Guns: The Next Disaster for the GOP?

The striking down of Roe v. Wade and newly enacted Republican legislation seeking to ban or limit abortion - something Glenn Youngkin and Virginia Republicans tried unsuccessfully this past seession - has generated a growing backlash by a majority of voters in numerous states.   Yet, Republicans continue to refuse to get the message that what thrills the GOP's lunatic and extremist base doesn't sell so well to those not living inside the Fox News and Christofascist and white supremacist bubble when it comes to book banning, demonizing gays, anti-abortion extremism, and perhaps next the GOP quest to put the wants of gun fanatics over the safety of the majority of citizens.   Part of what prompted the Tennessee Republican's racist ouster of two Democrats from the legislature is the unexpected (at least in GOP circles) reaction of thos seeking sensible gun laws in the wake of the latest school slaughter in Nashville. Simply put, Republicans have contempt for the will of the majority of voters.   As a column by a former Republican in the Washington Post points out, Democrats and gun control activists need to turn GOP insanity on gun laws into the next GOP policy disaster at the polls.  Here are excerpts:

In Tennessee, Republican lawmakers expelled two Black Democratic state representatives who exercised their constitutional rights by joining a protest in the state Capitol in response to a mass shooting at a school. The stunning sight of White lawmakers condescendingly dismissing two young Black men should be a wake-up call.

The expulsion of two Black male lawmakers, but not a White female representative, in a state with a history of virulent racism should shock the conscience of all Americans. How did we get here?

The slaughter of six people at a Christian school in Tennessee last month spurred a large demonstration mostly by young people in Nashville. High school students walked out of class, and throngs went to the state Capitol. . . . “More than a thousand people joined the protest organized by local mothers, packing the building’s rotunda and forcing highway patrol troopers to clear paths in the crowd for lawmakers to walk through. . . . “Demonstrators held aloft placards reading ‘No More Silence’ and ‘We have to do better’ while chanting ‘Do you even care?’ and ‘No more violence!’ ”

It seems there is new energy and intensity in the generation that has grown up with lockdown drills and horror stories.

Rather than heed the public’s demands, Republican lawmakers voted to expel two members who peacefully protested. That’s rich for a party that claims people need guns to protect themselves from tyrannical government. It might be simpler to vote the tyrants out.

Republicans have shown their true colors — not only reflexively against lifesaving reforms but also thoroughly intolerant of dissent. The effort to short-circuit democracy predictably earned the scorn of everyone from the local ACLU to ordinary citizens to civil rights and gun-reform organizations around the country. (Even before the lawmakers’ expulsion, Students Demand Action and Moms Demand Action organized several hundred walkouts in 42 states and D.C. on Wednesday.)

Democrats have the national electorate on their side. Polling consistently shows sky-high support even among Republicans for common-sense gun reforms such as background checks, red-flag laws and raising the minimum age for gun purchases. Support for a total ban on semiautomatic weapons ebbs and flows but has generated strong support in states that have passed such laws.

And yet, some Republicans remain stubbornly opposed to public sentiment. They utter the same inane excuses after each mass school shooting.

And despite opposition of almost 80 percent of residents in deep-red Florida, Republican presidential-wanna-be Gov. Ron DeSantis championed a bill to legalize permitless concealed carry in his state. The White House rightfully called him “shameful” for signing the bill behind closed doors.

Republicans would rather ignore data showing red states with lax gun laws have higher murder rates than blue states with stricter laws. . . . For the past 21 years, the top 10 murder rate states have been dominated by reliably red states, namely Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and Missouri. . . . If one really is pro-life, regulating or banning weapons of war that rip children’s bodies to shred might be a good place to start.

If gun-safety advocates were savvy, they would strike while the iron is hot, staging larger rallies and protests and putting gun safety — along with abortion and democracy — at the top of the list of concerns for the 2024 election.

Gun-safety activists and civil rights groups should embrace the message of the post-Dobbs activist community: Democracy still matters.

Ultimately, we have no democracy if the people cannot decide what laws they want to live under and whom they want to represent them. And if Republican officials refuse to listen to the voters, they should join the growing list of defeated Republican politicians.

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The "Tennessee 3" Highlight the GOPs Longing to Revive Jim Crow

The Republican Party of today bears no resemblance to the party I grew up in and later in which I was very active.  This reality has been underscored over and over again with ultra-reactionary and fascist judicial rulings and legislation, ranging from a Trump appointed extremist judge's ruling to overturn FDA approval of an abortion drug, to the erasure of common sense gun laws, to signals that much of today's GOP base - principally evangelicals and Christofasist and white supremacists - want a return to the Jim Crow era when blacks "knew their place" as evidenced by the Tennessee Republicans expulsion of two black representatives from that state's lower house.  The real "crime" these to individuals committed was speaking out and showing the craveness of Republicans to the gun industry and the hypocrisy of Tennessee Republicans who have overlooked far worse (and criminal) conduct committed by white legislators.   In today's GOP and among the hideous MAGA base, no dissent can be allowed and those who speak out must be slienced and/or disenfranchised. Driving this is the evangelical/Christofascist and white supremacist hatred of minorities (both racial and sexual) and anyone or fact that shows the falsity and/or ugly bigotry of their beliefs.  On every front, these people want a return to the early 1950's, yet with each new culture war outrage they are awaking younger voters and minorities to the fact they must turn out and vote and purge Republicans from elected office as happened this past week in Wisconsin.  A column in the Washington Post looks at the phenomenon.  Here are highlights:

The Tennessee state legislature’s expulsion of young Democratic lawmakers as punishment for protesting gun violence is being widely described as an extraordinary outlier. President Biden declared the move “without precedent.” Others see it as a rare throwback to hardball tactics largely not seen since the civil rights era or even the Civil War.

All of that is true enough, but the Tennessee events are also part of a larger story that is unfolding all around the country: GOP state legislatures are resorting to increasingly novel, overbearing and indefensible power plays to hold off the rising tides of backlash unleashed by their descent into reactionary rule.

The GOP-controlled Tennessee House voted late Thursday to expel two of the “Tennessee 3.” That trio of Democratic lawmakers had committed the transgression of presiding over protests at the capital — with one wielding a bullhorn — demanding action on guns after the horrific mass shooting in a Nashville school that left six people dead, including three children.

Two of the three Democrats — both young, Black and representing urban areas — were ousted by overwhelmingly White and conservative majorities. The third, a White woman, narrowly survived the vote. . . . the protests, while raucous, were peaceful, and according to the Tennessean, no lawmaker has ever been expelled for breaching decorum rules.

At bottom, this hysterical GOP overreaction was triggered, as it were, by mass citizen dissent over the ugly realities of right-wing rule. Before the shooting, Tennessee Republicans had been weakening gun laws every which way. After it, one Republican went viral for declaring that “we’re not going to fix” the problem, which for many protesters typified GOP pro-gun mania and helped inspire their response to it.

All of this mirrors a larger story. Red states are sinking deeper into virulent far-right culture-warring — banning books, limiting classroom discussion of race and gender and prohibiting gender-affirming care for transgender youth. GOP legislatures passing these things were of course legitimately elected by majorities, though in some cases gerrymanders increase their power.

Those legislatures are also finding onerous ways to use power to tamp down on the unexpectedly ferocious dissent their culture war has unleashed among numerical minorities, largely concentrated in cities and suburbs inside red states. As analyst Ron Brownstein argues, this often pits an overwhelmingly White, older, rural and small-town Republican coalition against an increasingly diverse, younger and more urban coalition.

“These Republican legislatures are stacking sandbags against a rising tide,” Brownstein told CNN. Call it the GOP retreat into Fortress MAGA.

In Florida, GOP Gov. Ron DeSantis concocted a phony rationale to fire a local elected prosecutor over his abortion stance. DeSantis is also scrambling to exert power over Disney’s local governance structure to punish it for opposing his “don’t say gay” law, in effect using the state to retaliate against a corporation for responding to a genuine shift in the culture.

In Georgia, after Democrats scored statewide victories in 2020, the GOP legislature passed an onerous voter suppression law partly targeted at Black voters. When corporations opposed that law, congressional Republicans vowed retaliation, again threatening state action against private companies getting culturally in step with consumers and employees by pushing for more Black political participation.

Yet this retreat into Fortress MAGA faces a problem: Whenever state-level Republicans undertake another reactionary lurch, it often goes national in a big way. Attention has poured down on everything from insanely broad book bans to shockingly harsh proposed punishments for abortion to anti-transgender crackdowns with truly creepy implications.

Tennessee illustrates the point: If Republicans hadn’t sought to expel the Tennessee 3, you might never have heard of them. As commentator Charlie Sykes puts it, Republicans both “look horrible” and have turned the Tennessee 3 into national “superstars.”

This sort of thing only perpetuates youthful awareness of — and resistance to — ongoing GOP radicalization. Young voters often get their political news through this sort of viral circulation. All this will surely color their perceptions of the national GOP. Is this what Republicans want, after losing a Supreme Court race in ultra-divided Wisconsin by a stunning margin, partly because abortion rights drove uncommonly robust youth turnout?

The GOP retreat into Fortress MAGA will continue apace. But how high will Republicans have to build those walls?

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The Abortion Ban Backlash Is Freaking Out Republicans

On Tuesday Wisconsin voters by a wide margin sent a resounding message that they do not support anti-abortion activist/extremists.  Following on the heels of the Republican Party's poor showing in the 2022  mid-terms where abortion played a significan role as a backlash against the overturning of Roe v. Wade, one would think Republicns would have gotten the message that while a majority of their primary voting base want near comlete bans on abortion - here in Virginia Youngkin and the GOP House;s effort to curtail abortion rights failed only due to the Democrat held Virginia Senate - the majority of general election voters do not.  At some point gerrymandered districts will likely not be enough to contain the voter backlash.  Yet, the GOP seemingly cannot escape the demands of its ever more strident and out of touch party base that threatens a primary challenge for any office holder who does not drink their Kool-Aid.  A column in the New York Times looks at the dilema Republicans have created for themselves and which hopefully will continue to equate to election losses.  Here are excerpts:

After the Republican Party’s disappointing performance in the 2022 midterms, fueled in large part by a backlash to the Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v. Wade, the Republican National Committee recommitted itself to anti-abortion maximalism.

A resolution adopted at the R.N.C.’s winter meeting in January urges Republican lawmakers “to pass the strongest pro-life legislation possible.” Addressing their party’s poor showing in November, it said that Republicans hadn’t been aggressive enough in defending anti-abortion values, urging them to “go on offense in the 2024 election cycle.”

The 11-point loss of the Republican-aligned candidate in Wisconsin’s Supreme Court election on Tuesday has influential conservatives rethinking this strategy. “Republicans had better get their abortion position straight, and more in line with where voters are, or they will face another disappointment in 2024,” said a Wall Street Journal editorial.

Ann Coulter tweeted, “The demand for anti-abortion legislation just cost Republicans another crucial race,” and added, “Please stop pushing strict limits on abortion, or there will be no Republicans left.” Jon Schweppe, policy director of the socially conservative American Principles Project, lamented, “We are getting killed by indie voters who think we support full bans with no exceptions.”

But having made the criminalization of abortion a central axis of their political project for decades, Republicans have no obvious way out of their electoral predicament. A decisive majority of Americans — 64 percent, according to a recent Public Religion Research Institute survey — believe that abortion should be legal in most cases. A decisive majority of Republicans — 63 percent, according to the same survey — believe that it should not.

Now that the end of Roe has awakened a previously complacent pro-choice majority, anti-abortion passion has become a liability, but the Republican Party can’t jettison it without tearing itself apart.

The reason voters think Republicans support full abortion bans, as Schweppe wrote, is that many of them do.

In the last Congress, 167 House Republicans co-sponsored the Life at Conception Act, conferring full personhood rights on fertilized eggs. In state after state, lawmakers are doing just what the R.N.C. suggested and using every means at their disposal to force people to continue unwanted or unviable pregnancies.

The Texas Senate just passed a bill that, among other things, is intended to force prosecutors in left-leaning cities to pursue abortion law violations. South Carolina Republicans have proposed a law defining abortion as murder, making it punishable by the death penalty.

In Florida, which already has a 15-week abortion ban, Gov. Ron DeSantis is expected to soon sign a law banning almost all abortions at six weeks. This isn’t something Florida voters want — polls show a majority of them support abortion rights — but it’s a virtual prerequisite for his likely presidential campaign.

Republican attempts to moderate abortion prohibitions even slightly have, for the most part, gone nowhere.

It’s true that this week Tennessee’s Legislature passed a bill permitting abortion to save a patient’s life or prevent “serious risk of substantial and irreversible impairment of a major bodily function.” But the legislation is meaningless to the point of perversity, since it places the burden of proof on doctors rather than on the state, so that they must still fear prosecution for treating pregnant people in severe medical distress. Language that would allow women to end “medically futile pregnancies” was stripped out.

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Clarence Thomas" Arrogant and Corrupt

Clarence Thomas - who I have never viewed as qualified to be a Supreme Court justice - has once again displayed his arrogance and seeming corruption in new disclures of Thomas' (and his lunatic wife) acceptance of hundreds of thousands of dollars in luxury trips around the globe for more than two decades, including travel on a superyacht, from a Republican mega donor.  None of these gifts were reported as required by the Court's flimsy ethical requirements.  Thomas - who in some ways is the Courts Donald Trump when it comes to arrogance and belief that he is above all rules - has long flouted the reporting rules and made no effort to appear unbiased in cases before the Court.  Worse yet, he has refused to recuse himself from cases before the Court involving many of his wife's political and far right ideological associates.   He - along with Samuel Alito - have made the Supreme Court appear to be little more than a kangaroo court with the result that public confidence and respect for the Court has plummeted.   It is long past time that (i) Thomas be removed from the Court and (ii) the Supreme Court justices be made subject to the ethical rules that bind the rest of the federal judiciary.  A piece and a column in the Washington Post look at Thomas' latest scandal and his unfitness for office.  First these highlights for the Post article:

Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas accepted luxury trips around the globe for more than two decades, including travel on a superyacht and private jet, from a prominent Republican donor without disclosing them, according to a new report.

ProPublica reported Thursday on an array of trips funded by Harlan Crow, a Dallas businessman. The publication said Thomas typically spends about a week every summer at Crow’s private resort in the Adirondacks. It said the justice also has vacationed at Crow’s ranch in East Texas and has joined Crow at the Bohemian Grove, an exclusive all-male retreat in California.

ProPublica cited a nine-day trip that Thomas and his wife, Virginia “Ginni” Thomas, took to Indonesia in 2019, shortly after the court released its final opinions of the term. That trip, which included flights on Crow’s jet and island-hopping on a superyacht, would have cost the couple more than $500,000, if they had paid for it themselves, the publication said.

Federal law mandates that top officials from the three branches of government, including the Supreme Court, file annual forms detailing their finances, outside income and spouses’ sources of income, with each branch determining its own reporting standards.

Judges are prohibited from accepting gifts from anyone with business before the court. Until recently, however, the judicial branch had not clearly defined an exemption for gifts considered “personal hospitality.”

According to ProPublica, Thomas’s trips funded by Crow do not appear on his financial disclosures.

Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Richard J. Durbin (D-Ill.) vowed in a statement that his panel would take action in response to the ProPublica report, calling the behavior of Thomas “simply inconsistent with the ethical standards the American people expect of any public servant, let alone a Justice on the Supreme Court.”

Durbin and other Democrats renewed calls for the Supreme Court to adopt a strict ethics code that would include a process for investigating alleged misconduct, and some Democrats called on Thomas to resign.

“The Supreme Court should have a code of ethics to govern the conduct of its members, and its refusal to adopt such standards has contributed to eroding public confidence in the highest court in the land," Van Hollen said in a statement.

“Is Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas corrupt? I don’t know,” Rep. Ted Lieu (D-Calif.), a member of the House leadership team, said in a tweet. “But his secretive actions absolutely have the appearance of corruption. … For the good of the country, he should resign.”

The Post column looks at why Thomas needs to leave the Court to help save its legitimacy:

The Supreme Court’s legitimacy crisis just entered a new chapter in the form of a shocking report that Justice Clarence Thomas apparently violated ethics laws by accepting luxury trips for more than two decades without disclosing them. In response, Richard J. Durbin, chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee, vowed that his panel “will act.”

But what would it look like if the Illinois Democrat and his committee actually do act to the full extent of their authority? Is there any hope for accountability — or, barring that, reforms that could place limits on such apparent misconduct and restore public faith in the high court?

The report from ProPublica details that Thomas enjoyed extensive luxury gifts from billionaire and GOP donor Harlan Crow, from vacations on Crow’s superyacht to flights on his private jet to sojourns at various exclusive retreats around the country.

This largesse did not appear on Thomas’s financial disclosure forms, ProPublica reports, which ethics experts say violates a post-Watergate law requiring various federal officials, including justices, to disclose many gifts. One retired federal judge called the moves “incomprehensible.” A former government ethics lawyer added: “When a justice’s lifestyle is being subsidized by the rich and famous, it absolutely corrodes public trust.”

ProPublica notes, failure to disclose the trips might violate a law requiring justices to divulge information on “anything of value,” with some exceptions. Durbin, for his part, blasted Thomas for the disclosure failure, labeling this “inconsistent with the ethical standards the American people expect of any public servant, let alone a justice on the Supreme Court.”

If so, that seems to demand an aggressive response from the Judiciary Committee. Legal experts say the committee could act to shed light on the situation in many ways that would fit squarely within its authorities.

“If the committee’s investigation of the facts that have been exposed by journalists warrants it, Justice Thomas should definitely be subpoenaed, as should any other witness relevant to patterns of unlawful or unethical activity,” Feldman told me.

Thomas recently failed to recuse himself in a case involving the plot to subvert the 2020 election outcome in Arizona, even though his wife, Virginia Thomas, advocated for such subversion. As a Post editorial noted at the time, the justices could set for themselves the same type of ethical standards that lower-court judges face, including disclosure and recusal guidelines. Congressional scrutiny of the new Thomas revelations might make that harder for them to resist.

Last fall, Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. fretted aloud about critics questioning the legitimacy of the court. But the justices themselves could act to shore that up. And, if they don’t, that scrutiny could build pressure for Congress to create new ethical checks on the court.

Democrats sometimes seem uncomfortable with the core principle that Congress has a legitimate oversight role when it comes to the courts, including the highest in the land. As Stephen Vladeck, a law professor who writes a Substack about the high court, points out, Congress has historically embraced that role but badly abdicated on it only in recent decades.

“The result has been a court that isn’t looking over its shoulder — and justices who don’t seem to see any reason why this kind of behavior raises eyebrows,” Vladeck told me. The Thomas revelations, Vladeck added, are only the latest iteration of “the same basic problem — the lack of meaningful congressional oversight.”

This seems like as good a moment as any to begin setting that right.

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