Today is the 80th anniversary of D-Day. There are some good history articles online, such as On D-Day, the U.S. Conquered the British Empire by Michel Paradis at The Atlantic and ‘Almost terrifying to contemplate’: Why D-Day nearly didn’t happen by Garrett M. Graff at WaPo.  And we should be grateful President Biden is representing the U.S. at the commemoration today and not that other guy.

“In their generation, in their hour of trial, the Allied forces of D-Day did their duty,” Biden said, standing before dozens of World War II veterans at the Normandy American Cemetery. “Now the question for us is, in our hour of trial, will we do ours?”

Yesterday’s Senate vote on the right to contraception amounted to an IQ test for Republicans. They flunked.

Republicans argued the bill was unnecessary, because they don’t oppose contraception and there are no efforts to ban it.  

“Senate Democrats are using their power in the majority to push an alarmist and false narrative that there was a problem accessing contraception,” Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-La.) said on the Senate floor. “This is not an issue unless their candidate for president is running behind in the polls.” 

If they don’t oppose access to contraception, then why block the bill? They must have known the point of the bill was to get them all on the record of being for or against a right to contraception. And, in fact, there are several attempts by Republicans in the states to put limits on access to contraception. See also:

Yesterday the Wall Street Journal ran a story allegedly sourced from several people, Democrats and Republicans, that allegedly documented deep concern about President Biden’s mental decline. Yeah, they’ve gone back to that. Josh Marshall read it for all of us and reports that the “several people” are Mike Johnson and Kevin McCarthy.

I read the piece and I noticed right away, but had to go back and make sure I was understanding the circumlocutions, that this purported deep dive on Biden’s slipping leads off with the accounts of two people: Speaker Mike Johnson and former Speaker Kevin McCarthy. There are some efforts to fuzz that up with Johnson since you have to piece together the meaning of the sourcing. (It’s based on the accounts of “six people told at the time about what Johnson said had happened” during a one-on-one meeting between Biden and Johnson. ¯\_(?)_/¯ ) About ten paragraphs in it notes in passing that of the more than 45 people the reporters spoke to for the piece over several months “most of those who said Biden performed poorly were Republicans.”

I do wish I could ask Mike Johnson when the Commandment about not bearing false witness (number eight or nine, depending on the source) was suspended. But just notice that that Murdoch Media is resurrecting the “Joe is brain dead” talking point now.

Update: Charles Pierce:  “I find it more than a little convenient that, after a solid month of stories about how El Caudillo del Mar-a-Lago was dozing off at the defense table during his own criminal trial, we have ‘some’ who ‘wonder’ about Biden.”

What we’re up against: Pennsylvania Republicans jeer, leave statehouse floor in protest of officers who defended Capitol on Jan. 6.

Finally we get to our not-favorite judge Aileen “Loose” Cannon. Loose continues to find creative ways to waste time and push the trial date further into the future. Yesterday she re-shuffled the dates of hearings on various issues and added a new one, a hearing on whether Jack Smith’s appointment of special counsel is unconstitutional. And she took the bizarre step of inviting third party “friends of the court” with no direct involvement in the case to offer testimony at this hearing. Next I expect Trump’s lawyers to file a brief claiming the court has no jurisdiction because Trump is actually the Dauphin of France. Loose would probably schedule a hearing on that. See also Judge Aileen Cannon Will Entertain Any Excuse to Delay Trump’s Trial at The New Repuplic.

Update: Judge orders Steve Bannon to report to prison on July 1 for contempt of Congress sentence

In all the hoopla over the thirty-four counts some other news got buried. On Friday  President Biden proposed a permanent cease-fire plan between Israel and Hamas (more here on the plan from Al-Jazeera). Very, very simply, the plan includes three phases that would begin with releasing hostages and prisoners on both sides plus allowing hundreds of food trucks into Gaza. Next would be negotiation toward a permanent end to hostilities, and last is the rebuilding of what was destroyed. I assume that somewhere in there some provision would be made for how Gaza will be governed.

President Biden initially framed the proposal as an Israeli proposal that he hoped Hamas would accept. Many have pointed out that he waited to announce the proposal until after Shabbat had started in Israel, so that Netanyahu couldn’t respond right away. By now it’s clear Netanyahu wasn’t behind the proposal and probably won’t agree to it. Juan Cole explains that if Netanyahu did accept a peace plan his hard-right coalition would collapse, costing him his position as Prime Minister. See also Fred Kaplan at Slate.

Complicating all this is that on Saturday Netanyahu was invited to address Congress. Speaker Mike Johnson has been pushing hard for this, and I take it Chuck Schumer finally caved. It’s not clear to me if Netanyahu will be speaking remotely or will show up in person. I don’t think he could set foot in the U.S. without being slammed by protests. A large part of the Democrats of both houses are already saying they will not attend.

In another surprise move, President Biden announced he is putting tighter restrictions on the number of migrants allowed to cross the border and apply for asylum. Progressives in Congress are not happy. I suspect Biden has his eye on the election with this one. There’s not much he can do about the border until he gets a Congress that will work with him.

Speaking of Congress — I couldn’t bear to watch any of the news stories about the House committees grilling Dr. Anthony Fauci and Attorney General Merrick Garland. House Republicans are just baboons throwing feces as far as I’m concerned. Some might consider that comparison an insult to baboons.

In other news — see 3 Organizers Of Trump Fake Elex Plot—Including Chesebro—Charged In Wisconsin.

Also, too — The Epoch Times is a horrible, hard-right propaganda rag. And now it may go out of business.

D’oh! Why didn’t we think of this?

Take a propagandistic news outlet and pump it full of cash from overseas criminal scams that you laundered yourself and bingo you have a supposedly growing media property. Allegedly.

The one glitch, as Epoch Times CFO Bill Guan found out, is that the law may eventually catch up to you.

Guan was indicted in the Southern District of New York on one count of conspiracy to commit money laundering and two counts of bank fraud for allegedly laundering $67 million in illicit criminal proceeds for the benefit of the Falun Gong-affiliated Epoch Times.

Among the sources of the so-called “revenue” laundered into Epoch Times were fraudulently procured unemployment insurance benefits obtained using stolen identities that were then loaded onto prepaid debit cards and sold at 70-80 cents on the dollar, according to the indictment.

Falun Gong is a Chinese religious movement that also produces those Shen Yun music and dance extravaganzas you must have seen advertised on the TV. Falun Gong was horribly persecuted in China and now has its headquarters in New York state somewhere, I understand. I used to be sympathetic to them until I found out the organization is behind right-wing extremist politicians here and in Europe. So they came West for freedom and are working to destroy freedom. I appreciate why they would be anti-Communist, but neo-facsism isn’t an improvement.

Let’s just hope Epoch Times shuts down.

In the days before The Verdict a number of poll analysts had pointed out that much of Trump’s “lead” in the polls was coming from people who didn’t vote in 2020. If you looked at polling results of people who did vote in 2020 — people who are likely to vote, in other words — Biden looks a bit better. See The Shaky Foundation of Trump’s Lead: Disengaged Voters.

The disengaged voters are also low-information voters. Some of them may have been barely aware that Trump was on trial for something. But I think the news about the conviction was big enough they might have heard it by now. And it may take some time to process. There are all kinds of opinion columns out there about What This Will Mean for the Election. I don’t think we know yet. A lot will depend on what the two parties do with the conviction, and what comes out in news and social media about the conviction and eventually settles into “conventional wisdom.”

Also, a lot is going to depend on Trump in the next few days.

Juliette Kayyem at The Atlantic provides some interesting observations —

The first post-trial press conference of the once and potentially future president, and now convicted felon, was bizarre, even by his standards. The word unhinged tends to be overused in this context, but Donald Trump lacked focus as he spoke after the conclusion of his trial in a New York state court on 34 felony counts relating to his payoff of the porn star Stormy Daniels. The presumptive Republican nominee ranted about this and that, including off-topic riffs on “Little League games” being canceled, “propane stoves,” the rainy weather, and immigrants living in “luxury hotels.” It wasn’t really a press conference—he took no questions—but nor was it what some feared it would be: a call to action.

Here’s an unfiltered video of the press conference. I could only watch about a third of it. Trump did sound old and tired at the beginning but pulled himself together a bit, even as what he said was a stream of lies. About the only thing he got factually correct in the part I watched is that some guy really did attack another guy with a machete in a Times Square McDonald’s on May 30. The rest of it is nonsense, and I believe you all are well informed enough to recognize that if you watch it. For the record, there are fact checks here and here.

Kayyem then notes that Trump didn’t call for violence in his speech, and as far as I can tell he hasn’t yet since the conviction. His culties are calling for burning down the nation, but so far I haven’t heard they’ve done anything about it.

Trump could already have started using his sentencing date, July 11, as a cause for his supporters and the GOP elites to rally around, much as he did with January 6, 2021. Then, the last time he lost big, he was still president and had all of the tools of the presidency to try to stop his loss from taking effect and prevent the transfer of power. But he doesn’t have that this time. He is not in office; this is not 2021. He may yet attempt to orchestrate disruption, protest, even violence, but unless he is elected again, he cannot promise his supporters that they will be pardoned. And he could actually face jail time. The calculations are different.

That last part about facing jail time is critical. Trump may dimly understand that his behavior between now and the sentencing could make a difference in the sentencing. And having a violent mob outside during his sentencing hearing might not be the smartest move, assuming he could conjure one.

That said, Reuters just reported this —

 Donald Trump said he would accept home confinement or jail time after his historic conviction by a New York jury last week but that it would be tough for the public to accept.

“I’m not sure the public would stand for it,” the Republican presidential candidate told Fox News in an interview that aired on Sunday. “I think it’d be tough for the public to take. You know, at a certain point, there’s a breaking point.”

I suspect most of the public would take it pretty well. And as I understand it, even if Trump were sentenced to jail he could seek to have the sentence stayed pending appeal, which of course could take a while. I don’t expect him to be locked up anytime soon.

Back to Juliette Kayyem:

Second, a great deal has happened since January 6, 2021, and Trump should rightly be worried that he cannot deliver the crowds. The MAGA movement is furious but not organized. “Mass mobilizations are hard and require work,” The Atlantic’s Ali Breland wrote on Friday, including “boring little logistical things.” No such effort on Trump’s behalf seems under way. And, as I’ve written previously, Trump’s people may be angry, but they are also dispersed and in disarray, and many are in jail because of the post–January 6 prosecutions. Several leaders of the Oath Keepers and the Proud Boys, groups that took such a planning role before the Capitol riot, have been found guilty and are serving time for seditious conspiracy. Today, Trump’s rallies are small, though he continues to lie about the numbers.

Kayyem points to the pathetically sparse show of support outside the Manhattan courthouse, even as Trump kept lying that “they” were keeping the protesters away.  The notables of the Republian Party showed up to kiss Trump’s ass, of course. (Someday some of those same people will swear up and down they didn’t really mean it; they never really liked Trump, really. They were just there to unify the party, or something.) Even though New York City is mostly solid blue, there are still a few million Trump voters within easy public transportation distance of the courthouse. More could have been there if they had wanted to be there.

As the summer goes on we may see a reprise of the “Trump trains” of 2020 or the even better Trump boat parades that were a source of much amusement four years ago. Or, we may not. That will be something to watch for. There’s a headline at The Guardian declaring the Right is mobilizing, but it didn’t give any examples of actual mobility among Trump supporters other than bloviating on the Internet. What we are more likely to see are the GOP bozos in Congress (example) attempting to “investigate” Judge Merchan (and his daughter) and Alvin Bragg. That could get ugly.

There’s also the fact that Trump has an election to win. Unleashing a violent mob, even if he could do it, may not do much to win over independents and old school suburban, college educated Republicans. Kayyem writes,

Trump lost the election in 2020. He lost in court last week. He’s on a longtime losing streak, and he knows that the only way to turn that around is to win the presidency. The likelihood that Trump can’t help himself is always high, and he could easily beckon violence on his social-media platform and get a response from the die-hard fringe. But Trump may be calculating that a spectacle of unruly masses on July 11—assuming he could get them—would not be such a great look for a presidential candidate when the whole world is watching. 

And so, according to Reuters,

Asked what Trump supporters should do if he were jailed, Republic National Committee Co-Chair Lara Trump told CNN: “Well, they’re gonna do what they’ve done from the beginning, which is remain calm and protest at the ballot box on November 5th. There’s nothing to do other than make your voices heard loud and clear and speak out against this.”

That may be the official Trump campaign position on protesting. If there are any violent protests, Trump will probably want to be able to demonstrate he didn’t call for it.

In related news: There’s a thing called a “pre-sentence interview” Trump is supposed to submit to, in person, before the sentencing hearing. This is a New York state thing, I take it. According to Business Insider, after the verdict Trump actually was handed a form telling him to immediately report to a probabtion department upstairs somewhere to begin some kind of processing, but he didn’t do that. He’s supposed to schedule an in-person interview with the probabtion department, but he is expected to blow it off. There are no specific penalties attached to blowing off the interview, but it won’t help him at sentencing.

Trump is now claiming he never called for Hillary Clinton to be locked up back in 2016. So what percentage of Americans are stupid enough to believe that?
Something else to read: “Swept Up!” The Russian Payments That Led to Trump’s Felony Conviction at Emptywheel.

MAGA as a social-psychological phenomenon has always been about alienation. All kinds of smart observers of mass movements have said that people who are alienated from their communities and cultures are vulnerable to being sucked into authoritarian mass movements. Through such a movement people find connection, identity, and a feeling of power. They even find a sense of purpose, even if their only purpose is owning the libs.

This article in Scientific American was written shortly after Trump won the 2016 election, so it’s a tad dated, but it says a lot of useful things about Trump supporters. For example,

In simple terms, a Trump rally was a dramatic enactment of a specific vision of America. It enacted how Trump and his followers would like America to be. In a phrase, it was an identity festival that embodied a politics of hope.

And

When we put it all together, these figures tell us something important about leadership in general and about the 2016 leadership contest. They underline the point that leadership is never about the character of individuals as individuals. This is the “old psychology of leadership” that our own theoretical and empirical analysis has called into question. Instead leadership is about individuals as group members—whose success hinges on their capacity to create, represent, advance and embed a shared sense of “us.”

Another feature of Trumpism is the way he used his rallies to reinforce the sense that his alienated audience was under threat. The larger culture wasn’t just strange and uninviting to them; it was actually out to get them. There was safety only in banding together with like-minded folk and not asking questions.

That’s why it hardly matters to the true believers that Trump didn’t accomplish a single damn thing he promised to do when he was running in 2016. What matters is how he makes them feel about themselves. And a threat to Trump is felt as a threat to his culties. Their identities are fused with his.

Reuters reports that Trump followers are calling for violence because of the verdict.

Supporters of former President Donald Trump, enraged by his conviction on 34 felony counts by a New York jury, flooded pro-Trump websites with calls for riots, revolution and violent retribution.

After Trump became the first U.S. president to be convicted of a crime, his supporters responded with dozens of violent online posts, according to a Reuters review of comments on three Trump-aligned websites: the former president’s own Truth Social platform, Patriots.Win and the Gateway Pundit.

And so on. We’ve yet to see if this will go beyond talk, of course. Trump’s powers to call up riotous mobs haven’t worked all that well recently.

It’s a damn shame the Manhattan trial wasn’t televised. Watching Trump sit, obediently and often asleep, in the courtroom day after day might have put a big dent in his image. But the true believers probably heard little about the tamed and subdued Trump sitting in the court. I doubt that the trial that was reported, if it was reported, on right-wing media bore much resemblance to the trial that I was following in the New York Times and MSNBC. And for that reason I don’t know how much Quinta Jurecic’s observations in The Atlantic hold true:

Trump’s political appeal has always been tied to perceptions of his invincibility. He was a force of nature, the godlike manifestation of the people’s will unbound by law. Now, though, the Trump balloon has been punctured. The Übermensch is not so über. When Trump stepped out of the courtroom after the verdict to deliver remarks to the press, he walked with hunched shoulders, declaring his innocence in a flat, exhausted tone, as if he was struggling to summon his typical reserves of fury. He had a new look about him, unseen even after the 2020 election, when he lost but claimed victory; he looked defeated.

Trump will appeal, but that’s going to take time. In the meantime there will be a sentencing, and the title “convicted felon” will stick to Trump like dog poo on his shoes. The conviction may not have punctured his follower’s image of him, yet, but over the next few weeks it could start to sink in.

It’s also the case that while the true believers may rally around Trump, the conviction could have a different effect on more traditional conservative voters — such as the people still voting for Nikki Haley in primaries — and right-leaning independents. These are people who may share some hard-right opinions but whose personal identities aren’t centered on Trump.

Seriously, though, the only way to break the fever of Trumpism is for Trump to be revealed without doubt as vulnerable and fallable and a loser. If that ever happened, his “base” is likely to crumble.

Speaking of the appeal, Reuters reports that the appeal will center on Stormy Daniels’ testimony. That seems a weird choice. I wonder if that is Trump’s idea.

I wasn’t expecting the verdict this soon. Oh, boy.

A link to the New York Times live feed article. No paywall.

Sorry, I almost forgot —

.

The jury in Manhattan has begun dliberations. I have been looking for details about the judge’s instructions to the jury, to see if there were any surprises, but so far I haven’t found anything. Trump and his lawyers are required to remain in the courthouse while the jury is deliberating, so they are available as soon as here is a verdict. Everything I’ve heard says the prosecution put together a solid case and the defense was throwing spaghetti at the wall, but there’s no knowing what the jury will decide.

Meanwhile, state Republican parties are getting crazier. There’s an accocunt of the recent Texas Republican state convention in the Texas Tribune that you have to read: At Texas GOP convention, Republicans call for spiritual warfare. It begins:

From his booth in the exhibit hall of the Texas GOP’s 2024 convention, Steve Hotze saw an army of God assembled before him.

For four decades, Hotze, an indicted election fraud conspiracy theorist, has helmed hardline anti-abortion movements and virulently homophobic campaigns against LGBTQ+ rights, comparing gay people to Nazis and helping popularize the “groomer” slur that paints them as pedophiles. Once on the fringes, Hotze said Saturday that he was pleased by the party’s growing embrace of his calls for spiritual warfare with “demonic, Satanic forces” on the left.

“People that aren’t in Christ have wicked, evil hearts,” he said. “We are in a battle, and you have to take a side.”

Those beliefs were common at the party’s three-day biennial convention last week, at which delegates adopted a series of new policies that would give the party unprecedented control over the electoral process and further infuse Christianity into public life.

It gets scarier from there. And then there’s Florida. On Judd Legum’s Substack site, Popular Information, he describes how the Florida Department of Education is turning “civics” instruction into indoctrination of Christian nationalism and right-wing political ideology. See Florida educators trained to teach students Christian nationalism and Florida civics training links “cancel culture” to mass murder.

This, of course, is what authoritarians do — they take over institutions to use for their own purposes. There are stories like this coming from several states, but these are possibly the worst. And a lot of state GOPs are currently broke, or close to it, because Trump is sucking up all the donations and not sharing them. MSNBC:

A growing number of state Republican operations are either broke or perilously close to it. Last year, the Minnesota Republican Party reported having only $53 in the bank and over $330,000 in debt. In January, Michigan’s Republicans faced bankruptcy amid a brutal MAGA leadership fight. So much for being the party of fiscal responsibility.

Republican Party chairs know from Democrats’ past examples that starved state operations lead to electoral blowouts at the ballot box. But the Republican National Committee isn’t coming to the rescue with a fire hose of cash, and that gives Democrats a clear roadmap for capitalizing on the GOP’s historic weakness this November.

Republicans can thank Donald Trump for their current financial problems. Trump’s deal with the RNC requires the party to run its donations first through his Save America PAC — which already paid over $50 million toward Trump’s personal legal fees in 2023 alone. That was before RNC co-chair Lara Trump mused about skipping the middleman making the GOP pay Trump’s legal bills directly.

Meanwhile, on Trump’s recent fundraising tours he’s been telling wealthy donors he doesn’t want to hear about any measely million-dollar donations. Make that $25 million or nothing. He’s promising he’ll give them policies that will provide a good return on their money, including tax cuts, deregulation, and oil drilling approvals. He’s making explicit quid pro quo promises, in other words, campaign finance law be damned. It’s all about the money.

This seems to me to point to a future implosion. The question is, will the GOP take the nation down with it?

As I write this, closing arguments in the Manhattan “hush money” trial are beginning, with Todd Blanche for the defense up first.. It says in the NY Times that “Todd Blanche, the defense lawyer, says his closing argument will take about two and a half hours, and Joshua Steinglass, the prosecutor, responds that his will be between four and four and a half hours. The judge says that means we may or may not finish at 4:30, and that he will ask the jurors if they can stay late in order to finish closing arguments if necessary.” That sounds like jury deliberations will begin tomorrow. I’ll keep an eye on the play-by-play reporting and update if anything freaky happens.

Meanwhile, the New York Times has a long article headlined The Untold Story of the Network That Took Down Roe v. Wade: A conservative Christian coalition’s plan to end the federal right to abortion began just days after Trump’s 2016 election. This is the story “of how an elite strike force of Christian lawyers, activists and politicians” worked together to get enough Christian nationalists on the court to overturn Roe. No paywall.

Update: Ooo, this is fun. Robert DeNiro is holding a big press conference outside the courthouse to troll Trump. Two of the J6 Capital Police officers, Harry Dunn and Michael Fanone, are there also.

Though Mr. De Niro and the two former police officers did not address Mr. Trump’s Manhattan trial — he is charged with falsifying business records related to a hush-money payment to a porn star before the 2016 election — they sought to draw attention to his actions that led to the events of Jan. 6, which are the subject of another federal criminal case pending against Mr. Trump.

You probably heard that Trump got booed and heckled at a Libertarian Convention yesterday. Before you get the impression that Libertarians suddenly grew some sense, let’s look at why they booed and heckled Trump.

Libertarians, who believe in limited government and individual freedom, blame Trump, a Republican, for rushing through the creation of a COVID-19 vaccine when he was president and for not doing more to stop public health restrictions on the unvaccinated during the pandemic.

Other than that, they’re fine with a neo-fascist who wants to make himself dictator-for-life and unaccountable to the law.  So Libertarians are still, basically, arrested adolescents who don’t want to be told to eat their vegetables. Most of them, anyway, although the more extreme Libertarians are just fascists in denial about fascism.

RFK Jr. got a better reception from the Libertarians, I take it —

Addressing a few hundred delegates, Kennedy accused Trump of allowing the government to abuse individual liberty during the pandemic. He said: “I think he had the right instinct when he came into office. He was initially very reluctant to impose lockdowns, but then he got rolled by his bureaucrats. He caved in and many of our most fundamental rights disappeared practically overnight.”

Kennedy earned further applause when he asserted: “All of our constitutional rights were ploughed under. They closed all the churches but they kept open the Walmarts and the liquor stores.”

President Biden sensibly declined the Libertarian invitation to speak at their convention. From the Maha Archives: Libertarians Are the Enemy.

In the Truth Social Universe, Trump’s Libertarian address was a triumph. From Rolling Stone:

Although he received a less than friendly reception from Libertarians, you’d never know from Trump’s posts on Truth Social about the night. Trump reposted a video from GOP Rep. Mike Lee where Lee said, “Trump knocked it out of the park tonight at the #LibertarianConvention. Well done, sir!”

Trump posted at midnight after his address, “Everyone here tonight believes that we must fight for the same fundamental freedoms: Freedom of Expression. Freedom of Religion. Freedom to own a Firearm. Freedom from over-Taxation. Freedom from over-Regulation. Freedom from government Discrimination. And we believe that we do not have a FREE COUNTRY if we do not have FREE SPEECH!”

Don’t get me started on the famous Republican hypocrisy on free speech.

In other news: I’m so disgusted with the mess Loose Cannon has made of the Mar-a-Lago ducuments case that I don’t even want to think about it. I am just hanging on to faint hope that the case will be tried some day, even if it’s next year. Or the year after. But you’ve probably heard that Trump has claimed recently that the FBI had planned to assassinate him when they executed the search warrant in August 2022. In spite of the fact that the FBI knew full well Trump was in New York that day. Somebody should explain to Trump that if the FBI really wanted him dead, he would be.

Anyway, Jack Smith has asked Loose to place a gag order on Trump to keep him from talking about assassination. Marcy Wheeler wrote a good post about all this, and I direct you to her place.

Enjoy Memorial Day, everybody.

Do watch this bit from Alex Wagner’s show on MSNBC last night:

Try the link.

Here’s more from Dahlia Lithwick and Mark Joseph Stern at Slate:

Alito says, in short, that courts should pretty much never find that state legislatures acted with racist intent, because they are owed this presumption of good faith that cuts in their favor. And he just makes up the reasons why—he’s just pulling it out of his pocket. Alito says: First, state legislators are bound by an oath to the Constitution, and we should assume they’re following that oath. Second, when we accuse state legislators of doing race-based redistricting, we’re accusing them of “offensive and demeaning conduct” that bears a “resemblance to political apartheid,” and “we should not be quick to hurl such accusations at the political branches.” Finally, he says, we should be wary of voting rights plaintiffs “who seek to transform federal courts into weapons of political warfare” through racial gerrymandering claims.

Whoever could imagine the state legislature of South Carolina enacting anything racist, right? Or, in other words, Sam Alito must be living on another planet, because he doesn’t seem to get this one.

This case should have been really easy because the Supreme Court decided a similar one in 2017: Cooper v. Harris, which involved a North Carolina congressional district. The court, which looked very different in 2017, struck down the district. And in her majority opinion, Justice Elena Kagan rejected all the garbage that Alito shoveled into the law on Thursday. She wrote that plaintiffs don’t have to present a specific kind of evidence and appeals courts should defer to district courts’ findings, not go over them with a super-skeptical eye.

Here, rather than acknowledging that he’s overturning Cooper v. Harris, Alito accuses Kagan of misreading her own opinion from just seven years ago. He says she was talking about “an imaginary version” of Cooper v. Harris—which, I cannot stress enough, is a decision that she herself wrote. It is a noxious mix of mansplaining and gaslighting for Alito to overrule this precedent without admitting it, then tell the author of the precedent that she misunderstood the meaning of the opinion that she wrote.

As much as I’d love to smack Alito around with a blunt object, I do not advocate doing such things. Violence is wrong. I just want Alito removed from the court and banished from politice society. Maybe even deported. He should just go away.

Sometimes when you’re in dissent, you try to make the best of the majority opinion: You can suggest that there are still ways around the new blockade, other approaches or theories or methods that might get around the majority’s roadblock. But here, Kagan gives it to us straight. As she puts it, the majority tells states to “go right ahead” and draw racial gerrymanders because “it will be easy enough to cover your tracks in the end.” If this is now the law, there is really no law against racial gerrymandering. The equal protection clause has been gutted. The post–Civil War amendments no longer have any meaningful application to racial gerrymandering.

It’s been 154 or so years since the 15th Amendment gave Black men the right to vote, and White racists are still pushing back any way they can think of. The only thing that’s changed is that the White racists have to frame their arguments as not being racist.

And then there’s Clarence Thomas … This is Mark Josephe Stern:

And yet, as bad as Alito’s opinion was, it didn’t go far enough for Justice Clarence Thomas, who penned a solo concurrence demanding a radical move: The Supreme Court, he argued, should overrule every precedent that limits gerrymandering—including the landmark cases establishing “one person, one vote”—because it has no constitutional power to redraw maps in the first place. And he places much of the blame for the court’s allegedly illegitimate intrusion into redistricting on a surprising culprit: Brown v. Board of Education.

Brown was, of course, the 1954 decision holding that racial segregation in public education violates the equal protection clause. Many of us celebrated its 70^th anniversary just last week. But Brown has always had its detractors, and Thomas has long been one of them. He has written that the decision rested on a “great flaw” by focusing on the stigma that Jim Crow inflicted on schoolchildren. He rejectedBrown’s assertion that Black children suffered constitutional harm when denied access to integrated education. And he condemned the court’s ongoing efforts to remedy decades of segregation by integrating public school systems by judicial decree, decrying these integration efforts as “predicated on black inferiority.”

Again, what planet does this man live on? It can’t be this one.

In other news: “The International Court of Justice on Friday ordered Israel to immediately halt its military assault on Rafah, the city in southern Gaza where more than 1 million people had sought refuge in dire conditions.” This is the UN’s highest court. Good luck with that.

So Samuel Alito was caught flying an upside down flag at his house and an “appeal to heaven” flag at his New Jersey beach home. And there are reports Leonard Leo has been flying the “appeal to heaven” flag at his Maine summer home. Hmmm. I just published something at Patheos explaining where this flag comes from and why it’s controversial. But there’s something else I wrote about awhile back that connects Leonard Leo and Sam Alito.

Leo and his conplex of right-wing interest groups are pushing to get a Catholic charter school, funded by taxpayer dollars, open in Oklahoma. This would be St. Isidore of Seville Catholic Virtual School, an online charter school already approved by an Oklahoma state agency called the Oklahoma Statewide Virtual Charter School Board. The school is expected to open in August of 2024 for the 2024-2025 school year. The attorney general of Oklahoma is opposed to this school and says it violates the state constitution, and he’s been trying to stop the school in the courts. But here’s the Alito-Leo connection.

St. Isidore is represented by Nicole Stelle Garnett of the Notre Dame Religious Liberty Initiative, a clinic associated with Notre Dame University in South Bend, Indiana. Garnett, a law professor at Notre Dame, is on the board of the Federalist Society, where Leonard Leo is co-chairman. She is also on the advisory council of a Catholic University law school initiative that is funded by anonymous donations directed by Leonard Leo. Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito is the honorary chairman of that group. Lots of connections there.

There’s this vast network of hard-right Christian nationalists trying to turn the U.S. into a theocracy, and the “appeal to heaven” flag is a way to signal each other, I guess.

The irony is that the phrase “appeal to heaven” is taken from John Locke’s Second Treatise on Government, and among other things in this treatise Locke was arguing for  the end of the divine right of kings and in favor of governments that take their authority from the people. If Locke came back today he wouldn’t be part of Leonard Leo’s theocratic schemes, I’m pretty sure.

Speaking of Sam Alito, he wrote the majority opinion released today siding with South Carolina Republicans over a gerrymandered electoral map. Having gutted the Voting Rights Act passed by Congress, now the justices are saying that little ol’ them just don’t have the authority to override how the states draw their maps or run their elections.

But even worse was what Clarence Thomas wrote. I got a whiff of this watching Joy Reid and looked it up. Thomas in a concurrence actually wrote that the Warren Court back in 1954 overstepped in its decision in Brown v. Board of Ed. Yes, he did. Let that sink in. That worthless fat ass is sitting in the great Thurgood Marshall’s seat saying that, you know, white people will get around to being fair eventually. Let’s not rush things. In effect. You can find this part of the “opinion” beginning on page 64.