The Fall of Roe v Wade: US Politics, June 2022

A great point that got lost in yesterday's hearing was that a big part of why there appeared to be discrepancy in the Georgia ballots was that many voters voted for every office and measure EXCEPT for President. And people's takeaway was fraud instead of both candidates sucking.

we all know that doesn't actually matter

https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/81NZ+SaFGTL.jpg

Breaking news: The Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled today that boycotts are not protected by the First Amendment. @ACLU has confirmed it'll take the case to the Supreme Court, with huge implications for free speech in America.🧵

— Julia Bacha (@juliabacha) June 22, 2022

heeeeey I wonder how this Supreme Court will rule

Thanks for the confidence, all!

If I was a Floridian I'd start working on personhood and citizenship for aquatic life and hope that can swing the state back to purple by 2050.

Manatees are definitely libs.

Quite helpful.

heeeeey I wonder how this Supreme Court will rule

But but but Conservatives LOVE Boycotts!

too little, too late for the Botha government

Sorry, Alfred— the power of local elections is really important, much respect for your canvassing.

But let’s be real: there’s no way to deny that the lack of enthusiasm for the guy in charge trickles down to local elections, too, and while that’s unfortunate, I also don’t blame the youth for feeling as they do.

I don't either, and I had drinks last night with a 25-year-old who repeated some of these points; but to realize my age motivates me to say, "Biden's a doddering old man, but I've lived with GOP majorities in Congress, and shit's gonna get bad without the doddering old man and his Congress" is shattering, and to be paralyzed thinking this is my own old man shit is sobering.

To my mind Biden's done good, he would've done better with a Senate majority he didn't expect but nevertheless dominated by two jackanapes and their cowardly silent colleagues, but I think y'all forget how flash is the 21st century presidential mode. Obama was always glamorous, whatever his flaws, and my boy voted for him; Trump was loud, all the time, on Twitter or whatever. Biden owns being an fossil. That doesn't matter to me, not when the alternative was worse. My job is to persuade.

On that 8th Circuit ruling: I'm not a lawyer, just a guy reading Twitter, but this seems like it's kind of at odds with the whole idea that "money is speech" undergirding Citizens United etc. Not that a wily strict constructionist can't find a way around it, of course.

The ruling, by Judge Kobes (a Trump appointee who received a “not qualified” ABA rating) claims that a boycott is simply economic activity, without expressive qualities. Kobes used to be the General Counsel for Senator Mike Rounds (SD), a co-sponsor of the federal anti-BDS law.

— Julia Bacha (@juliabacha) June 22, 2022

xpost My job Yes indeed. Also, I've heard several interviews with this author, speaking of local initiative:

Waste
One Woman’s Fight Against America’s Dirty Secret
Catherine Coleman Flowers
With a foreword by Bryan Stevenson

The MacArthur grant–winning environmental justice activist’s riveting memoir of a life fighting for a cleaner future for America’s most vulnerable

“To Flowers, the neglect of the sanitation problem in Lowndes County is as obvious an environmental injustice as the contamination of drinking water in Flint, Michigan.” —The New Yorker

One of Smithsonian magazine's Ten Best Science Books of 2020

Catherine Coleman Flowers, a 2020 MacArthur “genius,” grew up in Lowndes County, Alabama, a place that’s been called “Bloody Lowndes” because of its violent, racist history. Once the epicenter of the voting rights struggle, today it’s Ground Zero for a new movement that is also Flowers’s life’s work—a fight to ensure human dignity through a right most Americans take for granted: basic sanitation. Too many people, especially the rural poor, lack an affordable means of disposing cleanly of the waste from their toilets and, as a consequence, live amid filth. Flowers calls this America’s dirty secret. In this “powerful and moving book” (Booklist), she tells the story of systemic class, racial, and geographic prejudice that foster Third World conditions not just in Alabama, but across America, in Appalachia, Central California, coastal Florida, Alaska, the urban Midwest, and on Native American reservations in the West.

In this inspiring story of the evolution of an activist, from country girl to student civil rights organizer to environmental justice champion at Bryan Stevenson’s Equal Justice Initiative, Flowers shows how sanitation is becoming too big a problem to ignore as climate change brings sewage to more backyards—not only those of poor minorities.

So, not hopeful, but some shit did just happen. FBI search warranted and seized the cell phone of Nevada's top GOP asshole (which implies evidence of criminality), DOJ subpoenaed the top GOP asshole in Georgia (same), Mo Brooks (having lost his Alabama race and supposedly retired from politics) reportedly *now* is open to cooperating with the J6 committee ...

Still, all these assholes, so close to jail, yet so far. Like, the Texas AG, hasn't he been under indictment for years? Literally seven years ago?

Good news on a dark day:

On the 50th anniversary of Title IX, the Biden administration proposed sweeping changes to the landmark law that would bar schools, colleges and universities from discriminating against transgender students, a move that comes as the battle over transgender rights moves to the front lines of the culture war.

The proposal would extend the protections of Title IX, which prohibits schools that get federal funds from discriminating on the basis of sex, to transgender students, compelling schools to accommodate and protect them. This includes permitting them to use bathrooms that align with their gender identity, using their correct pronouns and addressing bullying based on their gender identity.

It would also amend the rules that govern how schools, colleges and universities investigate and resolve claims of sexual assault and sexual harassment. Over concerns that people were being wrongfully punished, President Donald Trump’s education secretary, Betsy DeVos, revised the rules to make them more accommodating to the accused. Critics assailed the changes, saying they would discourage sexual assault survivors from coming forward to report assaults or harassment.

Where is my tiny violin?

https://www.politico.com/news/2022/06/23/trump-aides-book-00041620

Those Title IX rules are good, but how easily can they be thrown out by the next administration? (The whole administrative rule-making process baffles me.)

The memoir of Deborah Birx, the Covid response coordinator under Trump, has sold fewer than 6,000 copies;

i have made a pledge to stop typing or thinking "FUCK YOU!" in situations like this. yes, i have made that pledge and i am just noting that right now.

Ffffffffffriggin

Publishing companies will soon require a billionaire bulk-buyer to be on-board before publishing a political memoir

Lol

A lot of this is down to timing, I think. Many of these books, if published while Trump was still president, would’ve done better.

https://www.politico.com/news/2022/06/22/gop-senator-considering-blocking-school-meal-funding-deal-over-transgender-policy-fight-00041366

There's a veiled implication that most of these anti-trans laws are there to 'protect the children' or 'stop grooming' or whatever, but this guy is ready to have all children go without free or reduced-price lunch to uphold his values... at least he's consistently anti-child

The fact that there are maybe 1000 real people who genuinely wanted to read Birx’s memoir is incomprehensible.

https://c.tenor.com/eGd9bbtxjQ4AAAAd/dr-birx-stare.gif

that was one of the hardest moments of her life. having to stand there. watching that happen. struggling with whether to do say something publicly at the moment, or to keep it back for that best selling memoir

Hence the book, Karl. Buy it already!

Feds searched the home of Jeffrey Clark. Whole lotta searchin' goin' on.

But could it not be said that we are all searching, Josh?

keeping the eye on the ball

New: The Biden administration plans to pay some "Havana Syndrome" victims roughly $100,000 to $200,000 each in compensation. US government still doesn't know the underlying cause of the mysterious ailments. W/ @John_Hudson https://t.co/n9BrFIqH9n

— Shane Harris (@shaneharris) June 23, 2022

my whole family suffers from Havana Syndrome, Mr Biden

-Neanderthal

Someone should really do a Perlstein project about the democrats because my fucking god

I'm havana syndrome right now

Ooh na-na

Cicadas made it hard to sleep last night, can I get $5k?

Anyway, there’s a hearing on right now

Pun intended?

Lol no (but I get it)

the names of the congress members who requested pardons WILL be REVEALED in today's hearing...

COMING UP!!

Committee vice chair Rep. Liz Cheney (R-WY) said that viewers can expect video testimony by three former Trump White House staffers at the close of today’s hearing.

The video testimony, Cheney said, will identify members of Congress who contacted the Trump White House after Jan. 6 to seek presidential pardons.

lol Rudy literally was looking to recruit an AG that was "not worried about his reputation."

Former Trump acting attorney general Richard Donoghue and former White House lawyer Eric Herschmann claimed in video testimony that they did not mince words when they spoke to Jeffrey Clark.

“I said, good fucking — excuse me, sorry, fucking a-hole, congratulations, you just admitted your first step or act you would take as attorney general would be committing a felony and violating Rule 6(e),” Herschmann recalled telling Clark.

Donoghue claimed that he pointed out Clark is “not even competent” to serve as attorney general, citing Clark’s lack of experience as a criminal attorney and in conducting a criminal investigations.

Donoghue went on to claim that former White House counsel Pat Cipolllone called Clark’s never-sent draft letter that falsely declared the DOJ had found fraud a “murder-suicide pact” and said that he wanted nothing to do with

it was a very even argument, good arguments on all sides, practically a tie

Acceptance of a pardon is a de facto admission of guilt - if somebody is innocent, there's no reason to pardon them

Yeah, you can't be pardoned for nothing. There has to be a there there.

yeah, but they were just asking for them pardons, just throwing that out there as an idea. no big deal, just nice to have the promise of a pardon. you know. just in case...someone thinks you did some crimes and can prove that, somehow

who among does not have a couple pardons in their back pockets? when i meet important people i try to get them pretty much immediately. they'll be like "bla bla bla bla, i'm rich and important!" and i'll say, "beg your pardon?". 9 times out of 10 they heed my request, which i interpret as granting of a pardon, if that comes up in my life for some reason.

"excuse me, sorry, fucking a-hole, congratulations" for July thread title.

Must be so weird to be all these behind the scenes career politicians and lawyers who spent their entire lives leading up to this moment where all these crooks and liars and idiots just swooped in and knee-capped their aspirations.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OwOAGRWDnGc

Former acting deputy attorney General Richard Donoghue testified that he wanted to “cut through the noise” during a Dec. 27, 2020 meeting with Trump by being “very blunt” that the then-President’s bogus claims of election fraud were “simply not true.”

After reiterating that Trump’s claims of massive election fraud lacked credibility, Donoghue noted that although there were “isolated incidents” of fraud, none of them were enough to question the results in any state.

Donoghue then claimed that Trump told him: “Just say it was corrupt and leave the rest to me and the Republican congressmen.”

these would likely be some of the same republican congressmen who were asking for pardons, and later today will be telling everyone that they had no idea that their names were connected with a pardon and had nothing to do with it

“Someone broke into my account and sent an email asking for a pardon”