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The Constitution Will Not Save Us From Trump and the Far Right

The Founding Fathers are often depicted as all knowing and the architects of America's unique democratic system.  In reality, they were fallible men and the constitution they crafted filled with political compromises in order to get all of the original thirteen states to sign on.  Fast forward 200 plus years and these political compromises from over two centuries ago now threaten the continued existence of America as we have known. In particular, too much power is vested in small states through the grant of two U.S. Senators to states with populations smaller than many individual cities, the Electoral College that allows the loser of the popular vote to still win the presidency, and a Supreme Court too easily stacked and wholly unaccountable to the will of the majority of Americans.  Since these defects in the Constitution set the stage for and created the political peril the nation now faces, as a column in the New York Times lays out, the U.S. Constitution will not save us from the tyranny of a minority of the population and a possible autocracy that potentially lies ahead.  Indeed, the Constitution desperately needs amendments to thwart  the threats.  Here are column excerpts: 

On Thursday, the Supreme Court gathered to consider whether Donald Trump, as president, enjoyed immunity from prosecution for attempting to overturn the 2020 election. Even if the justices eventually rule against him, liberals should not celebrate the Constitution as our best bulwark against Mr. Trump. In fact, the document — for reasons that go beyond Mr. Trump, that long preceded him and could well extend past him — has made our democracy almost unworkable.

For years, whenever Mr. Trump threatened democratic principles, liberals turned to the Constitution for help, searching the text for tools that would either end his political career or at least contain his corruption. He was sued under the Constitution’s emoluments clauses. He was impeached twice. There was a congressional vote urging Vice President Mike Pence to invoke the 25th Amendment to proclaim Mr. Trump unfit for office. More recently, lawyers argued that the states could use the 14th Amendment to remove Mr. Trump from the ballot because of his role in the Jan. 6 attack.

Each of these efforts has been motivated by a worthy desire to hold Mr. Trump accountable for his actions. Each of them has failed. As we head into the heat of an election season, we need to confront a simple truth: The Constitution isn’t going to save us from Donald Trump. If anything, turning the page on the man — and on the politics he has fostered — will require fundamentally changing it.

It is not just that Mr. Trump would never have been president without the Electoral College. Think about why those previous efforts to use the Constitution to hold Mr. Trump accountable failed. Impeachment processes collapsed in the Senate because it lopsidedly grants power to rural, conservative states. The Supreme Court was able not only to keep Mr. Trump on the ballot in Colorado, but also to narrow the circumstances in which disqualification could ever be used, because Republicans have been able to appoint a majority of the justices on the court, despite losing the popular vote in seven of the past eight presidential elections.

For years, liberals were squeamish about acknowledging these facts, perhaps out of habit. While most countries view their documents as rules for governing — rules that may become outdated and can be reworked if necessary — our own politicians routinely tell a story of American exceptionalism rooted in our Constitution. It is a sacred document that, as Barack Obama once put it, “launched America’s improbable experiment in democracy,” grounded on shared principles of equality, self-government and personal liberty.

In these Trump years, as polls have shown some Americans drifting away from those shared ideals, liberals are clinging even more tightly to the document as a symbol under threat.

A year and a half ago, for instance, when Mr. Trump called for the “termination” of existing election rules, liberals were understandably outraged. . . . . The problem is that these pledges of constitutional fealty can’t substitute for actually convincing the public of the importance of inclusive democracy.

Rallying around the Constitution means embracing the very text that causes these pathologies. Its rules strengthen the hand of those indifferent or even opposed to the principle of one person, one vote. After all, those rules smooth the path for a Trumpian right to gain power without winning over a majority.

The shock to the constitutional system that Mr. Trump represents didn’t start, and won’t end, with him. The best — and perhaps only — way to contain the politics around him is to reform government, so that it is far more representative of Americans. The goal is to keep authoritarians from ever again gaining power without winning a majority and stacking powerful institutions with judges and officials wildly out of step with the public. But this requires extensive changes to our legal and political systems, including to the Constitution itself.

We need new campaign finance laws and expanded voting rights. We need to end the Senate filibuster, eliminate the Electoral College, combat gerrymandering and partisan election interference, adopt multi-member House districts and add new states like Washington, D.C. We need to reduce the power of the Senate . . .

Such reform requires pushing back against the extreme power of the Supreme Court through measures like judicial term limits and expansion of the size of the court. And an easier amendment process would give Americans the power to update their institutions and incorporate new rights into the document, rather than having to rely only on what judges decide.

No doubt these changes can seem politically unfeasible. But it would behoove Americans concerned about the dangers posed by Mr. Trump to take seriously such a comprehensive agenda, if for no other reason than because many on the right are already working on constitutional reforms of their own.

Groups like the Convention of States (which counts Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida as a vocal supporter) have succeeded in getting 19 of the 34 states required under Article V of the Constitution to agree to convene a new constitutional convention. The Convention of States package of potential changes includes giving “a simple majority of the states” the ability “to rescind actions by Congress, the President, or administrative agencies,” empowering Republican officials to nullify any policies they oppose, regardless of whether those policies enjoy vast national support.

These efforts will persist even if Mr. Trump is no longer on the political stage. And so long as liberals refuse to confront what needs to be done to fix the Constitution, his supporters and groups like the Convention of States will control that debate.

It now falls to Americans to avoid learning the wrong lessons from this moment. Mr. Trump may lose at the ballot box or be convicted in one of the four criminal cases he faces, including the one that started this month in Manhattan. If he is held accountable, it will not be because the Constitution saved us, given all its pathologies.

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The Republicans Who Want American Carnage

Today's Republican Party wants no solutions to many pressing problems as demonstrated by their killing of the bipartisan U.S. Senate border legislation that would have gone a long way to solve the situation at America's southern border.   Instead, as a whole the GOP wants chaos that it can use to frighten its aging white/evangelical base and perhaps some swing voters to the extent they exist in today's polarized political atmosphere.  This reality is all the more true now as the U.S. economy continues to perform well and crime is once again falling.  Hence the constant GOP whining about the border even though the sabotaged a solution and depiction of large cities as crime ridden hell holes. Once frightening part of the GOP agenda is to call for the violent suppression of protesters - other than right wing protesters, of course - all in the likely hope that the unrest will be exacerbated and provide more GOP talking points.  A piece in The Atlantic looks at this GOP agenda, the current college campus protests and the carnage Republicans hope to generate.  Here are highlights:

Tom Cotton has never seen a left-wing protest he didn’t want crushed at gunpoint.

On Monday, the Arkansas senator demanded that President Joe Biden send in the National Guard to clear out the student protests at Columbia University against the Israel-Hamas war, which he described as “the nascent pogroms at Columbia.” Last week, Cotton posted on X,  “I encourage people who get stuck behind the pro-Hamas mobs blocking traffic: take matters into your own hands. It’s time to put an end to this nonsense.”

This is a long-standing pattern for Cotton, who enjoys issuing calls for violence that linger on the edge of plausible deniability when it comes to which groups, exactly, are appropriate targets for lethal force. During the George Floyd protests of 2020, Cotton demanded that the U.S. military be sent in with orders to give “no quarter for insurrectionists, anarchists, rioters, and looters,” insisting unconvincingly in a later New York Times op-ed that he was not conflating peaceful protesters with rioters.

Senator Josh Hawley of Missouri, who had raised a fist in apparent solidarity with the mob that assaulted the Capitol on January 6 before fleeing through the halls to avoid them once the riot began, echoed Cotton’s call for deploying the National Guard to Columbia.

What Cotton and Hawley are doing is simple demagoguery. When Donald Trump was inaugurated president, he spoke of an “American carnage” that he would suppress by force. Trump’s attempts to apply the maximum level of violence to every problem did not solve any of them. Migration at the southern border surged in 2019 until a crackdown in Mexico and the coronavirus pandemic brought it down; Trump’s presidency ended with a rise in violent crime . . . . and with widespread civil-rights protests.

There have been documented instances of anti-Semitic rhetoric and harassment surrounding the protests; a rabbi associated with Columbia University urged Jewish students to stay away, and the university’s president, Nemat Shafik, recommended that students not living on campus attend classes remotely for the time being. In the same way that the Israeli government’s conduct does not justify anti-Semitism, the anti-Semitic acts of some individuals associated with the protests do not justify brutalizing the protesters.

[T]the kinds of mass violence and unrest that would justify deploying the National Guard are currently absent, and the use of state force against the protesters is likely to escalate tensions rather than quell them. . . . NYPD Chief John Chell told the Columbia Spectator that “the students that were arrested were peaceful, offered no resistance whatsoever, and were saying what they wanted to say in a peaceful manner.” The arrests did not end the protest.

The calls from Cotton and Hawley to deploy the National Guard are not about anyone’s safety—many of the pro-Palestinian protesters, against whom the might of the U.S. military would be aimed, are Jewish. As the historian Kevin Kruse notes, sending the National Guard to campuses facing Vietnam War protests led to students being killed, including some who had nothing to do with the protests, rather than to anyone being safer.

As we approach the summer of 2024, the economy is growing, migration to the border has declined at least temporarily owing to what appears to be a new crackdown by Mexican authorities, and in many major cities, crime is returning to historic lows, leaving protests as the most suitable target for demagoguery. The Biden administration’s support for Israel divides Democrats and unites Republicans, so the longer the issue remains salient, the better it is for the GOP. More broadly, the politics of “American carnage” do not work as well in the absence of carnage. Far-right politics operate best when there is a public perception of disorder and chaos, an atmosphere in which the only solution such politicians ever offer can sound appealing to desperate voters.

This is why the Republican Party is constantly seeking to play up chaos at the border and an epidemic of crime in American cities, no matter what the reality of the situation might actually be. Cotton and Hawley are demanding that Biden use force against the protesters not just because they consistently advocate for state violence against those who support causes they oppose as a matter of principle, but also because any escalation in chaos would redound to their political benefit. They don’t want to solve any problems; they want to make them worse so that the public will warm to “solutions” that will continue to make them worse. They don’t want order, or safety, or peace. What they want is carnage.

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THe GOP and Turning White Anxiety Into a Movement

The twin pillars of today's Republican Party are racism and white "Christian" extremism, both of which Donald Trump has skillfully played to his advantage in all of his campaigns.  Both are powered by fears of whites and Christofascists that they are losing their privilege and power and ability to dominate and ride rough shod over the rest of American society.  Republican "friends" and acquaintances would deny these motivations in their support of someone as morally bankrupt as Trump, yet for the non-super wealthy who care only about lower taxes, there really is no other explanation, especially when the American economy is currently the envy of much of the world.  Trump, of course, was not the first Republican to use white racial hatred and anxiety and white Christian nationalism to turn out voters. Richard Nixon used the former as the keystone of his "Southern Strategy" and George W. Bush used gay marriage opposition in his 2004 campaign where anti-gay referendums were placed on state ballots, including here in Virginia, to drive evangelicals to the polls.  Indeed, Trump and his acolytes have only taken fanning white/Christofascist anxiety to new levels such accusing immigrants of "poisoning the nation's blood."  A piece in The Atlantic looks how pandering to and inflaming white anxiety became a hallmark of today's GOP. Here are highlights: 

In May 1995, Pat Buchanan appeared at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C., to announce an immigration policy that would become the centerpiece of his presidential campaign. “We have an illegal invasion of this country,” Buchanan warned. To resist it, he called for a “Buchanan Fence” patrolled by the military along the southern border, a five-year moratorium on legal immigration, and a constitutional amendment that would deny citizenship to children born in the U.S. to undocumented parents.

The platform was designed to stave off something Buchanan had long dreaded: “If present trends hold,” he noted a few years earlier, “white Americans will be a minority by 2050.” Buchanan was the first major politician to transform white anxiety about that prospect—which the Census Bureau first predicted in 1990—into an organizing principle for the conservative movement.

Buchanan never came close to winning the presidency, but the fear he incited of a majority-minority future has become integral to the Republican Party and Donald Trump’s 2024 campaign. Like Buchanan, Trump has made opposition to undocumented immigration the cornerstone of his presidential bid. Although he and his supporters try to portray this as a matter of law and order, they often admit that their chief concern is America’s shifting ethnic composition.

“People are just alarmed by what they see in the changes in the demographics in our country,” South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem, a Trump surrogate, said in Iowa this year. A few weeks earlier, Trump accused migrants of “poisoning the blood of our country.”

For Buchanan and Trump, immigration isn’t just about America’s ethnic identity. It’s also about electoral power. Even as the GOP slowly diversifies, white Americans continue to make up a disproportionate share of its base, leading many conservatives to view nonwhite immigration as an existential threat.

[T]he American right’s preoccupation with declining white power isn’t new; it shaped the right’s defense of slavery and the violent overthrow of Reconstruction. By the time Buchanan ran for president, it wasn’t new for him either. He’d begun politicizing white resentment at the start of his career, creating a blueprint that would prove hugely influential for the GOP.

As a young speechwriter for Richard Nixon, Buchanan helped conceive of the “southern strategy” that Republicans used to appeal to white voters who were alienated by the civil-rights movement. Buchanan counseled Nixon to ignore “liberal issues” like housing, education, and unemployment.

When he ran for president in the 1990s, Buchanan was still criticizing the civil-rights laws of the 1960s, trying to court revanchist white voters, such as supporters of the Klansman turned presidential candidate David Duke. He described the Voting Rights Act as “regional discrimination against the South” and visited Confederate monuments while campaigning in states such as Georgia and Mississippi. “Who speaks for the Euro-Americans?” he asked. “Is it not time to take America back?”

Buchanan first ran for president in 1992 under the slogan “Make America First Again,” a riff on Ronald Reagan’s “Let’s Make America Great Again.” . . . . Although Buchanan didn’t win a single state, Republicans adopted some of his positions on immigration as the official party platform, pledging to “equip the Border Patrol with the tools, technologies and structures necessary to secure the border.”

Four years later, Buchanan ran again and won the New Hampshire primary. During the campaign, he portrayed his effort to preserve Judeo-Christian values and white power in the face of a massive demographic shift as part of America’s oldest struggle, calling his followers “the true sons and daughters of the Founding Fathers.”

After he lost the nomination, Buchanan was sidelined by the GOP establishment. Instead of getting a prime-time slot at the convention, he was blocked from speaking entirely. . . . He spent the 2000s in the political wilderness, watching as the country’s white population grew by just 1 percent from 2000 to 2010 while the Black population grew by 15 percent, and the Hispanic and Asian populations by 43 percent. Every few years he published screeds with titles like The Death of the West: How Dying Populations and Immigrant Invasions Imperil Our Country and Civilization and State of Emergency: The Third World Invasion and Conquest of America. “The people who put the GOP in power are not growing in numbers nearly as rapidly as immigrants and people of color who want them out of power,” he wrote in 2006. “The fading away of America’s white majority entails an existential crisis for the GOP.”

These writings, mostly ignored at the time, appeared prophetic after Barack Obama’s election in 2008, when Republicans fretted over the diverse coalition assembled by the first Black president. As Buchanan became more marginalized, his ideas paradoxically found greater favor within the GOP. His concerns about white displacement, which Republican leaders had mostly tried to downplay in the 1990s and 2000s, were now being pushed into the mainstream of the party. . . .

These views clearly influenced Trump and his advisers. In August 2014, the GOP consultant Kellyanne Conway released polling showing that white voters who were unhappy about demographic change would turn out in higher numbers if a candidate emphasized “stricter enforcement of current immigration laws” and demanded that “illegal immigrants … return to their home countries.” While Trump prepared to launch a seemingly quixotic bid for the presidency, his chief strategist Steve Bannon called the missing-white-voter theory and Conway’s polling on immigration “the intellectual infrastructure” of Trump’s campaign.

If Buchanan helps explain the start of Trump’s presidency, he also helps explain its culmination on January 6. . . . Unlike many Republicans, the insurrectionists didn’t come from the country’s reddest or most rural counties. Instead, they were more likely to reside in counties whose white populations had experienced significant declines, such as Harris County, Texas, a majority-minority area that includes Houston. The study described a political movement “partially driven by racial cleavages and white discontent with diversifying communities.” . . .. Fears of a “Great Replacement” were the “most important driver of [the] insurrectionist movement,” the survey concluded.

The fact that Trump has found so much more political success than Buchanan did 30 years ago in exploiting white anxiety suggests that it will worsen as the supposed majority-minority tipping point approaches. That’s coming sooner than Buchanan once feared; white Americans, census data now suggest, will technically be a minority by 2045. Buchanan may have failed to hold back demographic change, but the backlash he sparked is only getting stronger.

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The Humiliation of Donald Trump

For decades Donald Trump has surrounded himself with flatterers and sycophants - and more recently countless Republicans - who pander to his narcissism and intense and overwhelming need to believe himself powerful, important and a New York socialite.  Now, stuck sitting in court as a criminal defendant where an endless flow of negative depictions and stark reality are hitting him daily and where he is not in charge and can be ordered to shut up.  Adding to the unpleasant spectacle are several reports that Trump - who mocks "sleepy Joe" - has fallen asleep while sitting with defense counsel.  The overall image is anything but what Trump must want to project even as he whines that he is being politically persecuted. Frankly, I can think of few things more enjoyable than seeing Trump, a man who loves to denigrate and humiliate others, now being humiliated himself.  Meanwhile, many voters are being reminded just how sleazy Trump is  and why they should vote against him in November.  A piece at Salon looks at the ongoing humiliation of De Trumpenfuhrer.  Here are highlights:

While it falls far short of the punishment he deserves, there was no small amount of satisfaction from reports that Donald Trump had to spend much of the first week of his first criminal trial quietly taking it as mean tweets about him were read aloud in court.

Trump is such a famous narcissist he literally has a woman who follows him around with a wireless printer to keep him in a steady supply of online praise. Hearing what people outside of the paid shills have to say was, all reports suggest, very upsetting for the former president. He glowered and eventually tried to leave the courtroom so quickly that he had to be told to sit down by the judge. 

The jury is now impaneled, and no longer will be asked to talk about past social media posts calling Trump "dumb as [expletive]." But, as Monday's trial opening suggested, this trial is set to put Trump's fragile ego through a lengthy battering. It's hard to believe it — considering his ridiculous hair, hideous makeup and comically oversized suits — but by all accounts, Trump seems to actually believe he cuts an impressive figure. He famously spent decades longing to be included in the ranks of Manhattan's social elite, imagining he had a "classiness" they were simply failing to see. . . . "The rich and powerful sometimes invited him to their parties, but behind his back they laughed at his coarse methods and his tacky aesthetic."

Alas, getting elected president allowed Trump to finally swaddle himself in the pomp that allows him to successfully delude himself into believing he has an air of dignified stature.  . . . Trump's clownishness just made all of that seem ridiculous to those looking on, but his attempted stern-faced expressions and chin-up pride showed that he really did seem to feel he was finally being taken for the great man he wished himself to be.

Even after leaving the White House, Trump went to great lengths to keep himself in this elevated atmosphere. Unfortunately, he gets a lot of help keeping up the illusion of majesty. The presence of Secret Service protection allows him to travel with pricey black car entourages at the taxpayer's expense. He also sees a steady stream of Republican politicians visit Mar-a-Lago, allowing Trump to play the part of a king greeting supplicants who kiss the ring. 

While the outcome of the trial remains weeks away, the process of being a criminal defendant has already stripped Trump of most of the trappings he uses to prop up his delusions of nobility. He has to sit still and do what he's told, which he whines about ad nauseum when he's outside of court. He keeps reportedly falling asleep and believable rumors suggest the smell of him is hard to bear. 

On Monday, the humiliations continued to pile on Trump with opening arguments and the first witness, former National Enquirer publisher David Pecker. Even in this truncated day of court, the picture painted of Trump was not the regal leader of his fantasies, but who he actually is: A sleazy poseur who belongs to the world of trashy tabloids and scheming hucksters. The whole thing is a harsh reminder, to his face, that Trump is more suited to wallowing in the gutter than sitting on a throne. 

The prosecutor, Matthew Colangelo, did not hold back from the salacious details in describing the alleged crimes that led to Trump sitting at the defendant's table: the extramarital sex, the hush money payments, the alleged out-of-wedlock child, the conspiracy with the National Enquirer to pay women off in a practice with the tawdry name "catch-and-kill." He spoke of Trump as such a miscreant that he required a full-time "fixer" to "take care of problems." . . . Colangelo spoke of Trump's crude bragging on the infamous "Access Hollywood" tape about how he likes to sexually assault women. 

Regardless of the air quality around his desk, defense attorney Todd Blanche had a stinky job on Monday: Trying to portray Trump as somehow above the shady people he surrounds himself with. Blanche sanctimoniously called Trump "President Trump," as if saying it makes it true. He tried to humanize his glowering orange lump of a client . . . .

It may work, of course. Jurors are people and people can be bamboozled, as Trump's entire career demonstrates. But Blanche's argument just doesn't make sense.  If Trump is such an upstanding citizen, then why would he need someone like Cohen to commit crimes on his behalf? Nor is Trump "just like you," unless you, ordinary person, do so many terrible things on a regular basis that you literally need a full-time fixer to clean up your messes.

Pecker only spent about 20 minutes on the stand before the judge called recess for the day, but in that brief time, the jury got another glimpse into the vulgar environments that are Trump's natural home. Pecker described his business as "checkbook journalism" and agreed with Colangelo that he traffics in "juicy stories."

Despite Trump trying to tell reporters this trial is going "very well," reports from inside the courtroom are that he was seething. No surprise there. Prior to this, Trump spent all day, every day inside a bubble, surrounded by flatterers and sycophants, always ready to tell him that he's a mighty man who definitely doesn't weigh an ounce over 215 and wins every golf game with ease. Now he's spending his days in a dingy courtroom, staying silent while other people talk about his real self: A pathetic figure who pressures reluctant women into sex, and then runs to his seedy friends and barrel-scraping employees to bail him out of trouble. If there was a hell, Trump's punishment would be to look into a mirror for all of eternity. Having to hear people tell the truth about him for hours a day is as close as we're going to get on the mortal plane. 

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The House Vote: Ukraine Won, Trump and Putin Lost

After consistently being opposed to more aid to Ukraine, Speaker Mike Johnson changed course and brought a vote on the Ukraine aid package which passed with 101 House Republicans voting for the aid package. We may my never know what brought about Johnson's conversion, especially in the face of threats by Marjorie Taylor Greene who some in Congress have called "Putin's special envoy" and other Republicans have lamented as repeating Kremlin talking points.  Whatever the cause of the conversion, the vote passing the aid package - which the Senate promises to pass quickly - is a major defeat for Donald Trump and his puppeteer, Vladimir Putin.  Time will tell whether Greene and other narcissistic Republicans like Matt Gaetz - about whom one fellow Republican stated  “Scumbag Matt Gaetz paid minors to have sex with him at drug parties” - will take revenge on Johnson.  Meanwhile one can only imagine the raging going on at the Kremlin and at Mar-a-Lago.  Adding to Trump's problems is the fact that opening arguments begin tomorrow in his hush money trial and hold the prospect of voters being reminded of Trump's slimy history and general moral bankruptcy.  A piece at The Atlantic by a former Republican looks at the Ukraine vote and other cracks in Trump's intimidation of Republicans.  Here are highlights:

The House vote to aid Ukraine renews hope that Ukraine can still win its war. It also showed how and why Donald Trump should lose the 2024 election.

For nine years, Trump has dominated the Republican Party. Senators might have loathed him, governors might have despised him, donors might have ridiculed him, college-educated Republican voters might have turned against him—but LOL, nothing mattered. Enough of the Republican base supported him. Everybody else either fell in line, retired from politics, or quit the party.

Trump did not win every fight. In 2019 and 2020, Senate Republicans rejected two of his more hair-raising Federal Reserve nominations, Stephen Moore and Judy Shelton.

But Trump won almost every fight that mattered. Even after January 6, 2021, Senate Republicans protected him from conviction at his impeachment trial. After Trump left office, party leaders still indulged his fantasy that he had “really” won the 2020 election. Attempts to substitute Ron DeSantis or Nikki Haley as the 2024 nominee sputtered and failed.

On aid to Ukraine, Trump got his way for 16 months. When Democrats held the majority in the House of Representatives in 2022, they approved four separate aid requests for Ukraine, totaling $74 billion. As soon as Trump’s party took control of the House, in January 2023, the aid stopped. Every Republican officeholder understood: Those who wished to show loyalty to Trump must side against Ukraine.

At the beginning of this year, Trump was able even to blow up the toughest immigration bill seen in decades—simply to deny President Joe Biden a bipartisan win. Individual Senate Republicans might grumble, but with Trump opposed, the border-security deal disintegrated.

Three months later, Trump’s party in Congress has rebelled against him—and not on a personal payoff to some oddball Trump loyalist, but on one of Trump’s most cherished issues, his siding with Russia against Ukraine.

The anti-Trump, pro-Ukraine rebellion started in the Senate. Twenty-two Republicans joined Democrats to approve aid to Ukraine in February. Dissident House Republicans then threatened to force a vote if the Republican speaker would not schedule one. Speaker Mike Johnson declared himself in favor of Ukraine aid. This weekend, House Republicans split between pro-Ukraine and anti-Ukraine factions. On Friday, the House voted 316–94 in favor of the rule on the aid vote. On Saturday, the aid to Ukraine measure passed the House by 311–112. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer said the Senate will adopt the House-approved aid measures unamended and speed them to President Biden for signature.

As defeat loomed for his anti-Ukraine allies, Trump shifted his message a little. On April 18, he posted on Truth Social claiming that he, too, favored helping Ukraine. . . . . But that was after-the-fact face-saving, jumping to the winning side after his side was about to lose.

Trump is still cruising to renomination, collecting endorsements even from Republican elected officials who strongly dislike him. But the cracks in [GOP] unity are visible.

Some are symbolic. Even after Haley withdrew from the Republican presidential contest on March 6, some 13 to 19 percent of Republicans still showed up to cast protest votes for her in contests in Georgia and Washington State on March 12; Arizona, Florida, Illinois, and Ohio on March 19; and in New York and Connecticut on April 2.

Other cracks are more substantial—and ominous for Trump. Trump’s fundraising has badly lagged President Biden’s, perhaps in part because of Trump’s habit of diverting donations to his own legal defense and other personal uses. In March, Biden had more than twice as much cash on hand as Trump did. Republican Senate candidates in the most competitive races and House candidates also lag behind their Democratic counterparts.

How much of this is traceable to Trump personally? The Ukraine vote gives the most significant clue. Here is the issue on which traditional Republican belief in U.S. global leadership clashes most directly with Trump’s peculiar and sinister enthusiasm for Vladimir Putin’s Russia. And on this issue, the traditional Republicans have now won and Trump’s peculiar enthusiasm got beat.

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Defeat MAGA and Save Democracy From the Bottom Up

Perhaps it is because I have been actively engaged in politics or well over three decades and grew up in a politically engaged family, but I find it maddening that one hears of those who whine that they are not excited about candidates and may not vote or who in protest vote for a third party candidate with not the slightest chance of winning.  Both approaches by default amount to a vote for the least favored of the two main candidates and can result in the election of a candidate that will directly harm their interests and the nation as a whole. I have similar lack of respect for those who only vote in presidential election years - a symptom more prevalent among lukewarm Democrats - and allow Republican victories at the state level that result in similar harm.  Last year Virginia dodged a serious bullet when Democrat turnout gave control of the Virginia General Assembly and stopped GOP governor Glenn Youngkin and right wing extremists from turning Virginia into a warmed over version of DeSantis' Florida.  As the 2024 elections heat up, Democrats are adding a strategy of winning elections from the local and state level upward by focusing on issues like abortion, voting rights, worker safety protections and LGBT rights where state and local candidates can defeat the MAGA agenda and in the process hopefully drive turnout that will benefit the top of the ticket.   A piece in The Atlantic looks at the effort.  Here are excerpts:

On Indivisible’s website, the first words you’ll find—in large font and all caps—are “Defeat MAGA. Save democracy.” The progressive organizing group, formed shortly after Donald Trump’s 2016 win, sees the stakes of this fall’s presidential election as enormous, even existential. Yet when it deploys more than 2,000 volunteers to canvass neighborhoods in Arizona over the next seven months, the presidential race is the last topic it plans to bring up.

“We’re not going to be knocking on doors trying to convince people to vote for Joe Biden,” Indivisible’s co-founder Ezra Levin told me. Instead, its volunteers will be trying to turn out voters for just about every other Democrat on the ballot—including the party’s nominees for U.S. Senate and House seats and its candidates for the Republican-controlled state legislature—as well as a referendum that could restore abortion rights in Arizona.

Groups like Indivisible believe that although many Democrats are unenthusiastic about Biden, they’ll vote for him if they can just be persuaded to go to the polls. “If you get people out for the reproductive-rights amendment,” Levin said, “they’re not going to vote for the guy who overturned Roe.”

Democrats are betting that they can reverse long-held conventional wisdom on voting behavior. Support is generally thought to flow from the top of the ticket down: State and local candidates “ride the coattails” of the presidential nominee, and parties sink or swim on the strength of their standard-bearers. Not this year, Levin told me. “A large part of the theory of victory is the reverse coattails,” he said.

The strategy is a gamble. . . . Nevertheless, faith in the reverse-coattails effect is fueling Democratic investments in down-ballot races and referenda. In North Carolina, for example, party officials hope that a favorable matchup in the governor’s race—Democratic Attorney General Josh Stein is facing Republican Lieutenant Governor Mark Robinson, who has referred to homosexuality as “filth” and compared abortion to slavery—could help Biden carry a state that Trump narrowly won twice. Democrats are also trying to break a Republican supermajority in the legislature, where they are contesting nearly all 170 districts. “The bottom of the ticket is absolutely driving engagement and will for all levels of the ballot,”

Meanwhile, in key states across the country, Democrats and their allies are planting ballot initiatives both to protect reproductive rights where they are under threat and to turn out voters in presidential and congressional battlegrounds. They’ve already placed an abortion measure on the ballot in Florida . . . and they plan to in Arizona, whose highest court recently ruled that the state could enforce an abortion ban first enacted during the Civil War. Democrats are also collecting signatures for abortion-rights measures in Montana, home to a marquee Senate race, and in Nevada, a presidential swing state that has a competitive Senate matchup this year.

The Biden campaign and the Democratic National Committee are endorsing these ballot measures even as they dispute the suggestion that the president will need help from down-ballot races to win. “Just like they did in 2020, 2022, 2023, and 2024, voters across the country will reject Trump and MAGA Republicans’ extreme plans to drag our country backwards and side with President Biden and Democrats’ unified and positive agenda of protecting our rights and freedoms this November,” Rhyan Lake, a DNC spokesperson, said in a statement.

“It would be unusual,” Abramowitz told me, for a ballot measure to increase the number of people who vote in a presidential election year. “Generally it’s the presidential election that drives turnout.” A quick look at just about any state’s results helps explain why. The number of votes for president, at the top of the ballot, typically exceeds the total for any other race further down; referenda usually appear at the end of a multipage ballot.

But there are reasons to think that dynamic could change this year. Polls show that voters are unexcited about the Biden-Trump rematch, and since 2022, when Roe was overturned, abortion-related ballot measures have produced stronger-than-expected turnout just about everywhere, including during midsummer special elections in red states such as Kansas and Ohio. “If there’s any issue that has the potential to drive turnout above and beyond the presidential turnout, it might be the abortion issue,” Abramowitz said.

[T]urnout, of course, is only half of the equation. In swing states such as Arizona and Nevada, Democrats will need voters who show up to support abortion rights to also cast their ballot for Biden. That’s no sure thing. In Kansas and Ohio, abortion-rights referenda passed easily but didn’t produce a groundswell for Democratic candidates. The same has been true with other policy areas; a majority of voters, for example, have repeatedly voted to increase state minimum wages on the same ballot in which Republican candidates who opposed lifting the wage have won election.

Democrats are trying to prove that analysis wrong. They point out that, unlike in some presidential-election years, their candidates up and down the ballot are running on a unified message on issues such as abortion, which could strengthen the connection that voters make between the policy and the nominees running on it. Indivisible is also hoping that a new strategy built around “relational organizing” will attract votes for both abortion rights and Biden. Rather than sending out volunteers to knock on the doors of people they’ve never met, the group will ask those volunteers to contact members of their own community with whom they already have some ties. The Biden campaign and other Democratic groups also plan on incorporating it into their ground games this fall.

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Much of the GOP Controlled South Is Hostile Towards Workers

The history of the American South is one of huge wealth disparities and underpaid workers, first in the form of slaves and their plantation masters and then by sharecroppers struggling to get by financially and in many cases the same large landowners who were former slaveholders.   While prosperity blossomed in many parts of the North and far West under thanks to unions and tax policies that did not give breaks to the wealthy while placing much of the burden of paying for government services and infrastructure on the lower and middle classes, the South clung to a past of control by the privileged few and labor laws that favored big businesses and large landowners to the detriment of workers.  One hears endless platitudes from southern Republicans about wanting to bring "good paying jobs" to their states, yet they push rabidly anti-labor policies under the guise of "right to work" laws and anti-unionism,  policies that continue even in Virginia although the population/ economic explosion of Northern Virginia and parts of the so-called urban crescent somewhat mask the phenomenon. Indeed, some southern states are even seeking to roll back bans on child labor.  Now, the United Auto Workers is pressing to unionize plants in the South and the usual suspects within the GOP are acting as if organized labor is an existential threat to society.  A column in the Washington Post looks at what's happening and the hysterical over reaction from Republicans.  Here are highlights:

Last year, the United Auto Workers announced an ambitious plan to organize workers and unionize foreign-owned auto plants in the South.

“One of our biggest goals coming out of this historic contract victory is to organize like we’ve never organized before,” Shawn Fain, the president of the U.A.W., said after winning significant wage and benefit gains in negotiations with Ford, General Motors and Stellantis (formerly Chrysler). “When we return to the bargaining table in 2028, it won’t just be with the Big Three. It will be the Big Five or Six.”

U.A.W. is targeting 13 automakers — including Toyota, Hyundai, Honda, Nissan, Volvo and Tesla — employing around 150,000 workers in 36 nonunion plants across the South. It faced the first major test of its strategy on Wednesday, when 4,300 workers at a Volkswagen factory in Chattanooga, Tenn., began voting on whether to unionize. The vote ends Friday. If it’s successful, it will be a breakthrough for a labor movement that has struggled to build a footing in the South.

The mere potential for union success was so threatening that the day before the vote began, several of the Southern Republican governors announced their opposition to the U.A.W. campaign. . . . “As governors, we have a responsibility to our constituents to speak up when we see special interests looking to come into our state and threaten our jobs and the values we live by.”

It is no shock to see conservative Republicans opposing organized labor. But it is difficult to observe this particular struggle, taking place as it is in the South, without being reminded of the region’s entrenched hostility to unions — or any other institution or effort that might weaken the political and economic dominance of capital over the whole of Southern society.

The history of Southern political economy is to a great extent a history of the unbreakable addiction of Southern political and economic elites to no-wage and low-wage labor. Before the Civil War, of course, this meant slavery. And where the peculiar institution was most lucrative, an ideology grew from the soil of the cotton fields and rice paddies and sugar plantations, one that elevated human bondage as the only solid foundation for a stable society.

“In all social systems there must be a class to do the menial duties, to perform the drudgery of life,” Senator James Henry Hammond of South Carolina declared in an 1858 speech. . . . .A decade later and the slave system was dead, crushed underfoot by the armies of emancipation. The landowning Southern elite had lost its greatest asset — a seemingly inexhaustible supply of free labor. They would never regain it, but they would fight as hard as they could to approximate it.

The next 30 years of Southern political life would be a roiling battle to stymie Black political and economic power, part of a larger struggle to control Southern labor, Black and white alike. By the turn of the 20th century, Southern elites had silenced the Populist movement and agrarian rebellion of the 1890s — which brought poor Southerners of both races together in a fledgling and fragile political alliance — with Jim Crow segregation and disenfranchisement.

As the sociologist Jack M. Bloom puts it in “Class, Race and the Civil Rights Movement,”

The apparent defeat of Populism and the subsequent disenfranchisement of blacks brought about a severe setback for these whites, as well. Many of them lost the right to vote. They were subject to the harsh terms of their employers, and they remained without labor unions to counter the power the wealthy retained. When they did try to form unions, they found the region’s tradition of violence turned against them.

White supremacy had triumphed, but not all whites would be supreme.

Jim Crow did not eradicate Black political action or erase class conflict among whites. Nonetheless, it established a hierarchical order of social and economic dominance by the owners of land and capital. It also produced a world of poverty and disinvestment, of Robert Penn Warren’s torn-down mills and grass covered tracks and “whitewashed shacks, all just alike, set in a row by the cotton fields.”

It was in defense of this world that Southern political and economic elites bitterly resisted organized labor as it grew by leaps and bounds in the 1930s, backed by Franklin Roosevelt, Robert Wagner and the National Labor Relations Act.

Organized labor was, is and remains an existential threat to the political and economic elites of a region whose foremost commitment is to the maintenance of an employer-dominated economy of low-wage labor and its attendant social order. Where an earlier generation complained of C.I.O. “communism,” this one warns of U.A.W. socialism. “They proudly call themselves democratic socialists,” the statement issued on Tuesday by the Republican governors says.

You may have heard the phrase “New South.” It first took hold in the last decades of the 19th century, a slogan meant to distinguish the forward-looking merchants and industrialists of the post-Reconstruction years from those whose gaze was fixed hopelessly back toward a bygone age.

The term made a bit of a comeback in the mid-20th century to describe the modernization of the South in the years and decades after World War II. This New South was, as a result of the victories of the Civil Rights movement, a more moderate South of integration and economic growth.

Neither the vote in Chattanooga, nor the upcoming vote of auto workers at the Mercedes-Benz plant near Tuscaloosa, Ala., will be dispositive for the ultimate success of the U.A.W. campaign in the South. Win or lose, this will be a long march for organized labor.

But like a gardener taking stock of her plot for the season ahead, victory might mean the chance to refresh the soil in preparation for a new kind of New South.

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The Republican and Christofascist Assault on Librarians

As a shy child - and later as a closeted teenager - who loved to read, the public school libraries and local public library afforded me a way to both expand my knowledge and eventually come to realize that I was not some lone freak attracted to other boys.  The books I read in the latter case were anything but pornographic - e.g., Mary Renault's historical novels, many set in Classical ancient Greece - and helped in small way for me to achieve some level of self-acceptance.  Now, Christofascist white Christian nationalists and the self-prostituting Republican candidates and office holders who pander to them are waging a war on libraries and librarians who offer those like me as a youth a means to see themselves represented  or expand their knowledge about others.  Hence the rash of book banning laws and laws that would criminalize librarians for doing their jobs.  While the proponents of such laws pretend they are seeking to "protect children" and limit access to "obscene" materials (with obscene being defined bby the extremists), the real agenda is to erase segments of the population form view.  Indeed, the vast majority of targeted books involve LGBT and/or black characters and themes.  In some states, things have gotten out of control and even Florida has limited the number of book challenges one can bring in recognition that right wing activists - some who have no children in public schools - are systematically challenging large numbers of LGBT or black themed books.  While a number of so-called "blue states" are seeking to counter the right wing assault on libraries and librarians, in red states, librarians are quitting their jobs rather than face prosecution pushed by extremists.  A piece in the Washington Post looks at the rights effort to censor books and ease those they hate from public view.  Here article highlights:

Sam Lee, a leader of the Connecticut Library Association, heads to work these days torn between hope and fear.

She’s encouraged because legislators in her state proposed a bill this year making it harder for school boards to ban library books. But she’s fearful because Connecticut, like America, is seeing a sustained surge in book challenges — and she wonders if objectors will see the legislation as a reason to file more complaints.

The bill in Connecticut, pending before an education committee, is one of a raft of measures advancing nationwide that seek to do things like prohibit book bans or forbid the harassment of school and public librarians . . . . Legislators in 22 mostly blue states have proposed 57 such bills so far this year, and two have become law, according to a Washington Post analysis of state legislative databases and an EveryLibrary legislative tracker.

But the library-friendly measures are being outpaced by bills in mostly red states that aim to restrict which books libraries can offer and threaten librarians with prison or thousands in fines for handing out “obscene” or “harmful” titles. At least 27 states are considering 100 such bills this year, three of which have become law . . . Lawmakers proposing restrictive bills contend they are necessary because school and public libraries contain graphic sexual material that should not be available to children.

But other lawmakers say bills like Steele’s are ideologically driven censorship dressed up as concern for children. They note that, as book challenges spiked to historic highs over the past two years, the majority of objections targeted books by and about LGBTQ people and people of color.

“To attack library books, you’re attacking the ability to learn, grow, think,” said Missouri state Rep. Anthony Ealy (D), who introduced a bill this year to prohibit book bans in public libraries. It “has nothing to do with protecting kids.”

A bill pending in New Jersey grants librarians the right to sue if they suffer “emotional distress, defamation, libel, slander [or] damage to reputation” due to harassment from someone displeased with their books. Another, in California, stipulates public libraries cannot remove books “for partisan or political reasons.”

Still other measures, focused on public libraries, build on state and federal laws that forbid discrimination in public places due to a person’s race, sex or gender. These bills assert that removing titles about, say, LGBTQ people, would violate the equal protection clause of the Constitution.

“If we’re not turning people away from the door based on the color of their skin or the fact they’re wearing a rainbow pride flag, we should not be taking their books off the shelf,” said Chrastka of EveryLibrary.

Other protective bills outlaw book removals. Some draw inspiration from an Illinois law enacted last year that prohibits “the practice of banning specific books or resources.” At the time, Gov. J.B. Pritzker declared his state was “showing the nation what it really looks like to stand up for liberty.”

This year, Vermont lawmakers have proposed three protective bills. One would prohibit removing library books due to “school board members’ or member of the public’s discomfort, personal morality, political views, or religious views.”

Some restrictive library bills give parents more power over book selection, for example requiring schools obtain parental sign-off before providing children sexually explicit content. Another common move is to require that libraries post lists of their books for parental review.

But the majority of the bills work the same way. They eliminate long-established exemptions from prosecution for librarians — sometimes teachers and museum employees, too — over obscene material. Almost every state adopted such carve-outs decades ago to ensure schools, museums and libraries could offer accurate information about topics such as sex education.

Removing the exemption means librarians, teachers and museum staffers could face years of imprisonment or tens of thousands in fines for giving out books deemed sexually explicit, obscene or “harmful” to minors. For example, an Arkansas measure passed last year says school and public librarians can be imprisoned for up to six years or fined $10,000 if they hand out obscene or harmful titles.

It has forged a poisonous atmosphere for librarians, said Megan Tarbett, a county library director in West Virginia and president of her state’s library association. West Virginia considered a bill this year ending exemptions from prosecution over “obscene” material for schools, public libraries and materials, but it failed to pass.

In some places, librarians have already called it quits. . . . Tara White was appointed Elkhart Community Schools’ director of literacy in 2015. For the first several years, she never fielded a book challenge — until 2021, when community members objected to 60 titles, she said. When she defended the books, a conservative website claimed she was fighting for porn in school.

Then last year, Indiana passed a law declaring school employees can face criminal prosecution — leading to a possible $10,000 fine or 2½ years of jail time — for handing out sexual material that is “harmful to minors.”  White resigned.

“I loved being a librarian and … helping every student find themselves in a book,” White said. But while certain she wasn’t actually “breaking the law, nobody wants to go through that process.” Nobody wants to go to jail, she said, for giving children books.

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