Lessons of History and Trying To Avoid the Same Mistakes

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The move is a familiar one — a prominent Republican gathering the courage to arrest his party’s drift toward Trumpism and then, when the next election comes around, heading for the exits.

But rarely has such an exit been so consequential for that segment of the party. And rarely has it come with the degree of resignation Romney expressed. Unlike other Trump critics who have opted to retire, Romney appeared to have had more than a fighting chance, had he opted to run again. Utah is an unusual state, deeply conservative but also with a large vein of Trump skepticism coursing through that conservatism. And Romney’s personal brand there — dating to his stewardship of the 2002 Salt Lake City Olympics — clearly gave him latitude that other Republicans have not enjoyed. [...]

In an interview with longtime Washington Post politics correspondent Dan Balz, Romney played down the idea that he would get involved in supporting a 2024 candidate who is running against Trump. The reason: It would be counterproductive.

(full article online)

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2023/09/13/mitt-romneys-startling-familiar-concession-demagogues-have-won/?link_id=5&can_id=6e84143cce349aec0c9a0b4e4a28c9c6&source=email-kevin-mccarthy-secures-trumps-payback-but-at-what-cost&email_referrer=email_2046055&email_subject=mitt-romneys-startling-but-familiar-concession-the-demagogues-have-won

 

[Sixties Fan]

When a court ordered the school district to rehire him, the Seattle Times’ Danny Westneat reported, they initially did not get a response. While Bremerton students were preparing for a new season of football, Kennedy was meeting with former Vice President Mike Pence. On the night before their first game of the season, he was awarded an engraved rifle at an American Legion convention. Meetings with former President Donald Trump, and later, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, crowded his calendar. (Kennedy dined with DeSantis but remains loyal to Trump.)

Kennedy finally returned to coach single game last Friday—staying at a friend’s house, since he no longer had a residence in Washington—and then quit.

The court’s embrace of Kennedy’s lie about his interest in having his job back was matched by its embrace of his lies about just what he was doing when he prayed on the football field. Writing for the majority, Justice Neil Gorsuch characterized it as “brief, quiet, personal religious observance.” In reality, as Sotomayor detailed:

While Kennedy’s letter asserted that his prayers “occurr[ed] ‘on his own time,’ after his duties as a District employee had ceased,” the District pointed out that Kennedy “remain[ed] on duty” when his prayers occurred “immediately following completion of the football game, when students are still on the football field, in uniform, under the stadium lights, with the audience still in attendance, and while Mr. Kennedy is still in his District-issued and District-logoed attire.”
The District further noted that “[d]uring the time following completion of the game, until players are released to their parents or otherwise allowed to leave the event, Mr. Kennedy, like all coaches, is clearly on duty and paid to continue supervision of students.”

In other words, this was anything but brief, quiet, or personal. It was a performance carried out while he was on duty working for a public school system, and while students remained under his authority. Of course a court that was willing to pretend his praying was brief, quiet, and personal was also willing to believe that Kennedy actually wanted his job back rather than raking in money on the right-wing speaking circuit and schmoozing with politicians.

And the Supreme Court has continued to embrace such lies in its quest to remove any guardrails on what Christians can do in the name of their religion. This year, the court ruled in favor of a website designer who claimed—falsely, as Melissa Gira Grant discovered—to have been asked to make a wedding website for a gay couple and wanted the court to say that she was allowed to discriminate, even though shehad never faced any actual penalty for refusing to make such a website. Sure, the court’s right-wing justices said. There’s no need for you to have suffered a penalty for your actions: We’ll preemptively deploy a set of outlandish hypotheticals to conclude that you and other Christians have the right to discriminate.

Here is the thing: This Supreme Court majority doesn’t care. It doesn’t care about the facts of a case. It doesn’t care about legal precedent or the basic rules in which court decisions are supposed to be grounded. It cares about the far-right outcome. And that’s how it’s going to be for decades—unless Democrats get it together to reform the court.

(full article )

Yet another of the Supreme Court's 'religious liberty' cases proves fraudulent

Last year, when the right-wing Supreme Court majority ruled that public schools not only could allow employees to engage in public prayer while on the job but that they must allow it (never mind the ...

www.dailykos.com

 

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Not less than TWO WEEKS ago, Kevin McCarthy told reporters that impeachment is a "serious matter" that demands a "vote on the floor in the people's House and not a declaration by one person." So when he unilaterally declared by himself yesterday that the House would be opening a baseless and futile impeachment inquiry into President Biden, the media naturally confronted him about his glaring hypocrisy...and he had a very hard time trying to explain himself without using the phrase "Well, this ISN'T a serious inquiry, we have nothing to stand on, and I only did it to mollify rabid extremists who are threatening to fire me through the terms of the Faustian bargain I made to get this job in the first place."

 

[Sixties Fan]

The FBI agent managing the team on the Hunter Biden criminal case testified to the House Judiciary Committee that US Attorney David Weiss had ultimate authority over the case, contesting testimony brought forward by whistleblowers.

Thomas Sobocinski, the special agent in charge of the FBI’s Baltimore field office, told committee investigators in a closed-door interview last week that from his perspective, Weiss had the authority to bring forward whatever charges he wanted in whatever venue he preferred.

“It was my understanding that David Weiss had the authority, and at no point did I ever differ from that,” Sobociniski said, according to a copy of his interview transcript obtained by CNN. “There’s never been anything in my view that changed that.”

Sobocinski’s transcript, which was first reported by The Washington Post, comes as House Republicans continue to investigate allegations that the criminal case of President Joe Biden’s son was mishandled. It’s all part of the House GOP impeachment inquiry into the president, even though Republicans have yet to find evidence that the president did anything illegal.

Sobocinski’s testimony disputes a number of claims from an Internal Revenue Service whistleblower about a key October 2022 meeting including FBI and IRS agents, Weiss, and other Justice Department prosecutors that occurred at a critical point in the criminal probe. IRS whistleblower Gary Shapley, who was in the meeting and worked on this case, said Weiss revealed in that meeting that he is not the deciding person on whether charges are filed. Shapley provided his notes on that meeting and email exchanges about it to Congress to support his claim. The notes say, “Weiss stated – He is not the deciding person.”

But Sobocinski was also in that October 2022 meeting and said Weiss never said that.

“I went into that meeting believing he had the authority, and I have left that meeting believing he had the authority to bring charges,” Sobocinski testified.

Reflecting on Shapley’s accusation of Weiss, Sobocinski said, “In my recollection, if he would have said that, I would have remembered it.”

In a letter to the House Judiciary Committee responding to Sobocinski’s testimony, Shapley’s legal team contested Sobocinski’s testimony, noting that Shapley took notes of the October 2022 meeting while Sobocinski did not.


(full article online)

https://www.cnn.com/2023/09/13/politics/fbi-agent-whistleblower/index.html?link_id=17&can_id=6e84143cce349aec0c9a0b4e4a28c9c6&source=email-trump-screws-the-gops-entire-biden-impeachment-effort-3&email_referrer=email_2045785&email_subject=mccarthy-crumbles-in-biden-impeachment-confrontation

 

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Part 1

“This madness has come on us for our sins.” — Alfred Lord Tennyson, Idylls of the King.

Mitt Romney will leave the Senate the same way he came in. One of the vanishingly rare statesmen left in politics, Romney tried to be the conscience of the party he once led. That made him a very lonely man.

As he told the Wapo’s Dan Balz yesterday: “It’s pretty clear that the party is inclined to a populist demagogue message.”

Now comes the verdict of history.

Over the last several years, Romney unburdened himself to McKay Coppins, whose book on Romney is excerpted in the Atlantic. It’s an extraordinary read, and a reminder of so much of what we’ve lost. A former governor, and the nominee of his party for president, Romney tried to warn his party against the dangers of Trumpism and became the first senator in U.S. history to vote to convict a president of his own party. He did it twice; and if a handful of his colleagues had followed his lead, we would be living in a different world today.

Instead, he’s joining Liz Cheney, Adam Kinzinger, and a handful of other principled conservatives, in exile.

**

The first piece I ever wrote for The Bulwark was about Romney and his quixotic effort to pull the GOP back from the full embrace of the Trump presidency: “What Romney Exposed About Late-Stage Trumpism.”

Romney’s central heresy was his observation that “policies and appointments are only a part of a presidency.”

To a great degree, a presidency shapes the public character of the nation. A president should unite us and inspire us to follow “our better angels.” A president should demonstrate the essential qualities of honesty and integrity, and elevate the national discourse with comity and mutual respect. As a nation, we have been blessed with presidents who have called on the greatness of the American spirit. With the nation so divided, resentful and angry, presidential leadership in qualities of character is indispensable.

As I noted back in 2019, not only is this passage not especially controversial—it was almost a boilerplate restatement of what conservatives have claimed to believe for decades.

But the perfervid defenses mounted by Trump World told us quite a lot about the decadence of late-stage Trumpism. Romney had performed a useful service. I wrote back then: “He has exposed the extent to which the acceptance of Trump’s character hardened from tactical improvisation into habit—and this habit has now become full-blown intellectual justification.”

It only got worse. A few months later, after the release of the Mueller Report, Romney found himself alone in denouncing “the extent and pervasiveness of dishonesty and misdirection by individuals in the highest office of the land, including the President.” He was alone again when he called out Trump for his attempts to extort the Ukrainian president in an effort to dig up dirt on the Biden family. And he fully realized how isolated and out-of-step he was when he was loudly and roundly booed by his fellow Utah Republicans just weeks after he voted to convict Trump for his role in the January 6th insurrection.

As the boos intensified, Romney asked the crowd:

“Aren’t you embarrassed?”

That question seems to hang in the air. How is the GOP not thoroughly humiliated by what it is becoming?

Romney is still wrestling with the question.

Unlike so many of his colleagues, who have rushed to embrace the Trumpian moment, or cowered in the cloakrooms, or become addicted to the trappings of office, Romney has been thinking about Death and History and Fragility and Violence. As he tried to tell his colleagues: “There are worse things than losing an election. Take it from somebody who knows.”

No wonder nobody wanted to sit with him at the GOP caucus meetings, which Coppins says “had a high school cafeteria quality that made him feel ill at ease.”

Mitt Romney and the Verdict of History

Thoughts about Death and History and Fragility and Violence.

morningshots.thebulwark.com

 

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Part 2

Some of the highlights of the Coppins piece on Romney:

The addiction of power

What Romney learned watching his fellow senators and their desperate need to stay in office: “Job preservation became almost existential. Retirement was death. They needed the stimulation, the sense of relevance, the power.”

**

The verdict on Trump

A fellow senator told Romney privately:

“He has none of the qualities you would want in the president, and all of the qualities you wouldn’t.“ But that senator wouldn’t say it publicly.

Mitch McConnell once said to Romney:

“You’re lucky. You can say the things that we all think. You’re in a position to say things about him that we all agree with but can’t say.”

**

Political violence

Fear of political violence runs through the account.

“There are deranged people among us,” he told me. And in Utah, “people carry guns.”
“It only takes one really disturbed person.”
He let the words hang in the air for a moment, declining to answer the question his confession begged: How long can a democracy last when its elected leaders live in fear of physical violence from their constituents?

**

The silence of Mitch

In the days leading up to the violent attack on the Capitol, Romney sent an urgent text message to the Senate’s GOP leader.

Romney sends his text: “In case you have not heard this, I just got a call from Angus King, who said that he had spoken with a senior official at the Pentagon who reports that they are seeing very disturbing social media traffic regarding the protests planned on the 6th. There are calls to burn down your home, Mitch; to smuggle guns into DC, and to storm the Capitol. I hope that sufficient security plans are in place, but I am concerned that the instigator—the President—is the one who commands the reinforcements the DC and Capitol police might require.”
McConnell never responds.

**

On January 6th

He thought about the text message he’d sent to McConnell a few days earlier explicitly warning of this scenario. How were they not ready for this? It was, in some ways, a perfect metaphor for his party’s timorous, shortsighted approach to the Trump era. As a boy, he’d read Idylls of the King with his mother; now he could understand the famous quote from Tennyson’s Guinevere as she witnesses the consequences of corruption in Arthur’s court: “This madness has come on us for our sins.”

**

Fragility

Shortly after moving into his Senate office, Romney had hung a large rectangular map on the wall. First printed in 1931 by Rand McNally, the “histomap” attempted to chart the rise and fall of the world’s most powerful civilizations through 4,000 years of human history. When Romney first acquired the map, he saw it as a curiosity. After January 6, he became obsessed with it. He showed the map to visitors, brought it up in conversations and speeches. More than once, he found himself staring at it alone in his office at night. The Egyptian empire had reigned for some 900 years before it was overtaken by the Assyrians. Then the Persians, the Romans, the Mongolians, the Turks—each civilization had its turn, and eventually collapsed in on itself. Maybe the falls were inevitable. But what struck Romney most about the map was how thoroughly it was dominated by tyrants of some kind—pharaohs, emperors, kaisers, kings. “A man gets some people around him and begins to oppress and dominate others,” he said the first time he showed me the map. “It’s a testosterone-related phenomenon, perhaps. I don’t know. But in the history of the world, that’s what happens.” America’s experiment in self-rule “is fighting against human nature.”
“This is a very fragile thing,” he told me. “Authoritarianism is like a gargoyle lurking over the cathedral, ready to pounce.”

**

The cravenness of Paul Ryan

After word leaked that Romney was going to vote for the first article of impeachment against Trump, he got a call from his former running mate.

Romney had been less judgmental of Ryan’s acquiescence to Trump than he’d been of most other Republicans’. He believed Ryan was a sincere guy who’d simply misjudged Trump.

And yet, here was Ryan on the phone, making the same arguments Romney had heard from some of his more calculating colleagues. Ryan told him that voting to convict Trump would make Romney an outcast in the party, that many of the people who’d tried to get him elected president would never speak to him again, and that he’d struggle to pass any meaningful legislation. Ryan said that he respected Romney, and wanted to make absolutely sure he’d thought through the repercussions of his vote. Romney assured him that he had, and said goodbye.

**

Hawley and Cruz

What bothered Romney most about Hawley and his cohort was the oily disingenuousness. “They know better!” he told me. “Josh Hawley is one of the smartest people in the Senate, if not the smartest, and Ted Cruz could give him a run for his money.” They were too smart, Romney believed, to actually think that Trump had won the 2020 election. Hawley and Cruz “were making a calculation,” Romney told me, “that put politics above the interests of liberal democracy and the Constitution.”

**

J.D. Vance

“I don’t know that I can disrespect someone more than J. D. Vance,” Romney told me.
They’d first met years earlier, after he read Vance’s best-selling memoir, Hillbilly Elegy. Romney was so impressed with the book that he hosted the author at his annual Park City summit in 2018. Vance, who grew up in a poor, dysfunctional family in Appalachia and went on to graduate from Yale Law School, had seemed bright and thoughtful, with interesting ideas about how Republicans could court the white working class without indulging in toxic Trumpism. Then, in 2021, Vance decided he wanted to run for Senate, and reinvented his entire persona overnight. Suddenly, he was railing against the “childless left” and denouncing Indigenous Peoples’ Day as a “fake holiday” and accusing Joe Biden of manufacturing the opioid crisis “to punish people who didn’t vote for him.” The speed of the MAGA makeover was jarring.

**

The bargain

[It] was hard to dispute that the battle for the GOP’s soul had been lost. And Romney had his own soul to think about. He was all too familiar with the incentive structure in which the party’s leaders were operating. He knew what it would take to keep winning, the things he would have to rationalize.
“You say, ‘Okay, I better get closer to this line, or maybe step a little bit over it. If I don’t, it’s going to be much worse,’ ” he told me. You can always convince yourself that the other party, or the other candidate, is bad enough to justify your own decision to cross that line. “And the problem is that line just keeps on getting moved, and moved, and moved.”

Mitt Romney and the Verdict of History

Thoughts about Death and History and Fragility and Violence.

morningshots.thebulwark.com

 

[Sixties Fan]

For almost three years now, Republicans have defended or embraced Donald Trump’s authoritarianism — from lies about his 2020 loss to inciting an insurrection — which backfired as Americans proved unexpectedly eager to vote in defense of democracy in the 2022 elections as well as in contests this year.


But Republicans aren’t giving up — they’re going even further. To an unappreciated degree, they have responded to these electoral losses with even more flagrantly anti-democratic maneuvers all around the country.
The pattern is becoming clear: Even as voters are mobilizing to protect democracy at the ballot box, Republicans are redoubling their commitment to the former president’s anti-majoritarian mode of politics. And this, in turn, is motivating voters even more.

Call it the “MAGA doom loop.” It’s playing out in state after state.

Let’s start with Michigan, where Trump’s decisive loss in 2020 led MAGA loyalists to reshape the state Republican Party around devotionto the “big lie.” Then Democrats resoundingly captured full control of the state’s government in the 2022 midterms, in which election-deniers across the country lost races up and down the ticket.

Now, the Michigan GOP is in shambles. Just this month, the chairman again called for scrutiny of supposed 2020 fraud, prompting infighting over debunked conspiracy theories. And as the New York Times reports, the party’s descent into MAGA mania is alienating donors, draining volunteer enthusiasm and driving away swing voters. All of that will further dim Trump’s 2024 chances in this crucial battleground state.



(full article online)

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/09/14/trump-2024-chances-michigan-wisconsin/?pwapi_token=eyJ0eXAiOiJKV1QiLCJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiJ9.eyJyZWFzb24iOiJnaWZ0IiwibmJmIjoxNjk0NjY0MDAwLCJpc3MiOiJzdWJzY3JpcHRpb25zIiwiZXhwIjoxNjk2MDQ2Mzk5LCJpYXQiOjE2OTQ2NjQwMDAsImp0aSI6ImVmMGEwY2IwLWZlMmMtNDk5My1hY2VlLTM2NGZjOTI3OWM5NCIsInVybCI6Imh0dHBzOi8vd3d3Lndhc2hpbmd0b25wb3N0LmNvbS9vcGluaW9ucy8yMDIzLzA5LzE0L3RydW1wLTIwMjQtY2hhbmNlcy1taWNoaWdhbi13aXNjb25zaW4vIn0.26swCWTaKHpnYT6LqPJeFjeC14T40jUbOY_1z5G4wG4&link_id=9&can_id=6e84143cce349aec0c9a0b4e4a28c9c6&source=email-what-mitt-romney-saw-in-the-senate-2&email_referrer=email_2047523&email_subject=kevin-mccarthys-profanity-laced-tirade-overshadowed-the-special-gop-impeachment-briefing

 

[Sixties Fan]

This week, the Republicans in the House made the unprecedented and constitutionally dubious decision to launch an impeachment inquiry into President Biden without a single shred of evidence. While the politics of impeachment are likely to blow up in the Republicans’ faces, this unpredictable situation is not without pitfalls for Biden and the Democrats. One of those pitfalls involves the horse-race obsessed political media and dystopic information environment flooded with disinformation and clickbait. The White House is so concerned about how news of the impeachment inquiry will reach the public that on Tuesday they sent a letter to news organizations urging them to not to treat this inquiry as normal. As Ian Sams, Special Assistant the Spokesman for the White House Counsel’s Office wrote:

Reporting that solely focuses on process rather than substance is woefully inadequate when it comes to something as historically grave as impeachment.

It’s time for the media to ramp up its scrutiny of House Republicans for opening an impeachment inquiry based on lies. When even House Republican members are admitting that there is simply no evidence that Joe Biden did anything wrong, much less impeachable, that should set off alarm bells for news organizations.

The White House’s concerns are warranted. Less than 24 hours after McCarthy’s announcement, social media is being flooded with enough disinformation and overly credulous reporting to make people who haven’t been following the story think that Biden is somehow guilty of something. I wanted to provide some information and context to help Message Box readers understand this madness and talk to your friends and family who may encounter the bad info floating out there.

(full article online)

Impeachment Scam: What You Need to Know

The GOP is hoping to use impeachment and a broken info environment to damage Biden

www.messageboxnews.com

 

[Sixties Fan]

But something else also happened. In his majority opinion in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, Justice Samuel Alito invited Americans to decide directly how much abortion access to allow. “In some states, voters may believe that the abortion right should be even more extensive,” Alito wrote. “Voters in other states may wish to impose tight restrictions.” Unexpectedly, in red and purple states that have put the question directly to the public — asking people to reject or support abortion rights in a ballot measure — they have voted against new restrictions or in favor of more access every time.

(full article online)

The Surprising Places Where Abortion Rights Are on the Ballot, and Winning

After Dobbs, the political ground seems to be shifting in some unpredictable ways.

www.nytimes.com