Working in the service industry is far from easy. While there are, of course, plenty of folks who genuinely enjoy working in the restaurant business and earn a nice take-home pay, that’s sadly far from the case for all workers. Whether individuals feel satisfied with their earnings or not, however, we know it’s structurally unfair for people to earn a subminimum wage, especially so when that wage is dependent upon the choices of those being served. Even in the best circumstances, this dynamic is ripe for harassment and extensive emotional labor. But for historically marginalized folks, it can be even worse.

In light of LGBTQIA+ Equal Pay Awareness Day, recognized on June 15, 2022, One Fair Wage, a nonprofit that represents tipped wage workers on the national scale, released a new report that details the experiences of queer people who are not only disproportionately represented in the service industry but also report facing higher levels of discrimination and sexual harassment than their straight, cisgender peers.

Let me put this bluntly: Joe Biden should not run for reelection in 2024. He is too old.

Biden will turn 80 on November 20. He will be 82 if and when he begins a second term. The numbers just keep getting more ridiculous from there. “It’s not the 82 that’s the problem. It’s the 86,” one swing voter said in a recent focus group, referring to the hypothetical age Biden would be at the end of that (very) hypothetical second term.

In recent weeks, I’ve spoken with 10 official and unofficial advisers to the administration who have spent time around the president during these deranged and divided days in America. “What has this been like for him?” is what I’ve been asking them, essentially. “How is he holding up?”

They say, for the most part, that Biden is coping fine. You know, despite the 8.6 percent inflation, his depressed approval numbers, his vice president’s worse approval numbers, the looming wipeout in the midterms, and all the other delights attending to Biden as he awaits the big, round-numbered birthday he has coming up in a few months. But here’s another recurring theme I keep hearing, notably from people predisposed to liking the president. “He just seems old,” one senior administration official told me at a social function a few weeks ago.

There is nothing like the U.S. presidency to accelerate the aging process. This has been well documented, usually in those side-by-side photos of spry incoming presidents seen next to dramatically older-looking versions of themselves upon departure. Yet Biden keeps insisting that he will run again. The White House reaffirmed as much on Monday night via a tweet from the president’s press secretary, Karine Jean-Pierre. “To be clear, as the President has said repeatedly, he plans to run in 2024,” she wrote. It was an instant classic in the genre of political statements that raise far more questions than the one they were supposedly meant to answer.

Luckily, the message came equipped with everyone’s favorite political qualifier—“plans to.” Plans, after all, can change. In this case, the sooner the better.

Stepping aside would permit Biden to shed the demands of being a disciplined candidate (never his strong suit). It would be immediately liberating, allowing the president to focus on what he’s extremely well suited to: being a familiar mensch and champion and consoler to a country in dire need of one. He could off-load all of the burdens and suspicions that come with electoral ambitions. Nothing buys goodwill for a politician like self-removal from consideration.

The age issue will only get worse if Biden runs again. The “whispers” are becoming shouts. It has become thoroughly exhausting—for Biden and his party and, to some extent, the country itself. But the question quiets considerably when no one’s calculating how old a president born during Franklin D. Roosevelt’s administration will be in 2028.

It all feels impolite to point this out—disrespectful, ageist, and taboo, especially given the gross Republican smears about Biden being a doddering and demented old puppet. No one wants to perpetuate this garbage. In fact, people who have had regular contact with Biden describe him as engaged with the day-to-day aspects of his job and generally sharp on details. He will sometimes mangle sentences, blank on names, get tortured by teleprompters, lose his train of thought, or not make sense—which is not so abnormal for someone his age.

Biden is by no means the more eloquent character he was in his younger days. It can be painful to watch him give prepared speeches. His tone can be tentative, and certain sentences can become hopscotching journeys. His aides in the room look visibly nervous at times. Biden worked to overcome a stutter during his youth, and in general it can become more difficult for stutterers to conceal these effects as they age.

[Read: What Joe Biden can’t bring himself to say]

Otherwise, Biden deals with a fairly standard array of old-guy ailments. He has a spinal arthritis condition that his physician said might contribute to the “perceptibly stiffer” gait he has been observed with in recent years. He takes an anticoagulant and a cholesterol pill. He had a polyp removed from his colon last year, suffers from occasional bouts of acid reflux, and once had minor surgery to treat an enlarged prostate (you’re welcome).

Geriatricians are always emphasizing that the effects of aging vary widely from person to person. By every indication, Biden appears to be among the lucky ones. His doctors cite no major health concerns. He takes care of himself. He does not drink or smoke, is not overweight, and works out at least five times a week. He looks great for a guy his age. Biden is fit to faithfully execute his duties, the White House physician said in his most recent health summary.

The question is: Should he? The answer: Sure, for now. But not a day after January 20, 2025.

As a point of professional comparison, Biden would be enjoying his 15th year of retirement if he had spent his career as a commercial airline pilot, or his 24th year if he had been an air-traffic controller. There’s a reason the FAA mandates compulsory departure times for these positions (65 for pilots, 56 for controllers). These are life-and-death tasks that demand peak stamina and mental acuity. The pressure can be crushing, burnout is rampant, and no one wants to see grandpop in the damn cockpit.

A majority of Americans say they would favor a maximum age for their elected officials too. Of those Americans, about two-thirds think the limit should be 70 or younger. This would send nearly 30 percent of the United States Senate out to pasture. I would call this a good start, as hard as it might be to imagine someone other than Dianne Feinstein or Chuck Grassley charting out our kids’ futures.

The “concerns about Biden’s age” matter received a fibrous super-boost on Sunday when The New York Times published a front-page report that was based on conversations with nearly 50 Democratic officials across the country. Almost everyone interviewed expressed “deep concern” about the elderly state of the man in the chair. Biden’s advanced age was presented as a kind of proxy for the tired and hobbled state of his agenda and the Democratic Party. To see the sentiment presented so universally among prominent Democrats was rather jarring.

[Tom Nichols: Leave Joe Biden alone]

“The presidency is a monstrously taxing job and the stark reality is the president would be closer to 90 than 80 at the end of a second term,” David Axelrod, the chief strategist for Barack Obama, told the Times, putting a finer, fun-with-numbers point on the story.

The broader subtext of the Times article—and, in a sense, every article about Biden’s age—is that the matchup between America’s current condition and the doctor on call feels untenable.

This was not true in 2020. Biden said he was running for president—for the third time—because he viewed the prospect of Donald Trump’s reelection as an existential threat to the nation. Poll after poll revealed that “electability” was the most important quality that Democrats were seeking in a 2020 nominee. Biden scared the fewest people. They mostly just wanted someone who could get rid of Trump. Someone who could come into office, not tweet like a madman, not propose bleach as a COVID treatment, not impugn the reputations of war heroes, civil-rights icons, and disabled reporters. Someone who could just be decent and serious and leave America in relative peace for a little while.

And Biden did this. He performed the most vital service of his presidency before it even began, on November 3, 2020. He showed up on January 20, 2021, and swore his oath in front of 25,000 National Guard troops charged with protecting Washington from his predecessor’s most fervent supporters—kind of a yikes moment for our democracy, you might recall. Officials I’ve spoken with who were on the inauguration stage that day say the overwhelming sentiment was one of relief; people were milling about thanking one another for their various roles in helping along this exceedingly precarious transition.

Theoretically, the rest could have been gravy for Biden after that. Or, alternatively, a procession of headaches and crises before a more and more hostile audience.

“What a terrible job you have,” Jimmy Kimmel told Biden last week, when the president stopped by the late-night set for one of those feel-good presidential sit-downs. “I’m glad you’re doing it, but boy, oh boy, does this seem like a bad gig.” Biden kept insisting that he’s never been more optimistic about the country’s future, but he sure sounded like his heart was not in this. Kimmel became briefly exasperated.

“Why are you so optimistic?” the host interjected. “It makes no sense!”

The audience laughed. They had a point.

“This generation is going to change everything,” Biden went on. He meant young people—the same cohort whose support for Biden has eroded markedly in recent polling. This would have made a perfect segue for Biden to announce that he was stepping aside and allowing the ever-restless, too-long-waiting “next generation” of Democrats to finally inherit the whirlwind. Alas, he did not.

[Read: The Democrats’ midterm identity crisis]

Probably the main rationale for Biden to re-up in 2024 is the argument that he is the candidate best suited to beating Trump if he runs again. Biden has done it before. His age would be less of a factor against his predecessor, who turned 76 on Tuesday.

But for all the trauma that Trump inflicted on the country during his term, he appears to have kept the devotion of his base voters. Trump has even edged Biden by a few points in a recent batch of way-too-early rematch polls. Swing voters, independents, and Republicans who voted for Biden in 2020 are among the most unenthusiastic to the idea of his running again, says Sarah Longwell, the Republican political operative who hosts the podcast The Focus Group for The Bulwark. They mainly cite his age, she adds. And Republican voters give every indication of being far more motivated right now than Democrats, many of whom are sounding alarmingly demoralized. It hurts to even imagine what another Biden-Trump race could look like.

The other rationale for Biden to run would be the gnawing riddle of: If not him, then who? “Don’t compare me to the almighty. Compare me to the alternative,” Biden used to say during the 2020 campaign. Four more years of Trump proved a sufficiently appalling “alternative” to land Biden in the White House in 2020, but it would be nice if Democrats had an obvious alternative to step in for the guy whom only 29 percent of Americans and 48 percent of Democrats want to see run again in 2024. Vice President Kamala Harris has not exactly asserted herself as the clamored-for heir apparent.

At the very least, Biden not running would unleash a profusion of youth and energy into the Democratic field. The non-AARP-card-carrying likes of Pete Buttigieg or Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez or Chris Murphy or whoever it is could stand silently on the soapbox of the Iowa State Fair for five hours, and it would still feel like a refreshing change. They could commence with the Democrats’ long-overdue debate about their next leaders and best ideas. It would send a message of a party not afraid of its future, and provide a contrast with an opposing party cemented in its terrifying past—with its same terrifying frontman.

Aside from reinvigorating the Democrats, Biden could instantly burnish his own legacy by opting out of 2024. He would be praised for knowing when to step aside, for putting the interests of his party and country before himself, and for selflessly turning things over to the next acts. Gratitude would flow, maybe even from some of the Republicans he talked about doing business with. Everyone loves an elder statesman. A historic credit would be due to Joe Biden.

He spared the country from more Trump in 2020. He stepped in, calmed the thing down, and God love ya for that, Joey. He should be thanked up and down the Rehoboth boardwalk, ice-cream cone in hand, sooner rather than later.

---

Jack Segelstein contributed research to this article.

We here at Daily Kos are irritatingly familiar with the goings-on of the "Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officer Association," the Richard Mack-led hive of anti-government conspiracy theories that all vaguely revolves around a central premise declaring local sheriffs—as opposed to all other elected officials—are the true arbiters of what the Constitution does or doesn't allow. It's not Congress, and it's not the Supreme Court, you silly goose.

It's Some Guy, duly elected sheriff of Spittake County, who determines whether you have to pay taxes or abide by federal firearms laws or kidnap your state governor because they made you miss a hair appointment. Want your own meth lab? Hey, talk to your local sheriff, because drug laws ain't the boss of you. The law is whatever Sheriff Someguy says it is on any given day, and maybe if you don't donate to the next law enforcement meet-up, it'll be something else tomorrow.

These people get on television, mind you. Richard Mack, David "Bling" Clarke, and the others are invited onto the teevees to provide "analysis" of various national ills, and hosts go out of their way to make them seem vaguely hinged. But I'm not sure if we knew this one: Talking Points Memo reports that one of these self-proclaimed "constitutional" sheriffs, Barry County, Michigan Sheriff Dar Leaf, actually got his hands on a ballot tabulation machine last year in the wake of conservative conspiracy theories insisting that Donald Trump only lost reelection because of "rigged" voting machines.

Listen and subscribe to Daily Kos Elections’ The Downballot podcast with David Nir and David Beard

Campaign Action

Leaf had previously attempted to get courts to allow him to impound voting machines, but Leaf didn't have a shred of evidence to justify it, and the court told him to take a hike. After the court refused to go along, reports TPM, Leaf sent "a deputy and a private investigator" to township election clerks throughout the county, questioning and attempting to bully them into surrendering equipment. One clerk allowed them to take a Dominion ballot tabulator for inspection; Leaf's team (or somebody) allegedly took the machine to Detroit and disassembled it.

By "disassembled," we effectively mean "destroyed." The machine's security seal was broken, revealing the machine had been tampered with. And rather than being, say, thrown out of office for a plot to improperly tamper with voting machines, Leaf is now filing another lawsuit claiming that it's other state officials who are interfering with his authority to hunt for fraud that neither he nor anybody else can find.

Oh, it's not going to get an inch in court, mind you. But bizarrely, this paranoid and batshit conspiracy theorist continues to hold office. That's despite Sheriff Leaf palling around with everyone from the Constitutional Sheriff's group to Pillowman Mike Lindell to election hoax promotion machine, Sidney Powell.

And if the name Dar Leaf rings a bell for you, that's because this particular Michigan has a history. Leaf earned national attention when a militia kidnapping plot targeting Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer was foiled, but produced footage of Leaf speaking onstage at an anti-Whitmer rally shoulder-to-shoulder with some of the militia thugs arrested for their roles in the plot.

Leaf was putting the "constitutional sheriff" theory that his decisions trumped all other government regulations into practice, during that rally. He specifically praised a local barber who defied pandemic lockdown orders as a "little version of Rosa Parks," encouraging other Michigan citizens to defy pandemic orders.

Undeterred, Leaf later responded to questions about the kidnapping plot by suggesting to a reporter that the militia had the right to attempt a citizen's arrest of Whitmer.

We can say, then, that the rule of law in Barry County, Michigan is spotty at best. Whether you're allowed to kidnap a sitting governor because you're mad about hair salon appointment cancellations during a national emergency is something still up for debate, and if you find that the courts aren't willing to entertain your requests to impound election equipment because you're pissy about the outcome and/or don't think the vibes are right then you can send a few underlings from town to town to demand that they turn over the equipment anyway. After all, Sidney Powell and the guy who makes pillows both think that, uh, Italian satellites might have space-lasered the vote totals on behalf of Dead Hugo Chavez, and if the local sheriff thinks that every court in the land, every election official, every election expert and anyone else you can name are all wrong, dead wrong, in insisting that never happened then buckle up, because it's sheriffin' time.

All right, so the voters probably have to pay for another destroyed vote tabulator. Fine. Republicans have been tampering with voting equipment all across the nation, with new subpoenas issued in Georgia over another tampering case on Wednesday—in that case, conspiracy theorists were given improper access to a server and were able to copy its contents in a rather stunning case of outright Republican corruption. The idea that anyone witless enough to believe Trumpian conspiracy theories about Italian satellites or dead Venezuelan leaders has the forensic chops to find out anything about a voting machine by unscrewing some parts and examining it for silverfish and/or bamboo is pretty laughable all on its own, but that's almost beside the point.

The bigger issue here seems to be that Barry County, Michigan, is in the apparently-permanent thrall of a far-right terrorist sympathizer whose interpretation of the law consists solely of what he and the last three Facebook posts he's read feel like.

What's up with that, Barry County? I realize in a nearly all-white, all-Republican county now known more for terrorism than tourism you're going to get quite the list of characters for local office, but if your local law enforcement guy is now nationally known for both his ties to an attempted terrorist act and, now, for tampering with voting equipment, don't you think it might be time to turn the post over to a particularly photogenic dog?

There are a lot of ways for a county to be famous, and the rest of us are questioning your life choices. And that's an understatement.

RELATED STORIES:

Michigan sheriff says accused terrorists were within their rights to 'arrest' Gov. Whitmer

Conservatives run away from consequences for encouraging Michigan militia’s terrorism plot

White sheriffs find political home with far-right organizations

Michigan’s anti-Whitmer protests were also organizing grounds for would-be militia kidnappers

Testimony from J. Michael Luttig will indict the whole GOP's radicalization against democracy.

TALLAHASSEE, Fla. — Florida is the only state in the nation that has not placed an order with the federal government for doses of the Covid-19 vaccine for young children, saying the distribution process is “convoluted.”

The Florida Department of Health, through a statement, said Wednesday that it did not place an order with the federal government for vaccine doses for kids five and under in part because it doesn’t advise all children get vaccinated. The deadline for placing a pre-order was Tuesday and 49 other states met the cutoff date.

“States do not need to be involved in the convoluted vaccine distribution process, especially when the federal government has a track record of developing inconsistent and unsustainable COVID-19 policies,” the DOH statement said. “It is also no surprise we chose not to participate in distribution of the COVID-19 vaccine when the Department does not recommend it for all children.”

The news was first reported by McClatchy.

The department provided a statement to POLITICO just hours after advisers with the U.S. Food and Drug Administration voted unanimously to give emergency authorization for the use of Pfizer and Moderna vaccines on children between the ages of 5 and six-months old. The approval fast tracks the vaccine toward distribution and kids could start receiving shots as soon as Tuesday.

Children 5 and under are the last group of Americans who aren’t able to get the vaccine.

Florida’s Department of Health is led by state Surgeon General Joe Ladapo, an outspoken skeptic of the Covid-19 vaccine. Ladapo, an appointee of Gov. Ron DeSantis, told reporters Tuesday after a news conference that he opposes the use of the vaccine on young kids. He has publicly questioned the effectiveness — and safety — of vaccines even though there’s general consensus within the medical community that it protects against Covid-19 and lessens serious symptoms.

Ladapo has been voicing concerns about the safety of the vaccines since the first doses were made available. Ladapo joined 20 other doctors in signing a petition in July 2021 urging the FDA not to give the Pfizer vaccine its final approval without years of studies and clinical trials.

DeSantis has also fought against any vaccine mandates, going so far as to press lawmakers in Florida’s Republican-controlled Legislature to prohibit businesses from requiring workers to get the shot. DeSantis also fought with local school districts that wanted to implement mask mandates during the summer and fall of 2021, when the Delta variant was sweeping through the state and leading to record-high hospitalizations.

Most recently, Florida’s Health Department threatened the Special Olympics with a $27.5 million fine over the organization’s vaccine requirement — with DeSantis saying at the time: “What connection that has to competing, I don’t understand.”

Children in Florida can still get the vaccine once it’s made available through pharmacies that partner with the federal government, such as CVS.

In recent months, Florida’s Department of Health has limited its response to the ongoing Covid pandemic, leaving much of the work up to the healthcare industry, which will refer the bulk of newly infected patients for testing and treatment. The DOH statement, which was not attributed to a name, says that doctors can also order vaccines.

“Doctors can order vaccines if they are in need, and there are currently no orders in the Department’s ordering system for the COVID-19 vaccine for this age group,” the statement said.

Read 4 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Today, in the Calculated Risk Real Estate Newsletter: Fed Chair Powell: "Homebuyers need a bit of a reset"

A brief excerpt:

Here are some interesting comments on housing from Fed Chair Jerome Powell today. This is a quick transcript - sorry for any errors - the video is here and the discussion on housing starts around 1:51:00.
...
Powell: ...

"I'd say if you are homebuyer, somebody or a young person looking to buy a home, you need a bit of a reset.   We need to get to back to a place where supply and demand are back together and where inflation is down low again, and mortgage rates are low again.

This will be a process were by ideally, we do our work in a way were the housing market settles in a new place.

There is much more in the article. You can subscribe at https://calculatedrisk.substack.com/

We’re still learning the circumstances surrounding a fire in Baltimore this Wednesday morning, but from what we know, the situation is certainly both sad and scary. According to local CBS outlet WJZ 13, the fire resulted in three people being sent to the hospital. Details are still being fleshed out, but as far as we know currently, at least one Pride flag was set on fire. Police initially believed this flag being set on fire spread to three other homes on the same block, resulting in damages to all four of them. Now police are saying they believe the fires are technically two separate incidents, with a home on the same street that had visible Pride decor being set on fire, as well. 

The fire was reported around 4:30 in the morning according to the fire department and was contained by 5 AM. Victims included a 30-year-old woman, a 57-year-old man, and a 74-year-old-man, according to Fire Chief Niles Ford. All three victims were brought to Shock Trauma for treatment, and both the 30-year-old and 57-year-old are in critical condition. The 74-year-old is in serious condition, per Ford. It’s unclear if all victims were in the same home or not.

RELATED: Starbucks workers allege managers are using trans-inclusive policies as latest union-busting tactic

Police Commissioner Michael Harrison said in a press briefing that the cause of the fire is still being investigated and that the motive is unclear. Initial reports said police were considering the incident as a possible hate crime.

“This is an ongoing investigation to determine facts, to determine the cause, and right now, we’re not prepared or equipped to determine cause or the facts of how it started,” Harrison stated. 

One of the houses is almost completely destroyed, with another sustaining serious damage.

You can catch some local coverage below.

And a bit more coverage here.

Notably, this is far from the first time people have targeted Pride flags, including in recent memory in Baltimore. For example, as reported by local outlet WMAR 2, in May, Baltimore Police were investigating two incidents where they believed the same person had been seen on camera setting two LGBTQ+ Pride flags on fire in the night. Now, this incident is not explicitly tied to the recent fires, but does speak to bigger-picture concerns and fears about LGBTQ+ folks and allies being targets for hate. 

And who can we thank for that? Largely Republicans. We’re seeing conservatives ignite such hysteria over everything from books to pronouns to health care to sports, it’s no wonder people might be more brazen in their hate and threatening behaviors. After all, Republicans are essentially running on these queerphobia platforms just in time for midterms, and they’re not showing any signs of slowing down. 

The economy will feel worse before it feels better.

If you are a person living in the United States right now, you are probably at least medium worried about the economy. From inflation to the stock market, a lot about money feels pretty lousy. The good news: The Federal Reserve is taking action to try to bring down inflation and get the economy back to whatever normal is. The bad news: The action it’s taking isn’t going to immediately make everything better, and in the shorter term, it could make things feel worse.

“Getting inflation lower is usually painful because the Fed mainly has in its policy toolbox tools that make things even less affordable because the Fed’s policy toolbox is geared toward cooling demand,” said Gregory Daco, chief economist at EY-Parthenon. “If the Fed manages to cool demand, then there will be less price pressures, but cooling demand entails essentially making things more expensive.”

To put it more plainly, the idea is to tamp down consumer spending and slow business expansion by increasing costs in other areas (namely, borrowing and loans). The Fed is trying to get you, for now, to stop buying so much stuff.

On Wednesday, the Federal Reserve raised interest rates by three-quarters of a percentage point. It made the same hike in June, which marked the biggest increase in 28 years. This marks the Fed’s fourth interest rate hike this year as the Fed tries to bring down inflation.

The hope is that, eventually, the Fed’s moves will bring down prices that people have definitely noticed creeping up all around them. But they will have shorter-term implications as well. Higher interest rates mean consumers should expect the cost of their credit card debt, mortgages, and car loans, among other items, to go up. The cost of borrowing for businesses will increase, too, and companies are likely to slow down on investments and hiring. The stock market has for weeks been reflecting some anxieties over the Fed as well, as higher interest rates cut into valuations and profits.

The forest that it’s hard to see for the trees is a more balanced economy on the other side, but some of the trees are pretty thorny.

“Rates have already gone up, we already are in a transition phase where the economy is slowing down. The pieces are being put in place for a rebalancing of demand and supply, but it doesn’t happen overnight,” said Brian Bethune, a financial economist at Boston College. “It’s usually a bumpy ride.”

What the Fed is trying to do

The Fed’s line for a while was that inflation would be transitory: Once some of the kinks in the economy, such as supply chain crunches, were worked out, it would begin to fade on its own. But in recent months, the Fed has taken a more assertive stance. Powell has made a hawkish pivot, acknowledging inflation is “much too high” and indicating he’s dedicated to getting it down.

The Fed has three main tools at its disposal to try to gain control of the situation, Daco explained. The first is forward guidance, as in, communication: talking to the public and saying what its intentions are in terms of monetary policy. Basically, if the Fed says it’s going to take control of the situation, the public — hopefully — believes it will. The second tool is raising the federal funds rate — the interest rate banks charge other banks — which will trickle out across the economy across interest rates and make it more expensive to borrow. (With Wednesday’s hike, the federal funds rate is 2.25 to 2.5 percent, and officials expect it to be above 3 percent by the end of the year.) The third is balance sheet normalization, which the Fed is just undertaking. It is starting to unload some assets, such as Treasuries and mortgage-backed securities, which should tighten financial conditions, though it will take some time.

Combined, this is intended to deter spending and lead to less money sloshing around in the economy overall. There are wide-ranging effects.

“When the Fed tightens monetary policy, that has a direct effect on equity prices, on long-term interest rates, on corporate bond spreads, on volatility, on the value of the dollar, on a number of financial measures,” Daco said.

Companies become more reluctant to invest and hire as credit becomes more expensive, the cost of equity increases, and the environment becomes more volatile. Declining markets have a negative impact on consumer moods, which also affects spending. There’s an intended chilling effect across the economy — one officials hope will not lead to a recession, though there are no guarantees. The Fed is walking a tightrope in trying to get from an accommodative, easy-money scenario to conditions that are normalized and tightened — without disrupting the economy too much.

This all is guaranteed to cause some short-term disruptions and problems, but in the long run, it’s all supposed to be worth it.

“We have to endure the short-term pain in the economy in order to get inflation back under control,” said Tara Sinclair, a senior fellow at the Indeed Hiring Lab. She compared the Fed hiking interest rates and tightening monetary policy to a medical treatment that might require patients to undergo something painful in order to have longer-term health. “Then, going forward, we can have a much more stable environment where we know prices are going to be growing about 2 percent per year, we have more certainty about that, we have a better sense of demand and supply coming together. That’s a better working environment for the economy as a whole, and businesses want that kind of certainty.”

If the Fed were to not increase interest rates and get inflation expectations in check, the risk is that prices would continue to spiral upward. Workers will also ask for higher wages, companies will raise prices to pay those wages, and it becomes a sort of cycle of doom. The central bank’s task now is to stop that from happening and to try to keep high inflation from becoming entrenched.

What this all means for you

What the Fed’s interest rate hike Wednesday means, and what it does going forward (basically, how fast it moves and how much), for different people depends on their position in the economy. If you’re a saver, this is not a bad deal for you. If you are looking to buy a house, yeesh.

In recent years, interest rates have been so low there’s been very little incentive to save. When rates go up, savers get higher interest rates and can make more money. “Conservative savers that have their money in the bank or bonds or whatever and stayed away from risky things have been paid nothing,” Bethune said.

For borrowers, the situation is quite the opposite. Mortgages have already shot up, with the 30-year fixed mortgage rate surging in June, though it’s since come back down somewhat.

Car loans will become more expensive, as will credit card debt.

“For credit cards, it’s going to show up pretty quickly, and it will impact not just things you buy in the future but your current balances, too,” said Matt Schulz, chief credit analyst at Lending Tree. Usually, when the Fed raises rates, credit cards’ APRs (annual percentage rates) go up by about the same amount within a billing cycle or two, he said. “Generally, these individual rate hikes aren’t enough to really rock anybody’s world financially. The danger is when you have a lot of them in a short period of time, they add up pretty quickly and can be pretty impactful.”

Companies are likely to slow down on expansion and hiring, which we’ve already seen in some arenas, such as the tech sector. Depending on how aggressive the Fed is going forward, the economy could very well see an uptick in unemployment and more layoffs. (That said, firms may be a little more reluctant to lay off employees given how hard it was to re-hire during the pandemic.) Anxious companies reluctant to hire could just make it harder to find a new job.

If you’ve got money in the stock market, whether you’re day trading with Robinhood or just investing through your 401(k), things are already looking a little rough. In the long term, stocks generally go up, and most experts would advise you to hold on. Markets could continue to be rocky for a while, though how the market will react to any single piece of news — or, really, why it does anything — is hard to predict.

This is just not going to be very fun for a while

I would like to tell you that there are a million things you can do to completely insulate yourself from some of the pain that’s ahead, but then I would be lying, which I generally try not to do. So instead I will just say this: This sucks. Everything’s expensive, and for a while some things are going to be more expensive, and then eventually things will not be more expensive anymore. In the meantime, it’s not going to be particularly enjoyable. And there could be a recession on the way, or maybe we’re already in one!

One thing consumers can do to navigate the moment is to reduce some spending. Maybe put off the summer trip that hasn’t been booked yet, or save that home purchase for a later date, if possible. Walk instead of driving to your destination. “That’s something that will put them in a better position going forward, but also they’ll do their part in contributing to reducing demand,” Sinclair said.

Schulz said that if you have credit card debt, try to pay it down now, before rates go up even more. “That debt is only going to get more expensive in a pretty big hurry. It would definitely be smart to try and knock down that debt as much as you can,” he said. In its monthly review of credit card offers, Lending Tree found that the average APR on new credit cards in July is over 20 percent.

One fun fact, or rather, tip: Consumers can call and ask to have their credit card interest rates reduced and, often, find success. According to Lending Tree, more than two-thirds of requests for lower credit card APRs are granted.

There are some measures you can try to take to prepare in the event of an economic downturn, such as building up savings and trying to be extra nice to your boss. But the real answer on how to prepare for a recession is sort of that you can’t.

“If you prepare for a recession, you end up having that recession. I mean, it’s pretty simple. Recessions are self-fulfilling prophecies,” Daco said. “If one person prepares for a recession, that’s fine, they’re going to retrench, they’re going to buy a little less, they’re going to be more careful with their outlays. That’s fine. But if 300 million or 350 million people do the same thing, if everybody cuts their spending by 5 percent, well, then there’s a 5 percent correction in spending, so that entails a recession.”

Still, the overall takeaway is that the going will be tough for a while, and some people will be able to better manage than others. “Just put off buying a car” isn’t realistic advice for everyone. There’s only so much the Fed can do on the economy’s current woes as well. It can take action on the demand side, but there’s not a lot for it to do on supply, which is where a lot of problems with energy and food prices are stemming from. Gas prices are likely to remain high for a while. Other factors putting pressure on prices, such as Russia’s war in Ukraine and the global Covid-19 outbreak, are beyond the control of anyone in the US government.

The economy, which feels terrible right now even if it isn’t really on paper, is about to get worse for a lot of people before, eventually, it gets better.

“The long-term situation the Fed feels that is much more important for them is to go ahead and reduce the pressures on the economy … so that we have a healthier, stable economy going forward,” Sinclair said. “That will set the economy up for better long-term growth.”

Now, everybody has to wait and see whether this pans out, and, in the meantime, deal with their rising gas receipts and credit card bills.

Update, July 28, 11:50 am: This story was updated to reflect a July 27 Federal Reserve announcement and current mortgage rates.

Donald Trump’s scammy, aggressive fundraising tactics have been making news since he rode down that escalator to announce his white nationalist presidential bid seven years ago. The Jan. 6 House committee revealed that Trump was fundraising for an election legal defense fund that did not exist, and that the proceeds from it have instead lined the pockets of Trump family and hangers-on.

Since he lost the election, Trump’s Save America PAC has been raking in tens of millions more from Trump supporters. So where are all these millions coming from, the money for that non-existent defense fund and for the Save America PAC that just keeps on raking it in? Retirees, in large part, The Washington Post finds: more than half of the donations are from people on Social Security. The Post reviewed Federal Election Commission records for the Save America PAC and a Save America joint fundraising committee, data showing that “nearly two-thirds of those 2.5 million contributions came from people who listed their occupation as ‘retired.’ More than 6 in 10 were contributions of $100 or less from retirees.”

Trump has raised over $390 million since his election loss, another review by The New York Times finds, and “much of the money spent by political committees affiliated with Mr. Trump went toward paying off his 2020 campaign expenses and bolstering his political operation in anticipation of an expected 2024 presidential run.” One of those groups bolstering his operation is the America First Policy Institute, a supposed think tank, which of course has “paid to hold events with Mr. Trump at his private clubs, including Mar-a-Lago, in South Florida, and Bedminster, in New Jersey.”

RELATED:  Jan. 6 committee follows the money, builds fraud case against Trump and team in the 'Big Rip-Off'

Largely on the backs of the small dollar donors who keep falling for his snake oil. “Small-dollar donors use scarce disposable income to support candidates and causes of their choosing to make their voices heard, and those donors deserve the truth about what those funds will be used for,” Rep. Zoe Lofgren said at Monday’s hearing. Like Don Jr.’s girlfriend, Kimberly Guilfoyle, getting $60,000 for her two-minute introduction of Trump at the Jan. 6 rally that kicked off the insurrection.

We talk to expert Brandi Buchman about everything you need to know for the Jan. 6 committee, hearings, and investigation on Daily Kos' The Brief podcast

Campaign Action

Of the $98 million raised for the Save America PAC, the one he created after the election and is the “primary hub of his ongoing political operations,” just $4 million had gone to candidates, other PACs or party committees by the end of April of this year.

If they’re still giving money to Trump, those small-dollar donors won’t even really care that their money is going to feather TrumpCo’s nest. They’re that deep into it. But the rule of law demands that the government care. The Justice Department should investigate Trump’s PACs as it has done a number of scam PACs and, if it finds evidence of fraud, levy charges like it’s done against those scams.

“It would certainly be novel for the Justice Department to pursue a fraud case against a former president’s PAC, but Trump’s fraudulent postelection fund-raising was novel, too,” Brendan Fischer, a campaign finance expert at the watchdog group Documented, told the Times. He pointed out that the amount of money raised since the election by Trump was “entirely unprecedented.”

Common Cause’s Stephen Spaulding sees ample evidence in what the committee has found thus far for the Justice Department to investigate whether these actions have “crossed the line into wire fraud.”

Meanwhile, Trump just keeps on building that war chest, spending little of what he takes in on the candidates and causes he supposedly supports. Just this week, they sent out another one, Trump Jr. asking people to pay for the opportunity to put their name on the “official” birthday card for his dad.

RELATED STORIES:

Read 23 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Don't count Bill Gates among the fans of cryptocurrencies and NFTs. From a report: Those digital asset trends are "100% based on greater fool theory," the Microsoft co-founder said Tuesday at a TechCrunch conference, referencing the notion that investors can make money on worthless or overvalued assets as long as people are willing to bid them higher. Gates added that he's "not long or short" crypto. And he mocked Bored Apes NFTs, joking that "expensive digital images of monkeys" will "improve the world immensely." Instead, Gates said he prefers old fashioned investing. "I'm used to asset classes, like a farm where they have output, or like a company where they make products," he said.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

It was a shot across the bow the day Gov. Ron DeSantis’ press secretary Christina Pushaw tweeted that those who opposed Florida’s “Don’t Say Gay” bill were against what she called the “Anti-Grooming Bill,” and are essentially pedophiles. Republicans found their meat and promptly began chumming the trans- and homophobic waters with it. Today, the GOP has aimed its vitriol away from same-sex marriage and directly onto LGBTQ+ young people and their families.  

Rev. Mark Burns was running for South Carolina’s 4th Congressional District, but about a week or so before his loss Tuesday (there really is a God), with just 23.8% of the vote to incumbent and Trump-endorsed William Timmons, Burns took to the airwaves to suggest murdering LGBTQ+ folks.

Burns appeared on The Stew Peters Show and immediately began furthering the ongoing homophobic rhetoric by the GOP about LGBTQ+ people being “groomers,” an attack that accuses adults of building relationships with minors in order to manipulate and sexually exploit them. Burns also says gender-affirming health care for trans youth is “child abuse,” The Advocate reports.

RELATED STORY: Sources say Trump chomping at the bit to announce reelection bid—in DeSantis’ Florida, no less

“That’s why, when I’m elected, I don’t want to just vote. I want to start holding people accountable for treason to the Constitution. I am going to push to reenact HUAC,” Burns said, referring to the House Un-American Activities Committee, a long-abolished group of lawmakers appointed to investigate the ties of private citizens to fascism and communism.

“We need to hold people for treason, start having some public hearings, and start executing people who are found guilty for their treasonous acts against the Constitution of the United States of America. … Just like they did back in 1776,” Burns added.

Burns isn’t alone in his hateful and violent hyperbole.

On Wednesday, Florida Republican Sen. Marco Rubio posited on Twitter that “Hispanic voters” are turning away from the Democratic party because they don’t want “schools trying to turn their son into a daughter.”

Michael Woods, a science teacher in Florida, told The Nation that not only is he banned from teaching about gender and sexuality, but the schools in the state have all but erased sex-ed requirements.

What remains in the curriculum? “Mainly defining ‘what is LGBTQ?’ We actually stress abstinence,” Woods said, “but if you’re choosing not to be abstinent, [we also cover] ‘here’s how you protect yourself.’”

Woods says people have no idea how “dangerous” the “groomer” slur is, particularly for teachers and school staff, as they are in contact with minors daily.

“Do you understand the consequences of that word? I’m a Special Olympics coach. That requires people to have trust in me. I’m a prom sponsor. I chaperone the senior class trip,” Woods said.

Sharon McGowan, legal director of Lambda Legal, a national LGBTQ advocacy organization, told The Washington Post that Trump Republicans are “wearing the more outrageous, more offensive as a badge of pride.”

“We’re seeing the recycling of tropes; there are go-to tropes that people use and this notion that somehow a child being taught in school is ‘grooming’ them to have a particular sexual orientation,” McGown said.

In an interview she posted on Twitter, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia called Democrats “the party of pedophiles” and “the party of princess predators from Disney.”

Greene added: “The Democrats are the party of elementary school teachers [who are] trying to transition their elementary-school-aged children and convince them they’re a different gender. This is the party of their identity, and their identity is the most disgusting, evil, horrible things happening in our country.”

Michigan Democratic state Sen. Mallory McMorrow famously spoke against a GOP colleague accusing her of wanting to “groom and sexualize kindergartners.” She told the Post in an interview that she makes a direct connection between Trump’s rhetoric about the Big Lie and attacks on the LGBTQ+ community.   

“If people don’t trust elections, then it opens the door really quickly to believing the government is run by a Satanist cabal of pedophiles, and they’ll stop at nothing in the name of protecting kids. … We don’t have that much time, we need to reach out to everybody and tell them, ‘There’s hate, and then there’s people who want to make the government work, and that’s the choice,’” McMorrow said.

The Jan. 6 select committee's case against Donald Trump comes into view.

SANTA FE, N.M. — New Mexico’s secretary of state on Tuesday asked the state Supreme Court to order the Republican-led commission of rural Otero County to certify primary election results after it refused to do so over distrust of Dominion vote-tallying machines.

Democratic Secretary of State Maggie Toulouse Olive’s request came a day after the three-member Otero County commission, in its role as a county canvassing board, voted unanimously against certifying the results of the June 7 primary without raising specific concerns about discrepancies.

The commission’s members include Cowboys for Trump co-founder Couy Griffin, who ascribes to unsubstantiated claims that former President Donald Trump won the 2020 election. Griffin was convicted of illegally entering restricted U.S. Capitol grounds — though not the building — amid the riots on Jan. 6, 2021, and is scheduled for sentencing later this month. He acknowledged that the standoff over this primary could delay the outcome of local election races.

“I have huge concerns with these voting machines,” Otero County Commissioner Vickie Marquardt said Monday. “When I certify stuff that I don’t know is right, I feel like I’m being dishonest because in my heart I don’t know if it is right.”

The commission’s vote is the latest example of how conspiracy theories and misinformation are affecting the integrity of local elections across the U.S. Trump has continued to describe the 2020 election as “rigged” or “stolen,” despite a coalition of top government and industry officials calling it the “most secure in American history.”

Dominion’s systems also have been unjustifiably attacked since the 2020 election by people who embraced the false belief that the election was stolen from Trump. The company has filed defamation lawsuits in response to incorrect and outrageous claims made by high-profile Trump allies.

New Mexico’s Dominion machines have been disparaged repeatedly by David and Erin Clements of Las Cruces in their review of the 2020 election in Otero County and voter registration rolls at the request of the commission. The Clements are traveling advocates for “forensic” reviews of the 2020 election and offer their services as election experts and auditors to local governments. Election officials including County Clerk Robyn Holmes say the Clements are not certified auditors nor experts in election protocols.

The couple has highlighted problems during sporadic, hourslong presentations to the commission this year. Local election officials dispute many of the findings as mistaken or unfounded.

County canvassing boards have until June 17 to certify election results, prior to state certification and preparation of general election ballots.

Under state law, county canvass boards can call on a voting precinct board to address specific discrepancies, but no discrepancies were identified on Monday by the Otero commission.

“The post-election canvassing process is a key component of how we maintain our high levels of election integrity in New Mexico and the Otero County Commission is flaunting that process by appeasing unfounded conspiracy theories and potentially nullifying the votes of every Otero County voter who participated in the primary,” Toulouse Oliver said in a statement. She accused the commission of willful violations of the state election code.

New Mexico uses paper ballots that can be double-checked later in all elections, and also relies on tabulation machines to rapidly tally votes while minimizing human error. Election results also are audited by random samplings to verify levels of accuracy in the vote count.

The Otero County commission voted last week to recount ballots from the statewide primary election by hand, remove state-mandated ballot drop boxes that facilitate absentee voting and discontinue the use of Dominion vote tabulation machines in the general election.

On Monday, Holmes said those instructions from the county commissions conflict with state and federal election law, and that she would only recount the election by hand under a court order.

“The election law does not allow me to hand tally these ballots or to even form a board to do it. I just can’t,” said Holmes, a Republican. “And I’m going to follow the law.”

Holmes noted that the state-owned vote tabulation machines from Dominion are tested by Otero County officials in public view and that the machines also are independently certified in advance. Griffin said he and fellow commissioners don’t see the process as trustworthy.

“That’s a source that we don’t have any control or influence over,” he said.

Mario Jimenez of the progressive watchdog group Common Cause New Mexico said the public can view testing of vote-tallying machines prior to elections in every county, and that certification notices are posted on every machine where voters can see them.

“They have no basis — other than ‘we just don’t trust the machine’ — for not certifying the election,” Jimenez said of the Otero County commissioners.

Though Trump won nearly 62% of the vote in Otero County in 2020, county commissioners have said they are not satisfied with results of the state’s audit of the vote count nor assurances by their Republican county clerk that elections this year will be accurate.

County commissioners could not immediately be reached for comment Tuesday.

Marquardt, the commissioner, laughed Monday at the suggestion that a court might intervene in the election dispute.

“And so then what? They’re going to send us to the pokey?” she said.

A man who appears to be seen taking photos of security checkpoints and hallways in the U.S. Capitol during a tour led by Republican Representative Barry Loudermilk on Jan. 5, 2021, is also allegedly seen—and heard—in footage captured from January 6 where he is outside of the Capitol screaming threats at Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, and Reps. Jerry Nadler and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. 

The committee released segments of security footage from the tour on Wednesday morning, arriving fresh on the heels of an announcement by U.S. Capitol Police chief Tom Manger stating that the department found “no evidence” that Loudermilk led a “reconnaissance tour” of the complex with supporters of former President Donald Trump.

The man who appears to be taking photographs has not yet been identified publicly but according to multiple outlets including CNN, he has been interviewed by the select committee. 

RELATED STORY: Insurrection probe hits lawmaker who allegedly gave tours of Capitol with request for cooperation

Committee chairman Bennie Thompson first asked Loudermilk to cooperate with the probe voluntarily this May, giving him an opportunity to discuss the video footage the panel discovered during its review of key Capitol surveillance video. 

In a statement, USCP Chief Manger said footage reviewed by the department did show Loudermilk with a group of 12 people that initially ticked up to 15 as they walked through a number of office buildings around the U.S. Capitol. Manger said the guests did not “appear in any tunnels” leading to the Capitol itself.

The committee’s release appears to challenge that narrative, or at the very least, point out behavior it still deems highly suspicious. 

“The foregoing information raises questions the Select Committee must answer,” Thompson wrote in a letter to Loudermilk on Wednesday morning. 

“Public reporting and witness accounts indicate some individuals and groups engaged in efforts to gather information about the layout of the U.S. Capitol as well as House and Senate office buildings in advance of January 6, 2021,” Thompson wrote. “For example, in the week following Jan. 6, 2021, members urged law enforcement leaders to investigate sightings of ‘outside groups in the complex’ on Jan. 5, 2021, that ‘appeared to be associated with the rally at the White House the following day.”

Letter to Rep Loudermilk Capitol Tour June 15 by Daily Kos on Scribd

The individuals accompanying Loudermilk, the committee noted, “photographed and recorded areas of the complex not typically of interest to tourists, including hallways, staircases, and security checkpoints.”

Including an image in the letter of an individual appearing to photograph a staircase in the basement of the Longworth House Office Building, Thompson notes Loudermilk is just nearby talking to other members of the group in the background.

In the nearly three-minute-long video shared by the committee, the man believed to be part of the Capitol complex tour given by Loudermilk on the 5th is recorded by a friend on the morning of the 6th.

They are near the Washington Monument when his friend shows him a flagpole he’s carrying with a sharpened end. 

“That’s for a certain person,” the companion tells the man. 

“That’s right, that’s for somebody special, somebody special,” the man responds. 

On the day of the Capitol assault, that same man taking photographs of the halls a day before is excitedly heard clamoring about “patriots” converging on the Capitol in a recorded video.

“There’s no escape Pelosi, Schumer, Nadler, we’re coming for you. We’re coming in like white on rice for Pelosi, Nadler, Schumer, even you AOC. We’re coming to take you out and pull you out by your hairs.

How about that Pelosi? Mind as well make yourself another appointment. When I get done with you you gonna need a shine up on top of that bald head,” he says. 

The video also shows two photos obtained by the committee that appear to have been taken by the same person. One photo is of a nameplate for Rep. Jerry Nadler, something that would typically appear just outside of a lawmaker’s office. Another photo captured the physical directory of Democratic Majority members.

Before the video came out, on Tuesday, Loudermilk accused the committee of falsely accusing him of giving reconnaissance tours. 

“To my knowledge, no one that visited my office on January 5 was involved in any illegal activity on Jan. 6, so if the committee has the evidence they should release it, not just make accusations,” Loudermilk told CNN. 

A representative for U.S. Capitol Police did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Punchbowl News was the first to report that the committee had this footage. 

When calls for an investigation were first raised by a group of more than 30 Democrats about Loudermilk’s tours, he issued a swift denial and filed a House Ethics complaint against Democrats who demanded a closer examination. 

Loudermilk slammed the Democrat's request for an investigation as a “stain” on Congress.  He also voted to overturn the certification of the 2020 election results on Jan. 6 after the attack.

During the riot, Loudermilk, according to texts obtained by the select committee, sent a message to Trump’s then-chief of staff Mark Meadows. 

‘It’s really bad up here on the Hill. They have breached the Capitol,” he wrote. 

Loudermilk has defended the tour he gave of the Capitol on Jan. 5 as something he did for “a constituent family with young children” merely eager to meet with their congressman.

A member of Democratic Rep. Jesús “Chuy” García’s staff, deputy communications director and digital director Ben Kamens, said on Twitter Wednesday that he saw the group identified by the committee in the Capitol Tunnel between the Longworth and Cannon and Capitol building between 1 and 2 p.m. on Jan. 5. 

Kamens said they were unescorted. He has already provided this information to the committee and law enforcement.

Kamens told Daily Kos over email Wednesday that he remotely interviewed voluntarily with the committee in February and sat for just under an hour. 

“I approached one of them and asked them to put on a mask because people that work here have pre-existing conditions and it was before the wide availability of vaccines,” Kamens said. 

Indeed, the Capitol building was closed to visitors and anyone on unofficial business. 

“It was a group of mostly older women [in their] 40s to 50s and young men, late teens early 20s that I saw,” Rep. Garcia’s communications director said Wednesday. “I wouldn’t have gone that way if it wasn’t an intern’s first day and I wasn’t showing her how to get around on our way to get her ID badge.”

At the time Kamens said he witnessed this, he was working as a congressional aide to Rep. Andy Kim, a New Jersey Democrat. 

Kim inadvertently made headlines after the insurrection. He was spotted cleaning up debris from the floor of the rotunda after the building was secured.

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a New York Democrat who has experienced routine harassment by the former president’s supporters and Republican members of Congress responded to the video release in a tweet on Wednesday.

Rep. Loudermilk did not respond immediately to a request for comment Wednesday.

He released a statement late Wednesday afternoon, however, accusing the committee of “doubling down on a smear campaign” against him and claimed to have received death threats as a result of the footage’s release. 

The Georgia Republican also said he did not recognize the man making threats toward Pelosi, Schumer, Nadler and Ocasio-Cortez.

CBS News reported on Wednesday that it reached Al Foley, identified as “one of the Rep. Loudermilk’s constituents who toured the Capitol with the Congressman” on Jan. 5 and was previously interviewed by the Jan. 6 Committee. 

Foley told CBS that suggestions it was a reconnaissance tour were “the farthest thing from the truth.” The allegation, Foley said, was “disgusting.” 

A spokesman for the committee told Daily Kos on Wednesday that he did not believe Foley was the man taking photos of the stairwell leading up to the Longworth Building. 

In another clip obtained by NBC News on Wednesday that was not a part of the original three-minute clip released by the committee, the same man seen taking pictures during the tour with Loudermilk on Jan. 5 filmed another part of his visit in the Capitol.

In related news, in a court filing on Wednesday, Proud Boy Zachary Rehl entered a document onto the record that generated a considerable stir this spring: an extensive plan to attack and occupy federal buildings. Proud Boy ringleader Henry “Enrique” Tarrio, who is now facing seditious conspiracy charges for crimes connected to Jan. 6, allegedly cited the plan during the attack. 

RELATED STORY: Tarrio is back in jail and feds find chilling plan to storm federal buildings 

1776 Returns by Daily Kos on Scribd

We talk to expert Brandi Buchman about everything you need to know about the Jan. 6 committee on Daily Kos' The Brief podcast

Grift made Donald Trump. Grift made the modern-day Republican Party. It seems almost inevitable that the two would eventually come together to present the greatest threat to the nation in more than a century: January 6, 2020.

Few of the revelations unveiled by the Jan. 6 committee on Monday about Trump’s fundraising were really new. After all, months after the event, former Trump fixer and attorney Michael Cohen declared Trump’s claims of election fraud the “greatest grift in U.S. history.” He said that Trump “has made it very clear that he is grifting off of the American people, these supporters, these individuals that are just sending money to him at record levels.”

But the connection the committee made to that grift—the Big Rip-off, as Rep. Zoe Lofgren termed it—to the violent and horrifying events on Jan. 6: that clicked. As did the case the committee seems to be making for felony wire fraud. That’s the takeaway from one prosecutor, anyway: New York state Attorney General Letitia James. “The new details revealed tonight related to January 6 are disturbing,” James tweeted Monday. “It’s my duty to investigate allegations of fraud or potential misconduct in New York. This incident is no exception.”

RELATED:  Jan. 6 committee follows the money, builds fraud case against Trump and team in the 'Big Rip-Off'

James is already investigating the Trump family and the Trump Organization for fraud in New York real estate practices. The bar in that investigation is relatively high: “James will need to show that the three eldest Trump children and their father knew what they were doing was wrong—and did it anyway.”

The Jan. 6 committee arguably has met that bar so far, presenting testimony from various members of Trump’s own team that they told him he had lost, that there was no fraud, that there was no basis for continuing the Big Lie and—this is the fraud part—for continuing to fundraise on it. There’s the financial fraud.

Campaign Action

Then there’s the fomenting violent sedition part. Al Schmidt, former Philadelphia city commissioner, spoke to that Monday. He stressed that the city took “seriously” every claim the Trump campaign raised about fake ballots cast in dead people’s names. “Not only was there no evidence of 8,000 dead voters voting in Pennsylvania, there was not even evidence of eight,” Schmidt said.

For his efforts, Schmidt and his family were inundated with death threats from the MAGA crowd. “The threats became much more specific, much more graphic, and included not just me by name, but included members of my family, their names, ages, address, pictures of our home, every bit of detail you could imagine,” he said.

That’s the very dangerous side of the tradition of grift that the Republicans have been perfecting for the past 60 years, as author and historian Rick Perlstein told The Washington Post’s Greg Sargent. “This phenomenon of conservative Republican leaders seeing their constituencies as a pool of marks to squeeze money out of really does go back to the beginnings of the conservative takeover of the Republican Party in the 1960s,” Perlstein said. “As is so often the case in the Republican Party under the Trumpist reign, it takes normal historical patterns of behavior and turns them up to 11.”

“Right-wing voters are acclimated into an understanding of the world in which they are being victimized by dark forces,” he continued. “That’s a great way for conservative leaders to get money shoveled in their direction. But it’s also a great way to form what Marxists used to call a ‘cadre,’ a group of fanatically dedicated followers.”

“Now we face the phenomenon of millions of people, many of them armed, who are identifying their own safety, comfort and flourishing as human beings with the political success of Donald Trump and his allies. […]  If you think the stakes are whether civilization itself survives, and that you’re dealing with a cabal of shadowy enemies, of course you’re licensed to use any means to stop them,” Perlstein said.

Back in March, I started off an article with the sentence, “Congressional redistricting — the process of redrawing the nation’s 435 congressional districts to reflect the results of the 2020 census — is not quite finished, but it’s getting darn close.” Clearly, I jinxed it: Since then, the national redistricting landscape has changed substantially, thanks to a new Republican-drawn plan in Florida and a court-ordered remap of New York.

Moreover, it’s taken the 2021-22 redistricting cycle from a clear win for Democrats to something far more ambiguous — perhaps best described as the preservation of a Republican-leaning status quo. And a ruling earlier this month striking down Louisiana’s congressional map is yet another reminder that the 2021-22 redistricting cycle ain’t over till it’s over — and, in fact, very likely won’t be over until well after 2022. That said, the map below is probably the one that will get used in this year’s congressional elections (with Louisiana pending, of course).¹⁷

And as has been true for decades, this national congressional map is biased toward Republicans. Assuming Louisiana’s congressional map is reinstated upon appeal,¹⁸ the 2022 House map will feature 208 congressional districts with a FiveThirtyEight partisan lean¹⁹ of R+5 or redder, compared with 187 districts that have a FiveThirtyEight partisan lean of D+5 or bluer. Throw in the highly competitive seats, and 225 districts would be more Republican than the country as a whole, while 210 would be more Democratic. In other words, if the national House popular vote were perfectly tied, Republicans would theoretically win 225 seats and Democrats would win 210 (ignoring, for now, other factors like candidate quality).²⁰

By this measure, however, Democrats are actually in a slightly better position than they were before, having added a handful of Democratic-leaning seats. Under the old congressional lines (those used in the 2020 election), there were 208 congressional districts with partisan leans of R+5 or redder and 181 with partisan leans of D+5 or bluer. Counting swing seats, 230 seats were redder than the nation as a whole, while 205 seats were bluer.

However, by other measures, the new map is better for Republicans. First, the “tipping-point” congressional seat — i.e., the majority-making 218th bluest and 218th reddest seat in the House — is slightly more Republican-leaning. Under the old lines, the tipping-point seat had a FiveThirtyEight partisan lean of R+2.3; under the new ones, the tipping-point seat will have a FiveThirtyEight partisan lean of R+2.5 (again, assuming Louisiana’s map is reinstated on appeal).²¹

In the short term (i.e., in this year’s midterms), Republicans are also more likely to pick up seats from redistricting. Remember that all the numbers above merely reflect each seat’s underlying partisanship; they don’t account for which party currently holds each seat. And when we do that, we see that more Democratic-held seats have been turned red this redistricting cycle than Republican-held seats have been turned blue. By my calculations, Republicans can expect a net gain of roughly three or four seats this November due to the effects of redistricting alone — not accounting for shifts in voter preference.²²

Watch: https://abcnews.go.com/fivethirtyeight/video/uh-gerrymandering-work-56183686

Some of the House map’s GOP bias is due to geography (i.e., the Democratic tendency to cluster in cities, plus rural areas’ tendency to vote Republican). But a lot is also due to deliberate decisions by partisan mapmakers — namely, Republican lawmakers drawing congressional maps that advantage their own party. In 2014, a pair of academics created a metric called the efficiency gap, which attempts to quantify this phenomenon by measuring how efficient a map is at converting votes into seats for a given party. And using this measure, we find that seven of the 11 most biased congressional maps in the country were drawn by Republicans, while only one Democratic-drawn map (Illinois’s) provides Democrats with more than 1.2 undeserved seats. 

In fairness, this wasn’t because Democrats didn’t want to gerrymander. If given the opportunity, they may have tried to draw Democratic-friendly maps in states like Colorado or Washington where they have full control of state government. However, they didn’t have the chance; those states have vested the power of redistricting in independent or bipartisan commissions. (Though commissions are not a cure-all for gerrymandering — maps like California’s and New Jersey’s still have notable Democratic biases despite being drawn by commissions.) As it was, though, only five maps this cycle (worth 32 districts) ended up getting enacted unilaterally by Democratic politicians or institutions,²³ while 18 (worth 171 districts) were enacted unilaterally by Republican ones. 

That’s an even bigger disparity than we expected at the beginning of the cycle, when we observed that Democrats controlled the redistricting process in eight states worth 75 districts but Republicans controlled the process in 20 states worth 187 districts. That’s because liberal courts cracked down on gerrymandering this cycle and generally enforced fairer congressional maps — even when it hurt the Democratic Party. Most notably, Democrats initially drew maps with galling efficiency gaps in Maryland and New York, only to see them get struck down in court. However, courts in Republican-controlled states largely did not return the favor. For example, despite appearing to be slam-dunk illegal gerrymanders under established judicial precedent, Republican-drawn maps in Alabama, Florida and Ohio look like they will stand for at least the 2022 election. 

Watch: https://abcnews.go.com/fivethirtyeight/video/gerrymandering-fault-56134801

The resulting national congressional rat’s nest doesn’t just hurt Democrats; it also hurts the average voter who just wants their vote to matter. As Republicans drew maps to help protect their vulnerable incumbents, they decreased the number of competitive House seats around the country. The number of swing seats has been declining for years due to both gerrymandering and simple polarization, but this year, we’re on pace for the smallest number of non-safe seats (defined as having partisan leans between D+15 and R+15) in decades. 

By our reckoning, the new maps²⁴ have six fewer highly competitive seats (partisan leans between D+5 and R+5) than the old ones. The number of competitive Republican districts (partisan leans between R+5 and R+15) has decreased by even more — 13 seats! However, the number of competitive Democratic districts (partisan leans between D+5 and D+15) has increased by 12.

This reflects the different goals the two parties had in redistricting this year, as can be seen plainly when we break down the seat change by which party enacted the new maps. Having won the 2011-12 redistricting cycle, Republicans had little left on their redistricting to-do list other than to reinforce Republican-held seats that weren’t as red as they could be. As a result, they drew a whopping 18 fewer swing and light-red seats in exchange for 16 more dark-red ones.

On the other hand, the number of solidly blue seats decreased by three in states where Democrats unilaterally redistricted. But the number of light-blue seats grew by six. That’s because Democrats’ goal in redistricting wasn’t to draw safer seats for themselves; it was to draw more seats that leaned Democratic, whether by a lot or a little. The way they did this in states like Nevada and New Mexico was to dismantle solidly blue districts and spread their wealth of Democratic voters out among more districts. 

To be sure, it’s a risky strategy. Democrats could hold several seats they might otherwise have lost — but, in a particularly good election year for Republicans, they could also lose seats that wouldn’t have been in danger under the old maps. But for a party trying to dig its way out from under a Republican-biased House map, it may be worth risking more losses in a worst-case scenario in order to make it possible for the party to win a majority in (more common) neutral scenarios.

Up to this point, I’ve been focusing on the partisan impact of the 2021-22 redistricting cycle. But I’d be remiss not to mention the racial impact too. As part of their efforts to draw the best possible maps for their side, both parties — but mostly Republicans — neglected to provide full representation to people of color. 

Sometimes, this took the form of denying seats to racial minorities even when their numbers could support them. For example, Texas’s nonwhite population increased by almost 4 million people between the 2010 and 2020 censuses, almost single-handedly earning the state two new congressional districts. But the state did not add any new districts where people of color were the largest racial or ethnic group. Similarly, it is readily possible to draw two predominantly Black districts in Alabama and Louisiana, but the maps passed by those states’ Republican legislatures contained just one predominantly Black district each. (This is why Louisiana’s map has been found illegal, for now.) The new maps in Arkansas, Georgia and South Carolina are also currently subject to lawsuits over racial gerrymandering.

Other times, this took the form of actively decreasing the clout of nonwhite voters. This is difficult, if not impossible, to quantify since a racial group does not have to constitute a majority of a district in order for that district to elect that racial group’s preferred candidate. But districts in Florida, Georgia, Maryland, Michigan, Nevada and North Carolina all got whiter to the extent that their ability to consistently elect Black or Hispanic voters’ candidate of choice is now in question. Most egregiously, the predominantly Black congressional district between Tallahassee and Jacksonville — which was created explicitly to elect Black voters’ candidates of choice and both Democrats and Republicans alike agreed was constitutionally protected — no longer exists under Florida’s new map.

Voting-rights advocates are suing over that maneuver, too, and the case is currently pending before a mid-level Florida appeals court. A final decision isn’t expected before the midterms (especially since the losing side would almost certainly appeal to the Florida Supreme Court anyway), but that doesn’t mean the lawsuit will disappear. In fact, it is just one of many lawsuits that could continue to change the face of the national congressional map for years after the “2021-22” redistricting cycle is supposed to be complete.

On that note, we already know that at least one state will have to go through the redistricting process again during 2023-24: North Carolina. The North Carolina Supreme Court struck down the legislature’s first two attempts at drawing a congressional map and eventually imposed its own, but the map is only valid for one election cycle. Several other states could join North Carolina. There’s Florida, of course, where past rulings by the Florida Supreme Court (albeit a less conservative one) suggest that the new map should be struck down as both a racial and partisan gerrymander. This would necessitate a complete redraw ahead of the elections in 2024 — or, if the case really drags on, 2026.

The Ohio Supreme Court is also currently considering the legality of Ohio Republicans’ second attempt at a congressional map, which is not all that different from the one that was struck down as a partisan gerrymander in January. If they strike it down again, Ohio will have to adopt a new map for the 2024 elections. And regardless, Ohio will have to adopt a new map for 2026 anyway, since this one was not passed with bipartisan support, which is required in Ohio for a map to last the entire decade.

There are also Alabama and Louisiana, whose maps seem destined to be decided by a single U.S. Supreme Court decision next year, as they both hinge on the question of whether the Voting Rights Act requires them each to draw a second Black district. Because this is a federal case, the decision here could also inspire — or force — other states to redraw their maps to include fewer or more minority-opportunity seats, depending on which way the ruling goes.

Watch: https://abcnews.go.com/fivethirtyeight/video/gerrymandered-districts-weird-56189221

But the case with the biggest potential repercussions is a federal lawsuit brought by Republicans in North Carolina that makes a radical argument: that only state legislatures, not state courts, have the power to draw new congressional districts. The Supreme Court will decide on Thursday whether to take the case, and if they decide to embrace its argument to the fullest, every congressional map not enacted by a legislature could be invalidated. This would mean not only throwing out court-ordered maps in Connecticut, Minnesota, New Hampshire, New York, Pennsylvania, Virginia and Wisconsin, but potentially also commission-drawn maps in Arizona, California, Colorado, Hawaii, Idaho, Michigan, Montana, New Jersey and Washington. In other words, the 2020s could see a historic amount of mid-decade redistricting.

And this underscores the folly of ever declaring redistricting complete; maps are never set in stone. The national congressional map might be “darn close” to final for 2022, but it will continue to evolve in the years after. While it’s tempting to wrap up our redistricting coverage with a neat little bow, I’m not going to do that. Redistricting doesn’t work like that. Maps could still change; partisan and racial biases could still get better or worse. This isn’t goodbye; it’s see you later.

BRUSSELS — A new crypto crisis is looming — and companies fear the regulators’ ax is about to drop.

One of the biggest lenders within the crypto market, Celsius Network, is struggling as the booming sector turns sour. The lender announced early Monday morning that it was suspending withdrawals and crypto trading functions due to “extreme market conditions,” a decision that will make it impossible for people to access the digital assets they had deposited with the company.

Celsius’s decision effectively froze the digital assets of more than 2 million customers, many of whom had made deposits on the promise of advertised annual yields of as high as 18 percent — rates that are unheard of among traditional bank accounts.

A collapse could leave those depositors penniless.

The company’s balance sheet has been in a freefall since late last year, shortly after it raised $750 million from top venture capital firms and a major Canadian pension system, with reported assets plummeting by 50 percent since late December. Celsius’s digital token, CEL, has also deteriorated in price, from trading close to $4 in late 2021 to just 0.32 cents now. Another rival company has already offered to scoop up certain assets in light of “what appears to be the insolvency” of Celsius.

Crypto companies are already on high alert after weeks of uncertainty in a market downturn that has seen the value of the whole market drop by two-thirds since its $3 trillion peak in early November. Crypto markets are also reeling from the recent collapse of TerraUSD, a so-called stablecoin whose popularity soared thanks to the sky-high returns promised through a connected lending platform. Celsius’s tumble has done little to help the market turmoil, with the price of Bitcoin falling further to around $22,000 — a far cry from its November high of $67,000.

The ongoing crisis has raised new fears that market regulators could put the kibosh on the nascent crypto lending businesses that have positioned themselves as alternatives to traditional banks.

“I am pretty angry at how reckless[ly] Celsius is conducting their business,” Crypto Finance’s chief executive, Patrick Heusser, said in an email, referring to the company’s promises of high yields. “My guess is that a rather strong or overreacting measure by the regulators will be the result (instead of a thoughtful one).”

“In the end, the consumer is getting punished (again) and also all the serious service providers that act thoughtful and in a compliant and regulated way,” he added.

Heusser is far from alone. At an Amsterdam fintech conference last week, attendees working for crypto companies were whispering concerns about Celsius and fearing a regulatory backlash. Among the few who were comfortable speaking about it publicly was Stephen Richardson, vice president of product strategy and business solutions at the crypto company Fireblocks.

Regulators would be “very swift” to address a crisis in crypto lending, he told the audience, especially after the recent crisis in the stablecoin market saw investors lose billions. “We need to be careful there,” he said.

Celsius didn’t respond to POLITICO for comment.

A watchful eye

Market volatility is nothing new for most crypto companies. This time is different, however, because the regulators on both sides of the Atlantic are watching — and overall market sentiment is much more bearish.

For more than a year, American state and federal agencies have been ramping up their efforts around the lending businesses, which is more widespread in the U.S. BlockFi agreed to pay $100 million to the Securities and Exchange Commission and to nearly three dozen state regulators last year to settle charges that it had operated an illegal lending business, while Celsius and other businesses were slapped with cease-and-desist letters from at least four state regulators.

“It’s mind-boggling to me,” John Reed Stark, a former chief of the SEC’s Office of Internet Enforcement, said in an interview, adding that lending platforms have become “a plague with no regulatory oversight, no consumer protections. No fiduciary infrastructure of any type.”

The EU’s executive arm and legislators in Brussels are also keeping an eye on things as they close in on a new bill that aims to regulate Europe’s markets in crypto assets, dubbed MiCA.

The bill will set the standard for stablecoins, digital assets that are pegged either to a national currency or to a basket of liquid assets to keep their value steady. TerraUSD’s recent collapse strengthened legislators’ resolve for these rules, especially since the “algorithmic” stablecoin relied on financial engineering to keep the link to the greenback.

MiCA doesn’t target crypto lending. But it sets strict industry standards and supervision for crypto token-issuing companies that set up shop in Europe after the rules come into force. Celsius’ crisis shows the need to strengthen those draft rules to ensure that preexisting crypto companies are also in scope, according to Green MEP Ernest Urtasun.

“The mis-selling scandals are growing in the crypto sector while consumer and investor protection rules for [retail investors] do not adequately address the reality of this new sector,” said the Spaniard, who has played an influential role in negotiating MiCA and anti-money laundering rules for crypto in the European Parliament.

He also took aim at a grandfathering clause in the European Commission’s proposal of MiCA that “would prevent the application of the new EU set of rules to actors already operating.” That measure would in theory leave Celsius exempt from MiCA, because the lender already has an office in Lithuania. “Cases like Celsius are showing once again the need to remove such provision,” he said.

Collateral damage

Chief among the concerns of market entrepreneurs is that regulators could restrict or ban crypto lending altogether. While the EU has no uniform set rules for lending outside of mortgage and credit loans, the fear is the European Commission could feel compelled to shut the sector down. That’s unlikely to happen within the remainder of its legislative cycle, which ends in 2024, unless the crisis is too big to sit idle.

Certain lenders, such as Celsius — which billed itself as a bridge between traditional banking models and crypto-based decentralized finance — have lured retail investors onto their platform by advertising high returns if they deposit their crypto assets with them. Like traditional banks, these platforms lend these funds out to borrowers in exchange for collateral that’s confiscated if loans aren’t repaid.

Many of these loans are used by big crypto investors to buy more digital assets because their interest rates are much lower than they would otherwise be on traditional financial markets. This strategy can bring huge returns on crypto investments in boom times. The losses, however, can be massive if the market turns sour.

Like its competitors in the business, Celsius uses its deposits for lending and profits from the difference in interest.

But authorities in New Jersey and Texas have found that the platform also generates revenue “through cryptocurrency trading, lending, and borrowing,” as well as “engaging in propriety trading” — the practice of investing for direct market gain rather than on behalf of clients. Their concern is that Celsius became overexposed through these practices, leaving its depositors on the hook.

“We are now seeing the negative effects of unregulated … lending platforms that are under-collateralized” in the crypto market, said Marshall Hayner, chief executive of Metal Pay, a U.S.-based crypto payments company.

Hayner fears that the regulator’s axe would also hit crypto lenders in the decentralized finance space, where computer programs execute and record transactions in multiple online ledgers without the use of a central entity.

DeFi borrowers often have to provide collateral that’s worth more than the loan that they’re seeking from a consortium of crypto investors — much like peer-to-peer lending.

“It’s important we protect innovation for crypto in America, while preserving the safeguards we have come to expect in banking and traditional financial services,” Hayner said. “A good step is a strong framework for stablecoin regulation that is not reactionary in nature but thoughtful and supportive for competition.”

 A collaboration centering Black voices and exploring the importance and impact of Juneteenth

Today, Vox and Capital B, a local-national nonprofit news organization centering Black voices, announced a new editorial initiative examining the history, significance, and impact of Juneteenth. The effort highlights and explores how all Americans ought to observe the historical celebration, which marks the day in 1865 when a group of enslaved people in Galveston, Texas, finally learned that they were free from the institution of slavery, almost two-and-a-half years after President Abraham Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation. The effort will illuminate a central question: What does it mean to celebrate the end of slavery — and what truths about Black freedom does it expose? As we approach the first anniversary of the creation of the federal holiday, Vox and Capital B explore how Juneteenth can serve as a moment for reflection, reckoning, and a celebration of freedom.

“Capital B and Vox are aligned in our missions to provide context about the issues that matter most to our audiences, and it made perfect sense to come together for a Juneteenth partnership. Joining our respective editorial strengths to add a unique depth and purpose to this coverage,” said Lauren Williams, CEO, and co-founder of Capital B.

“Exploring the big questions and providing clarity to the public is the central mission of Vox,” said Swati Sharma, editor-in-chief of Vox. “There is no better partner than Capital B, with their parallel commitment to serving the audience and to meditate on the significance, history, and importance of Juneteenth.”

Contributors to this package include Sean Collins on how Juneteenth isn’t just a celebration of freedom, but a monument to America’s failures; Julia Craven on how Juneteenth merch is American consumerism at its most crass; Jewel Wicker on how three Black women couldn’t find a place where their families felt safe, so they bought a town; Fabiola Cineas on how there’s no freedom without reparations; Ian Millhiser on how democracy in America is a rigged game; and Kenya Hunter on the Juneteenth flag, explained.

The artwork accompanying these pieces is created by Detroit-based artist and illustrator KaCeyKal! who uses vivid colors, unique shapes, and abstract bodies to tell a story through print and painting.

The Constitution was written to thwart Black freedom. But we can change the rules.

Part of the Juneteenth issue of The Highlight, our home for ambitious stories that explain our world.

For six years, at the height of Southern leaders’ massive resistance to desegregation, Derrick Bell held one of the most harrowing jobs in the legal profession.

From 1960 to 1966, as an attorney with the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, Bell oversaw desegregation lawsuits in the South, trying to make real the integration promised by Brown v. Board of Education.

In the first decade after Brown, integration made little headway — by 1964, only 1 in 85 African American students in the South attended integrated schools. Often, Bell and his colleagues couldn’t even find a plaintiff willing to sue a segregated district, because Black families justifiably feared they’d be targeted by the Ku Klux Klan if their names appeared on a lawsuit.

Black civil rights lawyers also risked their lives litigating cases. Once, while he was defending two criminal suspects in Tennessee, future Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall was arrested on false charges and nearly lynched by a white mob.

Bell, who died in 2011, eventually left behind his career as a full-time civil rights lawyer. But the experience of watching the promise of equality beat down by violent white supremacists informed his work as a critical race scholar.

“Racial equality is, in fact, not a realistic goal,” he wrote in 1992, warning that “by constantly aiming for a status that is unobtainable in a perilously racist America, black Americans face frustration and despair.”

To be clear, Bell did not counsel passive despair. “We must maintain the struggle against racism else the erosion of black rights will become even worse than it is now,” Bell warned in his essay, and he viewed this constant striving as worthy in its own right. “The struggle for freedom is, at bottom, a manifestation of our humanity that survives and grows stronger through resistance to oppression,” he wrote, “even if that oppression is never overcome.”

Bell understood something profound about the United States: The American political system is a rigged game. It was originally meant to advantage enslavers and today benefits anti-egalitarian actors with little interest in true racial equality.

That fact has led to the constant “erosion of black rights” that Bell chronicled — something clearly on display one year ago, not long after President Joe Biden had signed legislation marking Juneteenth as a federal holiday. In the president’s words, the holiday “marks both the long, hard night of slavery and subjugation, and a promise of a brighter morning to come.”

Two weeks later, the Supreme Court defiled that promise, imposing new limits on the Voting Rights Act, which has, since 1965, forbidden race discrimination in elections. The Court’s new restrictions on the Voting Rights Act are unlikely to be the last.

Even as the United States celebrates freedom for African Americans, the political equality that sustains that freedom is slipping away.

---

The pattern in American civil rights history has been brief periods of rapid pro-egalitarian progress — think the post-Civil War period or the civil rights era — followed by much longer periods of retrenchment, when dominant groups claw back many of those gains.

If the United States is to break its cycle of brief periods of egalitarian triumphs, and longer periods of resentment and retreat, we must have a Constitution that, unlike our current one, fully honors the principle that all people are created equal.

The original Constitution — that is, the document drafted at the Constitutional Convention of 1787 — was a truly monstrous document. It was, in the words of abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison, “a covenant with death, and an agreement with hell.”

The framers, who included both enslavers and staunch opponents of slavery, produced a document that contains at least four provisions added for the very purpose of protecting slavery. Several other features of the Constitution, like the Electoral College, for example, may not have been inserted for the purpose of promoting slavery, but they certainly had that effect.

Though modern-day scholars disagree about whether the Electoral College was, in the words of Harvard historian Jill Lepore, “a compromise over slavery,” it nevertheless gave tremendous political power to the states that enslaved the most people. That’s because the Constitution gives each state a number of electoral votes matching the number of seats it controls in Congress, and the Constitution’s infamous three-fifths clause permitted slave-holding states to count 60 percent of their enslaved population when US House seats were apportioned.

Even after the Northern population outstripped the South’s to such a degree that slave states could not dominate the House, another anti-democratic feature of our Constitution ensured that enslavers would wield outsize power.

The Senate remained a bastion of power for enslavers for generations. Because the Constitution gives each state two senators regardless of its population, enslavers could still block anti-slavery legislation so long as they did not permit the total number of free states to exceed the number of slave states, something they did successfully for decades.

---

Two hundred and thirty-five years after the Constitutional Convention, the Constitution remains a profoundly inegalitarian document. The Senate and the Electoral College remain stains on the soul of the nation.

Similarly, while three constitutional amendments ratified after the Civil War abolish slavery, pledge equal citizenship rights to all Americans, and promise equal voting rights, these promises were only as valuable as the public officials entrusted with keeping them. As anyone familiar with the history of the Jim Crow South knows, most of these officials didn’t even begin to keep these promises for nearly a century.

The times when those promises were kept at all can be attributed to “interest convergence,” a phenomenon Bell first wrote about more than four decades ago: “The interest of blacks in achieving racial equality is accommodated only when that interest converges with the interests of whites in policy-making positions.”

Bell did not argue that white people “concerned about the immorality of racial inequality” are nonexistent, but he believed that this cohort of white people is insufficient to form a victorious political coalition when it links arms with Black people.

To some extent, Bell’s principle is implicit in the fact that racial minorities are, well, in the minority. And Black people have historically carried a particular burden because white supremacists have often tried to separate them from the social and political mainstream, in many cases through explicitly segregationist policies.

The Constitution’s pathologies exaggerate this problem. Because of the Electoral College, Senate malapportionment, and quasi-constitutional barriers to legislation such as the filibuster, Black Americans — and the broader Democratic coalition that most Black voters belong to — need to win supermajorities in multiple elections to pass legislation protecting their rights, like a law restoring the Voting Rights Act.

Even if they were to successfully do that, Republicans need only to file a lawsuit and convince five of their fellow partisans on the Supreme Court to strike down that legislation.

This is not a new dilemma — the structural barriers facing Democrats today pale in comparison to the ones facing enslaved Black people in 1860, or the ones facing civil rights activists in 1960. But one of the frustrating things about this particular moment in American history is that our Constitution now prevents Black Americans from achieving crucial civil rights victories even when a coalition aligned with their interests controls the Congress and the White House — and when their interests align with a majority of the nation.

That is a potent reminder that, in those rare moments when an egalitarian coalition does wield power, it should emphasize structural reforms that will allow it to achieve future victories and sustain past ones.

Because the best way to win a rigged game is to change the rules.

---

In 2022, the interests of Black people have converged with the nation’s majority political party, at least on the crucial topic of voting rights.

The president of the United States supports legislation to restore the sort of voting rights protections that the Supreme Court stripped away in Shelby County and similar cases. So does the vice president. So do 219 members of the House of Representatives. So does every Democrat in the Senate — although Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV) backs a weaker version of this legislation than the Democratic leadership initially proposed.

Yet, because of structural barriers such as Senate malapportionment and the filibuster, this convergence of interests is not enough to pass a bill through Congress.

In the current Senate, Democrats and Republicans control an equal number of seats, but the Democratic “half” represents 43 million more people than the Republican “half.” Black people, and racial minorities generally, bear the brunt of this uneven representation. According to a 2019 memo by the progressive think tank Data for Progress, Black voters have nearly 20 percent less influence over Senate elections than they would if Senate seats were distributed fairly so that every American’s vote counted the same.

In effect, while the Constitution once treated Black Americans as three-fifths of a person, today’s Senate treats Black Americans as four-fifths of a person.

Absent structural reform, it’s going to get worse. By 2040, according to a University of Virginia analysis of census projections, half of the United States will live in eight states. About 70 percent will live in 16 states — which means that just over 30 percent of the population will control 68 percent of the Senate.

This sorting of most Americans into just a few states has profound implications for Black voters, who are overwhelmingly Democratic. In the last three presidential elections, the Democratic candidate received 90 percent or more of the Black vote — and it may soon be impossible for Democrats to win a majority in the United States Senate.

One of the best predictors of partisan voting patterns in the United States is population density — densely populated areas tend to be Democratic bastions, while sparsely populated areas are typically Republican strongholds. If this pattern holds, Republicans may soon gain a permanent supermajority in the Senate.

Without a Senate majority, Democrats not only won’t be able to pass federal legislation, they also won’t be able to confirm justices to replace the ones who voted to gut the Voting Rights Act. In effect, Black Americans — as well as non-Black Democrats, urban residents, and liberals generally — will only be able to achieve policy victories when their interests converge with an overwhelmingly white Republican Party.

Perhaps that will happen occasionally, especially on symbolic matters; the vote to make Juneteenth a federal holiday was bipartisan. It’s also possible that, especially as the United States slides closer to one-party rule, an increasing number of conservative Black Americans will join the GOP in the hopes of gaining some modicum of political power.

But on issues like voting rights, it’s hard to imagine Black interests converging with Republican interests anytime soon. Why would the GOP protect the voting rights of a cohort that overwhelmingly prefers Democrats?

---

It’s not that there isn’t hope for Black Americans. It’s easy to design a more just and egalitarian system than the US Constitution. But it is also very hard to make an ideal constitution into a reality.

The obvious first step is to abolish the Senate or to, as University of Connecticut historian Manisha Sinha suggested to me, “make our Senate a bit like the House of Lords” — a largely advisory body that does not have the power to block legislation outright.

Assuming that the United States retains a system where the chief executive is elected separately from the legislature, the Electoral College also must go. In 2020, President Joe Biden defeated Republican Donald Trump by more than 7 million votes. Yet he would have lost the presidency if only 43,000 Biden voters in Georgia, Arizona, and Wisconsin had not cast a ballot. That’s not acceptable in a nation that purports to be a democratic republic.

Then there’s the problem of gerrymandering.

Racial gerrymandering remains a prominent feature of American elections, and the Supreme Court appears determined to keep it that way. Last February, for example, the Court voted 5-4 to reinstate an Alabama congressional map that gave Black voters 14 percent of the state’s US House seats — even though African Americans make up about 27 percent of the state’s population.

The best solution to the problem of gerrymandering is proportional representation. In a proportional system, the nation would be divided into large electoral districts that would each receive several seats in Congress.

These seats would then be allocated according to the total percentage of votes each party receives — so if the Democratic Party receives 35 percent of the votes in a particular district, it would receive about 35 percent of that district’s seats. Under our current system, a district composed of 55 percent white Republicans and 45 percent Black Democrats will send zero Democrats to Congress. Under a proportional system, the Black minority in such a district would receive nearly as much representation as the white majority.

Realistically, a constitutional amendment is not a viable solution to implement any of these reforms. Amendments require three-quarters of the state legislatures to agree. And it’s unlikely that states that benefit from the Constitution’s anti-democratic pathologies would agree to cure them.

There may be feasible ways to enact some of these reforms without an amendment. The National Popular Vote Compact, for example, calls for a bloc of states adding up to a majority of the Electoral College’s electoral votes to agree to give those votes to whichever candidate wins the popular vote. It’s an ingenious way to nominally leave the Electoral College in place, while simultaneously ensuring that the candidate who wins the popular vote becomes president.

Other ways around the effectively unamendable Constitution are lawful, but difficult to imagine happening. A 2020 proposal in the Harvard Law Review, for example, suggested dividing the (heavily Democratic) District of Columbia into more than 100 states and admitting them all into the Union — and then immediately having these new states approve a raft of pro-democracy amendments to the Constitution.

The thing these solutions have in common is that they’re the sort of fixes that pit the Constitution’s formalistic rules against its spirit, and they’d likely trigger a significant backlash — or be struck down by a Supreme Court that is still controlled by Republicans — unless they had a truly overwhelming political coalition behind them.

Yet, if the reforms suggested above are ambitious and difficult to implement, they are also equal in magnitude to the crisis facing American democracy. If nothing changes, an overwhelmingly white, increasingly authoritarian political coalition could soon gain the enduring power to veto any federal law, along with perpetual control of the Supreme Court.

That is not a democracy, and it is unworthy of a nation that claims to be founded on the principle that all people are created equal.

---

Transforming the United States into an egalitarian democracy will not be easy. But, as Niko Bowie, a professor at Harvard Law School, reminded me when I asked him how to overcome the many structural disadvantages plaguing American egalitarian movements, “the United States has faced such a crisis before ... nevertheless, democracy has emerged.”

It has emerged thanks to the work of those who retained a clear moral vision in the face of anti-egalitarianism. So let me close by attempting to offer the same sort of moral clarity William Lloyd Garrison offered to the abolitionist movement.

It is wrong that our Constitution denies the fundamental equality of all Americans. It is wrong to count some votes more than others. It is wrong to drive families into poverty solely because we count some votes more than others. It is wrong to allow the one unelected branch of government to dismantle our voting rights. It is wrong that our Congress will not restore those rights because a few senators care more about preserving the filibuster than they do about ensuring that Black people have an equal voice in our society.

And it is wrong that an authoritarian narcissist, who possesses no aptitude for or interest in governance, was allowed to occupy the White House after receiving nearly 3 million fewer votes than his opponent.

Juneteenth is an apt time to reflect on these matters. It’s a reminder of our nation’s most unforgivable sin. But it is also a celebration of freedom, and of those who overcame unimaginable odds to write equality into our Constitution. It is past time that we made that promise real, by changing the Constitution, if need be.

As Garrison said in 1844, “it is an insult to the common sense of mankind, to pretend that the Constitution was intended to embrace the entire population of the country under its sheltering wings; or that the parties to it were actuated by a sense of justice and the spirit of impartial liberty; or that it needs no alteration.”

Ian Millhiser is a senior correspondent at Vox, where he focuses on the Supreme Court, the Constitution, and the decline of liberal democracy in the United States.

Read 20 remaining paragraphs | Comments

By Travis Gettys Two of the white nationalists arrested after traveling to Idaho in a U-Haul truck have ties to a right-wing former state legislator from Washington. Mishael and Josiah Buster, two brothers from Spokane, were among 31 members of Patriot Front who traveled from various states to Coeur d’Alene, where police said they intended to provoke a violent clash during a LGBTQ+ pride event — which also drew an alternative “prayer walk” organized by former state Rep. Matt Shea, reported The Spokesman-Review. Shea, who was expelled from the House Republican caucus after he was found to have…

Read More

A debate is heating up on the left, and it's about to get hotter.

Read 9 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Sens. Bernie Sanders and Lindsey Graham held a debate about the economy Monday at the the Edward M. Kennedy Institute in Massachusetts, aired on Fox Nation. The event was supposed to be some kind of kumbaya bipartisan thing, bringing the two sides together for a discussion about the economy. Sanders, an independent from Vermont, gave a full-throated defense of the vision progressives have for America: a public health care system, a living wage, and tax fairness. Graham, a South Carolina Republican, reiterated his party’s dream of ending Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid.

“In the United States, Lindsey, we spend twice as much per capita on health care compared to the people of any other country, while major countries like Canada, the U.K., Germany manage to supply health care to all their people,” Sanders said. “Why is that?” he asked rhetorically. “Because they’re not having insurance companies ripping off the system.”

That’s socialism, said Graham. “And it’s not going to fix America. We are not a socialist nation. There is a better way, I promise you this.” His better way happens to be at the center of a big Senate Republican fight, and puts him at odds with his party leader, Mitch McConnell, who really does not want Republican members sticking their necks out right now and telling the American people that their vision is to do away with the decades-old programs that Americans revere, not to mention depend on.

If Republicans take over the Senate, Graham promised, they will start right in on the cuts. It’s not idle talk, by the way, as Graham is the ranking member of the Senate Budget Committee—he’d take over in 2023 if Republicans win the majority. “Entitlement reform is a must for us to not become Greece,” he said in the debate. By “reform,” he means cutting benefits and disqualifying people.

To be fair, Sen. Rick Scott was a lot less subtle about his plan to do away with the programs and pretty much everything else as we know it in American society, a plan McConnell has been apoplectic about going public. The Florida Republican, tasked with regaining the majority as head of the National Senate Republican Committee, released his vision earlier this year, a plan in which everything passed by Congress—every existing program—ends after five years.

Listen and subscribe to Daily Kos Elections’ The Downballot podcast with David Nir and David Beard

Campaign Action

This plan was exactly what McConnell did not want Republicans to talk about doing, and Scott has doubled down in opposition to his leader.

McConnell tried to defuse the situation back in March, telling reporters that he’s the one in control. “If we’re fortunate enough to have the majority next year, I’ll be the majority leader. I’ll decide in consultation with my members what to put on the floor.”

“We will not have as part of our agenda a bill that raises taxes on half the American people and sunsets Social Security and Medicare within five years. That will not be part of the Republican Senate Majority Agenda.” Note how careful he’s being there in talking about the programs he knows Americans love—Social Security and Medicare—without saying he’ll prevent them from being cut.

Which is precisely what Graham was talking about, a less radical and bombastic plan to end the programs as we know them, but an end nonetheless. That’s an agenda McConnell isn’t going to denounce.

RELATED STORIES

Inflation has been eating into the wage gains of ordinary Americans for more than a year, souring them on the economy. Now, the wealthy are just as pessimistic.

Consumer sentiment has plunged to levels not seen since the 2008 financial crisis, down more than 40 percent over the past 12 months, according to one closely watched survey. Another poll found that the number of people who feel positively about the economy has dropped 20 percentage points since September — driven down by wealthier people who had thrived during the pandemic as the stock market boomed.

The cratering of optimism across all income groups — even as the economy is churning out jobs and growing — is bleak news for Democrats as they head into the midterm elections, with the data underscoring that there are few pockets of voters who aren’t feeling the misery of rising prices in everything from food and shelter to airline tickets. The stock market's slide this year has spread the pain to all income groups, with the benchmark S&P 500 Index tumbling nearly 4 percent on Monday alone.

“The instability of the market has rattled both the wage payer and the wage earner,” said Kevin Madden, executive vice president of advocacy at Arnold Ventures and a veteran Republican strategist.

With Federal Reserve policymakers meeting this week, that mood is bound to darken even more as the central bank continues its campaign of aggressive interest rate increases designed to combat inflation by raising borrowing costs and slowing economic growth.

Joanne Hsu, director of the influential University of Michigan consumer survey, which last week hit record lows, said there has been a precipitous drop in sentiment among the top third of income earners. Typically, people who make more money feel better about the economy. But in the first half of the year, feelings among all income groups converged as share prices began experiencing heavy declines — shrinking financial buffers for wealthier Americans.

Some 90 percent of the value of stocks owned by households are held by the wealthiest 10 percent of Americans, according to Federal Reserve data.

“It’s basically impossible to ignore” that inflation has broadened out across sectors, Hsu said. “We had strong stock market performance up until the beginning of this year.” The S&P 500 has declined more than 20 percent this year.

Inflation has also caused income to shrink for many people in higher brackets. Some low-wage workers as a group have seen their take-home pay increase as employers face fierce competition for labor in sectors like retail and hospitality, but price spikes disproportionately hurt lower-income people whose spending is less discretionary.

The result: No one is feeling great about where things stand, even as the unemployment rate sits near modern-era lows at 3.6 percent and many people continue to spend heavily.

“Nobody’s going to say it’s a good economy” while inflation is elevated, said Claudia Sahm, a senior fellow at the Jain Family Institute and a former Federal Reserve economist.

Higher-income people weathered the worst economic impact of the pandemic much better than those who earned less; almost 40 percent of workers in households making less than $40,000 lost their jobs in March 2020. Wealthier Americans enjoyed a soaring stock market and saw their savings balances rise more than a third over pre-pandemic levels, according to data from the JPMorgan Chase Institute.

“High-income consumers didn’t experience a pandemic recession in the same way as low-income consumers,” Hsu said.

But the sentiment tide began to turn last summer when inflation picked up. A poll this month from Global Strategy Group found that among voters making an annual salary of between $100,000 and $400,000, the number who described the economy as doing well fell by half since September. A big culprit? Market turmoil.

Richer voters were much more likely to cite stocks as the best way to judge how the economy is doing than those making less, the poll found. Forty-five percent of those earning more than $400,000 a year cited the market as a top indicator; 22 percent of those making less than $30,000 a year said the same.

“A lot of investments were made under the assumption that inflation would be low, and interest rates would be low for a long [time],” Columbia Business School Professor Kairong Xiao said. “Unfortunately, we now know that this won't be the case. Inflation is approaching double digits, and the Fed has to really tighten monetary policy pretty aggressively.”

For some corners of the job market, low unemployment is helping weather the inflation storm. The Atlanta Fed found that median hourly earnings for job switchers were up 6 percent over the last year in May — a full 1 percentage point more than the overall average.

“When people feel really, really squeezed in every other market, [the] labor market is the one market where the odds are in their favor. And it's the one market they're kind of relying on to solve all their other problems,” said Julia Pollak, chief economist at ZipRecruiter.

But much of that growth is concentrated in lower-income industries — meaning that higher-income workers are less likely to be able to rely on burgeoning paychecks to counter the pain of larger price tags.

Those in the lowest quarter of average wages saw their pay increase by 6.7 percent over the last year in May, according to the Atlanta Fed. Those in the highest quartile of average wages saw their income go up by about half as much, or 3.6 percent.

“If inflation is helping to keep the labor market tight, and the tight labor market is helping to raise wages at the bottom, low-income people may be better off as a result,” said Marc Goldwein, senior vice president and senior policy director at the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget.

Still, he said, “high inflation … isn’t good for anybody.”

As my colleague Laura Clawson has covered at length here at Daily Kos, Starbucks workers are doing an absolutely incredible job of organizing. More than 100 Starbucks locations have voted to unionize under Workers United in the past year alone—yes, there are literally thousands of stores in the nation, but still. Their efforts are incredibly inspiring and life-changing, and clearly, the folks in charge of the company are sweating the movement.

One example? According to a complaint filed with the National Labor Relations Board, per Bloomberg, Starbucks has started telling baristas that unionizing could cost them gender-affirming health care for trans workers. An openly trans worker at an Oklahoma City Starbucks told the outlet her manager mentioned trans health care benefits in a “veiled threat” while talking about how her benefits could get better, stay the same, or worsen if the store unionized. 

⁩”I think the company realizes that we as trans partners feel particularly vulnerable at this time,” Neha Cremin told Bloomberg in an interview. “I think that in some cases they are willing to take advantage of that.” She went on to allege that during a one-on-one meeting, her manager mentioned knowing she specifically had used the trans-inclusive health benefits.

RELATED: Starbucks is very unhappy about all the customers ordering drinks under the name 'Union Strong'

Another employee, this time based in Pittsburgh, told the outlet that managers held a meeting with her and discussed her plans to receive gender-affirming surgery. The two managers allegedly suggested that she might lose her benefits to do so if she unionized, and asked what she thought would happen if her coworkers didn’t understand the value of such coverage and negotiated for a package without it included. (The worker asked to be anonymous out of fear of retaliation.)

Reggie Borges, who serves as a Starbucks spokesperson, denied these claims to CNBC.

Starbucks, for context, has actually provided some solid gender-affirming health care since back in 2012 and more recently pledged to cover travel costs for folks who had to leave their state to receive gender-affirming care in the wake of anti-trans bills going into law in Republican-controlled states. (The company has promised to provide the same benefit for folks seeking abortions.) The company has gotten a lot of praise and positive attention from the LGBTQ+ community and allies for its trans-inclusive policies.  

In the big picture, this is just one of many reasons why health care shouldn’t be tied to our employers. Workers shouldn’t need to feel trapped in a job—or loyal to a job to the point of potentially not unionizing—simply because they’re the only job in the area or field of expertise that offers life-saving health care. It’s great that Starbucks has offered these benefits. Truly! But if employees feel they have to basically keep their mouths closed in order to keep accessing that health care, that is clearly not great. 

There’s also the valid concern for many trans folks that switching jobs can be an invitation to receive hate and discrimination. Trans folks report high rates of discrimination when it comes to interviewing for jobs, and many folks also feel they’ve been turned down for opportunities or even lost their jobs because of their gender identity. Not surprisingly, many trans folks also experience homelessness or housing insecurity and are low-income. It’s all connected. 

It's fair to assume leaders at Starbucks know the value of what they offer trans workers, and especially how high the stakes are now for access to this precious life-saving care thanks to conservatives trying to stomp it out. But workers should never fear their necessary health care is going to disappear because they dare to organize for better working conditions for all. 

Sign the petition: Transgender children deserve all our love, support, and gender-affirming care  

Christophe Coupé and company analyzed speech rate (on the left) across different languages, and then compared it to information rate (on the right) in bits per second. While speech rate and information rate are still coupled, there’s less variation in information rate across languages. More syllables doesn’t necessarily mean more information.

Tags: information, language, words