Capture the courts, then manufacture plaintiffs

I’ll start with a cartoon: Clay Jones has one posted Daily Kos that shows Matt Gaetz about to whack Kevin McCarthy with a bat while two black men walk by. One of them says, “Damn...I hate to see Republican-on-Republican crime...” Kerry Eleveld of Kos reported another aspect of McCarthy’s removal. The former Speaker was really good at fundraising. The money he raised tended to go to the most vulnerable seats. Now add that lack of fundraising to the apparent money mismanagement by Republican leadership, donors closing their wallets, and Democrats doing quite well at pulling in the money and the funding for next year’s campaign could be quite lopsided. Eleveld also reported that some media sites are catching on this isn’t a Congressional issue, it’s a Republican issue. I’ll let you read the specifics. Joan McCarter of Kos took a look at the two guys who have said they want to be the next speaker. Jim Jordan is described as a “legislative terrorist.” It looks like the phrase may mean he is really bad at legislating and really good at jumping in front of cameras and yelling. As for Steve Scalise the phrase “like David Duke without the baggage” is used again. Philip Bump of the Washington Post tweeted a chart showing how liberal and conservative each Speaker of the House was, along with the average for the members of each party in the chamber, and with the breadth of the member’s ideology. The chart goes all the way back to the 93rd Congress in 1972 (if I computed that right). Up to the 99th Congress in 1984 Democrats were just as conservative as Republicans, though Republicans crossed over the midway point only a bit and Democrats were much more liberal. Starting with the 108th Congress in 2002 there was no liberal/conservative overlap between the parties. And by the 112th Congress in 2010 neither party came close to the middle. Through the whole chart the party average has drifted further out from center. When Democrats held the Speakership that person was a bit to noticeably more liberal than the party average. Starting with gaining the Speakership in 1994 the Republican in the job was about as conservative as his members. McCarthy was a bit more liberal than the average. Then we get to the point of the chart (as fascinating as all the rest is): Scalise is a bit more conservative than the average, Jordan is significantly more conservative than the average and much more conservative than anyone else who’s had the job. So it is no surprise that, as McCarter reported, the nasty guy has endorsed Jordan. And it is good to see, as Walter Einenkel of Kos reported, that Liz Cheney, who lost reelection because of her participation in the January 6 Investigation Committee, said:

Jim Jordan knew more about what Donald Trump had planned for Jan. 6 than any other member of the House of Representatives. ... Somebody needs to ask Jim Jordan, “Why didn't you report to the Capitol Police what you knew Donald Trump had planned?”

Einenkel wrote:

Cheney told the audience that she doesn’t believe Jordan can secure the votes to become the next speaker. However, she said, if he somehow were able to get the votes, “there would no longer be any possible way to argue that a group of elected Republicans could be counted on to defend the Constitution.”

In a pundit roundup for Kos Greg Dworkin has a few interesting quotes. First, from David Rothkopf of the Daily Beast. He says the MAGA crowd wanted the government shutdown, taking a House shutdown as a consolation prize.

In fact, the origins of the attacks on the government date back at least four decades to the Reagan administration, when the former president popularized the idea within his party that government was actually the enemy. His joke that the scariest words one could hear were, “I’m from the government and I’m here to help,” has metastasized from being a pitch for smaller government into a movement to blow the whole damn thing up.

Dworkin quoted Will Bunch of the Philadelphia Inquirer:

Yet to a small but influential gaggle of so-called “thought leaders” on the edge of the stage — the pseudo-intellectuals of right-wing think tanks, and chaos-agent-in-chief Steve Bannon — the growing rot infecting another key U.S. institution is just more evidence for their stunning argument now flying at warp speed, yet under the radar of a clueless mainstream media. The D.C. dysfunction is more proof, they would argue, that the nation needs a “Red Caesar” who will cut through the what they call constitutional gridlock and impose order. If you’re not one of those dudes who thinks about Ancient Rome every day, let me translate. The alleged brain trust of an increasingly fascist MAGA movement wants an American dictatorship that would “suspend” democracy in January 2025 — just 15 months from now.

When I toured Germany with Brother and Niece in 2019 she talked quite a bit about what she saw as various leaders trying to mimic what they saw as the greatness of Imperial Rome. That quest is still here. And way down in the comments is a cartoon by David Hayward. It shows a white sheep and a rainbow sheep helping a badly beaten Jesus. The white sheep asks, “What happened to him?” The rainbow sheep replies, “He stood between me and the church.” Laura Clawson of Kos reported on the effort by Rep. Jared Moskowitz (D-FL). His district includes parts of Palm Beach County, where Mar-a-Lago is located. He wrote a letter to the Palm Beach County property appraiser and said if the nasty guy claims his resort is worth $1.5 billion please tax it as if that were the true value. The Supreme Court started a new term this past week. McCarter reviewed the most important cases. They touch on such things as environment and consumer protections, a case that questions how various boards and agencies are funded; a case that questions whether courts should defer to how government agencies interpret ambiguous laws; a case on gerrymandering; a case about taking guns away from those under restraining orders for domestic abuse; whether the federal government can collect taxes; and maybe the case of whether judges can overrule the FDA on the appropriateness of abortion drug mifepristone. Nina Totenberg of NPR explained that first case. The Consumer Financial Protections Bureau has been cracking down on payday lenders because poor people can get sucked into paying significantly more than what the original small loan was for. Payday lenders are fighting back by challenging how the CFPB is funded. It isn’t funded through the Congressional budget so that it isn’t subject to the whims of Congress (though the person running it is subject to the whims of the president). The payday lenders say that funding it outside of the federal budget is unconstitutional. If the justices side with the lenders it could also pull down other agencies that are funded outside of the budget, like the Federal Reserve, the FDIC that protects bank deposits, the US Mint ... and Social Security and Medicare. The military is quite interested in this case because so many bases have payday lenders outside their gates looking to help young servicemembers. McCarter reported on Tuesday’s oral arguments for the CFPB case. Thankfully, the court appears highly skeptical of what the lenders were asking. A lot of that skepticism is because Thomas asked,

Mr. Francisco, just briefly, I'd like you to complete this sentence. Funding of the CFPB … violates the appropriations clause because?

And Fancisco had a hard time answering. Alito was the most receptive to the arguments. But he should have recused himself because his bestie and fishing buddy Paul Singer could richly benefit from the case. Many of the cases on this year’s docket come from the 5th Circuit, which has many judges nominated by the nasty guy and is the most conservative. They are sending attempts to give the conservative Supremes a chance to wreck more of the government and society and many cases are half-baked. Last June the Supremes ruled on a case where a wedding planner wanted to discriminate (on religious grounds) against same-sex couples. The conservatives on the Court allowed it. That case was set up by the Alliance Defending Freedom (whose freedom?), considered a hate group by the SPLC. McCarter discussed a WaPo investigation into ADF’s cases to fight marriage equality. The website planner turned out to be bogus – she was only thinking about going into the business and the guy in the “gay” couple who filed the complaint was actually straight and had filed nothing.

A new investigation from The Washington Post details how much work the ADF put into manufacturing this and other cases to fight marriage equality. The Post found that ADF had previously represented “a photographer from Kentucky, videographers from Minnesota and a pair of Arizona artists who created stationery” in successfully challenging local anti-discrimination laws, providing the legal precedent for the ADF’s eventual win before the Supreme Court. But the ADF didn’t just represent these businesses: They all but manufactured most of them in order to create these precedents to bring to the court. Once the cases were over, some of the businesses didn’t bother to operate. ... What the Post doesn’t get into is that the ADF is connected to a larger dark money network created by Leonard Leo, the man behind the far-right restructuring of the Supreme Court. Accountable.US dug into Leo and his involvement in a number of cases before the court last session and found multiple ties to the ADF. ... It’s a well-orchestrated and massively funded project with Leo at the center. The right has systematically captured the courts, using Republican presidents and senators to appoint friendly judges to the federal bench. Then they manufacture plaintiffs and cases to put in front of these sympathetic judges, where they know they have a good chance of winning. From there, it’s on to the Supreme Court, where Leo’s friends Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito—along with the three Donald Trump appointees who owe their seats to Leo—will finish the job.

The goal of Leo and ADF is to end marriage equality. That was the challenge and invitation that Thomas put into his concurrence of the overturn of the right to an abortion. As part of a Ukraine update from a week ago, Mark Sumner of Kos quoted a line from Ken Burn’s documentary on the American (I do have international readers) Civil War. The line refers to the battle of the Monitor and the Merrimack, the first two ironclad ships. The line says, “From the moment the two ships opened fire that Sunday morning, every other navy in the world was obsolete.” From that Sumner wrote:

At the moment, Ukraine appears capable of successfully capturing areas it targets and holding them against multiple Russian assaults. However, Ukraine isn’t racing forward because its military, like Russia’s military, is obsolete. But then, so is China’s. And every military in Europe. And the U.S. military. That’s not to say that any of these militaries are useless. Obviously, they are not. But what’s happening in Ukraine right now is a kind of “punctuated equilibrium” in the evolution of military operations. In Ukraine, drones—both aerial and aquatic—have reached such numbers and demonstrated such widespread capabilities, that many traditional weapons systems have become limited in their roles.

They may have become limited, but may systems are still useful. RO37 of the Kos community wrote a very good explanation of the Black Sea Grain Deal that allowed Ukraine to export grain to feed Africa and Asia. He also explained why Putin ended it – Putin wants back into the SWIFT international banking system that transfers money as a way to lessen or bypass sanctions. In addition to ending the safe passage deal Russia has been attacking Ukrainian port infrastructure. The big reason why Putin declaring an end to the deal is so effective is ships going to and from Ukraine can’t get insurance. Russia is offering to replace the grain for free – but only to African countries friendly to Russia (as in allowing Wagner mercenaries control their mines). Through these various steps Russia is setting up a narrative:

* The war is causing disruptions to global food security, so only by ending the war can this famine be ended. * Russia cannot be blamed for the famine, as Russia is providing free grain and trying its best to help the developing world. * The Ukrainian grain deal meant shipping food mostly to Europe, and Russia’s cancellation of the grain deal isn’t to be blamed for the crisis. * America and Europe should be blamed for triggering the crisis because of their outrageous refusal to abide by the conditions of the Grain Deal (which, according to Russia, means reconnecting its banking system to SWIFT).

That third point is a lie – Ukraine isn’t shipping “mostly” to Europe. And the rest are only partly true. Ukraine’s allies need to start working on counteracting that propaganda and consider other ways to get the grain flowing again. In another post a few days later RO37 reported that Ukraine is working on getting the grain flowing again. The first part is loading grain at the Danube River ports of Izmail and Reni in the far southwest of Ukraine, then running the ships along the coast through the territorial waters of Romania, Bulgaria, and Turkey where a Russian attack would widen the war. Alas, the largest ships can’t get to those ports. So some of the ships are braving the 140 km trip through Ukrainian waters up to Chornomorsk, near Odesa. That is made safer by the second part of Ukraine’s efforts, the Battle for the Black Sea, at least the part west of Crimea. The main component of that is to make Sevastopol too dangerous for Russia’s Black Sea Fleet. Steps in doing that included retaking oil rigs out in the sea. Then striking a sub and ship in the Sevastopol drydock, putting both the vessels and drydock out of commission. Those and other attacks convinced Russia earlier this week its primary fleet assets shouldn’t be in Sevastopol, but should be moved to the Russian mainland, where the drydock facilities aren’t as good. Russia’s ability to enforce the blockade is eroding. In the past two weeks ten freighters have passed through Ukrainian ports. One even docked at Chornomorsk. The risk isn’t completely gone. Russia still has some ways to attack. For now, Ukraine is winning the battle, enough to go on the offensive against the ports on Crimea. This might be my last post for a while. I do most of my writing for this blog in the evening. I tend to watch a movie on Sunday evenings (and plan to do so again tomorrow) and have rehearsals on Mondays and Tuesdays. And this Wednesday I leave for a short trip to Charlotte, NC. There I’ll visit Cousin and Aunt (she’s almost 94!), then attend attend the Reconciling Ministries Network convocation. This is the group urging the United Methodist Church to fully integrate LGBTQ people into the life of the denomination. I might post if tomorrow’s movie is short or I get some time during the convocation. If not, I may not post again until perhaps the 18th. And that means I may not comment on momentous events that happen in that time.