Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: Texas, by way of the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals, is before the Supreme Court on a conservative culture-war issue.
This case centers on a Texas law that requires sites with one-third or more content that is “harmful to minors” to verify the age of users before granting access.
Continue reading “Supreme Court Mulls Letting 5th Circuit Ignore Precedent It Doesn’t Like In Texas Porn Case”There’s a cottage industry of takes these days on how Democrats can again become the “party of the working class.” Many of those are reactive, defensive, operate on misleading or ill-considered concepts of what the 21st century working class even is. But today I had one of these pop into my inbox that I read and thought, yeah, that makes a lot of sense. The gist is that Democrats should make themselves the party of gig workers. The title of the article is “Champion the Self-Employed.” But as author Will Norris explains, the demographic and economic profile of those technically categorized as “self-employed” has changed pretty dramatically in recent years. It still includes the generally high-earning and disproportionately white and male consultants and solo operators of various sorts. But as a group it’s now much, much larger — especially in the wake of the pandemic — and is more female and less white. It’s also much lower income, more precarious.
Continue reading “Democrats and the Gig Economy”North Carolina state appeals court judge and Republican state Supreme Court candidate Jefferson Griffin filed a legal brief on Tuesday with the state Supreme Court, laying out his latest argument for why the court should toss out November ballots and overturn the results of the state Supreme Court Race in his favor.
Continue reading “North Carolina Republican Tries New Strategy For Stealing State Supreme Court Race”A lot of things happened. Here are some of the things. This is TPM’s Morning Memo. Sign up for the email version.
We should all understand by now that the vaunted FBI “background check” – in the context of presidential nominees, not run-of-the-mill security clearances – is not what it’s been falsely portrayed as for decades. The notion of some big high-level vetting of nominees’ backgrounds sounds good, like a fancy form of due diligence. You want this job? Then you need to consent to throwing open your whole life to FBI scrutiny. But it was always less formalized and more subjective than commonly understood and described in news reports.
Garrett Graff has more on the broken vetting system:
Normally, transitions and administrations want desperately to know potential personnel vulnerabilities in advance. The entire point of a security check is to determine whether someone is already ethically compromised or has potential areas that an adversary could leverage to compromise them — from hidden affairs to gambling problems to substance abuse. At a fundamental level, a security check is about whether a potential nominee is worthy of public trust. You generally, as a point of good government, don’t want senior officials in sensitive positions open to compromise or blackmail.
The Trump administration, meanwhile, sees background checks differently — they want to hide and obfuscate the misdeeds, liabilities, weaknesses, conflicts-of-interest, corruption, and points of existing or potential compromise of their nominees until they’re safely ensconced in the highest level of the US government and already reading the nation’s most sensitive secrets.
As Graff notes, what has shifted that makes the whole edifice wobbly and unsustainable now is that in the past the president wanted the FBI to find any smoking guns, skeletons in the closet, or unexploded ordinance. It was in the president’s interest to smoke this stuff out before they invested their own political capital in a nominee, not to mention better for national security, the smooth operation of government, and a host of other substantive reasons. There was an alignment of interest between the president and the FBI that has broken down under Trump.
What we’re left with is a mechanism that pawns off the blame for unfit and risky nominees on the FBI, rather than affixing that responsibility where it firmly belongs: on the president and his team. The White House, the transition team, and senators all use the FBI for cover, dodging their own responsibilities. That’s not really the FBI’s fault, though I question whether it should be involved at all any longer. It’s in an impossible position, with its credibility and professionalism being used to provide political cover.
We’re 10 years into the Trump era, but we’re still slow to jettison the things that no longer serve a functional purpose and may in fact camouflage and obscure the truth of things. That’s understandable in part because it feels like we’re contributing to Trump’s destruction by tossing out things that used to work. The challenge is not to maintain the form of things as a substitute for the substance of things, especially when the substance has drained away and the form is only a facade masking malfeasance.
TPM’s Josh Marshall on who bears the responsibility for confirming Trump’s dangerously unqualified nominees.
So much of Trump’s campaign of retribution, destruction, and corruption comes down to Pam Bondi serving as attorney general. We’ll be liveblogging her confirmation hearing, which begins at 9:30 a.m. ET.
The joke nomination of Pete Hegseth to be defense secretary picked up crucial support from Sen. Joni Ernst (R-IA) despite a flailing confirmation hearing in which Senate Republicans did everything they could to protect and shield the singularly unfit and unqualified nominee. If you missed the hearing, a sampling of the rundowns:
In her meeting with Sen. James Lankford (R., Okla.), Gabbard couldn’t clearly articulate what the role of director of national intelligence entails, two Senate Republican aides and a Trump transition official said. When she met with Sen. Mike Rounds (R., S.D.), Gabbard seemed confused about a key U.S. national-security surveillance power, a top legislative priority for nearly every member on the Senate Intelligence Committee, conflating it with other issues, the aides said.
Only two (or three, depending on how you count it) Democrats defected as the GOP-controlled House passed a bill barring transgender women from competing in women’s sports.
Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (R-TX) threatened to fire the president of Texas A&M over the university’s participation in a conference focused on networking and mentoring opportunities for “historically underrepresented students.”
WSJ: “In a steady parade of companies retreating from their diversity efforts, Costco Wholesale is standing out by holding fast.”
Republicans in the Minnesota House pulled a fast – and possibly illegal – one yesterday.
State Democrats had boycotted the opening session to deprive Republicans of a quorum, prompting the presiding officer to suspend legislative business for the day. But Republicans proceeded to purport to elect their own House speaker anyway.
Mother Jones has a good rundown of the unusual series of events that have created complicated power dynamics over who will ultimately control the state House.
In her typical highly performative way, Rep. Nancy Mace (R-SC) went off on Rep. Jasmine Crockett (D-TX) during a House committee hearing Wednesday:
Crockett: Somebody’s campaign coffers are struggling right now so she’s going to keep saying trans trans trans.. Child listen
— Acyn (@Acyn) January 14, 2025
Mace: I am no child! Do not call me a child. I am a grown woman. If you want to take it outside pic.twitter.com/o2EBHzcwoT
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There are a few things that are critical to understanding the Trump Cabinet nominations and how Senate Democrats should approach them. The first and most important is that in the case of every nomination the question is entirely up to Republicans. Republicans have a three-seat majority. They have the vote of the Vice President in a tie. What happens or doesn’t happen is entirely a matter decided within the Republican caucus. It is totally out of Democrats’ control. What follows from that is that everything Democrats do, inside the hearing room or outside, is simply and solely a matter of raising the stakes of decisions Republicans make and raising those stakes for the next election. The aim isn’t for any Democratic senator to try to claw their way through the steel wall of Republican loyalty to Donald Trump. It’s to do everything they can to illustrate that Donald Trump staffs his administration with unqualified and/or dangerous toadies and that Senate Republicans are fine with this because they put loyalty to Trump over loyalty to country.
This all sounds obvious. And it is obvious. But people struggle to see the obvious as obvious. I’m seeing headlines and comments that Democrats failed to change the dynamic or knock any Republicans free. That’s a crazy standard since the dynamic is set. None of this is about whether Hegseth gets confirmed. Republicans control that. It’s about establishing the record Republicans will be running on in 2026 and the stakes for every Senate Republican in a competitive election.
Here’s a sort of update from the world of billionairedom. Today Blue Origin, Jeff Bezos’ space company, was set to attempt its first launch of its hulking “New Glenn” rocket. But they’ve now scrubbed that attempt because of some technical issues and they’re going to try again on Thursday. Blue Origin is either 100% owned or near 100% owned by Bezos. It’s unclear whether some very limited equity may have gone to some early employees. But big picture: it’s Jeff Bezos’ company. It’s not part of Amazon or some public company. It’s his.
The company now seems to be Bezos’ main focus and he’s apparently relocated to Florida to give the company his especial attention. While all space technology is of interest to me, normally I wouldn’t be rooting for a new Bezos business venture. I have no particular beef with Bezos. But as we’ve seen repeatedly in recent months and years, what we might call the super-billionaires have way, way too much power. But in this case I’m really hoping this launch succeeds and that Blue Origin makes big strides in general.
I’m doing this post to explain why.
Continue reading “Three Cheers for Blue Origin … No Really”After days of telling the world that Elon Musk is a “truly evil person” who should “go back to South Africa,” and that he would “have Elon Musk run out of here by Inauguration Day,” Steve Bannon has backtracked.
“Look, he’s, the bottom line, he’s not going to be totally out,” Bannon told Politico on Monday, adding later: “Look, when you write $250 million worth of checks, when you’ve got, when you’re that involved, when you have actually backed a ground game, you’re going to have a seat at the table.”
Continue reading “Elon Bought More Influence Than Me, Bannon Says”Pete Hegseth, once the most endangered of Trump’s nominees, now seems on a glide path to confirmation as Defense Secretary.
During his confirmation hearing Tuesday, Republicans fell in line, including Sen. Joni Ernst (R-IA), who once presented the greatest obstacle to his confirmation — that is, before a right-wing pressure campaign brought her back in line.
Democrats brought up the allegations of sexual assault and alcohol abuse, which Hegseth decried as a “smear campaign” in the left-wing media.
Sen. Tim Kaine (D-VA) was notably effective, the first to touch on Hegseth’s storied history of infidelity.
We’re covering his hearing from Capitol Hill. Follow our live updates below:
Tucked into ex-Special Counsel Jack Smith’s 137-page report on Donald Trump’s 2020 self-coup attempt, he explores a question that’s hung in the background of the case: Why wasn’t Trump ever charged with insurrection?
Continue reading “Smith Considered Charging Trump With Insurrection. The Law Wasn’t Ready.”As the Hegseth hearings unfold, I wanted to give you a view into a small part of the story which, while perhaps not terribly consequential in itself, sheds some additional light on the Trump team’s effort to lock down details about Hegseth’s background as well as general press credulity about the same. This morning’s Axios reports that the Trump transition’s “red line” is that only Armed Services Committee Chair Roger Wicker (R-MS) and Ranking Member Jack Reed (D-RI) should be briefed on Hegseth’s FBI background check, not the rest of the committee. “The Trump transition team is demanding the president-elect’s nominees be treated the same way they insist Joe Biden’s were,” it reads.
Continue reading “Confirmation Theater and Press Credulity”
