PBS's "Frontline" Documentary "Democracy on Trial" Raises Issue of Who Is a True "Conservative"

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Tuesday, January 30) PBS ran a 2 ½-hour episode of their long-running documentary series Frontline called “Democracy on Trial,” directed by Michael Kirk and co-written by him and Mike Wiser. It purported to be the whole story of the indictments against former President Donald J. Trump but it was pretty much a rehash of the hearings last summer of the House Select Committee on January 6, 2021. Most of the archival film clips were from the committee’s televised hearings, and a lot of the interviewees were participants in the hearings, including former Congressmember Adam Kinzinger and former Arizona House Speaker Rusty Bowers. Bowers was voted out of office by the voters in his legislative district and Kinzinger voluntarily chose not to run for re-election because he realized it wasn’t worth the bother – two more heads on Donald Trump’s trophy wall of Republicans who disagreed with him and tried to hold him accountable. One of the people I felt sorriest for in the show was Robert Ray, a former Trump attorney, who tried to present the case for Trump’s defense in a calm, reasonable and relatively emotionless fashion – which may explain why Ray is a former Trump attorney. Last Monday, when Rachel Maddow interviewed E. Jean Carroll (whom Trump sexually assaulted in the mid-1990’s and who sued him for defamation and won two judgments against him – the first for over $5 million and the second for a whopping $83.3 million) and her two attorneys, Roberta Kaplan and Shawn Crowley, one of the attorneys mentioned that Trump’s principal counsel in the case, Alina Habba, behaved very differently whether or not Trump was in the courtroom. When he wasn’t, she was a professional, reliable attorney who avoided histrionics; when he was, she went off the deep end with him and, among other things, insulted the judge to his face.

Though the show didn’t mention it, Fox News chose not to cover the House hearings on January 6 and, when asked why, the people in charge of Rubert Murdoch’s “news” network said bluntly that it was because their audiences weren’t interested in seeing it. It’s yet more evidence that the late New York Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan was wrong when he said, “Every man is entitled to his own opinion, but not to his own set of facts.” America’s media landscape has become so fragmented that people are entitled to their own sets of facts, since the modern age of multiple TV networks and Web sites allows them to absorb only information that agrees with their preconceived notions of what is “true.” It’s been said that had Fox News existed during Watergate, Richard Nixon would have survived politically and served out his full Presidential term. One development since the House committee hearings on January 6 that the show mentioned was Trump’s (and his attorneys’) attempt to get the whole case against him thrown out on the idea that a former President is absolutely immune from any criminal charges against him for things he allegedly did while in office unless he was first impeached by the House of Representatives and convicted and removed from office by the Senate for the same offenses. In this, as in so much else, Trump is following the precedent set by Richard Nixon, who in 1977 matter-of-factly told interviewer David Frost, “When the President does it, that means it is not illegal.”

Nixon was effectively arguing for an American version of the Führerprinzip (“Leader Principle”), the Nazi doctrine that the will of the leader was the ultimate law and he could make anything he wanted to do legal just on his own say-so. Trump is also very much of this mind-set; early on in his Presidency he fired FBI director James Comey when Comey refused to pledge “loyalty” – “loyalty” not to the United States Constitution and the laws he was pledged to enforce, but personal loyalty to Donald Trump. And it was Nixon’s hand-picked successor, Gerald Ford, who established the precedent that former Presidents cannot be prosecuted for things they did in office when he gave Nixon a blanket pardon for everything he did as President just one month after Nixon resigned the Presidency. Every time I hear how unprecedented it is to indict a former President for crimes allegedly committed while in office – including on this show, in which narrator Will Lyman said, “For the first time in American history, a president [was] charged with crimes in office” – I once again curse Gerald Ford and hope he is rotting in hell for the Nixon pardon.

One of the most interesting aspects of this Frontline episode, at least to me, was the sheer number of people who were identified as “conservative” in the chyrons announcing who they were as they made statements critical of Trump: David French, Bill Kristol (once an iconic figure on the American Right), Mona Charen, Gabriel Sterling (the Florida elections official who first warned that Trump’s statements about the 2020 election were going to trigger violence), Charlie Sykes, and perhaps Trump’s most significant critic on the Right: retired judge J. Michael Luttig. It was Luttig, along with former Vice-President Dan Quayle, who convinced Trump’s Vice-President, Mike Pence, that he did not have the loony-tunes “power” Trump and his attorneys, notably John Eastman, said he had to reverse the outcome of the Presidential electors by throwing out slates of electors who’d voted for Joe Biden and replacing them with electors pledged to Trump. In her 1974 book The Mask of State: Watergate Portraits, Mary McCarthy said that among other things, Watergate had been a test to determine who is truly “conservative” – “conservative” in the Edmund Burke sense of believing in the rule of law and in social traditions that should not be reversed lightly or arbitrarily based on the idea that we could do better by radically changing course – and who isn’t. As I’ve read in these pages before, the current six-member majority on the United States Supreme Court is not “conservative”; the six justices, three of them appointed by Donald Trump, are Right-wing revolutionaries committed to making radical social changes in American society (most of which, above all the overturning of Roe v. Wade, are not supported by majorities of the American people).

It’s become obvious that most Americans, especially most Republicans, are not “conservative” in the Burkean sense either; they are committed to a radical restructuring of American society aimed at reversing the liberal gains of the 20th century (the 1930’s and 1960’s in particular) and remaking America into a Christian-nationalist dictatorship. Among the voices of true conservatism on this program was Bill Kristol’s analysis of the dilemma Mike Pence faced on the eve of January 6, 2021: “Pence had just a clear conflict between what Trump wanted him to do and what the Constitution and the rule of law required him to do. I think he'd managed to navigate those conflicts in various ways over four years. Not always, in my view, the right way. But this was such a blatant transgression.” Another voice for true conservatism on this show came from Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger – one of the few Republican politicians who has defied Trump and got away with it, repelling the primary opponent Trump put up against him and being renominated and re-elected – who explained his reaction to the phone call he got from Trump on January 2, 2021 pleading with him to “find” the 11,780 votes that would have “flipped” Georgia from Biden to Trump. “What I knew is that we didn’t have any votes to find,” Raffensperger recalled. “We had continued to look. We investigated. I could have shared the numbers with you. There were no votes to find.”

Former Arizona House Speaker Rusty Bowers also spoke for true conservatism against the cult of Trump when he said, after Trump appealed to him in on the basis of party loyalty, “For someone to ask me to deny my oath and just let the courts figure it out, or punt it to someone else, is not something I will do. … We choose to follow the outcome of the will of the people. It’s my oath.” And Gabriel Sterling, who recalled that he had been a Republican since age 9 during Ronald Reagan’s re-election campaign in 1984, said, “I’ll go to my deathbed knowing that they knowingly lied. They looked in the state senators' eyes, the people of Georgia, the people of America, and lied to them about this, and knew they were lying, to try to keep this charade going on that there was fraud in Georgia.” But given the thug-like behavior of the Trump cultists and the fact that anyone, no matter how low on the totem pole – like Ruby Freeman and her daughter Shaye Moss, who were personally called out by President Trump and his then-attorney, former New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani on ridiculous charges that they altered the Georgia election results – gets not only vituperative insults but out-and-out death threats, it takes real personal courage to stand up to the Trump thugocracy, and that kind of courage is in tragically short supply in today’s Republican Party.

Doug Porter: GOP Flaunts Racism as Election Strategy

I've posted e-mails from Doug Porter at Words & Deeds before, but here's a good one regarding Nikki Haley's bizarre (to say the least) response to a question about why the U.S. Civil War (the one from 1861 to 1865) happened. If you've seen the clip on TV, you can sense the gears going around in Haley's brain as she tries to figure out what's the "right" response. The plain truth is that the U.S. Civil War happened because some white people in the seceding states wanted to make sure they kept having the "right" to own Black people as slaves. Everything else is just B.S., and it's fascinating to hear Haley saying the Civil War was a battle over "individual freedom" without specifying just which side was for "individual freedom" and which side was against it. – Mark Gabrish Conlan, January 2, 2024

GOP Flaunts Racism as Election Strategy

It's as American as apple pie.

by DOUG PORTER

JANUARY 2, 2024

A GOP Presidential wannabe, Nikki Haley, is getting noticed in the media because she danced around a citizen’s questions concerning the civil war and slavery.

Get this: a brown-skinned person who presents as white pandered to the racists in the electorate who would harm her if given the opportunity. I suppose nothing is surprising in a political world shaped by lies and conspiracies.

Haley is trying to represent herself as a “reasonable” candidate to lead her party into the 2024 elections… wink, wink.

Here’s columnist Thom Hartmann, who also has a lot to say about the economic conditions prior to the Civil War:

When she was called out on it by the questioner, who said he was “astonished” that her answer didn’t mention slavery, she tried to be glib, asking rhetorically, “What do you want me to say about slavery?”

When the gaffe went viral, Haley tried to clean it up by saying that “of course” slavery was a cause of the Civil War, and, later, blaming the “gotcha” question on a “Democratic plant” who’d sneakily inserted himself into her town hall.

The simple reality is that the pro-slavery South is still very much with us, and is still—after 163 years—trying to make the case that democracy should be replaced with a strongman white supremacist oligarchy.

“Freedom” is the word of choice by modern day apologists, used to paper over past events connected to an economic and cultural system based on the belief that their supreme being created a hierarchy determined by sex and skin color.

Having fostered the perception that the white population in this country is threatened by granting rights or eliminating barriers to other racial groups, GOP politicians are openly supporting causes and actions designed to protect its imagined majority of citizens. Individuals considered extremists are now accepted as part of their coalition by party leaders.

Since they can’t use the words “n***er lovers” any more, GOP politicians have adopted the term “cultural Marxism” to dismiss criticism of their political actions and portray those opposing them as dangerous. We’ve reached the point where the concept of a nation built around advantages for certain classes is considered normal

Books and curriculum inclusive of or featuring those considered to be outside the white, male nexus are being suppressed. Companies with diversity programs are coming under fire. And cultural events with non mainstream leading characters are boycotted and disparaged.

Jumping back into US history, Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation wasn’t accepted by his opposition or much of the populace as a great moral statement. As Heather Cox Richardson enumerates, Lincoln’s party lost bigly in the 1862 midterm elections, losing 25 seats in the House of Representatives and control of governance in Ohio, Illinois, and Indiana.

The sausage-making of the Emancipation Proclamation had long-term repercussions. The redefinition of Black Americans as superhuman workers undercut later attempts to support formerly enslaved people as they transitioned to a free economy, and the road to equality was not at all as smooth as the Republicans hoped. But that such a foundational change in our history emerged from such messy give and take, necessary in order to preserve our democratic system, seems a useful thing to remember in 2024. The well of racism in this country runs deep. The shockwave after H. Rap Brown declared that “racism is as American as apple pie” eventually led to processes of nation self-examination and some realization that so much of our society was built upon the assumption of white supremacy.

The process came up short when it came to understand racism’s role in our national wealth and its shaping of the economy. Thus, the door to Make America Great Again was left open. The foundation of racism renewal is economic, of course, a building block in the quest of a few to destroy democracy and pave the way for an authoritarian oligarchy.

Instead of a civilization reaching for the stars of equality and empathy, these are advocates for a future existing in the sewers of ignorance and hatred; where violence and cruelty are currency.

An indication of the weakness in our democracy is that there won’t be anti-racism advocacy involved in the vast majority of voting choices we get to make this year. In fact, such advocacy is actively portrayed as a call for chaos by those who would use this imagined chaos as a stepping stool for power.

Simply saying the phrase Black Lives Matter is portrayed as a call for anarchy and destruction. In vetting the profiles of users at Threads**, a would-be successor for Xitter, I’ve noticed the preponderance of ordinary people who use the BLM initials as a statement of beliefs.

Politicians, on the other hand, rarely use the phrase. If you wanna push back against the book banners and denialists, let’s make that phrase mainstream for good. It’s just a word choice, but symbolism is a powerful political motivator.

*****

I am currently signed up with a half-dozen social media platforms with formats and intentions similar to those of the company that Elon Musk has destroyed. Sometime this spring I’ll publish an accounting of my perceptions and experiences. One thing I can already tell you, is that the days of social media serving as news feed are long gone.

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Tuesday’s News Shorts

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Nebraska Legislative Preview - The Definition of Insanity Via Daily Kos

Erin Porterfield, executive director of nonprofit Heartland Workforce Solutions investigated why blue collar workers are now leaving Nebraska. Among reasons cited are that negative experiences with racism “contribute to feeling unsafe” and to reduced employment and social opportunities. “Feeling like Nebraska isn’t for everyone,” was another refrain, along with increased limits “on rights for people of diverse identities, including transgender care.” How are the Nebraska Republicans responding to this crisis? If you guessed more tax cuts for the rich, you would be right! Surprise! Surprise! They are consistent. Pillen has pledged to cut property taxes “significantly” in the next legislative session. The Nebraska Governor promised to reduce property taxes by $2 billion or 40%. Pillen would fund these massive tax cuts by cutting state spending by 6% and placing draconian spending caps on county and local governments. That would most likely include cuts to public school funding.

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Playbook PM: Biden’s big election-year choice Via Politico

And in a handful of swing-state counties that have backed the last four presidential victors, WSJ’s Ken Thomas, Catherine Lucey, Eliza Collins and Paul Overberg find a familiar refrain: Voters aren’t enthused about either frontrunner. In these areas, often removed from big cities and home to aging populations, there’s “a broader frustration with America’s trajectory and a desire to break the logjams that impede progress on the country’s economic and social problems.” Behind closed doors, an uncorked Biden often gets more candid, or assertive, at campaign fundraisers. That can create headaches for aides who have to clean up his gaffes or inconvenient truths, but several donors tell Reuters’ Steve Holland, Nandita Bose and Trevor Hunnicutt that his campaign “could actually use more of this type of aggressive language, especially pushing back on Republican attacks.” Meanwhile, Trump is laying big plans: He tells Breitbart’s Matthew Boyle and Alexander Marlow that he’ll make a “heavy play” for Minnesota, New Jersey, New York (!), New Mexico and Virginia in the general election. And he floats the possibility of a rally at Madison Square Garden.

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Shawn Fain’s New Year’s Resolution Is to Lay the Ground for a National Strike Via The Nation

Fain’s May Day throwdown takes aim at capital’s divide-and-conquer legal regime. But to be successful in 2028, the labor movement will need millions of workers to join in: those now in unions, who should begin to line up contracts for that decisive date, and many more who are not yet in unions but are beginning to organize.

This vision is what makes the new surge of auto worker organizing the UAW is currently embarking on particularly momentous.

In the wake of the UAW’s breakthrough strike and contract settlements at Ford, General Motors, and Stellantis, workers at the industry’s growing non-union plants—Toyota, Honda, Subaru, Hyundai, BMW, VW, Tesla, and more—are beginning to organize on a scale not seen in generations. Thousands of workers have signed union cards in the last few weeks. The UAW has dispatched organizers to non-union plants and launched a splashy national media campaign along with social media organizing tools.

Ruy Texeira on How the Democratic Party Lost the American Working Class: CNN "Inside Politics" with Dana Bash, December 30, 2023

One of the most important trends in American politics over the last three decades has been the ongoing alienation and disenchantment of working-class (non-college-educated) voters from the Democratic Party and their move to the Republican Party. This trend began well before Donald Trump emerged as an unlikely but surprisingly credible spokesperson for working-class voters' interests and concerns. The Democrats long ago lost the support of a majority of white working-class voters, and now, by using the same strategy by which they won the white working class – appeals to cultural conservatism and often outright racism – Republicans are beginning to peel away support among working-class voters of color as well. This is yet another factor complicating the Democrats' chances in 2024 and Joe Biden's ability to remain President in the face of an aggressive, no-holds-barred challenge from Donald Trump. Political scientist and analyst Ruy Texeira appeared on CNN's Inside Politics program with host Dana Bash to discuss this on December 30, 2023.

Ruy Texeira on Democrats’ Losing the Working Class, CNN, December 30, 2023

Dana Bash: More than 20 years ago, two political scholars [John Judis and Ruy Texeira] argued that the Democratic Party’s coalition would control politics. And for a little while, it looked like they might be right. A left-of-center party with a diverse base elected Barack Obama as the first Black president in 2008 and won control of the House and Senate. But then the election of President Donald Trump upended some of those early-2000’s theories. So the question is, what changed? What went wrong with the Democrats with those predictions. And one of the experts and co-authors of a new book, Where Have All the Democrats Gone?, Ruy Texeira, joins us now.

Thank you very much for coming in. So you point to two factions in the Democratic Party, what you call the “shadow party” of activists, and then the Silicon Valley and the Wall Street types. Can you explain these two factions, and how you think that they are actually problems for the Democratic Party?

Ruy Texeira: Sure. The way I think about it, Dana, is the Democratic Party in the broad sweep of the last 50 years has said a kind of a long goodbye to the working class. There’s a great divide that’s opened up economically and culturally between the working class and the college-educated in the last part of the 20th century. And like we saw the white working class move away from the Democrats in a big way. And then in the 21st century, we saw increased movement of the white working class away from the Democrats, and a sort of cultural identification of the Democrats with basically the sort of college-educated liberal-ish, and in many ways almost radical views on race, gender, crime, immigration and so on.

So the result of this is a movement of the working class en masse away from the Democrats. Now in 2016 Democrats thought, “Well, O.K., the white working class bailed out on us. But why did they do that? Because Trump is a racist, and we can’t reach these voters anyway, so who cares?” basically. But then the thing that happened – O.K., they lost the Presidency – but in 2020 we see non-white, especially Hispanic, working-class voters moving away from the Democrats. We still see that today in all the polling.

So in fact, if you really count the noses of who supports whom in this country, the Republicans are now the party of the working class. They get more working-class votes than the Democrats do. And if you look at any given poll, the Democrats will be up by about 10 to 15 points among college-educated voters and down 10 to 15 points among working-class voters. That’s a huge change, and it represents a party that is more dominated by these college-educated voters, elites. Silicon Valley, Wall Street, Hollywood.

I mean, there’s a whole identification of the Democratic Party with a group of institutions – activists, foundations, academia, you name it – that all push the Democrats in a direction that’s away from the priorities and the culture of working-class voters. And that now shows in the polls.

Dana Bash: You also write about immigration.

Ruy Texeira: Right.

Dana Bash: You and your colleague John Judis wrote in the Wall Street Journal last month, “While Republicans would eventually make opposition to illegal immigration their signature issue, Democrats went in the opposite direction – supported, surprisingly, by labor unions. The AFL-CIO’s abandonment of employer verification and sanctions undercut any attempt by the Democratic Party to stop illegal immigration, and soon Democratic activists became unwilling even to debate the issue.”

Ruy Texeira: That’s right. I mean, most Democrats don’t know this anymore, or if they knew it they’ve forgotten it. But Democrats were once the party that stood for controlling immigration. The Jordan Commission in the 1980’s basically was oriented to trying to damp down the level of immigration and having an E-Verify system so employers couldn’t employ illegal immigrants. And there was a sense that high levels of immigration basically constrict and constrain the low-wage labor market and undercut unionization.

But that really disappeared in the late 1990’s, and now in the 21st century you see Democrats identified, not exactly with open borders, but pretty porous borders and a lack of concern, as it were, with border security. And we see this in the Biden administration’s campaign, and we also see it – and this is very important, politically, right now – the Republicans and the Democrats are trying to cut a deal on tightening up border security –

Dana Bash: Yes.

Ruy Texeira: – versus Israel and Ukraine funding. They’ve had an incredible amount of difficulty doing this because Democrats – there’s a big faction of the party that does not want to compromise in any way on border security, because they feel border security is kind of like racism.

Dana Bash: Well –

Ruy Texeira: And that’s a problem.

Dana Bash: Yeah. I mean, the other issue is it’s not just border security. They’re trying to significantly overhaul some of the key asylum laws.

Ruy Texeira: Right. Well, that’s how you can tighten it up. By – because the asylum system is huge, in terms of the immigration problem.

Dana Bash: I just want to show our viewers some data –

Ruy Texeira: O.K.

Dana Bash: [Showed graph that displayed the percentage of white voters without college degrees that went for various Democratic Presidential candidates since 1992:

Bill Clinton, 1992: 39 percent
Bill Clinton, 1996: 44 percent
Al Gore, 2000: 40 percent
John Kerry, 2004: 38 percent
Barack Obama, 2008: 40 percent
Barack Obama, 2012: 36 percent
Hillary Clinton, 2016: 29 percent
Joe Biden, 2020: 32 percent]

– of how white voters went starting in 1992 through 2020. And the voters we’re talking about here are the ones that you write about: non-college-educated white voters. If you look at the data, in 1992 Bill Clinton, 39 percent. It makes your point that it was already a majority for Republicans. It hasn’t changed that much. Probably the low mark was iin 2016, when Hillary Clinton was running against Donald Trump, and it was up slightly in 2020. So it hasn’t – when you look at the coalition in and around Barack Obama, it hasn’t changed that dramatically since then, except around the margins.

Ruy Texeira: Well, one thing to note about the [Bill] Clinton vote is he actually carried the white working-class vote, because there were so many votes for [independent candidate H. Ross] Perot. So he actually carried the working class –

Dana Bash: Bill Clinton.

Ruy Texeira: He carried the white working-class vote in 1992 and 1996 by a point or two. So in a way, one way to think about what’s happened is that the heavily working-class Perot vote, on the Presidential level, which was for a third-party candidate, moved over time into the Republican camp en masse. And that’s not just at the Presidential level, but also a lot of Congressional seats and particularly a lot of Senate seats, where the Democrats are no longer competitive in a lot of these states. So that’s a lot about what happened to the Democratic coalition between the 1990’s and today.

And again, as I’m pointing out, in 2020 and now we see this movement of the non-white working class away from the Democrats as well. So you do see this coalition shifting, again, where Republicans are more of a working-class party than the Democrats. And that’s such a change from the historic image and practice of the Democratic Party in terms of politics today, I think.

Dana Bash: Yes, it’s definitely not FDR’s Democratic Party.

Ruy Texeira: It’s not his party anymore, and it’s not your father’s Democratic Party. It’s different. The question is, how competitive is it? Can the Democrats get where they want to go with this coalition?

Dana Bash: We’ve got to end this show now. We appreciate your coming – come back and we’ll discuss what the solutions are for the Democratic Party.

Ruy Texeira: I’d love to.

Voting for Republicans Is Voting Against Democracy

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan for Zenger’s Newsmagazine • All rights reserved

Voting for a Republican – any Republican, from the lowliest city council or special-district seat to the Presidency – in 2024 means voting against democracy; I’ll say that again: voting for a Republican means voting against democracy. The modern-day Republican Party has not only given up on democracy, it has repudiated it at all levels. It intends to govern, once it retakes control of the Presidency, the Senate and state governments it does not already control, as an authoritarian force, jamming its ideas and ideologies down the throats of Americans even when most of the country disagrees with them.

Republicans in power gave two vivid demonstrations of their hostility towards democracy on April 6 and 7, 2023. On Thursday, April 6, the two-thirds majority in the Tennessee General Assembly voted along party lines to expel two young African-American members, Justin Jones and Justin Pearson, for the “crime” of having stood up on the floor of the Assembly and joined protesters in calling for safe, rational gun laws in the wake of the March 27 mass shooting at a private Christian school in Nashville, the state’s capital.

One day later, on Friday, April 7, Matthew Kacsmaryk, a federal district judge in Amarillo,Texas, issued a ruling in a case brought by a private anti-abortion group invalidating the U.S.Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA) 2000 approval of mifepristone, a drug used in non-surgical abortions and also to treat women who’ve miscarried. Kacsmaryk said his ruling would apply nationwide, in states that have explicitly protected a woman’s right to choose to end her pregnancy as well as in states that haven’t.

Neither of these decisions went into full effect immediately. The local governments in Nashville and Memphis, which under Tennessee’s constitution have the power to fill legislative vacancies, both voted unanimously to reappoint Jones and Pearson as their own interim replacements pending a special election, and they re-won their seats when those elections occurred. And the mifeprestone decision was put on hold, first by a three-judge panel of the U.S. Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals and then by Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito – author of the majority opinion in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the case that overturned Roe v. Wade after 49 years, who set Wednesday, April 19 as the date for a Supreme Court hearing on the case. On April 22 the Supreme Court issued an indefinite “stay” (delay) of Kacsmaryk’s ruling, so mifeprestone remained available until the Court has a chance to rule on the “merits” of the case.

Overall the modern-day Republican Party has shown not only a rejection of democracy but a visceral contempt for it. Time and time again, today’s Republicans are embracing positions overwhelmingly rejected by large majorities of Americans. Though abortion is an issue notoriously difficult to poll on – a lot depends on how the questions are worded – 62 percent of American poll respondents say they want abortion legal in “all or most cases.” A majority of Americans want to see assault weapons like the AR-15, used in virtually all mass shootings these days, banned (as they were in the U.S. from 1994 to 2004), and up to 90 percent want universal background checks for gun buyers.

Violating the Constitution to “Save” It

Ordinarily, a political party in a representative democracy that goes so far out of line with the majority opinion of its country’s people would be dooming itself to political oblivion. But that doesn’t worry today’s Republicans. Driven by a fanatical belief that they know what the country really needs, whether the people who live here want it or not, the Republicans have cleverly used the anti-democratic features of the U.S. political system – some of them written into the Constitution itself, some developed through centuries of custom – that serve to keep Republicans in power regardless of what the people want or how they vote.

At least some of these compromises were made at the 1787 Constitutional Convention so there could be a United States at all. To guarantee small states that their interests wouldn't be swallowed up by larger, more populous states, the Framers of the Constitution created a two-house legislature and guaranteed each state the same number of Senators regardless of its population. This has become more undemocratic over time as the population gap between the largest and the smallest states has steadily grown. In 1787 the largest state, Virginia, had nine times as many people as the smallest, Rhode Island. Today the largest state, California, has 80 times the population of the smallest, Wyoming.

The Framers also created the Electoral College, which over time has also taken on the role of boosting the political power of smaller, more ethnically homogeneous states. Since 1992 there have been eight Presidential elections, of which the Democratic nominee has won five and the Republican has won three – but only once, in 2004, did the Republican actually win the popular vote for President. George W. Bush became President in 2000, and Donald Trump in 2016, through carrying enough smaller, more homogeneous states to win majorities in the Electoral College despite losing the popular vote.

In 2020 several political commentators noted that Trump’s re-election campaign and the Republicans in general had given up on winning the popular vote and concentrated on gaining the all-important electoral majority. It’s an historical oddity that in all four Presidential elections since the modern two-party system emerged during and after the Civil War in which the popular and electoral vote diverged – Rutherford Hayes vs. Samuel Tilden in 1876, Benjamin Harrison vs. Grover Cleveland in 1888, George W. Bush vs. Al Gore in 2000, and Donald Trump vs. Hillary Clinton in 2016 – it’s always been the Democrat who won the popular vote and the Republican who won the Electoral College and hence the Presidency, never the other way around.

One other thing the Framers did that has been ruinous for American democracy in recent years was to give state legislatures virtually absolute control over national, state and local elections. State legislatures determine what districts would-be Congressmembers and state legislators will run in, and also regulate the time, place and manner of conducting elections. If you read the great Constitutional amendments which expanded the franchise – the 15th, which (at least theoretically) guaranteed the voting rights of people of color; the 19th, which guaranteed them to women; the 24th, which abolished poll taxes; and the 27th, which lowered the voting age to 18 – all of them are framed as specific limitations on the otherwise absolute power of state legislatures to regulate who may vote, where and when.

One of the most starkly repressive and anti-democratic features of American politics is legislative gerrymandering. The term comes from Elbridge Gerry, a delegate to the U.S. Constitutional Convention, who as governor of Massachusetts in the first decade of the 19th century produced a legislative map designed to keep his party, the Democratic-Republicans, in power permanently. Opponents joked that one of the districts looked like a salamander, and they called it the “Gerrymander.” The term stuck, and since the development of computers and their use in drawing legislative district lines, gerrymandering has become more and more precise.

Current political scientists have estimated that only about 10 percent of the 435 House of Representatives districts are truly competitive between the two major parties. In all the others, voter registration margins are so lopsided that most House members are more likely to lose their seats by being “primaried” – usually by someone more extreme in their politics – than losing a general election to the other major party’s candidate. Republicans have generally pushed more extreme gerrymanders than Democrats, so when Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Georgia) says she’s taking extreme-Right positions because they reflect “the will of my voters,” she’s absolutely right – only the “voters” she’s representing are a cadre of extreme Republicans with the same views as hers.

To see how effective modern-day gerrymandering is, one need only look at two states that sit side-by-side, Michigan and Wisconsin. In Michigan, a citizens’ initiative took the power to draw legislative districts away from politicians and gave it to an independent commission; in Wisconsin, the state legislature still draws the lines. Besides being right next to each other on the map, Michigan and Wisconsin are both more or less evenly divided between the two major parties and they’re both on the list of six so-called “swing” or “battleground” states that determine Presidential elections.

Yet in Michigan, Democrats in 2022 not only re-elected their Democratic governor but gained control of both houses of the state legislature – while in Wisconsin, Democrats only narrowly (by one seat in one house) avoided having two-thirds Republican supermajorities in both houses that would have effectively nullified the power of their re-elected Democratic Governor, Tony Evers. In 2018 65 percent of Wisconsin’s voters chose a Democrat to represent them in the state legislature – but the Republicans had done such a good job of gerrymandering that Democrats got just 45 percent of the legislative seats.

In April 2023, Wisconsin voters elected a liberal Democrat, Janet Protasiewicz, to their state’s Supreme Court in May, largely in the hope she’d reverse Wisconsin’s gerrymandered districts and protect women’s choice against a 1931 “zombie law” banning nearly all abortions that became effective once the U.S. Supreme Court reversed Roe v. Wade (https://apnews.com/article/wisconsin-supreme-court-election-abortion-0d188b5c6f841546f98436c1ab8180fa). Legislative Republicans responded by blocking her from taking office for four months by threatening to impeach her.

Legislative gerrymandering is only one tool by which Republicans, once they seize control of a state through an election, make sure they never have to give it up. Another tool is voter suppression; instead of trying to convince or persuade voters, modern-day Republicans seek to shrink the electorate so people unlikely to vote for them aren’t able to vote at all. John Roberts, the current Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court, has led the Court in a series of decisions that have effectively gutted the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and made it harder for people of color either to vote or to have effective representation in Congress and state legislatures.

The latest of these is a November 20, 2023 ruling by the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals – just one rung below the Supreme Court – that would take away the ability of private citizens and advocacy groups to bring lawsuits challenging state laws as discriminatory against voters of color (https://www.politico.com/news/2023/11/20/federal-court-deals-devastating-blow-to-voting-rights-act-00128069). Under this opinion, only the federal government, through the Department of Justice, could bring such suits – which, if the Republicans regain the Presidency in 2024 or thereafter, would mean the effective elimination of any enforcement of the Voting Rights Act.

The Supreme Court vs. the People and the Constitution

The transformation of the United States Supreme Court over the last several decades of Republican Presidents has in itself been a major attack on democracy. What many people don’t realize is that the U.S. Constitution does not specifically grant the Supreme Court the power to invalidate laws by declaring them unconstitutional. That is a power the Court proclaimed itself in 1803, in a case called Marbury v. Madison, in which then-Chief Justice John Marshall said, “It is the duty of the judicial department to decide what the law is.”

Since then, the Supreme Court has usually been a Right-wing force in American politics. It reached its height in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, when in a series of utterly dreadful rulings it declared minimum-wage laws unconstitutional, effectively banned labor unions, exalted corporations as “people” with the same political and legal rights as actual humans, and ruled that racial segregation was constitutional as long as the facilities for whites and Blacks were “equal” – which, not surprisingly, they never were. In the 1930’s there was a bitter clash between President Franklin D. Roosevelt and the hard-line Right-wing court majority who were throwing out New Deal legislation as fast as Congress could pass it – and when Roosevelt tried to respond by expanding the number of justices on the Court, his critics called it “court-packing” and successfully mobilized to stop him.

Things gradually changed because Roosevelt was able to reshape the court through sheer attrition. Because Roosevelt’s presidency lasted over 12 years – longer than any before or since, especially after the 22nd Amendment (passed in 1947, two years after Roosevelt’s death) limited the Presidency to two terms – he and his successors (including Republican Dwight Eisenhower, who appointed two of the most liberal justices in U.S. history, Earl Warren and William Brennan) reshaped the court in a more liberal direction.

Even after Warren’s retirement in 1969, the Court for a few more years kept trending liberal, and the justices didn’t always fall on major cases the way you’d expect them to based on the partisan affiliations of the Presidents who appointed them. It’s hard to believe given how the whole concept of women’s bodily autonomy in general and her right to abortion in particular has become one more issue dividing the two major parties, but the majority opinion in Roe v. Wade (1973), which for the next 49 years guaranteed a woman’s right to choose whether to carry a pregnancy to term, was written by Harry Blackmun, appointed by Republican Richard Nixon – and the dissent was written by Byron White, appointed by Democrat John F. Kennedy.

Republican leaders saw this as a major problem. A young Right-wing activist named Leonard Leo formed a group called the Federalist Society that would identify law students with solidly Right-wing politics and mentor them as they rose through the legal profession. Leo regarded such relatively liberal or moderate Republican Supreme Court appointees as Warren, Brennan, Blackmun, John Paul Stevens and David Souter as mistakes, and one major mission of his organization was to make sure future Republican Presidents appointed only hard-core Right-wingers not only to the Supreme Court but the federal judiciary as a whole. Today it’s virtually impossible to get a federal judicial appointment from a Republican President unless you’re either a Federalist Society member or have their imprimatur.

In previous posts I’ve referred to Leonard Leo as “the most important American you’ve never heard of,” and his role in hand-picking much of America’s judiciary is only part of his matchmaking skill. He’s also become the point of contact between judges, including Supreme Court justices like Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito, and super-rich people who want to offer them bribes, including sweetheart loans and expensive trips, to build goodwill at the Court. Even before some of the major scandals involving favors wealthy individuals have done for sitting Supreme Court justices – including lavish vacations and flights on private planes, private-school tuitions and free housing for their relatives, and the like – on May 3, 2023 Financial Times columnist Edward Luce wrote an article called “America’s Anything-Goes Supreme Court” (https://www.ft.com/content/f2a34faa-9ef7-4e11-9ea1-ef65e6c1d4ae) in which he discussed three reasons why the Supreme Court has fallen to its lowest level of approval in the history of public polling on the subject.

“The first was the manner in which this court has been filled,” Luce wrote. “After the death of Antonin Scalia in 2016, the Republican Senate kept a vacancy open for the final ten months of Barack Obama’s term on the unheard-of grounds that the next president should decide. Donald Trump then filled the slot with a ‘conservative’ justice, Neil Gorsuch. When the liberal justice, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, died six weeks before the 2020 election, Republicans wrapped up the confirmation of Amy Coney Barrett, Trump’s highly ‘conservative’ nominee, in near-record time. The new umpires were only too willing to profit from a politics that rewrote the rules as it went along. As a result, the court now has an unassailable 6-3 ‘conservative’ majority which seems likely to last at least the next two decades.” (I’m putting quotes around the word “conservative” because the current court majority is a group of Right-wing revolutionaries and there’s nothing truly “conservative” about them.)

“The second,” Luce added, “is the unpopularity of this court’s decisions — most notably last year’s overturning of Roe v. Wade, the 1973 ruling that enshrined the right to abortion. In addition to flying in the face of public opinion, their move overturned the principle of ‘settled law’ to which each of the justices had attested in their hearings. Last year the court also gave the green light to partisan gerrymandering, which feeds heavily into America’s disaffection with politics. Ditto for another ruling that allows gun owners to carry concealed weapons in public.

“The third cause of the court’s plummeting standing,” Luce continued, “is the fact that the justices are not bound by even the flimsiest of ethical codes. Last month, ProPublica, a non-profit investigative group, revealed that Clarence Thomas, the most ‘conservative’ justice, had taken millions of dollars in hospitality from Harlan Crow, a Texan billionaire. This included numerous private flights, superyacht holidays in Indonesia and New Zealand and annual stays at his palatial New York estate. Crow also purchased Thomas’s mother’s house and paid to renovate it. None of this was disclosed.” Recently Chief Justice John Roberts proclaimed a so-called “code of ethics” for himself and his fellow justices – but without any enforcement mechanism, it will make no difference.

At the end of his article, Luce compared the current 6-3 Right-wing majority on the U.S. Supreme Court to the Iranian Council of Guardians, the board of Muslim clerics that essentially rules Iran and has veto power over who gets to run for office in Iran’s nominal democracy as well as everything the electeds try to do. “Iran’s Council of Guardians is unelected, regulates women’s bodies, cannot be removed and is impervious to public opinion,” Luce wrote. “They answer to a higher power. The more America’s Supreme Court resembles a theocratic body, the more it imperils itself.” And just as Iran’s Governing Council sees its mission as imposing a theocratic agenda on Iran’s people and stamping out anything that goes contrary to the “will of Allah” as they define it, U.S. Republican judges in general and the U.S. Supreme Court in particular see their mission as advancing the cause of so-called “Christian nationalism” and gradually whittling away at the separation of church and state.

Republicans’ Determination to Control Women’s Bodies

One of the most revealing comments in Edward Luce’s commentary on the current U.S. Supreme Court is his point that the Court, like Iran’s Council of Guardians, “regulates women’s bodies.” Regulating women’s bodies, and in particular re-enslaving them to their wombs so they can’t have sex without the risk of becoming pregnant, is one of the main priorities of both the Republican Party and America’s radical Right in general.

And they’re pursuing this goal despite overwhelming evidence that almost 60 percent of Americans are pro-choice. This is borne out not only by opinion polls but actual election results. In 2022 abortion rights were directly on the ballot in six states – California, Michigan, Vermont, Kentucky, Montana and Kansas – and in all six the pro-choice position won. California, Michigan and Vermont voters amended their states’ constitutions to guarantee abortion rights. Kentucky and Kansas voters rejected attempts by anti-abortion activists to write language in their states’ constitutions to ban abortion. Montana voters rejected a measure that would have called for prosecuting doctors and nurses who failed to provide care for a fetus that survived a late-term abortion.

With current polls showing Donald Trump leading Joe Biden in five of the six so-called “battleground states” – Arizona, Nevada, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Georgia – that will effectively determine the next Presidential election, Democrats are panicking and working to put abortion rights on the ballot in those states in hopes of driving voter turnout for their party. But a recent attempt to do that in Nevada was just thrown out by judge James T. Russell before they could even collect signatures to get it on the ballot (https://thehill.com/homenews/state-watch/4325295-judge-rejects-nevada-attempt-enshrine-abortion-ballot/).

The lengths to which Republicans will go to pursue their anti-choice agenda in spite of the clear will of the American people were amply displayed this year in Ohio. In order to keep pro-choice activists from writing reproductive choice protections into the Ohio constitution, the Republican-controlled Ohio legislature first put on the ballot in August a measure to change the threshold for amending the state constitution from a simple majority to 60 percent – not coincidentally, just above the 55 to 57 percent of Ohio voters that were supporting it in polls. The legislature put this on the ballot despite their previous vote to get rid of midsummer special elections in odd-numbered years because so few people vote in them. Ohio’s pro-choice activists mobilized voters in that state to reject that amendment, which they did by a 14-percent margin (https://ohiocapitaljournal.com/2023/08/08/ohios-issue-1-goes-down-to-defeat/).

In November 2023 Ohio voters went on to pass the measure protecting abortion rights in the state constitution by a similarly lopsided margin, with 56.62 percent voting yes and 43.38 percent voting no (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/November_2023_Ohio_Issue_1_). This vote came despite lots of misleading campaigning against it, including ballot language from the Ohio Secretary of State’s office that described what the measure would do in highly partisan and propagandistic terms – Secretary Frank LaRose said it “would always allow an unborn child to be aborted at any stage of pregnancy regardless of viability,” which it wouldn’t – and campaign arguments from the anti-choice side saying it would allow for “abortions after birth,” which don’t exist.

But losing twice at the ballot box didn’t stop the Ohio legislature from looking for ways to ban abortion in the state despite the public vote (https://ohiocapitaljournal.com/2023/11/13/some-ohio-gop-lawmakers-attempting-to-undermine-democratic-process-after-voters-protect-abortion/). A quartet of Right-wing extremists in the Ohio legislature – Jennifer Gross (R-West Chester), Bill Dean (R-Xenia), Melanie Miller (R-Ashland) and Beth Lear (R-Galena) – are pushing a bill to strip Ohio’s state courts of the ability to enforce the pro-choice constitutional amendment. “The Ohio General Assembly shall have the exclusive authority over implementing Ohio Issue 1 [the pro-choice amendment],” the draft legislation says. “All jurisdiction is hereby withdrawn from and denied to the Courts of Common Pleas and all other courts of the State of Ohio.” The bill also threatens impeachment against any judge who tries to enforce Issue 1. The four authors explained in a press release on the official Ohio Republican legislators’ Web site that the bill was needed to block “mischief by pro-abortion courts.”

Legal experts in Ohio argue that what Gross, Dean, Miller and Lear are trying to do is itself unconstitutional. “Whatever authority the legislature might have to tinker with the jurisdiction of the state courts, it cannot eviscerate a rights-granting provision of the state constitution,” said Case Western Reserve University law professor Jonathan Entin. Constitutional law expert Steven Steinglas called the bill “ridiculous,” and added, “I know we’re talking respectfully about the Ohio General Assembly, but saner minds will, I am sure, prevail.” But even if the bill never gets to be law, it’s still a vivid illustration of the visceral contempt modern-day Republicans have for the rule of law and the democratic principle.

Donald Trump and His Fascist Re-Election Agenda

The campaign for the 2024 Republican Presidential nomination has been totally dominated by former President Donald Trump. The latest polls show him with over 60 percent support from Republican voters, and ironically his various legal troubles – including four indictments in three jurisdictions charging him with a total of 91 felonies – have only boosted his support in his own party. What’s more, legislative fatigue, distrust and a general sense that the 81-year-old Joe Biden is too old for the Presidency (even though Trump is just three years younger!) have kept the general-election polling between Biden and Trump dead even, with Trump (as mentioned above) leading in five of the six “battleground states” that will probably determine who the next President is.

During the 2016 campaign I compared Donald Trump to Antaeus, the giant in Greek mythology. Antaeus was the son of the sea god Poseidon and the earth goddess Gaia, and he could not be defeated in battle because every time an attacker knocked him down, Gaia would replenish his strength and he would get up again stronger than before. Antaeus was finally defeated and killed by Herakles – or, to use his more famous Roman name, Hercules – who, on the advice of the goddess Athena, lifted Antaeus in the air with one hand while knifing him with the other to make sure Antaeus couldn’t touch the earth and thereby regain the strength to fight off and kill Herakles.

Throughout his career as a businessperson and a politician, Trump has similarly withstood all sorts of scandals that would have been career-ending for any other public figure. He survived in 1991, when the people who’d lent him money to build his failing Atlantic City casinos were about to force him into bankruptcy when they realized the casinos would do better with Trump’s name on them than without it. They cut a deal with him whereby the casinos would still bear the Trump brand but he wouldn’t be allowed to have any role in running them – and this revolutionized Trump’s business model because he realized he could make developers pay through the nose to license Trump’s name and he could make money off their projects without the bothersome necessity of actually building or running anything.

During his 2016 campaign he called the media “enemies of the people,” mocked a disabled reporter who covered him on the campaign trail, called on his rally audiences to beat up hecklers (and said he’d pay for their legal defense if they were arrested), said Fox News reporter Megyn Kelly “had blood coming out of her eyes, blood coming out of her wherever” when she asked him a tough question about his abusive comments about women, mocked U.S. Senator John McCain (R-Arizona) and said, “He wasn’t a war hero because he was captured. I like people who weren’t captured.” All these incidents led to Trump rising in the polls, and even the October 2016 revelation that in a taped conversation with Access Hollywood host Billy Bush that he could sexually assault women and “they let you do it, because when you’re a star, you can do anything” didn’t stop Trump’s seemingly unstoppable win in November.

Trump’s next Antaeus-like comeback from seeming defeat happened when he lost his 2020 re-election bid to Joe Biden – or at least that’s what the reality-based world said happened. Trump immediately responded with a series of press conferences claiming that he had really won the election and it had been “stollen” from him (that spelling, with two “l”’s, is the one he routinely uses on his own “Truth Social” media site) – and in the classic manner of Naxi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels and his philosophy of the “Big Lie,” repeated it over and over until nearly all U.S. Republican voters believed it.

Trump not only urged his followers to come to Washington on January 6, 2021 – the date on which the U.S. Congress was supposed to meet and perform the “ministerial” (government-speak for actions with a predetermined outcome) function of certifying Biden’s victory – he called them to a rally on the Ellipse in D.C. and urged them to march on the Capitol to stop the certification of Biden’s win. Trump said he would join the march personally – I’ve long suspected he had Benito Mussolini’s 1922 March on Rome as his model – and though he didn’t because the U.S. Secret Service said it would be too risky and wouldn’t let him, the riot he arguably provoked with his incendiary speech lasted three hours (during which Trump refused the requests of his own staff, including his adult children, to do something to stop it) and led to the deaths of five people.

Later evidence developed by the House of Representatives select committee appointed to investigate the riot, and the special prosecutor U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland picked to handle an official Justice Department probe, made it clear that Trump intended to foment a coup d’état to stay in office illegally despite his election defeat. And most of his party sided with him: 151 Republicans in the U.S. House of Representatives – three-fourths of the party’s delegation – voted with Trump and refused to certify the election. Mitch McConnell and Kevin McCarthy, Republican leaders in the Senate and House, respectively, initially attacked Trump for sparking the riot but quickly changed their tunes once they learned that Republican base voters were with Trump no matter what. Three weeks after the riot, McCarthy went to Trump’s golf resort at Mar-a-Lago, Florida and went through a self-abasing ceremony many people compared to the “taking the knee” ritual in the TV miniseries Game of Thrones.

Since then, Trump has not only declared his candidacy to retake the Presidency in 2024 but has staked out a frankly authoritarian and anti-democratic platform. Variously called “Agenda47” (https://www.donaldjtrump.com/agenda47) and “Project 2025” (https://apnews.com/article/election-2024-conservatives-trump-heritage-857eb794e505f1c6710eb03fd5b58981), the essence of the plan is to replace all career civil servants who won’t toe Trump’s line with so-called “loyalists” loyal only to Donald Trump. Adolf Hitler and the Nazis had the same idea; they called it the “Führerprinzip” (“leader principle”). The idea both Hitler and Trump had was that their will would be the ultimate legal authority. As I noted when Trump fired FBI director James Comey in 2017 after Comey refused to pledge “loyalty” to Trump, the American soldiers who fought in World War II had sworn an oath to preserve and protect the U.S. Constitution. The Germans they were fighting against had sworn a personal oath to Hitler.

Trump already started this process during his first term when in October 2020 he issued an executive order with the seemingly innocuous title “Schedule F.” As Jonathan Swan reported on Axios.com July 22, 2022 (https://www.axios.com/2022/07/22/trump-2025-radical-plan-second-term?fbclid=IwAR0H-mDvYLnxMAb5N2zIQkU2zg87EsaGSE1nnMxiSs06Uj_4fWLSwiTwuL8), “Tens of thousands of civil servants who serve in roles deemed to have some influence over policy would be reassigned as ‘Schedule F’ employees. Upon reassignment, they would lose their employment protections. … An initial estimate by the Trump official who came up with Schedule F found it could apply to as many as 50,000 federal workers — a fraction of a workforce of more than 2 million, but a segment with a profound role in shaping American life. Trump, in theory, could fire tens of thousands of career government officials with no recourse for appeals. He could replace them with people he believes are more loyal to him and to his ‘America First’ agenda.”

“Schedule F” fell through the media cracks when the election and Trump’s increasingly bizarre contesting of the results dominated news coverage during late 2022. Joe Biden rescinded the “Schedule F” executive order just two days after taking office, but Trump has made it clear that if he becomes President again in 2025 he will immediately reinstitute it and start clearing out the civil-service bureaucrats whom he believes obstructed his agenda the first time around.

Trump has also made no secret of his plan to weaponize the U.S. Department of Justice and use it as a tool to prosecute his political “enemies” whether they’ve done anything criminal or not. He’s claimed this is revenge against Biden for having allegedly weaponized the Justice Department against him, but there’s plenty of evidence that Trump has always believed U.S. Presidents should have the power to order the prosecution of political opponents and anyone else they don’t like. He said so himself in a remarkable interview with Right-wing talk radio host Larry O’Connor on WMAL-FM November 2, 2017:

“[T]he saddest thing is, because I’m the President of the United States, I am not supposed to be involved with the Justice Department. I’m not supposed to be involved with the FBI. I’m not supposed to be doing the kinds of things I would love to be doing. And I am very frustrated by it. … [A]s a President, you are not supposed to be involved in that process. But hopefully they are doing something, and at some point maybe we’re going to all have it out.”

Indeed, Trump and his last Senate-confirmed Attorney General, William Barr, had a falling-out over precisely this question. In October 2020 Trump called Barr into his office and demanded that Barr get indictments against Joe Biden, former President Barack Obama and his 2016 general election opponent, Hillary Clinton. Trump seemed to think that just indicting these people on the eve of the 2020 election would be such a blow to the Democratic Party that he would be guaranteed to win re-election. Barr tried to explain to Trump that the Justice Department can’t just go ahead and indict people without probable cause that they’ve committed actual crimes. Trump was unpersuaded, and within a month he’d ordered Barr to “resign.”

Robert Kagan just published an op-ed in the Washington Post stating flat-out that Trump has already pledged to pursue a dictatorial agenda if he’s returned to the Presidency in 2024. Trump has promised, Kagan wrote, “to use the powers of his office to persecute anyone who dares challenge him.” The battlefield of American politics is already littered with the scalps of Republican elected officials who dared to take on Trump and try to hold him to account, including Justin Amash, Bob Corker, Jeff Flake, Liz Cheney, Adam Kinzinger and, most recently, Mitt Romney. With the aid of a fanatically devoted base, Trump has essentially taken over the Republican Party and turned it into a cult of personality.

And a recent YouTube video from the British newspaper The Guardian (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hY68idKVKx0) shows just how fanatical the Trump base is. It was filmed in South Carolina and showed that, with just a handful of exceptions, the Republican Party in that state is unshakably devoted to Trump. The low point of that YouTube video comes when a Black woman compares Trump to Mahatma Gandhi and Nelson Mandela as a political martyr. That video also features Congressmember Marjorie Taylor Greene demanding that all other Republican candidates for the Presidency drop out at once and endorse Trump.

Trump’s example has inspired Republicans up and down the ballot to copy his methods and swear fealty to his goals (whatever they are). Just as the Nazis who gained seats in the German legislature before Hitler’s total takeover in January 1933 worked industriously to sabotage any efforts to solve Germany’s economic problems because Hitler and the Nazis knew they did best when the German economy was at its worst, Trump and his colleagues in the Republican clown car currently running the House of Representatives are, I’m sure, consciously aware that the more they can do to make the U.S. government and democracy as a whole look unworkable, the better Trump will do in 2024.

U.S. Congressmember Chip Roy (R-Texas), a member of the so-called “House Freedom Caucus,” recently took the floor to complain that the House Republicans have not done anything to convince American voters that they deserve to retain their majority. But the overall context of his remarks made clear that the biggest thing he wants House Republicans to do is shut down the government to force President Biden and the still Democratic-controlled Senate to agree to massive cuts in government spending. These cuts will fulfill the Republicans’ long-term ideological mission to eliminate what’s left of the “social safety net” and take money away from most Americans to give it to the super-rich.

The Republicans, under Donald Trump’s leadership, are pursuing an agenda that would never win majority support from the American people in a free and fair election. So they’re rewriting election laws in state after state to make sure we never have one again. Among the major policy goals of the current Republican Party is a nationwide ban on abortion, allowing just about anybody to buy almost any sort of gun they want and carry it with them everywhere they go, ending all programs to fight human-caused climate change, and simultaneously exalt corporate power while targeting corporations that oppose the anti-women, anti-Queer Republican “faith-based” policy agenda.

As Trump continues his campaign to win back the Presidency in 2024, his rhetoric and the reality of his proposals are both sounding ever more like Hitler, Mussolini and the other original fascists. At a Veterans’ Day speech in New Hampshire (https://www.npr.org/2023/11/17/1213746885/trump-vermin-hitler-immigration-authoritarian-republican-primary), Trump said, “We pledge to you that we will root out the communists, Marxists, fascists, and the radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country.” A few brave news commentators noted that the reference to perceived political enemies as “vermin” was also rhetoric Hitler used to attack the Jews and justify his program to exterminate them all.

More ominous is Trump’s repeated promises to invoke the Insurrection Act, which allows the President to order the U.S. military to maintain “order” under certain circumstances. The Act reads, “Whenever the President considers that unlawful obstructions, combinations, or assemblages, or rebellion against the authority of the United States, make it impracticable to enforce the laws of the United States in any State by the ordinary course of judicial proceedings, he may call into Federal service such of the militia of any State, and use such of the armed forces, as he considers necessary to enforce those laws or to suppress the rebellion.” Trump wanted to invoke this as part of his illegal plot to stay in power even after he lost the 2020 election, and if returned to the Presidency he would almost certainly use the Insurrection Act to send U.S. soldiers into American cities and towns to suppress demonstrations against him.

American democracy is pretty well doomed if Donald Trump regains the Presidency in 2024 and the Republicans take back the Senate and keep the House. Their leadership models are authoritarians like Vladimir Putin in Russia, Viktor Orbán in Hungary, Recep Tayyip Erdogan in Turkey, Narendra Modi in India, Giorgia Meloni in Italy, Geert Wilders in The Netherlands and Javier Milei in Argentina. All of them won power by proclaiming themselves as friends of “the people” against unspecified sinister “elites” who were keeping them down – the recipe Trump followed to perfection in his rise to power and the Presidency in the U.S. As Robert Kagan wrote in his Washington Post article, “In just a few years, we have gone from being relatively secure in our democracy to being a few short steps, and a matter of months, away from the possibility of dictatorship.”

PBS's "Frontline" Re-Runs 2002 Show About Israel and Palestine in Wake of Hamas's Attack and Israel's Genocidal Response

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan for Zenger's Newsmagazine • All rights reserved

Last night (Tuesday, November 7) the PBS show Frontline re-ran a show about Israel and Palestine from June 27, 2002 called “Shattered Dreams: The Road from Oslo.” Obviously the re-run was occasioned by the current violence between Israelis and Palestinians kicked off by the reprehensible October 7 attacks on Israeli civilians, including the murder of 1,400 Israelis and the kidnapping of 240 as hostages, who were forcibly taken to Gaza and are being held there now, by fighters from the terrorist group Hamas. The show was produced and directed by Dan Setton and Tor Ben Mayor, and featured interviews with the late Palestinian leader Yasir Arafat and Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu – who first won election in 1996, served until 1999 and has been in and out of the prime ministership ever since – along with diplomats on both the Israeli and Palestinian side who desperately tried to negotiate an agreement for peace in historic Palestine. U.S. President Bill Clinton made Middle East peace a major goal of his administration, including sponsoring the Oslo agreements in 1993 that supposedly set up a framework for an ultimate resolution. Key to the Oslo accords was the so-called “two-state solution” in which Israel would agree to the creation of an independent Palestine in the West Bank and Gaza, and the two countries would live together side by side as neighbors. Clinton was frantically leading or hosting negotiations to achieve that end until the end of his presidency in early 2001 at a variety of venues, including Sharm-al-Shaikh, Egypt; Wye, Maryland; and ultimately Stockholm, Sweden.

When I was still publishing the print edition of Zenger’s Newsmagazine I riffed off the phrase “the heckler’s veto” – the ability of organized (or not-so-organized) mobs to silence speakers they don’t like by disrupting their events – and coined the phrase “the terrorists’ veto” to indicate the ability of terror groups in highly fraught situations like the ongoing hostility between Israel and Palestine to sabotage attempts at a peaceful resolution by staging well-timed attacks to sow mistrust on the other side. Time and time again, both Israelis and Palestinians have used “the terrorists’ veto” to stoke the fires of the conflict and keep any peaceful solution from even being negotiated, much less implemented. The downward spiral began, at least according to this program, when Yitzhak Rabin, the Israeli prime minister who had helped negotiate the Oslo accords, was killed by a Right-wing Jew in 1995, two years after the agreement. Rabin’s funeral drew leaders of the Arab world, some of whom had never set foot in Israel until then. King Hussein of Jordan said of Rabin, “You lived as a soldier, you died as a soldier for peace. And I believe it is time for all of us to come out openly and to speak our piece.” President Clinton said, “Your prime minister was a martyr for peace, but he was a victim of hate.” Palestinian Authority President Yasir Arafat didn’t attend Rabin’s funeral – he stayed home and watched it on TV for what he said were “security reasons” – but he told Frontline, “It was very, very difficult and painful for me personally. But the most important thing for the Palestinians and for the Israelis and for the whole Middle East area is to return back to protect the peace of the brave which I had signed with my partner, Rabin, and to live together as we had decided.” But the negotiations faced opposition from both hard-line Jews in Israel and Palestinian militants in organizations like Hezbollah in the north (on Israel’s border with Lebanon) and Hamas in the south (on Israel’s border with Egypt).

According to this documentary, written by Setton and Mayor and narrated by long-term Frontline commentator Will Lyman, Hamas had “gained power among Palestinians by controlling the mosques and providing food and education to the poor.” The show featured a chilling clip of a Hamas leader haranguing a crowd and saying, “We will invade Palestine and drive out the Zionists, the oppressors, the rapists. And the only way is the way of the gun! This is the only way! This is the only way!” As called for in the Oslo agreements, Israel gradually withdrew from the largest population centers in the West Bank, and on August 15, 2005 – three years after this documentary premiered – Israel totally pulled out of Gaza. Unfortunately for the Palestinians, Israel maintained a security infrastructure on their border with Gaza and controlled Gazans’ access to food and energy – and they used that power arbitrarily, periodically cutting off Gazans’ ability to obtain the necessities of life. Gaza has since been described as “the world’s largest open-air prison,” and the Israeli jailers have been relentless in their pressure on the territory. Ironically, the Israeli government’s policy to wall off Gaza and keep its citizens from having reliable access to basic needs and also the education they would need to better themselves uncannily resembles the way European governments from the Middle Ages to the end of the 19th century generally oppressed their Jewish populations. It’s amazing, given the deep-seated mistrust of both Israelis and Palestinians for each other, that they came as close as they did to an agreement despite the ins and outs of politics in both Israel and Palestine. In 1996 Israeli secret agents blew up Yehiya Ayash, Hamas’s chief bomb-maker, and triggered a visceral response among Palestinians who saw Ayash as a shaheed – a holy martyr – and vowed revenge. Three weeks later, at least three suicide bombers from Hamas launched attacks inside Jerusalem, killing 46 and wounding hundreds more, followed by another attack in Tel Aviv that killed 17 people, all 17 years old or younger. This led to a nosedive in popularity for Rabin’s successor as Israeli prime minister, Shimon Peres, just as he was facing a new election. “They called me traitor,” Peres told Frontline. “They called me killer or murderer.”

In retaliation, Israel orders a counterattack that mistakenly targets a United Nations compound. Israeli Arabs, who made up 20 percent of Israel’s voting population at the time, call for a boycott of the upcoming election – and Netanyahu beats Peres, albeit barely. Netanyahu’s political “brand” is opposition to the peace process he is now obliged to carry out. He told Frontline, “I thought it was important to lay down the ground rules so Arafat would know exactly where I was coming from. Two-thirds of the public supported Oslo at the time. The international community supported it. They really thought that Arafat meant peace. I didn't think that he meant peace. And I said I would honor it under two conditions: One, that Arafat honor it. The second was that I would reduce the dangers in Oslo, reduce the withdrawals, reduce the price that Israel would have to pay.” Among the issues on which Netanyahu took a harder line than Rabin or Peres was the building of new Jewish settlements in the West Bank – thereby eating up more and more of the land that was supposed to constitute the eventual Palestinian state – and the “right of return” by which Palestinian families demanded to be re-admitted to the territories within Israel they’d been forced out of by the Nakba, the driving out of Palestinian Arabs at gunpoint in the late 1940’s when the state of Israel was created in the first place. The “right of return” is a big non-starter for most Jewish Israelis because it would mean the end of Israel’s status as a “Jewish state” if millions of Arabs were permitted to return there, where they could conceivably vote the Jews out of power the way Black South Africans did to whites after the fall of apartheid. Since 2002 the political rhetoric inside Israel about what to do with the Palestinians has become even more uncompromising.

In a recent post to the New Yorker’s Web site (https://www.newyorker.com/news/annals-of-human-rights/inside-the-israeli-crackdown-on-speech) journalist Masha Gessen tells stories about Israeli Jews who have faced violence or the threat of violence from fellow Jews for allegedly not being militant enough in their attitudes towards Hamas. Jewish Israeli journalist Israel Frey told Gessen he was nearly lynched by a mob outside his home a week after Hamas’s October 7 attacks, and though he called the police, the cops who came clearly indicated that their sympathies lay with his attackers. “The police protected my life only in the sense that they prevented people from entering the building, and escorted me out,” Frey said. “I don’t know when I’ll be able to go home, if I can go home at all.” Israeli officials in 2023 denounced United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres when he said at a U.N. Security Council meeting, “It is important to also recognize the attacks by Hamas did not happen in a vacuum. The Palestinian people have been subjected to 56 years of suffocating occupation. They have seen their land steadily devoured by settlements and plagued by violence; their economy stifled; their people displaced and their homes demolished. Their hopes for a political solution to their plight have been vanishing,” Israeli officials canceled their scheduled meetings with Guterres and called for his resignation. “On October 17th, Kobi Shabtai, the head of Israeli police, announced that he would not allow any demonstrations against the war,” Gessen reported. She quoted Shabtai as saying, “Anyone who wishes to identify with Gaza, is welcome to — I will put him on the buses that are heading there now.”

It’s become clear over the last month that Israel has launched a genocidal assault on the entire population of Gaza – and is using the Hamas attacks as a pretext. Mutual trust and peace between Israelis and Palestinians seems farther away than ever – which adds poignance to the sad commentary of Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erekat at the end of the 2002 Frontline show: “I know Palestinians and Israelis can make peace. If it's not next year, if it's not in 10 years, the day will come when Palestinians and Israelis will build on what I, my colleagues and the Israelis achieved in the negotiations of permanent status. I don't think they will ever re-invent the wheel. And the difference between this moment until the moment of reaching an agreement will be how many names — Palestinians and Israelis — will be added to the lists of death and agony. At the end of the day, there will be peace.”

PBS "Frontline" Show Explores Mitch McConnell's Legacy in Remaking America's Courts in His Right-Wing Image

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan for Zenger's Newsmagazine • All rights reserved

Last night (Tuesday, October 31) I watched a PBS Frontline show called “McConnell, the G.O.P. and the Courts,” dealing with U.S. Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell (R-Kentucky) and his successful fight to remake the U.S. judiciary – not just the Supreme Court but the whole ball of wax, from the lowliest district courts on up to the Supremes – in a direction writers Michael Kirk (who also directed) and Mike Wiser persisted in calling “conservative” even though it’s nothing of the sort. It’s actually a movement of Right-wing revolutionaries bound and determined to remake America in their own image, at once shrinking government when it comes to regulating the economy in general and corporations in particular and vastly increasing the size and scope of government in terms of its power over individual’s private lives, especially how they can have sex, with whom, under what circumstances and how they may deal with the consequences therefrom, both good and bad. Kirk and Wiser portrayed McConnell as a man deeply shaped by a childhood disability; he contracted polio at 2 and spent the next few years almost completely confined to his bedroom, with his mom as his caregiver. When he finally emerged from his medical cocoon and started going to school like the other kids, McConnell soon gravitated to student politics, running for campus president in his high school – since his dad was an Army officer, the family moved a lot and it wasn’t until his freshman year in high school that the McConnells settled in Louisville, Kentucky – and winning after he put together a list of endorsers that included the most popular people on campus. Much of the show is narrated by McConnell himself via excerpts from his autobiography, The Long Game (itself a good description of his political strategy!), and the audiobook version of it he read himself. In it he described the exhilaration he felt on his election as high-school student council president and how he decided from that point he would make electoral politics his life’s work. After a stint in President Gerald Ford’s Department of Justice, where he served alongside such leading lights of the Right-wing judicial movement as Antonin Scalia and Robert Bork, McConnell returned home and mounted his first campaign for professional elective office when he ran for judge/executive of Jefferson County, Kentucky (which contains Louisville), the top leadership position in county government.

At the time McConnell was still seen as a moderate Republican – in 1964 he’d co-authored an op-ed in the Louisville Courier-Journal endorsing the proposed Civil Rights Act and criticizing fellow Republicans who opposed it, including Barry Goldwater, the GOP’s 1964 Presidential nominee, who as a Senator from Arizona had voted against it. He got the Courier-Journal’s endorsement at a time when the paper almost never endorsed Republicans. According to Keith Runyon, who was then on the Courier-Journal’s editorial board, “He came into the editorial board room at the Courier-Journal, where I worked, for his endorsement interview, and he sat down and he answered our questions. He came off as being enlightened, thoroughly honest. And he did a very, very good job in his interview.” After two terms as judge/executive, McConnell decided to run for U.S. Senate in 1984 against two-term Democratic incumbent Dee Huddleston. McConnell brought in Roger Ailes, already legendary for having run Richard Nixon’s TV campaign for U.S. President in 1968 and ultimately the founding news director of Fox News, to run his campaign. Ailes demanded that McConnell authorize a scorched-earth negative campaign against Huddleson, including a famous TV commercial showing a bloodhound allegedly trying to track down Huddleston for doing paid speaking engagements instead of showing up at the Senate for key votes. McConnell squeaked through by 5,000 votes in a year in which Ronald Reagan won 49 states in his re-election bid and carried Kentucky by 300,000 votes. After his Senate campaign, McConnell had breakfast with his old friend Keith Runyon from the Louisville Courier-Journal and, according to Runyon, “[H]e said, ‘Keith, I don’t know that you all will ever endorse me again.’ And I said, ‘Well, why is that?’ He said, ‘Because I’m going to have to become much more conservative to be re-elected, much more conservative than you all are.’ And so he became.”

The next key step in McConnell’s political devolution came in 1987, when Reagan nominated McConnell’s old Justice Department colleague Robert Bork to an open seat on the U.S. Supreme Court. Bork had accumulated a long record of stating openly his opposition to abortion, women’s rights in general, and Queer rights. As an appeals court justice he’d written an opinion upholding the constitutionality of anti-Queer sodomy laws that the U.S. Supreme Court later upheld. Liberal and progressive groups mounted a full-court press, lobbying people to call their Senators and demand that Bork not be confirmed to the Supreme Court, and the tactic worked – Bork’s confirmation was voted down 42 to 58. But McConnell left the controversy over Bork literally vowing revenge and saying the Democrats’ victory over Bork would come back to haunt them. It did. The documentary shows footage of McConnell declaiming about the Bork defeat, “And so to Robert Bork, you happen to be the one who set the new Senate standard that will be applied, in my judgement, by a majority of the Senate prospectively. Unfortunately, it got set over your dead body, so to speak, politically. … We’re going to do it when we want to. And when we want to is going to be when the president, whoever he may be, sends up somebody we don’t like.” McConnell got his revenge when Antonin Scalia, yet another former colleague of his from Gerald Ford’s Justice Department, died suddenly in February 2016. Almost immediately, McConnell, then the Senate’s majority leader, announced that he would personally block any attempt by Democratic President Barack Obama to appoint a successor to Scalia, on the ground that there would be a Presidential election in nine months and the voters should therefore get to decide who would get to fill that vacancy on the Court. New York Times reporter Peter Baker recalled, “Mitch McConnell doesn’t even wait for the day to end after Antonin Scalia dies to put out a statement saying, in effect, we’re not going to let President Obama replace him. That it’s an election year, we’re going to wait for the next president to nominate somebody.”

In late March, Obama went ahead and nominated then-Appeals Court judge Merrick Garland to fill Scalia’s seat – but McConnell was able to make sure the Senate, with a Republican majority, wouldn’t even meet with Garland, much less consider him. McConnell said bluntly, “The right-of-center world, it does not want this vacancy filled by this president. … [W]e're not giving a lifetime appointment to this president on the way out the door to change the Supreme Court for the next 25 or 30 years.” According to PBS Supreme Court reporter Nina Totenberg, when one Republican Senator – Jerry Moran (R-Kansas) – threatened to break ranks and meet with Garland, McConnell immediately said if he did, McConnell would personally recruit an opponent to run against Moran in the Republican primary. Moran caved. “It was outrageous at the time, and it’s still outrageous,” said Washington Post columnist Eugene Robinson. “They kept the seat open for nearly a year, refusing to give Merrick Garland even a hearing, even the courtesy of being rejected. But he did it. He had the power to do it, and so he did.” When Donald Trump beat Hillary Clinton in the 2016 Presidential election, McConnell got his Right-wing replacement for Scalia – Neil Gorsuch, son of President Reagan’s controversial appointee to head the Environmental Protection Agency, Anne Gorsuch. Trump would go on to make two more Supreme Court appointments – Brett Kavanugh, who replaced Anthony Kennedy (the judge Reagan had appointed after the Bork defeat, who was mostly a solid Right-wing vote but differed with the Right on two major issues, juvenile justice and Queer rights: it was Kennedy who wrote the opinions invalidating sodomy laws and bans on same-sex marriage); and Amy Coney Barrett, who replaced liberal icon Ruth Bader Ginsburg when she died of cancer less than two months before the 2020 election. McConnell used his power as Senate leader to rush through Barrett’s confirmation – and when he was confronted about his obvious hypocrisy in denying a Democratic President in his last year in office the chance to replace a Republican Justice, while rushing through a Republican appointee just two months before a Presidential election, McConnell said, “I can only repeat that we have an obligation under the Constitution, should we choose to take advantage of it, to fill the vacancy, and I assure you that’s very likely to happen.” According to former McConnell chief of staff Josh Holmes, McConnell not only told Trump to rush through an appointment to replace Ginsburg, he said to Trump that Barrett – a long-standing anti-abortion, anti-choice activist – should be the nominee. Barrett was confirmed as Senate Democrats watched helplessly while McConnell steamrollered the nomination.

The Frontline show also detailed McConnell’s other compromises to stay in Trump’s good graces, including going along with Trump’s racist comments about Mexican and Muslim immigrants and his statement that there were “very good people – on both sides” in the 2017 demonstrations in Charlottesville, Virginia, in which neo-Nazi protesters and anti-racist counter-protesters clashed in the streets, violence ensued and one person was deliberately run over by a racist driving a Dodge Challenger (an iconic vehicle for the racist Right since the TV show The Dukes of Hazzard, whose central characters drove a Dodge Challenger painted to look like the Confederate flag). According to Kirk and Wiser, McConnell never believed in President Trump’s claims that the 2020 election had been “stolen” from him (or “stollen,” as Trump has been spelling it in his recent Truth Social posts), and he was aghast at the attack on the Capitol by Trump supporters on January 6, 2021. The night of January 6, with the official Congressional certification of Joe Biden’s victory over Trump delayed for several hours by the mob’s onslaught, McConnell said, “We’re not going to let these people keep us from finishing our business, so we need you to get the building cleared, give us the O.K. so we can go back in session and finish up the people’s business as soon as possible.” McConnell’s original reaction to the second impeachment of President Trump over his role in allegedly inciting the January 6, 2021 riot was supposedly to tell two advisors that if what Trump had done wasn’t an impeachable offense, he didn’t know what was. But when push came to shove he voted to acquit Trump, and though there were 57 Senate votes to convict Trump, the Constitution requires a two-thirds vote to convict, and they were 10 short. “He is not the idealistic young man he had been back at home,” Right-wing columnist Mona Charen told Frontline. “Being in power had changed him. He had become too in love with power, and so he was willing to make too many compromises in the name of holding onto power.”

The Frontline documentary began and ended with clips of the two recent press appearances in which McConnell literally froze up and found himself unable to talk, and the second one came – ironically enough – in a press conference just as McConnell was being asked whether he would run for re-election to an eighth term in 2026. This led me to ponder the bizarre gerontocracy American government has become; I remember joking that for all the talk about the 2020 Democratic Presidential field having an unprecedented range of people of all ages, genders and colors, the final choice was between two seventy-something white men, Donald Trump and Joe Biden (three if you count Bernie Sanders, Biden’s last-standing opponent for the nomination). I remember thinking when Barack Obama won the 2008 Presidential election that I had passed an important generational milestone – finally there was a President younger than me – but there hasn’t been one since: Trump broke Ronald Reagan’s record as the oldest President ever and now Biden has broken Trump’s. McConnell has said that reshaping the federal courts – not just the Supreme Court but the entire U.S. judiciary – in a Right-wing direction has become his legacy accomplishment, and it’s hard to deny that. Under McConnell and Trump, the Supreme Court has a solid and seemingly impregnable 6-3 Right-wing majority that has thrown its weight around, most notably in reversing Roe v. Wade and destroying the whole idea that the Constitution guarantees women autonomy over their own bodies. It’s also vastly expanded the reach of the Second Amendment, including throwing out a century-old New York law restricting the concealed carrying of weapons (you see what I mean when I say that whatever these people are, they are not “conservative” by any stretch of the imagination), invalidating President Biden’s attempts to forgive student-loan debts and block the spread of COVID-19, and severely restricting the right of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to do its job of protecting the environment.

McConnell’s legacy will be an America in which women have no right to say no to pregnancy and forced birth, Queers once again are illegal and same-sex marriage is a distant memory, people have no right to be protected against crazies among them who stage mass shootings, and corporations have the right to pollute as much as they damned well please and work their employees, including children, to death – but not the right to speak out against politicians enacting an “anti-woke” agenda, as the Walt Disney Corporation found out to its cost when it dared oppose Florida Governor Ron DeSantis’s so-called “Don’t Say Gay” bill. As Edward Luce wrote in the May 3, 2023 Financial Times (https://www.ft.com/content/f2a34faa-9ef7-4e11-9ea1-ef65e6c1d4ae), the closest analogue anywhere in the world to the U.S. Supreme Court Trump and McConnell have created “sits in Tehran. Iran’s Council of Guardians is unelected, regulates women’s bodies, cannot be removed and is impervious to public opinion. They answer to a higher power. The more America’s Supreme Court resembles a theocratic body, the more it imperils itself.”

“The world has fallen out of love with democracy"

Chilling new documentary on Russian dissident journalist Dmitri Muratov exposes the worldwide threats to democracy and media freedom.

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan for Zenger's Newsmagazine • All rights reserved

On Tuesday, September 26 PBS showed a documentary on their Frontline series called “Putin vs. the Press,” though it’s not a story of Russian president Vladimir Putin’s attack on all independent media outlets but one newspaper, and one individual, in particular. The newspaper is Novaya Gazeta (“New Gazette”) and the individual is its editor/publisher, Dmitry Muratov. Muratov co-won the 2021 Nobel Peace Prize with Maria Ressa, a journalist from the Philippines who likewise defied a dictatorial and corrupt government to report the truth about it to her readers. In his acceptance speech, Muratov said these depressing words: “The world has fallen out of love with democracy. The world has begun to turn toward dictatorship. In my country, and not only there, it is popular to think that politicians who avoid bloodshed are weak, while threatening the world with war is the duty of true patriots.” Even the United States, long considered the world’s bastion of republican government, is undergoing a long-term embrace of dictatorship; the Republican Party has virtually abandoned democracy as a long-term goal or a short-term practice. Donald Trump’s 2024 Presidential campaign is on a major roll, not despite but because of its openly dictatorial character, It seems like nothing will break his hold on the overwhelming majority of his party, and as he himself has boasted, every new criminal indictment against him just strengthens his hand politically and reinforces his absolute rule over his party.

Novaya Gazeta was founded in 1993 with seed money from the Nobel Prize scholarship awarded to former Soviet Union president Mikhail Gorbachev, who tried and ultimately failed to break Russia’s long-time record of authoritarianism. Gorbachev wanted a mixed economy for the Soviet Union and an end to the forcible repression of political dissent. He saw a free press as crucial to the latter and he backed Muratov’s enterprise as one way to ensure that future Russian governments would face legitimate criticism from an independent media. Muratov recalled during the show that he had got interested in journalism in particular after two star players on a Russian hockey team had brusquely refused his request for autographs. His mom complained to the local state-owned newspaper and they ran a story that resulted in Dmitry receiving signed photos of the two hockey players in the mail. Unfortunately, Vladimir Putin took over as Russia’s president at the end of 1999 and immediately declared war on the free press, punishing newspapers and other media outlets that dared criticize him with threats, denials of licenses needed to publish, and worse. During the show Muratov notes he’s been to the funerals of at least six of his best reporters, all assassinated – he thinks – by Russian goon squads associated with Putin and in some cases directly working for him. “Igor Domnikov was the first,” Muratov said on the program. “He was a brilliant guy. He was killed by bandits for his series of investigations. Yuri Shchekochikhin, my closest friend and an outstanding journalist. He was poisoned. Anna Politkovskaya. She made it to Chechnya, disobeying all orders. And I was on vacation at the time. Of course, I blame myself terribly for this. I should also mention Nastya Baburova and Stas Markelov. Natasha Estemirova, who was Anya Politkovskaya’s main collaborator on Chechnya. Their portraits hang on the walls right above the table where we meet and I see them many times a day. I’m ashamed of myself, but not the newspaper.”

Things got even worse for Muratov in 2022 when Russia launched its invasion of and war against Ukraine. If I were in Russia I could be arrested and sentenced to 15 years in prison for writing the above sentence because Putin and his puppet legislature, the Duma, has literally made it a crime to call Russia’s attack on Ukraine a “war” or an “invasion” instead of the Russian government’s preferred euphemism, a “special military operation.” For years Muratov had gone up to the limits of Putin’s censorship without actually crossing the line – there’s footage of him asking Putin about his designations of certain individuals, including journalists, as “foreign agents” without any due process or right to appeal. Muratov once even asked Putin at one of the president’s press conferences, “I still have a question about ‘foreign agents.’ This law has no judgment. There is no court there. You are declared a ‘foreign agent.’ There is no evidence. There is no sentence. You are just branded a criminal. Let me remind you of our favorite childhood book. This is exactly what happened to Milady in The Three Musketeers. But when Milady was beheaded at dawn, she was at least finally read the sentence.” Putin replied, “First of all, I would like to congratulate you on being awarded the Nobel Prize. So, your concern about ‘foreign agents.’ I’m not going to beat around the bush. You said there was no verdict. You’re right, there really isn’t one. Milady was sentenced and her head was cut off. But no one is cutting anything off here.” Muratov also lost a key protector when Mikhail Gorbachev died of natural causes in August 2022 at age 91, cutting off one of the few remaining disincentives for Putin to mess with him directly.

During the early 2020’s Muratov was more or less freely allowed to travel outside Russia – a privilege the Russian state in its various authoritarian regimes (the Tsarist Empire, the Soviet Union, now) hasn’t always allowed its citizens.. In this documentary he’s shown in Oslo, in Riga (the capital of Latvia, one of the Baltic republics Joseph Stalin forcibly annexed to Russia in 1940 and whose departure in the 1980’s started the chain of events that led ultimately to the Soviet Union’s disintegration) and even in New York, where he went to witness the auctioning off of his Nobel Prize medal to benefit Ukrainian refugees. His trip to Riga was particularly consequential because he was there ostensibly to be a judge at a documentary film festival, but really to supervise the evacuation of many Novaya Gazeta staff members, including young journalist Roman Anin, to Riga to publish an edition in exile there. Muratov took great pains to maintain the idea that the version published in Riga had no connection to his old one from Moscow, but after the film festival was over he returned to Moscow despite the warnings from Anin and others in his circle that this wasn’t a good idea. “I came to Novaya Gazeta in 2006 when I was 19 years old,” Anin said in this documentary. “He’s like my second father. People think that his job is to be the chief editor, but his job is to save people, and he has always been like that. I’m afraid that something might happen to him. I wouldn’t go [back to Russia] … [b]ecause I know that they most likely will arrest me. I know that nobody survives Russian prison, or at least there is a very small chance that you can survive Russian prison. And he knows all of that, and despite that he goes back.” When Muratov went back he got red paint laced with acetone, which burned his eyes and nearly blinded him, thrown at him in his train car. The Russian authorities identified his assailant but, all too predictably, did nothing. Muratov’s own reporters were able not only to identify him but document his connections to the Russian secret police.

Ultimately, on September 1, 2023, Muratov was officially declared a “foreign agent” by the Putin government for “promoting anti-Russian views.” It’s not clear just what the consequences of being declared a “foreign agent” are – whether it’s like the apartheid South African government’s practice of “banning” certain individuals, including forbidding them to be named or mentioned in the media, or it goes farther than that. But it’s certain that Putin has an ultra-low threshold of tolerance for dissent, including sending out hit people to assassinate those he considers “enemies of Russia” even in other countries. Muratov himself equated being declared a “foreign agent” with being called an “enemy of the people.” No sooner had Muratov returned to Russia that two of his reporters, Elena Milashina and Sasha Nemov, were seized by agents of the pro-Russian government in Chechnya. “They were severely injured, beaten,” he said. “Sasha Nemov and Elena Milashina were taken right after the flight [from Russia to Chechnya. Attackers] threw the driver out, put them in a car, took them to be tortured. [They had liquid iodine thrown on them and were repeatedly beaten with hard plastic sticks.] The people who did this, it was an armed group of 10-12 people. They knew what plane, on what flight, at night by Utair they would arrive in Grozny. This means that these people had access to the passenger flight booking system. To me, this shows that these people represent the authorities of the Chechen Republic.” “Putin vs. the Press” is an inspiring tale of resistance but also an extremely depressing program that shows how easily the virus of authoritarianism can infect even a country like our own which has traditionally taken its status as a republic for granted. Given the current state of American political affairs – with Donald Trump dominating the Republican polls and running neck-and-neck with Joe Biden in the 2024 Presidential election, and radical-Right House Republicans threatening to shut down the U.S. government and demanding an end to U.S. military aid to Ukraine as part of their price for keeping it open – Russia’s present could well be America’s future.