Slouching Towards Oblivion

Showing posts with label democracy. Show all posts
Showing posts with label democracy. Show all posts

Monday, February 26, 2024

Today's Quote


Find the enemy that wants to end this American experiment in democracy and kill every one of them until they're so sick of the killing that they leave us and our freedoms intact.
--Gen Jim Mattis, USMC

Sunday, February 18, 2024

The Test


It's pretty appalling to keep finding out that so many Americans know so little about our history or our government.

The citizenship test has some of the easiest questions ever - stuff I was taught in grade school - starting like in 3rd or 4th grade.

Nobody's asking you to present a full dissertation on the details of our little experiment in democratic self-government, but holy crap, people, c'mon - ya gotta know some of this to be at least kind of effective in the whole democracy thing.

Democracy is not something we have
unless it's something we do.
And we have to know something about it
to make the damned thing work.

Check yourself:


The next time you hear somebody shit-talk immigrants for not knowing enough about USAmerica Inc, ask them a few of those questions.

Monday, November 13, 2023

Nancy MacLean

We pay attention to things so we're less likely to be fooled.
  • We pay attention to our health so pharmaceutical ads are less deceiving
  • We pay attention to economics so we're not as likely to be deceived by "Financial Reporters" telling us about indicators - leading or trailing or Market Basket or Durable Goods or interest rates or whatever
  • We pay attention to politics so we won't be fooled so often by demagogues and dog-assed Republicans




GOP megadonor pours millions into effort to hinder Ohio abortion amendment

New campaign finance records show Illinois Republican megadonor Richard Uihlein is funding the bulk of the campaign aimed at thwarting a constitutional amendment on abortion in Ohio.

Ohio is likely the only state this year to have a measure on the ballot to enshrine abortion access into the state constitution, setting up a test case for how the issue may drive voters ahead of the 2024 presidential election. A USA TODAY Network/Suffolk University poll released this week found 58% of Ohioans support a constitutional amendment.

That support may not be enough to pass. Currently, such amendments require support from a simple majority — 50% + 1 vote. But the GOP-led state legislature set up a special election for Aug. 8 to raise the threshold to 60%. That measure is known as Ohio Issue 1.

Uihlein, an Illinois shipping supplies magnate with a history of donations to anti-abortion groups, was the top funder of Protect our Constitution, the main group supporting Issue 1. Uihlein gave $4 million to the group, the bulk of the $4.85 million raised.

Last month, a CBS News investigation found Uihlein had an outsized role in getting Issue 1 on the ballot. In April, he gave $1.1 million to a political committee pressuring Republican lawmakers to approve the August special election. Financial disclosures show a foundation controlled by Uihlein has given nearly $18 million to a Florida-based organization pushing similar changes to the constitutional amendment process in states across the country.

Uihlein didn't immediately respond to a request for comment.

Ohio Republicans pushing to change the rules over constitutional amendments originally billed the effort as one that would prevent outside interests from influencing the state constitution. But supporters, including Secretary of State Frank LaRose, have since acknowledged the change would make it harder for a constitutional amendment on abortion to pass.

Last year, voters in Kansas and Michigan chose to preserve abortion access in their state constitutions with just under 60% approval.

Once the August special election was approved, money began to flow in on both sides. The central group opposed to raising the threshold for passing an amendment to 60%, One Person One Vote, raised a total of $14.4 million. The Sixteen Thirty Fund gave $2.5 million to the effort, campaign finance records show. The group, based in Washington D.C., has spent millions on left-leaning causes, including the campaign against the confirmation of then-Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh.

Saturday, October 07, 2023

It's Not Both Sides

Not all Press Poodles are created equal.

Heather Cox Richardson:
"This is not your mother's Republican Party. It has be come an extremist faction that has within its goals to get rid of the kind of government under which we've lived since 1933. So you have to start from the premise that you can't Both-Sides this issue. We have a national problem that is embodied by one hard-right extremist party."




Tuesday, September 26, 2023

A Small (ish) Win


Republicans continue their mighty struggle to beat back the forces of creeping democracy.

Seriously - I can't think of a shittier thing to do than to say you're serving the interests of your constituents by doing things that take away their right to choose their leaders - degrading democracy and claiming you're protecting it.

Our little experiment in democratic self-government seems to be hanging by a thread, even as we get a few faint glimmers of hope from a SCOTUS that has also seemed inclined to fuck us over.

But I'll take a win anywhere any time.


US Supreme Court won't halt ruling that blocked Alabama electoral map

WASHINGTON (Reuters) -The U.S. Supreme Court on Tuesday denied a request by Alabama officials to halt a lower court's ruling that rejected a Republican-crafted electoral map for diminishing the clout of Black voters, likely clearing the way for a new map to be drawn ahead of the 2024 congressional elections.

The court's action leaves intact a Sept. 5 decision by a federal three-judge panel in Birmingham that the map approved by the state's Republican-led legislature to set the boundaries of Alabama's seven U.S. House of Representatives districts was unlawfully biased against Black voters and must be redrawn.

That map was devised after the Supreme Court in June blocked a previous version, also for weakening the voting power of Black Alabamians.

President Joe Biden's fellow Democrats are seeking to regain control of the House in next year's elections. With Republicans holding a slim 222-212 majority, court battles like this one are helping to shape the fight for control of the chamber.

Black people make up 27% of Alabama's population but are in the majority in only one of the seven House districts as drawn by the state legislature in both the maps it has approved since the 2020 census.

Electoral districts are redrawn each decade to reflect population changes as measured by a national census. In most states, such redistricting is done by the party in power, which can lead to map manipulation for partisan gain. Voting rights litigation that could result in new maps of congressional districts is playing out in several states.

The Supreme Court's 5-4 June ruling affirmed a lower court order requiring state lawmakers to add a second House district with a Black majority - or close to it - in order to comply with the landmark 1965 Voting Rights Act, which prohibits racial discrimination in voting. Black voters tend to favor Democratic candidates.

Following that ruling, the legislature adopted a plan that increased the portion of Black voters in a second House district from around 30% to 40%, still well below a majority. The three-judge panel ruled that this new map failed to remedy the Voting Rights Act violation present in the first map and directed a special master - an independent party appointed by a court - to draw a new, third version of the map ahead of next year's elections.

The latest Republican-drawn map drew swift objections from Black voters and civil rights activists. They said the plan failed to fix the Voting Rights Act violation identified by the Supreme Court, and that it raised concerns under the U.S. Constitution's 14th Amendment guarantee of equal protection under the law.

The Alabama map concentrated large numbers of Black voters into one district and spread others into districts in numbers too small to make up a majority.

The Supreme Court's June ruling was authored by conservative Chief Justice John Roberts and joined in full by the court's three liberals, Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson. Conservative Justice Brett Kavanaugh joined the judgment in a separate opinion.

Conservative litigants had succeeded in persuading the Supreme Court to limit the Voting Rights Act's scope in some important previous rulings.

The Supreme Court's 2013 ruling in another Alabama case struck down a key part that determined which states with histories of racial discrimination needed federal approval to change voting laws. In a 2021 ruling endorsing Republican-backed Arizona voting restrictions, the justices made it harder to prove violations under a provision of the Voting Rights Act aimed at countering racially biased voting measures.

Thursday, June 22, 2023

A Status Report


Dictionary
 
free·dom

noun
➡︎ the power or right to act, speak, or think as one wants without hindrance or restraint.
"we do have some freedom of choice"

➡︎ absence of subjection to foreign domination or despotic government.

"he was a champion of Irish freedom"

➡︎ the state of not being imprisoned or enslaved.

"the shark thrashed its way to freedom"


Opinion
Dictators’ dark secret: They’re learning from each other

In the spring of 2012, Vladimir Putin was feeling the pressure.

For months, anti-Putin protests had surged through the streets of Moscow and other cities following fraudulent parliamentary elections the previous December. Mr. Putin, who was about to be sworn in for a third term as president, harbored a fear of “color” revolutions — the 2003 Rose Revolution in Georgia, the 2004-2005 Orange Revolution in Ukraine — as well as other popular revolts like the 2010-2012 Arab Spring, in which four dictators were overthrown. Until his inauguration in May, Russian authorities had tolerated the demonstrations. But when street protests broke out again, some marred by violence, the police moved in aggressively and hundreds were arrested.

On July 20, Mr. Putin signed legislation — rushed through parliament in just two weeks — to give the government a strong hand over nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), which he suspected were behind the protests. He had long been apprehensive about independent activism, especially by groups that were financed from abroad. Under the new law, any group that received money from overseas and engaged in “political activity” was required to register as a “foreign agent” with the Justice Ministry or face heavy fines.

The law crippled these groups, the backbone of a nascent civil society that had blossomed in the 1990s in Russia after the dissolution of the Soviet Union. Such organizations are the heartbeat of a healthy democracy, providing an independent and autonomous channel for people to voice their desires and aspirations. One of the first groups to be targeted was Memorial, founded during Mikhail Gorbachev’s years of reform to protect the historical record of Soviet repressions and to defend human rights in the current day. Mr. Putin was determined to squelch it and others like it.

Soon, similar laws began to crop up around the world.
In the following years, at least 60 nations passed or drafted laws designed to restrict NGOs, and 96 carried out other policies curtailing them, imposing cumbersome registration requirements, intrusive monitoring, harassment and shutdowns. The wave of repressive measures offers a revealing look at the titanic struggle between democracy and authoritarianism. In the past decade, dictators have forged transnational bonds, sharing methods, copying tactics and learning from one another. They are finding new ways to quash free speech and independent journalism, eradicate NGOs, silence dissent and suffocate criticism.

In previous editorials in this series, we examined how young people who posted freely on social media were wrongly imprisoned by authoritarian regimes. We also described how Russia created and exploited disinformation about biological weapons. This editorial looks at how autocracies are reinforcing themselves by swapping methods and tactics.

The dictators want most of all to survive. They are succeeding.

A cascade of restrictions

The Russian “foreign agent” law hung an albatross around the neck of NGOs and, later, independent journalists and bloggers — anyone who received any money from abroad, even payment for a single freelance article. All were required to post a label on their published material identifying it as the work of a “foreign agent,” which in Russia has traditionally been associated with spying. When many organizations refused to oblige, the law was amended so the Justice Ministry could put them in the registry without their consent. Then in 2015, Russia added a new law designating any organization “undesirable” if the government deemed it a threat to national security — effectively a ban. One of the organizations so labeled was the Open Society Foundations established by financier George Soros, which had been, among other things, a lifeline of personal subsidies for Russian scientists in the lean years after the Soviet collapse.

Azerbaijan was the first among former Soviet republics to copy Russia’s 2012 law in 2013 and 2014. Then came Tajikistan in 2014 and Kazakhstan in 2015 with legislation directly limiting foreign funding to NGOs or sharply increasing bureaucratic burdens on them. The laws were largely borrowed from Russia. The cascade of laws has been documented in the Civic Freedom Monitor of the International Center for Not-for-profit Law.

Egypt also put NGOs in the crosshairs. In 2013, the courts convicted 43 NGO workers, including Americans, Egyptians and Europeans, many in absentia, on charges of operating without required government approval. The notorious criminal prosecution, Case 173, dragged on for years. Although the 43 were later acquitted in a retrial, the harassment continues. Under President Abdel Fatah El-Sisi, Egyptian authorities have frozen the assets of human rights activists, banned them from traveling abroad and regularly called them in for questioning on suspicions of “foreign funding.” This included Hossam Bahgat, founder and director of the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights, one of Egypt’s most well-known rights organizations. Egypt replaced a draconian 2017 law on NGOs with a new one in 2019 but retained many harsh restrictions. The new law banned activities under vaguely worded terms such as any “political” work or any activity that undermines “national security.”

Cambodia, ruled by strongman Hun Sen for decades, in 2015 imposed a law under which NGOs can be disbanded if their activities “jeopardize peace, stability, and public order or harm the national security, culture and traditions of Cambodian society.” Uganda, which has an active community of NGOs, imposed a restrictive law in 2016; the groups have faced suspensions, freezing of accounts, denial of funding and restrictions on freedom of expression, association and assembly. In Nicaragua, the dictatorship led by former Sandinista guerrilla Daniel Ortega adopted a “foreign agent” law in 2020 and a law restricting NGOs in 2022. It has canceled the legal registration of more than 950 civil society organizations since 2018.

China, which originally permitted NGOs to exist in a legal gray zone, took a harder line after Xi Jinping came to power in 2012. A new NGO law went into effect in 2017, increasing state control over foreign and domestic funding to civil society groups. While Russia operated with blacklists, China created a whitelist, rewarding some NGOs whose interests it approved, as it sought to punish those in sensitive areas such as media, human rights and religion. Lu Jun, co-founder of one of the early successful NGOs, the Beijing Yirenping Center, which fought discrimination, recalled the ways in which the state turned against his group. For seven years, it was allowed to grow. But then, he recalled, “Between 2014 and 2019, in four separate crackdowns, nine of my colleagues were jailed and five of our offices were repeatedly searched until they were shut down.”

A secret school — or ‘mad scientists’?

How did so many countries come to do the same thing in the same decade? The answers are difficult to find — dictatorships are shrouded in secrecy. But Stephen G.F. Hall, a professor at the University of Bath, in Britain, uncovered evidence that the dictators copy, share and learn from one another. His new book, “The Authoritarian International,” looks at how this works.

According to Mr. Hall, authoritarian regimes must constantly maintain the illusion of steadfast control. Relax for a minute, and the illusion could vanish. “Protest is like a run on the bank,” Mr. Hall told us. “The protesters only have to get it right once.” For autocracies, protest and dissent are an existential threat.

“They’ve all seen what happens to autocrats generally — the Gaddafi moment, being dragged through the streets and beaten to death with a lead pipe. … They seem to know that if one country becomes democratic in a region, the rest will almost certainly follow. … And the best way to ensure that survival is to learn, to cooperate and to share best practices because you constantly have to stay one step ahead.”

Mr. Hall says much “authoritarian learning” is indirect, diffused through like-minded networks and emulation. When he began his research, he thought he might find an actual school of dictatorship, with Mr. Putin or other despots as “either star pupils or teachers telling other autocrats how to establish best survival practices.” But Mr. Hall did not find contemporary evidence of such a school. “I think it is primarily a case of trial and error,” he said, with the dictators more like “mad scientists” who run experiments and then share the results. which are passed around in the shadows, through security services and old-boy networks.

And there are traces of collaboration. According to Mr. Hall, Russia has frequently looked to Belarus as a proving ground and source of authoritarian methods. In 2002, Belarusian strongman Alexander Lukashenko created the Belarusian Republican Youth Union, a pro-regime, patriotic organization that could take control of the streets in Minsk in the event of an attempted color revolution. After the Orange Revolution in Ukraine, the Kremlin quickly created its own groups of “patriotic youths.” Years later, when Mr. Lukashenko was facing massive protests after stealing the 2020 presidential election, Mr. Putin came to his rescue. For instance, when Belarusian television workers quit their jobs in protest of the election fraud, Mr. Putin sent in Russians to keep the broadcasts going. (For Russia, the help is also driven by security concerns, given Belarus’s proximity to NATO.) Belarus also cooperates with China, which has long provided it with facial recognition technology. China’s telecommunications giant Huawei set up research centers in Belarus and brought Belarusian students to China for training.

Some authoritarian learning has its origin in history books. Magnus Fiskesjö, a professor at Cornell University, has shown how China in the past decade or so has brought back show trials, with staged, coerced confessions, borrowing both from the Mao era and reaching back to Joseph Stalin’s show trials of the 1930s. The extrajudicial show trials have been used against journalists, bloggers, academics, lawyers and entertainers, among others. The forced confessions go a step further than just silencing dissent; they are used to “shape reality” and create a more “predictably obedient society.”

The digital censors

In the world of authoritarian tactics, Russia and China are the center of gravity. They share know-how for policing the internet and generate sheaves of propaganda and disinformation, sometimes broadcasting identical sets of lies at the same time. Mr. Putin and Mr. Xi declared a “no limits” partnership in February 2022, but closer cooperation to squelch free speech on the internet was already well underway.

A glimpse of how it works was provided recently in a trove of internal documents, emails and audio recordings disclosed by Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty in an April 5 report by Daniil Belovodyev, Andrei Soshnikov and Reid Standish. The materials depict Russia and China working closely to help each other more tightly control the internet in two high-level meetings in 2017 and 2019.

The first meeting, on July 4, 2017, was a two-hour session in Moscow between Ren Xianling, who was then-deputy minister of the Cyberspace Administration of China, and Aleksandr Zharov, then-head of Roskomnadzor, the Russian government agency that censors the internet. According to the documents and other materials, the Russians wanted expertise from China about “mechanisms for permitting and controlling” mass media, online media and “individual bloggers,” as well as China’s experience regulating messenger apps, encryption services and virtual private networks. The Russians asked to send a delegation to China to study its vast domestic surveillance system and the “Great Firewall” that blocks unwanted overseas information. The Chinese visitors were particularly interested in methods used by the Russian agency to control the media coverage of public protest. The Chinese visitors’ questions were prompted by public demonstrations just a few months before, organized by opposition leader Alexei Navalny in March 2017. Mr. Zharov reportedly responded that the Kremlin wasn’t worried because the protests were small-scale and Mr. Putin’s public support was at a “very high level.”

Chinese President Xi Jinping and Russian President Vladimir Putin in March. (Washington Post illustration; Alexey Maishev/Sputnik/AFP/Getty Images)
The discussion came just as Russia was looking at how to install more sophisticated controls over the internet. The government attempted in 2018 to block the popular messaging platform Telegram but failed to do so. In May 2019, Mr. Putin signed new legislation requiring that Russian companies install more intrusive controls, and also envisioning the creation of an entirely isolated Russian internet. Outside researchers have found that the new controls gave the Kremlin “fine-grained information control” over internet traffic.

In July 2019, the Russian and Chinese teams met again in Moscow, according to the RFE/RL report. Mr. Zharov asked the Chinese for advice about how to deal with platforms that successfully evade Russia’s blocking. The failure with Telegram was brought up as an example. The Russians also asked the Chinese how they used artificial intelligence to identify and block “prohibited content.” RFE/RL disclosed this year that Roskomnadzor has been using sophisticated techniques to track Russians online, searching for posts that insult Mr. Putin or call for protests.

Then in October 2019, on the sidelines of the World Internet Conference in China, Russia and China signed a cooperation agreement on counteracting the spread of “forbidden information.” In December 2019, China sent requests to Russia, in three separate letters, with censorship requests to block articles and sites, such as the Epoch Times, a newspaper with ties to the Falun Gong movement that is persecuted in China, and links on GitHub, the software development website, that describe ways to bypass China’s firewall inside the country.

The dictators have clung to power

Of course, the United States and other democracies also cooperate and spend billions of dollars annually promoting the values of open societies and rule of law around the world. Like the dictators, the democracies share tactics and methods with one another. But there is one important difference: Diffusion of democracy appeals to — and relies upon — individuals and free thinking, while autocrats pursue their own survival by suffocating individual voices.

The latest Freedom in the World report shows a decline in freedom for the 17th year in a row. Many autocrats are proving resilient. In the nearly 11 years since Mr. Putin signed the “foreign agent” law, most of the world’s leading dictators have held on. Rarely have they been toppled by popular protests. They are building new means of repression along with the old. In China, tech companies have invented an electronic surveillance system that can automatically recognize a protest banner and demonstrators’ faces — and alert the police.

In Russia, Mr. Putin is unrestrained. The “foreign agent” and “undesirable” laws were revised again in 2022, making them significantly more draconian. While the earlier version singled out those who received money from abroad, now a “foreign agent” can be anyone who receives any kind of support from overseas or comes “under foreign influence in other forms.” New names are added every Friday to the registry compiled by the Justice Ministry.

As of June 16, the registry listed 621 groups and people.

“Authoritarian regimes are much more brazen than before,” said William J. Dobson, co-editor of the Journal of Democracy and author of “The Dictator’s Learning Curve,” published in 2012. “They are not sitting still.”

At the same time, autocracies are racked with challenges and setbacks. Mr. Putin’s invasion of Ukraine might yet doom his rule. In China, Mr. Xi demands obedience, but protesters defy him, as they did last winter over “zero covid” restrictions. And one example of successful protest came recently in Georgia. The ruling Georgian Dream party advanced yet another “foreign agent” bill to require any organization receiving more than 20 percent of its funds from foreign sources to register as “agents of foreign influence.” But the bill was widely criticized, and after mass protests around the Parliament building in March, it was dropped.

All who believe in democracy must find new ways to advance it. This is especially important now, when democracy has lost luster around the globe.

Democracy’s greatest strength is openness. It should be harnessed to tell the truth loudly and widely.







Saturday, April 08, 2023

The Once-upon-A-Time GOP

Republicans shit all over LGBTQ, and women, and POC, and they refuse to do anything about gun violence, and now in Tennessee they're making it very clear they have no intention of honoring their oath to protect and defend.


Almost every American under about 30 has been taught to play fair and treat people with respect. They grew up with brown friends, and with gay friends - and the young women grew up believing they'd eventually step into an adult world where they'd be free to make their own decisions on when (or if) to become moms.

Kids who've survived mass shootings - sometimes at their own schools - are growing up knowing Republicans will never do anything about the gun violence that took the lives of some of their friends, and made them live in fear every day. It's reasonable to believe a very large majority of those "kids" will never vote for a Republican. Ever.

It's very sad, and regrettable, and kinda gratifying, all at the same time.


Wednesday, April 05, 2023

Another One On Wisconsin

Why do these jokers seem to think they can convince me they're standing up for, and defending the institution by delivering remarks that defame and undermine the institution? It is a wonderment.


Loser Daniel Kelly makes his non-conceding concession (?)

On, Wisconsin

File this one under "Dodging Bullets".



Liberals win control of Wisconsin Supreme Court ahead of abortion case

MILWAUKEE — Liberals claimed control of Wisconsin’s high court in an election Tuesday, giving them a one-vote majority on a body that in the coming years will likely consider the state’s abortion ban, its gerrymandered legislative districts and its voting rules for the 2024 presidential election.

Milwaukee County Judge Janet Protasiewicz’s victory over former state Supreme Court justice Daniel Kelly will end 15 years of conservative control of the Wisconsin Supreme Court. She could face ethical questions when the court takes up politically charged cases because she campaigned heavily on abortion rights and repeatedly called the state’s election maps “rigged.”

The candidates, political parties and independent groups spent more than $40 million on the race, making it the most expensive judicial contest in U.S. history. It more than quadrupled the amount spent in Wisconsin’s 2020 state Supreme Court race.

Judicial candidates in Wisconsin do not run with party labels, but the race was steeped in partisanship. The state Democratic Party gave nearly $9 million to Protasiewicz, while arms of the Republican Party gave more than $500,000 to Kelly and GOP megadonor Richard Uihlein spent nearly $6 million to help him, according to campaign finance records.

At Protasiewicz’s victory party in downtown Milwaukee, the three liberals who sit on the court marched into the hotel ballroom arm in arm to Lizzo’s “About Damn Time.” They later joined Protasiewicz onstage, and the four of them — the court’s incoming majority — held their hands aloft as the crowd chanted “Janet!”

“Today’s results show that Wisconsinites believe in democracy and the democratic process,” Protasiewicz said. “Today I’m proud to stand by the promise I made to every Wisconsinite that I will always deliver justice and bring common sense to our Supreme Court.”

On Tuesday night, Kelly accused Protasiewicz of spreading “rancid slanders” and said he did not have a “worthy opponent to which I can concede.” He said he respected the voters’ decision but feared for the future of the court.

“I wish Wisconsin the best of luck because I think it’s going to need it,” he said, speaking from a rural, lakeside hotel 70 miles north of Madison.

Relatively large numbers of voters were expected to go to the polls in an off-cycle election that typically sees a turnout of less than 30 percent of eligible voters. Before the polls opened Tuesday, about 435,000 voters had cast early ballots. That is the equivalent of more than a third of the 1.2 million votes cast in the 2019 state Supreme Court race, the last time such a position led a ballot. Nearly 1 million voters cast ballots in the February primary, almost twice as many who voted in the February 2018 primary for a seat on the state Supreme Court.

Protasiewicz will start her 10-year term in August. She will replace Justice Patience Roggensack, a conservative who decided not to seek a third term after 20 years on the court. The next race for a seat on the court is in 2025, when liberal Justice Ann Walsh Bradley’s term ends.

As Wisconsin voters cast their ballots, former president Donald Trump appeared in a Manhattan courtroom and pleaded not guilty to 34 felony counts related to payments intended to silence an adult-film actress during his 2016 presidential campaign. Trump endorsed Kelly in 2020 but stayed out of this year’s race.

Protasiewicz and her allies had a fundraising edge and structured their campaign spending to run about three times as many ads as conservatives in the final weeks of the campaign, according to the media-tracking firm AdImpact. That’s because Democrats took advantage of a campaign finance law written by Republican lawmakers in 2015 that let them funnel huge sums to Protasiewicz, who qualified for the cheapest ad rates because she was a candidate for office. Conservatives ran most of their ads through independent groups that pay far more for ads.

Conservatives won a majority on the court in 2008 and over the next decade and a half issued rulings that upheld limits on unions, approved a voter ID law, ended a campaign finance investigation of Republicans, outlawed absentee-ballot drop boxes and adopted election maps that assured Republicans have commanding majorities in the state legislature.

Kelly joined the court in 2016, when the Republican governor at the time, Scott Walker, appointed him to fill a vacancy. He lost the seat by 10 points in 2020 but hoped to rejoin it this year.

Protasiewicz, 60, was raised in Milwaukee’s working-class south side, graduated from the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee and got her law degree from Marquette University in Milwaukee. She served as a prosecutor for more than 25 years before becoming a judge nearly 10 years ago. On the campaign trail, she often noted that the only client she ever had as a lawyer was the state.

Protasiewicz had the advantage in the race from the start. She got in early, raised $14 million over the next year and a half, and got Democrats to coalesce around her even though another liberal was also running. She came in first in the February primary with 47 percent. Kelly was second with 24 percent, edging out conservative Waukesha County Circuit Court Judge Jennifer Dorow by two points. (The other liberal in the race, Dane County Circuit Court Judge Everett Mitchell, received about 8 percent.)

Some conservatives feared all along that Kelly would have a tough time this year, citing his loss in 2020 and a string of writings that expressed opposition to abortion and called affirmative action and slavery morally the same.

Protasiewicz made abortion rights the centerpiece of her campaign. Democrats have found the issue resonates with voters since the U.S. Supreme Court in June overturned Roe v. Wade, the 1973 ruling that guaranteed access to abortion across the nation.

When the ruling came down, abortion providers in Wisconsin stopped offering the procedure because of an 1849 law that bans abortion unless one is required to save the life of the mother. A trial judge is slated to hear a challenge to the law next month, and the case is expected to eventually reach the state Supreme Court.

“I can tell you with certainty that if I’m elected on April 4th, I’m sure that we will be looking — I am sure we will be looking — at that 1849 law,” Protasiewicz said at a campaign stop in March in eastern Wisconsin.

She added: “I believe in a woman’s right to choose.”

Over the next two years, the state high court could be called on to decide a host of voting rules for the 2024 presidential election. And the justices could be dragged into challenges over the results of that election, as they were in 2020. Last time, conservative Justice Brian Hagedorn joined the court’s liberals to issue a string of 4-3 rulings that rejected challenges from Trump and his allies over Joe Biden’s win in the state.

Liberal groups are now preparing to file a lawsuit challenging the legislative and congressional districts that conservatives on the Wisconsin Supreme Court approved last year. Those maps so heavily favor Republicans that they have been able to gain nearly two-thirds of the seats in the state legislature even though Wisconsin is nearly evenly split between Democratic and Republican voters.

Even if the court acts quickly, it may not be able to draw new maps in time for the 2024 election. New maps would need to be set by next spring, just six months after Protasiewicz is sworn in. Ordinarily, redistricting challenges take years.

Protasiewicz will face tough questions when the court addresses the abortion and redistricting challenges. Critics have argued she cannot ethically participate in those cases after so clearly spelling out her views.

During the campaign, Republicans filed a complaint against her with the state’s judicial ethics commission. The commission moves slowly and has not said whether it believes she has broken any rules. Republicans have made clear they’re ready to file more complaints.

The commission’s powers are limited, however, and only the state Supreme Court can impose discipline on a justice for violating the judicial ethics code. The conservatives on the court would need to get at least one vote from the liberals to discipline Protasiewicz.

Protasiewicz has said she would not participate in cases brought by the state Democratic Party since it donated so much money directly to her campaign. But she has said she is inclined to remain on the abortion case and would likely participate in a redistricting case if someone other than the state Democratic Party brought it.

Protasiewicz was able to speak so freely about her views on abortion and redistricting during the campaign because of a 2002 U.S. Supreme Court decision. Acting on a lawsuit brought by the Republican Party of Minnesota, the conservative majority in a 5-4 ruling determined judicial candidates have a First Amendment right to express their views on political issues so long as they don’t promise to rule in a particular way.

But having now spelled out her views, Protasiewicz could face challenges over whether she can be impartial, said Charles Geyh, an Indiana University law professor who has written extensively on judicial ethics.

“If she is then called upon to resolve the redistricting matter, where she is on record saying it’s rigged, I have a hard time saying that she shouldn’t disqualify herself from that,” he said.

In Wisconsin, justices decide on their own whether they can participate in cases. That’s in part because conservatives on the court in 2009 ruled the justices could not force one of their colleagues off a case.

Eric H. Holder Jr., who served as attorney general under President Barack Obama, spent Saturday campaigning for Protasiewicz as the head of the National Democratic Redistricting Committee. In an interview, he contended Protasiewicz could remain fair on a redistricting challenge despite her comments in recent months.

“She has said the maps are not necessarily good, but she hasn’t said she would vote in a particular way with regard to a case that was brought before her,” he said. “And you have to look at what the case is, what’s the basis for the complaint that might be filed, and I’m confident that she can do so in an impartial way.”

It's Bad


  • We need to regard Campaign Finance violations as very serious crimes
  • Tax evasion - ie: ducking your responsibilities as an American citizen - should be a bad one too
Put it all together, and it's about rigging an election. And IMHO, in a democracy, that's the same as Sedition or outright Treason.

It should be obvious that there are forces in and around the GOP that are trying to kill our system of democratic self-government.

To me, that's not far removed from conspiring to commit murder. People need to burn for that.


Analysis: A Surprise Accusation Bolsters a Risky Case Against Trump

The unsealed case against Donald J. Trump accuses him of falsifying records in part to lay the groundwork for planned lies to tax authorities.


WASHINGTON — The unsealed indictment against former President Donald J. Trump on Tuesday laid out an unexpected accusation that bolstered what many legal experts have described as an otherwise risky and novel case: Prosecutors claim he falsified business records in part for a plan to deceive state tax authorities.

For weeks, observers have wondered about the exact charges the Manhattan district attorney, Alvin L. Bragg, would bring. Accusing Mr. Trump of bookkeeping fraud to conceal campaign finance violations, many believed, could raise significant legal challenges. That accusation turned out to be a major part of Mr. Bragg’s theory — but not all of it.

“Pundits have been speculating that Trump would be charged with lying about the hush money payments to illegally affect an election, and that theory rests on controversial legal issues and could be hard to prove,” said Rebecca Roiphe, a New York Law School professor and former state prosecutor.

“It turns out the indictment also includes a claim that Trump falsified records to commit a state tax crime,” she continued. “That’s a much simpler charge that avoids the potential pitfalls.”

The indictment listed 34 counts of bookkeeping fraud related to Mr. Trump’s reimbursement in 2017 to Michael D. Cohen, his former lawyer and fixer. Just before the 2016 election, Mr. Cohen had made a $130,000 hush money payment to the pornographic film actress Stormy Daniels, who has said she and Mr. Trump had an extramarital affair.

Various business records concerning those payments to Mr. Cohen, an accompanying statement of facts said, falsely characterized them as being for legal services performed in 2017. For each such record, the grand jury charged Mr. Trump with a felony bookkeeping fraud under Article 175 of the New York Penal Law. A conviction on that charge carries a sentence of up to four years.

But bookkeeping fraud is normally a misdemeanor. For it to rise to a felony, prosecutors must show that a defendant intended to commit, aid or conceal a second crime — raising the question of what other crime Mr. Bragg would contend is involved.

On Tuesday, Mr. Bragg suggested that prosecutors are putting forward multiple theories for the second crime, potentially giving judges and jurors alternative routes to finding that bookkeeping fraud was a felony.

As was widely predicted, he is pointing toward alleged violations of both federal and state elections laws. By doing so, he is in part plunging forward with a premise that has given pause to even some of Mr. Trump’s toughest critics.

As a matter of substance, it can be ambiguous whether paying off a mistress was a campaign expenditure or a personal one.

As a matter of legal process, to cite federal law raises the untested question of whether a state prosecutor can invoke a federal crime even though he lacks jurisdiction to charge that crime himself. Still, Article 175 does not say that the second intended crime must be a state-law offense.

To cite state law raises the question of why New York election rules would apply to a federal presidential election, which is governed by federal laws that generally supersede state laws.

At a news conference, Mr. Bragg pointed to both state and federal election law. He cited a New York state election law that makes it a misdemeanor to conspire to promote a candidacy by unlawful means, but did not explain why that law would apply to a presidential election. He also described a federal cap on campaign contributions without indicating why he had the authority to invoke a crime he could not himself charge.

But Mr. Bragg also introduced yet another theory, accusing Mr. Trump of falsifying business records as a way to back up planned false claims to tax authorities.

“The participants also took steps that mischaracterized, for tax purposes, the true nature of the payments made in furtherance of the scheme,” Mr. Bragg wrote in the statement of facts that accompanied the indictment.

The statement of facts also described how Mr. Trump paid Mr. Cohen more than Mr. Cohen had paid Ms. Daniels to cover income taxes Mr. Cohen would incur. Mr. Bragg further emphasized that point in his news conference.

His wording was ambiguous in places. At one point, he seemed to suggest that a planned false statement to New York tax authorities was just an example of the ways by which Mr. Trump and Mr. Cohen purportedly violated the state law against conspiring to promote a candidate through unlawful means.

But it is also a crime to submit false information to the state government. At another point Mr. Bragg seemed to put forward an alleged plan to lie to tax authorities — an intention to say Mr. Cohen had earned income for “legal services performed in 2017” to launder what was in reality a repayment — as a stand-alone offense.

In addition to covering up campaign-finance crimes committed in 2016, Mr. Bragg said: “To get Michael Cohen his money back, they planned one last false statement. In order to complete the scheme, they planned to mischaracterize the repayments to Mr. Cohen as income to the New York state tax authorities.”

In the courtroom, the prosecutor Christopher Conroy accused Mr. Trump of causing the Trump Organization to create a series of false business records, adding that he “even mischaracterized for tax purposes the true nature of the payment.”

That prosecutors cited the possibility of planned false statements on tax filings struck some legal specialists as particularly significant, given the speculation over how bookkeeping fraud charges would rise to felonies.

“The reference to false tax filings may save the case from legal challenges that may arise if the felony charges are predicated only on federal and state election laws,” said Ryan Goodman, a law professor at New York University.

Indeed, a range of election-law specialists on Tuesday expressed fresh doubt about whether Mr. Bragg could successfully use campaign finance laws alone to elevate the bookkeeping fraud charges to felonies. Among those skeptics were Richard L. Hasen, a University of California at Los Angeles legal scholar, and Benjamin L. Ginsberg, a longtime election lawyer for the Republican Party and a critic of Mr. Trump.

Even with the addition of the claim about intended false statements to tax authorities, Robert Kelner, the chairman of the election and political law practice group at the firm Covington & Burling, remained uncertain that it would show an intent to commit another crime.

“The local prosecutors seem to be relying in part on a bank shot exploiting Michael Cohen’s guilty plea in a federal campaign finance case,” he said. “But there were serious questions about the legal basis for the case against Cohen, making that a dubious foundation for a case against a former president. Prosecutors also allude vaguely to ‘steps’ taken to violate tax laws, but they say little to establish what that might mean.”

Still, Mr. Bragg emphasized that at this stage, prosecutors did not need to go into detail about what other crimes they believe Mr. Trump intended to commit.

But he will eventually have to show his hand. Barry Kamins, a retired New York Supreme Court judge who is now in private practice, said the next phase of the case would require prosecutors to divulge more.

“What is going to happen now is that the prosecutors are obligated to disclose things in discovery,” he said. “Defense counsel will learn in discovery the nature of the elections laws violations and the tax issues that were raised by Mr. Bragg in his statement of facts.”

Friday, March 03, 2023

Democrats Bring It

I've backed off my criticism of the Dems in recent years, and I think Jamie Raskin (D-MD08) puts my reasoning into words in pretty good shape (at about 5:50, 8:01, and especially 20:53).

"We are the democracy". We're the party in favor of getting everybody out to vote. We're the party of freedom - the freedoms of self-determination - choice and opportunity - as well as FDR's four freedoms. We're the party that wants everybody to have a real shot at making their lives what they they need their lives to be.





Wednesday, February 01, 2023

A Press Poodle Opines

...or maybe: Today's Pearl-Clutching-While-Ignoring-The-Obvious.

Here's a semi-famous and very capable academic, Danielle Allen, lamenting the problems of polarization, and while she kinda proposes some general things we could do to fix those problems, she passively asserts a Both Sides argument as to what might be causing this "Great Pulling-Apart", preferring instead to emphasize points that are not unimportant, but are also more effect rather than cause.
  • There's too many of us going in different directions
  • We've lost the bonds of love
  • Government has a very low approval rating
  • blah blah blah
Ms Allen does manage to start with one very solid observation: "...the fact that our house wasn't originally built for everyone."

But then she seems to go to great lengths not to acknowledge the fact that we've never really fully corrected for that little oops.
Division was built-in
It's never gone away
Periodically, forces arise that work hard to tear down our house...
... and right now, they're called Republicans


So while I have one very sharp criticism, I have to say she's got the right idea, but fake lord have mercy anyway.


Opinion
America is in a ‘Great Pulling Apart.’ Can we pull together?


Our nation is in desperate need of democracy renovation. We need to bring this old house we all share up to date and fit for purpose in the 21st century.

To some extent, our challenges are simply that our family is bigger now. Systems are straining under the scale and complexity of our family’s needs.

But there’s also the fact that our house wasn’t originally built for everyone. Some took light-filled rooms with beautiful views. Others were consigned to basements. We’ve got to renovate so that there are good rooms for all — so that power is broadly shared.

Finally, there’s the challenge that social media has blasted one of the original pillars of our Constitution out from under us. Geographic dispersal of the citizenry was supposed to mean that people had to go through elected representatives to get their views into the public sphere. This was supposed to slow the spread of dangerous factions and extreme views. In the design of our Constitution, geographic dispersal was essential to making representation work. But the internet — and social media especially — has shrunk the nation down to one crowded neighborhood. In a country made so “small,” we need to reimagine the very institutions of representative government.

So, let’s do that now, together.

All of us could look around and name forms of the deterioration that afflict our house. We experience the stresses from these pain points via polarization, divisiveness, toxicity, misinformation, distrust of each other and our political institutions, and government dysfunction. These are the symptoms we report. The root causes are those named above.

There’s plenty to be said about what we can do to tackle all these problems. First, I want to share why I care.

Bonds of love

When I was born in 1971, I inherited an original love of democracy from my family. My great-grandparents on my mom’s side fought for women’s right to vote and my great-grandmother was president of the League of Women Voters in Michigan in the 1930s. On my dad’s side, my grandfather helped found one of the first NAACP chapters in northern Florida in the 1940s, an exceptionally dangerous undertaking. We were a family that fought impossible fights and won.

As I grew up, civic engagement was all around me. My father had 11 brothers and sisters. Six family members, including my dad, migrated to California in the late 1950s and early ’60s, fleeing the Jim Crow South and seeking new opportunities and true freedoms. I grew up in a huge network of aunts, uncles and cousins, where participation was the rule. And they engaged across the political spectrum. In one glorious year in my youth, my aunt was on the ballot for Congress in the San Francisco Bay Area for the Peace and Freedom Party while my dad was running for the U.S. Senate from Southern California as a Reagan Republican.

Family gatherings were amazing forums for debate. My dad and aunt would go at it. He tall and skinny, bald, with a wreath of pipe-smoke curling around his head; she gay, built like a Mack truck, and with an incredible belly laugh. They agreed on what they were after: empowerment for themselves, their families and their communities. But they disagreed mightily on how to get there. My dad argued for market freedoms and civic virtues; my aunt for public-sector investment across society and experiments in living.

But they never broke the bonds of love. They debated the ideas, but they never fought the people. It was always clear that they would be there for one another, come what may. And both were empowered. They shaped their own fates and contributed to shaping the fates of their communities. That empowerment visibly nourished them. I could see it in their bearing, their energy and their success. This is where I learned my ideal of what democracy is, and why it matters.

Then our democracy became personal to me — for both its value and its failures.

This occurred as I watched my own generation come into adulthood. My parents’ generation moved up, from working class or lower-middle class to solidly middle class. Such has not been the case with my generation.

Over the half century of my lifetime, our nation has experienced a “Great Pulling Apart”, as I call it. My lifetime has coincided with the huge rise of income and wealth inequality in the country, with the rise of mass incarceration, and with the stunning rise of polarization. The life of my family, too, has been marked by the Great Pulling Apart. Some of us have reached new heights on elevators of opportunity; I hold a tenured professorship at Harvard; my brother is a corporate executive; cousins have found success as doctors or accountants.

But I also have dead cousins — from substance-use disorder and homicide. And cousins whose lives have been painfully impacted by incarceration, homelessness, mental illness and struggles to access health care. What the country has experienced, so too has my family.

Red alert on our democracy

Personally, the worst moment for me was in 2009 when I lost my youngest cousin, Michael, to homicide — after his long incarceration from a first arrest in 1995 for an attempted carjacking. His death was devastating. I began a journey to change the dynamics that led to it.

I dug into justice reform work. That taught me that even where there was bipartisan agreement about things we should change, we could rarely get changes through. The Great Pulling Apart, it turns out, has left us in a place where we can no longer govern ourselves so as to steer toward solutions to some of our worst problems.

My red alert on democracy came in 2013. That year the American people gave Congress an approval rating of 9 percent. This was very bad. Congress was supposed to be the people’s house. It was supposed to be the instrument through which we the people give voice to the directions we would like our society to pursue. For so few of us to approve of our own voice is a profound indictment of the health of our governance mechanisms.

In the years since, many people have experienced their own red alerts about the health of our democracy, but mine came at that moment.

Democracy, then, is the work before us. But seeing that is just the first step. I was desperate to answer the question of what innovations in governance would position us to address the Great Pulling Apart and to steer toward a “Great Pulling Together.” I wanted to know what renovations to democracy might help us govern more effectively to solve our shared problems.

In 2017, I had the opportunity to co-chair a national commission mounted by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. The academy is older than the country. It was founded by the same people who drove the Revolution — John Hancock and John Adams, among others. George Washington and Benjamin Franklin were members. Its charge then was to supply the new country with the knowledge resources it would need for success. The commission I was invited to chair was aimed at answering the same questions I was asking, so I leaped at the chance. In 2020, we released “Our Common Purpose” — a report on reinventing U.S. democracy for the 21st century.

That’s how I got here. Many others are here with me — with us — and with their own American origin stories. We have much to talk about.

This year, I am dedicating my Washington Post column to this project of democracy renovation. In the essays that will follow, I will share what appears to be the most important democracy renovations for tackling the Great Pulling Apart. I will draw on the 31 recommendations from the “Our Common Purpose” report, but also go beyond to outline what I believe is the path to securing for ourselves a capacity to govern inclusively and effectively in a fashion fit for the 21st century.

My overarching goal is a Great Pulling Together that gives us the civic strength needed to tackle the challenges that stem from the remarkable scaling up and complexifying of our society. Those challenges include stalled mobility and dysfunctional immigration policies; the climate crisis; social alienation, disempowerment and violence. These are our most difficult problems. We need governance up to the job of tackling them.

That requires democracy renovation.

I still believe that constitutional democracy offers the world’s best hope for human flourishing, and that’s why I do this work. I invite you to join me in it.

The Six Strategies and Thirty-One Recommendations

Strategy 1 - Achieve Equality of Voice and Representation
Strategy 2 - Empower Voters
Strategy 3 - Ensure the Responsiveness of Political Institutions
Strategy 4 - Dramatically Expand Civic Bridging Capacity
Strategy 5 - Build Civic Information Architecture that Supports Common Purpose
Strategy 6 - Inspire a Culture of Commitment to American Constitutional Democracy and to One Another

Monday, January 16, 2023

Party? What Party?

I worry that I've self-bubbled - that I'm hell-bent on feeding my confirmation bias, insisting that all these Press Poodles are deliberately overlooking the 800-pound gorilla jumping up and down on the sofa.

I refer (as always) to Nancy MacLean's theory of radical libertarians working to tear down the institutions of democratic self government in order to replace it with a corporate plutocracy.


I'm not saying that's the only possible explanation for the kind of Republican fuckery that makes them look like idiots - smart people can do some really stoopid things. But it bugs the fuck outa me when I know in my bones that the pundits are aware of what I'm talking about, and still they dance around it.

The point of the exercise is to kill our confidence in government, and the standard play is Divide & Conquer. So it makes perfect sense to blow up the GOP once it's regained some power, just to demonstrate the generic premise that "government doesn't work".

The implication being: "This form of government doesn't work. We need to throw it over and let someone who's strong enough to make the tough decisions really take it all in hand and get everything back on track - then we can do that good ol' democracy thing again when we're really ready for it." 

So here's Ezra Klein, explaining (IMO) GOP problems 2, 3, and 4, while completely ignoring the #1 problem with the GOP.


Three Reasons the Republican Party Keeps Coming Apart at the Seams

For decades, the cliché in politics was that “Democrats fall in love and Republicans fall in line.” The Democratic Party was thought to be a loosely connected cluster of fractious interest groups often at war with itself. “I don’t belong to an organized political party,” Will Rogers famously said. “I’m a Democrat.” Republicans were considered the more cohesive political force.

If that was ever true, it’s not now. These days, Democrats fall in line and Republicans fall apart.

It’s not just the 14 votes Kevin McCarthy lost before promising away enough of his power and prestige to finally be named speaker. It’s his predecessors, Paul Ryan and John Boehner, who both quit the job McCarthy now holds. It’s the Tea Party repeatedly knocking off Republican incumbents. It’s Ted Cruz and the Freedom Caucus forcing government shutdowns their colleagues never wanted. It’s Donald Trump humiliating virtually the entire Republican Party establishment and becoming the erratic axis around which all Republican Party politics revolves. It’s House Republicans ousting and isolating Liz Cheney because she insisted on investigating an armed assault on the chamber they inhabit. Today, a gaggle of Republicans isn’t a party. It’s closer to a riot.

Perhaps the rise of small-donor money and social media and nationalized politics corroded party cohesion. But Democrats have been buffeted by all that, too, and responded very differently. Barack Obama beat Hillary Clinton for the presidential nomination in 2008, but rather than exiling the Clintons to the political wilderness, he named Hillary secretary of state, and then supported her as his successor. In 2020, the party establishment coalesced behind Joe Biden. When Harry Reid retired from the Senate, he was replaced as leader by his deputy, Chuck Schumer. When Bernie Sanders lost in 2016, he became part of Schumer’s Senate leadership team, and when he lost in 2020, he blessed a unity task force with Biden. Nancy Pelosi led House Democrats from 2003 to 2022, and the handoff to Hakeem Jeffries and Katherine Clark was drama free.

So why has the Republican Party repeatedly turned on itself in a way the Democratic Party hasn’t? There’s no one explanation, so here are three.

Republicans are caught between money and media.


For decades, the Republican Party has been an awkward alliance between a donor class that wants deregulation and corporate tax breaks and entitlement cuts and guest workers and an ethnonationalist grass roots that resents the way the country is diversifying, urbanizing, liberalizing and secularizing. The Republican Party, as an organization, mediates between these two wings, choosing candidates and policies and messages that keep the coalition from blowing apart.

At least, it did. “One way I’ve been thinking about the Republican Party is that it’s outsourced most of its traditional party functions,” Nicole Hemmer, author of “Partisans: The Conservative Revolutionaries Who Remade American Politics in the 1990s,” told me. “It outsourced funding to PACS. It outsourced media to the right-wing media.”

Let’s take funding first. Theda Skocpol and Alexander Hertel-Fernandez have documented the way money has flowed out of the Republican Party’s official organizations and into an “extra-party consortia of conservative donors” centered around the Koch network (which, importantly, is and long has been far bigger than the Kochs themselves). Between 2002 and 2014, for example, the share of resources controlled by the Republican Party campaign committees went from 53 percent of the money Skocpol and her colleagues could track to 30 percent.

What rose in their place were groups like Americans for Prosperity and the Heritage Action network and the American Legislative Exchange Council — sophisticated, well-financed organizations that began to act as a shadow Republican Party and dragged the G.O.P.’s agenda further toward the wishes of its corporate class.

What were the hallmark Republican economic policies in this era? Social Security privatization. Repeated tax cuts for corporations and the wealthy. Free trade deals. Repealing Obamacare. Cutting Medicaid. Privatizing Medicare. TARP. Deep spending cuts. “Elected Republicans were following agendas that just weren’t popular, not even with their own voters,” Skocpol, a professor of government and sociology at Harvard, told me.

But what really eroded the party’s legitimacy with its own voters was that the attention to the corporate agenda was paired with inattention, and sometimes opposition, to the ethnonationalist agenda. This was particularly true on immigration, where the George W. Bush administration tried, and failed, to pass a major reform bill in 2007. In 2013, a key group of Senate Republicans joined with Democrats to make another run at it only to see their bill killed by Republicans in the House. There’s a reason immigration was Trump’s driving issue in 2016: It was the point of maximum divergence between the Republican Party’s elite and its grass roots.

The failure of Bush’s 2007 immigration bill is worth revisiting, because it reveals the pincer the Republican Party was caught in even before the Tea Party’s rise. The bill itself was a priority for the Chamber of Commerce wing of the party. The revolt against that bill was centered in talk radio, which was able to channel the fury of grass-roots conservatives into a force capable of turning Republican officeholders against a Republican president.

It wouldn’t be the last time. As the Republican Party’s corporate class was building the organizations it needed to tighten its control over policy, the party’s grass-roots base was building the media ecosystem it needed to control Republican politicians. First came Rush Limbaugh and his imitators on talk radio, then Fox News (and eventually its imitators and competitors, like OANN), and then the blogs, and then digitally native outlets like Breitbart and the Daily Wire. The oft-missed secret of the right-wing media ecosystem is that it is ruthlessly competitive. If you lose touch with what the audience actually cares about, you lose them to another show, another station, another site.

Conservative media became, on one hand, the place that grass-roots discontent with the Republican Party’s leadership or agenda could be turned against the party’s elite, and on the other hand, the place where the party’s elite could learn about what the grass roots really wanted. It also — with the rise of online fund-raising — became a place rebellious Republicans candidates could find money even after they alienated their colleagues and repelled the Koch class. Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene was one of the 10 top fund-raisers in the House in the 2022 election cycle.

So that’s one explanation for what happened to the Republican Party: It’s caught between a powerful business wing that drives its agenda and an antagonistic media that speaks for its ethnonationalist base, and it can’t reconcile the two.

But notice a problem lurking in the language here. Talking about “the Republican Party” makes it sound like the Republican Party is, in each era, the same thing, composed of the same people. It’s not.

Same party, different voters.


A few decades ago, the anti-institutional strain in American politics was more mixed between the parties. Democrats generally trusted government and universities and scientists and social workers, Republicans had more faith in corporations and the military and churches. But now you’ll find Fox News attacking the “extremely woke” military and the American Conservative Union insisting that any Republican seeking a congressional leadership post sign onto “a new shared strategy to reprimand corporations that have gone woke.”

“The reason the Democrats are much more supportive of the institutions is because they are the institutions,” Matt Continetti, author of “The Right: The Hundred-Year War for American Conservatism,” told me. “Republicans are increasingly the non-college party. When Mitt Romney got the nomination in 2012, the G.O.P. was basically split between college and non-college whites. That’s gone. The Republicans have just lost a huge chunk of professional, college-educated voters — what you would have thought of as the spine of the Republican Party 40 years ago has just been sloughed off.”

The problem for the Republican Party as an institution is that it is, in fact, an institution. And so the logic of anti-institutional politics inevitably consumes it, too, particularly when it is in the majority. This was almost comically explicit during the speaker’s fight. “BREAK THE ESTABLISHMENT ONCE AND FOR ALL,” wrote Representative Andy Biggs, an Arizona Republican, in a fund-raising appeal tied to his opposition to McCarthy. Representative Chip Roy told reporters the aim was “empowering us to stop the machine in this town from doing what it does.”

The more that the anti-establishment wing of the Republican Party expresses itself, the more the party loses once-loyal voters inclined toward institutions and gains new voters who mistrust them. You can see this, to some degree, in the so-called Woo-Anon pipeline, where anti-establishment hippies found themselves, particularly during the pandemic, drifting into the furthest reaches of the right — in one case, going from teaching yoga classes in Southern California to joining the Jan. 6 insurrection.

“Democrats are increasingly the party, when they’re in the majority, of the suburbs,” Continetti told me. “And to me, the American suburbs are the ballast of this country — they’re more small-c conservative than movement conservatives. The suburbs don’t want to rock the boat. So the Republican Party, as it’s become more rural and more non-college educated, they don’t have as much investment in the system. By that very reason, they become much more inclined to rock the boat.”

Suburban voters provided Joe Biden his crucial margin of victory in 2020 and saved the Senate for the Democrats in 2022. Depending on how you look at it, they’re a check on the Democratic Party’s radicalism or an impediment against its much-needed populism. Either way, the parties are pushing each other to become more distilled versions of themselves. The closer the Democrats come to the major institutions in American life, the more Republicans turn against them, and vice versa.

Republicans need an enemy.


When I asked Michael Brendan Dougherty, a senior writer at National Review, what the modern Republican Party was, he replied, “it’s not the Democratic Party.” His point was that not much unites the various factions of the Republican coalition, save opposition to the Democratic Party.

“The anchor of Democratic Party politics is an orientation toward certain public policy goals,” Sam Rosenfeld, author of “The Polarizers: Postwar Architects of Our Partisan Era,” told me. “The conservative movement is oriented more around anti-liberalism than positive goals, and so the issues and fights they choose to pursue are more plastic. What that ends up doing is it gives them permission to open their movement to extremist influences and makes it very difficult to police boundaries.”

It wasn’t always thus. The defining consensus of the midcentury Republican Party was its opposition to the Soviet Union. “The Cold War was the engine driving the mainstream Republican Party to the left,” Gary Gerstle writes in “The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order.” “Its imperatives forced a political party that loathed a large centralized state and the extensive management of private enterprise in the public interest to accept these very policies as the governing principles of American life.”

Gerstle’s point here is subtle. Anti-Communism made Republicans more than a purely anti-government party. Liberals sometimes frame this as hypocrisy on the part of Ronald Reagan and other self-styled conservatives — how can you hate government but love the military? — but in Gerstle’s view, fighting Communism kept Republicans committed to a positive vision of the role of government in modern life. It turned tax cuts and deregulation into questions of freedom. It turned highway construction into a question of national defense.

And so it’s no surprise that you first see today’s Republican Party — complete with government shutdowns, doomed impeachment efforts, bizarre investigations and vicious congressional infighting — in the 1990s, after the Soviet Union had fallen. Then came George W. Bush, and his initially listless administration, which was revived by Al Qaeda — another external enemy that lent focus and coherence to the Republican agenda. But that faded, too. And as that faded, the trends of the Gingrich era took hold. The enemies, again, became Democrats, the government and other Republicans.

There is an irresolvable contradiction between being a party organized around opposition to government and Democrats and being a party that has to run the government in cooperation with Democrats.

You can see this dynamic even now. The easiest route to bipartisan cooperation is to frame a bill as anti-China, like the CHIPS and Science Act. McCarthy’s first act with any bipartisan support was to create a new committee to focus on competition with China. But China isn’t our outright enemy in the way the Soviet Union or Al Qaeda was. It’s certainly not enough of a force to organize Republican Party politics around a positive agenda.

All of this suggests that McCarthy has won himself a miserable prize. To become speaker, he traded away many of the powers he would have had as speaker. He reportedly promised to give those who would destroy him plum committee assignments that will, in turn, give them more control over what comes to the House floor. He apparently agreed to spending caps and budgetary guarantees that will commit House Republicans to the kinds of brutal cuts and dangerous showdowns that make them look like a party of arsonists, not legislators. He made it possible for any member of his caucus to call a vote on him at any time. And most important, he was proved weak before he ever held the gavel.

“All McCarthy has is the title on the door above his office,” Skocpol told me. He’s a hollow speaker for a hollow party.

REMEMBER:
It didn't suddenly get all fucked up yesterday.
And we won't get it all un-fucked by tomorrow.