The other BBB

It's gonna get REEEEEAL ugly

Trump held a rally in Texas.

As darkness fell and the crowd swelled to the thousands, the sound system blared the late Laura Branigan’s “Gloria,” the same tune that had electrified Trump’s most diehard followers at the D.C. Ellipse on the morning of Jan. 6, 2021.

[...]

[Trump] delivered one of the most incendiary and most dangerous speeches in America’s 246-year history. It included an appeal for all-out mayhem in the streets to thwart the U.S. justice system and prevent Trump from going to jail, as the vise tightens from overlapping criminal probes in multiple jurisdictions.

  Philadelphia Inquirer

I think it's obvious this is the main focus* of Trump's current and future rallies: try to keep him out of jail if he gets indicted for any crimes either Federal or New York State.

nd it also featured a stunning campaign promise — that Trump would look to abuse the power of the presidency to pardon those involved in the Jan. 6 insurrection.

The significance of the date is wholly understood by Trump's own "brownshirts". I'm just waiting for them to actually don brown shirts.

Trump’s lengthy speech in Conroe contained three elements that marked a dangerous escalation of his post-presidential, post-Jan. 6 rhetoric. Let’s digest and analyze each of them:

Continue reading.

*

"If these radical, vicious, racist prosecutors do anything wrong or illegal, I hope we are going to have in this country the biggest protest we have ever had in Washington DC, in New York, in Atlanta and elsewhere because our country and our elections are corrupt," Trump told the crowd in Conroe, Texas on Saturday night.

[...]

Of course, Biden’s presidency deserves our full scrutiny, with praise for what’s gone right (an economic boom) and criticism for what’s gone wrong (broken promises on climate and student debt). But while Biden is seeking to restore democratic norms, a shadow ex-president — unpunished so far for his role in an attempted coup on Jan. 6 — is rebuilding a cult-like movement in the heartland of America, with all the personal grievance and appeals to Brownshirts-style violence that marked the lowest moments of the 20th century. On the 89th anniversary of the date (Jan. 30, 1933) that Adolf Hitler — rehabilitated after his attempted coup — assumed power in Germany, are we repeating the past’s mistakes of complacency and underestimation?

  Business Insider

Lindsey gets brave

Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) said on Sunday that former President Trump’s suggestion that he would pardon Jan. 6, 2021, rioters if reelected is “inappropriate.”

During Graham's appearance on CBS’s “Face the Nation,” host Margaret Brennan played a clip of Trump speaking Saturday at a Texas rally, where he said he would treat the Capitol rioters "fairly."

“If I run and I win, we will treat those people from Jan. 6 fairly,” Trump told the crowd. “We will treat them fairly, and if it requires pardons, we will give them pardons because they are being treated so unfairly.”

[...]

"I don't want to do anything from raising bail to pardoning people who take the law into their own hands because it will make more violence more likely," he said. "I want to deter people who did what on Jan. 6. And those who did it, I hope they go to jail and get the book thrown at them because they deserve it."

  The Hill

How long before he backtracks?

To our country's everlasting shame, this poor excuse for a human being is able to speak, write, and publish as "President of the United States of America".

UPDATE:

No attempt to hide it

Even before they know who the nominee is, they're admitting they won't likely vote to confirm, admitting they're simply there to obstruct.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

In this country

Still not a decent wage.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Start your Sunday with a surprise

Yep.  I was nowhere near it.

It's Sunday

Excerpts from Mark Twain's Letters from Earth"

From Satan's Letter III

The best minds will tell you that when a man has begotten a child he is morally bound to tenderly care for it, protect it from hurt, shield it from disease, clothe it, feed it, bear with its waywardness, lay no hand upon it save in kindness and for its own good, and never in any case inflict upon it a wanton cruelty. God's treatment of his earthly children, every day and every night, is the exact opposite of all that, yet those best minds warmly justify these crimes, condone them, excuse them, and indignantly refuse to regard them as crimes at all, when he commits them.

[...]

God banished Adam and Eve from the Garden, and eventually assassinated them. All for disobeying a command which he had no right to utter. But he did not stop there, as you will see. He has one code of morals for himself, and quite another for his children. He requires his children to deal justly -- and gently -- with offenders, and forgive them seventy-and-seven times; whereas he deals neither justly nor gently with anyone, and he did not forgive the ignorant and thoughtless first pair of juveniles even their first small offense and say, "You may go free this time, and I will give you another chance."

On the contrary! He elected to punish their children, all through the ages to the end of time, for a trifling offense committed by others before they were born.

[...]

You would not suppose that this kind of Being gets many compliments. Undeceive yourself: the world calls him the All-Just, the All-Righteous, the All-Good, the All-Merciful, the All-Forgiving, the All-Truthful, the All-Loving, the Source of All Morality. These sarcasms are uttered daily, all over the world. But not as conscious sarcasms. No, they are meant seriously: they are uttered without a smile.

From Satan's letter X

The two Testaments are interesting, each in its own way. The Old one gives us a picture of these people's Deity as he was before he got religion, the other one gives us a picture of him as he appeared afterward. The Old Testament is interested mainly in blood and sensuality. The New one in Salvation. Salvation by fire.

The first time the Deity came down to earth, he brought life and death; when he came the second time, he brought hell.

Life was not a valuable gift, but death was. Life was a feverdream made up of joys embittered by sorrows, pleasure poisoned by pain, a dream that was a nightmare-confusion of spasmodic and fleeting delights, ecstasies, exultations, happinesses, interspersed with long-drawn miseries, griefs, perils, horrors, disappointments, defeats, humiliations, and despairs -- the heaviest curse devisable by divine ingenuity; but death was sweet, death was gentle, death was kind; death healed the bruised spirit and the broken heart, and gave them rest and forgetfulness; death was man's best friend; when man could endure life no longer, death came and set him free.

In time, the Deity perceived that death was a mistake; a mistake, in that it was insufficient; insufficient, for the reason that while it was an admirable agent for the inflicting of misery upon the survivor, it allowed the dead person himself to escape from all further persecution in the blessed refuge of the grave. This was not satisfactory. A way must be conceived to pursue the dead beyond the tomb.

The Deity pondered this matter during four thousand years unsuccessfully, but as soon as he came down to earth and became a Christian his mind cleared and he knew what to do. He invented hell, and proclaimed it.

[...]

It does not appear that he ever stopped to reflect that he was to blame when a man went wrong, inasmuch as the man was merely acting in accordance with the disposition he had afflicted him with. No, he punished the man, instead of punishing himself.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

It's Sunday

Proof once again that religious people are great for business.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Karen

Breyer's retirement speculation

I've been listening to and reading opinions about why Breyer decided to retire, and one of the ones I think might be closest is that he saw the conservatives taking two cases that were already settled law in order to reverse them - abortion and affirmative action - and he didn't want to be there for it.

Pennsylvania court rejects state's mail-in law

October and November of 2022 are going to outcrazy everything preceding them.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Covid deaths in America update

Insurrection case update

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Ken Paxton is keeping his name in the news

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton went on MyPillow CEO and conspiracy theorist Mike Lindell's broadcast platform and urged the public to put pressure on the state's Court of Criminal Appeals judges over a recent ruling that stripped him of the power to unilaterally prosecute supposed election-fraud cases.

"Contact the Court of Criminal Appeals. Call them out by name. I mean, you can look them up," the Republican attorney general said during an interview last week with Brannon Howse on Lindell's platform, Frank.

"There's eight of them that voted the wrong way," Paxton said and urged listeners to "call them," "send mail," and "send email."

[...]

In December, the Texas Criminal Court of Appeals — an all-GOP panel — ruled 8-1 that Paxton can no longer unilaterally prosecute purported cases of voter fraud.

  Business Insider

Attorney General Ken Paxton recently announced a hefty $2.8 million campaign haul, showing the competition he can still raise big bucks while under FBI scrutiny.

But where most of the money came from is a mystery.

Paxton has yet to name all his campaign donors, despite a deadline last week that required disclosure.

Among the missing are those who paid up to $50,000 to rub elbows with Paxton and former President Donald Trump at a fundraiser in December. Entry to the private reception, held at Trump’s swanky Mar-a-Lago club in Florida, started at $1,000.

Paxton’s campaign blamed technical issues for the delay and promised to file an update once fixed.

  Dallas News

The technical issues are not what they're implying, that is, not mechanical.

In an explanation attached to the report filed on Dec. 19, Paxton’s campaign said it ran into technical issues with the commission’s electronic filing software. After hours of trying to upload the report on time, the campaign brought in “an expert to assist with the filing” and still faced problems, the report said.

Bullshit. Who was that "expert"?

No other major campaign seemed to face similar issues. More than 1,400 candidates, including Gov. Greg Abbott and Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, filed their recent campaign finance reports by the deadline, according to the Texas Ethics Commission.

“TEC staff has confirmed that the filing system was functioning properly and that we did not experience any server-side technical issues during this reporting deadline,” Johnson said.

[...]

Three Republicans are vying to oust Paxton in what many see as the marquee GOP primary race. Texas Land Commissioner George P. Bush, former state Supreme Court Justice Eva Guzman and U.S. Rep. Louie Gohmert all posted seven-figure fundraising hauls last week.

Paxton did too. But his report came a day late and named the donors who gave just $652,000 of his $2.77 million total. Details dropped off for contributions made after mid-October.

[...]

The report is notable because Paxton’s fundraising was dwindling in late 2020 after several top staffers accused him of abusing the office to help a campaign donor and the FBI began investigating.

[...]

“Texas has the weakest, most corruption-prone campaign finance system in the country,” said Anthony Gutierrez, executive director of Common Cause Texas. “It is striking that our top law enforcement official can’t manage to meet our extremely low disclosure requirements.”

[...]

Lax state ethics laws give Paxton little incentive to move quickly, open government advocates said. The fine for turning in his campaign finance report late is a flat $500, no matter whether it is tardy by a day or a month.

Oh wow. That'll discourage politicians. JFC.

Paxton’s fundraising fortunes seem to have shifted last summer when Trump endorsed his bid for a third term as attorney general. The fundraiser at Trump’s club on Dec. 9 reportedly netted Paxton’s campaign a whopping $750,000 – more than he reported raising in the months of July, August and September combined.

Those donors should be disclosed in Paxton’s campaign finance report. Only people who write checks or give cash worth less than about $90 don’t have to be named.

In case you've forgotten what a sleaze Ken Paxton is, refresh your memory.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

The plan that could have worked

And we have the nameless Senate aide to thank for this plot being foiled. 

When did Mike Flynn lose the thread?

AKA escape reality.

I'd like to see his flow chart for just how this will work.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

This is MAGA

This is so sad.  And so shameful.  White Americans unironically pass bills to keep themselves from feeling any discomfort in the learning of history.  Black people can be slaves and be subjected to discrimination, but god forbid white people should be made to feel uncomfortable.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Here we go - Part 2

UPDATE:

Texas senator admits gerrymandered map violates Constitution

Yes, the new voting restrictions will matter

Contrary to what Republicans - and some never-Trumpers - would like you to believe.

Republicans found out in 2020 that mail-in ballots are bad for their party.  That's why they're so adamant that people vote in person.

“States are not engaging in trying to suppress voters whatsoever,” Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) declared last year.

Facts on the ground in Georgia tell a different story.

  Mother Jones

Continue reading.

Also, who would believe Mitch McConnell?

Also...

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

It's Sunday

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Keep goin' guys - you're getting there

UPDATE:

A (likely temporary) win for the environment

A US judge invalidated a major oil-and-gas lease sale saying the government failed to account for its climate change effect, in a significant win for environment advocates.

The decision cast uncertainty over the future of the US federal offshore drilling programme, which has been a chief source of public revenue for decades but also drawn the ire of activists concerned about its effect on the environment and contribution to global warming.

[...]

The sale generated more than $190m, the highest since 2019, on 1.7 million acres sold. It drew bids from US oil majors including Exxon Mobil Corp and Chevron Corp.

Thursday’s decision came after the environmental group Earthjustice challenged the sale on behalf of four other green groups, arguing US President Joe Biden’s interior department was relying on a years-old environmental analysis that did not accurately consider greenhouse gas emissions that would result from development of the blocks.

[Judge Rudolph] Contreras agreed, faulting the administration for excluding foreign consumption from its greenhouse gas emissions analysis and for ignoring the latest science on the role of oil-and-gas development in global warming.

[...]

The offshore drilling industry slammed the decision.

“Uncertainty around the future of the US federal offshore leasing programme may only strengthen the geopolitical influence of higher emitting – and adversarial – nations, such as Russia,” National Ocean Industries Association President Erik Milito said in reaction to the ruling.

Scott Lauermann, a spokesman for oil industry lobby group the American Petroleum Institute, said it was “reviewing” the decision and “considering our options”.

  alJazeera

I'm guessing this will go to the Supreme Court.

Biden last January had announced a moratorium on new gas and oil drilling on federal land pending a review in an effort to make responding to the climate crisis a central part of his presidency.

But a federal judge in Louisiana, nominated by former president Donald Trump, ruled in June the administration had to get congressional approval for such a move.

[...]

Devorah Ancel, senior lawyer at the Sierra Club, one of the plaintiffs, told the Financial Times: “The Biden administration’s failure to adequately evaluate the climate impacts of this massive lease sale wasn’t just out of step with their stated commitment to climate action, it was also illegal.”

Biden campaigned for the White House partially on a pledge to end federal oil-and-gas drilling to fight climate change, but efforts to suspend new auctions failed after Gulf Coast states sued.

Congress has mandated that the United States hold regular auctions of public lands for oil-and-gas development.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Pennsylvania governor rejects gerrymandered map

Gov. Tom Wolf has vetoed a congressional map sent to him by Republican lawmakers, leaving the monumental job of picking Pennsylvania’s next district lines to the state courts.

In a veto message issued late Wednesday, Wolf said the map failed “the test of fundamental fairness.”

[...]

The map sent to Wolf by the GOP-controlled legislature was initially drawn by Amanda Holt — a noted redistricting reform advocate and former Lehigh County commissioner — and championed by state Rep. Seth Grove (R., York). It was amended by Grove’s legislative committee after GOP members of the panel criticized how their counties were split.

It improves upon four fairness criteria outlined in a previous state Supreme Court ruling, but nonpartisan analyses show it has a partisan bias in favor of Republicans.

  Spotlight

And yet, that is allowed by the Supreme Court, so this map may eventually be allowed to stand.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Let the opining begin

Justice Stephen Breyer is retiring. We all understand that he's doing so in order that Joe Biden can get a liberal judge on the court while the getting is good. We also understand that Trump's nominees were not only ultra-conservative, they were young in order that there would be ultra-conservatives on the court for years to come. We also all understand that the Supreme Court is political, regardless of claims to the contrary.

The Washington Post has published an editorial opinion about how Biden should handle this situation. Please recall that Biden ran on the promise that if he got a chance to nominate a justice it would be a black woman.

From the Post:  

Justice Stephen G. Breyer will retire at the end of the Supreme Court’s current term, concluding a nearly three-decade career as one of the nation’s top judges — and giving President Biden a rare chance to shape the judicial branch. Mr. Biden should resist partisan pressure to place the youngest, most ideologically strident judge on the high court. Instead, he should pick the best candidate for the job.

The first and foremost qualification — a commitment to judicial independence — is the opposite of what many progressive activists desire.

  WaPo

I highly doubt it's the opposite of what they desire. One wonders: did the Post offer the same opinion when Trump nominated any of the three ultra-conservatives during his one term? I'm not going to research that. I'm going to hope they did.

Mr. Biden has himself suggested another reasonable consideration: diversity, pledging during his presidential campaign to nominate a Black woman for the job. This would be a welcome first, and there are well-qualified Black women on the federal bench whom he could promote. But the president also should not feel restricted to the pool of candidates serving on appeals courts, from which every sitting justice but one hails. Some of the nation’s best justices traveled different paths to the court.

For their part, Republicans should give Mr. Biden’s pick a fair shake. This might seem like a fantasy. The hardball they played in recent years to force a 6-to-3 conservative court majority did more to poison the judicial nomination process and politicize the court than any act since President Franklin D. Roosevelt tried to pack it. They would harm the country even more if they now condemned a qualified Black female nominee as a radical.

[...]

The nation’s leaders should consider ways to reduce the high stakes of any single Supreme Court pick and cut the element of luck that determines which president gets to decide the court’s composition. Imposing 18-year term limits would do both. Along with Mr. Biden’s nominee, lawmakers should consider this idea with open minds.

That is absolutely right. Term limits are obviously needed. On the other hand, there's an even better solution: floating number of justices. Perhaps combine that with term limits.

Also, I'm not too concerned about Republicans giving Biden's pick "a fair shake."  They have a whopping majority of their idealogues on the bench.  Even if Roberts - or rarely Kavanaugh - vote in a non-idealogical way, it would take both of them at the same time to side with the "liberals" to thwart a conservative outcome, and that's highly unlikely to happen.  When it comes to things really important to Republicans - abortion, immigration and corporate power - there's no question which way the Court will go.  They can afford to look as though they're not obstructionists on this vote.

At any rate, it's a good idea to look at the Post's op-ed from the view of a non-white person.

Michael Harriott has a long Twitter thread doing just that. He begins...

Continue reading.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

UPDATE:

UPDATE:

Higher sentences for insurrectionists who assaulted police

A judge in the United States has imposed a 44-month prison sentence on a man who pleaded guilty to a felony charge after throwing objects at police during last year’s January 6 attack on the US Capitol and boasting about his actions on social media.

The defendant, Nicholas Languerand, has been jailed since his arrest in April 2021 in the US state of South Carolina and will receive credit for time served.

Languerand pleaded guilty in November to a single charge of assaulting law enforcement with a dangerous weapon. Authorities said he hurled objects, including an orange traffic barrier, at police and took an officer’s riot shield on January 6, 2021. He was 26 at the time he entered the guilty plea.

Languerand bragged about the attack on social media, vowing that “next time we come back with rifles”.

[...]

Prosecutors had recommended a 51-month sentence, but US District Judge John Bates in Washington said on Wednesday that a “modest reduction” was warranted in light of Languerand’s personal circumstances, including what the judge described as an “extremely difficult and chaotic upbringing”.

When Languerand was a child, his father intentionally set fire to a trailer that he and his mother were living in, nearly killing them, Languerand’s grandfather told the judge during the sentencing hearing.

  alJazeera

They'll all be doing it

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

It's Sunday

Is Newt getting out ahead of some personally bad news?

On Fox News, [former House Speaker Newt] Gingrich unleashed on Sunday on the [January 6] committee and Attorney General Merrick Garland for acting like a "lynch mob" in their pursuit of "innocent people." He also warned that when Republicans win majorities in Congress the January 6 investigators are "going to I think face a real risk of jail for the kind of laws they're breaking."

[...]

The select House committee investigating the US Capitol riot wants to speak with Ross Worthington, who worked in the Trump White House as an advisor for policy, strategy, and speechwriting.

[...]

Worthington served as a research director and lead writer for the media and communications firm Gingrich Productions before joining Trump's transition team that helped him prep for the White House in late 2016 and early 2017.

He also served as deputy communications director for Gingrich's unsuccessful 2012 presidential campaign and a year later they co-authored the book, "Breakout: Pioneers of the Future, Prison Guards of the Past, and the Epic Battle That Will Decide America's Fate." In a January 10 letter to Worthington, the committee said that it believes he helped draft the January 6 speech Trump gave at the rally on the Ellipse in Washington before the lame duck president's supporters stormed the Capitol.

[...]

"This might be hitting a little close to home for Gingrich and he is upset that his colleague has to deal with the January 6th commission," one former Republican leadership staffer told Insider in an email when asked about the connection between Gingrich and the Worthington subpoena.

  Business Insider

Or maybe that it might lead straight to Newt?

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Finally!

On the campaign trail, Biden vowed that if he were to get a vacancy he would fill it with an African American woman, which would represent a historic first for the high court. Potential candidates include Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson, 51, who was confirmed last year to the powerful DC-based appellate court. She once served as a law clerk for Breyer, and also worked as an assistant federal public defender and served on the US Sentencing Commission.

Another possibility would be Justice Leondra Kruger, 45, who serves on the California Supreme Court and is a veteran of the US Solicitor General's office.

  CNN

Want to bet whether the Senate has a hard time confirming any Joe Biden nominee?

UPDATE 1/27:

We desperately need term limits for Congress (and SCOTUS)

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Justice Roberts gets an F

Every December, the chief justice of the Supreme Court of the United States composes a “Year-End Report on the Federal Judiciary.” [...] It is not supposed to be the judicial version of the State of the Union so much as a trite message about how “great” things are going on the bench, usually with some boilerplate stats that show how hard judges are working.

[...]

John Roberts’s 2021 review] has all the stylistic markings the media consistently praises Roberts for: It is good-natured, reassuring, and banal to the point of hokey. Never mind that things are far from OK within the judiciary—that the judicial branch has been captured by an army of conservative hacks and the Supreme Court has veered so sharply to the right that even the general public has noticed, dragging its poll numbers to record lows.

[...]

Roberts’s annual review has all the charms of an old country goose: ordinary and unassuming from a distance, but an irritable, irascible beast that will peck your eyes out if you get too close.

[...]

[L]ike a child who agrees to be grounded before the full extent of their misdeeds can be revealed, Roberts [...] raises the issue of judicial independence because Congress is finally considering reining in the rampant corruption he himself refuses to stop and punishing the ethics violators he refuses to hold accountable.

[...]

The issue that seems to have sparked Congress’s concern—and Roberts’s pushback—is a scandal that rocked the judiciary last year. In September, a Wall Street Journal investigation revealed that 131 federal judges improperly heard cases involving companies whose shares the judge or members of the judge’s family held. Since that initial article (which covered only cases heard between 2010 and 2018), the Journal has reported that 136 judges subsequently informed the parties in 777 lawsuits that they should have recused themselves and that the cases could now be reassigned to other judges or reopened.

[...]

The violations are too numerous to be chalked up as one-off errors and speak to a pervasive disregard for the rules and a culture of impropriety.

Congress recognized this right away. The House held a hearing in October on making judges’ financial disclosure forms available to the public (as they are for elected officials), which would help interested parties identify judges who should not be hearing their cases.

[...]

The Senate Judiciary Committee has proposed modernizing judicial ethics rules and disclosure requirements. And Senator Elizabeth Warren and Representative Pramila Jayapal have expressed interest in legislation that would impose civil sanctions on judges who fail to recuse themselves when they should.

Roberts refuses to brook any of this. In his year-end report, he hits back against the possibility of congressional interference by trying to make people believe the whole problem can be solved with more webinars. “Collectively,” he writes, “our ethics training programs need to be more rigorous."

  The Nation

Pause for a moment here to reflect that even these ethics rules do not apply to Supreme Court judges.

(Interview with the author of the above article, Elie Mystal.)

Roberts takes much the same approach to what he calls “inappropriate behavior in the judicial workplace” (which I can only assume refers to sexual harassment, though Roberts declines to name it). Despite consistent reports of sexual harassment and misconduct in the judicial branch, Roberts claims, not for the first time, that “inappropriate workplace conduct is not pervasive within the Judiciary.” He then goes on to suggest that expanded guidance and training should resolve the few cases he is willing to admit actually happen. What won’t be necessary is congressional interference.

[...]

The report is framed by a discussion of William Howard Taft. Roberts presents Taft as a chief justice who, despite having been president, upheld the principles of judicial independence. But history remembers Taft’s time on the court as one that was terrible for workers: The man literally struck down a tax on companies that used child labor. Taft’s most famous case is one in which he upheld the president’s right to dismiss federal officials without Senate approval.

[...]

And [Roberts] knows that even if people did know these things, Democrats in Congress and the White House lack the strength or the vision to rein him and his cohorts in

Roberts’s cries for judicial independence are actually demands that the judiciary be placed above accountability.

And the ones at the top, including Roberts, pretty much are.

Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor wondered during oral arguments Dec. 1 on Mississippi’s anti-abortion legislation whether the Supreme Court as an institution could survive the “stench” from overturning 50 years of precedent of its Roe v. Wade decision.

[...]

[B]ut the Roberts court’s stench became noticeable with its [earlier voting rights decisions].

[...]

[T]he Roberts court at the end of its 2020 term made it more difficult to challenge voting restrictions post facto. Its decision in Brnovich v. Democratic National Committee said that Section 2 of the [Voting Rights Act], which banned nationally racial discrimination in voting, applied only to intentional discrimination, not to acts that have the effect of disadvantaging racial groups, a standard that will be difficult to meet, intentions being much harder to prove than effects.

The Roberts court’s “stench” comes from decisions that have eroded the principle on which our constitutional republic was founded, i.e., the people are the ultimate sovereigns in America, and they exercise that sovereignty through voting, initially by voting to ratify the Constitution. Examples of such Roberts court decisions include Shelby and Brnovich as well as Citizens United v. FEC (2010), which reversed long-standing campaign finance restrictions.

  The Hill

Let's go further back in Roberts' history...

[President Ronald] Reagan said that the Voting Rights Act humiliated the South. Reagan brought in a guy to figure out how to oppose the 1982 Voting Rights Act amendment, and that guy is John Roberts. John Roberts got his legal start arguing against the Voting Rights Act.

[...]

He is a friend and a handmaiden to White supremacy. People look at his persona and they're saying he can't possibly be that bad. It's because very few people have actually read his decisions and actually understand his entire history on these issues.

  Elie Mystal CNN interview

John Roberts was 26 years old. [...] It was 1981.

[...]

[A]s an aide to Attorney General William French Smith, Roberts was tasked with making the case against one of the most consequential voting rights laws in the nation’s history.

The House had recently passed legislation extending the Voting Rights Act of 1965 — a seminal civil rights bill that dismantled much of Jim Crow — and shoring up one of its key provisions after a 1980 Supreme Court decision had severely weakened the law.

[...]

“Something must be done to educate the Senators on the seriousness of this problem,” Roberts wrote his boss, Smith, just a few days before Christmas. In a subsequent memo, he argued that the rapidly advancing bill — which now forms much of the backbone of American voting rights law — was “not only constitutionally suspect, but also contrary to the most fundamental tenants [sic] of the legislative process on which the laws of this country are based.”

[...]

Though President Reagan preferred a weaker voting rights law — he once described the Voting Rights Act as “humiliating to the South” — the conservative president eventually bowed to political pressure and signed the legislation Roberts deemed contrary to many of our nation’s “most fundamental” tenets.

[...]

President George W. Bush made him chief justice of the United States in 2005. Roberts is now the most powerful judge in the country. As Congress has grown more and more dysfunctional, the Supreme Court is increasingly the locus of policymaking within the United States.

[...]

Among other things, Roberts dismantled much of the Voting Rights Act in Shelby County v. Holder (2013), and he’s joined decisions making it much harder for voting rights plaintiffs to prove they were victims of discrimination. On the basic question of who is allowed to vote and which ballots will be counted, the most important issue in any democracy, Roberts is still the same man who tried and failed to strangle the Voting Rights Act nearly four decades earlier.

[...]

As originally enacted, the Voting Rights Act required jurisdictions with a history of racist voting discrimination to “preclear” any new voting-related laws with the Justice Department or with federal judges in Washington, DC. But this preclearance provision was initially scheduled to expire five years after the law was signed in 1965.

[...]

Congress [...] chose to extend this requirement again in 1975, in 1982, and in 2006. Each time the Voting Rights Act was renewed, it was signed by a Republican president — including at least two Republicans who’d previously criticized the law.

[...]

Although [in 2006] President Bush initially displayed some ambivalence toward Voting Rights Act renewal, and some members of his Justice Department advocated scrapping preclearance, legislative opposition to the renewal never got too far off the ground.

As Edward Blum, a wealthy anti-civil rights activist who would go on to be the driving force behind the Supreme Court case that gutted preclearance in 2013, complained in a 2006 National Review article, “Republicans don’t want to be branded as hostile to minorities, especially just months from an election.”

  Vox

That was then. They no longer care. They just deny it and go on, even when it's obvious.

Justice Antonin Scalia gave voice to [Republican] frustration during oral arguments in Shelby County v. Holder (2013), the Roberts Court case that quashed preclearance. The Voting Rights Act, Scalia claimed, was a “perpetuation of racial entitlement,” and “whenever a society adopts racial entitlements, it is very difficult to get out of them through the normal political processes.”

“I don’t think there is anything to be gained by any Senator to vote against continuation of this act,” Scalia continued. “And I am fairly confident it will be reenacted in perpetuity unless — unless a court can say it does not comport with the Constitution.”

[...]

And so the Supreme Court’s Republican majority stepped up to cure this perceived injustice. Chief Justice Roberts led the charge.

Roberts’s majority opinion in Shelby County posits that the United States simply isn’t racist enough to justify a fully operational Voting Rights Act.

[...]

Black voter turnout “has come to exceed white voter turnout in five of the six States originally covered by” Section 5, Roberts claimed.

Preclearance worked. So there was no longer any need for it.

[...]

One of the most famous was raised by Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg in her dissenting opinion: “Throwing out preclearance when it has worked and is continuing to work to stop discriminatory changes is like throwing away your umbrella in a rainstorm because you are not getting wet.”

[...]

Another problem is that nothing in the Constitution suggests that the Supreme Court gets to decide whether the United States is racist enough to justify extraordinary measures to halt that racism. To the contrary, the Fifteenth Amendment provides that the right to vote “shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude,” and it gives Congress the “power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.”

What powers Congress has not thrown away to the executive branch, it's throwing away to the judicial branch.

Almost immediately after the Supreme Court decided Shelby County — which, among other things, allowed North Carolina to enact new voting laws without federal supervision — North Carolina’s GOP-controlled legislature began work on an omnibus bill that combined several provisions making it harder to cast a ballot.

[...]

The state’s new election law, in the words of a federal appeals court that struck it down, targeted “African Americans with almost surgical precision.”

[...]

North Carolina is just the tip of a much larger iceberg. Roberts and his fellow Republican justices have already taken bold steps to undercut American voting rights. And they are likely to do much more.

[...]

In 2015 [...] Roberts voted to eliminate a federal ban on housing discrimination that has a disparate impact on people of color. But Roberts wound up joining a dissenting opinion in that 2015 case because Justice Anthony Kennedy, a relatively moderate conservative who retired in 2018, voted with the liberal justices to preserve the fair housing law. Now, however, Kennedy is gone. And his replacement, Justice Brett Kavanaugh, is, if anything, even more hostile to voting rights than Chief Justice Roberts.

[...]

[In 2020,] the Court’s Republican majority, in an unsigned opinion joined by Roberts, held that many [mail-in] ballots must be trashed [...] . The crux of the Court’s decision in Republican National Committee v. Democratic National Committee (2020) is that it is more important to prevent courts from altering “the election rules on the eve of an election” than it is to ensure that every vote is counted. And this rule apparently applies even if a sudden, unanticipated crisis [such as the Covid-19 pandemic that arose early that year] risks disenfranchising thousands of voters.

[...]

This moment of profound peril for American democracy is, in many ways, Roberts’s doing. He’s worked his entire career to undermine voting rights.

That article has a nice summary of the history of the Voting Rights Act if you are curious about it. 

 ...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Georgia AG asks for a special grand jury

Feds take an interest in fake elector signatures

Federal prosecutors are reviewing fake Electoral College certifications that declared former President Donald Trump the winner of states that he lost, Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco told CNN on Tuesday.

"We've received those referrals. Our prosecutors are looking at those and I can't say anything more on ongoing investigations," Monaco said in an exclusive interview.
  CNN

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Seditious conspiracy update

Stewart Rhodes and nine alleged co-conspirators with the extremist Oath Keepers group pleaded not guilty Tuesday to seditious conspiracy and other charges in the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol by a pro-Trump mob.

An 11th defendant arrested with Rhodes on Jan. 13, Edward Vallejo, was not present during a court hearing in the case Tuesday and will be arraigned later.

[...]

Rhodes said he was communicating at the Capitol on Jan. 6 with members of his group, part of the far-right anti-government movement, in an effort to “keep them out of trouble.”

[...]

A 48-page indictment alleges that Rhodes, Vallejo and nine previously charged defendants plotted “multiple ways to deploy force” to stop the lawful transfer of presidential power by Inauguration Day 2021. The group conspired to organize into teams, undergo paramilitary training, coordinate travel, assemble and stage weapons and don combat and tactical gear before most joined the Capitol breach, prosecutors alleged.

All “were prepared to answer Rhodes’ call to take up arms at Rhodes’ direction,” the 17-count indictment states. They were evidently drawn to Washington partly in the hope that Trump would invoke the Insurrection Act, transforming the Oath Keepers into a kind of shock-troop militia to keep Trump in power in the White House despite the 2020 election result, according to court filings.

U.S. District Judge Amit P. Mehta of D.C. set a July 11 trial date for the group, with a backup date of Sept. 26.

  WaPo

Alex Jones testified before the Jan 6 Committee

Pro-Trump broadcaster and conspiracy theorist Alex Jones told listeners that he asserted his Fifth Amendment rights nearly 100 times during an interview Monday with the Jan. 6 select committee.

But during a Monday evening broadcast, Jones, who had been subpoenaed last November, gave his audience what he characterized as his “unofficial testimony.”

[...]

Jones said the Jan. 6 committee seemed to have a lot of detailed information about him — that they displayed images of text messages he had with Wren and Cindy Chafian, who organized a pro-Trump rally on Jan. 5. Both Wren and Chafian had been subpoenaed by the committee last fall.

[...]

Jones said the committee suggested they routinely monitor his show. He denied being aware of a Dec. 31 broadcast in which a substitute host, Matthew Bracken, specifically suggested storming the Capitol.

  Politico

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Watch for this...

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

MAGAworld will lose its shit

Rather, lose it more.

WASHINGTON (The Borowitz Report)—President Biden silenced critics of his mental sharpness on Monday by correctly identifying Peter Doocy of Fox News.

After Doocy asked the President a question, Biden made an impressive display of his mental acuity by conclusively demonstrating that he knew who Doocy was.

While some have questioned whether Biden, who is seventy-nine, has the cognitive powers necessary to serve as President, his spot-on description of the Fox White House correspondent seemed to put those doubts to rest.

“The President was faced with a cognitive test—‘Who is Peter Doocy?’—and he nailed it,” one observer said. “This leaves ‘person, woman, man, camera, TV’ in the dust.”

  New Yorker

It's bi-partisan!

UPDATE:  Doocy took it in stride, tho...