Defending democracy worldwide; The poisoning of the federal judiciary; Thinking of an American Taliban

That says it all nicely. Good job nice lady with the naughty words!

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Constant attacks on the courts and our legal system by DJT and his morally rotted, authoritarian Republican Party is intended to poison the rule of law in the minds of as many Americans as possible. What America’s radical right authoritarianism wealth and power movement wants to do is to convince Americans that authoritarian elites alone can fix what is allegedly broken in our legal system. That is yet another gigantic authoritarian lie. 

Bloomberg reports about a new step toward poisoning the federal judiciary that authoritarian senate Republicans are taking:

Republicans Vow to Block Future Biden Judicial Nominees

A coalition of Republican senators has vowed not to support any of President Joe Biden’s judicial nominees, effectively blocking the appointment of new district judges in Florida, Ohio, Wisconsin, and other states six months before Election Day.

The 10 Republicans also from Utah, Alabama, Missouri, Tennessee, and Kansas said in an open letter on Friday that they won’t vote to confirm the administration’s political and judicial appointees.

“As a Senate Republican conference, we are unwilling to aid and abet this White House in its project to tear this country apart,” according to the letter that encourages other lawmakers to join in blocking more appointments.

“Joe Biden and his army of partisan hack judges have weaponized our judicial system against his political opponent,” Sen. Roger Marshall (R-Kan.) said in a tweet Friday. “Words are not enough. Call on your Senator to join our fight— We will block every single Biden judicial nomination until America votes on November 5th.”

The GOP stance means that Biden’s potential nominees to more than a dozen district vacancies won’t be able to move forward in the chamber.

Senate tradition requires US trial court nominees earn home-state senator support in order to advance to a hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee. 

The White House condemned the letter as “radical and hyperpartisan” that prioritizes lawmaker interests above the welfare of their constituents.

The “threats” by Republican lawmakers “would harm the American people in the name of politics and proven lies—whether it’s by blocking the appointment of U.S. Attorneys who prosecute criminals, district judges who sentence them, and U.S. Marshals who protect courthouses and track down fugitives,” presidential spokesman Andrew Bates said in a statement.

As is usual these days, authoritarian radical right (ARR) Republicans cynically and shamelessly blame Biden and the Democrats with being divisive and partisan hacks. The divisive partisan hack force at work here is DJT and ARR Republican politicians and elites who have publicly states that they want to weaponize the rule of law for partisan purposes. All of their rhetoric and partisan hack behavior is just another gigantic ARR lie designed to further damage our democracy, civil liberties, rule of law, respect for truth and tolerant secular society.

One thing that seems to be broken with our rule of law system is that it is too lenient with elite white collar criminals, traitors, corrupt politicians and the like. Look at how hard it was just to get DJT convicted as the felon we all knew he was. And that scumbag still walks free spreading his divisive lies, slanders and crackpot conspiracy theories in his public drive to kill democracy and establish himself as King for life of a kleptocratic dictatorship, heavily infused with kleptocratic plutocracy and bigoted, intolerant, kleptocratic Christian theocracy run by a bigoted, wealthy White Christian male Taliban.  

Well, at least Biden had the guts to criticize the ARR law-poisoning move and correctly say it is based on damaging hyper-partisan politics and proven lies. By golly, there is still a spark of life in Joe.

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A few thoughts about an intolerant, bigoted, kleptocratic American Christian Taliban: 

One still gets to vote, the other doesn’t?

At the 1/6 coup attempt or was it patriots engaging in

innocent, legitimate political discourse?

Teeth ridiculous?

For the lolcat non-cognoscenti:
A lolcat (pronounced /ˈlɒlkæt/ LOL-kat), or LOLcat, is an image macro of one or more cats. Lolcat images’ idiosyncratic and intentionally grammatically incorrect text is known as lolspeak

Q1: Is there such a thing as an American Christian Taliban, or is it too early to call it out, or is it non-existent?

Q2: If there is such a thing as intentionally grammatically incorrect lolspeak, is there such a thing as an intentionally socially incorrect lolburp? 

Vermont law: Oil companies liable for climate change; The plan to kill democracy

The AP reports:

Vermont becomes 1st state to enact law requiring oil companies 

to pay for damage from climate change

Vermont has become the first state to enact a law requiring fossil fuel companies to pay a share of the damage caused by climate change after the state suffered catastrophic summer flooding and damage from other extreme weather.

Republican Gov. Phil Scott allowed the bill to become law without his signature late Thursday, saying he is very concerned about the costs and outcome of the small state taking on “Big Oil” alone in what will likely be a grueling legal fight. But he acknowledged that he understands something has to be done to address the toll of climate change.

“I understand the desire to seek funding to mitigate the effects of climate change that has hurt our state in so many ways,” Scott, a moderate Republican in the largely blue state of Vermont, wrote in a letter to lawmakers.

“For too long, giant fossil fuel companies have knowingly lit the match of climate disruption without being required to do a thing to put out the fire,” Paul Burns, executive director of the Vermont Public Interest Research Group, said in a statement. “Finally, maybe for the first time anywhere, Vermont is going to hold the companies most responsible for climate-driven floods, fires and heat waves financially accountable for a fair share of the damages they’ve caused.”

Maryland, Massachusetts and New York are considering similar measures.

The American Petroleum Institute, the top lobbying group for the oil and gas industry, has said it’s extremely concerned the legislation “retroactively imposes costs and liability on prior activities that were legal, violates equal protection and due process rights by holding companies responsible for the actions of society at large; and is preempted by federal law.” 

It is about time someone started getting serious about who is going to pay for the human and environmental costs of oil companies taking profits for decades without any social conscience or accountability. No doubt the oil cos. will immediately haul this law into court and attack it until it is either dead and gone, or it is vindicated. Dead and gone is probably the most likely outcome. But, hope still springs eternal.

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John Yoo -- he wants to unleash the dogs of

legal war against Democrats

(Yay! Bring on the lawyers!!)

NY Mag writes about the GOP's plan for any criminal lawsuit against DJT: 

Republicans have long been predicting that criminal charges against Donald Trump would lead to Republicans ginning up charges against Democrats out of pure revenge. The prediction, of course, was designed to legitimate it. And now, inevitably, members of the Republican legal Establishment have moved from predicting this turn of events to advocating for it.

John Yoo, the former Bush administration lawyer (who himself escaped prosecution for his role in constructing legal justifications to torture detainees, many of whom turned out to be held wrongfully in the first place), has an essay in National Review arguing for revenge prosecutions. The imprimatur of Yoo, a Berkeley law professor and fellow at two of the conservative movement’s least-insane think tanks (the American Enterprise Institute and the Hoover Institution), underscores the progression of “lock her up” from wild seriously-not-literally Trump-campaign demagoguery in 2016 to party doctrine in 2024.

“Repairing this breach of constitutional norms will require Republicans to follow the age-old maxim: Do unto others as they have done unto you,” urges Yoo. “In order to prevent the case against Trump from assuming a permanent place in the American political system, Republicans will have to bring charges against Democratic officers, even presidents.”   

The deepest conceptual flaw in Yoo’s demands for legal revenge is his belief that Trump is an innocent victim. “Democrats have crossed a constitutional Rubicon,” he argues. Before now, he claims, opportunities to prosecute presidents abounded but were never taken, out of principle:

Gerald Ford, in a great act of statesmanship, pardoned Richard Nixon even though it doomed his chances in the close 1976 election. Bush did not prosecute Bill Clinton for lying to the Whitewater special counsel, even though Clinton’s Justice Department had conceded that he would become legally liable once he left office. Obama did not attempt to relitigate the difficult policy decisions made during the War on Terror by prosecuting Bush and his aides (of which I was one). Trump did not order the investigation of Hillary Clinton, even though her intentional, illegal diversion of thousands of classified emails to her home computer network was a central theme during his campaign. Nor had local or state prosecutors dared to interfere with the workings of the presidency before.

It is pretty clear where this unwarranted partisan malice is going. Just like Hitler could not be appeased, it is clear that DJT and the authoritarian GOP cannot be appeased. Sometimes history rhymes. It is rhyming right now. 

A silver lining?

But maybe there is a silver lining here. If both main political parties shift to focus on finding lawbreaking in each other, maybe the rule of law will benefit. Maybe it would be a little like legalizing same-sex marriage -- legalization strengthened the institution of marriage. It seems to me that the law is too often not vindicated, especially against elite white collar criminals like DJT. Why not make more use of existing laws?

For example, a gun law that Hunter Biden broke is being (or has been) used to prosecute him, but prosecutions of that gun law are rare. If memory serves, less than ~0.2% (about 1 in 500) of violations of that gun law are prosecuted. Although Hunter's gun law infraction was minor, lasting for just 11 days, Republicans had to find some way to prosecute him for something. That is what they could find, apparently also along with some tax cheating. NBC News reported last year about the gun and tax laws that Hunter broke:

The federal gun charge, which makes it unlawful for a drug addict to possess a weapon, is a rarely used statute that is facing legal challenges and has recently been used as a catch-all charge against white supremacists.

Like the gun charge, the tax charges are rarely brought against first-time offenders and even more rarely result in jail time, Andrew Weissmann, a former FBI general counsel and NBC News contributor, tweeted Tuesday. “This is if anything harsh, not lenient,” he wrote.  

Paul Butler, a former federal prosecutor and an NBC News legal analyst, said on MSNBC on Tuesday that the deal Hunter Biden reached was a decent outcome for the president's son, but not the “sweetheart deal” that Trump and his allies have made it out to be.

If a person is serious about vindicating the rule of law, prosecution for violation of unenforced gun and tax laws should be the norm, not a rare exception. What some pro-Trump commentators and political blowhards, e.g., the liar-hypocrite Mitch McConnell, are saying about the felony convictions of DJT in NY state court is that the misdemeanor book-keeping errors that DJT knowingly committed were minor and should never have been prosecuted in the first place. 

Just because a crime is minor, does that morally justify not prosecuting it? In my moral mindset, two wrongs = two wrongs, not a right. Committing the crime is one wrong, not prosecuting it is another. 

As far as I am concerned, I hope that the elite Dems and Repubs bring a tidal wave of prosecutions against each other, including prosecutions by one side for all unfounded prosecutions by the opposing side. It is fair, rational and pro-democracy to actually seriously believe in the rule of law, especially for rich and/or powerful elites. They are the ones who can afford to endlessly game the system to escape justice, just like DJT had successfully done for decades and is still doing in the remaining three criminal lawsuits against him.

Qs: Why are the tax and gun charges are rarely brought against first-time offenders and even more rarely result in jail time? What is the point of having laws if they are rarely enforced, e.g., do they give prosecutors leverage against defendants? Or is Germaine, once again, off his rocker, out to lunch, over the top or otherwise an over-agitated, handsome, young nincompoop?

A distinction without a difference?

Here’s something on the heavy side for a weekend question, and something I think about occasionally: 

Q: Are people who proclaim a religion (e.g., Christians, Jews, Muslims) cult members?  Why/why not?

 

What is a cult, really?  Webster defines it as:

 

• Is calling religion “a cult” just a mean, emotionally-charged claim and not really being fair (objective) about it? 

• What does it take to call/refer to some organization as a cult?  I.e., what are the necessary components for cultism (e.g., distinct leader(s), focal points, specific ideology, mission, etc.)?

• What are the dividing line distinctions between cult/not a cult (e.g., enough/not enough group think to qualify, real versus non-real/non-verifiable claims, etc.)?

• Is being in a cult “shameful?”  If yes, why (e.g., stereotyping, insulting, etc.)?  If not, why not (e.g., has mass appeal, has lofty goals, etc.)?

• If you are religious or have some religious leanings, do you consider yourself a cult member?  Explain your position.

Take some time to think about it in earnest.

by PrimalSoup

The convicted felon pretends to back away from Project 2025; Commentary on the verdict

Hm, guess the verdict 

did come out so well?

Salon writes that the convicted felon (it feels so nice to write that) and kleptocratic dictator wannabe DJT claims he is backing away from Project 2025:

Trump is now trying to downplay Project 2025

Trump’s campaign issued a statement distancing the former president from a plan drawn up by former staffers

Project 2025 (and its auxiliary Trump’s “Agenda 47”) are a plan by right-wing extremists and other authoritarians to end America’s multiracial democracy and to replace it with a White Christian nationalist plutocracy.

A conspiracy is a plan by two or more people operating in private to advance their interests and goals above those of some other person(s) — or in this context the American people. Project 2025 is not a conspiracy. These plans are exhaustively detailed in a book titled “Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise” and are regularly discussed at conferences, in interviews, and in other public forums. Project 2025 and its related plans, like Agenda 47, were not hatched overnight. As author and journalist Anne Nelson and other experts have been extensively documenting, Project 2025 and the other right-wing extremists’ and neofascists' plans to end America’s multiracial democracy have been years and decades in development:

But ignore it at your peril. The massive tome is the latest iteration of a four-decade-long process of crafting right-wing policies to dismantle the federal government, deregulate industry and eliminate consumer protections and public health measures, while installing a regime controlled by fossil fuel interests and the Religious Right. Not coincidentally, the members of its advisory board have been making headlines attacking American institutions at a grassroots level, in preparation for the big takeover—ranging from Moms4Liberty’s assaults on local public schools, to the Koch-founded Institute on Energy Research’s war on climate initiatives.

Project 2025 lays out specifics for hundreds of policy objectives affecting every area of public life. Many of them affect three primary areas: first, the dismantling of environmental regulations, clean energy measures, and climate policy; second, a rollback of civil and political rights for women and LGBTQ populations and the elimination of public health measures; and third, a massive purge of career civil servants and the concentration of power in the Executive branch in the White House, to consolidate an entrenched authoritarian regime.

Public opinion polls and other research have repeatedly shown that a large percentage of the American public remains unaware of the existential danger that Donald Trump and his MAGA movement and the other neofascists and authoritarians represent to the country’s democracy and freedom. It is the responsibility of the Fourth Estate to wake the American people up from their sleepwalking and political zombification. As an institution, the American news media has largely failed in this obligation.  

To awaken from and escape the Age of Trump and this worsening democracy crisis, the American people need more pro-democracy journalism that illuminates, informs, and gives them solutions. Unfortunately, such work is an outlier in American mainstream news media that largely remains ill-equipped to meet the challenges of the Age of Trump, the global democracy crisis, and what comes next with the 2024 election and beyond.

The Salon article is quite long. It points out the few MSM sources that have gone woke, see the threat and call it what it is, i.e., authoritarianism, neofascism, Christofascism, fascism, plutocracy, etc. So far, I am not aware of anyone calling the authoritarian radical right agenda kleptocracy or kleptocratic. However, that is also a key part of what the radical right wealth and power movement is all about. The radical right is not just about setting up a dictatorship-plutocracy-theocracy. It is also very much about accumulating a lot more wealth for the already wealthy people and interests who run our already seriously corrupted government.

Q: Why is the American mainstream news media largely ill-equipped to meet the challenges of the Age of Trump and the global democracy crisis? Media ownership by corrupt corporations and greedy plutocrats? 

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The NYT reports (not paywalled) on the verdict that made DJT a convicted felon:

Live Updates: Trump Lashes Out After Conviction in Misleading Speech

Donald J. Trump, the first U.S. president to become a felon, excoriated prosecutors and the judge in his criminal case and ran through a litany of false statements as he spoke to reporters and a small crowd of vetted supporters at Trump Tower in Midtown Manhattan.

In a rambling and misleading 33-minute speech, derided the trial as “rigged” and attacked the judge in his first public comments since a Manhattan jury found him guilty of all 34 felony counts of falsifying records to cover up a sex scandal that threatened to derail his 2016 presidential campaign. He also made numerous misleading statements about the case and what took place at the trial.

Mr. Trump, who said he would appeal the verdict, continued to attack people who testified against him in the seven-week trial, specifically his former fixer, Michael D. Cohen, the star witness for the prosecution. He also admitted that he got “very upset” with his lawyers.

Good, he is upset with his lawyers. I hope he fires all of them and refuses to pay them. That would help in the DJT personal chaos department.

The WaPo reports (not paywalled) on an issue that is personally concerning, namely the overall impact of DJT on the rule of law:

Even as Trump is found guilty, his attacks take toll on judicial system

That the hush money trial happened at all is a sign of democracy working, analysts say, but Trump’s all-out offensive dealt a “body blow” to the judiciary

For months, top advisers to Donald Trump expected that he would be convicted by a New York jury on all 34 felony counts. So Trump and his team waged an all-out war against the judicial system before the verdict came in, hoping to blunt the political damage and position him as a martyr.

They sent hundreds of fundraising appeals attacking the prosecutors and the system, raising millions of dollars on false claims. They lined up allies outside the courthouse almost every day to question the fairness of the proceedings. Trump attacked the judge, the judge’s daughter and, finally, even the jury — ordinary, anonymous New Yorkers called to perform their basic civic duty.

But amid the relentless offensive by Trump and his allies on the legal infrastructure holding him accountable, the trial came with a substantial cost, according to those who study democracy, with the ultimate impact likely to be measured in November.

“The judicial system has taken a body blow from Trump’s assaults,” said Kim Lane Scheppele, a professor of sociology at Princeton University who studies the rise and fall of constitutional government. Forcing him to sit through the trial, follow orders and listen to evidence against himself meant that “his rage at being controlled by others is going to be directed at trying to bring the whole judicial system down with him.”

Indeed, Trump went on a long diatribe after his conviction was announced. “This was a disgrace,” he said. “This was a rigged trial by a conflicted judge who was corrupt.”

Time will tell how the damage manifests. We can only hope that it will not be crippling, e.g., by getting DJT re-elected, claiming false martyrdom. 

We cannot go back in time and undo to vast damage that Merrick Garland did by delaying any prosecution of DJT for so long. Garland failed miserably. What he did could easily turn out to be too little, too late. This New York state verdict alone may not be sufficient to protect the rule of law.

Wait, what?? . . . . what, what what? . . . . who? . . . . . what what?

Everybody is reporting that DJT is now a convicted felon. 34 felonies. NPR reported that poll data released just before the jury tossed a turd in Trump's party punch bowl indicated that a conviction would hurt the lying, fornicating, deeply insulting, treasonous scumbag Trump only a little bit more than it would help him in battleground states. About 19% said it would hurt him and ~17% said it would help them vote for DJT.

That's how close we are to the brink of fascist Armageddon, or whatever horrors another Trump administration brings down on our democracy, civil liberties and rule of law.

The NPR commentator blowhards say that this verdict reinforces the strength of the rule of law in America. Maybe so. Maybe not. How appeals that DJT files turn out will shed some light. 

Trump's public comments so far are deeply insulting to the jury. He calls them biased and unfair. After those people spent that much time out of their private lives, Trump calls them partisan liars.

That is deeply, deeply insulting to me. What about you?

DJT is corrupt, immoral sub-human filth. If any people on planet Earth are agents of Satan, they include Trump along with mass murdering monsters like Putin and China's Xi.

Qs: Is Germaine over the top for calling DJT corrupt, immoral sub-human filth? And waddabout (1) his elite sub-human GOP defenders like the Christofascist thug House Speaker Mike Johnson, who also deeply insults the jury and our legal system, and (2) DJT's rank and file supporters? What about the rank and file? Are they blameless and innocent?

What about the rank and file?[1]

Footnote: 

1. Various sources report that DJT's website crashed because his loyal supporters were rushing to donate to him. The Hill reported:

Former President Trump’s fundraising page crashed shortly after he was convicted on 34 felony counts by a New York jury, an issue his campaign attributed to an influx of donations.

“The American people see through Crooked Joe Biden’s rigged show trial,” Trump’s campaign posted on the social platform X. “So many Americans were moved to donate to President Trump’s campaign that the WinRed pages went down. We are working on getting the website back online as quickly as possible.”

What about the rank and file? Innocents or complicits?

Legalized political corruption in America

In the years leading up to the 2010 USSC decision in Citizens United v. Fed. Election Commission, Republican federal judges had been nibbling away at laws that tried to tamp down on political corruption. The Citizens United decision blew a huge hole in anti-corruption laws, paving the way for the massive, shameless corruption that now poisons American state and federal governments.

By legalizing corruption, euphemistically called “protected free speech” by pro-corruption, authoritarian Republican judges, America’s radical right authoritarian wealth and power movement was greatly empowered. It aggressively expanded its decades-long effort to (i) take power from federal and state governments, and (ii) take civil liberties and the power that protected them from citizens. As much of that power and attendant wealth flowed to corrupt politician, business, and religious elites as they could possibly get away with grabbing and keeping. The new power to be corrupt was at least as useful as the new cash.

A current example of legalized corruption comes from the prosecution of US Senator Bob Menendez (D-NJ). CBS News reports:

Prosecutors trying to prove that New Jersey Sen. Bob Menendez wielded his political influence in exchange for bribes cannot show jurors evidence that they argue is “critical” to their case, a federal judge ruled Friday.

U.S. District Court Judge Sidney Stein said prosecutors could not use text messages from 2019 that allegedly show Menendez, who was the top Democrat on the powerful Senate Foreign Relations Committee, assuring Egypt and the New Jersey businessmen who are alleged to have bribed him that he was not delaying military aid to the country after Egypt heard he had put a hold on it.

The jury also cannot see another text from 2022 in which the senator's wife, Nadine, allegedly told one of the businessmen that “Bob had to sign off on this.” The text included a link about two pending foreign military sales to Egypt, according to prosecutors.

Prosecutors argued last week that Egypt was “frantic about not getting their money's worth,” which is why it contacted Menendez through two of the New Jersey businessmen, who allegedly gave the senator cash, gold bars, and other things of value. The text involving Menendez's wife signaled, “You keep the bribes flowing, and he is going to keep giving you what you want on the military aid,” prosecutor Paul Monteleoni told Stein before the decision.

But Stein determined the Constitution's “speech or debate” clause, which protects lawmakers against prosecution over official legislative acts, applied to the evidence.

“The core legislative act is clearly the hold or releasing the hold. I don't think it matters that there was mistaken information here,” Stein said Tuesday, before making his decision official in an order later in the week.

Such an interpretation would prohibit “some of the core most critical evidence,” Monteleoni countered.

The judge here, Sidney Stein, is a Democrat appointed to the bench by Bill Clinton. That probably makes Stein a neoliberal who is inherently sympathetic to elite white collar criminals. Or maybe the law is such that high-level corruption like this simply cannot be prosecuted any more. Unless I misunderstand this reporting, if a federal politician entangles corruption like bribe-taking with official business, it is legal. 

The American Prospect wrote about the Menendez legal situation last March:

One More Way the Supreme Court Has Legalized Corruption

The Menendez story also illustrates a subtle way the Supreme Court’s de facto legalization of corruption interacts with other aspects of the campaign finance system. You see, he has not officially dropped out of the race—and has even floated that he will run as an independent in the general election—because pretending like he’s still a candidate lets him spend his campaign cash on his legal defense.

The context is important here. The sheer comical excess of the Menendez indictment illustrates how rampant political corruption is in this country. The reason people getting nailed by law enforcement for corruption tend to be people with literal gold bars and stacks of cash sewn into their jackets is because of Supreme Court decisions making it impossible to prosecute instances of corruption that are somewhat more deniable. In McDonnell v. U.S., the Court unanimously overturned the conviction of a former Virginia governor and his wife who had set up meetings with officials for a pharmaceutical company while taking valuable gifts from the company’s owner. In FEC v. Ted Cruz for Senate, it ruled that candidates can loan their campaigns money, and then pay themselves back with donor cash after the election is over and the victor is known—effectively opening a window labeled “bribes here.” And in Citizens United v. FEC, of course, they legalized effectively limitless corporate spending in politics.

Partly as a result of these decisions, Washington, D.C., is absolutely awash with people being effectively bribed, morally if not legally. Lobbyists are throwing all kinds of money and gifts around all the time. As a politician, if you behave well in office as a senator or representative, you can expect to be offered all kinds of cushy lobbyist or no-show “consulting” jobs that are actually worth much more than a sack of gold ingots.

So while Menendez was doing the kind of idiotic corruption that actually may have run afoul of the remaining shreds of anti-corruption law, now he is taking advantage of a more subtle variety: spending his campaign money on his legal bills. Should he actually contest the Senate election this year, he is absolutely certain to lose—a recent poll found him with 75 percent disapproval among New Jersey residents—and he’s already given up on seeking re-election as a Democrat. But pretending to be running allows him to spend his remaining campaign funds on his legal defense. Just between October and December last year, he spent $2.3 million out of his campaign coffers on legal fees. And as of the end of December, there’s still another $6.2 million in that account.

This is not just about corruption of federal politicians and the federal government. The corruption problem is in the states too. Last February, The Economist wrote about the flow of power to state Attorney General politicians, like the shamelessly corrupt Ken Paxton of Texas:

State attorneys-general are shaping national policy

Despite not being elected to do so

To foreigners looking in, it is unusual enough that America elects most of its top prosecutors. More shocking is the amount of money going into political campaigns. Now the two have come together in a way that would make even the least wonky American curious. Between 2008 and 2022 the cost of state attorney-general races rose from $17m to $222m. Over that period governors’ contests became only eight—rather than 12—times pricier and those of state senators merely doubled.

The cashflow reflects something much bigger: the role of state attorney-general has been recast. The job used to be about defending state laws and prosecuting cheats, fraudsters and corporate bullies. Today attorneys-general shape nationwide politics and policy by pushing strategic lawsuits through their favorite courts. Their quiet rise to power has made the states’ top lawyers some of America’s most unchecked partisan players.

Two attorneys-general, one a Republican and one a Democrat, exemplify the new breed. First there is Ken Paxton of Texas. Between 2021 and 2023 he refused to represent state agencies in court at least 75 times, according to ProPublica and the Texas Tribune, both news outlets—often seemingly for ideological reasons. He has dropped child-sexual-assault cases after losing track of the plaintiffs, let payments to crime victims lapse and taken decreasing interest in catching Medicaid cheats. Instead he chose to energize his Trumpian base by relentlessly suing the Biden administration. Mr. Paxton has blocked vaccine mandates and banned abortion when it was still protected under the federal constitution. Most recently he brought the country’s attention to a bitter row over whether Texas can enforce its own immigration regime at the southern border.  

[In a 2000 decision,] the Supreme Court ruled that due to the threat of rising sea-levels the Massachusetts attorney-general could lead the charge. Massachusetts v EPA set the precedent for a single state to challenge the federal government in court. That drastically expanded the reach of attorneys-general—Republicans soon raced to sue Barack Obama when he took office. Over time attorneys-general realized that if they banded together with like-minded colleagues across the country, they could handpick the district with the most sympathetic judges in which to bring their case. One federal judge’s injunction in their favor, and against Washington, could shut down a policy for the whole country until a higher court ruled on its appeal. “Not only can they play on their home-turf, they can now choose the referee,” says Steve Vladeck of the University of Texas at Austin. 

The strategy took off when Mr. Trump became president. Democratic attorneys-general sued the federal government more times in four years than they had in the previous 16, says Paul Nolette, a political scientist. Republicans took it a step further under Joe Biden, aiming their litigation not just at Democratic policies but at the administrative state itself. Today these lawsuits are masterfully co-ordinated to maximise partisan wins, says James Tierney, a former attorney-general of Maine who teaches at Harvard University. With that in mind it is less surprising that Mr Trump’s Muslim travel ban was halted by a judge in Honolulu and mifepristone, an abortion pill, was temporarily outlawed by a judge in the Texas Panhandle. 

Follow the money

Dark-money groups caught on to the fact that attorneys-general had sway and that their races were cheaper to influence than congressional ones. The Concord Fund, a conservative one, has pumped at least $9.5m into the contests since 2020. That cash no doubt helped unseat moderates: a five-term Republican attorney-general of Idaho who refused to be a political activist was booted out in 2022. The left is no more tolerant of impartiality. The Democratic Attorneys General Association, which funds candidates, announced in 2019 that it would no longer back Democrats who were not explicitly pro-choice. For aspiring attorneys-general the calculus has become clear: get more political, get elected.

The Economist, which is inherently anti-government and anti-Democratic Party, also singled out New York’s Democratic attorney-general Letitia James for (i) prosecuting Donald Trump for lying to lenders about his finances (finance fraud), and (ii) prosecuting the bosses of the National Rifle Association for corruption. The Economist grudgingly concedes that the James prosecutions “may have more legal merit” than some of what Paxton has done in Texas. That is an understatement. It reflects the pro-business, anti-government bias The Economist usually brings to the table. And, the case for equivalence between Republicans and Democrats The Economist makes is not persuasive to me.  

But as one can see, there are multiple ways to be corrupt in politics and get away with it.