The Republican War on Freedom goes into overdrive
And Joe takes some very good advice.
Welcome to a Tuesday evening edition of Progress Report.
Lots to discuss tonight, so let’s dive right in… after we all appreciate this lil gif I made of Ron DeSantis melting down in Japan yesterday.
This won’t be the only DeSantis appearance in tonight’s newsletter, but I promise it’ll only get more damning.
OK, on that note, time for the content.
It’s official: He’s running — and he’s got some very good messaging.
President Joe Biden announced on Tuesday that he will run for a second term in the White House in 2024. In his re-election campaign announcement video, Biden frames the election — and the larger civilizational civil war in which we are still mired — as a fight for freedom, a term that he uses over and over again over the three-minute runtime.
“Freedom — personal freedom — is fundamental to who we are as Americans,” he says near the beginning of the spot. “There’s nothing more important. Nothing more sacred. That’s been the work of my first term — to fight for our democracy.”
It’s a deft transition, linking personal freedoms, from reproductive rights and LGBTQ+ rights to the right to vote and economic security, all of which are under assault from Republicans at all levels of government. It’s a clever challenge to the GOP’s long-time vice grip on such a core part of the American identity — and if it seems like I’m gushing about the approach, it’s because it’s exactly the campaign narrative that I’ve been pushing for the past 13 months.
In March of 2022, I argued that Republicans’ growing intrusion into people’s personal lives, their limitation of direct democracy, and their rapid erosion of voting rights all constitute direct attacks on Americans’ freedom:
These Republican blockades on popular policies and popular will offer Democrats the opportunity to stake their claim on being the party of freedom. These chances don’t come around often.
Every time one of these laws pass, they make national news and contribute to the narrative that the GOP has become more interested in fascism than freedom.
Now, the sheer number of abortion bans, bans on books and gender-affirming care, and further attacks on voting rights make the freedom argument even more relevant and urgent.
It’s beyond encouraging to see Democrats using my exact line in an aggressive manner. You can read the entire post right below; the more people that subscribe to this newsletter, the more time I can spend on fueling the pushback to this war on content.
Speaking of freedom, one of our upcoming stories will be about how conservatives are seizing secular public institutions and turning them into conduits for far-right indoctrination… but I wanted to give you a little preview tonight, given how much it has to do with freedom.
You may have seen the story about the Texas state Senate passing a bill that would require the state’s public schools to display the Ten Commandments for students. That bill would foist religion onto every single student in the state in a very overt way, while there’s another bill that could be even more toxic for children and their right to a competent education.
Here’s the outrageous language in HB 3614 and SB 763: “A school district may employ a chaplain instead of a school counselor to perform the duties required of a school counselor under this title. A chaplain employed under this subsection is not required to be certified by the State Board for Educator Certification.”
Let that sink in. A school counselor is there to help kids deal with what are often real low points in their lives and navigate the education system so that they are able to succeed. Now, Texas wants schools to swap out trained professionals with at least one master’s degree and two years of teaching experience and replace them with a bunch of small-time religious leaders who have no actual qualifications.
Ron De Mass Murderer
Ron DeSantis’s hand-picked surgeon general doctored a study about the health impacts of the Covid vaccine last year, editing the conclusion to state that the jab caused elevated cardiac-related death in men 18-39. DeSantis specifically picked this guy because he’s an anti-vaxxer, and then weaponized the study he doctored to scare people out of getting vaccinated.
Since the vaccine became widely available, Florida has experienced one of the highest Covid death rates in the country. Tens of thousands of Floridians have lost their lives due to DeSantis’s cynical, dangerous campaign against Covid safety precautions. Just how many have died, is unclear, because the state is no longer providing those numbers.
In a just world, this new revelation would send DeSantis to face trial in the Hague, but our nihilist media and political culture has instead dubbed him a top-tier presidential candidate… at least for the moment. Being a doofus or asshole on camera is always punished more than causing mass death in American politics.
Beta Max
It gives me no pleasure to say this, but it’s time once again for our recurring opening segment: How is Dick Durbin failing American democracy today?
The chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee upped the ante by allowing himself to get posterized by members of the Supreme Court twice today, once early this morning and then once in the evening.
The day kicked off with the news that days after Neil Gorsuch was confirmed to the court, he sold some land and a log cabin to the CEO of Greenberg Traurig, a massive law firm that very often argues cases before the Supreme Court. The $1.825 million sale netted Gorsuch somewhere between $250k and $500k for his share of the property.
Gorsuch listed the deal on his disclosure form, which is technically an improvement on what Clarence Thomas has ben doing, but he omitted one key fact: the buyer’s identity. The justice has gone on to hear 12 cases argued by Greenberg Traurig, siding with them eight times.
In response, Durbin accused Gorsuch of “falling short of the ethical standards” and called again for the court itself to take action on ethics reform. Hours later, that pipe dream blew up in Durbin’s face when Chief Justice John Roberts refused his invitation to voluntarily testify before the committee in an utterly humiliating letter that reads more like a taunt than a standard communication.
How did Durbin respond to getting pants in front of the entire legal world and government bureaucracy? By promising that his committee would come up with a new code of ethics. No hearings about Thomas or Gorsuch’s shady and/or illegal deals; no investigations into what is likely a mountain of corruption and illegal transactions by members of the court; and no attempt to rattle a group of impervious goons that have been regularly stripping Americans of their basic rights with glee.
Now, to be fair to Durbin, he’s not the only sucker in the Senate: Word broke late this evening that Sens. Angus King and Lisa Murkowski are behind new legislation that would require the Supreme Court to write its own ethics rules within the next year.
It’s really gobsmacking: Supreme Court justices have lifetime appointments to what is the second-most powerful job in the United States, they’ve shown a deep disinterest in following even the least stringent guidelines placed upon them, and they’re now being offered the opportunity to decide the rules that they’ll be required to follow.
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Good work. Keep it up.
The myth of 3 co-equal branches of government has been exploded by the Roberts court. How can people with a life-time appointment, who lie about their belief in stare decisis, and have no accountability for unethical behavior, be considered as on an equal footing with the legislative and executive branches?