Don’t let good scandals go to waste

Sep 20, 2023

Welcome to a Tuesday edition of Progress Report.

Tuesday was National Voter Registration Day, a day that celebrates great acts of civic selflessness done in service of a deeply flawed process.

There is no real need for proactive voter registration in the United States, at least in any significant way. The government is capable of tracking people’s locations with great precision, and even absent that, Americans volunteer information about their whereabouts as a matter of due course. Requiring proactive voter registration may be helpful for political organizations, and it can teach someone a first lesson in the democratic process, but it still creates unfair and unnecessary barrier.

The good news is states are beginning to eliminate the proactive registration requirement. On Tuesday, Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro announced that people will soon be eligible to be registered to vote when they interact with the DMV.

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New Hampshire

Race: State House, Rockingham District 1

Date: September 19th, 2023

Candidates: Hal Rafter (D), James Guzofski (R)

The Result:

Rafter, who we spoke to and featured here at Progress Report last month, won in an absolute landslide, but hey, Rafter won by nearly ten points to flip the district blue and there’s no reason why they shouldn’t learn about it all.

I live in Manhattan, which means that the small TV in my building’s laundry room is permanently set to a cable news network. I spent a fair amount of Sunday doing laundry, which meant involuntarily exposure to MSNBC and its endless loop of punditry. Your mileage may vary with this stuff, but there’s only so much one can hear about the House GOP’s idiotic impeachment inquiry into Joe Biden and tight poll numbers before succumbing to exasperation.

Then, on Monday, we were all treated to contrived outrage from every Republican on Capitol Hill about the tweak to the Senate’s dress code. Even crooks like Ryan Zinke, who was so corrupt that he had to resign from the congenitally corrupt Trump administration, had the audacity to complain about it, as did people rooting for the criminals and trespassers on January 6th.

Why are we forced to listen to this stuff? Because Republicans are strategic and cynical enough to talk about them constantly.

Like ChatGPT and other AI programs, cable news isn’t programmed to create anything truly original, so it’s only as good as the data being it’s being fed. In theory, that shouldn’t be all that limiting, but these networks are designed with a narrow remit. They exist to amplify scandal, Beltway gossip, and rhetorical debate, which puts them in league with most political news coverage.

The White House showed a shaky grip on these dynamics when the president’s counsel sent a letter to news executives requesting that they apply greater scrutiny to “an impeachment inquiry based on lies.” It’s certainly better than the administration’s absolute refusal to engage on Donald Trump’s unprecedented number of criminal indictments — Trump wouldn’t be on the offensive, pursuing the union vote if he felt any pressure — but the fact that the letter itself made headlines indicates that during a presidential election, the news cycle strips away context and flattens everything into content.

Instead of urging restraint, Democrats need to respond by flooding the zone with substantive conservative scandals, and as luck would have it, leadership’s ineptitude has created a pile-up of stories that require urgent attention and exposure. Here are a few of those legitimate scandals that Democrats should be investigating both for their criminality and importance in changing the narrative.

The Captured Supreme Court

At this point, Democrats’ refusal to do a Hebron or even talk much about the rampant corruption scandals around the court’s far-right justices is a scandal in its own right, and quickly becoming more offensive and outrageous. As a result, the court’s historic conflicts of interest and blatant illegal activities continue to fade from public view even as it mushrooms in size and outrageousness.

It was egregious enough when the story was about billionaire Nazi enthusiast Harlan Crow serving as Clarence Thomas’s long-time, unreported sugar daddy whilst being an interested party in cases before the court.

It got even worse when Samuel Alito got added to the list of justices enjoying first class hospitality on the dime of billionaires with deep interests vested in court decisions.

And it became infuriatingly absurd when Alito, via a self-righteous puff piece in the Wall Street Journal written by an attorney who will be arguing a case before the court next month, and Thomas, through a flippant non-disclosure of just a few of the gifts he received from his billionaire benefactors, told the Judiciary Committee to shove it.

Over the past ten days, reporters have exposed new depths of the far-right legal movement’s insidious, institutional capture of the Supreme Court. First, there was the revelation that longtime Federalist Society terrorist Leonard Leo worked with Ginni Thomas and Harlan Crow to begin setting up the massive right-wing legal apparatus and bogus “nonprofit” tax shelters in the months between the Citizens United decision.

Inside information gave them the head start on the process; when Thomas got dinged for advocating on active issues facing the court, she simply reconfigured her organization to play a quieter, but no less critical role in the legal lobbying process that also wound up making her even more money than she would earned otherwise. Leo is under investigation for self-dealing and not disclosing payments to people like Ginni Thomas, which are far more pertinent accusations to the American people than Hunter Biden’s gun charge.

The other big revelation is indicative of the unprecedented coordination happening between conservative lawmakers, lobbyists, attorneys, and Supreme Court justices. It also involves Leonard Leo and his gigantic network of dark money funnel organizations, but this time it involves Brett Kavanaugh and the Alabama officials who refuse to comply with the surprising decisions that the court issued in the state’s gerrymandering case back in June.

The gist of the story is that Kavanaugh is very connected, through Leo and other lawyers, to the Alabama officials who continue to pursue a full evisceration of the Voting Rights Act. Their decision to resubmit racist maps that still don’t follow the court’s command to create a second Black-majority Congressional district, the investigation suggests, may be the result of being backchannel assurances that Kavanaugh is ready to reconsider a vote he made just a few months ago.

That sort of case-rigging would be unprecedented, and at the very least, all the connections should have Kavanaugh under an intense spotlight. This is far from an isolated fluke, and could call into question the suitability of right-wing judges to hear cases brought and/or litigated by the far-right organizations and firms that share such close relationships through billionaire benefactors.

It’s really a no-brainer: The scale of the coordination, radical politics, and dark money involved, combined with the names directly implicated, all add up to scandals tailor-made for the sort of coverage that can drive a story forward in new directions while reshaping public perception.

Forcing these conservatives to answer questions under oath should be something of a game-changer; it would underscore for many people that the Supreme Court is not a legitimate body worth obeying, but perhaps more importantly, continue to reiterate to regular Americans who don’t pay as much attention that the conservatives in charge aren’t trustworthy.

The Republican War on Children

After so many years of pretending to give a single shit about the welfare of children and the sanctity of the family, the GOP’s unlimited cynicism and rank hypocrisies should finally be catching up to them.

In the wake of the gut-wrenching Uvalde massacre last year, I decided to call Republicans the Party of Child Murder due to their refusal to do anything about the gun violence that is now the nation’s number one killer of children.

After they began wrecking public education and ramped up the vicious attacks on BIPOC and queer kids in schools, I broadened the catchphrase to the Conservative War on Children.

And once again, it’s only getting worse. Over the past few months, millions of children have been kicked off of Medicaid, most of them improperly due to state error or outright eagerness to abandon them. The problem is only getting worse, and being felt more acutely as kids go back to school, get sick, and then find themselves being denied care.

The Great Abandonment began to be felt long before the unwinding began, too. Since the Child Tax Credit expired in 2022, child poverty has more than doubled, from an all-time low of 5.2% to 12.4%. This is very much the fault of Joe Manchin, but it’s even more so the fault of Republicans, who voted as a caucus to block the authorization of the CTC and still refuse to do anything about it despite its obvious impact.

That story made news for about a minute, and the White House sent out a release blasting Republicans for blocking the re-expansion, but it still quickly faded from view. Absolutely criminal.

Republican Perverts and Nazis

This is sort of a catch-all for a growing trend in Republicanism. As the party moves to the far-right and is further shaped in the image of Donald Trump, Republicans shed all ability to feel shame or fear base backlash. It’s sort of their superpower, but not feeling shame doesn’t mean imperviousness to the political impact of other peoples’ judgments.

As I’ve been covering for more than a year now, the Republican Party’s intersection with Naziism has become alarmingly broad, to the point that lawmakers like Ron DeSantis refuse to ever condemn the vile antisemitic attacks that constantly get carried out in their names. On Monday, in fact, police in Florida finally arrested one of the Nazis who unfurled the racist, antisemitic banners around Disney World and highway overpasses, and DeSantis — a man who loves to act tough on crime — said absolutely nothing.

This should be a gimme for Democrats looking for critical media coverage of Republicans because it ticks off every box in the quick, simple, and ongoing news story construction. Nazis are unambiguously bad, a statement or condemnation from a public official is something easy to demand and monitor, and the longer a politician goes without issuing an condemnation, the more controversial and weird it seems. We also know this is something the media would stay on if prompted because it takes minimal effort to cover, especially once outside groups start speaking up.

If Republicans can successful spin diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives into being evil, Democrats should have zero problems making sure that racism and creepiness are albatrosses around Republicans’ neck in the same way.

As for perverts, Matt Gaetz looks as if he’s going to run for governor of Florida in 2026. Right now, the main narrative around him is his challenges to exasperated Speaker Kevin McCarthy, but those aren’t substantive stories, even if they are based on debates on the House floor. You know would be even more compelling to news media obsessed with personality-based conflicts? The fact that Gaetz loves dating high school girls.

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