Monitoring Biden and other Contemporary Events

WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court is still great.

It’s the greatest gathering of grievances we’ve ever seen on the high court. The woe-is-me bloc of conservative male justices is obsessed with who has wronged them.

It might be an opportune time to hire a Supreme shrink so these resentful men can get some much-needed therapy and stop working out their issues from the bench.

Neil Gorsuch is settling a score for his mother.

In her memoir, Anne Gorsuch Burford wrote that when she was forced out as Ronald Reagan’s Environmental Protection Agency administrator in 1983, her 15-year-old son, Neil, “was really upset.” He told her: “You should never have resigned. You didn’t do anything wrong. You only did what the president ordered. You raised me not to be a quitter. Why are you a quitter?”

The scar from that trauma flared as he prepared a moot court brief with classmates at Harvard Law School and “tried to add material concerning the E.P.A. that did not fit,” according to a classmate who talked to The New York Times.

Burford was attacked during her tempestuous tenure as an enemy of the environment who slashed rules and spending to gut the E.P.A. The last straw, even for Republican lawmakers and Reagan officials, was when she rejected calls to turn over documents about a toxic-waste cleanup program that her agency had corrupted. She received a contempt citation from Congress.

The Times wrote in an editorial back then: “On becoming the head of the E.P.A., Anne Gorsuch inherited one of the most efficient and capable agencies of government. She has turned it into an Augean stable, reeking of cynicism, mismanagement and decay.”

Last year, her son moved to complete her toxic mission. He enthusiastically joined the 6-to-3 vote to severely curtail the E.P.A.’s ability to regulate power plant emissions. The activists who pushed for Gorsuch to be nominated to the court are finally getting to their real goal: the dismantling of their despised administrative state.

On Monday, the court agreed to review its unanimous decision in Chevron v. Natural Resources Defense Council from 1984. As Charlie Savage wrote in The Times: “If the court overturns or sharply limits the Chevron precedent, it would become easier for business owners to challenge regulations across the economy. Those include rules aimed at ensuring that the air and water are clean; that food, drugs, cars and consumer products are safe; and that financial firms do not take on too much risk.”

The Chevron ruling arose from a challenge to a decision by Gorsuch’s mother to lower automobile emissions standards. He can now vindicate her stance.

Samuel Alito also feels maltreated. In writing the opinion that overturned Roe v. Wade, this brazenly political justice who doesn’t distinguish between his legal and religious views mercilessly stripped women of the right to make decisions about their bodies. But somehow, he whines that he is the victim.

Last month Alito told The Wall Street Journal that he did not like the way the court’s legitimacy was being questioned. “We are being hammered daily, and I think quite unfairly in a lot of instances. And nobody, practically nobody, is defending us.”

Funny. That’s how many women feel about this Supreme Court.

Clarence Thomas, who is still bitter over being outed as a porn-loving harasser of women who worked for him — even though Joe Biden did his best to sweep the corroborating evidence under the Senate rug — was slapped with more revelations of ethics derelictions this past week.

ProPublica broke the news that Thomas’s billionaire benefactor for luxury trips and family property, Harlan Crow, had also secretly paid the private school tuition for Thomas’s grandnephew.

The Washington Post revealed that Leonard Leo, an executive vice president at the Federalist Society — the cult that has transformed the courts in its own right-wing image — surreptitiously funneled tens of thousands of dollars to Thomas’s wife, Ginni, for “consulting work” a decade ago.

The Post reported that Leo told the G.O.P. pollster Kellyanne Conway to bill a nonprofit group he advises and use that money to pay Mrs. Thomas, but stipulated that the paperwork should have “No mention of Ginni, of course.”

“The same year, the nonprofit, the Judicial Education Project, filed a brief to the Supreme Court in a landmark voting rights case,” the paper said.

John Roberts cannot accept that these justices are incapable of policing themselves. Despite all the slime around him, he refused to testify before Congress about a court that blithely disdains ethics.

One reason may be, as The Times reported, that the chief justice’s own wife, Jane, has made millions of dollars as a legal recruiter, placing lawyers at firms with business before the Supreme Court.

Even though I’ve been writing since Bush v. Gore that the court is full of hacks and the bloom is off the robes, it is still disorienting to see the murk of this Supreme Court.

The White House took a victory lap after Friday’s jobs report posted a surprise beat with new data showing the economy added 253,000 nonfarm payroll jobs in April while the unemployment rate dropped to 3.4%.

The report was largely good news all around for Biden and his top aides. But the administration zeroed in on one number in particular: an increase in labor participation among workers aged 25 to 54, or so-called "prime age" worker.

The really good news is working age Americans are participating in the labor force at the highest rate in 15 years, not just since the pandemic," President Biden said Friday afternoon during a cabinet meeting focused on implementing his economic agenda.

The prime-age labor force participation rate stood at 83.3% in April, the highest since March 2008. This increase also pushed prime age participation above the Trump-era high of 83.1% seen in Jan. 2020 on the eve of the COVID-19 pandemic.

The White House was also enthusiastic about a host of other numbers in the report, including the overall unemployment rate, which is now at its lowest level in 50 years, as well as a Black employment rate, which fell to 4.7% in April. The latter reading marks a record since the measure was first introduced in 1972.

The Black unemployment rate is something Biden and his aides have focused on since the beginning of his administration but the attention Friday returned again and again to participation.

"Workers' ages 25 to 54 are being attracted back into the labor force because it's a great time to get a job," added Bharat Ramamurti, the deputy director of Biden's National Economic Council, during an interview with Yahoo Finance Live on Friday morning. "We think that's a very positive story."

Preston Mui, an economist at Employ America, wrote in a note Friday this uptick in prime age participation shows, "that the answer to 'worker shortages' is to bring people off of the sidelines into the labor market, not to destroy labor demand and increase job losses. Running the labor market hot gradually boosts labor force participation."

On the other side of the aisle, a top Republican seized on revisions to the jobs gains in previous months to argue that the labor market isn’t as strong as it's been cracked up to be.

March data was revised to show that 71,000 fewer jobs were created than previously reported while February's results were lowered by 78,000 jobs. Both months still show positive job growth on net, just at a lower level than previously reported.

"The headline number of today's jobs report covers up the underlying data showing that job creation in February and March was far below what was originally reported," said House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Jason Smith (R-MO) in a statement.

Ramamurti nevertheless touted the strength of both this month’s report as well as "several in a row at this point" during Friday's interview, adding that he feels confident that the overall economic picture is bright and — failing some disruption like a debt ceiling crisis — a recession can be avoided.

"I think we can continue to see that balancing act over the next several months," he said.

...In the figure of Babbitt, this new fascism sees something holy. She was “transformed” after her death, Sharlet writes, into “yet another flag, like a new tarot card in the deck of fascism,” a unifying symbol. A fringe belief, yes, but a consequential one. “The politics of the fringe may not be rational, but they’re cunning, surrounding the center and moving inward, until suddenly there they are, at the heart of things,” he writes. There is the QAnon Shaman standing in the Senate chamber, and Marjorie Taylor Greene, and Lauren Boebert, and Babbitt herself. The threat is not distant. It’s already here.

The America I once knew, which has become the land of Babbitt and Greene, always planned for expansion and conquest, not coexistence. This nation within a nation wants to triumph over all others. Trump was a means to an end, but he has become more than that, too. Like Babbitt, he is a symbol: an earthly father figure, a reflection of their God...

The man authorities have identified as the shooter who murdered eight people and wounded at least seven others at a mall in Allen, Texas, on Saturday, Mauricio Garcia, appears to have been a white supremacist. He sported Nazi tattoos and wore a patch on his vest that said “RWDS,” which stands for “Right Wing Death Squad.” (Hispanic-Americans often identify as white, and as scholar of white power movements Kathleen Belew noted on Twitter, today’s militant right holds together largely because of their interest “in hurting vulnerable communities, antisemitism, anti-Islam, anti-trans, misogynist violence.”)

A search by Aric Toler of the Netherlands-based investigative journalism group Bellingcat turned up what appears to be Garcia’s social media account on an unmoderated Russian site. In his postings, he wrote: “A lot of the stuff going on in f*cking clown world. You better believe their wouldn’t be we’ll convert your children drag queen story hour loser’s running around loose. No [Jewish-controlled government] communist or liberal fake news media under Hitlers watch”.

Garcia had been dismissed from the Army for mental-health reasons three months after entering the service, but the reference to “drag queen story hour losers” reflects the relationship between the rhetoric of the modern-day Republican Party and his self-declared membership in a RWDS.

Beginning in the 1980s, Republican leaders found voters to support their “supply-side” economics, which cut taxes and regulations to concentrate wealth so investors could bolster growth, by turning their base against “liberals.” Calling those who opposed their policies “socialists” out to rig the system to redistribute wealth to minorities and women, they began the process of forging a base that considered itself the only real Americans. That process continued over the decades as right-wing media reinforced the idea. Still, though, leaders focused on their economic policies, especially tax cuts, and emphasized culture wars primarily to turn out voters.

Trump turned that formula on its head, playing directly to the base. He offered its members the anti-Black, anti-immigrant, and antiabortion measures it craved, in exchange for utter commitment to his leadership. His drive for authoritarianism dovetailed with a religious movement to create a new ideology for the Republican Party, one that explicitly rejects democracy.

That argument, articulated most clearly by Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán, is that the secular principles of liberal democracy—equality before the law, free speech, freedom to go to church or not, academic inquiry, a free press, immigration, companies that can make decisions based on markets rather than morality—destroy virtue by tearing down the sexual and religious guardrails of traditional society. In order to bring that virtue back, right-wing thinkers argue, the government must defend religion and self-sacrifice (although it’s hard to miss that they’re looking for other people to make those sacrifices, not themselves).

Last week, on May 4 and 5, the Conservative Political Action Conference met in Budapest for the second time, and once again, Orbán delivered the keynote address. The theme was the uniting of the radical right across national boundaries. “Come back, Mr President,” Orbán said of Trump’s 2024 presidential bid. “Make America great again and bring us peace.” Orbán claimed his suppression of LGBTQ+ rights, academic freedom, and the media is a model for the world.

Plenty of the people there from the U.S. seemed to agree. “Hungary,” Representative Paul Gosar (R-AZ) said, “is a beacon.”

In a recorded message, Trump said conservatives were “freedom-loving patriots” who are “fighting against barbarians.” “We believe in tradition, the rule of law, freedom of speech and a God-given dignity of every human life. These are ideas that bind together our movement,” he said. He called for the audience to “stand together to defend our borders, our Judeo-Christian values, our identity and our way of life.”

While conference organizers were celebrating Hungary as the only truly free country in Europe, they were taking advantage of Hungary’s suppression of the media to permit only hand-picked journalists to cover the event. Failed Arizona gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake said that “truth-tellers and peacemakers” were being destroyed by “fake news,” as they call every journalist who criticizes them.

Jacob Heilbrunn of the National Interest was one of those barred from the conference. He watched from his hotel room and wrote in Politico, “Throughout, the idea was clear: Liberalism is synonymous with tyranny.”

This ideology is behind the right-wing attacks on immigrants, LGBTQ Americans, the media, reproductive rights, and education. Florida, led by governor Ron DeSantis, has been out front on these issues, but other Republican-dominated states are following suit. Eager to stay at the head of the “movement,” Trump recently claimed that universities are “dominated by marxist maniacs & lunatics” and vowed to bring them under control of the radical right. “He will impose real standards on American colleges and universities,” his website says, “to include defending the American tradition and Western civilization.”

That formulation is also what enables the very people who are taking away others’ rights to claim that they are the ones being persecuted. The reference to right-wing death squads on Garcia’s vest refers to former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet, whose goons murdered thousands of political opponents, often by tossing them from helicopters. Since the 2016 Trump campaign, modern right-wing activists in the U.S. wear T-shirts offering “free helicopter rides,” and saying “Pinochet did nothing wrong.”

These ideas are embraced only by a minority in the United States, but that minority is working hard to cement its power by gaming the system. Election lawyer Marc Elias recently warned that “we cannot out-organize voter suppression” and that the myth that we can “minimizes the real world effects of repeated, targeted suppression laws. It shifts the burden from the suppressors to the voters. It suggests that victims of voter suppression simply need to be better ‘organized.’”

He notes that Ohio, Arkansas, South Dakota, Idaho, and Florida have all passed voter suppression laws this year and that the new laws put in place after 2020 have worked. Minority and youth voting have dropped significantly. Since 2008, Black voting in states dominated by Democrats has increased by 1.8 points; in Republican-dominated states it has dropped by four points. In Georgia, Black participation rates dropped from 47.8% to 43.2% between 2018 and 2022. Hispanic participation dropped from 27.6% to 25.1%, and the youth vote dropped from 33% to 26%.

Voter suppression is not “campaign tactics,” Elias warns. It is “the illegal and immoral deprivation of constitutional rights.”

snood wrote:

I’m telling you, this Santos character is a REAL piece of work.

Everything about him to me screams professional con man. The NYTimes piece raises many questions, but the biggest to me is, where was the money coming from? It's very curious.

If things keep up at this rate there soon won't be a Republican left walking the streets of America.