Takes one to know too many

Panic about newcomers to the United States seems to be a hardy perennial in the American experience. 

Because my parents were unusually old when they reproduced, closer to 40 than 25 when they had a child, I carry a memory of coming up with people who had come of age during the immigration restriction panic of the 1920s. Even in the 1950s, they saw nothing amiss in reflexive "soft" prejudice against people who came from what they saw as "shithole" countries; in their world, that would be people of Italian or, even worse, Polish ancestry. The great patriotic coalition of World War II had sanded some ugly edges off this for them and this disdain didn't extend either to European Jews or American-born Blacks. But during the restricted phase of legal immigration that extended to 1965, they were just normies with normie attitudes. 

My generation were more open to new experiences and newcomers; we call that the Sixties. We were beyond shocking and very controversial to previous generations.

And then, like many Americans, my parents became more and more open to the different sort of Americans who came among us when we opened legal immigration doors a crack. 

The dwindling white base of the current Republican Party desperately wants the past and their entitled bigotry back. The Supreme Court's too small majority affirming birthright citizenship does not mean the end of the fight; it merely signals a new phase in the never finished struggle over who is a real American.

Air Force vet and former Republican Congresscritter Adam Kinzinger speaks to this moment; he knows the worst of his former constituents.  

Why Trump Won't Stop Until He Ends Birthright Citizenship 

Who is an American isn’t a difficult question. Despite what four politicians in black robes tried to tell us ..., the 14th Amendment is incredibly clear, written in language anybody can read and comprehend: “Any persons born or naturalized in the United States.” It’s simple: If you’re born here, you’re an American, and entitled to all our country’s blessings. And it used to be pretty widely agreed upon that this was an asset that this set our country above other nations as a beacon of freedom.

When I swore an oath to protect and defend the Constitution, I knew this was part of the deal. And I served in uniform alongside people that would have proudly given their life for their country, even if their parents were born somewhere else.

... Let’s be very clear about this: Trump and his allies are not going to stop trying to end Birthright Citizenship, and whoever succeeds him will pick up that mantle. Deciding “who is an American” is central to the MAGA project; it is among the very first steps in their playbook. 

If you think this is an overstatement, just look at one response yesterday from a prominent MAGA stooge—the CEO of the right-wing magazine The Federalist: 

click to enlarge

I'm reproducing this deranged screed here because most of us don't see the stuff our right wingers stew in. "Deny entry to all pregnant foreigners." "Deny entry to all female foreigners." "Require sterilization of all foreign visitors prior to entry." These people are scared stupid!

Kinzinger goes on: 

What makes America exceptional is the idea that citizenship isn’t about bloodlines or tribal membership—it’s about our shared commitment to a set of principles. It is a big, sprawling, living and breathing Democracy. This is what sets us apart from nations that define citizenship by ethnicity or religion. A Shining City on a Hill isn’t meant to be admired in the distance, it is an actual place with people, industry, traditions and faith.

And that gets us to the core of MAGA. The movement to end birthright citizenship isn’t trying to make America stronger. It’s trying to make America smaller, more fearful, more divided. It’s trying to turn the Constitution into a weapon against the very people it was designed to protect. Ultimately, Trump wants a smaller citizenry, a smaller democracy and a smaller America—in every sense of the word.

This is an existential fight for [Stephen Miller], for Trump and for the sociopaths they’ve got running the government right now. It is the skeleton key to the fascist takeover so many of them pray for each night. So the fight continues because they will never stop. 

America, as they know it, cannot exist with birthright citizenship in place because they believe it diminishes them. And, to me, that’s what makes the MAGA movement so weak and pathetic. They want to make being born here a curse, when the rest of us know it is an immense privilege. ...

What happened at the Supreme Court is not just another move in an ongoing MAGA v. Dems chess match. This is our existential fight.

Calling all California Democrats

We've got a race for a new governor on the ballot this year and, for the moment, it's a mess.

As you probably know, California chooses most of the candidates who appear on our November ballots by a crackpot "top two jungle primary" system. (I've always hated this foolishness, but the voters chose it by referendum, so here we are.) Everyone seeking a state office runs on the same ballot in the June primary; that includes all Democrats, Republicans, and whatever other nuts may be out there. 

Only the two with the highest number of votes in June get to move on to contest the fall election when most normal voters get around to tuning in. That's what the primary is for, to pick the genuine candidates. Or at least what it should be for: weeding out those with no chance. 

But this year, a ridiculous number of politicians think Californians just might decide to want them as governor. In addition to two right wing Republicans who have fractional support, eight Democrats are competing for our votes. 

Five of the Dems are living also-rans who have proved unable to break into more than 8 percent (and usually much less) in polling. 

Three of the Dems are running neck and neck in the mid-teens in polling. And of those, any of the three might have a chance to win the job. The other low-polling five are vanity candidates, just taking up space. 

The two Republicans also poll in the teens. No Republican is going to win the governor race against any Democrat. Dems are some 45 percent of the state's electorate, while Reps are about 25 percent while the rest are independents who mostly vote for a Dem.

But while the Dems divide their votes among eight candidates, five of whom haven't got a chance, it's numerically possible that the top two highest voter winners in June could be the two Republicans! Dems would not have a November candidate.

The five also-ran Democrats need to do the state a favor and DROP OUT NOW!

The ones who should drop out now for the good of the state are:

Xavier Becerra: info@xavierbecerra2026.com

Antonio Villaraigosa: contact@antonio2026.com

Matt Mayhan: mayor@sanjoseca.gov

Betty Yee: info@bettyyee.com

Tony Thurmond: info@tonythurmond.com

Some big names there. But these folks have not caught fire and merely endanger their state by staying in a race they can't win. Their personal ambition should give way to the good of the community they claim to want to serve. I've provided email addresses: we can thank them for their service and ask them politely to step aside for the common good. 

Then, take your pick among the genuine Dem prospects; links are to their websites:

Katie Porter 

Eric Swalwell 

Tom Steyer 

If we can get the also-rans out of the running, we can forget about the two Republican knuckle-draggers. But serious California Dems need to step up and let the voters choose their candidate without letting personal ambition risk the well-being of us all. 

• • •

For a more temperate description of this absurd California kerfuffle, see this link. 

One woman drops away: where's she off to?

Tressie McMillan Cottom's dissection of Marjorie Taylor Greene's split from the Orange Toddler and his MAGA fiefdom is delicious. Don't miss it. [gift article] 

[Explaining her resignation from Congress] ... she offered a mealy-mouthed apology for her role in our “toxic politics.” But on the whole she is, like many conservative women, a beneficiary of the very feminism that she reviles. She has long thought that being a tough girl rumbling alongside the boys will earn their loyalty, when all it ever does is earn women the right to throw themselves on the sword for men who never deserved their sacrifices.

To her credit, Greene is a survivor. She took a hard look at her political fortunes and appears to be betting on herself. As some reporting indicates others in the House are also looking to retire, she may end up being prescient. Or she may have mistimed the market on Trump’s political fortunes. Either way, she took the only choice she really had available to her.

There is not a real place for women in Trumpism, in MAGA or in the mainstream Republican Party, as long as they are one and the same. But Greene’s trajectory is a lesson fit for a fairy tale. If you want to control your own destiny, it’s better to be a wicked witch than a princess.

There's a way that MTG is sharper than some of her MAGA sisters. She has been even more of a true believer in the MAGA fantasy universe than many who just offered a self-interested imitation. (Think GOP Rep. Elise Stefanik for example.) She'll seek, or more likely invent, her own new authentically crazy persona. Who knows what Greene will adopt in order to chart a new course? What seems certain is that she won't just exit the stage quietly.

She cries out against a corrupted faith

She's not pulling any punches. Anthea Butler chairs the Religious Studies department of the University of Pennsylvania. She begins her history and jeremiad White Evangelical Racism: The Politics of Morality in America with this uncompromising declaration:

Evangelicals, you have a problem. That problem is racism. 

... why do people who identify as as evangelicals vote over and over again for political figures who in speech and deed do not evince the Christian qualities that evangelicalism espouses? 

My answer is that evangelicalism is not a simply religious group at all. Rather, it is a nationalistic political movement whose purpose is to support the hegemony of white Christian men over and against the flourishing of others. 

... evangelicalism is an Americanized Christianity born in the context of white Christian slaveholders. ... Racism in evangelicalism is not only about individual sin. It is about corporate sins of a religious movement that continues to believe itself good and that good is predicated on whiteness and the proximity to power. 

... As an African American woman who once trained in an evangelical seminary, I don't say these thing lightly... Whether ignoring race or hiding behind race, the evangelical whitewashing of race and racism does not work anymore.

This little book recounts the history which led to the evangelical "problem."

From the time that the first Africans were kidnapped to this country as slaves, enslavers sought to ensure the parts of the Christian bible to which they were exposed emphasized obedience to masters. 

... there was even a slave Bible produced in England that omitted passages about freedom.

In the 19th century abolitionists led by Frederick Douglass and William Lloyd Garrison repudiated and also reshaped American Christianity; after the Civil War freed the slaves, many Christian denominations split into northern and southern fractions over the continuing challenge of freed Black people in "their" society. The South got the KKK; in the immediate post war period, northern denominations aided education for the freed people. 

But by the early 20th century, Jim Crow segregation and repression were the rule most everywhere. White fundamentalists and Pentecostals created an extensive infrastructure in the interwar era; in the 1950s, Billy Graham became the archetypal white evangelist. Butler describes his uneven outreach to Christian formations of color. By the last decades of the 20th century, white evangelicals had become the base of the current right wing Republican party, organized by the Christian Coalition against abortion, feminism, desegregation of evangelical colleges, and gays. They were ripe for the picking by Donald Trump and MAGA.

Growing up Christian in Los Angeles in the 1980s and 90s, Anthea Butler thought she was part of this movement -- until she discovered she wasn't.

Once upon a time, I was an evangelical. A Pentecostal, to be exact. I was happily ensconced in the Church on the Way and preparing to start Fuller Seminary in the fall of 1992. That spring, the Rodney King verdict came down and the riots happened. I had a front row seat to one of the ways that evangelicals decided to deal with this traumatic event. Evangelical churches decided to come together under the aegis of Church on the Way's Pastor Hayford to hold what they called a "Love LA" service ... It was to be a healing celebration, a chance for racial reconciliation.  

For me, it was the moment I found out that despite my frenetic activity and full-steam participation in the church, I was invisible. For the service, I was sitting by Hayford's mother, who knew me from several other events. She turned to me at the greeting time and said, 'Welcome to Church on the Way.' At that moment, I knew that no matter how much I had worked or served or prayed with people, I was simply a Black person visiting the Church on the Way. Much like many evangelicals of color, I was just a Black person in this white woman's space. I was welcome due to the situation, but I could not possibly be a member of the church she belonged to. That moment encapsulated for me what evangelical attempts at interracial cooperation accomplished. Invisibility.

Butler goes on to ask, what went wrong in the evangelical movement?

... This is a movement that could have and should have moved on from its roots in nineteenth-century racism and slavery revealed in this book. Yet it has not. And that is due to the choices made by leaders and followers within the evangelical movement. 

Why have evangelicals and their leadership made choices over and over again to embrace racism? Because it is what has allowed them to attain and hold political power. ... 

... When evangelicals married their educational and religious institutions to nationalism and political power starting in the 1950s, they gained a foothold that has now become a stronghold. Evangelicals became well educated, and they shaped their historical narrative more around theology and esoteric boundaries, mostly white cultural boundaries, ignoring their social and historical connections to broader American life. ... Trump isn't the reason why evangelicals turned to racism. They were racist all along. 

... class and wealth have encouraged evangelicals to hold onto racism tightly as part of their belief about capitalism, God, and nation. ... 

... Access to power made evangelicalism brittle, and unforgiving. Ideology trumped the gospel. Loving your neighbor turned into loving only those who believe as you do. As a result, evangelicals live in silos to keep themselves pure. ... And, as a result, evangelicals are regarded with disdain by the broader public. Evangelicals wear this as a badge of honor and as a sign of persecution of Christians. Evangelicals are not being persecuted in America. They are being called to account.

Butler speaks directly to others with whom she has shared an evangelical Christian commitment:

... Ask yourself, What are you leaving as the posterity of American evangelicalism? What are the organizations you support leaving behind? Can you see past the individual sin of racism and understand that your votes, your choices, your actions participated in white supremacy and racist policies and policing? ... 

If you asked such questions, you would probably lose friends, and you might even lose your church. Yes, I am asking a lot of you. To step out of the comfortable place you reside in while the world burns is difficult. It is, however, worth it. If you feel one ounce of conviction, then there is hope for you. There may even be hope for our nation. 

I hope these words find root in you. I hope they trouble you. I hope they sear your soul. I hope they make you change. There is only a little time left, but there is time. The time is now.

When Donald Trump won a second term with evangelical acclamation, Butler wrote a preface to a second edition of her book -- a plea that is anguished but determined:

In this dangerous moment for American democracy, White Evangelical Racism continues to provide a concise history of the motivations and goals of evangelicals who seek to create a white Christian nation, where everyone, no matter what race, ethnicity, or creed, will have to live with their leadership and laws. It is not enough for them to have influence with politicians and legislatures, or schools teaching Christian texts. They want Jesus -- or more precisely their view of Jesus -- and by association themselves, to be the center and leaders of civic life in America. Their oft vaunted appeals to the founding of America as a Christian nation are not only a distortion of the nation's history. They are evangelicals' claim to rule and reign in the here and now. 

As you engage this history, think abut what will happen if the United States becomes a theocracy. Consider if you want to live with people who believe that whiteness is the framework, culture should be only "Anglo-Saxon," and religious freedom is only for people who think and believe as they do. 

These are the stakes.

Terror for transpeople

Where decent people saw a frightening political murder, disgusting people saw an opportunity to stir and enlist hatred for political purposes.

Unhappily, it's fair to say that Charlie Kirk's Republican funders and political sponsors (but not the woman who loved him) got one bit of what they'd paid for after his untimely demise: yet another chance to stick it to transfolk and other gender nonconforming people.

Journalist Parker Molloy reports on the terror unleashed. 

... While the Heritage Foundation manufactures fake statistics to paint trans people as violent terrorists, actual terrorism is happening in the real world—and it’s targeting LGBTQ people.

In the week following Charlie Kirk’s death, there have been at least two attempted terrorist attacks explicitly planned as “revenge” against the LGBTQ community. Not revenge against any actual suspect or accomplice. Not revenge based on any evidence. Just revenge against random gay and trans people for something they had nothing to do with.

In Phoenix, a 49-year-old named Treven Gokey was arrested after threatening to shoot up a gay bar. He told police he wanted to be “a martyr for Charlie Kirk” and that “radical left violence breeds a far-right response.” When officers asked him about recent violence, he said it made him want to “harm others” to send a message. He’s now sitting in jail on a $250,000 bond, charged with making terroristic threats.

Meanwhile in Texas, Joshua Cole posted on Facebook about an upcoming Pride parade in Abilene: “fk their parade, I say we lock and load and pay them back for taking out Charlie Kirk.” He added, “theres only like 30 of em we can send a clear message to the rest of them,” before suggesting they go “hunting fairies.” The FBI arrested him the day before the parade. During questioning, he admitted he “did not believe that the gay pride event should be allowed.”

... Heritage claims — based on absolutely nothing — that “transgender ideology” drives violence. But in the real world, it’s anti-LGBTQ rhetoric that’s inspiring actual terrorist threats. These men didn’t need evidence that LGBTQ people were involved in Kirk’s death. They didn’t need facts. All they needed was the permission structure that years of demonization had already built.

And that permission structure got reinforced immediately after Kirk’s death. Conservative media blamed “the left” before anyone even knew who the shooter was. The day after the assassination, bomb threats forced evacuations at the DNC headquarters and multiple HBCUs. The apparatus of rage was already primed and ready — it just needed an excuse.

Cole, by the way, had already been arrested for making terroristic threats back in 2019. The court noted his “prior criminal history” and said his release would pose a “serious danger to any person or the community.” But sure, let’s create a new terrorism category for trans people who, according to actual data, commit less than 0.1% of mass shootings. ...

Meanwhile we're in a "government shutdown" because Republicans refuse to present a budget that enough Democratic senators will vote for to overcome a filibuster. The media mostly focuses on the vicious cuts that Republicans are trying to make to health care, cuts which Democrats reject.

But the Republican plan also includes poison pills designed to erase and even destroy trans lives and life. Erin In The Morning reports:

... There is one promising sign for LGBTQ+ people in all this: Democrats, by refusing to cave to Republican demands on both the full-year appropriations bills and the continuing resolution, have shown a degree of backbone critics often accuse them of lacking. ... When talks eventually turn back to funding the government for the full year, there’s hope that Republicans may steer clear of poison pills like the anti-LGBTQ+ riders that risk blowing up the process altogether. 

... Still, there’s reason for concern that the pressure of a shutdown could push Democrats to cave on key constituencies—LGBTQ+ people chief among them. The memory of last year looms large. When Republicans laced the House version of the National Defense Authorization Act with anti-trans riders, Democrats in the Senate, having control of that chamber at the time, had the chance to strip them out. Instead, leadership folded: they refused to allow a vote to remove the provisions and passed the bill intact, cutting off TRICARE coverage for gender-affirming care for the children of servicemembers. For many trans advocates, it was a stinging betrayal. 

Now the fear is of a repeat—only worse. This year’s House NDAA goes even further, piling on a military bathroom ban, a sports ban, a coverage ban, and more, and the same fears hold true for negotiations over the bills funding the federal government for the next year.

... Republicans—Trump chief among them—have made clear that anti-trans provisions are on the table for the full-year appropriations fight. In recent days, Trump used both a Truth Social post and a grotesquely offensive deepfake video of Chuck Schumer to hammer Democrats, accusing them of protecting transgender people in the shutdown fight and vowing to walk away from negotiations unless they conceded ground. On Capitol Hill, several Republican members echoed the line, blasting Democrats for supposedly backing “taxpayer-funded transgender surgeries” in the federal budget—a talking point pulled straight from the party’s broader anti-trans playbook.

But backlash can go either direction. This report continues:

At least one source told Erin In The Morning that congressional offices were inundated with calls from LGBTQ+ constituents on Tuesday demanding that their rights not be bargained away in the final FY26 appropriations deal. ... 

... call your congressmembers and demand that any negotiations over funding the government for the next year must not include anti-LGBTQ+ provisions pushed by Republicans in power.

Republicans needed a scapegoat to blame for the vicious harm they want to inflict on us all; trans people have been drafted to serve that function. They can't really be so afraid of such a tiny, less than 1 percent fraction of the 330 million of us, can they? Oh gosh, apparently they can and want everyone to share their fears. And beat up on the bogey, metaphorically and sometimes actually.

It's on all of us to ensure that MAGA can't pick off one tiny segment of our American body on the way to injuring all of us. 

Bad faith Republican politics

Stuart Stevens was a career Republican political strategist, the capstone of whose work was serving in a leading role in George Romney's 2012 campaign against Barack Obama.  In this 2021 book, he looks back at that campaign, and his lifelong political orientation and concludes It Was All a Lie: How the Republican Party Became Donald Trump.

He's unsparing about this conclusion; his early campaign work in the South taught him that race was the substrate of all US politics:

[I learned] a truth as basic and immutable as the fact that water freezes below thirty-two degrees Fahrenheit: race was the key in which much of American politics and certainly all southern politics was played. It was really very simple: the Democratic candidate needed 90-plus percent of black votes to win. ... Since [the 1964 Civil Rights Act] no Republican candidate has broken 17 percent with African American voters, and by 2016 only 3 percent considered themselves Republicans. ... 

... the Nixon White House had laid out the path to electoral success by maximizing white grievance and suppressing the African American vote through a combination of manipulation, lies and legal challenges. It was the road that the Republican Party took in the Trump White House. ... Race has defined the modern Republican Party.

Since the 2024 presidential election, many pundits have attempted to muddy the question of whether the Republican Party is still the overwhelmingly racist formation that Stevens describes, but the best data we have suggests that little has changed despite whatever gestures Trump and his crew make. (Take a look at the cabinet, for example; bet you can't name his HUD appointee, the usual Black slot ...)

Beyond issues of race, Stevens has plenty to denounce in the moral foundations of his former party:

• "Family values" was never a set of morals and values that the Republican Party really desired to live by ... it was just another weapon to portray those on the other side as being out of the mythical American mainstream. ...

• The professional politicization of Christianity as a right-wing force was always more about the acquisition of power than a commitment to Christianity. It was where the commercialization of Christianity meets the politicization of Christianity. ...

• The Republican Party is held aloft by a large, powerful, and ever growing industry of deceit. The purpose of much of conservative media is to lie to their audience. ...

• The most distinguishing characteristic of the current national Republican Party is cowardice. The base price of admission is a willingness to accept that an unstable pathological liar leads it and pretend otherwise. ...

All, I think, commonplace understandings four years on from the publication of this book and among the folks to whom I relate personally here on the Left Coast.

What I found more interesting in this book than Stevens' denunciation of Republican orthodoxies were the moments when he delves into the contradictions that can be experienced by a political consultant or advisor. This is something of which I have some 30 years experience in and around campaigns, some of which I had some influence in. In such a position, your job is to win ... not necessarily to be onboard with all the policy implications. 

For example, Stevens writes:

When [Republican Pennsylvania Congressman] Tom Ridge [on the eve of his campaign for governor] was facing a decision on how to vote on the 1994 assault weapons ban, I'd like to say I urged him to vote for the ban ... I didn't, nor did I advise him to vote against it. I never thought my role was to remind clients of deeply held beliefs. ... I cared about one thing -- winning -- and had every reason to believe it would mean we'd lose.

I get this. I can't say I ever differed from a plausible candidate I was working for on a matter of such consequence, though I'm not sure about that. But I certainly worked at least one campaign without any belief that my candidate would be a net gain to city and society if we won; I wanted the experience of working in a well-funded operation of a particular sort in order to increase my campaign skills, win or lose. That campaign work was about me, not the candidate. Such is extremely common among political operatives, however little we admit this to ourselves.

Stevens' book retained its interest to me, even though in the current Trump regime, it reads a little dated. If interested in what a good man learned that led him away from his previous political positioning, I highly recommend this one.

The Supremes gone rogue

Leah Litman, University of Michigan law prof and former Supreme Court clerk, doesn't mess around. In Lawless, she argues, persuasively and with piercing humor that "the Supreme Court runs on conservative grievance, fringe theories, and bad vibes." Any pretense of deep legal reasoning from the Roberts court's major decisions is just insubstantial smoke covering BS. 

It's a pleasure to get the straight story, even if it is appropriately terrifying.

... the Supreme Court is extremely powerful. It is also poorly understood. The combination makes the Court pretty dangerous. It's easier for the Court to get away with, say, letting aspiring insurrectionists off the hook if people aren't paying attention, or if people think they must have misunderstood what is happening because it couldn't possibly be that ridiculous. 

Except ... it is that ridiculous. ...

It's been a (bad) process getting here. News consumers will recognize some landmarks along the way. 

The country has changed over the last several decades, with more diverse demographics and more inclusive median political views. The changes trend against the Republican Party's view on feminism (or as some Republicans like to call it, the "childless cat ladies") race ("Oh my God, Karen, you can't just ask [African] people why they are white?"), democracy (which some Republicans think is overrated, and maybe unconstitutional), corporate power (which some Republicans think should be virtually unlimited), government itself (which some Republicans think shouldn't exist), and more. Republicans have come to believe the dwindling support for their increasingly fringe views wrongs them. ... 

Since the early 2000s (with roots older than that), the Supreme Court has translated conservative grievance and other bad vibes into bad law. ... It is a little too coincidental that at the very moment Republicans gained a supermajority on the Supreme Court in 2020, the Court suddenly realized that the Constitution required the country to adopt the Republican Party's platform on abortion, voting rights, industry regulation, campaign finance, and a bunch of other stuff, too.

Litman urges us not to confused by mystification around the high court. 

The justices are not pulling Jedi mind tricks that people simply do and cannot understand. It's not like these guys (and Amy) are among the Nine Greatest Legal Minds in the Country. Heck, some of them are just nepo babies [she means Neil Gorsuch, remember him?] . ... These are exactly the kind of people you might expect to be appointed under a rigged system that is controlled by some out-of-touch weirdos. The minority-ruling party that gave the justices their jobs is currently gripped by some kind of antidemocratic fever dream, unconcerned with such things as law, facts, and will of the American people. 

Okay -- this book is not just denunciation of the limited qualifications of the Republicans on the current court. Litman carefully dissects the Court's rulings in five vital spheres in which they are working on enshrining reactionary legal theories. These are the chapters: on women's freedom -- The Ken-Surrection of the Courts; on LGBT rights -- "You Can't Sit with Us!"; on voting rights -- Winter Is Coming; on enabling oligarchs -- There's Always Money in America; toward dismantling the state as we know it -- The American Psychos of the Supreme Court.

Litman is not optimistic, but she remains hopeful that if the people are able to understand that the Court has gone bonkers, we'll figure out how to fix it. We really don't want to be ruled by cranks in black robes.

Okay, that got bleak. In my defense, this is a nonfiction book about the Supreme Court, and the Court is broken and is going to take an awful lot to fix. ... The world is not going to get better because we want it to and big changes will obviously take time ... So let's get started.

Imagine yourself at the beginning of the end of one of the great legal dramas of our time, when the law professor says to Elle, "If you are going to let one stupid prick ruin your life, you're not the girl I thought you were." 

Only now she's saying, "If you're going to let one stupid Court ruin your democracy, you're not the girl (or boy, or nonbinary reader) I thought you were." 

... They've stolen a Court and they are practically daring anyone to challenge them. It's time to call their bluff. 

I found this book a surprisingly enjoyable romp through the wilds of Republican legal malfeasance. The details were not new to me; I follow this stuff. But I love Litman's attitude; we could all use more of it.

• • •

You can follow a wealth of writing and writers who unpack legal developments for untutored citizens. Some of my current favorites include Jay Kuo, Chris Geidner at Law Dork, and Joyce Vance at Civil Discourse. We don't have to be mystified by law; we've got a right to demand that whatever law we live under should be "of the people, by the people, and for the people" in President Lincoln's words.

A righteous rant ...

I reproduce here a righteous rant from Simon Rosenberg. His Hopium Chronicles project may be a little too Democratic Party-oriented for the taste of most of my friends. But you got to love that he activates people, in the style of, and in homage to, FDR and Harry Truman.

I've made this a little easier to read:

In these first six terrible months of Trump they have told us who they are and what they want - they want our country to be poorer, weaker, less safe, less healthy and less free. 

The agenda is clear. There is no American greatness or a better tomorrow. Their way is a diminished country, with fewer opportunities for our people, an end to our democracy, and a nation less able to chart our course in a competitive world. They want for more them and less for all of us. They cannot run away from who they are and what they are doing. There isn’t any way to put lipstick on this Trumpian pig. 

And unlike 2024 we cannot shirk from our responsibility to tell this part of the story. 

For the first step in defeating Trumpism is to make sure every voter available to us understands exactly who they are and what they mean for our nation’s future. 

The passage of the Big Ugly [Budget Bill] gives us an opportunity to go tell this bigger story about this rancid agenda of sabotage, plunder and betrayal. We are no longer limited in our comms and story telling to the elements of the big ugly. We must now in fact integrate the elements of the big ugly into their broader agenda and attack it on all fronts. They have betrayed us and we can and must find a better way, together. 

• The tragedy in Texas has started a national debate about their “more for me, less for all of you” agenda. 

• The return of measles has given us an opportunity to talk about their assault on our health care. 

•Trump’s ongoing tariff fiasco allows us to talk about his core betrayal of working people by raising prices not lowering them. 

• His attempt to create a secret police gives us an opportunity to talk about his authoritarian fantasies and abandonment of the Constitutional order here in American. 

The upcoming debate over Congress’ Fiscal Year 2026 budget gives us an extended opportunity to explain the harms of their agenda to the American people. 

Democrats in state and localities across the country can start to immediately organize town halls, hearings and other community conversations to talk to their constituents about what the Big Ugly and the broader GOP agenda means for them (and we need to help them do this). 

For it is no longer notional or a promise. It is here. 

And people are dying. The economy is slowing. Prices are rising. Our debt is exploding. 

Masked men are disappearing people into foreign and domestic gulags. Measles has returned. 

The world is laughing at us. 

They’ve given themselves huge tax cuts while levying one of the largest tax increases in history on working people. 

Our leader is a fucking painted clown, a joke, an impulsive and out of control fool, being enabled by unprecedented cowardice in what was once the Party of Lincoln and Reagan. ...

What else, Simon? Unfortunately, there's always more when a conman is dependent on hyping up a base of the vengeful and deluded.

Snippets from the Senate crime scene

They are voting on this abomination right now. It seems right to share a few tidbits from Democratic Senators denouncing Donald Trump's Big Ugly Wealth Transfer budget. After all, the poor will get over it ...

"This is the most deeply immoral piece of legislation I have ever voted on in my entire time in Congress,” said Senator Chris Murphy (D-CT).

“[W]e're debating a bill that’s going to cut healthcare for 16 million people. It's going to give a tax break to…massively wealthy people who don't need any more money. There are going to be kids who go hungry because of this bill. This is the biggest reduction in…nutrition benefits for kids in the history of the country.”

... “This bill is a farce,” said Senator Angus King (I-ME). “Imagine a bunch of guys sitting around a table, saying, ‘I've got a great idea. Let's give $32,000 worth of tax breaks to a millionaire and we’ll pay for it by taking health insurance away from lower-income and middle-income people. And to top it off, how about we cut food stamps, we cut SNAP, we cut food aid to people?’... I've been in this business of public policy now for 20 years, eight years as governor, 12 years in the United States Senate. I have never seen a bill this bad. I have never seen a bill that is this irresponsible, regressive, and downright cruel.”

... “This place feels to me, today, like a crime scene,” Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) said on the floor of the Senate. “Get some of that yellow tape and put it around this chamber. This piece of legislation is corrupt. This piece of legislation is crooked. This piece of legislation is a rotten racket. This bill cooked up in back rooms, dropped at midnight, cloaked in fake numbers with huge handouts to big Republican donors. It loots our country for some of the least deserving people you could imagine. When I first got here, this chamber filled me with awe and wonderment. Today, I feel disgust.” 

All by way of historian Heather Cox Richardson. 

 

MAGA is both ignorant and nuts

Often the utterances and actions of MAGA Republicans incite horror and rage. But sometimes consternation seems the appropriate response. 

For example, Trump seems to have appointed a director for the Federal Emergency Management Agency who "said during a briefing that he had not been aware the country has a hurricane season ...." His tenure is likely to get interesting fast.

Via Sarah Longwell @sarahlongwell25.bsky.social‬

 

 

Meanwhile Republican US Senator from Iowa Joni Ernst offered a novel GOP defense of their Big Ugly Budget Bill which funds lower taxes for billionaires with cuts to Medicaid. Ernst doubled down on this thought in a condescending, sarcastic "apology" video. It's hard to imagine who'd find dying for lack of affordable healthcare appealing.

See no evil: the toll of the Trump team's Signal chat lapse(s?)

Wouldn't they have loved to get the intel on D-Day?

The people whose lives might be at risk as a result of the Trump team's frat boy approach to national security are not amused.

Signal Chat Leak Angers U.S. Military Pilots
Men and women who have taken to the air on behalf of the United States expressed bewilderment after the leak of attack plans. “You’re going to kill somebody,” one pilot said.

Illinois Senator Tammy Duckworth, who lost both legs and use of her right arm when the combat helicopter she piloted in the Iraq war was shot down, had a very direct response

Duckworth: ‘Pete Hegseth is a ‘f‑‑‑ing liar’ “...This is so clearly classified info he recklessly leaked that could’ve gotten our pilots killed. He needs to resign in disgrace immediately,” Duckworth said in a statement. 

The Washington Post's judicious columnist Philip Bump unpacks what accountability for the security breach might look like and why we won't get it from the Trump clown show.

The point of accountability is to reinforce that bad things are bad. ...

... Trump — and by extension his party — have proved increasingly likely to rise to the defense of anyone seen as under fire from any perceived opponent. (“Deny, deny, deny,” Trump once reportedly advised an ally.) In any previous administration, Hegseth wouldn’t be the secretary of defense in the first place. Deeply unqualified (beyond his closeness to Trump) and mired in multiple scandals, he was nonetheless confirmed by a Republican-led Senate unwilling to face the ire of Trump. Since the Signal scandal broke, Hill Republicans — a group ostensibly empowered to enforce accountability from the executive branch — have not indicated any newfound appetite for challenging the White House. No one thinks the Justice Department, helmed by some of the more energetic Trump sycophants in America, will launch any serious investigation.

Without accountability, the damage here would not simply be that the U.S. government will continue to be led by people who don’t know or don’t care why communications about military operations occur over secure channels. It is also that there will be no public signal that the actions of these officials were bad. No signal to others in government. No signal to Trump’s base of support. No signal to America’s overseas allies that this government holds such mistakes to account.

This is precisely what (the deeply insecure) Trump wants to avoid, of course. He will happily malign people who used to serve under his direction — but always as he introduces some imaginary distance from them. It would be very hard for him to do so with Hegseth in particular: He picked and advocated Hegseth despite concerns about his readiness; if the criticisms of Hegseth were accurate, then so were the criticisms of Trump.

What results is a weird (and for the right, ironic) moral relativism, one centered on the whims and actions of Donald Trump. We know that religious conservatives revamped their moral boundaries once Trump became the Republican presidential nominee in 2016. What we’ve seen since is an entire party willing to shift black-and-white moral and ethical issues into a muddy, gray area in which Trump alone remains untainted.

Republican politicians have replaced both common sense and elementary ethical calculation with "Anything for Mr Trump." They've become servile as well as ignorant.

The crime is in plain sight

Somebody on social media created this all-too-appropriate image.

 

Our rulers are running national security like a marginally competent, clubby family business. They don't trust the apparatus of government, so they have been going "off the books" to try to do their stuff. Since they are mostly ignorant light-weights, they are making a dangerous mess.

People keep suggesting that the Trumpies are so much more competent this time around. Not so. They've just found new, less orderly, and more vicious ways to impose themselves on the American state and people.

Paul Waldman explains how it is all about grievance.

No Republican alive has felt the kind of intoxicating surge of power they are experiencing right now, not because of the size of their 2024 electoral victory but because they have collectively decided that with sufficient aggression and creativity, they can go after just about every individual or institution that ever pissed them off. Even as they set about destroying the federal government, they are expanding its power to harass and intimidate their enemies wherever they may be found.

Incompetently of course, but no less malicious for that. 

Trumpism -- what does it signify? Anything enduring?

The New Republic and its editor Michael Tomasky are serving up a series of articles which endeavor to discern just how much of a break Donald Trump's 2024 election is from historical American voting patterns. Though the Trump regime seems novel in its ostentatious corruption and bottomless ignorance of the work of democratic governance, are we really seeing a profound realignment of political coalitions to meet popular demand?

I should preface this by saying I doubt we are living anything as profound as the realignment that occurred in the 1840s and 50s at the birth of our current parties or even akin of the shuffling of party allegiances in response to the Civil Rights movement which gave the GOP the recalcitrant white South and encouraged Democratic dominance of most cities. 

The presidential election of 2024 was very close. Donald Trump's margin was tiny by historical standards. It seems overblown to assume it points to stable realignment.

But Trump himself seems such a radical break from what Americans at least pretended to expect from a president that we have to think about whether there is really something new, something discontinuous with our history, in this moment.

Tomasky is giving scholars and observers space to take a shot at this question. The New Republic offers a long interview with Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, the Harvard scholars who were co-authors of the 2018 bestseller How Democracies Die. Here are some excerpts to ponder:

Excessively flattering image - but he'd like it

What if Trump Does Everything He’s Promised—and the People Don’t Care?

... ZIBLATT: I think there’s an analogy here to Bonapartism in France. When Napoleon Bonaparte came along, he added a new element to French political culture. And that continues through today. You know, his nephew then ran for president some decades later, [and] every French president ever since has these kind of overreaching tendencies. So it’s now a part of French political culture—along with a Republican tradition and the socialist tradition, there’s a Bonapartist tradition.

 Maybe this is what has happened in the United States. Political scientists used to talk about the liberal tradition in America. But there’s always also been an illiberal tradition. But there’s now a new distinctive illiberal tradition in American politics today, which is the Trumpist tradition. And so, even if we get through this over the next several years, there’s an electorate that’s out there, there’s a way of thinking about—and talking about—the world that is not going anywhere. And so, to make our democracy stable means, on some level, that we need to have at least two political parties that are committed to democracy, that are committed to the rules of the game. And so if we want our democracy to be stable, our parties need to figure out how to sideline that now persistent part of our political culture.

... TOMASKY: Final question. What if, after watching all this and possibly more unfold, the people just don’t care?

LEVITSKY: That’s always a challenge when it comes to democratic backsliding. I don’t think the problem is merely apathy. A combination of factors—fear for some, exhaustion for others, resignation for others—may push many activists to the sidelines, limiting our capacity to slow down and eventually defeat Trumpism. Apathy would play a role in that. The reality is that life will go on as usual for most people during the Trump administration. Most people won’t be targeted by DOJ, the FBI, or the IRS. The economy may remain relatively healthy, so many people may continue to live good lives. So the combination of some people moving to the sidelines out of fear or exhaustion and others remaining on the sidelines because they don’t feel a compelling reason to join the fight—that could easily deplete the ranks of the opposition. It’s something I worry a lot about.

I have always looked back at periods of abuse like the internment of Japanese Americans and McCarthyism and wondered why so few people rose up against it at the time. Now I fear we may see something similar under the second Trump administration.

ZIBLATT: I guess I don’t accept the premise. I think overwhelming majorities of Americans are committed to democracy. We may just take it for granted. But when citizens lose their democracy around the world, the record is pretty clear: They clamor to get it back, and they begin to appreciate it. I only hope we all have the collective imagination to realize what’s at stake before we lose it ourselves. 

Kevin Mahnken writes for a non-profit education news organization, The 74 [million], named for the number of young people undergoing that education. In The New Republic, he offers an interesting effort to situate Trump's re-election in the history of political parties and federal government. 

Constant Change: The Global Anti-Incumbent Bias Is Real. But America’s Is Worse.

... Americans’ distaste for their own elected officials is not the symptom of a memetic bug recently caught from Argentina or Poland, but a distinctly homegrown phenomenon. In fact, it has been at work for the better part of two decades.

This becomes clear when one asks which recent election, whether in a presidential or midterm cycle, was decided in favor of continuity rather than change. Control of either the White House or at least one chamber of Congress switched parties in nine of the last 10 federal elections dating back to 2006; even in the lone exception, 2012, Republicans held onto their majority in the House of Representatives despite winning 1.3 million fewer votes than their Democratic opponents nationwide.

While Biden’s belated exit from the 2024 race will be remembered as a singular episode of political hubris, the whiplash of those results has befooled a generation of leaders in both parties—periodically leading them to make, and lose, political gambles that subsequently appear mysterious. George W. Bush staked the political capital he won in 2004 on Social Security reform, only to have it open a trapdoor under his entire second term. Barack Obama hit the Tea Party wall just two years after charging into office on a generational tide of progressive enthusiasm. Mitt Romney’s team was reportedly dumbfounded on election night in 2012, just as Clinton advisers deluded themselves on their way to a 2016 shock for the ages. The list goes on.

The peculiarity of the age is even more apparent when examined over the sweep of the twentieth century, during which an incumbent president was reelected in almost every decade. More impressive still, he typically captured more votes, a higher vote share, and often a better Electoral College margin than in his previous race (or that of the man he succeeded in office). Theodore Roosevelt accomplished the feat in 1904, Wilson in 1916, FDR in 1936, Ike in 1956, LBJ in 1964, Nixon in 1972, Reagan in 1984, and Bill Clinton in 1996.

You can throw in Bush II for good measure, but none others have followed. Barack Obama, as gifted a vote-getter as any of his predecessors, couldn’t recreate his huge 2008 margins after four years in Washington. Trump collected 11 million more votes in 2020 than he had in 2016, yet still lost by a considerable margin. Add it up, and a different party has won the White House in each of the last four consecutive elections.

The most recent time that happened was between 1880 and 1896, when Republicans traded blows for five straight campaigns with a Democratic Party that had finally washed off the reek of slavery and secession. Not coincidentally, it was also the only other period when a president—New York’s Grover Cleveland, beloved of bar trivia contestants and mugwumps alike—served two nonconsecutive terms.

The politics of the late nineteenth century are often cited as an analogue for those of modern times. We too live in an era of close elections and ultra-high voter turnout, each driven by our intense partisan identification. And, as in the Gilded Age, modern Americans’ animus toward incumbent politicians extends from the Oval Office to Congress. Back then, the House flipped between parties six times in the span of 20 years.

The political entrepreneurs of our own times have put a ceiling on that kind of volatility through the use of algorithm-powered gerrymandering, but it is impossible to imagine one party installing a four-decade majority, as the Democrats did in the 1950s.

The electoral lessons of this comparison are undeniably murky. In 1884, the Democrats managed to break the GOP’s 24-year stranglehold on the White House by running Cleveland, the governor of what was then the country’s most important swing state. If they wish to turn the page from the Obama-Biden-Harris epoch, they can choose from among its talented governors in Pennsylvania, Michigan, or North Carolina, none of whom are closely associated with the party’s disastrous 2024 performance. ...

But nominating a few outsiders in the short run won’t quell the apparently perpetual disgust that Americans feel for their leadership class. ...

I think Mahnken is onto something in that those of us shaped in the long 20th century experience did tend to assume that incumbent presidents get re-elected. We projected that onto Biden until it became completely obvious that he could no longer cut it as a candidate. (I assume his incapacity was also true of him as a President and his post-election behavior seems to confirm that. But the two roles are different, a main driver of much political dysfunction.)

What this country needs to get out of this cycle is some inspirational politicians with a uniting vision. Obama once offered that, however shallow it proved in practice. Is inspiration that grips a majority still possible in a time of imperial uncertainty and the collapse of trust in any media to communicate truth? We don't know. But humans have a strong desire to be inspired, so such a turn seems possible, even if we currently don't see it. The USofA-- to be continued ...

Big trouble ahead

The presidential election just past was a very close contest. Oh sure, Trump wants to overwhelm us with his claim that he won by a landslide. That's just authoritarian bombast. Because he won all the projected swing states, his win looks huge, especially on a map. And across the country, he did actually dig out a one percent plus actual majority. But if only 115,000 voters distributed across Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin had gone the other way, we'd have a President Harris.

Since the election was so close, everyone gets to have their own plausible theory of what happened. I'm sticking with mine: COVID put us in a nasty mood and Trump was able to capitalize on this. (That's the only thing he knows how to do: turn venomous emotions into profit for himself.) I read the deluge of explanations for Harris' loss, but remain conscious that even vast quantities of data -- and there is more every day -- can't definitively account for the narrow outcome. Eventually many pundits and commentators will settle on some theory -- and then historians and political scientists will come up with their alternative takes. The 2024 election lends itself to interpretation and reinterpretation.

All that is introduction to sharing excerpts from the leftish economic historian Adam Tooze's take on our American predicament. Although I am not sure I buy it completely, I find his Olympian draft of contemporary history quite intriguing. 

... The essential fact about US politics in the current moment remains that the two party system anchored in the ancient constitution divides the country almost half and half. Those cleavages run through society including through the working-class and the business interest. ...

... If the class analytic of workers v. owners is not helpful in making sense of Trump’s victory, the idea of a revolt against the Professional Managerial Class (PMC) may be more so.

The PMC was a term coined in 1977 by Barbara and John Ehrenreich. The term designated the rising mass of college-educated white collar professional and managerial workers whose ambiguous role in modern Western politics the Ehrenreich’s were trying to explain.

In the 1960s and 1970s many professional and managerial people contributed to social movements that were clearly progressive. Furthermore, for the vast majority of folks who count themselves as progressive this alignment has a deep logic all the way down to the present day. 

As Gabe Winant, one of the sharpest observers of the contemporary scene, noted back in 2019 in N+1:

For all the cynicism and compromises that professional pretensions engender, professional labor  [i.e. the labor of the PMC, per Adam Tooze] does carry a utopian seed—in the impulse to create and disseminate knowledge, to care for the sick, or to defend the rights and dignity of the democratic subject.

And yet what is also undeniable is that in the late 1970s and 1980s large and powerful parts of the PMC broke with any association with classic, working-class. left-wing politics, rooted in the trade union movement. Instead, they provided their support to the agenda of neoliberalism. Despite its endless critiques of the state and its rhetoric about markets, actually existing neoliberalism was the latest iteration of PMC politics. Neoliberalism was a managerialism.

.. The outcome in electoral terms in the US from the 1990s onwards was an increasing alignment of the Democrats with College-educated voters, an alignment that was particularly strong for women and minorities. Figures like the Clintons and the Obamas personify this coalition.

By 2008 this corporate-PMC synthesis made a large and tempting target for populisms of the left and the right. These populisms pitted “the people” against an elite bloc that was more often than not personified, not by oligarchs or the owners of the means of production, but by members of the PMC. Perversely, the much remarked upon resentment of working-class voters, particularly men, triggered by new patterns of inequality and disadvantage, vented itself in the first instance on elementary school teachers and social workers, often women, who found themselves grouped with “beltway liberals” in the crosshairs of right-wing populist vitriol.

... Trump and Brexit in 2016 were early breakthroughs for the new anti-PMC politics.

The Trump shock of 2016 caused soul-searching in the Democratic party elite. The principal wager of the Biden administration was an effort to react to the first wave of anti-PMC revolt by widening the Democratic electoral coalition so as to attract trade unionists and working-class Americans back into the fold. In many ways this was ironic. The fact that the American working-class is increasingly feminized and diverse is no conceit of woke PMC ideology. Under Biden the party chased the image of the blue-collar production worker, almost as hard as they would eventually chase the respectable centrist Republican.

In 2020 when COVID demonstrated the harsh and dysfunctional reality of governance under Trump, the Democrats won back a majority. Though not for the anti-vaxxers, but for a majority of the population, COVID was a “PMC moment”. Nurses, doctors and lab scientists mattered, along with logistics experts and people who could get things moving again. It was not merely coincidental that COVID handed a PMC-dominated Democratic party a surprise victory. It was not for nothing that it was the Democratic majority in Congress that carried the US under Republican Presidents, both through the crisis of 2008 and that of 2020.

In 2024 with the electorate wanting a faster return to normality - resentments concentrated in the superheated discussion of “inflation” - what came back to the fore was the anti-PMC coalition that Trump rallies like no politician before him....

... What has become obvious with the Clinton-Trump-Biden-Harris-Trump sequence is that the Democratic formula is itself increasingly a driver of crisis. It is not capable of providing reliable electoral wins. And when it does have power, nostalgia for the bygone era of hegemony and the reflexes of US globalism - a quintessential product of the 20th-century PMC - tend to accelerate crisis in the form of aggressive claims to US leadership and a resurgent neoconservative revisionism. ...

In the first Trump administration, expressive gestures of rupture with the status quo were tempered by vested interests and the functional imperatives of the moment. The administration then inherited an economy with plenty of slack and a relatively calm geopolitical environment. Until 2020 few complex trade-offs were called for. When COVID hit, the Trump administration and the Republicans in Congress rapidly decomposed. How the Trump administration will actually look remains to be seen, but the environment today is far more complex and will test the anti-PMC politics of the Trump administration far more seriously.

Looks like big trouble ahead, and that's aside from the Christian nationalist and cult-of-Trump fascist aspirations of the Orange Man's coalition.

Serious matters

The New York Times seems to think there's something entertaining, certainly unserious, about Republican South Carolina Congresscritter Nancy Mace trying to bar her new colleague Delaware Rep. Sarah McBride from the House bathrooms. As you might know, McBride is trans.

In Washington this week for new member orientation, Ms. McBride was still sitting through mandatory cybersecurity trainings, setting up her payroll, selecting district offices and learning how to introduce a bill when her new Republican colleague, Representative Nancy Mace of South Carolina, announced plans to introduce a measure to bar transgender women from using women’s restrooms and changing rooms in the Capitol complex.

Ms. Mace did not try to pretend that she was doing anything other than targeting one individual with her resolution, even though it would apply to all employees and officers of the House.

“Sarah McBride doesn’t get a say,” she told reporters on Monday night. “I mean, this is a biological man.” She said that Ms. McBride “does not belong in women’s spaces, women’s bathrooms, locker rooms, changing rooms — period, full stop.”

Nancy Mace is a a bigoted attention-seeking pig. Full stop. And should be confined to remedial kindergarten. 

Congresswoman Crockett knows what really matters -- as she usually does.

The NYT finds a Democratic Congresswoman who sticks up for McBride (there were others):

“There was no women’s restroom off the House floor until the 1990s,” said Representative Melanie Stansbury, Democrat of New Mexico. “For my female colleagues to go publicly after another colleague, and openly attack her, I find disgusting, disgraceful, irresponsible and anti-democratic. Why are you here in this institution?”

So the reporter gives the last word to a male Republican: 

Representative Tom Cole, Republican of Oklahoma and chairman of the Appropriations Committee, avoided questions about the news of the day. “I’m trying to avoid the great bathroom debate,” he said.

Very cute, the whole story. Except to the woman who has to live inside it. 

Presumably McBride has seen it all before. You don't win a statewide race for Congress without well-honed toughness. But the sheer lack of courtesy and willed ignorance from the Republicans reminds, as if we needed reminding, that these people aren't mature enough to be in government.

• • •

By far the most insightful effort to unpack the issues around transwomen participating in youth and adult womens' sports I've ever encountered comes from Parker Malloy. This is a terrific instance of READ THE WHOLE THING.

Since we're, once again, focused on the fraught matter of bathrooms, here's a section of this article I found particularly lucid: 

What laws around things like restrooms and restrictions on updating identifying documents do is to create a world in which trans people are obligated to out themselves as trans to people all day, every day. 

Should a trans woman have to announce to bouncers and bartenders that she’s trans before getting a drink? 

Should a trans man have to decide whether to break the law by using a men’s restroom or loudly signal to everyone in a restaurant that his birth certificate says “female” by walking into a women’s restroom?  

Because that’s what these bills are advocating for: a world where trans people have to essentially wear a big neon sign disclosing their medical history to everyone around them. That sort of extremely private information is not the type of thing strangers two tables over have any inherent right to know. If someone isn’t your doctor or romantic partner, there’s no legitimate argument for why that person has any right to know what kind of genitals you were born with. That’s just the truth.

When you create a legal system in which trans people are forced to repeatedly out themselves, you’re creating a system designed to never fully accept them as people.

In 2016, a Wisconsin school reportedly forced a trans boy to wear a bright green wristband to ensure that school security guards (who had been instructed to be on the lookout for “students who appear to be going into the ‘wrong’ restroom”) could catch him if he used the boys’ restroom. This is about surveillance and social exclusion.

As someone, not trans myself, who routinely gets yelled at by blue-haired ladies in public bathrooms -- accused of being in the wrong one for my apparent gender -- I feel this to my core. And, nowadays, at 77, in still-civilized California, I snap back at my accusers, politely if they seem merely confused, furiously if they are aiming to erase me. It's always been my schtick that "this is what a woman looks like -- get used to it." If I'm feeling accommodating, I'll cede that "this is one way a woman looks." There seem to be a close to infinite supply of these women with a bathroom problem. Now that is serious.

November 20 is the Transgender Day of Remembrance – a day to commemorate the transgender, non-binary, and gender non-conforming persons who are targeted and killed for living authentically and courageously.

Musing on a couple of maps

Seven states voted for reproductive freedom -- that's significant. It's particularly good to see Missouri among the places where abortion rights won; at every level, the state is blood red Republican, but women still had their say.

The losses in South Dakota look to have been about strategic/tactical misfires. The Florida loss, where abortion freedom got 57 percent of the vote, came from the state's unusual 60 percent requirement to pass a measure. Look for more GOP states to try to implant that.

But all in all, this was more demonstration that women, of all political inclinations, don't want the state telling us what we may do with our bodies. 

All these initiatives don't make legal abortion safe though. With the Republicans in power across the federal level, it's a sure thing that many of them will come after reproductive health care... To be continued. ...

• • •

Meanwhile, here's a picture of the fact that elections mostly don't end in split verdicts any more. The states in yellow each have one US Senator from each party. The others are solid Blue or Red.

... only Maine, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin will send a split-party delegation of one Democrat and one Republican to the Senate. That is the lowest number since Americans began directly electing senators more than a century ago.

Yet there's still some mixing at the presidential level. Michigan, Georgia and Arizona went for the the Reps this time, but they send two Dem Senators to Washington. 

We know why Maine is a mixed bag -- Susan Collins refuses to go away. She's safe until she retires. In 2026, Dem Senators in Georgia and Michigan will be up for re-election. Can Dems put any other states in play? Possibly North Carolina, but winning back the Senate will be a stretch.

While we fixate on Trump ... MAGA mess below creates opportunities

The Downballot reports that Democrats are contesting far more state legislative seats all over the country than Republicans.

Across the 85 legislative chambers holding regularly scheduled elections in 44 states this year, Republicans are defending 3,169 seats while Democrats are protecting 2,616. But Republicans have failed to field a candidate in 1,066 Democratic seats, while Democrats have left 1,127 GOP seats uncontested.

While the Democratic figure for uncontested seats is slightly higher in raw numbers, on a percentage basis, they're playing more offense: Democrats are challenging Republicans in 64% of GOP-held seats, while Republicans, conversely, are contesting 59% of Democratic seats.

The totals reflect strong Democratic recruitment in many states, including Wisconsin, North Carolina, Florida, and even Idaho. In total, Democrats are running 2,042 challengers compared to 1,550 for the GOP. When accounting for open seats (which are also tallied in our new data set), Democrats are fielding 2,485 non-incumbents, versus 2,224 for Republicans.

The disparity also arises from the current dysfunction in the GOP. Lots of veteran legislators retired or were dumped by MAGA voters in primaries.

Altogether, 124 GOP legislators who wanted another term were denied renomination by voters, often for allegedly failing to adhere to far-right orthodoxy. Just 28 Democratic lawmakers, by contrast, lost primaries this year.

This is no way to build a political party. Perhaps a mob ... 

Assuming we live to fight another day, there's lots to build on here.

New voters?

Did you know that Elon Musk is a naturalized American citizen? Born in South Africa in 1971, the tech tycoon apparently thought, correctly, that his prospects would be improved by acquiring citizenship here. Good for him; in this respect, he's ordinary. (One doubts that actually...)

 

He's not only ordinary but also, as is common, butt-ignorant about his adopted country and the truths about immigration. 

 

It's neither easy nor fast for immigrants to become naturalized citizens who can vote.

The underlying US immigration legal framework has not been thoroughly overhauled by Congress since 1986 (regular order path) and 1990 (asylum process). There have been multiple administrative and court-ordered adjustments; both paths are barely functioning, starved (mostly by Republicans) for funding and strategic vision. Of course people want to come here -- for all our manifold faults, the country is both richer and safer than a lot of their home countries.

 

The most recent failed legal reform effort was this past year. Republican US Senator James Lankford hammered out an immigration compromise which could have passed with bipartisan support and which President Biden agreed to sign. Candidate Trump wanted to keep the existing immigration mess and successfully pressured Republicans to kill it, to the disgust of all parties.

There have been times in my life when my political work consisted of trying to encourage naturalized citizens -- yes, these folks are full citizens -- to join the voting pool. Despite excited headlines claiming "With an election looming, the U.S. is approving citizenship applications at the fastest speed in years," only a small increase in new citizen registrations has become normal in especially fraught elections. I think this phenomenon may date to the California anti-immigrant panic of the mid-1990s. But, just as for other Americans, turning citizens into voters is a slog, taking years to become habitual. And legally eligible non-citizen residents don't rush into the naturalization process; it's expensive, complicated, and sometimes emotionally wrenching.

The Pew Research Center presents some fascinating facts:

Most naturalized citizen eligible voters have lived in the U.S. for more than 20 years. About three-quarters of immigrant eligible voters (73%) have lived in the U.S. for more than two decades. Another 20% have lived in the country for 11 to 20 years, while relatively few (8%) have been in the U.S. for a decade or less.

Among naturalized citizen eligible voters, more than half (55%) live in just four states: California, Florida, New York and Texas. These four states are also the country’s most populous when looking at eligible voters overall. Combined, they’re home to roughly a third of the U.S. electorate (32%).

 The naturalized citizen share of the electorate differs widely in some potential battleground states in the 2024 election. Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin are widely considered to be among the swing states this fall. ...

In Nevada and Arizona, naturalized citizens make up 14% and 9% of all eligible voters, respectively. They account for 7% of eligible voters in Georgia, and about 5% in both Pennsylvania and Michigan. In Wisconsin, they are just 3% of the electorate.

In overall numbers, Georgia’s naturalized citizen electorate is the largest among these swing states at 574,000, while Pennsylvania is not far behind at 546,000. Both of these states were among the closest in the 2020 presidential election.

 What do I take from this statistical picture of naturalized citizens? 

• Like Americans born here, naturalized Americans don't vote automatically. If you want their votes, you have to talk with them and turn them out. Voting can be intimidating, even when Republicans aren't spreading lies in immigrant communities.

• It's not very clear that naturalized citizens have different issue desires and preferences than anyone else. (Well maybe Ukrainian-origin immigrants might be especially urgent in seeking aid to their relatives under siege.)

• This is still a country enriched by immigrants many of whom choose to become citizens. Immigration by ambitious strivers is what makes this country unique and interesting. It always has been.

It's more than a little sick that so many Republican pols are willing to beat up on some of the best of us.