The amazing and terrifying fantasy world of the Fox News viewer

Posted on January 31, 2021 by Dartagnan

For some unfathomable reason, probably having something to do with “balance,” Google delivers Fox News headlines to my newsfeed. I saw the poisonous nature of this Republican propaganda network from its very inception, and I remember savaging some right-winger back in the late ‘90s who was trying to convince me that Fox’s token inclusion of the late Alan Colmes somehow made the network’s ridiculously skewed coverage “fair.” Like most people I choose to associate with, I avoid either watching or reading anything spewed on Fox News because it’s an unpleasant experience that leaves me feeling dirty and gross, during and afterward.

Invariably, I have run into situations where such exposure is impossible to avoid, like being compelled to walk down a smelly, urine-soaked alleyway in order to cross a city block. Over the years, these unpleasant encounters have occurred in bars, airports, and gyms, whenever the business opts to subject others to Fox News. Now Google has made the decision to subject me to the outlet—at least until I decide to modify my settings or preferences, I suppose.

Fox News thrives on instilling feelings of outrage and indignation in its viewers in order to confirm, reinforce, and amplify their existing biases, whether they’re biases against women, racial minorities, socially conscious liberals, or just Democrats in general. That’s how it makes money, as vividly explained by a former Fox News anchor: by keeping viewers “hooked” and in a state of near-constant agitation through a constant barrage of vaguely threatening misinformation about supposed nefarious deeds by select groups it targets. Most of its anchors and reporters are dimwitted, giggling monkeys chosen not for their journalistic abilities, but for their willingness to act as a permanent conduit for fear-mongering and outrage-churning. They don’t traffic in facts, but innuendo and selective omission. That’s why there are so few journalists on Fox whom the rest of the profession deems reputable or trustworthy. From the very start, it’s been a network made mostly of commentators posing as journalists, but possessing no credentials or pretense to journalistic bona fides.

Since Fox has now grudgingly been forced to acknowledge Joe Biden’s victory and no longer has an opportunity to glorify Donald Trump on a daily basis, it has reverted to its normal defensive crouch, best characterized as constant, picayune whining about everything that Democrats do. Every action by Biden or Democrats is somehow indicative of betrayal, or weakness, or something.

As Matt Gertz, writing for Media Matters, notes, its coverage and fealty to the Trump administration provided record viewership for Fox News. With Trump now gone, or at least not as accessible as he once was, the network faces an inflection point as it determines how to proceed.

The network's executives would likely prefer to move on from Trump and pivot back to its Obama-era brand, becoming the “voice of opposition” to the incoming Biden administration. The network could focus its programming on smearing Biden officials, conjuring up Biden pseudo-scandals, stalling or blocking Democratic proposals, and bolstering anti-Biden political movements and Republican challengers. That was a unifying message for the right in 2009 that garnered huge ratings for the network. And Republican leaders would doubtless appreciate new Benghazis and “death panels” as cudgels to use against the incoming Democratic administration.

At the same time, Fox’s on-air talent will come under tremendous pressure to rebuild its once-record audience. The clearest path to that goal will be to give the recalcitrant Trumpist viewers what they want: more lies that Trump actually won, more unhinged conspiracy theories about Democrats, more paranoid fantasies about the left, and more apocalyptic culture war rage. That will incentivize the rest of the right-wing media to do the same, in hopes of either snagging guest appearances on the network or pulling away some of its market share.

I suppose all this was to be expected. But now that the 24/7 hagiography of Trump has gone by the wayside, we can also, during this time of transition, see a familiar profile reemerging—that of the “average” Fox News viewer—a profile which can be painstakingly assembled by reviewing how Fox News reports certain people and events.

Unsurprisingly, the typical Fox News viewer is white and male. Based on Fox's advertisers, he is over 60 years old and is very concerned about his Medicare supplemental insurance. He may consider trying to lose weight with Nutrisystem products, and fantasizes about going to a Sandals resort. He is thinking about transferring his old VHS tapes to a Legacybox, but only after he buys a LifeLock to protect his identity from scammers. Presumably he’ll first clear all these decisions with his Visiting Angels home health care aide.

Our Fox News viewer believes that the Black Lives Matter movement is as violent or more so than the Ku Klux Klan. He believes the only purpose of Planned Parenthood is to perform abortions, and many of these are “partial birth” abortions. He believes climate change and global warming are Democratic scams. He has a visceral fixation on Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez that he can’t seem to understand, because he knows from Fox News that there are millions of beautiful conservative women (many of them blonde) out there who would certainly find him attractive, if he could only meet one of them.

Our viewer believes the U.S. is under continual attack from an invasion of undocumented immigrants, and that a new caravan of Spanish-speaking drug dealers, rapists, and gang members is threatening our southern border as we speak. At the same time, he believes Democrats are plotting to outlaw the possession of firearms.

He believes the 2020 presidential election was stolen and fraudulent, even if he doesn’t know exactly how. He believes the COVID-19 pandemic is completely overblown, and is far less likely to take precautionary measures to protect himself and/or his family and others. He believes antifa is far more dangerous than the COVID-19 pandemic, and believes that the failure of mainstream media to cover “antifa riots” after Biden’s inauguration is proof of liberal bias. This, he reasons, is further proof that the riots on Jan. 6 in Washington, D.C., were provoked not by Trump’ own supporters, but by “antifa.”

The following are some more of our typical Fox News viewer’s beliefs, based on headlines from Fox’s website over the past two days:

Biden may be the new president in name, but the actual president is Susan Rice.

Biden’s campaign was bankrolled by millions in “dark money.” This is bad. Republicans would never do this.

Tulsi Gabbard holds noteworthy and important opinions about everything.

The most powerful people in the entire Democratic Party are the four “Squad” Congresswomen.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in particular wields enormous influence within the Democratic Party, such that her every utterance is noteworthy; she dictates the entire Democratic agenda.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is also a coward who is afraid of gun-carrying members of Congress.

Black people are mostly violent criminals, except for those who appear on Fox News as conservative commentators.

Antifa is … everywhere.

Hollywood stars are jumping ahead of everyone else to receive the COVID-19 vaccine.

Biden’s cancellation of the Keystone pipeline is a job-killing political disaster that spells doom for the Democratic Party.

Biden and his son Hunter committed unspecified crimes in Ukraine that involved some sort of shady corporate deal and made the Bidens millions. This information is all contained on a laptop somewhere.

Democrats abused the National Guard during the inauguration.

Biden will kowtow to everything China wants.

China is a threat to us in space warfare.

Karl Rove is a sage voice on economic policy.

Glenn Greenwald says Democrats are the true fascists. Because he was once believed to be a liberal, he must be right.

Arms treaties with Russia are bad.

Joe Biden taking questions from pre-selected reporters is bad.

QAnon believers are being persecuted.

A sheriff in Cochise County, Arizona, noticed that “illegal” border crossings “spiked” after Biden won the Democratic primary.

Neera Tanden is bad and dangerous for some reason.

Pamela Anderson believes “Big Tech” seeks to control your brain.

Anthony Fauci is the highest-paid member of the federal government, and this is bad, because Fauci is bad.

__________________________________________________________________________

The common theme through all of these imaginary persecutions and insults contrived by Fox News is one of eternal victimhood, as former Fox anchor Tobin Smith observed in November 2019, writing in The New York Times about the network’s smear of Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman after he testified during the first impeachment trial.

Weaponized and tribalized political video narratives in the hands of Fox News producers can become something like drug-abuse epidemics — keeping addicts of that conspiracy theory high and coming back for more.

Believing in conspiracy theories is a psychological construct for people to take back some semblance of control in their lives. It inflates their sense of importance. It makes them feel they have access to “special knowledge” that the rest of the world is “too blind,” “too dumb” or “too corrupt” to understand.

Fox viewers are taught, over and over, to believe they’re under constant assault and must therefore continue tuning in, for the good of themselves and the nation. It’s a cynical psychological scam that has paid huge dividends to the Murdoch family, and by warping the minds of tens of millions of Americans, very nearly wrecked our country in the process.

When history looks back at the events of Jan. 6, it will be simple to conclude that they occurred as a consequence of Donald Trump and his cult of personality. But without Fox News’ full-throated support, Trump’s entire presidency, let alone his baseless, endgame assertions of election fraud, would never have had enough oxygen to sustain itself.

Fox News, and everyone who works there, is every bit as culpable as he is.

McConnell is terrified of Trump, but why isn’t he worried about a center-right Republican revolt?

Posted on January 30, 2021 by Mark Sumner

When Mitch McConnell gave a hint that—following that little thing where violent Trump supporters engaged in a deadly insurgency where they pushed aside police and went roaming the halls of Congress for congressional hostages—it might possibly, maybe, be okay to, just this once, hold Donald Trump accountable for inciting sedition, the response was simple. Trump broke out a few Patriot Party pins, hinting that he and his remaining followers might just slink away to some place where they were free to stage all the insurrections they liked without the pesky threat of someone wiggling The Finger of Concern. That was all it took to snap McConnell and crew back into line. Only five Republicans in the Senate were even willing to allow that impeaching Trump is constitutional, a question that is about as controversial as “is the sky blue?”

The ease with which Trump’s threat to shave some fraction of the party’s voters away generated boot-clicks (and licks), raises the question: Why doesn’t someone else do this? It’s possible to debate whether “sane conservative party” is an oxymoron, but back before the election—and even before the previous election—there were plenty of Republicans who claimed they were ready to pull up stakes and start a new party to save the old Grand Old.

So why haven’t they?

Here’s conservative author Tom Nichols writing in The Atlantic back in September 2020.

I was a Republican for most of my adult life.

[…]

I understand the attachment to that GOP, even among those who have sworn to defeat Donald Trump, but the time for sentimentality is over. That party is long gone. Today the Republicans are the party of “American carnage” and Russian collusion, of scams, plots, and weapons-grade contempt for the rule of law. The only decent, sensible, and conservative position is to vote against this Republican Party at every level, and bring the sad final days of a once-great political institution to an end. Then build the party back up again—from scratch.

Instead, argues Nichols, sensible conservatives should allow the GOP to crash and burn, so that it can be resurrected or replaced by a new “center-right party.”

A month later, conservative pundit Max Boot pulled out one of history’s most famous misquotes to make his point.

“We had to destroy the village in order to save it.” That famous, if probably apocryphal, quote from the Vietnam War describes how I feel about the Republican Party. We have to destroy the party in order to save it.

As a lifelong Republican until Nov. 9, 2016 — and as a foreign policy adviser to three Republican presidential candidates—it gives me no joy to write those words. It’s true that the party had long-standing problems—conspiracy-mongering, racism, hostility toward science—that Donald Trump was able to exploit. But he has also exacerbated all of those maladies, just as he made the coronavirus outbreak much worse than it needed to be.

Instead, says Boot, America needs a … sane center-right party.

Then in December, well after the election, when it was clear Trump was going to keep clawing away at the party no matter what, the Never Trumpers’ never Trump Evan McMullin popped up in The New York Times to keep on pounding that drum.

So what’s next for Republicans who reject their party’s attempts to incinerate the Constitution in the service of one man’s authoritarian power grabs? Where is our home now?

The answer is that we must further develop an intellectual and political home, for now, outside of any party. From there, we can continue working with other Americans to defeat Mr. Trump’s heirs, help offer unifying leadership to the country and, if the Republican Party continues on its current path, launch a party to challenge it directly.

These are far from the only voices to raise the idea of walking away from the Republican Party of Trump and taking their ball elsewhere. Though in the immediate aftermath of Trump’s election Republicans were still talking about just waiting him out then dragging the party back to center, everyone acknowledges that this is no longer possible. The Republican Party isn’t just a party led by Trump, it’s a party about Trump. With ideas and a foundation that goes no deeper than Trump’s.

And why not? It may be easy to see that under Trump Republicans managed to lose the House, then the White House, then the Senate. What’s less clear is how thoroughly they’ve cleansed their institutional memory. Of Republicans now serving in the House, 85% have never served under a Republican president who was not Donald Trump. He is all that they know.

That may explain why most congressional Republicans are so quick to roll over when Trump snaps his fingers. It doesn’t explain why no one has followed through on the plan that conservatives have been talking up since before Trump took office. A whole cadre of Republicans from Jeff Flake to Justin Amash left the GOP—and their positions in Congress—after getting crossways with Trump. None of them has been out there on the hustings ringing the bell for the New Center-Right Party of Traditional Republican Dreams.

Donald Trump may not be able to get an accused pedophile elected in Alabama, or boost an inside trader back to office in Georgia. But he has demonstrated repeatedly that he can raise the temperature of his supporters high enough to knock good candidates out of Republican primaries. And there’s no doubt that Trump means it when he says he lives for revenge. Whether it’s Mitt Romney or Liz Cheney, every single Republican who supported Trump’s impeachment (#1 or #2) is certain to get meet a frothing Trump supporter in their next primary.

So why don’t they beat Trump at his own game? Why aren’t Romney and Murkowski parked in McConnell’s office letting him know that, unless he encourages the party to wake up and smell reality, they’re going to start a new party? Bring in Flake. Bring in Amash. Enlist the pens of all those pundits and the pocketbooks of the Lincoln Project. Put up a New Republican Party candidate for every House and Senate seat.

After all, their threat is just as good as Trump’s. They don’t have to be able to win. They don’t even have to be able to swing a majority of Republicans with them. In a lot of districts they’d need to persuade just 10%, or 5%, or 2% of Republicans to join them to make sure the GOP loses a slot. And that’s what all those pundits and former officeholders and real red Republicans have been saying—the party needs to get a few shots until it wakes up and comes back to itself.

So again, why aren’t they doing it? The biggest reason is … they don’t really mean it. Or at least they don’t mean it enough to put in more work that writing a guest column.

Since Republicans won’t convict, turn the second impeachment into a trial of the Republican Party

Posted on January 29, 2021 by Dartagnan

Quavering under explicit threats from Donald Trump that he will start a neo-fascist third party (grossly named “The Patriot Party”), Senate Republicans, led by Kentucky blowhard Rand Paul, have signaled that there is no way they would ever vote to convict Trump for inciting the deadly insurrection that killed five people on Jan. 6, and sent hordes of stinking Trump supporters to smear feces all over the House and Senate chambers while trying to hunt down members of those legislative bodies.

Now that we know this, now that it’s clear, let’s just remember who controls the trial and the admissible evidence in that trial: the Democratic Senate. Just like then-Majority Leader Mitch McConnell constrained the first trial by admitting no witnesses or evidence, Democrats are free to admit whatever it takes to paint a clear picture of the environment Trump created, which motivated and aided his incitement of the mob.

Max Boot, writing this week for The Washington Post, makes an excellent point.

When the impeachment proceedings begin in the Senate, it will not be just Donald Trump in the dock. The entire Republican Party will be on trial. And there is every reason to believe that the GOP will fail this test — as it failed every other during the past four years.

As Boot emphasizes, Trump’s guilt here is crystal clear and becoming even clearer than that with each passing day. Boot notes the Center for Responsive Politics report revealing that Trump’s corrupt campaign funneled $2.7 million to groups that organized and participated in the violent insurrection. Many of the participants in the event itself have directly characterized their actions as a response to Trump’s siren call.

There’s no doubt that Trump is guilty of inciting the insurrection. As an added bonus, it’s also clear that he had exhausted all other means to overturn the election, even trying to force the attorney general’s office to involve the Justice Department in the coup attempt. Many witnesses may now be called to attest to Trump’s desperation, further providing evidence for his motives in inciting the Jan. 6 attack.

As Boot observes, we caught a fleeting glimpse, out of the corner of our eyes, of Republicans possibly, maybe, kind of considering doing the right thing and convicting this criminal president of the worst offense any president could possibly commit against this nation: willful insurrection.

But no, it was not to be. Because … they’ve all suddenly become Constitutional scholars!

To avoid having to defend Trump’s indefensible conduct, many Republicans are taking refuge in the argument that it’s unconstitutional to impeach a president who has already left office. This is simply untrue, as more than 150 legal scholars — including a co-founder of the Federalist Society! — point out. “In 1876,” they note, “Secretary of War William Belknap tried to avoid impeachment and its consequences by resigning minutes before the House voted on his impeachment. The House impeached him anyway, and the Senate concluded that it had the power to try, convict, and disqualify former officers.”

Never mind that this vast concern for the Constitution wasn’t on display during Trump’s first impeachment trial, or throughout his entire months-long effort to delegitimize a national election and disenfranchise 80 million Americans. Nothing unconstitutional to see there, I guess.

But there actually was something to see, after all. It was the sight of House and Senate Republicans doing absolutely nothing to stop that effort, and in fact aiding and abetting it through their votes to negate the verdict of the American people—though not in their own elections, mind you. In fact, there was a whole lot to see. And there’s a whole lot of complicity to explore.

We saw Missouri Sen. Josh Hawley raise his fist in support of the insurrectionists, practically egging them on, as long as he could ride the coattails. We saw Texas Sen. Ted Cruz lending his own voice to the treachery, along with 140 members of the House of Representatives.

These people not only supported this lie, they campaigned on it in their own elections. The rot runs right down into the state legislators who wanted to get in on the action. Local party organizations are supporting Trump’s insurrection efforts in state after state, from Wyoming to Arizona.

The GOP appears more eager for retribution against Republicans who upheld their oaths of office than against a president who violated it. All 10 of the House Republicans who voted to impeach Trump are now facing a backlash at home, with local party organizations scolding them for disloyalty and primary challengers lining up against them. Pro-Trump House members are also demanding Cheney’s ouster as chair of the House Republican conference.

The cancer cuts down to the bone. It isn’t just Trump, but a culture of Republican-abetted sedition that needs to be presented to the American people on Feb. 8. Call some witnesses from those state legislatures who met with Trump as he hemmed, hawed and threatened them. Call Hawley as a witness and obtain all his contacts and communications with the administration before the insurrection. Same with Cruz. There’s no privilege attached, not when you’re trying to commit a crime, boys.

Americans really need to see the big picture. Let’s give it to them. And let Hawley and Cruz—and Trump—squeal their seditious little asses off.

Marco Rubio attempts to attack American Federation of Teachers and is demolished on Twitter

Posted on January 29, 2021 (Updated January 29, 2021) by Walter Einenkel

After toeing the Republican line that COVID-19 wasn’t a big deal, questioning mask mandates, promoting the false narrative that Dr. Anthony Fauci lied to the American public, and questioning stay-at-home orders, Florida coward Marco Rubio stepped up in front of everyone else—teachers, first responders, and the elderly—to grab a vaccine for himself. Rubio is recently remembered for saying an impeachment trial for a president who helped create, fester, and enact an attempted coup d’etat on the United States is “stupid.” He’s also seemingly only been able to muster up the work ethic of a toddler during nap time, trying and failing to attack real legislator, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

On Wednesday, probably unable to read clearly from underneath the boots he’s been licking for the last four years, and unable to find his Bible Quote of the Day calendar, Rubio tried to attack public school teachers, and more specifically the “National Teachers Union” on Twitter. Rubio wrote, “National teachers’ union (not teachers) are saying they won’t go back to work until 2022. We should not send a single taxpayer dollar in Covid funds to schools that aren’t going to reopen.” Yup. Guy has very little to say about an insurrection from within his own political party, but he’s got serious grandstanding to do when it comes to promoting bad public health safety and our children.

It’s hard to know exactly what Rubio was talking about; perhaps he was referring to the impasse that the Chicago Teachers Union and the city has come to over COVID-19 resources and the safeguards being presented to teachers for reopening schools. Maybe he’s talking about the American Federation of Teachers? Not sure. Marco needs to go back to school. Badly. In the meantime, the internet learned him a little.

First, American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten stepped in, to point out that Marco Rubio is a lying sack of shit.

Marco Rubio is lying. Our union has been talking about reopening since April, in fact I published an OpEd on it this week. The fact reopening safely costs money. Trying to withhold money from schools only slows down reopening. Stop lying Senator. https://t.co/PZnU7xxXGU
— Randi Weingarten (@rweingarten) January 27, 2021

Daily Kos’ own Mark Sumner called Rubio out as well.

Marco Rubio continuing the trend of using the Big Lie to spread hate and divisiveness. Tell me, Senator, is there an appropriate Bible verse for that?
— Mark Sumner (@Devilstower) January 27, 2021

Then a simple statement of facts.

You do realize that remote and hybrid learning require infrastructure, implementation costs, curriculum costs & personnel, right? Instead of threatening to make education MORE difficult, maybe you should listen to what educators say they need to meet the needs of their students.
— doesnotexist (@BrianFiddle) January 27, 2021

Those are big ideas for Rubio. This might be more his speed.

That's smart: They don't have the resources to get open, so the natural thing to do is: Cut their resources more. Thinking like this is proof of why kids need to be (safely) back in school. We've turned out too many stupid people already.
— Virgil Simpson (@HorseyDC) January 27, 2021

Maybe this approach will be easier for him to understand.

I’m of the opinion that we don’t pay legislators until they start focusing on Americans instead of trying to tear each other apart based on party politics.
— Elysabeth Britt (@ElysabethBritt) January 27, 2021

Maybe we can appeal to his Santa Claus-level understanding of Christianity and Catholicism?

does your jesus tell you to lie
— Atrios 🟨🟥 (@Atrios) January 27, 2021

But let’s be clear what is going on here.

Shame the National Teachers' Union dissolved the National Security Council's Pandemic Response Team in 2017 and then ignored their federal intelligence regarding an impending pandemic and then got on air to tell us 15 cases were going to zero and then told us to shoot up bleach.
— Gen X Army Brat (@GenXArmyBrat) January 27, 2021

The depths of Marco Rubio’s crapitude are just staggering.

Democrats ditch Republicans on COVID-19 relief, start budget reconciliation process

Posted on January 26, 2021 by Joan McCarter

House Democrats are moving forward on a COVID-19 relief bill, preparing to ditch the Senate Republicans and provide critical relief to the American people without them. Initial votes could come as soon as next week, and President Joe Biden has signed off on using the procedure—budget reconciliation—to get his relief package through as Republicans in the Senate continue to obstruct.

"Reconciliation is a means of getting a bill passed. There are a number of means of getting bills passed. That does not mean, regardless of how the bill is passed, that Democrats and Republicans cannot both vote for it," White House press secretary Jen Psaki said. "So the president obviously wants to make this bipartisan, hence he's engaging with members of both parties and he remains committed to that." House Budget Chairman John Yarmuth said Monday that he is preparing the reconciliation instructions for the package, and is even going to include Biden's $15/hour minimum wage increase, even though that's a "stretch" in his words to qualify under the rules for the procedure.

Budget reconciliation became a thing as an optional procedure under the Congressional Budget Act of 1974. That act requires Congress to come up with a budget resolution every year, and that resolution can instruct the committees to craft bills that would reconcile current law with the decided-upon budget plan. The main advantage of legislation developed with it is that it is considered under expedited procedures on both the House and Senate, and it is not subject to the 60-vote threshold in the Senate that has killed everything good any Democratic president has tried to do since 2008. It begins with a resolution that instructs the relevant committees in both the House and Senate to draw up legislation to meet a budget specified within the resolution—the bill that the committees finalize must either reduce or increase the federal deficit by no less or no more than the resolution determines. Anything included in the legislation after it is combined, or reconciled, by the House and Senate has to thus change either spending or revenue. Sort of. Budge reconciliations can't touch Social Security, they can't increase the deficit in a 10-year window, and they are limited to federal spending or revenue. Mostly.

The "sort of" and "mostly" as a limit in the Senate's rather expansive power to decide what it wants, one has a simple majority. The Congressional Budget Office and the Senate parliamentarian act as the referees for the process, the CBO making the budget projections and the parliamentarian ruling what provisions can be included depending on the degree to which a provisions budget impact is "incidental"—does it impact spending or revenue—or not. If the Parliamentarian rules it incidental under the Byrd rules (a tightening up of the process spearheaded by then-Sen. Robert Byrd in 1958), then it comes out. That is unless the president of the Senate, the person sitting in the chair who in this case would be Vice President Kamala Harris, overrules the parliamentarian. That hasn't happened frequently, but we also haven't been in a global pandemic that's crippling the economy frequently.

One authority on the federal budget and Senate rules believes that even the minimum wage increase could be passed in reconciliation, along with the rest of the provisions—including another round of direct $1,400 payments, increasing and extending emergency unemployment benefits, hundreds of billions in aid to state and local government and schools, funding for vaccine production and distribution, expanding testing and tracing, as well as other proposals. Bill Dauster, who served as deputy chief of staff to former Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, "said in a guest op-ed column for CQ Roll Call that a minimum wage boost has enough budgetary impact to be considered under the Byrd rule."

Now that McConnell has caved to allow the Senate to organize, the committees can start the work of drafting their components of the reconciliation bill. There's a hard deadline for them to get it accomplished—another unemployment cliff in March, because that's as long as Senate Republicans would let that go. There's also that matter of an impeachment hearing that begins in a couple of weeks. The House, Yarmuth said Monday, is on it: "we will be prepared to go to the floor as early as next week."

Senate Republicans, still terrified of Trump, make up constitutional arguments to protect him

Posted on January 25, 2021 by Joan McCarter

On Monday evening the House will transmit to the Senate the article of impeachment to prevent Donald Trump from ever being in a position to destroy democracy again. Senate leaders have reached an agreement to begin the hearings on February 8. Most Republicans there are not so sure that inciting a violent insurrection against the very body in which they sit is such an impeachable thing. Not that they want to argue about Trump, because they actually did live through that terror that left five people dead, but they need a straw to cling to to avoid dealing with him. And his supporters. So they've made up a new thing: it's unconstitutional to impeach him.

Never mind that there is precedent for impeaching a former federal officer, and that the weight of scholarship on the issue supports it, even though the Framers did not make it explicit in the document itself. Probably because they couldn't possibly envision a Senate so thoroughly corrupted they'd be on the side of Trump. So you have the likes of Arkansas Republican Sen. Tom Cotton, who opines "The Senate lacks constitutional authority to conduct impeachment proceedings against a former president. […] The Founders designed the impeachment process as a way to remove officeholders from public office—not an inquest against private citizens." He's presuming to speak for the Founders, who spoke for themselves, and that's not what they said.

For example, President John Quincy Adams: When the House was debating its authority to impeach Daniel Webster after the fact for conduct while he was secretary of state, Adams said "I hold myself, so long as I have the breath of life in my body, amenable to impeachment by this House for everything I did during the time I held any public office." The reality is, the Framers left this ambiguous, but they also left the Senate the power to do what they need to do. One, at least, foresaw what could be coming someday.

Here's Alexander Hamilton: "When a man unprincipled in private life[,] desperate in his fortune, bold in his temper […] despotic in his ordinary demeanor—known to have scoffed in private at the principles of liberty—when such a man is seen to mount the hobby horse of popularity—to join in the cry of danger to liberty—to take every opportunity of embarrassing the General Government & bringing it under suspicion—to flatter and fall in with all the non sense of the zealots of the day—It may justly be suspected that his object is to throw things into confusion that he may 'ride the storm and direct the whirlwind.'" There's one Framer who would surely want Trump cut off from any possibility of future office.

Of course, not all Republicans are making this bad faith argument. Others are trying to play the "unity" card. Like Florida Sen. Marco Rubio who got bogged down on Fox News, of all places, arguing that the impeachment is "stupid" even though Trump "bears responsibility for some of what happened." Which part he doesn't make clear. Maybe the five dead people? The one senator who voted to convict Trump last time around (that whole extorting Ukraine to get dirt on Joe Biden to throw the election for Trump—there's a theme developing here) says there's no question he should be impeached. "I believe that what is being alleged and what we saw, which is incitement to insurrection, is an impeachable offense," Sen. Mitt Romney said Sunday. "If not, what is?"

Meanwhile, the trial doesn't start for another two weeks, and the evidence against Trump just keeps increasing, from his machinations in the Justice Department to try to overthrow Georgia's election to his campaign's orchestration of the rally that Trump whipped up into an insurrection. Five people were killed in the insurrection, a cop died by suicide in the aftermath, and 139 U.S. Capitol and D.C. police were assaulted and/or injured in the attack. That evidence, and more, will be presented to the Senate and the American people, along with hours of video of the attack. Republicans might think now that they can make vague arguments about the Constitution, but in the face of the horror inflicted on the nation, their arguments are going to prove pathetic at best, treasonous at worst.

Trump supporters continue to plot violence as second impeachment trial approaches

Posted on January 25, 2021 by Laura Clawson

Thousands of National Guard troops will remain in Washington, D.C., through the second impeachment trial of Donald Trump thanks to continuing threats of violence against lawmakers. The number of troops has already dropped and will continue to drop from a high of around 25,000 to below 20,000 now. It is slated to drop to 5,000 in February.

In addition to the threat of armed protesters returning during the impeachment trial, law enforcement agencies are looking into threats that were “Mainly posted online and in chat groups” and “have included plots to attack members of Congress during travel to and from the Capitol complex during the trial,” the Associated Press reported based on information from an unnamed official who “had been briefed on the matter.”

These threats are not hard to imagine. Indeed, one of the alleged Capitol attackers already faces charges for threats against Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and for saying it’s “huntin[g] season” with respect to the officer who fatally shot rioter Ashli Babbitt as she tried to climb through a broken window to get to where lawmakers were evacuating the House chamber.

House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy has been flailing in his response to the Capitol attack, but even he has been very clear about the threat to members of Congress, telling his caucus not to attack any of their colleagues by name because “it's putting people in jeopardy.”

Saying he had reached out personally to some Republicans—we can guess which offenders those might have been—McCarthy emphasized, “Do not raise another member's name on a television, whether they have a different position or not. Let's respect one another and you probably won't understand what you're doing, and I'm just warning you right now—don't do it.”

The insurrection Donald Trump incited isn’t going to go away all at once. The threats continue, and they’re not just threats to individual members of Congress—they’re threats of continuing attacks on our democracy.

Trump’s second impeachment is about more than you think

Posted on January 23, 2021 by Mark Sumner

When the House acted swiftly to impeach Donald Trump for a second time on Jan. 13, the actual Articles of Impeachment were shockingly brief. With just five pages, the first of which is completely taken up with the names of sponsors who signed onto the resolution, the gist of the single article is that Trump repeatedly issued false statements that inflamed the crowd and incited insurgents on Jan. 6. The statements cited in the resolution include Trump’s oft-repeated claim that “we won this election, and we won it by a landslide” and more aggressive statements like “if you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore.”

Those statements, which Trump repeated at the rally he held shortly before the insurgents swarmed up the steps of the Capitol, may seem scant. And arguments over whether they are really incitement to violence may seem to allow Republicans a lot of wiggle room when it comes to their vote.

But the article is not everything that House members will be bringing to the Senate when they come for Trump’s trial on Feb. 8.

In addition to the article itself, there are considerably more detailed supporting documents. These documents don’t just cite the statements that Trump made on the morning of the assault on the Capitol, they cover the whole period following the election and show how Trump laid the groundwork for violence. That means that things like the phone call Trump made to Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, and tweets that Trump put out threatening any officials who got in his way, are fully covered.

The document also details events on Jan. 6, including statements by Rudy Giuliani urging the crowd to have “have trial by combat,” and Donald Trump, Jr. warning Congress that “we’re coming for you.” And it points out how, when Trump got up to speak, he called out specific legislators as targets for the crowd’s hate before falsely telling them that he was going to walk up Pennsylvania Ave. with them.

The document is far from comprehensive. It doesn’t contain a full list of the 62 legal actions filed by Trump’s team. It doesn’t cover all the changes Trump made at the Pentagon following the election. It doesn’t discuss the scheme to sub in a Devin Nunes aide as head of the CIA. It doesn’t cover Michael Flynn’s plan to implement “partial martial law” or DOJ attorney Jeffrey Clark’s scheme to use the Justice Department to interfere in counting the electoral vote.

But there is more than enough in the provided documents to show that the crowd that pushed through police to hunt hostages in the halls of Congress wasn’t just inflamed by a few offhand words Trump delivered on that Wednesday morning. The insurgency was the result of weeks of incitement and of planning by both Trump and other members of his team. It was neither spontaneous nor an accident. It was an attempted coup.

And members of a failed coup should expect to pay a price.

Jurors want Attorney General Daniel Cameron impeached for shameless lies in Breonna Taylor case

Posted on January 23, 2021 by Lauren Floyd

Three grand jurors in the Breonna Taylor case have had enough of Kentucky Attorney General Daniel Cameron’s lies and manipulation, and on Friday they decided to do something about it. They filed a petition with the Kentucky House of Representatives calling for Cameron's impeachment after he failed to even mention a homicide charge in his presentation to the jury last September, according to the Louisville Courier-Journal.

Taylor, a 26-year-old emergency medical technician, died on March 13 after officers smashed through her door while she was sleeping and fired 32 times into her apartment, hitting her six times. But Cameron only presented to the jury three wanton endangerment charges, regarding shots fired into a neighboring apartment. Kevin Glogower, the lawyer representing the three grand jurors, said in the petition: “The Grand Jurors did not choose this battle. This battle chose them."

Glogower told the Courier-Journal that the jurors were “randomly selected” and “terribly misused by the most powerful law enforcement official in Kentucky,” adding that “Mr. Cameron continues to blatantly disregard the truth.”

Officers have said they were responding to a shot fired by Taylor's boyfriend Kenneth Walker, who has maintained that he thought intruders were breaking into his girlfriend's home instead of police. Officers used a no-knock drug warrant for Taylor’s ex-boyfriend Jamarcus Glover to justify their presence in Taylor’s home, but Glover didn’t live at Taylor’s house and was already in police custody at the time of the shooting. Det. Joshua Jaynes, who secured the drug warrant, and Det. Myles Cosgrove, who fired the shot the FBI determined killed Taylor, were officially fired this month for their roles in the deadly shooting, the Louisville Metro Police Department confirmed to media on Jan. 6.

Brett Hankison, who is accused of blindly firing 10 shots into Taylor’s home during the raid, was also fired, but Sgt. Jonathan Mattingly, who shot Taylor five times, was only reassigned to administrative work. Mattingly was injured in the incident when Walker shot the cop, Cameron said during a news conference on Sept. 23.

Cameron used the press event to allege that the grand jury “agreed” that Mattingly and Cosgrove were “justified in their return of deadly fire after having been fired upon by Kenneth Walker.” While dodging a question about whether homicide charges were presented to the jury, the prosecutor instead claimed that his office presented “all the information” and jurors “were walked through all the homicide offenses.”

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Jurors maintain that simply is not true. “Neither Cameron nor anyone from his office mentioned any homicide offense to the grand jury,” they said in their petition, obtained by the Courier-Journal. “Not only were no homicide offenses presented as alleged, no charges of any kind were presented to the Grand Jury other than the three wanton endangerment charges against Detective Hankinson."

Trump attorney who ‘burrowed’ into critical job at last minute is placed on administrative leave

Posted on January 22, 2021 (Updated January 22, 2021) by Mark Sumner

Donald Trump may have never admitted that he lost—bigly—but he sure spent his last months in office acting like a loser. That wasn’t just a matter of Trump completely checking out of his already inadequate governance, or drumming up support for an insurrection. It also included a firestorm of ripping out even marginally competent officials and making last-minute Trumpist substitutions. In particular, Trump got genuinely busy right after the election in replacing top Pentagon and national security officials. Some of those new officials seem to have been involved with the slow, inadequate response to the Jan. 6 insurrection.

Even after the failed coup, the deck chairs kept moving on the Trumptanic. Less than 24 hours before Trump made the nation genuinely grateful by leaving Washington for good, Trump loyalist Michael Ellis was sworn in as the top attorney for the National Security Agency (NSA). This is a slot that’s supposed to be a nonpolitical civil service position awarded to the best qualified applicant. The push to seat Ellis in this post raised immediately generated calls for a review by an inspector general. But Trump’s team pushed around those calls to seat Ellis and keep him working until the last minute.

That minute is up. President Biden has placed Ellis on administrative leave. Now everyone wants to know just what he did in his less than two days on the job.

Ellis was not a newcomer to the Trump White House. He was originally a White House attorney before Trump handed him the role of senior director for intelligence on the National Security Council in March 2020. As Kerry Eleveld reported at that time, Ellis was considered a “Trump loyalist” who had no experience in intelligence. He was already known as someone who had slipped classified information to Rep. Devin Nunes and for requesting that transcript of Trump’s Ukrainian call be moved to a more secure server. His move to the NSC came shortly after Republicans handed Trump a free pass on his first impeachment—an impeachment that included key witnesses from the NSC who testified to Trump’s attempted blackmail of the Ukrainian president.

Even though Ellis was already in the NSC and there were only days to go, The New York Times reports that former Acting Defense Secretary Christopher Miller scrambled to move Ellis into place over objections. Among other things, Ellis’ appointment seems to be a clear violation of rules against “burrowing,” in which political appointees are assigned supposedly competitive civil service positions that normally carry on between administrations. Insiders have also said that Ellis was given the job over several more experienced attorneys who scored higher and had applied for the position. Why the rush? Well, for one thing, the top attorney has almost total control over that classified server where the transcripts from the Ukraine conversation and other classified conversations are stored.

For the moment, Ellis has been ordered to the sidelines. The Biden White House put Ellis on administrative leave Wednesday evening.

However, if the investigation fails to show that seating Ellis violated regulations, the protections provided to civil service jobs could well see him returning. Which doesn’t mean he would once again be in charge of such critical areas. He may get to stay, but he can definitely be reassigned.