In a new book one of the 19 children who were the center of the popular Christian reality show which eventually was rebranded as “19 And Counting,” recounts growing up in the highly restrictive home of Jim Bob and Michelle Duggar and how she has made a major move to separate herself from what she called an “unhealthy version” of Christianity.
In an interview with the New Your Times to discuss her book “Becoming Free Indeed: My Story of Disentangling Faith from Fear,” Jinger Vuolo describes what the Times calls the “darker side” of growing up Duggar.
According to the now 29-year-old whose family’s world was rocked when brother Josh was accused of molesting his sisters and then later sent to jail for possession of child pornography, she lived in fear of doing anything outside the lines of what the family permitted in their tightly orchestrated world that was shared with their fans.
As the Times Ruth Graham wrote, “Even after the image began to crumble, the family has maintained a largely united front. No other siblings have spoken as critically about the family’s theology and values as Mrs. Vuolo. With an online following that includes 1.4 million followers on Instagram, her declaration of independence is being closely watched as a high-profile example of re-examining one’s own religious upbringing.”
Speaking with Graham, Jinger Vuolo explained, “I was just so crippled with fear, and I didn’t know why,” with the Times report adding, “She described herself as a ‘serious rule-follower,’ who took to heart her family’s admonitions to dress in long skirts, avoid rock music and date only under parental supervision. In Mrs. Vuolo’s world, it was never a question that she would bypass college, marry a man approved by her parents and devote her life to parenting and home-schooling.”
In the interview, she discussed the influence of Bill Gothard, who was later accused of sexual harassment, on her family’s lifestyle, telling the Times, “That was all I ever knew. His words, in my mind, were almost the words of God.”
With that in mind, in her book, she writes that she is in the process of “disentangling,” as she separates “the truth of Christianity from the unhealthy version I heard growing up.”
The report goes on to note that she claimed that “she hoped the book, and her ordinary life itself, would show her friends and family who still follow the teachings of her childhood that there’s another way.”
“Even though you’re told your life is going to fall apart if you leave, it’s not. You don’t have to even lose your faith in God,” she explained.
American voters often waver from one election to the next between electing majorities of Republicans or Democrats to Congress or their state legislatures, yet the results of ballot initiatives remain remarkably predictable. Last November’s outcomes results again showed a majority of voters — even those in deep-red states — favoring progressive policies when voting on individual issues rather than voicing their party identity.
But instead of accepting those outcomes as guidance to better represent their constituents, many Republican legislatures are trying to obstruct or neuter citizen lawmaking.
Last year, pro-abortion-rights voters won in all six states with questions on the ballot, including the GOP strongholds of Kansas, Kentucky, and Montana. That success has advocates exploring ballot measures to amend state constitutions in a dozen or more states.
Two Republican officials on Michigan’s Board of State Canvassers initially blocked both of those initiatives from the ballot. Though supporters gathered a record 735,000 petition signatures for the reproductive-rights measure, the two officials claimed that inadequate spacing in the fine print of ballot petitions was disqualifying and voted to disqualify the voting rights initiative on another technicality. The initiatives’ backers filed lawsuits, and thankfully the Michigan Supreme Court ruled in both cases to prevent the sabotage and enable citizens to vote on the issues.
Twenty-four states enable proactive initiatives while two additional states enable citizens to nullify laws, but not enact new ones. Around the turn of the century, progressive initiatives began outnumbering conservative ones, and 2022 yielded victories on a wide range of progressive causes. But Republican politicians increasingly deem this an unacceptable intrusion into their powers and push bills to undermine ballot initiatives on three different fronts: erecting barriers to initiatives reaching the ballot, making passage more difficult and corrupting voters’ intent post-passage.
Last year, Ballotpedia counted a record 232 state bills impacting ballot measure processes, of which 23 passed. The Ballot Initiative Strategy Center (BISC), a nonprofit advocate for citizen lawmaking, listed 140 of those bills as impeding citizen initiatives. And the attacks are unrelenting: Missouri Republicans introduced a dozen such bills this January alone.
Ohio Republicans, meanwhile, proposed legislation to radically increase signature-gathering costs and require a 60 percent supermajority vote for constitutional initiatives. The author of the latter bill openly declared his intent: to block a forthcoming citizen initiative expanding reproductive choice. Also motivating the attack is an initiative to create an independent redistricting commission, which would neutralize gerrymanders that effectively ensure a Republican majority in the legislature. (In an unusual plot twist, a leading advocate for the initiative is Maureen O’Connor, a Republican and former Ohio Supreme Court chief justice.)
Roadblocks to citizen lawmaking may be making their intended impacts, as just 30 initiatives made state ballots in 2022 — the fewest this century. In Utah, for example, an out-of-state group with anonymous funding called the Foundation for Government Accountability helped pass a 2021 law banning paying signature gatherers per valid signature, which is currently standard practice. By nixing a key incentive for workers to gather more signatures than they would if paid only an hourly wage, the law will hike both the cost and duration of campaigns to qualify a ballot measure. “Qualification challenges, courts blocking measures and onerous restrictions” all contributed to the decrease, says Chris Figueredo, executive director of BISC.
Image via Ballotopedia.
Unlike direct voter-disenfranchisement tactics, the escalating assaults on direct democracy have generated few headlines. But regardless of our policy preferences, ballot initiatives provide a vital safety valve, giving citizens a tool to bypass unresponsive legislatures that ignore or defy their constituents. This corrective power is especially vital today, as gerrymandering makes dislodging officeholders in safe seats nearly impossible.
Despite the preponderance of progressive ballot victories, direct democracy is a nonpartisan, pro-democracy tool popular with citizens across the political spectrum. Two-thirds of the 24 states with proactive citizen initiatives typically have had trifecta Republican control of state government. In Colorado, which flipped from GOP control of all branches of government in 2004 to a Democratic trifecta today, 65 percent of voters supported a 2022 initiative to cut state income taxes. If more state legislatures flip to Democrats, conservative initiatives undoubtedly will serve as a check on their power as well.
The election results of 2022 demonstrated that citizen initiatives unite voters with differing party loyalties to advance common interests, often addressing issues where legislators decline to act. The threats to citizen lawmaking should be resisted in favor of protecting one key avenue to ensure frustrated voters a constructive way to engage and progress toward inclusive democracy.
Jeff Milchen is the founder and a board member of Reclaim Democracy!, which works to strengthen grassroots democracy and revoke excessive corporate power. Twitter: @JMilchen
Political experts are warning about a group of nearly 60 far-right wing politicos including Ginni Thomas, Matt Schlapp, and Cleta Mitchell who reportedly will issue a letter calling for the House and Senate to delay votes on leadership positions including Speaker of the House and Senate Majority Leader.
Axios’ Jonathan first reported the news, posting at least part of the letter and the list of signatories (below).
Some of the other more recognizable names on the letter include Mark Meadows, the former Trump White House chief of staff; Cleta Mitchell, the attorney who The New York Times calls the “architect of Donald J. Trump’s failed efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election”; former Trump attorney Jenna Ellis; former U.S. Senator and former Heritage Foundation president Jim DeMint (R-SC); former Trump deputy campaign manager David Bossie, the right wing activist and head of the organization responsible for the Citizens United Supreme Court lawsuit that made countless billions of dark money in political elections legal.
Also, white supremacist and disgraced former U.S. Congressman Steve King (R-IA); convicted felon and disgraced former U.S. Congressman Steve Stockman (R-TX), right-wing religious extremist Kenneth Blackwell of the Family Research Council, which is on the Southern Poverty Law Center’s list of anti-LGBTQ hate groups, and others.
“The Republican Party needs leaders who will confidently and skillfully present a persuasive coherent vision of who we are, what we stand for, and what we will do,” the letter reads. “Many current elections are still undecided. There should be no rushed leadership elections.”
“Conservative Members of the House and Senate have called for the leadership elections to be delayed,” it adds, not naming which ones. “We strongly urge both Houses of Congress to postpone the formal Leadership elections until after the December 6 runoff in Georgia and all election results are fully decided.”
“Note at least 3 people on this letter–Mark Meadows, Jenna Ellis, and Cleta Mitchell–are almost certainly subjects of the Jan6 investigation,” observed civil rights and national security journalist Marcy Wheeler. “So this is partly a crime-protection racket, signed by Clarence Thomas’ spouse.”
Politico Senior legal affairs reporter Kyle Cheney, who has done extensive reporting on the January 6 insurrection, commented, “some of these people are experts at seeking delays of elections.”
Investigative journalist and columnist Dave Troy, who has done extensive reporting on Vladimir Putin, noted: “All this makes me ask is what these clowns (Ginni Thomas, Cleta Mitchell, Mark Meadows et al) are planning between now and December 6, and how to stop whatever it is. Are they planning to poison someone? What is it this time?”
“Why aren’t these people in jail, anyway?” he also asked.
The American Independent’s senior political reporter Emily C. Singer simply called it a “who’s who of insurrection supporting Republicans.”
“So you’re telling me that Ginni Thomas, Mark Meadows and Matt Schlapp want to interfere in an ANOTHER election,” wrote Attorney Adam Cohen of Lawyers for Good Government. “Folks, even if the Democrats retain the House, we cannot rest. Because these people won’t.”
It’s no secret that Dick Uihlein and his wife Elizabeth Uihlein are major donors to the Republican Party. But according to analysis from the Daily Beast, the billionaire owners of the shipping company Uline have shown a preference for a certain type of Republican in the 2022 midterms: MAGA “election deniers” who either falsely claim or imply that the 2020 election was stolen from former President Donald Trump.
The bogus claim that supporters of now-President Joe Biden stole the election from Trump has been repeatedly debunked, and even some of Trump’s former allies on the right have called out the Big Lie as nonsense — including former U.S. Attorney General Bill Barr, who was once considered a Trump loyalist but denounced Trump’s claims of a stolen election as “bu*****t.” But none of that has stopped the Uihleins from donating to election deniers.
In a report published by the Daily Beast on November 3, journalist Roger Sollenberger explains, “The billionaire Uihlein family are the biggest Republican donors for the 2022 midterms. But a review of federal data also shows that the overwhelming majority of that money has gone to candidates who have denied or questioned the 2020 election results — in fact, about 80 percent of it went to those Republicans.”
Sollenberger reports that according to Federal Election Commission (FEC) data, Dick and Elizabeth Uihlein “gave about $1.7 million to incumbent candidates” between January 7, 2021 and August 31, 2022.
“About $1.3 million of that money, or nearly 80 percent, went to campaigns or committees tied to the 147 Republicans who voted, on January 6, to overturn President Joe Biden’s victory,” Sollenberger explains. “The Uihleins have also given around $225,000 to non-incumbent Republicans seeking federal office in 2022. And more than 85 percent of that amount — around $191,000 — also went to candidates who have either denied or questioned the legitimacy of the election results, including some who attended events at the January 6 insurrection.”
In an article published by ProPublica on October 26, reporters Justin Elliott, Megan O’Matz and Doris Burke described the Uihleins (who own the shipping company Uline) as the “largest contributors” to the gubernatorial campaign of Pennsylvania State Sen. Doug Mastriano — a far-right conspiracy theorist, QAnon ally, Christian nationalist and “Stop the Steal” Republican who, in the Keystone State, is running against Pennsylvania Attorney General Josh Shapiro (the Democratic gubernatorial nominee). Shapiro, in his attack ads, has relentlessly attacked Mastriano as a dangerous, unhinged extremist, and it appears to be working. Polls released in early November have found Mastriano trailing Shapiro by 16 percent (Fox News), 10 percent (The Hill/Emerson College) or 12 percent (USA Today/Suffolk University).
According to Elliott, O’Matz and Burke, the Uline owners “are major funders to groups spreading election falsehoods, including Restoration of America, which, according to an internal document obtained by ProPublica, aims to ‘get on God’s side of the issues and stay there’ and ‘punish leftists.’ Flush with profits from their shipping supply company, the Uihleins have emerged as the No. 1 federal campaign donors for Republicans ahead of the November elections, and the No. 2 donors overall behind liberal financier George Soros. The couple has spent at least $121 million on state and federal politics in the last two years alone, fighting taxes, unions, abortion rights and marijuana legalization.”
Right-wing media outlets are often quick to report on “Real Time” host Bill Maher’s scathing criticisms of “political correctness” and the “woke” movement, but they typically overlook the fact that Maher spends a lot more time bashing far-right MAGA Republicans — who he views as not only terrible from a policy standpoint, but a dire threat to U.S. democracy itself. And when Maher made a Tuesday, November 1 appearance on MSNBC’s “The Beat,” he predicted that in 2024, former President Donald Trump will be able to “pull off a coup” with the help of his allies at the state level.
Maher told MSNBC’s Ari Melber, “The party out of power almost always wins the midterm election anyway, right? Because it’s the midterms. You’ve gotta throw the rascals out. So, everyone’s sort of acting like this is a normal time, but it’s not. Once they win, the die is cast.”
The “Real Time” host added that countless Republican “election deniers” are “on the ballot” in the 2022 midterms, and he described them as extremists who “basically don’t believe in democracy.”
“They don’t believe that the person with the most votes wins unless he’s on our side,” Maher told Melber. “OK, so this is what Trump has been doing behind the scenes: wanting to put these people in place, because let me tell you something, Ari. On January 20 — my birthday — 2025, he’s going to show up at the inauguration whether he’s on the list or not. He’s going to show up. But this time, he’s going to have this army of election deniers that he has put in place.”
Maher continued, “I mean, people don’t slide into authoritarianism necessarily with tanks in the street. Hitler was elected. Putin was elected. Erdogan in Turkey was elected. Viktor Orbán…. You can get elected, and then just not leave. And that is what I think is going to happen.”
Maher went on to say that Democrats aren’t doing enough to counter the authoritarian threat the U.S. is facing from Trump’s allies and the MAGA movement.
“People haven’t gotten it, I don’t think,” Maher told Melber. “This ship of state has hit the iceberg. But we’re still, like, acting like it’s normal like they did on the Titanic. ‘Oh, what was that?’ And they went back to drinking champagne. But really, the ship was going to go down.”
Maher added, “If the Republicans who win this election, which I’m sure they will — I think they will —again…. What we’re going to see in the next two years is just hearing after hearing about whatever. Hunter Biden. And they’re going to impeach (President Joe) Biden.”
Maher predicted that Trump will win the 2024 presidential nomination but won’t concede if he loses to a Democrat.
“Again, Trump is not going to accept no for an answer,” Maher continued. “And he’s going to have the people in place this time who will allow him to pull off this coup…. Nobody has realized that we are already in a completely different paradigm, and this has happened in many other countries — and it seems to be happening now. This is the it-can’t-happen-to-us moment, but it’s happening to us.”
The United States has had more than its share of disturbing political headlines in the weeks leading up to the Tuesday, November 8 election, from death threats against election workers to a break-in at the campaign headquarters of Arizona Secretary of State Katie Hobbs (who is running for governor against far-right MAGA Republican Kari Lake), to a violent attack on House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s husband, Paul Pelosi, on Friday, October 28. During the invasion of the Pelosi’s San Francisco home, the intruder demanded to know, “Where is Nancy?” before attacking Paul Pelosi with a hammer — indicating that the attack could have been politically motivated rather than a robbery attempt. “Where is Nancy?” is a phrase that some of the rioters used during the January 6, 2021 invasion of the U.S. Capitol Building.
The attack on Paul Pelosi came before a weekend of attention-grabbing political headlines around the world, from thousands of fascists descending on Predappio, Italy, Benito Mussolini’s birthplace, to celebrate the 100-year anniversary of Il Duce’s rise to power to left-wing candidate Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva’s narrow victory over far-right President Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil’s 2022 election. Some of Lula’s supporters fear that with Brazil having become so bitterly divided — not unlike the U.S. — the country could suffer political violence from pro-Bolsonaro authoritarians.
In a column published on Halloween, Never Trump conservative and Washington Post opinion columnist Max Boot speaks candidly about far-right violence in the U.S. — stressing that it is disingenuous to use “both sides” rhetoric when discussing the United States’ problem with political violence, most of which is coming from the far right rather than the far left.
“The same day as the Pelosi attack, a man pleaded guilty to making death threats against Rep. Eric Swalwell (D-Calif.),” Boot explains. “Two days earlier, three men who were motivated by right-wing, anti-lockdown hysteria after COVID-19 hit were convicted of aiding a plot to kidnap Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer (D). In August, another man died after attacking an FBI office because he was so upset about the Bureau’s search of Mar-a-Lago.”
Boot continues, “Then there are all the terrible hate crimes, in cities including Pittsburgh, El Paso and Buffalo, where gunmen were motivated by the kind of racist rhetoric — especially the ‘Great Replacement theory’ — now openly espoused on Fox ‘News.’”
Boot goes on to say that many journalists, in the interest of being “fair-minded,” will write something along the lines of, “To be sure, political violence is not confined to the right. Rep. Steve Scalise (R-La.) was shot in 2017 by a gunman with leftist beliefs, and in June, a man was arrested for allegedly plotting to assassinate Supreme Court Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh after becoming incensed about court rulings on abortion and guns.”
Republican National Committee Chair Ronna Romney McDaniel, following the assault on Paul Pelosi, said, “Violence is up across the board.” But Boot finds such comments disingenuous, as most of the political violence in the U.S. is coming from the far right rather than the far left.
“Violence is unacceptable whether from the left or right, period,” Boot writes. “But we can’t allow GOP leaders to get away with this false moral equivalency. They are evading their responsibility for their extremist rhetoric that all too often motivates extremist actions. The New America think tank found last year that, since September 11, 2001, far-right terrorists had killed 122 people in the United States, compared with only one killed by far-leftists.”
Boot continues, “A study from the Center for Strategic and International Studies last year found that since 2015, right-wing extremists had been involved in 267 plots or attacks, compared with 66 for left-wing extremists. A Washington Post/University of Maryland survey released in January found that 40 percent of Republicans said violence against the government can be justified, compared with only 23 percent of Democrats. There is little doubt about what is driving political violence: the ascendance of (Donald) Trump.”
Boot wraps up his column by emphasizing that it is disingenuous to claim that in 2022, the left and the right are the same when it comes to political violence in the United States.
“Please don’t accept the GOP framing of the assault on Paul Pelosi as evidence of a problem plaguing ‘both sides of the aisle,’” Boot warns. “Political violence in America is being driven primarily by the far right, not the far left, and the far right is much closer to the mainstream of the Republican Party than the far left is to the Democratic Party.”
White nationalist and twice-convicted felon Steve Bannon told Kash Patel – who served as chief of staff to the acting secretary of defense under former President Donald Trump – that Republicans are going to go after Democrats “with a bayonet” if the GOP wins majorities in the United States House of Representatives and the Senate in the November midterm elections.
“What word of advice would you give to leadership in the House in the next two weeks and then after they take power?” Bannon asked Patel on Wednesday’s edition of War Room: Pandemic. Patel proceeded to reference COVID-19 conspiracy theories and threaten Democratic Capitol Hill lawmakers.
“It’s simple. I said, I have no problem going around the country campaigning for you because you care about America First values. And you better not forget the things that you campaigned on: accountability, destroying the two-tiered system of justice, and ending the politicization of law enforcement in our military. Gone are the days where you force individuals who are brave enough to serve this country to choose between faith and a fake China virus jab. These things have to be front and center. Reinstating those law enforcement military personnel that were removed from their positions because they chose faith over a jab that wasn’t fully tested,” Patel replied, noting that Representatives Adam Schiff (D-California), Eric Swalwell (D-California), and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-New York) are among the lawmakers that the right-wing would like to get rid of.
“But what I’m going to remind these people of that we’re sending to Washington — the [Nevada GOP Senate candidates][Adam] Laxalts [Nevada], the Blakes [Masters of Arizona], the JDs [Vance of Ohio] and everybody else — is that you guys, on these committees, with the majority, have to come in and subpoena everybody and every record and put them out for the American people, not keep them to yourselves. Two: you got to kick all these people off the committees like they did to us,” Patel continued. “Watermelon head Schiff, Swalwell and company, AOC, and the whole squad have no business touching the American Constitution because they have lit it on fire for the last five years. And they will not be permitted to have leadership positions of any kind.”
Patel also said that Republicans “will conduct a full-scale overhaul of the intelligence and law enforcement communities, whether it’s with – through a Church-like commission or otherwise. Every member of Congress and every senator needs it be known that when they’re sworn in on January 1st, they were sent there for these reasons. This is why the American public sent you there. And if they forget, I’m going to come on your show and remind them, by name.”
But Bannon thought that harsher measures are necessary. “No, we’re going to do it by bayonet,” he stated. “By the way, MSNBC, you want something to complain about, about Kash Patel? Just – we’ll cut this segment. You just listen to what he just said ’cause that’s gonna be reality.”
Former President Donald Trump is already laying the groundwork to challenge the results of the Pennsylvania Senate race, viewing the election as a “dress rehearsal for Trump 2024,” according to Rolling Stone.
Trump last month met with Republican allies at Trump Tower to demand they “do something” about the Senate race between Pennsylvania Lt. Gov. John Fetterman and Republican challenger Mehmet Oz, claiming that there was a “scam” happening in Philadelphia and elsewhere around the state.
“During our briefing, he was concerned that 2020 is going to happen again in 2022,” Michael Caputo, a former Trump administration official who attended the meeting along with Bradford County Commissioner Doug McLinko and retired CIA officer Sam Faddis, told Rolling Stone. “Our team encouraged him to be concerned … [Furthermore], I’m advising Republicans to recruit and train election observers and a team of attorneys to oversee historically problematic precincts,” Caputo said.
The meeting was one of several in which Trump has discussed plans to challenge the 2022 midterm results, and not just in Pennsylvania, four sources told the outlet, discussing “scorched-earth legal tactics they could deploy.”
TrumpWorld is planning “aggressive court campaigns” if there is any hint of doubt about the results, according to the report. Trump himself has been briefed on plans in multiple states, including in Georgia, but he has been particularly fixated on the Pennsylvania race. If Oz does not win or the results are close, sources told Rolling Stone, Trump and other Republicans are already planning to “wage a legal and activist crusade against the ‘election integrity’ of Democratic strongholds such as Philly,” according to the report.
One source told the outlet that Trump is particularly focused on Pennsylvania because he sees the Senate race as a “dress rehearsal for Trump 2024.”
Trump during the September meeting urged GOP allies to work to limit mail-in voting in the state, pushing debunked claims that the 2020 election was stolen in Philadelphia and demanding officials focus on the heavily Democratic and diverse area, according to the report. Trump has asked several advisers what Republicans are doing to prevent Democrats from “steal[ing] it in Philadelphia [like] they did last time,” sources told the outlet.
Numerous Trump allies are ready to help wage another campaign to stoke doubt in election results before any votes are even cast.
“It’s important to prepare for legal fights that will inevitably arise,” Hogan Gidley, a former Trump White House spokesman who now works at the America First Policy Institute, told Rolling Stone. “The effort that the Center for Election Integrity is focused on started at the beginning of this year…We’ve been seeding efforts across the country in important states…[because] having people on the ground locally is key to these efforts — because if you’re not at the table, you’re on the menu.”
MyPillow founder Mike Lindell, who has spent millions pushing lies that voting machines flipped votes from Trump to President Joe Biden, also vowed to fight over the 2022 results.
“No matter what happens, I’m not giving up on getting rid of those voting machines … I will not stop until the machines are gone,” Lindell, who is facing a $1 billion defamation lawsuit from Dominion Voting Systems, told Rolling Stone.
Patrick Byrne, the former Overstock CEO who has likewise poured his own money into the “Big Lie” crusade, has teamed with former Trump national security adviser Michael Flynn to form the so-called America Project.
“We have made proper preparations for post-election challenges if necessary, but our overwhelming focus is on having a clean, transparent election, which obviates the need for post-election legal scuffles,” Byrne told the outlet.
The Third Circuit Court of Appeals earlier this year ruled that tossing such ballots would result in “disenfranchising otherwise qualified voters” over a “meaningless requirement” that does not affect the voters’ eligibility. The Supreme Court last week tossed the court’s decision but did not rule on whether the ballots are required to be counted. A state court previously ruled that undated ballots can be counted and the state’s Supreme Court in 2020 ruled that such ballots should be counted that year but not in future elections.
Democratic Gov. Tom Wolf and Acting Secretary of State Leigh Chapman issued guidance urging counties to count the undated ballots but the RNC and a group of Pennsylvania Republicans sued last week, asking the state Supreme Court to rule that the undated ballots should not be counted. The lawsuit is led by attorneys Kathleen Gallagher and john Gore, who previously represented Pennsylvania Republicans in their attempt to overturn the 2020 results over late-arriving mail-in ballots.
It’s a trend that could play out across the country as numerous election deniers seek midterm wins, including Arizona gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake and New Hampshire Senate candidate Don Bolduc. And pro-Trump media has boosted the message.
“If it is fair, Kari Lake’s going to win,” Fox News host Tucker Carlson said recently.
Pro-Trump radio host Mark Levin accused Democrats of “trying to steal the election for Fetterman,” citing the dispute over the undated ballots.
The Rolling Stone report noted that Trump’s obsession with bolstering the Republican legal infrastructure to challenge the election stands in stark contrast with the “relatively small sums” he has poured into the campaign to boost Oz’s chances. His super PAC has spent just $770,000 on TV ads for Trump, compared to $34 million from the Senate Leadership Fund, which is allied with Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky.
Some Republicans have taken notice.
“There’s a lot of people that were Trump supporters, who backed him through thick and thin,” a Pennsylvania Republican attorney told Rolling Stone. “That’s not lost on them.”
The Supreme Court may be within a few months of ending democracy in the United States and turning the White House over to a group of billionaires who’ve already funded the GOP takeover of multiple state legislatures.
But don’t just take my word for it. Consider these sources:
And Moore v Harper is just the latest in a long string of naked assaults on American democracy and the rights of average American citizens, particularly when they conflict with the rights of billionaires and giant corporations.
So, how the hell did we end up here?
Of the six-vote hard-right majority on the Supreme Court, only one of them was appointed by a president who actually won his election (Thomas: Bush Sr.). The other five were appointed by George W. Bush (lost in 2000 by about a half-million votes) and Trump (lost in 2016 by over 3 million votes).
The urgency and ferocity with which they’re ripping our Constitution to shreds seems driven by their knowledge of their own illegitimacy.
Republican appointees across our federal court system are trying to “deconstruct the administrative state” of America, to quote Steve Bannon. Most recently, the majority-Trump-appointed 5th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled this week that the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau’s funding mechanism is unconstitutional. That case will appear at the Supreme Court soon, in all probability.
The most concerning case right now, however, is Moore v Harper which considers the bizarre theory Trump was pushing Pence to accept, that voters don’t determine who becomes president via the Electoral College but that individual state legislatures can simply award their Electoral votes to whichever candidate strikes their fancy.
It’s loosely based on language in the Constitution, but defies two centuries of precedent and turns pretty much every part of elections over to state legislatures with no oversight whatsoever by either governors or the people, and can’t be appealed to any court, including the Supreme Court.
Judge Michael Luttig — the famous and credible conservative judge, the Edmund Burke of this era — has joined the team fighting the potential outcome of this decision.
Luttig suggests this theory, if adopted by the Court, could very well signal the end of Democratic presidents so long as more than 25 of our 50 states have Republican-controlled legislatures (and their governors can’t even veto their legislatures, according to this theory). Today 30 states’ legislatures are fully under GOP control, up from 14 in 2009.
Luttig, the elders among us may remember, personally ran Clarence Thomas’ Supreme Court hearing and worked for years side-by-side with John Roberts in the Reagan Justice Department. He’s friends with both men and is considered one of the top conservative judges in contemporary America.
The “Independent State Legislature theory” at the core of Moore v Harper is, according to Luttig:
[A]ntithetical to the Framers’ intent, the text, and the Constitution’s fundamental design and architecture.
But that’s just the beginning of the out-of-control and dangerous behavior of the far-right radicals on today’s court. Since there’s been a conservative majority on the Court it has, among other things:
*Handed the 2000 election to George W. Bush
*Radically cut back the rights of unions to organize and represent workers
*Declared that billionaires buying politicians is merely “free speech”
*Gutted the power of the EPA to regulate planet-destroying carbon pollution
*And ripped the heart out of both the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act.
In just the past year this Court, now stacked with 3 new and deeply unqualified (but young!) hard-right Trump-humping activists, has already ruled to:
*End the 6th Amendment right of prisoners to challenge convictions when their lawyers were demonstrably corrupt or incompetent (Shinn v Ramirez✎ EditSign). In her dissent, Justice Sotomayor wrote, “The Court’s decision will leave many people who were convicted in violation of the Sixth Amendment to face incarceration or even execution without any meaningful chance to vindicate their right to counsel.”
*Remove from US citizens who move to (or live in) Puerto Rico the right to receive certain Social Security benefits in their US v Vaello-Madero case. Whacking the rights of over 300,000 Americans living in PR, the six crazies on the Court ruled that only Congress could fix the damage they themselves were doing. The problem with that, as Justice Sonia Sotomayor pointed out in her dissent, is that because PR isn’t yet a state and has no member of Congress to fight on their behalf the Court was simply “punishing disparities suffered by citizen residents of Puerto Rico under Congress’ unequal treatment.”
*Take away your Miranda rights to remain silent, avoid self-incrimination, and know you have access to a lawyer. Americans cannot, the 6 “conservatives” on the Court ruled in Vega v. Tekoh, sue police officers who fail to tell them their Miranda rights.
*Eliminate many non-citizens’ rights under the Constitution when abused by the federal government. While the Constitution refers to “persons” rather than “citizens” in most critical places (like the 14th Amendment guaranteeing equal protection under the law), the Court decided in two cases, Garland v. Gonzalez and in Johnson v. Arteaga-Martinez, that noncitizens often are not entitled to bond hearings or class-wide injunctive relief when screwed by the feds.
*Rip away 4th Amendment privacy rights against unreasonable search and seizure for all persons living within 100 miles of an ocean or our borders with Mexico or Canada (that’s two out of three American citizens – even here in Portland, I’m within 100 miles of the Pacific Ocean). In Egbert v Boule, the six rightwingers on the Court ruled that border patrol and other federal officers can search you, your home, or your vehicle for any old reason they want because you live in the vicinity of a border or ocean and they consider you suspicious. No warrant necessary anymore.
*Give police officers who use excessive force immunity from accountability. In Rivas-Villegas v. Cortesluna and City of Tahlequah, OK v. Bondthe Court upheld its own invention, the doctrine of “qualified immunity,” that makes it almost impossible to sue cops when they wail on you or even kill you (in the Tahlequah case they killed a man in his own garage) for little or no reason.
*Kill the power of the EPA under the Clean Air Act to regulate carbon pollution or protect communities from having their water supplies poisoned by industry seeking profits. West Virginia v EPAended that agency’s power to regulate carbon dioxide in our atmosphere, and Louisiana v American Rivers handed polluters, overturning 50 years of precedent, the power to overrule states’ and tribes’ rules against pollution of their waterways.
That was last year, and apparently it was just a warm-up:
*Now the Court, in addition to taking on Moore v Harper that could guarantee no Democrat in our lifetimes will ever again become president, is planning to take a second large bite out of the Voting Rights Act in Merrill v Mulligan.
*Even as guns have become the leading cause of death among American children and gun-related crime is washing over our country like a poisonous bloody tide, the Court is preparing to unleash even more weapons on our nation by gutting gun owner licensure laws in New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen.
Virtually every one of these decisions are or will be based on the power the Court gave itself to overturn laws passed by Congress and signed by the President in its 1803 Marbury v Madison case.
That case caused such a backlash that the next time the Court ruled on a major constitutional issue was in 1856 with Dred Scott v Sanford, which arguably kicked off the Civil War and President Lincoln refused to recognize.
From the founding of our republic until the post-Reconstruction era, the Court rarely ruled to strike down or modified laws based on their reading of Constitution. Mostly it just did its job as the final court of appeals; after all, the buck has to stop somewhere.
That’s how it’s designed in the Constitution: when different judges disagree or cases go back-and-forth on appeal, the Supreme Court makes the final decision about who wins and who loses.
Back in the early days of the republic the Court was sometimes referred to as the “chickens and dogs court” because so many cases had to do with disputes between farmers (most of America was agricultural at the time).
The idea of deciding cases on the basis of the Constitution was considered exotic or bizarre, and the idea of striking down laws made by Congress and signed by the president was so unthinkable it was only done twice in major cases during the first century of this nation’s history.
When the Court voted in 1803 to give itself the power to claim the Constitution as its excuse to overturn Congress’ laws, then-President Jefferson reflected the outrage of the nation.
There is literally nothing in the Constitution that gives the Supreme Court the exclusive right to decide what the Constitution says or means and impose it on the other two branches of government, or on the rest of America. That is a power the Supreme Court took onto itself in that 1803 decision of its own, Marbury v Madison.
It was such a radical step that it drove then-President Jefferson to declare:
[O]ur Constitution…has given — according to this opinion — to one of [the three branches of government] alone the right to prescribe rules for the government of the others; and to that one, too, which is unelected by and independent of the nation… The Constitution, on this hypothesis, is a mere thing of wax in the hands of the Judiciary which they may twist and shape into any form they please.
The popular outrage was so intense that, after that 1803 Marbury decision, the Supreme Court only ruled twice between the founding of our nation and the 1860s on a constitutional issue, and in each case both Congress and the president at the time ignored the ruling.
The first was President Andrew Jackson when the Court ruled the Second National Bank was constitutional and Jackson shut it down anyway, claiming it wasn’t. He said:
The Congress, the Executive, and the Court must each for itself be guided by its own opinion of the Constitution. Each public officer who takes an oath to support the Constitution swears that he will support it as he understands it, and not as it is understood by others… The opinion of the judges has no more authority over Congress than the opinion of Congress has over the judges, and on that point the President is independent of both.
A generation later, President Abraham Lincoln chose to explicitly ignore the Supreme Court’s expansion of chattel slavery in its 1856 Dred Scott v Sanford decision, as did Congress, and even went on to free enslaved Americans before the Court could weigh in again.
Instead of putting the Supreme Court in charge of American laws, the Framers of the Constitution did the opposite: they put Congress in charge of the Supreme Court.
As they wrote in Article 3, Section 2 of the Constitution:
[T]he Supreme Court shall have appellate jurisdiction, both as to law and fact, with such Exceptions, and under such Regulations as the Congress shall make.
Republicans know this well. When John Roberts worked as an attorney for Ronald Reagan, he suggested that both Brown v Board and Roe v Wade could be overturned by Congress by simply stripping from the Court the power to decide on issues of race or abortion (as I detail in The Hidden History of the Supreme Court and the Betrayal of America).
Most recently, in the wake of the Obergefell gay marriage decision, Republicans in Congress offered a law stripping from the Court its power to rule that gay people could get married. The Marriage Protection Act, which passed the House of Representatives on July 22, 2004 but failed in the Senate, explicitly says:
No court created by Act of Congress shall have any jurisdiction, and the Supreme Court shall have no appellate jurisdiction, to hear or decide any question pertaining to the interpretation of, or the validity under the Constitution of, section 1738C or this section.
While this sort of court-stripping is likely to meet resistance both from Congress and from the Supreme Court, a much easier step is to simply reduce the power of the Court to go off on these wild excursions based on their mind-reading of the Founders.
That could be accomplished by Congress creating an “regulation” for the Court that says all decisions involving Constitutional matters must be decided by consensus (the most strict) or with no fewer than 7 out of 9 notes.
Other options include expanding the size of the Court, term-limiting the Court, or — what FDR had proposed — moving all over-70 justices (Alito, Thomas, and Roberts in 3 years) to “emeritus” status so they can continue to participate in deliberations but lose their vote (or all the emeritus members’ votes are consolidated into one when there’s consensus).
Republicans are already talking out loud about state legislatures legally handing the 2024 election to Trump or DeSantis regardless of who wins, no insurrection necessary this time, because they’re assuming the Court will rule their way.
So, with Moore v Harper and even more toxic and democracy-hobbling or even democracy-destroying decisions coming before the Court, what can we do?
At the very least, Congress should mandate that the Court abide by the same ethics rules that every other federal court and judge must follow, and that all arguments and decisions be televised. This would increase the power of dissenters on the Court and raise the integrity-focusing power of the spotlight of public opinion.
All of these options are within the power of Congress, should it choose to end the filibuster and exercise that power.
Whatever strategy Democratic leadership and the Biden administration choose, America is today in the midst of a severe constitutional crisis and action is needed right now or, at the very least, in the weeks immediately after this November’s election.
If we fail, 2024 may be this nation’s last election for president.
Fox News’ Tucker Carlson recently attempted to twist the words of MSBNC’s Tiffany Cross when she delivered her assessment of the insurrection on the U.S. Capitol.
On Wednesday, October 19, Carlson accused Cross of demonizing white women. During the recent segment, Cross insisted white women played a significant role in the insurrection.
The MSNBC host went on to express how white women were more of “enablers to this very dangerous domestic terrorist movement.”
According to HuffPost, white women played a “front-facing role” in the insurrection and more than 100 of them participated in the insurrection. The report also compared white women’s insurrection role to the reemergence of the Ku Klux Klan.
With the emergence of social media, far-right factions now have more outlets to spew hatred and spin conspiracy theories. HuffPost notes that Cross’ assessment appears to align with the historical timelines.
However, Carlson is arguing otherwise. The Fox host, who has been pushing the so-called “great replacement” theories over the last several months, accused Cross of fearmongering.
“So it’s not just whites, it’s white women,” Carlson said. “Their women are bad too! The women, of course, are the key to reproducing the white race, which is clearly a threat, as she says again and again to you and your family. They’re dangerous. They want to hurt you.”
However, he didn’t stop there. Carlson went on to suggest that the assessment was based on one theory: that white women are a danger to the United States.
“The gist of it is very, very clear. White women are dangerous because white people are dangerous. They are, by the nature of their DNA, potential domestic terrorists.”
u201cTucker Carlson went full nazi going after Tiffany Cross, a black MSNBC host. Tucker directly invoked the blood libel in graphic terms and described white women as the key to the “white race.” nnhttps://t.co/YjC0e1qiwNu201d
