I have been reluctant to write anything about the war in Ukraine, even though it is the American government’s most important current initiative and even though I remain skeptical about the administration’s war aims and about the role that Washington’s leading think tanks and media have played in pressing the conflict. One reason I have been hesitant to venture an opinion is that I am not an expert on the area. But the other reason is that the information we are getting from the mainstream press and official sources is, at best, inconsistent.
Continue reading “Who To Believe On The War In Ukraine?”Elon Musk Admits Labeling NPR ‘State-Affiliated Media’ Might Not Have Been Accurate
Twitter CEO Elon Musk reportedly said the social media platform’s recent decision to label NPR as a “state-affiliated media” account might not have been accurate during a series of emails he exchanged with an NPR reporter earlier this week.
Continue reading “Elon Musk Admits Labeling NPR ‘State-Affiliated Media’ Might Not Have Been Accurate”Much Of The Media Is Both Sides-ing, Obscuring The Truth In The GOP Tennessee Expulsion
As Tennessee Republicans expelled two state House Democrats for joining in a protest calling for gun reform from the House floor, the national media turned its attention to the chamber.
Continue reading “Much Of The Media Is Both Sides-ing, Obscuring The Truth In The GOP Tennessee Expulsion “Clarence Thomas: C’Mon, They’re My Friends
U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas said on Friday that, in the future, he would begin to disclose some of what he described as “hospitality,” which came in the form of superyacht sojourns.
Continue reading “Clarence Thomas: C’Mon, They’re My Friends”Young Black Dems Could Be Reappointed To Tennessee House After ‘White Supremacist-Led’ Expulsion
Tennessee Democratic Reps. Justin Jones of Nashville and Justin Pearson of Memphis — two young Black men — were expelled from the state House on Thursday, while Rep. Gloria Johnson of Knoxville — an older white woman — survived the Republican-led attempt to oust the trio who participated in a peaceful gun protest from the floor of the chamber last week.
Continue reading “Young Black Dems Could Be Reappointed To Tennessee House After ‘White Supremacist-Led’ Expulsion “They Straight Up Did The Racism In Tennessee
A lot of things happened. Here are some of the things. This is TPM’s Morning Memo.
Tennessee Be Tennesseeing
Just when you didn’t think it could get any worse, the GOP-controlled Tennessee House did itself one better.
Rather than expelling all three Democratic members it targeted for protesting school shootings, the GOP House only expelled the two young Black male members and left the older white woman alone.
The silver lining: It makes it crystal clear what this was really about.
In truth, they “did the racism” all afternoon long:
It was quite a day in Nashville:
Tip Of The Hat
For some time now, Ron Brownstein has been leaning hard into the notion that red states are building a nation within the nation. It’s one helpful organizing framework for what’s happening across the country right now. I count at least three items in today’s Morning Memo that are encompassed by this paradigm: the Tennessee House expulsions, West Virginia’s bans on transgender athletes, and the new Idaho abortion ban.
Where To Even Start With The Clarence Thomas Scandal?
ProPublica’s landmark exposé of the cozy ethically-challenged relationship between Justice Clarence Thomas and a billionaire backer of conservative causes broke just as Morning Memo “went to press” yesterday. So I noted it but wasn’t able to fully digest it.
Having had 24 hours to consider it, I don’t have much to add! Why? The story is so complete and well-reported, with few strings left dangling or loose ends unresolved, that it simply stands as is. Not much further explication required.
You could see how strong the story was because other news outlets took it at face value and immediately launched into getting reaction to it and building on it.
Well done all the way around by ProPublica.
The Scandal Within The Scandal
This “painting,” y’all …
8/ Inside Topridge hangs a photorealistic painting of one of Thomas’ visits to the 105-acre property in remote upstate NY.
— ProPublica (@propublica) April 6, 2023
The painting shows Thomas enjoying a cigar alongside Crow and chatting with other conservative power brokers like Leonard Leo: pic.twitter.com/Bq4CYGew30
How To Rein In The Corrupt Roberts Court?
A clean, crisp thread on why Congress needs to step up to hold the Supreme Court accountable to the political branches:
SCOTUS Declines To Intervene In Trans Athlete Case
The Supreme Court declined to enforce a West Virginia law banning transgender girls from playing on school sports teams for girls.
This was a closely watched case both because of its implications for transgender athletes amidst a nationwide conservative attack on transgender people and because it was on the Supreme Court’s controversial and increasingly used shadow docket. As Nina Totenberg notes:
While the court’s conservative supermajority has come under considerable criticism for its aggressive use of the emergency docket to deal with controversial issues without full briefing and oral argument, this time the court stayed its hand.
Justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas dissented.
The case continues, and it or a similar case could wind up back before the Supreme Court in the future. But as of now, no circuit court has ruled on the legality of the anti-transgender laws sweeping the country, and it looks like the Supreme Court will hang back until the appeals courts weigh in on the issue.
Not Sure What To Make Of This
Experts are still evaluating the new rule proposed by the Biden administration interpreting Title IX as it applies to transgender athletes.
My sense yesterday of the coverage was an initial outcry that the Biden administration was going along with bans on transgender athletes, followed by a slight easing back from the worst case fears. I’m not a Title IX expert, but I suspect this is still shaking out in terms of what it means in practice.
The WSJ has a pretty holistic piece on the latest developments. One other caution here: It’s still very early in the rulemaking process, so this will play out and be tweaked over many months.
NPR Suspends Its Use Of Twitter
An NPR spokesperson confirms it has stopped tweeting from its house account since Elon Musk’s Twitter falsely labeled the public radio network “US state-affiliated media.”
In what amounts to a sick burn in the staid, dulcet-toned public radio world, @NPR also changed its bio in part to say: “You can find us every other place you read the news.”
This Dude Has A Lot Of Explaining To Do
A two-fer of news here so bear with me for a moment.
Trump-appointed DHS Inspector General Joseph Cuffari has been a magnet for controversy not because of his investigative work but because of his own conduct.
Cuffari is currently under investigation by a committee of inspectors general (which is who steps in when one of their own needs policing), but he and some of his top staffers have now sued to block the outside panel from investigating them.
In a very telling development, they are being assisted in their lawsuit by the New Civil Liberties Alliance, a conservative non-profit backed by among others the Koch Brothers and Leonard Leo’s network that is waging a legal war against the “administrative state.” Sarah Posner wrote about the New Civil Liberties Alliance extensively for TPM last fall.
That’s the first bit of news.
The second bit of news, also very much in our wheelhouse: It was revealed this week in the civil lawsuit that the investigation of Cuffari has “expanded … to include his role in missing Secret Service text messages from the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol,” the Washington Post reports.
On Monday, investigators demanded records related to the deleted texts from the Office of Inspector General Joseph V. Cuffari, an appointee of President Donald Trump whose office shut down an inquiry into the Secret Service messages last year amid the House’s probe of the insurrection.
The records request, which was revealed in a federal lawsuit this week filed by Cuffari and his staff against the panel of inspectors leading the probe, suggests new urgency in a high-profile investigation that began in May 2021 and has since evolved into a wide-ranging inquiry into dozens of allegations of misconduct, including partisan decision-making, investigative failures and retaliation against whistleblowers.
The missing Secret Service texts from around Jan. 6 remain a source of great interest.
The Mystery Of That Party Switch In North Carolina
As you probably know by now, a recently elected state rep in North Carolina with longstanding and deep ties to the Democratic Party suddenly flipped to the GOP, giving it a supermajority that could override the vetos of Gov. Roy Cooper (D-NC). It’s still not clear why she made the switch.
Idaho’s First-Of-Its-Kind Abortion Ban
TPM’s Kate Riga dives in.
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Why You Took the Plunge
A gratifying but also really fascinating note from TPM Reader MG explaining why he finally made the decision to sign up after reading the site for many years — the role of evolving readers habits and the decline of Twitter are very interesting to hear and also match some of my own experience. Needless to say, if you’d like to join MG in signing up, just click right here …
Continue reading “Why You Took the Plunge”First of all, thank you and thank you to the entire TPM team for the top notch work you all do.
I’ve been a TPM reader for as long as I can remember and frankly feel a little sheepish that it took me this long to pitch in to support the work that you do. At some point, probably when my work life got crazy busy and I didn’t have as much free time, I started relying more on my Twitter feed to keep up with the state of affairs in the world. My Twitterverse largely consisted of all of the writers I had always been reading before but eventually I stopped reading their work and was instead just scrolling through the feed to keep up with the news. Not mindless scrolling….I felt like it was providing a play by play from a variety of sources that I trusted. But I wasn’t clicking through to anyone’s actual reporting anymore.
Then the slow erosion of Twitter began.
Stop! Read! Super Important.
We’re four days into our annual TPM membership drive and we’re making progress. I try to make these pitches fun and punchy. But really … it’s super, super important. These drives are always something of a leap in the dark. We don’t know how they’ll go. So a really sincere thank you to all 202 new members who’ve signed up so far this week. Thank you! (If you’re game, shoot us an email and let us know why you chose to sign up.) If you haven’t, please just click right here and join us! You get access to everything we publish and depending on which membership level you choose you get reduced or zero ads which makes reading the site faster and less cluttered. Most important, you support our team’s work. You ensure TPM stays vital and independent. Just click right here.
Where Things Stand: Remember, This All Began As A GOP Effort To Downplay Not Just School Shootings, But Jan 6
As my colleague Emine Yücel just reported, Tennessee Republicans have voted to expel one of the three Democrats who participated in a protest that broke out in the state House last week, as children and parents showed up to demand expanded gun control in the wake of another school shooting.
Emine and I followed the livestream of floor proceeding closely all afternoon and the rhetoric was, honestly, shocking. As Republicans gave lengthy, cringe speeches about the importance of following House rules, demanding to know how Rep. Justin Jones (D) carried a concealed bullhorn into the House chamber, yelled about him wearing the wrong type of lapel pin and argued that the Democrat from Nashville was intentionally creating chaos on the House floor to get attention because he is young, Democrats pleaded with their colleagues to drop the embarrassing crusade.
Continue reading “Where Things Stand: Remember, This All Began As A GOP Effort To Downplay Not Just School Shootings, But Jan 6”A Specter Is Haunting the GOP—The Specter of Abortion
There’s a specter haunting the Republican Party — the specter of abortion. While it’s difficult to say that an issue that is important to so many voters and that has been talked about in politics for decades is still underrated as a driver of recent political outcomes, that somehow manages to be the case. Debates over transgender rights, “parents’ rights,” crime politics and inflation drive more headlines. But abortion is turning the tide in more elections.
The American political class got an early heads up in the Kansas abortion referendum blowout less than six weeks after the Supreme Court handed down the Dobbs decision on June 24, 2022. We saw it again in Wisconsin on Tuesday, as the liberal Supreme Court candidate, Janet Protasiewicz, trounced the conservative, Daniel Kelly, in this consistently 50-50 state by 11 points. Gov. Gretchen Whitmer used her prodigious political talent and a host of issues to drive Republicans from power in all three branches of state government in Michigan. But the core issue has been abortion rights. Of course, abortion was likely the single, central issue — coupled with a broader rejection of Republican extremism — which turned the 2022 midterm election from a GOP rout to a Democratic upset. Abortion is now acting like an electoral riptide or a shark, especially across the northern tier of the country, unseen at the surface but pulling one Republican after another under the waves.
Continue reading “A Specter Is Haunting the GOP—The Specter of Abortion”