James.galbraith

And some people were naïve enough to believe they might be telling the truth.

An emboldened religious right wants the public to pay for its schools.

The plaintiffs in Carson v. Makin, a case being heard next Wednesday, December 8, begin their brief to the Supreme Court with an absolutely ridiculous historical comparison.

“In the 19th century, Maine’s public schools expelled students for adhering to their faith,” they claim, citing one example of a Catholic student expelled for not completing lessons off a Protestant bible. Now, according to the brief, Maine is committing a similarly repugnant sin against religious people by refusing to pay state residents’ tuition at private religious schools.

Under this reasoning, there is no relevant difference between denying a public education to a Catholic student and refusing to pay for private religious education. “The times are different,” the plaintiffs’ brief claims, “but the result is the same: denial of educational opportunity through religious discrimination.”

Carson, in other words, represents a significant escalation in the war over whether the government can enact policies of which religious people — and religious conservatives on the Supreme Court — disapprove. It moves the battleground from whether religious conservatives can seek exemptions from individual laws to whether they can also demand that the public actively fund their faith.

Typically, the Court’s “religious liberty” docket involves laws and policies that prohibit religious parties from acting in a way they believe is consistent with their faith. A church wishes to hold a crowded service, for example, in violation of a public health order limiting the number of people who can gather at one time during a pandemic. Or, an employer wishes to provide its employees with a health plan that excludes birth control in violation of a federal regulation requiring the insurance to cover contraceptive care.

But Carson is not like these cases. It claims the state of Maine must spend existing tax revenue from its secular residents to pay the private school tuition of some religious students. No one in Maine is prohibited from sending their children to a religious private school. The plaintiffs in Carson already send at least one child to such schools. The question is whether the Constitution requires the government — and, by extension, anyone who pays taxes to that government — to subsidize religious education.

Notably, the state could also wind up having to pay for hate speech in the process. According to Maine’s brief, both of the plaintiff families in Carson want the state to pay for tuition at schools that discriminate against LGBTQ students and teachers. One of those schools allegedly requires teachers to sign an employment agreement stating that “the Bible says that ‘God recognize[s] homosexuals and other deviants as perverted’” and that “[s]uch deviation from Scriptural standards is grounds for termination.’”

To be fair, Carson also involves Maine’s fairly unusual public school vouchers program, so it’s unclear what immediate impact a victory for the plaintiffs in this case would have in other states. Although much of Maine operates ordinary public schools run by local school districts, some students — predominantly those who live in sparsely populated areas where there is no local school — are not assigned to a particular school. Instead, the state offers to pay the private school tuition of those nearly 5,000 students, who would otherwise have no access to a free education.

Only “nonsectarian” schools are eligible for this subsidy. Parents can still choose to send their children to an institution that seeks to inculcate those children into a particular religious faith, but they won’t receive state funds to do so.

Nevertheless, the plaintiffs in Carson claim Maine is constitutionally obligated to subsidize religious education, at least so long as it provides similar funds for secular private education.

It’s the sort of argument that would have had little chance of prevailing until fairly recently, but that is likely to prevail in a Supreme Court dominated by conservative Republicans who are quite sympathetic to the religious right.

Just last year, the Court took a significant step toward tearing down the distinction between laws that impose unwanted obligations on people of faith and laws that merely deny taxpayer dollars to religious institutions. In a worst-case scenario for the separation of church and state, Carson could obliterate that distinction.

How we got to the point where the Carson plaintiffs’ arguments are taken seriously

At the outset, the plaintiffs’ main argument in Carson seeks to push the Roberts Court’s growing deference to religion to a new level, further divorcing it from the text of the Constitution itself. The bulk of their brief argues that Maine’s system violates the Constitution’s free exercise clause, which generally bans laws “prohibiting the free exercise” of religion.

The key word here is “prohibiting.” Again, no one in Maine is prohibited from doing anything because of the state’s decision to pay tuition at only some private schools. Both of the plaintiff families in Carson currently send children to religious private schools that are ineligible for subsidies. The only question in Carson is whether Maine must use tax dollars to pay for this religious education.

Barely two decades ago, there was a serious constitutional debate about whether states are even permitted to fund religious education. As established in Everson v. Board of Education (1947), longstanding precedent holds that “no tax in any amount, large or small, can be levied to support any religious activities or institutions, whatever they may be called, or whatever form they may adopt to teach or practice religion.” In 2002, Zelman v. Simmons-Harris asked the court to consider a school voucher program that primarily benefited religious schools. Though a majority of the Court abandoned Everson’s strict approach in this case, four justices dissented and would have applied the stricter rule.

Yet even after Zelman, the Court largely viewed the question of whether to subsidize religious education as a matter within lawmakers’ discretion.

Until the Roberts Court.

Most notably, in Espinoza v. Montana Department of Revenue (2020), the Court held that states must subsidize religiously affiliated schools under certain circumstances. Espinoza held that a state may not deny a subsidy to a religious institution “simply because of what it is” — that is, simply because the institution identifies with a particular faith.

But Espinoza also maintained a distinction between religious “status” and religious “use,” which is particularly relevant to the Carson case now before the Court.

Suppose, for example, a state provides grants to help set up food banks and soup kitchens. If a church wishes to set up a soup kitchen and is otherwise eligible for the grant, it can’t be denied the grant solely because it is a religious institution. Its “status” as a Christian-affiliated entity is not a valid basis to deny a grant under Espinoza.

Now imagine a slightly different church, that wishes to use the state-funded grant to purchase Bibles that will be distributed to people at the soup kitchen. In this scenario, the church is no longer just providing a secular service, food for the hungry. It’s providing an inherently religious service, the distribution of a holy text. This kind of inherently religious activity is what the Court meant by religious “use,” and Espinoza suggests states may still be allowed to deny funding to such activities — even if they can’t deny funding to religious institutions that qualify for subsidies funding secular activity.

And this distinction between religious “status” and religious “use” is now front and center in the Carson case.

The radicalism of the plaintiffs’ arguments in Carson

Although the tuition program at the heart of the Carson case predates Espinoza, it might as well have been designed specifically to survive judicial review after that decision. As the state explains in its brief, Maine determines whether a particular school is “sectarian,” and therefore ineligible for state subsidies, by asking if it “promotes the faith or belief system with which it is associated and/or presents the material taught through the lens of this faith.”

Although “affiliation or association with a church or religious institution is one potential indicator of a sectarian school,” this factor does not determine whether a school is classified as “sectarian.” Rather, the question is “what the school teaches through its curriculum and related activities, and how the material is presented.”

Under Espinoza’s framework, in other words, Carson is a case about religious “use.”

Nevertheless, the plaintiffs seek an expansion of Espinoza, claiming that policies which require religious families to “choose between their religious beliefs and receiving a government benefit” are unconstitutional — and that Maine’s tuition program forces these families to choose between “their right to tuition assistance or their right to freely exercise their religion.”

It’s a deeply radical argument, if taken to its logical end point. This case involves an unusual school voucher program that applies only to a small minority of Maine’s children — mostly students in very rural areas where it is not cost-efficient for the state to operate a public school. But if the Constitution does not permit states to force families to choose between receiving a free education and a religious one, then any public school system is potentially at risk.

Again, the plaintiffs’ argument is that the government cannot require a religious family to “choose between their religious beliefs and receiving a government benefit.” But traditional public education, where students are assigned to a government-run school that offers a free education, is a government benefit. All families that send their children to private, religious schools choose to forgo a free public education. So, if the plaintiffs are correct that families cannot be forced to make this choice, the entire public education system may be required to pay for private tuition at religious schools.

It’s not at all clear that the Court will be willing to go that far. Indeed, in Espinoza, Chief Justice John Roberts’s majority opinion appeared to anticipate this problem, and he attempted to nip it in the bud. “A State need not subsidize private education,” Roberts wrote in Espinoza, “but once a State decides to do so, it cannot disqualify some private schools” because of their religious status.

But Espinoza was also a 5-4 decision, before Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s death gave Republican appointees a supermajority on the Court. And, while Roberts is quite conservative, he’s the least conservative member of the Court’s six-justice Republican majority. Conservative litigants no longer need Roberts’s vote to prevail, and it is unclear whether Roberts’s five more conservative colleagues agree with him that “a State need not subsidize private education.”

Even if they do agree with Roberts in principle, it’s hard to draw a principled line between a school voucher program that excludes religious education and a traditional public school system that excludes religious education. In the likely event the Carson plaintiffs prevail before the Supreme Court, it is probably inevitable that someone in a traditional public school district will file a new lawsuit claiming they are also entitled to have their private school tuition paid for by their state’s taxpayers.

At the request of Gov. Mike Parson, the Missouri Department of Health conducted an analysis of COVID-19 infections and deaths in those cities and counties that implemented mask mandates compared to the rest of the state. As The Missouri Independent reports, the results of that analysis were clear: During every part of the pandemic, mask mandates worked to reduce rates of infections and prevent deaths.

The department then sent an email to Parson’s office reporting that the mandates worked, complete with a pair of graphs showing the results of their analysis. From of April through October, areas with mask mandates averaged 15.8 cases per day for every 100,000 residents. Those areas without a mask mandate had 21.7 cases per day over the same period. The difference in the rate of deaths is even more stark. Deaths in areas without mask mandates occurred at a rate three times higher than in those areas with masks.

The difference between the results is consistent over the course of the entire pandemic, through both peaks and valleys of infection in the state. The mask-gap is there before vaccines become available, after vaccines become available, and right through the period in which delta becomes dominant. At the very end of the study period, mandates are saving lives more effectively than ever, with a death rate in masked areas that’s literally fifteen times lower than in unmasked areas.

So naturally, Parsons did what any good Republican governor would do when confronted with information that could save thousands of lives in his state—he buried it. 

Despite being instructed to collect this information the results were not made public. It took a Sunshine Law request from the Independent and the Documenting COVID-19 project to obtain charts and emails connected to the analysis. Those emails show that the analysis was actually performed by Assistant Bureau Chief Nathan Koffarnus, who forwards the results back to Department of Health Director Donald Kauerauf. While acknowledging that other variables are to be considered, Kaurauf makes this statement in his response.

“I think we can say with great confidence reviewing the public health literature and then looking at the results in your study that communities where masks were required had a lower positivity rate per 100,000 and experienced lower death rates.”

Referencing one of the charts attached, the difference is beyond stark. Masks aren’t just effective, they are shockingly effective.

These results, and the statement from the Department of Health, did not appear in the materials prepared to update Parson’s cabinet on the pandemic and were not made part of any public release. Neither the governor’s office nor the Department of Health has responded to requests for comment.

Missouri Gov. Parson rarely appears on the top list of Republican governors. That’s because, having stumbled into office after former Gov. Eric Greitens resigned in the middle of a scandal that included federal charges of invasion of privacy, Parsons is not on anyone’s shortlist of Republicans who might replace Trump on the 2024 ticket. However, when it comes to politicizing COVID-19 at every opportunity, at massive cost to the citizens of his state, Parsons has not missed a beat. With assistance from radical attorney general Eric Schmitt, Parsons has launched an assault on masks mandates, vaccine mandates, and the power of local officials that matches his more infamous colleagues like Ron DeSantis or Greg Abbott. 

As with many other states, Missouri tends to have urban areas where Democratic support runs high, and rural areas that run from red to blood red. In the state’s two largest cities—Kansas City and St. Louis—Democratic officials attempted to protect citizens through mask mandates and social distancing restrictions. At the same time, Parson did everything he could to undercut these actions. That includes executive orders limiting local authority, stripping power from county health officials, and ordering the entire state government to cooperate in a lawsuit against vaccine mandates.

The New York Times data tracker indicates that St. Louis City has averaged 206 deaths per 100,000 throughout the pandemic, and Kansas City has averaged 192. However, rural Grundy County, Missouri has averaged 558 deaths per 100,000, with five other rural Missouri counties are also seeing deaths at rates over 500 per 100,000. Vaccination in these same rural counties averages 41%. Douglas County, MO, has averaged 478 deaths per 100,000, twice the national average, while having a vaccination rate of just 23%.

While the difference in vaccination rates certainly contributes to the vast gap between masked and unmasked areas in the state, the gap was already present and extremely significant before the first vaccines were available.

Earlier in the week, there was a degree of excitement in the media over news that former Trump chief of staff Mark Meadows was negotiating to appear before the House Select Committee on Jan. 6. That excitement seemed more than a little exaggerated, considering that Meadows was still seeking to limit his testimony and still carrying on the pretense that Donald Trump has executive privilege that extends to the grave.

Any remaining idea that Meadows’ appearance indicated some sort of break in the fearful loyalty of Trump’s inner circle should definitely have been quieted by the first glimpse at portions of Meadows’ upcoming book, which seems to be full of the such breathless, hero worshiping, “only Trump could do it” drivel that it might have been compiled from Trump’s own tweets. Meadows is not about to go on the stand and give the committee any nugget of truth about Trump while he’s making the rounds of conservative outlets selling the latest Trump hymnal.

However, one story out of Meadows’ “memoirs” did garner press attention. That’s because Meadows admitted that, three days before the first debate with Joe Biden, Trump tested positive for COVID-19. It seemed like not just a story showing Trump’s constant neglect of the pandemic, and his constant lying to the public, but possibly a deliberate attempt to spread the disease to his political opponent.

Then Trump issued a statement calling the story “fake news,” and Wednesday night Meadows dropped on Newsmax to agree: Mark Meadows is a liar.

In the story from Meadows’ book, the White House medical staff calls Meadows to tell him that Trump has tested positive for COVID-19 just as he is climbing onto Air Force One, Meadows passes the word onto Trump, who responds with a typically Trump four-letter-word-laden response. Then, according to Meadows, a second test is administered aboard the plane—though not before Trump wanders around maskless and talks to others on board, including the accompanying reporters.

In describing that second test, Meadows specifically notes that it is a “Binax” test, That’s a form of rapid antigen test. Looking at the CDC evaluation of Binax’s test, their trial run of 274 asymptomatic people showed a 9% rate of false negatives, but a 0% rate of false positives. In fact, when compared with the more accurate PCR testing …

Among symptomatic participants, 113 (13.7%) received a positive BinaxNOW antigen test result, and 176 (21.3%) received a positive real-time RT-PCR test result. Among asymptomatic participants, 48 (1.9%) received a positive BinaxNOW antigen test result, and 123 (4.7%) received a positive real-time RT-PCR test result.

In other words, for those already showing symptoms of COVID-19, the Binax test was 55% more likely to give a negative result. For those who were asymptomatic, but actually infected, the Binax test missed almost two thirds. The CDC’s conclusion was that the rapid antigen test used in Binax has a “reduced sensitivity to detect infection” and the ability to detect the virus “was lower compared with real-time RT-PCR.”

In other words, if Trump took a second test as described by Meadows, he took the version most likely to return a false negative.

Two days after that Air Force One flight, Trump made a Rose Garden appearance in which his podium was inexplicably distant from those of other speakers — something that had no happened before. And the night after that, the managers of the first debate announced that Trump had arrived at the location late. In fact, he was too late to take the mandated test that his team had agreed to before the debate. With Joe Biden’s permission, Trump was allowed to continue “on the honor system.”

Not until two days after the debate, on a 1 AM tweet, did Trump admit to testing positive.

Even the Newsmax announcer seems more than a bit unsure about Meadows’ “fake news” declaration: “The timing is interesting,” he says. “you have to admit. Was it even a week later they choppered him to Walter Reed and the president was very sick?”

Meadows response was … incoherent. “Yeah, listen, any time we look at things, and we look at tests, and we look at what happened, It’s … it’s certainly … uh … that’s what I outlined in the book. And … uh … talk about that Walter Reed visit. But there are a lot of great stories in the book.”

Sure there are. And Mark Meadows will stand by to tell you how they’re all wrong.

Back in the spring and summer, Republican governors in one state after another cut off unemployment benefits in an attempt to force people—who were supposedly sitting home, being lazy—back into the labor market. Now? Some of those same Republican governors are offering unemployment benefits to people who quit their jobs rather than get a COVID-19 vaccination.

A new Iowa law opposing vaccination mandates, requiring businesses to offer exemptions from mandates for extremely broad reasons, included a provision that “an individual who is discharged from employment for refusing to receive a vaccination against COVID-19 ... shall not be disqualified for benefits on account of such discharge,” a move Gov. Kim Reynolds described as “the assurance that they will still receive unemployment benefits despite being fired for standing up for their beliefs.”

It came nine days after Reynolds announced a plan to make it more difficult for people to collect unemployment, doubling the number of weekly work searches required and imposing strict audits, and less than six months after she announced she’d be cutting off expanded federal unemployment benefits because “these payments are discouraging people from returning to work.”

The federal unemployment benefits were not discouraging people from returning to work: JPMorgan noted at the time that it “looks like politics, not economics, is driving decisions regarding the early ends to these programs.” After the cutoffs, data showed that people didn’t flood back into the workplace after unemployment aid was slashed.

It’s not just Iowa.

Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee went from rejecting expanded federal unemployment benefits—because “We are paying people to stay home. That needs to change”—to signing a law that gives unemployment benefits to people who leave their jobs rather than get a COVID-19 vaccination.

Same in Florida, where Gov. Ron DeSantis railed against people on unemployment in May and in November signed legislation that not only lets people collect unemployment after leaving a job over a vaccination mandate but lets them refuse a job with a vaccination requirement and continue collecting aid.

All of these states ban people from collecting unemployment if they were fired or refused a job over a failed drug test, Slate’s William Saletan notes. But refusing a vaccination that could not only save their own lives but help bring a deadly pandemic to an end? That is a right that must be defended, say Republicans.

The help on offer is limited by the existing Republican policies of these states: Florida and Tennessee have a maximum weekly unemployment benefit of $275, though Iowa’s is higher, at $651. But the principle remains: According to Republicans, people who were unemployed because they were afraid to expose themselves to COVID-19 on the job, or who had caregiving responsibilities, or who weren’t willing to take the lowest possible offer at an abusive workplace were scapegoated and refused help. People who refuse a safe, free vaccine that is a public health necessity are valorized and protected. It’s one more way these Republican governors are actively politicizing vaccination and endangering us all.

I was warned ages ago that violence is not a solution to any problem, and that if I wanted Carrot Top to stop doing prop comedy I should just bide my time. Did it work? I’m scared to look. Can someone at least let me know if Jeff Dunham is still at large?

But Republicans these days seem to have missed the memo. In their bath salts hallucination of a universe, political violence is tres chic. The party’s modern luminaries include rampaging death-gnome Kyle Rittenhouse, scaredy-’ristocrats Mark and Patricia McCloskey, Jan. 6 rioter and tragic Donald Trump victim Ashli Babbitt, and Montana Gov. Greg Gianforte, who earned piggish praise from Trump in 2017 after body-slamming a reporter. (How conservatives’ Tinker-Toy minds manage to shart out encomiums to Rittenhouse while seizing on the absurdity that the Capitol officer who shot Babbitt is somehow a murderer is a mystery for the ages.)

And now? Violently attempting to overthrow the U.S. government on behalf of clammy fascist Donald Trump is apparently a feather in your cap if you’re running for office in Texas.

A North Texas man facing federal charges for allegedly assaulting police officers during the Jan. 6 insurrection and siege at the U.S. Capitol is now running for a Texas House seat.

Mark Middleton, who was indicted in May by a federal grand jury in Washington, D.C., is challenging incumbent GOP Rep. David Spiller of Jacksboro in House District 68. Following this year’s redistricting, the district stretches from the Oklahoma border south to Lampasas and San Saba counties at the edge of the Texas Hill Country.

How long before Trump, who appears to be installing his 2024 coup crew as we speak, endorses this lout? And, of course, state Republicans have accepted his application to become a candidate for the March 1 primary—because the Hitler Goof Party (aka the GOP) simply can’t afford to alienate a future brownshirt. (Who would be left if they did?) 

The couple have pleaded not guilty and are free on a personal recognizance bond while they await trial on nine counts involving assault of a law enforcement officer, interference with a law enforcement officer during civil disorder, obstruction of an official proceeding, unlawful entry on restricted grounds, and disorderly conduct on Capitol grounds.

Blue Lives Matter! Unless they’re trying to keep a mob from murdering the vice president and speaker of the House! In that case … never mind!

According to the FBI, Middleton and his wife, Jalise, were seen on video rioting on Jan. 6 with the other Trump troglodytes. Oh, and he says Texas should consider seceding from the U.S. So, yeah, not exactly an exemplar of American patriotism, unless cumulative flag-humping hours is your key metric.

Were Republicans always like this, or did someone feed them after midnight or something? I seem to remember long-ago tales of Republicans who didn’t launch spumes of COVID spittle into the ozone every time they spoke. I swear. It wasn’t all that long ago, either. 

Hmm. Maybe I dreamed it. Never mind.

It made comedian Sarah Silverman say, “THIS IS FUCKING BRILLIANT,” and prompted author Stephen King to shout “Pulitzer Prize!!!” (on Twitter, that is). What is it? The viral letter that launched four hilarious Trump-trolling books. Get them all, including the finale, Goodbye, Asshat: 101 Farewell Letters to Donald Trump, at this link. Or, if you prefer a test drive, you can download the epilogue to Goodbye, Asshat for the low, low price of FREE.

Republican presidents have said for years that they would appoint justices who will overrule Roe. They’ve probably succeeded.

Midway through arguments in a case that could end with the Supreme Court abolishing the constitutional right to an abortion, Justice Sonia Sotomayor asked a pointed question about the Court’s future: “Will this institution survive the stench that this creates in the public perception, that the Constitution and its reading are just political acts?

There are early signs Sotomayor is correct that the public is turning against the Court as the Court turns against Roe v. Wade. But during Wednesday’s oral arguments in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, all six of the Court’s Republican appointees appeared eager to push ahead anyway and overrule at least some key parts of the Court’s prior decisions protecting abortion.

The justices were asked to consider a Mississippi law that prohibits nearly all abortions after 15 weeks of pregnancy, a law that violates the Court’s decision in Planned Parenthood v. Casey (1992) that pregnant people have a right to terminate their pregnancy up until the point when the fetus is “viable,” meaning it can live outside the womb. A majority of the Court appeared very likely to overrule this part of Casey.

At least four justices seemed inclined to go even further, eliminating the right to an abortion altogether. And though Justice Amy Coney Barrett played her cards a little closer to her chest than her colleagues, it seems more likely than not that she will join them. In other words, there could be a majority for overturning Roe.

And even if the Court does not explicitly overrule Roe, it could easily announce a new legal standard that renders Roe an empty husk. A decision like that might leave Roe nominally alive, but that would also leave states free to restrict access to abortions to the point they’re nonexistent in the state, or come up with other creative ways to effectively ban them.

It is still possible the Court will surprise the myriad of legal analysts predicting the end of a constitutional right to an abortion. In 1992, when the Court heard Casey, even Justice Harry Blackmun, the author of Roe, expected his landmark opinion to be overruled. Instead, Casey weakened, but didn’t overrule, Roe.

But after Wednesday’s oral arguments, no one should bet Roe will receive another stay of execution. The two political parties are too well-sorted on questions of abortion rights, the Republican Party has grown too sophisticated in picking judges who will hew to the GOP’s policy preferences, and a majority of the sitting justices were exceedingly skeptical of Roe at Wednesday’s argument.

The two issues at stake in Dobbs

Casey laid out a two-part framework governing the right to an abortion. The first part is that “a State may not prohibit any woman from making the ultimate decision to terminate her pregnancy before viability,” which occurs around the 24th week of pregnancy.

Casey also held that states may, under certain circumstances, regulate abortion. But such regulations may not impose an “undue burden” on the right to terminate a pregnancy — meaning states cannot enact a law “if its purpose or effect is to place substantial obstacles in the path of a woman seeking an abortion before the fetus attains viability.”

The Court initially asked the parties in Dobbs to write briefs on only the first of these two holdings, whether “all pre-viability prohibitions on elective abortions are unconstitutional” — a clear signal that at least some members of the Court want to overrule Casey’s viability holding.

Indeed, all six of the Court’s Republican appointees appeared eager to overrule that holding. That includes Chief Justice John Roberts, the most cautious member of the Court’s conservative majority. Roberts asked Julie Rikelman, one of the lawyers struggling to defend Roe from a hostile Court, “Why is 15 weeks not enough time” for someone to decide whether to terminate their pregnancy?

While Mississippi styles its law as a 15-week ban, that clock starts to tick on “the first day of the last menstrual period of the pregnant woman.” So, in practice, the law functions more like a 13-week abortion ban.

But Mississippi wound up going much further in its brief, asking the Court to overrule Roe and Casey altogether. If the Court agrees Roe should be overruled, it could do so explicitly, or it could reinterpret the “undue burden” standard so it no longer imposes meaningful limits on abortion regulations.

Roberts largely focused his questions on Casey’s viability line. He appeared less interested in the question of whether to overrule Casey’s second holding, that abortion regulations are invalid if they impose an undue burden on the right to terminate a pregnancy — at least for now.

But a majority of the Court did not appear to share Roberts’s relatively incrementalist approach. At least four, and most likely five, of the Court’s remaining conservatives seemed ready to toss out Roe and Casey in their entirety.

The Court’s right flank sounded quite emboldened

There’s been a lot of commentary lately arguing that we have a 3-3-3 Supreme Court — three justices on the far right, three on the left, and three somewhere in between. That characterization of the Court is superficially accurate but also somewhat misleading. While it is true that Roberts, Barrett, and Justice Brett Kavanaugh are often more cautious than their three most conservative colleagues, the three justices in the middle are still very far to the right.

The three most conservative justices — Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, and Neil Gorsuch — played their typical role of insisting the Court should give conservatives everything they are asking for in Dobbs, and without any delay. Thomas, at one point, compared Roe to Lochner v. New York (1905), an infamous decision striking down pro-labor legislation, and which is widely taught in law schools as an example of how judges should never, ever behave.

Similarly, Alito seemed to compare Roe to Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), the equally infamous pro-segregation decision.

Gorsuch, meanwhile, spent much of his question time arguing that Casey’s undue burden standard is “difficult to administer” and should be abandoned. He even tried to get Rikelman to admit that, if the Court overrules Casey’s viability line, it must also scrap the undue burden test — a result that would effectively eliminate the constitutional right to an abortion.

In the past, Kavanaugh has sometimes pushed for more incremental attacks on Roe. In June Medical Services v. Gee (2019), for example, he argued in favor of placing complicated procedural barriers in the way of abortion plaintiffs that would make it difficult for them to bring their cases to federal court or to receive a meaningful remedy.

But on Wednesday, Kavanaugh seemed no less eager to overrule Roe than Thomas, Alito, or Gorsuch. At one point, Kavanaugh rattled off a long list of landmark — and largely celebrated — Supreme Court decisions, including its school integration decision in Brown v. Board of Education (1954), its first one person/one vote decision in Baker v. Carr (1962), and its marriage equality decision in Obergefell v. Hodges (2015), which all overruled previous decisions.

The clear implication was that if the Court could overrule precedent in those cases, why can’t it overrule Roe?

That leaves Barrett, who often implies at oral argument that she might take a more centrist approach than her most conservative colleagues, but who also votes with the Court’s right flank much more often than not. Though Barrett’s questions were less revealing than Kavanaugh’s, they left little doubt that she disagrees with essential parts of Roe and Casey.

Among other things, Barrett repeatedly brought up so-called “safe haven” laws, which allow someone who recently gave birth to immediately give up their child for adoption (Barrett herself is the adoptive mother of two children). “Both Roe and Casey emphasized the burdens of parenting,” she noted, before asking why safe haven laws don’t “take care of that problem?”

In one particularly remarkable moment, Barrett appeared to argue that being forced to carry and birth a child is no big deal. “It doesn’t seem to me to follow that pregnancy and parenthood are all part of the same burden,” she said. “It seems to me that the choice, more focused, would be between, say, the ability to get an abortion at 23 weeks or the state requiring the woman to go 15, 16 weeks more” before terminating their parental rights after giving birth.

Barrett, in other words, appeared quite determined to erase Casey’s viability rule. And, while she was less explicit about whether she would eliminate Casey’s undue burden standard, the tone of her questioning was extremely dismissive of both Roe and Casey.

So the right to an abortion is in deep trouble. At the least, the Court appears very likely to overrule Casey’s viability standard — and there’s a good chance it will go all the way to overruling Roe entirely.

I will conclude by reiterating a point I’ve made several times before; that the most important question in Dobbs is not whether the Court writes the magic words “Roe v. Wade is overruled.”

Dobbs is almost certain to announce a new legal standard governing abortion rights that is far less protective of those rights than Roe or Casey. The Court might explicitly overrule Roe. It might leave some small part of the right to an abortion — such as the undue burden standard — in place for at least a little while. Or it might announce a completely new legal rule that makes it functionally impossible for abortion plaintiffs to protect their rights, even if some hollow shell of Roe remains nominally on the books.

It now appears more likely than not that the Court will either explicitly overrule Roe or eliminate it in a more backhanded way. Either of these outcomes would mean the end of the constitutional right to an abortion.

Read 19 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Read 8 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Click here to go see the bonus panel!

Hovertext:
I hope you have enjoyed your internship reading today's comic.

Today's News:

Read 9 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Click here to go see the bonus panel!

Hovertext:
I'm gonna start using that threat when my kids won't brush their teeth.

Today's News:

One of the cornerstones of President Joe Biden’s Build Back Better plan for families and children is universal pre-K—the opportunity for young children in every household to attend public preschool. “We’re going to make sure that every three- and four-year-old in America has access to quality preschool,” Biden has said in promoting the program. It’s a more than laudable goal which not only gives children a solid start in learning, but also frees up a big chunk of their families’ budgets, saving the cost of private daycare or preschool and allowing parents more freedom in choosing work opportunities.

With every good idea a Democrat comes up with that helps regular people and boosts the economy, there’s a Republican saying “we’re not going to do that.” In this case, it’s a bunch of red states which are threatening to boycott the program. We’ve seen this before with Medicaid expansion under the Affordable Care Act. That legislation was written to make Medicaid expansion universal among the states, but the Supreme Court decided it had to do something to undercut the law, so they made that provision optional, leaving tens of millions of people without healthcare. This legislation, Build Back Better, gives $110 billion in federal funding for states to offer free prekindergarten, allowing states to pursue the funding or not. And for a growing number of Republican states, it’s “not.”

The Washington Post talked to Republican lawmakers in  Missouri, New Hampshire, North Carolina, South Carolina, Minnesota, Texas, and Arizona who either say outright they’d reject the funding or that they have serious problems with it. They have a problem with federally imposed education standards for preschool, as well as the possibility that federal funding would end at some future point, leaving states holding the bag.

There “absolutely is going to be opposition from Republican state lawmakers,” said Jonathan Bydlak, director of the governance program at the R Street Institute, a conservative group that advocates for free markets. “There’s a philosophical disagreement that this is not the proper role of the federal government and that this is federal meddling, similar to opposition to other education standards in the past.”

Which is another way of saying they’ll oppose anything that a Democratic president and Congress passes, because that’s just how it work. One legislator, state Sen. Roger Chamberlain, told the Post. “Using short-term federal funds for a one-size-fits-all approach isn’t something we are interested in here in Minnesota.” He chairs the education committee in the Republican-led Senate. He calls the plan “a bait and switch on our kids’ future.” Other Republicans, like New Hampshire Republican Majority Leader Sen. Jeb Bradley, use that excuse as well, arguing that  “especially the way it’s been described, funding for six years and then it goes away.”

That’s a tacit admission that a future Republican Congress and administration would likely try to do away with the program, just like they tried to repeal Obamacare. Because of course they are! While the funding for the program might truly be an issue for legislators, it’s a handy excuse, too. Extending any program to help young families might just end up helping people they don’t believe are worthy of help. That includes the would-be preschool teachers, who would be paid at least $15/hour or on par with the state’s K-12 teachers with comparable qualifications.

On the other hand, there are a few red states—West Virginia and Oklahoma—that already provide universal pre-school to all 4-year olds. Beginning in 2023, Colorado will also offer it. It’s a popular thing, so on the one hand it’s a thing Democrats in refusenik states could point to—“we want to give this to you, Republicans wouldn’t let it happen.” But it would be better if they could actually just have the preschool for all their kids.

Given the likelihood that this Republican opposition was going to happen, since they’ve seen it before, the take it or leave it approach for the program in Biden’s plan is surprising. Any time you center a program on the common sense notion that even a Republican is going to do the thing that will help their constituents, you’re not showing a strong grasp on reality.

An alternative, which might be too late for Congress to do, given Majority Leader Chuck Schumer’s timeline to have the bill done by Christmas, is to build out an existing program. Head Start For All would be one option. Dr. Conor P. Williams is a senior fellow at the Century Foundation and a partner at the Children’s Equity Project, has made a case for that. There’s a lot to argue for it—there wouldn’t be a fight over educational standards lining up between the states and the federal government. “To expand access while maintaining quality, any new universal pre-K system will have to connect and align existing state and local preschool systems,” Williams writes. “The easiest way to do this is to apply Head Start’s standards—or equivalent—across the entirety of the system (while providing supplemental funding to help programs upgrade to meet those standards).”

Additionally, the staff and the facilities are already there—building them out would be faster than creating new ones from scratch. Williams also argues that “expanding Head Start could enable greater socioeconomic integration in early learning programs.” Because of the different eligibility criteria from the various funding options for pre-K—federal, state, non-profit, private—the result is often “socioeconomically and, in some cases, racially segregated classrooms.”

“Harmonizing these standards would make it easier for local leaders to enroll diverse classrooms of children,” Williams argues. What that means in the larger landscape:

A much broader group of children would benefit from the program’s equity-focused standards. More children with disabilities would be fully included and supported in preschool programs alongside their peers without disabilities. More young dual-language learners would have access to bilingual learning. All children would gain protections against expulsion, a protection that is especially important for Black children who are consistently and unfairly the victims of harsh discipline.

John J. Drew, President/CEO of Action for Boston Community Development, which provides Head Start and Early Head Start services to more than 3,000 low-income children and their families in the Boston area, points to the decades of experience in the Head Start program as a reason to use it as the basis for universal pre-K. “Head Start is synonymous with high-quality early education and care,” he said. “No program has been reviewed and scrutinized like this one. There is no need to reinvent the wheel.”

“In many communities, we have affluent parents who want to pay for their children to attend Head Start because the quality of education and care are so much higher than other available early education programs,” he said. “Head Start can make a difference for all our children.”

If President Sen. Joe Manchin, the West Virginia Democrat, succeeds in his goal of delaying Build Back Better into 2022, Democrats should take the opportunity to fix that, to take the decision out of state hands and put it directly into the programs that have been so successfully providing high-quality pre-school for decades.

[The decision is at odds with rulings by some other federal courts, and could end up setting an important precedent.]

 

On November 18, a federal district court issued a ruling indicating that the Takings Clause of the Fifth Amendment may require the government to pay compensation in a case where a police SWAT team destroyed an innocent person's home in the process of pursuing a criminal suspect. As Judge Amos Mazzant recognizes in his opinion in Baker v. McKinney, this ruling is at odds with decisions in similar cases by some other federal courts, which hold that there cannot be takings liability in such cases because of the "police power" exception to the Takings Clause. The issue here is an extremely important one, one on which existing jurisprudence is far from a model of clarity. As the case goes forward, it might end up setting a significant precedent.

Reason's Bill Binion has a helpful summary of the disturbing facts of the case:

In July 2020, Wesley Little—who Vicki Baker had terminated as her handyman about a year and a half prior—arrived at Baker's home in McKinney, Texas. Baker's daughter answered. Recognizing him from news reports that he was wanted for the abduction of a 15-year-old girl, she left the premises and called the police.

SWAT agents soon arrived. They set off explosives to open the garage entryway, detonated tear gas grenades inside the building, ran over Baker's fence with an armored vehicle, and ripped off her front door, despite being given a garage door opener, a code to the back gate, and a key to the home. The house was unlivable when they were through….

"In its pursuit of the fugitive and pursuant to its police powers, Baker alleges the City caused significant economic damage—over $50,000—to her home. Then, the City refused to compensate her for the damage," writes Judge Amos L. Mazzant III of the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Texas…..

Baker will likely still have to overcome an appeal from the city. But if her suit meets a more fortunate fate, she may recuperate some of the financial costs incurred as she battles stage 3 cancer and tries to leave the state for retirement. Yet some things will not be replaceable. An antique doll collection was damaged by tear gas, for example. Worse yet, her daughter's dog was left deaf and blind.

"I've lost everything," Baker told Reason last March. "I've lost my chance to sell my house. I've lost my chance to retire without fear of how I'm going to make my regular bills."

Some of these aggressive tactics may have been understandable, given that Little was holding a 15-year-old girl against her will, and that he was believed to be armed. But, as Judge Mazzant recounts in his ruling, by the time the SWAT team  "forcefully entered
the home by breaking down both the front and garage door and running over the backyard fence with a tank-like vehicle known as a BearCat," Little had already released the girl unharmed. When the police entered the house, they found he had taken his own life.

The Fifth Amendment says  the government must pay "just compensation" whenever it takes private property for public use. Courts have long held that deliberate destruction of private property by government officials counts as a taking. As far back as 1872, the Supreme Court ruled that "where real estate is actually invaded by superinduced additions of water, earth, sand, or other material . . . so as to effectually destroy or impair its usefulness, it is a taking, within the meaning of the Constitution." You don't have to be a takings scholar to see that Vicki Baker's house was "effectually destroy[ed] or impair[ed] [in] its usefulness," and that the police deliberately caused the damage.

However, courts have also long held that at least some exercises of the "police power" (government's authority to protect public health and safety) are exempt from takings liability. In the 2019 case of Lech v. Jackson, the US Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit used the police power theory to deny takings liability in a situation remarkably similar to this one. There, too, the police essentially destroyed an innocent family's house in the process of trying to apprehend a suspect (in that instance, a suspected shoplifter).

Judge Mazzant's opinion suggests - correctly, in my view - that the reasoning of Lech is wrong, and that it isn't binding on his court (which is in the Fifth Circuit, not the Tenth):

The City asks this Court to adopt what would constitute a per se rule—that destruction to private property resulting from the exercise of valid police power cannot constitute a Fifth Amendment Taking. Neither the Supreme Court nor the Fifth Circuit have directly found a taking that requires just compensation when destruction of property results from the exercise of valid  police power. The City correctly points out that other circuits have foreclosed recovery under similar circumstances. See Manitowoc Cty., 635 F.3d 331; Lech, 791 F. App'x. 711; AmeriSource Corp., 525 F.3d 1149.

However, both the Fifth Circuit and the Supreme Court have suggested such action could amount to a taking. In John Corp. v. City of Houston, the Fifth Circuit asserted that "a distinction between the use of police powers and of eminent domain power . . . cannot carry the day" when assessing whether a taking has occurred. 214 F.3d at 578–79. Further "[t]he Supreme Court's entire 'regulatory takings' law is premised on the notion that a city's exercise of its police powers can go  too far, and if it does, there has been a taking." Id.(citing Penn. Coal Co. v. Mahon, 260 U.S. 393,  415 (1922)). In Lucas v. S.C. Coastal Council, the Supreme Court opined that if "the uses of private property were subject to unbridled, uncompensated qualification under the police power, the natural tendency of human nature would be to extend the qualification more and more until at last private property disappeared." 505 U.S. 1003, 1014 (1992)….

The Court finds the Fifth Circuit and Supreme Court reasoning persuasive, particularly at this stage of litigation where it construes allegations in the light most favorable to Baker. At the motion to dismiss stage, it would be imprudent to foreclose Baker's ability to recover based on the shaky reasoning recited in non-binding cases from other circuits—especially when both the Fifth Circuit and the Supreme Court have alluded that a taking could result from destructive police power. Because Baker has plausibly alleged the City's destruction of her home resulting from the exercise of its police power could amount to a taking, the Court continues its takings analysis….

While the Court acknowledges that governmental bodies are not "liable under the Just Compensation Clause to property owners every time policemen break down the doors of buildings to foil burglars thought to be inside[,]" Nat'l Bd. of Young Men's Christian Ass'ns v. United States, 395 U.S. 85, 92 (1969) (emphasis added), Baker has alleged damage to her private property—and the City's refusal to compensate for such damage—that plausibly amounts to a Fifth Amendment violation.

I think Judge Mazzant is absolutely right that the police power does not create a blank-check exemption from takings liability. Nor is there a blank check for law-enforcement operations specifically. I outlined some of the reasons why in my critique of the Lech decision and in an amicus brief in which the Cato Institute and I unsuccessfully urged the Supreme Court to review and overrule Lech. Among other things, I pointed out that the Takings Clause was enacted in the first place in part as a reaction against the depredations of British troops during the colonial era and Revolutionary War. Many of these seizures and occupations of property were, of course,  undertaken for the purpose of enforcing various British laws against recalcitrant colonists.

More recently, in December 2019, the Court of Federal Claims ruled that the police power exception does not foreclose takings liability in a case where the Army Corps of Engineers deliberately flooded large parts of Houston in order to prevent potentially worse flooding elsewhere during Hurricane Harvey in 2017.

Judge Mazzant's ruling doesn't definitively resolve the case. It merely rejects the City's motion to dismiss, allowing Baker to move forward with her claim. The decision also doesn't establish a clear standard for when destructive law-enforcement operations qualify as takings. For the moment, the court only rejects the theory (endorsed in cases like Lech) that such operations enjoy a virtually categorical exemption.

Even this preliminary ruling is likely to be appealed. Thus, this ruling is just the beginning of what may be a prolonged legal battle. But it's a legal battle that bears watching. The status of the police power exemption to takings is a major issue for a wide range of government policies, including deliberate flooding of private land (as in the Houston case), Covid-19 shutdowns, and (as in this case) law enforcement operations.

Finally, it's worth noting that, regardless of the legal issues, a just government would accept that it has a moral obligation to pay compensation in cases like this one. After all, its agents have deliberately inflicted enormous harm on an innocent homeowner. Even if they do so for a good purpose (catching a dangerous criminal), basic justice and fairness demand that the cost be borne by the general public who benefit from his capture, not arbitrarily concentrated on one person, who did no wrong.

Sadly, however, governments are often blind to the demands of justice. That's one of the reasons why we need constitutional rights.

NOTE: The plaintiff in this case is represented by the Institute for Justice, a public interest law firm with which I have longstanding connections, including working there as a summer clerk when I was in law school, and writing multiple pro bono amicus briefs on their behalf. I do not, however, have any involvement in the present case. IJ has issued a  statement on Judge Mazzant's ruling, available here.

The post Federal Court Rules Takings Clause May Require Compensation when Police Destroy an Innocent Person's Home in Process of Pursuing a Suspect appeared first on Reason.com.

In July, President Joe Biden issued a series of rules requiring that federal workers, and workers at companies that receive federal contracts, must be vaccinated. That included health care workers who work for hospitals that receive Medicare or Medicaid payments. However, earlier this month, a three-judge panel in Texas blocked the implementation of the mandate for many large companies. Now, as The Washington Post reports, a federal district judge in Missouri has acted to block even the mandate for health care workers. That includes workers dealing face-to-(hopefully-masked-)face with COVID-19 patients in emergency rooms and workers caring for those most vulnerable to bad outcomes in nursing homes.

What both rulings have in common is simple enough: Trump-appointed judges.

Unsurprisingly, the ruling from District Judge Matthew Schelp is filled with the kind of political language that might be expected from a Trump appointee, with statements including claims that implementing the rule would create a “...politically and economically vast, federalism-altering, and boundary-pushing mandate...” The ruling also flatly accepts unsupported claims by a group of Republican state attorneys, headed by radical right Missouri attorney general Eric Schmitt, that the mandate would cause a collapse of the health care system. According to Judge Schelp, it’s the mandate that’s the threat that “significantly understates the burden that its mandate would impose on the ability of health care facilities to provide proper care, and thus, save lives.”

In fact, Judge Schelp ultimately echoes right-wing talking points by claiming that vaccine mandates mean that people will just walk off the job. “The loss of staffing in many instances will result in no care at all,” writes Schelp, “as some facilities will be forced to close altogether.” This isn’t just untrue; it’s a massive lie.

Vaccines work. Vaccine mandates work. And this ruling will directly contribute to the death of Americans. But even that is just one part of what makes this so notably wrongheaded.

COVID-19 vaccines work. That effectiveness has been demonstrated both in the thousands who participated in controlled trials and in the relationship between rates of vaccination and rates of serious illness worldwide and within the United States. Multiple long-term surveillance studies continue to show that vaccines are highly effective at preventing hospitalizations and deaths, even in the face of delta and other variants.

Vaccine mandates work. That’s been demonstrated from the airlines to education to the military, where vaccine requirements have all but eliminated anti-vax holdouts. Despite dire predictions that thousands would walk off the job rather than take a jab, in New York City, only 34 out of over 35,000 police actually went on unpaid leave when they failed to meet vaccine deadlines. A company mandate resulted in at least 99% of United Airline employees getting vaccinated. Schools across the country have seen that mandates increase vaccination for both students and staff.

Mandates have also made a huge difference among health care workers. As NPR reported in September, health care workers were not immune to being influenced by vaccine misinformation and disinformation. As a result, 27% of those on the front lines of the crisis remained unvaccinated just three months ago. Then companies began enforcing mandates. While The New York Times ran headlines such as “Over 150 Texas Hospital Workers Are Fired or Resign Over Vaccine Mandate,” that headline deliberately obscured was the fact that the 153 fired or suspended came from a system that employed just under 25,000. Thanks to a vaccine mandate, Houston Methodist hospitals went from 75% vaccinated, to 99.4% vaccinated. That change absolutely saved lives.

Around the world, differences in vaccination rates are among the biggest factors in determining the number of COVID-19 deaths. In Russia, where vaccination rates are below 40%, despite the home-grown and widely trumpeted “Sputnik” vaccine, death rates have continued to rise dramatically as the delta variant became dominant. Currently, Russia is seeing case fatality rates well above 3%—twice that of the United States. On the other hand, even during the worst of the delta surge, the rate of deaths in Israel, where vaccine rates are higher than in the U.S., stayed well below 1%. And while the daily rate of cases in the U.K. may seem terrible, a combination of widespread testing and a vaccination rate 10% higher than the U.S. means that the case fatality rate there has remained around 0.4% throughout the delta surge.

Around the world, the World Health Organization estimates that between 115,000 and 180,000 health care workers have died from COVID-19. Kaiser Health News found over 3,200 U.S. health care workers had died in just the first year of the pandemic. That number was as of March, well before the delta surge. With a quarter of those workers still unvaccinated as of this fall, misinformation means that thousands more are likely to die—and that’s not considering their families, friends, or others who become infected from contact with these unvaccinated workers dealing directly with COVID-19 infections.

The “burden” imposed by mandates is fantastically small. That’s been demonstrated again and again. However, Republicans—including Judge Schelp—ignore that truth to maintain a pretense that vaccines will either cause massive disruptions or generate widespread walkouts. Neither of which is at all true,

The success enjoyed by Republican attorney generals appealing mandates to Trump-appointed judges will open the floodgates on lawsuits from former employees against companies, universities,  hospitals, and local governments that imposed vaccine mandates. The result is likely to be a legal chaos that goes on for years.

The specific means by which Republicans have been fighting these mandates—by arguing that federal agencies don’t have the right to set the rules how such steps are implemented—has much broader implications. Rulings such as those from Judge Schelp are another step in making it impossible for executive branch agencies to effectively implement policy, whether it comes from legislation or executive order. 

Finally, the pliancy demonstrated by these Trump-appointed judges is another huge warning for what comes next, when these same attorney generals stand in front of the same judges, to restrict voting, defend gerrymandering, and overturn any election that doesn’t fall their way.

Click here to go see the bonus panel!

Hovertext:
Asking whether humans intrinsically bad is like asking if a sword is intrinsically bad. The answer is yes, with occasional exceptions.

Today's News:

Why isn't there more focus on making Republicans pay a price for their ongoing radicalization?

Republican Congresswoman Nancy Mace, inflicted on us by the state of South Carolina, has been running a bold new online ad condemning Democratic plans to boost funding for the Internal Revenue Service. Why, you might ask?

"Biden's policy will double the size of the IRS at the cost of billions of dollars in unpaid taxes. We should stabilize our nation's economy first."

While @z3dster has done us the solid of parsing out what the hell Mace's word shrapnel was meant to actually mean, it's still worth stewing on that odd language. "At the cost of billions of dollars in unpaid taxes?" At the ... cost? But going after tax cheats is widely recognized as being a net federal win, because just a little money allocated to investigating the most prolific tax-dodgers results in much larger revenues when the dodged taxes actually get paid, so—ooh. Ooooooh.

Right.

What the House Republican is saying here is, of course, boosting IRS capabilities will "cost" the wealthiest tax dodgers in the country billions of dollars, and forcing rich tax cheats to pay what they owe will harm the economy so very much that we shouldn't even think about it until we've "stabilized" everything else first.

You've heard of trickle-down economics? This is trickle-down tax fraud. If we don't let rich Americans who have more offshore bank accounts than you have spoons get away with their current level of financial crimes it is all of you who will suffer, because that money being paid in taxes won't be going to buying new yacht chandeliers, or underwater television sets, or the spiffy new uniforms the upper classes want you to wear while hunting you for sport.

Instead, that money will be going to the government, and the government will probably waste it on stupid things like rebuilding roads in places you don't live, or saving coastlines you don’t visit, or giving you better childcare options after your name comes up in the to-be-hunted-for-sport lottery.

In any event, what Mace is suggesting is that American financial criminals have been hiding so very damn much money that attempting to collect it could destabilize our nation's very economy. Shouldn't be done! Too dangerous!

Oooookay?

See, our problem here is that we're taking a Republican message literally instead of treating as the propagandistic word salad it is intended as. It’s not meant to make sense. Mace may or may not distance herself from the premise of her own self-promoted statement after she's gotten sufficient mockery for it, but it was crafted not to make an actual argument but to burp scary-sounding words at Republican base members primed to react to them without thought. "At the cost of billions" is meant to invoke the notion that it will be costing the nation money, rather than bringing it in. "Stabilize" is meant to invoke the notion that the nation's economy is currently not stable, when all the facts and figures suggest that the economy is now actually in pretty darn good shape.

Things are so good, in fact, that ports are being clogged with the stuff Americans are now wanting to buy and (mostly anti-labor) economic grumps are warning that if we keep raising wages and recovering from pandemics then we'll summon the Inflation Monster, so central banks need to start taking a few good golf swings at worker knees before things get out of hand. And that’s all while the pandemic is still raging around us.

The "Biden's policy" bit is also rote party schtick: While nigh-on everybody who is not personally evading taxes or being lobbied by people who do all agree that returning IRS funding to something approaching normal is both necessary to curb now-rampant tax dodging by the wealthy and an enormous government gain, calling it "Biden's policy" is intended to portray the move as partisan rancor, or spreading socialism, or otherwise controversial.

It's all gimmick. Republicanism may no longer have policies of its own, but each new congresscreature is in tune with the larger movement's dictionary of cult phrases and contrarian phrasing. Going after tax dodgers will "cost" you money. Doing the "Biden policy" on anything will further "destabilize" the glorious f--king paradise of corpses and lines for toilet paper gifted to us by Dear Crabby-Ass Leader in his final year.

Rep. Nancy Mace may be new to town, but she and every other newly elected House Republican gained their current position by telling the ever-outraged base whatever they wanted to hear. She's in a bit of hot water over that at this precise moment, in fact, being roundly mocked for a particularly comical Sunday show circuit that saw her both undermining vaccination efforts on Fox News while claiming to support them on CNN.

It's all a game; there is little effort being put into attempting to discern what policies would best serve the nation here, and flopsweat-level effort being put into selling the base on the nation that whatever policies actual experts come up with are most certainly an effort at "socialism," an attempt to abridge your "freedoms," or a flat-out conspiracy to harm you because the "elites" will do nigh-on anything to oppress you, whether it be bamboo-laced ballots or firefly chemicals in your vaccines or arresting "patriots" whose only crime was attacking the U.S. Capitol during a joint session of Congress in a seditious attempt to cancel the results of a United States election.

All that said, we're not going to get anywhere if we ignore it all and let the Maces of new Republicanism fire off chaff meant to invoke primal reaction while breezily evading the part where nothing they said made any actual sense. So we're all ears, Rep. Nancy Mace.

You say going after tax cheats will "cost billions"—who ya aiming that statement at, representative?

Because the only people who will see a "cost" when going after prolific tax fraud are the folks doing the actual crimes. Is that who you're going to bat for here? Did they send someone to your office to make that case?

And you're saying American tax cheats are costing the rest of us so much money that making them actually pay it would threaten to destabilize the entire economy?

Oh, do tell. That one's worth a floor speech. We all really want to hear you explain that going after institutionalized tax evasion by people who can hire more lawyers than the IRS has available investigators would threaten our very way of life. There haven't been many Republicans with the guts to make that argument in public, but you made it a sponsored online ad.

Please explain, representative. Give it your best shot.

If the conservatives destroy Roe v. Wade without overturning it explicitly, they can no longer claim to be above politics.

Microsoft's $300 Xbox Series S was the most popular console during Black Friday, it's been claimed. From a report: According to Adobe's Digital Economy Index data, the cheaper Series S outsold both PS5, Switch OLED Model and the more expensive Xbox Series X during the biggest holiday sale day of the year. Adobe claims its data comes from analysing 1 trillion visits to retail sites, in addition to surveying over 1,000 retailers on their most popular items. If accurate, a key element of Series S's popularity is likely that, unlike the highly sought-after PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X, Series S has been widely available to purchase during Black Friday week. At the time of publishing, it's still in stock at many retailers.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

You’ll often hear hardcore right-wing Trumpists refer to themselves as “patriots.” Repeatedly. Donald Trump himself regularly refers to his devoted followers the same way. And because the word has a common, generic meaning, most of us glance over its use without giving it much attention.

We should be, because the word is actually a kind of code, a signal of team membership. Certainly, its use has an obvious propaganda purpose: If the people who support Trump are “patriots,” then his opponents by right-wing logic must be unpatriotic and unAmerican. But more importantly, identifying as one signals to others your affiliation with the far-right “Patriot Movement”—better known to some as the militia movement or “constitutionalists.” And understanding this is central to understanding that this movement is the nexus of the right’s insurgent war on democracy.

“Patriots” has become the word that far-right ideologues, including various pundits and politicians, and their army of followers use to identify one another. “Ladies and gentlemen, it is time for us as patriots to stand up,” admonished Republican Senate candidate J.D. Vance this week in calling for support for Kenosha shooter Kyle Rittenhouse. Tucker Carlson titled his pseudo-documentary promoting a conspiracy theory that “the left” is now persecuting conservatives “Patriot Purge.” The Jan. 6 insurrectionists currently under arrest in the D.C. Detention Facility call the section where they are held the “Patriot Wing.”  

Indeed, it was the word that the mob of right-wing extremists who invaded the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6 consistently used to identify themselves. A video of himself recorded by Scott Fairlamb, the 44-year-old mixed martial arts fighter sentenced this week for assaulting police officers outside the Capitol showed him shouting: “What (do) Patriots do? We fucking disarm them and then we storm the fucking Capitol!”

Inside, the “QAnon shaman” Jake Angeli—garbed in furs and a horned hat—could be heard hailing his comrades: “Hold the line, Patriots!”  In a New Yorker video taken inside, Angeli can be seen greeting other rioters inside the Senate chambers: “Heyyyy, glad to see you man. Look at you guys, you guys are fuckin’ Patriots!” Leading a prayer from the dais later, he thanked God for “filling this chamber with Patriots who love you and love Christ.”

This was not new. For the previous three years, Donald Trump had come to refer to his most rabid followers as “patriots,” and those same followers used the same word to describe themselves and each other—particularly the conspiracy theory-fueled worlds of Infowars and the QAnon cult. Following his defeat at the polls in November, however, its use intensified and spread, cropping up among Trump supporters ranging from white nationalists to Republican congressmen.

In mid-November, white nationalist podcaster Nick Fuentes—whose organization bore the Trumpian name America First—declared the post-election environment, one in which a majority of Republicans believed the election had been stolen, ripe for advancing the white nationalist cause: “This is the opportunity to galvanize the patriots of this country behind a real solution to these problems that we’re facing.”

One QAnon adherent—identified as Thad Williams of Tampa, Florida—posted on Twitter that he had raised more than $27,000 to provide monetary aid to Trump fans trying to get to Washington on Jan. 6: “Patriots, if you need financial help getting to DC to support President Trump on January 6th, please go to my website,” he wrote three days before the event.

Then, during the “Stop the Steal” rally at The Ellipse prior to the insurrection, Alabama Congressman Mo Brooks—who led the House effort to contest the certification of the Electoral College votes—warmed up the crowd with an incendiary speech: “Today is the day American patriots start takin’ down names and kickin’ ass!” Brooks had shouted, to roaring approval.

One of the attendees at the Trump rally that preceded the Jan. 6 riot—a 55-year-old man from Chicago—told a reporter: "We're not moving on … We are not Republicans. We are the MAGA party. We are Patriots.”

And when the men who had come to the capital city that day prepared for violence began marching on the Capitol, they called each other and themselves Patriots. Jeffrey Sabol of Colorado—who was later charged with beating two police officers who were attempting to save another rioter who herself later died—told investigators that as he approached the steps of the Capitol, equipped with zip ties, a two-way radio and earpiece and wearing a black helmet and steel-toed boots, he heard flashbangs going off, which he interpreted as a “call to battle” set off by antifa infiltrators. So, he told them, he hurried to the front lines and “answered the call because he was a patriot warrior.”

Trump supporters elsewhere who celebrated the insurrection applied the label as well. A Stop the Steal protest organizer in Illinois told a local TV station: "Well, now the patriots are waking up and we're taking our country back. As you've seen in D.C., they've stormed the Capitol and they are making their voices be heard. So, that's what we'll continue to fight for."

And after Trump’s coup attempt failed, and he angrily blamed the loss on the Republican Party for failing to support his every dictate—at one point announcing he intended to leave the GOP, and create his own third party. The name he intended to bestow on his new entity was the “Patriot Party.” He only backed down after Republican leaders mollified him by assuring him they would be dutifully loyal to him in the future.

The insurrectionists’ use of the name Patriots, however, is not simply the generic one suggesting people with a deep love of American democracy. In reality, you’ve never met a more seditionist lot; well before the attack on the Capitol, it was common for them to speak among themselves of overthrowing the government and “the globalists,” and preparing for civil war. Their notions of patriotism revolve around enforcing authoritarian adherence to “legitimate” leadership figures and not around the democratic values America of our historical traditions.

In psychological terms, it’s an expression of a deep need to see oneself, and to be seen by others, as heroic. The dynamics of achieving that heroic status inform everything they do and say, particularly their constant reification of concocted enemies against which they set out to do battle. In the 1990s, the threat was the “New World Order” and its black helicopters; in the 2000s, it became an invading horde of immigrants, combined with the threat of Islamist terror. Under Trump, it became “antifa” and Black Lives Matter and critical race theory.

In practical terms, it is an identification with the far-right conspiracist Patriot movement that, for the past 30 years, has been generating such antigovernment activities as organizing so-called “citizen militias,” as well as violent “sovereign citizen” extremists, border-watching “Minutemen” vigilantes, armed “III Percent” gun fanatics, and more recently, street-brawling “Proud Boys”—all of them built around an alternative far-right universe comprising conspiracy theories.

Indeed, while the Patriot movement has been typically described over the decades since it began organizing in the 1990s by researchers who have monitored them as “antigovernment,” that term may not give the most accurate sense of their ideology. Given that many of them deny they are opposed to government—they in fact believe government would be just fine if they were in charge, as they believed they were under Donald Trump; they simply oppose any kind of liberal democratic government—and that many of them are unmistakable in their hostility to democratic principles and democracy itself, it is more fundamentally an antidemocratic movement.

Their hostility to democracy is reflected in one of the movement’s embedded truisms: “America is a republic, not a democracy” (which is, as historian George Thomas explained in detail in The Atlantic, is not just a historically wrong claim, it’s a dangerously toxic one). It’s also reflected in the movement’s historic animus directed at ethnic and religious minorities, as well its openly seditionist rhetoric, and its bedrock belief that liberal democratic government is secretly in the hands of an evil “globalist” (or “communist” or “Marxist,” depending on the conspiracy theory) cabal. That hostility became starkly manifest on Jan. 6.

*

While the Patriot movement has often been considered synonymous with the militia movement of the 1990s, it really is more of an umbrella term encompassing a range of far-right extremists, including so-called “sovereign citizens” and “constitutionalists.” In the post-alt-right era, it has been adopted for identification by an even broader range of ideological warriors, including the Alex Jones Infowars crowd and the Proud Boys.

The Anti-Defamation League defines the Patriot movement thus: “A collective term used to describe a set of related extremist movements and groups in the United States whose ideologies center on anti-government conspiracy theories. The most important segments of the ‘Patriot’ movement include the militia movement, the sovereign citizen movement and the tax protest movement. Though each submovement has its own beliefs and concerns, they share a conviction that part or all of the government has been infiltrated and subverted by a malignant conspiracy and is no longer legitimate.”

The use of the name originated with right-wing extremists in the mid-1980s who called themselves “Christian Patriots,” and were unabashedly racist—many of its participants could be found at annual “Aryan Congresses” assembled by the “Christian Identity” Aryan Nations near Hayden Lake, Idaho. This movement was studied in depth by sociologist James Aho in his 1990 book, The Politics of Righteousness: Idaho Christian Patriotism (University of Washington Press). Derived in many regards from the openly racist and antisemitic “Posse Comitatus” belief system, Christian Patriots also claimed that ordinary people could declare themselves “sovereign citizens” to free themselves from rule by the federal government (including paying taxes), and that the county sheriff was the supreme law of the land, able to countermand federal law if he deemed it unconstitutional. Civil rights laws, public land ownership, a federal education department—these were all considered null and void in their world of radical antifederalism.

Following the tragic outcomes of the armed federal standoffs at Ruby Ridge, Idaho, in 1992, and at the Branch Davidian compound near Waco, Texas, in 1993, an idea that had been circulating in far-right circles—a strategy called “leaderless resistance” that called for forming small action-directed “cells,” along with violent acts of “lone wolf” domestic terrorism—became the consensus response among Christian Patriots. They called them “militias”—a reference intended to invoke the wording of the Second Amendment as a way to justify their existence.

Moreover, to broaden the appeal of the militias to include more secular-minded recruits, the movement dropped “Christian” and began calling itself simply the “Patriot movement.” The name stuck permanently.

At the time he blew up the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City in 1995, Timothy McVeigh self-identified as a “Patriot,” as did Eric Rudolph, the 1996 Atlanta Olympics backpack bomber. The Montana Freemen—purveyors of sovereign citizen pseudo-legal scams and major figures in the movement—engaged in an 81-day armed standoff with FBI agents in 1996 near Jordan, Montana.

Despite the connection to public violence, however, the Patriot movement—as I explained in my 1999 book In God’s Country: The Patriot Movement and the Pacific Northwest—played the strategic role as part of a campaign for ideas and agendas from the radical right to become more mainstream. The general idea was to strip their overt bigotry (especially the innate antisemitism and racism) from their radical localist and nativist politics and to present them wrapped in American-flag bunting and lofty sounding “constitutionalist” rhetoric that disguised its utterly nonsensical nature with heavy doses of jingoist jargon.

Throughout the 1990s, the Patriots continually organized their vigilante paramilitaries as militia groups, and preached the constitutionalist approach to government to anyone who would listen, along with their never-ending web of “New World Order” conspiracy theories, peddling maps of “FEMA concentration camps” and sightings of “UN black helicopters.” The conspiracism reached a kind of fever pitch in 1999 over the supposed looming “Y2K Apocalypse,” but after that proved to be an utter nonevent, it then receded into a low-level hiatus during most of the early 2000s, with conspiracists mostly devoted to the massive speculation industry that sprang out of the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

Among the leaders of that industry was radio host Alex Jones, a onetime John Birch Society member who began his career in Texas regurgitating conspiracy theories originally concocted by the Militia of Montana and other Patriots, then packaging them for mass consumption. Shortly after the embarrassment of having hysterically hyped the Y2K Apocalypse, Jones seized on the 9/11 attacks as a fresh, and wildly promotable, avenue for drawing listeners into his web of fantasies. Over the years, Jones increasingly identified on-air with “the Patriots” in their “war against the globalists.”

In the early 2000s, much of the radical right, including white nationalists, began organizing around immigration as an issue because of what they saw as an unwelcome tide of nonwhites permanently altering the American cultural landscape. Among Patriots, this manifested itself in the formation of vigilante border-watch militias who took it upon themselves to detain border crossers and to threaten them, motivated by a far-right conspiracy theory that immigration from Latin America was part of a New World Order plot to turn the American Southwest back over to Mexico in a “Reconquista.”

The most successful of these was the 2005 “Minuteman Project,” which attracted Patriots from around the country to participate in a large vigilante patrol on the Mexico border that also drew massive media coverage. Within five years, however, the Minutemen had crumbled apart amid internal bickering and the increasing criminality of its participants, culminating in the 2009 murders of an Arivaca, Arizona, man and his 9-year-old daughter in a botched home invasion by a Minuteman leader named Shawna Forde and her henchmen. Minuteman cofounder Chris Simcox is now in prison for a child molestation conviction.

Around 2008 and the election of Barack Obama to the presidency, the Patriot movement suddenly came roaring back to life. While the numbers of militia groups had declined to a mere 131 groups in 2007, they revived sharply over the next two years, with 512 groups. By 2012, they had reached a record high 1,360 militia groups. However, relatively few of the movement’s leaders from the 1990s remain active to this day, many of them having subsequently died.

The revival of the Patriot movement during the Obama years primarily revolved around the Tea Party movement. By mid-2010, it had become clear that the Tea Party—first promoted by mainstream media as a kind of normalized right-wing populist revolt against liberal Democratic rule in the Obama era—had swiftly transformed into a massive conduit for conspiracy theories, ideas, and agendas directly from the Patriot movement. Attending a Tea Party gathering after that year, particularly in places like rural Montana, was indistinguishable from the scene one could have found 15 years before at a militia gathering: the same speakers, the same books, the same rhetoric, the same plenitude of paramilitary and survivalist gear for sale.

The ultimate emblem of this ideological takeover by the Patriots was the ascendance of the Gadsden flag (“Don’t Tread On Me”) as the Tea Party’s most prominent symbol. The flag had originally been revived in the 1990s by the Patriot movement and was commonly on prominent display at their gatherings, as well as available through the Militia of Montana mail-order catalog.

It remained a standard symbol for Patriots well afterward, and was prominently used by Minutemen groups while organizing vigilante patrols on both the Mexican and Canadian U.S. borders. When a group of far-right conspiracists gathered to discuss the supposed globalist conspiracy to destroy Western civilization at the core of their world views, a Gadsden flag was hung above the club where they met.

But soon after the Tea Party began organizing rallies in the spring and summer of 2009, Gadsden flags began appearing prominently. Soon the banner became the best-known symbol of that movement—reflective of the flood of Patriot movement ideologues who seized control of the Tea Party agenda.

The yellow Gadsden flag and its coiled rattlesnake also made prominent appearances during two armed standoffs with federal law enforcement in the West led by Nevada rancher Cliven Bundy and his family, first in Nevada in 2014, and then in the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in Oregon in 2016. Two of the participants in the Nevada standoff, Jerad and Amanda Miller, went on a murder spree two months afterward in Las Vegas. After shooting two police officers to death in a pizza parlor, they covered their bodies with a Gadsden flag.

The same flag appeared in large numbers among the mob that invaded the Capitol on Jan. 6; one of the five people who died that day in the crowd, a 34-year-old Georgia woman named Rosanne Boyland, had carried her own Gadsden flag to the rally that day. (It was later determined she had died of an accidental amphetamine overdose.) Numerous insurrectionists carried them inside the Capitol that day; one left their flag, still attached to its pole, sticking out of a large waste can for crews to clean up afterwards.

It now appears everywhere there is a right-wing protest, including last weekend’s Proud Boys marches in New York and Los Angeles. Now, it flaps prominently from the back ends of jacked-up pickups that cruise with “Trump Trains” and anti-Joe Biden protests, alongside “Blue Lives Matter,” “Trump Is My President,” and “Fuck Biden” flags.

The seep of the Patriot Movement’s most recognizable emblem into mainstream right-wing politics is symbolic of the movement’s gradual, and now seemingly complete, absorption into conservative politics and, by extension, the Republican Party.  

Patriots have shifted the focus of their antidemocratic fervor over the years. Today’s Patriots no longer are focused on black helicopters, troop movements, and the government fiascos at Ruby Ridge and Waco. But at their core is the same fundamental ideology: fueled by conspiracy theories with an antisemitic core, angrily militant and heavily armed, organized around vigilantism and a desire to end democratic governance through eventual overthrow.

The core animating beliefs of the Patriot Movement today are either direct descendants of their original worldview, permutations of long-held cultural values, or modern-day adaptations of those values to fit their narratives about current events and politics:

• The world’s politics and culture are being secretly controlled by an elite cabal of “globalists” who seek to enslave the world under a single, tyrannical world government (long known, and still referred to at times, as “the New World Order”).
• The “unpatriotic” Americans they oppose—variously liberal Democrats, civil rights and immigrant rights leaders, environmentalists, mainstream journalists—are the willing tools of Socialists, who are Marxists, who are Communists, who are actually the real fascists. All are worthy of elimination.
• In addition to the government, media and educational institutions are under the control of the cabal, and are dedicated to brainwashing American children with Marxist propaganda.
• All of these coconspirators are deliberately encouraging nonwhite immigration into America so that the traditional white demographic base of the country will be permanently altered with more “obedient” races.
• America is not a democracy, it is a republic. “Democracy” is a Socialist lie.
• The Second Amendment not only forbids any kind of gun safety restrictions whatsoever, it also enshrines the formation of private armies accountable to no one because they are “militias.”
• The same amendment exists to enable ordinary citizens to obtain any kind of armament they desire so that they can rise up and prevent any kind of “Communist takeover” by taking up arms against a “tyrannical” world government. (This is known as the “insurrectionary theory of the Second Amendment.”)
• The globalist cabal knows that the resulting heavily armed populace is the chief obstacle for their nefarious schemes, which is why they work so relentlessly to undermine the Second Amendment—and why Patriots must defend it with their blood and their arms.
• The Constitution severely limits the power of the federal government, which should not be permitted to own federal lands, enforce civil rights or environmental laws, engage in overseeing public education, or any other traditional function outside of providing a national defense.
• The extraordinary extremism now exhibited by their enemies—endorsing “socialist” government funding schemes, supporting same-sex marriage and abortion rights, embracing a movement to end racist policing—means they have been overwhelmed by Marxist ideology and are an existential threat to their republic. This means that any kind of force, especially lethal force, is a reasonable response to this threat.
• Donald Trump’s presidency came under relentless attack from the globalist cabal even before he won election, because he is a real American Patriot who espouses and defends real American values. The 2020 election was nefariously stolen from him by the cabal using election fraud, and the Jan. 6 riot in Washington, D.C., was a justifiable attempt by ordinary Patriots to prevent the theft of his presidency.
• Joe Biden is not only being controlled by the elite cabal, he is also in the pocked of the Chinese Communist Party, and his administration is now engaged in a program of destroying America to pave the way for a Communist takeover.

These beliefs, all of them fundamentally extremist, form the cornerstones of the Patriot Movement’s worldview and how it organizes and recruits. And as we can see, a number of them are being voiced steadily and regularly by ostensibly mainstream right-wing figures, particularly Fox News pundits, social media trolls, and Republican politicians.

This is how extremism has crept into the mainstream, like the Gadsden flag: unremarked upon, quietly, and with only a few raised eyebrows within mainstream political discourse. In the same way, the Patriot Movement has silently insinuated itself at the center of that discourse and radicalized an entire political party along the way.

The Patriot Movement is the nexus of the insurgent war on democracy that is currently well under way; it may be helpful to think of Jan. 6 as the open declaration of that war. Most of all, if we have any hope of defeating this threat to the American democratic way of life, we need first to properly identify it and call it out.

When right-wingers call themselves or fellow activists “Patriots,” it’s going to be essential to understand that they’re not identifying as believers in America. Rather, they are the opposite.

As things stand right now, Republicans are heavily favored to take control of the House in the 2022 midterm elections. This isn't because of dissatisfaction with Democratic results, or because a year before election day Democratic candidates have all botched their campaigns irrecoverably. It's because in more states than not, Republicans are the ones drawing the lines of where each new congressional district will go, and Republicans have already redrawn maps in enough states to be all but assured of victory when Election Day finally rolls around.

That's the analysis from The New York Times, which has noted that Republicans only needed to flip a handful of seats to regain power and, based on the maps already out, the party's lawmakers have already redrawn district boundaries into ones that will give them those wins. The actual election part, the part we point to as evidence of our robust democracy, is of little consequence. In most states lawmakers are easily able to draw maps which will all but assure their own reelections, all but assure that the opposing party is stuffed into as few districts as possible, or carefully divided so that they represent an always-manageable minority inside multiple Republican districts rather than gaining majority status anywhere.

Elections aren't going to save us, because they're among the things being taken from us. Right now. As we speak.

If there are going to be consequences for a shift to violent fascism that has seen a president organize an attempted coup, his party's top political leaders mobilize to help him, "Proud Boys" in body armor showing up to school board meetings, demands to hunt down, remove, and burn the same genres of books that Nazis formed great piles of, and the disintegration of "news" into a self-indulgent and valueless netherworld in which demanding the nullification of a United States election or promoting absolute lies meant to propagandize the public into ignoring their eyes and ears is still not enough to prod decency-based contempt from wealthy hosts paid to wallow vapidly through it all, it will have to overtop a gerrymandering effort that all but assures the lawmakers who treat elections with the most contempt will control who can vote for them, how much effort it will take, and what happens if the voters do something their political strategists promised wouldn't happen.

In practice, what this means is that unless Democrats can somehow convince the national press that fomenting an actual damn coup is not within the bounds of what a political party and its actors are allowed to do, the party has no more than 12 months remaining to uncover all remaining details of how Mark Meadows, Steve Bannon, Donald Trump, Rudy Giuliani, and a majority of seated House Republicans convinced large swaths of the Republican base that the election Trump lost was "stolen," and so inherently corrupt that it should have been erased and replaced with whatever new government lawmakers decided on.

That's all the time that Congress has, and its all the time the decrepit Department of Justice has. If Republicans retake the House next November, they will declare that the Jan. 6 insurrection shall not be further examined because it is a "witch hunt." They will declare Bannon, Meadows, and all the others hiding the details of how and why the crowd was gathered to be American heroes, and form new committees instead premised on the notion that Hunter Biden or Hillary Clinton are the far greater dangers.

The whole premise of House Republican action from Jan. 6 until now has been to delay, delay, delay, attempting to run out the clock before any printed conclusions are reached on the link between false propaganda the party itself invented and dispensed and the resulting deaths at the hands of pro-Trump rioters who believed them. Why this is important to Republican leaders is a bit mysterious; conservative punditry, the Sunday shows, and most other sources of "news" have already validated the dissemination of false propaganda for the purposes of overturning an election to be Not Actionable. You will still be allowed on television. You will still be interviewed, allowed to present to your voters thoughts on "migrant caravans," or gas prices, or masks, with the understanding that fomenting insurrection for your own gain is just one piece of what you have to offer in the discourse.

House Republicans have spent the past 18 months attempting to block a probe that will almost certainly prove no more than we already know: Donald Trump and (more importantly) his myriad Republican allies promoted false information in an attempt to portray an election loss as the product of enemy action. Donald Trump and his Republican allies beat that drum relentlessly, week after week, inventing fantastical reasons why their base should not abide by the election results but should instead demand that each Republican-held state in which voters chose his opponent nullify their vote totals and declare Trump to be the winner. Trump and his top allies took criminal actions meant to goad and intimidate elections officials into doing just that. And when the courts rejected the party's lies and few in the election's infrastructure were willing to turn traitor for the sake of an incompetent blowhard and his own vice president reluctant to be the figurehead around which the rest of the seditious plot could be assembled, Donald Trump and his allies put out a public call looking for bodies willing to disrupt a joint session of Congress rather than allow it to seat the party's opponent.

Every historic accounting of the Jan. 6 insurrection will conclude that it was the result of an intentional propaganda campaign bent on discrediting America's elections, and that the crowd was assembled that day in a genuine, if ill-designed, attempt to nullify one. Every historic accounting will note that it was accomplished with the willing assistance of the majority of Republican lawmakers.

But if the news channels do not care, voters cannot be expected to, and the news channels emphatically do not care. The biggest news story of the new millennium is not one that the enforced vapidity of politics-as-sports analysis can take on, because such discussions hinge on being featureless and consequence-free. Panel discussions are the news equivalent of a sitcom: You are allowed to bleat and bluster for however much time the network has allocated, but above all there must be no new revelations or consequences that might carry over into next week's show.

What should we do with these well-dressed figures that introduce bills and by-the-way attempted to overthrow our democracy using the same fraud-based techniques synonymous with authoritarian control? Should we hang them from the studio lights? Should we ... stop calling them? But we shook their hands. And the opposition, it should be pointed out, is equally radical in its demands to return to the tax rates in effect when each of us began our careers.

At this point my only suggestion is for Democrats to begin treating the press with the same contempt that Republicans have made a core part of their personas. It is the only thing proven to work, at least. The press is currently allying with pro-sedition figures who lied to the public in an attempt to nullify the results of an election. Those lies directly led to multiple deaths; there is no argument to the contrary. The claims that the election was "stolen" were both invented, purely as propaganda move, and resulted a crowd storming the Capitol and attacking police officers, and Congress, as consequence.

The network hosts and heads now ignoring these murders to glad-hand the coup's allies are not engaged in "journalism." They are working, on purpose, to normalize the toppling of government as only one of numerous potential paths America might soon take.

There's nothing more inherently partisan than brushing off an actual seditious coup attempt as valid political speech. You can rest assured that if there was any militant leftist group capable of such an attack, entirely new network shows would be launched dedicated specifically to hunting down its enablers. The insurrection is being whitewashed because the political press, an entity distinct from journalism, wishes to keep fascist insurrection and anti-fascist opposition on equal, "balanced" footing. True journalism calls out corruption and lambastes propaganda and the figures that use it to undermine democracy.

What you see on television and slathered on op-ed pages is frequently the precise opposite. Not only are the propagandists given special access to mislead the public, they are thanked afterwards for doing so. Not reproached. Not condemned. Thanked, and invited back.

If insurrection is not sufficient to end Trumpism in the halls of power, elections will not be sufficient to extract those that allied themselves with it. So long as "immigrant caravans" are considered equal dangers to "fomented an attack on a joint session of Congress, one that resulted in deaths, and continues to disseminate the same falsehoods today," the actual partisan vote totals hardly matter. The press will give the public no reason to believe they should not vote however they voted in the last five elections, or the last 10; the risk that a future election might be erased outright, after the repeated vows of far-right politicians that they will take such actions if the vote totals make it necessary, will be ignored as of less consequence than the supply chain failures that represent the fk around, find out edges of modern business practices and, especially, an undercurrent of disapprobation that too many Americans have been getting far too uppity about what sort of jobs they will take and what sort of treatment they will stand, and maybe it is time for another arch-right father figure to mete out the necessary punishments.

I would say that sneering contempt is what is next required. Those that echoed Trump, Rudy, Meadows, Bannon and others to lay the groundwork for a coup should be treated with the absolute loathing that such acts deserve. The House needs to begin doling out such punishments, or at least taking relentless action to make sure each Republican is on the record, dozens of times, in blocking them. Democratic lawmakers need to make the case for voting protections in far starker terms, identifying the nameable enemies of free and fair elections and condemning their acts not merely as partisan gamesmanship but as a war on voting itself. Voters do not know that the insurrection is continuing, as the party purges "disloyal" election officials, new Republican-written state laws grant new powers to challenge and overturn vote totals, and Republican demands that the propaganda campaign that led rioters to believe they were acting as patriots go unprobed. But it is continuing. All those things are premised on allowing a future Republican Trump to succeed in nullifying a future election that does not go the party's way—by removing the specific obstacles, whether they be people, laws, or potential consequences, that thwarted the Republican attempt a year ago.

Treating those that goaded insurrection with the contempt that democracy's traitors deserve will inflame the fascist base, to be sure. It will only serve as further proof, to them, that their proudly sociopathic "way of life" is under assault from the hated elites who foist laws and science and book-learning on them.

But expressing relentless and open contempt for those that attempted to nullify a United States election by spreading hoaxes meant to justify its erasure will force "should lying to the public as means to topple government be treated as just another political tool" into a bit more public debate than the current, absolutely insufferably vapid political class is currently willing to abide. The only way Americans can freely decide whether elections should be considered sacrosanct or purely advisory is if they know the question is being asked. Very few voters, in either party, are aware of how just how much effort the faces on television went to in order to goad a frothing base into outright insurrection. Nobody on CNN will tell them. None of the shameless, pointedly absurd "panel discussions" will point a finger at those who spread lies leading to violence inside the Capitol and say You, in your actions, have betrayed the people. You are the worst of America, and we will not help you do your damage.

Those that attacked police and went hunting for politicians are now pictured on law enforcement flyers. The political figures whose lies convinced the crowd to do it, though? Why are the "news" networks thrusting them in front of cameras and allowing them, or even prodding them, to repeat their lies?

A new revival from John Doyle lays bare the country’s dark fairground heart.

“What a wonder is a gun,” a character muses early on in Assassins, now revived in an excellent production at Classic Stage Company. And the second you see a gun point across the stars-and-stripes-painted set, you’re going to think of the last American mass shooting you heard about.

Yet despite the repeated image of guns leering out of posters and programs in this show, Assassins is not just about weapons. It’s about what we’ve all been living through over the past year, the past two years, the past five years, and what it’s brought out in the country. It’s about why America seems to love her weapons so.

The characters of Assassins, each of whom will eventually attempt to kill a US president, all feel betrayed, forgotten, left behind by those who matter. The Proprietor (Eddie Cooper) of the nightmarish fairground where they meet tells them he has a cure for their problems, and that it is a gun. He also sells the assassins the promise that they are right to feel betrayed. “Everybody’s got the right to be happy,” he sings, counting his cash with a flourish as his customers take turns aiming their new guns. “Everybody’s got the right to their dreams.”

It’s this dark echo of the Declaration of Independence that keeps winding its way through Assassins’s deceptively cheerful score, before it finally resolves into “Another National Anthem.” We’ve all got the right to the pursuit of happiness. If yours doesn’t succeed, well — who pays?

Everyone does, answer the assassins. Everyone else in the country.

Assassins, with a score by Stephen Sondheim and a book by John Weidman, has a long and troubled history. It first premiered off-Broadway in 1990 to decidedly mixed reviews, perhaps due in part, the New York Times theorized at the time, to the “relatively jingoistic” Gulf War era, which did not care to see a series of US presidents be shot in effigy. A revival planned for 2001 was rapidly postponed (guess why), and so the show wouldn’t end up making its way to Broadway until 2004, in a production directed by Joe Mantello with Neil Patrick Harris playing the Proprietor’s counterpoint character, the Balladeer.

The 2004 Assassins, safely distanced from either a popular war or a national tragedy, was a massive critical success, winning five Tonys. The production effectively rehabilitated the show’s reputation from a problem show to one of Sondheim’s most darkly funny and ironic works. (Sondheim has said he considers it to be “perfect.”)

In our own moment, which seems to offer up another national tragedy every month, Assassins feels less funny and more like a dark confirmation of what you already feared might be true. It’s like an insight into the worst part of our national character that wouldn’t become unavoidably clear until 30 years after it was written.

If ever there was a director who should be a perfect match for Assassins, it’s Sondheim vet John Doyle, who takes the reins at Classic Stage Company. Starting with his Sweeney Todd revival in 2004, Doyle popularized the stripped-down approach to musical theater: small casts, minimal sets, actors playing their own instruments. And Assassins, whose chronology spans John Wilkes Booth shooting Lincoln in 1865 and Samuel Byck stalking Nixon in 1974, with all of the main players mingling across the centuries on that nightmarish fairground, benefits from an approach so stark you can see its bones.

With Doyle’s sparse arrangements, we can hear more strongly than ever how false the countermelody to the other national anthem rings. That countermelody is provided by the folksy Balladeer (Ethan Slater), who strums his guitar with an unnervingly placid smile and serves as a narrator of sorts for long stretches of the show. He’s selling us the twangy, jingoistic legend of America. “I just heard, on the news, how the mailman won the lottery!” he sings. “Goes to show, when you lose, what you do is try again.”

While the Balladeer allows to the audience that “every now and then the country goes a little wrong” and that a madman or two, or nine, might happen to come along with a gun, he assures us that we have nothing to worry about in the long run. “Doesn’t stop the story,” he croons. “Story’s pretty strong.”

Which story do you think is stronger, Assassins asks, the Balladeer’s song or the Proprietor’s? The story that tells you this is a country where dreams come true or the story that tells you if your dream has failed, you are owed retribution? Is there really a difference?

Still, there are times when Doyle’s strategy is sometimes more stark than is helpful. On the long barren stage, jutting into the audience and exposed on three sides, the actors seem adrift in time and space. In the dialogue scenes they struggle to land Weidman’s spiky, jagged-toothed jokes: there’s nowhere to ground the punchlines.

Sondheim’s score is so sleek and insinuating that it by and large protects the songs from a similar fate, but even there, at certain moments, the tone is distorted. Giuseppe Zangara, the hapless Italian immigrant who tried and failed to assassinate FDR, gets a comic number in jokey stage dialect about how he was driven to assassination by stomach pains. It’s a funny song, it traditionally gets a laugh, and then Zangara traditionally interrupts the audience’s laughter with a chilling, vengeful howl: “No laugh! No funny.”

The idea is that the joke and its destabilization together teach the audience how to watch this pitch-black show and its rage and its irony; how we will rarely sympathize with the assassins, but we must always take them seriously. But when I saw Doyle’s production, when Zangara (Wesley Taylor, nicely put-upon) shouted, “No laugh!,” he shouted into dead silence. The whole thing felt so solemn that the audience would never have dreamed of laughing in the first place.

Still, that empty stage does give the performers space to shoot out pulses of discordant, malevolent energy into the audience. Making the most of it, Adam Chanler-Berat resists the urge to be charming and goes inward, and incel, instead as John Hinckley Jr., the man who shot Reagan because he was obsessed with Jodie Foster. Will Swenson jolts the whole audience upright as oily, aggrandizing Charles Guiteau (who killed James Garfield), with a fake smug smile fixed permanently below his wide and frantic eyes.

Most unsettling of all is Steven Pasquale’s John Wilkes Booth, the first American presidential assassin, who sweeps onto the stage in a rustle of silk and menace, with unmistakable intent. The other assassins sometimes seem to lash out at random, but Booth knows exactly what he’s doing, and he leads the rest of them along by his example. So strong is his conviction that he even gets the Balladeer to strum along to his sweet-toned ode to the Old South — right up to the point that it devolves into a snarl of racial slurs.

Doyle’s somberness helps suit this Assassins to our own dark days. He rarely stoops to hokey literalism, but it is still impossible to watch this production and not think about the anti-lockdown rallies, the anti-mask rallies, the anti-vax rallies, the election rallies; how they can become riots.

As the assassins form their final tableau, they strap Covid-19 masks across their noses and mouths, printed with the American flag. In the background, on the same screen where we just saw Jackie Kennedy fling herself away from a just-shot JFK, footage of the January 6 Capitol riot flickers. One last final scream of rage from the part of the country we try to drown out with our ballads.

“They may not want to hear it,” the assassins tell us, “but they listen, once they think it’s gonna stop the game.” Walk out of the theater and try to stop listening.

We're on alert overload. Stray comments and offhand requests once shouted across the office now blink and buzz at us from Microsoft Teams and Slack. Our communication has grown fragmented, spread across myriad apps we have to learn, conform to, remember to check. From a report: Meanwhile, personal texts and social-media mentions have bled into the workday after all this time at home, adding another layer of distraction to our time on the clock. Why put your phone on silent if the boss isn't hovering over you? Our culture has evolved to accommodate rapid communication, says Gloria Mark, a professor of informatics at the University of California, Irvine, and it can be mentally taxing. Many of us struggle to conjure up that brilliant thought that hit right before the notification burst in. "Your memory is just overflowing with information," she says. It doesn't make for great circumstances for getting work done, but there are ways individuals, managers and organizations can contend with the onslaught. Dr. Mark's research finds people switch screens an average of 566 times a day. Half the time we're interrupted; the other half we pull ourselves away. Breaks -- even mindless ones like scrolling Facebook -- can be positive, replenishing our cognitive resources, Dr. Mark says. But when something external diverts our focus, it takes us an average of 25 minutes and 26 seconds to get back to our original task, she has found. (Folks often switch to different projects in between.) And it stresses us out. Research using heart monitors shows that the interval between people's heart beats becomes more regular when they're interrupted, a sign they're in fight-or-flight mode. The onus is on teams and organizations to create new norms, Dr. Mark says. If individuals just up and turn off their notifications they'll likely be penalized for missing information. Instead, managers should create quiet hours where people aren't expected to respond. "It's a matter of relearning how to work," she says.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Here at Daily Kos, we’ve covered Republican attacks on trans youth—and particularly, trans youth in schools—amid the ongoing novel coronavirus pandemic. Again and again, we’ve talked about how deeply vulnerable trans and queer youth are, both at home and in school; being “outed,” for example, can result in a young person being abused at home, or even becoming homeless. Bullying and harassment at school can contribute to mental health issues like depression, anxiety, and even push youth to leave school without a diploma. Queerphobia is real and its effects in the short and long term are sadly very real.

It’s important to celebrate when parents and allies get things right—we love covering stories where brave folks stand up for their openly trans loved ones, whether that’s participating in a protest or speaking at the statehouse. But, sadly, sometimes families aren’t supportive. Sometimes the people who are supposed to fight on behalf of vulnerable marginalized youth get it wrong. As reported by The Guardian, for example, two sets of parents are suing a school district in Wisconsin because teachers and staff, apparently, provided students with a shred of trans-inclusive dignity—and the parents think this is a violation of their constitutional rights. 

As some background, the Kettle Moraine school district has a policy in place that allows students to change their names and pronouns without their parents or guardians being involved. This means, for example, that a student can let teachers know they want to be referred to with they/them pronouns without the school calling home or requesting a signed note from the parents. This is basic dignity, really, and makes perfect sense, but it’s not the norm in all school districts.

Two sets of parents have filed a lawsuit against the district over this policy, arguing that it’s a violation of their constitutional rights as parents. The suit argues that the school district oversteps and undermines parents regarding a “major” and “controversial” issue. Specifically, the suit argues that using the correct name and pronouns for a trans child is essentially a form of medical treatment for gender dysphoria, and insists that parents must make that decision for minors.

Surprising absolutely no one, two conservative groups are representing the parents in the suit—the Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty and, you guessed it, the Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF). The nonprofits filed the lawsuit in Waukesha County circuit court in November.

According to the lawsuit, the parents of one of the children, a 12-year-old, have already removed their child from the district in an effort to “avoid daily affirmation” of their child’s identity by teachers at the school. The child wanted to use he/him/his pronouns and a different name upon returning to school, and apparently, the parents could not handle their child having even the smallest bit of dignity and affirmation. So they pulled them from school. And sued. 

What do the parents want? According to the suit, the parents want a “declaration and injunction” against the policy to “ensure” that the district will “respect their role as parents.”

In a statement to CBS News, Kate Anderson, who serves as senior counsel for the ADF, said that parents’ rights to “direct the upbringing, education, and mental health treatment” of their children is one of the “most basic constitutional rights” they have. Anderson says school districts are “ignoring” and “actively working against” this.

To which I say: But what about the rights of children?

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

Public safety officials fear the nation's 911 centers will continue to languish in the analog era , after Democrats slashed proposed funding for a digital makeover in their social spending bill. From a report: The potentially life-saving ability for people to send texts, pictures or videos to 911 centers, and for centers to seamlessly share data with each other, remains out of reach for many of the country's 6,000 centers. The House Energy & Commerce Committee advanced a proposal that would have spent $10 billion on next-generation 911 centers in September, but that funding was reduced to $470 million for deployment in the final House version of the Build Back Better Act. A cost report to Congress on next-generation 911 from 2018 estimated it would take about $12 billion to implement the networks nationwide, though advocates say $15 billion might be needed. "To say I'm disappointed is to put it mildly," Brian Fontes, CEO of NENA: The 911 Association, told Axios. "It's extraordinarily unfortunate." Next-generation 911 would allow centers to accept multimedia from those in need and let centers share data among themselves easily to ensure the best response.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

WASHINGTON — The number of Americans applying for unemployment benefits plummeted last week to the lowest level in more than half a century, another sign that the U.S. job market is rebounding rapidly from last year’s coronavirus recession.

Jobless claims dropped by 71,000 to 199,000, the lowest since mid-November 1969. The drop was much bigger than economists expected.

The four-week average of claims, which smooths out weekly ups and downs, also dropped — by 21,000 to just over 252,000, the lowest since mid-March 2020 when the pandemic slammed the economy.

Since topping 900,000 in early January, the applications have fallen steadily toward and now fallen below their prepandemic level of around 220,000 a week. Claims for jobless aid are a proxy for layoffs.

Overall, 2 million Americans were collecting traditional unemployment checks the week that ended Nov. 13, down slightly from the week before.

Until Sept. 6, the federal government had supplemented state unemployment insurance programs by paying an extra payment of $300 a week and extending benefits to gig workers and to those who were out of work for six months or more. Including the federal programs, the number of Americans receiving some form of jobless aid peaked at more than 33 million in June 2020.

The job market has staged a remarkable comeback since the spring of 2020 when the coronavirus pandemic forced businesses to close or cut hours and kept many Americans at home as a health precaution. In March and April last year, employers slashed more than 22 million jobs.

But government relief checks, super-low interest rates and the rollout of vaccines combined to give consumers the confidence and financial wherewithal to start spending again. Employers, scrambling to meet an unexpected surge in demand, have made 18 million new hires since April 2020 and are expected to add another 575,000 this month. Still, the United States remains 4 million short of the jobs it had in February 2020.

Companies now complain that they can’t find workers to fill job openings, a near-record 10.4 million in September. Workers, finding themselves with bargaining clout for the first time in decades, are becoming choosier about jobs; a record 4.4 million quit in September, a sign they have confidence in their ability to find something better.

Read 1 remaining paragraphs | Comments