Preach, Al, preach

 

What a different, better world we might be living in if the Supreme Court hadn't elected George W Bush in 2000.

The 2000 election was the beginning of the end of US democracy

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

The actual stolen election

And got away with it assisted by the Supreme Court, which keeps telling us they don't get involved in political issues.

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

Presidential candidate Beto O'Rourke chimes in

Truth.

I share your frustration, pal.

Just sow confusion and then run out the clock

The exact contours of the FBI’s investigation [into Brett Kavanaugh's past] weren’t clear and could potentially evolve, as Mr. Trump and senior administration officials pushed back against reports that the White House dictated who would be interviewed as part of a reopening of Judge Kavanaugh’s background investigation that lawmakers agreed to last week before the full Senate considers his nomination.

The Wall Street Journal reported Saturday that the parameters of the FBI probe, which are determined by the White House, would include interviews with the first two women who publicly accused Judge Kavanaugh of sexual assault but not a third, Julie Swetnick. She said last week in a sworn affidavit that the nominee attended parties decades ago where she was raped and tried to get women drunk at such gatherings. Ms. Swetnick didn’t say Mr. Kavanaugh raped her. The judge has repeatedly denied all allegations of sexual misconduct.

Late Saturday evening, Mr. Trump said on Twitter he had not limited the FBI investigation to only allow interviews with certain individuals.

“Actually, I want them to interview whoever they deem appropriate, at their discretion,” Mr. Trump said. But one person familiar with the FBI’s thinking said it was unlikely that the shape of the investigation would change without official communication from the White House that it wanted the bureau to interview other people beyond the list already provided.

The FBI has declined to comment on the Kavanaugh probe.

  WSJ

So WTF are you publishing claims from "one person familiar with the FBI's thinking?"

White House officials appearing on Sunday morning news shows rebutted reports that Mr. Trump’s team was seeking to limit the investigation but didn’t say that Ms. Swetnick would be interviewed.

“The president very much respects the independence of the FBI, and feels as he said last night that they should be looking at anything they feel is credible within this limited scope,” Kellyanne Conway, a senior adviser to Mr. Trump, told CNN Sunday morning.

And that's what we expect them to do.

Asked if White House counsel Don McGahn told the FBI who could and couldn’t be interviewed, Ms. Conway said she didn’t think Mr. McGahn would do that but added that she hadn’t discussed the matter with him. “But we’re not trying to interfere,” she said. “It’s the president saying, ‘Go ahead.’ ”

This confusion and no department seeming to know what another department is doing, and just generally appearing to be ignorant of facts, used to be seen as a mark of incompetence. I'm beginning to think that they found out it works for them, so now it's a feature, not a bug.

White House press secretary Sarah Sanders, who also spoke Sunday, said, “The White House is not micromanaging this process.”

“The Senate is dictating the terms,” she said in an interview on Fox. “They laid out the request, and we’ve opened it up.”White House press secretary Sarah Sanders, who also spoke Sunday, said, “The White House is not micromanaging this process.”

“The Senate is dictating the terms,” she said in an interview on Fox. “They laid out the request, and we’ve opened it up.”

Grassley's Asses? THAT Senate?

Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham, a member of the Judiciary Committee and a close ally of the White House, said on ABC Sunday that the FBI would interview Christine Blasey Ford and the witnesses she said were present at an early 1980s teenage house party at which she alleged Mr. Kavanaugh assaulted her, as well as Deborah Ramirez, who alleged Mr. Kavanaugh exposed himself to her during a drunken party when they were both freshmen at Yale University.

Asked if it would also include an interview with Ms. Swetnick, Mr. Graham indicated it currently did not. Mr. Graham did say that Mark Judge, a high-school classmate of Mr. Kavanaugh’s whom Dr. Ford says was in the room at the time of her alleged attack in the early 1980s, would be interviewed. Ms. Swetnick has said Mr. Judge was “present” when she was victimized in 1982. Mr. Judge’s lawyer has denied those allegations and said he doesn’t recall the events described by Dr. Ford, who testified about them before senators last Thursday.

And that's going to be Mark Judge's story, I'm sure. I don't recall. It worked for Reagan. And Jeff Sessions.

FBI background investigations are different from criminal investigations in that they are done at the request of a “client”—in this case the White House—and investigators are unable to deploy search warrants or grand jury subpoenas. Potential witnesses are allowed to decline requests to be interviewed.

[...]

Sen. Mazie Hirono, a Hawaii Democrat on the Judiciary Committee, said on ABC that all three accusers should be able to speak with the FBI.

“They all came forward with credible reports,” Ms. Hirono said. “They all said they would be willing to talk to the FBI. The only person that didn’t want an FBI investigation, frankly, was Judge Kavanaugh.”

Oh, we will.

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

Deconstructing America - Part Whatever

That mockery of a presidential commission sat for the first time Wednesday morning, but it was years in the making. [Dissenting Scupreme Court Justice] John Paul Stevens saw it coming. In 2000, the Supreme Court blessed official ratfcking with a constitutional imprimatur. Famously, it held that its decision in that case was "limited to the circumstances" of the 2000 election and, therefore, had no precedential value. That may be true in the nation's courts, but it has proven to be a deadly precedent in our politics.

[...]

[T]he past 17 years has been the worst period for voting rights since the collapse of Reconstruction, and it all goes back to the dynamics unleashed in our politics in 2000. In 2000, for example, Florida contracted for a voter "purge" list that disenfranchised an estimated 20,000 voters, most of them minority citizens, because their names were similar to those of convicted felons. And, now, we have the Interstate Voter Crosscheck Program, which is to that Florida purge list what an oak is to an acorn. The entire Republican political apparatus, state and federal, has been dedicated to rolling back every hard-won expansion of the franchise and democratization of the franchise back to 1913.

I chose that date because that was when the 17th Amendment calling for the direct election of senators was ratified and, as John Nichols points out in The Nation, they're even after that now. You may be comfortable handing the election of senators over to monkeyhouses like the Kansas and Texas state legislatures, but I'm not. This is, of course, part and parcel with the attempt to call a Constitutional Convention under Article V, a constitutional neutron bomb that is dangerously close to exploding.

[...]

So now we have the hideous spectacle of Kris Kobach, the manifestly dishonest secretary of state from Kansas, and the father of the Crosscheck system, having been tasked at the highest level of the federal government with delegitimizing and suppressing votes over the entire country. The spirit of the Brooks Brothers Riot that stopped the 2000 recount in Dade County is now the official policy of a presidential administration, and not by accident, either.

[...]

True, the pushback on Kobach has been vigorous. (He's getting sued so often you'd think he was President* Trump and the NAACP was a bunch of contractors he'd stiffed.) But the patterns of force unleashed 17 years ago continue unabated in our politics, in our political dialogue, and in our perceptions of ourselves as a self-governing people. Every time a citizen declines to vote because "they're all the same," and every time a citizen declines to vote because it's too much trouble, those patterns win again. And if you want an argument that every election matters, imagine where we'd be on the travel ban without state attorneys general, or where we'd be on voting rights issues without the steadfast resistance of secretaries of state around the country.

  Charles P Pierce

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