U.S. Politics

[Rick Plant]

Charlie Crist @CharlieCrist

Ron DeSantis talks a lot about freedom but does little to protect it.

It’s time to elect a leader that can deliver more than empty promises — on reproductive freedom, LGBTQ+ & voting rights — and so much more.

Are you ready, Florida?

https://twitter.com/CharlieCrist/status/1567686592134782978


Jevin D. Hodge for Congress @JevinHodge

A federal investigation found David Schweikert guilty of using taxpayer money for his campaign, taking illegal campaign contributions, and even letting his Chief of Staff take a trip to the Super Bowl on the taxpayers' dime.

Follow here for more.

https://twitter.com/JevinHodge/status/1567662317281714177


Emilia Sykes @EmiliaSykesOH

Absolutely no Republicans in Congress voted to cap the cost of life saving insulin, and my opponent would be no different. Regardless of what attacks say, I will fight for lower cost prescription care for NE Ohio.

https://twitter.com/EmiliaSykesOH/status/1567660863418408967


Brad Pfaff @pfaff4congress

If you thought Marjorie Taylor Green was bad, let me introduce you to my opponent, Derrick Van Orden.
 
Derrick entered the restricted area at the Capitol on January 6th, and is now running for Congress. We cannot let him win.

https://twitter.com/pfaff4congress/status/1567605480792416256

[Rick Plant]

President Biden @POTUS

Nearly 10 million new jobs have been added to the economy, a record high at this point in a presidency.
 
We've got 3.7 percent unemployment – a near record low.
 
A big reason for all this is the American Rescue Plan. And not a single Republican in Congress voted for it.

https://twitter.com/POTUS/status/1567858706724929538

[Rick Plant]

GOP stuck with Pandora's Box after Roe: Republicans run head first into the same-sex marriage trap



The Senate is back from recess, and legislators are facing down a daunting to-do list to complete before the November election, including passing appropriations bill and confirming more of President Joe Biden's judicial nominees. Additionally, there's now increasing pressure to make time for a vote on the Respect for Marriage Act, which would offer limited protection to bolster previous Supreme Court decisions legalizing interracial and same-sex marriage in the face of this summer's blockbuster decision from the court striking down Roe v. Wade's landmark legalization of abortion.

The bill was passed in the House earlier this summer in response to the court's unprecedented move of taking away a right once granted. Such a move on its own would have raised fears that the court would next overturn other decisions that granted rights like same-sex marriage and birth control, but Justice Clarence Thomas erased any lingering doubts that such things are next on the religious right's wish list by explicitly inviting lawsuits challenging those previous decisions.

Republicans are in an electoral double bind.

So Sens. Tammy Baldwin, D-Wis., and Susan Collins, R-Maine, called on their colleagues to pass new protections by arguing in a Washington Post op-ed on Tuesday that such legislation is "bipartisan." After arguing that "a majority of Democrats, Republicans and independents" support same-sex marriage rights, the two note that the legislation already passed through the Democratic-led House with "strong bipartisan support." The goal of these two senators isn't mysterious. Passing the bill through the Senate requires getting past the filibuster. That, in turn, means convincing 10 Republicans to join the slim 50-vote Democratic majority in the Senate to back the bill. Their op-ed was about persuading wary Republicans that it's safe and, in fact, savvy to back this politically popular view.

But to call the bipartisan support for same-sex marriage "strong" is, at best, political embroidery.

Same-sex marriage has strong Democratic support. In fact, it's unanimous, with all 220 House Democrats backing the bill and the expectation that all 50 Democrats in the Senate will. Only 22% of House Republicans, however, were willing to vote for same-sex marriage. Digging into the numbers, things look even worse on the GOP side. As an analysis from the Washington Post shows, a significant number of those Republicans who did support the bill "are retiring or represent districts in Democrats' sights in the midterms."

That doesn't make it impossible for the bill to pass through the Senate, to be clear. If 20% of Republican senators vote for the bill, that's enough to drag it across the finish line. It's still not clear if that will happen, however.

A few Republican senators have publicly indicated support, but many are being tight-lipped about where they stand. Baldwin told reporters that she expects a vote on the bill during the week of Sept. 19. But things took a dim turn this week, when Baldwin's fellow Wisconsin senator, Republican Ron Johnson, declared that he had no intention of voting for the bill, arguing that the Supreme Court was wrong to legalize same-sex marriage in the first place. Johnson was reportedly one of the senators who LGBTQ rights advocates had hoped to get on board. He is up for re-election in a swing state this year and had previously been coy about his position, leaving hope that he would attempt to appeal to moderates by backing the bill. This loss is a bad blow for those hoping to pass the bill.

The Republican opposition to abortion rights is hurting them in the polls already. Adding their opposition to same-sex marriage to the pile will only reinforce the Democrats' message: Republicans are right-wing radicals who are wildly out of step with the mainstream on social issues.

But even if LGBTQ advocates manage to cobble together 10 votes for this bill, that shouldn't be taken as serious evidence that Republicans have become more moderate on this issue. It's not just that the vast majority of Republican politicians oppose same-sex marriage. The attacks on LGBTQ rights have only been escalating in GOP circles in the past couple of years. Across the country, Republicans are passing laws to ban books and censor teachers for acknowledging the existence of LGBTQ people. Policies to bar gender non-conforming kids from playing sports and to punish families for supporting LGBTQ kids have also been enacted. In Texas, the Republican Party platform declared that homosexuality is an "abnormal lifestyle choice." Sen. Rick Scott of Florida, the head of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, released an 11-point blueprint for the GOP this year which stated that the "traditional familiy" is "God's design for humanity,"  and asserted that a Bible quote about the "male and female He created them" should be the guide for government policies. In response to the Respect for Marriage Act, specifically, the GOP's House Freedom Caucus put out a statement declaring that the "radical left" has "attacked the norms of masculinity and femininity, and now it wants to further erode the sacred institutions of marriage."

The "radical" left in this case represents over 70% of Americans who support same-sex marriage, a number which includes 55% of Republican voters. The disconnect between where voters stand and where the Republican political establishment stands is understandably puzzling. Why don't Republicans moderate their views to reflect where their voters are?

Because Republicans are in an electoral double bind.

On one hand, their most dedicated and enthusiastic voters — the ones who show up for primaries, donate money, and volunteer — disproportionately come from a Christian nationalist base with radical right-wing views. They're rigidly opposed not just to abortion, but contraception and reject the constitutional separation between church and state. And because Christian conservatives vote in large numbers in primaries, they've pushed the elected representatives far to the right. On the other hand, the general election voters Republicans need to win office tend to be more moderate, especially on "social" issues like LGBTQ rights and reproductive health care access.

Republicans generally try to square this circle by passing draconian laws to please their Christian right base while attempting to obscure their views from the larger public. This strategy is playing out dramatically this election cycle on the issue of abortion. After the Roe overturn, Republican state legislatures have been moving quickly to pass ever more punitive abortion bans, frequently rejecting moderating amendments allowing the procedure for rape victims or for patients who are in medical crisis. But often those same politicians turn around and misrepresent their views to the public, running ads and making statements meant to reassure voters they won't vote for the anti-choice policies they have and will almost certainly continue to vote for.

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., understands intimately that it's easier for Republicans to win elections if the voters are ignorant of how far-right the party's policy views actually are. He's been blocking efforts by Republicans to release a party platform, precisely because he knows it would contain language on reproductive rights, LGBTQ rights, and other issues where the GOP opposes the majority views. He was not happy with Rick Scott going behind his back to release the 11-point pseudo-platform for precisely this reason. It created multiple news cycles in which the actual views of Republicans, which most voters reject, were publicized.

This likely explains why so many Senate Republicans are playing peek-a-boo with their intentions on the Respect for Marriage Act. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., may be reluctant to bring it to a floor vote without knowing if it's going to pass or not. As long as it's not brought up for a vote, Republicans can play both sides of the issue, letting their Christian right base's wishes prevail without alienating general election voters who are unaware of how anti-gay the mainstream GOP is. Once there's a vote, however, it forces them into a binary choice of alienating one group or the other.

This all shows why it's smart politics for Democrats to bring the Respect for Marriage Act up for a vote in the next few weeks, regardless of whether they know where the whip count stands. If they get 10 Republican votes, then they've passed a popular policy that also prevents some — though not all — potential legal fights over same-sex marriage rights in the future. If they don't get the 10 votes, however, it's still a political win, if not a policy win. The Republican opposition to abortion rights is hurting them in the polls already. Adding their opposition to same-sex marriage to the pile will only reinforce the Democrats' message: Republicans are right-wing radicals who are wildly out of step with the mainstream on social issues.

https://www.salon.com/2022/09/08/stuck-with-pandoras-box-after-roe-run-head-first-into-the-same-marriage-trap/

[Rick Plant]

Michigan Republican squirms when reporter confronts her about telling poll workers to 'act like spies'



In a clip shown on CNN on Thursday morning, the chair of the Wayne County Michigan Republican Party was forced to scramble after being confronted by the network's Drew Griffin over her previous advice to poll workers to "act like spies."

Republicans in the state are under fire after CNN obtained video of officials giving tips on breaking the law on election day, and that came back to haunt Cheryl Costantino, who was featured in the video that also contained appearances by 2020 election deniers.

In the video, when asked about cell phones, Costantino was seen telling workers, "I would say maybe just hide it or something, and maybe hide a small pad and a small pen or something like that because you need to take accurate notes," before responding to concerns about illegality by advising, "That's why you got to do it secretly."

Confronted by CNN's Griffin, the GOP leader tried to make light of her training "spy" comments aimed at interfering with voters casting their ballots.

Asked about her comments, she paused, before offering, "Well, to kind of reframe it and make it more fun and interesting."

She added, "As I said just, you know, instead of causing a bunch of scenes and things like that, just write it down, just kind of be like spies and let me, you know, let me know what's going on."

Watch:

[Rick Plant]

The disgusting cruelty of Ohio’s extremist abortion ban is intolerable

They were warned. Ohio Republican lawmakers and Gov. Mike DeWine were warned time and again that their abortion ban was cruel and would lead to heartbreaking situations of unimaginable pain and anguish for many people.

They were warned that their abortion ban set a stage of legal nightmares for doctors and personal nightmares for patients. They were warned that pregnancy is complicated and comes with inherent dangers that radical, extremist lawmaking would make infinitely worse.

They were warned of the pain; they were warned of the suffering; they were warned of the torment that some patients would experience if Ohio state government inserted itself into doctor’s offices and emergency rooms to dictate the reproductive health of Ohioans.

They didn’t care. They ignored the warnings, then passed and signed Ohio’s extremist abortion ban anyway.

When the U.S. Supreme Court overturned national abortion rights in its Dobbs decision, Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost rushed to implement Ohio’s heartless, draconian law.

More than two months later, Ohio doctors are sharing stories just as horrifying as any possibility lawmakers and the governor were explicitly warned against.

They are telling of women who have partial deliveries too undeveloped to survive see them stall. In that condition, half-delivered, these patients have had to sign paperwork, and then wait for 24 hours, or for the fetus’s heart to stop, OCJ’s Marty Schladen reported Wednesday.

Women suffering other complications such as a detached umbilical cord have faced similar intrusions just after they were devastated to learn they would lose a child they dearly wanted.

They, too, have had to wait a day or for fetal demise. In one instance, that took 14 hours.

Other women — shattered to learn that the baby they’re carrying lacks vital organs necessary for survival — are being told that in Ohio they have to carry that baby, possibly for months, only to see it be stillborn, or to watch it quickly die.

“Lawmakers didn’t go into this blindly,” Tani Malhotra, a maternal fetal medicine doctor, said. “Physicians provided testimony. We called their offices. We sat with legislators to help educate them and tell them why this is bad policy. The (American Medical Association) and the College of Obstetrics and Gynecology tried to explain to them why this is bad law. They were educated. They knew exactly what these consequences were going to be because we told them.”

What is one to make of people who can hear such testimony from medical experts and doctors — testimony warning of enormous, gut-wrenching, heart-breaking pain that would inevitably be caused by this bad, thoughtless law — and ignore it?

The stridency of ignorance? The unearned confidence of religious zealotry?

The casual disregard of humanity and human empathy in favor of extremist ideology removed from reality? The ignoble placating and pleasing of political special interests over compassionate human interests? All of that?

Yes. All of that.

They call themselves “moral,” yet they would force 10-year-old children to destroy their bodies carrying and delivering pregnancies from their rapists.

Their supporters call themselves “values voters” and their organizations centers of “virtue,” yet the law they advocated and got passed and signed forces women with a half-delivered doomed pregnancy to undergo an onerous bureaucratic process of sneering legal paperwork before the tragedy that has befallen them can be medically addressed.

The women suffering these tragedies over pregnancies they wanted are shamed for the loss of them out of their control, falsely told they have “options” when they do not.

These are not representative of good human values, and it’s certainly no virtue to subject others to such trauma and cruelty.

The vast majority of Ohioans are not extremist on abortion: They generally believe there should be some restrictions on abortions, but abortion care should not be criminalized and banned such as it is now in Ohio.

This is because most Ohioans understand that the world is complex, and human situations are nuanced and complicated.

This sledgehammer of extremist law inflicts grave injustice unbefitting of such sensitive issues.

But this sledgehammer of injustice is exactly what Ohio Republicans have now taken to these very private, very personal decisions.

They were warned, and they did it anyway.

If this cruelty and suffering is what they wanted, they’ve certainly created a lot of it.

https://ohiocapitaljournal.com/2022/09/08/the-disgusting-cruelty-of-ohios-extremist-abortion-ban-is-intolerable/

[Rick Plant]

The White House @WhiteHouse

Since President Biden took office, our economy has added more than 660,000 manufacturing jobs. This is more manufacturing jobs on average per month than any other President in the last 50 years.

https://twitter.com/WhiteHouse/status/1568305739189391362

[Rick Plant]

Gianforte asks courts to help keep the public out of his business



“Let me tell you about the very rich. They are different from you and me. … Even when they enter deep into our world or sink below us, they still think that they are better than we are. They are different.” -F. Scott Fitzgerald

Montana Gov. Greg Gianforte doesn’t just think he’s better than we are.

He insists upon it.

In a recent court filing defending his decision not to release a single piece of paper, Montana’s governor asserts not only that he is different and better than us common folk, but that he alone is different among mortals in Montana. And maybe most insultingly, he tries to co-opt the state’s constitution into conferring that power upon him.

When business leaders enter politics, as Gianforte did, they often paint a pretty word picture as they talk about running government more like a business. It’s a popular trope, and it would seem to make a certain degree of sense unless you think about it too deeply. And yet that overly simplistic approach to governance demonstrates how little most of them understand the business of government – that profit-and-loss statements don’t translate easily when it comes to educating a child or helping to find services for struggling families, both of which maybe inefficient, uncertain and cash-intensive.

However, business leaders like Gianforte often struggle mightily, and think differently when it comes to the level of scrutiny they should have to endure from the likes of a curious or even adversarial public. They recoil at the idea that the public should be able to see what they’re doing and how they’re doing it, features that don’t often exist in private business.

Transparency, compromise and accountability – hallmarks of good government and the very checks put in place by our founding fathers and mothers – are to rich, successful businessman like Gianforte, burdensome, meddlesome and insulting. After all, what right should we, the public, who have tasted such little entrepreneurial success when compared to him, have to question someone as accomplished as him?

And that’s where the constitution comes in.

The state’s constitution says that the public has two fundamental rights of observation and participation – including the right to see public documents and the right to participate or observe in the decision-making process.

Apparently, Gianforte doesn’t think much of those because he’s trying to block both.

When he took office, he created a tracking form that monitored bills as they wound their way through the legislative process. This form, apparently, included comments from administration and department officials that Gianforte used to help decide whether to sign the measures into law.

We can’t say much more beyond that because we don’t know. A public documents request, filed shortly after the conclusion of the 2021 Legislative session, was denied. Gianforte’s office said every single one of those forms – and we’re not sure how many there are – are, quite frankly, none of the public’s damn business.

Realizing that Montana’s right-to-know provisions are among the strongest in the nation and that they have also been well established by courts for decades, Gianforte does exactly what he and other Republicans so often repudiate: He invites the court to recognize new laws that don’t exist, namely recognizing “executive privilege” – a concept that even his own attorneys admit doesn’t exist in current state law.

“Because the executive communications privilege and deliberative process privilege also have existed under Montana’s common law – and are necessary for integral governmental and public purposes – the court can (and should) recognize and apply those privileges now,” Gianforte’s lawyer said in court briefings.

In other words, he invites the judges to be activists.

Yet, those statements are a twisted version of half truths. The notion of executive privilege is not recognized as such exactly because of the strong public right to know. And what executive privilege did exist in common law is a vestige of the state’s weak laws that were replaced by the 1972 Constitution, not an extension of it.

Any court should be given pause when an executive like the governor asks so clearly to be given additional privileges that rob the public of transparency or accountability. Our constitution specifically allows the public the express right to see how decisions are made; it requires our leaders to provide the documentation and access to see how and why decisions were made.

This right to know that Gianforte wants the courts to eliminate by finding words in law that are simply not there is even more essential today because Gianforte remains walled off and inaccessible to the press and most of the public, seeming to only appear at events where the lines are carefully scripted and the people appropriately adoring.

Gianforte has continued to refuse routine press conferences where the hard questions can be asked. He has refused interviews and his staff almost reflexively decline to comment. This isn’t the press whining about access, it’s instead a real-life example of the near impossibility of trying wrangle answers about how his administration works and what he thinks. One of the few ways the public knows what Gianforte is thinking is by the very documents his office is producing.

But now, Gianforte wants courts to close that trickle of information, too, because he needs a means where he can gather “frank” opinions “in confidence.”

Seems to me, Gianforte’s problem isn’t with too much information, it’s that not enough gets to the public. Funny how a man who has poured so much of his own fortune into running for public office would seem to want to cut the public out of it. Maybe even most shockingly: Gianforte throws himself upon the court’s mercy to allow him the privilege of silence while he deliberates about policy that will become the law for the rest of us.

F. Scott Fitzgerald was right: The rich aren’t like you and I.

Montana Constitution, Article II:

Section 9. Right to know. No person shall be deprived of the right to examine documents or to observe the deliberations of all public bodies or agencies of state government and its subdivisions, except in cases in which the demand of individual privacy clearly exceeds the merits of public disclosure.

Section 8. Right of participation. The public has the right to expect governmental agencies to afford such reasonable opportunity for citizen participation in the operation of the agencies prior to the final decision as may be provided by law.

https://dailymontanan.com/2022/09/08/gianforte-asks-courts-to-help-keep-the-public-out-of-his-business/



Dems on top Michigan court block GOP ‘game of gotcha’ attempt to remove abortion measure from Nov. ballot

Like many state courts, judges on the Michigan State Supreme Court are elected. In 2018 and 2020 Democrats were able to win more seats on the state's highest court, giving them a 4-3 majority.

On Thursday those efforts paid off.

Democratic Supreme Court justices blocked efforts by Republicans to remove two important measures from the November ballot: abortion and voting rights after Republicans tried to turn a technicality into the disenfranchisement of more than 750,000 Michiganders who signed petitions to get abortion on the ballot.

"Last week, the [abortion] question was sent to the state Supreme Court after Republican canvassers argued the amendment's spacing and formatting would be confusing to voters," NPR reports.

The Supreme Court ordered the Board of Canvassers to include the questions on the November ballot, allowing voters in The Great Lake State to have the opportunity to expand voting rights and enshrine the right to choose into the state's constitution.

Chief Justice Bridget Mary McCormack called GOP efforts to derail the abortion measure from getting on the ballot "a game of gotcha gone very bad."

"Seven hundred fifty three thousand and seven hundred fifty nine Michiganders signed this proposal-more than have ever signed any proposal in Michigan's history," the Chief Justice wrote. "The challengers have not produced a single signer who claims to have been confused by the limited-spacing sections in the full text portion of the proposal. Yet two members of the Board of State Canvassers would prevent the people of Michigan from voting on the proposal because they believe that the decreased spacing makes the text no longer '[t]he full text,'" she charged, as University of Michigan law professor of Law Leah Litman noted.

"That is, even though there is no dispute that every word appears and appears legibly and in the correct order, and there is no evidence that anyone was confused about the text, two members of the Board of State Canvassers with the power to do so would keep the petition from the voters for what they purport to be a technical violation of the statute. They would disenfranchise millions of Michiganders not because they believe the many thousands of Michiganders who signed the proposal were confused by it, but because they think they have identified a technicality that allows them to do so, a game of gotcha gone very bad."

University of Michigan Regent Jordan Acker called the Chief Justice's opinion "a pretty big judicial smackdown."

https://www.rawstory.com/dems-on-top-michigan-court-block-gop-game-of-gotcha-attempt-to-remove-abortion-measure-from-nov-ballot/