Conservative grifters caught red-handed

Good ballot initiative and Supreme Court news, too

Welcome to a Monday night edition of Progress Report.

Donald Trump was scheduled to join Elon Musk in a Twitter live broadcast earlier this evening, which went about as well as you’d expect a conversation between two spoiled morons on a broken platform would go. Here’s what tonight’s trending topics looked like:

The conversation eventually got underway, allowing Trump to debut a strange new lisp that sounded like Daffy Duck had a dental procedure and then called into New York sports talk radio. Beyond that, the website ordeal was the most entertaining part of the event. Musk claimed that the tech failure was a result of a “massive DDOS attack” on Twitter (again, I won’t call it X), an excuse that multiple staffers immediately shot down.

The screw-up was more likely a product of Musk’s having fired most of Twitter’s engineering staff and having nobody around to properly test or fix the stream before it became an embarrassment.

Then again, Ron DeSantis also experienced Elon Musk’s digital amateur hour when he launched his doomed presidential campaign last summer, which has me looking past the tech-based explanations. While not particularly spiritual or conspiracy-minded, I’m becoming open to the possibility that the internet is sentient and has been trying to protect us from exposure to such toxic stupidity.

Now we’ve gotten our nightly circus update out of the way, let’s get to the news.

Note: To make this work as accessible as possible, I’ve lowered the price for a paid subscription back down to Substack’s $5 minimum. If you can’t afford that right now, please email me and I’ll put you on the list for free. Every paid subscription makes it easier for me to comp one while becoming sustainable.

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Inconvenient truths: Republican Senator and GOP vice presidential nominee JD Vance got himself caught in a stupid lie on Sunday during an interview with Margaret Brennan on CBS’s Face the Nation.

Asked about the many times he‘s dismissed powerful women as “childless cat ladies,” Vance sought to reframe the comments as indicative of his supposed support for pro-family policies.

"I'd love to see a child tax credit that's $5,000 per child," Vance said. "President Trump has been on the record for a long time supporting a bigger child tax credit, and I think you want it to apply to all American families."

A $5000 child tax credit would be 150% more than the historic credit that Democrats passed in 2021, which temporarily cut child poverty in half. It’d be even larger than the expanded child tax credit that the Senate voted down less than two weeks ago — a vote that Vance skipped for campaign rallies.

Republicans block help to 16 million poor kids

Vance accused the Democrats of using it as a show vote, but show votes only exist when the other side refuses to even consider a worthy idea. If Vance really cared about expanding the assistance to low-income families, he would have been in DC to whip his GOP colleagues to vote for it — he may never have more power in the Senate than he does now.

Brennan, who deals with politics more than policy, was too quick to accept the idea that Democrats were holding a simple show vote. But by far the biggest offender here was the CBS digital editor who wrote the headline for the story based on the exchange, as they once again gave prominence to Vance’s lie and buried the truth further down.

When a parent who doesn’t follow the ins and outs of Washington legislation (or doesn’t read Progress Report) sees this, they are going to simply think that wow, JD Vance wants to give me a big check, when the truth is the exact opposite.

Supreme Court: If it weren’t already obvious, new polling indicates that the American people do not hold the same esteem for our August institutions as certain powerful Democrats in DC (I’m talking about you, Dick Durbin).

A new survey from USA Today found that 76% of Americans are in favor of enacting a binding code of ethics on Supreme Court justices that would include a mandate to report gifts, withdraw from political activity, and recuse from cases in which they or their spouses have conflicts of interests. There is overwhelming support for an ethics code across the ideological and partisan spectrum, with approval from 70% of Republicans, 76% of independents, and 89% of Democrats. 

After years of holding out, President Biden proposed that Congress adopt a code of ethics for the court last month.

Relatedly, Americans really do not like Clarence Thomas, who is both the longest-serving and most brazenly corrupt justice. After a year of being regularly exposed for accepting enormous gifts, financial support, vacations, and private plane rides from far-right billionaires, Thomas earned a 42% unfavorable rating, with just 27% of respondents viewing him favorably. He’s so corrupt that only half of Republicans approve of him

President Biden’s other major proposal, an 18-year single-term limit for justices, also has the support of a majority of Americans, albeit a somewhat slimmer segment of them. All told, 63% of respondents were into the idea, led by 83% of Democrats and 61% of independents. Half of Republicans supported the idea, which is better than anticipated given the size of the GOP majority.

The ideas don’t poll as well when they are associated with Biden, but I think even chocolate ice cream or puppies would lose a few points if voters were reminded that Joe liked them. Nonetheless, it wouldn’t hurt Vice President Kamala Harris to talk up the importance of the court, the stakes going forward, and the need for reform when speaking to voters.

More than 80% of poll respondents said that the president’s power to nominate justices will play a large role in how they vote, with 70% of Democrats calling it very important.

Nothing like a little bit of validation for all my rants.

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North Dakota: The people of North Dakota will once again vote on whether to legalize recreational marijuana.

The rest of this post, with stories about key ballot initiatives, workers’ rights, abortion rights, explosive revelations about Ron DeSantis and a prominent fellow Republican’s latest grift, and a MAGA hero going to jail, is for premium subscribers.