Category: Politics

Conservative Hypocrisy Over ‘Packing the Supreme Court’

Republicans and other conservatives were seized by conniption fits when

AP Photo. J. Scott Applewhite

President Biden formed a commission to investigate the possibility of expanding the number of justices on the Supreme Court.

Quite predictably, the committee has recommended that the court should not be expanded. So what else is new in D.C.?

What that committee, Republicans, other erstwhile conservatives, and establishment Democrats all fail to recognize, at least in public, is that the Supreme Court has already been successfully “packed” by Senator Mitch McConnell and Donald Trump.

Millions of dollars of “dark money” has been invested in placing new justices on the bench that will predictably rule in favor of big-money, corporate interests.

The fact that some of these justices may also lean in an anti-abortion direction is a serendipitous coincidence for “pro-life” evangelicals who are generally so monomaniacally focused on their anti-abortion agenda that they give little thought to other issues at stake.

The Daily Poster has an important article entitled “How Dark Money Captured the Supreme Court” describing a recent report issued by three senior members of the Senate.

The report explains the pivotal role played by anonymous, big-money donors in the selection of the Supreme Court justices appointed by Donald Trump and the Republican members of the Senate.

Justice may still be blind — though that is debatable — but her sensitive nose can detect the sickening-sweet smell of money a mile away. And her hand is always held out for another corrupting contribution.

Here is the article. I strongly encourage you to follow the links and read the additional material you find there:

As Congress nears a deal on Biden’s Build Back Better reconciliation bill, a separate battle is quietly playing out within the Democratic Party over how to handle the extremism and minoritarian rule of the Supreme Court.

Last week, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., and Sens. Debbie Stabenow, D-Mich., and Sheldon Whitehouse, D-R.I., published a report on the way that dark money and corporations have captured the Supreme Court.

The report lays out how an extensive network of right-wing groups — including the Federalist Society, the Heritage Foundation, and organizations in the Koch network — have worked to appoint judges who undermine voting rights and favor corporate interests.

What is perhaps most remarkable about the report is that three senators, including the Senate majority leader, are raising serious questions about the legitimacy of an institution that many Democrats are unwilling to confront.

For example, just two weeks earlier, the commission that Biden set up to examine court reform published draft materials of their own report. Those materials expressed skepticism about adding justices to the court, suggesting that it would be seen as a partisan move and undermine public trust in the court.

“Some commissioners believe that there is a real risk that the willingness of Congress to expand the size of the U.S. Supreme Court could further weaken national and international norms against tampering with independent judiciaries,” said the draft document on court expansion, even going so far as to suggest that court-packing may be evidence of “democratic backsliding.”

But, as the three senators’ new report on “court capture” argues, the country’s highest court is already being manipulated.

Whitehouse separately wrote a law review article last week about the influence of dark money and dark money groups’ use of amicus briefs to influence the court.

“The effects of this litigation strategy on our democracy are frightening: the courts are becoming an arena for enacting policies by judicial decree that are too unpopular to pass through democratically elected legislatures,” he wrote. “These coordinated efforts warp the judiciary toward anonymous, ultrawealthy donor interests, all without the public ever learning about the role of dark-money interests in shaping the law.”

Wise Christians Will Embrace Classical Liberalism

David French is a Christian, a political commentator, a former staff writer for the National Review, a columnist for Time Magazine, and senior editor of

David French

The Dispatch, a conservative news site.

He recently published an excellent piece entitled, “A Christian Defense of American Classical Liberalism,” in which he clearly and compellingly describes the equally malicious rise of authoritarianism from both the Right and the Left in America.

Both are dangerous in very similar ways. But, more than that, he explains why  Christian theology provides the church with the best framework for understanding these dangers.

Christian theology also offers the best framework for grasping the social and political benefits of classical Liberalism.

Below is an excerpt:

On the push and pull between ‘humans as made in the image of God and humans still trapped in sin.’

I’d like to introduce you to a term you need to know (indeed, many of you no doubt know it already). It’s “horseshoe theory,” and its short definition is relatively simple. As political movements grow more extreme, they grow more alike. Like a horseshoe, they bend closer together.

A classic example of horseshoe theory is represented by 20th-century European clashes between fascists and communists. It’s not that there aren’t differences between fascism and communism, it’s that in their totalitarian reality, the two competing regimes created quite similar conditions on the ground. 

Thankfully the American manifestations of horseshoe theory haven’t created anything remotely like the fascism and communism that led to history’s bloodiest war, but we’re seeing horseshoe theory emerge nonetheless, and its left-wing and right-wing manifestations have settled on the same target—American classical liberalism.

By “American classical liberalism,” I mean the specific structure of government created by the founding generation, modified and expanded through the Civil War Amendments, affirmed and extended through judicial precedent. While this constitutional structure is malleable enough to accommodate a wide variety of social, economic, and foreign policy choices, at its heart it is defined by a commitment to individual liberty, equality under law, and democratic government. 

On the left, the challenge most prominently comes from a series of critical theory-influenced ideologies that fundamentally reject that American founding (and American classical liberalism itself) as irrevocably stained and tainted (mainly) by America’s racial sins. Classical liberalism, in this telling, was the enabler of great injustice. 

Some definitions of critical race theory, for example, specifically reject liberalism, viewing liberalism as a “vehicle for self-interest, power, and privilege.” This is why, for example, critical theory-influenced colleges often attempt to pare back commitments to free speech and due process on campus. These “liberal” commitments are perceived as oppressive to women and people of color, enabling “hate speech” or sexual predation.

On the right, the challenge comes most prominently from a cohort of mainly Christian intellectuals, many of whom were featured in an extended New York Times piece about the new right and some of whom are in a marriage of convenience with Trumpist populism. They perceive liberalism as both problematic on its own terms and inadequate to the task of resisting “woke” post-liberals on the left. 

Whereas critical race theorists root their objections to liberalism in its coexistence with American oppression, many Christian post-liberals (perhaps we can call them “critical religion theorists”) root their objections in liberalism’s alleged contributions to American immorality and godlessness, with a particular emphasis on abortion and the sexual revolution. 

You will find the entire article here. Take a look.

Study Uncovers the Core of White Supremacy at the Heart of Jan. 6 Insurrection

Robert Pape is a researcher at the Chicago Project on Security and Threats, a think tank he runs at the University of Chicago.

He recently published the results of a study into the backgrounds and identities of all those arrested and charged for their participation in the January 6th attack on our Capitol building in Washington, D.C.

We have long known that Christian Nationalism was an important, motivating ideology for many of the Trump followers involved in that attack.

Dr. Pape’s report now shows the equally important role played by White Supremacy in motivating that attack.

This marriage of Christian Nationalism with White Supremacy is not new, of course. It has a very long history in this country.

The fact that many people who call themselves Christians believed that Jesus Christ had blessed this violent attack; the fact that they claimed their involvement was integral to their patriotic, Christian witness; that “keeping America white” is a major plank in their “Christian worldview”; all combined with the evidence indicating that this movement continues to expand is more than abundant reason to weep for the evangelical church in this country.

If you know Christian leaders/teachers who are instructing their congregations about the gross, anti-Biblical, anti-Christian errors of this American idolatry, then please encourage them and offer your support.

If the leaders and pastors of your church are remaining silent or, worse yet, endorsing the heresies of Christian Nationalism and White Supremacy, then talk with them, correct them, express your dissatisfaction with their departure from Biblical truth; tell them that they are wrong and pray for their transformation.

The Truth of the Gospel of Jesus Christ is on the line.

The New York Times article by Alan Feuer entitled “Fears of White People Losing Out Permeates Capitol Rioters Towns, Study Finds” explains the details [all emphasis is mine]:

Counties with the most significant declines in the non-Hispanic white population were the most likely to be homes to people who stormed the Capitol.

Jason Andrew for The New York Times

When the political scientist Robert Pape began studying the issues that motivated the 380 or so people arrested in connection with the attack against the Capitol on Jan. 6, he expected to find that the rioters were driven to violence by the lingering effects of the 2008 Great Recession.

But instead he found something very different: Most of the people who took part in the assault came from places, his polling and demographic data showed, that were awash in fears that the rights of minorities and immigrants were crowding out the rights of white people in American politics and culture.

If Mr. Pape’s initial conclusions — published on Tuesday in The Washington Post — hold true, they would suggest that the Capitol attack has historical echoes reaching back to before the Civil War, he said in an interview over the weekend. In the shorter term, he added, the study would appear to connect Jan. 6 not only to the once-fringe right-wing theory called the Great Replacement, which holds that minorities and immigrants are seeking to take over the country, but also to events like the far-right rally in Charlottesville, Va., in 2017 where crowds of white men marched with torches chanting, “Jews will not replace us!”

“If you look back in history, there has always been a series of far-right extremist movements responding to new waves of immigration to the United States or to movements for civil rights by minority groups,” Mr. Pape said. “You see a common pattern in the Capitol insurrectionists. They are mainly middle-class to upper-middle-class whites who are worried that, as social changes occur around them, they will see a decline in their status in the future.”

One fact stood out in Mr. Pape’s study, conducted with the help of researchers at the Chicago Project on Security and Threats, a think tank he runs at the University of Chicago. Counties with the most significant declines in the non-Hispanic white population are the most likely to produce insurrectionists. This finding held true, Mr. Pape determined, even when controlling for population size, distance to Washington, unemployment rate and urban or rural location.

Law enforcement officials have said 800 to 1,000 people entered the Capitol on Jan. 6, and prosecutors have spent the past three months tracking down many of them in what they have described as one of the largest criminal investigations in U.S. history. In recent court filings, the government has hinted that more than 400 people may ultimately face charges, including illegal entry, assault of police officers and the obstruction of the official business of Congress.

In his study, Mr. Pape determined that only about 10 percent of those charged were members of established far-right organizations like the Oath Keepers militia or the nationalist extremist group the Proud Boys. But unlike other analysts who have made similar findings, Mr. Pape has argued that the remaining 90 percent of the “ordinary” rioters are part of a still congealing mass movement on the right that has shown itself willing to put “violence at its core.”

Other mass movements have emerged, he said, in response to large-scale cultural change. In the 1840s and ’50s, for example, the Know Nothing Party, a group of nativist Protestants, was formed in response to huge waves of largely Irish Catholic immigration to the country. After World War I, he added, the Ku Klux Klan experienced a revival prompted in part by the arrival of Italians and the first stirrings of the so-called Great Migration of Black Americans from the rural South to the industrialized North.

In an effort to determine why the mob that formed on Jan. 6 turned violent, Mr. Pape compared events that day with two previous pro-Trump rallies in Washington, on Nov. 14 and Dec. 12. While police records show some indications of street fighting after the first two gatherings, Mr. Pape said, the number of arrests were fewer and the charges less serious than on Jan. 6. The records also show that those arrested in November and December largely lived within an hour of Washington while most of those arrested in January came from considerably farther away.

The difference at the rallies was former President Donald J. Trump, Mr. Pape said. Mr. Trump promoted the Jan. 6 rally in advance, saying it would be “wild” and driving up attendance, Mr. Pape said. He then encouraged the mob to march on the Capitol in an effort to “show strength.”

Mr. Pape said he worried that a similar mob could be summoned again by a leader like Mr. Trump. After all, he suggested, as the country continues moving toward becoming a majority-minority nation and right-wing media outlets continue to stoke fear about the Great Replacement, the racial and cultural anxieties that lay beneath the riot at the Capitol are not going away.

“If all of this is really rooted in the politics of social change, then we have to realize that it’s not going to be solved — or solved alone — by law enforcement agencies,” Mr. Pape said. “This is political violence, not just ordinary criminal violence, and it is going to require both additional information and a strategic approach.”

Mr. Pape, whose career had mostly been focused on international terrorism, used that approach after the Sept. 11 attacks when he created a database of suicide bombers from around the world. His research led to a remarkable discovery: Most of the bombers were secular, not religious, and had killed themselves not out of zealotry, but rather in response to military occupations.

American officials eventually used the findings to persuade some Sunnis in Iraq to break with their religious allies and join the United States in a nationalist movement known as the Anbar Awakening.

Recalling his early work with suicide bombers, Mr. Pape suggested that the country’s understanding of what happened on Jan. 6 was only starting to take shape, much like its understanding of international terrorism slowly grew after Sept. 11.

“We really still are at the beginning stages,” he said.

Stephen Wertheim: “Sorry Liberals. But You Really Shouldn’t Love NATO.”

The one time I have been arrested for peacefully protesting was at an Anti-War/Anti-NATO demonstration in Chicago. I include a brief account of that arrest in my book, I Pledge Allegiance: A Believer’s Guide to Kingdom Citizenship in 21st Century America (Eerdmans, 2018).

I participated in that march, with tens of thousands of others, because I have long believed that NATO (the North Atlantic Treaty Organization) should have been disbanded at the end of Cold War.

It was and remains a Western military alliance that was created to “protect Western democracy” against the alleged threats of world communism advanced by the Soviet Union. But once the USSR ceased to exist, why shouldn’t the largest bloc of military forces in the Western world also disband?

Since then, the USA has easily twisted NATO into an ostensibly “independent” European arm of its own nationalistic, military objectives.

Quite predictably, NATO’s continued existence, and the omnivorous hegemony that inevitably characterizes every multi-national military machine, has been a key player in instigating many of the regional conflicts playing themselves out in Eastern Europe, South Asia, and the Middle East today.

The dissolution of the USSR meant the demise of NATO’s communist equivalent: the Warsaw Pact. So we can forgive Russia’s well-founded nervousness when NATO announced that it would not similarly disband.

To assuage Russia’s fears, the US pledged that if NATO expanded, it would never included nations that had once been a part of the Warsaw Pact.

NATO quickly broke that promise and now includes member states sitting cheek to jowl with the Russian border. And we wonder why Russia has become antagonist and suspicious of US foreign policy?

NOW who is the colossus seeking world domination? I’ll give you a hint: it sure ain’t Russia.

Dr. Stephen Wertheim is an historian of U.S. foreign policy, the director of

Stephen Wertheim

grand strategy at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, and a visiting faculty fellow at the Center for Global Legal Challenges at Yale Law School.

His recent book is entitled, Tomorrow, the World: The Birth of U.S. Global Supremacy. I have it now on my reading list.

He also recently wrote an important editorial for the New York Times criticizing President Biden’s reaffirmations of the US commitment to NATO.

The article is called “Sorry, Liberals. But You Really Shouldn’t Love NATO.” It is important reading. Since it is behind a paywall, I have reproduced it in full. (All emphases are mine):

Even before today’s NATO summit, President Biden settled the most important question: He affirmed America’s commitment to defend the alliance’s 30 members by force. And despite divisions on many other foreign policy issues, his party stands in lock step behind him. To most Democrats, alliances symbolize international cooperation. Proof positive is that Donald Trump supposedly sought to tear them down.

Yet current progressive enthusiasm for NATO is anomalous. After the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, depriving NATO of its original reason for being, skeptics of the alliance included liberals as much as conservatives. In 1998, 10 Democratic Senators joined nine Republicans in opposing the first, fateful round of NATO enlargement, which would soon extend the alliance to Russia’s border.

Among the dissenters was Senator Paul Wellstone of Minnesota. In between voting against the first Iraq war in 1991 and the second after Sept. 11, Mr. Wellstone warned that expanding NATO would jeopardize Europe’s hard-won gains. “There is peace between states in Europe, between nations in Europe, for the first time in centuries,” he said. “We do not have a divided Europe, and I worry about a NATO expansion which could redivide Europe and again poison relations with Russia.”

Events have proved him wiser than his party seems to think. The left has ceded criticism of NATO to the right, mistaking armed alliances for friendly partnerships and fixating on Mr. Trump’s rhetoric instead of his actions. (In the end, he reaffirmed every U.S. alliance commitment, embraced NATO’s expansion to Montenegro and North Macedonia, and beefed up U.S. forces in Eastern Europe.) It’s time for Americans to recover their critical faculties when they hear “NATO,” a military alliance that cements European division, bombs the Middle East, burdens the United States and risks great-power war — of which Americans should want no part.

At first, the United States figured it could enlarge its defense obligations under NATO because doing so seemed cost-free. Throughout the 1990s, post-Soviet Russia lay prostrate. The United States, by contrast, could trim its military spending only to enjoy greater pre-eminence than ever. If the Soviet collapse made NATO seem less necessary, it also made NATO seem less risky. Warnings like Mr. Wellstone’s, voiced by many analysts at the time, sounded hypothetical and distant.

But they have gained credence as Russia objected, first with words, eventually with arms, to the expansion of an alliance whose guns had always pointed at Moscow. By 2008, NATO declared its intention to admit Georgia and Ukraine. Each had been a founding republic of the Soviet Union and had territorial disputes with Russia. For each, Russia was willing to fight. It swiftly occupied parts of Georgia. Once Ukraine’s pro-Russian president was overthrown in 2014, Russia seized Crimea, home to its Black Sea naval base, and backed separatists in the Donbas region.

The conflict in Ukraine continues, with no resolution near. Rather than use diplomacy to back an internationally negotiated settlement, the United States has preferred to arm Ukraine with lethal weapons. After decades of overreach, the Biden administration now faces a stark choice: commit to fight for Ukraine, creating a serious risk of war with Russia, or admit that NATO expansion has come to an overdue end.

Lacking an adversary of Soviet proportions, NATO has also found new foes “out of area” — its euphemism for waging wars in the greater Middle East. The bombing of Libya in 2011 was a NATO operation, signaling to war-weary Americans that this time the United States had real partners and multilateral legitimacy. The war proved disastrous anyway.

NATO helped fight the forever war in Afghanistan, too. Seeking to support U.S. aims after Sept. 11, it undertook “our biggest military operation ever,” Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg boasted in March. Two decades later, European soldiers are leaving, having failed to remake Afghanistan but perversely succeeded in making NATO seem relevant. Absent the Soviet threat, as Secretary General Stoltenberg admitted, the alliance has had to go “out of area or out of business.”

At least the Middle East contains the real, if receding, threat of terrorism, against which minimal military action can be warranted. But Europe is stable and affluent, far removed from its warring past. America’s European allies provide their people with world-leading living standards. They can also perform the most basic task of government: self-defense. In any case, Russia, with an economy the size of Italy’s, lacks the capability to overrun Europe, supposing it had any reason to try. If American leaders cannot countenance pulling U.S. forces back from Europe, then from where would they be willing to pull back, ever?

The danger of permanent subordination to America has started to register in European capitals, long solicitous of American commitment. President Emmanuel Macron of France has accused NATO of experiencing “brain death” and proposed creating an independent European army, an idea rhetorically welcomed by Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany. The watchword in Brussels these days is “strategic autonomy,” meaning autonomy from the United States. Europeans scarcely seek to disinvite American forces from their continent. Still, they are finding that cheap security from Washington carries mounting costs: dependence on an erratic superpower, pressure to restrict business with China and Russia, and division in Europe itself.

The real question is what Americans want. They could continue to fetishize military alliances as a “sacred obligation,” as President Biden characterized NATO on Wednesday. Or they could treat them as means to ends — and coercive means that often corrupt worthy ends.

For progressives who seek to end endless wars and prevent new ones, the matter of Europe can no longer be skirted. The United States can trust Europeans to defend Europe. Otherwise, it would seem that America truly intends to dominate the world in perpetuity, or until the day a war so great puts dreams of dominance to rest.

There is More Than One Way to Pack a Court

President Biden recently formed a commission that will look into the mechanics of restructuring the US Supreme Court by increasing the number of justices from 9 to 13.

The Republican media campaign is now in overdrive warning about the apocalyptic terrors that will be unleashed if Democrats are allowed “to pack” the Supreme Court. (Watch the Religious Right lament here.)

The hypocrisy is so thick you can cut it with a knife.

Republican legislators have their own troubled history with court-packing at the state level. Neither should we forget the manipulative powerplays undertaken by Republican Senators Mitch McConnell and Chuck Grassley in seating their own conservative choices.

Their Republican skull-duggery included denying Merrick Garland, President Obama’s Supreme Court nominee, from receiving the Senate confirmation hearing that dominees deserve.

At the time, McConnell insisted that it was improper to appoint a new justice “so close to a presidential election” (recall, the Trump/Clinton election was weeks away).

However, McConnell’s appeal to principle proved to be nothing more than cynical, partisan gamesmanship as he then rushed to confirm Justice Amy Coney Barrett only weeks before the election of president Biden.

And this is only the tip of a very tawdry, partisan, judicial iceberg. (There is a laundry list of similar shenanigans in the appointments of Justices Gorsuch and Kavanaugh, as well. But those sad stories are for another post.)

More to the point for the purposes of this post is the important warning

October 13, 2020, Washington, District of Columbia, USA: United States Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (Democrat of Rhode Island) makes a presentation during his questioning of President Donald Trump‚Äôs Supreme Court nominee Judge Amy Coney Barrett during the second day of her Senate Judiciary Committee confirmation hearing Tuesday, October 13, 2020 (Credit Image: © Greg Nash – Pool Via Cnp/CNP via ZUMA Wire)

repeatedly raised by Senator Sheldon Whitehouse over the anti-democratic flood of “dark money” now shaping the Supreme Court.

“Dark money” consists of untraceable, and therefore anonymous, financial contributions typically made to a political action committee and “front groups.” The promise of anonymity allows wealthy, big-money donors to move the court in the directions they want without the public realizing what is happening.

Although conservatives contribute the lion’s share of this money, it’s a bipartisan affair. Dark money pours in from both Republican and Democratic donors, lobbyists, billionaires, CEOs, and corporations.

Of course, big money, corporate money, generally gets what it wants.  And what dark money wants are Supreme Court justices and case decisions that promote their interests, leaving the little guy to hold the bag.

I urge you to take a few  minutes to watch Senator Whitehouse’s presentations where he explains the findings of own his investigations into the overwhelming influence of dark money on the Supreme Court.

Folks, the Supreme Court has already been packed. In fact, its been stacked — stacked against us, the people. Yet, you will never hear conservative politicians, Republicans, Pat Robertson or others of his ilk condemn this undermining of American democracy.

The current conservative outcry against Biden and his commission is just one more example of how easy it is for the wealthiest 1% and corporate power in this country to manipulate the public — especially conservatives.

Below is Senator Whitehouse’s explanation about the influence of dark money on the Supreme Court. His most pertinent remarks begin at the 8:40 mark:

 

More Evidence that the Republican Party Hates Democracy

The extraordinary phenomena of last year’s protests over George Floyd’s murder at the hands of Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin, combined with two Democratic victories in Georgia for the state’s seats in the US Senate has infuriated the Republican party.

Republicans have responded as Republicans do: undermine the power of the people.

First, they have introduced dozens of new voter suppression laws in local legislatures across the country. Naturally, Republicans object to this characterization, but Stacey Abram’s recent testimony before a Senate committee regarding Georgia’s new voter laws puts the lie to that Republican defense (watch here and here).

Second, Republicans have submitted numerous bills that would outlaw public protests and demonstrations.  They would also immunize drivers who run into protesters with their cars. (All the videos I have seen show drivers who deliberately target peaceful demonstrators.)

Today’s edition of the New York Times has an article about this second problem. It’s entitled, “G.O.P. Bills Target Protesters (and Absolve Drivers Who Hit Them).”

Below is a lengthy excerpt of that article. (It is behind a pay wall). Or you can read the entire piece by clicking on the title above:

Republican legislators in Oklahoma and Iowa have passed bills granting immunity to drivers whose vehicles strike and injure protesters in public streets.

A Republican proposal in Indiana would bar anyone convicted of unlawful assembly from holding state employment, including elected office. A Minnesota bill would prohibit those convicted of unlawful protesting from receiving student loans, unemployment benefits or housing assistance.

And in Florida, Gov. Ron DeSantis signed sweeping legislation this week that

Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida has used the term anti-riot bills for legislation that limits the right to protest. Credit…Phil SearsAssociated Press

toughened existing laws governing public disorder and created a harsh new level of infractions — a bill he’s called “the strongest anti-looting, anti-rioting, pro-law-enforcement piece of legislation in the country.”

The measures are part of a wave of new anti-protest legislation, sponsored and supported by Republicans, in the 11 months since Black Lives Matter protests swept the country following the death of George Floyd. The Minneapolis police officer who killed Mr. Floyd, Derek Chauvin, was convicted on Tuesday on murder and manslaughter charges, a cathartic end to weeks of tension.

But while Democrats seized on Mr. Floyd’s death last May to highlight racism in policing and other forms of social injustice, Republicans responded to a summer of protests by proposing a raft of punitive new measures governing the right to lawfully assemble. G.O.P. lawmakers in 34 states have introduced 81 anti-protest bills during the 2021 legislative session — more than twice as many proposals as in any other year, according to Elly Page, a senior legal adviser at the International Center for Not-for-Profit Law, which tracks legislation limiting the right to protest.

Some, like Mr. DeSantis, are labeling them “anti-riot” bills, conflating the right to peaceful protest with the rioting and looting that sometimes resulted from such protests.

The laws carry forward the hyperbolic message Republicans have been pushing in the 11 months since Black Lives Matter protests against racial injustice swept the country: that Democrats are tolerant of violent and criminal actions from those who protest against racial injustice. And the legislation underscores the extent to which support for law enforcement personnel and opposition to protests have become part of the bedrock of G.O.P. orthodoxy and a likely pillar of the platform the party will take into next year’s midterms.

“This is consistent with the general trend of legislators’ responding to powerful and persuasive protests by seeking to silence them rather than engaging with the message of the protests,” said Vera Eidelman, a lawyer at the American Civil Liberties Union. “If anything, the lesson from the last year, and decades, is not that we need to give more tools to police and prosecutors, it’s that they abuse the tools they already have.”

Laws already exist to punish rioting, and civil rights advocates worry that the new bills violate rights of lawful assembly and free speech protected under the First Amendment. The overwhelming majority of last summer’s nationwide Black Lives Matter protests were peaceful — more than 96 percent involved no property damage or police injuries, according to The Washington Post, which also found that police officers or counterprotesters often instigated violence.

Police officers making an arrest during protests in Miami last year over the death of George Floyd Credit…Cristobal HerreraEPA, via Shutterstock

Most of the protests held across Florida last summer were also peaceful, though a few in Miami, Tampa and Jacksonville produced some episodes of violence, including the burning of a police car and a sporting goods store. Still, as they embraced the bill that Mr. DeSantis signed into law, Republican leaders expressed scorn for cities that trim police budgets and tolerate protesters who disrupt business and traffic.

“We weren’t going to allow Florida to become Seattle,” said Chris Sprowls, a Republican who is the speaker of the Florida House, mentioning cities where protests lasted for months last year and demonstrators frequently clashed with the police. “We were not going to allow Florida to become Portland.”. . . 

. . . State Senator Shevrin D. Jones, a Democrat from Broward County and a vocal critic of the law, noted that Mr. DeSantis had been quick to emphasize how necessary the bill was the day after the deadly Jan. 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol but had made no mention of that event during Monday’s bill signing, focusing solely on the summer protests.

That was evidence, he said, that bills aimed at punishing protesters were disproportionately targeting people of color. “This bill is racist at its core,” Mr. Jones said.

So far, three bills aimed at limiting protests have been signed into law — Florida’s and new laws in Arkansas and Kansas that target protesters who seek to disrupt oil pipelines. Others are likely to come soon.

In Oklahoma, Republican lawmakers last week sent legislation to Gov. Kevin Stitt that would criminalize the unlawful blocking of a public street and grant immunity to drivers who strike and injure protesters during a riot. Last June, a pickup truck carrying a horse trailer drove through a crowd of Black Lives Matter protesters on a Tulsa freeway, injuring several people and leaving one paralyzed. The driver, who said he had sped up because he feared for the safety of his family, was not charged.

The bill’s author, State Senator Rob Standridge, said the Tulsa incident had prompted him to seek immunity for drivers who strike protesters. He said Tuesday he wasn’t aware of any drivers who had been charged after striking protesters in Oklahoma. “My hope is that this law never is utilized,” he said in an interview. Carly Atchison, a spokeswoman for Mr. Stitt, declined to say whether he would sign the bill, which passed with veto-proof majorities.

Tiffany Crutcher, whose twin brother, Terence Crutcher, was shot and killed in 2016 by a Tulsa police officer who was later acquitted on a manslaughter charge, said the Oklahoma proposal represents Republican efforts to extend the Trump administration’s hostility toward people of color.

What the Church Can Learn from Eugene Debs

Eugene Debs (1855-1926) was an American politician who became an important early leader in the labor union movement. He condemned

Labor activist Eugene V. Debs speaks at the Hippodrome in New York City in 1910

corporate greed, was a vocal proponent on behalf of American workers, helped to lead numerous strikes, and fought for genuine democracy in the workplace.

Naturally, figures like Debs are a thorn in the side of entrenched, establishment power, so he made many enemies in high places. President Woodrow Wilson had him imprisoned for speaking out against the US entry into World War I. [No, folks, “cancel culture” is hardly new!]

In my view, Debs is a true American hero who has been largely forgotten by mainstream America.

Ed Quish has an interesting article about Deb’s life and legacy at Jacobin magazine. It’s entitled “The Cold War is Over. It’s Time to Appreciate that Eugene Debs Was a Marxist.”

Whenever a learn something new about a figure like Eugene Debs (or a man like Henry Wallace, another person I admire for similar reasons) I can’t help but ask myself, “Where were his Christian counterparts?”

Though he didn’t claim to be a Christian (to my knowledge) in the

Eugene Debs

evangelical sense, his politics, ideology, and actions demonstrate a more profound appreciation for the nature of the kingdom of God and the demands that kingdom makes upon its citizens than is shown by the evangelical church today.

Below is an excerpt:

Throughout his life, Eugene Debs was smeared as an enemy of the American nation. During the 1894 Pullman strike, Harper’s Weekly attacked Debs’s leadership of the uprising as equivalent to Southern secession, claiming that in “suppressing such a blackmailing conspiracy as the boycott of Pullman cars by the American Railway Union, the nation is fighting for its own existence.” Thirty years later, when Debs was imprisoned for speaking against World War I, President Woodrow Wilson denied requests to pardon him, refusing to show mercy to “a traitor to his country.”

Debs’s sympathizers have often defended him against allegations of treason by highlighting his authentic Americanism. Rather than a traitor, they claim, Debs was a true patriot who stood up for nationally shared ideals like freedom and democracy while imbuing them with socialist values. Historian Nick Salvatore, for instance, argues in his landmark 1982 biography that Debs’s life “was a profound refutation of the belief that critical dissent is somehow un-American or unpatriotic.” Inspired by Debs’s example, socialists today might occupy the left flank of a progressive patriotism, pushing the United States to make good on its democratic promise in a way that liberals and centrists cannot do on their own.

Despite some intuitive appeal, this nationalist strategy is a dead end. . . At a basic level, democratic nationalism presents the nation as bound by a shared identity and shared interests, uniting different classes behind a common project domestically and internationally. In the United States, this project has only ever been a variant of capitalist empire that, even when grafted to the cause of democracy. . . 

In his own time, Debs rejected that kind of nationalist project, making his politics more than the radical edge of common sense “Americanism.” When Debs called out the absurdity of the wartime view that patriotism means dying overseas for capitalist profits while treason consists in defending workers everywhere, he showed us the proper response to nationalist ideology: not to try to hijack it for progressive ends, but to liberate us from its obfuscations.

Click here to read the complete article.

Deficit Hawk Hypocrisy Aims to Hurt the People

Once again, Republicans (and many Democrats) are  running around like Chicken Little warning about the economic sky collapsing now that Congress has passed the recent covid relief bill.

It is a tired, predictable, knee-jerk, conservative reaction to any government spending that aims to help the average American.

Remember that none of these folks expressed similar concerns about the folly of “deficit spending” when president Trump’s retrograde tax plan added between $1 to $2 trillion to the national debt.

None of these people complained about the CARES Act last March when a vast portion of that relief money, intended for the unemployed and small business owners, ended up lining the pockets of the richest Americans.

The litany of deficit-hawk hypocrisy could go on and on…

[For an excellent analysis of this misguided concern written by a well-regarded economist, I recommend reading the recent book by professor Stephanie Kelton called The Deficit Myth: Modern Monetary Theory and the Birth of the People’s Economy (PublicAffairs, 2021)].

At the DCReport, Bruce Bartlett has a good article exposing not only the

Bruce Bartlett

hypocrisy of this deficit fear mongering but also how very wrong the warnings have always been.

The article is titled “Inflation Hawks: Never Right, But Never in Doubt.” You can read an excerpt below or click on the title to find the entire piece:

Predictably, conservatives are once again warning about inflation. This happens every time a Democrat takes office—even if he merely continues the identical policies of his Republican predecessor.

Unfortunately, these concerns, which always receive wide media attention, are costly both politically and economically.

Bill Clinton was forced to adopt a deficit reduction plan in 1993 that led to the defeat of many Democrats in 1994 and the installation of Newt Gingrich as speaker of the House.

Barack Obama was forced to scale back his stimulus plan in 2009 and was browbeaten into deficit reduction in 2011. That kept the economy running in slow gear throughout Obama’s presidency paving the way for Donald Trump.

Now that Joe Biden has gotten his stimulus, the inflation-mongers are just getting started again. . . 

. . . It’s been an article of faith among conservatives since the beginning of the financial crisis in 2008 that inflation is right around the corner.

This conviction follows from a core conservative belief that inflation invariably results from increases in the money supply. As Milton Friedman, the Nobel Prize-winning economist put it a half-century ago in an oft-quoted line: “Inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon.”

Thus, when the Federal Reserve vastly expanded the money supply in late 2008, conservatives anticipated a sharp rise in inflation. It didn’t happen. . . 

. . . Yet, year after year, there was no inflation. In 2009 we saw prices fall slightly, the opposite of these predictions and warnings. The Federal Reserve couldn’t even hit its own target of 2% inflation. The average inflation rate for 2009 through 2020 was less than 1.3% annually.

 

That did nothing to dislodge right-wing orthodoxy, however. Conservatives continue to say that inflation was right around the corner. No amount of empirical data could shake their deeply held belief. . . 

 

“How Republicans are Breaking Democracy”

Ari Berman has an informative article at Mother Jones magazine describing

Ari Berman

the ongoing efforts of the Republican party — which is the minority party in this country, by the way — to dominate American politics.

Making it more and more difficult for people to vote is only one of their tactics. Berman outlines the others in “The Insurrection was Put Down. The GOP Plan for Minority Rule Marches On: How Republicans are Breaking Democracy.”

Below is an excerpt:

. . . This isn’t about which party wins elections, but whether democracy itself survives. Some anti-democratic measures were deliberately built into a system that was designed to benefit rich white men: The Senate was created to boost small conservative states and serve as a check on the more democratic House of Representatives, while the Electoral College prevented the direct election of the president and enhanced the power of slave states through the three-fifths clause. But these features have metastasized to a degree the Founding Fathers could have never anticipated, and in ways that threaten the very notion of representative government.

In the past decade, the GOP has dropped any pretense of trying to appeal to a majority of Americans. Instead, recognizing that the structure of America’s political institutions diminishes the influence of urban areas, young Americans, and voters of color, it caters to a conservative white minority that is drastically overrepresented in the Electoral College, the Senate, and gerrymandered legislative districts. This strategy of white grievance reached a fever pitch when domestic terrorists emboldened by the president occupied the Capitol to prevent Congress from certifying Biden’s Electoral College victory. But that unprecedented attempt by Trump and his allies to overturn the election results is a mere prelude to a new era of minority rule, which not only will attempt to block the agenda of a president elected by an overwhelming majority but threatens the long-term health of American democracy. “The will of the people,” wrote Thomas Jefferson in 1801, “is the only legitimate foundation of any government.” And now that foundation is crumbling. . . 

Privatization + Deregulation = Texas Nightmare

I am sure that you have already heard or seen examples of the conservative misinformation machine’s attempts to blame the Texas power outages on the inadequacies of wind turbines, solar power, and the Green New Deal.

Texas’ Republican governor, Greg Abbott, gave the game away, however,

Texas governor Greg Abbott

when he made two different TV appearances on the same day to discuss the problems Texas is facing.

Chris Hayes of MSNBC broadcast the clips back-to-back, highlighting both the conservative, Republican lies about green energy, but also Gov. Abbott’s close kinship to Pinocchio. You can almost see his nose grow in the clip below.

First, Abbott spoke on local, Texas television. When talking only to Texans, he explained the power outages accurately, like a reasonable person. The primary issue was a lack of winterized equipment, especially for the natural gas facilities and pipelines. The gas tanks and supply lines were frozen solid.

Then Abbott spoke to a national audience on the Fox network. In this interview, he spewed his conservative hogwash about the failures of wind farms and solar panels, though (strangely enough) he did mention that these sources only supply about 10% of Texas’ power. (He, obviously, was counting on his conservative coconspirators to be so busy cheering his lies that they wouldn’t stop to reflect on the obvious incongruity of his statement.)

Gov. Abbott’s two-faced appearances demonstrate that he is a sock puppet for America’s fossil fuel industry, as are all the other conservatives spewing the same rubbish. They are exploiting the poor people of Texas by balancing their corporate lies about what went wrong on the frozen backsides of suffering people who have no heat or clean water.

But, hey. That’s what selling your soul to corporate power will do to you.

According to the National Institute on Money in State Politics, Greg Abbott has taken over $28 million from fossil fuel corporations over his political career, including $11 million alone in his most recent election campaign.

No wonder he can only criticize the Green New Deal.

The real problem in Texas – aside from unscrupulous politicians – is the inhumane economics of deregulated privatization. Neoliberalism strikes again, but his time it’s the conservative fan base of anti-government, pro-laissez faire capitalism that is paying the price. (As opposed to the South American working class and other species of human cannon fodder typically exploited by US corporations around the world.)

Federal regulators warned Texas officials a decade ago (!) that its power grid was not prepared for extreme winter conditions, the very conditions that struck Texas this week. (Check out this good overview of the issues by the Union of Concerned Scientists. Thanks to my friend Suzanne McDonald for bringing this report to my attention.)

Texas had been warned. The CEOs and politicians chose to do nothing.

It’s not hard to figure out what happened. First, the majority of Texas is not connected to the national power grid. Texans pride themselves on their independence. So, they decided to go it alone.

Furthermore, Texan “power independence” is motivated by the conservative hatred of federal regulation. By keeping Texas power separated from the rest of the nation, Texas power companies remained free of regulatory oversight.

Ahem……Sooooo…when federal regulators told Texan power company officials that they were woefully unprepared for future blizzard conditions, Texan politicians remained warm and cozy with their corporate overlords and told the feds to stuff it. No one could force them to do otherwise.

It’s not hard to imagine the decision-making process.

The CEOs and board members of Texas power companies got together and decided that preparing for a “once in a century” winter storm front was not cost effective.

Cost effectiveness is the cold, hard, bottom-line reality that the sycophants of unfettered, global capitalism love to ignore – and what too many of their followers rarely think about. (The economics at play are also known as neoliberalism – check out this good discussion at Jacobin magazine.)

It is ALWAYS a bad idea to hand over control of public services/utilities to private corporations. Private corporations do not work in the public interest, regardless of what the PR department tells you.

Yes, yes, neoliberal propagandists like to talk about the superior services that will supposedly arrive with privatization, and the lower prices made possible by glorious deregulation.

Except, this predictable PR palaver is all smoke and mirrors.

The truth of the matter is that the #1 priority of any corporation is PROFIT, making as much money as possible for its shareholders. Cost effectiveness is judged according to increasing profit margins.

Winterizing Texas was not economically feasible if these corporations were to continue raking in the dough.

Predictably, then, the rich made more money while the majority of Texans were set up to suffer. But, hey, it’s only once a century, right?

This, folks, is neoliberal chicanery writ large.