“Political language has to consist largely of euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness…. The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one's real and one's declared aims, one turns, as it were, instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish spurting out ink.” —Politics and the English Language, George Orwell
In July I covered guvnas in part 2 of this series. Today is a mix tape of happenings.
Rep. Bennie Thompson, D-Miss., told reporters at the Capitol on Tuesday that the committee will continue its hearings on Sept. 28 at 1 p.m. ET. Supposedly, Ginni Thomas agreed to a voluntary interview ahead of the public hearing which might be revealing. Also, according to Politico, a federal judge has cleared the way for the committee to access the phone records of Arizona GOP Chair Kelli Ward, dismissing Ward’s lawsuit to block a subpoena issued by the panel in January. Good news for everyone but Kelli Ward. Arizona-based U.S.District Court Judge Diane Humetewa ruled, “That three-month period is plainly relevant to its investigation into the causes of the January 6th attack. The Court therefore has little doubt concluding these records may aid the Select Committee’s valid legislative purpose.”
More in Arizona…Democrat Adrian Fontes is up against wacko Mark Finchem for Secretary of State. In a debate last week, Finchem claimed the 2020 election was “irredeemably compromised” when asked to account for his belief that former President Donald Trump, not President Joe Biden, won the popular vote in Arizona two years ago.
As reported in AZCentral, Finchem offered several conspiracy theories, unsupported by evidence, for his belief that Maricopa County’s vote was rigged. In Yuma County, he pointed to an actual fact – several people who have pleaded guilty to ballot harvesting. “We’ve got people who were indicted for the very thing that we’re talking about right now, who pled guilty and frankly, those votes altered the outcome of Yuma county,” he said. “So how do they get counted? How did people who were disenfranchised to nullification, how do we help them?” In fact, two Yuma County residents pleaded guilty to “harvesting” a total of four ballots. And it happened not in the November 2020 election (which Trump won in Yuma by more than 4,000 votes) but in the August 2020 primary.
For a good time, watch the debate here:
And when it comes to voting in Arizona to retain or deny judges, it’s always tricky as hardly anyone knows who they are or their background. Thanks to my friend Judy Browder, I was sent to the Gavel Watch Report for more information. Here are the judges in the Arizona Supreme Court to be aware of.
Do Not Retain:
James P. Beene (appointed by Ducey)
Featured in the Federalist Society’s Oct 2022 symposium on “Originalism and the Arizona Constitution.” In 2018, Justice Beene delivered the Appellate Court’s decision in Madonna v Arizona, upholding a recently passed AZ law requiring “strict compliance” for public initiatives, not “substantial compliance.”
William G. Montgomery (appointed by Ducey)
He fiercely opposes LGBTQ equality, and openly refused to provide adoption support services to same-sex couples. He is a staunch defender of the death penalty, the failed "war on drugs," and mass incarceration and claims membership in the ideologically right-wing Federalist Society.
Read the PDF for other judges that need the boot. Unfortunately, Pima County Superior Court Judge Kellie Johnson is not on the list—you know, the judge who last week took Arizona back to the 19th century. She took it upon herself to restore a law put into effect by Arizona’s Territorial legislature in 1864 and then reworked in 1901 by lifting a decades-old injunction that has blocked enforcement of that ancient law. The term-limited Republican Attorney General Mark Brnovich praised the court’s decision: “We applaud the court for upholding the will of the legislature and providing clarity and uniformity on this important issue.”
Even Senator (D) Krysten Sinema, who I’m not wild about and bears an uncanny resemblance to the judge, ripped Johnson’s decision to lift an injunction on all abortions – except to save the life of a mother – saying “it removes basic rights Arizona women have relied upon for over a century. A woman’s health care decisions should be between her, her family and her doctor.”
Heather Cox Richardson took quite the interest in this story on Saturday as she wrote, Oddly, I know quite a bit about the 1864 Arizona Territorial legislature, and its story matters as we think about the attempt to impose its will in modern America. She wrote that the legislature at the time (in 1864) provided that “No black or mulatto, or Indian, Mongolian, or Asiatic, shall be permitted to [testify in court] against any white person,” thus making it impossible for them to protect their property, their families, or themselves from their white neighbors. It declared that “all marriages between a white person and a [Black person], shall…be absolutely void.” And it defined the age of consent for sexual intercourse to be just ten years old (even if a younger child had “consented”).
She went on to write, So, in 1864, a legislature of 27 white men created a body of laws that discriminated against Black people and people of color and considered girls as young as 10 able to consent to sex, and they adopted a body of criminal laws written by one single man. And in 2022, one of those laws is back in force in Arizona.
Is this insane, or what? Since Brnovich will not be running, his replacement is just as bad…a man named Abraham Hamadeh, who is also an election denier. Hamadeh has vowed to use the power of the attorney general’s office to uphold these draconian abortion bans. All YOU have to do is cast a vote this November for Kris Mayes to keep another lunatic out of office. Kris Mayes. Cast a vote. Do it.
In last Friday's Dispatch I wrote about how Republicans are using Christian Nationalism and ideas promoted by the Federalist Society to push their agenda on the American populace. In an interview in the New York Review of Books, Laurence H. Tribe, University Professor Emeritus at Harvard and now writes for various publications, ties it all together much more succinctly. His is a thorough indictment of the illogic, legal inconsistencies, and arrogance of the Supreme Court’s ruling to overturn Roe v. Wade. “This is unlikely,” he warns, “to be the final step on the treacherous path the Court has chosen.”
He said, The legal and philosophical principles that converged in Roe v. Wade, and emanated from it in the years since, included principles of gender equality, personal privacy, bodily autonomy, and the separation of church and state. All of those principles came under attack from rightward-leaning jurists in ways that, while they did not legally support the overruling of Roe, made it clear that the underlying agendas of the judges in question would demand that Roe be ripped from the fabric of constitutional law. This is pursued in the name of restoring fidelity to the Constitution’s original meaning, but it has the effect of making ours a less democratic, less inclusive, less gender-neutral, more homophobic, more misogynistic, more authoritarian, and more corporate-friendly and wealth-empowering polity.
And to my friends and former neighbors in Kansas, he said, The most important, immediate step is to do what the citizens of Kansas did, seeking by popular referenda or otherwise to make state constitutions protect bodily integrity and the rights of women and sexual minorities. Next will be the effort to enact a national legislative codification of Roe v. Wade and to do all we can to protect such legislation from invalidation by the right-wing Supreme Court.
Last Friday, Heather Cox Richardson wrote her commentary on the House Republicans’ Plan for the Country which is worth a read. She wrote, Covering just a single page, it presents vague aspirations—many of which Biden has already put in place—but focuses on the radical extremes of the MAGA party while trying to make those extremes sound mild.
As for the Republicans call for a strong economy, she wrote that it’s a paraphrase of what the Biden administration has been doing. She went on to say, while the Republicans offer no actual proposals to contribute to these goals, Biden has taken concrete steps to address inflation by taking on the shipping monopolies that hiked transportation costs, for example, while Democrats in Congress have passed legislation capping the cost of certain prescription medications. Biden has released reserves to help combat high gas prices, which have now fallen close to their cost last March—a barrel of oil is now under $80—while expanding our nation’s pool of truck drivers and just last week averting a train strike that would have endangered supply chains. The incentives in the Inflation Reduction Act are designed specifically to make America energy independent while addressing climate change, and Biden’s extraordinary efforts to support economic development in the Indo-Pacific region, along with the CHIPS and Science Act, were explicitly designed to reduce U.S. dependence on China.
And, echoing Laurence H. Tribe’s point above she wrote, The section about accountable government calls for preserving constitutional freedoms, which they interpret as an apparent national ban on abortion—a constitutional right until this past June—saying they will “protect the lives of unborn children and their mothers.” They defend “religious freedom,” which the right wing, including the Supreme Court, has interpreted as freedom for Christian schools to receive public tax money and for Christian coaches to pray with students.
And in the “How Stupid Do Republicans Think We Are?” category, Charles Pierce reported on Kevin McCarthy’s “Commitment To America” plan of inaction with two takeaways. 1.) A rollout video to promote their ‘commitment’ to us peons shows footage of a drilling rig at sunrise to celebrate the rich heritage of the American story and the vibrancy of the American Dream. The reality is that the stock footage used was filmed in Russia by Serb Grbanoff. Bwwaaahaaaaahaaaaaaa. 2.) McCarthy went on to use an Abraham Lincoln quote, “Commitment is what transforms a promise into reality,” which was never uttered by Lincoln but came from Lehman Brothers, the Wall Street titan that collapsed in the 2008 financial crisis. BwwwaaaaaHaaahaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa.
There are plenty of criticisms that can rightly be aimed at Democrats, and the party in general, but when you really take a look behind the curtain of the MAGA party, which was the Republican Party, the choice is crystal clear. JUST. VOTE. BLUE.
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Your posts always have details I don't know about, haven't read before, and from the right perspective--so they are always valued.