The last several days have seen a Republican stampede to distance the party from the Alabama Supreme Court’s decision of a week ago, when it ruled that embryos frozen for in vitro fertilization (IVF) should be considered children and that their injury can be treated like injury to a child. That decision has led major healthcare providers in Alabama to stop IVF procedures out of fear of prosecution.
IVF is very popular—about 2% of babies born in the U.S. are the product of IVF—and Republicans recognize that endangering the procedure has the potential to be a dealbreaker in the upcoming election.
The fury at the Alabama decision of those who have spent years and tens of thousands of dollars in their quest to be parents was articulated yesterday in a conversation between Abbey Crain and Stephanie McNeal of Glamour, in which Crain recounted her five-year IVF journey and noted that the Alabama justice who wrote the decision, Jay Mitchell, “who,” as she said, “lives five miles down the road from me, goes to a church that people in my circle go to, and has children in schools in my community, has more of a say in whether and when I get to be a mom than me.”
The Alabama decision is a direct result of the June 2022 Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision of the U.S. Supreme Court, decided thanks to the three religious extremists former president Trump nominated to the Supreme Court. That decision referred to fetuses as “unborn human being[s]” when it overturned the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision recognizing the constitutional right to abortion. The Alabama decision cited the Dobbs case 15 times, relying on it to establish that “the unborn” are “living persons with rights and interests.”
Republicans are now denying they intended to halt IVF with their antiabortion stance and their appointment of religious extremists to the courts. But that position doesn’t square with the fact that since the Dobbs decision, they have pressed for so-called personhood laws, laws that give the full rights of a person to an embryo from the time of conception. Since Dobbs, sixteen state legislatures have introduced personhood laws, and four Republican-dominated states—Missouri, Georgia, Alabama, and Arizona, although Arizona’s has been blocked—have passed them.
In the U.S. House of Representatives, Republicans introduced a national personhood bill as soon as they took control in January 2023. The bill, titled “Life at Conception Act,” currently has 124 co-sponsors, including House speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA). On Friday, Johnson claimed to support IVF, raising the question of what exactly that support for IVF means, considering the process requires discarding certain embryos.
In the U.S. Senate, Rand Paul (R-KY) introduced a “Life at Conception Act” on January 28, 2021. It currently has 18 co-sponsors, including Steve Daines (R-MT), who is the head of the National Republican Senatorial Committee (NRSC), the official campaign organization to elect Republican senators. On Friday the NRSC distributed a memo to candidates telling them to “align with the public’s overwhelming support for IVF and fertility treatments.”
While it is the IVF story that has garnered the most attention this weekend—likely because it has obvious implications for the 2024 election and Republicans have tried to rush away from it—it is simply a different facet of a larger story: the leaders of the Republican Party are working to overthrow democracy.
On February 15, news broke that Alexander Smirnov, the informant who had provided the “evidence” that then–vice president Joe Biden and his son had each taken a $5 million bribe from the Ukrainian oil and gas company Burisma, had been indicted by a federal grand jury for lying and “creating a false and fictitious record.” On February 20, Trump-appointed Special Counsel David Weiss of the Justice Department filed a document concluding that Smirnov has “extensive and extremely recent” ties with “Russian intelligence agencies.”
The use of Russian disinformation to destabilize democracy in the U.S. looks much like the information warfare Russia has used to establish Ukrainian leaders that worked for the Kremlin. It was the ouster of one of those leaders, Viktor Yanukovych, in the 2014 Maidan Revolution ten years ago that prompted Russian president Vladimir Putin to invade Ukraine later that year. Yanukovych won office with the help of American political consultant Paul Manafort, who advised and, briefly, chaired the Trump campaign in 2016, when it weakened the Republican party’s platform plank that supported arming Ukraine against Putin after his 2014 invasion.
Seeding lies about corruption that came from Russian-linked Ukrainians was central to Trump’s 2019 impeachment: his phone call to Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky demanding Zelensky announce an investigation into Burisma and Joe Biden’s son Hunter was part of an attempt to create dirt on the Bidens. That call happened after Trump’s advisor Rudy Giuliani went to Ukraine, where he talked to “an active Russian agent,” according to the FBI. FBI agents warned Giuliani that he was a target of Russian disinformation.
That poison has now spread from Trump’s rogue team in the White House to the Republican Party itself, which has apparently been carrying water for Putin at the very center of our government.
Meanwhile, under pressure from Trump loyalists in the House, Speaker Johnson is refusing to take up a measure to aid Ukraine in its resistance to Russia’s 2022 invasion. Such a measure is popular in the U.S., both among the population in general and among lawmakers. While other countries can provide funds, only the U.S. has enough of the required war matériel Ukraine so desperately needs. Already, Russia has managed to retake the key city of Avdiivka because Ukraine’s troops don’t have enough ammunition, and today Jimmy Rushton, a Kyiv-based foreign policy analyst, quoted a Ukrainian officer’s report that they can’t “medivac our guys from the contact line anymore because we don’t have any artillery ammunition to suppress the Russians. We have to leave them to die.”
The reluctance of House Republicans to support Ukraine has global implications. Putin is trying to tear up the rules-based international order that has protected international boundaries since World War II, while Trump has threatened to destroy the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) that holds back Russian aggression. In the Wall Street Journal on Friday, chief foreign affairs correspondent Yaroslav Trofimov noted that European countries are worried that the U.S. will not defend its allies, while Putin has made “a de facto military alliance with the rogue regimes of North Korea and Iran while growing closer and closer to authoritarian China.”
European nations have expanded their own military production and support for Ukraine; Poland and the Baltic states have invested far more in their militaries than NATO’s threshold of 2% of a nation’s gross domestic product. In the Washington Post, Michael Birnbaum reported Friday that some of the nations that border Russia are looking again at land mines, concertina wire, and trenches—the technology of last century’s wars—to protect themselves from a Russian invasion.
Putin and allies like Viktor Orbán of Hungary have been clear they believe democracy is obsolete. Far-right extremists in the United States agree, insisting that democracy’s demand for equal rights before the law undermines society as immigration, LGBTQ+ rights, and women’s rights challenge “traditional” values. That ideological justification has led many white evangelical Christians to flock to Trump’s strongman persona.
How religion and authoritarianism have come together in modern America was on display Thursday, when right-wing activist Jack Posobiec opened this weekend’s conference of the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) outside Washington, D.C., with the words: “Welcome to the end of democracy. We are here to overthrow it completely. We didn’t get all the way there on January 6, but we will endeavor to get rid of it and replace it with this right here.” He held up a cross necklace and continued: “After we burn that swamp to the ground, we will establish the new American republic on its ashes, and our first order of business will be righteous retribution for those who betrayed America.”
But Saturday’s South Carolina Republican primary suggested that the drive to lay waste to American democracy is not popular. Trump won the state, as expected, by about 60%—lower than predicted. Former South Carolina governor Nikki Haley won 40% of the vote. This means that Trump will have to continue spending money he doesn’t currently have on his campaign.
More important than that, even, is that it shows that even in a strongly Republican state, 40% of primary voters—the party’s most loyal voters—prefer someone else. As Mike Allen of Axios wrote today: “If America were dominated by old, white, election-denying Christians who didn’t go to college, former President Trump would win the general election in…a landslide.” But, Allen added, “It’s not.”
Which may be precisely why Trump loyalists intend to overthrow democracy.
IVF And The Faithlessness Of The GOP
Republicans desperately trying to cover their tracks are running the same play as the Supreme Court justices who lied about settled law to get confirmed so they could overturn Roe v. Wade.
When Democrats endeavored in 2009 and 2010 to reform the health-care system and extend coverage to the uninsured, they chose the path of least disruption. They left in place existing systems that cover the elderly (Medicare), workers (employer-sponsored insurance), the poor (Medicaid), and veterans (the V.A. health system), and supplemented them with a new system for uninsured people. They’d buy health plans in a new regulated marketplace, and most would qualify for significant subsidies.
Barack Obama wanted everyone else to understand that he’d embraced this approach because it would leave the other systems in place. His shorthand for explaining this was “if you like your plan, you can keep your plan.”
As an elevator pitch it was pretty reasonable. Directionally, it was correct. But it was not literally true for every last insured person in the country. The Affordable Care Act also imposed new regulations on insurance carriers. It eliminated a class of scammy junk plans. It required insurers to add new benefits to their existing coverage. As such, when the coverage expansion began in 2013, some already insured people didn’t get to “keep” their plans. They got shifted into comparable ones, or better ones, or had to buy new plans online, and when their cancellation notices began arriving in the mail, Republicans erupted, seemingly scandalized by Obama’s broken promise.
If you followed politics closely a decade ago, you’ll remember this episode well. And if you’re a literalist, you’d have come away from the experience thinking Republicans were committed to absolute truth in advertising. Obama’s sin was to speak categorically about something that was true in general, and Republicans treated it as an unforgivable sin.
In reality, Republicans do not care about truth in advertising, per se.
To the contrary, they have embraced near-total faithlessness. Long gone are the days when they ran and lost on a plan to privatize Medicare—now they promise not to touch entitlements on the campaign trail, hoping to win enough power to simply break the promise. When their policies are unpopular or disruptive, they don’t even bother with Obama-style salesmanship, where policy and rhetoric at least point in the same direction. They now simply pursue a range of toxically unpopular policies, while telling voters they do not.
MORE LIKE EMBRY-NO!
If you want an object lesson in a crucial difference between the two parties, contrast Obama’s sin with the GOP’s clumsy, all-hands effort to deceive the public into thinking it’s a champion of in vitro fertilization.
The Onion@TheOnion
5h
Clarence Thomas Announces 50% Discount On All Favorable Rulings https://bit.ly/4bNbTCt
Ronald Brownstein@RonBrownstein
2h
The nation w/in a nation that red states are building: OK GOP state senator says of LGBTQ people “We are a Republican state – supermajority – in the House and Senate. I represent a constituency that doesn’t want that filth in Oklahoma,” Woods said.
Laurence Tribe 🇺🇦 ⚖️@tribelaw
2h
When Ken Chesebro surfaced in this mess, at first I felt a bit of pity for the guy. No more. Not only did he plot to overturn the Constitution's transfer of power to the newly elected president, but he's been lying to pretty much everyone about his role. More indictments await.
Jay Rosen
@jayrosen_nyu
"Fewer grievances, more policy: Trump aides and allies push for a post-South Carolina 'pivot.'"
By Matt Dixon, Kristen Welker, Jonathan Allen, Vaughn Hillyard, Garrett Haake and Carol E. Lee.
https://nbcnews.com/politics/donald-trump/trump-push-south-carolina-pivot-fewer-grievances-rcna140239
NBC has been featuring this. I have some comments
Thanks for filing this report on time last night.
As your post-publication editor, I have a few questions. You're all experienced professionals so I assume you have good reasons for every call you made here. I just want know what they are. Ready?
* Why did it take six people to make this?
* So Trump’s staff want him to pivot to the general election and rely less on personal grievances. Any reason to think that he is capable of — or perhaps newly interested in — a reduction in personal invective? Has he changed?
* If our answer is YES, Trump has changed and he no longer thinks that grievance politics can get him there, where in our report do we show that?
* If our answer is NO, same guy, then why are six NBC journalists helping to broadcast the pained wishes of his campaign staff?
* Advisers will often try to send a message to the candidate through the media, but is that something we should be involved in?
* And if this is a good use of our platform, why do we grant them anonymity— as if they have some huge scoop for us, and face danger if found out?
* Why is “more policy” the big headline here when by my count that word — policy — comes up exactly once in the piece, and it’s from a voter.
* Again I ask: any evidence that Trump is interested in — and capable of — a shift to “policy” as the centerpiece of his campaign?
* In the modern era, or in the memory of anyone at NBC News, has there ever been a president less qualified to make that pivot to “more policy” of which our own headline confidently speaks? This bothers me.
* Did anyone wonder, as I have wondered, whether the depiction of “policy” as the next phase of the Trump campaign was really a wish of our own: to be perceived as serious people engaged in something more edifying than mere horse race coverage and vapid “strategy” talk?
* One more thing on "policy” as what Trump advisers say they want to feature going forward. Are we really talking to readers, viewers, and voters with that claim? Or are we competing with our peers in journalism upon the dubious and mucked up terrain of the micro-scoop?
I wrote this because it seemed to me that NBC News was here treating election coverage as a hunt for things we can sound objective about. Framing "fewer grievances, more policy" as a plausible next step for Trump is more than a stretch. It conflicts with everything we know.
Lots of moving pieces on this Monday, with the biggest stories coming in international affairs.
The U.S. has appointed a special envoy for Sudan, which is ten months into a civil war that has turned 8 million people into refugees, sending 1.5 million into other countries; closed 80% of the hospitals in the area of the fighting; and prompted torture, rape, and deliberate starvation of civilians, at least 14,600 of whom have been killed. Tom Perriello will, the State Department said, “coordinate the U.S. policy on Sudan and advance our efforts to end the hostilities, secure unhindered humanitarian access, and support the Sudanese people as they seek to fulfill their aspirations for freedom, peace, and justice.”
The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) is about to expand again. After 19 months of stalling, Hungary’s parliament voted today to approve Sweden as a new member, bringing the number of NATO countries to 32. Hungary’s prime minister Viktor Orbán, who has good relations with Russia’s president Vladimir Putin, has a history of using his country’s veto power over NATO to extract concessions; in exchange for Hungary’s approval, Sweden has agreed to provide it four fighter jets and for Saab to open an artificial intelligence research center in Hungary.
There is also a major piece moving in the Middle East. This morning, the Palestinian Authority’s prime minister Mohammad Shtayyeh and cabinet offered to resign in order to clear the way for a new government. Palestinian Authority president Mahmoud Abbas accepted the resignations but asked the government to stay in place as a caretaker until a new government can be formed.
This is a big deal because it’s part of a larger plan for the Palestinian territories after the war.
Since Hamas attacked Israel on October 7, 2023, the U.S. government has maintained that Israel has a right and a duty to defend itself against Hamas, but that it must operate within international humanitarian law that limits harm to civilians and that it must have a vision for a postwar political process to establish a Palestinian state next to Israel: the two-state solution.
On the first condition, Zack Beauchamp of Vox reported last week that Israel Defense Forces (IDF) permitted far higher civilian casualties after October 7 than it had in previous wars. The result has been the dramatic destruction of lives and Gaza’s infrastructure that have so horrified many Americans that yesterday an active-duty U.S. airman set himself on fire outside the Israeli embassy in Washington, D.C., dying by suicide in protest of civilian deaths in Gaza.
The Biden administration has worked to get aid into Gaza but has stood firm against a permanent ceasefire because it maintained that permitting Hamas to rebuild would leave the conditions for further warfare in place. It has also insisted that Hamas must return all the hostages its militants took on October 7. But in the U.S., the devastation in Gaza has fueled angry opposition to the administration by those who insist that Biden is fueling “genocide” and who demand an immediate cease-fire.
Beauchamp suggests that Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, has largely ignored the second condition—that Israel must consider a postwar formula—at least in part because of his own legal troubles.
Netanyahu is facing an ongoing corruption trial and apparently counts on staying in office to keep himself out of prison. To stay in office, he must hold his coalition together, and that means bowing to his far-right partners, who want to rebuild Israeli settlements in Gaza and oppose any Palestinian control there. Any plan for a postwar settlement threatens to break his coalition and lead to new elections that Netanhayu would likely lose. Until last week, Netanyahu vowed only “total victory” over Hamas.
But while Netanyahu refused to discuss a postwar plan, leaders in Arab states, as well as the U.S. and the European Union, appeared to see the crisis in Gaza as an opportunity to change the longstanding political dysfunction in the Middle East. For months now, they have been developing plans for a postwar settlement that includes a Palestinian state overseen by a revitalized Palestinian Authority along with security guarantees for Israel backed by normalization of relations between Israel and Saudi Arabia. Arab states have offered billions of dollars to rebuild Gaza so long as neither Hamas nor Israel is in charge of the territory.
As Dennis Ross, U.S. Middle East specialist under both Republican George H.W. Bush and Democrat Bill Clinton, noted, for the first time in the long struggle in the modern Middle East, the Gulf Arab states see normalizing ties with Israel as important to their own security and economies. They have refused to get drawn into the conflict, pointing out to Israel their reliance on diplomacy rather than arms to prove that normalization of relations is key to Israeli security.
Such a process required remaking the Palestinian Authority, which administers the West Bank and administered Gaza for a year between the time that Israel withdrew from Gaza in 2005 and Hamas won legislative elections in 2006. In mid-January, according to Barak Ravid of Axios, national security officials from Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Egypt, and the Palestinian Authority met secretly in Riyadh to figure out how to revitalize the Palestinian Authority to enable it to play its role in governing Gaza.
At the end of January, Secretary of State Antony Blinken asked officials at the State Department to review procedures for the U.S. and the international community to recognize a Palestinian state, and the Biden administration sent CIA director William Burns to help Egypt and Qatar broker a deal between Hamas and Israel for the release of all remaining hostages held by Hamas and a pause in fighting to get humanitarian aid to Gaza.
Meanwhile, Netanyahu made clear his determination to retain control of Gaza and stood firm against the two-state solution. At his back, he has had Trump and his loyalists, who are staunch supporters of Netanyahu. The news that the State Department was figuring out procedures for recognizing a Palestinian state prompted outrage from Trump’s former ambassador to Israel, David Friedman. He wrote: “I’m hoping this is just unauthorized and false messaging from one of the many at State who despise Israel. But make no mistake—this “recognition” would be even more devastating to Israel than the attacks of October 7!! Not to mention rewarding terrorists for their brutality! Unconscionable!”
Perhaps with the security of such support behind him, on February 23, Netanhayu released to his cabinet his own plan for a postwar settlement. It said that Israel will keep control over Gaza and that rebuilding the devastated territory will depend on its demilitarization, and rejects the “unilateral recognition” of a Palestinian state. On the same day, the Israeli government announced it would add more than 3,300 new homes to settlements in the Israeli-occupied West Bank after three Palestinian gunmen killed an Israeli settler and wounded five more.
During its time in office, the Trump administration reversed four decades of U.S. policy by saying that such settlements did not violate international law, but following Friday’s announcement, Secretary of State Blinken promptly restored the old rule, saying that settlements are “counter-productive to reaching an enduring peace. They’re also inconsistent with international law. Our administration maintains a firm opposition to settlement expansion and in our judgment this only weakens, it doesn’t strengthen, Israel’s security,” he said.
Meanwhile, Netanhayu said yesterday on CBS’s Face the Nation that Israel plans to continue its assault on Hamas by attacking Rafah, a city in southern Gaza where about 1.4 million displaced Palestinians are taking shelter, something Biden has warned him against doing without a credible plan for protecting civilians. On February 24, Netanyahu said he would convene the Israeli cabinet this week “to approve military plans for an operation in Rafah, including the evacuation of civilians.”
Negotiations for a release of the hostages and a pause in fighting continue. On Friday, officials from Israel, Egypt, the U.S., and Qatar, which serves as an intermediary for Hamas, met in Paris. White House national security advisor Jake Sullivan said he hoped for a final agreement “in the coming days.” Today, Biden told reporters that he hopes to see a temporary cease-fire by next Monday.
On February 13, Amy Mackinnon and Robbie Gramer of Foreign Policy referred to the administration’s attempt to pull a two-state solution out of the chaos of the Middle East as Biden’s “grand bargain,” and they point out that “it faces staggering challenges.” A week later, in Foreign Affairs, political scientist Marc Lynch and foreign affairs scholar Shibley Telhami replied that “the idea of a Palestinian state emerging from the rubble of Gaza has no basis in reality.”
Today’s announcement of a new Palestinian Authority appears to be a shift.
“We are in this to win it,” No Labels’ chief strategist, Ryan Clancy, told me one morning earlier this month. Clancy and 16 other representatives of the beleaguered centrist group were staring at me through their respective Zoom boxes during a private briefing, electoral maps and polling data at the ready, all in defense of their quest to alter the course of the 2024 presidential campaign.
He continued: “And that’s a function not only of having a ticket eventually that can accumulate electoral votes—”
That’s when Nancy Jacobson, the group’s CEO and founder, interjected.
“But I just want to clarify, this organization is not in it to win it,” Jacobson said, a truly unusual statement for a political operative.
“This organization is in it to give people a choice.”
In the coming weeks, No Labels seems poised to intervene in the presidential race with a “unity ticket”—ideally one Republican and one Democrat—meant to appeal to the large number of Americans dissatisfied with the likely major-party nominees, President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump. Unlike Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Cornel West, Jill Stein, and other independent or third-party contenders, the No Labels candidates will likely be mainstream and, to use No Labels’ preferred language, offer “commonsense” values.
Even if the forthcoming White House bid ends up as nothing but a sideshow, it is still garnering attention: Polls indicate that a No Labels ballot line may well draw more votes away from Biden than Trump. It could be the deciding variable that secures Trump’s return to power.
Why is No labels doing this? Some of the group’s opponents allege that No Labels is nothing more than a money-raising grift. Others have suggested that No Labels is a shadowy Republican dark-money group, and that the “unity ticket” is a stalking-horse bid to help Trump. Yet another theory is that No Labels is full of idealists who, whether they realize it or not, are playing Russian roulette with American democracy, as one critic recently put it to me. Jacobson and the organization vehemently deny all of the above accusations.
I’ve spent the past several weeks talking with No Labels’ leaders, staffers, consultants, and opponents, trying to understand the organization’s endgame. I came away confused, and convinced that the people behind No Labels are confused, too. They’ve correctly diagnosed serious problems in the American political system, but their proposed solution could help lead to its undoing.
Nancy Jacobson, a longtime Democratic fundraiser who is married to the longtime Democratic pollster Mark Penn, founded No Labels 15 years ago. Back then, her goal was to build the voice of the “commonsense majority” and bring compromise to Capitol Hill during what was then seen as an era of division and dysfunction. (It looks bucolic compared with the present day.) The bipartisan Problem Solvers Caucus, an earnest, relatively uncontroversial coalition of Democrats and Republicans, eventually emerged in the House of Representatives as the result of No Labels’ work.
So many political observers view Jacobson as a Beltway operator that her colleague and friend of 30 years, Holly Page, who sits on No Labels’ board of advisers, came to our interview prepared to dispute that characterization before I even mentioned it. Page informed me that Jacobson is not, in fact “a conventional creature of Washington,” and instead likened her to a Silicon Valley disrupter who’s willing to “try things” and “challenge conventional norms.”
Disruptive is certainly one way to describe the group’s recent change in focus from congressional gridlock to the White House, where its leaders saw a much bigger problem. Given the timing of this pivot, one might assume this bigger problem they identified was a dictator knocking at the door. Not quite.
No Labels’ leaders look at the 2024 race and see failure on both sides underscored by a larger failure of choice. They see Trump lumbering toward another Republican nomination as he faces the possibility of conviction(s) and imprisonment. They view Biden as both far too old and having tacked too far to the left, a man who didn’t keep his campaign promises and abandoned his long-held reach-across-the-aisle mentality. No Labels raised $21.2 million in 2022, up from $11.3 million the year before. (The 2023 figures are not yet available to the public.)
In mid-January, I sat down for a group interview with three of No Labels’ leaders—Clancy, Page, and a co-executive director, Margaret White. Clancy told me that Biden had abused his presidential power in signing an executive order to forgive student-loan payments. He compared this decision to Trump’s executive action to fund the construction of a southern border wall.
I asked everyone to share whom they’d voted for in the 2020 election. Clancy and Page both said they’d voted for Biden. White demurred: “Oh, I don’t know if I want to answer that question.” I asked again, this time about 2016. Page voted for Hillary Clinton, Clancy for Gary Johnson. “Yeah, I don’t want to—I’m not interested in putting that out there,” White said once more.
No Labels’ leaders are hardly alone in hating their 2024 options. In late January, a Decision Desk HQ/NewsNation poll showed that 59 percent of voters are “not too enthusiastic” or “not at all enthusiastic” about the prospect of a 2020 rematch. A separate poll in December found roughly the same thing.
But unlike all the people sitting around complaining about the coming election, No Labels is trying to do something. And sometimes that something is described in grandiose terms. In one email to me, Jacobson shared that her college-age daughter had decided to enlist in the Israeli Defense Forces upon graduation. “I am scared for her as a parent. Terrified,” Jacobson wrote. “But how can I not celebrate her when I myself am risking so much for a cause I believe in?”
Over the past two years, her group has been working to place its name on ballots around the country. It has succeeded in 16 states so far, and aims to reach 33 in the coming months. In the remaining states, No Labels is leaving the task of getting on the ballot up to its eventual “unity ticket” candidates. Though No Labels would dispute that these candidates would really be “its” candidates in any meaningful sense.
The group insists that it is merely a 501(c)(4) social-welfare organization and not, as one might assume, a nascent political party. But not everyone at No Labels is on message. At the private briefing this month, one team member shared their screen with a chart boasting that 110,000 people were “No Labels Party Members.” When I asked about that specific word—party—which contradicts the organization’s central argument, Clancy, the chief strategist, said, “To the extent that this is convoluted, we can blame our campaign-finance laws.” A day later, a No Labels representative emailed me a lengthy statement explaining the difference between what a political party does and what No Labels is doing. I can’t say I was able to discern a clear distinction.
Perhaps oddly for an organization dedicated to political choice, No Labels also insists on keeping secret the selection process for the “unity ticket” candidates. Guessing the eventual ticket has become a sort of parlor game during an otherwise boring primary season. While still not official, Clancy told me it was looking “pretty likely” that No Labels would announce a ticket, though he added that no politician has “an inside track” to the ballot line. Larry Hogan, the former governor of Maryland and a former No Labels co-chair, was believed to be in consideration, but he is instead pursuing a Senate bid. So was Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia, a centrist Democrat, who this month went so far as to float Senator Mitt Romney as a potential running mate. “Third-party run, everything is on the table,” Manchin told reporters. A day later, he announced that he wouldn’t run for president at all. Dean Phillips, the Minnesota congressman challenging Biden for the Democratic nomination, is already a member of the Problem Solvers Caucus, and recently said he’d consider running on a “unity ticket” if the conditions were right.
Back in November, the organization’s leaders scuttled plans for an April 2024 in-person convention in Dallas. My request for details about a rumored replacement “virtual convention” went unanswered, perhaps under the logic that they can’t plan a convention if they don’t have candidates. So the conversations are happening quietly.
More generally, the group is cagey about its internal operations, and won’t even share the names of its donors. (Harlan Crow, the Texas real-estate tycoon who has financially supported conservative Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, is one.)
Even once the ballot-access work is finished and the candidates are secured, No Labels’ plan seems quixotic. In the United States, it remains nearly impossible for a third-party candidate to win a presidential election. The most successful third-party candidate of the modern era, Ross Perot, whom No Labels often name-drops, received just less than 19 percent of the popular vote in 1992 despite briefly dropping out of the race, but didn’t secure a single electoral vote.
In an email to me, Jacobson alluded to the idea that “winning” a majority of the vote is not necessarily No Labels’ main goal. “Abraham Lincoln was actually a winner with 39% running on the No Labels of his day—the little-known Republican Party,” Jacobson wrote. “Ross Perot in 1992 before he pulled out was actually polling at 39%, ahead of both Bush and Clinton. Most people don’t realize that you don’t need 50% to win—you only need 35% or slightly above that.”
Back in December, Clancy raised the head-scratching idea of creating a “coalition government.” He noted that if no candidate secured the requisite 270 electoral votes to claim the presidency, certain “unbound electors” could be “traded” among candidates. This sounded a bit like something out of a West Wing episode.
Around this time, another No Labels co-founder, former Representative Tom Davis, told NBC News that No Labels candidates could potentially “cut a deal” with another party’s ticket and offer electors in exchange for Cabinet positions, or even the vice presidency. A different path, Davis said, was that a contingent election could simply be decided by the House. Such an outcome would almost certainly throw the election to Trump.
Rick Wilson, one of the founders of the “never Trump” Lincoln Project, is a vocal No Labels critic. He believes the formerly centrist group has evolved into yet another cadre of Trump enablers, and that its ballot-access plan is far from benevolent.
“While No Labels has every right in the world to try to put somebody on the ballot, we have an equally sacred right under the First Amendment to object to it,” Wilson told me. “I feel like No Labels is doing something dangerous and definitely stupid,” he added. “Probably extremely dangerous. Likely to cause the return of Donald Trump. And in those things, I’m going to speak out.”
But it’s not just No Labels’ opponents who are questioning the group’s recent actions. Former Senator Evan Bayh, a personal and political ally of Jacobson’s for 25 years, whom she recommended I interview for this story, is fully supporting Biden. “It’s possible to be friendly with someone and disagree with them—or even occasionally strongly disagree,” Bayh told me. He spoke highly of Jacobson’s character and her integrity, but he also told me that several months ago, he expressed concern about her approach. “Look, I know you’re doing what you think is the right thing here,” Bayh said he told his friend. “But the consequences of error could be profound.”
In that warning, Bayh articulated the most common criticism you tend to hear of No Labels: that its leaders are, to use a tired political metaphor, way out over their skis. As the “unity ticket” unveiling supposedly approaches, more veteran Democrats and Republicans are beginning to take notice, and voice concerns. On February 5, a bipartisan group of 11 former members of Congress sent a letter to three No Labels leaders warning them that a contingent election would be “calamitous.”
Although it’s stocked with former elected officials and veteran Washington power brokers, No Labels can seem naive about the ugly contours of contemporary American politics. On a Thursday morning last month, the organization held an event at the National Press Club. All the No Labels luminaries were there: former Senator Joe Lieberman, the civil-rights activist Benjamin Chavis, former North Carolina Governor Pat McCrory. I thought the group might finally announce its candidates, and I suspect that many of the roughly two dozen other reporters in attendance assumed the same. No such luck. We were handed a purple folder containing a letter sent to the Department of Justice alleging an “illegal conspiracy to use intimidation, harassment, and fear against representatives of No Labels, its donors, and its potential candidates.”
The letter claims that Melissa Moss, a consultant associated with the Lincoln Project, told Page, “You have no idea of the forces aligned against you. You will never be able to work in Democratic politics again.” And: “You are going to get it with both barrels.” (Page told me that this happened last summer over lunch in a public setting; Moss declined to comment for this story.) In a video screened at the press conference, Rick Wilson can be heard saying on a podcast that “they”—No Labels—“need to be burned to the ******* ground.” Jonathan V. Last, the editor of The Bulwark who has contributed to The Atlantic and other outlets, is also heard saying, “Anybody who participates in this No Labels malarkey should have their lives ruined,” and “The people who are affiliated with No Labels should be publicly shamed to society’s utmost ability to do so.”
As the clip rolled on a flatscreen TV, the No Labels representatives looked out at the assembled reporters, solemn-faced. McCrory, the group’s national co-chair, raised his voice in disbelief when it was his turn to speak from the dais. “I mean, did you see that video? Did you listen to that video?” he asked. “Who do they think they are, Tony Soprano?”
Though scheduled to last an hour, the event ended after 45 minutes when the Q&A portion was abruptly cut short without apparent reason. The No Labels brass exited the room. Out in the hallway, journalists were told that a follow-up “gaggle” was imminent. But it never happened. Several reporters stood around talking for a bit, then, one by one, dispersed.
Later, when I spoke with Wilson about his comments in the clip, he said the video screened for reporters had been disingenuously edited.
“I am not a person who is known for holding back,” Wilson said. “I was shocked, though, when they elided a quote of mine in their press conference, where I said they had to be burned to the effing ground. But then I said the next word. The word they cut off was politically.”
The full quote does appear in the DOJ letter. But the whole episode seemed, to me, less an example of bad faith and mendacity than a simple loss of focus. Why spend all this time and effort complaining about your opponents’ tactics when you’re supposed to be selling the public on your ability to beat them?
As of now, the top of the “unity ticket” seems likely to go to a Republican—if it goes to anyone. During last month’s press conference, Lieberman said that the current Republican candidate and former United Nations ambassador Nikki Haley could be a No Labels contender of “the most serious consideration.” Haley’s campaign immediately said she’s not interested. On Sunday, Joe Cunningham, No Labels’ national director, raised the prospect again. Once more, her campaign immediately said no thanks.
Nevertheless, Haley’s name keeps coming up in conversations.
At the virtual briefing earlier this month, one No Labels adviser, Charlie Black, a Republican strategist who worked on presidential campaigns for John McCain, Ronald Reagan, and both Bushes, told me he was personally rooting for Haley in the Republican primary and hopes she pulls off “a miracle.” Were this to happen, it’s unlikely that No Labels would launch a ticket. I asked whether it had been more difficult than anticipated to secure candidates for the No Labels ballot line. Black replied that the group had only begun talking to prospective candidates this month—an assertion contradicted by prior reporting.
No Labels’ recent shift in priority from Congress to the executive branch has caught many by surprise, and some of the group’s supporters are asking questions about the pivot. Last month, two members of the Durst family sued the organization over breach of contract and “unjust enrichment.” Douglas and Jonathan Durst, who are cousins in a real-estate dynasty, allege that No Labels pulled a “bait and switch” with their $145,000 donation in pursuing this third-party presidential project. In an email to me, a lawyer representing the Dursts wrote, “The commitment No Labels made to its donors was that it would not be a third party but, rather, a facilitator of bipartisanship to bridge the political divide. It has now broken that commitment and must be held accountable for it.”
Clancy, for his part, told me that the Durst lawsuit lacks credibility, and described it as part of a broader effort to make his and his colleagues’ lives “difficult” during the current ballot-access push. “I mean, they might have a leg to stand on if they gave money six months ago with some expectation this is only going to congressional work,” Clancy said. “They gave money six years ago and three years ago, respectively. We didn’t even start this 2024 project until two years ago.”
Clancy also dismissed criticism of the organization as fundamentally unjust. “Look, I don’t mean to keep pleading the refs, saying our opponents are being unfair,” Clancy told me. “Though they are.”
“The way that, just repeatedly, the worst motives are ascribed to No Labels, and to Nancy—it’s very frustrating,” Clancy said a bit later. “Nancy and No Labels are very comfortable operating quietly, and just hoping that good stuff gets done.”
During the private briefing, Andy Bursky, the group’s chair, told me unprompted: “No Labels’ ballot-access infrastructure is not the work of crackpots or crazy dreamers or amateurs. Rather, it’s an effort led and staffed by clear-eyed, sober professionals, animated by a shared concern for our democracy and, in particular, the choices that the two-party duopoly is shoving down the throats of the electorate.” A few minutes later, Jacobson chimed in with a more macro, and more confusing, thought: “No Labels will never, ever be involved in politics.”
Perhaps they assumed that everyone viewed the 2024 election through No Labels’ lens: that once ballot-access was secured, some patriotic, high-profile politician would be grateful to be tapped for the third-party nomination. So far, that hasn’t happened.
Near the end of my in-person interview with Page, Clancy, and White, I asked them point-blank if they’d lose sleep at night if No Labels ran a candidate and, as a result, Trump won the election. Clancy virtually repeated my words back to me, as if articulating them gave them extra weight.
“I’d lose sleep if I thought I was part of an effort that was responsible for getting Trump back in the White House,” he said.
“Me too,” Page added.
“Yeah, absolutely,” White said.
In an email, Jacobson told me, “Personally, I would never vote for Trump ever, nor would the leaders or the donors to the group.”
Her email signature features an animated GIF of Washington Crossing the Delaware with the words BE BRAVE and her group’s logo hovering above the painting’s choppy waters. Jacobson and her allies seem to earnestly feel they are doing just that—being brave—but in the fog of presidential-election war, they may also have lost sight of their enemy.
The House of Representatives will be back in session tomorrow after the February 19 Presidents Day holiday. It is facing a number of crucial issues, but the ongoing problem of the radicalism of the MAGA Republicans has ground—and, apparently, continues to grind—legislation to a halt.
The farm bill, which establishes the main agricultural and food policies of the government—agricultural subsidies and food benefits, among other things—and which needs to be reauthorized every five years, expired in September 2023. While Congress extended the 2018 bill as a stopgap until September 2024, the new bill should be passed.
The farm bill has more breathing room than the appropriations bills to fund the government in fiscal year 2024 (which started on October 1, 2023). Four of the continuing resolutions Congress passed to keep the government running will expire on March 1; the other eight will expire on March 8. Operating on a continuing resolution that maintains 2023 levels of spending means the government cannot shift to the new priorities Congress agreed to in the 2024 National Defense Authorization Act, and Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, along with leaders from the Pentagon and the Senate, warns that the lack of appropriations measures is compromising national defense.
On an even tighter timeline is the national security supplemental bill to aid Ukraine, Israel, the Indo-Pacific, and to provide humanitarian aid to Gaza. Ukraine is running out of ammunition, and its war effort is faltering. Every day that passes without the matériel only the U.S. can provide hurts the Ukrainians’ cause.
All of these measures are stalled because extremist MAGA Republicans in the House are insisting their demands be included in them. Negotiators have been trying to hash out the farm bill for months, and today Senator Debbie Stabenow (D-MI), chair of the Senate Agriculture Committee, said she would rather continue to extend the 2018 law than bow to the House Republicans’ demands for cuts to food assistance programs and funding for climate change.
Appropriations bills are generally passed “clean,” that is, without the inclusion of unrelated controversial elements. But House Republicans are insisting the appropriations bills include their own demands for much deeper cuts than House leadership agreed to, as well as riders about abortion; gun policy; diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives; LGBTQ+ rights; and so on. Those are nonstarters for Democrats.
As for the national security supplemental measure, lawmakers agree on a bipartisan basis that Ukraine’s successful defense against Russia’s invasion is crucial to U.S. national security. The Senate passed the bill on a strong bipartisan vote of 70 to 29, and if brought to the floor of the House, it would be expected to pass there, too.
But House speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) refuses to bring it to the floor. When President Joe Biden first asked for the aid in October, Republicans insisted they could not see their way to protecting our national security overseas without addressing it on the southern border. A bipartisan group of senators spent four months hashing out a border provision for the bill—House Republicans declined to participate—only to have House Republicans scuttle the measure when former president Trump told them to. The Senate promptly passed a bill that didn’t have the border component. Rather than take it up, the House recessed.
Today, President Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris met with congressional leaders and urged them to pass the appropriations bills and the national security supplemental. But Biden, Harris, Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY), Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY), and House minority leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) all agree on the need to pass these measures immediately. The holdout is House speaker Johnson.
After the meeting, Schumer said the meeting on Ukraine was “one of the most intense” scenes he had ever seen in the Oval Office. "We said to the speaker, 'Get it done.' I told him this is one of the moments—I said I've been around here a long time. It's maybe four or five times that history is looking over your shoulder, and if you don't do the right thing, whatever the immediate politics are, you will regret it. I told him two years from now and every year after that, because really, it's in his hands."
For his part, Johnson said that “the House is actively pursuing and investigating all the various options” on the supplemental bill, “but again, the first priority of the country is our border and making sure it’s secure.”
Johnson appears to be working for Trump, who is strongly opposed to aid for Ukraine and likely intends to use immigration as a campaign issue.
But Trump is a poor choice to give control over United States security. Yesterday, Special Counsel Jack Smith responded to Trump’s motion to dismiss the charges against him associated with his stealing and hiding classified documents on the grounds that he was being treated differently than President Biden, who had also had classified documents in his possession but was not criminally charged.
Smith noted that while there have been many government officials who have accidentally or willfully kept classified documents, and even some who briefly resisted attempts to recover them, Trump’s behavior was unique. “He intentionally took possession of a vast trove of some of the nation’s most sensitive documents…and stored them in unsecured locations at his heavily trafficked social club.” Then, when the government tried to recover the documents, Trump “delayed, obfuscated, and dissembled,” finally handing over only “a fraction” of those in his possession. No one, Smith wrote, “has engaged in a remotely similar suite of willful and deceitful criminal conduct and not been prosecuted.”
Perhaps to distract from Smith’s filing, House Committee on Oversight and Accountability chair James Comer (R-KY) and House Committee on the Judiciary chair Jim Jordan (R-OH) today subpoenaed information from Special Counsel Robert Hur’s investigation into Biden’s handling of documents. Hur’s report exonerated the president and showed such contrast between Trump's behavior and Biden's full cooperation with officials that Smith used material from it in his filing.
Comer and Jordan are likely also eager to find new material against Biden after the man who provided the key evidence in their impeachment attempt turned out to be working with Russian intelligence agents and was recently indicted for lying and creating a false record.
Since this year is a leap year, Congress has three days to pass the first four of the appropriations measures or to find another workaround before March 1, when parts of the government shut down. As Schumer said, those measures, along with the national security supplemental bill, are now in Speaker Johnson’s hands.
