<The Republican Party was blasted Sunday for “sleepwalking through the past seven years” and jumping to “slapdash schemes” in a panicked effort to stop Donald Trump from being its nominee.

“They should be panicked,” wrote Jennifer Rubin in the Washington Post.

She went on: “Nervous Republicans are reduced to pleading with Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin to enter the race, but there’s no sign yet he would or, if he did, that he forcefully would attack former president Donald Trump or that others would drop out.

“In a Post Opinions essay on Thursday, [CBS News’ Rob] Costa reported on a planned gathering of insiders next month. 'It is the latest slapdash scheme in a long search for a standard-bearer and a portrait of the powerlessness so many Republicans feel as Trump plows ahead, shrugging off criminal indictments and outrage over rhetoric they fear is growing dark and dangerous.'"

And she said it was exactly how the party reacted in 2015, when Trump’s rise was ignored until it was too late to do anything about.

“This is what comes from Republicans sleepwalking through the past seven years and refusing to dump Trump when multiple opportunities arose,” Rubin wrote.

“...It’s what comes from accommodating his tantrums, including provoking a government shutdown while running an impeachment inquiry (the first hearing of which was characterized by a number of Republicans as a disaster) even Republicans’ go-to legal hack Jonathan Turley threw cold water on. It’s what comes from placing hope in a Florida governor who is extreme, unlikeable and untested on the national stage.”

So, she said, the GOP was now left with the choice of Trump or “a list of challengers so hapless and unlikable that the debates have come to resemble the “Star Wars” bar scene.”

She finished: “Truth be told, there might be no solution to the GOP’s quandary. And that — not Vice President Harris, not Biden’s age, not premature polls and not pointless debates — should be the election campaign story.”>

<In a Sunday, October 1 op-ed, New York Times opinion columnist David French posits that Christian nationalism may not be "serious," but it is "very dangerous."

He argues, "It's not a serious position to argue that this diverse, secularizing country will shed liberal democracy for Catholic or Protestant religious rule. But it's exceedingly dangerous and destabilizing when millions of citizens believe that the fate of the church is bound up in the person they believe is the once and future president of the United States."

French notes that upon seeing "a tremendous surge of interest in Christian nationalism" immediately following the January 6, 2021 attack on the United States Capitol, "I started to hear questions I'd never heard before: What is Christian nationalism and how is it different from patriotism?"

The columnist cites Baylor University church history professor Thomas Kidd, who argues, "Actual Christian nationalism is more a visceral reaction than a rationally chosen stance."

French responds to Kidd's argument saying, "He's right. Essays and books about philosophy and theology are important for determining the ultimate health of the church, but on the ground or in the pews? They're much less important than emotion, prophecy and spiritualism."

He adds:

That's why the Trump fever won't break. That's why even the most biblically based arguments against Trump fall on deaf ears. That’s why the very act of Christian opposition to Trump is often seen as a grave betrayal of Christ himself. In 2024, this nation will wrestle with Christian nationalism once again, but it won't be the nationalism of ideas. It will be a nationalism rooted more in emotion and mysticism than theology. The fever may not break until the 'prophecies' change, and that is a factor that is entirely out of our control.>

<Senator Steve Daines has warned Kari Lake against dwelling on the past ahead of her Senate bid.

Lake will launch her campaign for the Senate seat held by independent Kyrsten Sinema with a rally on October 10, the Wall Street Journal reported on Thursday. She will enter the Arizona race as a front-runner for the GOP nomination after her loss in last year's race for governor.

Lake, a staunch ally of former President Donald Trump, has refused to acknowledge her loss to Arizona Governor Katie Hobbs, despite courts repeatedly rejecting her lawsuits. She took a leaf out of Trump's playbook by using claims of election fraud to fundraise and build support among Republicans.

But Daines, chairman of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, which is devoted to electing Republicans to the Senate, said the disappointing showing in last year's midterm elections shows voters aren't interested in rehashing the past.

In 2022, voters widely ejected Trump-backed candidates in battleground states, including Arizona, who had promoted the former president's false claims of fraud in the 2020 election.

"I think one thing we've learned from 2022 is voters do not want to hear about grievances from the past," Daines said in an interview with CNN.

"They want to hear about what you're going to do for the future. And if our candidates stay on that message of looking down the highway versus the rearview mirror, I think they'll be a lot more successful particularly in their appeal to independent voters, which usually decide elections."

The Montana Republican praised Lake as "very gifted," but said it's "going to be important for her to look to the future and not so much the past."

The Arizona race is a top target for Republicans looking to take control of the Senate, which Democrats currently hold with a 51-49 majority that includes Sinema, who left the Democratic Party last year after frustrating her Democratic colleagues with her opposition to their priorities.

Sinema hasn't announced whether she will seek a second term in the Senate, and the only major Democrat in the race is Rep. Ruben Gallego. Republican Mark Lamb, the sheriff of Pinal County, is also in the race.

Lake has repeatedly hinted at a Senate run in recent social media posts.

"Arizona has two TERRIBLE options running for Senate right now," Lake wrote in a post on X, formerly Twitter, last week.

In the post, she called Gallego "an unhinged Marxist" who "believes that border security is racist" and said that while Sinema claims to be an independent, she "votes with Biden more often than Bernie Sanders does."

Lake added: "Arizonans want something different. They want a Senator who will put them first.">

<Conservative Justice Clarence Thomas for the first time recused himself from a case involving the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol by then-President Donald Trump's supporters as the Supreme Court on Monday rejected an appeal brought by former Trump legal adviser John Eastman.

Thomas, under fire over claims of ethical lapses, had participated last year when the court rejected Trump's bid to prevent White House documents from being handed over to the House committee investigating Jan. 6.

Then, Thomas was the only justice to signal support for Trump's legal arguments.

This time, Thomas stepped aside in the case involving Eastman, who had served as a law clerk to the justice. As is typical for justices, Thomas did not explain why he recused himself.

Eastman's case also involved the now-defunct Jan. 6 committee, centering on the former law professor's efforts to prevent his former employer, Chapman University, from handing over emails.

Eastman had pushed the discredited argument that then-Vice President Mike Pence had the power to refuse to certify the 2020 presidential election results.

He has also been indicted over efforts to overturn the 2020 election results in Georgia.

Eastman recently vouched for Thomas following various news reports alleging that the justices had fallen short of ethical standards.

Thomas earlier had faced criticism for failing to recuse himself from Trump's Jan. 6 case because his wife, conservative political activist Virginia “Ginni” Thomas, had been a vocal supporter of Trump’s efforts to overturn the election.

Court rejects 14th Amendment case

In another Trump-related case, the court on Monday rejected a long-shot legal challenge seeking to block Trump from being elected president again.

The justices turned away an appeal filed by John Castro, a write-in Republican candidate for president, who represented himself in the case and has filed similar lawsuits.

Castro argued in his appeal that Trump is ineligible to be on the ballot under the Constitution's 14th Amendment because of his "aid and comfort to the convicted criminals and insurrectionists that violently attacked our United States Capitol on January 6, 2021."

It is just one of several cases around the country seeking to block Trump from the ballot by invoking the 14th Amendment, which states that no one shall hold any office who “engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the [United States], or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof.”

Although some legal scholars have backed the argument, others have dismissed it, pointing out the difficulty of enforcing the constitutional provision and questioning whether Trump's actions rose to the level of "insurrection or rebellion."

Trump is facing criminal charges for his role in events leading up to Jan. 6 and was also impeached by the then-Democratic controlled House of Representatives in the days after the episode. The Senate acquitted Trump after falling short of the 67 votes needed to convict him.

Although the Supreme Court could end up weighing in on the issue before the 2024 election, Castro's case seemed like an unlikely contender in part because after losing in a federal district court in Florida, he filed his appeal directly at the high court instead of going through the normal appeals process.

The judge who handled the case was Judge Aileen Cannon, a Trump appointee who attracted scrutiny for her role overseeing another criminal case involving the former president, in which he has been accused of unlawfully retaining government documents at his Mar-a-Lago residence after leaving office.

Even before the Supreme Court rejected Castro's appeal, it had signaled a lack of interest in the case by not even asking Trump's legal team to file a response.>

<Political extremists have been radicalized to the point that it is causing random acts of violence all over the country as people turn on their neighbors, warned the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace's Rebecca Kleinfeld in an interview with Salon Monday.

On one hand, Kleinfeld argued, we are seeing less of the sort of organized rioting that grabbed headlines through much of the Trump years, from the neo-Nazi Charlottesville "Unite the Right" rally to the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol — in large part because far-right activists have become paranoid and believe any large gathering within their movement is an FBI false flag.

This happened in August, when Trump surrendered for arrest at the Fulton County Jail, and a rally for Trump at the building was hampered by paranoia among his supporters.

But they haven't abandoned their violence, she continued — they've just directed it at their own communities.

"We are seeing people kill neighbors over politics or murder business owners who display a pride flag," said Kleinfeld, referencing a recent shooting in Lake Arrowhead, California.

"In other countries, when someone runs a car into a peaceful crowd, it's almost always a rare international terrorist event. In America, that has happened over 150 times since Heather Heyer was killed at the Unite the Right rally. Political violence and credible threats have become small scale, hyperlocal, across the nation, and extremely frequent." Moreover, she added, this violence isn't just against Democrats, but against "traditional" Republicans in a power struggle for control of the GOP itself.

While this is prominent among right-wing extremists, noted Kleinfeld, there have been similar cases of left-wing violence as well, mainly in attacks against property, and such incidents have doubled since 2016 — however, she said, this is from a "much lower point."

What's important to understand, Kleinfeld said, is that there have been surges in violence of this type in the past as well, like in the Revolutionary War period and in the 1960s — they tend to coincide with drops in public trust in government and civic institutions. And it boosts not just violence but also general anti-social behavior – she referenced Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-CO) and her theater escapades.

"Society and civilization are actually very fragile things — as anti-social behavior gets normalized and people 'let it all hang out', as it were, all forms of violence tend to rise," warned Kleinfeld. "We are probably on the verge of that again, and this MAGA political faction and left-wing illiberalism pushing people towards it will be to blame for the deaths and dystopian cities we are going to have for the next few decades.">

<Never cared for the smell of Napalm in the morning myself. Perhaps if used under the right conditions...

<Former federal judge Michael Luttig ripped The Washington Post’s Monday op-ed against invoking the 14th Amendment to disqualify former President Trump from the 2024 election, calling it “perhaps the most journalistically incompetent and irresponsible” piece he has ever read on the U.S. Constitution.

Section 3 of the 14th Amendment, ratified in 1868 in the aftermath of the Civil War, includes a clause that states no person shall hold elected office who “engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the United States.”

Several experts, lawmakers and activists have argued this clause could disqualify Trump from the 2024 ballot for his alleged actions in connection to the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol. Federal prosecutors have alleged the former president stood at the center of a campaign to block the certification of votes on Jan. 6.

Luttig took aim at the paper’s interpretation of the amendment.

“This editorial today by @washingtonpost is perhaps the most journalistically incompetent and irresponsible editorial on the Constitution of the United States and a question of constitutional law by a major national newspaper that I ever remember reading,” Luttig wrote Monday in a post on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter.

Luttig, a conservative appointed by former President George H.W. Bush who has repeatedly criticized Trump’s false election claims, claimed the op-ed titled “The 14th Amendment can’t save the country from Donald Trump” misquoted Section 3 of the 14th Amendment.

The provision has already been cited in two lawsuits in Minnesota and Colorado seeking to keep Trump off the ballot.

The Post’s op-ed addresses several points of uncertainty over the provision, writing that the answers “in most instances, aren’t terribly clear.”

Luttig was responding to the beginning of the piece, wherein the Post’s editorial board calls the case for invoking the 14th Amendment “intriguing,” but that “banking on an arcane paragraph to protect the country from a second Trump term would be foolish.”

“The editorial inauspiciously begins by ‘misquoting’ the Disqualification Clause of Section 3 of the Fourteenth Amendment itself, next dismissively pronouncing the argument for disqualification made by the nation’s foremost constitutional scholars as little more than intriguing and then admonishing the American public that ‘banking on an arcane paragraph to protect the country from a second Trump term would be foolish’ of them,” Luttig wrote in a later post on X.

Luttig also argued the Post does not actually explain why the American public should not be relying on the 14th Amendment.

“But it is probably because, as we see in the newspaper’s buried cynical lede in the concluding paragraph,” Luttig wrote. “The [Washington Post] fears the current Supreme Court will never interpret the Constitution to disqualify the former president, no matter what the Constitution says.”

Luttig was referencing the final paragraph of the op-ed that argued invoking the 14th Amendment would make its way to the Supreme Court, where the chance of Trump’s disqualification being affirmed “seem low,” and that the nation would be “better off” relying on votes to keep the former president out of the White House.

“One would at least expect that serious reasoning would have to follow in support of its warning that the American public’s resort to and reliance upon the Fourteenth Amendment would be ‘foolish,'” Luttig wrote. “Instead, what follows borders on, if it does not pass into, the silly and absurd.”

Luttig’s criticism follows an op-ed he co-wrote for The Atlantic in August where he encouraged the use of the 14th Amendment to keep Trump off the ballot.

Section 3 of the amendment has rarely been used since the period immediately following the Civil War and has never been used to disqualify a presidential candidate.

Trump has dismissed the argument, claiming it has “no legal basis or standing” in connection to the 2024 election.>

<The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday declined to hear an appeal by two lawyers contesting a $187,000 financial sanction imposed on them by a judge who found they made recklessness and frivolous claims in litigation they brought seeking to overturn former President Donald Trump's 2020 election loss as fraudulent.

The justices turned away the appeal by Ernest Walker and Gary Fielder, who had filed a lawsuit in Colorado accusing voting equipment company Dominion Voting Systems, Meta's Facebook and the Center for Tech and Civic Life nonprofit organization of working to steal the election from Trump. The judge who dismissed the suit ordered Walker and Fielder to pay the legal fees of the parties they sued.

The justices announced their action on the first day of their new nine-month term.

Trump's campaign and allies filed a raft of failed lawsuits in numerous states seeking to undo the Republican businessman-turned-politician's loss to Democrat Joe Biden. The suits were based on Trump's false claims that the election was stolen from him through widespread voting fraud. Walker and Fielder in their lawsuit represented eight voters from five states.

U.S. Magistrate Judge N. Reid Neureiter in August 2021 imposed the sanctions on Walker and Fielder over the suit that was filed in federal court in December 2020, the month after the election.

"This lawsuit was filed with a woeful lack of investigation into the law and, under the circumstances, the facts," Neureiter wrote. "The lawsuit put into or repeated into the public record highly inflammatory and damaging allegations that could have put individuals' safety in danger. Doing so without a valid legal basis or serious independent personal investigation into the facts was the height of recklessness."

The lawsuit, the judge concluded, was "one enormous conspiracy theory" and arguments made by the lawyers "crossed the border into the frivolous."

The Denver-based 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals last year affirmed the sanction based on the "inherent power" of judges and also a federal law that states that a lawyer can be held liable for costs for "unreasonably and vexatiously" extending a court case.

The 10th Circuit in its ruling said "an attorney is expected to exercise judgment, and must 'regularly re-evaluate the merits' of claims and 'avoid prolonging meritless claims.'"

Trump's allies made false claims that Denver-based Dominion's ballot-counting machines were used to manipulate the election in favor of Biden. Fox Corp and Fox News, which aired those claims, in April settled a defamation lawsuit by Dominion for $787.5 million, averting a trial.

Fielder and Walker, in asking the Supreme Court to hear their case, said in a legal filing that they "behaved with decorum and timeliness. Every pleading was filed within the rules of professional conduct."

Fielder and Walker told the justices that "by sanctioning counsel in this regard, citizens and lawyers will both hesitate to vindicate their rights, and the rights of others in similar situations."

Dominion and the other defendants waived any response to the petition by Fielder and Walker to the Supreme Court.

Fielder and Walker were among other lawyers who either were hit with sanctions or faced attorney-misconduct complaints for legal work on lawsuits challenging Trump's loss. Some of those pending sanctions cases involve lawyers more closely in Trump's orbit, including his former counsel Rudolph Giuliani and ally Sidney Powell.>

<Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis has trying to convince far-right white evangelicals that he is more anti-abortion than 2024 presidential frontrunner Donald Trump, noting that Trump criticized him for signing a six-week abortion ban into law. So far, however, it isn't working: Polls released in late September find second-place candidate DeSantis trailing Trump by 52 percent (New York Post) or 51 percent (Morning Consult).

Trump is anti-abortion, bragging that the three justices he appointed to the U.S. Supreme Court — Brett Kavanaugh, Amy Coney Barrett and Neil Gorsuch — all voted to overturn Roe v. Wade in 2022. But he has criticized Florida's six-week abortion ban as too severe, fearing it will alienate swing voters.

In a report published on October 2, Religion News' Jack Jenkins reports that Trump's position on abortion is "raising frustration among anti-abortion activists and spurring his Republican primary opponents to try to peel away conservative religious voters from the former president."

Anti-abortion activist Abby Johnson told Religion News, "While there are a number of areas that both sides on the abortion issue can come to an agreement on, like paid maternity leave and childcare aid, there is no compromise on whether abortion should be legal or not. No specific number of weeks is acceptable past conception for those of us who believe in the sanctity of life."

Johnson added, "Any candidate who is truly pro-life should be able to vow to sign any pro-life legislation that comes across their desk. President Trump's disappointing comments only serve as an avenue for pro-lifers to find another candidate to support."

But the Rev. Robert Jeffress, a Trump supporter and Religious Right activist, defended Trump during a recent appearance on NBC News' "Meet the Press" — saying he considers Trump "very pro-life" but is merely acknowledging "a political reality."

March for Life President Jeanne Mancini, meanwhile, told Religion News, “There is no reason why any politician, particularly one who claims to be pro-life, cannot support lifesaving measures, with at least a minimum 15-week federal standard which protects children past the point at which they can feel pain. It is the right, compassionate and even popular thing to do.">

<Two of the most partisan judges in the country handed down an order last week that is hard to explain as anything other than an attempt to preserve Republican control of the US House of Representatives. The voting rights plaintiffs in this case, known as In re: Jeff Landry, already filed an emergency application in the Supreme Court asking the justices to lift this order.

It’s the latest effort by several of the most radical judges on the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, an increasingly rogue court dominated by Republican appointees, to manipulate the law in ways that benefit the Republican Party. The Supreme Court already plans to hear several cases this term where it is likely to reverse the Fifth Circuit, including a case where the Fifth Circuit declared an entire federal agency unconstitutional.

The Fifth Circuit’s order, handed down by Judges Edith Jones and James Ho, concerns a long-running lawsuit alleging that Louisiana’s congressional maps are an illegal racial gerrymander. In June 2022, a federal trial court agreed with the plaintiffs in this case, then known as Robinson v. Ardoin, and concluded that “the appropriate remedy in this context is a remedial congressional redistricting plan that includes an additional majority-Black congressional district” — one which would likely elect a Democrat to Congress.

Before that trial court’s order could take effect, however, the Supreme Court stepped in and temporarily blocked it — essentially putting the case on hold until the justices resolved a different racial gerrymandering suit, known as Allen v. Milligan, which challenged racially gerrymandered maps in Alabama. The Supreme Court ruled in June 2023 that Alabama’s maps are, indeed, illegal, and ordered that state to draw new maps that include a second Black congressional district.

Shortly thereafter, the Supreme Court lifted its hold on the Robinson litigation. Then the trial judge in that case scheduled a new hearing for Tuesday, October 3, which would have likely ended in the trial judge ordering Louisiana to either redraw its maps or accept court-drawn maps.

Now here’s the part where things take a weird turn: Last week, Jones and Ho abruptly ordered the trial judge to cancel the October 3 hearing. Their decision relies on a rarely used process known as a “writ of mandamus” which, under well-established legal rules, cannot even arguably be applied to this particular case.

This decision most likely won’t prevent the courts from ordering Louisiana to draw new maps at some point in the future, but it could delay the case long enough to leave the current, GOP-friendly maps in place during the 2024 election cycle.

Worse, Jones and Ho stepped in despite the fact that a different panel of three Fifth Circuit judges was already scheduled to hear the Robinson case on Friday, October 6 (this Friday hearing concerns whether the trial court’s June 2022 order was correctly decided). Notably, the Friday panel is significantly more moderate than Jones or Ho — it includes Judge Carolyn King, a Carter appointee, and Judge Leslie Southwick, a center-right Bush appointee who sometimes disagrees with the Fifth Circuit’s MAGA faction. (The third judge on this Friday panel, Jennifer Elrod, is a hardliner similar to Jones or Ho.)

So Jones and Ho didn’t simply issue a legally inexplicable order sabotaging a court proceeding that was likely to cost the Republican Party a seat in the US House, they also did so despite the fact that a different, more moderate panel of their own Fifth Circuit colleagues already had jurisdiction over the same case.

A “writ of mandamus” is a highly unusual court order that appellate courts may hand down to block truly egregious errors by a lower court. As the Supreme Court held in Will v. United States (1967), “only exceptional circumstances amounting to a judicial ‘usurpation of power’ will justify the invocation of this extraordinary remedy.”

Indeed, the Supreme Court has warned that a writ of mandamus may issue only if the party seeking it has “no other adequate means to attain the relief he desires,” and only if that party has a “clear and indisputable” right to such extraordinary relief....>

<....Nevertheless, Jones and Ho invoked mandamus to block one of the most routine orders that a trial judge may hand down: A decision scheduling a hearing in a long-running lawsuit that has been on that judge’s docket for more than a year.

To justify this relief, the two MAGA judges essentially accused the trial judge of rushing this case — either by not giving the state legislature enough time to attempt to redraw its maps on its own, or by not giving the state’s lawyers enough time to prepare for the October 3 hearing.

But neither of these allegations are plausible. The trial judge initially ruled in June 2022 that Louisiana’s maps are legally suspect and should be redrawn — so the state legislature has had nearly 16 months to redraw the maps if it wanted to do so. Similarly, while the Supreme Court’s decision to temporarily pause this case gave the state’s lawyers a brief reprieve from litigating it, the justices ended that pause in June 2023. So the state has known for more than three months that it needed to prepare for an eventual hearing in this case.

Moreover, even if the trial judge had actually rushed this case, that still would not justify mandamus relief. Again, a writ of mandamus may only issue if the party seeking it has “no other adequate means to attain the relief” they seek. To the extent that Louisiana believes that the trial judge erred in her initial decision concluding that the maps should be redrawn, the state can present those arguments to the more moderate panel that will hear the Robinson case on Friday. Additionally, if the state disagrees with whatever the trial judge orders it to do after the October 3 hearing, it can also appeal that decision to the Fifth Circuit.

There is, to put it simply, no justification whatsoever for Jones and Ho getting involved in this lawsuit.

So what’s really at stake in this case?

In the long term, Jones and Ho’s attempt to insert themselves into a lawsuit that they have no business hearing is unlikely to matter. If the Supreme Court invalidates their mandamus order, the October 3 hearing will proceed (possibly at a later date if the Court does not move very quickly), and the litigation will advance as it normally would through appeals courts.

Alternatively, if the Supreme Court backs Jones and Ho’s attempt to sabotage the case, Louisiana’s appeal before the King/Southwick panel will still proceed, and the trial court will most likely be able to reschedule the October 3 hearing at some future date — though that may be weeks or months from now.

It’s unclear how the Court will react to this case. Although Jones and Ho’s decision is clearly erroneous, the Supreme Court is dominated by Republican appointees. And some of the justices have expressed concerns that the Court is too willing to grant relief on its “shadow docket,” an expedited process that allows the Court to weigh into cases that have not received full briefing or oral argument. Jones and Ho’s order is currently before the justices on the shadow docket.

In any event, while the long-term implications of this case are minimal, the potential consequences for the 2024 election are enormous. The Supreme Court has held that lower court judges should not hand down decisions enjoining a state’s election laws as an election draws close — and some justices have even suggested that lower courts may not issue such injunctions as much as nine months prior to an election.

So the Robinson plaintiffs need to secure a court order imposing new maps on Louisiana soon, or there is a high risk that they will have to wait until after the 2024 election before those maps go into effect. If they do not get such a court order soon, a US House seat that should have gone to a Black Democrat will likely go to a white Republican, at least for two years.

Jones and Ho, moreover, are two of the most unapologetically partisan judges in the entire federal judiciary. Jones is a former general counsel to the Texas Republican Party, and is known for a string of cruel decisions, such as one holding that a man could be executed despite the fact that his lawyer slept through much of his trial. Ho is a kind of judicial edgelord who makes Jones look measured and reasonable by comparison.

The most likely explanation for their mandamus decision, in other words, is that Jones and Ho want the Republican Party to control the US House of Representatives. And they are willing to ignore well-established constraints on their own power in order to maximize the likelihood of a Republican Congress.>

<Democrats and Republicans on Capitol Hill might not agree on much, but there was one belief that generated bipartisan consensus last week: The GOP’s first impeachment inquiry hearing was an embarrassing fiasco.

One senior Republican staffer described the proceedings as “an unmitigated disaster.” Another conceded that House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer and his staff “botched this bad.” Steve Bannon, meanwhile, slammed GOP members for being unprepared, while one of his guests said House Republicans “don’t know what they’re doing at all.”

It was against this backdrop that Politico reported that some in the party were prepared to do more than just complain.

The same report, which has not been independently verified by MSNBC or NBC News, added that House Republicans privately agreed that “a ‘reset’ needs to happen.” It went on to note that Republican Rep. Dan Bishop of North Carolina is among those “pushing for a Jordan takeover.”

While GOP officials weigh their options, there are few angles to this that are worth keeping in mind.

The first is that Comer has earned the frustration of his allies. The Kentucky Republican has spent months overseeing a flailing crusade, making promises he couldn’t keep, holding hearings that undermined his own partisan efforts, and releasing ostensible “evidence” filled with factual errors.

Of course “people are just not happy.”

The second is that GOP insiders are mistaken if they think Jordan would excel where Comer has failed. Let’s not forget that the Ohioan’s conspiratorial “weaponization” committee has held all kinds of strange hearings, none of which has done Republicans any favors. Indeed, after one of his many underwhelming endeavors, Jordan confronted complaints from disappointed conservatives and headlines about his GOP-led crusade being “a dud.”

In April, in the aftermath of several Jordan missteps, one GOP aide who conceded that Jordan’s campaign was off to a “rocky start.”

Politico’s report from Friday quoted Republican saying that Jordan has been “tested on this stuff.” Perhaps. But is there any reason to believe the far-right Judiciary Committee chairman has passed any of these tests?

Finally, whether GOP insiders are prepared to grapple with this or not, maybe congressional Republicans are struggling with their impeachment effort targeting President Joe Biden because the Democrat hasn’t actually done anything wrong? Maybe shifting from one chairman to another would be irrelevant if there’s no underlying controversy worth examining?>

<The far-right group behind the legal effort to eliminate Roe v. Wade has its focus on a new target, according to a report.

Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF) killed the abortion legislation in the Supreme Court. It's also the group that tried to stop the FDA certification of the abortion pill mifepristone.

The New Yorker reported its next goals include fighting against LGBTQ freedoms and issues that the ACLU supports. Group members consider the ACLU their nemesis.

"For more than half a century, conservative Christians have decried the left’s ever-expanding demands for personal rights," said the report. "The right to free speech allowed pornography to permeate the culture. The right to freedom of conscience for atheists and religious minorities silenced school prayer. And the right to privacy was stretched to protect birth control, abortion, gay sex, and, eventually, same-sex marriage."

"In 2018, the organization’s lawyers drafted a Mississippi law banning most abortions after fifteen weeks of pregnancy; last year, A.D.F. successfully defended that law in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the case that overturned Roe," the report also said.

Critics of the ADF say that they're inventing fights to keep a disappearing culture war alive and well. For example, a Colorado website designer who won a case at the Supreme Court earlier this year over building a gay marriage wedding site was never asked to make such a site. In fact, she spoke to her pastor about going into business making wedding sites and her pastor told her to call the ADF.

"And A.D.F. routinely sends out bulletins urging churches and ministries to be on the lookout for 'sogis' — prohibitions of discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity," said The New Yorker. "An A.D.F. legal guide warns churches that such prohibitions 'are not designed for the innocent purpose of ensuring all people receive basic services'; rather, 'their practical effect is to legally compel Christians to accept, endorse, and even promote messages, ideas, and events that violate their faith.'”

They even have their own toll-free hotline number for aggrieved Christians to call for help.

The ADF and other far-right groups are now sounding the alarm that liberals want to change the gender of students. A lawyer for the ADF helped write the so-called "Don't Say Gay" law in Florida. The next state it's focusing on is West Virginia, where the group is working to ban trans athletes.

The reporter spoke with Kristen Waggoner, the group's chief executive and general counsel, about the debate over same-sex marriage and interracial marriage and asked why one can be blocked while the other can't. Waggoner claimed that in interracial marriage, the Supreme Court concluded in Loving v. Virginia that there were bans in place because "part of a whole system of laws were designed to subjugate a whole class of people out of group bigotry."

The report said the group argues being against same-sex marriage isn't bigotry, it's Christianity based on "the teachings of all the Abrahamic faiths."

The report noted that during the age of slavery, the Bible was used to justify the practice, claiming it was deeply rooted in the Abrahamic faiths. "And Abraham himself was polygamous," the report recalled.>

<Many supporters of Donald Trump and his Make America Great Again (MAGA) movement have expressed outrage that the former president's New York state fraud case will be decided by a judge and not a jury.

However, those upset by this manner of proceedings are missing a key fact: Trump's team made the decision for the case to be a bench trial without a jury.

Trump, along with his adult sons and their family business, is accused in a $250 million civil lawsuit brought by New York's attorney general, Letitia James, of inflating his net worth by billions of dollars to secure favorable loan terms from banks. James said Trump has exaggerated his wealth by more than $2 billion.

At the beginning of the trial on Monday, where Trump appeared in person, Judge Arthur Engoron said that "nobody asked for" a jury trial, meaning he alone will preside over the trial.

Mike Davis, a former chief counsel for nominations to Senate Judiciary Chairman Chuck Grassley who now heads the Article III Project (A3P), was among those who have complained about the lack of jury.

"The Democrat New York attorney general, Letitia James, had this Democrat judge simply rule that Trump committed fraud—no trial, no jury," Davis, who frequently voices support for Trump, said on Steven Bannon's War Room podcast last week.

Davis shared a clip of his War Room appearance on X (formerly Twitter) last Thursday, and numerous people pointed out in the comments section that it was Trump's attorneys who decided against having a jury. Last week, Engoron ruled that for years Trump had committed fraud about his real estate empire, in a phase of the case known as summary judgment.

When discussing that judgment on X, David Giglio—who unsuccessfully sought the GOP nomination for the U.S. House in California's 13th Congressional District—mistakenly said Engoron didn't allow Trump to have a jury.

"So let me get this straight...A left wing judge issued a summary judgement against Trump & concluded he 'defrauded' banks out of money via loans that he (checks notes) paid back in full w/interest?" Giglio posted last week. "No wonder the judge denied Trump a jury trial. Total [banana emoji] republic stuff."

Trump himself railed about the results of the summary judgment and the lack of a jury during a Wednesday post on his Truth Social platform.

"I have a Deranged, Trump Hating Judge, who RAILROADED this FAKE CASE through a NYS Court at a speed never seen before, refusing to let it go to the Commercial Division, where it belongs, denying me everything, No Trial, No Jury," he wrote.

Laurence Tribe, professor emeritus of constitutional law at Harvard, took exception with such comments from Trump.

"Manhattan Supreme Court Justice Arthur Engoron noted that 'nobody asked for' a jury trial. So Trump's complaints about being tried by Justice Engoron, in addition to being baseless, make no sense," Tribe wrote on X. "Had he wanted a trial by jury, he should've requested one."

Some have asserted that one of Trump's lawyers, attorney Alina Habba, forgot to ask for a jury. Trump's team has not commented on these reports.

"When the judge just informed your client that the only reason he doesn't get a jury trial is because you forgot to check the box to ask for one," Ron Filipkowski, editor-in-chief of the media outlet MeidasTouch, wrote on X in a post that included a photo of Habba at Monday's hearing.

In a separate message on X, Filipkowski noted that Trump has made disparaging comments about Engoron.

"I have to say it was brilliant for the stable genius to waive his right to a jury trial and have the case decided by a judge who you just said should be removed from the bench for criminal conduct," he wrote. "Hard to complain about a biased judge when you wanted him to decide the case."

Former federal prosecutor Harry Litman wrote on X that "it's incredibly easy to ask for a jury trial. You just check a box on a form.

"Hard to believe that Trump understood that his lawyers hadn't done it when he's been savaging the judge who is now the factfinder in his huge fraud trial," Litman said.

Democratic Representative Ted Lieu of California suggested Trump could have intentionally decided against a jury.

"The former President and his legal team likely concluded a jury would find he committed fraud," Lieu wrote on X. "This way Trump can keep falsely blaming the judge for the outcome."

When reached for comment, a spokesperson for Trump maintained the former president did not have the option of having a jury.

<Donald Trump's lawyers requested a delay in the Washington, D.C. case around the 2020 election overthrow and Jan. 6 attacks, saying they need more time to get security clearances to ensure they can access all of the documents in the case.

In a filing Monday, the Justice Department responded by telling the court that such a security clearance isn't necessary because few classified documents will be part of the trial.

Rather than respond to Trump's request for more time, Judge Tanya Chutkan on Tuesday simply set a deadline of Oct. 11 for all lawyers to have their clearance necessary to move forward.

Lawfare's Anna Bower posted the decision Tuesday morning demanding Trump lawyers John Lauro and Gregory Singer complete the tasks needed to apply for clearance by Wednesday of next week.

"The Notice shall also state whether the defense anticipates that any other of its members, whose assistance is reasonably required, will need to obtain a security clearance," Chutkan wrote.>

Is it not lovely? No drama, merely a simple order to comply. Give the Orange Prevaricator nothing for the inevitable appeal after taking it on the chin.

<House speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) is starting to look like he won't survive a challenge to his leadership.

Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL) has filed a motion to vacate, which McCarthy has said he plans to bring up for a vote Tuesday afternoon. And Democrats have said they will not vote present or vote in favor of tabling the motion -- which could doom the California Republican.

"Sources say the caucus is unified," reported the Washington Post's Leigh Ann Caldwell. "McCarthy’s actions on Jan 6, his trip to Mar a Lago, his attempt to discredit the Jan 6 Cmte, his reneging on debt limit deal and his actions this weekend are all the reasons."

House minority leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) has actively urged Democrats to vote against any procedural motion to delay the vote on Gaetz's measure, and he believes Democrats should vote to remove McCarthy as speaker after less than a year on the job.

Four Republican lawmakers have publicly committed to voting to oust McCarthy, and a handful of others say they're leaning in that direction.

McCarthy can only afford to lose five GOP votes if Democrats stand united against him.>

<When identifying the individuals most responsible for convincing supporters of Donald Trump that the 2020 election was stolen, no one surpasses Trump himself. But one could argue that the second person on the list is filmmaker and right-wing activist Dinesh D’Souza, whose 2022 film, “2000 Mules,” reinvigorated unsubstantiated allegations about voter fraud — and earned him an enormous sum of money in the process.

D’Souza’s fraud allegations were adapted from a group called True the Vote, which has been in the “election protection” industry for some time. The film alleges that cellphone geolocation data allowed True the Vote to identify a ring of people who collected and submitted ballots. The film doesn’t show this data, though, save for one map depicting a purported ballot “mule” near Atlanta. Instead, it relies on publicly available surveillance footage captured at ballot drop boxes, which D’Souza claimed in the movie and in an interview with The Washington Post depicted solely those who’d been identified as “mules” who visited numerous drop boxes.

There is literally no reason to believe any of this. No one has ever been identified as part of such a ring, despite the purported “evidence.” The surveillance footage never actually shows anyone going to more than one drop box to deposit a ballot. In fact, only rarely does it show anyone depositing more than one ballot. The map of a “mule” that it shows was fake, as True the Vote’s Gregg Phillips admitted in an email to The Post. The geolocation data used for True the Vote’s alleged analysis was not sufficiently precise to identify a visit to something as discretely located as a ballot drop box, even if they knew where at a location the boxes were located. True the Vote has declined to share its data publicly or make its alleged whistleblowers known to authorities, triggering state-level condemnation of their work.

And that’s just the technical side. D’Souza made other claims, like that he had estimates of how many ballots were being deposited on average, something he says could be determined from video analysis. That’s nonsense. But it was an important number because it let him present a purported scale of the fraud sufficient to show that Joe Biden didn’t actually win in 2020 — precisely the argument that his market was craving.

All of this still has currency. Despite repeated, robust debunkings of the film’s claims, Trump supporters continue to point to it as valid. Trump himself did so as recently as last month, telling NBC News’s Kristen Welker that “there’s so much proof” of fraud, including “2000 Mules” and “all of the ballot stuffing that’s on tape.”

One reason this all continues to ferment is that there has been no accountability for D’Souza or True the Vote. D’Souza’s already shaky credibility has evaporated outside of the right-wing media; True the Vote never had much in the first place. (Phillips’s insistence in November 2016 that he had evidence of millions of fraudulent votes in that election was never validated.) Elsewhere, claims about fraud have been curtailed in the face of legal challenges (like the Dominion Voting Systems suits against right-wing media outlets). So far, D’Souza has avoided that fate.

But that may be about to change. On Monday, U.S. District Judge Steven D. Grimberg allowed a lawsuit against D’Souza and True the Vote to move forward — a suit that might impose some penalty on the filmmaker for his false presentations.

At issue is the film’s inclusion of footage showing a man named Mark Andrews depositing multiple ballots into a ballot box. This wasn’t fraud, as a state investigation determined; he was submitting ballots for himself and his family. Andrews claimed that he’d received threats as a result of the claims made in the film and in media appearances. Last year, he sued for defamation.

“Defendants asserted in multiple published statements that an image of Andrews dropping off the ballots was such an example of a mule and that Andrews had committed various crimes,” Grimberg wrote in his ruling allowing the suit to move forward. In fact, the movie was released after Andrews was cleared by Georgia authorities, but it still includes footage of Andrews submitting ballots as D’Souza calls it a crime in a voice-over....>

<.....Grimberg also noted that D’Souza’s companion book — pulled from shelves at one point to remove false claims — used a still of Andrews positing ballots, which a caption described as “organized crime.” The book was published “after Andrews’s counsel informed Defendants that their portrayal of Andrews was false,” Grimberg wrote.

The stage is set for a ruling against D’Souza and True the Vote, though it isn’t a certainty. But the suit moving forward also means that we may get new evidence that the central conceit of the movie — that geolocation data pointed to mules who were then caught on tape — is false.

When D’Souza spoke to The Post last year, he asserted that everyone shown in the film was a mule, identified by True the Vote as having gone to 10 or more drop boxes. (Why they wouldn’t simply put a bunch of ballots in one drop box is never explained.) So, in theory, there should be some evidence that Andrews did so, if he was a “mule.” The lawsuit’s discovery process, then, might force the defendants to show what they have — or what they don’t.

Attorneys for Andrews hinted at this possibility in a statement.

“After today’s win for our client, we’ll now move into the discovery phase of the case,” Sara Chimene-Weiss of Protect Democracy said. “We’re confident we’ll soon uncover even more evidence that the Defendants fabricated, without any actual facts or underlying data, their lies about our client as part of their broader campaign to sow doubt and spread falsehoods about voters and the 2020 election.”

It’s worth noting, as Grimberg did, that Phillips has already disavowed Andrews as a “mule.” In a May 2022 Post article, Phillips is quoted as saying that Andrews is “not a mule to us” — despite D’Souza insisting, in the Post interview that was published on the same day — that “of course there is a claim being made” that those depicted in the film were multiple-drop-box-visiting “mules.”

The Andrews case may yield a judgment in favor of Andrews, to his benefit. It may also make others wary about citing the movie as a credible presentation of alleged voter fraud in 2020. But it might also go further: demonstrating that there is no connection between the video footage and the purported geolocation data, which the lack of footage of people visiting multiple drop boxes would suggest.

And if there is no geolocation data tied to the video presentation, “2000 Mules” falls apart immediately and completely.>

<The judge presiding over former President Donald Trump's fraud trial in New York scolded Trump's lawyers by name after they arrived late to court.

Judge Arthur Engoron cautioned Trump's legal team about being mindful of the time after the attorneys returned 10 minutes late after a recess on the second day of the trial.

Naming attorneys Christopher Kise, Alina Habba and Cliff Robert, Engoron told the lawyers, "I like to run a tight ship," according to the Daily Beast's Jose Pagliery. The judge also said he would be firmer on the length of breaks and warned that moving forward, he would start at the agreed upon time even if people were not back in the courtroom by then.

Newsweek reached out to Kise via email for comment.

New York Attorney General Letitia James' $250 million civil trial against Trump, the Trump Organization and his two eldest sons, Donald Jr. and Eric, began on Monday. She is accusing the Trump family and their company of misrepresenting their wealth by billions. The case, which does not have any jurors because "nobody" on Trump's team asked for a jury trial, will be decided solely by Engoron and pose a massive threat to Trump's businesses.

Tuesday's scuffle was the latest in the trial. On Monday, Kise got into a heated exchange with Engoron after the judge asked another attorney at what point something is "material."

"You owe it to the defendants to listen to this evidence," Kise shot at Engoron. "I don't think you are an expert on accounting standards...we have experts you haven't heard from.

"I would caution you to listen, there is a lot more to this story, there are layers to this and we need to give witnesses an opportunity to take the stand and learn what this case is about," the lawyer told the judge.

Engoron also began Tuesday by warning Trump's attorneys not to argue against earlier rulings, saying, "Trials are...not an opportunity to relitigate what I've already decided. That's why have [sic] appeals."

Trump himself took direct aim at the judge in a social media post during Monday's lunch break, calling Engoron a "rogue judge" and "Trump hater."

"We're going to be here for months with a judge that already made up his mind. It's ridiculous," the former president complained to reporters outside the courthouse.

"This is a judge that should be disbarred," Trump said. "This is a judge that should be out of office. This is a judge that some people say could be charged criminally for what he's doing. He's interfering with an election—and it's a disgrace."

On Tuesday, Trump, who has maintained "there was absolutely no fraud" told members of the press he'd take the witness stand "at the appropriate time." He is named on both James' and his team's witness lists.>

<Representative Kevin McCarthy of California is lashing out at the eight Republicans who voted to oust him as speaker of the House.

McCarthy's control of the lower chamber was stripped on Tuesday after a motion to vacate the speakership was passed by a vote of 216-210. GOP Representative Matt Gaetz, who filed the motion, joined seven other Republicans and all Democrats in voting for McCarthy's removal.

The California Republican, who served as speaker for less than nine months, became the first lawmaker to ever be removed from the job by a vote in the House. He was immediately replaced by his own choice for speaker pro tempore, Representative Patrick McHenry of North Carolina.

While the House now faces an uncertain road in choosing a more permanent successor, McCarthy made it clear in a press conference on Tuesday night that he would not be attempting to win back the gavel, arguing that the rule allowing the motion to vacate was not "good for the institution."

"Unfortunately, 4 percent of our conference can join all the Democrats and dictate who can be the Republican speaker in this House," McCarthy said. "I don't think that rule is good for the institution, but apparently I'm the only one."

"I believe I can continue to fight, maybe in a different manner," he continued. "I will not run for speaker again, I'll have the conference pick somebody else."

McCarthy then attacked the "trustworthiness" of the Republicans who voted to oust him, saying that they are "not conservatives and they do not have the right to have the title." He reserved particularly harsh words for Gaetz.

"The trustworthiness of a lot of individuals, it makes it difficult," said McCarthy. "I do not think, regardless of who the speaker is, that you should have that rule ... I don't think this is about the Republican Party, I think it's something about some people who are not a conservative."

"You all know Matt Gaetz," he added. "You know it was personal ... everything he accused somebody of, he was doing. That all was about getting attention from [the press]. I mean, we're getting email fundraisers from him as he's doing it. 'Join in quickly.' That's not governing, that's not becoming of a member of Congress."

Newsweek reached out for comment to the office of Gaetz via email on Tuesday night.

Gaetz celebrated the success of the motion to vacate shortly after the vote took place. He told reporters that McCarthy was "a feature of the swamp" who had "risen to power by collecting special-interest money and redistributing that money in exchange for favors," adding that Republicans had broken "the fever" of his leadership.>

<Donald F. McGahn, II is a well-respected lawyer who has spent his life in service to conservative causes. Well-educated and cautious, McGahn seems like the last person who would have found himself in the orbit of the mercurial Donald J. Trump. But, in 2016, that was precisely where the highly regarded conservative campaign lawyer was positioned.

A longstanding member of the conservative Federalist Society, McGahn proved to be one of the primary architects of the Trump Administration’s legal assault on the Administrative State.

In fact, had it not been for McGahn whispering in the forty-fifth president’s ear, it is likely that the totally out-of-his-element Trump would have never picked the outstanding conservative jurists to the federal courts—including the Supreme Court of the United States—that he had ultimately chosen. Naturally, too, the working relationship between McGahn and Trump had totally collapsed by the end of the first year of the Trump Administration.

Surviving President King Kong (ASA Donald Trump)

As McGahn would later confess, he was routinely subjected to “badgering phone calls” at home by President Trump who would often say, in McGahn’s words, “some crazy *** ****.”

Things deteriorated so badly between Trump and the man who had served as the White House Counsel that McGahn had secretly coined a derisive nickname for his boss “******* Kong” (a reference to the infamous movie monster, King Kong, who terrorized the denizens of New York while destroying everything in his sight). Just like so many men and women who found themselves working in the chaos pit that was the Trump White House, McGahn had repeatedly written his resignation letter.

Each time he contemplated handing an unstable Trump the letter, McGahn tabled it only after realizing that his position as White House counsel gave McGahn a “once-in-a-never-again” opportunity. That opportunity was for McGahn to personally, fundamentally reorder the Administrative State by stacking the federal courts with jurists whose entire raison d’être was hemming in an out-of-control bureaucracy.

Trump takes the credit, as executives are wont to do, for all the successes of those under him. The only problem for Trump is that he clearly would not have arrived at the excellent judicial picks that we vital.

Instead, the judges were clearly the result of McGahn’s lifelong commitment to the conservative cause of rolling back an Administrative State that, like the shrubbery around a long-abandoned mansion, has overgrown the original structure they once supported, and is in need of being seriously pruned....>

<....In fact, in Michael Schmidt’s book Donald Trump v. the United States: Inside the Struggle to Stop a President, McGahn detailed a fight that he had with the forty-fifth president in which Trump demanded that McGahn withdraw the nomination of Neil Gorsuch to the Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS).

Ever the egoist, Trump became aware of Gorsuch’s attacks against the President’s escalating public attacks on the legitimacy of the federal judiciary. Trump was told how Gorsuch, during meetings with several prominent Democrats on the Hill as part of the nomination process, had “pointedly distanced” himself from Trump on the forty-fifth president’s vicious public castigations of the federal judiciary.

Trump believed that Gorsuch would not be adequately loyal and attempted to scuttle his nomination to the bench. This was one instance where McGahn prepared his single-line resignation but ultimately buggered off that approach, realizing that he could manage the uneven Trump long enough to get Gorsuch on the bench.

The Real Brains Behind Trump’s Operation

McGahn got Gorsuch on the bench. Followed by Brett Kavanaugh, whose nomination process will forever go down in history as one of the greatest (thankfully failed) assassination attempts of anyone appointed to the SCOTUS bench in the history of our republic. On top of Gorsuch and Kavanaugh—the coup de grace to McGahn’s service in the tumultuous Trump Administration—McGahn helped to usher an additional 54 conservative jurists to federal appeals courts along with 174 conservative jurists to various district courts.

Inevitably, the McGahn-Trump relationship was damaged beyond repair.

On Oct. 18, 2018, two years after McGahn began advising Trump on various legal matters, McGahn left Trump’s orbit under a cloud of animosity and controversy.

Sadly, McGahn Won’t Be in Another Trump Administration

Because of McGahn’s overriding commitment to the cause, the grand vision of the Right, of reducing a bloated and unaccountable Administrative State has finally migrated from the realm of theory to political reality.

Today, there are three cases – with more on the way – that SCOTUS will hear in which grave damage to the Administrative can be dealt. These cases would have never been heard, had McGahn’s recommendations for judges to Trump not been heeded.

Should this growing conservative assault on the Administrative State persist and be successful, it could create massive opportunities for the next conservative president to build momentum and continue slaying the various swamp creatures who run the administrative swamp in Washington, D.C. Conservatives owe Don McGahn a serious debt of gratitude—as does Donald Trump, whose legacy is built upon his successful selection of judges.>

<The compulsion to do something in response to perceived public concerns is a syndrome endemic in the political class and, increasingly, the mass media. Lately, “Do Something Syndrome,” or DSS, has led to policies that ignore adverse consequences and grossly mischaracterize or oversell the benefits.

DSS is especially evident in using climate change as a justification for domestic policies that trivially affect global carbon dioxide emissions — 40 billion tons per year — and exact an enormous financial and lifestyle toll on the public. The issue is not whether carbon dioxide is rapidly accumulating — it indisputably is — but what can and should be done about it, at what cost, and who should do it. (Spoiler alert: it isn’t the U.S. or Europe, it’s China and India, by far the greatest emitters of greenhouse gases.)

Instead, climate zealots impose vast punitive and futile costs on the public for initiatives seen as virtuous but that make little difference in a global context and often ignore better options.

Typical DSSthink underpins a recent initiative that would discourage gas-fired hot water heaters by imposing drastic regulations on them. That follows a push to transition to electric stoves from gas ones. Both programs are unpopular, and the emissions reduction of them will be trivial — at best less than 0.05% — but they serve the political purpose of visibly demanding sacrifice for an ostensibly noble goal.

Another example is the pipe dream of eliminating fossil fuels for electricity generation without an extensive push into nuclear power. We performed a detailed analysis of employing renewable technologies (e.g., wind and solar) to replace the 2.4 billion megawatt-hours produced annually by natural gas and coal generation. It is simply not feasible.

Decarbonizing just the current demand for electricity in the U.S. would be the most ambitious public works project in history. It would require about 350,000 2-megawatt wind turbines occupying 2-8 million acres (the needed acreage varies widely depending on conditions) or 5.8 million acres of solar cells, costing approximately $1 trillion to $2.5 trillion — not including the cost of land, transmission (from distant solar and wind fields), maintenance (turbines are failing faster than anticipated), and ultimate decommissioning and disposal. (For perspective, the state of Rhode Island occupies less than 1 million acres.)

And this does not include battery backup (no gas generators allowed!), at a cost of over $1 trillion per day to compensate for intermittency. Weather history indicates that four days’ worth of backup is needed, but mineral shortages suggest it would take many decades to produce the batteries.

Then there is the zealots’ push for electric vehicles despite data such as Volkswagen’s own estimates that an electric Golf must be driven 77,000 miles before the emissions savings offset the carbon dioxide generated in producing the car and battery. VW is not alone, and as electric vehicle range is pushed higher to satisfy buyers, the heavier batteries only increase the emissions break-even mileage.

Finally, if the cost of charging stations is included, the EV advantage virtually vanishes. And there are additional problems for downtown city dwellers: Do we dig up streets for chargers or seize property to construct subsidized charging garages every few city blocks?

We have two better ideas that would really accomplish something. However, they violate the decarbonization dogma, so they’re unattractive to DSS sufferers.

First, we should promote domestic production of oil that is delivered via (emissions-free) pipelines — another DSS sacrificial lamb — to offset the 18 million tons per year of carbon dioxide spewed out by tankers transporting oil to the U.S. from abroad. Sadly, cutting domestic production is more powerful imagery than a solution that would make a real difference in emissions.

Second, let’s abandon all subsidies for EVs and subsidize hybrid vehicles instead. They do need gasoline, but in much smaller amounts, and don’t require charging stations. Toyota estimates that the carbon dioxide from the mining of minerals for a single EV could instead be spread over 37 hybrids that have much smaller batteries. The carbon dioxide emissions from battery manufacturing are relevant to any rational analysis but are ignored in EV sales pitches because they do not come out of tailpipes.

There is no simple remedy for DSS, except for the public to demand coherent explanations from political leaders, and then to vote accordingly.>