James.galbraith

The QAnon infection now courses through the GOP, and its own elected officials are fearing for their lives.

Trump's own intelligence services believe the lie of a stolen election could inspire future violence.

The Trump administration made another horrific attack just days after its seditionist supporters ransacked the U.S. Capitol on Thursday by announcing a Health and Human Services (HHS) rule “that will permit social service agencies and providers that receive HHS grant funding to discriminate on the basis of sexual orientation or gender identity, as well as religion and sex,” Lambda Legal said.

Should the rule take place as scheduled on Feb. 11, the legal organization said the “eleventh hour” attack will be far-reaching, affecting HHS-supported social services ranging from foster care to HIV prevention services to programs for unhoused seniors, adults, and children. “HHS is charged with protecting the health and wellbeing of all people,” Lambda Legal’s Youth in Out-of-Home Care Project Director M. Currey Cook said, “but its actions today demonstrate once again its complete disregard for its mission.”

“The rule announced Thursday is just the latest in a series of regulatory changes by HHS that target LGBTQ people and people living with HIV, as well as other vulnerable and marginalized communities,” Lambda Legal said. So the fact that Republicans have continued to tout the outgoing administration as pro-LGBTQ would be laughable if it weren’t so horrific. In just one example this past fall, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo ignored internal protests from his own department employees in order to address a right-wing religious organization that supports so-called “ex-gay” therapy, the Miami Herald said. 

That report said that Pompeo’s speech to the Florida Family Policy Council, a group also affiliated with several other anti-LGBTQ organizations, was covered in red flags, including staffers finding links to conversion therapy—which is torture—on the group’s site, as well as anti-gay flyers at the location where the speech was to take place. But Mike just didn’t care.

The Trump administration is making a deliberate decision to continue this anti-gay animus as it’s just days away from going out of power—and when the incoming Biden administration has already made clear it will begin reversing Trump administration policies right away. Trump loyalists have already admitted they’ve enacted changes with the goal of just making things harder for Biden. Advocates from Lambda Legal urge the new administration to stay the course.

“We call on the Biden-Harris administration to address discriminatory policies such as these immediately, and commit to eliminating them root and branch,” Lambda Legal senior attorney Sasha Buchert said. “But in the meantime, Lambda Legal is prepared to take whatever action is necessary to protect the LGBTQ community from harm.”

“With this rule, the Trump administration and HHS continue their no-holds-barred and comprehensive assault on the health and well-being of LGBTQ people and everyone living with HIV, as well as on women, religious minorities, and limited English speakers,” Buchert said. “Even as Trump administration officials abandon ship, HHS has announced yet another dangerous rule that invites discrimination against the very people federal grant programs are meant to help.”

Marvel’s buzzy new Disney+ series wraps an intriguing superhero mystery in throwback sitcom trappings.

The future of Marvel has arrived — and it looks nothing like the 13 years of Marvel storytelling we’ve come to know. Gone are the intergalactic warlords, shirtless demigods, immensely powerful Infinity Stones, time travel, and even the Avengers, at least for now.

Marvel’s newest release, the kickoff to its Phase 4 era of movies and the post-Iron Man and Captain America chapter of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, is a half-hour, laugh-tracked, black-and-white sitcom called WandaVision.

Elizabeth Olsen and Paul Bettany reprise their roles as superheroes Wanda Maximoff and Vision (hence the title WandaVision). Instead of working to save the world, they’re perplexingly living as a charming pair of newlyweds in the world of a fictional TV show set in the fictional town of Westview. Their identities as superheroes are a secret, and their lives are suddenly playing out in a sitcom they don’t really understand or realize they’re part of.

There’s no explanation of how Wanda and the reanimated Vision — who died in 2018’s Avengers: Infinity War — ended up starring on their sitcom, or who is producing it. They don’t really know, either; every time they’re asked about their personal histories or any significant dates of note, including the year they’re currently living in, they blank. There’s no explanation for where all the other Avengers went, nor do Wanda and Vision seem to understand they’re trapped in a television show.

The only thing we do know is that this show, all of its smiles, and all of its feel-good goofs, isn’t at all what it seems to be.

Marvel made the first three episodes of the show available for critics. And here are my initial thoughts on the good, the bad, and what we’ve seen so far.

The show’s very clever show-within-a-show gimmick works, but has its drawbacks

Marvel

WandaVision drops its viewers right into the middle of Marvel’s most ambitious experiment yet: The telekinetic Wanda Maximoff and her synthezoid boyfriend Vision are, for whatever reason, stars of a vintage sitcom that borrows heavily from I Love Lucy, I Dream of Jeannie, and Bewitched. WandaVision uses the visual gags and slapstick humor of these throwback series to tell the couple’s comic book story of trying to fit in with the world around them.

The sitcom is a show within the bigger show — a mystery of how these characters got to this point since we last saw them on the big screen together. And the focus of the first three episodes is more about the sitcom and Wanda and Vision living their strange sitcom lives than the overarching Marvel adventure.

The format allows Bettany and Olsen to lean into different aspects of their characters than we’ve previously seen in Marvel’s films. That mostly means comedy and romance. Bettany gets to be goofy. Olsen gets to be warm and charming. The set design, the performances, and the specific feel of a multi-camera sitcom — WandaVision’s pilot was filmed in front of a live studio audience — reflect a love for these indelible shows.

But sometimes that love gets in its own way.

Because Bettany and Olsen are playing their comic book characters as if those characters were unnaturally placed into a sitcom, it feels as though the performances are never fully allowed to be earnest. The conceit that this sitcom isn’t part of reality, and the characters are supposed to be unnaturally existing in this sitcom world, provides cushion to jokes that don’t land or timing that doesn’t quite work since the default tone is to be stilted and strange.

But the real meat and payoff of the show, and what we’re told to take seriously, is the central mystery of why these characters are stuck in what appears to be an alternate reality. And there’s much more gimmick than mystery-solving in the first three episodes.

I hope WandaVision gets even weirder

The best parts of the first three episodes are when WandaVision unapologetically leans into its weirdness — like a very strange scene featuring a bird in episode three. Perhaps that’s because I feel like all live-action television could be improved with more avian creatures. But the more unexplained moments the show throws at us, and the more it pushes up against what feels like horror, the more it allows the sitcom device to really hammer home its uncanny artificiality.

The result is that the sitcom beats feel even stranger, maybe even more menacing — in a way that goes beyond “these characters sure are acting unnaturally.” It makes you realize the intense desperation for these characters to be “normal,” and the tragedy that “normal” is the one thing they’ll never be able to be. When the characters sink back into their comedic shtick, then, it feels even more unnerving.

Elizabeth Olsen finally has more to do

Elizabeth Olsen’s Wanda Maximoff has been a character in the MCU since 2015’s Age of Ultron, and has had maybe 15 minutes of actual screen time in those five years and multiple movies. Wanda has rarely gotten to be anything other than a grieving, angry soul (like when she lost her brother in Ultron and when she confronted Thanos in Infinity War), or someone who’s in love with Vision.

WandaVision gives her much more to do.

While Vision is in the name and Bettany’s Vision is a lead character, the show is really all about Wanda. The format of mimicking legendary sitcoms like I Love Lucy and Bewitched allows Olsen to dip into slapstick comedy and rom-com territory that Marvel’s movies haven’t had room for. Olsen’s hammy charm offensive — which strives to walk a line between a frazzled Lucille Ball and a smirky Barbara Eden — is fun to watch. At times, her performance made me forget that this show fits into a bigger MCU design, and I kinda wished that a Wanda and Vision sitcom was a real thing.

The mystery at the heart of the show is pretty intriguing

Marvel Studios

What keeps this show going is figuring out what’s actually happening. After 90 minutes of WandaVision, I still don’t know who the villain is or how our heroes are going to get back to reality. Could the fake sitcom be a manifestation of Wanda’s grief over losing her brother and Vision? Is there a different character who’s manipulating everyone involved? Is Nick Fury involved? Are the supporting actors in this sitcom Skrulls or S.W.O.R.D.? Does this whole setup have something to do with that pesky reality Infinity Stone?

I have my guesses, which haven’t changed much from what I picked up on from the show’s trailer. But I appreciate that even though WandaVision borrows more than enough material from the comic books, I don’t know everything that’s happening — a very different experience than Marvel movies, where we know many of the big beats going in and get through the entire plot, villain, motivation, and resolution in about two hours.

WandaVision feels like it’s going to get better

After seeing the first three episodes, I think WandaVision is a show whose early going is going to seem better in hindsight, once it has some time to unspool. The foundation the show is clearly working toward in the first three installments really comes to life in episode three — the oddities, the central mystery, and the very suspicious supporting characters all start to come together. I imagine that when everything starts locking into place, the first episodes will take on a new meaning. Until that happens, WandaVision’s debut is an intriguing, visually captivating world with a lot of question marks, one that’s full of potential but also requires a bit of patience.

The first two episodes of WandaVision’s nine-episode series will premiere on Disney+ on Friday, January 15.

Polish government officials have denounced the deactivation of Donald Trump's social media accounts, and said a draft law being readied in Poland will make it illegal for tech companies to take similar actions there. From a report: "Algorithms or the owners of corporate giants should not decide which views are right and which are not," wrote the prime minister, Mateusz Morawiecki, on Facebook earlier this week, without directly mentioning Trump. "There can be no consent to censorship." Morawiecki indirectly compared social media companies taking decisions to remove accounts with Poland's experience during the communist era. "Censorship of free speech, which is the domain of totalitarian and authoritarian regimes, is now returning in the form of a new, commercial mechanism to combat those who think differently," he wrote. Poland's ruling Law and Justice (PiS) party, which is ideologically aligned with Trump on many issues, has itself been accused of trying to limit freedom of speech in recent years.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Newly-elected QAnon devotee and GOP congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene said she would file impeachment articles against Joe Biden on January 21.

Said Greene on Newsmax (below): “I would like to announce on behalf of the American people, we have to make sure our leaders are held accountable, we cannot have a President of the United States who is willing to abuse the power of the office of the presidency and be easily bought off by foreign governments, foreign Chinese energy companies, Ukrainian energy companies, so on January 21, I will be filing articles of impeachment on Joe Biden.”

WJCL reports: “The announcement came only hours after the U.S. House voted to impeach President Donald Trump for the second time. During the hearings, Greene, wearing a mask with the word ‘Censored’ on it, attacked Democrats, saying their own actions had opened the doors to remove them from office.”

She’s not waisting any time pic.twitter.com/9onAhxUASZ

— bart h. (@blitzbroeks) January 14, 2021

#ImpeachBiden #QuidProJoe#BidenCrimeFamily

— Marjorie Taylor Greene (@mtgreenee) January 14, 2021

The post QAnon Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) Vows to File Impeachment Articles Against Joe Biden on His First Day in Office: WATCH appeared first on Towleroad Gay News.

America’s long lame-duck period gave Trump supporters months to plan a violent uprising. It needs to end.

On October 19, 2015, Canadians voted to end nearly a decade of Conservative Party government and elect a new government led by Liberal Party leader Justin Trudeau. Just over two weeks later, on November 4, Trudeau was sworn in as prime minister.

Five years earlier, a very similar series of events played out in Great Britain. On May 6, 2010, Britain held its most recent election where control of its government changed partisan hands — voters tossed out the incumbent Labour Party government and replaced it with a coalition led by the Conservative Party’s David Cameron. Just five days after the election, Cameron became prime minister.

Modern democracies, in other words, can and do transfer power very rapidly — and much faster than the two and a half months that separate President-elect Joe Biden’s election on November 3, 2020, and his inauguration on January 20, 2021, the official transition date established by the 20th Amendment. French President Emmanuel Macron won election on May 7, 2017, and was sworn in just one week later. Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party won his election on May 16, 2014. He became prime minister just 10 days later. Japan’s Abe Shinzo, the last Japanese politician to preside over a transition of partisan rule, also took office 10 days after his party won an election.

The dangers of a long lame-duck period have come into stark relief in the wake of last week’s storming of the US Capitol. America’s lame-duck period gave insurrectionists loyal to President Donald Trump two full months to plan the putsch that briefly occupied the Capitol and forced lawmakers to flee in terror — and they were egged on this entire time by a president who encouraged them to stage a “wild” protest while lawmakers formally certified Biden’s victory on January 6.

Meanwhile, as the sitting president, Trump retained command and control over both federal law enforcement and US military forces that eventually helped secure the Capitol. For unclear reasons, the Pentagon was reportedly slow to approve emergency requests to send troops to regain control of the building. And, for as long as Trump is president, the nation’s capital will need to rely on the Trump administration to protect against future violence.

Even before Trump seemed to cheer on a violent attempt to overthrow Biden’s incoming government, the lame-duck president spent the post-election period doling out pardons to his cronies and handing out medals to his most sycophantic loyalists in Congress. While Trump’s abuse of the pardon power has been particularly egregious, it’s hardly unprecedented. President George H.W. Bush pardoned several former officials involved in the Iran-Contra scandal more than a month after he lost his bid for reelection. President Bill Clinton pardoned his half-brother, as well as wealthy fugitive Marc Rich, during his final days in office.

American history is replete with examples of outgoing presidents who actively sabotaged their successor during the lame-duck period — sometimes in the middle of a historic crisis.

The United States, in other words, pays an enormous price for its long lame-duck period. There’s no good reason the US cannot join Canada, Britain, France, India, Japan, and other nations in transitioning swiftly to a new administration after a presidential election.

Why we have a lame-duck period

In 1984, Sens. Claiborne Pell (D-RI) and Charles “Mac” Mathias (R-MD) proposed a constitutional amendment that would have moved Inauguration Day from January 20 to November 20 — around two weeks after the presidential election. A long lame-duck period, Mathias said at the time, “made sense during the horse-and-buggy days of our republic,” but it no longer did in an age when newly elected officials can travel quickly from their home states to Washington, DC.

Among other reasons for such an amendment, Pell noted that the long interregnum between presidents can harm US foreign policy because neither the outgoing nor the incoming president can effectively negotiate with international leaders during this period. As Pell wrote in a 1982 op-ed, while the memory of the Iran hostage crisis was still fresh, “neither President Carter nor President-elect Ronald Reagan possessed the real authority required to deal with the situation” during Carter’s lame-duck period. Reagan did not yet have any formal power to speak for the United States, and Iranian leaders knew that Carter was on the way out.

The idea that there should be a long waiting period between an election and the day when newly elected officials take office, Princeton politics professor Keith Whittington explained in 2018, stems from an era when “citizen-legislators were often farmers as well as politicians, and the legislative calendar needed to be organized in a way that did not interfere with the necessities of planting and harvesting.”

In a largely agrarian society, winter was an ideal time for farmers to conduct business and prepare for the growing season. So the government’s calendar accommodated this reality. While Congress determined that federal elections should take place on the first Tuesday after the first Monday in November back in 1845, prior to the ratification of the 20th Amendment, newly elected members of Congress and presidents would take office the following March 4 — thus giving them the entire winter to get their affairs in order before traveling to the capital.

In a nation without railroads, airplanes, telephones, or the internet, moreover, considerable time was needed to complete the formal process of choosing a president. After voters cast their ballots, word of how many votes were counted for each candidate often had to be brought to a central location by horse and buggy. And once all the ballots were tallied, members of the Electoral College needed to be informed of their appointment. And those members had to gather within their respective states — again, frequently traveling by horse and buggy — to get to this meeting.

After the electors cast their ballots, records of their votes had to travel to Washington, and members of Congress had to also travel back to Washington to formally certify the results — or to choose a president from among the top candidates if none of those candidates received a majority of the electoral votes.

And looming over all of this was the fact that the new president needed to form a government, often corresponding with potential Cabinet secretaries via letters that took days or weeks to arrive.

As the country developed new methods of travel and communication, the law evolved with it, but only to a limited degree. In 1933, the 20th Amendment became part of the Constitution. That amendment changed the date when new members of Congress would be sworn in from March 4 to January 3, and it moved the date for presidential inaugurations to January 20.

While the 20th Amendment explicitly provides for a period of about two months when deposed lawmakers will remain members of Congress, it was in its time celebrated as an end to lame-duck lawmaking. A New York Times article announcing the ratification of this amendment proclaimed that “39 States Ratify Amendment Ending ‘Lame Duck’ Terms.” That same article predicted that the likelihood that Congress would continue to do work in the period immediately after an election, at least barring an emergency that forced the president to convene a special session of Congress, was “one chance in a thousand.”

As legal scholar John Copeland Nagle wrote in a 2012 article criticizing lame-duck lawmaking, “the universal understanding of those involved with the Amendment could not imagine that Congress would meet after Election Day and before January 3, citing the difficulties of winter travel and the distractions of the holidays.”

As recently as the 1930s, in other words, the United States remained disconnected enough that the prospect of lawmakers traveling to Washington in the post-election period was unimaginable even to some of the most sophisticated political observers in the country.

But we no longer live in such a world. Lame-duck congressional sessions are now a regular feature of the post-election period. Presidents can travel across the country in mere hours, and communicate with potential appointees whenever they want.

There’s also one other way that the United States in 2021 does not resemble the United States in the 1930s. An array of federal laws now allows major party presidential candidates to create a formal transition team prior to the election. Such a law could be expanded to ensure that potential Cabinet secretaries and other close aides to a presidential candidate are fully briefed and prepared to assume their new role the minute an election is held.

America’s long lame-duck period, in other words, is a relic of an era when the nation needed a considerable amount of time simply to choose a president — much less to allow that president to take office with a full array of lieutenants and advisers ready to go.

As we learned during the long week while ballots were still being counted in the 2020 election, the country would probably still need a few days or even a couple of weeks to finalize the election and to swear in the new president. New members of Congress, similarly, might require a little bit of time to hire staff and prepare to do their jobs.

As Whittington writes, “if the new legislature were to be called into session immediately after Election Day, it would find itself disorganized and understaffed and effectively unable to conduct public business for weeks.”

But there’s simply no reason this process should take two months.

Three disastrous presidential transitions before Trump

The biggest danger from a substantial lame-duck period is that an outgoing president will use their final months in office to sabotage their successor — something that’s happened several times even before Trump’s disastrous transition to the Biden administration.

1) James Buchanan to Abraham Lincoln

Easily the most tumultuous presidential transition in American history was the pre-Civil War transition from President James Buchanan to President Abraham Lincoln. Seven slave states seceded from the Union while Buchanan was a lame duck. And, while Buchanan purported to be a unionist who opposed secession, he refused to do much of anything to preserve the Union.

“How easy would it be for the American people to settle the slavery question forever and to restore peace and harmony to this distracted country,” Buchanan claimed in a lame-duck address to Congress. “All that is necessary,” according to the outgoing president, was for the slave states “to be let alone and permitted to manage their domestic institutions in their own way.”

Among other things, Buchanan denied that he had the power to use force to protect federal forts and garrisons in the traitorous states, so he allowed Southern militias to seize control of many such forts — and of the armaments therein. His hands-off approach gave the Confederacy months to form a government and to begin to organize a military.

A civil war was probably inevitable once Southern states began seceding. But those states were better organized and far better prepared to wage a war of treason in defense of slavery due to Buchanan’s ineptitude.

2) Benjamin Harrison to Grover Cleveland

The transition from President Benjamin Harrison to President Grover Cleveland in 1888-89 wasn’t as calamitous as the transition from Buchanan to Lincoln — how could it be? But Harrison and many of his fellow Republicans spent much of the lame-duck president’s final days in office sabotaging the economy and actively discouraging investment in the United States.

As Boston College historian Heather Cox Richardson recounts in To Make Men Free: A History of the Republican Party, after Harrison’s loss to Cleveland, Republican-aligned newspapers featured apocalyptic warnings about how Democratic proposals such as a lower tariff and an easier monetary policy would bring about economic ruin. “It remains for the wise man to endeavor so to arrange his personal affairs that he will suffer least from the threatened affliction,” warned the Chicago Tribune.

Numerous investors, foreign and domestic, believed these newspapers and started pulling their money out of the market.

Harrison, meanwhile, ignored pleas from banking titan J.P. Morgan and others to reassure these investors. By mid- to late February, the stock markets were in free fall. And yet Treasury Secretary Charles Foster commented publicly that the administration’s only job was to “avert a catastrophe” until Cleveland took over on March 4. As the markets collapsed, Foster spent his last several days in office sitting for his official portrait.

By the time Cleveland finally took office, the financial sector was in a full-scale panic, and the economy slipped into an economic depression. Then, having worked to sabotage the economy, Republicans ran in the 1894 midterms on the message that Cleveland’s Democrats had tanked the economy. And it worked! Democrats lost more than 100 House seats in the worst midterm defeat in American history.

3) Herbert Hoover to Franklin D. Roosevelt

President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal represented a sea change in American governance. Before the New Deal, the kind of activist government favored by Roosevelt was widely viewed by American elites as not just unwise but illegitimate and unconstitutional.

One person who shared this disdain for Roosevelt’s plans was his predecessor, President Herbert Hoover. Hoover lost the 1932 election in a landslide, largely due to his listless response to the Great Depression, but he spent his lame-duck period pressuring Roosevelt to abandon the New Deal policies that the incoming president promised to enact if elected.

In a letter delivered to Roosevelt during the final weeks of Hoover’s presidency, for example, Hoover warned that bank failures could result unless Roosevelt publicly abandoned his plans and pushed for austerity.

Roosevelt was unmoved by these pleas, but it is likely that the testy transition from Hoover to Roosevelt played a significant role in the states’ decision to ratify the 20th Amendment and reduce the length of the lame-duck period for all future presidents. As Yale law professor Akhil Amar writes in America’s Constitution: A Biography, when Congress proposed this amendment,

Everyone knew that President Herbert Hoover was unlikely to be reelected in November. Yet everyone also understood that the soon-to-be-lame-duck president would remain in power for four months after being repudiated, with no mandate (and perhaps little inclination) to do anything, despite the widespread view that immediate action was needed to pull the country out of its Depression.

Twenty-eight states voted to ratify the amendment in January 1933 alone, as the lame-duck president hatched failed schemes to get Roosevelt to abandon his campaign promises.

It may be possible to form a consensus around a swift presidential transition in 2021

The Constitution is nearly impossible to amend — amendments require three-quarters of the states to agree, which means that any amendment that is opposed by a meaningful political faction within the United States is all but certain to fail.

Yet it might be possible to build the overwhelming consensus necessary to amend the Constitution and eliminate the long lame-duck period. Democrats, having lived through a brutal transition from Trump to Biden, are likely to see the wisdom of such an amendment. Republicans, meanwhile, don’t have anything immediate to lose from a shorter lame-duck period, because such an amendment couldn’t possibly be ratified fast enough to shorten Trump’s term. Republicans even might have something to gain if the amendment took effect during a Democratic administration because it would cut the length of that administration.

If something like the Pell-Mathias amendment, which would have moved Inauguration Day to November 20, were to become law in 2021, the most immediate loser could be Joe Biden. Such an amendment would cut two months off his term and could potentially allow a Republican to take office two months early if a GOP presidential candidate prevails in 2024. Alternatively, the amendment could be written to take effect after the 2028 or 2032 election, so that lawmakers asked to ratify the amendment would have no way of knowing which party would benefit when it took effect.

Realistically, Congress would probably need to spend some time consulting with state election officials and other experts, regarding just how fast the states could certify congressional and presidential elections, before it decided just how much to cut the lame-duck period. But it should go without saying that a losing president should not be allowed to spend months plotting to undermine their successor.

As Republicans begin coming out for impeachment, it's time to contemplate the unthinkable.

The Washington Post reports that the Commerce Department inspector general revealed in a letter on Tuesday that top U.S. Census Bureau political appointees put “significant pressure” on staffers to produce a count on undocumented immigrants by this Friday, “even though staff there say the data isn’t ready,” the report said. Per one employee, what they were being told to do was “statistically indefensible,” the report continued.

But according to an NPR report on Wednesday, that effort appears to be over. “Senior career officials at the bureau instructed the internal team assigned to carry out Trump's presidential memo to stand down and cease their work immediately on Tuesday night,” NPR said it had learned. No matter what happens, what is clear is that President-elect Joe Biden must accept no such findings if they do come when he takes office next week.

While the report said that Commerce Department Inspector General Peggy Gustafson’s letter to Census Bureau Director Steven Dillingham names Nathaniel Cogley and Benjamin Overholt as the political appointees demanding the count (who themselves are set to leave the agency within days), whistleblowers point to pressure from the top as well.

“Several whistleblowers at the bureau told Gustafson that Dillingham had categorized the report as the bureau’s ‘top priority,’ regardless of the data’s accuracy, the letter said, adding: ‘OIG is also aware that you inquired into a financial reward for speed on this directive,’” the Post continued. “Gustafson said Dillingham is obliged to respond to the letter and asked him to do so by Thursday, after which ‘OIG will evaluate whether to interview you under oath.’”

Per the report from NPR’s Hansi Lo Wang early Wednesday, the move halting a count “effectively ends the bureau's participation in Trump's bid to make an unprecedented change to who is counted in the 2020 census numbers that will be used to reallocate each state's share of congressional seats and Electoral College votes for the next decade.” Advocates told the Post the last-ditch effort from political officials was “astounding, just astounding.”

“There’s a transition of the president in a little more than a week, and trying to rush out these numbers knowing they won’t be implemented in order to sow further division and disunity within the population is just astounding to me,” Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund President Thomas Saenz told the Post. 

For a grossly unjust and unconstitutional act, this whole mess has stretched out far too long—and that’s been aided by the conservative Supreme Court, which last month dismissed the legal action against the Trump administration’s mission to erase undocumented immigrants from the count in order to affect apportionment of House seats, apparently claiming it’s too early to challenge the obviously unconstitutional policy he’s been trying to implement.

“The liberals dissent on all fronts AND say Trump's policy is illegal,” legal observer Mark Joseph Stern said at the time.

“The Supreme Court majority’s dodge in the case keeps alive a far-right passion project to fundamentally change who gets representation in the United States,” Talking Points Memo said at the time. “Even if Trump does not succeed in implementing the policy due to logistical issues that have arisen, Friday’s decision sets the table for a future administration to try again during the next census.” President-elect Biden must take any and all steps to ensure that the census includes all people—including asking the Democratic Congress to redo it if necessary.

How does a small, mostly rural state soar up the charts to exceed every other such state when it comes to killing the largest percentage of its population? It definitely helps to have Kristi Noem as governor.

What that openness has earned her state is an astounding 12% positive rate for COVID-19. In this case, that’s not 12% of tests coming back positive. That’s 12% of the total state population testing positive. There is also good evidence that the entire Midwest surge that hit multiple states in the fall is tied to Noem’s “openness,” which she demonstrated by holding the Sturgis motorcycle rally without restriction. That surge not only spread across a dozen states, the echoes are still going, contributing to new record levels of COVID-19 each day.

So as the nation hits 4,281 deaths in a single day, everyone should take time out to remember Kristi Noem for all that she, and other Republican leaders like her, have done for this nation.

While Republicans in Congress have made a point of placing their loyalty to Donald Trump above the institutions of the nation—right up to the point of encouraging insurrection—Noem, and other Republican governors like her, have placed support of Trump’s policies ahead of the lives of their citizens. Which is worse may be impossible to determine. Both are simply horrendous.

In order to show their support for Trump, Republican leaders have forced open schools even in areas where COVID-19 numbers were high. They have not just failed to issue simple mask mandates that could provide an immediate effect in helping their states; multiple Republican governors have issued orders that prohibit cities and counties from issuing local mask mandates. That includes Gregg Abbott in Texas and Doug Ducey in Arizona, both of whom were forced to lower those barriers after cases in their states exploded. 

Despite having guidelines from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) that identified reasonable stages for reopening businesses, Republican governors in state after state hurdled past those guidelines to reopen much faster than the level of disease would indicate. And those governors have been uniformly neglectful when it comes to re-imposing restrictions when cases rise. That’s how Texas, Arizona, and Florida have returned to the top of the “new cases” charts even after they were at the peak of a previous surge over the summer.

Of course, it’s not just red states that are suffering. On Tuesday, California alone reported an astounding 605 deaths. Those losses were centered in the Los Angeles area where hospitals have now been overrun for weeks. It’s too early to be sure, but that number may indicate that the case fatality rate in the area is moving up due to the simple unavailability of ICU beds, exhausted and overburdened staff, and a shortage of oxygen.

Meanwhile, though earlier reports of a new, more infectious United States strain of the coronavirus were largely a theory pushed by Dr. Deborah Birx to excuse continued failures in containing COVID-19, it now seems that two new strains may have actually emerged. As CNBC reports, researchers believe these strains emerged in the last three weeks and appear to contain some of the same changes to spike proteins as new strains in the U.K. and South Africa. These new strains may be more contagious, but there is not currently any indication that they are either more deadly or better able to evade vaccines.

That more contagious strains should emerge over time is exactly what should be expected. In fact, the ability to spread is practically the only evolutionary pressure on viruses. That more contagious version could be more deadly or less deadly and it would likely have no effect on its ability to spread; the most contagious period for SARS-CoV-2 is in the days just before and after the appearance of first symptoms. If patients uniformly burst into flames a month after infection or 100% recovered without incident, it would make little difference in the rate of spread.

There have been diseases in the past where more damaging variants have been replaced by a rapidly spreading version with mild symptoms. Or in which an extremely deadly disease limits its own spread by knocking off hosts before they can effectively pass on the virus. Neither of those cases describe what is happening with this coronavirus.

What can be expected is that more variants will continue to arise and, if given sufficient time and a large enough pool of hosts, a variant is likely to appear that is not restricted by current vaccines. This makes it critical that vaccines are distributed widely and rapidly simply to reduce the ability of the virus to spread and bring down the potential sources of a vaccine-breaking mutation. 

There is good news on that front: Both vaccine distribution to states and the critical “last inch” from syringe into arm appear to be improving. Vaccines are getting out there more quickly and are actually getting into the population, if not always to the people who might need them most. In spite of stories showing reluctance by some to take the vaccine, public offerings appear to be so overrun that appointments are being filled within seconds of announcements.

There is also one other bit of good news on the way: Johnson & Johnson, which produced a single-dose vaccine that entered phase 3 trials late in 2020, has announced that it expects to issue initial results within two weeks. It’s not clear whether the company will immediately apply for an emergency use authorization from the Food and Drug Administration or wait for more cases in trial volunteers to give definitive results. It also appears that the company is running behind on production and may not catch up to earlier projections until spring. However, it does seem there could soon be a third vaccine available in the U.S. 

Sen. Lindsey Graham is leading the charge against President Donald Trump’s impeachment and removal in the Senate, even as the White House remains largely uninvolved and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell suggested he's open to voting to convict the president.

Graham, who just last week said he had had “enough” of Trump’s bid to overturn the election results after he incited a deadly riot at the Capitol, has been calling around to Republican senators urging them to oppose convicting the president in the Senate’s upcoming impeachment trial, according to three people familiar with the effort.

Kevin Bishop, a spokesperson for the South Carolina Republican, confirmed that Graham “has been calling on his own,” adding, “Honestly we’re way ahead of any request from the White House.”

McConnell is taking a markedly different approach. In a letter to Republican senators on Wednesday, the Kentucky Republican did not immediately reject the House’s impeachment of Trump and said he plans to weigh the opposing views during the trial. He also urged his colleagues to keep their powder dry in the run-up to the trial. The House impeached Trump in a bipartisan vote on Wednesday evening.

“[W]hile the press has been full of speculation, I have not made a final decision on how I will vote and I intend to listen to the legal arguments when they are presented to the Senate,” McConnell wrote, according to a copy of the letter obtained by POLITICO and a McConnell spokesperson.

Regardless, McConnell is not looking to expedite any action. In his letter, McConnell also rejected Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer’s request that the Senate reconvene this week as soon as the House sends the impeachment article across the Capitol. That means the trial will not begin until Jan. 19 at the earliest.

“Given the history, rules, and Senate precedents governing presidential impeachment trials, there has never been any chance that any fair or appropriate trial would conclude before President-elect Biden is sworn in,” McConnell wrote. “Whether it were to begin this week, next week, or later, the trial will not end until after the President has left office. This is simply a fact.”

Most Senate Republicans appeared to heed McConnell's advice and did not issue statements after Trump became the first president to be impeached twice. A few GOP senators have said they think Trump should resign or may have committed impeachable offenses, including Pat Toomey (R-Pa.) and Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska). Sen. Ben Sasse (R-Neb.) has said he'd consider articles of impeachment.

But the vast majority haven't taken a position on Trump's impeachment and removal, even as some have criticized his rhetoric that fueled the insurrection.

A two-thirds majority is required to convict and remove the president, meaning 17 Republicans would need to join all Democrats. It's unclear whether the numbers would be there, but if McConnell did vote to convict, it would increase the likelihood others would follow.

"Make no mistake, there will be an impeachment trial in the United States Senate," Schumer said Wednesday. "There will be a vote on convicting the president for high crimes and misdemeanors; and if the president is convicted, there will be a vote on barring him from running again."

In a statement late Wednesday night, President-elect Joe Biden praised the House’s vote to impeach Trump but urged Senate leaders to not let the trial get in the way of his Cabinet confirmations and his legislative agenda, including Covid-19 relief, which Biden has said will be his top priority.

“This nation also remains in the grip of a deadly virus and a reeling economy,” Biden said. “I hope that the Senate leadership will find a way to deal with their constitutional responsibilities on impeachment while also working on the other urgent business of this nation.”

Meanwhile, the White House has remained largely on the sidelines. During Trump’s first impeachment, Trump had a full legal team and a messaging operation emanating from the White House — one that recruited Trump’s top allies on Capitol Hill and other outside advisers to defend the president on the airwaves.

But as the House was preparing a vote to impeach Trump on Wednesday, few Republicans were openly defending the president. Instead, some were haranguing the House’s impeachment process as rushed and unfair, and arguing that the Democrat-led efforts would further divide the country.

In a statement Wednesday, Graham criticized Senate leadership for its handling of the House’s impeachment proceedings, saying GOP leaders were “making the problem worse, not better.”

Though Graham was not specific, his comments came after the New York Times first reported, and confirmed by POLITICO, that McConnell told associates that he believes Trump committed impeachable offenses after he incited Wednesday’s insurrection at the Capitol, which left at least five people dead.

“The last thing the country needs is an impeachment trial of a president who is leaving office in one week,” Graham said in his statement, calling out the handful of Republicans who have already said they will vote in favor of impeachment.

In the aftermath of the Jan. 6 riots at the Capitol, Graham had taken to the Senate floor to chastise the president and his supporters. “Enough is enough,” he said of the effort to stop the certification of Biden’s win. “Count me out.”

Two days after the riots, Graham warned Speaker Nancy Pelosi against pursuing articles of impeachment. That same day, however, he was heckled at an airport by Trump supporters, who called him a traitor.

On Tuesday, Graham rode with Trump on Air Force One to a stop at the southern border. That night, word began circulating that the senator was asking his GOP colleagues to put out their own anti-impeachment statements as a means of closing ranks around Trump and stopping the momentum that appeared to be building when it was reported that McConnell was personally comfortable with the president’s ouster. Graham’s efforts came as a surprise to at least some in leadership.

“Lindsey often does his own thing often without his staff looped in,” a senior GOP Senate aide said.

Tags: impeachment

After receiving death threats, Republicans say they’re afraid to vote to impeach.

There is a disturbing reason Republicans in Congress are giving for refusing to break with President Donald Trump: They fear for their lives.

According to Rep. Jason Crow (D-CO), this is a major reason why more House Republicans aren’t voting to impeach Donald Trump in the wake of the attack on the Capitol.

“The majority of them are paralyzed with fear,” Crow said in a Wednesday MSNBC appearance. “I had a lot of conversations with my Republican colleagues last night, and a couple of them broke down in tears — saying that they are afraid for their lives if they vote for this impeachment.”

Tim Alberta, Politico’s chief political correspondent, found in his own reporting that “Crow was right.”

“I know for a fact several members *want* to impeach but fear casting that vote could get them or their families murdered,” Alberta writes. “Numerous House Republicans have received death threats in the past week.”

This fear has not only affected impeachment vote. Rep. Pete Meijer (R-MI) has said that he personally knows several House Republicans who wanted to vote to certify Joe Biden’s 2020 electoral win but were afraid for their lives if they chose to do so.

“I had colleagues who, when it came time to recognize reality and vote to certify Arizona and Pennsylvania in the Electoral College, they knew in their heart of hearts that they should’ve voted to certify, but some had legitimate concerns about the safety of their families,” Meijer told Reason magazine’s Matt Welch. “They felt that that vote would put their families in danger.”

The comments from Crow, Alberta, and Meijer illustrate a devastating truth: The Capitol Hill attack was, in large part, a success.

The violent seizure of the Capitol demonstrated to legislators that crossing Donald Trump puts them in the literal crosshairs. This was explicitly part of the point for some: In online comments cited in an FBI document on the violent threats before the attack, one person wrote that “Congress needs to hear glass breaking, doors being kicked in.”

“We get our President or we die,” they added. “NOTHING else will achieve this goal.”

Convincing Congress to install Trump for another presidential term was always an unattainable goal. But influencing legislators to vote differently in the future, in ways more congenial to the Trumpist movement, was not.

In weak and young democracies, especially ones with recent experience of civil war, you often see a phenomenon called “electoral violence,” in which armed groups use intimidation and force to coerce voters into supporting their preferred political parties.

In the United States, it seems like we’re seeing the emergence of something more properly termed “legislative violence.” Far-right demonstrators in both DC and state capitals are using both threats and actual violence to coerce members of their own broad political faction, the Republican Party, to toe their line. In a country where firearms are omnipresent and easily attainable by legal means, legislators have good reason to take such threats seriously.

Of course, both electoral and legislative violence are antithetical to democracy. They replicate the political conditions of an authoritarian state, where the fear of physical violence prevents citizens and government officials from having an authentic voice in their government. It is the antithesis of the democratic ideal of self-government, its replacement with the rule of the most ruthless and brutal.

It is alarming that this is happening in the United States today. And there are very good reasons to believe that the success of these tactics — that the rioters successfully took the Capitol and scared elected officials — will lead to them being tried again.

A recent Politico article describes an unnamed GOP House member flying home after the Capitol attack, expecting support after their ordeal from constituents. Instead, he recalls being greeted by a striking refrain from his supporters.

“Do you think that Congress got the message?”

A political scientist explains why the GOP has to reform if we want to fix American democracy.

After the US Capitol was stormed by insurrectionists last week, American democracy is teetering on the precipice.

Democratic politics, at its core, has always been about navigating the tension between stability and progress. If a society resists change for too long, it becomes inert; if it changes too quickly, it becomes unstable. Traditionally, conservative parties have privileged stability and left-leaning parties have privileged change. That’s an oversimplification, but you get the point.

But what happens to democratic societies when conservative parties became radical in their defense of the status quo?

It’s a question we have to ask given the current state of the Republican Party. Even after the events of last week, even after at least five people were killed at the seat of American democracy, nearly 150 Republican lawmakers formally objected to the results of the 2020 election anyway. And even if that vote was performative, that so many GOP officials are still willing to play chicken with American democracy in this way speaks volumes about the state of the party.

Harvard political scientist Daniel Ziblatt (most recently co-author of How Democracies Die) argued in a 2017 book that the importance of conservative parties in democratic systems has been largely underappreciated. Democracies tend to evolve in the direction of more equality, and how a society responds to those changes determines how healthy and stable it is over time. Since it’s often the conservative parties that dictate this response, how they’re organized and what they do (or don’t do) is hugely consequential.

I reached out to Ziblatt to talk about his level of concern and how he views the GOP in historical terms. We discussed why democracies have buckled when conservative parties were too weak to control their more radical elements, why the Republican Party has become such an outlier, and why major constitutional reforms might be the only way to fix the problem.

Much of this conversation occurred before the US Capitol was besieged, so I contacted Ziblatt again after January 6 to get his thoughts on what transpired and what it means for the future of the country. After processing the attack, Ziblatt says it’s become clear that we’re facing “a regime-threatening moment” and a real tipping point for American democracy.

You can read a lightly edited transcript of our entire conversation below.

Sean Illing

Well, here we are, just a few days after the riot at the US Capitol. What were you thinking when you watched this unfold? Do any historical analogues spring to mind?

Daniel Ziblatt

I think what was so striking for everyone watching this is just how unfamiliar it all felt and looked — to American eyes. There is a record of these sorts of uprising across US states in recent years and in the past, but having this happen at the seat of power was so disorienting. Hence the proliferation of names to describe it: ”coup,” “putsch,” “riot,” “insurrection,” and so on. We just don’t know how to make sense of it.

But in the days since, it has become clear this was a regime-threatening moment. Not only because of the violence but also because the aim was to disrupt the constitutional transfer of power. This is serious business, and most worrying is that it has, at the very least, the tacit support of some leading figures in the Republican establishment.

As I saw the video of Sen. Lindsey Graham being harassed at the Washington, DC, airport for having failed to sufficiently support President Trump, I was reminded of Churchill’s definition of an appeaser — as one who feeds a crocodile, hoping he will be the last one eaten. We have a rotten sore in the midst of our political system, infecting the whole system, that isn’t going anywhere anytime soon.

Sean Illing

Why are properly functioning conservative parties so essential to the health of democratic systems?

Daniel Ziblatt

I’m not sure if they’re more important than liberal or progressive parties, but their importance is definitely underappreciated by most liberals and progressives.

If you look at the history of democracy in Western Europe, and the US, to a degree, a pattern emerges: When economically powerful groups aren’t well-organized into parties that can compete and win in a democratic process, then those groups tend to go outside of the political process and undermine democracy. In places where you’ve had strong center-right parties, like Britain in the 19th century, there was a much more stable constitutional order, and in places where conservative parties were weaker, like Weimar Germany, democracy was much less stable.

Sean Illing

Can you clarify what you mean by “well-organized” conservative parties? Because in the case of the Republican Party, they’re still winning elections but they’re not strong or organized by your standard.

Daniel Ziblatt

The key thing is that conservative parties are governed by professional politicians who have a stake in the continuation of the political system. That’s more important than whether conservatives win elections or not. So you can imagine a situation like late 19th-century Spain or late 19th-century Germany where conservatives do really well in elections, but it’s because the elections are rigged, and you have state officials tampering with the election and repressing the vote so that conservatives win. That’s a strong conservative party but not in the sense that I mean it.

It’s critical that conservatives discover the power of political organization within the democratic context. Sometimes people will say, “Well, what about the Nazi Party? This was a strong party. This wasn’t good for democracy.” And that’s certainly the case, but that’s sort of the end of a long process under which conservatives hadn’t been particularly well-organized. And what happens when conservatives aren’t well-organized is they can’t control their most radical base — and that might be the clearest parallel to our current period.

Sean Illing

If you look across the democratic world today, how much of an outlier is the GOP?

Daniel Ziblatt

I don’t really have to guess at this. There’s an organization called Varieties of Democracy that we used in our book to categorize parties as abiding by democratic rules or not. And they’ve taken that and applied it to every major political party in almost every democracy since 1970. And what you see, based on the expert evaluations, is that in the mid-1970s, the Republican Party is basically in the same grouping as other major center-right parties throughout Europe.

Beginning in the 2000s, however, it goes dramatically off course in terms of its commitment to democratic norms. The American Republican Party now looks like a European far-right party. But the big difference between the US and a lot of these European countries is that the US only has two parties and one of them is like a European far-right party. If the GOP only controlled 20 percent of the legislature, like you see in a lot of European countries, this would be far less problematic — but they basically control half of it.

So I think the central weakness of our political system right now is the Republican Party. We had what was basically a center-right party and over time it’s become more ideologically extreme while still doing well electorally, and that opens the system to further extremism and risks a kind of spiral in which both parties become more radicalized in response to the other.

Sean Illing

There aren’t any perfect historical parallels, but what are the most instructive examples in your mind?

Daniel Ziblatt

It’s a tough question, but I’ll go back to the German example. When I wrote the book on German conservatives, I was writing between 2010 and 2015 and I saw the Republican Party losing control in ways that reminded me of 19th-century Germany. It kind of freaked me out.

I remember Romney running for the GOP nomination, and so many people assumed he would win the primary because the party has all the control and he was the establishment incumbent guy. But I kept thinking, “Yeah, that’s true right now, but historically there are lots of cases where the grassroots gets control of the party, and when they do, it’s bad news for democracy.” Fast-forward to 2016 and Trump and you can see how that played out.

I do want to be cautious about this comparison, because there are a couple major differences. One is that Germany had a proportional system, so it was much harder to hold the conservative base together in a highly fragmented system. Also, the conservative party in Germany was very young, didn’t have deep roots or a deep history. We’re not talking about the party of Lincoln going back 150 years or whatever. The Republican Party is more substantial as an organization than the German conservative party ever was.

So there are real differences, and I’m always careful when making these Weimar comparisons. But as dangerous as it is to go wild with the Weimar comparisons, it’s just as dangerous to foreclose that comparison because it ended so badly.

Sean Illing

There do seem to be problems today that are unique to our time, or maybe it just seems that way. I’m thinking of the media landscape and the fact that so much of the GOP base has been captured by misinformation and false narratives.

Are there any examples of parties being subsumed by alternative realities in this way, or is this something that wasn’t really possible until the digital age?

Daniel Ziblatt

One of the most uncanny parallels to the Weimar era is that the leading figure in the German nationalist scene in the mid-1920s was this guy named Alfred Hugenberg, who had no political career. He was an adviser and a businessman. But slowly, he built up a media empire. He owned movie theaters and newspapers and even the official German wire service, which provided news to local newspapers.

As this new media infrastructure was developing, he was pushing a total nationalist agenda, infusing nationalist themes into newspaper stories. And he then got himself selected as the head of the German Conservative Party in 1928. He was uncharismatic and a failure as a politician, but he helped turn the political debate in a more nationalist direction.

Today, it’s more complicated because the media infrastructure is so all-encompassing. But I’ve seen people draw parallels to the end of World War I where you had this narrative emerge in Germany that basically said that Germans were stabbed in the back by liberals and Jews and communists, that they didn’t really lose the war. This myth was perpetuated after 1918, and it slowly spread throughout the political system. You could say that as people retreated more into mythology, they started to believe what today we’d call “alternative facts.”

But I do think our situation is much better because in the case of Germany, the entire national political system had experienced this humiliating defeat. The country was decimated by a major war. We’re not there. So whatever we’re dealing with here, it’s on a much smaller scale.

Sean Illing

Given everything you’ve said here, how alarmed are you not just about the Republican Party but the overall trajectory of American democracy?

Daniel Ziblatt

The need for major institutional reforms has become much clearer in my mind. The Republican Party is supposed to moderate in order to win votes. You’re not supposed to be able to go too far to the extremes and keep winning votes in a two-party system. That’s the puzzle in front of us. Two-party systems are supposed to be self-correcting. When it goes too far away from an average voter, you get punished and you moderate and go back to the middle.

This isn’t happening because our constitutional system is filled with all of these counter-majoritarian crutches (like the Electoral College) for any party that does well in rural areas, and that allows Republicans to win office without winning a majority of the electorate. So we have to reform our institutions to compel the GOP to compete in more urban, more diverse areas — that’s the path to moderation.

Sometimes people will say to me, “Well, we can’t engineer our way out of this problem. There needs to be deep societal change.” They say it’s naive to think we can reform our institutions. I say it’s naive to think we can get out of this without reforming our institutions. We simply have to change the basic incentives governing our political system.

It’s hard to imagine a realignment like the one that eliminated the Whigs in the 1850s. And that didn’t end well. The big dilemma is whether it makes more sense to keep the white nationalist anti-system elements within our system outside of the party. But that only works if their isolation can be accompanied by their weakening. My concern is that the electoral base for Trumpism is, at this point, real, broad, and deep.

More broadly, we should begin to think about the idea that Germans in the postwar period called “wehrhafte Demokratie” — this is a “defensive democracy” — one that embraces the inclusion, competition, and civil liberties of liberal democracy but one that doesn’t take democracy for granted.

In Germany, the theory of “defensive democracy” had two main thrusts — one is the attempt to bolster a democratic political culture through education, and the other is an aggressive willingness to isolate and exclude from political debate those views that endorse violence and that actively engage in violence. This doctrine was invented in the 1930s in response to Nazism. We may, ultimately, need a “wehrhafte Demokratie” for the social media age.

A retired U.S. Navy SEAL special warfare operator who videotaped himself on Facebook bragging about "breaching the Capitol" last Wednesday was obviously seeking attention, and as of recently, he got it in the form of FBI questioning, according to ABC News. Adam Newbold, 45, was on his way home from the Capitol riot when he said on camera that he was "proud" of the deadly attempted coup and that "destruction" was necessary.

"There are stories to tell from generations upon generations, um, that hopefully, uh ... that hopefully it pans out to be a positive revolution," he said. "HOOYAH!" He also attempted to explain away vandalism that occurred in the riot. "There was destruction, breaching the Capitol, our building, our house," he said in the video since deleted from Facebook. “And, um, to get in you had to destroy doors and windows to get in.”

Newbold, who wore a T-shirt representing his firearms training company Advanced Training Group Worldwide, seemed to imply in the video that he witnessed the destruction himself and that there may be more to come. "I'm hoping the message was strong enough," he said. "Unfortunately, maybe it wasn't. I'd hate to see this escalate more."

In another video posted on his YouTube page Dec. 13, Newbold talked about “a storm coming.” “Hello patriots,” he started the video. “There are dark forces in this world pulling the strings behind the curtain, and you’d better believe it’s not just Joe Biden because we have bigger worries.”

He continued:

“I’m not an anti-government guy, but I am anti-corrupt government. I believe in the Constitution of the United States. Most all of my military, law enforcement, FBI, CIA, and other federal agent friends as well as Intelligence Committee personnel feel the same way. There’s a storm coming. Noone’s coming to save us. It’s up to we the people to stand up and voice our opinions strongly. Prepare yourself, for you are the protector of family, friends and country. Get ready for whatever’s coming. God bless our country. Keep us all safe, all safe, right and left-leaning personnel. Everyone thinks they’re doing what’s right for this country. Democrats are not bad people. I’m a Republican. Republicans are not bad people. They believe in what they’re doing, but they are, we are, being manipulated, and we’re putting, we’re being pit against each other for the purpose, I believe, of destroying our country. We’re not going to let it happen. Stay safe and effective.”

A spokesperson for the Naval Special Warfare Command declined to comment to ABC News. "It would be inappropriate to discuss the actions of an individual, whose reserve service ended almost four years ago, that are subject to an ongoing federal investigation,” the spokesperson said.

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New video shows pro-Trump insurrectionists coordinating a plan and discussing the layout of the U.S. Capitol as the attack unfolded.

Mediaite reports: “The video shows a group of people inside the building while a man was heard asking his cohorts ‘what’s the floor plan?’ As the group strategized their next move, a woman with a megaphone consulted them through a broken window and gave them instructions for how to force their way through. The video’s emergence comes as the FBI and the Department of Justice continue to investigate the storming of the Capitol, with more than 100 open cases for felony charges of sedition and conspiracy. Several of the rioters have been arrested already and Trump is set to be impeached for incitement of insurrection.”

The attack on the Capitol was coordinated and planned.

Here are the insurrectionists talking about the plan, including detailed schematics of the Capitol building.

pic.twitter.com/e3uJNicTDy

— Holly Figueroa O'Reilly (@AynRandPaulRyan) January 13, 2021

The post New Video Shows Insurrectionists Discussing Layout of U.S. Capitol, Coordinating Plan of Attack: WATCH appeared first on Towleroad Gay News.

Scientists in Brazil have downgraded the efficacy of a Chinese coronavirus vaccine that they hailed as a major triumph last week, diminishing hopes for a shot that could be quickly produced and easily distributed to help the developing world. From a report: Officials at the Butantan Institute in Sao Paulo said on Tuesday that a trial conducted in Brazil showed that the CoronaVac vaccine, manufactured by the Beijing-based company Sinovac, had an efficacy rate just over 50 percent. That rate, slightly above the benchmark that the World Health Organization has said would make a vaccine effective for general use, was far below the 78 percent level announced last week. The implications could be significant for a vaccine that is crucial to China's global health diplomacy. At least 10 countries have ordered more than 380 million doses of the Sinovac inoculation, CoronaVac, though regulatory agencies have yet to fully approve it. A senior official in Hong Kong, a special administrative region of China that had already ordered CoronaVac, said on Wednesday that an advisory panel would strictly review the vaccine based on clinical trial data before it was rolled out there. "Those countries that have ordered the Chinese-made vaccines are probably going to question the usefulness of these vaccines," said Yanzhong Huang, a senior fellow for global health at the Council on Foreign Relations and an expert on health care in China. "Countries with opposition parties might use this to challenge the decision made by the incumbent government, and that will likely have domestic political implications in these countries," Mr. Huang said. Sinovac did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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After four-and-a-half years of unbending loyalty, Vice President Mike Pence is ready to move on from Donald Trump. All it took was the president inciting a riot that, quite literally, put Pence’s life in danger.

“Pence is done with Trump’s bulls--t,” said a former Pence adviser. “He’s not going to give a prime time speech saying, ‘F you Donald Trump,’ but in his own way he is going to just get to the finish line and keep his head down.”

The vice president has spent the past few days navigating between two political forces. There is bipartisan praise for his refusal to indulge the president’s unconstitutional ploy for a second term. But the MAGA base he cultivated alongside Trump is now threatening him with political retribution and even death for that same refusal.

Not wanting to inflame the situation further, Pence and his aides have tried to dodge the spotlight since the president attacked him for lacking the “courage” to illegally overturn the election outcome. While Trump traveled to the Southwestern border on Tuesday as part of an effort to shift the conversation away from last week’s deadly rampage, Pence’s team scaled back a similar farewell tour that would have dispatched the vice president to several events this week to tout the administration’s accomplishments.

But the VP hasn't completely checked out or turned on Trump either. On Tuesday, he formally rejected calls for him to invoke the 25th amendment to initiate the removal of the president from office. The vice president is planning to attend a memorial service for famed Air Force pilot Chuck Yeager in Charleston, W.Va., on Friday — his first planned public appearance since overseeing Congress’ election certification last week — and has also discussed meeting with state governors battling the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic and vaccine rollout between now and next Wednesday.

In a sign of Pence’s eagerness to go his separate way, he plans to attend Biden’s inauguration on Jan. 20 apart from Trump, who has vowed to skip his successor’s swearing-in and is expected to depart for his West Palm Beach estate prior to then.

It’s the most overt attempt by Pence to create political distance from Trump — a man he declined to abandon amid the “Access Hollywood” leak, or through an impeachment trial in 2019, or when Trump bullied Republican allies, threatened long-standing alliances and cursed his way through campaign rallies.

For that distancing, Pence has earned plaudits from prominent conservatives, Republican lawmakers and right-wing organizations, especially since last Wednesday, when he returned to the House chamber hours after the riots to oversee certification of Biden’s win. Even Trump allies have rallied by Pence’s side as the MAGA-faithful continue to rail against him for his alleged treachery.

“I am totally supportive of him doing what he thinks is right,” said former House Speaker Newt Gingrich.

People familiar with the matter said the vice president has found solace in the outpouring of support for himself and other members of Congress who rebuffed Trump’s pressure to stop the certification of Joe Biden’s win. Pence and his allies have also been pleased with what they perceive to be a reputational boost he’s enjoyed, and the increasing likelihood that Trump will forgo launching a comeback campaign in 2024. Pence harbors presidential ambitions of his own. But the prospect of Trump running for office again in four years had threatened to freeze the Republican primary field and place Pence in an uncomfortable position.

“Mike Pence is stronger today as a candidate for 2024 than he’s ever been because he’s been loyal to the president, but also loyal to his conscience and doing what’s right,” said a former White House official.

While Pence has yet to decide on a future presidential bid, he is expected to spend the next few months selling the successes of the Trump administration — on everything from tax reform and deregulation to religious freedom — with paid speeches and appearances in front of conservative audiences. He also plans to publicly push back as the incoming Biden administration works to undo many Trump-era policies, with op-eds and media appearances. One person close to Pence said his short-term goal is to help Republicans take back the House in the 2022 midterm cycle and find a lucrative board position or steady stream of speaking opportunities to generate income.

The future of his relationship to Trump is less clear. Though a senior administration official said the two had a “good” conversation on Monday night — their first since Pence had to be hurried out of the Senate chamber minutes ahead of the mob — it is unclear if Trump has offered an apology for what Pence allies view as a remarkable betrayal. Nor has Trump expressed contrition for his remarks that preceded last week’s Capitol Hill putsch.

“If you read my speech … it’s been analyzed and people thought that what I said was totally appropriate,” Trump told reporters on Tuesday.

Despite a reprieve from Trump’s wrath after the president was banned from social media sites Facebook, Twitter and Instagram last week, Pence has faced increasingly dark threats from the president’s supporters and defenders. Outside the chaotic scenes last Wednesday, some Trump backers were caught on camera chanting, “Hang Mike Pence.” Over the weekend, attorney Lin Wood, who led an unsuccessful effort to overturn the 2020 election results, was censored on the Twitter-alternative Parler for suggesting that Pence be executed by “firing squads.”

A spokesperson for Pence declined to comment further on the conversation he had with Trump. But a former Pence adviser said of the president: “He absolutely owes the vice president an apology, not just for endangering his life, but for trying to dupe people into thinking [Pence] could do more” to change the outcome of the 2020 election.

Most Pence aides and allies said they anticipated that Trump would make life difficult for his vice president for declining to interfere with the Jan. 6 certification vote to affirm Biden’s win, citing the intense pressure Trump and his own allies — including White House chief of staff Mark Meadows, director of presidential personnel Johnny McEntee and former campaign adviser Boris Epshteyn — had already put on Pence and his team leading up to last week’s joint session.

But in the aftermath of last Wednesday, some said they’ve still been surprised by Trump's refusal to make amends with his vice president, particularly as Pence resists calls to organize the president’s removal from office or pressure him to resign.

“It’s all just very disappointing. I thought I’d lost the capacity to be shocked and I was wrong,” said one person close to Pence, noting that Trump and those pushing Pence to unilaterally overturn the election results — like former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani — “didn’t even have a plan” for the unprecedented fallout that would have ensued if Pence had obliged.

Daniel Lippman and Anita Kumar contributed to this report.

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The Court’s decision may be the beginning of the end of Roe v. Wade.

On the surface, the Supreme Court’s decision in FDA v. American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, which was handed down Tuesday evening, is fairly minor.

The case involves a Food and Drug Administration requirement that a pill used in medication abortions must be distributed to patients directly by health providers and not by retail or mail-order pharmacies. A lower court temporarily suspended this requirement during the pandemic; the Supreme Court’s decision effectively reinstates the requirement.

The Court released no majority opinion, which means that the decision in American College does not explicitly change existing legal doctrine. And the case concerns a policy that the Biden administration could likely reverse after President-elect Joe Biden takes office.

Read between the lines, however, and American College warns of a dark future for abortion rights.

The premise of pro-abortion rights decisions like Roe v. Wade (1973) is that the Constitution provides special protection to the right to an abortion that it doesn’t provide to other elective medical procedures. Yet, as Justice Sonia Sotomayor explains in dissent, American College effectively rules that a commonly used abortion drug may be regulated more harshly than any other legal medication.

Although Chief Justice John Roberts wrote an opinion explaining that he would decide the case on very narrow grounds — holding that courts should defer to public health agencies during the pandemic — no other justice in the majority joined this opinion.

For many years, Justice Anthony Kennedy — who typically voted to uphold abortion restrictions but sometimes voted to strike down particularly aggressive attacks on reproductive freedom — held the balance of power between four justices who support abortion rights and four who oppose them. But Kennedy’s retirement in 2018 and the death of pro-choice Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg in 2020 — both Kennedy and Ginsburg were replaced by staunchly conservative Donald Trump appointees — makes it exceedingly likely that the Supreme Court will permit laws that effectively ban abortion.

American College does not go that far, but it is an ominous sign for anyone who cares about the right to terminate a pregnancy.

American College concerns access to abortion during the pandemic

The specific issue in American College involves mifepristone, part of a two-drug regime that is used to induce abortions. Mifepristone causes tissue within the uterus to break down and separate from the uterus itself. A day or two after taking mifepristone, the patient takes a drug called misoprostol, which makes the uterus contract and expel its contents.

While mifepristone is often taken at home, the Food and Drug Administration only allows the drug to be dispensed at hospitals, clinics, or other medical offices. It is not available at retail or mail-order pharmacies.

This limit on who can dispense mifepristone has been in effect for more than 20 years, and it’s ordinarily a fairly minor limit on abortion rights. During the Covid-19 pandemic, however, it is potentially a significant burden on patients’ ability to terminate their pregnancies.

In the midst of a deadly pandemic, any trip outside of the home — including a trip to an abortion clinic — can potentially expose individuals to the coronavirus. Moreover, as Justice Sotomayor explains in her dissent, “three-quarters of abortion patients have low incomes, making them more likely to rely on public transportation to get to a clinic to pick up their medication.”

That means that these patients “must bear further risk of exposure while they travel, sometimes for several hours each way, to clinics often located far from their homes.”

Indeed, in no small part due to concerns that patients who need to travel in order to pick up medications could become infected with Covid-19, the FDA has eased many restrictions on prescription drugs for as long as the pandemic rages.

The federal government, Sotomayor notes, “has urged healthcare providers and patients to take advantage of telemedicine.” It has “waived many in-person drug distribution requirements because they could ‘put patients and others at risk for transmission of the coronavirus,’” and it has also waived certain mandatory tests that ordinarily must be conducted before certain drugs can be prescribed.

And yet, under the Trump administration, the FDA has refused to relax restrictions on mifepristone. It even appears to have singled mifepristone out for particularly restrictive treatment. As Sotomayor writes, “of the over 20,000 FDA-approved drugs, mifepristone is the only one that the FDA requires to be picked up in person for patients to take at home.”

This is why American College is such a significant decision, even if it does not make any explicit changes to the Supreme Court’s legal doctrines governing abortions. Instead of holding that abortion is a constitutional right entitled to special protection by the courts, the decision in American College suggests that the government may treat abortion-related treatments more harshly than any other medical treatment.

Most of the conservative justices did not explain their decision

Sotomayor’s dissenting opinion was joined only by herself and Justice Elena Kagan — although Justice Stephen Breyer, the Court’s third liberal justice, indicated that he would have left in place a lower court decision which suspended the FDA’s restriction on who can dispense mifepristone.

Of the six conservative justices, only Chief Justice John Roberts explained why he voted the way he did, and Roberts’s opinion, for what it’s worth, disclaims any suggestion that American College is a broad attack on abortion rights.

“The question before us is not whether the requirements for dispensing mifepristone impose an undue burden on a woman’s right to an abortion as a general matter.” Rather, Roberts writes, he believes that “courts owe significant deference to the politically accountable entities with the ‘background, competence, and expertise to assess public health’” when deciding how the government should respond to the pandemic.

But Roberts is the most moderate member of the Court’s Republican majority. And his views matter far less than they used to, now that a majority of the Court is more conservative than he is. The five most conservative justices — a bloc of judges that is large enough to hand down binding decisions with or without Roberts — did not join Roberts’s opinion or otherwise explain their votes.

Every one of those five most conservative justices, though, has signaled a desire to roll back abortion rights — or even to overturn Roe outright.

American College, in other words, is unlikely to be the last decision from this Supreme Court restricting reproductive choice.

The Senate hasn’t held a single confirmation hearing on Biden’s nominees. That’s not normal.

Traditionally, after a presidential election, the Senate spends the period between when new senators are sworn in on January 3 and when the president is sworn in on January 20 holding confirmation hearings on the incoming president’s cabinet. This allows those nominees to be confirmed very swiftly after the president takes office.

Twelve of President Ronald Reagan’s nominees were confirmed in his first two days in office, as were 13 of President Bill Clinton’s nominees, seven of President George W. Bush’s, and nine of President Barack Obama’s. President Donald Trump’s cabinet was confirmed more slowly, but the Senate still respected the tradition of holding confirmation hearings prior to Trump’s inauguration.

But so far, no hearings have been held on President-elect Joe Biden’s nominees — meaning Biden could face a serious delay in getting his administration ready to begin governing.

The Senate, which will still be led by Mitch McConnell for a little over a week, is currently out of session and will remain out of session until January 19, the day before President-elect Joe Biden takes office (technically, the Senate will hold brief “pro forma” sessions on the 12th and the 15th, but no business is conducted at these sessions).

As CNN’s Kylie Atwood notes, this is the first time in at least 10 presidential transitions where the incoming president’s nominee to be secretary of state won’t even have a confirmation hearing before that president’s Inauguration Day. And it’s unclear whether any hearings will be held before the Senate is scheduled to reconvene on January 19.

The Senate Finance Committee announced on Tuesday that it will hold a confirmation hearing for Treasury Secretary nominee Janet Yellen on January 19, the Armed Services Committee will hold a hearing for Defense Secretary nominee Lloyd Austin on the same day, and Homeland Security Secretary nominee Alejandro Mayorkas will also reportedly receive a hearing on the 19th.

But confirmation hearings for the incoming cabinet typically begin much sooner. Eight days before Trump took office, for example, six of Trump’s cabinet nominees had already received hearings.

In case there is any doubt, incoming Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer is eager to start hearings right away. In a “Dear Colleague” letter circulated to senators on Tuesday, Schumer wrote that “the violent insurrection at the U.S. Capitol on January 6th showed us we need qualified Senate-confirmed people (not in an acting capacity) in key national security positions on Day One.”

He added that “the economic challenges our nation faces also require having key economic nominees confirmed and on the job ASAP.”

Part of what could be complicating things is the Senate’s shifting power dynamics. When all members of the 117th Congress take their seats, Democrats will have the narrowest majority in the Senate. For the moment, however, Senators-elect Raphael Warnock (D-GA) and Jon Ossoff (D-GA) are waiting for the state of Georgia to officially certify their election victories. Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, a Republican, has until January 22 to do so.

Even after Warnock and Ossoff take their seats, moreover, the Senate will be evenly divided between Democrats and Republicans. That means that the vice president’s tie-breaking vote will determine who is Senate majority leader — and Democratic Vice President-elect Kamala Harris does not take office until January 20.

For the moment, incoming Democratic committee chairs do not yet have control over the committees that they will soon lead.

It also means that, for at least the next several days, McConnell rules the Senate. And he appears to be using his final days as majority leader to undercut the Biden presidency.

McConnell is using impeachment as an excuse to further delay Senate business

Indeed, McConnell also seems to view the recent attack on the US Capitol by a pro-Trump mob, and Democratic calls to impeach Trump for encouraging this attack, as an additional opportunity to undermine Biden.

McConnell’s office did not respond to a request for comment regarding the timing of confirmation hearings.

Last Friday, as House Democrats began to organize their effort to impeach Trump for a second time, McConnell circulated a memo laying out how the Senate would conduct an impeachment trial. The Senate, McConnell noted, is “currently in recess” until January 19. He then claimed that it is impossible to recall the Senate before this date unless all 100 of its members unanimously consent to do so.

Schumer is currently exploring whether he and McConnell could bypass this unanimous consent requirement under a post-9/11 resolution permitting “the majority and minority leaders or their designees, when the Senate is out of session, acting jointly and within the limits of the Constitution, to modify any order for the time or place of the convening of the Senate when, in their opinion, such action is warranted by intervening circumstances.” But even if this resolution does permit Schumer and McConnell to call the Senate back into session early, McConnell would have to agree to such a move.

McConnell’s impeachment memo also claims that, shortly after the Senate does reconvene, it “must” proceed to consider the articles of impeachment against Trump. This trial, according to McConnell, would “begin after President Trump’s term has expired” — most likely on January 20 or January 21.

Thus, under the process McConnell lays out, the Senate would not be able to remove Trump from office even if the requisite number of senators believe that Trump should be removed — under the Constitution, two-thirds of the senators present must agree to remove Trump. Moreover, because McConnell claims that the Senate must begin an impeachment trial almost immediately after Biden becomes president, this trial could further delay confirmation of Biden’s cabinet and the passage of legislation such as a Covid-19 relief bill.

Even if McConnell does successfully delay Trump’s second impeachment trial until after Trump leaves office, such an impeachment is not futile. The Senate does not just have the power to remove an impeached official from office, it may also permanently disqualify Trump from holding office. In other words, senators could potentially forbid Trump from running for president again.

It’s also unclear whether an impeachment trial will actually prevent the Senate from conducting other business — especially once Warnock and Ossoff are sworn in and Schumer becomes majority leader. Biden is reportedly urging the Senate to “bifurcate” its proceedings during the impeachment trial — potentially allowing the Senate to focus on the trial for part of each day and on other business for the remainder of the day.

But Biden is still likely to begin his presidency a few steps behind where it should be. Unless confirmation hearings begin very soon, holding those hearings after Biden takes office could delay the confirmation of individual cabinet members by days or even weeks. And even if those hearings move at lightning speed, Senate Republicans could still potentially block all confirmations until Warnock and Ossoff take their seats.

Meanwhile, the United States just suffered its worst domestic attack since 9/11. And crucial agencies such as the Departments of Justice, Homeland Security, and Defense will lack permanent leadership.

Why Republicans have to be held accountable for the attack on Capitol Hill.

It’s been less than a week since a mob whipped up by President Donald Trump attacked the US Capitol in his name, and Republicans in Congress are already telling Americans to move on. What’s needed now is not punishment for insurrection, they say, but rather “healing” for a country rent by partisan fissures.

“To deliver a better America, partisans of all stripes must first unite as Americans and show that a peaceful transition has occurred,” House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) said in a Friday statement. “Impeaching the president ... will only divide our country more.”

But there has not been a “peaceful transition.” Five people are dead, and dozens injured, because the president’s supporters attacked Congress in an effort to disrupt its confirmation of President-elect Joe Biden’s victory.

Had such an attack been perpetrated by jihadists or a foreign power, Republicans would not want to simply move on: They would demand consequences, action to ensure that it never happened again. The reason they are not now is that it is their party, from President Trump on down, that bears responsibility for inciting this mob by insisting that the 2020 election was fraudulent. McCarthy himself voted against certifying Biden’s Electoral College victory — even after the House was attacked by marauders with zip ties and a hanging noose.

It is true that America needs healing, but of a very different kind. The country requires an aggressive treatment regimen to fight the illness at the heart of American democracy: the Republican elite’s willingness to stoke paranoid and violent fantasies prevalent among its base. It is not just Trump to blame, but also those Republicans who led the charge in trying to overturn the election result: people like Sens. Josh Hawley (MO) and Ted Cruz (TX), and Reps. Mo Brooks (R-AL), and Andy Biggs (R-AZ).

The clearest and simplest path forward is to hold these elites accountable: to punish them for what they’ve done, sending a signal that such behavior will not be tolerated in a democracy.

Impeachment, which the House plans to vote on Wednesday, is the most visible such punishment. But it isn’t the only one. Other forms of what political scientists call “horizontal accountability” — government officials holding each other accountable for wrongdoing — include barring Trump from holding future office under the 14th Amendment, censuring members of Congress like Hawley who directly enabled him, and launching criminal investigations into whether Trump and other speakers at the January 6 rally committed the crime of incitement. It is not clear yet which, if any, of these options will end up being merited, only that it is worth looking into all of them.

Because not doing so, according to experts on political violence and democracy, carries a profound risk: that the use of violence in US politics becomes normalized. Given the magnitude of the risk, American officials who care about democracy — Democrats, Republicans, executive branch officials, federal prosecutors, and more — have an obligation to pursue every tool that might plausibly head it off.

Trump and his allies “are exploiting a climate of absolute impunity and doing whatever they can get away with,” says Kate Cronin-Furman, an expert on war crimes accountability at University College London. “If it were harder to get away with shit, they’d act differently.”

The case for punishing Trump and his chief allies isn’t about political retribution. It’s about defending and repairing the country’s frayed democracy.

Healing it, if you will.

Violence poisons democracy

In an op-ed published in the Detroit Times on Saturday, Rep. Pete Meijer (R-MI) laid out the democratic danger posed by the Capitol Hill insurrection in unusually stark terms.

Meijer tells a story about another Republican Congress member who, once the House reconvened after the attack, voted to nullify Joe Biden’s victory in the 2020 — not out of conviction, or even political expedience, but out of fear of violent reprisal:

My colleague told me that efforts to overturn the election were wrong, and that voting to certify was a constitutional duty. But my colleague feared for family members, and the danger the vote would put them in. Profoundly shaken, my colleague voted to overturn.

An angry mob succeeded in threatening at least one member of Congress from performing what that member understood was a constitutional responsibility.

According to Meijer, the armed intimidation predated the attack, shaking those Republicans who have been brave enough to challenge Trump’s election fraud lies.

“Republican colleagues who have spoken out have been accosted on the street, received death threats, and even assigned armed security,” Meijer, who voted to certify Biden’s electoral victory, writes. “I have been called a traitor more times than I can count. I regret not bringing my gun to DC.”

We like to think of democracy and the politics of violence as being entirely separate. But as the political scientist Henry Farrell reminds us, they are not always that far away: Politicians in alleged democracies court violence as a means of holding and winning power, generally with catastrophic consequences for citizens and the stability of the democratic political system. By encouraging their followers to see their political opponents as illegitimate — and letting them follow that logic where it leads — Republicans have been flirting with this kind of anti-democratic behavior for years.

Drew Angerer/Getty Images

“This ... is the main cause of our current crisis — and of the difficulty in solving it,” Farrell writes. “Today’s Republican party is one where it is considered divisive to take decisive action against a faction that was trying to hunt down Democratic and Republican politicians a few days ago.”

Trump’s speech that inflamed the mob at the pre-insurrection rally is at the extreme end of this dangerous spectrum. Unlike most Republicans, who try to avoid directly condoning violence, Trump seems to revel in it. He continued to defend his conduct during the insurrection as legitimate as recently as a Tuesday press conference.

If he gets away with this, it would be a signal that extreme anti-democratic behavior is acceptable in the GOP. The same will be true if the politicians who took the lead on legitimizing Trump’s false claims of voter fraud, like Hawley and Cruz, suffer no consequences for their actions. Violence may become not only acceptable but perhaps routinized as a response when Republicans don’t come out ahead via the democratic process.

There are already warning signs. A plurality of Republican voters — 45 percent — approve of the attack on the Capitol, per a YouGov poll conducted late last week. According to Capitol Police, there is an ongoing plot to attack the Capitol again around Biden’s inauguration.

Democracy demands accountability

If we want our political elites to stop courting anti-democratic elements — and we do — then we need to change their incentives.

“If there isn’t political punishment for politicians backing — whether openly or tacitly — political violence, they have incentives to keep playing with fire like this,” says Paul Staniland, a professor at the University of Chicago who studies political violence. “If there are practices that are bad for democracy but you don’t impose costs on those who engage in these practices, then they have less reason to worry about continuing to act in democracy-undermining ways.”

Holding politicians accountable for damaging democracy means imposing real consequences for their behavior — creating a deterrent to future anti-democratic behavior. Few politicians are willing to test the limits and risk their career ending in impeachment, censure, or even arrest.

“I think Trump and co. also figured there would be little consequence for trying and failing. I.e., a failed putsch would be cheap, at least for them personally. This is why it’s so important to punish them,” writes Jay Ulfelder, a scholar of democratic breakdown at Harvard’s Carr Center for Human Rights. “If you want to deter them from trying this crap again, you have to change their expectations about how painful it will be to try again & fail.”

Tayfun Coskun/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images

But accountability doesn’t only deter; it also repairs damage to democratic norms. Healthy democracies don’t need to arrest leaders for inciting an attack on their Capitol; in those countries, their leaders wouldn’t even dream of it. They would believe it to be not only politically costly but wrong — not the sort of behavior that politicians can justifiably engage in.

From this point of view, punishing Trump and his allies sends an extremely powerful signal to government officials and ordinary Americans: that no one is above the law, and that we as a society will not tolerate neo-Confederate nonsense. Beliefs get reinforced by political action, a virtuous cycle in which important demonstrations of democratic resilience boost faith in the system, in turn making citizens independently less likely to take actions that undermine it.

In the short run, deterrence is democracy’s most powerful weapon. Those Republicans who are manifestly uninterested in democratic norms have shown that they will not act decently on their own; they need to be compelled.

But in the long run, norms need to be restored: Americans must be socialized into believing that what just happened was fundamentally undemocratic, against everything our country ought to stand for. Those that enabled it should be remembered in the same breath as the likes of Sen. Joseph McCarthy (R-WI).

To strengthen both democratic deterrence and democratic norms, we must do to Trump and his allies what was once done to McCarthy: inflict consequences for wrongdoing.

What real accountability looks like

The late Guillermo O’Donnell, one of the leading scholars of imperiled democracies in Latin America, distinguished between two broad ways to punish politicians for misbehavior in a democracy.

“Vertical accountability” is when citizens hold government officials accountable; “horizontal accountability” is when government officials hold one another accountable. A fully stable and healthy democratic system, according to O’Donnell, has multiple mechanisms of accountability — a series of overlapping vertical and horizontal checks on power aimed at preventing any one official or branch of government from abusing their authority.

Elections are the primary mechanism of vertical accountability in a democracy, a direct method for the people to reward or punish elected officials based on their performance. But electoral defeat, even the loss of both the presidency and the Senate, failed to deter Trump and his GOP allies from engaging in anti-democratic behavior. In fact, electoral defeat is what caused the president’s actions: He was rebuked by the voters and tried to seize power anyway.

In cases of such severe anti-democratic behavior, horizontal accountability becomes even more important. Political elites have to hold the line and be a check on one another.

House Democrats’ impeachment push is the most obvious way forward. Pursuing it is worthwhile even if they believe, most likely correctly, that the Senate would be likely to once again acquit Trump.

Samuel Corum/Getty Images

The difference between this impeachment and the last one is the gravity of the president’s offense. This isn’t merely a phone call attempting to solicit foreign interference in the US election, as was the case in the Ukraine scandal. This is the president egging on a direct and violent attack on the Capitol that killed five people, successfully intimidated legislators, and disrupted the functioning of US democracy.

For these reasons, you’re hearing a handful of Senate Republicans, including the moderate Lisa Murkowski (AK) and the conservative Pat Toomey (PA), calling on Trump to resign — a sentiment that could, in theory, be converted to impeachment votes. It’s at the very least worth attempting, as impeachment is the clear first choice in the US Constitution for punishing presidential misbehavior. This will be the legislature’s best chance to hold the line against such a drastic departure from democratic norms.

But impeachment isn’t the only consequence available.

There is a provision in the 14th Amendment — Section 3 — that was explicitly designed to bar ex-Confederates from holding high office in postwar America. It operates entirely separately from any impeachment proceedings, and so could be used even if Senate Republicans acquit Trump. Here’s the text:

No person shall be a Senator or Representative in Congress, or elector of President and Vice-President, or hold any office, civil or military, under the United States, or under any State, who, having previously taken an oath, as a member of Congress, or as an officer of the United States, or as a member of any State legislature, or as an executive or judicial officer of any State, to support the Constitution of the United States, shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof.

In theory, this provision might allow Congress to bar Trump — or, for that matter, legislators like Hawley and McCarthy who backed his seditious activity — from holding public office again. How this would actually work — whether Congress could implement it by simple majority vote or something more complicated — isn’t exactly clear.

But two constitutional law experts, Yale’s Bruce Ackerman and Indiana University’s Gerard Magliocca, believe that Trump’s behavior does qualify under Section 3, and that the incoming Democratic Congress could punish him under it if they so chose. Some House Democrats, including Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), are already investigating the option (potentially for use against some legislators).

If Trump were to be barred from public office on 14th Amendment grounds, the threat of him running again in 2024 and starting all of this over again would be defused. It would also pose a strong deterrent to other Republicans by threatening what they value most: their political careers.

There are other sorts of consequences that can be imposed on the legislators who supported Trump’s bid to overturn the election. While it’s very unlikely that people like Hawley and Cruz would be expelled under the normal procedure these bodies use for expelling a member (a two-thirds vote), a censure vote only requires a simple majority. The 14th Amendment could also be applied to bar them from holding office, though it would be wise to consider it only in extreme cases.

Finally, Congress isn’t the only part of the US government that can impose a form of horizontal accountability on Trump. The most prominent among these others is the justice system.

During the rally before the insurrection, Trump directly instructed his supporters to march on the Capitol. Though at one point he asked them to do so “peacefully,” other lines in his speech were more aggressive.

“We’re going walk down to the Capitol,” Trump told the crowd. “We’re probably not going to be cheering so much for some of them [legislators] because you’ll never take back our country with weakness. You have to show strength, and you have to be strong.”

I spoke with several legal experts about whether this speech qualified as “incitement”: encouraging others to an “imminent lawless action,” a category of violent speech that is not protected by the First Amendment. Some said they believed it did; others weren’t sure. All agreed that it was a close call and would depend a lot on what we learn in the coming months about Trump’s intentions — how closely (if at all) the White House coordinated with the rioters beforehand, whether Trump really was “delighted” by the violence he saw (as Sen. Ben Sasse has claimed he was told by White House aides).

“If there is enough evidence that Trump intended to incite violence, then I think his language could be read as advocating violence,” says Caroline Mala Corbin, a First Amendment scholar at the University of Miami law school. Trump has denied that his words amounted to incitement, saying on Tuesday that “if you read my speech ... people thought that what I said was totally appropriate.” Some people, perhaps.

Trump is not the only elected official who may have engaged in incitement. Rep. Mo Brooks said in his speech at the rally that “today is the day American patriots start taking down names and kicking ass.”

Karl Racine, Washington, DC’s attorney general, has already begun an inquiry.

“I’m looking at a charge under the DC code of inciting violence, and that would apply where there’s a clear recognition that one’s incitement could lead to foreseeable violence,” he said on Monday. “We still have more investigation to do, and that’s what we’re going to do.”

Disrupting a culture of elite impunity

Criminal prosecution of prominent individuals is the most powerful signal any democracy can send that its leadership class is not above the law.

Many other contemporary democracies, ranging from Peru to France to South Korea to Malawi, have punished leaders for crimes committed in office. Scholars of democracy see it as a vital form of horizontal accountability, of ensuring that leaders are deterred from engaging in the most egregious abuses of power.

This might seem strange to Americans because we have a culture of elite impunity, where lower-level criminals in government are punished but the leaders behind their actions escape criminal investigation. None of the architects of George W. Bush’s torture policy were arrested or even faced serious professional sanction, despite strong evidence that they broke domestic and international law.

The Obama administration chose not to go after them in order to avoid getting their legislative agenda mired in a controversial battle; “a belief that we need to look forward as opposed to looking backwards,” as then-President Obama put it.

This logic is seductive — and what Republicans are parroting now. ”It is past time for all of us to try to heal our country and move forward,” Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) wrote last week.

Democrats “are placing a desire for vengeance above the best interests of the country,” Rep. Kevin Brady (R-TX) tweeted. “We have great and important tasks to accomplish soon and we must focus on defeating Covid, rebuilding our economy and getting back to normal.”

Indeed, stopping the pandemic and repairing the economy are pressing problems. But we have seen what elite impunity has wrought: a political leadership class that sees little risk from behaving dangerously and even perhaps illegally, allowing members of one party to court the most extreme anti-democratic forces — including outright insurrectionists — in the pursuit of their political ends.

For the United States to solve its problems, it needs a functioning political system. Working to hold Trump and other culpable Republicans accountable is not “vengeance,” but rather an effort to save the United States from the worst catastrophe of all: a political meltdown that threatens the stability of the government itself.

“The greatest threat the US faces now is not from more divisiveness or polarization, but from not holding elected and party officials accountable to democratic norms and values,” writes Jennifer Victor, a political scientist at George Mason University.

“Until that happens, things get worse.”

Law enforcement didn’t treat the Capitol rioters as a threat. The consequences were disastrous.

Five days ago, a mob stormed the US Capitol, the seat of American government and — supposedly — one of the most secure and heavily guarded buildings in the country.

Now lawmakers, security officials, and voters are trying to piece together what happened, and more details are emerging about the security failures that led to a siege not seen since 1812. And many are pointing to evidence of complicity by police officers who appeared to stand by or even assist rioters whose actions ended up causing a fellow officer’s death.

On Monday, Capitol Police Chief Yogananda Pittman said “several” officers have been suspended and more than a dozen others are under investigation for their part in the insurrection. A congressional source told the Washington Post that investigators found messages showing support for Wednesday’s rally that led to the Capitol riots.

It was clear on Wednesday that Capitol Police and federal law enforcement were woefully unprepared for the size and violence of the crowd at the Capitol, despite repeated warnings in the days leading up to the event. One activist, for example, told the Washington Post she was so disturbed by threats on Parler and other social media sites that she called the FBI in late December, telling the agency, “they’re planning to kill members of Congress and they’re openly discussing bringing guns over state lines.”

Lev Radin/Pacific Press/LightRocket via Getty Images

Win McNamee/Getty Images

“I thought if that didn’t get their attention nothing would,” she said. But neither this warning nor anything else, apparently, convinced law enforcement to take the threats of violence seriously.

Then, when the mob actually entered the Capitol, federal backup was slow to arrive in part because there was no plan in place for coordination between federal forces and the Capitol Police. For example, there was no operations center established in the Pentagon to manage National Guard presence at the Capitol, leaving federal officials scrambling to call local leaders to coordinate a response, Rep. Jason Crow (D-CO) said in a summary of a call with federal officials. That contributed to the long delay in getting federal forces to the Capitol.

Across law enforcement agencies, many are echoing the same message: that no one anticipated an attack of this kind on Congress and the Capitol, fomented and egged on by the president himself. Yet President Trump had been encouraging just such an attack for weeks, culminating in his speech Wednesday in which he urged supporters to “walk down to the Capitol” and “show strength” against “bad people.” The danger was in plain sight.

“You literally couldn’t have had more information,” R.P. Eddy, a counterterrorism expert and CEO of the intelligence firm Ergo, told Vox. But law enforcement agencies, starting with the Capitol Police, didn’t do what was necessary with that information: “The threat assessment, obviously, was a total failure.”

And the reason for that, he and others say, goes back to the inability of law enforcement officials to see Trump supporters — a group of mostly white Americans, some of them law enforcement officers themselves — as a real threat.

What happened at the Capitol was a colossal failure of planning

It’s only become clearer over the past six days that insurrectionists were planning their actions openly in the days leading up to Wednesday’s riot, and that many people had sounded the alarm. Posters in pro-Trump online forums were making plans to “encircle” Congress and “go after the traitors directly” and to “Bring handcuffs and zip ties to DC,” according to the Washington Post. And numerous watchdog groups and private citizens sent warnings to government officials about the threats.

“It’s not so much that the cops weren’t aware of it. It’s almost like they were willfully ignorant of the possibility of violence,” Marc Ginsberg, president of the Coalition for a Safer Web, who personally warned officials of his findings, told the Post. Tensions surrounding brutal police action against protesters this summer also left local and federal officials wary of a large police presence during the planned protest.

Law enforcement officials were preparing for a crowd in the “low thousands,” according to Crow’s call on Sunday with Secretary of the Army Ryan McCarthy — not the approximately 8,000 people who showed up. They were also prepared for “small, disparate violent events” like stabbings and fistfights, despite numerous social media posts about guns, ammunition, and kidnapping lawmakers. The Capitol Police also had not requested federal support in the days leading up to the riot, and both the Capitol and DC Metropolitan Police Departments had declined offers of additional National Guard backup, McCarthy said. Tensions after

Then, when it was clear something far more serious than a few scuffles was taking place, the lack of planning made it difficult for Capitol Police to get reinforcements. During and after the riot on Wednesday, there were reports that the federal government had initially denied requests for National Guard backup by DC Mayor Muriel Bowser and others, raising the concern that federal agencies still led by Trump might have been unwilling to help put down a riot started by Trump supporters.

Drew Angerer/Getty Images

Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call via Getty Images

McCarthy, however, said the delay was not about politics but a lack of preparedness. After Bowser and Capitol Police Chief Steven Sund requested federal reinforcements shortly after 1:30 pm on Wednesday, federal officials worked to understand the situation for more than an hour, according to the call with Crow. Their efforts were hamstrung by the lack of an operations center in the Pentagon, forcing them to “manage the situation by tracking down previously unknown contacts of local law enforcement and making ad hoc calls in an office environment,” according to the call summary.

But whatever happened at the Defense Department, responsibility for Wednesday’s events really started with the Capitol Police, Eddy said. “Every event like this has a lead agency,” he explained: “one group who’s responsible, ultimately, for what’s going to happen.” In this case, it was the Capitol Police. They failed to prepare their officers — many of whom were in ordinary uniforms rather than helmets and riot gear — and they failed to prepare in advance for the federal reinforcements they would need, Eddy said. “They obviously failed to understand what the threat was going to be.”

Ultimately, federal forces arrived and law enforcement was able to clear the Capitol — but not before a Capitol Police officer and fours of the rioters were fatally injured. Another Capitol officer died by suicide on Saturday. And reports in recent days have made clear that the situation could have been even worse, with video showing rioters very close to invading the Senate chambers while senators were still inside.

In essence, the Capitol Police “were prepared for a flurry when instead what happened was an avalanche.”

The failure to prepare — and to respond — goes back to bias

Now the biggest question is why law enforcement failed so spectacularly to prepare for an event almost everyone else could see coming. The answer is about bias, according to Eddy.

Many of the rioters had a lot in common with the officials in charge of doing threat assessments in the days and weeks ahead of the riot, he explained: “They probably were very similar in race, probably very similar in income, probably very similar religious beliefs.” That includes a number of rioters who are law enforcement themselves. Departments around the country have suspended officers for their involvement in the riot.

The failure to anticipate the violence of January 6 was a “failure to imagine that folks who look like you, who probably think like you, are going to come do something that’s wildly different than what you’d want to do, and they’re going to try to kill you in the process,” Eddy said.

Matt McClain/The Washington Post via Getty Images

And it wasn’t just about failure to prepare. While some Capitol Police officers were assaulted by rioters, others appeared to aid or at least do little to stop them, with one officer taking a selfie with a rioter (he has since been suspended, Rep. Tim Ryan confirmed on Monday) and others appearing to move aside barricades to let them get closer to the Capitol.

“There was some degree of complicitness, not among all of the police officers or law enforcement agents, but some,” Sabrina Karim, a professor of government at Cornell who studies global policing, told Vox. Some of that likely stems from similarities in ideology between some police and some of the rioters, with “blue lives matter” signs seen alongside Confederate flags and other racist imagery during the riot. “White supremacy has really crept into police forces,” Karim said.

Fixing those systemic problems will require big changes in police training and recruitment, she added. It’s also a reminder of the need to reimagine what police departments do and what they focus on. “On one hand, different groups of people are deemed a threat when maybe they’re not because they’re peacefully protesting, whereas a group of rioters full of domestic terrorists are not seen as a threat,” Karim said. Addressing that “is going to take transformational change.”

And with more threats looming around President-elect Joe Biden’s inauguration on January 20, that change is more urgent than ever. “The mob thinks they won,” Eddy said. The rioters who took selfies of themselves in the Capitol on Wednesday “are going to think they’re heroes, and they’re going to want to do it again.”

“I’m hoping we can come back together,” insist the very people who tore the country apart.

Republicans have spent the past two months lying about the election being stolen from President Donald Trump and refusing to acknowledge President-elect Joe Biden as the race’s winner.

But after thousands of Trump followers took what they were saying seriously and rioted last Wednesday at the Capitol, leaving five people dead — and as Trump faces impeachment for his role in inciting that riot — those same Republicans are trying to turn the page without any accountability for the role they played in poisoning the minds of their supporters.

“It’s not healthy for the nation,” Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH) said Sunday on Fox News of Trump’s possible impeachment. “I’m very concerned about where we’re at. I’m hoping we can come back together.”

Jordan, however, was one of the leading purveyors of misinformation about Trump’s loss to Biden being “stolen,” falsely claiming Biden’s win was the product of “shenanigans.” He was one of 139 House Republicans who voted on the day of the riots against accepting the results of the election. But following the violence, his dark insinuations about Biden’s victory have suddenly been replaced with pleas for everyone to turn the page.

Jordan’s talking point — that now is a time for healing instead of accountability — has emerged as the standard Republican response to the Trump riot.

“Our country is not just divided. We are deeply hurt,” tweeted House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) last Friday, ignoring that he, too, spent November and December suggesting Biden’s victory was legitimate, and voted last Wednesday against accepting the election results. “Impeaching the President with just 12 days left in his term will only divide our country more.”

“We must come together and put this anger and division behind us,” added Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX), who was one of eight senators to vote last Wednesday against certifying Biden’s victory, and who played a leading role in fomenting Trump followers in the hours ahead of last week’s rioting.

“I don’t think anybody can look and say impeachment of this president is the thing that’s gonna help unite and bring our country together,” said Rep. Steve Scalise (R-LA), another Republican who refused to accept Trump’s defeat.

But perhaps the most shameless expression of this sentiment came from Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA), who on Monday on Fox Business accused Democrats of “overplaying a lot of things, including the deaths of these people on Capitol Hill.” Issa is perhaps best known for leading Republican efforts during the Obama years to endlessly investigate a 2012 attack on a US diplomatic compound in Benghazi, Libya, that killed four.

Republicans: Give the rioters what they want or there will be more violence

Beyond hollow calls for healing, Republicans are trying to dodge accountability for last week’s riot by suggesting that efforts to impeach Trump could lead to more violence.

“In the spirit of healing and fidelity to our Constitution, we ask that you formally request that Speaker Nancy Pelosi discontinue her efforts to impeach President Donald J. Trump a second time,” a group of House Republicans who didn’t challenge the election results wrote to Biden last Thursday. “A second impeachment, only days before President Trump will leave office, is as unnecessary as it is inflammatory.”

That talking point has also gained traction on Fox News. On Monday, for instance, Fox & Friends host Brian Kilmeade said “this country is ready to explode,” which he cited as a reason for Pelosi and other Democratic leaders to “bring down the temperature a little, look to turn the page, be inclusive.”

In short, Kilmeade’s argument is that the rioters must be appeased, or there could be more violence.

Fox News host Chris Wallace made a similar argument last Friday, saying that for Trump “to be removed from office either from within his administration or by Congress would only enrage [his supporters] further.”

What comments like those from Kilmeade and Wallace ignore, however, is the leading role Fox News played in misleading Trump supporters into believing the election was stolen — and that the network could play in, as Kilmeade suggested, bringing “down the temperature” by being honest with viewers that the election was not stolen. As Recode’s Peter Kafka put it, “Fox builds and starts bonfire, complains about flames and heat.”

Moving toward some sort of healing after last week’s violence is obviously an admirable goal, but part of that process involves acknowledging the factors that radicalized Trump supporters in the first place. And chief among them are the lies elite Trump supporters and right-wing media pushed to discredit Biden’s victory.

Until there’s an honest reckoning on that front, Republican talk of coming together and turning the page needs to be seen for what it is: a cynical attempt to avoid responsibility for tearing the United States apart in the first place.

The FBI, meanwhile, reports that armed protests are being planned at all 50 state capitols in the days leading up to Biden’s inauguration.

If Republicans and Republican-adjacent media outlets are serious about healing, a good place to start would be denouncing the election lies that motivate people who are taking up arms on Trump’s behalf. So far, they haven’t been willing to do that.

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jasonbuechler writes: A North Idaho internet provider, Your T1 WIFI, emailed customers to say customers would need to opt-in to access Facebook and Twitter from its service. They wisely seem to have changed their mind on that after it started garnering attention on social media. The ISP says it decided to restrict service this way after receiving numerous calls from customers concerned about censorship. "They could do this themselves but some do not have the technical knowledge to do so and it would be very tiresome for us to do it for them and it would be expensive to visit each customer that wants this done," the company wrote in an email. The customers' requests for firewalls preventing access to these sites followed the tech giants' decisions to close down Donald Trump's accounts and suspend his activity. After the decision started attracting attention on social media, the owner of the company said the websites would only be blocked for customers who asked. KREM.com notes that Your T1 WIFI "may violate Washington state's Net Neutrality law, which states that internet providers may not manipulate access to content."

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