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Tag Archives: 2024 Election

This Is Not Normal. They Are Not Serious People.

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Wednesday night’s Republican “debate” should have convinced journalists to tell the truth about how dangerous and divorced from reality Republicans have become. They’re no longer “conservative” in any way and shouldn’t be treated like a normal political party.

Ben Rhodes, an author and former Obama official, captured the flavor of the event:

… A stage full of people acted like a bunch of kids trying to get admitted to some fascist costume party. Kill people at the border! Prohibit women from any agency over their bodies! Side with Putin! Etc. Etc.

Six of the eight prospective presidents (!!!) said they would support their party’s 2024 nominee even if he’s a convicted felon, even if one of his crimes was trying to overthrow the government.

But coverage of the 2024 presidential election is looking a lot like what we were fed in 2016 and 2020. The New York Times, for example, published this on Thursday: “Our Writers Pick the Winners, Losers and ‘the Star of the Evening’ From the First Republican Debate”. Ten of their well-paid opinion writers ranked the night’s performers on a scale of 0 to 10.

Politics as sports or entertainment.

Margaret Sullivan, the Public Editor at the Times before the management decided they didn’t like the idea of a Times employee being allowed to criticize the paper in public, wrote about Wednesday night for The Guardian. Her principal focus was on a rising star in MAGA World:

He thinks the climate crisis is a hoax, supports Vladimir Putin’s aggression in Ukraine and would gladly pardon D____ T____ on day 1 of his would-be presidency. A wealthy biotech entrepreneur, the 38-year-old has never before run for public office.

Despite all of this (or maybe because of it), this week’s Republican debate became a national coming-out party for Vivek Ramaswamy.

Suddenly, this inexperienced and dangerous showoff is almost a household name.

Many in the Republican base ate up his showmanship and blatant fanboying of their hero, [the individual now charged with 91 felonies]. In CNN’s post-debate focus group of Republican voters in Iowa, for example, Ramaswamy got the most favorable response.

… Many in the mainstream media declared him victorious. The Washington Post put him up high in its “winners” column, trailing only behind [the individual facing four criminal trials], who wasn’t even there. (Choosing not to enter this particular clown car showed some uncharacteristic good sense on the former president’s part.)

The New York Times analyzed the situation under a glowing headline “How Vivek Ramaswamy Broke Through: Big Swings With a Smile”, with emphasis on his style: “unchecked confidence and insults”.

For this millennial tech bro, his performance on the Fox News stage in Milwaukee couldn’t have gone much better.

As a glimpse of America’s future, it couldn’t have gone much worse….

Certainly, Ramaswamy has the essentials covered. No, not foreign policy chops or a background in public service, but a mocking aversion to social justice and equality….

His night in the spotlight, and its aftermath, shows that neither Republican voters nor many in the mainstream media have learned much since [the leader of the cult] came down the elevator in 2015 and proceeded to wreak havoc on the country.

In case there was any doubt, now we know: they will always fall for the attention-seeking, the policy-unencumbered, the candidate quickest with a demeaning insult. That’s a “winner”, apparently.

And it’s all too familiar.

“Ramaswamy is like T____ in the larva stage, molting toward the full MAGA wingspan but not quite there yet,” wrote Frank Bruni in his New York Times newsletter. “His narcissism, though, is fully evolved.”

Not everyone in the media, of course, was buying it. Charlie Sykes, editor in chief of the right-leaning Bulwark, was blunt, calling Ramaswamy “facile, clownish, shallow, shameless, pandering”, but, then again, “exactly what Republican voters crave these days”.

Given that the Republican party – still firmly in the grip of a twice-impeached con man – has lost its mind, this craving makes a certain amount of sense.

But it makes the endless media normalization even more cringe-inducing. Shouldn’t mainstream journalists be able to step back a tiny bit, providing critical distance rather than the same old tricks?

How can there be “winners” in yet another milestone on the way to fascism?

Section 3 of the 14th Amendment Should Matter

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No person shall … hold any office, civil or military, under the United States … who, having previously taken an oath … to support the Constitution of the United States, shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof. 

The 14th Amendment was ratified in 1868. Section 3 was designed to stop anyone who had rebelled against the United States from ever having a role in the government again. It’s not commonly applied (we don’t have that many insurrections or rebellions), but it’s still in the Constitution. The New York Times reports that legal experts are paying attention:

Two prominent conservative law professors have concluded that [the Orange Menace] is ineligible to be president under a provision of the Constitution that bars people who have engaged in an insurrection from holding government office. The professors are active members of the Federalist Society, the conservative legal group, and proponents of originalism, the method of interpretation that seeks to determine the Constitution’s original meaning.

“Originalism” is bullshit, but others have reached the same conclusion, including a University of Virginia professor and Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW). What’s interesting about these two professors is that they would ordinarily be expected to bend over backwards to support the Orange Menace, like so many other Federalist Society members have done.

The Times article suggests the likelihood of lawsuits:

The scope and depth of the article may encourage and undergird lawsuits from other candidates and ordinary voters arguing that the Constitution makes him ineligible for office.

“There are many ways that this could become a lawsuit presenting a vital constitutional issue that potentially the Supreme Court would want to hear and decide,” [one of the authors] said.

Of course, the Supreme Court deciding that the 14th Amendment applies to the former president would require two of the Court’s right-wing, so-called “originalist” Justices to accept the Constitution’s plain language, not something they’re used to doing.

Nevertheless, here’s the authors’ summary of the article:

Section Three of the Fourteenth Amendment forbids holding office by former office holders who then participate in insurrection or rebellion. Because of a range of misperceptions and mistaken assumptions, Section Three’s full legal consequences have not been appreciated or enforced. This article corrects those mistakes by setting forth the full sweep and force of Section Three.

First, Section Three remains an enforceable part of the Constitution, not limited to the Civil War, and not effectively repealed by nineteenth century amnesty legislation.

Second, Section Three is self-executing, operating as an immediate disqualification from office, without the need for additional action by Congress. It can and should be enforced by every official, state or federal, who judges qualifications.

Third, to the extent of any conflict with prior constitutional rules, Section Three repeals, supersedes, or simply satisfies them. This includes the rules against bills of attainder or ex post facto laws, the Due Process Clause, and even the free speech principles of the First Amendment.

Fourth, Section Three covers a broad range of conduct against the authority of the constitutional order, including many instances of indirect participation or support as “aid or comfort.”

[Section Three] covers a broad range of former offices, including the Presidency. And in particular, it disqualifies [the former president], and potentially many others, because of their participation in the attempted overthrow of the 2020 presidential election.

Everybody Should Recognize the Stakes

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The new management at CNN has decided to split the difference between truth and lies by becoming more like Fox “News”. One piece of evidence is that they invited the deplorable former president to do his act in front of an audience of likely Republican voters who’d been told it was fine to applaud and cheer their cult leader but not to boo him. It was painful for any decent person to watch. It did, however, convince the Washington Post‘s editorial board to describe the stakes in the next presidential election. What they wrote was somewhat less wishy-washy than usual:


 What will, or should, the 2024 presidential election be about? Will it be about the normal issues and concerns of most elections — topical issues such as the economy, immigration, abortion? Or should it primarily be about the existential threats posed by the reckless former president?

Voters will make their own calculations about what’s important as they weigh their choices. But after [his] performance … on Wednesday, there is no escaping that he has an agenda that is anything but normal. This includes pardoning those convicted during the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol; reveling in attacks and mocking victims of sexual abuse; and promoting an anti-democratic view of the office of the presidency. There is no turning a blind eye to what this would mean if he were reelected.

The former president might not become the Republican Party’s nominee…. By the time the primaries take shape early next year, Republican voters could have genuine reservations about his electability in a general election… [But] he remains the party’s dominant figure and its most likely nominee.

President Biden has no serious opposition for the Democratic Party nomination….That means America could be heading for a rerun of the 2020 election, with the two nominees having traded places as incumbent and challenger.


. A rematch between these two politicians would be an election with clear choices and enormous consequences for the future of the country that go beyond normal considerations of presidential elections.

In many ways, the election next year will look and feel like all elections… Put aside the [orange] elephant in the room and it’s just like elections always were…. The two would outline drastically different policy agendas that would move the country in opposite directions. The policy debate will be familiar and not unimportant, but it will not be the most important element of the election.

Txxxx’s [appearance] on CNN was a bright spotlight reminding everyone that this is a different era politically. He is anything but a traditional candidate, and, therefore, the stakes in these elections have been and will be unlike those that voters have had to confront….

For some Republicans, opposition to the Democrats’ priorities has been enough for them to stick with Txxxx. No doubt that is still the case. But it was perhaps easier for them to compartmentalize policy choices on the one hand vs. Txxxx’s [authoritarian]  instincts…. It’s not that Txxxx has changed; it’s that he takes every opportunity to reiterate those anti-democratic instincts, making the threats he represents more difficult for anyone to ignore.

His statements at the town hall were replete with false claims. He lied when he said the election was stolen. He still claims that those supporters who stormed the Capitol are patriots and good people. He still will not commit to accepting the outcome of the 2024 election. As he puts it, he will accept the outcome if he thinks it is fair. And he has made clear that he intends to attack the institutions of the federal government if he is reelected to the presidency.

Most Americans know where they stand on Txxxx and have for years. Close to a majority simply oppose him outright, and they have turned out in big numbers in three consecutive elections: 2018, 2020 and 2022. A portion of the electorate, the hardcore loyalists, will follow him wherever he takes them. Another portion 
 may still be torn.

Republican voters will render the initial judgments… Some of his rivals may attack directly. Others are likely to tiptoe around the big question about his fitness for office and the dangers another term in the White House would represent.

If he becomes the nominee, a broader electorate will judge him, and he said a number of things during the town hall that could hurt him, among them claiming credit for the overturning of Roe v. Wade. The instincts of many people will be to approach 2024 as something familiar and with choices comparable to those of the past. But [his] candidacy presents a unique challenge to the electorate, to elected officials, to strategists and operatives, to the media….  That is the [issue] of the 2024 election.

Unquote.

In other words, he’s a monster. He’d be even less restrained given another four years in office. He’d use the government to punish everybody he sees as an enemy. That means nobody should treat him like a normal candidate. And although the Post’s editorial board is too anemic to say it out loud, we should all vote for the Democratic presidential nominee no matter if it’s Biden, Vice President Harris, a random governor or senator, or the least charismatic Democrat on some town’s city council.

My hope is that voters will have a more realistic view of the parties and economy a year and a half from now and will elect more Democrats than anybody now thinks possible. That will happen if enough of us keep in mind the stakes.

Making Crazy and Dangerous Sound Normal

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The Orange Menace, campaigning for president for the third time, spoke at a gathering of rabid reactionaries this weekend. A reporter for HuffPost captured the scene:

Within minutes of taking the stage, [he] went into his typical remarks, disparaging the United States as a “filthy communist country” and attacking Democrats and the news media. “They’re not coming after me. They’re coming after you. I’m just standing in their way,” he said. “We will drive out the globalists. We will kick out the communists.”

And even though dozens of rows in the back remained empty, [he] thanked the fire marshal for letting in so many of his supporters. “Look at all these people. They’re up to the rafters,” he said.

[He] called prosecutors investigating him “racist” — the ones in New York and Georgia are Black — and claimed they only went after him because he is likely to win the presidency again. He continued lying about the 2020 election having been stolen from him: “We did much better in 2020 than we did in 2016.” He added later, “I won that second election, and I won it by a lot.”

He relitigated, at length, his two impeachments… And he promised that if he won reelection, he would take revenge on those who didn’t respect his followers. “I am your retribution,” he said….

He promised that if he won the White House, he would quickly end the war because he “gets along great with Putin.”

“I’m the only candidate who can make this promise: I will prevent — and very easily — World War III. Very easily. And you’re going to have World War III, by the way, you’re going to have World War III if something doesn’t happen fast,” he said.

His aides had promised reporters that [he] would offer a forward-looking vision for his return to the White House. Instead, his 105-minutes on stage was largely a repeat of his oft-repeated lies and grievances.

Even this relatively accurate description doesn’t capture what went on. CNN’s Daniel Dale added this (see here for his fact check of the “wildly dishonest speech”):

Untitled

But Jennifer Rubin of The Washington Post points out that we still have a big problem.

We saw throughout [the Orange Menace’s] two presidential campaigns and four years in the White House a symbiotic relationship between mainstream media outlets and Republicans, in which both made [him] out to be a far more normal politician than he was.

On the one hand, there was Republican denial (Didn’t see the crazy tweet! I’m sure he’s learned his lesson!). On the other, there was the media’s determination to avoid claims of bias and maintain a false balance — which often resulted in their obscuring how loony he sounded….

Apparently, neither the media nor supposedly sober Republicans have learned anything from the past. [He] gave a bonkers speech on Saturday, musing about Russia blowing up NATO headquarters, claiming President Biden had taken the border wall and “put it in a hiding area,” and telling the crowd, “I am your warrior. I am your justice. And for those who have been wronged and betrayed: I am your retribution.”

We do not get headlines acknowledging this is unhinged. Instead, we get from the New York Times: “[T] Says He Would Stay in 2024 Race if Indicted.” And a similar angle from CNN. ABC started its website report this way:“Former President [DT] continues to reign supreme over the conservative wing of the Republican Party.” From The Washington Post: “[T] takes victory lap at conservative conference”.

CBS intoned that [he] “aired grievances with his familiar foes: President Biden, the Department of Justice, and the litany of legal fights he is embroiled in.” Politico went with: “[T] ties a ribbon on the most MAGA CPAC [conference] yet.” Hmm.

From the coverage, you would never understand how incoherent he sounds, how far divorced his statements are from reality, and how entirely abnormal this all is. Talk about burying the lede.

The press and Republicans’ mutual distaste for candidly acknowledging [his] break with reality and the danger he poses to democracy was on full display on the Sunday shows [where Republican politicians said they’d support whoever the party nominates in 2024]. 

Coverage can be so bland and innocuous as to mislead. The audience — that is, potential voters — might easily come away from such coverage believing that [T] acted like a normal candidate, not a figure plainly unfit to handle any public position. And interviews can be so inept as to allow Republicans to repeatedly avoid explaining how in the world they could support someone so unfit for office.

If you put cowering Republicans together with media unwilling to accurately describe what is going on in front of them, you wind up gaslighting voters, who come away with the impression that [T’s] carnival of crazy is acceptable. We know how this ends: If [too few of us are] willing to call [him] out for what he is — and the danger he poses to the United States — we risk returning him to the Oval Office.

Whereupon, expect the headlines: “How did this happen?”

How To Fix a Lawless Supreme Court

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The Judiciary Act of 1869 “provided that the Supreme Court of the United States would consist of the chief justice of the United States and eight associate justices [and] established separate judgeships for the U.S. circuit courts”.

There were nine circuit or appellate courts in 1869. The US population was around 38 million. Now there are thirteen circuits. The population is 338 million. We’ve also got a lot more laws and lawyers. A simple act of Congress, signed into law by the president, could add four justices to the Supreme Court, one for each circuit. Given the Court’s additional workload, simple arithmetic and common sense support adding four Supreme Court justices.

An added benefit would be that the president could nominate and the Senate could approve four justices who respect the Constitution and legal precedents; who don’t want to promote Christianity, patriarchy, white supremacy, plutocracy and the gun culture; and who don’t want to give corporations license to destroy the environment. In other words, seven honorable justices vs. the six dishonorable ones we have now.

I think that’s the best way to fix a lawless Supreme Court, although there are other possibilities (all, of course, assuming a Democratic House of Representatives and at least fifty Democratic senators go along).

Paul Waldman explains how states like California and New York are already working on new licensing requirements and the wide-ranging designation of what the Republican majority called “sensitive places” where guns can be prohibited:

[When you say] “the Supreme Court says I have the right to carry around this lethal instrument giving me the ability to murder anyone I encounter in an instant”, the rest of us are more than justified in responding: “Yes, that’s what the Supreme Court says. But we will take steps to protect ourselves from the danger you and other gun owners pose”….You’ll be able to get your guns, but just as you have to show you can operate a motor vehicle safely before getting a driver’s license, you’ll have to satisfy some requirements before getting a gun permit.

And just like you can’t drive your car on sidewalks or in grocery stores, you can’t take your gun anywhere you want. No doubt the Supreme Court Six will rule in favor of insanity, but, as Mr. Waldman says, some laws will survive, the legal process could take years and, meanwhile, lives will be saved.

Jamelle Bouie has written two columns on the same subject this week. From his second:

[Article 3, section 2 of] the Constitution tells us that the court’s appellate jurisdiction is subject to “such Exceptions” and “under such Regulations” as “the Congress shall make.” [But] the court’s appellate jurisdiction accounts for virtually everything it touches. And the Constitution says that Congress can regulate the nature of that jurisdiction. Congress can strip the court of its ability to hear certain cases, or it can mandate new rules for how the court decides cases where it has appellate jurisdiction.
 It can even tell the court that it needs a supermajority of justices to declare a federal law or previous decision unconstitutional.

He then discusses the “Guarantee Clause” (Article 4, section 4″, which says that “the United States shall guarantee to every State in this Union a Republican Form of Government”. A republic is generally considered to be a state in which supreme power is held by the people and their elected representatives, not by a monarch. Interestingly, courts have been reluctant to specify exactly what a republican form of government is, leaving that decision to Congress. Mr. Bouie continues:

[But we do have] Justice John Marshall Harlan’s famous dissent in Plessy v. Ferguson, in which he condemns “sinister legislation” passed to “interfere with the full enjoyment of the blessings of freedom, to regulate civil rights, common to all citizens, … and to place in a condition of legal inferiority a large body of American citizens, now constituting a part of the political community.”

This, he writes, “is inconsistent with the guarantee given by the Constitution to each State of a republican form of government, and may be stricken down by congressional action, or by the courts in the discharge of their solemn duty to maintain the supreme law of the land.”

A Congress that wanted to could, in theory, use the Guarantee Clause to defend the basic rights of citizens against overbearing and tyrannical state governments. It’s been done before. After the Civil War, Radical Republicans in Congress found their constitutional power to reconstruct the South chiefly in the Guarantee Clause, which they used to protect the rights of Black Americans from revanchist state governments.

 As Mr. Bouie says in his first column:

The Supreme Court does not exist above the constitutional system… In the face of a reckless, reactionary and power-hungry court, Congress has options
.The power to check the Supreme Court is there, in the Constitution. The task now is to seize it.

It’s almost impossible to imagine the 50 Democrats in today’s Senate all having the courage and understanding to seize the moment and reform the Supreme Court (one of them who’s against reforming the filibuster is rumored to have killed a proposed surtax on incomes over 10 million dollars, I suppose because of her support for the working class).

But it looks like a terrible crisis may be approaching. Three law professors write in today’s Washington Post about a case the Court has agreed to hear later this year, Moore v. Harper:

Just three years ago, a 5-to-4 Supreme Court prohibited federal courts from addressing whether extreme partisan gerrymandering violates the Constitution. But don’t worry, the court said, state courts can curb the practice if they conclude it violates state constitutions.

Harper invites the Supreme Court to go back on that promise. This invitation is based on an unsupportable legal claim known as the independent state legislature theory (ISLT). The theory would disable state courts from protecting voting rights in federal elections.

In theory (and given the recklessness of the Republican majority), the Court might rule that state legislatures have absolute authority to determine how their states vote for president. State legislators could ignore the voters and appoint whoever they wanted to represent their state in the Electoral College.

The outcome in 2024 is a virtual clone of the 2020 election: Biden carries the same states he did that year and DeSantis gets [the rest]. Biden is going to the White House for another four years.

Until the announcement comes out of Georgia. Although Biden won the popular vote in Georgia, their legislature decided it can overrule the popular vote and just awarded the state’s 16 electoral votes to DeSantis.

We then hear from five other states with Republican-controlled legislatures where Biden won the majority of the vote: North Carolina, Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Arizona.

CNN announces that DeSantis has won the election….Â