<Many liberal and progressive pundits have been predicting a "brain drain" from red states — skillful, college-educated doctors, university professors and teachers leaving because of oppressive MAGA policies. OB-GYNs are worried about draconian anti-abortion laws; teachers and librarians are under attack from the far-right Moms for Liberty.

The New Republic's Timothy Noah, in an article published on November 22, emphasizes that the "brain drain" from red states isn't something that may or may not happen in the future — it's already underway.

"Republican-dominated states are pushing out young professionals by enacting extremist conservative policies," Noah reports. "Abortion restrictions are the most sweeping example, but state laws restricting everything from academic tenure to transgender health care to the teaching of 'divisive concepts' about race are making these states uncongenial to knowledge workers."

Noah continues, "The precise effect of all this on the brain drain is hard to tease out from migration statistics because the Dobbs decision is still fairly new, and because red states were bleeding college graduates even before the culture war heated up. The only red state that brings in more college graduates than it sends elsewhere is Texas, but the evidence is everywhere that hard-right social policies in red states are making this dynamic worse."

Noah cites specific examples, including doctors Kate Arnold and Caroline Flint — a same-sex married couple who left deep red Oklahoma and moved to Washington, D.C. to get away from Republican anti-abortion and anti-contraception activities as well as book bans in their former state

"Kate Arnold and Caroline Flint are two bright, energetic, professionally trained, and public-spirited women whom Washington is happy to welcome — they both quickly found jobs —even though it doesn't particularly need them," Noah explains. "The places that need Kate and Caroline are Oklahoma and Mississippi and Idaho and various other conservative states where similar stories are playing out daily. These two fortyish doctors have joined an out-migration of young professionals — accelerated by the culture wars of recent years and pushed to warp speed by Dobbs — that's known as the Red State Brain Drain."

School teacher Tyler Hallstedt, according to Noah, left Tennessee for Michigan because of GOP education policies. And teachers in Texas, Noah notes, have been "quitting at a rate that's 25 percent above the national average," while South Carolina has "teacher shortages in 17 subject areas this school year, more than any other state."

"With the sole exception of Texas," Noah explains, "red states are bleeding college graduates. It's happening even in relatively prosperous Florida. And much as Republicans may scorn Joe and Jane College, they need them to deliver their babies, to teach their children, to pay taxes — college grads pay more than twice as much in taxes — and to provide a host of other services that only people with undergraduate or graduate degrees are able to provide. Red states should be welcoming Kate and Caroline and Tyler and Delana. Instead, they're driving them away, and that's already costing them dearly.">

<A recent New York Times article points to a very urgent warning about the dangers posed by former President Donald Trump's current mental state. Thomas Edsall, an NYT columnist, spoke to Leonard Glass, an associate professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, who expressed grave concerns about the 'delusions' of former President Donald Trump. Glass contended that Trump's recent remarks—like calling his opponents 'vermin,' which was reminiscent of autocratic leaders like Adolf Hitler—indicated that Trump was prepared to go even further in undermining American democratic norms than he did during his first term.

The professor contended that there are a number of warning signs that point to a 'major deterioration of' Trump's character: “He acts like he’s impervious, 'a very stable genius,' but we know he is rageful, grandiose, vengeful, impulsive, devoid of empathy, boastful, inciting of violence, and thin-skinned. At times, it seems as if he cannot control himself or his hateful speech. We need to wonder if these are the precursors of a major deterioration in his character defenses.”

The alarms about Trump's instability and dangers were raised long before he was elected president in 2016 and have only gotten stronger over time. These cautions began during the 2016 primaries and the general elections and have persisted over Trump's four years in office, becoming more frequent as he ages and grows increasingly 'delusional' about the results of the 2020 election, as per CNN.

"If Trump — in adopting language that he cannot help knowing replicates that of Hitler (especially the references to opponents as 'vermin' and 'poisoning the blood of our country'), we have to wonder if he has crossed into 'new terrain,'" Glass said. "That terrain, driven by grandiosity and dread of exposure (e.g., at the trials), could signal the emergence of an even less constrained, more overtly vicious and remorseless Trump who, should he regain the presidency, would, indeed act like the authoritarians he praises."

Glass then cautioned that a second term could potentially lead to a number of frightening scenarios since Trump would be able to fill his second government with 'yes-men' who will likely not oppose any of his most aggressive impulses. "Absent conscientious aides who could contain him (as they barely did last time), this could lead to the literal shedding of American blood on American soil by a man who believes he is 'the only one' and the one, some believe, is a purifying agent of God and in whom they see no evil nor do they doubt," he said.

The majority of the experts consulted by the New York Times regard Trump's recent actions and public statements as part of a developing process. “Trump is an aging malignant narcissist,” Penn State psychology professor Aaron L. Pincus told the outlet. “As he ages, he appears to be losing impulse control and is slipping cognitively. So we are seeing a more unfiltered version of his pathology. Quite dangerous.”>

Work with him on this one, will ya, <ursus banalus>? He needs yer help!

<Nancy Pelosi

Although Nancy Pelosi has done much for women in politics and knows how to keep the House in order, the California lawmaker is not popular. Many see Pelosi as a symbol of liberal elitism, while others believe she failed upcoming Democratic stars. She stood in the way when Democrats tried to pass ethics reforms that would have forbidden members of Congress from trading individual stocks, making her a polarizing figure.

Marjorie Taylor Greene

The far-right firebrand Marjorie Taylor Greene has openly controversial stances on science and guns, and some of her statements were nothing short of shameful. Comparing mask mandates to the Holocaust, talking about Jewish space lasers, and indulging in conspiracy theories makes Greene loud, proud, and annoying.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the Democratic representative from New York, certainly gets attention. She is loud and uses plenty of buzzwords, and her Met Gala appearance in the “tax the rich” dress only further annoyed people. Comparing detention centers to concentration camps did not help.

Mitch McConnell

The Senate Minority Leader is seen as complicit in many (allegedly) immoral things. After decades in politics, Mitch McConnell does not care about retiring, and it is hard to compromise with him, making him unpopular with Republicans just as much as Democrats.

Lauren Boebert

Before public vaping and “touching” during a musical, Boebert was known for her outlandish, often amusing statements. From adding human babies to the endangered species list to her “precautionary” proposed amendment, Boebert, who became a grandma at 36, is a puzzle.

Rashida Tlaib

The Michigan Democrat was recently censured, but Tlaib, a part of the “Squad,” has been annoying for many despite her accomplishments. The reason? After her congressional swearing-in, Tlaib shouted, “Impeach the mother….” and her language did not improve with time.

Matt Gaetz

The Advocate’s editor’s friend from D.C. described the Florida Republican, “I don’t know anyone who would say anything nice about him, and again, I’m not telling you something that’s breaking news.” Many suggested Gaetz might be the most hated politician, but it appears that the role of villain does not bother him.

Debbie Wasserman Schultz

Wasserman Schultz, who represents Florida’s 23rd congressional district in the House of Representatives, is also one of the most disliked politicians. Politico even reported that she is more loathed by fellow Democrats than Republicans, and the reason is reportedly her “abrasive” personality.

Ted Cruz

Cruz must have mentioned his podcast in every interview in the past months. Republican consultant Matt Dowd said, “To know Ted Cruz is to dislike Ted Cruz…Every time I think he can’t go lower, he goes lower…” He was often called a “grifter,” and many see the Texas lawmaker as “entertainment.”

Cory Booker

The Democratic senator from New Jersey is often described as dull and annoying. But as Mic.com reported, some people’s biggest issue with Booker is that he turns “distress into fuel for his personal marketing machine.” Even Vanity Fair shared that his posts on social media are boring, while others called him “uninspiring.”

Lindsey Graham

Speaking on Fox, the South Carolina Republican struggled to hold back tears over Donald Trump’s indictment and begged supporters for their help. During the interview, a heckler in the audience shouted, “You lie by omission, and you lie.” A former staffer told the Bulwark, “Every politician moves and shakes in some way—it’s the nature of the beast. But for Graham, his song and dance have been more aggressive than most. It includes lies, over-the-top rhetoric, immoral conduct, and a direct assault on our democratic institutions.”

Chuck Schumer

The Majority Senate Leader is now part of a long-running joke in D.C. It says, “The most dangerous place in Washington is between Schumer and a microphone.” Schumer loves the media, and it is annoying for Democrats. Some even dubbed Schumer a Democratic Mitch McConnell.

Elise Stefanik

The far-right GOP lawmaker started as a rising star, but she became increasingly annoying during the pandemic, and it cultivated by introducing a resolution to expunge Trump’s impeachments. Stefanik was joined by Greene, and the dynamic duo tried to rewrite the history.>

<If there is one statistic that best captures the transformation of the American economy over the past half century, it may be this: Of Americans born in 1940, 92 percent went on to earn more than their parents; among those born in 1980, just 50 percent did. Over the course of a few decades, the chances of achieving the American dream went from a near-guarantee to a coin flip.

What happened?

One answer is that American voters abandoned the system that worked for their grandparents. From the 1940s through the ’70s, sometimes called the New Deal era, U.S. law and policy were engineered to ensure strong unions, high taxes on the rich, huge public investments, and an expanding social safety net. Inequality shrank as the economy boomed. But by the end of that period, the economy was faltering, and voters turned against the postwar consensus. Ronald Reagan took office promising to restore growth by paring back government, slashing taxes on the rich and corporations, and gutting business regulations and antitrust enforcement. The idea, famously, was that a rising tide would lift all boats. Instead, inequality soared while living standards stagnated and life expectancy fell behind that of peer countries. No other advanced economy pivoted quite as sharply to free-market economics as the United States, and none experienced as sharp a reversal in income, mobility, and public-health trends as America did. Today, a child born in Norway or the United Kingdom has a far better chance of outearning their parents than one born in the U.S.

As the economy is on the upturn, who's feeling the impact?

This story has been extensively documented. But a nagging puzzle remains. Why did America abandon the New Deal so decisively? And why did so many voters and politicians embrace the free-market consensus that replaced it?

Since 2016, policy makers, scholars, and journalists have been scrambling to answer those questions as they seek to make sense of the rise of Donald Trump—who declared, in 2015, “The American dream is dead”—and the seething discontent in American life. Three main theories have emerged, each with its own account of how we got here and what it might take to change course. One theory holds that the story is fundamentally about the white backlash to civil-rights legislation. Another pins more blame on the Democratic Party’s cultural elitism. And the third focuses on the role of global crises beyond any political party’s control. Each theory is incomplete on its own. Taken together, they go a long way toward making sense of the political and economic uncertainty we’re living through.

“The American landscape was once graced with resplendent public swimming pools, some big enough to hold thousands of swimmers at a time,” writes Heather McGee, the former president of the think tank Demos, in her 2021 book, The Sum of Us. In many places, however, the pools were also whites-only. Then came desegregation. Rather than open up the pools to their Black neighbors, white communities decided to simply close them for everyone. For McGhee, that is a microcosm of the changes to America’s political economy over the past half century: White Americans were willing to make their own lives materially worse rather than share public goods with Black Americans.

From the 1930s until the late ’60s, Democrats dominated national politics. They used their power to pass sweeping progressive legislation that transformed the American economy. But their coalition, which included southern Dixiecrats as well as northern liberals, fractured after President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Richard Nixon’s “southern strategy” exploited that rift and changed the electoral map. Since then, no Democratic presidential candidate has won a majority of the white vote.

Crucially, the civil-rights revolution also changed white Americans’ economic attitudes. In 1956, 65 percent of white people said they believed the government ought to guarantee a job to anyone who wanted one and to provide a minimum standard of living. By 1964, that number had sunk to 35 percent. Ronald Reagan eventually channeled that backlash into a free-market message by casting high taxes and generous social programs as funneling money from hardworking (white) Americans to undeserving (Black) “welfare queens.” In this telling, which has become popular on the left, Democrats are the tragic heroes. The mid-century economy was built on racial suppression and torn apart by racial progress. Economic inequality was the price liberals paid to do what was right on race.....>

<....The New York Times writer David Leonhardt is less inclined to let liberals off the hook. His new book, Ours Was the Shining Future, contends that the fracturing of the New Deal coalition was about more than race. Through the ’50s, the left was rooted in a broad working-class movement focused on material interests. But at the turn of the ’60s, a New Left emerged that was dominated by well-off college students. These activists were less concerned with economic demands than issues like nuclear disarmament, women’s rights, and the war in Vietnam. Their methods were not those of institutional politics but civil disobedience and protest. The rise of the New Left, Leonhardt argues, accelerated the exodus of white working-class voters from the Democratic coalition.

Robert F. Kennedy emerges as an unlikely hero in this telling. Although Kennedy was a committed supporter of civil rights, he recognized that Democrats were alienating their working-class base. As a primary candidate in 1968, he emphasized the need to restore “law and order” and took shots at the New Left, opposing draft exemptions for college students. As a result of these and other centrist stances, Kennedy was criticized by the liberal press—even as he won key primary victories on the strength of his support from both white and Black working-class voters.

But Kennedy was assassinated in June that year, and the political path he represented died with him. That November, Nixon, a Republican, narrowly won the White House. In the process, he reached the same conclusion that Kennedy had: The Democrats had lost touch with the working class, leaving millions of voters up for grabs. In the 1972 election, Nixon portrayed his opponent, George McGovern, as the candidate of the “three A’s”—acid, abortion, and amnesty (the latter referring to draft dodgers). He went after Democrats for being soft on crime and unpatriotic. On Election Day, he won the largest landslide since Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1936. For Leonhardt, that was the moment when the New Deal coalition shattered. From then on, as the Democratic Party continued to reflect the views of college graduates and professionals, it would lose more and more working-class voters.

McGhee’s and Leonhardt’s accounts might appear to be in tension, echoing the “race versus class” debate that followed Trump’s victory in 2016. In fact, they’re complementary. As the economist Thomas Piketty has shown, since the’60s, left-leaning parties in most Western countries, not just the U.S., have become dominated by college-educated voters and lost working-class support. But nowhere in Europe was the backlash quite as immediate and intense as it was in the U.S. A major difference, of course, is the country’s unique racial history.

The 1972 election might have fractured the Democratic coalition, but that still doesn’t explain the rise of free-market conservatism. The new Republican majority did not arrive with a radical economic agenda. Nixon combined social conservatism with a version of New Deal economics. His administration increased funding for Social Security and food stamps, raised the capital-gains tax, and created the Environmental Protection Agency. Meanwhile, laissez-faire economics remained unpopular. Polls from the ’70s found that most Republicans believed that taxes and benefits should remain at present levels, and anti-tax ballot initiatives failed in several states by wide margins. Even Reagan largely avoided talking about tax cuts during his failed 1976 presidential campaign. The story of America’s economic pivot still has a missing piece.

According to the economic historian Gary Gerstle’s 2022 book, The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order, that piece is the severe economic crisis of the mid-’70s. The 1973 Arab oil embargo sent inflation spiraling out of control. Not long afterward, the economy plunged into recession. Median family income was significantly lower in 1979 than it had been at the beginning of the decade, adjusting for inflation. “These changing economic circumstances, coming on the heels of the divisions over race and Vietnam, broke apart the New Deal order,” Gerstle writes. (Leonhardt also discusses the economic shocks of the ’70s, but they play a less central role in his analysis.)

Free-market ideas had been circulating among a small cadre of academics and business leaders for decades—most notably the University of Chicago economist Milton Friedman. The ’70s crisis provided a perfect opening to translate them into public policy, and Reagan was the perfect messenger. “Government is not the solution to our problem,” he declared in his 1981 inaugural address. “Government is the problem."....>

<.....Part of Reagan’s genius was that the message meant different things to different constituencies. For southern whites, government was forcing school desegregation. For the religious right, government was licensing abortion and preventing prayer in schools. And for working-class voters who bought Reagan’s pitch, a bloated federal government was behind their plummeting economic fortunes. At the same time, Reagan’s message tapped into genuine shortcomings with the economic status quo. The Johnson administration’s heavy spending had helped ignite inflation, and Nixon’s attempt at price controls had failed to quell it. The generous contracts won by auto unions made it hard for American manufacturers to compete with nonunionized Japanese ones. After a decade of pain, most Americans now favored cutting taxes. The public was ready for something different.

They got it. The top marginal income-tax rate was 70 percent when Reagan took office and 28 percent when he left. Union membership shriveled. Deregulation led to an explosion of the financial sector, and Reagan’s Supreme Court appointments set the stage for decades of consequential pro-business rulings. None of this, Gerstle argues, was preordained. The political tumult of the ’60s helped crack the Democrats’ electoral coalition, but it took the unusual confluence of a major economic crisis and a talented political communicator to create a new consensus. By the ’90s, Democrats had accommodated themselves to the core tenets of the Reagan revolution. President Bill Clinton further deregulated the financial sector, pushed through the North American Free Trade Agreement, and signed a bill designed to “end welfare as we know it.” Echoing Reagan, in his 1996 State of the Union address, Clinton conceded: “The era of big government is over.”

Today, we seem to be living through another inflection point in American politics—one that in some ways resembles the ’60s and ’70s. Then and now, previously durable coalitions collapsed, new issues surged to the fore, and policies once considered radical became mainstream. Political leaders in both parties no longer feel the same need to bow at the altar of free markets and small government. But, also like the ’70s, the current moment is defined by a sense of unresolved contestation. Although many old ideas have lost their hold, they have yet to be replaced by a new economic consensus. The old order is crumbling, but a new one has yet to be born.

The Biden administration and its allies are trying to change that. Since taking office, President Joe Biden has pursued an ambitious policy agenda designed to transform the U.S. economy and taken overt shots at Reagan’s legacy. “Milton Friedman isn’t running the show anymore,” Biden quipped in 2020. Yet an economic paradigm is only as strong as the political coalition that backs it. Unlike Nixon, Biden has not figured out how to cleave apart his opponents’ coalition. And unlike Reagan, he hasn’t hit upon the kind of grand political narrative needed to forge a new one. Current polling suggests that he may struggle to win reelection.

Meanwhile, the Republican Party struggles to muster any coherent economic agenda. A handful of Republican senators, including J. D. Vance, Marco Rubio, and Josh Hawley, have embraced economic populism to some degree, but they remain a minority within their party.

The path out of our chaotic present to a new political-economic consensus is hard to imagine. But that has always been true of moments of transition. In the early ’70s, no one could have predicted that a combination of social upheaval, economic crisis, and political talent was about to usher in a brand-new economic era. Perhaps the same is true today. The Reagan revolution is never coming back. Neither is the New Deal order that came before it. Whatever comes next will be something new.>

<Appearing on MSNBC on Thanksgiving weekend, former federal prosecutor Glenn Kirschner stated that judges are getting fed up with assertions made by lawyers for Donald Trump trying to forestall gag orders that would bar him from launching attacks on prosecutors, judges and courthouse employees.

Speaking with host Katie Phang about a new motion made over Thanksgiving by the Department of Justice to rein in the former president, Kirschner claimed the arguments made by Trump's lawyers that he can't be held responsible for violent threats aimed at his targets by his supporters isn't going to fly with judges much longer.

"I sat through the argument earlier this week in the D.C. Court of Appeals case, regarding the constitutionality of the gag order and there was discussion about what was going on in other jurisdictions," Kirschner explained. "Similarly, Judge [Tanya] Chutkan was presiding over the trial in Donald Trump's case, has regularly talked about what's going on in other jurisdictions."

"So I think this evidence will probably be accepted by the appellate court and Donald Trump's lawyers, as recently as yesterday, filed their reply and they continue to ask the judges to just check your common sense at the door," he continued. "You don't need to bring it with you to bear on this issue. One thing stood out about the letter that Trump's team filed yesterday; they say, again, Mr. Trump did not directly threaten [Judge Arthur Engoron clerk] Miss Greenfield. That is the broken peg on which they continue to try to hang their legal argument."

"The good news, Katie, is in court on Monday, Judge Patricia Millett directly knocked that down," he elaborated, "She said, and I quote, 'there is a clear pattern here.' Donald Trump issued a statement, and witnesses get threatened. So, I think the judges are beyond this nonsensical claim that Donald Trump just says things that are hyper-critical of the witnesses who are expected to testify against them, and he should bear no sort of consequences when his supporters instantly rise to his call and begin intimidating, threatening, and harassing the witnesses.">

<Something terrible and deadly is happening here in the United States, and House Speaker Mike Johnson just announced that he wants to double down on it. More on that in a moment.

If you were born and live in Japan, you can expect to live to 85 years old. For South Korea average lifespan is 83, as are Norway, Switzerland, Iceland, Israel, and Australia.

It’s 82 for Italy, Spain, Ireland, France, Finland, and New Zealand.

Cuba (!) and Panama are 79; Uruguay and Croatia are 78.

A total of 61 countries have average lifespans of 78 years or older, ranging from Singapore’s 84 to Estonia’s 78.

And then there’s the United States. Our average lifespan comes in at a paltry 77 years, along with Iran, Tunisia, and Morocco.

And it’s entirely because of Republican policies.

That’s the main conclusion of a new study published in PLOS One, one of the world’s leading publications of peer-reviewed science across a wide variety of fields.

The report, rigorously scientific, was funded by the National Institute on Aging (NIA), a division of the United States’ National Institutes of Health (NIH).

They concluded that if, in 2019, “liberals” (Democrats) had run all the Red states, then 171,030 fewer Americans would have died that year. On the other hand, if “conservatives” (Republicans) had succeeded in imposing their healthcare, tax, labor, and gun policies on the Blue states, there would have been an additional 217,635 dead Americans.

This follows the Brookings Institution study published two years ago that concluded Republican anti-mask and pro-snake-oil (hydroxychloroquine, ivermectin, etc.) policies unnecessarily killed 400,000 Americans during the first year of the pandemic.

That study, along with a report from Congress detailing Trump’s incompetentmalicious response to the pandemic, provoked psychologist Mary Trump to refer to her uncle as a “mass murderer.”

Add to that the Republican anti-vax propaganda and, as The New York Times reports, GOP policies are continuing to kill Americans:

“Since Dec. 1, when health officials announced the first Omicron case in the United States, the share of Americans who have been killed by the coronavirus is at least 63 percent higher than in any of these other large, wealthy nations, according to a New York Times analysis of mortality figures.”

And the majority of those dying are Republican followers. Not the Republican politicians and multimillionaire TV commentators, who are all well-vaccinated (Fox required vaccination for all employees), but the people who listen to them, watch them on television, and believe their lies about vaccines and masks.

None of this is new and none should be surprising.

In 2014 the International Journal of Epidemiology published a report titled “US Infant Mortality and the President's Party” looking at the years between 1965 and 2010. They concluded:

“Across all nine presidential administrations, infant mortality rates were below trend when the President was a Democrat and above trend when the President was a Republican. … Republican administrations were characterized by infant mortality rates that were, on average, 3% higher than Democratic administrations.”

The results were, they wrote, solid. Very solid, in fact:

“Conclusions: We found a robust, quantitatively important association between net of trend US infant mortality rates and the party affiliation of the president.”

It turns out it’s not just American conservatives whose policies kill their own people.

Back in 2002 researchers looked at 100 years of data from Australia and England in a paper for the Journal of Epidemiological Public Health (JEPH) titled “Mortality and Political Climate: How Suicide Rates have Risen During Periods of Conservative Government, 1901-2000.”

They controlled the study for years of both war and drought, and concluded that more people kill themselves when conservatives are in power — in both countries, even at different times — than when liberals control the government. The subtitle of an editorial in the JEPH about their paper, in fact, was: “Do conservative governments make people want to die?”

The answer, according to the data, is yes. Noting an excess death rate of around 17% among the 238,431 suicides during years of conservative rule, the final sentence of that editorial was:

“[R]oughly 35,000 of these people would not have died had these Conservative governments not been in government. This is one suicide for every day of the century, or more appropriately, two for every day that the Conservatives ruled.”....>

<.....Drenching the country in blood seems to be a popular sport for conservatives and Republican politicians.

— United Republican opposition to negotiating drug prices is why here in the United States we’re paying $38,398 for an anti-cancer shot that costs $260 in the United Kingdom.

— Twelve Red states still refuse to offer Medicaid to their low-income workers, even though the federal government pays 90% of the cost. But while you can’t get healthcare in Red states, you sure can get a weapon of war.

— And with 120 guns for every 100 citizens, these deadly weapons — whose sole purpose is to kill humans — have become the leading cause of death for American children, a horror not found in any other country in the world.

— By the end of last year, fully half of American states abandoned all meaningful gun regulations, allowing permit-less carry, further increasing the carnage as The New York Times documented in heartbreaking detail.

— Republican advocacy for fossil fuels and lies about climate change are also killing Americans. An estimated 32,000 deaths a year come about just because of tailpipe and smokestack pollution.

— This doesn’t begin to measure the people who’ve died from extreme weather events causing wildfires across the West, derechos and flooding across the Midwest and South, and warming-amplified hurricanes in Mexico and the American Southeast. Or the people who’ve simply lost everything when their homes and jobs are wiped out.

Instead of doing anything about these issues, Republicans in Congress and state houses vote in a block to support the fossil fuel billionaires who fund their campaigns rather than supporting their states’ citizens who are getting whacked by the carbon pollution that industry lied to us about for over six decades.

And now House Speaker Mike Johnson wants to gut Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid because “we’re drowning in debt.” What he fails to mention is that 100% of our nation’s $34 trillion debt was caused by Reagan, Bush, and Trump tax cuts along with the $10 billion in illegal wars Bush and Cheney lied us into.

As my colleague Chauncey DeVega points out:

“Social demographers have repeatedly shown that there is actually more early death, suicide, murder, criminality, poverty, prescription drug abuse and other forms of human misery and suffering — on a per capita basis — in ‘red State’ America than in more cosmopolitan, progressive, affluent and dynamic ‘blue’ cities and regions.”

While all this is shocking in aggregate, it shouldn’t surprise us that a political party that swears its first allegiance to billionaires and giant multinational corporations would choose money and profits over health and life.

The Republican Party, as I noted last year, has ceased to be a legitimate political party with actual policy positions and become, instead, a loose collection of Nazis, cult-based “Christians,” antisemites, predatory hustlers, misogynists, gun nuts, bigots, and government haters, all funded by billionaires who don’t want to pay their taxes.

This is not Dwight Eisenhower’s Republican Party; it’s barely Nixon’s anymore.

America can do better, but first we must overcome the billions that are being spent right now to put the GOP back in charge of the White House and Senate.

And that means we all have to do everything we can to wake people up and get out the vote.>

<Following a Wisconsin Supreme Court review of the voting districts in the state this week, former President Donald Trump accused Democrats of "cheating" — and called on Republicans to put a "stop" to it.

"Tremendous cheating going on in a State that I love, Wisconsin," Trump wrote in a Truth Social post. "Republicans must do something to stop it!"

Earlier this week, the Wisconsin Supreme Court heard oral arguments in a constitutional battle over district map boundaries, with Republicans battling to hold onto their virtual stranglehold control in a state that has been called the "poster child" of gerrymandering.

After a winning in 2011, Republicans drew new districts for the state legislature so Republican stacked and distorted in their favor that it made it almost impossible for many of them to lose future elections.

During arguments, Republicans accused Democrats of violating the state Constitution with their proposed maps, which they accused Democrats of waiting to present until reaching a 4-3 court majority.

“Everybody knows that the reason we’re here is because there was a change in the membership of the court,” conservative Justice Rebecca Bradley said at the beginning of the proceeding.

Republicans began plotting immediately to impeach newly elected Justice Janet Protasiewicz, who flipped the court majority.

In his Truth Social post, Trump included a recent Wall Street Journal editorial accusing the court's new liberal majority of attempting a "judicial coup" by issuing what's expected to be an order to redraw the maps.

The "court declined to hear claims that the maps are a partisan gerrymander, agreeing instead to consider the Trojan horse of whether geographically splintered political districts justify throwing out the maps altogether. Wink, wink," reads the editorial.

In the oral arguments on Tuesday, one justice asked for both sides to recommend experts who could help the court draw new maps if the existing ones are going to be thrown out, according to the New York Times.

Should the Democrat-proposed maps become a reality, it could case a radical shift in power in the state by opening up several new seats for Democrats, especially as Wisconsin remains a battleground for the upcoming 2024 election.

The state Supreme Court is not expected to immediately rule on the case.>

Guess the dear boy missed the Biblical passage 'bout the pot 'n the kettle.....

<As communities across the nation are experiencing heightened tension and acrimony, including fights over “parents’ rights” concerning public school classroom curricula and library books, a wave of states are implementing “universal vouchers.” These allow public dollars to follow any student—not just children with disabilities or those in poor-performing schools—to private schools, among other uses. As of July 2023, seven states had initiated a universal voucher program. Nine more had expanded existing programs. According to Education Week, “Private school choice is not a new thing, but what we’re seeing now is very new.”

One prominent example from this past February is the Arkansas Learns Act, introduced by Governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders, which includes vouchers to provide up to $6,600 per student attending a private school. It is no accident that Deep South states are represented in this movement en force, as this is the very region where efforts to divert public dollars to private schools first began. Uncovering the racist legacy of the nation’s first major expansion of private schools—in the post-Brown V. Board of Education South—offers important context for parents as they weigh whether they should trade public for private schools and support the use of vouchers to do so.Segregation Academies 1.0 Many Americans are familiar with images from Central High School in 1957, when President Dwight Eisenhower sent in the National Guard to escort the “Little Rock Nine” to class, integrating the school. What is less known is that the following year, Arkansas Governor Orval Faubus retaliated, closing all Little Rock public high schools. The school board tried to lease the high school buildings to a newly formed group that intended to operate an all-white high school using public funds, a move successfully blocked by the NAACP. Undaunted, Faubus purchased buildings on the public dime to house the hastily formed Raney High School. The school enrolled 800 white students that year. Before the public schools reopened in 1959, state funding for displaced white students spurred the opening of two more all-white private schools, the first of what came to be known as “segregation academies”— private schools established with the express purpose of excluding Black students.

Elsewhere across the South, resistance to public school integration dragged on for years. Securing public funding for all-white private schools was the go-to solution in the face of integration mandates. In 1964, the Mississippi legislature created a voucher program for students attending nonreligious private schools. Immediately, this prompted the founding of three private segregation academies. Hoping to spawn more schools, the White Citizen’s Council in its journal The Citizen offered step-by-step instructions, assuring anxious parents in 1964 that the State of Mississippi would “pay up to $185 a year to each child in a nonsectarian school for tuition purposes.” The Citizen opined, “[Parents] want their children to be raised and educated free from the tensions of racial conflict in the classroom, free from the frustrating drag of mass mediocrity, and free from the blight of self-styled progressive educators whose avowed aim is to turn young Americans from the established inheritance of their fathers to alien theories of collectivism and anti-white racism.”

After 1960, the fraction of students in private schools fell in all other regions but grew rapidly in the South. In Mississippi, for example, private school enrollment spiked from 3.5 percent of all students in 1967 to more than 10 percent in 1972, driven by the exodus of white students from public schools. By 1975, approximately 750,000 white students were attending segregation academies across the South. Public funds were “vitally important in the founding and support of many segregation academies,” per the Yale Law Journal. According to one historian, in some instances, “entire student bodies moved from formerly all-white public schools to new private schools,” built with public funds, legally and otherwise. Books and other school materials were transferred to the new schools, along with desks, blackboards, and even buses, secured via hastily organized “purchases” for pennies on the dollar.

Whites also tried to steal the identity and legacy of the local public schools. “They took along the trappings of the old school, its colors, its teams, mascots, symbols, its student newspaper, leaving behind the shell of the building,” write educational historians David Nevin and Robert Bills....>

<.....Segregation Academies 2.0

Even today, the link between vouchers and resistance to integration in the South is not a subtle one. Two months after Arkansas Governor Sanders announced the LEARNS Act, her attorney general filed motions in U.S. District Court to end decades-long federal desegregation orders in three school districts, orders which would have precluded students in those districts from participating in the voucher program.

Of the 82 non-special-needs schools that had been approved for the Arkansas LEARNS Act by August 10, we uncovered at least 11 that were founded between 1964 and 1975, the best proxy for a former segregation academy. Many others not founded with racist intent also have predominantly white student bodies, including those in parts of the state with a substantial Black population. Typical of its peers, the former segregation school Pulaski Academy, in Little Rock, now has a non-discriminatory admissions policy but a student body that is 8 percent Black, in a city where Blacks are the majority.

Meanwhile, Mississippi is attempting to divert $10 million in American Rescue Plan dollars to private schools, a move that was ruled unconstitutional in October 2022 when a suit was brought on behalf of Parents for Public Schools. Mississippi’s attorney general appealed this ruling in May 2023, charging that the group had no standing, as it was the schools and students—not the parents—who would be adversely affected by funneling federal dollars to private schools. This challenge has not yet been resolved.

More and more Northern states are adopting the same strategies that their Southern counterparts used to evade Brown—diverting public dollars to private schools (eight non-Southern states to date have implemented universal vouchers) or implementing other schemes, such as Educational Savings Accounts (ESLs) or tax credits, to accomplish the same ends. In nearly every case, there has been strong opposition from practitioners and parents alike. Yet this has not slowed the trend.

Ongoing segregation and resegregation of America’s schools are colossal human and policy failures. In Arkansas and elsewhere, redirecting public funds to private schools will almost certainly perpetuate the very inequalities that so many of the post-Brown southern segregation schools were created to preserve. It is students—especially but not only students who are Black, rural, with disabilities, and from families with low income—who once again stand to lose the most from these radical state-level schemes.

Part of the push toward universal vouchers, no doubt, is that some parents are dissatisfied with the quality of the public schools available to them. Yet there is no evidence that universal vouchers will solve that problem. Improving public schools isn’t easy, but one strategy can significantly move the needle. There is strong evidence that increasing the pay of new teachers improves student outcomes. Higher starting salaries attract more talented people into the profession and keep them there longer. It can allow them to be more fully devoted to teaching rather than being forced to do odd jobs like driving for Uber or Instacart to get by. In addition to introducing universal vouchers to students attending private schools, the Arkansas LEARNS Act also increases the minimum salaries for new public school teachers to $50,000 per year.

In fact, a movement to increase teacher pay is sweeping across the South, but these efforts haven’t gone far enough. In some places, like Texas, conversations about universal vouchers are well underway while teacher salaries, which remain woefully low, are ignored. Honoring America’s public school teachers by ensuring they receive a fair paycheck for their labor is one strategy that can significantly boost children’s learning outcomes without running the risk of resegregating the nation’s schools. That is evidence-based policy that can have an impact on the education of all of our kids.>

<While plenty of Republicans strive to put Jan. 6, 2021, behind them, two congressional conservatives are trying to use the insurrection at the U.S. Capitol as a way to criminalize causes they disagree with.

Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia and Sen. Tom Cotton of Arkansas are leading a bicameral battlecry for federal law enforcement to throw the book at an enemies list that includes progressive colleagues, outspoken pro-Palestinian activists and Black Lives Matter protesters.

The strategy turns on equating recent, mostly nonviolent pro-Palestinian demonstrations with the deadly siege at the Capitol.

In the past month, Cotton has repeatedly called on the Department of Justice to crack down on people who've challenged Israel's war in Gaza. The two-term senator urged Biden administration officials to use “every law-enforcement tactic against these pro-Hamas insurrectionists that it has used in the January 6 cases” after protesters last week clashed with police outside of the Democratic National Committee.

U.S. Capitol Police characterized that off-campus event as "not peaceful," noting in an official statement that some of the approximately 200 protestors "failed to obey our lawful orders" — which led to six officers being injured and one arrest for assaulting a police officer.

“Track them down, arrest them, convict them, and lock ‘em up,” the Arkansas Republican posted on X, the social media site formerly called Twitter.

Cotton tweeted something similar two weeks before when a dozen anti-war activists interrupted a Senate hearing, and about a month ago when pro-Palestinian groups swarmed the Cannon House Office Building rotunda while hundreds of others rallied along Independence Avenue Southeast adjacent to the House side of the Capitol.

“DOJ should treat this mob of Hamas supporters the same way they treated grandmothers who wandered into the Capitol on January 6,” Cotton posted online.

In its most recent report about the ongoing Jan. 6 investigations, Justice Department officials wrote that more than 1,200 defendants have been charged with riot-related crimes since former President Donald Trump commanded his followers to “fight like hell” to keep him in power....>

<.....According to DOJ, 418 defendants have been criminally charged for “assaulting, resisting, or impeding” law enforcement officials that day, and 117 defendants have been charged with “using a deadly or dangerous weapon” to assault the 140 police officers who tried to defend the Capitol.

One of the cops who was battered, gassed and bear sprayed throughout the ordeal on Jan. 6, 2021, described it as guerrilla warfare.

Nearly 700 people, so far, have pleaded guilty to the various federal charges, including 201 felonies. And DOJ estimated that Trump supporters caused $3 million in damage that day, including physical damage to the building, grounds and associated costs to the U.S. Capitol Police.

Neither Cotton nor Greene responded to repeated requests for comment about their campaign to punish political opponents. But both have been vocal on social media.

“FBI Director Christopher Wray is obsessed with targeting Trump supporters who were at the Capitol on Jan 6, 2021, but claimed he did not know that a terrorist group called ‘Global Intifada’ organized the illegal occupation of the Cannon House Office Building on Oct 18th,” Rep. Greene railed online after arguing with the law enforcement chief during a recent congressional hearing.

Wray pleaded ignorance, prompting Greene to lash out about "investigating terrorism" and demand that he arrest members of the group she said she had uncovered while scouting out the Cannon office building protestors.

“FBI manhunt and tanks for a guy who used pepper spray at police on Jan 6?” Greene marveled a few weeks back, adding, “They don’t do this for Antifa/BLM rioters or Ceasefire Now Pro-Hamas/terrorists."

The conservative bomb-thrower recently noted that she fine-tuned a censure resolution against Rep. Rashida Tlaib, D-Mich., after two dozen GOP colleagues joined House Democrats in torpedoing her initial effort to chastise the Palestinian-American lawmaker.

“I am removing ‘insurrection’ and replacing it with ‘illegal occupation’ on Oct 18th that broke the same federal laws as Jan 6 ,” Greene wrote online.

When New York Democrat Jamaal Bowman admitted that he pulled a fire alarm during a House vote on a stopgap funding bill, Greene cried for swift justice.

“[Jamaal] violated the exact same law that January 6 defendants are being prosecuted for every day ... I'm demanding that the Department of Justice prosecute him the same way they prosecute January 6 defendants,” she proposed not once, but twice.

Bowman pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor charge of "willfully and knowingly" pulling a false fire alarm and agreed to pay a $1,000 fine.

While Cotton voted to acquit Trump in his back-to-back impeachments, the Arkansas Republican did not join Greene and the other 146 congressional Republicans who voted to overturn the 2020 election results. She’s been trying to normalize the event ever since — lighting into a congressional reporter last spring for continuing to ask about what she called “a riot that happened here at the Capitol one time.”

“It’s over, okay. It was a riot. It was horrible. I hated it,” she told NBC’s Scott Wong before her anger boiled over again.

“Everyone’s being prosecuted that should be prosecuted,” she said, adding, “Go ask about BLM and Antifa rioters. See if they’re rotting in jail.”>

<Rep. Matt Gaetz’s (R-FL) recent success in leading the ouster of former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) has catapulted him further into the national spotlight, but the path ahead is fraught with challenges as voters in Florida appear to be scaling back their support.

Gaetz’s journey from Florida state politics to a powerful force in the House has been marked by both victories and controversies, with the congressman known as an outspoken conservative firebrand. His 1st Congressional District in Florida's panhandle is one of the most red in the state, easily winning his reelection bids since being elected in 2016.

This year, Gaetz launched his most controversial and consequential move yet, introducing the motion to vacate that ended in the House stripping McCarthy of his post in a 216-210 vote, marking the first time ever that a speaker was fired from the job.

Gaetz and the group of Republicans who joined House Democrats in voting to remove McCarthy on Oct. 3 have praised new House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) despite weeks of struggling to unite the party in backing a new leader. However, recent poll numbers show Gaetz's constituents might not be too satisfied with him.

A poll from the Florida Atlantic University Mainstreet PolCom Lab released last week shows 57% of Florida voters disapprove of his job performance as a member of Congress, while only 21% of voters approve. While it’s no surprise that 82.9% of Democrats disapprove of the conservative congressman, Republican support is split, raising alarms for Gaetz’s reelection and possible future aspirations to a higher office: 36.3% of Republicans disapprove of him, and 36.6% of Republicans approve.

After Gaetz and seven other Republicans removed McCarthy, the House erupted in chaos for weeks as the GOP conference couldn't unify around a new leader. The first nominee, House Majority Leader Steve Scalise (R-LA), failed to gather enough support and dropped out. The second, Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH), fell short of securing a majority of the votes in a third round of balloting. House Majority Whip Tom Emmer (R-MN) lost his status as the party's speaker-designate after pushback from Republican members and former President Donald Trump.

Some members from Gaetz's own party called for him to be expelled from the Republican conference immediately after the vote, including Rep. Mike Lawler (R-NY) and Rep. David Joyce (R-OH).

“It was disgraceful and violated House Republican conference rules. That required a majority of a majority to remove a House speaker and file that motion to vacate, and they didn’t adhere to that, and it was wrong,” Lawler told CNN’s Wolf Blitzer in an appearance on The Situation Room.

Joining the belief that Gaetz will be expelled from Congress is McCarthy himself, who said on Sunday that he could face the same expulsion threat that Rep. George Santos (R-NY) faced once the House Ethics Committee released its report.

“We're gonna have to come together,” McCarthy said Nov. 17 on Fox News's Sunday Morning Futures. “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.”

Gaetz has been under review by the House Ethics Committee, focused on allegations that he engaged in sexual misconduct, illicit drug use, misusing campaign funds and state identification records, and other allegations. That investigation was paused due to a related 2020 investigation into allegations that Gaetz had sex with a 17-year-old. The Department of Justice dropped the investigation earlier this year, declining to bring charges against him, citing they could not make a strong enough case.

Gaetz has repeatedly denied any wrongdoing in both cases. Last week, Gaetz called for a House Ethics investigation into McCarthy over an altercation with Rep. Tim Burchett (R-TN), who claimed McCarthy "sucker-punched" him in the kidney, which McCarthy denied.

Tensions between Gaetz and McCarthy have only risen since the Florida congressman withheld his vote in all 15 ballots as McCarthy fought to win the speaker's gavel in January. Gaetz voted for anyone but McCarthy, casting his ballot for former President Donald Trump and House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan (R-OH), finally voting present along with other detractors in the last round.

The Washington Examiner reached out to Gaetz for comment.>

<As ex-President Donald Trump continues to aim for the 2024 presidency despite facing four indictments, many legal experts across the country are urging judges to utilize Reconstruction-era laws to block the MAGA hopeful's chances at succeeding this time around.

Per The Guardian, "The resurgence of these laws in recent years has surprised some observers, but proponents say they are strong tools to fight back against anti-democratic movements happening today. And there aren't more recent laws that deal directly with insurrection since the last major one happened during the civil war."

Historian Eric Foner told the news outlet "it makes sense to use existing laws from that time period because they haven't been repealed, despite the lack of use in the many decades since then, and reflect similar ideas to what’s happening today. The recent use of them shows just how strong the laws created by the Reconstruction Congress are."

He says, "It's a political commentary on what is possible politically today. And it's an odd thing because it's considered more possible to resurrect these laws than to pass new ones."

Furthermore, The Guardian notes, "Beyond Trump, too, lawsuits using these Reconstruction-era laws seek to enforce voting rights and prevent discrimination in modern-era elections," as "The laws from this time period were designed, in part, to reintegrate the Confederate states back into the country and ensure that they did not yet again attempt to overthrow the government or pass laws to restrict newly freed Black citizens."

The news outlet points to the fact "section 3 of the 14th amendment, recently making headlines as various lawsuits attempt to use it to keep Trump off the 2024 ballot, makes it illegal for someone who was an officer of the US government to hold office again if they engaged in 'insurrection or rebellion.'"

Former NAACP Legal Defense Fund President Sherrilyn Ifill, who will soon open a center focused on the 14th amendment at Howard University School of Law emphasizes "judges need to show courage to enforce the amendment’'s provisions," saying, "They may not want to do it any more than I wanted to sue a president under the KKK Act, but their job is to apply the law to the facts and issue a ruling that is consistent with what the law demands."

Some judges have shown that courage, according to The Guardian. For example, despite the fact that "14th amendment lawsuits in Colorado, Minnesota, Michigan and Florida have been tossed, though many are still ongoing and those bringing the lawsuits are likely to appeal," a New Mexico judge recently "ruled that a county commissioner who had participated in the January 6 riots couldn't hold office any more because of the 14th amendment."

Protect Democracy lawyer Jessica Marsden said the "Reconstruction Congress created laws that were 'flexible and responsive to modern-day threats', making them applicable today and worth trying to enforce."

Ifill noted, "We have been compelled to use tools that we didn't use in the past or didn't need to use because we didn’t have the kind of threat and the kind of character prepared to break norms as we do now with Mr Trump and his confederates. We are in a moment of democratic crisis. Trump and his agenda and Trumpism is a unique threat to the core of American democracy. And I think that has sent everyone into the space that we have to use all of the tools that are available to us.">

Whaddaya think, <ursus banalus>? Should your favourite president be allowed to ply his wares of evil?

<keypusher: < George Wallace: <Libpusher: You're a sockpuppet, a loser, and a troll.> This lib is triggered.

Told you all I was hitting the target.>

<Prosecutors working out of Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg's office are asking the judge in the Stormy Daniels hush money case to intercede and force Donald Trump's lawyers to provide a list of their expert witnesses after stonewalling them for months.

That case has been lost in the shuffle as the former president battles a $250 million financial fraud lawsuit in another Manhattan courtroom, a racketeering case in Georgia, an obstruction of justice federal trial in Florida and a trial in Washington D.C. tied to his actions surrounding the Jan. 6 insurrection.

According to a report from the Daily Beast's Jose Pagliery, Manhattan prosecutors have taken the next step and asked Judge Juan Merchan to compel Trump's legal team to provide them with their proposed list of expert witnesses, with accusations they are trying to "sabotage" the trial and extend it out as long as possible.

As the report notes, the former president was charged with 34 felony counts related to paying off adult film star Stormy Daniels about an alleged affair at the time Trump was making his first bid for the presidency.

The Beast's Pagliery reports the pre-trial exchange of information between the prosecutors and the defense team is "not going well."

"Prosecutors say Trump’s lawyers ignored two months of emails starting in August, refusing to respond to their repeated requests that the defense team identify who in the world they’re planning to call at trial," the report states. "Those experts would, in theory, justify how Trump orchestrated a two-step cover-up that involved having close associate Michael Cohen transfer $130,000 to silence Stormy Daniels, then faking Trump Organization business records to pay him back as supposed 'legal fees.'"

Susan Hoffinger, head of the Manhattan DA’s investigations division, previously wrote to Trump lawyers explaining, "As such, the People request that Defendant comply with his reciprocal discovery obligations.”

Trump's legal team responded over a month later and put the blame on the DA's office for not giving them information they requested.

"But prosecutors say that excuse only appeared five weeks late," wrote the Beast's Pagliery. "And now it’s been three months since the deadline... Prosecutors now warn that this kind of hiccup could muddy up the busy months ahead. Trump is already drowning in legal trouble, currently wrapping up an extremely lengthy bank fraud trial in the civil courthouse next door. And come the new year, the top-ranking Republican presidential primary candidate will be busy with the Iowa caucuses, followed by elections in Nevada, Michigan, and South Carolina.">

<The fate of an obscure provision of President Donald Trump’s 2017 tax package, which will be reviewed by the Supreme Court next week, has many experts panicked over the potential to destabilize the nation’s tax system. In addition, some say the outcome could preemptively block Congress from creating a wealth tax.

But the case has also exposed questions about the accuracy of the personal story a Washington State couple presented to the court in making their constitutional challenge to the tax, a one-time levy on offshore earnings.

Charles and Kathleen Moore appear to have closer ties to the company central to the case than they disclosed in court filings. Among other things, Charles Moore served on its board for five years and made a significant cash contribution to the company, records show.

Legal advocacy groups often rely on individuals to humanize their efforts in court, and it is not the first time that those on the other side have pointed to inconsistencies between what the justices are told in filings and the realities outside the courtroom.

This time, however, questions about the legal basis for the couple’s challenge to the tax have been raised before the justices are scheduled to hear oral argument on Dec. 5. Advocates who oppose their challenge have asked the Supreme Court to ditch the case and urged the couple’s attorneys, who come from an anti-regulatory advocacy group, to correct what they say are omissions and misstatements in the record.

Mindy Herzfeld, a tax policy expert from the University of Florida who has written extensively about the case known as Moore v. United States, said the court should not decide a constitutional question based on “an inaccurate set of facts.” To do so, she wrote in a recent column in Tax Notes, “risks undermining the Court’s legitimacy and creating the impression that its docket and its decisions are too easily manipulated by politically motivated interest groups.”

Dan Greenberg, an attorney for the Moores and general counsel of the Competitive Enterprise Institute, said in a statement: “I’m confident that our filings are candid and accurate.”

Adding to the tension are calls from Democratic lawmakers for Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. to recuse himself from deliberations in the closely watched case, because of his ties to another member of the Moore’s legal team. Alito rejected those suggestions, saying he and that lawyer have not discussed the case.

Case could have wide repercussions

The justices are being asked to decide whether a tax on offshore earnings that helped fund Trump’s massive tax cut is permitted under the limited powers of taxation that the Constitution grants to Congress. Activists behind the case believe a ruling in their favor could preemptively bar other taxes that Congress has not previously tried to impose, including a tax on wealth that Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) and others on the left have pushed as an equitable way to generate new funds for government spending.

An unusual political coalition has come together to defend the offshore-earnings tax, from the Biden administration to conservatives including former House Speaker Paul D. Ryan. Not because they favor a wealth tax, but because they worry a ruling against one little-known provision could undermine vast swaths of existing taxes on investments, partnerships and foreign income, which together raise billions or even trillions in revenue.

“A lot of the tax code would be unconstitutional if that thing prevailed,” Ryan said about the case at a recent Brookings Institution event. “I’m not for a wealth tax, but I think if you use this as the argument to spike a wealth tax, you’re going to basically get rid of, I don’t know, a third of the tax code.”

The court could also devise a narrow ruling that only applies to a few tax situations.

The Moores were subject to $15,000 in taxes due to the 2017 law, springing from investments they had made in a company based in India. The law created a one-time tax on certain offshore earnings that had previously been exempt from taxation unless the taxpayer brought the money back to the United States.

The Moores argue they never earned any money from their investment and sued the federal government seeking a refund. The District Court dismissed their case, and the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit upheld that decision, saying the tax was within Congress’s power and permitted under the Sixteenth Amendment regardless of whether the Moores took in, or “realized,” any income.>

<....The appeals court quoted an earlier Supreme Court opinion to say that a taxpayer is not entitled to “‘escape taxation because he did not actually receive the money.’”

The specific tax that the Moores object to paying, known as Section 965, was forecast to raise more than $300 billion over 10 years. Some major corporations have already paid billions under this specific tax; a ruling that struck it down entirely might mean the government has to issue tens of billions of dollars in refunds.

And conceivably, the effects could ripple out much further. The Tax Foundation calculated that ending the taxation of all earnings retained in partnerships would cost the United States government more than $3 trillion over the next 10 years.

The couple’s story

In Supreme Court filings and a video interview of the couple prepared by their legal team, the Moores describe making a $40,000 investment in 2006 in the new company of their friend, Ravindra Kumar Agrawal, whom Charles met while working as a software engineer at Microsoft.

“That was a lot of money for us, but we believed in Ravi’s idea and wanted to support him and see it to fruition,” Charles Moore said. The business supplies power tools to small-scale farmers in India.

“During all these years, we weren’t getting any money, but we were really excited to be part of this company that was growing and reaching more and more people all over India,” Kathleen Moore said in the video interview, which was posted by the Competitive Enterprise Institute. “I would say that was the return on the investment.”

The Moores’ attorneys say in court filings that the couple were “without any role in KisanKraft’s management.” Charles Moore said in a 2020 statement submitted to the court that he “never received a distribution, dividend, or other payment from KisanKraft.”

But tax experts say the Moores were more involved in the company than they suggested. Information included in KisanKraft’s corporate filings, reviewed by The Washington Post and first reported by Tax Notes, show Charles Moore listed as a director of KisanKraft from April 2012 until March 2017. A company resolution announcing Moore’s departure from the board cites his contribution to the “welfare and growth of the company.”

In his sworn statement, Charles Moore says that he visited India to vacation and to tour the company and meet employees. He does not mention that he was a director and reimbursed for about $14,000 in travel expenses between 2014 and 2017.

Moore made a contribution of cash to the company of about $245,000 in 2014 and was repaid the next year with interest at 12 percent, records show. In 2019, after the lawsuit was filed, Moore sold about 20 percent of his holdings for close to $300,000, according to the records.

Herzfeld said Moore’s years on the board, additional investments in the company and sale of shares undermine the couple’s argument that they were passive investors with no control over company activities — and therefore should not be subject to the tax.

The group Patriotic Millionaires, which believes the tax is constitutional, told the justices in a letter last week that the “factual background presented to you is not remotely accurate.”

But there has been no indication that the alleged discrepancies will become an issue before oral arguments next week.

A spokesperson for the court said she did not know whether the letter would be reviewed by the justices. In general, correspondence from those who are not participants in a case are not posted on the court docket, which lists the official case records before the justices.

Though Herzfeld said in her column that the Solicitor General’s office, which will defend the tax on behalf of the U.S. government, could suggest the justices dismiss the case and return it to the lower court for further factual review, Solicitor General Elizabeth B. Prelogar has not raised concerns about the record with the court. A spokesperson for Prelogar declined to comment.

Professional conduct rules require attorneys to notify the court and correct the record if they learn that factual assertions were incorrect. But the Moores’ attorneys say the record they presented is accurate.

The couple had a connection to the Competitive Enterprise Institute long before the launch of their legal challenge. Charles Moore’s father, Thomas Moore, was a longtime CEI board member and member of President Ronald Reagan’s Council on Economic Advisers....>

<....The potential conflict of interest in the case cited by Democratic lawmakers involves David B. Rivkin, a lawyer who is representing the Moores and who twice interviewed Alito for articles that appeared on the Wall Street Journal editorial page. Alito has dismissed calls for his recusal, saying that he and Rivkin never discussed any issue in the Moore case and that Rivkin’s involvement in the litigation was disclosed in the second article.

Competing views on unrealized income

Tax lawyers and other experts with views on the case have generally fallen into three camps of opinion on what the Supreme Court should do.

One group, mostly conservatives, says that the couple was taxed on unrealized gains, and never took in any income from their investment in the Indian company. Taxing them on money they never actually had, this group argues, is outside of the limited powers of taxation that the Constitution grants to the federal government.

Thomas Berry, a Cato Institute attorney who wrote an amicus brief siding with the Moores, said a decision in their favor “would let Congress know how far is too far in taxing property and taxing wealth. … In the long run, that simply means Congress is less likely to make this mistake again and will know in the future that it can’t raise revenue through an unconstitutional wealth tax.”

A second group, mostly left-leaning, says that taxing unrealized gains is allowable under the Constitution, which was the opinion of the lower court that ruled earlier on the Moores’ case.

“There are tons of exceptions to a strict realization requirement, [and] not only that, but those exceptions to realization are really important to maintaining the integrity of our progressive income tax,” said Andy Weiner, a lawyer who wrote an amicus brief along with several tax professors defending the tax law. “If you strike down the mandatory repatriation tax because there’s no realization requirement, that is going to be a very powerful tool for taxpayers to challenge all sorts of laws in all sorts of contexts.”

And then there is the third school of thought on this case. This group, including both Republicans and Democrats, has doubts about the constitutionality of taxing unrealized gains — but says that’s not what happened to the Moores. The tax on the Moores was perfectly legal, they say, because it wasn’t a tax on unrealized gains at all.

“The Moores aren’t being taxed on the change in the value of their shares. They’re not being taxed on the price of their shares, which would be like a wealth tax. … What’s being taxed is actual earnings and profit,” said George Callas, who as a staffer for Ryan helped write the section of the 2017 tax law at issue in this case.

He and other experts who argue that the Moores weren’t taxed on unrealized gains liken the tax on the couple to others that Americans routinely pay. One significant example: When two or more people form a business partnership, they each pay some taxes on their personal income tax filings on whatever money the business makes each year, regardless of which partner actually takes home the revenue.

If the tax on the Moores’ investment in the India-based company is struck down by the Supreme Court, these experts warn, a long list of other tax provisions would also be undermined.

“Their logic is, you can’t tax an owner on profits earned by the business they own unless those profits are sent up to the owner through a dividend or some other type of payment. Huge swaths of the tax code are based on the premise that you absolutely can do that,” Callas said. “The day after a ruling for the Moores, taxpayers and their tax advisers are going to be filing lawsuits saying various provisions of the tax code are unconstitutional, and they’re going to refuse to pay their taxes.”

The case is Moore v. United States.>

<Attorneys for former President Donald Trump reasserted on Monday that the gag orders issued by his New York civil fraud trial judge were “unconstitutional” and should remain stayed until a lawsuit against the presiding jurist is resolved.

Writing in the reply that Manhattan Supreme Court Justice Arthur Engoron abused his authority to silence protected speech and punish the same with sanctions, Trump’s attorneys accused the judge of “brazen” violations of the U.S. Constitution and New York’s Constitution.

“Petitioners moved for a stay of further enforcement of the Gag Orders in an attempt to redress Justice Engoron’s brazen and unmitigated violations of the United States Constitution, the New York State Constitution, the Judiciary Law, and the Rules of this Court,” the memo said. “The notion that an openly and overtly partisan individual would have any role in the decision-making process of this unprecedented case runs squarely counter to the foundational principles of American judicial independence and the Constitutional guarantee of a fair trial.”

The latest Trump filing was a response to two oppositions submitted last week on behalf of Engoron and New York Attorney General Letitia James (D). On Nov. 16, Trump sued Engoron and James under Article 78 in an effort to undo the jurist’s gag orders against both the former president and his lawyers.

Those high-profile orders barred the parties in the case from verbally attacking the judge’s court staff, especially Engoron’s Principal Law Clerk Allison Greenfield, and prohibited Trump attorneys Christopher Kise, Clifford Robert, and Alina Habba from “making any public statements, in or out of court, that refer to any confidential communications, in any form, between [the judge’s] staff and [the judge].”

“In sum, the Gag Orders shield Justice Engoron and his openly partisan clerk from the precise scrutiny essential to maintaining public confidence in the judiciary and ensuring a fair trial,” Trump’s lawyers reiterated Monday. “Supreme Court has ignored with impunity clear, and troubling, evidence of partisan political bias and, in so doing, undermined, perhaps irreparably, the rule of law.”

While Trump wants the gag orders to remain stayed until the Article 78 suit is decided, the state wants the gag orders back in effect while the former president’s petition makes its way through court.

On Nov. 22, Lisa Evans, deputy counsel in Office of Court Administration and of counsel to Engoron’s lawyer David Nocenti, wrote that the gag orders were not issued on a whim, and that Trump and his team “have no likelihood of success on the merits.”

“[I]t is unquestionable that the conduct engaged in by Petitioners — the deluge of the court’s chambers phone and the law clerk’s personal cell phone, personal emails and social media accounts with hundreds of threatening, harassing, disparaging and antisemitic messages — which threatens the safety of court staff is the type of countervailing interest being served that warrants the imposition of the limited gag orders imposed by the Court,” the filing said. “The First Amendment does not prohibit courts from limiting speech that threatens the safety of the court’s staff. Courts have broad discretion to control the conduct of litigants and attorneys in ongoing proceedings.”....>