Someone asked me today in the media, "People are curious, what does Mike Johnson think about any issue?" I said, "Well, go pick up a Bible off your shelf and read it. That’s my worldview."
- Speaker Mike Johnson to Sean Hannity
This week's featured post is "Mike Johnson is worse than you think".
This week everybody was talking about the new speaker
Wednesday, the House ended three weeks of chaos by electing Mike Johnson (R-LA) Speaker of the House on a party line vote. The featured post outlines why Johnson scares me more than some random right-wing extremist with similar views on most issues: Mike Johnson is a Christian Nationalist. So he feels perfectly justified in ignoring the will of the electorate and imposing his moral vision on us.
But there's more to think about here than just Johnson. Last week I may have raised your hope that non-MAGA Republicans had found their backbones. I apologize. After watching the MAGA wing torpedo Tom Emmer's candidacy for speaker, his supporters gave in and voted unanimously for Mike Johnson, whose ideology differs from Jim Jordan's only by being more theocratic.
Ken Buck of Colorado is a prime example. Two weeks ago, in an interview with MSNBC's Katy Tur, Buck seemed to be taking a principled pro-democracy stand:
I asked [Steve Scalise] last night: "Will you unequivocally and publicly state that the election, the 2020 presidential election, was not stolen?" He didn't answer that question very clearly and Jim Jordan didn't answer that question very clearly.
But then he backed down and voted for Johnson, who led 100 Republican members of Congress in supporting an unsuccessful lawsuit by the Texas attorney general that would have invalidated the electoral votes of Georgia, Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin. Without those states, Joe Biden would not have had 270 electoral votes and the outcome of the election would have been thrown into dispute. (The Supreme Court refused to consider the case on the grounds that Texas had no standing.)
After casting his vote in support of Johnson on Wednesday, Buck told CNN that he had not heard Johnson acknowledge that President Joe Biden won the 2020 election, as he had previously demanded of Jordan and Scalise.
“I have not gotten that promise from Mike,” Buck said. “I hope he comes around to that point.”
Here's how much respect Johnson has for Buck's question: When Johnson faced the press for the first time as speaker, ABC's Rachel Scott tried to ask something similar. She was shouted down by the Republican congresspeople surrounding Johnson, highlighted by North Carolina's Virginia Foxx yelling, "Shut up! Shut up!" The Hill describes the Speaker's response:
Johnson smiled, shook his head and said “next question.”
That seems to be Speaker Johnson in a nutshell: He dresses more neatly than Jim Jordan, keeps his cool, and is not as uncouth as Virginia Foxx. But he's on the same page, and will unapologetically take advantage of their rudeness.
In the same Katy Tur interview, Rep. Buck mentioned that he wanted assurances from the speaker candidates that they would bring Ukraine funding up for a vote. It looks like he didn't get that from Johnson either. Thursday, Speaker Johnson announced that he intended to separate Ukraine and Israel funding bills. The implication of that is that each bill would be subject to the Hastert Rule, which does not allow votes on bills that don't have majority support inside the Republican caucus. Ukraine aid is a close question within the caucus, so it may not come up for a vote in the full House, where it would surely pass.
and the Israel/Gaza war
Unless you implicitly trust one side or the other, it's hard to get any clear idea of what's going on in Gaza. Bombs are falling, and whatever anyone intends, they fall (like the rain) on the just and the unjust alike. A ground invasion has started, but doesn't seem yet to be an all-out assault. Such an assault may still be coming, but it might not.
The possibilities for the war to expand are numerous. A northern front could open between Israel and Hezbollah. A uprising in the West Bank is possible. I've seen a claim on X/Twitter -- God knows if anything on X is true these days -- that Israeli settlers are attempting to expel Palestinians. Peter Beinart believes this report enough to claim he saw it coming in his article last spring: "Could Israel Carry Out Another Nakba?".
and another mass shooting
This is America, so you don't have time to process one shooting before the next one happens. Saturday night, shots were fired in Tampa's Ybor City neighborhood.
A shooting erupted in the middle of Ybor City after a Saturday night full of Halloween celebrations, leaving two dead and at least 18 people injured, Tampa police said.
But you may not be ready to think about that yet, because the rampage in Lewiston, Maine Wednesday evening is still so fresh. A shooter attacked random people in a bar and in a bowling alley, killing 18 and wounding 13. (Early reports that 50-60 people had been injured were wrong.) The shooter has been identified as Robert Card, and his body was found Friday; apparently he killed himself.
If you wanted to make the point that American gun laws are insane, you could hardly have designed an event more perfectly. In July, Card bought a Ruger SFAR high-powered rifle and a Beretta semi-automatic pistol. Ten days later, while serving as an Army reservist at a camp in New York,
the army gave Card a “Command Referral” to seek treatment after he told army personnel at Camp Smith Card had been “hearing voices” and had thoughts about “hurting other soldiers.” A National Guard spokesperson confirmed to CNN Card was transported to the nearby Keller Army Community Hospital at the United States Military Academy for “medical evaluation,” after Army Reserve officials reported Card for “behaving erratically.”
His family was also worried about him.
Card's family told NBC News on Thursday that he had been hearing voices for months. “His mind was twisting them around,” said Katie Card, the suspect’s sister-in-law.
She said the family reached out to police and Card’s Army Reserve base as they “got increasingly concerned.”
Unfortunately, Maine only has a "yellow-flag law", a watered-down version of the red-flag laws 21 other states have.
Even though Card underwent psychiatric treatment, [Nick] Suplina [senior vice president for law and policy at Everytown for Gun Safety] said he believes that would not have immediately set Maine's yellow flag law into motion because that process involved a law enforcement agency in a different state. [New York]
The family would have likely had to contact police in Maine, starting a new process, Suplina said.
So in the United States, or at least in Maine, you can be crazy, people can know you're crazy, there can be a recent record of you buying a gun suitable for mass killing, and nobody can do anything about it.
I've heard several local people explain that implementing a more effective red-flag law hadn't seemed all that urgent, because Maine (and particularly a small town like Lewiston), just didn't seem like the kind of place where these things happen. But the inadequacy of that kind of thinking has been exposed over and over again: Parkland, Florida wasn't the kind of place where these things happen. Neither was Uvalde, Texas or Newtown, Connecticut. After last year's Fourth of July shooting in Highland Park, Illinois, I tried to explain what that meant:
I don’t think I’ve ever been to Highland Park, and you probably haven’t either. But you’ve seen it. The movies use Chicago’s North Shore suburbs to symbolize affluent communities so sheltered from the scary aspects of modern life that teens have to seek out adventure for themselves. Ferris Bueller lived in Highland Park; so did Joel Goodsen from Risky Business. That idyllic family life The Good Wife had before her crooked-politician husband went to jail and everything fell apart? It was in Highland Park. The town sits between Lake Forest, where 1980 Best Picture Ordinary People was set, and Winnetka, site of the Home Alone house. (But parts of that movie were shot in Highland Park too.)
During their glory days with the Bulls, basketball legends Michael Jordan and Scotty Pippen had Highland Park mansions. Jefferson Airplane’s Grace Slick was born there. About 30K people live there now, and the 2010 census says the median household income is over $100K.
Here’s what I’m trying to get across: If a mass shooting can happen in Highland Park, it can happen anywhere. It can happen in your town too.
So me say it again: As long as we have these crazy gun laws, we're all vulnerable.
Meanwhile, the Supreme Court is hearing a case that could invalidate another kind of red-flag law: one that takes guns away from domestic abusers. Such laws are excellent from two points of view:
- They undoubtedly save the lives of spouses, children, and other close associates of violent individuals.
- And they probably prevent mass shootings, because mass shooters often start on a smaller scale, with violence against the people closest to them.
But maybe a law disarming domestic abusers is one of those nice things we just can't have in the United States, at least not under this Supreme Court.
According to Vox' Ian Millhiser, Zackey Rahimi is "an individual that no sensible society would allow to have a gun". Allegedly, in addition to assaulting his girl friend in a parking lot, Rahimi fired a gun at a bystander who witnessed the incident. He was involved in five other shooting incidents in a little over a year.
And yet, an appeals court recently found that Rahimi has a constitutional right to own a gun. In fact, any law that tries to take his guns away is unconstitutional on its face.
That means that, if the Fifth Circuit’s decision is upheld by the Supreme Court, this federal ban on firearm possession by domestic abusers may never be applied to any individual, no matter how violent that individual may be and no matter how careful the court that issued a restraining order against such an individual was in ensuring that they received due process.
But we haven't gotten to the craziest part yet: That result is a correct application of the doctrine Clarence Thomas laid out in the 2022 Bruen decision.
Bruen held that, in order to justify nearly any law regulating firearms, “the government must demonstrate that the regulation is consistent with this Nation’s historical tradition of firearm regulation.” This means that lawyers defending even the most widely accepted gun laws, such as the federal ban on gun possession by domestic abusers, must show that “analogous regulations” also existed and were accepted when the Constitution was framed — particularly if the law addresses “a general societal problem that has persisted since the 18th century.” If they cannot, the challenged gun law must be struck down.
And that's where we're out of luck. Domestic abuse certainly existed in the Founding Era, but it wasn't considered a crime. And there's no contemporary record of any law taking flintlock pistols away from wife beaters. So unless the Court wants to backtrack on a fairly recent decision, Rahimi (and even worse people) will get to keep his guns.
and the Trump trials
Another of Trump's co-defendants in the Georgia RICO case pleaded guilty Tuesday: Jenna Ellis.
Ellis, who once described herself as part of an “elite strike force team” of attorneys pursuing unfounded claims of election fraud, pleaded guilty to one count of aiding and abetting false statements and writings.
“If I knew then what I know now, I would have declined to represent Donald Trump in these post-election challenges,” a tearful Ellis told the judge.
What damage Ellis' testimony might do to Trump -- or to co-defendant Rudy Giuliani, who Ellis worked with closely -- is still speculative. In the NYT, Norman Eisen and Amy Lee Copeland cast her as a star witness, but it's hard to say at this point.
Two different Trump gag orders were in the news. In the civil fraud trial against the Trump Organization in New York, Judge Arthur Engoron called Trump to the stand, found his testimony not credible, and fined him $10,000. Engoron had earlier issued a gag order on Trump preventing him from attacking officers of the court when Trump had baselessly posted on Truth Social that Engoron's law clerk was Chuck Schumer's girlfriend. He had fined Trump $5K when the post persisted on Trump's campaign website, which his lawyers said was "inadvertent".
This fine came after Trump told reporters outside the courtroom on Wednesday that "This judge is a very partisan judge with a person who is very partisan sitting alongside him — perhaps even much more partisan than he is." Judge Engoron took that as yet another reference to his clerk, which Trump denied on the stand. (He claimed he was talking about Michael Cohen, who had appeared that day as a witness. Attacking witnesses is also typically frowned upon.) This was the claim Engoron said he didn't believe.
Meanwhile, Judge Tanya Chutkan (presiding in the federal election interference case against Trump) issued a gag order banning him from attacking prosecutors and witnesses in that trial. She stayed the order temporarily while waiting for an appellate court to rule, but then reinstated it when Trump used the temporary break in the order to go after potential witness Mark Meadows.
Trump is claiming that his status as a former president and current presidential candidate gives him rights no other criminal defendant would have. I doubt the appeals court will agree with him.
Ultimately, Trump will have to be found in contempt of court because he is in fact contemptuous of the proceedings against him. Clearly, $10K fines are not going to restrain him. Eventually, we'll have to see if jail time works.
This should be an exciting week in the New York fraud trial: Don Jr., Eric, and Ivanka are expected to testify.
you also might be interested in ...
The Commerce Department reported that the US economy grew at a 4.9% annual pace in the third quarter. (And yes, that number does account for inflation.) The previous week, a report from the Federal Reserve said that both mean and median household wealth is up. In other words, American households are generally richer than they were before the pandemic.
One of the continuing mysteries of American politics is that President Biden consistently polls badly on economic issues, while the country's economic statistics have been quite good.
Weird weather continues to result from climate change: Hurricane Otis made landfall near Acapulco as a Category 5 storm Wednesday. It is the only Cat 5 storm to hit the Pacific coast, and intensified from a mere tropical storm in less than 24 hours.
Virginia holds its elections in odd years, making the state a possible bellwether of national trends. Two years ago, Glenn Youngkin's upset victory in the governor's race drew attention to critical race theory and other right-wing education tropes.
A week from tomorrow, the governorship is not on the ballot, but control of the legislature is. Democrats currently hold a small majority in the Senate and Republicans in the House.
Here are a few things Trump said in Sioux City, Iowa yesterday. He bragged about being willing to ignore our NATO obligations.
I remember, the head of a country stood up and said, "Does that mean that if Russia attacks my country, you will not be there?" And I said, "That's right. That's what it means. I will not protect you."
He said hello to Sioux Falls, not realizing where he was. (Sioux Falls is in South Dakota.) And he claimed that Hungary shares a border with Russia.
The NYT collects some of Trump's other recent blunders: He warned that the US is on the verge of World War II. He bragged about being ahead of Barack Obama in the polls, and claimed that he beat Obama in 2016. He referred to Hungarian President Viktor Orban as the president of Turkey. He pronounced Hamas as if it were hummus.
But Biden is the one who's out of it because he's too old.
Mike Pence suspended his presidential campaign. From the beginning, his campaign has felt like one of those moments in football when a quarterback cocks his arm and I think, "Where is he throwing that?" And sure enough, the pass goes right to a defender and gets intercepted.
Same thing here. I never understood what voters Pence was targeting. MAGA voters resent Pence for not cooperating in Trump's coup. Non-MAGA voters resent Pence for staying loyal to Trump right up to moment of the coup. Maybe he thought that he could reclaim the Evangelical voters he led to Trump in 2016, but they're long gone. In the GOP, the good-Christian-family-man boat sailed a long time ago.
He should have thrown the ball out of bounds and punted.
You may not know about Conservapedia, the conservative alternative to the "liberal" (i.e., reality based) Wikipedia. But Kat Abu pays attention to these things, while managing to keep her sense of humor.
and let's close with something massive
There's something really primal about singing along with large numbers of people. Also, large groups often sound surprisingly decent. (The notes sung tend to average out on the right ones.) Astrid Jorgensen of Australia started the Pub Choir project to create singing-together projects on an epic scale.
At Pub Choir events, Jorgensen teaches a well-known song in 3-part harmony to non-trained singers. The performance is filmed and posted on the net.
In this video, Pub Choirs in cities across Australia unite to sing Toto's "Africa". The result is strangely compelling, whether you like the song or not.
