I want to return to the topic Nicole LaFond wrote about in yesterday’s column. Senate Republicans spent the day last week getting a detailed polling brief explaining (and searching for a solution to) how it is the public got the idea that “pro-life” politicians want to ban abortion. Who is responsible for this terrible misunderstanding?
I hesitate to use the term “gaslighting” because it’s become so ubiquitous and overused in our culture. Even that phrase doesn’t quite capture it, a shift that is somehow both instant and glacial — a kind of policy moonwalk in which the evacuees are so stunned and disoriented it’s not always clear whether they’re fooling their marks or themselves. It now seems clear that the only thing that will be at all memorable about the GOP’s first presidential debate of the 2024 cycle on August 23rd will be that brief speech from Mike Pence in which he staked his campaign on his bible-rooted, evangelical, pro-life record and endorsed a 15-week national ban.
House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) — under pressure from the far-right — officially announced on Tuesday he is “directing” House committees to open an impeachment inquiry into President Joe Biden over unclear and bogus accusations manufactured by Donald Trump defenders in his caucus.
Groups pushing to disqualify Donald Trump from 2024 ballots struck again Tuesday, filing a lawsuit in Minnesota Supreme Court to bar him from the state’s presidential primary ballot.
A impeachment launched in hopes of finding some evidence of wrongdoing that can justify its existence.
An impeachment inquiry designed to buy off Speaker Kevin McCarthy’s rabid and restless far-right flank so he can avoid a government shutdown that those same extremists are angling for.
It’s unchartered territory, but that’s where things stand as the House reconvenes today after a long summer recess. The stage is set for the rest of September, with government funding running out at the end of the month.
McCarthy Throws In On Bogus Impeachment
Speaker Kevin McCarthy is expected to give the House GOP a green light this week on initiating a groundless impeachment of President Biden, according to reporting from Punchbowl, which points to a Thursday closed-door conference meeting as the fulcrum of the House’s first week back.
McCarthy Squeezed By Senate GOP
The Senate is remarkably unified on proceeding with appropriations votes while the House GOP ties itself in knots. That adds more pressure on McCarthy to figure something out. And the bargain he seems to be trying to make is to placate his extreme wing by tossing them an impeachment bone. But as is so often the case, there’s no real reason to think that will be enough to buy their acquiescence on avoiding a government shutdown. The end result may very well be we get both impeachment and shutdown this fall. Yay. Thanks, Kev.
It’s Happening, Y’all
The obvious fact that Joe Biden is old is becoming a beginning, middle and end to 2024 horse race coverage. It’s the “but her emails” of 2024. It’s a fact so obvious and glaring that you can use it to make any point and buttress any argument, at which point of course it becomes meaningless drivel.
Josh Marshall noted one particularly ripe instance of the “age issue” being pumped up into something meant to be political analysis. Here’s another piquant example from the WSJ: “Is Biden Too Old to Run Again? We Asked People Born on His Exact Birthday.” You know it’s become a crutch of conventional wisdom when reporters are pitching and editors are greenlighting new “angles” on Biden’s longevity. Clever!
What makes it so insidious is that it’s no one story, no one piece of less-than-trenchant analysis, no single lazy cable news segment. It’s the sheer totality of the conventional wisdom being ingested by journos and pumped out nonstop. It becomes a substitute for original thinking, a balm for those either unable or unwilling to hold the real complexities of the world in their heads, and a shortcut for reporters without anything new to offer.
‘I Just Had Another One’
Politico: How McConnell scrambled to protect his job after two freeze-ups
Alabama Dares SCOTUS To Show Some Self Respect
You know the basic details already:
In a big surprise in June, the Supreme Court rejected Alabama’s congressional district map and ordered a do-over. The gist was that the Alabama map needed to have a second majority Black district (though it should be said that the ruling was arguably slightly less categorical than that).
In response, Alabama’s GOP-controlled statehouse coughed up another congressional district map but again included only one majority Black district.
Last week, a three-federal-judge panel rejected the new map, again for lack of a second majority Black district.
That brings us to yesterday. Alabama had asked the three-judge panel to stay its ruling while Alabama appeals to the Supreme Court – and was practically laughed out of court:
Alabama brushed off the setback and immediately went to the Supreme Court for a stay. Ball in your court, SCOTUS.
In a NYT op-ed – “Alabama Has Put the Supreme Court’s Legitimacy on the Line” – Kate Shaw writes: “Facing a crisis in public confidence, the court should take the opportunity to regain some of its rapidly dwindling legitimacy by sending a clear message that even its ideological fellow travelers do not get a pass from abiding by its rulings.”
Trump Seeks Long-Shot Recusal Of Chutkan
It’s going to be fun watching Donald Trump try out all the maneuvers the hundreds of convicted Jan. 6 rioters tested out and watched fail in their own cases: judge recusal, change of venue, legal challenges to the underlying criminal charges. It’s going to be a long list.
For what it’s worth, Trump’s recusal bid is unlikely to go anywhere with U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan or the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals.
Trump’s Low Energy Defense In Georgia
Presumably it’s part of his delay strategy, but Donald Trump has been slow and lethargic in responding in court to the sweeping RICO indictment in Georgia. Yesterday, rather than filing his own motions, he adopted and joined in several of the motions filed by his co-defendants, including one seeking to dismiss the indictment.
Feds Drop Case Against Mike Flynn Compadre
Prosecutors originally won a 2019 conviction against Bijan Rafiekian, a former biz partner of Mike Flynn, for illegally lobbying for Turkey, but the trial judge set aside the verdict. Now prosecutors have dropped “one of the last prosecutions stemming from investigations into alleged foreign influence over Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign,” as Politico put it.
Extremists Keep Targeting The Grid
Politico: Extremists keep trying to trigger mass blackouts — and that’s not even the scariest part
TPM flashback to April: Aspiring Right-Wing Terrorists Are Targeting The Power Grid Amid Rise In Accelerationist Extremism
Sign Of The Times
(1 of 5) JUST IN: The all-time highest number of billion dollar disasters on record occurred.
Uncertain Death Toll In Devastating Flood In Libya
DERNA, LIBYA – SEPTEMBER 11: A view of devastation in disaster zones after the floods caused by the Storm Daniel ravaged the region, on September 11, 2023, in Derna, Libya. The death toll from floods in the eastern Libyan city of Derna has risen above 2,000, local media reported on Monday. Further thousands are believed to be missing. The head of Libya’s Tripoli-based unity government, Abdul Hamid Dbeibeh, on Monday declared three days of national mourning for the victims of deadly floods that ravaged the North African country. (Photo by Handout/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images)
In a private meeting between Senate Republicans and the leader of a super PAC closely linked to Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) last week, senators were fed the results of recent polling that found voters attitudes about “pro-life” language has dramatically shifted since the Supreme Court’s ruling on Dobbs.
This article was originally published at ProPublica, a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative newsroom.
At their annual reunion last month, Deborah Taylor Mapp and her former neighbors shared memories of growing up in the Norfolk, Virginia, neighborhood of Lamberts Point when it was a thriving middle-class Black community.
I was pleased to get this email from TPM Reader PT because they hit on a critical part of the Ukraine, Musk, Starlink story. It’s also a key reason why — as we discussed in the previous post — why the Pentagon was a bit slow to grasp the complexities of the situation. The U.S. (and our treaty allies) don’t need Starlink. We have constellations of satellites with secure communications networks for our own military needs. The world’s other major powers do too. But Ukraine isn’t a major military power. So it’s relying on what’s meant to be a civilian network.
Colorado Secretary of State Jena Griswold (D) pushed back on Donald Trump after the former president argued that an effort to use the 14th Amendment’s Disqualification Clause to keep him off the ballot in 2024 was “election interference.”
I wanted to share this email from TPM Reader VN. It picks up where we left off talking about Elon Musk, Ukraine and the rise of the state-like global oligarchs. VN’s email may read like a criticism or a rejoinder of my earlier points. But as we discussed in our subsequent correspondence, I basically agree with the points they make.
Musk’s behavior has been atrocious. But he shouldn’t have been allowed to be in that position in the first place. That’s on the Pentagon and the U.S. government more generally. In the first rush of enthusiasm and support for Ukraine, Musk shipped a bunch of free Starlink devices to Ukraine and agreed to cover the cost of the service. Later when he cooled on Ukraine he started threatening to shut the service off if the Pentagon didn’t pick up the tab. That’s standard mercurial behavior from Musk. But of course the Pentagon and more broadly the U.S. should be picking up the tab. Much as I loathe the person Musk has turned out to be, I remember thinking at the time, how can this even be a question? Of course they should pick up the tab. The idea that we’d leave it to the whim of someone like Musk to be covering the cost of mission-critical technology for an ally at war is crazy. The back and forth over the cost got sufficiently messy that it has always been unclear to me whether there wasn’t something more to the argument. But, again, of course the U.S. should pay for it — at least once it was clear how critical it would be to the Ukrainian war effort.
As I was perusing the news of the day last night I was reminded of just how bad a lot of political reporting is. And not generally bad but bad in the sense of recycled D.C. conventional wisdom which is itself largely the product of reporters who take their cue from Republican messaging gurus. Our example this morning comes from Josh Kraushaar, late of National Journal, now with Axios.
The topic is “Biden’s broken bully pulpit,” or rather that’s the title. The topic is Biden’s feeble poll numbers. That in itself is true enough. Biden’s public approval has been mired in the low 40% since the summer of 2021. Polls also show that voters are concerned about Biden’s age. But the topic of this update is that even as things get better it doesn’t matter because being super bold prevents Biden from convincing anyone of anything.
