The Weekly Sift

Roosevelt’s four freedoms were the building blocks of a humane society — a social democratic aspiration for egalitarians then and now. These Republican freedoms are also building blocks not of a humane society but of a rigid and hierarchical one, in which you can either dominate or be dominated.

– Jamelle Bouie, “The Four Freedoms, according to Republicans“

This week’s featured posts are “Summing Up at the End of the Trump/Russia Investigations” and “How I Evaluate Sources“.

But if you only read one essay this week, it should be the Jamelle Bouie column quoted above. He looks at the agenda that is passing in red-state legislatures and synthesizes four Republican “freedoms”:

• Freedom to control, manifested in state control of women’s uteruses,
• Freedom to exploit, represented by the rollback of child labor laws,
• Freedom to censor, exemplified by book banning and preventing schools and universities from teaching about systemic racism and other forms of oppression,
• Freedom to menace, demonstrated by laws allowing guns to be carried anywhere, openly or under concealment, and used whenever the bearer feels threatened.

More about this below.

This week everybody was talking about the debt ceiling

It’s hard to know what to say. In some sense, it’s the most important thing happening. But whatever negotiations are or aren’t happening between President Biden and Speaker McCarthy are behind closed doors, so we don’t really know anything.

It’s also hard to guess what the negotiating positions would mean, even if we knew them. Democrats are worrying that Biden will give away the store and get nothing back other than a promise not to blow up the world economy until next spring.

Americans of either party should worry about whether McCarthy can make a deal at all. Maybe anything he agrees to will be framed by Marjorie Taylor Greene and Matt Gaetz as a RINO sell-out, and lead to McCarthy losing his speakership rather than to a deal.

And finally, does Biden have a Plan B? Could he circumvent the debt ceiling via the 14th Amendment? Or by citing the contradiction between the debt-ceiling and that appropriation bills Congress has passed? Or by minting a platinum coin or selling consol bonds?

There are reasons to worry that this partisan Supreme Court will nix those options, independent of what the laws actually say. (Though I don’t see any grounds for objecting to consol bonds or less radical high-interest bonds that would sell above par.)

But all the Plan Bs sound gimmicky, and like an expansion of executive power. Biden will be in better political shape to invoke one if he can argue that he has been driven to his last resort; he did in fact did offer deep concessions that Republicans did not accept, and came to the conclusion that no deal with McCarthy was possible.

So if Biden offers concessions, is he giving away the store or setting up a deft counter-move? There’s no way to know.

and the red states’ continued decline into oppression and authoritarianism

Thursday morning, The New York Times greeted me with these headlines:

• South Carolina House Passes Six-Week Abortion Ban
• Texas Legislature Bans Transgender Medical Care for Children
• Montana Governor Signs Total Ban of TikTok in the State

Just another day in red America. Remember when the GOP was supposed to be about Freedom? Each of those three bills is Big Government telling people how to live their lives.

Other headlines I saw this week:

• School librarians face a new penalty in the banned-book wars: Prison. “One example is an Arkansas measure that says school and public librarians, as well as teachers, can be imprisoned for up to six years or fined $10,000 if they distribute obscene or harmful texts. It takes effect Aug. 1.” The terms obscene and harmful are, of course, undefined. So a prudent librarian will steer clear of any book that any judge might object to — or if the librarian wants to avoid a court case altogether, avoiding any book that any parent might object to.
• School Can Force Trans Girl to Dress as Boy for Graduation, Judge Rules. “A federal judge ruled late Friday evening that the Harrison County [Mississippi] School District can prohibit a 17-year-old transgender girl from attending her graduation Saturday unless she dresses in attire designated for boys” Tim Miller‘s summary: “The government preventing parents from seeing their child graduate unless they wear state mandated pants.”
• The Short Life of Baby Milo. Deborah Dorbert knew for three months that the fetus she was carrying had no chance to live, because it lacked essential organs. But Florida’s abortion ban forced her to complete the doomed pregnancy. Her son was born and lived 99 minutes.
• The staggering fine print of Texas and Florida’s new anti-trans bills. “Chriss laid out a scenario in which [the new Florida law] would apply: A family is living in California, which doesn’t have a ban on gender-affirming care. A parent contesting custody of their child could take them on vacation to Disney World in Orlando, go to the nearby Orange County courthouse, and ask the judge to take emergency jurisdiction over the custody case because the other parent is planning to help the child get puberty blockers.”

The outrageous attacks on personal freedom and parental rights are coming so fast that I’m sure I missed a few.

but here’s something I’ve been meaning to tell you

Namely, how I assess unfamiliar sources.

and you also might be interested in …

Wednesday, House Republicans refused to vote on a motion to remove George Santos from Congress.

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Dahlia Lithwick asks an important question: What if reporters covered the Supreme Court the way they cover every other branch of government?

Her point, in short, is that reporters on the Supreme Court beat act as if they are covering the Law itself, not a public institution made up of nine immensely powerful human beings.

[T]he longstanding tradition of covering the cases rather than the Justices meant that, with few exceptions, there have not been a lot of folks in the SCOTUS press corps on the Clarence/Ginni Thomas beat; almost nobody on the Dobbs leak beat; and, aside from routinely reporting the fact of plummeting polling numbers, few court insiders on the “legitimacy beat.” With the notable exception of Politico’s Josh Gerstein, who co-reported the Dobbs leak last year, virtually all of the scoops about Clarence Thomas’ ethical breaches, Leonard Leo’s golden spigot, the rich donor to Supreme Court Historical Society pipeline, Ginni Thomas’ election disruption efforts and the catastrophic leak investigation all came from enterprising investigative reporters, political reporters and “outsiders” at Politico, Pro Publica, and the New York Times.

… But it’s not just that we mostly settle for covering the cases. We further let the cases set the agenda for what we consider “justice.” If the nine Justices decide to revisit affirmative action, and Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, and federal preemption around labor disputes, we’ll then devote a year to debating both sides of these legal issues—regardless of the fact that they were supposed to be long settled. As long as the court thought it was a good time to breathe life into the Major Questions Doctrine or the Independent State Legislature Theory, we have considered the questions of that theory seriously, despite its manifest unseriousness. And once the Supreme Court started to invent its own facts—as it did in the Coach Kennedy case last term, the affirmative action cases this term, and of course 303 Creative, the refusal of service to same sex couples case, also this term—it began to matter urgently that the press would still routinely be covering “cases” as usual, even though these cases included wholly imaginary “facts”—or, as in 303 Creative, no facts at all. Repeating manufactured narratives with which the court will eventually manufacture legal doctrine serves the Court’s interest. The problem is that it does not serve the interests of the public, and that’s who journalists are supposed to be writing for.

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The headline from Noelle Dunphy’s $10 million lawsuit against Rudy Giuliani was her accusation that he boasted about selling pardons for $2 million each.

[Giuliani] also asked Ms. Dunphy if she knew anyone in need of a pardon, telling her that he was selling pardons for $2 million, which he and President Trump would split. He told Ms. Dunphy that she could refer individuals seeking pardons to him, so long as they did not go through “the normal channels” of the Office of the Pardon Attorney, because correspondence going to that office would be subject to disclosure under the Freedom of Information Act.

But when you read the 70-page complaint, that is far from the worst of it. (Even if she can support that claim, he could counter that he was just talking big to impress her.) The complaint makes sickening reading. It paints Dunphy as a vulnerable woman coming out of an abusive relationship. Giuliani lures her by promising a huge salary ($1 million per year) and that he will represent her against her abuser. He then starts his own abusive sexual relationship with her, comes up with excuses to “defer” the vast majority of her pay, strings her along without a formal employment agreement for two years, and then fires her without paying the salary or fulfilling any of his other promises.

She claims to have recorded many of their conversations (including one where he gives her permission to record their conversations), and that (because her job including managing his email) she has his email files, including emails from long before her employment.

And if you’re wondering how Giuliani’s judgment could be that bad, Dunphy has a ready explanation: He was drunk almost the entire time he employed her.

If any of that is true, Giuliani should just find the $10 million and not let this go to court.

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Giuliani faces another lawsuit, a defamation suit filed by two Georgia poll workers whom Giuliani baselessly accused of election fraud. Friday, the judge ordered Giuliani to provide a detailed accounting of his net worth, which is never a good sign.

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My Pillow founder Mike Lindell isn’t just delusional about the 2020 election, he also doesn’t pay his bets. (I looked for a word that packs the same punch as “welsher” without demeaning any ethnic group, but I didn’t find one.) In 2021, Lindell was claiming he had computer data proving that the Chinese had interfered in the 2020 election, and he seemed to back up his claim by offering a $5 million Prove-Mike-Wrong challenge. But now that he has lost that challenge, he won’t pay up.

Cyber-detective Robert Zeidman quickly did prove Mike wrong.

Coming to this conclusion this apparently wasn’t all that hard. Some of the data, Zeidman recently told the Las Vegas Review-Journal, looked like someone had simply typed random numbers; another data set had been created just days before the contest, not before the 2020 election, which was pretty obvious given that creation dates on the files had not been altered.

Lindell is not a computer expert himself, so one likely explanation is that he was conned by fraudsters who sold him the “proof” he wanted to believe existed. Marks often get emotionally invested in the con they’ve fallen for, and typically are the last people to grasp what has happened. Successful businessmen like Lindell can be perfect targets for conmen, because they really, really don’t want to believe they are suckers.

The rules of his contest stipulated binding arbitration on claims, and the arbitration panel selected by a Lindell company ruled in Zeidman’s favor in April. But Lindell is still refusing to pay, so this week Zeidman took his case to federal court.

Zeidman may have to get in line to collect, though, because Lindell is also being sued by Dominion Voting Systems for his lies about their role in the 2020 election. One reason Fox News had to settle with Dominion for $787 million was that Tucker Carlson gave Lindell an uncritical platform to spew his baseless allegations.

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David Roberts links to AP’s “2024 Republican hopefuls rush to defend Marine who put NYC subway rider in fatal chokehold” and then comments:

I wonder how much evidence will have to accumulate before “objective” reporters are allowed to take note of the *pattern* of rapidly rising support for vigilante violence on the right. And then they could go a step further and connect the rising support for vigilante violence with the relentless push to get more guns into circulation. And then they could go eve[n] further and connect the support for vigilante violence & the push for more guns with the declining demographics that make winning via democratic means increasingly difficult.

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The Washington Post asked people attending a gun show why they wanted guns. Nearly all the answers contained the word protection.

[O]ver and over, people told me they needed their guns to keep themselves safe. Safe from what? Most couldn’t answer; they simply had a feeling that the world had become a more dangerous place. … Republican leaders, including Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin, have resisted calls for increased gun regulation after shooting deaths, arguing that the root problem is mental illness. But the paranoia that fuels gun-buying has come to seem like a mental health issue in its own right.

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The New Yorker visits the Gathering of Thought Criminals, a New York salon for those who “simply feel persecuted for holding unpopular opinions”. Apparently, if you profess ideas that most people deem objectionable, and they dare to object, then you’ve been “cancelled” and are entitled to sympathy.

Meanwhile, Florida parents who want their child to receive gender-affirming care can now have that child taken away. Is there a salon for them somewhere?

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Jim Brown died Thursday night at the age of 87. He was arguably the greatest running back in NFL history. In 2010, NFL Network ranked him #2 on a list of the greatest NFL players ever, behind only Jerry Rice. (At that time, Tom Brady had only three of his seven Super Bowl wins, and was ranked #21.)

Brown also had social significance as a key member of the second generation of Black athletes in the national spotlight. The first generation, led by Jackie Robinson and Joe Louis, had mostly kept their heads down, avoided making waves, and let their performance do the talking. The second generation, led by Brown, Bill Russell, and (a few years later) Muhammad Ali, could be more outspoken, and were frequently portrayed in the media as troublemakers.

Today, the NFL is a quarterback’s league and runners only rarely make headlines. But in Brown’s era, the NFL was a runner’s league, and he was the best anyone had ever seen. Here are some highlights. (Copyright issues aren’t letting me embed the video.)

and let’s close with something from down under

Normally, I pick a closing to be amusing and not at all political. This one does involve a political issue, but I’m hoping it’s amusing enough to get by. Australia, the video claims, has all kinds of deadly dangers. But at least it doesn’t have AR-15s.

What we’re really talking about is this plan to capture the U.S. Supreme Court, to install people on it who are sure things. Not to choose people because they have reputations for being fair (or we think they might be fair), but because the people who are at the decision-making table — Leonard Leo, who chose the judges that Trump chose from — believes that they will be sure votes. … We are seeing this revolution that Leonard Leo has put in place. It is one that the American people didn’t ask for, didn’t give consent to, weren’t informed that this is why these judges were chosen. In fact, they were said to be judges who were “rule of law judges”. … Their definition of “rule of law” is not the same as most people’s, which is following precedent, respecting those rules. Instead, their definition of “rule of law” appears to be to change the law to be what they rule.

– Lisa Graves, interviewed by Dahlia Lithwick

This week’s featured post is “Does the US have a spending problem?“

This week everybody was talking about the debt ceiling

When House Republicans began threatening a debt-ceiling showdown shortly after winning a majority last November, most commentators (and most voters who were paying attention) assumed it would lead to the usual dance: a lot of posturing leading up to the deadline (which might come as early as June 1), then a temporary increase to give negotiations more time, and then a deal seconds before the extra time ran out.

As the date of the catastrophe gets closer, more and more people are warning that we could really go over the cliff this time.

This week’s featured post is the third in my debt-ceiling series.

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Speculation about ways to circumvent the debt ceiling is getting more serious. Lawrence Tribe explains why he believes the debt ceiling is unconstitutional under the 14th Amendment:

The right question is whether Congress — after passing the spending bills that created these debts in the first place — can invoke an arbitrary dollar limit to force the president and his administration to do its bidding.

There is only one right answer to that question, and it is no.

And Eric Levitz describes how consol bonds get around the debt ceiling:

In simple terms, a consol bond is one that never matures. A normal bond commits a borrower to paying back the principal on their loan plus interest at a set date. A consol bond, by contrast, requires the borrower to make annual interest payments forever but does not require them to pay off the loan’s full value at any particular point in time.

This is handy since the legislation establishing the U.S. debt limit defines the federal debt as the amount of principal that the government is obligated to repay. Thus, while a normal U.S. Treasury bond increases the national debt as defined by the debt ceiling, a consol bond does not. If the government borrows money via bonds that have no principal — only interest-payment obligations — then it can continue funding its operations indefinitely, even in the absence of a debt-ceiling hike.

A less extreme version could resemble a traditional bond but take advantage of the same loophole: Suppose a bond had a principle of $1,000, but paid $100 a year in interest? The Treasury could sell it for a lot more than $1,000, but it would only count $1,000 towards the debt limit.

and we’re still finding out more about Clarence Thomas’ corruption

Two new Thomas scandals broke this week: Harlan Crow (the billionaire who we already knew takes the Thomases on annual vacations that would cost hundreds of thousands of dollars for them to replicate on their own) paid the private-school tuition of Thomas’ grandnephew, whom Thomas was “raising as a son”.

And Leonard Leo (who is at the center of a network of dark-money groups whose purpose is to make our courts more conservative) directed groups he influences to pay at least $100K to Thomas’ wife’s consulting firm. Leo’s instructions say nothing about work to be done, but just to “give” Ginni Thomas money, with “no mention of Ginni, of course”.

Vox is keeping a running count of the revelations. Another good summary comes from New York Magazine’s Eric Levitz, who also sums up the problem they outline:

In a world where low-level civil servants get nervous about letting friends buy them lunch, it is not easy to explain why it is totally fine for a man entrusted with enormous, democratically unaccountable power to accept hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of gifts from partisan political activists, let alone fail to disclose them.

Chris Hayes did a good job covering the Thomas scandals on his Friday show. His opening block reviewed the new developments and raised the question: “Just how much money has secretly flowed from right-wing donors and interests into the household of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas?” His conclusion is that we just don’t know, but that it’s clearly quite a lot.

A later block of that show felt validating to me personally. Last week, I presented my theory of what Crow has been doing: He is Thomas’ “minder”, and the point of showering Thomas with expensive favors is not to “buy his vote on any particular case”, but to “give him something to lose if he should start seeing the charms of liberal philosophy” — as previous Republican-appointed justices like David Souter and John Paul Stevens had.

That interpretation seemed obvious to me, so I was wondering why I wasn’t hearing it from other commentators. Well, Friday Chris made precisely that case. So did Levitz:

The claim that none of these payments actually influenced Thomas’s jurisprudence seems plausible. Thomas was a reactionary long before he met Harlan Crow. It is possible that Crow’s largesse was motivated by a desire to insure against the risk of Thomas converting to liberalism à la David Souter.

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Senator Whitehouse tells the Judiciary Committee that Clarence Thomas’ acceptance of luxurious unreported vacations has a precedent: Justice Scalia took more than 70 free vacations at expensive resorts, and declared none of them.

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If you want to dig deeper into the dark-money network that is pushing the courts to the right in ways that undermine democracy, listen to the “Clarence Thomas and the Billionaires” episode of Dahlia Lithwick’s Amicus podcast. That’s where the quote at the top of the page comes from.

and the case(s) against Trump

Closing arguments are happening today in E. Jean Carroll’s defamation suit against Trump. The case, which hangs on whether Trump raped Carroll in the 1990s, will then go to the jury.

The Trump team mounted no defense, while Carroll not only described the rape under oath, but presented supporting evidence:

• Two women testified that Carroll told them about the rape soon after it happened.
• Two other women testified that Trump attacked them in similar fashion.
• The jury saw the Access Hollywood tape from 2003 in which Trump bragged about assaulting women.
• The jury also saw a Trump deposition from October. In the course of that testimony, Trump said that Carroll was “not my type”, but also mistook a photo of Carroll for his second wife, Marla Maples. (He also told Carroll’s lesbian lawyer that she wasn’t his type either. The lawyer was unfailingly polite during questioning, but I would have loved to hear her say, “With all due respect, you’re a fat old man. Nobody cares whether they’re your type.”)

The weakness of Carroll’s case is that

• No third person saw the rape happen.
• Carroll can’t say when it happened any more precisely than late 1995 or early 1996.

The standard of proof in a civil case is more-likely-than-not. So while I can imagine deciding that Carroll hasn’t proved her case beyond a reasonable doubt, given the vagueness of the timeframe, it’s hard for me to see how Trump’s non-defense can seem more likely than what Carroll has presented. (Trump’s lawyer is portraying the whole case as a conspiracy of Trump-hating women. But the judge will undoubtedly remind jurors that what either lawyer says is not evidence.) The defense has to be hoping that the jury contains at least one die-hard Trump cultist.

Whichever way it goes, we’re likely to get a verdict this week. It will be the first time a jury has ruled on Trump’s behavior.

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If Joe Biden gave a deposition like Trump’s, Fox News would be replaying it 24/7 as evidence of dementia. Trump not only misidentified his second wife Marla Maples in a photo, but also says he can’t remember whether his affair with her started before or after his divorce from Ivana. In fact that affair was headline news at the time.

But nobody worries about that second thing being dementia, because we all — even his supporters — assume he’s lying under oath.

Ditto for his previous written responses to Robert Mueller’s questions. His answer to almost every question was that he didn’t remember.

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Four members of the Proud Boys, including their former leader Enrique Tarrio, were convicted of seditious conspiracy Thursday. This is the third trial in which the Justice Department has gotten seditious conspiracy convictions against people involved in January 6. (Two previous trials convicted members of the Oath Keepers, including their founder Stewart Rhodes.)

Tarrio was convicted despite spending January 6 in Baltimore. He is the first person to be convicted of conspiring to organize the attack without directly participating in it. This suggests that DoJ is finally moving up the chain, and could eventually get to Trump.

Collectively, the three trials demonstrate that DoJ has gotten good at proving that there indeed was a seditious conspiracy on January 6. The question now is just: Who were the conspirators?

None of the convicted conspirators have been sentenced yet, but the DoJ just made its sentencing recommendation for Oath Keeper founder Stewart Rhodes: 25 years in prison. We’ll see if the judge agrees. Meanwhile, a man convicted of attacking police with a chair and bear spray was sentenced to 14 years, the most any January 6 defendant has received so far. Prosecutors had asked for 24 years.

Sentences like that increase pressure on conspirators to flip on someone higher up the chain.

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Speaking of flipping, The Atlanta Journal Constitution reports that at least eight of the 16 fake electors Trump lined up to cast Georgia’s electoral votes for him (in spite of the fact that he lost the state to Joe Biden) have accepted immunity deals from Fulton County DA Fani Willis.

It’s not immediately clear what they’re going to testify to or who they’re going to testify against, but it is an indication that Willis will be seeking indictments against people higher in the fake-elector conspiracy. Willis has already warned local officials to be ready for indictments to come down (with possible violent responses from protesters) during the July 11 to September 1 grand jury term.

She hasn’t said whether she plans to indict Trump, but it’s hard to see why indictments against John Eastman or Rudy Giuliani would provoke violence.

and you also might be interested in …

King Charles III was crowned in England Saturday. I’m not sure why anybody cares about this, but a lot of people seem to.

President Biden did not attend, because no American president has ever attended an English coronation. (No offense, but kings just aren’t our thing.) He was represented by the First Lady.

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The National Weather Service’s Climate Prediction Center gives a 62% chance of El Nino developing by July. If so, that will likely mean record global temperatures.

My somewhat oversimplified understanding of El Nino and the climate is that the temperature measurements we usually see are air temperatures, but global warming also affects the oceans. El Nino releases ocean heat into the air.

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Jordan Neely was a homeless man acting weird on the New York subway, until someone killed him. Everyone knows who did it, but the killer hasn’t been arrested or charged with anything. Some people regard him as a hero.

To me, this is the urban version of shooting a stranger who rings your doorbell. These days, everyone who exhibits unexpected behavior seems like a threat, and many seem to believe that potentially deadly force is a reasonable response, especially if the object of your fear fits into some easily dehumanized category.

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Ted Cruz has a challenger in 2024: Congressman Colin Allred, who faced an interesting choice when he graduated from college. Allred hadn’t been drafted by the NFL, but he had gotten into law school. He took the risky path and went to an NFL training camp anyway. He made the squad, and had a four-year career as a Tennessee Titans linebacker. Then he returned to the law.

I wonder if Allred has read Josh Hawley’s book on manliness yet.

Ted is already rattled. His fund-raising text against Allred used a picture of Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg instead of Allred. (Those Black people — they all look alike. Right?)

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Another mass shooting in Texas and once again Republican officials are calling for prayer. They need to read the Book of Amos, which quotes God saying this:

I hate, I despise your feasts, and I take no delight in your solemn assemblies. Even though you offer me your burnt offerings and grain offerings, I will not accept them; and the peace offerings of your fattened animals, I will not look upon them. Take away from me the noise of your songs; to the melody of your harps I will not listen. But let justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream.

In other words: “It pisses me off when you expect me to fix problems you caused and refuse to work on.”

Early indications can be misleading, but the mall shooter looks like a right-wing extremist.

Governor Abbott repeats the other popular meaningless response to our gun-violence problem:

The long-term solution here is to address the mental-health issue.

But of course he’s been cutting mental-health funding. Because he doesn’t actually care about mental health; he just wants to shift attention away from gun control.

This is a popular rhetorical tactic on the Right: minimize one problem by comparing it to another, when in fact you don’t want to address either one.

So if you want to talk about how many unarmed people of color are killed by police, they’ll ask why nobody on the Left cares about the much more serious problem of black-on-black crime. But their interest in black-on-black crime goes away as soon as you stop talking about the police. Or they’ll ask why we’re sending money to Ukraine when there are homeless veterans here in the US. “OK, then,” you say, “let’s do something about homeless veterans.” Never mind. They only cared about the veterans to argue against aiding Ukraine.

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Who in 1967 suspected that the unknown young Cat Stevens was writing an anthem for the 2020s, “I’m Gonna Get Me a Gun“?

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Also in Texas: A car plowed into a crowd of people outside a shelter serving migrants and homeless people in Brownsville, while the driver shouted anti-migrant obscenities. Seven dead, ten injured.

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Deborah Fallows borrows her husband’s Substack blog to tell her story of long Covid.

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Brexit was the UK’s version of Trump’s America First policy: The rest of the world has been taking advantage of us and we’re going to put a stop to it.

Well, it’s now pretty clear that was a huge mistake, and the British economy is in bad shape.

and let’s close with something retro

The next big thing in transportation might be a ship with sails. Not big cloth ones like the old clipper ships, but huge vertical wings. Cargo ships may never against be completely wind-powered, but what if wind assistance could cut fuel use by 30% or so?

Transgender people are people, representative, and deserve to be treated as such by this body too.

– Justin Pearson

This week’s featured post is “Reflections on driving across America“. My time in the wilderness gave me a vision I’d like to get out of my head.

This week everybody was talking about bizarre shootings

By now, we’ve almost gotten used to mass shootings, even school shootings: Somebody goes crazy in a way that makes them want to see a lot of people dead. Even though it doesn’t make sense in any rational way, we’ve learned how to tell a story about it. You say, “There was a school shooting in Nashville” and people more-or-less know what you mean.

But the last two weeks have been marked by shootings that made the whole country go “Huh? What was that about?”

It started with the shooting of Ralph Yarl on April 13. Ralph is 16 years old, Black, and (still) lives in Kansas City, Missouri. His mother sent him to bring his younger brothers home from a friend’s house. But he got the address wrong, so he rang the doorbell of Andrew Lester, who is 84 years old and White. Lester told police he was “scared to death” to see a young man “approximately six feet tall”, so he shot him through the glass door, hitting him in the head and arm. (Yarl is actually 5’8″ and weighs about 140.) Police believe there was a “racial component” to the incident.

Yarl is home now and talking, so at least there’s that.

Two days later Kaylin Gillis, a 20-year-old White woman, was in a car full of young people who turned down the wrong driveway in Hebron, New York, a rural community near Vermont. As the car was backing out, Kevin Monahan reportedly came out of his house and fired two shotgun blasts at the car, killing Gillis.

Three days after that, just past midnight on Tuesday, four cheerleaders were in a supermarket parking lot in Elgin, Texas, regrouping after they had car-pooled to a practice session. Heather Roth got into the wrong car and saw Pedro Rodriguez Jr. in the passenger seat. She realized her mistake and returned to her friend’s car. Rodriguez allegedly got out of his car and began shooting, grazing Roth and seriously wounding her friend Payton Washington.

Also on Tuesday, a basketball rolled into Robert Singletary’s yard, and he yelled at the kids who came to retrieve it. When one of the kids’ fathers came to Singletary’s door to protest the language he had used, Singletary reportedly opened fire, wounding the father and his six-year-old daughter.

Hardly anybody even mentions the Instacart drivers who got shot at for being at the wrong address on Saturday. Nobody was hurt and they were in Florida, so local police didn’t think shooting at them broke any laws.

In each of these cases, someone got rattled or annoyed for a somewhat understandable reason — a stranger getting into your car, kids who won’t respect your property line — and then opted to shoot rather than talk or just walk away. For both Gillis and the cheerleaders, the situation was already resolving itself: the car was backing out the driveway, Roth got out on her own. If the shooter just does nothing, everyone goes home unharmed.

The NRA likes to say that “an armed society is a polite society” (a quote Psychology Today critiqued last year). But these incidents make the opposite point: In an armed society, misunderstandings and trivial conflicts easily become life-threatening. In each of these cases, someone is dead or badly wounded because there was a gun involved. In each case, we can be thankful that no “good guy with a gun” was ready to shoot back. Who knows what the body count would have been?

The more accurate slogan is: more guns, more deaths.

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I have to apply this principle to the suggestion that we can solve school shootings by arming teachers. First off, until she retired, my sister was an elementary school teacher. I don’t like the image either of her feeling obligated to shoot it out with somebody wielding an AR-15, or of a gun being one more thing to keep track of in a normal day in her classroom. (I just talked to her; she doesn’t like it either.)

But second, I have to wonder how long it will be before some teacher is the shooter. Kids can be annoying. Parents can be annoying. There are arguments in teacher lounges. Teachers often feel mistreated or unfairly judged by their principals. How long before one of these situations leads to gunfire?

And finally, I am absolutely certain that armed teachers will have a higher suicide rate. Like policing, teaching is an emotionally stressful profession, full of ups and downs and occasional feelings of pointlessness or failure. As a Stanford study noted, access to a gun is a major risk factor for suicide:

Suicide attempts are often impulsive acts, driven by transient life crises. Most attempts are not fatal, and most people who attempt suicide do not go on to die in a future suicide. Whether a suicide attempt is fatal depends heavily on the lethality of the method used — and firearms are extremely lethal.

Give teachers guns, and more of them will wind up dead. More guns, more deaths.

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The shootings mentioned above make another point: The sheer number of guns is only part of America’s problem. Another part is the exaggerated level of fear that gun manufacturers use to sell more guns, and that right-wing media uses to argue against sensible gun laws.

Andrew Lester’s problem wasn’t just that he had a gun. It’s that his mind so quickly jumped from seeing a Black teen at his door to stories of deadly home invasions, which are actually quite rare. And what if you need to fend off multiple home invaders? Then you don’t just need a gun, you need the kind of high-capacity magazines that anti-Second-Amendment types want to ban.

Your goal is to protect yourself and your family. Having 15 to 30 rounds in your weapon at a time will exponentially increase your ability to defend your family. You can be the greatest shot in the world, but 10 rounds runs out faster than 15 to 30. Period.

Besides, what if your attackers are equipped with high-capacity magazines themselves? In a situation where you are defending yourself and your family, you do not want to be outgunned. Having high-capacity magazines is a responsibility you can take to ensure that you won’t be outgunned

What if? What if? Our culture trains our minds to jump to the most horrifying possibilities, no matter how unlikely they are. And right-wing politicians stoke fear. As Donald Trump likes to tell his rallies: “They’re not coming after me. They’re coming after you. I’m just in the way.”

They? Who the hell are they?

Paul Waldman quotes NRA President Wayne LaPierre: “every day of every year, innocent, good, defenseless people are beaten, bloodied, robbed, raped and murdered”. Lately, though, it looks like the bigger danger is scared people with guns. If you want to feel less afraid, don’t buy a gun. Just turn off Fox News, especially when they cover Trump or LaPierre.

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David French, a gun owner who was considered a staunch conservative not so long ago, describes the current right-wing attitude towards guns as “idolatry”. (French also wrote the foreward for a book discussing right-wing idolatry of another type: Christian nationalism.)

He mentions the shootings I just discussed, and connects them with people who take their guns and go looking for violent encounters: Kyle Rittenhouse and Daniel Perry, just to name two. Both are revered as heroes by a certain segment of the Right.

Whoever that guy was who said “Blessed are the peacemakers”, he has been long forgotten.

and medication abortion

Friday, the Supreme Court put a stay on Judge Kacsmaryk’s order taking the abortion drug mifepristone off the market. So the drug remains available for now.

The back-and-forth here is a little confusing, so let’s review.

• Anti-abortion organizations filed a federal lawsuit in Amarillo, where they were guaranteed a hearing before Kacsmaryk, who is a well-know culture warrior likely to agree with them. The suit asked the court to reverse the FDA’s approval of mifepristone, which has been available for 23 years and is used in over half of all abortions.
• Ignoring a number of clear deficiencies in the case, Kacsmaryk gave the plaintiffs what they wanted: a court order removing mifepristone from the market.
• He put a stay on his ruling for a week to give the FDA time to appeal.
• The FDA did appeal to the court above Kacsmaryk’s, the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, which might be the most conservative appellate court in the country. (Plaintiffs also knew that when they filed the suit.) The Fifth Circuit will hear arguments on the merits of the case on May 17.
• In the meantime, the FDA asked the Fifth Circuit to stay Kacsmaryk’s ruling until it decided the appeal. But the court only suspended part of the ruling, leaving mifepristone on the market, but less available than it had been: Under their ruling, the drug couldn’t be mailed, and could only be used by women less than seven weeks pregnant rather than ten.
• The FDA asked the Supreme Court to stay the whole ruling, pending the Fifth Circuit’s decision. Friday, the Court granted that request.

So: the temporary situation is unchanged from the time before Kacsmaryk’s ruling. The long-term situation will be decided by the Fifth Circuit sometime this summer. Given the commentary in its ruling on the stay, the Fifth Circuit is likely to impose at least some restrictions on mifepristone, which the FDA will then appeal to the Supreme Court. The ultimate decision, then, is probably at least a year away.

A few comments: The Supreme Court is unlikely to go along with Kacsmaryk when the case reaches it next year, but not because it cares about women’s health or respects their bodily autonomy. Agreeing with Kacsmaryk, though, would profoundly disrupt the pharmaceutical industry, because FDA approval could never again be taken as final. This case would establish a precedent allowing just about anybody to ask a court to remove just about any drug from the market.

By granting the stay, the Supreme Court refused to play the game many of us feared: They could have denied the lawsuit ultimately (protecting the pharmaceutical industry), while allowing mifepristone to stay off the market for more than a year as the legal machinery churned.

The two dissenters — Alito and Thomas — wanted to play that game.

and the Fox Dominion settlement

Ever since this case was filed, I’ve believed that Fox had to settle, because the damage it threatened went far beyond the money. Rupert Murdoch or Tucker Carlson answering questions under threat of perjury simply could not be tolerated.

What’s more, Dominion was always bound to accept a settlement. Settlements are zero-sum; what one party loses the other gains. But the trial would negative-sum. Beyond some point, the damage to Fox’ reputation would not be balanced by any gain to Dominion.

When parties are in a negative-sum game, the rational thing to do is get out of it. And that’s what Fox and Dominion did this week when they agreed to a $787.5 million settlement.

Now, lots of us were hoping to see that trial, where big-name Fox hosts would have to admit that Joe Biden won the 2020 election fair and square, and that they knowingly lied when they told their viewers anything else. That would have been a great thing for American democracy and for our political discourse as a whole. But Dominion’s lawyers represent the corporation and its shareholders, not American democracy. So that didn’t happen.

Will this settlement cause Fox to lose credibility with its viewers? It ought to, but it probably won’t. For comparison, think about Trump’s $25 million settlement with the people Trump University defrauded. The money was a tacit admission of fraud, just as the $787.5 million is a tacit admission that Fox lies to its viewers. But Trump’s followers didn’t want to look at it that way, so they haven’t.

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I had just written a note criticizing Fox for the fact that no heads were rolling, when I noticed that Tucker Carlson is leaving the network in a blameless parting of ways. If CNN or MSNBC faced a similar scandal, Hannity and Ingraham would also be out the door. But we’ll see.

Undoubtedly Tucker has a plan, and will take his pro-Trump pro-Russia White-supremacist program somewhere else.

and the debt ceiling

So we’re now probably less than two months from a true debt ceiling crisis, one that would force the government to default on at least some of its obligations. Kevin McCarthy has the hostage, but he’s still working on his ransom letter. Maybe he’ll be able to pass a laundry list of Republican demands, or maybe his caucus can’t even get to “yes” when no Democrats are in the room. (One provision that is in all the rumored demands I’ve seen: Biden has to give back all the progress he’s made towards fighting climate change.)

I’ve previously written about why the debt ceiling shouldn’t exist at all and how we got $32 trillion in debt. I’ve promised an article on whether (or to what extent) the debt actually is a problem, and I will come through on that before the country defaults.

and you also might be interested in …

The Texas Senate has passed one bill mandating every public-school classroom display the Ten Commandments, and another allowing public and charter schools to set aside time each day for students to read the Bible or pray. The Ten-Commandments bill still has to pass the House, while the Bible-reading bill just needs the governor’s signature.

Proponents believe these are “wins for religious freedom in Texas”, and that the Supreme Court’s decision in the praying-coach case indicates these bills will pass legal muster. In the ten years since I wrote “Religious Freedom means Christian Passive-Aggressive Domination“, they just keep proving my point.

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DeSantis’ war on Disney is getting increasingly hard to explain.

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The WaPo has a frightening story about Ottawa County, Michigan, where anti-government MAGA types have now become the government themselves.

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We have the Tennessee GOP to thank for calling national attention to Justin Pearson, who is amazing. Here, he schools a legislator pushing an anti-trans bill about American traditions.

Transgender people are people, representative, and deserve to be treated as such by this body too.

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Monica Potts goes back to her Arkansas home town to try to figure out why rural and small-town women are dying young.

In 2012, a team of population-health experts at the University of Illinois at Chicago found that white women who did not graduate from high school were dying about five years younger than such women had a generation before—at about 73 years instead of 78. Their white male counterparts were dying three years younger. From 2014 to 2017, the decline in life expectancy in the U.S., driven largely by the drop among the least-educated Americans, was the longest and most sustained in 100 years.

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Several red states have been changing laws to allow more child labor. The push is coming from the Foundation for Government Accountability, an organization funded by several large conservative donors.

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Back when Mike Lindell was claiming he had irrefutable proof the 2020 election was stolen, he announced a $5 million challenge for anyone to disprove his data. When Robert Zeidman claimed the prize, Lindell welched. This week an arbitration panel found that Lindell owes Zeidman the $5 million.

Meanwhile, Lindell is furious that Fox News settled with Dominion Voting Systems, which is the villain in Lindell’s delusional theories. Dominion is also suing Lindell, who says he won’t settle even if Dominion pays him.

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Suicide rates went down during Covid. It turns out that this is typical: When the world is trying to kill you, the desire to kill yourself diminishes.

and let’s close with something anthropomorphic

Do you ever find yourself talking to inanimate objects? Urging your car to keep going as you watch the gas gauge drop? Scolding a shoelace that keeps untying itself for no good reason? Asking your lost keys where they’re hiding this time?

Well, Ian Chillag talks to a lot of inanimate objects. In his podcast Everything is Alive, he interviews items most of us are unable to converse with: a can of off-brand cola growing old in the refrigerator, a newspaper, a baguette, a song that gets stuck in your head.

The conversations are clever and imaginative. Having just returned from a cross-country driving trip, I can testify that they passed the time while keeping me alert.

The Republican Party in Tennessee succeeded in creating tens of thousands of lifelong Democrats when they did this. … The Tennessee state legislature showed its hand. They’re not representatives, they’re rulers. You don’t get a voice. What you think doesn’t matter. You’re going to do what you’re told. Whether you accept that or not is up to you.

– Beau of the Fifth Column,
speaking to young Tennessee voters after the legislature’s expulsion
of elected representatives Justin Jones and Justin Pearson

This week’s featured post is “What We Learned from the Trump Indictment“.

This week everybody was talking about the Trump indictment

Believe it or not, he was arraigned and the indictment was unsealed last Tuesday, not even a week ago. Details of the indictment and what happens next are discussed in the featured post.

and the Tennessee Three

If you’re the kind of Sift follower who reads and remembers every word, you’ve heard of Nashville legislator Justin Jones before: Back in February, I linked to this clip of Jones calling out the Tennessee General Assembly’s Republican majority for its hypocrisy in outlawing drag shows “to protect the children”, but ignoring far more serious dangers to the state’s children. Several more Jones speeches have popped up on my social media feeds in the last few months and very nearly made it into the Sift. You could say I’m a fan.

Well, Thursday the majority took its revenge and expelled Jones from the Assembly, along with another eloquent young Black representative, Justin Pearson of Memphis. A White woman, Gloria Johnson from Knoxville, missed expulsion by one vote. (If the votes had been taken in a different order, Johnson might have been expelled too. Pearson was expelled last, and so was able to vote for Johnson. But the margin against Jones and Pearson was more than one vote.)

The trigger for the expulsions was an incident on March 30. A few days before, a shooter had killed three children and three adults at the Covenant School in Nashville. Young people from all over the state came to Nashville on the 30th to protest the legislature’s unwillingness to do anything about Tennessee’s gun violence problem. As demonstrators filled the Capitol gallery, Jones, Pearson, and Johnson occupied the floor without recognition from the Republican chair, and led the protesters in chants. The business of the Assembly was disrupted for about an hour.

Tennessee, you should remember, was the birthplace of the KKK. A bust of KKK founder Nathan Bedford Forrest was prominently displayed in the Capitol — I saw it myself in 2013 — until 2021, when Jones was leading a protest movement against it. So it should not be surprising that White Republican Speaker Cameron Sexton would not take lightly such disrespect from uppity young Black representatives. Expulsion is vanishingly rare in Tennessee history — only two representatives have been expelled since 1866, and those were for bribery and sexual misconduct. Expulsion for a violation of “decorum” has no precedent.

But never mind that. Gerrymandering has given Republicans a supermajority, so they could muster the required 2/3rds vote purely on party lines. So the Justins are out. (A clever protest line I’ve been seeing: “No Justins, no peace.“)

Much of the debate prior to the expulsions made it clear that uppity-ness was the Justins’ real crime. Here’s White Republican Rep. Andrew Farmer talking down to Pearson.

That’s why you’re standing there, because of that temper tantrum that day. That yearning to have attention. That’s what you wanted. Well, you’re getting it now.

To which Pearson responded:

You all heard that. How many of you would want to be spoken to that way?

Wikipedia explains what happens next:

The expulsions of Jones and Pearson left vacancies in House Districts 52 and 86. Article 2, Section 15 of the Tennessee State Constitution allows the local legislative body—in this case, the Metropolitan Council of Nashville and Davidson County and the Shelby County Board of Commissioners, respectively—to appoint an interim successor until a special election can be held. At least 29 members of the 40-member Davidson County Metropolitan Council have vowed to reappoint Jones; the measure requires a majority of members to approve it. Shelby county commissioner Erika Sugarmon claimed that commissioners were threatened with cuts in state funding for certain local projects during budget negotiations if Pearson were reseated, which was disputed by a spokesperson for the House Speaker.

So local officials are going to send Jones and Pearson right back to the General Assembly. White Speaker Sexton will probably not take that uppity-ness well either, so stay tuned.

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Prior to these events, University of Washington Professor Jake Grumbach had quantified the health of democracy in each state.

Grumbach’s State Democracy Index (SDI) grades each state on a series of metrics — like the extent to which a state is gerrymandered at the federal level, whether felons can vote, and the like — and then combines the assessments to give each state an overall score from -3 (worst) to 2 (best).

Tennessee got the lowest score in the nation. Wisconsin (see below) also did badly.

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White Speaker Sexton’s draconian response to protest has led some journalists to take a closer look at his own situation. Jud Legum claims to have found a problem much more serious that a breach of “decorum”: Sexton appears not to live in the district he represents.

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Just last week, I remarked on the strangeness of the GOP making absolutely no policy moves to change its disastrous performance with young voters, nothing that would say to them “We’re not your enemies”.

Well, in Tennessee, young people showed up in the thousands to tell the legislature what they want — action against gun violence — and the legislature’s response was to expel two young representatives who demonstrated with them. In short: “We are your enemies.” I think a lot of young voters have heard that message loud and clear.

(See below for similar cluelessness in Wisconsin.)

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Two of my favorite podcasters have roots in Tennessee, and commented on this week’s events: “liberal redneck” Trae Crowder and Beau of the Fifth Column. Trae’s reaction is funnier, Beau’s more serious.

and abortion pills

As I predicted three weeks ago, the lone federal judge hearing cases in Amarillo did the job Trump appointed him to do: He issued an injunction taking mifepristone, part of the two-drug combination used in almost all medication abortions (which now constitute more than half of abortions nationwide), off the market.

Judge Matthew J. Kacsmaryk’s ruling makes precisely the arguments that Adam Unikowsky had debunked over a month ago: An organization of doctors (incorporated in Amarillo precisely to bring this case to his court) has standing to sue, based on a mythic rush of patients they may have to treat after medication abortions go wrong. The FDA was wrong to rely on 20 years of safety data out of Europe, and is wrong now to rely on mifepristone’s 23-year safety record in the United States. The plaintiffs do not have to exhaust the FDA’s own process before suing.

All of this flies in the face of numerous Supreme Court precedents, which Unikowsky cited. But nonetheless, Kacsmaryk found that the plaintiffs were likely to prevail in their claims, justifying an injunction upending the majority of abortions in America.

Kacsmaryk’s ruling is couched in the terms of pro-life propaganda, without even a pretense of objectivity. In footnote 1, for example, he explains why he will use the terms “unborn human” and “unborn child” rather than “fetus”. Throughout his ruling, doctors who prescribe mifepristone are “abortionists”, while the doctors suing are “physicians”.

Unlike abortionists suing on behalf of women seeking abortions, here there are no potential conflicts of interest between the Plaintiff physicians and their patients.

In other words, the plaintiffs’ (and the judge’s) prior commitment to a religious ideology that their patients may not share is not a relevant conflict.

Anyway, this predictable judicial activism won’t stand unless higher courts validate it. The FDA and the Justice Department appealed to the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals on Friday. This is one of the most conservative appeals courts in the country (another reason for the plaintiffs to choose Amarillo), so we’ll see what happens.

Almost simultaneous with the Amarillo injunction, a federal judge in Washington state issued a contradictory injunction ordering the FDA not to remove mifepristone from the market. That injunction applies to the 17 (blue) states whose attorneys general were suing.

The two rulings will be appealed to different appellate courts. So unless those courts miraculously come to the same conclusion, the fate of mifepristone will ultimately have to be decided by the Supreme Court. When that might happen, and whether the drug will remain available in the meantime, remains to be seen.

and Clarence Thomas

Speaking of the Supreme Court, there’s a new Clarence Thomas scandal.

Thomas, if you remember, has been embroiled in scandal since Anita Hill accused him of sexual harassment during his confirmation hearing in 1991.

Back in 2011, he had to amend 20 years of financial disclosure forms after Common Cause pointed out that he hadn’t listed the sources of his wife Ginni’s income — largely conservative think tanks like the Heritage Foundation (who have opinions and desires about Supreme Court decisions). He blamed that on “a misunderstanding of the filing instructions”. Common Cause found that explanation “implausible”.

Justice Thomas sits on the highest court of the land, is called upon daily to understand and interpret the most complicated legal issues of our day and makes decisions that affect millions. It is hard to see how he could have misunderstood the simple directions of a federal disclosure form.

Thomas regularly has had conflicts of interests through his wife. In 2011, he didn’t recuse himself from Supreme Court rulings on the Affordable Care Act, despite Ginni’s active lobbying for repeal of the act.

More recently, Thomas didn’t recuse himself from ruling on ex-President Trump’s request that the Court block release of White House records related to January 6. (He was the only justice to vote in Trump’s favor.) When Mark Meadows turned over his text messages, we found out that Ginni had been urging Meadows to urge Trump to challenge the 2020 election, which she called “the greatest Heist of our History”.

The latest scandal is that the Thomases have been accepting massive gifts from billionaire GOP donor Harlan Crow for over 20 years, and Justice Thomas hasn’t been reporting them as the law requires. Clarence and Ginni regularly cruise on Crow’s yacht, fly on his private jet, and vacation at his private resort.

In late June 2019, right after the U.S. Supreme Court released its final opinion of the term, Justice Clarence Thomas boarded a large private jet headed to Indonesia. He and his wife were going on vacation: nine days of island-hopping in a volcanic archipelago on a superyacht staffed by a coterie of attendants and a private chef.

If Thomas had chartered the plane and the 162-foot yacht himself, the total cost of the trip could have exceeded $500,000. Fortunately for him, that wasn’t necessary: He was on vacation with real estate magnate and Republican megadonor Harlan Crow, who owned the jet — and the yacht, too.

… These trips appeared nowhere on Thomas’ financial disclosures. His failure to report the flights appears to violate a law passed after Watergate that requires justices, judges, members of Congress and federal officials to disclose most gifts, two ethics law experts said. He also should have disclosed his trips on the yacht, these experts said.

Crow himself has not had cases before the Supreme Court during this time, but he is associated with organizations that often do, like the Club for Growth and the American Enterprise Institute.

He has also donated hundreds of thousands of dollars to a Tea Party organization founded by Ginni Thomas — one that paid her $120,000, ProPublica notes.

Thomas issued a statement making this excuse:

Early in my tenure at the Court, I sought guidance from my colleagues and others in the judiciary, and was advised that this sort of personal hospitality from close personal friends, who did not have business before the Court, was not reportable.

In other words, Thomas has once again misunderstood the legal requirements. I have three comments on this:

• As in the Common Cause scandal, Thomas’ defense is that he isn’t very good at law.
• Even if his false impression were true, Supreme Court justices shouldn’t be trying to squeak through loopholes in the rules. Any idiot should know that accepting these kinds of favors looks really, really bad and would undermine the legitimacy of the Court.
• Thomas’ “close friend” is someone he didn’t know when he joined the Court.

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Meanwhile, elected Republicans and conservative media has been lining up to defend Thomas. The Wall Street Journal editorial page characterized this scandal as a “smear” and “another phony ethics assault to tarnish the Supreme Court”. The “smear” charge is repeated in a tweet from Senator Cornyn.

Last week, many of the same voices were trying to make some sinister connection between Trump-indicting DA Alvin Bragg and billionaire George Soros, because Soros contributed to an organization that contributed to Bragg’s political campaign. But here we have an actual corrupt arrangement, where millions of dollars in benefits accrue to Thomas personally, and it’s no big deal.

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I don’t want to make too much of Crow’s collection of Nazi memorabilia. Lots of people collect weird things, after all. But it does seem like a red flag.

and Wisconsin’s stunning election

Most other weeks, this would be the top news story: Wisconsin voters elected a liberal to replace a conservative on the state’s Supreme Court, tipping the balance in the liberal direction for the first time in 15 years.

The result is important for two reasons:

• Wisconsin’s Supreme Court has been one of the most blatantly partisan in the country, giving Republicans a huge advantage statewide.
• Wisconsin elections are typically close, and this one wasn’t. The liberal won by 11%.

Let’s start with partisanship. Wisconsin has long been one of the most gerrymandered states in the country, locking in large Republican majorities in spite of a relatively even split among the voters.

Wisconsin is an evenly divided purple state and [Governor] Tony Evers won re-election with 51.2% of the vote, but on the very same 2022 midterm ballots, Republicans won more than 60% of seats in the state legislature.

Republicans also hold six of the state’s eight seats in the House of Representatives.

Many states are gerrymandered because the state’s supreme court tolerates biased maps. But in Wisconsin, the state supreme court chose the map itself, resulting in a map that was even more biased than the previous one. If the new liberal majority tears those maps up, the state could return to a semblance of democracy.

Now let’s talk about that “evenly divided” electorate. In 2016, Trump won the state by 43,000 votes, or less than 1%. In 2020, Biden won by 20,000 votes, a little more than half a percent. But on Tuesday, Janet Protasiewicz beat Daniel Kelly by over 200,000 votes, more than 11%.

We don’t have detailed exit polls that break that victory up according to demographics, but educated opinion attributes the landslide to two groups: women and young people. The court is expected to rule on whether the state’s ancient ban on abortion is back in effect after Dobbs, and Republicans nationwide have a serious problem with young voters.

It’s fascinating watching Republicans try to deal with this reality without changing any of the positions that have alienated women and young voters. National GOP chair Ronna McDaniel said, “When you’re losing by ten points there is a messaging issue” on abortion. But of course there isn’t a “messaging issue”; voters understand very well where the two parties stand on abortion, and they agree with the Democrats.

Former Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker sounded a similar alarm about young voters. He noted the big margins Democrats ran up among younger voters in the 2022 midterms, and then called attention to the 82% of the vote “the radical” (Protasiewicz) got in Dane County, home of the University of Wisconsin.

But like McDaniel, Walker doesn’t see the need for any policy changes. In his mind, the problem isn’t that the GOP is dominated by climate-change denial, or that it promotes (or at best winks at) racism and homophobia, or that it wants the state to take control of women’s bodies.

This is years of liberal indoctrination come home to roost.

I suppose the obvious answer, then, would be to ban more books, as DeSantis is doing in Florida. But in the real world, the GOP’s problem with young voters isn’t that they’re deluded, it’s that they see all too well what Republicans stand for.

and you also might be interested in …

Texas Governor Greg Abbott says he will pardon newly convicted murderer Daniel Perry if the pardon application reaches his desk.

Perry murdered a demonstrator who was protesting the murder of George Floyd. Both Perry and his victim were armed, so Perry claims self-defense. But he raised that claim in his trial, and a jury of his peers unanimously rejected it. What does Abbott know that they didn’t?

This is yet another example of creeping fascism in red states: brownshirt violence going unpunished. Apparently, in Texas you can get away with murdering people the regime considers undesirable.

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Over 100 classified documents have appeared on social media sites, revealing closely held US assessments of the military situation in Ukraine, China, and the Middle East. It’s still not known who released the documents or why.

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A. R. Moxon makes an apt analogy I wish I had thought of first: Elon Musk and his Twitter followers resemble Butthead with an army of Beavises.

Along the way he raises a dangerous idea that I haven’t analyzed: Maybe the profit in technological disruption comes from the associated destruction, not the creation.

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Jon Cooper explains the folly of Ron DeSantis’ escalating war against Disney:

If he eventually wins, his GOP presidential primary opponents (and Democrats) will rightfully portray him as being anti-business. If he loses, his opponents will ridicule him for having been beaten by a mouse. Either way, the American people are already seeing DeSantis for what he is — thin-skinned, vindictive, stubborn, mean, shortsighted, and not very bright.

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Meanwhile, Democrats are using the vagueness of DeSantis’ own laws to try to get his book “The Courage to Be Fascist Free” taken out of school libraries. After all, it contains several “divisive concepts”.

and let’s close with a blast from the past

Yesterday my wife and I were drinking tea at the one table in Cafe Vinyl in Santa Fe (“coffee, records, books, t-shirts”) when the not-quite-30 guy behind the counter cued up a Tom Waits album we used to listen to in the 1970s.

Aside from the sheer nostalgia of it, listening to Waits while the 20-somethings flipped through used vinyl records raised an issue I’ve been thinking about since I read a Slate retrospective on Rod McKuen last fall: What gets remembered and what doesn’t?

One of the weird contradictions of living in the future is that every artist is at the tip of your fingers, but you can only find who your fingers know to search for. In the not-so-distant past, artists could avoid slipping away thanks to only the physical evidence: a record in a thrift store, a used book with a man in a white turtleneck on its cover, murmuring to the bewildered shopper, “Who am I? To whom did I matter? To whom did I stop mattering?”

The Spotify algorithm, Amazon’s recommendations, they’ll never, ever show you Rod McKuen. Those are designed to direct you towards things that other people like right now. But thrift stores, used bookshops, and Goodwills are, accidentally, perfectly designed to show you things that people liked decades ago, then stopped liking.

Unlike McKuen, Waits deserves to be remembered. So here’s one of my favorites from 1976, Waits’ lampoon of salesmanship and advertising, “Step Right Up“.

“You got it, buddy. The large print giveth and the small print taketh away.”

No Sift next week. The next new articles will appear on April 3.

The beginning of wisdom is the definition of terms.

– attributed to Socrates by Epictetus
Discourses, book I

This week’s featured posts are “A right-wing judge takes aim at medication abortions” and “Can the anti-woke mob define ‘woke’?“

This week everybody was talking about indicting Trump

For some while, I’ve been playing down speculation about possible Trump indictments, because those stories have been in reruns for months: Yes, there are all these grand juries and a list of possible charges that could be pressed at any time. We could talk forever about all the possibilities. But is anything actually happening?

This week, though, things got a lot more definite, at least with respect to the Manhattan grand jury investigating the Stormy Daniels payoff and the false business records that covered it up. AP reports that law enforcement officials are making security plans to handle a Trump indictment and arrest. Trump’s lawyer said Friday that Trump would appear voluntarily if indicted (and would not hand Governor DeSantis the hot potato of deciding whether to delay or block his extradition from Florida). NBC says the arrest could happen this week. In a Truth Social post, Trump claimed he would be arrested tomorrow. So that’s a little more than just speculation.

Former Manhattan prosecutor Karen Friedman Agnifilo describes the process in a 13-minute video, including a few things I did not already know: The indictment will be sealed until the arraignment, but Trump will have seen it, and so will be able to spin it for some period of time while the DA’s office is obliged to stay silent. Also, if he refused to come to New York and fought extradition, his problems wouldn’t be limited to Florida. Any state could arrest him and send him to New York. It’s kind of hard to run for president under those conditions.

Here’s the outline of the case: Trump had sex with porn star Stormy Daniels (real name Stephanie Clifford) in 2006. Late in the 2016 presidential campaign, Trump’s fixer Michael Cohen paid Daniels $130,000 not to tell her story to the media. (As Chris Hayes reminded us this week, the payoff happened shortly after the Access Hollywood grab-them-by-the-pussy controversy had nearly destroyed Trump’s candidacy. A follow-up sex-with-a-porn-star scandal would have been a big deal.) Trump repaid Cohen over a period of months, with the Trump Organization falsely recording the payments as legal fees. An indictment would claim that the $130K was an unreported campaign contribution, which would be a crime. Falsifying business records in furtherance of a crime is another crime.

A lot of people find it ridiculous that Trump would be indicted for this, rather than for his more serious offenses, like inciting a riot and trying to overturn an election. (That said, a Fulton County grand jury is still discussing whether to indict him for election manipulation in Georgia.) I’m sure we’ll hear similar complaints if Jack Smith indicts Trump for mishandling classified documents and obstructing the investigation of that crime.

Politically, the unfortunate thing about this case is that the scandalous part (sex with a porn star while your wife is tending a new baby) isn’t the criminal part, which is more technical. So it sounds to a lot of his (male) supporters like he’s being charged with something that shouldn’t be illegal, and that they’d do if they had the chance.

And while complaints about the smallness of the crime may be valid as far as they go, I think that’s the wrong way to look at this situation.

it’s really not a notional offense. If we had known in the final weeks of the 2016 election that a presidential candidate would arrange a hefty payment to kill a story about his sleeping with a porn star and do it by committing tax fraud and campaign finance fraud, I don’t think any of us would have said, “Oh, well, that kind of stuff happens all the time. Let’s not pretend those types of fraud are crimes.”

You and I would be indicted if we did what Trump has done, so he should be indicted too. There shouldn’t be one set of laws for Trump and another set for everybody else. (His fans want to claim the reverse, that the law shouldn’t be harder on him than it would be on anybody else. I agree with their point in theory, but I don’t believe that’s what’s happening.) If you don’t think these laws should apply to Trump, what laws should?

The obvious comparison here is Al Capone, who was convicted of tax evasion, not murder and racketeering. I’m sure that prosecution also seemed a bit ridiculous, but should Capone have been able to get away with avoiding taxes just because he was also a murderer?

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The second big question related to a Trump indictment is whether he will incite another riot. He’s posting all-caps screeds on his Twitter-clone Pravda Social, calling on supporters to PROTEST and TAKE OUR NATION BACK, which resembles his pre-January-6 rhetoric.

Trump’s speeches have always been dark, full of visions of “American carnage” and so on. But lately it’s gotten worse.

In 2016, I declared, “I am your voice.” Today, I add: I am your warrior. I am your justice. And for those who have been wronged and betrayed, I am your retribution. I am your retribution.

He’s been getting more and more explicit about the idea that if he gets back into power, he’ll make a lot of people suffer.

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In other Trump-related legal news, a DC judge has ordered Trump lawyer Evan Corcoran to testify to the grand jury investigating Trump’s mishandling of classified documents. Courts ordinarily don’t expect lawyers to testify against their clients (i.e., attorney/client privilege), but the judge is invoking the crime/fraud exception: Conversations in which a lawyer and his client conspire to break the law are not privileged.

That means that Special Counsel Jack Smith has convinced the judge (by a preponderance-of-evidence standard, i.e., more likely than not) that Trump and Corcoran discussed committing a crime.

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Tucker Carlson may have texted “There isn’t really an upside to Trump.”, but I believe that’s too pessimistic. Think of all the law we’ve learned since the Donald came into our lives.

and abortion

One of the featured posts covers the lawsuit that seeks to outlaw the abortion drug mifepristone.

and Ron DeSantis

DeSantis seems to have entered a tricky new phase of his quest for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination. He hasn’t declared his candidacy yet, but he has begun making appearances in places like Iowa that sure look like campaign rallies. Previously, Republicans had mostly been responding to the idea of nominating DeSantis, but now they’re going to have a real campaign and candidate to examine. This is a transition all candidates have to go through. Some sail through it, while others are thrown by it.

One famous example was Ted Kennedy in the 1980 presidential cycle. High inflation and the Iranian hostage crisis had made President Carter vulnerable to a primary challenge, and Kennedy seemed to represent a return to the halcyon days of JFK’s Camelot. Polls showed him crushing Carter in the primaries, and then probably sailing into the White House. But in August of 1979, just as he was getting ready to announce his candidacy, Kennedy sat down for a televised interview with Roger Mudd — an interview so consequential that it headlined Mudd’s obituary more than 40 years later. “Why do you want to be president?” Mudd asked. Kennedy was stumped for an answer. (One lesson here is that abrasive or pugnacious interviewing is not necessarily the most hard-hitting. A simple question can be devastating if there’s no good answer. One of the featured posts discusses a similarly devastating simple question: When Briahna Joy Gray asked Bethany Mandel to define woke.)

Ted went forward with his campaign and took his challenge all the way to the convention, where he gave a historically great speech. (“The work goes on, the cause endures, the hope still lives, and the dream shall never die.”) But after the Mudd interview, the bloom was off the rose. A new Kennedy presidency no longer seemed inevitable, and Ted was just a candidate running to Carter’s left, not the reincarnation of his sainted brothers.

Early in the 2012 cycle, Texas Governor Rick Perry was briefly ahead in the polls. But his campaign had a rocky start, and his chances vanished for good during a debate in November, 2011, when he boldly promised to eliminate three government agencies, but could only remember the names of two of them.

The candidates most vulnerable to this transition might be described as “high concept”. They haven’t run nationally before and don’t have a committed following, but their attraction can be summed up in one simple line: Scott Walker was the governor who broke the public-employee unions. Marco Rubio was a handsome young senator who could bring Hispanics into the GOP. Gary Hart was a new kind of Democrat challenging the Mondale establishment.

Ron DeSantis’ high concept is that he’s Trump without the baggage. He’s the anti-woke candidate who will troll the libs and fight tooth-and-nail against the kind of people the Republican base hates, but he’s not a pussy-grabbing insurrectionist who will have to spend more time in court than on the campaign trail. He can look ahead to 2024 and beyond, rather than constantly relitigate 2020. At 44, he can exploit Joe Biden’s age in way that 76-year-old Trump can’t.

That capsule description looks good to a lot of Republicans, but now they’ll have to see what they think of the actual Ron DeSantis. We started getting a preview of that process this week, when he answered Tucker Carlson’s question about Ukraine.

While the U.S. has many vital national interests – securing our borders, addressing the crisis of readiness within our military, achieving energy security and independence, and checking the economic, cultural, and military power of the Chinese Communist Party – becoming further entangled in a territorial dispute between Ukraine and Russia is not one of them.

In some sense, that was the right answer for his campaign. Aiding Ukraine is popular nationally, and most voters understand that the Russian invasion is more than a “territorial dispute”, but the most likely Republican primary voters are on the other side of that question. In MAGA circles, aid to Ukraine is always cast in a zero-sum frame: “Why are we sending our money to Ukraine when we still have problems X, Y, and Z at home?” (as if they have obvious solutions to X, Y, and Z that can only be funded if Ukraine aid gets scrapped). So nobody who challenges Trump can afford to be the pro-Ukraine anti-Putin candidate.

But the deeper problem is that he had to answer the question at all. Reagan Republicans may be in the minority now, but they’re not gone, and Republicans who look to the general election know that it would be fatal to run as the Putin party against the Zelenskyy party. And DeSantis wants to be seen arguing with Pete Buttigieg or Kamala Harris. He doesn’t need people like John Cornyn and Marco Rubio challenging his lack of foreign-policy experience.

But that’s going to keep happening for a while now: DeSantis wants to talk about woke teachers indoctrinating kids to hate America, Anthony Fauci shutting down America’s economy for no reason, and predatory doctors pressuring teen girls to cut their breasts off. But he’s going to face increasing pressure to take positions on issues that are off-brand for him, like health care and jobs.

And as he goes into small early-decision states like Iowa and New Hampshire, individual voters are going to be telling him the actual problems in their lives, and expecting him to pretend that he cares. That might be difficult for him.

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An NYT newsletter (behind a paywall) claims DeSantis is falling behind Trump in recent polls. Polling is hard in this race, because the results various polls get are wildly inconsistent with each other. But

In this situation, the best way to get a clear read on recent trends is to compare surveys by the same pollsters over time. … Every single one of these polls has shown Mr. DeSantis faring worse than before, and Mr. Trump faring better.

DeSantis is suffering from the same problem Republicans have been having since 2015: He seems to be hoping Trump will magically disappear, because he doesn’t want to anger Trump’s base by criticizing him. So Trump can tear him down without any fear of DeSantis striking back.

Barring a heart attack or a well-placed meteor, the only way to beat Trump is for somebody to take him on. If DeSantis won’t do that, he should save his effort and not run.

and you also might be interested in …

The International Criminal Court in The Hague issued an arrest warrant for Vladimir Putin. He’s charged with war crimes for deporting Ukrainian children to Russia.

The warrant has few immediate consequences, since the ICC won’t be taking Putin into custody anytime soon. However, it does limit his travel options and puts a stigma on him. The ICC has international prestige, so this counts for more than just a claim made by the Ukrainian government or his country’s other enemies.

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Saturday, the NYT published an article on something that has been long rumored but never definitively established: The Reagan campaign’s successful attempt to sabotage the Carter administration’s efforts to negotiate the release of American hostages in Iran.

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The state of Texas is taking over Houston’s schools. The state is dominated by White Republicans, the city by Black Democrats, so trust is hard to come by here.

and let’s close with a simple test

If you see a Ukrainian flag here, you’ve been watching too much news. It’s a Jersey shore sunrise, photographed and submitted to a Smithsonian photo contest. (The flag would be upside down anyway.)