Two bits: The one-way ratchet to tyranny; The ratchet's political moral lubricant

 Ratcheting our way to kleptocratic dictatorship, one step at a time: The HuffPo reports that Senate Democrats used a rule-breaking tactic to advance two judicial nominees because Republicans themselves had done the exact same thing twice. Sen. Judiciary Committee chairman Durban called the rule breaking just a matter of following the Republican “precedent.” 

Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee had full-blown meltdowns on Thursday after Chairman Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) held votes on two of President Joe Biden’s judicial nominees without allowing debate on them, saying he was simply following the “new precedent” established by Republicans when they did the same thing to Democrats, twice.

Durbin appeared to completely blindside Republicans by moving straight to votes on two U.S. District Court nominees, Mustafa Kasubhai and Eumi Lee, without opening up the floor for discussions on them. Both nominees had two previous hearings and had been debated. But typically the panel would still allow for more discussion in what was their confirmation hearing.

“The two preceding chairs of this committee violated the letter and spirit of Committee Rule IV,” Durbin said, referring to a committee rule that requires at least one member of the minority to vote with the majority to end debate on a matter before moving to vote on it.

Durbin said one former chair, Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), violated this rule with a vote on Brett Kavanaugh’s Supreme Court nomination, and Lindsey Graham (R-SC) was chair when he broke the rule to advance a partisan immigration bill without Democratic input. 

“In doing so, Republicans established a new precedent that I followed on one occasion last Congress and will follow again today,” said the Illinois Democrat. “I’ve said time and again there cannot be one set of rules for Republicans and a different set for Democrats.”

If I recall right, Senate Republicans when Obama was in office were blocking all judicial nominees, even though they did not control the Senate. The Dems could not get even one judge confirmed. So, Dems changed the rule to confirm a trial and appeals court nominees. The Dems left intact the existing rule for confirmation of Supreme Court justices. 

After they got back in control of the Senate, radical Republicans got their revenge. They (1) refused to allow Obama's nominee Merrick Garland to even get a hearing, and (2) removed the rule for Supreme Court judges. That allowed authoritarian radical Senate Republicans to bulldoze onto the court three corrupt, radical right authoritarian Christian nationalist plutocrats. Those three extremists are the radical Gorsuch, the sex predator Kavanaugh, and the Christian nationalist freak Barrett. 

One can see where this is going. The toxic act-react ratchet keeps moving the Senate and American politics generally away from bipartisanship and pro-democracy compromise. It pushes us toward single party rule and some form of kleptocratic authoritarianism or tyranny.

In my firm opinion, this one-way trek to kleptocratic dictatorship hell is inevitable because the Republican Party has radicalized and become authoritarian. Unless absolutely necessary, the GOP no longer cooperates, compromises or even respects inconvenient fact or truth. For the modern radicalized GOP, winning power and wealth is everything. Democracy, civil liberties and the rule of law just get in the way.

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The House voted 311-114 today to expel George Santos, with 105 Repubs voting to expel him. 

The main reasons were criminal indictments against him, and House ethics rules prohibiting misuse of campaign funds and various alleged crimes. The Hill comments:

Once seen as a GOP trailblazer, Santos is facing federal indictment on 23 counts of wire fraud, identity theft and other campaign finance charges, and many Republicans came to view him as a drag on the party’s image and a liability heading into a tough election cycle where control of the House is up for grabs.  

Santos has consistently pointed out that he has only been charged and not convicted.

“It starts and puts us in a new direction, a dangerous one, that sets a very dangerous precedent for the future,” Santos said on the House floor Tuesday. “Are we to now assume that one is no longer innocent until proven guilty, and they are in fact guilty until proven innocent? Or are we now to simply assume that because somebody doesn’t like you, they get to throw you out of your job.”

People voting against expelling Santos argued this would set a bad or dangerous precedent for the reasons Santos himself raised in his defense. Sadly, that is spot on true. The concern is about political self-preservation. Lots of Repubs probably have skeletons in the closet and want more protection for their jobs in case they get caught and whacked. If this serves as precedent, then the ratchet can be fired up any time some politician in the House gets incited for committing one or more crimes. The overwhelming moral concern appears to be political self-preservation, not defense of voters or democracy.

Only one news report about Santos today that I've seen even mentioned the fact that Santos got elected to office on the basis of his slew of jaw-dropping lies and fantasy stories. Voters were deceived and screwed out of a knowing choice. Among the news reports I saw, only one person who was reported to raise the concern that Santos lied to me. That complaint was raised by an irate Santos constituent, not any news media I'm aware of and not any politician. That fact of screwed voters was not very important, at least for the politicians who voted not to expel. For those people, lying to voters is not grounds for expulsion.

Santos should have been expelled as soon as the scope and depth of his lies and deceit of voters became clear and undeniable. In other words, deceiving voters and screwing them out of an informed choice is not major a moral concern for the politicians here. Even the people who voted to expel were focused on Santos’ bad criminal actions, not playing immoral dirty tricks on voters. Or, if some politicians who voted to expel were concerned about screwed voters, it wasn't reported much or at all. 

NYT book review: It Can't Happen Here

It Can't Happen Here is the 1935 Sinclair Lewis novel that predicted the rise of fascism in America. From a Jan. 2017 NYT book review, Reading the Classic Novel That Predicted Trump:

“It Can’t Happen Here” is a work of dystopian fantasy, one man’s effort in the 1930s to imagine what it might look like if fascism came to America. At the time, the obvious specter was Adolf Hitler, whose rise to power in Germany provoked fears that men like the Louisiana senator Huey Long or the radio priest Charles Coughlin might accomplish a similar feat in the United States. Today, Lewis’s novel is making a comeback as an analogy for the Age of Trump. Within a week of the 2016 election, the book was reportedly sold out on Amazon.com.

At a moment when instability seems to be the only constant in American politics, “It Can’t Happen Here” offers an alluring (if terrifying) certainty: It can happen here, and what comes next will be even ghastlier than you expect. Yet the graphic horrors of Lewis’s vision also limit the book’s usefulness as a guide to our own political moment. In 1935, Lewis was trying to prevent the unthinkable: the election of a pseudo-fascist candidate to the presidency of the United States. Today’s readers, by contrast, are playing catch-up, scrambling to think through the implications of an electoral fait accompli. If Lewis’s postelection vision is what awaits us, there will be little cause for hope, or even civic engagement, in the months ahead. The only viable options will be to get out of the country — or to join an armed underground resistance.

Lewis’s book sold 320,000 copies, becoming his most popular work to date. Reviewers agreed that the book’s success had little to do with its literary merits; though “a vigorous anti-fascist tract,” one critic noted, it was “not much of a novel.” What propelled its popularity was a sense of urgency, the worry that the United States — like the nations of Western Europe — might contain dark forces yet to be unleashed.

milo mentioned this book in a comment today. I was unaware of it. This seems appropriate for the interesting times we are going through. Some other reviews say that the book did not predict Trump, but most all the reviews out there talk about disturbing parallels, similarities and the like between Trump and the fictitious bad guy, US Senator Berzelius "Buzz" Windrip. The bad guy rises to power to become America’s first outright dictator.

News bits: The warnings get more desperate; Germaine’s war update; Free speech battles

Another warning comes in a really long WaPo opinion by Robert Kagan (not behind the paywall):

A Trump dictatorship is increasingly inevitable. We should stop pretending.

Let’s stop the wishful thinking and face the stark reality: There is a clear path to dictatorship in the United States, and it is getting shorter every day. In 13 weeks, Donald Trump will have locked up the Republican nomination. In the RealClearPolitics poll average (for the period from Nov. 9 to 20), Trump leads his nearest competitor by 47 points and leads the rest of the field combined by 27 points. The idea that he is unelectable in the general election is nonsense — he is tied or ahead of President Biden in all the latest polls — stripping other Republican challengers of their own stated reasons for existence. The fact that many Americans might prefer other candidates, much ballyhooed by such political sages as Karl Rove, will soon become irrelevant when millions of Republican voters turn out to choose the person whom no one allegedly wants.

For many months now, we have been living in a world of self-delusion, rich with imagined possibilities. Maybe it will be Ron DeSantis, or maybe Nikki Haley. Maybe the myriad indictments of Trump will doom him with Republican suburbanites. Such hopeful speculation has allowed us to drift along passively, conducting business as usual, taking no dramatic action to change course, in the hope and expectation that something will happen. Like people on a riverboat, we have long known there is a waterfall ahead but assume we will somehow find our way to shore before we go over the edge. But now the actions required to get us to shore are looking harder and harder, if not downright impossible.

The magical-thinking phase is ending. Barring some miracle, Trump will soon be the presumptive Republican nominee for president. When that happens, there will be a swift and dramatic shift in the political power dynamic, in his favor. Until now, Republicans and conservatives have enjoyed relative freedom to express anti-Trump sentiments, to speak openly and positively about alternative candidates, to vent criticisms of Trump’s behavior past and present. Donors who find Trump distasteful have been free to spread their money around to help his competitors. Establishment Republicans have made no secret of their hope that Trump will be convicted and thus removed from the equation without their having to take a stand against him.  

In fact, it has already begun. As his nomination becomes inevitable, donors are starting to jump from other candidates to Trump.

Kagan’s opinion piece goes on at length like that. Notice that some (most? nearly all?) Trump donors are more concerned about their wealth and power than democracy, civil liberties or the rule of law. And, some things bear repeating:

 

Let’s stop the wishful thinking and face the stark reality: There is a clear path to dictatorship in the United States .... we have been living in a world of self-delusion, rich with imagined possibilities. Maybe it will be Ron DeSantis, or maybe Nikki Haley. Maybe the myriad indictments of Trump will doom him with Republican suburbanites .... Trump will soon be the presumptive Republican nominee for president. When that happens, there will be a swift and dramatic shift in the political power dynamic, in his favor. .... In fact, it has already begun.

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Update in Germaine’s war on (defense against?) dictators, grifters, 

liars, aggressors, irrational emotional manipulators and traitors

In view of the increasing likelihood that DJT will be the next president with a central goal of killing democracy to establish his vision of an American authoritarian kleptocracy, I’ve ramped up my efforts in defense of democracy. I’m now writing emails to authors at NYT, WaPo and other sources who either (1) still don’t see the threat, or (2) maybe unknowingly continue to normalize and validate the intent of America’s the radical right’s authoritarianism and deep corruption by calling it stupid, inaccurate stuff like “conservatism”, “conservative”, “the right”, “traditional” or “moderate conservative.” I try to send out one respectful, fact- and logic-supported dart every 2-3 days. I am careful about who gets pick, what is written and why. Some of those folks do not want to be contactable by email (I don’t do traditional big social media), so they can be hard or impossible to track down.

I suspect that targeting authors at actual journalism sources will have more pro-democracy impact than engaging in hand-to-hand combat with radical right trolls, cranks and conspiracy freaks at online news and politics sites that still have not banned or blocked me, e.g., BN&R, National Zero and reddit. Most of the radical right politics online world has banned or blocked me, so that's not an option.

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In an interesting analysis piece, WaPo author Philip Bump mused about Musk’s latest outrage over the alleged infringement of his sacred free speech rights. This is about a key propaganda point that authoritarian radical right liars and haters constantly raise as they howl in self-righteous moral outrage about things they don’t like. Musk doesn’t like losing money or advertisers on X that pay him money. He’s losing some now because of his recent virulent outburst of anti-Semitism. Bump writes:

Once again: Speaking freely doesn’t mean 

speaking without consequence

Elon Musk’s fury at advertisers is a microcosm of a prevalent view of speech and primacy on the right

On Wednesday, Elon Musk appeared at the New York Times’s DealBook Summit, where he was interviewed by Andrew Ross Sorkin (whom Musk at one point called “Jonathan”). Sorkin asked Musk about companies pulling their ads from X (formerly Twitter) in the wake of a report showing ads sitting next to pro-Nazi content and after Musk’s endorsement of antisemitic rhetoric and conspiracy theories.

Musk was indignant. He claimed that he wanted those companies to stop advertising.

“If somebody’s going to try to blackmail with advertising? Blackmail me with money?” he said. “Go f--- yourself.”

Musk has framed his social media company as a battleground in the war over honesty and truth, insisting that any criticism of the company or his decisions is rooted in a fear of an unfiltered reality. But those advertisers aren’t leaving because they are terrified of forbidden truths and desperate to get Musk to silence those they fear. They’re leaving because they don’t want their brands associated with Nazis. They’re probably also leaving in part because Twitter’s audience is shrinking, whatever bespoke metrics the company invents to give a different impression. If you’re Coca-Cola, the cost-benefit analysis here isn’t that complicated.

An advertiser boycott was “going to kill the company,” Musk insisted to Sorkin. “And the whole world will know that those advertisers killed the company, and we will document it in great detail.”  

For a long time, Musk — and many others on the right — have labored under the misapprehension that the right to free speech also means facing no repercussions for what you say.  

Advertisers aren’t “blackmailing” Musk to get him to make X less toxic or to encourage him not to post endorsements of hateful rhetoric. They’re just leaving because Twitter has changed. If anyone is trying to extort anyone, it’s Musk and X chief executive Linda Yaccarino.  

“Information independence” is a terrific phrase, in the same way that “alternative facts” is. It’s a cloak of seriousness that nonsense can wear around the public square. The next time my kids get in trouble for lying at school, I’ll simply remind the principal that they were exercising “information independence.”

Musk accuses advertisers of blackmail for leaving X. They leave because is a toxic hellscape. The irrational arrogance and blatant lies here are off the charts. Musk is free to spout anti-Semitism, pro-Nazi hate, racism, anti-vaxx crackpottery and whatever other filth and harmful lies he chooses to poison America with. 

This is just one part of the beliefs and thinking of America’s authoritarian radical right kleptocratic wealth and power movement. For rancid radical right elites like Musk and the quieter ones with adult-level emotional control, it’s always about their wealth and power and nothing much else. Well, maybe except maybe for the out-of-control monsters like Musk, feeding gigantic egos is a part of the wealth and power thing. 

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Elite Christian Republican family values on parade:

Christian Ziegler, the Florida GOP Chair and husband of Moms for Liberty co-founder Bridget Ziegler, is under criminal investigation over allegations of sexual battery by a woman who claims to have been involved in a long-term sexual relationship with both of the Zieglers. The investigation was first reported by the Florida Center for Governmental Accountability’s news division The Florida Trident.

Moms for liberty is a crackpot far right hate group of nice White ladies that advocate against school curricula that mention LGBQT rights, non-White race and ethnicity, critical race theory, and faux discrimination against Whites, i.e., inconvenient history.

Ziegler (the pervert with his name on his shirt) The Mistress Beater

Doesn’t beat his wife because she would kill him with a 

baseball bat - MAGA Moms for Liberty wear the pants at the Zieglers house!

Checking out the mammals

(note the T. rex hairdoo)

Reconsidering policy choices

News bits: Another monster at the USSC; Abortion cruelty in TX; Fun fact check; Fun headlines

The Atlantic writes about another monster lawsuit that would gut a major part of federal government power to regulate vast amounts of money and financial crime: 

The Case That Could Destroy the Government

What was once a fringe legal theory now stands a real chance of being adopted by the Supreme Court

This Wednesday, the Supreme Court will hear a case that poses the most direct challenge yet to the legitimacy of the modern federal government. The right-wing legal movement’s target is the “administrative state”—the agencies and institutions that set standards for safety in the workplace, limit environmental hazards and damage, and impose rules on financial markets to ensure their stability and basic fairness, among many other important things. The case, Securities and Exchange Commission v. Jarkesy, threatens all of that. Terrifyingly, this gambit might succeed.

The case involves garden-variety securities fraud. George R. Jarkesy Jr., a right-wing activist and conservative-radio talk-show host, ran a pair of investment funds with $24 million in assets. But he misrepresented how the funds were run, paid himself and his partner exorbitant fees, and inflated the assets’ value. As punishment, the SEC fined him several hundred thousand dollars and prohibited him from working in some parts of the securities industry—very standard stuff.

Jarkesy responded with what can be described only as chutzpah. He didn’t just contest the SEC’s ruling; he alleged that the SEC’s entire process against him was unconstitutional. Among other things, he asserted that Congress never had the authority to empower the SEC and that the SEC adjudicator who punished him was too independent from presidential control.

In May of last year, Jarkesy’s arguments were accepted by two judges on the conservative Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals. In a 2–1 decision, the court agreed with Jarkesy, all but ruling the SEC’s entire existence unconstitutional. The opinion was so extreme that Judge W. Eugene Davis, twice appointed by Republican presidents—and elevated to the appeals court by Ronald Reagan—dissented vigorously.

Jarkesy’s most far-reaching constitutional argument is built on the “nondelegation doctrine,” which holds that there may be some limits on the kinds of powers that Congress can give to agencies. Jarkesy argues that, when Congress gave the SEC the power to decide whether to bring enforcement actions in court or in front of an independent agency adjudicator, it gave away a core legislative function. It thus violated the doctrine and engaged in an unconstitutional delegation.

This is wild stuff. Not long ago, a lawyer would have been laughed out of court for making such nondelegation claims. Today, they’d have a good chance of destroying the federal government’s administrative capacity—taking down its ability to protect Americans’ health and safety while unleashing fraud in the financial markets.

Whether Congress’s grant of authority to the SEC was constitutional should not be a close question. Congress has delegated expansive authority to government agencies since the dawn of the republic. Only twice in American history has the Supreme Court concluded that a delegation to an agency ran afoul of the Constitution—and both of those times, nearly 90 years ago, involved unusual statutes nothing like this one.  

The SEC was created as an independent agency in 1934, after the financial crash of 1929, to thwart the sort of market manipulation that preceded the Great Depression; Congress has granted it additional powers over the years to continue protecting financial markets. Responding to catastrophes and guarding against market manipulation is exactly the kind of work that Congress should empower the executive branch to do. Requiring Congress to legislate in response to every new fraud some crook might dream up would not be a good use of its time. And there’s no reason to think that delegating authority to police markets runs afoul of the Constitution. 

Notice how the radicalized autocratic, plutocratic, theocratic USSC can take down democracy, the rule of law and civil liberties. It just does it slowly, one case at a time, as quietly as possible. Power and wealth flow to wealthy elites and big corporations from government and individual citizens.

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From the Don't Blame the Cruel Anti-Abortionists Files: The Hill reports that the Texas state attorney is arguing in court that women who have been denied medical treatments for problem pregnancies should sue the doctors, not the state of TX.  

Lawyers in the Texas attorney general’s office said Tuesday that women should sue their doctors, not the state, over a lack of access to abortion in defending the state’s strict law.

Beth Klusmann of the Texas Attorney General’s Office made that point in oral arguments before the state Supreme Court in a case challenging Texas’s abortion ban, which bars doctors from providing abortions after a fetal heartbeat is detected — typically around six weeks into pregnancy — with exceptions only for cases in which the life of the mother is at risk.

“If a woman is bleeding, if she has amniotic fluid running down her legs — then the problem is not with the law,” Klusmann said. “It is with the doctors.”

Klusmann was responding to plaintiffs in the case, who had charged the legislation had plunged the state into a “health care crisis.”

The lawsuit in Zurawski v. Texas was brought by 22 women who said that state law had forced them to carry nonviable and dangerous pregnancies to term — in other words, to go through the ordeal of pregnancy with a fetus that would not survive, and that in many cases was putting them at serious risk.

The arrogance and callousness of the monsters that run the state of TX is breathtaking. First, TX legislators write sloppy, ambiguous laws that incentivized people to report doctors and health care providers for violating their crappy laws. Then, they tell women caught in the crossfire to sue the doctors.

TX sounds like a hell hole for women and other hated groups, but lots of people love the place, including lots of women and people in targeted groups. 

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To lighten things up here’s a fun history bit & fact check. The asserted history fact:

Here’s the PolitiFact verdict:

• Former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy’s assertion is undercut by two centuries of U.S. history, including land gains following wars against Mexico, Spain, Filipino rebels, Japan and Native American tribes.

• United States-Mexico war, 1848: Under the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, Mexico ceded 55% of its territory, including the present-day states of California, Nevada, Utah, New Mexico, most of Arizona and Colorado, and parts of Oklahoma, Kansas and Wyoming.

McCarthy, dressed in formal attire, embarrassed himself when he make his false assertion on November 26, 2023 in a speech at the Oxford Union. The Oxford Union is the 200-year-old debating society at the University of Oxford in England.

Those Republican elites. They’re just so full of . . . . . . MAGA!!

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“Epic humiliation”: GOP mocked for rejecting Hunter Biden offer to testify publicly --
“What the Republicans fear most is sunlight and the truth,” said Rep. Jamie Raskin

AOC Says Republicans Would Be “Humiliated” If Hunter Biden Hearing Was Public -- Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said Republicans are afraid that the public will see that they have no case

It’s Official: Mike Johnson Is Even Less Competent Than Kevin McCarthy Was -- We’re now barreling toward a government shutdown and the House of Representatives is completely paralyzed.

U.S. GDP grew at a 5.2% rate in the third quarter, even stronger than first indicated (Darn Biden and his rotten economy /s)

A Texas Woman Goes Before School Board To Announce Porn Addiction Claim. She Blames the Scholastic Book Fair -- It turns out the woman may work for a conservative publishing company trying to take down Scholastic (Darned scholastic porn books /s)

Republicans Trip Over Their Own Assholes Trying to Take Down Hunter Biden 😮

Sarah Huckabee Sanders 🤪 appoints anti-LGBTQ+ Christian nationalist to oversee state libraries -- Jason Rapert recently called LGBTQ+ people a cult and a "devil of Hell."

Ah Sarah, what a patriot, full of charm and grace.

So, what did he say?

Oh, that’s what he said