Dispatches

HOUSE FREEDOM CAUCUS IS READY TO FORCE GOVERNMENT SHUTDOWN. The House Freedom Caucus has set the stage for a government shutdown, issuing a list of demands that they know will never be met, Laura Clawson noted at Daily Kos (8/21). They are thereby setting up a test of wills between themselves and basically everyone else in the House and Senate, starting with House Speaker Kevin McCarthy. Congress will need to pass a temporary funding bill to keep the government open when current funding ends on Sept. 30, and the Freedom Caucus is insisting it will not back a clean continuing resolution. Even a short-term bill, they insist, would need to include their far-right demands.

Freedom Caucus members are opposing any bill that “continues Democrats’ bloated COVID-era spending,” which is to say they’d oppose a short-term spending bill that didn’t make cuts right off the bat, because they didn’t like the last government spending bill to pass. Additionally, they say, they won’t support any spending bill unless it includes the hateful immigration bill House Republicans said was a “first week” priority, but only managed to pass in May. They are vowing to oppose any bill that doesn’t “[a]ddress the unprecedented weaponization of the Justice Department and FBI to focus them on prosecuting real criminals instead of conducting political witch hunts and targeting law-abiding citizens” and “[e]nd the Left’s cancerous woke policies in the Pentagon undermining our military’s core warfighting mission.”

“In translation, the Freedom Caucus is saying that it wants a government shutdown because they know that these demands will never be met,” Clawson wrote. “The only way to keep the government open will be for McCarthy to rely on Democratic votes to get a clean continuing resolution and, ultimately, a funding bill through the House. The Freedom Caucus is banking — with good reason — on McCarthy being unwilling to do that.”

But just in case this is the moment McCarthy finds a spine, the Freedom Caucus said it would “oppose any attempt by Washington to revert to its old playbook of using a series of short-term funding extensions designed to push Congress up against a December deadline to force the passage of yet another monstrous, budget busting, pork-filled, lobbyist handout omnibus spending bill at year’s end and we will use every procedural tool necessary to prevent that outcome.” In other words, if you try to pass this without us, we will do whatever it takes to block it from getting a vote.

It’s not clear that the Freedom Caucus demands could get through the House with its very narrow Republican control. They definitely can’t get through the Senate. So when the Freedom Caucus says that its support is contingent on getting all of their demands and that its members will do whatever possible to block a House vote on a bill they don’t like, they’re saying they want a shutdown. Let’s be very, very clear about that as the possibility of a government shutdown looms next month: It’s not both sides. It’s House Republicans.

TRUMP ONLY CARES ABOUT TRUMP. TRUMP VOTERS ONLY CARE ABOUT TRUMP. TRUMP CO-CONSPIRATORS ARE SCREWED. At this point, Donald Trump faces four separate indictments, 91 felony charges, and a current maximum sentence of 696.5 years in prison. Which sounds like a good start, Mark Sumner noted at Daily Kos (8/21).

But in addition to his tax fraud, theft of classified documents, and attempts to overturn the 2020 election, there’s another big area of concern where Trump currently faces no charges. As The Guardian reported back in June of 2022, Trump not only raked in $250 million by whining to his followers about how the “witch hunt” was out to get him, he claimed to be stashing that money away in a “election defense fund” that never existed.

Now, the 18 co-defendants in Georgia and three co-defendants in Florida would like some of that cash to deal with their own, very real, legal concerns. But that’s not happening.

Jenna Ellis, former Trump attorney and current host of the “Jenna Ellis Show on X,” took to social media (8/21) to express clear displeasure and a none-too-subtle threat.

“I was reliably informed Trump isn’t funding any of us who are indicted. Would this change if he becomes the nominee? Why then, not now? I totally agree this has become a bigger principle than just one man. So why isn’t MAGA, Inc. funding everyone’s defense?”

Ellis certainly isn’t the only one with her hand out. The New York Times reported (8/19) that Rudy Giuliani repeatedly tried to get Trump to part with some cash to pay bills Giuliani has turned in since he signed on to help Trump in the scheme to smear President Joe Biden, run Trump’s legal team during its long losing streak following the election, play a major role in the efforts to overturn the results through illegal means. Trump reportedly owes Giuliani “millions.”

Giuliani reportedly hired his own attorney to try and recover some of that money. That didn’t work. Then he went to Trump and “made personal appeals to the former president” both at Mar-a-Lago and at Trump’s West Palm Beach golf club. That didn’t work, either. Neither did having Giuliani’s son pay a visit to Trump in New Jersey, though Trump did promise that at some point he would attend a pair of fundraisers for Giuliani. Which hasn’t happened so far.

Ellis and Giuliani are learning what hundreds of carpenters, cabinet makers, plumbers, dishwashers, painters, bartenders, and supposed “friends” have learned before: Donald Trump doesn’t pay his bills.

According to PBS, Trump’s PAC recently put out $40 million in legal fees to defend Trump. But the outlay to defend anyone else—from his former chief of staff to the guy who helps him select those extra-long ties—is bupkis.

Somehow, all these people thought they were on “Team Trump.” But Trump is, and always was, a solo act.

Right now, Ellis’ social media feed is full of appeals for cash. However, the amounts raised don’t look to be even close to what Ellis and others will need as they look forward to months of legal preparation for the Georgia case.

By a total lack of coincidence, Trump raking in $250 million in 2022 for his nonexistent fund was followed by a sharp decline in Republican small-dollar donations. Rather than seeing the usual bump as the 2022 midterms approached, Republicans actually saw the numbers go down.

As the New York Times reported, total online donations dropped by 12% “across all federal Republican campaigns and committees.”

“Some Republicans blamed inflation. Some blamed tech platforms. Others accused certain campaigns and committees—in particular the highly aggressive Trump operation—of simply overfishing and polluting a limited donor pool for everyone.”

TRUMP DOMINATES IOWA, TOO. REPUBLICANS DON”T CARE THEIR GUY MIGHT BE A LITERAL CRIMINAL. A new survey out from Iowa’s polling guru J. Ann Selzer shows Donald Trump dominating the first-in-the-nation caucus much like he’s dominating the national landscape, Kerry Eleveld noted at Daily Kos (8/21).

The Des Moines Register/NBC News/Mediacom Iowa poll conducted by Selzer Aug. 13-17 shows: Donald Trump: 42%; Ron DeSantis: 19%; Tim Scott: 9%; Nikki Haley: 6%; Mike Pence: 6%; Chris Christie: 5%; Vivek Ramaswamy: 4%.

The top second-choice candidates were Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis at 20%, Sen. Tim Scott of South Carolina at 15%, tech entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy at 12%, and Trump at 10%.

This matters more in a caucus state since people are sometimes forced to go with their second choice if their first choice doesn’t meet the threshold of support in their precinct.

While the survey was in the field, Trump racked up his fourth criminal indictment—the expansive racketeering charge filed by Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis. Instead of hurting Trump, it boosted his stature from an 18-point lead over DeSantis pre-racketeering charge to a 25-point margin after Willis filed the charges in Georgia.

Republican tribalism is running particularly hot right now, with 65% of Iowa Republicans saying they don’t think Trump committed serious crimes.

Nationally, a Marist poll conducted Aug. 11-14 found 44% of Republicans still say Trump has done “nothing wrong” when they are asked more generally about the indictments he is facing.

But as the Washington Post’s Aaron Blake noted recently, drilling down on each specific case suggests a greater sense of angst among Republican voters. An AP-NORC poll conducted Aug. 10-14 tested voters’ views of the four criminal cases filed against Trump: the Manhattan business fraud case, each of the federal indictments stemming from Trump’s mishandling of classified documents, his efforts to overturn the 2020 election, and Trump’s attempt to interfere in Georgia’s vote count (although the Georgia racketeering charge hadn’t dropped yet).

Looking at the combined polling on each individual case, just 16% of Republicans said Trump did “nothing wrong” in every instance.

“So deep down, nearly all Republicans know Trump did something wrong, but they just don’t care. He’s still their guy, and the Republican nomination is still his to lose,” Eleveld concluded.

MISSISSIPPI’S CULTURE OF CRUELTY SHOWS ITSELF AGAIN AND AGAIN POST-DOBBS. There’s too much horror in stories of women and girls unable to get abortions after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, but even so, this one from Time magazine stands out. “She Wasn’t Able to Get an Abortion. Now She’s a Mom. Soon She’ll Start 7th Grade,” the headline reads. The story of a child raped by a stranger and too traumatized to tell her mother what happened to her—a child whose doctor says “She just had no clue” she was pregnant—is heartbreaking. But the bigger picture in Mississippi, the state that pushed Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization to the Supreme Court and succeeded in getting Roe overturned, is enraging even without the trauma of a child rape victim, Laura Clawson noted at Daily Kos (8/20).

Here’s a key paragraph where Mississippi shows itself:

Mississippi’s abortion ban is expected to result in thousands of additional births, often to low-income, high-risk mothers. Dr. Daniel Edney, Mississippi’s top health official, tells TIME his department is “actively preparing” for roughly 4,000 additional live births this year alone. Edney says improving maternal-health outcomes is the “No. 1 priority” for the Mississippi health department, which has invested $2 million into its Healthy Moms, Healthy Babies program to provide extra support for new mothers. “There is a sense of following through, and not just as a predominantly pro-life state,” says Edney. “We don’t just care about life in utero. We care about life, period, and that includes the mother’s life and the baby’s life.”

Clawson notes the state is investing $2 million into a program to provide extra support for new mothers, while anticipating an additional 4,000 births because it banned abortion. That’s $500 per baby. A year’s supply of diapers typically costs more than $800. That doesn’t even begin to factor in the mother’s lost income, the extremely high cost of formula, clothes, and more. In any case, this is not money that is going directly to families: It’s a program offering home visits and referrals for existing supports like food stamps.

A pittance of $500 per child is not “a sense of following through.” It is a joke. Somewhat more helpful is that Mississippi finally extended Medicaid coverage for new mothers to 12 months from its previous 60 days, after Gov. Tate Reeves (R) dragged his feet for months, claiming he needed more data on whether extending health coverage to postpartum patients would be a good idea. That move came after Mississippi’s maternal mortality rate worsened between analyses of data from 2013 to 2016 and data from 2017 to 2019—a decline that fell on Black women, while maternal mortality rates for White women improved slightly.

The fact that Mississippi forced a traumatized child to give birth—because her mother didn’t know a rape exception to the state’s abortion ban existed, and because in any case that exception is a bit of language in the law to make it sound better and not a real, functional thing that people can access—is terrible. It’s the intent of the law, and it’s cruel. That the police in her case don’t seem to have any sense of urgency about finding her rapist is also unspeakably bad.

But Mississippi’s abortion ban, and other state laws like it, are not cruel only in the most horrifying cases. They represent a vast and callous disregard for women’s lives all around. That includes women like Lationna Halbert, who got pregnant in the weeks between when her hormonal birth control implant expired and when she could afford a new one, then sought an abortion from the Jackson Women’s Health Organization the month after Dobbs was decided. Instead, she gave birth in a hospital with no hot water and brought her baby home knowing she had no help paying for child care (and poor availability of affordable child care, in any case) so that she could go back to work. She had to put her dreams of going to cosmetology school on hold, while her boyfriend worked long hours to support their family.

These bans also make care worse for pregnant people who are seeking medical supervision throughout pregnancy and delivery, because, as Time reports, abortion bans make health care deserts worse:

When Emory University researcher Ariana Traub surveyed almost 500 third- and fourth-year medical students in 2022, close to 80% said that abortion laws influenced where they planned to apply to residency. Nearly 60% said they were unlikely to apply to any residency programs in states with abortion restrictions. Traub had assumed that abortion would be most important to students studying obstetrics, but was surprised to find that three-quarters of students across all medical specialties said that Dobbs was affecting their residency decisions.

Why? Because they do not want to live in states where their own health care or that of their family members would be compromised. “More than 24% of women in Mississippi have no birthing hospital within a 30-minute drive,” Time reports, “compared to the national average of roughly 10%.” And that’s before the Dobbs effect really takes hold.

POLL GIVES SHOCKING NEW DATA ABOUT THE CULT OF TRUMP. A new poll shows Donald Trump has effectively become the nation’s most successful cult leader, convincing people his words are worth more than those from their own friends and family members, Markos “Kos” Moulitsas noted at Daily Kos (8/21).

There isn’t much that should surprise us about the MAGA movement anymore, but this CBS poll manages to do so.

Among Trump voters, 71% think what Trump tells them is true, while 63% believe friends and family and 56% believe conservative media figures, but only 42% think that what their religious leaders tell them is true, which puts this story about “liberal Jesus” in a new context. Remember the key passage in that story from an NPR podcast:

“It was the result of having multiple pastors tell me, essentially, the same story about quoting the Sermon on the Mount, parenthetically, in their preaching — ‘turn the other cheek’ — [and] to have someone come up after to say, ‘Where did you get those liberal talking points?’ And what was alarming to me is that in most of these scenarios, when the pastor would say, ‘I’m literally quoting Jesus Christ,’ the response would not be, ‘I apologize.’ The response would be, ‘Yes, but that doesn’t work anymore. That’s weak.’ And when we get to the point where the teachings of Jesus himself are seen as subversive to us, then we’re in a crisis.”

So yeah, it’s no surprise that Trump supporters no longer trust their religious leaders what with all their liberal yapping about Jesus.

Weirdly, only 56% of them feel that conservative media figures give them the truth, but that makes sense when you consider how relentlessly Trump has attacked Fox News the last couple of years when “Fox News” is synonymous with “conservative media.” Trump posted this on his trash social site late last week:

“Why doesn’t Fox and Friends show all of the polls where I am beating Biden, by a lot,” he asks, and the answer is because it’s just not true. The polls have the race neck and neck. And given that Trump couldn’t beat Joe Biden with the advantages of presidential incumbency, nor could he beat Hillary Clinton in the popular vote, he hasn’t exactly proven the ability to win anything “by a lot.”

He’s then left crying about the pictures Fox uses of him. That’s just sad and pathetic to any outsider, but that’s not what the cult hears. Ever since Fox backed away from the Big Lie that Trump had won the 2020 election and fired Trump-loving Tucker Carlson, Trump’s attacks on the network have been relentless. So yes, if you’re part of the Trump cult, you’re going to follow his lead and distrust conservative media hosts.

Next up, over a third of Trump voters don’t believe what their friends and family members say. That’s some serious cult action! It’s clear they only believe friends and family who are fellow cult members. If someone is a White, male, rural southerner, odds are that everyone around him is also a Trump supporter. But anyone whose immediate circle isn’t part of the cult? Well, it’s time for disconnection. No dissent against their Dear Leader can be trusted.

As shocking as that was, there is one even bigger shock in the poll: Twenty-nine percent of Trump voters don’t feel that Trump himself tells them the truth. That is, a significant portion of Trump’s own voters think he’s full of sh*t, and they still support him!

FORMER CEO OF RIGHT-WING PROJECT VERITAS BEING INVESTIGATED BY NEW YORK DA. James O’Keefe, the founder and former CEO of Project Veritas, is under investigation by the Westchester, N.Y., County District Attorney’s Office, according to a new report from The Nation. When asked for details about rumors of an investigation into O’Keefe, the director of public affairs at the district attorney’s office said that while they couldn’t get into specifics, they could confirm that O’Keefe was being investigated, Walter Einenkel noted at Daily Kos (8/18).

It was only a few months ago that O’Keefe’s and Project Veritas’ acrimonious split became public. Leaks of unhappy staff, a power struggle, and possible financial malfeasance have dogged the right-wing muckraking operation for the last couple of months. In May, Project Veritas filed a complaint against O’Keefe alleging he had failed in his “fiduciary duties” to the company, and making disparaging comments about the nonprofit while still being under contract. It also reiterates claims of “financial misconduct by O’Keefe.”

There is speculation that the Westchester district attorney is investigating some of these financial misconduct claims.

The last couple of years of O’Keefe tenure at Project Veritas were marked by legal losses, claims of being defrauded by other scam artists, and acts of God. (Hurricane Ida flooded the nonprofit’s headquarters in September 2021.) Long gone are the days when Ginni Thomas, wife of Supreme Court Justice (and billionaire pocket-dweller) Clarence Thomas, handed out pretend journalism awards to O’Keefe and friends.

THREATS OF VIOLENCE AGAINST TRUMP JUDGE AND GRAND JURORS HAS BEGUN. Donald Trump was on :Truth Social" most days of the week before he was to turn himself in at the Fulton County Jail, attacking the judges and prosecutors overseeing his various criminal indictments, and his followers are taking notice—threatening, racist, and already at times, criminal notice. A Texas woman has been charged with threatening to kill US District Judge Tanya Chutkan, the judge in the federal case charging Trump with crimes related to his efforts to overturn the 2020 election, Laura Clawson noted at Daily Kos >(8/17).

Abigail Jo Shry of Alvin, Texas, left Chutkan a voicemail opening with a double-barreled racist insult and going on to threaten, “If Trump doesn’t get elected in 2024, we are coming to kill you, so tread lightly, bitch,” according to the charging document. Shry went on to say, “You will be targeted personally, publicly, your family, all of it.” She additionally threatened, in the voicemail, to kill Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee, all Democrats in Washington, and all LGBTQ+ people. When the FBI knocked on her door, she admitted to having made the call. She wasn’t planning to go to Washington, D.C., to actually kill anyone, she told the FBI agent, but “if Sheila Jackson Lee comes to Alvin, then we need to worry,” the agent reported her saying. That doesn’t seem like the kind of thing you want to tell the FBI when they’re asking about death threats you’ve made against federal officials.

Shry’s father has offered the defense that she’s just a nonviolent alcoholic who becomes “agitated by the news” while “drinking too many beers.” That may be a majority of the people who respond to Trump’s efforts to incite his supporters with attacks on judges and prosecutors—but all it would take is one of those people getting off the couch and grabbing one of their plentiful guns to cause a real tragedy.

Chutkan isn’t the only person associated with the criminal charges against Trump whose safety is at risk. Georgia reveals names of grand jury members, and Media Matters reports they’re being doxxed on far-right message boards, with their personal information accompanied by direct threats and racist slurs:

One user wrote that the grand jurors’ names was a “hit list” to which another user responded, “Based. Godspeed anons, you have all the long range rifles in the world,” while another wrote that they were “about ready to go Turner Diaries on these treasonous n***** f**ks” (referring to a violent white nationalist book). And another user ominously wrote that the jurors were “committing election interference” and so they “should indeed be careful.”

Trump is setting the tone here, even if his supporters are taking it several steps further. One of Trump’s Truth Social posts alleged, “They never went after those that Rigged the Election. They only went after those that fought to find the RIGGERS!” That’s a single letter of pretense that you’re not using an all-capped racial slur, and Trump’s supporters have enthusiastically taken up yelling about “riggers”—when they’re even bothering to swap in an R for an N.

There’s a reason that Chutkan is the person on Trump’s attack list getting death threats almost immediately after becoming a public part of the case. It’s the same reason Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis had to warn her staff, “I am not concerned with the calls, emails, or ads and you should not concern yourself with them.” Trump and his supporters have a particular vengeful focus on Chutkan and Willis because they are Black women, and some members of the Georgia grand jury will get that special attention as well. Racists gonna racist, in short.

If Trump’s supporters can walk right up to the line of direct threats before facing criminal charges, Trump himself—in theory—should be on a tighter leash. The conditions of his release bar him from making “inflammatory statements” and in particular attempting to intimidate witnesses. Yet Trump is doing exactly that and has yet to face consequences. The New York Times reports, “Some lawyers have said that if Mr. Trump were an ordinary citizen issuing these attacks, he would be in jail by now.” It’s one of the many ways Trump has been given special, lenient treatment as he moves through the legal system.

Any judge, though, who puts Trump in jail over his efforts to intimidate witnesses and incite his supporters to violence will face a major burst of rage from those supporters, along with accusations by Trump and much of the Republican Party that it’s a political persecution of a presidential candidate. Trump is banking on continuing special treatment for exactly that reason.

From The Progressive Populist, September 15, 2023

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