To preserve gerrymandering, Wisconsin GOP threatens to impeach justice who critiqued gerrymandering

Wisconsin is so absurdly gerrymandered, a roughly 50-50 split between the state’s Republican and Democratic voters—Donald Trump edged out Hillary Clinton in 2016, President Joe Biden squeaked by Trump in 2020, and Badger Staters narrowly reelected Democratic Gov. Tony Evers in 2022—has somehow produced gaudy Republican supermajorities in both the state Assembly and Senate. The party currently holds a 64-35 advantage in the Assembly and a 21-11 edge in the Senate.

Of course, if Wisconsin Republicans had their druthers, they’d draw little circles around every Chick-fil-A in the state and make those congressional districts. And previous state supreme courts might have let them get away with it.

But when liberal Judge Janet Protasiewicz trounced her conservative opponent in the state Supreme Court election in April, it was a big win—not just for those who care about reestablishing their reproductive rights, but for anyone who genuinely cares about representative democracy.

In other words, fair legislative maps looked achievable for the first time in more than a decade. Which meant it was now past time for the GOP to squeal.

On Friday, Assembly Speaker Robin Vos hinted that impeachment could be on the table if Protasiewicz votes to disrupt the GOP’s plans for a permanent white minority rule over our country—or, worse, if Sen. Ron Johnson is ever forced to fill out his ballot next to a Black person. Why? Because she will have “prejudged” the case.

"If there's any semblance of honor on the state Supreme Court left, you cannot have a person who runs for the court prejudging a case and being open about it, and then acting on the case as if you're an impartial observer," Vos said during an interview with WSAU host Meg Ellefson when questioned about the durability of the Republicans’ bullshit maps. “You cannot have a judge who said, you know, the maps are rigged because she bought into the argument that that’s why we're winning elections, not the quality of our candidates, and then she sits on that trial acting like she's gonna listen and hear both sides fairly—that just can't happen.”

Okay, fine, but it’s kind of hard not to “prejudge” a gerrymandered map. Vos clearly has! Granted, he’s not a judge—and judges do need to rule on the particulars of individual cases without making snap, predetermined decisions, but in the storied history of easy calls, this one is right up there with the 1989 cancelation of “She’s the Sheriff.” 

Anyone who looks at the issue and can’t see what’s going on has no business working at a Pep Boys, much less serving as a supreme court justice. 

Consider this April story from The Atlantic, published shortly after Protasiewicz’s win flipped the state’s highest court to a 4-3 liberal majority:

After Democrats got wiped out in the 2010 midterms, Republicans gerrymandered Wisconsin with scientific precision—ensuring that in a state more or less evenly divided politically, the GOP would maintain its grip on power regardless of how the voters felt about it. Democrats would have to win by a landslide—at least 12 points, according to one expert—just to get a bare majority of 50 seats in the assembly, whereas Republicans could do so by winning only 44 percent of the vote. The U.S. Supreme Court has fueled a bipartisan race to the bottom on gerrymandering by invalidating every voter protection that comes before it, but even in today’s grim landscape, the Badger State is one of the standouts.

Wisconsin is a famously closely divided state, but thanks to their precise drawing of legislative districts, Republicans have maintained something close to a two-thirds majority whether they won more votes or not. With that kind of job security, Republicans in Wisconsin could enact an agenda far to the right of the state’s actual electorate, attacking unions, abortion rights, and voting rights without having to worry that swing voters would throw the bums out. After all, they couldn’t. And year after year, the right-wing majority on the state supreme court would ensure that gerrymandered maps kept their political allies in power and safely protected from voter backlash. Some mismatch between the popular vote and legislative districts is not inherently nefarious—it just happens to be both deliberate and extreme in Wisconsin’s case.

Nice racket, huh? In other words, Wisconsin’s liberals have been held hostage for years by unscrupulous Republicans who couldn’t care less about representative democracy. And this was years before the party as a whole decided it had no use for such quaint throwbacks

But that doesn’t mean Wisconsin Republicans are done being shameless partisans.

The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel:

In January, Protasiewicz called the state's legislative maps "rigged" in a public forum and in March, she told Capital Times reporters in a podcast interview she would "enjoy taking a fresh look at the gerrymandering question."

"They do not reflect people in this state. I don't think you could sell any reasonable person that the maps are fair," Protasiewicz, a former Milwaukee County judge, said in the January forum. "I can't tell you what I would do on a particular case, but I can tell you my values, and the maps are wrong."

Vos suggested if Protasiewicz does not recuse from cases involving the maps, she would violate her oath of office, which might push lawmakers to consider impeaching her.

"I want to look and see, does she recuse herself on cases where she has prejudged? That to me is something that is at the oath of office and what she said she was going to do to uphold the Constitution. That to me is a serious offense."

As The Journal Sentinel points out, Republicans now have the power to hold impeachment trials after having attained a supermajority in the state Senate—largely thanks to gerrymandered maps. And if they do, they could theoretically sideline Protasiewicz in order to protect those same maps.

An impeachment would prevent Justice Protasiewicz from hearing cases until & unless she is acquitted by the Wisconsin Senate. If the Senate drags its feet in holding a trial, that might be enough to leave gerrymandered maps in place for 2024. https://t.co/ifDTHoi9j0 pic.twitter.com/tknTlKAnJj

— Michael Li 李之樸 (@mcpli) August 12, 2023

As the above xweet from Brennan Center redistricting and voting counsel Michael Li explains, judges who’ve been impeached can’t even rule on cases until they’ve been acquitted. With Protasiewicz so sidelined if Republicans pull the trigger on impeachment, they could leverage a deadlocked 3-3 court to keep their maps (and minority rule) in place through 2024. 

Meanwhile, Democrats in the Wisconsin Assembly are understandably calling bullshit. 

"That type of reaction shows how threatened the Republican majority is by a challenge to their rigged maps,” Rep. Evan Goyke, a Milwaukee Democrat, told The Journal Sentinel. “It's really good evidence that the state is gerrymandered, that they'd be willing to go to such an unprecedented maneuver.”

Goyke also suggested that Protasiewicz would have to be dense, corrupt, or a Republican (three great tastes that taste great together) to not see how untenable the current maps are.

"I also think that Justice Protasiewicz is a live human being in Wisconsin and understands that we are living in this gerrymander," Goyke said. "I don't think that one comment invalidates her ability to serve."

Goyke further noted that Protasiewicz’s commanding 11-point victory in April is “a pretty clear mandate where the people stand.”

Sure, but since when do Republicans care where people stand?  They’re typically more interested in forcing them to sit still and take their medicine, whether they want to or not.

But as the Daily Kos Elections team points out in a great thread worth a read, that approach is only going to continue to blow up in GOP faces.

So what would the WI GOP do then? Keep impeaching until there are just two hardcore conservatives left? As we saw in Ohio, voters don't much like it when elected officials try to abrogate their rights. Scorched-earth tactics risk a major backfire for the GOP

— Daily Kos Elections (@DKElections) August 12, 2023

Check out Aldous J. Pennyfarthing’s four-volume Trump-trashing compendium, including the finale, Goodbye, Asshat: 101 Farewell Letters to Donald Trump, at this link. Or, if you prefer a test drive, you can download the epilogue to Goodbye, Asshat for the low, low price of FREE.  

Florida Republican introduces impeachment articles against Joe Biden

Rep. Greg Steube, R-Fla., jumped ahead of his Republican colleagues on Friday and introduced articles of impeachment against President Biden.

While several congressional committees are building a multipronged case to remove Biden from office, Steube said it was past time to take action. He filed articles of impeachment against Biden charging that the president had been complicit in his son Hunter's alleged crimes and had worked to shield him from justice.

"It’s long past time to impeach Joe Biden," Steube said in a statement. "He has undermined the integrity of his office, brought disrepute on the Presidency, betrayed his trust as President, and acted in a manner subversive of the rule of law and justice at the expense of America’s citizens."

Steube filed four articles alleging high crimes and misdemeanors by Biden.

DOJ, FBI, IRS INTERFERED WITH HUNTER BIDEN PROBE, ACCORDING TO WHISTLEBLOWER TESTIMONY RELEASED BY GOP

The first accuses the president of abusing the power of his office by allegedly accepting bribes, committing Hobbs Act extortion and honest services fraud related to use of his official position. These charges arise from Biden's alleged involvement with his family's business dealings, including Hunter and James Biden's (the president's brother) alleged effort to sell access to then-Vice President Biden between 2009 and 2017 in exchange for "payments and business opportunities from foreign and domestic business partners."

House Oversight Committee Chairman Rep. James Comer, R-Ky, on Wednesday released a memo purporting to show that foreign payments to the Biden family totaled more than $20 million — though Democrats say none of the evidence shows that President Biden accepted any payments or committed misconduct. 

The second article charges that President Biden obstructed justice, citing IRS whistleblower testimony that "members of the Biden campaign improperly colluded with Justice Department (DOJ) officials to improperly interfere with investigations into tax crimes alleged to have been committed by Hunter Biden." Both the Justice Department and special counsel David Weiss, the U.S. attorney appointed to investigate Hunter Biden, have denied that the Biden administration impeded Weiss' work.

The third and fourth articles accuse Biden of "fraud" and paying for Hunter Biden's illegal drugs and trysts with prostitutes, respectively. 

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"The evidence continues to mount by the day – the Biden Crime Family has personally profited off Joe’s government positions through bribery, threats, and fraud. Joe Biden must not be allowed to continue to sit in the White House, selling out our country," Steube said. 

On the same day, Steube introduced legislation to require the Secret Service chief to write a report on the illicit use of controlled substances in the White House. The move comes after the Secret Service closed its investigation into cocaine found at the White House last month without identifying a person of interest. Steube named the bill the "Helping Understand Narcotics Traces at the Executive Residence (HUNTER) Act." 

"The United States Secret Service (USSS) refers to themselves as one of the most elite law enforcement agencies in the world. It’s completely unacceptable that the USSS has failed to find who is responsible for bringing cocaine into one of the most secure buildings in the world," he said. "The American people deserve answers. My legislation demands information on the closed investigation into the cocaine found at the White House in July and focuses on how Congress can provide oversight to prevent future illicit usage of controlled substances in the White House."

Steube's articles of impeachment have jumped ahead of at least four GOP-led committee investigations pursuing avenues to impeach Biden or his top officials. The White House has ridiculed suggestions that Biden should be removed from office.

CNN'S JAKE TAPPER CHALKS UP BIDEN FAMILY MONEY REVELATIONS AS ‘SLEAZY’ BUT NOT CRIMINAL DURING COMER CLASH

"We’re not going to get into what House Republicans want to do or may not do — hypotheticals. That’s on them. That’s for them to speak to. What I can speak to is exactly what we’re doing today." press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said in July. 

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"The economic data is so much better than economists had expected. And so, that’s because of the work that this President has done. That’s going to be our focus. Our focus is going to be on what we can do to make Americans’ lives a little bit better, giving them that extra breathing room."

If Republican panic about ‘Hunter Biden’ is any clue, a new Trump indictment is about to drop

A rough measure of how close House and Senate Republicans believe Donald Trump is to new criminal charges can be summed up by two words: Hunter Biden. The volume of Republican screeching about "Hunter Biden" seems to reach its peak in the days just before each new Trump indictment. If past is prologue, then House Republicans are currently expecting Trump to be indicted in Georgia for everything from a conspiracy to corruptly overturn the results of an election to a conspiracy to block every McDonald's toilet from Rome to Augusta.

House Republicans are currently freaking the entire hell out, seemingly inventing new Biden conspiracy theories by the hour after the latest of their supposed star witnesses–the one who was to accuse President Joe Biden of a great many things and seize all the news cycles from now until 2025–delivered a big fat zero. Rep. Greg Steube is the latest to go Full Freakout, and it's ... honestly, it's more pathetic than anything else. In a hilariously overhyped Newsmax "exclusive," the Florida congresscritter says he's going to file a new resolution calling for Biden's impeachment for "bribery, for extortion, obstruction of justice, fraud, financial involvement in drugs and prostitution." That there is no evidence of this is at best a side note. Steube promises he'll provide proof in a press release.

Aaah, this takes me back to the days when all the nice respectable Republican lawmakers and pundits super-duper insisted that Bill and Hillary Clinton were running drugs out of an Arkansas airport, but only in their spare time between murdering half of the people on the American East Coast. It's possible the Queen of England was involved, but it depended on which crackpot you asked. And then the same crowd told us President Barack Obama was a changeling, smuggled into a Hawaiian hospital crib in a worldwide plan to make some random day-old infant the future president. From there we went to, "The Russian government is innocent. Actually the Democratic Party hacked itself and Hillary put the evidence of this in Ukraine, in some dude's house or something." Now we're back to Dark Brandon allegedly doing all the crimes Steube was able to spell correctly without help, because it turns out Biden's lifelong political passion promoting better rail transportation was all a front for whatever the fuck

I'm not sure whether Steube realizes that fellow crackpot Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene already beat him to the "impeach Biden" punch literally months ago and keeps re-announcing it every time someone around her so much as sneezes. Greene is even doing Steube one better by demanding that Congress expunge the two impeachments of Donald Trump so as to cleanse Dear Leader's tainted record.

Speaking of Greene, she's currently escalating her rhetoric as well. She was never terribly coherent to begin with, but at this point she's just a puddle of words rippling softly in response to breezes nobody else feels.

Greene: This comes down to consumers like a single mom who can't afford to buy cereal because the price of grain has gone up so much with this war in Ukraine.. and this is why we have to do everything we can to impeach Joe Biden pic.twitter.com/hnC0kr7xZD

— Acyn (@Acyn) August 11, 2023

All right, so in order to save our Lucky Charms we have to let Russia take over Ukraine so that they'll sell us Ukraine's grain for cheap, and Joe Biden's stopping us from doing that so he's got to go. I think that's the message? Maybe?

There were few people in America who even knew who hell Rep. James Comer was before he too became a Newsmax staple and Republicanism's Replacement Devin Nunes. Now he's just another guy who sees conspiracies everywhere, all the time. That is, unless somebody mentions the names "Donald Trump" or "Jared Kushner" to him, at which point his eyes roll back in his head and he pretends he cannot hear you because he is communicating with the spirits.

Comer: I’d vote for impeachment right now. I don’t have to think twice about that… Our president has taken millions— his family has taken pic.twitter.com/NSmGXkJHEo

— Acyn (@Acyn) August 10, 2023

And then there's this performative confederate dumbass.

There's never been an allegation in the history of our country that a President of the United States, or then Vice President in Joe Biden's alleged case, sold official favors for millions of dollars. pic.twitter.com/6EyS9HgM5T

— Ted Cruz (@tedcruz) August 11, 2023

Again, if you're looking for an allegation that a president sold official favors for millions of dollars, you need to go back in history only to the hoary old days of exactly now. There are a great many people, many of them quite a bit smarter than Sen. Ted Cruz, who are alleging that Donald Damn Trump and family were running a get-your-official-favors-here carnival booth during his presidency. They’re saying everything from the bookings at Trump's hotels and resorts to the restructuring of foreign alliances to Jared Kushner's $2 billion pile of new Saudi money is all part and parcel of Trump and his family selling out the nation's broader interests so that Trump could forge better ties to filthy rich authoritarians elsewhere.

Cruz is having his very own little meltdown of evidenceless conspiracy-cranking, but since Cruz is an allegedly dignified senator as opposed to a House of Representatives ratscrabbler, he's got to hope his audience skips the massive pockmarked "if" that he's using to preface his newest Rudy Giuliani-level hoax.

And if Ted Cruz roamed the countryside kidnapping hundreds of children and sold them to an evil factory owner, he should be thrown in prison. https://t.co/MIFnHJafFg

— Kevin M. Kruse (@KevinMKruse) August 11, 2023

I can't imagine being part of the conservative movement. It just seems so tiring. You've got to keep track of Greene's latest broadcasts from inside what appears to be a lightly haunted New England hotel. You've got Cruz telling you that the stuff rattling around in his own head like the ball in a spray paint can is the most outrageous outrage in all of history. Then you've got to stare and nod your head like you know who the f--k Greg Steube is when he starts talking.

What's clear here is that Republicans in the last week have sharply ramped up the urgency with which they are saying Hunter Biden things, and that generally tends to coincide with times in which Trump is believed to be in brand new legal peril—after which Fox News and other conservative circles suggest that whichever new Trump indictment has dropped is only meant to distract from the super-important new not-evidence those Republicans are now announcing they still don't have.

Based on the urgency of these new Biden theories, Republicans appear to believe that Trump is about to be indicted for attempting to sell off American children as his newest self-branded mail order product. You might want to make sure you've got popcorn ready, because it appears something big is about to drop.

Sign the petition: No to shutdowns. No to Biden impeachment. No to Republicans.

Take that, GOP schemes to rig ballot measures! On this week's episode of "The Downballot," co-hosts David Nir and David Beard gleefully dive into the failure of Issue 1, which was designed to thwart a November vote to enshrine abortion rights in the state constitution. The Davids discuss why Republican efforts to sneak their amendment through during a summertime election were doomed to fail; how many conservative counties swung sharply toward the "no" side; and what the results mean both for Sherrod Brown's reelection hopes and a future measure to institute true redistricting reform.

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Co-conspirator 5’s memos show that Jan. 6 was a planned coup

On the heels of the public exposure of a memo from lawyer Kenneth Chesebro proposing what would become the central strategy of Donald Trump's attempted coup on Jan. 6, 2021, Politico has a new overview of Chesebro's role in the conspiracy that's worth a read.

Chesebro only made it to Co-Conspirator 5 status in Trump's newest federal indictment, overshadowed by figures such as hoax architect Rudy Giuliani and lawyer John Eastman, but in memos it was Chesebro who laid out each of the core elements of the plan for then-Vice President Mike Pence and Congress to simply nullify the election's results come Jan. 6. Eastman appears to have been the one who packaged it all up for sale to Trump and the rest of the White House team.

In the Dec. 6 Chesebro memo revealed Wednesday, he proposes a plan to create fake, uncertified electoral slates in multiple Joe Biden-won states that would then be passed to Pence, who would announce them as the "true" electors using an allegedly unilateral constitutional power that allows the vice president to count up the electoral votes literally however he or she wants. That version of the plan was the one the co-conspirators and conspiring Republican members of the House and Senate worked towards, creating the fake electoral slates. It was Sen. Ron Johnson who appears to have been the volunteer who would smuggle the fake electors to Pence on the day of the vote.

Pence foiled the scheme by refusing to be a part of it even though Trump and Trump's team had pressured him intensely. He was retaliated against on Jan. 6 when Trump singled out Pence as his enemy even as violent pro-Trump insurrectionists hunted for targets in the halls of the Capitol.

But Chesebro had alternative plans as well. All of them hinged on the conservative Supreme Court being sufficiently crooked enough to come up with a legal facade for ignoring the certified electoral slates of multiple states purely on Republican say-so. Or at least for the court to put a pause on the electoral counting that would, in the eyes of the public, help justify other extreme actions to overturn the results.

A week after the Dec. 6 memo proposing the original plan of Pence unilaterally altering the counts himself, Chesebro had already brainstormed a fallback position that would have the same effects.

On Jan. 6, Chesebro said, Pence would announce his recusal from presiding over the joint session of Congress, citing the unconstitutionality of the Electoral Count Act as well as a conflict of interest because of his candidacy for reelection. This, Chesebro contended, would “insulate” Pence from charges of making a self-serving decision and leave the matter ostensibly in the hands of a senior Republican senator. Then, after beginning to count electoral votes from an alphabetical list of states, that senator would refuse to count the votes from Arizona, citing the competing slates of electors. If Arizona wants to be counted, this senator would say, it would either have to “rerun” its election or allow for more judicial review of the outcome.

It's important to acknowledge here that this plan, too, was absolutely batshit crazy. The plans concocted by Trump's alleged "legal" team all hinged on a supposed ability for a vice president or temporary acting Senate president to simply declare that they weren't going to count the votes of states that the Republican candidate didn't win because fuck you, that's why. This was in accordance with the theory that power is unilaterally invested in the vote-counter and there is not a damn thing anyone else in the entire country can do about it.

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This was entirely batshit crazy for a whole host of reasons, and perhaps especially for the complete indifference shown towards what 330 million people might think—or do—when they learned that their entire constitutional democracy was a fiction. Chesebro himself continued to recognize that his plan was so destructive and batshit crazy that the Supreme Court could very well not go along with it. Again, this is a plan that would end with Chesebro and the others facing a firing squad at pretty much any other point of history or in any other country. At some point even the Supreme Court would have to decide whether this was a stunt worthy of forcing the most powerful military on the planet into choosing sides.

But Chesebro still held out hope that the resulting batshit chaos would somehow result in a miracle occurring. Perhaps the election would be thrown out, making House Speaker Nancy Pelosi the acting president. Or perhaps not. Spin the wheel and take your chances, America. The rancid sacks of shit proposing this plan were willing to risk everything for the slightest chance to erase an election.

But another outcome, he said — one that appears even more far-fetched in hindsight — might play out: Trump could quit the race in exchange for a negotiated deal to make Pence president.

“In this situation,” Chesebro wrote, “which would be messy and unpalatable to many … it doesn’t seem fanciful to think Trump and Pence would end up winning the vote after some legislatures appoint electors, or else that there might be a negotiated solution in which the Senate elects Pence vice president and Trump agrees to drop his bid … so that Biden and Harris are defeated, even though Trump isn’t re-elected.”

First off, fuck this dude sincerely for his willingness to throw all of democracy against a wall in the off chance that the debris would make a pretty pattern that he, personally, might like. But the notion that Donald Trump would "quit the race" in a ploy to make Pence president may be more delusional than the plan to assert dictatorial Pence powers. Trump has never done anything in his life unless it would benefit Trump. Just how were Giuliani, Eastman, and the other seditionists going to convince Trump to drop his claims of winning the election so that Pence could sit behind his desk? Were they going to offer him Alaska? Delaware? Agree to convert our newest aircraft carrier to a floating Trump-branded result?

And no matter how many Trump lawsuits fell because each of them were based on craptacular hoaxes that fell apart upon even the most cursory examination—which has landed multiple lawyers in Trump's orbit in deep professional trouble, and that is putting it mildly—Chesebro and Eastman and the others just kept pressing forward. As the House select committee that investigated the coup discovered, Justice Clarence Thomas was widely seen as the coup's most likely Supreme Court ally. As Trump pressured Pence, the coup's architects hunted for cases that might give Thomas the means to at least temporarily block a state's results from being counted.

“Possibly Thomas would end up being the key here — circuit justice, right? We want to frame things so that Thomas could be the one to issue some sort of stay or other circuit justice opinion saying Georgia is in legitimate doubt,” Chesebro wrote. “Realistically, our only chance to get a favorable judicial opinion by Jan. 6, which might hold up the Georgia count in Congress, is from Thomas — do you agree, Prof. Eastman?”

This was just one week before Jan. 6, after courtrooms across the country had thrown out the team's farcical "evidence" of fraud over and over again, leaving the seditionists with no remaining legal fig leaves that would justify their plan. But when not even Thomas gave them the justification they sought, the plan didn't change.

Trump and his allies even scheduled a "march" on the Capitol to coincide with the counting of electoral votes, another means of potentially delaying the vote or creating enough chaos to justify throwing out or "redoing" the election's results.

The reason Trump stood by as the violent mob attacked police and ransacked the building is self-evident: This was the delay the team had been trying to make happen. Trump and the coup planners indeed used the delay caused by the evacuation of Congress to again work the phones, pressuring individual lawmakers to go along with the plan.

What the Chesebro and Eastman memos have spelled out, much too plainly, is that from at least Dec. 6 the plan was to nullify Trump's presidential election loss through Republican fiat, either through Pence or through other House and Senate accomplices, and the co-conspirators all recognized that a likely result of their plan would be massive public unrest and almost certain violence. And they did not care. At all! The "plan" was for Trump to declare that the Insurrection Act allowed him to put down public protests by military force, and he was to give those orders, and the coup planners were willing to spin the wheel on what would happen after that as well.

There was seemingly no jumping-off point where Trump's team of true believers proved unwilling to risk mass violence, military violence, or a new civil war on the vaporous chance that they could erase a Republican election loss. The memos are banal in tone: Things might get "messy" after their "bold" strategies were employed, but oh-fucking-well, those were simply the risks of overturning a democratic election and installing a Republican winner regardless.

It was seditionist from the start. The plan was never to prove actual fraud in any state, it was to unilaterally declare "fraud" and announce that the results were invalid because Pence said so. The Supreme Court would hopefully declare the moves "nonjusticiable" because it was Congress doing them, after which the only remaining concerns would be enforcing order as the public objected.

These ratbastards and their allied Republicans intended a coup from the beginning. It was a stupid plan, mind you. It was premised on a great deal of wishful thinking, and with never a thought to what would happen if Trump called up the military and some member of the military dropped a missile onto the White House in response, but it was a coup by design.

It's hard to imagine what justice can even be meted out here against a team of conspirators whose communications show complete indifference to the damage caused by their schemes.

Conservatives cried about how the “woke” (whatever that means) “Barbie” movie would fail. It didn’t. In fact, the film has struck a chord with American and international audiences. Daily Kos writer Laura Clawson joins Markos to talk about the film and the implications of the Republican Party’s fixation on mythical culture wars, which is failing them in bigger and bigger ways every day.

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Joe Biden reminds Fox News’ Peter Doocy that he’s a lousy reporter

On Thursday morning, “Fox & Friends,” a show featuring a handful of people you would be shamefaced to call your “friends,” ran with a video of an exchange between President Joe Biden and Fox News’ nepo-baby reporter Peter Doocy. In the video, Doocy asks the president, “There’s this testimony now, where one of your former business associates is claiming that you were on speaker phone a lot with them, talking business? Is that … wha–” at which point Biden cuts him off, saying, “I never talked business with anybody, and I knew you’d have a lousy question.”

Doocy feigns surprise at being called full of shit, but frankly, Biden was being nice. It was a lot worse than a “lousy” question. Doocy asks why it is a “lousy” question, and Biden rightfully answers, “Because it’s not true.”

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Doocy is manipulating the well publicized and fully available testimony of Hunter Biden’s former business partner, Devon Archer. He’s posing a question that asserts a falsehood. Archer very specifically testified that Biden never under any circumstances—even tangentially—discussed business with his son Hunter, or with Hunter’s associates.

But if you are stuck in the moral spitoon that is the right-wing media world, you’d think that Doocy’s question and its pathological false premise are somehow fact-based. Doocy and his conservative uniform are used as some kind of proof that this lie has been researched. It is the reason Republicans wanted Archer’s testimony done away from the cameras: It’s easier to lie about what someone said when your audience is unwilling to read.

There’s one response that I think sums Doocy up. Mr. President, would you do the honors?

Forever and always: pic.twitter.com/DPcXg3cQAb

— Lucille Bluth’s Martini (@justdrew404) August 10, 2023

Sign if you agree: Fox News is a waste of your brain cells.

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More than 60 Utah Republicans endorse primary challenger to Mitt Romney

More than 60 Republican lawmakers from Utah are pushing to end Sen. Mitt Romney’s career on Capitol Hill.

Utah state House Speaker Brad Wilson has taken the first steps toward challenging Romney, the Republicans' 2012 presidential nominee, by forming a Senate exploratory committee in April.

The committee on Thursday announced that Wilson’s possible run is already being endorsed by three quarters of his GOP colleagues in the statehouse’s lower chamber and two-thirds of Republicans in the Utah Senate.

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"I am honored and encouraged to have the support of so many leaders from all corners of this great state," Wilson said. "Utah needs a bold, conservative fighter in the U.S. Senate and I am humbled at the support and encouragement we’ve received so quickly."

Romney has, at times, had a fraught relationship with Republicans in his state, particularly other elected officials, over his willingness to criticize and votes to convict former President Donald Trump after his impeachments. Utah’s Weber County GOP voted to censure him for it in May 2021.

Trump swept the state in 2020 during his race against President Biden.

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Romney has not announced whether he plans to run for re-election in 2024, but he filed a statement of candidacy with the Federal Election Commission earlier this year. It would be his first re-election campaign after winning his seat in 2018.

Early fundraising data show both he and Wilson are gearing up for an expensive fight.

'ENOUGH IS ENOUGH': UTAH MAYOR ANNOUNCES BID TO TAKE ROMNEY'S SENATE SEAT

Romney has raised nearly $1.8 million so far this year for a possible re-election bid. Wilson’s war chest is currently larger with just over $2.2 million in receipts, but $1.2 million of that is a loan from the candidate himself.

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Wilson’s exploratory committee website touts him as "pragmatic and conservative" and a lifelong Utah resident. "Brad is exploring a run for the U.S. Senate in 2024 and knows Utahns deserve a bold, proven, and conservative fighter to represent them and their values in our nation’s capital," the site said.

Fox News Digital reached out to Romney’s office to inquire about any updates to his electoral plans, but did not immediately hear back.

Trump tried to steal Pennsylvania. Here’s how we stop him from succeeding next time

Next year's battle for the White House will once again come down to just a handful of states, and one of those states will be Pennsylvania.

And if Donald Trump is the GOP nominee once more, there's every reason to think he'll try to steal Pennsylvania's electoral votes, just like he sought to do in 2020—and was just indicted for.

Three years ago, our sturdiest backstop was the Pennsylvania Supreme Court, which conclusively shut down Trump's many bogus lawsuits that sought to overturn the election. We need to make sure the state's highest court stands ready to safeguard democracy yet again, which is why Daily Kos is proudly endorsing Judge Dan McCaffery in the Nov. 7 race to fill a critical vacant seat.

Democracy is on the line once again. You can help protect it by donating $5, $10, or whatever feels right to Democrat Dan McCaffery in Pennsylvania!

McCaffery is an unimpeachable jurist who has sat on the bench for a decade, winning election as an appeals court judge in 2019. He's the son of immigrants who fled violence in their native Ireland, an Army veteran, a West Point graduate, and a former prosecutor. He has the support of Planned Parenthood, labor unions across the state, and the state Democratic Party. And he earned the highest possible rating from the Pennsylvania Bar Association. In short, he's a fair-minded, independent judge who can be trusted to do the right thing.

Not so his Republican opponent. Judge Carolyn Carluccio not only holds extreme anti-abortion views, she's tried to conceal them by stripping references to her promise to be a "Defender" of "All Life Under the Law" from her campaign website. Even more troubling, she suggested without any evidence that mail voting could lead to fraud and even refused to answer directly when the Philadelphia Inquirer asked if she thought the 2022 and 2022 elections were "free and fair." That sounds like exactly the sort of judge Trump would want to have in his corner.

It goes without saying that the stakes in 2024 are as high as they come, which makes this fall's contest an extremely high-stakes affair as well. Right now, Democrats hold a 4-2 majority on the Pennsylvania Supreme Court, meaning that if Republicans flip this seat (which became vacant after Democrat Max Baer died last year), they'll shrink that edge to 4-3. That's way too close for comfort, especially if there's ever an absence, a recusal, or another vacancy.

And it wasn't too long ago that Republicans controlled the court—it was only in 2015 that Democrats were able to take it back. Republicans have never accepted the legitimacy of that new Democratic majority and even threatened to impeach Democratic justices after they struck down the GOP's gerrymandered maps a few years ago, so we know they're going to fight like hell to regain power.

In Wisconsin, we just saw how low conservatives will stoop to win a state Supreme Court seat—they even literally ran a shot-for-shot remake of the infamous Willie Horton ad. Pennsylvania Republicans will fight just as dirty.

That's why we need to do everything we can to help McCaffery win in November. The best antidote to corporate dark money is grassroots people power, and Daily Kos excels at delivering that.

Donate $20—or whatever you can—right now to elect Dan McCaffery to the Pennsylvania Supreme Court!

5th Circuit deals blow to federal gun statute used in Hunter Biden case

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit on Wednesday voided a federal law that prevents unlawful drug users from possessing firearms.

The statute, 18 U.S.C. § 922(g)(3), bars anyone who is an "unlawful user of or addicted to any controlled substance," including marijuana, from possessing a gun. Violators can face up to 10 years in prison. However, a three-judge panel, citing the Supreme Court's landmark gun rights decision last year, unanimously found the statute unconstitutional as applied to defendant Patrick Daniels. 

Daniels, an admitted habitual marijuana user, was arrested in April 2022 after police searched his car and found marijuana and two loaded firearms. He was convicted in July 2022 and sentenced to nearly four years in prison and three years of probation — a conviction the 5th Circuit panel has now thrown out. 

Though the decision is limited to Louisiana, Mississippi and Texas, it could potentially impact the ongoing federal case against Hunter Biden, who is charged in Delaware under the same statute. Former Assistant U.S. Attorney Andrew McCarthy told Fox News the Justice Department could use the 5th Circuit's opinion as a rationale for a new plea agreement.

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"Even though Hunter Biden’s situation is readily distinguishable from that of Patrick Daniels, it’s possible the Justice Department could rationalize that the 5th Circuit’s ruling supports its exercise of discretion to give Biden deferred-prosecution treatment (as currently proposed, two years of probationary conditions followed by dismissal if the conditions are met) in a plea agreement," McCarthy said. 

The 5th Circuit case, known as U.S. v. Daniels, was decided by Judges Jerry Smith, Stephen Higginson and Don Willett. Together, they held that the 922(g)(3) restriction was too broad as applied to Daniels and unsupported by a "historical tradition of firearm regulation," as required by the Supreme Court in Bruen. 

"Just as there was no historical justification for disarming a citizen of sound mind, there is no tradition that supports disarming a sober citizen who is not currently under an impairing influence," Smith wrote. "Indeed, it is helpful to compare the tradition surrounding the insane and the tradition surrounding the intoxicated side-by-side."

The statute's language does not distinguish between a person who is intoxicated or a person who is sober but in possession of drug paraphernalia at the time of their arrest.

The court observed that the founding-era law "institutionalized the insane and stripped them of their guns; but they allowed alcoholics to possess firearms while sober." 

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"In short, neither the restrictions on the mentally ill nor the regulatory tradition surrounding intoxication can justify Daniels' conviction," Smith wrote. Further, the court said there was no historical tradition of stripping away gun rights from persons who are non-violent, drug users or otherwise. 

"The government asks us to set aside the particulars of the historical record and defer to Congress' modern-day judgment that Daniels is presumptively dangerous because he smokes marihuana multiple times a month. But that is the kind of toothless rational basis review that Bruen proscribes. Absent a comparable regulatory tradition in either the 18th or 19th century, § 922(g)(3) fails constitutional muster under the Second Amendment." 

The 5th Circuit has now declared two federal gun statutes unconstitutional under Bruen's precedent. In a previous case, U.S. v. Rahimi, the court struck down a federal statute that made it a crime for a person with a domestic violence restraining order to be in possession of a gun — a decision that has been appealed to the Supreme Court

In a concurring opinion, Higginson criticized Bruen for causing "uncertainty and upheaval" in how the government can apply public safety laws, which he said "face inconsistent invalidation." He observed that lower courts have wildly differed in their interpretations of Bruen, leading to disparate outcomes for individuals across the country charged with the same federal crime. 

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"Already, as courts work through the impact of Bruen, defendants guilty of a gun crime in one jurisdiction are presently innocent of it in another," the judge said.

Such is the case for Hunter Biden, who is charged with violating 18 U.S.C. § 922(g)(3) because he was a crack cocaine user when he bought a Colt Cobra .38 Special from StarQuest Shooters, a gun store in Wilmington, Delaware, in 2018. 

McCarthy said that while there are essential differences between Biden and Daniels, the Justice Department could still use the 5th Circuit's decision to go easy on Biden.

"The 5th Circuit panel unanimously ruled that the 922(g)(3) restriction was too broad as applied to Daniels. Historically, the law has permitted gun possession prohibitions against people who were actively under the influence of drugs or alcohol, but not against people who were sometimes under the influence but apparently sober at the time they possessed guns," he explained. 

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"Unlike Daniels, who by his own admission is a regular marijuana user, Biden was a cocaine addict who was provably binging on cocaine in the October 2018 time-frame when he possessed at least one firearm," McCarthy continued. "Marijuana is now legal in many states (even though it is still deemed a prohibited substance under federal law that is not enforced); cocaine is an illegal substance under state and federal law — it is more addictive, more debilitating, and consequently its possession and distribution are punished more severely in penal statutes.

"So the cases can be distinguished," McCarthy said. "Nevertheless, it would not be unreasonable for the Justice Department to say it needed to rethink prosecution standards for 922(g)(3) in light of the Daniels decision. Of course, the question would then be whether Hunter Biden was being given favorable treatment — i.e., was he being given a pass when the Biden Justice Department would still prosecute similarly situated people? It’s too early to answer that question."

Gun rights activists celebrated the 5th Circuit's opinion, denouncing 18 U.S.C. § 922(g)(3) as an unconstitutional restriction on the Second Amendment. 

However, Higginson warned that "further reductionism" under Bruen "will mean systematic, albeit inconsistent, judicial dismantling of the laws that have served to protect our country for generations." 

"This state of affairs will be nothing less than a Second Amendment caricature, a right turned inside out, against freedom and security in our State," Higginson wrote.