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panicinthestudio · 2 years

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Admit it. Republicans have broken politics., October 29, 2018

Neither party is perfect, but Republicans in Congress have been drifting towards political extremism since long before Trump, and they’re making it impossible for Congress to work the way it’s supposed to.

Over the past few decades, both Democrats and Republicans in Congress have moved away from the center. But the Republican Party has moved towards the extreme much more quickly -- a trend that political scientists’ call “asymmetrical polarization.”

That asymmetry poses a major obstacle in American politics. As Republicans have become more ideological, they’ve also become less willing to work with Democrats: filibustering Democratic legislation, refusing to consider Democratic appointees, and even shutting down the government in order to force Democrats to give in to their demands.

Democrats have responded in turn, becoming more obstructionist as Republican demands become more extreme.

And that’s made it really easy for media outlets to blame “both sides” for political gridlock. As political scientists Thomas Mann and Norm Ornstein explain in their book “It’s Even Worse Than It Looks,” journalists feel a pressure to remain neutral when covering big political fights. So politics coverage has been dominated by the myth that both parties are equally to blame for the gridlock in DC.

But they’re not. And the only way to stop Republicans in Congress from continuing their drift towards the extreme is to be brutally honest about who’s responsible for breaking our politics.

Read more of Ornstein and Mann’s work here: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/02/opinion/sunday/republicans-broke-congress-politics.html

Vox

Still, if not even more, relevant alongside ongoing false equivalence between the American political poles, with the Republican Party openly not caring that their candidates are unqualified and/or declaring their own victory as the only legitimate result. The intentional erosion of trust in and the electoral institutions themselves is not just self-centred but corrosive to political legitimacy as a whole when denialism of factual results is permitted.

#relevant #politics #ideology #polarization #Republican Party #USA #Thomas Mann #Norman Ornstein #extremism #radicalization #American #Vox #Carlos Maza #media #false equivalence #political science #2010s #21st century

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dontmeantobepoliticalbut · 1 year

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Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) went on a bizarre tangent after she was called out for lying about her past comments suggesting the Parkland, Florida, school shooting was staged.

During an interview with CBS News’ Lesley Stahl broadcast Sunday on “60 Minutes,” Greene was asked for her stance on the 2018 massacre, which left 17 students and staff dead. Two years before she was elected to Congress, Greene responded to a comment on Facebook calling the shooting a “false flag” operation.

But when asked about it by Stahl, Greene tried to rewrite history.

“I never said Parkland was a false flag,” Greene said. “No, I’ve never said that. School shootings are horrible. I don’t think it’s anything to joke about.”

As she was speaking, “60 Minutes” showed a screengrab of Greene’s now-deleted 2018 Facebook comment.

“We fact-checked,” Stahl replied. “Before I got to this interview.”

Greene offered a word-salad comeback, derailing the discussion.

“Have you fact-checked all my statements from kindergarten through 12th grade and in college? And as I’ve paid my taxes and never broken a law, and the only, I got a few speeding tickets, do we need to talk about those too?” she said. “Because I think where you’re going down is the same attacks that people have attacked me with over and over.”

Stahl didn’t challenge Greene further.

Greene, a Trump-supporting firebrand who was the first open supporter of the QAnon conspiracy theory to be elected to Congress, has on multiple occasions endorsed conspiratorial nonsense about school shootings and was filmed in 2019 harassing a Parkland victim who advocates for gun control.

In another 2018 Facebook comment section unearthed by the Media Matters for America watchdog, Greene responded “this is all true” to a user who said that “none of the School shootings were real or done by the ones who were supposedly arrested for them.”

Greene, during her “60 Minutes” interview, tried to shift blame for her past social media activity, suggesting that “other people also ran my social media” when she liked a 2019 comment suggesting Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) should get a bullet to the head. (Greene was not a member of Congress in 2019.)

Even if that were the case, Greene has publicly alluded to her belief that school shootings are staged. Last year, Greene suggested in a video that the July 4 shooting in Highland Park, Illinois, was orchestrated “to persuade Republicans to go along with more gun control.”

CBS News faced significant backlash over the weekend for interviewing Greene and giving a platform to her dangerous rhetoric. Following the release of the sit-down, Stahl was criticized for allowing Greene to hijack the conversation, failing to adequately call out the lawmaker’s false claims, and normalizing the extremist’s unhinged behavior.

“I have known Lesley Stahl for more than 40 years, worked alongside her for many election weeks. She has been a great journalist, but this is a disgraceful, cringeworthy performance. Shameful to the max,” tweeted Norman Ornstein, an emeritus scholar at the American Enterprise Institute.

“This is even worse than I thought it would be,” wrote The Atlantic staff writer Tom Nichols. “Imagine getting outflanked by MTG, whose answer was ‘what, are you going to go back to everything I’ve said and done since kindergarten’ and Stahl just took it.”

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mariacallous · 1 year

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On Sunday morning, NBC’s Chuck Todd hosted the Ohio Republican congressman Jim Jordan on Meet the Press, where the querulous conservative ranted about President Biden’s sloppy handing of classified documents.

Todd showed more tenacity than usual in challenging this combative guest (he “incinerated” Jordan, applauded the Daily Kos) but Jordan nevertheless managed to drive home his ill-conceived accusations through sheer volume, repetition and speed.

Jordan’s real victory was being given the chance to do so, at such length, on national TV. Meanwhile, over on Fox News, the Texas Republican senator Ted Cruz was trying his sneering best to connect Hunter Biden to the document dustup, and the rightwing network was helping by showing various file photos of the president’s troubled and troubling son, always with a crazed look in his eye. And social media, of course, overflowed with memes about Corvettes stuffed with boxes, a not-too-subtle shot at classified papers discovered in Biden’s Delaware garage.

Deprived of Trump-style excitement by a mostly competent, sometimes boring president, the news media has greeted the supposed scandal of Biden’s mishandling of classified documents with breathless glee. CNN has devoted hours of coverage to chewing it over. The broadcast networks have, in some cases, led their evening newscasts with it.

Finally,all this coverage seems to say, a chance to get back to the false equivalence that makes us what we truly are! And make no mistake, any effort to equate Biden’s sloppy mishandling with former president Trump’s removal of hundreds of classified documents to his Florida hangout at Mar-a-Lago is simply wrong.

As Todd pointed out, Biden has cooperated with the justice department’s search for documents, while Trump has obfuscated and resisted. And although much of the news coverage has pointed this out, it has nevertheless elevated the supposed Biden scandal by giving it so much time, attention and prominence.

It might even remind you of the media’s appalling obsession with Hillary Clinton’s email practices during the 2016 presidential campaign – an obsession that may have affected the election’s outcome, helping to give us four years of a president with no respect for the democracy he was elected to lead.

Why does this keep on happening?

No one has described the cause better than two thinktank scholars in a 2012 Washington Post opinion piece (and the italics are mine): “We understand the values of mainstream journalists, including the effort to report both sides of a story. But a balanced treatment of an unbalanced phenomenon distorts reality. If the political dynamics of Washington are unlikely to change any time soon, at least we should change the way that reality is portrayed to the public.”

The scholars – one from the conservative American Enterprise Institute, the other from the progressive Brookings Institution – were Norman Ornstein and Thomas Mann, who had written a book, It’s Even Worse Than It Looks, about the rise of Republican party extremism and the resulting threats to American democracy. That movement has only metastasized over the past decade, helped along by Trump’s chaotic term and aftermath.

Typical of the media’s “both sides” tendency is this equalizing line in a 2021 Washington Post story about the congressional investigation of the January 6 attack on the US Capitol: “Both parties have attacked the other as insincere and uninterested in conducting a fair-minded examination.” Well, sure, but only one party was consistently resisting efforts to get at the facts and do something about the horrendous attack on American democracy.

It’s debatable if Biden’s mishandling of documents – and more recently that of former vice-president Mike Pence – warrants much attention at all, much less the full-bore media blitz it’s getting.

“The bigger scandal here,” said Jameel Jaffer, executive director of the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University, is the over-classification of information; the US government puts its classified stamp on 50m documents a year. In an interview with the Guardian’s David Smith last week, Jaffer called that system of secrecy “totally broken in ways that are bad not just for national security, but for democracy”.

Even so, Jaffer didn’t intend to let Trump off the hook.

As Todd rightly pointed out to his combative guest, Biden and Pence didn’t make a fuss about handing over what they shouldn’t have had. (“They raided Trump’s home. They haven’t raided Biden’s home,” Jordan charged. “Because Biden didn’t defy a subpoena,” Todd aptly shot back.) But such challenges are no match for the vast over-coverage of what isn’t all that much of a story, and which is only getting so much attention because of the media’s defensive desire to appear fair and because of its ratings-driven lust for conflict.

Happily, Americans are capable of putting this trumped-up scandal in context, at least according to a recent CBS poll that shows the president’s approval rating unmoved by the wall-to-wall coverage, and in which the vast majority of respondents believe it’s the norm for former office-holders to have classified documents in their homes.

The public, it seems, can respond to hyperbole with a yawn. If only the news media could be as wise.

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azspot · 2 years

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There are so many in the mainstream press that are just fearful to a remarkable degree of being branded as having a liberal bias. And what we see is that the reaction to that is to bend over quadruply backwards to show there is no bias.

Norman Ornstein

#sclmb

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nodynasty4us · 2 years

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#wilbur ross #census #citizenship #republicans

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kp777 · 2 years

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By Paul Krugman

NY Times

June 27, 2022

Many political analysts have spent years warning that the G.O.P. was becoming an extremist, anti-democratic party.

Long before Republicans nominated Donald Trump for president, let alone before Trump refused to acknowledge electoral defeat, the congressional scholars Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein declared that the party had become “an insurgent outlier” that rejected “facts, evidence and science” and didn’t accept the legitimacy of political opposition.

In 2019 an international survey of experts rated parties around the world on their commitment to basic democratic principles and minority rights. The G.O.P., it turns out, looks nothing like center-right parties in other Western countries. What it resembles, instead, are authoritarian parties like Hungary’s Fidesz or Turkey’s A.K.P.

Such analyses have frequently been dismissed as over the top and alarmist. Even now, with Republicans expressing open admiration for Viktor Orban’s one-party rule, I encounter people insisting that the G.O.P. isn’t comparable to Fidesz. (Why not? Republicans have been gerrymandering state legislatures to lock in control no matter how badly they lose the popular vote, which is right out of Orban’s playbook.) Yet as Edward Luce of The Financial Times recently pointed out, “at every juncture over last 20 years the America ‘alarmists’ have been right.”

And over the past few days we’ve received even more reminders of just how extreme Republicans have become. The Jan. 6 hearings have been establishing, in damning detail, that the attack on the Capitol was part of a broader scheme to overturn the election, directed from the top. A Republican-stuffed Supreme Court has been handing down nakedly partisan rulings on abortion and gun control. And there may be more shocks to come — keep your eyes on what the court is likely to do to the government’s ability to protect the environment.

The question that has been bothering me — aside from the question of whether American democracy will survive — is why. Where is this extremism coming from?

Comparisons with the rise of fascism in Europe between the wars are inevitable but not all that helpful. For one thing, bad as he was, Trump wasn’t another Hitler or even another Mussolini. True, Republicans like Marco Rubio routinely call Democrats — who are basically standard social democrats — Marxists, and it’s tempting to match their hyperbole. The reality, however, is bad enough to not need exaggeration.

And there’s another problem with comparisons to the rise of fascism. Right-wing extremism in interwar Europe arose from the rubble of national catastrophes: defeat in World War I — or, in the case of Italy, Pyrrhic victory that felt like defeat; hyperinflation; depression.

Nothing like that has happened here. Yes, we had a severe financial crisis in 2008, followed by a sluggish recovery. Yes, we’ve been seeing regional economic divergence, with some ugly consequences — unemployment, social decline, even suicides and addiction — in the regions left behind. But America has been through much worse in the past, without seeing one of its major parties turn its back on democracy.

Also, the Republican turn toward extremism began during the 1990s. Many people, I believe, have forgotten the political craziness of the Clinton years — the witch hunts and wild conspiracy theories (Hillary murdered Vince Foster!), the attempts to blackmail Bill Clinton into policy concessions by shutting down the government, and more. And all of this was happening during what were widely regarded as good years, with most Americans believing that the country was on the right track.

It’s a puzzle. I’ve been spending a lot of time lately looking for historical precursors — cases in which right-wing extremism rose even in the face of peace and prosperity. And I think I’ve found one: the rise of the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s.

It’s important to realize that while this organization took the name of the post-Civil War group, it was actually a new movement — a white nationalist movement to be sure, but far more widely accepted, and less of a pure terrorist organization. And it reached the height of its power — it effectively controlled several states — amid peace and an economic boom.

What was this new K.K.K. about? I’ve been reading Linda Gordon’s “The Second Coming of the K.K.K.: The Ku Klux Klan of the 1920s and the American Political Tradition,” which portrays a “politics of resentment” driven by the backlash of white, rural and small-town Americans against a changing nation. The K.K.K. hated immigrants and “urban elites”; it was characterized by “suspicion of science” and “a larger anti-intellectualism.” Sound familiar?

OK, the modern G.O.P. isn’t as bad as the second K.K.K. But Republican extremism clearly draws much of its energy from the same sources.

And because G.O.P. extremism is fed by resentment against the very things that, as I see it, truly make America great — our diversity, our tolerance for difference — it cannot be appeased or compromised with. It can only be defeated.

#republican party #gop #republicans #right wing politics #fascism #white nationalism

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cherdenjohns · 5 months

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Nikki Haley Is “a grasping, amoral toxic stew of unbounded ambition and vile views ... - Blue Virginia

As you can see below, the brilliant Norman Ornstein describes Nikki Haley – whose name is all over the internet today due to her failure to ...

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jkanelis · 7 months

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Wait for trials ... and convictions!

Norman Ornstein is one of those Washington, D.C., gray eminences whom the media turn to for a look at the political landscape and whether it is changing under our feet in real time. Ornstein believes that Donald Trump’s current standing as the “frontrunner” for the 2024 presidential election is going to change “when and if the convictions” start rolling in from the felony criminal trials that…

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xtruss · 7 months

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How McConnell’s (Addison Mitchell McConnell III) Bid To Reshape The Federal Judiciary Extends Beyond The Supreme Court

— OCTOBER 31, 2023 | By Priyanka Boghani & James O'Donnell | PBS—NOVA

A Still From Frontline's Documentary "McConnell, The GOP and The Court."

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Kentucky) is widely credited with cementing a conservative majority on the Supreme Court.

But McConnell’s crowning achievement may extend past the Supreme Court. Experts in Frontline’s upcoming documentary McConnell, the GOP & the Court, said that McConnell sees his role in filling the federal judiciary with conservative judges as one of the strongest parts of his legacy.

When President Trump took office and McConnell served as Senate majority leader, Trump had more than 100 vacancies to fill in the lower courts, including 17 in the U.S. courts of appeals — all of them lifetime appointments. The Supreme Court hears around 80 cases a year, while the courts of appeals handle tens of thousands of cases annually — often making them the last word in most cases that impact the lives of Americans.

“[McConnell] has calculated, correctly, that most of the most contentious issues in our society eventually wind up in the courts,” conservative columnist and author Mona Charen told Frontline in a 2023 interview for McConnell, the GOP & the Court. “It is critical, if you want certain outcomes, to be sure that you have the right mix of judges.”

McConnell’s Strategy During Obama’s Presidency

During the first 2020 presidential debate on Sept. 29, President Trump boasted of the “record” number of judges he had appointed, adding that one of the reasons he had the chance to appoint so many was because former President Barack Obama had left so many vacancies.

“When you leave office, you don’t leave any judges,” Trump said. “That’s like, you just don’t do that.”

It wasn’t President Obama’s decision to leave the judicial vacancies, however. Just as McConnell helped cement a conservative majority on the Supreme Court for decades to come, judicial experts and journalists who spoke to Frontline for Supreme Revenge, a 2019 documentary examining the political battle over the highest court, credited McConnell with holding open vacancies that Trump then filled with conservative federal judges at a breakneck pace.

McConnell himself took credit for the strategy in a December 2019 interview with Sean Hannity of Fox News. When Hannity wondered why President Obama left so many vacancies, McConnell said: “I’ll tell you why. I was in charge of what we did the last two years of the Obama administration.”

McConnell “completely changed the nature of congressional warfare against Obama and Democratic judicial nominees,” Norman Ornstein, a political scientist at the conservative think tank American Enterprise Institute, told Frontline in 2019.

McConnell was exposed to the machinations of judicial appointments early in his career, when he worked for Marlow Cook, a U.S. senator from Kentucky who sat on the Senate Judiciary Committee. During his time as a staffer for Cook, McConnell saw two of President Richard Nixon’s Supreme Court nominees rejected.

“It was in those years that McConnell really came to understand the importance, the centrality of judicial nominations in our political system, both the Supreme Court nominations and also … federal lower-court nominations,” Alec MacGillis, a ProPublica reporter and author of “The Cynic: The Political Education of Mitch McConnell,” told Frontline in 2019.

The young McConnell also learned “what it takes to get these nominations through the Senate, to really kind of figure out how to win that game, the game of judicial politics,” MacGillis said.

Those lessons proved useful when McConnell took on leadership positions in the Senate. Senate Republicans were in the minority for much of Obama’s tenure, but under McConnell’s leadership they employed filibusters to slow down or block the confirmation of judicial nominees — a tactic Democrats had used under President George W. Bush. GOP senators also withheld “blue slips,” which were traditionally given to the two senators from the home state of a judicial nominee for their approval or rejection.

In order to overcome those efforts to stall appointments, in November 2013 then-Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and the Democrats changed the rules, eliminating filibusters for federal judicial and executive branch nominees, with the exception of Supreme Court nominees.

At the time, McConnell told the Democrats, “You’ll regret this, and you may regret this a lot sooner than you think.” When Republicans took control of the Senate in 2015, confirmations of Obama’s judicial nominees slowed to a crawl.

According to the Congressional Research Service, only 28.6 percent of Obama’s judicial nominees were confirmed during the last two years of his presidency, the lowest percentage of confirmations from 1977 to 2022, the years the report covered.

Trump’s Judicial Appointments, With McConnell’s Help

When Trump won the 2016 election, Senate Majority Leader McConnell employed the “nuclear option” when Senate Republicans ended filibusters for Supreme Court nominees — stymieing attempts from Democrats to block Neil Gorsuch’s confirmation.

Thirty of President Trump’s appeals court nominees were confirmed during his first two years of office. According to CRS, that was the greatest number of appeals court nominees confirmed by the Senate in the first two years of any presidency since it started tracking that data.

President Trump maintained his pace through the last two years of his term and appointed 54 appeals court judges during his 4-year tenure — a higher number than any other recent president, with the exception of President Jimmy Carter. (By comparison, President Obama appointed 55 appeals court judges over the course of eight years.)

By the end of his term, Trump confirmed a total of 228 judges across the appeals and district courts. They were mostly young, white and male. They would go on to decide cases about elections, voting rights, immigration, the environment, labor, abortion, gun control and other issues that impact the lives of Americans. They will remain on the courts for their lifetimes.

Biden’s Impact on the Judiciary

When President Joe Biden took office in 2021, Sen. McConnell once again became Senate minority leader, with fewer tools at his disposal to shape the makeup of the nation’s judges.

Amid that new dynamic, President Biden has left his own mark on the judiciary, nominating demographically diverse candidates. In June, Biden confirmed his 100th district court judge, which put him ahead of Trump’s figures at the same point in his tenure, though it’s unclear if that pace can continue through the end of his term.

As Biden’s push for judicial nominees has reached purple and red states, Republican senators have been slow to return “blue slips,” a tactic they used during the Obama administration, to thwart some of those nominations. That means Biden has struggled to confirm judges in southern states, especially those with two Republican senators. The Democrats’ leader in the House and some progressive groups have pushed for the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee chair to do away with the “blue slip” practice.

The new confirmations came at a time when a number of high profile Supreme Court rulings and controversies have affected public perception of the federal judiciary, including scandals that led to calls for the Supreme Court to adopt an ethics code. McConnell has defended the Supreme Court, arguing that it is less polarized than the public believes and describing it as “ideologically unpredictable.”

Still, experts have told Frontline, the effectiveness of the judiciary — whether at a district court level or the high court — does depend in part on the public’s belief in their independence from party politics.

“The courts rule and expect their decisions to be obeyed based upon a sense among the public, fostered by our Constitution, that they are the ultimate arbiters,” Jamie Gorelick, who served as deputy attorney general during the Clinton administration, told Frontline in 2018. “They don’t have a standing army. They have no way to enforce their rules. Their rulings are enforced by the majesty of the courts.”

“If the American public comes to believe that this is just another political body, that you can count a Republican vote or Democratic vote, that this is a process that is easily manipulated by politicians, it hugely diminishes the courts and their ability to perform their function under the Constitution,” she said.

As the documentary McConnell, the GOP & the Court recounts, federal courts hold a unique power to McConnell to shape American policies in a lasting way that Congress, legislation and policy cannot. To McConnell, his role in shaping the judiciary has been a signature accomplishment, according to Dan Balz, who covers national politics, the presidency and Congress at The Washington Post.

“His overriding priority was to remake the federal judiciary,” Balz said. McConnell’s efforts not only shaped the makeup of lower courts, Balz noted, but also built a pipeline of conservative judges who would go on to serve in more powerful positions.

“When there were openings on the appellate courts and ultimately the Supreme Court, you had people who were fully experienced and ready to go and ready to step in and be nominated for the Supreme Court, that being obviously the ultimate goal,” he said.

— This story was originally published May 21, 2019. It has been updated.

#Addison Mitchell McConnell III #Reshape #The Federal Judiciary #The Supreme Court of the United States 🇺��#Priyanka Boghani | James O'Donnell #NOVA | PBS | Frontline

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adhoccc · 8 months

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What about Congress and the courts? To start with, Congress can impeach and remove Supreme Court justices, with no comparable power going the other way. The Senate can reject nominees for the court that have been proposed by the president. And Congress can, and has, added and subtracted members of the Supreme Court, going from its original six down to five and up to as many as 10 before settling at nine in 1869. But we also know that Article 3 gives little direct power to the Supreme Court. It has original, constitutionally mandated jurisdiction, but here is the critical element of Article 3, Section 2: “In all cases affecting Ambassadors, other public Ministers and Consuls, and those in which a State shall be Party, the Supreme Court shall have original jurisdiction. In all the other cases before mentioned, the Supreme Court shall have appellate jurisdiction, both as to Law and Fact, with such Exceptions, and under such Regulations as the Congress shall make.”

Norman J. Ornstein na The New Republic.

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pscottm · 1 year

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Trump's 2025 vision: A lot more power for him

What Trump is proposing for 2025 ... is the trappings of a democracy. ... But it's a Potemkin village," said Norman Ornstein, an emeritus scholar at the American Enterprise Institute

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ilovetheater-nl · 1 year

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Music Stages presenteert opera Papoea van Maarten Ornstein op 13 mei 2023 in Muziekgebouw in Amsterdam

Music Stages, het Amsterdamse productiehuis, presenteert op zaterdag 13 mei in Muziekgebouw aan ‘t IJ: Opera Papoea, gecomponeerd door Maarten Ornstein. De roman Norman was het schrijversdebuut van Merel Hubatka. Het verhaal is gebaseerd op de biografie van haar vader. Ze beschrijft daarin hoe de Papoea’s speelbal werden van grote internationale ontwikkelingen. Samen met componist Maarten…

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#Maarten Ornstein #Music Stages

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dontmeantobepoliticalbut · 2 years

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The House Select Committee investigating the Capitol attack will unveil new evidence at Watergate-style public hearings this week showing Donald Trump and top aides acted with corrupt intent to stop Joe Biden’s certification, according to sources close to the inquiry.

The panel intends to use the hearings as its principal method of revealing potential crimes by Trump as he sought to overturn the 2020 election results, the sources said, in what could be a treacherous legal and political moment for the former president.

As the Justice Department mounts parallel investigations into the Capitol attack, the select committee is hoping that the previously unseen evidence will leave an indelible mark on the American public about the extent to which Trump went in trying to return himself to the Oval Office.

“They’re important for setting a record for posterity, but they’re also important for jolting the American public into realizing what a direct threat we had coming from the highest levels of government to illegitimately install a president who lost,” Norman Ornstein, a political scientist and emeritus scholar at the conservative thinktank the American Enterprise Institute, said of the hearings.

The panel’s ambitions for the hearings are twofold, the sources said: presenting the basis for alleging Trump broke the law and placing the Capitol attack in a broader context of efforts to overturn the election, with the ex-president’s involvement as the central thread.

At their heart, the hearings are about distilling thousands of communications between top Trump White House aides and operatives outside the administration and the Trump campaign into a compelling narrative of events about the events of 6 January, the sources said.

In order to tell that story, the sources said, the select committee intends to have its senior investigative counsels reveal previously secret White House records, photos and videos that will be presented, in real time, to starkly illustrate the live witness testimony.

On Thursday night, at the inaugural hearing at 8pm, the panel’s chairman, Bennie Thompson, and the vice-chair, Liz Cheney, are likely to make opening arguments, outline a roadmap for the hearings, and give an overview of the events of 6 January, and the preceding weeks.

The panel is likely to focus on broad themes for the following four hearings, such as how Trump used false claims of voter fraud to undermine the 2020 election and future races, and how he tried to use fake electors to deceive Congress into returning him to office.

House investigators are also likely to focus on how Trump directly pivoted to the 6 January congressional certification – and not the December deadlines for states to certify their electors – as an inflection point, and how his actions led straight to militia and far-right groups’ covert maneuverings.

The panel is then likely to reserve its most explosive revelations for the final hearing in prime time, where the Select Committee members Adam Kinzinger and Elaine Luria are expected to run through Trump’s actions and inactions as the 6 January attack unfolded.

The list of witnesses has not yet been finalised, the sources said, but it is expected to include top aides to former vice-president Mike Pence, aides to Trump’s former chief of staff Mark Meadows, and people with direct knowledge of militia group activities on 6 January.

From a legal perspective, the panel has already alleged in court filings that Trump and his external legal adviser, John Eastman, violated multiple federal laws to overturn the 2020 election outcome, including obstruction of Congress and defrauding the United States.

The Select Committee hopes that by revealing new evidence in hearings, the sources said, it can convince beyond a reasonable doubt the American public and potentially the Justice Department that the former president violated laws to reverse his 2020 election defeat.

Among the highlights of the already-public evidence include the revelation that Eastman, Trump’s external legal adviser, admitted to Pence’s counsel, Greg Jacob, that his scheme to obstruct Congress on 6 January was unlawful, but pressed ahead with it anyway.

The internal White House schedule for 6 January that the Select Committee obtained through the National Archives, meanwhile, showed that Trump would have known he had no plans to march with the crowd to the Capitol when he falsely promised that at the Ellipse rally.

House investigators are in many ways making their case to the American public, the sources said, since it is not certain whether the panel will make criminal referrals to federal prosecutors, given they are not binding on the Justice Department, which has the sole authority to file charges.

But that quest will come with its own challenges, and the panel’s greatest difficulty is perhaps not so much whether they can show wrongdoing by Trump and his top advisers, but whether it can get Republican and independent voters to care.

The repeated delays in holding the hearings have meant House investigators were able to finish most of the evidence-gathering they intended to conduct (the committee initially anticipated holding them sometime in “the spring, then in April, then in May, and now in June").

Committee counsel recently told one witness who had been assisting the investigation for months that it didn’t expect to ask for any more assistance, according to two sources familiar with the inquiry. “We are pretty much done,” the counsel told that particular witness.

But the consequence of the decision to delay the start of public hearings, and the constant drip of news from the investigation, is that it might have driven some “6 January fatigue” – which Trump’s allies on Capitol Hill are intent on weaponising to defend Trump.

The former president’s most ardent defenders in Congress and top Republicans led by the House Minority Leader, Kevin McCarthy, are planning aggressive counter-programming to the public hearings that slam the panel as partisan, according to party aides.

The Republican National Committee has also circulated a one-page memo of talking points, Vox earlier reported, requesting that Trump surrogates attack the investigation as “rigged” – even though multiple federal courts have ruled the inquiry is fully legitimate.

Overcoming counter-programming to cut through to Republican and independent voters could pose a challenge, the panel’s members have privately discussed. After all, the sources said, the panel is not trying to convince Democrats of Trump’s role in the Capitol attack.

The prospect of collective public exhaustion over 6 January-related news, with each new revelation seemingly more shocking than the last, appears to have also pressed the select committee to cut its June hearings schedule from eight hearings to now six.

According to a draft schedule reviewed by The Guardian and first reported last week, the panel anticipates holding just the first and final hearings – on 9 June and 23 June – in prime time at 8pm. The other four – on the 13th, 15th, 16th and 21st – will be at 10am.

Still, the target audience for the select committee is not Republicans but swing voters, Ornstein said. “I don’t have any expectation that Republicans who believe the election was stolen will change their minds. But it’s about the other voters and whether it will jolt the Democratic base into understanding what the stakes are.”

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worldofwardcraft · 2 years

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The doctor is in (the cult).

June 30, 2022

Remember that official White House doctor who lied about Donald Trump's weight and height (claiming he was just one pound short of being morbidly obese and two inches taller than Obama), who told us Trump had "incredibly good genes" and that if he only ate a little healthier could live to be "200 years old"?

That fibbing physician was none other than Navy Rear Admiral Ronny Jackson (pictured above eagerly anticipating the Trumpian Rapture). Jackson has since retired from the military to become a Republican, ultra-MAGA congressman from Texas. And he sure has all the qualifications to be one.

Apparently, even back when he was President Obama's personal physician (and what was Obama thinking?), Jackson browbeat subordinates, made sexual comments about female colleagues and was nicknamed the Candyman because of the casual way he allegedly doled out prescription drugs. He sure fooled former senior White House advisor David Axelrod, who wrote in 2018, "In my experience, he was [a] very good guy and [a] straight shooter."

But when Trump tried to make Jackson head of the Veterans Administration, the Pentagon came out with a blistering report loaded with witness testimony about his unfitness for the position and psychological instability. Here's CNN quoting from that report.

Many of these witnesses described RDML Jackson's behavior with words and phrases such as "meltdowns," "yells for no reason," "rages," "tantrums," "lashes out," and "aggressive." These witnesses also described RDML Jackson's leadership style with terms such as "tyrant," "dictator," "control freak," "hallmarks of fear and intimidation," "crappy manager," and "not a leader at all," it adds.

As a GOP congressman, this medical practitioner scoffed when the World Health Organization called the COVID omicron variant "highly transmissible" and "concerning." He even announced it was all part of some kind of elaborate Democratic conspiracy to "push unsolicited nationwide mail-in ballots" in the 2022 midterms. And, in a bid to confirm his credentials as a certifiably crackbrained GOP buffoon, he recently tweeted, "Don't forget that when parents wanted a normal education for their kids, Biden had the DOJ label them as TERRORISTS."

But now the House Ethics Committee is investigating Jackson for possible illegal diversion of campaign funds. Specifically, using campaign money to pay for his membership in an exclusive Amarillo social club. Observed conservative political scientist Norman Ornstein, “Goodness, Ronny is not just a pill-pushing quack, a radical, a serial liar, and a seditionist. He is also thoroughly corrupt!”

No surprises there, Norm. Doc Ronny is simply another of the GOP's extreme right-wing physicians-turned-politicians. Only in his case, the M.D. stands for MAGA Dupe.

#ronny jackson #maga cult #maga idiots #house ethics committee

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