GOP Control of Either House in 2024 Will Be a Sh*t Show

It’s a good thing that the likelihood of Republicans gaining majority control of the House of Representatives or Senate is fading. It was looking pretty inevitable until, for starters, the U.S. Supreme Court repealed Roe v. Wade. You’ve heard the quote, “Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned,” and the conservative members of the Supreme Court — one-third of them appointed by President Trump — has triggered that fury in one simple decision.

I’m not saying that maintaining Democratic control of both houses of Congress is a slam dunk, but let’s hope that it’s now a possibility.

Passing right-wing legislation, such as a national ban on abortion, is only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the result of Republican control. Moreover, the right-wing legislation they pass would have to overcome a presidential veto for at least the next two years. The bigger part of that iceberg is what the various committees might do under Republican chairs.

Can you imagine the investigations that they would conduct if, for example, Rep. Jim Jordan becomes chairman of the House Judiciary Committee?

Last week, Jonathan Nicholson of HuffPost compiled a list of investigations we might expect if Republicans take control of either house. Democrats haven’t gone overboard in the way that we can expect their GOP counterparts to go.

Picture, for example, investigations of all their favorite enemies, from Anthony Fauci to Hillary Clinton to the Vice President and President themselves — and their families.

You’ve probably heard Republicans refer to the “Biden Crime Family.” Given Republican control, QAnon and Tucker Carlson might as well be in charge of setting the congressional agenda. That will delight their followers, but what about the rest of us and the future of our country?

How much attention do you think Donald Trump paid to his job between election day and Biden’s inauguration? Was he reading the Presidential Daily Brief each morning? (Not that he read it regularly before becoming preoccupied with staging a coup.)

It has been refreshing to have a president who takes his job seriously, who devotes his waking hours to the country’s business, not his own.

Ditto for the Democrats in Congress. They have been focused on serving our country, not on the country serving them. Isn’t that a pleasant change? I’d hate to lose that focus after next month’s mid-term elections.

 

The ‘Big Lie’ Is the Gift That Keeps on Giving — for a Man With No Shame

By JIM SMITH

We learned last week that Donald Trump conned his small-donor followers out of $250 million on the pretext that the money would be used by an “election integrity committee” to fund challenges to Joe Biden’s election, when in fact no such committee existed and none of the money was even used for ballot recounts. It went to his hotels, the Jan. 6th rally, and mostly to his political campaign. His donors are, simply, suckers, reminding me of how he said that he loves uneducated voters and his “deplorables.” (Yes, although he attacked Hillary Clinton for using that term, he used it himself to describe his rightwing and racist followers.)

Whether or not he intended to use it long-term, when Trump saw the fundraising potential of the Big Lie, he decided to double down on it. Money, however, is not the only way the Big Lie has paid off for him.

Because his supporters believe anything Trump tells them and have been inoculated to dismiss any fact-checking as “fake news” paid for by the likes of George Soros, the Big Lie has generated the kind of misguided enthusiasm that could propel the Trump Party (formerly the GOP) to victory. The Democrats don’t yet have as much get-out-the-vote enthusiasm, and turnout is what wins any election. Besides, will getting the most votes even matter?

Steve Bannon brilliantly conceived a precinct strategy built upon the Big Lie and has already showed impressive success in getting Trump’s true believers to take over grass roots Republican precinct committees and school boards and to win nominations for the Secretaries of State who run elections.

The Supreme Court, with its 6-3 conservative (and Catholic) majority is dismantling abortion rights and the separation of church and state. Five of those six were nominated by presidents who did not win the popular vote.

The Trump Party is following the playbook of fascist movements in the past, convincing supporters that any fact-checking by mainstream media is part of the conspiracy against their beliefs because those media are owned by the “radical socialist Democrats.”

The latest strategy is to include a mention of Snopes and Factcheck.org within their emails, warning readers that they “will tell you this is not true, but don’t believe them!”

How can that many Americans be so easily conned into believing what the rest of us know to be obvious untruths?

Have we passed the tipping point in the rightwing takeover of our country? We’ll know that for sure if the Trump Party takes control of both the U.S. Senate and the House of Representatives and wins Secretary of State races in battleground states. That’s all that’s required to steal the 2024 presidential election. After all, the US Constitution does allow for state legislatures to go against the popular vote and send their own electors to the Electoral College.

If they pull that off, Americans will be “up in arms” figuratively, but they will be outgunned literally by the storm troopers armed with AR-15 rifles, so I suspect it won’t matter. Death threats and the threat of violence are highly effective political tools.

Consider the following item from Heather Cox Richardson:

Today, June 20, 2022, a Republican candidate for the Senate in Missouri, disgraced former governor Eric Greitens, released an advertisement threatening those Republicans he considers too moderate, the so-called Republicans In Name Only… In the ad, Greitens is armed with a shotgun and flanked by military personnel as they burst into a house. “Today, we’re going RINO hunting,” he says. “The RINO feeds on corruption and is marked with the stripes of cowardice,” he continues. “Join the MAGA crew. Get a RINO hunting permit. There’s no bagging limit, no tagging limit, and it doesn’t expire until we save our country.”

Of course, it’s the Trumpers who are the true RINOs.  The above excerpt is a tacit acknowledgement that only the non-Trump Republicans can save us, but will they? On June 6, 1954, Boston attorney Joseph Welch brought down Sen. Joseph McCarthy with his televised line, “Have you no decency, sir?” When will other Republicans join Rep. Liz Cheney and speak out?  When will they defy the death threats, stand up and say, “Have you no shame, sir?”

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My thanks to the readers who support this column through my GoFundMe campaign at www.FundTalkingTurkey.com

 

If They Loved America, Wouldn’t Anti-Trump Republicans Speak Out?

  I’m reminded by the silence of mainstream Republicans of a quote often attributed to Edmund Burke: "The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing."

I hesitate to use the word “mainstream” because it appears that the Republican Party is now the party of Trump and that the values (or lack of them) of Donald Trump have been adopted by the Republican mainstream. The rest of us should be frightened.

Thom Hartmann, the radio host and newsletter writer I admire for his articulate coverage of the decline of American democracy under the spell of Donald Trump, wrote a particularly cogent newsletter this Monday.

In the headline, Hartmann asks, “Is the Anti-Democracy Movement Reaching a Tipping Point in the US and Around the World?”

In it he notes: “Ukraine and Taiwan represent possible tipping points for democracy internationally, while Republicans passing laws that allow politicians to ignore the results of elections… could be a tipping point here.”

Hartmann notes that “virtually the entire Republican Party has rejected supporting democracy at home and supporting democratic governments abroad.”

This is no small matter. It is becoming clear that our Constitution is being used against us, and I see no way to avoid the death spiral of democratic rule in America.

Yes, the filibuster, which allows a minority of Senators to frustrate the majority, could be eliminated by a majority vote of Senators, because it is a Senate rule, not embedded in the Constitution. To their shame, two Democratic Senators prevented that from happening so that a voting rights bill they claim to support could pass without any Republican votes.

But even if the filibuster were eliminated, it does not change the structural issue built into the Constitution which gives the same vote in the Senate to Wyoming with fewer than 600,000 residents as it gives to California with over 39 million residents.  And the District of Columbia, which has more residents than Wyoming, has not one vote in the Senate (or in the House of Representatives).

Because our electoral system is under so much discussion since the former president started claiming his election was stolen through massive fraud — the Big Lie, as we call it — we are becoming more and more aware of how fragile our democratic republic is, and I’m not hopeful that there will be a happy ending, even if we see Trump and his cronies go to jail, as they should, for the many crimes that are coming to light thanks to the diligent work of the Jan. 6th committee and multiple prosecutors in New York and now Georgia.

My Republican mother and father, for whom integrity, civility and respect for the law were paramount (and instilled in us children), would be astounded at how our country is being brought down by the opposite traits of a single man who boasted that he could murder someone in broad daylight on Fifth Avenue and not lose a single vote.

The trendlines are all going in the wrong direction. Income inequality is on the rise, with the 10 richest billionaires doubling their wealth during the pandemic, while the government had to print money just to keep the bottom 99% above water. Non-partisan election officials are being terrorized by death threats and their jobs taken over by right-wing partisans. Legislatures are passing laws restricting ballot access and preparing to declare fraud if they don’t like the next presidential vote and send their own slate to the Electoral College. Tucker Carlson is convincing his viewers that we should support Russia instead of Ukraine. Where does this madness end?

As a wealthy white American, I have little to lose as long as I keep quiet in Trump’s new America, but it’s not an America I wish to live in.

 

Talking Turkey: America, Alone Among Democracies, Is ‘Autocratizing’

By JIM SMITH

The chart below is extracted from one compiled by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace with figures for all the 100+ nations invited to President Biden’s recent “Summit for Democracy.” This version is limited to the major “liberal democracies,” designated as “free” by Freedom House.

While democracy and freedom of expression is declining in the majority of liberal democracies, only Israel scored lower than the United States, which was the only liberal democracy tagged as “autocratizing,” meaning that it is moving toward an autocracy. In columns 2 and 4, the lower the score, the less democratic the country is and the less freedom of expression it has. We don’t rank well.

Sadly, this is not news to me, nor probably to most of my readers. The passage of voter suppression laws in Republican-controlled states has gotten a lot of press, but that’s only the tip of the iceberg. You’ve also read, here and elsewhere, of the master plan to overturn any election of a Democratic presidential candidate in 2024 by having key states declare their voting results “fraudulent” to justify sending a Republican slate to the Electoral College — in other words, succeeding where they failed on Jan. 6th. If they succeed in 2024, we’ll probably fall off the list of liberal democracies altogether.

Should that legal maneuver (which, it should be noted, the Constitution allows) fail, insurrection is Plan B. It is actually being planned by the heavily armed militia types within the so-called Republican Party. Their support within the rank and file, however, is what’s so shocking. A CNN poll in October showed that over three-quarters of those who identify as Republicans think Joe Biden was fraudulently elected. Although the militia types are a small percentage of those Republicans, having that kind of widespread support makes “hitting the streets” easier to justify. If, as is possible, the Supreme Court rules in mid-2022 that Americans have an unrestricted right to carry a gun anywhere in the country, that could make a repeat of Jan. 6th even more deadly. (D.C.’s gun laws reduced that likelihood last January.)

According to a scary msn.com article (click here to read it) 17 million Americans bought 40 million guns in 2021 and are on track to buy 20 million more. “If historical trends hold, the buyers will be overwhelmingly white, Republican, southern and rural.” There is “a growing belief among many Republicans that the federal government is an illegitimate tyranny that must be overthrown by any means necessary.”

On the subject of climate change, we debate where the tipping point is — the point at which climate disaster is irreversible. Some think we have already passed it, given, for example, the loss of summer ice in the Arctic Ocean.

Well, we may have passed the tipping point of civil war/insurrection. This is not hyperbole. If mask mandates and vaccine mandates trigger death threats and armed violence, the pronouncements of Tucker Carlson and others that our democracy has been stolen can lead the armed wackos who believe that lie to make the lie come true through armed rebellion. The 2022 mid-terms could be a major tipping point. If the Republicans gain control of one or both houses of Congress, it will indicate that enough of America has fallen for the big lies and the lesser lies and there may be no turning back. Follow that with the election of Donald Trump of Tucker Carlson in 2024, and we can likely kiss the American Experiment goodbye.

Here are clickable links to two related columns that I read while researching this column:

¨  Column by Christy E. Lopez in the Washington Post: Beware the extremist, dangerous and unconstitutional ‘constitutional sheriffs’

¨  Column by Dana Milbrank in the Washington Post: ‘We are closer to civil war than any of us would like to believe,’ new study says

 

Prof. Heather Cox Richardson's history lesson for today is a must-read

If you don't subscribe to her free newsletter, you really should consider it.  For $5 per month, you can support it as I do.  

Last night's "Letter from an American" really put our existential fight for democracy over autocracy in historical context.  I consider it a must-read.  Here's the link:

https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/october-26-2021/

Every President Leaves a Legacy, So What Will Donald Trump’s Legacy Be?

    As our country struggles to recover from the Trump presidency, it’s hard not to think about what Pres. Donald Trump’s legacy will be. We’re living it every day.

If you Google “Donald Trump’s legacy” (with the quote marks so you only get hits with those words in that order), you get 57,000+ hits, and it’s interesting to see the various takes on his legacy. The #1 hit is, appropriately, from the BBC, which has the useful perspective of being British but with a nightly news program on public television, which I record and occasionally watch. (There is an entire BBC America channel on both Dish Network and DirecTV.)

That article makes the observation that “If Donald Trump had followed the example of his predecessors and conceded power graciously and peacefully, he would have been remembered as a disruptive but consequential populist leader…. a president who, before the pandemic, presided over an economic boom, re-oriented America's opinion of China, removed terrorist leaders from the battlefield, revamped the space program, secured an originalist (conservative) majority on the US Supreme Court, and authorized Operation Warp Speed to produce a Covid-19 vaccine in record time.”

Indeed, the legacy of Donald Trump turned on his Jan. 6th incitement of violence because he could not accept defeat, an aspect of his personality so well laid out in his niece Mary Trump’s book, “Too Much and Never Enough.”

But that was not his first incitement of violence. At least one clip from his many rallies comes to mind where he encouraged his followers to assault a protestor, declaring that he would pay the legal expenses if they were prosecuted.

The BBC article describes his Alt-right followers as “Trump’s shock troops,” and indeed they were just that, appropriately reminiscent of the Nazi Brownshirts, aka Storm Troopers.  A big element of Trump’s legacy will be his emboldening of violent right wing extremists, including white supremacists, epitomized by his response to the Charlotteville “Unite the Right” rally.

Trump’s “Big Lie” about losing the 2020 election due to fraud and his emboldening of right-wing extremists is his most enduring legacy (in that we are living with it well beyond his term in office), but there are other important elements of his legacy worthy of highlighting.

We lost four years of leadership in addressing climate change, which poses an existential threat to our planet. He cut funding for renewable energy and boosted support for coal and other fossil fuels. He emboldened climate deniers, but that was just one element of a larger denial of science. We’re living with that legacy not only in the forest fires and drought plaguing our country but in lives lost due to vaccine hesitancy and misinformation, which he fostered despite taking credit for Operation Warp Speed.

Trump’s damage to the Republican Party may or may not be long lasting, depending on how successful the party, propelled by his rhetoric, is in the 2022 and 2024 elections. Losses in those elections would be a second repudiation of Donald Trump and could, hopefully, lead to a return to the GOP of old which did, for the most part, put country above party — at least until the election of Barack Obama, when it truly assumed the role of being the “Party of No” under the leadership of Sen. Mitch McConnell.

Trump’s reshaping of the judiciary, not just the Supreme Court, will be an enduring legacy, too. With the help of Sen. McConnell, he appointed over 250 judges, most of them recommended by the conservative Federalist Society. The American Bar Association rated 10 of Trump’s appointees “unqualified,” but the Senate confirmed them anyway.

Donald Trump succeeded as no previous president has in demonizing the free press, or what he called the “lamestream media.”  (The use of insult name-calling is also part of his legacy.) If a news item didn’t flatter him, it was deemed “fake news” and his followers believed him. He called the free press “the enemy of the people,” but saying so identifies Trump as the true enemy of the people.

Supporters of Donald Trump Say They Love America, But That’s an Oxymoron

    I had an “aha moment” last week when a reader who'll I'll call Bradley O. asked if I remembered him. I said, “Yes, you support Donald Trump.”  He responded, “That's right, I love my country,” which frankly pissed me off because it suggested that I didn’t love my country because I don’t support Donald Trump.

 Although he denied that implication, it got me thinking. Is it really possible that a supporter of Donald Trump loves America? In a twisted way, I suppose that’s possible, but let’s analyze what supporting Donald Trump really means.

To support Donald Trump is to support a man who incited insurrection against America because he didn’t accept his electoral defeat. At least his supporters are consistent, because many of them think it’s fine to display the confederate battle flag and to preserve statues of men who mounted actual armed conflict against our country in support of the continued enslavement of African American men, women and children.

Those same people applaud the appointment of “originalists” to the U.S. Supreme Court. An originalist is someone who supports the original intent of the founding fathers, which included the disenfranchisement not only of enslaved people but of women and, it should be noted, of men who didn’t own property.

What version of America do these supporters of Donald Trump love?  It’s not the America I love, which is a land of opportunity for all, not just for a select few. I love the America which welcomed immigrants and no longer imprisons and kills native Americans.

America has always been a work in progress, always striving toward a “more perfect union.”  Trump supporters talk about “making America great again,” but they are really talking about turning back the clock on the social progress that enfranchised women and persons of color (albeit 100 years after passage of the 13th Amendment), that allowed women to control their own bodies, and that recognized the rights of LGBTQ citizens to exist, to express their love for each other, and to be safe.

To support Donald Trump is to support a man whose rhetoric has emboldened white supremacists and racists (including anti-Semites), who he called “very fine people.” To “live and let live” is not part of their lexicon.

True Americans recognize and accept that we are not perfect now and never have been and choose to learn from history instead of ignore or bury it. Yes, our ancestors committed the Sand Creek massacre, the Tulsa massacre, the imprisonment of Japanese Americans in concentration camps, the Tuskegee experiment which involved leaving syphilis untreated in African Americans to see how it damages the human body, and more. Supporters of Donald Trump don’t want our children to know the dark side of our history because it will make them “uncomfortable.”

To support Donald Trump is to support a man who evaded the draft by getting a doctor’s note about bone spurs and derided Sen. John McCain, a war hero, in life and even upon his death solely because Sen. McCain, unlike Vladimir Putin, didn’t like him.

To support Donald Trump, above all, is to honor a man who always puts his interests above those of his country. His decision to downplay Covid-19 because it might hurt his re-election is an example, and it cost countless American lives. He has yet to urge vaccination, despite secretly getting his own family vaccinated. 

 

The 2022 Mid-Term Elections Will Test How Gullible & Misinformed We Are

   I’m reminded of the saying attributed (erroneously, it turns out) to Abraham Lincoln that “You can fool some of the people all of the time and all of the people some of the time, but you can’t fool all of the people all of the time.”

Donald Trump and his enablers are working hard to prove that statement wrong — or at least to fool enough voters between now and the 2022 mid-term elections to gain control of the U.S. Congress. And just in case they can’t fool enough voters, they’re also working hard to keep non-Trump voters from the polls.

An actual quote from Abraham Lincoln is quite appropriate in this regard:  “Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether our nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated [to the proposition that all men are created equal] can long endure.”

How much longer can the con we know as the Big Lie build and maintain momentum?

It’s reported that the well-armed and well practiced militias who failed in the January 6 insurrection attempt will take up their arms in August to “reinstate” Donald Trump as president of the United States.  Apparently, they think they could succeed. If those militias do attempt such a coup — for that’s what it would be — and it fails, which it surely will, what effect will that have? Will the Republicans who still consider Trump critical to their own electoral future continue to hold their noses and stand behind him?  Will they, as Republican senatorial candidate J.D. Vance put it so well, “suck it up” and stick with Trump even though they know better?

The fact that so many Americans actually believe the Big Lie (and all the lesser ones) says something very sad, and very disturbing about the United States — namely that roughly 30% of Americans are easily manipulated because they are so gullible and misled.

Surely you have seen the statistics about how uneducated Americans are about basic American facts such as how many branches of government there are. All you need to do is Google the question, “How stupid are Americans,” and you will [not] be surprised how many academic, comedic and journalistic entries you’ll find, such as this June 26, 2020, headline from The Guardian: “Trevor Noah: America ‘dealing with a deadly strain of stupidity’.”

Thom Hartmann’s email newsletter on July 8 reminded us that the term “drinking the Kool-Aid” originated with the Jim Jones religious cult which committed mass suicide on Jones’ order in Guyana back in 1978 by drinking Kool-Aid laced with cyanide.

Hartmann calculates that for every one of the 913 people who committed suicide with Jim Jones, 438 Americans have died because they adopted from Trump a reluctance to take the Covid-19 vaccine. However, unlike Jones, who killed himself along with his followers, Donald Trump had himself and his family secretly vaccinated in the White House. This shouldn’t surprise us, but it also probably wouldn’t faze his followers, who have been nicknamed Cult-45.

There are two ironies that are apparent to me. The first one is that the craziness coming from the Republicans, QAnon, Tucker Carlson and Donald Trump himself is as motivating for those of us who recognize the con as it is for Trump’s base.

The second irony is that Covid is surging only in the states with low vaccination rates, and virtually all Covid deaths are people who declined to be vaccinated. In other words the virus is probably killing off Trumpers in numbers that may well match or exceed the number of non-Trump voters the same states are seeking to suppress.

The coming months will get more and more interesting. The Trump organization and possibly Trump himself may go on trial. There may be that promised insurrection in August. There will be more books published about Trump and his actions as president and before he became president. Worst of all, however, there will be more hysteria manufactured about wedge issues such as critical race theory. Buckle up!