With Luck, the Supreme Court’s Bostock Ruling May Destroy the GOP Coalition

With luck evangelicals will come to the realization that the current Republican Party has never cared for them or embraced their causes beyond lip service and the pandering of Donald Trump.  The GOP's real interest has always been focused on corporate America and what benefits corporate America.  In the amicus briefs filed in the combined cases under Bostock v. Clayton County, corporate America sought a ruling in support of LGBT Americans that would curb legalized religious based discrimination that interfered with both corporate America's recruiting/hiring efforts and  the sensibilities of wealthy, educated CEO's.  Justice Neil Gorsuch delivered for gays and for corporate America in his majority opinion and left evangelicals and the scamvangelists who routinely fleece them reeling and engaging in spittle flecked rants.  Gorsuch's ruling was right under the wording of Title VII, right under moral standards - no one is more immoral than evangelicals - and on the right side of history.  As we move into the 2020 elections, with luck evangelicals will defect from the GOP which has always viewed them as useful idiot. A piece in the Washington Post looks at this possibliity.  Here are highlights:

President Trump won the presidency in part because he rallied religious voters with his promise to fill the vacant Supreme Court seat following Justice Antonin Scalia’s death with someone who would protect their values. It is thus ironic that the opinion of Scalia’s replacement, Justice Neil M. Gorsuch, in Monday’s decision holding that the Civil Rights Act of 1964 forbids employment discrimination against LGBTQ Americans, may start the unraveling of the coalition behind Trump — and the Republican Party.

Strongly religious voters have gravitated toward the Republican Party for some time now, but it wasn’t always this way. . . . . Clinton won the white Catholic vote, and Reagan won it in his two races by roughly the same margins that he won overall. Catholics did not tilt Republican in the 1980s or 1990s, and the evangelical GOP tilt was significantly less than it is today.

Data from the Pew Research Center shows this started to change in 2000, as the culture war led religious voters to increasingly back Republicans. In 2000, Bush won white Catholics by seven points while losing the national vote by about half a point. That difference between the white Catholic vote and the national vote grew with each succeeding election, rising to 11 points in 2004, 12 points in 2008, and 23 points in 2012. Evangelical voters made a similar shift. . . . The inference is clear: The more that secular elements within the Democratic Party successfully pushed their cultural agenda, the more religious voters moved to Republicans.

Trump moved these figures to new, astronomical heights. He won 81 percent of the white evangelical vote and 60 percent of the white Catholic vote even while losing the national popular vote by 2 percentage points. White evangelicals voted 67 points more Republican than the nation as a whole, while white Catholics voted 25 points more Republican than the nation.

Concern about the Supreme Court’s role in the culture wars clearly impacted this dramatic shift. The 2016 exit poll found that 21 percent of all voters said Supreme Court appointments were the most important factor in their vote; Trump carried them by a 56 to 41 percent margin. It’s clear that fear of a culturally liberal court drove a crucial number of normally Democratic-supporting white voters to back Trump.

Gorsuch’s decision Monday could throw all of this into the political dustbin. Regardless of the decision’s legal merits, religious voters clearly expected Gorsuch and his fellow Trump appointee, Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh, to oppose progressive attempts to advance their cultural agenda through the courts. “But Gorsuch” was a common phrase used to justify continued support for Trump among religiously motivated voters throughout 2017 and 2018. Now that Gorsuch has proved himself untrustworthy in their eyes, they would be right to question whether Republican assurances meant anything at all. Indeed, Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.), has already said as much on the Senate floor.

Even a small reduction in the Republican margin among the devout will destroy any hope Trump will be reelected. Evangelical voters made up between 21 and 38 percent of the vote in the key Southern states of Florida, Texas, Georgia and North Carolina in 2016.

If his margins among this demographic fell by only 10 points this year, he would lose Florida and North Carolina based on his 2016 result and would even lose Georgia and Texas if the 2018 election returns are a better measure of those states’ current partisan breakdowns.

Trump’s hold on the Midwestern “blue wall” is also imperiled by erosion in religious voters’ support.

Republicans and Trump will need to confront this challenge sooner rather than later. Trump will need to spend more time shoring up his support among religious voters than he might like, likely stressing religious liberty and pro-life measures. Congressional Republicans would also be well advised to demonstrate their support for measures important to these voters. None of this, however, can fully replace what these voters’ faith in Republicans ability to appoint the right people to the Supreme Court provided. For these voters, Trump and the GOP were tested and found wanting.

Let's hope evangelicals belatedly wake up to the fact that congressional Republicans never really cared about  evangelicals' litmus test issues.

Sanders' Travels to Totalitarian Regimes Haunt His Campaign

Sanders in Russia.

In addition to, in my view, an over weaning ego, Bernie Sanders shares another trait with Donald Trump: he never admits that he is wrong or that there are other legitimate perspectives. In his recent 60 Minutes interview, Sanders had an opportunity to disavow his past flirtations with and laudatory comments about brutal communist regimes in Russia, Cuba and Nicaragua, but, being Sanders, he did not do so.  Now, his opponents for the Democrat primary are focusing on this aspect of Sanders past that could prove radioactive in a general election - especially in crucial Mid-West states - and which the Trump campaign will laser focus upon.  To me it is yet another reason that a Sanders nomination could see Trump, even hated as he is by so many, being reelected and the nation sliding more and more toward fascism - something Sanders and his base claim to oppose.  A piece in the Washington Post looks at this very damaging baggage that Sanders carries.  Here are article highlights:

The mayor of tiny Burlington, Vt., was back from Nicaragua and eager to share the good news.

The country’s Soviet-backed government — forged via armed rebellion — was cutting infant mortality, reducing illiteracy and redistributing land to peasant farmers. Its Sandinista leaders, branded terrorists by the U.S. government, impressed him with “their intelligence and their sincerity.”

Three years later, Bernie Sanders was fresh off the plane from Moscow, reveling in the beauty of the land and the contentedness of the people.

And a year after that, he returned from Cuba having tapped into a revolutionary spirit “far deeper and more profound than I understood it to be.”

With Sanders now surging to the top of the Democratic presidential field, those three-decade-old impressions introduced a volatile new element in the race Monday as rivals reacted to Sanders’s decision to defend his remarks, not disclaim them.

Asked about his favorable reviews of Fidel Castro’s Cuba in a “60 Minutes” interview that aired on CBS on Sunday night, Sanders said the communist leader deserved criticism for “the authoritarian nature” of his government — as well as praise where it was due, including for “a massive literacy program.”

The comments offered instant fodder for opponents who had already been sharing the old clips and highlighted the risk to a candidate with a track record of sympathy for communist and socialist governments that is unlike any other recent Democratic nominee.

Rivals seized on the brand-new video to portray the senator from Vermont as naive — a possible preview of attack lines in Tuesday night’s debate and of the barrage Sanders is likely to endure in the general election if he makes it that far.

“Fidel Castro left a dark legacy of forced labor camps, religious repression, widespread poverty, firing squads, and the murder of thousands of his own people,” former New York mayor Mike Bloomberg tweeted. “But sure, Bernie, let’s talk about his literacy program.”

Former South Bend, Ind., mayor Pete Buttigieg compared Sanders to President Trump, tweeting that after four years of giving dictators a pass, the United States needs “a president who will be extremely clear in standing against regimes that violate human rights abroad.”

Sanders has promised to remake the party in his far-left image as a “democratic socialist,” and he argues that his vision for a political revolution is best exemplified by thriving democratic, first-world societies like Denmark.

Yet in the 1980s, during the dying days of the Cold War, Sanders indulged a fascination with far more disruptive and divisive strains of a socialist ideology he has embraced throughout his adult life.

Returning home from visits to some of the United States’ most avowed enemies, Sanders offered some criticism but also plenty of praise in Vermont community television recordings.

Now, Sanders’s comments are coming back to life as opponents say his warm feelings toward his hosts decades ago make him vulnerable to attack and reveal a soft spot for left-wing despots.

“If people are going to vote for socialist candidate Bernie Sanders, they need to understand what socialism means historically. And it’s not Scandinavia,” said Marion Smith, executive director of the congressionally authorized Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation.

Smith recently tweeted a clip from a 1988 news conference in which Sanders lauds the Soviet Union for its chandelier-filled transit stations and its “palaces of culture.” Smith demanded an apology for what went unmentioned.

“He turned a blind eye to what was known about the ongoing systematic human rights abuses, the suppression of religious and ethnic minorities, the jailing of dissidents,” Smith said. “He was very clearly joining the ranks of the useful idiots who believed in the propaganda of the Soviet Union and carried it to the West.”

Sanders’s infatuation with revolutionary left-wing movements, particularly those in Latin America, was long-standing, and it became a key feature of his first stint in elected office.

Sanders has recalled feeling “very excited” by Castro’s 1959 revolution, which played out during his teens. “It just seemed right and appropriate that poor people were rising up against rather ugly rich people,” he said in 1986.

Watching the video decades later, Latin America scholar Richard Feinberg said Sanders appeared to have had “a rather simplistic” view of the developing world, as well as an overly rosy assessment of Nicaragua’s leaders. But the reason for Sanders’s attraction, he said, was clear.

“In Nicaragua, he found his equivalents to his view of the United States . . . allegedly a small group of wealthy people at the top versus the struggling, noble poor,” said Feinberg, . . .

Trump and the GOP must be salivating at the prospect of a Sanders nomination.

Vladimir Putin's Useful Idiots in America

As previous post indicate, I personally do not put it past Donald Trump, a/k/a Def Fuhrer, to have conspired with Russian efforts to throw the election in Trumps favor.  Recall, the Russian foreign ministry has confirmed communications with the Trump campaign, Trump invited Russian hacking, and stories of Trump's dependence on Russian money to support numerous projects, including some in New York City.  But regardless of Trump's complicity in the Russian efforts, Putin had many "useful idiots" in making sure Trump won the election. A column in the New York Times looks at Putin's unwitting accomplices.  Naturally, much of the blame falls on the main stream media - the same media that allowed the nation to be taken to war in Iraq based on Bush/Cheney lies.  Here are column highlights (please read the whole piece, especially if you voted for Trump so that you can see how you were played by Putin):

On Wednesday an editorial in The Times described Donald Trump as a “useful idiot” serving Russian interests. That may not be exactly right. After all, useful idiots are supposed to be unaware of how they’re being used, but Mr. Trump probably knows very well how much he owes to Vladimir Putin. Remember, he once openly appealed to the Russians to hack Hillary Clinton’s emails.

Still, the general picture of a president-elect who owes his position in part to intervention by a foreign power, and shows every sign of being prepared to use U.S. policy to reward that power, is accurate.

But let’s be honest: Mr. Trump is by no means the only useful idiot in this story. As recent reporting by The Times makes clear, bad guys couldn’t have hacked the U.S. election without a lot of help, both from U.S. politicians and from the news media.

Let me explain what I mean by saying that bad guys hacked the election. I’m not talking about some kind of wild conspiracy theory. I’m talking about the obvious effect of two factors on voting: the steady drumbeat of Russia-contrived leaks about Democrats, and only Democrats, and the dramatic, totally unjustified last-minute intervention by the F.B.I., which appears to have become a highly partisan institution, with distinct alt-right sympathies.

Does anyone really doubt that these factors moved swing-state ballots by at least 1 percent? If they did, they made the difference in Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania — and therefore handed Mr. Trump the election, even though he received almost three million fewer total votes. Yes, the election was hacked.

By the way, people who respond to this observation by talking about mistakes in Clinton campaign strategy are missing the point, and continuing their useful idiocy. All campaigns make mistakes. Since when do these mistakes excuse subversion of an election by a foreign power and a rogue domestic law enforcement agency?

So why did the subversion work?  It’s important to realize that the postelection C.I.A. declaration that Russia had intervened on behalf of the Trump campaign was a confirmation, not a revelation . . .  

The pro-Putin tilt of Mr. Trump and his advisers was obvious months before the election — I wrote about it in July. By midsummer the close relationship between WikiLeaks and Russian intelligence was also obvious, as was the site’s growing alignment with white nationalists.

Did Republican politicians, so big on flag waving and impugning their rivals’ patriotism, reject this foreign aid to their cause? No, they didn’t. In fact, as far as I can tell, no major Republican figure was even willing to criticize Mr. Trump when he directly asked Russia to hack Mrs. Clinton.

This shouldn’t come as a surprise. It has long been obvious — except, apparently, to the news media — that the modern G.O.P. is a radical institution that is ready to violate democratic norms in the pursuit of power. Why should the norm of not accepting foreign assistance be any different?

The bigger surprise was the behavior of the news media, and I don’t mean fake news; I mean big, prestigious organizations. Leaked emails, which everyone knew were probably the product of Russian hacking, were breathlessly reported as shocking revelations, even when they mostly revealed nothing more than the fact that Democrats are people.

Meanwhile, the news media dutifully played up the Clinton server story, which never involved any evidence of wrongdoing, but merged in the public mind into the perception of a vast “email” scandal when there was nothing there.

And then there was the Comey letter. The F.B.I. literally found nothing at all. But the letter dominated front pages and TV coverage, and that coverage — by news organizations that surely knew that they were being used as political weapons — was almost certainly decisive on Election Day.

So as I said, there were a lot of useful idiots this year, and they made the election hack a success.

If we’re going to have any hope of redemption, people will have to stop letting themselves be used the way they were in 2016. And the first step is to admit the awful reality of what just happened.

It means not making excuses for news coverage that empowered that subversion.

And it means not acting as if this was a normal election whose result gives the winner any kind of a mandate, or indeed any legitimacy beyond the bare legal requirements. It might be more comfortable to pretend that things are O.K., that American democracy isn’t on the edge. But that would be taking useful idiocy to the next level.

If American democracy survives Trump - and I have my doubts - I truly hope that historians identify those who basically acted in league with a hostile foreign power either through laziness, partisan extremism, and motivations driven by hate and bigotry.  There are many villians and all need to be held accountable by the view of history.