Roxan Wetzel is a relative newcomer to politics. She began to get involved in 2019, she said, inspired by the start of North Carolina gubernatorial candidate Mark Robinson’s meteoric rise in politics.
Continue reading “Some Trump Electors In Swing States Are Primed To ‘Stop The Steal’ Again In 2024”Supreme Court Allows Virginia Plan To Purge Supposed Non-Citizens To Go Forward
In a win for Republicans trying to perpetuate the myth that non-citizens will vote en masse for Democrats, the Supreme Court on Wednesday allowed a voter purge program in Virginia to move forward only days before the presidential election.
Continue reading “Supreme Court Allows Virginia Plan To Purge Supposed Non-Citizens To Go Forward “You Know What’s Really Garbage? Tired, Old Political Reporting Tropes
A lot of things happened. Here are some of the things. This is TPM’s Morning Memo. Sign up for the email version.
Here We Go Again
Like sharks with blood in the water, leading national political reporters went into a feeding frenzy last night after Republicans faked outrage at remarks from President Biden that they construed as calling Trump supporters “garbage.”
This dance is so predictable, rehearsed, and tired that everyone has their roles to play and feels compelled to play them despite how intellectually and journalistically bereft the whole exercise has become.
Among the tells in the coverage:
- Top-tier political reporters quickly jumped on the perceived gaffe;
- The parsing of what Biden said quickly gave way to “meta” analyses that it didn’t matter because it was a gaffe anyway;
- Republican professional fake outrage was treated like a genuine groundswell of umbrage.
On that last point, “firestorm” was the word of choice:
- Axios: Biden sets off election firestorm with “garbage” comment
- Politico: Biden sparks a firestorm on the right over ‘garbage’
- NBC News: Biden sets off a firestorm with his response to Trump rally comedian’s Puerto Rico comments
Among the bigs, the WaPo managed to come closest to capturing the actual dynamic: White House, Trump campaign clash over whether Biden called Trump supporters ‘garbage.’
I’ve grown weary of explaining how these kinds of journalistic set pieces require suspending good, independent news judgment; rely on old, hackneyed journalistic tropes; and traffic in erroneous assumptions about Republicans (and journalists themselves) representing the “real America.”
This kind of coverage has been deeply problematic for a long time, as TPM has pointed out relentlessly for two decades. It has become more egregious and even less defensible when gaffe-based, double-standard coverage is deployed in covering an election with democracy on the ballot.
The coverage lacks intellectual rigor in too many ways to list here, but here’s one example to illustrate the point. When Biden – who isn’t even on the ballot any longer – says something imprecise or wrong-headed, he and the White House scramble to correct the record, say that’s not what he means and not what he thinks, and emphasize what he does actually mean and think. It’s an elaborate self-disavowal. When Trump says something truly outrageous, on purpose, he usually doubles down in the face of withering criticism and confirms that’s exactly what he meant. It’s the former and not the latter that is prone to getting the “firestorm” coverage.
The fact that this manufactured outrage and the race to cover it comes five days after Trump called America a “garbage can for the world” makes the whole thing beyond absurd.
Harris Leaves It All On The Ellipse
With the well-lit White House in the background, Kamala Harris gave a tight 30-minute speech on The Ellipse in DC Tuesday night, framing the choice in next week’s election around Donald Trump being more interested in using the powers of the presidency to pursue his own personal grievances than in serving the American people (starts at the 1:11:00 mark):
In her speech, Harris:
- compared King George (“a petty tyrant”) to Donald Trump (“another petty tyrant”);
- called Trump a “wannabe dictator”;
- accused Trump of ruling by “chaos and division.”
Political Violence Watch
- California: The man already serving a 30-year federal prison sentence for attacking Rep. Nancy Pelosi’s husband Paul in their San Francisco home was sentenced to life in prison for his conviction on parallel state charges.
- Georgia: “A federal judge sentenced an insurance salesman to 21 months in prison on Tuesday for making threatening phone calls to Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis and Sheriff Patrick Labat, saying he wanted to deter others from acting similarly against public officials doing their jobs,” the AJC reported.
- Pennsylvania: A 74-year-old man was arrested after allegedly threatening Trump the day before the former president’s rally at Penn State.
Cannon Declines To Recuse In Trump Assassination Attempt
U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon ruled that Donald Trump’s lavish praise of her and “speculation” that he might promote her if re-elected were insufficient for her to recuse herself from overseeing the attempted assassination trial of Ryan Routh.
Trump Runs Same Old Playbook In Pennsylvania
- CNN: Trump stokes voter fraud fears in Pennsylvania as counties investigate and state urges patience
- NYT: As Trump Sows Doubt on Pennsylvania Voting, Officials Say the System Is Working
- Philly Inquirer: Donald Trump makes false claims about ballots in Lancaster County in Truth Social post
Why Subverting The Election Will Be Harder This Time
NBC News runs through the various scenarios for Donald Trump to try to subvert the 2024 election and none of them are gimmes.
Election Threats Watch
- TPM’s Khaya Himmelman: Courts Shut Down Non-Citizen Voter Fear Mongering Efforts Across the Country
- WaPo: “A jury in this bright-red corner of rural Virginia found an avid Donald Trump fan not guilty of attempted illegal voting in a one-day trial Monday, accepting the man’s claim that he was only trying to test the election system for voter fraud when he asked to vote a second time in local elections last year.”
- NYT: Two local election officials in Michigan who wanted to hand count ballots have been removed from overseeing the vote.
Of Course Trump Is Coming For Obamacare
Speaker of the House Mike Johnson (R-LA) confirmed what all but the most credulous of political reporters already well knew: A Trump II presidency will be gunning for Obamacare.
Bezos Backlash Costs WaPo
At least 250,000 WaPo subscribers have cancelled their subscriptions since owner Jeff Bezos’ announced its decision to not endorse a candidate in the presidential election.
The Elon Musk Chronicles
- TPM’s Kate Riga: Musk’s Attack On Media Matters Could Become ‘Playbook’ Under Trump II
- WaPo: On Elon Musk’s X, Republicans go viral as Democrats disappear
MUST READ
Former UVa history professor David Shreve:
In one of the more enduring puzzles of the last half-century of American politics, American citizens routinely and consistently rank Republican presidents, and Republican Party elected officials in general, as better stewards of “the economy.” Indeed, since the late 1980s, this perception has prevailed more often than not and has also transformed political contests more significantly than any other major factor.
China-Linked Hack Of U.S. Telecom Systems
NYT: “Members of former President Donald J. Trump’s family, as well as Biden administration and State Department officials, were among those targeted by the China-linked hackers who were able to break into telecommunications company systems, according to people familiar with the matter.”
Anticipatory Obedience?
WSJ:
U.S. Archivist Colleen Shogan and her top advisers at the National Archives and Records Administration, which operates a popular museum on the National Mall, have sought to de-emphasize negative parts of U.S. history. She has ordered the removal of prominent references to such landmark events as the government’s displacement of indigenous tribes and the incarceration of Japanese-Americans during World War II from planned exhibits.
Visitors shouldn’t feel confronted, a senior official told employees, they should feel welcomed. Shogan and her senior advisers also have raised concerns that planned exhibits and educational displays expected to open next year might anger Republican lawmakers—who share control of the agency’s budget—or a potential Trump administration.
Alito’s Pal: Princess TNT
The evolution of Justice Samuel Alito’s German princess benefactor from ’80s party girl to right-wing Catholic crusader is something to behold. A life in pictures:
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Doctors Are Preoccupied With Threats Of Criminal Charges In States With Abortion Bans, Putting Patients’ Lives At Risk
This article is part of TPM Cafe, TPM’s home for opinion and news analysis. It was originally published at The Conversation.
Abortion bans are intended to reduce elective abortions, but they are also affecting the way physicians practice medicine.
That is the key finding from our recently published article in the journal Social Science & Medicine.
Medical providers practicing in states that implemented abortion bans in the wake of the 2022 Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Supreme Court decision are forced to balance the needs of their pregnant patients against the risk that the providers could be prosecuted for treating these patients. This dilemma has serious and far-reaching consequences.
We interviewed 22 medical providers working in reproductive health care across Tennessee in the six months following the implementation of the state’s total abortion ban in 2022.
Providers spoke with our team about the need to protect themselves from criminal liability and told us that they were increasingly hesitant to provide care that their patients needed.
Why it matters
A 2024 ProPublica investigation found that at least two women have died in Georgia as a result of being denied medical care stemming from the implementation of these abortion bans. Nearly all of our interviewees spoke about their fear that these kinds of deaths would happen.
Providers told us that patients often believe that these bans include exceptions when the health of the pregnant person is at risk, but that is not always true in practice.
In states with abortion bans, providers grapple with ensuring the health and autonomy of their patients while facing the looming threat of medical malpractice lawsuits and criminal liability.
The Tennessee abortion ban allows for an “exception for situations where the abortion is necessary to prevent the death of a pregnant woman or prevent serious risk of substantial and irreversible impairment of major bodily function.”
The problem is that such cases are rarely clear-cut. And the stakes for health care providers are very high. In certain states, including Tennessee, if they are found to have provided an abortion in a case where the mother’s life or health was not imminently at risk, they can face felony charges, which could include multiple years in prison.
In interviews, providers described many cases where terminating a pregnancy is medically necessary for the pregnant person. Take cases of preterm premature membrane rupture, a condition where a pregnant person’s water breaks before 37 weeks of pregnancy. Serious complications can follow a premature membrane rupture, particularly in cases that do not result in the beginning of labor.
The standard treatment for this condition is to induce labor in an effort to prevent such potential medical complications. However, if it is early on in a pregnancy and the fetus would likely not survive outside the womb, this treatment is now discouraged, as the law does not sufficiently clarify what interventions are allowed to protect the pregnant person.
In many cases, the physical harm the pregnant person is experiencing correlates with the level of legal protection a medical provider receives.
Although doctors are trained to follow best practices around health care treatment, fear of malpractice accusations leads to the widely documented practice of defensive medicine, cases where providers either over-administer testing or avoid risks in an effort to prevent malpractice lawsuits.
Abortion bans make this dynamic far worse because they often involve the threat of criminal prosecution, which is not covered by malpractice insurance. This exposes providers to a new form of risk, one that is shaping how providers interact with patients and provide care.
Our team calls this new form of defensive medicine “hesitant medicine.” Providers are forced to prioritize their own criminal legal protection over the well-being of their patients, so they hesitate to provide treatment that patients need. Hesitancy is exacerbated by bans that are ambiguous about when a provider can intervene during a pregnancy complication.
What’s next
It will take years before researchers have data showing the full picture of how abortion bans are affecting women’s reproductive health. However, our interviews show that these bans are already shaping how providers are treating pregnant people.
A majority of our interviewees had considered moving to a state without an abortion ban to practice medicine with far less stress around the threat of criminal prosecution, a trend that is already occurring. Over time, this exodus of providers could exacerbate the problem of health care deserts in the United States.
To mitigate some of this harm, more effort is needed from medical associations, employers and legislatures to clarify or revise the Tennessee “Human Life Protection Act” in a way that better protects women’s health.
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
Election Miscellany #3
Pretty remarkable. In a moment of unguarded exuberance, Speaker Mike Johnson promised today that he and future-President Trump will abolish Obamacare and bring back the joys of denial of coverage for preexisting conditions.
Continue reading “Election Miscellany #3”Election Miscellany #2
I want to mention one element of the story we’re now seeing unfold before us. We don’t know who’s going to win this thing or just how either candidate might do it. But what has always been the most obvious way for Harris to win this election is to hold the Blue Wall states of Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania. I’ve already discussed with you the issues with the Trump campaign’s decision to outsource its ground operations to super PACs and the way that doesn’t seem to have panned out. But the states themselves aren’t entirely passive players. Or they shouldn’t be. When things are working as they should the national party and the presidential standard bearer’s campaign can plug into a dynamic party organization in a given state.
A pattern that has become more and more clear to me over the last month or so is that to the extent Democrats are outplaying Republicans on the ground a significant part of that is the legacy of Trump’s “Stop the Steal” shenanigans. It’s left a number of these state parties deeply splintered and unable or even unwilling to do the kind of work that keeps a party organization functioning.
Continue reading “Election Miscellany #2”Not Just Non-Citizens And Dems: Trump’s Got A GOP Guy To Blame If He Loses, Too
It’s been clear to those paying attention for some time that Donald Trump has no intention of accepting the results of an election he loses. For two years now, he’s dodged repeatedly in public anytime he’s presented with a version of the now-very-familiar questions: “Will you accept the results of the election?” “Will you commit to a peaceful transfer of power?” These inquiries, of course, only became necessary after his failed attempt to cling to power four years ago.
Continue reading “Not Just Non-Citizens And Dems: Trump’s Got A GOP Guy To Blame If He Loses, Too”Courts Shut Down Non-Citizen Voter Fear Mongering Efforts Across the Country
For the last several months, Republicans have been perpetuating the false narrative that non-citizens are illegally voting en-masse on behalf of Democrats this cycle, as Donald Trump and his supporters manufacture voter fraud hysteria that they can point to if they lose next week.
Continue reading “Courts Shut Down Non-Citizen Voter Fear Mongering Efforts Across the Country”A Massive Backlash
NPR reported yesterday afternoon that The Washington Post has lost more than 200,000 subscription in the backlash against owner Jeff Bezos’ last minute intervention ending the Post’s policy of endorsing presidential candidates. That’s a staggering figure, far more than I would have guessed. When I wrote my piece over the weekend, the clearest report was that they’d lost over 2,000 subscriptions. If I understand the numbers right, the Post lost almost 10% of its paying subscribers in a single weekend. Again, a totally stunning and in business terms devastating number — in part because the cancellations appear to continue.
I got some inkling that the damage might be severe when TPM Reader BS emailed me this morning to tell me that after canceling his subscription, he received a special offer to restart his subscription including a link to a new article by Dana Milbank in which Milbank argues that he’s not giving up on the Post and he hopes readers don’t either. If the Post had lost a couple thousand subscribers, that would have been a downer for them and certainly a black eye among news super-consumers and what we might call elite news and politics opinion. (I use “elite” here in a purely descriptive sense.) But it wouldn’t be a huge thing in business terms. And I’d be surprised if the institution itself would address the issue so frontally in the pitches to cancelling members. That’s especially since basically all of the columnists and reporters asking readers not to leave do so while roundly denouncing Bezos’ decision.
Continue reading “A Massive Backlash”Threatening ‘The Enemy Within’ With Force: Military Ethicists Explain The Danger To American Tradition
This article is part of TPM Cafe, TPM’s home for opinion and news analysis. It was originally published at The Conversation.
On the campaign trail, former President Donald Trump has declared there are serious threats to the United States. First, he said, there is “the outside enemy, and then we have the enemy from within, and the enemy from within, in my opinion, is more dangerous,” as he told Fox News in an Oct. 13, 2024, interview.
He went on to say that “the bigger problem are the people from within. We have some very bad people. We have some sick people, radical left lunatics. And I think. And it should be very easily handled by, if necessary, by National Guard or, if really necessary, by the military.”
When asked on CNN about Trump’s remarks about using the military on U.S. soil, Mark Esper, one of five people who led the Defense Department during Trump’s presidency, said Americans “should take those words seriously,” most especially because Trump had already tried to do so when he was president.
As professors of military ethics, we worry that Trump’s actions while president, and his comments about his plans for a potential second term, may put the military in a tough position. The July 1, 2024, Supreme Court ruling giving the president immunity for official acts – potentially including as commander in chief of the military – would make that tough position even more difficult.
Response to demonstrations
In the summer of 2020, protests, including some violent ones, arose in cities around the U.S. in the wake of the May 25 murder of George Floyd. Then-President Trump announced he was considering sending the U.S. military into the streets of several American cities. He had already deployed some National Guard members in Washington in an effort to control the demonstrations there.
At the time, the two of us considered the possibility of dissent within the military hierarchy, saying that resistance would be most effective “if it were to come from those at the top.”
Indeed, many of the highest-ranking generals, admirals and Cabinet-level advisers resisted Trump’s requests to send the military to “beat the f— out” of protesters and “crack their skulls” – or even “just shoot them.”
Though Trump reportedly wanted to bring as many as 10,000 soldiers to Washington, fewer troops were deployed in the nation’s capital. No federal military personnel were used against public demonstrations in the U.S. that summer. Some National Guard troops were called up by state governors, not federal orders.
The reasons for civilian control
For his potential second term, Trump says he wants to hire Cabinet and other government officials who will follow his orders without question, rather than people who might try to prevent his worst inclinations from being enacted.
Questions about dissent and disobedience will therefore likely fall on those at more junior levels of military service in a second Trump administration than they did in the first.
The U.S. military has long been dedicated to the principle of civilian control. To minimize the chance of the kind of military occupation they suffered during the Revolutionary War, the country’s founders wrote the Constitution requiring that the president, an elected civilian, would be the commander in chief of the military. In the wake of World War II, Congress went even further, restructuring the military and requiring that the secretary of defense be a civilian as well.
For that reason, in a time of increasing political polarization, military educational institutions are focusing even more explicitly on the oath military members take to the Constitution, rather than to a person or an office.
As the Joint Chiefs of Staff reminded the military after the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection, and just before the inauguration of Joe Biden as president, military personnel serve the nation’s interests, not those of a politician or a political party.
Nonpartisanship could become partisan
When faced with a potential order to deploy the U.S. military within the nation’s borders, however, service members may find themselves in a situation where upholding the military’s tradition of staying out of politics could itself appear partisan.
Military members have a duty to obey orders from superior officers. But as military ethicists, we recognize that the content of an order is not the only factor that determines whether it is a moral one.
The political motivation for an order may be equally important. That’s because the military’s obligation to stay out of politics is deeply intertwined with the mutual obligation of civilian officials not to use the military for partisan reasons.
If an elected official were to attempt to use the military for obviously partisan ends, the decisions of military personnel to either follow the order or resist it would open them up to accusations of partisanship – even if their actions were attempts to protect the military’s strict partisan neutrality.
At the nation’s founding, John Adams and Thomas Jefferson worried about a military that would be loyal to a particular leader rather than to a form of government. James Madison was concerned that soldiers might be used by those in power as instruments of oppression against the citizenry.
Trump has said the National Guard or the military could “easily handle” political protesters. He has recommended one “really rough, nasty” hour of police violence to curb criminal activity. He has expressed a desire for military officers to be obedient to him and not the Constitution.
It’s not clear that military members could follow those kinds of orders and remain nonpartisan. By refusing to follow orders about military deployment to U.S. cities for political ends, members of the armed forces could actually be respecting, rather than undermining, the principle of civilian control. After all, the framers always intended it to be the people’s military – not the president’s.
Risks for military members
There is a long line of military heroes who had the moral courage not to follow immoral orders. In fact, it was a junior officer who first exposed the widespread use of torture in the global war on terror.
That particular example may be useful to consider in the weeks and months ahead, given the significant effort at the time to argue that some of those immoral orders could nonetheless be legal.
Recently, some of Trump’s former military advisers have raised concerns about the the potential use of U.S. troops in American cities. But several of his civilian advisers have already recommended being less reticent about finding legal means to deploy the military within the country. And a July 1, 2024, Supreme Court ruling gave the president criminal immunity for official acts – which almost certainly include giving orders to the military.
Regardless of who wins the 2024 presidential election, there will likely be significant protests over policy – perhaps even over the results themselves. If the military is ever called in because of those actions, military members would have to consider whether they could ethically follow the orders to do so. To be ready to answer these important questions, they have to consider them now.
We often ask our students to imagine themselves in numerous different ethical situations, both real and hypothetical. In the present circumstance, we believe one set of ethical questions could quickly become very concrete for those serving:
“Would you obey an order from a president – a particular president giving an order for a particular reason – to deploy to a U.S. city? What might it mean for the nation if you did? And what might it mean for American democracy if, in some circumstances, you were brave enough not to?”
Many Americans claim to venerate military men and women, thanking them for their service and standing to celebrate them at sporting events. They may need much more support than that from the American people, and soon.
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article. The academic views expressed in this article are the views of the authors alone and should not be read as endorsing any candidate for office. They do not reflect the official position of the U.S. Naval Academy, the Naval Postgraduate School, the U.S. Navy, the Department of Defense or any other entity within the U.S. government; the authors are not authorized to provide any official position of these entities. This article contains some material previously published on June 11, 2020.