Independent:
Jennifer Rubin/WaPo:
Perry Bacon Jr./WaPo:
A thread:
John Ganz/Substack with a long but interesting and well-documented essay on Trump and what we will call his “fascist adjacent” position.
Dan Froomkin/Presswatch:
Kathryn Joyce/Salon:
Timothy Noah/TNR:
‘This is a moral moment’: Warnock tells senators ‘history is watching us’ as voting rights bill collapses
‘We have been summoned here by history’
Democratic Senator Raphael Warnock – a senior pastor at Georgia’s Ebenezer Baptist Church, where Martin Luther King Jr preached up until his death – issued a pointed rebuke at his Senate colleagues who have invoked the words of the late civil rights leader while obstructing the passage of a bill to protect and expand voting rights.
“You cannot remember Martin Luther King Jr and dismember his legacy at the same time,” he said.
Jennifer Rubin/WaPo:
Finally, some moral clarity in the voting rights debate
It has become fashionable for Republicans to roll their eyes whenever Democrats insist on having an extended debate on voting rights. Fruitless. A stunt. Why bother? Even some in the media and a few grumpy Democrats have dismissed the need for it. What’s the point of President Biden speaking since he does not have the votes to pass a bill? Why extend the agony?
Now we have an answer. On Wednesday night, every Republican voted against reauthorization of Section 5 of the Voting Right Act and the Freedom to Vote Act; every Republican plus Sens. Joe Manchin lll (D-W.Va.) and Kyrsten Sinema (D-Ariz.) then voted against changing the filibuster rule, thereby dooming passage of the bill.
A funny thing about those votes: They put the best and the worst of the Senate on full display…
Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) on Wednesday shredded the “never before changed the filibuster” argument. Sen. Raphael G. Warnock (D-Ga.) gave one of the most stirring speeches, making clear that while John Lewis gave blood on the Edmund Pettus bridge, this Senate couldn’t bring itself to “bridge” a procedural rule. Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.), who bent over backward to accommodate Manchin’s concerns on voting reforms, blasted the gamesmanship: “I think by voting this down, by not allowing us even to debate this, to get to the conclusion of a vote, that is silencing the people of America, all in the name of an archaic Senate rule that isn’t even in the Constitution. That’s just wrong.”
When Sen. Tim Scott (R-S.C.) insisted it was unfair to equate voting restrictions to Jim Crow, Sen. Cory Booker (D-N.J.) let him have it. “Don’t lecture me about Jim Crow,” Booker declared angrily. “I know this is not 1965. And that’s what makes me so outraged. It is 2022, and they are blatantly removing more polling places from the counties where Blacks and Latinos are overrepresented.”
Eric has been in full panic mode over the NY investigation, and continues to personally attack and threaten the prosecutor. Today, he says they are PROSECUTING HER, which is incredibly dumb. They filed a ridiculous lawsuit to try and stop the investigation that will be tossed. pic.twitter.com/Ek0lG8Y8XS
— Ron Filipkowski (@RonFilipkowski) January 19, 2022
Perry Bacon Jr./WaPo:
An anti-Black backlash — with no end in sight
We are in the midst of an aggressive, sustained backlash against recent shows of Black political power. The Senate’s rejection of a comprehensive voting rights bill on Wednesday night both leaves in place some of the most pernicious elements of that backlash and confirms that Black political power in the United States remains subject to reversal from the nation’s White majority.
Backlashes, counter-movements and other actions that negate advancements of Black political power are nothing new. The post-Civil War amendments to the Constitution were in many ways undone by Jim Crow. Some of the advances of the 1950s and ‘60s on voting rights, school integration and other issues have been gradually reduced by conservative opposition. The election of Barack Obama resulted in a Republican Party that passed voting restrictions targeting Black people and a GOP president whose rise was accelerated by suggesting that Obama's presidency was not legitimate.
From 2017 to 2020, in the aftermath of Donald Trump’s election, there were three big examples of rising Black political power.
A thread:
If I'm reading it right—and I'm not sure I am, as it's confusing as hell—tonight's order in Trump v. Thompson isn't just a win for the Jan. 6 committee in this case, but has big potential implications that should have Trump and his supporters worried.https://t.co/zsEKmBYF0a
— Scott R. Anderson (@S_R_Anders) January 20, 2022
What it suggests, however, is that future presidents probably can't rely on executive privilege to protect information relating to potentially major unlawful conduct, like interfering with the transition of power. By today's standards, that's not an insignificant caveat.
— Scott R. Anderson (@S_R_Anders) January 20, 2022
John Ganz/Substack with a long but interesting and well-documented essay on Trump and what we will call his “fascist adjacent” position.
What is Trumpism?
Once More Into the Breach
The country remains in constant situation political immobilism and deadlock. The political leadership of both parties seemed increasingly unable to deal with the basic issues facing the society. It’s in this context, the charismatic figure Trump entered the G.O.P. primaries as an interloper, not a life-long member of the party’s “General Staff” to borrow again from Gramsci. He presented himself as leading a national restoration and went directly after racial and ethnic minorities. He rolled over the leadership of the party’s attempts to fight him off, because they had lost their grasp on its mass base. We forget the extreme heights of rhetoric Republicans used to try to denounce Trump. In the process, Trump and his supporters put incredible pressure on the old leadership and middle-ranks of the Republican party and Conservative movement. (Sometimes, this included actual threats like in the case of David French, where “alt-right” trolls harassed his family.)
This brings me to the next point. As soon as Trump appeared as a viable political force, the entire mob of the American extreme right, relatively small and disparate as it may be, flocked to Trump and tried to act as his “shock troops” or “commandos” when and where they could. Trump may not be purely fascist in the classical sense, but his style and practice of politics was close enough to excite and mobilize this section of the political fringe. This has not always worked in Trump’s favor politically, but it is not a constituency he has ever been eager to jettison. For instance, he was very careful in his wording around Charlottesville, and about the Proud Boys during the debates, and also pretty gentle about the January 6 rioters even when asking them to go in. Trump clearly views this type of group as important to him politically, and he often speaks of them in menacing terms. He attempted to mobilize this contingent during the January 6 crisis; the tactical results of that in the immediate-term “war of maneuver” were a total failure, but longer-term strategic significance is still yet to be seen. Now, his alliance with such groups may be a political misjudgment on his part, but this proximity should inform the way we think about his politics. It is true that these groups are disparate, small, struggling with police interventions, prosecutions, and internal squabbles, etc. but they nonetheless exist and have some political valence, even if it is largely negative.
Long version: Republican Bob Stefanowski, who tried bringing Trumpism to Connecticut in 2018, opens his second bid for governor. Short version: Democrat Gov. Ned Lamont is going to win.
— *The* Editorial Board (@johnastoehr) January 19, 2022
Dan Froomkin/Presswatch:
Where are the interviews with regular Americans terrified for our democracy?
I am terrified about a scenario the likes of which I would never have even imagined before a few years ago. I thought this country’s constitutional system was unshakeable. Now it’s shaking and so am I. What would I do?
And of course I’m not alone. A Quinnipiac poll out this week found that a significant majority of Americans – by a 58 to 37 margin – believe “the nation’s democracy is in danger of collapse.” Some of that is right-wingers who think the 2020 election was stolen, but it’s 56 to 37 percent among Democrats, too.
Over half of Americans also consider it very likely (19 percent) or somewhat likely (34 percent) that there will be another attack in the United States like the one at the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021.
And while people who follow me on Twitter are hardly a representative group, I was struck by how many people responded to this tweet by telling me that not only are they terrified, but that everybody they know is terrified, too.
I don’t read about people who feel that way in the news, though.
A growing number of pundits are trying to sound the alarm, and some of them end up being quoted in news stories. But that’s not the same as a cultural trend piece that takes the temperature of a population.
BREAKING: Jan. 6 committee chair Bennie Thompson says the panel expects to next ask Ivanka Trump to cooperate with the investigation
— Hugo Lowell (@hugolowell) January 20, 2022
Kathryn Joyce/Salon:
"Christian flag" case reaches Supreme Court: Is the Proud Boys flag next?
Far-right group wanted to fly obscure "Christian flag" over Boston City Hall. Will the Supreme Court go along?
The question boils down to whether whatever flies atop Boston's municipal flagpoles represents government speech from the city itself or just that of private individuals who are participating in a public forum the city has provided. If the flagpole is deemed to be government speech, Hollman said, there's no question about whether the city can be compelled to "speak" about religion — in fact it would be prohibited from doing so. But if the court rules that Boston had unwittingly "designated some kind of forum for private speech, then free speech rules would require them to let people in, regardless of their viewpoint."
Timothy Noah/TNR:
The Only Place Biden’s Floundering Is in a Sea of Journalism Clichés
There are five headlines about presidencies. Welcome to number three.
Amateur night at the White House” The “amateur night” insult is my favorite White House coverage cliché, because it so perfectly combines fury with a complete lack of specificity. It’s very early days seeing this precise phrase used against Biden, so perhaps I’m jumping the gun in situating Biden at this stage. Lexi McMenamin of Teen Vogue referred January 14 to “public officials who are acting like it’s amateur night at the Apollo on live television” by way of describing recent Biden administration comments about Covid-19. But the “amateur night” trope hasn’t yet penetrated the major dailies. Perhaps they maxed out on it during the Trump presidency, which was (among other things) an unending sequence of luridly bad decisions made by people who had little to no understanding of their public responsibilities.
...
“His/Her Presidency Is Over” “It’s never too early to begin the death watch for a presidency,” my friend Jack Shafer, media columnist at Politico, advises me. “You’re always rewarded.” But journalistic death notices for Biden’s presidency remain at least a few months off. They tend not to cluster until after a president’s first two years in office.
words used to describe Republicans: Very loud, They don’t represent everybody, Have to regroup, Wrong direction, Weak, Ruthless, Inconsistent, Uncivil, Dishonest and cowardly, More business-oriented, Arrogant, Capitalistic, Unnecessarily divisive, Chaotic (2/3)
— Edward-Isaac Dovere (@IsaacDovere) January 20, 2022