TPM Reader RP is still at it …

Just to keep you up-to-date, I’ve yet to hear from Senator Jeanne Shaheen if, in addition to confirming she’ll vote to enact a federal law making abortion accessible and available to all women, she’ll also answer my other question as to whether she’ll vote to change the filibuster, if not eliminate it entirely, so the Senate can proceed with a bill for such a law.

I’ve called her office in Manchester, NH twice (once last week and once the week before) to remind her office that Senator Shaheen still has to answered this question.  Each time, the person with whom I spoke immediately found a record of my question(s) and assured me she would bring to Senator Shaheen’s attention that I’ve asked again for an answer to my question regarding the filibuster issue.

Just after I wrote the post below I got a new email from Joe Biden. No, Joe and I aren’t that close. I mean “Joe Biden,” the guy who spends most of his time sending fundraising emails. It seems they are creeping up to something more specific (emphasis added).

In bleak times amid onslaughts from the right there’s a tendency for many Americans on the liberal or leftward side of the political spectrum to attack the Democratic Party. Certainly the Democratic Party merits lots of criticism. But we should be clear on the particular roots of this reflex. When you feel angry and outraged you want to attack someone. The right doesn’t care about your attacks or your rage or your fears. Indeed, in our trolling era they relish them, laugh at the them, taunt you with them. The party that at least broadly lines up with your views, on the other hand, cares a lot. So it’s a much more appealing target.

I say this because it is a toxic tendency that we are all vulnerable to but should try to overcome. And I raise it here as preface to what I hope will be viewed as constructive criticism. Hopefully it is constructive because time is of the essence.

Sens. Warren and Smith have an op-ed in the Times today in which they say at the bottom of a lengthy and quite good article …

Ask every Senate candidate to commit to reforming the filibuster rules, so that the chamber can pass federal legislation protecting the right to reproductive freedom. If voters help us maintain our control of the House and expand our majority in the Senate by at least two votes this November, we can make Roe the law all across the country as soon as January.

Great. But for any of this to happen you are going to need at least a few senators to get the ball rolling. And getting the ball rolling means making a clear bumper sticker-like pledge and goading colleagues to sign on. It has to be at the top of the article not at the bottom of a laundry list at the end.

The modern conservative judicial movement always had abortion and the reversal of Roe v Wade as its central empowering goal. Many intellectuals and activists had different political and goals. But those often esoteric and complex goals were never what powered the politics and the appointments. That was always abortion. When white evangelicals made their pact with the scofflaw libertine Trump, it wasn’t about “takings” or delegation or “originalism.” It was about abortion. So today represents a victory for the conservative judicial movement, later embodied in The Federalist Society, that was five decades in the making.

There are many observers who despise the results but yet still grant the legwork. There was a liberal Court that made all sorts of liberal decisions, the story goes. Conservatives didn’t like that. So they got organized and changed it. Liberals did it first and then conservatives did it.

But that story was never really quite right.

This and other articles are among the first I’ve seen that make me think there will be prosecutions of individuals involved in the attempted 2020 presidential election coup. This one is from the Post and reports a new round of subpoenas and what appear to be court-ordered searches of various individuals involved in the “fake elector” scheme. Let me note a couple points about that part of the coup conspiracy.

Ron Johnson has managed to win two elections in Wisconsin – both of which were races Democrats were optimistic about winning. But this new poll number out of Wisconsin is pretty striking on a number of counts.

Here are the numbers.

One of the more interesting things to come out of the Jan. 6th hearings is the greater detail about the involvement of members of Congress. One detail yesterday was the involvement of Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI) in the fake electors plot. He somewhat lamely passed it off as the rogue behavior of an unnamed intern. Here’s one of several videos of Johnson yesterday rushing away from reporters trying to avoid questions.

Let me comment briefly on the TPM Reader responses below on the “tactical” lifestyle, Jan. 6th, mass shootings and more. Most of these have been in the vein of, “It’s not just the long wars, it’s this too.” And I think in every case I agree. No big historical development or reality pops up out of nowhere, unrooted to the particular historical era in which it arises.

It’s true as MF puts it that the millions of young American men who saw combat in World War II didn’t come back and spend years dressing up as GIs. In a way they didn’t have to as they returned to a society rapidly reorganized around the Cold War. It’s worth noting that the long-running abandoned POW activism emerging out of the Vietnam War was in many ways just that and it was a seedbed of late 20th century right wing activism. But certainly the mere existence of foreign conflicts didn’t “cause” the tactical firearms culture. A whole host of factors conditioned that reaction.

From TPM Reader JS …

Just saw your take, via the wayback machine, regarding the “tactical” culture and Greitens’ ridiculous ad. One thing Busse left out in his Atlantic article and SS didn’t mention in his email is the impact the “Call of Duty” video game series has had on all of this. CoD is a first-person shooter game, which means you play the game from your character’s eye view – you literally feel like you’re in combat.