Editors’ Blog

The Republican National Committee today voted to censure Reps. Cheney and Kinzinger. But in the course of doing that they officially declared the January 6th insurrection and the conspiracy that preceded it as “legitimate political discourse.”

As we’ve been saying for months, it is an explicitly pro-insurrection political party.

I think public opinion, which is currently sour on the direction of the country and thus on the Democrats as well, isn’t mostly driven by jobs numbers or other government statistics. It’s more fundamentally driven by lived experience. And a lot sucks right now, even though there’s been a lot of positive economic news. Having said that, there’s really no question the consistently flawed jobs tabulations have hurt Joe Biden significantly. Again and again we’ve found out that a slackening recovery was actually a series of counting errors. The reports are “revised” later. But those revisions, in the nature of things, don’t get a fraction of the attention that the monthly reports do. I’m basically certain there’s no funny business going on. At least in broad outlines the cause seems pretty clear: the chaos of the pandemic has at least temporarily broken our system of tabulating jobs numbers.

Journalists have taken way too long to absorb this fact.

You know the news by now: Over the weekend, former President Trump told a crowd of supporters that if he runs/wins in 2024 he will pardon insurrectionists charged in the Jan. 6 Capitol attack. It’s egregious enough on its own, but a report surfaced yesterday revealing that Trump’s been talking about this for a while: in the waning days of his presidency, just after a mob of his supporters stormed the Capitol trying to do a coup, Trump was obsessing over the idea of potentially offering a blanket pardon to his supporters who attacked the Capitol.

These numbers came out a week or ten days ago. I had seen them before. But seeing them mentioned again today just made me marvel. In December 2021 unvaccinated people in the United States were 97 times more likely to die of COVID than people who are vaccinated and boosted. 97 times more likely. Just think about that number.

The metric is ‘only’ 14 times more likely compared to people who are vaccinated but not boosted. That is a remarkable level of protective benefit by any standard. But I find the degree of benefit from the booster even more eye-popping. It’s not a marginal difference. And to think tens of millions of Americans simply refuse to take this simple, free step.

There’s a fascinating passage in these new Trump election lawyer memos from the pre-January 6th period. One particularly jumped out at me in which Trump campaign lawyer Kenneth Chesebro casually runs down the relative difficulty of stealing the election in each of the key states.

“In conclusion, it appears that voting by an alternative slate of electors is unproblematic in Arizona and Wisconsin; slightly problematic in Michigan (requiring access to the senate chamber); somewhat dicey in Georgia and Pennsylvania in the event that one or more electors don’t attend (require gubernatorial ratification of alternates); and very problematic in Nevada (given the role accorded to the Secretary of State).”

A new episode of The Josh Marshall Podcast is live! This week, Josh and Kate discuss news around the Supreme Court nomination, including the Republican reaction, and the push for legislative election reform.

You can listen to the new episode of The Josh Marshall Podcast here.

Perhaps I’m just so dispirited after a year of being forced to analyze and discuss Joe Manchin on a daily basis. But I find myself compelled to resort to media criticism for the second time in a week. I read this morning that Whoopi Goldberg has been suspended for two weeks from The View for her earlier comments about the Holocaust. This whole episode is a testament to the general insipidness of our public culture.

Goldberg’s comments were clearly rooted in ignorance rather than malevolence. She not only issued a genuine apology rather than a half-assed ‘I’m sorry if anyone was offended’ type apology. She also spoke to people, privately and publicly, and seemingly learned why her comments were wrongheaded and corrected herself. ABC’s suspension was needless and stupid. It will be derided as “cancel culture.” But it’s really more the kind of corporate ass-covering that only discredits the values it purports to serve. It’s a consequence that, as far as I can tell, basically no one was asking for.

On the first day of Black History Month this week, there were a string of bomb threats made targeting historically Black colleges and universities in the U.S. The FBI announced today that it would be looking into those threats and investigating them as “racially or ethnically motivated violent extremism and hate crimes.”

“This investigation is of the highest priority for the bureau and involves more than 20 FBI field offices across the country,” the FBI said in a statement, noting the probe was “of the highest priority for the bureau.”

I confess to some feelings of pessimism (something I’m usually characterologically and ideologically opposed to) and drift about the current political moment. But despite the frequent and understandable claims that none of it matters, there’s more going on than people maybe realize with ex-President Trump and the January 6th investigators. Here I don’t mean specifically what the investigators are coming up with — though I think there’s a lot going on there too. I’m talking about Trump’s efforts to manage the Republican response to those findings and its on-going work.

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Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch is set to headline the Federalist Society’s annual conference in Florida over the weekend. It’s closed to the press. And while it may not be a great look for a sitting Supreme Court justice to speak at an ideological event, it’s not uncommon. Gorsuch has spoken at Federalist Society events in the past. In fact, all of the conservative justices on the Court currently have ties, in some form or another, to the conservative organization.

But part of what makes this year’s confab so intriguing are the prominent conservative names he will be sharing the program with.