James.galbraith

The Republican National Committee cut million-dollar checks to six state parties in August as it prepared for the fall campaign. But one payment stands out amid a torrent of money flowing to traditional battleground states: $1.3 million to once-brick red Texas.

On one level, it’s an astonishing development. But for those paying close attention this year, it’s hardly surprising at all.

Texas is more competitive this year than it’s been in a generation. And even though Democrats have been talking about this coming for, oh, perhaps 20 years, Texas has flown far under the radar in 2020 as states more essential to the battleground map (like Wisconsin) or more gettable for Joe Biden (like Arizona) suck up all the attention.

But eyes would have popped if you traveled back to 2008 and told Texans, when Barack Obama lost the state by 12 points while winning nationally by 7 points, that the 2020 presidential contest in the state would be polling inside the margin of error. Yet even in 2016, President Donald Trump won Iowa by a larger margin than Texas, and in 2018, Democrat Beto O’Rourke lost to Sen. Ted Cruz by just 2.6 percentage points. The state’s rapidly growing and diversifying cities and suburbs are chock full of college-educated voters, a core constituency Trump has struggled to hold within the GOP.

What happened

Both national parties send cash to state parties to fund get-out-the-vote efforts, field operations and staff. The RNC sent $1.3 million to the Republican Party of Texas in August, double what it sent in July and on par with what central battlegrounds like Arizona and North Carolina are getting. It’s also the biggest transfer ever from the RNC to the Texas state party.

The Democratic National Committee is also investing in the Texas Democratic Party, sending more than $150,000 last month. Much of that is also going to pay for staff and mobilization. But Democrats say the investment needed to turn Texas blue is lower than ever despite the state's size, because down-ballot candidates, from a Senate contender to congressional and state House hopefuls, are having so much more success in funding their campaigns through small-dollar, online donations.

“The knock against Texas was that we were a hundred-million-dollar endeavor, but that’s not the case anymore because now, we’ve got so many well-funded races, from state House up, that they’re driving up the vote,” said Manny Garcia, the executive director of the Texas Democratic Party. “The fact that the RNC needs to send money to the Texas GOP is noteworthy, the fact that Texas GOP is talking about needing to do voter registration is noteworthy, the fact that the polling is so tight is noteworthy.”

What it means

Many Republicans in Texas and nationally say if O’Rourke couldn’t win in 2018 — in a wave election, with a huge financial advantage and volunteer network, and with his supporters using straight-ticket voting (which the legislature outlawed in 2017, but didn’t implement until after 2018) — then it can’t be done in 2020. They also insist that though the polls may be tight now, their voters will come home.

They may be right. But this view downplays the underlying trends transforming national politics, as well as their potency in Texas. And hearing this view also rang a bell: I spent 2018 reporting on ancestrally Republican places that supposedly couldn’t go blue as Democrats chased the House majority, from the beaches of Orange County, Calif. to the leafy sidewalks of the Atlanta collar counties — and, yes, the suburbs of Dallas and Houston. That November, they all voted in Democrats, including in two Texas districts the GOP had designed to protect incumbents earlier in the decade.

Clearly, Trump is making Texas more competitive — the FiveThirtyEight polling average has Trump leading by a point — and the trend goes down the ballot. “The biggest problem for Republicans, particularly in urban areas, is Donald Trump … and that trend is going to continue until Trump is no longer the standard bearer for the party,” said former Republican state Rep. Jason Villalba, who represented a suburban Dallas County seat before losing a GOP primary in 2018. “That same phenomenon that happened here is replicating itself all over the state.”

But Jordan Berry, a Texas-based Republican consultant, called the RNC’s investment “insurance,” not a fire alarm.

“If Democrats are going to continue to pour record-breaking amounts of dollars into Texas, it makes sense that Republicans are going to need some reinforcements,” said Berry, who is working on several congressional and state House races. “We don’t need to match them dollar-for-dollar, but you do want some extra padding.”

James Dickey, the former Texas Republican Party chairman, said that “sometimes money is put in to stop up a hole, but much more often, money is put in to support the continuance of a successful effort, and this is the latter,” pointing to the state party’s “biggest field and voter outreach effort in many years.”

However, several Republicans did acknowledge that trouble could come for them in suburban-based federal and state House seats, and the money could help shore things up.

“If Trump barely wins Texas, we lose Texas-22, Texas-24 and possibly Texas-21,” said one Texas-based Republican consultant, ticking off three once-safe House seats that have become competitive in the Trump era. “Democrats probably take the state House in that scenario, too.” (Democrats need to flip nine state House seats to win the chamber.)

What to watch

If Texas truly becomes a major battleground in the last six weeks of the race, more money of all sorts will need to flow in, from serious TV advertisement buys from the presidential campaigns to additional investments from the national parties. You would also see more visits from the candidates themselves, if things really started to change.

RNC Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel, who visited Georgetown, Texas, last week, said she doesn’t “think Texas is up for grabs, but I’m going to be here because we’re not going to take any state for granted.”

The Texas Republican Party did not answer requests for comment. RNC spokeswoman Mandi Merritt said in a statement that the committee “works for all candidates up and down the ballot and we are leaving no stone unturned with our unparalleled ground game, historic infrastructure and get out the vote operation.”

And Republicans reiterated that the $1.3 million help for the state party — although historic in its size — isn’t the size of investment that would really get their attention.

“Call me again if it’s $10 million or $20 million,” said one national Republican strategist.

The CIA has made it harder for intelligence about Russia to reach the White House, stoking fears among current and former officials that information is being suppressed to please a president known to erupt in anger whenever he is confronted with bad news about Moscow.

Nine current and former officials said in interviews that CIA Director Gina Haspel has become extremely cautious about which, if any, Russia-related intelligence products make their way to President Donald Trump’s desk. Haspel also has been keeping a close eye on the agency’s fabled “Russia House,” whose analysts she often disagrees with and sometimes accuses of purposefully misleading her.

Last year, three of the people said, Haspel tasked the CIA’s general counsel, Courtney Elwood, with reviewing virtually every product that comes out of Russia House, which is home to analysts and targeters who are experts in Russia and the post-Soviet space, before it “goes downtown” to the White House. One former CIA lawyer called it “unprecedented that a general counsel would be involved to this extent.”

Four of the people said the change has resulted in less intelligence on Russia making its way to the White House, but the exact reason for that — whether Elwood has been blocking it, or whether Russia officers have become disillusioned and are producing less, or even self-censoring for fear of being reprimanded — is less clear.

One administration official explained the reduced Russia-related intelligence flow from CIA to the National Security Council as a matter of “quality over quantity.” Another administration official said that while the CIA is not the only agency that provides intelligence to the NSC, this official’s perception was that the CIA was “certainly” exhibiting an “abundance of caution” about the Russia intelligence it was sending to the NSC, beginning around the time of Trump’s impeachment proceedings. A whistleblower complaint about Trump from a CIA analyst, which Elwood relayed to NSC lawyer John Eisenberg at the time, is what sparked Trump’s impeachment — feeding the mistrust toward Russia-related intelligence inside the White House and among the agency’s top ranks.

The heightened scrutiny within the CIA comes as the Justice Department, through prosecutor John Durham, continues to investigate the intelligence community’s findings about Russia’s interference in the 2016 election — and particularly the conclusion drawn by Russia analysts that Russian President Vladimir Putin interfered specifically to boost Trump’s candidacy rather than just sow chaos.

Trump, who has publicly railed against the intelligence community’s conclusion that Russia interfered in 2016 to bolster his candidacy, has also been working to bring the intelligence community further under his control since his impeachment acquittal in February. He has installed loyalists in top positions like director of national intelligence and the senior-most intelligence post on the NSC staff.

Current and former officials have said that in private, the president remains extraordinarily sensitive around the subject of Russian meddling — to the point where they hesitate to raise the topic. As recently as last Thursday, the president blasted his own FBI director on Twitter for testifying that Moscow was seeking to “sow divisiveness and discord” and “denigrate Vice President Biden” in a bid to influence the 2020 campaign.

“Scrutinizing intelligence product and process is exactly what is expected of Director Haspel not only because it’s her job, it’s her life’s work — developing sources, vetting information, and checking assumptions — it’s in her blood,” said CIA press secretary Timothy Barrett. “She rightfully asks difficult questions and ensures intelligence is corroborated, double-checked, and then run through the wringer once more. Any suggestion of a political motive for how she leads this agency is misguided.”

After this story was published, Barrett added: “The notion that the General Counsel or anyone else in senior leadership impedes analysis is laughable. Everyone who works here knows that analytic objectivity is beyond reproach.”

Haspel’s scrutiny of intelligence coming out of the CIA’s Russia House has led to some recent dust-ups. The head of Russia House, whom officials declined to identify by name because they work undercover, was fired earlier this year, according to four of the current and former officials familiar with the matter, but remains at the agency in another mission center. It’s not clear why he was ousted, but Haspel’s personal dislike of him was clear. “Gina was not a fan,” said one of the people familiar with the matter.

Another Russia House analyst quit earlier this year after Haspel accused him of lying about intelligence — an accusation that happens fairly often, several former officials said. “She calls analysts liars all the time,” said one former CIA official. The head of the mission center itself is still in place.

More recently, Haspel “completely dismissed” Russia House analysts who brought her intelligence showing a correlation between Russia and the curious phenomenon of diplomats experiencing brain trauma, according to one current U.S. official with knowledge of the episode. The brain trauma issue first came to light in 2017 when American and Canadian embassy staff in Cuba complained of mysterious health problems that have never been definitively explained.

“She had a very defensive reaction, reacted very poorly and made some comments about needing to clean out Russia House,” the official said.

Intelligence is a two-way process: Officials at the NSC and other “consumers” in the government regularly send questions and requests to the intelligence community in what is known as a “tasking,” while “producers” in America’s spy agencies then try to provide answers.

But the Russia portfolio at the NSC has faced constant churn over the past few years: Ryan Tully is the fifth person to hold the senior director role, which previously had been held by Fiona Hill and Tim Morrison, both of whom testified in the impeachment inquiry. Joe Wang, who was deputy senior director for Europe and Russia at the NSC under Tully, left for the State Department over the summer. All that turnover “has been hard on [Russia policy],” another administration official said, “because you need someone driving it who has a consistent view — and it doesn’t seem like working on [Russia] has been a top priority.”

Critics of national security adviser Robert O’Brien say he has been prone to highlighting national security information and intelligence “that he knows the president will respond well to,” as one former White House official put it. “O’Brien doesn’t want anyone to touch things Russia-related because of the reaction,” a second former White House official said. “He just doesn’t want to rock the boat with Trump.”

An NSC spokesperson didn’t respond to a request for comment but an administration official pushed back and said: “Anyone who’s watched the NSC policy process over the last year knows how seriously the NSC has been working to counter Russian malign activities.”

Like other specialized units, Russia House — which remained highly compartmented even after it was integrated into the CIA’s Mission Center for Europe and Eurasia as part of a reorganization under former CIA Director John Brennan — is extremely protective of its intelligence. But some within the agency, including Haspel, have described it as too isolated and in need of an overhaul, according to several of the current and former U.S. officials.

Others describe that characterization as unfair, and say a level of secrecy and limits on collaboration with other units is necessary to protect the information from being too widely shared or manipulated. “We thought her feeling that Russia House was cliquey or insular was grossly unfair,” said a former senior CIA official. “She had preconceived notions about it, from her own time at the agency.” Haspel joined the CIA in 1985 and spent nearly her entire career working undercover as a clandestine officer, serving as chief of station in Europe and Central Eurasia and focusing at times on Russian operations, according to a CIA-issued timeline.

Some still fear, however, that Haspel’s negative perception of CIA’s Russia analysts is the result of ongoing political pressure by the Trump administration to frame them as biased and myopic because of a conclusion they drew in 2016 that has enraged the president: that Putin ordered an interference campaign specifically to bolster Trump’s candidacy. That analysis was based at least in part on information from a highly sensitive CIA asset in the Kremlin, and is now at the center of Durham’s probe.

“When I was there, Russia House was the most sensitive, most secretive organization in the building,” said Larry Pfeiffer, who served as former CIA Director Michael Hayden’s chief of staff. “They’re very protective of the information, and rightfully so. Given Russian counterintelligence efforts, and the incredible sensitivity of any sources they might have, if something were to get out it could result in the loss of the life of an asset. And given what we know of Russian security efforts, I can only surmise that those assets are few and far between.”

Some people familiar with Haspel’s enhanced scrutiny of the Russia material say it isn’t necessarily nefarious, or the result of her working to stay in Trump’s good graces. One U.S. official acknowledged that while Haspel “has been very demanding of anything Russia-related,” it’s possible that she just feels “protective” of the agency she came up in. “She knows that they’re under a microscope,” this person said. “So she feels like they need to be more precise, and airtight.” At least one CIA assessment likely to anger Trump was reportedly included in the CIA’s classified World Intelligence Review, which is disseminated to a wide array of policymakers and other stakeholders, on Aug. 31: that Putin was probably personally directing an ongoing operation to undermine Joe Biden’s candidacy.

Trump’s firing of former acting Director of National Intelligence Joseph Maguire, who made the career-ending decision to allow a deputy to brief lawmakers on Russia’s ongoing election interference, is still top of mind for many in the intelligence community who fear they could land in Trump’s crosshairs if they challenge him in any official setting.

Those fears played out on Thursday night, when Trump went on a Twitter rampage against FBI Director Christopher Wray. Wray had testified during a public congressional hearing about Russia’s ongoing attempts to undermine Biden — China is “a FAR greater threat than Russia, Russia, Russia,” Trump replied on Twitter — and the threat of white supremacist violence in the U.S. “I look at them as a bunch of well funded ANARCHISTS & THUGS who are protected because the Comey/Mueller inspired FBI is simply unable, or unwilling, to find their funding source, and allows them to get away with “murder,’” Trump tweeted in response.

Wray and other national security leaders, including Haspel, had specifically sought to avoid Trump’s wrath earlier this year by requesting that the annual Worldwide Threats hearing before Congress be held behind closed doors and out of his sight.

Haspel’s detractors say that approach has warped the agency’s mandate to deliver its unvarnished assessments of world affairs, heedless of political considerations. “The director has abdicated her responsibility to tell the president what he needs to be told, and that is in part enabled by Elwood,” said another former senior CIA official. This person said Elwood is “in virtually every meeting, making decisions and getting involved in things that are not legal issues” — including her role in reviewing all of the Russia-related material before it’s sent out to the consumer, a job usually done, if necessary, by a unit’s in-house lawyer.

Another former CIA official said Elwood showed “a lot more interest” in the agency’s counterintelligence unit than previous general counsels, and had that unit’s attorney begin reporting to her deputy. “No one is willing to challenge” Elwood or Haspel, said the former senior CIA official. He added that Haspel’s changes have “been framed by some as an effort to ‘protect the building’ — well, her job is not to protect the building, it’s to protect the country.”

Mitch McConnell may be driving American politics to the brink of insanity, but let’s assume that the majority leader himself is entirely sane.

There are two possible reasons why it would be rational for him to act on the Supreme Court vacancy in a way that is so damaging to the reputation of the Senate, and so contemptuous of half of his Senate colleagues and of American voters.

One is that he expects his party to hold power a very long time. Who cares what the opposition thinks when they don’t matter now and won’t in the future?

The other is that he expects to hold power a very short time, or at least is keenly attuned to this possibility, and believes that once power is lost it is gone indefinitely. Under this scenario, it would make sense to lock in as many gains, as quickly as possible, for as long as possible. The enduring scorn of the opposition is an acceptable price to pay because the long-term contest is essentially over.

Which possibility more likely reflects the ruthless rationality of the McConnell mind?

The Republican Party’s sprint to install a justice for a lifetime appointment this year, either days before a presidential election or in the lame-duck session afterward, looks a lot like the dying spasms of a political movement that began five decades ago.

McConnell knows the prognosis, and is unsentimentally getting the movement’s affairs in order. The most important item in the last testament is filling courts with people in position to check liberal ambitions long after McConnell is gone. Pursuing this goal so close to Election Day is a reversal of the majority leader’s alleged principle in 2016 that Supreme Court vacancies should not be filled in a presidential election year. But it is consistent with his true principle: Exploit every advantage of power for as long as his party has it. The Kentucky Republican, in a loveless alliance with Donald Trump, is a skilled practitioner of the politics of decline, and for a conservative movement that is in palliative care.

This is not a prediction for the November election. It is possible that Trump and Senate Republicans get a modest boost — more than modest is unlikely in an electorate with views so hardened — from the intensified focus on the court, and a lessened focus on coronavirus.

But confident and growing political movements do not act like Senate Republicans under McConnell’s leadership are acting. They don’t act like previous words and actions have no meaning, and that principles and precedents are for fools. They don’t practice a politics of nihilism that virtually begs Democrats to write their own ends-justifying rules and treat Republicans vindictively the moment they are ever in the majority. But this is how a vulnerable movement in the end stage of the political life cycle acts. What begins as idealism turns to pragmatism, then to cynicism, finally to fatalism.

It is fitting that the end, like the beginning, is about control of the courts. The brand of conservatism that McConnell and most Republicans of his generation rode to power was to a significant degree a backlash against the Supreme Court. In the eyes of activists, unelected justices were defying democracy by imposing policies, on such issues as abortion rights and school busing, that were out of step with popular opinion. Liberals didn’t like it but this new conservative movement was clearly in the ascendancy, as highlighted by Ronald Reagan’s 1980 victory and his reelection by winning 59 percent of the vote and 49 states.

Here’s something else liberals did not like: These majorities were responding to genuine ideas about the proper role of government, persuasively articulated by Reagan and his acolytes. McConnell, first elected to the Senate in 1984 at age 42, surely considered himself one of them.

Now, at 78, McConnell is leading a party that depends on exploiting every avenue to preserve power despite not commanding national majorities. Starting in 1992, in seven presidential elections, Republicans have won the popular vote just once.

The national electorate is younger, more diverse, and less traditional in cultural attitudes, and more enthusiastic about a robust role for government. The Republican Party for most of this century draws overwhelmingly from people who are older, white, and socially conservative. In recent years, college-educated voters are taking flight from the GOP.

Republicans have won power in significant measure through institutions that buffer the influence of national majorities: The Electoral College, the Senate, and, above all, the Supreme Court.

A conservative movement that in youth worked to rein in the Supreme Court’s unelected power in the name of democracy now hopes in old age to harness the Supreme Court’s unelected power to protect it from the hazards of too much democracy.

These institutions can slow long-term demographic and ideological trends but they are unlikely to halt them. This means that, in due course — whether this year or sometime in the future — we will learn how closely Democrats have been studying the McConnell methods and whether they will choose to emulate them.

President Donald Trump on Tuesday attacked Rep. Ilhan Omar yet again for her Somali origins, saying the Minnesota Democrat is “telling us how to run our country.”

“How about Omar of Minnesota?” Trump said at a rally in Moon Township, Pa., outside Pittsburgh. “We’re going to win the state of Minnesota because of her, they say. She’s telling us how to run our country. How did you do where you came from? How’s your country doing? She’s going to tell us — she’s telling us how to run our country.”

Omar is a U.S. citizen — a requirement for serving in Congress — and was naturalized after coming to the country as a child refugee from Somalia.

The comment was one of the president’s many jabs suggesting Omar is not an American. Going after her has become almost a staple of his campaign rallies, where he often focuses on her more than other progressive lawmakers critical of the president.

Omar is one of the first two Muslim women to serve in Congress and the first to wear the hijab. She has been the subject of relentless Islamophobic attacks since running for office in 2018.

Last year, Trump called for Omar and some of her progressive peers in Congress to “go back” to “the totally broken and crime-infested places from which they came.” Trump supporters also chanted “send her back” during a rally last year, a line that has become common among his base.

During a rally last week, Trump called Omar an “extremist” and said Democrats wanted to allow into the country Somali and Yemeni refugees who he said were coming from “Jihadist regions.” He also bragged about deporting Somali nationals during that rally, calling them “hardened criminals” who are “back in their country where they can do all the complaining they want.” He held the rally in Minnesota, the state with one of the largest ethnic Somali communities in the country.

Software engineer Cal Paterson writes: Mozilla recently announced that they would be dismissing 250 people. That's a quarter of their workforce so there are some deep cuts to their work too. The victims include: the MDN docs (those are the web standards docs everyone likes better than w3schools), the Rust compiler and even some cuts to Firefox development. Like most people I want to see Mozilla do well but those three projects comprise pretty much what I think of as the whole point of Mozilla, so this news is a a big let down. The stated reason for the cuts is falling income. Mozilla largely relies on "royalties" for funding. In return for payment, Mozilla allows big technology companies to choose the default search engine in Firefox - the technology companies are ultimately paying to increase the number of searches Firefox users make with them. Mozilla haven't been particularly transparent about why these royalties are being reduced, except to blame the coronavirus. I'm sure the coronavirus is not a great help but I suspect the bigger problem is that Firefox's market share is now a tiny fraction of its previous size and so the royalties will be smaller too - fewer users, so fewer searches and therefore less money for Mozilla. The real problem is not the royalty cuts, though. Mozilla has already received more than enough money to set themselves up for financial independence. Mozilla received up to half a billion dollars a year (each year!) for many years. The real problem is that Mozilla didn't use that money to achieve financial independence and instead just spent it each year, doing the organisational equivalent of living hand-to-mouth. Despite their slightly contrived legal structure as a non-profit that owns a for-profit, Mozilla are an NGO just like any other. In this article I want to apply the traditional measures that are applied to other NGOs to Mozilla in order to show what's wrong. These three measures are: overheads, ethics and results.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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When this all started, Covid-19 was impacting large cities at a much higher rate than everywhere else. This straightforward chart from NPR shows how the share of deaths in small and medium cities has made its way up to over half of all weekly Covid-19 deaths.

Tags: cities, coronavirus, NPR

More than any other single individual, Daryl Johnson can speak to the failure of the Republican Party to keep America safe from right-wing and white supremacist terrorism over the past few years. Most recently, he has spoken out to condemn the Trump administration’s stubborn rejection of facts and data on the danger that type of extremism poses. The impeached president has been out there spewing hate and fear while lying about which candidate will make Americans safer, while Johnson—along with former members of Trump’s own counterterrorism team—has been telling the truth. Trump is right about the fact that one candidate for president will have a far more positive impact on our safety. But he’s dead wrong about which one that is.

Mr. Johnson has been at this work for a long time, and has compiled quite a record of both being right about violent right-wing extremists, and of being attacked by conservatives who were attempting to coddle them. He served for a quarter century as a front-line participant in our government’s struggle against extremist terrorism. From 1991 to 1999 he was part of the U.S. Army’s counterterrorism efforts, then moved over to the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms (ATF), where for six years he analyzed radical anti-government groups. Then in 2004 Johnson moved over to the newly formed Department of Homeland Security (DHS), where he became the lead domestic terrorism analyst for the next six years.

In April 2009, Johnson’s team produced a report called “Right-wing Extremism: Current Economic and Political Climate Fueling Resurgence in Radicalization and Recruitment.” From its key findings:

“The DHS/Office of Intelligence and Analysis (I&A) has no specific information that domestic rightwing terrorists are currently planning acts of violence, but rightwing extremists may be gaining new recruits by playing on their fears about several emergent issues. The economic downturn and the election of the first African American president present unique drivers for rightwing radicalization and recruitment.”

The report, which was produced for law enforcement officials, was leaked to a right-wing “shock jock” named Roger Hedgecock, who pushed it out into the conservative media ecosystem. At the time, conservative media mainstays like Rush Limbaugh, Michael Savage, and others went berserk, and Republican elected leaders such as then-Minority Leader Rep. John Boehner went right along with them. DHS ultimately withdrew the report and apologized to anyone offended.

The report has, over time, proven to be accurate in predicting the rise of right-wing and white supremacist terror. Johnson, understandably frustrated by these events, left the government in 2010. In addition to founding his own consulting firm, he also participated in Netroots Nation in 2017 as part of a panel on “The White Face of Domestic Terrorism: How Islamophobia Distorts the Reality of Terrorist Violence in America.”

Although he characterizes himself as a Republican who “personifies conservatism,” Johnson has been a consistent and harsh critic of the current administration’s approach to right-wing, white supremacist terrorism. Only a few months after The Man Who Lost The Popular Vote was inaugurated, Johnson wrote a Washington Post column. “Heated political campaigning by Donald Trump in 2016 pandered to these extremists,” he warned. “Now, right-wing terrorism has become the national security threat which many government leaders have yet to acknowledge.” He added that Trump has “placated white supremacists and anti-government extremists ... Rhetoric from the president has further emboldened the alt-right.”

In 2019, speaking to Chauncey DeVega at Salon, Johnson compared the two parties on this issue. “On the Republican side it is denial. I believe the Democrats are more or less in agreement that there is a problem and they want to do something about it ... The Republicans do this as part of a deliberate strategy on their part to create an atmosphere of fear and paranoia, because they depend on those emotions to win elections.” 

Just this month, as we’ve seen reports of the Trump White House’s deliberate malpractice when it comes to protecting Americans from white supremacist and right-wing terrorism (I looked at the matter in my own post), Johnson has continued to speak out. “It’s government dysfunction and bureaucracy at its worst.” Regarding the administration’s focus on antifa (which is not even an actual group or organization, as Trump’s own FBI director recently explained, contradicting his boss), he added: “The administration coming out and naming one group ‘terrorists’ and not saying anything about white nationalism? It’s ridiculous.”

Daily Kos’ own David Neiwert interviewed Johnson for a post last week that discussed the report made by whistleblower Brian Murphy, head of the intelligence office for DHS, on these failings. Johnson told Neiwert that there are “people in the department who I guess are reluctant to acknowledge that threat and do something about it. So they’re still dragging their feet.” He added: “The positive thing is that there are people higher in the department at higher levels who see that it’s a problem, that white supremacy is an issue and a national-security concern. But they’re being offset by these people that don’t want that to happen.”

Clearly, Johnson knows what the problem is. The problem is Donald Trump, and the people he has appointed to high positions in our government’s counterterrorism infrastructure. They are making us less safe because they consistently put politics above actually protecting Americans from threats that Trump himself, as Johnson noted above, is exacerbating.

And Johnson isn’t the only person—or even the only Republican—who’s saying so. Miles Taylor and Elizabeth Neumann, both high-ranking officials in DHS and past Republican voters, have recorded lengthy videos endorsing Joe Biden over Trump this fall. They’ve also been quoted by multiple media outlets describing the failings of the Trump administration to respond appropriately to the information their own experts in government have provided about the danger posed by white nationalist, right-wing terrorism.

Johnson has not formally endorsed Biden, although his previously cited comments speak for themselves.

As for what Biden will do, most importantly he will listen to facts. He rejects Trump’s approach to white supremacist extremism in every imaginable way—both in terms of tactics as well as rhetoric. On the one hand, Trump can’t stop himself from playing footsie with those thugs, as seen in such comments as his disgusting assertion that there were “very fine people on both sides” of a deadly 2017 neo-Nazi march in Charlottesville. Biden, on the other hand, put those exact words from Trump at the center of his announcement for president, starting his remarks with the words: “Charlottesville, Virginia.”

The former vice president cited what Trump said, the words that “stunned the world and shocked the conscience of this nation.” Biden added: “With those words, the President of the United States assigned a moral equivalence between those spreading hate and those with the courage to stand against it. And in that moment, I knew the threat to this nation was unlike any I'd ever seen in my lifetime.” Biden will never ignore or downplay the threat posed by white supremacist extremists. And he will do the opposite of feeding their hate—he will directly combat it.

In August 2019, after a white supremacist parroting Trump’s fearmongering regarding Latino immigrants murdered 20 people in an El Paso Walmart, Biden returned to this theme, proclaiming that the racist-in-chief’s rhetoric “almost legitimizes these people coming out from under the rocks. This is white nationalism. This is terrorism of a different sort, but it's still terrorism.”

More recently, after violence in Portland, Oregon, and Kenosha, Wisconsin, followed peaceful protests for Black lives, Biden made clear where he stands and called on his opponent to do what he has still not yet done in a forceful and thorough way: condemn extremism coming from the right wing.

The next day, the Democratic nominee continued: “This president long ago forfeited any moral leadership in this country. He can't stop the violence because for years he's fomented it.”

Even more recently, on Thursday night at a CNN Town Hall, Biden called out Trump one more time:

I've condemned every form of violence, no matter what the source is. No matter what the source is. The President is yet to condemn, as you've probably noticed, the far-right and the white supremacist, and those guys walking around with the AK-47s and not doing a damn thing about them.

I'm waiting for the day when he says I condemn all those white (supremacists).

On the Biden-Harris campaign website, separate from a detailed array of policies on gun violence more broadly, there are clear proposals to address white supremacist and anti-Semitic extremist hatred and violence. First, one has to identify that a problem exists in order to combat it, something Trump simply has not done.

A section entitled “The Rising Tide of Hate, Bigotry and Anti-Semitism under Donald Trump” notes that since Trump took office, America has witnessed a “historic increase” in hate crimes against Jews and other minority communities. Going further, Biden’s site explains that “Trump, in clear language and in code, dangerously encourages and emboldens xenophobia, prejudice, and hatred among white nationalists and anti-Semites,” adding that Biden will “call hate by its proper name, whatever its source, and condemn it—every time.”

In terms of action, the campaign outlines the following steps:

• Restore funding for a critical effort to address domestic extremism, which the Trump administration has cut.

• Work for a domestic terrorism law that respects free speech and civil liberties, while making the same commitment to root out domestic terrorism as we have to stopping international terrorism. Biden will appoint leadership at the Department of Justice who will prioritize the prosecution of hate crimes.

• Break the nexus between extremism and gun violence by enacting sensible gun control laws, banning assault weapons and high capacity magazines to get these weapons of war off our streets.

Additional specifics are discussed elsewhere on the campaign website and include society-wide education efforts and prioritizing prosecution of certain hate crimes, as well as increasing the severity of punishments for them.

President Charlottesville’s simple unwillingness to take action to protect Americans from the danger posed by the right-wing/white supremacist element of his own base belies any fearmongering claims his campaign makes about the impact a Biden victory would have on our safety. In reality, Biden would make the American people safer, because he would hire and take advice from people like Daryl Johnson and other professional counterterrorism experts whom right-wing hacks have driven out of government service. Having them back on the job in a Biden presidency should let all of us sleep better at night, and feel more safe during the day.

Ian Reifowitz is the author of The Tribalization of Politics: How Rush Limbaugh's Race-Baiting Rhetoric on the Obama Presidency Paved the Way for Trump (Foreword by Markos Moulitsas)

Surprising virtually nobody, the Republican Party, led by Donald Trump and Mitch McConnell, plan on capitalizing on the passing of Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, by being utter hypocrites. It isn’t a surprise that the Republican Party is filled with spineless, power hungry empty suits. It’s just depressing. Sen. Mitt Romney was one of the two or three Republican senators that some people speculated would safely pretend to have some kind of personal integrity and publicly acknowledge the anti-Democracy power-grab being performed by McConnell. 

The one thing that many people forgot about Sen. Mitt Romney is that he has no scruples. He’s a billionaire who wants to be president and that’s all he wants. That’s it. Whether or not he lies to himself about a Mormon God that loves him, his actions are incredibly amoral. Since Monday, as Republican senator after Republican senator began giving their truly pathetic excuses for how and why they would vote on a Supreme Court Justice to replace Ginsburg, after having screamed about not even voting on President Obama’s nomination of Merrick Garland for 293 days, “coward” and “cowards” began to slowly trend on Twitter. After Mitt announced his fake new principals those terms shot into the stratosphere.

Here is it simple and plain.

A sad reality check.

Here’s a fact.

This one really started to just take off. I wonder why?

And something to give to friends and family.

And let’s define “moderate.”

Not a real quote. But totally believable.

And this.

But finally, remember this, and pass this on to conservative friends and family.

Microsoft suffered a rare cyber-security lapse earlier this month when the company's IT staff accidentally left one of Bing's backend servers exposed online. From a report: The server was discovered by Ata Hakcil, a security researcher at WizCase, who exclusively shared his findings with ZDNet last week. According to Hakcil's investigation, the server is believed to have exposed more than 6.5 TB of log files containing 13 billion records originating from the Bing search engine. The Wizcase researcher was able to verify his findings by locating search queries he performed in the Bing Android app in the server's logs. Hakcil said the server was exposed online from September 10 to September 16, when he notified the Microsoft Security Response Center (MSRC), and the server was secured again with a password. Reached out for comment last week, Microsoft admitted to the mistake.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Let's get real about what Trump's eldest son is really up to here.

President Donald Trump claimed Monday at an Ohio campaign rally that the coronavirus poses little threat to young people and “affects virtually nobody,” as the number of Americans to have died from Covid-19 climbed toward 200,000 in the United States.

“It affects elderly people. Elderly people with heart problems and other problems. If they have other problems, that’s what it really affects,” Trump told supporters at an airport outside Toledo.

“That’s it. You know, in some states, thousands of people, nobody young. Below the age of 18, like, nobody,” he continued. “They have a strong immune system, who knows. You look — take your hat off to the young, because they have a hell of an immune system. But it affects virtually nobody. It’s an amazing thing.”

“By the way, open your schools, everybody,” Trump added. “Open your schools.”

Americans ages 0-17 make up roughly 8.4 percent of positive Covid-19 cases in the U.S., and roughly 107 Americans ages 0-18 have died from the disease, according to CDC data.

But there are likely much more asymptomatic infections among young people than have been detected, and the rate at which children are becoming infected is increasing — probably because of their return to school and other normal activities.

A recent study from the American Academy of Pediatrics and the Children’s Hospital Association found that more than 513,000 children in the U.S. have caught the coronvairus since the pandemic began, including 70,630 from Aug. 20-Sept. 3.

And a CDC report released last month indicated that weekly hospitalization rates had steadily increased among children.

The president’s latest remarks contradict the more dire assessments he told The Washington Post’s Bob Woodward in a series of taped interviews conducted earlier this year for the veteran journalist’s latest book on the Trump White House.

“Now, it’s turning out, it’s not just old people, Bob. Just today and yesterday, some startling facts came out. It’s not just older,” Trump told Woodward in a March 19 interview. “It’s plenty of young people.”

In that same interview — recorded at a time when the White House was still publicly dismissive of the coronavirus’ risk to Americans — Trump also said that he “wanted to always play … down” the virus and acknowledged: “I still like playing it down.”

The president and White House officials have insisted that he was merely trying to project calm in the pandemic’s early days, and Trump said in an ABC News town hall last week that he actually “up-played” the coronavirus “in terms of action.”

More than 6.8 million Americans have become infected with Covid-19 as of Tuesday morning, according to a Johns Hopkins University tracker, and more than 199,000 have died.

Joe Biden has pitched himself to voters as a “union man,” a son of Scranton, Pa., who respects the dignity of work and will defend organized labor if he wins the White House.

To rank-and-file members in some unions, especially the building trades, it doesn’t matter. They’re still firmly in Donald Trump’s camp.

Labor leaders have worked for months to sell their members on Biden, hoping to avoid a repeat of 2016 when Donald Trump outperformed among union members and won the White House. But despite a bevy of national union endorsements for Biden and years of what leaders call attacks on organized labor from the Trump administration, local officials in critical battleground states said support for Trump remains solid.

“We haven’t moved the needle here,” said Mike Knisley, executive secretary-treasurer with the Ohio State Building and Construction Trades Council, who estimated that about half of his members voted for Trump in 2016 and will do so again. “Even if given all the information that’s been put out there, all the facts — just pick an issue that the president has had his hands in — it doesn’t make a difference.”

Among members of North America’s Building Trades Unions, there is a dead heat in six swing states, with Biden receiving 48 percent of the vote and Trump 47 percent, according to an internal poll shared with POLITICO.

“He has a very, very, very solid foundation of our members,” said James Williams, a vice president of the International Union of Painters and Allied Trades, whose surveys of members painted a similar picture. “They connect with his messaging and a lot of the fear-mongering going all the way back to when he was first elected with, ‘Be afraid of the immigrant. The immigrant’s here to take your job.’ That resonated with our membership. They feel like their way of life and their way of living is under attack and without really understanding the dynamics at play. I mean, the immigrant worker is being abused by employers.”

Trump’s support in some unions could provide an opening for him in the Midwest, particularly in the key Rust Belt states that powered Trump’s victory in 2016 — Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin — where union voters have a sizable impact. Roughly one in six voters nationwide is either a union member or comes from a union household, according to a Gallup Poll earlier this month, and that number rises to more than one in four in states like Michigan.

Those voters, historically a bedrock of Democratic support, shifted away from the party in 2016, according to exit polls. Hillary Clinton won union voters by less than half as much as former President Barack Obama had four years earlier — and that swing alone may have been enough to account for her losses in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Michigan, one analysis found. Even if Biden takes back the White House, there could be far-reaching impacts on the Democratic Party and labor movement if that trendline persists.

The question this year is whether Biden can win those union members back, and by how much. Some labor leaders said there is cause for hope for Biden: While many Trump voters remain firm in their support, they said, Biden is winning over more of their members than Clinton did. They attributed that in part to Trump’s handling of the coronavirus pandemic.

“We’re seeing a whole different attitude toward Joe Biden than we saw mostly because Trump has a record of failure. Biden has a record of being there for us,” said Rick Bloomingdale, president of the Pennsylvania AFL-CIO. “It’s just a different feel out there. Obviously, we still have members who support Trump.”

Though it showed a virtual tie, the NABTU survey represented a seven-point drop for Trump from March, the first change for the president in two years, said Sean McGarvey, the union president. He attributed the change to Trump’s management of Covid-19, calling it “the greatest mistake of his presidency.”

“It’s going to be close among my members between Biden and President Trump, but there’s been dramatic change in the last six months,” McGarvey said, adding that if Trump had been more aggressive toward the coronavirus, “He’d be bulletproof. We wouldn’t even be talking about Joe Biden now.”

However, even as they praise the Democratic presidential nominee as a less-flawed candidate than Clinton, other union leaders said they fear there’s nothing they can say to the Trump supporters among their ranks to sway their opinion between now and November.

They said parts of Biden’s record, such as his past support for the North American Free Trade Agreement and the Trans-Pacific Partnership, hurt him, and that some members still look to the pre-pandemic economy under Trump as a high point.

“It doesn’t seem like there’s anybody changing their minds,” said Don Furko, president of the United Steelworkers Local 1557 in Clairton, Pennsylvania, who said the majority of his membership is backing Trump.

In northern Minnesota, local USW officials are working to educate members on steps Trump has taken to attack organized labor and encouraging them to vote for their jobs rather than on social issues like immigration, said John Arbogast, staff representative for District 11. But, he added, “you’re not going to change a Trumpster’s opinion.”

TJ Ducklo, Biden’s national press secretary, said the former vice president “sees this election as Park Avenue vs. Scranton — a choice between someone who has always stood up for working people and believes this country was built by unions, and Donald Trump, who punishes the middle class with tax cuts that only benefit him and his rich friends.”

Samantha Zager, deputy national press secretary for the Trump campaign, said, “Throughout his 50 years in politics, Biden has consistently put special interests ahead of American workers — including in his promise to shut the economy back down if he were elected — and that’s why President Trump is seeing strong support from union members.”

At a national level, most union officials have largely lined up behind Biden, appearing with him at events and acting as campaign surrogates. But they said their efforts to spread that enthusiasm have been hindered by the pandemic, which has severely limited organized labor’s in-person ground game.

With the exception of Unite Here, most unions have avoided door-knocking in an effort to prevent spreading the virus. Labor officials said some members don’t share their cell phone numbers, which is a challenge when their efforts to boost Biden have shifted to phone-banking, texting and other virtual work. So-called labor walks — organized labor’s term of art for canvassing — are largely no more.

Pat Eiding, president of the Philadelphia AFL-CIO, said trades leaders need to talk with their members more often about Biden to be effective. A refinery closed recently in the city and Trump supporters have misleadingly made some union workers believe he'll bring back the facilities, he said.

The evidence that member outreach works, he said, is the 2008 presidential election, when they spoke frequently with the rank-and-file at job sites as early as 5 a.m. and overcame prejudice in their unions against an African-American Democratic nominee.

“We said ... the man’s Black. But here's the issues: He’ll protect you and your jobs,’” he said. “And when we were able to go directly to members, instead of just being on a bully pulpit, we were able to get them to vote for Obama. And that was not an easy thing to do.”

Furko said the USW’s political team is knocking on doors, but it has not come to distribute materials and share information about Biden at the plant and union hall as they normally would due to the virus — they simply sent fliers instead.

“They know that they’re there if people want to come,” he said. “But I still have at least 2,000 pieces of paper on my table.”

In a sign of the tension among construction workers about Trump, at least one building trades union has not yet endorsed a candidate in the presidential race: the International Union of Operating Engineers.

“Everybody seems to be dancing on this thing. But if you go by my house, you’ll see on the lawn a Biden sign,” said Robert Heenan, second vice president of IUOE. Among rank-and-file members in Pennsylvania, where he is business manager of Local 542, he added, “I think a lot of them are going for Trump.”

The United Mine Workers of America have also held back an endorsement. Members turned against Clinton in 2016 when she said she would put coal miners out of business, and many are staying away from Biden because they fear he is also anti-coal, said Chuck Knisell, an international vice president of UMWA’s District 2.

“The biggest argument that I have from our membership is that this isn’t a blue-collar, working-class Democratic Party that my dad or mom was in,” Knisell said. “It’s morphed into something different.”

But within more liberal unions, especially those with large numbers of Black and Latino members, leaders report major excitement for Biden — which could potentially offset GOP gains in the building trades as well as other moderate- and conservative-leaning unions. Public-sector unions in major cities likewise tend to be a font of Democratic support.

Mary Kay Henry, president of the Service Employees International Union, said 70 percent of her rank-and-file members backed Clinton. This year, she said, at least 80 percent are supporting Biden.

“And his pick of Kamala Harris has probably moved the needle — we’re just going back into the field with a poll — to 90 percent,” she said. “Our members are on fire for the Biden-Harris ticket.”

Union officials said there is also some evidence that Biden may be making inroads among another camp of rank-and-file members: those who disliked both candidates in 2016 and chose to vote third party.

Labor leaders have zeroed in on those members as the most persuadable this year. Some estimate that third-party voters in the union ranks were as big a problem for Clinton as the voters who flipped to Trump, so winning that cohort alone could give Biden a significant boost.

“Going into this election, those folks who sort of felt like they couldn’t vote for Trump in 2016, but really weren’t enthusiastic about Clinton, really understand what’s at stake now,” said Michael Podhorzer, political director with the AFL-CIO. “I think that’s something of a bump that can be counted on.”

Ryan Bennett, who’s in charge of roughly 800 active and 200 retired plumbers and pipefitters as part of UA Local 174 in Coopersville, Mich., said he’s starting to hear from members who view the past three-plus years of the Trump administration as a series of broken promises for organized labor.

“They’ve all seen that none of that has come to fruition,” Bennett said, referring to Trump’s pledges to bring back manufacturing jobs and overhaul the country’s infrastructure. “A lot of those members that were in the middle are going to end up on Joe Biden’s side.”

It's been 130 days since the House passed the $3.4 trillion HEROES Act, which Sen. Mitch McConnell has refused to take up, and it's eight days until the government runs out of funding with the end of the fiscal year. Oh, and the election is in 41 days.

The House is scheduled to vote today on the "clean" continuing resolution (CR) introduced Monday. Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Democrats have always made it a big deal to be the grown-ups fighting to keep government. So maybe this isn't the year to do that. Maybe this is a year for Democrats to take a hard line on a potential government shutdown. Maybe, just maybe, they could save the Affordable Care Act by doing that. If they attached a repeal of the individual mandate and passed it, the whole rationale for the Supreme Court case would be moot. There's leverage against the Senate to make that happen. Equally as important, it would force Senate Republicans to vote on saving health care. That's always helpful.

As it stands, Trump gets his nominee, the case gets heard on Nov. 10, and that's that. As soon as a Trump court rules, it's history. One way or another, Congress and the new president have to come back next year to save the ACA. Might as well give this a try. And put Republicans on the spot.

There's leverage now as McConnell would much rather be spending the next eight days lining up Trump's Supreme Court nominee's confirmation. He would much rather be distracting the nation from the official 200,000 dead people his negligence on the coronavirus contributed to. He would really like to avoid a government shutdown. His whole conference fervently wants to avoid that. They want to get the SCOTUS nominee done, fund the government, and get out of town to campaign.

Pelosi doesn't have to give them those things. There's an awful lot she could be asking for in this CR because she does have a lot of leverage right now. Yes, her members want to get home and campaign too, but guess what? The House Democratic majority isn't in jeopardy. The rest of the nation is.

Attorney General Bill Barr has gotten entirely too comfortable making up new rules to justify trampling all over the Constitution, and Monday was no exception. Grousing that Democrats had been "scolding and insulting" during Barr’s last appearance before the House Judiciary Committee, the Justice Department is now declining to make witnesses available from the department’s Civil Division, the Bureau of Prisons, and the U.S. Marshals Service.

"Rather than attempt to obtain information from the Department that would assist the Committee in recommending legislation to the House, many Members of the majority devoted their time entirely towards scolding and insulting the Attorney General," Assistant Attorney General Stephen Boyd wrote in response to a request from House Judiciary Committee Chair Jerry Nadler. 

"In what can only be viewed as a coordinated effort to muzzle the Attorney General the Members repeatedly invoked the phrase, ‘reclaiming my time,’ which they employed more than 30 times when the Attorney General tried to respond. All told, when the Attorney General tried to address the Committee's questions, he was interrupted and silenced in excess of 70 times."

Gasp—interrupted in excess of 70 times! Horrors. The all-too mild-mannered and exceedingly reasonable GOP minority would never interrupt a witness in order to simply "air grievances," as Boyd put it. 

The House Judiciary panel was seeking to interview the head of the Civil Rights Division, Assistant Attorney General Eric Dreiband, Bureau of Prisons Director Michael Carvajal, and U.S. Marshals Service Director Donald Washington.

But Boyd proceeded to fabricate a new imaginary standard that lawmaker questions, not simply the investigation itself, must serve a "legitimate legislative purpose."

"As the Supreme Court recently reiterated, the purpose of a hearing by the House is to obtain the information necessary to legislate 'wisely and effectively,' and the questioning is required to serve a legitimate legislative purpose," Boyd wrote. That's ludicrous. There's no such “legitimate” purpose standard applied to individual lawmakers' questions. And who the hell is Barr to decide whether questions are serving a legitimate purpose, especially when he was the witness. According to Barr's new standard, witnesses going forward get to determine which questions are and aren't legitimate in the course of a lawmakers' inquiry. Unless, of course, those witnesses don't even show up at all, which is the case here.

After making up a new standard to deny the panel witnesses, Boyd then helpfully offered that the Justice Department might be willing to work with the committee to make future witnesses available "should the Committee commit to doing so in an appropriate and productive manner."

To reiterate, Barr is now the subjective arbiter of what's legitimate, appropriate, and productive conduct for congressional lawmakers seeking to perform their constitutionally prescribed oversight duties. 

(L-R) Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY), President Donald Trump, and House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA). | Erin Schaff/Pool/Getty Images

Compared to center-right parties in developed democracies, the GOP is dangerously far from normal.

The Republican Supreme Court power grab after Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s death should be shocking, given the naked hypocrisy involved. The only reason it isn’t is that we’ve come to expect this from Republicans — and not just under Trump.

Republicans shut down the government in the 1990s and impeached President Bill Clinton over far less than what Trump has done in office. Under Obama, they fanned the flames of birtherism, held the global economy hostage to force spending cuts, and elevated obstructionism to the level of governing principle.

At the state level, they have rewritten electoral rules to block Democrats from voting and seized power from Democratic governors after they have won elections. Just this week, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis proposed a bill that would effectively criminalize anti-police violence protests — and protect drivers who ran over protesters with their cars.

This kind of radicalism is not at all normal — at least, when compared to center-right parties in other advanced democracies.

Experts on comparative politics say the GOP is an extremist outlier, no longer belonging in the same conversation with “normal” right-wing parties like Canada’s Conservative Party (CPC) or Germany’s Christian Democratic Party (CDU). Instead, it more closely resembles more extreme right parties — like Viktor Orbán’s Fidesz in Hungary or Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s AKP in Turkey — that have actively worked to dismantle democracy in their own countries.

The Supreme Court saga can’t be considered in isolation. It is symptomatic of a profound brokenness in American politics, one party dragging us away from the developed-world political standards we aspire to and towards a fight over the most basic of democratic principles: whether power should be shared. And that’s a disaster for American democracy.

“The only way we move forward is when Republicans reform, and cease to be an increasingly authoritarian white nationalist party,” says Steven Levitsky, a Harvard professor and the co-author (with Daniel Ziblatt) of How Democracies Die.

The Republican Party really is different

Levitsky’s views are not at all an outlier.

A 2019 survey of nearly 2,000 experts on political parties from around the world asked respondents to rate political parties on two axes: the extent to which they are committed to basic democratic principles and their commitment to protecting rights for ethnic minorities. The higher the number, the more anti-democratic and intolerant the party is.

The following chart shows the results of the survey for all political parties in the OECD, a group of wealthy democratic states, with the two major American parties highlighted in red. The GOP is an extreme outlier compared to mainstream conservative parties in other wealthy democracies, like Canada’s CPC or Germany’s CDU.

Its closest peers are, almost uniformly, radical right and anti-democratic parties. This includes Turkey’s AKP (a regime that is one of the world’s leading jailers of journalists), and Poland’s PiS (which has threatened dissenting judges with criminal punishment). Experts rate the GOP as substantially more hostile to minority rights than Hungary’s Fidesz, an authoritarian party that has made demonization of Muslim immigrants into a pillar of its official ideology.

Pippa Norris/Global Parties Survey

In short, there is a consensus among comparative politics scholars that the Republican Party is one of the most anti-democratic political parties in the developed world. It is one of a handful of once-centrist parties that has, in recent years, taken a turn toward the extreme.

“The transformation of the GOP is in line with other transformations of conservative into far-right parties, like Fidesz in Hungary,” said Cas Mudde, an expert on right-wing politics at the University of Georgia.

Over the past decade and a half, Republicans have shown disdain for procedural fairness and a willingness to put the pursuit of power over democratic principles. They have implemented measures that make it harder for racial minorities to vote, render votes from Democratic-leaning constituencies irrelevant, and relentlessly blocked Democratic efforts to conduct normal functions of government.

According to Jennifer McCoy, a political scientist at Georgia State University, these measures follow common patterns seen among populist authoritarians who initially win power by electoral means. They tend to pass changes to the electoral system aimed at ensuring “one party dominates government” while also working to marginalize or control “accountability institutions” like the judiciary or oversight watchdogs.

“Many of these leaders are able to do so when they first win a clear majority and then begin to change rules or the constitution to further entrench their advantage and get to supermajorities,” McCoy tells me.

For Republicans, the process of moving toward anti-democracy has taken decades rather than a single election. There was never a single unified GOP plan to lock out Democrats, akin to the way that Fidesz intentionally remade the Hungarian political system after winning the country’s 2010 election. There is no authoritarian plot behind the GOP’s recent maneuvers, and no secret plan to end elections or declare martial law.

What there is, instead, is systematic disinterest in behaving according to the democratic rules of the game. The GOP views the Democrats as so illegitimate and dangerous that they are willing to employ virtually any tactic that they can think of in order to entrench their own advantage. This is perhaps the party’s core animating ideology, at every level: we must win because the Democrats cannot be given power.

You can see the effects of this idea most clearly on the state level, where most of the action of election administration happens in American systems. In a forthcoming book chapter with Murat Somer, a scholar at Turkey’s Koç University, McCoy describes clear evidence that “Republican-led states [are] more likely to support anti-democratic measures, including failing to respond to democratic mandates from the public, curbing political participation, using policy to tilt the electoral playing field in one’s favor, and rejecting progressive policies approved by municipalities.”

For example, Republicans won about 50 percent of the US House vote in North Carolina in 2018’s election. That translated into 70 percent of House seats due to heavily gerrymandered districts. Wisconsin Democrats won every statewide election in 2018 but did not win majorities in either chamber of the state legislature. While Democrats are also at a disadvantage due to concentration in urban areas, gerrymanders share much of the blame.

North Carolina Rep. David Lewis, who chaired the state redistricting committee that put together a map so racially contorted that it was struck down in court in 2016, openly professed the power politics behind extreme gerrymandering in a speech on the statehouse floor.

“I think electing Republicans is better than electing Democrats,” he explained. “So I drew this map in a way to help foster what I think is better for the country.”

Lewis is notable mostly for his unusual honesty. Republicans believe they ought to win elections, and are doing everything in the power to make that the case — including changing the rules to stack the playing field in the favor. The effect is a party committed to an anti-democratic creed outside the norm of advanced Western democracies that insists that it is the true guardian of American democracy.

Any effort to fix American politics needs to be clear-eyed on this point: The Republican Party is so beyond what’s normal in a healthy democracy that some kind of radical pro-democracy reform is required — be it ending the filibuster, court-packing, DC and Puerto Rico statehood, a new Voting Rights Act, or all of above — to try and turn things around.

“The Republicans pose too much of an authoritarian threat,” Harvard’s Levitsky tells me, “to simply go on with business as usual.”

---

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Some makers of smart speakers, video doorbells and other hardware hit roadblocks buying key ads in search results on Amazon; gadgets made by e-commerce giant get edge. From a report: Amazon.com is limiting the ability of some competitors to promote their rival smart speakers, video doorbells and other devices on its dominant e-commerce platform, according to Amazon employees and executives at rival companies and advertising firms. The strategy gives an edge to Amazon's own devices, which the company regards as central to building consumer loyalty. It puts at a disadvantage an array of gadget makers such as Arlo that rely on Amazon's site for a significant share of their sales. The e-commerce giant routinely lets companies buy ads that appear inside search results, including searches for competing products. Indeed, search advertising is a lucrative part of the company's business. But Amazon won't let some of its own large competitors buy sponsored-product ads tied to searches for Amazon's own devices, such as Fire TV, Echo Show and Ring Doorbell, according to some Amazon employees and others familiar with the policy. Roku which makes devices that stream content to TVs, can't even buy such Amazon ads tied to its own products, some of these people said. In some cases, Amazon has barred competitors from selling certain devices on its site entirely. The policies show the conflicts between Amazon's large e-commerce platform for sellers and its role as a product manufacturer in its own right. While traditional retailers buy inventory from manufacturers and resell it to consumers, limiting the number of vendors they can work with, Amazon's platform has more than a million businesses and entrepreneurs selling directly to Amazon's shoppers. Amazon accounts for 38% of online shopping in the U.S. and roughly half of all online shopping searches in the U.S. start on Amazon.com. "News flash: retailers promote their own products and often don't sell products of competitors," said Amazon spokesman Drew Herdener in a written statement. "Walmart refuses to sell [Amazon brands] Kindle, Fire TV, and Echo. Shocker. In the Journal's next story they will uncover gambling in Las Vegas."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Republican Sen. Kelly Loeffler, who faces several opponents from both parties in Georgia’s Nov. 3 all-party primary, is out with another commercial where she seeks to burnish her right-wing credentials, but this time, she does so by favorably comparing herself to that icon of modern conservatism, Attila the Hun. Reporter Ben Jacobs may have put it best when he tweeted, “Comparing yourself favorably to a pagan warlord best known for ravaging Western Christendom seems like a bold move.”

The commercial begins ordinarily enough, with a woman telling the guy who is presumably supposed to be her husband, “Did you know Kelly Loeffler was ranked the most conservative senator in America?” to which he replies, “Yep, she’s more conservative than Attila the Hun.” The scene then shifts to a throne room as a seated Attila growls to a servant, who translates his command as, “Fight China, got it.” (Attila did not fight China.)

Attila’s servant continues with the to-do-list of, “Attack big government,” which is an interesting way to describe Attila butchering numerous people and almost bringing the Western Roman Empire to its knees. Attila issues one more command, which the translator reads out as, “Eliminate the liberal scribes … Uh oh.” But just in case the audience is meant to think that even Loeffler thinks this casual joke about mass murder is going too far, an unseen narrator jumps in, “More conservative than Attila the Hun. Kelly Loeffler, 100% Trump voting record.”

The commercial left plenty of observers incredulous, including Rep. Doug Collins, who is Loeffler’s main intra-party foe. His spokesperson responded, “Kelly thinks conservatives are grunting, filthy, mass-murdering open borders atheist polygamists. She lives in a seriously warped palace with an odd view of the peasants.”

Loeffler’s ads came the same day that pastor Raphael Warnock, who is the favorite candidate of national Democrats, released a survey from GBAO to argue that he’s well positioned in the Nov. 3 all-party primary. The poll finds Loeffler in the lead with 29%, while Warnock edged out Collins 25-19 for the second spot in an all-but assured January runoff; two other Democrats, businessman Matt Lieberman and former U.S. Attorney Ed Tarver, take 11% and 5%, respectively. This sample also finds Joe Biden ahead 49-46.  

The memo also includes data from an unreleased early July survey to reinforce its case that Warnock, who began running ads a month ago, has been gaining ground. That poll found Collins in the lead with 26%, while Loeffler outpaced Lieberman 21-19. Warnock was in fourth with just 16%, while Tarver was at 9%.

We also got another new survey from the British firm Redfield & Wilton Strategies, but while it has the top four candidates in the same order as GBAO’s newer poll (Tarver is not mentioned in the writeup), it finds a tighter race to reach the runoff. Loeffler is in first with 26%, while Warnock leads Collins 21-19 for the crucial second place spot and Lieberman isn’t too far behind with 15%. The sample also finds Donald Trump ahead 46-45.

We can't let an Attila the Hun win this race. Please chip in $3 today to send Raphael Warnock to the Senate!

Don’t assume Mitt Romney will stick it to Donald Trump and try to block the president’s Supreme Court nominee.

After the death of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the Utah Republican finds himself at another legacy-defining crossroads. He must decide whether to support an effort to install Trump’s third Supreme Court justice and shift the balance of the court to the right for decades to come, or oppose the move on principle and hinder the plans of Trump and Majority Leader Mitch McConnell.

With two of his Senate Republican colleagues lining up against a preelection appointment, a Romney defection would evenly split the 53-47 GOP Senate and one more, however unlikely, would defeat the GOP push. With the pressure looming, Romney is showing little of his hand.

Since Ginsburg’s death on Friday, he’s declined to address the looming vacancy even as the vast majority of his conference gets on board with a speedy confirmation. He told reporters Monday he would not comment before Tuesday's weekly party meeting and a chance to discuss the issue with his colleagues.

His reticence is not altogether a surprise: Romney is on the party’s whip team and prefers to speak to his colleagues before making a significant decision or announcement. And many Republicans think he will get on board.

“This is a lot different than impeachment,” said Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.). “Romney is from a state that is very religious and strongly pro-life. I think he was elected to support a nominee like that. … I would be very surprised if Romney doesn’t vote for the nominee.”

Romney has already made lonely political stands in the Trump era. He won’t support Trump for president and was the sole Republican vote to oust him from office during this winter’s impeachment trial. But that doesn’t make Romney an automatic vote against Trump’s appointee. And his staff has pushed back against the suggestion he’s leading the charge to block the pick.

People on both sides of the debate are giving Romney a wide berth. Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine), who opposes filling the seat before the election, said she’s speaking to fellow senators about how to handle the vacancy — but has not spoken to Romney. Sen. Rick Scott (R-Fla.), who once criticized Romney in the run-up to impeachment, declined to weigh in on the Utah Republican’s role in the next Supreme Court nomination.

“He’s a principled person. And he’s going to make his decision on what he thinks is right,” said Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.).

“I admire Sen. Romney’s character and his independent streak, his willingness to weigh things carefully and his careful consideration of matters of precedent and consequence,” added Sen. Chris Coons (D-Del.). “This is a moment of great consequence.”

Romney’s short Senate career has been punctuated by big moments of distancing himself from the president: marching in a Black Lives Matter protest and penning an op-ed before he even took his Senate seat vowing to push back against Trump when needed. He also occasionally criticizes Trump’s rhetoric, but he’s careful not to get dragged into a back-and-forth with the president on Twitter or elsewhere.

Yet the party’s 2012 presidential nominee has also largely backed Trump’s appointments and much of his agenda. His voting record is a regular reminder that he’s still a conservative, which his GOP colleagues hope is a sign that he will divorce his differences with Trump from the monumental opportunity the conservative movement sees before it.

“I really don’t know what he’ll do,” said Sen. Mike Braun (R-Ind.). “I think he’s probably wrestling with it just like he has on other issues.”

Romney’s opinion may not be decisive: He’d need one other Republican senator to join him and Sens. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) and Collins in opposition to derail McConnell’s hopes of a swift confirmation. For now, that would take a surprise defection after vulnerable Sen. Cory Gardner (R-Colo.) backed McConnell's strategy.

But should Romney be the only other Republican to join the Senate GOP’s moderate bloc, it would invite the explosive scenario of Vice President Mike Pence breaking a 50-50 vote on the Senate floor for a Supreme Court nominee, perhaps just days before Election Day.

Romney’s decision may do a lot to illustrate what kind of senator he will be as he finishes his first two years in the chamber. Romney has little of the baggage of his colleagues over past Supreme Court fights or battles over precedent. At a 2018 debate, Romney said Senate Republicans’ blockade of President Barack Obama’s Supreme Court nominee, Merrick Garland, set no new standard and did not say how he would handle an election-year confirmation under Trump.

Conservative advocacy groups are keeping a close eye on Romney. The Judicial Crisis Network announced Monday that it was pouring $2.2 million into ads boosting the effort to fill the seat. The targeted states are home to vulnerable GOP incumbents, except one: Romney’s Utah.

But Romney is insulated from immediate political ramifications. His term isn’t up until 2024, and that gives Romney significant freedom to make his own way.

With the filibuster gutted on all nominations after recent rules changes by both parties, Senate Democrats are powerless to stop Trump’s appointment on their own. But many enjoy good relationships with Romney and are counting on him to take yet another stand against Trump.

“He’s shown extraordinary courage before,” said Senate Minority Whip Dick Durbin (D-Ill.). “I hope he does again.”

The thing about Sen. John Cornyn is that he’s just as god-awful as junior senator Ted Cruz—he’s just better at trying to hide it. Like Cruz, he’s opposed bipartisan legislation that would put undocumented immigrants on a path to citizenship. That opposition has included denying legalization to first responders like Houston paramedic Jesus Contreras, a Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) recipient who helped save lives in the aftermath of Hurricane Harvey. Cornyn wants to deport people like Contreras—that’s just a fact.

But now that he’s facing a formidable challenger in Democratic nominee MJ Hegar—along with Texas being seriously in play in the 2020 presidential race—Cornyn’s running a Spanish-language ad featuring a jaw-dropping claim that he’s actually supported legalization for young undocumented immigrants. “On the Senate floor, Cornyn has had numerous opportunities to vote yes” on the DREAM Act, immigrant rights advocacy group America’s Voice (AV) noted. But “[e]very time, he’s voted no.” 

Texas needs a U.S. senator who will support undocumented immigrant youth. Donate now to help make that happen.

The Spanish-language ad, entitled “Tranquilo,” or “Calm,” starts with a wide shot of the U.S. Capitol as silhouettes of people arguing and screaming at each other fill the screen. It then segues into a shot of a seated Cornyn serenely looking back into the camera. You see, he’s the calm amid Washington’s infighting, and he’s the one who’s actually been busy working to solve problems, thank you very much. “And while Senator Cornyn is in favor of secure borders,” the narrator claims, “he firmly supports the legalization of Dreamers.” 

A lie in Spanish is no different from a lie in English, and Cornyn, dear friends, is a mentiroso: “Although Cornyn voted for the DREAM Act in 2003, he subsequently voted to block its passage—once in 2007 and again in 2010—arguing that it would lead to ‘chain migration’ and widespread fraud,” San Antonio Current reports. “Cornyn blasted the latter effort to pass the act as a ‘political football in a political stunt.’” 

The senior senator from Texas would know a thing or two about political stunts. When the Senate was debating a historic comprehensive immigration reform package back in 2013, Cornyn filmed  an exploitative video at the unmarked graves of migrants who died attempting to cross the U.S./Mexico border. Cornyn feigned concern in the video, but his goal was to derail the bill at all costs. In the end, the package passed the Senate by a historic and bipartisan margin—and without Cornyn’s support. In fact, Cornyn’s status as the Lucy-pulling-the-football of the Senate is so infamously known among those who work in the immigration world that his shenanigans have a nickname: the “Cornyn Con.”

AV notes one of his tricks back in 2007: “Cornyn voted against the comprehensive immigration reform bill that included Dream Act provisions even though it was drafted by his partner at the time, Senator John Kyl (R-AZ) and supported by President Bush,” the organization said. “Just after helping to defeat the bill, Cornyn had the audacity to deliver a speech on the Senate floor about the need to pass immigration reform.” Seriously.

Not much has changed over a decade later. House Democrats passed legalization that would put young immigrants, including DACA recipients like Jesus Contreras, onto a path to citizenship over a year ago, but Cornyn has done nothing to pressure Republican Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell to allow the bill to go to the floor. Cornyn has a particular responsibility to act here: His state is home to the second largest population of DACA recipients in the nation. It’s on him to act. He hasn’t.

"Cornyn’s claim that he strongly supports the legalization of Dreamers is a bald-faced lie," AV founder and executive director Frank Sharry told San Antonio Current. "When you look up the phrase 'two-faced politician,' you’ll find a photo of John Cornyn." Daniel Briones, a Texas resident and DACA recipient, called Cornyn’s ad “completely false” in an AV release received by Daily Kos.

“Sen. Cornyn has had multiple chances of supporting legislation to protect Dreamers but instead he has decided to vote against us,” he said. “Unlike Cornyn, we immigrant youth are committed to continue to fight for a permanent solution that protects us without harming or deporting others. In Texas, we need a senator that is committed to support legislation that would give permanent solutions to immigrants and not use us as bargaining chips for more enforcement.”

Cornyn isn’t remotely concerned about immigrant families, including those who call his state home. But he’s suddenly very concerned about his job—and he’s clearly saying anything to keep it.

By Fatma Khaled

Fleeing Mexico in 2012 after receiving death threats due to advocating for LGBTQ+ rights in the country, Mexican transgender activist Ishalaa Ortega was granted asylum in the U.S. on the basis of persecution on account of political opinion, gender identity, and sexual orientation. However, others like Ortega with similar asylum claims could now find their claims denied if the new asylum rules proposed by President Donald Trump’s administration go into effect.

The changes proposed in June could impact over 330,000 affirmative asylum-seekers with pending applications with United States Citizen and Immigration Services (USCIS). The rule also redefines the claim of granting asylum “for individuals in a particular social group,” which could directly impact individuals seeking asylum on the grounds of persecution on account of sexual orientation.

Over 87,000 public comments were submitted on July 15 by organizations including HIAS (an immigrant resettlement organization) and Immigration Equality arguing that the proposed changes will abolish the asylum system.

“We are not invading the country, we are looking for a place to live in dignity,” said Ortega.

Although Ortega was successfully granted asylum in 2016 primarily on the basis of persecution on account of political opinion for being a LGBTQ+ activist, such a claim will be deemed weak if argued in an asylum case under the new proposed rules.

“The restrictions under the new rule are essentially made such that you have to be proposing the overthrow of your government for example in order to qualify for asylum on the basis of political opinion, which is obviously going to exclude a huge number of people,” said Neela Ghoshal, senior researcher of the LGBT Rights Program at Human Rights Watch.

Ortega decided to seek asylum when the death threats she received over the phone turned into actual threats when she was approached by a stranger who threatened to kill her. Her life was in grave danger after she rallied and protested against the anti-LGBTQ+ agenda presented by Fernando Castro Trenti, who was running for the governor’s office of Baja, California at the time.

Presenting documentation proving that she was threatened because of her political opinion on LGBTQ+ matters was a winning argument for Ortega, but she also argued that she was seeking asylum on the basis of her sexual orientation and gender identity. Ortega presented cases of activists who were killed in Mexico because they were either LGBTQ+ or allies of the community to demonstrate how homophobia and transphobia were endemic in Mexico, and “to prove that all my activism was exactly to change the mindset of a culture.”

The new proposed rules for asylum may mean that what worked for Ortega may not work for the thousands of asylum applicants who, according to the American Immigration Council June report, have not yet been scheduled for an initial interview. Their cases could be delayed for up to four years.

The overall context in which the threats or risk originally manifested serves as solid evidence that the asylum applicant was under persecution. However, Ghoshal explained such evidence could be excluded under the new regulation, which could block a claim on the grounds that it allegedly advances stereotypes about a cultural context that may have contributed to homophobic violence.

“They up the level of the standard of prosecution itself and say that a threat needs to have happened or is happening [and is] not just verbal,” explained Bridget Crawford, legal director at Immigration Equality. “If someone threatens to kill you, do you have to wait for it to happen until you flee?”

Blocking asylum claims that are made on the basis of cultural context could also impact women hoping to flee from their homes, especially in areas where domestic violence goes unpunished.

“Because gender-based claims are no longer valid to prove persecution, lawyers may now try to navigate provisions that have not been used to bolster a woman’s claim, including for example religion, race, or sexuality,” said Cynthia Katz, supervising attorney at HIAS.

Gender and domestic violence claims have previously won asylum for petitioners. “T”—a 32-year-old who asked to be identified only by her first name’s initial—fled Honduras as a single mother to escape her husband’s physical abuse and build a safer life for herself and her two boys in the U.S. She was granted asylum in 2018. For others like T, however, that pathway may be closed under the new proposed rules.

Katz added that lawyers know that an attack on a woman is because of her gender, but the argument from the immigration court boils down to the fact that they are not going to open up the gates of litigation to everyone, which will challenge practitioners to be thorough in every claim they make.

An already “broken” system

The U.S. asylum system is already troubled without these new regulations, lawyers and experts argue. The Trump administration has long been dismantling the asylum system to make it difficult for individuals to claim credible fear of persecution, particularly along lines of gender-based violence and domestic violence. In June 2018, Attorney General Jeff Sessions issued a decision that denied asylum to individuals who use domestic violence or gang violence as criteria to support their claims, making it harder for victims escaping gender-based violence to find safety.

“The mere fact that a country may have problems effectively policing certain crimes – such as domestic violence or gang violence – or that certain populations are more likely to be victims of crime, cannot itself establish an asylum claim,” the Sessions ruling read.

In the aftermath of Sessions’ ruling, Katz observed that "[the] courts have been stepping away from domestic violence claims since."

Additionally, as of July 2020, the backlog of pending cases in U.S. immigration courts recorded an all-time high of 1.2 million cases. Individuals who applied for asylum waited for more than 930 days to be approved, according to the American Immigration Council. For both Ortega and T, waiting in limbo for three to four years to get their cases approved was not the only hurdle in a system that Ortega describes as “broken.”

Both women struggled with obtaining and maintaining a work permit while their cases were pending. Ortega, who received her permit two years after applying for asylum, experienced homelessness for a while and was covering some of her expenses by performing in drag shows in New York. T, who previously worked as a kitchen helper and was studying to become a nurse in Honduras, was rejected from jobs in which employers feared she would be unable to renew her permit—which she received eight months after applying for asylum—if her case continued to be pending in court or was denied altogether.

The anti-immigrant sentiment evident in American society and in officers in detention centers is another layer of emotional stress that both women had to endure while their cases were processed. Ortega was apprehended by border patrol officers at the northern U.S-Mexico border. She said they made her “feel like a clown in front of everybody” as they laughed at her. Three days later, she was sent to Otay Mesa Detention Center in San Diego, California.

Ortega stayed for 40 days at the detention facility, where she was asked if she identified as LGBTQ+ and was later given the choice to either stay in solitary confinement or the men’s facility. She chose the latter. Two weeks later, Ortega was forced to work washing dishes or serving people food for eight to 12 hours per day in return for $1 a day.

“I was enslaved and being treated as a prisoner without committing a crime,” said Ortega, who now works as a case manager at a community health center and is pursuing a political science degree.

For T, working as a woman of color while waiting for her approval was challenging. During her work as a carpenter on some construction sites in New York, she was always referred to as “the Black one.” Workers on site would say “get one of the Black ones to do this,” referring to her this way instead of calling her by name.

While both the Department of Justice and Department of Homeland Security are reviewing and analyzing the comments without determining a date for the final rule, Crawford is currently advising her clients to apply for asylum as soon as possible amid the layer of uncertainty added by the pandemic.

“I am just asking God to please touch President Trump’s heart to show compassion to people,” said T. “The majority of immigrants came here to escape a miserable situation they were living in their own country.”

Fatma Khaled is a New York-based multimedia journalist whose reporting focuses on politics, gender injustice, mental health, and immigration. A graduate of Columbia Journalism School, she had previous experience covering some parts of the Middle East with focus on human rights, regional politics, and business news. 

Prism is a BIPOC-led nonprofit news outlet that centers the people, places and issues currently underreported by our national media. Through our original reporting, analysis, and commentary, we challenge dominant, toxic narratives perpetuated by the mainstream press and work to build a full and accurate record of what’s happening in our democracy. Follow us on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram.

Katharine McPhee, the Idol runner-up and Smash actress now married to mega-producer David Foster, is being called out for her hypocrisy in courting an LGBTQ audience while donating to Senate Republicans.

Jezebel read her the riot act after finding a self-employed singer named Katharine McPhee had made  “two separate donations in 2020 to the National Republican Senatorial Committee, or NRSC, a committee focused on electing Republican senators and maintaining the GOP’s majority in the Senate.”

Wrote Jezebel: “Fans of McPhee would probably be crushed to learn that she supports the more overtly and consistently racist, homophobic, misogynistic, imperialist, and transphobic of the United States’ two major political parties—particularly all of the gay fans that she has actively courted for years now on social media, calling them “my gay boys” and doing her best to stay fluent in the online gay parlance du jour, or at least hiring someone who is.”

The post Katharine McPhee Called Out for Donating To Republicans While Courting a Gay Fanbase appeared first on Towleroad Gay News.

At his campaign rally at the Toledo Express Airport on Monday, Donald Trump told Ohioans that the coronavirus, which has killed 200,000 Americans under his watch, “affects virtually nobody.”

Tell that to the kids and loved ones of the 200k people who have died. https://t.co/iADValJNad

— Katie Hill (@KatieHill4CA) September 22, 2020

Said Trump “You know, In some states, thousands of people—nobody young. Below the age of 18, like, nobody. They have a strong immune system, who knows? You look…Take your hat off to the young, because they have a hell of an immune system. But it affects virtually nobody. It’s an amazing thing.”

The post Trump Says COVID-19, Which Has Killed 200,000 Americans Under His Watch, ‘Affects Virtually Nobody’ — WATCH appeared first on Towleroad Gay News.

The well-deserved tributes to Ruth Bader Ginsburg in the wake of her death justifiably focus on her transformational role in ending centuries of legal discrimination against women.

Starting in 1971, Ginsburg won five cases before the Supreme Court based on the equal protection clause of the Constitution’s 14th Amendment. Those cases led the court to end blatant discriminate against women.

She was not the first woman who attempted to use the 14th Amendment to achieve equality. Yet her legal theories, determination and brilliant litigation strategy won, where others before her had failed.

It is less known that Ginsburg’s victories on behalf of women also provided a roadmap and legal precedent for ending legal discrimination against the LGBTQ community.

Unequal protection

The 14th Amendment was enacted after the Civil War, in 1868, to give formerly enslaved Black people and their progeny equal protection under the law. It states, in part: “No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; … nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.”

Women’s rights advocates immediately tried to use the 14th Amendment’s broad language to gain rights. At the time that the 14th Amendment was enacted, women could not own property or vote and were considered their husbands’ property.

They focused on the 14th Amendment’s broadly worded “privileges and immunities” clause as a way to gain some form of legal protection. Because that clause had no fixed meaning, it could be interpreted, they believed, in a way that advanced women’s rights.

So, in 1872, Myra Bradwell sued the state of Illinois after being denied a license to practice law because she was a woman. Ruling against her, the Illinois Supreme Court held that Bradwell did not legally exist separately from her husband, and that the privilege and immunities clause did not require the state to allow her or any other woman to pursue a professional career.

Similarly, in 1872, activists, including Susan B. Anthony, invoked the 14th Amendment to demand the right to vote. Anthony and several others were arrested after they voted in the November election. At Anthony’s trial, the judge said “The 14th Amendment gives no right to a woman to vote, and the voting by Miss Anthony was in violation of the law.”

One woman in Missouri, Virginia Minor, sued when she was refused the right to even register to vote. She argued before the U.S. Supreme Court – through her lawyer husband – that the 14th Amendment guaranteed her the right to vote as a “privilege and immunity.”

She lost.

Credit where it’s due

A century later, Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s work transformed American jurisprudence for women. To do this, she also invoked the 14th Amendment. But this time, she focused on the amendment’s Equal Protection Clause, which was enacted to protect newly-freed enslaved people.

Ginsburg did not devise this strategy alone. She was inspired by the writings of the African American lawyer and civil rights activist, Anna Pauline “Pauli” Murray. Murray, a co-founder of the National Organization for Women, argued that the 14th Amendment’s equal protection clause could be used to guarantee gender equality.

Murray’s 1950s book, “States’ Laws on Race and Color,” was considered the bible of the civil rights movement. Ginsburg was so influenced by Murray’s work that she listed Murray as a co-author of her first U.S. Supreme Court gender justice brief, Reed v. Reed, in 1971.

The legal strategy that Ginsburg used, however, was her own.

In 1971, the notion of women’s equality was absurd to most people. Ginsburg, who was at the top her her class at Harvard and Columbia law schools, could not get a job after she graduated.

Predicting that a Supreme Court composed of older white men would likely dismiss demands by women that they should be treated equally, she realized gender stereotypes could be shattered only if white men argued that women should be treated equally under the law.

For example, in the 1973 case, Frontiero v. Richardson, she successfully sued on behalf of the husband of a female Air Force officer, who was refused military benefits on the theory that women could not be primary economic providers for their families.

Similarly, in Weinberger v. Weisenfeld in 1975, she sued on behalf of a man who had been denied Social Security survivor benefits. That agency automatically assumed that men would not need survivor benefits because they earned more than their wives.

This was a brilliant strategy. Based on the five lawsuits that Ginsburg won, the Supreme Court articulated for the first time that the 14th Amendment was not only the vehicle for racial equality – it could also be invoked to achieve gender-based equality.

Another 30 years

Even after Ginsburg’s victories in the 1970s, women still did not have equal rights under the law. The equal protection women enjoyed, according to the Supreme Court, wasn’t as strong as the protection that the Constitution afforded against racial discrimination.

It wasn’t until over 30 years later, in 1996, when she was a sitting justice on the U.S. Supreme Court, that Ginsburg fully equalized the playing field for women.

In the case United States v. Virginia Military Academy, Justice Ginsburg wrote for the court’s majority that “exacting scrutiny” must be applied to any law that treats women differently than men.

She wrote that any law that “denies to women, simply because they are women, full citizenship stature – equal opportunity to aspire, achieve, participate in and contribute to society” violated the equal protection Clause.

The RBG playbook

Once it was cemented into law that the equal protection clause could overturn non-race-based discriminatory laws, other marginalized groups began using the Equal Protection Clause to gain equal rights, including the LGBTQ community.

Their first victory was a 1996 ruling, Romer v. Evans, overturning laws around the country that made gay sex a crime.

A series of similar victories based on the equal protection clause followed, all written by Justice Anthony Kennedy, a conservative Republican appointee. Those decisions culminated in the 2015 landmark ruling Obergefell v. Hodges, where the Supreme Court ruled in favor of marriage equality, expanding the application of the 14th Amendment’s equal protection clause to cover LGBTQ persons, by requiring all states to recognize same-sex marriages that were performed in other states.

Justice Kennedy’s opinion, which extols the virtues of marriage, states that “It would misunderstand these men and women to say they disrespect the idea of marriage… They ask for equal dignity in the eyes of the law. The Constitution grants that right.”

In 2020, the Bostock v. Clayton County decision, which banned employment discrimination against LGBTQ workers, used a similar analysis. Even though it was based on Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, as a legal scholar, I believe the language used by Trump appointee Justice Neil Gorsuch, who wrote the court’s majority opinion, comes straight out of the RBG playbook.

Gorsuch wrote: “Those who adopted the Civil Rights Act might not have anticipated their work would lead to this particular result. … But the limits of the drafters’ imagination supply no reason to ignore the law’s demands … Only the written word is the law, and all persons are entitled to its benefit.”

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These advances were only possible because Ruth Bader Ginsburg paved the way for applying the equal protection clause beyond its original purpose, to promote equality for women.

To echo Justice Gorsuch, that is something that the drafters of the 14th Amendment certainly never considered, and almost certainly never would have endorsed.

Penny Venetis, Clinical Professor of Law, Director of the International Human Rights Clinic, Rutgers University Newark

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

The post How Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s Legal Victories for Women Led to Landmark Anti-Discrimination Rulings for the LGBTQ Community appeared first on Towleroad Gay News.

Noah Purvis, a contestant on CBS’s heterosexual matchmaking hit Love Island, abruptly vanished from the show in recent episodes with no explanation, but internet sleuths believe they have one. Purvis was discovered to have an alter ego, Ethan, who has appeared in videos from Corbin Fisher and other studios.

so apparently noah from love island used to be… uh.. an actor #LoveIsland #LoveIslandUSA

(look at the spot on his chest) pic.twitter.com/skziyFBECU

— Henry #henrius (@henriusbb23) September 18, 2020

Pop Culture reports: “Although it is unclear if this is what led to his Love Island absence, [RepublicWorld] reports that word of Purvis’ other career eventually reached CBS executives, who “immediately removed him from the show.” The network has reportedly begun editing him out of episodes and has scrubbed his name, pictures, and bio from Love Island‘s social media as well as from its official website.”

Pop Culture adds: “The 24-year-old home healthcare provider, according to his bio, had joined the dating competition series on Day 26 of the show’s second season back on Sept. 18, becoming the latest bachelor for the audience to swoon over, though his stay in the villa was short-lived, as he was mysteriously absent after just a handful of episodes, leaving fans wondering what had happened.”

Here is his Love Island bio: Noah Purvis is a 24-year-old home healthcare provider currently pursuing his credentials in massage therapy. Originally from St. Louis, Missouri, Noah sees himself as a true Southern gentleman who knows when to close his mouth and listen to a woman’s needs. Outside of work, he spends his time bodybuilding and making comical videos for his YouTube channel, which has 10 thousand subscribers. He is also a brand ambassador for personal training app Fitplan.

Love island producers introducing Noah and then actin like he was never there like #LoveIslandUSA #LoveIsland pic.twitter.com/leQSWwHMVf

— Marko Tropp (@MrFeels18) September 21, 2020

…if Noah was actually kicked off the show for boinking other guys for a check, that's some anti-sex worker bullshit#LoveIslandUSA #LoveIsland

— davey wants a fucking nap (@fringkles) September 21, 2020

If the show kicked Noah out because of his porn past then Imma be pissed. Even though I don't know him and don't really care about him. Sex work is still work. #LoveIslandUSA #LoveIsland

— MJJ (@TackingSlay) September 20, 2020

Maybe it is because he didn’t disclose it, therefore breaking his contract. But that would be my first guess I cant believe they could get away with booting him for sexual orientation.

— Carmen (FallenDragon009) (@CarmenD123) September 20, 2020

MISSING: Noah Purvis, contestant of #LoveIsland Season 2.

Last seen: Friday, September 18, 2020. #LoveIslandUSA pic.twitter.com/HOvooGmOlT

— ~ (@llltse) September 21, 2020

The post ‘Love Island’ Contestant Mysteriously Vanishes from Show as Gay Adult Film Past Surfaces appeared first on Towleroad Gay News.

President Donald Trump said during a campaign rally over the weekend that he is “counting on the federal court system”—which he has packed with right-wing judges—to declare a winner of the presidential election on the night of November 3, a statement that one journalist described as an “outright pledge to use the courts to stop votes from being counted.”

“We’re counting on the federal court system to make it so that we can actually have an evening where we know who wins, OK,” Trump said during an event in  Fayetteville, North Carolina on Saturday. “Not where the votes are going to be counted a week later, two weeks later.”

Trump appeared to be referring to states that have extended absentee ballot deadlines to accommodate the unprecedented surge in mail-in voting driven by the coronavirus pandemic, which is expected to delay the announcement of an election winner. In the key battleground of Pennsylvania, for instance, the state Supreme Court ruled last week that mail-in ballots received by November 6 must be counted as long as they are postmarked by Election Day. More than 20 other states are similarly allowing mail-in ballots to arrive days after November 3 if postmarked on time.

Watch Trump’s remarks, which came just 24 hours after the Supreme Court announcedthe death of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg:

"We're gonna have a victory on November 3rd the likes of which you've never seen. Now we're counting on the federal court system to make it so we can actually have an evening where we know who wins" — Trump pic.twitter.com/q5bfsJQb76

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) September 19, 2020

“Trump said he wants to use the federal courts to cheat in November by denying Americans’ lawfully-cast mail-in ballots,” Rep. Don Beyer (D-Va.) tweeted Sunday in response to the president’s comments, which came less than 45 days ahead of the November election.

“This is an open admission that Trump hopes to use the Supreme Court to steal the election,” added Beyer.

MSNBC‘s Garrett Haake noted that while declaring an Election Night winner is “not a thing courts do,” the “fact that the president is calling for it demands our attention.”

This shouldn't get lost. At last night's rally, President Trump said he was "counting on" the federal courts to declare a winner on election night. That's not a thing courts do… but the fact that the President is calling for it demands our attention. https://t.co/m1AZHjBqVW

— Garrett Haake (@GarrettHaake) September 20, 2020

Trump’s comments further validated growing fears that the president could attempt to falsely declare himself the winner on Election Night, even with many mail-in ballots—which Trump has baselessly characterized as uniquely vulnerable to manipulation—left to be counted.

“It’s easy to imagine the president, a geyser of self-serving lies and conspiracies, prematurely declaring himself the victor, crying foul as his lead evaporates as additional votes are counted, and challenging any loss based on the mail-in ballots he’s already condemned as fraudulent,” Vanity Fair‘s Eric Lutz wrote earlier this month. “Such a scenario would be every bit as dangerous as one in which he tried to postpone the election.”

As Common Dreams reported last week, major corporate media outlets are facing pressure to craft and publicize a plan to combat any misinformation or premature victory declarations by the president or other candidates on Election Night.

The National Task Force on Election Crises, a coalition of election experts and academics, warned in a letter to news outlets last Wednesday that the “period of uncertainty” caused by the historic flood of mail-in ballots “will add further pressure to an already strained system and allow bad actors to attempt to undermine our democratic process.”

New York magazine’s Ed Kilgore has argued that any effort by the president to falsely declare victory on Election Night will depend on media outlets echoing and failing to adequately debunk his “bogus claims.”

“Challenging the lies at the very point of utterance,” Kilgore wrote earlier this month, “will be essential to stopping them from developing into a contested election and possibly a constitutional crisis.”

Content licensed under (CC BY-SA 3.0)

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When asked what options Democrats have if Trump and McConnell try to push through a Supreme Court nominee before the election or in a lame duck period, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi told ABC News anchor George Stephanopoulos on Sunday morning, “We have our options. We have arrows in our quiver that I’m not about to discuss right now.”

“The fact is we have a big challenge in our country,” Pelosi added. “This president has threatened to not even accept the results of the election with statements that he and his henchmen have made. So right now our main goal, and I think Ruth Bader Ginsburg would want that to be, would be to protect the integrity of the election as we protect the American people from the coronavirus.”

“The fact is that this administration has been a total failure at protecting the health and well-being of the American people and it has had an impact on our economy,” Pelosi continued. “The lives, the livelihoods, and the life of our democracy are threatened by this administration.”

Pressed on whether Democrats were ruling anything out when it comes to the SCOTUS nominee, Pelosi paused, smirked, and replied:

“Good morning. Sunday morning. We have a responsibility. We take an oath to protect and defend the Constitution of the United States. We have a responsibility to meet the needs of the American people. When we weigh the equities, protecting our democracy requires us to use every arrow in our quiver.”

“We have our options. We have arrows in our quiver that I’m not about to discuss right now,” Speaker Pelosi tells @GStephanopoulos when pressed on what Democrats would do if Pres. Trump and Republicans push a SCOTUS nomination ahead of the Nov. 3 election. https://t.co/MCxVZDHboU pic.twitter.com/9Rd1sXdIQW

— ABC News (@ABC) September 20, 2020

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(440): I swear to god, if you ever yell my name during sex with my sister again..your balls will be stapled to your nipples.

Marvel

The Easter eggs, clues, and comic book callbacks in the WandaVision tease.

The future of the Marvel Cinematic Universe looks a lot like I Love Lucy.

During Sunday night’s Emmys broadcast, Marvel released the first official trailer for WandaVision, the upcoming Disney+ show centering on the Scarlet Witch (a.k.a. Wanda Maximoff) and her late ex-boyfriend Vision, an android. The trailer — which presents the series as a pastiche of vintage television sitcoms starring a very domestic Wanda and Vision — raises more questions than answers.

Here’s a few Qs: What the hell is going on? Why are these two superheroes, one of whom is supposed to be dead, now in Nick-at-Nite purgatory? And why does it seem as though they’re trapped and can’t leave? And who put them in there?

More complicated is figuring out how this show folds into the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU). Marvel’s post-Endgame strategy is to have its Disney+ shows weave into the MCU. WandaVision makes for the first new MCU story following the Avengers’ final battle; after WandaVision, Scarlet Witch’s next confirmed appearance will be fighting alongside Doctor Strange in 2022’s Doctor Strange and the Multiverse of Madness. We know she’s going to get out of this sitcom abyss in time for that, but we have no clue how.

As weird as the trailer sets up the show to be, there are a few clues to pull from the comics and Easter eggs within the trailer itself that might spell out the future of Wanda and her love affair with Vision. Bigger yet, it may hide answers to some universe-building questions — like whether or not this is what brings the X-Men into the fold.

Below is a brief breakdown of the big clues and things to expect based on what we saw in the trailer.

The trailer’s comic book Easter eggs include twins, wine, and a weird witch

Given that all of Marvel’s movies and television shows draw on the deep canon of Marvel comics, there’s always some semblance of spoilers lurking about. Just Googling a character’s name leads to an archive of 50-plus years of continuous Marvel narrative about them.

The WandaVision trailer has a couple of very noteworthy comic book references. To casual fans, they might not seem like much, but they are huge Easter eggs referencing Wanda and Vision’s comic book storylines.

One big clue is that Wanda and Vision are holding what appear to be twin boys:

Courtesy of Disney+

In the influential comic book event “House of M” — which offers many more hints for what to expect from WandaVision; we’ll get to them in a bit — Wanda imagines a reality for herself in which she has two babies. In the repercussions of “House Of M,” the babies end up reincarnated, through a very complex series of events, as two future superheroes who come to be known as the Young Avengers’ Wiccan and Speed. The appearance of twins in WandaVision could signal or reference their existence in the MCU.

And then there’s Kathryn Hahn’s character in what appears to be a witch’s hat:

Courtesy of Disney+

Though Hahn’s character is unnamed on the show’s IMDb page, she’s rumored to be playing Agatha Harkness (or “Agness,” which is a combination/code name pointing to Harkness’s real identity), a witch in the Marvel comics universe. Harkness is one of Scarlet Witch’s mentors, and she also ties into Vision’s award-winning 2015–2016 solo comic book series (written by Tom King and drawn by Gabriel Hernandez Walta), in which the android tries to live a happy suburban life. In that comic, Harkness sees a future where Vision will destroy the world; WandaVision seems to include a lot of imagery from the comic, too.

Speaking of IMDb, some comic book fans may cite Teyonah Parris as Monica Rambeau on the cast list as a red flag. Fans of the Captain Marvel comics know that Monica Rambeau was one of the heroes who previously held the title of Captain Marvel. In the 2019 Captain Marvel movie, though, Monica is a little girl and not yet a hero. Parris’s Rambeau does appear briefly in the trailer; she looks to be shot out of space and into reality, signaling she’s not only older than when we last saw her but also that she might have her photonic, light-manipulating powers in this iteration.

What seems most interesting for comics fans, though, may be what appears to be a big message on a bottle. There’s a brief shot of a wine bottle that bears a huge M stamp on its neck and a label that reads “Maison du Mépris”:

Courtesy of Disney+

The translation of that label is “House of Contempt.” On the surface, it seems like contempt is a good word for how Scarlet Witch may feel toward either the reality she’s trapped in or the reality she’s left behind. It could also be a reference to the 1963 film Le Mépris by Jean-Luc Goddard, a movie often cited for its ironic telling of a story about emptiness; WandaVision, too, seems to tell a story about an over-the-top way to mask its hero’s feelings of emptiness. But the prominence of the letter M and the French word for “house” on the bottle seem to be a big wink to fans about “House of M,” the huge Scarlet Witch-centered comic book story about reality warping.

Why WandaVision looks a lot like the Marvel comic book storyline “House of M”

From what we can piece together from the trailer, Wanda and Vision are in some kind of alternate dimension. Vision is somehow alive, despite Thanos killing him in Infinity War, and has been reunited with Wanda. They’re now living their lives in a crooked, glitchy collection of jump cuts from classic television shows while Kathryn Hahn’s character torments them. (Personally, that sounds preferable to what’s going on in the real world right now.) At the same time, it’s clear the world is still functioning outside of Wanda and Vision’s reality, and some kind of government operation is apparently observing them play house together.

While the movies have yet to establish whether this is Scarlet Witch’s doing, the comic books have a precedent for this type of alternate-reality story: “House of M.”

Written in 2005 by Brian Michael Bendis and drawn by Olivier Coipel, “House of M” was a comic book crossover event that featured both the Avengers and the X-Men. Just prior to that event, Scarlet Witch suffers a nervous breakdown and can’t control her powers, resulting in the deaths of fellow Avengers Hawkeye, Ant-Man, and Vision. In “House of M,” Scarlet Witch is in an even worse psychological state as she deals with the grief of killing her friends and her lover. Her powers, which are connected to the fabric of reality, are also tethered to her mental state; therefore, her psychotic break poses a threat to all mankind, a trope that Marvel tends to love.

For example, in the first issue of the event, Scarlet Witch creates a reality in which she has kids and lives her very own happily ever after. I do enjoy that the reality she creates has her brother, Quicksilver, dressed in a sensible turtleneck for the occasion:

Courtesy of Marvel

Professor X of X-Men fame interrupts that reality, jolting both Wanda and readers. He says everything that Wanda is experiencing is a hallucination induced by her fragile psychological state.

Courtesy of Marvel

He specifically tells her to “stop abusing” her powers and to put reality back to the way it was. Left unchecked, Wanda could rewrite reality into whatever she wants, or whatever she thinks she wants:

Courtesy of Marvel

And the kind of bonkers thing about it all is that this happens in the first few pages of the comic book event. “House of M” goes on to explore the X-Men and Avengers discussing the morality about what to do with someone who’s capable of molding reality to her liking. Theoretically, Scarlet Witch could erase all of them from existence at any moment, and that’s a colossal threat.

But instead of wiping everyone off the planet, Scarlet Witch creates a reality in which mutants (which is what she was at the time before Marvel retconned her origin story) are the dominant race of humanity, treated as royalty and celebrities. This inverted her true reality, in which mutants are feared and hated. And when everyone realizes they’re living in Scarlet Witch’s fake reality, her psychotic break leads her to famously de-power almost the entire mutant race by saying the words, “No more mutants.”

Given what we see in the trailer and the complete lack of mutants in the MCU, it’s probably safe to say WandaVision won’t exactly follow “House of M.” Introducing mutants into the universe, creating an alternate reality for them, and then ultimately de-powering them — all while tying their fate to the upcoming Doctor Strange movie — is an impossible amount of territory to cover in a single season of television. But it’s not difficult to see how the show could borrow from the realty-warping elements of “House of M,” at least.

WandaVision looks like it borrows heavily from the comics, which means tweaking Scarlet Witch’s powers (again)

When it comes to telling Scarlet Witch’s story, the Marvel movies and the Marvel comics have never really seen eye-to-eye. In Avengers: Age of Ultron, she has telekinesis as well as mind control powers, which she uses to mess with the Avengers and, later, evacuate Sokovia. Her mind control powers are dropped (or forgotten about by the writers) after Age of Ultron, as she uses telekinesis alone in Captain America: Civil War, Infinity War, and Endgame. And based on WandaVision and what we know of Scarlet Witch’s role in Doctor Strange and the Multiverse of Madness, it seems like those powers are shifting again — possibly toward the same set the hero has in the comic books.

Scarlet Witch is much more powerful in the source material than she is in the movies. Granted, the history of her powers is much more confusing in the comic books than in the movies, possibly explaining why the MCU turned her power set into something much simpler, like limiting her to moving stuff with her mind.

Instead of leaving her with mind control and telekinesis, comic-book Scarlet Witch has powers that can warp reality (more on this in a bit) and tap into actual, mystical magic. In books like the recent Strange Academy — where Doctor Strange and his faculty teach teenage wizards, sorceresses, warlocks, etc., at a magic school — Scarlet Witch is established as one of the most adept magic-users in the Marvel comic book universe.

And her magic, usually defined as “chaos magic,” makes her one of the Marvel universe’s most powerful characters, as seen when she goes toe-to-toe with the cosmic Phoenix Force in 2012’s Avengers vs. X-Men. In that comic, the Phoenix is all about restoring order, and Scarlet Witch’s power is about chaos and disruption:

Courtesy of Marvel

The origin of these powers is muddled, thanks to various retcons throughout the comics, but her original powers were related to manipulating probability — hence her affinity for “chaos magic.”

Courtesy of Marvel

Some writers took this to mean that if Scarlet Witch had the power to manipulate probability, then she would also have the power to warp reality. That’s what’s seemingly happening in the WandaVision trailer, as Wanda and Vision find themselves trapped in a sitcom dimension.

Maybe this alternate reality is a taste of Wanda’s true powers, and she’s processing her grief through vintage sitcoms because, growing up in war-torn Sokovia, the only form of happiness she knows is television? Maybe she’s being manipulated by whomever Kathryn Hahn is playing? Or maybe this is a way of bringing Vision and other characters back into the MCU? And maybe those other characters are ... the X-Men?

The biggest question: Is WandaVision going to give us mutants?

All of this leads us to wonder: Will Scarlet Witch’s powers be the thing that finally manifests mutants and the X-Men in the MCU?

There’s a two-part impetus behind the question. The first part of the equation is Scarlet Witch and the mutants’ close connection to “House of M.” It’s a mutant story, and its protagonists and consequences directly affected the mutants of Marvel’s comic book world.

The second, and possibly more important part, is that weaving Marvel’s mutants into the MCU seems like a difficult but increasingly likely task.

Up until Disney’s acquisition of Fox in 2019, Marvel wasn’t able to use the X-Men and their related villains because of Fox’s long-held film rights to the characters. With all those characters now under one roof, Marvel now has the chance to unite the X-Men with the MCU characters. If it wants to introduce the X-Men into the MCU, Marvel will have to figure out a storyline in which mutants are either created within the MCU or are logically introduced to our existing heroes (such as something like S.H.I.E.L.D. secretly monitoring mutants all along).

Scarlet Witch altering reality in WandaVision and then subsequently dealing with multiple realities in her team-up with Doctor Strange presents a convenient way to introduce them. For what it’s worth, Scarlet Witch as a gateway for mutants in the MCU could’ve made even more sense had the comics not retconned her original backstory. Before Marvel shook everything up, the comics originally presented Scarlet Witch and her twin brother Quicksilver as Magneto’s mutant children. X-Men readers remember Magneto as Charles Xavier’s best friend and toughest mutant enemy.

I wouldn’t be opposed to that kind of introduction. I’m a big X-Men fan and would love to see my favorite characters on the big screen again.

That said, I’d also be quite content with WandaVision not introducing any of that stuff and just giving us a better glimpse into the Scarlet Witch character than we’ve ever had. Ever since their introduction, Scarlet Witch and Vision have been used more for subplots than figuring into the Avengers story as main characters. With the Disney+ story, they finally have a delightfully bizarre-looking story to themselves. It’s finally an opportunity to get to know the characters on their own terms. And there’s plenty to have fun with there, even if it doesn’t include the X-Men.

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US Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell. | Nicholas Kamm/AFP via Getty Images

Our various undemocratic institutions are reenforcing each other in a deadly spiral.

On a blustery November day, I found myself on the Boston Common with what turned out to be a very small group of protesters. Our view was that Al Gore, who had clearly gotten more votes than his opponent, should be seated as the next president of the United States.

It didn’t happen, and in fact, the line of argument we pursued — that democratic legitimacy ought to count for something — wasn’t even taken up by the Gore campaign or Democrats. They instead pursued a legalistic argument that was denied by a 5-4 majority of conservative Supreme Court justices. Two decades later, we’re staring down the barrel of exactly what I worried about that November: not an old Constitution with some funny quirks, but a self-reinforcing spiral of minority rule.

It’s time to start doing something about it.

Hardball on a tilted playing field

When Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia died in February 2016, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell declared it was too close to the date of a presidential election to hold hearings on the confirmation of a successor.

When Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg died in September 2020, McConnell clarified that the rule only applied to situations in which the Senate majority and the president are of opposite parties, and that naturally, a replacement for her should be confirmed as quickly as possible.

The hypocrisy is, of course, galling to liberals who are also simply frustrated by the prospect of defeat. But for all the talk of Merrick Garland’s “stolen” Supreme Court seat, McConnell wasn’t cheating. He was playing what Georgetown University Law Center professor Mark Tushnet calls constitutional hardball, “practices — legislative and executive initiatives — that are without much question within the bounds of existing constitutional doctrine and practice but that are nonetheless in some tension with existing pre-constitutional understandings.”

And while you may not like hardball, to an extent, that’s the point. This is a country with elections, and the idea is if politicians’ deployment of hardball tactics becomes unpopular, they’ll lose their elections and things will change.

McConnell’s actions were unpopular. Polls showed that voters believed the Senate should have held hearings on confirming Garland to the Court. And when the votes were counted in November, Hillary Clinton got more than Donald Trump and Democratic Senate candidates got more votes than Republican ones. But the GOP retained a Senate majority, Trump became president, and Neil Gorsuch sat on the Supreme Court.

Which is just to say that the problems with the current American political situation only really come into view when you zoom out and view the whole landscape. Every electoral system has its quirks, and elected officials are entitled to throw some elbows if they think it’s important. But McConnell’s brand of hardball isn’t a fair game — his ideas don’t need to be popular to win, and his unfair advantage in one arena extends its power into other arenas.

The circle of entrenchment

Thurgood Marshall did not want a Republican to nominate his successor. But in 1988, George H.W. Bush won a historically unusual third straight term for the GOP and Justice Marshall’s health gave out in October 1991, when he had to step down for medical reasons. This was not yet the era of constitutional hardball in the US Senate, so a Democratic-controlled body confirmed Clarence Thomas to succeed him. Thomas’s confirmation was nearly derailed by sexual harassment allegations, but even if the body had handled Anita Hill’s charges more responsibly and blocked Thomas, some other conservative would have gotten the job.

Nine years later, a 5-4 conservative Supreme Court majority that would not have existed had Marshall retained his health for one more year cut short the vote-counting in Florida and ensured that George W. Bush would become president. One of the five, Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, was heard to tell friends that fall that she preferred a Republican president because then she could retire with her succession in GOP hands. And retire she did in 2005, creating the vacancy now held by Justice Samuel Alito. Her fellow moderate conservative, Anthony Kennedy, also strategically retired in 2018 — choosing his timing not only so that a Republican could pick his replacement but so as to help GOP Senate candidates in a tough midterm fight.

Public perceptions of the Supreme Court are often dominated by abortion politics, where O’Connor and Kennedy often sided with the left. But the fact that both justices preferred GOP-selected replacements is a reminder that there are many other issues on the docket, and their own view is that on most matters, they leaned to the right.

That was true on the decisive Bush v. Gore litigation. It was also true of Kennedy’s siding with the right on voting rights, gerrymandering, and campaign finance issues.

Control of the courts allows Republicans to further tilt the electoral playing field. Waging judicial politics on a tilted playing field allows Republicans to control the courts.

Minority rule politics

In 2018, the Democrats won such a landslide in the popular vote that they were able to overcome the 3-4 point skew of the House map. But the Senate map gives rural areas 2.5 times the voting power of big cities, meaning Democrats need to win Senate races by 6 to 7 points.

This puts Democrats at a disadvantage. But the problem is actually more serious than that. The House gerrymanders, for example, while large are clearly not insurmountable.

But even when they are surmounted, what you get is a House where the pivotal members represent seats that Donald Trump won even while he lost the popular vote. This impacts not just electoral outcomes but actual governance. If a majority of the House represented anti-Trump districts, then the House would be politically empowered to act aggressively to check Trump’s abuses of power. But since the Democratic majority relies on Trump crossover voters, Democrats have hesitated to move aggressively with oversight or to use the power of the purse to back up the rule of law.

Nancy Pelosi’s gamble, which is not too far-fetched, is that Trump is unpopular enough that if Democrats just put their heads down and talk about basic policy issues — health care, the pandemic, the minimum wage — they can hold their majority and Joe Biden can beat them. But it’s a big gamble. Trump would almost certainly be reelected even if he loses the popular vote by a point or two, and could conceivably be reelected while losing by three. In the 2018 Senate map, Democrats won a very large majority of the votes but actually lost seats. So on the one hand, there’s a risk Pelosi’s gamble fails, Trump retains power, and, having established all manner of abusive precedents, proceeds to consolidate it. But there’s also the risk that even if Pelosi’s bet pays off, Democrats will be unable to govern.

Constitutional hardball in defeat

In the 2018 midterms in Wisconsin, Democrats swept narrow victories in the statewide races and secured 53 percent of the votes cast in elections for the lower house of the state legislature. But because of gerrymandering, the GOP won more than 60 percent of the seats. And knowing they’d be insulated from public backlash, the legislature held a special lame-duck session during which they stripped power from the state executive branch and reassigned it to themselves. Something similar happened in Michigan that same year, and in North Carolina two years earlier.

This is another case where minority rule begets minority rule.

Once the minoritarian legislature becomes comfortable with its exercise of power, it starts gobbling up the other institutions not despite its lack of democratic legitimacy but because of it. Only because the US Senate is so egregiously malapportioned did it make sense for McConnell to trample so blatantly over public opinion and the president’s traditional prerogatives. And if Republicans retain a Senate majority despite a Biden win, which is a very plausible outcome, they may well do the same on the whole panoply of executive branch appointments. We’re accustomed to seeing the president as the main driver of his Cabinet, with the advise and consent function limited — even by an opposition Senate — to smoothing off only the roughest edges.

But it used to be the case that presidents could get Supreme Court appointments through an opposition-held Senate. Will there be a housing and urban development or health and human services secretary in 2021 if Republicans hold a Senate majority? Absent filibuster reform, will any legislation pass at all even if Republicans are consigned to the minority? Of course, even faced with gridlock, a president can wield executive authority. But will six conservative Supreme Court justices allow any of it?

Given the extent of the tilted maps — 2 to 3 points in the Electoral College, 4 in the House, 6 to 7 in the Senate — Republicans could probably hold majorities forever if they wanted to. But they choose to play their hand more aggressively than that, moving forward boldly with unpopular policy initiatives and then obstructing during period defeats.

Someone should do something about it

Neither Joe Biden nor Senate Democrats seem inclined to pursue these measures yet, but if Democrats win a Senate majority this fall, there is a partial solution at hand:

• End the filibuster so a Senate majority can govern.
• Admit DC, Puerto Rico, and ideally the US Virgin Islands as US states.
• Adopt tough legislative curbs on partisan gerrymandering.
• Expand the lower courts, at a minimum, as a way of improving the operation of the federal judicial system and putting the Supreme Court on notice to behave itself.

In a pinch, you add seats to the Supreme Court itself. Either way, Democrats need to get out of the funk of thinking of these moves as outrageous norm violations. The actual issue is that the American democratic tradition carries within it two overarching super-norms that are contradictory. One is adherence to the Constitution and to the rule of law. The other is adherence to the concept of political equality — that all citizens are equal and ought to have their interests and views considered equally by the political system.

This latter idea is not part of the original constitutional order, but is implicit in the Declaration of Independence, in the 14th Amendment, in the landmark Baker v. Carr case requiring “one person, one vote” in state legislative districts, and in much of our political culture. McConnell’s own statement on Ginsburg’s passing invokes the concept of popular sovereignty, arguing that “Americans reelected our majority in 2016 and expanded it in 2018 because we pledged to work with President Trump and support his agenda, particularly his outstanding appointments to the federal judiciary.”

But of course Americans did no such thing. Most voters preferred the opposite outcome. What gives McConnell his power is not the will of the people but the lines on a map. If Democrats win, they would have not only the power that McConnell currently wields but also the genuine popular mandate he pretends to — and they should use it.

The harder question is what to do if, this November, most people vote against Trump and against McConnell and they win anyway. Twenty years ago, before I was a journalist, I thought the answer was to take to the streets — an idea that at the time found little support among elite political actors. In the desperate year of 2017, Democrats did turn to mass resistance outside the electoral system as a political tool, but after the midterms, they dropped it, to their detriment. It was protests that toppled Mariano Rajoy’s corrupt right-wing government in Spain in 2018, Park Geun-hye’s corrupt right-wing government in South Korea in 2017, and Sigmundur Davíð Gunnlaugsson’s corrupt right-wing government in Iceland in 2016. And it is mass protests in Belarus that may topple a corrupt and authoritarian government there.

So far, nobody in charge of anything seems to be thinking along these lines. But after a summer of uprisings and sporadic rioting, it’s worth remembering that while patience is a virtue in politics, charging ahead with unworkable ideas is not. People are upset about the direction of the country, and rightly so. If institutions block change through electoral means, then anger will unleash itself in other forms. It would be much better for the country for that to be smart, well-designed acts of civil disobedience led by responsible and strategically minded people. But if responsible leaders won’t lead, then irresponsible ones will.

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