Insurrection: FAFO

In Defying the Odds, we discuss Trump's record of disregarding the rule of law.  Our next book, Divided We Stand, looks at the 2020 election and the January 6 insurrection.   Trump and his minions falsely claimed that he won the election, and have kept repeating the Big Lie.  And we now know how close he came to subverting the Constitution.  

Zach Montague at NYT:

Four members of the far-right Oath Keepers militia were found guilty of seditious conspiracy on Monday for their roles in trying to keep Donald J. Trump in office after his 2020 election defeat, nearly two months after the group’s leader — Stewart Rhodes — was convicted of the same offense in a separate trial in November.

A jury in Federal District Court in Washington also found the four defendants guilty of two separate conspiracy charges.

The defendants — Roberto Minuta, Joseph Hackett, David Moerschel and Edward Vallejo — were originally charged along with Mr. Rhodes and other members of the group. But their trial was broken off as a separate proceeding by the judge in the case, Amit P. Mehta, because of space constraints in the courtroom.

The jury returned the decision after about 15 hours of deliberation over three days, and it came as a parallel sedition trial for members of the Proud Boys — another far-right group that joined the mob outside the Capitol on Jan. 6 — continued to play out in the same courthouse.

From DOJ:

An Arkansas man was found guilty in the District of Columbia today of felony and misdemeanor charges for his actions during the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol Breach. His actions and the actions of others disrupted a joint session of the U.S. Congress convened to ascertain and count the electoral votes related to the presidential election.

Richard Barnett, 62, of Gravette, Arkansas, was found guilty of all charges including: obstruction of an official proceeding, interfering with a police officer during a civil disorder, entering and remaining in a restricted building or grounds with a dangerous or deadly weapon, disorderly and disruptive conduct in a restricted building or grounds with a dangerous weapon, all of which are felonies. He was also found guilty of entering and remaining in certain rooms in a capitol building, disorderly conduct in a capitol building, theft of government property, parading or demonstrating in a capitol building.

Barnett was arrested on January 8, 2021 in Little Rock, Arkansas. U.S. District Court Judge Christopher R. Cooper scheduled a sentencing hearing for May 3, 2023.

...

In the 24 months since Jan. 6, 2021, more than 950 individuals have been arrested in nearly all 50 states for crimes related to the breach of the U.S. Capitol, including over 284 individuals charged with assaulting or impeding law enforcement. The investigation remains ongoing.

 

George Santos Was Inevitable

Our recent book is titled Divided We Stand: The 2020 Elections and American Politics.  Among other things, it discusses the state of the parties. The state of the GOP is not good. 

David French:

I completely reject the argument I’ve heard from critics on the left who claim that this is what Republicans have truly been all along—or at least since Goldwater. I freely admit that I was wrong about the strength of the reactionary right. A healthy political movement does not produce a Donald Trump. But the Republican river flowed differently when Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, George W. Bush, John McCain, and Mitt Romney were its leaders. The social, cultural, and moral pressures pushed in different directions.

Let’s put it this way: No one is writing a book called When Character Was King about Trump.

The great challenge for the GOP isn’t beating Democrats. That it can often do. The Democratic Party’s own inadequacies are responsible for many of its electoral weaknesses. A party that nominates Hillary Clinton is not a party that puts character at the center of its own political project.

No, the great challenge for the GOP is reversing the course of its river. To the extent that a person influences a party and a nation, the direction of that influence should flow towards truth, towards courage, towards competence. Make lies exhausting. Make incompetence countercultural. Make cowardice shameful again.

How do we know the conservative Christians of 1998 were correct? The evidence was right in front of our eyes then. Clinton corruption degraded our political culture in plain view. But if there was any remaining doubt at all, conservative American Christianity proved its own thesis. It tolerated serious wrong, its conscience was seared, and now unrestrained lawlessness and moral corruption rots the movement.

George Santos was inevitable. The American right rendered him inevitable. And now it lives with the consequences.

Trump's Travails

In Defying the Odds, we discuss Trump's dishonesty and his record of disregarding the rule of law.  Our next book, Divided We Stand, looks at the 2020 election and the January 6 insurrection.     He hurt the GOP in 2022 and now he is running for 2024.

 Lloyd Green at The Guardian:

Once again, the legal pitfalls and enthusiasm deficit that plague Donald Trump’s bid for the 2024 Republican nomination are on display. On Thursday, a federal judge imposed $938,000 in sanctions on Trump and his lawyers. Meanwhile, an appearance touted by Trump as a major campaign event was nothing more than a closed-door speech to deep-pocketed election-deniers at a Trump property.

...

“Mr Trump is a prolific and sophisticated litigant who is repeatedly using the courts to seek revenge on political adversaries,” the court thundered in its ruling. “He is the mastermind of strategic abuse of the judicial process.”

Judge Donald Middlebrooks shredded Trump and his lawyers for bringing a failed and frivolous racketeering lawsuit against Hillary Clinton, her political allies and a passel of ex-government officials. In the judge’s eyes, the lawsuit was little else than a repackaged Trump campaign stump speech.

A day later, Trump dropped a separate lawsuit filed against Letitia James, New York’s attorney general. That case too was pending before Middlebrooks, who similarly viewed that matter as “vexatious and frivolous”. The threat of sanctions hung in the air.

As for the Trump speech the public never heard, it now is another self-inflicted nothingburger, up there with his much-touted Trump NFT superhero trading cards – a waste of time and attention, a lost opportunity.

Earlier in the day, Trump had vowed to deliver a major political announcement later that night. He also promised to resume his signature rallies. Instead, he spoke behind closed doors at Trump Doral, his resort in Miami, to Judicial Watch, a tax-exempt group ostensibly dedicated to promoting “integrity, transparency and accountability in government and fidelity to the rule of law

The GOP's Next Gift to the Democrats

Our recent book is titled Divided We Stand: The 2020 Elections and American Politics.  Among other things, it discusses the state of the parties. The state of the GOP is not good. 

Timothy Noah at TNR:

Consumption taxes are having a moment, as they do every 20 years or so. They are never a good idea, but the current iteration, which House Speaker Kevin McCarthy has promised to bring to the floor, is a worse idea than usual.

Under the Fair Tax bill sponsored by Representative Buddy Carter, a Georgia Republican, all income, capital gains, estate, gift, corporate, and payroll taxes would be eliminated. They would be replaced by a flat 30 percent national sales tax on everything you buy. Even Grover Norquist, the hard-right president of Americans for Tax Reform and flat-tax advocate who famously said he wanted to shrink government “to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub,” told Joseph Zeballos-Roig of Semafor this week that the Fair Tax bill was “a political gift to Biden and the Democrats.” Elsewhere Norquist has called it “one of the stupider ideas that have been put forward.” If the “fair tax” passed in the House it would still have no chance of becoming law, of course, because the Senate and the White House would stop it. That makes a purely symbolic House vote all upside for the Democrats.

The Midterms Are Over… What’s Next?

 What happened? 

Rep. Kelly Armstrong (R-ND): “This is the weirdest election I’ve ever been a part of.”

The fundamentals looked terrible for Democrats:  One formula predicted that Democrats would lose 44 House seats.  Instead, they lost nine.

In Senate races, Democrats outperformed the polls. Candidates mattered.

Margins of election-night leaders:  election eve polling averages vs. actual:

• Arizona: Kelly (D) 1.0%  vs. 4.9%
• Georgia: Walker (R) 0.6% vs.  -0.9%
• Nevada: Laxalt (R) 2.8% vs. -1.9%
• New Hampshire: Hassan (D) 1.0% vs. 9.1%
• Ohio: Vance (R) 7.5 % vs. 6.5%
• Pennsylvania: Fetterman (D) 0.1% vs. 4.5%
• Washington: Murray (D) 3.0% vs. 14.9%
• Wisconsin: Johnson (R) 2.8% vs. 1.0%

Democrats had a unique opportunity to run as an opposition party.

• Trump was (and is) unpopular.  

• People see the Supreme Court as a political branch: 63 percent say the Supreme Court is mainly motivated by politics
• And Dobbs was unpopular.

Abortion mattered more than pre-election polls suggested.

CAVEAT:  REPUBLICANS WON THE AGGREGATE VOTE FOR THE HOUSE.

The final score:

• House  222R-212D (1 vacancy that leans D)
• Senate 51D-49R

Why is this Congress different?

• In the 20th century, divided government was often very productive.  But Congress was far less polarized and House majorities were usually larger.
• Republicans have always had internal feuds.  But they never broke into the open this way:

What's next?

Government shutdowns and debt default:  both are bad, default is much, much worse.

• How much worse?  Consider the Twinkie analogy from Ghostbusters.
• There is no congressional majority in favor of default.  But it might be hard to pass legislation averting it.
• We have had shutdowns and debt brinkmanship before.  Each time, there was blowback.
• 1995-96 shutdown
• 2011 debt limit crisis
• 2019 partial shutdown
• Few members of the House majority witnessed firsthand how badly these tactics backfired in past decades. Only about a quarter of House Republicans were serving during the 2011 debt limit crisis. Just four (Rogers, C. Smith, Calvert & Lucas) were there for the 1995-96 shutdown fiasco. 

Investigations and Oversight (and Dems rejoice)

• Border security
• Afghanistan
• Hunter Biden
• Presidential documents

Some investigations (e.g., Watergate) have had a major political impact. Most have not (e.g., Fast and Furious).

Unknowns:

• The state of the economy
• Foreign crises
• Disasters TBA

Mister T sums it up:

Social Media and January 6

In Defying the Odds, we discuss Trump's record of disregarding the rule of law.  Our next book, Divided We Stand, looks at the 2020 election and the January 6 insurrection.   Trump and his minions falsely claimed that he won the election, and have kept repeating the Big Lie.  And we now know how close he came to subverting the Constitution.  

 From a draft staff report that the January 6 Committee decided not to publish:

• Extremist users on various platforms took their cues directly from President Trump, particularly after his December 19th tweet. The Select Committee has gathered evidence to show that far-right forums such as TheDonald.win, Parler, and 8kun were telegraphing their plans for violence following President Trump’s December 19th tweet that pushed January 6th as a critical day in the Stop the Steal movement. However, this phenomenon was not confined to extremist platforms; on places like Twitter, Facebook, and Discord, supporters of President Trump closely tracked his claims about a stolen election and subsequently his calls to descend on D.C. to protest the Joint Session of Congress on January 6th, 2021.
• Trump’s December 19th tweet was a transformative moment across social media. In addition to causing a shift towards more explicit targeting of D.C. on a singular date on Twitter, the President’s “be there, will be wild” tweet caused major shifts in other platforms. The Select Committee has collected evidence to show that Discord shut down a server, DonaldsArmy.US, just hours after the tweet, because it immediately became a hub for users of TheDonald.win to organize and coordinate their travel to D.C. and strategize how they could bring firearms into the city in response to the President’s call. Smaller platforms did not react quickly enough to the threat posed by an organized far-right extremist movement centered around President Trump. Aside from Facebook and Twitter, other social media companies did not move quickly enough to interrupt networks of extremists who threatened American democracy. The most damaging example is likely Reddit’s belated takedown of r/The_Donald; by waiting a year to remove the subreddit from its site, Reddit allowed moderators to freely advertise TheDonald.win, an alternate forum that hosted violent content prior to January 6th.
• Less developed social media platforms were forced to make entirely new content moderation policies to respond to President Trump’s incitement. In several cases, platforms such as Twitch and Discord altered their policies on incitement or shifted resources to focus on domestic extremist violence to position themselves to better respond to another situation like January 6th—or another leader like Donald Trump. In the case of Twitch, their new policy on incitement was a direct response to President Trump. 

Internal House GOP Fights

 Our recent book is titled Divided We Stand: The 2020 Elections and American Politics.  Among other things, it discusses the state of the parties. The state of the GOP is not good. 

Tara Palmieri at Puck:

As I wrote last week, Republicans have been fixated on whether 71-year-old Rep. Vern Buchanan might retire from Congress after losing the House Ways & Means chairmanship to the 42-year-old Speaker’s pet Jason Smith, potentially reducing Kevin McCarthy’s margin of error from four votes to three to pass critical partisan legislation. (If McCarthy somehow loses fabulist George Santos, too, he could be held hostage by as few as two members of his already fractious House conference.) Vern’s people say he won’t retire (despite the rumblings on the Hill), but they didn’t deny that he was mighty pissed to be passed over as the most senior person on the Ways & Means committee by Smith, a member who was fifth in line.

Just how angry was he? Well, a source on the House floor during the vote told me that while McCarthy was gaveling down the votes, Buchanan walked up to McCarthy and said, “You fucked me, I know it was you, you whipped against me.” He then proceeded to chew out McCarthy’s deputy chief of staff for floor operations, John Leganski. It was shocking to see such fury from Buchanan, who’s known for being mild mannered. Indeed, I heard that the tirade was so heated that the Speaker’s security detail stepped in with a light touch. (McCarthy’s spokesperson Matt Sparks disputed this detail saying, “at no point did anyone have to step in.” A spokesperson for Buchanan declined to comment.)

Ursula Perano and Zachary Petrizzo at The Daily Beast:

On the first day of Congress this year, Jan. 3, the mounting tension between Greene and Boebert reached its boiling point. According to multiple sources, the two women were nearly in a screaming match in the Speaker’s lobby ladies room just off the House floor.

 “Greene questioned Boebert’s loyalty to McCarthy, and after a few words were exchanged, Boebert stormed out,” a source familiar with the fight told The Daily Beast

According to another source familiar, while in the bathroom, Greene asked Boebert, “You were OK taking millions of dollars from McCarthy but you refuse to vote for him for Speaker, Lauren?”

According to another source familiar, while in the bathroom, Greene asked Boebert, “You were OK taking millions of dollars from McCarthy but you refuse to vote for him for Speaker, Lauren?”

The first source said Greene was in a stall and, upon coming out, confronted Boebert about taking money from McCarthy for her re-election and then turning against McCarthy when it came time to vote. The Colorado Republican was allegedly unaware that Greene was also in the bathroom at the time.

“That’s when Lauren said, ‘Don’t be ugly,’” the first source said, before she—in the words of this source—“ran out like a little schoolgirl.”

Asked about the dustup in the Capitol, Boebert simply said, “See you later. Bye.” (Boebert didn’t return The Daily Beast’s subsequent request for comment ahead of publication.)

Greene didn’t return The Daily Beast’s request for comment.

At least one other member is alleged to have witnessed the exchange: Rep. Debbie Dingell (D-MI). But over the course of three interviews with three different Daily Beast reporters, Dingell would not say what she saw.

“What happens in the ladies room stays in the ladies room,” Dingell said.