Billionaires who don’t feel sufficiently admired

Morgan Stephens of Daily Kos reported there is an effort to get Biden to certify the Equal Rights Amendment to require gender equality. This article says this amendment to the Constitution has been ratified by enough states. All that needs to be done is for Biden to tell the National Archives: yep, all the requirements have been met, so make this amendment officially a part of the Constitution. Even after reading I am puzzled why the Archive can’t do that on its own. The last state to ratify was Virginia in 2020. The nasty guy told the Archives not to make it official because the confirmation process took too long. Since I hadn’t heard anything about the ERA since the 1980s and hadn’t heard about Virginia’s ratification only four years ago I thought I had better check this story out. So I went to Wikipedia (aware that its accuracy is suspect). And I found the situation isn’t simple. The amendment was first proposed in 1921. It finally passed Congress in 1972 with a seven year time limit (which was in an accompanying law, not in the amendment text). To be part of the Constitution 38 states (¾ of them) must ratify an amendment. By the time of the deadline in 1979 only 35 states had ratified it. Them some of them revoked their ratification. The deadline was extended to 1982. Four more ratified, then one of those revoked. Some states said their ratification is good only until the deadline. If not enough states have ratified by then our approval has expired. Since then there have been more extensions and extension attempts. There have been lawsuits against the extensions. There have been lawsuits over whether a state can revoke its ratification. All that means I understand why Biden is hesitant to tell the Archives the amendment should be made official. I had written that the nasty guy wanted to fire FBI Director Christopher Wray. The nasty guy had hired Wray (after firing his predecessor) and Wray has another three years in his ten year term. That term was set up by Congress to make sure FBI directors could remain above politics. Oliver Willis reported that Wray has said he will resign on inauguration day. He says he is doing it so the FBI can focus on fighting crime instead of on his fate. So the nasty guy is free to nominate Kash Patel to the job. Willis reminds us why Patel will be so bad. One reason, which I had mentioned before:

Patel also authored three children’s books starring a thinly veiled version of himself and Trump (as a king) fighting against Democratic plotters seeking to usurp an imaginary kingdom.

In a pundit roundup for Kos Chitown Kev quoted Jonathan Chait of The Atlantic:

Now Trump, preparing for his second term as president, has decided to replace the FBI director again. The figure he picked to replace Comey—the lifelong Republican Christopher Wray—proved unable to meet Trump’s expectations for the position, which are (1) to permit Trump and his allies to violate the law with impunity, and (2) to investigate anybody who interferes with (1). Wray, wrestling with the problem of Trump’s desire to separate him from a job he apparently liked, chose to step down on his own. This raises the likelihood that the media will treat the replacement of Wray as normal administrative turnover rather than as a scandal. […] The problem that keeps arising is that there is no way to remain in Trump’s favor while following the law. In a celebratory statement posted to Truth Social, Trump claims, “Under the leadership of Christopher Wray, the FBI illegally raided my home, without cause.” Had the FBI raid actually been illegal, he could have proved that in court. He didn’t, because by taking massive troves of classified documents when he left office, keeping them in a wildly unsecured location, refusing multiple requests to return them, lying repeatedly about it, and engaging in a clumsy cover-up, Trump had given the bureau no other choice. For Wray to allow this brazen defiance of the law would have been to simply admit that the law doesn’t apply to Trump, in or out of office. But that is precisely the credo Trump demands that the bureau follow. It is why he has selected Kash Patel, a sycophant so childishly worshipful that he spelled out his loyalty to Trump in a literal children’s book portraying Trump as a virtuous king and himself as Trump’s loyal wizard. Perhaps Patel (or whomever Senate Republicans ultimately confirm for the position) will, once in office, somehow develop an adult, professionalized understanding of the rule of law. More likely, Trump’s FBI director will discover that actually locking up Trump’s enemies is hard. This was the anticlimactic outcome of the Durham investigation, Trump’s first-term campaign to imprison his foes, which resulted, after months of conservative-media salivating, in two embarrassing acquittals in court.

In another roundup Kev quoted Paul Krugman, in what he announces is his last column for the New York Times. A bit:

What strikes me, looking back, is how optimistic many people, both here and in much of the Western world, were back then and the extent to which that optimism has been replaced by anger and resentment. And I’m not just talking about members of the working class who feel betrayed by elites; some of the angriest, most resentful people in America right now — people who seem very likely to have a lot of influence with the incoming Trump administration — are billionaires who don’t feel sufficiently admired.

Kev also quoted Res Huppke of USA Today:

Axios reported last week that, including Trump himself, the administration-to-be is already staffed with 14 billionaires. ... I’m sure these down-to-earth billionaires care deeply about the forgotten men and women who put Trump in office. Surely they are in no way “elite,” aside from perhaps owning an island, or maybe occasionally hunting poor people for sport on said island.

Down in the comments – after the cartoons – The Geogre wrote about an article by Adam Cox and Ryan Goodman of Just Security on “The Public Framing of Mass Deportation” as in how they’ll structure their lies to keep mass deportation palatable to the public. They will say they are targeting the deportations the public supports – getting rid of those who have broken the law – but they’ll actually target groups whose deportation is easiest to accomplish. Deporting criminal noncitizens will keep public support but there aren’t nearly enough such criminals to meet the numbers the nasty guy is talking about. Saying that’s what they’re doing is a trick to satisfy those who have no idea of the state of immigrants and their lack of crimes. Polling has shown the public doesn’t support dragnets that tear families apart or hit long-term residents with deep ties. So they’re already lying by redefining their terms. They will falsely tag entire classes of immigrants as criminals. See the effort in falsely claiming immigrants ate pets in Springfield, Ohio. There will be lots of stories of immigrant crime. An example (which is not true) would be a headline blaring, “Mexican nationals rape women.” The story would be spread by media and eventually appear on an executive order. They will falsely equate criminal law and immigration law, declaring that a violation of immigration law is a crime when it is only a civil offense. That makes all undocumented immigrants, which they’ll refer to as an “illegal immigrant” (a legally meaningless term) to be a criminal and a high priority for deportation. The Geogre reminds us “the goal is quiescence, not legality.” The goal is to keep public protests at a minimum while keeping “immigration” a hot topic for the 2026 midterm elections. Then comes redefining legal immigration – those here with official permission – as illegal. Along with that they’ll keep up the drumbeat that immigration is an “invasion.” The Geogre’s quotes and comments ended here. So I went to the original article. Some of the other thing it discusses: A major obstacle is to mass deportation political. Americans support stiffer border patrol, but they don’t support mass deportation and do support paths to legal status and citizenship. Another major obstacle is logistical. How to identify, locate, and arrest large numbers of noncitizens? In modern times the US has deported only a quarter million in any one year, and that rate wasn’t sustainable. It was also more than a decade ago. The nasty guy’s goal is an order of magnitude larger. I add one way to avoid the work of determining who is and isn’t a citizen is to not care if citizens are caught up in any dragnet. Undocumented immigrants that have been here for more than a decade are not easily identified. This include most of the 11 million who are undocumented. That lack of easy identification is why the nasty guy will target the easy to identify first. Another way to tag immigrants as criminals is whether they use programs they shouldn’t. An example is getting a drivers license. Immigrants from several countries have been given Temporary Protected Status. These are countries with high internal violence where going back could be deadly. Haiti is one of these countries. The nasty guy could revoke those programs and easily send those people back. This could be one million such people, perhaps as many as three million.

At bottom, these tactics boil down to a potentially profound betrayal of the American public. These approaches fail to reflect the public’s expressed preferences for immigration policy, and mislead rather than try to reason with or persuade Americans toward a more aggressive deportation policy. Some of the rhetorical tactics are familiar, and, indeed, have been practiced by both Democratic and Republican administrations. But not in the context of trying to legitimize the displacement of potentially millions of people. The remaining question is whether such tactics can succeed in the coming period, that is, whether deceptive framing of actual underlying deportation policies can win out.

A couple days ago Leila Fadel of NPR spoke to Kristin Kobe Du Mez, who is a professor of history and gender studies at Calvin University, a Christian school. She is the author of the book Jesus And John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted A Faith And Fractured A Nation. In this discussion she explores the belief that the US is (or is supposed to be) a Christian nation and explores how her faith has been politicized. Here’s some of what Du Mez said:

What's different about Christian nationalism is this sense of privilege that the country itself must reflect particular Christian values. They present histories - largely mythical histories of the founding era that suggests that the Constitution was, even some will go as far as to say, inspired by God and that the Constitution reflects biblical values.

Responding to the nasty guy promising a task force on anti-Christian bias.

Now, to understand how that can make sense when the majority of Americans do hold Christian beliefs, it's important to note that when they talk about threats to religious liberty, many conservative Christians have a fairly expansive notion of what that entails. They want the religious liberty not just to practice their own beliefs, but also they think that to be faithful as Christians means to reshape society and even to impose those beliefs on fellow Americans. And when they are not able to do that, that seems like a restriction on their religious liberties. It'll be very interesting to see what that task force actually entails because within the Christian nationalist framework, often some of the key targets of Christian nationalists are fellow Christians themselves - fellow Christians who did not adhere to the Christian nationalist agenda.

I long ago figured out when religious people talk about religious freedom they mean freedom to discriminate, to force others to be like them. Du Mez was asked why the nasty guy appeals to the far right of Christianity:

His real appeal lies in the fact that he has promised to give Christians power. ... And, yes, he's not what many might expect, but he's their strong man. And in fact, he may be all the more effective at restoring Christian America because he's not constrained by traditional Christian virtue.

Du Mez added these people argue that the separation of church and state is a myth.