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Tag Archives: Republican Party

At the Heartbreak Hotel on Desolation Row

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Let’s consider the Supreme Court’s radical right Gang of Five. They’re trying to take America back to 1953 or so, if not earlier, ignoring what the majority of Americans want.

Three of them (Gorsuch, Kavanaugh and Coney Barrett) are the only three justices in US history who were both (1) selected by a president (D____ T____) who lost the popular vote and (2) approved by a group of senators who represented less than 50% of American voters. (That particular president took office only because the national news media was fixated on the email practices of the Democratic candidate and the director of the FBI broke his agency’s own rules by releasing “news” that harmed the Democrat a few days before the election.)

One (Gorsuch) took his seat on the Court after Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell blocked consideration of Barack Obama’s nominee, Merrick Garland, for a record 293 days, saying the upcoming election precluded any talk of a nominee.

McConnell got another one of them onto the Court (Coney Barrett) when he reversed the “rule” he’d invented for Garland. She was nominated by T____  just 38 days before the 2020 election (when votes were already being cast) — another record.

The fourth member of the Gang of Five (Alito) was nominated by a president (George W. Bush) who lost the popular vote the first time he ran. He might have also lost the Electoral College if the five Republicans on the Supreme Court had allowed Florida to keep counting votes (just think, President Gore would have meant leadership on the climate crisis and no Iraq war).

Alito is the author of the draft decision overturning Roe v. Wade, which he called an “egregiously bad” decision. He apparently came to that conclusion after his 2006 Senate hearing, during which he told the US Senate that he’d look at abortion with an “open mind”.

The fifth justice (Thomas, nominated by George. H. W. Bush) ascended to the Court after lying to the US Senate about his bad behavior (the senators didn’t believe Anita Hill). He was the first Supreme Court justice approved by senators from states representing less than half the country. Although his wife openly supported the January 6th insurrection, he proceeded to cast the only vote in favor of keeping insurrection-related emails secret.

All five of the Gang are Catholics, as is the sixth Republican on the Court (Chief Justice Roberts, the second justice chosen by Bush #2). None of them told the Senate they would overturn Roe v. Wade if given the chance.

Meanwhile, the Republican justices have been making our politics less democratic, less representative of the nation as a whole, by allowing more money into politics, weakening the Voting Rights Act and refusing to do anything about the rampant gerrymandering of congressional districts. All of this has made it less likely Democrats will be elected and much less likely that conservative institutions like the Court, the Senate and the Electoral College will ever be made more responsive to public opinion.

In other words, we’re screwed.

The American journalist Alex Pareene explains why, furthermore, electing more Democrats might not make much difference:

One of the more consequential contradictions of the Democratic Party is that the vast majority of its staffers, consultants, elected officials, and media avatars, along with a substantial portion of its electoral base, are institutionalists. They believe, broadly, in The System. The System worked for them, and if The System’s outputs are bad, it is because we need more of the right sort of people to join or be elected to enter The System. . . .

Institutionalists, in my experience, have trouble reaching an anti-system person, because they think being against The System is an inherently adolescent and silly mindset. But believing in things like “the integrity of the Supreme Court” has proven to be, I think, much sillier, and much more childish.

In the beginning of Joe Biden’s presidency a lot of very intelligent people tried to come up with ideas for how to change the Supreme Court, which is poised to spend years eroding the regulatory state and chipping away at civil rights. Expand it, perhaps. Or marginalize it. President Joe Biden, a committed institutionalist, formed a commission of legal scholars—from across the ideological spectrum, of course—to investigate what ought to be done about it. They failed to come up with any answers. “Lawmakers,” the commission wrote, “should be cautious about any reform that seems aimed at the substance of Court decisions or grounded in interpretations of the Constitution over which there is great disagreement in our political life.” You might be mad at the Court because of the decisions it produces, but it’s essential that everyone still trusts the processes that led to them.

This was a white flag. I think some people in the White House have some sick hope that the end of Roe will galvanize the midterm electorate. Something like that may indeed happen. But if they wish to understand why the president has been bleeding youth support for the last year they should try to imagine these young people (and “young”, at this point, has expanded to like 45) not as the annoying and hyper-engaged freaks they see on Twitter every day, but as ones they don’t see anywhere, because, having been urged to pay furious attention by people in the party, they discovered that those people had absolutely no realistic plans to overcome entrenched, systemic obstacles to progress. . . . 

The legitimacy crisis is that our institutions are illegitimate. For my entire adult life, beginning with Bush v. Gore, our governing institutions have been avowedly antidemocratic and the left-of-center party has had no answer for that plain fact; no strategy, no plan, except to beg the electorate to give them governing majorities, which they then fail to use to reform the antidemocratic governing institutions. They often have perfectly plausible excuses for why they couldn’t do better. But that commitment to our existing institutions means they can’t credibly claim to have an answer to this moment. “Give us (another) majority and hope Clarence Thomas dies” is a best-case scenario, but not exactly a sales pitch.

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Après This, le DĂ©luge

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Nobody knows how bad it’s going to get. Paul Waldman of The Washington Post warns that it may get much, much worse:

As we grapple with the Supreme Court’s apparent and imminent decision that would overturn Roe v. Wade, Democrats are warning that this portends an attack on many other rights guaranteed in prior decisions. The right to use birth control could go next, because the 1965 case that guaranteed it, Griswold v. Connecticut, was the foundation on which Roe was built. The conservatives could reverse Obergefell v. Hodges, the 2015 case that guaranteed marriage equality.

Heck, under the rationale Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. used in his decision, even Loving v. Virginia, which struck down state laws outlawing interracial marriage, would be vulnerable.

To these warnings, many conservatives have replied: “Oh, come on. You liberals are exaggerating. The Supreme Court isn’t going to do that, and Republican state legislatures aren’t going to go nuts and outlaw contraception. Just calm down.”

But the truth is that, if anything, liberals aren’t panicking enough. The future of any particular right might be hard to predict, but we can say for sure that both the Supreme Court’s conservative supermajority and Republican politicians are feeling unrestrained, unlimited in their ambitions, with the kind of freedom only a complete lack of accountability can provide.

Do you doubt? Let’s take a look around:

  • There is a push within the antiabortion movement — which will need a new focus once Roe is overturned — to go after contraception. Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.) recently denounced the ruling in Griswold, and she’s not alone. Republican states are already moving to limit access to birth control in various ways, and this is a clear target of many in the movement. They will likely begin by targeting Plan B, then IUDs and the pill.
  • A Louisiana House committee approved a bill this week that defines a fetus as “a human being from the moment of fertilization,” making both a woman who has an abortion and her doctor guilty of participating in homicide. Some GOP states have already outlawed receiving medication for abortions through the mail; more will follow, and do you think they won’t be arresting women who get them? Even under existing law, prosecutors in red states have often investigated and arrested women who have had miscarriages; under the new abortion regime such arrests are almost certain to accelerate.
  • Republican legislators are exploring ways to stop women from having abortions not only in their own states but in other states, as well.
  • Though Alito’s draft ruling included a passage denying it is a prelude to nullifying other rights, many legal experts read it to suggest that Obergefell [the marriage equality case] could be the next precedent to be reversed; it was a 5-to-4 decision of a court far less conservative than this one, which believes that stare decisis is for losers. Alito, Clarence Thomas, and John G. Roberts Jr. all dissented angrily from that decision; they now have three more conservatives who could join in reversing it on a nearly identical rationale to the one they will use to overturn Roe.
  • Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (R) said Wednesday that the state plans to “resurrect” a 1982 ruling that required states to provide public education to all children, including those of undocumented immigrants. Many conservative activists are open about their intention to completely replace American public education with private school vouchers and home schooling.

There is simply no doubt that conservatives — both on the Supreme Court and in elected offices — are feeling unleashed in a way they have not been in modern history. To any suggestion of “They’d never go that far,” you have to ask, why not?

Obviously, Republicans (except for a few extremists) don’t actually want to overturn Loving so states can make interracial marriage illegal, even if some might muse about it. But most of them would like to overturn Obergefell, so the chances that they’ll at least try are far higher.

If you believe political constraint might stay their hand, you’re probably wrong.

You might argue that Republicans know Americans are perfectly content with marriage equality by now. But most Americans are happy with Roe, and look what’s happening there.

Over and over, Republicans have learned that there are seldom political consequences for the choices they make. Yes, they lose elections when circumstances turn against them — there’s an economic collapse, or they lose in midterms like the president’s party usually does, or they put up some terrible candidates. But as a rule, the voters do not hold them to account for their extremism.

We’ve seen it before: Republicans do something shocking, liberals say, “History will not be kind to you,” and Republicans respond, “Who cares?” In the end, all that matters is power and your willingness to use it.

They learned it after Bush v. Gore, when the Supreme Court simply handed George W. Bush the presidency. It didn’t matter: Everyone moved on, Bush got reelected, and he put a couple more justices on the court.

They learned it when not just then-Majority Leader Mitch McConnell but all Senate Republicans joined in refusing to allow President Barack Obama to fill a Supreme Court vacancy in 2016. Liberals got mad, but what happened? Republicans got their supermajority. Power wins, and the public’s attention span is short.

The conservative movement has many more ambitions — and a Supreme Court eager to fulfill them. So, no, liberals are not being hyperbolic when they warn about the retrograde right-wing revolution that could follow the end of Roe. The right is not hiding its plans. All you have to do is believe them.

Crazy Times with a Dose of Humor

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It continues to be a noteworthy phenomenon: how the Right ignores real threats (e.g. the climate crisis) while publicizing imaginary ones (e.g. Critical Race Theory). Words fail me, but Tom Tomorrow devoted his last two comic strips to this lunacy. 

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This Modern World has a website. If you’d like to give a bit of support to Tom Tomorrow and receive each week’s cartoon (with additional commentary) by special email delivery, you can sign up here.

Down, Down, Down We Go, Politically Speaking

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Considering that this is 2022, not 1952, it was quite a surprise the first time I read that a Republican politician called some innocuous Democrat a “communist”. But crazy talk is no longer out of the ordinary for one of our major political parties. Ed Kilgore of New York Magazine was surprised too:

The day after the 2020 vice-presidential debate between Mike Pence and Kamala Harris, then-President D____ T____ did something that is hard to do: He actually shocked me with intemperate language, in this case referring to Harris as a “monster” and a “communist.” The “monster” business didn’t surprise me, actually, given T____’s long history of personal insults to women. But “communist?” Seriously? I hadn’t heard a Republican call a Democrat a commie since the high tide of McCarthyism — and even back then, the rare slur was associated with specific (if lunatic) allegations of subservience to an international Marxist-Leninist conspiracy operating out of Moscow. Sure, for a generation, Republicans have been imprecisely calling Democrats “socialists,” though no more than a handful of Donkey Party members answer to that appellation, . . . but “communist” is actually pretty precise . . . 

It’s not just T____ throwing the term around. One of his favorite Republican acolytes, Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, calls Democrats — all of them, not just some of them — communists all the time (most recently in her speech to a white-nationalist group, in which she referred to “Democrats, who are the Communist Party of the United States of America”). When Republicans lost two Senate seats and control of the upper chamber in Greene’s home state in January 2021, South Dakota governor Kristi Noem called the winning Democratic candidates communists. And another Republican member of Congress, Senator Tommy Tuberville of Alabama, betrayed a lack of understanding of communism just last month in explaining that the Russians were invading Ukraine because, as a communist, Vladimir Putin “couldn’t feed his people” and needed Ukraine’s farmland [note: Russia’s authoritarian leader, a fascist kleptocrat, doesn’t even belong to the Communist Party, although some Russians still do].

But amazingly ridiculous accusations are now a sign of the times in Republican circles (even though journalists still refer to Republicans as “conservatives”). From Thomas Zimmer and The Guardian:

Ever since entering Congress, Marjorie Taylor Greene has been making headlines . . . The latest escalation came last week, when she smeared her Republican colleagues in the Senate, Lisa Murkowski, Susan Collins and Mitt Romney, as “pro-pedophile” after they voted to confirm Ketanji Brown Jackson to the US supreme court; Democrats, she added, “are the party of pedophiles.”

. . . The fact that Greene’s antics are so clearly designed to keep herself in the spotlight has prompted calls for the media and commentators to stop paying attention to her rather than be complicit in the amplification of far-right propaganda. And if what’s on display here were just the extremist behavior of a fringe figure, it would indeed be best to simply ignore her. This, however, isn’t just Greene’s extremism – it is increasingly that of the Republican party itself. Greene and the many provocateurs like her are not just rightwing trolls, but elected officials in good standing with their party. Ignoring them won’t work, nor will making fun of them: These people are in positions of influence, fully intent on using their power.

In any (small-d) democratic party, Greene’s extremism should be disqualifying. In today’s Republican party, she’s not being expelled, she’s being elevated. Greene is undoubtedly one of the rightwing stars in the country, and that’s not just a media phenomenon. Republican candidates crave her endorsement. . . . 

Greene’s rise is indicative of a more openly militant form of white Christian nationalism inserting itself firmly at the center of Republican politics. “America First” candidates like Greene are representing the Republican party all over the country. In Arizona, for instance, state senator Wendy Rogers proudly declared herself to “stand with Jesus, Robert E Lee, and the Cleveland Indians” back in December – all of them supposedly “canceled” by “satanic communists”. .. .  In Georgia, gubernatorial candidate Kandiss Taylor runs on a platform of “Jesus, Guns, and Babies” and openly advocates for the establishment of a Christian theocracy.

The Republican party doesn’t just tolerate such extremists in an attempt to appease the fringe – this isn’t simply a matter of acquiescence out of convenience or cowardice. What we really need to grapple with is the fact that this sort of radicalism is widely seen as justified on the right. The exact language someone like Greene uses might be slightly crasser than what some conservatives are comfortable with, and some Republicans might disagree with specific aspects of the public image she projects. But it’s obviously not enough for them to break with her, or with any of the Christian nationalist extremists in their ranks.

If anything, most of what Greene is saying actually aligns with the general thrust of conservative politics. Republicans are currently all in on smearing anyone who disagrees with their assault on LGBTQ rights [or supports sex education in schools] as “groomers” and declaring any progressive social position adjacent to pedophilia. And it’s really hard to tell the difference between Greene’s propaganda and what much of the reactionary intellectual sphere has been producing. Rod Dreher, for instance, one of the Religious Right’s best-known exponents, has called the Democrats the “party of groomers” and “the party of child mutilators and kidnappers” . . . 

That’s precisely the key to understanding why so many Republicans are willing to embrace political extremism. Greene’s central message is fully in line with what has become dogma on the right: that Democrats are a radical, “Un-American” threat, and have to be stopped by whatever means. Everyone suspected of holding liberal or progressive positions is a “fellow traveler with the radical left,” as senator Ted Cruz put it; as part of the “militant left,” Democrats need to be treated as the “the enemy within,” according to senator Rick Scott; and Florida governor Ron DeSantis declared that Stacey Abrams winning the Georgia gubernatorial election would be akin to a foreign adversary taking over and lead to a “cold war” between the two neighboring states.

. . . Greene’s pedophilia accusations . . .  adhere to the higher truth of conservative politics: that Democrats are a fundamental threat to the country, to its moral foundations, its very survival. “How much more can America take before our civilization begins to collapse?” Greene asked last week. There aren’t many conservatives left who disagree with her assessment. That’s how they are giving themselves permission to embrace whatever radical measures are deemed necessary to defeat this “Un-American” enemy.

Once you have convinced yourself you are fighting a noble war against a bunch of pedophiles hellbent on destroying the nation, there are no more lines you’re not justified to cross. Greene and her fellow extremists are perceived to be useful shock troops in an existential struggle for the survival of “real” America. The right isn’t getting distracted by debates over whether Greene’s militant extremism or Mitch McConnell’s extreme cynicism are the right approach to preventing multiracial pluralism. They are united in the quest to entrench white reactionary rule.

I fear that . . .  we might have become a bit numb to how extreme and dangerous these developments are. Let’s not be lulled into a false sense of security by the clownishness, the ridiculousness of it all. Some of history’s most successful authoritarians were considered goons and buffoons by their contemporaries – until they became goons and buffoons in power.

What we are witnessing is one party rapidly abandoning and actively assaulting the foundations of democratic political culture. Every “Western” society has always harbored some far-right extremists like Greene. But the fact that the Republican party embraces and elevates people like her constitutes an acute danger to democracy.

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Yet, if you believe the polls, Americans who are willing and able to vote are going to put these right-wing bastards in charge of Congress next year. Two years later, if given the chance, they’d put the treasonous conman who can only handle short sentences back in the White House. This is America in 2022, not 1952.

Providing for the General Welfare Works

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I don’t think I’ve ever heard anybody say the goal of the Democratic Party is to “provide for the general welfare” (that phrase from the Constitution). We’ve all heard instead that Democrats are fiscally irresponsible big spenders, while Republicans keep government spending under control, helping the economy grow. Simon Rosenberg, who leads a progressive think tank, explains how wrong this is: 

Inconvenient truth, fiscal responsibility edition:

Biden is now the third consecutive Democratic president to have seen the annual deficit drop significantly on their watch. It rose significantly under the last three Republican presidents.

[Biden] said he’d soon become the only president “ever to cut the deficit by more than $1 trillion in a single year.” He’s on track to deliver. . . . 

When it comes to the deficit, Americans have endured a remarkably consistent pattern for four decades.

It starts with a Republican presidential candidate denouncing the deficit and vowing to balance the budget if elected. That Republican then takes office, abandons interest in the issue, and expresses indifference when the deficit becomes vastly larger. Then a Democrat takes office, at which point Republican lawmakers who didn’t care at all about the deficit suddenly decide it’s a critical issue that the new president must immediately prioritize.

During the Democratic administration, the deficit invariably shrinks — a development Republicans tend to ignore — at which point the entire cycle starts over.

As the cycle spins, polls continue to show that most Americans see Republicans as the party most trustworthy to reduce the deficit, despite reality, because some partisan branding is tough to change, even in the face of four decades’ worth of evidence. [Steve Benen, MSNBC]

There is perhaps no more important false narrative in American politics than the [Republican Party] is the party of growth and fiscal responsibility.

Team Biden appears to be eager to take that on. Praise f—ing be.

The White House is leaning into a new argument: That deficit reduction can and should be recast as a positive feature of successful *progressive* economic policy. [Greg Sargent]

As we’ve been saying for many months now, it is essential that every 2022 voter knows that when Democrats are in power things get better, and when Republicans are in power they don’t.

The data is clear, overwhelming. . . .

 [It’s] the most important, least understood story in American politics. . . 

Since 1989, 43 million jobs have been created in the US, 41 million – 95% – have come under Democratic presidents. 

33.8 million jobs = 16 yrs of Clinton & Obama 

7.4 million jobs = 13 months of Biden

1.9 million jobs = 16 years of Bush, Bush & T____ [Rosenberg]

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. . . Democrats need to have this conversation with voters this year. It is essential knowledge, critical to understanding where we are, and where we are going as a nation.

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It’s amazing that voters regularly say they “trust” Republicans more on the economy despite their consistently worse results. Why? Republicans associate themselves with low taxes and getting the government “out of the way”. But reducing taxes on people and corporations who already have lots of money doesn’t help the economy; it simply concentrates more wealth at the top. Repealing the Affordable Care Act or abolishing the Department of Education wouldn’t create jobs. Democrats do a better job on the economy by spreading the wealth around. They do this by promoting the “general welfare”, as the Constitution requires. When the general population is better off, the economy is better off. It’s as simple as that.