Mitch McConnell has been quietly pushing Donald Trump to open up the coffers of his leadership PAC and super PACs to help the rest of his party—a necessary move if the GOP wants any chance of winning back the Senate, Politico reported (9/9 ).
Trump is sitting on nearly $99 million in his PAC, and although he vocally endorses a few candidates nationwide—J.D. Vance in Ohio and Blake Masters in Arizona—apparently, he has given them little more than scraps toward the financial support they desperately need, Rebekah Sager noted at DailyKos (9/9).
Sen. Kevin Cramer (R-ND) tells Politico that Trump “should invest to win, and not just to finish second or tied. I think he ought to do it. I really do. I think he ought to get generous. ... One thing Donald Trump doesn’t like to do is lose.”
In a July op-ed for the Wall Street Journal, Karl Rove mused about what Trump was doing with his treasure trove of campaign donations, writing that the former president “hasn’t shown much interest” in giving to Republican candidates. “If Mr. Trump doesn’t start actually deploying these funds to help candidates he’s backed for Congress, governor, and other statewide offices, donors might not keep giving to the former president’s causes. Trump-endorsed candidates might start to wonder how strong an ally the former president really is, beyond lending his name in a primary,” Rove wrote before millions in donations poured into Trump’s war chest following the FBI search of Mar-a-Lago in mid-August.
A GOP strategist working on House and Senate races tells Politico that Trump’s “a penny pincher. He’s not going to spend money on people when he can spend money on himself. In lieu of spending money, he can do events for you. ... Everyone thought that, by Labor Day, he would be loosening up the purse strings a bit, and money would be flowing in.”
According to Politico, Trump’s Save America has given the legal maximum of $5,000 to a few vulnerable Senate candidates and a total of $150,000 in those same $5,000 increments to other RNC accounts, including those of incumbents running for safe seats. Republican political strategist Scott Jennings told the Washington Post, “We need all the help we can get.”
According to the Post, when interviewed about the ongoing money woes of the Senate GOP candidates, Mitt Romney said, “I would sure hope that President Trump would use some of that money he’s got to get Republicans elected to the Senate. ... It’ll be good for the country and good for the people he’s endorsed.”
In an interview with Politico, an unnamed Trump adviser said simply that the former president has no “moral obligation to spend millions on candidates,” but the adviser thinks “it would be a politically smart move for [Trump] to spend big,” adding that the former president still “doesn’t owe it to these people.”
DROPPING GAS PRICES HAVE R’S FRANTICALLY SEARCHING FOR NEW LINE OF ATTACK—AND CAMPAIGN FUNDS. Republicans are looking for a “reset” on their 2022 campaign, which means they’re probably whipping up tales of a new migrant caravan at this very moment. Once confident of their 2022 prospects—House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy predicted that his party would gain 60 seats in the House—Republicans are now searching for a message that will stick and worrying about money, Laura Clawson noted at DailyKos (9/12).
Gas prices and inflation were going to be the message, but then gas prices started dropping and months later, haven’t stopped. As a result, the Washington Post reports, “About 1 in every 6 ads mentioned ‘gas prices’ in July, but only 1% of ads mentioned the words in early September, according to AdImpact data.” Instead, Republicans have turned to “crime” as the key talking point for their ads, with 29% of Republican ads now mentioning crime, up from 12% in July. And when Republicans are talking about crime, you know the ugly racist dog whistles are going to be blowing furiously.
Democrats, meanwhile, are hammering on an issue Republicans claimed no one really cared about: abortion. It turns out people really care, and they’re hearing about it in 1 out of 3 Democratic campaign ads. Polls show the number of people who say abortion is a key factor in their voting decisions is rising, and voter registration numbers show young people and women are newly motivated.
Messaging isn’t the only Republican problem, though. They’re also struggling with money, particularly on the Senate side. The National Republican Senatorial Committee (NRSC), led by Sen. Rick Scott (R-FL), raised huge amounts of cash early in the cycle only to blow most of it, leading to a lot of backbiting among Republicans.
The criticism has gotten so intense that Scott lashed out in a memo to donors. “Any so-called Republican who aids and abets the enemy is in fact trying to defeat Republican candidates and is a traitor to our cause,” he wrote. “But these small people will not win.”
It doesn’t make you look like a strong leader and likely winner when your message to donors is about infighting and the fact that a lot of people in your own party think you are doing a terrible job.
But to be fair, while Scott’s NRSC has been the biggest story about Republican money woes, it’s not the only one. Republicans more generally saw an online fundraising drop-off from the first quarter of 2022 to the second—and their efforts to blame that on inflation ran into the harsh reality that Democrats were not experiencing similar drop-offs.
YOUNG AMERICANS’ APPROVAL OF BIDEN SOARS AFTER STUDENT DEBT CANCELLATION. Young American adults’ approval of President Joe Biden has jumped by double digits after he announced his student debt cancellation plan for federal borrowers. Polling conducted Sept. 7-9 by TechnoMetrica Institute of Policy and Politics (TIPP) for Investor’s Business Daily revealed that “adults 18-44 now approve of Biden’s handling of the presidency by a 51%-40% margin. Biden’s net approval of 11 points among younger Americans reversed from net disapproval of 11 points in August. At that time, just 40% approved and 51% disapproved of his job performance.”
“Biden’s move to forgive a portion of federal college loans probably contributed to his polling bounce, but it’s not clear how much. College grads now approve of Biden’s job performance 56%-41% vs. 51%-43% in August,” IBD reported (9/12).
The survey showed 46% of American adults approve how Biden is handling the presidency, and 48% disapprove. That net -2 approval rating improved from August’s -14, when 39% approved and 53% disapproved.
Biden in August extended a freeze on federal student loan repayments through the end of the year, while his administration sorts out various relief policies. For those making less than $125,000 a year, or $250,000 as a household, the government will erase up to $20,000 of debt for Pell Grant recipients and up to $10,000 for other borrowers, Jessica Corbett noted at Common Dreams (9/12).
Additionally, as Common Dreams reported (8/24), the president announced changes to the income-driven repayment (IDR) program that The American Prospect managing editor Ryan Cooper said is “potentially a bigger deal than forgiveness.”
Cooper noted film and television editor Michael Tae Sweeney’s tweet about the polling results, which highlighted GOP efforts to urgently kill Biden’s student debt relief policies.
“This is one of the reasons the GOP is so desperate to try to get the issue in front of their corrupt judges to strike it down before people start feeling the actual effects of the cancellation,” Cooper tweeted.
The TIPP poll was conducted just after YouGov surveyed Americans on the president’s plan for Yahoo! News Sept. 2-6. Those results, released Sept. 8, show a plurality of voters across the political spectrum support it.
Nearly half of Americans—48%—told YouGov they support the plan, compared with 34% who opposed it and 18% who said they were not sure. Among those with student debt, 70% support the plan—and among those who previously had student loans, 48% were supportive.
FOSSIL FUEL GIANTS TARGETED ACTIVISTS WITH ‘JUDICIAL HARASSMENT’: REPORT. The fossil fuel industry has targeted at least 152 climate campaigners and community leaders in recent years with lawsuits aimed at silencing protests, as well as other forms of “judicial harassment,” EarthRights International reported.
The nonprofit legal group identified 152 cases in which fossil fuel companies used judicial intimidation to stop critics from organizing against oil, gas, and coal extraction, including 93 it termed strategic lawsuits against public participation (SLAPP) and 49 “abusive subpoenas” directed at individuals and groups, Julia Conley reported at CommonDreams (9/12).
“The fossil fuel industry has responded to growing public concern about climate change by retaliating against those who challenge its practices,” said Kirk Herbertson, senior policy adviser for EarthRights and the author of the report. “We cannot let the oil, gas, and mining industries weaponize the legal system to silence their critics.”
According to EarthRights, the report—titled “The Fossil Fuel Industry’s Use of SLAPPs and Judicial Harassment in the United States”—is the first to quantify the lengths fossil fuel companies go to within the judicial system to silence their critics, such as four anti-fracking activists in Colorado and a reporter who filmed their protests in 2018, numerous groups and people who demonstrated against the Dakota Access Pipeline, and a grassroots group that spoke out about public health concerns regarding a coal ash landfill in Alabama.
Oil company Energy Transfer Partners filed the lawsuits against Greenpeace, Earth First Movement and several individuals who supported the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe in its campaign to stop the Dakota Access Pipeline, and openly admitted the cases were meant to intimidate the protesters and others who would speak out against fossil fuel projects. The company sought $900 million in damages and invoked the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) Act.
As the report says, Energy Transfer Partners CEO Kelcy Warren told a North Dakota news anchor: “Could we get some monetary damages out of this thing, and probably will we? Yeah, sure. Is that my primary objective? Absolutely not. It’s to send a message—you can’t do this, this is unlawful, and it’s not going to be tolerated in the United States.”
For years, said Greenpeace USA (9/12), Big Oil has tried to “shut us up, shut us down, and strip away our First Amendment right to free speech” using SLAPPs.
In addition to dozens of SLAPP cases, the report details “abusive subpoenas,” a legal tactic used frequently by oil companies ExxonMobil and Chevron, among others. Although many of the subpoenas sought by fossil fuel giants were dismissed by courts, they can still have “a chilling effect” and discourage campaigners from communicating about their work.
“In 2012, Chevron tried to obtain the private communications of dozens of activists, lawyers, and scientists in retaliation for criticism of its environmental pollution in the Amazon region,” the EarthRights report says.
The group released its analysis two days before Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.) was set to lead a congressional hearing on “the legal assault on environmental activists and the First Amendment.” A Greenpeace representative is scheduled to testify.
PUBLIC DISSATISFACTION WITH US HEALTHCARE SYSTEM POINTS TO NEED FOR ‘PUBLIC OPTION.’ Just 12% of Americans think healthcare in the United States is handled “extremely” or “very” well, further evidence of the deep unpopularity of a profit-driven system that has left roughly 30 million without insurance coverage and contributed to the country’s stunning decline in life expectancy, Jake Johnson noted at CommonDreams (9/12).
The new Associated Press/NORC Center for Public Affairs Research poll finds that 56% of the US public believe healthcare in general is handled “not too well” or “not at all well,” while 32% believe healthcare is handled “somewhat well.”
“The poll reveals that public satisfaction with the U.S. healthcare system is remarkably low, with fewer than half of Americans saying it is generally handled well,” AP notes. “The poll shows an overwhelming majority of Americans, nearly 8 in 10, say they are at least moderately concerned about getting access to quality healthcare when they need it.”
The survey results will come as no surprise to those who have attempted to navigate the byzantine US healthcare system to obtain basic care, which often comes at such prohibitively high costs that millions each year are forced to skip treatments to avoid financial ruin as insurance giants and pharmaceutical companies rake in huge profits.
The AP/NORC findings, based on interviews with 1,505 US adults between July 28 and August 1,show just 6% feel prescription drug costs are handled well or extremely well in the US, where pharmaceutical firms have broad authority to set prices as they please.
As for potential solutions to the country’s longstanding healthcare crises, the new poll shows that “about two-thirds of adults think it is the federal government’s responsibility to make sure all Americans have healthcare coverage, with adults ages 18 to 49 more likely than those over 50 to hold that view.”
“The percentage of people who believe healthcare coverage is a government responsibility has risen in recent years, ticking up from 57% in 2019 and 62% in 2017,” AP notes.
More specifically, the survey shows 40% support for a “single-payer healthcare system that would require Americans to get their health insurance from a government plan.” Depending on how the question is framed and phrased, single-payer—more commonly called Medicare for All—has polled as high as 70% support.
According to the AP-NORC poll, 58% “say they favor a government health insurance plan that anyone can purchase”—a public option.
Recent research shows that a Medicare for All system of the kind proposed in legislation introduced by Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) and Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-WA) could have prevented hundreds of thousands of COVID-19 deaths in the US over the past two years.
“In the richest country in the world, no one should die or go into debt just because they don’t have access to healthcare,” Jayapal, the chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, tweeted. “We need Medicare for All now.”
CHIEF JUSTICE ROBERTS PRETENDS HE’S STILL IN CHARGE OF SUPREME COURT. New Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson will be formally sworn in Sept. 30 for the opening of the Supreme Court’s October session. Speaking publicly for the first time since the Court blew up American society by reversing federal abortion protections last June, Chief Justice John Roberts (9/9) insisted the court is perfectly legitimate, everything’s absolutely fine, and please stop being mean to them.
Roberts told the attendees of the 10th Circuit Bench and Bar Conference in Colorado Springs, Colo., mostly judges, that it was “gut-wrenching” to have to come to work every day through barricades because the decisions the Court had made were so enraging to the general public, the people showed up to tell them so. There’s no reason to assume that because one of the justices is married to an insurrectionist, two are there because Mitch McConnell stole their seats for Donald Trump, and a third allegedly has a history of sexual assault—and they lied to the Senate to get their seats—that people should question the Court’s legitimacy, Joan McCarter noted at DailyKos (9/12).
“You don’t want the political branches telling you what the law is. And you don’t want public opinion to be the guide of what the appropriate decision is,” said Roberts. “Yes, all of our opinions are open to criticism. In fact, our members do a great job of criticizing some opinions from time to time. But simply because people disagree with an opinion is not a basis for criticizing the legitimacy of the court.”
Of course, criticism of the Court is not simply about disagreement with decisions. It’s about the fact that it’s obvious that the Court has been hijacked by the far right, packed by Trump, and is operating on raw power of the majority to upend decades of progress.
Roberts went on to say that the Court’s job is just to decide what the law is on the basis of interpreting the Constitution. “That role doesn’t change simply because people disagree with this opinion or that opinion or with a particular mode of jurisprudence,” he said. That’s a good indication that we can expect more of the same from this session of the Court, because nothing is going to change and he’s not going to be challenging his extremist colleagues. “I think just moving forward from things that were unfortunate is the best way to respond,” he said.
That’s just not going to work, McCarter wrote. Because the Court has been radicalized, and the American public is condemning it. In a year’s time, public approval for the Court reversed, from 60% approval in July 2021 to 61% disapproval in the weeks following the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health decision overturning federal abortion rights. Just 38% of respondents in that poll approved of the Court, and just 36% approved of the Dobbs decision.
In fresh polling from progressive firm Data for Progress, support for abortion rights is high—61%—and a majority of 54% of voters believe that the Court “needs more limitations on its authority so it doesn’t overstep its power.”
At The American Prospect, Ryan Cooper notes that the Constitution gave Congress the power to enforce those limitations, and, in fact, did so recently.
The “Court shall have appellate Jurisdiction, both as to Law and Fact, with such Exceptions, and under such Regulations as the Congress shall make.” Congress made such an exception in the newly passed Inflation Reduction Act, when lawmakers put the drug price control provisions out of the Court’s reach, writing, “There shall be no administrative or judicial review” of those measures.
Cooper points out that if the Democrats can keep the House and increase their Senate majority to stop a filibuster, Congress could protect federal abortion rights that way, taking it out of the Court’s jurisdiction.
“The legitimacy of the Court is also at stake right now, and in order to save it, Congress needs to fix it. That means larger reforms than limiting its jurisdiction—it means changing its fundamental make-up to recapture it from the extremists, and that ultimately means expanding it,” McCarter concluded.
JUDGE BLOCKS ARIZONA LAW LIMITING FILMING OF POLICE. Civil libertarians applauded as a federal judge blocked enforcement of an Arizona law restricting how people can film police officers after agreeing that the legislation is unconstitutional, Brett Wilkins noted at CommonDreams (9/9).
US District Judge John Tuchi granted a preliminary injunction sought by the ACLU of Arizona and media outlets on the grounds that HB 2319 violates their First Amendment rights.
The law—which was passed by Arizona’s Republican-controlled Legislature and signed by Gov. Doug Ducey (R) in July—outlaws recording police at a distance of closer than eight feet if the officer verbally objects. It also empowers police officers to order people to stop filming them on private property, even if the property owner consents to the recording.
“Today’s ruling is an incredible win for our First Amendment rights and will allow Arizonans to continue to hold police accountable,” ACLU of Arizona staff attorney K.M. Bell said in a statement.
“At a time when recording law enforcement interactions is one of the best tools to hold police accountable, we should be working to protect this vital right—not undermine it,” they added. “HB 2319 is a blatant attempt to prohibit people from exercising their constitutional right to record police in public and we’re glad to see the court take action to stop it from going into effect.”
The national ACLU said: “We have a First Amendment right to film police—and we will use it.”
HB 2319 comes at a time when citizens are increasingly empowered by the ability to record and broadcast footage of officer misconduct that is sometimes used to bring perpetrators to justice. Video of former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin kneeling on George Floyd’s neck for over eight minutes was a key piece of evidence used to secure a murder conviction in the case.
The police department in Phoenix, the nation’s fifth-largest city, is currently under federal investigation not only for alleged excessive use of deadly force and racial discrimination but also for how it handles constitutionally protected protests and the journalists covering them.
None of the defendants in the ACLU-led lawsuit—Maricopa County Attorney Rachel Mitchell, Maricopa County Sheriff Paul Penzone, and Arizona Attorney General Mark Brnovich—opposed the injunction, according to the *Phoenix New Times*.
POLITICO’S NEW MAVERICK PUBLISHER IS A BIG FAN OF TRUMP, MUSK, NONPARTISAN CONTRARIAN CENTRISM. Axel Springer CEO Mathias Döpfner sent a rather bizarre email to his executive team “weeks” before the November 2020 elections, the Washington Post reported (9/6).
“Do we all want to get together for an hour in the morning on November 3 and pray that Donald Trump will again become President of the United States of America?” he asked his team.
That the rich “entrepreneurial”-styled head of an international news company whose properties include *Politico*, the D.C. political journal, might have still been backing ridiculous clownburger Donald Trump—after transparently corrupt acts and a pandemic response that relied heavily on his clownburger son-in-law poking his nose into things before everyone lost all remaining interest—is not really news. Much of the news you read comes through the filter of right-leaning corporate owners who don’t give a particular damn about anything but themselves and their personal cash flows, whether it be the Post’s own worker-gouging Bezos or the unmitigated malevolence of the Murdoch clan. It’s baked in, Hunter noted at DailyKos (9/11).
The weirder part is that Döpfner apparently insisted quite boldly he had never sent such a message, right up until *Post* reporter Sarah Ellison showed him a copy of the email in question, after which he claimed he might have sent such a thing as “an ironic, provocative statement in the circle of people that hate Donald Trump.”
You know, just to get a rise out of his own executives. As one does, when one wants to be a free-spirited provocateur.
The email contained a numbered list of Trump’s supposed best accomplishments, aside from the being impeached for corruption and leading a staff of incompetent mostly-crooked buffoons through a campaign of screwing up any part of government any one of them was aware of.
“No American administration in the last 50 years has done more,” wrote Döpfner after listing off successes like “defending the free democracies” against Russia (?), pressuring NATO to spend more money (??) and, of course, “tax reforms.”
We’re told that Döpfner’s politics are hard to pin down, but that he thinks the Post and The New York Times have gone too far left while he is not a fan of conservative media’s “alternative facts.” He believes there is a nonpartisan path between the two, between “predictable political camps.” He is an iconoclast, spending his money on “a collection of female nudes by female artists” rather than the usual yachts. He’s not a fan of racism or homophobia, but as his plaudits for Trump’s alleged successes show, neither is a dealbreaker.
Oh, and he calls Elon Musk “one of the most inspiring people” he’s met, and the man’s son works for the fascism-promoting white-nationalist-boosting Peter Thiel, and it just happens that the two news outlets at the top of the company’s German media empire are a hard-right skeevy tabloid and a not-as-hard-right mostly corporatist paper—an arrangement we here in America are already quite familiar with and do not find “hard to pin down” in the slightest.
By the time you’re even halfway through, then, the *Post* story paints a picture of the sort of big-media iconoclast who is utterly rote at this point. Got it. He’s a right-leaning new-money self-promoting entrepreneur type who wants to chart a path where rich people get lots of tax cuts, but we maybe don’t burn his LGBTQ friends at the stake. He’s here to revamp journalism around a version of centrism that thinks Donald Trump was doing a bang-up job when he was scooting around the world dragging his bare ass on the carpets while not giving a particular damn about the crooked parts or the authoritarianism.
“Jeebus Cripes, this is Great Gatsby stuff. New Wealth Fixes The World is what Ayn Rand choked her pages with. This sort of nihilistic I-can’t-be-defined-by-your-politics hokum is the essence of every “tax cuts for rich people, marijuana for the poor people” college libertarian rant—and the people in charge of the world love this vapidity. Each of them is convinced they, personally, may have invented it,” Hunter noted.
From The Progressive Populist, October 1, 2022
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