Excellent portrait of the consummate moderately right wing sack of shit, member of the far right corporate American Legislative Exchange Council, coal broker and chairman of the Senate Energy and National Resources Committee, this podcast, which Robert Reich heard and excerpted this from:

King Manchin

The Texas anti-abortion law, which deputizes citizens to act against anyone who even intends to help any woman get an abortion in the short window of time before the fetal heartbeat can be detected, a couple of weeks after the first missed period, is reminiscent of the old Fugitive Slave Act. You can hear an excellent legal discussion in the most recent episode of Dahlia Lithwick’s Amicus podcast. Here’s a bit about this deadly new law (for poor women in Texas), from that discussion:

…this does hark back to some very dark American history and dark American history that has been supported through the United States Supreme Court. So the fugitive slave acts provided for citizen participation in the establishment, the furthering the preservation of American slavery. It weaponized the citizenry, deputized citizens to surveil, to start to apprehend people who were in violation of US laws by escaping themselves out of slavery, out of an inhumane situation. And there were bounties that were provided for their success and surveilling and successfully apprehending, obtaining individuals who dared to exercise liberty, autonomy and freedom.

And when you think about this Texas law, there are certain analogs that eerily resemble that of the Fugitive Slave Act in that it provides for a right of action of private citizens. It provides for financial renumeration of those citizens who are able to successfully peg someone who has aided or abetted an individual in obtaining an Abortion.

And what this means with the law written in such broad terms that this could implicate the Uber driver, the Lyft driver, the bus driver, or the receptionist that works at an abortion clinic, virtually anybody who has been in the way of the path of a person exercising the constitutional right to terminate a pregnancy?

What’s interesting about the law, Dahlia, is that after Roe v. Wade, there was Planned Parenthood v. Casey. And what comes out of there is that there should be no obstacle placed in the path of a woman and terminating a pregnancy. And Texas has flipped that on its head, which instead you may sue anybody who aids and abets a person on the path of terminating a pregnancy. It is a very dangerous law and it is very dangerous and alarming what has happened at the Supreme Court.

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And, as you recall, there were some very religious Christians who truly believed that God and Jesus truly blessed the institution of slavery. These cocksure pieces of shit never change, since God tells them they are 100% correct, why would they change? Amy Coney Barrett and her pious ilk would be right at home with those righteous slavery defending motherfuckers.

The original, extra crispy, grass roots Ku Klux Klan arose in the defeated Confederacy right after the end of the Civil War. They viscerally hated blacks, feared their new constitutionally guaranteed electoral power and tortured and terrorized as many as possible. For a brief time, the newly formed Department of Justice, enforcing federal law against terrorist groups like the KKK, locked up all the Klan leaders. Then the Supreme Court made it clear that groups of murderers like the Klan were subject only to state law, the Ku Klux Klan Act and the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments be damned.

During the rapid industrialization of the US in the early twentieth century, a new Ku Klux Klan arose, a more inclusive, corporate klan if you will. Because it was set up by marketing experts, paid a bounty for each new dues paying member (and these experts both became millionaires based on their commissions) they needed to expand their net, make the old Klan tent bigger by appealing to a wider spectrum of hatreds, tailored to local custom. In the cities where most of the industrial jobs were located it was the goddamned Jews and Italians, godless Jews and Catholics pouring into the country by the millions (until the restrictive 1924 Immigration Act, that is). In places where Latinos were hated the most, it was the goddamned Latinos! Chinese? We fucking hate ’em! Join us and we’ll make them regret being Asian! Ten dollars is all it takes to join. A big tent, open to all haters. By 1924 there were 2.4 million proud, card carrying Ku Klux Klansmen and women, though the men, as men will, committed most of the muscular atrocities against their hated enemies (the women had their backs, though).

Charles M. Blow, writing in the NY Times, provides the rest of the story, in his op-ed From ‘Ku Kluxism’ to Trumpism.

One hundred years ago this week, The New York World began to publish a 21-part explosive exposé on the inner workings of the Ku Klux Klan.

It was a sensation. At least 18 other newspapers across the country ran The World’s bombshell reporting. According to The Columbia Journalism Review, “The series drew two million readers nationwide. New Yorkers stood in line for copies. And the Justice Department and several congressmen promised to investigate the group.”

The World would win a Pulitzer Prize for its efforts.

But, as I read through that coverage to write this column, I was struck by just how resilient Klan ideology has been in the years since The World exposed the group’s systems and rituals; its ideas have been repackaged and dressed up — or, disrobed, as it were — but the core tenets remain the same. I was even struck by how many of the same tactics are still being used to preserve white supremacy and subjugate racial, ethnic and religious minorities in this country.

It proves to me that Klan thinking is not really about the organization itself or its tactics — the night riding or cross burning — but about the very meaning of America and who controls it.

As one of the Klan’s “grand goblins” put it in a 1921 speech: “America for real Americans! Guardianship against the alien, the anarchist and all who would subvert that banner, be they white or black or yellow!”

It is that widening of the scope of hatred and oppression that first jolted me as I studied the Klan’s history. By the early 1920s, its leaders had moved on from primarily anti-Black hatred. To grow the brand, they had to grow the ring of bias. As one of The World’s articles put it, “Now the negro has become a side issue with it. Today it is primarily anti-Jew, anti-Catholic, anti-alien, and it is spreading more than twice as fast through the North and West as it is growing in the South.”

That is not dissimilar from today, when xenophobia and Islamophobia have taken a more prominent role.

In fact, The World wrote that at times the Klan would tailor its message of hate by region, appealing to Japanophobes on the Pacific Coast, framing itself as a bulwark against radicalism in the “Central West,” fanning hatred of immigrants on the Atlantic Coast and stoking fears about Jews and Catholics throughout the country. As The World put it, “Wherever a prospective member lives, he has been promised that his pet aversion will be made an object of Klan action.”

This sounds eerily similar to the successful campaign that Donald Trump ran in 2016.

Many of his supporters view America not as a grand idea, malleable and expandable, but as a white man’s invention in which the displacement and slaughter of Native people and the enslavement of Africans was a necessary evil.

So they demand a strict deference to that idea of America because, to them, it promises a society bowing at their feet, a nation defined by its reverence for whiteness.

At one of the Klan’s initiations, members were told to say, “All men in America must honor that flag — if we must make them honor it on their knees!”

Anyone else remember how Trump supporters treated Colin Kaepernick?

Furthermore, the Klan realized, much as Trump did, that hate was an industry and that the right — or wrong — man could milk it for profit. As The World wrote at the time:

The original Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, Inc., modestly begun five years ago, has become a vast enterprise, doing a thriving business in the systematic sale of race hatred, religious bigotry and “100 percent” anti-Americanism.

Perhaps the last lesson and similarity between the Klan of the 1920s and Trump’s legion of supporters are that exposure doesn’t necessarily lead to eradication. After The World’s exposé, the Klan didn’t shrink; its membership surged.

Just four years later, in 1925, anywhere between 30,000 and 50,000 Klan members marched down Pennsylvania Avenue in D.C., in what The Washington Post called at the time “one of the greatest demonstrations this city has ever known.”

In 1913, eight years before The World’s articles, Louis D. Brandeis, soon to be nominated as a Supreme Court justice, wrote a piece in Harper’s Weekly under the headline “What Publicity Can Do,” arguing that “sunlight is said to be the best of disinfectants.”

But in journalism, this idiom is more complicated. Sometimes, the infected court the infection. Sometimes, the light you shine on evil also illuminates the path to it. Sometimes, publicity is advertising.

Consider how this continues to manifest today. Over the past few years, we’ve seen how the press has amplified all manner of conservative fictions and fever dreams, from election denial to the rise of QAnon conspiracy theories to the lunacy of the anti-vax movement.

Sometimes people are drawn to these, and what we believe to be fact and logic repels them. Sometimes when we expose evil, we create or amplify its allure. Sometimes people willfully plunge into — and are consumed by — the flame that provides the light.

The core ideology of the Klan lives on in a more palatable form, in suits and uniforms, among lawmakers and judges, pushing back against progress and forward in the form of gentrification.

One hundred years later, pointy-hat white supremacy has evolved into soft-shoe white supremacy: same goal, less gauche.

I was listening to the Orange Polyp’s niece, Mary Trump, discuss the collective PTSD we have been recently suffering as a nation, as a planet. When her uncle, always the selfish, abusive prick he is now, was declared president in 2016 she had a full-blown PTSD reaction. She pointed out that the trauma her PTSD awakened was not related to her infamous uncle, it was just that the election of somebody so rotten, narcissistic, unethical, racist, nakedly “transactional” and unconcerned with the well-being of anyone but himself, filled her with terror. She knew that the worst among us had once again been elevated to a position of immense power. She was not wrong to feel that way. Donald Trump’s power over others is based on terror of his inevitable reprisals, backed with barked threats of violence and revenge, actual outbreaks of violent pay back, and continual atrocious betrayals of public and private trust that her famously transgressive uncle has never been held accountable for.

Covid-19 arrived just in time for her insane, powerful uncle to weaponize it, killing hundreds of thousands, who died needlessly as the former president divided the country on how to deal with a deadly pandemic, based on personal loyalty to him and a twisted notion of “freedom from tyranny”. The pandemic, he insisted, was a hoax perpetrated by Biden’s puppet masters in the Chinese Communist Party, that threatened the controversial incumbent’s undeniable landslide re-election strategy. Dr. Fauci is seen as a Commie traitor by tens of millions of Americans who continue to follow the former president’s scattered thoughts on the pandemic. How the Polyp is still walking around a free man, with the many serious crimes there is probable cause to believe he committed, including electoral interference, obstruction of justice and incitement to insurrection, is a mystery out of a dystopian science fiction novel.

Think of a childhood nightmare, like any good horror movie, where the monster finally leaves the scene and you can take a breath and wipe the sweat off your face. The next part of the dream happens under a beautiful blue sky, birds singing, a gentle breeze wafting through the flowers. Suddenly the bloody hand of the monster bursts up out of the earth, followed by the hideously muscled body, and the fucker is back, more terrifying than ever, and chasing you to your death by heart attack. In a healthy sequel to this nightmare your subconscious might have you suddenly stronger than the monster, grabbing the fucker and shoving it into a strong box you then lock, chain and throw into the middle of the deepest ocean. More often, though, the monster simply waits its next opportunity to chase you to a gruesome death. The terror this triggers is PTSD.

When someone rules by terror, an abusive parent, a partner, a bullying boss, a political leader, PTSD is always waiting. When you are in the grips of an abuser you don’t have time to process the trauma, all of your life force is focused on survival, particularly when the abuser appears to be all-powerful. Any moment the abuser can re-traumatize you, you have to be constantly vigilant, which is exhausting. Every abuser demands silence from his victim, snitches get stitches. If the abuse becomes well known the abuser risks people stronger than him coming to stop him from acting out against those weaker. In our current system we appear to have a shortage of people strong enough to resist the societal pressures to get rich, maintain privileges, etc. and strong enough to call bullshit on abuse in a way that can’t be ignored.

I’ve got no answer to the ultimate question of how we fight systemic abuse, except to keep finding allies and keep fighting, directly addressing the traumas we all face, with whatever means are at our disposal, in spite of how exhausting the fight is. In a nation of laws, as we are always told this is (and it’s certainly a nation of strict, even draconian laws when it comes to poor people and minorities) enforcement of the law against criminal abusers is the only protection the rest of us have. If criminals can openly threaten any reprisal imaginable, and send goon squads to harass and threaten direct violence, at say, school board meetings, and there is no consequence for this — the results are grimly predictable. We don’t actually live in a nation of law, we live in a nation of slaveholders and slaves, with a militarized army of slave catchers ready to use deadly force to enforce the bloody status quo and wink at the “crimes” committed by the protected class.

Of course, to speak of slavery in a nation that long ago outlawed it, except as punishment for a certain class of law breakers, is like comparing any other form of harmful abuse to rape. Rape is rape, slavery is slavery, a death camp is a death camp, certain things are indecent to compare other things to, we are often reminded. Indecency, of course, is famously in the eye of the beholder. Ron Deathsantis in Florida killing 69 children, and counting, with his Trump-inspired orders against reasonable pandemic precautions in his state, a hero to his enraged base, is an indecent motherfucker. The sassy Republican woman who heedlessly governs another Covid-19 hotspot, South Dakota, the muscular worm who governs the Hang ’em High state of Texas, heroes to some, indecent, irresponsible reckless killers to others.

PTSD is an illuminating frame to see things in — we are all suffering from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder in a nation, in a flooding world that is also on fire and subject to drought, where there is now no penalty for public lying, even spreading lies that incite deadly violence and the dismantling of our democracy. The First Amendment protects the right tell even the most disgusting lies, we know, just as the Second Amendment, per Antonin Scalia, protects the right of zealots in Texas to outlaw all regulation of guns, including the need for a permit to carry or use one. The lack of accountability for and “rehabilitation” of our wealthiest criminals, top war criminals, traitors like Robert E. Lee (unaccountable for his treason and leading an armed rebellion that resulted in 700,000 American deaths, honored in his lifetime and pardoned posthumously by Gerald Ford…), adds to the power of our collective trauma. Our collective trauma is cumulative, since traumas of past generations get passed on in the form of reality-based terror, and ongoing reality-confirming violence, and each generation adds new layers to the constantly evolving, never-addressed trauma.

Post Traumatic Stress Disorder is exhausting, and debilitating, and can only be overcome with hard, patient, painful work, usually involving other PTSD victims. Most of us, of course, are famous for not wanting to do hard, painful work, particularly if it takes tremendous patience. More challenging still, because this is collective, national PTSD, based on collective, national traumas, it will require much of this hard, painful work to be done a public level, in full view of everyone. It will require painful admissions, apologies and reconciliation. It will require objective justice. Let’s fucking do it, I say.

Seems obvious, I know. I knew somebody who is a compulsive liar who committed criminal fraud a few times. He’s slick though, never paid a fine, never even been dragged into court. He’s reasonably good at his grift and, especially, at playing on people’s sympathies to convince them he had no choice whenever he did something indefensible. He could still be right about what he read in a book, something he saw, of course, but I used to take everything he said with the proverbial pood of salt. If you know somebody has a bias, take it into consideration when you assess what they have told you. It is quite easy today to find out if somebody taking a public position is being paid for their political bias, it takes a few clicks.

Of course, today, in public life, bias is no vice, neither is lying to achieve a morally higher goal. Transactional is what “win at all costs” is called today.

I was sickened by the recent Supreme Court dead of night summary decision, on party lines (the “moderate” corporatist John Roberts betrayed his own) that stripped millions of Texas women of the right to choice guaranteed by Roe v. Wade. The inventive new law allows a muscular minority in the great state of Texas to deputize citizen vigilantes to run to court to stop abortions and make some good money doing it — at absolutely no risk to themselves. The majority (60% appointed by Trump) wrote that the law’s scheme is so novel and complex that nobody can easily tell if it is unconstitutional, since it doesn’t empower government but private citizens to enforce an unconstitutional new law, and therefore, it’s hands off until ten more states do the same thing and the case winds up on the actual docket of the Supreme Court. We don’t even get to the issue of constitutionality, say the right wing majority, because the law to prevent abortions was done so creatively.

Then, in Jeff Bezos’s Washington Post, opinion columnist Henry Olsen ran a column called The Supreme Court had no reason to block Texas’s abortion law. It is a short, forceful piece arguing that the court could not have “legally” acted any differently than the five right wing zealots did. Here’s a slice:

Most legislatures that have sought to limit legal abortion contrary to Roe v. Wade have run afoul of this because the laws they passed made the state the agent of enforcement. The state could thus be enjoined by a court from enforcing the law given its presumptive unconstitutionality. The Texas law, however, avoids this by placing the exclusive authority to enforce the law in the hands of private citizens who could sue abortion providers in civil actions. Therefore, there are no governmental defendants who have the power to harm.

The point is not whether Olsen is right or wrong in his opinion. The question is who is this dispassionate observer? Here you go:

Henry Olsen is a Washington Post columnist and a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center. 

Ethics and Public Policy Center:

The Ethics and Public Policy Center (EPPC) is a conservative^[2][3] Washington, D.C.-based think tank and advocacy group. Founded in 1976, the group describes itself as “dedicated to applying the Judeo-Christian moral tradition to critical issues of public policy”, and advocacy of founding principles such as the rule of law.^[4] The EPPC is active in a number of ways, including hosting lectures and conferences,^[5] publishing written work^[6] from the group’s scholars,^[7] and running programs^[8] intended to explore areas of public concern and interest.

EPPC’s current president is Ryan T. Anderson, who previously worked as the William E. Simon Senior Research Fellow at The Heritage Foundation. On February 1, 2021, he succeeded Edward Whelan,^[9] who now serves as EPPC’s vice president^[10] and holds the title of distinguished senior fellow and Antonin Scalia Chair in Constitutional Studies. George Weigel, Catholic theologian and papal biographer, is also a distinguished senior fellow.^[11]

EPPC is a qualified 501(c)(3) organization^[12]

We also learn, without any details, that EPPC founder was deemed too controversial for government work during the Reagan administration:

EPPC was founded in 1976 by Ernest W. Lefever, an American political theorist. He was nominated in 1981 for a US State Department position by US President Ronald Reagan before ultimately being rejected for the opportunity for his controversial background.^[14] He served as president of EPPC until 1989 and continued to write scholarly articles for EPPC until his death in 2009.^[15] Lefever said upon founding the institute that “a small ethically oriented center” should “respond directly to ideological critics who insist the corporation is fundamentally unjust.”^[16]

As far as American persecution of the corporations being a crime against Judeo-Christian ethics, Mr. Lefever wrote:

The Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington, DC, “is one of several [organizations] devoted to improving public appreciation of the role of business in what it terms a ‘moral society.’ It was founded by Ernest Lefever, who expressed his concern that ‘U.S. domestic and multinational firms find themselves increasingly under siege at home and abroad. They are accused of producing shoddy and unsafe products, fouling the environment, robbing future generations, wielding enormous power, repressing peoples in the third world, and generally being insensitive to human needs. We as a small and ethnically oriented center are in a position to respond more directly to ideological critics who insist the corporation is fundamentally unjust.'”[1]

According to the EPPC website the organisation was “established in 1976 to clarify and reinforce the bond between the Judeo-Christian moral tradition and the public debate over domestic and foreign policy issues.” [2]

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Or, in other words:

Tom Barry has this to say about EPPC:Created in 1976, EPPC was the first neocon institute to break ground in the frontal attack on the secular humanists. For nearly three decades, EPPC has functioned as the cutting edge of the neoconservative-driven culture war against progressive theology and secularism, and the associated effort to ensure right-wing control of the Republican Party. It explicitly sought to unify the Christian right with the neoconservative religious right, which was mostly made up of agnostics back then. A central part of its political project was to “clarify and reinforce the bond between the Judeo-Christian moral tradition and the public debate over domestic and foreign policy.” Directed by Elliott Abrams from 1996-2001, EPPC counts among its board members well connected figures in the neocon matrix including Jeane Kirkpatrick, Richard Neuhaus, and Mary Ann Glendon.

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It is, like the Heritage Foundation, the Cato Institute, the Institute for Humane Studies (Charles Koch’s favorite charity) funded by right wing billionaires and their charitable trusts. You can read all about it in a minute here. My point is, take the known bias of the writer into account when deciding how much credence to give his legal, moral or justice analysis. It is quite possible that EPPC and many groups like it had a hand in thinking up the innovative new anti-abortion Texas bounty hunter law. Former fellows and resident conservative scholars include Rick Santorum and pardoned felon, former president of the highly moral Judeo-Christian EPPC, Elliott Abrams [1].

In any case, it’s pretty clear why Henry Olsen supports the Supreme Court’s unappealable refusal to intervene. In fact, Olsen’s op-ed is probably also displayed prominently on the website of his main gig, scholar and senior fellow at the venerable right wing “think tank” (yep, it sure is). One of the great innovations of the Koch network is the seamless blending of “fact” and “fiction,” done in ideological hot houses called “think tanks”, slanted opinion that emerges as somber, considered influential news and other public opinion shaping forms, like op eds in prominent mass media.

This presentation by Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) lays out the judicial part of the doggedly field-tested, effective (and handsomely funded) right wing strategy to dominate democracy, though they represent a minute, infuriated minority galvanized into political action by the Warren Court’s 9-0 1954 decision that segregation in public schools is unconstitutional. Fury at “activist” judges led them to form a network dedicated to ensuring their activist judges became the majority on the federal bench. This rightwing network kicked into high gear when the death of Scalia gave “illegitimate” Obama the opportunity to shift the 5-4 court with the addition of the truly moderate Merrick Garland, an outcome to be prevented at all costs (and financed to the tune of tens of millions of dark dollars). Whitehouse lays bare a large swath of the “vast right wing conspiracy” that Hillary Clinton was mocked and vilified for talking about. The first rule of fight club is shut the fuck up about fight club!

[1]

Elliott Abrams:

Iran-Contra Scandal

Abrams was heavily involved in the Iran-Contra scandal. In 1991, Abrams was indicted by the Iran-Contra special prosecutor for giving false testimony before Congress in 1987 about his role in illicitly raising money for the Nicaraguan Contras. He pleaded guilty to two lesser offenses of withholding information to Congress in order to avoid a trial and a possible jail term.^[5]

He was pardoned by President George H.W. Bush along with a number of other Iran-Contra defendants on Christmas night 1992.^[6]

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The men who drafted and fought over the blueprint for the American experiment in democracy began with the famous words “We the people, in order to form a more perfect union…” and then set out a plan they hoped would establish justice, ensure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare and secure the blessings of liberty to the people and the people’s posterity. Of course, at the time, “the people” was understood to exclude the majority of humanity, women were to have no political say, Blacks were not universally considered human, let alone part of “the people”, indigenous Americans were excluded as were poor “white” men and many others over the years.

After the bloody Civil War the constitution was amended to include former slaves, and anyone else born in the United States, as citizens with Privileges and Immunities subject to Equal Protection by the federal government. Immediate steps were taken, notably by the Supreme Court, to thwart this change, but it is written into the Bible of American democracy and would eventually, almost a century later, after decades of court battles and bloody street protests, become enforceable law. Of course, it would be more than half a century after the end of the Civil War, after a long fight, before women got the vote, but the animating idea of “a more perfect union” seems to have been that democracy is an evolving work in progress, infinitely perfectible.

Resistance to this progress has always been the work of reactionaries, conservatives, the organized right. In every era they united to oppose the evolution of democracy. Their game is always perpetuity– keeping things as they are and making sure the status quo never fundamentally changes. Some have advanced shrewd arguments for their view that the way things are is about as good as it can be, advanced theories that showed the dangers of including everyone in democracy, they raised the terrifying specters of Socialism and COMMUNISM. Others simply did the grunt work to make sure people they didn’t like couldn’t vote, couldn’t get their day in court, couldn’t stand on rights guaranteed to them in the constitution. The most intellectually ambitious reactionaries created high-minded philosophies to justify their reactionary views. The Originalists, for example, hold a judicial philosophy that minimizes the radically democratizing changes to the Constitution made after the Civil War, always harkening back to the “intent of the framers,” the original wealthy white men who hammered out the original slavery-protecting “Originalist” Constitution almost a century earlier.

There are scholars who point out, with ample proofs, that the post-Civil War Constitution is a radically redesigned blueprint much more in line with a modern, ethnically diverse, largely urban, non-slave holding democracy than the unamended Originalist version. Radicals on the left want to create fundamental change in their lifetimes, not just plant seeds that will germinate a few generations from now. They recognize that time is running out to fix a badly dysfunctional system. “Moderates” are the “reasonable” compromisers who advocate a middle ground, some changes are needed, they concede, but change is best achieved in small, sometimes imperceptible increments.

Reactionaries, for whatever reason, always seem more energetic, better funded, more fanatical, more devoted, better organized, more relentless and readier to resort to any means necessary to achieve their aim of keeping things just the way they are. The reactionaries of their day said “fine, you have the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments — we have States’ Rights!” and one of the rights of those states was to find workarounds for the new prohibition against slavery (the clause “except as punishment for a crime” came in handy), the Supreme Court helped out with the 14th, leaving virtually every detail of federal citizenship in the hands of the states until 1964, and, as for the right of American-born Blacks to vote… whell, there are ways to squash that shit, right at the polls. if they don’t get the message with the damned lynchings and having their damned homes burned to the ground. As for blocking all federal legislation to stop lynching, or enforce the unalienable human rights (in a democracy) we call Civil Rights, we have the filibuster!

Adam Jentleson, who recently wrote a history of how the filibuster, almost always used to advance slavery and then segregation, came to cripple the Senate, had an op-ed in the NY Times the other day entitled When Will Biden Join the Fight for Voting Rights? He begins by setting out all that Biden has accomplished with a mere 50 votes in the Senate, deftly sidestepping the filibuster to provide funds to fight Covid-19, to give economic relief to millions, to lift millions of children out of poverty. He then points out that racism at law has always required, under the filibuster, a supermajority to rein it in.

During the Jim Crow era, the Senate held long, contentious debates on the bills that built the middle class, such as Social Security or Medicare, but none of those bills needed to get a supermajority to proceed. By contrast, popular bills to stop lynching, end poll taxes and fight workplace discrimination faced endless filibusters, and were blocked by supermajority thresholds. While Mr. Biden and Senate Democrats aren’t intentionally recreating such an unfair system, in practice, they are, perpetuating the same double standard that upheld Jim Crow for almost a century.

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His essay is worth reading. He continues:

But they can avoid repeating the mistakes of the past. In March, during his first speech on the Senate floor, Senator Raphael Warnock argued that “no Senate rule should overrule the integrity of our democracy.” If Senate rules happen to preserve what Warnock called “Jim Crow in new clothes,” just as they preserved the original version, they must be reformed. For Democratic leaders, this means finding the political will to never again allow bills that guarantee equal access to voting and representation to suffer unequal treatment.

Recall that on the day Warnock was declared the winner of the Georgia runoff for Senator, a mob carrying the Confederate flag stormed the Capitol, injuring 140 Blue Lives Matter officers in hand to hand combat to prevent the final certification of the winner of the presidential election. Reactionaries will always do whatever it takes. If it takes a lynch mob, so be it. The hopped up grunts, as always, will go to prison, meantime, we get what we need — a violent, galvanizing argument to rally our side.

All the rest of us have is law and the enforcement of law. If a parliamentary rule prevents any action in the Senate, if even one defiant member of the opposition party registers an intention to “filibuster”, there has to be a way to fix this. Jentleson, a former Senate staffer, offers a workaround to those who claim, incorrectly, that the filibuster is about protecting “bipartisanship.”

[S]enators can reclaim their right to shape the rules of the Senate even when doing so runs afoul of the parliamentarian, a staff member whose influence has grown dramatically in recent decades as senators lost faith in their ability to interpret Senate rules. Up until now, senators have enthusiastically abused the spirit of reconciliation while adhering, with comic devotion, to its letter; they use it to pass trillions in spending but studiously discard the provisions the parliamentarian deems insufficiently “budgetary,” such as a minimum wage increase. But only senators and the vice president preside over and vote in the Senate, and they have final say over what gets included in reconciliation bills. Rather than acting as automatons who simply read the rulings that the staff hands them (literally), they can include civil rights in the forthcoming reconciliation bill and, when the parliamentarian rules against it, Vice President Kamala Harris can issue her own ruling countermanding the parliamentarian. Fifty senators can sustain Harris’s ruling and pass voting rights, without ever having to vote to alter the filibuster itself.

Senators can also simply reform the rules to ensure that civil rights bills are treated equally. Given the Senate’s ugly history of blocking such legislation, there is ample justification for targeted filibuster reforms to ensure that civil rights bills receive majority votes.

Of course, Senators Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema oppose ending the filibuster, and imbue bipartisanship with lofty importance. But at the end of the day, it is up to Mr. Biden to bring home the small number of votes needed to end the tiered system that forces voting rights legislation to garner supermajorities in the Senate, while other bills sail through with just 50 votes.

Biden has the bully pulpit now and Jentleson argues that he must do everything in his considerable power to rally his party to the cause of protecting voting rights, federal enforcement of which has been systematically dismantled by the reactionary majority on the Supreme Court. If the many Republican state voter suppression laws are allowed to stand unchallenged (except in courts where resolution of the issues is years away) then we will have, in the next election, a gerrymandered Republican majority, in the House and likely also in the Senate (two for each state, populations be damned). Then, under existing parliamentary rules, anything else Biden has planned will be subject to the mockery of an obstructionist right-wing joke. Ta ta to bipartisanship and democracy, both. Welcome to the One Party United States of Charles Koch and friends.

. . . it is impossible to look at the effort Mr. Biden has devoted to voting rights until now and conclude that he is pulling out all the stops. His heart does not seem to be in this fight. Instead of pressing for the reforms necessary to pass these bills with 50 votes, he has defended the filibuster, while his administration has been challenging civil rights leaders to “out-organize” the Republicans who have implemented systematic, state-sanctioned voter suppression. Many find his stance naïve. “‘Just count the jellybeans’ is a helluva strategy,” political analyst Bakari Sellers tweeted in frustration.

He concludes:

The effort Mr. Biden poured into infrastructure shows what genuine commitment from the White House looks like. While the president has given one major speech dedicated to voting rights, he has held numerous speeches and events on infrastructure, sending the signal that the issue is a top priority. His cabinet and staff practically camped out on Capitol Hill. By late July, according to Bloomberg’s Jennifer Epstein, his staff had held at least 998 meetings and calls on infrastructure; the office of legislative affairs had held 330 meetings and calls with members of Congress and their top aides in the previous month alone.

Mr. Biden has invited comparisons to President Lyndon Johnson, but Mr. Johnson paired accomplishments like Medicare with the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts. Then, as now, the task was deemed so daunting that some cautioned against investing too much of the president’s political capital in the effort. By the time of his assassination, President John F. Kennedy had let segregationists take civil rights hostage to his top domestic priority: a tax cut.

But when Mr. Johnson’s advisers counseled him to give up on civil rights, too, he shot back, “What the hell is the presidency for?” He personally intervened to get the civil rights bill to the floor, then forced his former mentor, fellow Democrat and self-avowed white supremacist, Senator Richard Russell, to lead a filibuster for roughly three months, betting that he could crack an obstructionist front that had remained solid since Reconstruction ended in 1877. Mr. Johnson had to deal with more than a few reluctant senators — most of those filibustering the civil rights bill were Democrats. To beat them, Mr. Johnson did not use magic powers. He simply spent months working every angle, relentlessly.

If Mr. Biden fails where Mr. Johnson succeeded, he will have left intact the system of legislative segregation that preserved Jim Crow. Whatever else he accomplishes, that will remain part of his legacy.

The president may try everything and fail. But the stakes are so high, he has to try.

As Joe Biden himself has said many times — come on, man!

Former Acting Assistant Attorney General Jeffrey Clark, the man who heroically tried to keep his boss Donald Trump in power by amplifying Trump’s absurd and false claims after the Orange Polyp lost the election, no doubt fancies himself a man of principle. Most fascists believe they are serving a higher calling that does not require them to play by the ordinary rules, rules made for weaklings. They operate with urgency, goaded by a sense of outraged grievance. As Trump said during his long exhortation on January 6, before sending an angry mob down to gently hug and kiss the Capitol Police: “when you catch somebody in a fraud you’re allowed to go by a different set of rules.” Indeed.

Today Jeffery Clark, a man who went by a very different set of rules (“alternative rules”) that included attempts to have the DOJ knowingly lie to keep Trump in power, heads the New Civil Liberties Alliance, the extreme right-wing outfit that is dragging universities into courts to challenge mask mandates and trying to get the eviction moratorium lifted. You know, NEW civil liberties. A reminder of what fascists actually stand for, from that great article on the shady history of American fascism that I cited the other day:

Fascism is not a principled or ­ideological stand; it is the politics of grievance, an ­instrumentalist response to a ­political ­situation it perceives as unacceptable. ­Fascism is the counter-revolutionary politics of force, justified by ultra-nationalism, glorified by myths of ­regeneration and purification, performed by masculine cults of personality and sold as the will of the people.

source

After Hitler launched a bloody and failed insurrection in Munich, 1923, his famous Beer Hall Putsch, a sympathetic right wing judge in the scrupulously democratic Weimar Republic gave him a platform to make patriotic speeches to his fellow citizens, day after day. He got a slap on the wrist by way of a sentence, for treason, a short stay in plush accommodations in Landsberg Prison. He emerged as a national celebrity with a book to sell.

After Trump launched a bloody and failed insurrection on January 6, a quick, failed second impeachment and … crickets. Sure he’s been harshly punished by Twitter, and Facebook tiptoes around a temporary ban until, presumably, the incorrigible liar changes his stripes, but otherwise . . . crickets. Where are the federal charges? Where is the indictment in Georgia for his seditious recorded call to Raffensberger during which he violated every clause of the Georgia criminal law regarding interference in elections? It’s mystifying and disquieting that, even with the Fourteenth Amendment specifically banning insurrectionists from holding public office, the man who has always played by radically different rules is poised to be the GOP presidential candidate in 2024, perhaps after serving as savage, punishing Speaker of the House for a couple of years.

It is exhausting to repeat that American democracy itself hangs in the balance, as the forces of democracy fret about the right thing to do, while the well-funded friends of fascism are busy day and night planning and carrying out the next steps in their decades-long campaign for one-party rule. 51 votes in the Senate would end the filibuster, or carve out an exception for voting rights, which should not be in question more than 50 years after the Voting Rights Act the now supermajority right-wing Supreme Court has been vivisecting in recent years.

The 51 principled votes to limit or abolish the filibuster could be there, should be there, except that Kirsten Synema insists on performing her quirky, haughty, mavericky dance, Joe Manchin meets with oil and coal barons to get his orders, and Dianne Feinstein, who gushed at Miss Lindsey Graham’s graciousness while shoving Federalist Society superstar Amy Coney-Barrett down the nation’s throat, sits on the fence, referring obliquely to some higher principle about compromise. Trump’s people have no such scruples.