James.galbraith

A homophobic Karen who went viral for an on-camera tirade in which she used gay slurs and had a lot of other very 2020 stuff to say has been identified as Gina Bisignano, the owner of Gina’s Eyelashes and Skincare in Beverly Hills.

ICYMI: Homophobic Trump-Supporting ‘Karen’ Lips Off About L.A. Lockdown: WATCH

TMZ gives an update on its original story, saying Yelp shut down the reviews on her page because people were leaving reviews like the “owner of this salon is a blatant racist, homophobic, transphobic, xenophobic, conspiracy theorist, tar faced loser” and “this place is great. They help create the illusion of beauty on the outside, so I can hide all my hateful, Q conspiracies, and homophobia on the inside.”

The post Homophobic Karen, ID’ed as Beverly Hills Salon Owner, Hit with Onslaught of Bad Yelp Reviews appeared first on Towleroad Gay News.

Roman Catholic Diocese v. Cuomo is one of the most significant religion cases in the past 30 years.

For the past six years, the Supreme Court’s right flank has wanted to revolutionize the law governing so-called “religious liberty” cases, in which a plaintiff who objects to following a particular law on religious grounds seeks an exemption from that law.

Late on Thanksgiving eve, in a decision handed down while much of the country was already asleep, the Court made this vision a reality. Roman Catholic Diocese of Brooklyn v. Cuomo, a decision allowing some houses of worship to operate in defiance of New York state’s rules seeking to limit the spread of Covid-19, is one of the two most significant religion cases of the past 30 years, and may prove to be one of the most important religion decisions in the Court’s history.

New York state limited attendance at religious services in areas with coronavirus outbreaks to 10 people in areas with the most severe outbreaks, and to 25 people in areas where the state is concerned that a severe outbreak could occur. In a 5-4 vote, the Supreme Court held that the state may not enforce these restrictions.

Roman Catholic Diocese marks a sea change in the Court’s approach to religious objectors, and it is an early sign of the significance of the late liberal Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s replacement with conservative Justice Amy Coney Barrett.

Under the old rules, religious objectors typically could not seek exemptions from the law if granting them an exemption could harm people who do not share their faith. And the old rules were much more concerned with preserving equality between secular and religious individuals than with giving special advantages to people of faith. In the business context, for example, the Court was primarily concerned with ensuring that religious business owners did not obtain legal exemptions that would give them a leg up over their competitors.

As the Supreme Court held in United States v. Lee (1982), “when followers of a particular sect enter into commercial activity as a matter of choice, the limits they accept on their own conduct as a matter of conscience and faith are not to be superimposed on the statutory schemes which are binding on others in that activity.”

But the Supreme Court started to dismantle decisions like Lee in Burwell v. Hobby Lobby (2014), which permitted private businesses to refuse to include birth control coverage in its employees’ health plan despite a federal regulation requiring these businesses to do so. Just as significantly, Hobby Lobby established a strong presumption that when a religious objector seeks an exemption from a federal law, the objector will get that exemption barring unusual circumstances.

Yet, for reasons explained below, Hobby Lobby only benefited religious objectors who sought exemptions from a federal law. State law still applied with considerable force against religious objectors, even after Hobby Lobby.

The practical effect of Roman Catholic Diocese is that it extends the Hobby Lobby regime to a wide range of cases involving religious objections to state law. There are still technical differences between the law governing plaintiffs who seek exemptions from a federal policy and those who seek to avoid state law, but the practical differences are now thin or even potentially nonexistent.

To be sure, Roman Catholic Diocese involves actual houses of worship that seek an exemption from legal restrictions, so the argument for a “religious liberty” exemption is stronger in this case than it was in Hobby Lobby, which involved for-profit businesses. But the majority opinion in Roman Catholic Diocese is written fairly broadly — broadly enough that the case is likely to have sweeping implications for for-profit businesses and other, similar institutions seeking a religious exemption from the law.

The implications of this doctrinal revolution are profound. Among other things, the Court is currently weighing whether religious objectors have a right to defy laws barring discrimination against LGBTQ individuals. Subsequent cases could potentially give religious conservatives a right to engage in gender discrimination, or to violate a bevy of other laws.

And, as Roman Catholic Diocese involves a challenge to state rules seeking to prevent the spread of a deadly disease, religious objectors may even prevail when their claims could endanger human life.

“Religious liberty” before Hobby Lobby, briefly explained

Although the old regime was less favorable to certain religious objectors than decisions like Hobby Lobby and Roman Catholic Diocese, the Court was often fairly protective of religious liberty plaintiffs prior to Hobby Lobby. So long as those objectors did not seek an exemption that, in Justice Ginsburg’s words, would “detrimentally affect others who do not share [the objector’s] belief,” such exemptions were often granted by federal courts.

The prior regime began with Sherbert v. Verner (1963), a seminal decision holding that the Constitution limits the government’s ability to enforce laws that impose a “substantial infringement” on someone’s religious beliefs. Sherbert also declared that such an infringement may only be “justified by a ‘compelling state interest in the regulation of a subject within the State’s constitutional power to regulate.’”

The Court’s use of the three words “compelling state interest” sowed considerable confusion into religious liberty doctrine. Typically, when the Supreme Court uses the words “compelling interest,” it signals that the Constitution applies the highest possible safeguards against a particular kind of government action. Laws that discriminate on the basis of race, for example, must overcome a “compelling interest” test.

Lawyers refer to this highly rigorous test as “strict scrutiny.” Under strict scrutiny, a law cannot be enforced unless it uses the “least restrictive means” to advance a “compelling governmental interest.” Most laws that are subjected to strict scrutiny are struck down.

Yet, while the Supreme Court used the loaded words “compelling state interest” in its Sherbert opinion, empirical data shows that the judiciary applied something far less rigorous than strict scrutiny in cases involving religious objections — so religious objectors typically lost their cases under the Sherbert regime.

A 1992 study by James Ryan, now president of the University of Virginia, found that federal courts of appeals heard 97 free exercise of religion cases applying the “compelling interest” test between 1980 and 1990, and they rejected 85 of these cases. A similar study by UCLA law professor Adam Winkler looked at cases between 1990 and 2003. Winkler found that federal courts upheld 59 percent of “religious liberty burdens” during that period. By contrast, federal courts applying the compelling interest test upheld only 22 percent of free speech restrictions and 27 percent of laws that engaged in discrimination on disfavored grounds such as race.

Courts during the periods studied by Ryan and Winkler, in other words, often used the rhetoric of strict scrutiny. But they treated cases brought by religious objectors very differently than cases that applied full-bore strict scrutiny. Religious objectors typically lost their cases during these periods, while victims of race discrimination or other such activity were far more likely to prevail.

The Supreme Court, moreover, often encouraged lower courts to treat religious liberty cases with a fair amount of skepticism, even as the justices maintained that Sherbert was still good law. The Court’s 1982 decision in Lee, holding that business owners are broadly prohibited from seeking religious exemptions for their business, for example, is very much at odds with the Court’s approach to cases where strict scrutiny applies.

Then, in Employment Division v. Smith (1990), the Supreme Court appeared to abandon Sherbert altogether. “To make an individual’s obligation to obey such a law contingent upon the law’s coincidence with his religious beliefs, except where the State’s interest is ‘compelling,’” Justice Antonin Scalia wrote for the Court in Smith, is “permitting him, by virtue of his beliefs, ‘to become a law unto himself.’” Such an outcome, according to Scalia, “contradicts both constitutional tradition and common sense.”

Under the new rule announced in Smith, a religious objector must follow “neutral law[s] of general applicability.” Thus, so long as a law applies equally to religious and secular actors, the religious objectors cannot seek an exemption under Smith.

Smith’s effective decision to overrule Sherbert, however, triggered a bipartisan backlash from lawmakers who believed it did too much to limit religious liberties. Congress enacted the Religious Freedom Restoration Act of 1993 (RFRA), which sought to “restore the compelling interest test as set forth in Sherbert” and one other related case.

RFRA, however, only applies to the federal government. Smith’s permissive rule still allowed the 50 states to enforce any “neutral law of general applicability” against religious objectors.

After RFRA, but before Hobby Lobby, states had a broad power to enforce their laws against religious objectors, so long as those laws did not single out people of faith for inferior treatment. The federal government, by contrast, had to comply with “the compelling interest test as set forth in Sherbert,” although that test, as Ryan and Winkler’s research demonstrated, was less rigorous than full-bore strict scrutiny.

Thus, under RFRA, most lawsuits brought by religious objectors against the federal government would fail.

Hobby Lobby applied full-strength strict scrutiny to federal religious liberty lawsuits

Hobby Lobby held that two businesses, whose owners object on religious grounds to certain forms of birth control, could refuse to cover those forms of contraception in their employee health plans, even though a federal regulation required employers to provide such coverage.

This decision was a doctrinal earthquake. As Justice Ginsburg explained in dissent, until Hobby Lobby, “no decision of this Court recognized a for-profit corporation’s qualification for a religious exemption from a generally applicable law, whether under the Free Exercise Clause or RFRA.”

Hobby Lobby was also significant for another reason. Rather than applying the watered-down version of the compelling interest test required by Sherbert, Hobby Lobby applied the full force of strict scrutiny to the federal birth control regulation — a test that, as Justice Samuel Alito noted in his majority opinion, is “exceptionally demanding.”

Thus, Hobby Lobby effectively abandoned Lee’s holding that businesses generally must comply with the law, at least with respect to federal laws. It also held that plaintiffs with religious objections to a federal law benefit from the strong version of strict scrutiny applied to race discrimination cases — not the less rigorous test created by Sherbert.

Because Hobby Lobby was an RFRA case, however, its holding only applied to federal laws. After Hobby Lobby, religious liberty cases involving state laws remained subject to the permissive test announced in Smith.

Roman Catholic Diocese transforms Smith into little more than an empty husk

The holding of Smith is that the state may apply a “neutral law of general applicability” to a religious objector — only laws that single out people of faith for lesser treatment than secular individuals are suspect under Smith. The Court’s opinion in Roman Catholic Diocese upends this balance by defining what counts as a “neutral law of general applicability” so narrowly that it is virtually meaningless.

The punchline is that, with few exceptions, the Hobby Lobby rule will apply equally to state and federal laws. Nearly any law could be unenforceable against religious objectors, unless that law survives strict scrutiny.

The New York state rules at issue in Roman Catholic Diocese involve a complicated regime the state uses to prevent the spread of Covid-19. New York classifies areas with an elevated risk of coronavirus transmission as “yellow,” “orange,” or “red” zones. Houses of worship in orange zones may only admit a maximum of 25 people, while places of worship in red zones may only admit up to 10 people.

While these restrictions are quite severe, they are actually less harsh than the restrictions imposed on secular businesses that are similar in character to places of worship. As a lower court that upheld New York’s restrictions explained, “public gatherings with scheduled starting and ending times such as public lectures, concerts or theatrical performances” must “remain closed entirely” in the relevant zones.

Thus, the state effectively banned all public gatherings where large numbers of people gather in auditorium-like settings. It then gave a special exemption to houses of worship that allowed them to have small, limited gatherings. Whatever you think of that policy, it does not single out places of worship for inferior treatment. Indeed, it does the opposite.

Nevertheless, a majority of the Supreme Court struck down New York’s headcount limits on houses of worship because the state’s rules treat those institutions less favorably than businesses that do not involve public gatherings in auditorium-like settings.

“In a red zone, while a synagogue or church may not admit more than 10 persons,” a majority of the justices explained in an unsigned opinion, “businesses categorized as ‘essential’ may admit as many people as they wish.” The opinion then lists several examples of “essential” businesses, including “acupuncture facilities, camp grounds, [and] garages.”

Yet, while it is true that garages and acupuncturists are subject to different rules than churches, the reasons are hardly arbitrary. As Justice Stephen Breyer writes in dissent, “members of the scientific and medical communities tell us that the virus is transmitted from person to person through respiratory droplets produced when a person or group of people talk, sing, cough, or breathe near each other.”

Large groups of people typically do not gather in an acupuncture facility for hours at a time and sing. But they do engage in such potentially dangerous activity in churches and many other houses of worship. So it makes sense that places of worship should be treated differently than businesses that bear little, if any, resemblance to those places of worship.

The point is this: Justice Breyer’s dissent suggests that a state law is a “neutral law of general applicability” so long as that law treats religious institutions the same way as similar secular institutions. The majority opinion, by contrast, suggests that a law is suspect if a court can find any example of a secular institution that is treated differently than a religious institution.

Although Roman Catholic Diocese is a case about houses of worship, the majority’s reasoning has profound implications for other institutions that seek religious exemptions, including for-profit businesses. Consider, for example, Justice Alito’s dissent from the Supreme Court’s decision not to hear Stormans v. Wiesman (2016).

Stormans involved a Washington state regulation that required pharmacies to “deliver lawfully prescribed drugs or devices to patients.” Pharmacy owners who object to certain forms of birth control on religious grounds sought an exemption from this regulation, claiming they should have the right to refuse to dispense medications that they find religiously objectionable.

Though Washington’s regulation is neutral and generally applicable on its face — it ordinarily requires all pharmacies to deliver all lawfully prescribed drugs, regardless of whether the pharmacy owners are religious — Alito argued that the law is not neutral because it contained some secular exemptions. A pharmacist, for example, could refuse to dispense a prescription if it does not accept the patient’s insurance. Or if the prescription might be fraudulent. Or if the patient was already taking another drug that could cause negative health effects if mixed with the new prescription.

Alito’s Stormans opinion, in other words, suggests that Washington had to make a devilish choice. Either the state had to give broad exemptions from its pharmacy regulation to religious objectors, or it might have to force pharmacists to fill fraudulent prescriptions or even to endanger the health of their customers. Given such a choice, it’s hard to imagine that any state would refuse to provide an expansive religious exemption.

Roman Catholic Diocese effectively writes the rule that Alito advocated in Stormans into the law, and the implications of this decision are likely to be profound. It means that, when someone objects to a law on religious grounds, they will typically be exempt from the law unless the law survives strict scrutiny, because it is very easy to find secular exemptions to even the most unobjectionable laws.

A state’s ban on murder, for example, may have an exemption for people who kill in self-defense. State bans on animal cruelty typically permit livestock to be slaughtered for food. Laws banning individuals from possessing machine guns still permit members of the military to carry such weapons as part of their service. The tax code is absolutely riddled with provisions allowing people not to pay some part of their federal taxes if, for example, they have a mortgage or are raising a child.

Does this mean that the Supreme Court is likely to permit religious objectors to kill? Or to refuse to pay taxes? Or to allow them to torture animals (provided that the state’s ban on animal cruelty doesn’t single out people of faith for inferior treatment)? Most likely not. Among other things, such laws would still be enforceable so long as they survive strict scrutiny — meaning that the law uses the “least restrictive means” to advance a “compelling governmental interest.”

But the new approach announced in Roman Catholic Diocese suggests that any law is subject to strict scrutiny if a religious objector can point to any exemption to that law. And, as Winkler’s research shows, the overwhelming majority of laws subject to full-bore strict scrutiny fail that test.

The lack of funding from Congress is making the pandemic worse.

When Covid-19 began spreading across the United States this spring, the federal government put in place a series of protections to help workers and families weather the economic impact.

Then, one by one, the government took them all away.

Expanded unemployment insurance, which helped keep millions of laid-off workers out of poverty, expired at the end of July. Federal stimulus checks were issued to millions of taxpayers once, beginning in April, but never again. The Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) loans meant to keep small businesses afloat expired in August, even as many of those businesses faced a second surge in cases.

And it’s about to get a lot worse, with a host of benefits from student loan forbearance to the federal eviction moratorium set to expire at the end of December.

Many economists agree that the federal government’s insufficient economic protections are driving Americans — especially low-wage workers who have been especially hard-hit in the crisis — further into poverty. But something else is also becoming abundantly clear: The lack of economic safeguards for Americans is making Covid-19 worse, too.

The latest evidence is a study showing that lifting state-level eviction moratoriums, which allowed landlords to once again kick out renters for nonpayment, was associated with an increase in Covid-19 infections. Between March and September, getting rid of the bans and allowing evictions to continue led to as many as 433,700 excess Covid-19 cases and 10,700 deaths, the researchers found.

Meanwhile, the lack of relief for small-business owners is forcing many to choose between closing their doors forever or staying open during the pandemic — and contributing to transmission rates. “They’re making heartbreaking decisions every day,” Lindsey Leininger, a public health educator and professor at Dartmouth’s Tuck School of Business, told Vox.

And with unemployment benefits running out, workers, too, are forced to go back to unsafe occupations, even if they have underlying conditions that make them especially vulnerable to the virus. “We have not made it feasible for most people to safely shelter in place,” Camara Phyllis Jones, a family physician, epidemiologist, and past president of the American Public Health Association, told Vox.

Those most affected by the lack of economic protection are those most impacted by Covid-19: Black Americans, other people of color, and people living in poverty. And as the country enters a dark winter, inaction by the Trump administration and Congress isn’t just hurting Americans’ livelihoods — it’s costing them their lives.

The federal government gave Americans some economic relief in spring. Then it dried up.

Covid-19 caused unprecedented economic devastation when it first began spreading in the US earlier this year. As restaurants, hotels, and other businesses shuttered, unemployment reached heights unseen since the Great Depression. In late March, more than 6 million people filed for unemployment in a single week; before the pandemic, the highest number of initial claims in a week was about 700,000 in 1982.

Food banks were overwhelmed with individuals and families unable to afford groceries, and the nonprofit Feeding America projected that one in six Americans — including one in four children — could experience food insecurity in 2020. Meanwhile, 5.6 million workers lost their employer-provided health insurance in March and April, leaving many without a way to pay for medical care during a public health crisis.

To help blunt the pandemic’s economic impact, Congress instituted a number of measures: a $600-per-week addition to unemployment benefits, an expansion of unemployment insurance to cover part-time and gig-economy workers, a stimulus check of up to $1,200 paid to many Americans, and PPP loans to help small businesses keep employees on the payroll. Some state and local governments also announced eviction moratoriums, and in September, the federal government ordered its own ban through the end of the year.

The programs were far from perfect, but they helped many Americans stay afloat: Despite skyrocketing unemployment, some estimates found that poverty actually fell in April and May thanks to the availability of federal aid.

But as the virus continued to rage, that aid started to dry up. It’s now been four months since expanded unemployment benefits expired, and Congress hasn’t approved any new relief in that time.

That’s hurting Americans’ ability to pay their bills and provide for their families — especially if they previously worked in low-wage service-sector jobs that were disproportionately hard-hit in the spring and have been slow to return. But it’s also hurting the country’s ability to fight the virus.

Small businesses are one example. While experts don’t yet have a complete picture of what’s driving Covid-19 transmission right now, they generally agree that some of the most dangerous venues for spread are places like restaurants, bars, and gyms — venues “where almost by definition, people can’t wear masks and are indoors,” as Brandon Guthrie, a professor of global health and epidemiology at the University of Washington, told Vox. For example, one study found that people who tested positive for Covid-19 were about twice as likely to have recently eaten in a restaurant compared to those who tested negative.

However, many states and cities have been slow to shut down such businesses, even in the face of a devastating third wave this fall. In New York, for example, restaurants remain open for indoor dining while schools are closed, though Mayor Bill de Blasio has announced a plan to bring elementary school students back later in December. In much of Florida, restaurants and bars opened at full capacity in September, despite continued spread of the virus.

Many factors (including pressure from the Trump administration to just open everything) have gone into state and local leaders’ decisions about business restrictions. But since the summer, one big factor has been the lack of federal aid to small businesses and workers. Policymakers know that if they institute shutdowns, restaurants and bars will go out of business and workers will lose jobs. This likely factors into their decision-making. “You’ve heard governors saying that the availability of those federal funds has been important,” Guthrie said, and they “are really concerned about what is going to happen if those resources dry up.”

In the absence of those resources, meanwhile, individual businesses can’t easily decide to stay closed — even if their owners know it might be dangerous to remain open. Restaurants and bars “are not high-margin businesses even in the best of times,” Leininger said. Their proprietors often “want to do right by public health, but also want to do right by their families and their workers in terms of livelihoods.”

It’s hard to quantify exactly how much the lack of federal support for businesses and workers has contributed to coronavirus spread. But clusters of infections have been linked to reopened bars and restaurants, including a Friendly’s in Riverhead, New York, and a brewpub in East Lansing, Michigan. Between March and August, around a quarter of Louisiana’s Covid-19 cases outside of nursing homes and prisons “stemmed from bars and restaurants,” the New York Times reported; in Colorado, 9 percent of all outbreaks as of August had been traced to such venues.

“Every time we see an outbreak that’s seeded in a bar or from a restaurant establishment with indoor dining, that is something that could have potentially been prevented if those settings weren’t open,” Leininger said.

The lack of aid is forcing Americans to put themselves and others at risk

It’s not just about supporting businesses. Individual Americans haven’t gotten the help they need from their government to keep themselves safe, either. Earlier in the year, expanded unemployment may have helped people reduce their exposure to the virus because they “felt less pressure to have to go back into higher-risk settings” for work, Guthrie said. But the expiration of those benefits, along with the ongoing damage to the job market caused by the pandemic, has forced many people to take any job they can get — even if that means exposing themselves and their families to the virus.

“If you are a waitress, and you managed to get some hours at the place where you work but they’re not doing social distancing and they’re not providing PPE [personal protective equipment], are you going to take the chance to quit and try to go work somewhere else?” asked Janelle Jones, managing director of policy and research at the Groundwork Collaborative. Especially with a lack of help from the federal government, many Americans can’t afford to take that chance.

Others, meanwhile, have been unable to find work or pay their bills — and an increasing number face eviction from their homes. Forty-three states and Washington, DC, passed eviction bans earlier this year, but some lasted as little as 10 weeks and many expired in the summer. As of July, large shares of renters in many states — 58 percent in Tennessee and 59 percent in West Virginia, for example — were at risk of being evicted, according to CNBC.

The authors of a new study found that lifting state-level eviction moratoriums, in addition to costing people their homes, also contributed to the spread of Covid-19. “When people are evicted, they often move in with friends and family, and that increases your number of contacts,” UCLA’s Kathryn Leifheit, one of the study’s co-authors, explained to CNBC. Others may move into a shelter, also increasing their risk.

Whether it’s unemployment or evictions, Black and Latinx Americans, who are less likely than white people to have the accumulated wealth to weather an economic crisis, have been disproportionately affected — likely contributing to the high rates of infection and death in many communities of color. “People of color are more likely to be infected because we’re more exposed and less protected,” Camara Phyllis Jones, the epidemiologist, said.

The lack of economic protections is as important to understand as the lack of PPE and other safety measures. “When you force people to enter into situations that are more dangerous because of an economic need when you could address the economic need,” Jones said, it means “we have prioritized some people’s profit over other people’s lives.”

The situation is about to become even more dire, since a number of programs, including the nationwide moratorium on evictions and the extension of unemployment to part-time and gig-economy workers, are slated to expire at the end of the year.

“We’re already in a situation that is like a terror state of economic disasters,” the Groundwork Collaborative’s Janelle Jones told Vox, “and it will just get worse at the end of the year.”

Economic relief would help people support their families — and help the country control the virus

Experts are clear that it doesn’t have to be this way. Additional federal support for bars and restaurants would allow these businesses to shut down until it’s safe to reopen. “This is restaurant owners’ and bar owners’ time of need,” Leininger said.

Meanwhile, a continuation of unemployment benefits, along with paid leave and affordable health care, could help ordinary people stay safe at home and help the US control the virus, Janelle Jones said. More direct payments like the spring stimulus checks may also be necessary: “We can send people money,” Janelle Jones added. “We know how to do it.”

After months of deadlock in which Republicans opposed more generous proposals by Democrats, Congress may be starting to move on the issue: On Tuesday, a bipartisan group of senators announced a $908 billion stimulus plan that would include $300 per week in additional unemployment benefits for individuals, as well as support for state and local governments and small businesses, the Washington Post reported. But even this compromise, which leaves out additional stimulus payments to individuals and is significantly slimmer than the $2 trillion package sought by Democrats, will have a difficult road in a Republican-controlled Senate.

And while Congress fights it out, millions of Americans will have to continue living and working through a pandemic without the economic cushion needed to keep themselves and others safe. “It is a choice we’re making every day to leave millions of people this insecure and vulnerable,” Janelle Jones said.

President Donald Trump threatened to veto must-pass defense policy legislation on Tuesday unless lawmakers agree to repeal a legal shield for social media companies, a move that one senior House staffer called "a total non-starter" for Democrats.

Trump's push to repeal the protections, known as Section 230, has become the most contentious remaining issue in talks on the National Defense Authorization Act. The president ratcheted up the pressure on Congress in a pair of tweets Tuesday night, threatening to nix the $740 billion bill unless it includes the repeal.

"Section 230, which is a liability shielding gift from the U.S. to 'Big Tech' (the only companies in America that have it - corporate welfare!), is a serious threat to our National Security & Election Integrity. Our Country can never be safe & secure if we allow it to stand," Trump tweeted.

"Therefore, if the very dangerous & unfair Section 230 is not completely terminated as part of the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), I will be forced to unequivocally VETO the Bill when sent to the very beautiful Resolute desk," Trump added.

A senior House staffer said the issue has no chance of success with Democrats.

“It’s a fucking joke,” said the staffer, who spoke anonymously to discuss private negotiations. “This is a complex debate that has no business as an eleventh-hour airdrop.”

The senior staffer said the push to include other proposals targeting Section 230, even a bipartisan bill led by Senate Majority Whip John Thune (R-S.D.), in the defense bill won't make it either. “Full stop,” the staffer said.

The latest curveball from Trump comes as lawmakers rush to clinch a compromise defense bill this week. Democrats will almost certainly reject Trump's demand of a total repeal of the online protections.

The House and Senate passed their versions of the defense bill with enough bipartisan support to overcome a potential veto. It's unclear if those margins would hold up if Trump followed through on the threat.

It's the second time Trump has threatened to veto the defense bill. Over the summer, Trump pledged to tank the bill over a provision to remove the names of Confederate leaders from Army bases.

The base renaming issue was the greatest divide between lawmakers and the White House heading into negotiations, but lawmakers appeared to be inching toward a deal on the matter this week.

Axios reported Monday that the Trump administration had made a last-minute push to repeal Section 230, which protects online companies such as Facebook and Twitter from lawsuits over content posted on their platforms. Trump has sought to limit the protections, and even some Democrats have voiced concerns that the protections have been abused by social media companies.

An industry source who asked not to be named told POLITICO that Republican leaders on Capitol Hill have already told the White House that Democrats won't accept a full repeal as part of the defense bill H.R. 6395 (116).

Senate Republicans, instead, are aiming for more modest changes to the liability provision. Axios reported that Sen. Roger Wicker (R-Miss.), a member of the Armed Services Committee who also chairs the Commerce Committee that has jurisdiction over telecommunications issues, is pushing for negotiators to adopt his legislation to limit the protections in the final NDAA.

The defense policy bill is likely one of the last major pieces of legislation lawmakers will pass this year and before the end of Trump's presidency next month, making it a target for issues that aren't directly related to national security.

A repeal of online liability protections first emerged last month after White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows floated a potential agreement in which Trump would drop his opposition to renaming military bases in exchange for repealing Section 230.

House Armed Services Chair Adam Smith (D-Wash.) said at the time that he would be open to compromise in order to finish the defense bill. And though he conceded social media platforms had abused their immunity, he downplayed the likelihood of Democrats agreeing to Trump's wholesale repeal of Section 230.

"I think these platforms are getting away with things they shouldn't get away with," Smith told the Council on Foreign Relations.

"The committees of jurisdiction will have something to say about this," he added. "And the president's motivation is transparent: he thinks social media was mean to him ... and he wants to sue them as a result, and he's looking for us to give him that power."

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It's been 199 days since the House passed the $3 trillion HEROES Act, and 63 days since the House passed its compromise $2.2 trillion bill.  Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, back in town after a week off for Thanksgiving, once again trolled Democrats and the nation, saying on the Senate floor, "There is no reason why we should not deliver another major pandemic relief package to help the American people through what seems poised to be the last chapters of this battle."

But there is a reason: He is still insisting on a liability shield for businesses that give them immunity from wrongful death lawsuits when they allow their workers to be exposed to a deadly virus. Which has definitely happened. McConnell seized on bad advice from one of former President Barack Obama's economic advisers, Austen Goolsbee, that Democrats should "should take half a loaf, and then let's try to get another half of a loaf." That's of course what McConnell told House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to do, leaving out the part where there is no second half, because he won't allow President-elect Joe Biden to have that win when he takes office next January.

We've got one last shot at taking McConnell's Senate Republican majority away in January. Please give $3 right now to send the GOP packing.

Control of the U.S. Senate is at stake. We need you to phonebank, textbank, and do other crucial work necessary to win for Jon Ossoff and Rev. Raphael Warnock. Click to find the activity best for you.

So here's what Pelosi needs to do: come back with stimulus to state and local governments that incumbent GOP Sens. David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler can't resist. Come back with $2,000 stimulus checks for everyone and restore the $600 enhanced unemployment insurance and do all the things for all the people that have already expired or will expire at the end of December and MAKE IT ABOUT GEORGIA. Make this runoff election a referendum on the stimulus and on Republicans' refusal to help the states. Georgia has already had to slash its 2021 budget by 10%, and cut almost $1 billion from public K-12 education. That hurts the whole state, a state that clearly is embracing change.

Make the case for a unified Democratic government right now—in Georgia—by not backing down and taking McConnell's crumbs, but by throwing everything we've got into Georgia and making the nation’s survival the message. Put the pressure on Loeffler and Perdue, and by extension McConnell and his majority.

Ending that majority, and flipping it to the Democrats, is the only way to make sure Biden has the opportunity to push for and pass the big, necessary stimulus package the country has to have.

Is there any point in trying to reach good-faith compromises under such conditions?

Szájer József, a Member of the European Parliament (MEP) from Hungary, has resigned after getting busted at an orgy in Brussels, Belgium over the weekend amid the COVID lockdown there.

The New York Post reports: “The sex party in the Belgian capital took place Friday in the bar on Rue des Pierres, the Brussels Times reported, citing local media. The European Union official, who has not been identified, allegedly tried to flee but was caught and questioned by authorities, according to La Dernière Heure. All of the attendees — most of whom were naked men — were fined for violating the coronavirus measures, a source told Het Laatste Nieuws.”

We sadly welcomed József #Szájer 's resignation. His political creed, the uncompromising representation of #HU 's sovereignty and the interests of HU citizens are values ​​that will continue to serve as the basic principles of our delegation. https://t.co/BVixOv0wQX

— FideszEP (@FideszEP) November 29, 2020

József, who was later identified as the MEP, released a statement: “A newspaper ran in the Belgian press today about a house party in Brussels on Friday that I was attending. After the police certificate, I indicated that I was a representative because I did not have a card, the police conducted the procedure, was given a verbal warning and then taken home. I didn’t use drugs, I offered to the police on the spot to have an official test done, but they didn’t. Police said an ecstasy pill was found. It’s not mine, I don’t know who placed it and how. I made a statement to the police about this. I am sorry that I have violated the rules of assembly, it was irresponsible on my part, I will take the penalties for that.”

Szájer is a longtime representative of Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s Fidesz party, VICE reports: “Fidesz has waged an assault on LGBTQ rights in Hungary since coming to power in a so-called defence of what it terms ‘Christian values’. This year alone, the Hungarian government has ended gender recognition for transgender people and legislated to ensure that only heterosexual married couples can adopt children.”

The post Anti-LGBTQ Hungarian Lawmaker Resigns After Getting Busted at COVID Lockdown Orgy in Gay Nightclub appeared first on Towleroad Gay News.

Republicans already have the knives out for President-elect Joe Biden's pick to lead the powerful White House budget office, Neera Tanden, who currently leads the left-leaning Center for American Progress. It must be the idea of Biden selecting a policy-steeped head of a think tank to lead a powerful government agency that has Senate Republicans' panties in such a twist. In other words, competence is really the issue here, not partisanship. Because when it came to approving every single one of Donald Trump's partisan know-nothing hacks, Senate Republicans ate it up and went back for seconds and thirds.  

Remember House Freedom caucuser and supposed deficit hawk Mick Mulvaney, whose main qualification was huddling in the halls of Congress with the right-wing fringes of the GOP? Every Senate Republican but one—the late John McCain—got behind Mulvaney's confirmation, hailing it as the harbinger of a new era of fiscal responsibility. That was just 10 months before every one of those GOP senators also cast a party-line vote to blow a trillion-dollar hole in the deficit for a tax giveaway to the rich and corporate-y. In fact, the Congressional Budget Office later estimated the GOP tax cut would add $1.9 trillion to deficits over the next decade—and that was a pre-coronavirus estimate.

But now, those very same Republicans say Tanden is just too partisan. 

Their main objection is that Tanden is an active Twitter user who goes to bat for Democrats and liberal principles. Could be worse—she could have backed an effort to acquit a president who tried to steal a U.S. election by extorting a foreign ally to fabricate an investigation into his political foe. Still, Sen. John Cornyn of Texas—who did vote to clear Donald Trump of his assault on the U.S. Constitution—is calling "radioactive."

In fact, after Republicans jammed nearly every Trump nominee through on partisan lines—not to mention confirming some 230 lifetime federal judges—Cornyn is shocked that Biden isn't asking Republicans to dictate his picks in advance. 

“I really am a little surprised, particularly on the OMB nominee that there hadn't been at least some consultation," Cornyn told Politico. "I mean some of these problems can be avoided. And people, you know, saved from the embarrassment.” 

I mean, if Cornyn and the rest of congressional Republicans aren't embarrassed by the last four years of selling their souls to the most corrupt U.S. president in history, then it's really impossible to imagine who else should be embarrassed by anything ... like, ever. It's not like Tanden put her hand on a Bible before opening a Twitter account and swore an oath to refrain from saying anything critical while Republicans trashed our democracy, trampled the U.S. Constitution, backed Trump's overt embrace of white supremacists, and turned a blind eye on Trump's pandemic slaughter of some 265,000 Americans. In fact, anyone who stood by silently while Republicans greased the skids to fascism committed a profoundly unpatriotic act. Taken on the whole, Tanden's objections to that course, vehement or otherwise, were a stand for the republic. 

But hey, taking that stand was "overtly partisan," says Ohio Sen. Rob Portman, who also voted for Mulvaney's confirmation and Trump's acquittal without hearing from a single witness. Oh, and Portman's also a self-proclaimed deficit hawk who voted for the $1.5 trillion dollar tax cut that's projected to cost Americans far more than they got in return. But Tanden, we are told, should be embarrassed. 

The Los Angeles County coroner’s office last month announced an independent inquest into the police shooting of Andrés Guardado, a historic decision that would give officials power to subpoena witnesses and relevant documents. But four members of the L.A. County sheriff’s office, including the deputy who shot and killed Guardado, refused to testify, “invoking their 5th Amendment right against self-incrimination even though none of them have been accused of a crime,” the Los Angeles Times reports.

“First @LACoSheriff dismissed the investigation into Andres’s death as a ‘circus stunt,’” tweeted Julián Castro, who as a 2020 presidential candidate released an ambitious policing reform plan addressing the exact kind of police violence that led to the 18-year-old’s death at the hands of law enforcement this past summer. “Now officers refuse to cooperate with the inquiry. You’re there to serve and protect the people, not yourselves. This looks like a cover up to protect officers and prevent accountability.”

Castro referred to a remark from Sheriff Alex Villanueva last month, who called the inquest “a circus stunt,” the LA Times continued. This “circus stunt” is being overseen by a former court of appeals justice and is the first such investigation in the area in more than three decades, the Los Angeles County coroner’s office said at the time. The only stunt here is what the parties involved in Guardado’s death are trying to pull off.

The sheriff’s department claims that the four officials who refused to testify—including shooter Miguel Vega, his partner Chris Hernandez, and two homicide detectives—made their decision based solely on independent legal advice and not the department. However, Loyola Law School professor Laurie Levenson told the LA Times that their decision “was clearly coordinated.”

“I’m sure what they’re thinking is, ‘We don’t know where this is headed. We don’t know who this is going to target. We don’t know if they’re going to claim there’s some kind of cover-up. We don’t know enough not to assert our 5th Amendment right,’” she said in the report. “I think you can take it for what it is: No one is volunteering from that sheriff’s office to cooperate in that inquiry.” LAist reports that Villanueva himself recently refused a subpoena from the Los Angeles County Civilian Oversight Commission relating to the spread of the novel coronavirus inside his jails.

The fact that the homicide detectives also joined in on refusing to testify was “remarkable and disappointing,” former sheriff’s department official Mike Gennaco said in the report. “They were fact-finders, and there’s no allegation that there was some sort of conspiracy to cover up the facts.”

Right now it’s unclear how retired Justice Candace Cooper will proceed in light of the blockading from the four sheriff’s department officials. “Cooper said she wouldn’t make any findings Monday and adjourned the hearing, leaving open the possibility of calling more witnesses,” the LA Times report said. “It’s unclear when the proceedings will resume, or if there will be an effort to compel the four sheriff’s officials to testify.”

Guardado’s family in June filed a wrongful death lawsuit against the county, the sheriff's department, Vega, and Hernandez, alleging they “not only used unreasonable and excessive force in fatally shooting the young man but were possibly acting in connection and in agreement with members of one or more LASD gangs of which they may be affiliated,” a release said. 

Court testimony from a sheriff’s deputy this past August identified Vega and Hernandez as potential recruits for a racist and violent law enforcement gang. According to Austreberto “Art” Gonzalez, “the ‘Executioners’ use violence against other deputies and community members as well as illegal arrest quotas to increase their standing within the group,” NBC News reported.

Rudy Giuliani reportedly wants to avoid the fate of Donald Trump's last personal lawyer: doing time. According to The New York Times, Giuliani—who was under federal investigation for potential money laundering and his dicey efforts to dig up dirt in Ukraine on Trump’s political foes—as recently as last week discussed getting a preemptive pardon from Trump before he's booted from the Oval Office.

Turns out Giuliani, who was supposedly working as Trump's private lawyer for free, wasn't working for free after all. In fact, as Giuliani trotted around the globe last year conducting shadow diplomacy for Trump—particularly in Ukraine where he was palling around with now-indicted Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman—no one had any idea who was paying Giuliani. But perhaps it wasn't exactly on the up and up. Surprise!

In fact, amid the election rush this fall, a superseding indictment dropped against Parnas and Fruman that drew the first direct link between their case and payments made to Giuliani. And a little over a month ago, ex-Parnas associate David Correia pleaded guilty to “defrauding investors in an insurance start-up that paid Giuliani for consulting work and to lying to federal regulators investigating suspected campaign finance violations.”  

Asked about his pardon conversations with Trump, Giuliani declined to comment on discussions with his client—he apparently believes asking one’s client for pardons is privileged. That's not exactly how it works. But then again, Rudy's been making up a lot of stuff lately. For the past two years, Giuliani has nearly matched Trump's unique ability to swim in a miasma of conspiracy. From Joe Biden's supposed corruption to Hunter Biden's theoretical wet laptop to a mythical "pattern" of fraud that stole the election from Trump—Giuliani has been going toe to toe with Trump in their house-of-mirrors universe. 

But the one reality both men seem clear about is that Giuliani's work has been criminal and Trump almost surely has an interest in making sure Giuliani isn't cutting any deals with federal prosecutors to avoid jail time. After all, one’s allegiance to the boss only goes so far when it comes time to pay the piper. 

How to succeed in hyperpolarized politics: run a blitz.

Joe Biden will become the US president during an extraordinary moment in history, one that could very well prove to be the calm before the storm, a brief prelude to dissolution and illiberalism. Trump’s bid to become a full-on authoritarian failed, but Democrats could easily lose the House in a 2022 backlash. Biden could face total congressional opposition, even impeachment — as the recent baseless “stolen election” narrative has shown, if Republicans don’t have any evidence, they’ll just make something up.

Or maybe Democrats will keep the House and take the Senate in 2022, and legislation will become possible! Who knows? (The Georgia Senate runoffs are another big question mark.) If there’s one thing I’ve learned over the past five years, it’s that I definitely don’t know what is going to happen next, and it doesn’t seem like anyone else does either.

What we do know is that Republicans will wage full-on war on Biden from the second he takes office. They will generate fake conspiracies and controversies through right-wing media and social media. Conservative voters will be told again and again that Biden and Kamala Harris are uniquely dangerous traitors engaged in all sorts of elaborate evil plots. The entire conservative movement, from top to bottom, will view limiting Biden to one term as its primary strategic objective. And the movement will engage in misinformation, norm violation, procedural fuckery, and outright lawbreaking, if necessary, to achieve that objective.

Samuel Corum/Getty Images

The right will be what it is, what it has been becoming for decades now; expecting anything else would be madness. The question is how the Biden administration should behave, knowing all this.

It would be foolish for anyone to claim to have all the answers, or any of the answers really, but in my mind the most pointed lesson about how to behave in a hopelessly partisan environment comes from Donald Trump himself.

Before getting to that (suspense!), it’s instructive to take a look back at some of the experiences of the administration for which Biden was vice president.

Obama’s efforts to collect and spend “political capital” were mostly for naught

When Barack Obama took office in 2009 in a deepening recession, he expected to receive some Republican help bailing out the economy. It’s easy today to look back on that expectation as naive, but at the time it wasn’t unreasonable. The economy was on the brink of disaster, the need was clear, and the depth of conservative backlash was not yet as evident as it would become later.

What happened instead was a wall of opposition from Republicans, built on bad-faith objections about deficit spending and government waste. With so little room to maneuver, Democrats were forced to negotiate with the tiny handful of moderate Republicans and the large handful of conservative Democrats in the Senate, holding the stimulus bill down to their arbitrary spending caps. In the end, the stimulus bill passed with zero Republican votes in the House and just three in the Senate. The result was an inadequate economic boost and a sluggish recovery that hobbled the rest of Obama’s presidency.

Since it was widely agreed that “political capital” was limited and Democrats could only take on one fight at a time, the question then became what to tackle next. The answer proved to be health care reform, perceived as a policy better developed and more widely supported in the Democratic caucus.

In July 2009, Democrats in the House introduced a health care plan based on a system that had been road-tested by Mitt Romney in his recent tenure as governor in Massachusetts. Many Democrats thought the process would take a few months, and then Congress could move on to climate change. Instead, again and again, Republicans lured Democrats into extended negotiations, only to withdraw support at the last minute over some new bad-faith objection (see: “death panels”). That left Democrats negotiating with their most conservative members, who did much the same thing (Joe Lieberman, may his name live in infamy).

In the end, talks dragged on until March 2010, when Obama finally signed the Affordable Care Act. It got no Republican votes, in the Senate or the House.

Jewel Samad/AFP via Getty Images

Then it was finally time for climate change, and the strategy there was yet more clever sequencing. Obama told Republicans that if they didn’t cooperate on climate change legislation, he would regulate greenhouse gases via the Environmental Protection Agency, which would offer less flexibility and less ability to compensate hard-hit communities. The idea was that the threat of EPA regulations — made inevitable by the Supreme Court’s 2007 Massachusetts v. EPA judgment that carbon dioxide is a pollutant subject to the Clean Air Act — would frighten Republicans to the legislative table, where they could better defend their interests.

Instead, Republicans vowed implacable opposition to all of it. They would fight furiously against legislation when it was on the table and then fight regulations just as furiously when they came up.

To a cool Vulcan mind like Obama’s, it seemed entirely irrational, against Republicans’ own best interests. At that point, he had not fully internalized the extent to which the conservative movement has become unleashed id, driven more by right-wing media than by Republican politicians, fueled by resentment and organized purely to defeat the libs.

In June 2009, when the climate bill passed the House, it got eight Republican votes. By mid-2010, it was dead in the water, with no hope of any Republican votes in the Senate. Democrats no longer had their filibuster-proof 60 seats, and there was nothing like the same support in the caucus that health care reform generated, so it never came to a Senate vote. It ended with a whimper, not a bang.

As promised, Obama’s EPA began slowly rolling out regulations, one at a time. It wasn’t until late in his first term that auto mileage standards were finalized and into his second term before EPA got to power plants. Republicans were able to keep Obama’s Clean Power Plan tied up in court through the end of his second term. Then Trump took power and began a simultaneous all-fronts assault on Obama’s regulations, unrolling them so fast it was difficult to even keep track.

Two-party partisan politics really is a zero-sum game

The theme of these stories is that Democrats relied on clever sequencing over and over again, imagining some amount of political capital (“credibility”) that they could husband and spend strategically to get assistance across the aisle, at every juncture underestimating the ferocity and unanimity of Republican opposition. They kept behaving as though they would find good-faith negotiating partners, as though they were still in the postwar American era of relatively low (or at least manageable) polarization.

What too few of them realized was that they were already in a new era of near-total polarization, with the population sorted into like-minded enclaves, a bifurcated media ecosystem nurturing stacked (and diametrically opposed) “mega-identities,” and voters motivated primarily by “negative partisanship,” which is to say, hatred of the other side.

Nathan Howard/Getty Images

A fully polarized two-party system really is a zero-sum game. Any victories or gains by one side come at the other side’s expense, even if the victory secures shared goals. The rational course for the party out of power is to fight with full intensity against everything, always, and that’s what Republicans did under Obama. With scarcely any exceptions, from 2010 through 2020, they pushed in every case for maximal partisan advantage, no matter the stakes or possible cost.

The GOP has failed to repeal the Affordable Care Act, despite a few close calls, but otherwise, its unprincipled pursuit of raw power has paid off handsomely. The party captured state legislatures in 2010 and was able to gerrymander itself minority rule in several states. It practically shut down Congress as a legislative body for six years of Obama’s term. It blocked Merrick Garland’s nomination to the Supreme Court and for its efforts got Neil Gorsuch. It ignored Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s dying wishes and for its efforts got a 6-3 conservative Court majority that could last for generations.

Republicans blocked so many Democratic judicial nominations that Senate leader Harry Reid had to get rid of the judicial filibuster to keep the courts staffed. Then, when the GOP took control of the presidency and Senate, it used the absence of the filibuster to pack the federal courts full of hyper-ideological, young, often woefully unqualified judges.

Rather than paying any price for total partisan warfare, Republicans were rewarded in 2016 with the presidency and both houses of Congress. After carrying the country to the brink of authoritarian crisis, it has now lost the House and the presidency. But Joe Biden has been left to tackle a virtually uncontrolled pandemic and millions of people out of work and on the verge of homelessness or food insecurity.

The GOP will likely retain control of the Senate, which means there will be no adequate economic recovery package and none of Biden’s ambitious campaign plans will come to fruition. It has kept control of key state legislatures, so it will be able to gerrymander itself an advantage for another decade.

FairVote

The elections of 2022 will be another partisan brawl, and the odds are stacked against Democrats; the president’s party has lost seats in every first-term midterm in the past 100 years, save three (1934, 1998, 2002). If Republicans gain full control of Congress, impeachment becomes a real possibility, even if conviction is very unlikely.

It’s a grim situation, and Biden is starting out behind the eight-ball. How should he proceed?

Biden should run a blitz

Here we return to the lesson that Trump has to teach Biden about life in hyperpolarized politics.

To wit: blitz. Do everything at once.

No matter what the Biden administration does, it will be accused of socialism and corruption by the right. And the past several years have richly demonstrated that conservative parts of the country, particularly rural areas and low-density suburbs, are almost completely captured by right-wing media, from Fox on the TV to AM conservative radio to Sinclair-owned local news to the profusion of shady Facebook sources and groups, where misinformation is rapid and rampant.

Democrats badly need to address this media asymmetry. Despite what conservatives have convinced themselves, mainstream media outlets like CNN are not analogous to Fox, and Democrats have no comparable radio, local TV, or social media operations to carry their messages and narratives straight to voters where they live.

But that is long-term work, and 2022 is right around the corner.

The only thing Biden will have real control over is his administration and what it does. And his North Star, his organizing principle, should be doing as much good on as many fronts as fast as possible. Blitz.

By constantly blundering forward, Trump has helped chart which US institutions and norms provide real resistance and which don’t. The courts have tangibly restrained Trump; they have been the primary bulwark against him. But the chattering of the media and the political classes? Moral outrage? Precedent and tradition? Civil protest?

All of these have proven gossamer. Trump charged right through them like they were cotton candy. By constantly acting, being on the offensive, generating new stories and controversies, he simply overwhelmed the ability of the system to fasten on any one thing.

Biden should learn the lesson. All that matters is what gets done, put on paper and into law. The rest is vapor.

The administration should staff up as rapidly as possible with ambitious young progressives and tell every single civil servant that the next two years are going to be a full sprint. Start immediately rewriting and reimplementing the environmental, public health, and worker safety regulations Trump has weakened. Reverse his immigration policies. Drop his lawsuits.

Reassess the social cost of carbon. Replace Trump’s weak Affordable Clean Energy rule with more stringent carbon rules for the power sector. Ditch EPA’s “secret science” rule and restock scientific advisory boards with actual scientists. Put a moratorium on new oil and gas drilling leases on public land. Pledge the purchasing power of the federal government — around $500 billion a year — toward clean energy technology.

Shutterstock

Through the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), direct federal financing toward carbon reduction and clean energy across agencies. Use the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA) to reject regulations from any agency that do not include both a climate and equity “screen” to ensure that they reduce emissions and help the most vulnerable. Use the powers conferred by the Dodd-Frank financial reform bill to integrate climate risks into the financial system.

I’ve written more about what Biden can do on climate change without Congress. Vox’s Dylan Matthews took a wider policy view with 10 big things Biden can do with executive powers, from forgiving student loan debt to reigning in factory farming. More ideas can be found here, here, here, and here, among other places. There’s no shortage of ways for Biden to deploy the powers of the presidency, and he should maximize every one of them.

The new rule of partisan politics is to act, not react

All of these moves will elicit howls of outrage and court challenges from the right. Many will also infuriate the left, since they will inevitably fall short of Biden’s grand campaign promises.

Biden can’t control any of that. Doing less, negotiating more, relying on clever sequencing, chasing after receding promises of cooperation — none of that will solve anything, any more than it did for Obama. He can reach across the aisle, make it clear his door is open, but he shouldn’t wait around for anyone to walk in.

Biden’s best chance is to try to overwhelm the system the way Trump did, by doing so much that it’s impossible to make any one thing into a lasting story. He should launch so many simultaneous reforms that there’s no time for right-wing media to make up lies about all of them or for the Supreme Court to hear them all. He should ignore bad-faith attacks and stay relentlessly on message about what’s gotten done and what’s getting done next. He should, at every juncture, get caught trying to make government work better for ordinary people.

To succeed, all this must happen alongside Democratic Party efforts to improve messaging and media, get persistent party infrastructure on the ground in communities the party has neglected, and innovate on voter outreach and persuasion. (Aaron Strauss has some good ideas on that front.)

But Biden has something the rest of the party at the federal level does not have: the power to improve Americans’ lives in a visible way. More than anything else, cynicism about government’s ability to do that is corroding US politics. The best thing Biden can do, morally and politically, is act, as much and as fast as possible, and then talk about it, and do more of it, and talk about it more. (And he should be clear about exactly who stands in the way of bigger, better changes, and why his name is Mitch McConnell.)

The rest of it, he should ignore: the Washington chatter about the latest Republican accusations or catty infighting among Democratic factions, the cable news story or Twitter drama of the day, the latest offensive thing Trump or some Trump surrogate said, all of it. Bulldoze through it.

The president has limited ability to control political discourse and drama, but he has an enormous capacity to change policy and direct resources. Biden should use that power while he has it, without hesitation or apology.

Trump has scheduled more federal executions than any president in at least a century.

Editor’s note: Brandon Bernard was executed by lethal injection on Thursday for crimes he committed at age 18. This piece was originally published on December 1.

When five Black and Latino teenagers were wrongfully convicted of the rape of a jogger in New York City’s Central Park in 1989, prominent businessman Donald Trump bought newspaper advertisements calling on New York state to “bring back the death penalty” in the wake of the attack. Little did the country know, Trump’s views on capital punishment then would inform his presidency decades later: In July, the Trump administration reinstated the death penalty at the federal level after a 17-year hiatus.

The return of federal executions demonstrates an unprecedented and grim picture of Trump’s legacy in contrast to previous administrations. The Washington Post’s editorial board described it as a “sickening spree of executions.” To put it in perspective, only three people had been executed by the federal government in the past 50 years. Meanwhile, in less than five months, eight people have already been put to death by Trump’s Justice Department, with five more executions scheduled to happen before Trump leaves office.

“The Trump administration’s policy regarding a death penalty is just historically abhorrent,” said Robert Dunham, executive director of Death Penalty Information Center, a bipartisan organization that does not take a position for or against the death penalty, but rather is critical of the way capital punishment is administered.

If the remaining executions in December are carried out — making a total of 10 for 2020 — it will mark more civilian executions in a single calendar year than any other presidency in the 20th and 21st centuries. “No one has conducted this number of federal civilian executions in this short period of time in American history,” Dunham added.

Of the five upcoming federal executions during the lame-duck period, four of them are Black men, while the fifth will be the first woman to be executed by the federal government in nearly 70 years. These federal executions come in concert with the rallying cry for racial justice and an overhaul of America’s policing and criminal justice systems that has left a disproportionate number of Black people arrested, jailed, convicted, and dead. More than 44 percent of the remaining 54 people on federal death row are Black, according to the Death Penalty Information Center, even though Black people make up only 13 percent of the US population.

“The fact that we’re having a record-high number of federal executions, at the same time that we’re near a record low in state executions, in the middle of a pandemic, shows how much the Trump administration is either out of touch or that it cannot resist gratuitous acts of cruelty,” Dunham said, adding that only seven state executions will occur this year — the lowest since states began carrying out executions in colonial times. “Nobody needs to carry out an execution during a pandemic.”

Just last week, the Justice Department also published a rule that would allow other methods for capital punishment, such as firing squads, lethal gas, and electrocutions; Attorney General Bill Barr is currently racing to finalize that rule.

Trump’s push for additional methods and a number of federal executions will be part of his presidential legacy and highlights a stark divide between the administration’s actions and dwindling support for the death penalty among Americans.

Four Black men are scheduled for federal execution weeks before Trump leaves office

On November 19, Orlando Hall, a Black man sentenced to death for kidnapping, rape, and murder in 1994, became the eighth and latest inmate to be executed by the federal government since it reinstated federal executions this summer. He is also the first in more than a century to be put to death during a lame-duck period. Shortly before Hall was executed by lethal injection, the US Supreme Court had denied his request to stop the execution — with new Justice Amy Coney Barrett joining the majority ruling.

While Hall is the second Black man to be executed out of the eight so far since July, the remaining men scheduled to be put to death are all Black. “In an apparent effort to forestall criticism that the federal executions were racist, the administration selected white prisoners first,” Dunham said; the executions were reinstated as racial justice protests broke out across the country this summer. “What’s striking about that, though, is that it still tells us a lot about whose lives matter because only one of the people executed so far was convicted for killing an African American.”

Brandon Bernard, convicted of kidnapping and murder, is scheduled to be executed by lethal injection on December 10. Bernard, who is also Black, was only 18 years old when he committed crimes that resulted in the deaths of a young white married couple in 1999. But five of the nine surviving jurors who supported the death penalty at the time now believe it is inappropriate. Even Angela Moore, the federal prosecutor who helped put Bernard on death row, wrote an op-ed in the Indianapolis Star making a case for why the federal government should let him live.

“I always took pride in representing the United States as a federal prosecutor, and I think executing Brandon would be a terrible stain on the nation’s honor,” Moore wrote.

During his time in prison, Bernard has been a model prisoner, mentoring at-risk youth. “Having learned so much since 2000 about the maturation of the human brain and having seen Brandon grow into a humble, remorseful adult fully capable of living peacefully in prison, how can we say he is among that tiny group of offenders who must be put to death?” Moore wrote.

Alfred Bourgeois, a Black truck driver in Texas who was convicted of abusing and killing his 2-year-old daughter in 2002, is scheduled for execution the day after Bernard. Bourgeois’s execution was originally scheduled for January 2020 but was halted by a federal judge who blocked the Trump administration’s early moves to bring back the federal death penalty. Bourgeois’s lawyers then argued to suspend his death sentence on the grounds that he’s entitled to an intellectual disability evaluation under the Eighth Amendment.

The next two inmates on death row are scheduled for execution in 2021 just a few days before Biden’s inauguration. Cory Johnson, who was convicted of murdering seven people during a drug trafficking operation in Richmond, Virginia, is scheduled for lethal injection on January 14. Like Bourgeois, Johnson’s lawyers argue that there is overwhelming evidence that Johnson has intellectual disabilities.

On January 15, Dustin Higgs is scheduled to be put to death for a crime committed in 1996. The Justice Department claims that Higgs kidnapped and murdered three women, but the Daily Beast reports that while he was present at the scene of the crime, witnesses confirm that Higgs did not kill anyone. Co-defendant Willis Haynes fired the shots, but the Justice Department argues that Higgs coerced his friend Haynes into committing the crime.

But Haynes, who was sentenced to life in prison, confirmed through a signed affidavit that Higgs did not coerce him, saying, “the prosecution’s theory of our case was bullshit. Dustin didn’t threaten me. I was not scared of him. Dustin didn’t make me do anything that night or ever.”

The other person on the Justice Department’s execution schedule is Lisa Montgomery, the only woman on federal death row and the first woman set to be federally executed in nearly 70 years. In 2004, Montgomery killed a pregnant woman and then attempted to pass off the baby as her own. Montgomery, who Dunham said has severe mental illness due to an abusive past, was initially scheduled for execution by lethal injection on December 8, but it was delayed due to her lawyers contracting Covid-19.

The Justice Department is fast-tracking new rules on the death penalty before Biden’s inauguration

Trump is the first president in 17 years to reinstate federal executions, despite a recent poll showing that a record-low number of Americans consider the death penalty “morally acceptable.” Even across party lines, the death penalty has been a historically contentious issue. Since the US Supreme Court revived capital punishment in 1976, state governments have been doing most executions, though those have declined in the past two decades, too.

In addition to pushing through federal executions over the past five months, the Justice Department published a new rule to the Federal Register on Friday that would allow the use of other methods for capital punishment. The new regulation reintroduces the use of firing squads and electrocutions for federal executions in addition to lethal injections. The new rule is set to go into effect in 30 days instead of the generally allotted 60 days. As it stands for the remaining inmates awaiting execution, only Higgs appears not to have a method of execution stated on the Justice Department’s schedule — the rest are marked for lethal injection.

The Trump administration’s move, among many others, is another thing President-elect Biden — who has signaled at various times that he would end the federal death penalty — will have to face once in office. Biden, a political veteran, has repeatedly addressed criticism during his presidential campaign over the role he played in passing the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act, also known as the 1994 crime bill, signed by President Bill Clinton. The bill allowed the expansion of crimes eligible for the federal death penalty, which aided the conviction of some of the inmates now awaiting execution. (Hall was only eligible for the death penalty because the crime bill added kidnapping resulting in death to the list of crimes.)

The Trump administration is trying to cut corners and fast-track dozens of rules that range from oil-drilling in the Arctic to immigrant restrictions, as well as the death penalty rule, before Biden takes over. If the rules are finalized, the new administration would have to go through a convoluted process to roll them back. But since Biden has pledged to abolish the death penalty at the federal level and incentivize states to follow the federal government’s example, the new death penalty rule may virtually not be of use in his administration.

“Unlike the environmental regulations or policies making it more difficult to negotiate on trade or world safety, the Biden administration can take as much time as it wants to undo this regulation,” Dunham said. “Undoing it isn’t that difficult. I believe the regulation is intended to make it easier for the Trump administration to carry out the remaining lame-duck executions.”

The bigger question is how Biden’s administration will transform a historically racist criminal justice system while also healing the wounds brought by the Trump administration.

“The Trump administration’s conduct, when it comes to criminal legal issues, has been highly political, and mostly out of step with the direction that most of the United States is heading,” Dunham said. “When push came to shove, it reverted to policies that are more extreme in their cruelty and the arbitrariness of their application than anything else we have seen in modern American history.”

The Trump administration’s push for federal executions, while the country has been preoccupied with the election and the pandemic, is no different.

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The capacity for the "bipartisan," "both-sides," kumbaya kind of Democrat to confuse capitulation and compromise really is something awful to behold. Witness the latest from a new bipartisan "gang" attempting to find a COVID-19 stimulus breakthrough by giving into Sen. Mitch McConnell's worst demand "temporarily." Also by not doing the one thing that would help the most right now: direct stimulus payments to everyone. Because not doing the most helpful and most popular thing in the pursuit of compromise is how these people think.

Here are the Democratic culprits, names that will likely not shock you: Sens. Chris Coons, Joe Manchin, Jeanne Shaheen, Maggie Hassan, and Mark Warner, as well as independent Angus King. They're working with all the Republicans McConnell regularly rolls over: Mitt Romney, Susan Collins, Lisa Murkowski, and Bill Cassidy. What they've proposed is $300/week bump to unemployment insurance, down from the $600/week that was included in the CARES Act; $300  billion more to the troubled and less than effective Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) small business loans; $250 billion in funding to state and local governments; $50 billion to health care and vaccine distribution; and a temporary liability shield for corporations to not have to worry about protecting their workers. (Disclosure: Kos Media received a Paycheck Protection Program loan.) During the most dangerous time yet in this pandemic. When we've already seen instances of companies killing workers by not giving them the protection they need to stay healthy.

Seriously. They left out stimulus checks. Even McConnell hasn't ruled them out in negotiations this fall. The one thing that would help the most people the most right now—as well as keep the economy sputtering along—would be to put money in people's pockets right now. The nation's top economists have been clamoring for it, calling "direct cash payments […] one of the quickest, most equitable, and most effective ways to get families and the economy back on track." And they left it out. To fund PPP loans. Loans. That have to be paid back unless the small businesses taking them can meet sometimes impossible standards. That's what these yahoos are suggesting. This is what the rest of the world is doing:

And this is what these great minds came up with: 

Just. Give. Everyone. Money. Now. 

Flynn is likely just the start.

Outgoing President Donald Trump kicked off what will likely be the first in a series of pardons of his associates last week, with his pardon for former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn.

Flynn pleaded guilty to making false statements to investigators back in 2017 — but that’s not all Trump pardoned him for.

The typical way pardons work is that the recipient is pardoned for specific crimes. But Flynn’s stands out because it also has preemptive aspects — that is, it’s written broadly to try to pardon Flynn for possible crimes he hasn’t even been charged with.

Preemptive pardons aren’t unprecedented, but they are unusual, and come far closer to a sort of presidential declaration that the president’s associates should be above the law. And Trump’s use of the tactic for Flynn hints at just how far he could go in his final weeks in office.

Several of Trump’s former top campaign advisers — Steve Bannon, Paul Manafort, and Roger Stone — have been charged with or convicted of specific crimes, for which they could be pardoned. (Trump already commuted Roger Stone’s sentence but has not yet granted him a full pardon.)

The universe of potential preemptive pardons, though, is far broader. For while many Trump associates have been charged with crimes, an even greater number have been investigated but have not faced any charges.

For instance, there’s the president’s lawyer Rudy Giuliani. The New York Times’s Maggie Haberman and Michael Schmidt reported Tuesday morning that, “as recently as last week,” Giuliani discussed “the possibility of receiving a pre-emptive pardon” from Trump (though Giuliani denied this on Twitter). Federal prosecutors in New York have probed Giuliani’s business activities and indicted two of his associates.

And some of Trump’s allies are urging him to take preemptive pardons even further. “I’d tell President Trump to pardon yourself and pardon your family,” Fox host Sean Hannity said Monday. It remains unclear whether Trump will try to go that far (particularly, a self-pardon may not be legal and the president can’t pardon state crimes), but it’s clear enough that his lame-duck pardon shenanigans are only getting started.

The Flynn pardon is very broad, and much of it is preemptive

In December 2017, Michael Flynn, Trump’s former national security adviser, pleaded guilty to one count of making false statements (lying to the FBI about his conversations with the Russian ambassador). Since then, his case has become a protracted legal saga — first Flynn tried to withdraw his plea, then a new Justice Department team sought to have the case against Flynn thrown out, and the judge in the case, Emmet Sullivan, has been weighing whether he should permit this latter move.

Last week, Trump announced that he had pardoned Flynn, but no documentation for that pardon clarifying its parameters was released until Monday night. Here’s what it looks like:

Court filing

The pardon begins by listing the crime to which Flynn pleaded guilty: making false statements to federal investigators. But it covers a whole lot more than that. Flynn is also pardoned for:

• “any and all possible offenses arising from the facts set forth in” the charging documents in his case (Flynn also admitted making false statements in Foreign Agents Registration Act filings about his work for the government of Turkey)
• any offenses “that might arise, or be charged, claimed, or asserted in connection with the proceedings” in his case (for instance, there has been some discussion about whether Flynn could be charged with perjury by admitting his guilt under oath in court and then changing course)
• “any and all possible offenses within the investigatory authority or jurisdiction” of special counsel Robert Mueller, and “any and all possible offenses arising out of facts and circumstances known to, identified by, or in any manner related to” Mueller’s investigation (that is, if Mueller found anything else that Flynn could be criminally charged for, the pardon is meant to cover that)

So this is not a typical pardon, targeted at crimes someone has actually been charged with or convicted of. It’s a preemptive pardon, designed to shield Flynn from being charged in the future.

In that respect, it’s similar to the unconditional preemptive pardon President Gerald Ford granted his former boss and predecessor Richard Nixon — a sweeping pardon for any criminal offenses Nixon may have committed during the course of his presidency.

The Flynn pardon is not quite as broad as that, but it’s clearly tailored to try to wipe out the possibility that Flynn will face any further charges connected to the current case against him, or in any way related to the Mueller investigation.

Will Trump issue more preemptive pardons?

The New York Times has already confirmed that one preemptive pardon is under discussion — for Giuliani.

Late last year, news broke that federal prosecutors in the US Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York (SDNY) were scrutinizing Giuliani’s business and finances, exploring his contacts with former top Ukrainian officials, and investigating a host of potential crimes (including obstruction of justice, money laundering, serving as an unregistered agent of a foreign government, mail fraud, and wire fraud).

Two of Giuliani’s associates, Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman, were indicted on charges of campaign finance violations that October. The pair allegedly had been helping Giuliani make connections with Ukrainian officials who claimed to know of scandalous information about the Biden family, that could be helpful to Trump. (The revelation of Trump and Giuliani’s efforts to get dirt on Biden from Ukrainian officials eventually resulted in Trump’s impeachment.)

This year, there have been few new developments in the matter. CNN reported that the investigation into Giuliani “was upended by the coronavirus pandemic, limiting prosecutors’ ability to interview witnesses, collect further evidence, and meet with the grand jury.” Giuliani has not been charged, but if this investigation is serious and still underway, he’d obviously be hoping for a pardon while his client is still in charge of the executive branch.

There has also been some discussion — at least from Sean Hannity — about preemptive pardons for members of the Trump family.

Trump’s son Donald Trump Jr. faced scrutiny in the Mueller investigation but ultimately wasn’t charged. Trump himself also was probed for obstructing justice, but Mueller opted not to charge him, in part because Trump was the sitting president.

President Trump could attempt to pardon himself, but it’s unclear if that would be legal (a popular theory among the #Resistance is that Trump will resign early and let newly installed President Mike Pence pardon him). One issue here, though, is that the president has no power to pardon state crimes — and he is currently under investigation for potential bank and insurance fraud in New York state.

Now, if Trump truly does plan to run for president again in 2024, he might have political reasons to hold back on the broadest assertions of his pardon powers. Then again, he might feel he’s appropriately laid the groundwork to defend those moves, having disparaged any investigations of himself or anyone close to him as “witch hunts.” All that’s clear now is that his pardons are only getting started.

Some who want pardons are backing Trump’s “stolen election” lies

Finally, there’s been a notable pattern among some who are likely seeking pardons: They’ve tended to champion Trump’s lies and conspiracy theories that the 2020 election was stolen from him.

Giuliani, of course, has been in charge of Trump’s post-election legal fight, spreading false claims of widespread voter fraud while reportedly seeking a preemptive pardon.

Attorney Sidney Powell — Flynn’s lawyer — stood up with Giuliani at a press conference two weeks ago making particularly bizarre claims of fraud. (She asserted that the voting systems company Dominion rigged the vote against Trump, in part because there was “communist money” involved and that the company had ties to the late Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chávez.) Powell has filed lawsuits as well filled with similarly false claims. (Flynn himself has said “there is no doubt in my mind” that Trump won in a “landslide.”)

Bannon, too, has been spreading false information advancing Trump’s stolen election narrative, and has been advising Giuliani behind the scenes, according to the Washington Post.

Whether or not there was any explicit quid pro quo involved here, it’s clear that all these people were interested in pardons (in Powell’s case, for her client), and that all these people knew the importance of pleasing the man who could issue those pardons. Indeed, the main champions of Trump’s post-election fraud lies have been people who wanted Trump to pardon somebody — which is revealing of how much bad faith is at play here.

Anti-elite resentment deployed in the service of the elite.

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On the other hand, once there's enough orbital debris, we can go back to saying the sky's the limit.

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Ohio Representative John Becker (R-Union Township) and Representatives Keller, Vitale, and Zeltwange have filed 12 articles of impeachment against Ohio Governor Mike DeWine over the state’s COVID restrictions.

Wrote Becker in a press release:

“Governor DeWine has violated the Ohio and United States Constitutions, as well as multiple sections of the Ohio Revised Code.  Among his abuses of power, he meddled in the conduct of a presidential primary election and arbitrarily closed certain businesses, while allowing other businesses to remain open.  He later instituted a statewide mask mandate, implementing that requirement as a condition of employment, making Ohio a hostile work environment.  The mandate also extended to congregants at places of worship, forcing citizens to choose between worshipping their God and worshipping at the altar of unbridled government.  Many Ohioans find the mask mandate offensive, degrading, humiliating, and insulting.  There is also evidence that masks can be hazardous to one’s health.  Gov. DeWine doubled down when he expanded the mandate to our school-age children, who are less susceptible to COVID-19.”

Said Becker in a statement: “I kept holding out hope that we wouldn’t get to this place. For months and months, I’ve been hearing the cries of my constituents and of suffering people from every corner of Ohio. They keep screaming, “DO SOMETHING!” They are hurting. Their businesses are declining and depreciating. Their jobs have vanished. The communities that have sustained their lives are collapsing, and becoming shells of what they once were. Living in fear, many have turned to drugs and yes, even suicide, to end or tolerate the unbearable pain inflicted by the governor upon their livelihoods, and the damage caused by his unraveling of the fabric of Ohio. It is long past time to put an end to government gone wild.”

WTVG reports: “According to the Ohio State Constitution, the House of Representatives has the sole power of impeachment, but a majority of members must concur. The State Senate tries the impeachment, with a two-thirds vote needed to convict a governor of impeachment.”

The post Ohio Republicans File 12 Impeachment Articles Against GOP Governor Mike DeWine Over COVID Restrictions appeared first on Towleroad Gay News.

Donald Trump is heading to Georgia on Saturday for an appearance with Republican Senators David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler. The purpose of the visit is supposedly to drive turnout for the runoff election coming in January, but on Tuesday morning Trump had a different message: Let’s call the whole thing off.

Tweeting in response to conspiracy theories about more skullduggery by the Hugo Chavez-inspired Dominion voting systems, Trump sent a message to Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp saying that he had allowed the state to be “scammed.” Trump then told Kemp to “call off election. It won’t be needed. We will all win!” How this is supposed to work is completely unclear. Is Trump suggesting that if there’s no election, Loeffler and Perdue win by default? Is this one of those times when Republicans shake their fist at the 17th Amendment and its insidious support of democracy? Is Trump even talking about the Senate election at all, or is he telling Kemp to call off the already certified presidential race?

Who knows. But it’s certainly a perfect tone for Trump to adopt when he makes his visit to the peach state. 

As the Associated Press reports, Trump is expected in Georgia on Saturday, where he will … he will … honestly, they don’t know. There’s no better representation of just where the Republican Party is now than the way they are eyeing Trump’s visit. On the one hand, after four years of blind obedience and praise, the degree of Trump’s approval has been converted into the single measure of what it means to be a Republican. For that reason, Trump sharing the stage with the two embattled senators is considered vital in order to get the GOP turnout required to keep the Senate safe for Mitch McConnell.

On the other hand, Trump isn’t just a loose cannon rolling around the party blasting in all directions; his absolute refusal to admit his own defeat has led to Trump blasting both Kemp and Georgia Republican officials. Trump has retweeted numerous not just unproven, but provably false claims about fraud in Georgia while savaging the Republican secretary of state and blaming Kemp for running “the most corrupt election in American history.”

This isn’t the first time Trump has suggested that Kemp skip over the messy idea of holding an election. Back on November 17, Trump said he hoped that Kemp would “see the light” and “take charge” to save Perdue and Loeffler. How that’s supposed to work is a mystery. And Kemp has already been forced to warn Trump against interfering in the state’s elections. Which makes his upcoming visit even more terrifying to the state GOP.

But maybe Trump will explain on Saturday how Georgia can push back on the will of the voters. Or maybe he will just convince his own supporters that “voting” in “elections” is a game for suckers. One thing is clear—Republicans are right to be terrified of Trump’s visit. They’ve painted themselves into a corner. And now Trump wants that corner.

Let’s give GOP Leader Mitch McConnell the boot! Give $4 right now so McConnell can suffer the next six years in the minority.

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Donald Trump’s sustained attacks on the integrity of Georgia’s presidential election tally are threatening the Republican Senate majority — and GOP senators are starting to fret.

Even as the key battleground states have certified their results and Trump’s legal challenges are crumbling, the president is refusing to let go of his baseless claims of widespread voter fraud and fight to overturn the election results. Moreover, the official presidential transition is already in motion, and President-elect Joe Biden received his first presidential intelligence briefing on Monday.

But Republicans are increasingly seeing Trump’s posture as not just rhetoric. They view it as a self-serving quest that could imperil the GOP’s grip on the Senate by depressing turnout in two runoffs races that will decide which party controls the upper chamber. And they are publicly hoping he will refrain from pushing his false fraud claims when he visits the Peach State this week to campaign for Sens. David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler.

“Making an allegation without having facts to back it up could be detrimental to his long-term legacy,” Sen. Mike Rounds (R-S.D.) said flatly.

“I would hope when the president is in Georgia Saturday he talks about the importance of turning out the vote,” added Sen. Roy Blunt (R-Mo.), a member of GOP leadership. “And I think what he says on that trip will probably matter more than what he’s said up until now.”

Republicans believe Trump’s involvement is key to motivating their voters for the Jan. 5 runoffs. But there are already signs that Republicans are trying to avert a collapse in Georgia, where the candidates and outside groups are raising millions.

Advisers to the president’s eldest son, Donald Trump Jr., are launching a super PAC aimed at turning out supporters in the runoffs — some of whom are calling for an all-out boycott of the races. And over the weekend, Republican National Committee Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel tussled with a Trump backer who claimed the twin Senate races had already been “decided,” essentially echoing the president’s claims of voter fraud.

“It does no good if they self-fulfill a prophecy of refusing to vote, and lose the legacy that the president provides,” Rounds said when asked about the boycott that some of Trump’s supporters are plotting.

Even as Trump urges his supporters to vote for Perdue and Loeffler, he is continuing to hammer Georgia’s secretary of state and governor — both Republicans — for what he calls a “fraudulent” result in favor of Biden. Trump even said he was “ashamed” of his endorsement of Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp in 2018, and on Monday called him “hapless.”

Republicans in Georgia are exasperated with his rhetoric, and they’re publicly urging the president to avoid talking about the Nov. 3 election.

“It’s time for this to be over,” said former Sen. Saxby Chambliss (R-Ga.), who previously held Perdue’s seat. “When he comes he needs to not be talking about his race, he needs to be showing his support for the two candidates in Georgia and put to rest anybody who makes any comment about the fact or has any idea about not voting because they might think these two candidates aren’t doing enough to question the election.”

Both Perdue and Loeffler have called on the secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, to resign, in an overt nod to Trump and his challenges to the Georgia election results. But they’ve declined to more fully embrace his arguments, even as top GOP officials — like Raffensperger — are actively pushing back.

“The ridiculous things claimed in some of these lawsuits are just that — they’re insanity, fever-dream, made-up internet cabal,” said Gabriel Sterling, a Republican and the voting system implementation manager for Georgia’s elections.

Even as Trump continues to wage his implausible legal fight, Senate Republicans are coming around to acknowledging Biden’s victory. Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas) said it’s “becoming clearer by the minute” that the former vice president won and, as a result, “I’m already moving on.”

And Senate Majority Whip John Thune (R-S.D.) said the General Services Administration's move last week to allow the presidential transition process to move forward after weeks of stalling “suggests [Trump] understands which way it’s headed.”

Republicans, meanwhile, were offering their thoughts on Biden’s choices for his Cabinet, another sign that they are preparing for the inevitable.

Underscoring Trump’s influence over the GOP, only a minority of Republicans are calling out the president for seeking to overturn the results of the election in battleground states. And most are waiting for the Electoral College to formalize the election results on December 14 before officially declaring Biden the president-elect.

But a handful of Republicans are starting to express concern about the long term impact Trump’s false allegations of a “rigged election” and widespread voter fraud could have on the country.

“There has not been evidence presented yet of any systematic or substantial nature, and so I think it’s most unfortunate and damaging to the cause of democracy to make serious accusations without serious evidence,” said Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah), a frequent critic of the president who did not vote for Trump in November.

“I just worry about the erosion of the public’s confidence in our electoral process,” Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) said of Trump’s allegations, and urged him Monday to concede. “It’s pretty integral to who we are as a country.”

Burgess Everett contributed to this report.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Science Magazine: Continuing the spate of stunning news about COVID-19 vaccines, the biotech company Moderna announced the final results of the 30,000-person efficacy trial for its candidate in a press release today: Only 11 people who received two doses of the vaccine developed COVID-19 symptoms after being infected with the pandemic coronavirus, versus 185 symptomatic cases in a placebo group. That is an efficacy of 94.1%, the company says, far above what many vaccine scientists were expecting just a few weeks ago. More impressive still, Moderna's candidate had 100% efficacy against severe disease. There were zero such COVID-19 cases among those vaccinated, but 30 in the placebo group. The company today plans to file a request for emergency use authorization (EUA) for its vaccine with the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), and is also seeking a similar green light from the European Medicines Agency. The data released today bolster an interim report from the company two weeks ago that only analyzed 95 total cases but produced similarly impressive efficacy. "I would still like to see all of the actual data, but what we've seen so far is absolutely remarkable," says Paul Offit, a vaccine researcher at the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia who is a member of an independent committee of vaccine experts that advises FDA.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

On Thanksgiving, Vice President-elect Kamala Harris made some calls to Americans. She spoke with a young Bay Area artist and thanked him after a video he made showing him creating a portrait of the vice president-elect went viral. She also called University of Chicago Medical Center Resident Nurse Talisa Hardin to thank her for the work Hardin has been doing on the front lines of our current COVID-19 pandemic.

Hardin testified in May, virtually, before a coronavirus subcommittee of the House Oversight Committee, where she spoke about her experience as a nurse in the ICU. She explained how thinly spread these major facilities were with the rise in COVID-19 patients and the lack of sufficient protections she and other nurses were receiving to accomplish their very dangerous and important jobs. Specifically, Hardin explained in May that the need for protection is not only for the nurses and medical staff themselves, it’s essential for protecting the families of the people taking care of the sick. According to the National Nurses United, both Hardin’s mother and uncle contracted COVID-19, and her uncle is still in the hospital fighting the illness.

Harris spoke with Hardin, thanking her for the work she had done and continues to do and telling Hardin she had been reading about her work. The video call went for about 15 minutes according to CNN, and Harris discussed the possibility of using the 1950 Defense Production Act to potentially expedite the process for supplying Hardin and others with the protection they need.

Unlike the current White House squatter, Harris and Biden understand that part of the job of being an elected official is to, at the very least, try and use your position to touch people’s lives and possibly reassure them that you are trying to make things better for them. If you don’t plan on doing that, you can at least tell them you are thankful that they do the work that you’re not doing. In contrast with Harris’ phone call, just read a little of the long-winded and mostly self-congratulatory video statement Trump gave to members of the military on Thanksgiving.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Things keep going downhill for aspiring hydrogen truck-maker Nikola. Nikola's stock plunged on Monday morning as the company announced that a previously announced deal with General Motors was not going to close. Instead, the two companies signed a "non-binding memorandum of understanding" related to the use of GM's hydrogen fuel cell technology in Nikola's future semi trucks. GM will not take a stake in Nikola as originally planned. Nikola's stock is down 26 percent as I write this on Monday morning. The stock is down 58 percent since September 8, the day Nikola originally announced the GM deal. The news means that Nikola is canceling the Badger, a planned pickup truck that critics have long derided as vaporware. Under Nikola's September deal with GM, GM was supposed to design and build the Badger on a cost-plus basis. The deal would have enabled Nikola to sell a pickup truck it didn't otherwise have the capacity to manufacture. But it was hard to see how Nikola was going to make a profit selling what would have essentially been a re-badged GM product. Moreover, it wasn't clear that Nikola had enough cash to finance the development of the Badger alongside the company's semi trucks and a planned network of hydrogen fueling stations. With the hype around Nikola cooling, Nikola may not be able to raise the necessary cash from Wall Street.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Indiana Attorney General Curtis Hill has asked the U.S. Supreme Court to reverse a January decision by the U.S. 7th Circuit Court of Appeals upholding an Indiana judge’s ruling allowing both members of a married same-sex couple to be listed as parents on their child’s birth certificate.

The AP reports: “The original case involved Ashlee and Ruby Henderson, a gay married couple from Lafayette who filed a federal lawsuit in 2015 challenging Indiana’s birth records law. They sued the state health commissioner and Tippecanoe County officials because county officials would not list both of them as parents on the birth certificate of their son, who Ruby conceived through artificial insemination.”

The Indy Star adds: “In the case of the Henderson family, their child’s birth certificate had just one person, Ruby, listed as the parent. Seven additional couples joined the suit as plaintiffs after Indiana successfully appealed the case up to the 7th Circuit.”

Wrote Hill in the appeal to SCOTUS: “A birth mother’s wife will never be the biological father of the child, meaning that, whenever a birth-mother’s wife gains presumptive ‘parentage’ status, a biological father’s rights and obligations to the child have necessarily been undermined without proper adjudication.”

The post Indiana Attorney General Asks SCOTUS to Reverse Ruling Allowing Same-Sex Couples to Both Be Listed as Parents on Child’s Birth Certificate appeared first on Towleroad Gay News.

For a bunch of incompetents when it comes to actual governing, the Trump administration has been remarkably creative and effective when it comes to destruction. It's like they've trawled through every aspect of every department looking for fires to set, policies to dismantle—or enact—to cause the most damage possible. If anything, Trump's loss has made them even more determined to just blow it all to smithereens and to make things as difficult and screwed up for the incoming Biden administration as possible. If it can needlessly harm a maximum of people, it's even better.

Take, for example, a new proposed rule Health and Human Services (HHS) is rushing to finalize that would force HHS staff—under Biden—to assess almost every HHS regulation and determine whether it should be continued, amended, or rescinded. If the assessment doesn't happen, the regulations automatically expire. Which is why they call it “Securing Updated and Necessary Statutory Evaluations Timely” (SUNSET). What this would do in practical terms is pull legions of staff from running Medicare and Medicaid and Obamacare and all the other programs—in the middle of a pandemic when there are real emergencies.

It's probably no accident that they're trying to promulgate this rule exactly 10 years after the Affordable Care Act, with its raft of regulations, was enacted. Because the automatic expiration happens at 10 years unless the assessment is done. HHS estimates that in the first two years it would have to assess more than 2,400 rules at a cost of $26 million over 10 years. It would require 90 full-time staff to complete. And, as Jessica Schubel at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities argues, it would "distract the Biden Administration from critically important priorities that it must address, especially COVID-19. It would disrupt work on program operations and force the Administration to delay adopting its health care priorities because it needed to redirect staff to review existing regulations."

The work would have to be done because the regulations in question are governing how programs like Medicaid, for example, work and how states implement and run their programs. It’s an asinine rule meant to do nothing but sabotage the Biden administration. It's not even remotely necessary because the department already has review processes in place, processes that would be disrupted for regulations that need to be considered because staff would be pulled off doing unrelated and unnecessary reviews.

Just for example, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) issues hundreds of regulations every year. Biopharma trade publication Biocentury spoke with a former senior FDA official who said that complying with the rule would "paralyze" the FDA. Coleen Klasmeier, formerly an attorney in the FDA's Office of the Chief Counsel, blasted the administration for making the announcement the very day after the election, with Trump refusing to concede. "First, it takes a particularly generous amount of tone deafness to do this today," she told Biocentury. "Second, it will paradoxically increase regulatory complexity and disrupt settled expectations with uncertain benefits for small entities. Third, it would harm the public health for regulations to automatically sunset, which seems likely given the burdens associated with performing the review."

HHS Chief of Staff Brian Harrison was clear about why they pushed this. "The reason we're doing this now is because we at the department are trying to go as fast as we can in hopes of finalizing the rule before the end of [Trump’s] first term." In terms of fucking absolutely everything up, it was a win-win for Team Trump. They could either upend basically the entire healthcare system (when the Supreme Court seems unlikely to choose to do so by tossing Obamacare) under Trump, or make one more mess for Biden to have to untangle in his first weeks in office.

Instead of actually working on the coronavirus pandemic, this is what Trump's HHS team is spending time and energy on: cooking up more bombs. Hopefully there are enough career officials in the government to slow walk this and prevent it from becoming final.

The state of Arizona—represented by Republican Gov. Doug Ducey and Republican Attorney General Mark Brnovich and Democratic Secretary of State Katie Hobbs—certified President-elect Joe Biden's win over Donald Trump in that state. Biden won that state by 10,457 votes, netting eleven more electoral votes.

While the state's Republican leaders were certifying those results, Trump's "elite strike force team" of lawyers, in real life known as habitual losers Rudy Giuliani and Jenna Ellis, were holding what they called a "hearing" with nine Republican state legislators, in which Hunter Biden's laptop apparently featured. Because of course it did. The meeting was held in a downtown Phoenix hotel, AP reports. Apparently no landscaping company parking lots were available.

The "elite strike force" is also demonstrating stupid lawyer tricks in Georgia, where they are asking for an audit of signatures on absentee ballot envelopes for the fifth time. Yes, a hand recount has already been conducted and yes, Biden won the state, again.

Also, too, former elite strike force member Sidney Powell, who had been kicked off of the team for being too much of a conspiracy theorist, has been freelancing in the state because something something Dominion resulted in Republicans voting Republican but not for Trump and "near zero Black votes" for Trump, "which is also highly improbable" according to Powell who apparently has never met any Black people.