GOP Culture Warriors Lost Big in School Board Races

Poll after poll indicate that a majority of Americans do not embrace the culture wars, book banning, racism and religious extremism that  thrills the increasingly evangelical/Christofascist and white supremacist dominated Republican Party base.  Yet, the Republican Party and its candidates refuse to exit from the buble of Fox News and other far right "news" outlets that make one believe everyone in the nation wants to erase accurate history, including the good, the bad and the ugly, make gays disappear and make life for transgender Americans a living hell.  The same racist and homophobic messages embraced by hate merchants like Ron DeSantis was embraced by GOP candidates in some of the first rounds of school board elections and, thankfully, voters rejected the majority of them.  Sadly, given the moral bankruptcy and the hatred that motivates so much of the party base it is doubtful this early message will be received by Republicans further up the ballot.  A piece in Politico looks at the poor showing of right wing extremist candidates which one can only hope will be a harbinger for more Republican losses.  Here are article highlights:

Amid all the attention on this month’s elections in Wisconsin and Illinois, one outcome with major implications for 2024 flew under the national radar: School board candidates who ran culture-war campaigns flamed out.

Democrats and teachers’ unions boasted candidates they backed in Midwestern suburbs trounced their opponents in the once-sleepy races. The winning record, they said, was particularly noticeable in elections where conservative candidates emphasized agendas packed with race, gender identity and parental involvement in classrooms.

While there’s no official overall tally of school board results in states that held an array of elections on April 4, two conservative national education groups did not dispute that their candidates posted a losing record. Liberals are now making the case that their winning bids for school board seats in Illinois and Wisconsin show they can beat back Republican attacks on divisive education issues.

The results could also serve as a renewed warning to Republican presidential hopefuls like Donald Trump and Ron DeSantis: General election voters are less interested in crusades against critical race theory and transgender students than they are in funding schools and ensuring they are safe.

“Where culture war issues were being waged by some school board candidates, those issues fell flat with voters,” said Kim Anderson, executive director of the National Education Association labor union. “The takeaway for us is that parents and community members and voters want candidates who are focused on strengthening our public schools, not abandoning them.”

“We lost more than we won” earlier this month, said Ryan Girdusky, founder of the conservative 1776 Project political action committee, which has ties to GOP megadonor and billionaire Richard Uihlein and endorsed an array of school board candidates this spring and during the 2022 midterms.

Democrats hope the spring school election season validates their playbook: Coordinate with local party officials, educator unions and allied community members to identify and support candidates who wield an affirming pro-public education message — and depict competitors as hard-right extremists.

Yet despite victories in one reliably blue state and one notorious battleground, liberals are still confronting Republican momentum this year that could resemble November’s stalemated midterm results for schools and keep the state of education divided along partisan lines.

Conservative states are already carrying out sharp restrictions on classroom lessons, LGBTQ students, and library books. And they are beginning to refine their message to appeal to moderates.

Trump, DeSantis, former Vice President Mike Pence, former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley and other Republican presidential hopefuls are leaning on school-based wedge issues to court primary voters in a crowded White House campaign.

Conservatives have also seized on transgender students to rejuvenate a social agenda that includes a push to restrict transgender athletes in sports, gender-affirming medical care and access to LGBTQ-affirming library materials.

“What I was most surprised by was just the sheer prevalence of these Republican candidates,” said Ben Hardin, executive director of the Democratic Party of Illinois, after his party made an unprecedented decision to endorse dozens of local school and library board candidates and funnel nearly $300,000 into those elections.

In Oswego, Ill., a small community in Chicago’s far southwestern suburbs, the 1776 Project supported four candidates running as part of a “We The Parents” slate on a platform aligned with the conservative parental rights movement. Each of those candidates lost, including to one candidate endorsed by a local Illinois Federation of Teachers affiliate.

The Chicago Tribune reported Oswego’s We The Parents slate received support from the local Stamp Act political action committee, which proclaims it will “fight to preserve our cultural and religious heritage” and “resist attempts by the Left to transform and reshape American society.”

A group of conservative candidates in the wealthy Chicago suburb of Barrington who were backed by the 1776 PAC, Moms For America Action and Awake Illinois also lost their school board bids.

“Fortunately, the voters saw through the hidden extremists who were running for school board — across the [Chicago] suburbs especially,” Pritzker told reporters after last week’s election. “I’m glad that those folks were shown up and, frankly, tossed out.”

Teacher unions are also celebrating a school board victory in a bellwether community in suburban Milwaukee. . . . . Wauwatosa’s GOP-backed aspirants still lost by wide margins to teacher union-supported candidates. The 1776 Project won slightly less than half of the nearly 50 Wisconsin races it endorsed candidates in.

Moms For Liberty, a newly prominent conservative group that helps train and endorse school board candidates, said just eight of its candidates won races in Wisconsin last week. The group had endorsed candidates in another 20 elections, its founders said.

Let's hope the rejection of GOP extremism continues.

Monday Morning Male Beauty

 

More Sunday Male Beauty - Pt 2

 

Clarence Thomas: A Study In Corruption

Lord Acton noted 136 years ago that "Power tends to corrupt; absolute power corrupts absolutely."  A case in point is Justice Clarence Thomas who we are finding out has used his seat on the U.S. Supreme over the last decades to receive millions in gifts and lavish trips and never reported any of it despite the legal obligation to do so. With a life time appointment and the threat of removal through impeachment unlikely given the party split in the U.S. Senate and current GOP control of the House of Representatives, Thomas - as well as his delusional wife - arrogantly feels he can do whatever he wants, caring nothing for the further damage he is doing to the already tattered reputation of the Court (Thomas' corruption is on top of the fact that three sitting justices likely lied under oath during their confirmation hearings).  As an associate justice, Thomas' annual federal salary is as of this year $285,000.00.  Certainly not an insignificant income but one that doesn't go far in an expensive metropolitan area like Washington, D.C., and the northern Virginia suburbs.  For Thomas to pretend that gifts totaling many times his annual income have no bearing on his votes on the Court is an insult to sentinent individuals.  A column in the New York Times looks at Thomas' use of his position on the Court like a winning lottery ticket and the need to impose restraints on the members of the Court.  Here are excerpts:

We have Clarence Thomas to thank for the latest illustration of how the Supreme Court’s outsize power, isolation and virtual immunity from public pressure has made it a magnet for corruption and influence-peddling.

For more than 20 years, according to an investigation by ProPublica, Justice Thomas received lavish and expensive gifts — including luxury trips to private resorts — from Harlan Crow, a Texas billionaire and real estate developer with a long record of extensive support for Republican politicians, conservative media and the Federalist Society.

Under a federal law passed after Watergate, it appears that Thomas was supposed to disclose these gifts and trips to the government. He hasn’t. Instead, Thomas has lived a lavish life on the largess of his rich confidant while posing, in public, as the most humble and unassuming of the justices. In return, Crow has gotten direct access to one of the most influential and powerful men in America.

If Thomas were an ordinary federal judge, this conduct would be an obvious — and flagrant — violation of the judiciary’s code of ethics. But that code doesn’t actually bind the nine members of the Supreme Court. For them, it is mere guidance.

For his part, Thomas denies wrongdoing.

And while several Democrats, most notably Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, have called for investigations and even impeachment, there’s no real expectation that Thomas will even answer questions about his conduct, much less face consequences for it. He is still as free as he’s ever been to treat his seat on the court — ostensibly a public trust — like a winning lottery ticket, to redeem with the nearest friendly billionaire (who happens to have a collection of Nazi paraphernalia and Hitler-related souvenirs).

Last year, in the wake of a different Supreme Court ethics scandal — involving a sophisticated and well-funded influence operation aimed at Republican justices like Thomas and Samuel Alito — I wrote about the problem of lifetime tenure for judges and justices. The framers of the Constitution embraced service on “good behavior” because they wanted a truly independent judiciary, free from the corruption and venality of ordinary politics.

But, I asked, “What if lifetime tenure, rather than raising the barriers to corruption, makes it easier to influence the court by giving interested parties the time and space to operate?” My answer was that it does. Nothing that has happened since makes me think any differently.

There is a second point to make here, one that harks back to arguments from the anti-Federalist opponents of the Constitution.

Turning his eye to the Supreme Court, the writer who called himself Brutus blanched at the power and authority that the Philadelphia convention entrusted in such a small group of men. “Every body of men invested with office are tenacious of power,” he wrote. “The same principle will influence them to extend their power, and increase their rights” and, he continued, “enlarge the sphere of their own authority.”

“No free people ever reposed power in so small a number,” he said.

Although I can’t say for certain, it sounds like both Brutus and Chase are channeling Machiavelli’s observation that “the few always behave in the mode of the few.” Build an exclusive, oligarchical institution, and you’ll get an exclusive, oligarchical politics.

This has always been true of the Supreme Court — a reliable friend of property, capital and class rule throughout its 234-year history, occasional bouts of decency notwithstanding — but it has become an acute problem in this era of unchecked judicial supremacy. As the court arrogates more and greater power to itself, and grows both distant from and contemptuous of public opinion, it naturally attracts flatterers and intriguers.

With his close ties to a powerful, property-owning billionaire, Thomas embodies the historic role of the Supreme Court in American politics, not as a liberator or defender of the rights of political and social minorities, but as a partner to and ally of moneyed interests.

The Supreme Court is not going to police itself. The only remedy to the problem of the court’s corruption — to say nothing of its power — is to subject it to the same checks and limits we associate with the other branches. The court may adjudicate disputes within the constitutional order, but it does not exist above or outside its reach. In practice, this means the Democratic Party will have to abandon its squeamishness about challenging and shaping the Supreme Court and the federal judiciary. Whether it’s through structural change or a simple ethics code, it is up to elected officials to remind the court that it serves the republic, and not the other way around.

We have a poor record of elite accountability in American politics. But even by our pitiful standards, we seem to be living in an era of almost total impunity for people of influence. Both the powerful and their apologists treat political authority as a grant of freedom from rules, responsibilities, duties and obligations. You see it in the case of Justice Thomas, whose defenders say he is the victim of a smear campaign.

This is not how a republic should work. Our leaders — who chose to vie for influence — should be shackled by the power they wield, not free to abuse it for their own interests and their own pleasures. And if they won’t act in the spirit of public service, then we should make them.

More Sunday Male Beauty

 

Kacsmaryk Mislead the Senate in His Confirmation Hearings

Some likely think me aweful, but during my almost 35 years involved in politics I have found few people or groupds of people who liar more and disseminate more deliberate falsehoods against those they dislike - typically gays, racial minorities and non-Christians - than evangelicals and Christofascists.  For these people, the end justifies the means, so lying, deception, untruths, a total disregard for eithics, and harming others are all fully acceptable if they further the increasingly anti-democratic evangelical/Christofascist agenda.  Forcing their reactionary and hate and division based religious beliefs on all citizens is all that matters.  Certainly falling into the Christofascist category is  Matthew Kacsmaryk (oictured above), the Trump appointed federal judge who last week invalidated the sale of a long used anti-abortion drug nationawide (his ruling has been stayed and the case is on appeal). Sadly, Kacsmaryk is representative of some of the extremist and/or unqualified judges nominated by Donald Trump and approved by the then GOP control Senate. Trump's nominee selection focused on far right ideology rather than credentials and the ability to objectively and unbiasedly decide cases. Now, it turns out that Kacmaryk may have deliberately sought to hide his anti-gay and anti-abortion extremism during his confirmation hearings - remember, lies and deceit are fine if they aid the Christofascist cause.  The Washington Post looks at his apparent deliberate effort to hide some of his most extreme views.  Here are highlights: 

As a lawyer for a conservative legal group, Matthew Kacsmaryk in early 2017 submitted an article to a Texas law review criticizing Obama-era protections for transgender people and those seeking abortions.

The Obama administration, the draft article argued, had discounted religious physicians who “cannot use their scalpels to make female what God created male” and “cannot use their pens to prescribe or dispense abortifacient drugs designed to kill unborn children.”

But a few months after the piece arrived, an editor at the law journal who had been working with Kacsmaryk received an unusual email: Citing “reasons I may discuss at a later date,” Kacsmaryk, who had originally been listed as the article’s sole author, said he would be removing his name and replacing it with those of two colleagues at his legal group, First Liberty Institute, according to emails and early drafts obtained by The Washington Post.

What Kacsmaryk did not say in the email was that he had already been interviewed for a judgeship by his state’s two senators and was awaiting an interview at the White House.

As part of that process, he was required to list all of his published work on a questionnaire submitted to the Senate Judiciary Committee, including “books, articles, reports, letters to the editor, editorial pieces, or other published material you have written or edited.”

The article, titled “The Jurisprudence of the Body,” was published in September 2017 by the Texas Review of Law and Politics, a right-leaning journal that Kacsmaryk had led as a law student at the University of Texas. But Kacsmaryk’s role in the article was not disclosed, nor did he list the article on the paperwork he submitted to the Senate in advance of confirmation hearings in which Kacsmaryk’s past statements on LGBT issues became a point of contention.

Now, six years later, as Kacsmaryk sits as a judge in Amarillo, Tex., his strong ideological views have grabbed the country’s attention after his ruling this month that sought to block government approval of a key drug used in more than half of all abortions in the country — an opinion that invoked antiabortion-movement rhetoric and which some medical experts have said relied on debunked claims that exaggerate potential harms of the drug.

[O]ne former review editor familiar with the events said there was no indication that Kacsmaryk had been a “placeholder,” adding that this was the only time during their tenure at the law review that they ever saw author names swapped. The former editor, who spoke on the condition of anonymity out of fear of reprisal, provided emails and several drafts of the article.

The circumstances surrounding the article’s authorship raise questions about whether a judicial nominee was seeking to duck scrutiny from a process designed to ensure that judges are prepared to interpret the law without personal bias, said lawyers who worked on judicial nominations in Republican and Democratic administrations . . . . Adam H. Charnes, who worked on judicial nominations while the principal deputy in the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Policy under President George W. Bush . . . “I’m pretty sure the Senate would expect you to produce something like that,” Charnes said. The scenario “strikes me as problematic,” he said — and, he added, “a little shady.” 

The Senate Judiciary Committee’s questionnaire requires nominees to disclose any publication with which they are associated, regardless of whether they are formally listed as authors, said Alex Aronson, who was a former chief counsel to Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R. I) and led judicial nominations for the senator. Whitehouse questioned Kacsmaryk during his confirmation hearing.

To leave such a publication off the questionnaire, he added, is “unethical” and raises concerns about “the candor and honesty of the nominee.”

When Kacsmaryk requested the authorship switch, the editor familiar with the events said they raised the issue with Reitz, the law review’s editor in chief. The lower-ranking editor asked why Kacsmaryk was making the request. Reitz smiled, the editor recalled, then said, “You’ll see.”

Even after Butterfield and Taub were designated the authors, Kacsmaryk remained involved, the emails show, offering additional minor edits. The final version is almost identical to the one submitted under Kacsmaryk’s name.

During his confirmation hearing that December, Democratic senators questioned Kacsmaryk extensively on his views on LBGT rights and abortion — issues at the heart of the article he had submitted to the law journal.

The journal article argues against a 2016 Department of Health and Human Services rule forbidding doctors to discriminate against patients who seek gender-affirming care or pregnancy termination. The rule from the Obama administration, the article says, should contain a “conscientious objector” exception.

A law review article is exactly the kind of material the Senate Judiciary Committee is trying to gather in the judicial confirmation process, several people said, because it provides a sense of the judge’s personal opinions.

Many of Kacsmaryk’s recent decisions have been wins for the right, including two that struck down new Biden administration protections for transgender people. One decision, issued late last year, involved the same issues raised in the journal article, “Jurisprudence of the Body.”

Kacsmaryk sided with doctors represented by America First Legal Foundation, set up by former Trump White House adviser Stephen Miller, who challenged HHS guidelines designed to protect transgender patients against discrimination.

It will take decades to undo the damage done to the federal judiciary - including the Supreme Court - done by Der Trumpenfuhrer. 

Sunday Morning Male Beauty

 

More Saturday Male Beauty

 

Republicans and Right Wing Judges Refuse to Quit Abortion Bans

Poll after poll shows that a majority of Americans oppose Republican efforts to ban abortion.  Likewise, the majority of Americans disapprove of the ruling by an extremist Texas judge banning abortion medication nationwide.   Yet Republicans in state houses across the country - and in Congress - continue to flout the will of the majority of the citizens and pass legislation and hand down rulings that inflict far right evangelical/Christofascist religious beliefs on all.  The 2022 mid-term results and the recent Wisconsin Supreme Court race indicate that long term, this is going to be a losing strategy.  The problem for the Republican Party is that religious extremists have been so empowered within the party and hold so much power in primary elections that no one dares to defy them and they are a faction that cannot be reasoned with.  Their goal of a nationwide abortion ban either through Congress or on a state by state basis will remain relentless - for these folks the end justifies the means whether it means lying, trampling on the rights of others, or deliberately harming others.  A piece in Salon looks at the GOP's self-created problem which I for one hope brings down the GOP.  Another piece in the Washington Post looks at the damage being done by right wing extremist judges.  Here are excerpts from Salon:

If you are following the issue of abortion right now you almost surely have a headache. There is just so much happening all over the country that it's very hard to wrap your head around what's going on and how to fight it. This was the predictable outcome of overruling Roe v. Wade to "send it back to the states" because it was always part of the anti-abortion movement strategy. Instead of fighting on one front at the national level, pro-choice advocates would be forced to fight on many different fronts in many different ways while at the same time battling back one attempt after another in the federal courts to degrade the right in the states where it is legal. The final goal remains a national ban even if they have to get it done incrementally.

This was always obvious by the fact that while they always piously proclaimed that abortion is murder while at the same time insisting that they merely wanted to return the issue to the states, as if it was fine with them if some states decided to keep it legal. What they really wanted to do was disperse the resources and energy and wear down the opposition.

Even Donald Trump is having trouble negotiating the issue with his most devoted followers. According to Rolling Stone, he's been meeting with evangelical leaders and trying to convince them that abortion is a loser and they need to change their approach. He tells them they must stop talking about bans and start emphasizing "exceptions" instead because otherwise Democrats will paint him as an "extremist." And when he's asked about how he plans to advocate for their cause in the future, he resorts to bragging about his past accomplishments . . . . His supporters were not amused. One wondered if Trump was "going to try to make us swallow getting next to nothing in return for our support?"

Apparently, Trump's telling anyone who will listen that the Republicans are "getting killed" on abortion, which is true, and Republicans in Washington are freaking out, as Rolling Stone reports: In recent weeks, numerous emergency meetings — focused on abortion-related messaging and the potential for compromises — have been held by conservatives in nonprofit organizations, on Capitol Hill, and in elite Republican and evangelical circles, multiple sources familiar with the situation attest.

Trump seems to think that if the anti-abortion zealots will just agree to allow some exceptions for rape and incest (and maybe the health of the mother) that the whole thing will calm down and everyone can go back to the way it was.

First of all, even if the anti-abortion zealots were to agree, the genie is out of the bottle. Roe was overturned and the battle for women's autonomy isn't going to magically disappear because they agree to allow for an exception for rape and incest, which until fairly recently was supported by most pro-lifers. The right to abortion is supported by a large majority of Americans and that majority is growing. Gallup polls from last May show support for abortion in all or most cases at 85%, higher than when polling began in 1975 (76%).

Unfortunately, those numbers are not going to deter the anti-choice movement and the institutions that support it, including the churches that wield massive influence on the Republican Party. 

And there are activist right wing members of the judiciary ready to step in, as we've seen with the Texas judge who banned one of the medical abortion drugs . . . . . they've also put the FDA's ability to regulate all drugs at the mercy of a full variety of zealots who seek to interfere in all Americans' private medical decisions.

And then there are the activists: . . . . . Lila Rose believes the GOP's national policy should be a total ban with no exceptions and she holds Trump responsible for going wobbly on the issue.

Meanwhile, the pragmatists in the party seem to be drifting toward some kind of 15 week "compromise" but they need look no further than Ron DeSantis who had already signed one into law yet felt compelled to push for the more draconian 6 week ban under pressure from the right as he tries to gain traction in the GOP primary. There is no reason to believe that he will be able to finesse this any better than Trump will.

They brought this on themselves. For decades they encouraged and enabled a religious right extremist faction in their party to seize power (even tacitly encouraging anti-abortion terrorism) secure in the knowledge that they would be thwarted in their goals by Roe v. Wade. They allowed them to demagogue the issue as murder, genocide and even a holocaust apparently thinking that it was all just politics. Now this has become inconvenient and these people are being asked to stand down. Apparently, they didn't know that "sending it to the states" was just the anti-abortion movement's strategy and they never meant a word of it. The GOP is stuck with a political albatross around its neck and it's choking on it. 

Here are excerpts from the Post:

U.S. District Judge Matthew J. Kacsmaryk’s widely panned ruling blocking the Food and Drug Administration’s approval more than 20 years ago of an effective and safe medication, mifepristone, used both for medical abortions and to treat miscarriages, is another in a string of decisions from right-wing judges that may well boomerang on the MAGA movement. The decisions have revealed its true reactionary face.

Kacsmaryk’s opinion (which the Justice Department appealed on Monday and moved to stay) displays the three telltale characteristics of Trump-appointed judges’ opinions: Contempt for the law, sleight of hand on the facts and partisan language more appropriate to a MAGA rally than a courtroom.

Kacsmaryk’s logic would essentially abolish the standing requirement for lawsuits against drug approvals by creating a special exception out of thin air. That is not the law.”

Moreover, the judge’s reliance on the 1873 “anti-vice” Comstock Act smacks of utter desperation to find any rationale for his desired result. . . . . Comstock was largely invalidated by the Supreme Court’s 1965 ruling in Griswold v. Connecticut.

Kacsmaryk’s ruling also makes factual assertions that are “scientifically baseless and infused with hostility to abortion,” constitutional scholar Kate Shaw writes in a New York Times op-ed, “including that the FDA failed to consider ‘the intense psychological trauma and post-traumatic stress women often experience from chemical abortion.’”

The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists lambasted the decision as “inflammatory” and “brazenly” substituting “the court’s judgment for that of trained professionals.”

Given that Kacsmaryk’s decision has heaped fuel onto the conflagration caused by the overturning of Roe v. Wade, Republicans might want to ponder: Is the right-wing judiciary as a whole a threat to the MAGA movement’s viability?

It is one thing to gin up the base on invented threats from critical race theory or the “great replacement theory.” But when the MAGA movement’s judges begin to inflict radically unpopular edicts on those outside the right-wing audience, that risks sparking a counter-response: a determined, broad-based movement insistent that the United States not turn the clock back on decades of social progress.

Radical judges who would impose their will on modern America make themselves a target for a movement that pushes back on the courts’ decisions and on the courts themselves. No wonder that there are rising calls for expanding the Supreme Court as well as lower courts (to dilute right-wing judges’ power); limiting Supreme Court terms; and stripping jurisdiction from the Supreme Court. Support for progressive state judicial candidates who vow to act as a counterweight to right-wing judicial imperialism is almost inevitable.

Saturday Morning Male Beauty