Filling The Void

Hello, it’s the weekend. This is The Weekender ☕

These past few weeks have been grueling for everyone who cares about politics, and particularly so for TPM’s small-but-mighty staff — lots of late night and weekend work, lots of marathon days followed by more marathon days. 

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This kind of work is only sustainable when we know that what we’re doing is important, that it’s helping guide our readers through periods of extreme uncertainty and anxiety. Your contributions (alongside the many lovely emails we’ve received in recent days) communicate to us that we are filling that void and helping you make sense of one of the most turbulent periods in the history of our politics — and that you trust us to help you navigate all of the turbulent periods in the future. 

Asking for money is awkward; acknowledging that you all are enabling us to have one of the best, honest, rewarding jobs in political journalism is easy.

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Here’s what else TPM has on tap this weekend:

• Josh Kovensky digs in on the role that former Trump AG Bill Barr played in creating content for the right-wing mediasphere. 
• Kate Riga reports on recent remarks from Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan begging someone, anyone to please do oversight on the high court.
• Khaya Himmelman checks in on Mike Lindell after he sent out a particularly unhinged email about mail-in ballots to followers this week. 
• Emine Yücel explains why Republicans are talking about “red meat” so much.

Let’s dig in.

Kagan: Someone Please Do Oversight On Us

Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan said Thursday at a judicial conference that the Supreme Court should have an ethics code that isn’t self-enforced, suggesting that Chief Justice John Roberts set up a commission of lower court judges to police complaints against the justices.

“The thing that can be criticized is: Rules usually have enforcement mechanisms attached to them, and this set of rules does not,” Kagan told a meeting of federal judges and lawyers, adding: “It’s a hard thing to do to figure out who exactly should be doing this and what kinds of sanctions would be appropriate for violations of the rules, but I feel as though we, however hard it is, that we could and should try to figure out some mechanism for doing this.”

She also said, for those of us who are very sick of hearing about RBG and Scalia’s joint opera escapades:

“I get frustrated sometimes when people talk about the collegiality question. Some of my colleagues share a great love of baseball. Some of my colleagues share a great love of golf.”

“That’s good for the court, but I can’t imagine why the public should care,” she added — yet another sign that we are into an era of seeing the justices as political actors, not as gods to worship or celebrities to obsess over. 

— Kate Riga

Bill Barr, Media Man

The DOJ’s internal watchdog released two reports this week detailing a couple of the most egregious instances of politicization during Bill Barr’s tenure as attorney general. The first, to do with him ordering prosecutors to retract a sentencing recommendation in favor of a lighter one for a close ally of Trumps’; the second, to do with Barr directing the DOJ to issue a statement amplifying misleading claims that poll workers in a key swing state had discarded nine mail-in ballots marked for Trump.

Both were instances of overt politicization, as the reports show: Barr took the incredibly unusual step of reaching down into the depths of the DOJ bureaucracy to personally commandeer decisions in two cases. But the findings also evince another quality: The strange mixture of cause-and-effect among public officials who themselves may deeply believe what they read in right-wing media.

This is all ancient history, in part because of a clear lack of urgency on the part of the IG office. These incidents happened nearly four years ago; we may be five months from a second Trump administration.

But take the case of discarded ballots in Luzerne County, Pennsylvania. Barr pumped up both the then-President and the American right by taking selective facts from the investigation – that the ballots were for Trump, and had been cast by military personnel – and feeding them to Trump and, later, to the public via a press release. It was a gross departure from DOJ norms, and it had a real effect. It inflamed conspiracy theories around voter fraud and set the stage for Trump to seed the myth that the election was stolen after he lost it. At the same time, the report notes that Barr was particularly incensed to learn that the discarded ballots had been cast by members of the military. I have a hard time believing that he would have reacted the same way that he did had he not spent years marinating in right-wing media.

At the end of the day, it means that Barr ended up creating content for the media universe that primed him to believe such things were possible in the first place. It’s not to absolve him of misconduct here or to ignore that he was using the DOJ to put his thumb on the scale in the election. Rather, it’s to note that a lot of what the right-wing media does is to influence people into taking decisions that end up melding reality towards that which had previously only existed in feverish news stories and op-eds.

— Josh Kovensky

‘Mail-In Voting Is Terrible,’ Says Mike Lindell After Urging Followers To Mail In Ballots

Election denier and MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell sent out an email earlier this week from the “Lindell Offense Fund” — supposedly the name of his new plan to secure elections from a number of non-existent threats — with an urgent call for voters to get their mail-in ballots.

Upon first read, it sounded like Lindell, who has falsely claimed that mail in ballots are unsafe and will compromise the safety and security of our election system, had suddenly changed his tune on mail-in ballots.

“We are countering PLANS TO COMPROMISE election ballots with one simple thing YOU can do!,” the emails reads. “Go get your mail-in ballot NOW — not just your registration — but your actual ballot.”

As Lindell explained to me in a phone call, a MyPillow Guy about-face on mail-in voting couldn’t be further from the truth! Instead, he claimed he is urging voters to actually take advantage of the mail-in voting system in order to guard against some amorphous someone using your ballot to do a fraud.

“Mail-in voting is terrible,” he said. “Believe me, I’m not encouraging mail-in voting or early voting – I’m like the RNC.”

The goal instead, he explained, is to avoid a potential “identify theft” situation, so that nobody can claim that you cast a vote when you have not – an issue he thinks is widespread and threatening to the upcoming election. 

“You request it, then when you go to vote same day, if you get in there and they say that you’ve already voted, you pull it out and you say, no, I haven’t,” he said. “It becomes identity theft.”

— Khaya Himmelman

Words Of Wisdom

“Kamala can’t have my guns. She can’t have my gasoline engine. And she sure as hell can’t have my steaks and cheeseburgers.”

That’s Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) during a Fox News interview this week talking about the presumptive Democratic nominee, Vice President Kamala Harris.

This is not the first time we have heard Republicans scream “Democrats are coming to take your burgers and your gas stoves and cars!” And it certainly won’t be the last — especially with Harris as the new target of their ire.

Ever since President Biden announced he will not be running for reelection and endorsed Harris, MAGA Republicans have been flailing to find ways to attack the Vice President. If this is not a prime example of said flailing, I don’t know what is.

Now that their trusty “Biden is too old to be president” argument is out the window, the GOP is really showing how out of shape they’ve gotten over the course of eight years with Trump as their candidate. 

Whether it’s yelling about red meat or engaging in lazy, racist and misogynistic attacks — which even Republican leadership has urged them to move away from — Republicans are once again holding onto ridiculous and lazy fear mongering for dear life.

— Emine Yücel