<Inside a Pittsburgh synagogue in 2018, a white man with a history of antisemitic internet posts gunned down 11 worshipers, blaming Jews for allowing immigrant “invaders” into the United States.

The next year, another white man, angry over what he called “the Hispanic invasion of Texas,” opened fire on shoppers at an El Paso Walmart leaving 23 people dead, and later telling the police he had sought to kill Mexicans.

And in yet another deadly mass shooting, unfolding in Buffalo on Saturday, a heavily armed white man is accused of killing 10 people after targeting a supermarket on the city’s predominantly Black east side, writing in a lengthy screed posted online that the shoppers there came from a culture that sought to “ethnically replace my own people.”

Three shootings, three different targets — but all linked by one sprawling, ever-mutating belief now commonly known as replacement theory. At the extremes of American life, replacement theory — the notion that Western elites, sometimes manipulated by Jews, want to “replace” and disempower white Americans — has become an engine of racist terror, helping inspire a wave of mass shootings in recent years and fueling the 2017 right-wing rally in Charlottesville, Va., that erupted in violence.

But replacement theory, once confined to the digital fever swamps of Reddit message boards and semi-obscure white nationalist sites, has gone mainstream. In sometimes more muted forms, the fear it crystallizes — of a future America in which white people are no longer the numerical majority — has become a potent force in conservative media and politics, where the theory has been borrowed and remixed to attract audiences, retweets and small-dollar donations.

Replacement theory is a central theme on Tucker Carlson’s show on Fox....

....No public figure has promoted replacement theory more loudly or relentlessly than the Fox host Tucker Carlson, who has made elite-led demographic change a central theme of his show since joining Fox’s prime-time lineup in 2016. A Times investigation published this month showed that in more than 400 episodes of his show, Mr. Carlson has amplified the notion that Democratic politicians and other assorted elites want to force demographic change through immigration, and his producers sometimes scoured his show’s raw material from the same dark corners of the internet that the Buffalo suspect did....

....In just the past year, Republican luminaries like Newt Gingrich, the former House speaker and Georgia congressman, and Elise Stefanik, the center-right New York congresswoman turned Trump acolyte (and third-ranking House Republican), have echoed replacement theory. Appearing on Fox, Mr. Gingrich declared that leftists were attempting to “drown” out “classic Americans.”

In September, Ms. Stefanik released a campaign ad on Facebook claiming that Democrats were plotting “a PERMANENT ELECTION INSURRECTION” by granting “amnesty” to illegal immigrants, which her ad said would “overthrow our current electorate and create a permanent liberal majority in Washington.” That same month, after the Anti-Defamation League, a civil rights group, called on Fox to fire Mr. Carlson, Representative Matt Gaetz, Republican of Florida, stood up both for the TV host and for replacement theory itself.

“@TuckerCarlson is CORRECT about Replacement Theory as he explains what is happening to America,” Mr. Gaetz wrote on Twitter. In a statement after the Buffalo shooting, Mr. Gaetz said that he had “never spoken of replacement theory in terms of race.”....

....Throughout his presidency, Mr. Trump filled his public speeches and Twitter feed with often inflammatory, sometimes false rhetoric about immigrants, and he employed the term “invaders” in arguing for a border wall. Such language has been more broadly adopted by his most ardent supporters, such as Wendy Rogers, an Arizona state senator, who last summer said on Twitter, “We are being replaced and invaded” by illegal immigrants.

Efforts to reach Ms. Rogers on Sunday were unsuccessful. Reached by email, Mr. Gingrich declared replacement theory “insane,” adding that he was opposed to all anti-Semitism as well as “the white racist violence in Buffalo.”

Responding to criticism of Ms. Stefanik’s ad in the wake of the Buffalo shooting, a senior adviser for the congresswoman sent two responses: a sorrowful statement from Ms. Stefanik about the killing in Buffalo, and a fiery rejoinder from the adviser that “despite sickening and false reporting,” the congresswoman “has never advocated for any racist position or made a racist statement.”....>

<According to a report from the Daily Beast, a frantic Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL) clashed with FBI investigators who were assisting the Florida Republican's father who was being blackmailed \-- and then ran to Fox News and lied about it to make the FBI look bad as news broke that he was also under investigation.

As the Beast's Roger Sollenberger wrote, an FBI report details agents' interactions with the younger Gaetz on the day that it was being reported that he had allegedly been sending money to an associate who in turn was reportedly passing along the cash to young women for sexual favors -- raising questions about sex trafficking.

According to the FBI report, investigators were meeting with the lawmaker's father, Don Gaetz, a former president of the Florida Senate, who was being victimized by blackmailers who claimed they had dirt on his lawmaker son, when the younger Gaetz burst in on their meeting.

As Sollenberger wrote, as the elder Gaetz was handing a recording device back to the investigators while asking them to collect more evidence when his son Matt lashed out at the agents.

"That evening—around 7:45 p.m., according to the FBI report—two special agents rang the doorbell at the Gaetz family residence. They had come for their recording device. The sting was off, but the records don’t explain why, and they don’t mention the Times story," writes the Daily Beast, which then quoted an FBI report stating that "M. GAETZ yelled, ‘He has a lawyer!’ multiple times.”

Sollenberger's report continued, “M. GAETZ yelled, ‘Do you have a warrant to be here?’ and asked his father if they took anything from him. The agents did not respond, the report says. Don Gaetz answered his son: no, they only took the recording device they had previously given him."

Following the altercation, Gaetz appeared on Fox News with host Tucker Carlson in what the controversial Carlson later called "one of the weirdest interviews I’ve ever conducted."

"Minutes later, Matt Gaetz was on national television delivering a broadside against the men he still alleges extorted his family, while at the same time describing a series of events that FBI records show wasn’t accurate," The Beast reports.

Asked for comment about the discrepancy between what Gaetz told Fox viewers and what the FBI report detailed, a spokesperson for the lawmaker issued a statement that read, "Rep. Matt Gaetz stands by every word he has said about this fiasco. Time has only vindicated his claims and resulted in the guilty plea of one of the people involved in a shakedown of his family,” the spokesperson said. “Due to ongoing investigations of other people involved in this shakedown, we will not have further comment.”

Gaetz is still reportedly still under investigation by federal and Florida state officials.>

<Although Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) is expected to waltz to a Republican primary win in Georgia next week, voters in her district are becoming increasingly unhappy and unsettled by her constant self-promoting antics that she performs in lieu of actually doing anything for her constituents in her solidly red district.

According to a report from the Washington Examiner, the controversial freshman lawmaker is facing a slew of challengers who see cracks in her support back home.

As the Examiner's Barnini Chakraborty wrote, "For all of her theatrics, Greene has no real power: She was stripped of her committee assignments for racist remarks she made before she was sworn in. Her in-your-face tactics made her a national name but haven't done much to endear her to constituents who say they've had enough."

One of the five candidates opposing Taylor Greene, Jennifer Strahan, explained that people in the district need someone in Washington D.C. who is actually interested in doing the job they were sent there for.

"I think we have a lot of serious issues going on today, and I think we need a serious representative who wants to actually drive positive change and not just celebrity," she explained.

One local voter who asked not be named, said of their current House representative, "She's an embarrassment," before adding, "She seems nice enough, but you get her in front of a microphone, and she goes bonkers!"

Another challenger for the GOP nod, James Haygood, admitted he was frustrated by her lack of accomplishments, telling the Examiner, "You are supposed to go to Washington to work, but the people of the 14th District elected you to represent them and their needs, and for 15 months, we've had no representation. She's on no committees, and she cries about, 'Oh, everybody's picking on me,' but it's always somebody else's fault."

Democratic strategist David McLaughlin suggested voters in 2020 may have not known who or what they were voting in her first primary and then they were stuck with her in the deeply conservative district that saw the Democratic nominee abruptly drop out two months before the general election.

"At that point, voters had no chance of stopping her unless they voted for her Democratic opponent, who really didn't even make it all the way to Election Day," he explained.>

<Marjorie Taylor Greene was joined on the campaign trail by local CBS affiliate reporter Rick Folbaum this week who pushed the controversial representative on some of her past statements.

“Greene clearly enjoys a challenge and never misses a chance to burnish her image as a fighter as we learned when we asked her about a new report from the Anti-Defamation League documenting a 133% rise in anti-Semitic incidents in Georgia, including in Greene’s 14th District,” Folbaum says in his report.

He notes “we wanted to know if she was worried that some of her past statements, considered offensive by many Jewish people, could inadvertently be contributing to the problem.”

“No, I am not contributing. You’re lying about me,” Greene shot back when asked the question. “You don’t even know what my words were.”

“This was your post, under your name and you’re talking about the Rothschild family, which has been at the center of antisemitic conspiracies since the 19th century,” Folbaum then said to Greene, showing her some of her own words.

“I did not know that. I have no idea,” she responded, playing coy about the intent behind her post.

“That was what? 20-what,” she asked.

It's worse that the outcome is different.

“2018,” he responded, noting in his report that she shrugged it off as it was a remark made before she entered politics.

“We don’t care,” one of Greene’s constituents told Folbaum when asked about her past comments.

Folbaum then reported that some people in Greene’s district do care, however.

“Ronald Reagan is spinning in his grave to know there are people that claim to be Republican and are sympathizing with Vladimir Putin. It is despicable,” said one constituent who confronted Greene while on the campaign trail.

You have said disparaging things against the Jewish community, you suggested a space laser, you are disrespecting the United States Congress and you are a shame,” the man says to Greene in a clip.>

Hahahahaha!

<On Monday, thanks to a case brought by Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX), the Supreme Court struck down another aspect of the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act (BCRA). At issue in this case was a limit on how much a candidate could loan themselves and have donors repay them after an election. The limit had been a generous $250,000. Following yesterday’s ruling, even that fig leaf is gone, leaving elected officials free to ask donors for money that will go right into their own pockets.

The case is FEC v. Ted Cruz for Senate. Senator Ted Cruz loaned $260,000 to his campaign committee and then sought reimbursement from political donors to make himself whole. This was $10,000 over the then-legal limit, suggesting the violation was ginned up as a test case to challenge another aspect of BCRA. (It also undermines any everyman image Cruz might be trying to portray — how many of us could loan anyone, including a political campaign, over $250k?)

The Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act (BCRA) was the brain child of Republican Senator John McCain (AZ) and Democratic Senator Russ Feingold (WI), and it was passed in part as reaction to the implosion of Enron. The Rehnquist Court in 2003 upheld nearly every aspect of the BCRA as constitutional against a facial challenge in McConnell v. FEC.

The Act is now only 20 years old, but it has had a hell of a time before the Roberts Supreme Court. As I wrote about here, the Roberts Supreme Court has been deregulating corruption since its very first term by kicking big holes in campaign finance laws and by making white collar crime harder to prosecute as it lets shady politicians — from Bob McDonnell to Bridget Anne Kelly — off the hook for corrupt acts.....>

<.....The Roberts Supreme Court took its first chunk out of BCRA in Davis v. FEC — striking down a law called the millionaire’s amendment which had allowed candidates running against super rich self-financed candidates to raise more money. The Court, in Davis, came perilously close to ruling that it was unconstitutional to discriminate against the rich. As Justice Alito wrote in his majority opinion:

“Different candidates have different strengths. Some are wealthy; others have wealthy supporters who are willing to make large contributions. … Leveling electoral opportunities means making and implementing judgments about which strengths should be permitted to contribute to the outcome of an election. …it is a dangerous business for Congress to use the election laws to influence the voters’ choices.”

Later, in 2007’s FEC v. Wisconsin Right to Life, the Roberts Court limited what ads could be regulated under BCRA.

Then, in 2010’s Citizens United v. FEC, the Roberts Court really took a hatchet to BCRA, finding that the law’s ban on corporate-funded political ads was unconstitutional. This opinion caught the attention of lots of Americans, from the President to average citizens who decried this turn of events as worthy of amending the Constitution. President Obama called out the Supreme Court in his first State of the Union declaring, “[w]ith all due deference to separation of powers, last week the Supreme Court reversed a century of law that I believe will open the floodgates for special interests — including foreign corporations — to spend without limit in our elections.” In the audience, Justice Alito (now famous for his leaked opinion overturning Roe v. Wade) shook his head and mouthed the words “not true.” History has shown Obama was right as “corporations gave $301 million to super PACs and hybrid PACs from the 2012 to 2018 cycles, 87 percent of which went to conservative groups” and there was an additional $100 million in corporate spending in the 2020 election.

In the new case authored by Chief Justice John Roberts, there is enormous sympathy shown for Senator Cruz in passages like “Cruz, of course, suffers a $10,000 pocketbook harm.” Roberts also continues his longstanding hostility to campaign finance reform stating “we have denied attempts to reduce the amount of money in politics, to level electoral opportunities by equalizing candidate resources, and to limit the general influence a contributor may have over an elected official.” In the end Roberts concludes: “the Government has not shown that Section 304 [of BCRA] furthers a permissible anticorruption goal, rather than the impermissible objective of simply limiting the amount of money in politics… We also conclude that this provision burdens core political speech without proper justification.”

In her dissent in Cruz, Justice Elena Kagan had several choice words for the majority including in the opening paragraph, where she described an elected politician getting made whole after a huge loan to his campaign is repaid by political donors: “The politician is happy; the donors are happy. The only loser is the public. It inevitably suffers from government corruption.”

<Oklahoma state Rep. Mickey Dollens proposed mandatory vasectomies for boys once they hit puberty.

Dollens, speaking before a floor of legislators on Thursday, asked GOP lawmakers to consider his proposal.

Dollens made his remarks as the Oklahoma legislature debated a law that bans abortion from conception.

An Oklahoma state rep proposed an idea for legislation that would make vasectomies mandatory for young men in the state.

Speaking before a floor of legislators, state Rep. Mickey Dollens said on Thursday that he is thinking about introducing the legislation next year.

"I would invite you to co-author a bill that I'm considering next year that would mandate that each male, when they reach puberty, get a mandatory vasectomy that's only reversible when they reach the point of financial and emotional stability," he told GOP lawmakers.

"If you think that's crazy then I think that maybe you understand how 50 percent of Oklahomans feel, as well," the Democrat said.

Dollens' remarks were made as the Oklahoma legislature debated HB 4327, a restrictive law that effectively bans abortion from the moment of "fertilization." The legislature on Thursday passed the bill, and Gov. Kevin Stitt is expected to sign it into law.

If enforced, Oklahoma's law would be one of the strictest abortion restrictions in the country.

The legislation comes as the Supreme Court weighs overturning Roe v. Wade, the 1973 landmark case that legalized abortion in the United States. Politico earlier this month published a draft Supreme Court opinion signaling a reversal of Roe v. Wade. In the draft, Associate Justice Samuel Alito characterized abortion as "egregiously wrong from the start."

Abortion will remain legal in the United States until the court hands down a final verdict, which could come as early as June. But the leaked draft opinion was enough to put reproductive rights activists and doctors who perform abortions on high alert.>

<In March 2020, then-President Donald Trump wanted a "course correction" after "mostly critical" reviews of his Oval Office address on COVID-19, his former senior counselor Kellyanne Conway wrote in her new book.

She suggested engaging with the four living former presidents.

"'They each have dealt with major crises,'" she recalled telling Trump in "Here's the Deal: A Memoir," out Tuesday. "'It will show leadership, bipartisanship, and calm everyone.'"

Trump, however, wasn't interested.

"'Ugh,' he said. 'They're all horrible to me,'" Conway wrote of his response.

Conway pressed on, saying "they haven't been great," but added "this is bigger than all that."

She also thought the move could help him get reelected.

Trump listened to her pitch, she wrote, on how Jimmy Carter could offer advice and George W. Bush would engage. She reminded him of how he and his wife Melania "genuinely got along" with Bush and his wife Laura during Bush's father's funeral.

"'Barack Obama would not decline. He dealt with Ebola and swine flu, and this is serious, too. More serious, it seems,'" she wrote, describing her advice to Trump.

She also told Trump, "'Bush and Obama would help and then go back to their lives. The only one who may be tough to get rid of is Bill Clinton. He'll enjoy the spotlight again, loves this stuff, and'—I smiled—'may want to be your best buddy.'"

Trump later told reporters he didn't want to "bother" the former presidents.

"I don't think I'm going to learn much and, you know, I guess you could say that there's probably a natural inclination not to call," he said during a White House coronavirus task force briefing.

In April 2020, however, he spoke with his campaign rival Joe Biden about ideas for tackling COVID.

"It was a cordial conversation, which I witnessed, and Biden was especially engaged," Conway wrote. "So much so that, after the call, President Trump looked at me and to my surprise declared: 'Everyone is wrong. He hasn't lost it.'">

<Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH) has until next week to answer the House Select Committee's questions about his role in Donald Trump's effort to overturn his 2020 election loss.

The Select Committee gave Jordan until June 11, two days after the first televised hearing is scheduled to air in prime time, to answer its questions, and the panel provided a timeline of the Ohio Republican's “meetings, calls and communications” with Trump administration officials about those efforts.

Nov. 6, 2020: Jordan requested a call with then-attorney general William Barr the day before the election was called for Joe Biden and also communicated with White House chief of staff Mark Meadows about efforts to "pressure" Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Wolfe to audit his state's presidential election results.

Nov. 9, 2020: The lawmaker participated in a meeting with senior White House officials to develop a "blueprint" for the Trump campaign's strategy after the election was called for Biden, arguing the president's loss was tainted and announcing legal actions to challenge the results.

Nov. 14, 2020: Jordan took part in a meeting between Trump campaign officials and members of Congress where Rudy Giuliani announced the campaign would cast doubt on the results by linking Dominion Voting Systems to Venezuelan leaders Hugo Chavez and Nicolas Maduro and Antifa activists in the U.S.

Dec. 21, 2020: Jordan participated in a meeting with Trump, Vice President Mike Pence, Trump's legal advisers and more than a dozen lawmakers about a strategy to challenge the electoral certification on Jan. 6, 2021.

Jan. 5, 2021: The congressman communicated with Meadows to advise Pence to object to certifying electoral votes that he believed were unconstitutional, which various Trump legal advisers and the president himself had urged the vice president to do against the advice of White House counsel.

Jan. 6, 2021: Jordan spoke to Trump for 10 minutes at 9:24 a.m. and at least once after lawmakers were evacuated to a secure location after the president's supporters attacked the U.S. Capitol, and he also told Meadows the president's congressional allies were losing enthusiasm "now that their revolt would be covered only by C-SPAN.”>

<There’s a new contender for most absurd GOP scapegoat for gun violence.

Rep. Billy Long (R-Mo.) was asked during an interview with Missouri radio station The Eagle 93.9 on Wednesday whether there was any appetite among Republicans in Congress to pursue changes to gun laws. It came in the wake of a gunman’s massacre of 19 children and two teachers in Uvalde, Texas.

Long, who is running for the U.S. Senate, said guns aren’t the issue. He criticized proponents of gun control for “trying to blame an inanimate object for all of these tragedies.”

He said there are a few solutions but that the problem can be traced back to when abortion became legal nationwide.

“When I was growing up in Springfield, you had one or two murders a year,” he said. “Now we have two, three, four a week in Springfield, Missouri.

“So something has happened to our society. I go back to abortion, when we decided it was OK to murder kids in their mothers’ wombs. Life has no value to a lot of these folks.”

The data doesn’t support that claim. The Supreme Court’s Roe v. Wade ruling in 1973 established abortion rights in the U.S.

In 1970, 499 murders were reported in Missouri. in 1975, the figure was 505. And in 2019, 568 murders were reported in the state.

The data does show, however, that the gun problem in America is linked to the proliferation of guns and the ease at which people can obtain them. Other countries have had great success in curbing gun violence by tightening gun laws or banning guns and implementing gun buyback programs.

Semiautomatic assault rifles, the guns frequently used in mass shootings like the one last week in Uvalde, are also shown to be part of the problem. In 1994, sweeping legislation was passed that banned certain assault weapons. It expired in 2004. Mass shooting deaths were 70% less likely during the ban, one study found.

“If there was something that would work that would prevent some of these things, any reasonable person is going to look at anything like that,” Long said.

“But to this day and time, no one has been able to come up with any kind of a suggestion that would have helped in any of these situations.”

He proposed retrofitting schools with additional doors so that all classrooms had both entry and exit points. Classrooms without extra doors are just “killing zones,” he said. He suggested the money spent on foreign aid to Ukraine could have been used to do this.

Elected Republicans, many of whom receive significant campaign support from the gun lobby, have blamed just about everything but guns in the wake of a recent spate of mass shootings. The supposed culprits include “wokeness,” architecture and a departure from worshipping Jesus.

Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), for example, thinks the issue is schools have too many doors.>

<Florida Governor Ron DeSantis defended his veto of $35 million in funding for a potential spring training site for the Tampa Bay Rays after the Major League Baseball team last week said it was committed to “actionable change” in the wake of the school mass shooting in Texas.

“I don’t support giving taxpayer dollars to professional sports stadiums,” DeSantis said Friday at a press briefing when asked about the veto of the youth sports complex. “Companies are free to engage or not engage with whatever discourse they want, but clearly, it’s inappropriate to be doing tax dollars for professional sports stadiums. It’s also inappropriate to subsidize political activism of a private corporation.”

The Tampa Bay Rays said on May 26 that it would donate $50,000 to the Everytown for Gun Safety’s Support Fund and use its channels to offer facts about gun violence in the wake of “devastating events that took place in Uvalde, Buffalo and countless other communities across our nation.” ....>

<The dispute in Ritter v. Migliori, an election case currently pending on the Supreme Court’s shadow docket, is beneath the dignity of a nation’s highest court.

It involves a fight over whether 257 ballots cast in a low-level state judicial race should be tossed out because of a very minor paperwork error. It also involves a fairly obvious violation of a federal law providing that voters should not be disenfranchised due to such errors.

And yet, this nothingburger of a case features legal arguments that target much of what remains of federal voting rights laws, after the Supreme Court spent the last decade taking a hatchet to those laws.

David Ritter is a Republican candidate for a judgeship on the Lehigh County Court of Common Pleas in Pennsylvania. Official tallies show him leading Democrat Zachary Cohen by 71 votes. Meanwhile, 257 ballots remain uncounted — enough to potentially flip the race from Ritter to Cohen.

Ritter wants the Supreme Court to prevent these ballots from being counted, thus locking in his victory. And, while the election took place last November and two other judges who prevailed in that election have already been sworn in, the outcome of the Ritter/Cohen race remains uncertain as the fight over these uncounted ballots drags on.

A state law provides that voters who cast their ballots by mail shall “date and sign” the envelope accompanying their ballot. Significantly, however, the state does not care which date the voter writes on this envelope — only that a date is written upon it. Envelopes that are dated “July 4, 1776” or “April 5th, 2063” will be opened and the ballot within shall be counted. But Ritter argues that voters who fail to write any date should be disenfranchised.

Ritter’s argument conflicts with a federal voting rights law, which provides that voters should not be disenfranchised due to paperwork errors “if such error or omission is not material in determining whether such individual is qualified under State law to vote in such election.”

This law, which was enacted as part of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, was intended to prevent states from hunting through paperwork filed by voters of color to find small errors that could then be used to disenfranchise those voters. But the law is written broadly to apply to any state action that would strip someone of the right to vote because of a paperwork requirement that is irrelevant to whether the voter is legally qualified to vote.

Ritter in other words, should be an extremely easy case. Even if there might be a legitimate reason why Pennsylvania could require voters to accurately state the date when they cast their ballot, a requirement that voters must write any random date on their ballot envelope is “not material in determining whether such individual is qualified under State law to vote.”....

....Nevertheless, Ritter raises three legal arguments that could do considerable violence to federal voting rights law. His arguments would have gained no traction in another era. But this Court is notoriously hostile to federal voting rights statutes. As Justice Elena Kagan wrote in a 2021 dissenting opinion, her Republican-appointed colleagues have “treated no statute worse” than the Voting Rights Act.

There is a non-zero risk, in other words, that the Court could transform this low-stakes case, about an entirely clearcut dispute, into a vehicle for gutting much of what remains of American voting rights law.

....Any time this Court hears a voting rights case is a cause for alarm

The bottom line is that Ritter involves a straightforward violation of a federal statute, which clearly requires the 257 disputed ballots to be counted. In his attempt to prevent those ballots from being counted, Ritter asks the Court to do considerable violence to the federal government’s power to protect voting rights.

And yet, given this Court’s history, it is entirely possible that at least five justices will take Ritter up on his invitation to gut this part of federal voting rights law. The arguments raised by Ritter are extreme, but they aren’t less extreme than the kinds of arguments that have already earned favor with the justices.

Four justices, for example, have signed onto a theory known as the “independent state legislature doctrine,” which would potentially give gerrymandered state legislatures limitless power to write highly partisan election laws — even if those laws violate the state’s constitution. The newest justice, Amy Coney Barrett, has not yet weighed in on this theory. But it is entirely possible that she will provide the fifth vote for it because she typically votes with the Court’s right flank in voting rights cases.....>

<Former President Donald Trump on Monday responded in a lengthy statement to the House's ongoing Jan. 6 committee hearings, assailing the panel as illegitimate and their presentation as one-sided -- but rather than refute their evidence, he reiterated the same baseless claims about the 2020 presidential election that are at the center of the proceedings and the group's case that he had attempted a "coup."

Trump's 12-page statement, sent to reporters on Monday night, comes after the second public hearing held by the House select committee investigating last year's deadly Capitol attack. His statement, marked by characteristic exclamations and insults, called the hearings "a smoke and mirrors show" that failed to include "all exculpatory witnesses, and anyone who so easily points out the flaws in their story."

The statement, however, did not directly respond to the specifics laid out by the committee to the public thus far -- including testimony earlier Monday from Trump's inner circle that he knew he had lost the last presidential race and had no legitimate reason to claim widespread fraud, instead choosing to listen to Rudy Giuliani to falsely claim victory over Joe Biden.

Much of Trump's statement, instead, went after President Biden and the Democratic majority in Congress, building on arguments Republicans are making ahead of November's midterms. Trump said Democrats were at fault for various issues plaguing the country, and he framed the effort to investigate Jan. 6 as a way to deflect attention away from these issues.

"America is crumbling, and Democrats have no solutions. Our nation has no hope of change for the better under Democrat leadership," Trump said. "People are desperate. Rather than solving problems, Democrats are rehashing history in hopes of changing the narrative."

Members of the committee, which includes two Republicans, have pushed back at the characterization that their investigation is motivated by partisanship. Instead, they have said, their work uncovered the extent to which the former president worked to undercut the democratic process and remain in power.

"The Constitution doesn't protect just Democrats or just Republicans. It protects all of us, we, the people. And this scheme was an attempt to undermine the will of the people," Rep. Bennie Thompson, D-Miss., who chairs the committee, said during the first public hearing on Thursday....>

Da rest ta come....

<.....Throughout much of his Monday statement, Trump rehashed false or unfounded claims by him, his campaign and his supporters that the 2020 election was rigged in favor of Biden through stolen ballots, mistaken vote counts and various other means.

Trump said the ongoing Jan. 6 hearings were a "narrative" authored by Democrats "to detract from the much larger and more important truth that the 2020 Election was Rigged and Stolen."

Numerous legal challenges by Trump and others as well as audits and investigations in the wake of the 2020 election discovered no pattern of widespread issues. Likewise, local election officials across the country -- both Democrats and Republicans -- said the fraud claims were without merit.

Trump used his statement to make arguments beyond the last election, targeting Biden and the Democratic Party's perceived vulnerabilities with voters, such as rising inflation.

"Our country is in a nosedive," Trump said. "Americans are struggling to fill their gas tanks, feed their babies, educate their children, hire employees, order supplies, protect our border from invasion, and a host of other tragedies that are 100% caused by Democrats ... and the people of our country are both angry and sad."

The Jan. 6 investigations and its hearings, Trump contended, were meant to bar him from running in the next presidential election. "This is merely an attempt to stop a man that is leading in every poll, against both Republicans and Democrats by wide margins," he boasted, without offering evidence.

Trump has repeatedly teased but has not formally announced if he will run for president in 2024. He has played a large role in the ongoing 2022 midterm election primaries by endorsing candidates in races across the country, with mixed results.

Video depositions played at the first two hearings included witnesses who were close with Trump at the time of the election and on Jan. 6, including his daughter and adviser Ivanka Trump and then-Attorney General Bill Barr.

Barr, who has stated his team found no evidence of extensive fraud, described how he felt about Trump's increasing focus on such claims, telling investigators: "He's become detached from reality if he really believes this stuff."

5647. ‘Double-perpetual’ An extract from page 61 of The Pleasures of Chess by Assiac (New York, 1952):

<It may be the most important declaration to date in the US House of Representatives’ hearings on Jan. 6 — and it’s not a revelation about scheming or skulduggery but rather a solemn plea to all Americans by a revered former judge.

“No American ought to turn away from January 6, 2021, until all of America comes to grips with what befell our country that day, and we decide what we want for our democracy from this day forward,” former federal appeals court judge J. Michael Luttig declared in a written statement to the House select committee investigating Jan. 6.

Those are vitally important words for our country. And Luttig, as a veteran of the Ronald Reagan White House, a former clerk for then-appeals court judge Antonin Scalia, a top official in the George H.W. Bush Justice Department, and then a well-regarded judge on the the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit, is a highly credible voice to deliver that message.

Let’s hope Luttig’s sterling conservative credentials are enough to break through on a matter where partisan affinity can have a dismaying truth-distorting or truth-rejecting effect. As uncomfortable as it is for past or current supporters of Donald Trump to revisit it all, Jan. 6 was a moment where our democracy was under serious assault, both from the anti-constitutional scheming of Trump and his political henchmen and by the brutal, police-assaulting MAGA crowd that stormed the US Capitol hoping to further his effort to overturn the election results.

Indeed, had Vice President Mike Pence buckled to his boss’s relentless pressure and aided and abetted the White House’s schemes, we really would have seen a purloined election — one stolen by Trump.

As Luttig said in his written statement, part of which he repeated in oral testimony on Thursday: “It is breathtaking that these arguments even were conceived, let alone entertained by the President of the United States at that perilous moment in history. Had the Vice President of the United States obeyed the President of the United States, America would immediately have been plunged into what would have been tantamount to a revolution within a paralyzing constitutional crisis.”

We also learned from Greg Jacob, the vice president’s former legal counsel, that even John Eastman, the bizarre right-wing lawyer who hatched the plot to have Pence reject the Electoral College results, realized that action wouldn’t survive US Supreme Court scrutiny if constitutionally reviewed by the court. But according to former Trump White House lawyer Eric Herschmann, Eastman was willing to see violence in the streets if that’s what it took to keep Trump in power.

Now, anyone who writes about Jan. 6 is familiar with the rationalizations that have become the reflexive right-wing retort. One is that the House select committee isn’t legitimate, because House Speaker Nancy Pelosi didn’t accept two of House minority leader Kevin McCarthy’s nominees, whereupon McCarthy announced Republicans wouldn’t participate at all. (Pelosi then appointed two GOP representatives, Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger, to the panel.)

But that’s a spurious objection for this reason: The GOP was set on thwarting any systematic examination of Jan. 6 and the events that precipitated it; witness the way Senate Republicans used a filibuster to block a House-passed plan for an independent commission. That opposition, born in part of GOP concern that the proceedings would hurt Republican chances in the midterm elections, can’t be allowed to prevent an accounting so vital to American democracy.

Sadly, even conservative commentators who should know better, like radio host and former Reaganite Hugh Hewitt and Wall Street Journal columnist Kimberley Strassel, have embraced that exercise in obscurantist evasion.

Anyone inclined to seek a similar safe space from truth must come to grips with this reality: The most damning revelations from the committee hearings so far have come not from Democrats or inveterate anti-Trump voices, but rather from top members of his former administration or campaign.

For our democracy to endure, the Constitution must be honored over political cause or candidate. On Jan. 6, the vice president did just that in rejecting Trump’s nefarious plot.

Pence stuck to principle and the Constitution, risking possible death at the hands of a violent mob that was calling for his hanging — and was in his close proximity at the time. He should be the hero of Republicans who purport to cherish the Constitution and the rule of law — just as Donald Trump should be the object of their ire.>

<Republicans in Texas formally rejected President Joe Biden's election in 2020 as illegitimate and voted in a state-wide convention that wrapped up this weekend on a party platform that calls homosexuality an "abnormal lifestyle choice."

The party's embrace of unfounded electoral fraud allegations in a bedrock Republican state came as a bipartisan congressional committee seeks to definitively and publicly debunk the false idea that Biden did not win the election.

Biden received 7 million more votes than rival Donald Trump. Biden also received 306 votes from the Electoral College, more than the 270 needed to win.

The congressional committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol is building a case that Trump's efforts to overturn his defeat in the 2020 presidential election -- including by denying he lost -- amounted to conspiracy to illegally hold onto power.

Trump, the 45th U.S. president, has denied any wrongdoing.

"We reject the certified results of the 2020 presidential election, and we hold that acting President Joseph Robinette Biden Jr. was not legitimately elected by the people of the United States," the Texas party said in a resolution, passed in a voice vote at its convention.

Texas is a major player in U.S. national politics, with 38 electoral votes, the second highest after California. Voters there have backed Republican presidents for the past four decades.

According to a recent Reuters/Ipsos poll, about two-thirds of Republicans believe the 2020 presidential election was stolen from Trump. State and federal judges dismissed more than 50 lawsuits brought by Trump and his allies challenging the election while reviews and audits found no evidence of widespread fraud.

PLATFORM ATTACKS 'CHOICE' OF HOMOSEXUALITY

One of the proposed principles in the latest Texas Republican party platform https://texasgop.org/wp-content/upl... also includes new language criticizing homosexuality and voicing opposition to "all efforts to validate transgender identity."

"Homosexuality is an abnormal lifestyle choice," it reads, a statement that is not in the 2020 platform https://texasgop.org/platform.

Votes on the provision are being tallied and certified following the bi-annual state party convention, a party spokesperson said.

The Log Cabin Republicans of Houston, an organization that represents LGBT conservatives, said it was once again denied a request to set up a booth at the party's convention this week, as it has been for past conventions. The group called the Texas Republican Convention's actions "not just narrow-minded, but politically short-sighted."

However, the group is seeing "no evidence" of other state Republican conventions adopting similar bans or exclusionary language, Charles Moran, Log Cabin Republican managing director, told Reuters.

"If anything we are being more included” than in the past, he said, noting that the 2020 Republican presidential campaign had an official pride coalition, and the gay Republican vote doubled between 2016 and 2020. "President Trump was the most pro-gay Republican that we have ever had,” he added.>

<Republican Rep. Adam Kinzinger warned of "violence in the future" after he said he received a mailed threat against him and his family.

Kinzinger made the comments Sunday on "This Week" on ABC News while discussing his work on the January 6 committee. His position as one of only two Republicans on the committee has subjected him to threats, he said.

"This threat that came in, it was mailed to my house. We got it a couple of days ago, and it threatens to execute me, as well as my wife and 5-month-old child. We've never seen or had anything like that. It was sent from the local area," said Kinzinger, who represents Illinois' 16th congressional district.

He added that he's not worried about his personal safety, but he is concerned about his family.

"I don't worry – but now that I have a wife and kids, of course, it's a little different," Kinzinger said. "There's violence in the future, I'm going to tell you. And until we get a grip on telling people the truth, we can't expect any differently."

A spokesperson for Kinzinger did not immediately respond to Insider's request for comment on Sunday.

As the Jan. 6 House committee continues to hold its public hearings about its investigation into the Capitol siege, a new Ipsos/ABC News poll found that a majority of Americans say former President Donald Trump should be criminally charged for his role in the Capitol riot.

During his interview, Kinzinger said the Republican party has "utterly failed the American people at truth," arguing that Trump "knew what he was doing" ahead of the Capitol siege, Insider's Pocharapon Neammanee reported.

"I certainly think the president is guilty of knowing what he did, seditious conspiracy, being involved in these, you know, kind of different segments of pressuring the DOJ, vice president, et cetera," Kinzinger said. "Unfortunately, my party has utterly failed the American people at truth.">

<Gov. Ron DeSantis’ “Stop WOKE Act” is facing its first federal court test after weeks of being celebrated by the political right for restricting race-based teaching and training in schools, universities and workplaces.

But not all conservatives are lined up behind the Republican governor.

A civil liberties organization, which has sided with Florida Republicans in the past on campus speech issues, is among those now condemning DeSantis’ approach.

“It’s intended to chill speech,” said Adam Steinbaugh, an attorney with the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE). “The entire point of the new law is to set out certain categories or concepts that the state disdains and says you can’t introduce.”

Much of the debate over “Stop WOKE” has centered on public schools and businesses.

But the law may be the most significant among several measures DeSantis signed that put his imprint on higher education in Florida, not only restricting speech but also adding new limits on tenure for Florida professors and changes to how public colleges and universities are accredited.

Draft legislation shaped by the governor’s office also suggests that DeSantis may want even more control over faculty hiring at colleges and universities if he wins reelection in November, heightening anxiety in Florida and across the nation’s higher ed community.

“People in hiring positions are telling us they’re hearing from professors in other states who question, ‘What’s the political environment like on your campus?’” said Andrew Gothard, president of the United Faculty of Florida, a union representing 25,000 members across the state.

“They’re wondering if government is going to keep them from doing their jobs or research. Clearly, based on these kinds of questions, there’s a narrative and concerns about working in Florida,” Gothard said.

While “Stop WOKE” may be the latest battleground, the nonprofit FIRE has fought restrictions on campus speech in Florida before. But then it was with the support of conservatives.

FIRE, which receives funding from several conservative foundations, supported a 2018 law signed by then-Republican Gov. Rick Scott intended to eliminate “free speech zones” on Florida campuses, a move hailed by conservative lawmakers who felt these zones were being used to quarantine right-leaning speakers.

That measure gained added focus because it was seen as opening more campuses to the political right. It emerged shortly after protests rocked the University of Florida ahead of a speech by white nationalist Richard Spencer, a leader of 2017’s neo-Nazi torchlight parade in Charlottesville, Virginia.

FIRE, though, has broken with Florida Republicans over “Stop WOKE” because, Steinbaugh said, it hammers speech suppression into Florida law.

“For conservatives who think this is a good idea and that maybe these topics or concepts should be verboten in higher education, I’d say, consider what a legislature in a left-leaning state might do with the authority to say which subjects are true or false, or can or can’t be discussed,” Steinbaugh said. “It’s a Pandora’s box that you don’t want to open.”

FIRE is asking Florida universities to narrowly interpret the new “Stop WOKE” law, set to take effect July 1. It also has reached out to faculty members, possibly ahead of a lawsuit if educators feel their ability to discuss areas of expertise is limited by the new speech restrictions.

But a federal lawsuit seeking to overturn the measure is already slated for its first hearing Tuesday before U.S. District Judge Mark Walker in Tallahassee. The challenge was filed by the Jacksonville firm of Sheppard, White, Kachergus, DeMaggio & Wilkison, known for its civil rights work.

Plaintiffs include a pair of high school teachers, a professor at the University of Central Florida, and a soon-to-be kindergartner from Nassau County. They’re asking Walker to stop the law from going into effect. FIRE is not among the plaintiffs.

Along with violating free speech rights guaranteed under the U.S. Constitution, the lawsuit claims the Stop Woke law gives the state power to “arbitrarily decide what speech is prohibited and what speech is permitted.”

“As such, plaintiffs have every reason to believe that these vague standards can and will be used to silence speech on these topics with which Florida’s GOP politicians disagree,” the lawsuit said.....>

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/d...

<....Attorneys for DeSantis and Attorney General Ashley Moody have countered by arguing that First Amendment issues are not at play. Instead, “public school curriculum set by elected officials is government speech,” that earlier court decisions have said can be regulated.

“The in-class instruction offered by state-employed educators is also pure government speech, not the speech of the educators themselves,” the state argues in defending the law.

“Stop WOKE” was approved in March, mostly along party lines in the Republican-led Legislature. It prohibits any teaching that could make students feel they bear personal responsibility for historic wrongs because of their race, color, sex or national origin.

It also blocks businesses from using diversity practices or training that could make employees feel guilty for similar reasons. Anyone offended could sue an institution or individual, arguing their civil rights were violated by being made subject to such instruction.

Universities also could lose state funding.

Speaking at a charter school in Hialeah Gardens when he signed the law in April, DeSantis condemned “pernicious ideologies” like critical race theory, which examines the role racial discrimination has played in shaping American history and modern society.

He also blistered the media, “elites,” “leftists” and Stacey Abrams, the Democratic candidate for governor in Georgia.

While the measure earned its nickname when DeSantis termed it the “Stop the Wrongs to Our Kids and Employees Act," the Legislature settled on a simpler title, calling it the “Individual Freedom Act.”

Workplace restrictions for Florida businesses: DeSantis' 'Stop WOKE' Act could force Florida businesses to rethink diversity training

DeSantis, though, embraced the attack on “woke,” which found its place in his policy agenda that included a move to strip Disney World of its special tax district because of its parent company’s opposition to another priority of the governor, the parental rights legislation opponents branded “Don’t Say Gay.”

“In Florida, we will not let the far-left woke agenda take over our schools and workplaces,” DeSantis said. “There is no place for indoctrination or discrimination in Florida.”

DeSantis clearly views higher education as a big target for change.

United Faculty of Florida has already sued the governor over “intellectual freedom” surveys being distributed to faculty, students and employees at colleges and universities that the union sees aimed at stifling open discussions on campuses.

The annual surveys, approved under a law last year, are to be analyzed by university and college leaders in a report scheduled to be released in September.

This year, DeSantis signed new legislation that could make it more difficult for faculty to retain tenure, which has been a standard at universities since the 1940s. Tenure was enacted to blunt political interference and give faculty freedom to discuss and research controversial topics without fear of dismissal.

But DeSantis has condemned what he termed “lifetime appointments” for professors, adding he wants to “make sure the faculty are held accountable.”

The law also requires universities to periodically change accreditation agencies every five- to 10-years.

That provision was viewed by critics as retaliation by DeSantis after the current agency used by most schools criticized the University of Florida for attempting to deny two professors from testifying as expert witnesses in a voting rights lawsuit.

The agency also cautioned Florida State University during its presidential search when the governor’s former Education Commissioner, Richard Corcoran, was an applicant.

Yet even with these changes, DeSantis appears to want more.

A 70-page proposal drafted by Republican lawmakers at the governor’s request and obtained by the news site, Seeking Rents, outlined plans for giving university boards of trustees — heavily influenced by DeSantis — faculty-hiring authority, taking it away from school presidents.

Similarly, the proposal would give the university system’s Board of Governors, whose members are mostly governor appointees, power to investigate university presidents, fire employees, review existing degree programs and veto budgets.

The measure never made it past the concept stage. But many think it shows what may be in store for colleges and universities in a DeSantis second term.

<On Saturday morning, Texas Senator John Cornyn tweeted a racist comment along with a share of former President Barack Obama's statement regarding Friday's Supreme Court ruling to reverse Roe v. Wade.

Obama, making his statement on Twitter on Friday morning shortly after the ruling was handed down, said "Today, the Supreme Court not only reversed nearly 50 years of precedent, it relegated the most intensely personal decision someone can make to the whims of politicians and ideologues—attacking the essential freedoms of millions of Americans."

The following morning, Cornyn shared that statement from Obama to his own Twitter account adding "Now do Plessy vs Ferguson/Brown vs Board of Education."

Brown v. Board of Education, ruled on by the Supreme Court in 1954, did historical justice in wiping away the 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson ruling, making "separate but equal" rightfully unconstitutional.

Following Cornyn's initial tweet, which received tremendous heated backlash, he fired off another one saying "Thank goodness some SCOTUS precedents are overruled."

"Let's help out less intelligent fellow Americans out," one commenter said in response to Cornyn's initial tweet. "Plessy stood as law of the land longer than Roe. That was [John Cornyn's] point. Now if liberals are arguing Brown v. Board of Ed was wrongly ruled because of long standing precedent, then they should openly say so."

That comment was retweeted by Cornyn. The following replies were not.

One commenter tweeted a photo of Cornyn with the word "racist" in red over his chest.

Another commenter shared an archival photo of a Black man drinking from a water fountain labeled "colored" and asked "You miss this sort of thing?"

And yet another out of the thousands of similar commenters shared an illustration of a Klan hood next to a MAGA hat featuring the text "Evil doesn't die, it reinvents itself.">

<The House of Representatives launched its hearings on the Jan. 6 insurrection in the face of grimly low expectations.

Didn’t we already know what happened? After two impeachments and innumerable disclosures, was there anything new to learn about the misrule of Donald Trump?

The conventional wisdom turned out to be wrong.

The hearings have been informative, often gripping, sometimes dramatic. Former Trump aides have offered blunt assessments of their boss’ claims that the 2020 election was stolen. (“@#$%*&!#,” in the concise judgment of former Atty. Gen. William Barr.)

Less prominent figures have described what it was like to become a target of the former president’s anger, like Ruby Freeman, the Georgia election worker whom Trump falsely denounced by name as “a professional vote scammer.”

“Do you know what it feels like to have the president of the United States target you?” the 62-year-old shop owner testified tearfully. “There is nowhere I feel safe.”

What has made the hearings an unexpected success isn’t, as some have suggested, Hollywood production values. They’re not all that slick.

The hearings have worked because they’re unusually well-organized — and, for Congress, refreshingly free of bloviation.

Each session has focused on one chapter in Trump’s sprawling plot: his bogus claims of fraud, his pressure on state officials to change the election results, his bullying of then-Vice President Mike Pence, all culminating in the riot he inspired on Jan. 6.

The basic facts have been familiar, but many of the details are new, especially the firsthand testimony from Republican officials.

It has added up to the equivalent of Trump’s third impeachment — this time, more damning than his first (in 2019, on Ukraine) or second (in 2021, immediately after the insurrection).

That wasn’t what the House committee intended — at least, not consciously.

“I don’t think that we conceived of this as another impeachment,” Rep. Adam B. Schiff (D-Burbank), a member of the committee who participated in the two earlier inquests, told me. “But it could have that impact.”

The word “impeach” originally means “to discredit,” Schiff noted.

“I would hope that what the public has seen in these hearings discredits and disqualifies Mr. Trump from ever holding office again,” he said.

In that sense, they’ve served as a kind of metaphorical impeachment.

The hearings have also served another purpose: They’ve shown the public a road map to the criminal charges Trump could face if Atty. Gen. Merrick Garland decides to prosecute him.

The committee and its leaders have....already cited at least three potential criminal offenses: inciting the riot on Jan. 6, obstructing a federal proceeding (by trying to block the count of the electoral vote), and conspiracy to defraud the United States (for example, by organizing bogus slates of “alternative electors”).

“President Trump had no factual basis for what he was doing, and he had been told it was illegal,” Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.), the committee’s vice chair, said in the hearings’ opening session....>

<According to a report from Politico’s Meredith McGraw and Matt Dixon, key Republican donors are growing increasingly put off by what is being described as the “exhausting circus” that surrounds Donald Trump due to his efforts to remain a viable GOP candidate in 2024.

As the report notes, the revelations by the Jan 6th committee investigating the Capitol insurrection that forced lawmakers from both sides of the aisle to flee for their lives is taking a toll not only on the former president's already tattered reputation but also of big money Republican Party donors who are starting to look for other candidates to invest in.

As the Politico report states, conservative voters are, for the most part, still enamored by Trump but “elements of the voters, donors and activists that make the three pillars of the party are exhausted too, they say. And they’re growing less willing to let the baggage of the Trump years complicate the future.”

GOP donor Dan Eberhart explained that “Trump fatigue” is a real thing.

“Trump is facing an important onslaught of negative facts with these hearings and there is no real defense. He has no friendly members on the committee and there aren’t facts to put in front of the public to make any of this sound less bad,” he claimed while adding the Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) is “is lying in wait sharpening his knives,” and reaping the benefits of a fading Trump.

One unnamed DeSantis adviser admitted the Florida governor is being helped by the former president’s travails.

“I think the January 6 hearings are a continuation of the exhausting circus that surrounds Trump,” they explained. “There are of course the lunchbox Republicans who think this is a ‘mass conspiracy,’ but among the donor class many are just tired of this.”

“It’s a @#$%show. Some donors are getting sick of the @#$%show,” they added.

While some supporters of Trump have dismissed the damage the hearing have done to the former president, Politico reports that he isn’t so sure, reporting, ”Trump himself seems to have internalized that the hearings have inflicted some dents.”

GOP strategist Sarah Longwell claims she has seen a shift in attitudes toward the former president.

“With January 6 they’re on Trump’s side, but they’re also exhausted by it. It creates that sense of wanting to move on. The question is whether that sticks. I’ve seen it before when Trump’s baggage is out there they get annoyed about having to defend it, they drift away and then come back,” she claimed.>