James.galbraith

Conservatives truly cannot get enough when it comes to demonizing trans people, especially trans youth. Trans youth are particularly vulnerable when it comes to harassment, bullying, and both physical and verbal abuse while at school, and are also more likely to become homeless and leave high school without a diploma. Trans youth report higher rates of mental health issues like depression, anxiety, and even suicidal ideation. And yet Republicans can’t get enough of trying to isolate and disparage them even more.

A recent example comes to us from Shelley Luther out of Texas. Luther, you might remember, is the hair salon owner (and former teacher) who went to jail after defying pandemic orders to shut down her salon in Dallas in May 2020. Since then she’s gained some notoriety, fired off some racist tweets, and is running for a seat in the Texas House. As reported by the Houston Chronicle, Luther participated in a candidate forum on Saturday and used her time to let folks know she isn’t “comfortable with transgenders” and wishes kids were able to laugh at their transgender classmates. Yes, really.

As some background, Luther is running against fellow Republican Reggie Smith in the Republican primary for a state House seat in the 62nd District. That seat is in a heavily conservative district outside of Dallas. The primary is on March 1. After refusing to obey COVID-19 lockdown orders she served just a few days in jail, but she has become a favorite of Republicans since. 

“The kids that they brought in my classroom,” Luther recalled at Saturday’s candidate forum, according to the outlet. “When they said that this kid is transgendering into a different sex, that I couldn’t have kids laugh at them … like, the other kids got in trouble for having transgender kids in my class.”

Here’s that video.

It’s mean! It’s weird! Honestly, it’s disturbing—adults shouldn’t want to see literal children made fun of or laughed at for any reason, and especially not when there’s loads of research and personal anecdotes available affirming how marginalized these particular youth already are. Luther should be ashamed of herself.

But in an email to the outlet, Luther claimed she “respected and supported all students” in her classroom. She went on to say it was hard for her to teach because “the topic of gender transition became the top discussion” in her classroom on a daily basis, and the “center of focus” was on the student and not the lesson. 

“We should focus more on learning instead of arguing about which bathroom someone should use,” she told the outlet. “Bullying is never acceptable, and did not occur.”

It would be lovely if people were learning instead of arguing about bathroom use! That’s why trans youth should have fair, safe, and equal access to bathrooms and locker rooms that align with their gender identity. No need to argue about someone’s basic human rights and ability to perform an essential bodily function.

And if a teacher doesn’t feel able to balance discussions of real-world issues with prepared lesson plans, perhaps the students deserve better and the teacher in question can look into a different career path? Research shows teachers feel uniquely ill-equipped to handle anti-LGBTQ+ bullying in schools, but that’s a sign that more outreach, training, and education are needed—not that it should be free rein to make fun of vulnerable kids.

Between Luther’s comments and the TikTok video from an Oklahoma school board member fantasizing about trans-inclusive parents dying by suicide, it’s been an especially rough few days of news. Whether or not all anti-trans bills are actually signed into law, it’s obvious conservatives are jumping all over transphobia to get votes and push an already structurally vulnerable population into the shadows. It’s up to all of us to speak up and speak out in favor of trans inclusions, protections, and real equality. 

In an effort to educate folks about what we’re up against in this Texas primary, here’s Luther’s campaign announcement video from a few months ago.

Sign the petition: Demand the Senate pass the Equality Act and protect the LGBTQ community from discrimination.

What all these new GOP bills are really trying to accomplish.

Guess who’s back in the news with yet another scandal? Yes, it’s the postmaster general everyone loves to hate for his wanton and corrupt destruction of the oldest and most beloved public institution, the U.S. Postal Service, Louis DeJoy. And he’s in hot water with the Biden administration this time.

The Postal Service has a fleet of old, inefficient, gas-guzzling delivery vehicles—70% of the fleet is between 25 and 32 years old. Part of DeJoy’s 10-year plan for the agency is replacing that fleet with safer, modern vehicles, with air-conditioning and airbags and all the modern conveniences. DeJoy has secured an $11.3 billion contract with Oshkosh Defense for 165,000 trucks for the agency. When the initiative for the new vehicles was announced a year ago the USPS assured the public that “many” of those vehicles, but not all, would be electric. As it turns out, “many” in DeJoy speak is 10%. Which means 90% will be gas-powered.

The Environmental Protection Agency slammed the contract last week, and is trying to prevent the contract from going through because of the potential harm to the climate and people’s health. The Biden administration has committed to converting the entire federal fleet of vehicles to electric power. The USPS fleet is about one-third of all those vehicles.

“The Postal Service’s proposal as currently crafted represents a crucial lost opportunity to more rapidly reduce the carbon footprint of one of the largest government fleets in the world,” wrote Vicki Arroyo, the EPA’s associate administrator for policy, in a letter to the USPS.

The EPA warned DeJoy last fall that the environmental analysis it conducted for the contract was flawed and incomplete. In a USPS Board of Governors meeting Tuesday, DeJoy was typically defiant. He said the plan he has developed “builds in flexibility to increase the number of electric vehicles should additional funding become available from internal generation through profitable operations or through congressional appropriations should Congress decide to fund this initiative as a matter of public policy.”

However, he insisted, “we cannot at this time count on additional funding.” He said the Postal Service was concerned about both the cost of building the electric vehicles and the cost of infrastructure for them. He went on to say that the commitment to a fleet that is just 10% electric “is frankly ambitious given the pressing vehicle and safety needs of our aging fleet and our dire financial condition.” He did say that the USPS is conducting an environmental review of the plan, but added that “we are compelled to act prudently in the interest of the American public.”

That review is unlikely to pass muster with the EPA, which is already frustrated with DeJoy for having “funded as much as $482 million to the vendor” before conducting an environmental analysis, “exactly what CEQ regulations prohibit.” The EPA said that the Postal Service’s draft analysis “presents biased cost and emission estimates” that favor gas-powered vehicles.

“There were just pages and pages of detailed economic and environmental analysis by EPA that the Postal Service either ignored or dismissed with a rhetorical wave of its hand,” John Walke, who directs the clean-air project at the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), told The Washington Post. It’s entirely possible that DeJoy will be hit with lawsuits from NRDC and other environmental organizations if they go forward with this contract as is.

The EPA projects that the Postal Service’s new gas-powered trucks would total nearly 20 million metric tons in greenhouse emissions over the projected 20-year life span of the vehicles. That’s about the same as the annual emissions from 4.3 million passenger vehicles. They would burn about 110 million gallons of gas annually, just an 18% decrease in fuel consumption compared to the 30-year old vehicles in use now. Those emissions would cause an estimated $900 million in climate damages, the EPA estimates. An independent analysis determined that the agency would save $4.3 billion in the long term if it electrified the fleet entirely.

The USPS’s assertion that they can’t afford to go electric are thus questionable. The agency ended the 2021 fiscal year reporting $23.9 billion in liquidity in COVID-19 emergency funding. While the agency is in deep debt thanks to a 2006 law that requires it to prepay retiree health benefits 75 years into the future, that burden is likely to be eased by Congress.

On Tuesday, the House passed a postal reform bill in a strong bipartisan vote, 342-92. The bill wipes out $57 billion of the UPSP’s $206.4 billion in liabilities, straight off the top. It also ends that obligation for retiree health benefits, instead requiring retired postal workers to enroll in Medicare. That will save the agency about $50 billion over the next decade. The bill has strong bipartisan support in the Senate, with 14 Republicans cosponsoring the bill there, so it’s not likely to be filibustered. 

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer applauded passage of the bill. "With an overwhelmingly bipartisan vote in the House,” he said “it is my intention for the Senate to take up and pass this bipartisan, bicameral postal reform bill before the end of this work period."

If the bill can move through the Senate quickly, there’s a better chance that DeJoy could finally be shown the door. There’s been reluctance in Congress and from postal service unions for ousting DeJoy because he’s been a champion of this legislation, and there’s been some fear that rocking the DeJoy boat could end up getting this key reform passed.

But getting rid of DeJoy is still high on the list of priorities for many Democrats. First, though, the final two pending nominees to the Board of Governors have to be confirmed, and then the full board needs to feel some pressure from Congress, from the White House, and from the public to do the right thing and can DeJoy.

That’s what Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse is urging. “The Postal Service urgently needs a change in leadership,” said Whitehouse. “Under Postmaster General DeJoy, the Postal Service is actively choosing to ignore science and the law in order to make sure one of the world’s largest fleets of government vehicles continues to be a major source of pollution. Postmaster General DeJoy has messed around with our mail system for too long and he’s caused real harm to the Americans who rely on it. This cannot continue.”

Rep. Gerald Connolly, the Virginia Democrat who leads the House subcommittee overseeing the United States Postal Service, agrees, calling DeJoy’s flouting of President Biden’s directive to electrify the fleet “antediluvian” and a threat to combatting climate change. “The average age of the postal fleet is 30 years,” Connolly said. “They’re spewing pollution and they are guzzling gas. There is no question we have to replace the fleet, and it is a once-in-a-generation opportunity to take electric vehicle technology to the next level with the second- largest vehicle fleet in America.”

Related stories:

DeJoy’s dastardly plans for the Postal Service didn’t end with the election

Postmaster General DeJoy is running a ‘covert operation’ to monitor social media

Postal Service board inexplicably not ready to boot DeJoy or stop his disastrous plan for the agency

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It didn’t take long after Justice Stephen Breyer announced his retirement for conservative politicians and pundits to criticize President Biden’s campaign pledge to nominate the first Black woman to the Supreme Court. Republican Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas denounced Biden’s promise as “offensive” while GOP Sen. Roger Wicker of Mississippi preemptively dismissed the prospective nominee as benefitting from a racially discriminatory “quota.” On Fox News, Sean Hannity slammed Biden’s pledge as “identity politics on steroids.”

But many astute analysts promptly pointed out that Republicans haven’t objected to prior presidents’ pledges to nominate a woman to the Supreme Court. There was no equivalent outcry, for instance, when President Ronald Reagan vowed to appoint the first woman to the Supreme Court during the 1980 presidential campaign — a promise he fulfilled the following year by nominating Sandra Day O’Connor. Nor was their condemnation of former President Donald Trump’s pledge to nominate a woman to fill the late Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s seat in September 2020. 

As Stanford professor and FiveThirtyEight contributor, Hakeem Jefferson, tweeted, “Conservatives didn’t get upset when Trump promised to nominate a woman to the bench because the qualifier ‘white’ was simply implied.” He later added that it’s the misogynoir, or unique biases Black women experience, not the pledge, that is the problem.

Recent polling data certainly seems to support Jefferson’s argument. Take, for example, Republican responses to the two YouGov polling questions about the importance of nominating a woman and the importance of nominating a Black woman to fill vacated SCOTUS seats in 2020 and 2022, respectively.

The chart above shows that more than half of Republicans and over three-quarters of Democrats thought it was important to have a female justice replace Ginsburg in a September 2020 YouGov/Yahoo Poll conducted a few days before Trump nominated Amy Coney Barrett to fill her seat. But while a similarly large share of Democrats said it’s very or somewhat important to have a Black woman replace Breyer in a January 2022 YouGov survey, only 13 percent of Republicans said the same about Biden nominating a Black woman.      

Of course, there are other factors that may be driving Republicans’ divergent responses in that chart besides including the word “Black” before woman in the 2022 polling. Trump’s 2020 nominee, after all, was filling a Supreme Court seat held for over a quarter-century by a feminist icon, who was only the second woman to ever serve on the high court. That could have easily amplified the importance of nominating a woman more than replacing Breyer, a male justice.³⁰

Yet there are good reasons to nonetheless suspect that Republicans are uniquely opposed to presidential pledges in support of African Americans — especially when they’re made by Democratic presidents. In fact, a similar pattern emerged in a May 2009 CNN/ORC poll, which asked respondents to rate the importance of race and gender in then-President Barack Obama’s forthcoming pick to fill the Supreme Court seat vacated by Justice David Souter’s retirement. Just 14 percent of Republicans said it was important Obama nominate an African American to the Supreme Court. 

To be sure, both Democrats and Republicans were nearly twice as likely to say it was important for Obama to pick a woman than they were to say it was important for him to nominate an African American to the Supreme Court, as you can see in the chart below. But unlike Democrats who have experienced a sharp uptick in the share who think a Black person should be nominated to the court since 2009, the share of Republicans who agree is practically unchanged.

This is yet another reminder of the remarkable shift partisans’ racial attitudes have undergone in the past decade. Several surveys show that the share of white Democrats who view systemic racism as an impediment to Black progress has skyrocketed in recent years. It’s no surprise, then, that the overwhelming majority of Democrats (82 percent) support “President Biden’s plan to nominate a Black woman to the United States Supreme Court” — especially when Democratic leadership frames the nomination as combatting the same structural biases that have excluded African American women from the high court throughout the nation’s history.   

Republicans, meanwhile, have moved in the opposite direction on race. As I wrote in a previous piece for FiveThirtyEight, GOP politics are increasingly animated by the belief that anti-white discrimination is as big of a problem in American society as biases against racial and ethnic minorities. Those views helped fuel Trump’s rise within the party; and they factor heavily into conservatives’ mischaracterization of critical race theory, an academic framework that helps explain how racism permeates American institutions, as an anti-white “existential threat to the United States.” Few Trump voters (19 percent) approve of Biden’s pledge — especially when prominent Republicans frame it as a racially discriminatory appointment of an unqualified justice who doesn’t “know a law book from a J. Crew catalog.” That is, of course, patently false as FiveThirtyEight’s Amelia Thomson-DeVeaux and Elena Mejía wrote in a recent analysis of Biden’s judicial appointees so far.

But understanding the power racial grievances have in GOP politics today goes a long way in understanding why Republicans are so strongly opposed to Biden’s pledge to nominate the first Black woman to the Supreme Court. As Republican Sen. John Kennedy of Louisiana recently said, “I want a nominee who’s not going to try to rewrite the Constitution every other Thursday to try to advance a ‘woke agenda.’” And undoubtedly, the race, gender and partisanship of Biden’s prospective pick all intersect with one another to heighten these Republican fears of “wokeness” run amok in ways that nominees of other identities almost certainly would not.

When former President Donald Trump defends you, run! It can only mean one thing, and in Joe Rogan’s case, it confirms just how racist he is. 

In addition to the worthless trash that comes out of his mouth about “woke culture,” the silencing of “straight white men,” talking shit about the COVID-19 vaccine, the worst of his content has been his blatant and ubiquitous use of the N-word. All of which has caused a bloodletting of several artists to leave Spotify, including Neil Young, Joni Mitchell, Nils Lofgren, India.Arie, David Crosby, Stephen Stills, Graham Nash, and Failure. 

Even Rogan admits he’s “a fucking moron,” so now he’s on an apology tour, one that includes a nonapology and a lot of denials about being a racist. So who comes to his defense? That’s right: the 45th president. The guy who’s referred to one of his MAGA followers as “my Black,” and was called by Washington Post columnist Colbert I. King: “the most racist president in modern history.” 

Trump’s great advice to Rogan reads in part: 

“Joe Rogan is an interesting and popular guy, but he’s got to stop apologizing to the Fake News and Radical Left maniacs and lunatics. How many ways can you say you’re sorry?” 

Rogan could start by offering a sincere apology. Which he has not done, as his current one is riddled with contradictions and refutations.  

Former Democratic presidential candidate Andrew Yang is apologizing for defending Rogan. Claiming that the podcast host couldn’t possibly be racist as he works with Black people. 

Sounds a lot like a guy who recently defended one of his employers to me (one with an “OK” sign on his truck that appeared to be a lot like the symbol white supremacists use) by saying the man was married to a Thai woman, so he couldn’t be racist. After a shitstorm of backlash, Yang deleted his tweet in defense of Rogan and tweeted: "I think we should have the capacity to forgive people — whether a podcaster or a mayor — if they mess up. Maybe it's because I mess up too."

After publicly supporting Rogan, Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson did an about-face once he learned about Rogan’s pervasive use of the N-word. 

“I was not aware of his N-word use prior to my comments, but now I’ve become educated to his complete narrative,” Johnson, 49, wrote on Twitter Friday. “Learning moment for me.”

Hundreds of doctors have urged Spotify to intervene on Rogan’s unrelenting attacks on vaccines, and multiple artists have called him out for being a racist. But, as made clear in a letter from the CEO of Spotify, Daniel Ek, which was sent to employees on Sunday, Spotify’s $100 million baby with 11 million devoted The Joe Rogan Experience listeners is a cash cow the streaming platform won't easily give up. 

“I want to make one point very clear — I do not believe that silencing Joe is the answer,” Ek wrote. “We should have clear lines around content and take action when they are crossed, but canceling voices is a slippery slope.”

You can read the full letter here, per The Hollywood Reporter. 

Rep. Guy Reschenthaler is a Republican out of Pennsylvania’s 14th Congressional District. Guy is one of the many white guys who voted to overturn our democratically decided 2020 election. Rep. Reschenthaler is also the GOP big-brain that looked at the murder of George Floyd by former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin and said “the murder of George Floyd means we should invest more in police departments.” Prior to that, while running for Congress, Reschenthaler is the fellow that wrote a forward for the racist, homophobic, Islamophobic tome written by disgraced former Navy SEAL Carl Higbie.

Guy isn’t a particularly good guy and he doesn’t seem to have very good ideas in general. What is Reschenthaler’s new big idea? It’s that masks are killing kids. It’s not COVID-19, and it’s not being kept out of school when COVID-19 spreads throughout a classroom and forces everyone to stay at home: It’s the masks. That’s the problem. Democratic officials have made some bad decisions, taking mask-free photos in places where they are promoting wearing masks. This is just the discussion- and thought-free hook dunderheads like Reschenthaler have needed to promote their save the children by exposing them more nakedly to COVID-19 stance. It’s a strange play until you consider that their cynical idea for grabbing power is simply fostering chaos with no solutions other than “vote for me.”

But guys like Guy want you to know that they have science on their side. 

According to the CDC, there have been 287 deaths related to COVID-19 of Americans between the ages of 0-4. There have been 623 deaths of children ages 5-18. To put this into perspective: The CDC reported that there have been 325 regular flu deaths reported in Americans under the age of 18 since the 2018-2019 flu season. You see the difference in the numbers, right?

Anyway, Guy Reschenthaler has an answer for this—these kids were maybe gonna die anyway? During a speech on the House floor, Reschenthaler explained himself like this: “Many of these children had pre-existing, I’m sorry I mean, underlying conditions, making them more vulnerable to severe COVID-19 than the average child. Meaning that many of these children died with COVID not of COVID. But then again, that’s real science, not political science.”

Sooooooo. The real science flaw in this guy’s poor math is that the pediatric deaths caused by flu, historically, also disproportionately affect children with “underlying conditions.” Like all illnesses, the severity of how it is experienced is almost always predicated on how many and what kind of underlying conditions we have. The fact of the matter is that there have been almost three times as many deaths with COVID than with the flu.

You get that? Listen, you gotta break some eggs if you’re going to run on a no-policy, anti-labor, lower-taxes-for-billionaires program, baby! I don’t know if Dante’s idea of hell would allow it, but people like Reschenthaler fill out the criteria for residency in a handful of the rings of hell. Maybe he’ll just be smeared across them all? Hopefully that won’t conflict with his underlying condition of being a fucking dirtbag.

If you want to read more about how terrible Guy is, head on over to republicinsanity’s updated profile of him here. 

The assault on voting rights gets another boost from the high court, and that's just the beginning.

The U.S. Supreme Court hacked one more big chunk out of the Voting Rights Act (VRA) Monday, allowing Alabama to implement a congressional redistricting plan a lower court had rejected. They did it again using the shadow docket, without having heard arguments, constituting a stunning blow to voting rights and one of the last remaining protections in the law against racial discrimination in voting.

The lower court required the state’s Republican legislature to redraw its map because it diluted Black votes in violation of Section 2 of the VRA. The map in question allows for just one of seven of the state’s districts to have a Black majority, a dilution of the Black vote as prohibited by what was left of the VRA. Section 2 of the law prohibits any voting procedure that “results in a denial or abridgment of the right of any citizen of the United States to vote on account of race.” That happens, the provision goes on, when, “based on the totality of circumstances,” racial minorities “have less opportunity than other members of the electorate to participate in the political process and to elect representatives of their choice.”

The Supreme Court put the lower court’s ruling on hold, meaning Alabama will conduct its primary and likely general election this year using that racist gerrymander. The vote was 5-4, with Chief Justice John Roberts joining the dissent in this emergency order—another shadow docket decision concluded without a hearing. Read that sentence again. The majority decision was too extreme for John Roberts, who led the court in gutting the VRA beginning in 2013.

Justice Elena Kagan was furious in dissent. "Today’s decision is one more in a disconcertingly long line of cases in which this Court uses its shadow docket to signal or make changes in the law, without anything approaching full briefing and argument."

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“Substantial questions merit substantial thought,” she wrote. “Here, the District Court carefully and correctly applied the now-existing law and concluded that Alabama has unlawfully diluted the voting power of Black Alabamians.” 

The majority decision, she continued, “does a disservice to the District Court, which meticulously applied this Court’s longstanding voting-rights precedent. And most of all, it does a disservice to Black Alabamians who under that precedent have had their electoral power diminished—in violation of a law this Court once knew to buttress all of American democracy."

Justice Brett Kavanaugh dismissed that, disingenuously saying in his concurrence, “The principal dissent’s catchy but worn-out rhetoric about the ‘shadow docket” is similarly off-target. The stay will allow this Court to decide the merits in an orderly fashion—after full briefing, oral argument, and our usual extensive internal deliberations—and ensure that we do not have to decide the merits on the emergency docket.” That’s Kavanaugh trying to pretend that they didn’t just tell the states that racial gerrymandering will be allowed by this court from now on.

He also argued that the court had to act immediately because the four months the legislature has before the primary in May just isn’t enough time for them to develop a new map. “Running elections statewide is extraordinarily complicated and difficult,” Kavanaugh observed. The district court’s order, he wrote, “would require heroic efforts by” election officials “in the next few weeks—and even heroic efforts likely would not be enough to avoid chaos and confusion.”

Kagan had an answer to that, too: “Alabama does not—because it cannot—contend that redrawing its map in advance of this year’s elections would be impossible. The State’s legislature enacted its current plan in less than a week.”

In a year of truly radical decision-making by the extremist on the court, this shadow docket ruling ranks high. It was so radical it took Roberts by surprise. The lower court, he wrote in his own dissent “properly applied existing law in an extensive opinion with no apparent errors for our correction.”

This is a radical majority bent on reshaping the nation and putting it firmly under the thumb of Republican minority rule for the foreseeable future.

Passing the voting rights and elections reform bills already passed by the House in the Senate is one partial remedy, in that it would restore the VRA and add new protections including ending racial gerrymandering. But that’s clearly not enough, because the illegitimate Trumpian majority on the Supreme Court will be there to strike down whatever protections Congress passes. 

The only solution is to expand and reform the Supreme Court. President Joe Biden and Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and Speaker Nancy Pelosi have to do everything in their power to make that happen. What's the point of having control of the House, the Senate, and the White House, along with the biggest bully pulpit in the world, if you won't use it to secure the future of democracy?

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The Court’s median justice just made it much harder to stop attacks on the right to vote.

On Monday night, the Supreme Court handed down a deeply alarming decision that suggests that the Court’s Republican majority is about to cut away one of the few parts of the Voting Rights Act that it hasn’t already gutted or killed.

The immediate impact of the Court’s 5-4 decision in Merrill v. Milligan is that Alabama’s new congressional maps, which a three-judge panel that includes two Trump appointees determined to be an illegal racial gerrymander, will take effect in the 2022 election. Under those maps, only one of the state’s seven districts — or 14 percent of the US House seats — has a real shot of electing a Black lawmaker. African Americans make up about 27 percent of the state’s population.

The lower court ordered the state to draw at least two districts “in which Black voters ... have an opportunity to elect a representative of their choice.” Thus, had the lower court decision taken effect, it is likely that the racial composition of Alabama’s congressional delegation would closely match that of the state as a whole.

Monday’s order only suspends the lower court’s decision until the Court can give this case a full hearing. But the allegedly racially gerrymandered map will be in effect for the 2022 election — and it could become permanent after the Supreme Court hears and decides the full case.

One reason the Court’s order in Merrill is disturbing is that Alabama’s lawyers offered an exceptionally weak legal argument when they asked the justices to block this lower court order. Their argument could potentially neutralize an important safeguard against racist gerrymanders. The Voting Rights Act provides fairly robust protections against racial gerrymanders — legislative maps that target voters of a particular race — but Alabama asked the Supreme Court to impose a new burden on plaintiffs challenging racial gerrymanders that may be impossible to overcome.

Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote a separate concurring opinion that would impose a novel new restriction on all voting rights cases. More on the specific convoluted restriction later. But in creating his new restriction, Kavanaugh relied heavily on Purcell v. Gonzalez (2006), a decision which held that courts should be reluctant to change a state’s election rules as an election draws close. “Federal courts ordinarily should not enjoin a state’s election laws in the period close to an election,” Kavanaugh wrote.

There’s still a fairly obvious problem with Kavanaugh’s opinion. Alabama will not elect its new slate of US House members until November. It’s now February — nine months before the date of the general election and more than three months before the state’s next primary election. The state simply is not in a “period close to an election,” unless we count the entirety of 2022, and therefore the entirety of any year in which an election is held, as “close to an election.”

Technically, Kavanaugh’s opinion is not a binding precedent. It was joined only by Justice Samuel Alito, not by a majority of the Court. But Kavanaugh is also the median vote on this Republican-dominated Supreme Court — in politically charged cases, there are normally four justices to Kavanaugh’s left, and four to his right. That means that his words carry an unusual amount of weight, since it is unlikely that a litigant will find five justices willing to contradict him.

The bottom line is that Merrill — even in its temporary form — is a disaster for voting rights. It suggests that the Court is going to escalate its assault on the Voting Rights Act — and on voting rights more broadly. And it suggests that even exceedingly weak legal arguments offered by red states have a very good shot of prevailing in this Supreme Court.

Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

Kavanaugh would strip the federal judiciary of much of its power to protect voting rights

When Purcell was handed down in 2006, it largely went unnoticed by anyone who isn’t an election lawyer. Purcell warned that “court orders affecting elections ... can themselves result in voter confusion and consequent incentive to remain away from the polls,” and that this risk increases “as an election draws closer.”

No justice dissented in Purcell, and its warning about court orders that disrupt elections is best read as a note of caution. Purcell was correct that voters might be confused about how to vote if, say, a court were to order a bunch of polling precincts to be relocated on the eve of an election. So the Court asked judges to be careful about such last-minute orders without actually forbidding them in especially compelling cases.

But as the Court grew more conservative, it seemed to treat Purcell less as a reason for caution and more like a firm command. The Court’s Republicans relied on Purcell, for example, to halt lower court orders that would have made it easier to cast a ballot at the height of the pandemic.

Kavanaugh’s opinion in Merrill would expand Purcell even further if adopted. Alabama enacted its congressional maps on November 4, 2021, and the lower court handed down its decision striking down those maps on January 24, 2022 — well more than nine months before the general election.

Moreover, as Justice Elena Kagan notes in a dissenting opinion, the lower court heard “over seven days of testimony” and received “more than 1,000 pages of briefing.” The lower court opinion striking Alabama’s maps is 225 pages long. It’s unclear how these three judges could have moved any faster and still worked through the complicated factual questions in Merrill in a careful and judicious manner.

So one upshot of Kavanaugh’s opinion is that the Purcell window — the period that counts as “close to an election” — should extend for more than nine months. That’s such a long period of time when courts cannot hand down “orders affecting elections” that it would be helpful if Kavanaugh informed us when, exactly, a judge is allowed to hand down an order impacting a state’s election laws.

In fairness, Kavanaugh does write that there are some cases when Purcell should not apply, even if an election is about to happen. But he writes that lower courts are bound by Purcell unless “the underlying merits” of a case “are entirely clearcut in favor of the plaintiff.”

Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

Here as well, his opinion goes off the rails. As Chief Justice John Roberts writes in dissent, “the District Court properly applied existing law in an extensive opinion with no apparent errors for our correction.” (Roberts isn’t exactly known as a champion of voting rights. The fact that he accuses his Court of going too far in a voting rights case is itself remarkable.)

The underlying merits of Merrill are clear under existing law. Kavanaugh’s suggestion that the proper outcome is unclear only makes sense if you presume that longstanding Supreme Court precedents should be tossed out.

Thus, the upshot of Kavanaugh’s opinion appears to be two-fold. First, Kavanaugh would extend the Purcell window so that it apparently encompasses the entire election year. And, second, he would forbid judges from ruling in favor of voting rights plaintiffs during this window, even if those judges faithfully apply existing law, if Kavanaugh personally believes that this law should be changed.

How else should we understand Kavanaugh’s implication that this relatively straightforward case is not clear-cut?

Alabama seeks an unprecedented new restriction on the Voting Rights Act

The Court’s precedents governing racial gerrymandering are, admittedly, quite messy.

When a plaintiff alleges that a state’s legislative maps violate the Voting Rights Act — like the plaintiffs in the Alabama case are alleging — courts typically must apply the multi-step analysis that the Court laid out in Thornburg v. Gingles (1986). The last step of this analysis requires judges to weigh at least nine different factors before striking down a state’s legislative map.

In Merrill, however, Alabama did not attack any of the more confusing parts of the Gingles framework. Indeed, it made the baffling decision to attack what may be the most straightforward part of this framework.

Under Cooper v. Harris (2017), a fairly recent decision applying Gingles, a plaintiff who believes that a state should have an additional district where a particular minority group is in the majority must show that this group is “sufficiently large and geographically compact” that it is actually possible to draw a new district where they “constitute a majority.”

The purpose of this requirement, as Justice Kagan explains in her Merrill dissent, is to require voting rights plaintiffs to prove from the outset that “what they are asking for is possible.” There’s no point allowing a lawsuit to move forward if a court cannot actually give the plaintiffs what they seek.

In any event, the plaintiffs in Merrill cleared this very low bar. One set of plaintiffs, for example, hired a mathematician to produce four sample maps that feature compact districts, and that include two Black-majority districts.

US District Court for the Northern District of Alabama

Alabama, however, asked the Supreme Court to impose a new restriction. According to the state, the Merrill plaintiffs erred because, in order to produce these sample maps, the plaintiffs had to “prioritize race first and consider other race-neutral factors second” — something the state claims is not allowed.

But this objection makes no sense. Again, Gingles and Cooper require a plaintiff who alleges that a state should have two Black-majority districts to first produce sample maps with two Black-majority districts. How is it even possible to complete that task without paying close attention to race?

As Kagan writes, “at no time has this Court held that plaintiffs must answer the race-infused question of the first Gingles condition without any awareness of race.”

Kagan does acknowledge one other possibility: “Plaintiffs can now use technology to generate millions of possible plans, without any attention to race,” she writes, and some of these randomly drawn maps would presumably contain two Black-majority districts.

But really, what’s the point of imposing such a burden on voting rights plaintiffs? Asking these plaintiffs to produce millions of random maps and then hunt through them to find some that include two Black-majority districts is a bit like asking Vox Media to fire its writers and replace them with a million monkeys banging away at a million typewriters.

Eventually, those monkeys would produce an analysis of the Supreme Court’s decisions that is just as trenchant as anything I could write — but only after churning out countless pages of gibberish.

In any event, Kavanaugh appears to believe that it is not “entirely clearcut” whether the Voting Rights Act requires the Merrill plaintiffs to use the monkeys-banging-on-typewriters method to produce sample maps.

While the Court figures that out, a total of five justices agreed to halt the lower court’s order and allow a racial gerrymandered map to be used in Alabama in 2022.

Why (mostly) 20- and 30-something dudes made crypto and sports betting their personality.

In November, I went to the most unpleasant event I’ve ever attended, located in a warehouse-like bar in downtown Manhattan and devoted entirely to the subject of NFTs. It was hosted by Gary Vaynerchuk, better known as Gary Vee, the motivational speaker-slash-entrepreneur-slash-influencer whom my boyfriend was profiling for another publication. The crowd primarily consisted of hordes of men, who were not wholly unpleasant themselves but who spoke a language so impenetrable to outsiders that being around them made me feel as though I’d missed something major.

They seemed to work in tech or finance, mostly, and had come to connect with others over the thing they loved most in the world, the wild force driving the feeding frenzy of people storming the bouncer to get inside: money, and making it as quickly as possible. The event’s attendees were at the extreme end, of course, but their language has started trickling into the mainstream as well. If Instagram made everyone a photographer and Twitter made everyone a writer, perhaps whatever the internet has done to the traditional banking system is in the process of turning us all into finance bros.

There has never been a more opportune time to have “money” as a hobby. Options trading, once the provenance of professional financiers, has soared with the rise of stock trading platforms like Robinhood, which makes it extraordinarily easy to buy and sell individual stocks. Stories of artists making hundreds of thousands on NFTs of their work and of cryptocurrency enthusiasts making bank buying and selling them have abounded over the past year. A wave of legalization of online sports betting has swept the country, and with it, lucrative promotions for first-time gamblers that offer what is essentially free money. Not only did the pandemic create a mass of people who were bored and restless, it also created some people with enough financial privilege to try something a little risky with their $1,400 stimulus check.

The gamification of money, and the blurring boundaries between what constitutes investing and what constitutes entertainment, have raised plenty of concerns, and many argue that the government is too far behind the times to adequately address it. “Gambling went from being something that was super taboo to being easier than ordering food on Uber Eats,” says Josh Clayton, a 29-year-old copywriter in Brooklyn. “You watch a sports game and every commercial is an ad for sports betting.”

Josh started sports betting thanks to the massive deal that Caesar’s, one of the largest online sportsbooks, was offering new users: a free $300 to bet just for signing up, plus a match of up to $3,000. He put in $50 of his own money but cashed out with around $800. “A lot of sports fans love to talk about their teams and pretend that they’d be a better head coach than the guy who is eminently qualified and gets paid $40 million a year,” he says. “Sports betting gives you a little taste of making those decisions, and when you win, it feels like a validation of you being smart.”

It’s similar to what people who invest in stocks or crypto feel when something “moons,” or rises in value extremely quickly. “It just totally took over my life in the span of, like, a week,” said Jeff Andrews, a 40-year-old data reporter and a former coworker of mine. Less than a month ago, two of his friends who work in private equity told him about the tens of thousands of dollars they made in NFT trading, and then gave him advice on what to buy next. Since then, he’s made around $25,000, thanks to several moons he scored through tips that trickled in from multiple group chats and Discord servers.

Because of the ways in which this type of information disseminates — in subreddits, in breathless Twitter threads, on niche Discord servers — the world of betting and investing is dominated heavily by people who are already well-represented in tech, finance, and internet culture, which is to say that it is overwhelmingly young and male. Proponents of crypto love to talk about the benefits of decentralizing the financial system, how it can allow for historically underrepresented groups to build wealth, and how NFTs can be used to fund projects supporting charitable causes. Celebrities, from A-listers like Matt Damon, Reese Witherspoon, and Gwyneth Paltrow to Z-list Bachelor influencers, evangelize cryptocurrency as an almost philanthropic cause; what goes unspoken is that they stand to profit from more people investing after them.

Yet in practice, buying and selling crypto often amounts to a whisper network of people already in the know advising each other in private group chats what to buy and when. To an outsider, it can look like a perfectly legal form of insider trading, entirely shielded from any sort of oversight. The wealth gap among holders of bitcoin is 100 times worse than the US economy: the top 0.01 percent control 27 percent of the 19 million bitcoin currently in circulation.

For people who’ve long been interested in investing, the phenomenon has been somewhat bizarre to witness. “I give advice to friends who want to get into investing and tell them to put some into exchange-traded funds or index funds,” says Omar Khan, a 29-year-old who works in fintech and has been investing in the stock market since he was a freshman in high school. “Then all of a sudden these people are like, ‘No, that’s too complicated,’ and they want to get into SPACs. I’m like, hold up — you went from being too cautious to invest in an S&P 500 ETF to SPACs, which are an absolute scam?” (SPACs are a way to list private companies on the stock market, thereby allowing everyday traders to invest in them; many have criticized them as a bubble similar to the dot-com boom.)

Omar says his friends often cite supposedly heartwarming articles about people who put in a few hundred bucks in meme stocks, NFTs, or crypto and became millionaires. It’s irresponsible journalism, he argues, because it so often ignores the many people who lose even more than they put in. “In my group chats with finance friends, we’re like, ‘So many people are gonna lose so much money.’ We’re watching a train crash.” It’s worth wondering, he says, whether the low barrier of entry into this world is such a net positive. “There’s no phone call [to a broker] that you would have had to make 20 years ago. There’s no warning sign of like, ‘hey, are you sure you want to put $50,000 in this penny stock?’”

A year ago, Kevin, who asked me to use a pseudonym to protect his privacy, put $50 into a FanDuel account, which he then gambled into $750 before losing it all in an online roulette game. “It’s a sickening feeling losing that money, but I always come back thinking it will be different,” he told me over Twitter DM. The 26-year-old auto parts specialist in Erie, Pennsylvania, says he realized he had a gambling problem after repeatedly losing after a long winning streak, and then trying to win it all back. “Thankfully, I realized I had a problem before I lost something I couldn’t [get back], like my car or apartment,” he says. “I just want people to know how dangerous it is before you go in unprepared.”

Pretty much every new investor or gambler I spoke to for this story said that for the majority of their lives they’d been relatively risk-averse. Many hadn’t grown up with much money to begin with, which instilled in them a desire to save and invest responsibly in stable portfolios like 401ks, Roth IRAs, or index funds. But because of how easy it is now to gamble in sports, the stock market, or crypto, their approach had changed. While most have been careful not to bet more than they can afford to lose, the wave of sports betting legalizations across the states has watchdog organizations concerned: About 2 percent of Americans struggle with gambling addiction, some of whom end up losing jobs, families, their homes, even their lives.

Other new sports bettors have found real community and joy from the hobby. Multiple people (particularly men) I interviewed said that they now texted regularly with old friends from high school or college about their bets, and that it made talking to new people in social situations easier. “When someone says they have some money on the Australian Open, you’re like, ‘Oh, you gamble on sports too!’ And then you can have a little conversation about it,” says Dan Greene, a 33-year-old journalist.

For Madi, a 23-year-old in Minnesota (she preferred to not use her last name because sports betting still isn’t technically legal in her state), sports betting is more than just a conversation starter. As a queer woman, she says she’s almost never taken seriously as a longtime college and pro football fan, and for her, sports betting is proof that she actually knows what she’s talking about. “In a lot of social spaces, people tend to assume I don’t know much about sports,” she says. “There’s so much baggage that comes with being a female sports fan and a lesbian sports fan. So it feels really validating when I get things right.”

Richard Johnson, a 28-year-old who covers college football at Sports Illustrated, said that his interest in crypto was the product of a lifetime of learning to save. “As a Black person, this wealth was never accessible to us until, like, 50 years ago,” he says. “Our generation is not going to have Social Security or pensions. We’re not even going to fucking retire. The only way to get to the American Dream is to invest.”

A vocal backlash to the nascent concept of Web3, or a vision of the internet that runs on the blockchain and crypto, has cemented itself within the culture. Skeptics argue that the whole thing is killing the environment and is also a Ponzi scheme, which, jury’s still out! What’s significant, though, is how often the backlash comes from inside the house.

Despite turning a five-figure profit in just the span of a few weeks, Jeff still wonders whether it’s even worth it to continue investing in NFTs. He now keeps constant tabs on the rising and falling value of ethereum, newly released projects, and Discord announcements. “I’m not sleeping well because I’m so wired all the time,” he says.

More than that, though, he’s become disillusioned by the lofty promises of the true believers. “The more they explain it, the more I get queasy about it,” he says. “I thought that as I went on I’d learn about it and be like, ‘Okay, this makes sense. I understand why there’s value in this,’ and every day I am renewed with the sense that this is the stupidest fucking thing on the planet.”

Jeff, like most skeptics for whom the system has actually worked pretty well, is eager to cash out once the price of ethereum goes back up. But talking to him, and to the rest of the (almost entirely) men who’ve turned money into a hobby, made me more than anything feel like I was too late to something that hadn’t even really happened yet. Because of course it isn’t “too late” to become an overnight crypto millionaire or to cash out on an incredibly lucky bet; it’s just highly unlikely that that person will be you. Nobody wants to be a cynical spoilsport, stewing in resentment of these men who have won and will probably keep winning, who look a lot like the ones who have always won: the men who have the time, the knowledge, the energy, and, most importantly, the money to turn “having money” into its own hobby.

You can’t hate the players, of course. I asked Jeff if he’d made any money in the 20 or so minutes that we’d been talking. “Not really,” he said. “Around $200.”

This column was first published in The Goods newsletter. Sign up here so you don’t miss the next one, plus get newsletter exclusives.

 After being indicted by a federal grand jury in Oct. 2021 for allegedly lying to the FBI, Nebraska Rep. Jeff Fortenberry now claims he didn’t lie—but he was confused during interrogations. According to new court documents filed Friday, attorneys representing the GOP official argue that Fortenberry was confused due to his age. His attorneys also plan to call on an expert who can speak to his failing memory and age.

According to the Omaha World-Herald, Fortenberry’s lawyers said they wanted his entire conversation with the FBI played for the jury to prove that the agents' questions were repetitive and Fortenberry was confused rather than lying. He “did not have a clear recollection of the events,” the defense team claimed. The point on Fortenberry’s aging is interesting since he is only 60-years-old.

Prosecutors have called the defense’s suggestions “nonsense,” the Associated Press reported. Fortenberry’s attorneys are also questioning the political position of lead prosecutor, Mack Jenkins. In response to their motion, prosecutors have noted that a memory expert would offer nothing more than common-sense observations that people already know about memory recall. Additionally, they noted that Fortenberry is an “obscure” politician whose campaign donor in question donated to both Democrats and Republicans alike, the Omaha World-Herald reported.

“While defendant tries hard to proclaim this case is infected by politics, it is he who keeps injecting it,” prosecutors said. “The defendant and his counsel continuously seek to charge his case with politics, make defendant’s political affiliation the focus, and otherwise attack the motives of the prosecution team—none of which are relevant to any legal or factual defense.”

The FBI questioned Fortenberry in connection to an investigation into potential campaign finance violations. A press release last year from the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Central District of California said that a federal grand jury was charging the congressman with “concealing information and making false statements to federal authorities who were investigating illegal contributions made by a foreign national to the congressman's 2016 re-election campaign."

In October, Fortenberry denied all allegations of lying, he even went as far as to ask his supporters for thoughts and prayers as he faced the “bogus charge.” According to Daily Kos, his wife, Celeste, sent an email to supporters, which read, in part:

“Let me say it again: This accusation is entirely false. Jeff did not lie to the FBI. This has all the marks of being a political attack, a bogus charge manufactured to take him out.”

The charges include one count of scheming to falsify and conceal material facts and two counts of knowingly and willingly making false statements and representations to federal investigators.

Fortenberry is among several lawmakers who investigators said received illegal campaign contributions from Lebanese Nigerian billionaire Gilbert Chagoury. Accepting these contributions violated federal laws banning foreign nationals from donating to political candidates.

According to the Omaha World-Herald, Chagoury allegedly donated to Fortenberry because of a shared interest in protecting Christians from persecution in the Middle East.

During his interview in regards to the contributions, prosecutors believe Fortenberry lied. They claim that Fortenberry had been informed that the money “probably” came from Chagoury during a 2018 phone call from the organizer of the California fundraiser, even though he says he cannot recall the call and knew nothing about the contribution.

"A number of years ago, some very bad people illegally transferred money into my campaign, along with several other members of Congress," Fortenberry said in October in response to the accusations. "They were caught, they were punished and they've been held accountable, thankfully."

According to an FBI affidavit, the donations went to Fortenberry's campaign in March 2016.

"I answered their questions. Later, we went back and answered further questions," Fortenberry said in a YouTube video. "I told them what I knew and what I understood. They've accused me of lying to them and are charging me with this. We're shocked. We're stunned. I feel so personally betrayed. We thought we were trying to help and so now we will have to fight."

Fortenberry has pleaded not guilty to all charges. A hearing in the case is scheduled for Tuesday before U.S. District Judge Stanley Blumenfeld Jr. of Los Angeles. While a date has not been set, Fortenberry’s trial is scheduled to begin early this year, most likely in March. 

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Sen. Lisa Murkowski on Sunday encouraged President Joe Biden to choose a Supreme Court nominee who could receive broad bipartisan support and not pick the one that would be "to the furthest left."

During a joint appearance with Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) on CNN’s State of the Union, the Alaska Republican said that a significant bipartisan vote on Biden’s Supreme Court pick would send a message to those Americans who see the courts as increasingly politicized.

“I want to make sure that the president nominates an exceptional candidate, an exceptional individual, and I would be honored to be able to support an exceptional African American woman,” Murkowski said.

Murkowski’s remarks are a contrast to those of her fellow GOP Sens. Ted Cruz of Texas and Roger Wicker of Mississippi, who have criticized Biden's pledge to nominate an African American woman to the high court. Wicker recently likened Biden's promise to affirmative action. Democrats are quick to note that other presidents, including former President Ronald Reagan, previously pledged to nominate women to the Supreme Court.

Murkowski is widely viewed as one of the most likely Republican senators to support Biden’s pick. She has backed 79 percent of Biden’s judicial nominees this Congress and voted last year to confirm Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson to the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals. Jackson is viewed as a frontrunner for the Supreme Court seat.

Democrats can confirm whoever Biden picks without GOP support, as long as all 50 Democrats are present and support the nominee. Manchin and Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (D-Ariz.) have yet to break with the president on a single judicial nominee. During his CNN appearance Sunday, Manchin said that all of the potential candidates mentioned thus far are “extremely qualified” and predicted whoever Biden picks “will get a majority of votes, it’ll get 60 or more.”

While Democrats can confirm the nominee along party lines, Murkowski said that Biden should pick a nominee who can get more than just one Republican vote. So far this Congress, Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) has crossed party lines the most frequently to support Biden’s nominee, followed by Murkowski and Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.).

“It goes back to his words at the prayer breakfast. How are we going to unify? What is it that we need to do?,” Murkowski said Sunday. Picking an individual who can get broad bipartisan support “sends a signal to the public that maybe, maybe the courts are not as political as the legislative and the executive branch.”

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The Court takes up its first big redistricting case since Republicans gained a 6-3 supermajority. What could go wrong?

The Supreme Court is likely to hand down a decision soon in Merrill v. Milligan, a case where the worst-case scenario for democracy would neutralize one of the few remaining prongs of the Voting Rights Act that the Court has not yet dismantled.

The case concerns Alabama’s new congressional districts, and whether they violate the Voting Rights Act’s prohibitions on racial gerrymanders. Days before the state of Alabama asked the justices to carve another chunk out of America’s voting rights laws, a three-judge panel ordered the state of Alabama to redraw its congressional maps. Notably, two of the judges on this panel were appointed by former President Donald Trump.

Among other things, the panel’s opinion in Singleton v. Merrill explains that Black Americans make up about 27 percent of Alabama’s population, but they would only have a real shot of electing their candidate of choice in one of the state’s seven congressional districts under the new map based on the 2020 census. Thus, while Black Alabamans represent more than a quarter of the state’s population, they only control 14 percent of the state’s congressional delegation.

The lower court ordered the state legislature to redraw the map, relying on a provision of the Voting Rights Act banning racial gerrymanders. To reach that decision, the three judges spent 225 pages walking through the exceedingly complicated test announced in Thornburg v. Gingles (1986), which asks whether a state election law that imposes a disproportionate burden on racial minorities “interacts with social and historical conditions to cause an inequality in the opportunities enjoyed by [minority] and white voters to elect their preferred representatives.”

As I’ve written, the legal rule that the Court announced in Gingles — which governs many redistricting cases filed under the Voting Rights Act — is a mess. It advises courts to weigh at least nine different factors. And it would be reasonable for a state to ask the Supreme Court to come up with something less unwieldy to help lower courts sort through these sorts of cases. Alabama could have gone this route, and if it had proposed a reasonable modification to the Gingles test, it’s possible that such a modification could have helped them defend their maps.

But Alabama does nothing of the sort in the Merrill case. Instead, it proposes a new rule that, if adopted by the Supreme Court, could effectively make it impossible to challenge a racial gerrymander in federal court.

At one point, for example, Alabama quotes favorably from a 1994 opinion by Justice Clarence Thomas, which was joined only by one other justice, and which suggests that no voting rights violation occurs even if a state gerrymanders its districts to make it impossible for racial minorities to elect their preferred candidate. Under this theory, “minorities unable to control elected posts would not be considered essentially without a vote; rather, a vote duly cast and counted would be deemed just as ‘effective’ as any other.”

The state’s primary argument, meanwhile, would trap voting rights plaintiffs in a kind of Catch-22.

Alabama’s arguments could impose an impossible burden of proof on voting rights plaintiffs

The Merrill case is actually two separate lawsuits, one brought by a group of plaintiffs led by Democratic state Sen. Bobby Singleton, and another brought by a group of voters and organizations that includes the Alabama State Conference of the NAACP.

The crux of the plaintiffs’ arguments in Merrill is that Alabama should have two congressional districts, instead of just one, where Black voters can elect their preferred candidate. Before such a lawsuit can proceed, however, Cooper v. Harris (2017) requires these plaintiffs to prove that it is actually possible to draw two such districts without having to rely on ugly, misshapen districts that could stretch across much of the state.

Under Cooper, the Merrill plaintiffs must show that Black Alabamans are a “sufficiently large and geographically compact” group that it is actually possible to draw two districts where they “constitute a majority.” If these plaintiffs cannot make such a demonstration, then their lawsuit will fail before a court even considers many of the more complicated questions demanded by the Supreme Court’s opinion in Gingles.

To overcome this initial burden, two different sets of plaintiffs hired separate experts. One group of plaintiffs, for example, hired Moon Duchin, a mathematics professor at Tufts University, who produced four separate maps with two Black-majority districts.

US District Court for the Northern District of Alabama

Again, the purpose of these maps is limited. The state is not required to adopt any of these four maps. Indeed, the lower court explicitly stated that, should it determine that Alabama’s existing maps are illegal, and that a new redistricting plan must be drawn, “Supreme Court precedent also dictates that the Alabama Legislature ... should have the first opportunity to draw that plan.”

Rather, the purpose of these sample maps was just to show that it’s actually possible to draw two majority-Black districts that are reasonably compact.

Alabama’s brief to the Supreme Court, however, faults the Merrill plaintiffs for paying too much attention to race when they produced the sample maps demonstrating it is possible to draw two compact, majority-Black districts. To produce these maps, the state claims, the plaintiffs “must necessarily prioritize race first and consider other race-neutral factors second.” Alabama claims that map-makers must be absolutely forbidden from giving such a priority to racial concerns — even if they only do so to produce hypothetical maps which prove it is theoretically possible to draw two Black-majority districts.

It’s a stunning argument. Again, Cooper effectively requires these plaintiffs to produce sample maps where at least two districts have Black majorities. How is that even possible unless whoever produces these sample maps prioritizes race while drawing them? It’s like asking an artist to draw a picture of an elephant without ever permitting them to look at an elephant.

Indeed, if Alabama’s proposed rule were adopted by the Supreme Court, it’s unclear whether any similar racial gerrymandering lawsuit could prevail — or even get past the threshold of inquiry demanded by Cooper.

The Supreme Court has been systematically dismantling voting rights

Merrill involves a particular kind of racial gerrymandering suit, which permits voting rights plaintiffs to challenge such a gerrymander even if they cannot prove that the lawmakers who drew the maps acted with racist intent. If the Supreme Court adopts the bar proposed by Alabama — one potentially impossible to overcome — a voting rights plaintiff might still prevail if they can show that a map was enacted with a racist purpose.

Except that, in Abbott v. Perez (2018), the Supreme Court required voting rights plaintiffs alleging invidious intent to overcome such a high burden of proof that it is virtually impossible for them to prevail. Under Perez, lawmakers enjoy such a strong presumption of racial innocence that only the most egregious displays of racism are vulnerable to lawsuits.

Similarly, in Shelby County v. Holder (2013), the Supreme Court effectively eliminated a practice known as “preclearance,” which required states with a history of racist voting practices — including Alabama — to submit any new election rules for review by officials in Washington, DC, before those new rules could take effect.

The Court, in other words, appears to be systematically dismantling the law’s safeguards against racism in elections. Merrill could continue that project — indeed, it could accelerate it, since this will be the first major redistricting case heard by the Court’s new 6-3 Republican supermajority — and make it much easier for states to draw racially discriminatory legislative districts.

On Thursday, the Republican National Committee (RNC) took the next steps to forward an official censure of Republican Rep. Liz Cheney and Rep. Adam Kinzinger.  That censure resolution doesn’t pull any punches: Republicans are nervous about the findings of the Jan. 6 committee, and anxious to promote the new standard that obedience to Trump is more important than following the law, upholding the Constitution, or discovering the truth. 

But there is one particular piece of the resolution that stands out—and not in a good way. 

“WHEREAS Representatives Cheney are Kinzinger are participating in a Democrat-led persecution of ordinary citizens engaged in in legitimate political discourse, and they are both using their past professed political affiliation to mask Democrat abuse of prosecutorial power, therefore ...”

The idea here that Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger were never real Republicans, but only “professed” that they were as some part of long con is extraordinary enough. But nothing else in the censure resolution quite matches up to the claim that the insurgents who smashed their way into the Capitol—in an event that injured over 150 police officers, caused millions of dollars in damage, included the theft of materials from both Congressional chambers as well as offices, and ultimately resulted in nine deaths—were just “ordinary citizens engaged in legitimate political discourse.”

The resolution may be intended to condemn Cheney and Kinzinger, but what it does is absolutely erase any scrap of legitimacy for the RNC.

As The New York Times reports, in the days immediately following the Jan. 6 assault, Republican leaders in Congress were quick to condemn the violence. But the Republican National Committee under chair Ronna McDaniel has become ever more radical and welcomes only those who pledge their full allegiance to Trump, and only Trump.

This was, after all, the party that failed to produce a platform in 2020, settling instead for a default policy of whatever Trump says.

For Republican representatives and senators—at least, those not named Majorie Taylor Greene or Josh Hawley — the attempt to punish Cheney and Kinzinger is far more frightening than the role those two Republicans play on the House select committee. That’s because the RNC action serves to underscore the fact that the current GOP is about Trump, and only Trump. It has no goals. It has no plans. It’s just involved in smacking down whoever fails to bow deeply enough this week.

And considering that Trump condemned Lindsey Graham as a “RINO” for opposing the idea of giving Jan. 6 defendants a blanket pardon, they all understand that anyone could find themselves in the crosshairs at any time. 

Not every Republican is anxious to do a Ted Cruz crawl.

On Friday, Sen. Mitt Romney tweeted his support for Cheney and Kinzinger, writing that “Honor attaches to Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger for seeking truth even when doing so comes at great personal cost.” He also wrote that “Shame falls on a party that would censure persons of conscience,” but he failed to mention either McDaniel  or Trump.

What’s worrying Republicans in D.C. is that their party has made supporting violent insurgency not just something they can ignore in the name of “moving on,” but a prerequisite of membership. That move is genuinely doing what the censure resolution claimed about Cheney and Kinzinger—creating a division in the party that endangers their efforts to capture the House in November.

Republican candidates are going to end up running in November not on some variant of “Biden is bad,” but having to actively endorse the idea that the Jan. 6 insurgency was good. The RNC is putting them in a position where they have no choice but to buy into Trump’s pardon offer if they want access to the resources and financial support of the party.

Republicans are now officially, objectively the pro-insurrection, pro-violence, pro-sedition party. After all, those claims about “ordinary citizens engaged in in legitimate political discourse” must surely include the members of the Oath Keepers who have been charged with seditious conspiracy, and whose plans for Jan. 6 included stationing massive caches of weapons and explosives just outside D.C.

On Friday afternoon, McDaniel altered the text of the resolution, changing that last section to read “a Democrat-led persecution of ordinary citizens who engaged in legitimate political discourse that had nothing to do with violence at the Capitol.” 

That, however, is not the resolution that members of the party voted on and passed.

It is endorsement season, the most lucrative of all political seasons if you are the sort of political hack who for whatever reasons has stumbled into a position of party influence but are repulsed by the thought of doing any actual work—and already things are sounding very, very familiar.

In a new Axios report, we get word of what appear to be some pay-to-play endorsement schemes involving several big names in American conservatism. It's hard to act too surprised about either of them because both actors have been so reliably crime-adjacent in the past that merely exchanging cash for an endorsement counts as a bog-standard conservative grift.

Axios reports that Arizona Republican candidate Jim Lamon, who's currently running for Senate, wrote a $20,000 check to American Conservative Union (ACU) Chairman Matt Schlapp for "communications consulting"; two weeks after that, Schlapp announced his endorsement of Lamon's campaign. When Lamon wrote another $20,000 check to Schlapp, the ACU announced its own endorsement of Lamon.

So did the "communications" Lamon was paying Schlapp for consist mostly of paying Schlapp to "endorse" him and prod the rest of the ACU to do the same? Probably! Almost certainly, in fact! And it's not exactly illegal, because Lamon is getting what he paid for. He paid money to have one of the griftier powerbrokers in conservatism publicly boost him, and that's what he got. Money well spent!

The second bit of Axios' scoop is, well, pretty much the same story. Ohio Republican Jane Timkin is also running for Senate; Timkin's campaign ponied up $5,000 for the services of "a firm run by ex-NYPD chief Bernard Kerik."

"On the same day," reports Axios, Kerik tweeted about Timkin. He went on to appear at her rallies and promote her on Ohio radio.

Apropos of nothing, the press obsession with identifying Bernard Kerik solely as a former New York Police Department chief is odd as hell. Anyone who has been on this planet for long enough to find expired soup cans in their pantry knows Kerik first and foremost for the bit where he got sentenced to a prison stint for felony tax fraud and other crookedness. His name reappears in Republican circles today in large part due to Donald Trump doling out a pardon in 2020 because Donald Trump invested a nontrivial part of his presidency in boosting the fortunes of tax cheats who lie to federal officials and/or steal cash from fellow Republicans.

Kerik is an ex-felon, yet in Axios and in other political outlets, this descriptor rarely comes up—and that is, to repeat, odd as hell.

We have all seen the stories where a heroic American saves an unconscious woman from a burning car or thwarts an attempted violent assault only to have his picture plastered in the papers with headlines like "Ex-marijuana dealer saves woman from burning car" or "Paroled felon thwarts crime." In the story, we learn that the hero had a drug possession charge dickity-two years ago or was jailed at age 19 on a drunk driving conviction. Those are such defining moments of their life and character that even after running into a burning building or saving the Duke of South Blokenshire from a pack of rabid dogs, the "was once arrested for pot" part is still the only bit worth a headline mention.

But Kerik, now—he doesn't get the same treatment. No, he's just a former NYPD chief. Whatever he might have done to get booted from the job, whatever sketchmonster stuff he might have gotten up to in the days immediately after his moment of 9/11 fame ... eh. Not important.

Getting back to the main story, though, it's the Schlapp part that's more interesting. If you were to make a wild, uninformed, completely half-assed bet as to which one of these conservative powerbrokers is most likely to someday find himself in prison for campaign finance crimes or other dodgy bookkeeping, this is one of the rare occasions on which the guy who already went to prison for financial crimes looks like the worse bet. Matt Schlapp and his wife have been repeated subjects of press reports on shady Republican campaign dealings, and the ACU is currently under federal investigation after a grand jury indicted Republican Tennessee State Sen. Brian Kelsey on multiple counts of violating federal campaign finance laws.

The circumstances of that probe are rather similar; the Republican then-candidate funneled over $100,000 through a chain of PACs that eventually resulted in about $66,000 being pushed to the ACU, which "immediately thereafter" spent around $80,000 on radio ads boosting Kelsey. Kelsey's indictment accuses him of violating campaign rules, but the ACU is reportedly being investigated with a focus on Schlapp's role in the endorsement and whether the money transfers amount to illegal coordination between the campaign and the conservative group.

Before that, Schlapp was in the news for collecting $750,000 in two weeks for a last-ditch lobbying campaign asking for a presidential pardon for another Trump-backing conservative financial criminal. That pardon was never written—but that doesn't mean Schlapp didn't walk away with enough new cash to pay off most American mortgages a few times over.

So then: exchanging $20,000 for an announcement by an important-sounding grift—er, conservative voice—that by golly, now that they've taken a good look at your check they've discovered that you're the best candidate in the race for whatever-it-is. Is that legal? Who the hell knows at this point! Probably! Why wouldn't it be!

It's also legal now to scam the conservative base by telling them you're going to build a border wall you don't intend to build. It's also undeniably proper to sell them "survival buckets" filled with insurmountable amounts of horrific desiccated somethings. And it's nigh on holy to tell them that God absolutely wants you to die a horrible, miserable, agonizing tube-down-the-throat death rather than do the bare minimum to protect yourself or anybody else. There's nothing about the ACU, its conferences, its allies, its hangers-on, and its weird creepy overdressed crowd of wannabe powerbrokers that's not a grift. That's the whole point of it.

Should we mention to the conservative base that this is all just a pro wrestling performance? That the people chosen as the best "conservatives" for office are chosen in large part based on who wrote the biggest check to whom? Probably, but they wouldn't listen anyway, so screw 'em. People have been writing entire magazine articles for years now pointing out the unbelievable amount of outright scamming that the top stars of conservatism aim at their mailing list followers, from gold coins to "nutrition" powders to pillows filled with foam scraps and petty hatred. They never listen.

Still, though, is there anyone in the Trump conservative orbit who isn't either a felon, under indictment, or under investigation for financial crimes? Is there anyone anywhere in conservatism who's not once removed from the movement's biggest crooks?

Senate Republicans on Thursday stepped up their attacks on one of President Joe Biden’s Federal Reserve board nominees, warning that she would use the Fed’s powers to steer capital away from the oil and gas industries and undermine the central bank’s independence.

Sarah Bloom Raskin, whom Biden tapped to be vice chair for supervision and regulation, said at her confirmation hearing that the Fed has no role in allocating capital and insisted she would not go beyond its legal authority to oversee the financial sector.

“Supervisory and regulatory actions must always stay within the bounds of the law,” she said. “I understand Congress’s strictures and authorities and have always acted within them.”

Raskin's nomination has turned into a battleground over the role the central bank should play in encouraging financial institutions to assess and mitigate the risks they face from climate change. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell jumped into the fray after the hearing, accusing her of planning to "bully" the private sector.

Senate Banking Republicans kept returning to Raskin’s earlier speeches and writing, including a New York Times op-ed in which she criticized the Fed for making changes to its emergency pandemic lending programs that she said would benefit struggling oil and gas firms.

Pressed to explain her view, Raskin said it is "inappropriate for the Fed to make credit decisions and allocations based on choosing winners and losers." And she said her op-ed was about decisions the Fed had made about emergency lending programs, not as part of the supervisory process.

Republicans were not satisfied and accused Raskin of reversing herself on long-standing positions.

“This is one of the most remarkable cases of confirmation conversion I have ever seen,” Sen. Pat Toomey (R-Pa.), the top Republican on the Banking Committee, said.

Toomey said the Fed’s plans to assess banks’ exposure to climate risks will inevitably lead to new restrictions, such as increased capital requirements or limits on their exposure to fossil fuel industries.

“The idea will be to allocate capital away from the heavily carbon-emitting parts of our economy,” he said. “How do I know that? Because Ms. Raskin has told us this repeatedly.”

McConnell, a Kentucky Republican, blasted Raskin on the Senate floor Thursday, saying she would go beyond the Fed’s limited dual mandate to “pursue liberal environmental goals.”

“President Biden’s nominee for Fed Vice Chair wants unelected bureaucrats to financially bully the private sector into policy changes which lack enough support to become law the honest way,” McConnell said.

Raskin has said that financial institutions should account for the risks posed by climate change. Aggressive greenhouse gas emissions policies that make fossil fuels more expensive could devalue the assets held by banks, harming investments in firms whose business models rely on carbon-intensive goods and services, Raskin and other climate experts have said.

"Whatever the risk, the job of the banking regulators is to make sure that the banking system has appropriately accounted for these risks and is just prepared to mitigate them,” she said Thursday. “Now, the watchword here is resiliency, resiliency in the face of potential risks."

Though some Democrats have criticized Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell for failing to do more on climate change, they argued Thursday that Raskin’s views are no different than his.

“There’s been a lot of hyperventilating about today’s nominees that is based on hyperbole and misrepresentation rather than their records and actual experience,” Senate Banking Chair Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio) said.

“As a governor, she never advocated for the Fed to allocate private capital,” he added. “If that’s not evidence and proof, what could be?”

On Feb. 1, Republican Gov. Mike Parson of Missouri tweeted out that he had “accepted the resignation of Department of Health and Senior Services Director Don Kauerauf.” After saying Richard Moore would be the temporary acting director, Gov. Parson went on to complain that “It's unfortunate that we now have to disrupt state operations and the leadership at an entire department because the Missouri Senate chose to indulge a few men's egos.”

What he was referring to was the blowback from Missouri’s Republican state senators who attacked Kauerauf for not being entirely anti-vaccine and questioning whether or not he was sufficiently against any and all abortions. Republican Sen. Mike Moon, who led the campaign against Kauerauf told reporters, “We had an overwhelming outpouring from the people of Missouri from all over the state, and their voices were heard. We acted on their will.”

“Their will” seems to have been the misconception that Kauerauf’s statements that he was hoping more Missourians would get vaccinated was some form of tyranny. Seriously.

What was interesting about this move to rid the state of Missouri of its leading health official during a pandemic was that Kauerauf seemed to say all of the ignorant things we have come to expect from GOP-nominated public health officials. He said he was against all public health mandates; he said he was against all abortions; he said he believes that life begins at “conception.” It seems that his only sin was saying that he believed in trying to figure out ways to get more Missourians vaccinated as an effective public health policy. Not a mandate, mind you. Just saying “Hey, maybe get vaccinated.”

A protest of about 100 people calling for state senators to vote down Kauerauf took place on Sunday. MAGA-hat-wearing dunderheads gave clearly well thought out* statements about their problems with the Department of Health and Senior Services Director.

Deborah Wiersma, of Pacific, Missouri, wore a red hat supporting former President Donald Trump to protest outside the Senate committee hearing. She said even though Parson and Kauerauf don’t support mandates, she’s concerned that they’re still encouraging masking, testing, social distancing and vaccinations.

“I’m against all of it,” she said.

Since chaos is the order of the day for Republicans across the country, now, as COVID-19 numbers and hospitalizations surge throughout the Show-Me state, seems to have been the perfect time to gum up the works. Senate Democratic Leader John Rizzo released a statement:

“Missouri is in the middle of a health crisis and now the state is without a health director because a small but loud group of extremist Republicans are against fighting a disease that has killed 17,000 of our fellow Missourians. Misinformation and lies have defeated professionalism and integrity.”

Rizzo also told NPR that the only criterion for getting rid of the state’s health director seems to have been “because he wouldn’t say that vaccinations were a bad thing.”

It’s a pretty intense example of how the real slippery slope that conservatives have always warned Americans against, with regard to gun safety laws and same-sex marriage, is really only applicable to bad public health policy decisions. Many found Gov. Parson’s frustration with his political allies a real dose of schadenfreude, as Gov. Parson has mangled the response to the pandemic in his state by bending over backward to appease the anti-maskers and anti-vaxxers who misinform the public. This is the guy who covered up a study—one that he requested—that showed how mask mandates actually work to reduce rates of infection and prevent deaths.

*See not clear or well thought out.  

Most of the details that have emerged concerning Donald Trump’s attempt to overturn the results of the 2020 election have focused on the counting of electoral votes on Jan. 6 and the various steps Trump’s team put in place to destroy the process on that day. But that doesn’t mean there were not efforts being made to destroy democracy through a more direct route.

Yet another new memo, this one surfaced by The Washington Post, included a proposal to bypass all legal restrictions and tap directly into the raw data collected by the NSA, giving Trump’s team access to phone records, text messages, social media, emails, and other online activities of everyone in the nation. This unprecedented violation of privacy would then be used so a panel appointed by Trump could skim though the global sea of data looking for anything that could be held up as evidence of foreign interference in the election.

Once found, this evidence would be used to support what may be one of the most chilling examples of bureaucratic doublespeak ever committed to paper, described as “next steps to defend the Constitution in a manner superior to current civilian-only judicial remedies.”

Whether that translates into “roll out the tanks,” or “round up the disloyal,” or both is unclear.

The new document, issued on Dec. 18, 2020, creates a plan for a three-man panel that would have access to all NSA data. All three of those appointed were to be Trump loyalists, with one being former White House aide and Michael Flynn loyalist Rich Higgins. He was kicked off the National Security Council in 2017, after which he issued a memo describing how:

“A cabal of leftist ‘deep state’ government workers, ‘globalists,’ bankers, adherents to Islamic fundamentalism and establishment Republicans are conspiring to remove President Trump and impose cultural Marxism in the United States.”

That memo also claimed that the American Civil Liberties Union and Black Lives matter were working against Trump in partnership with the United Nations and the Muslim Brotherhood. Clearly, this was the exactly the right man to be put in charge of reading every American’s text for signs of foreign connections.

All of the data collected by the NSA is supposedly sealed without a court order describing specific information under request. Under the scheme described in the memo, Trump would have avoided all those court defeats by simply bypassing the court and producing whatever “evidence” was required to support his claims directly from his three-man panel.

The plot to hand over all NSA “raw signals data” to Trump’s team and use it to support “[defending] the Constitution in a manner superior to current civilian-only judicial remedies” is described in the article as one of a number of last-ditch efforts by the Trump team as time ticked down on other efforts at overturning the election. With Jan. 6 approaching, a series of court defeats raining down on them, and a lack of apparent commitment from then-Vice President Mike Pence, the Post describes Trump’s team as “desperate” to come up with alternatives. 

But what’s most amazing about this secret memo to bypass the courts, destroy the privacy of every single American, and generate an excuse for ending democracy through a selective reading of Tinder swipes and Subway orders, may be that it wasn’t secret at all.

Just as it took until last month to discover that a 38-page PowerPoint presentation was given to Republican members of Congress to instruct them in how best to assist Trump on Jan. 6, the proposal to read raw NSA data was apparently circulated widely in Republican circles. That includes usual suspect Sen. Ron Johnson, whose office admits they had a copy. So did Sen. Kevin Cramer, who got a copy of the memo courtesy of failed Republican congressional candidate Michael Del Rosso—one of the three would-be members of the All-seeing Panel of Three.

But it was far from only two senators who got a peek at this idea. Just as with the how-to-overthrow-democracy-in-six-easy-steps PowerPoint, this scheme also became the subject of a large meeting involving Cramer, Sen. Cynthia Lummis, and “some two dozen others crammed into a ground-floor hotel conference room.” Johnson was also there via teleconference.

That Jan. 4 meeting, during which the scheme to bypass the courts was presented along with a series of wild claims about Venezuela or China having control of voting machines, is also new information. It apparently had some of the same allegations as the PowerPoint and was intended to move senators to join Josh Hawley in supporting overturning the election for Trump.

Also among the recipients of the proposal to tap every phone call, email, and text message in the nation was My Pillow guy Mike Lindell. Considering that Lindell recently had a multiday telethon devoted to looking at screens of randomly generated static, it’s impossible to say what he might have found if allowed to skim worldwide satellite communications. 

However, there is something that Lindell said when asked about this that keeps coming up. The purpose of the Jan. 4 meeting, according to Lindell, was to sway senators to “delay the Jan. 6 certification of Biden’s election victory, making time to examine votes in key states.”

Except there had already been over two full months in which to examine those votes. There had already been machine recounts, and hand recounts, and forensic audits. There had already been more than 80 court cases filed and dismissed for lack of evidence or simple lies. Ten hours, or 10 days, or 10 weeks weren’t going to change that. 

The purpose of getting senators to go along with halting the Jan. 6 count wasn’t to allow more time for investigation, it was to allow Trump to be crowned on that day.

As the details of Donald Trump’s scheme to block the final count of electoral votes on Jan. 6 have emerged, one item that initially seemed minor has emerged as a focus of Republican efforts. The false slates of electors put forward in seven states looked at first like little more than a stunt. Including in their ranks state Republican Party officials, along with members of both state and county governments, these false electors weren’t a random selection of people off the street. They were, in most cases, the actual electors who would have been put forward had Trump actually won those states.

It’s now clear is that, early on in the effort to overturn the electors, these false slates of electors were identified as a critical component of the whole scheme. They were to act as the key “evidence” that the outcome in these states won by Joe Biden was actually in dispute, and give Republicans on Congress something to point too when justifying their support for Trump’s coup. To that end, Rudy Giuliani was at the center of plot, directing Trump’s legal team to get those electors in place.

Now, additional memos turned up by The New York Times demonstrate how this effort went forward in Wisconsin, working in lockstep with other legal challenges as Trump’s team sought to give the impression that a clear victory for Biden was somehow “in dispute.” Just two weeks after the election, a memo was sent out to Trump campaigns telling Republicans in Wisconsin to move ahead, gather the false electors on Dec. 14, and have them cast their invalid votes for Trump.

Virginia’s new governor, Glenn Youngkin, kicked off his term with a political magic trick. In the first of nine executive orders issued on Jan. 15, the day he took office,³¹ he banned the teaching of “inherently divisive concepts, including critical race theory” in K-12 public schools. It was a smart way to show his base he’s already jumping on issues they care about. Education policy, particularly the alleged role critical race theory plays in public school curricula, was a centerpiece of Youngkin’s campaign. But the impact of this executive order is less straightforward than it seems, because critical race theory isn’t actually taught in Virginia public schools.

This kind of tactic is increasingly familiar in politics today. Republican politicians, in particular, build entire campaigns around false or misleading information, then implement policies that respond to those falsehoods, cementing them further in our political landscape. 

The debate over critical race theory — a complex academic framework for understanding racism that would never actually be taught to second-graders but that at least nine state legislatures have tried to ban anyway — is just one such example. There’s an entire gamut of culture wars where this dynamic has taken hold. Abortion, one of the most powerful and long-lasting social issues in modern politics, is another example where arguments are increasingly framed in ways that tend to benefit Republicans. And because of that, Democrats frequently appear to be ceding ground, even though voters typically trust them more than Republicans on these issues and public opinion is often on the Democrats’ side.

The rebuttal to these issues seems like it should be simple. Why not just tell voters that critical race theory isn’t being taught and move on? Or say that abortions are safe and increasingly rare but will always be necessary for some women? But so far, Democrats haven’t really figured out a way to convince voters that some GOP messages aren’t based in reality. Experts told us that’s because Republicans’ often misleading framing is effective not because Americans believe it wholeheartedly or because they know all that much about the issue. Rather, the reason why abortion rights and critical race theory sticks in people’s minds is that these issues touch on broader anxieties.

“Calling critical race theory an ‘existential threat’ activates racial animus and fears around white victimhood, which are strongly tied to support for conservative candidates and policies,” said Maneesh Arora, a political scientist at Wellesley College. Once those fears have been stirred up, Arora and other experts told us that it can be very difficult for other politicians to dismiss them. In fact, politicians’ sparring over the facts — or Democrats’ oversimplifying voters’ concerns as “fake outrage” — might make those underlying fears seem more justified.

So that leaves Democrats going into a midterm election year with a serious conundrum: How do they fight a messaging war when the other side is playing fast and loose with the truth?

For years, the debate over abortion has revolved around misleading or downright inaccurate claims — like when former President Donald Trump accused Democrats of promoting infanticide (they were not), or when 20 Republican senators petitioned the Food and Drug Administration to classify the abortion-inducing drug mifepristone as a public health hazard (it is not). 

Myriad state-level abortion policies are also based on faulty or spurious science — including counseling that requires abortion providers to tell patients, inaccurately, that abortion is linked to breast cancer or infertility; legislation that limits abortion after a certain point because of disputed research on fetal pain; and a web of restrictions on abortion providers that similar health care providers don’t face, often justified by the incorrect assertion that abortion is dangerous.

Americans are generally not following the ins and outs of abortion politics — if anything, they may be actively avoiding it — but that also works to Republicans’ advantage. Americans’ views about abortion are fuzzy and malleable, in large part because they just don’t know very much about it. A Kaiser Family Foundation poll conducted in December 2019 found that Americans tend to overestimate how many abortions happen late in pregnancy, and underestimate how many abortions happen early. And while a majority are aware that abortion performed in a medical setting is safe, they were off about just how safe it is: Only about a quarter know, for instance, that it is safer than giving birth or getting your appendix removed, which a number of studies support.

Even without much information to go on, the idea that women and doctors, abetted by Democrats, are advocating to “execute” babies — which Trump has claimed on multiple occasions — might seem too outlandish to believe. But Tresa Undem, a researcher who studies public opinion on abortion, said that this kind of framing is successful not because Americans wholeheartedly believe it but because they don’t wholeheartedly disbelieve it. 

“​​Abortion later in pregnancy — it’s so rare that the vast majority of people don’t have personal experience with it and it’s never ever talked about,” Undem said. “So if Trump and Republicans come along and say there are doctors ripping babies from women’s wombs at the moment before birth, people will be like, ‘What?’ and there’s nothing in their minds to push back. They won’t necessarily believe it, but they’re not going to not believe it. That’s where I think Republicans are really successful.”

Like critical race theory, abortion also taps into much deeper anxieties — in this case, about gender roles. Polls by Undem and others have found that attitudes toward abortion track closely with broader attitudes about women’s place in society. Perhaps unsurprisingly, people who hold traditional views, which often emphasize women’s roles as mothers, are more likely to oppose abortion. 

But as misleading ideas about abortion become embedded in policy, those misleading concepts come to feel increasingly real. “There are hundreds and hundreds of policies that have been passed around the idea that women will ultimately come to regret their decision [to have an abortion] and therefore the state has to intervene to protect them and give them the knowledge they need,” said Alesha Doan, a political scientist at the University of Kansas. There’s no evidence that this is actually true — in fact, the opposite seems to be the case — but the policies give it an air of certainty. “People assume that politicians are passing laws for a reason, so the laws legitimize the idea that abortion regret is widespread and give it traction,” Doan said.

Undem told us that abortion has been a successful culture-war issue on the right because most people don’t need to know much, if anything, about the reality of abortion in America to have an opinion on it. The debate is about values: who gets to make the decision to have an abortion, who should be involved, how much to weigh the life of a fetus. 

In that sense, then, critical race theory is similar. Voters ordinarily trust Democrats over Republicans on education, but invoking critical race theory is different from sparring over class size or test scores. Fundamentally, it’s also about values — specifically, how children should be taught about racism. And it’s taking hold because of conservative white parents’ fears of a more progressive school curriculum. 

Recent polling suggests that this often misleading messaging is taking hold, too, as a notable share of Americans — namely Republicans — falsely believe that critical race theory is nothing more than a sinister plot to teach white children that they’re inherently evil. According to a July Reuters/Ipsos poll, for example, 20 percent of Americans (including 16 percent of Democrats and 31 percent of Republicans) said they believed that critical race theory “says that discriminating against white people is the only way to achieve equality.” Moreover, 22 percent said they believed that critical race theory “says that white people are inherently evil or bad.” In fact, critical race theory says neither of these things.

And even though a November Economist/YouGov poll found that a majority of Americans didn’t think or weren’t sure that critical race theory was being taught in their community’s schools, there’s still a misunderstanding on how bans on critical race theory could affect the teaching of related subjects that parents do want their kids to learn. A USA Today/Ipsos poll from late August and early September highlighted that schism: While 63 percent of parents with school-aged children said they supported their schools’ teaching about the lingering effects of slavery and racism, just 49 percent said they supported the teaching of critical race theory.

According to historian Keisha Blain, a 2022 National Fellow at New America and professor at the University of Pittsburgh, it’s hard to separate the current opposition to critical race theory in schools from a white backlash to a perceived loss of power and status. “We have seen this kind of response before in the aftermath of the civil rights movement. White conservatives began to propagate the false argument that Black Americans were somehow receiving ‘special treatment’ and thereby threatening the rights and opportunities for white people,” she said. “In the end, backlash politics thrive on misinformation, and they always rise to the surface as a way to counter any kind of political progress for marginalized groups.”

Indeed, the framing of abortion and critical race theory fights offers a kind of roadmap that other Republican politicians might use to run successful campaigns over the coming years. But, as several experts noted, GOP voters are not inherently gullible, nor are they more prone than Democrats to believing misinformation. “Both sides are vulnerable,” said Brendan Nyhan, a Dartmouth College political scientist who studies misinformation. “One of the key factors right now is that there’s a more developed apparatus for promoting false claims on the right. There’s a right-wing media ecosystem that doesn’t have a direct parallel on the left in its scope or influence.” 

So what can Democrats do in response? One potentially disastrous option for them is to keep engaging with these issues on Republicans’ terms. While this might be easier said than done, as partisanship and strong party loyalties help misleading information spread and thrive, Democrats can still realize when they’re in a fight they can’t win. 

That leaves them with two leading possibilities: They could unravel some of the misinformation out there, reframing conversations in ways that are both truthful and potentially beneficial to them electorally. With abortion, that could mean talking about it as an issue that’s fundamentally about women’s power and autonomy. And on critical race theory, as Blain told us, that might look like them providing evidence on what these bans in schools really mean for public school curricula. For example, over the next several years, executive orders like the one Youngkin issued are likely to lead to teachers getting reprimanded for doing their jobs. (Youngkin, for his part, already implemented a tip line for parents to report “inherently divisive practices,” like teaching critical race theory, in schools.) So if Democrats can condemn those offenses while also reframing public discourse on those issues, public opinion — and the terms of how these debates are framed — may later be on their side. “Democrats need to push back against proposed bills that use the label of ‘critical race theory’ as a cover to simply remove the writings of Black and brown authors from the classroom,” Blain said. 

Alternatively, Democrats could coalesce around a completely different message that energizes their own base “rather than getting stuck talking about critical race theory — which is something that animates the right, and just isn’t really an issue on the left,” Arora said. Because of increasing partisan polarization, he said, it’s unlikely Republican voters’ opinion on this issue will change unless elites in their own circles say otherwise, so it may be prudent for Democrats to focus on where they can unify their own base instead. 

Regardless of the choice Democrats make, though, experts said that telling voters their fears and concerns about these issues aren’t real is the worst of both worlds. After all, insisting that the focus on critical race theory is just fake news will only alienate the people who believe it’s not — and it won’t do much to convince Democratic voters that they should care about the underlying issues either. 

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Hell, I can't even make myself say it on purpose.

Today's News:

An anonymous reader quotes a report from CNET: NordVPN and Surfshark have finalized a merger agreement between the two VPN providers, the companies announced Wednesday. Though the specifics of the transaction aren't being released, the finalized merger agreement follows months of negotiations between the two companies that began in mid-2021, according to a joint press release issued by Surfshark and Nord Security, NordVPN's parent company. Surfshark and NordVPN had been rivals in the ultra-competitive market for VPNs (virtual private networks) prior to the merger, but are now joining forces to "solidify both companies' offerings in different market segments and diversify the geographical reach," according to the press release. More consumers have turned to VPNs in recent years to counter increasingly invasive digital tracking from search engines, ISPs and advertisers, as well as to circumvent local content restrictions and censorship. But the merger of two of the industry's top names -- both of which have long been among CNET's top VPN picks -- highlights the continued trend of consolidation in the VPN industry, which finds more brands under the umbrella of just three big companies -- Kape Technologies, Tesonet and Ziff Davis -- making it more important than ever to understand which entities are ultimately controlling the data sharing and privacy policies that underpin VPNs. The merger announcement follows the news just days ago that Surfshark was developed with the help of Tesonet, the same Lithuanian business incubator that helped NordVPN in its early days. While the Tesonet-NordVPN relationship was already known, the ties between Tesonet and Surfshark had been previously undisclosed. That changed last week after a report at Lithuanian news site Verslo zinios.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Adrian Blanco for The Washington Post used squares connected at the corners to compare federal judge confirmations across presidencies. Each square represents a demographic, which is sized by number of confirmations. I like it.

Tags: diversity, Joe Biden, judges

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