New GOP laws invite violence, empower lunatics
Leonard Leo is a freak who breaks the law.
Welcome to a Friday edition of Progress Report.
Just like DC itself, most of the hyper-online political commentariat exists in a bubble. Their worlds are ordered by partisanship and ideology, politics pre-sorted by race and class, rocked by any deviation. Sadly, national politics is based more on vibes than statistics or ideological consistency, and The Wall Street Journal’s most recent presidential poll of six swing states proves it. A few head-scratchers:
Half of voters say that Donald Trump would be better at protecting democracy than Joe Biden. How? Sure, Biden failed to make much progress on the issue, he’s also never tried to overturn an election or stoke a coup.
Voters endorse economic conditions in their home states and are relatively pleased with their financial situations, including investment portfolios. At the same time, they are convinced that the national economy is going to shit.
Trump has a 51% approval rating in those states right now, whereas he left office in 2021 with a historically low national mark of 34%.
What could explain these phenomena? Faulty polling, possibly, but they’re not much different than past responses. It’s at least partly a lingering remnant of the Reagan era, when the government was cast as the center of evil conspiracies.
I’ve spent all week working on a story about the Key Bridge collapse in Baltimore, where we spoke to community members and workers about how they’re trying to survive, which has provided me a bit more insight.
One guy, a military vet who worked at the since-departed Bethlehem Steel mill for decades and looks like Sam Elliott’s Scrappy Doo, told us that “the government is the most corrupt organized crime in the United States.”
It was an obvious pivot to the far-right, until it wasn’t. John also repeatedly expressed great pain on behalf of the immigrants who were killed in the collapse and preached the importance of multiracial working class solidarity in the face of corporate and conservative divide-and-conquer strategies.
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Republicans in Georgia last week approved a major new voter suppression bill that received little attention but will considerably alter election administration there. Passed on a party line vote just hours before the end of Georgia’s legislative session, the bill pulls together a number of disparate provisions, including one that will make it easier to successfully challenge the validity of other peoples’ voter registrations.
With guidelines geared toward punishing lower-income residents, the new law could super-charge an effort by Republican activists who have already challenged more than 100,000 voter registrations over the past few years. While a vast majority of those challenges have lodged by just a handful of right-wing kooks, a combination of the new law, a recent federal court decision, and shoddy new technology are sure to lure a much larger army of conservatives to attack the rights of neighbors, co-workers, and anyone else deemed unlikely to vote for GOP candidates.
Registration challenges have proliferated across the country since 2020, causing confusion for local residents and a nightmare for county election administrators. It has been particularly troublesome in Michigan, another state teeming with conspiracy theorists armed with algorithms that always seem to target voters in urban areas.
Michigan’s Democratic secretary of state, Jocelyn Benson, recently instructed various county clerks to re-register the more than 1100 voters that they’d been pressured into purging, foiling months of work by conservative activists. Yet there is little doubt that the volume of challenges, increasingly fueled by anti-immigrant conspiracy theories, will only continue to grow, both in Michigan and in states where election administration is not overseen by the author of the book State Secretaries of State: Guardians of the Democratic Process.
In fact, the conservative dominance of the federal judiciary could soon open the floodgates to resident-on-resident challenges even in states run by enthusiastic guardians of the democratic process. A judge sided with the conservative Voter Reference Foundation this week in the group’s lawsuit to force New Mexico to publicly release its voter registration data, which the VRF wants to upload to a website that currently contains the data of 32 other states. The organization is run by Gina Swoboda, chair of the Arizona GOP.
The Georgia law, lawsuits, and broader boom in voter registration challenges are part of an insidious trend tied to the GOP’s embrace of dehumanizing rhetoric and incitements of violence against culture war bogeymen. Through both legislation and media saturation, Republicans are orienting their supporters toward actively policing, reporting, and sometimes even punishing their neighbors.
Once shunned by party leaders, a network of disaffected, armed-to-the-teeth militias are in many states invited to “monitor elections,” casting suspicious eyes on and intimidating their fellow voters. The chances of voter fraud, again, are infinitesimal, but that’s beside the point. The same vigilance was encouraged by the Texas Republicans who backed SB 8, the anti-abortion law that encouraged bounty hunters to report and sue anybody who helped a woman get an abortion.
The fall of Roe v. Wade allowed the state to pass a more straight-forward and draconian ban, but Texas lawmakers continue to work hard to provide new opportunities for reactionary cranks to snitch on neighbors.
In February 2022, Texas AG Ken Paxton announced that allowing a child to receive gender-affirming care constituted child abuse, at which point Gov. Greg Abbott encouraged Texans to squeal on parents who loved their children. A federal appeals court just days ago blocked Paxton’s criminalization of good parenting, the same fate that befell a law there that rewarded bounty hunters for reporting drag shows.
Drag queens may now technically be allowed in libraries, but they may not have many books to read to kids. Remarkably, states continue to pass laws that allow and incentivize individuals to report books that make them uncomfortable.
LEONARD WEIRDO: After 40 years of far-right zealots slowly shifting America’s political gravity, a swelling tidal wave of fascism now threatens what remains of our democracy.
The New York Times on Wednesday reported that Leonard Leo, the conservative power player who was Donald Trump’s judicial guru, has assembled a $2 billion fund intended to help Trump win in November and then refashion the federal government into a feckless fiefdom of ideological extremists and reactionary billionaires.
The report was complete with a roster of prominent donors and lunatic movement operatives who are building giant war chests with his fundraising network.
One of them is Stephen Miller, the scrotum-faced racist wunderkind who drove Trump’s immigration policy and is now running the America First Legal Foundation, which manufactures culture war grievance lawsuits.
The firm uses Twitter, now teeming with groyper under the stewardship of Elon Musk, to solicit complaints from white people deluded enough to blame DEI for their failure to get hired or promoted at Disney and shameless enough to join a federal civil rights lawsuit against the company.
The story, which also had details of Leo’s clear personal financial misconduct, should have been a blockbuster, and in the past, something this big and frankly terrifying would have been picked up by news outlets all across the country. It would have served as the basis for high-profile investigations and become a liability that those involved would have to quickly address.
In 2024, it hardly got any attention at all, bred no crisis, and will likely slide out of public view within a week.
Sadly, I can’t say I’m all that surprised, because conservatives — with the help of many Democrats — have made themselves immune to consequences over the last few decades, as if the expectation of evil reduces its impact.
Last week, I uncovered video of Leonard Leo delivering a speech (see above) last year in which he unleashed an angry diatribe of Christian nationalist bile and reactionary resentment, which should have caused serious questions about the legal agenda that he pushes through the judiciary. Instead, it was mostly crickets.
Naturally, there also has been little coverage of the latest judicial crisis unfolding in the United States. Last month, the Judicial Conference of the United States, the body of the top judges that oversees the federal judiciary, ordered an end to the manipulative practice of forum shopping.
Far-right legal groups had been using it for years now. There is no usefulness used to ensure that super-reactionary who they knew would be sympathetic to their reactionary lawsuits, especially Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk, the zealot who is trying to try to take down and medicated abortion is the way to go. Mitch McConnell, the clown prince orchestrator of the right-wing judiciary, urged courts and judges not to comply, which. Already, the infamous 5th circuit is doing just that, portending a much bigger battle.
NETANYABOOOOO: As recently as February, people — including progressive Jews — who criticized Israel were being called antisemitic by op-ed columnists, politicians, and rich weirdos obsessed with college campuses.
It’s a small mercy, but things are really starting to shift, but on the outside and in.
Last month, a Gallup poll found that only 36% of Americans approved of Israel’s onslaught in Gaza, down from 50% in November. Facing stiff headwinds, the White House responded by doing what it usually does: more of the same.
The administration decided to send Israel billions of dollars worth of weapons and fighter jets, shrugging off the 33,000+ dead, famine gripping Gaza, and the Netanyahu regime’s blatant international laws. The act was immoral. The timing was terrible.
Then the IDF fired one missile after another at a convoy of relief workers for Chef José Andrés’s World Central Kitchen, killing seven of them, including one American.
On Monday night, I predicted that it would mark an inflection point in the public’s perception of the war, which is exactly what has happened. Even some prominent Bush-era neocons began calling for change. And on Thursday, Biden supposedly told Netanyahu, during an angry and tense phone call, that he had to cut the shit or risk not getting any more of those weapons.
The pressure from Congress is also ramping up, with more than 70 House members, including Nancy Pelosi, sending the president a letter demanding an investigation into the WCK murders. If the country votes to attack Iran, Israel will almost immediately began opening up another aid shipping lane to Gaza, which is a small mercy underscoring the power that the US could yield on any country.
Biden had no intention of going this route, but public pressure is demanding it. Netanyahu, meanwhile, just got challenged to a September election. Remember, nobody is truly untouchable.
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