Mostly Monday Reads: American Should be Better than this

By dakinikat on July 8, 2024

"Nice of All The King's Men to provide their exalted Royal with an easy-to-read version of Project 2025 with lots of pictures." John Buss, @repeat1968

Good Day, Sky Dancers!

I spent some time this weekend talking to happy and relieved friends from the UK and France. I cannot say that anyone I know in this country is either happy or relieved right now. For the first time in 40 years, the Tories lost control. One of my friends, a retired secondary school teacher for a Catholic school in the Midlands, expressed joy at the possibility of what's ahead. Can you imagine that feeling here? The BBC is reporting on what's up next as the new government is formed.

Sir Keir Starmer is the UK's new prime minister, after his Labour Party swept to power in a landslide general election victory.

The Conservative Party suffered a dramatic collapse after a tumultuous 14 years in power, which saw five different prime ministers run the country. It lost 250 seats over the course of a devastating night.

Rishi Sunak - the outgoing PM - accepted responsibility for the result and apologised to defeated colleagues during a brief statement outside a rainy 10 Downing Street. He said he would resign as party leader in the coming weeks.

In his first speech as prime minister after greeting dozens of jubilant Labour supporters who had lined Downing Street, Sir Keir vowed to run a "government of service" and to kick start a period of "national renewal".

"For too long we've turned a blind eye as millions slid into greater insecurity," he said. "I want to say very clearly to those people. Not this time."

"Changing a country is not like flicking a switch. The world is now a more volatile place. This will take a while, but have no doubt the work of change will begin immediately."

The French are also celebrating in the streets. I discussed the results with my exchange French Teacher, who also taught in Southeast Asia and was in Vietnam with his now wife when Saigon fell. They now run a Vietnamese restaurant in Nice. He expressed relief. This is a report by CNN's Christian Edwards. "What happened in France's shock election, and what comes next?"

It was meant to be a coronation. Crowds of supporters had crammed into election night events at the RN party HQ in Paris and at outposts all over the country, to watch the moment many felt had been decades in the making: Confirmation that their party, and its long-taboo brand of anti-immigrant politics, had won the most seats in the French parliament.

That wasn't to be. The fervent atmosphere soured as supporters saw the RN had slumped to third place. Jordan Bardella, the 28-year-old leader handpicked by Le Pen to freshen the party's image and purge it of its racist and antisemitic roots, was dyspeptic. He railed against the "dangerous electoral deals" made between the NFP and Ensemble which had "deprived the French people" of an RN-led government.

"By deciding to deliberately paralyze our institutions, Emmanuel Macron has now pushed the country towards uncertainty and instability," Bardella said, dismissing the NFP as an "alliance of dishonor."

"Of course the conflicted convicted felon claims to know nothing about Project 2025." John Buss, @repeat1968

Well, Bardella sounds rather grumpy Trumpy, doesn't he? Still, both of our oldest allies have shown us the path away from Donald and MAGA. Notice it means we have to absolutely swamp the voting booths. It appears that Project 2025 is scaring Americans, which it rightly should. Amplification of the Fascist Manifesto has gotten us to the point that Donald denies he knows anything about it. Historian Timothy Synder has an excellent analysis of the situation in his Thinking About Substack. "Fascism and Fear. The Moment, The Media, The Election."

It should seem odd that media calls to step down were not first directed to Trump. If we are calling for Biden to step aside because someone must stop Trump from bringing down the republic, then surely it would have made more sense to first call for Trump to step aside? (The Philadelphia Inquirer did). I know the counter-arguments: his people wouldn't have cared, and he wouldn't have listened. The first misses an important point. There are quite a few Americans who have not made up their minds. The second amounts to obeying in advance. If you accept that a fascist is beyond your reach, you have normalized your submission.

When media folks describe discussions among Democrats as chaos and disarray, they are implicitly suggesting that it is better for a leader of a party to never be questioned. (Why, after all, is being part of an array a good thing?) An obvious point goes missed: Democrats can say what they want, because none of them is afraid. And that is good! Governor Maura Healey can express her dissent and Joe Biden can express his frustration with her — but no one is worried about her physical safety.

Trump, by contrast, controls his party through stochastic terror, threats issued through social media that his cult followers can be expected to realize. Republicans leave politics because they fear for themselves and their families. Those who remain all obey in advance. That is new, and it should not be normal, and it should not spread any further. But it becomes normal when we treat discussions, and not coercion, as abnormal.

If I am right that much of the energy behind the Biden pile-on is displaced fear of a regime change, much of the media will continue to generate fascist froth for Trump, whether or not Biden is the Democratic nominee — unless, of course, journalists confront their fears, and keep the issue of regime change inside the story, and provide a constructive alternative alongside personal criticism.

Jim VandeHei and Mike Allen of Axios focus on "Behind the Curtain: Trump's dream regime."

So let's dig into each component of the Republican fantasy:

A strong president indifferent to pressure. Well, that's Trump. He has long held that his power in office is virtually unchecked. The Supreme Court just added another layer of protection. The Justices ruled in Trump v. U.S. that presidents enjoy immunity from criminal prosecution for actions within their core constitutional duties, and presumptive immunity for other official acts. It'll take years to sort out the elasticity of immunity — but it's wide.

A compliant, Republican-controlled Congress. It's a coin toss who wins the House and Senate this year — much like it has been throughout this era of a 50-50 America. The Senate looks promising for the GOP, thanks to a favorable map that has Democrats playing defense in deep-red West Virginia, Montana and Ohio, plus five swing states. The House is harder, mainly because there are lots more Republicans in Biden-won districts than vice versa.

A conservative Supreme Court. A 6-3 majority is significant, as the most recent decisions showed. It was the six Republican-appointed justices who expanded presidential power. The three Democrats warned of a looming monarchy.

A weakened administrative state. The Court, in a series of rulings but most notably the reversal of the Chevron decision, handed Republicans a massive triumph in a 40-year war to weaken independent agencies. It basically ruled that individual bureaucrats and independent agencies can no longer set the rules for business regulation.

Purge hostile federal employees. Right now, a lot of the nitty-gritty of governing is handled by full-time civil servants who aren't political appointees and often operate outside the full control of the president. But Trump has threatened to fire tens of thousands of these civil servants and replace them with pre-vetted loyalists.

The intrigue: Trump last week tried to distance himself from the Heritage Foundation's Project 2025, which is recruiting loyalists to help carry out radical plans to transform the U.S. government.

He claimed to "know nothing about Project 2025." Truth is, Project 2025 was largely written by his allies and encapsulates a lot of what he hopes to do — and how he might do it, longtime Trump officials tell us.

Between the lines: We've written extensively about Trump's plans to stretch the power of the presidency on everything from punishing critics to using the U.S. military for domestic action.

Instead of continually polling about Biden's age and debate performance, why don't they poll on Project 2025? Frankly, if I were up there on the campaign staff right now, I'd actually be pushing polling on it. Donald is aware of how much of the language plays with mainstream America. This Washington Post article by Michael Scherer and Josh Dawsey makes me wonder what the result could be. "Trump proposes scaled-back platform that softens language on abortion, same-sex marriage. The draft was circulated Monday among members of the 2024 Republican convention platform committee. It will be discussed and voted on later this week."

The 2024 Republican convention platform committee quickly adopted the plank that Donald Trump and his aides had drafted during a meeting Monday in Milwaukee, despite the concerns of some antiabortion activists that the document stopped short of explicitly calling for a constitutional amendment to give embryos or fetuses constitutional rights and does not call for any national bans on abortion.

The final vote, according to a person who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe the closed-door proceedings, was 84-18.

The document, with a long introduction in the voice of Trump, the presumptive nominee, says that existing constitutional rights to due process grants states the power "to pass laws protecting those rights."

"After 51 years, because of us, that power has been given to the states and to a vote of the people," the document says, according a copy of the document obtained by The Washington Post. "We will oppose late term abortion while supporting mothers and policies that advance prenatal care, access to birth control, and IVF (fertility treatments)."

The document was presented Monday to members of the Republican convention platform committee, a group handpicked by leaders of the Trump campaign that includes some members who want stronger language around abortion. The 2016 platform, which Trump used in his 2020 reelection campaign, called for a constitutional amendment to affirm the constitutional due process rights of embryos and fetuses, and a national law that would ban abortion, with some exceptions, after about 20 weeks of gestation.

Trump has changed his position on the issue since that Supreme Court overturned the fundamental right to the procedure in earlier stages of pregnancy. He now argues that each state should come up with its own regulations. He no longer calls for a constitutional amendment that would bar all states from allowing the procedure, a point of contention for many antiabortion activists.

It's a good thing most voters ignore a Party's platform because this one now has weasel wording. Weasel wording is basically the tool of the right-wing majority on the Supreme Court, too. This is from Vox and is written by Ian Millhiser. "The Supreme Incompetents. The justices are awful at their jobs, and they don't know that they are awful at their jobs."

The justices are barely able to manage their own docket, even though it's been shrinking for decades. They publish incompetently drafted decisions that sow confusion throughout the judiciary, then refuse to accept responsibility when those decisions lead to ridiculous and immoral outcomes. They take liberties with the facts of their cases, and they can't even be trusted to read the plain text of an unambiguous statute correctly. In just the last few years, they've overruled so many seminal precedents that law professors no longer know how to teach their classes.

If the justices did not wield such awesome power, and if lawyers who practice before them did not have to treat them with ritualized obsequiousness, most of the justices would be laughingstocks. Few people this famous are so ostentatiously bad at their jobs.

And yet, despite their incompetence, the justices continue to claim more and more power — even though they simply do not have the personnel or expertise needed to address every policy question they've added to their own plates.

I used to believe that Trump and his followers and the Federalist Society, the conservative legal group that played an enormous role in choosing his judges, were two distinct authoritarian movements that shared power during Trump's four years in office. The MAGA movement is a cult of personality that seeks to elevate a singularly chaotic man. The Federalist Society and its allies prefer a distinctly lawful tyranny that still follows predictable rules.

But then the Federalist Society's picks took over the Supreme Court. And they have behaved so haphazardly, with such eagerness to smash institutions built over decades or even centuries, that it's hard to see them as anything other than Donald Trump with a law degree. Unlike Trump, the Court's Republican majority speaks in polished legal prose when they decide to hurl decades worth of settled expectations into the sun. But their behavior on the bench is no less chaotic than that of the insurrectionist president who appointed half of them.

Worse, the United States has what might be called a Dunning-Kruger Supreme Court — after the psychological phenomenon where incompetent people fail to recognize their own incompetence.

The justices aren't just very bad at their jobs; they appear to be blissfully unaware of just how terrible they are at those jobs. How else can one explain, say, their decision to replace all of American Second Amendment law with a novel and impossible-to-apply legal test — one that led to astonishingly depraved results — and then to offer no new guidance to lower court judges after all but one of the justices realized just how badly they'd screwed up?

What is that old saying about the ends justify the means? We're under another intense heat warning today. The western half of the state is dealing with Hurricane Beryl. Climate change denial should be getting much more difficult down here in the South, but denial is strong in this Republican Party. They prefer to stew like that proverbial frog in a pot. Let's just hope we can turn voters out like the UK and France and be rid of these suckers for a long time.

What's on your reading and blogging list today?