<The right-wing assault on public health didn’t end with Covid conspiracies. The attack is ongoing, and as it unfolds, we’re seeing examples of how a country under Republican control could pervert the concepts of health and wellness to align with pseudoscientists and far-right hucksters.

This fear came to mind as I read a new Daily Beast report on attempts by conservative anti-vaxxers to win control of the medical board that oversees the prestigious Sarasota Memorial Hospital in Florida.

As the Beast reports, the group of contenders looking to win seats on the board includes Mary Flynn O’Neill, sister of former Trump adviser and conspiracy theorist Michael Flynn.

According to the outlet:

A victory for the conspiracy theorists would allow them to set standards for what qualifies as effective and ethical health care — a horrifying prospect. Florida is already offering a crash course in the dangers of allowing pseudoscience to drive health policy, in the policies of its surgeon general, Dr. Joseph Ladapo.

And yet Florida alone doesn’t paint the full picture of the conservative movement’s assault on public health. There’s more where that came from should conservatives win the White House and control of Congress this fall. As my colleague Steve Benen explained over on the MaddowBlog, Donald Trump has said that, if elected, he’d cut federal funding for schools that have any kind of vaccination mandate. It’s as if to compensate for taking credit for the Covid-19 vaccines, Trump is trying to prove his antiscientific bona fides by condemning vaccines altogether.

And Republicans in the House of Representatives have proposed a bill that would effectively cut off public health research at the knees. As I wrote last month, their proposal to ban funding for medical schools that study disparate health outcomes for racial and ethnic minorities would essentially prohibit crucial public health studies and negatively affect public health for all communities.

The conservative movement’s broad rejection of health institutions and the experts who lead them has terrifying implications for Americans’ well-being and vitality. The right-wing crusade at Sarasota Memorial Hospital, Trump’s vow to punish schools with vaccination mandates and the GOP assault on health disparities represent the breadth of the disaster that awaits public health if Republicans claim victory this fall.>

<There has been some head-scratching about what former President Donald Trump is up to in his defense in the hush money payment trial against him, for which jury selection begins Monday. He keeps filing motions that seem certain to lose, and then when they do he sometimes refiles them again. Some have suggested that he is using the trial to cultivate a narrative of grievance to boost his political standing among his followers nationally, and he undoubtedly is.

But as the author of a new book analyzing the case, it appears to me that he is attempting to reach his supporters in Manhattan in the hopes that at least one will make it onto the jury and then steadfastly refuse to convict him — no matter the strength of the evidence. (Trump denies all wrongdoing.) Judge Juan Merchan’s just-released and extremely detailed jury questionnaire demonstrates that he’s on guard against Trump’s maneuvering — but that doesn’t mean that, if this is Trump’s strategy, the former president won’t continue to try.

When a juror completely disregards the evidence and the law and instead decides based on other reasons such as bias, that is known as “jury nullification,” and it happens for a variety of reasons. When I was a criminal defense lawyer in Washington, DC in the 1990s, the phenomenon was the subject of considerable attention because some of our jurors were fed up with the war on drugs and the associated police strategies. No matter how overwhelming the proof, prosecutors found that they would get a juror who simply would not follow the law. Because criminal juries must be unanimous, even one such juror is enough to prevent a guilty verdict.

My book details dozens of times in which Trump has made obviously losing arguments in the hush money case — a pattern that supports the inference he might be seeking a jury nullification strategy. The latest example: he’s trying to have the judge recuse himself based on flimsy allegations of conflict of interest because his adult daughter works for a firm that does work with Democratic candidates. As the former White House ethics czar, I know that the occupation of an adult child who is not a party or a witness to a case does not give rise to a conflict under New York law.

What makes this even more suspicious is that Trump previously raised and lost this motion. Indeed, as part of that prior go round, the state judicial commission on ethics said there was nothing to it.

Nevertheless Trump has filed again claiming the facts have changed because he is now the presumptive Republican nominee and Democrats — including the judge’s daughter and the firm she is part of, and its clients — will supposedly benefit from the Trump prosecutions. But none of that materially changes anything with respect to the erroneous argument that Merchan has a conflict, because as matter of law we don’t hold judges responsible for the outside activities of their grown children. I believe Trump clearly is up to something other than winning these motions, and that it is fair to conclude tainting the jury pool is part of it.

Here’s how it works. Step one: Cue up a fight with the court, no matter how ridiculous. The point is the fight itself — not to win. In another recent example, Trump pushed the limit of a gag order the judge had already imposed. He lost when the gag order was extended to shut down his shenanigans– but he got a tremendous amount of ink out of the fight. He also just failed in reupping his effort to assert absolute immunity even though he had previously litigated this issue and lost. And he’s currently pushing another recurrent and doomed kvetch about pre-trial publicity as a basis to delay the trial. It isn’t, and that effort was just rejected as well.

Step two: Try to get a hearing out of it, provoking even more intense news coverage in the heart of New York City — and further goose attention by having Trump be present in court for the most high-profile clashes, guaranteeing they will dominate the headlines in the days before, during and after the hearing itself.

That’s what Trump did with his attempt to delay the trial last month after tens of thousands of documents were produced at the last minute by federal prosecutors in response to a subpoena from Trump. At the actual hearing, his lawyers could not identify a single useful citation to support delay. Some wondered why they bothered — but if the point was to trigger anger among potential Trump-supporting jurors, it makes sense....>

<....Step three: Hold a Trump press conference, which ensures that any jury nullification advertisement has the broadest possible reach with the jury pool. His court appearances in the hush money case tend to be followed by speaking to the press such as at his 40 Wall Street building, where he blasts the prosecutors, judges, witnesses and the entire system he claims is going after him.

We cannot, of course, be sure that this is what Trump is up to. He and his lawyers certainly would never admit it; preemptively influencing jurors to violate their oaths to follow the law would hardly be welcomed by the tough judge in this case.

Fortunately the judge need not wait for a confession to deal with Trump‘s tsunami of futile motions and the attention they may be drawing among potential jurors. He has begun the effort to ameliorate that threat in the form of his very thorough written juror questionnaire. All prospective jurors will have to complete it before they are questioned in court.

The document includes direct questions to probe the possibility of bias — such as whether potential jurors “will be fair and impartial.” And it also includes ones that make clear the inference of influence — such as whether potential jurors have attended a Trump rally or even where they get their news from. The breadth of the questionnaire is likely to be effective — it’s one thing to harbor a grudge on behalf of Trump, but quite another to outright lie about it.

We can expect similar scrutiny on voir dire — individual questioning of each of the jurors who make it past the rigorous screening in the questionnaire. It may take time, but the care is worth it, given the risk of a jury nullification campaign here.

Beyond ordering a probing juror questionnaire, Merchan has also attempted to stanch the flow of Trump’s baseless motions, requiring the parties to seek permission before filing any motions. Now he should up the ante by starting to sanction Trump and his lawyers for any frivolous arguments from here on out. The former president and several attorneys associated with him have been hit with sanctions in prior cases for frivolous action against a political adversary and, of course, for pushing Trump’s 2020 election lies, and it is time for them here.

If, as the evidence suggests, Trump is trying for jury nullification, it is hardly a sign of strength. On the contrary, as I argue in my book, Trump is in a position of weakness. He is at great risk of conviction and a sentence of incarceration, and he knows it. That is reflected in his desperate motions strategy, whatever its explanation.>

<[Event "56th New England Open"] [Site "Lowell Mass"]
[Date "1996.08.31"]
[Round "2"]
[White "Frenklakh, Valery"]
[Black "Targonski, Stanley"]
[Result "0-1"]
[ECO "D01"]
[WhiteElo "2320"]
[BlackElo "2235"]

<[Event "56th New England Open"] [Site "Lowell Mass"]
[Date "1996.08.31"]
[Round "2"]
[White "Yedidia, Jonathan"]
[Black "Shapiro, Daniel E"]
[Result "1/2-1/2"]
[ECO "D00"]
[WhiteElo "2480"]
[BlackElo "2330"]

<Conservative activist Leonard Leo was hit with a subpoena from Senate Democrats on Thursday as part of a probe into Supreme Court ethics and whether individuals or groups used luxury gifts to access justices.

The subpoena from the Senate Judiciary Committee arrives months after it was authorized, CNN reported. "Mr. Leo has played a central role in the ethics crisis plaguing the Supreme Court and, unlike the other recipients of information requests in this matter, he has done nothing but stonewall the committee," Durbin said in a statement to the outlet. "This subpoena is a direct result of Mr. Leo's own actions and choices."

Leo, who sits as board co-chairman of the influential Federalist Society, told CNN that he would not comply with the subpoena, calling it "unlawful" and the "left's dark money effort to silence and cancel political opposition."

In February, watchdogs told Rolling Stone that Leo was building out his dark-money network: A counsel at one of his primary nonprofits had registered two new dark-money organizations with subsidiaries baring names similar to groups through which Leo has run effective activism campaigns. "As Leonard Leo faces increasing scrutiny for his shady nonprofit network, it's no surprise he's desperately trying to rebrand," said Caroline Ciccone, president at the watchdog group Accountable.US. "But no matter how many sketchy new groups he comes up with, he can't rebrand the extreme agenda he's still attempting to force on everyday Americans."

During his time as then-President Donald Trump's judicial adviser, Leo helped build the Supreme Court's conservative 6-3 supermajority. Leo, an anti-abortion zealout [sic], fostered a network that has spread money in efforts to bring cases before the Supreme Court, determine which cases the justices consider, and influence the court's decisions.

In November, the high court adopted its first-ever code of ethics. The move came in the wake of increased scrutiny into Justice Clarence Thomas‘ close relationship with Nazi-obsessed billionaire and GOP donor Harlan Crow, including gifts and trips funded by Crow that Thomas failed to disclose.

However, Democrats called out the lack of a mechanism to enforce the code, allowing justices to police themselves.

Other justices have faced criticism along with Thomas. Justice Samuel Alito reportedly accepted a vacation at an Alaskan luxury fishing lodge from Republican donors that he did not disclose, and Justice Sonja [sic] Sotomayor's staff reportedly urged public institutions where she held speaking engagements to buy her memoir or children's books.>

<Over the course of the last couple of years, Donald Trump has shared a few unkind words about special counsel Jack Smith. The former president has, for example, referred to the prosecutor as a “thug” in a “mental state of derangement” who “may very well turn out to be a criminal.”

Soon after, the Republican condemned the special counsel as a “mad dog psycho.” He’s also accused Smith of overseeing “a Gestapo type operation,” as well as being an “animal” and a “lunatic.” At one point, Trump suggested the special counsel’s investigation was “treasonous.”

But last week, the presumptive GOP nominee broke new ground, suggesting Smith “should be sanctioned“ for “attacking a highly respected Judge, Aileen Cannon, who is presiding over his FAKE Documents Hoax case in Florida.”

None of this reflected reality in any way. Cannon and the special counsel have, in fact, clashed over procedural matters, but (a) Smith never “attacked” the jurist; (b) no one seriously believes the controversial, Trump-appointed judge, whose competence and impartiality have repeatedly come into question, is “highly respected”; (c) the classified-documents case is neither “fake” nor a “hoax”; and (d) the idea that the prosecutor “should be sanctioned” for pressing Cannon to follow the law is hopelessly insane.

But the former president nevertheless returned to the subject yesterday, publishing a follow-up item to his social media platform. As Axios reported:

This actually understated matters a bit. In his online missive, the former president argued that President Joe Biden, Attorney General Merrick Garland, and Smith are trying to “illegally intimidate and harass” Cannon.

In other words, the presumptive GOP nominee would have the public believe that the special counsel and the nation’s chief law enforcement officials are engaged in criminal misconduct against a federal district court judge.

Trump went on to say that Biden, Garland, and Smith are calling Cannon “terrible names, wrongfully threatening her with Impeachment, and disrespecting her.”

Again, for those with even a passing interest in reality, the Republican’s claims are plainly delusional. No one involved in the prosecution of this case has engaged in name-calling toward the presiding judge. They’ve also not threatened to impeach her.

But this isn’t a “Trump tells hysterical lies” post. Rather, there are two other areas of concern here.

The first is the truly breathtaking levels of hypocrisy on display. Trump, more so than any modern American political leader, has gone after sitting judges with a vengeance — “disrespecting” them, calling them “terrible names,” and at times even going after members of their families.

If anyone has any doubts about this, they should feel free to ask U.S. District Judge Gonzalo Curiel, U.S. District Judge Lewis Kaplan, New York State Supreme Court Justice Juan Merchan, New York State Supreme Court Justice Arthur Engoron, and U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan, each of whom has been on the receiving end of Trump delegitimizing tantrums.

If the former president believes such conduct constitutes “illegal harassment,” he might as well turn himself into the authorities now.

But the other angle of interest was something else the Republican wrote in his online rant:

He made a similar comment last week, while calling for sanctions, asserting without cause that Smith is “obviously trying to ‘play the ref.’”

We’ve probably all heard the “every accusation a confession” expression, but this is ridiculous. Trump has a variety of reasons to launch campaigns against the judges overseeing his cases, but the more the former president talks about others working the refs, the more he makes clear that he goes after judges and their families as part of a larger effort to work the refs.>