New York Times:

Hamas and Israel Prepare for 3rd Exchange of Prisoners for Hostages

The Egyptian government said it had received a list of those who would be swapped. Jake Sullivan, President Biden’s national security adviser, said that at least one American citizen could be among them.

• An earlier delay underscores the fragility of the agreement.

• Freed Israeli hostages are sharing details of their time in captivity, relatives say.

• Biden’s national security adviser says an American hostage might be released on Sunday.

NBC News:

The five 'extremely excruciating' weeks of talks that led to the Hamas hostage deal

Vast challenges remain in freeing all 240 hostages. Most of all, Hamas’ claim that it is not holding roughly 100 of the captives.

The final agreement — the outlines of which had been on the table for weeks — wouldn’t have been accepted by Netanyahu without enormous pressure from Biden, according to a senior Israeli government official.

“This deal was a Biden deal, not a Netanyahu deal,” the official said.

Washington Post:

White House grapples with internal divisions on Israel-Gaza

The Hamas attacks and Israeli reaction have roiled the Biden team like no other issue during his presidency

The division inside the White House is to some degree between Biden’s senior longtime aides and an array of younger staffers of diverse backgrounds. But even top advisers said they recognize the conflict has hurt America’s global standing. “We’re taking on a lot of water on Israel’s behalf,” one senior official said. Still, Biden’s aides noted that his public statements have become increasingly direct on the responsibility Israel has to minimize civilian casualties and to allow aid into Gaza, even as he declines to call for a cease-fire as many liberals want.

The White House also insists it has influenced Israel’s military tactics, pointing out that more than 100 aid trucks a day on average are getting into Gaza and that Israel is now allowing in some fuel. One senior administration official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss secret diplomacy, said that after the United States dispatched three senior military officers in late October to advise the Israelis on strategy, they sent only about a third as many troops into Gaza as they had initially planned.

Sahil speaks truth.

Peter Wehner/The Atlantic:

Have You Listened Lately to What Trump Is Saying?

He is becoming frighteningly clear about what he wants.

I thought about the events that led up to the Rwandan genocide after I heard Donald Trump, in a Veterans Day speech, refer to those he counts as his enemies as “vermin.” “We pledge to you that we will root out the Communists, Marxists, fascists, and the radical-left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country—that lie and steal and cheat on elections,” Trump said toward the end of his speech in Claremont, New Hampshire. “They’ll do anything, whether legally or illegally, to destroy America and to destroy the American dream.” The former president continued, “The threat from outside forces is far less sinister, dangerous, and grave than the threat from within. Our threat is from within.”

When Trump finished his speech, the audience erupted in applause.

Mediaite:

Trump Lashes Out At ‘The Atlantic’ After Brutal Article Details His Recent Rhetoric: ‘Frighteningly Clear About What He Wants’

Former President Donald Trump took aim the The Atlantic on Saturday and personally attacked its owner Laurene Powell Jobs.

“It’s so good to see how badly the THIRD RATE MAGAZINE, The Atlantic, is doing,” Trump said of the storied publication.

“It’s failing at a level seldom seen before, even in the Publishing Business. False and Fake stories do it every time! They’ve got a rich person funding the ridiculous losses, but at some point, rich people get smart also. Steve Jobs would not be proud of his wife, Laurene, and the way she is spending his money. The Radical Left is destroying America!”

Darren Samuelsohn/The Messenger:

Trump Vows to Prosecute Critics and Rivals — But it’s Not Quite That Easy

The Republican presidential frontrunner's second-term retaliation plans may be catnip for his MAGA audiences but will be far more difficult to implement in real life

Even for someone who has twice survived impeachment and who can expect to be successful in making it his top priority upon inauguration to redirect the DOJ from prosecuting him to becoming one of his biggest defenders, legal experts told The Messenger that Trump may be a bit overconfident if he thinks he could also achieve his goals by taking absolute command of the nation’s most powerful arm of law enforcement to direct at his leisure.

If he doesn’t win, problem solved.

Click for the entire message from George Takei. With age comes experience, at least sometimes, but it’s certainly true for Biden.

A reminder the House is back Tuesday, so the standard starting routine applies at noon: A Speaker pro tempore for the day is appointed, a benediction, the Speaker’s approval of the journal (previous session’s activity), The Pledge of Allegiance, and a George Santos expulsion motion.

Matt Robison on Elon Musk:

Greg Sargent/The Washington Post:

Youngkin’s disastrous night shows the right’s culture war has fizzled

But the GOP governor’s comeuppance isn’t just about the durability of abortion rights as a political winner for Democrats. It also shows that right-wing culture-warring on education — built around a “parents’ rights” agenda limiting school discussion of race and gender — has utterly lost its political potency, allowing Democrats to respond with their own affirmative liberal cultural agenda.

Strikingly, more than $5.5 million was spent on ads about education in the Virginia legislative contests, according to data provided by the tracking firm AdImpact. While it’s unclear what percentage focused on “parents’ rights,” some Republicans modeled their campaigns on the way Youngkin turned that issue into a 2021 victory — an upset that led many pundits to declare education a political loser for Democrats even in blue territory.

Amanda Marcotte/Salon:

"I'm so tired of these psychos": Moms for Liberty is now a toxic brand Last month, Salon reported on one town's fight over a right wing school takeover — Tuesday, the resistance won big

Last month, I published an investigative report about how Moms for Liberty, a group dedicated to rewiring American education toward the far right, had taken over the board of education in the Pennridge School District, about half an hour outside Philadelphia. Moms for Liberty, a heavily funded astroturf organization linked to GOP leadership, wasn't especially subtle in its strategies, pinpointing a handful of swing districts in purple states, like Virginia and Pennsylvania, and targeting school board elections, which are usually low turnout and easy to win. Once installed, Moms for Liberty members started banning books and Pride flags, as well as protesting that teachers were "grooming" kids with "smut," which usually meant either a history book or acclaimed, age-appropriate fiction. The idea was to create moral panics around sex and race that could tip national elections towards Republicans.

Well, it backfired.

As I reported, parents in the Pennridge district eager to fight back against right-wing radicals formed the Ridge Network and got the word out, arguing to voters that the group was degrading the quality of the public schools. This week, those efforts paid off: Democrats won all five of the open school board seats in the district, wresting control away from Moms for Liberty.  

ICYMI, it also happened in Iowa. This from Bleeding Heartland was previously shared: “Progressives win, book banners lose many Iowa school board races.”

Tom Bonier/The New York Times:

American Elections Are About Abortion Now

Abortion rights won big on Tuesday night. In Ohio, a constitutional amendment enshrining protections for abortion rights was on the ballot, and in Virginia, control of both chambers of the state legislature was considered a tossup, and both parties made abortion rights the central issue of their campaigns. The pro-abortion-rights measure in Ohio passed by a wide margin. In Virginia, the Republican governor, Glenn Youngkin, made his proposal for a ban on abortions after 15 weeks of pregnancy the central argument for electing Republicans in the state legislature. Republicans failed to win back control in the Senate and lost their narrow majority in the House of Delegates as turnout surged to historically high levels in key swing districts.

Before this week’s elections, most of the attention of the political class and the public was focused on national polls showing Donald Trump holding a lead over President Biden in the 2024 presidential contest. But it is now clearer than ever that the backlash against the Dobbs decision — and voters’ general distaste for strictly limiting abortion access — could play a crucial role in winning Mr. Biden a second term. Certainly, there will be many other major issues at play in this election, including war and voters’ perceptions of the economy. But abortion could plausibly be the deciding factor next November.

NBC News:

Ron DeSantis says it's 'out of bounds' to attack candidates' kids — except for Hunter Biden

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis said he disagreed with Vivek Ramaswamy's reference to Nikki Haley's daughter.

In an interview with Fox News, DeSantis said he disagreed with Vivek Ramaswamy bringing up former United Nations Ambassador Nikki Haley’s daughter in a discussion about TikTok during the presidential primary debate hosted by NBC News on Wednesday night. He cautioned against dragging family members into the political fray.

“I think the kids are out of bounds. I didn’t think that was an appropriate thing to do,” said DeSantis, who has three young children.

“I keep the kids out of it for sure,” he added of his own conduct.

But out on the campaign trail, the governor does not shy from making a punchline out of Hunter Biden, 53, joking about his history of addiction and embarrassing details of his personal life that have surfaced publicly.

While Hunter Biden is an adult, so is Haley’s daughter — albeit a few decades younger than the president's son. Both, however, are politicians’ children who are not in elected office.

Adam Wren/Politico:

Can the GOP ever come to grips with the lies of 2020?

Mike Johnson’s election, and the process getting there, showed a party not willing to address the fundamental question facing it.

Whether the Republican Party can ever reconcile its divergent response to Jan. 6 is not the next question. It’s the question defining this turbulent political moment in Washington and beyond — roiling and coursing just below the surface. These days, all roads lead back to the original lie that Donald Trump won.

They fear their voters. It’s as simple as that. 

Good for him. 

Liam Donovan/New York Times:

Matt Gaetz Created a Win-Win Situation for Himself

Within weeks, many of those same hard-line conservatives mounted a procedural blockade of government funding bills, forcing Mr. McCarthy to choose between the shutdown they sought to compel, and the bipartisan end-around that would lead to his removal as speaker. While Mr. McCarthy’s reliance on Democratic votes was cited as evidence of noncompliance with the January deal, the blockade and ensuing mutiny was a practical acknowledgment that what is achievable under the current balance of power in Washington had proven insufficient to hard-liners.

In the end, the inside influence they had sought for the past decade was less fulfilling than the outside clout that had secured that power.

Liam predicts the same destructive cycle could begin anew and all too soon. Any Speaker has to work with the Senate and the White House, both controlled by Democrats, even if the Senate is just barely.

Daily Beast:

Democrats Say They Have No Choice but to Work With Extremist New Speaker

Democrats are appalled by much of Mike Johnson’s record. But they say they have to find a way to look past his extremist beliefs.

In reality, Johnson’s history on the issue is far from irrelevant. The 2020 election remains incredibly important to the most powerful person in the GOP—Trump—and Emmer’s certification vote stance was no small reason why Trump issued a scorching statement torpedoing his speaker bid.

Johnson’s role in trying to overturn the election was a signal to GOP voters and Republicans in Congress that he was sufficiently “conservative” and aligned with their values.

Should Johnson remain the Speaker through the 2024 election, his approach to the 2020 election—which saw him discount the will of voters and an abundance of facts about the fairness of the election in order to keep Trump in power—will be anything but a relic of the past.

The scandal sheets on Mike Johnson:

Politico Playbook:

What’s in store for Speaker Johnson?

MAGA MIKE’S LOOMING GAVEL WOES — House Republicans’ three-week-long nightmare is over. But for new Speaker MIKE JOHNSON, the nightmare is just beginning.

While it was all smiles and standing ovations from his GOP colleagues yesterday, the new leader is about to run smack into the tough reality that he just got promoted to the worst job in Washington.

That includes the pleasure of dealing with the egos, rivalries and demands of a bitterly divided GOP Conference … of negotiating with Democrats eager to flip the House and see him fall flat on his face … and let’s not forget about the public scrutiny that’s already ratcheting up on a man who has probably received more attention in the past 48 hours than he has in his entire career.

Let’s unpack some of the heartburn ahead …

Punchbowl News:

How Johnson will get squeezed

Brand-new Speaker Mike Johnson has two brewing problems — House GOP moderates and Senate Republicans.

House Republican moderates overwhelmingly backed Johnson, ending several weeks of internal fighting. But they’re warning they aren’t going to blindly follow a far-right agenda.

The vow from center-right Republicans will have an impact across a range of issues, but there are two areas in particular worth watching — government funding and the potential impeachment of President Joe Biden.

“We have to speak up,” Rep. Lori Chavez-DeRemer (R-Ore.) told us. “We’re a strong voice as majority makers. Now’s the time to express it with a new speaker.”

In the aftermath of Johnson’s election, many House Republicans exuded a kumbaya vibe, as unrealistic as that seems.

Yet there are lasting scars from the last three weeks. The bitter clashes between top Republicans — with threats in particular aimed at GOP lawmakers, their families and staffers from some supporters of Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) — aren’t going to be forgotten anytime soon.

Politically vulnerable Republicans, notably the 18 members in districts Biden won in 2020, have already faced a slew of tough votes.

Jennifer Rubin/Washington Post:

Republican radicalization takes its toll

The findings in this year’s Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI) annual American Values Survey are a disturbing reminder that, regardless of the political fortunes of four-time-indicted former president Donald Trump, the MAGA movement he spawned has radicalized millions of Americans.

The poll, conducted in partnership with the Brookings Institution, surveyed more than 2,500 Americans on everything from trans rights to QAnon to racism.

The survey’s great value comes as a warning about the radicalization and alienation of a segment of the major parties’ followers. “Today, nearly a quarter of Americans (23%) agree that ‘because things have gotten so far off track, true American patriots may have to resort to violence in order to save our country,’ up from 15% in 2021,” the survey found. “PRRI has asked this question in eight separate surveys since March 2021. This is the first time support for political violence has peaked above 20%.” A full third of Republicans believe this, compared with 13 percent of Democrats. Meanwhile, QAnon believers have jumped from 14 percent of Americans to 23 percent, with Republicans twice as likely as Democrats to buy into the extreme conspiracy theory.

Matt Robison interviews Barbara McQuade:

Natalie Jackson/National Journal:

Either 59% or 22% of Republicans want a speaker loyal to Trump. Which is it?

The same pollster yields wildly different responses by changing the question format.

The items on the trait list selected by two-thirds or more of Republicans as important were generic leadership traits—“strong leader,” “trustworthy,” “ethical,” and “intelligent”—while items directly about the politics of the speakership, including the Trump-loyalty item, were chosen by less than a third of Republicans.

The preference for generic over political items is an indicator that even Republicans aren’t paying a ton of attention to the specific issue. The Economist’s poll also showed that only 28 percent of Republicans were paying “a lot” of attention to McCarthy’s removal, and while 3 in 4 Republicans had heard of McCarthy and could give an opinion on him, around 4 in 10 hadn’t heard of the alternatives—Scalise or Rep. Jim Jordan.

Jim Jordan won’t automatically sink the GOP without campaigning against what he stands for, because, well, most people don’t know who their Senators are.

On the other hand, Jordan is easy to campaign against, because of what he stands for. And a campaign against what he stands for will happen. Just not yet.

Don Moynihan/Substack:

A "legislative terrorist" tries to become Speaker Jim Jordan as a symptom of the deinstitutionalization project

What are the factors that make for a good Speaker of the House? Surely it involves the ability to manage factions, and to understand and protect the institution that you lead.

Whatever the criteria, Jim Jordan fails to meet them. His rise as a candidate signals how the Republican Party has shifted focus from governing to deinstitutionalization.

Read it in full, it’s amazing. And bad for MAGA.

John Burn-Murdoch/X/Twitter via Threadreader:

Some quick thoughts on why large parts of the mainstream media keep slipping up on Gaza/Israel (and why it was the same at times with Covid): The main reason is a failure to keep pace with modern news gathering techniques, but there’s more. 

With the proliferation of photos/footage, satellite imagery and map data, forensic video/image analysis and geolocation (~OSINT) has clearly been a key news gathering technique for several years now. A key news gathering technique *completely absent from most newsrooms*. 

Obviously not every journalist should be an OSINT specialist, just as not every journalist is a specialist in combing through financial accounts, or scraping websites, or doing undercover investigations. But any large news org should have *some* OSINT specialists. 

Good thread on media rushing to judgment, more at the link.

New York Times:

In Tel Aviv, Biden’s Embrace of Israel Came With a Gentle Warning

In a rare wartime visit, President Biden paired his support for Israel with a plea for caution not to let overwhelming grief or anger drive the country to go too far.

In a way, Mr. Biden flew to Israel on Wednesday to give the whole country a hug, to say how much America grieves with Israel and stands by Israel and has Israel’s back. But with the hug came a whisper in the ear as well, a gentle warning not to give into the “primal feeling,” not to let overwhelming grief or overpowering anger drive the country to go too far as he believes America did after Sept. 11, 2001.

David Rothkopf/Daily Beast:

Biden’s Israel Trip Was a Gamble That’s Already Paying Off

Humanitarian aid is finally entering Gaza, Israelis felt supported, and Netanyahu is unlikely to disrespect the U.S. president again any time soon.

The response of the Biden team in the wake of the explosion and fire at the hospital was calm, compassionate and resolute.

They determined to proceed with the trip. The White House announced the summit with regional leaders would be postponed. Secretary of State Antony Blinken, whose extraordinary shuttle diplomacy following the Hamas attack on Israel has been a diplomatic master class stated, “All civilians, Israeli and Palestinian, must be protected. Deeply saddened by the explosion at the Al Ahli Arab hospital in Gaza. As @POTUS said, “The United States stands unequivocally for the protection of civilian life.”

The tenor of the Blinken statement illustrated yet another challenging aspect of the Biden mission. He sought to both show support for Israel, and to seek to temper the Israeli response to the terrorists’ atrocities to ensure it was consistent with international law and that humanitarian concerns of both Israelis and Palestinians would be given priority.

There will be an address to the nation form the Oval Office tonight.

Alex Burness/Bolts:

“I Don’t Think They Care”: Virginia Is Slow-Walking the Fix to a Wrongful Voter Purge

With elections weeks away, state officials admitted improperly removing some people from voter rolls. Local advocates say the state is doing too little, too late to remedy the harm.

Even after Virginia’s delayed acknowledgment, it took the state two additional weeks to reinstate Shelton onto voter rolls. She found out Monday when she checked her registration status on the state’s site.

Shelton says neither state officials nor her county registrar have reached out to tell her that she has been reinstated. “I haven’t heard anything from anyone. I just happened to be checking online,” she said. “If I wasn’t checking, I would not have known, and I would keep on assuming I was denied.”

There is little time before Virginia’s Nov. 7 elections, which will decide control of the legislature and other local offices; half of the early voting period is over, and the deadline to ask to vote by mail looms next week.

Voting rights advocates warn that Virginia is doing too little, too late to stave off confusion and correct its costly mistake in the lead-up to Election Day.

They say they don’t even know how many people the state has reinstated so far and how many remain improperly purged, since the state is sharing little information. “They’re very tight-lipped about what they’re doing now, how this happened, and how they’re going to rectify it,” says Sheba Williams, who helps formerly incarcerated people regain their rights as the founder of the Richmond-based nonprofit Nolef Turns. “I don’t think they care.”

David Makovsky/Times of Israel:

The trust Biden built with Israelis doesn’t come with a blank check

The depth of the US president's commitment impressed ordinary Israelis but an ongoing Gaza war could test ties

This may have been one of the most devastating weeks in Israel’s history, but it also could mark a fundamental turning point between the Israeli public’s relationship with US President Joe Biden.

Israel has had emotional moments of connection before with foreign leaders at times of great shock. One came when Jordan’s King Hussein kneeled before grieving Israeli families after a crazed Jordanian soldier killed seven Israeli schoolgirls. Another came when President Bill Clinton met with Israeli high school students after four suicide bombings, two of them on Tel Aviv buses, during a single nine-day period in 1996. These were not standard political meetings, but intimate encounters between a grieving society and a foreign leader who they came to see as a trusted friend for their words and actions. This week may be another.

Biden’s three sets of White House remarks – first over the weekend, then a forceful statement on Tuesday expanded upon in remarks to American Jewish leaders on Wednesday – were effective for different reasons. They had an extraordinary and immediate impact inside Israel. A commentator on Israel’s right-wing Channel 14 apologized to Biden on-air for questioning his commitment to Israel in the past, saying this was the “moment of truth.” Huge billboards sprung up on Tel Aviv’s Ayalon Highway declaring “Thank you, Mr. President” and quoting from his speech. Public reaction, judging from Israeli TV and social media, ranged from grateful to ecstatic.

Simon Rosenberg/”Hopium Chronicles” on Substack:

The President’s Speech On the Terror Attacks in Israel - Yesterday, the President gave his first extended set of remarks on Hamas’ barbaric attacks on Israel. His remarks have been widely praised. Many have called it the finest hour and finest speech of his Presidency. Do watch. The remarks are only about 10 minutes long. The video is below and you can find a transcript here.

YouTube Video

Jonathan V Last/The Bulwark:

Biden Gets 10/7 Right

Another crisis and another solid response from POTUS.

Our hearts may be broken, but our resolve is clear.

There’s more. You can read the rest. You should read the rest.

Here are some things Biden did not do:

• He did not tweet out threats.

• He did not call people dogs.

• He did not alienate any of our allies.

• He did not endorse war crimes.

• He did not criticize any of his domestic political opponents.

Just objectively speaking: Is there anything more you could want from an American president at a moment like this? Because if there is, I can’t think of it.

Joe Biden has done the job about as well as anyone—Republican or Democrat—could have hoped.

Bruce Hoffman/The Atlantic:

Understanding Hamas’s Genocidal Ideology

A close read of Hamas’s founding documents clearly shows its intentions.

How many Israelis, or Jews, or anyone else for that matter, have read the 1988 Hamas Covenant or the revised charter that was issued in 2017? With 36 articles of only a few paragraphs’ length each in the former, and 42 concise statements of general principles and objectives in the latter, both are considerably shorter and more digestible than the 782-page original German-language edition of Mein Kampf. Moreover, unlike Hitler’s seminal work, which was not published in English until March 1939, excellent English translations of both the original Hamas Covenant and its successor can easily be found on the internet.

Bruce Hoffman is a professor at Georgetown University. He is also the Shelby Cullom & Katharine W. Davis Senior Fellow for Counterterrorism and Homeland Security at the Council on Foreign Relations and the George H. Gilmore Senior Fellow at the U.S. Military Academy’s Combating Terrorism Center.

This is not a pretty or relaxing read.

Jerusalem Post:

Poll: Majority blames gov’t for Hamas massacre, says Netanyahu must resign

An overwhelming majority of 86% of respondents, including 79% of coalition supporters, said the surprise attack from Gaza is a failure of the country's leadership.

The survey, which polled 620 Israeli Jews from across the country, also found that a majority of respondents believed Netanyahu should resign following the conclusion of Operation Swords of Iron.

A slim majority of 56% said Netanyahu must resign at the end of the war, with 28% of coalition voters agreeing with this view, and  52% of respondents also expect Defense Minister Yoav Gallant to resign.

As I have noted, expecting Israelis to rally around Netanyahu the way it happened here after 9/11 is a misread of the situation and a projection of American politics onto a different society.

Patricia Murphy/Atlanta Journal Constitution:

They can’t run their caucus. How can Republicans run a country?

It would be tempting to compare the House GOP caucus to the Mickey Mouse Club. But at least the Mickey Mouse Club had a leader. House Republicans are nowhere close to being able to say the same.

It’s been a week and a half since a group of eight disgruntled Republicans ousted former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy. But after days of closed-door caucus meetings and secret ballot votes this week, Republicans are further away from choosing a new speaker than the day McCarthy was booted…

In the same period of time that the House has been leaderless, Hamas launched a deadly massacre against Israel, with more than 1,000 Israelis dead and at least 22 Americans killed. Israel responded by bombing Gaza, and Secretary of State Anthony Blinken traveled to the Middle East with the United States’ hostage specialist to seek the return of Americans held there…

The only things House Republicans have managed to do in response are fight amongst themselves, gavel the chamber into session for seven minutes, and take Nancy Pelosi’s office away from her. It hasn’t been pretty.

A bipartisan solution is available, but Republicans aren’t ready yet.

Here’s an interesting pair of articles regarding Wisconsin:

Associated Press:

2nd former Wisconsin Supreme Court justice advises Republican leader against impeachment

Former Justice Jon Wilcox told The Associated Press that there was nothing to justify impeaching Justice Janet Protasiewicz, as some Republican lawmakers have floated because of comments she made during the campaign about redistricting and donations she accepted from the Wisconsin Democratic Party.

“I do not favor impeachment,” Wilcox told AP in a telephone interview. “Impeachment is something people have been throwing around all the time. But I think it’s for very serious things.”

New York Times:

Wisconsin Republicans Retreat From Threats to Impeach Liberal Justice

Republicans had floated the idea of impeaching Janet Protasiewicz, newly seated on the Wisconsin Supreme Court, before she could undo the party’s legislative gerrymander. But on Thursday, they backed off.

Wisconsin Republicans signaled on Thursday that they were retreating from their threats to impeach a recently seated liberal State Supreme Court justice, Janet Protasiewicz, before the newly left-leaning court could throw out the gerrymandered legislative maps that have cemented the G.O.P.’s hold on power in the state.

Robin Vos, the powerful Republican speaker of the State Assembly, said at a news conference in Madison that he would not seek to remove Justice Protasiewicz based on the argument he and fellow Republicans had been making for two months — that statements she made calling the maps “rigged” during her campaign for office this year compelled impeachment if she refused to recuse herself from a case challenging them.

Now, Mr. Vos said, the focus would be on what Justice Protasiewicz does “in office.” He said that if the court ruled against the Republican-drawn maps and other conservative causes, he would appeal its decisions to the U.S. Supreme Court. Impeachment, he said, remained “on the table” but was not something Republicans would pursue now.

It’s very hard to know what’s bluster and what’s a plan—or intimidation.

New York Times:

Republicans Choose a New Speaker Nominee, Then Quickly Undercut Him

Multiple lawmakers refused to honor their party’s internal selection of Steve Scalise, continuing the chaos over the speakership with no end in sight.

Republicans used to consider themselves the orderly party, the one that assiduously adhered to the rules and respected the will of the majority. But the traditional rule book has been thrown out the window when it comes to the extraordinary tumult in the House.

In what would have been unthinkable in the past, numerous House Republicans on Wednesday refused to honor the results of their internal election of Representative Steve Scalise of Louisiana for speaker — historically a given. They threatened a mutiny on the House floor that had factions of the party in open conflict amid the unrelenting chaos on Capitol Hill.

Republicans are, in fact, the party of refusing to accept election results. They are nihilists and insurrectionists. And it’s on full display in the House. But there is a way out, unlikely though it may be. This is from the Washington Post:

Hakeem Jeffries: A bipartisan coalition is the way forward for the House

House Republicans have lashed out at historic public servants and tried to shift blame for the failed Republican strategy of appeasement. But what if they pursued a different path and confronted the extremism that has spread unchecked on the Republican side of the aisle? When that step has been taken in good faith, we can proceed together to reform the rules of the House in a manner that permits us to govern in a pragmatic fashion.

The details would be subject to negotiation, though the principles are no secret: The House should be restructured to promote governance by consensus and facilitate up-or-down votes on bills that have strong bipartisan support. Under the current procedural landscape, a small handful of extreme members on the Rules Committee or in the House Republican conference can prevent common-sense legislation from ever seeing the light of day. That must change — perhaps in a manner consistent with bipartisan recommendations from the House Select Committee on the Modernization of Congress.

In short, the rules of the House should reflect the inescapable reality that Republicans are reliant on Democratic support to do the basic work of governing. A small band of extremists should not be capable of obstructing that cooperation.

No specifics here, just a statement of principle. Still, getting important bipartisan bills on the floor for a vote would be a step forward.

Bolts Magazine:

Kentucky Activists Step In to Deliver on the Promise of Voting Rights Restoration

After the governor restored hundreds of thousands of people’s rights in 2019, a coalition led by formerly incarcerated Kentuckians is working to inform people of their rights.

The outlook changed dramatically for Kentuckians with felonies in 2019, when Democrat Andy Beshear entered office with what he called a “moral responsibility” to help others like Malone. Two days after his inauguration, Beshear issued a sweeping executive order to automatically restore voting rights for people convicted in Kentucky of nonviolent crimes once they finish all parts of their sentence, including parole or probation. The order instantly restored voting rights to about 180,000 Kentuckians and sliced the state’s disenfranchised population in half.

But in practice, this massive expansion of voter eligibility has not translated into a wave of newly-enfranchised Kentuckians actually heading to the polls. In the 2022 midterm election, three years on from the executive order, only about 7 percent of people whose voting rights were restored by Beshear’s order actually cast ballots, according to the Kentucky Civic Engagement Table, a voting rights organization. That’s compared to 42 percent of the overall electorate.

Part of the blame, Kentucky’s advocates say, lies with a Beshear administration that did little to notify people affected by the order. This inaction has inspired Kentuckians like Malone to step in and inform people who are eligible to vote but may not realize it. Their project has kicked into higher gear recently, ahead of a critical November election that, as I reported last month, could lead to a reversal of Beshear’s order and a return to blanket disenfranchisement of anyone convicted of a felony.

A coalition of activists and nonprofit organizations have been using public records and word of mouth to identify people whose rights were restored, traversing the state to tell those people they have the right to vote and to encourage them to exercise it. In addition to door-to-door canvassing, this coalition scours social media, meets people in barber shops and churches, in parks and county jails, and at public events like this Lexington festival.

Politico:

McCarthy loyalists vow to draw out painful speakership battle

House Republicans' state of emotional limbo is particularly problematic, since they'd otherwise welcome the chance to move quickly on aiding Israel.

Republican lawmakers are scheduled to meet Tuesday evening for another forum on the internal speakership election that's expected to take place on Wednesday, though neither Scalise nor Jordan has the votes to win the speakership on the House floor — and, importantly, McCarthy does not have the votes he'd need either. That emotional limbo is particularly problematic for House Republicans who would otherwise welcome the chance to move quickly on helping Israel beat back weekend attacks by Hamas.

While the conference remains polarized, Duarte joined GOP Reps. Carlos Gimenez and John Rutherford of Florida in making their plans clear during a closed-door House GOP conference meeting Monday night, according to three GOP lawmakers.

Rutherford warned his fellow Republicans that he was prepared to keep voting for McCarthy over and over, suggesting that the former speaker’s still livid supporters are ready to hold out for some time in order to undercut the other candidates.

As many have noted, the war Republicans are focusing on is their internal one. Meanwhile, Kevin McCarthy has asked his allies to not nominate him, but only after disrupting the election for those who are running. Perhaps the beneficiary will be Patrick McHenry, a McCarthy ally.

In any case the fecklessness and petty childishness of Republicans while Biden leads the country is on full display.

New York Times:

Israel-Gaza WarAs Scale of Atrocities Emerges, Biden Condemns Hamas Attacks as ‘Sheer Evil’

Speaking from the White House, President Biden said 14 Americans had been killed during Hamas’s incursions into Israel and that some U.S. citizens were being held hostage.

• President Biden bristled with indignation during his 10-minute address at the White House, appearing as angry as he ever has in public since becoming president. In remarks after speaking with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, he denounced the attack as “evil” multiple times. Victims, he said, had been “butchered” and “slaughtered,” and he decried the “bloodthirstiness” of the assailants.

Major speech by a major politician.

David Schenker/Haaretz:

Israel Focused on the Wrong Iranian Threat, With Deadly Results

Israel's fixated on the Iranian nuclear threat while Iranian proxies Hamas and Hezbollah dramatically increased their capabilities

Hamas’ unprecedented attack on Israel is a watershed moment. Not only did the intelligence failure rival that of 1973, the long-term implications of this bloody assault are as consequential as the 1967 war.

One early take away from this outrage is that Israel’s longstanding strategy of “wars between the wars”--the plan to constrain its Iranian proxy adversaries through limited kinetic action--was insufficient…

For more than a decade, Israel’s political and security establishment has been narrowly focused on the threat posed by the Iranian nuclear weapons program. While the IDF periodically targeted Hamas assets and personnel as well as Iranian forward operating positions in Syria, Israel has largely avoided largescale operations against Hamas and Lebanese Hezbollah. The reticence to seriously militarily degrade these terrorist organizations was understandable; an Iranian nuclear weapon is an existential threat, while Hezbollah and Hamas were considered a deadly, but tactical challenge.

Noga Tarnopolsky and Shira Rubin/Washington Post:

Israel massed troops in the West Bank. Then Hamas attacked from Gaza.

Three days after the deadliest attack in Israeli history, with at least 900 dead, the country is on the cusp of a long and bloody war in Gaza. More than 300,000 reservists have been called up to serve. But the capacity of Israel’s military, long revered here as a source of stability, suddenly feels like a question mark. Equally unclear is the end game for Netanyahu — with his Gaza containment strategy in ruins, some are calling for a full reoccupation of the territory…

Aharon Zeevi Farkash, former head of the Israel Defense Forces’ military intelligence branch, told Israeli radio station Reshet Bet that “after we are able to probe this, we will see that we knew almost everything. There were intelligence assessments hours before. The question is, did we understand what we knew?”

Analysts also point to a failure in political leadership. Netanyahu, they contend, allowed military preparedness to erode alongside Palestinian militant escalation as he pursued a contentious plan to weaken Israel’s judiciary — setting off months of furious protests that delighted the country’s adversaries.

This is one of the main reasons Israelis are not giving Netanyahu much leeway. They see him as the architect of unreadiness. The political implications follow.

This echoes the Israeli press, much of which is still paywalled but the New York Times has:

As War Rages, Netanyahu Battles for Reputation and Legacy

The horrors committed by Hamas on Israeli civilians are all but certain to mark Benjamin Netanyahu’s legacy no matter the outcome of the war.

After leading Israel for nearly 16 years in total and priding himself on bringing the country prosperity and security, Mr. Netanyahu, 73, now confronts the vivid failure of his own policies toward the Palestinians — presiding over what many Israelis are calling the worst massacre of Jews since the Holocaust.

The Hamas breakout from Gaza and incursion into Israel proper, killing hundreds of civilians as well as soldiers, is all but certain to mark Mr. Netanyahu’s legacy no matter the outcome of the fierce war he now promises against Hamas.

On Tuesday, under pressure to do so, Mr. Netanyahu struggled to try to negotiate a unity government that included some of his main rivals, most of them experienced military officers. But disagreements continued over their demands for a smaller security cabinet to administer the war, which would sideline some of Mr. Netanyahu’s most controversial ministers.

David Rothkopf/Daily Beast:

It’s Dangerous for the U.S. to Give Israel a Blank Check to Assault Gaza

There’s no military solution to the Israel/Palestine conflict. If there were, the attacks of this past weekend would not have happened.

In the wake of atrocities, it is hard to be rational. But the failure of rationality in precisely moments like these that begets future atrocities. It does not help the Israeli people, nor does it advance U.S. interests to “show solidarity” by supporting, defending, or even simply tolerating the bad acts or instincts of the most incompetent, corrupt, and vile government in Israel’s history. Such a position dishonors the victims of Hamas and the rest of the people of Israel if it compounds the crimes with more crimes that make more senseless bloodshed more likely. It is not “loyal” to increase the likelihood of more, not fewer, October 7ths.

Pedro Soriano Mendiara/Agenda Publica:

Israel, the North Star in US Foreign Policy

Israel’s increasing shift to the right, exemplified in 1977 by Likud’s first electoral victory, which also coincided in time with a similar shift in the Republican Party and the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980, made the relationship between conservative administrations in the two countries increasingly comfortable, even after the fall of the Soviet Union. In that sense, the attacks of 11 September 2001 and the fight against Islamic jihadism only served to strengthen the ties between the two countries in their struggle against a common enemy.

While Republican administrations supported Israel’s heavy-handed policy towards its adversaries, Democratic administrations tried to get it to reach agreements with them (for instance, the 1978 Camp David Accords between Israel and Egypt under President Carter or the 1993 Oslo Accords between Israel and the PLO, negotiated under President Clinton).

This partisan division of labour has become more strained in recent years as the Democratic Party, in particular, has sought to adopt a more critical stance towards its ally (perhaps inevitably, as American Muslims, a traditionally Republican bloc, began to vote Democratic after 9/11 and gained more influence in Democratic administrations) and Israeli governments began to rely on far-right parties to govern. It is well known that relations between Presidents Obama and Biden with the current Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu were and are very frosty and that the latter’s authoritarian policies, with his attempts to control the Israeli judiciary, are viewed with great concern by the current US administration.

In other news… 

Associated Press:

Former Wisconsin Supreme Court justice advises Republican leader against impeachment

There should be no effort to impeach a liberal Wisconsin Supreme Court justice based on what is known now, a former justice advised the Republican legislative leader who asked him to review the issue.

Some Republicans had raised the prospect of impeaching newly elected Justice Janet Protasiewicz if she did not recuse from a redistricting lawsuit seeking to toss GOP-drawn legislative district boundary maps. On Friday, she declined to recuse herself, and the court voted 4-3 along partisan lines to hear the redistricting challenge.

Assembly Speaker Robin Vos had asked three former justices to review the possibility of impeachment. One of those three, David Prosser, sent Vos an email on Friday, seemingly just before Protasiewicz declined to recuse, advising against moving forward with impeachment. That was after a state judiciary disciplinary panel rejected several complaints lodged against Protasiewicz that alleged she violated the judicial code of ethics with comments she made during the campaign.

Satire, folks. Or is it? There are some editors and publishers...

Ian Ward/Politico:

Kevin McCarthy’s Downfall Is the Culmination of the Tea Party

Political scientist Theda Skocpol on how tea party politics laid the foundation for the GOP’s current troubles.

“I’m sitting here looking at a picture on my iPad of the three ‘Young Guns’ from that iconic cover of their book,” she said. “All three of them were felled in succession by the popular anger of the tea party base.”

The tea party that Skocpol was referring to no longer formally exists as a faction in Congress, its erstwhile allies having been subsumed into the far-right Freedom Caucus or into the generic “America First” wing of the GOP. But according to Skocpol, the history of the tea party remains essential to understanding the forces that ultimately led to McCarthy’s political demise.

Cliff Schecter on the Speaker fiasco:

Politico:

‘What Is Broken in American Politics Is the Republican Party’

Fourteen experts on the roots of Kevin McCarthy’s ouster and why Republicans keep destroying their own leaders.

We asked some of the smartest thinkers and observers of politics and Capitol Hill to weigh in. Something seems broken in American politics — but what is it? Does the dysfunction stem from a sickness in the Republican Party, or is it decay in the institution of Congress? Or is it something else entirely — and is there a way to fix things, so we can return to some semblance of a healthy democracy?

Their responses leaned heavily toward blaming a populist, Trumpian, or even nihilistic turn in the GOP, although others took issue with the premise of the question, arguing that stability in politics isn’t always a sign of health or that American politics may not be as fractured as it seems. Few, though, were optimistic about improvement any time soon.

New York Times:

Now Is The Time To Pay Attention To Trump’s Language

Donald Trump has never been shy with his language, but recently, the Times editor Alex Kingsbury argues, his violent speech has escalated. In the past few weeks alone, Trump suggested that his own former general was treasonous, said that shoplifters should be shot and exhorted his followers to “go after” New York’s attorney general. Alex says he understands why voters tune Trump out but stresses the need to pay attention and take action for the sake of American democracy.

Paul Farhi/Washington Post:

Trump’s violent rhetoric is getting muted coverage by the news media

After eight years of Trump in politics, is a ‘banality of crazy’ setting in?

Last week, the Republican Party’s leading presidential candidate proposed executing suspected shoplifters.

“Very simply, if you rob a store, you can fully expect to be shot as you are leaving that store,” former president Donald Trump said in Anaheim, Calif., outlining his vision for a second term at the convention of the state’s Republican Party. As the audience applauded, laughed and cheered, Trump added for emphasis, “Shot!”

Trump’s advocacy of extrajudicial killings was widely covered by newspapers and TV stations in California but generally ignored by the national press. No mainstream TV network carried his speech live or excerpted it later that night. CNN and MSNBC mentioned it during panel discussions over the next few days. The Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, NPR and PBS didn’t report it at all. The New York Times wrote about it four days later, playing the story on Page 14 of its print edition.

Local coverage matters. But national coverage needs to do more and better.

Washington Post:

Moderates could unite amid House speaker chaos. Why don’t they?

So far, Republicans plan to elect a new speaker using GOP votes alone. It may not work — and no one knows what happens next.

The failure of the last-ditch effort by the self-styled “problem solvers” underscores how unlikely it will be for the House to solve its leadership vacuum in the coming days through some kind of unity government that might otherwise seem the most obvious path forward.

Even with government funding set to lapse in less than 45 days, aid to Ukraine in limbo and America’s reputation as a functioning democracy on the line, there was little sign this week of interest in cobbling together a bipartisan coalition that could be the fastest way to collect the 217 votes necessary to elect a speaker.

Paul Kane/Washington Post:

McCarthy thought he could harness forces of disruption. Instead they devoured him.

As far back as 2009, the future House speaker tried to channel the anti-politician, tea-party wave building into a political force, but the movement crushed him

“You get enough people on their surfboards, you send them in the right direction and see how many can get to shore,” McCarthy told The Washington Post in a January 2010 interview.

More than 85 political surfers made it to shore in the November 2010 elections that put Republicans in charge — a political wave that elevated Boehner to House speaker; Eric Cantor (Va.) to majority leader; and McCarthy to majority whip. Their friend Paul D. Ryan (Wis.) became the top policy wizard as chair of the House Budget Committee.

Less than 13 years later, all four have been devoured by the very forces they helped launch. One by one, each got booted out of office by rabble-rousing disrupters who, after first taking flight in 2010, came to dominate national Republican politics following Donald Trump’s ascendancy to the White House in 2017.

McCarthy — the tactician who was the least substantive of the quartet — managed to last the longest, until Tuesday. A small band of GOP rebels linked arms with Democrats to oust him as House speaker, the first time in U.S. history that a sitting speaker had been expelled through the obscure motion to vacate.

David Rothkopf/Daily Beast:

A Broken Congress Is What MAGA Always Wanted

If they couldn’t shut down the government, they proved they could cripple the House of Representatives as a consolation prize.

There have been MAGA true believers shitting on the floor of the Congress ever since Jan. 6, 2021. But the right wing’s active desecration of the U.S. government extends far beyond ugly recent events on Capitol Hill, and dates back long before the Trumpist insurrection of two and a half years ago.

In fact, the origins of the attacks on the government date back at least four decades to the Reagan administration, when the former president popularized the idea within his party that government was actually the enemy. His joke that the scariest words one could hear were, “I’m from the government and I’m here to help,” has metastasized from being a pitch for smaller government into a movement to blow the whole damn thing up.

Darren Samuelson/The Messenger:

Trump’s Lawyers Ask Judge to Dismiss Jack Smith’s 2020 Indictment, Citing ‘Presidential Immunity’

Trump's trial is scheduled to begin on March 4, 2024, in Washington, D.C.

Donald Trump's attorneys on Thursday asked a federal judge to throw out in its entirety Special Counsel Jack Smith's criminal indictment charging the former president with trying to overturn the 2020 presidential election.

The former president's 52-page motion to dismiss the indictment centers around an untested legal argument that Trump had "presidential immunity" that protects him from any criminal charges tied to his actions leading the country.

"Breaking 234 years of precedent, the incumbent administration has charged President Trump for acts that lie not just within the 'outer perimeter,' but at the heart of his official responsibilities as President," Trump's lawyers argue. "In doing so, the prosecution does not, and cannot, argue that President Trump’s efforts to ensure election integrity, and to advocate for the same, were outside the scope of his duties."

This is an important challenge and gets to the heart of the Trump defense. He should lose resoundingly, but in this world nothing’s certain except death, taxes, and GOP House dysfunction.

Also on the legal front but a different case:

Well, that one went nowhere.

That one went nowhere as well.

Will Bunch/Philadelphia Inquirer:

America needs to talk about the right’s ‘Red Caesar’ plan for U.S. dictatorship

“Thought leaders” of the far right talk openly about a 2025 dictatorship. People need to be alarmed.

TV pundits compared a near-shutdown of the federal government and Kevin McCarthy’s subsequent ouster as speaker to the iconic sitcom Seinfeld — a show about nothing. In capitals around the globe, world leaders and baffled analysts struggled to make sense of the utter dysfunction paralyzing the nation that just a generation ago held itself out as the lone superpower.

Yet to a small but influential gaggle of so-called “thought leaders” on the edge of the stage — the pseudo-intellectuals of right-wing think tanks, and chaos-agent-in-chief Steve Bannon — the growing rot infecting another key U.S. institution is just more evidence for their stunning argument now flying at warp speed, yet under the radar of a clueless mainstream media.

The D.C. dysfunction is more proof, they would argue, that the nation needs a “Red Caesar” who will cut through the what they call constitutional gridlock and impose order.

If you’re not one of those dudes who thinks about Ancient Rome every day, let me translate. The alleged brain trust of an increasingly fascist MAGA movement wants an American dictatorship that would “suspend” democracy in January 2025 — just 15 months from now.

Steve Benen/MaddowBlog:

Trump pushes envelope with comment on the ‘poisoning’ of U.S. ‘blood’

There’s nothing new about Donald Trump attacking those seeking a better life in the United States. But “poisoning the blood of our country” is new.

It’s often tempting to ignore reports on Donald Trump’s rhetorical excesses. Everyone has seen countless examples of the former president making unhinged remarks about matters large and small, to the point that they start to have diminishing returns.

But in recent days, there’s been a flurry of new reporting on the Republican’s radical rhetoric, and given the specific details, it’s best not to shrug one’s shoulders and look away. Axios reported this week, for example, that Trump's “violent rhetoric ... has grown more extreme as the walls have begun to close in on his business empire, livelihood and personal freedom.”

Since he left office, Trump’s erratic behavior has been masked, numbed and normalized by the political fatigue permeating the media and the public. But his words’ violent turn in recent weeks — calling for a U.S. military leader to be executed, mocking a potentially fatal assault on a congressional spouse, urging police to shoot shoplifters — suggest a line has been crossed.

For those who keep up on current events, much of the list will likely seem familiar.

New York Times:

From a Capitol Hill Basement, Bannon Stokes the Republican Party Meltdown

The former Trump adviser has helped create the spectacle of G.O.P. dysfunction, using it to build his own following and those of the right-wing House rebels who took down Kevin McCarthy.

Representatives Matt Gaetz of Florida, the instigator of the rebellion, and Nancy Mace of South Carolina, one of seven other Republican defectors, huddled with Mr. Bannon for a morning meeting ahead of a joint appearance on his “War Room” podcast.

“Tectonic plate shift here in the imperial capital,” Mr. Bannon told his listeners at showtime, while directing them to donate to his guests online. “We must stand in the breach now. We have to lance the boil that is K Street in this nation.”

From this cavelike studio not far from where Congress meets, Mr. Bannon, the former Trump adviser, has been stoking the chaos now gripping the Republican Party, capitalizing on the spectacle to build his own following and using his popular podcast to prop up and egg on the G.O.P. rebels.

Nancy Mace is no moderate.

Jonathan Allen/NBC:

The GOP armed its bazooka caucus. What could go wrong?

Analysis: Republicans now use powerful procedural weapons — impeachment, removal of the speaker and election certification — to thwart majority rule and disrupt democratic institutions.

It was inevitable that giving Rep. Matt Gaetz the procedural bazooka he demanded would end in the political annihilation of newly former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy.

For Gaetz — a 2020 election denier, a defender of the Jan. 6 insurrection and the subject of an ethics investigation into allegations of sexual misconduct, illicit drug use and more — rules seem to matter most when they benefit him. The animating tenet of his political ideology — a strain of the broader conservative bent against taxation and spending — is that the federal government works against the public interest because it is corrupt. Chaos feeds his narrative.

McCarthy's substantive sins were avoiding a national default and a federal shutdown, which interfered with Gaetz's ability to demonstrate that the government is broken. So Gaetz, R-Fla., used his procedural weapon — the "motion to vacate" — to do the next best thing: He aligned with Democrats to throw the House into a state of anarchy. For one day, at least, Gaetz and his seven followers ruled the 433-member House.

Washington Post:

As House GOP flails, government shutdown fears reemerge

House Republicans on Wednesday started the process of choosing their next leader, but whoever they choose is likely to face the same political constraints that led to McCarthy’s ouster. The former speaker was deposed in part over the fury that followed his decision on Saturday to extend government funding with Democratic votes. After the House did not pass several other Republican spending bills, McCarthy agreed to essentially take up a bipartisan Senate measure, jettisoning the far-right’s demands for hundreds of billions in budget cuts and a crackdown on immigration.

Already, the chaos on the House floor is eating into the time necessary to forge a bipartisan agreement on spending. Congress passed a law on Saturday night to keep the government operating for about 45 days. But now the House is in recess through this weekend, and the mess consuming the GOP will carry on at least into next week’s vote on the next speaker, reducing the number of days lawmakers have to work to about 30, said Bill Hoagland, senior vice president at the Bipartisan Policy Center, a nonpartisan think tank.

Whosoever they choose, the’ll suck. But so did McCarthy, so here we are. And as to Democratic thinking real time, this is an excellent explainer from Aaron Fritschner on X/Twitter via Threadreader:

Some are writing about this as if we chose to overturn a status quo of Kevin McCarthy playing the part of Speaker Scarlet Pimpernel secretly fomenting plans to do the right thing. We had plenty of reason to think things could get worse quickly. It was unstable and unsustainable. 

Will the next Speaker be worse? Nobody can possibly know who it'll be or what the dynamic will be. But at some point - this phrase has been trotted out in bad faith many times lately so lets try to use it well - you have to think about the institution. And, you know, the country. 

Their so-called "moderates" who enabled McCarthy's empowerment of the right because he campaigned and raised money for them could've acted at any time to correct that course. Not one of them did so much as sign a discharge petition. They made a choice and they're still making it. 

Matt Robison and Paul Hodes with Jamie Raskin:

Alex Kingsbury/New York Times:

Trump’s Promise of Lawlessness

Mr. Trump, as General Milley discovered and many Americans already knew, is a man unencumbered by any moral compass. He goes the way he wants to go, legalities and niceties be damned. Last week in a post on his social network, Mr. Trump argued that General Milley’s actions would have once been punishable by death.

Most Americans probably didn’t notice his screed. Of those who did and were not alarmed, far too many nodded along in agreement. As Josh Barro said in a Times Opinion round table this week about the former president’s recent comments, “Trump is and has been unhinged, and that’s priced in” to the views that many voters have of him.

Joe Perticone/The Bulwark:

The Biden Impeachment Inquiry Starts With a Flop

“These witnesses aren’t giving any answers. They’re just asking more questions.”

The House Oversight Committee held the first hearing in its impeachment inquiry of President Joe Biden today. At least at the start, reporters and onlookers packed the hearing room in the Rayburn House Office Building. But the room was equally packed with skepticism and doubt regarding Republicans’ claims that the president is somehow implicated through his son Hunter in a pay-to-play influence-peddling scheme…

CNN reports one Republican called it an “unmitigated disaster” and lamented the lack of performative “outbursts.” Toward the end of the hearing, there were empty seats in both the audience and on the dais, a rare scene for such a consequential hearing. Even Fitton departed with a few remaining lawmakers to go.

Rep. Maxwell Frost (D-Fla.) summed up the overall mood of the hearing:

These witnesses aren’t giving any answers. They’re just asking more questions.

Aaron Fritschner/X via Threadreader:

This hearing was a major tactical mistake by Comer, Jordan, and McCarthy. The whole point is to damage the President politically, but the first hearing totally backfired. Having started this it's hard to stop, and it will get harder as they go, for all of them. Real risk here imo

Meanwhile, actual fact finding rolls on:

Joyce Vance/”Civil Discourse” on Substack:

That brings us to today and Scott Hall, an Atlanta-area bail bondsman who was facing seven charges in the Fulton County case, including a RICO violation and conspiring to steal sensitive election data in Coffee County. This afternoon, with little advance notice, Hall pled guilty to five misdemeanors, will serve five years of probation, pay a $5,000 fine, and agreed to cooperate with prosecutors. It’s the sort of deal that is so beneficial to a defendant that it suggests prosecutors believe his cooperation is valuable enough to merit the bargain.

So what might Hall be able to do? It’s not clear how important of a role he played in the overall scheme, and who he might have had direct communications with. But Hall was in the thick of things with Sidney Powell when she went to Coffee County, Georgia on January 7, the day after the insurrection, to carry out her scheme to illegally access voting machines. Hall’s cooperation is a bad sign for Powell. And Powell, in turn, had conversations about pursuing the Big Lie with others in the group and was in the room with Trump during some of the key conversations.

Sidney Powell isn't the only Trump co-defendant who should be concerned by Hall’s plea deal. Hall reportedly had an hour long call with Jeff Clark on January 2nd. That’s a long time for the Georgia bail bondsman to have been on the line with the Attorney General-wannabe who wanted to push states Biden won to call those results into question based on untrue allegations of fraud to try and swing the electoral vote call to Trump. It’s unlikely the call was just an hour of pleasantries. Precisely what was said and how good Hall’s recollection is—and whether or not he has contemporaneous notes or other verification of what took place during the call—remains to be seen.

Charlie Sykes/The Bulwark:

Comer’s Fiasco

“An unmitigated disaster”

Fresh off a chaotic and embarrassing presidential debate, and slouching toward a government shutdown, congressional Republicans took time out Thursday to roll out the Biden impeachment inquiry. The charitable view is that the first hearing was a dumpster fire inside a clown car wrapped in a fiasco. To put it mildly, the GOP did not bring their best. Here’s the WaPo’s Jackie Alemany:

"It is shocking that House Oversight would tap witnesses that don’t enforce your narrative," source adds. https://t.co/ZeCKgqZL6z

— Jacqueline Alemany (@JaxAlemany) September 28, 2023

John Halpin/The Liberal Patriot:

TLP/YouGov 2024 Presidential Election Project—Wave 2

President Biden continues to hold a narrow lead over Donald Trump, but inflation concerns and doubts about his economic agenda weigh him down.

The Liberal Patriot will release the results in a series of posts over the next two weeks and the full data can be found here.

Initial findings include:

President Biden maintains a small lead over likely Republican nominee Donald Trump. Our first wave of research released earlier this summer showed Biden with a 6-point lead over Trump, a result that is essentially unchanged in our September polling. Currently, 47 percent of registered voters say they would choose Biden if the election were held today compared to 41 percent who would choose Trump; 9 percent would choose someone else or are unsure and 3 percent say they would not vote.

Polls this early are to set narrative, and they are certainly being used for same. TLP’s schtick is to tack towards the middle (Third Way neo-Clinton style) and they read everything as such, in my opinion.

Brandi Buchman/Law and Crime:

Trump’s fight to stay on 2024 election ballot threatens to turn Constitution’s insurrection clause into ‘historical ornament,’ experts say

The litigation invoking Section III isn’t unprecedented or hallowed ground, though [Praveen Fernandes, constitutional expert and vice president of the Constitutional Accountability Center in Washington, D.C.] acknowledged that this situation is unique since this is the first time it is being invoked against a person running for president. The U.S. has been “somewhat fortunate,” Fernandes said, that it has not had insurrections disturbing its stability the way many other nations have.

“I think the Framers were wise to establish this provision and not hem it in with language that was specific to the Civil War or Confederate officers,” he said. “They forged this language in the historical crucible of the Civil War but made a choice, a drafting choice, to be more expansive about officers who violated their oaths not being trusted again to serve the public.”

While some may argue that it is “undemocratic” for voters to use Section III to challenge someone’s ability to be on the ballot, Fernandes noted that the Constitution itself was a democratically enacted instrument, agreed upon by the people to serve as the governing document for a nation, and there was a reason the framers included the clause in the document.

Cliff Schecter:

New York Times:

Trump Lawsuit Against Judge in Fraud Case Rejected by Appeals Court

Former President Donald J. Trump had accused Justice Arthur F. Engoron of ignoring an earlier decision that could have barred evidence from the case.

The appeals court, in a terse two-page order Thursday, turned aside a lawsuit Mr. Trump filed against the trial judge, Arthur F. Engoron, which had sought to delay the proceeding.

The ruling came two days after Justice Engoron issued an order that struck a major blow to Mr. Trump, finding him liable for having committed fraud by persistently overvaluing his assets and stripping him of control over his New York properties. Justice Engoron sided with the New York attorney general, Letitia James, who last year sued Mr. Trump, accusing him of inflating his net worth by billions of dollars to obtain favorable loan terms from banks.

New York Times:

Trump’s Sprawling Legal Defense Effort Comes Under Strain

Former President Donald Trump’s team has found lawyers for others caught up in his prosecutions and has paid many of their legal bills. That arrangement may not be sustainable.

In an interview, Mr. Rowley said he was simply trying to help witnesses who did not have lawyers or did not know how to find one, and that he never sought to influence anyone’s testimony. And legal experts said the voice mail, while somewhat unusual, did not appear to cross any ethical lines.

But as Mr. Trump’s legal problems have expanded, the ad hoc system has come under intense strain with the PAC doling out financial lifelines to some aides and allies while shutting the door on others. It is now running short of money, possibly forcing Mr. Trump to decide how long to go on helping others as his own legal fees mount.

Prosecutors have also brought conflict-of-interest questions about some of the arrangements before the courts, and witnesses and co-defendants may begin to face decisions about how closely they want to lash their legal strategies to Mr. Trump’s.

David Cay Johnston/DC Report:

Judge Gives Trump Organization the Corporate Death Penalty

Donald Trump is no longer in business.

Worse, the self-proclaimed multibillionaire may soon be personally bankrupt as a result, stripped of just about everything because for years he engaged in calculated bank fraud and insurance fraud by inflating the value of his properties, a judge ruled Tuesday.

His gaudy Trump Tower apartment, his golf courses, his Boeing 757 jet and even Mar-a-Lago could all be disposed of by a court-appointed monitor, leaving Trump with not much more than his pensions as a one term president and a television performer.

Chris Lehmann/The Nation:

The Great Rolling Trump Fraud

A summary judgment in the legal case against the former president rules that he’s exactly as shady as he looks.

Engoron made similarly short work of the two-pronged paper defense Trump and his attorneys mustered for the billions in dodgy valuations they racked up—the magical disclaimer supposedly stipulating that the estimates supplied to bankers, loan officers, and insurers were “worthless”; and the allied contention that any reasonable financial officer would soon override such valuations via standard due-diligence research. “Defendants’ reliance on these ‘worthless’ disclaimers is worthless,” he drily noted. “The clause does not use the word ‘worthless’ or ‘useless” or ‘ignore’ or ‘disregard’ or any similar words. It does not say, ‘the values herein are what I think the properties will be worth in ten or more years.’ Indeed, the quoted language uses ‘current’ no less than five times, and ‘future’ zero times.” And he observes that the due-dilgence dodge is little more than a license to frontload systemic fraud into any company’s business model: “Defendants’ stance is, practically speaking, that they may submit false [suspected fraudulent claims] so long as the recipients know, from their own due diligence, that the information is false.”

Still, there is one limited sense in which Trump’s defense was anchored in reality. In a deposition, Trump contended that he could affix any value he saw fit to any property in question, for the simple reason that he could always “find a buyer from Saudi Arabia” to accept the price.

Philip Bump/Washington Post:

How much would your house be worth if the Trump Organization owned it?

The New York Post, appearing eager to side with the longtime star of its gossip pages, scoffed at the objective appraisal included in the judge’s ruling, insisting that other assessments put the value of Mar-a-Lago at somewhere around $300 million. Those well-versed in mathematics will notice that this would still mean the $612 million Trump valuation was twice the actual worth of the property.

But here is a different approach. Instead of defending the Trump Organization’s inflation efforts, you can put them to work for you. The tool below allows you to choose a property value between $100,000 and $1 billion (for especially lucky readers) and see how those values might have been presented to investors had the Trump Organization’s inflationary metrics been applied. All of the calculations here are taken from the judge’s ruling, in which the presented value and assessed values are offered explicitly — as in the Seven Springs example above.

The tool is set at $400,000 to start, about the median sales price for U.S. homes this year.

Matt Glassman/X via Threadreader:

Why is defeating the Previous Question on a rule so much more powerful/dangerous than defeating the rule?

The answer is that defeating a rule is *negative* agenda setting, while defeating the PQ is *positive* agenda setting. 

When you defeat a rule, the leaders who brought the rule cannot set the agenda. But that's the end; you block them from doing something, but that's it. They go back to the side rooms and try to figure out what to do next. 

When you defeat the PQ on a rule, you block a *vote* on the rule and leave it live on the floor, open to amendment. You can then propose an amendment to it, and if your coalition that defeated the PQ holds together, you can pass your amendment.

In effect, YOU set the agenda.

This is why it terrifies leaders so much more than a rule defeat, and why it's truly a declaration of war against the leadership. You aren't just saying no to their agenda, you are seeking to substitute *your* agenda. 

Mona Charen/The Bulwark:

The Fear Factor in Republican Politics

The MAGA movement has made political violence and intimidation a regular feature of our public life.

This is not new, but that shouldn’t diminish our outrage. On at least 24 occasions, the former president has accused critics of treason. They ranged from Peter Strzok, whose offense was exchanging worried texts with his lover to the then-anonymous administration official who penned a New York Times op-ed saying that many insiders in Trump world were aware of his unfitness to Democrats who declined to applaud at the State of the Union address. Yes, these examples seem like something out of Idiocracy, but millions of Americans, contra Salena Zito, take him literally and seriously.

Now Trump has upped the ante by including a reference to the death penalty, which is in fact a punishment available in cases of treason, not just “in times gone by.” Trump knows full well that some of his more rabid followers may interpret this as an invitation to assassination, just as the January 6th crowd chanted “Hang Mike Pence.” That thuggishness, that play of the finger near the trigger, places Trump in a category all his own in American politics.

That’s why Biden gave that speech on democracy yesterday.

From Matt Robison: