This article was originally published at ProPublica, a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative newsroom.
State Rep. Taylor Rehfeldt was speaking on the floor of the South Dakota Capitol, four months pregnant with her third child, begging her Republican colleagues to care about her life.
Continue reading “Some Republicans Were Willing To Compromise On Abortion Ban Exceptions. Activists Made Sure They Didn’t.”A lot of things happened. Here are some of the things. This is TPM’s Morning Memo. Sign up for the email version.
By the time we sit down for turkey again next year, Donald Trump may be the president-elect for a second time. That persistent thought soured my holiday like spoiled deviled eggs. If this was the last Thanksgiving before the end of democracy as we know it, I hope you made it a good one.
The rule of law is on the ballot in 2024, and it trumps every other political and policy consideration.
It is the umbrella under which every other issue is addressed: Want to restore abortion rights? Want to openly debate Israel and Palestine? Want to accelerate the energy revolution to head off the worst of climate change?
Good luck. Because if Trump, as promised, harnesses the power of the federal government to attack his perceived political enemies, exact retribution for slights, overturn elections, eviscerate the right to vote, and continue the effort to lock in GOP minority rule, he will break the democratic mechanisms for adjudicating policy preferences, enacting new laws, and enforcing them.
Trump is promising a fundamental break with the rule of law and from that will flow a fundamental breakdown in democratic processes and institutions. It is as simple as it is hard to stay at maximum threat level for years on end.
If elections don’t count, if Trump and the GOP won’t accept defeat as an option, if a majority of the electorate can’t make its voice heard at the ballot box, then nothing else really matters. It’s as stark a choice as the United States has ever faced.
Trump’s rhetorical attack on Thanksgiving came the day after a new revelation about the consequences of those kinds of attacks. The judge in the New York fraud case against him defended his gag order in a filing that revealed that he and his law clerk had received hundreds of credible threats in response to Trump’s attack. Among other things, the law clerk’s cell phone number and personal email address have been compromised.
Special Counsel Jack Smith seized on the revelation in the New York fraud case to press the DC Circuit Court of Appeals to uphold the gag order in the Jan. 6 case against Trump. With the appeals court having already heard oral arguments and poised to rule any day now, Smith filed a rare Thanksgiving Day supplement to the appeal alerting the court to the New York filing detailing the threats against the judge and law clerk. Trump responded that the filing was “impermissible” and “irrelevant.”
AP: Trump hints at expanded role for the military within the US.
NYT: A Troubling Trump Pardon and a Link to the Kushners
Donald P. Moynihan unpacks Trump’s three-part plan to transform the federal government into an instrument of his personal power:
Kim Wehle with part one of a four-part series on Trump and the rule of law.
Daily Beast: “A conservative nonprofit tied to a controversial ‘White House-in-waiting’ for a second Donald Trump presidency has apparently unintentionally revealed its top donors—and two of them are foundations famously associated with liberal causes.”
Aid to Israel and Ukraine are the most pressing end-of-the-year matters.
Rep. George Santos (R-NY) is now expecting to be expelled by the House.
Ex-cop Derek Chavin, convicted in the murder of George Floyd, was stabbed and seriously injured Friday by a fellow inmate at a federal prison in Arizona.
The Kansas state court filing system has been offline since a mid-October cyberattack, reducing lawyers to filing via fax and in-person visits to courthouses.
In a new Rolling Stone report, Trump is reported as having said he can pivot toward a more moderate position on abortion in the general election because anti-abortion leaders have no leverage over him.
The spectacle of the UN’s annual climate change conference being hosted by a petrostate and taking place in a largely artificial man-made environment in the desert gets underway this week. Set your expectations low.
Jason J. Eaton, 48, of Burlington has been arrested in the Saturday shooting of three students of Palestinian descent in front of his apartment building. Police have not yet publicly confirmed any motive for the shooting.
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This article was originally published at ProPublica, a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative newsroom.
Outside Healy Chapel on the campus of Saint Joseph’s College of Maine, the American flag swayed at half-staff. Inside, candles flickered, and the dying autumn light filtered softly through stained glass. A nursing student sobbed as a small group of mourners read aloud the names of the 18 people slaughtered with an assault-style rifle in late October at a bowling alley and a restaurant up the road in Lewiston. The college had shut down for two days as police sought the killer, whose body was found in the woods after he turned a gun on himself.
Continue reading “How A Maine Businessman Made The AR-15 Into America’s Best-Selling Rifle”While we’re still in the extended Thanksgiving weekend, I wanted to take a moment to thank all of you, especially our members but all of our readers, on behalf of everyone at TPM. We literally couldn’t do it without you. It’s a member funded publication. The overwhelming percentage of our revenue comes directly from your monthly and annual membership fees.
We are, paradoxically and oddly at this point, a huge success story, in this strange relative sense of moving forward, having stable finances and getting ready for a hugely consequential election. This would be normal and unremarkable if not for the fact that almost everyone else is struggling or going under. It’s entirely because of our readers and their dedication to what we do. You’ve consistently been there for us. Which is amazing. And we thank you for it.
In addition to keeping us solvent it has also been a liberation for us inasmuch as basically our entire focus, both editorially and in terms of our business, is reader satisfaction. That should be the case for any successful publication. But when most of the revenue comes from advertising much of that focus is only indirect. You need to keep readers happy because without happy readers you can’t keep the advertisers happy. They’re the source of the money.
If you’re looking to do us another solid, let me remind you we’re trying to hire a new reporter and we’re looking to spread the word. You can see more on that here.
Thank you and have a great rest of the weekend.
This article is part of TPM Cafe, TPM’s home for opinion and news analysis. It was originally published at The Conversation.
For better and worse, the Maury County Courthouse in Columbia, Tennessee, has come to represent the overlooked cultural divisions between urban and small-town America.
The courthouse was the site of the lynching of a Black teenager in 1927. It also served as a rallying spot for white vigilantes who assembled there during race riots in 1946.
It is now the focus of a modern-day controversy that emerged shortly after popular country singer Jason Aldean released his music video in July 2023 for his hit single “Try That in a Small Town.”
Continue reading “Jason Aldean Song Triggered Renewed Attention On Racist Vigilante Justice And Small-Town Nationalism”For right-wing litigants, the line of communication has never been clearer. Their ideologically aligned Supreme Court justices send out messages — “trial balloons,” “bat signals” — in concurrences and dissents, raising a topic that maybe, perhaps, it would behoove a motivated lawyer to bring up in a case.
This time, a fellow judge picked up on the hint. U.S. District Judge Lee Rudofsky of Arkansas, a Donald Trump appointee, eagerly took up the qualms of Justices Neil Gorsuch and Clarence Thomas that private litigants could never actually sue under Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act — despite the fact that they’ve been doing so for decades.
Continue reading “Trump Judges Decimate Voting Rights Act After Supreme Court Bat Signal”After an email exchange TPM Reader TW flagged to my attention this Times symposium on the Oslo Process. It’s quite good, better than we usually have any business expecting from daily journalism. If you’re too young to remember the Oslo years or aren’t familiar with it, you’ll learn a lot from reading it. It’s quick and conversational, not a challenging read. If you are familiar you’ll probably learn some new nuances and details. The gist and one many of us know is that peace was genuinely sought after by both sides and I think it was really possible. History is full of contingencies, things that might have gone one way or another. Those contingencies build on each other to create what is usually the illusion of inevitability. But there were also basic structural flaws to the process and the standing participants which led to failure.
The core structural flaw was that the process was open-ended. In theory there was a five year deadline, but just what was supposed to happen over that five years or what end state it would arrive at at the end of five years was never clear. That meant that enemies of the process on both sides had plenty of time to destroy it. And they were able to do that because the players in power on the both sides were weak.
Continue reading “Why Did Oslo Fail?”This article is part of TPM Cafe, TPM’s home for opinion and news analysis. It was originally published at The Conversation.
Too often, K-12 social studies classes in the U.S. teach a mostly glossed-over story of U.S. settlement. Textbooks tell the stories of adventurous European explorers founding colonies in the “New World,” and stories of the “first Thanksgiving” frequently portray happy colonists and Native Americans feasting together. Accounts of the colonies’ battle for independence frame it as a righteous victory. Native American removal might be mentioned as a sad footnote, but the triumph of the pioneer spirit takes center stage.
As a scholar of Native American and Indigenous rhetorics, I argue that this superficial story hides the realities of what many historians and activists call “settler colonialism.” Historian Lorenzo Veracini asserts that colonial activity isn’t just about a nation sending out explorers and bringing back resources, or what scholars refer to as “classical colonialism.” It’s also about what happens when a new people moves in and attempts to establish itself as the “superior” community whose culture, language and rights to resources and land supersede those of the Indigenous people who already live there.
Continue reading “Superficial Thanksgiving Stories Hide The Realities Of Settler Colonialism”It’s not yet clear what Rep. George Santos (R-NY) will announce during his planned press conference on the Capitol steps on Nov. 30 — the spectrum of possibilities is vast and could range from denying he’s ever gotten Botox to announcing his resignation.
The calculated media moment is rare for the congressman who often makes headlines by simply walking the halls of the Capitol, sometimes toting an unidentified infant. But it’ll come at a precarious time for Santos, just a few days after the House returns from the Thanksgiving break when his colleagues are expected to vote on whether to expel him from Congress.
Continue reading “Santos Sees The Writing On The Wall”In a few recent posts we’ve discussed the question of whether one state or two states is the most logical or possible resolution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. (You can see my argument here.) A few days ago TPM Reader RC sent me this April Foreign Affairs article, Israel’s One-State Reality. It was written by three scholars at GW and another at the University of Maryland. The piece was interesting to me because it illustrates a lot of what the one state argument is really about. As the title suggests, the article is not so much an argument that one state in Israel-Palestine is a solution to anything but an assertion that it is the current reality.
In other words, Israel’s not a country that functions as a democracy while controlling occupied territories whose final status will be decided at some point in the future. It’s a single country in which all Jews have political and civil rights and most Palestinians have limited civil rights and no political rights. Given that the post-67 occupation has persisted for 56 years, this argument has many merits to it. But what is the import of that assertion? In itself it’s simply a definitional claim. That part comes next. It’s an argument for the withdrawal of US support and some escalating framework of sanctions to compel Israel to come up to international standards in which one ethnic group or most of it facing systemic legal discrimination just isn’t okay.
Continue reading “One More One/Two State Discussion Before Thanksgiving!”
