Category Archives: January 6 MAGA riot

War chest

From the Gray Lady, a couple days back. It partially explains why the GOP behaves so obsequiously toward their unhinged, endlessly embattled former frontman, in our pay to play political system. Where money spent on partisan influence speaks louder than a 98-0 vote in the Senate (see, for example, Shelby County v. Holder, 2013, which ended enforcement of voting rights).

Trump Entered 2022 With $122 Million in the Bank

By Shane Goldmacher Jan. 31, 2022

Donald J. Trump’s political operation raised more than $51 million in the second half of 2021 as the former president continued to dominate the Republican fund-raising landscape in his first year out of the White House, according to new federal filings.

Mr. Trump’s overall war chest entering 2022 stood at $122 million — more than double the cash on hand of the Republican National Committee itself — as he continued to solicit his online supporters with the same pace and intensity of the heat of the campaign

You be the judge

The Washington Post ran a story about the lack of ethical oversight for Supreme Court justices the other day. The article came in the wake of Jane Mayer’s piece on the same story in the New Yorker. Not only are their majority rulings unappealable, the judges are not subject to the same ethical rules that bind all other members of the federal judiciary and every other employee of the federal government. They are not subject to any ethical rules whatsoever, actually.

Clarence Thomas’s wife, Ginni, is a right wing lawyer, member of the secret non-profit Council for National Policy, an activist member of MAGA nation who works as a highly paid consultant for right wing outfits that petition the court in various cases. Thomas finds no reason to recuse himself from casting the potentially deciding vote on these cases dear to his wife and the rest of America’s far right. Truly, there is no reason for him to do so, outside of the ethical standard that constrains all other judges from ruling on cases where it looks like they, or a family member, have a vested interest. This is from the Washington Post:

Ginni Thomas’s name stood out among the signatories of a December letter from conservative leaders, which blasted the work of the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 insurrection as “overtly partisan political persecution.”

One month later, her husband, Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas took part in a case crucial to the same committee’s work: former president Donald Trump’s request to block the committee from getting White House records that were ordered released by President Biden and two lower courts.

Thomas was the only justice to say he would grant Trump’s request.

That vote has reignited fury among Justice Thomas’s critics, who say it illustrates a gaping hole in the court’s rules: Justices essentially decide for themselves whether they have a conflict of interest, and Thomas has rarely made such a choice in his three decades on the court. . .

. . . Caroline Fredrickson, a Georgetown University law professor who served on the White House commission, said that she could think of no precedent for Justice Thomas’s decision to rule on issues closely linked to his wife’s activism.

“In every case that has come up, he has shown no interest in recusal and has in fact seemingly been defiant,” Fredrickson said. “To be a Supreme Court justice and to be married to a firebrand activist who’s trying to blow things up” is unique. “It’s so out of bounds that if it weren’t so frightening, it would be comical.”

Fredrickson said that while Thomas theoretically is supposed to recuse himself when there is a perceived conflict, “there’s no binding mechanism” to enforce it. “It’s sort of the honor system, it depends on their own evaluation. … It’s kind of crazy. They’re supposed to be responsible for keeping us all on the right side of the law. And in fact, they don’t have any responsibilities themselves.”. . .

. . . The first major case that drew national attention to that potential conflict came in 2000, when the fate of the presidential campaign between Republican George W. Bush and Democrat Al Gore came before the Supreme Court. At the time, Ginni Thomas was working with the Heritage Foundation to recommend people for jobs within a possible Bush administration. Some Democrats called for Clarence Thomas to recuse himself from hearing the case that would decide the presidency, but Ginni Thomas told the New York Times at the time that “There is no conflict” and that she rarely discussed cases with her husband.

It was a pivotal, historic moment, and Gore faced a decision that would set the tone for politicians dealing with the court for years. Pressed by his aides about whether to call out the perception of the conflict, Gore instead instructed his deputy campaign manager Mark Fabiani to issue a statement that said, “The vice president has the highest regard for the independent judiciary, so we’re not going to comment on the various questions that have been raised.”

Thomas then joined with the 5-4 majority that ruled for Bush.

Today, Fabiani looks back and sees Gore’s faith in the independence of the judiciary as a turning point in history.

source

I have not yet read all of the great Jane Mayer’s story on this subject in a recent New Yorker, which came out a few days before this one, and is much more detailed [1]. This one has detail enough, for a short article. Here’s how this Washington Post piece ends:

Hours before the attack on the Capitol, she [Ginni Thomas] celebrated the crowd at the “Save America” rally on the Ellipse, where Trump and others made baseless claims that the election had been stolen. She urged people to tune into C-SPAN “for what Congress does starting at 1:00 p.m. today. LOVE MAGA people,” referring to Trump’s slogan, “Make America Great Again.” In a subsequent post, she wrote, “GOD BLESS EACH OF YOU STANDING UP OR PRAYING.”

After the protesters stormed the Capitol, Ginni Thomas updated her post to note that it was written before the violence. She later wrote a message to a group of about 120 people who had clerked for her husband, suggesting that she would refrain from inserting herself in such divisive political matters.

“I owe you all an apology. I have likely imposed on you my lifetime passions,” she wrote. “My passions and beliefs are likely shared with the bulk of you, but certainly not all. And sometimes the smallest matters can divide loved ones for too long.”

In the wake of that apology, reported last year by The Post, she wrote, “Let’s pledge to not let politics divide THIS family, and learn to speak more gently and knowingly across the divide.”

Nonetheless, months later, Ginni Thomas inserted herself into one of the most fraught political issues of the moment: the investigation into what led to the insurrection.

She was among a group called the Conservative Action Project who signed a Dec. 15, 2021, letter to House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) decrying the probe. The letter said that the two Republicans on the panel, Reps. Liz Cheney (Wyo.) and Adam Kinzinger (Ill.), should be removed as members of the House Republican Caucus, complaining that the committee put out “improperly issued subpoenas and other investigatory tactics designed not to pursue any valid legislative end, but merely to exploit for the sake of political harassment and demagoguery.”

This high-powered hyper-right wing white female lawyer is the perfect wife for the Supreme Court’s Black Klansman. He learned everything he needed to know about recusing himself for the appearance of impropriety from his mentor Antonin Scalia. Scalia flew in Vice President Cheney’s plane for a few days of hunting, while Scalia was sitting on a case involving keeping all details of Cheney’s Energy Deregulation Task Force top secret, though the work of the task force led to a financial calamity for the State of California. Asked about the appearance of impropriety, Scalia shook his head and told the young reporter “it’s a sad day in America when people question the integrity of a Supreme Court Justice.”

Had she been a great and experienced reporter, you’d have hoped for the obvious follow-up question. “Yes, Justice Scalia, we can all agree it’s a sad day in America when that happens. My question, which you have not answered, stands, though, ‘given the appearance of impropriety, which is the standard for recusal, how do you justify not recusing yourself from this case involving a personal friend you took a vacation with recently?” Scalia, a brilliant and witty man, would no doubt have put the pushy reporter in her place, but the question remains: is it perfectly fine for unappealable partisans to decide, on their own, when they have crossed an ethical line signing rulings that defend their, or their loved ones, extreme positions?

[1] for example, from the great Jane Mayer:

His wife, meanwhile, has become less publicly visible, but she has remained busy, aligning herself with many activists who have brought issues in front of the Court. She has been one of the directors of C.N.P. Action, a dark-money wing of the conservative pressure group the Council for National Policy. C.N.P. Action, behind closed doors, connects wealthy donors with some of the most radical right-wing figures in America. Ginni Thomas has also been on the advisory board of Turning Point USA, a pro-Trump student group, whose founder, Charlie Kirk, boasted of sending busloads of protesters to Washington on January 6th. . .

. . . Four years ago, Ginni Thomas inaugurated the Impact Awards—an annual ceremony to honor “courageous cultural warriors” battling the “radical ideologues on the left” who use “manipulation, mobs and deceit for their ends.” She presented the awards at luncheons paid for by United in Purpose, a nonprofit that mobilizes conservative evangelical voters. Many of the recipients have served on boards or committees with Ginni Thomas, and quite a few have had business in front of the Supreme Court, either filing amicus briefs or submitting petitions asking that the Justices hear cases. At the 2019 event, Ginni Thomas praised one of that year’s recipients, Abby Johnson, a former Planned Parenthood employee who became an anti-abortion activist, for her “riveting indictment of Planned Parenthood’s propagation of lies.” That year, Thomas also gave a prize to Mark Meadows, then a hard-line Republican in Congress, describing him as the leader “in the House right now that we were waiting for.” Meadows, in accepting the award, said, “Ginni was talking about how we ‘team up,’ and we actually have teamed up. And I’m going to give you something you won’t hear anywhere else—we worked through the first five days of the impeachment hearings.” . . .

. . . Another organizer of the January 6th uprising who has been subpoenaed by the congressional committee, Ali Alexander, also has long-standing ties to Ginni Thomas. Like Fletcher, Alexander spoke at a rally in Washington the night before the riot, leading a chant of “Victory or death!” A decade ago, Alexander was a participant in Groundswell, a secretive, invitation-only network that, among other things, coördinated with hard-right congressional aides, journalists, and pressure groups to launch attacks against Obama and against less conservative Republicans. As recently as 2019, Ginni Thomas described herself as the chairman of Groundswell, which, according to documents first published by Mother Jones, sees itself as waging “a 30 front war seeking to fundamentally transform the nation.” As Karoli Kuns, of the media watchdog Crooks and Liars, has noted, several Groundswell members—including Steve Bannon and Sebastian Gorka, the fringe foreign-policy analyst—went on to form the far-right flank of the Trump Administration. (Both Bannon and Gorka were eventually pushed out.) According to Ginni Thomas’s biography in the Council for National Policy’s membership book, she remains active in Groundswell. A former participant told me that Thomas chairs weekly meetings. . .

. . . In January, 2019, Ginni Thomas secured for Gaffney the access that her Web site promises. As Maggie Haberman, of the Times, and Jonathan Swan, of Axios, have reported, not long after Clarence and Ginni Thomas had a private dinner at the White House with Donald and Melania Trump, the President’s staff gave in to a months-long campaign by Ginni to bring her, Gaffney, and several other associates to the White House to press the President on policy and personnel issues. The White House was not informed that Gaffney’s group had been paying Liberty Consulting for the previous two years. (Gaffney’s group did not report signing a contract with Liberty Consulting for 2019.)

The White House meeting was held in the Roosevelt Room, and by all accounts it was uncomfortable. Thomas opened by saying that she didn’t trust everyone in the room, then pressed Trump to purge his Administration of disloyal members of the “deep state,” handing him an enemies list that she and Groundswell had compiled. Some of the participants prayed, warning that gay marriage, which the Supreme Court legalized in 2015, was undermining morals in America.

One participant told me he’d heard that Trump had wanted to humor Ginni Thomas because he was hoping to talk her husband into retiring, thus opening up another Court seat. Trump, given his manifold legal problems, also saw Justice Thomas as a potentially important ally—and genuinely liked him. But the participant told me that the President considered Ginni Thomas “a wacko,” adding, “She never would have been there if not for Clarence. She had access because her last name was Thomas.”

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Rage farming?

When I read this headline yesterday in the Washington Post:

I immediately pictured the in-your-face, proudly ignorant, provocatively opinionated, unvaccinated, infectious former running mate of maverick John McCain smugly saying to the world, and NYC in particular, “here’s your fucking honor system, assholes.” It was enough to piss me off, the thought of that provocateur giving the finger to the honor system, like everyone else in her slavishly authoritarian party.

I felt a flash of anger. I thought of Tich Nhat Hanh’s good advice.

Here is Sarah Lazarus’s wry version of the Palin story:

Sarah Palin dined out at multiple New York City restaurants after testing positive for COVID, but in her defense, she’s had a lot of time to fill since her libel trial got delayed because she tested positive for COVID

The New York Times had their usual judiciously worded headline today:

A few hours after I saw the Washington Post headline I went back and took a look at the Washington Post article.

https://wapo.st/3G1f7RO

It turns out Sarah Palin ate outdoors, which is apparently fine in New York City if you are unvaccinated, whether tested or untested (covid positive could be a deal breaker there, it is an honor system). The article states that, according to someone, she went back to the restaurant to apologize for the ruckus she’d caused a few days earlier, which may be true. The article also noted that it has not been disclosed when Palin tested positive for covid-19, meaning the five day isolation period the CDC recommends could theoretically have passed. All unlikely, perhaps, but possibly true.

So is the attention grabbing headline really fair? Sarah Palin is in NYC to testify in her federal lawsuit against the New York Times, she claims a 2017 editorial libeled her. She’s waiting for a negative covid test so the trial can get started. By dining outdoors, it seems she had not actually flouted the letter of New York City’s pandemic regulations, assuming she wasn’t lying about her infectious status. She surely also enjoyed the attention she got for making the radical left covid-haters mad, you betcha.

She is an ignorant asshole, and a sassy symbol for millions more, standing on the right to infect whoever they want with a potentially deadly disease, in the name of performing rabid partisan politics and “owning”, if not also killing, political enemies. She is an aggravating pustule on the eyelid of American democracy, the wet dream of cynical fucks who pictured someone exactly like Trump as the president one day. But is the provocative, click bait headline fair in announcing that she deliberately flouted New York city’s covid rules when the article under the bold headline makes a something of a case that she may not have? Just asking.

Everybody wants to be treated fairly, you could even say we all deserve it. Fairness is another word for justice, after all. Even a provocative piece of shit is entitled to make the case that she’s being treated unfairly, as Ms. Palin is about to do in federal court in this anarchist jurisdiction.

t’s Be slow to anger, quick to seek better understanding. Breathing is much better than holding your breath til your face turns blue. Trust me on that one.

Not succumbing to anger is very, very hard to do, I know, particularly when provoked, even moreso when constant provocation is part of a deliberate plan to keep everyone enraged, to increase “engagement” on “social media” and bring about long planned American fascism, a privatized corporate state with unlimited wealth for a few and a hearty fuck you to everyone else.

It is best, for yourself and for all of us, to practice being slower to anger, quick to seek better understanding. Breathing, and letting ourselves calm, not immediately reacting to each provocation, is much better than holding your breath til your face turns blue. Trust me on that one.

And, yeah, calmly, and with love, fuck Sarah Palin.

Hard to refute

After their candidate won the election that was stolen from him, in their fevered imagination, a host of extralegal steps were undertaken by partisan conspirators, justified by crackpot constitutional theories, to keep their defrauded leader in power. Their efforts focused on January 6th, the last chance to keep him in power over the will of an 8 million vote majority and an Electoral College majority identical to his four years earlier. The final play, right before Biden’s victory would become irreversible, was a show of force, the violent storming of the Capitol building.

Initially denounced by all Republican leaders, they soon saw the popularity of the alternative reality that their leader had been deprived of power by an organized bipartisan plot to rig the election and steal victory from him. The so-called riot was, like, a totally legit peaceful protest. The rioters were right all along! That story has legs!

Using the filibuster back in May, Senate Republicans shut down debate on formation of a senate committee to investigate the January 6th siege of the Capitol. This was after weeks of bad faith negotiations during which the GOP was granted every advantage they sought on that committee. When the House formed a special committee, the Republican leader in the House tried to insert two or three loud-mouthed defenders of the right to riot when an election is allegedly stolen. These shrill obstructionists were correctly kept off of the commission. One of them is now standing on his absolute right not to divulge anything he discussed with the former president on January 6th, something he claimed he’d be glad to talk about, since, as he repeated, he had nothing to hide.

Now the word is that the House January 6th Select Committee is illegitimate, not bipartisan, another baseless Democrat [sic] witch hunt like Mueller’s, that the two Republican members are traitors to the rest of the Republican Party.

Bearing all that in mind, take a look at this short video and look for a weak link in the story that it presents, in light of what the January 6th Committe has now confirmed with a mountain of evidence.

Merrick?

Jon Ossoff, excellent speech in defense of the right to vote

It’s hard to believe democracy is still having to fight this same fucking war over and over again against the infinitely wealthy forces of reaction and entitlement, but there we go.

Jon Ossoff, the first Jewish US senator from the great state of Georgia (mein yamulka’s off to you, Jon), delivered a powerful speech in defense of passing a federal law to protect the once again threatened right to vote.

The only thing I wish Ossoff would have added was that not only was the Voting Rights Act last reauthorized in a bipartisan vote, as he points out, but in a unanimous bipartisan vote, 98 to zero in the Senate. All 16 Republicans still in the Senate voted for Voting Rights in that 98-0 vote, the same folk now all unanimous in filibustering debate and a vote on the same law they’d embraced in 2006, like the craven tools of authoritarianism they now plainly are (OK, not that last part, Jon).

Powerful speech well worth hearing, very sad that not even one of the sixteen Republican former voting rights supporters was moved by it.

Majority Rule vs. the machinations of the unscrupulous uber-wellborn

Why is the 1965 Voting Rights Act so crucial to democracy? The law was a great victory for equality at law after a bloody, generations-long fight for enforcement of the constitutionally guaranteed right to vote, a right long denied, openly and also under many subterfuges.

From the start, wealthy, determined reactionaries gritted their teeth about Black, brown and urban poor people voting and got to work to counter “majoritarian tyranny.” Over decades they figured out how to get the Supreme Court to grant them a series of game changing powers to perpetuate their privileges.

A key prize was the new constitutional right to form legal entities to spend limitless amounts of tax-deductible money to engage in fully protected freedom of speech, to express partisan political views and influence political outcomes, to the extent their vast fortunes allowed. Everybody else, one vote and limited campaign donations, at best. The right to vote is the majority’s only voice to oppose the designs of determined, activist billionaire reactionaries.

The right to vote is the essential right of democracy, in a government that derives its just powers from the consent of the governed. It can take millions of us casting votes to express our combined wishes to overcome the will of a handful of super-wealthy individuals, their identities secret, spending limitless, anonymous, tax-deductible dough to influence elections, to lobby and buy the Sinemas, Manchins, McConnells and their ilk.

Senator Sheldon Whitehouse describes the electoral game, tirelessly and cleverly rigged by right-wing billionaires and their hired political operatives and other hirelings to secretly wield undemocratic influence on a mass scale.

Whitehouse ends his speech talking about the dark money funded “Honest Elections Project,” a corporate entity created solely to influence elections. The Honest Elections Project exercised $45,000,000 in 100% anonymous free speech prior to the 2020 elections. No individuals are associated with this gigantic influence machine because all identities are legally laundered through 501(c)(3) Donors’ Trust, which also makes their political gifts tax deductible. Here’s Whitehouse:

Somebody wrote [The Honest Elections Project] a $19,000,000 check to suppress votes.


Folks, if we don’t get to the bottom of this we’re going to have a real problem on our hands, and when we get to the bottom of this, the American public will be with us because they hate this stuff.

You can be a Bernie Bro or you can be a Tea Partier, you can disagree on everything. and you agree that big dark money corruption has no place in American democracy.

Hard to argue with any of that (hence the filibuster, which silences all debate). The whole presentation is well worth taking in.

McConnell gloats

From Heather Cox Richardson’s Letters from an American, January 19, 2022

Greg Sargent, from today’s Washington Post:

At the one-year mark in President Biden’s first term, there’s no sugarcoating it: A barrage of new polls are absolutely brutal for him. Surveys from NBC News and the Associated Press both put Biden’s approval at 43 percent, and CBS News puts it at 44 percent, in large drops since last summer.


In short: Everything is going pretty much as Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell has planned. We know this because the Kentucky Republican told us exactly how he planned it. In fact, he laid out the playbook more than a decade ago, and it has changed little since then.


At dark moments such as these, after Biden’s voting rights agenda fell to a Republican filibuster on Wednesday night, it’s worth revisiting a largely-forgotten, 11-year-old quote from McConnell. It captures a crucial insight about U.S. politics that helps illuminate the struggles Democrats are facing, and why they feel so frustrating and intractable.


At the time, McConnell was similarly wielding his role as minority leader to obstruct another Democratic president, by denying any and all GOP support for proposals like the 2010 Affordable Care Act. McConnell explained his thinking to journalist Joshua Green:


“We worked very hard to keep our fingerprints off of these proposals,” McConnell says. “Because we thought — correctly, I think — that the only way the American people would know that a great debate was going on was if the measures were not bipartisan. When you hang the ‘bipartisan’ tag on something, the perception is that differences have been worked out, and there’s a broad agreement that that’s the way forward.”

https://wapo.st/3nDZfyn

Why change the winning, hopelessness-inspiring gridlock formula that brought us Jesus’s choice Donald Trump and the triumph of Charles Koch’s once lunatic fringe John Birch Society?