Stephan: What goes around comes around. We are watching a new trend. The Democrats have learned from the Republicans led by McConnell, and now it is going to play the other way. And I predict the Democrats will increase their majorities in both the House and the Senate in 2022.
The policy that incoming Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Dick Durbin is pursuing would make no change to the so-called “blue slip” process. Credit: Tom Williams/Getty
Senate Democrats are planning to continue the GOP’s approach to giving home-state senators veto power over lower court nominees — while granting freer rein to President Joe Biden’s circuit court nominees.
The policy that incoming Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) is pursuing would make no change to the so-called “blue slip” process that Republicans changed in 2017 to yank home-state senators’ power to block former President Donald Trump’s circuit court picks. While Democrats criticized Republicans for scrapping blue slips for Trump, they’re now signaling that after four years of bruising judicial confirmation battles, they’re not going to reinstate the obscure tradition they had defended.
“Chair Durbin has said on a number of occasions that there cannot be one set of rules for Republican nominees and another set of rules for Democratic nominees,” said a Senate Judiciary Committee Democratic aide.https://e5d4f188e53d717f86f2dbd416ac0864.safeframe.googlesyndication.com/safeframe/1-0-37/html/container.html
Then-Judiciary chair Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) cited delays from Democrats when he did away with blue slips for […]
Stephan: In the last 45 days, we have witnessed things happen in the United States that five years ago I would not have thought possible, and it has left me shell shocked, and deeply concerned about the survival of democracy in America. More than that it has demonstrated to me once again the power of a group of people who hold a collective intention, and worldview. America's problem at its foundation is a problem of consciousness. And nowhere is this clearer than in Texas today. So I decided to focus today's edition on what is going on there. Both the catastrophes that plague Texas, the pandemic, and the power and water failure, should have been if not avoidable, in the sense of the Coronavirus, at least very less of a problem, and the power and water crisis, should never have happened at all.
Stephan: The racist southern states of the old confederacy continue to be overwhelmingly racist, which politically translates to Republican. Republicans do not like democracy and are doing everything the party can do, at the state level, to see that people of color find it very difficult to vote, and that congressional districts are rigged so that as many as possible are majority White. That may sound partisan but it is, in fact, simply factual.
Credit: www.politicspa.com
Southern states will be especially vulnerable to partisan and racial gerrymandering due to single-party control over the process and weaker protections for communities of color, a new report has found.
The Brennan Center for Justice, a liberal public policy institute at New York University Law School, analyzed the redistricting landscape across the country, categorizing states based on their projected risk for partisan and/or racial gerrymandering. The 27-page report, released Thursday, found abuse in the mapmaking process will be most severe in four Republican-controlled Southern states: Florida, Georgia, North Carolina and Texas.
Meanwhile, every state is facing a shared challenge: a compressed timeline to draw the new maps. Typically, population data needed for redistricting is released in April, but due to delays caused by the COVID-19 pandemic and the Trump administration, the Census Bureau is now expecting those figures to be ready in late September. This will further complicate this year’s redistricting process, and therefore preparations for the 2022 midterms as well.
Michael Li, a redistricting expert at the Brennan Center who authored the report, said this round of redistricting is likely to be the […]
Stephan: This is what has really begun to worry me. We have one political party that is actively working against American democracy. My hope is that the Republican Party schisms into two parties, one an ethical genuinely conservative party and the other a racist Trumpian party, and this nasty little cult is such a minority that it withers to irrelevancy. But as is obvious by what is happening at the state level and in the Congress, the United States is in a very parlous position; don't think for a moment that we have shed Trumpism.
Seven Republican members of the U.S. Senate voted to find former President Donald Trump guilty of inciting the Jan. 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol that left five people dead. By the end of this week, six of the seven may have faced censures from local and state Republican parties back home because of those votes.
Together with the 10 Republican House members who voted to impeach Trump, the seven GOP senators made Trump’s second impeachment the most bipartisan in American history. But if those votes foreshadowed a looming civil war within the GOP, the hasty efforts to censure anyone who crossed Trump are a good indication of which side has the larger army.
As the riot in the Capitol played out, even the GOP lawmakers who helped incite it briefly attempted to distance themselves from the mess they had created. But rather than a reckoning, the Republican Party is attempting a purge. From Congress to state legislatures, and in the state- and county-level parties that make up its base, the GOP’s […]
Stephan: Marcotte has it right. I would only add that what is happening in Texas is a natural and predictable event in a society that has no social priority but profit. If this were a society that made fostering wellbeing the first priority none of this would be happening because it is a completely avoidable social catastrophe.
Texas Republican Governor Greg Abbott
Donald Trump may be gone, having left behind a pandemic that has killed nearly 500,000 Americans, due to his malicious incompetence. Still, his spirit of governing the people like you hate them and want them to die lives on in the Republican Party and its propaganda apparatus, Fox News. Just take a look at the GOP response to the crisis in Texas, which has been buried under blizzards so bad that “unseasonable” is a comical understatement. The ice and snow has caused the power grid in the state to collapse, leaving millions of Texans without power and heat in deadly conditions. Rather than deal with the problems with maturity and grace, however, Texas’s Republican Gov. Greg Abbott and his allies are taking a page directly from Trump’s coronavirus response playbook by abandoning people while exploiting the situation to push a far-right, authoritarian agenda that will only make the problems much worse.
Just as Trump’s response to the pandemic suggested he was rooting for the coronavirus, Abbott and company are using this natural […]
