Bits: GOP attacks on the rule of law; GOP attacks on inconvenient truth

As commented on here before, authoritarian radical right Republican (ARR) politicians in Georgia want to get rid of the prosecutor in Trump's election subversion case in that state. That amounts to a direct attack on the rule of law. Another major avenue of attack is coming from ARR Republicans in congress. The Messenger reports:

Trump’s Government Shutdown Push to Starve His 

Criminal Cases Has a Fundamental Flaw

Trump is openly goading his congressional loyalists to shut down the federal government at the end of next week for the explicit purpose of sabotaging his criminal cases.

“Republicans in Congress can and must defund all aspects of Crooked Joe Biden’s weaponized Government that refuses to close the Border, and treats half the Country as Enemies of the State,” the former president and 2024 Republican frontrunner wrote on his website Truth Social on Thursday morning. “This is also the last chance to defund these political prosecutions against me and other Patriots.”

In the event of a shutdown, the U.S. court system will remain fully funded for up to three weeks. And even after that, the judicial branch of the federal government can tap into “carryover” funds from previous years and fees like the ones charged by Pacer, the online court documents database that costs the public 10 cents a page for downloads.

Special Counsel Jack Smith, whose team works for the Justice Department, has an additional cushion provided by a “permanent, indefinite appropriation,” which will continue to finance the already-charged cases against Trump. The scheduled start dates for the trials in the two federal Trump cases also aren’t scheduled until March and May of 2024 respectively, well beyond the time window that any shutdown is expected to last.  

Republican Rep. Andrew Clyde, a Trump supporter from Georgia, proposed an amendment that would target funding of state and federal prosecutions of the former president, but the special counsel’s office is already funded. There is no evidence that Trump’s criminal prosecutions in New York and Georgia have received any substantial federal financing.

Despite the alleged “fundamental flaw”, one can expect ARR Republicans in congress to do their best to try to protect the traitor Trump from as much prosecution as they can. This is open war on the rule of law by the radicalized, authoritarian Republican Party.

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Remember the successful ARR attack on federal funding for gun violence research that was imposed in 1996 (my 2021 post is here)? That funding ban was triggered by this 1993 research paper that showed that gun ownership was a risk factor for domestic homicide. 27 years later that ban still hampers gun violence research in the US.  As I discussed here in 2015, the ARR has fought against all research that could generate truth that is inconvenient to ARR dogma, wealth and/or power. The ARR tactic of killing inconvenient research is not new.

The ARR Republican Party in congress is now doing the same thing to federally funded research on the effects of online misinformation and lies. The WaPo writes:

Misinformation research is buckling under GOP legal attacks

An escalating campaign, led by Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) and other Republicans, has cast a pall over programs that study political disinformation and the quality of medical information online

Academics, universities and government agencies are overhauling or ending research programs designed to counter the spread of online misinformation amid a legal campaign from conservative politicians and activists who accuse them of colluding with tech companies to censor right-wing views.

Facing litigation, Stanford University officials are discussing how they can continue tracking election-related misinformation through the Election Integrity Partnership (EIP), a prominent consortium that flagged social media conspiracies about voting in 2020 and 2022, several participants told The Washington Post. The coalition of disinformation researchers may shrink and also may stop communicating with X and Facebook about their findings.

The National Institutes of Health froze a $150 million program intended to advance the communication of medical information, citing regulatory and legal threats.  

“If the question relates in any way to misinformation or disinformation, please do not respond,” read the guidance email, sent in July after a Louisiana judge blocked many federal agencies from communicating with social media companies.  

“In the name of protecting free speech, the scientific community is not allowed to speak,” said Dean Schillinger, a health communication scientist who planned to apply to the NIH program to collaborate with a Tagalog-language newspaper to share accurate health information with Filipinos. “Science is being halted in its tracks.”  

Academics and government scientists say the campaign also is successfully throttling the years-long effort to study online falsehoods, which grew after Russian attempts to interfere in the 2016 election caught both social media sites and politicians unawares.

Once again, we clearly see blatant, direct attacks by elite radical Republican Party authoritarians on inconvenient truth and science, and on the public interest. To establish their corrupt dictatorship, Republican politicians attack and subvert the same thing that all or nearly all other dictators, theocrats, plutocrats and kleptocrats target, prominently political opposition, pluralism-tolerance (to have scapegoat groups to attack and fearmonger about), democracy, civil liberties, especially voting rights and elections, and sources of inconvenient truth. None of these tactics are new. Same dictator lies, deceit, slanders, crackpottery. It's just a different day in a different country, now the US.

Note that some government scientists say the Republican dictators' campaign is throttling research on online falsehoods. If Trump or another Republican dictator wannabe is elected president in 2024, those scientists would be searched out and fired as communist deep state enemies. They would replaced by thugs who will deny that online lies are of any consequence, assuming any even exist in view of the reality of post-truth and alt-facts.