann points out the $1.7 TRILLION ($1,700,000,000,000) windfall America’s now several hundred billionaires received during the pandemic and then plays the rest of FDR’s comment:
“A number of my friends who belong in this very high upper bracket have suggested to me on several occasions of late that if I am re-elected president they will have to move to some other nation because of high taxes here. Well, I will miss them very much.”
gratuitousblahg 