The news is so horrible. Out country is being broken up into pieces and flushed down a drain. And there seems to be nothing anyone can do to stop it. The most recent I’ve seen — NIH cuts billions of dollars in biomedical funding, effective immediately

Dana Milbank, arguably the last decent editorial columnist left at WaPo — there may be another, but I can’t think of who it would be — has written as good a summation of where we stand as I’ve seen. See Democrats, don’t save Trump from himself.

See also Inside Musk’s Aggressive Incursion Into the Federal Government by a bunch of people at the New York Times.

This morning a federal judge did put a temporary block on Musk’s access to the Treasury payment system, but at this point I don’t know if a judge’s order even means anything. Who’s going to enforce it?

Wired has been doing some good reporting on what the Muskrats are up to. See A US Treasury Threat Intelligence Analysis Designates DOGE Staff as ‘Insider Threat’ and DOGE Builds ‘Firewall’ Between Musk’s Team and [U.S. Digital Services] USDS Workers, for example.

I’m just seeing this — In a harbinger of illiberalism, Trump fired the Archivist of the United States without telling her or Congress why.

That’s enough to digest for now. Please feel free to vent about whatever is most upsetting you in the comments.

I saw on television there was a decent turnout at the state capitol protests yesterday. I felt bad for not trying to get to one, but I’ve been really slammed with arthritis pain in my knees recently.  I saw an orthopedic guy yesterday who gave me a steroid shot in one knee (the other is beyond help, apparently) and am in much less pain today. But it’s safe to say my marching in the streets days are over, unless I can get my hands on a wheelchair and someone to push it. Younger people will have to do the marching now.

There’s so much going on it’s hard to keep up. But one of the first headlines to jump out at me today was at Slate, Pam Bondi Instructs Trump DOJ to Criminally Investigate Companies That Do DEI. This is by Jeremy Stahl and Mark Joseph Stern.

One astonishing memo, seen by Slate, puts the DOJ at the center of President Donald Trump’s widespread efforts to destroy any traces of initiatives that would create inclusive and diverse workspaces, otherwise known as DEIA. The new memo claims that it will target private-sector diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility initiatives for potential “criminal investigation.”

In other words, the government is going to interfere with the hiring practices of private companies. And the righties will say that’s what Affirmative Action did, but frankly Affirmative Action was about protecting individual citizens from discrimination. And the righties will say that now White men are being discriminated against, and I will say, yeah, and I’m King Charles.

I am sure I’ve preached this sermon before, about how I grew up in a “sundown town” and was around White racists a big chunk of my life, Something I realized while I was still a young person was that the White guys who were the most openly bigoted were relentlessly … ordinary. They weren’t especially smart, or accomplished, or exceptional in any way except for being loudmouth bigots. And most of them were living standard middle-class lives, with ok jobs and a decent home and the usual accoutrements of average Americana. But they believed they were owed all the goodies the American Dream had to offer, and if their lives weren’t fulfilling their expectations it must be the fault of those other people.

It’s also the case that a lot of them clung to their identity as a White male as the one thing that made them special. They couldn’t face being relentlessly ordinary. See also something I wrote in 2017, The Myths That Guide Us.

This is an entirely subjective opinion not backed up by scholarly studies, but I know my people. I sincerely believe a whole lot of these guys go down the white supremacy rabbit hole because they’ve come to live inside a myth that says their whiteness entitles them to greatness. In their own minds they are the heirs to a noble tradition of warrior-men who eventually will return in glory and re-assert their natural superiority over all those other people. And yeah, it’s nonsense, but it’s a fantasy that helps them avoid confronting how utterly banal they and their lives actually are.

Many of the people in the Trump Administration fit the categories of “banal” and “ordinary,” but they got pushed up ladders because they were loudmouth advocates of the White supremacist fantasy that won’t die.

Part of the fantasy is that DEI programs require quotas, meaning that somehow more-qualified White guys lose jobs to less-qualified minorities or women in order to fill a quota. But quotas are illegal, according to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. DEI means that companies should not be hiring and promoting less-qualified White guys over better-qualified minorities and women. This is a concept alien to a bigot, of course.

When I graduated college in 1973 Affirmative Action was just going into effect, and it was only because of that that at least some of my highly accomplished sister graduates were considered for professional jobs and not automatically dumped into secretarial pools. The best jobs, of course, automatically went to the White guys, including some very average ones.

In most of my early career in book publishing  — which is a female intensive industry — in the 1970s and 1980s, I still saw very average — and sometimes downright stupid — White guys promoted over the heads of women with more experience and skills. (And as I recall there were few racial minorities in publishing in those days. That didn’t start to change until the 1990s.) The rule seemed to be that a White guy was considered competent, even with copious evidence to the contrary, as long as he didn’t burn down the building. Women and minorities were assumed to be less competent until they had put in a few years proving themselves with exceptional service to the company. And then maybe they’d be allowed up the ladder just a step.

I’ve worked for a couple of male managers who were so colossally stupid they were clearly costing the company tons of money. One guy rendered the entire department of a relatively small company nearly dysfunctional before the owner noticed there was a problem — book schedules were blown, books were published with sections missing, books were printed with pages of gibberish that nobody noticed — and even then he brought in a (male) consultant to evaluate the situation. The consultant, bless him, recommended firing the stupid manager. This was in the 1970s; this was the “meritocracy” Trump wants to take us back to.

A long time ago I read an argument that the problem was not so much that there were huge barriers to women and minorities, but that White men often got too many passes to move up without deserving it. That may have become less true over time, but it never entirely went away.

See also a post from back in 2009, The Default Norm, about Sonia Sotomayor’s confirmation hearing to be a Supreme Court justice. The hearings painfully exposed that many of the Senators harbored the perspective that White maleness is the default human norm, and anyone else must be assumed to be less normal and treated differently.

And, of course, over the years I’ve had some excellent male managers and some clunky female managers, but on the whole by the time we got into the 1990s there seemed to be less discrimination — in publishing, anyway, I can’t speak for other industries — and more putting people into jobs they could actually do, regardless of sex or skin color. It did American business a lot of good, I suspect. I also suspect that companies that develop and sell consumer products, recreation, entertainment, that kind of thing, and who want customers of all races and genders, find that having a diverse workforce is very useful in that regard. White guys alone tend to be oblivious to what might interest and appeal to other people. Many large companies have come to appreciate that diversity is good for their bottom lines.

Government is lagging behind. I found a 2021 study that said White men are 30 percent of the U.S. population but hold 62 percent of all elected offices.

What exactly is Bondi going to investigate? Did a company send recruiters to Howard University, for example? Is that going to be criminal now? Are more women and minorities than White Men (who are only 30 percent of the U.S. population, after all) being hired by some company? Is that criminal now?

And does Bondi appreciate that Sandra Day O’Connor, after graduating near the top of her law school class in 1952, was offered no jobs with a legal firm except as a legal secretary? She eventually got a first professional job as a county deputy attorney after offering to work without compensation. And were it not for feminists in the 1960s and 1970s making noises about women’s equality, I doubt it would have occurred to Ronald Reagan to nominate a woman to the Supreme Court. Or maybe he was trying to prove something after having opposed the Equal Rights Amendment.

And for years the Right whined that any government interference with private business was socialism. I guess they’ve changed their minds.

Stuff to Read

Highly recommended — Josh Marshall, The Three-Headed Chimera of Trumpian Destruction

David Frum, The Atlantic, How Trump Lost His Trade War 

Timothy W. Ryback, The Atlantic, The Oligarchs Who Came to Regret Supporting Hitler

Paul Krugman, RFK Jr. and the MAGA Death Trip

Dana Milbank, Washington Post, From the river to the sea, Palestine will be … abolished?

MSN/WaPo, Gutting USAID threatens billions of dollars for U.S. farms, businesses

This isn’t even getting into the last in what Elon Musk has been up to. It’s too much.

Many games are afoot, my friends. A lot of news broke late yesterday that appears to send Trump’s legal issues into new trajectories.

Among these: Today Rudy Giuliani will be meeting with Fani Willis and her team, says the Daily Beast. Nobody knows what this meeting is about. He doesn’t need to meet with them just to surrender and post bail, I don’t think. Should Trump be worried? Michael Cohen thinks so:

David Kurtz at TPM breaks it down more:

In March 2023 testimony to the DC grand jury, Taveras and De Oliveira perjured themselves by denying having any conversations about the security footage at Mar-a-Lago.

In June 2023, Smith advised Woodward that Taveras was a target of its investigation and sought a hearing with the chief judge in DC over Woodward conflict of interest. Woodward was repping both Nauta and Taveras.

U.S. District Judge James Boasberg provided Taveras with a public defender to confer with about the conflicts of interest Woodward had. On July 5, Taveras informed Boasberg that he was changing lawyers from Woodward to the public defender.

Soon after, Taveras recanted his prior false testimony to the grand jury and implicated Trump, Nauta, and De Oliveira. The superseding indictment soon followed.

Possibly related, but I’m not sure — earlier this month Smith filed additional grand jury information from the D.C. grand jury in the documents case, and Loose threw a fit over it.

Cannon said there was not “sufficient legal or factual basis to warrant” the “secrecy” — and ordered a clerk to remove both of Smith’s filings from the South Florida docket.

Cannon also asked Trump’s legal team to respond to allegations from those grand jury proceedings that attorney Stanley Woodward — representing Trump valet Waltine Nauta — has conflicts of interest in the documents case, since three of his clients may be called to testify as government witnesses.

The potential witnesses include Mar-a-Lago IT director Yuscil Taveras and two others who worked in the Trump White House and followed the 45th president to Florida, filings show.

Loose threw this fit shortly after the superseding indictment had been filed, or at least it was reported on after the superseding indictment had been filed, but I suspect there’s a connection.  Back to David Kurtz:

Smith is hitting back hard on three main points: (1) his use of the grand jury in DC was proper; (2) Woodward is deeply conflicted for all the above reasons but also because he was provided to Taveras and paid for by Trumpworld entities; and (3) there is zero precedent for resolving this kind of conflict by barring the testimony of a key witness, which is what Woodward proposed.

The legal expert bobbleheads on MSNBC have been saying all along that there is nothing at all wrong with having two grand juries in two places, considering that the alleged criminal activity was taking place in two places. Loose is just incompetent.

And then there’s Mark Meadows, who seems to be trying to have it all different ways at once. See How Mark Meadows Pursued a High-Wire Legal Strategy in Trump Inquiries by a bunch of people at the New York Times (no paywall).

In brief, Meadows appears to be cooperating, at least partly, with Jack Smith, but he’s resisting cooperation with Fani Willis. Regarding Georgia, Meadows wants his case moved to a federal court. He’s got a hearing on this next week, but his deadline for surrender to Fulton County is this Friday. And Fani Willis refused Meadows’s request for an extension. So he’s asking a judge to protect him from being arrested.

[Update: A judge told Meadows and Jeffrey Clark he can’t stop Fani Willis from having them arrested if they don’t surrender by Friday.]

But we learned this week that Meadows told federal prosecutors he doesn’t recall former President Trump “ordering, or even discussing, declassifying broad sets of classified materials before leaving the White House,” for example. So he’s not totally stonewalling Jack Smith. He appears to be trying to avoid a criminal conviction while not becoming a rage target of the Trump base. Good luck with that.

Word is that Trump plans to turn himself in at the Fulton County jail on Thursday night to get maximum television coverage.

In other news: Tonight is the first Republican presidential nomination debate. A lot of commentators are saying that if Ron DeSantis doesn’t do especially well tonight he might as well drop out. That’s probably true.

The eight finalists who are eligible and expected to debate are DeSantis, Asa Hutchison, Tim Scott, Doug Bergum, Nikki Haley, Mike Pence, Chris Christie, and Vivek Ramaswamy. But Bergum (and who is he, again?) was injured playing basketball yesterday and may not be able to be there. So they can’t hook the guy up on Zoom or something?

In other other news: There are reports that Trump’s big idea for the economy is a “universal baseline tariff” on virtually all imports to the United States; something in the neighborhood of 10 percent. Even the mouth breathers at Power Tools are appalled and talking about Smoot-Hawley II. WaPo:

Turns out Trump’s foreign policy was for sale to the highest bidder. And it wasn’t just the Trumps cashing in.

See also Juan Cole and Heather Cox Richardson. Juan Cole wrote,

Donald Trump as president dumped the Paris Climate Accord, withdrew from the 2015 Iranian nuclear deal, endorsed the 2017 blockade of Qatar by Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, and pushed for declaring the Muslim Brotherhood a terrorist organization. The Brotherhood had been part of the 2011 uprisings against Arab dictators, leading Arab monarchies to see them as subversives and dangerous to the status quo.

All of these steps were on a wish list of the United Arab Emirates, the fabulously wealthy Gulf oil state, with its capital at Abu Dhabi.

And Heather Cox Richardson wrote,

According to today’s charges, once Trump was in office, Barrack continued to lobby for the UAE until April 2018. He allegedly worked with allies in the UAE to draft passages of Trump’s speeches, hone press materials, and prepare talking points to promote UAE interests. Without ever registering as a foreign agent, he worked to change U.S. foreign policy and appoint administration officials to meet a “wish list” produced by UAE officials.

Barrack helped to tie the Trump administration to Saudi Arabia and the UAE, turning the US away from Qatar, an ally that hosts US air bases (although they are now being closed as bases and in the process of becoming housing for our Afghan allies before their US visas come through). From the beginning, the administration worked closely with Abu Dhabi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Zayed, who controls $1.3 trillion in sovereign wealth funds and essentially rules the UAE, and with Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MBS), whom Prince Mohammed championed.

In May 2017, Trump advisers Jared Kushner and Steve Bannon, along with Saudi and UAE leaders, met without the knowledge of then–Secretary of State Rex Tillerson to talk about blockading Qatar. When Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Bahrain, and Egypt launched a blockade on June 5, 2017, Trump cheered them on, although the State Department took a neutral stand and the Pentagon thanked Qatar for hosting US troops.

Trump’s first foreign visit as president was to Saudi Arabia, remember, which gave us the famous glowing orb moment:

Tom Barrack  also was instrumental in bringing Paul Manafort and Rick Gates into the Trump campaign, which introduced the Russian connection as well. See also What Really Happened to the Inaguration Money? and The Trump Inauguration: Grifters Gonna Grift.

There are allegations floating around that Barrack took in about  $1.5 billion from the UAE and the Saudis. When Trump finds out someone other than him was making money on his admnistration, he’ll blow a fuse.

Can we talk big-time hypocrisy? The Right has gifted martyrdom to the late Ashli Babbitt, the woman shot and killed while rioting in the Capitol January 6. These past six months they have called for the name of the law enforcement officer who shot her, but the officer was cleared of wrongdoing, and his name was not released.

Now parts of rightie media have named a name, based on their analysis of the video of the shooting. I am not going to repeat the name here, because the wider his name is known the more peril he is in. And I have no opinion as to whether the man named is the real shooter. I do have an opinion that the Justice Department was right to clear him of wrongdoing.

To review, on January 6 Ms. Babbitt was in the forefront of a port of the mob who came up against the barricaded door of the Speaker’s Lobby, a space outside the main entrance of the House chamber. Members of Congress and their staffs were escaping through the lobby at the time. Rioters shattered the glass on the doors. In the videos, you can see a law enforcement officer standing behind the doors with a gun drawn. Babbitt, with the help of other rioters, was squeezing herself through an open space to get into the lobby. You can see her in this photo; she’s wearing the striped backpack.

I am told that in some videos, security staff can be heard shouting “Get back! Get down!” I have not watched every video myself to verify that, but in this one you can hear rioters yell, “he’s got a gun.” One officer is plainly visible pointing his handgun. And as Babbitt’s head came through the window, he fired. She was struck in the neck and declared dead at the hospital.

The righties make much of the fact that Babbitt was not armed. But the security staff at that time had no way to know who was armed. And in any event, by then police all over the building were being routed and beaten up by the overwhelming force of the mob. Armed or not armed, the rioters were a clear danger to the legislators still a few feet away, either evacuating or still in the House chamber. This photo taken from within the House chamber suggests that if those doors had been broken through, more people would have been shot.

It is regretful that anyone died in that mob. But how deluded do you have to be to believe that Babbitt died “for no reason“?

The Department of Justice said of the officer who shot Babbitt:

The focus of the criminal investigation was to determine whether federal prosecutors could prove that the officer violated any federal laws, concentrating on the possible application of 18 U.S.C. § 242, a federal criminal civil rights statute. In order to establish a violation of this statute, prosecutors must prove, beyond a reasonable doubt, that the officer acted willfully to deprive Ms. Babbitt of a right protected by the Constitution or other law, here the Fourth Amendment right not to be subjected to an unreasonable seizure. Prosecutors would have to prove not only that the officer used force that was constitutionally unreasonable, but that the officer did so “willfully,” which the Supreme Court has interpreted to mean that the officer acted with a bad purpose to disregard the law. As this requirement has been interpreted by the courts, evidence that an officer acted out of fear, mistake, panic, misperception, negligence, or even poor judgment cannot establish the high level of intent required under Section 242.

The investigation revealed no evidence to establish beyond a reasonable doubt that the officer willfully committed a violation of 18 U.S.C. § 242. Specifically, the investigation revealed no evidence to establish that, at the time the officer fired a single shot at Ms. Babbitt, the officer did not reasonably believe that it was necessary to do so in self-defense or in defense of the Members of Congress and others evacuating the House Chamber. Acknowledging the tragic loss of life and offering condolences to Ms. Babbitt’s family, the U.S. Attorney’s Office and U.S. Department of Justice have therefore closed the investigation into this matter.

I don’t know the status of the evacuation at the exact moment of the shooting, but it’s my understanding that the mob could well have gotten their hands on members of Congress if it had gotten through that door. Lawmakers Were Feet and Seconds Away From Confrontation With the Mob in the Capitol, according to a Wall Street Journal headline. And now that the mob has the name of an officer, he and his family will need to be moved to a very safe, undisclosed location. So far, none of the published articles naming his name have given his address or the names of family members, but that’s only a matter of time. Somewhere, no doubt, he is already doxxed.

It’s my understanding that the shot that killed Ashli Babbitt was the only gunshot fired in the Capitol that day. There was, of course, bear spray and tasers and many blunt objects in the hands of the mob. I’ve waded into some rightie sites today, and according to rightie lore, all of the rioters who died that day were killed by Capitol security. Beside Babbit, these are:

Kevin D. Greeson, 55, of Athens, Alabama. According to news reports, Greeson was standing with a group of Trump loyalists on the west side of the Capitol when he suffered a heart attack and fell to the sidewalk. He was talking on the phone with his wife at the time. According to righties, he had a heart attack because he was shot in the chest with rubber bullets.

Rosanne Boyland, 34, of Kennesaw, Georgia. Ms. Boyland was trampled by her fellow rioters, although the official cause of death was “acute amphetamine intoxication.” Even so, the New York Times “Day of Rage” video shows rioters trampling over her. According to rightie lore, the crowd ran because it was being fired on. No, it wasn’t. The crowd was not in retreat but in advance. No shots are heard. No one in that part of the crowd was shot.

Benjamin Philips, 50, died of a stroke. According to the coroner, both Greeson and Philips died of hypertensive atherosclerotic cardiovascular disease. According to righties, someone in Capitol law enforcement threw him off a balcony. No videos have emerged of anyone being thrown off a balcony, and no news stories mention anyone being thrown off a balcony.

The point is that a characteristic of Trump supporters is blind tribal loyalty and an inability to take personal responsibility for anythng.

Speaking of deaths, on July 6 Chris Hayes made the point that the House would have been evacuated sooner except that Rep. Paul Gosar was taking his time objecting to the ballots of his own state. If the House chamber had evacuated sooner, Ashli Babbitt might still be alive. Chris Hayes stopped short of accusing Gosar of coordinating with the mob. Hmm.

And let us not forget that abut 140 officers were injured in the defense of the Capitol. Many injuries were serious — broken ribs, smashed vertebrae, head injuries. Officer Brian Sicknick died the next day, perhaps from unrelated causes, and two other officers committed suicide in the days after the riot.

But we must remember that the mob is still out there, and still dangerous, and they think they have righteousness on their side.

See also: Philip Bump, The death of Ashli Babbitt offers the purest distillation of Donald Trump’s view of justice.

H.R. 1, the For the People Act of 2021, was introduced and referred to House Committees on January 4. It is a bill intended “To expand Americans’ access to the ballot box, reduce the influence of big money in politics, strengthen ethics rules for public servants, and implement other anti-corruption measures for the purpose of fortifying our democracy, and for other purposes.”

I can’t tell you how much we need this bill to pass.

It’s a huge bill, so I can only provide a few highlights. If my discussion doesn’t include your favorite voting reform idea, that doesn’t mean it isn’t in there, somewhere. And of course the committees are going to tinker with it for awhile, but here is a brief discussion of what’s in this bill’s three divisions — Voting, Campaign Finance, and Ethics.

Voting

Here’s a bullet list of the voting section I copied from Common Cause.

• Automatic voter registration
• Online voter registration
• Same day voter registration
• Make election day a federal holiday
• Voting rights restoration to people with prior felony convictions
• Expand early voting and simplify absentee voting
• Prohibit voter purges that kick eligible voters off the registration rolls
• Enhance election security with increase support for a paper-based voting system and more oversight over election vendors
• End partisan gerrymandering by established independent redistricting commissions
• Prohibit providing false information about the elections process that discourage voting and other deceptive practices

Note the part about ending partisan gerrymandering. That by itself would go a long way toward forcing the GOP to sober up and act like a grown-up political party again, IMO.

One section reaffirms the commitment of Congress to restore the Voting Rights Act. I’ll quote this part —

The Supreme Court’s 2013 Shelby County v. Holder decision gutted decades-long Federal pro3 tections for communities of color that face historic and continuing discrimination, emboldening States and local jurisdictions to pass voter suppression laws and implement procedures, such as those requiring photo identification, limiting early voting hours, eliminating same-day registration, purging voters from the rolls, and reducing the number of polling places. Congress is committed to reversing the devastating impact of this decision.

From there, the bill discusses specific examples of discrimination from recent elections. The bill would ensure that federal civil rights laws protect citizens from these discriminations. There are also provisions aimed at protecting access to voting for Native Americans and people with disabilities.

There’s a section calling for D.C. statehood. It also calls for uniform standards in federal elections.

Campaign Finance

Here’s the bullet list for this section:

• Require secret money organizations that spend money in elections to disclose their donors
• Upgrade online political spending transparency rules to ensure voters know who is paying for the advertisements they see
• Create a small donor-focused public financing matching system so candidates for Congress aren’t just reliant on big money donors to fund their campaigns and set their priorities
• Strengthen oversight rules to ensure those who break our campaign finance laws are held accountable
• Overhaul the Federal Election Commission to enforce campaign finance law
• Prohibit the use of shell companies to funnel foreign money in U.S. elections
• Require government contractors to disclose their political spending

There’s a long section that takes direct aim at the Citizen’s United decision that’s worth reading on it’s own. It starts on page 533 on this pdf.

There’s a section dedicated to closing loopholes that allow foreign money into our elections. There’s language prohibiting deepfakes and otherwise deceptively edited audios or videos unless there’s a clear disclaimer, e.g., this video has been manipulated. A candidate who is the subject of deceptively edited audios or videos can sue for damages.

Ethics

• Slow the revolving door between government officials and lobbyists
• Expand conflict of interest law
• Ban members of Congress from serving on corporate boards
• Require presidents to publicly disclose their tax returns
• Overhaul the Office of Government Ethics to ensure stronger enforcement of ethics rules
• Require members of the U.S. Supreme Court abide by a judicial code of ethics

I’m sure you already know where all those provisions are coming from.

The Common Cause page has more information and links to other summaries. See also:

Center for Responsive Politics, Democrats prioritize campaign finance overhaul with ‘For the People Act’

Matt Keller, The Hill, Trump actions illustrate why Congress must pass the For the People Act

Center for American Progress, Momentum Builds for Democracy Reform as Schumer Designates the For the People Act as Senate’s First Bill

This bill is what we need to stop the continued erosion of democracy by right-wing plutocrats and fascists and Trump wannabees, never mind Trump himself  It is absolutely vital to restoring democracy. Without it, I fear we’re going to continue to lurch toward ruin and dictatorship.

But of course, the catch is that there is no way this bill will pass in the Senate unless the Dems kill the filibuster. Ed Kilgore, New York magazine:

To put it bluntly, the lesson many Republicans took away from their former president’s attempted theft of the presidential election is that the voters who defeated him need to be discouraged from returning to the polls in the future. As Ron Brownstein notes, there’s a new frenzy of voter-suppression measures underway in Republican-controlled states that may hold the balance of power in upcoming elections: …

… The urgency of these measures should be obvious, with red states narrowing the path to the ballot box and with the decennial redistricting about to begin. And unlike many other measures facing a filibuster, voting rights and democracy-promotion legislation does not qualify for inclusion in a budget-reconciliation bill that can be enacted with a simple majority. So in many important respects, it’s now or never for voting rights. …

… In any event, Democrats in Congress and the White House and their advocacy-group and grassroots supporters need to come to a quick consensus about how to test the willingness of Democratic filibuster defenders like Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema, and relatively independent Republicans like Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski, to make some new exceptions to the disreputable old institution. Voting rights might offer the most compelling case for limited filibuster reform, and for Democrats, the cause without which all others may ultimately fail.

Kilgore suggests that the foot-draggers might be persuaded to kill the filibuster specifically for voting rights legislation, leaving it intact for other laws. I think that’s a good idea. He also suggests testing the waters by putting the John Lewis Voting Rights Act up for a vote first.

But we absolutely need this bill. I am stick to death of the right-wing nutjobs turning our country into crap. It has to stop.

If you missed Rachel Maddow last night, this brief segment is worth a look.

What she’s saying here is that because of a law passed during the Nixon Administration, it is possible to use the budget reconciliation process to bypass the filibuster and pass big bills with a 50 percent vote. This can’t be done multiple times a year; it can only be done with bills written as part of the budget. But since Congress didn’t pass a budget last year and hasn’t passed one this year, we’ve can use reconciliation twice this year.

There are limits to what kind of bill can be passed through reconciliation. The Congressional Budget Act permits using reconciliation for legislation that changes spending, revenues, and the federal debt limit, it says here. Senate rules allow senators to block provisions that are not connected directly to spending, revenue, and debt.

Maddow thinks the Democrats could use reconciliation to pass covid relief/stimulus and a jobs/infrastructure bill. But that leaves out other vital reforms we really, really need. Immigration reform and voting/election reform come to mind.

Do see Ron Brownstein, The Decision That Will Define Democrats for a Decade, at The Atlantic.

The party’s immediate political fate in the 2022 and 2024 elections is likely to turn mostly on whether Joe Biden can successfully control the coronavirus outbreak—restarting the economy and returning a sense of normalcy to daily life. But the contours of American politics just over that horizon, through 2030 and beyond, will be determined even more by whether Democrats can establish new national standards for the conduct of elections through a revised Voting Rights Act and sweeping legislation known as H.R. 1, which would set nationwide voting rules, limit “dark money” campaign spending, and ban gerrymandering of congressional districts. With both bills virtually guaranteed to pass the House, as they did in the last Congress, their fate will likely turn on whether Senate Democrats are willing to end the filibuster to approve them over Republican opposition on a simple-majority vote.

Agreed; there’s no way ten Republicans would be persuaded to vote for this.

That decision carries enormous consequences for the future balance of power between the parties: The number of younger and diverse voters participating in future elections will likely be much greater if these laws pass than if they don’t, especially with state-level Republicans already pushing a new round of laws making it tougher to vote based on Donald Trump’s discredited claims of election fraud in 2020. Given those stakes, the Democrats’ voting-rights agenda is quickly becoming a focal point of the pressure from left-leaning activists to end the filibuster. “Our grass roots will not accept the notion that we had good intentions, but we just failed” to pass these laws, Senator Jeff Merkley of Oregon, a Democrat who is the lead sponsor of the Senate companion to H.R. 1, told me.

It could be catastrphic for the Dems if they don’t get election reform passed.

More from Greg Sargent:

A few days ago I proposed that the insider Republican establishment, led by Mitch McConnell, would cut Trump loose from the party. Others disagreed. Now it appears they were right and I was wrong, although Mitch isn’t necessarily happy about it.

Nicholas Fandos and Jonathan Martin, The New York Times:

Three times in recent weeks, as Republicans grappled with a deadly attack on the Capitol and their new minority status in Washington, Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky carefully nudged open the door for his party to kick Donald J. Trump to the curb, only to find it slammed shut.

So his decision on Tuesday to join all but five Republican senators in voting to toss out the House’s impeachment case against Mr. Trump as unconstitutional seemed to be less a reversal than a recognition that the critical mass of his party was not ready to join him in cutting loose the former president. Far from repudiating Mr. Trump, as it appeared they might in the days after the Jan. 6 rampage at the Capitol, Republicans have reverted to the posture they adopted when he was in office — unwilling to cross a figure who continues to hold outsize sway in their party.

One thing I want to say about the vote on Tuesday — it’s my understanding that the motion voted on this past Tuesday was not whether Trump could be impeached after he had left office, but whether the Senate could vote on whether Trump could be impeached after he left office. Rand Paul made a motion to hold a vote on the constitutionality of the impeachment trial. Then Chuck Schumer asked for a vote to table the motion, and that’s what was voted on Tuesday. That may or may not matter going forward, but I do try to be accurate.

Michael Scherer and Josh Dawsey, WaPo, Republicans back away from confronting Trump and his loyalists after the Capitol insurrection, embracing them instead:

DHS has issued a warning of a “heightened threat environment across the United States” from “ideologically-motivated violent extremists with objections to the exercise of governmental authority and the presidential transition, as well as other perceived grievances fueled by false narratives.” Trumpers and right-wingers, in other words.

No doubt every rightie in media, social and otherwise, will start screaming that the Biden Administration is unfairly targeting them.

Some elements in DHS have unsuccessfully tried to warn us about the danger of right-wing extremism for years, of course. Remember this one?

In April 2009, federal intelligence officials issued a prescient warning to police departments around the country.

“Right-wing extremists will attempt to recruit and radicalize returning veterans in order to exploit their skills and knowledge derived from military training and combat,” experts in the Department of Homeland Security wrote. “These skills and knowledge have the potential to boost the capabilities of extremists — including lone wolves or small terrorist cells — to carry out violence.”

It was one of DHS’ most explicit mentions of homegrown terrorists since 9/11, one with a direct connection to the military.

But the call to action was effectively buried after powerful Republican politicians and their allies in the right-wing media launched broadsides against President Barack Obama’s administration and Democrats, alleging that they had disrespected the men and women in the U.S. military while attempting to surveil and silence conservatives. The blowback shifted the debate away from how to actually address the threat and into another partisan public spectacle.

In the years since, every time someone proposes that there’s a threat of violence from right-wing groups, that person is shouted down. So let’s see what happens this time. But the 2009 report was prescient. Since the January 6 Capitol insurrection, news stories about the number of cops and ex-military who were among the insurrectionists have spread throughout the land, to the surprise of absolutely no one who’d been paying any attention at all.

It’s also the case that many people involved in national security are inclined to give righties a pass. For example, Iveta Cherneva at Salon discusses FBI Deputy Director David Bowdich, who will be retiring soon.

In the spring of last year, when I was a candidate for the office of UN special rapporteur on freedom of speech, Bowdich was quoted, in a memo leaked to the New York Times, reacting to the nationwide wave of Black Lives Matters protests. Bowdich maintained that the protesters should be arrested under an outdated racketeering law from the 1940s. The leaked memo showed that Bowdich considered the social justice movement “a national crisis” comparable to 9/11. The hundreds of thousands of people mourning and marching across the country, unified by the simple concept that no life should be taken lightly, were seen by the FBI’s deputy director as similar to terrorists or members of organized crime operations.

The problem is bigger than Bowdich.

The FBI remains obsessed with dissident or radical voices on the left, while largely ignoring the violent extremists and the real terrorism threat on the far right, as recently revealed by an Intercept investigation that found “glaring disparities between law enforcement’s depiction of groups on the right and the left.”

When it came to analysis of left-wing groups, “law enforcement intelligence was often vague, mixed up in online conspiracy theories or untethered to evidence of suspected criminal activity”. When it comes to the right, on the other hand, the documents showed “law enforcement agencies across the country sharing detailed and specific information on the mobilization of armed groups looking to use the unrest as cover to attack law enforcement and protesters and set off a civil war.”

This suggests to me that right-wing extremism presents a much more tangible, clear, and present danger than anything happening on the left.

It’s also the case that for years, right-wing organizations glorified gun culture and, with the help of right-wing politicians, have managed to erase anything resembling gun control in large parts of the country. So now we’ve got vast swarms of right-wing thugs who are legally armed to the teeth and who have been primed to oppose anything resembling democratic government. Way to go, America.

Please see Out of the Barrel of a Gun by Charles Homans at the New York Times. We are all increasingly at the mercy of angry, heavily armed people — mostly men — who fervently believe they have a constitutional right and patriotic duty to destroy the government and anyone who supports it as the heavily armed people see fit. The “constituion,” in this case, is an amorphous thing that exists in their imaginations and bears no resemblance to the document drawn up and ratified in 1789, but good luck explaining that to them.

The only thing that’s stopped these specimens from being an even bigger threat is that they’ve been more of a culture than a movement, at least until recently. Trumpism and the pandemic have given them direction and focus. Mary McCord writes in the Los Angeles Times:

Since the onset of the pandemic, paramilitary groups have engaged in armed intimidation and threats at statehouses, governors’ mansions, and public health officials’ homes in opposition to public health orders. They have endangered public safety — with fatal results — by self-deploying to “protect” property from what have been largely false rumors of antifa violence during racial justice demonstrations. Six men involved with a private militia have been charged with plotting to kidnap Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer and try her for treason. These groups are trained and organized for the sort of violence that occurred on Jan. 6. Support for Trump has often been at the core of their online rhetoric, and Trump’s apparent encouragement of their activities has been used to normalize their extremist views for broader appeal.

The Capitol siege reveals something that many have been willing to ignore for too long: the involvement of paramilitary organizations that often refer to themselves as “patriots” with extremists who openly advocate for and commit violent attacks to intimidate and coerce. Many condemn the latter as domestic terrorists, and indeed, the U.S. Code defines domestic terrorism as activities that involve crimes of violence committed with the intent “to intimidate and coerce a civilian population” or “to influence the policy of a government by intimidation or coercion.” But few have been willing to acknowledge that some paramilitary organizations and their members have advocated for and committed acts that meet the domestic terrorism definition.

Few have been willing to acknowledge that a bunch of American-born white guys who wave the flag and call themselves “patriots” could be domestic terrorists. But they are, and they have been for a long time. Maybe they’ll finally be recognized as such.

In other domestic terrorism news — Reuters reports,

Enrique Tarrio, the leader of the Proud Boys extremist group, has a past as an informer for federal and local law enforcement, repeatedly working undercover for investigators after he was arrested in 2012, according to a former prosecutor and a transcript of a 2014 federal court proceeding obtained by Reuters. …

… Tarrio, in an interview with Reuters Tuesday, denied working undercover or cooperating in cases against others. “I don’t know any of this,” he said, when asked about the transcript. “I don’t recall any of this.”

Law-enforcement officials and the court transcript contradict Tarrio’s denial. In a statement to Reuters, the former federal prosecutor in Tarrio’s case, Vanessa Singh Johannes, confirmed that “he cooperated with local and federal law enforcement, to aid in the prosecution of those running other, separate criminal enterprises, ranging from running marijuana grow houses in Miami to operating pharmaceutical fraud schemes.”

Oops.