Republican Assault on Democracy and March Towards Fascism

[Bact PhD]

Dateline Flori-DUH:
Just when I thought Supreme Emperor couldn’t be any more odious…to quote the late Ron Popeil, “But Wait, There’s More!”

www.tallahassee.com/story/news/politics/2022/06/16/desantis-florida-stop-woke-act-challenged-universities-free-speech/7630033001/

This is mostly a summary of what’s already out there, but for this gem:

Draft legislation shaped by the governor’s office also suggests that DeSantis may want even more control over faculty hiring at colleges and universities if he wins re-election in November, heightening anxiety in Florida and across the nation’s higher ed community.

[snip]

A 70-page proposal drafted by Republican lawmakers at the governor’s request and obtained by the news site, Seeking Rents, outlined plans for giving university boards of trustees — heavily influenced by DeSantis — faculty-hiring authority, taking it away from school presidents.

Similarly, the proposal would give the university system’s Board of Governors, whose members are mostly governor appointees, power to investigate university presidents, fire employees, review existing degree programs and veto budgets.

The measure never made it past the concept stage. But many think it shows what may be in store for colleges and universities in a DeSantis second term.

“We’re at a tipping point right now,” said Gothard of United Faculty. “We have a Legislature and a governor who are taking their time to attack groups and individuals who disagree with their political ideology.”

[pnwguy]

The GOP state playbook will be to control state universities.

[goldenvalley]

Jun 16, 2022 16:05:22 GMT pnwguy said:

The GOP state playbook will be to control state universities.

Wouldn't it be easier to destroy them?  Shut off the money.

[indy]

Jun 16, 2022 17:15:09 GMT goldenvalley said:

Jun 16, 2022 16:05:22 GMT pnwguy said:

The GOP state playbook will be to control state universities.

Wouldn't it be easier to destroy them?  Shut off the money.

Wouldn't that just be self-defeating? Then all the students would either go to private or blue state public universities, neither of which will give them any level of control.

Although it seems to me if you already had them K-12, aren't they already 'indoctrinated' to the extent possible? I mean, I know a fundamentalist who has an advanced degree in biology and doesn't believe in evolution, so this idea that controlling the curriculum will drive different outcomes seems pretty suspect to me.

[Bact PhD]

Jun 16, 2022 18:33:12 GMT indy said:

Jun 16, 2022 17:15:09 GMT goldenvalley said:

Wouldn't it be easier to destroy them?  Shut off the money.

Wouldn't that just be self-defeating? Then all the students would either go to private or blue state public universities, neither of which will give them any level of control.

Although it seems to me if you already had them K-12, aren't they already 'indoctrinated' to the extent possible? I mean, I know a fundamentalist who has an advanced degree in biology and doesn't believe in evolution, so this idea that controlling the curriculum will drive different outcomes seems pretty suspect to me.

However, you get out-of-staters at those state universities, too. Can’t pass up the chance to indoctrinate more folks…and we can’t take the chance that the impressionable in our ranks might get ahold of crazy ideas, amirite?

Seriously, there’s a REASON the college search is taking place outside of Flori-DUH.

[jackd]

Cost is a big factor for students and out of state tuition at good public universities is equivalent to attending private universities. That's DiSantis' leverage over Florida families.

[AnBr]

But if it damages the credibility of said universities?

[jackd]

Money tends to prevail.

[indy]

Jun 16, 2022 21:41:24 GMT jackd said:

Cost is a big factor for students and out of state tuition at good public universities is equivalent to attending private universities. That's DiSantis' leverage over Florida families.

Not quite equivalent but getting pretty close. University of Florida is about 6.5K (tuition and fees) for in-state and 29K for out of state. Most privates are up around 50K+. Heck, a small liberal arts school my son looked at (which nobody has ever heard of) was 50K.

In any case, 6.5K is quite a bargain these days. Half the cost of most Big 10 Universities (the original Big 10, that is, not the current roster which I'm not even familiar with).

[Bact PhD]

Jun 17, 2022 10:56:00 GMT indy said:

Jun 16, 2022 21:41:24 GMT jackd said:

Cost is a big factor for students and out of state tuition at good public universities is equivalent to attending private universities. That's DiSantis' leverage over Florida families.

Not quite equivalent but getting pretty close. University of Florida is about 6.5K (tuition and fees) for in-state and 29K for out of state. Most privates are up around 50K+. Heck, a small liberal arts school my son looked at (which nobody has ever heard of) was 50K.

In any case, 6.5K is quite a bargain these days. Half the cost of most Big 10 Universities (the original Big 10, that is, not the current roster which I'm not even familiar with).

Other states in the southeast are also in the $30-35K ballpark for out-of-state tuition & fees. Room and board is a bigger variable than one might expect. Interestingly, the tuition rates in NC & VA depend on the specific institution (especially for out-of-staters). The flagships (UVA, UNC) charge markedly more than the “lower-tier” schools (James Madison, Appy State, e.g.).

The “bargain” aspect for the likes of UF & FSU is very compelling, especially when you throw in the lottery-funded scholarship $$ for those with the stats, making the out-of-pocket cost even lower than that. Anymore, it’s something like 90% of UF students are also “Bright Futures” recipients. That’s why UF has made those “Best Value Colleges” list for the last umpteen years.

All in all, awfully hard to pass up…

[indy]

From what a remember, 30-35Kish was pretty much the standard tuition and fees for out of state public colleges we looked at, excepting UCLA, which I think was closer to 45K, and the University of Michigan, which was 50K+.

Yeah, 6.5K would be hard to pass up. There are still some pretty good bargains elsewhere for in-state students. I think Purdue is still less than 10K too and even less depending on family income. I think the University of Illinois now waives tuition and fees for any families making less than 60K.

A lot of BS public relations flies around about this, especially at the more expensive schools. Many of the Ivies, for example, say things  like 'our students graduate with less than 15K of debt'. Which is true, but it's because their families pay for it. 56% of Harvard students pay the entire amount of tuition + fees (+ room and board of course) and around 50% of all ivy students do  [http://studentaidpolicy.com/who-pays-full-sticker-price-for-a-college-education.html]. And of course it's a sliding scale so many more are still paying a good portion of it. Any chance of attending Harvard for less advantaged kids is still pretty rare.

[LFC]

Eastman, Giuliani, and Powell weren't the only lawyers helping Trump. This one sounds like the most competent of the bunch. He also sounds like somebody without morality who can excuse that fact with the "it's my duty as a lawyer" defense against anything, even fascism.

The attorney who reportedly suggested that “‘wild’ chaos” would prompt Supreme Court justices to be more likely to intervene in the 2020 election has spoken exclusively with TPM about his representation of the Trump campaign during its efforts to overturn the election.

Kenneth Chesebro fielded extensive questions from TPM about his representation of the Trump campaign, about how he went from a liberal cause lawyer and protégé of Harvard Law Professor Larry Tribe to a Trump attorney, and about his views on the Jan. 6 Capitol insurrection.

On several of the key questions that have emerged about his legal work for Trump, Chesebro was lawyerly, careful, and tightlipped in his responses. He was more forthcoming about his own background, how he came to be involved with the Trump campaign, and the criticisms that have come his way since he emerged as an early proponent of some of the Trump campaign’s most controversial strategies to overturn the 2020 election.

What emerges from hours of sitdown interviews is a picture of a man who was deeply involved at a high level in coordinating the Trump campaign’s strategy to overturn the election, who regrets the violence at the Capitol as self-defeating, and who wishes that more attention had been paid to the issues he raised.

“There was good reason to argue that under Article II, that Biden had not legitimately won the electoral votes,” Chesebro told TPM. “I’m not saying that Trump deserved to win in each state, I’m saying it was legitimate to argue under Article II that there was a problem.”

He was up to his ears in the Wisconsin mess. This gives you an idea of how he can justify just about anything he does.

Chesebro told TPM that his work for Trump began with a request from an old friend of his named Jim Troupis, who contacted him on Nov. 10, 2020: Could he help out on the campaign’s litigation in Wisconsin? Troupis, a former Wisconsin judge whose law firm was hired to draw the state’s radical post-2010 gerrymander, was repping Trump in the state.

Chesebro agreed to help with a lawsuit that sought an extraordinary remedy which has now become familiar: disqualifying hundreds of thousands of ballots in the state’s two most Democratic counties.

He sent Troupis a memo laying out the alternate elector scheme for the first time on Nov. 18, per the New York Times. That memo would set the course for the Trump campaign’s post-court approach, which intensified the following month.

The campaign, Chesebro argued in his memo, did not have to fight for victory by the so-called “safe harbor” date, or by the date when the states certified their electors — Dec. 8, 2020. Jan. 6, 2021 was the real deadline for the Trump campaign, he suggested.

And to get there, the Trump campaign needed to make sure of one thing: that multiple slates of pro-Trump electors in states that the campaign baselessly claimed it had won would be sworn in.

Chesebro’s work for Trump shied away from some of the more outlandish claims that people in Trump’s orbit were latching on to, like Hugo Chavez manipulating the election results from beyond the grave. Instead, he focused on a more staid argument: that election measures taken to run the election in Wisconsin during COVID-19 invalidated Biden’s victory.

He actually once worked for liberal Lawrence Tribe and even worked on Bush v Gore for Gore. I think this probably explains him pretty well.

When Dec. 14 and Trump’s loss in the state came around, the electors were ready. Wisconsin’s Republican electors met and cast votes for Trump — per Chesebro’s memo, ready for the state to go back and transmit the Trump, and not Biden, electoral votes to Congress.

“If you don’t know for sure the final result by December 14, it can be prudent to have multiple electors cast the ballot,” Chesebro told TPM.

“That kind of — as I would call it, Alice in Wonderland or off-the-wall theory shocked me because of its willingness to trash democracy, but not because of its weirdness,” Tribe told me. “Ken would come up with weird ideas from time to time, quite weird ideas, and seem to lack judgment about whether they were sound or not, and didn’t really care about whether they were legitimate.”

Chesebro maintains that “material deviations from the state statutes’ ‘ in Wisconsin’s 2020 election cast the result into serious doubt. But by that point, courts around the country had thrown out similar arguments. Wisconsin wasn’t going to put Trump ahead.

By that time, Tribe told me, “it was quite clear that claims Trump really had won the election were quite wild and not to be accepted by courts.”

[LFC]

There are Trumpers running from The Big Lie yet ... not really. They may not be staunch Trumpers but they embrace the power of The Big Lie even if they want to leverage to put somebody else in office.

There he was, on tape if not in person: Bill Stepien, the very campaign manager of Donald Trump’s 2020 reelection campaign, explaining calmly and matter of factly that President Trump lost, he and the candidate knew he had lost and every conspiracy theory and false claim and desperate attempt to stay in power was in the words of Bill Barr, bullshit. It wasn’t even begrudging nor presented as an admission. Just matter of fact.

Since polls now routinely show that Republican voters treat it as an orthodoxy that the 2020 election was stolen from Donald Trump, this was quite a thing to hear. Other than the candidate himself, a campaign manager speaks with more authority and knowledge about a campaign than anyone else. Indeed, often with considerably more than the candidate. This has been one of the most notable dimensions of the Jan. 6th hearings to date. The witnesses are mostly Republicans and they’re all friendly witnesses. Indeed, a lot of them are among the ex-President’s most diehard loyalists. Seeing faces you’re more accustomed to seeing on Fox News railing against the Deep State now calmly explaining how the President lost the election fair and square can’t help but be jarring.

And that wasn’t all. House Republicans have been saying for months that their top agenda item in 2023, if they reclaim the House, will be vengeance for the Jan. 6th committee investigation. Given how they’ve spoken about it one might have expected a 24/7 war room operation, counter-programming the hearings and defending the President. And yet elected Republicans have been conspicuously silent. Aside from some introductory whining they seem inclined to sit it out.

What starts to seem clear is that many elected Republicans are quite content to let Democrats and Liz Cheney knock Donald Trump off the electoral stage for them. Or at least knock enough polish off him to make the 2024 election a much more distant prospect. To be clear, this isn’t yet another prediction that “the fever is finally breaking.” Republicans seem just as wedded to Trumpism. They just don’t care about Trump himself. And that gets to another oddity about Bill Stepien as our representative Trumper. From his testimony and proud embrace of being on “Team Normal” you’d hardly guess that he is currently running the primary campaign of Harriet Hageman, who is attempting to unseat outcast Republican Liz Cheney. The entire premise and point of the Hageman campaign is the Big Lie and Cheney’s refusal to accept it. It is entirely a creation of Team Trump. And yet Stepien is running it as a self-identified member in good standing of Team Normal.

[LFC]

The Jan 6 Republican Insurrection didn't simply consist of an unruly mob. The Proud Boys in particular executed this as a military style operation with the Oath Keepers also involved.

In fact, it shows an additional point I hadn’t understood. The mechanics of the breakthrough into the Capitol have been explained either as poor preparation by the Capitol Police or the individual heroism of Capitol Police officers. So it’s either a negligent failure or an heroic one. But this reconstruction of events shows something a bit different. At several points the attempted breakthroughs failed. The defenders were able to reinforce their positions, bring in more personnel in riot gear, etc. At those points, the Proud Boys leaders directing the assaults drew back from the attack points to where they could see the whole complex more clearly. They reevaluated and chose another entry point to attack. They then issued orders to had picked members of their team to refocus on other more vulnerable entry points. It’s very much a military operation.

As I said, this wasn’t just an angry mob overwhelming outnumbered defenders. There was a lot more command and control than that. And that command and control was coming from the Proud Boys. The Proud Boys and Oath Keepers collaborated in their planning and both groups bought caches of weapons and so forth. But at least from the Times reconstruction what I’m describing here was mostly the Proud Boys.

Here’s the link to the Times video. As I said, it’s really something you must watch.

The video really is eye opening. Every Republican not screaming about this treason is complicit, giving aid and comfort to the America's enemies. That's because many of them are themselves America's enemies.

[LFC]

Mike Pence; still a piece of lying shit.

[goldenvalley]

Jun 21, 2022 22:17:39 GMT LFC said:

Mike Pence; still a piece of lying shit.

He is as lost in his own head as Trump is.  Up there with the Texas guy who said the explanation for the murders in Uvalde was "god's will."  It's god's will that Pence be president and most anything is all right if Pence thinks it gets him closer to the presidency.

[AnBr]

Jun 21, 2022 22:17:39 GMT LFC said:

Mike Pence; still a piece of lying shit.

There he is, a supposed "man of god" bearing false witness.

[andydp]

Jun 21, 2022 22:25:11 GMT goldenvalley said:

Jun 21, 2022 22:17:39 GMT LFC said:

Mike Pence; still a piece of lying shit.

He is as lost in his own head as Trump is.  Up there with the Texas guy who said the explanation for the murders in Uvalde was "god's will."  It's god's will that Pence be president and most anything is all right if Pence thinks it gets him closer to the presidency.

“The party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.” — George Orwell, 1984

[LFC]

The FBI appears to be looking into the fake electors.

The FBI seized Nevada Republican Party chair Michael McDonald’s phone on Wednesday after executing a search warrant as part of the federal investigation into ex-President Donald Trump’s fake elector scheme, according to local news outlet 8 News Now.

McDonald was on the slate of so-called “alternate electors” that Trump planned on using in his plot to steal the 2020 election by having Joe Biden’s electors thrown out and replacing them with his fake ones.

The FBI also issued a search warrant on Wednesday for another top Nevada GOP official who served as a sham Trump elector: state party secretary James DeGraffenreid. However, agents reportedly couldn’t find him.

McDonald and DeGraffenreid have already been subpoenaed by the House Jan. 6 Committee.

[LFC]

More on the DOJ going after fake electors.

A new report in the Washington Post today indicates the Justice Department might be expanding the scope of its focus on the fake Trump electors scheme, zeroing in on the people involved in the plot who may have intended to follow through or tried to follow through with the scheme.

Previous reports have revealed the DOJ was looking at the fake electors plot, but the bureau was reportedly mostly in talks with people who sounded the alarm about the scheme — which was a key layer of MAGAland’s campaign to keep Trump in power despite losing the election.

We knew that the DOJ had previously issued subpoenas or had tried to speak with some of the people who were planning to function as Trump electors in states around the U.S. if Trump won those states, but didn’t ultimately end up doing so. Per the Post: “Some of those Republicans have told The Post they didn’t participate because Biden had won the popular vote in their state and they did not think the gatherings were appropriate; others said they declined to participate because were ill or had scheduling conflicts.”

Federal agents issued subpoenas to people in at least two states on Wednesday, according to the Post. The addresses federal agents targeted suggest that the DOJ might be now focused on political activists who supported then-President Trump in his effort to recruit fake electors to help invalidate President Biden’s 2020 win, according to the Post’s review of publicly available information.

FBI agents “conducted court authorized law enforcement activity Wednesday morning at two locations” in the Post’s words. One of the addresses where this new activity occurred was at the home of a man name Brad Carver, who is a lawyer in Georgia who allegedly signed a paper claiming to be a Trump elector, according to the Post. The other location of federal activity took place at the home of Thomas Lane. According to the Post, Lane worked for the Trump campaign in Arizona and New Mexico. The Post is careful to note that the FBI did not identify the names of the people living at those addresses. But, like good journalists, the Post reporters looked it up.

People in Michigan who were part of the fake electors scheme also were targeted with subpoenas on Wednesday, an anonymous person told the Post.

The Post’s report is still premature and the language is careful, hedging that it is very unclear what exactly the DOJ might be after with this new activity. But it all comes after the fourth round of Jan. 6 committee hearings on Tuesday, when state officials from Georgia and Arizona gave emotional and damning testimony about Trump allies’ efforts to pressure them into overturning Biden’s electoral college wins in their states.

[LFC]

Josh Marshall's take (in full due to paywall) on the DOJ going after the fake electors. It sure sounds like the Jan 6 Committee has been publicly pushing them hard to do their f***ing job and they don't much like it. I hope he's wrong but my faith in Garland's willingness to act is still pretty low.

This and other articles are among the first I’ve seen that make me think there will be prosecutions of individuals involved in the attempted 2020 presidential election coup. This one is from the Post and reports a new round of subpoenas and what appear to be court-ordered searches of various individuals involved in the “fake elector” scheme. Let me note a couple points about that part of the coup conspiracy.

First: I continue to be surprised that this is the focus. I don’t discount the seriousness of the offense. But it seems somewhat down the list of offenses relative to other things that happened. As I noted on the podcast today, it’s not like anyone didn’t know as a factual matter who the real electors were. Biden won Wisconsin. So his electors were the electors. Period. No one was going to be confused. The point, at least as I understand it, was to create a patina of procedural legitimacy to enable some future judge or executive or legislative branch official to accept these fake electors as real. Again, that’s pretty bad. But is it as bad as pressuring state officials to reject the results of the elections or “find” fake votes? I’m not so sure. The issue, I suspect, is that in this case various individuals were making formal attestations, signing documents, swearing oaths that were false. They were often false claims made to the United States government. So these bad acts trigger specific statutes around which prosecutions can be built, even if the substantive actions aren’t the most serious in the whole coup conspiracy.

Second: The DOJ is now escalating its claims that the Jan. 6th Committee is stymieing and endangering its prosecutions, particularly the seditious conspiracy charges against the Proud Boys and other violent domestic extremist groups. All of this strikes me as the weakest kind of blame-shifting crap.

First of all, criminal prosecutions are not more important than congressional investigations. Going on forty years ago, because of an appellate win for Ollie North, Congress became much more cautious about the use of it own investigatory powers. Basically, don’t risk doing anything that could complicate or endanger a DOJ prosecution. That was a bad misjudgment. As I’ve argued many times, for wrong-doing in the political sphere exposure and public accountability is often more important than the prosecution of specific crimes. The decision to leave the entire Russia probe to a narrowly framed criminal investigation is a good example of that. At the end of the day, most of the details of the investigation turned out to be none of the public’s business. Huge mistake and error.

Beyond this, this simply isn’t how the different branches of government talk to each other. The DOJ is asking for all of the committee’s work product, all the interviews, depositions, etc. This is the kind of request you make if you’re trying to force a “no” which you can then make a public stink about. While it is often overdone, each branch is rightly jealous of its independence and prerogatives. Each goes to great lengths to ensure that it not treated as subservient to another. The way these things work is how the committee itself went about it when it needed material from the executive branch: the requesting branch says what it wants and then there’s a negotiation between the two branches. The committee members have made very clear they want to have those discussions — but won’t hand over everything just because the DOJ demands it.

On its face it’s not clear why the committee’s depositions put the DOJ’s prosecutions in any jeopardy. It is not at all credible that the committee has any interest in endangering those prosecutions or that it would be cavalier about those risks. Indeed, the committee has to a fault made clear that a core focus of its hearings is to press the DOJ to act. It’s the committee which has demonstrated that it is playing for keeps. They don’t have anything to prove. It’s the DOJ which has at best taken a cautious and — how should we put it — highly deliberate approach. It has something to prove, not the committee.

There may be a deeper story we don’t know. But on its face it looks like the committee’s hearings are pushing the DOJ to move more aggressively. DOJ officials are now somewhat lamely tossing out these complaints to make it seem like it was the committee slowing them down all the time.

Don’t buy it.

The good news is that whining aside the DOJ investigations do appear to be escalating.

[jackd]

Josh ignores a couple of points. The DOJ does not announce the progress of its own investigation as it goes along. Also, the DOJ does not want to create defense evidence by having its witness interviews contradict, in any significant way, the congressional statements. As to the Georgia issues, the District Attorney there (Atlanta?) is very actively pursuing the case and could certainly do a prosecution by itself.

Prosecuting Trump is no slam dunk. The court cannot direct a verdict in the government's favor and the case willl have to get through a jury. Consider the difficulties in getting a jury without a Trump sympathizer on it.

[LFC]

Trump dissed Mo, Mo lost his primary, and now he's pissed.

Time For Payback

One day after losing his bid for Alabama Senate, Rep. Mo Brooks (R-AL), still licking his wounds over Trump’s endorsement snub, told CNN on Wednesday that he’s now open to testifying in front of the House Jan. 6 Committee, which had announced a subpoena for him last month.

• Brooks said he has a “basic requirement,” however: That his testimony be public so people get the whole thing, not just “bits and pieces dribbled out.”

• Committee chair Bennie Thompson (D-MS) told CNN that the panel has “redone” Brooks’ subpoena, which hasn’t been served to the GOP congressman yet because he was out campaigning (RIP).

• Brooks declared earlier on Wednesday that he was retiring from politics — and took a shot at Trump. According to Brooks, the former president was “the big loser” in the Alabama GOP Senate primary runoff because he’s not “a man of his word,” has “no loyalty” and won’t take action unless it “enhances his wallet or his ego.”

[goldenvalley]

Jun 23, 2022 15:35:06 GMT LFC said:

Trump dissed Mo, Mo lost his primary, and now he's pissed.

Time For Payback

One day after losing his bid for Alabama Senate, Rep. Mo Brooks (R-AL), still licking his wounds over Trump’s endorsement snub, told CNN on Wednesday that he’s now open to testifying in front of the House Jan. 6 Committee, which had announced a subpoena for him last month.

• Brooks said he has a “basic requirement,” however: That his testimony be public so people get the whole thing, not just “bits and pieces dribbled out.”

• Committee chair Bennie Thompson (D-MS) told CNN that the panel has “redone” Brooks’ subpoena, which hasn’t been served to the GOP congressman yet because he was out campaigning (RIP).

• Brooks declared earlier on Wednesday that he was retiring from politics — and took a shot at Trump. According to Brooks, the former president was “the big loser” in the Alabama GOP Senate primary runoff because he’s not “a man of his word,” has “no loyalty” and won’t take action unless it “enhances his wallet or his ego.”

I'd have trouble believing anything he has to say.  He was clearly hard core Trump standing there on 1/6 with his body armor on. Then he said something about repeatedly telling Trump his rescind the election scheme was illegal. Now he's mad at Trump.  Do you believe he'll tell the truth or an embellished story out of desire for revenge?

[LFC]

Jun 23, 2022 16:31:15 GMT goldenvalley said:

I'd have trouble believing anything he has to say.  He was clearly hard core Trump standing there on 1/6 with his body armor on. Then he said something about repeatedly telling Trump his rescind the election scheme was illegal. Now he's mad at Trump.  Do you believe he'll tell the truth or an embellished story out of desire for revenge?

He wouldn't dare bend or embellish the truth once under oath.

[tick]

[tick]

[tick]

[tick]

Hah, I'm just f***in' with you. Of course I wouldn't trust him. I don't even trust him to be able to grasp the difference between lies from reality. Mo is more than a few bricks shy of a pallet.