<.....Moynihan says the best outcome for protecting democracy is that President Joe Biden gets reelected. But even that is, at best, a temporary fix. And given Biden’s dismal approval rating, no one can count on that. We’re still a year out from the 2024 presidential election, and polls are merely a snapshot in time.

But they do capture current voter sentiment, and they indicate that Trump — barring a massive defection to Nikki Haley or one of the other GOP presidential candidates — is likely to become the Republican Party nominee next year. And he is running ahead of Biden in many key general election states. Democrats, therefore, must act now to defend against the possibility that Trump, despite all of his legal troubles, could again occupy the Oval Office. It would be profoundly unwise for them to just cross their fingers and hope for the best instead of doing what they can now to lessen the damage that could be caused by Trump being reelected.

“A plan that centers on Democrats always winning the presidency to defend democracy isn’t much of a plan, because eventually you’re going to lose,” Moynihan says. “Even if it’s not Trump, some of the stuff Trump is talking about is becoming embedded into the conservative governing philosophy.”

Democrats could pass a law that makes Schedule F illegal so that Trump would not be able to fire all of these civil servants and replace them with his loyalists. Moynihan notes that this has been attempted before, but it hasn’t yet been done.

“If you look at the history of authoritarianism, the way authoritarians accumulate and consolidate power is by neutering the judiciary and neutering the bureaucracy to ensure that they are loyal,” Moynihan says. “What he would do with the bureaucracy would be beyond anything we’ve seen in the last 140 years—when the civil service system was created.”

Though Democrats don’t currently control the House, so they might have trouble getting this conversation going there if Republicans try to block their efforts, they do control the Senate.

With Sen. Majority Leader Chuck Schumer in charge of what legislation goes to the floor and what debates are taking place in the Senate, Democrats could push to get legislation that would outlaw Schedule F passed and make it a topic that’s loudly being discussed in Congress.

“It would be a great idea if senators were to bring this to the floor and make the case for it,” Moynihan says. “The value of bringing it to the floor is going to be communicating to the public about what’s going on, drawing attention to this and holding hearings about how bad this could be. That’s part of Congress’ role. It’s oversight. It’s identifying which issues are important.”>

<Right-wing election deniers are seeing consequences of their efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election by facing a slew of defamation lawsuits, The Guardian reports.

Per the report, "Defamation law has traditionally been sparingly used in the US, given the very high bar that plaintiffs have to meet. Under the 1964 supreme court ruling New York Times Co v Sullivan, they have to be able to show 'actual malice' on behalf of the accused.

Rachel Goodman, an attorney with non-partisan advocacy organization Protect Democracy, told The Guardian, said the group's legal action is about "accountability as a way of ensuring that our democracy can get back on track."

Currently, according to the report, Protect Democracy has five ongoing defamation suits "against individuals and outlets who propagated election denial, including ex-President Donald Trump lawyer and former New York mayor Giuliani, the Gateway Pundit and the beleaguered undercover video outfit Project Veritas," as well as conspiracy theorist Dinesh D'Souza, and failed Arizona GOP candidate Kari Lake.

The Guardian notes election denier and My Pillow CEO Mike Lindell also faces defamation suits from voting machine technology firms Dominion and Smartmatic.

Per the report, "The lawsuits are designed in part as a strategy of deterrence," as "those pressing the libel suits hope that anyone contemplating a renewed assault on next year's presidential election, in which Trump is once again likely to be the Republican candidate, will look at the potentially devastating costs and think twice."

Giuliani's trial — Protect Democracy's first in its series of defamation suits — is set to take place in federal court in Washington, DC on December 11.

"This is lawfare," Lindell told the Guardian. "Lawfare hasn't been used in our country since the late 1700s, and that's what they are doing."

The right-wing conspiracy theorist argued, "I have a first amendment right. These defamation cases are damaging free speech – people are afraid to speak out, to come forward with anything."

Goodman emphasized in her interview that "the first amendment does not provide blanket protection for mendacity," saying, "It does not protect those who knowingly spread lies that destroy reputations and lives."

The lawyer added, "We aim to demonstrate that there is no immunity for spreading intentional and reckless lies. Ensuring accountability for intentional defamation is a crucial part of deterring election subversion from happening again in 2024.">

Choke on it, liars and deniers! Yew heah me, <fredvermin>?

<A prominent Harvard constitutional law expert was stunned by what he called the "bizarro" Colorado court ruling determining that Donald Trump "engaged in insurrection" — yet could still be on the state's ballot for the 2024 presidential election to head the same government he tried to upend.

"What accounts for this ... bizarro, upside-down holding that the highest office in the land, the one of the greatest power, the one whose danger to the republic is at its maximum, would somehow be exempt?" from constitutional protections against insurrectionists, emeritus professor Laurence Tribe asked on MSNBC Saturday.

Colorado District Court Judge Sarah B. Wallace on Friday ordered Trump included in the state's primary ballot, even though she determined that "Trump engaged in an insurrection on January 6, 2021 through incitement." Trump's candidacy had been challenged in court by voters and a watchdog group. They cited Section 3 of the 14th Amendment, passed after the Civil War, aimed at blocking those who had already tried once to overthrow the government — or supported those who did — from returning to office.

Wallace ruled that the section does not specifically name presidents, so Trump could be on the ballot.

The section does, however, list representatives, senators, vice presidents, presidential electors and anyone holding "any office, civil or military, under the United States" who previously took an oath of office.

Former US Court of Appeals Judge J. Michael Luttig said on MSNBC that Wallace made an "egregious error" in the ruling, noting that the "office of president is of course an office under the United States, from which a person can be disqualified by Section 3."

Tribe said that Wallace's ruling would have allowed one-time US senator Jefferson Davis, who eventually led the confederacy, to later become a US president after the defeat of the confederacy.

Wallace mentioned that very scenario in her ruling, admitting it sounded "preposterous."

Colorado Secretary of State Jena Griswold on Saturday also lashed the decision, saying it "basically means that the presidency is a get-out-of-jail-free card for insurrection."

"I find that very troubling," Griswold said in an MSNBC interview Saturday.

"The American people need to know that the president .... the person most in charge of protecting the Constitution, actually has a duty to do so," she added.

At a rally in Iowa Saturday, Trump called those who challenged his Colorado candidacy in court "losers.">

<An illegal Chinese biolab unearthed in California roused concerns last week when local officials and contractors reported finding pathogens labeled "HIV" and "Ebola" during a CDC-ordered waste eradication at the site. Now federal agencies face criticism that they "dropped the ball" on investigating how pervasive the threat could be nationwide.

"It reads like a movie script and a horror movie script, when you detail all of those things that were missed," Rep. Ashley Hinson, a Republican from Iowa, said Sunday on "FOX & Friends Weekend."

Jia Bei Zhu, 62, who was behind the lab, was reportedly a Chinese citizen and a wanted fugitive from Canada.

"We want to know how he was able to obtain these pathogens. How is he able to get away with running a lab, getting millions of dollars sent to him from the Chinese Communist Party and then obviously coming into our country stealing American intellectual property?" she continued.

Last week, the House Select Committee on the People’s Republic of China (PRC) announced he allegedly had ties to the Chinese government. Authorities also reported Zhu had stolen millions of dollars worth of intellectual property and was part of an ongoing transnational criminal enterprise with ties to the PRC.

He was arrested in October, months after a code enforcement officer first raised eyebrows about a green garden hose sticking out of a hole at the location - a code violation that spawned further inspection with alarming results, including the discovery of thousands of vials containing biological substances and mice used for disease research.

Hinson, like others, is concerned that more could be hidden across the U.S., posing a threat to national security.

"The FBI and the CDC really dropped the ball here in terms of investigating not only this illegal lab, but now we wonder how many more labs like this exist in the country," she said.

"So clearly, we have some work to do to make sure we're prepared, because we know China is doing everything they can to constantly undermine us."

The House Select Committee on the PRC further claimed that both the FBI and the CDC were contacted by local law enforcement, but the agencies declined to investigate.

Officials later contacted Rep. Jim Costa, D-Calif., who pressed the CDC to get involved, prompting the agency to conduct an investigation that reportedly unearthed "at least 20 potentially infectious agents," but eventually wrote that the investigation unearthed "no evidence of select agents or toxins" in a three-page report on the findings.

Local officials – and House members critical of the investigation – simultaneously argue the agency's actions fell short.

"The CDC and others hung up on them, ignored them, until Congressman Jim Costa called them," Rep. Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., said. "But when the CDC showed up they should’ve done what was right then, and they did not. They did not test the pathogens. They did not even find all of them. They left a freezer with Ebola in it, and we know how lethal that is…"

The CDC responded to claims made in the House committee's report on the biolab investigation, issuing the following statement:

"CDC strongly disputes the report’s conclusions critical of the agency. The report includes numerous inaccuracies, including both the charge that CDC did not respond to local requests for aid and the false implication that CDC had the authority to unilaterally investigate or seize samples from PBI’s Reedley building. Indeed, CDC has, and continues to be actively engaged, within its regulatory authorities, in the intergovernmental efforts to address issues surrounding the facility."

At least 20 potentially infectious agents in illegal underground lab, according to CDC Meanwhile, President Biden welcomed Chinese President Xi Jinping to the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) summit last week, garnering additional criticism from Republicans.

"It's a true slap in the face to Americans," Hinson continued on Sunday. "The Newsom administration and the Biden administration really rolled out the red carpet for President Xi. A genocidal dictator came to town, they cleaned up San Francisco, did a parade that was fitting for a hero's welcome, and then hosted him as a guest of honor at a boozy dinner. Meanwhile, in Reedley, California, we're busting an illegal biolab…"

"They had over a thousand mice that were designed to transmit COVID. So this administration needs to hold China accountable for its role in spreading COVID around the world, and it's very clear of their intention here, which was to do more damage to our country," she said.>

The scum must be brought to justice.

<Former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) suggested on Sunday that Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL) could face the same expulsion threat as Rep. George Santos (R-NY) once the House Ethics Committee released its report on him.

McCarthy made the comments during an appearance on Fox News's Sunday Morning Futures after being asked about House Speaker Mike Johnson's (R-LA) laddered continuing resolution, which would extend some appropriations bills into January and the rest into February.

“I think Johnson was very smart about making sure keeping our troops paid, especially in the Mediterranean where they are right now,” McCarthy began. “Unfortunately, we had a number of members doing the exact same thing they did before, stopping bills from moving forward.”

“We're gonna have to come together,” he continued. “We do know this is really driven … [by] Matt Gaetz’s ethics complaint. I think once that ethics complaint comes forward, he could have the same problem that Santos has. I think the conference would be probably better united to be able to move forward and get this all done.”

Backed by seven of his GOP colleagues, Gaetz led the charge to oust McCarthy in early October. Gaetz and McCarthy have long had a fraught relationship, though their feud sparked national headlines as the former blocked McCarthy’s speakership bid in January. McCarthy has argued that Gaetz’s efforts to take him down were based on personal grievances over his failure to shut down the ethics inquiry into allegations of sexual misconduct and misuse of campaign funds by the Florida lawmaker.

Gaetz has faced calls to be removed from Congress by House Republicans who were enraged over his historic campaign to oust a sitting speaker of one's own party, though not over his ethics investigation. Santos, who has already survived two previous expulsion votes over his numerous federal indictments, appears poised to be expelled from the body once Congress returns from Thanksgiving recess.

A number of members from both parties had refrained from voting aye on the previous motions to expel because they wanted to wait for the ethics report.>

<kbob: <HeMateMe: what was Archimedes doing in the bathtub? moving something with his lever?> It is a little alarming to me that rather erudite comments of mine and others on Archimedes stemming from this post were taken down, possibly as being deemed pornographic by some computer algorithm. I wonder how far off is the day when we are accused, tried, and executed without any process for human intervention.

<stone free or die: <kbob> I suspect a smelly furry in need of a bath.

perfidious: <kbob.... It is a little alarming to me that rather erudite comments of mine and others on Archimedes stemming from this post were taken down, possibly as being deemed pornographic by some computer algorithm. I wonder how far off is the day when we are accused, tried, and executed without any process for human intervention.>

On another site, I proposed to post while using the word 'twaddle'. The site ran up the flag until I explained what should have been fairly obvious: the word has nothing to do with a certain less endearing term, which should have been fairly clear, but apparently was not....

....Highly possible; he has vented much choler in recent months over having posts 'targeted' for deletion. all while blithely posting off-topic and political dross on game pages. That would be his way of getting his own back.

<For a brief moment in the summer of 2023, the surprise No. 1 song “Rich Men North of Richmond” focused the country’s attention on a region that often gets overlooked in discussions of the U.S. economy. Although the U.S. media sometimes pays attention to the rural South — often concentrating on guns, religion and opioid overdoses — it has too often neglected the broad scope and root causes of the region’s current problems.

As economic historians based in North Carolina and Tennessee, we want a fuller version of the story to be told. Various parts of the rural South are struggling, but here we want to focus on the forlorn areas that the U.S. Department of Agriculture refers to as “rural manufacturing counties” — places where manufacturing is, or traditionally was, the main economic activity.

You can find such counties in every Southern state, although they were historically clustered in Alabama, Georgia, North and South Carolina, and Tennessee. And they are suffering terribly.

Yes, the South is actually in crisis

First, let’s back up. One might be tempted to ask: Are things really that bad? Hasn’t the Sun Belt been booming? But in fact, by a range of economic indicators — personal income per capita and the proportion of the population living in poverty, for starters – large parts of the South, and particularly the rural South, are struggling.

Gross domestic product per capita in the region has been stuck at about 90% of the national average for decades, with average income even lower in rural areas. About 1 in 5 counties in the South is marked by “persistent poverty” — a poverty rate that has stayed above 20% for three decades running. Indeed, fully 80% of all persistently poor counties in the U.S. are in the South.

Persistent poverty is, of course, linked to a host of other problems. The South’s rural counties are marked by low levels of educational attainment, measured both by high school and college graduation rates. Meanwhile, labor-force participation rates in the South are far lower than in the nation as a whole.

Unsurprisingly, these issues stifle economic growth.

Meanwhile, financial institutions have fled the region: The South as a whole lost 62% of its banks between 1980 and 2020, with the decline sharpest in rural areas. At the same time, local hospitals and medical facilities have been shuttering, while funding for everything from emergency services to wellness programs has been cut.

Less wealth, less health

Relatedly, the rural South is ground zero for poor health in the U.S., with life expectancy far lower than the national average. So-called “deaths of despair” such as suicides and accidental overdoses are common, and rates of obesity, diabetes, hypertension, heart disease and stroke are high – much higher than in rural areas in other parts of the U.S. and in the U.S. as a whole.

Manufacturing counties in the rural South are particularly unhealthy. Residents there die about two and a half years younger than the average American, which to demographers is a staggeringly high differential.

These things, of course, didn’t happen in a vacuum. The Obama-era Affordable Care Act encouraged states to expand Medicaid coverage, but Southern states largely refused to do so. That left large portions of the low- and lower-middle-income population in the rural South uninsured. This has pushed many medical facilities in the region into a death spiral, as their business models — predicated on governmental insurance of one kind or another — became untenable.

Given all this, is it any wonder that rates of upward mobility in the rural South are among the lowest in the country? Alas, probably not — certainly not to residents of rural North Carolina, a state where more than half of its counties lost population between 2010 and 2020.

It wasn’t always this way

Although some people think that these areas have forever been in crisis, this isn’t the case. While the South’s agricultural sector had fallen into long-term decline in the decades following the Civil War — essentially collapsing by the Great Depression — the onset of World War II led to an impressive economic growth spurt.

War-related jobs opening up in urban areas pulled labor out of rural areas, leading to a long-delayed push to mechanize agriculture. Workers rendered redundant by such technology came to constitute a large pool of cheap labor that industrialists seized upon to deploy in low-wage processing and assembly operations, generally in rural areas and small towns.....>

<....Such operations surged between 1945 and the early 1980s, playing a huge role in the region’s economic rise. However humble they may have been, in the South — as in China since the late 1970s — the shift out of a backward agricultural sector into low-wage, low-skill manufacturing was an opportunity for significant productivity and efficiency gains.

This helped the South steadily catch up to national norms in terms of per-capita income: to 75% by 1950, 80% by the mid-1960s, over 85% by 1970, and to almost 90% by the early 1980s.

Although today the rise of the Sun Belt is often associated with, if not attributed to, climate, low housing costs and the growth of the South’s booming metropolitan areas, all those rural sweatshops and humble-looking processing sheds opening up in the early postwar era mattered a lot. They elevated the living standards of countless once-desperate and impoverished farmers.

The origins of the rural crisis

By the early 1980s, however, the gains made possible by the shift out of agriculture began to play themselves out. The growth of the rural manufacturing sector slowed, and the South’s convergence upon national per capita income norms stopped, remaining stuck at about 90% from then on.

Two factors were largely responsible: new technologies, which reduced the number of workers needed in manufacturing, and globalization, which greatly increased competition. This latter point became increasingly important, since the South, a low-cost manufacturing region in the U.S., is a high-cost manufacturing region when compared to, say, Mexico.

Like Mike Campbell’s bankruptcy in Hemingway’s “The Sun Also Rises,” the rural South’s collapse came gradually, then suddenly: gradually during the 1980s and 1990s, and suddenly after China’s entry into the World Trade Organization in December 2001.

Between 2000 and 2010, for example, manufacturing employment in North Carolina, one of the South’s leading manufacturing states, fell by about 44%. Starting a bit earlier — in 1998, when the Asian currency crisis squeezed Southern manufacturers — we find that the Tar Heel State lost 70% of its manufacturing jobs in textiles and 60% in furniture between then and 2010.

Other states in the South’s “manufacturing belt,” such as South Carolina and Tennessee, lost about 40% of their manufacturing jobs between 2000 and 2010. Although they have recouped some jobs since then, not one Southern state has as many manufacturing jobs as it did a generation ago. And most of the job growth in the southern manufacturing sector in recent decades has taken place in or near big cities.

The proportion of craftsmen and factory workers in the rural Southern labor force fell from 38% in 1980 to a little over 25% by 2020 — a trend that was particularly striking in rural manufacturing counties.

Factory jobs there increasingly gave way to low-level service-sector gigs, which generally paid less. As a result, median income per capita in rural manufacturing counties in the South has stagnated and is much lower than in rural manufacturing counties elsewhere in the U.S.

The first step is recognizing there’s a problem

Those parts of the rural and small-town South that were once heavily involved in manufacturing are in economic crisis today.

One might argue that the current mess is a legacy effect of the South’s historical dependence on a low-skill, low-cost growth “strategy” — beginning with slavery — that privileged short-term economic gains over patient investment in human capital and long-term development. That’s a big claim about a larger, more complex story.

For now, our aim is simply to call attention to the problem. One must first acknowledge it before there can be any hope of a remedy. Until then, the inhabitants of such areas will remain feeling, as the Southern writer Linda Flowers vividly put it, “throwed away.”>

<Former president Donald Trump tried to do a charitable thing Sunday, handing out food to Texas National Guard soldiers, troopers, and others who will be working at the border during Thanksgiving. But he then complained that there wasn't enough food left for him.

"The food looked very good. I wanted to have some, but they didn't have any for me. They had none left. That's not good. That's my kind of food too," Trump said, drawing some chuckles from the crowd.

Trump was in Texas to endorse Gov. Greg Abbott for reelection. In his endorsement speech later that same day, Trump referred to migrants as "the enemy."

"We need a president who's going to secure the border," Abbott said of Trump.

Both Abbott and Trump are virulently opposed to migrants coming across the U.S. southern border and have used ugly, racist rhetoric to push their views. Abbott has started a program that buses migrants from Texas to Democratic-led cities such as New York and Washington, D.C.

Trump has promised to be even more racist and anti-immigrant than he was his first time in office. He's said he wants immigrants to submit to "ideological screening" before they are allowed to enter the country and has vowed to bring back and expand his ban on Muslims entering the country.

"I will implement strong ideological screening of all immigrants," Trump said in a speech last month. "If you hate America, if you want to abolish Israel, if you don't like our religion (which a lot of them don't), if you sympathize with jihadists, then we don't want you in our country and you are not getting in."

Trump has also promised to end birthright citizenship, a right guaranteed by the 14th amendment, for children of undocumented immigrants. "As part of my plan to secure the border on Day 1, I will sign an executive order making clear to federal agencies that under the correct interpretation of the law, going forward the future children of illegal aliens will not receive automatic U.S. citizenship," Trump said in a campaign video released in May.

He also last month told far-right website The National Pulse that immigration is "a very sad thing for our country; it's poisoning the blood of our country."

The Biden campaign responded to Trump's racist and xenophobic plans in a statement from campaign spokesperson Ammar Moussa earlier this month: "Mass detention camps, attempts to deny children born here citizenship, uprooting families with mass deportations - this is the horrifying reality that awaits the American people if Donald Trump is allowed anywhere near the Oval Office again. These extreme, racist, cruel policies dreamed up by him and his henchman Stephen Miller are meant to stoke fear and divide us, betting a scared and divided nation is how he wins this election.">

<Senator Mike Lee (R-UT) got torn apart by reporters who fact-checked his attempts to fuel January 6th conspiracy theories with new footage released from the U.S. Capitol riot.

Conservatives celebrated on Friday when House Speaker Mike Johnson announced the release of 40,000 hours of footage from the day Donald Trump’s supporters besieged Congress. Lee, who was involved in the scheme to help Trump overturn his 2020 election defeat, reacted to the footage throughout the weekend by picking fights with Liz Cheney and demanding an investigation of the January 6th Committee.

As Lee claimed in a series of tweets that the footage somehow disproves the Left’s political narratives about the Capitol riot, he picked up on a tweet from Derrick Evans, the former West Virginia lawmaker who pled guilty to a felony civil disorder charge after live-streaming himself storming the Capitol. The post had a photo of a Trump supporter inside the Capitol holding an object in his hand, giving Evans basis to say “Is this person flashing a badge? If so, this would prove there were undercover federal agents disguised as MAGA.”

Ever since the riot, right-wingers have attempted to minimize the violent lawbreaking of the event while claiming that federal agents secretly incited the mob to create a false flag justification to legally persecute Trump’s supporters. As such, Lee seized on Evan’s [sic] tweet and said “I can’t wait to ask FBI Director Christopher Wray about this at our next oversight hearing. I predict that, as always, his answers will be 97% information-free.”

But as Politico’s Kyle Cheney and NBC News’ Ryan J. Reilly promptly pointed out, the man in the photo is Kevin Lyons, a Trump supporter who was sentenced to prison on one felony charge and five misdemeanors after stealing from Nancy Pelosi’s office. Furthermore, the object in Lyons’ hand was not a badge, but a vape, which he was seen carrying earlier in the day.

For what it’s worth, Evans has admitted that he may have been mistaken with his tweet that Lee picked up.>

<Will Rob Manfred apologize to the state of Georgia and its citizens? The commissioner of Major League Baseball announced Thursday that the annual All-Star Game will be held in Atlanta in 2025, two years after he moved the game from the city because of a controversial election law.

What’s changed? Not the bulk of the law, the Election Integrity Act of 2021, which tightened up vote-by-mail and voter ID rules. Mr. Manfred at the time bowed to Democratic Party and media distortions about the law, which President Biden infamously called “Jim Crow 2.0.” Stacey Abrams, who had lost to Gov. Brian Kemp in 2018 but had refused in Donald Trump fashion to accept the result, also played the race card.

Mr. Manfred said he’d consider returning the game to Atlanta if he saw some appropriate change. Perhaps what he meant is that he’d return the game to the Georgia capital if it turned out the attacks on the law were specious. Georgia set turnout records for a midterm election in 2022 and led Southeast states in overall voter turnout. Ms. Abrams ran against Mr. Kemp again and lost in a rout. The league’s flip-flop shows how easily big American businesses can be swayed to bend to progressive political panics, no matter the facts. Two years later Mr. Manfred may figure this is old news, and that most Georgians will be mollified because the game will soon be in Atlanta. Well, we remember, and Mr. Manfred still owes Georgians a major-league mea culpa.>

<Ohio's conservative Republicans tried repeatedly to fend off an abortion rights referendum, first trying to raise the threshold required for approval, then creating confusion prior to the vote.

It failed, and voters this month overwhelmingly approved permitting abortions at least until viability, or about 23 weeks into a pregnancy, a window during which almost all abortions take place. When the Supreme Court in 2022 overturned the Roe v Wade protections, Ohio law banned most abortions.

With the Nov. 7 vote, access to abortion is now a settled issue in the Buckeye State, right? Wrong.

Conservatives are pushing a measure that would have the Republican-dominated legislature, rather than the courts, adjudge any interpretations of the law. The GOP speaker of the Ohio house, Jason Stephens, vowed, "this is not the end of the conversation" and said there are "multiple paths" for abortion foes to pursue.

In a deeply polarized country, too many conservatives increasingly are willing to ignore democratic norms if those norms go against GOP interests.

When Ohio Republicans got control of the levers of state government, they fashioned one of the most partisan gerrymandered state legislative and congressional delegations in the country. This has generated an arrogance in which the Ohio Republican Party easily survives corruption scandals and sometimes even the will of voters. In 2015 and 2018, Ohio voters overwhelmingly approved redistricting reform of both the state legislature and congressional delegations. The Republicans found enough loopholes to render those votes meaningless, and nothing changed.

Democrats, it’s true, also engage in partisan gerrymandering, but I'm unaware of an example of such blatant disregard of a voter referendum.

When students started voting more Democratic, Ohio Republicans set a new identification barrier, making it harder — especially for out-of-state students — to vote.

In 2018, Florida voters, by an almost two-to-one margin, approved a measure giving non-violent released felons the right to vote, but the Republican legislature and Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis moved quickly to gut the law, toughening a requirement that these ex-prisoners had to pay all fines, fees and restitution before being able to vote. Despite efforts to help those who couldn't afford this, more than a hundred thousand potential voters were disqualified.

What’s more, the DeSantis administration, with much fanfare, prosecuted a handful of the felons who did vote — most unwittingly — who didn't meet the requirements....>

<....Wisconsin voters this spring easily elected a Democrat to the State Supreme Court, replacing a Republican and for the first time in years giving Democrats a majority. That so unsettled Republican legislators that they planned to disqualify the newly elected justice from voting on any redistricting challenges. They only backed down when retired Republican justices said it was a step too far.

Much of this has been fueled by Donald Trump's bogus claim that the 2020 election was stolen from him. This gained currency when 147 Republican members of Congress voted against certifying the election results. I'd guess that no more than a quarter of those members actually believed the election was “stolen.”

“There was a royal spike in voter suppression after the 2020 election,” notes Wendy Weiser, vice president for democracy at New York University’s Brennan Center, a non-profit progressive think tank that closely and reliably follows voting law around the country.

The goal here is to dampen the votes of people or color and young voters. Whether it's effective is debatable. Its purpose is not. It has little to do with “election fraud.”

Ben Ginsburg, the top GOP election lawyer before the Trump era, examined and dismissed all those fraud-related charges of voting improprieties, noting they didn't affect a single election.

The worst states on voter restriction, along with Ohio and Florida, probably are North Carolina and Texas, both with heavily gerrymandered Republican-dominated state legislatures. In North Carolina the GOP enacted a series of voting restrictions while stripping the ability of Gov. Roy Cooper, a Democrat, of his role in overseeing elections.

Texas several years ago passed a sweeping bill designed to restrict voting, including making vote-by-mail harder and limiting assistance for voters with disabilities. A trial challenging these provisions just ended, but a judge's decision isn't expected for a while. In the meantime, the voting provisions remain in effect.

In Washington, D.C., one of the ardent Republican election deniers is the new Speaker of the House, Mike Johnson of Louisiana. He questioned the value of democracy, saying it amounts to “two wolves and sheep deciding what's for dinner,” preferring instead a “biblically sanctioned” government. Johnson led the congressional Republican effort supporting a preposterous suit by the Texas attorney general to overturn the election returns in Michigan, Pennsylvania, Georgia and Wisconsin, all states that Biden carried.

That's about as anti-democratic as it gets.>

<Who cares?? Chess is a sport for all.

Another unnecessary attempt to open up the trash here. Puffy is well-known for shallow posts that inform us of nothing at all, but he certainly delights in the subject given his Rogoff history.

<David DePape, the Trump supporter who assaulted Paul Pelosi with a hammer, was found guilty last week on charges of assault and attempted kidnapping.

Salon columnist Amanda Marcotte on Monday dissected the defense that DePape tried to use to get himself acquitted and she said that its failure looks like an ominous omen for former President Donald Trump.

Essentially, argued Marcotte, DePape and his lawyers tried to plead "innocent by reason of stupidity" by emphasizing the fact that he fell into a right-wing conspiracy theory rabbit hole that led him to sincerely believe that the 2020 election was "stolen" from former President Donald Trump.

Marcotte then linked this to the defense that many legal experts expect Trump to make at his Washington D.C. trial on charges of trying to defraud the United States by illegally remaining in power after losing the election. "Like DePape, Trump seems to be investing heavily in the 'I really believed it' defense," she explained. "In both the federal case and the Georgia RICO case related to Trump's January 2021 coup attempt, Trump's team has signaled that he may argue that he sincerely believed the election had been stolen. The hope here is to downgrade the long list of crimes in Trump's indictments to innocent mistakes made by a guy who just didn't know better."

The problem, though, is that juries have shown they just don't buy this kind of defense -- and not just in DePape's case.

"Both the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers tried out a variation of this defense, arguing that they let their belief in ludicrous fantasies get the better of them during the Capitol riot," noted Marcott. "They were convicted. Indeed, many Jan. 6 insurrectionists have rolled out the 'well-meaning moron' argument at trial and, by and large, have found themselves headed to prison.">

<U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon, the Trump appointee overseeing the former president's Mar-a-Lago classified documents case in South Florida, last week pushed back a conference to meet with prosecutors until February and also denied a request from special counsel Jack Smith, a "one-two punch" that The Daily Beast's Jose Pagliery warned has "created chaos that can spill over into his other legal battles ahead of the 2024 election."

Cannon in her order denied Smith's request to schedule a CIPA Section 5 hearing on what classified materials Trump plans to use at trial, noting that she would set all remaining deadlines in March 2024, when Trump's election subversion trial is slated to kick off in Washington, D.C.

“Not scheduling a CIPA section 5 hearing, which is routine, is a clear sign she is just as much in the bag for Trump as when she issued her horrendous pretrial rulings (both reversed in scathing language by the conservative 11th Circuit),” tweeted former Mueller prosecutor Andrew Weissmann. “What a piece of work is she.”

Pagliery compared Cannon's keeping of the currently scheduled May 2024 trial date in Florida to "booking a restaurant reservation one doesn't intend to keep," quoting former CIA lawyer Brian Greer, who said that the judge's choice effectively throws the judges presiding over the ex-president's cases in Washington, D.C., Atlanta, and New York "in limbo."

"Another judge could schedule something for May but may not want to, because it’s possible trial will still go in May. If you’re a cynic—and I’m not—you might say she deliberately did this," said Greer.

"So while these three other judges figure out how to keep their cases chugging along toward trial, they’re competing with a nebulous case in South Florida—one that could claim a huge block of time to figure out unprecedented constitutional issues," Pagliery wrote. "That’s especially true because the case is being overseen by a judge with less experience presiding over trials than the average municipal traffic court administrator," underscoring how a New York Times analysis determined that only four of the 224 criminal cases assigned to Cannon since assuming her position in 2020 had gone to trial. The four cases amounted to a mere 14 total days of trial.

Some legal experts chalked up Cannon's latest antics to more than a mere lack of experience.

“She is a full fledged member of the Trump defense team," tweeted Norman J. Ornstein, a senior fellow emeritus at the American Enterprise Institute. "Aileen Cannon is utterly unfit for the bench. Someone should introduce an impeachment resolution against her. It will go nowhere but will highlight her outrageous conduct."

Pagliery noted that Cannon previously "stopped the FBI from sorting through the Top Secret records special agents recovered at his Florida mansion — until an appellate court reversed her at breakneck speed. She feigned an invasion-of-privacy crisis that never really posed any harm to the ex-president—and got caught. Then, in August, she questioned the Justice Department’s continued use of a secret grand jury far outside her district—perfectly positioning Trump’s lawyers to decry 'abuse' over what appeared to be a parallel investigation in Washington.">

<Remember when the right wing exploded because presidential candidate Barack Obama’s pastor once yelled “God damm America!”?

Well, take a look at the hatred against America coming from today’s right led by former President Trump.

Speaker of the House Mike Johnson (R-La.), is on tape saying that America is “so dark and depraved.” Trump famously described America as sick and defined by “American carnage.”

As we enter the 2024 election cycle, columnist William Galston writes in The Wall Street Journal that he “shivers” with fear that a Trump return to the White House will “trigger the biggest threat to constitutional governance [in the U.S.] since the Civil War.”

Long ago, hatred led the southern states to break away and form an anti-American confederacy. Today, we are watching Trump encourage his own rebel hatred of America, and it poses the biggest threat to constitutional democracy since the Civil War.

There is no way to downplay Trump’s disdain for the pillars of America political stability.

The Washington Post and New York Times now report that Trump is already planning to use the U.S. military against political opponents who demonstrate in the streets if he returns to the White House. Those plans include going after former staff who now express alarm about him.

He wants “the Justice Department to investigate …[former]allies who have become critical of his time in office…,” the Post reported.

Last week, Trump seemed to confirm those stories when he said that once he is back in power, he will “root out” what he called “vermin” in the U.S. He specifically targeted people willing to deny his false claim that the 2020 presidential election was stolen from him....>

<.....Trump is constantly undermining public trust in the nation’s courts by lashing out at judges, prosecutors and even court officers involved in the four indictments he faces on 91 criminal charges. That includes the First Amendment protection for a free press.

Trump was recently quoted as saying American should “take my words to heart. I believe the press is the enemy of the people.”

“He’s using this language,” said ABC correspondent Jonathan Karl, who spoke to Trump for a new book. “This language out of the Third Reich — ‘enemy of the people.’”

Karl said Trump “is talking about a campaign of revenge and retribution.”

Trump’s hatred of modern America is also evident in his claim that recent immigrants are “poisoning the blood of our country…coming in with disease…”

The head of the League of United Latin American Citizens compared Trump’s comment to Nazi propaganda about Jews, according to the Washington Post.

The head of the Anti-Defamation League, Jonathan Greenblatt, agreed.

“We have seen this kind of toxic rhetoric inspire real-world violence before in places like Pittsburg [at a synagogue] and El Paso [at a Walmart],” Greenblatt told CNN.

Trump’s hatred for America fits with his imitators’ efforts to undermine Congress. Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.), a big Trump backer, has an anti-American agenda that boils down to stirring so much chaos — including nearly a month without a Speaker — that the House is now so broken it fails to even pass an annual funding package.

The GOP majority’s disrespect for America was evident in the embarrassing, schoolyard-type elbowing incident between former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) and Rep. Tim Burchett (R-Tenn.).

The same Trump-inspired disdain for American democracy was on display when a GOP senator invited a witness at a public hearing to engage in a fistfight. Sen. Markwayne Mullin (R-Okla.) had to be reminded by Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) that “you’re a United States senator!”

That was in line with the violent Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol by Trump supporters to stop Congress from effecting the democratic transfer of power to a newly elected president.

According to the Capitol Police, threats by the public of violence against members of Congress have skyrocketed from fewer than a thousand in 2016, when Trump was elected, to more than 7,000 last year.

Those threats come amid ominous occurrences, such as the vicious hammer assault on former Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s husband Paul, which Trump still jokes about at his rallies.

In September, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, who polls second behind Trump for the nomination, complained that the Proud Boys were getting “excessive sentences” for rioting at Capitol and promised to “look at all those cases,” if he is elected president.

The FBI reports that far-right domestic violent hate groups like the Proud Boys — which Trump famously called on to “stand by” — now constitute the biggest domestic threat to the security of the United States.

This disdain is on display in Sen. Tommy Tuberville (R-Ala.) blocking promotions for hundreds of U.S. military officers for months because of the Pentagon’s abortion policy, interfering with an essential government operation and revealing more disdain for American democracy.

Hatred of America and Americans, fueled by the incitement of violence and stochastic terrorism, is winning in the Republican Party.

It is the real platform for Trump, the party’s front-runner for its presidential nomination.>

<It was a rough day in court for Donald Trump’s legal team Monday as they tried to persuade three appeals court judges to lift the gag order preventing him from publicly disparaging those involved in his election interference case.

U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan placed a limited gag order on the former president in October after he lashed out on social media against special prosecutor Jack Smith, calling him a “thug” and “deranged.” Chutkan called Trump’s words “language that presents a danger to the administration of justice.”

MSNBC’s Katy Tur set up clips of the exchanges over the gag rule.

“Jack Smith’s team wants it, saying it’s necessary to keep people safe. Donald Trump’s team is appealing it, saying it violates his free speech and ability to campaign. And while the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals has yet to rule, we did get some hints. Take this exchange, where Judge [Patricia] Millet presses Donald Trump’s team on whether their arguments that it’s unconstitutional to limit the political speech of a candidate would stand if Donald Trump were not running for office.”

JUDGE: Would your position be any different a year ago?

TRUMP LAWYER: I think the gag order would still be unconstitutional.

JUDGE: Would your position be any different?

TRUMP LAWYER: I don’t see how it would be different.

JUDGE: The fact that we have a campaign going on does not matter. What matters to you, and this is still political speech, which gets very high protection no doubt.

TRUMP LAWYER: I wouldn’t put it that way. I think the campaign, in other words, we have a whole —

JUDGE: You said your position would be no different if it were a year ago!

“There was this exchange, where Trump’s team was asked to clarify where they would draw the line regarding speaking to or about witnesses, as in, when is it okay to use free speech to call out a witness or interact with a witness, and when is it not okay,” Tur said.

JUDGE: If he were to pick up the phone and call someone that is known to him to be a witness, a prospective witness in this case, and speak with that person without counsel present, would that — that would violate the restriction undoubtedly. Would the First Amendment protect that communication under your test?

TRUMP LAWYER: We have not contended that —

JUDGE: I — That’s not what I am asking! I’m asking you to apply the test to your propose [sic]— because we have to write a test that can be applied. And we have to know how it’s going to be applied. So, I’m asking your position, your legal position: Would that phone call be protected by the First Amendment or not?

LAWYER: Is it a phone where what’s said is “Happy Thanksgiving,” or a phone call that says —

JUDGE: I’m not telling you why! Because the order, the pre-release, the release restriction doesn’t care about the content!

Tur went on to explain that special prosecutor Jack Smith’s team also got grilled on their legal interpretations over whether a gag order should be allowed to stand.>

<Although her district leans red in voter registration, CO Rep. Lauren Boebert won both of her elections by just a handful of votes. Since winning her 2022 race by only 606 votes over Democratic challenger Adam Frisch, things have gotten much bleaker for her chances of holding the seat in 2024, and she knows it.

First, Boebert has been in the middle of more drama during the tumultuous Speaker elections, where she backed McCarthy in January, then backed Jim Jordan, and continued to incoherently flip-flop her positions on the Speaker repeatedly.

Then, the "family values" candidate went through a divorce and was caught vaping and fondling her date in a crowded theater where children were present before being asked to leave.

Fundraising has also been a problem, as her challenger Adam Frisch is much more organized and well-funded than he was during his last campaign, outraising Boebert nearly 4-1 last quarter.

Now, the next bomb to drop on Boebert's campaign is Colorado's looming ballot initiatives for 2024, which are likely to turn Democratic-leaning voters out in droves. There is a ballot initiative to enshrine abortion rights in the CO Constitution - favored by a large majority of voters and Frisch but opposed by Boebert. These initiatives have also turned out young voters in huge numbers already in the most conservative states like Kansas and Ohio.

Colorado may also have an initiative to take the state to rank-choice voting in 2026. If that makes it on the ballot (signatures are still being gathered), that could also increase turnout and spell doom for her in 2026 even if she survives this time. Rank-choice voting has crushed polarizing candidates in other places since voters can put multiple candidates ahead of one they strongly dislike. Alaska's rank-choice system resulted in Sarah Palin's defeat, even though she received the most 1st place votes in that Republican state, because so many voters ranked her last among several choices.

Boebert seems well aware of the predicament she is in, expressing her displeasure today with the ranked-choice initiative.>

<Last month, following an embarrassing 22-day stalemate, House Republicans finally found a guy they can all tolerate as Speaker: Mike Johnson. If you’d never heard of the Louisiana representative, you’re not alone. Multiple Senate Republicans said they had no idea who he was: John Cornyn described him as “pretty anonymous,” and Susan Collins admitted she needed to Google him. Hours before his election on October 25, learning more about Johnson required some serious digging. At the time, Googling “Mike Johnson” brought up hits for a Bachelorette contestant, a retired NHL star, and the owner of a North Carolina Toyota dealership before the congressman appeared in the search, as the Washington Post reported.

Since then, journalists have been scrambling to learn more about who Speaker Johnson is and where he stands on key issues. The conclusion: Despite his Ned Flanders persona, he’s a pretty troubling dude! Unless, of course, you think the 2020 election was stolen from Donald Trump, would love to see abortion outlawed nationwide, and don’t think same-sex marriage should be legal.

Here are some not very fun facts we’ve learned about the guy Republicans barely know, but decided to make leader of the House and second in line to the presidency.

He masterminded Trump’s election coup.

If you’ve learned one unsavory fact about Johnson in recent days, it’s probably that he was a key architect of Trump’s effort to steal the 2020 election. As New York’s Jonathan Chait explained, Johnson’s work on this front is actually the “primary source of his leadership claim and the central reason he has managed to unify the party.” After publicly flirting with Trump’s voting-machine conspiracy theories, Johnson honed in on the idea that the widespread use of mail ballots during the pandemic gave the House GOP an opportunity to make Trump president. Chait wrote:

Leaning on his background as a constitutional lawyer, he crafted an argument that several states had improperly changed their voting rules in response to the pandemic, thus nullifying their results and allowing the Republican House to select the winner.

His case, stringing together a series of implausible legal claims, brought together many Republicans who were queasy at Trump’s wild lies with Trump’s strongest supporters. Johnson circulated his case to the party and reminded them that Trump “anxiously awaited” their support. As the New York Times explained in a deeply reported story last year, Johnson’s arguments had a singular influence. About three-quarters of Republicans supporting Trump’s election challenge, the Times noted, “relied on the arguments of a low-profile Louisiana congressman, Representative Mike Johnson, the most important architect of the Electoral College objections.”

But all this went down three years ago, so apparently we’re not allowed to talk about it anymore.

He’s the least-experienced House Speaker in 140 years.

After a short stint in the Louisiana state legislature, Johnson was elected to the U.S. House in 2016. He is in only his fourth term and has never served in a senior leadership position or even as a full committee chair prior to his election as Speaker, according to Politico. That makes him the least-experienced person elected to the top position since John G. Carlisle in 1883.

He worked for the conservative legal group behind the case that ended Roe v. Wade.

Before entering elected office, Johnson spent eight years working as a senior attorney and national spokesperson for the Alliance Defending Freedom, a conservative legal group described by the New York Times as the “largest legal force of the religious right.” It is dedicated to outlawing abortion and curtailing the rights of LGBTQ+ people, among other causes. The ADF was behind the case that led to the Supreme Court overturning Roe v. Wade and has scored many other victories for the religious right in recent years, as The New Yorker reported:

In the past dozen years, its lawyers had won fourteen Supreme Court victories, including overturning Roe v. Wade; allowing employer-sponsored health insurance to exclude birth control; rolling back limits on government support for religious organizations; protecting the anonymity of donors to advocacy groups; blocking pandemic-related public-health rules; and establishing the right of a baker to refuse to make a cake for a same-sex wedding....>

<....While working with the ADF, Johnson fought to shut down abortion clinics and defended Louisiana laws restricting abortion.

He wants to ban abortion nationwide.

Johnson has an A+ rating from the anti-abortion group Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America. He has voted for a federal abortion ban and pushed legislation that would outlaw abortion nationwide. The New Republic reports:

Johnson has also co-sponsored at least three bills hoping to ban abortion at a nationwide level, including the Pain-Capable Unborn Child Protection Act, the Protecting Pain-Capable Unborn Children From Late-Term Abortions Act, and the Heartbeat Protection Act of 2021, all of which carry criminal penalties of up to five years in prison for physicians who perform abortions.

He blamed abortion for school shootings.

Johnson made this bizarre argument during an interview with New York’s Irin Carmon in 2015 when he was still working for the ADF.

“Many women use abortion as a form of birth control, you know, in certain segments of society, and it’s just shocking and sad, but this is where we are,” he said. “When you break up the nuclear family, when you tell a generation of people that life has no value, no meaning, that it’s expendable, then you do wind up with school shooters.”

He also blamed abortion for Social Security and Medicare cuts.

While serving as chair of the Republican Study Committee from 2019 to 2021, Johnson proposed trillions of dollars in cuts to Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. He said these cuts wouldn’t be necessary if forced birth were the law of the land.

“Roe v. Wade gave constitutional cover to the elective killing of unborn children in America,” Johnson said. “You think about the implications of that on the economy; we’re all struggling here to cover the bases of Social Security and Medicare and Medicaid and all the rest. If we had all those able-bodied workers in the economy, we wouldn’t be going upside down and toppling over like this.”

He blamed mass shootings on the teaching of evolution.

Of course, abortion doesn’t cause mass shootings alone; the process of evolution is also a culprit. In a sermon he delivered at Christian Center of Shreveport in 2016, Johnson claimed the United States was founded as a Christian nation but had gotten off track in recent years with the introduction of things like “no-fault divorce laws,” “legalized abortion,” and the teaching of evolution, per the MeidasTouch Network.

Johnson then explained why he thinks this led to mass shootings:

“And people say, ‘How can a young person go into their schoolhouse and open fire on their classmates?’ Because we’ve taught a whole generation, a couple generations now of Americans, that there’s no right or wrong, that it’s about survival of the fittest, and you evolve from the primordial slime. Why is that life of any sacred value? Because there’s nobody sacred to whom it’s owed. None of this should surprise us.”

He fought to make taxpayers fund a Noah’s Ark theme park.

Johnson has close ties to the Evangelical “young-Earth creationist” movement, which holds that Earth is only about 6,000 years old and that early humans coexisted with dinosaurs.

In 2015, Johnson represented the Ark Encounter creationist theme park, which features dinosaurs riding on a life-size Noah’s Ark, in its successful legal battle to secure $18 million in tax subsidies from the state of Kentucky. According to HuffPost, Johnson has described himself as a “dear friend” of Ken Ham, founder of the group Answers in Genesis, which is behind both the Noah’s Ark theme park and the Creation Museum.

“The Ark Encounter is one way to bring people to this recognition of the truth, that what we read in the Bible are actual historical events,” Johnson said in a 2021 interview with Ham.

Johnson has yet to be questioned about his personal views regarding the origins of human life and the age of the planet.

He fought to ban same-sex marriage in Louisiana.

While serving as senior counsel for the ADF, Johnson went before the Louisiana Supreme Court in 2004 and 2014 to defend a statewide ban on gay marriage. ABC News reports that around the same time, Johnson also “filed suit against a New Orleans law that provided benefits to same-sex partners of city employees.” A state appellate court upheld the benefits.

While advocating against the New Orleans law, Johnson argued that the path from supporting gay rights to allowing pedophilia is a slippery slope.

“When you tear down the taboos, the doors open up for everything. That’s the danger,” Johnson said. “We are not trying to tie homosexuality to pedophilia, but when you tear down one barrier, others fall … Let’s stop here and draw the line here because then it leads to sexual anarchy.”.....>

<.....He led an anti-gay campus movement.

In the early aughts, far-right Christian groups responded to nationwide Day of Silence protests, in which students on college campuses remained silent all day to highlight anti-gay discrimination, by organizing “Day of Truth” counterprotests. This effort, which involved conservatives handing out pamphlets on the evils of homosexuality, was spearheaded by Johnson and the ADF.

“If the other side is going to advance their point of view,” Johnson told the Harvard Crimson in 2005, “it’s only fair for the Christian perspective to present their view, too.”

He wrote a lot of homophobic op-eds.

Throughout his time working with the ADF, Johnson wrote multiple editorials that have been unearthed by CNN. In these op-eds, he argued for the criminalization of gay sex and said legalizing same-sex marriage would lead to America’s doom.

In response to the U.S. Supreme Court’s landmark 2003 decision in Lawrence v. Texas, which invalidated laws against sodomy, Johnson wrote an editorial in his local Shreveport, Louisiana, paper arguing that “States have many legitimate grounds to proscribe same-sex deviate sexual intercourse.” He also said constitutional bans on discrimination don’t apply to gay people as “all are capable of changing their abnormal lifestyles.”

In other pieces that ran in the same Louisiana paper, Johnson called homosexuality an “inherently unnatural” and “dangerous lifestyle.” He also wrote, “Your race, creed, and sex are what you are, while homosexuality and cross-dressing are things you do. This is a free country, but we don’t give special protections for every person’s bizarre choices.”

He introduced a national version of Florida’s “Don’t Say Gay” bill.

Americans’ attitudes toward gay marriage have evolved rapidly in the past few decades, and plenty of politicians have made remarks about homosexuality that they now regret. But Johnson didn’t leave his anti-gay stances in the early aughts.

Late last year, Johnson voted against a bill codifying same-sex and interracial marriages (he was joined by all but 39 Republicans).

Around the same time, Johnson introduced a bill that critics described as a federal version of Florida’s “Don’t Say Gay” bill, which never got a floor vote. The Stop the Sexualization of Children Act would have blocked the use of federal money to “develop, implement, facilitate, or fund any sexually oriented program, event, or literature” for kids under 10. Sexually oriented was loosely defined: As NPR noted, “The language in the proposed legislation lumps together topics of sexual orientation and gender identity, with sexual content such as pornography and stripping.”

He was an advocate for “covenant marriage,” which makes it harder to divorce.

Johnson got his first media exposure in the late ’90s as the face of Louisiana’s marriage-covenant law. While a law student, Johnson helped draft the 1997 Family Research Council–backed law creating an option for couples to sign a “covenant” that requires counseling and several years of separation prior to a divorce. Johnson and his wife, Kelly, opted for a covenant marriage when they wed in 1999.

“My wife and I both come from traditional Christian households,” he told ABC News in 2005. “My own parents are divorced. As anyone who goes through that knows, that was a traumatic thing for our whole family. I’m a big proponent of marriage and fidelity and all the things that go with it, and I’ve seen firsthand the devastation [divorce] can cause.”

The Johnsons are still together and host a podcast called Truth Be Told, in which they “present thoughtful analysis of hot topics and current events from a Christian perspective.”....>

Still going....

And yes, <fredtheidolater>, I intend to post as I see fit.

<....He blamed post-Katrina looting on America turning away from God.

After Hurricane Katrina, Johnson took a break from railing against the evils of homosexuality in his local paper and wrote an op-ed blaming the looting that happened after Hurricane Katrina on atheists, legalized gambling, and then–Lousiana governor Kathleen Blanco’s being “a nurturer rather than a firm, decisive leader.”

“The Bible teaches that man has an inherently sinful nature, capable of all kinds of evil,” Johnson wrote. “What we are seeing is the natural by-product of a culture that increasingly denies God’s existence, makes excuses for immorality, and fosters a sense of entitlement and victim mentality amongst the poor.”

He doesn’t believe in the separation of church and state.

This shouldn’t come as a shock considering everything we’ve just learned. ABC News reports that during a podcast recorded in September 2022, Johnson referred to the “so-called separation of church and state” and said, “The founders wanted to protect the church from an encroaching state, not the other way around.”

“If anybody tries to convince you that your biblical beliefs or your religious viewpoint needs to be separated from public affairs, you should politely remind them to review their history and you should not back down,” he added.

He once partnered with a conversion-therapy organization.

Before entering politics, Johnson provided legal advice to a group called Exodus International, which held counseling sessions designed to help young people “convert” from gay to straight. According to CNN, Johnson advised the group between 2005 and 2010 and promoted its anti-gay stances in interviews. “I mean, our race, the size of our feet, the color of our eyes, these are things we’re born with and we cannot change,” he told a radio host in 2008. “Homosexual behavior is something you do; it’s not something that you are.”

In 2013, Exodus International closed and its founder apologized for the “pain and hurt” caused by the group.

He suggested that Rome fell partly because it was too gay.

CNN reports that during his time advising Exodus International, Johnson offered an unorthodox theory for Rome’s collapse. “Some credit to the fall of Rome to not only the deprivation of the society and the loss of morals but also to the rampant homosexual behavior that was condoned by the society,” he told a radio host in 2008.

His wife is an anti-gay therapist whose work was inspired by the ancient Greeks.

Before Kelly Johnson took down her website last week, she billed herself as a therapist with a specialty in temperament counseling. Her firm, Onward Christian Counseling Services, states that homosexuality is equivalent to bestiality and incest. As Insider explains, the company takes a very old-school view of psychology:

The temperament-based approach breaks people down into five types: Melancholy, Choleric, Sanguine, Supine, and Phlegmatic. Richard and Phyllis Arno, who established a test to identify people’s temperament, founded the National Christian Counselors Association in the early 1980s. They and their advocates prefer the term temperament over personalities as the term personality is characterized as a “mask” while temperaments are “inborn” and thus inherent to each individual regardless of outside influences such as parenting. Their work is largely based on Hippocrates’ view that there were four temperaments.

He was dean of a college that failed to launch.

In 2010, Johnson was hired to be the first dean of the Judge Paul Pressler School of Law at Louisiana Christian University. “From a pure feasibility standpoint,” Johnson said, according to comments uncovered by the Associated Press. “I’m not sure how this can fail.”

It failed. The law school did not bring in enough money to get off the ground and the funding that it did pull in was allegedly misappropriated by the Louisiana Christian University president. In hindsight, all this may have been a blessing: In 2018, six men accused Paul Pressler, the school’s namesake, of sexual misconduct while several of the accusers were underage....>